Tag Archives: breakbeat

UKF FEATURE ON MIDNIGHT BASS, BONGO & THE SCOTTISH DNB SCENE: ‘RAVE SCENES – EDINBURGH’

26 January 2023 -

This feature was first published by the UKF website.  Words by Becca Inglis.   

“Edinburgh’s a really good hub for connecting the whole of Scotland together,” says Anikonik, local DJ, Nook promoter and former EQ50 mentee. “You could probably fit the whole of the drum & bass scene in Scotland into Bristol.” To put the size of the Scottish scene into perspective, there are fewer people in the whole of Scotland than there are in London – London has a population of nearly nine million, while Scotland only has five million.

That means that, even with more than a hundred miles between Aberdeen and Edinburgh, Scottish heads tend to travel between cities to attend club nights. You’ll see the same faces at Midnight Bass in Edinburgh, Symbiosis in Glasgow, or the Junglism Castle Party in Dundee. There’s even the Jungle Bus, which couriers Aberdonians down to big d&b nights in the central belt.

But in spite of its committed fanbase, drum n’ bass remains an underdog genre in Scotland.  “Everywhere else in Scotland is a lot more of a techno culture, really,” says producer Refracta, who plays as a resident with Electrikal and Midnight Bass. Names like Slam, JD Twitch, Optimo, Sub Club and Pure have all helped to put Scotland’s name on the global electronic music map, with Glasgow’s nightlife especially celebrated worldwide for its bustling house and techno scene. It’s one of Scotland’s oddities that, though Glasgow’s is considered the country’s music capital, it’s in Edinburgh that breakbeat has built its strongest enclave.

“Edinburgh’s definitely the drum & bass capital of Scotland,” says Anikonik, who moved down from Dundee with the night she co-promotes, Junglism Scotland, in 2016. She’s far from the only Scottish d&b fan to have gravitated to Edinburgh. Refracta used to mission over to Bongo from North Berwick, a seaside town an hour up the road. Richard Ince and DJ Era ventured up from the Scottish Borders in 2007, before they built their now notorious rig, Electrikal Sound System.

Photo Credit: Ben Glasgow (Lights Out Collective)

Scene veteran DJ Kid thinks that the reason why drum & bass has taken off so much more in Edinburgh than elsewhere in Scotland mostly lies with its university students. “Because you’ve got that new influx every year, it’s like this revolving door of students. It means you’ll always have that support,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the amount of English students that were in Edinburgh, there wouldn’t have been a scene over the years.” Nearly a quarter of students admitted to the University of Edinburgh in 2021 were English, and they bring their music tastes with them each year when they come up to study. That’s as true today as it was in the 90s, when DJ Kid was a resident at the one-time Edinburgh institution, Manga.

Scotland didn’t take easily to breakbeat at first, DJ Kid remembers. Unlike the nights that were booking him down south, where he played teeming jungle and hardcore raves, he and Manga founder G-Mac struggled to fill the floor at La Belle Angele. More than once, DJ Kid played to a room of 30 people in a 500 capacity venue. “You just couldn’t get breakbeat and jungle accepted in Scotland,” he says. “The majority of music that was always heard up here was a 4/4 beat.”

But there came a turning point in 1997, when Manga booked Ed Rush to play their first birthday. “We had never had a sellout, and it completely sold out in advance,” says DJ Kid. “The line from La Belle was down the vennel and away up the road on the Cowgate. I remember thinking, ‘This is mad, this is it. This is when it’s finally gonna happen.’ From then on, Manga became a bit of a monster.” Manga was the go-to drum & bass night for the next decade, selling out monthly and bringing up jungle and d&b stalwarts, like Roni Size, Fabio & Grooverider and DJ Marky, until its last party in 2008. “People would come to Manga even if I had my gran on the decks,” says DJ Kid. “It was a big wave that we were on.”

Edinburgh’s drum & bass scene has always tended to have one or two big brands leading the charge. After Manga came Xplicit (which was started by the same team as Edinburgh’s electronic music festival, Terminal V), and then Electrikal Sound System, which remains Scotland’s most recognisable d&b sound system today. It was Mungo’s Hi Fi who first taught founder Richard how to build and switch on the notoriously full-throated blue-horned stacks, after they gatecrashed an early Electrikal free party in Moffat.

“We had these little speakers,” Richard says. “Mungo’s turned up on the Saturday with a sound system. They have full Mungo’s overalls on. Jerome in his French accent was like, ‘Do you need some extra speakers?’ And they just opened the side of the van to half of Mungo’s Hi Fi. They set it up in this barn and absolutely kicked the arse out of it. We actually had to turn the generator off because they wouldn’t stop playing.”

Today, Electrikal can be found powering sets all over the UK, with regular sellout slots in Bristol, bookings at festivals like Boomtown, Outlook and NASS, and now a national tour. “At Boomtown, we had 10,000 people turn up to the Electrikal/Born On The Road street party,” says Richard. “I’d say we’re up there as one of the premium drum & bass sound systems, hopefully following in the footsteps of people like Valve Sound System. Obviously, Mungo’s Hi Fi were doing that for the reggae scene as well. We’re flying the flag high for Scotland with Bucky, Irn Bru and haggis-infused dubplates.”

Back in Edinburgh, they’re known for their heavyweight Wall of Bass nights, as well as for packing out Bongo with high profile acts, like Serum, Andy C and Dillinja, or artists on the cusp of breaking out, as with Hedex and Born On The Road. For more than ten years, Electrikal have been an essential conduit between Scotland and drum & bass around the UK.

That’s especially important for a scene based hundreds of miles away from the d&b heartlands in London and Bristol, where booking big names comes at a high price. Travel is automatically more expensive, and DJs need putting up in accommodation too. As costs rack up, they can get too prohibitive for smaller promoters.

“If you’ve got an act coming up from Bristol, you’re talking £200-300 return train tickets for one person,” says Anikonik. “That’s a joke. And then hotels in Edinburgh are extortionate. Unless you’ve got a really big following, you can’t afford to do that kind of stuff, which is unfortunate.”

“To be a promoter in Scotland right now, you need some serious cash behind you,” Richard adds. “Even the small to mid-sized acts have doubled or tripled their fees over lockdown, because they’re trying to make up for it, and it’s been making events harder and harder to put on.”

But, in a roundabout way, these setbacks may actually have benefited the local-led culture in Edinburgh, which can be found out in full force every Tuesday night at Midnight Bass. “Midnight Bass is the backbone, as far as I’m concerned, of the scene here,” says DJ Kid. “To have a weekly night that plays drum n’ bass in Edinburgh, it’s phenomenal.”

“There’s literally DJs I’ve never even heard of in Edinburgh that sell out the Tuesday night,” says Refracta. “Tuesday at Bongo is probably one of the busiest nights of the week, if not the busiest.”

Midnight Bass exists specifically to platform homegrown Scottish talent. Every Tuesday, the roster is made up of mostly locals, both the more established selectors and emerging DJs. Competition to play is high – browsing their past line-ups reveals the staggering number of people keen to assume position behind the decks, even in a small scene.

“There were loads of drum n’ bass crews that were doing small parties across Edinburgh. What we started doing was bringing all these parties together,” says Jamie. “A lot of these events, DJs and crews all have their own wee crowds. By bringing more people together, we can create a bit more of a cohesive community for drum & bass in Edinburgh.”

When the pandemic forced Midnight Bass to pause in 2020, they turned their attention to Scotland’s producers, releasing the Scotland VA on Bandcamp. Refracta features on the compilation, as do Torso and Mastaki, whose collab with Idylist, “Fatboi”, was named track of the week by BBC Introducing in Scotland. “It just so happened at that point in time that there were quite a few producers across Scotland all doing the same thing,” says Jamie. “We decided that we’d pull it all together for this release.”

A big part of their motivation was to showcase Scotland’s drum & bass artists to the rest of the UK, even the world. “Scotland has its own drum & bass scene. It’s insular compared to other cities and places around the UK,” Jamie says. “There’s quite a few DJs that haven’t really been picked up by promoters down south.”

Refracta agrees that being a producer in Scotland, so far away from the larger nights and labels down south, brings its challenges. “It is really difficult, I won’t lie,” he says. “It was really hard to network up here. I imagine the majority of label people and promoters have thousands of little people like me in their Instagram messages every day. Whereas if you’re in person, people will give you a lot more time of day.”

Nonetheless, Scotland’s producers have enjoyed quite a bit of attention down south of late. Refracta’s Elevate EP was picked up by DJ Hybrid’s Audio Addict label in 2021, while his funky collab with Torso, “Hollow”, went viral on Soundcloud. Blu Mar Ten put out WhyTwo’s record, Ghost, last year and imo-Lu has joined the Hospital family with the wistful liquid number “Hard Feelings”. Both imo-Lu and Anikonik are repping Scotland on the EQ50 mentoring scheme. Scotland hasn’t always been known for its prolific d&b producers, but that could be about to change.

It’s an exciting time for the DJs and promoters too. Since the pandemic, seemingly dozens of new names and nights have popped up in the city, signalling a new generation keen to make their mark. “Pre-COVID I knew all the DJs in the city off by heart,” says Prolifix, who runs Metropolis in The Mash House. “If you were new, you were on my radar like that. The other week I was headlining a night at Midnight Bass at Bongo, and I had a look at the lineup and I thought, ‘Who are you all?’”

The trick to sustaining a scene as small and as busy as Edinburgh’s is collaboration, says Prolifix. When you share the same audience not just with other club nights in your city, but the rest of the country, it’s in no one’s interests to clash. “You wouldn’t throw a drum & bass night on a Tuesday, when Midnight Bass is on. You just wouldn’t fucking do it,” he says. There’s a noticeable camaraderie between the promoters in Edinburgh. Nobody wants their own night to fall flat because another night was on, and everybody wants the scene to succeed. “At the end of the day, everyone’s out there for each other. We’ve all got each other’s backs,” says Prolifix. “It’s a small movement in terms of drum & bass scenes throughout the world, but we’re really close knit.”

One new night that has emerged since the pandemic is Sunday Service, which is spearheading the daytime party format in Edinburgh. Every first Sunday of the month, founder Pollyanna hosts an open decks session at The Dog House, where liquid tracks to accompany a chilled pint are the order of the day. Pollyanna set it up after she returned from Bristol, where she had been living for six years.

“I used to go to open decks at a place called To The Moon, which is a bar in Bristol, and I really liked the vibe,” she says. “You can bridge the gap between DJing at home and DJing in a club with DJing in a bar.” Sunday Service is the place for budding DJs to cut their teeth before they try their hand at Midnight Bass, or for more seasoned artists to get in some practice. Every month, it attracts a diverse crowd, with many of the older heads tempted out by the earlier closing time.

“I’ve been so happy to see it grow into exactly what I hoped it would – very supportive and inclusive,” says Pollyanna. “It’s to create a community vibe as well. It’s more like a DJ and producer meet up. Everyone that comes is a big lover of the scene and that type of music. It’s actually a chance for people to get to chat.”

People like Brynk and Ominous, two DJs who met at Sunday Service and are now launching their own club night, Niteshift. Brynk came to Edinburgh as a student, after fervently following the UK’s drum & bass from his home in Poland. Ominous started raving in the old Bongo – a dive venue that sat on Holyrood Road through the 00s, and is remembered fondly by many.

“In Scotland, there is much less opportunity to play, because of the timings. The finishing at 3AM, four slots,” says Brynk. “However, I believe that it’s really growing. It’s a good curve. I think you can tell by the nights that are opening. There are several new nights that happened just after the lockdown.”

“Small and strong” is the phrase that Pollyanna uses to describe the state of Edinburgh’s drum & bass scene today. Even with the challenges that it faces, it still stubbornly holds on in the Scottish capital, and has done for more than three decades now. And there are advantages to being on the petit side.

“If you were to start producing or DJing in somewhere like Bristol or London, there’s so many other people doing the same thing,” she says. “It’s hard to stand out. It’s hard to find that community vibe. But in Edinburgh, because there is a select amount of clubs that put on good electronic music, you get to know everyone. Everyone’s so passionate and everyone is really supportive.”

“I’ve seen it high and I’ve seen some lows, but it seems to be getting stronger again,” says Ominous. “It’s healthy. There’s several people trying to put on nights and it’s always good vibes. It’s a community.”

“Right now, it’s in the very early stages of becoming a culture,” says Refracta. “Whether or not it lasts is another thing, but I sure as shit hope it does.”

 

Categories: Blog, News
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nightwave’s recent Resident Advisor mix isn’t taking any prisoners!

19 October 2018 -

Nightwave headlines the Hobbes Music 5th Birthday Party on Friday 9th November.  This feature/interview is republished courtesy of Resident Advisor.

Maya Medvešek has spent a lot of her life in Glasgow, which you might guess from hearing her DJ. Something about the city seems to breed DJs who know how to rock a party by spanning genres and eras, unafraid to drop anthems while they do it. Medvešek is no different. Her sets encompass everything from classic acid house and electro to new-school grime and footwork. She has an enterprising spirit that keeps her selections adventurous and forward-looking, with a mixing style that hearkens back to the rough-and-ready days of classic Chicago house. This might be explained by her formative years spent in Ljubljana, a city she says took great influence from Chicago and Detroit.

It’s that push and pull between retro and futuristic that defines most of Medvešek’s work. Take her two recent EPs for Fool’s Gold. Wavejumper is a thrilling EP that combines Drexciyan electro with ghettotech and rap, while Sanctuary takes old rave music and polishes it. Her RA podcast is full of new and unreleased tracks that fold in techno, breakbeat, electro, footwork and acid. There are classic flavours from newer producers like Arttu and Bodyjack, early ’90s hardcore from Public Energy and an appearance from the king of rave throwbacks, Special Request. It’s mixed live from the decks at one of her favourite nightclubs, K4 in Ljubljana.

What have you been up to recently?

A great year so far. I released the Sanctuary EP on Fool’s Gold, Acid Mouse on Metro Jaxx, worked on remixes and music for a feature film, had the amazing opportunity to travel to India and teach production for women thanks to the British Council and Wild City, held Producergirls workshops, played some great gigs, celebrated five years of my club night, Nightrave, and my label, Heka Trax. It’s been a very personally transformative year as well as I’ve done a lot of inner work, shamanic retreats and practice, and feel I’m starting a new exciting chapter in my life and my music.

How and where was the mix recorded?

The mix was recorded at club K4 back home in Ljubljana, Slovenia while visiting. K4 is one of the oldest leading electronic music institutions in Slovenia (it’s been going since the late ’80s) and the first club I ever went to, so it has a special place in my heart. Recorded in one take on CDJs and a Pioneer mixer.

Can you tell us about the idea behind the mix?

Nice jackin’ house and techno party time, some classics, quite a lot of recent and unreleased stuff in there and a couple of my new tunes as well.

A lot of your productions and DJ sets incorporate old-school dance music sounds. What draws to you those classic styles?

I guess I’m partial to some rave nostalgia from when I started out, as it got me into DJing and producing, but mainly because it still holds so much energy and life. It’s no-nonsense music made for people to have a good time. I also love how club music has evolved into so many new forms and hybrids now, I often play quite a variety in my sets.

Is there a healthy scene in Ljubljana, and any producers or DJs to watch out for?

Ljubljana has always been a bit of a techno haven, I’m very grateful to have had such a good scene to look up to when I was a teenager—a fantastic Detroit and Chicago influence, loads of great electro, local producers like Umek and Random Logic. I moved to the UK in 2002, so I’m a bit out of touch but the scene is very vibrant. Try K4, Metelkova, Bozidar for clubs and look out for nights by Bojler, Stiropor, Rx:tx. If you like beautiful, shimmery jazzy vibes I recommend Your Gay Thoughts, they have a new album out soon.

What are you up to next?

Should have a couple more releases out this year and I’m starting a new label with a more focused direction. Apart from that, doing what I love most: DJing and travelling about. I also want to build on my therapist qualifications to hopefully help musicians with their mental health and wellbeing in the future. It’s all about creating a balance.

Tracklist /
Nightwave – Rainbow Body (unreleased)
Lauren Flax – It’s Ours (unreleased)
Arttu – WD40 (Jack For Daze)
Arma – Girl (unreleased)
Bodyjack – Nataraja (unreleased)
Mak & Pasteman – Reakt (Boom Ting)
Oli Furness – Trigger (Jack For Daze)
Benny Rodrigues – Cocaine Speaking (UTTU)
Special Request – Make It Real (Gerd Janson & Shan Prance Mania Mix) (Houndstooth)
Raito – Gunman (BNR)
Lone – Oedo 808 (unreleased)
Defekt – Acid Bounce (Tripalium)
Solid Blake – Masha (Modeselektion)
Martyn Bootyspoon – Spread That Kat (Steve Poindexer Remix) (Fractal Fantasy)
Public Energy – Three O’Three (Stealth)
Mella Dee – Expansion (Warehouse Music)
Nightwave – Bang The Rocks (unreleased)
Bleaker – Hype (Funk) (UTTU)
Ritzi Lee – Reverse Processed (Theory)
Panteros666 – Euronature (Meteociel)
Clark – Honey Badger (Warp)
Kenny Larkin – Without Sound (Rush Hour)
Categories: Blog, News
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Acclaimed American DJ Avalon Emerson makes her Bongo debut for Substance, Fri 16th Feb

04 January 2018 -

Sub_AvalonEmerson_FB

Riding high on the success of her remix of Octo Octa’s ‘Adrift’ (one of last year’s best releases for many DJs), a busy international DJ schedule (not least her much discussed B2B set with Copnehagen’s ace DJ Courtesy at the mighty Sonar festival in Barcelona) and a slew of fine releases prior to that, Avalon Emerson makes her Bongo debut for Substance on Friday 16th Feb.   To say we’re looking forward to welcoming her to the Bongo is a bit of an understatement…  TICKETS



Here’s a transcript of Will Lynch’s great Resident Advisor piece (from November 2016), plus video clips of some of her previous stand-out releases:

Last week, Avalon Emerson released a video for “Natural Impasse,” a track from her new record on Spectral Sound, Narcissus In Retrograde. She made the whole thing herself using emojis and clips from her phone, a process she explained on her YouTube channel.

“I trimmed each video, turned them into gifs, and processed them into various emojisaic gifs using a ruby script created by my friend Lucas Mathis (github: @lilkraftwerk), then edited them all together using Adobe Premiere, a process that took me about two months.”

Those three things—the gnarled club track, the homemade video, the scrappy method behind it—tell you a lot about Emerson as an artist and a person. For as long as she can remember, she’s found a creative outlet in music and technology, and has pursued both with relentless energy and resourcefulness, teaching herself to code, to make tracks and many other things besides. This self-efficacy helped propel her to where she is today—28, an ex-software developer, full-time DJ and producer. But there’s something else, also present in that clip, that makes her so compelling as an artist. For Emerson, this music is a rawer form of self-expression than it is for many of her peers. With all of her output, including her DJ sets and club tracks, she offers a window into herself, however oblique it may be.

Take Narcissus In Retrograde. For a bundle of club tracks, this record has an unusually deep personal dimension. The music is rooted in a period of change in Emerson’s life—the same stretch of time captured in the video. “It’s been a tumultuous year,” she told me. “A good year, but difficult. Quitting my job. Going through some intense relationship events with my family. Falling in love, and finally being in a relationship with a woman. On a micro level, it was fantastic. On a macro level, though, it’s seemed like the world was crumbling, especially with every piece of news from America. Another young black boy gunned down by police, a shooting at a Planned Parenthood, us electing this orange shit-mound for the highest possible office. There’s a strange tension there.”

We were sitting in the living room of her apartment in Neukölln, a bright attic space with wood floors and angled walls. She just moved in a few weeks ago—that’s her at 5:30 in the video, opening a box of sound treatment foam for her studio. When we first spoke, some three weeks earlier, she’d been warm but guarded, at times playfully sardonic (she raised an eyebrow at one of my questions and said, “So in other words, ‘What’s it like to be a woman DJ?'”). Things had changed since then. Trump had been elected president days earlier, an event so ominous it made it hard to talk about her music and her life as an artist.

Her recent set at Panorama Bar was a welcome diversion. She’d gone back-to-back with Courtesy for the final stretch of Leisure System, and was still glowing from the experience. Courtesy’s selections skewed dark and heady—I recognized only Karl Lukas Pettersson’s “Paradise Island” on Acido. Emerson was more flamboyant. “I’m like the colour commentator in the NBA—’Whoa! Boom! There it goes!‘”

By which she meant she played a lot of curveballs: The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” Nine Inch Nails’ “Ringfinger,” Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Rain,” Joe Claussell’s remix of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” and my personal favorite, an acapella of Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody” layered over the opening bars of Gesloten Cirkel’s “Submit X.” In each of these selections, there was an element of autobiography. The Knife was one of Emerson’s early influences, and “Ringfinger” was on Pretty Hate Machine, an album her mother “played the shit out of” when she was growing up. Ryuichi Sakamoto is another old favorite—she’d made the edit of “Rain” minutes before leaving for the club.

“A lot of my favorite edits come to me right before I play Panorama Bar,” she said. “It’s like clockwork. I did ‘Rain’ literally 20 minutes before the cab came, and I exported it wrong somehow so it was only one break. I played the original and then mixed in my break, basically doing a live Cybernedit.” (Cybernedits being her ongoing series of free club edits.) “It’s so easy to understand what is and isn’t tasteful or cool in a certain genre and play it off your USB,” she said. “Surprise and re-contextualization of familiar morsels—that’s what I like most about playing places like Panorama Bar and De School.”

Gigs at leading clubs like those are a regular thing for Emerson these days. Something she hadn’t mentioned about 2016 was that, amidst all that upheaval, she’d had an incredible year as an artist. Her reputation as a DJ boomed, and for the first time she spent most weekends traveling for gigs. This breakthrough had been a long time coming, but there was a needle that broke the camel’s back: her EP on Whities.

“People loved that one,” she said. “That pushed things over the edge, I started getting a shit-ton more gigs and the decision to quit my job was kind of made for me.”

It’s not surprising that particular EP had such an impact. Whities 006 is an ecstatic techno record, at once rowdy and euphoric. The atmosphere is bright and windswept, the rhythms soar as if carried by gusts of wind. DJ-friendly as they are, its tracks—”2000 Species Of Cacti,” “The Frontier” and “The Frontier (High Desert Synthapella)”—brim with a heart-clenching emotion fitting to the topic that inspired them: Arizona, the place where Emerson grew up.

“Try as we might,” she recently told CRACK, “we can’t escape where we came from. You hold a fondness for the place you started out in, even if you wanted nothing more when you were 16 than to leave that fucking place.”

Emerson was born in San Francisco but spent most of her young life in Gilbert, Arizona, where she never felt like she belonged. Her household was an exception. Both parents were into music. Along with Nine Inch Nails, her mother played a lot of synth pop in the house—”Propaganda, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Depeche Mode”—and also got her into astrology, which, as her track titles suggest, still inspires her today (when I asked about the phrase “triple scorpio supernova” on her RA artist page, she replied with this screen-grab). Her dad was into guitar, and the two of them would record themselves playing together using a program called Cakewalk, which sparked her interest in music production software.

From a young age Emerson was creative and resourceful. “That was kind of out of necessity,” she said. “Building my own computers and figuring out how things work. Not being able to afford software and figuring out how to download and crack stuff. Computer-based music creation was always super fascinating for me. I mean, even when I was super young, maybe like 11 or 12, me and my little sister would record songs on Cakewalk.”

Beyond the bubble of her friends and family, though, was a conservative stretch of America that Emerson knew she’d leave one day. She graduated high school with a full scholarship to Arizona State, where she studied journalism, but her time there only made her more determined to get away. At 19, she took an internship in San Francisco. The idea was to come back and finish her degree at ASU, but when the time came, she couldn’t do it. “I was ready to be an adult instead of staying in this stunted state of maturity you get in college,” she said. “So I dropped out.”

Emerson landed on her feet in San Francisco. She found work easily, first interning at tech startups and, later, XLR8R. Having taught herself to write code, she managed a web-store for a family of San Francisco boutiques, then got various jobs developing software for Bay Area tech companies. Armed with a fake ID, she explored the city’s underground scene. “There was this whole world of music I hadn’t had any exposure to,” she said. “Going to my first Honey Soundsystem and other queer parties, I’d never seen anything like that. I was into Pitchfork-y things like Crystal Castles or whatever. Then hearing, like, Argentinian cumbia, it’s like, ‘Whoa, what the fuck is this? This is tight!'”

That last one was presumably at Tormenta Tropical, a party cofounded by Shawn Reynaldo (then known as Disco Shawn) with whom Emerson had worked at XLR8R. “The party was in the Elbo Room, in the middle of The Mission,” she said. “This little upstairs place with low ceilings, kind of dank, with carpet and coloured Christmas lights, and these technicolor kaleidoscope Virgin Mary things, lit from behind. You could get a Tecate for a few dollars with a little lime in it. There were a lot of small little parties like that. It was a lively scene when I was there.”

But as musical influences go, nothing could touch Emerson’s second Bay Area residence: a 12-room warehouse in the SoMa neighborhood she’d found on Craigslist. The place was massive, home to 14 young creative types from around the world. It was also, occasionally, an illegal party spot called Club 380, where Emerson became a de facto resident DJ.

“There was this guy there named Matt, he was a couple years older than me and a really good DJ technically. His taste was different from what was popular at the time—more of a ravey sound instead of the DFA, nu-disco thing you always heard back then. When we threw parties, Matt and I would DJ all night. That was the first taste of real DJing I had.”

It was because of those parties that Emerson started making edits. At first she’d use Ableton to make small changes—extending intros, cutting out parts she didn’t like. Over time she got more creative, and soon she was making original productions. Thanks to a rigorous, self-imposed work schedule, she quickly honed her skills.

“I liked it, and I wanted to be good at it, so I made up my mind that I would make one track every month. I also decided to be my own PR agency. I made this massive rolodex of blogs and music media outlets, everything from small WordPress blogger sites to things like XLR8R and Mixmag. I would collect the contact information, and every time I created a track, I would write 100 personal emails to all these people. Some people picked it up and put it on their blogs. It was pretty addictive. If you release something and five pretty decently-sized blogs cover it, and it gets 10,000 plays and all these comments of like, ‘This is great!!,’ you get energized to make the next song and develop your skills.”

The once a month thing was key. “I know a lot of producers and writers and people in a lot of creative passions, professions, that will just continually work on something to no end, in private. You see yourself as your only gatekeeper, and maybe you don’t progress as fast as you want. Or at least as fast as I would want.”

Music became a vital mode of self-expression for Emerson, something she had to do “in order to stay sane.” The same is true today. “I would make music if no one heard it. But I’m not sure I’d DJ if there was no one there to dance.”

By 2014, someone showed one of Emerson’s tracks to her old friend Shawn Reynaldo, who was by then running the party and record label ICEE HOT. He decided to put out her first record, Pressure / Quoi, at the beginning of 2014, with remixes from Tuff City Kids.

The next one came a couple months later: Church Of SoMa, an ode to Club 380, was the first 12-inch on Spring Theory, a label run by one of the warehouse’s other residents, Guillaume Galuz. That fall, Spring Theory released her third one, Let Me Love And Steal.

These records chart the rapid evolution of Emerson’s sound. With their sampled vocal hooks, “Pressure” and “Quoi” had more of a straight-up house vibe than what would come later, but the urgency of the rhythms and the weight of the drums already showed a keen sense of club impact.

By Let Me Love And Steal, those house tropes had given way to something bolder and heavier, especially on the lurching “Triple Scorpio Mix.” The singular sound she has today—smooth but raucous, bright but heavy—was beginning to take shape.

Meanwhile, change was afoot at the warehouse. Emerson had moved out after a year or so but kept returning to play the parties. Others began leaving. An era was ending. “It was a very special thing, and everybody was kind of very depressed when it was over. But these things naturally ebb and flow. People move away, the French exchange students have to go home, things just change.”

By then Emerson was getting deeper into the tech world, at one point working at what she called a “stereotypical Y Combinator startup”—referring to the elite seed accelerator. At a glance, she had it pretty good. She’d made it in a city she loved, plying a trade she’d taught herself. She made tracks, she played gigs, she rode around San Francisco on a Vespa (“a 1980 P200E—really nice”).

But it wasn’t going to last. Emerson was working 60 hours a week, and falling into a career path she didn’t like, while San Francisco—”small, delicate, beautiful San Francisco”—was succumbing to a “monoculture of moneymaking,” which she couldn’t see herself in. Meanwhile, the music thing was looking better and better—her records were getting attention and she’d joined a booking agency. Some friends from the warehouse had moved to Berlin. “I’d just gotten a really big tax return, so I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s try this new thing.'”

Emerson hit the ground running in Berlin much as she had in San Francisco. She turned up with no prospects but found freelance work writing code, and eventually landed a job as a software developer. She continued making strides as an artist. In 2015 she released an EP on Shtum, a techno sub-label of Uncanny Valley, and played Panorama Bar for the first time. By the end of that year she was playing a few gigs a month. The prospect of becoming a full-time artist hovered into view. In May of this year, she went for it.

“It was kind of an economically-driven decision,” she said. “The money I made as a musician was approaching what I made as a software engineer, and finally those two things converged. But also, it was getting hard to manage. Playing two, sometimes three shows a weekend then coming in on Monday… I was becoming a little bit of a crazy person at the end. And I knew I couldn’t fully devote my brain to production and DJing until I quit my job. You have to close one door to really propel as an artist, I think.”

Things are different now than when Emerson made Narcissus In Retrograde. How this will affect her music remains to be seen. “There are things that have been so powerful and intense for me lately, and I’ve just barely been able to put them into this abstract musical form,” she said. “I’ve been doing kind of, I don’t want to say ‘experimental pop,’ but more lyrics-driven stuff not really made for the club. I’d really like to make an album.”

You get the sense that what’s come so far is just the beginning for Emerson. From the moment she quit school to stay in San Francisco, she improvised a path toward self-realization that’s just now come to a kind of landing point. “I’m really hitting my return of Saturn,” she said. “Have you heard that term? It takes 27 years for Saturn to go around the sun. When you’re about 27 it comes back to where it was when you were born. I’m more comfortable in my own skin than I’ve ever been.”

Categories: Blog, News
Tags: , , , , , ,

UK dance legend Congo Natty brings the jungle ruckus to Loco Kamanchi, Wed 25th Jan ’17

18 January 2017 -

congo_natty_banner

Loco Kamanchi welcomes veteran UK MC/producer Congo Natty (aka Rebel MC) featuring Congo Dubz & Iron Dread on 25th.

Scoring a slew of crossover hits between 1989 and 1992 (Just Keep Rockin’ and Street Tuff with Double Trouble; plus Better World, The Wickedest Sound and Tribal Base), Natty and co mashed up dub, reggae, soul, hip hop, breakbeat and hardcore styles, ushering in jungle and bringing black and white together under one roof – a true pioneer and a proper legend.

There’s a great interview with him in The Guardian, where he talks about what it was like when jungle first broke and the power of music to bring people together, no matter what their colour, creed or culture, among other things….

“Black and white, they should be taken out of the dictionary, in regards to people… By the time jungle came in 94, you’ve got all nations together in London, as one. There’s no colour ting.. Music, for a moment, it cancels out all the shit, and” – he clicks his fingers – “we are one.”

Sentiments such as these resonate deeply with us at the Bongo, especially at fractious times such as these.  But, quite aside from all that, jungle and drum n bass has had a massive impact on British pop music and culture and this man is a true original.

TICKETS have been selling fast!  Don’t sleep.

Categories: Blog, News
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,