4am by Orca

by user112512492

So, why not start off with this one.

I love this tune — ethereal-sounding, bittersweet in a way. For me it nails exactly what I think of as true hardcore sound: gentle, radiant melancholy peaking through the pads and vocal sample, and, at the same time, is almost contrasted by the break that stomps its way with roughness and intensity. What is really special about the beat design is it’s deployment of reversed and scratched chops, cut through by an abrupt vocal one-shot. This is a very unique staple of the time, heavily used by artists like Sonz of da loop era and Foul play, most recently revived by the 4am kru (their name is probably a reference to Orca as well). This achieves even more said roughness, with the aggressive discontinuity of drums rolling back and forth, and the resolute rudeness of what feels like a war-cry. I don’t think it makes sense to say the beat and overlaying pads/vocal sample are necessarily opposed to each other. The vocal one-shot is unmistakably part of the beat, while percusion in general is heavily pitched throughout, making it complement rather than conflict with the melody.

On very first listen it made me think of Leyland Kirby’s Death of rave project — a dissociative deconstruction of the live-set experience that is often referenced as what a person standing outside of a club might hear, going home from a night out and already beginning to feel the morning hangover. Funny that in terms of reference, my first association went almost directly in reverse: like most of Kirby’s work, Death of rave is fixed upon nostalgia in a negative sense, in this case for what tracks like 4am represent — a certain cultural moment, with a specific time, i.e. 90s, and a specific place, i.e. UK. Maybe my connection came up due to the fact that I first heard Orca on the Burial & Kode9 mix, with strong influence of Burial’s usual themes of the same vein, expressed through analogue distortion/ audible traces of decay.

In the original Orca track, however, the distortion is pretty much authentic. All versions we have are directly ripped from wax, simply because it was the medium of the time. 4am’s beat, not only fast and heavy, is also crisp, sort of crunchy — equalized with emphasis on high freq that, enhanced by the sound of mediatory distortion, invades the ear with a sharp focus of dancefloor presence. This is what I like about it — it stands the test of endurance, does not fade away, and holds its ground using the passing of time, with all the dust and scratches it brings, only to enhance the original intensity.

What stands out on top of this is that the tropes of nostalgic longing definitive of Kirby, Burial and countless other UK hauntologists, were part of the track from the very beginning. 4am’s overall mood sounds exactly the same as it did in 93. The sense of melancholy one might feel when hearing it is less brought by a deliberate message that something has happened and passed, and more by some immediate feeling that something is still happening and that soon it might stop.

Beverly Craven’s lyrics from Promise me sampled in the track:

"It’s four o’clock in the morning
And it’s starting to get light //
Now I’m right where I want to be
Losing track of time
But I wish that it was still last night
You look like you’re in another world
But I can read your mind
How can you be so far away lying by my side?"

I think many will agree that 4am is the most ambivalent time of a night out — not yet the morning, but already just past what feels like the most careless partying hours. This brings a longing for some immediate past, some hour ago or less, one that is still not fully separate from present — not in the sense that it haunts us with ideations of what was and could have been, but rather what’s still going on and possible, however transient and fragile it might be. By valuing the past, it brings value to the present and, unmistakably, extends it into the future, making the feeling of passage conscious with choice of the sample, and, at the same time, animating the listener’s body by the beat.

It is common to write about drugs when talking about this sort of music. To be honest, I don’t remember how MDMA feels, but two common things associated by almost everyone: the schizo-affective intensity of conflicting emotions and the soul-sucking void of withdrawal. The first is what I would connect to this counter-intuitive emotion of nostalgia for what just was and, in fact, still is. The second just enhances the first, as the beat does the sample, and, all things considered, just on the level of a chemical imballance in the head of a raver. However, the power of this track extends beyond clubbing and, most definitely, recreational use. To borrow from Fisher: "Taking MDMA is like improving Windows: no matter how much tinkering $ Bill does, MS will always be shit, because it is built on the rickety structure of DOS… using ecstasy will always fuck up in the end, because the Human OS hasn’t been taken out and dismantled."

For me, this a call to collective practice, visionary work on the future that is rooted in the present, conscious of the past and cherishing both what it made and continues to make possible. Many of us do not remember the 90s and never have been to UK. However, as recent global revival of jungle/hardcore music has shown (one example would be the ruthless blend of juke and breakcore emerging in the US), people have moved on past (early) Burial and Kirby’s fixation on a specific time and place "when music was about bringning people together for a shared experience" (Kirby’s SoundCloud). It is, always has been and will be forever. Keep thinking, writing, imagining, building, dancing, resisting the Calm downizm together. Hearing is believing.