Ten years ago, sitting in a beach chair and wearing a king's outfit, Moving Shadow founder Rob Playford sang "Words are meaningless and forgettable." Stop, that was Depeche Mode. But come to think of it, the story works just as well: first ditching the vocal-friendly acid house trends of the time (think "James Brown Is Dead"), then upping the BPMs with marble-crunching breaks, and finally ditching all semblance of conventional verse-chorus-verse structures altogether to explore something with just drums and -- oh yes -- bass, Moving Shadow was a label plainly ahead of its time.

It's unfortunate that the drop-off of jungle popularity has made people write off the company as an outdated "Factory Records for drum'n'bass." Even in the early output (Cosmo & Dibs, Blame), there was a sense of shoving soul breaks and old-skool hip-hop into even the most basic of hardcore techno. Moving Shadow just didn't care and it made people nervous. While so much of the dance world pointed itself toward progressive or ambient, Moving Shadow put out stuff like Renegade's "Terrorist" with its terrifying bass shock waves or 2 Bad Mice's "Bombscare" whose acid-house-blackened-in-a-pyre-of-breakbeats texture is still seen as a crucial landmark in the foundation of jungle.

Not that the precipitous pear shape can't be felt even here. Somewhere along the line, the idea to return to a vocal scheme of things returns and it's not pretty. The idea to push the heavy breaks and unidentifiable drop beats so they can work around nasally "divas" is crippling (the pretension in Cloud 9's "Jazzmin" almost smacks you of the precise moment when the genre collapsed in on itself like a boneless fowl shoved out of an airlock). Luckily, such lyrical ineptitude didn't come often in these ten years. Having 31 tracks that show the rise and fall of drum'n'bass from just one record label's back catalog is no small feat. It's not often that a dance label's birthday sounds this vital or educational. So while he may have worn a daft, figurative costume, Playford deserves all the royal payback in the world. ~ Dean Carlson, All Music Guide