BOGDAN RACZYNSKI

96 Drum n Bass Classixxx

Genre: ELECTRONIC, JUNGLE / FOOTWORK

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Boomkat Product Review:

Bogdan Raczynski’s sore thumb of breakcore-braindance for AFX’s Rephlex comes back around on his own label with some of the early ‘00s’ daftest and darkest tracker antics - big RIYL Squarepusher, Venetian Snares, Dev-Null

Originally presented in 2002 as a sort of fantasy DJ mix by Bogdan disguised variously as Abdullah K, DJ Whiskey, Ronny Rinkles and other names aping the heyday of ’90s hardcore jungle, ’96 Drum n Bass Classixxx’ has surely wrong-footed and baffled many ravers and record shop diggers in its time. Lighting off once again for its 21st birthday, the album re-emerges into a scene primed for reckless high tempos by waves of ruffneck dance music from the global south (Gabber Modus Operandi, Bamba Pana, Slikback) and salient examples of late ‘90s breakcore reissued from Christoph De Babalon or Jigen, with the album’s original dozen prang-outs augmented by two mad ones from the archive.

To be fair, this lapsed breakcore head doesn’t have the legs for its freakiness anymore, however we will never tire of its best, and darkest, cut ‘Trip to the Boom’; a monstrous hard stepper built from depth charge subs and pitch shifting free-party warehouse breaks, descending to the coldest Terminator levels in the mould of Nico’s No U-Turn classics or Panacea’s secret weapon remix of Christoph Fringeli & Pure. Trust we’ve rinsed this out in abandoned Victorian asylums and quarries over the years to heavily satisfied rictus grins and twisted spines, and we highly advise picking up its Ambush pressing for optimal pressure. The rest is for nippers bouncing on fresh pins, with a canny echo of AFX’s pioneering ‘Hangable Auto Bulb’ in the complementary archive cut ‘Flashbulb (Fnck U DJ 7a)’.

MP3 Release (14)