Don’t fear, the incessant promoing for our night is soon to come to a close… But to warm you up for the fast-approching
free Pelski Presents clubnight we’ve got a few tasters from our prodigious headliners…
Galswegian Rustie has received unparalleled critical acclaim on both sides of the pond. He weilds a formidable hybrid brand of genre-defying dubstep melded with wonky hip-hop. Rustie’s truly innovative productions chuck everything into the blender, from arcade-game 8bit melodies to jagged, sawtooth bass to his trademark layering of arpeggios, all tied together by inventive and impeccable production techniques. Some have coined his genre ‘aquacrunk’ (a name that strangely fits on hearing his sub-aqua squelches and juddery percussion, at once contorting and mutilating his American hip-hop influences).
His tracks and DJ sets alike display an audacious swagger rarely rivalled, and, two years on, his ‘Spliff Dub‘ remix remains a weird and wonky dancehall anthem in its own right.
Rustie recently handed out his remix of Keisha Cole’s ‘Shoulda Let You Go’on his myspace page. The sickly r’n'b vocals don’t sit well with me (my music snobbery is an affliction that often gets in the way of having fun, I’m afraid), and Rustie has plenty of better productions to check out, but it certainly illustrate his knack for turning true shite into gold:
Rustie – Keesha Resmak
However, one of my favourite Rustie remixes is his criminally underrated rework of Jamie Lidell’s ‘
Another Day‘ (listen to it below) – the soulful croon is defiled by the hefty plod of pads and filthy squelches of acidic bass woven together and simultaneously and erratically sprawled out across the track:
Our other, equally influential headliner is
Roska (AKA Wayne Goodlitt), hailing from a UK garage background, starting off in 1998 as a garage MC under the name of Mentor. As things progressed, Mentor slowly changed to Mentor Roska to Roska and he became an accomplished producer. Ever since, his productions have come thick and fast – and his releases are only the half of it, he’s reportedly holding onto 500 unreleased Roska productions on his hard drive…
The garage classic, Zed Bias’ ‘Neighbourhood’, recently saw a re-release, in the form of a hefty remix package, Roska injects MC Rumpus’s familiar vocal chant with some trademark bouncy riddim (buy it
here):
Last year Fabric handed out Roska’s conga-laden funky number, ‘Hey Cutie’, for free (true Pelskiites may already have picked it up from Pelski’s Playlist Pt IX).
Roska also producers under the Uncle Bakongo monicker, here he crafts similarly clattering percussive tracks, but strays a little further from the urban garage leanings of his Roska alias, with a stronger emphasis on stripped down tribal elements, in their barest and most organic forms. To call it minimal tribal would be doing it a disservice – it’s a tempting but misleading description (buy his latest release Masai
here):
Uncle Bakongo – Makonde
But my favourite Bakongo release is ‘Afar’, a track Martyn gave us a two minute teaser of in his recent Fabric mix. Roska utilises those junglist kicks and snares to provide some primal vitality. (It’s just been released on Roska’s label – cop it from
boomkat).
Another recent Roska production I simply cannot stop playing is another gem that was tantalisingly showcased on Martyn’s Fabric mix: his funky, tropical re-rub of ‘Words’ featuring D-bridge on the soul tip. Listen to it below and buy it
here.
