NICKYNUTZ 🇧🇪 BELGIUM — BLUDCLART COUNTDOWN EP
Released in collaboration with Bruckout Records 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Review by Gordon Lawrence Taylor
Voice In The Void
Infectious Unease Radio / Subterranean Zone Radio
Supporting independent and alternative music across the international underground.
Website:
https://infectiousuneaseradio.com
RELEASE INFORMATION
Artist: Nickynutz 🇧🇪 Belgium
Release: Bludclart Countdown EP
Label collaboration: Bruckout Records 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Release date: 14 July 2026
Format: Three-track digital EP
Total running time: 18 minutes and 2 seconds
Audio quality: Available in 24-bit/44.1 kHz
Price: €5 EUR or more
Production: All tracks produced by Nickynutz
BPM range: 166–172 BPM
Styles: Jungle, drum & bass, dancehall, dub, Amen breaks, old-school jungle, bass music, comedy and humour
The EP is presented as a collaboration between Nickynutz and Bruckout Records. Its declared concept is humour and comedy twisted into a jungle framework, with proceeds from the digital edition being directed towards financing a future vinyl release through Bruckout Records.
ABOUT NICKYNUTZ 🇧🇪 BELGIUM
Nickynutz is a Belgian DJ and producer associated with Liège and with a long history inside jungle, ragga-jungle, drum & bass and independent breakbeat culture. His artist biography states that he has collected records since 1985, began DJing during the early 1990s, started producing in 2004 and founded the Belgian label Animal Breaks in 2005. His catalogue also reaches across a considerable international network of underground labels and scenes.
That history matters when approaching Bludclart Countdown EP. This is not an artist borrowing the language of old-school jungle as a temporary costume. Nickynutz understands the music from inside its physical culture: vinyl, dubplates, independent labels, record collecting, sound-system communication and the strange humour that has always existed between the breaks.
REVIEW
There has always been laughter somewhere inside the machinery of jungle.
Behind the accelerated breakbeats, low-frequency pressure, dancehall warnings, sirens and visions of urban collapse, there has also been mischief: the unexpected vocal interruption, the disrespectful sample, the absurd sound effect and the rude punchline dropped seconds before the rhythm tears itself apart.
Jungle has never existed entirely within darkness or aggression. It has also been a music of wit, coded language, communal humour and rebellious theatre.
On Bludclart Countdown EP, Nickynutz brings that comic tradition directly into the centre of the release.
The three compositions are framed around exaggerated titles, deliberately ridiculous images and the collision of jungle intensity with comedy. However, this is not comedy placed over the music as decoration. The humour operates through the same fundamental principles as the breakbeat itself: timing, interruption, repetition, delay and sudden impact.
A vocal fragment can become a punchline, but it can also become percussion. A familiar cultural reference can be cut apart until it becomes strange. Something amusing can become threatening when surrounded by accelerated drums and bass pressure.
The laughter and the rhythm are not competing forces.
They strengthen one another.
THE ARTWORK: WARNING, TELEVISION AND THE APPROACHING ZERO
The visual presentation immediately establishes the EP’s character.
Its intense yellow background resembles a warning sign, an old rave flyer, cheap television advertising and the sleeve of an obscure independent record discovered at the back of a record shop. The large red NICKYNUTZ lettering refuses restraint. It is loud, direct and almost confrontational in its simplicity.
The Bruckout Records logo appears like a seal from an underground vinyl operation, while the central artwork presents a dark television image containing a clock and the word COUNTDOWN.
Everything appears to be waiting for an event.
The clock becomes a symbol of control, but jungle has never treated time obediently. It breaks time apart. It cuts, reverses, accelerates and reorganises rhythm until ordinary measurements no longer seem reliable.
A countdown promises order: ten, nine, eight, seven.
A jungle break promises disruption.
That conflict between regulated time and rhythmic disorder sits at the centre of the EP. The visual image prepares the listener for impact, yet the comedy makes it uncertain whether the approaching event is an explosion, a dancefloor collapse or an elaborate joke.
Perhaps it is all three.
TRACK-BY-TRACK REVIEW
1. BLUDCLART COUNTDOWN — 5:09
The title track introduces the release through a confrontation between rigid structure and junglist disorder.
A countdown is one of the simplest rhythmic systems imaginable. Every number arrives at an expected interval, producing anticipation while directing the listener towards a predetermined conclusion. Jungle does something very different with time. It fractures expectation, shifts emphasis and transforms a straightforward sequence into unstable movement.
The title therefore carries more meaning than its immediate comic impact suggests.
“Bludclart Countdown” places a deliberately confrontational, dancehall-derived expression inside the controlled world of the countdown. Formality is invaded by the language of sound-system culture. The calm voice of authority is interrupted by something unruly, physical and impossible to contain.
The track’s identity is rooted in that interruption.
The countdown creates expectation, while jungle creates uncertainty. Each moment appears to move towards a final point, yet the breakbeat continually threatens to tear the measurement apart before zero can be reached.
Comedy and tension are closely connected here. Both rely upon preparation and release. The audience must first be given a pattern before that pattern can be disrupted. The listener expects one conclusion, only to be struck by another.
This is also why humour can work so effectively within jungle. A comic sample must arrive at precisely the correct instant, just as a break, bass movement or rhythmic switch must arrive at precisely the correct instant. Poor timing destroys both the joke and the dancefloor.
Nickynutz understands this relationship.
The comedy does not weaken the music’s physical purpose. It becomes another rhythmic weapon. The joke is not placed outside the breakbeat; it is carried by the breakbeat.
The title track therefore establishes the EP’s central statement: jungle can be technically disciplined while behaving with complete disrespect towards seriousness.
It counts down towards impact—and laughs while doing it.
2. DIRTY CROCODILE — 5:48
With “Dirty Crocodile,” the humour becomes more physical, grotesque and animalistic.
The title immediately produces a cartoon image, but there is something threatening beneath its absurdity. A crocodile remains almost invisible below the surface. It waits patiently, appearing motionless until the instant it strikes.
That image belongs naturally inside jungle.
Breakbeat music frequently depends upon the tension between apparent stability and sudden violence. A rhythm can circle around itself, building familiarity, before being cut apart without warning. Bass can remain beneath the surface before rising with enough force to reshape the surrounding space.
The crocodile becomes a metaphor for that movement.
The word “dirty” is equally important. Within underground dance music, dirt is not simply a lack of cleanliness. It suggests weight, distortion, damaged texture, contaminated rhythm and a refusal of polished respectability.
Cleanliness belongs to the showroom.
Dirt belongs to the basement, the warehouse, the pirate broadcast and the speaker cabinet carrying years of accumulated pressure.
“Dirty Crocodile” therefore joins comic imagery to the physical language of bass music. The name sounds ridiculous, yet the creature it describes remains ancient, patient and capable of sudden brutality.
There is also a longer tradition of animals appearing throughout rave and jungle culture as mascots, monsters, hallucinations and carriers of rhythmic personality. Roars, growls, calls and imagined movements translate easily into percussion and bass.
Nickynutz draws upon that tradition without turning it into solemn mythology. His crocodile does not arrive as a sacred symbol. It crawls through the mud, drags the breaks behind it and appears ready to consume anything standing too close to the water.
Where the opening track occupies the artificial order of television and the countdown, “Dirty Crocodile” moves the EP into a strange junglist swamp.
The studio has flooded.
The machinery is sinking.
Something beneath the surface is still smiling.
3. ORIGINAL RUDEBOY INNA MONSTER MASH FEVER — 7:05
The closing track possesses the longest running time and the most extravagant title on the release.
“Original Rudeboy Inna Monster Mash Fever” brings together several cultural languages at once: Jamaican sound-system terminology, jungle identity, novelty horror, rave memory and knowingly excessive comic theatre.
The title reads like a lost dubplate discovered inside an abandoned funfair.
The phrase “original rudeboy” establishes a connection to Jamaican music and sound-system culture, whose vocal styles, bass structures and methods of musical transformation became fundamental to the development of jungle in Britain.
“Monster Mash Fever,” however, introduces an entirely different world: camp horror, cheap costumes, novelty records, television monsters and the joyful artificiality of the supernatural.
Nickynutz does not attempt to resolve this contradiction.
He throws both traditions into the same room and allows them to dance together.
At seven minutes and five seconds, the composition is given the space to function as the EP’s extended finale. Its title suggests a procession of rude boys, monsters, sound-system ghosts and reanimated breakbeats gathering for one final celebration.
There is a deeper structural relationship between horror and humour. Both depend upon expectation. Both make use of silence, delay, repetition and sudden impact. A scream and a punchline may produce different emotional reactions, yet both require the audience to be prepared before being confronted by the unexpected.
Jungle has always possessed an extraordinary ability to absorb fragments from apparently incompatible cultural sources. Horror films, dancehall voices, science-fiction warnings, public information broadcasts, soul records, children’s television and fragments of everyday speech can all be pulled into the breakbeat and transformed.
The sample does not remain where it began.
It is cut from its original world and made to serve another purpose.
Nickynutz embraces that collage tradition while refusing to treat it like a museum exhibit. The history is respected, but it is also shaken, exaggerated and pushed back onto the dancefloor.
The closing track brings the EP’s philosophy fully into focus: jungle can recognise its own history without becoming trapped inside nostalgia. It can carry decades of cultural memory while remaining rude, funny and alive.
The monsters are not returning from the past.
They never left.
They were simply waiting for the bass to begin again.
COMEDY AS A JUNGLIST METHOD
What distinguishes Bludclart Countdown EP is its understanding that humour within underground music is not automatically an escape from seriousness.
Comedy can challenge authority. It can transform familiar material and expose the absurdity hidden inside formal structures. It can also create a moment of recognition between producer, DJ and audience.
Within a dancefloor environment, a well-positioned comic fragment can release tension immediately before the music rebuilds that tension at a more physical level. The audience laughs, recognises the reference and then receives the impact of the next break collectively.
That shared reaction is important.
Underground music is often discussed through ideas of alienation, darkness, confrontation and social resistance. These elements are real, but they are not the entire picture. Underground communities also survive through humour. Laughter becomes a defence against exhaustion, authority, commercial pressure and the endless seriousness of the outside world.
Nickynutz treats humour as a compositional method rather than a novelty.
The three titles create a miniature progression. The opening track invades the controlled environment of television. The second introduces a dirty and potentially dangerous cartoon creature. The final track expands into a complete rudeboy horror celebration.
Each composition occupies its own scene, yet all three are united by the language of accelerated jungle and the deliberate use of absurdity.
The release moves within a range of 166 to 172 BPM, keeping it firmly connected to the physical centre of jungle and drum & bass. The concept may be playful, but the speed remains serious. Beneath every joke waits the demand of the dancefloor.
OLD-SCHOOL LANGUAGE WITHOUT EMPTY NOSTALGIA
The term old-school can sometimes become a trap.
It can be used to describe music that attempts to reconstruct the past without adding anything to it. Familiar breakbeats, samples and production methods can become empty historical decoration when they are separated from the attitude that originally gave them meaning.
Bludclart Countdown EP avoids that problem because it does not approach jungle history with excessive politeness.
Nickynutz remembers that early jungle was not created as academic material. It was loud, unstable, rapidly mutating and frequently humorous. It absorbed whatever it could use and ignored the boundaries others attempted to place around it.
The EP carries this attitude forward.
Its relationship with the past is active rather than ceremonial. Jungle history is not placed behind glass. It is pushed back into circulation, given a ridiculous title and made to work again.
That is a far more respectful treatment of the music’s history than simple imitation.
To preserve jungle does not mean freezing it.
It means allowing it to continue behaving badly.
INDEPENDENT CULTURE AND THE ROAD TO VINYL
The decision to use proceeds from the digital EP to help finance a future vinyl release through Bruckout Records gives the project another layer of significance.
This is independent music constructing its own infrastructure.
The digital release is not merely an endpoint. It becomes part of the process through which a physical edition may eventually exist. Every purchase therefore contributes to an underground cycle involving artist, label, supporter, pressing plant, DJ and record collector.
For jungle, vinyl carries particular historical weight.
The culture developed through dubplates, white labels, limited pressings, independent record shops, pirate radio, sound clashes and the direct movement of music from producer to selector. Records could circulate before the wider public knew the names of the tracks or artists involved.
The physical object became part of the mystery.
A future vinyl pressing of Bludclart Countdown EP would place the release inside that continuing tradition. The bright yellow artwork, black surfaces and accelerated humour would become something tangible: three pieces of junglist mischief cut into grooves and built to pass between hands.
The crowdfunding principle behind the digital release is also significant. Rather than waiting for large commercial structures to approve the project, the artist, label and audience become participants in the same process.
The underground supports the underground.
That principle remains essential, particularly at a time when independent artists can accumulate streams without necessarily receiving enough financial support to press physical music.
Purchasing the EP is therefore not only a transaction.
It is a vote for the record that may come next.
FINAL VERDICT
Bludclart Countdown EP is not a parody of jungle.
It is jungle using parody as a weapon.
Nickynutz takes humour, exaggerated imagery and cultural collision and places them inside a framework informed by old-school breakbeat pressure, dancehall inheritance, dub culture and independent production.
The result is mischievous without becoming disposable, self-aware without becoming detached and comic without surrendering the physical authority of the music.
Across its three tracks, the EP moves from television disruption to reptilian dirt before arriving at a full rudeboy monster celebration. Its world is bright yellow, blackened around the edges and permanently seconds away from impact.
It also demonstrates that underground music does not need to become emotionally solemn in order to carry history or meaning. Comedy can contain intelligence. Absurdity can become resistance. A ridiculous sample can expose more truth than a carefully prepared speech.
Most importantly, Nickynutz understands that jungle has never been defined only by darkness.
It has also been defined by survival, invention, disrespect and the ability to transform almost anything into rhythm.
The underground does not always have to stare into the void with a solemn face.
Sometimes it can bare its teeth, turn up the bass and laugh as the clock reaches zero.
TRACKLIST
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Bludclart Countdown — 5:09
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Dirty Crocodile — 5:48
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Original Rudeboy Inna Monster Mash Fever — 7:05