walking upstream…
Goldie
Clifford Price bounced between foster homes and the graffiti-and-breakdance crews of 1980s Wolverhampton before a spell getting his teeth capped in Miami gave him his name, and a spell in a north London studio gave him a craft. As Rufige Kru he helped pioneer jungle's most audacious production trick, the pitched and time-stretched breakbeat, then as Goldie he stretched the genre's chopped-up violence into orchestral drama on 1995's Timeless, dragging a pirate-radio sound onto the UK album chart without sanding down its edges. He co-founded Metalheadz, the label and clubnight that has anchored drum and bass's most serious, bass-heavy wing for three decades.
the sound in question
1995
TimelessGoldie
walk the tributaries ↓
4hero1990s · Breakbeat hardcore / Jungle / Drum and bass
By 1991 Goldie's girlfriend, DJ Kemistry, introduced him to Dego McFarlane and Marc Mac at their Reinforced Records studio, and the pair effectively taught him production from scratch, engineering, sampling and arrangement that he then poured into the Rufige Kru project and, eventually, Metalheadz.
listen: upstream & heresource: Mentors ↗
1990
Mr. Kirk's Nightmare4hero
1992
TerminatorGoldie
listen forLine up 4hero's queasy, chopped-up sample collage on 'Mr. Kirk's Nightmare' against Goldie's own debut as Rufige Kru — the same appetite for mangling a breakbeat until it sounds like it's coming apart, learned in the same room.
Afrika Bambaataa1980s · Electro / Hip hop / Funk
Before jungle, Price was a b-boy with the Westside crew and a graffiti writer around Wolverhampton and Birmingham — the electro and early hip-hop culture that Bambaataa's Zulu Nation exported to the UK in the early '80s, the records, the dance, the paint, was the scene he came up through, years before he ever touched a sampler.
listen: upstream & here
1982
Planet RockAfrika Bambaataa
1998
AngelGoldie
listen forYou can hear the electro-funk cosmic mythology of 'Planet Rock' — the sci-fi synths, the sense of music as interstellar transmission — resurface in the widescreen, space-themed sweep of Goldie's 'Timeless', just filtered through breakbeats instead of a TR-808.
King Tubby1970s · Dub / Reggae
Jungle grew directly out of the Jamaican sound-system culture that Caribbean migrants, including Price's own family background, brought to Britain — the heavy sub-bass, the cavernous echo, the practice (that Tubby effectively invented at the mixing desk) of stripping a track down to drums, bass and space. Jungle producers inherited that whole toolkit and ran it at double speed.
listen: upstream & here
1975
Roots of DubKing Tubby
1994
Inner City LifeGoldie
listen forThe dropped-out, cavernous verses of 'Inner City Life', vocal floating over almost nothing but sub-bass and delay, is a jungle-tempo descendant of the exact trick Tubby pioneered on the mixing desk: pull everything away except the low end and the echo, and let the empty space do the work.