- From jazz to jungle and back again, with remixes from El-B and Sully.
- The lead track on anonymous producer SW2's debut outing is about as perfect a homage to the glory days of London's broken beat scene as you'll find anywhere (it is, after all, called "New Park Bruk"). SW2's new record riffs on the same theme but adds a bit more breadth. A collaboration with the jazz drummer Moses Boyd, Bridge The Gap / Dirty South arrives courtesy of the tasteful GD4YA label, exploring the candlelit romance side of genres like UK garage. Boyd has already been moving closer to the dance floor (Exhibit A: his recent Katy B collaboration) and the two musicians (alongside remixers El-B and Sully), turn out an EP that celebrates a full cellar of London's dance music varietals.
"Bridge The Gap" is all about the saxophone and piano lines that bristle against one another as Boyd's drumming lights rhythmic fireworks. It falls somewhere between straight-up jazz and broken beat but, in the right hands—say Bradley Zero or Hunee's—you could also imagine it in a house set. SW2 and Boyd team up with Emmanuel Folorunso on "Dirty South," which features irresistible slap bass and choppy guitar right out of a Curtis Mayfield record, held together by Boyd's adventurous, almost rambunctious drumming.
The remixes channel slightly different flavours. El-B's flip of "Bridge The Gap" reins in the original's celestial tendencies as the old-school UK garage hero lays a syncopated half-time swing under the track and focuses in on just one melody to loop into a feel-good stepper. Sully goes deeper into the London night for his take on "Dirty South," a claustrophobic breakbeat weapon that chops and flips Boyd's drumming into razor sharp breaks that cut through the track with an icy accuracy. It's another high point on a record that provides a full panorama of some of the more soulful and jazzier sounds being made in the English capital.
Tracklist01. Bridge The Gap
02. Bridge The Gap (El-B Remix)
03. Dirty South
04. Dirty South (Sully Remix)