We know you all love MySpace Trawl as much as a fat person loves their cake, so get ready to tuck in to this week’s musical feast as we here at hecklerspray deliver you the gourmet first class musical treats, whilst ignoring the musical equivalents of the turkey twizzler. Oh how Jamie Oliver likes us. 

Last week we picked the surface of the world of dance music. As we subtly mentioned, this particular genre of music seems to have been forgotten about, which is a crying shame. There’s more to it than the stuff you hear your average chav playing in their blinged out Vauxhall Astra at 2am in the morning when you're just trying to get to sleep, you know. As we discovered last week with Emmet, if done correctly you can have anyone getting down and funky with some kick-ass songs. But wait. Stop the press! Not all music remotely classed as 'dance' has to be fast and energetic. It can also come in many various formats, as we will now discover with this week's Trawl find, Dosh. 

Hopefully, if your Dosh MySpace profile loads like ours did, you should be listening to the track called Naoise (no we didn’t spell it wrong) first, and straight away you get the sense of something that has been carefully nurtured by its creator. The opening drums sound like they've been recorded and then cut up to give the effect of something hitting you in all sorts of different directions. Soft melodies lie perfectly underneath these drumbeats, giving the impression of a song that would be best enjoyed alone in a room with all the lights turned down low. A splash of voices give Naoise a humanised feel, and help us imagine that this is something that has been crafted, not just banged away at a computer. 

Though with Dosh, we'd be confused to label him exclusively as a dance artist. Whilst the beats on the records sound like they have been created either on a computer or on some kind of drum machine, Dosh is a trained drummer and often enjoys mixing the two together. Or in a lot of cases, recording his drumming sessions as live and then fiddling around with them in various software programmes to give it that distorted and lo-fi feel to it. This practice seems evident in the track Rock It To The Next Episode where, once again, we hear a light pattering of drumming underneath a background of subtle noisescape of synths and melodies. 

The formula of using drum, piano and keyboard has been one which has seemingly worked for Dosh, with a career spanning several years and a fanbase of folks who are hungry for this sort of music and are happy to lap it up. But October sees the release of a new album from Dosh entitled The Lost Take. In his own words:

“The Lost Take reimagines Dosh as the full band he's always wanted to be. The Lost Take offers miniature opuses made from live improv inspired by raw, written instrumentation… Guitar, saxophone, bass, violin, clarinet and pedal steel lend a hand courtesy of a guest-cast featuring Andrew Bird as well as members of Tapes 'n Tapes, Happy Apple & Fog.”

In a nutshell, the trademark Dosh sound is going to be expanded to feature more instruments to give the feel that a whole band has made the album, instead of just one person. With a variety of different instruments, it should certainly make for interesting listening when it drops in all good – and bad record – shops. Whilst our loyal American hecklers will get to enjoy it on the 17 October, it seems like the UK, as usual, will have to lag around and wait for a release date, as currently there isn't one available. And they wonder why downloading music on the internet is so rife!

To add to our sulk, Dosh has only got tour dates announced, so far in America too. The live shows he puts on are another reason to love Dosh. Instead of using a laptop to play pre-recorded samples, you’ll be ale to see him drum away and play keyboards. Not at the same time we presume – maybe he uses magic or a sampler or something. But don’t worry about that, go see him! Do it for us.

Oh, and if you wondering, the name Dosh comes from… his surname. Dosh's full name is Martin Dosh. Amazing or what?

The Dosh MySpace Page

[story by Matthew Laidlow]