Clubs

Look to Shoreditch (no, it really hasn’t lost its creative pedigree just yet) for a clutch of London-based producers throwing down their beefy, ball-busting, bass-hugging beats who will fire up every dancefloor next year – even from the get-go (that’s New Year’s Eve, and they’re all playing in London). Here are our top three:

Mowgli and Solo
Their names go together like prosciutto and melon, no? Mowgli was reared on Europe’s illegal rave scene, has released an EP on Southern Fried Records, and remixes for Armand Van Helden and Tricky. Solo regularly collaborates with batty bass junky Hannah Holland and has been picked up by Claude Von Stroke’s fantastic house label, DirtyBird.

Separately, the two Italian-born, Brick Lane-based party DJs sample, synthesize and skewer globally inspired beats in their neighbouring studios. Together, they’re outlining a new strain of dance music, what they facetiously call ‘midget house’, concocting tracks for Mowgli’s DeadFish and FreshFish labels more speedily than we are sliding into a recession.
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‘DeadFish is more for “main room” house and electro that’s really dirty,’ says Mowgli from Australia, where he’s currently touring and, according to his MySpace, ‘falling in love every five minutes’, ‘but FreshFish is, like the name suggests, fresher, with softer, cooler music that combines fidget and minimal house.’ Stay tuned for a plethora of EPs and globe-trotting wonky house sounds: Deadfish-audio.com goes live in 2009.

Drums Of Death
We’re not sure how much more we can get away with gushing about this Bethnal Green-inhabiting, bleep-mangling Glaswegian, but we do know that he’s going to be sweating, shouting and smearing his voodoo make-up over any stage that’ll have him if Peaches’s word is anything to go by. It’s been a killer year for the DJ-cum-live one-man act. So far (in no particular order), he’s signed to Greco-Roman, toured with Hot Chip, played our first On The Up club night, released a bunch of singles, collaborated with the aforementioned electro-popster and remixed a forthcoming Prodigy single (‘They might hate it, I don’t know yet’). Next year, make way for all this chopped-up, bastardised, bass-obsessed nonsense to live it up on your iPod: his debut album is due in spring.

Mowgli and Solo play at Shoreditch Is Shit NYE at the 333. Drums Of Death appears at Urban Nerds NYE at Cordy House. Both December 31.