I’m not some little puppet, alright?



Hello and welcome to amateur hour at Fluxblog. I do hope we don’t disappoint…

Nio – “No strings” (Calypso mix) – Words and meaning aren’t always the same. It’s a neat trick to say one thing, mean another and still have your listener understand the hidden meaning rather than the obvious one. Often people that can do this are called “witty”. Saying one thing and meaning another is done pretty often on the internet because it’s a universal get-out clause if you’ve said anything stupid and/or offensive. One of the nice things about Flux is that he’s very capable of this kind of wit (unlike many of the practitioners), but mostly he just says what he means instead. That’s disciplined and shows a nice lack of ego.

This song is massively sonically inventive and I could talk for ages about that, and about how mixes like this one only ever appear on 12 inch singles and that’s one of the joys of the format. But I won’t. I’ll just say instead that although he’s singing about freedom, you get the sense from this song that Nio is actually telling somebody that he wants to commit to them, that he wants to be bound. He’s just doing it in a kind of roundabout way. Which isn’t witty, but is terribly moving.

You can buy this, and a variety of other Nio singles at Juno.

Lady Sovereign – “A little bit of shhh!” – On the other hand, Lady Sovereign is witty as hell. It took British people about 10 years to crack rock and roll. It seems like hip hop was a trickier beast, as it’s taken at least 20 years, but now the UK is motoring.

This tune has all the things you’d expect from a grime tune – the flat planes of bass, the atonal squawks and the slightly ramshackle beats. And as you’d expect the delivery of the MC oozes London-ness. But forget all the genre signposts – what makes this special and different is that it’s packed with little gags, little “ohhhh shit!” moments and far more personality than you’d credit possible to someone so tiny (she’s 5’1″ and likes to wear Adidas). Which is why ‘grime’ is such a terrible name for a genre as it appears to preclude the possibility of any sort of fun. Which is clearly not the case. Also, this tune has pianos, as they are careful to point out. But “don’t joke with us small folk”, kay?

The video to this song is on her website.

Also available at Juno.

Courtesy of Laces