![]() Boogie binds take songs like “Treacle” into a half-motion mining proto-house ideas, I-Level was unknowingly stumbling too. Updating “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” for the streets of Brixton, to return to the beginning, “Minefield” should have been a proper hit. Never entirely “adult” I-Level has that in-between feeling of young lads and gals navigating through equal measures of partying, wilding, and loving. It certainly tries to speak of the unease even casual dalliances must have been for youths back then. What strikes me about I-Level’s debut is how melancholic it feels. ![]() Luckily, as Joe was the owner of his own small recording studio, I-Level were free to explore how to exactly do all this new fusion, far from the label’s hand. You name it, everything from dancehall, post-disco, electro, new wave, and post-punk were styles keyed in by this trio who seemed more in tune with the music heard on the back streets of England than on in America’s shores. I-Level’s self-titled debut is fascinating because it gives you an above ground view of the various styles younger Brits were trying to digest and fuse into R&B and to make it decidedly of their own kind. Together, they’d join forces as I-Level and create a demo tape of “Give Me”, which would become their first single and be used to sign them to the largely R&B-free Virgin Records label. ![]() Then, a short stint in Spain and in England somehow brought him into contact with a young singer from Sierra Leone, Sam Jones, who was fronting a reggae band called Brimstone with keyboardist Duncan Bridgeman. Mixing punk, funk, and jazz, initially he created a group called Shake Shake! to create dance punk music in the vein of Gang of Four. Raised on Jazz Rock, the Weather Report, latin music, and “alternative” things published in Melody Maker, Joe struggled to find musicians who were willing to create the kind of music he was after. ![]() I-Level’s self-titled debut is one of my favorites in doing so, not just for what it sounds like, but how it did it (as mercurial as their short career was).īefore there was such a band called I-Level, there was a decidedly talented Polish-English musician called Joe Dworniak. ![]() Before Loose Ends, The System, Soul II Soul, and the Soul Connection crew did their thing, there had to be some groups willing to stuck their necks out to advance a decidedly British-kind of modern soul music. Trying to go for their third, hit single, with a slightly innocent tongue-in-cheek song, who knew that it could have jumpstarted the end to such a trailblazing crew. Thatcher’s England must have been a messed up time to grow up in, right? At the height of her pull, Essex group, I-Level, released a wonderfully romantic, uptempo electronic-R&B single called “Minefield” near after England’s ridiculous war with Argentina and promptly got banned from the radio. ![]()
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