Subterrain/Ultimate BASE

Homelands England 2000

Saturday 27th May 2000
The Bowl, Matterley Estate, nr. Winchester, Hants., England MAP

The Subterrain/Ultimate BASE tent was an interesting mix of fairly thumping techno (from the BASE boys) and more chilled deep/tech house and breaks (from Mr C and the End crew).

Annoyingly, as with several of the tents, the lineup times were different to the ones printed in the program - especially a pain in the ass when you'd struggled through the rain and mud to discover you had to wait an hour to see who you wanted.

So I caught the second half of Jim Masters' solid, but (for me) uninspiring techno set. The crowd seemed pretty up for it - I reckon that there were a few BASE junkies there, and he did play Jeff Mills' "The Bells" towards the end of his set.

The real highlight for me was Layo and Matthew "Bushwacka" B's set. For those who don't know, these two are part of the End soundsystem, with Mr C, and regulars in the back room of the End. Their set consisted of the unmistakable Layo and Bushwacka sound: breakbeat- house with deep funky basslines. They dropped tracks from there own LP and several Plank Records (Matthew Bs label) joints including the awesome "Nightshift" by Bushwacka. Their set varied from harder nu-school breaks to mellower End-style housey grooves but always held a consistent sound. I was well into it, so much so that I missed Leftfield play.

I left the tent to checkout other sounds around and missed Carl Cox, but my loyal techno reporters told me he played a banging set to a mad crowd.

I stumbled back in about threeish, by this time too off my face to be able to see who was DJing, to hear one of the nights truly awesome moments: Darren Emerson (as I later worked out) dropping in Donna Summers' "I Feel Love" in and out of the mix for about half an hour (well, that's what it felt like).

Overall, the tent provided a good solid mix of technical, if not that exciting, techno smattered with a few wicked tunes and excellent set of forward-looking, genre-hopping music from the End crew.

review by: Luke Williams