UK Bass Essentials

UK Bass Essentials

Bass music’s roots go back to the early ‘90s, when jungle—and crucially, the towering speaker stacks of Caribbean soundsystem culture—cracked the UK’s dance-music scene wide open. Rave had already set the preconditions for a state of permanent reinvention, and the innovations would come fast and furious, as rough-and-tumble jungle morphed into technically precise drum ’n’ bass, slinky house tunes begat whip-cracking garage, and the minimalist experiments of grime and dubstep opened up a whole new world of earth-shaking frequency. By the 2010s, experimental artists like Burial, Peverelist, and Zomby made UK bass one of dance music’s most dynamic movements. Not so much a clearly delineated subgenre as a zone of possibility, a space where lurching syncopations and low-end pressure collided with futuristic sound design and an attitude of defiant iconoclasm.

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