Drum & Bass

One of the best dnb tracks I ever heard! This tune kicks the sweet living bejaysus out of ya! :cool:

1997

ThirdMan wrote: »

Thanks for all your replies. There's too many posts to respond to individually, but there's some cracking tunes in there to get me started.

Now for the hard part.. how the fcuk do you mix this ****?

lol no worries man, no need to reply to all posts man, thats just me n Es been us lol ,anyways, Es Cee would be better placed than meself to advise on mixing ,He mixes up a storm whereas I couldnt mix eggs for an omolette but not for the want of trying!

Suppose the first thing would be, what are you using? digital,cd,vinyl or what? the only advise I'd be qualified to offer would be (as the man ellaskins would say) "Practice & Enjoy"

Best of luck with it all m8 , be sure to hang about the boards,you'll meet loads of sound lads all willing and able (well most will be able lol) to offer help & advice for ya.

G

EarlERizer wrote: »

One of the best dnb tracks I ever heard! This tune kicks the sweet living bejaysus out of ya! :cool:

1997

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_X0o_-u8f8

Great tune off a deadly album.

Still play Doc Scott's "The Swarm" out all the time, never lost it's edge imo.

ThirdMan wrote: »

I don't normally, but 90% of DnB doesn't interest me, at least what I've heard so far.

I'd say 99% of it doesn't interest me, and I'm sitting in a room with thousands of records, doing a weekly radio show, running a label, running a monthly night, doing at least two other gigs a month, downloading gigs and gigs of mixes and scouring every blog, website and forum there is for more good stuff.

FML tbh.


What does the kind of stuff that interests you sound like?

For new and innovative, but still rootsy sounding deep / jazzy / electronic / soulful stuff you're probably going to like the following:


Seba



Seba & Paradox



Macc (usually this experimental, not usually this jazzy)



Fracture and Neptune (recent stuff has been a bit less melodic, but they're still probably in my top 10 favourite producers working today)



ASC - all his stuff of late has been proper amazing, check his Symbol series for some deadly work. Ambient / Drone / Dnb / Downtempo... His album on Auxiliary was savage too.



Breakage - sort of jumped ship for Dubstep lately, amazing early releases but it was only towards the end of his career that he got really interesting IMO. this is an all time classic:



and so is this, for completely different reasons:



From Ireland, there's some great tunes out by Calibre - "Second Sun" is the album to check out, the most accessible, melodic and just plain beautiful of all the ones he's put out (and he's put out a lot of music, probably the most prolific electronic musician I can think of, Irish or otherwise.



This is off last year's album "Even If".



As for (modern) labels to check out, have a look for Subtle Audio, Arctic Music, Exit, Auxiliary, Warm Communications, Signature, Soul:R (Marcus Intalex' label - check out the DAT:Music series of compilations, they're both very good), Critical, Cylon (not the most prolific of labels, but Loxy's "CX" podcasts are some of the finest series of mixes going since the Autonomic podcasts stopped), Absys, Outsider, Kos.Mos, etc etc.

Older stuff: (early) Metalheadz, Good Looking, Source Direct, Looking Good, 720, Certificate 18, anything by Photek, Source Direct, J Majik (pre 1999), any Dillinja pre-1997, any Adam F pre-1998, Any Blame pre-2003 etc etc etc.


Let me know how you get on with those anyway!


If you're in Dublin you can tune in and hear me play stuff like this on the radio every Wednesday at 9pm on 106.4FM (repeated at 4am on Saturday night)

Nice one mate, glad you're feeling them!

I'll have a think for more stuff in a similar vein, and see what I can come up with...

EarlERizer wrote: »

Es , help me out here, please post up a listing as to subgenres and how to differentiate ..... coz fookedifino .... a timeline if you will! Cheers Buddy.

Well, like I said I'm not really into subgenres, I buy and play records from every niche and corner and mix them all together, and think that sticking to one single facet of a hugely diverse genre is a bit like shooting yourself in the foot...

That said, I love you guys, so here comes a potted history of the genre complete with youtube examples. Please bear in mind I have some pretty strong ideas though, and not everyone will agree with me.

You all know the basic story - Acid House blows up in 88, by 1990 harder Belgian rave tracks are filtering across the water as the Low Countries start to get into the swing of things... The Dutch turn Belgian Rave / New Beat into Hardcore and then Gabber, while over in England things take a completely different direction and UK Hardcore basically consists of pilled up nutters falling over themselves to grab the nearest four or five records, run them through a sampler and and glue them all together, with the Breakbeats and cut-and-paste aesthetic of 80's Hip Hop being as big of an influence as Electro and Techno were. Pretty much the only heads in London who had access to decent sound systems were the dub Reggae heads, who came with their soundsystem culture of Bass music, MC's, the cutting of Dubplates, the use of Pirate radio and so on and so forth.

Fast forward this about three years and 4 Hero, Rufige Cru, 2 Bad Mice, Ratty and Tango, DJ Hype, Shut Up & Dance, DJ Trax, Omni Trio and many others are beginning to make records that increasingly no longer quite count as Hardcore:



Production techniques improved, the music sped up a little, and Jungle takes off, as a result of the younger brothers and nephews of all the old London / Ipswich soundsystems starting to make tunes of their own after being exposed to the previously quite white Acid House scene.







Despite being the first ever homegrown UK electronic music genre, Jungle gets in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, with tales of crack fuelled violence, moody raves, muggings etc etc - as one writer put it "the racist myth that Jungle turned every raver's happy Woodstock into an Altamont with bassbins "

Meanwhile, running roughly in parallel, DJ's like Bukem and Fabio had been exploring an altogether smoother side of the music - legendary club "Speed" at the Mars Bar became known for a lower less frenetic tempo, and music that replaced ragga samples with pads and ambient bits ripped from Chicago house breakdowns, Vangelis records and the likes.

The media labelled it as "Intelligent Drum 'n Bass", but Fabio called his Jazzier take on the style "Liquid Funk", and was politely ignored for his trouble until around 2004 when for some reason the sound had a huge resurgence.








Meanwhile Jungle was on it's last legs, and was mutating in two directions; in one direction, you had the producers of all these seminal tunes waking up to the fact that now they were being offered decent sums of cash to play their records out, and they were beginning to notice that all those crazily intricate drum tracks with off the wall arrangements were an absolute **** to mix; their solution was to tone down the craziness of the drums, and to turn the bass up to 11. This became known as "Jump Up", and it's been the mainstay of all the big DnB events ever since.







On the other hand, in a dark grimy basement of a vacant office a bunch of heads were huddling around smoking weed in the faint lights of a big pile of samplers, running basslines through banks of guitar FX pedals and taking Jungle sonics and turning them into the bleak dystopian angry paranoid head**** that would become known as Techstep, which ruled the roost from late 95 to 97-ish :








"Neurofunk" is a term that has had an awful lot of absolute horse****e written about it it, starting with Simon Reynolds who coined it in his book "Energy Flash" - arguments about what is Neurofunk and what is Techstep have raged across the internet for at least as long as either has been discussed on the internet, suffice to say that Neurofunk was coined pretty much just to describe the slightly faster and more rhythmically simplistic tunes that Ed Rush & Optical, Stakka & Skynet, Ram Trilogy, Kraken and many others were starting to make from 98 onwards. The "Wormhole" album that Ed Rush and Optical did in 98, Ram Trilogy's "Molten Beats" lp and the Stakka & Skynet's album are pretty much the standards.









That sort of carry on was pretty much the reason the media declared DnB to be dead - making tunes harder and faster, all with the same boom TISH and just racing everyone else to come up with a more tweaked out midrange sound to layer over your bass became an end in itself, as evidenced by the formidable hit making partnership Bad Company, who took what the likes of Ed Rush & Optical and Andy C and his crew were doing and upped the intensity, creating a sound that was basically a hair's breadth away from being Heavy Metal for people who bought computer magazines.





This led to money success and riches beyond their dreams, followed by a disconcerting move toward out and out cheese as DJ Fresh's influence over the group increased to the point he was making the tunes and the other three lads were basically just doing the DJ work (yes, that very same DJ Fresh who got a UK number 1 off the back of a Lucozade ad recently)

Bad Company's last gasp before breaking up was this - note the retarded melody that sounds like a :



6 months after Bad Company broke up a trio of unknown Australians called Pendulum saw a gap in the market for stuff that sounded like Bad Company and released this, at a time when the internet was spreading DnB culture around the world (by this stage many Irish producers had already had vinyl releases on homegrown and UK and US and European labels - Beta 2, Zero Tolerance, Calibre, [Genetix], and a young Brazilian chap called Marky had already made serious waves with his first few releases as well)



Vault and Pendulum sort of set the agenda for big room main event stuff for years to come; Sub Focus, Camo & Krooked, the bulk of Hospital's output since 2003, High Contrast, State Of Mind, Concord Dawn, Netsky etc etc etc, all the really bland high energy fodder for UK student night crowds basically. Someone else in this thread called it "future dnb" - I've never heard that term applied to stuff like this before, but I'll either laugh or throw up into my mouth if I hear it used thus again.


There's more, but I'm sick of typing.

Jaysus Steve fair balls t'ya , for the info n the love lol ...... have to apologize though, that comment to Es Cee was a mere tongue in cheek remark as Es (& those who know me) already know I'm no genre junkie, Much like yourself I prefer to listen too and use whatever sounds good to me regardless of whatever pigeon hole it's 'supposed' to be in!

There are 3 styles of music , Sh1thot , **** & Country

Nice one for taking the time to give us a clear picture of it all, no excuses now for me generalising with terms like 'dnb', 'jungle', 'hardcore' & 'oldskool' ......... or I might just start making up names for it meself lol

Cheers man!:cool:

Ha, nice list, I actually have most of those believe it or not!

If you have any old Dom & Roland though I'd be very interested, really need a copy of "Can't Punish Me" and "The Storm" and a copy of "The Planets"...




Disgusting tune!