Thursday, 04 November 2021

Bomb the Bass

Bomb the Bass is an electronic dance music one-man band consisting of English musician and producer Tim Simenon.

As a name, Bomb the Bass came from Simenon's approach to collaging and mixing sounds whilst DJing in the mid to late 1980s; he says "samples were either scratched in live or sampled and looped on top of the rhythm section. So the concept was one of bombing the bass line with different ideas, with a collage of sounds. Bombing was a graffiti term for writing, like people would 'bomb' trains or whatever."

History

Pushing the needle: The accelerated success of Beat Dis

Released in 1987, the band's debut single was "Beat Dis", with composition credited to Emilio Pasquel / Captain Black / DJ Kid 33. Disguised as a U.S. import on the Mister-Ron imprint, in an attempt to conjure the mystique of Bomb the Bass being an underground New York act, the single exceeded expectations by eventually reaching number two on the UK charts.

Its roaring success put the then still relatively unknown Simenon on the front cover of Britain's most serious, and highly influential music newspaper, NME. This event was notable not only for being the moment when the previously pro-rock/anti-disco paper sided with post-disco dance music (at this time indie was NME's genre du jour), recognising and valuing Simenon for being a DJ first and foremost, rather than a musician; but also for the dawn of the term DJ culture. Used as the cover's sub-heading, the term would henceforth become the accepted term for the incoming trend (of which Simenon was arguably one of the UK's pioneers) of DJs as superstars, and which would dominate popular music at least for the next decade.

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Bomb_the_Bass