Part of the beauty of being a part of a merry band of musical scoundrels as we are is that you can stake your trousers on the fact that if there’s one thing we do well here, its diversity.  As a beloved reader of TRUANTS, (and we do love you, you know – real, actual love) week in week out, chunk after wedge after dollop after generous slice of gloriously varied musical freshness is brought forth with love and passion by the Truancy pixies, and delivered to you with a skip in our step and a song in our hearts. Sometimes what’s on offer is dark and moody; sometimes it’s hauntingly beautiful; sometimes it’s loud and rowdy and hands-in-the-air euphoric; sometimes it’s achingly cool and a bit sexy. Me; more often than not my contributions tend to stray onto the loud and rowdy side, a unashamed purveyor of 808 hand-claps, frivolous bounce and all things shiny and effervescent, designed to elicit wide grins and smash dancefloors to smithereens…this I cannot deny. Hey, it’s all about the juxtaposition of light and shade, right?

Sometimes, however, we have to challenge our tastes. Sometimes it becomes necessary to broaden ones horizons, shun our regular desires, reject the known and the reassuringly habitual and thus shape oneself into a more well rounded individual; to take a route down a shadier path less travelled now and again, expose ourselves to altogether more unfamiliar sensations that fire you out of your comfort zone and into the wilds of the unknown. Sometimes, reader, we need to ignore our instincts and our desires and open ourselves up to life, to the universe, to each other, and strip ourselves down to the raw self and rebuild again in order to really grow and develop as citizens and consumers of the arts.

Luckily for you, the day for challenging oneself is not today. So it is without further ado that I hereby studiously ignore all this hand-wringingly earnest advice, and do what I do best: present to you a generous slab of jaunty future-disco house from Brooklyn DJ and producer Ashley Jones, aka Treasure Fingers. For the past 2 years TF has been cropping up on an absolute raft of infectious remixes and his own original tracks, having caught the attention of needs-no-introduction Fool’s Gold records under whom his first EP Cross The Dancefloor was released.  Hold your horses though – I said hold them, dammit! – don’t be fooled into thinking we’re dealing with a new kid on the block here, our guy has racked up over a decade of international club experience and studio chops as part of the beloved drum & bass group, Evol Intent. Yet as Treasure Fingers, he’s found a way to fuse his diverse influences and deep history into a signature sound of party-ready drum breaks, gritty synth melodies and irresistibly catchy disco-tinged hooks and vocals with just the right amount of cut-up fizz….a sound that I daresay we will all be hearing a hell of a lot more of.

The track I’m rolling in with today, Lift Me, first came to my attention after its inclusion A-Trak & Armand Van Heldens’s triumphant Duck Sauce Mixmag mixtape earlier this year, and I’m delighted it’s now seeing the light of day as a full release on Defected this week.

[wpaudio url=”http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11615889/Treasure%20Fingers%20-%20Lift%20Me.mp3″ text=”TREASURE FINGERS – LIFT ME” dl=”0″]

Keep it real. Be true. We’ll do the challenge another day.