Armed with the amen break and his trusty sampler, Lynn Standafer is making an effort to put some emotional content back into the desiccated state of the drum and bass scene. “The beats would sound stale after a while, no matter how chaotic, without some sort of emotion,” he says about his drive to make
music. “Thanks to my sampler, I can grab emotion from anyone…it’s all about how I feel at the time.”
A case in point (which is almost enough of a reason to buy the record alone) is his sampling of New Age Celtic siren, Enya. “Endya” is barely two minutes long, but it is a whirlwind of razored beats savaging Enya’s distinct voice. It shouldn’t work, but it does; Extremely well. It gets even better with “Def?” which bangs ragga like a prison bitch with its hardcore amen smackdown and demonic basso thunder. Ragga vocals and distorted zombie movie samples pop up throughout
the record like angry banshees driven from their restless graves by the sonic destruction being lashed about them.
“Ill Cosby’s Remix Mashup” swaggers with cutup samples and vinyl breaks, single words piercing the mix with fiery infection. “West Side Breaks” shivers and cascades a This Mortal Coil song over a clattering break line, the emotional core of the song floating like a gossamer veil above the hi-hats and breaks. Standafer isn’t just about breaking things — about creating maelstroms of densely kinetic beats — he is seeking a marriage between ambience and action. The beats can’t exist in a vacuum; they have to go somewhere and they have to appear in public with some sort of vestments. “West Side Breaks” is a precise marriage between the two extremes — the languid loneliness of the chanteuse and the frantic effort of the rooting male of the species. “Knuckle Fucker” is a minute of Mario Bros. Mash-up, video game noises spun up to 180 BPM before being nailed to the floor by a spastic drill beat. Hipster ragga chipmunks invade “Kick Dem Down,” getting their tiny paws in the air against a backdrop of splattered amen breaks, hand drums, and squirting technoid rhythms.
Standafer wrecks up his vinyl collection of jungle, dancehall and ragga to provide grist for his sampler, layering out the resultant pieces against a barrage of beats and percussion. I usually find breakbeat empty and monotonous; however Standafer’s work as Enduser is a constant source of spine-rattling entertainment.
From Zero may start from a point of nothingness, but it gets to 180 MPH in just a few seconds. Excellent.
From Zero is OUT NOW on Mirex.
