TUNES OF 2015. One of the most under-rated producers around hooks up with one of the most under-rated labels around. I’ve always loved Shy One’s music - her roots are in grime and the UK funky of the late 2000s but her compositional sophistication is all her own, and there’s always been an undercurrent of west London broken beat to her tunes which comes right to the fore here. The UK/US-via-Tokyo label Diskotopia has been just so good over five years or so in a brilliant interzone between post-dubstep bass, house, soul, Balearic, and ambient, but always completely club oriented, and the new label compilation on Bandcamp which this is from shows they’re still firing on all cylinders.
Broken beat, as I wrote in the Guardian in September, seems to be finally getting the due respect that it never did during the 2000s and early 2010s. I have a nagging feeling that there was a kind of sublimated racist snobbery in its exclusion from a lot of the standardised histories of London underground music. Sure, it didn’t have a pirate radio presence so it didn’t fit neatly into the direct lineage of rave->jungle->garage->2-step->dubstep/grime->funky/bassline, but it was absolutely knitted into all those scenes in terms of personnel and mutual influence, and I can’t help suspecting that there’s a sense for a lot of people that its sophistication and musicality doesn’t fit with a certain need people have for rave music and its creators to be gritty, intuitive and untrained. Just as white rock critics wrote off and ignored the brilliance of lovers rock in the late seventies and early eighties because it didn’t “toe the sufferation line” - to use the phrase I’ll never tire of nicking off Lloyd Bradley - of the seemingly more righteous roots and dub, so a lot of people have carelessly dismissed “bruk” because it’s too cultured, too swanky, too grown up, not overly troubled or flashy. Anyway, that’s all academic now, but you can’t keep a good sound down, and this Boiler Room session proved it. Broken is everywhere going into 2016, from the rise of 22a to a flavour that runs right through modern house - and I think there’s going to some more truly great stuff on this kind of flex from Shy One very soon too.
