Shabby Culture went to Field Day this Saturday gone, to check that our carabiners were still secure as we climb the cliff face of new music. For the record, they are fraying a little at the join, but still intact.

This year though, we were feeling a bit washed out. Was it the roast pork roll? Maybe. Was it the dustbowl vibe as we rested on the charred ground of previous festivals? Could be. A medical man might put it down to the succession of FOUR POUND cans of lager we ingested. But I think it was something more sinister. Like some Kissinger-approved CIA technique for unsettling the locals in a commie-proxy-war-backwater, subsonic bass wubbed out from everywhere. One of Field Day's lovely bourgeois touches is a bandstand with a proper old-fashioned brass band doing spot-on versions of contemporary pop classics. But this year it was harder to enjoy, because, like an independent coffee shop being forced out by three Starbucks appearing within pissing distance, the whip and womp of bass from all stages subdued any subtlety they were producing.

I put it down to a bad bit of scheduling where maybe some dubby stuff had ended up on all stages at once. So walking over to the main stage, going past the smallest tent, Blogger's Delight, I was freaked out by how viciously loud the bass was in such a small place. But hey, it's bloggers delight, bloggers need to get their bass when they're out, laptop speakers are really tinny, right? Steve Mason is on the main stage. He plays a lovely version, just him and his guitar, of the Beta Band fave Dr Baker. Then his band comes out. They play the single off Mason's bleak and lovely Boys Outside album. Mason's voice is a thing of plaintive beauty as usual. The guitars and drums chime in synch. Then the bass player plays one note. And it sounds like a plane taking off. The rest of the sound is dragged right down into this depth charge. The meaning and the shape of the whole thing changes. It's baffling. This pattern continues through The Fall - clattery garage with a bass like a double decker bus crashing into a low bridge making MES's angry chattering even more meaningless. It works for the dance acts, like Caribou or the young turks like These New Puritans who have only ever played through these monster systems and have adapted their music to the sonic environment. But for bands who don't use space and bass, who are sonically middly or toppy, all you're ending up with is an omnisonic kick drum and a bed of nothing on top.

Later in the festival over a silver tray of chips and sausage, I discuss this with a friend of more than a decade who's been in bands and been going to gigs since the late 80s. She's managed to hack off a lot of the top end of her hearing with the years of snare drum soundchecks, MBV speaker-proximity and general sonic adventuring. She's relieved to hear me talk about the bass situation, and we compare notes on gigs by bands who we saw in the period before the venues all tooled up for the post-rave era. We wonder whether gigs are even worth going to if everything ends up sounding like dubstep remixes. I relate my sadness at going to Brixton Academy for the Pavement reform shows wanting to hear Steve Malkmus’s genius guitar lines and ending up with nothing but Steve West and Mark Ibold's grungey rhythm section. Like getting Joyce and Rourke instead of Marr and Moz.

I worry that I sound old. But no - music is not meant to limit itself to obeisance to one end of the spectrum. Galleries don't have only red lights, do they? Restaurants don't specialise in one part of the tongue, do they? Knocking shops... well, you get the idea. What to do, readers? What to do?