Modern d'n'b is rubbish - tune ID and a moan from an old man

UFO over easy

online mahjong
Pendulum - Tarantula

Do you think the rise of various styles of Garage music had anything to do with it?

Probably the other way round? I think the rise of garage was partly a reaction to the fact that it was almost impossible for new producers to get a look into the drum and bass scene.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Do you think the rise of various styles of Garage music had anything to do with it?

Well there's a well-worn idea that lots of people jumped ship to make garridge and that is where all the laydeez went raving because tech-step wasn't their bag. Which is a bit of a cliche but probably has some elements of truth in it. But that was probably 98-2000?

I think what I am asking is "what significant has happened between 2000 and now?" in terms of the demographic of d 'n' b fans, production, raves, etc.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
Between 2000 and now? Not an awful lot. The rise of the bouncier, silly mid-rangey dancefloor stuff... 1999 and 2000 were a couple of the worst years for releases that I can think of though. We're actually seeing a bit of a shift back towards the dark, tech-steppy feel of 2000 these days, except a lot of it is more backward looking. Check what Fracture, Breakage, Survival, Sabre etc are doing... it's very 97-y.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Between 2000 and now? Not an awful lot. The rise of the bouncier, silly mid-rangey dancefloor stuff... 1999 and 2000 were a couple of the worst years for releases that I can think of though.

There seemed to be a resurgence of female vocal tunes in 2000, from what I can remember - I wonder if that was a counter-reaction to garridge?

It's a shame because that book that came out ("all crew"?) paints quite an exciting picture of mainstream d 'n' b now.

Weird to see Andy C's name on the flier for the next night at that club.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Eerily someone just started a thread about the tune I was asking about on the Blood & Fire forum.

Apparently it's

Tarantula - Pendulum&Fresh feat. Spyda&Tenor Fly
 
it sounds like the tune you enjoyed was pendulum - tarantula

im not really into d&b at all, but at the love rave (7yearglitch) last saturday one of the dj's played a tune with badness on it, bigging up the silverlink or something like that, and that was proper fun - pure old jungle vibes, mad riffs, mental beatpatterns - completely unpredictable, he also dropped some happy hardcore which was nice
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I went raving in Eindhoven in Holland last weekend and the best option for everyone seemed to be a drum 'n' bass night. It's been about 8 years since I last paid any attention to drum 'n' bass other than a bit of ragga jungle and breakcore.

It's all very... flat... these days, isn't it? Very linear interpretations of tech-step, but a bit cleaned up. No mad chopped-up beats, not even that many big fat b-lines.
Flat is probably the best word for it - I think they've all got to processing the beats to make them hit harder to the extent that the drums just chug along at a constant level forever. And the 'deep' mainstream stuff is even worse in this respect than the 'hard' mainstream stuff because the word 'tasteful' has crept into its vocabulary. I think there might still be mainstream techstep stuff with messed up beats - Limewax and Noisia for intance - but I've not been looking that hard.

Subvert Central is definitely a good place to check though. There's loads of interesting stuff still happening in the margins.

I don't know how things got this way, but I've got half a theory about why they're staying that way - specifically, it seems like people have got very very good at producing reeses and two step beats, to the extent that attempting to try something else is going to sound a bit amateurish until people get better at it. But from a dancefloor / mainstream appeal point of view that means it never picks up critical mass.

Also, I think the very definite mainstream / underground split means that a lot of people who might inject something more interesting into the mainstream just ignore it entirely.

I'm not sure about the studentyness thing - most of the student dnb nights I used to go to were full of trustafarians who went nuts for oldskool amen mashups.

Hmmm... wasn't there a Blissblog a while back about the Zone of Fruitless Intensification that had a fairly good stab at explaining What Went Wrong?

Oh yeah and what is that "Tarantula" tune?
Cheesy genius is what it is.
Y'know what sucks even more? Breaks.
I think I like breaks less than any other genre I can think of. It just seems to be dance music shorn of any of the extremes of speed, bass, cheese, rage, sexiness, noise, minimalism, funk, intensity or anything else that actually make dance music interesting...
 
Funny, I feel the same way about house and techno, almost no good records getting made any more.
I know everyone on here will disagree with me but there it is.

Here are my thoughts about genres getting stagnant:

I think everything gets old after a while if it can't change. Once a style gets sucked into a rut, or too narrowly defined, there is no room left for originality.... This is happening to dubstep now - following a few years where nobody really knew what it was in relation to grime and garage (there was just a bunch of styles mixed up together, lots of exciting music) now the rules are seemingly written for each genre and much less innovation takes place.

So what we might now call ragga jungle (but then just called jungle) was an exciting step forward from hardcore (which was getting a bit stale by the end of 93). Then when started to get boring, some more techsteppy tunes arrived and were cool (no u turn, then ram trilogy etc) then that got boring for most of us... but it seems the parameters have all been tried and now they just get rehashed for the younger ravers who don't know it's all been done before.

the only way for dnb producers to really make new music that's original is to make something that isn't recognisably drum n bass. eg. zinc and hype's breakbeat garage stuff was a kind of new sound based on uk garage, 90s hardcore and newer production techniques from dnb... but it waasn't thought of as drum n bass and instead got accepted on the garage scene. it didnt sound much like other garage records at that time, but perhaps it got accepted there because the ukg scene was a bit newer and still more open to being defined in a broader way, the rules weren't set in stone yet.
 

borderpolice

Well-known member
the only way for dnb producers to really make new music that's original is to make something that isn't recognisably drum n bass.

But why would they want to do this? DnB is incredibly popular at the moment, a lot of my students are really into it. they are too young to see that there's not much sonic innovation. and: why should they? They are having fun.

It seems that genres always stay the same (Hip Hop, DnB, Metal, RnR ...), it's people who move from genre to genre in the course of their musical life. nuttin' wrong with that.
 

bassnation

the abyss
so, what did anyone make of rufige kru's 'malice in wonderland' then?

k-punks hyperbole aside, very disapointing indeed. not even a glimpse of their former alien creativity, spark and originality. the same too-fast chase scene drums, the same old everything, basically. the idea that this somehow recaptures their old vibe is laughable.

if anyone disagrees, i am more than happy to upload one of their old tunes and you can compare for yourself. goldies had it, hes washed up and the scene has long been utterly fucked. theres nothing to see here people, move on.
 
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But why would they want to do this

Because some of them might be into making original exciting music rather than just churning out the same old shit to make money?
Surely you post on here cos you are into music? So don't you think a lot of music producers are into music too?
I don't mean to lay into you, I just find your question almost shockingly cynical.
Maybe I am naive...



It seems that genres always stay the same (Hip Hop, DnB, Metal, RnR ...), it's people who move from genre to genre in the course of their musical life

Well... when did these genres get defined? It's easy to look back and say that because you can slot the records into whatever genre makes sense from a "now" point of view. But it's not true if you listen to music that has been defined in its own time as being of a certain genre.
For example:
No modern hip hop records resemble the works of public enemy at their peak or hijack or the funky 4, no modern garage record sounds like kariya or turntable orchestra, modern techno rarely resembles model 500, modern house has almost no trace of jesse saunders in there.
Then there's RnB which has changed hugely since the 50s... I don't see how you can possibly make the above statement!
 

bassnation

the abyss
Because some of them might be into making original exciting music rather than just churning out the same old shit to make money?
Surely you post on here cos you are into music? So don't you think a lot of music producers are into music too?
I don't mean to lay into you, I just find your question almost shockingly cynical.
Maybe I am naive...

i don't think you are naive, just idealistic. unfortunately there are loads of people who put making a living before artistic integrity. sometimes its hard to blame them even the results suck.

and LOADS of modern house sounds like, well, house music. there are many strands,but for the most part house is now a classic music form that doesn't mutate greatly.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
k-punks hyperbole aside, very disapointing indeed. not even a glimpse of their former alien creativity, spark and originality. the same too-fast chase scene drums, the same old everything, basically. the idea that this somehow recaptures their old vibe is laughable.

This is all at least partly Tech Itch's fault.

But yeah, it's not very good. The fact that so many people who seem to be writing from outside the drum and bass scene are enjoying it surprises me - when Reynolds and K-Punk talk about Malice in Wonderland they're still overwhelmingly negative about the drum and bass in general. I suspect that if they listened to some of the more interesting records being released, they'd be quite surprised.
 

IChiOne

Wild Horses
the good stuff doesn't get played in clubs, but it's still out there.

spank.gif
 

Logos

Ghosts of my life
This is such a huge subject I almost don't want to start.

The short of it is...lots of excellent music being made in the margins (Martyn, Subtle Audio, Intallex, Fracture and Neptune, Martsman etc etc).

But very little of it gets played in the clubs. For me personally the energy and the critical mass has dropped out of the few good underground clubs in the UK anyway. The best nights I've been to in the past two or three years have been in Germany and Holland.

I find the whole thing quite depressing.

Thats one of the reasons I got so in to dubstep a couple of years ago especially around the time of the DMZ parties at 3rd bass...the energy was incredible (so was the music) and completely blew me away, like nothing I've witnessed before or since.

P.S an aside about drum and bass being fwd thinking...I think this still feels so important because it was the post-Acid, British 'fwd' music par excellence. The whole narrative was to 'get to the future' and that was reflected in the relentless one-upmanship amongst producers. But I think that level of creative energy can only be sustained for so long., certainly not 15 years.
 
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