Late in 2006 Trevor Jackson's Output label, just shy of 100 releases, shut up shop and ceased trading in a whirl of rumour and speculation. I had been an avid fan of the label and collected virtually every release in all their different formats in the 10 years it had been active. As a tribute to the passing of one of the greats I put together a selection of my favourite moments from the back catalogue which ended up turning into a three hour marathon that was broadcast over the course of a couple of months on the radio show.

To also pay homage to the hand screened promo 12" put out with over half the releases I made a limited set of CDs with printed discs that joined up with the outer cover to form the title of each mix.

There are only five sets of these with Trevor Jackson and Kieran Hebden of Fridge/Four Tet both having a set as well as Mark E from Ireallylovemusic

Occasionally on the Solid Steel radio show I present another part of an ongoing series I call the Kraftwerk Kover Kollection. Each mix is an hour long collection of cover versions, tributes and songs that heavily sample the German four piece.

After the luke-warm reception of the 'Electric Cafe' album in 1986 it was another 14 years before they released anything new and even then Expo 2000' sounded like a rework of 'Musique Non-Stop' ('The Mix' doesn't really count in my book). During these years Electro, Hip Hop, House, Techno and Ambient happened amongst other things, all of which owed some form of debt to Kraftwerk. Such is their influence and appeal that, over the years, albums of cover versions have appeared in place of any new Kling Klang product to fill the public's need for more perfect 'robot pop' as Ralf Hutter once called it. As well as these, many high profile bands have added a song here or there to albums in tribute or interpolated Kraftwerk's melodies into their own compositions (ie: Coldplay's 'Talk' single).

When I started seriously researching these cover versions, I couldn’t quite believe how many there were and how diverse the bands were who were doing them. I’ve now completed my 8th Kover Kollection mix, each with an average of 35 tracks in it, that’s 280 covers and they’re just the good / weird ones that I liked enough to use. For every eastern European rendition on woodblocks there are five pumping euro trance versions that sound horrible. What I try to do is filter the best of these and find the weirdest, most leftfield covers because Kraftwerk’s songs are so simple that it seems they can be transposed into nearly any style you can think of. Balanese, gamelan, country, death metal, classical, rockabilly, even played by an orchestra of instruments made entirely of vegetables (see part 2 for this one). There seems to be no end to their influence over today’s music makers.

On January 18th 2004, Strictly Kev premiered the original 'Raiding The 20th Century' on XFM's 'The Remix' show in London. It was a 40 minute attempt to catalogue the history of cut up music - be it avant garde tape manipulation, turntable megamixes or bastard pop mash ups. It rapidly spread throughout the web and managed to cause a full scale server crash on Boomselection.info and ninjatune.net when they hosted it due to the volume of net traffic.

Shortly afterwards he read Paul Morley's recently published book 'Words & Music' and was amazed that certain chapters mirrored parts of his mix. Apart from the fact that the title, 'Raiding the 20th Century' was coined by Morley 20 years before for a future Art of Noise project, he also featured Alvin Lucier, who - purely by chance - was sampled on the opening track of the mix.

Kev decided to expand his idea to make the definitive document on cut up music including many other parts, omitted by the constraints of the original radio session. After months of further research he tracked Morley down and they recorded passages from 'Words & Music' specially for this mix in an attempt tomarry the two and finish something that neither of them actually started. A year to the day of the original airing, the newly expanded version is ready."

The definitive, extended version with specially recorded spoken sections by Paul Morley.

For full track listing see the ubuweb page.

39 minute version originally made for XFM's The Remix Superchunk section. An attempt to compress the history of the cut up into 40 minutes. Transmitted 18/01/04.

I wanted to do something really special for this, being a big fan of the group. There was a lot of secrecy surrounding this record and I was given a copy of the album just before the release. I rushed through it in a weekend to make the deadline for the radio show so that this could be out the week it was released.

As a thank you I made 10 copies in a foldout hexagon sleeve, each with a different sticker inside and a 3″ CD containing the mix. I sent four to Mike & Marcus, two to Warp and kept four for myself.

the Simon Says/Addams Family routine, the inclusion of Lorez Alexandra, 10cc and Vangelis but these were all refused or the licenses unobtainable.

Unfortunately the CD was released on Sept 22nd 2001, ten days after 9/11 and we had DJ Vadim’s ‘the Terrorist” acappella in the mix. Being that it would have been highly inappropriate to include it in a radio broadcast at the time, it was removed and a compilation of excerpts from various interviews we had given were inserted over ‘Ug’. PC had recorded lots of us doing simultaneous interviews over speaker phone only a few weeks earlier so I chopped them up and replaced the offending acappella at the 11th hour.

There was also another Director’s Cut, again 2 hours long, that we prepared for the London Xpress show on XFM which was subtly different again with variations on some mixes. Also an online Groovetech session that DK and I did which was us performing the ‘live’ version of the mix that we toured later, including parts of this version and more.

Come the time of the mix CD’s release we compiled a 2 hour ‘Director’s Cut’ of music that we had discarded, mixes that we liked but didn’t make the grade and tracks we couldn’t license. We included Ollie Teeba’s contribution (from Jazzy Jay to The Herbalier’s own Shocker Zulu) as it was originally integral to the mix and the original mix ending (from Steve miller to Starvue). For my money there are sections here that would have made the version we finally released even better,