17th October 12
PREMIERE: Swindle – Mischief [Deep Medi]
Posted in News - by Oli Marlow
As much as dubstep’s bred this welcoming outlook of anything goes expansion – producers using a myriad of musical influences as direct or in directly as you cared to, to push the genre in new shapes – no one’s really ran headlong into the jazz dubstep fusion/Bonobo kind of direction as much as they could have. Sure elements of it have been sampled extensively: a horn here, a splashy drum break there, a walking bassline/pointy piano combo wandering all the way throughout Joe’s remix of Scuba (and this whole Mala in Cuba thing, obvs), but it really can make a sonic difference, as NYC instrumentalist trio Archie Pelago (SR Mix #121) exemplify so gorgeously.
A producer building a beat and extensively focusing on the harmonic progression and interplay of a jazz band is a little bit of uncharted territory (though I’m sure there are probably more than twenty examples of it I’m overlooking right now). Sure someone like James Blake has that classically trained kind of phrasing but I’m talking about that brass; that concert piano and that serene humanization of the melodies. It’s something Swindle does really well on ‘Mischief’, the flip side of his new 12” for Mala’s Deep Medi imprint.
It’s easy to understand, from a production point of view, how you could just plonk a sick 140 bpm beat on top of a web of sampled instruments but ‘Mischief’ really benefits from the fact that everything is played live. The lithe way it wiggles through the evolutions is a real success suggesting that the direction and interplay between the producer and horn player harbours a next level of maturity for Swindle’s production.
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Swindle’s Forest Funk 12” is out on 5th November through Deep Medi.
wow!