Rob Booth’s long-running podcast series Electronic Explorations – a barometer of the state of play in exploratory electronic and club music over the past few years – has commissioned a series of five mixes celebrating the age-old joy of the warehouse party. It crowns off a busy and productive year for Booth. In the summer time he released the sprawling, and great, Electronic Explorations compilation to raise money to host a new website – read our interview with Booth around the comp and a selection of choice cuts here. He then concurrently launched said website, and has since released a few choice cuts from the compilation on limited vinyl.
This Warehouse Sessions series, its intentions encapsulated pretty comprehensively by its title, was released day-by-day across the course of last week, and gathered together several DJs – Horizontal Ground’s DJ Skirt (pictured above), Truss (aka MPIA3), Kangding Ray, AnD and Rob Booth & Stormfield – to showcase their idea of what a warehouse party should sound and feel like.
It feels like an appropriate gesture to cap off a year where British industrial techno sounds have progressively re-emerged in the wider clubbing consciousness, thanks to an increasingly productive Regis (and the rebooting of his British Murder Boys project with Surgeon under the name BMB), Vatican Shadow’s takes on classic Downwards/Sandwell District material, Silent Servant’s Negative Fascination LP, Blawan and Karenn’s punk-as-fuck construction site bangers, and a series of blistering releases from the Perc Trax, Frozen Border and Horizontal Ground labels (to name but a few).
So there’s healthily sized portion of dark and stern stuff here – enough to keep you suitably frosted over for the duration of the Christmas period. Click on the names to listen to the mixes and read about the artists: Skirt / Truss/MPIA3 / Rob Booth & Stormfield / AnD / Kangding Ray.
Says Booth of this series of mixes: "After my passion for warehouse raves was reignited by the recent ‘Dystopia presents Surgeon, Perc and Peverelist’ event, I decided to commission four mixes from some of my favourite producers (plus one from myself) to showcase their interpretations of the "warehouse" sound. Enjoy!"
The artists featured have all been busy this year too. Skirt has recently released a new 12" via Horizontal Ground, Bitten By The Black Dog, featuring original tracks plus a Black Dog remix; Truss has just released a crushing double 12" as MPIA3 via R&S; AnD continue to release raw techno 12"s via Black Sun and more; and Kangding Ray is about to release a new record via Berlin’s Raster-Noton label. All are well worthy of further investigation.
For more on Electronic Explorations, to buy the EE comp and to browse their extensive back catalogue of mixes (some great ones this year came from Vladislav Delay, Ancient Methods, Idle Hands and Pinch, among others), head across to the EE website.
