Lennie De Ice, the British music producer whose track We Are IE helped to shape the jungle genre in the 1990s, has died.
His friend and fellow producer Matthew Copeland posted the news on Facebook, writing: “You will for ever be the soundtrack of our generation god bless my brother fly high and keep the party going up there.” No cause of death was given.
Born Lenworth Green in London, he later recalled being immersed in music as a boy: “I was into the new wave of hip-hop and electro like Mantronix, Jonzun Crew and Afrika Bambaataa, plus I’d grown up in the era of Gary Numan, the new romantics and ska,” he said. He began creating his own music in 1986, using synths and drum machines, and became immersed in London’s nascent acid house scene.
He began working on We Are IE in 1988, “a tune that symbolised everything I was into – the breakbeat was hip-hop, the gunshot and rewind from the [reggae] sound systems and the 4/4 from acid house.”
Using a six-track mixing desk at home, Green utilised the “Amen break”, a breakbeat sampled from the Winstons’ 1969 soul track Amen, Brother which had already been used in early hip-hop. He was one of the first to use it in the context of dance music, and it became a core component of the sound of jungle, later developing into drum’n’bass.
With a cornucopia of sound that blended Algerian raï vocals, cartoonish gunshots, cut-up commands (“let me hear you scream”) and a dub reggae bassline that was as naggingly catchy as its central electronic melody, We Are IE has endured as a classic of British dance culture, going on to influence dubstep in the mid-2000s.
It was originally released in 1991 but Green was jailed for what he later called “something that happened about four or five years prior which had caught up with me”. He was released in 1993.
We Are IE was then reissued in 1999 and reached No 61 in the UK charts. It came back around in 2008 with a dubstep remix by Caspa & Rusko, and was remastered with further remixes in 2022.
Green also ran the label Do or Die and continued to produce music, including a 2013 remix of Letthemusicplay’s track Our Town, featuring Kae Tempest.
Drum’n’bass producer Futurebound was among those paying tribute to Green, calling We Are IE “one of the tracks that paved the way for us all to do this thing. Hearing this for the 1st time when Fabio dropped it 6am at Weekend World in 91, limbs everywhere when the Amen dropped. A memory to last for ever.” Another producer, Detboi, called Green “a true pioneer, blueprint, foundational stuff”.
Source: theguardian.com
