Bristol-born label boss, sweet rolling DJ and slick producer Collins Nemi has been jamming as Conducta since he was in his early teens. A master of garage, he would become inspired by Kaytranada to infuse more elements into the genre, creating homages to R&B, grime, funk and hip-hop within a single track.
Earlier in 2024, he called it a day for his imprint, Kiwi Rekords, believing that it had achieved its mission after a five-year run. Rather than being stuck in nostalgia, his label pushed UKG forward, gathering artists scattered in isolation into a community that took a sparse style from twenty years ago and gave it new legs. Now it's time for the genre to walk on its own.
Certainly, his set at Bass Coast showed Conducta was willing to go his own way. He did sprinkle a couple of warp-y garage tracks throughout the set, and they were funkier than a mosquito's tweeter, but he was otherwise unbound by style or era. When he approached a mix, it was nigh impossible to tell where he was going to go with it. Could have been dancehall, trance, jungle or some ineffable blend of the lot.
One of his choices injected Lil Jon into "Get Silly" by V.I.C., flipping the original rap track into a massive hard house banger beckoning the east and west coasts to, well, get silly. Lil Jon later appeared in a track that took his "Chris Rock in Da Club" interlude from Crunk Juice and almost turned it into gabber. His taste for adventure is seemingly matched only by his sense of humor.
Conducta has stated that his dream era is circa 1993-1997, and he delved into several homages to that age. Among others, he played a tweaked up version of the Chemical Brothers' big beat bomber "Hey Boy Hey Girl," put a Latin twist on Crystal Waters's house classic "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)" that pushed up its tempo and nudged the male-gaze flipping house of "Short Dick Man" by 20 Fingers into a pulsing breakbeat ditty.
Around halfway through his set, in a rare moment of consistency, he strung together a few drum and bass tracks that absolutely devastated, up there with the kind of sickness that Machinedrum and Sherelle had spun the night before. You knew it wasn't going to last long with how Conducta was selecting, though.
Referencing so much disparate music, he pulled on the common threads in their sound, and on the occasion when styles were too far apart to bridge the gap, he might slip in something like a musical cue from James Bond to smooth the particularly challenging transition. This mindfulness and skill allowed Conducta's performance to feel as though it was constantly gaining momentum throughout his hour-and-a-half set. This mix was all rise. They say it isn't humanly possible for someone to overdose on music, but this dude doubtlessly wrecked some people who were in the blast zone near the stage.