At the end of the 2000s something happened. Spasms of creativity on the edges of the drum’n’bass mainstream began to surface outside of the scene, giving people like myself hope that perhaps the music wasn’t dead and buried yet. That ray of hope was Autonomic, a label, club night and podcast series launched by dBridge – one fourth of late ’90s drum’n’bass powerhouse Bad Company – and Instra:mental – the duo of Alex Green and Damon Kirkham. Together they championed a new sound and aesthetic that was far removed from the excessive machismo and rush for the drop that had come to define much of drum’n’bass.

Autonomic brought back two key elements to the drum’n’bass template: space and soul. The space came from a focus on half-time rhythms, circa 85 bpm, and an avoidance of the obvious breaks and drum patterns. As for the soul, it likely came from their use of hardware, a practice that lets the human shine through machine-made sounds in ways that digital technology often doesn’t allow for. dBridge also echoes Sam Binga’s sentiments with regards drum’n’bass’s loudness wars, while Sam backs up dBridge’s reasoning that using hardware brings back a human element to the music, giving it “a fuck load of character and personality.”