You give amazing head love (1991)

Can't say I'd ever heard of Phil Perry before coming across a 1991 promo CD-single of his recently on an obscure blog (turns out it had been posted on the excellent Finest Def Mix blog back last September too, but I'd missed it).

Phil seems to have spent much of his career in the shadow of other singers, doing background vocals for Roberta Flack, Patti Austen or Will Downing. On his website you can sign up for the four-day Phil Perry Fan Cruise in the Bahamas and listen to his latest album Ready For Love which include the songs Ready For Love, Melody Of Love and The Strings Of Love. His previous album was called A Mighty Love. The album before that - Pure Pleasure - featured the songs After The Love Has Gone, When It Comes To Love, Love Don't Love Nobody and (whoah! calm down boy!) Love It Love It. See a theme here? Phil loves love.

The 1991 remixes of Amazing Love were done by the stone cold classic team of David Morales, John Poppo, Eric Kupper and Terry Burrus and it seems incredible that they were not thought good enough for full proper release. The chorus go "You give amazing love, no-one does it better and that's the truth. You give amazing love. Seems I just go crazy for your amazing love", and for some reason I just can't help replacing "love" with "head" every time I sing it. Try it!

Call me wicked, but there's something so earnest about Phil's singing that just needs a bit of derision. Despite that, and even though the song sticks to a pretty standard formula, the voice and production really lift it. I immediately (dare I say it) loved it.

So what do I do when given several mixes of the same song that seem to end too soon? I have to tinker with them, and it proved trickier than I thought. Firstly, the mastering is slightly different on the two mixes, meaning that I had to do some subtle filtering in parts to hide the crossover between the two. I extended the rhythm intro (far too short) on the Club mix, used the acapella from the Serious Moonlight mix for extra drama at the beginning and tagged an instrumental part of the latter to extend the former and make a satisfying 8'30" mix.

I could have added even more from the Jazzy Instrumental, but often a good mix isn't just about the length, it's about keeping the energy going, keeping it concise, keeping things interesting. Hopefully my re-edit does all those. I took great pleasure doing it, and I hope you'll like it.

You can have a listen below - and as the track is no longer available to buy (surprise surprise), it's a free download! Enjoy.

More MAW, more me

Following other blogs can be a sobering experience sometimes. For quite a while I couldn't find any current music I liked. My hypemachine thread was coming up with duds. Nothing on junodownload was doing it for me.

Then I came across some amazing blogs with music from the period I love. '92, 93', '94. Places like 90s Club CD Maxi Singles (run by a guy called Mark S) and Finest Def Mix. After having already bought everything I thought I liked from that time (thanks, eBay), these tireless bloggers were coming up with endless gems, day after day after day, that I'd never heard before.

At the same time, I had been tidying up my CD collection and hoping desperately to find time to get my vinyl organised. I set some CDs aside to sell them. Checking on Discogs and eBay, I have now understood that they are almost all completely worthless. All the stuff I thought was rare turns out to be commonplace. I do not have a large, priceless collection of music. I have a huge, worthless waste of space.

Of course I'm exaggerating. Many of my CDs aren't worth euros, but they are priceless to me, and the upside is that even if the other blogs put my paltry selection into perspective, I can still bring something to the table and get pleasure from some real discoveries.


Like Meli'sa Morgan (love that apostrophe). I came across a vinyl rip of her track "Still In Love With You" on the Gotta Have House blog. It blew me away. Firstly, both the mix and dub were great, secondly they are from the golden period of Masters At Work (early nineties) and thirdly I'd never heard of them before.

There was quite a lot of noise on the mp3's, which was a shame, so I de-clicked them with ClickRepair, took out the excess empty space at the beginning and end of the tracks and re-posted them for anyone to download. Mark S saw my comment, did a bit of research and found out that - in theory - a CD-single of the MAW mixes existed. In the meantime, I has gone mad about the track, e-mailing Meli'sa's old label and leaving a message on her Myspace page (neither ever replied).

But Mark came up trumps. Finding a CD-single for sale on amazon.de, but with no tracklisting, he chanced his luck and ordered it. A few days later, he received the CD and it contained all the Masters At Work mixes in top quality. For a househead and MAW-lover like me, it was as dream come true. He very kindly posted them to me for a project I had in mind...

Like many MAW mixes of the time, the vocal and dub were different but could be combined easily into one long track. Which, of course, I couldn't resist. So here's my Fist fusion of the Meli'sa's In The House and Hard Love dub mixes by Masters At Work. Top quality sound, top quality mixes, and my humble input. Perhaps I have something to offer to music after all.

Download Meli'sa Morgan - Still In Love With You (Meli'sa's In The House mix & Hard Luv dub Fist fusion) here.

The 49ers and Masters At Work get a Fist fusion: link repaired and edit improved!

UPDATE June 2010: three of the Masters At Work mixes have turned up on iTunes here! Still hoping the dubs will come out...I guess I knew that Masters At Work (MAW) had remixed borderline-cheesy italo house group The 49ers back in 1992, but the mixes never came out on CD (never came out in Europe at all actually), and over the years I gathered that if I hadn't heard them, well, they probably weren't very good.

This week, going through my ever-longer list of retro blogs with killer mixes from the 90s, I came across a new blog - definitely for me - called MAW Forever. There's some amazing stuff on there, precisely from their most fertile period, and a little down the page was "The Message" by 49ers. I have the CD single with another great Italian mix called the Gradualswingroundub, but after downloading the MAW mixes (seven of them!) I found at least three that I thought were really great!

They did, however, need a little work. The '12" vocal' and 'Dub Two' both had to be de-clicked, but de-clicking the 'Vocal dub' took all the force out the drum line, and I ended up having to remove clicks - or as many as I could - manually in order to keep the sound quality. Then I boosted the levels of all three mixes, joined the vocal and the dub (removing some of the dub that I found a bit repeptitive, and adding and extra bass effect at one point to suit my fancy) and then joined the Dub Two onto the end.

The result is nearly fifteen minutes of non-stop classic Masters At Work, and a great song. I'm really pleased with it. The vocal dub is simple but strong, and the Dub Two changes tack while keeping continuity. This is why I love re-editing on the computer. And why I love blogs!

Click here to download my Jason Fist re-edit of The Message by The 49ers.

Heartbreaking house track gets the Fist fusion treatment

Back in 1997, the whole Mongoloids house sound was big on both sides of the Atlantic, with regular exchanges between Basement Jaxx and the big New York names of the time. Looking back, I'm not sure who was emulating who (Sanchez copying Basement Jaxx copying Van Helden and Masters At Work...).

Corrina Joseph was one of the early signings on BJ's Atlantic Jaxx label back in 1997 when the Brixton parties were blowing up and they still had their underground cred. For me that time is long gone, but for a few years the Jaxx boys produced a string of class tracks (and did some cracking remixes) and Corrina Joseph was their muse. Then, after a couple of singles, she disappeared. There were a few dodgy rent-a-voice sightings (notably for Kamasutra in Italy) but for all intents and purposes she had gone.

So where did she go? Well, looking at her myspace page it would seem she took some time off from singing in order to have children and enjoy life. Good for her!

Though her glory days may be behind her, her classics tracks on Atlantic Jaxx never get old. Like Lonely, with the haunting melody of the main mix perfectly counterpointing the dark ambience and (typical Basement Jaxx) studio trickery of the dub. Obviously, somebody had to splice them together, and that somebody is me.

Download 12 achingly beautiful minutes of vintage vocals and classic Basement Jaxx here:

Corrina Joseph - Lonely (Original mix / Fallin' dub - Fist fusion) (mediafire)

How much Mariah Carey can you take?

My answer these days is 'not very much', or simply 'none at all', but back in the days she had quite a few belters that she, er, belted out, and thank the Lord (of garage and house) for the music blogs that have reminded me.

One of them is Finest Def Mix, with Goff from Thailand (of all places) posting classic remixes from Frankie Knuckles, David Morales and Satoshi Tomiie. Some real gems on there, and quite a few rarities.

Another is Nineties Club CD Maxi Singles (the title couldn't really get more explicit than that), with some cracking stuff.

And then there's Remixes Galores which mostly posts fluffy new club stuff and has an unhealthy Kylie Minouge fixation. However, they were the ones to remind me of the splendour of Fantasy by Mariah Carey as remixed by David Morales. I had it on vinyl back in the day, but hadn't listened to it for quite a while. Hearing it again was - I have to say - a revelation.

Of course, finding two excellent mixes of the same song spurred me into action. Adding a third mix from here (basically, type the name of any piece of music into Google Blogsearch and you're likely to find it immediately) I put the drum track, tribal club mix and garage mix together to make one 20-minute extravaganza! With two slow-it-down-speed-it-up-again bits like they used to do in the old days!

I'm rather proud of it, and despite the fact that I find her recent material complete drivel, it brings back memories of better (musical) days. You know, when Mariah was Photoshopped thin.

Download my sweet sweet version here and see what you think.

What do Britney Spears and Mercury Rev have in common?

It's been tough blogging recently. I'm supervising the renovation of an apartment (supervising, as in 'not doing any of the actual physical work') and have got quite a bit of proper paid work on too, which is good, but leaves less time for the more pleasurable things in life.

And it's been an age since there been any decent music on the blog too. Time to remedy that.

I've been a fan of James Holden ever since his extraordinary and brilliant mix compilation At The Controls (available here for the ridiculous price of £4.29). His label Border Community 'blurs the boundary between the bedroom and the dancefloor', and frankly I've seen quite few people do things on the dancefloor that would be best confined to the bedroom. But anyway...

I recently came across some unreleased remixes that he did for Britney Spears. The track Breathe On Me was not released as a single and James' remixes never got released... until he put high-quality mp3s on his site for a while. There was a mix and a dub, and of course I couldn't resiste tinkering with them, so Britney got the Fist treatment: I put a bit of the dub before the main mix, the whole thing now clocks in at 12'39" and Lord I love it to bits. Download my version here.

Mr. Holden doesn't actually do many remixes, but it seems his next one is for Mercury Rev. Their next spacey album is due out 29th September, and the track Senses On Fire has been remixed both by Holden and Fujiya & Myagi (who?). The mixes are only being streamed on the official site for the moment, but you can here a pretty good quality rip here.

Holden's mix is nearly ten minutes long, and pulses along quite nicely, although I challenge anyone to actually dance to it. By the way the lyrics to the original are "Senses are on fire (repeated 8 times), My senses are on fire (x2), Ready or not here I come, Senses are on fire (repeated 8 times)." What are they on?

Download the Britney Fist Fusion here, and Mercury Rev here.

Donna Summer gets a Jason Fist re-edit

Don't ask me why, but the other day I just happened to think of the old Cassius tune 1999, a really big hit here - and probably elsewhere too - when the French Touch was at its prime. I really wanted to find the original song that they had sampled...

It took only a couple of seconds on the web to find out that it was a long forgotten tune called (If It) Hurts Just A Little by Donna Summer. 'Long forgotten' because it was a throwaway 3-minute effort off one of her dodgier earlier-80s albums (despite being produced by Quincy Jones). The album was so bad that she couldn't even be bothered to find a name for it. It was just called Donna Summer. Crap.

30 seconds later, I'd found a site comparing the original with the Cassius tune. 2 hours later a pal had e-mailed me the tune from his personal stash of sampled discotronica. Hurrah!

The only problem was that the part I really like - the sample - only lasts 8 bars. What is one to do? Especially if you only have an ageing Mac and a simple sound editing program (no special sound card, no Protools)... Well, the answer is: you do your best.

It took a couple of hours, with quite a bit of fine tuning, but I'm pleased with the result. I've taken the break from the middle and inserted it in an extended end section. Although the song is intact from the beginning to about 3'15", the rest is my hard toil, all the more pleasing because you can't really tell.

Download my humble re-edit (which should really just be called "Jason Fist jigged about with the end bit") here. And as always, feel free to tell me what you think.

Donna Summer - (If It) Hurts Just A Little (Jason Fist re-edit)

P.S. Don't forget to cringe at the 1'20" mark when Donna sings "And the lies... can be cold as ice". And she really means it.