late 2-step appreciation thread

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dubplatestyle

Well-known member
okay, so i think the basic opinion is that late 2-step (2001 to early 2002, before the "garage rap" takeover completely displaced the dancefloor) is a fall from grace akin to neurofunk. simon (and matt?) have both said that 2001 was, in their opinion, the lowest ebb for uk pirate music since the pre-acid days. (i may be slightly misquoting here.) the general consensus is that it was some sort of transition period between ukg and grime. and i can understand this to some extent. the whole "blokestep"/breakbeat garage vibe was obviously a blind dead end (that killed ukg's girls appeal more than grime?); while zinc produced a number of good tunes, that first bingo beats comp is just so drearily, dreadfully dull that it made me want to turn in my garridge badge. (the second, though, is still tops. crucially this was mixed and selected by zed bias.) and has there ever been a more over-hyped without the goods act than the stanton warriors?

HOWEVER

there was some great garage made in this period! even leaving aside the oxide&neutrino/pay as u go/so solid proto-grime stuff, the brief interzone between ukg and dubstep (which i now i realize i "get" but will never love, at least on record and not in da club) produced a number of great tunes with really rattling percussion, slinking syncopations, and bassline warps. sure, the whole mood is a bit more "masculine" and ganja addled than the previous three or four years, but the tunes! menta's "sound of the future" and their "tonka" remix. the early horsepower stuff. bias' "ring the alarm" and his maddslinky and daluq sides. artwork's "red". the first sticky tunes before he realized the future was in grime. hype's "pussy track" (maybe the nastiest sub-bass ever on a garage track?) even the early darqwan stuff.

the socatronic percussion! the dred chants! the almost comically portentious basslines! i have been listening to this mix cd oris jay and j da flex did for sleazenation (!) all weekend called "future garage" and it's great. fuck the haters.

no, really, this is where you tell me i'm nuts and why, or you tell me i'm right and tell me good tunes i may have missed.

p.s. no, i know this stuff still isn't a patch on the 98-00 stuff.

p.p.s. i know matt hates the term "2-step". please don't banish me, master!
 
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stelfox

Beast of Burden
buck & bury by el-b was a cracking tune as was his remix of mutiny's the virus, plus his cut of you make me sick by pink. oris jay's remix of ladies first was pretty great, as was trippin' (feat delsena on vocals). might do a retospective mix of this good end of dub/breakstep at some stage. i stil play red to this day!
 
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dubplatestyle

Well-known member
yeah "buck & bury" was big. i also heard a great (unreleased) version of an erykah badu tune once too.

did i hallucinate this, or did jammer have an ep out on locked on before he was Jammer? was it any good?
 
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stelfox

Beast of Burden
now that i'm not 100 per cent sure about, p'haps luke might know. it sounds pretty likely, though. not exactly a million miles away, are they? yeah, it's around this period, when you had different styles jackknifing into one another - diva vocal tunes, big ragga-style stompers, breaks, horsepower gear etc - that fwd was a really interesting proposition.
 
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bassnation

the abyss
stelfox said:
buck & bury by el-b was a cracking tune as was his remix of mutiny's the virus, plus his cut of you make me sick by pink. oris jay's remix of ladies first was pretty great, as was trippin' (feat delsena on vocals). might do a retospective mix of this good end of dub/breakstep at some stage. i stil play red to this day!
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trippin' is a great tune. dark as you like, but still vulnerable and tender. its got these darkside mentasms processed and fucked to the point where they are whispers, like the ghost of rave haunting the track. fantastic stuff. oris jay is still turning out the goods, isn't he?

for the record i much prefer this kind of style to the croydon / dubstep thing. it seems a lot fuller, less clipped and less monotone than mark one and all that kru.
 
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dubplatestyle

Well-known member
stelfox said:
yeah, it's around this period, when you had different styles jackknifing into one another - diva vocal tunes, big ragga-style stompers, breaks, horsepower gear etc - that fwd was a really interesting proposition.
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yeah, when i read descriptions of fwd on hyperdub from this period (2001-2002) it seems like a really exciting club. now from what i read it sounds like a bunch of pasty techno bods in track jackets swigging stella and calling for a rewind of every cd-r dubplate. *ducks*
 
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Blackdown

nexKeysound
bassnation said:
for the record i much prefer this kind of style to the croydon / dubstep thing. it seems a lot fuller, less clipped and less monotone than mark one and all that kru.
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mark one isn't dubstep.
he's not from croydon, he's from manchester.
 
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bassnation

the abyss
Blackdown said:
mark one isn't dubstep.
he's not from croydon, he's from manchester.
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hang on, i'm getting confused.

i thought that mark one is a leading light in the dubstep genre, otherwise known as the "croydon" sound. i wasn't talking about mark one coming from croydon, you understand.

so if he isn't dubstep then what is he, cos its certainly not grime.

please enlighten me with the latest genre breakdowns so i can be more accurate with my posts ;)
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
luke doesn't know i'm afraid. i know nothing about this peiod cos it's when i was out of the country. i think that's the reason the standards slipped. i came back and it got better again.
 
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Blackdown

nexKeysound
bassnation said:
hang on, i'm getting confused.

i thought that mark one is a leading light in the dubstep genre, otherwise known as the "croydon" sound. i wasn't talking about mark one coming from croydon, you understand.

so if he isn't dubstep then what is he, cos its certainly not grime.

please enlighten me with the latest genre breakdowns so i can be more accurate with my posts ;)
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Dubstep = a very specific hybrid of garage, croydon-centric, ie horsepower, hatcha, youngsta, loefah, Digital Mystikz, Kode 9, Skreamz, Benga etc

Forward>> = a club night where they play many different styles of darker garage including dubstep (see above), grime (inc wonder, slimzee, geeneus, plasticman), breakbeat garage (inc oris jay, hot flush, search and destroy, slt mob, toasty boy) and a few styles in between (ie Landslide's broken beat influenced sets).

Mark One started making breakier stuff (like his Souljah release) and now has headed toward lyrical grimey stuff when he started working with Plastic Man (who happens to live in Croydon but makes grime). people can argue that Mark's not full on grime - fair enough - but i think he would be the first to say he's not dubstep, just as Plastic has.
 
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stelfox

Beast of Burden
dubplatestyle said:
yeah, when i read descriptions of fwd on hyperdub from this period (2001-2002) it seems like a really exciting club. now from what i read it sounds like a bunch of pasty techno bods in track jackets swigging stella and calling for a rewind of every cd-r dubplate. *ducks*
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wrong. they don't call for rewinds.
 
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bassnation

the abyss
Blackdown said:
Mark One started making breakier stuff (like his Souljah release) and now has headed toward lyrical grimey stuff when he started working with Plastic Man (who happens to live in Croydon but makes grime). people can argue that Mark's not full on grime - fair enough - but i think he would be the first to say he's not dubstep, just as Plastic has.
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thank you.

i think my confusion stems from having a few releases of mark one - but from maybe over a year ago which sound very much on the same tip as the horsepower crew, well maybe a little bit darker - but worlds apart from the grime i've been hearing, as was the rephlex compilations which sounded much more like a continuation of the instrumental tempa vibe than grime "proper".

personally i don't think plasticman sounds remotely like grime either.

what i'm defining as grime (and maybe incorrectly) is stuff like the mix that logan sama posted up earlier. but i'd be the first to admit that i'm a neophyte in this genre, who may be talking utter crap.
 
A

Ach!

Turd on the Run
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.imorecords.com/mp3/10758-1-b.mp3">'Roxy vs. El-B - Breakbeat Science'</a> has to be one of my favourite tunes from around that period - a skittering half-step beat with an enormous but taut, liquid bassline. I have a tape with a couple of MCs spitting over it too, when the style was mid-way between the old style repetitive garage chats and the more verbose hip-hop style structures we have now.
That period also seems to have been the time when the 'groove' function on sequencers seems to have been phased out of productions in favour of strict on-the-beat quantising, which fitted the more aggressive MC flows emerging.
 
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hint

hint

party record with a siren
I still play a few tunes from that period:

daluq's oriental express
artwork's red
darqwan's pipe dreams
menta's "nervous" mix of sound of the future
mark force's gypo
delinquent's brukout
landslide's garage-tempo stuff is dope too

... all got a bit of energy and swing to them that you can only really get with busy breaks, but it's hard to pull off from a production point of view cos it strays so close to the blokey, hyper-dull breaks stuff at that tempo.

in my experience, all of the above are certainly much more likely to make more open-minded people dance than even the "big" grime tunes. grime's still too alien to a lot of people on the dancefloor (with several notable exceptions).

didn't realise it was all so unfashionable... that's what happens when you live outside the big smoke I guess. ;)
 
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mpc

wasteman
dubplatestyle said:
HOWEVER

there was some great garage made in this period! even leaving aside the oxide&neutrino/pay as u go/so solid proto-grime stuff, the brief interzone between ukg and dubstep (which i now i realize i "get" but will never love, at least on record and not in da club) produced a number of great tunes with really rattling percussion, slinking syncopations, and bassline warps. sure, the whole mood is a bit more "masculine" and ganja addled than the previous three or four years, but the tunes! menta's "sound of the future" and their "tonka" remix. the early horsepower stuff. bias' "ring the alarm" and his maddslinky and daluq sides. artwork's "red". the first sticky tunes before he realized the future was in grime. hype's "pussy track" (maybe the nastiest sub-bass ever on a garage track?) even the early darqwan stuff.

the socatronic percussion! the dred chants! the almost comically portentious basslines! i have been listening to this mix cd oris jay and j da flex did for sleazenation (!) all weekend called "future garage" and it's great. fuck the haters.

no, really, this is where you tell me i'm nuts and why, or you tell me i'm right and tell me good tunes i may have missed.
Click to expand...

ive got that future garage sleazenation cd. i really like the first few tracks on that. in my opinion, those records were even better than the garage stuff being released now (i.e. grime & dubstep)

i was really into the menta stuff and beatfreaks did some amazing records ('twelves' has one of the best basslines ever). i was never too taken with the bingo records stuff. most of my friends from school were into that bassline garage type stuff and dj narrows stuff. that's why i'm into dubstep and grime now. there was lots of stuff from that period that was just pure 2 step filth. quite a few records were just limited whites from random people. i think people like vex'd are kinda of recreating that sound now, but obviously taking in other influences.

the artwork and horsepower stuff is proto dubstep. at the time, i didn't like that stuff at all. it was a bit too "soft" and laid back considering the absolute filth people like darqwan had been producing, although i really love dubstep now.
 
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mms

sometimes
hint said:
I still play a few tunes from that period:

daluq's oriental express
darqwan's pipe dreams
menta's "nervous" mix of sound of the future

didn't realise it was all so unfashionable... that's what happens when you live outside the big smoke I guess. ;)
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yeah 'as we enter' the b side of pipe dreams is lush, and oriental express is super vibey.

track i really like from that period if 'london' by trick or treat and that elb mix of that old chime tune 'meltdown'. 'we are now taking you the world of an lsd user'....

don't think fwd is full of pasty boys at all, but i haven't been since nov. kode 9 digi mystikz and loefah plus a few others have definitley got a very rootical side, but the music is very heavy on the bass pressure and super 'flat earth' . i really like that tho, a weird lack of momentum and release and just increasing weight which gives the music a very strange feeling that isn't present in any other kind of music i can think of, apart from maybe stuff like thomas koners earlier stuff and things like earth's earth 3.
it's nothing i've previously encountered in dance music, maybe it's more of the heavy pressure of one of jah shaka's infamous workouts, segued off and micro condensed .
it's odd music as well, as it feels at the moment like there is an odd space within the bass vortex it's created ready to be filled with weird energy and possibilities, it's already happening but it's gonna be exciting to see what will happen next.
personally i find aspects of it just as exciting as what is happening in it's cousin, grime.
 
hint

hint

party record with a siren
mms said:
kode 9 digi mystikz and loefah plus a few others have definitley got a very rootical side, but the music is very heavy on the bass pressure and super 'flat earth' . i really like that tho, a weird lack of momentum and release and just increasing weight which gives the music a very strange feeling that isn't present in any other kind of music i can think of, apart from maybe stuff like thomas koners earlier stuff and things like earth's earth 3.
it's nothing i've previously encountered in dance music, maybe it's more of the heavy pressure of one of jah shaka's infamous workouts, segued off and micro condensed .
it's odd music as well, as it feels at the moment like there is an odd space within the bass vortex it's created ready to be filled with weird energy and possibilities, it's already happening but it's gonna be exciting to see what will happen next.
personally i find aspects of it just as exciting as what is happening in it's cousin, grime.
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definitely - been sitting back and blasting that new tempa doublepack for the past couple of days. like you say - it's really odd music... the dynamics don't really come from the drums or stabs - it's all about the gaps that break up the constant rumbles from the bass and FX.

"crack bong" is a good example - the snares are really washy and spread out... the opposite of a lot of grime where they use really sharp, tight sounds like handclaps and gunshots that are designed to break through and define the rhythm. and, of course, the loefah track is all bottom end - really abstract music... you can't really pick out any notes but you know something's there cos you can feel it.

reminds me of the different flavours you'd get at d'n'b raves - one minute it's hype or grooverider, the next it's krust or dr s gachet... several different takes on the same style... seems a shame that in UKG the different sounds are defined by the club nights that they appear to be exclusively played at - are there many events where you'd find grime djs alongside the dubstep djs, or is it really as separate as it appears from the outside looking in?
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
twilight 2step

there's always good tunes that come out in any genre after the moment's passed... there's still good rock records being made, now and then

and likewise there's some nice contempo 2step tunes on 1xtra, this guy duncan powell... but as time goes by its more and more like someone who's an expert engraver, or brilliant player of bebop... a period exercise

i think of 2step by late 2000 as being like a peach or a pear that's passed its point of optimal ripeness, getting a bit squishy and brown

[c.f. the smart artcore end of drum'n'bass circa 1996 (ie non techstep, but things on reinforced) the beats were getting a little too clever and fiddly, the textures too dense]

the twilight 2steppa classic for me is 'mash up the venue' by james lavonz, which actually took me ages to fall for, cos the beats are a bit fussy, but it's got that killa girl vocal and bass-wooze

re the FWD/rinse fm sound, what i like about some of those tracks (can't think of specific ones but it's that Grime 2 style) is that the drums seem incomplete, surrounding an absent centre, the core drum pulse is missing but you have this skittery percussive stuff around the rim of the crater... they seem real slow, those tracks, cos all that's driving them is this bubbling bass-river of dark toxic low-end ooze... it does seem quite industrial/dub, On U tradition... even the Orb maybe (whose remix collection i'm listening to this minute, having had it for years unlistened, and boy it's really rather fine)... that whiteboy uk rootical thing... about time kevin martin did a FWD tune innit (he probably already has for all i know)
 
M

mms

sometimes
ukbass said:
isn't digital mystikz black?
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yep mala is mixed race and coki is black.

i think trying to discuss dubstep as a whiteboy rootical thing is kinda missing the point , rather like the whole problem people have with world music kinda samples and sources for beats, i think these sources arise from sound-scavenging and love of bass pressure, plus i think some of those boys are big into films etc. mystikz differ slightly as well as some of what they do applies conciousness grounded in rasta.
 
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