Mixtape – Scratcha DVA

Over the course of his production career, Scratcha DVA’s idiosyncratic approach has always ensure he sounded unique, something of an outlier from whatever sound he’s been allied with at the time. The long-running host of Rinse FM’s Grimey Breakfast Show regularly produces tracks that sound at arm’s length from his contemporaries – still mixable, but immediately recognisable as Scratcha’s own, even in the whirl of a club set.

His move away from grime into the realms surrounding UK funky a few years ago threw a welcome spanner in that nascent genre’s works. DVA’s take on house was weird, wired and with an intense focus on percussion. Take ‘Jelly Roll’, whose ascending-descending central melody was at once catchy and maddening, and whose rhythms constantly skirted on the verge of tripping over themselves. Or last year’s ‘Ganja’, from his first 12″ for Hyperdub, whose syncopated house beat was drizzled with sticky ectoplasm.

His latest 12″ for Hyperdub, released this month, has found his sound heading outward in new directions. Lead track ‘Madness’ is a low-slung slice of cosmic soul, not a million miles from the psychedelic hip-hop of LA’s Brainfeeder collective, whose scratchy melodies regularly threaten to drown Vikter Duplaix’s downbeat vocal performance. And the brooding ‘Polyphonic Dreams’ feels like the culmination of his dancefloor work so far, all pirouetting ringtone synths and half-submerged voices.

The latter features on the mix he’s recorded for us. ‘Funky’, as such, doesn’t exist as one discrete genre – instead, it’s more a hub around which individual takes on UK house can congregate and interact. Here, DVA’s own productions rub shoulders with other producers’ tracks (including the effervescent vocal broken beat of Roska’s ‘I Need Love’), in forty-five minutes of constantly shifting rhythms and bubbling sub-bass.

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Scratcha DVA The Stool Pigeon Mix by The Stool Pigeon on Mixcloud

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