REKchampa - Bartender's Theme
<a href="http://rekchampa.bandcamp.com/album/self-serve" data-mce-href="http://rekchampa.bandcamp.com/album/self-serve">Self-Serve by REKchampa</a>
http://rekchampa.bandcamp.com/track/bartenders-theme
Garage is a genre that sounds inherently restless. It's a sound that can often be described as 'busy' - with that flurry of percussion and its sort of off-kilter gallop. A hectic 2-step UKG beat is akin to the shaky trundling of a tea cart or the mechanical rattling of a speeding train. Garage often suggests motion, and in Bartender's Theme, by American producer REKchampa, this aspect of garage's fidgety drum patterns is used to throw the listener into a bustling metropolitan setting, subtly suggesting an obscure sense of urgency, while also building an almost palpable atmosphere with just a few simple but effectively combined elements. The build-up in this track is so understated that you'd be forgiven for not noticing its existence at all. There are no sudden rises or sharp drops here, but its modest nature is what gives it such a unique feel - a grounded and, for this blog, more tangibly human one. The frantic, expertly assembled drums take the foreground, with the muffled ascending-then-rapidly-descending 'melody', which sounds as if it's forming out of empty air, floating just above it, making a humble centrepiece as the only two discernable notes in the whole song. The essential addition of shopping-mall musique concréte creates the audial and synesthetic backdrop of the song - people - somewhere, everywhere; chattering, laughing, speaking naturally. The sound is both familiar yet strangely unfamiliar at the same time, and the result is a track which sounds plainly ordinary, yet disconcertingly foreign, a feeling which is spurred on by the final third's switch-up to an even more determinedly hectic pace. This track is a work of limb-twitchingly animated Garage mixed with an unexciting yet weirdly tense ambience. It's a track where nothing much happens, so to say, but a particular mood is crafted and an inhabitable world is built.