EDM has conquered the continent, but this Sacramento producer's new album offers a more discerning rifle through UK dance music styles
It's a well-established fact that young America has recently devoured electronic music like a Man Vs Food contest. As the controversial EDM movement continues to conquer the continent with its arsenal of synth breaks and speedy MDMA, it was only a matter of time before American producers began to look further than Rusko's Cockney Thug or N-Trance's Set You Free for inspiration.
Most EDM sticks to a pretty rigid formula: big intro, slow verse, wait for the drop, repeat as before. But if there's one man who can lead the kids in America to a world beyond 4/4, it's Lee Bannon, a young producer from Sacramento. His debut album, Alternate/Endings – a more discerning rifle through the UK's back catalogue of pioneering electronic genres – sounds more suited to blowing up the subwoofers of an uninsured Fiesta somewhere on the North Circular than planking at a frat party.
A common misconception among dance music fans is that, apart from a few efforts on the Matrix soundtrack, America has never really understood the dark urbanism of jungle and drum'n'bass. It's hard to say why exactly, but its claustrophobic, broken feel is hardly fitting of the land of the free. Bannon's upbringing, however, seems to buck the trend. "A lot of the older kids I grew up with on the West Coast were very much into it, it's a huge thing where I'm from. I even remember my mom playing [Goldie's seminal sigle] Inner City Life." Bannon's album manages to walk the line between past and present, retro-fetishism and respect for the past in a way that brings to mind fellow jungle and hardcore obsessive Zomby.
It's a record that sounds old and new at the same time, conjuring up images of Kool FM bomber jackets and gold teeth last seen at the Four Aces in Dalston. Yet Bannon, who cut his teeth producing for up-and-coming Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$, makes it all sound modern, strange and vital. He isn't some jumped-up pretender trying to do Roni Size for the Skrillex generation; he understands the history and the form of the genre he's working in. He talks about his love of St Albans D&B duo Source Direct, describing them as being "like Brian Eno with heavy drums", and remembers "having the Blockhead album in eighth grade". Which is pretty astonishing for any 13-year-old, let alone one from a country that didn't "get" electronic music. The fact that Alternate/Endings is coming out on Ninja Tune, the label founded by UK dance music pioneers Coldcut, only fuels this sense of authenticity. He might be a rap producer from the Golden State, but he throws down frenetic beats just as fast as any of the original nuttahs. All America needs to do now is get onboard.
Alternate/Endings is out in the UK on 13 Jan
by Clive Martin via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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