"With this trio of cassettes, Low End Activist has shown he’s up for the challenge, as he continues along the path begun on the initial ‘Airdrop’ with ‘Airdrop II’ and ‘Airdrop III’. The trilogy presents a thrilling minimalist distillation of decades of UK bass and club music."
With his 2024 opus, ‘Municipal Dreams’, UK producer Low End Activist used murky grime, dubstep, and garage to spin a semi-autobiographical tale of his upbringing in Oxford’s Blackford Leys Estate. The deep bass and shattered percussion alluded to disrepair and a general sense of dread. The record was less a commentary than a snapshot of a moment in time, told through the producer’s exacting and evolving production skills.
In the same year, Jamie Russell teamed up with Los Angeles imprint Peak Oil for ‘Airdrop’, one of our favourite albums of 2024 and a dizzying collection of, as our own Asmi Shetty put it, “dungeon noise”. The pairing of Low End Activist and Brian Foote’s label is a match made in heaven. Peak Oil releases are often tagged with the descriptors “deconstructed”, “minimalist”, and “skeletal”, and ‘Airdrop’ is no outlier within the label’s classification schema.
The label’s curatorial approach has yielded career best output from the likes of Purelink, Topdown Dialectic, and Hoavi. Their “less is more” philosophy plays out like watching a photo develop in reverse: all the familiar elements of, for example, dub techno, footwork, and house are reduced to their bare structures. Each release sounds like you’re in the middle of an abandoned factory, watching the building rust, decay, and fall apart. With this trio of cassettes, Low End Activist has shown he’s up for the challenge, as he continues along the path begun on the initial ‘Airdrop’ with ‘Airdrop II’ and ‘Airdrop III’. The trilogy presents a thrilling minimalist distillation of decades of UK bass and club music.
With the second and third editions, Low End Activist dives deeper into minimal garage and 2-step, spitting out dirty, low end textures that would blast the paint off the walls of a warehouse rave. Meanwhile, ambient interludes offer a definitive sense of downtrodden nostalgia between the harder club tunes. Each track hints at a fading memory hastily jotted down, as ghosts of the past disintegrate through our speakers.
“Brillos Teeth” and “Baldys Bins”, nestled in the back half of ‘Airdrop II’, will scratch the itch for dubstep fans, as the heavy bass design will knock you to the floor. On ‘Airdrop III’, “Time Vampire” follows in that vein, with skittering beats manoeuvring around vocal samples and manipulated, bell-like synths. “Kiss Bar” plays out like a mutated slab of breakbeat that pulses with an echo-laden array of percussion. Elsewhere, the soot, dust, and filth are a constant and most welcome presence in the cavernous dub of “NRG”. Low End’s production prowess heard on other releases is evident and amplified further by the contrast between the harder tracks interspersed between quieter, though no less blasted and fogged out, tunes.
At other points, the albums touch on a mutant strain of ambient adjacent textures that reveal a fascinating direction for the producer. “Earls Skank” closes the second volume in a quiet, pensive mood. The beatless track floats on a mix of cloudy synths that reflect the early morning hours, as unnatural factory lights illuminate the sky and the sounds of the night reverberate in your subconscious. That ending leads to the familiarly foggy “Cheque”, which opens ‘Airdrop III’ with slight beats that hint at the low key, stirring, and heavy hitting tunes ahead.
‘Airdrop II’ and ‘Airdrop III’ find Low End Activist infusing ambient strains into the UK hardcore continuum of dubstep, grime, and bass music. It’s a stunning collection that refracts prominent late 90s club aesthetics through prismatic productions that are timeless in their reverence for the sounds and experiences that shaped Low End’s style. A fitting addition to the catalogs of both artist and label, ‘Airdrop’ exists in the liminal spaces between the past, present, and future of UK rave.
Airdrop II & III are out now as digital and cassette format via Peak Oil. Order from Bandcamp.
AIRDROP II
1. Airdrop 01 (Jim’s Dubs)
2. Airdrop 02 (Bert’s Trap)
3. Airdrop 03 (Colin’s Golf)
4. Airdrop 04 (Merv’s Lazy Eye)
5. Airdrop 05 (Dion’s Amnesia)
6. Airdrop 06 (Smithy’s Porsche)
7. Airdrop 07 (Brillo’s Teeth)
8. Airdrop 08 (Baldy’s Bins)
9. Airdrop 09 (Dougy’s Ramp)
10. Airdrop 10 (Earl’s Skank)
AIRDROP III
1. Airdrop 01 (Cheque)
2. Airdrop 02 (Time Vampire)
3. Airdrop 03 (NRG)
4. Airdrop 04 (U Kno)
5. Airdrop 05 (Trust Meeee)
6. Airdrop 06 (Edge)
7. Airdrop 07 (Kiss Bar)
8. Airdrop 08 (Easy Money)
9. Airdrop 09 (Take Me)
10. Airdrop 10 (Outro)