5th Anniversary Treat! Mak 10 spinning UK Funky live in Montreal on New Years Eve 2010.  Courtesy of ESL Crew and Lawless Productions.

mp3: Part 1 | Part 2

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…

Riddim: There seems to be a really healthy mix of styles in UK House right  now.  There’s the straightforward smoothed out 4×4 stuff, the RnB  influence, elements of broken beat and soca making it more  rhythmically intense, and then a grimey influx too.  What’s your  take on the state of things right now and how would you like to see  it develop in the next year or two?

Roska: More vocal tracks I would like to see. Including from myself you will hear vocalists on my next releases. Other than that the scene is in a healthy state – a lot of new talent is coming through including myself. Using the broken or soca effect on the tunes coming out gives it that feel good factor when they drop in the clubs. You will find most of the producers in this scene come from either UKG and Grime so the tracks will have that influence.

Riddim: Your current style is quite broken with a definite grime influence  but still a hint of house in the background, especially on a track like Boxed In.  I’ve also seen Feeline music described as being like  “dubstep with a sex drive.”  I’m wondering how much allegiance you  feel to house music, especially that sexy/sensual side of it.  Is  there a balance that you’re trying to maintain there between the  rough and the smooth?

Roska: I would say my influence is more broken beat than grime. But as I have grown up listening to Dancehall, Reggae and R&B, the basslines have played a part in my music.

I used to listen to a lot of UK Garage the likes of Wookie, MJ Cole to name a few. I have had an eye for House for a couple of years and in my productions you may hear a straight 4×4 beat or you may hear the second kick come in a little earlier. My 3rd EP, due out in the next few months, will be straight house.

Riddim: You’ve mentioned that your dad was a sound man in the 80s and 90s  and that you grew surrounded by vinyl.  You must have developed an  ear for beats at an early age.  How has that background helped shape  your approach to production?

Roska: The music my Father played definitely played a big part in my life and even my Mother played a lot of music at home so I was always surrounded by Reggae, R&B, Soul. Later on in my late teens is when my ear for music grew.

Riddim: Can you tell us about starting out in UKG with your crew the Krazy  Brothers?  And how did you get here from there?

Roska: It was me and my cousin we used to call ourselves Krazy Brothers about 6 years ago he was a DJ and I was the MC. It started off as a mess about at home then we started to get on pirate radio around London – during this time I was attending my uncle’s studio he set up in a flat in Peckham, I was interested in production of music. Later on me and my cousin went seperate ways.

I was still interested in being an MC but I didn’t have a DJ so I started to make tracks and around this time the likes of Pay as u go were around and Grime coming through the ranks as a sub-genre of UKG. I started to make grime but I didn’t really push myself to make a name for myself back then.

I started to make hip-hop for about a year then I started to hear house music when someone gave me a DJ Pioneer mix CD in 2006. Tracks like ‘Cure and the Cause’ by Fish Go Deep and ‘Cant Get Away’ by Mood II Swing got me deep in to house music.  In between this I was listening to music by a producer called Nathan Haines who makes Nu-Jazz/ Broken Beat.

All of those segments play a part in my music now.

Riddim: Would you say there are hints of your current style in your earlier  grime tracks like Corporate?  It seems like that trademark percussion is emerging but there’s sort of an Eski feel too.  What’s changed since then besides the  tempo?

Roska: Wow, you really did your research on me! goodlitt.co.uk was meant to have been shut down ages ago – I stopped paying it! [Since then], I’ve used less bass that sounds grimey and used more sub basses.

Riddim: Has your production set up changed much since then?

Roska: I use pretty much the same set up just upgraded equipment. Back then I couldn’t afford studio monitors and a good quality sound card etc.

Riddim: Were you ever a FWD» regular, back when there was more garage,  more mixing of grime and broken sounds – DJs like Landslide, Zed  Bias, Slimzee?

Roska: I was a listener of Slimzee and Pay As U Go back in the day but I wasn’t really a raver then.

Riddim: Feeline/Boxed In and Climate Change are both out on Roska Kicks  and Snares.  Why did you decide to start your own label?

Roska: I needed to start a label to sell my products under for sites like Juno Download.

Riddim: And you’ve got an alias too.  What’s the difference between the two projects?

Roska: Uncle Bakongo is more a African tribal style of house or afro beat.

Riddim: What plans do you have for the label in the future?

Roska: More EPs and more vocal tracks. I have about 60 tracks sitting in my studio ready to be released. All the DJs over here keep asking for more tracks from me but they’ll have to wait till I’m ready to release.

Riddim: So you’re interested in doing some vocal versions of your tunes…

Roska: I’ll have some vocal tracks in the very near future coming out so watch this space

Riddim: Which other producers are you keeping an eye on these days? Which  track are feeling?

Roska: I work and talk with Fingaprint from Invasion Records who has produced hit’s like ‘Take Over’ and recently ‘Rolex Sweep remix’, I would say Invasion Records have got it when it comes to club hit’s – look out for their current release entitled Signed & Sealed featuring Courtney Dennie. I also I talk to DJ Naughty, Dubplate Malice, Crazy Cousinz and DJ Geeneus.

Riddim: Many thanks, Roska.

The Climate Change EP and Feeline/Boxed In are out now on Roska Kicks & Snare.  Find them at Juno , UK Record Shop , Uptown Records and Rhythm Division .  Roska and Uncle Bakongo digital tracks are available exclusively at Juno Download .

More info at: http://www.myspace.com/rosiroska

* * *

c/o the Riddim.ca global recon unit:
Paul Jasen (Canada), Siah Alan (US) and Tim Finney (Australia)

We’ll be back

Originally posted at Deeptime blog

It’s time to revive ‘Forward Sound,’ though maybe in the plural. Circa 2003 that was the open-ended term that used to describe what eventually became dubstep, along with a tangle of threads that split off or got left behind. Just like house first meant “what they play at the Warehouse,” it was a reference to the club night itself, the only place where you could hear as yet unnamed new mutations of the garage machine, whether in the form of Ghost, Landslide, Menta, kode9, Plasticman, Hatcha, Slimzee, etc, etc. And of course it was hardly a ’sound’ at all. Virtually every artist operating under that banner was a sound unto themselves and the Forward style could only ever be a snapshot of those trajectories out of UK garage that happened to be coinciding on a given Thursday night or in narrow bands of pirate ether.

Forward Sounds: mutant offspring straying into the house, swiping tools from the garage, and hallucinating new machines. For my money, the most exciting times in music are always the ones without names, when refugee styles get promiscuous in the zones between the trodden paths. Seven years on from the first FWD», I think it’s fair to say that the most interesting things in dubstep are increasingly outside. The D is contested territory, expanding around the world while, at the same time, narrowing its musical ambitions. Dubstep’s new mainstream seems happy enough to keep their options limited while more experimental types are left to decide whether they should cling to the name or cut themselves adrift.

In fact, the seismic rumblings seem to be getting louder across the entire spectrum of late-UKG these days. It’s not just dubstep that’s breaking up again. Grime’s undergone its own identity crisis in the last couple of years, struggling with quality control and losing venues over real and imagined violence. Now it’s bleeding into funky/UK house, last year’s bogeyman, death knell of “nuum” (or was that dubstep again?) which itself is slowly turning into a source of tentative optimism. Producers like Apple are hinting at the sort of mutations that originally made UKG into an interesting local product. Meanwhile, D1’s forthcoming track I’m Lovin is being billed by Tempa as a “Dubstep/funky house mutation.”

RWD Mag founding editor Matt Mason recently had this to say on the ‘Maybe Funky House will turn out OK‘ thread over at Dissensus:

It seems like there is a real convergence going on between all the (not so) different London scenes; grime, dupstep, UKG, bassline and funky house are all being appreciated by DJs and clubbers who claim to be into different sounds.

To me a set of all these styles played together doesn’t sound too different from a 1997 UK garage set, when producers, DJs and clubbers were, imho, far less conservative about what they considered appropriate for the dance floor. Which meant you had a scene with the broad mindedness to include everything from DJ Zinc to Masters at Work to TuffJam to Groove Chronicles to TJ Cases. I think this diversity was part of UKG’s (then) mass appeal.

Is this something people could see happening again? It sounds like it might be already.

We’ll see…

Forthcoming tunes from Punch Drunk, Scuba, Hessle Audio, and Hotflush.

RSD
Corner Dub (Red and Blue Mix) / Pretty Bright Light
Punch Drunk 003

Landing the mighty Rob Smith for Punch Drunk 003 is a real coup for the nebulous Punch Drunk imprint run out of Bristol’s Rooted Records. The label’s first release played it safe with sure bets from established names Pinch and Atki2. The second, from Peverelist, took a risk and became the focus of dubstep/minimal speculations early in the year. Number three pulls it all together with an artist whose biography reads like a history of Bristol bass culture. Rob Smith started out in the late-80s, as the first hybrids of hip hop and UK reggae were emerging. As half of More Rockers and one third of Smith & Mighty, he’s helped define Jungle, Trip Hop and UK Dub, while doing just as much to blur each into the other. With this release we get another example of dubstep by another route. Jah Shaka-descended steppers and early-AWOL era jungle seem like obvious reference points. There’s hardly a hint of garage here but, bright and light on their feet, these tunes have a panache that puts most DnB derivatives and quasi-dub efforts to shame. No time for half stepping, the Red and Blue mix of ‘Corner Dub’ runs a double time pulse under slow-filtering bass that recalls moments on Sandoz’ ‘Chant to Jah.’ Off beat pianos sparkle and fade as the track pares itself down to a dubbed-out roller, the apt phrase ‘just be humble’ occasionally ringing around the space. ‘Pretty Bright Light’ is equally strong – wah-bass to bend and shape you, and a sub so clean you might not see it until it’s too late. They hold down a brilliant tension with clusters of ever-deferring snares that break from dubstep’s tweakhead obsessions (‘the snare that smacks you across the room’), clattering along as though lifted from a DJ Randall set circa 1993.      Pure science aimed squarely at your waistline. Punch Drunk continues to surprise and impress.
- Paul Jasen

Vaccine
Signal to Noise / Wishful Thinking
Scuba 006

Signal to Noise has a dark, cavernous sound that evokes images of angry machines relentlessly exploring stark, alien soundscapes, stopping only to punctuate and penetrate the mix like robotic surveyors drilling for mineral samples. At the cut-out, the distorted and crushed beats descend into a dubbed out spiral while the sawing synthlines march in time to the straight-laced half step pattern. There is no huge drop, no massive bassline. This tune doesn’t need either. It’s much more subtle than that. More extroverted than the A side, Wishful Thinking brings light to the darkness. Computer glitches create ever-changing sonic textures over which the arpeggiated pad is layered to give movement to the entire piece. The melodic elements add beauty and lushness to the harsh rhythmical parts. This is the type of song you want to hear first thing in the morning and last thing at night.Strong first release from Vaccine, who has both songs breathing like a living organism.
-Sen-Foong Lim

TRG
Put You Down / Broken Hearts
Hessle Audio 001

TRG and a dreary train ride on the verge of a late spring: hour after hour of grey sky, swamp, leafless trees, mud and decay. Huddled cattle chewing, chewing, chewing… Seven stomachs and only one flavour. But also flashes of colour and signs of movement: the evergreens, bits of sun, a heron, a llama, crocuses breaking through the dead weight of matted vegetation. If dubstep had a winter it was the self-imposed chill of 2004/5, experiments at the edge of cryostasis cooling the organism to within inches of its life. Then it dragged on, leaving the patient in limbo. In early 2007 though, there’s increasing evidence of a wide-scale thaw and even a few new species to fill in the gaps between the perennials. Romania’s TRG is ‘at the forefront,’ says Martin Clark ‘of a new swing in dubstep; a return to the more overtly musical garage that preceded it.’ His forthcoming 12′, ‘Put You Down’ b/w ‘Broken Hearts’ is the first release from Hessle Audio, the new Leeds-based label run by scene mainstays Ben UFO and Ramadanman. Like a lot of relatively new dubstep adepts, he has a background in recent Drum and Bass – a natural link but one that too often translates into abrasive torpor. TRG sets himself apart from the field with a bass driven, vocal-centred slink rarely heard since the early Tempa era. ‘Broken Hearts’ rolls in with shades of El-B and Horsepower, but filtered through the latter day influence of Burial-haze and DMZ weight. It’s a proper 2-step tear out with stuttering kicks and heavily shuffled hats set to a pummelling two note bassline. The smokey hook smooths it out in a lovers rock style that’s a nice break from all-too-common badman/Rasta samples. ‘Put You Down’ is almost as effective, this time with an RnB tinge to the vocal. The riddim is a play of propulsive kicks, woodblock and precision hi-hats, punctuated by the blunted harmonics of distant piano chord (it could almost be a train whistle). This time the bassline is more drawn out and shapely – a little shove, a gentle tug. Infectious and propulsive, this pair of melancholic steppers manages to move FWD via a return to the root, reminding us that 2step still has many untapped veins. A welcome and successful first outing for TRG and Hessle Audio.
- Paul Jasen

Benga & Walsh / Gravious / Marlow
Bingo / Temple Bell / Road Kill
HotFlush 015i

Bingo highlights the disparity between the squonky bassline and the sustained pads – never shall the two meet. There are sections with only bass and drums, and others with only melodic elements and drums. The drum pattern is interesting in itself. The heavy emphasis on the 1 as well as the 3 is uncharacteristic of the genre and gives a very deliberate, paced feel to song. A great follow-up to this team’s recent releases on Immerse and HotFlush. As the title says, Gravious’ latest relies heavily on metallic bell sounds to resonate through the tune, providing an off-key melody that is immaculately accompanied by well-tuned percussive elements, Asian drones and mandolin sounds. The swell of the strings give Temple Bell an operatic and cinematic quality that would not be out of place in a Yimou Zhang film. An even dubbier version of this tune would be killer – the shimmering delays and cuts used at the very end of the song will sadly never get heard in a mix. Road Kill takes this 3-tracker from Asia to Jamaica in one skank-filled swoop. The lead synth sweeps through the song with dub delays filling voids you only thought were there while the single hit bass warps in to give the necessary bottom end weight. Well-treated echo effects give some grit and perfectly timed cut outs add to the anticipation of something good to come. With realistic drumming, Road Kill is more dub than dubstep, but it’s still a pure lighter lifter.
- Sen-Foong Lim

Spurred by the launch of the Hyperdub archive at Riddim.ca, Brazilian dubstep boss Bruno Belluomini got in touch, recently, with a few questions for a short feature at Tranquera.org. Since the site is all in Portuguese (I don’t remember writing in Portguese, but anyway) I thought I’d print the English version here.

What exactly made you put the UK Archive back?

There are few reasons. The simplest is that this is the single best collection of late UK garage writings around and it seemed wrong that it was no longer accessible. I was really glad when Steve agreed to let me host them and it was nice to see so much interest in them when they went up. It’s an important collection, both as a historical archive of a particular time and place in music, and as a site where people experimented with the way they write and talk about music. There are some really thoughtful pieces here. The collection is huge too. The Word document was something like 110 pages long.

On a more personal level though, these articles and interviews have been really important to me since I started learning about Dubstep, Grime and UK Garage in general a few years ago. As you know, it can be really hard to find out about a small local scene from so far away. Now the internet is the thing that can partially that take the place of being at the nights and talking to people face to face, but you’re still removed from it. I went through this with hip hop when I was a lot younger, way before the Internet, spending hours and hours tracking stuff down, tracing links, learning the scene’s history. Personally, I think when you’re coming into a scene from outside it’s important to learn as much as you can about where it comes from. Dubstep has attracted a lot of interest in the last year and a lot of people are trying their hand at making it, but very few it seems are trying to learn much about how it developed, what its foundations are, and I think you can hear that in a lot of the less than stellar music that’s been coming out for a few months now. So in that sense, I think the Hyperdub archive makes a good companion to Ammunition’s recent ‘Roots of Dubstep’ compilation.

Do you think that some concepts and ideas developed and written by people like Kodwo Eshun are present today in modern UK sounds like Dubstep?

Definitely. And actually, one thing that gets on my nerves is this reactionary idea that thinking too much about music is somehow doing some sort of damage to it or being elitist. So much thought goes into the production of music (how to create the right sound, what it represents, how it connects to the past/future, what it does to the body) that it deserves to be taken seriously. It generates its own theory so why not engage that?

So for example, Eshun describes different styles of dance music as rhythmachines – abstract machines where technologies of sound, culture and the body come together to generate a particular type of effect, “abducting” the dancer/listener into a what Erik Davis calls “acoustic cyberspace.” With these kinds of links in place, we can talk about music in relation to Sci Fi, cybernetics, physiology, digital technologies, space, mythology, etc. Steve Goodman calls the scenes that organise around these rhythmachines “speed tribes,” which I think is a good way of describing how groups of people follow particular types of sonic experience (rhythms, textures, frequencies, tempos) and distinguish their own scenes from all of these minutely different ones around them. These terms are really useful, for instance, in the case of Drum and Bass fans getting into Dubstep and not always understanding that there’s more to making it than just slowing down the kinds of tracks you were already making, or just taking out the breaks. Dubstep is different type of machine. Following that logic you could say it’s a from the Garage phylum. Historically, Garage emerges as an alternative to Drum and Bass and with a bit of digging you can find out why this splinter tribe wanted to build a new type of machine in the first place. Then you can look at the the Garagemachine’s operating system, see how it works and start hacking it, looking at how whatever thing you want to bring to it can be plugged into it. But the crucial thing is to keep the machine from breaking down in the process, losing its momentum or potential. Right now we have a lot of inertia.

How did you see the whole global scene today?

It’s actually becoming difficult to keep up with all of the new faces and events popping up literally everywhere. Honestly, I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about it all right now. In one sense I’m amazed to see such a huge amount of interest coming from all over the world – literally from places as far flung as China, Colombia, South Africa, etc – because I remember when you could count the international heads on three hands and hardly anyone else wanted to know about Dubstep. But quality control has been a huge problem this past year so you’ve got this paradoxical expansion/contraction thing going on in terms of global presence v. creativity. It’s moving but not really being the opportunistic mutant that it was. Or not as much as I wish it was anyway. You can argue against the elitism of dubplate culture (which I have) but you can also make the case that ‘democratization’ via mp3s/CD-Rs has just as much potential to to cause creative entropy. Just because you’ve got an exclusive doesn’t mean that it’s that great. I’m sounding really pessimistic here. There are some problems but there’s still loads of potential both in London and and around the world.

What we could expect from 2007?

It looks like steady growth in the forecast. I’m just waiting for the first pop hit. I’ve got my money on D1’s ‘Give it Back.’ You could have a really flashy ’stormy relationship’ video for that one. Seriously, I’m still watching DMZ and Hyperdub to see what the future holds. They’re on a whole other plane I think. And I’m curious about where Skream is headed from this point on because he seems right on the cusp of something bigger. Then there’s Shackleton who keeps going from strength to strength and has the minimal Techno scene interested in him. It looks like that could be a direction for Pinch as well. Apart from that I’ll be watching things spread and hoping that someone comes up with something utterly shocking. Burial was easily the best surprise of 2006. I’m hoping grime has a better year and that the two scenes get a little closer again. And, I’m finally playing out now too so I’ll be interested to see how people respond to the music, both the new and the old bits.

Also, I’d have to say also some of the Bristol crew are doing really exciting things – Pinch, Monkeysteak – and the new stuff I’ve heard from Peverelist is amazing. In the States I’m interested in what Dev79 and Starkey are doing. Then there’s yourself. I was really impressed with that EP you sent and I’m excited to hear more dubstep via Brazil. Dusk and Blackdown’s productions have also been getting really strong. And then there’s the Bug and his work with Warrior Queen. So yeah, actually, there’s more to be excited about than I was really letting on at first. I’ve been more optimistic in the last week or so.

Anything related to what UK Archives predicted?

Well I’d forgotten that one of the earliest of the Hyperdub pieces is called ‘The Haunting of UK Garage.’ How prescient is that? It seems like the whole year has had this overtone of haunting, memory, lost futures, and retrospective. I’m hoping that some of these lost/found futures have something nice in store for us.

**
Thanks to Bruno for the interest.
Read this in Portuguese at
 http://www.tranquera.org/2007/01/24/uk-garage-archives/