Black Secret Technology

Gerald Simpson had already left 808 State and already had Voodoo Ray behind him when he sat down at the Machine Room to make a long jungle record under the name A Guy Called Gerald. Black Secret Technology came out on his own Juice Box label in March 1995. No public account has settled on the day. The month is the one that stuck. His previous album, 28 Gun Bad Boy, had come out in 1992. Finley’s Rainbow, a single, had come in 1994. Jungle in those months was still mostly a 12-inch culture: dubplates, pirate radio, one track and then the next. He made a full album anyway.

What you hear is breaks that roll rather than stab, bass that carries a tune, and voices that are allowed to finish a line. The stricter darkside records of the same season often treated a vocal as something to chop and throw away. Simpson, who had come up programming machines and then walked out of a group to do it alone, kept the singer in the foreground. On the dance-album chart dated 1 April 1995 the record stood at number 8. So Many Dreams followed in 1996. The chart position is the commercial footprint. The listening fact is simpler: one producer, one palette, songs long enough to feel like soul records played too fast for soul radio.

Two years later Roni Size and Reprazent would take drum and bass to the Mercury Prize with New Forms. Black Secret Technology is earlier, and it is more purely his. It showed that a single author could hold a CD of this music together without sanding the breaks down for pop and without stripping the voice out to prove hardness. Juice Box released it. The Machine Room is where he made it. If you play it after a pile of 1994 darkside 12-inches, the thing he added is melody, and a person.

Sources

• Black Secret Technology: Juice Box, March 1995, recorded at the Machine Room, dance albums number 8 on the chart dated 1 April 1995, and the neighbouring Gerald releases.