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)

My archive disc says this is an extended version and it clocks in at 69 minutes so there’s an extra 9 minutes that wouldn’t have been on the Solid Steel broadcast.
The lovely sax sample used in the intro is from Stan Getz‘s ‘Soul Dance’ that also crops up in full later and he features twice here. That track reminds me so much of pillaging the easy listening bins for Command, Project 3 and others on North American tours. The Jim Backus record (the voice of Mr. Magoo and also God on a recent rock opera I found) was absolutely scratched to bits but I managed to clean it up. Who knew that that Bonobo remix of Pilote would wind up on a phone advert and he’d go on to become not only one of the biggest Ninja artists but one of the biggest on the world stage? Ah, this Neotropic stuff slays me every time, her best album of the era, ‘La Prochaine Fois’ is an electronic folk masterpiece, great memories associated with that one.

I think the comedy inserts throughout about the car starting and the radio DJs are from a Robert Klein comedy album, ‘Child of the Fifties’ (also check his ‘Mind Over Matter‘ release). He was a comedian who also did a radio show in the late 70s and early 80s, some of which were syndicated and pressed onto vinyl. So much great stuff in here that I’d forgotten, the Groop track, ‘Moonbase‘, a nice slice of psych on Jazzman offshoot, Stark Reality, Ian O’Brien‘s beautiful ‘Midnight Sunshine’, cLouddead‘s ‘Jon Abercrombie-sampling ‘Jimmy Breeze’. Sixtoo‘s ‘Work In Progress’ is still some kind of crazed masterpiece, shame about the tuning in the mix! I remember going to his apartment in Nova Scotia before he moved to Montreal and him playing us demos of forthcoming tracks, telling tales of neighbours banging on the door complaining about the noise (something he recorded for a future release). We went digging with Dynamic Syncopation and Fink in the freezing weather on a Sunday with huge icicles hanging off gutters and spent all afternoon in a local record store with condensation steaming up the windows, when we emerged hours later it had snowed and the whole street was covered in fresh powder. The second appearance of Stan Getz features my favourite song of his, ‘Bonjour Tristesse’, a beautiful track from his ‘Communications ’72’ album and something I ended up featuring in my live turntable re-score of The Monkees’ ‘Head’ film around this time.

As you can see from the sticker accompanying the tracklisting, this was from the period when Solid Steel was on BBC London, or LDN as they rebranded it. After Stan we have the extended content including another great lost artist, Broadway Project, who also samples the same track as cLouddead earlier. I believe he largely writes for film and TV these days although has recently upped loads of work to Bandcamp. The ‘William Tell Overture’ version I have no recollection of but looking it up, it’s from the Zachariah soundtrack which has some superbly weird moments as I recall. Tony Mottola‘s smoother than smooth version of ‘Spinning Wheel’ plays us out, coupled with more Robert Klein. This was definitely a phase I was going through.

Track list:
Phase 3
Jim Backus & Friend – Delicious
Pilote  – Turtle (Bonobo remix)
Neotropic – Still
Neotropic feat. Shorti – Memories
Groop – Moonbase
Mike Sharpe – Spooky
The Allies – D-Day
Ian 0’Brien – Midnight Sunshine
Stan Getz – Soul Dance
Phase 4 
cLOUDDEAD – Jimmy Breeze
Tortoise – Seneca
Dakota Oak – How Danny’s Friend Became A Force For Good
Neotropic – Je Suis
Sixtoo – Work in Progress
Stan Getz – Bonjour Tristesse
Broadway Project – Life of a Refugee
Jimmie Haskell – William Tell Overture
Tony Mottola – Spinning Wheel

Approximately 12 years ago this weekend I played my first set at a Halloween-themed version of Posthuman’s I Love Acid parties (see graphic above I made for a DVD of visuals I compiled for the set). Whilst there’s no recording of that set that I know of, there are photos as I took my good friend, photographer Martin LeSanto-Smith, along with me and he ended up shooting countless nights of the parties for them afterwards.

Roughly three and a half years earlier I’d put together a mix christened ‘Rave New World’ for Solid Steel, full of old late 80s and early 90s favourites which isn’t far off some of the Big Fish Little Fish or acid 45 sets I’ve been doing in recent years direct from only 7” vinyl. I’m not sure what prompted this collection of tunes at the time but I still stand behind each and every one of them.

The first track after the intro is from a clear flexi disc I’d traded with someone with no info at all on it (re-edited to say me name at one point) which I’ve since found out the origin of. Without Discogs to provide this valuable information I was in the dark for years but the full story behind this can be found here as part of my Flexibition entry of party and rave invites.

A couple of notable debuts feature later in the mix in the shape of Aphex Twin (Pacman) and Autechre’s debut release, two slices of hardcore from before they found their voice. I don’t know what to say about any more of these tracks as I love them all so much – the set gets heavier and heaver as it goes on so you have been warned. There’s a short, mystery track unlisted at the end that I have no recollection of putting there and can’t remember who made, let’s just leave it that way.

Track list:
Redruth – Solid Steel intro
Strictly Underground – lllegal Rave II advert
808 State – Cubik
Doug Lazy – Let It Roll (accapella)
John & Julie – Circles (Spiral mix)
Bam Bam – Give it To Me
The Destroyer – Senses (Hooligan mix)
DJ Dick – Weekend
GTO – Listen To The Rhythm Flow (remix)
Future Sound of London – Papa New Guinea
Meat Beat Manifesto – Radio Babylon
Incubus – The Spirit
Eon – Fear: the Mind Killer
Hardfloor – Hardtrance Acperience
Meat Beat Manifesto – Mindstream (Orbital remix)
Pacman – Power Pill
Autechre – Cavity Job
Sulphuric – The Acid Chamber
Vapourspace – Gravitational Arch of 10
The Hypnotist – Hardcore U Know the Score (remix)
The Hypnotist – House Is Mine (GTO remix)
Wiseblood – Death Rape 2000
Amen Andrews – Fear
Squarepusher – Come On My Selector
Aphex Twin – Cock 10 (Delco Freedom mix)
Caustic Visions – cvthru202
DJ Redoo – Bulldozer

I realised we hadn’t had anything from 2004 yet so went to find something from around this time back then. Just over 16 years ago the world was a very different but no less scary place, 9/11 had happened and the Iraq war was in full flow, as evidenced by some of the cut up speeches from George Bush Jnr. near the end of this mix. Despite that, this mix features an assortment of versions, covers and parodies of classic tracks as a running theme. From 60s pop to piano ballads, reggae mash ups (when they were still a new thing) and string versions. You can still hear the fallout of the bootleg craze and Armando Ianucci spoken word crops up throughout, possibly from Time Trumpet?

This mix is an odd one with virtually no contemporary tracks save for maybe the Depeche Mode remix and the M83 track at the end. It was also put together partly digitally as there are a lot of overdubs and extra touches. By the 00’s I was fully utilising the editing capabilities of Cubase to chop up and overlay mixes from the decks and construct sets that had a lot more going on in them than just a pair of records being played. The availability of more digital music via the web meant that songs could be edited in that I didn’t have physical copies of but this was still a year or so before I got Serato and was able to mix the two formats more easily.

Incidentally, the mix opens with the winner of the Solid Steel intro competition – an online comp for people to record new intros to the radio show using only the famous bleeps as a guide. It was won by Tom Miller and Jules Green – who both went on to set up the Keep Up! label and later, Tom with Shapes of Rhythm – the ‘version galore’ sample in their intro gave the mix its title. Les Surfs, who start the mix proper, released a ridiculous amount of singles during the 60s including this version of ‘The Clapping Song’ which I was collecting copies of at the time. The two versions of ‘Wild Thing’ later on are both sides of a mid 60s 7” I picked up somewhere in North America, parodying two competing senators recording versions to win votes but both ‘wildly’ out of their depth. Regarding the role call of American actors and musicians and US Army speeches that bookend the M83 track – I can’t recall their origins but both most likely came from the web.

Track list:
Tom & Jules – Version Galore Solid Steel intro
Les Surfs – Clac Tape
Anita Harris – The Clapping Song
Josie & the Pussycats – Clapping Song
Goyte – Just Can’t Get Enough (Mothloop mix)
Depeche Mode – Clean (Colder remix)
Marilyn Manson – Personal Jesus
Unknown – Dr Who theme
String Quartet – Work It Out
Beyonce – Work It Out (a capella)
Leroy Sibbles – Express Yourself
The Killer Meters – Just Kissed My Baby
Hot Paste – Make It Busta
Grandmaster Melle Mel – The Message (Paul Nice bootleg mix)
Bumps Jackson – Funky In Jamaica pt.2
Senator Bobby – Wild Thing
The Party Party / RX – Sunday Bloody Sunday
Senator Everett McKinley – Wild Thing
M83 – Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

Plus contributions from Beat Street, Mantronix, Armando Ianucci, George Bush Snr and Jnr