22 years ago this week, just as the ‘Kaleidoscope’ album was released, I was invited onto Mary Anne Hobbs’ Breezeblock show on Radio 1 to record a live mix in the studio. I think this was three turntables and an FX pedal, I can’t quite remember. The set is a few Food bits from the album and contemporary tracks from around the time, peppered with spoken word and the odd jazz piece.

My track, ‘Nocturne’ obviously features elements of Dudley Moore’s ‘The Millionaire’ from the Bedazzled soundtrack so I dropped in a snatch of that just to ram the point home. Position Normal were a really interesting outfit who made sample-heavy cut and paste pieces and were later dubbed ‘the Godfathers of Hauntology’ by Simon Reynolds in typically grandiose fashion. Two Banks of Four were a collective featuring Galliano’s Rob Gallagher and ‘Skylines Over Rooftops’ is from their debut album. Scratched over the top is the flute of Yussef Lateef’s beautiful ‘Lowland Lullaby’, something I would regularly play about with in DJ sets at the time.

PC’s Hustler’s Convention-sampling ‘Break’ is lightened up by a Dr Rockit’ track which completely escapes me now, I’ve looked for it everywhere in my collection but can’t find it. I think it was on Clear but don’t quote me, if anyone knows… A snatch of Andy Votel and Cherrystones leads into The Third Wave, a quintet of teenage girls who made an album with George Duke on MPS with several covers including Herbie Hancock and The Beatles. This was reissued in 1999 by Crippled Dick Hot Wax! hence it’s appearance here. They overlap into ‘The Sky At Night’ where there may be some tuning issues and then out into the epic finale – ‘Minitoka’ into Bent’s ‘Invisible Pedestrian’ laced with the acappella of Jelisha’s ‘Friendly Pressure’ – all live on three turntables. A brief food-related outro concludes and what you can’t hear here is Mary Anne bellowing “ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE!” or some such descriptive, completely destroying the ambience I’d just spent 30 minutes building.

PS: I was actually sent a CDr copy of this by Wise Buddah, the promo company that dealt with the show, after the set, complete with stickered, embossed sleeve.

Tracklist:
Now Is The Time For Food radio ad intro
DJ Food – Nocturne
Dudley Moore – The Millionaire
DJ Food – Nocturne
Position Normal – Nostrils and Eyes
Two Banks of Four – Skylines Over Rooftops
Yussef Lateef – Lowland Lullabye
DJ Food – Break
Dr Rockit – unknown
Andy Votel & Cherrystones – A Patterns Emerges
The Third Wave – Eleanor Rigby
DJ Food – The Sky At Night
DJ Food – Minitoka
Jelisha – Friendly Pressure (acappella)
Bent – Invisible Pedestrian
Eat Food outro

My section of a 2hr Solid Steel show from 1994 which clearly shows the transition from the ambient electronic scene into the early days of Mo Wax’s golden period. Global Communication, Future Sound of London, System 7 and Autechre holding the fort for the former and DJ Shadow, RSW, UNKLE and another unknown track at the end for the latter. Not much to say on this but it was a truly golden age, a combination of Matt, Jon, PC and I would troop up to KISS FM on a Friday evening and camp out in the smaller studio to pre-record the 2hr show live in one take, complete with ads. We rarely if ever that I can remember stopped or did a retake, there just wasn’t the option to edit back then, you got it warts and all, live radio. Matt refers to me as ‘Telepathic Kev’ at one point, a hang over from the Telepathic Fish nights we were doing together at the time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this era this week with the news that my old friend Chantal Passamonte passed away. I was sharing a house with her at this time and things were starting to happen; radio, gigs, we were doing a fanzine about ambient music (Mind Food) and working in the Ambient Soho record shop. Ninja was yet to full take off but things were bubbling and she was doing what she did best, networking with people throughout the electronic scene and making things happen. RIP Chantal aka Mira Calix.

PS: This was from a file I was sent years ago, I forget from who now (sorry), it had been recorded from cassette but the tape was quite speeded up and everything was a bit fast and pitched up, especially noticeable on things like Matt’s voice. I’ve re-pitched the audio down to where I think it sounds normal again.

Track list:
Global Communication – 12:18
Future Sound of London – Lifeforms (excerpts)
System 7 – Gliding On Dutone Curves (Cascade Mix)
DJ Shadow – Lost & Found (S.F.L.)
Autechre – Teartear
Renegade Soundwave – Black Eye Boy
UNKLE – The Time Has Come
Unknown – Unknown

Did you spot the opening bars of the first track at the end of last week’s mix?
Neil Richardson’s ‘Approaching Menace’, better known to most as the theme to Mastermind, opens a dark and strange set that I made for the 4th of February Solid Steel show in 2002. I always thought the Mastermind theme would make a good mix with the theme to Jaws. Anyway, Tom Waits (for no man) and is up next with the only track I ever liked by him, the amazing ‘What’s He Building In There?’. I’ve no idea where or how I heard this but love it, genuinely weird. The Aranos & Nurse With Wound fits right in with the mood too, taken from a Brainwashed Recordings compilation free with The Wire magazine.

A very odd mix of Roots Manuva’s ‘Dreamy Days’ follows by Super Furry Animals, I think this was only on the CD single. More hip hop from DSP aka Dynamic Syncopation Productions, a re-christened for the second album, In The Red. ‘No Regrets’ closes out the album featuring Dell Donahue who doesn’t appear on any other release according to Discogs. Telectu – ‘Data No.2’ kicks off the Exploratory Music From Portugal compilation – again from The Wire, they always yielded something good. A rare track from Boards of Canada mixes out of it, ‘Red Moss’ from one of the Boc Maxima tape that had surfaced around this time – oh to have this in high quality.
The finale is quite something, I don’t want to spoil it but it veers so often into laugh out loud over-the-top earnest-ness that I had to check to see if it was a parody. Wink Martindale was an American disc jockey, presenter and game show host with one of those ultra wholesome voices like Ken Nordine or Rod McKuen. He made many spoken word records and this particular track was a B side in the early 80s, a poem written by Robert. N. Test, a pioneer in promoting organ and tissue donations. Someone has made a very tongue in cheek video for it here

Track list:
Neil Richardson – Approaching Menace
Tom Waits – What’s He Building In There?
Aranos & Nurse With Wound – Mary Jane (Marbles mix)
Roots Manuva – Dreamy Days (Super Furry Animals mix)
DSP – No Regrets
Telectu – Data No.2
Boards Of Canada – Red Moss
Wink Martindale – To Remember Me (The Bed Of Life)

Seeing as it was 20 years since Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi was released last week I thought I’d pull out a show from back in early Feb 2002 where I mixed up a pre-release copy of the album that Warp had given me a few days before release. As far as I know there weren’t any CD promos sent out to journalists, there was a listening party at the Union Chapel which I went to, and there was the blue vinyl ‘Alpha & Omega’ 12” but the first most of us heard of the album was when we bought it. Having connections with Warp I persuaded them to give me a copy a couple of days early so I could absorb it and get a mix down in time for the show and the results you hear are from just a few complete listens.

But first! Osymyso’s genre-defining ‘Intro-Inspection’ kicks off the show and I believe that this is an early version of Part One that he played on Eddy Temple-Morris and James Hyman’s show, The Remix on XFM. The only place to get this at this point was via a rip of the show on the web, probably from the Boom Selection website that served as a place to find all the latest mash ups. By this point Osy (aka Mark Nicholson), The Freelance Hellraiser and Jonny and Mike from Cartel Communique had started a monthly night in the basement of a newsagent just off Tottenham Court Road in London’s west end. Originally known as King of the Boots it soon morphed into Bastard (named after Bastard Pop, the name given to mash ups by the press) and I can honestly say that it was some of the most fun I ever had clubbing. Osy’s mix does exactly what it says on the tin, a selection of over 100 intros to famous songs mashed up into one long mega mix, inspired by watching the reactions to clubbers on hearing the first bars of each new song at a party. Reasoning that one track consisting of multiple intros would elicit prolonged ecstatic reactions in the crowd he set about compiling his magnum opus (that is, until we hear his fabled second album).

Coldcut and Steinski’s remix of Boom Boom Satellites’ Chuck D-featuring ‘Your Reality’s A Fantasy’ is full of hard-panning excitement, a total banger with multiple breaks and breakdowns at a breakneck speed. It’s a full on start to the show and rarely lets up for the first 13 minutes, making the Quantic Soul Orchestra seem quaint in comparison. Ramping things down another notch, Koushik’s fuzzed out ’Only Dreaming’ wanders into view before drifting into the aforementioned Boards of Canada mini mix for the next 19 minutes. I’ve not listed all the tracks in this as it will give Mixcloud’s tracklister a hernia and mean some people might not be able to hear it due to multiple artists in one set. Suffice to say I got at least ten in there as well as snippets of others and a little reminder of the debut album for the intro. This was all done from vinyl with an FX pedal and then edited and overlaid in Cubase, probably took the best part of a day to do just this section alone.

BoC tracks are notorious for using weird tunings and nearly everything they do is out of tune with everything else so very hard to mix without it sounding a bit discordant. I picked up on several backwards passages on the record and reversed them again to add into the mix – the devil is in the details as they say. There’s some very weird off beat panning going on in ‘Alpha & Omega’ where I had two copies playing a beat apart with the delay feeding one side and returning on the other so you get odd ping-ponging in the left and right channels – complete accident but sounds great. I love this album so much, it’s one of the greats and, although the debut is a classic, I can never decide between this and Tomorrow’s Harvest – both dark, dystopian records. Finding ways to condense the tracks without seeming to edit too heavily and then transitioning to new tempos was a challenge but because I wasn’t so au fait with it maybe that helped.

We’re bought back into the real world by Edan with ‘Just Listen’ from the ‘Lexoleum-tile 2’ EP on Lex Records, a fun cut up instrumental as only he can do. A brief telephone message from Ollie Teeba about what I cannot fathom introduces one of my favourite mash ups of the era – Jonny Kawasaki’s ‘My Child Is Bootylicious’. This terrifying vision of Destiny’s Child as if rendered by Aphex Twin post-‘Windowlicker’ and then pitched down to a slow grind was just one of the kinds of avenues the mash up could have gone down if there had been a few more tech-savvy producers putting two and two together. This is more in the Kid 606, Flashbulb vein of cut up; noisy, full of machine gun edits and stretching the subject matter to its very limits – all the more exciting for it too. I thought it appropriate to follow with Squarepusher’s latest promo, untitled at the time it emerged on the subsequent album as ‘Do You Know Squarepusher?’. Switching from 45rpm to 33 near the end takes the tempo down to a less manic level whereby 4 Hero gingerly entires the fray with beats in time but not exactly in the same pocket as Tom Jenkinson’s frantic cut ups. There’s a little of Jammin’s ‘Hold On’ to pad out the ending (Hold It Down into Hold On-geddit?) and then a snatch of next week’s mix at the very end…

Part 2 next week!

Track list:
Osymyso – Intro-Inspection (early version)
Boom Boom Satellites – Your Reality’s A Fantasy (Coldcut vs Steinski Going Under mix)
Quantic Soul Orchestra – Assassin (Part one)
Koushik – Only Dreaming
Boards Of Canada – Sometime In The Future – Geogaddi minimix
Edan – Just Listen
Johnny Kawasaki – My Child Is Bootylicious
Squarepusher – Do You Know Squarepusher?
4 Hero – Hold It Down (Bugz in the Attic remix)
Jammin – Hold On