Cooly G – DUB OrGANIzER Vol.1

Cooly G takes funky into a whole other deep direction. The bass is huge and the beats remind me of that really old minimal / stripped back Chicago house but with a mad little London skip, grime and edge to them. Awesome stuff, she is going to be huge on the dance floor this year I reckon. There are big things coming from her in the form of a Hyperdub release as well, you don't get much cooler than that!

DUB OrGANIzER Vol.1 is a wicked collection of deep and lilting funky it manages to be sophisticated and sexy sounding yet a little bit raw all at once. First track Dis Boy Pt. 4 has a low slung steel drum and trumpet vibe to it but they don’t sound like your regular drum and horn combo as all her percussion is really deepy, skippy and clicky like its made by machine and filtered through and organic funk grinder. The horns are deep in the mix and filtered low, they give it a nice grimey sound. Little soulful vocal snippets and samples give all these tracks a really nice housey style. On track two Ya Instrumental you can really hear the bass working and the African rhythm’s that are so prevalent in this vibrant funky scene at the moment, this track really reminds me of Township Funk by DJ Majuva but a lot more mellow and spacey.

If you don’t know already funky is a dirty London swung house hybrid that kind of echoes past swung and housey scenes that seem to come out of our capital city, you know the ones UK Garage / 2-Step which mutated into Grime / Dubstep. Funky is another beast though it takes elements of house that has always been a big part of UK club culture and mixes it with the rhythmic flows of Africa. Not unlike house has done in the past, I mean in the early days house from Detroit and Chicago was a lot looser than some of it is now. The strict four to the floor kick patterns kind of took over really. But anyway funky brings the funk back by adding a new variation on swing by joining the dots somewhere between house, grime, dubstep and African style drumming. It’s kind of a UK version of Kwaito but that’s a whole other kettle of fish for another time…

Back to Cooly G, Craze Refix pounds and skips while ghostly vocal snippets usher the track in and melt into an acid line. Acid has always been a big part of house things really kicked off when someone got hold of a 303 and got tweaking. So the Craze Refix follows this tradition and puts a deep and hypnotic twist onto it. What I love about this funky scene is that it’s putting the bass back into house again, it’s something that has been lost a little over time, it’s like the second coming of the bleep and bass manuva of Warp in the early 90’s but with a slight contempory flavour. The final track on the EP is Floating a mellow little number with some really cool lyrical samples that flow over the soul drenched house patterns.

There is something really compelling about Cooly G’s take on funky it strips away everything that I can find a bit annoying about the scene, which is the overly cheesey stuff with dance moves and just down right blatant rip offs of old house. She’s not as dirty and grimey as people like Lil Sillva, Apple and D Malice she has her own deeper style that puts her out on her own at the moment. Cooly is pushing it in her own little direction and it’s very refreshing indeed. I can see her getting picked up far and wide by house and minimal heads as well as funky and dubstep DJ’s.

You can buy the DUB OrGANIzER Vol.1 EP direct from her myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/coolyg