Facade VIP / Skanka

Facade VIP / Skanka

Noisia / Gridlok [RAM Records]

16 November, 2007 | 2.10PM

• Written by: The Last Real DJ Alive
• Filed under: Music Recommendations: gridlok, noisia, ram records

The VIP of ‘Façade’ is raw drum & bass at its, er… rawest.

Harking back to the dirty, looping sounds of Ed Rush & Optical post-‘Wormhole’, pre-‘The Original Doctor Shade’, ‘Façade’ is a purposefully minimalist tech-stepper way below the technical standard of Noisia’s over-produced masterpieces.

With beats that sound as if they were sampled from RAM Trilogy’s classic remix of Ed Rush & Optical’s ‘Pacman’, this dirty track has two modes to its drop – a straight-up distorted one and a filtered, rolling edit, which interchange after every phrase.

‘Skanka’ by Gridlok is a very different release for RAM Records.

This isn’t very melodious – rather it’s a hype-track with big ass beats that sound suspiciously similar to Dillinja’s.

Everything is built around bit-crushed vocal samples and snippets of white noise.

It’s very experimental too, in that weird, spatial vocals wind around its stereo field in a fashion never really heard before in D&B.

The odd bongo or percussive stab that drops in at various points shows an admirable level of restraint by Gridlok in making a controlled, calculated track.

This is definitely one to look out for – “THE RHYTHM! THE RHYTHM! THE RHYTHM!”

• (0) Comments
• (1053) Views
• Get 'Facade VIP / Skanka' on Beatport