REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

the forthcoming remake of brighton rock

dj lil’ elle

a movie with no plot

last night at sidetracked i played one of my favourite sets in recent times. it helped that there seemed to be a big crowd spilling into crawdaddy from the m.i.a. show in tripod next door. then it was off to the twisted pepper for a great set from cooly g. big up to ignored playaz, and i look forward to their next gig. tonight it’s off to the sugar club for chilly gonzales. there’s a great interview with the man on nialler9.

Bobby Orlando – Pump It Up (Jon Averill Shock Edit)
New Order – Bizarre Love Triangle (Shep Pettibone Extended Remix)
The Faint – Battle Hymn For Children (Tensnake Remix)
LCD Soundsystem – 45:33 (Padded Cell Remix)
Selebrities – When I Look At You
The Chemical Brothers – Swoon (Lindstrom Remix)
Bostro Pesopeo – Falls (Hercules & Love Affair Remix)
Daft Punk – Face to Face
The Juan MacLean – By The Time I Get To Venus
A Guy Called Gerald – Voodoo Ray (Original 12″ Mix)
The xx – VCR (Four Tet Remix)
Lykke Li – Little Bit (The Loving Hand Remix)
Aaliyah – Rock The Boat (Soul Clap Remix)

who remembers hard house?

yesterday i picked up the latest soul jazz collection, riddim box – excursions in the uk funky underground. funky is a genre that i’ve flirted with, but haven’t fully devoted any proper time to over the past year or so. i think that really should change. i just haven’t really known where to start, so i grabbed this comp as it seemed a great stepping stone to further enlightenment. of course i recognised names like roska, zed bias (whose name i remember from the rough garage days of 2000) and altered natives (recently interviewed on truants).

right from the start i’ve been thinking “i like this, and i want to hear more like it”, which you can’t say for every compilation or genre. one that really stood out to me was sirens from hardhouse banton, if only because the smooth liquid beats of this track are so many worlds away from what i used to know as hard house. a little digging (ie looking at the cd’s inlay) tells me that this track is from 2008 – the tracks on this comp range from 05 right up to the present – but it still sounds pretty fresh to me. a simple upwardly mobile synth line and that murky numbers-esque whisper give this track a vaguely sinister edge – something that seems quite prevalent in this whole funky scene.

continuing with the siren theme, lil silva‘s pulse vs flex (itself from 2009, my bad) kicks off with a whole load of sirens and but it’s all about the relentless snares that propel the track forward on a wave of nervous, crackling energy. on a 2010 tip, dva’s natty is full of fat but subdued bassline wobs and uncontained rolls and fills, tribal rattlings and synth lines that sound like dripping taps.

so where next? time to immerse myself in night slugs and hyperdub, and, in the real world, check out cooly g at the twisted pepper in dublin this week. ignored playaz has consistently been bringing uk funky goodness to these shores for the past 12 months, and somehow i’ve managed to miss each and every one of his bookings. that all changes on friday.

HardHouse Banton — Sirens

Lil Silva — Pulse vs Flex

DVA – Natty