Bass Bits # 10 - UK Garage + 2step

UK garage presents similar problems to Jungle  

Speed garage basically is the addition of bruising baleful bad-boy B-lines to house.

With 2step, the finicky focus of science shifts to the stop-start beats - that's the most attention-seeking part of any production

But the bass gets really creative too - intricately syncopated patterns that weave around the beats, melodic but thud-boom impactful too

Often they're bringing back the reggae feel that had faded out from drum & bass in 96-97

But more lover's rock in vybe than roots 'n 'dubsway

Although you get that too sometimes. 


So many to choose...

Gant "Sound Bwoy Burial (187 Lockdown Remix)" - love the sort of braying blare of the bass on this swaggering monster of "ruffhouse"

Nuyorican Soul "Runaway (Mongoloids in Space)" -  Americans, so doesn't really count, but the kind of music that inspired the UKG crew, although what they did, didn't end up sounding much like this supremely elegant and musical stuff.

The bass takes a while to come in with this - 3.46 or thereabouts - but it's worth the weight.

Roy Davis Jr featuring Peven Everelist, "Gabriel" -  now would I be wrong in thinking that the reason this became such a scene-formative anthem in the UK is because it was a track giving unusual prominence and melodic-emotional weight to the bassline, compared with the US garage norm? 





Sneaker Pimps, "Spin Spin Sugar (Armand's Dark Garage Mix)" - Van Helden is one of the very first to work out the simple additive logic of sexy  house beat + rude jungle bassline = perfection. 




KMA Productions, "Cape Fear" - R U Feeling Wobbly?




From my "Feminine Pressure" piece in The Wire: 

"KMA’s “Cape Fear” combined breakbeat rhythms, ominous ‘video vocals’ and destabilising ‘bass warps’ that triggered crowd pandemonium the very first time the tune was played out, in late 96. “You could see the goosebumps rising on everybody’s neck, the hair standing on end,” says KMA producer/vocalist Six. “The crowd erupted, they were so confused about what just happened they forced the DJ to rewind the track.” 

The track originally started as a jingle on Six's radio show: 




Gisele Jackson "Love Commandments (Loop Da Loop vocal mix)" - the bass is banging on this - literally banging. 

Doolally's "Straight From the Heart" has got that skanking feel

Dreem Teem remix of Amira's "My Desire" - the tender B-line - like a heart skipping a beat, like butterflies in the stomach -  conveys the pangful tentativeness of love before it's certain of being requited

Steve Gurley remix of Operator and Baffled's "Things Are Never" - mystifyingly not on YouTube... until now!
Doom-boom menace... ominous sensuality



Talking about sensual menace... Groove Chronicles's "Stone Cold"



jazzual and bumpy until about 2-30 then in comes the baleful Reese-bass lick 

Grant Nelson feat Jean McClain "Step 2 Me (Bump N Flex Steppers Dub)" -- Grant crediting himself twice in this auto-remix. And why not - it's slamming.



Angel Farringdon + Lil Smokey, "Clean Riddem" - gorgeous little roller. On Johnny Biscuit Records! "This tune may seriously damage your health"!


U.S. Alliance - "All I Know (Da Grunge Mix)" - dem's Dem 2. Deadly precision, lethal detail. 

ba

New Horizons, "Slamdown".  From the "Scrap Iron Dubs" EP! Bleepazoid brutalizm. But also distantly related to PiL's "Albatross", I like to think. 




By "late 2step," the bass starts to take on this wet-look, oily slickness.  A technoid, even Photek-y scientific-ness enters the production, that would be very formative on dubstep, which early on was basically UK Garage minus songs. 

Groove Chronicles, "Black Puppet"

But you were still getting the odd rude 'n ' jaunty tune like this -  

Napa-Tac "Dibby Dibby Sound"

A darker dub mix of that little gem. 




Still the general trend was in the "Flat Eric" direction... for better or worse (worse, on the whole, I'd say)

Example of Flat Eric-ism -  this crossover-from-another-scene-entirely - Timo Maas the squelch monster.



That one exhausted my interest fairly quickly at the time - it's here as a sort of historical note more than a Thumbs Up For All Time.

Not sure if this is the DJ Narrows tune that grabbed my ear at the time but it does show off his slimy, writhy bass-worms approach - to be influential on later developments in nuum-bass. 



In the late phase of 2step, the other big future-leaning direction was garage rap. 

Looking for this, I discovered there was actually a full vocal version of So Solid Crew "Dilemma", with terrible dated rapping on top. I had always thought it was only ever an instrumental, on account of first hearing it on a 2step compilation. Notable for its "single-note sustained bassdrone veering upward in pitch". A premonition of the colder, harder, electro-dancehall sound of grime production.

Apologies to the 1843 tunes unmentioned in this necessarily truncated and incomplete post!

Bass Bits - Jungle Postscript

In response to my appeal for the droppin' of  (bass-)science, Droid steps in with a low-end lowdown:

"The 808 kick is the cornerstone of jungle bass, or jungle sub anyway. Detuned sine waves with a square wave another standard. Everything filtered and manipulated on the Akai/Emu. You would also find some people sampling bass notes or basslines. Quite unusual for anyone to use synths except for the obvious ones like Dead Dred, Arsonist. Pretty much everything was sampled - even the Reese bass which was fairly easy to make yourself if you had the gear. 

"I was waiting on the 'the bass came from hip hop' argument from Matt, and whilst its true that this is the source for the bass sound. The sensibility, how it was utilised, was very much a reggae thing. Bass was rarely melody in hip hop.

"AFAIK, the only other genre to use sub as a major element was Miami Bass and at the margins of electro."

Droid also nominates one tune out "too many" that's especially bass-dear to him: Foul Play "Being With You".

Pleasing me because I'd so wanted to include them....

He didn't specify which version, so I'm going to say this is his nomination




And this is mine:



Shivering...

Bass Bits #9 - Jungle

Skipping right past bleep - on the grounds that I already covered it - and onto jungle

Where to start?!

Too many to pick. Entire genre is based on bass. It's drums and it's bass - everything else is optional extras, gravy on top.

Just some extremely random (out of chronological sequence) faves, then, with a dozen other contenders jostling behind each one....


NC & Asend, "Take Your Soul"



Love the strange off-tone drone of this, like a dulled metallic clang almost. There's something humorously fixated about this track, about the way the whole tune clip-clops along, switching between two patterns.

In The Wire, I described "Take Your Soul" as an "ultra-minimal classic of compulsion-for-compulsion's sake.... whose one-and-a-half note bassline, percussive/textural as opposed to melodic, lodges itself in your memory-flesh as viciously as a flechette."

Omni Trio, "The Elemental"



The fluidity of the bassline  - delicate at first, like raindrops trickling down a blade of foliage in a jungle...then as the track takes off  thudding like smooth sub-lo thunder - works against the inflexible jack-knife-at-the-waist of the two-stepping beat.


Rufige Cru, "Menace"



The difference between "The Elemental" and "Menace" - which is only about four years, 92 to 96 - is immense. Partly that's down to production values: Rufige-bass sounds muddy, turbid compared to Moving Shadow's late 90s slick 'n' phat. And partly thanks to intent: "Menace" comes out of drugs, E and weed...  the bass is bleary, oozy, black gas that breaks down  the barrier between your body and the music. "Elemental" is crisp, rounded, glistening, articulated  - it's not speaking to or from a drugged consciousness particularly. "Menace" is also dubby, in its overall production, so there's a sound system echo here, whereas "The Elemental" seems suburban, not inner city...  designed for headphones, a car stereo, the living room.  D&B that's authentically from the heartland of Hertfordshire, that would sound just right on a drive from Aldbury to Chesham.


Talkin' "dirty"



How is that oozy seismographic sound near the start - and again at 1.50 - made then?  A 808 that is being detuned back and forth to different degrees?

Suddenly realised that despite having written a book on the subject, I'm not entirely sure how the bass in jungle records is actually made... 

Sometimes the B-lines have the boom-thud impact of an 808 - so it's the bass and the breaks that are coming out of hip hop. (Probably rather a high proportion of the prime movers in this post were actually present at  UK Fresh '86, now I think of it).

Other times it sounds like a bass-tone sampled from somewhere ( or even swatched together from different sources, an overlay of timbres) and then played on a keyboard as a bubblin' line or blasting riff 

Other times it so closely resembles the simple melodic units of reggae that you'd think it was a sample, but I should imagine it's a recreation of that using a keyboard -  isolating a reggae bassline from the drums would be quite hard to do, using a sampler, I'd have thought...

Then there are sort of pingy metallic bassline reports, which seem to hail from dancehall. 

Loads of other styles and sounds, tricks and devices.

I invite Those Who Know to drop some bass-science on me... 

Talking about science and the dropping thereof....



Danny Breaks, could just as well call himself Danny Bass....

That Safari Sound bass is luminous....

Eyes rolling back in the head with that one... ohmighosh

Now the multiple or stacked bassline is a whole different ball game

Rolling glow bass.... and then a different bass, bippety and reggae-style, comes in too...  paralleling the layering of Amens....



.... science chief  Ray Keith

Bass penetrates...



God bless SS


Lots of choices when it comes to Roni Size, DJ Die, Krust.....

This one is Size & Krust collaborating via two of their aliases. And who knows, maybe Die contributed by rolling the spliffs.



I remember having this on a tape off of Grooverider's show on Kiss FM and playing it over and over on a train journey to Scotland. On my way to Rezerection for a piece on gabba. Distinct memory of that strange Day-Glo bass-rift in my headphones and the excitement of crossing the border for the first time and the landscape getting all rugged and bare and craggy.

Ooh gosh, this next one.... memories.



I can't remember which mix I favored, I think the former, but let's do the other as well





Sometimes all that was needed was to go slow and low  - Origin Unknown, DJ Solo






I can't really convey what this next track means to me, how it makes me feel...  I don't think DJ Nut Nut ever did anything  else with quite this vibe .... he probably did a whole bunch of very solid, rinse-out  tunes like "Special Dedication"...  played his part... faded away...  but "The Rumble" is spirit-world stuff...  



Actually the flip is quite eerie and special now I remember. (Perhaps the X Factor was Pure Science?)



I can tell you what "The Rumble"  makes me picture... spring '94, back in England for a few months by that point, after a long period of being trapped in the USA (that's how I felt in '93 - kept away from the action. I made it back to London just twice, for about a month and a bit each time). In '94, when I wasn't out and about, in the clubs, I was glued to the pirates -  listening in the kitchen of a poky flat in a once smart, now faded Belsize Park block with charming old fashioned fittings and dodgy electricals.... I associate this and other songs of that year with the uncanny, indescribable sensation of a mild electric shock every so often.

I don't think I ever heard "The Rumble" played out once that whole year... There were tunes you heard scores of times on the pirates - "Music Box" by Size & Die was another that season -  but hardly ever heard played in the clubs, where by then it was nonstop raggAmentalizm and "The Burial" five times a night.


The greatest of the jazzy jungle tracks, with an upright bass feel at first and then into cascades of syncopated sub-lo bass-hits that maintain the jazzual feel





Dillinja....

I was thinking there should be a whole post dedicated to Dillinja, but I'm going to shove him in here with his brethren.

Could pick so many....


He could do bass that maimed... landmine bass, bass packed with nasty shards of jagged metal



He could do bass that soothed and healed and calmed.



There was dancehall and dub in there.



There was jazz and quiet storm.




Dillinja was a bass sculptor without rival. What went wrong? His decline from "Acid Track" onwards shows the power of scenius - even if you're a genius, when a scene turns to shit, there's no escaping its down-dragging currents.

Apologies to the 2637 tunes I forgot to include in this necessarily truncated and incomplete post!