Longtime listeners and readers of Talking To Ghosts will be familiar with my love of Saturate Records. Going back to 2012, they were a jumping on point for my introduction to bass music as a genre broadly. At the time, I wanted to find something that scratched some of the same itches as aggressive American dubstep, but also something that I could find more artistic interest in. Juke, 2-step, and especially future bass really hooked me, and this led me to the artist Krampfhaft, which in turn brought me to Saturate Records.
Saturate Records’ free compilations became a staple in my repeat listening - Saturated! Vol. 3 introduced me to Luisterwaar, G Jones, and Subp Yao. Vol. 4 introduced Deadcrow, Mad Zach, and Ethan Glass. Later releases, like Frenquency’s Greyscale and Starkey’s Odyssey Five, became instant favorites.
A couple years ago, before we entered this long quarantine, I started going to a bass music night regularly here in Portland called Wake The Town. Located in the basement of The Liquor Store, I’d show up around 10:30 and dance until close, around 2:30 in the morning. It didn’t feel like home in the way the industrial nights had when I was younger, but it was still a wonderful and physical escape – it was a feeling I had forgotten as I got tired of hearing the same goth songs over and over every week. Every month was something new, something I hadn’t heard before, and it all made me want to move.
At some point I stopped keeping up with Saturate’s new releases. Part of this is inevitable - I am constantly trying to find new and interesting music – but part of it was that as time went on, Saturate was focusing more and more on a post-trap sound that, while still fun, was a little less interesting to me than the weird syncopated experimentation of the earlier future bass releases. The music felt increasingly predictable, and that just wasn’t where I wanted to spend my listening time.
Recently, Michael put me back on to Saturate, sending me a few of their recent releases. They were pretty post-trap focused, as I expected, but I was surprised by a strange feeling of nostalgia that took over when I put them on. Every drop, every triplet snare roll, made me want to move in the way that all those nights in the Liquor Store basement made me want to move.
Saturate’s most recent release, Syntax Error by SIGKILL is just completely nasty - the song “Diesel” in particular trades the traditional post-trap 808 with a huge distorted saw that just rips through the mix and begs you to go wild. “Nah Nah” opts for a more drum and bass inspired beat to underpin the track, throwing screaming samples and synths on top to great effect.
Malware by Zack Hersh, released in October of 2020, scratches some of those same itches - dripping acid leads over huge distorted bass and syncopated rhythms brings back incredibly sensory-specific memories of dance club air, humid from a hundred and fifty sweaty bodies pressed into each other going wild over some previously unheard track.
The more I dig into Saturate’s recent releases, the more I’m overcome by this deep and intense nostalgia. I miss those early moments of the evening, where the DJs are playing more experimental tracks. I miss the radiant energy of people enjoying themselves. I miss escaping to the cold rain outside for a few moments to cool off from the heat of a packed basement. The longer this quarantine goes, the more intense these feelings get – the memory somehow becomes more sharp and more distant. It’s hard to know how to process this nostalgia – is it a hope for things to come back soon? Or instead of looking back should I look forward, and hope that some strange and interesting change happens in how we approach clubs and shows?
As long as that remains a question, as long as resolution is pushed into the endless horizon of this quarantine, music from labels like Saturate will continue to spark these complicated nostalgic feelings for me. Until then, I guess I’ll just have to shake ass to Pixelord in the privacy of my own home.
Saturate Records is a label based in Hamburg, Germany. You can find their many releases on Bandcamp.