MyDoorsAreOpen said:
In my experience, people who grew up thinking of classical or 'easy listening' stuff -- anything that uses sweeping lush violin solos or other melodies in the upper frequencies -- as their musical standard of beauty, are pretty turned off to drum n bass. For example, I imagine DnB being a hard sell in China, where the traditional music uses percussion very sparingly, and 'soft' shlock like The Carpenters is a perennial favorite.
I dunno man, sweeping melodies are a big love of mine and that is one of the reasons why I first got into dnb. It depends what sort of dnb ur listening to. Proper ambient dnb has melodies that blow trance, house, garage, pretty much anything except good ambient music out of the water. But u could go to 100 dnb raves a year and never hear a single track of it.
Rabbi said:
I got into dnb in the early 90's and was really into stuff like Bukem, Metalheadz, Subase, etc. Dnb was about exactly that, drums and bass. Creative beats. Soulful bass. Funk!
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indeed. although the breaks were noticeably better, the melodies were a lot better too. For me, at some point drum n bass has lost itself, it used to be drum n bass, now its just a form of fast breakbeat techno/house. You got all these suposid styles, tech step, liquid, jump up, drum funk, neuro funk blah blah, to me 99% of the muisc that fits into these catagories is 1 strain of dnb. Synthetic, 2 step rolling techno basicly. Its barely dnb, theres as much attention to the beats in house now days as there is in dnb. Some good stuff out there, people like Fanu are caining it, Seba etc. But yeah, I would say I love dnb but listening to u guys talk what the majority of u would seem to regard as dnb Ive not rly got a lot of time for.
There are some artists whos work before 2000ish was amoung the most exquisit electronic music ever produced, and really put dnb center stage amoung the main genres of dance on all fronts, melody, rhythm, structure, texture, the full works.
Photek
Source Direct
Goldie
4 Hero
Dj Crystl
Boymerang
Dillinja
Peshay
J Majik
Lemon D
Id argue the stuff these people have out out can only really be matched by the likes of Amon Tobin, Future Sound Of London, maybe more recently Boxcutter, BT and Fanu. And hence dnb, in terms of its backlog is still the greatest genre electronic music has yet to produce. But unless u got an extensive knowledge of these artists music between 1994 and 1998, then were not really talking about the same thing. If ur only familliar with their more recent stuff, or u dont really know more than 7/8 tunes from each of them, then Id have to probably agree with the people who are saying the sort of dnb ud be aware of walking into a club today is 95% rubbish. Id say the same for any of the staple genres atm though, its in no way alone in my estimation, all the 4/4 genres have always been this bad at least back when proper ambient/dark jungle was beign made it elivated itself above elementry synth and sequencer music.b And Im not trying to be elitist about it and 'oh if its not oldschool its shit', thats not the sort of person I am at all, Id love it if dnb was still rocking out but Im just not feeling whats coming out anymore sadly, it almsot pains me to say it but its true.
Theres a thread on this forum about dubstep, I mentioned some artists there, Gravious and Boxcutter, those 2 along with Amon Tobin, for me, are really carrying the spirit of the dnb I used to be into a lot more than modern dnb. To me these artists music bares a closer resemblance to what I really dig in jungle music.
