Leave the gaps in and the bass has room to breathe. That is the whole idea behind minimal drum & bass: space and restraint instead of density, with fewer layers, sparse percussion and a wide-open low end around the sub, so the pressure comes from what you leave out. The term is used loosely and has been pinned to two separate moments in the music's history, the tense, stripped-back productions of the mid-1990s and the spacious sound that spread around the Autonomic project in 2009 and 2010. Some of the artists the word has been attached to have said they disliked it.
Room for the bass
Instra:mental have said that drum & bass had "no space", with breaks stacked on top of each other, and that they chose to leave gaps instead; they described their own productions as "quite minimalistic in some ways". The first Autonomic single, in 2010, made the same case on wax: space, a minimal arrangement, rumbling sub-bass and a wiggling synth line. No wall of break, just bassline weight and air.
Autonomic operated mainly on a 170 / 85 bpm axis, so heads could skank at either speed. In 2010, ASC called the Autonomic sound "mainly electronica influenced stuff at the 170 (or 85) BPM range" and "drum & bass music that doesn't sound like drum & bass music". Boil the Autonomic movement down and it was 170 BPM music with more emphasis on space and melody. On half-time rhythms in drum & bass, Sam Binga said dubstep had shown that "you didn't need to batter people over the head with constant drum pressure to create danceable music".
Then there is the label itself, which was never a compliment for everyone. "Minimal" got thrown at tunes stripped back to ordinary drums and a handful of chords, and the people at the centre of the sound did not enjoy wearing it. Alex Green of Instra:mental said the whole thing "was labelled as minimal, which used to piss me off", and that Autonomic "got tagged as 170bpm music, which was never the intention".
Tension without clutter: Photek and Source Direct
Mid-1990s
Source Direct, together with Photek and Goldie, are credited with helping to spearhead a minimal, tense drum & bass sound that shaped the genre for generations: dark one pressure without the clutter. Source Direct were Jim Baker and Phil Aslett, two teenage friends from St Albans who made music between 1994 and 1999. Their early records got a break through Photek, who helped them onto Certificate 18; they also released on Metalheadz and later followed Photek to Virgin's Science imprint, and their album Exorcise the Demons appeared in 1999. Their album Controlled Developments (1997) runs on intricate, compressed drum edits, with suspense drawn from jazz-funk samples and synth drones. Tight chops, nowhere to hide.
Photek (Rupert Parkes) has been active since 1994. He was an early Metalheadz act with the Natural Born Killa EP; Virgin signed him to its Science sub-label in 1995, and his debut album Modus Operandi came two years after that signing. His records are all intricacy: polyrhythmic drums, chopped, edited and multilayered, alongside cinematic atmospheres. Every chop is placed, so the 1990s use of "minimal" is about tension and control, not a lack of programming.
A direct line runs from this era to the later one. The first Instra:mental singles, by Boddika and Jon Convex, came out on Source Direct's Demonic label, and a Source Direct reissue series was planned for the NonPlus label in 2015.
2009 to 2011: the Autonomic wave
Autonomic began as a podcast series and label run by Instra:mental, the London duo of Alexander Green and Damon Kirkham, with dBridge. Nine monthly podcasts appeared in 2009 and appealed to dubstep fans as well as a number of house and techno producers. In February 2010 the trio's mix FabricLive.50 was released in the UK, and the first Autonomic record followed in April 2010, with a collaboration between dBridge, Instra:mental and Skream on the A-side. dBridge later said the sound became a genre "out of nowhere", which was "in no way our aim".
Other labels soon took up the sound. dBridge's Exit Records issued the double compilation Mosaic Volume 1 in January 2011, with Instra:mental, ASC, Skeptical, Loxy and Resound alongside Scuba and Distance. In July 2010 ASC announced his Auxiliary label, which, he said, would at first focus on the 170 tempo; since 2009 his music had appeared mostly on Instra:mental's NonPlus. Exit's founding is dated to 2003, and its first album was Steve Spacek's Black Pocket in 2007.
Early 2010s: 170 and beyond
The post-Autonomic scene had its own roller in "Marka" by Dub Phizix and Skeptical, from late 2011 at about 174 BPM: a barebones rhythm with room all round it. Skeptical, part of the Module Eight collective with dBridge, Kid Drama, Loxy and Resound, made "Marka" with Dub Phizix and Strategy, and later made the Without A Trace EP with Alix Perez, released on Exit Records in 2017. As Autonomic wound down in the early 2010s, Instra:mental moved on to solo aliases.
Who to check
- Photek and Source Direct for the 1990s strand described above.
- dBridge, whose Future Forces 12-inch appeared on Renegade Hardware in 1996 and who later ran Exit.
- Instra:mental and ASC, the core of the Autonomic-era sound.
- Skeptical, a Module Eight member who made "Marka" and later the Without A Trace EP.
Labels and the night at E1
Exit Records is known as a label that led the way for innovation at high tempos. Its first label party, held at E1 in London in January 2020, ran for about eight hours with SP:MC hosting. Skeptical opened with the stripped-back "Duck Soup", and the host declared the night a "foghorn free zone". Autonomic itself, Auxiliary and NonPlus belong to the 2009 and 2010 story, while Metalheadz and Certificate 18 belong to the 1990s one.
What it left behind
Fracture has said that Autonomic "paved a way" for drum & bass to blend with other genres. In 2013 dBridge said he liked seeing the influence of his group's work on others, praised Om Unit's half-time work, and said there was "a lot still to be explored". That first Exit party mixed 140 BPM and half-time tunes with classic and contemporary drum & bass and jungle, all on the one bill.
Next door
Neighbouring categories on this site include Autonomic, Microfunk, Halftime, Deep and Intelligent, the last being the scene associated with Source Direct's earliest records around Good Looking. Photek himself still prefers the term jungle.
