drum & bass: the brave new world

There's definitely something in the air in drum & bass right now.
(Un)fortunatley, I've been around long enough that I can sense when change is afoot, and I can sense it now.

For the last few months my conversations with other producers keep coming back to similar themes. What I'm hearing from people is they're tired of the current sound and what they've been doing for the last few years. There's a real hunger for something new, or at least if not completely new, then different to what has been the recent status quo.
People keep saying they want to 'go deeper', a phrase that normally makes my teeth grind with hi-octane cringe. But these days I think I know what they mean.
i've heard the same things being said by producers from right across the whole spectrum of styles - people who are known for jump-up, people who are known for atmospheric & drumfunk, people who have been churning out Pendulum-style dancefloor bangers, people who have been writing very polite generic liquid - everyone seems to have had enough of just going through the motions. They want something more musical, more complex, more subtle, more *involved*. Producers are wanting to reintroduce light and shade into their music, both in terms of the dynamics of the tracks and also the content. Many of us are tired of that wall of sound, of that relentless 2-step snare. Sometimes it's just what you need, but often it just crucifies any music that you try and work around it.
Finally producers are saying 'enough is enough' and one by one they're stopping taking part in the volume war, not being afraid to make their music that little bit more delicate.

What's interesting to me is the tipping-point effect of all this. It's all happened at more or less the same time, and people have clearly come to these conclusions on their own. Now that people have started talking openly about it to each other, momentum is starting to build and confidence in our collective ability to force the music into much more interesting areas is growing.
Why has it happened now? I would hazard a guess at the rise and rise of Pendulum having something to do with it. The Pendulums have taken that stadium-d&b sound to it's logical conclusion - the stadium (more or less), and while many of us wish them good luck with it, seeing it finally happen has, I think, made many people suddenly take stock of their own output. I suspect many people have suddenly realised that's not a race they particularly want to be running in.

As you may or may not know, we're working on a drum & bass album right now. Around 6 weeks ago we got frustrated at how pedestrian it was sounding and tore lots of it up, vowing to take a swerve into the left-field and leave behind us all our concerns about whether the tunes fit in to what else is happening in the scene, or whether DJ [x] or DJ [y[] is likely to play it. Once we did that the music blossomed like crazy, giving us probably the best results we have seen for years.
Will it get played by all the dancefloor merchants? Not a chance.
Is it evocative, emotional, romantic music that I will want to listen to myself and be proud to stand by in years to come? Absolutely.

vive la revolution imo