Drum and Bass

London and Bristol's fast dance music, where chopped breaks and deep bass create a half-time feel at 170 BPM

Related

ContemporarySamplerSyncopation

Drum and bass is the fast dance music of 1990s London and Bristol, pressing chopped breaks, deep bass and Jamaican sound-system weight into 170 BPM.

Origins and era

In 1991 and 1992 London hardcore raves pushed breakbeats past 160 BPM, and producers began cutting hip-hop and funk breaks into new shapes. Fabio and Grooverider's nights at Rage gave the music a fixed audience, reggae and sound-system culture entered the drums around 1993, and MCs began rapping over the breaks. Goldie's album took it into mainstream reviews in 1995, while Bristol's Roni Size and the Full Cycle crew put jazz harmony and live bass into the drum tracks. After 1997 drum and bass became the more general name, and tempo and drum patterns settled.

What you hear

Tempos run from 165 to 180 BPM, yet the music feels like 85 because the snare lands on three and the kick stays sparse. Breaks are sampled, cut and reassembled, with the Amen and Think breaks the most used; edits and reversed hits are part of the arrangement. Some tracks use a two-step pattern instead, kick and snare trading more regularly and leaving room for an MC. Bass is a long sine or sawtooth tone carrying melody and weight, usually pushed very low. Tracks often open with a vocal or a sustained chord, then drop into drums and bass, and some versions are driven by continuous MC delivery.

Key figures

Goldie's Timeless brought double-album length and orchestral samples into drum and bass, Roni Size and Reprazent widened the line-up with live bass and jazz harmony, LTJ Bukem's liquid direction spread chords and atmosphere, and Shy FX and Andy C wrote dance-floor response into their production. In Bristol, Krust, Die and Suv made Full Cycle a second centre.

Lineage

Hardcore rave, hip-hop sampling, Jamaican dub and Detroit techno's sense of bass feed in; dubstep, grime, liquid funk and the fast sections of pop songs come out. It pushes dance tempo to its limit while putting the bass first.

Common misunderstandings

Drum and bass and jungle are often used as synonyms; in the 1990s the scenes and words differed, and today most listeners mix them. It is not simply fast techno, since the breakbeat cuts and bass writing come from hip-hop and reggae. Nor is there one drum pattern: the Amen is only the most famous, and producers keep dozens of breaks ready.

Sources

• Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash（Faber, 1998 及 2013 修订版），用于核对伦敦 jungle 场景与 1990 年代厂牌
• The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, edited by Nick Collins and Julio d'Escrivan（Cambridge University Press, 2007），用于核对碎拍采样与低音写法

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.