4-Hero are jungle legends: part one of two
Plus Tim Reaper, Seefeel, Mabe Fratti and more
Not many musicians can claim to have been at the heart of a new style of music, still fewer to be integral to two; and basically only 4-Hero can say they were fundamental to the birth of three different musical genres.
When I think of my favourite jungle producers Dollis Hill duo 4-Hero are always there, at the front of my thoughts. They also made some of the very best broken beat records; and you can definitely see their influence in the growth of the nu jazz scene in the mid to late 1990s. (Wikipedia, I see, also has them as pioneers of breakbeat hardcore but I’m not sure we can separate that from jungle.)
But it’s not just what they did; it’s how they did it. 4-Hero - aka Mark “Marc Mac” Clair and Dennis “Dego” McFarlane - are one of the most adventurous production duos in modern music, pioneering techniques like time-stretching and pitch shifting that would become fundamental to jungle; but they did so while making astounding records, ones that could as dark as infected hospital waste or as light as a buttonhole carnation, funky, soulful, reflective and mind-blowing in their quality.
Marc Mac and Dego - alongside early 4-Hero members Gus Lawrence and Ian Bardouille - came together, like so many other important UK artists of the time, around pirate radio, specifically London’s Strong Island.
“That radio station wasn’t just about us turning up and playing records, though. We were the station,” Mac said in a 2016 interview with Red Bull Music Academy. “It wasn’t about just music. It was always the technology behind the music, too. We were building the speakers for our sound system and building the transmitters for our radio station. Then, it wasn’t just about making music. We had to run a label.”
That label, Reinforced Records, would go on to become one of the most important labels in jungle. Goldie, Nookie and Doc Scott all recorded for Reinforced, which still continues to this day, although its focus is now more on reissues. But Reinforced is best known for the incredible string of 4-Hero productions, starting with All B 3 / Rising Son, which was released in May 1990, two tracks that combined breakbeats, samples and rave synths at a house tempo in a way that is borderline irresistible, like sunlight breaking over a particularly verdant rave. “When DJ Hype incorporated house and UK hip-hop into his music and dropped Rising Son, nothing else sounded like that. It was a new fusion,” Dego told Clash magazine in 2007.
The contrast with the group’s second release, the Combat Dancin’ EP, and more specifically with its break-out track, the curdled classic Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare, couldn’t have been greater. Where Rising Son was beatific, Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare was demonic, an anti-drug song (apparently) that features the chilling refrain “Mr Kirk, your son is dead; he died of an overdose…” over a murky Get Into Something break and bleeps that would rival anything on Warp for their ominous musicality. Naturally, ravers took it to their bosoms in their thousands and it became an anthem.
They followed this in 1991 with something equally as radical: a full-length LP, In Rough Territory, a rarity among rave producers and particularly those on their own independent label. In the RBMA interview, Gus Lawrence said that the decision was largely a financial one - “We were thinking about the money that we could sell the album for in order to pay off our debts quickly.” - but Marc Mac disagreed.
“I was still trying to make some music,” he said. “But seriously, having grown up collecting records, you know that the next stage as an artist is to make an album. I can’t think of any jungle artists at the time who were making albums.”
The album bears traces of both motivations. Mr Kirk’s Nightmare features twice on and much of the rest of In Rough Territory fees like an attempt to recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle flash of their dark rave anthem. The album even features a track called The Last Ever Bleep Track (Used To Death). It’s a fun release, rather than an essential one - I particularly love the Specials-sampling No Sleep Raver (Tired Eyes Mix) - but it feels very much of its time, a document of the era when British producers were just starting to creep into tentative jungle territory, with breaks, bass lines and mangled attitude.
It was around this time that the duo started to work with Goldie. Kemistry, who would go on to become one of the most famous DJs in jungle before her tragic death in 1999, took Goldie to see 4-Hero play at the Astoria and he was immediately smitten. “When I saw this shit I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do,’ he told Electronic Beats in 2016. “I pulled Marc to the side and I gave him my number and said, ‘Look, I do a lot of artwork and stuff, I wanna work with you.’”
Sure enough, Goldie redesigned the Reinforced logo and eventually released a series of classic 12 inches for the label as part of Rufige Kru, alongside his friend Linford Jones and producer Mark Rutherford. Rufige Kru’s first release for the label was the Krisp Biscuit / Killa Muffin 12 inch in 1992, followed by the Darkrider EP.
“When I took it [Darkrider] to Reinforced, they were fucking blown away, and after that I really started to work with them,” Goldie told Electronic Beats. “I would be there with Dego in the daytime and then when Dego would finish at 4 p.m., Marc would turn up after work and we’d continue with the same tune.”
(1992 would also see the debut of Tom & Jerry, Dego and Marc Mac’s more overtly dance-floor focused, rave-y duo. They have enough classics on their own to fill several pages. But Maxi(Mun) Style from the 1994 Dancer
EP is the one for me, for the way it effortlessly fuses airy soul samples with the filthiest dancehall.)
4-Hero’s work with Goldie essentially involved transforming the ideas in his head into musical reality. “I had a lot of ideas and samples in my head and Marc and Dego would listen to what I said,” Goldie told Electronic Beats. “We went into these intense sessions of cutting up breaks, recording them to DAT, resampling everything onto the computer and layering stuff.”
“Goldie was an ideas man. He was very futuristic and would push us as engineers and producers,” Gus Lawrence told RBMA. “He’d say, ‘I need the break to sound like the door was opening and closing,’ or, ‘Can you make the keys sound like flowers blooming?’ I’d sit there thinking, ‘What are we going to do?’ It was sound design before we even knew what it was, and we were doing it for Goldie.”
According to Marc Mac it was Goldie who first brought pitch shifting to jungle, on Rufige Kru’s classic Terminator. “The first time that I ever heard pitch-shifting was from Goldie,” Mac told RBMA. “He phoned me up about 3 AM when I was in bed and said, Listen to this, listen to this!’ down the phone, with Terminator playing in the background. I was like, ‘What is going on? Am I dreaming?’ That was pitch-shifting done though a device called a H-3000 Harmonizer, which musicians would use for harmonising vocals, guitars and other stuff. Goldie was putting stuff that wasn’t supposed to go through there, like drums, and came out with this effect. We used to call it ‘the parameters.’”
Time-stretching - changing the speed of a sample with altering its pitch - however, was a 4-Hero innovation. “Time-stretching came about when me and Dego sat down one day with a 950 sampler and we needed to check every single page of the manual: editing, this, editing that, and so on,” Mac told RBMA. “On the last page there was something on time-stretching and we thought, ‘What the hell is that about? Let’s try to figure it out.’ We started to experiment with it and heard how it made the breaks sound funny.
“Then we thought that if we sample the same break five or six times with a different pitch and put it back together, but made sure that the break stayed the same length, it should stay in time but the sound would change. That was the first time I remember anybody doing time-stretching.”
You can hear this effect on the February 1993 4-Hero 12 inch Journey From The Light, a record of fast, nocturnal breaks that is credited - notably by Simon Reynolds - with inventing the darkcore breakbeat sound that soon became jungle. The title track is a disgustingly stomach-churning record, the synth lead wriggling around like the snake pit in Raiders of the Lost Ark, while the grainy, time-stretched vocal that introduces the song would soon become a classic jungle effect.
It’s a mark of 4-Hero’s incredible polarity that 1993 also saw the duo release Better Place, a swinging US house track with Diane Charlemagne on vocals, and their next album, 1994’s Parallel Universe, would open with one of their sweetest, most heart-rending songs in Universal Love, written by Charlemagne and Marc Mac and beautifully sung by Carol Crosby, with dreamy saxophone licks also to the fore. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest songs in jungle and its jazzy, orchestral bent showed the way forward for 4-Hero as the jungle sound they had pioneered crept into the mainstream.
And that comes next week, in part two.
(And if you want to get part two direct to your inbox next week, might I suggest you subscribe to this Substack, if you don’t already?)
PS I’ve put together a best of 4-Hero playlist for you, on Spotify.
PPS let me know your early 4-Hero favourites below.
Some listening
Tim Reaper & Kloke - Alienation
Tim Reaper on Hyperdub? A marriage made in heaven. I’m not so familiar with Kloke, his collaborator here, but fans of Reaper’s exquisitely produced retro jungle will finds lots to admire on In Full Effect, the duo’s forthcoming album, from ragga jungle to full-on four / four rave throw downs. Alienation, the first track to be taken from the album, has a melodic sub bass burble that is pure DJ Zinc, an immaculately chopped Think break and a metallic, experimental sound scape that comes close to Detroit techno. It’s a throwback to 1993, of course, but it is a beautifully rendered one.
Sky Hooks is the first new music from Seefeel since 2011 and it reinforces everything I love about the band. The song, which is the first taste of Everything Squared, a new six-track mini album, has a gorgeous hook, which sounds as if it is being sung by slightly overemotional (and potentially drunk) angels out of the corner of a light afternoon sleep. With this brilliant hook established, Seefeel proceed to pull on our heart strings with a series of slowing building beats, noises and occasional guitar fuzz, just like in the good old times, when ambient music could still be beautiful.
Molly Nilsson - The Communist Party
What the literal hell is this? A 90s-ish, Vogue-gone-sloppy, tongue-in-cheek ode to communists from a Swedish singer-songwriter? “Are you now - or have you ever been - to a communist party?” No, is the honest answer. But, damn, it sounds like fun when explained by Molly Nilsson over a bumping house beat.
Overmono - Gem Lingo (feat. Ruthven)
Overmono are very much into their groove these days and while this might take them to some genuinely awful places - DJing with Swedish house Mafia? Really? - it also produces effortless-sounding (but obviously not effortless) jewels like Gem Lingo, with South-London singer-songwriter Ruthven, a stadium 2-step number with a spattering of industrial grind, a soupçon of sadness and trace elements of anthem.
The cello really is a fabulous instrument, full of drone and dignity. And Mabe Fratti is an absolute mistress at it. Sentir Que No Sabes, her fourth album and perhaps her commercial breakthrough, has tonnes of fabulous songs, dripping with emotion, experimentation and confidence; but Intento Fallido is my favourite, at least for today, thanks to the criss-crossing cello line that underlines its sky scraping chorus
Joe Goddard - Revery (feat. Alabaster DePlume)
The Joe Goddard album, which I reviewed for Pitchfork, is a little beige but it does have some stand-out moments, none more than Revery, with Alabaster DePlume, in which the duo unleash their astral funk on an Underground Resistance-style jazz techno number (it reminds me a little of Star Dancer, which obviously is a massive compliment.) I didn’t get on with the track’s vocal at first but I quickly came around to the way the rather lazy sounding voice complements the starry techno backing.
Some watching
Megamix Brutal
In the UK you can barely switch on the TV without finding a documentary exploring the history of rave music; so why shouldn’t Spain do the same with its own legacy or electronic music?
Megamix Brutal, a new drama documentary series from RTVE and TV3, isn’t that exactly, although it does cover, in quite excellent detail, the history of the Max Mix compilation albums, which helped to introduce the concept of the DJ as someone who does something other than simply take requests and occasionally clean the dance floor to Spain in the mid 1980s, as well as something of Valencia’s famed / feared Ruta Destroy. This it mixes with a very engaging true crime-ish strand, as the founders of the Max Mix label make it big, fall out with their rivals, try to break the US and then fall out spectacularly with each other.
Fans of musical history - and in particular dance music as mainstream force - will find more than enough to keep them engaged, with lashings of footage of pre-and post-dance explosion night clubs, DJs showing off their curious new art on prime-time TV in the 1980s and plenty of people doing bad things in Valencian car parks. But this is never overplayed, as three episodes rip through the central story of success and betrayal, combining modern interviews with the real-life characters at the centre of the Max Mix phenomenon with dramatic reconstructions of the key events of the 80s and 90s (get ready for a lot of Yuppie suits and cigars). It is all very stylishly put together, with an incredible eye for period detail.
Megamix Brutal is one of the most enjoyable series I have seen in a long while, an inadvertent history lesson that can be inhaled over one long viewing session, whether you care a fig about tape-editing techniques and the effect of bakalao’s growing popularity on Spanish listening or not. In Spain you can see it on RTVE Play and 3Cat. Outside Spain, I have no idea. But I do wish someone would take a chance on this gripping TV series, which could have an impact far beyond its home country.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise - With Simon Raymonde
Line Noise is, I know, generally concerned with electronic things. But a) loads and loads of electronic musicians love the Cocteau Twins. And b) who would turn down an interview with Simon Raymonde? I spoke to Simon about life in the Cocteau Twins, his dad and David Bowie, running Bella Union and more, much of which features in his debut book, out this September: In One Ear: Cocteau Twins, Ivor Raymonde and Me.
I reviewed the new Joe Goddard album for Pitchfork - “a record so relentlessly empathetic it can feel like getting smothered by a pack of golden retrievers”. This should be a good thing. But somehow it gets all a bit blurred and direction-less in the orgy of good feeling. Which is a shame.
The playlists
Slower than an Olympic walker with some serious stomach cramp, my playlists creep closer to a listenership in the three figures. So why not get involved? The newest and the Bestest 2024 has all the best new music of this year guaranteed; and the original Newest and the bestest has the same for the last three or so years.