from the 12” single, Reinforced Records, 1992It already seems like some of the more forward-thinking beats-heads are marinating in advance of the 20-year retro rule and beginning to bring back some of the more elemental vibes from early rave music, and I for one couldn’t be happier about that; if there’s one genre of music that I would like to see wholly revisited, it’s the early ‘90s breakbeat scene. The overriding sense of melody, the alarm sirens, the swifty breaks, and that sub, mmmmmmmm, the seismic roll of a sub-bass will never lose its appeal to me. The career of renowned beats duo Marc & Dego, better known to the world as 4 Hero, reads like an evolutionary map of the breaks, as they helped usher in the first waves of both breakbeat & jungle, then practically invented the concept of “broken beat” by themselves. This frenetic single finds them standing on the precipice of jungle’s birth, “…cookin’ up ya brain…bust another sample….let the bass go…ya’ll ready for this…?” Damn right!
