Episode 190: That Old Bristol Groove

I wanted a solid drum and bass groove and I wanted it to hold for most of the half hour. Thirty minutes at 170, and the only ups and downs are energy breaks, places to breathe before it rolls again. The picture in my head was DJing a properly active dance party, the kind where people came to get down and do not need pop hits recited at them. They need rhythms and basslines rolling through, and that is what this is. The melodic parts are there for flavour, some cerebral bits to think about while you follow your feet. It was a single afternoon. More than once during production I set a thirty-two bar marker cycling and just let it go round and round, not working, just feeling the groove. There were numerous places where I could not keep my feet still or keep my face from smiling. I was not thinking about anything else while I made it, not the books I have been reading, not the machines. It was a fun afternoon making something I would love to watch people groove to. Not yelling and screaming. Just grooving along. Here is the part that is different about this one. Thirty-two tracks, and nothing recorded in from outside, no horn, no real piano. Thirty-four Apple Loops, which for this show is unheard of, since most episodes borrow one or none. But every one of them is a beat or a fill or a riser. The loops were strictly for the drums, stacked and combined so it stays interesting and never goes to raw repetition. Everything with a pitch is mine. The bass and the melodic parts were the fun of it, layering different synths together, an FM bass under a modular sequence under an organ, to get textures and tonality wider than any single track could give me. There is a vinyl crackle running over the whole thing that I put there on purpose. It reads as E minor, same key and same tempo as 188, so call them siblings. But it opens in E major and stays bright for six minutes, the room filling before the floor commits. Then it settles into E minor from ten to twenty, and from twenty-two to twenty-seven it goes to A minor and gets more certain of itself than anywhere else on the record. That is the stretch where nobody is thinking anymore. The last two minutes come home to E minor. It feels very Bristol old school in places, with some English dubstep from before the brostep years and just a little bit of tearout in it. Thirty minutes and eight seconds. That old Bristol groove.