Join The Future: Why Bleep Still Matters
On Sunday March 7th, author, music journalist and researcher Matt Anniss will host a six-hour takeover loosely based on his acclaimed book Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music. Here he explains what motivated him to write the book, why he thinks Bleep Techno still matters in 2021, and what we can expect from Sunday’s broadcast…
Most of my friends and family initially thought I was either bonkers, or that Bleep was not significant enough to justify an entire book.
When I first started telling friends in Bristol that I was going to write a book on Bleep & Bass — or Bleep Techno as it is more commonly known — I received some fairly puzzled responses. It was 2014 and I’d just written an article for Resident Advisor about the style, dubbing the Bleep movement that initially emerged from Yorkshire in late 1988 and 1989, “Britain’s first bass revolution”.
Most of my friends and family initially thought I was either bonkers, or that Bleep was not significant enough to justify an entire book. Yet I firmly believed — as I suppose I would — that the story of the style had not been told, and that it played a far more significant role in the development of British dance music — and in particular the sub-bass-heavy variants that have long marked out club-focused styles birthed on this septic Isle — than others had previously acknowledged.
Those who have read Simon Reynolds’ book Energy Flash (1998), or lots of books since, will be aware of his “hardcore continuum” theory, which states that all subsequent manifestations of UK bass music — jungle, drum & bass, speed garage, two-step garage, breakstep and dubstep specifically — can trace their roots back to breakbeat hardcore. Reynolds rightly states that all of these styles owe a lot to Jamaican music and soundsystem culture, but incorrectly says that it was hardcore where British dance music adopted deep dub bass and some of the rhythmic ticks of reggae.
From the start, I was keen to set the record state. The first-ever Bleep and Bass record, Unique 3 and the Mad Musician’s double A-side ‘Only The Beginning/The Theme’, was delivered to selected record stores in the North of England in the autumn of 1988, pre-dating the first sub-heavy, dub and reggae-influenced breakbeat hardcore records by at least a year.
Unique 3 and the Mad Musician’s record drew up a blueprint that combined a weighty bassline — heavier than anything previously featured in US or UK house and techno records — with sparse, alien electronic bleeps, cheap synth-strings influenced by the sci-fi sounds of Detroit techno, and drums that drew much from Chicago house and New York electro.
In the two years that followed, many more records emerged from Yorkshire and the Midlands, in particular, that expanded on this blueprint, adding further rhythmic elements lifted from steppers reggae and dub, as well as more obvious Motor City techno and New York electro style sounds. A “bass war” broke out, with producers around the UK, inspired by the sheer weight of records such as LFO’s ‘LFO’, Ability II’s ‘Pressure Dub’, Nightmares on Wax’s ‘Aftermath’ and Ital Rockers’ ‘Ital’s Anthem’, desperately trying to get the deepest, loudest and warmest sub-bass their equipment and ears could muster.
Bleep was the first manifestation of something larger: distinctively British dance music that could only have been birthed in the UK’s post-industrial cities
The records that emerged in their wake included a swathe from London that largely ignored the electro and house influences, instead, utilising breakbeats lifted from hip-hop and funk records, adding their own dub style bass, bleeping melodies, and ragga samples. Many of the earliest breakbeat hardcore records were, as I say in Join The Future, really “Bleep & Breaks” records. Hardcore became something totally different when it started speeding up from 1992 onwards, with the earliest jungle records following a year later.
Since those days, there have been many additional variations of what would now be called “UK bass” or “British bass music”; all of these owe a great deal to Bleep & Bass and the UK bass blueprint it created, even if the pioneers of, say, dubstep or bassline may not cite the style as a direct inspiration. Bleep was the first manifestation of something larger: distinctively British dance music that could only have been birthed in the UK’s post-industrial cities, where near 70 years of immigration from the Caribbean has created exactly the right social and cultural ingredients for musical mutations. This is why Bleep still matters: it was the start of something that is now as much a part of Britain’s cultural identity as punk, Merseybeat or, closer to home, the Bristol sound.
Proving my theory and documenting something that genuinely hadn’t been to any extent, was what drove me to spend five years researching the book, but I also wanted to try and figure out why Bleep emerged, and in the places it did. To understand where we’re going, we need to learn from what came before.
In the case of Bleep and Bass, many different things fed into this: Northern Soul, jazz-funk and the ‘all-dayer’ scene; the strength of jazz-dancing and footworking in the North and Midlands in the early to mid 1980s; the strength of soundsystem culture and the sheer number of unlicensed ‘Blues’ clubs in Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield; the fact that the North and the Midlands fell in love with house music much earlier than London and the South; and the very particular socio-economic conditions within British cities — and particularly those that had thrived on heavy industry — in the Thatcher era.
I won’t go into those now — buy the book via the Velocity Press website if you want to know more — but some of this pre-history will be featured in the Join The Future special on Noods. I wanted to do something with audio, instead of print, that loosely told the same story, while also including new interviews and DJ mixes. The takeover was originally planned for early summer 2020, but personal circumstances meant that it had to be delayed until this year. I am grateful to Leon, Jack, Owain, Izzy and the rest of the Noods crew for accommodating this.
So what can you expect on Sunday? Well, for starters, it’s a story told in five parts (or six for the slightly longer archived version, which will appear on the Noods site and Mixcloud a few days after broadcast). The first two parts look at the roots of Bleep, with two special guest mixes: a killer 80s electro workout from Central Processing Unit boss CP Smith, and a specially commissioned trip through late 80s and early 90s steppers reggae and digi-dub from JD Twitch of Glasgow duo Optimo. Twitch wrote the foreword to the book and it was on his Cease& Desist label that the JTF compilation was released. The second part also contains an edited excerpt of a conversation I had with Rob Gordon, the producer and mixer most often credited with defining the Bleep & Bass sound, at No Bounds festival 2019.
Part three boasts two extended features on producers from outside of Bleep’s Yorkshire heartlands who gained huge inspiration from the style at the turn of the 90s. There’s an interview with Peter Duggal, whose 1990 records as Doggy and Demonik have just been reissued, and an interview with — and even better, a mix from — WNCL Recordings supremo Bob Bhamra AKA West Norwood Cassette Library.
The fourth episode is subtitled Bleeps International. It will contain a look at how Bleep & Bass influenced some within America and Canada to create their own sub-heavy takes on techno, and a superb mix of Bleep & Bass and related tunes (old and new) from a young female Dutch DJ called Titia, who is best known for her links with Clone and being a resident at leading Amsterdam LGBTQI+ club night IsBurning.
The final episode brings us bang up to date and is based around two features: a discussion of Yorkshire’s own garage mutation, bassline, with Breaker Breaker boss (and Warehouse Music artist) Haider — a bassline aficionado who first DJ’d and produced in and around Sheffield as DJ DS1 — and a contemporary UK bass mix-up from another son of the Steel City, Groundwork’s Porter Brook. In the archived version of the takeover, the final episode will run to 90 minutes and include an additional interview with Porter Brook.
Throughout the takeover, I will be providing context and commentary, in some places making use of snippets from some of the 100-plus interviews I did during my research for Join The Future. It will be informative and educational, then, but also entertaining. I can’t wait for you to hear the guest mixes, because all of them are exceptionally good.
One final thing: in recent times, many labels have announced compilations focused on Bleep, and reissues of rare Bleep releases. I’m genuinely proud that my quest to put the sound back into the spotlight has inspired others to dig into it more. Perhaps Bleep is finally getting the recognition it deserves.
Noods Radio is an independent radio station broadcasting from Bristol’s Stokes Croft. Founded in 2015 and born from Sunday music sessions, the station has grown to become the home of faces from around the globe. Tune in with open ears for daily shows from the misfits, dancers, collectors and selectors that make up our community.
