ahbijef, Sep 01, 2006
"Joining the dots between progressive, tribal, deep and funky house," proclaim the liner notes in bright orange. "It's gonna be an album of other people's records," adds Creamer, "but we're going to make our own records out of it. It's gonna be a big CD of remixes."
With the benefit of hindsight (four years of it, to the day), Creamer's boasts for this iconic DJ mix would sound wildly ambitious even today, while the mix itself falls short of that ambition, albeit in a way that perfectly encapsulates the perpetual shortcomings of Progressive House. That said, this is a deliciously dirty, filthily funky record that party people anywhere can, even now, seriously get down to circa half past midnight on any night.
Its greatest strength has always been the pair of opening tracks, the highly exclusive, delightfully lubricious "Take Me (I'm Yours)" by Peace Division, followed by the hugely effective Sono Pelican Remix of "Can You Feel (What I'm Going Thru)" by Matt Schwartz presents Sholan, with its bobbing, throbbing bassline and rhythms punctuated by subtly menacing tom–toms and timpani in the background. These tracks, and the seamless transition between them, represent both the point of departure and the high point of the mix, although that's not to say that the rest is disappointing. A reappearance by Peace Division later on in CD 1; tracks by Dan K, MV, and 4Toasters among others; and the updated version of Bernard Leon Howard III's trippy groove "Marscarter" (in virtually all of its full glory on CD 2) keep this party hopping all the way to the end.
"Bedrock" by Creamer & K, together with the more cerebral "NuBreed: Satoshi Tomiie" from Global Underground (both released in mid–2002), can be thought of as the joint high water mark for the Progressive House movement in its funky tribal phase, and fully illustrate both the strengths and the fatal limitations of this genre of underground dance music. Shortly after their release, breakbeat went on to supplant the tribal element in Progressive House as NuBreaks opened up dancefloors to an entirely new groove that made people really want to dance without any need for tribal percussive contrivances. It's also worth noting that a less celebrated, one–CD mix, "Nite:Life 12" by the lads at Lexicon Avenue (late 2002), delivered convincingly on the concept of Funky Progressive House with the sort of panache that makes Creamer & K and Tomiie look positively bookish.
In retrospect, the entire funky tribal movement in Progressive House had been fully anticipated two years earlier in a pair of benchmark releases from Global Underground, "GU 17: Danny Tenaglia/London" and "NuBreed: Danny Howells" (2000), which delivered the "funky goods" with a great deal more flair, subtlety, and colorful variation (Tenaglia especially). The two Danny mixes did not by any means go unnoticed, but were largely underappreciated for their prescience: the year 2000 coincided with the height of the Trance era in dance music, just before Trance collapsed under its own flabby exuberance and gave way to the dreary, soul–less, one–dimensional sounds of satanically dark, mechanistically tribal Progressive House that eventually morphed into the styles that inform "Bedrock" by Creamer & K and "NuBreed" by Tomiie. While these latter mixes are perfectly deserving of their iconic status, those by the two Dannys are really the ones that truly deliver on Creamer's promise "to join the dots".
4.1/5 (