Forty Five Minutes Of Kruder And Dorfmeister

Kruder and Dorfmeister, a trip hop/ downtempo duo from Austria, first found acclaim in 1993 with their G- Stoned EP. Their late night hazy, blunted tunes and remixes are the stuff post- club nights are made of, head nodding, drawn out tunes that slip by in a beautiful fug. The got phone calls and remix requests came in throughout the 90s, from Depeche Mode, Madonna, Roni Size, Alex Reece, David Holmes, Bomb The Bass and Lamb. In 1998 they compiled many of their remixes with a selection of their own tracks as The Kruder And Dorfmeister Sessions two CDs, four pieces of vinyl), an album which last year got the full re- release treatment. The pair, Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister, are touring in May to promote it. The mix below is a forty five minute selection of some of that album. Any of the tracks in the mix could have been substituted for any of the other twenty eight tracks from the album without any discernible dip in quality. They found a sound, refined it and  brought it to bear on whoever's music they touched. Rattly, slowed down hip hop drum breaks, subsonic bass, snatches of vocals, one or two words max, found sounds, an aural smoke filled haze flecked with jazzy organ fills, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... hovering close by. Sunday sounds for early February. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Kruder And Dorfmeister

• Lamb: Trans Fatty Acid (K&D Session)
• Bomb The Bass: Bug Powder Dust (Dub Remixed By Kruder and Dorfmeister)
• Kruder And Dorfmeister: Lexicon
• Strange Cargo: Million Town (K&D Session)
• David Holmes: Gone (K&D Session)
• Rockers Hi- Fi: Going Under (K&D Session)
• Roni Size: Heroes (Kruder's Long Loose Bossa)

Lamb were/ are a duo from Manchester, producer Andy Barlow and singer/ songwriter Lou Rhodes, jazz/ hip hop/ trip hop/ drum and bass, best known for their single Gorecki. They split in 2004 to pursue solo projects but reformed a few years later and have performed intermittently ever since. 

Bomb The Bass is the musical outfit for the legendary Tim Simenon, the man who made one of the first British acid house/ sample based records, Beat Dis. If you're looking for origin stories, Beat Dis is hard to beat. Bug Powder Dust came out in 1994, a powerful piece of mid 90s hip hop (from the third Bomb The Bass album Clear) with Justin Warfield on vocals. There were remixes aplenty- Dust Brothers, La Funk Mob, DJ Muggs (from Cypress Hill) and Kruder and Dorfmeister. 

Lexicon is a short interlude piece of music, one minute of Kruder and Dorfmeister from the Sessions album.

Strange Cargo was one of William Orbit's solo aliases, resulting in four albums- Strange Cargo, II, III and Hinterland. Strange Cargo III is the pick for me, 1993 ambient/ downtempo/ global/ dub classic with Beth Orton on vocals on the superb water From A Vine Leaf. Million Town was on Strange Cargo Hinterland from 1995.

Gone was a single from David Holmes' 1995 debut album, This Film's Crap Let's Slash The Seats, with Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell on vocals. It's a gloriously low slung trip hop torch song and was remixed by Two Lone Swordsmen as well as Kruder and Dorfmeister. K&D strip it right down to the bones. 

Rockers Hi- Fi are an electronic dub outfit from Birmingham, starting out as Original Rockers in 1991 and changing their name in 94. Going Under was from '97, deep and dubbed out. 

Roni Size famously won the Mercury Prize in 1997 with his album New Forms, drum and bass entering the mainstream (a move first made by Goldie in 1994 with Inner City Life). Bristol had already cemented its reputation with Massive Attack and Portishead, and Roni Size had attended house parties run by The Wild Bunch Soundsystem so the torch was being well and truly passed on. New Forms and the single Brown Paper Bag especially became festival favourites. The Mercury Prize became a bit of millstone around Roni's neck I think and he continued to plough his furrow with further albums in 2002, 2004 and 2014. 

Weatherall Remix Friday Nine

We've had a run of dub posts this week so I thought Weatherall Remix Friday should follow suit with the Sabres Of Paradise remixes of Bomb The Bass from 1994, Mr Weatherall's long standing dub interest and pursuits finding fully realised expression in a pair of remixes. 

The Sabres Main Mix is a seven minute deep dive into some heavy dub/ downtempo action, wobbly synths and reggae vocal (supplied by Spikey Tee) followed by all manner of echo and delay, rimshots, crawling rhythms, hisses, deep bass, swirling FX, melodica and the smell of smoke thick in the air. 

Darkheart (Sabres Of Paradise Main Mix)

The Second Mix, a minute longer, does that classic Weatherall trick of dubbing the dub, stripping things down and back further. The Second Mix, vocal free and more abstract, has much in common with the sounds Sabres Of Paradise were conjuring up for their own material at this point- it could easily fit onto Haunted Dancehall. 

Darkheart (Sabres Of Paradise Second Mix)

Darkheart was from Bomb The Bass' third album, the trip hop/ downtempo/ hip hop sounds of Clear. It was an album led by the single Bug Powder Dust which caused a bit of a stir- it was single of the year at Select magazine. The Darkheart 12" came out on a major label (4th And Broadway, owned by Island) and as a result is fairly easy to find today and very cheap, unlike much of the Weatherall back catalogue. In 1988 Bomb The Bass mainman Tim Simenon did much to shape what acid house would sound and look like, not least the smiley face (borrowed from Alan Moore's Watchmen comic) which adorned the cover of his Beat Dis single, a genuine late 80s classic and game changing record. But that's something for another day. 

Really Hard

Yesterday's post showed both the limitations and advantages of blogging as a medium for writing. I wrote yesterday's piece about the rush of great guitar music in the 1988/89 years in response to a comment on Facebook from a friend. I'd thought about it a bit in advance- on the way to and from work mainly- and came home and wrote it in the evening, an hour's work probably. I proof read it and re-read it, did a bit of tinkering and then published it yesterday morning.

The limitations of blogging are that it's usually just one person, writing a fairly quick response. I didn't bounce it off anyone or discuss it. I didn't really research it, talk to others for their point of view, haven't got an editor to to make suggestions or propose alternatives. A more widely considered piece with the opinions and perspectives of others would be better, more reliable maybe, more thought through and joined up.

The advantages of blogging are that it gets some instant responses by people, in some cases hundreds of miles away and in different countries, who can throw in their perspectives straight away, in the comment box on the blog and by commenting on social media. It becomes a conversation (and therefore the original post is in some ways just the first draft. Kerouac said first thought is always best- he'd have loved social media wouldn't he, Tweeting his way back and forth across America). Going back and inserting new sections into the original post didn't seem like a good idea but adding a follow up post did so that's what is here today, the perspectives of others who chipped in to answer the question Aditya posed on Facebook on Tuesday- why was 1988/89 such a fruitful time? (I hope this isn't just a case of Blog Will Eat Itself).

My post is here but in summary I said that guitar bands flourished by the late 80s because of the gains made by punk and the ensuing construction of the independent scene (labels, distribution, outlook); John Peel; the weekly music press; post punk's spirit of experimentalism; cheap technology; the dole and full grants for higher education; a gap left by the split of The Smiths; the polarised and oppositional nature of culture and politics in the 1980s which led to a defiantly non- mainstream mindset.

Martin left a comment about the split of The Smiths and the vacuum they left behind in the music press and the way that for ages they, the NME especially, used to constantly label bands 'The new Smiths' (they did the same with the Sex Pistols too). James and Raymonde both got that particular kiss of death, and I've got a feeling it was associated with The House Of Love and The Wedding Present too. Being branded The new Smiths didn't do James any favours- it raised expectations they couldn't meet, they sounded nothing like The Smiths anyway and by 1988 they were without a deal, had left two record companies and had to persuade their bank manager to loan them the money to release a live album. One Man Clapping was recorded at Moles in Bath over two nights in November 1988 and came out on their own label. The bank manager agreed to lend them the money after attending a gig in Manchester and being blown away by both band and crowd.

Really Hard (Live)

For a Smiths related extra the photograph at the top is one of mine, taken recently at Stretford Mall (formerly Stretford Arndale), a shopping centre Morrissey must have spent some hours in. There's a second hand record stall called Reel Around The Fountain.

Mark Ratcliff left a long comment on Facebook in reply which adds masses to my original post-

'The dole in the 80s was like art school in the 60s and 70s...it enabled you to pursue an interest whilst still being able to put a roof over your head and food in your belly. But i think there was another factor at work, too. The early to mid 80s were a dour time and youth culture was quite dogmatic. The music press at that time was very powerful and dictated what the hipper end of mainstream youth culture was allowed to like...God forbid you own up to having a Zeppelin lp in your collection of agit prop, post punk and proper soul. I left the UK to go to uni in the States at the time of the miners strike and everything in the culture felt either shrill and dictatorial, or incredibly earnest, obsessed with authenticity. Plus politics was horrible - there was no light at the end of the tunnel. A trip to a London club in 1984 or 1985 was terrifying if you didn't look the part. I remember coming back from New Orleans for a summer break and going to clubs with my sister, where everyone felt hyper conscious about what they looked like, or what kind of music they were allowed to enthuse over. But by the end of 86 and early 87, when i came back, i felt a change in the air - i think people felt that Thatcher was no longer quite as omnipotent and there was a loosening up of all those stifling musical strictures that had made it very hard to be completely honest about what you liked. The music press lost some of its authority around that time. People had got bored with being serious and po- faced. I remember going to Wendy May's Locomotion club at the Town and Country in late 86 and very early 87 and the sense of fun in the club was liberating. There was no E around, very few people had even heard about it and there was no house music being played but the mix of northern soul, a bit of Motown, some hip hop and the occasional dance inflected indie anthem from a band like That Petrol Emotion (Big Decision!) felt liberating after all the mid 80's London club bullshit. When E and acid house hit town in early 88 all the faces i used to see at The Locomotion pitched up at Land Of Oz and Spectrum - they were ready for it because they were chomping at the bit for something different, having had a taste of it already. In effect they had been primed for it. I also have some theories about why guitar music had a resurgence then, too but this is already the longest fb post i have ever written and is in danger of becoming a rant. '

Feel free to drop those theories you refer to at the end off whenever you're ready Mark.

Michael agreed with Mark about That Petrol Emotion, a band who embraced new technology (sampling) and the sense of possibilities that was in the air as well as guitars plus a large dose of politics. Big Decision was a massive song at the indie disco/alternative night.

Big Decision

Michael sees '88/89 as 'an incredibly liminal period where barriers between music started to drop... people became less precious or scared about shouting their influences, people rifling through their parent's record collections for great tracks or sounds for samples'. The barriers dropping definitely seems to be important in the Manchester guitar bands. The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays with one foot in the 60s and one at a club and the music they made being two different sweet spots in between.

The barriers were coming down all over in '88/89- not least physical barriers in Berlin- and the pick 'n' mix approach to making records resulted in several great singles that broke new ground and sold in vast quantities- Pump Up The Volume, Beat Dis and Theme From S' Express for three. Maybe liminal, transitional periods are much more interesting than periods where things are finished and fixed. That seems to be as a good a theory as any.

Beat Dis (Extended Dis)

The Names Have Been Changed To Protect The Innocent

In 1987 and 1988 the art of making records from samples of other people's records went overground. Following M/A/R/R/S's chart topper Pump Up The Volume in 1987 Tim Simenon's one man band Bomb The Bass went to number 2 in the UK (using some of the same samples). Beat Dis borrowed from a multitude of sources, some 80s hip hop- Public Enemy, Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow, EPMD, Schoolly D- and also from other sources- James Brown, Bar-Kays, Indeep, Prince, Hashim, Aretha Franklin, Jayne Mansfield and various TV programmes, notably Thunderbirds and Dragnet. It was inventive, exciting and new, making something fresh and new from familiar (and unfamiliar) sounds. A year later S'Express pulled off a similar trick. Unbelievably I haven't posted anything by Bomb The Bass in the seven and a half years before this post.

Beat Dis (Extended Dis)