UK Garage In 2001 – Down Down BIZZNIZZ

Part 2: The Tunes

Garage producers managed to outmanoeuvre the twin threats of pop and breakbeat by plugging into the capability of garage to make weird, teasing out the sense of wild disorientation that’s always existed at the heart of the music. It’s a tendency that started at the beginning of 2-step’s life with Dem 2’s android divas and Steve Gurley’s darkside paranoia, continued throughout garage’s crossover period with the bass excavations of Wookie and Zed Bias, and found itself in a radical new incarnation at the end of 2000 with James Lavonz’s utterly awesome “Mash Up Da Venue”. A jittery melange of whip-crack beats, stuttering vocal beatbox rhythms, eerie R&B vocals, indecipherable ragga chat and about four different basslines, “Mash Up Da Venue” comes on like Missy’s “Get Ur Freak On” stranded for a month in Jamaica with only daily doses of speed to keep it alive. It remains the most brilliant, forward-thinking dance track of 2000, and it cast a long shadow over the following year.

This tradition of weirdness flirts with darkness, but it’s mostly a different ‘dark’ to the edgy paranoia of jungle or hip hop; think instead of the over-sexualised euphoria of Chicago house, a world in which natural emotions and desires become so intense that they take on an air of the robotic, presumably because an ordinary human can’t stand that much stimulation. It’s that intensity that was picked up on in a big way last year; if garage is undeniably ’sexy’ music, in 2001 garage’s idea of sex was a rough, urgent affair, full of dangerous abandon, bruising enthusiasm and a lot of sharp fingernails. Steve Goodman at Hyperdub calls this amorphous internal genre ìnu-dark swingî, which pretty much encapsulates the competing, half-contradictory urges at work, the tension between lust and bad vibes. Listen to D’n'D’s “Pick It Up” (Remix), where a diva shrieks ìPick me up!î imperiously over a sly saxaphone riff, before the track switches over to a booming xylophone bassline somehow simultaneously pushed up way into the treble so that it scrapes out the insides of your ear with a rude insensitivity that’s almost delicious.

Intense is also a good way to describe ìNocturnalî, produced by Oris Jay under his Darqwan alias. As with many of the most experimental 2-step producers in ‘01, Jay’s sexuality is present but sublimated somewhere at a microscopic level within the groove – a snarling latin strut, with rustling counter-rhythms and mad bongos laced in between the stark, martial 2-step beats, over which Darqwan releases floods of lugubrious bass and throbbing electro synths. ìNocturnalî is unequivocally dark, deep and un-songful, but its lascivious bump & grind keeps its feminine, keeps it sexy. As one of 2-step’s darkest producers, Jay’s mission seems to be to constantly push at garage’s crucial balance between fear and lust in favour of the former, but most of the time he avoids actually toppling it as drum & bass did. Occasionally Jay’s tendencies towards the abstract do become too strong – some of his tracks resemble more closely the paranoid fracturescapes of Photek than anything else in garage. Thankfully, like his equally talented darkside mentor El-B, Jay will just as frequently swing in the opposite direction, introducing full vocals and pop-flavoured melodies just to retain that wonderful tension. He might horribly distend the tightrope, but he nonetheless successfully walks it.

It’s amazing how simply effective 2-step’s syncopation is in this regard, to the point where it’s hard to imagine a 2-step track that might actually sound wholly un-feminine. The most telling example of this rule is Zed Bias’s remix of DJ Zinc’s pounding breakbeat garage hit “138 Trek”, where Bias’s use of syncopation and warm textures thrillingly reinjects the femininity that Zinc worked so hard to remove. Predominantly working as a drum & bass producer, Zinc together with his breakbeat garage compatriots fetishises ideas of ìhardnessî, which is why he prefers rock-solid breakbeats to 2-step’s girlish syncopation. Bias’s beats – admittedly some of the sturdiest in 2-step – reveal the crucial misunderstanding underpinning this preference. Instead of weakening and undermining the masculine propulsion of Zinc’s coruscating bass-heavy groove, Bias actually takes it to increased heights by rendering it more uncertain and unstable. His tracks may be dark but they’re not claustrophobic; if anything they envision a world of pitch black freefall.

If contemporary jungle is all about psychic and physical ossification, locking into the straightahead groove and so becoming the perfect (and perfectly enclosed) machine, 2-step’s aura of danger and futureshock stems from its uncomfortable openness. These rhythms are almost dangerously unfinished and on the verge of disintegration, often tumbling from one bar to the next in such a chaotic fashion that I imagine them as decaying isotopes, constantly mutating into ever more freakish and dangerous grooves. To dance to them is to render yourself susceptible to rhythmic deception, to lose your footing as you stumble over the gaping chasms and sudden, spiking beats that wait for the unwary, or the flickers of seething bass that ooze from between the gaps like venomous bodily fluids.

To backtrack a little: I used the term ìmicroscopicî before in discussing the structure of garage’s grooves. It’s a word I’ve been thinking about a lot in relation to garage and its method of incorporating outside influences. It’s tempting to assume that this shrinking away from the worst excesses of garage’s crossover I discussed earlier might coincide with a tendency towards a purist purge and resurrection of a ìrealî or ìcoreî 2-step sound. The problem with this theory is that, so far at least, most producers have behaved in quite the opposite manner. Caught between breakbeats and pop, producers were left with no choice but to go everywhere else, with hip hop, dancehall, salsa, drum & bass, Belgian rave and even dub-techno worked into garage’s flexible structure in ever more intricate patterns.

What really distinguished garage in 2001 was the level to which producers strived to incorporate these alien sounds and sonic blueprints – nearly all of which were extent in the surface level flavouring of tracks through 2000 – at increasingly microscopic levels, twisting and distorting the basic 2-step beats into impossibly entangled hybrids. The evolution of Mystery Men’s ìShake Itî provides a good example: with its salsa riffs and bouncy bassline, the original ìShake Itî is basically Latin-tinged garage-pop, the sort of thing that J Lo might make if: a) she briefly went garage, and b) it was a good day for her. Lovely stuff, but it’s on the remix that the track really comes to life, locating the Latin influences within the rhythm by substituting the original’s straightforward beats for a near-spastic succession of snare hits that somehow creates a groove by striking at every other moment. It’s a stunning display of rhythmic sleight of hand; it’s also an undeniably Latin rhythm, but trying to disentangle the threads of Latin and 2-step from each other would prove an impossible task.

There was also, of course, that riddim: a headfucking, body-baffling Latin-dancehall syncopated beat that sounded like 2-step at double speed, bobbing up and down with a ferociously intense kick-kick-snare-kick-kick-snare pattern. I don’t know if it has a name, but it appeared in any number of tracks last year, the best place to hear it being the no-nonsense pummel of “Bouncing Flow” by K2 Family, where it benefits from being coupled with a similarly screwy MC-pattern. Starting its life in only the roughest, most dancehall-aligned underground tracks, the rhythm soon spread into the pop end of the scene with tracks like Chris Mac’s by turns slinky and hyperactive remix of Masterstepz & Celetia’s ìSorry (You Lied To Me)î, and reached its apotheosis in TJ Cases’s thrillingly bombastic ìOne By Oneî. A solid contender for garage tune of the year, ìOne By Oneî resembles a Whitney-style R&B-epic fractured into tiny shards that pit and swivel around cavernous bass rumbles, shockingly combining diva-drama with sonic largesse. No better proof could be offered that garage’s pop and underground inclinations still exist within a dialectic, trading ideas off each other with an open-mindedness that is the scene’s most valuable trait.

If there was one producer who continually managed to unify these inclinations into a particularly satisfying whole, it was Ed Case, whose endless stream of tracks and remixes revealed a garage take on dancehall that was both irresistible and yet totally individual and distinct. On his ‘01 updates of Monsta Boy’s ìSorryî his own ìYou’re Mineî and especially Gorillaz’s ìClint Eastwoodî, he sounds as ruthlessly efficient as Max Martin, channeling languidly lilting reggae and urgent rave into briskly sweet ‘n’ sour dance-pop (strangely, Case’s tracks always inspires me to use culinary imagery, their sharply opposed but strangely complementary flavours always putting me in mind of caramel drizzled over peanuts). A pop producer even at his ruffest, Case is a world away from the thoughtful experimentalism of Oris Jay or El-B, but offers as much cause for delight, proving there’s no set formula for this sort of musical frontier-living. The line ìthis music can go anywhereî is a well-worn cliche in dance music, trotted out when no one quite knows what to do next. In garage though (as with current hip hop), it rings true because not only are producers actually going everywhere, but they’re also discovering new routes there and back all the time.

It’s important to stress that UK Garage is not a flawless genre. There are plenty of duff tracks, failed experiments, cynical retreads and inferior items. It could easily all go down the toilet tomorrow. The biggest, most pleasant surprise for me throughout 2001 was that this didn’t happen, and so far there is nothing preventing a similarly vital 2002 (so maybe my karmic feedback loop exists after all….). The temptation is to shrug it off solely due to familiarity –we’ve been listening to it for a couple of years now, haven’t we? Surely it’s can’t be the source of the Next Big Thing! At its frequent peaks though, garage remains the most exciting dance music around, outperforming your expectations, challenging your complacency and, most of all, daring you to dance.