Goldie – Timeless

Classic Drum N Bass Album and My Top 10 All The Time Best Electronica Albums

pretty fascinated by the 2xLP, having just brought it home never having heard it after years coming up listening to the single CD issue and in my mind classic album proper. The vinyl release should basically be treated like its own EP. An almost totally different sound, eschewing the iconic, transcendent atmospherics of this masterpiece for a deep tunneling journey into those hypnotic extended breaks. If Timeless is emotional reintegration after a harrowing psychedelic escapade, the vinyl version is the k-hole.

It's time for a vinyl pressing with all the tracks of this timeless masterpiece....

Is there a full version of the 21-minute opener "Timeless" available on vinyl?

If you're going to only buy 3 "intelligent" drum'n'bass albums, the ones you need came out in short succession: 4 Hero's Parallel Universe, Goldie's Timeless, and T.Power's The Self-Evident Truth of an Intuitive Mind. All three sound a bit dated because d'n'b became all about hard two-step beats in the latter half of the '90s, a punishment from which it never really recovered. However they do still sound contemporary in that they're more like what came later than what came before; there are hints of the ragga and chipmunk sounds of early jungle, but those tropes appear sparingly, with the focus being on ever-more complicated arrangements of chopped-up beats and a suspenseful, sometimes menacing backing atmosphere.

Despite being more sophisticated and structured than almost anything that came before it, Goldie's album has extended "hard" runs, and in that respect, it's the most authentic as far as what you'd hear out at a rave at the time. 4 Hero's album is the prettiest, incorporating jazzy elements and introducing more traditional sophistication and smoothness to the genre, a torch carried by many other artists on this new, jazzy side of d'n'b for a long while afterward. T.Power's is the concept album, a cohesive "intelligent"/"ambient" work, not a collection of separate tracks like the others (notwithstanding the epic title track that kicks off Timeless). I enjoy the T.Power album more than the others just for its balls-out trippiness, but it pales in intensity compared to Timeless, and in musicality when compared to the 4 Hero album.

Its hard to separate Timeless from the almost legendary reputation of its creator.
Already deserving credit for pioneering his distinctive chopped beat and timestretching Rufige Kru sound under the wing of 4 Hero's forward thinking Reinforced label he had been producing music that had been at the forefront of the rave scene
But then he grabbed the mantle and took things to the next level.
So this album deserves the accolade for being maybe the first jungle album that reached out to the mainstream masses without compromising on its roots or its ambition
Inner City Life was the sound of rave turned sour by Thatcherism.
Hard,pissed off,sticking its chest out and spewing out gut wrenched blood spattered unadulterated soul.One of the first (maybe only) jungle tunes you could watch on MTV but despite that it did not try to soften its vision or message.
So maybe it was natural that Goldie would continue his ambassadorial tendencies and make his own persona more accessible to the masses
But like his metalheadz label which has remained uncompromising to the day this album was the perfect fusion of hard but accessible.
It was not the most innovative album of its time and maybe its not an album for the beats purists.But thats not the point.Tracks like the title cut,Jah the Seventh Seal snd Kemistry encapsulated the dark machine at the heart of Goldie's soul.Still Life,A Sea of Tears and You and Me showed a more reflective emotional side.This album is all about feeling.
To understand the rise and fall of Jungle you have to have to centre yourself on this pivotal album.

I am honestly not too schooled on DnB/Jungle that much, but I seeing/hearing the video for "Timeless" at 2 AM when I was 14-ish. As many of you can imagine, experiencing the atmosphere of such a track at that time and age was mind blowing. Ever since then it has been one of my favorite tracks of any genre. That cut alone just takes you in every emotional direction and transcends yourself from reality in every way. I am a jazz/soul head so the obvious underlying spacey jazz vibe on this whole album really captivated me. Absolutely essential genre defining release for ANY appreciators of electronic/jazz/chill/and all around soulful styles!!!

Groundbreaking, Utter brilliance...

Okay okay.. This album is Fucking insanely brilliant.. In my opinion the stand out here is "Timeless". I get a mysterious and unusual feel of nostalgia every time i hear those lush pads and Diane's soothing voice. Timeless got me into DNB, and it is and probably will remain my favourite track of all time, among a couple of others. All tracks are in a similer vein, i like most of them too. But for me the standout here is definetly Timeless. Thankyou Goldie for changing my life, it's a hard thing to put into words of what this album has done to me, but im sure you can figure it out.

Absolutely jaw dropping.

One have to keep always in mind that this is one of the first, one of the most daring and one of the best drum'n bass albums ever made, because maybe that icon called Goldie overshadows it. Indeed it is one of the defining albums of the 90's and the popularity of electronica. And it is much more in its incredible diversity: great jungle "jams" which foreshadow broken beat for a few years, good ballads, great construction of very long compositions, and a sense of freedom, of space, of greater-than-life that even the better and "sci-fiest" can't achieve. Add some ambient jazz ("Adrift") and a r'n'b number ("State of Mind"), and you have absolutely anything that electronic music can offer, at least in heart.

So good that very few dared to do something similar (drum 'n bass or jungle quickly moved into the 2/2 rhythms, forgetting the "caothic beats" subgenre) and even Goldie couldn't achieve this peak again. He made "Timeless" touched by God or an alien, I guess.

This album is fuckng classic. "Jah the 7th Seal" is the tune that got me into DNB. I think the legnth of "Inner City Life" is perfect. The only track I skip over is "State of Mind". It's a little uhm....not what I like. Other than that track, however, the album is brilliant. Thankyou Goldie!