From the depths of the archive comes one of my favorite pieces of atmospheric melodic DnB.
I first heard this on a compilation called “Legally Stoned”, which I’d highly recommend if you can find it, though I think it’s out of print.
At once beautiful, exotic, and neuro-deep, this piece definitely shows where that comp got its name from. It’s 10am, and I feel high just listening to it. I seriously wish they made more jungle like this still…
A few posts ago, I took the Plump DJs to task for abandoning funky breaks as they moved onto the wobbly-bass world of electro pseudo-rave. Well, that abandoned funk had to turn up somewhere, right? One of the places you might look is in the record crate of UK breaks producer Featurecast, whose recent tracks and remixes have been appearing in sets from A Skillz, Krafty Kuts and Z-Trip, to name a few of my favorite funkers. Featurecast, aka Lee Mintram, shares the same love of heavy sample-filled electro as his aforementioned contemporaries, he can scratch with the best of ‘em, and is one of the few artists we can consider the new hope for funky breaks. Get acquainted with him with this promo mix from October, and keep your eyes open for his name; the funk is strong with this one.
We now interrupt your regularly scheduled producer contest to bring you a piece of dance music cultural lore.
Back in the day, actually in 1986, when Detroit Techno was new, a producer named Kevin Saunderson ended up coming with an iconic sound - simple, effective, growling, with tons of built in movement - the essence of low end. Check out his bassline in Just Want Another Chance:
Note: Speakers with bass response or headphones HIGHLY recommended! We mean it!
Whoa, that’s some old school wobble….
Remind you of anything? This sound has come to be known as the Reese bassline (from Saunderson’s nickname “Reese”), and has played a huge part in the development of jungle and drum and bass as we know them!
For instance, Try Ray Keith’s 1994 tune Renegade - Terrorist, a true classic of the DnB genre:
The sound is easy to program and replicate - it’s just some detuned saw waves that beat against each other to cause a pulsating effect (you can find a basic description here if you want) - but has spawned generations of innovation.
Even with all the new craziness going on in the world of DnB today, it’s still a go to sound for many producers.
Check out the recent Commercial Suicide release Trei - Justify:
The sound here is made bigger through additional unison and some extra juice, but the concept is the exact same - it’s our friend the Reese bass! Damn that thing is hot. STILL!
You’ll hear DnB heads throwing around this term all the time, and this is what they mean.
This sound is key to the genre, and completely unforgettable…ever since people have come out with endlesss variations by distorting and mangling the frack out of it, but it all comes back to the Reese bass!
So take this moment to thank Kevin Saunderson for being awesome so many years ago!
Raise a glass and turn up the BASS!
We throw around the term “epic” quite a lot when promoting events, but it’s not often we can look back at a party to find the adjective holds true. This New Year’s Eve was such an event. We’d have to look all the way back to our days in “The Dungeon” in the early 2000s to find a party we threw with such a great crowd and positive energy… but this time we were fortunate enough to have the smoking/porta-potty area located outdoors.* The set up and breakdown were both relatively painless, and we didn’t have to break up a fight or pick up a plunger all night. All in all, the party went off without a hitch.
Well, almost.
See, setting up live sound can be a tricky business. With a large array of various musical devices from seven DJs all connected to the same mixer in a mass of wires tangled enough to rival a plate of linguine, there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong. So naturally, they did. Somewhere around midnight, the computer we set up to record our sets got disconnected from the mixer and from that point on, the music was lost.
But fear not, Beatery fans. Thanks to the wonders of home recording (and for my part, Serato’s history folder) we’ve been painstakingly reassembling the sets to recreate our New Year’s mixes as accurately as possible.** The first of these is below, with more to come next week, and you can find the pre-midnight sets, you know, the ones that survived, on our Black Tie Ball wrap-up page. We hope these sets and the photos on the page help you to remember the night as fondly as we will. Thanks a grip for spending the night with us, everyone. Keep bumpin’ in 2011.
*If you were there, you know the stench I’m referring to.
**You’ll forgive us if we don’t recreate the drunken beat-matches and bumped turntables.
Merry Christmas and a belated Happy Hanukkah everyone! As I’m sure is the case with you dear readers, we here at the Beatery are very much in the midst of hectic holiday and end-of-year preparations. We’re finishing our shopping, visiting families, baking pies, writing So You Think You Can Bump posts, and hey, did we mention we’re throwing an epic New Years Eve party? All told, we’re as busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, so we’re going to take a short break from the blogging. We’ll be back next week with a final post of the year (maybe), and then we’re going to rock Coffee Bar like it’s never been rocked before. (Literally. This will be the first dance party ever at the venue.)
But before we leave you to your eggnog and figgy pudding, why not unwrap a little Christmas cheer to get you through the holiday break? It’s a pretty nice haul, if I do say so myself: including a fun Beatles mini-mix by A Skillz, recent Plumps and Krafty sets, and- hey, what’s that that the bottom of the stocking? A new Mylo remix? He’s back?! It’s a Christmas miracle!
Happy holidays, everyone.
(Update 12/25- Santa left some more tracks under the tree! Ho ho ho!!)
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