… Music, that is, not pornography!
(Although to be fair a lot of the stuff featured in this post is truly filthy).
Anyways, as a special Bank Holiday treat, here are two excellent mixes from different ends of the hardcore spectrum, one hardcore techno, the other freeform hardcore. Both of these mixes are in zip files, and both are fecking excellent.
Enjoy!
A pre-streamlined Skelp playing at Rampage, Edinburgh, 2002
From time to time people ask me if I’m planning on doing any more freeform hardcore mixes … and frankly it’s a pretty good question!
I’d like to, but I left my freeform collection in London when I moved to Edinburgh, so now that I’m moving back to London, it looks like I’ll hopefully get the chance to put together one or two old skool freeform mixes in the coming months.
Until then, however, you could do a lot worse than check out The End of the Beginning, the great new mix that my old friend Skelp has just posted. I’ve known Skelp since the Rampage days, and he’s always had an ear for quality tunage, and this set is no exception, slamming through some golden early freeform/trancecore favorites from labels like XY2, Nu Energy, Digital Beats, and Great British Techno.
As the man himself would say … yaldie! 😀
Oh, and sad bastard that I am, of course I created a cue file for it, which you can grab here.
One of the dubstep mixes that I have been caning for the last couple of month’s is Plastician’s May 2009 mix, which you can download here.
Plastician (or Plasticman as he used to be known back when I interviewed him in 2005) is one of the leading dj’s in dubstep/grime, having long straddled the borderlands between the two genres, although these days he is probably better known as a dubstep dj (dubstep having long since outsripped grime in global popularity). Besides being an excellent producer, he is one of the best dj’s around, with an absolutely razor-sharp mixing style, which he deploys to good effect in this mix. If you are looking for other examples of his mixing prowess, his disc on the Rinsessions compilation remains for me pretty much the finest grime mix cd I’ve heard, and his Rinse 06 mix cd was a wicked combination of dubstep and grime.
Another mix I’ve been enjoying recently is the mix that Gemmy (of Bristol’s Purple Trilogy with Joker and Guido) did for Fact Magazine back in January. It’s a rather nice collection of colorful dubstep tracks, mostly from Bristol, with a large wodge of stuff that is still unreleased five months later. Nothing too mental, or even, I dare say, wobbly, just good tunes.
Worth having a look if you get the chance!
Long-time junglist hero DJ Zinc has recently begun working with house, and the results are pretty good! I’ve always been a big fan of the breakbeat garage tunes he did back in the early part of this decade as Jammin on his Bingo Beats label, so it’s neat to hear him working at a more restrained tempo again. I suppose what he is doing now is kind of a part of this UK funky sound that has gotten a bit of hype in recent times. Overall, I like it quite a bit (except for the tunes that feature rnb-style vocals, which I find a bit of a turn-off), and I enjoyed the Supa D mix that Rinse put out last year, but I’m not all that convinced by claims that this is some wildly exciting new frontier of musicology (man). Maybe I’m not listening all that closely, which I’ll freely admit, but it mostly sounds like nothing more than a new(ish) wrinkle on house. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that! House music is a nice thing, and I certainly like to listen to it, so I enjoy these tunes.
If you want to check out Zinc’s new sound, you should have a look here, where you can download the mix and read an interview with him about his new Bingo Bass imprint. Alternatively, you can download the mix directly from this link. There’s some really nice tunes on this mix, with lots of different flavours seeming to be thrown into the pot, with obvious influences from jungle, electro, hip-hop, rnb, and more sidling up to the house stuff to make a nice pot of bass-heavy, percussive stew. Worth checking out if you get a chance!
OK, this blog is obviously to highlight my own mixes, but occasionally if I run across something else I like, I might as well highlight it, no?
In any case, I recently downloaded Sekklow’s ‘Mind The Step’ mix from Dubstepforum.com, and I think it’s awesome. Really it is! And so, in the absence of a new mix from myself (I am still planning on doing that Karim tribute one, I just need to find the time), I might as well write a few words of praise for this mix.