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Although the Amen Break is nearly omnipresent, I think the Futurama mention is misguided. The rhythm in Futurama is the same as in the song it's based on: Psyche Rock by Pierre Henry. That song was published two years before Amen Brother. Although the rhythm sounds very similar, Futurama's (or Pierre Henry's) precisely lacks Amen Break's characteristic syncopation on its fourth bar.
If you're interested in more, this is a nice and short documentary (2014) on the Amen Break: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
My first attempt to load the video was met with an ad so I killed the yt app on my phone. I’m assuming this is the one narrated by a fellow with a deep voice and an acetate record. Timing would be about right. If so, this is a phenomenal look at the evolution of its place in music that I also was going to link in this thread. Music history.
Amen Break is just one of dozens used in jungle/d&b mind.
Here's one of my favourite tracks under his Mahakala alias – The Exodus (2018)
[Track] https://youtu.be/DYKUU-AsHvM
[Discogs] https://www.discogs.com/release/12603789-Mahakala-The-Exodus...
Although the Amen Break is nearly omnipresent, I think the Futurama mention is misguided. The rhythm in Futurama is the same as in the song it's based on: Psyche Rock by Pierre Henry. That song was published two years before Amen Brother. Although the rhythm sounds very similar, Futurama's (or Pierre Henry's) precisely lacks Amen Break's characteristic syncopation on its fourth bar.
I thought that break-beat was not present last decade as much as it was between 1990-2010.
Late 60s, early 70s had the best combination of technology & limitations to create some of the most memorable music. Go much earlier than that & everything sounds hollow. Too much later ( I'm looking at you, 1980s) and everything is polished & synthetic to phoniness.
The 1980s gave us samplers that could only do a few seconds of audio, and entire genres were built on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJf9Jptq7VY
People who came up then probably feel the same way you do, but about samplers with no practical limits.
The different examples really make the steady liquification of drum and bass over time clear. Yeah there's still a subgenre of really hard stuff but in the 90s it was all like that, just amen break over really dark metal/industrial kind of sounds. The melodic gap between Vic Acid and the Sub Focus remix is indicative, as dnb artists got older they got more classical training and started to focus on less harsh, more e…
There was actually a whole scene from the start of the 90s that focussed on melodic and atmospheric jungle and dnb. Check out Good Looking Records. In fact even Metalheadz pushed some this sound a lot. I personally see that as a fundamental part of jungle and dnb from the get go.