Leaving aside for a second the fact that their recent string of unique releases has been well and truly salivated over in these very pages, it does feel necessary to place some emphasis on Highpoint Lowlife’s latest. They've managed to bring together a sort of alternative all-star line up [Editor’s note: by which it’s possible to read: ‘followed with interest by me, perhaps not to the same extent by a large percentage of the population’] to remix Erik XVI’s Stern-Gerlachs Forsook EP. A surprisingly coherent listen, due to the source material’s common themes of melody and mood, it serves as an emphatic reminder of the considerable hotbed of underground talent the label is associated with.
Its opener is also one of its highlights; TVO’s aptly titled Latitudinal Mix of ‘Unionens sista dagar’ picks up immediately where his Starry Wisdom EP left off. Driven by the ominous clack and scuttle of insectoid mandibles, it’s a constantly shifting slab of techno that stretches off to infinity on a trancelike locked groove. When it finally heads skyward at around the six-minute mark, a translucent wash of ambience swells to occupy every available space, summoning up the hazy ghosts of Detroit. Both Ali Renault and Bill Ambrose also reach backward towards a similar geographic region, the former’s smooth lines a strong contrast to the latter’s Drexciyan electro stammer.
The capital’s bass mutations are well represented in the form of two polar opposites – Hot City’s sleazy, neon-lit garage and an ultra-minimalist, stripped back version of ‘Kalabaliken i Bender’ by Infrasonics bossman Spatial. Consisting of little more than brittle electronics and blank pulses of sub-bass, like the rest of his music it takes the structure of two-step to its logical extreme – stark and withdrawn, save a lone female voice crying into the void. It’s placing alongside Gravious’ absolutely immense Anti-Gravity Mix only serves to further emphasise both tracks’ considerable charm, as well as doing a neat job of highlighting the sheer diversity of interpretations on show here. Delectable stuff.
Some sublime Sunday hangover business: Mount Kimbie's remix of LV & Untold's 'Beacon'. A tonic to ease the pain from last night's Sonic Router birthday celebrations.
Without further ado, a Ronseal-style post containing three of the week's best offers in the free mix department. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
Alex Incyde has mixed up a storm for the latest in Dub War's ongoing series of podcasts, pulling together an impressive roster of none-deeper dubs including new material from Scuba, FaltyDL and Al Tourettes, plus an appearance from Bath boy Asusu's mighty 'No Kya'. Well worth the bandwidth theft for the few minutes it'll take to steal a bit of your hard drive. Download it here.
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CB/OB's got a lot of love for Cooly G - even amongst her peer group she seems almost criminally overlooked at times, perhaps because a huge quantity of her best material is only available on the Dub Organizer EPs from Blackmarket Records. Seriously -- take the time to investigate the fourth volume in the series, which shifts from the canned brass stabs and frosty glow of opener 'Weak' to the glorious percussive whirlwind that is 'Vs Perry'. It also happens to include her finest track to date, the softly yearning 'Him Da Biz', which has been rightly rinsed by Kode9 in his sets over the last six months or so. Following on from her tough-as contribution to FACT's podcast series, she's just recorded the first of a promised 'pair' of new mixes for XLR8R. Featuring material from herself, DVA, Martyn & DJ Gregory, it continues to skirt her distinctive line between downtempo atmosphere and dancefloor pace.
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Oh, and did someone mention a new free mix from Rinse FM's top man Geeneus? Arriving sometime in advance of his eagerly awaited Volumes Two compilation (hopefully featuring his incendiary collab with Ms. Dynamite, 'Get Low'), it flicks between hard-edged UKF stylings and his recent deeper house and techno excursions. It's good.
Muso's Guide have just published the latest in my ongoing series of Short Circuitry columns. This one takes a look at the future of bass mutants in 2010, from Fabric's excellent Elevator Music compilation to the first few Night Slugs releases - via Erik XVI's remixes EP, new stuff from Kieran Hebden, Millie & Andrea.
Bare love for Mosca -- "On the dancefloor, 2010 looks set to be Night Slugs’ year – the London night set up by Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990 has spiraled out into its own label, the first couple of releases from which look set to saturate clubs for the foreseeable future. Their first official 12” is Mosca’s long-awaited Square One, based somewhere in the hinterlands where dub’s expansive space meets funky’s tribal bounce. It’s certainly less immediate than some of funky’s biggest hitters, the title track’s tension between smooth legato and shattered vocal soul more akin to Cooly G than Crazy Cousinz- a conviction borne out on the compulsively brilliant B-side. A nocturnal tryst through London clubland’s astral plane, ‘Nike’ is three tracks in one – ten minutes of constantly morphing, ethereal dance music that manages to cram in an impressive roster of influences yet sound like nothing else around." Read the full column here.
Last Friday the Fleece played host to the opening night of an eagerly anticipated tour: The Ex & Brass Unbound, featuring the jazz chops of Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Roy Paci and Walter Wierbos. Even better, our local firebrands Zun Zun Egui were in support.
I reviewed the gig in full for Muso's Guide, but suffice to say that it was a singular experience - the entire time teetering on the edge of chaos, with excursions into free-jazz and frenzied Afrobeat all reined in by the skill of each musician on stage. Exhausting, but thoroughly worthwhile.
"And there are points where the bonds do seem to dissolve almost entirely – around halfway through the set everything falls away to a blaze of muddy background noise, structureless until Mats Gustafsson suddenly enters the vacant space with a furious and soulful saxophone figure. Whether it’s entirely planned or entirely improvised – or somewhere in the middle – it’s impossible to say, but it hardly matters." Full review up here. I strongly urge you to make the effort to try and catch them at one of the remaining three dates.
Although his Unbalance album last year was a significant step forward from 2008’s Aerial, which managed to take occasional missteps into clinical austerity, I’ve always found Dave Huismans’ A Made Up Sound material far more engaging than his music as 2562. It’s got something to do with a level of human connection – 2562 seems to act as the home for some of Huismans’ most alien abstractions, all sharp angles and blank canvas synth wash. By contrast, the first 12” on his AMUS label remained defiantly in touch with body movement: ‘Rework’ remains his most direct statement yet, a deft exercise in perpetual motion with an addictive-as-hell central motif that swings like a pendulum across successively busier layers of percussion.
A different beast again, his second release for the label further rewires the circuits of house and techno into something even more elusive. Unlike the current upsurge in producers incorporating more relaxed percussive aspects to their slower tempo tracks, Huismans’ productions rely on precision and pinpoint accuracy – their appeal lies in the chemistry that ensues when that rhythmic tension is played off against looser elements. Despite what its title might suggest, ‘Sun Touch’ is one of his most icy tracks yet, a sparse construction built almost entirely of tightly interlocking elements: music as modern architecture, all sharp angles and translucent surfaces of steel and glass. But in the spirit of futurism, it’s not soulless, playing its cool exterior against barely tangible wisps of looped melody that drift through the superstructure like action potentials.
The same contradiction is also true of the excellent ‘Drain’, which reimagines the urban dissociation of Burial, Scuba and Instra:mental as outright dystopian menace. Sparse save the ever-present mechanistic grind, it stretches out to an infinity of imagined futures. At heart, Huismans comes across as a restless experimentalist. The final ‘Untitled (Shortcut)’ aside – itself a sketch-like version of last year’s ‘Love In Outer Space’ – only the most cerebral of dancefloors would be ready for the future shocks he delivers here. It’s music to lose your mind in.
'WINTER OF LOVE', the latest in my ongoing collaborative efforts with local art peeps 145 Collective will be taking place at the Junction, Stokes Croft this Tuesday coming (9th February). The usual drill remains the same - interactive art in the back, live music in the front, this time from Jolt, We Are The Nynes and Open Tales. I will be doing my usual part, spinning vaguely appropriate music for a Tuesday night - depending on the mood, everything from Waits to Wiley and back again.
If all goes according to plan, next month should see our efforts move to a Friday. Expect an exponentially higher proportion of party music to folk delights.
Already the definition of a ‘buy on sight’ label, last year was an upping of the ante for Hyperdub. Quite aside from the heady list of seperate 12”s – crunked up stylings from Mark Pritchard and Joker, the double pronged grimewave of Cooly G’s ‘Narst’ and Kode9’s ‘Black Sun’ – ending 2009 with the 5 Years Of Hyperdub compilation was sufficient to consolidate exactly how influential Kode9’s label continues to be. But refreshingly enough, in this case the term ‘influential’ doesn’t have to indicate any level of beard strokery – it’s all visceral stuff, making groove and physicality as much a priority as emotional impact.
On the evidence of Kode9’s studio session on Gilles Peterson’s Radio 1 show last week, this year might just go one better. He bookended the show with his own unfinished dubs - the Spaceape-featuring ‘Other Man’ particularly spectacular, even in its embryonic form a synth-driven monster sharing its mutant DNA with ‘2 Far Gone’ and ‘Oozi’. By April we’re also due new material from Kyle Hall, Ikonika and Terror Danjah, whose upcoming 12” pulls together a pair of incendiary slabs of instrumental grime.
Meanwhile, as an opening gambit for 2010, Rinse’s own hyperactive breakfast host Scratcha DVA has put together a pair of bizarre and brilliant future house-not-house riddims. While the best products of the funky explosion thus far have worn their grime influences overtly – the clipped chords and driving energy of the likes of Cooly G and Roska – DVA takes his background in the genre and subverts it entirely. Stripped back to its bare essentials, ‘Natty’ sounds like nothing else out there. Its only touchstones are the percussion’s implied bounce and warping bursts of eski bass while a vague hint of tropical melody seems to stand out in hyperreality, lurching back and forth in a fug of overcaffeinated nausea. It’s heady stuff, the kind of track that forces a dancefloor to reassess its motion from the ground up.
Hitting the cough syrup hard, ‘Ganja’ is more direct and almost painfully insistent, some distant and sickly cousin to the cartoon kwaito of Mujava’s ‘Township Funk’. The most immediately pleasing aspect of funky’s emergence has been a loosening of percussive rigidity – there’s none of grime’s spasmodic kick-snare whipcrack or dubstep’s happy halfstep rut here. Instead, held in check by house’s mandatory offbeat hi-hat, DVA sends tendrils of Afrobeat percussion off in wildly divergent directions, hinting at the wild possibility of a thousand new drum patterns still to be discovered.
Leaving aside for a second the fact that their recent string of unique releases has been well and truly salivated over in these very pages, it does feel necessary to place some emphasis on Highpoint Lowlife’s latest. They've managed to bring together a sort of alternative all-star line up [Editor’s note: by which it’s possible to read: ‘followed with interest by me, perhaps not to the same extent by a large percentage of the population’] to remix Erik XVI’s Stern-Gerlachs Forsook EP. A surprisingly coherent listen, due to the source material’s common themes of melody and mood, it serves as an emphatic reminder of the considerable hotbed of underground talent the label is associated with.
