plastician - beg to differ

[rockypoppy2]

i dont think plasticman has gone all dubsteppy - sure hes got a few tunes on this album with big(ish) basslines, but he has always had that element to his sound. i quite like this album, but thats because i really like the "plasticman sound" - he manages to capture a sense of isolation (maybe living in croydon has something to do with it) really well, and i find listening to his stuff its a lot more honest, and i really like the minimal way he approaches music. the album is a bit slow - but isnt Badboy sound just a cha remix? i dont like the way thats become his token sound - kind of like skream - request line, skream managed to move away from that tune, but plasticman is kind of grounded with the legacy of cha.

shallow grave just epitomises all that is great about what he does - kind of like listening to a calmer blackmass plastics (not the remix). a good album i reckon, but not the sort of thing i listen to over and over - its mood music.

 

[DJL]

Just listened to this. Pure DJ album. Love the sound and some of the tracks are mad (Bad Boy Sound). Skepta is massive on this.

 

[gumdrops]

i dont really find myself listening to this too much. maybe cos all i have is a snippets version of the album but its dissapointing (to me at least) that the jump off point for almost ALL of this album is shallow grave (here, in a slightly inferior remix version) rather than say, cha. i know hes down on grime lately but i cant help thinking his jump to more dubstep stuff is shrewd and simply cos that scene is a safer bet if he wants to keep afloat and sell a bit more... maybe he only said he was grime before cos that scene was 'big' at the time, i dunno... could be wrong - i hope so, but it does seem that what he plays on his show these days is much more on the wobbler side of things. can it be that he just doesnt get enough new grime dubs? or that hes really just not into any of what he gets from producers?

 

[mos dan]

well i think he does find it difficult to find grime that he wants to play out, afaik. it's not that he doesn't want to!

but then plenty of grime djs *are* finding great new dubs - vocal and instrumental - to play, so, er, i dunno... i don't buy the idea that you can't play a two hour set with lots of good new grime records in it, because plenty of djs are..

 

[gumdrops]

thats what i mean. i dont buy his excuse that there are NO good grime instrumentals out there. there might not be loads but there definitely are SOME, at least enough to fill half a show on rinse. and as for not being sent them or whatever, how hard can it be? hes on rinse - he must know everyone there is to know in the scene. he could get them if he wanted. so i just think its just a clever (if also cynical) move on his part as dubstep is obv more bankable...

 

[Sick Boy]

It is fair to say that although there are plenty of good beats around these days, the popular styles of the moment don't really fit into Plasticman's M.O.. The form of grime he likes playing (cold, dark and bass-heavy) is a style that is quite scarce right now -- that's why Tubby, who is stylistically very similar to Plasticman, these days is mostly playing Footsie dubs and, you guessed it, dubstep.

 

[rockypoppy2]

thats what i mean. i dont buy his excuse that there are NO good grime instrumentals out there. there might not be loads but there definitely are SOME, at least enough to fill half a show on rinse. and as for not being sent them or whatever, how hard can it be? hes on rinse - he must know everyone there is to know in the scene. he could get them if he wanted. so i just think its just a clever (if also cynical) move on his part as dubstep is obv more bankable...

same goes for geeneus/rinse really. if you'd asked them before dubstep kicked off whether they wanted to go legal they'd have laughed at you. you start doing it for the love, then you end up chasing the money. its a shame though - i really like plasticman, hes obviously a great dj and an important pioneer in the scene.

maybe getting dropped from radio 1 didnt help his confidence in the genre,

 

[elgato]

i cant buy this idea at all, and i find it upsetting that people are so quick to assume that he's 'chasing money'

to me he comes off with genuine enthusiasm and passion, and has always repped what he wanted. was the stuff he used to play really that 'hot'? he was always an outsider to both scenes from what i could see

are his tastes not allowed to change? just cos he was into a certain sound 3 years ago shouldn't mean he should be tied to representing it for life, whether there is good stuff coming out of it or not...

and in any case Sick Boy raises a valid point imo

 

[rockypoppy2]

yeah ok, its silly to judge someone i dont know. but what i do think is, that the music he plays out now - is more crowd pleasing than a marker of what he thinks is genuinely good, or that he genuinely wants to play. i think he's compromised because hes not sure that grime instrumentals or whatever will kick off at fwd/dmz at all, and not noway near as much as dubstep ones.

 

[gumdrops]

yeah ok, its silly to judge someone i dont know. but what i do think is, that the music he plays out now - is more crowd pleasing than a marker of what he thinks is genuinely good, or that he genuinely wants to play. i think he's compromised because hes not sure that grime instrumentals or whatever will kick off at fwd/dmz at all, and not noway near as much as dubstep ones.

yep - i dont think its some utterly crass selling out for the cash move, hes always been in between sounds/scenes. i just think he knows that fwd people arent into grime as much and hes trying to survive in this scene so has to do what he can. he must know dubstep fans would buy more music than grime fans would so kept the album more on the dubstep side of things rather than grime. its just a shame IMO as what made all his stuff so good up to now was that it combined the best of both styles.

 

[tox]

yeah ok, its silly to judge someone i dont know. but what i do think is, that the music he plays out now - is more crowd pleasing than a marker of what he thinks is genuinely good, or that he genuinely wants to play. i think he's compromised because hes not sure that grime instrumentals or whatever will kick off at fwd/dmz at all, and not noway near as much as dubstep ones.

fwiw I saw him play a Grime and Dubstep night not *that* long ago and it was back-to-back grime vox and instrumentals, with a couple of big dubstep tunes thrown in.

that wasn't at fwd though, so perhaps the dubstep thing is crowd dependant, as gumdrops suggests.

 

[Grievous Angel]

Just to remind you, there is NO MONEY in dubstep records. There is a bit of money in playing out dubstep. If Plastic is playing more dubstep it's cos he wants to, not as some cynical marketing move. He's always said he's basically grime but plays some dubstep too and that's pretty much the case.