Adamantium Rage didn’t invent grime - but it did blow my mind
Plus Hiver, yunè pinku, Universal Harmonies & Frequencies and more
Did a young jungle producer accidentally create grime back in 1994? So wonders the typical blurb about Adamantium Rage, the soundtrack for a SNES Wolverine game, which has just been re-released by Sneaker Social Club. To this the answer can only be, “No of course he didn’t,” but that doesn’t make the Adamantium OST any less interesting.
To recap: in 1994 Acclaim Entertainment released Wolverine: Adamantium Rage, a platform game based on the titular X-Men character, for the then fashionable Super Nintendo system. To produce the SNES soundtrack, they commissioned Dylan Beale, half of ferocious jungle duo Rude & Deadly, who had to work within very tight constraints. Acclaim needed every piece of music for the game to have a sample space of 200kb or less, which forced Beale to get creative on his Akai s950. "I basically sampled an orchestral stab and the bass, a hi hat, snare, a few things like that, then I had to trim them down to minute sizes,” he told SBTV, via Fact.
Beale’s intention with the Adamantium soundtrack was to produce something that sounded like West Coast hip hop, with the faster end-of-level-boss tracks more influenced by jungle. And if you’re thinking: hip hop + jungle + basic sound palette + imagination = early grime instrumental, then you’re way ahead of me. To wit: Beale’s Adamantium Rage soundtrack sounds A LOT like early grime records - think Pulse X or So Solid’s Dilemma - which is to say, edgy string runs and orchestral stabs, pulsing bass and drums that fall like synthetic jackhammers, punctuated by spartan blips and bleeps. On the game, it must have sounded neat; on proper speakers it sounds mind blowing.
“I vividly remember when we first played the soundtrack on a bigger set of speakers to the boss,” Beale says on the Sneaker Social Club Bandcamp. “His initial reaction was one of amazement that we had created something so ‘real’ and different in comparison to everything else out there in terms of video game music, which I remember with great pride and fondness. Comparing to everything out there, it was totally unique - a moment in time.”
The game itself wasn’t a huge success, with reviews focused on its rather repetitive game play. But Beale’s music lived on. In 2016 Brixton grime producer Sir Pixalot released a mash up of the Adamantium track Tri-Fusion with J-Wing's Dubplate Acapella for Me to online pandemonium, J-Wing’s hard-nosed raps fitting like a glove over Beale’s teeth-on-edge instrumental. Comments on Pixalot’s Soundcloud page include “I still can't believe this sick ass beat got made in 94”, “this is just in-fucking-CREDIBLE!!!” and “I don’t believe it”, as grime fans reeled from this unlikely piece of musical history.
Seven years later, modernist hardcore label Sneaker Social Club has re-released the Adamantium soundtrack in its full glory, including a number of previously unreleased tracks. And it is a glorious work. Tri-Fusion is the obvious highlight, with its vicious, gladiatorial charm, but there are a number of other zeniths, including the P-funk-with-a-head-cold Weapon X Lab; the polyrhythmic Lady Deathstrike; and the irresistible strut of Alarm. True, the 21 tracks on the soundtrack do use a necessarily limited soundtrack and the audio quality isn’t great; but these limitations serve to draw the listener into the Adamantium world of head-pulsing excitement and steely rage,
Much as with Tri-Fusion, there are a number of tracks on the Adamantium OST that you could imagine a grime MC happily rhyming over and there is pleasing serendipity in a kind of early grime being found in a SNES game, considering disgraced genre pioneer Wiley himself drew inspiration from - and perhaps even sampled - video games in his early eskibeat productions.
So did Dylan Beale invent grime, some six years before Wiley formed the hugely influential garage crew Pay As U Go? In short, no - for reasons that tell us something interesting about the formation of new musical genres. I’ve written about this before. But, essentially, musical genres are created when new musical forms are made and then repeated. Make one 200BPM reggaeton song and you’ve got an anomaly; make 50 (or, better, get other people to help you to make 50) and you’ve got a new genre. Now you just need to name your sound and make sure it sticks. (It often doesn’t: Wiley, for example, favoured the name “eskibeat” for his own early productions; but the world went for “grime”.)
That’s why punk started with The Ramones and not The Stooges; why techno started with the Belleville Three (et al), not A Number Of Names. These pioneers invented a new (ish) sound, named it and the moniker caught on. You can’t call the early Stooges records “punk”, however punky they might sound, because such a thing didn’t exist at the time and wouldn’t do so for another five years.
Did early grime producers hear Adamantium Rage? It’s certainly possible although, as far as I can make out, there’s no evidence of this. Could it, then, have influenced their work? Or was the Adamantium Rage OST a vast cosmic fluke that lucked onto a sound that found its audience several years later?
Again, no one really knows. But it doesn’t particularly matter: the current trend for re-releasing video game soundtracks has revived some amazing music, from CoLD SToRAGE’s work for WipeOut to Hyperdub’s Diggin’ In The Carts: A Collection of Pioneering Japanese Video Game Music. And The Adamantium Rage soundtrack is the hardest, deepest and perhaps most exciting of all.
Some listening
Peggy Gou is both massive on the international dance circuit and a generally interesting character. Her productions spark with 80s house sass and fountains of hooks, many of which are in her native Korean, while her Gudu label has released records from the improbable likes of DMX Krew and Maurice Fulton. Up to now, I haven’t been that impressed by Gudu’s new signings but Dream Universe, by Italian duo Hiver, may change that. Dream Universe, the title track of their new EP, is a “tribute to early ‘90s house and trance” that manages to be genuinely euphoric without relying on saccharine build ups and ever more cavernous drops. This would be a MASSIVE hit at a Manchester Megadog and I can think of no more 90s compliment than that.
Irish / Malaysian producer yunè pinku has been dropping hit after hit, while her live set, which I caught at Primavera this year, is stunning. I don’t know if Killing Bee is named after its named after its buzzing, slightly menacing central riff but it really should be; this three minutes will certainly enhance your apicultural buzz.
Universal Harmonies & Frequencies - Multidimensional Transformation
Universal Harmonies & Frequencies is enigmatic producer Jamal Moss (aka Hieroglyphic Being) and saxophonist / composer / producer Jerzy Maczyński who coaxed their debut album, Tune IN, out of five days of improvisation in Amsterdam. I don’t know what kind of magic was going on in the Dutch waters but Multidimensional Transformation is a grungy, hooky, pop treat of slapping electronic beats, elegant synth burble and saxophone trails that could still soundtrack (the later hours of) your barbecue.
Look, I don’t want to be rude about it but I have been far harder at work on my playlist, the newest and the bestest, than you, collectively, have. I want you to go away and think about that.
Things I’ve done
In the latest issue of Disco Pogo magazine I wrote a mammoth feature on Second Wave Chicago house, talking to Ron Trent, DJ Heather, Boo Williams, Luke Solomon, Alan Braxe and more. It’s only available in the magazine - and very beautiful it looks too - but you can hear the Spotify playlist I put together to accompany it here.
Ed Banger star Myd popped by the Radio Primavera Sound studio early this Monday morning, with his use of shades on a cloudy autumn day suggesting he had enjoyed a good weekend. We talked about losers, geeks, Theophilus London, the brilliance of Ed Banger, learning to sing live and Fatboy Slim. You can listen here.
Twitching Around
On the Radio Primavera Sound Twitch this week, new Spanish star María José Llergo dropped by for an interview (in Spanish) and she was entirely charming, even singing for us. We discussed Shazam for birds, flamenco and blues and living in the country. You can watch it here (it is mislabeled) and listen here. And you really should because she is a star.