Quarter : Life.

Swerve @ The End

We're back at The End, where Durr was before, but it's hard to recognize what with the serious everything.

This is Fabio's night, a weekly realm staked out by one of the biggest and longest-running names in drum 'n' bass, where he keeps the genre's fire lit, a decade on, against the odds.

While the sounds don't feel new here, for the most part, and it's still male, very much a boy's club, the emphasis, whether or not it means anything, is on the low and livid rather than the liquid and funk, somehow avoiding both the late '90s Roni Size jazz-fusion that ruined everything and the insulated, dancefloor-hating aggression that's fought back ever since.

In the dark, samples of 'Grindhouse' and tossbacks to classic Omni Trio and Orbital stew in acid-synths and a new 21st century anarcho-primitivism, which all gets a cheered-on instant rewind. Huge heaps of record scratches and filthy poly-rhythms also pile on swirls of mass bass, like the sound of old, before it all went wrong -- marinating deep-down breakbeats in Bertolt Brecht and Terry Gilliam films -- when every junglist knew when to break your skull and when to do the heal, putting you on the cultural tightrope with them, laughing at death, hands together.

These are old ideas, 'an insane spectacle of collective homicide,' but likable as hell. In the middle of the night, something comes on that sounds like a mallet on a manhole as it chops and churns the staples of modern drum 'n' bass until the bits come off in one short, sweet, single-minded, and claustrophobic new potential for a sound in never-ending identity-crisis.

Under the lights, bubbles of pixy-stix youth bounce like all this was somehow just invented, and a boy gropes himself on a couch. And they might have, as much as one is convinced to deny it, a point.