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DJ Zinc @ Junk Southampton |
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DJ Zinc was first to “break in” the new DJ booth and Junk club Southampton last Friday. His set of “Crack House” was delivered to the eagerly awaiting crowd via Serato. Whilst we got chatting to the clubbers during the night quite a few came to see how hes made the transition from drum and bass to this new genre that he likes to push the boundaries with.
Was safe to say that the night went down well and people didn’t leave disappointed, even when most of his older fans that we have heard about before cannot bring themselves to accept the switch.
Junk is slowly making the transition from its old club layout to its new and much larger capacity, so it will be interesting to watch it take shape over the next month. Make sure that you watch out for their drum and bass nights, last Friday of every month as it is rumored that they may be teaming up with another force.
Following words by John McDonnell
guardian.co.uk Blogposts Wed 29 Jul 2009 12:19 BST
DJ Zinc was one of the leading names in drum'n'bass, but he abandoned the genre to pioneer a new hybrid of house music
There are few names more synonymous with drum'n'bass than DJ Zinc. His anthemic Super Sharp Shooter is one of the defining moments of jump-up jungle and laid the foundations for his illustrious career. Zinc, however, turned his back on the genre in 2007.
Disenchanted by the lack of originality, DJ Zinc told his agent to stop taking bookings for drum'n'bass nights and abandoned the sound he once lived for. He took most of 2008 off to spend time with his young son and figure out how he wanted to move forward in his career, before returning this year to play a hybrid of house sounds. From deep house to funky house to fidget house, he ended up producing something that did not fit into any of these sub-genres.
"I used to find house a bit boring. I never really got into it in the past 10 years," DJ Zinc explains. "But I started to hear different elements, the sort of stuff that Sinden and Switch were doing, which had a little bit more bass in it, and so I started to get into it. Early jungle, a lot of it was very house-like – same tempo, same elements."
Some of Zinc's recent house songs, such as the melancholic Blunt Edge may sound, on a casual listen, not too dissimilar to the kind of electro-house you might hear in a Berlin loft party. However, the driving bass tones and woozy synths give the song a euphoric, early-90s warehouse rave vibe.
On other tracks, the producer's roots are much more visible. Zinc commonly lays breakbeats over 4/4 drum patterns, like producers often did in the days of early jungle. Songs like Submarines and Killa Sound, featuring diminutive London female MC No Lay, have the addictive energy of jump-up jungle. It sounds as if he is trying to reinvent the jungle sound he fell in love with from its house roots.
Zinc describes his music as "crack house". It's a name he first coined to encompass the multitude of 4/4 sounds he was playing in his DJ sets. Having previously been named the No 1 drum'n'bass DJ in Japan, Zinc went on a tour of the country in late 2008 knowing his fans would be disappointed if he played his new sound, so he made a one-off compromise: half his set would be house and half drum'n'bass. His only problem now was how he would introduce his new sound to avid fans.
"I was with [MC] Dynamite in Nagoya, the day before we were DJing, and I was saying to him, 'Look, you're gonna have to introduce this house stuff. If you say just house, people will think it's Hed Kandi or something.' We were just sitting in the bar getting drunk and there was a sign on the wall that said 'crack house', and I pointed to it and he was like, 'There you go'. And it kinda works. People have their own preconceptions of what house is and if you give it a name that they don't know then they'll listen."
The name has since become an accepted subgenre of its own. "Quite a few people are now sending me demos and saying, 'Look, I've made this crack house.'" The appellation will no doubt gain more interest when Zinc's latest offering, the Crack House EP, is released on his Bingo Bass label later this year.
Zinc, however, has made excursions beyond drum'n'bass territory before. In 2000, he set up the Bingo Beats label and released a slew of breakbeat garage 12"s under the Jammin moniker (and many more on the Running label under his original pseudonym), but this eventually turned into a drum'n'bass label. Despite worries that UK garage would kill off drum'n'bass, the genre carried on strong. But now it seems dubstep has sapped much of the youthful energy on which drum'n'bass once thrived. "Many young producers prefer to make dubstep because that's the cool thing. It just seemed to me like there were fewer new producers in drum'n'bass, because most have turned their hand to dubstep and done it really well."
Although a fan of dubstep from its early days (he attended the first epochal dubstep night FWD>>), Zinc was intially underwhelmed by the energy of early beats in comparison to drum'n'bass. "At the time I was hearing about it, it was minimal, stripped-down, laidback. But this house stuff, compared to drum'n'bass, there's just as much energy."
Zinc isn't the only d&b DJ to switch allegiance to house. Beni from the Mixologists is one half of fidget-house duo Jack Beats, Clipz now makes house as Redlight and Adam F has just produced a house remix of the Prodigy. It's not hard to imagine more following suit.
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