For a good part of the last two decades drum ‘n’ bass has been a bit of a punchline. A short-lived mostly club scene in the 1990s – with occasional commercial appeal – it quickly got superseded by the fast pace of electronic music innovation.
However, given we now exist in all musical time periods at once what were once time-bound movements can re-appear in intriguing ways. Earlier this year I was riding through the Darling Gardens in Melbourne and there was a group of young goths sitting in the gazebo, smoking pot, and listening to drum ‘n’ bass. It was both disconcerting in that I felt completely ignorant of current youth culture, but also felt like an incredible way for the genre to re-emerge.
Back in the mid-late 90s, the Asian Dub Foundation sought to take the genre out of the club and into a more conventional band setting - fusing it with a South Asian inspired rock. The band’s 1997 single Buzzin’ is an absolute triumph of genre melding and high energy vibe setting. And singer Deeder’s cry of “drums and bass!” at the end of the bridge is hilarious.
Although mostly a UK phenomenon, drum ‘n’ bass found its way both into Australia and into strange new places. Melbourne dream-pop (ish) band Underground Lovers decided to incorporate the style of beat-making into their song Jumbled In The Common Box from their 1997 album Ways T’ Burn. Setting it to a WH Auden poem. With Auden having died in the early-1970s, he unfortunately never got to appreciate how his poetry would become enhanced by a skittering beat.