new build music
Derek Walmsley
Walking out of Kode9's DJ set at the recent
BLOC weekender in Norfolk, all of us there in The Wire's chalet
were saying more or less the same thing- noone else plays the kind
of music Kode9 currently plays out. There's very little of anything
approaching dubstep in his sets: instead, there's what sounds like
speeded up crunk, Southern hiphop reedited into ever sharper
shards, all kinds of ghetto funk given technofied refixes, neo-soul
taken at breakneck pace.
Both Kode9 and Hyperdub seem to be going in the opposite direction
to what you might associate with dubstep: the music is getting
quicker, sharper, more synthetic and fractured. Watching his set, I
wasn't sure whether to dance or to just marvel at the way he's able
to splice these musical genres together. The breadth of music
traversed was enough of a rush on its own.
It strikes me that few artists are able to speed music up and
retain the funk when they're remixing; it's much more common to
slow beats down, to straighten them out and explore the spaces
within (think of screwed and chopped hiphop, triphop etc.) It's a
much more difficult feat to speed music up and yet find a way to
still make it successfully mesh with other styles, to engage the
body. To do so is like trying to tinker with an engine while with
someone stepping on the accelerator. Perhaps understandably, remix
culture is more about breaking music down than building it up. It's
perhaps only Kode9 and Surgeon who've I've really felt they we able
to do this the other way round.
As Kode9 himself has suggested, the relationship between dance
genres (and their tempos) and the body is a deep and complex one
(think of how techno and house have subtly different emphases
despite fairly similar tempos, and yet they seem to 'work' entirely
differently). Splicing the DNA of dance genres is a bit like
playing Frankenstein. I'm still seriously impressed that it ends up
creating something so graceful and exhilarating, rather than some
disfunctional mutant that only a drugged-up crowd would enjoy.
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