THE BEATS

(still being updated…)

Swat crew:

NA crew:

Ben:

South­side 13 crew:

Click76 crew:

Siro:

Daos:

Ben:

Mr.Chick:

Liger:

KD:

Tom:

Ben:

Mr.Chick:

KD:

Daos:

Siro:

Day 4:

Siro:

Cane:

DaoS:

Ben:

Mr.Chick:

Kd + Toms:

Liger:

Erik:

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It seems like in the last few months things have been look­ing up for under­ground music in HCMC, espe­cially for bass music. There was the amaz­ing Goldie gig in Cage in Decem­ber of course, but also the spec­ta­cle of so many peo­ple danc­ing to dub­step when the Gaslamp Killer tore the roof off Cage in Novem­ber. A cou­ple of years ago I never imag­ined there would be even one per­son danc­ing to dub­step in Viet­nam, so to see so many peo­ple enjoy­ing the 25 min­utes or so of solid wob­ble dub­step that GLK started off his set with was inspir­ing. Plus more and more local DJs are incor­po­rat­ing dub­step into their sets. Shout out to Jase here, and also to Fugu and Mic­mac from Jet­lag, who’ve all been push­ing qual­ity dub­step recently both in online mixes and live sets.

But even though dub­step is just start­ing to break through in Viet­nam, and only became really pop­u­lar around the world in the last 2 years or so, it’s a scene that’s been devel­op­ing in Eng­land for the last decade. There’s already plenty of places online where you can read the con­vo­luted story of how dub­step evolved out of 2-step garage (just look up “dub­step” on Wikipedia), so this post is going to be more of a per­sonal fan­boy type of piece about my first expo­sure to the sound in 2004 and how I finally got to see one of my favorite DJs from that era 5 years later. If you don’t feel like read­ing some fan­boy rant­ing then skip this post, but you might still want to scroll down to the bot­tom and down­load the awe­some old school dub­step mix by Youngsta that I upped.

In 2004 I was liv­ing in Bris­tol. I was excited to be in the city of Mas­sive Attack and Roni Size, but by 2004 the echoes of the 90s drum’n'bass and (ahem) trip-hop explo­sions were really start­ing to die out. I was look­ing around for excit­ing new music, but there didn’t seem to be much around at the time except for the Lon­don grime scene – and you couldn’t get much of that on CD except for the Dizzee Ras­cal and Wiley albums and a cou­ple of the under­ground “Lord of the Decks” type com­pi­la­tions that you could only buy in a hand­ful of spe­cial­ist stores. So there was quite a lot of buzz when respected elec­tron­ica label Rephlex announced the release of a new com­pi­la­tion just called “Grime”. I rushed out and bought it on the day it came out, and still remem­ber how con­fused I was when I brought it home and realised that this “grime” CD was ALL INSTRUMENTAL WITH NO MCS.

After scour­ing a bunch of forums and blogs, I learnt that the music on this Reh­plex com­pi­la­tion wasn’t grime at all, but another muta­tion of UK garage known as “dub­step” which had oozed out of Croy­don in South Lon­don. I loved the music on the CD and was ready to uncon­di­tion­ally love any­thing with the word “dub” in it. I wanted more, but there was hardly any­thing else avail­able. Apart from the two Horse­power Pro­duc­tions albums and the “Dub­step All­stars Vol. 1″ mix by Hatcha (which seemed to be out of print and com­pletely unavail­able at that time), all the action was still on lim­ited run 12″s or down­loaded mixes/pirate radio ses­sions. It wasn’t until a few months later, just before I left to go back to Aus­tralia in Sep­tem­ber 2004, that I finally found another dub­step CD to buy at the leg­endary Rhythm Divi­sion record store in Hack­ney. It seemed to be a promo for a club in East Lon­don called FWD>>, which I’d heard of but never made the jour­ney from Bris­tol to Lon­don to attend. The CD was a 50 minute mix by a DJ called Youngsta live at FWD>>.

Back in Aus­tralia I played the CD obses­sively. This was most excit­ing music I’d heard in the new decade. It was dark and heavy like the doom metal I’d lis­tend to for the last few years, but still funky. I was kick­ing myself for never hav­ing gone to check out FWD>> when I was in Eng­land, and spent a lot of time online read­ing any­thing I could find about dub­step and down­load­ing mixes. I read with amaze­ment how in the early days at FWD>>, when this mind-blowing sound was being forged, there were often less than 10 peo­ple in the entire club.

For most of 2005 dub­step was still deep under­ground, and the sound seemed to keep get­ting darker and heav­ier. This was the half­step era when Loe­fah dom­i­nated the scene with ultra-minimal anthems like “Root” and “Hor­ror Show”. Finally in mid-2005 Tempa Records dropped the long awaited “Dub­step All­stars Vol. 2″ mix CD with none other than Youngsta at the helm. “Dub­step All­stars Vol. 2″ was a clas­sic doc­u­ment of 2005 half­step with plenty of Loe­fah and Dig­i­tal Mys­tikz tunes, but it also included a slightly electro-tinged tune called “Mid­night Request Line” by a Croy­don teenager known as Skream. Of course if you know some dub­step his­tory, you’ll know that “Mid­night Request Line” was prob­a­bly THE tune which saw dub­step start cross­ing over into wider club­land and things have kept get­ting big­ger since then. There was the Dub­step Wars radio spe­cial in early 2006, the Bur­ial phe­nom­e­non, Caspa and Rusko doing the first Fab­ri­clive dub­step mix, mas­sive dub­step nights at Min­istry of Sound in Lon­don and Skream becom­ing even more famous for the La Roux “In for the Kill” remix then he was for “Mid­night Request Line”. By 2009 dub­step was the hottest “new” music on the planet.

But after all those years, I still hadn’t made it to FWD>>, and I still hadn’t seen Youngsta play. I finally put that right in Octo­ber 2009 when I flew from Frank­furt to Lon­don just to catch a Sun­day night FWD line-up that included Youngsta and the great DJ Dis­tance. The next cou­ple of pho­tos are all snaps of Youngsta play­ing that night.

Even though I’d been lis­ten­ing to Dub­step since 2004, I realise that I never really knew what Dub­step was until I went to FWD>>. First of all, FWD>> is a small, no frills base­ment room but it has an absolutely wicked sound sys­tem. When I walked in DJ Dis­tance was play­ing and the sub was so pow­er­ful that every sin­gle note of the bass was like a punch to the solar plexus. On top of that the room was almost com­pletely dark, with the only illu­mi­na­tion being from the lights of the DJ booth (the lights didn’t come on until it was almost time to go home). The audi­ence was almost slam-dancing. Hear­ing dub­step in the dark, in a mass of heav­ing peo­ple and through that gut-churning sound sys­tem was a com­pletely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence to lis­ten­ing to it at home or in a club that wasn’t set up for the true headz.

DJ Dis­tance was great that night but Youngsta was an absolute rev­e­la­tion. Just before he came on the mon­i­tors packed in, so Youngsta pro­ceeded to do his entire set with no mon­i­tors. Dub­step is noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult for many peo­ple to mix but Youngsta laid down a tehc­ni­cally per­fect set of neo-halfstep (think Loe­fah‘s new Swamp 81 label). After wit­ness­ing Youngsta that night and tak­ing into account both his sem­i­nal role in devel­op­ing the dub­step scene in its early days and his tech­ni­cal skills, I’m ready to call him as one of the great­est DJs of all time.

But what was truly inspir­ing that night was feel­ing like I’d been able to drink a lit­tle bit at the source of my favourite music. Even though dub­step is now a mas­sive global phe­nom­e­non, I was still watch­ing one of the orig­i­na­tor DJs at one of the club nights that birthed the sound (even though FWD>> is now at Plas­tic Peo­ple, not at its orig­i­nal Vel­vet Rooms loca­tion when dub­step was being born). I thought about how this world­wide scene had been born from a few peo­ple at a tiny club, peo­ple who per­se­vered and kept DJing and pro­duc­ing tunes even when less than 10 peo­ple were com­ing out to hear them. This is the kind of thing that gives me hope that one day Viet­nam will also have an awe­some under­ground elec­tronic music scene.

So with­out fur­ther ado, here’s an upload of the first Youngsta mix I ever heard, For­ward Live Vol. 1 from way back in 2004. Lis­ten to how fresh and vital this music still sounds six years later. I hope some Viet­namese kids down­load this and one day pro­duce cru­cial dub pres­sure right out of the Mekong Delta.

For­ward Live Vol_ 01

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