House and Garage and Grime

blissblog: “Sub low is what you call underground house and garage, just think if the new name was called Sub Low you wouldn’t be fooled when you are deciding what rave to go on a Friday or Saturday night or what room to go and dance in your local club and still don’t get it. All you up and coming Dj’s playing dark side bass and drum tune’s like Bond, Buddha Finger, and the like’s of Wookie’s new stuff do you really think that is House n Garage. “

Now, yer man reckons that this is from 2001, maybe 2000. Makes some sense, especially the earlier date. What they call Sub-Lo they seem to be describing as, or at least aligning with, the breakstep sound (I mean — Buddha Finger!). And that’s alright by me, even if all the fucking hipsters slag off “breakstep” cos you can dance to it, it’s fun to listen to, and has a bit of depth… I mean, because it was named by Mixmag (bad, admittedly) and white people liked it (good), and worst of all cos the breakbeat crew adopted it as their own (again good IMO).

So it’s a matter of some satisfaction for me that our beloved, hipster friendly grime scene seems to be claiming descendence not just from ‘ardkore, but from a more recent cartoon-like genre which is as despised as ‘ardkore was until it got trendy.

Grime’s / Sub-Lo’s descendence from breakstep makes some sense. It’s not so much the twice as nice current is it. But not complete sense. The difference between producer-centric, Zinc-style breaks tracks to MC-centric 8 bar is pretty dramatic. I’d say there was a big mutation in between which must have come from somewhere. But where?

We could do with a history lesson here. Matt, Luke, Simon, whaddya reckon? When was the first “Grime” track? What changed it around? Which bits of garage did it grow from? Did any of you notice at the time? I didn’t, but I was busy with a baby and listening to nothing but dancehall…

There might be some useful post-rationalisation from listening to this mix… Para on UKD posted this:

“Check out this mix by some 17 year old dude, Skream -http://12.26.137.237/skream_mix_jan04.mp3 … Sounds all like early Autechre to me but then I guess that’s my white, 30 something reference point.”

I presume this is all done with new tracks, but I have no idea… but it sounds like it could be a missing link between dubstep / garage breaks and 8 bar. It’s a pretty good mix BTW, very dark atonal garage, but worth hearing. You’d better move quick though, I doubt it will be up for long.

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