1994 brought the world not one but two techno singles featuring banjos. One of these was “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” a Swedish eurodance take on an American folk song by a group called Rednex, which is still fairly popular today despite being terrible. The other was “Swamp Thing,” a prominent entry in a string of hits by […]

Wipeout 2097 was a racing game released in 1996 for the original PlayStation and other platforms. The game got some decent reviews, and it’s considered by some to be the best racing game available for the system at the time. The soundtrack, however, is even more representative of its time – and in spite of […]

I hadn’t heard of Toronto duo Adam K & Soha prior to this release. The good people at Beatport recently featured the track “Who Cares” on one of their bestseller lists, and I bought it because the preview got my feet tapping. After an obsessive amount of repeated listening, I went back and bought the […]

This week’s video is the work of an Englishman in the nineties pretending to be a French producer from the eighties. It did fairly well at the time, and it’s held up since, either despite or because of it being instantly dated. I do wonder how my friend DJ Paul G, an unrepentant Skee-lo fan, […]

Seven is the dubstep moniker of UK producer and DJ Eddy Berry. His 2009 single Drop is a bold, heavy entry in a genre that’s still emerging and ambiguous over on this side of the pond. It’s not a dense piece of music, but there’s a lot of weight and depth to it. The sounds […]

Sampling Bob James is typically a quick and easy route to a decent track. Two of his early works, 1974′s “Nautilus” and 1975′s “Take Me to the Mardi Gras,” are among the most sampled songs in hip hop history, appearing on dozens of tracks each. But 1976′s “Westchester Lady” is no slouch either; it’s been […]

Jega is the breakbeat/IDM solo project of Manchester’s Dylan Nathan, a man who produced the bulk of his creative output during the nineties. There’s not a great amount in common between the two Jega releases I recently picked up, 1996′s Phlax and 1998′s Type Xer0, but there’s a lot to like in each case. Phlax […]

It’s the sort of thing that seems laughable until it actually happens. Who would have thought that a single that was little more than a blend of an anthem by Gary Glitter and the theme from Doctor Who would rocket to the top of the UK pop charts? Certainly not the Timelords, better known as […]

Boy, there sure is a lot of great music on the soundtrack for Heat, the classic 1995 Michael Mann film. Combining the contemporary classical orchestration of Elliot Goldenthal with the works of plenty of other notable artists – including some outstanding contributions from Einstürzende Neubauten and Brian Eno – the Heat soundtrack is a chillingly […]

1999′s Spacecake is the second full-length release by PlatEAU, a partnership at the time between cEvin Key and Phil Western. Supposedly, Key and Western were among the original members who were arrested for marijuana possession, and who chose to form a group in favour of legalization as a result. How you go from there to […]