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

Side B of an old tape from 1996, the A side of which was uploaded last week. Wishmountain aka Matthew Herbert‘s short ’Welcome’ crashes into the Coldcut jingle to start, opening his debut 12” on the Evolution label, ‘Radio’. The next track is from my old mate Mark Nicholson, Osymyso to some, from his second release, ‘Peter And The Wolf’. This is ‘Wolf’ and it was after I played this that we met at The Blue Note one night and a mutual appreciation society was formed. The stuttering track that follows it I have no idea of and Shazam doesn’t know either, anyone? I’d really like to know what this one is actually, the track back at the end identifies it as ‘The Outcast’ but I can’t find anything that fits that name. The Brotherhood’s ‘Mad Heads’ floats in with its refrain of The World’s Famous Supreme Team phone call – super tough UK hip hop with production by The Underdog.

Another mystery is the next track sampling Soul II Soul’s ‘Back To Life’ – the sounds American to me, going by the track run down near the end of the set it’s DJ Double S’s ‘Feel The Melody’ from the Hip Hop Madness EP, a cut and paste 12” of the time I vaguely remember having an oversized label. So many people think of the UK when they think of trip hop but it was happening over in the US too with labels like New Breed putting out all manner of blunted beats. Octagon Man ‘The Rimm’ is next, this is a bit of an aggro session, lots of distortion and heavy beats, I did like it hard and heavy back then, I think I scared Coldcut and PC a bit sometimes with my preference for the hard stuff.

I’m really not doing well on this track list, Mixcloud is going to be penalising me for having too many tracks by ‘unknown’ in this set. The slow burn acid track I’ve no idea, help me out people, Shazam has given me five different results for this generic roller. The fast breakbeat cut up that slides out of it is by Funky Monkey, ‘LA Riot’ and by a process of elimination I think this is the Channel Zero mix by Andy Bell of Ride / Oasis / GLOK fame no less, according to Discogs. Great stuff, so much has slid under the radar over the years.

There’s a very abrupt change of tempo as I slam into another track I actually know! Aubrey Pasternak’s only release for Clean Up Records, the Star Wars sampling ‘New Hope’ – a great cut up that can still be had for pennies. Primal Scream’s excellent, Weatherall-produced ‘Trainspotting’ from the film of the same name follows, what a delight to hear this again. Matt Black can’t believe it’s them but comes to the rescue with a vague run down of the tracks at the end which saved me from presenting you with a virtually blank sheet for a track list.

At the end of this tape was a section of an ambient mix that I’d taped over, I’d estimate it was probably done three years before as it contains a couple of tracks I recognise from the time that we played a lot at the Telepathic Fish ambient parties that came before I joined the Ninja crew.
The first track I don’t recall but the Twin Peaks-sampling tune was always a favourite of my DJ partner at the time, Mario Aguera. It was the final version of ‘Days In The Trees’ by No-Man from their third single – proper chills down the spine stuff and will set you back £20 at least these days owing to Steve Wilson’s popularity. The brief snatch of track after it is by Hypnotone, an act who have seemingly been forgotten but had a couple of albums at the cross section of bleep, techno and ambient which are well worth tracking down. ‘God C.P.U (Ambient)’ is from their second, ‘Ai’ which, along with The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, The Shamen’s En-tact and 808 State’s 90, we played to death at the start of the 90s. I’ve left this in as it’s a nice reminder of those times but wasn’t part of the Solid Steel show .

Track list:
Wishmountain – Welcome
Osymyso – Wolf
The Outcast – Unknown
The Brotherhood – Mad Heads
DJ Double S – Unknown
Octagon Man – The Rimm
Unknown – Unknown
Funky Monkey – LA Riot (The Channel Zero edit)
Aubrey Pasternak – New Hope
Primal Scream’s – Trainspotting
– bonus ambient mix section
Unknown – unknown
No-Man – Days In The Trees (Reich)
Hypnotone – God C.P.U (Ambient)

Here’s the mix that was on the same CDr as last week’s upload, something that had appeared two weeks earlier at the tail end of 2002. Around the beginning of the 00’s I was pretty heavily into the bootleg/mash up scene and for several years my Solid Steel mixes were full of them. I do cringe at some of them sometimes when listening back, not all have aged well but I like to think I would at least choose the more interesting ones that took the songs to different places. The opening of this set features two downtempo Beatles numbers (hence the title on the disc), Bad Production of which was actually pressed up on a 7” although I can’t find that on Discogs. You wouldn’t get away with that these days! Or you’d have to wait 8 months to do it.

The excellent Beatle-esque Future Sound of London remix of Robert Miles’ ‘Paths’ sounds like a precursor to their Amorphous Androgynous workouts a few years later. I’ve got a feeling this is the single edit version, must get hold of the 7 min version which can be had on Discogs for around £1. More Sixtoo from the as then unreleased CDr he gave me, this turned up the next year on the Outremont Mainline Runs Across Sunset 12” on Vertical Form. There’s also a bit of Alvin Lucier’s ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’ mixed in there, not sure why or where from. The gorgeous Sutekh track, ‘Privacy’ comes from the album Fell which I don’t remember owning but glad I do/did.

JG Thirlwell makes two appearances in his Manorexia guise although I can only identify one, plus a snatch of Beatles near the end. The Japan-only bonus track from Boards of Canada’s Geogaddi LP mixes in using samples from Tony Schwartz Records The Sound of Children LP (Children And God). Food is/was a band front by Iain Ballamy who I found via their first couple of albums on Feral Records, the covers of which were designed by Dave McKean and came in beautifully illustrated card boxes. The skipping CD start is what gave this set its name, ‘Freebonky‘ is from their second album, Organic & GM Food. I think the Steinski track is the Burroughs vocal sampling although it’s hard to tell. 80’s Baby’s version of Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’ is where I start to cringe, these were gentle versions of known pop songs made for babies and there were a whole string of them. I added a subtle bit of the original now and again and a monologue about driving from George Carlin but the joke wears thin very fast after that.

Tracklist:
Bad Production – Bad Production
Avril Plays the Beatles – Becoz
Robert Miles – Paths (FSOL Cosmic Jukebox mix)
Sixtoo – Transfer Please, Perfect Wednesday
Suktekh – Privacy
Manorexia – Canaries in the Mineshaft
Manorexia – Edison Medicine
Boards of Canada – From One Source All things
Food – Freebonky
Steinski – Audio Collage 6
80’s Baby – Cars
Gary Numan – Cars

Given that the new Batman film is about to be released, the tenuous reason I picked this set out is the Snoop Dogg opener, ‘Batman & Robin’ which just bangs with DJ Premier production and offbeat fight sounds. A voiceover from an LSD documentary (I forget which but it may be a Negativland radio show) forms the glue that holds this mix together and accompanies Pedro’s excellent Steve Reich/Phillip Glass-esque remix of Cinema Record Music Library’s ‘Lost’. The RJD2 remix of N.O.W’s ’70’s 80’s’ I’d completely forgotten and it sounds super fresh to my ears 20 years later, perfect summer tune, this is why I love unearthing these old mixes.

During a visit to Canada on tour we passed through Halifax in Nova Scotia and hooked up with Sixtoo who furnished me with a CDR of untitled music, this became ‘Outremont Mainline Runs Across The Sunset’ on Vertical Form and the LSD doc is back over the top of this mellow instrumental. This period of his output is so underrated, definitely one of the more interesting producers from this era before he switched up his style. I don’t remember where the Brian Bennet & Alan Hawkshaw tune came from but it’s mostly likely an excellent French Jazz comp called The Urge compiled by Victor Kiswell with a track from different countries around the world.

I have no idea why Stephanie McKay didn’t make it bigger, her earthy, beautiful vocals sounded so much more appealing than others who came after her and forced a ‘soulful’ delivery. This track was listed as ‘Bluesin’ It’ but I think it’s actually ‘Rising Tide’, track her debut down on Go! Beat, produced by Geoff Barrow from Portishead and Tim Saul from Earthling. The Cliff Martinez tracks that play out are both from the Solaris soundtrack, hard to pick two favourites, the whole album is sublime, must revisit that too, love those pure tones. This set is a real mixed bag but it all makes sense to me and every track stands up two decades later.

Track list:
Snoop Dogg feat. Lady of Rage – Batman & Robin
Cinema Recorded Music Library – Lost (Pedro mix)
Nightmares On Wx – 70’s 80’s (RJD2 mix)
Sixtoo – untitled
Brian Bennett & Alan Hawkshaw – Name of the Game
McKay – Rising Tide
Cliff Martinez – First Sleep
Cliff Martinez – Wear Your Seat Belts

This is the third part recorded for the show I put up last week. A very Mo Wax-centric mix this time round with five of the tracks being from the label or previously signed to it. Attica Blues had moved on by this time and were signed to Columbia which was sadly the last we’d hear of them with the Test. Don’t Test album that this is taken from. The first part of Nigo’s Japanese exclusive ’Symphony No. 250910 – Escape From Planet of the Apes’ is up next which was from the Ape Sounds LP and literally sampled huge chunks of the POTA soundtrack over heavy beats. Around the same time the album was released in the UK but without this track, possibly for legal reasons.

DJ Shadow’s ‘Dark Days’ soundtrack was out on 7” and his excellent David McCallum-sampling theme was exactly what was needed by an audience fiending for more after the uneven UNKLE album. The Cinematic Orchestra rearranged Krust’s erm… ‘Re-Arrange’ which was probably from their remix album collection as I can’t find it in his discography and contains the same spoken word sample that PC used on his ‘The Sky At Night’ on Kaleidoscope the same year. Nigo Pt.2 is next – this part was remixed and became known as ‘March of the General’ on copies of the album outside of Japan, a highlight in the late period MW catalogue. I seem to remember Jadell did production on this at some stage with the Scratch Perverts, top work.

We end with Shadow’s ‘Giving Up The Ghost’, at that point unreleased but taken here from a mix James Lavelle had done from an acetate. You can hear the quality isn’t great but also it’s very fast compared to the version on The Private Press, but what a track, the follow up to Endtroducing gets a bad rep but for me its every bit as good. The mix is interspersed with various snippets of food-related spoken word, one from the How To Have a Dinner Party album and two from a Warner Bros. comp with skits related to eating vinyl and the quality of the plastic.

Tracklist:
Attica Blues – The Man
Nigo – Symphony No. 250910 (pt 1)
DJ Shadow – Dark Days (Spoken For mix)
Krust – Re-Arrange (Cinematic Orchestra mix)
Nigo – Symphony No. 250910 (pt 2)
DJ Shadow – Giving Up The Ghost

A two-in-one offering today as we kick off the year proper with a blend of robot-themed tracks from late 2000. This sowed the seed for my Remember The Future mix seven years later, constructed from records about robots. Jon More fave and Solid Steel spoken classic ‘Music For Robots’ kicks things off then into the Electro The Robot version of MBM’s ‘Original Control’ with samples from an actual robot built by the Westinghouse Electric Corp in the late 30’s.
Kraftwerk should need no introduction and then we have an oddity from a soundtrack by Milton & Anne DeLugg called Gulliver’s Travels Beyond The Moon. ‘Rise, Robots, Rise’ is a stomping brass affair that gives way to an always funky Rufus Thomas dance number, ‘The Funky Robot’.

After that mix of mechanics it’s back to business as usual with the reissued-on-7”-at-the-time ‘Brutus Drums’ by Eddie Warner and a precursor to the first Now, Listen mix in the form of Sabu Martinez’s ‘Hotel Alyssa’. I think this had been bootlegged at the time and the early 00’s were a ripe era for all sorts of ‘unofficial reissues’ popping up in shops no doubt making a few people a bit of cash in return. Much like the web at that point it was still the Wild West and huge shops like HMV regularly carried bootlegs with no questions asked. Freeform Arkestra was always a great tune to play out with that plucked bass sample and building tension. Some chancer called DJ Food follows and then into an evergreen classic from the box, Camping Gaz & Digi Random’s ‘Circus World’. Around this time I found five mint copies of this in the bargain box in Soul Jazz Records (now Sounds of the Universe) for a pound and proceeded to give them away to anyone who would take them. The combination of Circus clowns, ska, screaming children and theremin solo has never been bettered or even attempted by anyone else.

The covers above and below were from a (very short) period where I was going to make a custom cover for each mix, around the year 2000 when I think I got a decent inkjet printer for the first time and could print glossy colour images. This lasted for approximately three Solid Steel mixes but I did make others for one-off themed sets like the Kraftwerk Kovers and the interview shows.

Into part 2 of the original show with Robert Klein’s hilarious ‘Record Offer’ of every record ever recorded, “we drive a truck to your house!”. Klein has several 70’s comedy records that are worth tracking down as he covers the usual topics of sex and drugs in a manic style. A Ninja classic from Up, Bustle & Out into Coke Escvedo’s ‘Runaway’ leads into ‘Funkyacidstuff’ from Luke Vibert via a 12” of archive material on Planet Mu, the same one where the track ‘Analord’ gave the Aphex series its name.
Photek’s name has been coming back up a lot recently it seems and ‘Terminus’ was possibly the last track he made that caught my attention before he fell off the radar. A B side on one of the Virgin releases, this huge downtempo monster just tramples over everything else in size and scope, proper widescreen break beats with bouncing bass, distorted drums and synth stabs. The Prodigy were occasionally mining this vein too and another B side, ‘Molotov Bitch’ follows with its ‘Ants Invasion’ sampling melody line. Klute plays us out with ‘Kahno’ from a 12” release on the Certificate 18 label. More spoken word crops up that would later be used on Now, Listen too, this was from an airline travel record about the Far East I think although the name escapes me.

There’s a part 3 saved for next week…

Part 1
Forrest J. Ackerman – Music For Robots
Meat Beat Manifesto – Original Control (Electro The Robot)
Kraftwerk – The Robots
Milton & Anne DeLugg – RIse, Robots, Rise
Rufus Thomas – The Funky Robot
Eddie Warner – Brutus Drums
Sabu Martinez – Hotel Alyssa
Freeform Arkestra – Freeform Theme (Raw Deal mix)
DJ Food – Rubber Samba
Camping Gaz & Digi Random – Circus World

Part 2
Robert Klein – Record Offer
Up, Bustle & Out – Aqui No Mas
Coke Escvedo – Runaway
Luke Vibert – Funkyacidstuff
Photek – Terminus
The Prodigy – Motolov Bitch
Klute – Kahno