Half the speed, all of the weight
Drop a drum & bass tune to half the tempo and it leans back: same sub, same pressure, twice the space to swing in. Halftime is drum & bass built on that halved pulse. Typical tracks sit around 80-85 BPM, close to hip-hop tempo, against the 160-170 BPM of conventional drum & bass. The name itself is loose. In 2016 it was a catch-all for a mix of drum & bass, jungle, hip-hop and footwork that had moved through the bass scene in the preceding years, and emerging sounds between footwork, jungle, drum & bass, hip-hop and future beats were often filed under it for want of a better word. Tempo ranges get quoted, but heads still argue about where the edges are.
Slow/fast: how it sounds
The Autonomic sound was tied to half-time rhythms at around 85 BPM, working primarily on a 170/85 axis, while the movement that followed leaned on 160/80. Producers also wrote slow/fast, switching up between full and half time inside a single production, and that idea was nothing new.
The sound has more than one face. Ivy Lab's debut album was framed as a drum & bass-influenced take on instrumental hip-hop, drawing on the swing of Madlib and the late Jay Dee and on sampling as a practice shared by hip-hop and early jungle: chop it, flip it, let it breathe. At the other end of the range, a 2017 Alix Perez and Skeptical EP is half-stepping d'n'b with fuzzed-out basslines and dubby vocal samples.
Half-step before it had a name
Early sightings
Early sightings of half-tempo drum & bass go back as far as 1992, with DJ Phantasy & DJ Gemini's Switch To 33, and Digital and Amit had been experimenting with sparse kick arrangements since 1999. In the early 2000s the American act Hive and the Australian act Pendulum explored moving between full and half tempo. Sam Binga has said that drum & bass always had half-step tunes.
Autonomic and the early 2010s
Autonomic was a label, club night and podcast series launched by dBridge and Instra:mental, with the project dated to 2009. In December 2009 the pair were tapped to mix FabricLive.50, due for release in February 2010. By the early 2010s fringe producers were revisiting the slow/fast dynamic, drawing on jungle, footwork, beats and hip-hop, and Ivy Lab named Alix Perez, Om Unit, Fracture, Eprom and Machinedrum as examples. The scene's timeline takes in Om Unit's dubwise-leaning Cosmic Bridge label (launched 2011), Eprom's Pipe Dream EP on Rwina Records in 2012, and Ivy Lab's own Afterthought/Brat EP on Critical in 2013.
Ivy Lab and the 20/20 sessions
Ivy Lab are a London trio: Sabre, Stray and Halogenix. They first worked together on a Critical single in 2012, and Critical's owner Kasra encouraged them to develop the project. Sabre has said they moved into halftime gradually, to avoid upsetting their established profiles. Their 20/20 night in London gave its name to the label 20/20 LDN, and the debut album 20/20 Volume One came out on 6 November 2015. By 2016 the label had signed artists like Deft and Shield. In October 2016 the group had a Friday residency at Phonox in London lined up from 25 November, with guests including Dub Phizix & Strategy, and 20/20 LDN Vol. 2 was set to feature Fracture, Havelock, Deft and Phazz. Their Peninsula EP landed on Critical in March 2017.
By May 2017 halftime was showing up not just as a subgenre but as a style and rhythm arrangement across all drum & bass subgenres, with producers such as Noisia, Ivy Lab, dBridge, Alix Perez, Mefjus, Fracture and Kasra part of the conversation.
The names behind the tempo
Ivy Lab, with Sabre, Stray and Halogenix, are covered above. Alix Perez, who also released halftime-leaning material as ARP 101, and Skeptical recorded together for dBridge's Exit Records. Dub Phizix and Skeptical's Marka, with Strategy on the mic, is a hip-hop-influenced track at roughly 174 BPM with the rhythm stripped right back. Other names from this period are Om Unit, Sam Binga, Machinedrum, Great Dane and Kromestar, and the 2017 halftime crop also featured Vorso, Lewis James, Pugilist and Moresounds, among others.
The Rotterdam producer IMANU, who first gained recognition as Signal, adopted that alias in 2019 and releases mostly on Noisia's Vision Recordings. On the subject of naming things, IMANU has said: "we jokingly coined the term 'future breaks'".
Labels, nights and the wider map
- Critical Music released Ivy Lab's early work and their 2017 Peninsula EP, and counts Sam Binga on its roster.
- Exit Records, dBridge's label, announced Alix Perez and Skeptical's Without A Trace EP for release on 17 February 2017.
- Astrophonica, Fracture's label, turns up in the halftime conversation alongside Lewis James' Gradients.
- Cosmic Bridge, Om Unit's label, was founded in 2011.
- Flexout Audio sits in the same conversation with Vorso's WAVE006.
- The London night 20/20, and its Phonox residency, are described above. Low End Theory in Los Angeles also features: Alix Perez flew out there to play.
Where the half-step went
By 2017 halftime releases were coming from Turin, Melbourne, Prague, Los Angeles, Sheffield and elsewhere, and the style was being linked to other slow bass scenes including L.A. beats, London instrumental grime and Chicago juke and footwork. Subgenre, tempo or just a vibe: the name stays loose, and the heads are still arguing.
