Warriors Dance
From what seems like beyond the dawn of time, these records came out in 1989. Produced by Nigerian ex-pat Tony Addis and recorded at his Addis Ababa Studios (unfortunately not in Ethiopia). They represent a "House-ification" of Jazzie B's Africa Centre vibe. House became an unwitting agent of deconstruction and the results were fascinatingly unstable, throwing up all sorts of imminent possibilities. Bang The Party's "Bang Bang Your Mine" is a Jamaican-inflected take on tracks by Chi-Town House divas like Jamie Principle. Their revisions of House music found favor with Derrick May and Kid Batchelor's utterly wonderful "Release Your Body" ended up with a Mayday mix and a release on the Rolls Royce of Techno labels Transmat.
The signposts North, East, South and West are yet more nuttily prescient. "Rubba Dub" from the "Back To Prison" LP with its slow, echoing, displaced power-drill break-beats is what a dose of inspiration would have done to Trip-Hop. "Righteous Rule Dub" must be one of the best contenders for thee Ur-Dubstep track, maybe I'm showing my age (remembering the crazy old record dealer who tried to sell me Sequence on Sugarhill as Techno), but I can't hear the difference. In fact the Dub angle to the Warriors Dance stuff is well-documented, David Toop mentioning the label in his iconic A to Z of Dub in the May 1994 issue of The Wire.
Most interesting to me in 1992 was the recontextualisation of African music within Black Techno that was manifest on No Smoke's "Koro Koro" and their International Smoke Signal LP. For the first time there seemed practically nothing tackily "tribal" about the use of a sample of African (Bambara) singing. In Senegal we were told that "Koro Koro" meant "underground" and adopted it on all our flyers.
My pal Marcus at WARP forwarded an email from his tape enthusiast friend talking about some of his recent acquisitions, and I'll hope they won't mind me quoting it: "And my absolute favorite is that Soul All Dayer Of The Century album (also 1987) which has got Mike West on it as part of Beatfreak Sound mixing "Singing In The Rain" with digi reggae and DJ Ron cutting Pablo Gad's Hard Times into Planet Rock at half time to it. It is actually as close a moment to the birth of the idea of jungle as I've heard." Marcus paraphrased this is "jungle without the drum and bass" and that neatly encapsulates the vibe of the Warriors Dance stuff.