‘The next big sound in UK dance music is coming out of the west – and it’s a cracker’ says The Guardian, and scroll down to watch the Mary Anne Hobbs: Bristol Rise Up mini film for BBC Radio 1.

Article by Dan Hancox – The Guardian, Friday 12 June 2009:

‘Dubstep and grime, the two wayward children of UK garage, have grown up. Dubstep is the globetrotting student, stamping its imprint everywhere from Chile to Australia, hanging out with Snoop Dogg in LA and at warehouse parties in eastern Europe. Grime, always the more promising child, has developed a split personality: sometimes phenomenally popular and happy-go-lucky (as with Tinchy Stryder, Wiley and Dizzee Rascal’s electro-pop chart successes), but the rest of the time moody, introverted and defiantly self-sufficient. All that unites these estranged siblings now is their DNA. They come from the same place – the estates and pirate radio stations of London – and you can still see some family resemblance in their heavy basslines and their beats per minute, always around 140. But, if not exactly estranged, they are no longer close.

More importantly, what both dubstep and grime lack is the thing most prized in British dance music: novelty. In the streets and clubs, there is always talk of who’s “pushing things forward”, who’s “going on differently”. With the sounds of dubstep and grime firmly established, the search for the next big thing has turned once again to Bristol, the launching ground for the likes of Roni Size and his crew Reprazent, Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack and more.

Today, three of the brightest hopes of the new Bristol sound are sitting in a beer garden, humming Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter game themes, and downing cranberry sambucas. This is not how one imagines the future of British dance music. The three are 21-year-old Guy “Guido” Middleton, 23-year-old Jemal “Gemmy” Philips, and a third man, 20 years old, who leans in and gives his full name slowly and carefully to the dictaphone as “Joker … Joker”.

These three are making their names in the urban music world by bringing back one vital element that has been lost: tunes. “When I was growing up, I was into garage,” says Gemmy. “It had so many musical elements, and dubstep and grime lacked those incredible melodies – or, when they were there, people ignored them and focused on the aggression. Melodies are like memories to me – you hear a melody and you’ll be humming it all the way home. It sticks around in the way a bassline just won’t.”

Gemmy, who recently signed an album deal with the highly regarded Planet Mu label, has just spent his earnings from working in a bank on a new synthesiser, and he is pretty happy about it. “Synth melodies are a sound we can create and control. My mum never bought me a violin, I never had a grand piano growing up, but with electronics you can do anything. Sometimes I prefer it to human vocals – I like to make the synths sing for me instead.” At which point, Joker starts humming again.

Joker is the most established of the three: he is already a major name on the dubstep scene, and has been summoned for remix duties by the likes of Bloc Party. One recent single, Digidesign, released on Kode9’s Hyperdub label (which was responsible for bringing Burial to the world, among others), has been the most-played track at dubstep nights this year, lighting up the nation’s clubs with some much-needed colour.

Joker spells out how his tracks differ from the majority of generic dubstep tunes, which are the result of producers being engaged in a race to the bottom of the graphic equaliser in pursuit of ever-weightier bass. The tunes these Bristolians are making are suitable for home or headphone listening – you don’t need your own sub-woofer or night club in order to hear them properly. “We want to make something for people who don’t have decks,” says Joker.

There’s a gender issue here, too: since the sexy vocals and pop sensibilities of garage disappeared, British club music has become dominated by bland masculinity. Guido says that is reflected on dancefloors: “The low-end sounds carry the power, bass, and aggression, and the mids and highs carry the sexy melodies. Without the melodies, dubstep and grime clubs have lost the girls. But the girls get up and dance to our stuff.”

Guido plays the piano a lot, working out melodies and progressions, sometimes composing whole tracks at the keyboard before transferring them to his computer setup. That way of working is evident in tracks such as Orchestral Lab, Beautiful Complication and Cat in the Window, which are among the most unabashedly musical UK dance tunes in years. They are futuristic, danceable and in keeping with dubstep’s bass-worship, but you can imagine your milkman whistling them.

So if this isn’t dubstep, and it isn’t grime, what do you call it? The term “wonky” has been thrown up in the blogosphere, but today that gets immediate shakes of the head all round. And the idea of calling it “P-Funk”, in the tradition of George Clinton and Parliament, has the three of them collapsing in giggles. “We’re not a group – like, me on piano, Joker on bass, Gemmy on drums,” Guido stresses. But they agree they share a common emphasis on bold melodies, retro computer games, 1980s synth sounds and 90s American G-Funk such as Teddy Riley, Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg. What do they call their genre themselves? If anything, they say, they call it “purple”.

“It’s not a genre, but purple is the colour we all get along with,” says Joker, whose latest release is called Purple City. One of Gemmy’s first tracks was called Purple Moon, and a Purple Wow album from the three of them is in the planning stages, in addition to their forthcoming solo albums.

“When you hear a song, you envisage things: soul music is mahogany, basslines are yellow,” says* Joker*. This seems as good a point as any for me to ask if they are aware of synaesthesia, a dissociation of the senses that causes those with the condition to “hear” in colour, or to “taste” sound.

“It doesn’t surprise me, because the human brain is extraordinary – we don’t even use most of it,” says Joker. “I wouldn’t say I suffer from synaesthesia, but I can hear a sound and write a colour down. My friend was playing me a tune the other day, and I’m like, ‘Your bassline sounds kind of orange.’”

If visuals and sonics are so intertwined, what do they want on their album covers? Joker jumps at this: “I’ve had a vision of what I want: it’s me standing there looking really lost, there’s a sea behind me, and something’s coming down, this rich purple – a bit like Rainbow Road, in the game [Mario Kart], and there’s fruit pastilles raining from the sky.”

For too long, British dance music has been po-faced, masculine, drab. But in Bristol, there has always been a joyful zeal about music – from the community-orientated fever of St Paul’s Carnival to the astonishing “future shocks” of local trip-hop and drum’n’bass in the 90s. This visual, playful attitude to electronic music seems to be part of Bristol’s innovative spirit, their appetite for breaking away from what the rest of the country is doing. “There’s definitely something in the water here,” says* Gemmy*.

Joker agrees. “If we weren’t from Bristol, we wouldn’t sound like this. I swear I can recognise a Bristol beat cold – it’s always so different to a London sound.” With the city in the ascendant once again, it won’t be long before many more people can pick out a Bristol beat – and this time, they’ll be able to hum along to it, too.’

Purple hey: where to hear the new sound…

‘The perfect way to get acquainted with “purple” is through free MP3 mix downloads, which are full of tremendous unreleased material. Each of the three artists featured above have mixes available, ranging from 30 minutes to an hour. Guido’s High Rise Mini Mix is avilable at here, Joker’s Purple Wow Sound is here, and Gemmy’s FACT Magazine Mix is here.

As for releases by the artists themselves, they are all available on MP3 and vinyl. The essential purchase is Joker’s single Digidesign, released on Hyperdub. It’s widely available from record shops and download stores. His other recent output is worth hearing, too – look up Psychedelic Runway, 80s, and Do It. The flipside sounds like a slow dance for robots, and is a collaboration between two Danes, a rare non-Bristolian anomaly.

Guido also has a single available: Orchestral Lab / Way You Make Me Feel, which is on Punch Drunk. Both tracks shimmer with synth futurism while invoking the smooth tones of R&B and soul of years gone by. Supligen, Gemmy’s first outing for Planet Mu, has all of dubstep’s stepping, but in a gleefully malcoordinated way – not so much wonky as woozy.’

• For further information, visit:
myspace.com/guidoproductions
myspace.com/thejokerproductions
myspace.com/djgemmy

Or click here for the Guardian website.

See below for the Mary Anne Hobbs: Bristol Rise Up mini film for BBC Radio 1: