It has been nearly 10 years since I listened to Omni Trio’s early EPs on Moving Shadow. I rarely ever played them out when they came out – they were too full of piano breakdowns, diva vocals and syrupy synth breakdowns to fit into the kind of sets I was spinning at the time (German techno, then later screwface techstep, acid breaks and moody blunted trip hop if I remember correctly). But for some reason I hung on to them.
Listening to them again now you can hear the kind of proto-memories that Burial’s choices in vocal samples call upon – post-hardcore melancholy – that would be first reflected through UK garage at the tail end of the 90s. The rhythm science is what makes Rob Haigh’s tracks really interesting. These EPs (collected on The Deepest Cut Volume One) were a bridge between anthemic ‘ardkore and more drum & bass – skittering drums, hyperchopped breaks, micro-time stretches – and those bass drops. These were also the EPs that triggered the ultimately short-lived ‘intelligent drum & bass’ movement before it petered out with ‘jazzy’ rubbish and was then overrun by the brutalist darkside of techstep ushered in by Ed Rush, Trace and others.
I don’t listen to drum & bass anymore and haven’t for quite a while but listening back to these and those early Metalheadz releases reminds me that there was something quite special going on in the 90s before it all got codified and suffered genre-cide.