Wednesday, November 29, 2017

"I had good intentions"

So since 2013 we've been blogging about Disclosure. It's funny to see how massive these brothers have become - MASSIVE. They're part of the mainstream in America, which is really saying something I think, for a dance act from the UK. But it goes to show how much ground house music has broken here in Yankland in recent years...and yes even though house music has been American all along, being born in the gay black scenes of Chicago.

For the last week or so I've been listening to both of Disclosure's albums. Laugh at me for writing this way late, way past when these albums have been released - but I don't care. "Settle" from 2013 really seems to be just 24/7 house, while "Caracal" is more pop and r&b focused. I won't post up the links to the songs here, since they're so well-known and easy to find, but my favourites from "Caracal" are "Jaded" (even though I think it has too many lyrics), "Good Intentions" (I infuse some Sufism into it) and the closing track "Masterpiece", which is a real surprise.

Excerpt from a pitchfork interview (laugh, I don't care):
"The thing that got us into garage was dubstep. And once you’re into dubstep, you just start tracing it back. Because dubstep is obviously stemmed from grime, and grime is from garage, and garage from house. That’s the path we found.
 
In college, I had loads of friends who were into grime and I went to grime and dubstep raves. After a while, DJs just started playing old house and garage records again! We were going to watch Oneman, Jackmaster, and Ben UFO, back in 2009, and those guys were dropping old-school garage records—every third song would be an absolute classic. And we had no idea what some of those songs were. That’s when we decided to buy all that stuff and learn about it. Just because we were 10 years old the first time around doesn’t mean we can’t listen to it now; even though we got to it late, we still discovered it naturally, through buying records."

Man, 2009 both seems like yesterday and also a really long time ago. Time is elastic, I've thought for a while now.

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