Watching the future

Please find below my new chart for July.

If you're a house fan you probably won't recognise the first track on there. Instra:mental's 'Watching You' sounds to me like 22nd (yes that's 22nd not 21st) century electronic music. Not quite dubstep, not quite ambient electronica, not quite drum 'n' bass yet tipping a cap to all three it's proof that the UK is currently making some of dance music's most visionary music right now. While underground house might be trying to remake the 1990s, in London, new musical rules are being written. Dubstep is the 'catch all' term for the sound that has caught the world's imagination and it's no surprise that it seems to have polarised into two camps. Instra:mental and artists like Pangea or Appleblim definitely fall into the camp of artists that I find inspirational. Brought up on a diet of Detroit techno and forward thinking d'n'b, flick through their Myspaces influences and you'll uncover artists like Drexciya alongside hip hip visionaries like Method Man and Wu Tang Clan. It seems a lot of us in this game are all coming from the same musical places, yet in the 4/4 format of house and techno there is very little truly exciting futuristic new music breaking through.

In the early 2000s of course that wasn't true. The musical movement that later became mistakenly referred to as 'minimal' ignited an explosion of ideas and sound collages that propelled the scene. The cause was simple. Ravers were getting older and their tastes more sophisticated. Now the same seems to be happening with dubstep and drum 'n'bass artists like Instra:mental. Most are bored with the ever quickening BPMs of d'n'b and the formulaic drops. Like the 'minimalists' flocked to DC10, Fabric or the Panorama Bar the older d'n'b ravers are drifting towards the more discerning dancefloors.

The first electronic music to blow my mind was early jungle on a pirate station in London in 1993. I listened to the tapes I recorded of them for months on end and each time it was like peering through binoculars into the future. It's this futuristic thrill of discovering something truly new and invigorating that I'm missing most from house and techno right now. But as a music maker I share the burden of bringing something new to the table just like everyone else should. It's heartening though that artists like INstra:mental or Kode9 are providing the inspiration. Let's take a lead from them and re-imagine 22nd century.

Listen to 'Watching You' on this Myspace link