S.I. Futures
The Mission Statement
Mute
I’m loving this disc. In doing so, I am deeply offending my friend J., who is a real-live DJ who hates just about all music like this, stuff with squelches and beeps and inexplicable difficulties thrown into the beat. My friend is pissed off by IDM (“Intelligent Dance Music”), because he thinks that dance music should just be fun and danceable, and not continually mess with the listener. He may have a point…but I’m not here to play politics. I just really like the damn CD.
S.I. Futures is another pseudonym of Si Begg, a Leicester boy of great silliness and talent whose other aliases include Bigfoot, CabbageBoy, Buckfunk 3000. It is filled with vocoder vocals, with little squiggly sounds that substitute for beats, with cool-ass samples (“This is the Way” bravely throws in Beastie Boys samples from “Hold It Now Hit It”), and with some beats that could only be funky if you’re a robot – but it works, baby, it works like a busboy.
From the dead-on cybershuffle of “I Like That (Brand New)” and its rap-loving cousin “All Terrain Aspects” (a song that proves once and for all that British people just shouldn’t rap unless they are prepared to be Roots Manuva) all the way to ironic club workouts like “Freestyle Disco” and “I’m the Bomb,” Begg is in control. His synthesizers and computers must still be in a liquid state after demented techno stuff like “The News” and the big European club hit “We Are Not a Rock Band.”
All in all, it’s IDM all right, but it’s not pretentiously Intelligent, and sometimes not even all about Dance. It’s just cool-sounding stuff with a sense of humor (the booklet is made up to look like the packets they give you at corporate retreats, with each song a different seminar) that helps me to shake my pathetic non-club-going ass. I like this better than a lot of other crap I’ve heard this year, and if your brain is connected to your booty, you will too.
Mute Records: http://www.mute.com • S. I. Futures: http://www.sifutures.org
