Someone recently remarked that Sam Shackleton sounds a bit like plasticine northener Wallace from the Wallace and Gromit cartoons. The comparison to an eccentric inventor is somewhat appropriate, because most cliches about "bass science" are absent from his live set: there's no hard edges, physical overload, or dizzying drops or asymmetries. Instead there is an organic, intuitive quality on a human scale that feels familiar, as if it comes from inside rather than out.

It's still dark and evocative, but it's more a dark, familiar intimacy (quite appropriate for the atmosphere of Plastic People in London, where you're so close that you stand next to people you know for 5 minutes without noticing it) being alone but with a sense of warmth inside. For the whole of his set tonight, the bass is in a sense of liquid suspension- there's no brutal bass drops, just warm convection currents within the room. This vibrations feel much more inner than outer.

"Organic" bass can be overplayed, though, and getting a sense of constant dynamics in such a warm set is hard. Shackleton manages it, though, despite the lack of edges; basslines double and detach, there's a constant sense of symmetry and development, like single celled beings duplicating themselves. In terms of development, this gives the music a gliding feel, duplicating with the ease of fractal patterns.

Later in the mix, Shackleton plays a re-fixed verision of Can's "Mother Sky", which is very appropriate; Can's famed musical democracy between the four players gave a sense of multi-directional freedom, and there's the same gliding, rarefied feel to Shackleton's live set-up.

Tempo is dance music is been a subject that's increasingly interested me over the last couple of years.We seem to "understand" it better recently, so that exact microdistances between 124bpm and 128bpm (numbers provided are for illustration only) define whole nanogenres of dance musics. On the other hand, hiphop is no longer so dance-able, in my subjective opinion- Missy Elliot probably representing it's last stand of freaky dancing- and of course jungle's Jackson Pollock-style play with rhythm is over. Thus, the spread of tempos, from high to low, that can be considered dance music has narrowed: tempos are more honed, but more narrowly spread.

I wonder if the renewed interest over the last 7-8 years in disco coincides with this narrowing process. The slower tempos of Disco in many ways seems like the paradigm dance music, multi-gender, multi-sexualised, multi-racial. Perhaps the general narrowing of tempoes has been a return to the source, dance music wise.

Some of these thoughts came to a head watching Strategy this weekend as part of The Wire's 25th Birthday events. Stategy, aka Portland, Oregon's Paul Dickow, played a fantastic set of multi-layered kinda disco house- steady horizontal tempo with a vertical spectrum of rainbow textural hues. Perhaps the key to the kind of disco tempo he works at is that, dance wise, you can easily miss a beat as you're grooving away, unlike the faster pace of techno, which compels you to submit to each and every beat (to be more specific, disco gives the space to move fluidly between the beats, whereas the rigours of techno demand more muscular movements). The more ergonomic tempo of disco enables a push and pull on the dancefloor, as opposed to the straightforward thrust of techno.

It's hard not to read a gender aspect to this push and pull- it enables flirtation, interchange, fluidity, different roles for men and women. And of course, it's tempo draws people "out" (in both senses of the word!), whereas the slower tempos of hiphop enable men to retain their macho cool.

It makes me wonder, furthermore, about the point at which disco became house. There's such a crossover between the influences of the two, and they run at the same tempo, that perhaps they should be seen as a continuum. Nevertheless, the thought occurs: maybe the house resolution was more psychological than a straightforward musical progression: ecstacy made dancers more focused on their own experience, hence psycho-claustrophobia such as Adonis's "No Way Back" and Phuture's "Your Only Friend".