What The Funk Is Electro Swing?
In a slightly seedy downtown Paris, in a future just old enough for you to not quite remember it properly, lies an even slightly seedier techno boudoir populated by robots in ballgowns, and a veritable smorgasbord of colourful rapscallion steampunks. They twist and twirl through the smoky, Absinthe-and-microchip-flavoured night, tapping their vintage feet away to mischievous, elegant music which is as culturally elastic, as ballistic, as futuristic, as anachronistic and as what-is-this-ic as they are. It’s high-tech jazz. Beefed-up bebop. It’s electro swing, and it’s your new favourite thing.
OK. Pretentious prologues aside, what are we on about?
Electro swing is a rapidly expanding hybrid genre, an umbrella term for dance music which takes the toe-tapping melodic and rhythmic trappings of old-school jazz and swing and drags them kicking and screaming into the future. This fusion of retro and modern is nothing new, of course, as other hybrid styles like gypsy house (and hip-hop’s well-established fondness for old funk samples) will attest, and you can find electro swing’s ancestry in isolated releases like Mr Scruff’s seminal “Get A Move On”, but it’s only in the last few years that the sound has been popularised, personified and, if you like, genre-fied.
This explosion is due to the diverse likes of Austrian producer Parov Stelar, French label BNO (who released G-Swing’s “Swing For Modern Clubbing”), louche Brits The Correspondents and, possibly the most high-profile example, Parisian vagabonds Caravan Palace, who combine virtuoso musicanship and hugely catchy songwriting with pulsating electro production. These artists all approach the genre in their own unique ways, some choosing to focus on recreating the retro vibe and some on dragging swing into the current, more whomp-orientated zeitgeist, and that variety is partly why it’s become so popular, although admittedly we’ve been slightly slower to catch on in the UK.
Electro swing is already massive in Europe and steadily growing in popularity elsewhere, but as the year goes on, we can guarantee you’ll be hearing it more and more over here. Venues and festivals like London’s Book Club (which hosts Electro Swing Club every second Saturday) and Secret Garden Party have caught the bug, as have producers and artists from all corners of modern music. Swingstep, swing’n'bass, swing-hop; pretty much every style you can name can and has been jazzed up, adding an injection of vitality and fun that can sometimes be lacking from the more po-faced, self-absorbed areas of dance music.
One act making waves in the scene at the moment with their self-described ‘chunkier’ take on electro swing are Reading and Oxford-based duo Dutty Moonshine, aka Mike and Furley. Although they’ve not yet had any official releases, you can check their tunes out on YouTube and Soundcloud, and we’ve embedded a mix of theirs below. “Electro Swing On This!”, which covers everything from big band-driven hip-hop to Balkan dubstep via an utterly psychotic breakcore remix of Big Spender (no, really), works as an excellent introduction to the genre and will give you a good idea of what to expect from a Dutty Moonshine live set, namely fat brass, fatter bass and an abundance of beats. ‘It’s exciting,’ they say, ‘and infectious. The thirties and forties sounds, the themed events, it really strikes a chord with people. It reminds them that there’s a little more variety out there.’ The guys, already established DJs, discovered the sounds of the carnival separately, and after meeting at a club where Furley was playing and Mike was promoting, it didn’t take long for them to become partners in crime. ‘We thought of the name in about three minutes over a beer,’ says Furley. And the rest, as they say, is something.
Dutty Moonshine’s music, from the madcap piano-led breakbeat of “How To Escape A Haunted House” to the bouncy clownstep of “Mafia”, perfectly showcase the sense of zany creativity that electro swing inspires. ‘We both come from the rave scene,’ says Mike, ‘and we’re used to playing music that doesn’t mess about and gets straight to the point of smashing up dancefloors. We saw no reason why the sounds of the forties couldn’t be brought back with a great big bloody whomp!’ Their tunes tend to eschew straightforward house beats (‘we always found the house or 4-4 beat swing stuff a little limited,’ says Furley), opting for ‘beats of all sorts, from amens to three counts to two steps’, and we are assured that their debut release, which we can expect in the summer, will be ‘something different from what electro swing is used to… think swing meets dubstep, breakbeat and ska.’ It will feature a re-edited version of “Yes Please”, as well as some gypsy breaks and ‘a big, pumping house-swing tune… a complete dancefloor killer.’ Watch this space, and be sure to link with the duo on Facebook, Soundcloud and the like for updates.
Mike and Furley have a busy year coming up, with a video, appearances at Bestival, Glastonbury and Secret Garden Party and a ten-country tour of Europe in the works, as well as possible collaborations with Odjbox, Major Zero, Top Shelf Jazz and five-deck mentalists The McMash Clan. They are also planning to beef up their already hefty sounding live show (which currently features two decks, two laptops, a scratch mixer, a microphone and ‘the sweat droplets falling off Furley’s face onto the decks’) with an MC, a female vocalist, a saxophonist and some lindy-hop dancers. ‘We’re aiming to create some mad spectacles for the summer,’ they say. ‘Basically, it’s going to be banging.’ Keep an ear out for these cats, we reckon they’re going to be big.
But they’re not the only ones. A quick and painless dig through the Interwebs will reveal myriad artists all tweaking their own takes on swing, from DJs like Chinese Man and The Fungle Brothers to live electro gyptians Swing Zazou and Swedish swing-hoppers Movits!, and after a gradual build-up throughout 2010, all signs point to 2011 being the year for the sound to absolutely explode in the UK. Purists and snobs may sneer that it’s a passing fad, shamelessly recycling the old and not coming up with anything new, but to be fair, you wouldn’t go out raving with those people, would you? Electro swing, with its sense of humour, its variety and its upbeat, infectious bounce, is the perfect antidote to times which are more than a little troubled, and the creativity and energy it inspires are bringing exciting new artists out of the woodwork from Oxford to Scandinavia. It seems that it really don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
Isn’t it about time you hopped on the train?
ELECTRO SWING ON THIS by Dutty Moonshine
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