Future garage's USP?

[Blackdown]

What is future garage's - to use a bull$hit bingo phrase - unique selling point [USP]?

Scenes that exist to follow in the footsteps of another, long since past scene, seldom establish their own sense of identity and ideas nor have the momentum and popular support the original movement. What can future garage do to establish itself as different and distinct - but not a re-run of - UK garage?

[spaceman/wasteman]

Why? are you 'curating' a Future Garage compilation and wanna tag line?

[Fundamental]

What I get from 'future garage' or more just '2-step garage' is...

- it has the depth and weight of dubstep, the introspection, the implosion.
- You can dance. It has the groove and shuffle of UKG, which makes it potentially ripe for the dancefloor (obviously it seldom gets played in clubs atm)
- the focus is on the beats and is not MC or ego like it was yesteryear. (Butterz are doing a similar thing in grime.)
- it doesn't wobble, suit ketamine, promote violence and you can't mosh to it.
- it's not dry, boring and muso like techno, house and some of bass music.
- it is a challenge to produce well (I still think relatively few can do it well.)
- you can wear trainers in Fabric and XoYo

Downsides:
-Few are producing it really well (yet.)
That is quite simply because it is hard to make. Harder than say someone entering into dubstep with their first tune circa 2005.
- some garage-derived bass music that I like has become techno-muso music. (Resident Advisor *cough)
- It's not getting enough airplay, vinyl releases and girls. This is changing.

Sometimes you need to take a step back to go forwards. Yet there is nothing retrogressive about acts such as Dark Sky, Sully, Spatial, XXXY, Jamie Grind, Tessela, Kastle, Pariah, Fantastic Mr Fox. I'd argue that Ramadanman, SBTRKT, Scuba, Joy Orbison all make garage in some capacity, you just need to join the dots.

[Stealth Elf]

It's fucking epic??

[gremino]

That is quite simply because it is hard to make. Harder than say someone entering into dubstep with their first tune circa 2005.

dunno about that... wasn't there alot of bad Loefah copies in '06? that sound seemed easy to make, but only few really understands how the actual vibe is created.

[Fundamental]

yeah there is always a huge percentage of bad copies, but I still think a decent garage groove is a difficult thing to master. A basic garage groove is more difficult than say a basic half-step or a 4x4 house groove. The other difference with UKG is that you used to have the filter of spanking several hundred quid on a vinyl pressing/finding a distributor/cutting a plate to separate the wheat from the chaff in 2001.

[ToneBox]

- some garage-derived bass music that I like has become techno-muso music. (Resident Advisor *cough)

whats bad about that? the scene has to grow from somewhere. it's funny that you mentioned spatial because i first met him at a techno party a few years ago.

[Littlefoot]

I take issue with the idea that House and Techno are muso genres?! They are the fundamental (no pun intended!) basis of UK dance music. A lot of the best FG is directly housey side of garage with a techno starkness and melody imho.

Ok there may be some muso offshoots, but these are whole massssiiiiivvee worlds of music, not a tiny little sub genre like this stuff.

There is tonnes of muso FG kinda stuff coming up at the moment anyway, but thats the stuff I like

[Sentinels]

I just hate scenes where it comes more about being 'intelligent' or finding a rare white label than it does about dancing/vibing. UK garage, jungle, dubstep were never like this and there are certain parts of bass music that is like this in a massive way. I want this music to come off of the internet and get into the clubs regularly rather than wank off to it on Discogs.

[Nebula]

Future Garage isn't necessarily limited to the UK like the original FG. It also doesn't really follow a strict formula...it allows for more creativity thus more varied sounds. The sounds do range a lot...from Detroit Technoish sounds to ravey anthems. Those are the two reasons why FG is different I think.

[computer]

future garage is unique enough to be distinguished from the original uk garage sound

besides, is having a universally appealing 'unique selling point' necessarily a good thing? dubstep got super hyped and now look at the scene

[Littlefoot]

I just hate scenes where it comes more about being 'intelligent' or finding a rare white label than it does about dancing/vibing. UK garage, jungle, dubstep were never like this and there are certain parts of bass music that is like this in a massive way. I want this music to come off of the internet and get into the clubs regularly rather than wank off to it on Discogs.

Everything has that strain of "intelligence" after a while, House and Techno are decades old, the context is different....

[slowpokecity]

that's just the way music takes form on the internet, on the internet you can only see words so clearly people are going to get deep and romanticise how much they want a certain vinyl etc.

the elitism, bandwagons and genre-wars only exist on the internet. no one who's going to, playing at or putting on raves cares. it affects music a lot less then people think it does. its easy to look at UKFDubstep and think dubsteps gone to shit when really it hasn't, the internet just warps perceptions.


as for future garages USP, it's not a new one, it's just bass music you can skank out too, something we've needed to go back to for a long time.

but at the same time its composition on par with (imo) classical symphonies, if you sit down and listen to a well-produced FG track you can digest it properly and appreciate everything thats going on.

[Original Face]

What is future garage's - to use a bull$hit bingo phrase - unique selling point [USP]?

Scenes that exist to follow in the footsteps of another, long since past scene, seldom establish their own sense of identity and ideas nor have the momentum and popular support the original movement. What can future garage do to establish itself as different and distinct - but not a re-run of - UK garage?

I think some of FG is already more than a rerun of UK Garage. The chunkiness and wonkiness of, say, Brackles’ Get a Job has a freshness that takes it beyond the Breakstep of old, for example. And Sully’s In Some Pattern, as you said to FACT, “is a perfect example of how you can have a swung 2step framework but go in completely different directions with it, in this case part 80s electro part detuned synth/purple wow.” Although there may not be enough of this within the scene to make it distinct as a whole (if it is a whole), such tunes are a step in the right direction.

A word of caution, though. I think it’s telling that both the above examples take elements of garage and mash them together with elements from (mostly) more recent sounds (Grime, ‘wonky’, purple wow). The question to my mind is how much mileage there is in doing that. After all, Grime derived from garage in the first place, and the ‘purple’ sound is a form of dubstep, which is another of garage’s descendants. At some point we are bound to run out of compelling and novel combinations because the genres are so closely related. 'What then?' is what interests me.

[slowpokecity]

^^ very true. it's interesting you should mention grime, because grime is one genre that sounded completely different in 2002 to how it does now. its amazing to think that tunes from say Wiley or Jon E Cash (just two old producers off the top of my head) come from the same genre as something new from Terror Danjah or SRC.

which is interesting because once upon a time i guess you could say the "USP" of grime was it's speed and agression. which, with the new half-time lush synthesizer-based compositions of joker, src, TRC, etc, isn't true anymore.