I’m ending on an epic – after more than four years, 199 uploads and seven exclusive mixes – a three hour Solid Steel with Matt, Jon and myself from October 1994. As the show aired between 1am-3am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning and the traditional time of putting the clocks back is 2am – smack bang in the middle of the show – we get an extra hour. For this reason, this mix was referred to as a Spacetime mix, due to the fact that we time travelled during it and thus needed several tapes to fit it on. I’ve got nearly two and half hours, some of which would have been taken up by adverts and some may have been missed with tape turnovers but let’s just say the remainder has disappeared into the space time continuum.

I’ve also slaved over this track list between Shazam, Matt & Jon’s incomplete track backs in the recording and my own fading memory. I’ve nearly got it but not quite. The fourth tune at the 15 min mark was really annoying me as I know it, Jon says it’s ‘Todd Terry – Bad Boys’ but there’s no such track that I can find. UK original Todd Terry licensee Champion had an offshoot called Bad Boys Records in the early 90s so I checked there but it’s none of those releases. Turns out it was his Hardhouse alias with the dub of the B side ’11:55’, subtitled ‘Bee Boys Dub’. When we were (hand) writing down the track lists on the PRS sheets for Kiss we’d sometimes not know exactly what had been played in what order, were cribbing through a pile of discarded records, some of which were white label promos and just had to guess. Then sometimes we couldn’t read each other’s hand writing or ran out of time to go through the list, with Matt’s favourite get-out clause being, ‘and other mystery beats’. All in all it created confusion and no doubt frustration for those who wanted to track down the songs but had no access to any form of internet database like Discogs.

My section is roughly in the middle with Matt and Jon either side, I’ve left them in for this one as it’s the only three hour show I’ve got in the archive and it’s the last of this run. I think the Art of Noise is my entry point with maybe the Attica Blues as the exit – no idea on the female led ‘dabba daaah’ tune after it or the Hendrix-sampling trip hop track after that which is, again, naggingly familiar. I’d got the white vinyl FSOL ‘Smokin’ Japanese Babe’ 12” shortly before this show and was so taken with it I played both sides in full alongside a bit of old school electro. I’m not going to go through every track as I’m writing this Thursday night but I hope you enjoy this nearly two and a half hour ‘rub’ to end this epic archive project. When all is said and done, the left over tapes are minimal; a one and half hour Sphinx mix from the end of 1994 (we did a lot in that year!) a few personal mixes that I did for friends that never aired on Solid Steel and a live recording of PC and I in Bristol in 1997 which is mostly Patrick leading. I’ll send that one to him and maybe he’ll put it up, the others I may put up for free later but for now I need a break from the weekly uploads.

If you still want access to all these uploads you’ll have to subscribe but I anticipate a drop off in numbers which is fine, the work is done and I thank everyone who contributed along the way, especially those who have been here from the start (are there any?). I’ll let someone else do the math but there’s quite a few hours worth up here now and these are just up until 2007/8, not the years after which should be a bit more readily available in general via solid steel.net, Mixcloud, Soundcloud and various other places. I’ll be concentrating on my new monthly radio show on ROVR – the Electrik Collage – the third of which dropped last Friday – listen back here. It’ll be good to be looking forward and playing new music – like we did on Solid Steel – rather than getting stuck in the nostalgia trap, nice as it can be. I’m keen to make the shows that soundtrack these times that I’ll hopefully enjoy listening back to in 20 years time.

Track list:
The Sex Pistols – Anarchy In The UK
Beastie Boys – Fight For Your Right To Party
The Aloof – Society
Hardhouse – 11:55 (Bee Boys Dub)
The Transplant – Afrocentric (Come Together)
Bedouin Ascent – Internal Bleeding
Acacia – Cord
Hydra – Song For a Fish
Spacetime Continuum – Ping Pong
LFO – Tied Up
Mephisto Odyssey – Dream of The Black Dahlia (Keyboard mix)
Art of Noise – Opus 4
The Firesign Theatre – Everything You Know Is Wrong
Far Out Son Of Lung – Ramblings of a Madman
Far Out Son Of Lung – Zeebox
Vapourspace – Gravitational Arch of 10
The 7th Plain – Think City
The Octagon Man – The Demented Spirit
Hashim – Al-Naayfisch (The Soul)
La Funk Mob – Motor Bass Gets Phunked Up (Electrofunk mix)
Herbie Hancock – Rockit
Arthur Baker – Breaker’s Revenge (Extended Vocal version)
Unknown – unknown ambient
Autechre – Montreal
Silence – Omid/Hope
Massive Attack – Euro Child
Inky Blacknuss – Desolator
Far Out Son Of Lung – Are They Fighting Us
Far Out Son Of Lung – Smokin’ Japanese Babe
Attica Blues – Contemplating Jazz
Unknown – female vocal
Unknown – unknown trip hop
Single Cell Orchestra – Call Me
The Auteurs va Mu-Ziq – Lenny Valentino (Mu-Ziq #3) (on 45rpm)
Spring Heel Jack – The Sea Lettuce
Yellow Magic Orchestra – Tong Poo (The Orb remix)
Freak Power – unknown

As I’ve said before in these missives, a Solid Sphinx was an ad-free, minimal chat mix for two hours. The upside being that both we and the listeners could dive in and really immerse ourselves into the music without interruption between 1-3am. The downside is now evident when listening back and trying to identify the songs contained within as there were no track backs to let people know what was played. The old memory is unreliable three decades later and Shazam can’t identify everything you throw at it and so the track list for this upload is far from complete. Once again I implore anyone with a better recall to fill in the blanks here as I’m struggling although a couple are annoyingly familiar.

This show was at the tale end of 1994 and, to my trained ear, features all four of us in the original two hour rub. Kickstarted by PC, then I, Matt and finally Jon each took approx 30 minutes to mix and match whatever we had been feeling that week. This is just my section and I will forewarn you, it gets pretty nasty in places, certainly not a chill out half hour, you can almost feel the testosterone dripping from the speakers. Unknown DnB track 1 – no idea – in fact it may not even have come from my box, the lines are blurred as to where and when each of us end and begin but the second track, Caustic Visions, is definitely me. One of the group – I think his name was Tim possibly? – visited Ambient Soho one day brandishing their new single (actually Caustic Visions 2) and a brace of very well-designed promo posters. I was immediately taken with them and the disc was a fresh-sounding mix of acid, Gabber and industrial noise with a clear nod to Aphex Twin in both style and title (Caustic Window being one of his aliases). Always looking for the latest thing, I jumped on it and kept in touch, collecting several of their other releases, some of which were on Industrial Strength, the US hardcore techno label run by Lenny Dee. At one point I was convinced that Gabber would be the next thing to blow up but it never really caught on in the UK to the extent it did in Europe.

Anyway, I really liked what CV did and kept an eye on them for the few years that they were active as they always seemed to be occupying their own corner of the techno world. Three unidentifiable tracks follow; a rattle-y Amen-led DnB breakfest that seems to pre-figure Plug and Squarepusher with those rapid-fire machine gun edits and another that stops and starts like a scratch DJ who can’t keep their finger off the turntable stop button. Bridging the two is a wall of looping 8-bit noise that was also by Caustic Visions but the two DnB tracks show off my love of highly-detailed drum cut up programming before DJ Crystl’s classic ‘Let It Roll’ arrives to calm the waters somewhat. Crystl was originally the DJ with UK rap group The Brotherhood under the name of DJ Pump Action but left to pursue a DnB career before they achieved commercial success. ‘Let It Roll’ was a fresh sound at the time, even though the genre was still in its infancy. Racing in at what almost seems like double time is another unknown tune, and I’m barely keeping it in time at points before the actual track breaks down itself and shudders to a stop.

Mark Van Hoen’s Locust project was a big favourite back then, he didn’t and still doesn’t sound like anyone else and there were a lot of Aphex copyists around in the early 90s. You stood out by being original and having your own sound. With his spindly IDM and Designers Republic-designed sleeves he should have been on Warp by all accounts but wound up on the next best thing, R&S. I’d forgotten the next classic; this got a LOT of play at the time, a Sabres of Paradise remix of the Wolfgang Press of all people! They did two of which this was the second and I’m mixing the extended percussion breakdown of ‘Trans Europe Express’ over the middle of it for some time. The last track was a frustrating head scratcher until I ran across it by complete chance whilst researching something else just yesterday. Coming on like a slower version of Soul Coughing’s ‘Super Bon Bon’ (the Propellerheads remix – they must have used the same break) – it was local group Camberwell Butterflies with a track entitled ‘Gloop’ from their sole release on The Chill Out Label.

Track list:
Unknown DnB 1 – unknown
Caustic Visions – Contortion
Unknown DnB 2 – unknown
Caustic Visions – Virex
Unknown DnB 3 – unknown
DJ Crystl – Let It Roll
Unknown – Unknown
Locust – Good God
The Wolfgang Press – 11 Years (Sabres Main Mix 2)
Kraftwerk – Trans Europe Express
Camberwell Butterflies – Gloop

As described in earlier posts, a Solid Sphinx was an occasional Solid Steel show – usually live – with no ads and very little talking. It might have been that there were no ads booked in that week, no ‘reads’ (KISS-affiliated announcements to be made during the show) or just that there were only a few ads lined up and we conveniently forgot to air them. Either way, it was heads down and concentrate on the mix for two hours rather than have an eye on the clock for the next ad break.

What we have here are some edited parts of a 2 hour Sphinx where I was in control, I think Matt started the show off with a 30 minute mix, then me, then PC finished up, I don’t think Jon was around for this one. It’s marked as live on the tape which means we probably did it Saturday night directly to air whereas we usually pre-recorded it on a Friday night around 9pm if memory serves. I’ve snipped out some bits here and there just to make it a bit more digestible but you get the flavour – trip hop, electro, old school hip hop and spoken word interludes. I had acquired a copy of the Firesign Theatre’s Everything You Know is Wrong album and eagerly added some passages in here and there to add to the usual Coldcut Word Treasure jingles. We kick off with the end of Matt’s mix, some early jungle, and I come in with a Digidub tune that was a regular spin back in the day.

Cue Coldcut’s ‘More Beats’ on 45rpm then switched down to 33 for a tempo change before the underrated and overshadowed (by UNKLE on the A side) Howie B vs Major Force ‘Martian Economics’ – a fab slice or early trip hop if ever there was one. I loved that 12”, to me it embodied everything I wanted from ‘trip hop’ – dusty drums, weird electronics, samples and spoken world with a sci-fi touch. M.S.P. stood for Manic Street Preachers and the track ‘Faster’ was taken from a ‘promo’ 12” named Done & Dusted, featuring versions of MSP tracks made over by The Dust Brothers before they had to change their name to the Chemical variety of siblings. This was early big beat colliding with rock – as the Chems would perfect later, more electro than trip hop but still coming from similar sources, very exciting at the time – no idea if I still have it in the collection.

Kraftwerk cycle into the mix with ‘Tour de France’ – never ages – before an ambient breakdown I can’t identify and a clip of Matt Black’s dad reading a text called ‘The Ninth World’. There was an ad break here, or the tape ended but we proceed with Air Liquide’s ‘ The Increased Difficulty of Concentration’ and into Two Sandwiches Short of a Lunchbox which was Andrea Parker and David Morley on the Apollo label, an ambient subsidiary of R&S records. Weirdly I’ve just designed an LP sleeve for David for De:tuned records, how odd the way things circle back? The Dust Brothers are back with ‘Dust Up Beats’ from their My Mercury Mouth EP, I was obviously smitten and hoovering up everything I could find by them (which was probably less than 5 releases at the time including remixes). We slip into a couple of old hip hop classics, evidently played directly from Street Sounds Electro 4 by the sound of it as the two mix into each other exactly the same. I still think D.St’s mix of Herbie Hancock is one of the greatest mega mixes of all time, he obviously had access to the studio tapes and a proper studio to do it in but it’s a superb creation.

A brief blast of the Firesign Theatre before a track I’d forgotten all about, GTO’s ‘Dub Killer’ from their Data Trax vol.1 12” – a great example of odd little B side experiments that would turn up on dance singles around this time, very Renegade Soundwave / trip hop-sounding. Autechre’s ‘Teartear’ from Amber is up next, a track I still play out occasionally with its tempo switch down. Sheila Chandra was a big element of my ambient sets a couple of years earlier after I found a clutch of her LPs in Cheapo Cheapo’s in Soho. Her ‘Mecca’ track from the Roots & Wings album is a bit out of tune here but mercifully not for long. Tori Amos’s ‘God’ appeared in a variety of mixes including three from Carl Craig but my favourite was by The Joy – possibly their only remix work aside for one for D:REAM – and a 12 minute+ epic. Looking them up I found they were fond of long tracks with two mixes of their debut, ‘Shine’, clocking in at 27 minutes each(!). Denise Johnson was part of the group and they did work with her later, it’s very much in that post-ambient / baggy / Screamadelica / long Sabres of Paradise remix mode that was the thing around then.

Only one more entry until we hit the magic 200 mark and this series comes to an end. I probably have less than 10 tapes left and not all of them are going to be uploaded as I don’t want to go over the 200 mark at the moment. I also have drawers full of encoded cassettes I don’t want/need now so if anyone wants to make me an offer to take custody of them then feel free. I’m trying to clear things out that have been with me for decades that I don’t need.

Track list:
Coldcut – Solid Steel intro
L.S. Diezel & Launch Dat – Rougher Than A Lion
Coldcut – More Beats (on 45/33 rpm)
Howie B Vs. Major Force E.M.S. Orchestra – Martian Economics (Unified Plant Theory)
M.S.P. – Faster (7-11 Dub)
Kraftwerk – Tour de France
Matt’s Dad – The Ninth World
Air Liquide – The Increased Difficulty of Concentration
Two Sandwiches Short of a Lunchbox – Too Good To be Strange
The Dust Brothers – Dust-Up-Beats
Pumpkin & The Profile All-Stars – Here Comes That Beat!
Herbie Hancock – Megamix
The Firesign Theatre – Everything You Know Is Wrong!
GTO – Dub Killer
Autechre – Teartear
Sheila Chandra – Mecca
Tori Amos – God (The Dharma Kaya mix)