- Has skweee taken the world by storm? Not exactly. But the mostly Scandinavian pseudo-movement's bright colours and precocious experimentalism have proven influential with the international bass music scene. These days, it's splattered with 8-bit neon and fluorescent goop. Acting in some bizarre love triangle with dubstep and R&B, the skweee aesthetic—funky, 8-bit driven hip-hop-esque beats—has manifested itself in artists as diverse as Joker, Slugabed and Ikonika, and the self-identified skweee community has seen an explosion of record labels dedicated to documenting and exporting the bustling scene.
Norwegian Dødpop makes a case for itself as the premiere skweee imprint with its first retrospective compilation. As & Bs is composed entirely of singles (hence the name) and spans nearly three years. It paints a favourable picture of a label with its own odd little take on skweee, heavier and more physical than some of their counterparts. The disc starts fiercely with Beatbully's "Robot I Tromma," which lays down harsh noise and curdled textures on top of exploded drum samples. (This is no album of facile video game replications.)
That's a theme that Dødpop resolutely sticks to; rather than relying on the novelty of dance music rendered in a Nintendo world, the 8-bit elements are merely an accent. On Melekeveien's eponymously-title track, he turns blown-out 8-bit sounds into pumping trance progressions, and on "Mandag" realistic drum samples slice through the fabricated elements, a physical impact that much 8-bit music lacks. It's the Norwegian producer Beatbully who steals the spotlight, however, his vast bank of influences helping to pry skweee wide open: the Fairlight funk of his "Joppe pa Fabrikk" recalls early Prince at his best, and the excitable "Hjembrentfunk" plays on the modern grime contortions of producers like Starkey.
Dødpop's versatility also extends itself to the practical realm: these short, smirking bursts of colour work well as home listening but have definite dance floor potential. It's hard not to imagine the gorgeous trills on Sprutbass's "Ulykke" livening up a rave, and two tracks from Hedmark and Marcus Price even fully realize the genre's hip-hop potential as an MC spits over the constantly generating and crumbling scales. For a sound that's so obsessed with what is conventionally viewed as the two-dimensional, the explosion of influence and variation on As & Bs feels awfully 3D, and predicts a vibrant future for a genre proving as resistant to definition as dubstep has in the past few years.
Tracklist01. Beatbully - Robot i tromma
02. Melkeveien - Melkeveien
03. Beatbully - Hjembrentfunk
04. Sprutbass - Ulykke
05. Marcus Price & Hedmark - Nålar
06. Marcus Price - Surf (Hedmark remix)
07. Melkeveien vs. Niño - Mandag
08. Beatbully - Jobbe på fabrikk
09. Sprutbass - Romatropo
10. Ben Butler & Mousepad - Future Tent