FRIDAY PHREEK
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Hope y’all enjoyed our trip down memory lane this week, feels right to end with something current (and that’s actually been mixed & mastered!) Taken from ROC&B’s long player ‘People at the End of Time’ (available to buy here) it’s that dirty little instrumental ‘Space Phreek’. The still-might-happen-but-probably-won’t live show has a Quaid vocal on this that’s borderline sex-pest, till that see’s the light of day here’s the original mix.
Reflections on Creation & Bass — Space Phreek
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MIND GAMES
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Unmixed collab with Quaid and south London singer/producer Dziko from a few years back. More material from them coming soon.
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‘The True revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love…’
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To use the word ‘revolutionary’ in a musical context is a dangerous thing, unless of course you truly, genuinely mean it, and/or are really taking shit to the next level.
In hindsight I wish we hadn’t been so frivolous using it for a concept mixtape we put out in the early noughties. Spliced with vocal snippets from an Amiri Baraka lecture it featured new productions & edits from the whole FM posse. Revolutionary it wasn’t, but we definitely felt a lot of love doing it. Here’s a couple of cuts.
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ORIGINAL BEDROOM ROCKERS
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Don’t knock the S 3000. Despite the arcane operating system it was the sampler of choice for many of us, and relatively affordable (though I got mine on finance, by the time I paid it off it was worth less than a third of it’s original asking price). And for a while it was the nerve center of our bedroom studio setup’s, an essential tool for helping us do our thing before it all turned to computer processor power or upgrading to MPC’s.
It was using his S 3000 that Quaid put togther his first solo works which in time came together as the ‘Instrumentals’ ep. This is a little beat off of that, with a kind of broken house vibe, it’s taken from a crusty old DAT so might be a little peaky in places.
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JAZZ THE TEACHER
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It’s the vernacular that we we’re all schooled on and the music form that seemed to have the most potential to experiment with, and that turned us all on creatively back in the early 90′s.
The Dawn Club started off as a club night but soon became more about a collective of like minded souls making music both acoustically and electronically, and in most cases trying to find a union between the two. This period culminated several years later in an epic live performance at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival with a 6 piece band featuring fiery young jazz players, tabla, synths & samplers.
But the track I’m dropping today is the very first musical outing the Dawn Club ever took, and therefore one that carries a real weight of nostalgia. At one point it was getting serious interest from the heds over at Ninja Tune, but ultimately like most of our stuff never really found it’s way out into a wider audience.
Though that was never really the end game. The Dawn Club was what’s it’s always been about for us; the joy of making music.
So let’s take it back to those sweaty beat heavy nights at the Boiler Room, and remember when 6am dropped on that dirty old system…
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FRIDAY FUSION (ARCHIVE WEEK SPECIAL)
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Gonna be dropping some old FM joints over the coming week to celebrate our 10 year (+) anniversary; most of it isn’t properly mixed or mastered (and probably unheard of beyond these pages), so forgive it’s raw unpolished nature and I hope you get into the spirit of the journey we’ve all taken.
First up a track taken from an old jam tape by electronic trio ‘Unified Theory’. With nods to Marc Moulin & Moodymann ‘In Orbit’ is simply a moody rhodes workout over a locked-down groove & sadly never really went anywhere beyond this jam, but listening back now you at least get the essence of the tune even if it was never fully realised.
(Expect to hear a new Unified Theory cut on Quaid’s ‘Metropolis’)
Image from a series of amazing shots taken by astronaut Douglas H Wheelock, currently in orbit around the Earth on the International Space Station.
Unified Theory — In Orbit (jam session)
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Show me The Monae
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Is she the real deal?
That was the question on the minds of many at KOKO last night. Jannelle Monae seems to be carrying the hopes of a great number of music lovers, desperate for something to distract us from the endless blandness of our current generation of musicians. She cuts a slight figure on stage, the trademark hair losing it’s shape half way through the first number as she throws herself into some furious James Brown-inspired moves. Can such petite shoulders carry the weight of all this expectation ?
Almost.
She has all the ingredients she needs to conquer the world, save one. The songs. That might sound like a pretty damning comment, but when you see her live it feels like a minor thing, an oversite even. Such is the boundless desire to please, the creative freshness, the raw uncomplicated talent of the girl it seems almost trivial.
For my tastes she strayed to heavily into crap rock territory with a couple of tracks sounding like some a half worked out idea drowned with a motherload of delay. (in a bad way) But when it clicked,when the material was strong enough it was kind of magical. Not Prince ’84 magical, but something close to the brightest talent around today.
She just needs to take some time out (and find a collaborator maybe) to write that killer album, one with the emotional depth to supplement that seemingly unlimited potential and then we will really know if we have found what we were looking for.
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