Long-time junglist hero DJ Zinc has recently begun working with house, and the results are pretty good! I’ve always been a big fan of the breakbeat garage tunes he did back in the early part of this decade as Jammin on his Bingo Beats label, so it’s neat to hear him working at a more restrained tempo again. I suppose what he is doing now is kind of a part of this UK funky sound that has gotten a bit of hype in recent times. Overall, I like it quite a bit (except for the tunes that feature rnb-style vocals, which I find a bit of a turn-off), and I enjoyed the Supa D mix that Rinse put out last year, but I’m not all that convinced by claims that this is some wildly exciting new frontier of musicology (man). Maybe I’m not listening all that closely, which I’ll freely admit, but it mostly sounds like nothing more than a new(ish) wrinkle on house. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that! House music is a nice thing, and I certainly like to listen to it, so I enjoy these tunes.
If you want to check out Zinc’s new sound, you should have a look here, where you can download the mix and read an interview with him about his new Bingo Bass imprint. Alternatively, you can download the mix directly from this link. There’s some really nice tunes on this mix, with lots of different flavours seeming to be thrown into the pot, with obvious influences from jungle, electro, hip-hop, rnb, and more sidling up to the house stuff to make a nice pot of bass-heavy, percussive stew. Worth checking out if you get a chance!