Сoda Agency
If you're a drum & bass fan, there's a chance you will know of Kosheen trio Markee Substance, Darren Decoder and Sian Evans already, what with their debut Hide U release smashing it up on the circuit last year and subsequently voted Best Single at the recent Drum & Bass Awards.
But even if you're not a drum & bass fan, you might also recognise their music. Kosheen are one of the few acts on the dance scene who can claim to have had John Digweed spinning their track to finish his set at Bedrock one week and 5000 ravers singing a long to it at Helter Skelter the next. Or to have found favour with the drum & bass faithful, the breakbeat cognoscenti and the Dreem teem in the space of three singles.
The secret of the their success? Well, 10 years at the cutting edge of breakbeat culture obviously hasn't hurt, but Kosheen put it down to the timeless attraction of the good old fashioned song.
"We're trying to push our sound and take it into different areas," asserts Markee Substance. "We want to show people how versatile we can be. One of the most positive things so far has been the way people in different scenes have picked up on our records. That's great and the reason it's happening is because we're working with songs. A good song is universal; if you love it you'll love it, no matter what style of music you're into".
Songs have always had their part to play within dance music but not so much, particularly over recent years, in the sometimes technically obsessive beats-and-b-line driven worlds of breakbeat and drum & bass.
Reprazent/Breakbeat Era collective may have been ploughing a broadly similar furrow over the last few years, but elsewhere the combination of breakbeats and vocals has tended to mean either one off hits or strict home-listening oriented material. So their ability to conjure up drum & bass cuts with a decent tune that can still rinse out on the dancefloor is one reason why it's worth getting excited about Kosheen.
Another reason is their ambitious mission to fuse the spontaneity of traditional musicianship with cutting-edge dance music production techniques and take breakbeat science onto the next level. But the best reason of all is Kosheen's utterly distinctive sound that has grown from their finely tuned studio experiments. It's the sound of sweet soul and folk melodies mashing it up with a decades worth of urban dancfloor energy via a lengthy stopover at future-funk central. It's the sound of the organic being fucked with by the electronic to create chillingly beautiful tunes to melt your heart as easily as they move your butt. It's the sound of Kosheen and it's coming right at ya in the 2001.
Kosheen was a project born some two-and-a-half years ago when Bristol drum & bass faces Markee Substance and Darren Decoder hooked up with singer San Evans after hearing her sing on a tune a friend had recorded. But the Kosheen story had already begun long before that fateful meeting. From skatepunk bands to the Welsh free party scene and onto sweaty Bristol raves, it's a history as rich and varied as the music Kosheen create and one that's played a pivotal part in the development of the band's free-flowing 21st Century sonics.
For Sian Evans, the story begins in Wales. The product of a long musical dynasty, singing is in Sian's blood; her grandfather composed and conducted for male voice choirs and by her teenage years she was following in his footsteps providing vocals for numerous jazz and r&b bands, as well as immersing herself in the music of female singer/songwriters like Joni Mitchel. A hip hop enthusiast from an early age, it was perhaps inevitable that the young Sian would be caught up in the energy of the fledgling dance scene. Sure enough, she soon found herself an enthusiastic convert to the early-90s free party movement.
"Wales was buzzing at the time," remembers Sian. Everyone wanted to get a party together and there was plenty of space to do it. With the free party thing, we all thought we were having a revolution, we thought we were going to change the world through dancing and in a small way maybe we did. It certainly broadened a lot of people's horizons, musically and otherwise."
With mind well and-truly blown open and the taste for new sounds fresh in her mouth, Sian began venturing across the English border to Bristol, where she had her first encounter with drum & bass courtesy of the seminal Roughneck Ting parties. The brainchild of promoter Markee Substance and a group of like-minded ravers, Roughneck Ting was Bristol's first full-on drum & bass rave, establishing a serious reputation around the city with a series of firing parties between 1993 and 1998. It also played a major part in bringing the three Kosheen players together .
