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Union Jack-up Producers Basement Jaxx put British balls to red, white and blue house by MIREILLE SILCOTT
This may be a strange way to launch an article on London house producers Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton, the duo revered as Basement Jaxx--producers who stack records with soul, deep disco fire and emotive jazz, but I've done it for a reason. You see, by the mid-'90s, American house-makers heard too many clubbers saying that the deep grooves and divas had lost their authenticating cool. So said producers went and made something harder, more electronic and less, well, disco. Chicago cranked crushed loops and a drone. Detroit industrialism returned. So Britain, tirelessly one step ahead and fueled by a new "small club" ethic, picked up what America was dropping. And, in my opinion, producers Basement Jaxx did it best. "In the past few years, a lot of people in England got very interested in the more classic American stuff," says Ratcliffe. "With our first EP we tried, in a way, to mimic that sound. We didn't quite do it right, we put too many of our own ideas in it. But it sounded cool anyway." Cool isn't the word. Basement Jaxx broke last year with a track, "Samba Magic," on their Summer Daze EP on their Atlantic Jaxx label. With samples taken from Brazilian jazzist Airto's "Samba de Flora," it seethed with house boil--full-flowing (as opposed to cross-chopped) instrumentation. It sounded like Latin New York in 1978, it made you dance with your bum and not your fist. And soul-starved New York DJs ate it up, wondering how the hell this stuff came out of a London basement. Even if Ratcliffe and Buxton, presently working with vocalist Corrina Joseph on an "R&B thing," don't know what they're making, they have fallen within a post-Ministry of Sound "roots" movement in British house, a movement of basement discos and soul-friendly labels. Essentially, they're brandishing the torch that America, for the time being, has thrown down, and painting it their own jacked red white and blue pattern for '97. Basement Jaxx spin with Nav and Double "A" & Twist at Groove Society Friday, April 25. Club opens at 11pm. $8, 1288 Amherst. Info: 981-8440. In-store appearance at In Beat Records (3443 St-Laurent) at 8pm |
Heaven knows when western pop culture decided that music aimed at body movement was somehow degenerate or "cheese." But it did. Styles like techno have a romantic affinity with technology and futurism that house, with its black disco roots, vocals and soul, lost years ago.