GOLDEN ERA DNB: the past, present and future of Drum & Bass
The past, present
and future of
Drum & Bass.
Pick a year. Start digging.
Featured year
An album takes the Mercury Prize, Photek turns drum programming into the whole composition, and Bristol argues for a different future. 4 entries on file, most of them dated only to the year so far.
On rotation
From the archive
Club flyer, Hoxton
Held in the collection, dated by design and print method rather than by anything printed on it. Not yet cleared for publication.
New generation
The golden era
is not over.
This section is for producers working now. It is open rather than empty: the archive would rather carry nothing than carry a list assembled to look busy. Send a record.
Send us a recordRecords that take a risk with rhythm, space or sound design.
Labels running on their own terms.
Anything that would have sounded like the future in any decade.
Stories
How techstep got its shape
The 1995 to 1998 stretch, read through the records, the rooms and the machines that made them.
Sunday at the Blue Note
An oral history of a small Hoxton room, assembled from the people who were in it. Interviews in progress.
The samplers that built it
Time-stretch, truncation and 8 seconds of memory. What the hardware would and would not let you do.
Community
What the room knows
belongs in the record.
Track IDs, break sources, line-ups, the year a night actually started. Most of it sits in people’s memories and in threads that scroll away. The plan is to let verified community knowledge graduate into the archive, with the discussion kept attached as provenance.
- Discussion
- Curation
- Verification
- Archive
Objects
Printed, pressed
and numbered.
Apparel, prints and archive editions. Cultural objects rather than merchandise, and nothing listed until it exists.