Sounds of da future: the new wave of electronic garage

Left: Romanian producer TRG


The endlessly shifting, fractious DNA helix of dance music evolves and mutates from one week to the next. What could be the biggest news of the moment is quickly old hat, as genres become new ones, sub strands are conceived from the fecund loins of rave culture, and sounds move on.

While dubstep and the new wave of UK funky (think Afro house beats and offbeat Soca percussion, mixed with electronic dubby basslines) are considered to be the best thing since sliced bread right now, a sleeping giant is already stirring from its slumber, and threatening to engulf those sounds in 2009 - that of future garage.

Indeed, like many such nebulous descriptions, the glibly conceived term future garage has its roots in music that has already existed - UK garage, Detroit techno, grime, and of course dubstep - but simply arranges them in a way so compelling and crisp that it induces legions to follow its lead, and create their own twists on the formula.

For many, Burial's 'Untrue', with it's sublime screwface Brian Eno posturing and melancholic psycho-geographic audio depictions of London, was year dot. Pitch shifting the ultra bright, pink neon love lorn tones of UK garage and R&B divas into tear stained, fractured, abyssal stares, and ditching the rave entropy SSSLLLOOWWW beats of dubstep for the polyrhythmic bump 'n' grind funk shuffle of UK garage and two step, but of course drenched in dark London rains of synth sadness, Burial was molding something new, an evolved language from the much missed glory days.

But the man also known as Will Bevan's late 2007 darkage classic (both in the sense of dark garage and 'dark - age') was not the only record to embrace the shuffling rhythm and pair it with more pitchy backdrops. Beneath the surface, a whole movement has been gathering that looks set to rapidly consume the molasses drums of dubstep. This mutant two step is everywhere- from Romanian producer TRG's conflations of prime era Photek, hardcore rave stabs and the bump 'n' flex beats of '97 London, to Cloud's 'Timekeeper', a bizarre boom tick tick track blending Aphex Twin atmospherics, the dubbed out melodica of Augustus Pablo, and those tell tale street rhythms to mesmeric effect. Spatial, Pangaea, Martyn, 2562, Silkie and many more have all twisted the mid tempo, sinuous grooves of garage into their own singular forms. But why now?

With dubstep's dominance at an all time high, it's perhaps become apparent that the slowest beats of that genre simply don't translate to the dancefloor all that well. Burning trees at home is a different matter, but however rib rattling the bass waves sound pumping out of a Funktion One stack in a club, if the beats are too slow, all you can do is shuffle around moodily. Future garage gets the best of all worlds, capturing the dark atmospherics, and sublow pressure of dubstep, but wraps them in those bubbling beats - impossible to resist in their funking mood to swing.

Future garage takes those early flipside experiments of the Groove Chronicles, El-B, and Menta set - the darker, bass heavy instrumental'dubs' of more commercial garage tracks tucked away on b-sides, that so fascinated a young Skream, Hatcha, et al and kicked off dubstep - and continues the lineage in a more literal, and yet more willing to experiment manner, within the rhythmic strictures, of course. This is set to be an endless fascinating annum in the continual evolution of the genre. Reload and come again!

Skull Disco: Dystopian beats

Headbusting, cranium crunching, cerebellum cauterizing - that's the output of ostensible dubstep label Skull Disco, now defunct after only a handful of releases. And yet, in only a few slow, quiet but immensely menacing releases, they've utterly altered the musical landscape of UK bass culture and beyond.

Skull Disco is the most potent musical vision of a dark future we've witnessed thus far, where swooping phantasms of malevolent machinery skim over our heads, the ghosts of disquiet never far behind. Skull Disco's trick - and the name evokes, quite literally, our synaptic connections dancing and pinging back and forth, such are the audio hallucinations they conjure - is to make this darkness compelling, utterly immersive, and even spine tinglingly beautiful.

Perfectly capturing the malaise that currently enshrouds the globe, tracks by only a handful of artists - Appleblim, Shackleton and Gatekeeper - combine a string of cultural signifiers in bizarre and gob smacking new ways.

Dubwise echoes, samples of dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, 'Mentasm' hoovers, hardcore synth stabs are placed in an unfamiliar, fearful context. Shackleton's 'Hamas Rule' is extraordinary - an Arabesque procession of clicks and Middle Eastern drum hits, and the occasional Oriental melody, but charged with disquiet, evoking an uneasy peace before the next barrage of weaponry and all the more chilling in the current climate of war between Hamas' Gaza and Israel.

Appleblim's 'Fear' is prickles of cold sweat forming on the back of your neck, immense cityblock demolishing waves of bass summoned from the Earth, riding a slow, entropic beat, as Kwesi Johnson issues his ghostly warning of incipient tension: 'Madness tight in the heads of the rebels", evil blades of '97 vintage tech step synths cutting through the track.

Shackleton's 'Blood On My Hands' bears the same blueprint of 'Hamas Rule', but instead coasts on barely there Oriental percussion, and barely audible spoken word intonations beneath, as spectral keys crystallize into being.

Their first compilation, 'Soundboy Punishments', on which these tracks appear, is the perfect entry point, and a gateway into a new sonic portal, but 'Soundboy's Gravestone Descecrated by Vandals' similarly explores their compellingly twisted logic and narratives of UK bass gothic. The titles themselves place Skull Disco in the distinguished lineage of soundsystem crushing dub culture, referencing the 'soundboy murder' exhortations of dancehall and junglist toasters. Let the music into your skull and leave its indelible mark.