I started writing this post about The Wild Bunch a month or two back, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to talk about a crew that I actually know very little about. My lack of knowledge on these guys from their active days (1983-1986) makes sense, given that:

1. I was still rocking single digits in years back then, and
2. I lived in North America and these guys were from Bristol.

My interest in them mostly comes not from who The Wild Bunch were, but who some of the guys in the crew eventually became; after the Wild Bunch splintered up, Nellee Hooper went on to become a member of Jazzie B’s Soul II Soul soundsystem, Mushroom, Daddy G and 3D teamed up to become Massive Attack and Tricky would have a successful solo career as a vocalist/producer on his own after contributing to Massive Attack’s first two albums. All those post-Wild Bunch projects had a pretty profound effect on me personally.

Soul II Soul put me right on my ass the first time I heard “Keep On Movin’” on Energy 1200 back in 1989. Snagging their full album (on cassette, obviously) ended up being my very first dance music purchase.

Soul II Soul – Keep On Movin’
Club Classics, Vol 1 (1989)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Massive Attack’s first 2 albums got heavy heavy rotation on my stereo in the mid-90s. The video for “Karmacoma” was always on MuchMusic (back in the day when they actually played videos instead of the pap that’s on now) so I picked up a copy of the “Protection” LP and was instantly hooked. Soon after that buy I purchased Massive’s first album “Blue Lines”, which easily ranks on my Top 10 Albums of All Time list.

Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy
Blue Lines (1991)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Massive Attack – Karmacoma
Protection (1994)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tricky was another MuchMusic find; they were playing the video for “Overcome” on a regular basis. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more sombre, brooding tune on the airwaves in 1995, and given that I was a sombre, brooding teenager at the time it’s easy to see why I bought a copy of “Maxinquaye” soon afterward. It was a more challenging listen than any of Soul II Soul or Massive Attack’s output, but the weirdness of it made me a fan.

Tricky – Overcome
Maxinquaye (1995)

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was kind of shocked at first when I found out that these acts all had worked together previously in a UK soundsystem back in the mid-80s, but as I got used to the idea it started to make more sense. They were all on a similar wavelength but took different paths; dance music (Soul II Soul), mood music (Massive Attack) and hybrid rock/hip-hop (Tricky). They all had a relaxed approach to urban music, and they all showed a heavy soul influence.

You can see the common thread that runs through them all in “The Wild Bunch – Story of a Sound System”, a mix that crew retiree DJ Milo put together in 2002. The mix is a showcase of all the different styles (hip-hop, electro, disco, early house) the Wild Bunch pushed when they were up and running. Along with the tunes he used to play, Milo includes short clips of Wild Bunch performances complete with crowd noises to give the listener an idea of what kind of party Bristol’s finest soundsystem hosted.

The Wild Bunch
[excerpt from "Bombin'"]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anyways, enough yapping.

1. The Wild Bunch – Hands In The Air One Time (Live Intro)
2. The Russell Brothers – Party Scene
3. The Crash Crew – On The Radio
4. Spoonie Gee – Love Rap
5. T La Rock – It’s Yours
6. The Wild Bunch – Tearin’ Down The Avenue (Live)
7. Knights Of The Turntables – Techno Scratch
8. Newcleus – Jam On Revenge (The Wikki Wikki Song)
9. Micronawts – Smurph Across The Surf
10. Man Parrish – Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop) / Sucker DJ (Suckapella)
11. Younger Generation – We Rap More Mellow
12. Empress – Dyin’ To Be Dancin’
13. Fresh Band – Come Back Lover
14. BBCS & A – Rock Shock
15. Odyssey – Inside Out
16. Evelyn “Champagne” King – I’m In Love
17. Teena Marie – Behind The Groove
18. Thelma Houston – You Used To Hold Me So Tight
19. The Wild Bunch – Double Fresh (Live)
20. Visual – The Music Got Me
21. Montana Sextet – Who Needs Enemies With Friends Like You
22. Chain Reaction – Dance Freak
23. Mr. Fingers – Can You Feel It
24. The Wild Bunch – Dub Plate Fashion (Live)
25. The Wild Bunch – The Look Of Love

Download: DJ Milo – The Wild Bunch – Story of a Sound System

Heart – Alone
Album: Bad Animals (1987)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Too weird. One of the best hip hop crews of all time against one of the best bands of all time? I was half-intrigued, half-filled with that “urg, this is going to be a trainwreck, some unknown dude’s clamoring for attention, big time” feeling. So I clicked on the thumbnail for the LP cover, saw what you see above, and laughed. I figured that this Tom Caruana dude went all tongue-in-cheek when he put this project together, so I hit play on the file and gave it a listen.

I got four tracks in and I was hooked. Wu-Tang acapellas with beats made with Beatles instrumentals. I went about finding the full release right away.

Now, despite me getting hooked in and whatnot, I wasn’t entirely wrong with my initial “uh oh” feeling. In one sense, this LP definitely isn’t 100% as advertised. It turns out that only 6 of the 27 tunes use genuine Beatles instrumentals; the rest of the tracks use instrumentals from Beatles covers by other bands.

George, you so gangsta.

Knowing this only dampened my initial yes-ness for “Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers” a little bit, and all the bonuses (Beatles outtakes, clips from interviews with crazed Beatles fans, Ol’ Dirty singing “Love Me Do” with John and Paul) made up for it.

LP highlights? Give a listen below:

Killah Priest – Cross My Heart vs Marty Gold’s “Yesterday”

Method Man’s bit on “Uzi (Pinky Ring)” (@ 2:18), on top of the original “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

Rae, Ghostface & Cappadonna – Daytona 500 vs “Good Day Sunshine” by Roy Redmond

Inspectah Deck – Forget Me Not vs “You Won’t See Me” by Ernest Ranglin

Want to snag the whole project? Download a copy of it here. For all you trainspotting types, I include the names of each Beatles tune sampled in the Comments section of each track.

Let me know what you think.

Karl and I played Konkrete Jungle 15 last Friday.

Considering I hadn’t played out in a long while, I jumped at the chance when Saxon asked us to play. I enjoy playing out, and gigs where I can tag with Karl are opportunities I never say no to, given how similar our tastes and ideas about drum & bass are.

So we hit the spot with Mish and Threesixty in tow around 11 or so, Ramza and Ashes are on set. The kids were jumping around to what they were playing (what it was exactly I find kind of hard to explain), but I wasn’t really feeling it. There was a cartoonish quality to the tunes they were mashing together that really doesn’t do it for me. I put it like this: their set made me think about how Pendulum and Hazard tunes “feel” (not sound), kinda in-your-face and hyper. I can understand a set of that kind of music at 1am, but 11pm? If you’ve read my post about the Scruff gig, you know that for me 11pm’s a bit early for that sort of thing.

Karl and I get on deck at 11.30. As usual for sets at this hour, we decided to play twos: one of us plays two records, then the other plays two records. Twos are good because we both keep our energy up and neither of us can deviate too far from the overall direction of our set.

So Karl gets on and plays two tracks. I get on and play two tracks. Karl gets on, plays two, I get back on, play two. Most often, once we’re 20 minutes deep I’m usually starting to settle into the set and get comfortable. On this night that wasn’t the case. I don’t know if it was the system (I take a while to get used to DJ booths I’ve never played on before) or the venue or the crowd, but I had a hard time getting into our set, and into my mixes in particular. For some reason, it felt like all of my mixes were very slightly off… just enough to annoy me but not enough for most other people to notice. Thankfully, Karl pulled out “Warlock” by Phobia and that started to get me going.

Phobia – Warlock (2005) [Renegade Hardware]

After that, things smoothed out. Our dancefloor never really thickened up, but I was having fun and that was all I’d been hoping for. I played the Nu:Tone remix of Shy FX’s “Feelings” and that went over pretty well, and then in my last two of the night I threw together some old favorites, mixing High Contrast’s remix of “Renegade Snares” into “Up All Night” by John B.

Shy FX – Feelings (Nu:Tone remix) (2008) [Digital Soundboy]

John B – Up All Night (2000) [Metalheadz]

Omni Trio – Renegade Snares (High Contrast remix) (2003) [Moving Shadow]

After Karl and I got out of the booth, Shaun Doe and Dylan D went on. I hadn’t heard either of them play in ages, so I was pretty curious to see what they were going to come up with. It turned out that they played a bunch of old jump-up (from when jump-up was good) and some classics from the Urban Pressure days here in Ottawa. Most memorable parts of their set were Shaun playing “Can’t Punish Me” by Dom + Roland and Dylan playing “Trick of Technology” by Prisoners of Technology. The crowd seemed to dig their set quite a bit, which made me smile; seeing kids go off to real jump-up was refreshing.

Dom + Roland – Can’t Punish Me (2001) [Moving Shadow]

Prisoners of Technology – Trick of Technology (1996) [Fresh Kutt]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Overall, I found the whole night interesting. Given the crowd’s overall lukewarm approach to most of the tunes I played, they kind of reinforced what I’ve known for a long time: my taste and popular taste when it comes to drum & bass are very very different. I bet if I’d played something like “No Future” (one of my favorite tunes from 2009) three quarters of the dancefloor would have hit the bar. You really have to hit kids on the head with over-the-top tunes to get their attention nowadays (”Up All Night” vs “Renegade Snares remix” is about as big a sledgehammer I can come up with), and tunes with subtlety don’t seem to have much place on dancefloors anymore. Unfortunate.

Instra:mental – No Future (2009) [NonPlus+]

Still, I had a good time, despite these realizations. Thanks to Saxon and crew for inviting us to come play.

April Wine – Just Between You and Me
Album: Nature of the Beast
Year: 1981

Click here to view the embedded video.

As I often do when I hit a show in another town and I don’t have to drive, I had a few drinks that night. Usually this works out quite well, adding to the feeling of “yes!” that I get whenever I go to see an excellent deejay in a foreign city. Unfortunately, Intalex’ performance didn’t turn out to be what I’d call “excellent”, so instead of being in a great mood I ended up pretty pissed off with just about everything. In fact, I got so annoyed that at one point I sat down in a corner of the club and wrote a drunken review.

I read it the next day, and was amused by the angst in it. I figured it’d be an excellent bit of writing to post on here… so here it is, complete with random meanderings and typos.

Review #1: Drunk

What a nugget of joy! Can you tell I was vexed? The second review’s a bit more… balanced.

Review #2: Sober

I think I set myself up for a fall for this show.

The Intalex is one of the few bigtime drum & bass deejays / producers I still follow religiously. I tend to snap up his new releases when they come out, and I download his excellent but infrequent Soul:ution podcast whenever it’s available on mp3. His taste in music has always been A-1 and as far as I can remember the quality of his tunes has never lagged for periods of any period of time. In summary, he’s one of the most consistent jungle guys out there.

I’m just not sure how strong a “live” deejay his is.

There’s a big difference between putting together an internet radio show and playing a live set to 300 people in a club. On the internet you can pretty much play what you want in whatever order you want; that seems to be the format for Soul:ution Radio, and it works out great. If you’re playing a headlining slot in a live setting, you have to cater more to the audience, and make sure they’re dancing.

My major problem with Intalex’ set was that I think he catered too much. He got them dancing, and once they were dancing, he played the same kind of tune that got them dancing for the rest of the night.

As a deejay and as somebody who likes going out on the floor and dancing, I look for two things in a live deejay set above all else: clean mixing and variety. If you don’t have both of those locked down I’m not interested. Intalex’ mixing was just fine (as I’d hope it would be, given that he’s been playing out for years), but he was brutal when it came to variety. All I heard was rollers, all night long. I have nothing against rollers, they have their time and place in every deejay set and Intalex played some excellent ones (”Entropy” among them). However, as soon as I’d heard 20 minutes of the same kind of beat I started getting annoyed… and when they went on for over an hour and a half I was livid and anxious to get out of there.

Marcus Intalex & ST Files – Entropy

I suppose a lot of my disappointment is my own fault; if I hadn’t hyped the show to myself as much as I did I probably wouldn’t have been as upset at how it turned out. Still, I can’t help but think that he could have stepped outside of the box a bit more and challenged his audience a bit.

The night wasn’t a complete loss, though. Our host and friend Generic tagged a fun set with Corey K, the event’s promoter. G even played a tune that he and Threesixty had thrown together over the weekend. It sounded great and the crowd responded to it well, which put a smile on my face.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if I’d been cheated by the headliner. Did he play safe because he was in Montreal, a city that Generic described as “not ready” for hearing music that’s a bit more challenging? Or is he just not that good of a live deejay? It’s funny to say it, but I’ll have to see him play in another city to know for sure.

I’m a big Marcus Intalex fan. He’s an excellent producer, he runs one of the best drum & bass labels on the planet, and he’s always pushed top-notch, forward-looking music. He runs one of the best d&b-centric internet radio shows out there, Soul:ution Radio. He also speaks his mind and isn’t afraid to call out veteran producers that push cookie-cutter tunes that pander to jungle’s mainstream in order to line their bank accounts.

The Intalex is playing in Montreal tomorrow, bringing my couple of weeks of celebrating my birthday to a close. He’s one of the few drum & bass people left on my “see this deejay before you die” list. Me and a bunch of the lads are looking forward to hearing him, and you should too.

He’s playing @ Club Lambi (4465 St-Laurent), and cover is $10 advance. Local stalwarts Corey K and Generic are tagging a set, and DJ Hosta and Bus will be tagging one as well.

And for some reason, if you’ve never heard of Marcus Intalex, here’s a short tribute mix that Karl put together for his radio show Futurhythm this week.

Download: Karl Haze – Marcus Intalex Tribute (Futurhythm, 2010.01.20)

tracklist:

1. Da Intalex – What You Gonna Do? (Flex)
2. Marcus Intalex – Refreshed (Soul:R)
3. Mist.i.cal – Love Thing (???)
4. Mist.i.cal feat. Ras T Weed – Mistical Solution (Soul:R)
5. M.I.S.T. – Warp 1 (Soul:R)
6. Marcus Intalex – Skizm (Soul:R)
7. Marcus Intalex – Zumbar (Soul:R)
8. M.I.S.T. – Outerspace (Soul:R)
9. Mist.i.cal – Inside My Head (Soul:R)
10. Solid State – Just A Vision (Marcus Intalex & ST Files Remix) (Renegade)

And here’s my all-time favorite Intalex tune that Karl forgot to include. Tsk tsk, dude.

Marcus Intalex & ST Files – Love & Happiness

Good nights out have a natural progression to them. They start out nice and chill as the first attendees get into the spot, grab a drink, grab themselves an area in the nightclub and make themselves comfortable. Once the venue starts thickening up with people, the tone of the night should get a bit less chill and a bit more fun, with the vibe feeding off the latent energy of the people in the venue. If the crowd’s really up for the event the room will be buzzing with conversation and laughs at this point. Little chunks of the crowd will hit the main area of the club and start dancing a bit, limbering up for primetime. Eventually enough of the people who are still getting into the club will start feeling the same mood of the people that are already on the dancefloor… and once this happens, the spaces between the pockets of people on the dancefloor fill up and suddenly the party everybody has been waiting weeks for is happening all around them.

It’s rare when an event goes through all these stages without anybody really noticing. It’s even more rare when only one deejay is responsible for making it happen, and it’s rarer still when that one deejay is playing fourteen different genres of music and they’re all meshing like puzzle pieces. Mr. Scruff was that one deejay last Thursday. He was awesome.

He played dub, disco, funk, latin flavors, house, reggae, breaks, hip hop, jazz… as long as it had soul, he put it through Ritual’s soundsystem. He kept the energy up and the dance floor full throughout the night without ever having to play hard or aggressive. Instead he played a set I could only characterize as “playful”: tons of fun tunes put together with smart programming and tight mixing. As far as I can remember, the only truly hard tune he played was this one tune with a huge bassline we later found out was “Cyclotron” by Harmonic 313… and despite its robotic, synthetic feel he still made it fit into his set without any noticeable change in the mood he’d been building all night long.

Harmonic 313 – Cyclotron

Out of everything he played at the show, my favorite tune of the night was definitely “Let Me Change Your Mind”, a Zed Bias/Jenna G collaboration that Scruff played in the Essential Mix I mentioned in my last post. He also did a little self-promotion session of tunes he’s made over the years towards the end of the night; “Chicken In A Box” and “Get A Move On” were two of them.

Zed Bias & Jenna G – Let Me Change Your Mind
(excerpt from Scruff’s Essential Mix)

Mr. Scruff – Chicken In A Box

Mr. Scruff – Get A Move On

Click here to view the embedded video.

On top of all the excellent music he played, Scruff provided a couple of nice touches to the night. When we first got into the venue, we were given download vouchers. It seems that Mr. Scruff records every set he plays and then gives out vouchers with an access code so people can snag a big chunk of the night’s set from his downloads site. As a promoter myself, getting this voucher at the very start of the night before we’d even heard a single track definitely put me in a good mood; I knew that a deejay who was that interested in providing extras for his audience was going to care about putting on a good show.

Secondly, his touring VJ did a bang-up job. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about the visuals of a show, but the stuff they had on screen that night was great. Like all of his album art and some of his videos, Scruff drew all the animations that popped up on the VJ’s screen. The night started out slow, with music notes flying towards the audience like that old starfield screensaver you’d see on PCs back in the day. Then when there was enough buzz in the venue and he’d stepped up the music a notch, the notes disappeared and a little man showed up with a talk bubble that said “I think it’s time we had a dance”. It was a pretty saucy thing for a VJ to do, telling people to stop yapping and start dancing, but within a few minutes the dancefloor started to fill up. Right before that Harmonic 313 track came on the screen flashed a caution sign that said “Incoming Bass Alert”; every time that warning popped up the tune immediately after was super thick on the low end. Throughout the night a bunch of odd things would pop on screen, like tea kettles (Scruff’s a big tea drinker… he even has his own line of tea products), fish, and hundreds of odd people milling about, riding buses or chattering about whatever. It seems that all the videos that Ninja Tune assembled to promote Scruff’s “Ninja Tuna” LP were make by using the same material the VJ displayed at the show…

Click here to view the embedded video.

What impressed me almost more than Scruff himself was the crowd that went out to see him. I can’t remember the last time I saw a dancefloor that was mostly full at 11.30 but the people out on that night made it happen. Better yet was the crowd’s attitude; there was zero pretentious behavior, no bullshit attitudes, and it seemed that they were down with whatever sounds Scruff threw at them. It was maybe one of the most open-minded crowds I’d seen in a long time. The whole show reminded me a lot of how raves used to feel way back in the day, but without the ridiculous costumes and heavy drug use.

All in all it was an excellent show, and it was well worth the wait.

Download Mr. Scruff’s Ottawa set here! (access code: rir9GD)

Usually when Jan 11th comes around on the calendar I tend to get a bit morbid, thinking about my own mortality and whatnot… and this year was no exception. I was amused when the first tune I got SIMH (stuck in my head) in my 33rd year was “Struggle To The Grave” by Random Movement.

A few weeks ago I started thinking about age and how it changes you when it comes to music. I’ve been pretty disengaged from what’s happening in popular music for a while now, but in the last few weeks the realization at how out of touch I am with current trends in music really sunk in. I imagine if I was asked to deejay at a high school dance I’d probably get booed out of the gym after the first 15 minutes.

I have no idea what kids listen to anymore, and I’m getting increasingly comfortable with that. I chalk a lot of that comfort up to generational shift, that moment where an adult’s taste in music begins to set like cement and slowly becomes invulnerable to the newest hits that are flooding nightclub dance floors with teenagers. The way I see it, generational shift is somewhat hard-coded into human DNA and it’s only a matter of time before it kicks in.

I think the rest of that comfort comes with the fact that I’ve been disengaged from trends in pop music for a long time now. I’ve never been a big fan of pop, I haven’t watched MuchMusic in years and I don’t remember the last time I tuned the radio to anything that wasn’t the CBC or Team 1200. When I worked at the Ottawa Sun this one girl used to play Hot 89.9 all the time and after the first half an hour I got the nagging feeling that my brain cells were dying at a much faster rate than normal.

Am I babbling? Whoops. What was I talking about? Oh yeah; pop music blows and today’s my birthday.

After that “one year closer to the grave” bit of morbidity died down, my mood improved and I got a cheerier tune SIMH, “Birthday” by The Sugarcubes from 1987.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bjork’s awesome. No matter what she’s sounding like or what style/genre her albums take on she’s always managed to make an interesting spectacle of herself. She also dated Goldie for a little bit… I can’t imagine what sort of music their kids would have made if they’d had any.

The rest of my day was fine. It was nice and warm out so I went for a drive and played Hudson Mohawke’s Essential Mix real loud with the windows down. Then I came home, had dinner with my fam and here I am.

Thanks to everybody who left me a note on Facebook today. If you’d like to give me some birthday props in person, come out Thursday, I’ll be hitting up Mr. Scruff @ Ritual. If you don’t know him, he’s a pretty amazing DJ who plays pretty much whatever he likes, be it jazz, soul, house, hip-hop, funk or whatever… as long as it’s got soul. He’s well-known for playing marathon sets of 8 hours or more, so he’ll be playing *all night long*. Yes!

If you still aren’t sure, check out his Essential Mix from last year and/or a recent 5+ hour set of his recorded from Keep It Unreal, his Manchester-based 12 year residency (!). Hope to see you out there!

Download: Mr. Scruff – Essential Mix (2009.02.07)
Stream: Mr Scruff – Keep It Unreal, Live @ Band On The Wall, Manchester

I’ve never been big on house parties; being forced to mingle with people you don’t know for a few minutes at a time and then drifting apart to mingle with other people you don’t know. I suppose that’s all well and good for extroverts and whatnot, but when I’m in a social situation full of people I’ve never met before I tend to clam up and find interesting things to do that don’t involve all those people. Somehow I manage to either look at every single photo and painting on the walls in common areas or I find the household pet and we become best friends for the evening.

In any case, the countdown happened and I gave Mish a kiss and toasted the new year with her. She was cute, her festivation was already well underway and she was being adorable. After well wishing the few people I knew at the party, I ended up bumping into a girl I hadn’t seen in ages. She and I and her new husband ended up getting into a pretty good conversation when all of a sudden the hostess of the party came over and asked me to play some records. It turns out that all the deejays that had come to provide music for the party were playing off laptops and were having problems; given that I still haven’t succumbed to Serato Syndrome and I still bring vinyl with me to gigs I was a safe bet for tunes.

So I got on and played. I was a bit leery of playing at all, given that it was definitely a house-centric crowd and I’m primarily a drum & bass deejay, but I’d picked a bunch of saucy tunes with vocals so I figured I was as well prepared as I could be. Things turned out surprisingly well; I brought big older tunes like “Make Me Feel”, “LK”, “Midnight” and “Put That Woman First” as well as lots of Hospital, Soul:r and Liquid V material and the girls seemed to dig it. By the time I got to the end of my set I’d played for just around 2 hours or so.

The rest of the party was pretty good. I’d loosened up enough by then to feel a bit better mingling and chatting. I ended up leaving around 4 or so and hit the sack as soon as I got home. All in all not a bad New Year’s Eve.

I think playing that set got me to make my first New Year’s resolution ever: spin more often. Playing records for a wee dancefloor got me remembering why it was fun playing records in the first place.

Anyways, happy new years to you. Have a solid 2010.