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Kowton

Can a pro­ducer suc­cess­fully tra­verse the bound­aries between dub­step and techno? Shed cer­tainly doesn’t seem to think so. But the work of Bristol-based pro­ducer Joe Cow­ton may make him think twice about bass music cre­ators med­dling with four-to-the-floor dynam­ics and lower tempos.

Cow­ton made his first foray into dub­step pro­duc­tion while he was study­ing music tech­nol­ogy in Man­ches­ter. Inspired by both his visit to a DMZ rave in Leeds’ West Indian Cen­tre, and the records that he was pick­ing up at Boomkat’s now defunct phys­i­cal store, Pel­i­can Neck, Cow­ton started to craft his own take on the dub­step sound, prick­ing the ears of blog­ger and Keysound owner Mar­tin ‘Black­down’ Clark at an early stage. His first actual releases came under his Nar­cos­sist moniker, fus­ing together deep sub-bass tones with the rhyth­mic skip of UK garage on both the Mind­set and Clan­des­tine Cul­ti­va­tions imprints, but by the mid­dle of last year, Cow­ton had started to unveil a much dif­fer­ent style to his work.

His debut release as Kow­ton for Keysound was the first chance for many to hear what he’d been con­coct­ing in his new sur­round­ings of Bris­tol. By drop­ping the tempo down by a good 15 BPM and try­ing to inte­grate heav­ily swung rhythms and dub­step pro­duc­tion tropes into a house and techno tem­plate, Cow­ton has man­aged to cre­ate a gen­uinely unique niche for him­self. The clank­ing min­i­mal­ist churn of his 12-inch for Idle Hands from ear­lier this year only served to com­pound his rep­u­ta­tion in techno cir­cles, but Cow­ton def­i­nitely hasn’t left dub­step behind. His DJ sets fre­quently com­bine music from both genres.

www.listn.to/kowton
www.residentadvisor.com/kowton