DARQWAN: 'pipe dreams' - also darqwan djing in london soon

but he's not very garage at all

yeah is there an actually beat this time or is it just a clanking break with "spooky" fx? darqwan fell off SO FAST its scary

he's a bit 1998 like that

i think this track is like a year or two old, if i remember right. wasn't it his "big" tune?

the 'said the spider' vip remix was kinda good cos it seemed he saw what he did before and took it to its ridiculous ginormous moshy dnb fallout conclusion

i can only fear how po-faced he is irl

No way. Elevate and Said The Spider and Metro are all FANTASTIC.

What's the difference between a clanky break and a "beat" anyway jess?

Elevate is like the cleptomaniacs squared, this modified lurching 2 step bass kick and everything just keeps building over it, vocal science bursts and synth-bass and etc. each y'know, climbing like the track name sez, and when the rattle on the snare kicks in the thing is irrestistable, coz it just like completes the equation.

"Said The Spider" rilly is a break and spooky fx I guess, but oh what a break, especially with the hat in eighths riding thru the whole thing.

And as for Metro the swerving bass-synth is totally the underlying structure to all the guttah-garage stuff on the pirates, but the break behind it is just slightly more delicate and intricately swung than in Black Ops, say, so that you feel like there's at least three flows which fit over it, ranging from jungle to modern garage to genius cru's throwback etc.

sterling you know damn well what the difference is between a "beat" and a "break", esp irt garage

i dunno why anyone thought playing techstep records with unfiltered hip-hop breaks at 2/3 tempo was a good idea, but it's all so goddamn boring

jess have you heard elevate? or metro for that matter?

heyeheyehey im not some apologist for oris jay. i mean, ;like i said, this is the first tune ive heard thats interested me. i'll; have to look on juno if its that old.
yeah look, this 'not garage' thing. what is it, reaks? i dont reall think its sufficient to tag music just to what it sounds like. garage means a lot more than just the sounds. i mean, didnt tuff jam an all that denounce all that 2-step stuff as 'not garage'? or the equivalent. oris jay is about as garage is landslide is, but you can still buy oris jay/darqwan tunes in uptown, balcxkmarket, city sounds, pure groove and probably big apple (tho ive never been) etc so thats garage enough for me. anyway, anyone want to go? despite the oris-hating?

It's hip-hop now, imho. They just have to call it something else for branding purposes, and to assuage anxiety of influence.

Oris Jay also did great hands in the air stuff like "Trippin," so he's alright with me.

bbbbbbut uk hiphop = lame?
pitman?
blak twang?
dont know how either side would feel about being lumped in with the other.
anyway it turns out the version on the cd isnt the original so ive got no chance of finding it,

blak twang is lame! deal with it everyone!

"uk hiphop = lame?"

I don't really have an opinion on "UK hip-hop," I haven't listened to it enough. But this common perception would certainly make me want to me seen as something else if I was a Brit rapper. Whereas in contrast, the rave/post-rave scene in the UK has always had the futurist/"next" aura.

Aside from the fact that all these new garage MCs are totally versed in the protocols of hip-hop culture, and "MC tools" are, like, as old as the hip-hop hills, to me a lot of the newer instrumentals sound pretty similar to the Roots Manuva/bashment sound (I think it's the unfiltered bass sound on a lot of them).

Dizzy Rascal is a better MC than Roots Manuva, but I'm sure he wouldn't be getting nearly the hype he does if he was seen as coming out of "UK hip-hop"...

eh? what is the hype surrounding roots manuva? you mean, articles in q and the daily telegraph. i mean, dizzy has got to be 1000000x more well known about than roots manuva.
i still dont understand why it cant be called garage.

"dizzy has got to be 1000000x more well known about than roots manuva."

That's what I said.

(Although actually it's probably not true! He's just more hyped in, ahem, certain circles)

i will be extremely curious as to how/if/when dizzee is marketed and sold to my countrymen (i have a piece on him sitting in the voice's "this will probably never run" pile).

Tricky has to be the obvious precedent. (His new album is pretty bad I think).

The thing that bothers me about Dizzy is he seems set to be the latest in a very long line of Brit dance culture people--from Soul II Soul through Goldie--who do a couple of great 12 inches, get hyped to the skies as the future of music, and then don't really do too much afterwards. I would love to be wrong tho.

heh, i almost downloaded that tricky record (why do i still bother?)

i want ben to be wrong but i fear he will be right

Back to Darqwan, Sterling I so want you to be right but I can't believe anymore. How is Jess mistaken?

(NB. very hard for me to hear these tracks even by dubplate now so you'll need to humor me)

I gave my best shot at explaining above Tim. I really can't get any closer except maybe to make a comparison to rilly good minimal techno sets where everything changes up and evolves gradually and every small shift is like a revelation -- something I always associated with Feldman in that regard too. Elevate absolutely has that quality. Metro feels like it "refines" the nu-pirate sound without breaking it, or maybe even reclaims the nu-pirate sound as definitively still garage, makes the rhythmic connections explicit. Jack's Nu-Swing tries too hard for the same effect I think. And "Said The Spider" is like jess said, but it just does it really well.

I don't know why there's an animus to breaks anyway.

the first few textures were incredible...

oris will always be king of the snares...

I heard about that sleaznation...haven't seen it yet

check out

kode9-babylon
on dubplate.net

incredible

Actually from what little of dubplate.net I've been able to access the general standard of the usual producers has definitely improved again - the "progressive wing" are definitely having an easier time getting their heads around 8-bar than they did with 4-to-the-floor. Then again, you go back and listen to something like El-B's gorgeous "Buck & Bury" and it's clear that they've still got a long distance to reclimb.

My favourite stuff on there has to be the girly pop versions of the Musical Mob tracks - choice!

Been away a couple of days and damn look what happens! Pipe Dreams is a killer track but pretty old, came out nearly two years ago (I have a spare I think or can certainly help you get hold of one if you want one, whoever set this thread up...) However, I also agree with Jess and Tim re the vast majority of Oris's ouevre - just doesn't really do it for me (incidentally, he aint po-faced as it happens - quite a nice guy when I've met him).
Still, the thing that's so important to UKG's place in the hardcore continuum, at least for me, is its pluralism - the way a really wide variety of tunes fit into one set and the fact that there's room for all of them...
Oris' stuff was interesting as a counterpoint to bassline tracks/Ghost/Tempa-style dubstep and kinda bridged a gap back to techno and electro, but the problem with it, particularly when he plays it himself, is that it leads people to play sets that are ALL breakstep and not much else...
this is pretty dull and makes crisper sparky tracks like pipedreams and said the spider lose all the fissile metallic-sounding intensity that they have when juxtaposed with something altogether different... anyway he's not the world's most interesting DJ... also he really mixes properly which is boring in garage - i like the DJs grind stuff, slam in mixes and really crash through records working with an MC, his style is a lot more like smooth, nu-school breaks-style DJing and what the fuck's the point in that!!!?
BTW, I thought that sleze nation piece was pitiful particularly the stuff about arthur smith - dammit, if you're talking about techno, then probably not a bad idea to say that he also records as Grain and if you're slating pop garage, then he aint the best person to big up as he's got a hand in a fair bit of that, too... duh! Also the anti-pop slant pissed me off as garage should be pop, or at least as Reynolds say, alternative mainstream...
Anyways, I got work to do!

Oris Jay....... yes, I'll be there.

apologies for my abysmal typing. hopefully you'll be able to parse some sense into the earlier post - have hangover and am at work!

hardcore continuum vs bigbeat fallout fite!

I'm up for it - see you outside the school gates when the final bell goes!

I must be in the minority in thinking Jay has never topped "Nocturnal", which is possibly the definitive breakstep track. I guess my resentment towards most breakbeat garage is more a result of being proven wrong - at the end of 2001 I was still of the opinion that smart producers could stretch the bump'n'flex femininity of 2-step as far as they were willing to go (see "Nocturnal" obv.), but in 2002 the elastic definitely snapped. There is of course no reason why Jay's rhythms *should* maintain that tenuous connection, but it was my whole reason for liking him over, say, DJ Zinc, so now I can only feel somewhat irrationally betrayed.

tim-
i'm actually with you on this one, but i'd argue that "nocturnal" is not breakstep, hence notable. seminal breakstep tracks for me would be, in rough chronological order:
dee kline: i don't smoke
zinc: 138 trek
blowfelt: lickle rolla
artful dodger: ruffneck sound (original mix mind you)

all characterized for me by a relatively flat breakbeat sound, but what was interesting about oris jay's early work was that it had that twitch, the bump'n'flex, as do ghost and tempa. zinc's work, in contrast, has never had it - it's always been a looped break that the bassline sort of pulls at; big fat weighty drums. oris jay used to appreciate a good clippy sound.

perhaps the perfect middle ground for these sounds is hype's "kill the purists" remix of etienne de crecy - "scratched", where he's using jungly drum edits to combine the fatness of a break with the quantization swing of traditional 2-step programming.

but back to the original argument - "nocturnal" is programmed beats heavily swung but stuck right in the middle of heavy nsb bass and atmospherics. and the steel drums are just genius. most importantly, i'd argue that the best of the new ukg is still retaining that twitchy swung feel - dj virus' "rude sting" is a stormer basically by throwing a staccato bassline + stab on a swing beat. oh, and also menta - "snakecharmer".

personally i stayed on the garage train through this paradigm shift because the new tunes retain the rhythmic twitchery i've always wanted out of my dance music. so thank god breakstep petered out.

i will still contend that bingo beats 2 is a worthy record (although not top 10 as i hallucinated at the end of last year and is now ensconced for all time), probably cuz it was selected by zed "creamy center" bias; if the dubstep/breakstep/darkcore end had managed to keep cutting the velocity of the boom-bap sped up zinc hiphop tracks with the skittery 2-step stuff (and thereby actually giving the impression of movement and velocity rather than the endlessly surging tank tread sound of bing beats 1 - mixed by zinc - which is just pants) they might have been able to keep going indef.

not to haul up this thread uselessly, but here's a mix i did not long ago that contains:
dizzee
great chunks of 8-bar
nocturnal!
thought it might go down well.

http://wxdu.org/~cooper/cooper-4-03-mix.ogg

the oggs will play in a modern winamp. sub .mp3 for .ogg and you'll have mp3s encoded at a slightly lower bitrate (the better to convince folks to use ogg vorbis).

tracklist:
hatcha - bashment
darqwan - nocturnal
jon cutler - it's yours (ras kwame bootleg)
suburban lick - you're mine
heartless crew - heartless theme
layo and bushwacka - billie jean bootleg
basement jaxx - jus one kiss (sunship rmx)
qualifide - ? (dubs vol. 2)
the wideboys - get on up 4x4
menta - snakecharmer
benga - skank
gyrobeats - electric
jameson - switch
dom perignon & dynamite - hungry tiger
jon e cash - war
menta - sounds of da future
wiley - tweet tweet
big$hot - stomp
roll deep - roll deep regular
benny ill & dj dinesh - london
ts heritage feat. bubbles the gdc - on my mind

that mix looks firin'. have to try and set aside a chunk of time to download it tho', my pops' computer is ancient and he's always on it looking at maps.

interested to hear how this stuff is mixed, the Sleaze Nation cd was good but the blends are shameful. They try and be all tasteful and techno (which i s'pose makes sense), but can't coz of the short intros before the drops. what's your style cooper?

wanna hear more hatcha, 'highland spring' is dope.

anyone heard the menta remix of maw's nervous track? it's the worst thing ever

it doesn't even have the "da da-da da da" hop n'skip hook! just the ambient wash so they can do their breakbeat blah over it

chunk of time set aside, file downloaded, 'cept I can't get it to play. what is it with these ogg files, Winamp ain't having none of it. Boooo! (and I mean it in the archetypal pantomime sense).

Ain't got the money at the moment to keep up with everything so thought this was my ticket to ride, fed up with listenin' to the pirates on my tranny.

Cooper: Nice looking set, downloading it now.