Question about Speed Garage

[dj_soo]

I don't know much about speed garage or house but what I wanted to know was where the name "speed garage" came from?

I do know that "garage" was more or less the precurser to deep house being played primarily in NYC during the late 70s and 80s at a club called The Garage (hence the name).

So how or why did it come about that the UK ravetastic whoomp whoomp whoomp sound in the late 90s adopt the name of a style of music that was deep, soulful, and housey?

This has been bugging me for a while now...

[Mr.Wrong]

invented in garages by speed freaks obviously....DUH.

[FeelGood]

ive always wondered this too.

i seem to remember this one time at a rave, some asian guy was asking me what kind of genre the dj was playing, and with the volume being so loud, it was extremely hard to understand one another, in the end he said NO he didnt want any speed. i gave up at that point.

[QuanNeur]

it's really very simple- originary speed garage consisted of up-tempo samples of classic 80's and early 90's NYC garage acapellas, sometimes time-stretched, and paired with that classic speed garage bassline timbre. it wasn't long before the classic vocals disappeared and gunshot samples and ridiculous lyrics emerged. eek.

[**TORMENT**]

suprise, suprise blame it on the brits

^^ Yeah, to add to that:

From what I remember, Speed Garage was just another term ( like so many otheres ) for the british usurping & influence of that original stateside "garage" sound, and influence. In the states, TODD TERRY, Armand Van Helden, and more specifically TODD EDWARDS were putting out house tunes with big hoover sounding basslines, or leading to larger basslines anyway..the typical speed garage trademark, and it took off in the UK. The pitch in the tunes was a lot quicker than typical house trax as well, as mentioned.

But from what I remember, all the quintessential original Uk "speed garage" was made with ragga-jungle samples lifted from old skool Suburban Base records and stuff. Back in the day, I thought it was dumb.. or not very interesting. I remember the original stuff coming out, like in & around '96 & '97, and there was a jungle/dnb show on CiTR at the time called "Drum & Space" that used to play it too. I was doin my jungle radio thang then too, but I never liked "speed garage". I think out of all the jungle diversions that came out, IMO, a very biased opinion mind you, speed garage was the most useless. As a house fan, AND as a jungle/dnb fan, i never saw the sense in it. Like I said, just listen to any Suburban Base ragga-jungle tune of that time, and those were the exact same samples laid over a 4/4 beat.

"Speed garage". Meh.

It was obvious TODD TERRY was diggin jungle/dnb too at the time, hence the Resolutions LP/Cd that came out a bit later - which was pretty damn good. I like that album, to this day.

And further, from the speed garage thang, the sound took out the 4/4, added more old skool hardcore breaks, and hence 2step garage, which was really going back to the original hardcore breakbeat rave thang, but with big commercial RnB vocals & original tunes. Pure pop, and stuff.

As a jungle/dnb dj, I've always been interested in "garage" elements, but I only started spinning garage related sounds from the post-2step sound from about 3 - 4 years ago or so - the early DUBSTEP stuff , & now recent grime. That's where the biznez is. Always has been too.

Everything else is fluff.

[Pennywise]

i dont even know the answer to this one/

[WYATT]

i would never play a grime track> 4 me the speed garage has that funky that i like in house. with the bass lines that i love in dnb . I JUST LOVE THAT SHIIT!!! Grime is way to dark 4 me!

[**TORMENT**]

^^ its funny, cuz I've never listened to "speed garage" since those early days too, nor do I really want to, heh. I'm always a bit suprised it still has an audience. Let alone in Vancouver. Or on this board more like.

Strange.


Also, coincidentally, its key to point out that a lot of the UK speed garage & 2step stuff came from jungle producers, including some names who recorded for ol skool jungle labels like Suburban Base too. Just an aside.

Taken from a Wire article in 1999. Good info on all this chit chat:

http://members.aol.com/blissout/2step.htm



" Jungle's relationship with garage actually went back some way. Instead of techno clubs' ambient chill-out rooms, the second room at jungle clubs usually bumped to garage; pirate radio stations often programmed garage shows for mellow moments in the weekend (Saturday morning, Sunday afternoons). It was on these pirate shows that DJs started pitching up their garage imports (artists like Masters At Work, Kerri Chandler, Todd Edwards) to 130 b.p.m. giving them the extra "oomph" required by the London jungle audience. DJs favoured the dub versions of the US tracks, says Spoony of DJ collective The Dreem Teem, because "not having much vocal element, you could play the dubs faster without them sounding odd"; these near-instrumentals also left gaps for the MC's to do their stuff. Soon the DJs started making homegrown garage trax that sounded like their pirate shows--faster than the US sound, with jungalistic sub-bass, dub-wise FX, and ragga chants timestretched so that the vocal fissured and buckled like the wings of a metal-fatigued Boeing 707. This UK underground garage also radically intensified the aspect of the New York sound that most appealed to jungle-reared ears: intricate percussion patterns, highly-textured drum sounds, and above all, the skippy, snappy, syncopated snares and busy, bustling hi-hats that make garage much more funky than regular house. Reticular and metronomic, house is "banging" or "pumping"; polyrhythmically perverse, garage is all bump'n'flex, twitch 'n' grind. [2] But house and garage are both underpinned by a 4-to-the-floor kick drum that pounds monotonously on every bar.

..Todd Edwards's music had an extraordinary impact on London's emergent speed garage scene. If anyone in 2-step picked up Todd's baton and ran wild with it, it's Dem 2. "Destiny" features an android-diva whose plaintive bleat is so tremulously FX-warped that for months I thought it went "dance t' th' beat" instead of "des-tin-eee". Dem 2's "Don't Cry Dub" of Groove Connektion 2's "Club Lonely" is an even more ear-boggling feat of robo-glossalalia. This 1997 remix sounds like the missing link between Zapp's vocoder-funk mantra "More Bounce To the Ounce" and Maurizio's dub-house. Snipping the vocal into syllables and vowels, feeding the phonetic fragments through filters and FX, Dem 2 create a voluptuous melancholy of cyber-sobs and lump-in-throat glitches: "whimpering, wounded 'droids crying out in desolation!", as Spencer Edwards puts it. "

[mapleleaf4ever]

Wow... I actually learned a lot.