Pearsall presents 100 Circles Vol. 3
right-click, save as to download this free mp3 mix
Mixed in Berlin, July 2026
100% Vinyl
(76:18, 183.4 MB, 320 kbps mp3)
Direct link to the mix:
https://mixes-upload.pearsall.workers.dev/mixes/100circles/Pearsall-100Circles-ModernDrumNBassV3.mp3
Tracklisting:
- Addison Groove – Lue [50 Weapons]
- Margari’s Kid – Defender [Cosmic Bridge]
- Amit – Cold Blood [Amar]
- TMSV – Send Them Come [Cosmic Bridge]
- Champion Sound – Vershun Excurshun [Through These Eyes]
- Machinedrum – The Palace [Exit]
- Quartz – Weird Nightmares [Metalheadz]
- Eusebeia – Each to their Own Path [Western Lore]
- Kid Drama – Brutal D [Metalheadz]
- Ricky Force – Enemy [Repertoire]
- Tim Reaper & Pearsall – Seeing Faces [Dubplate]
- Sweetpea – Ur Luv [AKO10]
- Goldie vs J:Kenzo – Official Jah Roller [Metalheadz]
- Double-O – Straight 98 (Escher Remix) [Rupture LDN]
- Sully – 5ives [Over/Shadow]
- Fracture – What’s Gwarning? (Rollers Mix ft Mighty Moe) [Astrophonica]
- Digital – Friendly Fire [Function]
- Samurai Breaks – Marathon (Groves Remix) [Sub Merchants]
- Dub-One & Inphiltrate – The Badway [Scientific Wax]
- Equinox – Let’s Go Back [7th Storey Projects]
- Nebula – Astral Light [Scientific Wax Retro]
- Mantra – Rolling with Fabio [Rupture LDN]
- 12 Bit Jungle – Imagination [Parallax]
- Tim Reaper & Dwarde – Groovin [Creative Wax]
- Om Unit – Adventures In Eden [Cosmic Bridge]
Welcome back to the 100 Circles project. This is the third edition in the series. If you’re not familiar with it, you can read the previous blog posts (linked above), but the long and short of it is that 100 Circles is just about me exploring modern drum n’ bass (and to a lesser extent jungle) via my record collection.
After a long hiatus from buying new jungle / drum n’ bass on vinyl, I started buying again not too long after moving to Berlin in 2013. The key catalyst was meeting Vali NME Click and starting to share costs on shipments from the UK to Germany. Mostly I was buying new jungle, but along the way I was picking up new drum n’ bass as well. The mix series, thus, came about because I just wanted to listen to some of these great tunes when I was out and about. Nothing more complex than that! The name is a reference to the full four mix series using 100 distinct records, i.e. 100 circles.
How I did 100 Circles is pretty simple:
- Start with a huge pile of records
- Split that into four smaller piles, each one is a mix
- Using the first pile, split that into four smaller piles based on style / vibe: halfstep / juke / weird stuff, rollers, atmospheric, heavy dancefloor smashers
- After each mix, split the leftover tunes across the other piles
- Repeat!
So this third mix was built from a pile that included not just the original pile 3, but also the leftovers from piles 1 and 2. As mentioned, with each mix I split the pile into four smaller piles and then assemble it section-by-section with 6 or 7 tracks from each sub-pile making it into the mix. For volume three, the order was dubby / halfstep / juke tunes, then rollers, then the heavy stuff, before ending on the atmospheric tip.
I don’t actually want to go too much into the tracklisting. What I do want to do in this post is talk about one track in particular, because I think this is the first time it’s been aired anywhere, potentially. It’s called “Seeing Faces,” and I made it last year with modern jungle legend Tim Reaper.
Me and Ed in his home studio
The story of how we connected is actually kind of straightforward. In my previous job I was going to London a lot, since that’s where the company headquarters was, so I was flying over every two or three months for the best part of a week. Anyways, I have been a fan of Tim Reaper’s work for years, so as a Christmas present my wife actually got in touch with him to ask if I could make a track with him. We kind of had known each other a bit from online music for a while so he said sure, so I came over to his London flat for the first time in January 2025 and we did some music together.
It was a great laugh so after that every time I was back in London I would text and ask if he was free, so when he was available we’d meet up after work in the evening, I’d bring a load of samples from my record collection, we’d have a chat, have some pizza, and just get into things.
We made five tracks in the end, all of which are just on dubplate at the moment. I don’t think they’ll ever come out, unless somebody wants to put them out! I think they probably need a little more polish, but Tim (aka Ed Alloh, his real name) is obviously a very busy guy, so I dunno if that will happen. It was tons of fun watching him work, because he is insanely fast – none of the tracks we did took more than like three hours start to finish.
Of the five tracks, three were weird jungle techn0-trance hybrids, which was my idea, as you can imagine. They are definitely different! We also made a (totally sick IMO) 135 bpm breaks track that has a load of samples from (mostly American) 90’s house and techno tracks, plus, finally, ‘Seeing Faces’, which is the 11th track on this mix. The rest of the post is about this track!
Let’s talk about the name: I picked the name from the main sample, Jamaican reggae singer Horace Andy’s track “See a Man’s Face,” off his classic 1972 Studio One album Skylarking. We sampled a bit of the intro as well as the vocal. One of the tools Ed uses is an AI system, I forget what it’s called, where you put in an MP3 or WAV file and it splits it into stems for the different parts, so that’s how we were able to extract the vocal. It’s not completely perfect, but if you’ve layered a load of other stuff on top, it sounds fine.
The main break we used is from a DJ Krust track called “Accepted Meaning,” made probably around 1995. It was on dubplate for a long time and was only released a couple of years back as a white label by the Russian label OKBRON. We were discussing which break to use and I had a brainwave that we could use this one, and fortunately Ed had it on vinyl, so he grabbed it off his (impressivley organized) shelves, we cued it up, sampled it, and then he did some nice chopping of it so it wouldn’t be a straight replay. The bassline itself wasn’t sampled; we played that one. The fun part of working on a collaboration like this is bouncing ideas off each other – we were thinking about beat switches in the main part of the tune, so I suggested, “how about when we switch the beats we drop the bassline down a few notes to make it deeper and heavier?”
It works!
There’s another vocal sample in there, from North London hip-hop group The Brotherhood:
We float like a butterfly lifted on some ‘erbs
We’ll be the one droppin’ them now for the birds
This was on their track ‘Mad Headz’ which appeared on their (really great) 1996 album Elementalz. The Brotherhood were “one mixed race, one black, one yid, power of a pyramid”; two mc’s: Spyce (black), and Shylok (Jewish), and a DJ, Mr Dexter (mixed race). The producer was Trevor Jackson, also known as The Underdog, a very interesting and talented guy who has been involved in all kinds of cool projects over the years in London as a musician, producer, artist and all-around creative. who has been an extremely prolific producer over the years. Very interesting guy, very talented – worth checking out his Playgroup project in particular. In this case we didn’t need to do an AI extraction trickery – I had the acapella on vinyl, so off we went!
The last audio sample to discuss is the one in the breakdown,where a guy goes, “What’s the latest trend, man? Underground music, man.” This is some deep obscure shit, to be honest! It’s from a mid-80’s Brazilian documentary about New York City, which I stumbled across years ago on YouTube.
The video follows around a fictional Brazilian journalist named Ernesto Varela who did a series of gonzo-style travel docs in the 1980’s (his trip to the Soviet Union is quite interesting). So it’s a fictional character doing real interviews – anyways in this video he is in New York interviewing ‘Yuppies and Punks’, so both ends of the cultural spectrum in Manhattan. The audio sample came from him talking to some punks in the East Village where he asks what the latest trend is.
As a native New Yorker, obviously I find it interesting seeing this time capsule of New York City life, at a time when I was only a little boy (and with parents who were very much yuppies); not only is this a slice of a New York that doesn’t really exist any more, but something I particularly enjoy is that even though New Yorkers have this gruff reputation, everyone he talks to is very patient and helpful with this odd foreigner babbling away in Portuguese before switching to extremely rough English to ask them questions. They listen carefully and answer him seriously. It’s cool!
One last thing to talk about in the track is the horn in the breakdown – it sounds like a sample but isn’t! We were discussing what to have in the break and flicking through some synth sounds when we found the horn. Ed said, “that sounds cool,” and quickly laid out the horn riff. Immediately we were both like, “Woah, that works!” I laughed that it sounded like something from Lex Luger, the legendary Atlanta trap producer famous for his bombastic beats.
So, I hope that that is a useful little insight into the building blocks of this tune. Unfortunately for this particular collaboration, I’ve left that job earlier this year and I’m now going the solo entrepreneurship route, so no more trips to London for the moment!
That’s it! I hope you enjoy this mix, lots of great tunes in here, lots to enjoy. Expect volume four very soon.