A Guy Called Gerald re-released ’Black Secret Technology’

A Guy Called Gerald re-released ’Black Secret Technology’

26 August, 2008 | 3.05AM

• Written by: svnvt
• Filed under: Music News: guy called gerald

1995 was a good year for drum and bass (or jungle, as many people still called it back then).

Even though most people probably think of Goldie’s groundbreaking and commercially successful debut album ’Timeless’, there was another album, that shook (not just) the drum and bass world that year:

A Guy Called Gerald‘s ’Black Secret Technology’, which came out six months prior to ’Timeless’.

Thirteen years after its inital release, the album got re-released and is also available digitally for the first time [check it out in the player after the jump].

When Mancunian Gerald Simpson released ‘Black Secret Technology’ he was already called a pioneer of electronic music, being one of the original members of 808 State and having released the acid classic ‘Voodoo Ray’ under his own name after he went solo.

The album was his fourth full-length and his first jungle/drum and bass-album after several EPs for Juice Box (including the early classic ‘28 Gun Bad Boy‘).

‘Black Secret Technology’ epitomizes the rough breakbeat science of the early and mid-nineties, with its timestretch effects, hoover noises, tricky drum programming and Detroit techno synth and string arrangements.

Compared to Goldie’s ‘Timeless’ (who co-produced one of the tracks on ‘Black Secret Technology’), the album is not as polished and not as luxurious, but it’s as much as emotional and futuristic.

For its re-release the album got re-mastered. With this new brilliance in sound ‘Black Secret Technology’ is even more breathtaking.

Anyone interested in jungle and drum & bass should have listened to this stone cold killer of an album.

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