UK Garage’s Baltimore Club Connection
NUKG Monthly is Nathan Evans' UK garage and club music column. This edition traces the hidden rhythm pattern that connects Baltimore Club, UK garage and the inception of dubstep. Featuring an interview with author Al Shipley.
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This month’s episode is inspired by two things: my continued love for Introspekt’s album, Moving the Center - one of the best of the year, so studied and yet so free-feeling - and the new book by Al Shipley entitled Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music. In recent months, I’ve been fascinated with the same time in music that Introspekt pulls so much from: that crossroads moment where producers were pulling UK garage down much more rhythmically diverse paths, making dark garage and then, dubstep.
One such path was inspired heavily by Baltimore Club, a regional US style of club music that grew from black and gay clubs in the early 90s. It’s lesser-known that the rowdy, breaksy style which grew in a similar time to UKG is integral to the development of dark garage and early dubstep, in how its rhythm patterns regularly merged with UK garage, and that connection still carries on to this day.
Baltimore Club’s origins lie in a club called Odell’s, which was known for house and hip-hop nights, and the style merged the two into a high-octane breakbeat. Historically, Baltimore tracks reused two breakbeats - Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It)” and Gaz’s “Sing Sing” - and looped stuttering vocals that were often loud and nasty, perverted MCing that captures the energy of what took place weekly at Odell’s and Paradox. It shares a surprising amount of things in common with UK garage, as they existed and rose at a similar point in time for club music distribution - the era of local radio and white label pressings of records passed to DJs to gather buzz before release.
“UK garage and Baltimore club kind of arrived in the same BPM zone of 130-140bpm,” Al Shipley, author of Tough Breaks, added when we spoke on a Zoom call. “It seems to me that garage was a reaction to the really fast stuff like jungle, whereas Baltimore club, we got to that BPM by speeding things up from hip-hop and R&B. So we arrived at the same zone from different directions.” Interestingly, the Odell’s soundsystem was designed by Richard Long, the same Richard Long who designed the system at Paradise Garage, from which garage gets its name. Even at their inception, Baltimore club and UK garage share a connection through sound.
Baltimore club wouldn’t fully be crystallised as a style until DJ Technics created the “Dickontrol Break” in 1993, a five-kick pattern which would be used as the scaffolding for hundreds, if not thousands, of Baltimore Club tracks to come. “I think because Baltimore club has these breaks that are really busy, to have something that breathes really helps it,” Shipley explains the track’s significance. “The kick drum gives a little bit of a stride to it, as opposed to a four-on-the-floor, which is a completely different feel. Because the scene here was steeped in hip-hop and house, club was the fastest style we had here. So to have something where the pattern was a little slower, it gave people something to hold onto when they were partying for hours. Having that “Dickontrol” beat sort of relaxes things compared to a four-on-the-floor.”
Baltimore is the birthplace of one of dubstep’s key figures: Joe Nice, who helped the stateside spread of the genre from early on. Once aspiring to be a Baltimore club producer, when he fell out of love with the style during college, he discovered dubstep after visiting the UK Invasion stage at Starscape Festival 2002 in Baltimore. On the lineup, there was Hatcha, Benny Ill, Emma Feline and Zed Bias - a robust survey of the less commercial side of garage. He first visited the UK to explore dubstep in 2002, so he was in very early doors when it was still evolving out of UK garage. He would go on to become the man who brought dubstep to the US when he started the Dub War party alongside Dave Q in 2005.
In 2005, Nice became the first Black American to have a mix on Rinse FM, mixing a B2B with Kode9 and Mala, DJing with the on-the-fly inventiveness of a Baltimore club DJ. Of his mixing style, he said, “most dubstep DJs came into dubstep from jungle or drum and bass, not Baltimore Club and soulful house. My frame of reference, the way I like to mix, and the way I like to play is different, because Baltimore Club is the DNA of what I do as a DJ.”
When dubstep first hatched as an idea, it was from a decision to distinguish itself from UK garage. At first, it mattered less where it went, just that it was away from the commercial, Moschino-sporting crowd. Producers were trying anything, and one such idea this led to was an incredible fusion of UK garage and Baltimore Club rhythms. Chief among them was Benny Ill Vs Hatcha’s “Poison”, an early Tempa classic whose kick pattern traces over the Dickontrol break almost dead-on.
Benny Ill’s live mixes from 2003 were big on this style of pepped-up Dickontrol garage, and his “Half a C90” mix finds 90s house music from the likes of Louie Vega which carries the same kick pattern. Clearly, he’s a professor in the five-punch. Elsewhere, tracks like Horsepower Production’s “Galaxian” and El-B’s “Movin Up” also tried on the pattern to see how it fits, while Menta’s “Sounds of Da Future” sneaks the last kick at the last possible moment for extra jaggedness.
Where Technics’ “Dickontrol Break” kick pattern brought the sweaty Baltimore nights to a calmer point, according to Shipley, these post-garage, proto-dubstep producers turbocharged it to have the opposite effect: a nervy, twitchy rhythm that pushes the groove along in a way that makes you shake a little faster. This perfectly illustrated how producers were differentiating themselves from the commercialised UK garage of the time, and where they wanted to steer towards.
“I was reading Simon Reynolds’ book Energy Flash, about how UK garage was a more glamorous, clubby thing where people really dressed to impress,” Shipley notes. “Whereas in my book, Tierre Brownlee [aka DJ Tie.Be] said, ‘we dressed to sweat.’ People were not trying to be pretty, people were not trying to be fancy - they were getting busy.” By borrowing one of Baltimore’s key rhythm patterns, they threw a curveball that disrupted the shoulder and feet-heavy casual dancing of commercial 2step, and instead built a crowd similar to Baltimore’s: less image-focused and instead more involved in the music. It was a deliberate, controlled break away.
By 2008, dubstep had largely left this behind for the halfstep pattern that was most popular. Baltimore club would routinely get its shine both here and stateside, catching hipster attention in the mid-2000s in the US, then having the 2010s UK revival.
Then Introspekt came onto the scene in the 2020s. As her Spaces In Between show on NTS nails down, Introspekt’s musical philosophy is deeply entrenched in the connections between diasporic and regional US club rhythms with UK garage and dubstep. In my interview with her for Mixmag in late 2024, she revealed Baltimore Club to be one of the hidden ingredients to her sound, saying, “my first time coming into contact with Baltimore club, besides family because I have a lot of family in Maryland, was listening to Joe Nice on Sub FM. He blended DJ Technics’ ‘Dickontrol Break’ with some crazy dubstep track and it blew my mind. That specific moment of hearing Baltimore club in the context of dubstep has really influenced my use of that kick pattern in the context of using these garage-y, dubsteppy beats.” Like Nice before her, Introspekt often intersperses “Dickontrol Break” multiple times throughout her sets, almost like a point of origin after a short excursion. She also cites Steve Gurley and Chris Mack as carrying that Baltimore feel into 2step.
Tracks like “Ur A Jerk”, “rn” and “DIME SI SE ESCHUCHA” with INVT successfully fit the Dickontrol Break into straight 2step, without needing to loosen it out like Benny Ill and the like did back in the early 00s. She advances this rhythm fusion further on the frisky “Singamo Bootleg” (the 2nd best UK garage tune of 2024, according to this column), by setting the Baltimore garage rhythm down, then looping the last two kicks to give a feeling of tripping over oneself, making an already nervy rhythm shake like Courage the Cowardly Dog.
It’s not just Introspekt pushing this rhythm back into the fore. Buckley’s “Vitamins” on Bristol label Dimeshift, as well as speedy g Dane Main Phase’s “Dream State” both play with the pattern, creating a variant that has four kicks but had a percussive smack in place of the fifth in a way that’s too alike to not feel indebted. These two are represented as dubstep tracks, with Main Phase’s artwork looking eerily similar to that of Tempa’s new artwork. Nonetheless, they cannot be separated from the influence of “Poison” et al.
There is a fair shot that the renewed connection is, in part, down to the revival of dubstep with names such as Tempa and FWD returning, and new labels like Dimeshift going directly back to the era. However, it also speaks to a desire by some producers to restore the experimentalism of that dark garage/early dubstep era, perhaps as a way to rebuke the formulas a lot of popular UKG sticks to rigidly in 2025. Plus, in the age of the developed internet, cross-genre connections are far easier to forge than in 2003. “We’re in this post-everything area where there are all these dance styles at our disposal now, and all these regional styles are in conversation with each other,” Shipley says. “You can figure them out and study up on them all, so, if you’re making music now, the world is your oyster with mixing different styles together. Whether people know discreetly, whether you’re combining or not, you can make something exciting.”
Baltimore and garage is a connection that’s been established for over two decades, but with new international garage scenes now popping up, they bring with them their local rhythms to fuse together. Brazilian garage artists create a style which carries the embedded rhythm of “volt mix”, which is a variation of Miami bass that can be heard every day in the country (read here to find out how Miami bass managed to travel to Brazil). Crosstalk’s “MAMADA Dub” throws down a scorching bassline at its climax, powered by a drum pattern that carries the UK garage swing as well as the double-kick and snapping hi-hats that define volt mix. Chediak and Taleko’s bootleg of “Say My Name” accomplishes the same feat with similar tools, while also adding a Baltimore club breakdown when you expect it to cool down.
Rhythm is deeply localised and carries the philosophy of a scene, and what has been displayed above is how producers can take a pinch of each and affix their own rhythm out of it like pieces from a Lego set. Each kick placement, hi-hat placement connects to a group of people to which that element serves a purpose. By crossing them together, they create a dialogue that in some cases, could last almost 25 years.