Mosca – Influences

Mosca has carved out a name by distilling sounds from round the world and turning them into emphatically British rave bangers. He's touched on 2 step, techno, house and hip hop, always steering clear of the obvious, and keeping the groove that little bit left of centre. Recent years have seen him move closer to a twisted house sound, although his 4/4 work still retains the bass and shuffling percussion that are key to UK Soundsystem culture.
The Influences selection he's picked is a pretty accurate description of his sound – Mosca's productions exist in the point between Tubby's dubwise bass, Mood To Swing's garage swing, and Pearson Sound's relentless innovation. For more, catch the man's monthly radio show, every first Wednesday on NTS
Catch Mosca play for Secretsundaze with DJ QU and Virginia at The Laundry on April 2nd. For more info and tickets head here.
This is a good aural example of what I’m trying to express in words quite often in interviews and whatnot. On the surface this is a loungy jazz tune I guess, but the things it does to me… It has that great Lynchian layering to it, that otherworldly darkness just below the surface. It’s heart wrenching; that’s the best way to describe it but is of course a cliché – it does feel like my heart is being pulled in two or more directions when I listen to this. I love all of B&DCOG’s stuff and a lot of it is much darker than this, but in being darker, it’s somehow more one dimensional if that makes sense. With Karin, you could play this in a posh restaurant you know? It’s those chords that ‘work’ in the traditional sense then the odd ‘off’ note or chord change, that dissonance that’s held a little too long before dropping back into consonance – I’ve heard it described as a teardrop welling up before it falls. And the slow plodding tempo… it’s measured and laid back but somewhere in there is this energy, a wasp buzzing round frantically in a tin, all kinds of chaos going on… some Jacob’s Ladder shit, a real visual quality to it. To an extent these feelings are what I like to try and create with my music – functional or funky, maybe even fun on the surface, but this dark undercurrent without ever trying to be overly dark or trying to ‘mean’ one thing in particular. DJ Qu does it really well, and Prince Of Denmark. And even though I’ve banged on about it at length here, we’re hardly scratching the surface of what music can make you feel you know, that’s the beauty of music over the written word. Aaaaah! Stop me before I write some more…
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