This week we run down a few of the stand out producers of 2011, today with Martyn, 2562 and Maria Minerva.
9. MARTYN ‘Ghost People’ Brainfeeder
Martijn Deykers took to the slopes of 2011 to do what he does best: shape shift his sound. After his last LP ‘Great Lengths’ came to define the layering of dubstep templates over the spirit of techno, his new album ‘Ghost People’ pushes the same compulsion: from his eulogy of Detroit strings and deep beats, to London’s ambiguous constant reinvention of bass culture and onto his latest preoccupation and delicate reconfiguring of the DNA of 2-step, Martyn’s on point in taste and direction year on year, sprinting ahead whilst taking breath to wistfully look back he’s a true spirit guide across the spectrum of dance music.
Best Bit: ‘Popgun’ – a bona fide party starter that sounds like Carl Craig making weird ass jungle. In 2003.
8. 2562 ‘Fever’ When In Doubt
As concept albums go, 2562’s most recent long player, ‘Fever’, sits up there with the most audacious efforts we’ve come across in recent times. Spawned from one of the least likely sources – the wistful sounds of disco from the period spanning the mid-’70s to mid-’80s – Huisman expertly manipulates the fruit of years spent digging through dusty vinyl crates into a mutant form of dubstep cum techno. Every single nuance you hear has been sampled from disco records, and once isolated by Huisman, is augmented into an incredibly unique and textured sound that combines soulful swing with mind-blowing technical agility.
Best Bit: An innovator in the truest sense, fashioning the now well-trodden territory where dubstep meets techno.
7. MARIA MINERVA Various Not Not Fun Records / 100% Silk
The basic blueprints for functional dance music come blurred to near indistinction and soiled by a healthy dose of haze and distortion, from the Estonian goddess of electronics, Maria Minerva. A stalwart of Not Not Fun’s dance-orientated off-shoot label 100% Silk, Minerva has been just one of the artists to feature in a prolific run of releases yet it’s her who’s caught the discerning electronic music fan’s attention the most. Never letting go of a deep understanding of sensory and bodily intuition, Minerva’s sound is a miasma of dub-inflected disco, uncoiling in a shower of flirtatious charm and druggy decay.
Best Bit: Forgetting where you are for a minute and losing yourself in Minerva’s endless spiral of confusion.
Follow the rest of our Top 15 Producers of 2011 across this week on ClashMusic.com.
