Short Circuitry: January 2010

Night Slugs

Since this month’s sudden thaw fucked our already frayed wiring, Short Circuitry’s been in slow recovery on top of the kitchen radiator and has taken the opportunity to catch up on over a month’s musical backlog. Thankfully, we’re now back to our usual shepherd selves, rounding up and processing the usual herd of electronic releases into pre-shaped, bite-size portions – now with an added ‘free stuff’ section.

If the start of 2010 heralds anything in dance music, it’s a beautiful blurring of the lines between what were once seen as neatly insular regions. Towards the end of last year, drum ‘n’ bass innovators Instra:mental began releasing a run of immaculately crafted hybrid tracks that took in everything from eighties electro-pop to fractured dubstep. Dark dub/two-steppers TRG and Martyn began to explore the increased freedom provided by slower house tempos, and the skeleton of UK garage was redesigned by an entire cohort of bass experimentalists.

As befits one of the UK’s most influential club institutions, the people at Fabric have been closely been following these developments over the last year or so, as dubstep’s remit has shattered outward to encapsulate a widening cluster of sub-sounds. It’s a consistently shapeshifting and impossible to define landscape, so with fantastic new compilation Elevator Music Volume 1 they simply haven’t bothered to try – instead offering a momentary snapshot of bass mutations circa now. Either way, it functions impressively both as a scene primer (for those not predisposed to buying shedloads of vinyl) and as a collection of unreleased gems from both established and upcoming producers.

So Untold’s characteristically mindbending ‘Bad Girls’ and Martyn’s house workout ‘Friedrichstrasse’ rub shoulders with the far less ubiquitous likes of Doc Daneeka’s ‘Drums In The Deep’ and the delectable funky techno of xxxy’s ‘Sing With Us’. Even Caspa & Rusko are on atypically restrained form with ‘One Of The Same’, an echo drenched, space-is-the-place slink that sonically finds its feet not a million miles from Lindstrom’s cosmic disco groovefests. But most promisingly, the compilation’s best tracks are from relative unknowns – the lush tropical funk of Hackman’s ‘Pistol In Your Pocket’; Mosca’s insanely addictive ‘Gold Bricks, I See You’ easily eclipsing Joy Orbison at his own housey-garagey game – offering the tantalising probability that this year should be every bit as exciting as the last.

Kieran Hebden seems to have been similarly taken by these exciting states of flux, drafting in both Joy Orbison and Roska to remix his new Four Tet material and further pushing his penchant for jazzy cadence in a dance-oriented direction. Hebden’s new album There Is Love In You, his first Four Tet full-length in nearly five years, further draws on these connections. After the majestic understatement that was last year’s collaborative 12” with Burial, previous single ‘Love Cry’ and the mesmerizing ‘Sing’ are saturated in dazzling technicolour, a world away from Everything Ecstatic’s stranger meanderings. There are elements of his work with Steve Reid here too, both in the glitch-ridden interlude ‘Reversing’ and the ever-changing backdrops of ‘This Unfolds’. To these ears Hebden has always been a reliable talent, so the fact that There Is Love In You is so enjoyable comes as no great surprise. Yet it’s still a welcome statement from a musician who manages to conjure intriguing results regardless of setting.

Traces of Everything Ecstatic at its most percussively oblique also litter Lake, 10-20’s latest EP on Highpoint Lowlife. It’s an appropriately titled record, drenched in aquatic background chatter and curiously inverted, as though gradually resolved through several feet of murky water. But where Hebden’s periods of awkward abstraction are as likely to find resolve in a softly plucked melody line, tracks like ‘Overloam’d’ and ‘Endzone’ as often plunge into cavernous, introspective noise. It’s bracing stuff for the most part, a less easy listen than his earlier releases but as rewarding, dragging together uneasy hip-hop and ambient influences to create a result that’s as much an installation as a record.

Meanwhile, Highpoint Lowlife’s first release of the new year brings together a host of the label’s major players to rework material from Erik XVI’s frosty Stern-Gerlachs Forsook EP. The resultant seven tracks range from austere minimalism to unabashed hedonism, Hot City’s ‘Unionens sista dagar’ remix in particular escalating its house pulse to heart attack-inducing tempo. Infrasonics head honcho Spatial, on the other hand, contributes the EP’s least immediate – but almost certainly finest – moment with his remix of ‘Kalabaliken i Bender’. Consisting of little more than diffuse percussion and blank pulses of sub-bass, like the rest of his music it’s garage taken to the furthest extreme – stark, emotionally withheld and inhuman, save a lone female voice crying into the void.

Over the course of four releases on the Daphne label, semi-anonymous operators Millie & Andrea have been honing a similar balance between icy restraint and direct dancefloor action. Their most recent 12” neatly encapsulates their work over the last year or so, ‘Spectral Source’ combining a lean rhythmic chassis with expansive dub-techno atmosphere. By way of contrast, ‘Ever Since You Came Down’ is all stop-start jungle-influenced percussive mania, bulding in fits and starts before jerking to an abrupt halt.

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. Shifting from an opening dubstep-ish crawl, it suddenly picks up at around the three-minute mark to a clipped house/garage hybrid before a sudden drop into swirling, oceanic ambience. The payoff at the end of this extended interlude is glorious – three final minutes of bittersweet funky that finally tails off to leave a melancholy afterglow in its wake.

Night Slugs and Apple Pips associate Greena has carved out a similarly warped niche with his recent tracks – his ‘Square One’ remix, available for free download at XLR8R, locks the source material’s melody in a dense cage of percussion and swooping bass drops. His recent Apple Pips 12” pulls a similar trick but in sharper focus, ‘Tenzado’s toughly percussive nature undoubtedly dancefloor ready but cocooned in a humid ambiguity of intent.

It’s hard to isolate exactly what’s been prompting the emergence such an impressive array of unique sounds, but one of the main factors seems to be a renewed willingness amongst a generation of dubstep and grime producers to acknowledge Detroit and Chicago’s huge influence. The steady rise of laptop DJing, even amongst traditionally vinyl purist scenes like dubstep, can also claim some responsibility. DJs can easily change track tempo without shifting pitch and so mix together genres that would previously have been incompatible. Greena’s Ableton sets have always been willfully eclectic beasts, switching with surprising ease between UK bass sounds, classic techno and all manner of regional house variants – an ‘anything goes’ attitude that seems to be traveling further as genre boundaries become harder to draw. His recent mix for XLR8R is well worthy of a listen, moving seamlessly from the Detroit sounds of Omar S and Carl Craig, through Mosca and Untold, to Ricardo Villalobos and Claude VonStroke.

This month’s best free stuff

Greena’s XLR8R podcast, a dizzying forty-five minutes of genre-bending music.

Mosca – ‘Square One (Greena Remix)’, also available for download through XLR8R.

Deadboy – FACT Mix, in which the upcoming London producer whips up “a little heartache on the dancefloor”.

Sully – FACT Mix, further proof that two-step is still in capable hands, with tracks like ‘In Some Pattern’ treading the fine line between upbeat magic and keening melancholy.

Gilles Peterson podcast, with special guest Mala, a wholly worthwhile hour of chat and tunes: new Deep Medi material, classic dub and Steve Reich.

Further reviews, interviews and links to similar material can be found at Close Bracket/Open Bracket.

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