Trouble Vision at Corsica Studios, 19 September 2008

Trouble Vision at Corsica Studios, 19 September 2008

22 September, 2008
by: Robin

Trouble Vision: the first one ever, about one o'clock, and it's pretty hot and rammed. Not so that you can't get a drink before your soul dies and your dried-out eyes scare away the bar staff, but enough that every lurid, sidelong face is a natural rival. What makes people come to a night like this? No-one's trying to float a music style, because these days no-one has the attention span to listen to the same thing all night, just to find out what it really is. The publicity (in honesty) tries the codeword 'underground' several times, and maybe that's what people turn up for.

The interesting thing about tonight, though, is that the DJs hang around in the fuzzy zone between two things: obscure musics that steal the fun of big-time sounds, and mass-produced units people can adopt without offending family.

Rusko and Jack Beats (really Beni G from drum 'n' bass duo The Mixologists) have a strange relationship with their globe-touring, overpaid counterparts. The jump-up dubstep and 'fidget' house they respectively play works perfectly, because it pushes the same buttons but doesn't leave a dirty residue. Sometimes it's done by making commercially viable moves with virgin raw material, stuff that hasn't been shagged out by major-label exploitation. Sometimes they take the crude resources of out-and-out pop and refine them. Foamo – who recently broadcast on Kiss 100 and Rob Da Bank's Radio 1 show – is degrees less subtle. (His name does suggest foam parties, after all.) For some people it might cross the line into big-club noise, but there aren't many violated looks.

We watch Blaise Belville drop large hip-hop tunes between broadsides of dancehall, most of which must have been ubiquitous in Jamaica at one time or another. It's pure fun, capitalising on the exuberance of the ragga, which no-one can ever win against. His only problem is that he plays each record for a minute at most. Two would have been enough, but not one.

When the original acid house crew rebelled against the commercialisation of the new mode of leisure – that they had brought to London – they carried on with the same parties, playing the same music, but relying on some kind of distance. Cynics will say that when you arrive there, nothing matters but the audience's own sense of discernment, the knowledge they took a different route to appreciating the same thing.

When Blaise Bellville plays records just long enough for the audience to recognise them (or in any case get the gist) is he reducing his set to a manifesto of appreciation? Is Rusko the new Chemical Brothers? That's not the right view to take: try to like as much music as you can, and realise that these people just want to make it easy to have fun.

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Robin