Sometimes you’ve got to look back and take stock of what you’ve taken for granted, and after a year of enjoying it, it’s time to look back and acknowledge that 2009 was a year of really fucking good music. However, for many people 2009 will probably be remembered particularly for being the year that the stomping throb of dubstep became an unavoidable presence in UK music. Birthed in it’s initial 2-step form almost a decade ago from the remnants of the dying UK Garage scene by pioneers like Horsepower Productions and El-B, dubstep’s titanic sound established itself firmly as a favorite of DJ’s up and down the country with the emergence of a series of mainstream remixes – including dubstep reworkings of tracks by La Roux, Adele, The Prodigy and Kid Cudi.
Whilst dubstep sadly attained it’s mainstream success mostly with wobbling, mid-range commercial productions rather than the cerebral minimalism of Loefah or Digital Mystikz, the scene developed in a palpable flux. Dividing and evolving, the genre has sprouted a notable variety of offshoots, including an exciting progression, a potential pretender to dubstep’s throne, currently (and rather loosely) termed ‘Future Garage’. With a moniker as loosely applicable as that, it becomes fairly difficult to throw lazy generalizations around. Good. A quick hunt around the internet reveals the framework of a growing community of Future Garage aficionados on FutureGarageForum.com, and a slew of talented underground producers, expanding and developing a sound both inherently progressive yet subtly nostalgic for the heyday of UK Garage.
Joy Orbison – Hyph Mngo
Well-established, Mercury-nominated producer Burial is undoubtedly the most famous of Future Garage’s young innovators, adopting a combination of chopped and skewed vocal samples, jittery garage drum loops and haunting synthesizers to create immersive works of mournful nostalgia. Dubstep’s prevalent bass and garage’s loose 2-step drums essentially typify the genre’s structural skeleton, although every individual production from the scene’s developing artists varies considerably; from the taut synthesized modernity of Untold‘s brilliant Sweat, to the heart rending soulful minimalism of Pangaea‘s wondrous Memories. Whilst these artists and their ilk (see: Ramadanman, Martyn, 2562, Scuba) have begun to carve out a niche of atmospheric, powerful productions, none have developed a hype quite as palpable as Burial’s.
Currently warranting a similar level of ‘genius’ labels and hysterical hipster devotion is 22 year old producer Joy Orbison, whose anthemic track Hyph Mngo cemented the sound of Future Garage as a genuinely notable evolution in electronic music. A swelling, dense piece of euphoria, Hyph Mngo was recognised with near critical-consensus as being a distinctive, landmark production in an otherwise swamped dubstep scene. Abandoning the tired dubstep ‘wobble’ and plodding rhythms favored by most budding producers arriving on the scene, Orbison’s precisely chopped and layered vocal samples are powered forward by a tight mix of post-garage drumming and winding synthesizer melodies. Neither formulaic nor derivative of Garage, Orbison’s shimmering, euphoric production warrants everyone’s attention.
Whether ‘Future Garage’ develops into a fully-fledged genre or demonstrates itself as a limp attempt to catalog and file a handful of tracks remains to be seen, but the seeds have been sown. The framework is there but the generation of producers that promise so much must deliver and grow to ensure any sort of future for Future Garage. However it seems that with several record labels to watch (including Orbison’s own Doldrums Records and Ben UFO’s Hessle Audio) that these Young Pretenders to electronic music’s crown have the potential to bring a new sound to the forefront of electronic music. Long live innovation.
