Let It Roll

Let It Roll is a Czech drum and bass and jungle festival. The first edition was on 16 November 2002, at club Mlejn in Prague. About five hundred people got in. Sukimu put it on. He is also known as DJ Suki. This is not a British rock festival and not a UK “roll”. It is not a house date. The rhythm is the broken beat of drum and bass: fast bass, off-beat and MC voices. The name started in a neighbourhood club, by Luka metro station.

Sukimu came out of the Czech freetekno scene and vinyl decks. In 1997 he heard drum and bass at a party and held onto a drum pattern that was not four-to-the-floor. He had played hard techno with the Komatsu soundsystem. He had put on reggae nights that drew little notice. The Czech Republic lacked a large drum and bass party. In 2002 he built one, almost alone, at Mlejn. The bill was Czech: Yukimura, RaveBoy, GardenZitty Crew, Bass Beast Jungle Team. There was a reggae chillout room. It sold out. That November night is the start year.

The festival did not stay in the club. In the years after, it moved to larger Prague rooms: Abaton and Harfa hall. The Czech drum and bass crowd now fitted hundreds, then thousands, under a roof. The format was still indoor: winter, concrete, smoke and one stage. There was no camping. There was no lakeshore. There was a night — or a warehouse weekend — for people who wanted jungle, not a house disco. Local write-ups remember those hall nights as the step between Mlejn and the field.

In 2008 the first open air arrived. It ran on 25 and 26 July, in Staré Žďánice, near Pardubice, at the Oplatil sandpit. Sukimu was thirty. About three thousand people came. In 2009 the figure neared four thousand. The bill was no longer only Czech. British and European drum and bass names came in: Freestylers, Future Prophecies, Adam F, TC, Phace. The site was sand and water, not a club. For the first time the festival lasted more than one night outdoors. That move from hall to pit changed the scale.

What you hear is not house and not even four-on-the-floor techno. Drum and bass comes from 1990s British jungle: chopped breaks, heavy bass, high tempo. Jungle puts more weight on the break and on reggae. At Let It Roll those two words sit together. An MC marks the set. The crowd does not walk from one guitar stage to another. It stays on the floor, standing, for hours. A British rock “roll” is another date: another country and another genre. Here roll is a Czech night of decks, not a band poster.

After Žďánice the gathering grew. The open air ran longer and took larger grounds, including, later, the airfield at Milovice. Counts were already in the tens of thousands, not five hundred. Stages were redesigned each year: tall shapes, lights and a set that photos remember as much as the bill. That does not make the festival a visual fair. The centre remains drum and bass. The design is there so a sandpit or a runway reads as a dance site, not an empty hangar.

You reach it from Prague or from Pardubice, depending on the era. Mlejn sat on a metro line. Staré Žďánice asked for a car or a bus to a sandpit. An airfield site asks for a shuttle and a tent. By day, on the open air, there is sun on sand or grass and stages that are not yet pushing. At night the kick fills the ground. Late-July Czech weather can be heat or a short shower. If it rains, the pit floor gets heavy. In the Prague halls the problem was different: the roof, the room heat and closing time.

Let It Roll is not a British franchise brought in. It is a Czech promoter who built a jungle night in 2002 and, in six years, took it into a field. Sukimu sits at the origin of the name. Abaton and Harfa explain the city growth. Žďánice explains the jump outdoors. House sits outside that sentence. British stadium rock does too. What fits is a drum and bass crowd that started at five hundred people by the metro and ended up measuring summer in thousands.

The festival is read along that line, not as a “biggest” slogan. A night at Mlejn, a Prague hall, a Bohemian sandpit and, later, an airfield: the same broken beat. House has other Czech dates. A rock roll in England has other posters. Here the ground changed from club to field. The genre did not. It is still drum and bass and jungle, born in Prague in 2002, with Sukimu in the booth and a crowd that came for that, not for another electronic style.