Being with You

Of all the registers Foul Play occupied, this is their most tender, and the tension between the form and the feeling is what makes it extraordinary. Jungle's rhythmic machinery — the stuttering, pitch-shifted breaks, the elastic sub-bass — is all present, but placed in the service of something that feels recognizably loving. Whether or not the track samples the Smokey Robinson song it evokes in its title, the emotional territory is the same: closeness, warmth, the specific vulnerability of being known by another person. The production creates a kind of intimacy through its textures, high-register melodic phrases drifting over the kinetic rhythm section like something half-remembered, filtering through reverb and distance. The vocal elements, sampled and treated, carry genuine softness — the voice is never clean, always processed through the production's aesthetic, but the feeling survives the transformation. It occupies a space in the jungle canon that demonstrates how capacious the form could be, how its rhythmic intensity didn't preclude emotional nuance. This is a track for the end of a night rather than its peak, the moment when the crowd has thinned and the music turns inward, or equally for headphone listening on a grey afternoon when proximity to another person feels like the only thing that matters.