DJ KRUST, 'TOUCH'

Jungle tracks simply do not get any more exquisitely sensuous and beguiling than 'Touch.' It's an early record by Krust which seems to have appeared in hard format only in 1995, on a 12" split with fellow Bristolian and Reprazent-er Roni Size.

The piece is a slow but disorienting glide. There is a rippling electronic chime that is like an involuntary memory, startlingly clear, of something from the screens of a 70s childhood (and is, one guesses, a sample of something of that era). It has the aura of a white-magic word, a secret Open Sesame to an occult space of enchantment. Like as not you will feel as though you have heard it before, even if it isn't so.

Soon deep-blue woozy synth pads are let fall languidly on the surface of stuttering, skittish beats. They sound like a sweet love hangover from the ecstasy-drenched guitar delirium of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. It's a heady atmosphere of erotic aquaticism that Krust is generating here, and bursts of furious sounds of bubbling make this explicit. Wordless female vocalisations are vaporised into a hyper-intimate haze of soft gasps and hungry moans. They are backed sometimes by accelerated flurries of keyed-up synth-strings, sometimes by gentle, exploratory pushes of jazzed electric organ. This siren comes and then she is gone, sucked down into the bass-weight vortex.

But there is another voice in the mix, this one belonging to an actor in the movie Wild Style whose character's words are familiar from their inclusion in 'The Genesis' on Nas's Illmatic: 'Stop fucking around and be a man.' Yet the introduction of this call to wakefulness, to the onerous task of grappling with reality, seems ironic given its obvious inability to diminish the extraordinary oneiric power of this track's spell.

Kodwo Eshun wasn't writing specifically about ambient jungle in 'Abducted by Audio,' but 'Touch' is one of those gorgeously intense aural seductions that bring to mind said text: 'It's almost like you're being drugged by the beat, you're being beaten by the drug. And the fact is, you love it. There's nothing like it.'