Crash.Disco!

"...First up was eighteen year old Crash. Disco! Although playing to a rather small audience, at Cardiff Arts Institute, the Bangor teens blend of frantic bleeps and stabbing synth lines had the crowd transfixed. Sometimes reminiscent of recent French House played too fast, Crash Disco’s! youthful exuberance shone through in his productions." - Wales Online

Gruff Jones, a.k.a. Crash.Disco!, has obviously impressed us enough to have a mammoth double page spread just pages before you read this. So it should come as no surprise that this EP has gathered praise like a quickening snowball down our metaphoric office hills. Just shy of 10 minutes, Crash.Disco! piles into every conceivable gap a sonic orchestra archaeologically dated somewhere between 1987 and 1994. But it’s a lot better than that sounds. It’s no longer the cultural space of Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley or Sonic The Hedgehog. It’s where overly happy, yet strangely sinister, trenchcoat wearing anti-heroes jig uncontrollably. Chezza V glows with a joyous 8-bit hysteria, Catdisco transiently echoes the more soothing side of Daft Punk, and GTFO races like a Sega wet dream. Fantastic. SMR - The Miniature Music Press

I must admit I dont know much about the man behind Crash Disco! but I do know this, he makes infectious and energetic music that does a lot more than tickle your ear drums. Gruff Jones is on the rise and his is one name you definetly want to make a mental note of. His hyperactive hybrid of electro, chip tune and thunderous rhythms are putting both his name and his talent out there. If you havent checked in to check him out, do so ASAP! - The Speakerbox Below

It is an odd concept delving into a genre you haven’t once covered before. A genre you yourself would for example not choose to listen to over perhaps your preferred choice. However, we are all a greedy armchair listener expecting to be entertained by what is placed in front of us. And we shall sit there, bellowing our opinions on what we think is good, what we think is bad and what we think is just plain ugly.

The new 3-track EP from Crash.Disco! (aka Gruff Jones) is an anomaly to this argument, and will actually cause your spineless souls to stand upright out of your filthy armchair and start dancing (providing you have a certain amount of alcohol in your system so that it can be socially acceptable).

Each track is dynamic and well-thought out. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but for fans of catchy rhythms that many people oddly start singing or humming this EP is the perfect soundtrack to a night out in a city.

“It’s not a concept EP, it’s just what I describe as really retro. It’s as if it’s like a video game soundtrack or something.”

“It’s probably just influenced by so many childhood years of playing video games.”

Jones is insistent on making this record his own and not having someone else manage the way it is broadcast.

“A few labels were after releasing it, but I’ve decided to simply self-release it, so that I can kind of do things the way I want to.”

Jones is also winning the plaudits of many respected media folk. Last year, Huw Stephens described his music as “ace techno-chip-tuned beats which are guaranteed to get even the most reliable heartbeat going wonky.”

BBC Radio Wales presenter Adam Walton labelled Crash.Disco! as having “amazing melodic instincts” and that he “makes celestially inspiring tunes that could get a drunk slug up on its foot and dancing”.

On Crash.Disco!’s facebook page, Jones uses the words ‘Electro’ and ‘Nonsense’ in the genre specification. It is difficult to find two appropriate words that underline on what you are expecting from the music before listening – so in true Underclassed Idle Ideas fashion we shall combine these two words in order to form a new genre entitled…wait for it… ‘Electro-Nonsense’.

Jokes and mediocre analogies aside, the music itself is very upbeat and the ever-changing tempos in all three songs make it more unique than many other artists trying such a similar feat.

These songs are instead blueprinted very exquisitely, proclaiming a clearly talented young musician from Bangor, North Wales.

The release date for the self-titled EP is 24th October and is available to buy from iTunes. Physical copies of the record are available at the single’s launch party at Ten Feet Tall, Cardiff on the 26th of October. www.facebook.com/crash.disco www.soundcloud.com/crashdisco
- Underclassed Idle Ideas

Electro music is a strange creature. In one sense, it’s so analogous that writing a review of an EP of the stuff seems like it might be a trivial pursuit, best left to someone like Mixmag who know the subtle differences between this massively divided genre. On the other hand, your opinion on music should always be about how the piece of music you’re hearing makes you feel – anything else is likely to be snobbery.
That in mind, reviewing Crash.Disco!’s first EP is an easy task because there’s so much feeling in the 9.6 minutes that it lasts.
Take a look at Gruff Jones. He’s barely old enough to be allowed into a nightclub and yet a short experience of his music reveals that he’s definitely not acting his shoe size. No, this North Walian manages to pack so much feeling into a throwaway genre that you can’t help but move.
Jones’ music is almost entirely comprised of Nintendo samples or Megadrive sounds and listening to it is like taking a trip back to 1990 but with infinitely more charm than those dull days.
Starting with Catdisco, Jones introduces the theme of his EP – music that makes you feel good and alive. Listening to his swelling bass line through earphones is like swimming in an ocean of noise. Less hyperactive than previous singles that he’s put out, this track from Crash.Disco! is a headnod towards the more uplifting examples of the Daft Punk back catalogue.
Then we move onto Chezza V which brings back the earliest demos/compilation contributions by this young electro artist. Pulsing synths and pounding drum kicks make for an amazing backdrop to the electronic slips and bleeps that drive the whole track onwards. It’s a shame that summer is over because this would be the perfect track to listen to at a beach party: just when you think it’s all going to mellow out, it slams back in with the same energy that it started out with.
And then it Jones takes the EP into full video game mode and cranks out GTFO as the last track on this short EP. Just imagine you’re playing Doukutsu (Cave Story) and hovering around a world shooting computer bunnies and you’ll get a pretty good idea of how this track sounds and feels.
Crash.Disco! is a brilliant electro musician. He puts interest back into a genre which can often feel full of monotonous artists who have decided that they’d like to get to know Garageband better. Gruff Jones should be encouraged to keep on creating amazing music. Go on, give him a kick start and buy his EP when it comes out on 24 October 2011. - Plastik Magazine

Whilst others his age are spending most of their weekends off their heads on WKD and Smirnoff Ice, as they become accustomed to the delights of binge drinking and bad house music, Gruff Jones, aka Crash.Disco!, 18, has spent the last year making a name for himself with his own brand of frantic electronic music.
Like Daft Punk after too many E numbers, Crash.Disco’s! music is an infectious blend of video game bleeps and driving synth lines. Put simply, it is the sound of an excited teenager making overexcited music.

But how did a teenager from Bangor of all places end up making such heady electronic music?

Gruff Jones is an unassuming figure when we meet to discuss his meteoric rise in a Cardiff pub. Quiet and noticeably polite, he has none of the hedonistic tendencies you might expect from someone making such a big noise in the electronic scene. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt with a shaggy mop, Gruff looks the image of the classic muso teenager.

Sitting down to discuss the origins of Gruff’s infatuation with music, it emerges that a case full of his dad’s old funk records was the catalyst for his interest in something a little more leftfield.

“I’d been playing drums for a while in metal bands and then I came across a case of my dad’s old funk vinyl’s. There were no labels on any of them so I don’t know what I was listening to but they were a big influence on me.”

From there, Gruff graduated to house music, consuming anything from the Ed Banger stable with an unquenchable thirst. His knowledge of French house music made him somewhat of an anomaly in small town North Wales, but did land him the gig of DJ at Bangor students union.

“I was djing at the students union for a while, but the people who ran the club found out I was only 17, so that got cut short. I had a massive strop about for a while, but then decided I might as well try my hand at making some music.”

And giving “making some music” a go certainly worked out for Gruff. In the space of a year Gruff has taken his Crash.Disco! moniker from his Bangor bedroom to Huw Stephen’s playlist on Radio 1 and landed himself a coveted slot at the fringe festival for Radio 1’s big weekend in Bangor.

“The first tune I put up on Myspace started getting played by Lisa Gwilliam’s on BBC Radio Cymru. The producer, Gareth Iuaen was really helpful and passed it on to Huw Stephens. The next thing I knew it was getting played on Radio 1!” explains Gruff, clearly excited by his early success and sheer good luck.

From there Gruff landed the slot at the Big Weekend, a nerve wracking setting for a debut live outing by anyone’s standards.

“I thought I’d played really badly, but Bethan Elfyn and Huw Stephens told me I’d played a great set,” says Gruff, with the memory clearly still fresh in his mind.

With a gig in Camden and taking top spot in the Maes B competition as part of the National Eisteddfod it has certainly been a whirlwind year for Crash.Disco!

With new releases in the pipeline and his live show taking shape, 2011 could be the year Crash.Disco! comes of age in more ways than one. - Journal of Plastik