Line-up

Headliner
Dusky Last time in Toronto: 3 years ago

Venue

Standard Time

165 Geary Avenue, M6H 2B8, Toronto, ON, Canada

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Dusky biography

Electronic Dance Music takes many forms, including Dusky, an electronic dance music duo from London made up of Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman.

Having come together to create music in 2011, the duo has released works on a variety of labels including Anjunadeep, Dogmatick Records and Naked Naked. They established their own label, ’17 Steps’ in July 2014, releasing the EP, “Love Taking Over”. They have honed a distinct style of techno music, incorporating influences from classical and jazz, and obscure electronica music. Their genre doesn’t discriminate, crossing over into various ventures, and bending their genre throughout their sound. They have been championed by BBC Radio 1 Alumnus Pete Tong and managed to earned themselves a place on an ‘album of the year’ chart in 2011. Rob Da Bank and Zane Lowe played them on BBC Radio 1 too.

It was the band’s track ”Careless” that reached number 1 on the Beatport chart and held on to the spot for the next three weeks. In 2014, along with the launch of their very own label ’17 Steps’, the tracks were played on Radio 1 by Annie Mac.

They have earned a reputation as being a live techno act too, having played at XOYO and Fabric, two of London’s most prestigious clubs. They also earned a residency at Ibiza’s ‘We Love…Sundays at Space’. Over the years, they have landed sets at festivals including Glastonbury, Pukkelpop and Electric Daisy Carnival.

In 2014 they released the highly anticipated “9T8” on School Records.

Live reviews

Techno as a whole seems to be a difficult genre to comprehend. On the one side we have the enormous party jams that can only really be stomached in a dark room filled with people raving so hard they could cause some serious harm with a single limb. On the other we have the austere, impenetrable head music that makes Phillip Glass at his most concrete sound like Oasis. It’s one of the very, very few genres of music around where the extremes of the genre are the most well-known. What better examples of this are there than Tomorrowland being one of the world’s largest music festivals the same year that Aphex Twin releases a top ten album the world over? However, London based duo Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman, otherwise known as Dusky, prove that the two extremes can be put harmoniously together in their live sets. Yes, the music draws influence from and contains samples from the likes of Jazz, Classical and avant-garde Electronica but that doesn’t mean that you can’t dance to it like an absolute maniac. In fact quite the opposite, the effect of such strange music being so danceable is unlike few others in the world of electronic music. Techno is a difficult genre to comprehend but so are most genres when you think about it, Techno just needs more artists like Dusky, who can bring together the best of both extremes and give everyone a show to remember because of it. Highly recommended.

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