"IF YOU WANT A VISION OF THE FUTURE, IMAGINE CRAP 808 SAMPLES STAMPING ON A HUMAN FACE- FOREVER"
Over the last week Always Everything scribe Rory Gibb curated a great week of bass-themed content over at DiS: a pretty big coup considering the usual content over there is generally quite “indie”-minded. Bass music making headways into foreign terrain? Indie websites bandwagon jumping? Take it to a message board, chump.
The full week’s content can be found >here<, but I’ll highlight four articles most inkeeping with the Always Everything remit and/or authored by us.
Rory gets in depth with Keysound label boss, avid music journalist and irrepressible producer Martin Clark on the development of dubstep, the value of blogging and London’s indelible mark on global bass music.
// The other point to be made about documenting eras is how transient they are. I was listening to an old Rinse recording from about 2004 the other day and was suddenly struck by a sense of both familiarity and sadness. It made me realise that while there’s an unbroken stream of dubs and new music, things move quickly on. The seamlessness of the continuum hides the passing and before you’ve realised, in fact without you realising, those dubs are gone. Entire styles can disappear, producers of massive talent and importance can fade… lost in the noise of scenes and the relentless forward momentum. That mix brought such strong sense of nostalgia it reminded me the importance of documenting scenes. Because eventually someone will ask ‘how did we get here?’ and maybe we won’t be able to say. //
Rory picks o’er the bones of one of the most venerated dubstep labels of the decade: Appleblim and Shackleton’s incredible Skull Disco.
// Even by the time of UK garage’s death and reanimation into new, wraithlike forms, the two-step beat was rave stripped of excess fat, unnecessary components simply peeled away to leave – seemingly – the fewest elements required to make bodies move. Perhaps that’s why the resurgence of the garage beat in dubstep’s progeny a few years later was able to provoke such gut-wrenching nostalgia: by the time mass crowds began to gather around UKG in the late nineties, the genre was already a svelte, sultry shadow of the maximalist optimism that came before. Perhaps those minute snags and pauses that appeared between swung kicks, hi-hats and snares left enough space for the mind to fill in the gaps with shared memories. When the earliest dubstep practitioners further stripped away the final layers of muscle, sinew and tendon from its wiry frame, they left behind a skeleton. In keeping with their newly minted concept, Shackleton and Appleblim exhumed the dusty remains of their ancestors so they too could join the party. //
Simon Docherty (that’s me..) discusses the huge effect instrumental grime has had on the current musical landscape, from the coiled rhythmic prowess bleeding into Hessle, Blunted Robots et al, the hypercoloured synth work that has infected whole swathes of bass music and the icy austerity and experimentation constantly present throughout the last decade’s output.
// A more accurate either-or might then be found to explain grime’s contributions: monochrome greys versus fluorescent colours. After years of moody navel gazing, the playfulness of the grime sound palette acted as a panacea for po faced seriousness. It’s no coincidence that of the two biggest instigators of synaesthesia-inducing dubstep, Bristolian Joker started life as a grime producer, and the enigmatic Zomby’s playful melodies and hi-hat time signature trickery pay an undeniable debt to scene godfather Wiley. It’s particularly telling that the latter has an unreleased stockpile of beats in Wiley’s inimitable Eskibeat style: a stark, futuristic minimalism that borders on icy tribalism. One of the most acclaimed bass albums of the year has come via Guido, a producer who reproduces plastic, school-keyboard orchestrations in hyper clarity, retaining the melodic sensibility of the best Low Deep instrumentals. //
>Always Everything’s Ones To Watch<
Rory and I give a quick run down of some of the most promising young producers in the nebulously splintering present bass scene. Pariah, Bad Autopsy, Blawan and more get a look in
// At the moment it genuinely feels as though you can’t take more than a step or two without bumping into another promising musician working within the convoluted spheres of dubstep/post-dubstep/’whatever-the-hell-you-wanna-call-it-anyway’. It’s testament to the internet’s use as an easy access conduit to more or less anything you could possibly need – cheap laptops, cracked software, Ebay priced hardware – that more people than ever before are able to create music. That comes with a proviso, of course; there’s a lot of substanceless mulch out there. But then there are real glimmers of brilliance, and sometimes it only takes a tiny tipping of attention to push them above the parapet of the mainstream //
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