HERITAGE: Roni Size Speaks On Winning Mercury Prize For His Culture-Shifting Album 'New Forms' With Reprazent (1997)

HERITAGE: Roni Size Speaks On Winning Mercury Prize For His Culture-Shifting Album 'New Forms' With Reprazent (1997)


February 23, 2023

From the mid-'90s, Bristol producer Roni Size and his Reprazent cohorts Die and Krust helped sculpt the face and future of D&B in their own image. Bringing Bristol's jazzy, dubby, and all-round experimental temperaments to the table, they gave drum & bass a high-art sheen without compromising on any of the raw ingredients that made it such a visceral thrill in the first place. The bending bass lick of "Brown Paper Bag" will be immediately recognisable, but the entirety of their debut album, New Forms, remains a classic for the groundbreaking way they turned jungle and rap on their heads.

So much so, in fact, that Roni and Reprazent were the subject of a BBC2 documentary the same year he released the New Forms album with Reprazent, the collective/band he, Die and Krust formed with Dynamite MC and Onallee on vocals, Si John on bass guitar and Clive Deamer on drums.

That album more than deserved its own doc (not to mention the Mercury Prize they scooped for album of the year) and they even followed it up with a second album, albeit one that veered slightly from what made the first so magical. Features from Zack De La Rocha and Method Man were insanely impressive and absolutely not to be sniffed at, but nothing will ever beat that unpredictable heat, futurism, and spontaneity of New Forms.




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