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Bedroom Beats & B-sides book spread

Velocity Press to publish history of beat culture

After publishing books on the history of drum & bass and rave flyer artist Junior Tomlin, Velocity Press is to bring out a book on the evolution of modern beat culture.

In Bedroom Beats & B-sides: Instrumental Hip Hop & Electronic Music at the Turn of the Century, Laurent Fintoni details the rise of a new generation of bedroom producers at the turn of the century through the stories of various instrumental hip-hop and electronic music scenes.

From trip-hop, jungle, illbient, and IDM in the 1990s to just “beats” in the late 2000s, the book explores how these scenes acted as incubators for new ideas about composition and performance that are now taken for granted.

Combining social, cultural, and musical history with extensive research and over 100 interviews, the book tells the B-side stories of hip-hop and electronic music from the 1990s to the 2010s and explores the evolution of modern beat culture from local scenes to a global community via the diverse groups of fringe idealists who made it happen and the external forces that shaped their efforts.

“This book is a deeply personal project that has consumed me for over 20 years,” says Laurent Fintoni. “I hope it can do justice to the vibrancy and importance of the culture it seeks to celebrate and its people. I am grateful to Velocity Press for taking a chance on me as a first-time author and giving me space and support to tell the first, but hopefully not the last, version of this story.”

Bedroom Beats & B-sides is published on 6 November 2020 but you can pre-order it now on the Velocity Press website and receive it in October and with your name in the credits.