An Hour Of Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown And Downtown

Hardway Bros (Sean Johnston) and Monkton (Duncan Gray) DJ and remix together. In both cases there's something about the partnership that pushes both to do something that's different from what each does on their own. Their remixes as Hardway Bros Meets Monkton reference the seminal Augustus Pablo album King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown and as a result you'd be right to expect lots of dub percolating through the sounds cooked up in the remix studio. Dub, bass, echo, melodica- all are present. So is plenty of glorious chug and the wide spaces of cosmic disco. Cosmic, psychedelic, dub disco. The remixes also tend to be long, usually going up towards ten minutes, so this mix was always going to be a long one. 

An Hour of Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown And Downtown

• Jack Butters: Shake It Off (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Electric Blue Vision: Other Skies (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Perry Granville: Sailing Ships (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Fjordfunk: It's All Black (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown)
• GLOK: That Time Of Night (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Dub)
• Psychederek: Screamadereka (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Downtown Remix)
• Phil Kieran and Green Velvet: Enjoy The Day (Hardway Meets Monkton Downtown Remix)

Jack Butters is from Stoke- on- Trent, a city fmaous for consisting of five towns, its historic past as the centre of pottery and ceramics, and for it's football team Stoke City (the old ground, the Victoria Ground, was a fairly fearsome awayday in the past). What Stoke should be famous for now is Jack's music, not least this dubbed out Hardway and Monkton remix. I heard this played by Sean at ALFOS at The Golden Lion last summer and it sounded immense.

Electric Blue Vision is Jesse Fahnestock of 10:40 and Jezebell with singer Emilia Harmony. Other Skies came out last November, a 2023 highlight with three great remixes- this one plus remixes by Tambores En Benirras and Balearic Ultras. Sean and Duncan's remix is more majestic melodica led dub, a complete reconstruction of Jesse and Emilia's song.

Perry Granville's Sailing Ships becomes a metallic- dub- by- way- of- post punk- and- acid house trip in the Hardway Bros and Monkton hands, noises rattling round and ricocheting as the bass pushes on and thunder rumbles. There are stuttering vocal sample and pulverising synths, drop outs and re- entries and always underpinning everything, huge, live sounding bass. 

Fjordfunk released It's All Back in 2020 on the Tici Taci label, an eleven minute cosmic disco tune remixed into an eleven minute cosmische dub disco tune by Hardway and Monkton with a squealing guitar line dropping in and out and an ultra- distorted voice saying things that are impossible to make out. 

GLOK is Ride's Andy Bell. Since 2019 Andy's released several albums and singles as GLOK, experimental cosmische/ synth songs and tracks. That Time Of Night was on 2021's Pattern Recognition and features the voice of Shiarra Bell, Andy's wife, talking about the pleasures of being lost on a dancefloor, 'just one person, one part of the whole mass of people.. the heat and the light and the flashing...'. Hardway and Monkton take the track and turn it into a sleek, propulsive, krauty trip, a keening guitar line running through it with a booming, metronomic kick drum.

Psychederek is from Stretford, just up the road from me, and has recently released one of this year's best EPs, Alt!. In August 2021 he released the Space Arcade 12" on Chris Massey's Sprechen label, with the very ace Screamadereka coming in double Hardway Monkton remix form- the Downtown remix and Disco Dub version. The Downtown Remix is a glorious sunlit thing in two halves, the first half dubby psyche and the second a chuggy, pacier, cosmische glide. 

Phil Kieran and Green Velvet's Enjoy The Day came out in late 2022. Phil is a Belfast based DJ and producer. Green Velvet is from Chicago. Enjoy The Day is full on, four four drums and techno bass, chopped up and FXed vocals, 'you got it', and a piano line that is the definition of happy/ sad. 

V.A. Saturday

A few weeks ago I posted some tracks from Soul Jazz Records 100% Dynamite series, a sequence of compilation albums exploring records from Jamaica, every track a reggae/ dub winner. Soul Jazz expanded their mission way beyond reggae and the salsa and Latino funk they started out with. In 2005 Soul Jazz 111 was a two CD compilation titled Can You Jack? Chicago Acid And Experimental House 1985- 1995. The cover is black with a red circle which has the word ACID inside it. The first track is Maurice's This Is Acid and the last is Phuture's Acid Tracks. It's wall to wall acid. In between the start and finish it takes in lesser known acid tracks, B-sides and a few classics, wall to wall Roland 303 synthesisers, circa 120 bpm and endless variations on that bassline, the one that at deafening volume makes your chest pound and your clothes vibrate. Over the course of two CDs it can get a bit samey but equally if you need to clean your ears out and cleanse your palette, there are seventeen slices of powerful, raw, thundering/ minimal, swirling Chicago acid and house with jackhammer drum machine beats that caused something of a revolution when it arrived in the UK and across Europe, that will do just that. Here are three of those acid tracks, the two mentioned above (Maurice's vocal claiming definitive ownership, Phuture's twelve minute opus that is musically definitive and one from Green Velvet in the middle). 

This Is Acid

Explorer

Acid Tracks

NYE: A Mix For Dancing

New Year's Eve- I'm not sure what we're going to do tonight. New Year's Eve is a strange night at the best of times (unless you're young and in a club where all that happens is that the countdown to midnight is a brief interruption to a night of dancing). The reflective, verging on maudlin, aspects of it are too easily summoned at the moment but celebrating it feels odd too. Caught in no man's land.

But, still, Happy New Year to everyone who comes here for the music and the words, thank you for your comments and support, it means a lot. I hope you're having a good time tonight whether you're choosing to do something or nothing. See you all in 2023 for more of the same. 

This is a mix I put together of tracks from 2022, made for dancing to. It's what I'd want to hear as the clock ticked towards midnight, if happened to find myself in a sweaty basement with a good sound system and a strobe light tonight- you never know, it could happen. Sean Johnston's work features heavily, turning up on four of the tracks. There are a couple of transitions where things are a little skewwhiff (one of them skewwhiff in a way I quite like, the beats and noises piling up messily and then clearing) and the BPMs may be a little out but I think the track selection is good enough. A bunch of dance records sequenced together for an hour and a quarter, with a slow spaced out ambient start, a dubby ending and plenty of dancers in between. Happy new year.

NYE 2022 Dance Mix

• Space Ghost: 4 AM
• Long Range Desert Group: Adjustment Notice
• Rude Audio: Big Heat
• The Summerisle Six: This Is Something (Dub Mix)
• Peak High: Was That All It Was (Hardway Bros Bleep Dub)
• David Holmes: It's Over, If We Run Out Of Love (Hardway Bros Remix)
• Unloved: Turn Of The Screw (Erol Alkan Rework)
• The Orielles: Darkened Corners (Eyes Of Others Remix)
• Phil Kieran and Green Velvet: Enjoy The Day (Hardway Bros Meet Monkton Downtown Remix)
• Matt Gunn: Disko Drohne
• Cantoma ft. Quinn Lamont Luke: Alive (Conrad's Vacant Lot Remix)
• 10:40: Hawaii (Big Wave Dub)

Enjoy The Day

This came out last Friday- Enjoy The Day (Hardway Bros Meets Monkton Downtown Remix)- a four way collaboration that sounds like it should be filling floors at discerning discotheques near you as the December party season gets underway. The original track is by Phil Kieran and Green Velvet and here is remixed by the combined force of Hardway Bros and Monkton. The deep, dark groove and hedonistic vocal are one thing but the Italo piano that comes in is something else entirely, a gloriously happy/ sad, bittersweet refrain. The 808 rattles away, there is acres of lovely echo and space and the longer it plays, the better it gets. A pulsing, squiggly acid line pushes its way to the fore and rhythm gets tougher. Buy here and then rinse and repeat, as they say.  

Monday's Long Songs: Guest Post

Another very welcome guest post from Dr. Rob, live and direct from Ban Ban Ton Ton/ Japan. 

Colin Angus, of The Shamen, charted Ron Trent`s Altered States in one of the U.K.`s rock music weeklies, around the time of the landmark 12`s initial release in 1990.* Angus said it was a tune that he`d heard played at the infamous, illegal RIP parties, held on London’s Clink Street.** A darker, definitely non-Balearic, but equally as important contemporary of the more widely celebrated acid house incubator / shrine, Shoom.

 Altered States

I immediately added the tune to my “wants” list, but it wasn’t until Dutch label, Djax-Up-Beats reissued the record in 1992, that I managed to find a copy. It was probably a Kris Needs review, in his Needs Must, Black Echoes, column, that alerted me to its recirculation. The hunt for it took me from Flying Records, in Kensington Market - where it was “Great track, but sorry, no mate” - to Fat Cat in Covent Garden, just off Seven Dials, which fast became my new favourite shop. 

Ron Trent produced Altered States when he was just 14.*** His father was a percussionist (who sat in with jazz legend, Max Roach), a DJ, and co-founder of one of Chicago`s first record pools. Ron had grown up surrounded by rhythm, often playing along with his dad, on congas and traps, to the latest releases at home. Boy, does that upbringing show. 

Created on a friend’s set up of TR-909, D50, and SB01, the track is all about the drums. A huge kick counters a super simple key refrain. Tiny snippets of snares tease. Hand-claps crash and crack like thunder. Start, stop, and then start and stop again. There’s a synth-line that’s surely inspired by Master C&J`s Dub Love, but it`s the genius mixing, and editing****, of these basic, bad ass, percussive elements that bash your body - the breakdowns more like beatdowns - and hypnotize your head. The irregular programmed patterns made to alternately march, and totally wig-out. Everything coming together and colliding with a crazy intensity, especially when showers of jazz cymbals join in. Somehow, subliminally, continually climbing, this dynamic constantly changing for the whole of the track`s 13-minute duration. Driving its timeless status, and laying the stripped-back raw, jacking, foundation for Cajmere`s Relief Records imprint, which revitalized house and techno in the mid-1990s - and the Green Velvet one`s own classic, Conniption Fit.

 Dub Love

Conniption Fit

Green Velvet's 1994 single Preacher Man is the definition of simple but effective and set techno floors on fire in the mid- 90s (and ever since). 

Preacher Man

Notes

*Probably Melody Maker, probably while talking to Push.

**Where The Shamen`s vocalist, Richard “Mr. C(helsea)” West, DJed. 

***The whole Afterlife E.P. is great. 

****Edits by the one an only Armando. 

Youth In Trouble

Something to shake your bones and rattle your head on this Friday morning. Press play.



The Presets are an Australian duo who have been making varieties of dance/house music since 2003. An Oz Daft Punk if you like (but a bit tougher), in the Underworld ballpark too. Youth In Trouble came out in 2012 with their third album Pacifica. This remix by Green Velvet pushes everything up into the red. Julian Hamilton's vocals provide a sense of desperation while the drums and synths keep building without ever quite reaching the peak you think is going to come.