Goldie

Goldie is a dark angel of drum 'n' bass. His sonic tricks swoop into the listener's consciousness, twisting time and space before rumbling onto the dance floor in a crescendo of breakbeats.

"Terminator," his epoch-making "darkcore" cut, was the genre at its most frenetic and ferocious. "Timeless," his bittersweet lullaby of the ghetto, was its polar opposite. Passing in a flash of jazzy hooks, edgy beats and mesmerizing production effects, the cut's 20-some minutes are seemingly compressed into a second. Listening to "Timeless" is the musical equivalent of traveling at the speed of light.

While acknowledged as one of the genre's masters, Goldie is also its first auteur and is primarily responsible for its mainstream profile. Goldie provided drum 'n' bass with a face by embellishing his metallic, searing soundscapes with whispers of his own troubled biography -- a street kid from a broken home rescued by hip-hop, graffiti art and eventually raves.

Musically, this has been a mixed blessing. "Timeless" is generally acknowledged as a masterpiece, but the conceptual hijinks of later albums were adventurous at best, self-indulgent at worst.

Last year's mix album, "INCredible Sound of Drum 'n' Bass," proved that Goldie isn't totally bogged down in musical psychotherapy, however, and his Metalheadz nights continue to animate London's club scene. At the Liquid Room's always adventurous Drum 'n' Bass session, expect a special set that is dark, intense and magnetic, just like its maker.