Drum 'n' Bass Collection, The

15 years after Anne Dudley and J.J. Jeczalik started the Art of Noise and seven years after this compilation's spiritual ancestor THE AMBIENT COLLECTION, 1997's THE DRUM AND BASS COLLECTION appeared. The disc serves to demonstrate how influential Dudley and Jeczalik's trademark montages of repeated themes and motifs, sound effects, and hip-hop-derived beats were to yet another generation of dance music pioneers.
The collection's 11 remixes by such drum and bass notables as DocScott, Dom and Roland, ILS, Lightfoot, PFM, Seiji, J. Majik, Digital Pariah, Lemon D, Flyright and Aquasky tend to respect the structural integrity of the originals more than Alex Paterson and Youth's ambient experiments on THE AMBIENT COLLECTION. This is largely due to the fact that, with rare exceptions, the Art of Noise have always been primarily interested in creating insistent rhythms from unusual and exotic sources. Most of the endlessly fascinating DRUM AND BASS COLLECTION further refines this position.|