I still don't know if those tracks are swung enough in the hats to justify any kind of garage tag, most house has a little variation in hats. They are more swung than a lot of the stuff I found tho. Shake it is defo way more garage you're right.
Yo sorry for the late reply, had a big long one written out but then it crashed
+ busy moving to a new country and dat!
The garage thing is just like, a direct quote and recurrent theme in conversations with a bunch of the most influential jackin producers. Lorenzo has told me that he's specifically going for a garage swing in the drums. Kane's first musical love was mid 90s Nice N Ripe/Confetti records pre-speed garage garage-house, and that massively shows in the whole aesthetic, including the swung 4x4.
jimitheexploder;297610
But how is this track you posted...
[url said:
any less tech house then...
which most people wouldn't have a problem calling tech house.
The hip hop samples, the big bolshy drop, the whole vibe!
To me what separates jackin from other house (bearing in mind that it is still a sub genre of house of course) would be maybe 4 major things running in order of:
1) Big, massive, oversized basslines, which take their cue first and foremost from speed garage, bassline, and electro house but also grime and jungle. And this is also where jackin is most recognisably its own thing, with the warp-donk-owl bass. This bass isn't 100% new, you can hear it underneath the mid range in old bassline tracks, and there's a proto version of it in some old speed garage tunes, but it's innovation by isolation - it zooms in on an element that was inherent in those older genres and brings it right to the forefront, recontextualising it and exploring all the possibilities that that sound has to offer. I suppose in postmodernism this focussing on /under/-explored sonic forms rather than totally new ones is about the best we can do...
2) The vybe, the sound pallet - jackin's hip hop, pop, 'ardcore and cheese that makes it so goddamn fun and so irresistible to those of us who have given in to its charms. It's the element of jackin which means tracks might just break into a Craig David chorus halfway through a track -
- just because. If tech house (or UK bass, for that matter) had this sense of fun, then I'd fully back it, but it doesn't, so I don't.
What's interesting about this is the tension between jackin's absolute, unapologetic cheese, and the fact that it remains a type of house music, which still privileges 'depth', 'class' etc. It's a tension perfectly captured by the beautifully oxymoronic phrase 'deep and dirty', I've seen branded about on soundcloud and facebook.
3) the song structure - fundementally jackin is drop oriented like all /rave/ musics: garage, dubstep, 'ardcore, jungle, edm etc. as opposed to /club/ musics like most forms of house (electro excepting), which follow a structure of a more steady building and release of tension. House bubbles while jackin bangs.
4) The drums - skippy, detailed, shuffly snappy drums. Any given Lorenzo track - and lets be honest, he's the standard to measure jackin by - is bound to be more swung, more rhythmically detailed that any given 'big room', 'deep' or 'tech' house track. Yes there are jackin tunes with a very rigid 4x4, and in fact a lot of tracks are characterised by both a sharp 'neck snapping' 4x4 with a strict metronomic high hat on the off beat AND by lots of shuffly fills, fidget pops and glitches, garage swing around the edges. Jackin is bass + drums + samples, whereas for a lot of mainstream house the drums seem content to just mark time.
Shake it sounds like DJ Zinc era breakbeat garage, but tamer with more of a tech house/electro pallet of sounds, kind like DJ Zinc's Crack House era stuff which was pretty much his go at electro house to get in with Fake Blood, Erol Alkan etc.
I definitely see the influence, I get what you're getting at, but what I think you ignore is that Shake it sounds like a Lorenzo era Jackin house track as much as anything! Jackin to me provides a very neat parallel to UK funky. Both UK funky and Jackin are essentially sub-genres of UK garage - they exist very much in the space carved out by 2-step and speed garage over a decade ago. The difference is that Funky innovated the riddim section - the funky drums being essentially a reconfiguration of the 2-step beat - while Jackin innovated the bassline - the warp-donk-owl bass being just an evolution in the speed garage - bassline - UK B genealogy of bass science.
