DJ Fokus

DJ Fokus is without a doubt one of my favorite lesser known 93-95 artists. Originally releasing on the label Blueprint Records, his first release "The Theme" bw "Disengaged" is an in-demand amen smasher, fetching high prices these days. He followed this EP up with a solo outing on the same label, before releasing 2 EPs on his own label Suicide Records. All of these EPs featured heavily cut up beats and deep atmospherics, as well as the engineering talent of the amazing Pete Parsons. Following the Suicide Records releases, he did several more EPs on Dee Jay and Lucky Spin, also engineered by Pete Parsons (who engineered many of those tunes), before disappearing from the dnb world.




DJ Fokus - Vexxed



DJ Fokus - Watch Out
DJ Fokus - Media




DJ Fokus - Get a Bearing


Probably my favorite tracks by DJ Fokus is "Brave New World", off one of his later EPs on Lucky Spin. The other side of this release is probably more well known, having been featured on the popular Promised Land Vol 1 compilation. However, "Brave New World" has some of the sickest drum programming I've heard in any tracks from that time.



DJ Fokus - Brave New World

Mind Therapy pt 2

I already did an entry on Mind Therapy, but only scratched the surface w/ the one EP mentioned there (admittedly a great record). Here's several more bits of their stuff.

Their first EP was on the Jack In The Box label. This label was more of a distributor (I've definitely seen a sticker from them on some old records I own).

This EP precedes any of their E3 EPs by 2 years, and is thus a lot slower. However, the production is quality and it's a decent tune for sure.

Mind Therapy - Pushing Pot

Their next record was E3001, a 6 tracker with less-than-stellar production but some excellent tunes. The breaks are really nicely chopped but, because there's 3 tracks a side and the production is a bit thin to begin with, some of these don't hold up so well. However, there's a nice 4/4 version of the "ecstacy is safe" tune off E3005, already posted in a previous entry.


Mind Therapy - Ecstacey is safe - techno mix
Mind Therapy - Drum Beats Go Like This

The next EP was a bit of an improvement.... especially of note is the B side, which features a pretty wicked cut up drum-solo in lieu of a regular funk break. Because of this + the really sparse nature of the tune, it could almost be considered "proto-choppage", alongside the brown + dangerman tracks of the time.


Mind Therapy - Run Reel
Mind Therapy - Ruffneck Bizzness

Bay B Kane interview, pt 2

Continuing with the interview, part 1 is below or click here for it.
Also, anyone looking to contact Bay B Kane can email him

Different Aliases

I will try to answer the question about all the different aliases which i released tracks under. First of all, lets see how many i can remember...

Bay b Kane

Kid Thunder

Double Tee

Rinca

Code K

Intelligent Junglist

Icon

Parallel

These are the ones that i can remember, but there may have been one or two more still..lol.

The reasons behind having all these different names were quite simple really..

1. Sometimes it was purely for STEALTH reasons... especially with experimental tracks.
   
2. A way of releasing many tracks without over crowding or overexposing an established artist name.
   
3. Because of certain styles or sounds, which can be associated with a specific name or artist as the case may be.
   

Have a Break

"Have A Break" was indeed one of the very first strictly jungle breakbeat sample-friendly cd's. During a conversation with Andy Bailey, who was the label manager at Whitehouse, I was telling him about the time when I encountered Johnny L's management people running around like headless chickens frantically phoning people up and saying "Johnny needs breaks"... "he needs original breaks can you help?"... hahaha!! And we were cracking up (as you do) and he said that it would be great to do a full length CD of exactly what we were talking about: Breaks, but not just breaks by themselves... variations of breaks, break bounces, chopped up edits, all that type of stuff which I used to spend hours constructing sometimes. I was slightly against it at first, but then Andy said "I dont want you to include anything that you haven't used before". That persuaded me to go ahead and compile this breakbeat cd over a period of 4 weeks...

Of course, some people may remember the slogan for that chocolate wafer bar called KitKat which was "Have a Break..Have a KitKat"... so we did the cover and the name like the KitKat wrapper!! Dunno if we were infringing any copyrights there but who cares..lol. And so it was released and (surprisingly) did fairly well. I've since heard many tunes that borrowed breaks from "Have a Break" but I'm not gonna mention any names, coz i don't want to put anyone on da spot... Plus, it was intended exactly for that purpose, so BIGUP everyone who used samples from "Have a Break".

Studio Equipment

This is a good question and I'm gonna tell you exactly what kind of setup i had back in 1990 to 1996, studio equipment wise...

my mixing desk was a 24 into 8 into 2 SECK with a totally silent phantom power unit...i really loved that mixer.

AKAI S900 and an S950, giving me 16 seperate sample outputs

Roland JUNO1 as my main keyboard and midi controller

Alesis Qudraverb and a Midiverb II for effects

KORG M1 rack module

ATARI-STFM computer which I ran strictly and only CUBASE on for sequencing and
arrangements

My monitors were TANNOY Berkeley 18inch dual concentrics for the final 5 years.

My studio was named THE FRIDGE because it was in an old industrial refrigerator which had walls that were 4 feet thick, that consisted of sheet metal brick then sand and brick and sheet metal again!! Amazing soundproofing, very atmospheric... I remember marathon sessions in there with Mickey Finn, T Para and Sherry (my Rood Project partner)...and it's no exaggeration for me to say that hours and days used to go by without being noticed in there, as you had no concept of time of day or night as it had no windows. It was an amazing place to create music.

Teknarchi

Long before he started putting out techstep jams, Optical (aka Matt Quinn) put out some tight tunes under several other aliases - Little Matt, Teknarchi, HEAD F.U.K.,even some suprisingly quality oldschool happy hardcore tunes as Just Another Artist.

Here's a couple of nice dark jungle tracks he put out:

Teknarchi- Flashback
Teknarchi - Free Flow

In addition to that solo EP, Quinn released a record on bear necessities w/ nut-e-1:


Nut E 1 And Technarchy - Tuneful