Join The Future: Bleep Techno & British Bass Music

Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music is a critically acclaimed book by journalist and author Matt Anniss, originally published in 2019. Named by Rolling Stone UK as one of the best books on British music culture, It is available to purchase now direct from the publisher, Velocity Press. It can also be found in book shops and selected record stores worldwide. An updated and expanded second edition of the book, featuring a new afterword chapter, additional analysis and updated chapters, was published in early 2023.

Since the dawn of the 1990s, British dance music has been in thrall to the seductive power of weighty sub-bass. It is a key ingredient in a string of British-pioneered genres, including hardcore, jungle, drum & bass, dubstep, UK garage and grime.

In Join The Future, dance music journalist Matt Anniss traces the roots, origins, development and legacy of the sound that started it all: the first distinctively British form of electronic dance music, bleep techno.

A mixture of social, cultural, musical and oral history, Join The Future reveals the untold stories of bleep’s Yorkshire pioneers and those that came in their wake, moving from electro all-dayers and dub soundsystem clashes of the mid-1980s to the birth of hardcore and jungle in London and the South East.

Along the way, you’ll find first-hand accounts of key clubs and raves, biographies of forgotten and overlooked production pioneers, stories of bleep outposts in Canada and the United States, and the inside story of the early years of one of electronic music’s most iconic labels, Warp Records.
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