Common Ground

Most of you who are actively following the dubstep scene will have already have heard this, hell most of you were probably in the chat for all I know. But I thought it was a really, really well mixed set that deserves as much attention as possible.

Its interesting watching Ben get into dub reggae and techno to the depth that he has already established as a dubstep DJ. This is a mix he made for El Gato’s Bruk radio and I really thought it showed an interesting mixture of sensibilities.

If there is one small area that most of the DJs I talk to online seem to agree on it is that good dub techno is a worthy thing. Basic Channel is equally loved and respected by both the Detroit true school acolytes and the farthest out there of minimal European DJs.

Gutterbreakz has long been a source of information about what’s current in the dub techno scene but I don’t think he would have played the Melchior or Villalobos tracks. Maybe the Villalobos, definitely not Luciano and Melchior’s Father.

So yeah, I guess what I’m saying is that its nice to see Ben developing his own style as DJ in this kind of music as in his other area’s of interest. Which almost exactly mirror mine, its just that he’s a much much better DJ than I am at this point.

Ben UFO guesting on Bruk Radio

1. The Aggrovators/Johnny Clarke - Ites Green and Gold Dub
2. The Abysinnians - Declaration of Rights (Heartbeat)
3. Johnny Osbourne - Purify Your Heart (Trojan)
4. Scientist - One Two (Greensleeves)
5. King Tubby - My Mind Dub (Pablo)
6. The Heptones - I Shall Be Released (Island Records)
7. Keith Hudson - Darkest Night (basic replay)
8. Chosen Brothers - Mango Walk (rhythm and sound)

9. Deepchord - Vantage Isle [Spaceecho Dub] (Echospace)
10. Substance and Vainqueur - Reverberate (Scion Versions)
11. Sven Weisemann - Amity (Mojuba)
12. Villalobos - Minimoonstar [Shackleton remix] (Perlon)
13. Shed - Warped Mind (Berghain 02)
14. Claro Intelecto - Rise (Modern Love)
15. Jost and Klemann - CC01 [Detroit] (Dial)
16. Thomas Melchior - The Phantom (Perlon)
17. Portable - Thought In Action (~scape)
18. Brendon Moeller - Pink Noise (Third Ear)
19. Deepchord - Electromagnetic Dowsing [Mike Huckaby mix - Step 1]
20. Bodycode - Document of an African past (Yore)
21. Luciano and Melchior - Father (Cadenza)
22. Patrice Scott - Motions [Sunrise Dub] (Sistrum)
23. Theo Parrish - Falling Up [Carl Craig mix] (Third Ear)
24. Steve Reid and Keiron Hebden - People Be Happy [Audion extended mix] (?)
25. Move D - Honey (Smallville)
26. T++ - Space Pong (?)
27. Monolake - Ice (Imbalance)

28. Black Pocket - Ur A Star [Martyn remix] (Fat City)

And let me just say how exciting I’m finding Sven Weisemann, he seems to be making a uniquely percussive strand of dub techno influenced deep house. The track included on this mix reminds me of prime Mala stuff, only as 4×4 dance music. And it also seems like some of his tracks like Cabana Fever could be mixed nicely with slightly pitched down London funkiness.

If I do have one complaint with some of this dubtech it is that its slightly monotonous rhythmically speaking. It takes a brave and talented producer to expand past the dub process into more Caribbean sounding beats. Obviously Shackleton has been carving his own swathe of influence in this direction and I never would have thought I’d live to see him release music on Perlon.

That was particularly exciting for me, even if his remix of Villalobos is giving many DJs migraines at the moment. I’m certain a lot of people just scratched their heads and flipped the platter over: back into slightly more familiar territory.

I’ve been reading the series of essays on Detroit’s place in the modern techno scene on MNML SSGs with some interest. Pipecock’s essay mirrored some of my own experiences. Derrick May and Theo Parrish are two incredible DJs, they were life altering for me as well. But unfortunately I can’t bring myself to venerate Detroit in the way He does. At least I won’t do so at the cost of ignoring music that doesn’t fit Detroit sensibilities.

Still respect is due to both sides of the debate, or perhaps towards all sides. I remain convinced that this shouldn’t be a polarized black and white or us versus them kind of issue. It was the Belleville Three’s openness to European sounds that created much of early techno surely? Why must I imitate their present conservatism (or to be more specific the conservatism of some of their followers) when it was this radical kind of behavior that made them great initially? Obviously that and the depth of their individual talents. Still House is where my heart remains, there is an openness and permeability to house which remains unaltered after all these years.

And European house producer’s remain vocal about how deep their interest in the early Chicago scene remains. Prosumer practically worships Larry Heard, it would almost be cloying if the affection weren’t so genuinely felt. As a group the house producers associated with the Berghain show as much respect as can be shown without turning it into museum curation. This is living music, over codification will just turn it into what jazz has become. This year’s split between house and techno has worried me for precisely this reason. Yes, Marcel Dettman makes great trippy techno, and yes I like a lot of the stuff out on Ostgut Ton or Innervisions in a house vein.

But the intensely weird trippy music that minimal was, and still is occasionally, seems to be passing away. Dubstep lures away many of the deepest Berlin techno people, and house turns so far inward that 1984 starts to sound fresh again to many people.

I’m starting to miss Fuckpony when it was both Samim and Jay Haze.

And I really miss Booka Shade’s glory days, I still give those tracks to people unfamiliar with this stuff. The borderline between electrohouse and minimal, I guess between the shift in fashions between 2005 and 2006 was an exciting time. It was trashy, it was fun.

Now I listen to London people abuse subwoofers again.

We Like It Funky Cont.

Blackdown has clarified something that was bothering me, even from my tiny sampling of mixes and shows from this scene there seemed to be two different currents of thought. On the one hand you had your people like Apple, Mentor Roska and Geeneus making tunes that were quite out there. On the other you had a kind of vaguely claustrophobic sonic conservatism.

The two are probably best exemplified by DJ Perempay’s sets versus Mentor Roska’s new release Climate Change. Perempay used to be part of the Essentials camp, he DJed grime under the name Bossman. Even back then he was noted for being a very technically skilled DJ, and now that he DJs house nothing has changed. He has a tendency to create very skilled blends but tends to value more traditional sounding house over the newer more broken or grime influenced stuff.

I really enjoy his mixes despite this.

So far his Funkin Favourites is one of the better retrospectives of what the scene was before this year and his Funky House Vol 4 has some glimmerings of a potential experimental edge in the future.

Mentor Roska on the other hand can barely even be said to be making house, this house with a heavy broken beat slant to it if it is house at all. But make no mistake, this is loopy, heavily percussive music, its done away with a lot of the mincing that broken beat has been prone to.

There isn’t a lot of the slow development of a house track either, you get groups of 32 bar loops obviously intended to be chopped like a grime DJ as opposed to a slow blend a la tech house. I’m not sure if this is something that will sell the music to many DJs, going from thinking like a techno DJ to a hip-hop one in a single set can be difficult for many of those too set in their ways.

Its up on Juno Download.

Its fierce, heavily recommended.

The perfect mix of grime and bruk sensibilities.

The other tune that is really doing it for me at the moment (and I’ve no idea how recent it is) is Footloose’s Just Leave feat Simone. The A-Side has Footloose’s trademark funky synths and horns under Simone’s screed against aggro punks fucking up their dance. I’ve been in clubs that could have used this song playing at the door. Too many people think a Saturday night out is time to prove something, too many drunk assholes out there can’t just have fun.

The B-Side on the other hand seems to be actual invitation to violence, with Fingerprint’s massive electro bassline sure to destroy the dance anywhere its played. All those of you waiting for this music to get dark and weird, here’s your time. Personally I can handle a little cheese if it’ll drive away the boring straight boys. But to each his own, I wouldn’t mind seeing a balance emerge between all these different micro-genres inside the scene. If this music can find the same kind of mixture of elements that Slimzee’s set’s had as of 2002-3 things may get very exciting indeed.

We Like It Funky

Well, what to say, what to say? I’ve been away for some time, and I’m not quite sure how to get things rolling again. Dubstep had left me cold for months, I was broke as you can possibly get and 14 dollars for a single just wasn’t feasible. I decided it was time to curb my addiction to the latest greatest vinyl and start doing a little research into some other areas.

So where have I turned my interest, you may ask?

I’ve been quietly gathering a disco collection, been maintaining an interest in electro-funk and been completely ignoring metal altogether. Weather’s warm, serotonin levels are where they should be, fuck all that noise for the moment. And I’ve been cautiously but increasingly optimistically watching the London funky house scene for signs of life.

Bassline house left me cold, bar a T2 track here or there, so I wasn’t really that optimistic about a scene that was largely a rejection of two of my favorite kinds of music (grime and dubstep) by the people largely responsible for their existence. For a long time house has been the default area for UK Garage defectors to turn to. Wookie made house after his seminal run of 2-step singles and remixes came to a close. Zed Bias made house and broken beat for the majority of this decade. If the people who largely invented dubstep had no use for their baby, who was I to argue?

But when Geeneus and Sara Souljah are done with it, its really time to reassess things. So yeah, Geeneus and Zinc are recording together as Jelly Jams, which is kind of giving me a little cognitive dissonance. Going from what Geeneus was releasing a year or two ago, (anybody remember the track with the grindcore sample?) To what he’s making now, well its quite a step. But Blackdown and Tim Finney seem to agree that Funky is something to watch. And those guys know, most of my knowledge is based around observations they’ve made on message boards.

And funky sounds like something I’d like, house with a soca beat rhythm super-imposed and broken beat influences, sounds great right?

And it is starting to get there. Producers like Apple were starting to make beats that are definitely not “house” late last year and suddenly there’s a load of ex-grime people making funky house East London style. I was basically just waiting for that grime influence to show up, and now it has. Check out this excerpt from DJ Smoovie T’s recent show, courtesy of Tim Finney.

Its a track by Ear Dis called I Feel, and DJ Footloose has remixed it in a slighly grimier style. Which is awesome, sounds like a combination of grime and broken beat, mixing their two strengths to its advantage. DJ Footloose knows his shit, and so does Arms who is half of Ear Dis. I’m praying that more broken beat producers decide to start producing in this style. And more grime people, Donaeo went from providing tracks for Target’s mixes to making his recent hit Devil in A Blue Dress.

And its nice to see some talented people get away from Grime’s perverse little world of MC’s endlessly sending for each other and youngers getting hurt over nothing. After Crazy Titch went to prison I was pretty much done with it. Everything I found interesting about it had changed, the future funk beats were becoming rehashed Dipset shit, and the DJ’s weren’t even fucking around with vinyl anymore. Grime isn’t done, but I’ve been done with it for a long time.

I really have mixed feelings about Dubstep as well, but there’s a lot of talent there. And its nice to see some of that London talent moving out of the up-tempo ghetto and making stuff that can actually be mixed with other house, whether its from the US or mainland Europe. Watching dubstep get split between FWD dread techno and wobbleshite wasn’t fun for me.

I’m really far away from giving minimal tech-house any passes at this point, so seeing dubstep become 140 bpm swung techno wasn’t really overly exciting. Props to 2562 and Martyn, but I just don’t have the energy at this point. I’m in my mid-twenties now and I really can’t handle that tempo for very long periods in the dance, this geezer prefers the 100-130 bpm region. Maybe even a little balearic to start things off?

So anyways, even if some older farts than me have pointed out that funky house is nothing new, its been made constantly by dedicated people for the better part of thirty years now. It is new enough for many people of my generation, house is just about as old as I am. So yeah, I know my Jesse Saunders, my Mr Fingers, Steve Silk Hurley and Frankie Knuckles. But now I’ve begun to know the music that inspired them. The early Philly Soul that got mixed with Salsa influences in Mancuso’s Loft and eventually became disco. I’ve been listening to MFSB, Carol Douglas, The Trammps and McFadden and Whitehead to name just a few records sitting around my room.

So now that I really have a loose feeling for the entirety of the rhythm and blues mutations over the last half century I think I can appreciate music like broken beat for what it is, music that is heavily based in allusion. And now funky house as well. Its not my history, or that of my family. But it is the history of the dominant musical form of the latter half of the 20th century, after all what was rock and roll but bastardized rhythm and blues?

So yes this does feel a bit like a regression away from FWD, always FWD. But these here youngers need an education, don’t they?

And perhaps the only way FWD, is to RWD.