Hooversound Recordings — the London label run by SHERELLE and NAINA, born from the pair’s NTS show and steeped in jungle’s history — makes its first move of 2021 with a meeting of two generations. Hooversound Presents: Special Request x Tim Reaper sees Paul Woolford hand four cuts from last year’s Zero Fucks to Tim Reaper, the most talked-about junglist of the moment, and let the young producer loose on them. Special Request’s hardcore-soaked rave anthems were always halfway to the jungle; on the Hooversound Bandcamp page the record arrives carrying a Bandcamp Daily recommendation and no small amount of Resident Advisor buzz.
Reaper steps into the spotlight on the crest of jungle’s most convincing revival yet — a wave that has carried the mid-’90s sound back from the internet’s murkiest corners into the mainstream conversation, and made its young ambassadors the most sought-after remixers in the scene. Few deserve the attention more: Reaper has spent years excavating the golden era’s rarest white labels, and this EP gives him the keys to some of rave’s most beloved recent anthems.
Opener Elysian Fields (6:52) sets the tone, its dreamy pads kept intact whilst Reaper’s signature edits — chopped amens, swung snares and a drum programme that never sits still — pull the track from the rave into the jungle proper. Pull Up (6:09) is the most direct of the four, its vocal chant sliced into stabs and layered over a rolling break that builds pressure with every pass. Quiet Storm (5:14) is where the pair’s shared love of dub rises to the surface, all cavernous reverb, sub-bass weight and a bassline that rumbles rather than rushes. Closer Straight Off The Block (5:43) is the most rugged rework, its roughneck energy restored with a particularly vicious break edit that feels lifted straight from a 1994 dubplate.
Nothing here is a radical reimagining — Woolford’s originals were already steeped in the sounds Reaper adores — but that’s rather the point. Reaper’s edits honour the source material whilst flexing the technical muscle that has made him the scene’s most in-demand junglist: precision-timed edits, genuine swing and a sense of dynamics that lets even the busiest moments breathe. It’s a thrilling document of two rave generations meeting in the middle, and a confident statement of intent for Hooversound’s 2021.
