WHO ARE THE GANG OF TWO?

Andycapp & Rod (Todd) Skimmins are two DJ’s, record collectors and all around music lovers who between share over 30 years worth of musical knowledge between them. Prior to 2005 both Andy and Todd had played separately at numerous residencies since the early 90’s and traveled all over Canada as guests at various venues and clubs throughout the country. It wasn’t until both DJ’s decided to take up residency in Toronto that the Gang Of Two formed. At this point they had explored many genres starting with underground hip-hop, soul, jazz, and funk and then experimenting with leftfield house, disco, electro, and post-punk in their DJ sets. Tired of nights with crowds who were used to only hearing only one genre of music all night long they decided to push for something different and exciting, something that would push the club experience forward in a different yet familiar direction. This is how BANG THE PARTY was born.

BANG THE PARTY is a return to the ideals of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s New York scene: a time when pop, art, and dance music had not yet been divided and when disco was in bed with everything that moved. Not the disco most remember, John Travolta in that gleaming white suit but the disco that embraced any groove or bass heavy music- be it Sister Sledge, A Certain Ratio, or Arthur Russell: an amalgamation of false starts, wobbly rhythms, and glued together experiments.

At the centre of BANG THE PARTY is the ideal of the outsider: someone who is different, maybe a rebel who tries to exist outside the norm, an individual or group who tries to push the boundaries. We start with embracing the Tropicalia movement from Brazil of the late 60’s and early 70’s which established a new attitude that goes beyond traditional Brazilian music with an edge that gets mashed with psychedelia and a funky otherness that reigns supreme in ass-shaking mindbenders from the likes of Gilberto Gil, Jorge Ben, or Gal Costa. From here we bring into the fold the pioneers of the post punk dance movement who created the little known subgenre of punk funk: not quite funk, but its funky, full of slap bass, slashing guitar riffs and loads of percussion. It’s almost like a third-generation Xerox copy of funk: think of Talking Heads, Blondie, New Order, or Dinosaur L. This new wave of No Wave connected the dots between rock, disco, punk, funk, electro, and especially rap. The Bronx is where early hip-hop grew out of a combination of disco and funk breaks alongside soundsytem culture first brought to the New York block party jams of the first hip-hop DJ, Kool Herc and made popular by the likes of Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa who pioneered the electro scene in America considerably influenced by Kraftwerk and the tracks made from all over the place including Miami, Germany, Italy, and London.

The synth sound that formed the basis of electro continued to influence underground music. On one side of the fence, electro left its mark on New Wave music, but relative to the sound of BANG THE PARTY was the influence it had on black music, which spawned boogie and early house on the other side. This influence continues today and can be heard in the sounds of pioneers like Basement Jaxx, Daft Punk, Herbert, Maurice Fulton and LCD Soundsytem. These are artists who cleverly layer minimalistic rhythmic patterns over one-note bass lines and repetitive vocals to create a sound that still sounds refreshingly futuristic and at the same time very retro.

And so THE GANG OF TWO have set out to greatly broaden the rules of what dance music could be and create an environment in which glamour, unpretentiousness, excitement, and hedonism can be expressed through the epiphany of music. This is not only for other DJ’s and music lovers. Andy and Todd run with likes of local promoters, bands, filmmakers, graffiti artists, dancers, painters, and performance artists who together convey a sense of viable community, one in which the sharing and development of ideas takes precedent over trivial things