We Jostle

Sometimes club music doesn't need to be too clever. Sometimes all you need is an insistent groove and a hook. Allow nuance, subtlety or layers upon layers of carefully sculpted found sounds; sometimes the drive to dance to a piece of music overtakes the rational [over] thinking and just inspires movement. That's precisely what this trio of original productions from 19 year old Brummy, Wattville aka Matthew Evans, does incredibly well to inaugurate Sonic Router Records' debut vinyl release.

"The Wattville project initially was just going to be this fun outlet for music that I felt was going to be cool for me to play out," Evans states when pressed on the origins of the project. "Now it's become a lot more serious than that. The previous projects I worked on were never club music; it was more music that easily became a background soundtrack. I no longer wanted that; I wanted to create music that forces the listener notice it."

With the double A-side tracks 'Clan' and 'We Jostle' Evans does that emphatically and notably, with incredibly minimal tools. 'Clan', for instance, is just drums, albeit a pounding drum track with lashings of pitched percussion and the occasional vocal chant; but the impact that his staccato rhythm has throughout is so very instant. The gratification of it and the swirling, maddening melody of 'We Jostle', is painstakingly obvious.

"I'm currently living in Elephant & Castle," Evans continues. "It has a cultural richness that I had only been a part of up until the age of about eight, when I lived on Wattville Road in Handsworth in Birmingham. It holds a real affinity to E&C as a place. When I was a kid my dad was training to be a vicar and we attended a predominantly Afro-Caribbean church where we'd have meals afterwards, and they would put on all this incredible ethnic music that I used to love. The day I got to E&C I walked around the markets and that same rhythm was all I heard."

Wattville eschews this propensity for intricate percussion that he displays across the two A-sides on B-side 'Etching' though, counterpointing the rhythmic flamboyancy with a muggy stripped back roller that's more seedy late night Saturday in Middle England than any kind of totemic world music hybrid.

SRR002: Wattville's We Jostle will be released on limited edition vinyl. It'll also feature a remix of 'Clan' by NYC trio Archie Pelago