Happy Friday!
This week’s edition of Freeform Friday is all about celebrating those classic bits of freeform that never saw wax, for whatever reason. Some have since emerged as free MP3’s (never quite the same thing), some remain in limbo, and some, well, seem to be lost forever.
I’ll start with two tracks from Sharkey’s mix on Bonkers 3, which was, imo, perhaps the single best edition in that hallowed series.
First up is the instrumental mix of Sound Assassin by Sharkey. It’s an absolutely massive tune, albeit one that will sadly never see the light of day, as to my understanding the original DAT was lost and all that was left were a few scratchy dubplates.
Next up is another tune from the same album, Ravechief by Ramos & UFO, who were two of the finest producers of early freeform/trancecore. Sadly this tune was never released, even though Ramos was running RSR for many years and put out a large number of fine tunes on it.
Bang The Future were Billy ‘Daniel’ Bunter and Rob Vanden, and collectively they were the team behind super-influential label GBT, through which they released many of the best early trancecore tunes and helped set the pace for the scene to come. One tune that never made it to wax, however, was Elek Tek, an awesome rolling number that had only ever appeared on the Hardcore Explosion 2 compilation until Bunter released it as a free limited download last year. Quality tune.
For you freeform lovers out there, any cool unreleased tunes I should have included?