G*ddamn i used to listen to Torque so much. All rollers but this one is verrry nice. Gonna have to get my subwoofer out. Spent about like 100 hours listening to that record sm*king w e e d ❤
this is the thing - anything cutting edge in 2023 - sounds like it should have been from Torque - so groundbreaking its influence - a lot of new Metalheadz releases feel like this..... not knocking it as late 90s techstep was peak DNB!
Torque was behind the times in 1997. The tunes on it had been on dubplate for ages. By the time Torque came out Optical and Matrix had completely changed the game and the No U Turn sound wasn't cutting edge anymore. Obviously, the tunes sound great now but Torque was not ahead of its time. August, Westside Sax, What's Up, and the other big tunes from 95 were ahead of the game.
@@MemoryLaneCinemaWere you there in '97? If you were, how could you disagree? It is exactly what happened. Ed Rush left No U Turn right after the release of Torque, Trace made one more record, and No U Turn became a much more under the radar and connoisseurs type label. The world went mad on Optical, possibly the most hyped artist that there has ever been in Drum and Bass and the sound completely changed, with the old well worn breaks disappearing and the use of synths becoming more prevalent, replacing the Reece Project bass. If you listen to Grooverider's Essential Mix from early 1997 the change is very clear. I am not knocking No U Turn - I own almost every record on that label up to that point and bought Torque when it came out. However, No U Turn led the way in 1995. Production became much more technical in 1996. Torque is a great record but it wasn't ahead of its time. No U Turn sounded like the future in 1995. A record like Metropolis sounded like the future in 1996 - a much more technically produced record. In 1997, the old Life Could break led tunes were disappearing, and the sound was changing to what would become known as Neurofunk. That was the cutting edge sound of 1997 and next to it, something like Torque sounded old. I am not saying it was inferior, it just wasn't the new in-thing at that time. We are judging the record now years later, but at the time Torque was not considered to be ahead of the curve because it wasn't. The No U Turn crew were on the crest of a wave in 1996 but it was obvious that the music was going in a different direction in 1997 and there weren't that many engineers with those kind of next level skills. Everyone jumped ship and started to work with Optical and within a year, the scene had upped their production game massively and the sound that Optical - and Matrix - had pioneered was pretty much the sound of dancefloor Drum and Bass.
This is so much true... I got no words to express how much i am consumed by this simple jungle bits combined with darkest ambience... I can listen and re-listen this forever.... Etalon music... But etalon of the past...
Last time I did an all vinyl set, this was out of the bag. Still moves heads just as hard. Kids are like "is this a dubplate"? No... that's uh.... that's a record.
nico's tunes are just another level of paranoid darkness. any other tunes of his like this? Damn Son is another mad multi layered monster of a tune. What an awesome piece of plastic this must have been in '97 !
Also you can check very dark mix "Ed Rush, Dillinja, DJ Krust - Bass Mix" on my channel. This is not my mix, I found it somewhere at the year 2001 probably. But the style/mood of the songs in the mix is similar to this one and Torque album.
For all the old skool techsteppers....who knows this one track that has a repeating sample saying "you will be destroyed." It sounds like a sample of a the Cybermen from a 1960's Doctor Who episode. It's a basic bare bones techstep track from circa 1998 that I heard on the radio in NYC. Might have been some dubplate biznezz.
One of my all time favorite tracks, and also the one that introduced me to techstep ! I really hope that it will get a full length digital uncompressed release one day, I'd pay quite a lot to get it... All I could find at the moment is a shorter 5m42s version from a live mix where it's layered with parts of other tracks from the set
Soooo lo every motherfkr's knuckles be dragging on the flo. Dear god, if you've ever heard this belter on a dark, sweaty laser slashed dance floor five hours into a monster dnb set, then you, my friend, have lived.
Brutal. The only thing I recall coming close to the heaviness of the No U Turn sound was Ram Trilogy, "System Error" "Mind Overload" being a good examples
It's a reflection of the cold, grey and miserable place the UK is, but there's something great about that. Listen to the album Untrue by Burial and you'll see what I mean :)
