...and like THAT, I'm way into UK Garage. Totally obsessing on it, pretty much all I've listened to the last four days. I love these random musical obsessions, where you hear something that maybe you've listened to a bit before and then all of a sudden you go "hot shit! this is great!" I have a feeling this might last a bit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is going to be a bit of a long one...
This current genre binge comes courtesy of two current musics indebted in varying degrees to UK Garage. Firstly dubstep, which I've been listening to a fair amount these days, as it seems to be getting a lot bigger these days, with the number of interesting releases rising accordingly (see my discussion of Burial below). Dubstep is directly descendant from UK Garage, basically rising out of the dark 2-step sounds of El-B, Zed Bias and others circa about 2001. (Terminology note: UK Garage is often also referred to as 2-step, though 2-step can also be used to describe the type of beat used in UKG as well as other UKG influenced genres such as Dubstep and Grime. I try and keep the genre "UK Garage" separate from the beat "2-step," myself). One of the interesting features of current Dubstep is the "half-step" beat, which features only one snare hit per bar instead of two, making for an extremely slowed-down, spacious beat that is perfectly suited for creating dread-filled bass monsters. Interestingly, I read a comment somewhere (probably lost deep within this thread) that to those who have listened to a lot of UKG, only the nearest hint of a 2-step beat--a single snare to a bar--is needed to recall the 2-step framework to mind, imposing its jittering rhythm on an otherwise empty soundspace. Firstly, I find this a really interesting comment in that it shows how strongly affected our perception and experience of music is by our experiences with prior types of music; a musical artifact is never simply experienced in isolation, but always in relation to other music one has heard. It's also a great illustration how emptiness can create structure and attract attention as much as things that are actually there. Presence-through-absence. (But that's a whole other story, minimalism...) Anyway, the problem being that to me, I couldn't really hear these empty echoes of 2-step. Missing out on consensual auditory hallucinations, no fair! As a treat, here's one of the first big half-step tunes, the very aptly named "Horror Show" from Loefah. Do not even bother listening to this without a subwoofer, there's simply nothing there otherwise.
Loefah - Horror Show
Hot Chip, whom I keep threatening to write about as I've been listening to their new album a lot recently, are the other reason I wanted to get more into UK Garage, really for similar reasons as above. I read one description of Hot Chip as a "post house/2-step beach boys" seemed to me like a ridiculously good idea. And it is quite good, but the problem is I'm just not hearing the 2-step influences! Blast. (I really like Hot Chip, though the first time I heard them I hated them. This is the track that I hated-then-loved which also has the 2-step influenced beat that keeps kinda slipping me by, maybe you'll learn to love them to by the time I get to writing about them: Hot Chip - ABC)
So all this preamble was largely to show that I was interested in listening to some more UKG, to see if I could catch this 2-step structure and more firmly root it in my mind. All I needed was a catalyst, and it came in the form of this mix, specifically the second-half El-B tribute (the first half is only so good). Though often cited (as I just did) as one of the forefathers of Dubstep, I'd actually not heard very much of his original work, as it is actually quite hard to come by (so I hear). This was thus an easy in, and oh what an in it was. Still clearly rooted in UKG's 2-step beats, but moving towards the darkside that dubstep would later wholeheartedly embrace, it's a lot more limber than dubstep often tends to be, still spry enough with 2-step's wobbled basslines, off-beat drum programming and desiccated r&b divas to stave of the hyper-masculine bassworhsip of dubstep.
Thankfully, I had gone on a bit of UKG downloading binge a while ago (almost a year, say the tags on the mp3s), but for whatever reason had not given the tracks a thorough listening to--turns out the bandwidth bottleneck is not between the download host and my computer, but in fact between the speakers and my ears; I just don't have the time to give full attention to everything I download. This does, however, leave me with little easter eggs hidden about my mp3 collection that can later reappear much to my pleasant surprise. As was the case for The Best Garage Anthems...Ever! and Garage Anthems 2005, which I had downloaded when I was more heavily into Grime and was interested in checking out some genres around it. Trolling back through these has really been enjoyable and definitely upped my appreciation for the genre.
***
Great, well I've circled around the topic long enough, time to actually talk about Garage itself.
Garage is kind of an odd genre, with a long history of mutation and cross breading. I...shit I just balled up right there and realized i'm never getting through everything I want to say before I gotta go today, but I've already upped most of the tracks I was gonna talk about, so since the links only last 7 days, I should just post the damn things, and hopefully I can continue my Garagic rantings another day.
Sweet Female Attitude - Flowers (Sunship Edit)
Craig David - 7 Days (Sunship Remix)
3 of a Kind - Babycakes
So a lot of UKG is heavily influenced by r&b, often sounding like a housier r&b with more interesting drum programming and bass. The above three tracks are all beautiful examples of this, sexy, sophisticated dance music. A lot has been made about how UKG is a very adult and feminine music, especially compared with a lot of the much more male-dominated rave genres. Because of course the interesting thing about UKG is that despite its sometimes r&b trappings, it is actually a direct descendant of several rave genres, specifically jungle Garage House (which came out of New York). Thus we get tracks like the below, which venture into darker and more abstract territories. In these songs the tension between the pop tendencies of sexy vocals and the darker bassive tendencies of jungle and rave produce interestingly disorienting results. (I just made that word "bassive" up. I like it :) ).
Encore feat. Stephen Emmanuel and Eska - Coochy Coo
Zed Bias - neighbourhood
And this is not even getting into Garage House and all its earlier permutations which are also excellent and will be posted about sometime, blogging gods permitting.
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