3. Quannum Presents Solesides Greatest Bumps
With lists there can be a tendency to pick from the same, familiar genre, but I wanted to represent a diverse range of genres from my tastes and this Solesides double compilation continues with my hip-hop past. Greatest Bumps was released in the UK through Ninja Tune, and represents the West Coast and Bay Area in the main. The DJ Shadow material in particular struck me because I started to obsess over instrumental hip-hop rather than rap in later years. What I liked about Greatest Bumps is that it was encapsulating and showcasing a particular moment in time for the development of a sound – not just a history lesson for a solo career, like KRS-One’s A Retrospective.
I’d be on a school trip with a CD Walkman, headphones in and eyes out the window, and everyone would be like, "What the hell is this guy listening to?" I really was in my own little world back then. When I played my FABRICLIVE CD launch party, I actually opened with a DJ Shadow track that’s on this album, ‘Entropy (Part C – Count & Estimate)’, which was DJ Shadow with an MC called Gift of Gab on top. When I was 11 or 12, I obviously had no idea that, ten or so years later, I’d be playing it in a club to hundreds of people and seeing it absolutely go off. That still has a heartening circularity to it for me.
