This Friday’s FACT mix comes from one of the brightest talents in UK house music, East London’s Ossie.
If you’ve listened to underground house favourite DJ Petchy at any point in the last eighteen months, there’s a good chance you’ll have heard Ossie’s ‘Tarantula’. A beauty of a track, built on gloriously natural percussion and slide rule synths, with the support of Petchy and others it became an anthem on Live FM and other London pirates, before being snapped up for full release by Lightworks, a new label formed by Reecha (Dirty Canvas/No Hats No Hoods) and Jon Rust.
This month, Ossie followed it up with arguably an even better second single, the vocoder-led ‘Set the Tone’ on Hyperdub. He also played a show-stopping closing set at our recent party at Cable; time, thought we, to ask him for a mix.
What’s key with Ossie’s productions is that instinctive, live sounding percussion he uses, and his love for natural drums also comes through in his FACT mix. Blended to perfection, they melt and slip into each other like butter. Download the mix below, and check page two for a short Q&A with Ossie.
Moloko – Sing It back (Ossie Remix)
Karizma – Groove A ‘K” Ordingly (Atjazz Remix)
FCL – Let’s Go
Ossie – The Power of Love
DJ Gregory & Sidney Samson – Dama S Salon
Plesurekraft – Tarantula (Ghooppee Remix)
Ossie – That’s Mine
Danny Marquez & Tuccillo – Mumba
Ossie – Set The Tone
DJ Gregory – Attend 1
Vikter Duplaix – Manhood
DJ Gregory – Traffic
Bopstar feat. Zara Mc Farlane – Chiaroscuro (Vudoo Reprise)
Marlon D – Jesus Creates Sounds
Ossie – Ossie Baba
On July 23 and 24, the Portishead curated ATP event, I’ll Be Your Mirror, rolls into town.
To celebrate the event, the legendary Bristol group have made a two hour mixtape that features the majority of the acts playing I’ll Be Your Mirror, including Swans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Books, Factory Floor, DOOM, Grinderman and Company Flow.
* 00.00 “…They Don’t Sleep Anymore on the Beach…” / Monheim – Godspeed You! Black Emperor
* 13.19 We Carry On – Portishead
* 19.44 A Cold Freezin’ Night – The Books
* 23.04 Gazzillion Ear – Doom
* 27.15 You Fucking People Make Me Sick – Swans
* 32.20 Yang Yang – Anika
* 35.11 Real Love – Factory Floor
* 42.32 Infinity Skull Cube – DD/MM/YYYY
* 45.51 Untilted – Helen Money
* 51.42 “Four Spirits In A Room” Excerpt – Alan Moore & Stephen O’Malley
* 56.50 Plaster Casts Of Everything – Liars
* 60.43 8 Steps To Perfection – Company Flow
* 65.23 Written On The Forehead – PJ Harvey
* 68.49 Arabic Emotions – The London Snorkeling Team
* 71.27 Wulfstan – BEAK>
* 77.28 When My Baby Comes – Grinderman
* 84.09 Paris Signals – S.C.U.M.
* 88.30 Lovers With Iraqis – Foot Village
* 92.18 Gratitude – Acoustic Ladyland
* 96.29 Violence – The Telescopes
* 100.01 Hannibal – Caribou
* 106.15 Walk In The Park – Beach House
"Gil Scott-Heron, who died on May 27 aged 62, was a composer, musician, poet and author whose writings and recordings provided a vivid, and often stinging, commentary on social injustice and the black American experience; his declamatory singing style, allied to the overtly political content of his work, made him widely recognised as one of the inspirational figures of rap music." (The Telgraph)
"Scott-Heron first came to attention with his 1970 recording The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, an attack on the mindless and anaesthetising effects of the mass media and a call to arms to the black community: “You will not be able to stay home, brother./You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out./You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,/Skip out for beer during commercials,/Because the revolution will not be televised.”
Written when Scott Heron was just 18, it first appeared in the form of a spoken-word recitation, his impassioned incantation accompanied only by congas and bongo drums, on his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.
The following year Scott-Heron recorded the song for a second time, this time with a full band, for his album Pieces of a Man, and as the B-side to the single Home Is Where The Hatred Is.
The song went on to be covered, sampled and referenced in innumerable recordings, the title entering the lexicon of contemporary phraseology. In 2010 it was named as one of the top 20 political songs by the New Statesman.
Scott-Heron’s music reflected something of the militancy and self-assertiveness of such theorists and polemicists as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Over the course of some 20 albums he produced a series of sardonic and biting commentaries on ghetto life and racial injustice, including Whitey’s On The Moon, Home Is Where The Hatred Is, The Bottle (a lamentation about people squandering their lives on liquor, set to an irresistibly seductive Latin beat) and the anti-apartheid anthem Johannesburg. But anger was only colour in Scott-Heron’s music palette; songs such as Must Be Something and It’s Your World were moving affirmations of faith in the power of the human spirit.
A tall, rail-thin man with a wispy goatee beard and a countenance of prophetic gravity, Scott-Heron sang in a rough, declamatory voice that was once described as a mixture of “mahogany, sunshine and tears” and that always emphasised lyrical content over technique. The bass player Ron Carter, who played on Scott-Heron’s second album, Pieces of a Man, described it as “a voice like you would have for Shakespeare”.
His vocal style, and his political message, would be a major influence on such groups as Public Enemy and NWA, and would lead to his being described as “the godfather of rap”. It was a title that Scott-Heron himself always deplored: his music covered a far broader and more sophisticated emotional range than the crude rhetoric of so much rap music, which he dismissed on the ground that “you don’t really see inside the person. Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.” He preferred to describe himself as “a bluesologist”.
Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1 1949. He was named after his father, Gilbert Heron, a Jamaican who had settled in America, where his prowess at football (soccer) brought him to the attention of talent scouts from Scotland; in the early 1950s Gilbert snr played football professionally for Celtic and Third Lanark, earning the nickname “the Black Arrow”, before returning to Chicago. It was there that he met Gil’s mother, Bobbie, a librarian and an accomplished singer who had once performed with the New York Oratorial Society.
Scott-Heron would encapsulate his early years in a poem, Coming From A Broken Home: “Womenfolk raised me and I was full grown/before I knew I came from a broken home.” His parents separated when he was two, and he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott, in Jackson, Tennessee. Scott-Heron would credit his grandmother with being one of the primary influences on his life: “[She] raised me to not sit around and wait for people to guess what’s on your mind — I was gonna have to say it.”
Cultivating his interest in music and literature, she bought him a second-hand piano from a local funeral parlour and introduced him to the writings of the Harlem Renaissance novelist and poet Langston Hughes, who utilised the rhythms of jazz in his poetry and who became a major influence.
When Gil was 12 his grandmother died, and he moved to New York to be reunited with his mother, who brought up her son on her own. On the recommendation of his high school English teacher, Gil won a scholarship to a private school, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, before going on to study at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where Langston Hughes had once been a student.
In his second year at university he was given leave of absence to write a novel, The Vulture (1970), a thriller about ghetto life, while working as a clerk at a dry cleaners. On graduation he published a second novel, The Nigger Factory (1971), about campus unrest, and a collection of poetry, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.
By now Scott-Heron had begun performing his poetry in coffee houses and jazz clubs, where he was approached by the jazz producer Bob Thiele who, as head of the Impulse label, had recorded such artists as John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as being the co-writer, with George David Weiss, of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World.
Thiele signed Scott-Heron to his own Flying Dutchman label, and released Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, a live recording of one of Scott-Heron’s club performances. The follow-up Pieces of Man brought him together on record for the first time with Brian Jackson, a keyboard-player, flautist and composer whom he had met at Lincoln University, and who would become his principal collaborator on nine albums.
With Jackson, Scott-Heron refined an intoxicating hybrid of jazz, Latin and Afro idioms that established him in the vanguard of black American music in the 1970s. The success of a single version of The Bottle in 1974 led to his being signed to a major label, Arista. He enjoyed further chart success in 1976 with Johannesburg and, in 1978, with the anti-drug song Angel Dust: “Please, children would you listen, Just ain’t where it’s at. You won’t remember what you’re missin’, but down some dead end streets, there ain’t no turnin’ back.”
These lyrics were to prove ironic, for by the end of the 1980s Scott-Heron was himself beginning to be undermined by drugs use. Between 1970 and 1982 he made 13 albums, but it would be a further 11 years before the release of his 14th, Spirits; the album’s centrepiece was a gruelling three-part explication of the hells of drug addiction, The Other Side. While he continued to perform intermittently, Scott-Heron became a notoriously unreliable figure.
Monique de Latour, a New Zealander photographer who met Scott-Heron in 1995 and lived with him for several years, described how he would frequently vanish for days on end without explanation, often retreating to one of a number of flophouse hotels in Harlem.
In the hope of shocking Scott-Heron out of his addiction, de Latour took to photographing him when he was comatose on drugs and hanging the pictures on the walls; but he refused to look at them. “He didn’t like to look at himself at all,” she recalled. “He didn’t like to look in the mirror.”
In 2000 Scott-Heron was sentenced to 18 to 24 months of in-patient rehabilitation for possession of cocaine and two crack pipes, but given leave to complete a European tour. After failing even to turn up at a subsequent court hearing he was sentenced to between one and three years in prison. Released on parole, in 2003 he was again charged with possession of a controlled substance after cocaine he had hidden in the lining of his bag showed up on an airport x-ray. And in 2006 he was sentenced to two to four years in a New York State prison for violating a plea deal on a drug possession charge by leaving a rehabilitation centre.
In 2010 there was a resurgence of interest in his work when he returned with his first studio album in 16 years, I’m New Here. The record had come about after an English fan and record producer, Richard Russell, had written to Scott-Heron and then visited him in prison on Rikers Island in 2006.
The record put Scott-Heron into an abrasively contemporary musical setting, placing his gruff, time-worn spoken-word recitations — including a reworking of the Robert Johnson blues Me and the Devil — in a setting of dark, down-tempo beats, loops and samples.".
To celebrate the phenominal career of Gil - Kirk Degiorgio has posted a new Sound Obsession show :-
Sound Obsession - Vol 59 - Tribute To Gil Scott-Heron
In a career spanning over two decades, Kirk Degiorgio has earned the tag of 'the producers producer'. From his humble beginnings in 1983 as an electro DJ to his As One productions for Clear, Mo' Wax and Ubiquity, Degiorgio has remained true to his love of everything soulful, edgy and funky. Inspired by a vinyl buying visit to Chicago and Detroit in 1990 Kirk sold all his records and put together ART Studios in the model of those he saw at Transmat and Metroplex. Kirk fused his vision of the Detroit sound with funk and jazz influences resulting in a succession of projects under the names Future/Past, As One, Offworld, Esoterik, Elegy and Super-A-Loof - only recently has he used his actual name for his purist techno releases on the New Religion label. He has remixed artists as varied as Azymuth, Coldcut, 4 Hero, Innerzone Orchestra, Papo Vasquez and many more. His collaborations include work with visionaries like Ian O'Brien, Tony Allen, Carl Craig, and Paul Randolph. From 1992 until 1997 Kirk's ART/OpArt labels released important early productions from B12, Carl Craig, Aphex Twin, The Black Dog, Photek and others. Kirk has also recorded several albums as As One, as well as working as producer, writer, and backing singer for the band The Beauty Room.
TRACKLISTING:
Gil Scott-Heron - On Coming From A Broken Home Pt.1 - XL
Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Flying Dutchman
Gil Scott-Heron - Lady Day And John Coltrane - Flying Dutchman
Gil Scott-Heron - Home Is Where The Hatred Is - Flying Dutchman
Gil Scott-Heron - The Needle's Eye - Flying Dutchman
Gil Scott-Heron - Pieces Of A Man - Flying Dutchman
Gil Scott-Heron - Did You Hear What They Said - Flying Dutchman
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - Peace Go With You Brother - Strata East
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - Song For Bobby Smith - Strata East
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - Winter In America - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - Ain't No Such Thing As Superman - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - A Toast To The People - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - A Lovely Day - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - It's Your World - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - The Bottle (Live) - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - Racetrack In France - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - We Almost Lost Detroit - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - Better Days Ahead - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson - Third World Revolution - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron - Legend In His Own Mind - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron - The Train From Washington - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron - Morning Thoughts - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron - B Movie - Arista
Gil Scott-Heron - On Coming From A Broken Home Pt.2 - XL
Gil Scott-Heron - Who Will Pay Reparations On My Soul? - Flying Dutchman
The second half of XLR8R's two-part 200th podcast comes courtesy of another musical heavyweight, dubstep kingpin Mala (a.k.a. Mark Lawrence).
Whether operating solo or as one half of legendary outfit Digital Mystikz, the man helped put dubstep on the musical map in the mid-'00s, not only as a producer and DJ, but also as the co-founder of the genre-defining DMZ label and club night with Coki and Loefah. Along the way, he also found the time to start up his own Deep Medi imprint. His work has undeniably influenced an entire generation of bass-loving artists, including a large swath of those folks who regularly appear in XLR8R. These days, when he's not travelling the globe and reminding people of the power of sub-bass, he's still turning out new music—most recently last year's Return II Space album—and now he's kicking off a new mix series, Sound*System*Musik, the first chapter of which is this podcast for XLR8R. Over the course of its 45 minutes, Mala drops one low-slung, speaker-rattling tune after the next, many of them DMZ dubplates, and almost all of which seriously emphasize the dub end of the dubstep equation. He's a true master craftsman, someone who manipulates and massages low-end sonics with the precision of a surgeon, making his contribution to the XLR8R podcast series to true pleasure to behold.
01 Mala - Digital Mystikz "Livin' Different VIP" (DMZ)
02 V.I.V.E.K "Feel It" (Deep Medi)
03 Goth-Trad "Seeker"
04 Coki - Digital Mystikz "Ironshirt"
05 Mala "Enter Dimensions"
06 Kryptic Minds + Youngsta "Arcane"
07 Dark Tantrums "Unborn"
08 V.I.V.E.K "Big Bang" (Deep Medi)
09 Mavado "Dem A Talk (TMSV Refix)"
10 Coki "Revolution"
11 Jack Sparrow "Afraid of Me"
12 Mensah "Gambia"
13 The Dub Mechanics "The Clash"
14 Mala "Bad Spirits on Shoulders"
15 Digital Mystikz "Dun Stinky"
16 Commodo "Saracen" (Deep Medi)
17 Coki "Duppy Sour Sap"
18 Johnny Osbourne "Fally Rankin (V.I.V.E.K. Dub Version)" (Greensleeves)
19 Mala "Education" (DMZ)
20 Old Apparatus "Untitled Intro" (Deep Medi)
Apologies for not posting recently - have been distraceted by life outside the blogsphere...anyway i'm back with a FACT mix recently posted....its Oldschool/Jungle group 2 Bad Mice...... killer.
FACT mix 250 is a time machine. It’s destination? 1991, ’92, ’93, ’94.
This time machine has been built for us by 2 Bad Mice, the original nutters whose early productions – produced in collaboration with Rob Playford – constitute some of early rave’s finest musical moments, and midwifed jungle into life.
Founded in 1991 by Sean O’Keefe and Simon Colebooke, and, in a brilliant contraction of distant points on the map of English culture – dirty raves and bucolic children’s literature – they took their name (and that of their signature, breakthrough track) from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice, about two good-f0r-nowt rodents who vandalise a little girl’s dollhouse. The moniker, with its connotations of mischief, mayhem and bare-faced cheek, was perfect for O’Keefe and Colebrooke’s concoctions of shifty breakbeats, impish vocal loops and earth-quaking sub-bass.
“To be honest, I wasn’t sure about the use of [the name] as I thought it slightly cheesy,” Colebrooke would later recall. “But the anticipation of what could happen with the release made us so excited that it was soon forgotten. Sean knocked up the collage style cover, a test press and promo run were done and we were ready to unleash our first release…”
Key to the power of 2 Bad Mice’s beats was their then third member and producer Rob Playford, in whose poky studio their tracks were laid down in a haze of spliff-smoke. By the time he went on to engineer Goldie’s Timeless, Playford was happily describing drum ‘n bass as the next prog-rock and privileging the album format as the genre’s optimum vessel of expression, but for us the work of his that will truly endure is the more raw, impromptu and altogether less self-aware fare that he produced with 2 Bad Mice and their other collaborative project, Kaotic Chemistry. Taking their cue from souch trailblazers as Shut Up and Dance and Shades Of Rhythm, 2BM and KC brought a hip-hop approach to rave, sampling rhythms and chopping them up and sanding them down into devastatingly lean and mean dancefloor detonators – it’s telling that their most seminal anthem was titled ‘Bombscare’. At times you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but the fact is that 2 Bad Mice, unlike so many of their peers, resisted the toytown cartoonishness that’s often part and parcel of ‘ardkore, while also remembereing to make their music fun – just listen to the rollercoasting keyboard vamps, chipmunked soul vocals and parping horns on ‘Hold It Down’. There’s obviously and innocence and naivety to their productions, and that’s part of its charm; at the same time, have you ever heard as deliciously dark-hearted and minimal as ‘Waremouse’?
In parallel to their work as 2 Bad Mice, O’Keeffe, Colebrooke and Playford were making music as Kaotic Chemistry, whose choice of titles and imagery made no secret of rave’s narcotic drive. The front cover image of the Five In One Night EP (which features the classic ‘Drumtrip’) depicted a typical coffee table scene, a hand at the edge of the shot holding a fag and chopping out a line of speed, discarded wrap just out of focus; the photo on the back showed the same table adorned with a pile of pills. If at this stage you were still doubting the inspiration behind the record, the whispered intonation ‘Ecstasy…Ecstasy…Ecstasy…’ that kicks off the title track soon dispelled it. The follow-up LSD EP (Moving Shadow, 1992) tightened up chaotic Kaotic Chemistry sound; the breaks are at once more polished and more punishing, the vocal loops are less comical and more genuinely disorienting, the overall production and manipulation of space terrifically advanced, not just on past 2BM/KC product, but compared to anything being made at the time. ‘Illegal Subs’, ‘Drum Trip II’, ‘Space Cakes’, ‘LSD’ – every track on this EP is exemplary, mingling mirth and menace as only early UK rave can. It really is one of the most essential 12″s of the era, and still sounds rabble-rousing today. All together now: “You are the people of chemistry / the people of physics / the people of civilisation / the people of music / the people of rhythm!”
After that spasm of future-rushing activity across ’91-’94, 2 Bad Mice went quiet, O’Keeffe and Colebrooke choosing to concentrate on other projects and, you know, life. O’Keeffe in particular has produced some extraordinary solo work, especially under his Deep Blue guise, beginning with 1993′s classic ‘The Helicopter Tune’ and continuing right up to the mid-noughties. Having sold in excess of 120,000 records on labels like Moving Shadow, 31 and Good Looking, these days his primary interest “techy, tribal and DEEP house”. But 2 Bad Mice are not dead, oh no.
For the past half-decade or so O’Keeffe and Colebrooke have been treating a new generation of ravers to the initimable 2BM sound. Joined by their old mucker Rhodesy, who remixed ‘Bombscare’ with Rob Haigh in ’94 and worked for Parliament Records and Kiss FM in subsequent years, for their modern-day sets 2BM stay true to their ’91-’94 sound; their sets are a living testament to the potency of the hardcore sound, which despite having created or mutated into myriad different strains of different dance music since, remains unbeaten in its ability to make euphoria and dystopia feel like natural bedfellows.
2 Bad Mice play the resurgent Glade Festival on June 10. Other acts on the whopping bill include Photek, Untold, Hyetal, Machinedrum, Ben UFO, Object and Pangaea. It’s worth noting that none – repeat, none – of these artists would exist in the form that they do without 2 Bad Mice, so whether your a craggy old-skool survivor or a fresh-faced rave debutante, be sure to go pay your respects and experience the party of your life while you’re at it. More information and tickets here.
And so….here we have 2 Bad Mice’s FACT mix. It’s out 250th episode, something of a landmark, and we’re delighted to have Sean, Si and Rhodesy behind the decks for the occasion. Mixed with deadly precision, it’s essentially a greatest hits of hardcore and early jungle, all killer and no filler. With the possible exception of last week’s Machinedrum workout, we’re hard-pressed to think of a 2011 FACT mix this year that we’ve enjoyed quite this much. Whether you know ‘Space Cakes’, ‘Rockin’ Down The House’, ‘Bombscare’ et al like the back of your hand, or whether it’s all new to you, we strongly urge you to batten down the hatches and get raving.
TRACKLISTING:
1. Underkut – “Both Ends” Mendoza
2. Da Juice “Hear The Angels” Torso
3. Walters & Allen “On De Ball” Mendoza
4. 2 Bad Mice “Bombscare” Moving Shadow
5. Kicks Like A Mule “The Bouncer” Tribal Bass
6. Code 071 “A London Sumtin” Reinforced
7. The Sorcerer “Odyssey” ADR
8. MC Jay J & DJ Devious D “Time Of Our Lives” Awesome
9. Kaotic Chemistry “Space Cakes” Moving Shadow
10. Chemical Company “Define the Beat” White Label
11. M17 “Rockin’ Down The House” Chill
12. DJ Phantasy & DJ Seduction “DJ’s Unite” Impact
13. Edge 1 “Compounded” Edge Records
14. DJ Tim & DJ Misjah “Access” (Rhodesy VIP) X-Trax
15. Urban Hype “Trip” (Renmix) Faze 2
16. Phuture Assassins “Future Sound” (2 Bad Mice Remix) Suburban Bass
