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Mr. Scruff: A Review

Thursday - Jan 21st, 2010 by Fiver
Tags: Mr. Scruff, Ninja Tune, Ottawa, Ritual

Good nights out have a natural progression to them. They start out nice and chill as the first attendees get into the spot, grab a drink, grab themselves an area in the nightclub and make themselves comfortable. Once the venue starts thickening up with people, the tone of the night should get a bit less chill and a bit more fun, with the vibe feeding off the latent energy of the people in the venue. If the crowd’s really up for the event the room will be buzzing with conversation and laughs at this point. Little chunks of the crowd will hit the main area of the club and start dancing a bit, limbering up for primetime. Eventually enough of the people who are still getting into the club will start feeling the same mood of the people that are already on the dancefloor… and once this happens, the spaces between the pockets of people on the dancefloor fill up and suddenly the party everybody has been waiting weeks for is happening all around them.

It’s rare when an event goes through all these stages without anybody really noticing. It’s even more rare when only one deejay is responsible for making it happen, and it’s rarer still when that one deejay is playing fourteen different genres of music and they’re all meshing like puzzle pieces. Mr. Scruff was that one deejay last Thursday. He was awesome.

He played dub, disco, funk, latin flavors, house, reggae, breaks, hip hop, jazz… as long as it had soul, he put it through Ritual’s soundsystem. He kept the energy up and the dance floor full throughout the night without ever having to play hard or aggressive. Instead he played a set I could only characterize as “playful”: tons of fun tunes put together with smart programming and tight mixing. As far as I can remember, the only truly hard tune he played was this one tune with a huge bassline we later found out was “Cyclotron” by Harmonic 313… and despite its robotic, synthetic feel he still made it fit into his set without any noticeable change in the mood he’d been building all night long.

Harmonic 313 – Cyclotron

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Out of everything he played at the show, my favorite tune of the night was definitely “Let Me Change Your Mind”, a Zed Bias/Jenna G collaboration that Scruff played in the Essential Mix I mentioned in my last post. He also did a little self-promotion session of tunes he’s made over the years towards the end of the night; “Chicken In A Box” and “Get A Move On” were two of them.

Zed Bias & Jenna G – Let Me Change Your Mind
(excerpt from Scruff’s Essential Mix)

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Mr. Scruff – Chicken In A Box

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Mr. Scruff – Get A Move On

On top of all the excellent music he played, Scruff provided a couple of nice touches to the night. When we first got into the venue, we were given download vouchers. It seems that Mr. Scruff records every set he plays and then gives out vouchers with an access code so people can snag a big chunk of the night’s set from his downloads site. As a promoter myself, getting this voucher at the very start of the night before we’d even heard a single track definitely put me in a good mood; I knew that a deejay who was that interested in providing extras for his audience was going to care about putting on a good show.

Secondly, his touring VJ did a bang-up job. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about the visuals of a show, but the stuff they had on screen that night was great. Like all of his album art and some of his videos, Scruff drew all the animations that popped up on the VJ’s screen. The night started out slow, with music notes flying towards the audience like that old starfield screensaver you’d see on PCs back in the day. Then when there was enough buzz in the venue and he’d stepped up the music a notch, the notes disappeared and a little man showed up with a talk bubble that said “I think it’s time we had a dance”. It was a pretty saucy thing for a VJ to do, telling people to stop yapping and start dancing, but within a few minutes the dancefloor started to fill up. Right before that Harmonic 313 track came on the screen flashed a caution sign that said “Incoming Bass Alert”; every time that warning popped up the tune immediately after was super thick on the low end. Throughout the night a bunch of odd things would pop on screen, like tea kettles (Scruff’s a big tea drinker… he even has his own line of tea products), fish, and hundreds of odd people milling about, riding buses or chattering about whatever. It seems that all the videos that Ninja Tune assembled to promote Scruff’s “Ninja Tuna” LP were make by using the same material the VJ displayed at the show…

Totally odd visual content for your average night out, but it worked well and kept the vibe fun.

What impressed me almost more than Scruff himself was the crowd that went out to see him. I can’t remember the last time I saw a dancefloor that was mostly full at 11.30 but the people out on that night made it happen. Better yet was the crowd’s attitude; there was zero pretentious behavior, no bullshit attitudes, and it seemed that they were down with whatever sounds Scruff threw at them. It was maybe one of the most open-minded crowds I’d seen in a long time. The whole show reminded me a lot of how raves used to feel way back in the day, but without the ridiculous costumes and heavy drug use.

All in all it was an excellent show, and it was well worth the wait.

Download Mr. Scruff’s Ottawa set here! (access code: rir9GD)

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Posted in Music, Nightlife, Ottawa