Krust: The Edge Of Everything | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Picture this: it’s 1994 and you’re at a dingy warehouse rave. The music is like nothing you’ve ever heard before – crazy breakbeats played at inhuman speeds, basslines you feel in your chest, weird electronic sounds swooping in and out. There’s a lot of drugs around, sure, but still this music itself is like entering another dimension.

The style is being called jungle, or drum’n’bass. It’s been created by young producers from the UK’s Caribbean migrant community – raised on the sonic experimentation and apocalyptic tones of reggae, inspired by the hard-edged sounds of gangsta rap, equipped with new technology allowing them to venture where no musician has gone before. That era of music has often been recalled, fairly or not, by UK music critics Simon Reynolds and the late Mark Fisher when they criticise 21st century pop music’s lack of innovation – the birth of drum’n’bass remembered as pop’s last great leap into the future before it settled into a malaise of retro and pastiche.

In our hypothetical moment in 1994; it’s quite possible the song you were listening to was by Kirk Thompson, aka Krust. He produced a number of groundbreaking singles in the 90’s; and as one third of Roni Size & Reprazent, he was pivotal in bringing drum’n’bass into the commercial and critical mainstream.

Fast forward to 2020, and Krust is back with The Edge of Everything, his first album in 14 years. If pop music is stuck in a derivative rut, and drum’n’bass is now just another retro style to imitate, what will this one-time boundary-pusher do?

The Edge of Everything is certainly an ambitious record. Almost 80 minutes long, full of ambient interludes, found sounds, spoken word tracks, and a conceptual theme. That theme isn’t always obvious on a record without traditional lyrics, but clues lie in the album title and in opening track Hegel Dialectic. Karl Marx famously used Hegel’s theory as an analysis of opposing class interests shaping history. Like drum’n’bass mixing the utopian sentiment of rave with the apocalyptic dread of roots reggae, Krust is depicting a future of multiple possibilities - on “the edge of everything”. That comes out in the spoken word tracks – the hopeful sermon of Antigravity Love contrasted with the analysis of totalitarianism in 7 Known Truths – and the mix of euphoric breakbeats with bleak soundscapes.

One advantage of getting older as an electronic producer, compared to say a punk band, is that you’re not as restricted by the physical realities of ageing. In fact, technological advances have allowed Krust when desired to sound heavier than ever. Still, it has to be said that this is an album aimed much more for headphone listening than the dancefloor. Suitable for 2020, at least.

As the album progresses, it gets darker and more abstract. The breakbeats give way to eerie, claustophobic soundscapes. If this is Krust peering into the future, it’s not a very optimistic view. Maybe when it came to musical innovation, those 90’s producers had an unfair advantage – living through the end of the cold war and experiencing technological changes that offered bright new possibilities, they had a future that seemed worth exploring. Today - with a never-ending war on terror and fractured global order, imminent climate crisis, and technology used routinely for state or commercial psychological warfare – the future seems as disposable as the planned obsolescence of our consumer goods or the online content that appears then disappears from our screens. The rehashing of sounds from the past may represent a retreat into a past that seems more appealing than our present or future.

As for Krust, he is still aiming to push those musical boundaries. Making music not restricted by its genre norms, reaching into unfamiliar sonic territory, and aiming for big ideas. The fact that this dark, uneasy record is unlikely to hit the mainstream or light up dancefloors in 2020 could say something about changes to our culture industry, it could say something about changes to Krust, or it could say something about the future itself.

- Andy Paine.
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