Super Sharp Ssshhhhh....Remix 12

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DJ Zinc's 'Super Sharp Shooter' is a classic of jump-up jungle. With its crudely glutinous synth-pall and ominous rap vocal coiled around a steel-sprung bassline, this was the track which cemented Zinc's reputation as a sensei of the hardcore dancefloor. While Zinc himself has recently made inroads into the 2-step scene with the bouncy breakbeat funk of '138 Trek', it is Zed Bias, UK garage's unrivalled low-end technologist, who is rumoured to be behind this remix. In attempting to graft 'Super Sharp Shooter''s rigorous hypertensility onto the very different sonic body of 2-step, Bias has been unable to avoid a certain slackening of the track's original punitive intensity (hardstep's warrior-monk insistence on the body as a repository of martial knowledge sitting poorly with 2-step's orgasmatronic twitch 'n' grind). Where he has succeeded, however, is in broadening the track's scope, filtering its previously unidirectional energies into the laterally-oriented currents of the H&G mainstream. As a result, where the original induces a grimacing, gurning, feral concentration, 'Super Sharp Ssshhhhh....Remix' directs the dancer's focus outwards, opening his or her pores to the prospect, not simply of a comradeship of the oppressed, but of the intermingling of bodies, genders, races, precepts - that socio-cultural mix 'n' blend which 2-step, in its current, utopian phase, seems so helplessly to demand.