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Sunday 25 November 2007

Do You Really Like Hardcore?

Here's the first of a few additional track to be released from the Part IV mix (see below for the goods!), and once again, I'm taking it back to the oldskool. This is also, incidentally, my fave track from the whole mix.

This one came about as a complete surprise/fluke for me. I'd been working on a trilogy of Hardcore mashes, which resulted in the previous "Ms. Nelly's Nightmare" and "Congress of a Clown", and I had a few ideas as to what would make up the last track, but I'd sat on it for ages. I had 3 or 4 tracks to mash togehter, but none of them were really doing it for me (although, at least one of them will be finished off in a month or so once I get a bit of spare time), until one night at 3:30am after a night at the pub, it suddenly came to me.

I had been searching for the tracklistings to a wicked tape I had years ago, one of the fabby Mixmag Live tapes mixed by Slipmatt & Lime, the legends from the early 90s, responsible for SL2's "On A Ragga Tip" and "Way In My Brain" and "DJs Take Control". It was a pretty hardcore mix, consisting mainly of Belgian techno with sparse sprinklings of piano and breaks, but I loved it (I'll have to dig it out from the loft next time I'm over at me Mamma Colatron's house), but one track stood out for me at the time - Outlander's "Vamp" released on the legendary R&S Records. At the time, it was a cacaphony of drums and bass, with a variation on the infamous 'hoover' stab providing the melody. Awesome stuff.

Anyway, I found the track and desperately wanted to use it. It was at the aforementioned 3:30am slot when I drag and dropped the Pied Piper vocal in to Acid over the top for a laugh. And laugh I did. It was perfect! A little tempo change here and there and the syncopation of the vocals to the music was spot on, as if the two had been written for each other even though they are seperated by a decade. It finished off the old skool section of the Part IV mix perfectly.

Ironically, the track that made it into Part IV was unfinshed and edited 'on the fly', so here is the complete vision for the track, along with new intro and outro, featuring my two favourite MCs from back in the day, Everson Allen of the Ratpack and MC Mad P of Top Buzz fame. For completeness, the samples used are from:

Altern8 - Activ8
Ratpack - live at Pandemonium, Club Andromeda (May '93)
Altern8 - Infiltrate 202
Top Buzz - live at Fantazia, The Showcase (November '92)


The next probem is, I'm enjoying this hardcore revival so much, the trilogy has now been extended, indefinitely!!! 'Ave it....

Do You Really Like Hardcore?

Outlander vs. DJ Pied Piper & The Master of Ceremonies
(Vamp vs. Do You Really Like It?)



Download Page Here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?djveno3bzo2

Last Resort ZShare Link here:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/51610242f70501/


Mad P sums it up best
"You see we? We come from mash it up!"

Friday 23 November 2007

Part IV



I've been promising it for what seems like forever....and it's finally here. It's been on release only via an exclusive on Ramdomthoughts.co.uk and it appears to have gone done really well, but now it's time for it's Brian Blessed filled goodness to be unleashed on the world.

If I may, and I'm sure they won't mind, I'll quote a couple of mini-reviews from Scott and Bobby

"It's absolutely f**king fantastic basically"

"I can't fault it at all"


-Scott Johnson - http://ramdomthoughts.co.uk/

"Well, what can I say.......I'm absolutley gobsmacked mate. It's nothing short of amazing. I want to avoid all the cliche's but it's hard to. It's a real tour de force, a journey, a visual fim/story."

-Bobby Martini - http://bobbymartini.blogspot.com/ and http://www.bobbymartini.co.uk/

Haha! Success at last!

The first step in this mix took place roughly around the middle of August. I was messing around on with Acid Pro as always, and I thought back to stuff I could use. I have the Turin Brakes edition on the Late Night Tales compilation CDs, and I thought back to the curious 4th part of a 4 part story included at the end of the CD, as read by Brian Blessed. Its surreal, completely out of place, and it made very little sense, but the words "Welcome to the final part, of this 4 part story" rang in my head. I had messed around previously, making 3 previous full length "mixes" which whilst having stand out moments, never really worked for me, having no flow or theme running through them. And after chatting with Bobby via the gift of Facebook, I discovered that his fabulous full length mixes were all constructed in Acid so the capabilites of doing a proper mix were all there.

Immediately I began chipping away at Brian's spoken word, adding atmospheric strings and the obligatory George Bush samples. Fantastic. Sounded like the start of a movie or something.

It was around this time I also came across the debut Skinnyman album, "Council Estate of the Mind" after seeing him on a documentary about UK urban music. I had previously heard his amazing track "I'll Be Surprised" (still in my top 20 songs) on a Scratch Perverts mix CD so I knew his quality, but the album blew me away, especially for featuring heavily, dialogue from gritty Brit film "Made In Britain" by Alan Clarke. The samples just worked so well with the theme of the album. I had to purloin them for myself. Chopped them up. Inserted tactfully. They worked beautifully contrasting with Brian's vocal. "I'm not signing any contracts". Damn straight. I know too many folks in the music business been screwed over. This was perfect! 1min 20secs laid down and after, it just sounded like the perfect intro to a full length mix, and the theme of having Brian narrate throughout the mix really appealed to me, and so that was that. I just had to have one last go, and this time really mean it.

Check out the White City story over here - http://http//www.patrickneate.com/page.asp?p=wc1

Check out Made In Britain over here - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084287/

Now as some of you know, I have a completely un-structured way of working on these things. I generally make the tracks as I go along, depending on what source files I have to play with at the time, and a bonus of this is, that the ones I make that I can't use, release them on here anyway! It's a process though that has its drawbacks. Do I make it housey, trance, hip-hop, indie? My tastes are too eclectic to restrict myself to one style though, which becomes a nightmare for beat-matching, and keeping the flow going (I spent roughly 3 weeks working out how to get back from the reggae interlude to something a little more upbeat). As luck would have it however, I've been going through a phase of getting back to my musical roots, which was classic old-school rave and drum n' bass. As a result, I had a load of tracks begging to be used, and kept the flow going, all the time the dialogue from Brian and Made In Britain weaving in and out to match the pace of the music.

I finally finished this a couple of weeks back, and the response as highlighted above from the quotes has been phenomenal to me. As mentioned elsewhere on the web, I started on this journey around 8 months ago or so, as a hobby, a pastime to keep me doing something on a weekend when skint and bored from staying in. I started off crap, heck, I'm still crap relative to many other people (check my links on the left), but I think I am actually starting to get a little bit better, bit by bit, and with support from various other folk (you all know who you are), I am actually really glad I got in to all this and now live for a Friday night when I sit down and mess around with this wonderful genre. So this mix is the culmination of the last 8 months hard slog and practice. The perfect end to the year for me. So a big big thanks to those in the know for all your kind words, advice and support. This mix is for you chaps.

Enough blabbing. On with the tracklistings:-

1. Intro - Part IV
Brian Blessed vs. George W. Bush vs. Moulin Rouge (OST) vs. Made In Britain

2. Colatron - Work It the Fuck Out
Skinnyman vs. Beyonce
(Fuck Da Hook vs. Work It Out)

3.Colatron - Red Hot Work Out
Jurassic 5 feat. the Daptones vs. Beyonce
(Red Hot (Up Above) vs. Work It Out)

4.A brief interlude - Still being Smart
Miscellaneous Piano vs. Made In Britain

4.Colatron - Shhit Shack
Fedde Le Grande vs. B-52s vs. Wildchild vs. DJ Supreme vs. Afrika Bambaataa
(Take No Ssh... vs. Love Shack vs. Renegade Master vs. Tha Wildstyle vs. Get Up and Dance)

5.Kleerup (feat. Robyn) - With Every Heartbeat

6.Colatron - X-Hale Slowly
Aphex Twin vs. Kylie Minogue
(Xtal vs. Slow)

7.Easy Star All*Stars - Exit (Music For a Film)

8.The Upsetters - One Step Dub

9.Madness - One Step Beyond

10.Madness - One Step Beyond (Italian Version)

11.Colatron - Killa Katie
Killa Kela vs. Kate Nash vs. The Streets
(Crop Circles feat. Lee-Ra vs. Foundations vs. Don't Mug Yourself)

12.Bloc Party - The Prayer (acapella)

13.Colatron - The Preacher
Leftfield vs. Bloc Party
(Phat Planet (Lethal & Imaginary Forces remix) vs. The Prayer)

14.Colatron - The Second Coming
Italian Love Songs vs. Muse vs. Bad Boys vs. RJD2 vs. Aphex Twin vs. Greg Nice
(Italian Love Songs. vs. Intro vs. Veronica vs. Salud vs. Avril 14th vs. 3 mintues)

15.Colatron - Ms. Nelly's Nightmare
4-Hero vs. Nelly Furtado
(Mr. Kirk's Nightmare vs. Say It Right)

16.Colatron - Do You Really Like Hardcore?
Outlander vs. Pied Piper
(Vamp vs. Do You Really Like It?)

17.Colatron - The Congress of a Clown
Congress vs. Smokey Robinson
(40 Miles vs. Tears of a Clown)

18.TC - Flatline

19.Moby - Feeling So Real

20.Colatron - Teardrop[s]
Newton Faulkner vs. Massive Attack
(Teardrop vs. Teardrop)

21.Colatron - Beautiful Acoustic Blues
Buena Vista Social Club vs. Christina Aguilera
(Acoustic Blues Slide vs. Beautiful)

22.Colatron - My Cheated Heart Goes Bang
Stone Roses vs. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
(She Bangs the Drum (Elephant remix) vs. Cheated Hearts)

23.Colatron - I Saw a Bouncing Ball
Bat For Lashes vs. Aphex Twin
(I Saw a Light vs. Bucepahlus Bouncing Ball)

24.Outro - And there was nothing but darkness
Brian Blessed


I was going to write a little explanation of each track, detailing why each one was made or chosen for this mix, but I'd be here all night and I'm sure you just want to get to the music. If you really need to know about a track or selection, drop me a comment and I'll respond accordingly. But I will apologise in advance for "Beautiful Acoustic Blues" - I was hammered is all I can say. Still, two of the tracks in here made the Anti-Hit List so can't all be bad!

Now kick off the shoes, sit back in your armchair, turn up the volume and enjoy. I'm off for a glass of champers.

Part IV - 71min 55secs - 132Mb (256kbps)

Download page here:
http://www.divshare.com/download/2671439-139

Direct Download here:
http://http://s08.divshare.com/launch.php?f=2671439&s=139

Proper artwork too! It's a double cover, so if you don't like my mush, have Brian's instead!

Cover (double version)



Front Cover (single version)



Inlay Cover (Single version)



Rear + Tracklistings



Gordon's Aliveeeee?????? x x x

Saturday 17 November 2007

Hidden Dub

Well, I'm still on the ragga tip, but this one was made a LONG time before Smile Freely ever came to light.

This track was originally meant to be a part of the "Part IV" mix (to be posted here next week, keep 'em peeled) hence the bleed of the rasta vocal at the start of the track, it was to be mixed in with the original Easy Star track, but I went for a track from the Radiodread album instead and so this got pushed to the wayside. However, I do really like it, so I thought I'd share with you all, plus I loved messing around with a picture of Bjork for the artwork.

It should be noted, I can't take full credit for the idea behind this one, as it was inspired by an excellent mash that Coldcut played in their now legendary Essential mix a few years back on Radio One, but as should now be obvious, I love reggae, and I just had to have a go at it myself.

Easy Star All*Stars are a loose collective of musicians based around 4 core artists who are known for reggae re-workings of seminal classic albums, their most famous being the cover of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of The Moon". I first heard the album a couple of years back in a bar, and then a short time later as the warm up tape for Ian Brown at a gig, and I just fell in love with it. I'm also a HUGE Pink Floyd fan, so the meeting of two seemingly radically different genres was something I had to own. Dub Side of the Moon is seriously, one of the greatest albums I have bought in the last 10 years, and I thoroughly recommend it to everyone who loves music and more importantly, creative music.

Bjork needs no introduction to anyone, me thinks

Enjoy

Hidden Dub

Easy Star All*Stars vs. Bjork
(Step It Pon the Rastaman Scene vs. Hidden Place)



Download Page Here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?evbdym3ouzd

Last Resort ZShare Link Here:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/497222411ab474/

PS. Some of you may have noticed, I've been trying to update the look of the website. Well, I've had all sorts of games getting the banner to work, stats counter, GIFs etc. The Banner still isn't working for me, hence the crappy standard one, but fear not as I have the boys from Neteffekt working on a new web design as we speak, so all being well, over the coming weeks, you should notice a definite better look and feel to the website. These are exciting days to be Colatron! Laters y'all

Sunday 11 November 2007

A hint of things to come



Well, the end of another week but luckily for me, this has been a week off from work, very much needed, and the week of my 29th birthday (yep, only look about 22 so I can put it on the good clean living I do) so it's been full of crazy good fun.

The main highlight of the week however has been the completion of the now near-infamously delayed "Part IV" mix. It's rendered, it has artwork, and it kicks a**! I've previewed it to me good friends Scott Johnson and Bobby Martini and I've had nothing but glowing feedback so I'm really chuffed how it's come together. In fact, Scott has asked if he can use it as an exclusive on his forthcoming show 81 on the Ramdom Thoughts podcast. High praise indeed and a wonderful way for me to complete what has been an exciting year in terms of learning how to do this, and getting progressively better at it. I should take this point to thank Bobby and Scott for all of their encouragement and kind advice they have given me this year. Without them, this page wouldn't exist, and I would have given up a long time ago.

Check it out over at:
http://ramdomthoughts.co.uk/

It should hopefully be online within the next 10 days or so.

The second highlight of the week was hooking up with me good friend Angel for a joint b'day celebration and she discussing which acapellas she is going to try and record for me. I'm really excited at the prospect of working with a 'real voice' as opposed to knocking about with someone else's ripped from a CD; and if this wasn't enough, I was chatting to my old friend Zenda last night, ex- of Soni Quella, ex- of Elmira Landmine, currently of Duplicate Banana and he told me about how he and Steve are recording as we speak, and would love to give me the masters to either mash up or remix accordingly. Full steam ahead, these are exciting days.

The third highlight of the week, was giving out to my real world friends, my second "album" The Second Coming - a compilation of tracks, many of which have not been heard here yet. They have again gone down well with my friends, many of whom came out with the good old "I had no idea this is what you do" line that I'm sure so many of us have heard before. Quite a few of these tracks have made it on to the Part IV mix and I will be posting them up on here over the forthcoming weeks leading up to Xmas (although if I come with anything new in the meantime, it'll still be on here too).

As a taster to what there is, I'm posting this track - the intro I made to the Second Coming album, which also features on Part IV mix. If anything, it sounds like one of my promos, inserting an abundance of samples in to around a minute's worth of music, but the fact it has Aphex Twin's "Avril 14th" in there is reason to post it alone.

The Second Coming

Download Page here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?bmwnhgljyzx

This short track contains the following elements:
Italian Love Songs- strings
Muse - Intro
Bad Boys - Veronica
RJD2 - Salud
Aphex Twin - Avril 14th
Greg Nice - 3 Minutes

Probably useless to most of you out there but if there are any Colatron completists, you'll need this for the collection, lol.

Also, as some of you may have noticed, the old Blogspot URL is no more, the new URL being colatron.com. The beauty of working in telecoms is having access to ISPs/domain hosting etc. so after a little crash course in DNS management (5 minutes on Wikipedia!) I took the plunge and registered my own domain name. It's a little bit easier to remember, plus the old blogspot address still forwards on to here anyway (as you would have found out anyway). As a result though, my old promo I recorded for Scott over at Ramdom Thoughts is now out of date, and so I've put this new one together. If any one else out there has a podcast or even just a website and wants to use this to promote my little corner of t'interweb, then please by all means download this and showcase away.

colatron.com Promo

Download page:
http://www.mediafire.com/?5ydxdlyxfgf

Again, for those who like to know these kind of things, the samples used are:
Pharoahe Monch - Simon Says
Slick Rick, Beatnuts & Method Man - Brooklyn Bomb
Ador - The Renegade Master
The Voice of Colatron
The Streets - Don't Mug Yourself
Kate Nash - Foundations
Martin Luther King
Click Tha Super Latin - Air Force Crew Theme
The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony
Made In Britain - dialogue
Fat Boy Slim - Slash Dot Dash
Pied Piper - Do You Really Like It
Coca Cola Ad

Sample-tastic again, and a big thanks to Angel for the inspiration for using the Beatnuts track - it does indeed poop on the J-Lo version from a great height.

Keep 'em peeled folks, normal service will resume shortly.

Andy

Monday 5 November 2007

Smile Freely

Here's the promised second posting of the weekend folks, and it's reggae-tastic.

Not too much to say about this one, as it's a fairly simple A+B mash (again!), but it has quite an interesting history.

A couple of weeks back, I went to the wonderful Brownie's wedding to the equally wonderful Mel, up in Doncaster. The journey consisted of myself, Rusty and Joe "T-Bone" Turner, the supplier of wonderful compilation CDs of reggae and dub to me. Most people who know me, I love all genres of reggae from Trojan Lovers through to dancehall, but I have to take my hat off to Joey, his collection of reggae is literally unsurpassed. So I always look forward to the next CD he makes for me.



We salute you Joey, sir

Anyway, it just so happened that he had made a CD for me this day and for the journey. Containing old school gems from the Upsetters and Max Romeo (the man is awesome live....War In A Babylon remains my fave live song I saw last year) and many others, one track stuck out in particular - The Soul Brothers "Free Soul". A lovely piano led instrumental, it's refrain sounded somewhat familiar and it was only when Joey pointed out "Do you not think that sounds like Lily Allen's Smile?" that I realised. In fact, in a nudge nudge wink wink kind of way, Joey virtually implied the piano line was 'lifted' from this tune for use in Smile. Whilst not being identical, there was certainly a heck of a lot of similarities.

So the challenge was on to test the theory out. Unfortunately, the CD has spent the last 2 weeks or so in my car, so I only just got around to trying it out on the PC. One drag and drop later though in to Acid, and it was obvious this track would work. No key change required, minimal tempo change asked for, just a heck of a lot of vocal chopping was needed to fit it to the beat.

So Joey, this one's deidicated to you blue. I'd say light up a blunt and relax but you don't smoke :D

Hope you enjoy this simple little summer tune, much needed tonight, on a night of cold foggy darkness

Smile Freely

The Soul Brothers vs. Lily Allen
(Free Soul vs. Smile)



Download Page here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?1yxglctd1ua

Last Resort ZShare link here:
http://www.zshare.net/audio/46770262f79360/

PS. I'd be interested to know which tune people prefer with Lily; this one or my earlier mash with Deceptikon ("Sometimes I Smile"). I can't make my mind up at all

UPDATE!!!
I sent this track to Joey last night to get his verdict on it, and it transpires that it is indeed 'plagiarised' in Lily's version, the Soul Brothers being sampled heavily for it. Check out the link below for more info

http://www.musiclikedirt.com/2006/09/27/lily-allen-alright-steal/

Saturday 3 November 2007

My Cheated Heart Goes Bang

It's that time of week again when I get to upload the latest delvings into my mind up here on t'internet and this week I've been particularly busy, mash-up wise, desperately finishing off tracks left and right to get out "The Second Coming" album for a few mate's parties.

This should be the first of two planned posts this weekend, the second hopefully coming on line tomorrow all being well, and as long as I can put the odd finishing touch to it.

So first up is this little slice of ambient breakbeat with a tinge of indie goodness.

Originally, I planned to use the Yeah Yeah Yeahs vocal with an old-school hardcore track and I'd spent a good couple of weeks toying around with it, but earlier this week, I was perusing through some of the old tracks on my hard-drive and came across the Stone Roses remix album from a few years ago. It's a bit of a hit n' miss record with some amazing versions of the classic tracks from the greatest band to come out of Manchester (and a couple of not-so-amazing remixes) but there was one track that always stuck out in my mind from the album - the Elephant remix of "She Bangs the Drums". A complete departure from the original track, a great big slab of ambient synths, a hint of the original vocal, before heading in to a fizzing breakbeat, finishing with a choice guitar line, it's a wonderful example of what a remix should be.

Of course, anything instrumental on my PC, gets tested out against various acapellas, and on the second or third trial these two met, and clicked for me.

I also tried a hint of the Klaxons in there to make it an indie knees-up, but it got a little too busy so I stripped them back out.

The only problem I've had with this one is the art's a bit crap! Could not find a decent picture of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for love nor money. Still, hopefully doesn't detract from the track too much. Download and enjoy

My Cheated Heart Goes Bang

The Stone Roses vs. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
(She Bangs the Drums (Elephant remix) vs. Cheated Hearts)




Download page here:
Last resort ZShare link here: