DJ Boom, aka Herbert & Charles Webster, released this single sided piece of compressed minimal funk in 1999. It was another world back then. Hector, one of my sons, was only a few months old and the Internet was still finding its feet. More Herbert than Webster I think. Stripped down and painstakingly put together using microsamples as material, this sublime piece of Basic Channel flavoured house gathers momentum as it hurtles towards its zenith, peaking with the aid of a web of vocal samples that add to its counterintuitive density. It’s often possible to look at a record and have a Proustian moment, remembering its purchase as if it were yesterday. This one was interesting because it was one of many from Atlas Records on Archer Street in Soho. I was there during my lunch break, chatting to John Reynolds as I bought this release when who should pop up behind the counter but the shiny, cueball head of Richie Hawtin, buying the exact same record. This was ‘Final Scratch’/’DE9 Closer To The Edit’ era Hawtin, and, I’m guessing here but he could have been dropping off a shipment of ‘Minus Orange’. Maybe I bought the two releases at the same time? In any case Riche was a nice chap, we had a chat and I left, not knowing that in the not too distant future chance meetings like that in record shops would cease to be.
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