Innerzone Orchestra

“Bug in the Bass Bin” (Jazz version) b/w “Bug in the Bass Bin” (original version)

scum stats: test pressing…but it’s techno, so this could easily be one of 100 or even more

If you did a random scan of every time a drum beat popped into my head, this would be what you’d find 33% of the time.

Seriously, walking down the street, my daughters waking me up in the middle of the night, chewing on some gummy bears, unnecessary conference calls…Bug in the Bass Bin is the soundtrack to all of this.

I don’t think I’d heard of this song before doing research in the lead-up to the Dirtbombs techno covers LP “Party Store" almost ten years ago now.

I believe I read somewhere that this track was considered the “first” drum and bass song. That was enough for me to investigate.

Cue all kinds of apocrypha regarding the unknown origin of some of the samples, playing the 33rpm version at 45rpm, the underpinned jazz influence to it all…and I was quite happy to be in that rabbit hole.

I welcomed the challenge of trying to figure out how to translate the drum beat into something that Pat and I could replicate in the studio. We did alright, but in hindsight, I regret not learning how to play the five bass drum beats that (I think) begin each measure.

The session was actually pretty funny…I set my iPhone next to me with a timer running, the plan was that we’d just play the thing for ten minutes or so.

But pretty quickly, my screensaver activated and went to black, so no one in the band had any gauge as to how long we’d been playing the song.

And as repetitive as this groove is, once you’re in it, you really do lose all sense of time.

We played for over twenty minutes. The reel of tape ran out and we didn’t even know.

Word started to go around town about us working on an album that was all covers of Detroit techno tunes and through some stroke of fortune, Carl Craig (the brains behind Innerzone Orchestra) actually wanted to guest on our cover version.

Pretty. Damn. Cool.

He wanted to play modular synthesizer and had this set up that looked like it was responsible for sending the Apollo missions into space. All knobs and levers and I think some weird nylon string with a metal ball on it. And from what I can tell, he set this thing up and like a boulder at the top of a hill, just pushed it once and let it go on it’s own.

His sounds start the song, are pushed to the front of the mix around 10:36, and then to the front again around 19:06.

This song is so long that you cannot stream it on Tidal. I think that’s more an issue with whomever owns the publishing on the track, but whatever.

I asked him about the drums on the original, he said they were sampled and sliced up from an instructional dance record, but when I pressed him for more info, he clammed up and didn’t want to talk about it.

I am still DYING to know if that’s actually true and if so, what in the hell that record is.

I don’t expect anyone here to know, but if so, mention in the comments and I’ll pull a gem in the closet and send it your way.

(side note: the drums are NOT sampled from First Choice “Let No Man Put Asunder” but “Bass Bin” DOES sample a little keyboard riff from that track)

When we told Carl that we got lost in the song while we were tracking it and went on for twenty minutes, he smiled “That’s the whole spirit of the track,” he said. His comment felt reassuring. There’s a reason he did a 7-inch for the grand opening of Third Man Pressing. He gets it.

Anyway, I think the jazz version is pretty ace. A drum groove that I wish I could summon from my spaghetti arms. I wholly applaud Carl for his expansive musical palette, seems like techno fans can be close-minded, but he’s spreading the word.

As for the record…yeah, I’m a sucker for a test pressing. I still don’t even have the copy with the printed sleeve.

Three versions linked below, original, jazz, and Dirtbombs. Lemme know what you dig best in the comments.