Obey! @ Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
Fri 8 June
words: NOEL GARDNER
Right, so there’s a bunch of music from Chicago called ‘juke’ and ‘footwork’, which dates back to… well, if you want to, you can kind of keep digging back to the start of dance music, pretty much, but let’s say it’s about a decade old. Until a couple of years ago, it was extremely localised, but in the proverbial Web 2.0 era this was bound to change at some point, and DJs and producers from outside Illinois started incorporating its motifs – intricately edited samples and breakbeats paced at around 150-160 bpm – into their own sets and productions.
The first person to score a hit on the dancefloor with a juke/footwork-influenced track, while not being from the Chicago scene, was Addison Groove, with 2010 single Footcrab. If you went to club nights called ‘bass music’ or ‘future dubstep’ or similar at the time, you should recognise it as that one that goes FOOTCRABFOOTCRABFOOTCRABFOOTCRAB to no particular end other than getting inside your skull and prodding your brain with its footcrabby claws. Addison Groove, a Bristol resident named Antony Williams, was already a respected producer, issuing soulful, meditative dubstep as Headhunter, but Footcrab had more influence on the tempos and styles of UK dancefloors than all his previous releases put together.
Following the recent release of Transistor Rhythm, the debut AG album (on German label 50 Weapons, and featuring contributions from Spank Rock and Mark Pritchard of the Jedi Knights), he’s making his Cardiff bow this Friday with a 90-minute DJ set. Expect a wide palette of genres and frequently frantic tempos. It’s a bigger venue than normal, and a bigger booking, for the Obey! promo crew, and as well as the expected residents they deliver a set – also 90 minutes’ worth – from DjRUM. A London selector/producer of seemingly conflicting moods, Felix Manuel can flit from melancholic atmospherics to belting, cranked-up tangles of breakcore, gabber and hard UK techno. DjRUM plus Addison Groove equals three hours of wild weekend abandon.
Admission: £14/£10 adv. Info: 029 2023 2199 / www.clwb.net / www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?368846