The Night Slugs boss man is on a mission to explore all the different aspects of his DJing.
The much requested track from the Night Slugs co-founder will be released next month.
The collaborative project continues with a fourth release on their joint Night Voyage label.
Since its first release, the music of Night Slugs has always had a direct connection with the label’s design aesthetic. In the label’s infancy this manifested itself in the relationship between the angular rhythms and isometric cover illustrations, but in recent years the imagery has started to get more high resolution. Jam City’s Classical Curves and Egyptrixx’s A/B Til Infinity have both depicted strange computer generated scenes on their covers, with music with a depth of field to match. Egyptrixx even went a step further, working in parallel with designer ANF to make music that was a reaction to his alien environments. “I think that’s the way to go, with us,” label co-head Alex Sushon explained of the label’s direction to FACT in a recent interview, “to develop that relationship between the art and the music in tandem.”
Hear a track from the Night Slugs producer’s forthcoming Your Charizmatic Self.
Scott Wilson takes the current temperature of UK-centric and UK-inspired club music in this month’s column, with Celestial Trax, Acre, Beneath, DJ Q and more discussed.
The seven-track EP on Night Slugs will be the London producer’s first full EP since 2011.
London meets Amsterdam as the pair continue their collaborative endeavours for the first in a new series of 12″ releases.
In 1995, Chicago’s Dance Mania label was already a decade old and in the process of re-inventing itself. While the late 80’s had highlighted the sensual house cuts of Li’l Louis’ and the stalkerishly sultry monologue-driven techno of Hercules’ “7 Ways”, a new genre of Chicago artist were rising to the forefront of dance music in the mid 90s. The sound that DJ Funk, Waxmaster, DJ Deeon and Parris Mitchell pioneered was a stripped down, raw percussive sugar rush – immediately accessible, with explicit shouts and chants often recorded by strip club announcers in the early days. Relentlessly catchy and constructed with minimal resources (sometimes just a drum machine, microphone, and synthesizer working in conjunction), it was music for prime-time booze soaked sticky basement dance floors, bad decisions and good footwork.
To add some spice – and credibility – to this year’s annual best of round-up at Juno Plus, we enlisted some of our favourite DJs, producers and record label bosses to pick one record that didn’t leave their bag in 2012. We asked the likes of Gerd Janson, Levon Vincent, Veronica Vasicka, Bill Kouligas, Bok Bok, JD Twitch and Ron Morelli to take part, and their selections veered from the rickety techno of Powell to the bass heavy polyrhythms of Soundway Records, Omar S’s Eddie Murphy homage and much more.
Listen to Night Slugs duo Bok Bok and Girl Unit lean through 30 minutes worth of material recorded live using strictly hardware.
Parris Mitchell’s gaudy ghetto house anthem “All Night Long” is set to get reissued along with a pair of remixes from Night Slugs chief Bok Bok.
Bet you didn’t see this coming: Erol Alkan and Switch have teamed up for a release on the former’s Phantasy Sound imprint which comes with remixes from Bok Bok and Willie Burns.
Our good friends over at Oscillate Wildly have kindly asked us to perform Room 2 duties at their next party, which is headlined by Night Slugs impresario Bok Bok and Hessle Audio’s Elgato. We’ve got a pair of tickets to give away to our readers.
The new Crossover Series from the Sound Pellegrino crew makes for a canny and eye opening endeavour, offering like-minded producers from different paths the chance to collaborate together with the aim of “crossing the invisible bridges of the great house music archipelago”. The standard for the series is set truly high on the inaugural release that sees Alex Bok Bok Sushon team up with Tom Trago for the Night Voyage Tool Kit EP.
If you’d paid keen attention to recent interviews with either the Night Slugs founder or the Rush Hour regular, you might have noted subtle whispers of mutual appreciation – something that was clearly not lost on Sound Pellegrino figurehead Teki Latex, who approached the two to open proceedings on the Crossover Series. In broader terms, this project is just one aspect of a growing bond between the emergent powers of the UK underground and the Dutch standard bearers. (Blawan and Untold surfacing soon on Clone and Dexter indulging in some Bristol loving sounds for the recent Great Northern Driver 12″ are further examples for those who require them.)
Musically, Night Voyage Tool Kit is the result of a four day recording session at Trago’s studio in East Amsterdam earlier this summer, with the help of a Sequential Drumtraks 400 analogue drum machine newly gleaned from the aforementioned Dexter. The six tracks see Trago and Sushon deliver heavily, stripped down drum trax informed by a love of Dancemania era Chicago House. At times the results are playful; see the opening track “Pathfinder” – little more than the duo checking out how pliable the rubbery analogue tone at the core is, with drums stripped down to a hissing undercurrent. More structure is evident on the skeletal “White Type R”, which slowly unfurls into compressed head jack material, though that playful sense of melody creeps through intermittently.
The midway point here is perhaps the release’s strong point, with both “Vector” and Pom Clash” heavily pressurised club workouts. The former contains some brilliant usage of space, dropping into just the birdlike sonic swivels before a wave of percussion takes hold. The latter is even more thrilling, utilising the sort of Funky rhythms that Bok Bok knows all too well and marrying them with vocal stabs that veer the scale of dementia as the track bumps along.
As the EP progresses, the overarching feeling you get from this release is two producers becoming increasingly comfortable working together – see how the vocoder led “Time Master” unexpectedly bursts into a percolating 23rd century p-funk out. It’s obviously just the start of much more from the duo, with Trago revealing the duo will continue their Night Voyage endeavours in some shape or form.
Tony Poland
French imprint Sound Pellegrino has announced a new collaborative series aimed at “crossing the invisible bridges of the great house music archipelago”, with Rush Hour stalwart Tom Trago and Night Slugs chief Bok Bok teaming up for the first release.
Sonar turned 17 this year, and for a good number of people it’s an essential part of the calender. The schedule is fairly well mapped out – bask in the hazy bonhomie of Sonar By Day, conveniently located a stones throw from Las Ramblas, before allowing yourself to be pulled gently into the mayhem that is Sonar By Night. Those still standing when the sun rises over the back of the unnervingly large complex that houses the evening’s festivities can give themselves a pat on the back. All of this usually takes place in the standard Barcelona summer weather (scorchio) – oh, and at some stage you’ll probably get pickpocketed too.
Bok Bok (real name Alex Sushon) has reinvigorated the contemporary bass music scene with the heady blend of grime, dubstep and house purveyed on the Night Slugs imprint he co-runs with L-Vis 1990. The label was a dominant force in 2010, coming from literally nowhere (the first ever release was in January) with EPs from Mosca, Egyptrixx, Girl Unit, Jam City, Kingdom and Lil Silva among others which left an indelible, neon-tinged smear on the musical landscape. Such was the relentless nature of the Night Slugs release schedule that it barely dawned on anyone that the label boss himself was yet to contribute any solo material of his own.
Thus Bok Bok’s first official Night Slugs release, the five track Southside EP, has been the cause of much excitement and anticipation. Sushon is not a newcomer to the production game – “Ripe Banana” and “NNTF09” both appeared on the Night Slugs EP on the Dress 2 Sweat imprint formerly run by Jackmaster (and since swallowed up by the Numbers collective). Southside kicks off with the swirling, hazy atmospherics and taught chimes of “Charisma Theme”. Immediately demanding the listener’s attention, the hollow thumping kicks swiftly build into a clipped, rolling riddim with clapping beats, a fidgeting melody and undulating b-line.
“Hyperpass”, up next, is a much deeper, darker beast, with ominous dread vocal, a dubbed out soundscape, the sound of rainfall and urgent, insistent beats pumping out menacingly. “Reminder” is all hissing hats and searing snares, coupled with lassoing synths and a simple, repetitive bleepy melody. Hypnotic and harassing in tone, it will stay with you long after the needle has reached the run out groove. Then, there’s “Silo Pass” with its scythe sharpening intro, and distant voices, weighty subs and rattling SFX, before grime-infused half step smasher “Look” concludes the EP with poised and understated prowess.
Belinda Rowse
Look out next month for a hefty release from Deep Teknologi which sees the likes of Scratcha DVA, Bok Bok and Altered Natives remix the key players from the label overseen by T Williams (pictured above).