It’s always vaguely surreal when a scene or sound that you have long championed and proselytized on behalf of becomes common knowledge to the wider world, when it blows up seemingly over night and careers headlong into the public sphere. The natural knee jerk reaction on behalf of the pioneers and evangelist’s of the music and associated culture in question can range from victorious euphoria to incredulity. Do you accept and embrace the enfranchised implications of overground success and mainstream acceptance or veer hurriedly off the beaten track once more in fear of rank overexposure and stylistic appropriation and dissolution? It’s this dilemma that more often than not leads to genre fragmentation and stylistic callbacks, a melting pot of excitement and doubt that inadvertently leads to gloriously confusing hybrids and crossovers.
It’s when the personnel and pivotal figures within a movement ride rough shod over genre barriers and enable a synthesis of scenes that things get really interesting, however, and at the moment Manchester’s post-dubstep diaspora is well and truly thriving. Whether it’s deep dubstep abstraction in the form of Sicknote, the bipolar wobble/wonk rowdiness of Open Plan, half step back-to-basic’s institution Bass Camp or experimental eclectica at Hoya: Hoya, the sheer range and number of bass music night’s in the city is becoming quite dizzying. And that’s without even mentioning Hit and Run, Format, B.P.M or the notorious free parties and raves brought to us by the likes of Daylight Robbery and Gash Collective. Crucially, you see the same faces – logistics and time-space physics permitting – repping at all the aforementioned night’s. It’s heartening to find that it’s not a division of styles or adherence to genre but a genuine commonality of purpose that is most striking about the current scene in my fair city. Whether or not this is a kind of geographically specific micro-justification of Simon Reynold’s notorious Hardcore Continuum is, I suppose, a question for a different blog post entirely.
And the new nights just keep on coming. Take last weekend. As well as a cut price “credit crunch special” Hoya: Hoya with Brackles topping the bill, there was the downright sadistic choice to be made between two brand new club nights, both boasting superb line ups. Initially, I’d been all set to check out the opening night of Drum Clinic (Jamie Vex’d/Gemmy/Bass Clef) but chose instead (sorry guys!) to attend Curve at the recently reopened Band on the Wall which featured Cooly G and the impossibly hyped Joy Orbison.
Upon entering the venue, I was (after I had managed to acclimatize to the bewildering installation of a carpet that cover’s half of the dance floor) intrigued by the disparate nature of the clientele, a possible result of the composite nature of UK funky and Joy Orbison’s anointment as dubstep’s latest messiah. There were champagne flute toting, stiletto sporting glamour pusses sharing floorspace with hipster indie kids and chin stroking art school types hugging the walls while post-2 step children of grime bopped their brick caps in time to the insistent skank of the resident.
By the time Cooly G began her set the club was filling up nicely and the dance was well and truly on. One of the things I really love about funky is the manner in which it’s tribal afro-centric percussiveness and soca-infused rhythmic chirpiness enable a whole different set of dance moves to bust out from even the most inhibited of bodies. There’s a liquidity of movement and lack of bodily inhibitions at the heart of the music that can prove irresistible when the DJ is on form, and Cooly was nothing short of clinical in her melding together of tracks to form a bedazzling whole. That’s not to say that she’s all sweetness and light, however. Her own productions tend to throb with a minimalistic menace that sets her apart from a lot of the good time party fodder she so vocally despises (check her typically blunt appraisal of MC/skank based funky in Xlr8r’s recent feature). When she drop’s Narst live it’s stabby string motif and kick drum palpitations take on a new, altogether more nightmarish identity.
If Cooly is representative of a headstrong adherence to a varied yet streamlined approach to mixology, then Joy Orbison cut’s a slightly less stylistically discriminate figure. His set segues between staccato future grime (Terror Danjah’s Zumpi Hunter V.I.P is dropped early on) midnight hour 2-steppers (a Ghost track and a tune that sounds like a more paranoid, lurking Dem 2) and sugar rush hands aloft edifices of sun drenched rave that culminate in the unavoidable Hyph Mngo nut buster. “Underground means dance to me…the one thing I hate is IDM shit with no groove” he fiendishly declared in last months interview in The Wire, and there’s certainly not a single down-tempo millisecond throughout his entire set. The result is almost psychedelically impulsive. As appealing as this approach is, there is a nagging sense that it’s all a tad mono-rhythmic, in danger of sacrificing atmospheric variety in favor of omnipresent bounce. But that’s a minor quibble, and an afterthought. I was too busy dancing like a delirious goon to care.
The only downside to the whole evening was the impossibly muddy sound system, which even an anti-audiophile would have to admit to being phenomenally distorted and unclear. But there’s plenty of time to fix that. My home boys in Neuron Pro Audio could no doubt sort something out in that department. Wink wink, Curve, nudge nudge Band on the Wall. Scurrilous advertising over with. For now.
