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Shoosh @ Video Visions Bar

North London. Garage, grime, and dubstep in a '70s basement Mexican cafeteria. Miles from the Tube.

Still reeling.

A DJ is on, Dexplicit, behind a simple-simon color-ball and a rope-light, slaughtering future-shocked garage.

Britain's grime scene has suffered, its fractured MC-dominated hip-hop sound lost without its tension, and it's hard to tell if it's because of boredom, its always-the-bridesmaid failure to bash through the mainstream, or both. But this is something else.

Before grime, which was hard and masculine, there was U.K. garage and 2-step, which were loose and feminine. Tonight, there's the sound of the emergent bassline movement, which is hermaphrodite, except mutated by a mixture of intents.

We dance to mad house beats, dropped in a ditch, kept steaming. But there's also ragga, hip-hop, rave, drum 'n' bass, and dubstep. All at once.

Now full-on, high-speed, Dexplicit daylights Wiley, Wideboys, T2, and Benga & Coki with female vocals and hard effects. American R&B and pop choruses -- Mary J. Blige, Ace Of Bass, Prodigy, and The Clash -- scatter along seizures of sub-bass, like U.K. garage from an evil parallel world that never happened.

This is the English underground, which began with acid house and continues through dubstep, not as a continuum but as a single sound, a single idea, built from the bodies of the last few black movements in British music.

Apocalyptically loud. About five people there.

Amazing.