Breaks
Album Reviews: Claude Cooper & Brain Fog – More Myriad Sounds : Raucous rhymes and blistering jazz breaks make for one rebellious reworking.
Ah yes, the mysterious Claude Cooper – one person or many, illusive or illusion, prankster or producer, rumoured from Bristol but maybe not…still one thing is for certain, last year the Claude Cooper nameplate fronted the extraordinary ‘Myriad Sounds’ album, a riotous explosion of wild jazz and breaks that rightly slayed the critics and fired …
EP Review: LOXY & INK – SPRAY TRAINS OF THOUGHT – on R&S
Stalwarts of the drum & bass scene for nearly three decades, London duo Loxy & Ink open up their 2022 account with a new single ‘Spray Trains Of Thought‘. The UK breakbeat pioneers have racked up an arsenal of releases for breakthrough labels such as Metalheadz, Hospital Records and Renegade Hardware, as well as their …
Album review: Claude Cooper – ‘Myriad Sounds’: taut, essential Bristol jazz breaks and cinematic LSD groove
CLAUDE COOPER: a jazz breaks legend in his own lifetime, should he even exist; for who CC is remains a complete mystery. Certainly to me. Certainly to you. One physical single, early last year, “Tangerine Dreams” / “Two Mile Hill”, the initial orange vinyl pressing of which is, lemme tells ya, already ker-ching and anyhow …
Track: Dazzling lyrical flow and taut, smoky bass combine on The Allergies and Andy Cooper’s ‘Utility Man’
AS ANYONE well acquainted with The Allergies’ party beatz will testify, former Ugly Duckling riddim and rhymer Andy Cooper is pretty much a permanent house guest round at their Brizzle gaff these days; and he’s the kinda guest you want around, when he drops lyrical skills that’ll leave you whirling of the stripe he does …
News: Mysterious Bristol breaks scientist Claude Cooper announces a full album for January and drops ‘Stan’s Plan’; it’s so deliciously dirty
IMAGINE for a second we’re sat in a great pub, in Bristol – say The Christmas Steps, maybe, or the Bag O’Nails – and let’s further push the fanciful that I’m Brad Pitt-as-Tyler Durden (yep, I wholly over-flatter myself here, but a scribe can dream); and I lean over, conspiratorially, to whisper to you. And …
Album Review: Freestylers – Other Worlds
Freestylers are back with their unmistakable sound to hit you with their sixth album, a jam packed break spectacular with infectious grooves and dance floor bass shakers. but first lets hit the rewind….. The Freestylers have had a career that most could only dream of, having earnt their place as one of Britain’s most revered …
Track: ECHT! – ‘500 gr.’: towering, atmospheric breaks from Brusseleir quartet preludes their September album
ECHT! is a fat-as-hell beats collective which calls Brussels home, although each of the four hails from elsewhere, drawn to the open, centrifugal force of the Belgian capital. The name comes from the local Brusseleir dialect, and translates to English as simply ‘real’, although the French ‘vrai de vrai’ might seem to hit slightly closer: …
See: Pie Eye Collective feat. Hector Plimmer – ‘Flibbers’: gloriously subaquatic, rollin’ breaks for a dancefloor in Atlantis
PIE EYE COLLECTIVE is the solo project of Bristol-born, London-based sound scientist Matthew Gordon, who melds elements of ambient, broken beat, dub-techno and hip hop, all refracted and discoloured via a spectrum of tape-saturated synthesis. His influences are many and stylistically diverse, and include Sun Ra, Morton Feldman and Madlib; but he’s also heavily influenced …
Track: The Allergies – ‘Move On Baby’: Let the Bristol sunshine in with this Latin-inflected banger
HIGH SUMMER, nearly solstice time already – and bringing the necessary hip swing to the longest days are The Allergies, the ever-dependable Brizzle groovers, who today drop two phials of bottled rays from the golden orb: on the A you gots “Move On Baby”, fashioned in Latin brass, swingin’, tough breaks and whistles. Yes, there’s …
Track: TOMÁ – ‘Blind War (feat. Ben LaMar Gay)’: eclectic future soul breaks herald a rising talent sans frontières
ATOM is the forthcoming and wholly anagrammatical album of the Austrian-based, Bulgarian-born leftfield beats investigator Tomá Ivanov, known for the purposes of music as TOMÁ. His particular thing, he tells us, is “avant-garde lo-fi-jazz-psychedelic-pop”, which sounds appetisingly eclectic; and which eclecticism your ears will be pleased to confirm after taking a dip into his debut …