brettworks

Photek, “The Hidden Camera” (1996). This track is classic drum and bass that exemplifies the genre’s rhythmic inventiveness and orchestrational-arrangement resourcefulness. Photek (Rupert Parkes) builds seven minutes of music around eight or so parts that enter and exit the mix at 8- and 16-bar intervals. The through line is a skittish breakbeat (kick and snare drum samples), a few bass tones, and spare electric keys. In the background a hi hat ticks away and here and there a ride cymbal alights (entering at 2:02). Over this texture floats a pad (1:00), a liquid lead (1:40), one-shot samples of a voice and, befitting the track’s title, an occasional camera shutter sound. On one level, the music simply repeats. But it’s repetition with a difference in that no part seems to ever play the same way twice. Try to follow the bass as it wanders offbeat and over the bar lines and then falls onto the downbeats, or the snare’s ever-changing syncopations. It sounds like one long variation—like a few musicians jamming, albeit in a very disciplined way.

On YouTube there’s a video of Parkes in 1996 demonstrating how he sequenced breakbeats, using an early version of the software Cubase to trigger sounds from an E-mu hardware sampler. “The sampler’s the main instrument” he says. In a 2020 interview Parkes explained that drum and bass was “a style of programming, a style of using sonics to make music, as opposed to using instruments to make music. This was music purely about soundscapes, space, bass.”