FaltyDL, Plastic People

London's pirate radio stations and blacked-out VW Golfs are pumping out the sound of “UK funky”, a deliriously upbeat reboot of 1990s UK garage, fusing house music, dancehall, calypso, African rhythms and grime, its whipcrack rhythms supporting untold melodic and vocal hooks.  The sparse, bass-driven sound of dubstep – once the province of sulky boys from Croydon in dark rooms full of gigantic speakers – has exploded worldwide and is currently injecting its low-end thrum into any sound it comes in contact with, from the most underground techno clubs to the top of the pop charts.  And in the perhaps unlikely dual outposts of Los Angeles and Glasgow, something known as “wonky” - less a genre than a process applied to other genres – has seen hip-hop, soul, funk and electronica beats deconstructed, untethered from the rigidity of computer sequencing and given a slithering jazzy looseness.

In this midst of all this flux is New Yorker Drew Lustman – FaltyDL.  His releases thus far on UK labels Ramp and Planet Mu have managed to combine the bass throb and multicultural rhythms of British garage, funky and dubstep with the rhythmic freedom of wonky processing and a clear understanding of the strut and shine of his home city's disco heritage.  It was a perfect fit for him to be playing last night at the Non-Sense club night: a club dedicated to joining the dots between innovative club sounds past and present on the peerless soundsystem of Shoreditch's Plastic People venue.  It was clear we were in the right place on entering the club to hear the unique rolling groove of Can's 1972 'Vitamin C'; the resident DJs' ability to then seamlessly move from this, through the swing of 90s “2-step” UK garage and more modern deep house, then back to Arthur Russell (as Loose Joints)'s 1980 new wave disco classic 'Is It All Over My Face' showed a clear comprehension of the underlying structures that these tracks have in common.

Lustman, his understated mod style of cropped hair and polo shirt offset by heavy Japanese tattoos, entered the DJ box just after 1am, fired up his laptop and set a straightforward electronic disco beat going.  Though his performance was entirely digital, using laptop and hardware controller to blend and rework sections of his own and others' music, it was a performance, far from the cliché of “man checking his email on stage”: the small, low-ceilinged dancefloor area of Plastic People places the DJ or performer literally face-to-face with the crowd, and Lustman made the most of this, moving constantly, grinning, maintaining eye contact with dancers and generally becoming a part of the crowd.  Within ten minutes, he had subtly shifted his sound from the regular disco beat and squirming funk melodies to something completely off-centre, with baroque synth arpeggios tumbling over beats so polyrhythmic it was not immediately obvious where the first beat of the bar lay and drones as close to Alice Coltrane as to any dance producer.

Yet still the crowd danced.  And this is the crucial thing, the joy of the current state of dance music cross-fertilisation: this was a Saturday night dance crowd, and a smart, switched-on one at that, with an extremely healthy gender, racial and age mix.  These were not blokey electronica geeks, nor fashionista poseurs, nor were they conspicuously a druggy crowd – yet they were as willing to dance to outré and experimental electronic explorations as they were to straight-up disco.  Lustman kept things in balance, making sure that for every segment of seriously off-beam or jazzy rhythms he returned to vintage hip-hop breaks and samples reminiscent of Mantronix, or to the dramatic bodily thrills of dubstep bass drops, always keeping a track of common threads between the styles.  These shifts were by no means pitched perfectly: occasionally the dancefloor thinned out and lost its momentum, but Lustman always managed to pull them back, and by the time he began blending his own darting synth riffs with those of 'Wet Look' by young fellow genre-miscegenator from London, Joy Orbison, the air of unfakeable celebration was palpable.

It remained for the resident DJs to bask in the afterglow, and as the house lights came on they played one vintage soul and rare groove track after another to a crowd happy to continue dancing unselfconsciously despite their sweatiness being thus exposed in the fluorescent glare.  Plastic People is only a small club – there were probably 200 people there at most – but an important one, and the open-mindedness of the crowd and the ad-hoc genre linkages of Lustman and the Non-Sense residents was inspiring.  Even if I no longer had any interest in going dancing at the weekend, this is the sort of event I would be happy simply to know existed.