Low End Lowlife: 20.06.11

It is occasionally fascinating just how much one person can miss in a fortnight. Ten days of work, eight episodes of Eastenders (omnibus excluded) or in the case of the small Caribbean island of Grenada in late 1983, an entire military takeover. The world of bass music apparently trumps all of these items, having a level of productivity matched only by perhaps the breeding of bacteria on room temperature dairy produce and Kerry Katona's womb. Although distinguishing between the pair's offspring is probably a small medical journal in itself, so dwell we must not; Let us make haste to the tunes!

Deep Medi, run by Digital Mystikz member Mala, himself a veritable grand oak of dubstep has indeed been cooking with grease over the past few weeks. First dropping Silkie's 'City Limits: 1.6 - 1.8', coming packed with four wonderfully tight groove based pieces including the elasticated-bass led 'Techfunk', which comes complete with ridiculous stabbing 80's synth lines, to the also vaguely 80's eliciting 'Float'. I don't know if this is a compliment or not but I can't help but grin hearing a tune that travels from distorted sub-bass and plucky synth percussion through a saxophone break (nah, that's not a typo) into an amalgamation of the two that can only be described as aural prawn cocktail sloshing round a subwoofer. To follow up this delicious set comes the new release from Bristol kingpin Pinch, who has dropped two eye wateringly heavy tracks in 'Swish' and 'Tunnel Home'. As much as it is a great thing to see so many of dubstep's elders pushing further afield with their sounds it is just as pleasant when they head back to bunker for a pointlessly over the top bass wobbler. It is even better when they take time to bang out a couple as Pinch as done here. 'Tunnel Home' in particular melds a slightly faster than average dubstep bass tempo to clanking industrial percussion and sounds that you may wish to describe as "tunnelley." A word entirely suitable as an audio description, but blatantly just made up by me a minute ago.

Stepping out of the shadier sound and into an altogether more sunny vibe comes the latest 12" on Moonshine Recordings from the almost Dr Seussian (I may have made that slang up too) named Jing Bong Ting. On the A is the original mix of 'Cry Murder'. A reggae inflected dubstepper perfect for summer dance floors and highly evocative of the sort of works RSD & Mungo's Hi-Fi have a fine track record with. The flipside contains a much more aggressive jungle remix from Russian producer HoT, it isn't the most original of sounds to a man not particularly enamoured with the jungle style but it is probably the perfect sonic accompaniment to a half litre of vodka, some cut price Croatian fags and relentless resource mining in the Gulag.

On a much more electronic slant comes the new release from Bok Bok on the veritable electro warhorse label Night Slugs. Having seen a fine run of form thus far in releases from the likes of Girl Unit and Egyptrixx it would appear there is no slowing their unique roll. The Southside EP features three bristling tracks packed with squelchy bass lines for all you purple rangers out there, some 8-bit Nintendo nostalgia for the sqwee fans and a solid base of house styled rhythms to shackle the whole hotchpotch into a hip swinging beast. Ignore all those strange genre tags I just wrote. Grab this and go do some dancing... Please.

That's the lot for this week, so don't procrastinate looking for acoustic covers of Rebecca Black tunes on Youtube, two-step to your nearest record store and dig out these nuggets! Meanwhile I've got some Seussian Tunnelley things to be getting on with... If it's not clear by now that's just a euphemism for Gin & Tonic. Twice.