FINALE! EVERY GENRE PROJECT - December 31 - UK Garage

Jan 01, 2025

Genre of the Day - UK Garage

Album of the Day - Untrue by Burial (2007)

Happy new year’s eve! I can’t believe it’s the last day of the year - I am truly finding it difficult to grasp. I am so grateful, and mostly surprised, that I was able to sustain this project and listen to a different random genre of music every day in 2024 (nearly, I took my birthday, Christmas, and Coachella off—the holy trinity!). Apologies in advance: I’m quite a sentimental person. This post is probably going to be so sappy that maple syrup will seep out of my computer’s ports. 235,000 words later, stored in a Google doc that pains my browser and depletes my memory whenever I open it, taking time night in and night out to absorb music, ideas, and stories and wrap them up in a little bow has become an institutional part of my life.

This endeavor started as murmurs into the void sent to less than 10 subscribers for a couple of months, and I didn’t realize I could actually try to cultivate community and subscribers with other writers until maybe halfway through. Thank you to everyone who has read my articles and let new music into your life. I am very grateful for the fulfillment and new ideas this project has brought me. I am deeply thankful for the boundless creativity of musicians around the world who built all of these genres and the musicologists, historians, and journalists who have produced mountains of invaluable research material and invigorated my passions. A major catalyst for this idea was Tom Breihan’s incredible The Number Ones column that helped introduce me to the wide world of music writing.

On this last day, I cherry-picked UK garage, an addictive permutation of British dance music emerging in the turn of the 21st century closely related to bassline which appeared in November. The genre was an instrumental precursor to me pursuing this project and becoming so ravenous for sonic discovery when the genre enticed me a few years back, during my senior year of high school. It represents so much of what I sonically love all at once: sticky melodies, production ingenuity, R&B influence, avant-garde techniques drawn from sonic corners like dub (which started this year off) and drum’n’bass, and irresistible grooves. It helped me see the ingenuity of particular music genres and made me want to dig into a wider cross-section of genre histories as with this project.

Iconic electronic producer Burial’s Untrue is a fitting last-of-the-year entry—this album is a dynamic journey, spectral, haunting, gorgeous, raw, and inventive. “Archangel” is a beautifully mangled deconstruction of an R&B vocal flip, true to UKG, but with a Gotham-like soundscape with the genre’s iconic percussion built from video game samples. His interpretation of garage shuffles is crystalline and subtle, like the light pulses of “Endorphin”, samples emerging from the ether and retreating without a trace. He summons snippets like a sonic seance; a soft Aaliyah coo filters through “In McDonalds.” It’s as if the album scans the ever-moving and ephemeral processes of the mind. It is a wonder to take in, and yet another testament to musicians’ creative capacity, especially when armed with the free-form potential of digital music-making.

This may be the last Every Genre Project entry in its first iteration, but there is more to come. I will be wrapping up this project with little mini-articles, synthesizing and categorizing the genres I’ve covered with novel thematic angles; I also plan to keep up listening to a new genre every day, so really, what's old is new again.

I am very grateful for what this endeavor has helped me to discover about music and about myself ♥ Music reminds me of all the beauty of the world and the human experience, and I am so grateful to have heard and felt so many expressions of and perspectives on it through this research. Thank you all for joining me and I am excited for what’s next.

Talk to you in 2025,

Reid