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Clocking on

I love these guys a lot, in a time of precise, polite, over produced club music, Factory Floor stand out as a beautiful raw force to be reckoned with. Mr Black and I always love bands who nail club music for DJs to play and put simply, they make records we love to play in dark rooms with good sound systems. Also, found out recently that they had remixed one of our favourite local bands, therefore adding the FF stamp to the local music history timeline.

If you didn’t already know, clock on with the five below…

Hip Pop Punk Funk

Trevor Jackson is going through a bit of a revival of late. Not that he ever went away in my head. He strikes me as a guy who is always making something – even if it isn’t music. Restless. His brain always whirring – in need of a creative release. Relishing the opportunity to play his finds on NTS. Forever a fanboy.

I for one was delighted to listen to his cathartic clear out of old tracks sitting in the vaults and can’t wait to hear what he has up his sleeve in the future. As a dj and compiler, he is equally at home championing a definition of pop from his extensive record collection or hiding in a dark basement playing speaker shredding obscure wavs from the outer reaches of the internet. Always searching, always interested.

Warp Factor

There are very few labels that boast a back catalogue quite like the one that belongs to UK institution Warp Records (now also films). I love their diversity and so much of their output, especially the earlier releases that have remained perfectly frozen in warehouse abusing time.

Outside of well known perenials such as LFO & Windowlicker, here are another ten I always return to.

Manfredas

I think Mr Bones and I both agree on the talent of this artist. Manfredas is one of those producers whose music makes us smile. When I first heard him he reminded me of Zongamin, with his use of percussion mixed with queasy bass/base. (More music please Mr Zongamin!)

Always done with a psychedelic sense of fun and adventure that really works for the dance floor, dig in…

The Art Of Dance

One of my favourite artists from the Motor City is Kenny Larkin, although he seems to basque in the shadows of his peers at times. Kenny like Carl Craig comes from the second wave of Detroit artists and DJs that arrived after the Belleville innovators had paved the way. His connection with synths and hardware is absolute genius and he has a very distinctive sound. Here are five KL jams both old and more recent that all sound like they were beamed in from another galaxy.

Got Any Ting Tings Mate?

I had previously done a post ‘bass and drums’ touching upon this type of music. Stripped back, raw, dubby, often mixing the ‘dark’ with the ‘disconotdisco’. Hard to do right, many have tried and failed. We at BB HQ decided to do a dub of a dub of a post punk classic as part of our free ‘dubs’. That’s a lot of dubs in one sentence! The original Maximum Joy track (feat. below) is genius and good to go, we just took it down a slightly more stripped back darker territory for our recent mix with a quick scalpel – for those that like that type of thing. GRIP IT HERE and listen to some other classics in that style.

Praise Them

It’s not easy to make great club music utilising uplifting gospel & soul samples but when executed properly and dropped at the right point they can indeed raise the spirits.

Here are five that never fail and also the first in our Black Bones dub series, with a little reprise of a Twinkie edit that we dubbed out specially for those lights up moments!

GRIP IT HERE!

Magic Mike

Mike Simonetti is a bit of a punk. Turning his hand to a broad spectrum of amazing music since way back, but always doing things his way. Whether as a label owner, dj, digger, producer or expert editor it’s always worth checking.

Five below that merely touch on what he can do.

Tokyo Pressure

Rewind to 1988 and a crew come label in Japan were crafting amazing, hip hop, funk and house. It had a fun cut and paste sensibility to it and spawned an entire scene that came after.  Headed up by Masayuki Kudo & Toshio Nakanishi (RIP) this output has remained ridiculously fresh considering it was conceived around 30 odd years ago.

Here are five MF cuts that are still good to go…