Remedy who have brought over some of electronic music's biggest crossovers in the past year must have dropped the ball on the promotion for Saturday's DJ Krust gig in what I've heard venomously termed the Temple Bar Destruction of Music Centre. From Wedensday on their mailout list there was 250 offers of guest list passes for anyone bothered emailing in, then on Friday there was a kind mail announcing the adding of a "plus one" to anyone who got one of the original free passes.

In his Pitchfork column on Drum and Bass this month, Jess Harvell bemoans how it has come to feel "like a "fake genre" when compared to the organic vitality of a genre like Grime with its panaromic host of competing pirate stations, and a constant state of innovation germinating on dubplates before eventually crossing over in the form of an easily consumable Lady Soverign . Dnb remains "strung together via the grace of the internet rather than weekly jaunts to the club, pirate radio sessions, or chatting with the counterman at Hard Wax. But this is just life in a post-rave world where electronic music just doesn't matter to the mass culture as much as it did during the '90s."

This article was in lodged in the back of my unusually sober mind entering the main arena of the little black box that is the TBMC to see a total of 10 people sitting around while some bloke hammered out some dinner party drum and bass. With Bassbin's regular club-night becoming subsumed to the saturday night Pogo event in the the Pod Complex, the only thing I could assume was that Dnb was a dead genre in the city Well it seems Pogo just had Fabio over, who alongside Grooverider was one of the legandary pioneers of the genre. You can check out his radio show here. And by 12:30 the Krust gig had packed up, and it was easy to forget the two boring DnB Dj's who had meandered off with themselves into the land of what the good Dr Groove terms "drum and bass samurais."

Krust being one of the founders of Reprazent with Roni Size and that lot, you'd have to hope for something a little special. Not having a clue what to expect from him, I could only fear his mentionings of jazz and association with Goldie remixes in various interviews. This was pounding stuff, typically immaculately produced dnb verring on the hard step end of things with similarities with Knifehandchops violent "boom cha..boom cha" minus the intense acid techno tinged with gabber blast offs being the most ready made comparison in my musical lexicon. The distorted fuzzy bass lines had a deep industrial clang as if they had just survived the digestive tract of Steve Albini with these flightly little intense snare rattles shooting forth over the top that reminded me in parts of Venetian Snares later stuff. All round - sound! This is probably the third Remedy gig I've gotten a blag for - so joining that mail out list should be an immediate priority for any skimpers out there.

Labels: DJ Krust, Drum and Bass, Gig Review, Music