Duke Dumont and A*M*E - Need U (100%) - Rolling UK dance pop interzone thread

in a way, i think that might be my fave song of the year tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hut5E5bezsk

and they have a super pretty remix of the aforementioned #1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VoAqNNTEa0

which on the ep admittedly pales in the shadow of this piece of utter brilliance

clean bandit have proven divisive in my office, which i can only see as a good thing. i am firmly in the "yes" camp. on paper it shouldn't work at all but it just does.

The "Bass Drop Mix" of "Listen to the Badman" in particular is (((((|O_O|)))))

No way is this better than the original version with its ridiculous rave chords and disembodied diva vocals.

xp yeah, absolutely. as an actual chart thing it is just such a non sequitur that it's impossible not be disarmed, and then from that there's a frisson that comes from having your nose tweaked aesthetically

like i mean if you heard it and felt proven right, about life and stuff, then ur totally a disgusting savage. (ie i must get round to the grim task of seeing what popjustice think)

i guess it's just the difference between being playful and being the one note wacky tie office joker

same vibe that couches the central conceit of 'spoons' (ie, literally the spoons) as lightly punning kitchen sink melodrama moreso than pure gimmick

'spoons' kinda reminded me of something steve beresford might have done actually, like 'my body' by general strike or whatever

sorta got a nightmare audio vision of alunageorge covering viv goldman 'launderette' now i've said that

aaaaanyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0w0xU7SXIE

more fabness

u don't kno how it warms my cockles to see "now playing" actually paid attention to

same vibe that couches the central conceit of 'spoons' (ie, literally the spoons) as lightly punning kitchen sink melodrama moreso than pure gimmick

haha the first few times i heard "spoons" i just assumed the title was referring to, like, lovers in bed. then i actually listened closely and was like ohhhhh. when i talked to them i mentioned the first interpretation and one of them said it had never occurred to him and another was like, i thought that was the point.

absolutely love "waiting all night" and "baby" - the rudimental album is strong too on one listen

eh soz coming back off the dp thread here

matt u and cracklebox seem to just be saying that boogie disco stuff has existed and been popular recently - fine yeah sure but is skream operating with and addressing the same balearic plonkers with those mixes? no imo, it's an appeal to a different audience, and the move to do so is brighter than is being made out i think. they're far more akin to something like this (another jenna g, brand new good for u etc) in spirit and motivation than they are to terje edits and crystal vision or whatever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16zjHb2mglw

oh no wait those ukf savages left off the amazing thriller outro where she megamixes all the said classics! here:

http://youtu.be/SRPiw1eIvBQ

haha pushing at the outline of what constitutes the interzone! but why not? the ghost of jungle has always been one of its animating spirits iirc

is skream operating with and addressing the same balearic plonkers with those mixes? no imo, it's an appeal to a different audience

I'd agree with you on this, Hot Creations are probably the missing link here, even more than Bashmore or whoever. But I don't get a sense of the essential London-ness of them, even when he's remixing Rudimental.

Contrast with a lot of the more song-based stuff that we're talking about here which is harking back to (and updating) a spirit that's been dormant in British dance music for a long time, and yacht disco doesn't quite fit in with that even given the overlapping audience, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Not late enough in the 80s, wrong kind of wine bar.

1000 Soul Songs is wonderful though, astonishing in its shamelessness.

I dunno Matt I think you're drawing too sharp a distinction. It's all raw like sushi imo.

idk yeah it is likely a shade too neat but better him drawing some sort of line than me not i think ultimately

hot creay's ldn-ness (and i agree it has little bearing itt but for the sake of chitchat) is probably in their import electro-ness idk? that quirky off-the-wall newcleus thing

'emperor' remains the stupidest song i've found myself liking in an age anyway, punching myself in the face every time i sing along

The Skream remixes (and I mainly mean the Duke Dumont and Rudimental ones here) are kind of consciously harking back to a (even marginally) pre-acid house era. Dunno why, but that feels like an important distinction for me, in terms of spirit if nothing else, even though the links between the artists are obvious.

Struggling to think of the last time there were back-to-back #1s as good as Need U and Waiting All Night, btw.

Mozart's House is ridiculous.

Struggling to think of the last time there were back-to-back #1s as good as Need U and Waiting All Night, btw.

march 2010, pass out/telephone

(would "ding dong" have made it even better or cheapened it?)

the last time there were three even half-decent UK No 1s in a row was 2007, when we had a bizarrely great run of 7:

umbrella/the way i are/with every heartbeat/stronger/beautiful girls/about you now/bleeding love

The Skream remixes (and I mainly mean the Duke Dumont and Rudimental ones here) are kind of consciously harking back to a (even marginally) pre-acid house era. Dunno why, but that feels like an important distinction for me, in terms of spirit if nothing else, even though the links between the artists are obvious.

Yeah I see this. Though the sonic shift that would be required to take it from pre-acid to post-acid would be pretty minor (which is why I think of Neneh Cherry - "Buffalo Stance" is one of those tunes which is clearly post-acid house (and all the better for it) but still seems in communication with a lot of ideas immediately preceding it).

TS7 - Heartlight feat. Taylor Fowlis?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqFRq1xlOOg

xp Wow, 2007. Maybe I should have voted for that in the best year of the 00s poll.

Vice have an article for if you'd like to start irrationally hating this music

So is it gonna be like this?

Apr 7: Duke Dumont ft. A*M*E "Need U (100%)"
Apr 14: Duke Dumont ft. A*M*E "Need U (100%)"
Apr 21: Rudimental ft. Ella Eyre "Waiting All Night"
Apr. 28: Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams "Get Lucky" (seems pretty much certain)
May 5: Disclosure ft. Eliza Doolittle "You & Me" (release date 28/4, should be a big contender)
May 12: Chris Malinchak "So Good To Me'' (if we're to believe Vice)

Burial seems to be the elephant in the room here, at least the Disclosure and Black butter soulful end of things. Never thought Burial would end up being a positive influence after the first few rounds of imitators being so lame so i'm quite surprised to be delighted by the stuff in this thread. Those pitched down echoey vocals sound great in a tightened up pop framework.

liking a lot of the tunes on the youtube channel this is on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnW6Yra2FBQ

damn son, where'd you find this?

burial. you what.

exploding_head.gif

don't see why thats so strange, weren't burial like the reason disclosure got into dance music? I'm not a fan of burial myself but you can hear his influence. If I was gonna be really disgusting I would have mentioned Joy Orbison.

I see how Burial might lead to Disclosure (but more in the very limited sense that Burial may have originally inspired Disclosure to investigate some of the prior music which Burial was ghost-quoting, and now they're going directly to the source for inspiration) but not anything else in this thread.

yeah well, I really only meant in the even more limited sense of vocal treatments on some of this stuff. Much more likely Disclosure got the ideas for these techniques from burial than Groove Chronicles or someone, and as I said they are employed in a different way, but its definitely about and just thought it was funny people don't mention it is all. Certainly doesn't warrant an exploding head gif anyway

Joy Orbison and etc. circa-'10 post-dubstep seem like a much more direct influence on Disclosure than Burial does

The dance scene – or at least the best bits of it – just so happened to be being played out on the brothers’ doorstep. So, while Howard was entering his obligatory, teenage emo phase, Guy was discovering grime and later Benga and Skream, having gone to school with the former’s brother. “But then it merged,” says Guy “and we both started listening to people who were coming out like Joy Orbison and Floating Points.”

Now, they agree on more things than two teenage brothers should. They agree that Burial was the real entry point for them getting into the ambient, electronic music they make today; that dubstep is “far less expressive than 2-step” and thus far more boring; that once Howard begins getting involved with the recording and production process “there will be more fights”.

When we started out we were listening to Burial and people like that. We were listening to what was going on at that time and learning how to produce. Now at the end of 2012 we’ve gone back and tried to understand the roots of dance music. That’s taken us back to Detroit and Chicago and techno and old-skool garage and house. For most people it would be the other way round but we weren’t around when that stuff was going on. It’s been a different learning curve. We’re now influenced by Todd Edwards and Zed Bias and old-skool garage people like that.

This is the thing. When we started making the stuff we make, we were only aware of what's going on right now—like James Blake, Mount Kimbie, Joy Orbison, things like that. That was what we were listening to, and that's what we were pretty much trying to copy, just to learn how to make music. We liked it; we thought we would just try and copy it. It was only when we looked into those acts a bit more and realized where they took their influence from that we became aware that we were kind of making something similar to U.K. garage and 2-step and stuff like that. Obviously, those guys took their influence from that, and we took our influence from them; now, though, we've completely done the reversal, we take our influence from much older things like, say, MJ Cole. It's weird, getting into it, because obviously, when MJ Cole and all that was happening, we were only like eight and six years old. We weren't really aware of any of it. We were getting told we were making things that sounded like that, and we were like, "What is it?"

yeah well, was just a passing thought, didn't mean to derail the thread with it.

lol at everybody getting screwed up over mention of the b-word. heaven forbid that a pet act of ILM were actually influenced by ~burial~

I don't think anyone ITT would be surprised that Disclosure are/were influenced by Burial, but this thread isn't really about, say, "Control" or "What's In Your Head".

Pretty clear that stuff like "Need You (100%)" comes from a pretty distinct lineage. And even the Disclosure tracks that fall within this thread's remit feature straightforward vocals.

That interview passage Number None quoted is exactly what I would have expected! It feels like a really obvious learning curve, in much the same way that electro-house inspired a lot of younger listeners to get into first wave Chicago house.

that interview bears the hallmarks of the journalist bringing burial (and all those other names) up first, and disclosure going yeah i guess

really don't wanna harp on about it cos I don't even like Burial and I realise its getting away from the other disco-y stuff in this thread, but Disclosure's first single is pretty much exactly midway between Burial and Joy O and with the none-more-burial title of 'Street light chronicle'so it goes deeper than 'yeah i guess...'. I think that DNA lives on in their current stuff in the treated vocals, even in something like Latch which is surely within the remit of this thread right? (that reverby pitched 'never' backing vocal and the crackly breakdowns).

There's no reason why loads of the producers here wouldn't have listened to Burial and yeah some of Disclosure bears some similarity but surely not White Noise (which is the important one here) and definitely not Duke Dumont or Rudimental or most of what's being discussed here. I don't think Burial is any more significant here than loads of other mid-00s Brit producers.

yeah fair enough, its really just the odd production trick that I hear cropping up in some of this stuff occasionally, more of a flavour than any primary influence or whatever.

As for what this thread is really about,I think rtc pretty much nailed it earlier when he said 'sort of a 86-93 chart spirit with modern tools'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPAefVz-mXg

idk yeah i guess there's a possible case for burial reviving the vox treatment for bass diaspora people somewhere along the line but it's just a new one on me to totally divorce it from the insular mood and dusty rhythm and all that cobblers, i mean you might as well say he's the elephant in jackin's room as well by that extended logic. and yeah i wouldnt be as averse to joy o

if disclosure's next single features robbie craig & gerideau singing about haunted binbags though then all credit 2 u ben

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQz1x6ptjFo

this shift k3y you posted in the q thread def belongs itt imo, 'frozen' too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVosypP91Yk

probably muddying the waters again but i love it so w/e

shantie on marcus made me like it ever more still when it moved him to brilliantly and inexplicably exclaim "run for hills! run for the hills! go now!!"

kinda feel like the absence of the signature big fat monster drop on redlight's 'switch it off' is another sign of the times, a year ago it wouldnt have seemed enough

Which Marcus show is that.

wednesday 17th, i only happened to catch a bit of it live and iirc it wasnt particularly recommendable (turned it on later and GREYMAN had been thawed out from wherever to do a set, apparently unaware that four years had passed) but it was the first sunny day in an age and shants and ranks were reunited and feeling the vibe so it was still very pleasant all the same

giving this clean bandit show on rinse a go

basically they are nice and polite mumblekids playing a lot of xxyo, deadboy, ikonika, submerse et al. i'm sure there'll be some joy o shortly

the point it hits home though is how this new black butter wave uses the apolitical deracinated junkspace weaknesses of bass as dance music to its advantage in the chart pop sphere - "songful tunes touch on various amorphous dance flavours [...] without ever placing them too strongly in discouragingly specific context" - entropia becomes utopia (hence mdc's invocation of post-acid house era)

I saw Clean Bandit supporting Disclosure. They were sweet and endearing, slightly ungainly but well-meaning, like a community arts project Basement Jaxx, but with chamber music breakdowns. I like them a lot.