Label: Universal Egg Format: CD,2LP
Originally recorded in 1993-4, around the time when messers Cod, Tench and Perch were at the forefront of squeezing as much out of electronic music and reggae as possible and remixing the two into a new style of digital dub music where the drum machine didn’t so much crash mechanistically as step to a more human heartbeat, Secrets Of The Animal Kingdom In Dub has finally seen light of day in this release via Zion Train‘s own Universal Egg label.
The album takes various animals as inspiration, from the “Funnelweb”, “Wild Boar” and “Scorpion” at the dangerous end to the more obscure (“Gavial”, a “Rare Indian crocodilian with a pointed snout” as the sleevenotes conveniently inform)or fluffy “Sea Otter” and majestic “Condor”. Any track named “Manta Ray” has got quite a stupendous fish to live up to – fortunately the track here does the business in a swirl of over-flanged speech and slowly-building drum and bass pressure. Obviously, that’s pretty much what the rest of the album is like; Zion Train were pretty consistent in their commitment to the deepest of low end grooves and convoluted programming on their full-length releases around the early Nineties.
Comparing this album with classics like Great Sporting Moments In Dub and the breakthrough release A Passage To Indica with the benefit of hindsight reveals something of a greater variety of techniques at work in Secrets Of The Animal Kingdom. The rhythms have a slightly wider spread, the use of effects and synthesizers seem somehow more risky, perhaps – but maybe this is due to some cleaning up in an end-of-the-century studio manner making everything seem brighter? Whatever, it’s nearly seventy-four minutes of the kind of material which made Zion Train an essential chill-out or step-out selection all those years ago, and seems to do the trick nicely once again.
-Antron S. Meister-
Zion Train – Secrets Of The Animal Kingdom In Dub
Label: Universal Egg Format: CD,2LP
Originally recorded in 1993-4, around the time when messers Cod, Tench and Perch were at the forefront of squeezing as much out of electronic music and Reggae as possible and remixing the two into a new style of digital Dub music where the drum machine didn’t so much crash mechanistically as step to a more human heartbeat, Secrets Of The Animal Kingdom In Dub has finally seen light of day in this release via Zion Train‘s own Universal Egg label.
The album takes various animals as inspiration, from the “Funnelweb”, “Wild Boar” and “Scorpion” at the dangerous end to the more obscure (“Gavial”, a “Rare Indian crocodilian with a pointed snout” as the sleevenotes conveniently inform)or fluffy “Sea Otter” and majestic “Condor”. Any track named “Manta Ray” has got quite a stupendous fish to live up to – fortunately the track here does the business in a swirl of over-flanged speech and slowly-building drum and bass pressure. Obviously, that’s pretty much what the rest of the album is like; Zion Train were pretty consistent in their commitment to the deepest of low end grooves and convoluted programming on their full-length releases around the early Nineties.
Compared this album with classics like Great Sporting Moments In Dub and the breakthrough release A Passage To Indica with the benefit of hindsight reveals something of a greater variety of techniques at work in Secrets Of The Animal Kingdom…. The rhythms have a slightly wider spread, the use of effects and synthesizers seem somehow more risky, perhaps – but maybe this is due to some cleaning up in an end-of-the-century studio manner making everything seem brighter? Whatever, it’s nearly seventy-four minutes of the kind of material which made Zion Train an essential chill-out or step-out selection all those years ago, and seems to do the trick nicely once again.
-Antron S. Meister-
