Icons - Emotions With Intellect flac mp3 download

Future AspectsBlame: "It was all about new and exciting ways to trigger breakbeats. We got thinking, 'What would happen if we sampled the grace notes, or the shuffle?' It was about the ghost notes. You'd start re-triggering them from all these different start points."It was a case of, 'How can I out-edit the competition?'… Photek, Wax Doctor, Danny Breaks. We wanted to make them wonder how we put the drums together. That was it. Chopping breaks in interesting places."A lot of these breaks were inspired by hip-hop, and especially UK hip-hop. People like Hijack and Caveman. There was a lot of cool old links to that. They knew - the crazier the break, the better. That's what I get from this first track."Salsa FlavourBlame: "This was about five years before DJ Marky came over with his Brazilian DnB… maybe more. It was ahead of that. It was inspired by sampling. We'd find records with that salsa flavour and latin drum sound on and try and work them into what we were doing. We'd be looping these catchy things up and just be tapping our feet, going, 'Hold on. This is at a drum 'n' bass tempo…'"We wanted to be as authentic as possible with the salsa basslines over the top of, again, the craziest drums we could manage. Listening back now, I can hear all the crazy whistles and latin sound effects that we added over the top… Clapping in the background like it was some kind of cocktail bar [laughs]."Repro HouseBlame: "There's a drum pattern style in here that we loved. I think it was the first time it had ever been used in drum 'n' bass. It's that shuffle that people like Andy C would later use on tracks like Body Rock."We started getting into this function in Cubase where you could quantise to a swing. It opened our eyes a lot. A lot of the guys in the New York garage scene like Masters At Work and MK were doing it. Their snares were getting swung all over the place. We really started to experiment with what it would sound like applied to a breakbeat."I was also really into drawing these 16-note machine gun snare rolls in-between notes at the time. You end up drawing a bit of a velocity curve and it gives it a bit of feeling and movement. I think you can get a bit carried away with it, which we probably did [laughs]."Urban RadioJustice: "This track is based around a sample of someone like [legendary Jazz saxophonist] Charlie Parker. Then there's a bit of Public Enemy in there, too. That was the way we went about it back then. We were very sample heavy."We'd always find the break first, then build off that. We came from hip-hop, so it made sense. The drum beat was everything."I also like the bass on this one. I was a big fan of the Juno-106 and the Oberheim OB-X. Up to this point on the album we had more of the [LTJ] Bukem 808 bassline thing going on, so this made a nice change. At that time that sound was starting to get rinsed a bit. We were looking for something different." "We'd always find the break first, then build off that. We came from hip-hop, so it made sense. The drum beat was everything"Third Eye VisionsJustice: "This is based around a Roy Ayers sample. When I started this one I had an idea in my head of what I wanted. I wanted the arrangement of the track to take on a kind of song structure. It almost has that verse/chorus/verse with a bridge in the middle with the strings coming in."This was probably the first thing we'd written where we thought it actually resembled a proper song. Drum 'n' bass didn't have much of a structure back then; you just rolled with it. Nothing was mapped out. We were mapping out the formula as we went. That was a lot of the fun."It's harder to be experimental now, because it's all been done. When we were doing it, it was allnew ground."Lost In MusicBlame: "The bassline was taken from the Roland R-8 drum machine and spread across the keyboard. That was it. One sample played up and down. I imagine a little bit of saturation would have been added, not that I knew what it was back then."I had no idea about mixing or frequencies. All I knew was, 'If you turn that, it sounds a bit more in-your-face, like you hear in the clubs'. In a way, having no knowledge helped. We were breaking the rules without knowing them."You go on a weird journey as a producer, from breaking all the rules, then being cautious of not breaking them, to wanting to break them all over again. Back then we really were Lost in Music. I think I needed asat nav [laughs]."StratosphereJustice: "This is one of my favourites. It was good to have a full album so we could explore grooves like this one. It almost wrote itself."The break is from one of [Soul singer] Mickey Murray's tunes. We loved that break. I've used it a few times since, actually."The bass is long and held, but almost quite snappy as well. We just let everything ride over that pattern. The bass is almost the melody in that tune. It's the bass that is doing most of the work here, even though it's quite simple. Then you've got the higher, I don't know, whimsical bits over the top that are the icing onthe cake."Fluid DynamicsJustice: "This was inspired by a lot of jazz and funk. I was just talking to Blame about this the other day, about how it was all built around Earth, Wind & Fire samples. We found that to be quite poignant because of the recent passing of [bandleader] Maurice White."There's a great call and response on this tune. That's an important element to our tracks. Then the little piano and guitar parts weaving in. Some of it is sampled from a Majorcan guitarist called Joan Bibiloni. He's quite a famous producer on the island, who was quite futuristic. We used some of the great classical guitar he had. It really made the tune. It was just this weird amalgamation of Spanish guitar music and Earth, Wind & Fire samples."VertigoBlame: "This has that [jazz-funk legend] Bob James Westchester Lady sample in. I would have sampled it from its use in the Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince track, A Touch of Jazz. Adam F would go on to use it in Circles a few years after us. Where Adam F had the edge on us, though, is that he wasn't indulging himself in these crazy breakbeats [laughs]."There was a lot of reversing up to samples in this. It gave you a whoosh leading up to it. We also discovered reverse reverb and delay as well. We ended up doing it on every single thing we could get our hands on after that [laughs]. A few years later people were going on about it like it was this new technique."Electric SoulJustice: "Ah, more Joan Bibiloni on this, but his pad sounds. He was ahead of his time. I do like this one. The beat rattles along on it. It's a polished track, this one."I have to mention our engineer, Simon 'Sparky' Donohue. Sparky was the guy who tied everything together. It was his studio, and he was a very technical guy. He would take care of the - let's call it this - 'donkey work'. It freed us up to be creative. That's what you want your engineer to be in the studio."We could say, 'We want this sample chopped up and spanned across the keys', and then that's when we'd take over - triggering stuff and playing stuff that was ready to be played with. He was phenomenal. There was an understanding between us three."Planet FusionJustice: "Planet Fusion was never meant to be on the album. Neither was Nostalgia. They're not on the vinyl version. The distributor needed two more tracks to make up the CD."Planet Fusion isn't like anything else on the album, especially in tempo. I think it was us trying to do a more house-y tune, without being house, you know what I mean? It had that Detroit influence."It was all about the fusion. We were drawing from so many different styles of music from our collective record collections. It was all about being creative with those samples. We did everything we could to not sound like everybody else. That was our number one priority - to stand out." "We did everything we could to not sound like everybody else. That was our number one priority - to stand out."NostalgiaBlame: "We had a sense of sadness at the time for music lost. I like that, and the sadness you find in music made in minor keys. Now I know a lot of it was in minor seven and minor nine chords."Listening back to the track, that nostalgia comes full circle to me. I'd not heard this album for 15 years. It's like looking back through an old photo album, but in 3D. Now I know so much about music theory, I can listen back to the DNA of these tracks and see all the mistakes and how they shouldn't work. But they kinda did."

I feel like I should personally apologise to Blame and Justice - its 2017 and despite being a rave/jungle/d&b record buyer and collector since 1994 I never picked up on this album till now. Its frankly stunning and yet seems to have been slept on at the time - I have a couple of Icons 12''s but wish I had bought this album at the time. Maybe the two producers were just that bit too far ahead for most people's ears. Listening now it's all absolutely spot on for either a club or at home. So so good.

TJ, I don't know if you've seen but we've been talking about this masterpiece for years over at Dogs on Acidhttps://www.dogsonacid.com/threads/icons-emotions-with-intellect.18124/

Apology noted !! Thanks for getting on it and the words.TJ

When I decided to use my company Vinyl Distribution to promote the new sound of DnB emerging I was looking for artists who I felt could move into this new sound. I had been a big fan of the Blame & Justice projects that had been coming out since those early Rave years on the superb Moving Shadow Label. So after listening to the last Blame & Justice release on Shadow and not feeling it as I had all thier previous releases I decided to ring Tony aka Justice. We talked on the phone about how the Rave/Jungle scene was coming to an end, remember the article by Pete Tong "Raving is Dead" the writing was on the wall, however in an Documentary interview at the time I said within a few years Tongy would come to realise that a new scene was emerging and that he like many others would once again embrace the underground scene that we all came from. So after a long chat I invited Tony & Conrad down to my company Vinyl Distribution in Reading to have a chat about an idea I had. I played the ma bunch of releases I had planned and some of the early DnB records coming out through my company Vinyl Dist' and got the response I expected from these two talented artists, so I asked them if they would produce some prrojects for my new Basement Records sub label Precious Material. I asked them to not worry about DJ rections and to simply draw on thier musical backgrounds and put that into the music, so no restrictions, no formula, just pure heartfelt music. I wanted music that could be listened too anywhere, in a club, a bar at home with your friends, so the Icons project was born. The guys drew on all thier musical influences and produced the stunning Aspects & Inspirations projects. Even though at the time very few DJs supported the releases, the growing interst in the burgeoning DnB Scene from the mainstream, was enough to get the release some great reviews in magazines such as MixMag, Muzik & DJ and with the growing buzz around the club Speed hosted by Fabio & Bukem all added to the success of the release, the guys continued with the project and this awesome album was the result.To build up a catalogue of labels from my company the Modern Urban Jazz label was born.A DnB soundscape of Jazz, Techno & rare groove beats that was so infectious the album was released to critical acclaim. Now many years later this album is a glowing beacon to those formative years of the DnB scene and without doubt has lasted the test of time. Its still has not lost none of its impact as a wondereful musical journey and deserves its palce in DnB history. Voted no 17 in the Fact magazine 100 best albums of the 1990s, listening to it now you realise just how ground breaking this wonderful album was and what brilliant artists Tony & Conrad are to produce a DnB masterpiece.Basement Phil