Stephen Austin — Stevie Hyper D — became one of the most distinctive MCs of the jungle and drum & bass era. In a culture where the DJ and MC worked as a partnership, Hyper D pushed the microphone beyond simple crowd encouragement. His delivery could ride the breakbeat at speed, switch between lyrics and hooks, sing, hype a room and leave space for the music, all within the same performance.

His rapid double-time style became especially influential as hardcore evolved into jungle and drum & bass during the 1990s. Later generations of MCs have repeatedly cited the musicality and speed of his approach, while contemporary retrospectives describe him as a formative figure in the development of the jungle MC.

By the middle of the decade his voice was appearing across the major rave circuits and radio stations represented in this archive: One Nation, Desire, Telepathy, Dreamscape, Helter Skelter, Kool FM, Kiss 100FM and BBC Radio 1 among them. His work also travelled beyond the UK; the archive includes a 1998 recording with Nicky Blackmarket from Liquid Adrenalin in Toronto.

Hyper D signed to Island Records, but his career was cut short when he died in July 1998, aged 31. What survives is unusually suited to an archive like this one: not simply studio releases, but hours of live evidence showing how he actually sounded in a rave, alongside different DJs, in different rooms and at different points in jungle’s development.