12. Mumdance & Logos Proto
Mumdance was responsible for Take Time, arguably the best and most progressive-sounding track of 2014 (his collaboration with Novelist), while Logos produced one of 2013's most stunningly original albums with his deconstructed, floating reimagining of grime's soundscapes. It was with no small amount of excitement, then, that club music fans tuned into their collaborative album Proto. It doesn't disappoint. It is worth quoting the album's press release for some context here, because it acutely explains the goals (and, indeed, the outcome) of Mumdance and Logos' collab:
Proto focuses on the very brief sparks of innovation when new scenes were just forming and genre rules and paradigm were still grey areas; the early bleep track days when imported American techno was starting to be appropriated by the UK, the 93-94 proto era when hardcore was morphing into jungle and later when the darker sound of tech-step reared its mechanical, dystopian head. All of this is underpinned with Wot U Call It grime sensibilities and Mumdance and Logos trademark sonic disortientation.
Effectively, then, Proto refers back to the innovations of 1990s UK dance scenes (what Simon Reynolds refers to as the hardcore continuum) with the aim of locating innovation in their enduringly futuristic sound palettes. Although this undoubtedly runs the risk of falling into retromanic nostalgia, the experimental tendencies of both producers - fused with their technical proficiency - allows them to find new patterns and forms in these older styles. The title track is clearly a nod to early 90s jungle, but it is weird and alien enough to completely fit with the sounds coming out of drum & bass scenes today. Dance Energy is like an early hardcore track amped up on the steroids of contemporary production techniques, while the Eski-grime sounds of Chaos Engine are absolutely typical of the two musicians' forward-leaning approach. While this album has been met with some scepticism - any record that foregrounds its own futuristic sound and historic references in a single press release is bound to raise a few eyebrows - its sheer brilliance lies in its ability to completely confound these fears. It is a genuinely bracing record, tearing through references with abandon while successfully transforming those soundbites into something unlike anything else in club music today. Between them, Mumdance and Logos are undoubtedly two of the producers that are most committed to (and capable of) pushing dance music in novel directions.