Soundclash is the best thing I’ve ever done. Maybe the best thing I’ll ever do. It’s massive, it moves the crowd every time people play it. But it’s a choon – a song – it’s not a mix tool, though Atki2 uses it that way, it’s a record that people connect to. It’s worth having.
Harpy compared to Wiley… like that… Harpy’s arpeggiated heavy jazz wonk out of eski-bizniz… I’ll take that…
The next Grievous Angel release in my guise as BUBBLEZ is about to drop on Devotional Dubz… my third release on my own 100% bootleg label is the funky remix of Wiley’s magnificent ICE RINK featuring Riko. I reckon this is the ultimate UK gun man tune in any genre and definitely the ultimate funky gun man tune. Serious Ogun business.
As you know this has been caned already by loads of top DJs… FACT Magazine already covered it as a track of the week… It’s a good tune. And it has to be. Ice Rink is one of THE seminal grime tracks, it’s just awesome. Here’s video of the original with Kano et al.
Anyway. It’s out soon. Well it should be, I’ve had the TPs and they sound alright so it shouldn’t be long. There won’t be many of them and there won’t be a repress.
Amazing new tunage incoming - yes I know, yet more!
Idle Hands is, as the better connected among you know, the fab new label out of Bristol’s magnificent Rooted record shop…
Idle001 was a wonderful bit of subtechno shuffle matched with utterly Bristolian subby skank… and Idle002 is sheer quality, probably even better! The lead cut is Atki2′s utterly RIDICULOUS remix of Hanuman’s Bola which is… well it’s so good I can scarcely put it into words… it’s a superb bit of fat, bouncy deep, deep, DEEEEEEEP house music that is right up there with Theo, MAW, anyone you want to mention. Totally on it, totally next level, if Cooly G had made it she’d the Queen by now. Awesome.
And on the flip is Dub Boy and Atki2′s Tigerflower, a great little post-soca Karnival-style tune that really sets floors alight. Plus of course my own remix of it, which is absolutely BANGING hard crunchy funky. Real peaktime jump up gear. And from a geek perspective, it’s the best mixdown I’ve done yet!
Atki2 is a dynamite producer btw, very underrated – you haven’t heard his simply awesome Time Freezes yet? Ah. Then you haven’t heard the best record of 2010. Trust.
You already know how heavy octapush are live, right? Well, they rock it with a fantastic combination of low end heft and latin-meets-ragga beats. They had a great cut on Soul Jazz Records’ Stepper’s Delight compilation, blew up the Red Bull Stage at this year’s Sonar in Barcelona as well as the Glade Festival, and have a unique sound which combines the Lisbon Kuduro sound with elements of Garage, Dancehall and Techno. You’ll like it. And they’ve got a corking 12 out on Iberian records in a couple of weeks.
Main cut Deixa is a fantastic bit of karnival style banging niceness with ragga beats and 8 bit basslines. Top latino MCing from Toni Clean. Fabulous.
Baila Mundo is even better – hard bouncy jump up with the wonderful MC Zulu – he wot worked with Ghislain Poirier on Go Ballistic, which I remixed.
Dubshhh is what happens when wobble meets rave – cracking little tune actually. They’ve got better ones though.
Buy to pep up your funky sets with something with a bit of welly that’ll still get the girls on the floor. Really good stuff, not deep but proper bangers. Out 2nd November through ST Holdings 2009
Posted up last month but in development for some time, though clearly freshly updated, Reynolds on gender and aggression within the nuum. Comes with some interesting re-assessments of grime (read: “REYNOLDS STILL LIKES GRIME SHOCK”), some attractively snark-free analysis of dubstep (if you ignore the comments): THE NUUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, # 5: MASCULINE PRESSURE: or,(REAP)PRAISING THE “HARD” IN HARDCORE. via Energy Flash.
I think the main point I would make in reflecting on Simon’s piece is that there is perhaps a cycle between the different male archetypes – from gangsta to lover to rebel to mystic etc, and back again. Lots of performers / MCs will cycle through these personae in the course of a set. Or at least, a career. Just look at Wiley, James Brown, Marley etc. Certainly, scenes will cycle through these archetypes. So dubstep majors on the mystic persona, which is a natural evolution from and complementary to grime’s gangsta persona, which is a natural evolution from garage’s lover persona, etc. You can often see reggae performers deliberately take on these different persona in the course of a single performance. And all the different scenes can occupy multiple personae – but one tends to dominate. So garage had gangsta elements, mystic elements, rebel / political elements etc as well as the Lover archetype.
So it’s less a case of these being divergent paths as points on a continuum.
I think I might be about to put different phases of the nuum on different sephiroth of the tree of life, and no good will come of that, so I will stop now!
15 minutes of banging, heavy dubstep, ragga techno, grime and funky.
The other mixes on there are worth checking too – sbtrkt’s excellent “bastard son of 2step and techno” stuff and Mr Beatnik’s lovely downbeat soul and jazz selection.
Catch it live at U Dun Know at Video Visions Bar in Dalston on Saturday alongside LVis1990.
[Owen went to Sheffield to do something important recently. I tagged along. Sheffield is a marvellous city, but is intent on destroying all its good bits, especially Park Hill. We did something on Castle Market as well, but that's going to be on another site shortly]
I mised this at the time… FACT bigging up the Ice Rink remix. You can hear this on the myspace and on the mix for Crazy Legs club. I am playing a Crazy Legs soon, on the 31st, so you can hear it on a big system then.
“Woofah magazine co-editor and the man behind one of last year’s most underrated albums, Belief is the Enemy, has been foraging into UK Funky productions lately, and they’re fantastic. If you’ve heard Kode 9′s recent sets you’ll have heard GA’s edit of ‘Loser’, which is coming out soon on a white label under an alias, but his remixes of Wiley’s classic ‘Ice Rink’ step things up even further. The instrumental is good, but it’s all about the Riko version, which keeps the original’s alien squelches and clashes, mutates the best vocal from the original 12″s, and pretty much pisses all over the entire Major Lazer album.”
“It’s no secret that the man behind both the edits on this 12″ is Sheffield-based dubstep producer/Woofah magazine co-editor/general blogger dun’ good Grievous Angel, and they’ve been a pivotal point of Kode 9′s sets for a while; usually played either side of his own ‘Black Sun’. The familiarity of both tracks might have detracted from their impact since that night at Beyond, and I’m not sure either are as great as Grievous’ UK funky edit of Wiley’s ‘Ice Rink’, but still – if ever there’s a track you’ll ignore when it finally comes out, then hear it a year down the line and realise how stupid you were and end up shelling half a week’s rent on discogs then it’s this one.”
I went to Jeremy Deller’s procession in Manchester the weekend before last. It was fantastic! Deller’s aim was to represent lots of people who don’t normally figure in civic processions, without breaking the concept of an actual civic procession. We thought it worked really well. Right up History is Made At Night’s street. And indeed Infinite’s – this post is a response to Georgina’s comments on her blog about her end of year show, which is a response to John Eden’s psychogeographical review of it.
Here’s the Guardian’s video:
And another official video about the marchers, including the marching bands – this one performing the Fall’s Hit the North, and the boy racers:
The front of the procession – this one’s just some guy with a phone I think…
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I didn’t video all the bet bits but you had:
- the few surviving Manchester mill workers
- various May Queens
- mobile libraries
- the crowd of goths who hang around a town square with a truck with their favourite local goth band laying
- a 60-strong troupe of Hindu bag pipers in full Scottish regalia (!!!!!!!)
- a collection of boy racers in souped up hot hatches with massive soundsystems, all tuned into a special pirate radio broadcast by the Blackout Crew
- a reconstruction of England’s oldest tea toom
- the African buskers and dancers from the city centre on a flat bed truck performing for the crowd
- best of all, a steel band playing various Manchester hits, especially Joy Division, New Order and Buzzcocks.
It was all absolutely wonderful. It was the sort of thing Sheffield should do.
Blackdown:
“When I look around the Rinse roster, as well as the funky selectors, it’s DJs like Oneman and Brackles, who share our Thursday 11pm slot, who I increasingly feel musical affinity with. Dusk and I take a different approach to how we use old school on our show, and I sure would love to mix like Oneman, but selection wise I think there’s common ground.
Hyperdub have been an incredible inspiration in the last two years, but it’s nice to now see a collection of likeminded producers/DJs like Ben UFO, Oneman, Brackles, Braiden, Alex Bok Bok, Grievous Angel, Shortstuff, Martin Kemp and Joy Orbison using Hyperdubs, funky and old school grime ‘n’ garage sensibilities to find a way that isn’t either wobble, dub techno or dull commercial house. To find a way that preserves the quintessential London elements of feminine pressure, rawness, rudeness and all the other nuum factors, without coalescing into just one thing or becoming something unlistenable or unlistenably dull.
In practical terms, this may be as much a question of bpms as selection. Funky rides at 130 bpm, 2step-badman Sully flexes at 134ish and grime’s at 140bpm still. I’ve seen harder dubstep DJs pushing 150bpm. To me, with the gravity of the mass creativity of funky right now, I feel an urge to drop the bpms and up the groove.”
This is absolutely where I’m coming from right now. That strange yet familiar middle ground is just where my head’s at. I am delighted to be included in Blackdown’s list. The new “Magic Dub” tune a few of you have got is about dubstep, it’s about keeping 140 a worthwhile tempo… but it’s a halfstep house tune. Just to make the point… and because the sample is so good. I want to do more “dark subby dubstep” that’s … good.
So in the next month I have two singles dropping. One, next Monday, is bashy funky. One is dubstep, 140bpm garage and wonky. The line between the two is where the flex is.
lower end spasm.: 2 mixes for this week
Crazy Legs’ booking policy continues to impress me. I’m yet to attend one of their nights but judging by their booking policy and presentation, they’re definitely on a wavelength – Bristol’s answer to Night Slugs?
Anyway this is the 2nd of their mix series and it comes from longtime badman Grievous Angel. A lot of the GA productions Kode9 has been championing can be heard here, check it out.
Steven Wells is dead. This is a bummer. A great writer who I totally lost track of. I used to see him at gigs in the 80s and chat to him while buying his fanzine. He was a cool bloke, really nice. Now his dead.
Hollow Earth
“I suspect Zomby’s more recent stuff is using similar techniques, even if he’s using a controller to manipulate samples (as opposed to a Soft Synth) from within a PC. It’s the new face of electronic music and a weird flashback to how the control surface of the TB-303 was an escape route from the struggle of programming FM synthesis for DJ Pierre et al.”
Errr… I cannot recall a time when soft synths have not been controlled by external boxes, nor when this didn’t have a transformative effect on music-making. Not necessarily a GOOD effect, but a transformative one. Matt may not have been into music making long enough (his recent releases are great BTW!) to remember things like the Fat Boy controller, which mapped to rebirth and indeed all kinds of other things. Or indeed the original novation bass synth, which i have somewhere and whose knobs were often used to control soft synths. I don’t think it’s that big a deal – I don’t dispute any of his empirical evidence, FlyLo etc, but I think a lot of people have been doing that stuff for a long time.
But Matt is quite right to point to workflow as a driver of innovation. I think something like ableton and its open-ended triggering, re-sampling, synthesising and tweaking is also transformative. And what does that approach remind us of? Well, probably Orbital’s use of multiple Alesis hardware sequencers that they used to cut up the sequences driving their synths, live…
The Starkbot, Mayor of Starkville, live in session: “limited edition 320 of Starkey’s stunning performance at Various in Portland, Oregon April 11, 2009.” I know I always rave about Starkey but he is a complete fucking genius. Live he is, quite simply, heaven. I just found this mix today, check it out – and buy the great mix cd he did for Lo dubs.
DOWNLOAD HERE:
http://www.pdxindub.com/files/audio/Starkey_Live at Various 4.11.09.mp3
Climate change: Recent stirrings in the UK underground jolt Riddim.ca back to life…
Kicking off our open-ended investigation of London’s rapidly mutating house scene, we sit down for an email exchange with Roska. With a foot in broken beat and shades of grime, his new EP Climate Change maintains a healthy balance between houseful sensuousness and rugged riddimic experimentation. It’s also getting caned by DJs from Marcus Nasty to kode9. Get to know Roska…
You might want to know that you can pre-order the Loser / Move Down Low release at Red Eye already. Catalogue number 21483, listed as BUBBLEZ : Move Down Low / Loser : DEVOTIONAL DUBZ, ERZULIE 02. It’s not back from pressing yet but there won’t be many about so you might want to get in early.
This is the tune that The Guardian wrote about a while back, and which more importantly Kode 9, Dub Boy, Atki2 etc have been hammering for months. If you saw Kode play at El B’s FWD launch party you’ll have seen how both of these tunes move a floor – or at least they do on the Plastic People sound system!
Bubblez is the new name for funky bootz.
Hold tight for the Ice Rink / Riko remix – it won’t be coming out and not many people will be getting it, but you’ll hear it in the clubs soon.
This is a picture of me DJing at Ruffnek Diskotek / Monster Bass. Check out the size of Mungo’s rig, it’s chuffing massive and sounds ridiculously fat! Wasn’t turned up when I was playing but still sounded great.
Ace interview with K-Man by the man like Philip Sherbourne, who is a fan of Lady Dub and an all-round good egg from the techno scene. Only he is much more than that.
This is not a mix. Rather, this is a compilation of the best UK Funky I could find, taken from radio shows. I’m NOT pretending I have these tunes. Rather, I’m showcasing the best in UK Funky. Because, while funky is wonderful, there’s a lot of tunes out there I don’t like that much, and I wanted an hour of music I could point that would say, “this is what I want. This is what I want to make.” Something that would be, for want of a better word, a manifesto of what Funky could be; what I think it should be. I’m not very geeky about funky, or at least not yet, I just love it and listen to it and make it, so I don’t know many of the tunes on here. Probably someone like Queen of Sheba or Paul Autonomic knows every single one, but I don’t. The lyrics tab has timings of the radio shows and podcasts that I’ve taken the rips from.
What I do know is that this stuff absolutely rocks. Funky skeptics, start here.
Blogs are the cheapest, fastest and easiest way to get your music writing out there – but that hasn’t stopped a new generation of writers picking up the stapler and putting out a fanzine
