I don’t remember half the tracks on this mix save for the Journeyman, Coldcut and Attica Blues tunes. Journeyman’s ‘Rusty Beats’ is SO heavy, I think that was from his second album on Ntone, I have no idea who 2nd Gen is so had to look it up, it was from an EP on Flo (Flo 001 no less) called ‘Noise Sculptures’, seems he signed to Novamute the next year. The Override track came out on Ntone and was an alias of Tom ‘Klute’ Withers and you can hear that Photek / Bukem influence. I have Aquasky ‘Opaque’ down as the track midway through the mix, maybe something from the LP ‘Orange Dust’ that I may have had a promo of with no titles. The Animals on Wheels track is hard as nails too, this was from a 10” EP on the iLL label.

How scary / familiar does the Jello Biafra rant over Coldcut sound now? Who knew 23 years ago? Jello’s inclusion of course comes from the spoken word extract we used on the Coldcut Journey’s By DJ mix a couple of years before. Matt & Jon thought it would be good to remake it with Jello for real and one day he arrived at Ninja HQ in London Bridge. I was in upstairs with Jon Voda, in the mastering suite on his floor, working on the Coldcut/Grandmaster Flash collaboration track I think and Jello appeared at the door as he was to use the vocal booth to record his part. Jon introduced me, ’this is Strictly Kev, from DJ Food’. ‘From DJ Food or IS DJ Food?’ boomed Jello in his distinctive west coast drawl. And that’s my meeting Jello Biafra story…

Part 4 next week….

Track list:
Journeyman – Rusty Beats
2nd Gen – Statutory Angels
Override – Hungry
Aquasky – Orange Dust
Animals on Wheels – F.Y.A.
Coldcut – Every Home A Prison
Attica Blues – Enter

Rifling through tapes for this week’s upload I found this mid ’97 show which came in 4 parts. Part 1 was actually an excellent Autechre radio mix that was a promo for ‘Chiastic Slide’ but which they allowed us to air. If you want to assemble a full show then it’s listed on Discogs – https://www.discogs.com/Autechre-Radio-Mix/release/17922

Part 2’s track listing caught my eye though because the second track is M.F. Doom‘s debut single on Fondle ‘Em records, a Scooby Doo-sampling minor classic that first bought his new alias to the world, post-KMD.

Obviously with his shock passing announced in the closing hours of 2020 I thought it would be a little nod to include this set. I see these are now going for an insane amount on Discogs, not that my copies are for sale. His ‘Operation Doomsday’ album is a bonafide classic and would include a re-recorded version of this track.

The bulk of this mix though is taken up with the full length ‘invisibl skratch piklz vs da klams uv deth’ turntable routine from Q-Bert, Shortkut and Mixmaster Mike that blew everyone away when it debuted and won them the team title in the DMC championships in the mid 90s. The Underdog remixes Massive Attack and Steinski’s collaboration with Coldcut, ‘I’m Wild About That Thing’, is featured from their ‘Let Us Play’ album which dropped around this time. I probably picked the Doom and Piklz 12”s up in the States on tour with them that summer. I have to admit, the mix is pretty pedestrian but the content is great.

Part 3 next week…

Track list:
Pt.1
Autechre    Radio mix (Not featured here)

Pt.2
The Invisibl Skratch Piklz    vs da Klams uv Deth
M.F. Doom – Hey!
Massive Attack    – Rising Son (Underdog mix)
Coldcut – I’m Wild About That Thing

Special request upload for Anton Kibeshev: an early 1999 mix that was part of a show with Funki Porcini on Solid Steel although, sadly, the Funki Porcini part is missing as he must have recorded it elsewhere. I transferred these mixes from a DAT earlier in the year but part of the first mix is missing, there was something else on the tape recorded over it (part of an Autechre live set I think). It’s only the first track and a half but it bought the first mix – titled ‘Bendy Uptempo Funk’ – in at 24 minutes so I thought I’d couple it up with the second set – ‘The Rocket’ to make it to nearly an hour. Next week is Xmas so I’ll dig out something suitably themed.

There’s a lot here that I don’t recall, most of it would have been current buys/releases and I always seem to recall that the end of the 90s was a bit patchy after the yearly new genres that the rest of the decade had sprung on us. There’s plenty to digest here though, First Born ‘The Mood Club’ still gets plays out from a great little 7” with a variety-speed mix on the B side., Klute’s ‘Blood Rich’ has aged well, The Fantastic Plastic Machine remix was from a Japanese remix album of anime soundtracks I think.

310’s ‘Prague Rock’ EP is something I return to annually, 5 tracks of classic British Prog Rock chopped and sliced into polyrhythmic soundscapes on the Leaf label, all totally illegal samples from giants like Yes, King Crimson and Pink Floyd. It’s fantastic, every track a winner and I’ve never heard anything else come close aside from some early DJ Shadow productions. The record is easy to find and sells for around £2 on Discogs and was only ever a promo because of the samples. ‘The Voice of Britain’ is a Genesis cut up and the video on YouTube just adds to the weirdness, honestly, this is one of my all time favourite sample records ever, still sounds fresh 21 years later and 310’s own productions are nothing to be sniffed at either, amazing skills. You can hear and download it for free via their site including 2 remixes not on the 12”

‘Trama Nella Metropoli’ is one of the only old tracks here but it was new to me via a compilation that the Karminisky Experience Inc had given to me of old I Marc 4 tracks, this was one of the first legal library compilations out there and they still drop this track to this day. Apologies for my abstract / awful scratching into Q-Bert’s ‘Redworm’, I was so into this kind of turntablism in the mid to late 90s, unfortunately this kind of 100% purism rarely formed into anything other than a technically impressive but rather mediocre arrangement. Tracks like ‘Bear Witness’ were a far better showcases of exceptional Q-bert’s skills.

Part 2 is called ‘The Rocket’ – I have absolutely no idea why. Dodo kicks it off who was a quirky producer affiliated with the Digidub collective for a while I think who seemed to make a couple of singles and an album and then disappear. Roots Manuva’s excellent ‘Motion 5000’ sounds so good, loved this era of Rodney’s music but this Black Dog track I have no memory of. Tom Tyler made some great records for D C Recordings for a while and it looked like he was going to go the same way as The Cinematic Orchestra but it seems like he’s not made a record for 15 years according to Discogs. DJ Vadim finishes things off with the first single from his then second album which reminds me of a story connected to this date.

Valentine’s Day 1999 – I was living in the basement of a converted mental hospital in Camberwell, sharing with The Herbaliser’s Ollie Teeba and had gone to Sunday dinner with my girlfriend at her parents’ place in South West London. Midway through the afternoon her dad burst into the room, ‘It’s Ollie on the phone, you’ve been burgled, they’ve taken everything’, he deadpanned. Just like that, I didn’t know whether to be shocked at the message or his directness, it was a terrible piece of news to receive so we drove back to South East London to find that they hadn’t actually taken everything but had had a good root around and made off with a fair bit.

My decks and mixer went, that was gutting, not only because I needed them but because they were my first Technics, bought with money my late grandmother had left me when I first came to London. As a student, Technics were out of my price range and I wasn’t so foolish as to spend my grant on them and live off toast for the rest of the year. I wanted the money she left me to mean something so invested it in a pair of secondhand decks as I knew they would repay themselves several times over. One of them had been customised too with a black and yellow reverse switch, so if you ever come across a 1210 with an extra switch near the on/off button then it was probably mine. So this mix here is the last one made on my original turntables.

My Mac computer, monitor (one of the super heavy blocks, pre-iMac), money and a camera also went. Luckily I had an internal door lock on my room so they couldn’t actually get into the rest of the flat so Ollie’s room escaped untouched but my first thought was the work that was on the computer. One of the projects was the artwork for this Vadim single and forthcoming album as well as early designs for The Herbaliser’s ‘Very Mercenary’ LP. Another thing was an external drive under the table that had all my work for the ‘Kaleidoscope’ LP so far on it, luckily they’d ripped the wires out and left it, just taking the monitor and tower. That was an unhappy Valentine’s Day.

I’ve not included the ‘Unreleased Chicago Connection’ set as it was fairly minimal and was mainly taken up with Bundy K Brown‘s 18 minute Ariel M remix, all the material came from a DAT he sent me at this time when we were working on ‘Full Bleed’ for the aforementioned DJ Food album. The Chicago Underground Trio track has long since come out although I’m not sure if the Red Red Meat track ever made it.

Part 1 – Bendy Uptempo Funk
The Isolationist – Intro (from original tracklist, missing here)
Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra – Daunerfisch
Klute – Blood Rich
Firstborn – The Mood Club
Fantastic Plastic Machine – Theme From Lupin the 3rd (FPM Reconstruction mix)
310 – The Voice of Britain
I Marc 4 – Trama Nella Metropoli
Q-Bert – Redworm

Part 2 – The Rocket
Dodo – Iridium
Ian Simmonds – N.V.Y.
Third Eye Foundaion – Fear Of A Wack pPlanet
Roots Manuva – Motion 5000
The Black Dog – Babylon (Blue mix)
Tom Tyler – Swing Children
DJ Vadim – Friction

It seems apt to kick off with UNKLE’s Silver Apples-sampling ‘Rock On’ seeing as Simeon Cox passed away a few months back. DJs were catching onto krautrock, moog, library and psychedelia by the end of the 90s as new avenues from the by this time well-depleted soul, funk and jazz sample staples of much hip and trip hop. London was awash with bootlegs from the US and Italy of all sorts throughout that decade with many spurious compilations appearing laden with choice treats plucked from closely guarded digger’s secrets, sometimes with fake names. I think I chanced upon a boot of the first Silver Apples album around this time, the originals were out of my prices range but no matter, the music was there and this was still before sites offering copious such treasures for free download. In a way, the piracy of the physical form was killed by mp3s and the like in the Wild West Web of the 00s although there were still some doing the respectable thing and licensing library compilations like Jonny Trunk, Martin Green and Mark B.

Of the tracks here, only UNKLE, David Holmes and Red Snapper still seem to be active, The Sons of Silence were an interesting group on the Leaf label who put out a great cut up promo 12” with a B side called ‘The Golden Age of Men’s Music’, you can find it very cheap and it samples some very big names as well as another mysterious 12” called Black Helicopters which cuts up Led Zeppelin and Kenneth Williams. Cartel Productions I’d completely forgotten about, this was from a Clear Records side label called REEL Discs and sounds very like Kirk Degiorgio to me but is actually Dave Kempston aka Clatterbox. The Trolley Dollies was something to do with DJ Harvey and samples Mort Garson’s ‘Hair Pieces’ extensively I think. At the time he was doing his Black Cock re-edit boots with Kraftwerk and Dick Hymen cut ups that were big in clubs. Not sure what Buddy Rich and Tom Jones were doing in here, probably big club records at the time, Rich having been sampled by All Seeing I and Jones having a nice breakdown. David Holmes remixes Red Snapper to finish, pre-empting his later alias, The Free Association, with all manner of psychedelia, he must have done his Essential Mix around this time where he surprised everyone by pulling out a crate of funk, rock and psych instead of the techno he was known for.

NB: – the DAT and box pictured above isn’t the same one that this session came from, I did two separate shows with Riz from Neotropic and, although this was one of them, the other is on the DAT pictured. I’m 99% certain the date on this show is correct.

Track list:
U.N.K.L.E. – Rock On (Nutcracker mix)
Depth Charge – Romario (Rio Percussion Unit mix)
Sons of Silence – Vibra Slap (Ronnie & Clyde mix)
Cartel Productions – Park Central
The Trolly Dollies – Spacecake
Buddy Rich – The Beat Goes On
Tom Jones – Looking Out My Window
Red Snapper  – Bogeyman (David Holmes remix)

This is an odd set although I’m enjoying discovering some forgotten gems in these end of the 90s sets recently. The track list was labeled ‘Strictly’s Home Economix’ which suggests (to my mix-titling logic) that it was recorded at home. It came off a DAT originally and has none of the Solid Steel jingles or chat on it so bears out this theory and the levels are all over the place which also suggests that it was recorded straight to portable a DAT player that I had around the end of the 90s.

When we recorded sets at KISS or the Ahead of Our Time studio there would always be someone on hand to watch the desk levels and even things out or the signal would go through some sort of limiter. Some of the mixes here are pretty slack too so I wasn’t yet into the mix/edit stage of my Solid Steel sets that I’d begin around 1999/2000 – this is all still one-take, slips and slides and all. There was no date on the track list or the DATbut it was part of a show with Riz Maslen aka Neotropic and I remember we did a couple together around this time, one was at the studio but this one can’t have been. DK had the answer in his Solid Steel PRS archive, it was from 31/05/1998.

There are 3 parts on the DAT, with one very ambient / illbient / deep jazz set of nearly 30 minutes that I’ll spare you because A) it’s not that interesting and B) it has some nasty distortion on some of the tracks. It’s highly likely that it was never transmitted for just that reason. Regardless, there are two other parts that bear repetition on the tape, the first of which is here.

Part 1 kicks off with a recording of Company Flow – featuring El-P – doing a freestyle session over an MF Doom instrumental for Solid Steel and name-checking Coldcut(s). This was cheekily recorded and pressed up by DJ Vadim for a now very rare release on Mark B’s K’Boro label. I think it only came out as a white label and a quick check on Discogs reveals it’s one of 31 TPs and now goes for around £30! I actually designed some labels for it as I was doing lots of Jazz Fudge and some K’Boro artwork at the time and later on we get a Mark B & The MUD Fam track from the same label.

A mix of hip hop and trip hop from Ninja Tune and MoWax makes up a lot of this set plus Autechre remixing Stereolab, The Cinematic Orchestra’s Jason Swinscoe remixing Ryuichi Sakamoto and the Psychonauts reconstructing label mate, Money Mark. One half of King Kooba was Charlie ‘6 Ft’ Tate who also worked with The Herbaliser on occasion and Mr Quark was a producer from France I think who did some very twisted and hilarious trip hop-ish tracks that remind me of Sukia or Kid Koala. Excuse the mix of the loose 6/8 time Arsonists out of J Swinscoe’s even looser jazz mix, should have escaped from that a lot earlier. The mix of ‘Turtle Soup’ into ‘Chat ‘Bout’ is inexcusable though, should have got a red card, really not sure what’s going on there.

Part 2 next week!

Track list: Part 1
Stereolab – Refractions in the Plastic Pulse (Autechre remix)
King Kooba – Brown Blood (Campaign mix)
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Salvation (J Swinscoe remix)
Arsonists – Geembo’s Theme
Money Mark – Push the Button
Mr Quark – Am I Really Different?
DJ Food – Turtle Soup (Wagon Christ remix)
Mark B & The M.U.D. Family – Chat ‘Bout
Money Mark – Maybe I’m Dead (Psychonauts remix)

I mistakenly listed last week’s mix as Part 2 for some reason, probably because it was that way wrong on the PRS sheet despite an opening sample starting, “tonight on Solid Steel we have… “. Anyway, tonight we have a lesser known Boards of Canada remix from Funkstorung’s Michael Fakesch’s first solo single, ‘Demon. 1’ opening the show. It flows into a Pilote track I’d completely forgotten but am very glad to be reminded of (bit out of tune but have you ever tried mixing Boards with anything melodic? Virtually impossible).

The Psychic Warriors Ov Gaia track is one of my very favourite techno tracks of the 90s, as you can hear by my attempt to mix the whole thing in and under Four Tet’s ‘Glasshead’ despite the latter being loose as hell and the tuning being off, bass lines fighting etc. Trevor Jackson’s Output label was really firing on all cylinders around this time, his Skull EP, Kieran’s 12” and 7-Hurtz’ first release, all top drawer material and we’d hadn’t even got to the DFA connection yet.

Part 2:
MICHEAL FAKESCH  – SERFAISE (BOARDS OF CANADA MIX)
PILOTE – JUNIOR
PSYCHIC WARRIORS OV GAIA – OBSIDIAN
FOUR TET – GLASSHEAD
7-HURTZ – 7-HURTZ THEME
PSYCHIC WARRIORS OV GAIA – OBSIDIAN

We’ve had a lot of the ’00’s recently so I thought I’d reach back into the 90s a bit and pulled these from the DAT files, a couple of mixes from the same show near the end of ’99. Both are quite different so I’ve split them up as the part 1 and 2 that I recorded them as. We kick off with a hip hop-heavy half hour full of crashing beats and samples from a time when R’n’B hadn’t quite started to invade hip hop and the underground scene was in rude health.

Trevor Jackson’s Skull alias kicks the door in and crops up later too, there’s a healthy UK/US crossover with The Herbaliser collaborating with Latyrx on ‘8 Point Agenda’. I can hear a few samples that were floating around during the making of ‘Kaleidoscope’ in this and we would have been finishing it around this point. The computer ‘ghost voice’ also appears, programmed from an app and used as a presenter for the mixes as we’d left KISS FM by this time and were either recording mixes up at Ninja HQ in Ahead of Our Time studios or at home. There was no way to talk on the mic in the studio and, freed up from the need to play ads and ‘reads’ for the station, we just got on with the music. Streaming in a basic form was being explored by Matt Black via the Ninja Tune website ‘Pipe’ and track lists could be posted but this was early days and only a few were engaged on that level. This was sort of a wilderness period when we weren’t officially on the radio, just the web but we never stopped recording a show each week. Coldcut were very insistent that we keep going and not stop the weekly routine as something would come up, and it did in the form of the BBC a year down the line.

Porn Theatre Ushers’ ‘Me & Him’ is an under recognised classic and Public Enemy had made a decent enough single to get featured after a string of so-so releases. I first heard the second Skull track appearing here at a gig I was doing with DJ Vadim somewhere, he played the track from the beginning and let it run to an increasingly puzzled crowd, once the beat dropped everyone was on board though and I had to know what it was. The looseness and uniqueness of the production really made you stop in your tracks and pay attention. Finishing off with Shadow’s Lifer’s Group remix which got bootlegged at some point in the 90s along with the Zimbabwe Legit mix, this is pretty straight up but leads us into a more mellow late night techno excursion next week.

Part 1:
SKULL – SPAZTIK
THE HERBALISER – 8 POINT AGENDA
D.I.T.C. – GET YOURS
STEADY – TRICKNOLOGY
PORN THEATRE USHERS – ME & HIM
SKULL – CRASH
PUBLIC ENEMY – WHAT WHAT
LIFERS GROUP – THE REAL DEAL (DJ SHADOW REMIX)