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Subtitled ‘Canadian Vinyl Excavation series’, these two mixes were very much a result of going through the spoils of touring the US and Canada in 2000 and mixing in a sprinkling of new releases from the time. As I’ve no doubt previously mentioned, the international tours of the day were also excuses to go wild in record shops overflowing with vinyl post-CD boom, pre-vinyl resurgence, all cheap with a strong pound against a dollar conversion and an even better Canadian dollar rate. Regular day routines would be to travel to the next city, check in and either hit the record shops or do the soundcheck and try to squeeze in a dig before dinner. Days off were a free for all and the van or bus bays would fill up with bags of vinyl pretty quickly.
I’m using the trusty Line 6 FX pedal in some of this, it has a lovely long sustain on it and a gritty analogue sound, very versatile but a bit of a beast to control. This and next week’s mixes were based around the opening track by Vanilla Fudge whose concept album ‘The Beat Goes On‘ was split into four phases. Some great UK hip hop in here from Stylee C and Def Tex, both from the Son label, run by Al from the Ninja Tune office at the time. Some background on the Peter Cook & Dudley Moore track, a 1967 track that got put on a Beatles bootleg and led some people to speculate that it might be the band incognito. Dudley Moore wrote, “Regarding “The L.S. Bumble Bee“, Peter Cook and I recorded that song about the time when there was so much fuss about L.S.D., and when everybody thought that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was a reference to drugs. The exciting alternative offered to the world was L.S.B.!, and I wrote the music to, in some ways, satirize the Beach Boys rather than the Beatles. But I’m grateful if some small part of the world thinks that it may have been them, rather than us !”.
The Gil Trythall ‘Nashville Moog’ track was the last track on a frankly terribly Country Moog album I picked up but is a genuinely enjoyable piece of comedy filler. The Jonny Dankworth ‘Experiments with Mice’ is also a gem, fished out of a Toronto 45 bin, a fantastic retooling of the nursery rhyme in a jazz context, renaming the three mice after famous players and using their signature styles to flesh out the story, a kind of live mash up. At this point I’d been buying up jazz and soundtracks at a rate of knots for several years on tours, the costs being minuscule compared to UK prices, but was beginning to dip my toe into the psych rock pool with The Mothers of Invention and anything that said ‘psychedelic concept acid freakout’ on the cover. Of course I picked up a few duds along the way as many bands and artists cashed in on the summer of love but it made for some great sleeves. Apropos to nothing, the Quincy Jones track sounds like the Batman theme to me. That’s a very ambitious mix from The Mothers into Herbie Hancock, it just about holds together, the search for his ‘The Spook Who Sat Behind The Door’ flexi still goes on… For the final track I see I included Andy Summers & Robert Fripp, I have no recollection of this, or of ever owning any of their albums, although I’ve since become a Fripp devotee, very odd.
Parts 3 & 4 next week…
Phase 1
Vanilla Fudge – And The Beat Goes On
Stylee C – Old 3 Piece Suite
Mondo Grosso – MG2SS
Miroslav Vitous – Bassamba
The Soul Destroyers – Blow Your Top
Sandy Nelson – Bang That *%$£@+ Drum
Lord Buckley – Willie The Shake
5th Dimension – Good News
Def Tex – Sad Songs
Peter Cook & Dudley Moore – LS Bumble Bee
Gil Trythall – Nashville Moog
The Avalanches – Thank You Caroline (Andy Votel mix)
Phase 2
Jonny Dankworth – Experiments with Mice
Paul Horn – Interludium
Arthur Lyman – Taboo Tu
Quincy Jones – Boogie Bossa Nova
The Mothers of Invention – Help, I’m a Rock
Herbie Hancock – The Spook Who Sat Behind The Door
Fingathing – Slop
Sonny Terry – Blue’s Last Walk
Jack Nitzsche – No. 2
Andy Summers & Robert Fripp – Maquilage
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
Looking forward to getting stuck into this history of instrumental, electronic hip hop (trip hop if you must) by Laurent Fintoni. Laurent interviewed me for it about 6-7 years ago so I’m glad for it to finally see the light via Velocity Press. Also featured from the Ninja stable are Coldcut, Roots Manuva and label manager, Peter Quicke.
Order here https://velocitypress.uk/product/bedroom-beats-book/
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
Searching through old discs for something else I ran across these line-based designs for what became the Ninjatune.net website identity in the 00’s. Old heads will immediately recognise the Ninja Tune forum layout and colours. For a few years, after the mass Warp forum exodus had settled, it became a buzzing hive of creativity and connections in the pre-Myspace and Facebook era of social media. I still have good friends that I made through the forum and much fun was had on it over the years. Sadly, like anything, times change, people come and go and the largely unmoderated board eventually became overrun with trolls and any new blood attempting to join was faced with a barrage of abuse or an inpenetrable wall of in-jokes that would test even the hardened fan.
Anyway – here’s some of the design work, made so that it would be quick and easy to see at different sizes and pixel ratios I seem to remember – at least that’s what I was told to do by the web designer at the time. It all looks a little blurred because it’s been upscaled from Index-colour pngs to RGB jpegs. The bottom image is a flyer for a forum party, something that occasionally happened, self-initiated by users who wanted to meet the faces behind the names.
There’s a new Jane Weaver album, single and tour just announced for 2021! Lots of vinyl variations from different shops including poster option from Rough Trade – the single is a stormer GO HERE
All this week I’ll be doing guest posts on the Forgotten Graphics Instagram account with the contents of the cupboards in a chalet I used to holiday in in the Swiss Alps. One year we were rained in all day so I photographed some of the many games, books and toys stuffed in the packed cupboards there. Most had been in the family for decades and were French, German or Swiss in origin from the 60s and 70s so had a period charm I’d never seen before. Take a look over at forgottengraphics and give them a follow as they post beautiful images all the time.
Finally, after years of wanting a copy of Caza‘s psychedelic space book, Kris Kool, Italy’s Passenger Press has reprinted and recoloured it AND translated it into English! The original French language version of this always fetches high prices and this version has been done in association with Caza himself and includes extras as well. For the first 200 copies there’s also a signed print as an incentive too! You can pre-order it here
30 years ago this month, Ninja Tune came into being and 20 years ago the label made it into double figures. I made a Ninja-centric set for the occasion and this was recorded across various dates of a UK tour to support the Xen Cuts compilation album. At some point I put it down in two parts and the first 30 minutes of part 1 was played on Solid Steel 09/10/200 but the rest of this mix went un-broadcast I think.
Part 2 continues the theme – warning – some very shonky mixes in parts here, never try mixing heavily swung half time jazz with regimental double time drum n bass. Also – lots of scratching near the end, I had edited in some scratch jam from a set with Ollie Teeba and DK that I’d completely forgotten about, it goes on a bit but has some nice moments (only some, indulge me).
What’s nice about this is that you can hear the crowd at points and, in the current climate, that’s not something we’re going to hear much of any time soon. Also, this is all vinyl, Serato wasn’t even on the horizon at this point so all the jumps and wonky pushes and pulls you hear are me wrestling with the records in real time. No cue buttons to jump back to the start of a track, no ‘relative mode’ so that when the needle skips you don’t hear it, no loop function… I don’t miss it at all 
Happy Birthday 30th birthday Ninja!
Track list:
Mr Scruff – Get A Move On
DJ Food – Mr Quicke Cuts The Cheese
DJ Food – Ninja Walk
DJ Vadim – The Pimp Theme 126
Funki Porcini – Rocket Soul
Dynamic Syncopation – Closer To The Line
The Illuminati of Hedfuk – The Worm Turns
Neptune – Soul Pride
Up, Bustle & Out – Los Locos Cubanos (Snowboy mix)
Cinematic Orchestra – Ode To The Big Sea (Four Tet remix)
Cinematic Orchestra – Channel One Suite
2 Player – Extreme Possibilities (Wagon Christ remix)
Amon Tobin – Like Regular Chickens (Dillinja remix)
DJ Food – Scratch Yer Hed (Squarepusher remix)
Jungle Brothers – Jungle Beats
Dynamic Syncopation – Internal Affairs
Amon Tobin – Creatures
DJ Vadim – Friction feat. Iriscience
– Scratch jam w. Ollie Teeba + DK
Styly Cee – Here Comes Son
The Bar-Kays – Holy Ghost
KMD – Peachfuzz (Instrumental)
The Upsetters – Popcorn
Red Snapper – Hot Flush (Sabres of Paradise remix)
The Radiophonic Workshop – Dr Who Theme
30 years ago this month, Ninja Tune came into being and 20 years ago the label made it into double figures. To celebrate there was a run of dates in London, starting on a Thursday night in three separate bars around Hoxton. Plastic People, The Strongroom Bar and The Pool bar played host to various DJ combos as a warm up for the weekend.
The newly opened 93 Feet East played host on Friday – so new there was still wet paint in places – with Amon Tobin, Hexstatic, Coldcut, Kid Koala & P-Love, Fink, Neotropic, Mixmaster Morris, Mr Scruff and myself with visuals by The Light Surgeons.
The Scala saw a big funk and hip hop line up on the Saturday with The Herbaliser, DJ Vadim, Dynamic Syncopation, Kid Koala & P-Love, Luke Vibert & Blu Rum and a Big Dada Room with Roots Manuva, Mike Ladd, Gamma, Ty and New Flesh For Old.
Mercifully, Sunday saw a mellow come down at Ronnie Scott‘s as we all nursed out hangovers and witnessed intimate sets from DK, Clifford Gilberto, Chris Bowden and The Cinematic Orchestra.
I made a Ninja-centric set for the occasion and this was recorded across various dates of a UK tour to support the Xen Cuts compilation album. At some point I put it down in two parts and you can hear that the Mr Scruff – Ug/DJ Vadim – The Terrorist mix we put on the first Solid Steel mix CD originates from here. The first 30 minutes of part 1 was played on Solid Steel 09/10/200 but the rest of this mix went un-broadcast I think.
Part 2 to follow next week. Happy Birthday 30th birthday Ninja!
Track list:
Steinski – The Xen To One Ratio
The Herbaliser – Mr Chombee Has The Flaw
The Cinematic Orchestra – Channel 1 Suite
Mr Scruff – Fish
Neotropic – 15 Levels
Dynamic Syncopation – Bahian B-Boy
Up, Bustle & Out – Revolutionary Woman of the Windmill
Cabbage Boy – Planet
Amon Tobin – Sordid
The Herbaliser – Mrs Chombee (DJ Food remix)
Funki Porcini – Let’s See What Carmen Can Do
Mr Scruff – Ug
DJ Vadim – The Terrorist (acapella)
DJ Food – Turtle Soup (Wagon Christ remix)
The Herbaliser feat. Latyrx – 8 Point Agenda (acappella)
DJ Shadow & The Grooverobbers – Hardcore Instrumental Hip Hop
Quantum – Blue Flames
DJ Shadow & The Grooverobbers – Hardcore Hip Hop
Latyrx – Say That
Amon Tobin – 4 Ton Mantis
Saul Williams – Elohim
Dynamic Syncopation feat. Mass Influence – 2 The Left
9 Lazy 9 – Electric Lazyland
Roots Manuva – Fever
DJ Food – Sexy Bits (Autechre remix)
Dynamic Syncopation feat. Mass Influence – Ground Zero (acappella)
Big Dada Allstars – Showtime
Dynamic Syncopation feat. Mass Influence – The Plan
DJ Food – Dark Lady
Luke Vibert – Get Your Head Down
DJ Food – Freedom (Fila Brazillia mix)
Animals On Wheels – Modular Existence
DJ Food – Consciousness (Ashley Beedle Unconscious Dub)
Up, Bustle & Out – Bicycles, Flutes & You
This is the other side of the tape from week 15 (which was the week after this) and comprises a mix I did of 45 minutes which is all I have of this show. There may have been more but the cassette ran out. This is still billed as Openmind but Matt Black refers to me as ‘Strictly Kev on the mix’ at one point so this is somewhere midway to coming to the Solid Steel / Ninja fold and becoming a part of DJ Food.
Trip hop and electro is in full flow on this one with the first release on Clear – The Jedi Knights’ ‘May The Funk Be With You’, Afrika Bambaataa and an early Andrea Parker / David Morley production for the Apollo label under the name Two Sandwiches Short of a Lunchbox.
Jon More‘s (then) secret weapon – Forrest J. Ackerman’s ‘Music For Robots’ is deployed for spoken word effect (just wait until we got to Japan in a few years time…) and coincidentally (or maybe on purpose) the Yoshinori Sunahara track that opens the set is titled ‘Music For Robot For Music’.
After that the Art of Noise gets molested by Rick Rubin’s uber slow, ultra heavy ‘Dust Cloud’ from the Tommy Boy ‘Masters of the Beat’ compilation, it doesn’t always work but you can hear what I was trying to do. An early David Holmes mix for Justin Warfield and the Future Sound of London in their Far Out Son of Lung guise both dip their toes in psyched out trip hop with long, tripped out distorted beats and FX, this was the stuff I really loved (and still do) – weird, heavy, psychedelic beats and samples.
I think most people are hip to Justin’s LP debut LP by now, ‘My Field Trip To Planet 9’ – a trip hop classic before the term was even coined, if you’ve not heard it then check it out. The only other things like it at the time coming from the US were bits of Beastie Boys’ circa Check Your Head, some Divine Styler and maybe a bit of the DJ Muggs stable. UK remixes by Holmes, Ashley Beedle and The Dust Brothers (UK version, pre-name change). In a weird twist of fate Justin would soon feature on Bomb The Bass’ ‘Bug Powder Dust’ single which would also sample DJ Food’s ‘Dark Lady’. Sadly he largely left hip hop for more rock-based bands for about 20 years after this although he made another rap album 20 years later and made this astute observation: “The only caveat being I didn’t know what to talk about, and since hip-hop is at it’s best a vehicle for an artist with something he or she has to say, a point of view given voice over beats, and that if you had nothing to say, well…then better to not say anything at all. (A point lost on some modern rappers, and more importantly, the ever-growing audience that gobbles it up).
Track list:
Coldcut – Solid Steel intro jingle
Yoshinori Sunahara – M.F.R.F.M. (Armed)
Boymerang – The Don
Forrest J. Ackerman – Music For Robots
Art of Noise – Moments In Love
Rick Rubin – Dust Cloud
The Jedi Knights – May The Funk Be With You
Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force – Looking For The Perfect Beat (Bonus Beats)
DJ Food – A Little Samba
Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force – Looking For The Perfect Beat (instrumental)
Two Sandwiches Short of a Lunchbox – Too Good To Be Strange
Justin Warfield – Live From The Opium Den (David Holmes Dub)
Future Sound of London – Far Out Son of Lung & The Ramblings of a Madman
Bandulu – Run Run
Cannot wait for this to be back on our screens, I loved it in the 80s and recently found this copy of the NME with an interview with Fluck and Law inside.
My good friend and sometime collaborator, Aaron Thomason aka 2econd Class Citizen, aka Rodin and now aka Sun Moth, sent me this today. He’s also a painter in the little spare time he has between all the other things he gets up to. He’s been doing these ‘pours’ for a while now alongside his abstract landscapes and has a batch up for sale, this one is about 7″s square and very affordable. Go and check him out on Facebook or Instagram or Etsy – he’ll be launching some new music soon too
It’s that time of year – the La Boca poster for Beyond Fest – which is happening at a drive-in in Clairmont – go here for more details
As we conclude our field trip with Mr Geets Romo and the hopelessly out of his depth square narrator, played by Del Close and John Brent on their ‘How To Speak Hip‘ album we continue down the electronic jazz path of the late 90s. The Death track came on a silver 12” with no labels but a skull sticker listing the components used to make it and I regularly used it as a rhythmic bridge between styles when DJing. Looking it up now I see that it was the only release under this name by Thomas P. Heckman who started making all manner of electronic records in the 90s including starting the Trope label which this is on. It’s great having the internet and Discogs now to look this stuff up, back in the 90s, although we had email and a vague version of the web, it was hard to find out about some of the more obscure releases that turned up in record shops unless they came with a press release or were featured in a magazine.
The Tortoise remix here is by Bundy K. Brown who I was keeping close tabs on after we’d met in Chicago on our first tour of the US and pledged to work together. I love his remixes, there’s something about the way he puts things together with both a musician and engineer’s mind that brings out unique results. I love the way he draws things out here, the groove and mood gently unfolding with minute changes. Also, this one is LONG, so much so that I play the whole of the next record over it and barely get time to mix another track in before that’s ended.
Those records being Jamie Hodge’s Born Under a Rhyming Planet alias and Kingsuk Biswas’ Bedouin Ascent with their takes on electronic, abstract jazz. Both were prolific in the mid 90s and then went quiet as the 00’s appear, neither having released any music for over a decade now. Kingsuk especially I thought could have been as big as Aphex or label mate Luke Vibert, his complex angular rhythms were like no one else’s. Following this we have a track from the rare MASK 400 12” from Gescom’s Skam label, which sees Grace Jones’ ‘Private Life’ remixed by Post which may have been an alias for Mike Williamson. We get another (very out of tune, mix wise) track from Papa Blue’s ‘En Velo’ 12” (remember, cheap over on Discogs) and ‘Proxima Session’ was from a 12” entitled Jazz Roux by Uriel who followed a similar pattern to others here by being super active in the mid to late 90s and then disappearing.
Track List:
Del Close & John Brent – Field trip no.3
Death – Electronic Realisations 2
Tortoise – Find The One (Wait , Abstraction No.3)
Born Under A Rhyming Planet – Spasm Band
Bedouin Ascent – Internal Bleeding
Grace Jones – Private Life (Post remix)
Papa Blue – Luna en la Pampa
Uriel – Proxima Session
Very pleased to see Rian Hughes’ new book ‘XX – A Novel, Graphic’ featured so prominently in the new issue of Electronic Sound magazine with a double page of layouts.If you want an idea of what the book’s about then Sci-Fi Now has a very good review.
The Celestial Mechanic album that I created with Saron Hughes and Robin the Fog soundtrack’s the novel and also gets a mention – you can hear that here https://celestialmechanic.bandcamp.com
The Cape Town Electronic Music Festival 2020 is online only this year and, after a live stream last week they announced this Friends and Frequencies compilation. It’s a great selection of the many artists and friends who have played for them over the last nine years of running the festival. I’m very pleased to be kicking off the 137 track comp with the final song from 2012″s ‘The Search Engine’ album, the compiler’s felt that the spoken word on the track said what they wanted to say perfectly.
The compilation is designed to raise funds for all the artists involved as well as the industry supply chain so if you are in a position to pay more than the asking price please feel free to do so. Available here
Another chapter from Del Close and John Brent‘s ‘How To Speak Hip’ undercover field trip opens and closes this week’s mix and leads into the extraordinary ‘Traveller’ by Talvin Singh, the strings on this are so gorgeous, I really thought this would be the one to put him up there in the spotlight, win him awards and such, and it did of a sort but he deserves way more recognition. You can hear jazz creeping in here and it was starting to become fashionable again, after hip hop producers had moved from funk, soul and rock to jazz in the early 90s. Techno producers like Kirk DeGiorgio had started espousing its delights and people were rediscovering electric Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock albums. A good example is the Papa Blue track – a solo 12” on the Finnish Sahko offshoot PUU label – home of Jimi Tenor before he signed to Warp. Apparently it was an alias of Jaakko Salovaara who records under the name JS16 and this was his only release under this name. Find a copy, there are 20 for sale very cheap on Discogs, it’s a lost classic of hazy, trippy jazz comedowns.
From one-off obscurity to the first Cinematic Orchestra single debuting here, who could have guessed how far they’d come over the next 20 years? Massive Attack get dubbed up by Alpha, DJs Shadow and Krush dual in fine style and a certain LA rapper who would later move into my building in London shows up – what was her name again? Ultramarine close the mix and don’t release another album for another 15 years.
* The Muppets + Coolio at start note refers to a recording at the start of the DAT of Coolio trying to teach The Muppets to rap taped from the TV in Canada in the late 90s on tour. It also features a section from KISS meets the Phantom of the Park film, a terrible cash-in film that plays out like a Scooby Doo cartoon featuring the masked rockers whose careers were on a high at the time.
Part 3 follows next week…
Track list:
Del Close & John Brent – Field Trip no.2
Talvin Singh – Traveller
Papa Blue – Matusalem
The Cinematic Orchestra – Continuum
Massive Attack – Inertia Creeps (Alpha mix)
DJ Krush/DJ Shadow – Duality
T-Love – What’s My Name?
Ultramarine – K/V