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I introduce you to F-step

Art, they say, is rather like a badger. We know badgers exist, we see photos of them – but who has actually seen a badger, in the wild? Art is like this; it is beautiful but elusive, industrious but timid. Once in a while, though, a piece of art comes right out of the blue, just like a badger, and bites you in the face. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you – F-step.

I first heard F-step at a random rave in Wales, UK. It was in an old Hoover warehouse on the outskirts of Effe-on-Wye. I can say with complete justification that I have never seen anything like it. I was presented with a scene akin to 70 old people dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, except that the only gas in the air was of the chilled kind. There were people on the floor in front of me, just lying on the floor, writhing.

But what really struck me was the beat. Or beats, I should say. They wrapped around me, utterly supreme, and yet utterly incomprehensible. I consider my knowledge of jungle rhythms to be pretty solid, but this was like taking a jungle rhythm and squaring it, or even expanding it to the power of four: you can perceive one dimension of it at a time, but the whole picture is beyond the scope of the human mind.

Or at least, that’s how it seemed. As I say, the atmosphere was pretty chilled. Here, though, I think I should provide a more sober explanation. The sounds were being produced by two of Wales’ foremost and progressive jungle artists, DJs Abel and Cane. I got a few words with them about their sound – F-step.

“F-step first came about almost by accident”, commented Cane. “We were messing around with some tricky Photek, and we noticed the bizarre effect of concurrent, overlapping beats. At first, my head was screwed with it for a full week.”

Abel adds: “Our first tune was called Nasty. Everything was backwards about it – the voice, the bass effect, the beat itself sounded like it was coming back to you off a 10-foot wall. But that’s the effect of F-step – it sounds like chaos but it’s sublime.”

Clearly not modest about their sound, the two also tell me it’s about using old material to create something new. “There’s no need for new beats these days. All the beats we need can be made via permutations and combinations of the existing ones, over each other, around each other. And when that ‘beat supply’ finally does run out, the human race will probably be interested in something totally different, like sheep’s heads or something.”

As I say, we were in Wales. But the location didn’t matter. The idea of placing a beat over itself, but out of sync, has been well and truly investigated by these two, and they are heading for better places. They gigged in Cambridge recently, and are soon to move their sound abroad. “We have to be gentle with it,” says Cane, “we don’t want to warp peoples’ minds into submission. The human race might not be ready just yet.”

F-step keeps them busy – they have decided that no tune should extend beyond a minute or two (they observed ‘more comatose behaviour’ when the length surpassed that boundary). So, they have to keep writing new tunes, and when they’re DJing, it’s non-stop action. So little time to go from one tune to the next, and the mixing itself is a whole new F-step tune on its own. It’s the ultimate test of any disc-spinner.

Do I think F-step has a future? From what I saw on that October night, most definitely. But this music is like a drug – it’s always someone else taking it, telling you it’s great, whilst you’re convinced you’re better off sticking to the light stuff. Do we have the courage to get hooked on this junglist smack? Let’s hope so.

Source: Junglist.com