Nate-turally

The DJ Nate profile in this month's WIRE magazine (in which you can also find my vallenato article, and an interesting Dereck Walmsley review of a recently released champeta compilation) is interesting and well worth reading. The article begins by flagging house as a touch stone, but I'm not too convinced. There's very little evidence of a reliance on a kickdrum and the tempo is disorientatingly off kilter. I also wonder how you would go about incorporating one of these footwork tracks into a traditional house or techno set.

It's not that surprising to learn then, that Planet Mu are set to release an album in the not too distant future. With Sherburne raving about the promo tracks, and the future looking exceedingly bright for young Nate, it will be interesting to see if he follows in the footsteps of Wunderkind podcaster and beatsmith par excellence Kyle Hall in joining the dots between mid western dance music and UK bass. To be honest, its lucky Nate seems able to shit out about 3 tracks a minute because based on a brief perusal on Youtube, not all his work is up to the relatively high standards above. However, perhaps the most interesting thing about the article is this revealing comment:

"It's getting to the point where people can make music without even having a real program," he notes, clearly excited by the democracy of it. "[They] use the demo version and still come out with whole songs."

Is that not the germ of the Playstation beat/Grime circa 2002/3 philosophy taken to its logical, corner-cutting extreme? And perhaps more pertinently, what does that say for Juke/Footwork riddims? Flavour of the month, only to be archived by musical taste makers as some sort of DIY, rage doth spew from the streets, nadir never to be reached again?