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TThe progression from record collector to DJ to artist is common in dance music: the difference with the Northern Irish duo Bicep is that they did it all in public. They first appeared 12 years ago among a plethora of late 2000s bloggers dedicated to unearthing musical obscurities of varying hues and presenting them to the public. Their Feel My Bicep blog started out as a way to keep in touch with record collector friends from Belfast who had gone to college. Within a few years, it was attracting 100,000 visitors per month and spawned a career as a DJ, a Rinse FM radio show, a record label, a succession of remixes and productions and, ultimately, a deal with Ninja Tune, the venerable dance label. led by Coldcut, who presumably recognized cognate spirits.
The first posts on their blog are long gone, but you get a feel for its eclecticism in a 67-hour Bicep playlist on Spotify, where Angie Stone rubs shoulders with Aphex Twin and Odyssey, and Ohio gamers coexist with home of the 90s, punishing Basic Channel techno, drum’n’bass and the new wave of jazz. He doesn’t feel a million miles away from the kind of eclectic musical connections Coldcut made on their famous mix album 70 Minutes of Madness and the radio show Solid Steel in the mid-90s.
The Spotify playlist also includes Leftfield and Underworld, which also makes sense when listening to Isles. It’s not a particularly retro album – although anyone who remembers the 1991 Future Sound of London hit, Papua New Guinea and Orbital’s Halcyon, is going to feel some degree of nostalgia over the opening cocktail of ‘Atlas of syncopated beats, indelibly melancholy without words. female vocal samples and warm electronics – but within its scope and ambition, what it most obviously recalls are the hit cross-dance albums from the mid-90s. Like Leftfield’s Leftism, Underworld’s Dubnobass withmyheadman , The Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole and Orbital’s Snivilization, it offers music rooted in the culture of underground clubs: you variously catch the rhythmic and sound echoes of drum’n’bass and its hardcore precursor (Rever), Detroit techno (X) and British garage (Saku). But it tries to function as a home listening rather than a collection of tracks facing the dance floor.
Clearly this is the perfect time in history to attempt something like this, with listening at home being all we have for the foreseeable future, but coming up with stuff that works equally well on and off the track. dancing is not the easiest thing to do. One danger is that you end up with music that sounds dilettantish, dabbling in subgenres for the sake of variety. Another is that you sand too many edges, apply too thick a coat of shine, and you end up with something that floats tastefully but inconspicuously in the background rather than catching the listener’s attention: something that we frankly already have more than enough in the era of Spotifycore and curated playlists not to excite or surprise, but to make you never hit the fast forward button.
The biceps pull it out with considerable poise. Isles’s melodies are lush or melancholy, but the beats are too harsh and catchy for its content to be mistaken for something you would play at a dinner party. They arrive with a metallic sheen on X and a distorted crackle on the apricots; even the soft-toned Cazenove is supported by a rhythmic track that fidgets nervously, the bass drum landing unexpectedly. Electronic tones often have a cozy warmth, but it is also disturbed: the sundial gradually builds up on the reverberation until the end result is a strange kind of euphoria; X seems more and more fuzzy and seasick. Saku, with her guest appearance by bedroom R&B artist Clara La San, is the only vocal track: her performance is airy, the melody quite sweet. reminiscent of early 2000s pop-garage, but the synths surrounding it have something of a John Carpenter soundtrack about them.
The patchwork of influences is perfectly assembled by recurring stylistic themes, most notably the abundance of sampled voices: Apricots features both a 1958 recording of traditional Malawian singers and a Bulgarian choir. The duo suggested the world music samples aim to evoke the multicultural racketeering of everyday life in their east London adopted home, and you might, if you were so inclined, read something political there: an album called Isles, made by two emigrants from Northern Ireland, celebrating the cultural diversity of London, released a few weeks after Brexit. Likewise, you can find something very present in another of its common sounds: there is a huge echo on Isles, which often feels like playing in a cavernous and empty club. Or you can just put it on headphones and get lost in it, just treat it like fun, which it is.
This week Alexis listened
Gabriels: love and hate in another era
A beautiful reimagining of classic mid-60s soul from an LA trio also responsible for a fantastic Adam Curtis-inspired short.
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