Pure Garage presents Four To The Floor, mixed by DJ EZ & Todd Edwards

surely this is garage qua garage's last gasp

i noticed a strange thing recently that's happened to me - while i infinitely prefer old 2step to grime, i'd rather listen to new grime than old 2step right now! it took me awhile to get accustomed to grime - i downloaded "Pulse X" as early as april '02, but hated it for more than a year and found a way to enjoy it only recently...jess, that independence records site you linked on technicolor was a great catalyst for me. i've noticed that that site has a nu old skool section too, but i'm still kinda afraid to spoil good memories by checking it out.

yeah i haven't listened to any old 2-step in a year or so. perhaps i od'd at the time?

meanwhile i have been listening to almost nothing but old jungle all week.

i think at the end of the day 2-step might be my favorite music ever.

od'ing - yeah, me too, i'm sure i'll come back to it in time.

another reason why i haven't downloaded tunes from independance records' old skool section is that i'm guessing old skool stuff suffers a lot more converted to 500kb wma snippets than grime does.

one thing i will say is that i find it odd that people are reverting all the way back to 4/4 speed garage rather than just endlessly replaying 2-step if they're going to "go old school". is it just easier to program if you're hacking it out?

what i find odd is how few grime comps there are. you'd think these guys would be falling all over themselves to put out 2cd mixes, yet the closest i've seen is that slimzee/god's gift set. is there some sort of clique thing goin on that i'm not clued into? (obviously, i guess...)

i imagine coming up with a fat bass sound is tougher than putting together the beats - maybe all the vocalists are following ms. dynamite into r+b?

it really is oddly like jungle circa late 92/early 93 where there are maybe 2 or 3 "memorable" comps from the period.

as compared to the THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of 2-step and rave comps floating around out there.

has anyone heard any of that so called "urban house" stuff? has the old guard REALLY gone back to the PRE-speed garage days? i don't have the chance to listen to 1xtra, and there's barely any mp3 sites for grime nowadays, let alone the Dreem Teem-ish stuff.

for me the saddest thing about garage splintering three-ways is that some great producers have found themselves on the wrong sides of the divide... i have a hunch that, say, El-B is still coming up with the goods, but it's no good that he's trapped in the dubstep camp... at least i'm happy to see Sticky still keeping up with grime. wonder what D'n'd are up to now, they were totally on fire last year.

a friend of mine bought "Street Beats" and says it's great, haven't still burned it off of him tho.

El B put out a nice 12 inch with one of the Tuff Jam guys this year, under the name El Tuff. Straight up 2-step, but well done, better than the Dem 2 comeback.

I feel like such an old man. I haven't listened to 2step nearly enough and know almost nothing about grime.

matos i have to repay you for the speed limits so keep an eye out you know where

fiddo, check yr email

"meanwhile i have been listening to almost nothing but old jungle all week. "

Synchronicity alert!

"i think at the end of the day 2-step might be my favorite music ever."

ha ha double alert!

"for me the saddest thing about garage splintering three-ways is that some great producers have found themselves on the wrong sides of the divide... i have a hunch that, say, El-B is still coming up with the goods, but it's no good that he's trapped in the dubstep camp... at least i'm happy to see Sticky still keeping up with grime. wonder what D'n'd are up to now, they were totally on fire last year."

Yeah I think this is the big problem with dubstep in a nutshell - it feels cut off now. I used to love El-B's pop mixes like the one he did for Dane Bowers!

D'n'D seem to playing all sides of the game, from dubstep (one of them is also Artwork) to continued bassy pop 2-step to the sort of heavy 4/4 that manages to get played by both the grime *and* the old-guard. I'm not sure if they've made any Roll Deep-style grime though.

i listened to sound of the pirates tonight and i could not believe the vitality this music still possesses two or three years on. the range is fucking stunning, aside from being basically a composite of everything i love most about music. (r&b vocals, pop dancehall, cheesy rapping, spacious nuanced beats competing with hard-as-nails bass pressure...basically every trope/cliche/innovation "urban" pop has come up with in the last thirty years.) if people are going to get in a fiddly cul de sac rut of retro-dance why not this open-ended template rather than staid old speed garage? (i suppose somehow i have just answered my own question.)

as i mentioned on the uk garage thread i have just realised what a fucking idiot i was for ignoring this music back then. i now have to play catch up.

Yeah Fiddo (and sorry if I'm spelling out the obvious), I think it's precisely because 2-step is so open-ended that it's been skipped over in the conservative rush back to speed garage. If the producers stopped off at "Sound of the Pirates" they'd be terrified of sliding inexorably towards grime. (How fucking great is "Sound of the Pirates" though! Single best *disc* of garage ever probably).

What's interesting is that briefly it looked like there was going to be a sunny 2-step revival (lots of mag critics were mentioning it mid last year), but myabe the powers that be (Dreem Teem etc.) felt that this wasn't distinct enough from grime/dubstep etc. to maintain as a defensible outpost.

Happy hardcore did the same thing by bringing back the 4/4 - the line between 'ardkore and jungle wasn't distinct enough so they took another step back.

yeah i guess at the end of the day the "retreat" will always lead back to 4/4. (this sort of goes against what i said on my blog yesterday about 4/4 vs. broken beat, but i think it still holds true mostly.)

Yeah that's an interesting quandary. Is broken beat a "retreat" in the sense that urban house is? And vice versa. In some ways they're also at opposite poles - rules vs no rules. It's usually in the center that all the action occurs.

One of the really nice things about the Bugz Fabric mix - which you were right about by the way - is that so many of the tracks *do* sound like they're adhering to some sort of groove rules, even if they differ from track to track (I'm thinking of that Bugz mix of Vikter Duplaix in particular though).

For broken beat maybe the problem arises when "expect the unexpected" becomes an oddly boring orthodoxy - when the beats are so over the place that there's no groove, when every last instrument conceivable is worked into the mix, when the time signatures change constantly.

With urban house the (theoretical) problem is that everyone knows *exactly* what to expect, which is where the use of 4/4 comes in: the use of 4/4 beats is less likely to morph or mutate than that of breakbeats or syncopated rhythms. On "Sound of the Pirates" there's all that delicious tension between grasping the rules of the music but also seeing how the music constantly seeks to undermine or bend those rules.

i think one of the major problems with coming at 4/4 music from a jungle angle - aside from having everything have to live up to prime jungle for sheer excitement - is that a 4/4 beat is rarely going to sound as exciting (in a roller-coaster, what-the-fuck?! kind of way) as a chopped up break. so one of the oddest things about me liking 2-step so much is how goddamn subtle most of it is...there's probably more interesting programming stuff going on in some ramsey & fen tunes than in remarc or dj ss, but it's all so subtly modulating, revolving around all those fills and accents, that it's never gonna slap you upside the head on first listen. and of course it's much more insinuating than house too; i could never imagine a 2-step record being monolithic till the brought in the breakbeats and wideboyz-style butchers block stuff.

i wonder if the "urban house" stuff still has all those itchy, textured drum sounds the best old speed garage had.

"i could never imagine a 2-step record being monolithic till the brought in the breakbeats and wideboyz-style butchers block stuff."

Yeah, the Wideboyz were probably the greatest (or at least most effective) practitioners of ruthless dancefloor 2-step. I remember there was a period from late 2000 to mid 2001 where I couldn't go to a 2-step night without hearing *at least* four of their tracks or remixes. As I recall their remix of UGC's "Glad You Came To Me" was utterly inescapable.

Interesting though how so many of those slinkier subtler 2-step numbers were absolute dancefloor bombs though; producers like Bump & Flex or Ray Hurley were able to make dancefloor tracks that *felt* ruthless just because they were so sexy, despite the relative absence of raucous energy. As always Bump & Flex deserves special praise for not only being pre-eminent at this (eg. "Got Myself Together") but also the master of the last great wave of energetic 2-step with his soca-beat style.

"i wonder if the "urban house" stuff still has all those itchy, textured drum sounds the best old speed garage had."

From what I've heard there seems to be a subtle split between on the one hand the conservative vocal cuts and straightahead Todd Edwards homages and on the other the slightly more frenetic and urgent style that El-Tuff developed - cut-up drums, really jerky, very much like the 4/4 that was around *just before* 2-step took over completely. I'm thinking of something like the (totally underrated!) New Horizons mix of "Destiny", which *sounds* like it's 2-step even though it's not. Evidently a lot of producers don't feel comfortable ignoring 2-step's lessons *entirely*.

The best El-Tuff track incidentally is definitely their dub mix of Ladies First's "I Can't Wait", although "2-3-Bass" is also really good.

i bought this for $3.47 at tower records tonight.

they had this comp for the same price but i passed ... all of the stuff i recognized i've already got elsewhere and all of the stuff i didn't have i didn't recognize. should i go back.

anyway is warner strategic marketing one of the greatest labels of all time? up there with rephlex, mego, planet mu and mille plateaux?

their resume makes it sound like they do business consulting or something

Warner Strategic Marketing (WSM) is responsible for the development and re-promotion of the Warner Music back catalogue

wow they released crews control! i wish i could find cheap garage comps too... the service stations seem to let me down, although i dont look very hard i guess

Vahid, i think you're better off without that "Bass, Breaks & Beats" thing. EZ's penchant for crappy breakbeat garage ruined the latter "Pure Garage" installments (vibelessly disjointed sequencing and annoyingly OTT crossfader trickery didn't help either) - a whole comp of the stuff is surely as dull as it gets.

yeah, this isn't super-great either. the todd edwards disc is a pretty good replacement for my as-yet-unbought copy of "locked on" (i've never seen one for less than like $30!) but the EZ disc is just ... not dread enough. why does he pitch everything up so much?

Bass, Breaks & Beats I don't have, BUT it's probably the only place you'll ever get to hear the Zed Bias remix of El-B's "Serious", which is absolutely awesome. In fact I think the mp3 I used to have may have been ripped from this mix. The rest doesn't look too inspiring though admittedly.