When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which I ended up putting on promotional badges: “BASS CULTURE IS FOLK CULTURE”. It referred to the way riffs, refrains, ways of acting were passed down the generations, from reggae to rave to grime and on. But it also quickly took on more meaning, about where soundsystem and club music exist in society.
Hull-raised, longtime Bristol-based Sam “Binga” Simpson exemplifies a lot of this. First, he’s a scholar of the vernacular: this album in particular really shows off just how closely he’s studied localised micro genres from across the decades – things like breakstep, amapiano, Jersey club, ghetto house and a dozen other hyper-specific versions of house, grime, techno, electro, drum’n’bass, dancehall and what have you. But second, he’s a lifer. None of this scholarship is in the abstract. It’s all learned and honed from week-in-week-out playing to clubs and raves, as part of the living culture.
The result is 15 tracks that aren’t here for critical analysis on online forums, or the visual spectacle of TikTok and Reels: they’re entirely crafted, using tools honed in the workshop of the dance, for the purpose of moving bodies. To the unschooled the genre differences will be moot, but that doesn’t matter at all. Even if you only hear a torrent of zaps, clonks, whomps and crashes topped with bolshy and bawdy MCs extolling their own excellence and endorsement of hedonism, it should grab you, because the functionality of this music is wired straight to the human nervous system. It just works.
But the scholarship means that there are depths too. Simpson has brought in lots of collaborators – both producers and rappers with accents from across the British-Caribbean spectrum – and beneath the instant impact there is so much finesse and precision that you’ll get something new every time you listen to it. Paradoxically by stripping things to bare basics, this reveals just how much there are to those basics – and though you might think the functionality is one-dimensional to begin with, get it up loud and you’ll hear a celebration of that living culture that’s compelling and addictive.
Listen to "No Chase":
