- Towards the end of last year, Glasgow's Dress 2 Sweat label bade us farewell with Night Slugs EP, featuring tracks from Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990; the DJs and producers behind London's popular Night Slugs party. Now the fertile minds behind the event and the D2S EP introduce the Night Slugs record label with Mosca's "Square One."
Mosca's tracks are primarily built to power dance floors, but they are also deceptively sophisticated. They demonstrate an understanding of post-dubstep bass science while echoing the structures, textures and general sense of hedonistic abandon that characterised first generation hardcore.
The direct influence of dub is clearly audible in the sluggish (ha ha) bass of "Square One," which also features percussive tricks learned from a broad range of club music; from acid and rave, to garage and soca. Each of the producers who remix "Square One" focus on one of the track's rhythmic qualities, from Greena's bashment flex to Roska's almost minimal funky. Bok Bok himself is the only producer that radically reinterprets the source material, and in his hands "Square One" becomes a glooping, half step skank.
If anything, Mosca perhaps tries to cram a little too much into "Nike," a ten minute epic that builds from loping hip-hop crunch into rolling techno thump. "Nike" is labyrinthine, although it offers several escape routes for any DJ intrepid enough to use it in a set: its keening, pitch-bent synths virtually demand a detour into Purple Wow territory, while the last couple of minutes invite a foray into gaseous dub techno. At times "Nike" sounds a little like several unresolved ideas rather than an entirely cohesive track. Still, inventiveness and ambition deserve to be applauded; it would seem churlish to criticise any producer for displaying too much imagination at once.
Tracklist 01. Square One
02. Nike
03. Nike (Club Edit)
04. Square One (Roska Remix)
05. Square One (Julio Bashmore Longhorn Remix)
06. Square One (Greena Remix)
07. Square One (L-Vis 1990 Remix)
08. Square One (Bok Bok Remix)