Various Artists - Join The Future: UK Bleep & Bass (88-91)
I only bought this last week, so I feel that it’s inclusion requires some explanation. Before we get into that, this is a brilliant comp, it treads the line between trainspotter tackle and straight up belters with precision and style. The reason it’s on here is that it stands in for a huge and continuing part of my life, the not-an-album. In truth, dance music doesn’t need albums. I bought, and buy, some of them but the DJ part of my brain can’t be switched off and I pick my favourites and the other tracks unfairly languish on my hard drive until I’m scrolling through and re-address the record, older and with new preferences and prejudices. Dance music’s natural home is on 12”s and for it to really make sense you need to hear it mixed on a PA late at night. This is an album format chat though so I’m faced with: do I leave this off or do I choose a 12” that I had hammered and been hammered by? Or a mix, or most truthfully or all, one of the nights where it all came together and made sense? So, Join The Future represents the start of a period of buying as many jungle/D&D 12”s as I could afford and also, perhaps a bit neatly, because it’s new it also nods to the fact that it’s something that I still feel excited by. Even when I was not able to tour I’d trawl my usual online haunts for a sniff of the future, and there always was some, and there always is some.

I fell into this record-finding game at a rich moment, though - for much of that time I could tell you just by the sound of record and what breaks they were using when it was made, probably to within about six months? It was like watching a time-lapse video of music development - the future was being greedily hoovered in and pressed up at a rate that I had never seen before and you can stick your copy of Rumours up your bum if you disagree.