10 best techstep slammers - Part one

Plus Stereolab, Photek, Jenny Hval and more

"The Bladerunner", digital collage, Anna Jane McIntyre @annajanemcintyre

I used to think that techstep ruined jungle. I love drums, perhaps more than anything else, and techstep - the loud, aggressive and (almost) uniformly dark take on drum & bass that emerged in the mid 90s - paid a lot less attention to drum programming that the early jungle producers did.

They didn’t abandon their drums, as such: techstep record like Dilinja’s Silver Blade or Future Forces Inc.’s Dead By Dawn could still have some pretty fearsome drum programming. But drums went from being the central force in jungle to occupying a secondary position to techstep’s obsession with ever-more-fearsome bass programming.

From there - Alien Girl, Piper, Torque and all - it only seemed to be a short step into Pendulum, Noisia et al, producers whose obsession with utter darkness seemed to make drum & bass into a kind of techno metal, with no soul, funk or interest.

And so I blamed techstep for ruining jungle. Except, of course, this wasn’t really fair. For one, jungle / drum & bass is (commercially at least) in a healthier state than ever in 2025. True, the genre’s fortunes dipped a little at the start of the new Millennium; but D&B only seemed to view this as a challenge to grow ever bigger. And while I don’t pay as much attention to jungle as I used to, I can hear that it continues to produce a range of brilliant new music.

And it was two of these releases - Sully’s Model Collapse and the forthcoming Rufige Kru album - that made me think again about techstep. Neither release is exactly techstep. But both contain enough of techstep’s steely production perfection and dark-as-a-vicar’s-underwear technical grace to make me think again about the genre.

Doing so, my mind went back to when I first heard techstep. This isn’t an exact science, I should say. DJ Trace’s remix of T-Power's Mutant Jazz, which is generally pegged as one of the first techstep (or techstep-ish) tunes), was first released in 1995 and I think I heard it around then. I definitely remember hearing Jonny L’s fearsome Piper upon release, which was sometime in early autumn 1997, with parent album Sawtooth coming in November that year.

The April 1997 issue of Muzik magazine, meanwhile, came with a free cassette that featured five tracks from Grooverider’s forthcoming mix album The Prototype Years, including songs from Ed Rush & Fierce, Dillinja (as Cybotron) and John B, all as rabidly ferocious as a tetchy wolf. I think I bought it. But I definitely heard it.

So these could, technically, have been my introduction to techstep. But the time I remember really coming to the music was late one night in - I think - early 1998, although it could have been late 1997 - when the flatmate of my girlfriend at the time, Andy Mills, played me several records of thunderous intensity and mind-blowing intricacy, including Optical’s stunning Moving 808s. (At the end of part two of this top ten, I have Andy’s list of best techstep tunes, delivered fresh for 2025.)

I had been living in Paris for several months at this point, returning to Manchester for a week’s holiday. In France, house and techno were everything at the height of the French Touch and I hadn’t listened to any new jungle for months. And jungle had moved on dramatically - so much so, in fact, that I still remember that night’s discoveries, more than 25 years on.

Millsy brought me up to speed on what was happening. He had been to see Grooverider - one of the key DJs in the spread of techstep - a few nights earlier and the music he played was, apparently, a bit like a descent into hell, each song accompanied by a drum track that sounded like someone banging a metal pipe with the furious precision of a dedicated train vandal. Was I in? TOO RIGHT I was in.

Although I had heard the Grooverider Muzik mag mix, this sounded like something several steps on and I had to know more. And so we spend a few hours chatting and, in my case, having my mind blown by this devastating new music.

And so, in the spirit of that night, let me tell you my tech favourite techstep tunes, as compiled with the help of some friends. I’ve rambled so much in this intro that I will make it a two parter, with the first five tunes today and the next five next week, on this very newsletter. So why not sign up and get it direct to your inbox?

Incidentally, one thing that surprised me in putting together this list, is how early the records it features were released. I had always thought of techstep as a late 90s / early 2000s thing. But seven of these 10 records were released before 1997 was out and only one dates from the new Millennium. So maybe I was wrong about that, as I am wrong about so many things. As ever, let me know in the comments.

1. T Power - The Mutant Jazz Remix - Rollers Instinct (DJ Trace remix) (1995)

What’s the first techstep tune? There wasn’t one, as there so rarely is the first of anything. Lots of jungle was dark; much of it very well produced; large parts of it influenced by techno and industrial music; and so on. But DJ Trace’s Rollers Instinct remix of T Power’s Mutant Jazz (a jazzy number initially billed as being by T Power v MK Ultra on its 1995 release) has all the qualities to make it into a techstep original.

This is largely thanks to the input of DJ Trace, the long-established DJ and producer who remixed the track, and Nico, the studio boffin who engineered the remix. Nico would later found No U-Turn Records, which would release music from everyone from Ed Rush to Dom & Roland, as well as the classic Torque compilation in 1997, which was a landmark record for the nascent techstep scene.

The original Mutant Jazz is a lovely tune, light, jazzy, the kind of sunshine roller you could take home to meet the most demanding of parents. Trace’s remix, on the other hand, is vile, using the slightest suggestion of the sunny original only to underline its musical treachery.

There had been plenty of dark jungle tunes before. But what makes Trace's Rollers Instinct mix into techstep is the metallic, industrial edge to the bass and drums, which sounds as if more pleasant frequencies have been shaved off from pure malice. Needless to say, a lot of producers were listening.

2. Dillinja - Silver Blade (1996)

Dillinja - who I have written about on Line Noise before - is one of the most important, dynamic producers in the history of jungle, known for his incredible mix downs and the fury of his bass. It was, perhaps, inevitable that his music would be drawn into techstep, even if he’s not generally one of the first names to be mentioned when the tech conversation comes around.

This may be because Dillinja was already well established - in a way, say, Ed Rush, was not - when techstep came about, with his first release coming in 1991 and his first utter classic - The Angels Fell - hitting the shelves in 1996.

Silver Blade - a mixture of plaintive synth melodies and sci-fi atmospherics that seems to hover between bass hell and spectral heaven - both is and isn’t techstep. Or rather: it could be techstep if that’s what you want but I don’t think it is inarguably so in the way, say, Alien Girl is. I am including it here largely because Silver Blade appeared on Grooverider’s 1997 compilation / mix The Prototype Years, a record that is, for me, utterly essential for techstep.

Grooverider is one of the founding fathers of jungle, an utterly essential figure in the scene’s birth and subsequent development. And in the mid 90s, this was the sound he was into: hard, fast, unforgiving and yet gloriously produced: techstep, in other words, although I don’t think Grooverider ever called it that. Listen to Grooverider’s FabricLive 06 mix from 2002 for a brilliant example of how a little techstep can go a along way in a mix, as Grooverider alternates sunny D&B rollers (Peshay’s You Got Me Burning, Danny C’s The Mexican) with the very hardest of techstep smashs (Alien Girl, Mampi Swift’s Rebirth etc.). It makes you wonder why more DJs didn’t take this kind of route.

Grooverider’s support for techstep was reflected in his Prototype Recordings label, which debuted in 1994. In 1996 Prototype released records by Ed Rush and Boymerang, two pivotal figures in the techstep scene. The following year he dropped The Prototype Years (with the backing of Sony, no less, an indication of how important Grooverider was at this time), its 24 tracks (12 on unmixed vinyl) an absolute who’s who (and what’s what) of the emerging techstep sound, including Ed Rush’s Subway, Optical’s Grey Odyssey, Matrix’s Mute, Boymerang’s Still, Cybotron / Dillinja’s Threshold and - yes - Dillinja’s Silver Blade. Techstep royalty all.

(And, if you will excuse the diversion, you really do need to hear Dom & Optical’s VIP remix of Boymerang’s Still, which closed the mixed CD version of The Prototype Years but wasn’t on the vinyl release.)

Grooverider was always better known as a DJ than a producer. But he did make some astounding music, the best of which came around about this time, with a distinct techstep edge to it. His Mysteries of Funk album, which was released in 1998 again with the help of Sony, was produced by Optical, one of the greatest artists in all of techstep (of which more later) and includes the noxiously funky Starbase 23, which my friend Chris chose as one of his techstep classics.

Apparently, Chris wasn’t the only one on whom Starbase 23 made a big impression. “At the beginning of 1999 a friend of mine asked me to DJ at his girlfriend's birthday party challenging me to ‘bring my darkest Drum and Bass’” a certain Swagger writes on Discogs. “[Bad Company’s] The Nine had come out just before Christmas but I'm pretty certain that I didn’t play it that night. Anyway, my heart sank when he greeted me with the words, ‘Did you bring Bad Ass [presumable Mickey Finn and Aphrodite’s celebrated tune]?’

“It was something of an omen. I remember vividly putting on Starbase 23 the day before the party and when those really evil stabs come in, I remember thinking, ‘This will twist a few heads. I'm definitely playing this.’ To this day, I can still picture in my mind the looks of utter confusion, disgust and contempt…”

3. Ed Rush & Nico - Torque (1997)

Nico’s No U-Turn Records, as mentioned above, was one of the key labels in techstep. It was Ed Rush’s first label home (after a self-released debut) and also released early records by Nico himself and DJ Trace.

But the label really hit pay dirt with the release of Torque, a 1997 compilation album that set a blueprint for a particularly technologically advanced form of techstep. (Neurofunk, a drum & bass subgenre that saw itself as an even darker take on techstep, perhaps originated with this compilation. Although, honestly, I’ve never been quite sure of the difference between techstep and neurofunk.)

Torque also established the fluid partnerships that lay at the heart of No U-Turn and perhaps techstep itself. All 10 tracks on the album’s vinyl release were produced by DJ Trace, Ed Rush, Nico and - on one track - Fierce. Five tracks are by Ed Rush and Nico; three are by Trace and Nico; one is by Trace, Ed Rush and Nico; and one by Fierce and Nico.

It’s a brilliantly flexible way of working and the results are uniformly excellent - so much so that even techstep haters seem to love this album - filled with towering stepper beats, Reese (and Reese-inspired) bass and a general air of industrial collapse, like an apocalyptic battle between two vantablack spaceships that you suspect both sides kind of want to end in total destruction for all. Writing on Discogs, stylez-filth pegs the album as both “the end of the rave dream” and “Cold music for a decaying civilisation”, both very astute observations. There is nothing nice, at all, about the ten tracks here, no rave utopianism, happy voices, reggae lurch, Big Life optimism. It’s just cold.

And the epitome of this is Ed Rush and Nico’s hell-scraping title track, Torque. “Torque” means a force that causes something to rotate and as such the track is very well named. Torque sounds like it is an industrial experiment gone wrong, a motor spinning dangerously off its axis, not so much out of control - the tune is too precisely engineered for that - as out of OUR control and perhaps under the influence of a malevolent force.

You can almost hear a sense of security evaporate, as Ed Rush and Nico pick and tease at Torque's production with a series of subtly unpleasant industrial touches. This is techstep at its most techno, where almost nothing human remains at its core, nothing musical, melodic, colourful or warm. And it sounds GREAT.

4. Jonny L - Piper (1997)

When my friend Millsy was telling me abut Grooverider’s set being full of drum tracks that sounded like someone banging a metal pipe, it was perhaps Jonny L’s Piper he was thinking about, a tune with a crudely effective rhythm that is about as far from Photek or 4-Hero’s elaborate drum constructs as could possibly be.

This is not, typically, what I look for in a jungle track. But on Piper, by former rave producer and future True Steppers star Jonny L, it just works, playing off against a bass line that feels horrible squashed and angry, like a huge pissed off wasp trying to get out of a jar. Piper may have been an early techstep classic but it doesn’t really sound like a lot of other techstep tunes. The genre typically uses bass lines stretched out in extremis to further their nastiness; but Piper’s bass sounds claustrophobic and unwell, as if trapped within the confines of the song.

For a truly epic meeting of techstep minds, check out the looming metallic clouds of Grooverider’s Piper remix. And, on a very different note, try Jonny L’s 1993 rave classic The Ansaphone.

5. Future Forces Inc. – Dead By Dawn (The Final Chapter) (1997)

With Dead By Dawn (The Final Chapter) we welcome dBridge and Maldini - aka Future Forces Inc. - to the techstep party, two producers who, a few years later, would form drum & bass supergroup Bad Company with Michael Wojcicki (aka Vegas) and Dan Stein (aka Fresh) and unleash the utter bass line horror that is The Nine on the world.

I have previously argued that The Nine was so great it effectively wrecked the entire genre of drum & bass, which is one of the reasons I have not included it here. You can go and read that piece if you like. I should say here, though, that The Nine was notable for using “a whole load of distortion pedals and compressors” according to Vegas, which would definitely come to be part of the techstep mix. (And, actually, I’ve been listening to a lot of techstep to put together this list: even among this company, Christ The Nine is loud.)

Dead by Dawn (The Final Chapter), released the year before The Nine, wasn’t exactly subtle in its intent. But it does feel like a far more inventive tune compared to Bad Company’s intense bass focus. Techstep, so the story goes (justifiably), is all about the bass weight. But Dead by Dawn (The Final Chapter) shows how cleverly some techstep producers used the bass.

In this case, the track does have that huge, metallic, bass lead, the familiar three notes of descending doom that can have such a huge impact on the dance floor. But this is echoed by a considerably more subtle sub-bass line, that skirts around the edges of the mix in response to the bass lead and there is also a third bass line, which is essentially the lead getting technically messed up around the edges. It doesn’t sound like much on paper, maybe, but the actual impact is vast.

I’d also like to give Dead by Dawn (The Final Chapter) a shout out for its actually very gentle opening two and a half minutes, when it sounds like the song might not take the road into filth just for once, only to swiftly recant when the bass line comes in and drag us down to where we want to go.

… And here ends part one. Please do sign up to Line Noise to receive part two in your email next Wednesday.

Some listening

Photek - The Forge

When I interviewed jungle boffin Photek back in 2020, I asked him why his productions were so incredibly technically advanced, even compared to his 1990s peers. “I was just technically adventurous, and I was very diligent and relentless in putting in the time in the studio and just trying a different thing,” he said, “just trial and error, relentlessly putting the time in.” The producer’s return to knife-sharp drum & bass in 2025 show that the obsession continues to pay dividend. Breath Control initially felt slightly flat, only to explode into Ni Ten Ichi Ryu-style drum sorcery towards the end of the song (which, as you should know, is the best type of drum sorcery. But The Forge is the real gem, the drums coiled like a mechanical scorpion, perfectly attuned to attack, each noise sculpted out of pure digital artistry. And, no, I don’t know why the vinyl costs $500 but it’s on YouTube so you can listen for free.

Jenny Hval - The Artist is Absent (89 second rewrite)

Jenny Hval’s new album Iris Silver Mist seems like a record that is hiding secrets. It’s a strange, wonderful album that frequently makes you wonder why? Why all the spoken word, for example? What’s with the meta commentary? Why do songs appear to flow into each other and divide with little rhyme or reason? And what the hell does perfume have to do with any of it? Over and above this, though, Hval has written some of her most touching songs in years, with a few genuine tear jerkers to be found throughout the record’s 13 songs. The Artist is Absent is one of these - as well as an excursion into what i can only call Nu Jack indie house, being driven by a rhythm that suggests Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis at their most Rhythm Nation-y. If you claim that this is what you expected all along from Jenny Hval then you, my friend, are lying.

Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty and Hahn Rowe - Last Minute Guitar

Look, I might be about the only person in the world who doesn’t really like Fugazi (not dislike, they just leave me a bit cold - all that shouting…), so the reveal that the band’s drummer Brendan Canty has made an ambient record with sound artist Stephen Vitiello and violinist, guitarist and producer / engineer Hahn Rowe left me more intrigued than enchanted. The reality, however, is even brighter. Second, the trio’s new album, isn’t really ambient, despite coming out on Balmat; in fact it’s not really anything in particular, sitting somewhere in between post rock, violin drone, dub, punk and hurdy gurdy, the latter instrument being played by Animal Collective’s Geologist because of course it was. It’s like a walk in the forest, then, where familiar trees map out the territory but unexpected flora spatter the floor.

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Open the F*cking Fantasy

22 years on from their debut album, Black Moth Super Rainbow remain the evil Air, the sound of the laconic French band slipping inexorably towards the dark side and kind of feeling it. Open the F*cking Fantasy, which opens Tobacco & co.’s first new album in seven years, Soft New Magic Dream, will make you believe again that the Vocoder is the work of satan.

Unspecified Enemies - Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback

Unspecified Enemies’ debut album Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback apparently has its roots in another record, one that Louis Digital made in the early 2000s and subsequently lost, only to re-image in 2025 at Numbers’ behest from the fragments of the record found on a broken Iomega Jazz SCSI Drive. It’s a great story and I hope it’s true because the album certainly sounds that way, coming across like Detroit techno that has been warped and wobbled by the cosmic winds into music that exists between solidity and fragility, hardness and comfort, the past and the future. And the album’s mumbling, majestic title track is my favourite, the sound of a drunk computer trying to confess his feelings.

Stereolab - Aerial Troubles

Did Stereolab send me one of their fabulously mysterious brown-paper-bag seven inch singles? They did not. Am I sad about that? A little. Did I spend hours listening to the 21-second clip of Aerial Troubles that a helpful Reddit user uploaded before the song was properly released? Yes I did. Am I very happy about the new album, Instant Holograms On Metal Film? Hell yes.

Aerial Troubles is Stereolab at their most French pop-y, a sort of mid-to-latter period groop, where they calmed down from their frantic beginnings and relaxed into melody, gilded with the slightest touch of chug. The song reminds me of Stereolab themselves, without necessarily calling on any specific period of the band, which seems a perfect way to make a return.

What will the forthcoming album be like? I was intrigued to see the choice of Cooper Crain, best known as part of CAVE and Bitchin Bajas, as producer (the album is billed as “recorded and engineered” by Crain), rather than someone that Stereolab had worked with before - especially when Mouse on Mars were rumoured.

Crain’s production credits on record by the likes of Circuit des Yeux and Ty Segall suggest a rock-kind of direction but he is also credited with “Cwejman SM-1, Korg MS20, TR 606, Roland Jupiter 4, Oberheim SEM

Roland CR8000, Mellotron, Moog Micromoog, TR 707, General Filtering” on Instant Holograms On Metal Film, which suggests electronic may feature heavily.

In fact, from the look of the credits there are A LOT of synths on the new record, including guest contributions from Cavern of Anti-Matter’s Holger Zapf on ”Additional Electronics… Ancient Dabbling & Treatments”. And Aerial Troubles does end with a lovely sprinkle of synth frazzle… so I guess we will see.

Also, could the song’s lyrics about greed and insatiable consumption have come at any better time? All together now: “The numbing is not working any more / an un-fillable hole / an insatiable state of consumption / Systemic extortion.” Hello 2025.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast with Luke Solomon

My guest on the Line Noise podcast this week is Luke Solomon, a don of the UK’s house scene, Classic Recordings co-founder, Beyoncé collaborator, A&R guru and an excellent producer in his own right. We talked about his new Powerdance album - which is out now - becoming an accidental pop star with The Freaks (and the artistic dangers that entailed), discovering house music, his role on an up-coming off-Broadway musical, the explosion of Honey Dijon and how Beyoncé’s Renaissance changed house music

The playlists

“Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by playlist.” So (almost) spoke Plato. And he knew what he was talking about. (Most of the time anyway.) Luckily, I have two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest (unbridled by time). Do follow them for all the best new music.