Jungle Techno

What it is

1992 is when the word jungle first appears on a label, and for about eighteen months it meant this: breakbeat hardcore that had got faster, taken the piano out, and started letting the break carry beats the kick used to hold. Noise Factory, Rufige Kru, Johnny Jungle and the first wave on Reinforced and Ibiza Records all sit here. The four to the floor has not gone yet, but it has been cut back to beats 1 and 3, so the ear starts reading the break's own kick drum as part of the rhythm rather than as clutter. The stabs are still techno stabs, sampled off Belgian and Dutch records. The tempo is climbing about five bpm a year. Two years later there is no house kick left at all and the genre has renamed itself.

What it sounds like

Brighter and harder than hardcore, and noticeably emptier. A short, clicky kick on 1 and 3 rather than a booming one on all four, a break pitched up until its snare has a metallic ring, and a stab that is a sampled orchestra hit or a Korg M1 organ chord fired at sixteenths. The hoover is bent by hand across two bars. Underneath, a sub that has started to move at half the speed of everything else, which is the tell that jungle is coming. Reverb on the snare, nothing on the kick, and a rewind every few minutes.

Key elements

• The kick pulled back to 1 and 3The single change that opens the door. With beats 2 and 4 free of a house kick, the break's own bass drum becomes audible as a rhythm and producers start editing around it.
• The stabA Belgian techno chord hit, usually one sixteenth long, fired in threes and fives against the bar. Human Resource and T99 supplied most of the source material by way of a sampler.
• The hooverThe Alpha Juno What The patch again, but bent slower and lower than hardcore bends it, so it reads as a bassline rather than a stab. Two bars per sweep.
• Half-speed subA sine playing two notes a bar under drums moving at sixteen times that rate. It is the reggae bassline arriving early, and it is what turns this into jungle within a year.
• Break at 152, not 138The Think and Amen breaks pushed to a tempo their converters were not built for. The snare thins and the room tone turns into a hiss, and producers kept going anyway.

How to get them

• Two kicks, two jobsProgram a machine kick on 1 and 3 only, then leave the break's own kick hits wherever they fall. High-pass the break at 150Hz so the two never fight in the low end, and let the break's kick read as a mid-range thump.
• Fire the stab off the gridSample a single chord hit, trim it to about 120ms, and place it on the a of 1, the e of 3 and the and of 4. Groups of three against a four-beat bar are what makes the stab sound frantic rather than square.
• Bend the hoover by handSet the pitch bend range to twelve semitones and play the sweep with the wheel over two bars. Drawing it in automation gives you a straight line, and every record from this period has an audible wobble in the middle of the bend.
• Sub at a quarter of the speedA sine, mono, low-passed at 110Hz, playing a root and a fifth across two bars. Give it a 40ms pitch drop at the start of each note so it has an attack that survives on a small speaker.
• Repitch the break, then stretch a copyRun one layer repitched for the bright top end and a second time-stretched for the body, then crossfade them around 400Hz. This is the trick that carried straight into jungle a year later.
• Arrange in eightsEight bars of drums, eight with the stab, sixteen with everything, then drop to sub and hoover alone. Cue a reversed cymbal into every sixteenth bar and do not bother with a breakdown longer than that.

Reference points

Noise Factory, Rufige Kru, Johnny Jungle, Ibiza Records, Reinforced and the early Moving Shadow catalogue. Listed as reference points for the sound rather than as endorsements.