Ranting in the dark

Do you know this feeling of anticipation, when you hear the beginning of a great set of music and you just know that it will be devastating, it'll be extreme? You can just ... sense it.

There is this faint tingle in the air, playing with your senses. A chill crawls up your spine, buzzes through your nerves, makes you shake a little. Your eyes widen, your sight becomes glazed and disconnected. You look concentrated and determined.

You take a sip and make smalltalk, you just know that soon it wouldn't matter anymore. The music starts building up, but it's all still an anticipation. A feeling that at some point in the future you can go wild, you can lose it all and dive in this .. dark, tangled mass of people, that for now seems still, a monolithic, inpenetrable wall of humans.

Beat, the beat comes and slowly your body starts responding like you don't know what to do just yet. You keep the contact but your eyes start seeking. Seeking hints of activity. Your sound perception sharpens, as you concentrate on the melody. It gives you the feeling, the mood, the movement. The initial inspiration.

Bounce, baby, bounce - that gorgeous one in front of you gives out moves like she intends to start wars. You don't care, the moves are just only beggnng to show what's about to come later.

Punchy music kicks in and the bodies start rockng back and forth. The melody engulfs the crowd slowly and you find yourself in a sea of smilng, dancing, sweating people. Beats per minute, both music-wise and heart-wise accelerate. They sync and mess up your body and your mind. You start being one integral piece of the music, moving with it, living with it. The same pace, the same emotion, the same rythm.

Jump goes the dancefloor - one, two, ten tracks in a row pick up the speed, the mood, the punch of it all, lift you up and slowly eradicate the lingering threads of rational thought, creeping in the back of your mind.

And then you explode. You are all over the place along with your peers. Jumping madly, laughing, sweating, smiling. Boom - a flash of light, a punch of bass - your body jumps in unpredictable ways. Choreography is all about nature now, it happens on its own.

And then comes the moment of serenity. A little bit of a breather, a pause. Time to collect the victims and reinforce the ones still moving. Come on, breathe with me... Stop, take a sip of water and relax.

But I know. I know what's in your minds.

The pause gets sick. Heavy, overwhelming. It slows down and turns dark. Oddly melodic. Relaxing, without providing relief. Your mind starts to slow down and your pulse calms. You think - about bloody time. But there's a dark voice in the back your your head, a sick feeling that this is not going so well. The music starts pushing you down.

Down, down, down, the heavy lines crush any small remaints of sanity in your head, they reduce your body to an almost immobile wreck, seemingly relaxed, but oddly tensed up from the inside. Slowly, you realize that you're losing it all. Your sight wanders, your thoughts just ... vanish. You let go and dive in.

Observation of what's around comes like a gift. The realisation that this is so awesome that you can see the goosebumps on other people's hands just makes you feel even better. Your dancing skills are reduced to moving slowly and making funny faces but you don't give a damn.

And then, beat by beat, it gets rougher. Mixed upon a trippy melody, a dark bassline comes in. The vocal lifts you from the ground and leaves you floating, without support for what is about to come. The dark music pushes you down and down and down, and down.

And when you're ready to flip out, the beat raises from the back of the tune. The dark, sickening melody takes form. And it takes the form of a sledgehammer ready to smash you on the head.

You gotta get get. Boom! The next beat is the one that shatters your connection with reality. The one that looses it all - thoughts, concerns, precautions. Anything and everyting. Your pressed down, desperate mind escapes into the bliss by doing the only thing it's left to do. It stops. Rational thought is erradicated, everything is suppressed. At this point you get music that is so fast, so inspiring, so dark, so wicked, so engaging that there is nothing left.

A complete wipeout. There's the music, you and a crowd of disconnected people left. And nothing else.

This is when you become disconnected. This is when you assemble the pieces of the puzzle a few hours afterwards. This is when you wake up late and you realize you feel like someone took you apart, piece by piece, and when it all ended, they didn't nearly make it to put you back together.

This is when your mind is clean, your spirit high, your concerns gone, your love infinite, your friendship unlimited, your joy unextinguishable, your spirit high, your body painless....

Everything you are is everyting you wanted to be, everyhting you did was everything you wanted to do and if hell came down to earth right fucking then, you'd say ..."Meh, fuck it, I had a good time"

"Sucker punch motherfucker. Haaa-hahahahahahahaahah"

Yes, we are going back to the jungle, head-first and at high speed. And it's the right type of Jungle - Jungle as in music, as in D&B not as in forests, heat and tropical disease.

It's a disease of the mind, it's raw and dynamic, it's uplifting and devastating, it is the mood of power. And it's back, from the good old days. It's not like it ever really went away, it just kind of went on a more urban underground scene. And along with the powerful British Jungle beats came along a few new strong moods from the East - Ukraine, Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia. And along with bassdrive.com my playlist started having hmsu.org, at first, and recently eilo.org's new D&B channel.

And I realized I shouldn't be missing out on things so bad, although I never stopped showing up at good D&B events, not in Thessaloniki, not in Oslo, not in Sofia. There's always someone to drag me there. And drag me they did - to a true legend - Rony Size in the Hristo Botev hall, Sofia. It was a month ago but I still remember how we barely walked out of there that night. Easily 1500-2000 people, maybe more, maybe less and at the end we were almost begging to stop. The mood in that place is great, I love the stage in my home country. I've been at awesome places, great parties, amazing people, but nothing can beat the amassed mood of a Bulgarian crowd, ready for a party. That and the amazing Rony Size and Dynamite MC. Yes, wellcome to Sofia.

And you can't stop, and you can't stop, and you can't stop.

Jungle is massive! Hahahaha

/me is teasing his eardrums with the wicked sounds of the crazy Noisia