Posted by Budgie at July 12, 2007 06:41 PM

Can you see me lord?

A tenuous post...

Track : MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO - "PSYCHE-OUT"
Track : MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO - "DEVIATE"

At the late 80's / early 90's, when I was in my clubbing prime, I used to knock up mix tapes of the current 12"s and the like for booming out in friends cars on our way to wherever that nights clubbing was taking us. If I ran out of the countless remixes of Moby's "Go" or Bizarre Inc's "Playing With Knives" I used to raid my collection of Industrial records by artists such as Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, Consolidated and Meat Beat Manifesto to pad those C90's out. As the "rave" sound has becoming harder, tracks by those I just mentioned used to fit in nicely. Often these tracks would prove to be a bit harsher than what we were hearing out.

I got introduced to the music of Meat Beat Manifesto via a guy working in a Glasgow record shop. Whilst discussing sampling in records he uttered the inevitable "have you heard this?" and proceeded to play some tracks from "Storm The Studio". It was a right ole racket. Samples flying off in every direction, hip hop beats crunching up the speakers, dubby basslines rocking the shop, guitars piercing through it all and no to mention the primitive vocals... It got some funny looks in the shop, but I was hooked, bought a copy and gleefully went home knowing that this would soon be echoing out of my bedroom and terrifying my family...

"Storm The Studio" is still a frightening experience today, as was the next release I picked up by them, the aptly titled debut album that never was, "Armed Audio Warfare". Inbetween these releases came an album called "99%". It wasn't as harsh as the previous things I had heard, it was still hard enough, but it saw the band tighten up and their sound start to change. After that album they veered away from the industrial sound and explored more dance orientated things. The next 12" "Radio Bablyon" would go on to become a seminal rave track and would cement Meat Beat Manifesto as UK dance music pioneers with their techniques being echoed through scenes such as Drum & Bass and Big Beat. That's not to say the band don't exist anymore, far from it, they're still going strong...

"Psyche-Out" and "Deviate" are from "99%". Both still sound fierce 17 years on. Both indictive of the bands change from Industrial to Dance - "Deviate" being the more dancey with it's Todd Terry / "Disco Circus" break all the way through it.

Degrade Yourself.

Track : MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO - "RADIO BABYLON"

What can be said. It's a classic. Boney M sample. Soundsytem bleeps. Killer bassline. Dubbed out drums. What more do you want? And this came out the same year as the above 2 tracks. The change in sound is staggering.

Enjoy.

Go Buy : Meat Beat Manifesto - 99%

Go Visit : Meat Beat Manifesto

Feel free to leave a comment about these tracks in The Pipe section of the forum.

Ta,
Budgie