MIC Perri

I didn’t know that Toronto was the number one spot for drum’n’bass outside of London. This piece of info comes from Flipside during the intro to a phenomenally energetic live set in our nation’s capital … I mean Ontario’s capital.

MC Flipside serves up some capable rhymes atop A-Side’s "Momentum" and tosses in some vocal scratching for good measure. His presence is a comfortable fit and he sets the crowd off a few times with the ubiquitous "yeah, yeahs," "feeling alrights" and the like.

- The Manitoban

Toronto-based DJ Freaky Flow is all over the map on his latest drum 'n' bass endeavour, enlisting Choclair, Flipside, YlooK and Nelly Furtado to drive home an ambitious mix session on World Domination. After starting on an R&B tip with a Syndicate mix of Furtado?s "Party," Flow works some hyperactive scratches into Kingsize's "Eighties." Flipside adds freestyle to A-Sides? "Wake Up," after which Flow starts spinning into denser jungle territory.To top things off, Flow and Flipside end with a little skit that lays all the Brit-inspired, hype-obsessed MCs to waste. - Chart Attack

Freaky Flow with MC Flipside
Keep It Live
Moonshine

Toronto’s Jungle Scratchmaster is back. Freaky Flow was born in Philadelphia but moved to TO as a tot. He’s been on the turntables since he was 15, and it shows. FF loved soul jazz, garage house and hip-hop, but Jungle and drum ‘n’ bass is where he’s making his mark nowadays with his partner-in-crime MC Flipside.

Together they’ve played venues around the world including Puerto Rico, Japan and Hong Kong. Flow also produces, creating his own dub-plates. As well, the DJ recently completed a film degree in Toronto. Busy, busy, but with school done, he’s spending more time with the music.

Keep It Live is a live recording of a performance in Toronto at the Living Room just a few months ago. Now it’s in stores waiting for your ears. It just keeps on going and going and going, keeping it live and real. Great scratching, cutting and mixing throughout. This latest effort is a very tight and aural adventure. It’s high energy art from track one right to the end.

Couple that with a great MC and you have a new release worthy of sliding into your CD player. - See Magazine

This edition of the Trippin' on Energy series comes with some improvements over the first volume. For one, it's a mixed compilation. Also, Flipside steps up to the mike this time and hosts this 71-minute mix of 17 tracks, covering a spectrum of styles including house, funky breaks, jungle and techno. Tracks to look out for are Da Cool's version of Meet Her at the Love Parade, Lustral with Everytime, the '98 remix of Maestro's classic Let Your Backbone Slide, Eddie Amador's House Music and The Word Is Love by the Voices of Life.

Trippin' also features a good selection of Canadian tracks from the Stickman and Jinxx camps. Standouts include Soul Grabber Part 3, Nick Holder's remix of M1's Luv 2 Dance, Still Groovin' by Mitch Winthrop and Freaky Flow and PJ's remix of What It Takes by Choclair. This is a nice compilation, with an excellent variety of music. Don't forget to check out

- See Magazine

MC Flipside is the kind of DJ they have in Toronto, but that we don't have in Montreal. He's jump-up. And even though we've got two or three jump-up DJs here, they all declare themselves jump-up-but-cool, jump-up-but-underground, jump-up-but-slick. MC Flipside, host of an aged Energy 108 show, has none of those pretensions. He just plows along the dirty-energy track that runs from the Terry-inspired boom-bap, through breaky-house, to ragga-jungle with no stops for reputation-savers in between. And his mix, featuring Junior Sanchez, Frankie Bones, Toronto jungle stalwarts Sniper and Slip, plus sophomoric skits and too-nutty MCing, is the closest thing I've found to a good, raunchy mixed tape in a while. Those interested in lifestyle-wallpaper music, steer clear. 8/10 (Mireille Silcott)
- Montreal Mirror

This monster jam couldn't come at a better time as drum and bass has lost more than just a little lack in the luster. Same old tunes remixed to death, most of our UK D&B DJs have run dry on us in the creative department, so it comes as no surprise that it would take a Canadian to pick up the pace. Recorded live in Toronto at The Living Room for their SILK weekly on Thursdays, Freaky Flow drops a rip-roaring flurry of beats, scratching and deck tricks alongside the skilled vocal rhymes of MC Flipside. Wicked Canadian representin' with tracks by Catchin' Wreck (produced by Natural and Lush), D-Region (Jedi Records), Visionary (DJ Marcus and Nemesis), DJ Slip and a couple from Freaky Flow himself. - Klublife

"I'm proud of what Toronto has accomplished internationally. The scene has exploded," says MC Flipside, the Energy Radio and 1Groove.com radio host and DJ who constantly tours North America and countries such as Mexico and Japan with DJ partner Freaky Flow.

"I couldn't put up with the nonsense I was hearing," Flipside says of the attacks. "I couldn't deal with all the lies. I couldn't sleep, so I had to do something." Flipside's something is a seven-track CD entitled Freedom to Dance, which is being sold as a fundraising item in support of iDance. Producers such as Paranoid Jack, Robb G., St. Pete, Shine and Frankenstein have brought house, techno, trance, drum 'n' bass and hip-hop sounds together with the voices of Mel Lastman, Julian Fantino and Olivia Chow, as they've spoken of raves during city council meetings. The results are fun, funky and pointed.

"I just want people to realize there's a truth here," says Flipside. "I want people to realize we are a thriving culture, involving young, intelligent, inspired people who don't just sit and get high and go to parties. We are people with purposes. To be in your early 20s, to save money and put together a studio, for example -- to me, that's something. I mean, what kind of democracy is this? I want everyone who hears the CD or reads this to ask themselves this question."

- Eye Magazine

Cleary on the road to becoming the Canadian equivalent to MTV's DJ Scribble (minus the Cindy Margoles factor), Toronto's Flipside is a DJ/producer and MC who really knows how to multitask. When he's not DJing or accompanying Flow on tours to the far reaches of the planet, he's hosting a radio show on T-dot's FOXY 88.5. Flip recently decided to "take a break from his infectious lyrical rhyming to showcase his innovative DJ styles," and put out this mix CD, a collection of Bouge-friendly, main-room hard house tunes, heavy on the drum-roll tip, from names like Cevin Fisher, Felix da Housecat and Harry "Choo Choo" Romero.

- Montreal Mirror

House fans accustomed to their acoustic-sounding, computer-crafted music coming from a pair of Technics have no doubt been surprised by how much local 10-piece "live-house" ensemble King Sunshine sounds like a DJ. Now, after years of sporadic but sprawling club sets, the groove-laden group has finally put their music on wax.
Since founders Dave Austin (keyboards) and Roger Berman (drums) joined forces in Ottawa in university, they have been dedicated to revitalizing house through live performances -- an achievement reached only after relocating to Toronto in 1998 and ballooning to their current super size a couple of years later.

"We were heavily into funk and just getting into house music in first-year university," Berman recalls. "We started playing grooves -- wow, that was along time ago -- primarily four-on-the-floor. It started out as an acid jazz sort of thing and slowly but surely, as we got more into the music and started analyzing the music more, we started to make it a lot more clear and defined."

As the band grew in size, so did its repertoire of influences, and with a quartet of horns added to their rhythm section and vocalists, they were able to take that 4/4 beat and apply it to everything from jazz, soul and funk to Latin and techno.

Their live performances -- supporting such star DJs as Sneak, Mark Farina, Derrick Carter and their personal favourite, Theo Parrish, helped introduce them to Toronto's clubbing community, which has a tendency to be less than receptive to live music. But they've managed to win it over by emulating the DJ approach, building up their climaxes and breakdowns and mixing their songs together into one continuous 90-minute flow.

"Most bands don't try to take their listeners on any type of journey," says Berman. "It's more 'play a song, regroup, play another song.' We tailor our sets so that they mean something."

Despite the groove-oriented nature of their music, they also take pains to avoid the jam-band tag attached to fellow live-house acts like The New Deal, who attract more Phish-heads than underground clubbers.

"We were careful in our production to not have certain sections that go on too long or have five musicians just wanking -- we were pretty intellectual about the whole thing," says Austin, who writes the majority of the music, of their self-titled debut album. "We touched on a lot of different styles in the music. You're gonna listen to one song and you can't say that it's indicative of King Sunshine, which is very reflective of our live show; almost every song sounds different. It's to appeal to a lot of people, for one thing, but also those are where our interests lay."

Their biggest problem has been their size; with 10 people in the band, touring is difficult and expensive, and a local band can only play so many times before the crowds lose interest. Knowing that it would be near impossible to achieve their musical vision with fewer players, King Sunshine have simply avoided it.

But not getting on the road has also meant that they have been unable to reach beyond Toronto and find a record deal. So, with their eyes focused on the European market, they decided to record the album on their own and use it as a business card in the hopes of nailing down a distribution deal, or better.

The album -- heavy on deep house, funk and light jazz -- was recorded over the course of a year in a self-built basement studio dubbed Soul Motion and had professionals brought in only for the mastering process. "Most of the band members are pretty much perfectionists when it comes to making music, in terms of making every element on the album exactly the way we envisioned it," Berman says. "When you're playing live, things happen so quickly you can make a mistake and something could not sound so perfect but it's done, it's passed and people may not even notice. But when you're recording, you wanna make every single beat and rhythm perfect."

While laying down the songs, some of which the band have already been playing live for a couple of years, King Sunshine mixed up live and electronic percussion with digital synths and acoustic '70s-disco band instrumentation to create a sound that's not so easy to categorize.

"We try to recreate the electronic feel acoustically," says Berman. "House originally came from disco so we're just taking it full circle."

- Eye

Extended Idea might be the more appropriate header for this week's column. Last ish, the word of the week round these parts was organic. This week, we expand on the theme, continuing to keep it local and live while exploring human/electronic hybrids.

2001 was a banner year for underground dance music on several creative levels. At the heart of this has been the meeting of live and electronic, stage and studio, bands and DJs. Though this has been going on for some time, there's no doubt in my mind that the global dance music community (as stated last week) is at a crucial crossroads. The meeting of players and electronic producers is no longer about simple experimentation but is a more integrated and necessary push toward an explosion of future sounds.

A number of producers are picking up instruments and incorporating musicians and vocalists rather than straight-up sampling them from records. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of bands are performing sounds traditionally shared by DJs in dance clubs, encouraging audiences to get their groove on in a whole other context. For generations now trained to spot the Technics rather than gawk at guitars, this certainly is refreshing. Toronto has been a hotbed for such open-minded DJs, producers and bands, with live acts such as Directions, Audiophiles, Galactica Blast and last week's EP stars Mambo Urbano entertaining dance-music lovers over the past few years.

Another band performing with DJs and vocalists alike -- and blowing minds as they do -- is King Sunshine. Formed originally in 1998 by keyboardist Dave Austin, drummer Roger Berman, percussionist Lorne Lampert and bassist Marc Shapiro, the band expanded and gelled when Austin enrolled in Humber's jazz program in 2000, meeting guitarist Phil Cada and the horn section of Charlie Finlay, Steve Dyte, Joel Green and Johan Lee.

Seeing themselves as a bridge between live and electronic, jazz and dance musics, King Sunshine blend soul, funk, Latin and jazz influences into a live house experience that merges original pieces with tasteful covers of house classics. They've performed alongside DJs such as Ron Trent, Alton Miller and Theo Parrish, twice supported gospel-house vocalist Kenny Bobien and frequently brought dance-music lovers to their feet while performing with frequent, local vocal collaborators Coco Brown and Kamil and Janelle Dewhurst.

King Sunshine are talented, passionate and committed to the notion of collective, insisting on an emailed interview to bring as many opinions as possible. See you on their dancefloor.
- Eye