“Jungle’s soundworld constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle’s treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you’d be vulnerable to trauma). ‘It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for,’ runs the martial-arts-movie sample in Source Direct’s ‘The Cult’, a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call ‘neurofunk’ (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips ’n’ blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don’t even sound like breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle’s strategy of ‘cultural resistance’: the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.”