Green and Otchere decided on a simple narrative arc: a long weekend, Friday through to Monday morning, in the lives of four south Londoners – Meth, Q, Biggie and Craig – who they based on themselves and their mates. It’s often hard to tell them apart, their voices and personalities melting into a polyphonic mix, a scattershot and bantz-heavy flow of the kind that might be heard on a pirate station. They have minor run-ins with the police as they drive across town in Q’s mum’s Cortina, but this isn’t a protest or a journalistic novel; it’s more interested in inner space than in sociological space, the psychology of urban life as it’s modulated by beats and weed. Absolutely. I don’t cut any corners with my products and brands, I go on in on it. So when I work with someone I’m creating a connection and relationship between our brands. It’s very tight, it’s a family. From the hip hop side I’ve been working with guys like Rodney P, Omar, Skitz and Ty. From the jungle side I started with Kenny Ken, Moose, Ron. They’ve been with me ever since. I’ve never rinsed it, I’ve kept it as a family which keeps on growing. Exactly. We push the music from a cultural point of view and play a big part in the movement. I do feel that gets overlooked a lot. I’ll give you an example; some very big artists have used my logo and own my brand in their content to get stripes, but not reached out to me and worked with me. That’s a culture vulture move. I might not be on the frontline but my work is out there and I’ve been here in the game for 20 years, just reach out to the originators and work with us positively.

That’s what rave was about. I learnt from it, though. If I can get that attention then what I’m doing is having an effect and I should take it seriously. So I redefined my brand as Aerosoul because – as you mentioned with the graffiti – that’s what everything was founded on for me. I bought the two together. It was everything that represented me; hip hop culture, graffiti, wordplay, the music, fashion. The term itself is connected with the origin of the name jungle. During the time of junglists, they were sometimes referred to as "rude bwoii", a slang term originally used by Jamaicans (as rude boy), meaning "gangsta" or "badbwoy" ("bad boy"). The term refers to an inner city area of West Kingston, Jamaica, called Jungle (the subject of the Bob Marley song "Concrete Jungle", from the Wailers album Catch a Fire).

Tracklist

I want to push Aerosoul Africa. That’s part of who I am and my identity. I want to focus more on that as a brand. Afrobeat is huge and Africa’s rich culture needs to be celebrated with products everyone would be proud to wear. I’m working with a really inspiring artist from Tanzania and it’s a big focus for me. Beyond that I’m just making sure I’m making the best products and designs I can and bringing everything together. Aerosoul, Junglist Movement, Hip Hop Movement, Babysoul, Soulero Sista and Aersosoul Africa. Each one is its own brand but all under the main Aerosoul umbrella. We’ve had some great attention recently so it’s about capitalising on that and bringing everything together in-house. You just did a collab with Hospital for Hospitality In The Park, too. Do you have any other big collabs you can reveal for 2020? Neither of them were particularly interested in literary fiction (“a term I despise,” says Green today); the word-length was 50,000 (about 48,000 longer than anything either of them had ever written before); Green was now up country studying film at Northumbria University. Otchere says he’d never even read a full-length novel up to that point, preferring instead the wordplay and poetry of the sleeve notes on Sun Ra LPs. In more recent times he’s designed unique drops with Hospital Records for last year’s Hospitality In The Park, he’s collaborated with the exercise phenomenon that is Flight Klub and has partnered with Human Traffic Live with a new collection exclusive to the forthcoming Lost Weekend event at Printworks in May. The popularity rose so much that BBC Radio 1 gave Jungle a platform with the One In The Jungle weekly show.

Whenever we are talking about the evolution of Drum & Bass, there is one common reference that you will most certainly stumble upon, that it was oddly referred to as the b*astard child of Dance Music. From its emergence in the English rave scene in the early 90’s, Drum & Bass has evolved and stood as one of the most energetic and influential genres in electronic music. I lost every booking I’d ever worked for. When the police came to my house they said, ‘so, you’re the DJ everyone hates’. I had no idea the guy had been stabbed but people didn’t believe me,” she told me in 1996. Nonetheless, ‘Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare’ is a pivotal tune in the development of the darkcore scene.

Notes

I hear you. On the flip of that, when you do work with people this is much more than sending an artist a bunch of merch, right? Drum & Bass is a genre that spans across three decades of rich musical history. Since its inception in the early 90s, the genre has kept shapeshifting its styles into different eras of music and it has now consolidated itself as a genre that is influencing electronic music in big ways. For a genre so rich in its history, it’s only fair that we narrate its evolution in the way it deserves to be; and through our ‘Evolution of Drum & Bass’ series, we aim to take you on a ride right from where it all began to its place in electronic music in modern-day electronic music. We saw how much fun they were having and brought it into our own circles’ ... raving at AWOL in Ministry of Sound. Photograph: Eddie Otchere Definitely. For me collaboration is about mutual respect, when you get that balance the product is going to be dope. All my collaborations come about because we love what each other are doing. Even with the artists who I sponsor, that’s a collaboration for me. It’s not just product placement, it’s like A&Ring. People I’ve sponsored early on are now massive. That’s the A&R side, being able to spot a talent and seeing it if fits in with your brand and whether they’re going to be around for the long game. I ask myself where they’re going to be in five years time or 10 years time and we grow together. Conquering Lion was better known as Michael West, aka Rebel MC who’d had chart success with the commercial sound of hip-house. This ragga breakbeat mash-up couldn’t have been further from the mainstream. Like Remarc’s ‘RIP’ this tune samples Saxon Sound and King Addies’ ‘Saxon Vs. Addies Soundclash’ in Bermuda, 1994, but to much darker effect. For West, junglism was far more than a scene, he viewed it as an expression of militancy and subsequently used his profile to raise awareness of the socio-political drive inherent in the music. ‘Code Red’ was a high-octane warning of Junglism’s oppositional fury.

Long Piano rolls, bouncy basslines, breakbeats, and a lush blanket of vocals defined the Hardcore sound in the late 80s and early 90s. The Breakbeat Hardcore scene did see a steady revival in mid 2000s, but in the early 1990s, the genre slowly started fragmenting into several sub-genres like Dark-core and Happy Hardcore which paved a way for darker moods and melodies to make doorway in the UK Rave scene. While the genre was booming in the mainstream charts, the underground side, which had formed the foundations of the sound, kept experimenting with darker, grittier, and more menacing soundscapes and started testing these out in their DJ sets. The morphing continued and producers moved away from the ambient and textured soundscapes to a crispier and refined sound. Influences from the breakbeat hardcore styles were chopped up and glued together to create an accelerated, rolling, syncopated rhythm; and with the Hardcore scene giving way to their euphoric style of music for darker and industrial samples with faster and heavily edited drum programming in turn gave birth to Jungle. Lennie De-Ice’s ragga-tinged release ‘”We Are I.E.” in 1991 was the earliest prototype of Jungle music and it also laid the foundations for the genre for years to come. Even for electronic artists less directly linked to the genre, the influence of OG Jungle on this decade’s hitmakers cannot be underestimated. Shy One is a DJ and producer known for eclectic and diverse sets, but she tells me that “being from a raving family”, she recognises the “honour” of sharing a stage with”legendary pioneers of electronic music like Goldie and A Guy Called Gerald”. Speaking to Notion recently, electronic duo Chase & Status describe a career defining moment, “accidentally stumbling” on “one of the many pirate radio stations blasting out Hardcore Jungle” and being inspired to buy an album at random. The record in question, ‘Grooverider – Hardstep Collection 1’. Alongside Fabio, DJ Grooverider is on the bill for Outlook festival this year, as well as Hospitality in the Woods.No other logo represents this music and culture quite as ubiquitously or timelessly as that of the Junglist Movement brand. Although there's only a tenuous link between grime and jungle sonically, their histories share a heritage that explains at least some of the fanatical reception of Levy in grime's circle of veterans. Most pertinently, both genres are heavily influenced by hip hop; Jungle's breaks are essentially hip hop beats sped up and augmented by additional, micro-engineered drums and grime was the UKs reaction to a US lineage which was beginning to decline. Aside from that, both jungle and grime are inherently British, taking US influence and reshaping them into something completely idiosyncratic; urban music that UK youth can take ownership of without any sour taste of plagiarism lingering in their mouth. They represent two of the last truly innovative, organically home grown exports that we have; our very own musical fish and chips, without the grease and salty regret. Junglist Movement was the first design. But yeah, other ones I had did attract bad attention. In the rave era there was a lot of piss-taking stuff. That was part of the culture. So I did Roots with the Boots logo and Needafix for Weetabix and Natural Born Players for NBA. Boots and Weetabix weren’t happy. They threatened to throw me in jail! I was young and naïve at the time. They got heavy. That’s why I changed the name from Outrage Clothing. Zinc, Hype and Pascal’s ridiculous hip-hop/jungle fusion that starts with samples from LL Cool J and Method Man, builds through lysergic squelches, dubbed up half-time jazz beats and Sleng Teng meets bleep bass before erupting, in a flurry of gunshots into the double-time Amen breaks and wobbly bass of the main verse. This s one of those tunes that demands physical reaction and – despite it’s age and lo-fi production – still sounds immense today.

Tek 9 was an occasional solo project from 4Hero’s Dego McFarlane that fused ragga with hip hop to create an instantly recognisable drum&bass sound. His remake of Code 071’s ‘A London Sumtin’ brought the ragga b-line to the fore. Stretching the ‘Feelin’ It’ break from one of rave’s favoured sample sources, the Ultramagnetic MCs’ Critical Beatdown, Tek 9’s remix twists the original’s hardcore thrust into a twisting darkcore meets proto-jungle horror movie. Yeah it has to be. Fashion is very personal isn’t it? So I started creating more products around the Aerosoul brand. And when I was doing that Human Traffic came out and that took things up again. Absolutely. That’s another foundation. Aersosoul is inspired by typography. The book Subway Art had a big influence on me. I grew up in boarding school from the age of about 7 till I was 16. I was pretty much by myself, very independent, people around me from different cultural upbringings. We were doing graffiti, skateboarding, breakdancing, BMX. We’d take our lino down to the Madison Jones club in Bournemouth and battle these guys who ended up being the massive crew Second To None. We’d bury them every time! Hip hop culture during the 80s was huge, so I spent my years soaking it all up. Then when I met Dev it all fell into place. Another of the ‘should have beens’ from the drum & bass scene, Peshay was taken out of action by an illness that left him bed-bound for almost two years. Miles From Home, his debut album for Island Blue arrived too late have the impact he so richly deserved. One listen to ‘Psychosis’ is enough to reveal his production talent. Like ‘Pulp Fiction’, this was a defining tune for Metalheadz with its anxious cries, shrill noises, and jittering drum rolls that build towards the introduction of the Plastic Jam break that dominates from a minute in. The tune instantly evokes memories of a smoky basement in mid-1990s Hoxton. Fashion is also a very broad church. It’s meant you’ve worked with people from so many industries. Film, sports, not just music…Yes! We’re taking over room two at Fabric with Makoto, Kenny Ken, DJ Ron, Bailey, Zero T, AI, Seba with MCs Verse, Moose and 2Shy. We’ve got the jungle and drum & bass. A celebration of everything. The full spectrum of the music and the full spectrum of what I’ve been about. We’re going to shut down London that night. It’s brilliant – it’s time to celebrate the full culture. Yeah. They hit the right note with the right people. DJ Ron was one of the first who really helped me take the brand to where it needed to be. He was my mentor and very soon we had a lot of people representing the movement and clothing. It wasn’t long after that when I got the script for Human Traffic. The director had seen some of my samples, he was interested, the film went off and that was what really pushed the brand and design. Junglists belong to what is seen as a predominantly UK-based drum and bass subculture. As a subculture, however, it is not nearly as distinct as goth or punk to the untrained eye, where members can often distinguish each other by their mannerisms and fashion without hearing their choice of music. Many of those who identify as Junglists adopt a mix of rasta, rudebwoy and B-Boy fashions since jungle, drum and bass and hip hop have close ties as subcultures. Ahead of that, however, Leke will be taking over Fabric’s Room 2 on February 28 to celebrate the 20 th anniversary of Junglist Movement and his main brand Aerosoul. Just like the movement he’s been immersed as an integral figure in since day one (he was a founding member of Mixrace, an experimental rave/rap act who went on to be signed by Moving Shadow) the line-up covers all bass bases with a line-up of Aerosoul and Jungle Movement endorsed artists: Makoto, Kenny Ken, DJ Ron, Bailey, Zero T, AI, Seba and MCs Verse, Moose and 2Shy. Since the release of ‘”We Are I.E.”, sounds kept blurring and artists started finding their own niche in Jungle. Some artists preferred softer, ambient, and textured melodies while some preferred darker and heavier sounds which could create maximum sonic impact. Jungle music also became a way of expression for London’s streetwise and marginalized youth. They saw Jungle as “England’s answer to hip-hop”, by merging the Jamaican reggae scene with then 4-to-the-floor basslines and erasing racial boundaries by advocating unification of people from different walk of life through its multiculturalism.