I’ll be having a stall with my Further co-pilot, Pete Williams, this weekend at Jonny Trunk‘s first Groovy Record Fayre which, I’m reliably informed, will double as a celebration of 25 years of Trunk Records with DJs, a quiz, three bars and snooker tables in a glorious listed building. I’ll have various bits of Ninja Tune ephemera like promo CDs, flyers, posters, plus of course, some vinyl, comics and other oddities I can dig up. It’s all free, details above.
The incredible Cut Chemist 2.5 minute workout of Blackalicious’ ‘Alphabet Aerobics’ starts us off into the second section of the Director’s Cut, upping the tempo considerably into Four Tet’s epic ‘Glasshead’. Camping Gaz and Digi Random’s crazed theremin and ska ‘Circus World’ didn’t make the cut and neither did the UK garage beats of Sunship’s ‘Cheque One, Two’ (it’s a nice idea but a bit out of tune). The next section is so sublime and stayed in for exactly that reason, Herbie Hancock’s ‘Nobu’ out of ‘Glasshead’ and then into Link’s ‘Arcadian’ is, as Ninja’s licensing manager at the time, Dean Smith, used to say, ‘a moment’. Talking of which, this half of the mix was taken from the radio broadcast so DK, Dean and I are present occasionally to chat and track back over things. PC performed some judicious edits of ’Nobu’ for the final mix as it’s a very long track but the full thing appears here.
It was such a shame we couldn’t license Lorez Alexandra’s ‘Baltimore Oriole’ as the mix out of Link with the pitched down ending melody over it and then into Art of Noise’s ‘Moments In Love’ is just delicious. Another, err, moment occurs out of the AON and into Vangelis’ ‘Let It Happen’, originally slated to be the closer but replaced by Faze-O’s ‘Riding High’ on the final CD. The final section here was a proposed end selection I made which was vetoed for the mix coupling Coldcut’s ‘Autumn Leaves’ acappella with Air’s ‘Modular Mix’ and a lot of delay action. Following this is 10cc’s classic, ‘I’m Not In Love’ beautifully sliding into ‘Moments In Love’, the former I’m convinced of which was some sort of inspiration for the latter. The chord change as they mix together is another moment for me but the others weren’t having it, 10cc were just too uncool. The telephone message that ends the mix was left for me by Dom Smith, another Ninja Tune office employee (and now manager of Flying Lotus, Thundercat and the Cinematic Orchestra), in response to my answerphone containing a snatch of Missy Elliot’s ‘Beep Me 911’ at the time.
Part 2
Blackalicious – Alphabet Aerobics
Four Tet – Glasshead
Camping Gaz & Digi Random – Circus World
Sunship – Cheque One, Two
Herbie Hancock – Nobu
Link – Arcadian
Lorez Alexandra – Baltimore Oriole
Art of Noise – Moments in Love
Boards of Canada – The Colour of the Fire
Vangelis – Let it Happen
Air – Modular Mix
Coldcut – Autumn Leaves (acappella)
10cc – I’m Not in Love
Art of Noise – Moments in Love
A sampler from Sixtoo collaborator, Canadian MC Buck 65, for his album, ‘Talkin’ Honky Blues’ from 2003. I can’t even find this on Discogs, this is the thing with mini CDs, they’re so tiny they’re hard to find, even digitally.
I saw The Light Surgeons last night (still amazing) and had been sent a link to a documentary about Newcastle raves when I got home that included this screen shot. It’s called ‘The Kick, The Snare, The Hat & A Clap’
The Quadraphon Mk II – a lot of last week was spent working on this, making container pods that hold three extra tone arms, attached to a modular sliding rail that can be fitted over any DJ turntable.
Each tone arm can be moved and locked into position to recalibrate where the arm sits in the groove and the whole thing comes apart for portability.
It’s not perfect but better than the Mark I which had free-standing tone arms. Still got to perfect the sliding action to make it smoother and retool one of the pods but it all works. If you want to hear what comes out of such a contraption then check out the releases on my Infinite Illectrik label on Bandcamp.
Its debut should be at the Castles In Space Levitation show in Whitby, Nov 6th as part of The New Obsolescents’ first proper live show, the time and details of which are below. There are two nights and tickets can be bought here
20 years ago PC, DK and I presented a unique extended cut of our new Solid Steel mix as the CD was released and we were about to embark on a US tour with Four Tet and Bonobo to support it. This gave us an opportunity to retool the mix and add many parts originally up for consideration but not included for various reasons of time, flow or licensing restrictions. The devastating events of 9/11 the week before meant that the idea of including DJ Vadim’s ‘The Terrorist’ acappella was now firmly out of the window and this was replaced by Missy’s ‘Get Ur Freak On’ for the tour. In this mix it’s replaced with a selection of interview snippets PC had recorded from a round of pre-tour interviews.
In the original mix incarnation we had a section by Ollie Teeba from The Herbaliser as a guest (there was an idea that this would come out as an all-star affair with the Ninja Tune 10th anniversary Xen Cuts compilation originally but it wasn’t finished in time). Ollie’s section was added back in as well as many other ideas and additions that got cut in the final edit. Licensing problems meant that we couldn’t get loads of these like Vangelis (had fallen out with his label), Pharaoh Monch (big Godzilla sample they were being sued over) and Sesame Street were unhappy with their track being used next to rap tracks. This ended up being a godsend as their ‘Pinball Number Count’ would have settled near to DJ Vadim’s track and possibly scuppered the whole release. As it was we released it later as a standalone track and it was all the better for it.
The Jeru / Cinematic / DJ Shadow / Ken Nordine mix I used to do on my opening sets for Kid Koala and Amon Tobin during 2000 and Pharaoh Monch’s ‘Simon Says’ scratched into The Addams Family Theme was a little thing I used to do in my DJ sets and we overlaid the original to labour the point for this mix. Sabu Martinez made it into the mix and got extended with a couple of other tracks for a really uptempo part.
The Boards of Canada meet Grandmaster Flash long form mash up was a staple of my club sets around this time with the payoff coming when Melle Mel’s verse comes in as the track takes off. Blending perfectly into Ollie Teeba’s set of old school hip hop, breaks and Herbaliser tracks, this section didn’t make it as I think we changed directions as it wasn’t ready for the 10th anniversary and the Solid Steel mix CD series was formed out of that idea with The Herbaliser doing the third entry. Another Boards track after Pinball Number Count was probably way too much but the counting and children subject matter made it fit as well as the perfect tempo to introduce Blackalicious’ ‘Alphabet Aerobics’ which will kick off part 2 next week…
Part 1
Jeru Tha Damaja – Come Clean
The Cinematic Orchestra – Channel 1 Suite
Neotropic – Beached
DJ Shadow – Changeling
Ken Nordine – Looks Like It’s Gonna Rain
Mr Scruff – Ug
The Grooverobbers feat. DJ Shadow – Hardcore Instrumental Hip Hop
Pharoah Monch – Simon Says (instr)
Sabu Martinez – Hotel Alyssa-Soussie, Tunisia
Boards of Canada – Happy Cycling
Grandmaster Flash – The Message
Jazzy Jay – Cold Chillin’ In the Spot
Wildstyle Brakebeats – Gangbusters
Creators – Hard Margin (instr)
The Herbaliser feat Bahamadia – When I Shine (acappella)
The Nextmen – Mental Alchemy (instr)
The Herbaliser feat Latyrx – 8 pt Agenda (accapella)
Slick Rick – It’s a Boy (remix Instr)
Common – Resurrection
The Herbaliser – Shocker Zulu
Walt Kraemer feat. The Pointer Sisters – Pinball Number Count
Boards of Canada – Aquarius
Canadian producer, Sixtoo, comes with a 2 track 3″ CD inside a book called ‘Fight’, hand-printed and bound in a screenprinted outer slip from the now dormant Bully label. There’s also another 3″ release that I don’t have, a handmade tour exclusive with DJ Signify entitled ‘No One Leaves’.
On my travels round the web I ran across these late 60s parody drug posters – the following info was cribbed from the Worthpoint website:
Vintage Psychedelic Poster ‘Cocaine Candy’ Limited Print
Published by The Esoteric Poster Company in 1967
Hand-Pulled Serigraph on Thick Stock Paper, Semi-Gloss Finish
Original Art by Robert Wendell, after Roland Crump
Printing by Gawdawful Graphics / Wendell & Klopp
20″ x 13″ Black Light Sensitive
The Esoteric Poster Company, founded by Howard Morseburg in California during the early 1960’s, had a brief run before folding for good in 1968. The beatnik satirical ‘drug’ parody posters achieved popularity from the community they sought to mock. Owner and founder Howard Morseburg hired artists Roland Crump (acclaimed Disney animator) and Robert Wendell to produce the designs. Very limited printing, less than 300 (as low as 100) printed.. among the most collectible and prized of all 1960’s psychedelic era posters.
Guaranteed original from very limited back stock, from Howard Morseburg’s gallery in Alhambra, California.
A bit more history:
Howard Morseburg (1924-2012) began his career in the art business in the 1950s. He was a World War II veteran who had served in the Merchant Marine and later worked in the book and magazine business. As a young officer during the war, Morseburg was on the “Murmansk Run” to the Soviet Union and other perilous wartime voyages through the submarine-infested North Atlantic. It was one of Morseburg’s friends from this time, a young skipper named Jim Greenberg, who was to introduce him to the art business.
After the war, this friend became a ship’s captain on the Atlantic route, and began importing paintings by European artists to the United States. In Europe, which was still suffering from the economic after effects of the war, there was no appreciable market for these artists’ work. During the 1950s Greenberg began selling the paintings he imported to galleries, furniture stores and interior designers who were then developing a wider consumer market for art than had existed before the war. From his base in Seattle, where he and his young family were then living, Howard Morseburg followed suit, and he began selling paintings imported from Europe throughout the western United States.
In addition to the European paintings he received, Morseburg began representing young American artists. He also became involved in the West Coast printmaking movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he started to represent young artists like Wayne Thiebaud, Elton Bennett and Mel Ramos, who created their own hand-pulled prints. It was this interest in printmaking that helped lead to his next venture.
The Beatnik Posters: About 1960, Morseburg became interested in creating humorous and satirical posters. At this time, the “beatnik” movement was in full swing and coffee houses and jazz clubs were full of beatniks spouting free-form poetry to the beat of bongo drums. To Morseburg, the beatnik movement found in Greenwich Village, Seattle, San Francisco and the East Bay was ripe for satire. He met a talented young Disney artist and Imagineer named Roland Crump at a gift shop in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. Crump was a brilliant and eccentric young artist and designer who became one of the most important Disney “Imagineers.” Crump was already producing some hand-pulled beatnik posters before he met Morseburg, but once the association began, Morseburg had larger quantities of some of the posters published using the photo-offset process.
Crump designed a series of images that satirized the drug culture that was developing among the Beats, which Morseburg took on the road, travelling down the coast from Seattle to San Diego. In that era, drug use was not widespread and they were chiefly popular with musicians and beatnik hipsters. So, Esoteric Poster’s first releases were “Smoke Marijuana,” “Fly High, Fly Heroin Airlines” “Cocaine” and “Opium.”The next posters were which poked fun at a Beatnik club, and “Big Liz,” which was a colorful poster of a Beatnik princess. Those 30″ x 24″ posters were silk screened in three colours and for posterity’s sake they cost $0.50 to produce, were sold to book stores for only $1.00 and retailed for $1.95.
In the course of his frequent sales trips to visit art galleries, Morseburg personally distributed Esoteric’s posters. His primary outlets for the posters were the book stores along the west coast that catered to college students in Berkeley, Stanford, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego. These posters were produced as very early critical parody of the drug culture by the Esoteric Poster Company, but the message was so subtle that they were popular among the very community they sought to mock.
Below are a few more I’ve run across although details about dates and print houses are scarce but I’m reasonably sure they’re from the same era.
Original vintage black light ultra violet poster designed by Dominick Jago, 1969.
Depiction of the pharmacopeia of the era.
Publisher: Poster Prints, Plymouth Square Center-Conshohocken, PA.
Dimensions: full sheet: 21″ x 31.5″
Printed by The US Department of Health, Education and Welfare; Public Health Services and Mental Health Administration, possibly 1969 although other sources say 70’s.
Recorded over the Xmas break of ’98/99 (where PC and I went to LA to play at a disastrous New Year party which ended in multiple hospitalisations from a bad drugs batch and police shut down). This sounds like a live set recorded at home, possibly on three decks and is full of contemporary electronica, jazz, library and that end of the millennium weirdness where there wasn’t any dominant scene happening.
A blast of Tape Beatles opens before The Karminsky Experience Inc. and Dynamic Syncopation bring the fast breaks and soundtrack vibes in. People were increasingly becoming interested in OSTs and library tracks at the end of the 90s with lots of bootlegs and a few licensed comps floating around. Air‘s ambient classic on Fax continued this but in a more downtempo vein, not to be confused with the French band of the same name despite using a French title, this was a Pete Namlook alias.
Bruce Haack’s ‘Word Game’ beams in, completely from another galaxy with its chugging Moog groove, only to be superseded by Grooverider‘s excellent ‘Where’s Jack The Ripper’. I felt D’n’B was going through a dull patch at the time with all the dark No U-Turn type stuff not really floating my boat but this had that funk to it that had been lost over the last few years. The Boards of Canada Peel Sessions were out and they always got a lot of love from me on the show so I couldn’t resist halving the tempo and then mixing Grooverider in again over ‘Aquarius’. Followed is Slag Boom Van Loon‘s ‘Poppy Seed’, a track Boards would soon remix for the Planet Mu label.
Part 2 next week!
The Tape Beatles – Intro
The Karminsky Experience Inc. – The Hip Sheik
Dynamic Syncopation – Closer To The Line
Air – Je Suis Triste Et Seul Ici
Bruce Haack – Word Game
Grooverider – Where’s Jack the Ripper
Boards of Canada – Aquarius
Slag Boom Van Loon – Poppy Seed
The Tape Beatles – Outro
There’s a free Savage Pencil exhibition at Orbital Space for the month of September, that being the new name for Orbital Comics on 8 Great Newport Street, Covent Garden. There are T-shirts and prints for sale as well as prices on most of the artwork although they’re not cheap. It’s great to see the originals to the Nothing Short of Total War compilation on Blast First as well as several others and Edwin’s visual bite hasn’t dimmed in the last 40 years.
In the front of the shop there’s also a great display of Graham Humphreys‘ work for film and books, mainly dealing with horror or B movie content. It’s great to see the originals and most are for sale although some have already been taken.
Amon Tobin‘s 2002 album, ‘Out From Out Where’ is reissued today on Ninja Tune. It’s pressed on gold vinyl, l’ve remade the sleeve from the original files and it now includes a double sized poster. Order here https://ninjatune.net/release/amon-tobin/out-from-out-where
Here’s a silly little set from the last show we broadcast on Radio LDN, part of the BBC network, on a Monday nights in the early 00’s.
BBC London could never make up it’s mind around the turn of the millennium; after 18 years of being BBC Radio London and another 12 of Greater London Radio (GLR) they decided to switch to BBC London Live just as we joined the station in 2000. A year later and they changed it again to BBC LDN and then further to BBC London around the time they got rid of most of their specialist programmes in favour of talk radio.
We were part of this cull along with other DJs like Ross Allen and Dr Bob Jones and it came out of the blue, one week we were on, the next we had one show left. I found out from another presenter who casually mentioned “sorry to hear about your show”, whilst I was covering for the others solo one time. Seeing the puzzled look on my face, she realised her faux pas and explained that the station had axed all but two of their late night specialist music shows in favour of a more talk based radio station. We had one week’s grace and that was it but we really made use of that week…
But let’s start with how we came to be on the BBC in the first place: after leaving KISS in Feb ’99 (before we were pushed – big changes were ahead) Solid Steel set up home online, streamed via the Ninja Tune homepage every week, still maintaining it’s 2 hour format, uncertain as to how many people were listening. With DK now firmly in the producers chair, syndications to overseas stations had been instigated and we were looking around for a ‘home’ on a London station. There was a pilot show for GLR on 27/06/99 but the first regular slot was 27/03/2000, the week the station relaunched as BBC London Live. We had a midnight until 2am slot on a Monday night which suited us fine, no playlist, minimal fuss or bother from the powers that be and a proper studio to broadcast from.
The big drawback was that the studio was more geared to CDJing than turntable mixing and the decks there were more of an afterthought than an integral part of the set up. Out went the live mixing and in came the pre-prepared, home studio mixed sets, something that did no end of good for the quality control threshold but which sounds odd at times when listening back as we had to leave instrumental gaps for talking and tracklists in the selection. Another revelation was no adverts other than the occasional station sting for an upcoming event or show – yes! More uninterrupted mixes and less stop / start nonsense.
Initially we took over after Ross Allen‘s Destination Out show which was perfect as we caught a lot of his audience but he moved on to two separate nights of the week as his star rose. Generally two of us would present the show live whilst playing that week’s selection of mixes and we also had the means to take calls for competitions where we gave away tickets to shows or CDs in return for answers to ridiculously easy multiple choice questions. The BBC had a full online streaming web presence too so we were beamed live worldwide and, on occasion, we got calls from overseas for the competitions, including one from New Zealand! Being ‘on the BBC’ also afforded us instant credibility when asking for high profile interviews and both David Axelrod and Herbie Hancock were recorded using their facilities.
But all good things must come to a (tr)end and 21/10/2002 was the last show we did at the station, but we weren’t going out without making a statement and Matt, Jon, DK and I were all determined to make it one to remember. I kicked things off with plenty of loaded spoken word and songs aimed at the Beeb – Has It Come To This?, It’s All Over Now, The Show Must Go On, Fool If You Think It’s Over, It’s Just Begun – you get the idea. I must apologise firstly for the cheesiness of some of the tracks (a worrying amount of Queen) but mostly for the tuning on some of the mixes – oh my ears! This recording is the original studio mix without talking, not the live broadcast with the ridiculous competitions, shout outs and studio banter. I’ve actually edited this down as some of the tracks really laboured the point and some were in there for us to talk over so sound odd without it. Plus there’s a Stones track in there and Charlie Watts died this week (RIP).
After this (but not included here) Matt turned in a storming old school ultimate breaks and beats cut up using the Street Beat compilations in Ableton Live. Jon waded in with possibly the first BBC jingle and presented a set of mashed up hip hop acappellas, ending with Monty Python‘s phone in sketch. DK ran through some of the show favourites from the last few years, the tracks getting the most plays from the variety of DJs over the course of our tenure, flagged up some of the high profile jingles we’d recorded and ended appropriately with The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ as the final word. It was sad to go but we had no choice and it wasn’t as painful as the KISS departure because we had the internet support fully set up by this time, still it was great to be part of the BBC for a while.
Track list:
The Streets – Has It Come To This? (Hi Contrast Remix)
The Who – My Generation
The Rollings Stones – It’s All Over Now
RJD2 – The Final Frontier
Queen – The Show Must Go On
Mr Guder – Super Guder Breaks 3
Chris Rea – Fool If You Think It’s Over
Jimmy Castor Bunch – It’s Just Begun
Studio Housten – It’s Not Right But It’s OK
Blackalicious – Chemical Calathenics
DJ Food – Turtle Soup (Wagon Christ Remix)
Geoff Muldaur – Brazil
The Carpenters – It’s Only Just Begun
Joni Mitchell – Parking Lot
Jackson 5 – Never Can Say Goodbye
Julian Hand has done visuals for The Oscillation for years, mostly via projections, oil light shows and promo videos. He’s upped the ante for their new video and shot it in 360 for VR and you can watch it inside a headset from all angles. Those without a headset can pan around using the arrows at the top of the screen too.
This is an odd one because the first 10 minutes or so is an involved multi-layered affair with 2 or 3 tracks overlaid simultaneously in a way that would be virtually impossible with turntables. I can only assume that this section was an early idea for the first Solid Steel mix CD, Now, Listen.
The Aphex Twin/ DJ Food combo is frustratingly slightly out of time at the start and the tuning is a bit off too. Neotropic’s ‘Beached’ is in there and the only track to make it to the aforementioned mix CD and works well with Aphex and the Orb remix of Material ‘Mantra’ although it’s a long, laboured mix and wouldn’t have stood up on the CD. Cornershop’s ‘Easy Winners’ part 1 is such a killer beat, I remember Kid Koala in particular used to cut two copies of this up. It doesn’t quite work with the sombre tone of Neotropic in the background but Mantra rumbles along nicely in there.
After this section we get into some contemporary releases of the day with Andy Votel’s ‘November’ from his and Cherrystones’ excellent 10” EP ‘The Amazing Transplant’. A tempo switch mid-track see the unlikely addition of Hijack’s ‘The Badman Is Robbin’ but one I’m sure Andy would appreciate as it bridges the Cherrystones track from the same EP and they compliment each other for a while. A track from the lone Papa Blue EP on PUU features, still a lost classic and so beautiful and this is another 3 tracks at once mix which makes me think there may have been some computer overdubs going on. Back into another Votel/Cherrystones track and then the mallet instruments continue with Syd Dale’s excellent theme to Screen Test, ‘Marching There & Back’ on Trunk. Incidentally there’s a fabulous compilation album just out celebrating 25 years of the label which is pretty essential if you’re a fan of all things Trunk-related.
Continuing the wacky theme tunes that no doubt gave this mix its name we have an odd 7” on Acupuncture from around this time by Black Lodge that chopped up the ‘Pink Elephants On Parade’ song from Pinocchio to good effect. I think this was the first release on the label and was associated with a shop of the same name, Black Lodge went on to release material in the dying days on Mo Wax. The final track is 9 Lazy 9’s ‘Brothers of the Red’ overlaid with a fictitious listings read by an unknown narrator from Chris Morris’ Blue Jam album and still stands up although who could have predicted that Cerys from Catatonia would end up as a DJ?
Track list:
Aphex Twin – Untitled
DJ Food – The Sky At Night
Material – Mantra (Preying Mantra Orb remix)
Neotropic – Beached
Cornershop – Easy Winners part1
Andy Votel – November
Hijack – The Badman is Robbin’
Cherrystones – A Pattern Emerges
Papa Blue – Luna En La Pampa
Andy Votel + Cherrystones – A Pattern Emerges
Syd Dale – Marching There & Back (Screen Test Theme)
Black Lodge – Pink Elephants On Parade
Chris Morris – Club News (9 Lazy 9 – Brothers of the Red)
There have been a couple of articles about the Kaleidoscope reissue/companion album in actual physical magazines recently – a 4 page article in DJ Mag (Todd Edwards cover) and a 6 page interview with not only PC and myself but Matt & Jon from Coldcut/Food too in the current issue of Electronic Sound (Drive cover). There was also a 2 page lead review of the album(s) in the previous issue of ES (Field Recording cover) too. Lots of rarely or never before seen pics too.
Does what it says on the tin, all vinyl 45s, a mix of Freestyle, Hip House, Acid & Bleep circa 1989-91 – a very fertile time for the dance music scene with the initial euphoria of acid house giving way to the first generation of bedroom producers with affordable samplers. Debuts Friday night/Saturday morning US/UK time August 20th on the 45 Live show with Greg Belson via Dublab.
The second mix on this DAT and radio show, I remember this as I think I’d come back from Europe and found an odd record with snippets of old gangster films in Germany, one of the clips was Humphrey Bogart, the same sample The Herbaliser had used on ‘The Real Killer’. Kicking off with the almighty MBM and one of my favourites of their colossal back catalogue, ‘Acid Again’. Few were making music like this in the late 90s but Jack Dangers and co. never did much of what others were doing. How good is that Wai Wan track? Had totally forgotten about that but it’s a bit of a monster. No idea how The Imperial Brothers wormed their way in here, maybe I had just picked up the 12” as this sounds like it could be a dub mix maybe?
‘Shack Up’-sampling from Rare Force aka Robin from Hexstatic precedes a football-themed Depth Charge tune and another I don’t remember by Schneider TM from one of his earliest releases. Cartel Productions sounds like a Kirk DeGiorgio production but is actually Dave Kempston aka Clatterbox on the short-lived Clear label offshoot, REEL Discs. Mixing rather uneasily into this is the intro to major label years era Wagon Christ’s ‘Rendleshack’ on 33rpm before being catapulted up to the correct speed and bookended by the Bogart sample I alluded to at the beginning.
Part 2
Meat Beat Manifesto – Acid Again
Wai Wan – Nightmare
Imperial Brothers – We Come To Rock
Rare Force – Back On The Streets
Depth Charge – Romario (Rio Percussion Unit mix)
Schneider TM – Up-Tight
Cartel Productions – Park Central
Wagon Christ – Rendleshack
Out tomorrow – on sale at 8am GMT for Bandcamp Friday so set your alarms – Clocolan’s This Will End In Love album on Castles In Space.
Orange vinyl LP and red or purple shell cassette in clamshell case – from the Castles In Space bandcamp page.
Above is a scroll through different stages that the cover image I made went through before reaching the final state.
This show was requested a while back but I didn’t have a copy, luckily DK found it in his archive and transferred it direct from the DAT. This sounds like it was recorded up at Ahead Of Our Time studios in Clink St. probably with Ali Tod at the controls. I had to look up Zend Avesta as I don’t remember that at all but it was an early record by Arnaud Rebotini. The Tipper mix of DJ Rap was a club banger at the time with that bass breakdown, must dig that out again. Dynamic Syncopation‘s debut, ‘Closer To The Line’ still stands up as a bit of imaginary 70s soundtrack homage from the late 90s.
Bushflange always produced quality material but are virtually forgotten today it seems, around this time, Pete Herbert from the group had a record shop in Soho that I used to frequent regularly for new releases. This track sounds like a mix of David Holmes and Tipsy and came from their final single, Style Wars Vol.2. Bel Air Project is another I don’t recognise but Neotropic’s ‘Visicous Blooms’ is another mini classic from her second album, Mr Brubaker’s Strawberry Alarm Clock. It’s odd to hear an unknown band called Groove Armada’s debut, ‘At The River’ mixed in and out of Autechre, but who knew?
Part 2 next week
Part 1
Zend Avesta – Queen of Siam
DJ Rap – Bad Girl (Tipper mix)
Dynamic Syncopation – Closer To The Line
Bushflange – Foot Thought
Bel Air Project – Chimix
Neotropic – Visicous Blooms
Groove Armada – At The River
Autechre – Unknown
