Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music

Matt Anniss's critically acclaimed alternative history of UK dance music in the acid house era returns in updated and expanded form. Named by Rolling Stone UK as one of the best books on British music culture, Join The Future puts forward a persuasive new argument about the origins of UK club culture's longrunning love affair with bass. Since the dawn of the 1990s, Britain's dancefloors have moved to a string of styles built around skeletal rhythms and heavy sub-bass, including breakbeat hardcore, jungle, drum & bass, dubstep, UK garage, grime and bassline. Yet another previously overlooked sound pre-dated them all: bleep and bass, or bleep techno, the first distinctly British form of electronic dance music.

About the Author :
Matt Anniss is a journalist and author specializing in electronic music, DJing and club culture. He began his career on internet magazines in the late 1990s before joining the staff of IDJ Magazine as Music Editor in 2000, later becoming Editor. Since leaving the magazine in 2008, he's become a regular contributor to Resident Advisor, Red Bull Music Academy Daily and DJ Magazine, specializing in historical aspects of dance music culture. As an author, Matt has written over 50 non-fiction books for children and young adults.

Review :
"Britain is an electronic music heavyweight - this is the place that invented jungle, dubstep, speed garage - and here, dance music journalist Matt Anniss traces the origins of all of this back to bleep techno, which began in Yorkshire in the 1980s. Anniss researched this book for five years in order to claim the untold story of Britain's dance music revolution for the unique time and place that generated it." -Lauren O'Neill, Rolling Stone "In Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music, [Matt] Anniss argues for the cultural significance of the short-lived style known as bleep. He unearths the stories of its originators cast aside by the canon, emphasising that due credit must be given... According to Anniss, the Bleep sound (that would essentially create Warp Records) could only begin because of intercity cross-pollination between Bradford and Leeds, and because of multicultural developments such as certain white people being let into black spaces like blues parties - house gatherings featuring drink, dance and a soundsystem." -Tayyab Amin, The Wire "This was a vital creative era in British electronic music that deserved deeper exploration, so Matt Anniss's history of 'bleep and bass', which sets the sound in the socio-political environment of its time, is a significant addition to the literature of dance culture." -Matthew Collin, Altered State