Join The Future: Bleep Techno & the Birth Of British Bass Music
About this ebook
Since the dawn of the 1990s, Britain’s dancefloors have moved to a string of styles built around skeletal rhythms and heavy sub-bass, including breakbeat hardcore, jungle, drum & bass, dubstep, UK garage, grime and bassline. Yet another previously overlooked sound pre-dated them all: bleep and bass, or bleep techno, the first distinctly British form of electronic dance music.
A mixture of social, cultural, musical and oral history based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews, Join The Future tells the previously hidden history of ‘bleep’ for the first time. It brings forth the untold stories of bleep’s pioneers and those that came in their wake, moving from mid-80s electro all-dayers and reggae soundsystem clashes in the North and Midlands to the birth of breakbeat hardcore and jungle in London and the South East in the early ’90s.
Along the way, you’ll find first-hand accounts of key clubs and raves, biographies of forgotten and overlooked production pioneers, stories of bleep outposts in Canada and the United States, and the inside story of the early years of one of electronic music’s most iconic labels, Warp Records.
Now expanded to include more interviews, analysis and a brand-new ‘afterword’ chapter, Join The Future is one of the most revealing and significant books on dance music in years.
About the author
Matt Anniss is a journalist and author specializing in electronic music, DJing and club culture. He began his career on internet magazines in the late 1990s before joining the staff of IDJ Magazine as Music Editor in 2000, later becoming Editor. Since leaving the magazine in 2008 he’s become a regular contributor to Resident Advisor, Red Bull Music Academy Daily and DJ Magazine, specializing in historical aspects of dance music culture.
