PLabel: Not On Label – none
Format: Cassette, Mixtape
Country: UK
Released: 2022
Genre: Electronic
Style: UK Garage, Tech House, Techno, Garage House
Peace pipe 5, this time a fruitful meeting of dreamy UK Garage and deep clicky techno.
I was somewhere else when most of this stuff happened. In 1997 I went to university away from London. Having incorrectly decided I was above the prevailing patterns of new music, I buried myself in the secondhand section of the record shop. I think I was trying to find out why the music I liked sounded like it did, getting to grips with disco, krautrock, funk, new wave industrial etc etc. But in music, as in the real world, whole boom and bust cycles were swelling and crashing around me. Returning to London after my first term, I went to a Drum and Bass night at the then just opened Herbal in Shoreditch. I can’t remember now who was playing records, but it was clear something had changed. The club was 75% white and male. The dancing was fast and rigid, full-tempo rather than half-speed. The music was dark, unrelenting and utterly without drama or event. People had their shirts off. Of course, there was already an alternative, for several years fast bumpy house and clipped swingy two-step records had been pouring out of suburban studios. UK Soundsystem culture met US Garage. But, blink and you missed it, the glory years were almost over. As always the best bit was before the market flooded and every major label pop act had to have a Garage remix. Elsewhere, even before the opening of Fabric in 1999, a new kind of European dance records started to land in the UK. Early records on Playhouse, Kompakt and Perlon defined a new rhythm, glitchy and clicky, made possible only by intricate digital editing but somehow completely of and for the body. As far as I know these two genres never really cross pollinated. Except perhaps in YouTube algorithm purgatory via that Soul Capsule reissue. But this tape imagines an alternative late nineties, where records by Steve Gurley and Villalobos might have met coming out of a knackered function one system somewhere in Vauxhall. Sleep safe.... (Mint / New - with DL)
Tracklist
A Untitled 45:00
B Untitled 45:00
