I’ve been keep­ing an eye on 2600 Record­ings ever since they started talk­ing about this ini­tial release, a com­pi­la­tion of UK beat­mak­ers and pro­duc­ers, maybe a year ago. They’ve been feed­ing the beast with one great pod­cast after another, and it’s all lead up to this: Home Enter­tain­ment, fea­tur­ing such names as Req, Buddy Peace, ZILLA, Lukid and Mr Cooper, along­side a few names you may not have heard of before. Start­ing it off right with SasQwax (aka WORD fave Wax­fac­tor) and his Ambu­lance Chasers project, “GHC” is a beau­ti­ful and chunky piece of cinema-hop, com­plete with del­i­cate melodies, live bass and one of those cus­tom­ary gigan­tic beats Wax is so well-loved for. Rhythm Incur­sions head hon­cho brings us the next track (under the name Sirhowy), “I Remem­ber Cocoon Union,” a lovely live guitar-led jam that calls to mind Ulrich Schnauss and Chris­t­ian Kliene to my ears. Another high­light is the return of UK beat leg­end Req on “Con­cert Pianist,” reach­ing into his well-known crate of dusty records to bring us this piece of piano and beat exper­i­men­ta­tion (it sounds like the melody from this is off an old for­got­ten player piano in someone’s ancient saloon!). Tempa brings us two pieces of really exotic sound­ing pro­duc­tion. “Bracelet Tooth­pick” with Mr Laws might be sam­pling fin­ger picker Bela Fleck, but who can be sure. I do know this is one fun jam. “Won­der­land” is a slow burn­ing glac­ier that could eas­ily be back­ing Björk to great effect (poten­tial match made in heaven!). And then we come to two pieces by everyone’s favorite mixol­o­gist, Buddy Peace. How can you not love this guy? His pro­duc­tions are sim­i­lar to his mixes, full of TV out­takes, com­pli­cated beats, abrupt changes and a bewil­der­ing amount of detail in a short period. Some­day we’ll get a Buddy Peace album and we’ll die bliss­fully of music sat­u­ra­tion. Mr Cooper brings us the instru­men­tal of his Sage Fran­cis track, one of the high­lights from Sage’s most recent album. The drums on this track are… Bonham-large. There’s no other word for it, really, full of crash­ing sym­bols, deft pat­terns and some epic reverb. Every one of the 15 tracks on this com­pi­la­tion are wor­thy of being called high­light. You really just need to buy this bas­tard now and do what I have been doing, play­ing the hell out of it, try­ing to sur­vive the drums! Check out SasQwax’s mini-mix of the com­pi­la­tion below and buy it wher­ever good records are for sale!
SasQwax — Home Enter­tain­ment Mini-Mix (mp3)