Nookie — producer and DJ Gavin Cheung — belongs to the generation that experienced hardcore and jungle not as separate historical boxes but as a continuous period of experimentation. Breakbeats accelerated, basslines grew heavier, sampling became more intricate and producers kept discovering different emotional possibilities inside the same rapidly changing underground.

His early-1990s work sits directly in that transition. “The Sound of Music” arrived in 1992 as hardcore was beginning to fracture into new forms, followed by the Cloud 9 remix of “Gonna Be Alright” and the 1993 Reinforced material including “Shining in Da Darkness”. Those records could retain hardcore’s rush while opening more space for melody, pads, vocals and atmosphere. The history of jungle is not only a story of music becoming darker or harder; producers such as Nookie were exploring deeper, more musical and more spacious directions at exactly the same time.

The route into that music ran through the record shop as well as the studio. Cheung worked at Red Records, where producers and label crews were physically bringing in white labels and promos. He later recalled knowing Rob Playford before Moving Shadow was established and the Reinforced crew from their shop visits. Retail, production and A&R were part of the same underground network.

The aliases helped him keep different ideas moving at once. Nookie became associated with the more musical side, while Cloud 9 gave him room for tougher and more experimental Moving Shadow material; other names across the catalogue include Second Vision, New Balance and Binary State. The names changed, but the common thread was an unusually wide ear stretching from electro, jazz and funk to Detroit techno, house and breakbeat.

Nookie’s catalogue became connected with labels and networks central to that evolution, including Reinforced Records and Moving Shadow. These independent labels were more than logos on records. They linked producers, DJs, record shops, pirate stations and dancefloors, allowing new approaches to spread quickly while the terminology around hardcore, jungle and drum & bass was still changing.

As the decade progressed, the atmospheric strand became increasingly distinct. Nookie’s relationship with the Good Looking orbit placed his music alongside a wider movement that foregrounded jazz, soul, ambience and musical space within drum & bass. It was not an abandonment of rave energy so much as another route out of the same breakbeat laboratory.

A particularly revealing detour came through Larry Heard. The Paradise album, originally released in Japan in 1998 through Sony / Labello Blanco, paired Cheung’s production with vocals written and performed by the Chicago house pioneer. It makes the Detroit/Chicago influence in Nookie’s earlier listening history tangible: the same producer who came through hardcore could build a full album with Mr Fingers without treating house and jungle as separate musical planets.

Cheung later pushed that independence into Phuzion Digital, one of the early drum & bass labels built around digital releases while much of the scene was still centred on vinyl and dubplates. After stepping away from the genre for a period, he returned to production with new music rather than simply touring the old catalogue; his own archive now runs from the original Reinforced DATs through to current releases.

The surviving mixes on Nookie’s own Mixcloud extend that story beyond individual records. A Good Looking studio mix, a live set at The End with MC Conrad and the Atmosphere: Deeper Drum & Bass series show the DJ as curator as well as producer. Together they document the thread running through his work: breakbeat music that can move a rave while still leaving room for detail, mood and musicianship.