Goldie

If there's one term that can perfectly sum up the entire body of work of a personality like Goldie, it's undoubtedly “megalomania”. Granted, it's not exactly the most flattering of associations, one has to admit, but if it's a trait necessary to pull one of the cornerstones of Nineties electronic music out of the hat, then perhaps it's not such a malicious comparison after all. Also because, to conceive a work of the scope of “Timeless” (and a title like that already says a lot about its creator's intentions), simple ambition is nowhere near enough: you have to push well beyond that, risk everything, in order to give shape to your own vision. Someone like Clifford Joseph Price is certainly not the type to sit quietly tending his own little garden. A restless personality, with a childhood marked by constant shuffling between institutions and foster families, he showed from a very young age an unbridled curiosity and a great appetite for novelty, drawn to the most dynamic and innovative creative expressions of the time.

From the breakdancing of his crew around his native Wolverhampton (which earned him the nickname Goldielocks, conveniently shortened once the dreadlocks were cut off), to the graffiti art that led him to appear in documentaries and national TV programmes and broaden his horizons, the young man never stood still, constantly pushing to expand the boundaries of his pursuits. His arrival in music was, in short, nothing particularly strange, given the insatiability of the man in question; if anything, one has to wonder why, given the sheer breadth of interests he displayed, this side of him wasn't cultivated sooner. Yet it's precisely in this curious delay that a good part of the fascination surrounding a work like “Timeless” rests; in learning to pace himself, to rein in his impulsiveness, Price brought his vision into sharpest focus, nurtured it and pushed it to its extreme consequences, letting it express itself at its fullest potential. The rest is history.

Of course, in the meantime Goldie hardly stood still working on a single project. Since his return from the United States at the close of the Eighties, his expansion into the musical realm had been progressive, yet increasingly decisive. Coming back to a country utterly different from the one he'd left, the young man wasted no time feeding his own nostalgia or dwelling on the differences between the two sides of the Atlantic; instead he threw himself headlong into the new electronic environment of Albion, breathing deep the atmosphere, the unstoppable wind of novelty. Far more than acid-house and the harder-edged fringes of rave-culture, it was the contemporaneous breakbeat offshoot that became Price's main interest: compared to the expressive monolithism of the parent scene, the variety of timbres and references inherent to its offspring (in many ways reminiscent of the flourishing hip-hop landscape across the ocean) fit like a glove around Goldie's restless personality and his already rich store of experience.

Doing the rounds of themed club nights, popping pills between one and the next, the moment finally came for him to step into the spotlight. Determined at last to try his hand as a producer too, through the intercession of his then-girlfriend DJ Kemistry, Price got in touch with Dennis McFarlane and Mark Clair, better known as 4hero (who later became among the most legendary names of the entire breakbeat/jungle scene), and convinced them to make use of his graffiti-artist talents to create the artwork for their label, Reinforced Records. It was the start of a partnership through which the young man not only cut his teeth but began to display remarkable expressive qualities, all the raw material needed to build his opus magnum. Some fundamental pieces, though, were still missing.

The years leading up to the release of "Timeless" are, as usual, anything but static. Starting with his early artwork for the two DJs' label, Price became a fully-fledged part of its roster, while also working on other projects and collaborating with various other labels. These were years in which the young man didn't settle for going through the motions and putting out minor, forgettable releases, but rather showed off his formidable versatility and his great compositional instinct, helping the Reinforced bosses carry the early breakbeat sound toward a more refined, violent and hybrid form — the one that would soon come to be known as jungle music.

Not content with endlessly expanding the communicative potential of the scene, Goldie — who in the meantime was also recording under other monikers — pushed the boundaries of his own research even further. He experimented with new recording techniques, with his "Terminator" becoming a pioneering work in the use of time-stretching, the alteration of the speed and duration of an audio signal without changing its pitch. He gave full weight to the vocal element, building on the insights of Orb and 808 State, as in the later "Angel", where Diane Charlemagne's commanding soul voice looms over the segmented breakbeat pattern and heavenly samples drawn from the Eno/Byrne collaboration, revealing the pop potential of the entire rave scene.

In 1994 he finally managed to launch his own label, Metalheadz, together with DJ Kemistry, pursuing his musical ideals with even greater independence of means and the fullest creative freedom. It was precisely this shift in dynamics that would finally allow the timeless album to take shape.

In the process of making "Timeless", one meeting proved decisive: Rob Playford, boss of Moving Shadow (among the first labels to sniff out the potential of the then-nascent breakbeat scene), one of the most respected talent scouts in the business and a formidable sound engineer, was the missing link needed to complete the picture, the right person to give shape to Price's vision. While it's true that Price himself had never lacked initiative, pushing beyond expectations and conventions, his projects had nevertheless never ventured beyond the limited 12" format. What was missing, in short, was breadth — a dimension able to project the artist's ideas beyond the narrow confines of his releases, one that could give a broader, richer frame to his already fully mature expressiveness. The meeting of Price's unstoppable energy with Playford's composure — capable of reining in excessive enthusiasm and channelling his partner's many ideas into an organic flow — would be the spark that set off the drum'n'bass revolution. From here on, there was no turning back.

Hitting the shelves on September 11, 1995, "Timeless" — released simultaneously in two different formats (a single CD/cassette and a double CD, the latter enriched with two remixes for the US edition) — caused a major upheaval in an electronic scene that had already spilled over into public consciousness for some time, but was still unused to projects of such sweeping ambition. Above all, it was unused to being confronted with a twenty-one-minute opening monolith. And yet it would be precisely this colossal opening track that made the album's fortune, commercially and otherwise, and that placed Goldie among the leading figures of British electronic music. Split into three long chapters that flow one into the next with the dynamism of a prog suite, "Timeless" is the definitive drum'n'bass track, the moment in the spotlight for an entire scene that had until then remained submerged in the underground, a recap of everything that came before and, at the same time, a projection of what the future held in store for the whole genre. A unique clash across time, in which present, past and future speak the same language and find remarkable common ground, through a symphonic framework that, fittingly, could bear no other title than that of the album itself.

Whereas the rhythmic segmentation typical of jungle was nothing strictly innovative, even within Price's own production, and one can likewise recognise all those references — from dub to jazz — that made up (and still make up) the genre's framework, the relaunch achieved through the three movements of "Timeless" speaks of a sweeping transcendence of the scene's expressive limitations and purism. Finally channelled into a setting of immense atmospheric impact, Goldie's ideas find true fulfilment, gaining all the space they need to express themselves at full potential. Under his guidance, Playford's production shines like an artist's palette, layering synths and programming with the force of overlapping brushstrokes, in a strikingly visual conception of music, especially on the compositional level. Nocturnal, rarefied, with orchestral streaks lending the whole movement an ethereal structure, "Inner City Life" is jungle turned suspended, sensual and melodic, uncovering a pop sensibility that was literally unheard of, effectively becoming the most mature and complex drum'n'bass there is.

Among the genre's most celebrated hits, the first section of the title track is pure urban symphony, a scene of metropolitan release that Diane Charlemagne's voice — pure soul emphasis — underscores with extraordinary emotional intensity, becoming just another instrument in Goldie's palette. If "Pressure" holds back its lyrical impulses, keeping a firm grip on composition to showcase the dub roots of Goldie's sound (a clear nod to his Jamaican origins), then "Jah" arrives at a synthesis of the two poles set out in the first two parts, in a gripping cyclical structure that returns once more to the imaginative symphonic openings of the beginning. Serving as the perfect vehicle that contains and brings to life all of his different ideas, "Timeless" is the symptomatic expression of an entire modus operandi.

Even with these colossal twenty-one minutes of music alone, the case could have been closed right there, securing Goldie's place among the greatest electronic composers of all time. Yet it would hardly have been megalomania if such a majestic opening had not been matched by an album with equally, if not even more, ambitious intentions. While it's true that the opening track remains the project's unreachable pinnacle, the rest of the tracklist nonetheless reveals a creativity that is anything but monolithic, one quite willing to test itself on other fronts as well. While the rhythmic core of drum'n'bass clearly remains the focal point of the whole experience, it is nevertheless bent to serve the most varied stylistic needs, testifying to the flexibility of a language that so many imitators would, over time, flatten into mere mannerism.

He doesn't hesitate to step off the rails entirely and abandon the patterns that define his style, if doing so allows him to fully realise his vision with the impetus it deserves. These are clearly rare departures from the norm, yet they remain key moments in the overall economy of the project. "State Of Mind", with the clarity of its piano, escapes the vigorous urban brushstrokes that dominate the record to embrace a shimmering jazz-soul built on bass, synth-harp and vocal emotion, effectively relegating any rhythmic element to the background. "Adrift", drawing on similarly jazzy qualities, becomes instead a long ambient-pop meditation, with Cleveland Watkiss's voice marking every subtle shift in mood, dictated by a textbook use of time-stretching. Just a few passages, in a work that in its double edition runs well beyond a hundred minutes, but ones that reveal the breadth and scope of Goldie's imagination.

Even in contexts closer to his signature sound, the images Price conceives lose none of their bite or depth: if nothing else, they put the spotlight on the strength of the artist's language, which absorbs the surrounding present through the prism of its segmented rhythmic structures. "Sea Of Tears" thus becomes an opportunity to test his style in a setting entirely foreign to it, that of the most ecstatic, hazy new age: light, unobtrusive touches of guitar, animal samples and an overall sense of extreme relaxation nonetheless manage to coexist in total harmony with the blistering BPMs of the underlying pattern, almost tempered in their rapid pace.

"A Sense Of Rage" (a reworking of "Sensual" found on the single-disc edition) borrows the synth hook from "Twilight" by funksters Maze and carves out of it a futuristic breakbeat composition with a nocturnal, urban, deeply black touch. So while the new mix of the previously released "Kemistry" (simply, a dedication to his partner) offers only a broad impression of drum'n'bass, turning it into a battleground of subterranean dub moods, Charlemagne's grand vocal flourishes and curious synthetic balancing acts, in "Still Life" there are even hints of contemporaneous acid-house, with the Roland 808 fittingly underpinning the atmospheric spaciousness of the base drumming. All this before "You & Me", its keyboard sounds admittedly rather dated, closes the project in a virtuosic, once again symphonic embrace.

Other projects and producers would later come along (from friends Photek and Adam F, to Roni Size and Squarepusher) to carry the drum'n'bass gospel forward and bend its defining traits into the most varied shapes. Goldie himself would go on to push his research to extremes, venturing into the hour-long orchestral swoon of "Mother", the opening track of the misunderstood (and criminally underrated) "Saturnzreturn", a second torrential double album that matches and even surpasses the already grandiose ambitions of his debut. Without the communicative power of a work like "Timeless", capable of tearing down the barriers that had until then kept the entire breakbeat/jungle scene the best-kept secret of Britain's dense electronic underground, the future would have taken a very different course. Excessive, over-the-top (in every conceivable sense), yet driven by well-placed ambition, Goldie's testament has lived up to the presumption built into its very title, giving it real substance. As shown by the orchestra-only rendition of the title track performed for the album's twentieth anniversary, time, for a work like this, is a meaningless concept.

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16/12/2018