Meat Beat Manifesto

Jack Dangers (born John Corrigan) began playing guitar and singing in Perennial Divide, a band from the industrial town of Swindon that he shared with bassist Johnny Stephens, drawing inspiration from the danceable industrial music of Cabaret Voltaire and Human League. After releasing Purge and recording their second (unreleased) album, the group evolved into Meat Beat Manifesto, debuting with the EP Suck Hard (December 1987), a study in naïve cacophony: I Got The Fear combines free-jazz horns, hammering metallurgy, a sampled choir, and an inebriated drum machine; Kneel And Buzz is a maelstrom of pure white noise; Kick That Man is a horror nightmare, crushed by immense machinery and stunned by grisly sounds. (The single would later appear on Armed Audio Warfare). Meat Beat Manifesto soon became a reference point in the industrial movement thanks to the extravagant multimedia shows staged by visual artists Marcus Adams and Craig Morrison.

By applying experiments in rhythm and atmosphere from industrial music to house, Meat Beat Manifesto created a stylistically revolutionary work with Storm The Studio (Wax Trax, 1989). The sound sources of those four suites (remixes of three 12" singles and one promo) are essentially three: hip hop rhythms (violent, syncopated, nervous), samples (multiform, wild, omnipresent), and electronic dissonances (vaguely inspired by factory noises). God O.D. is primarily a hyper-kinetic rap, with a constantly evolving accompaniment transformed by the samples into a kind of traveling circus of studio possibilities. Re-Animator instead plays with bolder cacophonies: the mix is denser, whirling, almost symphonic, progressing through hysterical bursts rather than free flows, with breaks and offbeats, reaching levels of electronic experimentation reminiscent of Stockhausen.
I Got The Fear (their first single in 1987) explores softer, more morbid sounds. Strap Down is their most visceral dance track, propelled by African tribalism and distorted electronics, the techno equivalent of punk rock, a brutal assault reminiscent of Tackhead.

Their first proper album, 99% (Wax Trax, 1990), primarily marked a major advance in the practice of production and splicing of their samples. An industrial ballet like Hello Teenage America is designed for mass distribution, yet still represents the state of the art in collage. Between Psyche-Out, immersed in African tribalism and "acidic" sounds, and the funky fanfare of 10 X Faster Than The Speed Of Love, stands the frenzied, hypnotic house of Helter Skelter. With these records, Meat Beat Manifesto introduced a highly effective polyrhythmic and polyphonic style into the realm of dance music.

1990 was primarily the year of Radio Babylon, whose frenzied breakbeats effectively coined jungle music. The following year, the group shifted again with Paradise Now, a track that builds a "noir" atmosphere through a web of distorted beats and prefigures the psychological style that Tricky would bring to success. With these tracks, Dangers achieved a remarkable synthesis of European electronic music and American hip hop, of Cabaret Voltaire and Public Enemy.

On Satyricon (Mute, 1992), Meat Beat Manifesto is effectively a duo (Dangers and Stephens) of savvy dance-music producers, a format they invented and many others now imitate. The club singles are Edge Of No Control and Mindstream, fast-beat and minimally sophisticated; but the real novelty is in the "songs," of which Circles perhaps has the catchiest melody, fully in Depeche Mode territory. Placebo recycles their Radio Babylon, and Pot Sounds almost ends in trance. Less daring than its predecessors but more cohesive, Satyricon marks a partial retreat from the goals of the early 12" releases.

Jack Dangers, having moved to San Francisco in 1994, took four years to assemble another album, the double Subliminal Sandwich (Interscope, 1996). The record partly returns to the style of early Cabaret Voltaire but with a greater awareness of the role of ambient effects, sampling, and "concrete" sounds. The core of the project remains the nuclear fusion of sophisticated polyrhythms, dub bass, and rap vocals. Analog synthesizers (including Mellotron and Theremin) appear, adding a sense of retro. Apart from two tributes to Jamaican toasters (Nuclear Bomb and Assassinator) and some demonstrations of his skilled collage work (especially in the hypnotic percussive trance of 1979), the album excels in atmospheric scenography with She's Unreal and Addiction, which gain almost metaphysical depth in the dissonance play of No Purpose No Design and the trip-hop of Long Periods Of Time. The program culminates in the psychological mannerisms of Transmission and Cancer, immersed in oppressive atmospheres and jazz-inflected harmonies.
The second disc is simply a catalog of improvisational experiments. For the most part, they demonstrate the artist's ineptitude, engaged in puerile imitation of robotic electronics (Mad Bomber) and Morton Subotnick pieces (Stereophrenix). The excerpt from Electric People (the full version is six hours) speaks for itself—a tedious study of electronic rhythms. The only notable novelty is the symphonic studies of Tweekland, with echoes of Xenakis and Nono. Overall, however, the album, far from cementing a career, shows that Dangers is still an apprentice tackling projects beyond his reach. Yet the projects are undeniably fascinating.

Original Fire (Interscope, 1997) is a collection of rarities, unreleased tracks, and remixes, just as Armed Audio Warfare (Wax Trax, 1991) had been.

Less pedantic and pretentious than the average, influenced by surrealism and futurism, and perhaps simply more musically gifted than others, Meat Beat Manifesto have become masters of sonic manipulation for mass consumption.

Continuing his evolution towards a busier style of dance music, Jack Dangers recorded the mostly instrumental Actual Sounds And Voices (Nothing, 1998) as an exercise in layering sounds on top of rhythm. The new line-up of Meat Beat Manifesto is a trio with Lynn Farmer on percussions and John Wilson on guitars (guests contribute saxophone, theremin, organ, clarinet). The booming, driving, hallucinating jungle of Prime Audio Soup is a melange of syncopation, sampling, world-music and rapping, a cross of Enigma, Stone Roses and Squarepusher. That introduction simply lays down the credentials of the team.
The next step is to go beyond dance and rock. The intricate, bouncing synthesizer patterns of Book Of Shadows, coupled with over-the-top drumming and roaring bass, lead to a session of torrid jazz jamming. Herbie Hancock's specter rises from the 11-minute Thumb, which is exemplary of making music by breaking down the beats of dance music into an abstract magma of sounds and then rebuilding them again into powerful beats.
Intensity is the rule of the game, as the power-drill of Let's Have Fun and the frantic, chaotic Let Go make clear. The stormy scratching and the flood of peripheral events of Where Are You approach the hard rock of hip hop.
As usual, the vocal tracks are the weakest, but at least Acid Again, with its hyper-kinetic, android hip-hop moves, and the dissonant (dub and rhtyhm and blues) ballad of Funny Feeling deserve a place among his most adventurous experiments.
Dangers' psychedelic funk has assumed over the years a brutal quality that is the only liaison with the industrial music of his beginnings. Omitting the political raps of previous works, and replacing them with disconnected collages of vocal samples, has benefited Dangers' music. Employing jazz musicians (Bernie Maupin, Pat Gleason) has increased the warm and organic feeling of his music, that now bears little resemblance to the jungle scene that it spawned.

The 12" EP Eccentric Objects, which includes Peristaltic Wave and My Shorty, is almost a summa of Danger's collage art.

Jack Dangers released an album of his own remixes, Hello Friends (Shadow, 2001).

RUOK (Run, 2002) pushes the envelop of remix albums by composing songs out of samples (from his own past career as well as from other artists' songs), but the results sound just like that: remixes (No Echo In Space, What Does It All Mean, Horn of Jerico).

In Dub (Lakeshore, 2003) is a dub-style remix of R.U.O.K?, which means that the songs are completely devastated, to the point that one suspects the original song was merely an inspiration for its corresponding remix. Dangers, ever a beat sculptor, offers this experience also on DVD, where he becomes a full-fledged sound sculptor (in collaboration with DJ Shadow) adding another dimension to the "remix". The main difference between the original and the remix is that the original had spikes and pauses, whereas the remix sounds homogenous to the point of being monotonous or, as Brian Eno would put it, "music not to listen to".

Meat Beat Manifesto contributed At the Center (Thirsty Ear, 2005) to an avantgarde-jazz series.

Battersea Shield (Malicious Damage, 2005) is a collaboration with Orb.

Autoimmune (2008) was Danger's (elegant) tribute to dubstep.