He explained to FACT that “I re-opened the original .flp Fruityloops files in the same versions of the software they were built in at the time and bounced them as wavs completely flat. I’ve not added any new effects or eq to any of them. They all contain exactly the same sounds and mix settings as they did in the early ’00s, even as basic as they are I felt it would be wrong to change anything.”
But as well as Plasticman Remastered there will also be the inevitable slew of remixes and refixes.
FACT interview with Plasticman/Plastician
"Hard Graft" was the one I loved back in the day, when this stuff was seen as a sidestream to grime more than an entity in itself.
Indeed I included it in the Grime Primer I did for The Wire in 2005:
If you
hadn’t already guessed from the name, grime inverts values. Dutty, stinkin’,
even disgustin’--all are positive attributes in grime parlance. So when I say
“Hard Graft” is utterly dismal,
you’ll know this is the thumbs up. Grime often represents itself as gutter
music. Mark One and Plasticman go further, or deeper, with this track, and seem
to plunge into the sewage system. Full of clanking beats, septic gurglings,
eerie echoes and scuttling percussion, “Hard Graft” makes you imagine pipes,
storm drains, dank chambers.
Mark One,
Plasticman and their cohorts constitute not so much a subgenre of grime as a
side-genre, running adjacent to the scene proper. The sound is techy, MC-free, and
more danceable than grime. Although a number of black producers are involved,
you could fairly describe this style’s sonic coding as whiter than grime, and
situate it on a Euro continuum running through Belgian industrial techno (Meng
Syndicate, 80 Aum) through the cold technoid end of rave (Nebula II) to No U
Turn’s techstep and Photek-style neurofunk (the beats on “Hard Graft” sometimes
recall his “Ni Ten Ichi Ryu”). Plasticman’s nomenclative proximity to the
Richie Hawtin alias seems telling.
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