Where shall I take my intense fandom next? I’m thinking of maybe doing a tapestry of his face and sending it to the Hyperdub office.

I’ve got new neighbours. I had a “mutually assured cacophony” arrangement with the last lot - they tolerated my subwoofer, I tolerated their teenage son mutilating The Verve on his electric guitar in the adjoining room. But I’m worried the newbies won’t be so accommodating of bass pressure.

When I was at university, I loathed one of my housemates so much - a treacherous, Big Beat playing dwarf - that one afternoon I plugged my Korg MS-10 into my hi-fi amp, positioned the speakers to fire down against the floor (as his room was below mine), set the oscillator to “throb” and went out for the night. What a pathetic, ineffectual dork I was. As far as revenge strategies go, it’s on about the same level as my detailed circuit plans (aged 12) to build a pocket laser with which to scorch the flesh of the briefcase-snatching bullies who lay in wait for me on the long walk home to the vicarage. Why didn’t I punish my housemate with something aggressive and direct? Something with shit, or meat? (A friend tells a story about one houseshare which turned so toxic that a raw steak was nailed to a bedroom door, and not in a friendly way). Anyway…I’ve ordered a copy of Sonic Warfare. I’m worried it’s going to be all fucking academic and I’ll end up alienated and bewildered by it, that I’ll no longer feel a deep fanboy affinity with Kode9 even though I own his exact fucking coat. I’ll let you know.

1. Instra:mental - Watching You
2. Breakage - Clarendon
3. Instra:mental - Sakura
4. MC Conrad + DJ Furney - Drum Tools
5. Bok Bok - Ripe Banana
6. DJ Champion - Motherboard
7. Bubblez - Ice Rink
8. Untitled
9. Scratcha DVA - Nasty Nasty Nasty (Roska remix)
10. Cooly G - Dis Boy
11. Untold - Just For You (Roska remix)
12. Instra:mental - Leave It All Behind
13. Martyn - Mega Drive Generation
14. Kode9 + Space Ape - 2 Far Gone
15. Skream - What Did He Say
16. DJ Madd - Someone (Breakage’s unspecified remix)
17. Distance - Nomad
18. Loefah - It’s Yours
19. Pinch ft Yolanda - Get Up (Jack Sparrow remix)
20. DLX - Matter Of Fact (Breakage’s relatively speaking mix)
21. Kode9 + Space Ape - Time Patrol
22. Ramadanman - Revenue
23. Pangaea - Memories
24. Untold - Nobody Likes A Smart Arse
25. Naphta - Soundclash (Grievous Angel remix)
26. Joy Orbison - Hyph Mngo

00:00:00 (tracks 1 - 4): ~175BPM section
Four drum & bass tunes to kick off because I recorded this mix with a mate in mind who’s into it. I haven’t engaged seriously with the genre for a decade but I’ve started to buy the odd bit here and there, and I love the dBridge school of spacious D & B (which caused me a proper “what the fuck is this?” moment when I heard him play at my first Forward back at the start of this year)…as opposed to the tired and tiring “fill every frequency slot” stuff I normally seem to hear. There was a dBridge tune I wanted to include in this but I couldn’t fit it in without buying an extra CDJ. All four of these records are very different (but ace), and mixed together they add up to a genre crime I expect, but never mind! My favourite track is the epic, epic Clarendon which has one of the baddest jungle basslines ever.

00:11:56 (tracks 5 - 14): ~130BPM section
I said before that this is the centerpiece of the set, and musically this is the happy place that 2009 has taken me to. I’ve hubristically thrown in one of my own creations which is a sort of junglist / funky hybrid. Really excited about this direction in 2010!

00:38:44 (tracks 15 - 26): ~140BPM section
Dubstep roundup. More genre crimes but I intended this section as a varied showcase of dubstep sounds to try and steer my mate clear of Chase & Status and all that gormless shite. Mostly these are 2009 tunes but I also threw in a couple of enduring favourites (It’s Yours and Nomad). The mixing is rough in places because this section was recorded with an absolute skinfull of mulled wine in me when I should have been packing to go on holiday. (In fact there were two takes of this, from which I’ve cherry-picked the best bits and edited them together in Logic…) Matter of Fact for me will forever be associated with hearing the Plastic People sound system for the first time. Even though I own the record, in there it sounded like something else…

Enjoy!

The London dubstep scene, for example, is accessible and welcoming to participants from a wide range of social backgrounds in a way that the “underground” jungle scene never was, but it is also characterised by a certain self-consciousness which is inevitably somewhat embarrassing to those who can remember what the jungle scene felt like “back in the day”. Dubstep is an internationally-successful genre whose devotees desperately want to belong to a “scene” and to listen to avant-garde music with its roots in reggae, jungle and grime. Jungle, on the other hand, was essentially a local music - a seemingly spontaneous bricolage of reggae, hip-hop, dancehall, house and techno which nonetheless sounded entirely new and entirely unique - made for local dance crowds. It took most intellectuals, critics, audiences and producers from outside of that milieu several years to stop dismissing it as meaningless proletarian noise and to realise its musical importance, despite the efforts of early advocates such as Reynolds himself.

i definitely felt some (slightly) embarrassed recognition on reading this! as awkward 16 year olds living in an inward-looking northern town, me and my friends’ only real connection to developments in jungle came through the voracious consumption of Dreamscape / Pleasuredome tape packs and occasional confused/skint forays into our local underground record shop. now i’m an older, better off, terminally nostalgic 30 year old dad living in london, i jumped on dubstep as soon as i heard it (2004?). i love, love the music, but i’ll admit openly that in terms of personal meaning to me, it also represents a longed-for “second chance” to be involved (still very peripherally in my case) in a junglesque music scene.

edit
one thing that dubstep has, which i loved about jungle, is a pretty fast pace of innovation. i remember it seemed that jungle pushed itself forward so quickly from one season to the next - there would be a vogue for Arsonist style bass sounds, then it all went sort of techno, etc - and i think dubstep’s "edges" (which aren’t even edges in my opinion) have an even faster pace and a wider range of mutations and inbound influences. i feel a lot of excitement from this, and the fact that i know it can’t last makes it even more exciting as i self-consciously savour the moment…

edit 2
this snippet from a Ramadanman interview gave me vertigo when i encountered it:

When did you first get into UK bass music?

I guess it was probably jungle. I never really got into it that much, but I bought an LTJ Bukem CD when I about 12. I guess that was about 2000