First up: Absolute banger from Ill Phill & Loz:
Has absolutely everything I want in a track, love the ravey/tekkno synth stabs, hip hop voxs and a massive jackin bassline!
More darkside danger from man like Brent Kilner:
love the drums on this one, reminds me a lot of Narrows, proper Kick Daan Ya Door vybez
Jambie alerted me to this one:
" Big hit vocal with the pounding bass most clubbers want ! "
Who can argue with that???
Nato:
Halloween Party:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0k9pyp
WARNING! DANGER! may contain donk. handle with care!!!
I know that there's a lot of plausible deniability with jackin, that it's always edged very close to other genres (deep house, electro, bassline etc.) But for me, with tracks like You Want Me, We Superstylin, Snapbacks and Tattoos, there's no doubt that its its own genre, its own sound and its own thing. Thing is, jackin's always been a mixture of the strange and the familiar, and there was always a contradiction between the sense of it being something new+ its sense of locality (just for U Brum/Leeds) (See Loz's New Year's facebook status last year where he talks about "how many people get to say they invented a new genre) on the one side, and then this desire to connect to the wider house movement - "house & bass", having all of the major big room house acts play 02:31, Tom Shorterz in interveiws talking about Speed Garage as his 'guilty pleasure', when Speed Garage makes up a huge chunk of the DNA of jackin etc.
For me that's why I focussed on the name 'jackin' when I wrote my article, when to be honest the majority of ravers at 02:31 don't talk about jackin OR house & bass, but 'dirty house' or just 'the Rainbow sound'. For me what was most exciting about jackin wasn't just that there was loads of great music, which is true for Disclosure, Friend Within, all the assorted bassy house acts going on at the moment. What was exciting was that there was loads of great music focussed around a particular sound focussed around a couple of particular localities - something which was more or less meant to be impossible what with the internet and seapunk and witch house or whatever.
There's so many directions within jackin that could have been, and still could be such an interesting path. You've got all the properly hardcore euphoric hands in the air stuff (We Got a Love, Deep Love, Your Carress, all that stuff), Brent Kilner and his tech-step at 126 thing, and then artists like Lorenzo, Aggz, Chris Gresswell, Paul Lawrence just exploring all the contours, every wobble and warp of the jackin bassline. What we definitely don't need is for jackin just to become more like all the other bassy house out there.
Also the decline of bigtunes is such a shame too. That was such a great model, a central hub to get ALL of this stuff, where tracks would get released weeks after first appearing, where the artists could just upload them directly, no fuss, no labels etc. That just felt so much more hardcore/ravey going down to the record shop to pick up a white label that record signings, half-year release delays, and beatport....