It was recorded in St Albans, where he had grown up, and released in 1997. How It Works originally carried the job title Vice versa guys—a nod, perhaps, to Parkes' penchant for changing the direction of his beats, flipping them back and forth so often that time seemed to stand still even as he kept running forward. But the name How It Works it was even more appropriate. It came from the 1995 Michael Mann film Heat: When a sergeant asks Al Pacino's character, a sad cop with no illusions about his adversaries, what the criminals' MO is, Pacino fires back with his trademark, “Their MO is that they're good.”
The assessment epitomized Parkes' desire to prove his mettle on a fiercely competitive stage. That's exactly what it is How It Works is: a shot across the bow – a demonstration of Parkes' skill, as well as his determination to take drum'n'bass, as the more complex iterations of the sound became increasingly familiar, into uncharted territory. If Goldie's Eternalas many have noted over the years, it was the drum-bass equivalent of Pink Floyd's space-rock epic, How It Works it might as well have been an actual journey to the dark side of the moon, a journey into the airless, lightless unknown.
In 10 interrelated pieces that play like movements of a suite, How It Works plunges into a netherworld of hidden rhythms, thick synths and violent forebodings. It's awash in sea frequencies and bathed in the sounds of metal—scratching claws, clanking shells, glistening steel slicing the crescent moon. Neither strictly a club record nor, by any means, a chill soundtrack, it suggests a deadly confrontation between rhythm and atmosphere, each locked in the other's death grip.
In an environment that honored skill, audacity and Speed, the album's opening track, “The Hidden Camera”, is a spoof. After a string of Rhodes keys that sounds almost like a jazzman's rendition of church bells, the beat finally drops, but the song can't really be called drum'n'bass. There's no trace of a regular breakbeat in the snares and cotton blazes, and the raucous beat has little in common with the way jungle and drumbass usually moves. More importantly, the tempo is slow — 126 beats per minute, compared to the 160-170 range that had become standard for the genre.
The world was awash with icy grooves in 1997, but “The Hidden Camera” is hardly your typical downtempo. It sways with a coiled tension that telegraphs dangerous instability. The kick drum hits just before the downbeat, the snares dance around the backbeat, and all the drums in between either rush the beat, as if to make up for lost time, or fall behind. Unrecognizable noises, suggesting distressed dolphins, and gloomy sound effects, such as the cocking of a gun, set the uneasy mood. Yet for all that, the vibe is relaxed, thanks to a spare, raucous standup bassline and synth pads that swirl like the northern lights. The drum pattern is reproduced in two-bar phrases, but the keys and pads are drawn in longer arcs that overlap at uneven intervals. These overlapping phrases mean that your attention is always following the music on parallel but opposite paths—a hallmark of Photek's suffering.
