Weekly mp3 #85: Zero 7 - Everything Up (Zizou) (Joker & Ginz Remix)

You can get this from NME's MP3 of the day. NME has sucked a lot for at least a decade - their editor doesn't even describe the magazine as a music mag anymore - but there are occasional goodies to be leeched from them.

This is a good example of British dance music gone all blurred lines and genre confusion... Seems like a big thing all over 2009. We start off with some funny little percussion and a distorted electric piano type melody, then a heavy slo-mo beat comes along with some double-time shoogadooga bits. A snatch of a guy singing from the original song before the hugest synth bass drops in. HUGE. Things drop in and out a lot, many layers of riffing coming and going, and big doses of tension and release. There's squelchy stuff that reminds me of Prince and a distorted synth lead that makes me think of nothing so much as the distorted scat stuff from Sly & The Family Stone's 'Don't Call Me Nigger Whitey'. It's also weird how much some of the sounds are like 90s electronica like Mouse on Mars, yet it seems like it'd have huge dancefloor crowd.

Another remix I'm rating because of the remixers, not the original artist. Zero 7 are a pretty dull downtempo outfit. Joker & Ginz are ostensibly young guys from Bristol, usually described as making "dubstep", sometimes "wonky", but in their own words, "the purple wow". Ha, best genre name ever? I basically hate dubstep (at best don't really care about it), but bods at the fringes are taking stuff in awesome directions.