Rumblizm: In Praise Of The Reese Bass

A sound like thunder

Some elements of modern dance music have become legendary. There are several documentaries about the Roland TB-303. The Amen break even got an article in The Economist. For me, there is one sound that does not get the love it deserves: The Reese Bass.

Detroit is famous for three things: its car manufacturing industry, urban decay porn, and techno music. Although techno didn’t start in Detroit exactly. In the 80s, three black kids met in junior high school in Belleville, a white-ish, rural suburb 30 miles from Detroit. They loved Parliament/Funkadelic, Kraftwerk, and Yellow Magic Orchestra. With access to basic synthesizers, they began to make their own music under a multitude of names on their various labels.

One of them was Kevin Maurice Saunderson. In 1986, he made the track “Just Want Another Chance”. Released under the Reese moniker, it’s as baleful and disturbing as his Inner City tracks like “Good Life” and “Big Fun” are light and joyful.

Saunderson’s persona on this track is dark, obsessed, predatory (although it turns out he wasn’t the predator in Belleville). The sparse music intensifies the suffocating vibe - esp. the bassline.

Traditional pop basslines were played mostly on a bass guitar with the Fender Precision bass appearing in 1951. Although it took 20 years for musicians to find truly interesting things to do with the instrument (no disrespect to James Jamerson). The graceful fretless work of Jaco Pastorius and the invention of slap by Larry Graham made the bass more than just the stringed equivalent of a keyboardist’s left hand. There is no rock without the electric guitar but there is no funk and disco without bass maestros like Graham, Bootsy Collins, and Bernard Edwards. If we throw reggae and dub into the mix then the 1970s was probably the bassest decade ever.

But this is the 80s and the future is getting cheaper at a rapid clip. In 1980, a Fairlight synthesizer cost $25,000. Six years later, Saunderson used a Casio CZ-5000 synth that cost less than a 10th of that. While it is comparatively simple to reproduce, the Reese bass sounds less like the product of an instrument than that of a cataclysm.

As John Hull states:

“Perhaps the closest possible emulation of this sound would be a chorus of upright basses in an orchestra, just ever so slightly adjusting their tuning in and out of sync from one another.”

The wave forms seem unstable. The vibrations are not so much heard as felt, the aftermath of a distant earthquake. Even on airpods, you feel it. But it is meant to be felt through a sound system in a club.

The Reese resurfaces eight years later across the Atlantic in Essex. Detroit Techno and Chicago House and New York Hip Hop and UK Reggae Sound systems and MDMA and trips to Ibiza all get mixed up in Cubase software and East London clubs.

Ray Keith’s “Terrorist” shows how things got mixed up. It features chopped up and sped up samples of the Amen and Think breaks. There’s a dub bassline from Bristolians Smith and Mighty that trades blows with the mutilated drum sample. There’s vocal samples and horn samples. There’s a piano riff that echoes Japan’s “Nightporter”. You might lose the feet and ears of the dancers at any moment. So you must constantly surprise and impress.

And there’s the Reese bass. As Simon Reynolds explains:

“Alongside breakbeat science, the other half of jungle’s musical core is its radically mutational approach to bass… In jungle, bass – hitherto dance music’s reliable pulse – became a plasma-like substance forever morphing and mutating.”

The rumblizm of the Reese bass is perfect for physical force of the Jungle sound systems. It must be felt. Over time it slows down into the artificial glamour of 2-Step garage. Dubstep then slams on the breaks. The vibrational instability in synthetic basslines becomes all the more prominent the slower they get. The grinding metal on metal bass of dubstep gets called “wobble”. The menace of Saunderson’s original track become at once horrific and comic like a splattercore horror movie. First as tragedy, then as farce.

Kevin Saunderson created an early form of artificial reality - although through headphones and speakers instead of a $3000+ headset. The Reese bass is an artifical lifeform that colonizes music over the subsequent 30 years.

Respect due.