Published
Mon, Jun 10, 2019, 22:20
- Join The Future: Bleep Techno And The Birth of British Bass Music, is out in December.
A new publishing house called Velocity Press will issue its first book, Join The Future: Bleep Techno And The Birth of British Bass Music, in December.
The music journalist and author Matt Anniss explains that the idea for the book stemmed from an argument he had in a club in autumn 2010. In the press release, Anniss says he told a group of young DJs that the roots of bass music "could be traced back to a short-lived style variously referred to as 'Yorkshire bleep,' 'bleep techno' and 'bleep and bass'."
He'd go on to make a mix drawing connections between bleep and modern bass music. A few years later, Anniss dove deeper into the style—which saw producers like Unique 3, Nightmares On Wax and LFO mixing Detroit techno, Chicago house, electro and "steppas" style dub reggae—in a 2014 piece for Resident Advisor.
Following the RA feature, a trio of graphic designers asked Anniss to write a "bleep book" which they would lay out for their final project, published in an edition of one. The one-off version of Join The Future was published in July 2016 with the understanding that an expanded book would follow.
Over the next three years, Anniss interviewed "pioneers and forgotten producers," researched contemporaneous media coverage in the British Library and "dug deep enough to not only tell the story of bleep and bass, but a wider musical and cultural movement born not in London or Manchester—the two cities most discussed in UK dance music literature— but in basements, bedrooms and record shops in Yorkshire and the North Midlands."
Listen to a bleep mix from Anniss.
Velocity Press will publish Join The Future: Bleep Techno And The Birth of British Bass Music in December 2019.
