WOEBOT

A Nick Kilroy original entitled "Dark" from the Zabriskie Point website

If there's any label which I feel a kind of emotional entanglement with it's KIN. I let Nick Kilroy Kin into my heart when that was obviously a risky thing to do. The first time we met Nick confessed to having slept rough for years while he took smack. Even if I had dabbled in narcotics myself (checks watch, nearly a decade since I touched a thing...) I was a family man. I wasn't dissuaded because Nick was such a passionate, charming character. I've achieved enough, what with Anil Bawa and my memorial skin and symbolic fights with VICE UK to feel that I've done Nick's memory justice. In spite of Dee, Nick's partner, courageously continuing to run the label, I think I've earned my right to be dispassionate and objective. However, even the fact that this certainly ain't my exclusive (see k-punk's excellent press release here, I'm frothing with enthusiasm for Johnny Dark's record.

Certainly as Mark points out there are resonances of 2-step here but in actual fact Johnny's palate is infinitely more localised. To categorise something as 2-step actually denotes a dazzling heterogeneity of styles (in the way neither Grime or Dubstep enjoy much internal variation). This majestic EP owes nothing whatsoever to hyphenated soul of MJ Cole and The Dreem Teem, little to the bleak skank of 500 Rekords and Kronik, not much to the cheerfully surreal skip of the Dubaholics and Y-Tribe. No, Johnny is hooked on the then-anomalous, permutated, register-defying basslines of KMA ("Cape Fear", "Kaotic Madness"). Those basslines were literally "baffling", baffling as though you'd been physically manipulated by gigantic rubber/foam paddles, baffling in the sense that they at once thicken out the bottom-end AND ride slickly up the sides of the track, like a malign froth, and spill into the riff. Darkside Garage was a tiny proposition, but there were also the Skycap records. Everyone knows the skittering "Endorphin" but that tune is a subtler proposition really, an invitation to the spasticised charleston rather than a (pulls showerface) black-hole of dance-floor dread. More obscure is Skycap's later remarkable "Darksky EP" (2001) with Sky Joose pulls very similar moves to Johnny on "Can't Wait". "Never Happened" and "It's too close". The early Menta/DND tunes are probably also worth mentioning in conjunction.

I suppose the comparison is begging to be made with this quite excellent EP and Sound Murderer's Bad-bwoy Jungle revisionism. There's the unexpected gesture of Americans choosing to telescope in on obscure, neglected strands of UK Dance music. The key difference between the two is that the Dark is stunningly-good. Trading hard on 2-step's helium-pitched vocals Johnny rubberises the KMA bassline, but still it see-saws and roves; the music springs immediately to life. Although these endlessly restless tracks immediately conjure the quivering varispeed utopias of the Cocaine fiend, I prefer to think of them, rather than amphetamine-fuelled, as over-oxygenated: the body, accelerating, burning brighter. These tracks will have you twitching.

As invitingly improbable as the German Something J/DJ Maxximus's "Mercedes Bentley vs Versace Armani" as improbably inviting as The Soft Pink Truth's classic "Do You Party", both similar examples of orphaned electro-pfunk this EP deserves to be massive. My only reservation is with track 4, "HCD2" a remix of The Junior Boys "High Come Down" which prompts me to think that Johnny may indeed be better off without Jeremy Greenspan's occasionally irritating vocals.