The kid had been standing in the corner of the record store for a good while, soaking up the sound of the jungle 12"s spinning on the shop’s turntables, when he approached the counter with a puzzled observation. “I’ve been listening for half an hour,” he said to the shopkeeper, “and every tune’s got the same drums.”
It would have been easy to scoff at the comment, to write it off as the uninformed perspective of a newbie—it was, after all, the early 1990s—or the opinion of a cloth-eared contrarian. How many times have electronic music fans heard a similar gripe? It all sounds alike. Every song has the same beat. I’ve been listening to this DJ for half an hour and I don’t think he’s changed the record once.
Put yourself in the clerk’s shoes and you might imagine responding with a heavy sigh, If you’re looking for an Oasis record, HMV is across the street. Or maybe, more charitably: Mate, that’s the way jungle is supposed to sound. Here’s a Reinforced comp and a rave flyer—come talk to me next week.
But recalling the exchange a few years later, the man behind the counter that day—Rupert Parkes, better known as the celebrated drum’n’bass savant Photek—had a different reaction. “I couldn’t really argue with that, it was true!” he told Muzik magazine in 1996. “Everyone uses the same breaks. It’s very rare to find a new break which is really worth using. They’re drying up. It’s like oil, it’s not going to go on forever, so you’ve got to look for alternative sources.”
Parkes certainly seemed like someone who had discovered a game-changing new power supply. He had a critically acclaimed EP, The Hidden Camera, under his belt, along with a freshly signed five-album deal with Virgin that would soon take the 24-year-old producer from St Albans, 20 miles northwest of London, to a seat behind the wheels of a series of sports cars (Lotus Elan, Ferrari 348, Porsche Carrera S) in quick succession. If the ubiquitous breakbeats then clogging up record bins were the equivalent of fossil fuels—archaic, polluting, the stuff of dead dinosaurs—Photek’s 1997 debut LP, Modus Operandi, would appear to be powered by something more like cold fusion: a breathtaking, mind-bending rhythmic force that seemed to defy the laws of physics.
Jungle had reached peak breakbeat remarkably fast. The genre had only been around for a couple of years, the latest step in a rapid-fire evolution that had begun with the arrival of American house and techno upon the UK’s shores in the mid-to-late 1980s. When rave culture took off, British dance music was a hodgepodge of inputs: Black American house and techno; vintage soul, disco, and rare groove; Belgian and Italian house; Jamaican dub and reggae; and—crucially—hip-hop, both American originals and Brit imitations.
Working with rudimentary samplers and Atari computers, UK producers molded cut-up loops of funk records like the Winstons’ “Amen, Brother” and Lyn Collins and James Brown’s “Think (About It)” into the backbone of British dance music. The acid-house derivative called hardcore was a form of collage, essentially, cutting up choice bits from other sources—hip-hop records, house anthems, children’s television shows—and Frankensteining them into ragtag beasts held together by looped breakbeats. In the first few years of the ’90s, as hardcore’s riotous, anything-goes energy gradually channeled into the controlled rush of the sound known as jungle, a select few breaks got used over and over, becoming part of the genre’s lingua franca.
The limited pool of breakbeats was part of what made jungle so dynamic: Producers were forced to make do with what they had. Working against the limitations of the era’s primitive digital technology, they found novel ways of slicing and dicing up the drums. Stuttering, repeating, reversing. Kinking up the syncopation, adding filters or reverb to individual hits. Combining different breaks so that drummers in different rooms and different years were suddenly jamming together. Breakbeat science cut across the temporal and spatial planes, no more so than when Goldie’s Rufige Cru pioneered the concept of time-stretching—that is, changing the pitch of a sample without changing its tempo, or vice versa—on the 1992 single “Terminator.” The title was a reference to the Arnold Schwarzenegger film about an assassin sent from the future—the perfect conceit for a song that split open the rules of space-time with the express purpose of laying wreckage to the dancefloor.
Jungle’s early years gave way to an arms race in audio technology and studio know-how; producers vied to outdo one another as they concocted progressively more elaborate iterations of the same hoary breaks. By the middle of the ’90s, the genre was splitting in different directions. A group of artists with roots in Jamaican soundsystem culture invented ragga jungle. Another faction coalesced around the rugged aggression of the “Amen” break, with its battered and bloodied snares. (In Ben Marcus and Carl Loben’s 2021 history Renegade Snares: The Resistance and Resilience of Drum & Bass, the techstep producer Optical called 1995 “an Amen-chopping nightmare—everywhere you went, there were ten thousand Amen snares.”) Still another crew, led by the bespectacled LTJ Bukem, was moving in a mellower direction, pairing smooth, rolling rhythms with jazzy keys and new-age imagery. Goldie, one of the scene’s leading figures, was aiming outward: The eponymous opening track of his 1995 debut, Timeless, was a 21-minute suite that encompassed all the grandiose sprawl of progressive rock—part rave epic, part planetarium laser show.
Photek didn’t fall into any of these camps, even if he had allegiances across many of them. In 1997, Parkes told Muzik, “When jungle split, I was standing in the middle, so I stayed where I was.” In fact, he turned inward, directing his attention not to the broad sweep of the cosmos but the molecular makeup of his percussion, every beat a scale model of whirling subatomic particles.
Before he was an atom-smashing breakbeat physicist, Rupert Parkes was just another teenager raving in darkened warehouses. He had grown up on a mix of hip-hop, soul, funk, and reggae. But around 1989, as he listened to late-night broadcasts emanating from nearby pirate transmitters, he began hearing bits and pieces of his favorite music jumbled together into rough-hewn, hyperkinetic new forms. Gradually, the common denominator of these unruly hybrids came into focus: the breakbeat.
Parkes’ first raves—London’s Telepathy, in the industrial hinterlands of Marshgate Lane, where he witnessed Jumpin’ Jack Frost dropping blistering acid house and hardcore, and then Labyrinth in Dalston Lane—were trials by fluid: So much sweat dripped from the warehouse ceilings, he thought someone had spit on him. But the experience was addictive. After moving to the town of Ipswich, 85 miles northeast of London, in 1992, he poured his savings into a Roland W-30 sampling keyboard and spent the next six months deciphering its secrets. When he wasn’t squinting into the machine’s minuscule LED screen and saving samples onto floppy disks, he was hanging around Ipswich’s Essential Selection, a record shop whose owner, Rob Solomon, had begun banging out his own breakbeat hardcore records under the alias Origination.
Soon, Parkes was collaborating with Solomon on tracks like 1992’s “Sensation,” a slinky hardcore roller that balanced breathless snare chops, sped-up rave stabs, and ragga taunts of “Rude bwoy!” with unusually contemplative Rhodes keys. The music was evolving practically on a week-to-week basis in those days, and Parkes right along with it. Origination’s 1993 single “Make Ya Wanna Do Right” offset layered breakbeats with the dreamy synth pads that would become a hallmark of ambient jungle; “Out of This World,” which rounded out the B-side of the same record, poked into the shadows of what some were calling “darkside,” driven by dizzyingly cut-up snares and cloaked in an eerie metallic sheen.
Over the next few years, Parkes was wildly prolific, turning out scores of tracks under aliases like Studio Pressure, Synthetics, Code of Practice, Aquarius, the Truper, the Sentinel, Phaze 1, and Photek. It didn’t take long for Parkes’ signature to codify itself in the undulating layers and beckoning atmospheres of tunes like 1995’s “Drift to the Centre,” released as Aquarius. Utilizing a pile-driving “Amen” break and some dramatic gongs, it borrowed its watery keys from a recent 12" on downbeat trailblazers Mo Wax, its whispered vocal hook from a vintage Timothy Leary record, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Baby, baby” from a Quincy Jones-produced electro-funk track from the ’80s—a mixture of genres and eras that underscored Parkes’ resourcefulness and vision as a sampler.
Although Parkes was as influenced by techno as he was jungle—in a 1995 Muzik feature, he namechecks Berlin dub-techno pioneers Basic Channel and IDM stalwarts the Black Dog—he didn’t have access to techno’s synthesizers. Instead, he made resourceful use of his sampler, grabbing choice bits from his favorite records and using envelopes and filters to sculpt them into an approximation of the textures he was looking for. “I just thought, If I get this saw string and EQ it the right way, and put a reverb on it, then it’s going to sound like that sound on a Carl Craig record,” he told Renegade Snares’ authors. “There was a much easier way: just buy that keyboard and you’ll be able to replicate that very easily. But none of that occurred to me, because I had no formal intro to making electronic music.”
By 1995, the self-taught producer was nearing the peak of his powers. That year, Photek—which was fast becoming his principal alias—released a string of now legendary 12"s: “Seven Samurai”/“Complex” and “U.F.O.”/“Rings Around Saturn,” for his own Photek label; the Natural Born Killa EP, for scene kingpin Goldie’s Metalheadz; and, finally, “Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu (Two Swords Technique),” his debut for Science, a new electronic sub-label of Virgin.
Without losing an iota of soundsystem punch, Photek’s tracks were beginning to feel like movies in miniature. As a sound designer, Parkes experimented with Foley-like effects: water droplets, birdsong, atmospheres coaxed from brushed metal and rubbed glass. He could be wildly inventive: A martial arts fan, he mimicked the sound of a throwing star by whipping a bicycle chain above his head. For “Rings Around Saturn,” he recorded the sound of rainfall and wind chimes outside his house. For another track, he rubbed the record he wanted to sample on the carpet in order to build up a crackling electrostatic charge. He told The Wire, “I’m into that old, dirty sound. My album will probably come out on a CD and sound like a 78 record.” (Somewhere, a young Burial was taking notes.)
As Photek’s work became more complex, it opened up new expressive realms—like the inky, destabilizing minimalism of “Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu,” where the snare never seems to fall in the same place twice, or “U.F.O.,” built around audio of a notorious flying-saucer incident, where his dancing drums imitate the momentum-defying movements of extraterrestrial propulsion. On his debut album, he reached the apotheosis of his powers by stripping down his drums as never before.
Recorded back in St Albans, where he’d grown up, and released in 1997, Modus Operandi originally bore the working title Reverse Kids—a nod, perhaps, to Parkes’ fondness for switching up the direction of his beats, flipping them back and forth so often that time seemed to stand still even as it kept hurtling forward. But the name Modus Operandi was even more apropos. It came from Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat: When a sergeant asks Al Pacino’s character, a sorrowful cop with no illusions about his opponents, what the criminals’ M.O. is, Pacino shoots back in his trademark rasp, “Their M.O. is that they’re good.”
The bone-dry assessment epitomized Parkes’ desire to prove his mettle in an intensely competitive scene. That’s exactly what Modus Operandi is: a shot across the bow—a demonstration of Parkes’ virtuoso skill, as well as his determination to take drum’n’bass, as the more intricate iterations of the sound had increasingly come to be known, into unexplored territory. If Goldie’s Timeless, as many have noted over the years, was the drum’n’bass equivalent of Pink Floyd’s space-rock epic, Modus Operandi might as well have been an actual trip to the dark side of the moon, a voyage into the airless, lightless unknown.
