Nathan Evans' UK garage and club music column covers the latest songs, remixes, bootlegs, mixes and albums that capture his attention. This edition looks at how ec2a are making USBs a sought-after commodity, plus the return of three massive figureheads at long last.

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The Top 5 Tunes from ec2a’s recent USBs

It’s curious that ec2a founder Dr. Dubplate is the son of the manager of former London club/dubstep haven Plastic People. The Bristol label’s sound is very new-school - caffeinated bangers with slimy basslines and outrageous pop edits. But the Doc has ensured that it runs with an old-school business model based on producing extremely limited, extremely sought-after dubplates.

The word “dubplate” is being farmed out right now as a buzzword to sell exclusivity for exclusivity’s sake. There’s a hype that’s leading artists and labels to try their luck at making quick bank off of it, such as Special Request’s ‘Dubplate Edition’ of their PORTAL 1 single, which removes the printed cover art of the standard edition and changes the vinyl colour to pure black, all for an extra £20… somehow. ec2a is quite possibly one of the main proprietors of dubplate becoming a buzzword, but their plates are genuinely hard to come by. Running at just 50 records each time, the tracks on these plates are never released in full digitally and the label keeps its word in never repressing any dubplate - as Dr. Dubplate said in the label’s DJ Mag feature, “If you miss it, tough shit”.

Physical scarcity and exclusivity is a business model that pays its dues in the long term. This obviously requires the music to be quality, which it definitely is - of all the labels featured on my Top 100 UK Garage Tunes of 2023 list, ec2a has the most entries with 7, roaring ahead of second-place SPRAYBOX with 5. The model is reasonably similar to hip-hop producer The Alchemist’s ALC Records which has proved Pavlovian for collectors - high quality, highly-priced limited runs of physical goods that are guaranteed to sell out the moment they hit online shelves. ec2a’s markup is moderately high at £25 a pop, but when the plates are going to cost a fortune on Discogs anyway, why not pay that directly to the artists than a scalper?

Recently, ec2a has created a digital version of this model that feels like a wholesale deal in comparison. Stored on some sweet customised USBs, the two new compilation USBs come with 20 (mostly) exclusive tracks from the likes of Bullet Tooth, Skeptic, Longeez Bushbaby, DJ Cosworth and Gemi, for £50 each. Two Shell employed a similar product strategy with its “Boring Rock”, albeit tied to the duo’s many shenanegans, and it shows that fans are excited by physical products even if the actual music is still digital. Though it’s far easier to share files from a USB and potentially snag the exclusives for free, it still hasn’t stopped these memory sticks from selling out every time.

To find out what’s come loaded on these DJ weapons, I bought the two most recent ec2a USBs (USB-002 and S1 DUBS, I missed the first drop), and wrote about the five best tracks out of a total of 30.

Lu.Re - It Girl Dub

This one from London’s Lu.Re has been making waves for its sleazy synths that are as playfully obnoxious as the bubblegum-blowing, fur coat-wearing, acrylic nail-tapping vocal sample. The character in the sample could shoot a stare-down that can make or break your spirit, and the synths match that casual assertiveness with the digital fuzz of early Peaches or Gaga. A bass warp fills the airspace and doesn’t hit notes as much as it slides between them. Because, ugh, one note is so last season and having four at the same time is like, so major.

Bushbaby - Chip Dub

Following on from ‘Night Edit’, the 5th best garage tune of 2023, Bushbaby’s ‘Chip Dub’ gives the Tottenham rapper the dressing he deserves with shards of on-edge synth stabs and a bassline that invades the ears with long, concentrated attacks. Where ‘Night Edit’ had a kicking bounce underneath the dark atmosphere, this one makes space for Chip’s diss raps while masking him in a villainous voice effect.

S1 - GO HOME

S1 is a mysterious producer from the UK who loves the intensity of MCs, Audis and devising nasty low-end assaults. But he gives attention to detail, as listening to his S1 DUBS USB of exclusive cuts, you’ll notice the gapless intros and outros that flow immaculately between tracks no matter the order. Loaded with group and live MCing samples ripped from footage from the apex of a rowdy club night, the USB feels like a collective tape rather than the work of a single producer, and it maintains a perpetual feeling of hysteria.

Case in point: ‘GO HOME’. In which S1 strays close to Verrasco’s ‘Esc​á​ndaloo’ but cuts out the bass at random to give the image of a club so rowdy that the speaker signal is cutting out. The sampled MC calls out to the punters that he isn’t sure that everyone is grown up enough for what’s about to happen - “your mum’s outside, you’re grounded!”.

Introspekt - Act Like Ur Mind (Dark Mix)

Garage’s most roguish dubplate enthusiast Introspekt hands over the deepest track she’s ever made to USB-002. Fraught vocal harmonies sit on top of glacial chords to give it an ominous atmosphere, a disconnect that makes this old R&B sample feel like a seductive trap that you sense isn’t quite right. At the top of the climb, the group vocals sing, “body without no soul”, a well-placed warning for the headphone-slicing burnout that’s about to ensue.

S1 - TELL A BOY COME

From S1 DUBS, ‘TELL A BOY COME’ is a hefty 4x4er which I believe has enough force to switch the axis of the Earth. In the eye of the cyclonic bass is a tight spiral that makes the track feel like you’re inside a Tesla coil powering up. S1 switches it up in the second half with a crunching 2-step fallback.

The Return of Tuff Jam, Jeremy Sylvester and Duncan Powell

A grand reboot is happening before our very eyes, as several legends of the genre are coming back into the spotlight at once. It began when Duncan Powell returned late last year with a four-track EP titled 9 Years, after the amount of time he had stayed away from Fruity Loops. Jeremy Sylvester then announced his first release on an outside label in a very long time: Flashback EP will be released March 22nd on Shall Not Fade’s Time Is Now sublabel. The moment of all-stars assembling was sealed when Tuff Jam announced a reunion on Instagram, teasing their iconic logo and pinning their return with a new press shot that could have come from an old issue of Musik Magazine.

All three have reasons to be on the Mount Rushmore of UK garage. Powell held the fort down for upbeat 4x4 garage during the 2000s after the champagne era ended and most moved on to other styles; Sylvester, along with Grant Nelson created one of the best garage labels of all time and dance labels of the 90s; and Tuff Jam are closely tied to the inception of UK garage as Sven Vath is to trance, as IG Culture is to broken beat.

Be it a natural separation, a consolidation period under an independent label or a creative block that lasted 9 years, all three powered down for different reasons. But with them all coming back now, it shows a bridge being built between garage icons and the new generation, and that 2024 will bring these names, some criminally underrated in the case of Sylvester and Powell, to light.

Delian Sound - DIME004

Dubstep and jazz have an intertwined history. The most well-known blender of the two genres is James Blake, who made making dubstep more malleable after it established a strong and stale formula by 2010. However, Bristol label DIMESHIFT is picking up on a time before the genre really had one, a wild west where rhythms and rules hadn’t been cemented yet. Each release even comes with a 10” lathe cut, just like old dubstep and garage dubplates were pressed on (ec2a also presses on lathe cut). Its fourth release comes from Delian Sound, who creates a plunderphonic world where dubstep is fixed into beatnik jazz with brushed drums and pudding-thick double bass. If Digable Planets were British, they would have loved to hop on this.

The opening of ‘Crook’ plays like a short trip through a hectic, dank city. Rolling drums set the pace alongside rattling hollow tin cans, flaccid horn hits and the crank of a subway train. The sound of sirens ducks you into a side alley where you meet dialogue of someone arranging a bad deal from what could have been a Coppola flick. The viscous bassline finally steps in to put the whole scene together.

Digital Mystikz’ ‘Misty Winter’ seems like a point of reference for Delian Sound, a 2006 track that also uses bass as the grounding dubstep element underneath chilly live drums and atmospheres. ‘Sumtin’ Wicked’ also reminds of Semtek’s ‘Catching Smoke’ for its creeping build of electronics that climb up the side of the walls on eight legs. Like the punchline to a good joke, Delian Sound then delivers a bandy bassline that trips over itself like a drunk person staggering home after embarrassing themselves at their local.

If you want more proto-dubstep, CCL’s recent A Night in the Skull Discotheque mix manages to trace proto-dubstep sounds back to the late 70s right through to late 90s speed garage.

Mix of the Month: JOe The Third B2b Neffa-T with Flirta D - mode radio, 24th January 2024

There’s a class of DJs that aren’t just a pleasure to listen to but to watch as well. Their ability to pull out cunning trickery at a moment’s notice can create either a barrelling mix that resembles the Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling race or a series of spectacles akin to Soccer AM’s Skill Skool. We’re talking Jeff Mills, DJ EZ, and maybe we can even start including international sensations like DJ Ramon Sucesso. Neffa-T is perhaps grime and dubstep’s greatest example of this, and he went back to back with Joe The Third along with the UK’s most creative freestyler, Flirta D.

When Joe and Neffa are up, they’re almost never off the knobs, and not in the way that some DJs hold onto them like the tassels of a magic carpet. They apply minute touches that make tracks their own, dipping the bass on the last beat of a bar, sliding the volume on beat to make a manual double-time beat, and flicking the volume up and down to entangle tracks together. Here, they are working within the parameters of an MC freestyle, so they are feeding the MC rather than mixing solo, but these DJing sequences come in naturally regardless.

Flirta D himself rides the space-hopper grime bounce while hoovering up the most outrageous ad-libs he can find. His recent Rinse FM appearance with Oblig made the rounds recently, but Neffa-T and Joe The Third had him solo for an hour. In this hour, he switches from his usual Mortal Kombat announcer ad-libs and cartoonish onomatopoeia to house diva grunts and received-pronunciation elevator announcement voices (“door opening”). These ad-libs eat into the end of a bar, meaning his lines make little sense most of the time, but it doesn’t matter. He creates his own vocal dips; loops and sidechains them; takes the pitch down like a record player stopping; reverses his voice and jumbles his words as though he’s rapping in anagram.

Every freestyle sees Flirta D diving deeper into playing with the form in a maximalist way, adding another dimension on top of his quality flows. In a way, he operates like a DJ, building a bank of loops by slowly adding more sounds as he comes back around on a line, much like a DJ working on a drum pad or across four decks. “I’m a one man army, I reps to the death”, he raps.

Do Neffa-T and Joe The Third operate like MCs? Well, their mixing style is about teeing up hard switches and making quick exits into the next track, sort of similar to how MCs manage to transition from one set of rhymes to another seamlessly when they’re in a flow state. However, they do get time to create deck magic. The best moment comes when Neffa-T starts rewinding and playing a single loop over and over as though the beat is inhaling and exhaling, and Flirta D comes in as though he doesn’t realise the studio around him isn’t crumbling at this reality-breaking idea.

Silva Bumpa & Megan Wroe - Without You

‘Without You’ takes it back to the days of Big Ang, Platnum and H Two O - that Niche bassline sound. For Silva Bumpa, a devout disciple, the track is a return to a time when his native Sheffield was a powerhouse in UK club culture. Megan Wroe has a PinkPantheress-like conversational-ness to her as she celebrates being newly single, the fluid of good spirits flowing through as she overlaps each line in the chorus. Round pops of Korgan are backed up by saturated harpsichord, xylophone and synth frills all adding texture that takes you back to that time in the late 2000s.

Is it an exercise in nostalgia? Yes - it’s gushy, it’s rose-tinted, it’s sickly sweet. But there’s a purity to the joy here. Maybe the Niche sound has aged only for the better.

Solomon Rose - BRR001

Silkie is a name etched deeply in the dubstep world for his releases on Deep Medi Musik, but before that label even began, he cut his cloth producing and rapping over grime. His remix of Gemma Fox’s ‘Girlfriend Story’ sends swooning sped-up garage vocals trudging through grime’s squelch and dark strings.

Now, Silkie is stepping out under his full name Solomon Rose to debut a new garage label Bedroom Rat, and its debut two-tracker of cosmopolitan keys and glistening negative space puts you at a table of a strictly dress-code London bar. Andrew Ryce of RA compared Solomon Rose’s music to Introspekt’s, and I’m inclined to agree. But while Introspekt is the queen of unfuckwithable sexual deviance, there’s an ambiguity to the vocal chops here that say more than the lyrics tell. “TFC” doubles from 2-step to 4x4 with tech-house kicks, and Rose fashions excitable phrases like “really great” and “wooo girl” from different vocal cuts like a murderer’s letter. The trilling “aaaaaahhh yeah” vocal run is the moment that will stick with you.

What’s curious about “TFC” is the syrupy chords and airbrushed synths, textures that sound like they’re being pulled from the late-noughties progressive house era. As Pangaea did on his recent album Changing Channels, perhaps Rose is shooting a double-take back at the adjacent scenes that were going on as he was coming up in the thriving London dubstep scene.

Introspekt - Ur A Jerk / Vixen

This column’s third mention of Introspekt is warranted, as the LA producer has started 2024 with a care package of three sought-after IDs she’s been rolling out for the past year on NTS, Crack Audio, The Lot Radio and more.

‘Ur A Jerk’ repeats the title ad nauseum until it loses meaning, its cadence turning into a spiralling groove that lassos around a creeping two-note strut. The response of “I know” starts to fill the background, sounding like a DJ responding to a bombardment of crowd hecklers after spilling a vodka and coke over the decks.

The other two tracks coax you into a cloudy haze like a mirage of a mermaid on a rock out at sea, before dragging you down into Introspekt’s underworld like Ursula. Bonus track ‘Watch Me Work It’ works in one of the most popular acapellas over the last year after Hamdi made it popular, meanwhile ‘Vixen’ rings out with a chiming tune before the air gets sucked out to let in a molten white-hot bass that twitches, slides and spurts out from the side like a flame. Not another element dares disturb it.

Sharda - REVAMP

Last October, I wrote about Sharda’s NTS show in which he premiered four new tunes that I said if he were to release as a four-pack, “would be up there with Hudson Mohawke and Nikki Nair’s Set the Roof for EPs in 2023”. Now, he’s packaged these tunes into an EP titled REVAMP on Coil Records. Read what I said about them here.

|||||||||||||||||||| - ‘Entreat (Nisk Remix)’

‘Entreat (Nisk Remix)’ is a head-cleanser masquerading as a club track. Nisk is a new Bristol producer whose remix of |||||||||||||||||||| (also known as Barcode, a versatile German producer who is forcibly stalling their momentum with an ungoogleable name) is built from a woozy loop that DJ Koze might catch - odd, scuffy and strangely comforting. Familiar snares come in to rein in its choppy workings and point it to an ascent. Then it unblemishes into a nocturnal breakdown that could parse the reddest of mist, with jazzy keys rippling like a quiet moment from an ECM jazz album. The second part is more assertive on the low end, but Nisk uses a vocal sample that isn’t from the original track yet matches the tone perfectly - “Come back to, come back to me”, she stammers. A small, spacey feathering of keys floats down and grounds itself and you at the same time.

GDGD 011 - REPREZENT RADIO (MAHNOOR GUEST MIX), 28th January 2024

Brixton’s Reprezent Radio recently held a fundraiser to save the station and thankfully it’s gone down so successfully, it’s been extended to raise more money. One show that encapsulates a bulk of their programming is ‘GDGD’, which, as its name acronises, is split equally between Garage, Dubstep, Grime & Drill mixes. Their January show featured a guest mix from BBC Asian Network resident Mahnoor, but the show’s chief 2-stepper Nathfields took the opening portion with a garage mix that starts with a tour of the genre’s champagne era. El-B, SP:MC, Nice ‘N’ Ripe bass and saucy horn hits are all interspersed with echoes of the genre’s commercial heyday through vocal samples, framed as though Natfields is saying, “look how far we’ve come”. Then, the pulse-raising patois of Logan_olm delivers the big release of tension in this half-hour set, followed by some dubstep swells that could have come from Cesco’s lair.

Mahnoor takes the grime section of the mix, and she made it straight after attending Benga and Skream’s historic Boiler Room set. That rush of nostalgia flows out of her and into this mix. Midway through, she pulls the US and UK together by the East Coast with jerking Miami bass-infused grime, an edit of Terror Squad’s ‘Lean Back’ and a riddim chop of Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre’. From there on out, she ducks further into mid-2000s-era grime riddims à la Flukez, including salute’s smokey “Didn’t Cha Know / Percolator” flip.