Recorded back in St Albans, where he’d grown up, and released in 1997, Modus Operandi originally bore the working title Reverse Kids—a nod, perhaps, to Parkes’ fondness for switching up the direction of his beats, flipping them back and forth so often that time seemed to stand still even as it kept hurtling forward. But the name Modus Operandi was even more apropos. It came from Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat: When a sergeant asks Al Pacino’s character, a sorrowful cop with no illusions about his opponents, what the criminals’ M.O. is, Pacino shoots back in his trademark rasp, “Their M.O. is that they’re good.”
The bone-dry assessment epitomized Parkes’ desire to prove his mettle in an intensely competitive scene. That’s exactly what Modus Operandi is: a shot across the bow—a demonstration of Parkes’ virtuoso skill, as well as his determination to take drum’n’bass, as the more intricate iterations of the sound had increasingly come to be known, into unexplored territory. If Goldie’s Timeless, as many have noted over the years, was the drum’n’bass equivalent of Pink Floyd’s space-rock epic, Modus Operandi might as well have been an actual trip to the dark side of the moon, a voyage into the airless, lightless unknown.
Across 10 interrelated tracks that play out like movements of a suite, Modus Operandi plunges into a netherworld of skulking beats, viscous synths, and violent foreboding. It’s awash in seasick frequencies and bathed in the sounds of metal—scraping claws, clattering shell casings, glinting steel slicing through the penumbra. Neither strictly a club record nor, by any means, a chillout soundtrack, it suggests a mortal face-off between rhythm and atmosphere, each locked in the other’s death grip.
In a milieu that prized dexterity, audacity, and speed, the album’s opening track, “The Hidden Camera,” is a head-fake. After a sequence of Rhodes keys that sounds almost like a jazz player’s interpretation of church bells, the beat finally drops, but the song can’t really be called drum’n’bass. There’s no trace of any canonical breakbeat in the shuffling snares and cottony flams, and the herky-jerky cadence has little in common with the way jungle and drum’n’bass typically move. Most importantly, the tempo is slow—a pensive 126 beats per minute, compared to the 160-170 range that had become standard for the genre.
The world was awash in chilled grooves in 1997, but “The Hidden Camera” is hardly your typical downtempo. It bobs with a coiled intensity that telegraphs dangerous instability. The kick drum hits just before the downbeat, the snares dance around the backbeat, and all the drums in between are either rushing the beat, as though making up for lost time, or lagging behind. Unidentifiable noises, suggesting anguished dolphins, and grim sound effects, like a handgun being cocked, stoke the anxious mood. Yet for all this, the vibe is relaxed, thanks to a spare, noirish standup bassline and synth pads that swirl like the northern lights. The drum pattern plays out in two-bar phrases, but the keys and pads are drawn out in longer arcs that overlap at uneven intervals. Those overlapping phrases mean that your attention is always following the music in parallel yet contrasting paths—a hallmark of Photek’s looping sleight-of-hand.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
