“Nowadays we just like to be able to say that we DJ house and garage, it saves a lot of time because there is so much going on right now” – Bok Bok
For me, this month has mostly been about one release [above]. So let’s use that as a springboard to talk about a wider movement that’s happening in London’s underground.
In my original review of Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990′s Night Slugs EP, I talked about its 130-ish bpm tempo as “a significant indicator of the club night’s malleability [as] its roots are in 140bpm grime and garage, but their last rave at East Village was played closer to 130; house DJs Christian Martin and Cooly G the guests.”
I don’t want to turn this into an article on straight-up house – I’d be treading on some feet over at the other column if I were to do that. But there’s definitely a movement in London’s music scene towards house music as an all-encompassing philosophy: not only are the likes of Cooly G and Scratcha DVA playing as much foreign house as they are Funky, there’s a movement among many of the producers traditionally associated with dubstep to drop the tempo/bpm of their tracks so that they can mix them freely with both 130bpm house and 140bpm descendants of garage. And there’s definitely an attitude amongst many of these artists – be it Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990, or Deadboy, or Jam City – to just view what they make as simply house. When you look at Geeneus’s comment in the recent XLR8R piece on ‘Mutant Funk’, it’s clearly not just him who feels that all these movements come back to one structural form, as opposed to offshoots in their own right:
“With America, hip-hop is hip-hop, and even though the music changes and new sounds and people come into it, the flow remains hip-hop. But in the U.K., as soon as something new comes along, it’s like, “Oh, that’s new music-let’s call it a new name!” when really, it’s all the same thing. We just progress…” - Geeneus
“Nowadays we just like to be able to say that we DJ house and garage, it saves a lot of time because there is so much going on right now”, said Bok Bok in a recent interview with Trash Menagerie. Rightly or wrongly, there’s a lot of stigma attached to making dubstep right now – be it due to a desire to break away from the form, a result of the legions of breaks converts who just want to hear Rusko, or the backslapping orgies that stain the corners of Dubstep Forum – and producers are reluctant to use the word. Deadboy’s Twitter page refers to his music as “some kind of housey garage stuff”, and Appleblim’s skirted around the D Word for as long as he’s courted the house producers at Berlin’s Hard Wax store: in this interview, he refers to his Apple Pips nights as featuring “loads of different music, funky, house, techno, dubstep, garage.” Then there’s the trend to refer to the music made by Untold, Brackles, Shortstuff and more not as dubstep, but future garage.
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