"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
Two piece chicken and chips for 99p inside the party
[Verse 2 - Shotta Shah]
It's me; Shotta Shah Khan
Hold tight yes with the garlic naan
Smack Princess Pukka with the back of my palm
Sniff ten lines, that shit's haraam
Uncle will flip but I'll tell him keep calm
It's me and my boy Ali
Coming down Leeds Road at ninety
In my Chacha's Ferrari
I'm a taxi driver
Drive you to my yard for a fiver
Get a sucky off a prozzy for a bottle of cider
Up on the mic ah!
I said I took this bird to the Shimla Spice
Curry and rice on a Friday night
I got a vindaloo and it made me poo
Now I'm at Frame 2 with the Leeds road crew
See rap shows near Hollywood
Get tickets as low as $112
[Verse 3 - Halal Ham]
Stepped in the party, pass me the shisha
Drove to Bradford in my two-litre
Saw a peng ting, I'll go chat to her
Not going to Begum though like Shamima
I moved to this Auntie, Aunti went hanji
Then she went to go make me some handi
It's Shotta Shah and Kutta Khan and we go hard in Bradistan
A couple of apnas, a couple of goras
A couple of tings for a couple of pakoras
Uss bar kidda sohniye
And she's gonna take me home with her
Kasmeh bro it was mental
Spend my Eid monies on a rental
I was like "Boss who wants a Lambo?"
Popping bottles; Rubicon Mango
Shotta Shah is from Bad Boy Chiller Crew and here's another BBCC track that references Chicken Dhansak
What led me back to these was a more recent "Bradford Sound" track by MC Chippy
A real "Danelaw" look to most of the people in this video - red hair, pale skin, narrow eyes
A Scandi-ness that recalls Die Antwoord, the whitest people who ever rapped - until BBCC + crews
(although donkists the Blackout Crew were pretty pasty)
This Chippy fella looks like a mash-up of Catweazle and Jimmy Savile
Looking at these vids (and there's so many of them) I sometimes can't help picturing a post-apocalyptic tribe out of some Russell Hoban scenario.... mutant survivors who've reconstructed "civilization" using a handful of cultural fragments - in this case, a So Solid Crew DVD, a No Limit CD, singles by T2 and DJ Q... a Niche mix-tape pack ... over the centuries the repeated gestures and references devolved into rote ritual, emptied of meaning, original referents long lost....
Hey look - an Irish branch of this bassline/rap fusion
i.e the electronic future emerging first not out of pop's vanguards (art-pop or street) but from the middle-aged and the middle-of-the-road - radio and TV themes, musik for advertisements, , novelty pop, background music, easy-listening, etc
Raymond Scott, Jean-Jacques Perrey, this chap...
In part because who else could afford to use the gear at the start?
Built by The Arkiteket - an enigmatic figure, known to some on this circuit, but for this project self-shrouded in mystery.
Years in the making, The Deep Ark consists of three elements.
The core is a mix - an extended (8 hour plus) odyssey through 1990s Electronic Listening Music (to use the term originally deployed by Warp Records).
It's more like a remixtape than a selection of tracks segueing seamlessly one after the other. More often than not, the components have been partially disassembled - moving parts rejiggered, tempos tinkered, keys tweaked--before being jigsawed back into perfectly annealed alignment.
Listening to the entire length and breadth of The Deep Ark, you get a powerful sense of the music of this era as a single gigantic living organism. Each track is individually distinct while also webbed within an ecosystem of reciprocal influence and mutual inspiration. The balance between genius and scenius, the auteur and the collective, is ever-shifting.
Download the whole mix here here (where you'll also find the tracklist) or listen to it at YouTube.
As the word "Ark" suggests, this ultramix is a vessel in both senses: something that takes you on a voyage, and a container. A sacred repository, a canister for the future, an archive, a memorial.
Not so much separate levels or extensions of the mix, but plateaux in parallel, the two other components of The Deep Ark are visual and textual: a website and a book.
The site contains images, commentary about each track that features in the mix, and an in-depth meditation on the whys-and-wherefores of the project, cast as a dialogue between The Arkiteket and an unknown interlocutor.
Here's a snippet, discussing how The Deep Ark has been informed by the ideas and impulses of Romanticism:
"... I’m really thinking in the painterly sense here... an emotive, individualist representation of landscape and memory that touches on the darker aspects of the sublime... . We see this contradiction at work within this genre as a whole; Aphex Twin, an oneiric visionary in the mould of Blake, instantiating his dream music through sleep deprivation and the induction of hypnopompic and hypnagogic states, and Autechre, with their obsessive relish for intricately detailed sound design and their construction of these deeply evocative, hymnal, hyper-textural sonic sculptures, like scribes solemnly illuminating a testament to human emotion.... I think romantic is the best description of this intensely individualistic and emotional music, full of yearning, sadness and beauty.
The photographs are doctored documents of a landscape-turned-dreamscape - a real place that has served for many years as a site for ritual adventures, journeys to the end of the night. Images have been remixed in ways that parallel the techniques applied to the musical components of The Deep Ark. Photographs were altered, overlaid, colorized, mutated or outright generated via AI.
The result is a form of hallucinatory hauntology - a monument to an Area of Outstanding (Super)Natural Beauty.
A powerful and deep world of sound
filled with the vibrations of nature.
Music to match the wave patterns,
selected and transmitted to harmonise
with each cycle of this guiding line.
An unusual mental space where you can experience
the sweet beginnings of life itself.
To truly grasp the spirit of the dream tide
More about The Deep Ark from the Broken Sleep Bookswebsite.
A psychedelic odyssey that plunges the reader into a mythic exurban world of wonder, ritual, folly & friendship, The Deep Ark blurs the lines between the imagined, the real and the invoked. Moments of tenderness, humor, grief, joy and revelatory intensity combine to form a fragmented narrative of quiet lyrical beauty, suffused with an abiding reverence for the music, memories, community and landscape that inspired it. Check the forecast one last time, put your headphones on, open The Deep Ark and get lost.
Praise for The Deep Ark:
Gnarled, airy, and vibrantly psychedelicized, The Deep Ark is the kind of organic artifact that not only satisfies aesthetically, but draws you into the magical traces of its own production… a visionary and desperate bid to rediscover the animist potential still humming, even as you read in this, in the actual landscapes around us.
— Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
The Deep Ark is an extended meditation on the periphery of the state, represented in the social unit of the collective… the actual geography of heathland, golf courses, hills, and quarries… and in the UK’s melancholic electronica of the nineties
— Matthew Ingram, author of Retreat and The "S" Word
A rave review at International Times by Rupert Loydell:
"This book is a technicolour atlas, a shamanistic guidebook, an augmented mixtape, a multimedia experience, a natural high. It is primary experience mediated through photography and lyrical songs, evocative poems and secular hymns, emotional outbursts, cosmic wonder and everyday dirt. Techno-pixelations and long-exposure night photos enhance our reading of the words, just as the text changes what we see. Everyone of us is lost but together we can not only find each other but also ourselves"
And (effectively) a preview printed in The Wire about 18 months ago, by Michaelangelo Matos.
And more raves from those who know:
- Philip Sherburne, from his Futurism Restatedsubstack
An (almost) completely unconnected track - hypnagogic pop rather than electronic-listening-music - but that seems to come from a similar oneiric-psychogeographic wellspring.
Another project without much surface resemblance but with a kinship at core
