"IF YOU WANT A VISION OF THE FUTURE, IMAGINE CRAP 808 SAMPLES STAMPING ON A HUMAN FACE- FOREVER"
So there’s been quite a long time between me stopping writing regularly and picking up again. In that interim a hell of a lot of records have been released, and an overwhelming amount of good ones at that. Whilst waxing lyrical over some of the ones that have switched up the UK bass matrix, totally blown my mind and burnt up dancefloors might be fun, does the internet echo chamber really need another voice chiming in with how great Night Slugs is? We’re all basically in agreement that Ramadanman is leaving everybody in his wake, right? Is another belaboured juke reference gonna do the dialogue much good? Of course its pretty easy to blow your niche out of proportion with the internet and assume everybody’s following the same patterns and has read the same reviews, but even with this in mind it seems pointless to write articles that are not just out of date, but also more than catered for. With this in mind, in the lead up to launching the site proper I’m going to do this series; picking up some of the records/albums/eps that even the niche seemed to let slip by in the first half of 2010. This may be things that slipped below the radar, weren’t given the usual attention granted to the artists in question or maybe did get noticed but didn’t get a fair appraisal. It should have a nice flipside in showing where our heads are at musically right now.
1. MENSAH - PULSE 80’S
HENCH
First out the posts is the excellent debut release from Bristolian bass man Mensah. Further releases have established him as part of a new generation of Bristol producers mining the depths of hypercoloured grime and Dre style g-funk to inject sparse dubstep tropes with some psychedelic hue, but Pulse 80’s comes from somewhere else entirely. Absolutely skeletal in construction, the track is comprised of not much more than a hollowed out 808 jack track and some bass hits cribbed from (or more likely, in homage to) Musical Mob’s Pulse X, its sparseness giving each rimshot and drum machine click ample space to breathe. Hitting on some brilliant nexus point between 80s electro, early 00s grime and present day dubstep, the tune’s wickedly unique and by far the best of Mensah’s output thus far.
Slotting in nicely next to the last few month’s Footcrabbin’ output, its weird that it hasn’t been pulled for by more DJs in those circles. It fits in perfectly with the recent dancefloor narrative of “dark drum machine shit” Loefah laid out as label Swamp 81’s modus operandi, AND recent Autonomic sets- indeed, if not for the bpm difference, its a perfect match for Instra:Mental’s skeezy, stalker-house outtings. Wicked stuff nonetheless, and those drums fills were made for mixing out of!
Tomorrow: Mr Dibiase - Cakeology
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