rubberdingyrapids
Well-known member
http://blissout.blogspot.co.uk/
idk about anyone else but i never really felt any true bass pressure from bassline house. it was all about the mid-rangey, grime-ish idea of 'basslines' rather than proper jungle or dubstep-style low end. prob all to do with it being the mp3 age - like, why bother with low end when most people prob wont even catch it? i like a lot of the weird, manic bass-lines in bassline, but few of them go down low like theyre supposed to really, do they?
Now of course it could be that after such bass-sensitization in the 90s with jungle and UKG, by the 2000s those pleasure centres were burned out in my brain...
(Mind you, I'm actually having a hard time thinking of awesome bass bits in any genre during the 21st Century to date.... Rock for instance - despite there being a postpunk revival, it's slim pickings.... A few moments from Radiohead's Colin Greenwood, mostly on Kid A... The dude in Vampire Weekend - Chris Baio... )
But then I remembered....
There was at least one truly bass-tastic dance music genre in the 2000s.
And appropriately enough, it was called Bassline.
The bastard Northern child of speed garage... picking up on things from the previous post like Gant's "Soundbwoy Burial" (regarded as a Niche anthem in the North East) and productions by DJ Narrows... but pushing that warp science into a veritable Bass Baroque: intricately sculpted, slippery 'n' sinuous convolutions... frilly 'n' frantic... bass-snakes writhing and intertwining.... at times almost sounding at odds with the beat, like a counter-clockwise groove within the groove.
The sound had been bubbling along for much of the 2000s in that broad band of England from South Yorkshire across to Liverpool - its heartland being towns like Nottingham, Sheffield, Derby, Leicester ... A chap called Ambrose sent me a few burned CDs of DJ mixes in the mid-decade but can't say I was super impressed by Bassline House: mostly it just seemed like speed garage, frozen as a style, a regional curio (there was a subgenre called Organ House I seem to recall - that tickled me).
But the next time I checked it out - the later months of 2007 - Bassline seemed to have come along leaps and bounds. And a few months later it actually leaped into the UK charts, with a couple of hits that reached as high as #2.
idk about anyone else but i never really felt any true bass pressure from bassline house. it was all about the mid-rangey, grime-ish idea of 'basslines' rather than proper jungle or dubstep-style low end. prob all to do with it being the mp3 age - like, why bother with low end when most people prob wont even catch it? i like a lot of the weird, manic bass-lines in bassline, but few of them go down low like theyre supposed to really, do they?