BEST OF 2009: Mark Knight & D Ramirez vs. Underworld - Downpipe

It's been a huge year for dance music. Over the next ten days we're going to look back at the largest tracks of 2009, as featured on Large Weekend.

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What a tune! This got my heart racing at eight-thirty in the morning. If you were a new-comer to the dance music world and needed an example of what's so exciting about this genre, I'd suggest Downpipe as a starting point. Brit musician Mark Knight teams with Brit DJ D Ramirez to produce a very special track indeed. There's also a vocal version circulating featuring Karl Hyde (one half of the band Underworld). A massively infectious synth motif builds excitement from start to end as the collaborative talents involved create an all-consuming intensity that's extremely powerful. Just when things can't get better a new melodic break is introduced (3:03). Here, a minor-key melody builds crowd hysteria as strings and electronic sonic crescendos take us to a floor-exploding reintroduction of the percussion. There's a competency to the composition here that's so rare, so perfectly arranged and so beautifully produced that it would be near impossible to improve upon this work. A digital interpretation of ferocity from obvious masters of the genre.

rating: *****
url: www.myspace.com/dramirezmusic
url: www.myspace.com/djmarkknight
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