I’ve had this for a couple of weeks now so I should have reviewed it long before, but its back in stock at Bristols’ Rooted Records (the sole distributor) so it’s about time I got my arse in gear and posted this up.
Hyperlinks aren’t working so anything underlined has an address at the bottom of the post.
No matter how big Dubstep has become I have a rule that I stick to: buy any compilation or album that comes out. So you can be doubly sure that I was quick to pick up the first Dubstep DVD when it launched in late November. We may have had a BBC documentary and another one for MTV, but this one lasts a full 40 minutes and goes into a lot more detail than the other ones, which although being alright were essentially pretty concise affairs compared to this. Like the Rinse Sessions DVD from a while back, there’s a limited amount of times that you’re gonna want to watch this kind of thing, but at a fiver you can’t really deny yourself the experience of seeing this documentary. Anything you could possibly want to know about the Dubstep scene in Bristol is covered here, and it’s about time you caught up with your schooling.
Now what struck me first when I heard of this release was the fact that someone actually came up with the concept of making a DVD chronicling the Bristol scene at all. It seems like a strange, and presumably quite difficult thing to do. But Madboy and Spermchaser, the guys who made it, were going to the dances and decided to document all that was going on around them. And although it says on the sleeve notes that it was ‘cooked up, collated and cobbled together… on a £300 camcorder and a £20 microphone’, the finished product looks very professional. It was filmed between February and June last year but there must have been some hard graft put into it in the following 4 months or so before it came out of the pressing plant.
It starts off with clichéd scenes of urban decay- cracked pavements, pedestrian subways, abandoned trolleys, and shots of road signs and dual carriageways. While all this is going on you hear voiceovers from scene players like ThinKing and Pinch describing what the Dubstep sound is, with special reference to its emergence in the Brizzle.
The picture quality is very good; a lot better than I was expecting it to be. This is definitely no dodgy stag video. One thing about this video is that there are the daytime bits, which usually concentrate on Bristol streets or the Rooted Records shop and are in ordinary colour footage. These contrast heavily with the nighttime elements, where the producers/directors are a lot more creative in the way they film things. Most of the film takes place at night in the clubs, and there are loads of different ways to how they capture this, using different techniques & special effects. It’s almost like a music video in parts- lots of quick cuts from one clip to the next. Sometimes you see shots of people bouncing in time with the DVD’s soundtrack, which is cleverly qued up to the same tempo of whatever track was played in the actual venue.
Going back to the daytime bits though, one thing Living Inside The Speaker focuses heavily on is the towns’ graffiti, and judging by what we are shown I’d have to say that Bristol is possibly the UK’s Graf capital. With the areas they’ve chosen to show on the film, it’s sort of hard to tell if it’s a run down slum town or a bohemian city that needs a little bit of spit and polish (I wouldn’t know as I’ve never visited). One thing I can’t get my head around is the fact that half the citys’ populace speak in watered down cockney tones, while the other half have a West Country Farmer Giles brogue!
After the initial 4 minutes bit with the talking heads, it goes into a proper music video style segment of a club scene at Dubloaded (I think), shot in nocturnal vision (a sort of Gameboy monochrome green where people’s eyes look funny) to the soundtrack of an oriental sounding beat, Forsakens’ ‘Taiko Riddim’. Some may see this three minutes as an exercise in time wasting but it’s a nice interlude before the proper documentary bit starts, and you couldn’t really have a DVD of this nature without a lengthy club scene could you? Plus the ‘Taiko Riddim’ is pretty special, one I’d love to see the light of day on a 12″ release.
Once this interlude is over it gets into the meatier documentary side of things. DJ Pinch unsurprisingly looms large, cited by many as being the man most responsible for the Dubstep explosion in the city. “He’s put enormous amounts of like time and money into pushing the scene forward. Bristol’s [now] the second city in the whole world for Dubstep, it’s undeniable”. A fair point made by ThinKing, a moderator for the Dubstepforum.com, but an accolade he could easily attribute to himself as he was the one who introduced Pinch to Dubstep in the first place, taking him to his first Forward a few years ago.
While most of the scene faces in the vid have been filmed in Rooted Records or at club nights, Pinch is interviewed in a house. With the curtains closed in this cream coloured room (like the windowless flats in Trainspotting), you can almost imagine him as a Jedi master calmly surveying his Bristol Dubstep empire from his penthouse headquarters, though really it’s probably just a crummy ‘studio’ apartment! Interestingly though Pinch admits that, “if Forward had been in Bristol then I’d have just been happy going along to the nights and just kind of being a regular punter, it [his promotion of Dubstep nights] was really just motivated by a desire to hear more of it.” It’s bizarre to concieve of a producer as talented as him remaining satisfied with being just a dancer in the crowd, and not keeping himself busy knocking out quality tunes like ‘Qawwali’ (of which the VIP mix has a video on the DVD) or ‘Punisher’.
If there’s one point this documentary gets across very clearly it’s that this is a vibrant scene, with a lot of interesting local stuff coming out. Nick Gutterbreakz comments that the DJ’s & promoters are offering a “Dubstep sound that originates in Bristol rather than just playing out [the] London stuff”. The London visitors seem to agree with this as well. In the words of Skream: “Normally like when you hear a tune, and you know what it is, like but up here you don’t know what it is”, with DJ Chef confirming in both their minds that this is effectively a good thing. The argument stands up well when you think about it, and sort of justifies the lengths Madboy & Spermchaser must have went to making the film.
This premise of Bristol having a tightly knit clique of DJ’s & producers is backed up firmly by lots of chit chat from individual players like the H.E.N.C.H Crew, whos’ MC Jakes funnily enough says that he had “tried to make hip hop back in the day and it came out like Dubstep”. Other individuals who appear are Pinchs’ Dubloaded co-founder Blazey (in a drunk & stoned but coherent state), the various promoters and DJ’s including Peverlist and other Rooted employees but not, surprisingly, Headhunters’ (of H.E.N.C.H) Ascension records label partner Tech Itch.
Towards the end of Living Inside The Speaker it does get a little bit too technological and geeky, with the showing off of PC programme Ableton Live courtesy of Elemental, & Grim Dubs star Atki2 (I’ve heard it played out live and I’m aware it puts paid to the vinyl fetishists’ myth that only dubplates sound good). Showing us how a dubplate is made is interesting, but the studio session with Forsaken making a track seems like an unnecessary addition.
A few of the other things it talks about are the higher girl to boy ratio there is in Bristol Dubstep clubs compared to the London ones, the relative absence of class A’s in the events in a city that is renowned for it’s Drum & Bass nights (“it’s much more civilised”, as one person says), and how the internet has had a big effect on bolstering the scene, although perhaps this last point could be just as easily said for any town other than London.
There is one quite interesting admission from a club punter: “I think it [Dubstep] isn’t actually that big a thing, it just appears bigger than it is because of the huge amount of web interest it’s got because of all the blogs and the forums”. Which begs the question, is this DVD making the Bristol scene out to be bigger and more significant than it really is? How many club nights actually are there? When you see Elemental interviewed outside is it in the same club car park as the one Search & Destroy appear in? After all Bristol is a small city. But perhaps this in turn means that there are more Dubstep nights per capita here by far than in London. Certainly a point worth considering, as it’s possibly true.
But whatever small criticisms I may have of this release, I would recommend any Dubstep fan to purchase it, because there’s really nothing quite like it. I think a lot of London heads will be shocked when they see this. And as for the international contingent (who might have doubts about paying exorbitant international postage for something so small), why don’t you buy a few tunes off Rooted and bag this at the same time, it’s as cheap as chips (or as you say in the US, ‘freedom fries’). At the time of writing this there are still some copies of it left in the shop but they will sell out very soon. When this does happen all you need to do is pester Rooted with request emails because they seem quite happy to repress it in small quantities when the demand warrants it.
Cheers to Peverelist for the guidance. Review by Owen Griffiths
Hyperlinks:
Rooted Records:
http://www.rootedrecords.co.uk/catalog
’The BBC documentary’ refers to a special magazine BBC have within their website called ‘Collective’. Issue 236 has this short documentary and a text article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A10695684
’MTV’ refers to an MTV Base documentary called ‘About to Blow’: It’s archived on
http://youtube.com/watch?v=y8qlRMA6q98
The Rinse Sessions DVD filmed the Rinse FM December ‘05 special at the Ministry of Sound, and can be bought (at the time of press) at
http://www.mixingrecords.com/tapepack.html Bear in mind that there was also a 6 CD tape pack, whereas the standalone DVD version had only 2 CD’s with it.
http://www.DubstepForum.com
Pinch:
http://www.myspace.com/tectonicrecordings
Forward:
http://www.ilovefwd.com
Planet Mu:
http://www.planet-mu.com
Nick Gutterbreakz:
http://www.gutterbreakz.blogspot.com
Skream:
http://www.myspace.com/skreamuk
Chef:
http://www.myspace.com/dj_chef
H.E.N.C.H:
http://www.myspace.com/henchstep
MC Jakes:
http://www.myspace.com/jakeshench
Headhunter:
http://www.myspace.com/dubstepheadhunter
Tech Itch:
http://www.myspace.com/techitch
Elemental:
http://www.myspace.com/adamelemental
Grim Dubs:
http://www.discogs.com/release/703571
Atki2:
http://www.myspace.com/atki2
Search & Destroy:
http://www.myspace.com/searchanddestroy_uk
