New Burial album. More info?

I love Untrue. In fact, the dubstep genre made me go back and try to get acquainted with a line of genres that led up to it, e.g., jungle, drum-and-bass, 2-step, garage, and so forth.

As I understand it, most of those genres developed in the 90s. This makes me think that I completely missed the most interesting music of that decade (I was mostly focused on -- and uninspired by -- rock from the era)(n.1) The idea of pirate radio stations in London playing these new genres sounds a whole lot more exciting than 90s rock radio.

I wish I knew more about the differences between these genres. It seems clear that each new genre evolved from the next, but I don't have a good feel for where it all began (Chicago House maybe?) and how each new genre added or subtracted sounds/elements from their predecessors. Any info on this from you knowledgeable folks is, as always, appreciated.

__________________________
(n.1) Except for Nirvana, who were all-time great.

Daniel, probably the easiest thing is to just buy Simon Reynolds' Generation Ecstasy (or Energy Flash if you're in Europe). It tells this whole story with a special focus on the musics played on London pirate radio, ending with speed garage. Then you can read his (pretty amazing) 2-step article from 1999 on his website.

Back to the argument:

I do disagree with Pollywog, I thought the Kode 9/Spaceape album was great, better in fact than Burial. The best parts though were the ones that didn't sound much like dubstep orthodoxy - Kode 9 is actually a better hip hop producer than dubstep producer I think.

To be clear, Pipecock I'm not denying that all these musics that you like have "soul", rather I'm suspicious of this term as a valuable tool in discussing music. It's a black hole term: all that people can say is "i think this music has soul and that music doesn't" or "I think this music is more soulful than that music," and there's literally nothing you can say to add to that. It shuts down discussion, and in the process encourages lazy thinking (and generally unexamined canonical thinking to boot) where we don't know why one thing is better than another thing, IT JUST IS OKAY. Playing the soul-card is actually worse than playing the authenticity-card in this regard.

Generally, people who use this term a lot haven't thought much about why they use it, or what they're actually responding to when it pops into their head. True to form, you've had several opportunities to clarify what it is in Burial's music that makes you drag out the s-word beyond other evasive phrases like "expression", "transcends", escaping all the backwards thoughts etc... But of course if you wanted to do this you wouldn't have tried to shift the discussion towards soul in the first place.

"dance music is the oldest shit on the planet. house and techno music are the modern examples of the most basic percussive music that dates back as long as the idea of music has existed. it is not significanly different in intent or execution from tribal drumming. dance has existed a long long time, and it doesnt need synthesizers, ableton live, or max/msp. all you need is a funky beat and maybe a little melody. it is very simple. if youre relying on modern production gimmicks to excite people, that shit is novelty and not much else. drum and bass and dubstep were both music that was rhythmically interesting. they sacrificed that quality to become production trick music, which is why they are niche music that production geek people are interested in. they have become failures of what dance music is all about."

Even if we accept this, doesn't that effectively efface any difference between disco, house, techno etc. etc? Doesn't it render interesting sonic developments - like the specific sound of Rhythm & Sound releases - empty and meaningless?

Dance music, at least since the rise of electronic instrumentation, is at least as much about the sound-of-sounds as is it about melody, rhythm etc. It's not a binary choice between timeless compositions that can be played on any instrument on the one hand and sonic gimmicks or gear fetishism on the other. The two are always interwoven in various proportions in any dance music you look at. Sure, "I Feel Love" might be a great song, great performance from Donna etc., but it's also about that marvellous, totally distinctive synth arpeggio shimmer that Moroder extracts from his machines. Drum and bass was always already a "production trick music", from the very beginning producers were fascinated with the effect of particular techniques like pitchshifting, or with creating an entirely new sounding bassline (think of all the variations on basslines jungle produced just between 1993 and 1995).

The regression in jungle from the mid to the late nineties that you're referring to isn't primarily the tale of a shift from timeless expression to gimmicky production tricks. The rise in drum & bass's excessive fixations (eg. with creating an ever more subtle variation on an acid bassline) was an effect of a narrowing of the genre's horizons of possibility - which itself was partly due to a rejection of jungle's early days, which was seen as too gimmicky. By committing themselves to a more purist vision of what drum & bass was supposed to be, producers had no choice but to become more fixated on the minute details of production.

But that doesn't mean that purism is always bad and should be rejected in favour of "expression" - which sounds like an endorsement of things like Goldie collaborating with Noel Gallagher. It was precisely because early jungle narrowed its horizons of sonic possibility from the preceding hardcore techno that it was able to intensify certain aspects like the rhythms, the basslines. Ultimately the balance got shifted too far in that direction, but the move towards a certain purism and sonic fetishism was initially a productive component in jungle's development.

And let's not even start with 2-step, which for its entire lifespan was all about the brilliant exploitation of one new gimmick after another.

... And I say that last bit as someone who's generally not into purism in dance music. But my preference for more mutational sounds (which tend to be gimmicky in a different way - a la 2-step) doesn't prevent me from recognizing the potential validity of a purist approach.

It seems clear that each new genre evolved from the next...

...nah it was more like cross pollenation and contemporaneous evolution than a straight linear progression from one genre to the other

in all those genres there were artists who defied categorisation and crossed more than a few strictly defined boundaries...

...where'd it all begin ??? probably in jamaica, with soundsystem culture, versioning and dubbing out tunes which then drifted to the US and the UK by emigrants

and please don't capitalise my name TIM F, i don't like it...

Thank you for the recommendation, Tim. I'm going to seek out Reynolds' book.

...where'd it all begin ??? probably in jamaica, with soundsystem culture, versioning and dubbing out tunes which then drifted to the US and the UK by emigrants.

Yeah, I should have been more clear. I knew that, in many significant respects, these genres began in Jamaica. Largely through the recommendations of knowledgeable people here -- e.g., Alex in SF -- I've become a fan of a lot of roots reggae and dub (though, curiously, I haven't warmed up to post-roots Jamaican genres, like dancehall). I meant after the music migrated from Jamaica to England and the U.S. That's why I mentioned Chicago House as a possible starting point.

i don't think the starting point is a place, it's a piece of kit like a moog or fairlight, a drumulator or a roland 808...

...so contemporaneously in places like germany with kraftwerk or italo disco, in new york, chicago and detroit with hiphop, house and techno, people were using these same bits of gear and making it do different things which then got genrified, subgenrified and so on

electronica is not the story of a place and time in fixed linear thought. There is no continuum, there is though a woven lattice, an interconnected story of technology and man symbiotically creating musical art...

...what tended to happen though is, as the technology became more affordable, the poor talented people got hold of it and evolved the music even further, taking it from the 'intelligent' excesses of rich corporate producers to the streets and the underground then back into the mainstream limelight

and now we have burial who is deservedly occupying a prominent place in the lattice at a time when the structures and systems which governed the evolution have largely been deconstructed and made irrelevent by the internet...

"...what tended to happen though is, as the technology became more affordable, the poor talented people got hold of it and evolved the music even further, taking it from the 'intelligent' excesses of rich corporate producers to the streets and the underground then back into the mainstream limelight"

pollywog this seems like an excessively romantic and, for that reason, simplistic take on things to me.

Think of late nineties R&B and hip hop, where the rhythmic innovations were initiated almost exclusively on high-charting releases from major labels.

Your description does describe what happened in particular areas of music but I don't think it can be raised to the level of overarching narrative.

keeping it simple, yup thats me...

...I bet most of those high charting releases you talk of though were made by primarily poor to begin with, non classically trained or highly tutored studio engineers who came to prominence using cracked software and cheap gear then snapped up by A&R people in major labels with an eye for talent

i guess that's what pisses me off about dubstep. Is that there is a belief you don't have to be a musician or understand anything about music composition, you just have to make it sound good. Production values over substance the end being most of it sounds underdone...

...is the trademark burialesque crackle and rain hiss masking a distinct lack of substance ???

"...I bet most of those high charting releases you talk of though were made by primarily poor to begin with, non classically trained or highly tutored studio engineers who came to prominence using cracked software and cheap gear then snapped up by A&R people in major labels with an eye for talent"

... but then, in that case, who are these aristocratic bogeymen jealously guarding technology?

"i guess that's what pisses me off about dubstep. Is that there is a belief you don't have to be a musician or understand anything about music composition, you just have to make it sound good. Production values over substance the end being most of it sounds underdone..."

Again, this production vs music binary is one of the more pernicious talking points on this thread. I don't think dubstep reveals any more or less musicality than the preceding 'ardkore, jungle, 2-step, grime etc.

If we were going to nominate one element that is fatally missing from most dubstep, I'd say "levity" or "femininity" or "disco" ("Left Leg Out" excepted) before I'd say "musicality". Dubstep doesn't smile enough, basically.

... but then, in that case, who are these aristocratic bogeymen jealously guarding technology?

i shouldn't have to tell you...

...they might come after you too

Dubstep doesn't smile enough, basically.

...this are serious music made by serious cats

"you want smiley music listen to funky house or sum shit...
...this are serious music made by serious cats"

oh plz.

its true...

...most cats i've met on line or real life give their tunes some pretty serious titles

that's got to mean something ???

sometimes true statements are painful nonetheless.

"Production values over substance the end being most of it sounds underdone"

i wouldnt say dubstep is more about production values than the other genres mentioned but by trying to preserve elements of those genres while almost gentrifying them to get rid of the stuff that might be seen as 'embarassing', it lacks much in the way of movement/momentum. it makes a virtue of being inert. i say its biggest problem is trying to emulate dub (cos its 'proper music') more than dance music. grime doesnt have the high production values but at least theres something happening in it.

Yeah titchy is closer to the mark I think...

"gentrifying them to get rid of the stuff that might be seen as 'embarassing'"

This is basically what i mean by "rudeboyism" - what Simon Reynolds always described as a flava/cheese axis.

Dubstep doesn't smile enough, basically.

i say its biggest problem is trying to emulate dub (cos its 'proper music') more than dance music. grime doesnt have the high production values but at least theres something happening in it.

These are sharp observations. But, in both cases, dubstep's ''failings'' are by design. I'd guess artists working in the genre would admit these points and say its a necessary part of the asthetic.

FWIW -- in the right context -- I like the humorless, oppressive sound of dubstep (it's especially good during late-night walks when the weather turns colder). Also FWIW, I like the way dubstep emulates dub. It's a distinctive aesthetic, and it feeds the mood created by these songs: ghostly, angry, empty shells spinning in some nightmare distopia (I suppose these adjectives say as much about the music as saying it is or isn't ''soulful,'' but there it is).

I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with dubstep being grim and humourless and dub-fixated. And indeed many of my favourite dubstep tracks (stuff like Pinch's "Qawalli" or Mala's "Forgive") fit this paradigm fairly well.

But if I wanted to explain why dubstep seems so much less involving to me than jungle, 2-step or grime were, I'd say it's largely because as a genre it focuses around these attributes too restrictively. There could be a lot more light and shade with this music.

(to be fair, a lot of dubstep doesn't sound particularly dub-fixated at all, and I'm not sure that the more dub-reverent material is necessarily less interesting)

"I suppose these adjectives say as much about the music as saying it is or isn't ''soulful,'' but there it is"

No they're good descriptions because they're evocative, they have some level of specificity despite being removed from the music qua music. "Soul" is so broad and overused that it struggles to evoke anything now.

"soul" = "real"

pollywog trails off a lot..........

The po-facedness of dubstep is really overstated by people sometimes. Every dubstep producer I've chingwagged with has seemed less than serious about their "work" , there are plenty of frankly silly tunes (Coki refixing Minnie Ripperton, the stupid fucking horns in Cockney thug, the doo doo doo in "Night"), silly song titles (Skream's "Wobble dat gut"), and plenty of jacking 4/4 soca/funky influenced stuff going on (mainly looking at Benga here, saw him dj for the fifth time or something last week and it was one of the best nights I've been to for an age).

I love the beatless tracks on this record. They seem like the realisation of the non-genre of "urban ambient" (shite name). Other examples would be "Fabio's Ghost" by Rufige Kru (b-side to Terminator II) or "Undersea Flight" by Matrix (b-side to Optical "To Shape Future".

Much of the rest of the record, sadly, is crap. "Arcangel" seems destined to be this years tokenistic urban/ black Top 10 entry for the cognoscenti, which is hilarious because it's crap.

In terms of being some kind of eulogy for rave, stuff I've heard recently from Geeneus (e.g. "Old Skool What") or Breakage "Shroud" utterly slay this on that count.

hey guys, i made this thread about soul a few months ago, it never went very far but had a few very interesting starting posts. maybe you can continue your discussion over there.

contrived emotion

"I love the beatless tracks on this record. They seem like the realisation of the non-genre of "urban ambient" (shite name). Other examples would be "Fabio's Ghost" by Rufige Kru (b-side to Terminator II) or "Undersea Flight" by Matrix (b-side to Optical "To Shape Future".

Much of the rest of the record, sadly, is crap. "Arcangel" seems destined to be this years tokenistic urban/ black Top 10 entry for the cognoscenti, which is hilarious because it's crap."

Iain, its at least going in your favour, that if you inverted your opinions 180 degrees then you would be right. On the other hand, no amount rotation could salvage POLLYWOG. What kind of racist name is that, anyway?

"Soul" is so broad and overused that it struggles to evoke anything now."

no one told chuck d this.

I'd just like to point out that the term "wog" doesn't have any racist meaning in large parts of the English speaking world.

Pollywog, at least in the continental US, is slang for baby frogs.

I'm pretty sure pollywog lives in New Zealand, you'd have to ask him what his name means.

X-post to Tim.

If anything dubstep has swung too far away from the darkside halfstep sound of late 2005 and early 06.

Rusko, Caspa, Kromestar, some of Cotti's tracks.

They're fucking goofy.

No more dread, lots of LFO and moshing.

The scene has gotten incredibly populist over the last year.

DJ N-Type is probably the key figure in this change.

"Arcangel" seems destined to be this years tokenistic urban/ black Top 10 entry for the cognoscenti, which is hilarious because it's crap.

1. It's the best track on the record.
2. I doubt it will be a single, and I doubt if it was a single it would get anywhere near the charts.

i feel no guilt in being a dubstep tokenist and saying that archangel is probably the only one from this album i'll be rocking going forward

'Archangel' tires quickly... 'Etched Headplate' is far better imho.

ya in terms of tracks w/ "pitch-shifted ghost-diva" vox on this album, etched headplate >>>>>>>>>> archangel

On the other hand, no amount rotation could salvage POLLYWOG. What kind of racist name is that, anyway?

I'm half polynesian, half euro/nz...hence pollywog and the idea of a pollywog becoming a tadpole to a frog kinda suits me

i wouldnt say dubstep is more about production values than the other genres

i would, because the content is so minimal the production values have to be higher which is why i don't like burials scissorlike hi-hats, submerged woodblocks and lack of decent fills overlaid by crackle. It's a gimmick thats sadly worn off and may possibly stop it from becoming a future classic...

...having said that i love the epic ambience and droney bass, even the wonky vocals.

FWIW I ripped 'homeless' now 'dog shelter' off his myspace about a year ago and screwed it to one of our beats to show how burial might sound with straight drums ??? dead and buried...

http://www.myspace.com/pollywogga

...might do another one

lol at ur myspace

wow i had no idea that pollywog was racist. it's just another name for tadpole.

cheers jim...

...i are serious cat

that are serious myspace...hehe

"I do disagree with Pollywog, I thought the Kode 9/Spaceape album was great, better in fact than Burial. The best parts though were the ones that didn't sound much like dubstep orthodoxy - Kode 9 is actually a better hip hop producer than dubstep producer I think."

i dont think it was better than burial, not even close, really. but i listened to that album at least 5 times before i decided that i didnt really care for it, which is better than the < 10 seconds i can tolerate basically any dubstep tracks for. dubstep is so trash of a genre that the sound alone is so shallow and useless that even if there was content in the music it wouldnt be worth listening to in order to extract it.

"To be clear, Pipecock I'm not denying that all these musics that you like have "soul", rather I'm suspicious of this term as a valuable tool in discussing music. It's a black hole term: all that people can say is "i think this music has soul and that music doesn't" or "I think this music is more soulful than that music," and there's literally nothing you can say to add to that. It shuts down discussion, and in the process encourages lazy thinking (and generally unexamined canonical thinking to boot) where we don't know why one thing is better than another thing, IT JUST IS OKAY. Playing the soul-card is actually worse than playing the authenticity-card in this regard."

there is nothing to add to it, though. his music has soul means IT SOUNDS LIKE HIS EXPRESSION. that's all. can you disagree with someone's expression of something? it might not be your taste, but whatever. when the criticism is comparing it to music that has nearly no room for expression in it, that comparison makes almost no sense. but dubstep and jungle were once expressive, diverse sounding music. not now. which is why burial has more to do with 2-step in 99 and jungle in 95 than anything that any offshoot of those genres is doing today.

"Generally, people who use this term a lot haven't thought much about why they use it, or what they're actually responding to when it pops into their head. True to form, you've had several opportunities to clarify what it is in Burial's music that makes you drag out the s-word beyond other evasive phrases like "expression", "transcends", escaping all the backwards thoughts etc... But of course if you wanted to do this you wouldn't have tried to shift the discussion towards soul in the first place."

there is nothing to clarify that can be said in words. that is the beauty of music, it can convey things that words can't. basically, when you listen to burial's music, you know it is him. it does not convey the limits of a subgenre, it doesnt convey some outsider's idea of what production values should sound good. when jungle and 2-step were good, they were music that used the vague concepts of their genre to express emotion. now those genres consist largely of music that fits rigidly into a specific framework, which makes it much less effective to anyone listening outside of the specific fans of those genres.

"Even if we accept this, doesn't that effectively efface any difference between disco, house, techno etc. etc?"

those genres have very little difference, generally just a few localized elements that influenced each to be slightly different. this is why when i deejay, i play all of them together as one! this is why those genres have been alive and well despite many changes in sound for up to 30 years or more.

this idea is one of the most important ideas that most people seem to not notice. if you look at the deejays who were the ones who defined the genres, they played music that would have encompassed house, techno, electro, and disco (as well as jazz, and funk, and others!). it was the style of playing them together to highlight certain moods more than others. larry levan played alot of the same records as ron hardy who played alot of the same things as the early cats in detroit. it is all the same music.

"Doesn't it render interesting sonic developments - like the specific sound of Rhythm & Sound releases - empty and meaningless?"

yes. if people are listening only to the sound of them, that might explain why so many are happy to also listen to their many copy cats. for me, those copy cats do basically nothing because all they capture is the most shallow part of what rhythm and sound is doing. R&S are so effective because of the other things in their music: their soul, if you will!

"Dance music, at least since the rise of electronic instrumentation, is at least as much about the sound-of-sounds as is it about melody, rhythm etc. It's not a binary choice between timeless compositions that can be played on any instrument on the one hand and sonic gimmicks or gear fetishism on the other. The two are always interwoven in various proportions in any dance music you look at."

i completely disagree. some of the best artists were able to create new sounds, but the reason their music is remembered today is because they were able to place those sounds effectively into already fantastically composed and arranged music. "i feel love" would have been meaningless if the lyrics werent what they were, if a lesser singer had sung them, if the mood of the song didnt match that frantic electronic bass.

"Drum and bass was always already a "production trick music", from the very beginning producers were fascinated with the effect of particular techniques like pitchshifting, or with creating an entirely new sounding bassline (think of all the variations on basslines jungle produced just between 1993 and 1995)."

so many of those variations were just stolen from other music! "Reese" bass was of course sampled from a kevin saunderson track, many sounds were jacked straight from dub or dancehall jams, etc. "dread bass" was
one of the truly new joints, and it was of course overused in many forgettable tracks while the original "dread bass" song remained a classic because all the other elements were so captivating!

"The regression in jungle from the mid to the late nineties that you're referring to isn't primarily the tale of a shift from timeless expression to gimmicky production tricks. The rise in drum & bass's excessive fixations (eg. with creating an ever more subtle variation on an acid bassline) was an effect of a narrowing of the genre's horizons of possibility - which itself was partly due to a rejection of jungle's early days, which was seen as too gimmicky. By committing themselves to a more purist vision of what drum & bass was supposed to be, producers had no choice but to become more fixated on the minute details of production."

i guess the gimmick of good music was too much for those people. they have the irrelevence that purists deserve now, and im happy for it.

"But that doesn't mean that purism is always bad and should be rejected in favour of "expression" - which sounds like an endorsement of things like Goldie collaborating with Noel Gallagher. It was precisely because early jungle narrowed its horizons of sonic possibility from the preceding hardcore techno that it was able to intensify certain aspects like the rhythms, the basslines. Ultimately the balance got shifted too far in that direction, but the move towards a certain purism and sonic fetishism was initially a productive component in jungle's development."

im also not sure about this. i dont think of jungle as being a more restrictive genre than hardcore was, especially since so much of jungle used all the hallmarks of hardcore in its tracks. jungle covered all the ideas of hardcore and then added more (ambience, jazz, etc).

"And let's not even start with 2-step, which for its entire lifespan was all about the brilliant exploitation of one new gimmick after another.

-- Tim F"

but why then are some of the songs that used those gimmicks still memorable now while others arent? a gimmick with no substance behind it is worthless, and that is the way that drum and bass and dubstep are now.

any truly creative music will come up with new sounds, even if they are using old equipment. that's just the nature of how creativity works. but when the fixation is on the sound over everything else, you get throwaway disposable crap, which is what ruined jungle and 2-step.

"If anything dubstep has swung too far away from the darkside halfstep sound of late 2005 and early 06.

The scene has gotten incredibly populist over the last year.

-- Siah Alan"

the words of someone so caught up in a sub-genre that they think these shifts are meaningful to people outside of it.

"In terms of being some kind of eulogy for rave, stuff I've heard recently from Geeneus (e.g. "Old Skool What") or Breakage "Shroud" utterly slay this on that count.

-- Iain Macdonald"

breakage is good, though i dont think he is as good as burial is at capturing the overall mood of that era of stuff.

and to address one more thing Tim F said:

"But my preference for more mutational sounds doesn't prevent me from recognizing the potential validity of a purist approach.

-- Tim F"

see, to me the idea of being a purist in a genre of music that is nothing more than a gigantic mishmash of things is ridiculous. and most genres of music are like that!

you brought up the bit about Goldie with Noel Gallagher: of course i think that was a great idea! people should try everything. of course in the case of mashing things together like that, you will not fall into those restrictive definitions of what a genre is. i have never subscribed to those. when i deejayed jungle, i mixed with with breakcore, hardcore/gabber, ambient, hiphop, reggae, rock, etc. when i played 2-step, i mixed it with broken beat, techno, electro, jungle records at 33, etc. i played things with the overall idea of mashing up all the things that made those genres in with the genres and trying to achieve that feeling instead of playing 30 of the same sounding records.

there is nothing to clarify that can be said in words

^^ OTM

"If anything dubstep has swung too far away from the darkside halfstep sound of late 2005 and early 06.

The scene has gotten incredibly populist over the last year.

-- Siah Alan"

the words of someone so caught up in a sub-genre that they think these shifts are meaningful to people outside of it.

I think he made the quite reasonable assumption that people in a thread discussing dubstep might be au fait with the thing they're discussing.

The two Ps have basically just made this thread a mishmash of unreadable self-aggrandising shittery. I shall bid you all adieu.

don't you want to hear about pipecock's revolutionary "electic" dj'ing style? it sounds like the best thing ever.

Jungle recordz at 33?!?!

http://www.wexarts.org/wexblog/images/girltalk02.jpg

"don't you want to hear about pipecock's revolutionary "electic" dj'ing style? it sounds like the best thing ever.

-- moonship journey to baja"

nah, its about doing the same things that made the genres interesting and vital in the first place, not just playing the same old crap that people make to try to sound like each other. that shit is mad revolutionary. its revolutionarily fucking terrible.

There are a couple records you should check out pipecock.

Splash by Toastyboy

Breathless by Vaccine

Neverland and Officer by the Digital Mystikz.

They're worth you're time, before you write off the entire genre.

Isn't the basis of an eclectic style of DJing an open mind?

"There are a couple records you should check out pipecock.

Splash by Toastyboy

Breathless by Vaccine

Neverland and Officer by the Digital Mystikz.

They're worth you're time, before you write off the entire genre.

Isn't the basis of an eclectic style of DJing an open mind?

-- Siah Alan"

i will check those out, but i dont anticipate being interested. i have not heard a single DM track i have liked, havent heard the others.

the thing is, it is impossible to listen to every release in every genre that exists. i listen to lots of things over many genres, but people and genres dont get chances forever. its possible there are a few other good records in the genre, but to go through every release just to find them is not worth the effort when comparing it to other genres.

Thats fine, digging through dubstep releases at the moment is like looking for diamonds in an avalanche of shit.

A lot of the music is disposable, but some of it means to me what early jungle seems to mean to you. Or Theo Parrish or Omar S.

The one thing that I do like about Dubstep's popularity over in the UK is that it brings out some really interesting and talented and most of all young producers.

They are the hope for more interesting music to come.

the DM tracks leave me cold. "officer" is just boring, "neverland" sounds like demented carnival music in a bad way. the toasty cut was also dull. i did rather like the atmospherics in "breathless" by vaccine, but the angry sounding beat kinda ruined the overall effect a bit. definitely the best of that set of tunes, but still nothing outstanding IMO.

i just dont see the comparisons in terms of jungle or theo or omar to dubstep. those things were inspirational in how wildly diverse they can be and how many ideas they use. dubstep is so limited comparatively. i mean, alot of the early dubstep stuff (while it was 2-steppy) is music that i love, it had so many more elements going on.

and i feel you on bringing out new producers and deejays, that kind of thing is important. but i think it would be better for everyone if the music was a little more up to par.

"Splash by Toastyboy"

Oh yes.

I have only heard a handful of tracks in the N-Type mould - what i heard didn't exactly inspire me to check out more.

Even this stuff, which I guess you could describe as more bouncy and less serious than the preceding dub/half-step sound, falls into very similar potholes for me. What I've heard reminded me of bad breakbeat garage (all those "Buddah Finger"/"Jammin"/"Go DJ" style tracks floating around circa 2001) - there's actually a certain grimness to their fun I would say. Again, my issue with it is perhaps that it's a very masculine/anti-disco sound.

Pipecock's latest missive (the long post a bit upthread) is even more Geir-like!

I should dig up that thread where I debated with Chuck about the role of eclecticism in DJing.

Neverland was one of those tracks that just cracked it all open for me.

It helps to hear it loud, off vinyl, with a really powerful sub.

Before I got into dubstep I was into grime and breakcore, I don't think I really understood how trendy those musical scenes were a couple years ago.

Dubstep got me into the concept of minimalist beats as being worth listening to in their own right, not just as backing to vocalists or as wallpaper music.

The use of empty space in those early tracks was pretty mindblowing for me, I've since gotten an appreciation for less "gimmicky" forms of dance music. House, techno, disco and funk became a lot more interesting.

I don't think I really understood why dance music existed before I was about 19 or 20, had kind of sheltered childhood.

Check that Toasty track too, its arguably the best of the bunch.

As I see Tim has agreed with.