"When facing your enemy you have to aim for his weakest point. Use the Buddha finger accurately and you'll find you will win whatever he should try to do"
A six or so minute track on its 1994 release on the Nine Deadly Venoms album this is one of those things that music journalists like to call seminal.
Sampling and beat ripping had been going on for some time when this was put out and indeed J Saul Kane the man behind the group Depth Charge was a major innovator in the eighties of the techniques that would later be used to create House and Trip Hop.
What makes it on this release is that this is, as far as I know, the first record to effectively use samples not only to create beats and provide effects or voices but to create instruments. It had been attempted before in many guises, some had sampled noises and used them as a basis for instruments that sounded very little like the original noise, some had sampled instruments themselves and reused them. What this record does is something that is quite audibly astounding.
The entire track is a tribute to Kanes love of the Hong Kong cinema and the Kung Fu genre. The samples you hear are taken from films. In these samples we have the usual range of breaks and beats but in amongst it all forming a percursive background are samples of Kund Fu hands and feet chopping in their Whoosh Whoosh film style and clippettes of shouts and screams that make up beats and tunes that complement the main bass line.
On top of it all sits Kanes trademark use of the bizarre broken English of the dubbed sound tracks from obscure Kung Fu pulp films and b-releases. As usual he avoids the more obvious use of such samples as chorus lines or catch points but instead uses them to tell little tales and add to the general feel of the track.
"I am the devil. I must die to prove that Buddha exists."