Palatably bastardized

Milan, Italy’s Crookers tower
over the midgets of fidget

WITTILY, FROM ITALY: Crookers

by JACK OATMON

Unless you’ve been holed up in your apartment on an ether binge for the past two years, you can’t help but have noticed the extent to which meathead hip hop and home-brewed house have assimilated each other, thanks largely to the proliferation of stolen software synths. Actually, even if you haven’t left the house, the stuff is about as hard to miss online as Zubaz pants on Hammer. And you’ve likely also noticed that a great deal of this style comprises sloppy edits and half-assed B-more garbage produced by 17-year-olds. But certainly not all. In fact, a few folks are faring just fine in the fidget clique.

Milan, Italy’s Crookers have struck enough quality chords to become BBC Radio 1 darlings, having recently appeared on the Essential Mix, Annie Mac’s Mashup and BBC 1Xtra. British radio play aside, Crookers’ tunes display a welcome avoidance of the poorly mashed a cappellas of their ilk, and stay catchy without too many clichéd breakdowns, taking as much from minimal house as from the South. Their releases are subtle and carefully produced, but not so much as to be overly cerebral, maintaining a loose, intoxicating swagger.

“We met in a record shop where I was working,” says Andrea Fratangelo, aka Bot, explaining how he teamed up with Francesco Barbaglia, aka Phra. “We liked the same music, had a similar music background and were both already producing on our own, so the next step was to do something together.”

Despite having the same “went to the same record shop” origin story as about 50 per cent of producer duos in the world, there’s enough distinction to set them aside. First off, Italy hasn’t exactly been at the centre of the club music radar since the 1970s.

“Things are changing rapidly here at the moment, thanks to us,” says Fratangelo. “But also Bloody Beetroots, Nic Sarno, Congorock and some other good new Italian producers. The good thing is we kind of team up together, which never happened before in Italy.”

Strangely enough, they’re also proponents of Silvio Berlusconi’s look. “He’s extraordinary. I mean, who else gets more hair the older he gets?”

And it’s not every day that such bastardized uses of hip hop sounds get a bit of love from old-school fans, but Crookers have had at least a touch of respect from the purists on both sides, hip hop and house.

“We try to put many elements of hip hop in our stuff and we also see that lots of old-school DJs put a song or two of ours in their sets, so that’s a big honour for us.”

Fratangelo duly credits their broad references to the current heavily crossbred state of club music. “The feeling we have is that it’s going in every direction, it’s taking all types of influences to renew itself.”

While what they’re doing is nothing overly new or innovative, the difference is that in a scene that defines itself by the pace at which things become passé, it is a rare breed that bothers to get any particular sound right. At present, it appears that Crookers are indeed of that breed.

With Cherry Cola, Hatchmatik
at Club 1234 on Sunday,
June 29, 9:30 p.m., $12