Various Artists
Basslines
Garage is a soul-based, vocal-heavy offshoot of house music. Speed garage is a hyped-up version of the same, shot through with jungle’s sound and sensibility. The speed comes from the five- to ten-beats-per-minute increase in tempo from the house norm. Its subsonic fuck-the-crowd-let’s-move-the-floor bottom end, rather than seeping slowly through the double-time snare rolls of drum ‘n’ bass, anchors a disco-influenced four-on-the-floor pound. And aesthetically, speed garage shares early jungle’s love of kineticism for its own sake. Vocals and instruments are often playfully filtered or mind-bendingly screwed with, and the end result registers less as forbidding esoterica than fun, almost bubblegummy pop music.
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The set climaxes with Gisele Jackson’s seething “Love Command-ments.” A steel-drum fill introduces bass that ignites like napalm, shooting off in every direction, bright and fiery. Then Jackson starts screaming: “You need some UN-DER-STANDING! / From the start / I’ve got the LOVE COM-MANDMENTS! / Here in my heart.” Then she gets cut up and layered and looped: “You need some UN! / You need some UN! / You need some UN! / You need some UN!” And when, through the magic of digital manipulation, she testifies all over herself like that, she’s not preaching the gospel–she is the gospel.
