Keeping The Beat: Simenon's First Three Albums As Bomb The Bass
With each successive album, Simenon moved to buck the accepted dance music trend by incorporating ever greater amounts of live instrumentation into his sound: Unknown Territory would set raw rock guitars against its breakbeats; whilst Clear would strike out even further, blending reggae and dub into the mix courtesy of various instrumentalists from the On-U Soundsystem / Tackhead collective.
Despite scoring another huge hit with the trip-hop pioneering Winter In July single, the second album Unknown Territory was marred by delays; not least when Pink Floyd refused to clear a sample of "Money" included on one of the tracks. However, the most contentious delay was when the band had to briefly ditch their Bomb the Bass tag, due to media censoring out of context references to warfare during the first Iraq war. (The collective would briefly release under the singular title, Tim Simenon.)
Across his first three albums, Simenon would also continue to indulge his eclectic aesthetic fascinations by repeatedly borrowing from non-musical popular culture sources: with samples from both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Death Race 2000 soundtracks, and films like Videodrome and Blade Runner peppering tracks on Unknown Territory. Clear on the other hand (released on the Stoned Heights imprint of Island Records), bore heavy references to the writings - and infamous lifestyle - of William Burroughs: the cover was an homage to the advert poster of the Naked Lunch movie; Bug Powder Dust was a mish-mash of Burroughs references and mirror of the author's cut-up writing method; whilst the constant references to drug use, and the reliance on spoken word across most of the albums tracks would suggest an updated return to the Beat marriage of music and poetry. Said spoken words came courtesy of Justin Warfield, novelist Will Self (continuing the Beat tradition of mixing heroin with writing), and writer/musician Leslie Winer.
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