Hey,

Happy Groundhog Day! I’ll be rewatching the film tonight, I think.

#Music

Speaking Groundhog Day, I think I might’ve shared this one before, but sod it. Here goes again:

21 minutes of prog jungle. I absolutely love this track. I heard it when I was 15/16 (well, the first “movement”). Jungle as it was then was a relatively new music form – it evolved into drum ’n’ bass without the rough edges and became so bland. The rest of the album is a bit weird, from some manic jungle workouts to some jazzy torch songs, but this track is something I regularly stick on to give my sub-woofer a workout (that’s not a joke at Al’s expense).

Jungle evolved out of the DJ culture of playing breakbeats (the gaps in old funk records where the drums were the only thing playing, like Funky Drummer by James Brown or the Amen break from Amen, Brother by the Winstons), which was the basis of hip hop. Jungle played the 33 records at 45, so they sped up quite considerably – as they were instrumental, they didn’t have the chipmunk vocals. So they were higher-pitched and faster and in your face. But the bass came from similar drops in dub reggae records, but these were 45s slowed down to 33, so slower and much, much deeper. The real “rattle your heart” deep sub bass you get on this song at about 2:40. The drums on this are the Amen break, but cut up in a sampler and reprogrammed into new patterns, sometimes the skittery chaos, sometimes looping a fragment for way too long to build tension. And the bass is a Roland 303 bass synth (which was designed for guitarists to play along with, a failure, and electronic musicians picked up cheap and developed the rubbery sound into Acid House) or maybe even the kick drum from a Roland 808 or 909, which are really really bassy things, but pitched up and down to give melody.

Anyway. That’s a bit of a digression and I doubt anyone cares!

#Last Week

Okay, so you left this intrepid author having finished the edits to Marshall 5, which is called With Soul So Dead. He then worked on editing another project, which took a day to get through, but is shaping up well.

He then picked up OPERATION HIGH CONCEPT, which he should’ve named as something different. Police operations don’t tend to be so on the nose, e.g. OPERATION WHO IS UNDER THE PATIO or OPERATION OLD FAMOUS PAEDOS, but stuff like YEWTREE. Anyway, had a chunk of edits there, plus a bit of a plot collapse 2/3 of the way through. A couple of days working on that and he realised it’s ready to start work on.

But what’s this? The edits for Marshall 5 came back and he worked on them on Friday. And, yes, on Saturday. A pass of the easy stuff happened on Friday, then Saturday morning was fixing his more egregious mistakes.

#This Week

But finish he most certainly did. This week he will be doing a read-edit of Marshall 5, hoping to finish it by Friday. Maybe. It’s quite tight now, he thinks, but just needs to have all the rough edges smoothed off.

And he’s really looking forward to writing OPERATION HIGH CONCEPT. Oh yes.

#Stuff

God knows why I did that in 3rd person but I can’t be bothered to edit it.

Spent my off time last week watching the fifth season of FARGO. The first three seasons are up there with anything and the fourth is an awfully boring mess I abandoned quite quickly. But the fifth was a real return to form. Was. Until the last two episodes, it was a perfect distillation of what made FARGO FARGO, brutal domestic setups with bizarre real-life comedy. And the last two episodes were just flat, with a baffling final scene. Shame.

This is a boring bit. I shifted this newsletter from Substack to Beehiiv, mainly because, y’know, Substack tolerates and monetises actual nazis so I won’t no part of that (I barely use Twitter for the same reason). But the deliverability is nowhere near as good, as far as I can make out.

Anyway, I’ve made some changes so hopefully you’ll get this from [email protected] – please reply to this and let me know if you get it!

Here’s a really interesting interview Justin Hawkins did with Rick Astley last week, which is absolutely fascinating:

Have a great one!

Cheers,

Ed