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The Freestylers are the dancefloor sensation of the new millennium, a fast moving, electro-rocking monster movie that is going to hit your house like a tidal wave, and wash all your preconceptions out of the door.
When they play live, there’s up to twelve of them on the stage alone, guitars and a full rhythm section, DJ Jay-Rock, crowd pleasers MC Tenor Fly, MC Navigator and new vocalist Valerie M, a breathtaking whirl of sound and vision which leaves the audience as exhausted as the band. In fact, the dance is almost as important to the Freestylers as the music, and while break beats have been threatening to return to the dancefloor for years, the Freestylers are the first band to actually do something about it and were promptly proclaimed Best Band at the 1998 Muzik Magazine Awards.
On record, too, the Freestylers attack your feet first, as the world discovered when the band’s first album, We Rock Hard, hit the rocks. A blast of sheer sonic exuberance nailed to the phattest beats and rhythms around, "We Rock Hard" has already been proclaimed one of the dying century’s most dazzling, dizzying explosions, 13 songs and one long party and 500,000 sales later the band are about to drop their stunning new Album.
Freestylers producers Aston Harvey and Matt Cantor got together in 1993, through talking about the music they were into - electro, breakbeats, Afrika Bambaataa and the whole old school hip hop culture. But it wasn’t long before they took their obsessions into the studio, running off what would eventually become the Freestylers’ first U.K. single, "Drop The Boom" -; initially released on the small Street Plastic label pre- Freskanova. Like Matt says, "we plunder samples like no man's business.". "We’re into really instant music," says Aston. "Too many dance artists are making jazz albums, because they feel it’s the mature thing to do." And the upshot of that is - "there are plenty of great home listening albums. But not enough proper party ones." And for the Freestylers, proper parties are what it's all about. "A lot of the stuff the media will hype about, I don’t personally think rocks the dancefloor," Matt continues.
The Freestylers took off fast on the up and coming Freskanova label. The Uprock EP, and the FSUK2 remix compilation for the Ministry Of Sound have kept British dancefloors spinning; in America, "AK48," a retitled version of "Drop The Boom," became the hottest thing to hit the break circuit in years. By the time the Freestylers appeared on MTV’s PartyZone last summer, they had cut through the club scene’s traditional polarity like a cheesewire, and brought the world flooding to the Freestylers’ door. The boys took the UK summer festival scene by storm.
Grooverider, the Dub Pistols and Robbie Hardkiss have all turned in remixes for the US version of the UK chart topper "B-Boy Stance"; this was the first single on the US agenda. "Hip hop heads come to see us," Aston says, "clubby people, reggae people... it’s quite mad, really, two funky white boys bring all these people together. But people can see what we’re doing, and we're not selling out."