A late August show with Matt Black and I at the controls in which I kick off with three tracks straight from The Sound of MZEE compilation – a German label obsessed with Britcore rap. The two No Remorze tracks are straight out of the Hijack book of hardcore hip hop but with a German slant. Find their first album if you can, amazing record. Hearts of Darkness were the first release on Manchester label The Ruf errr… Label, releasing a couple of 12”s in the mid 90s before the label went full on hip hop. Alex Reece’s classic swinging remix of DJ Krush’s ‘A Whim’ should be familiar to all Mo Wax heads out there but Chronicles of Intense was lost in the mists of time to me and only Matt’s brief back track near the end gave any clue to it. Also lost is the identity of the stumbling breaks-y DnB cut after it that sounds like it’s nearly tripping over its own shoelaces, even more so when I turn it down to 33 rpm. As ever, if any of you recognise it, please leave a comment. UPDATE: Found it! The Committee – Profound Love on Creative Wax (but played here on 33rpm).

Kirk DeGiorgio’s Elegy slides in nicely and I discovered Kirk has not one but two compilations of rare material on his Bandcamp page featuring a whole host of bits and pieces from singles, comps and the like, no doubt excavated during lockdown – nearly 75 tracks in all spanning 1991-2014 – the man’s a genius. BPMF is a US 12” I picked up whilst working in Ambient Soho, really odd four-tracker that I still have somewhere on the Rancho Relaxo label. ‘Untitled #4’ is a bubbling acid thing that grooves away nicely out of Kirk’s track and then into Redcell (aka B12, a version of which also on a companion release to the Elegy track – ART 7.1/B1214.1). ‘Primitive Lites’ was taken from the then-new ‘Time Tourist’ LP and later featured in our Blech mix, still sounds like a futuristic city at night to me. Meat Beat Manifesto’s ‘That Shirt’, from their criminally under-appreciated Satyricon LP, still makes me laugh and exclaim, ‘It’s a Ben Sherman!’ whenever I chance upon one of their fine wares. Autechre’s ‘Second Bad Vilbel’ from the Anvil Vapre EP plays us out, brand new at the time, we didn’t know how good we had it, this was just another single on white label back then. I think it was either for this or the Keynell EP where I was staying at Sean and Rob’s after a gig in Sheffield and they were sampling kitchen utensils for beats and percussion sounds.

Track list:
Coldcut – Solid Steel intro
No Remorze – Interlude
No Remorze – Condemned To Death
Fast Forward – Day Of Infamy (Instrumental)
Hearts of Darkness – Don’t Fight The Featherweight
Coldcut – Solid Steel jingle
DJ Krush – A Whim (Alex Reece remix)
Chronicles of Intense – Prophecy
The Committee – Profound Love
Elegy – /P Switch
BPMF – Untitled #4
Redcell – Infinite Lites (Primitives mix)
Meat Beat Manifesto – That Shirt
Autechre – Second Bad Vilbel