The Beat Surrender

Sitting in amongst my ever expanding vinyl collection is two 12” singles that are much cherished by me and much played, to the point with one of them that i’m gonna have to start looking round for a better copy soon as it’s nearing the end of it’s well lived life.

The two singles are Beat Dis and Bug Powder Dust and despite the fact they are very different records, they are tracks that have meant i’ve always had a big interest in anything Bomb The Bass, or should I say Tim Simenon has to offer musically, despite this though he’s never nailed a really cohesive album for me.

Probably the nearest he’s come to this is with his mid 90’s effort Clear, the only thing that let it down really was that it veered too much towards the much in vogue Bristol sound of the time, the result of which was it living in the shadow of Portishead and Massive Attack who produced far better albums around the same time.

Nearly 15 years on though and he’s bravely stepping back into the long player ring again despite having a fantastic reputation for remixing other peoples work, Simenon is still keen to nail what for him would be as near as he feels he can get to a perfect album, he’s not a million miles away this time with Future Chaos.

It isn’t perfect, but very few albums in the world are, if they were that easy to perfect artists would make one album and then sit back and bask in it’s glory, it is though the most cohesive Bomb The Bass album yet of the four released, which may be down to the fact that it’s a project he has stopped and started a few times before finally finding the one piece of equipment that would allow him to strip everything back to basics and get the sound he wanted, the minimoog.

The result of using that piece of equipment in with his obvious production skills is that you get an album that is neither futuristic despite the title, yet also doesn’t sound dated and drawn inspiration wise from any particular era. Sure it’s low end sound may have one foot dangling over the 80’s, but it never goes as far as to dip it’s toes in, instead he’s cleverly used a host of collaborations on the vocals to draw out the distinctive sound of each track, allowing the musical back drop to remain for all intents and purposes fairly constant.

Continue