To celebrate the launch of Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, we're excited to announce a special evening of music and conversation at Soho's legendary venue - steeped in UK Bass Culture itself - Sounds of The Universe.
With free entry and free Wray & Nephew rum punch, book creators Joe Muggs and Brian David Stevens will be joined by Mykaell Riley for a Q&A, and then by trailblazers of Soundsystem Culture, Jumpin Jack Frost, Barely Legal, T Williams and more.
Following the event, there will be dancing and drinks long into the night at St Pancras' Standard Hotel.
Location: Sounds of the Universe • 7 Broadwick Street, Soho, W1F 0DA
Date: Saturday 18th January
Time: 16:30 • 19:00
We hope to see you there!
Bass, Mids, Tops has been listed on Pitchfork's The Best Music Books of 2019:
“Bass is fundamental,” writes Joe Muggs in this book’s introduction. It’s physical, not cerebral, he says, “reaching through walls and floors, propagating outwards, marking out social (and antisocial) spaces.” Bass, Mids, Tops is an attempt to follow those shock waves back to their source—the sound-system culture of Britain’s Caribbean immigrant communities—and then trace their reverberations through lovers-rock reggae and post-punk, through hip-hop, jungle, grime, dubstep, and beyond. Muggs interviews multiple generations of players—people like Dennis Bovell, a Barbadian dub selector who ran one of London’s most influential sound systems before producing everyone from the Slits to Linton Kwesi Johnson; Storm, a drum’n’bass DJ who, along with her late partner Kemistry, co-founded the influential Metalheadz label in the ’90s; and Mala, whose ’00s dubstep duo Digital Mystikz was responsible for a sound “as pure and strange as anything in British electronic history.” Told entirely through candid interviews (accompanied by portraits from Brian David Stevens), Bass, Mids, Tops is an engrossing tale of sounds ricocheting around the world—and an instinctive allegiance to frequencies more felt than heard. – Philip Sherburne
Bass, Mids, Tops is available to order HERE.
500pp (approx) heavily illustrated in b/w
165mm x 221mm
£25.00