SoulChampion.com has been established since the summer of 2000, and has grownas a forum and meeting point for fellow Garage heades in the US. How did they first hear of UK Garage? "I had heard about 'two step' this and that for quite a while but you couldn't hear it anywhere." states SoulChampion.com's originator, G Notorious. "I happened to be going over to London for a couple of weeks [summer 2000] for vacation and when I got there I was running around to all the shops trying to pick up a bunch of the tunes I'd heard [from a Pure Silk in Aiya Napa CD] and just going crazy listening to the music." <

On returning to Boston, the seeds were sown for his shift to UK Garage from Drum&Bass. Hooking up with like-minded individuals in the Boston area, (namely DJ Inanna and later, Elyte, Jam-2, and Senyo) they started pushing the UK Garage sound in the clubs of their hometown...

"Coming from Drum&Bass, I was into the heavier stuff initially, anthems like Basslick, Oh No That's The Word, Troublesome, Bump and Grind, Warrior, Messin Around... it just sort of felt like 'oh, so that's where jungle's gone'. I was really drawn to the syncopation and just crazy sounding beats. I've grown to love tunes from all different styles and varieties of UK Garage, I prefer stuff with vocals whether it's singing or MCing, but I'm still a sucker for a nice heavy bassline."

So what's he feeling from our side of hte pond? "At the moment, Sticky's burning it up! MJ Cole's consistently dropping unbelievable material! Ms. Dynamite, Jameson, Agent X, El-B, DnD, J-Sweet's bouncier stuff, there's some wicked tunes on the Ed Case album that a lot of people seemed to really sleep on, and whatever happened to the Middlerow Crew?! Their 2002 EP was blinding and I know various members have projects coming out but where's the 2003 EP?"

At the time Notorious started his garage operations there were no UK Garage promoters in Boston and finding venues that would support the sound proved to be frustratingly difficult. Exposure to the sound within Boston seemed to be non-existent. After about a year and a half of handing out hundreds of CDs, playing out on nearly every college radio station in the Boston area, and generally making a fuss about Garage to anyone who would listen, G Notorious ended up setting up his own night, thus Runnin was born.

"One of the surprising bursts we got was a crossover from the drum&bass crowd here. Our current weekly, Runnin Fridays, is drum&bass upstairs and Garage down [stairs] but pretty early on we noticed more and more of the junglists haning out on our floor. It's only surprising really because drum&bass was so huge here, when I started playing Garage there was a lot of tension. They started calling it 'gay-rage' and whatever. It was right at the height of the jocular heavy metal days for drum&bass so they couldn't handle the vocals and the fact that there was music to it. I think in a lot of ways they were afraid that Garage would steal D&B's thunder and be seen as the newest thing or whatever. In reality, most of the peoplewho were fronting had never heard the music or had heard like one RnB remix and passed the whole genre off as just being that."

Having produced Drum&Bass for three years he shifted his skills to UK Garage but soon found plenty of barriers in his way with pushing studio-based product: "The thing here is that no one's got distribution. You can record a tune, get it mastered and pressed, and drive it around to all the shops yourself in London and the rest of the world is buying their records from those shops. Here none of the distributors really care about anything but house and most people still don't know what Two Step or Garage is so unless you just market your tunes as House or Breaks it's hard to get anything out there but then if you do that, the people who are looking for Garage will probably never see it."

Pirate radio is a staple of British urban culture that is taken for granted in London and is slowly moving to other UK cities. You can't move off the dial more than 0.3 without picking up another new pirate bursting out of the frequency. The same can't be said for the US where DJ Inanna comments. "The US radio stations generally cover only commercial music. There are some college stations that have electronic shows but there is not a strong presence of underground music in general on the airwaves. [The internet is] very important, most of the underground music is heard on the internet and from personal web sites."

Notorious agrees with this diagnosis: "We can't really do pirate radio here. I mean if I wanted to get into it I could probably run a pirate station in Boston but in the end, who cares? It's not going to reach that many people, the states are too big for something like that to matter except to a local scene. Internet broadcasts are much better in that sense but then it's just a matter of letting people know."

His reaction to the current sounds emanating from the UK scene is surprising: "8 Bar doesn't really go over on the dancefloor here. The dark, menacing Drum&Bass sound never really died here so if people want that heavy stompy feeling they just listen to D&B. I mean, I buy some of the stuff and some of the vocal remixes coming out now do pretty well but people just can't handle the instrumentals, especially in the 'slightly change the bassline and give it a new name' category. I mean it's wicked that everything's so street level now rather than everyone shooting for the pop charts but some of that stuff is just too over the top. People here also don't understand that it's a reaction because they never went through what those tunes are reacting against."

Curiously, considering he's living in the land of hip-hop, Notorious states, "We have no MCs either! That's probably the most shocking thing to you guys! If you want to MC over here, you do Hip-Hop. Most Hip-Hop heads over here see D&B and Garage as 'techno music' and don't want to touch it."

The way music is distributed, listened to, and pushed in the States is completely different and so it seems that pursuing something new and original is made even harder by the barriers and lack of opportunities. G Notorious's target for SoulChampion.com is "really to aim outside of the established 'electronic dance music' scene. I mean our core crew comes from there but I'm more interested in reaching a wider audience. I think this music has more to say to more people."