- Minimalist interpretations of British dance music, from trip-hop to UK garage.
- Pleasure Club occupies a singular place in the London underground. Over the past four years, the label and party, helmed by DJ, producer and fabric resident Bobby, has found a sweet spot between the spacious, bottom-heavy sound of contemporary British techno (think Jossy Mitsu or Adam Pits) and the groovy tech-house-meets-UK-garage of the modern minimal scene. If you want to hear this in practice, Johnny Hunter's "U.K.Aim" is a good place to start. A crisp breakbeat sits underneath a fried vocal as short bursts of melody and detuned chords wander back from the smoking area. It's a druggy and scattered track where the empty space is as evocative as the instrumentation. On his debut LP, Dub Is King, Hunter takes this ascetic approach to production even further, stripping down a wide cross-section of dance music on eight tracks that celebrate soundsystem culture through the sparseness and echo of dub.
Hunter's tracks share a sensibility with the dub explorations of Francesca's mini-album released on Pleasure Club last year. Both take the building blocks of a genre and reassemble them slightly askew, bordering on the broken. Where Francesca's record was moody, the feeling on Dub Is King is almost buoyant, thanks to the way Hunter offsets his wobbles of sub with loose breakbeats. "Back To Source," for example, is like the shadow of a UK garage track where the breaks scat with a casualness under the twinkling chords. Even on such a skeletal track, Hunter conveys a vivid palette of emotions. He's a formidable alchemist who can wring uplift from not much more than a break, a bit of bass and a lost vocal or melody wafting up from the spliff smoke.
The dance floor cuts are equally spartan, but equally fun. It's hard to imagine a club where someone could launch into the electro lurch of "JH - Forward Ever," though its zombie stutter does a good job of painting a picture of what your brain feels like when you should have gone home somewhere between five and 24 hours earlier. "Four Floor" is also primed for the afters, with Hunter hollowing out tech house even further than he did with "U.K.Aim." The drums have some swing and crunch to them while the high-end has wooden plonks, whipping synths and microdoses of acid.
Hunter has discussed how he wanted to capture the movement between dub and electronic music with this record. Dub Is King occasionally touches on that crossover, offering us not so much a linear evolution but rather highlighting key nodes of this narrative, from the trip-hop of "Bufo/Freshly" to the 2-step of "Nah Wanna Accept." It makes for a convincing argument for how central dub is to British dance music in general as Hunter stakes out a claim for the specificity of British dance music at its most elemental.
Tracklist01. Bufo / Freshly
02. Likkle More
03. Dub Is King
04. Forward Ever
05. Nah Wanna Accept
06. 4 Floors
07. The Wickedness
08. Back To Source