Man and Boy (time will tell)

That was now (well, a few years ago)

And this was then (an aeon ago)





"We Rock the Most" -  I put that on the Energy Flash CD that was stuck on the first Picador edition book cover .... what an ideas-packed, action-crammed, eventful tune!

What do you know, I never even noticed this EP is called Time Will Tell!

So love love LOVE the "Infinite Hype"/"We Rock the Most" side I always forget the other two tracks on the flipside.






Adore the cover - it might actually be my favorite ardkore cover  (although there is a ton of competition)

Well actually I guess that is the back cover - and this below is the actual front cover -  a bit of a mess, yet cool in its UK attempted wildstyle.

This below is a similar kind of cover  (to the first image, ie. the back cover) from Moving Shadow squad - a cut up (or torn up) montage of Shadow crew messing about / getting messy. There were just kids!

But back to DJ Trax, he also had a hand in these slices of madness (alongside Dev Pandya, aka Paradox)













This a cappella bonus track (only on the promo?) leaves the terribly English rapping rather exposed!



Paradox + Trax also went by the name Brown & Dangerman






I'm sure I reviewed something by them but it wasn't that one, I don't think.

Trax's own stuff seems to have bypassed dark and gone straight from manic euphoria to intelligent and tasteful





There were titles like "Talking Drums", "Scattered Memories", "Distracted Thoughts", "Define Funk?", "Spirits", The Drummer Is The Heartbeat", and even - as we push into the 21st Century - "Frantically Calm", which could be a phrase from one of my own reviews

Well you can't stay a teenager for ever...

I hadn't quite the heart to follow through the trajectory all the way through into intelligence and clean production and downtempo chillage (similar trajectory to another freshfaced fave of that era, Danny Breaks)

Still I rather like that tune up at the top, from 2013, with the video, and Trax looking a bit battleworn

Here it is again -



The number  of times I have walked down Berwick Street! Or up it for that matter. The journeys would invariably take in the two nuum-oriented shops on D'Arblay Street, Reckless (mostly for their rack of old skool tunes) and -   in the middle of the fruit ' n' veg market - that poky branch of Music and Video Exchange (likewise heading straight for the 'hardcore' section but also exploring a bunch of other areas of interest as time went by).

But is that store in the video Blackmarket (if so it's moved to a different building as far as I can tell) or just somewhere equivalent?

Nice to have a snapshot of a shop interior with all the whites in marker-penned sleeves on the wall behind the counter.