Raw Stylus - Pushing Against The Flow (1996)

It's been a long while since I came across any hidden gems, such a long time in fact that I had seriously started to think it was over, that I'd heard every decent forgotten track from my favourite period, and that there was nothing left to discover... and then this popped up.

Roger Sanchez did some amazing remixes in the early 1990s, turning in multiple takes on a song, with great melodic vocals and inventive dubs, often turning a banal song into a club monster.

In the case of Pushing Against The Flow, the tune itself was already pretty good, but Sanchez brought it up to house speed, funked it up, and turned in some incredible, hypnotic dubs. Back in the day, people had more patience. They were prepared to wait for a mix to build and build, because it only made the payoff bigger and better. In this case the crescendo is particularly long with seemingly very few elements, and yet there's always something extra coming in to keep your interest. It just keeps rising and rising.

I have fused together two of the dubs, making a 16-minute mix that really explodes (for me) at the 9'43" mark. I think you need to be in a particular frame of mind to get the best out of it, whether natural or induced, and I can just imagine it being played in a club around 4am.

They don't make mixes like this any more. This is proper house. Listen / download here...



I can't say my fusion was hard to do, in fact it was actually just a simple cut and paste, nothing more, but knowing where to do it was crucial, and you don't feel the transition at all.

I'm so pleased to have found this track, and I've been listening to my version almost non-stop for a week now. Let's hope I never get tired of it.

Corrina Joseph - Live Your Life With Me (1997)

12 years ago! That's mad. At the time, Basement Jaxx were producing consistently complex and danceable tracks and were honorary members of the US Mongoloid crowd dominated by Nitebreed, Van Helden, Sanchez and Sneak. It wasn't a huge surprise then when Sanchez remixed this track by the wonderful Corrina Joseph.

The original contained the baseline and vocal sample that were later to become the huge hit Flylife, but the Sanchez mixes ditched most of the original elements and brought in a hypnotic latino riff that relentlessly turner and turned and reeled you in. However, the vocal mix ended rather abruptly and I thought it would be good to link the vocal with the dub, so that's what I did!

The result is 13'39" long, which will drive you mad if you don't like the song, or wild if you do!

Have a listen here.

You can download my Corrina Joseph - Live Your Life With Me (Narcotic Vocal mix/dub Fist fusion) here(19MB)
The Atlantic Jaxx catalogue is now available for legal download on sites such as Juno, so I've disabled the download of this edit.

20 minutes of Trippin' On Your Love

Kenny Thomas had a few 'hits' back in the early nineties, but I'd be surprised if many people remember him now. I only ever really noticed his track Trippin' On Your Love back in 1993, especially the Roger Sanchez Grand Diva dub that had (anonymous) female vocals instead of Kenny's. Go figure.

It was a pleasure then to come across a post on the Hard To Find Trax blog with the all the mixes from the double 12" promo, two from Simon Dunmore that are not really up my street and no less than six from Sanchez, all of them stormers.

Of course 16 year-old vinyl suffers, and the noise reduction on the recordings is pretty harsh. The treble is crushed and some of the voices sound a bit chevrotant as we say in French (i.e. warbling like a goat! Love that expression). However, if that's the tradeoff for being able to listen to this again, then fair enough. Does anyone realise how much time it takes to rip vinyl and clean the files up afterwards? Kudos.

The remixes are classics, all with their own identity. Sanchez was really at the top of his form here... and of course I couldn't leave all that great material alone. So...

...I boosted the treble and overall levels to get it sounding nice and crisp, did some manual de-clicking (yep, there were still quite a few left) then took all my favourite bits from the various mixes and ended up with a 20-minute version that I really like. Epic! Hurrah!

By the way, a Fist fusion doesn't just involve sticking everything together and making it as long as possible; ironically, certain parts of the individual mixes have to be shortened because they just drag on a bit over a very long mix. Here I trimmed a couple of things down and hopefully got a mix that keeps your interest, switching from vocals to the dub and back... and back again(!), something that sounds like it could have been one of the actual mixes. I only have a Mac and some very cheap software (not even any hardware) so I'm pretty pleased with the result. Sanchez and Hard to Find Trax inspired me!

You can download my Kenny Thomas - Trippin' On My Love Fist Fusion here.