This One’s For the Hot Steppahs

Delving a little bit further into the Last.fm community, I followed a path from Pursuit Grooves (through the wilds of myspace -yikes) that led to the Coopr8 crew of folks. CoOp is London party / venue where they make it a point to play only the right tunes. This is how Time Out London described a CoOp event from May:

The future soul, jazz, broken beat and funky breaks specialists’ nights are always chocker-blocked, so expect an intimate night with DJs IG Culture, Afronaught, Domu and Daz I Kue plus spesh guests Phil Asher (Restless Soul) and Seiji (Bugz In The Attic).

Exactly.

Streaming mix and more after the jump …

So, come to find out that the cats that make the music that fuels the scene and the movement have started a decidedly un-myspace like social networking thing at i.coopr8.net. Technically, the network is based in the customizable Ning platform. Jumping right in (something I’m not so keen to do with online social networks) I saw all sorts of cats in there whose records I spin and admire … well, more like covet … ok, actually sweat. Whose records I sweat. Hold on though - I’m not the star stuck kind of dude, but oh yes I am inspired by great art. So i.coopr8.net is was a good find. In addition to being full of seemingly cool and creative people who vibe to the same tunes I do, the networking aspect may come in handy for the next large scale project that’s currently in the cooker to be launched in ‘08 - ain’t it great. (More to come on that!) A few heads in the network are brooklyn based, which is fly, though mostly it’s populated with overseas folks. Ah, the internet.

So I don’t want to be the one leech in the network just bothering my favorite producers with silly comments; I feel like I have to contribute to the community as well, which brings us to the topic at hand.

Since damn near everyone up in that network is a DJ or music maker of some sort, mixes go back and forth, exclusive tracks are streamed, and collaborations born. Music to make folks move is at the heart of it all. So I reached back to the year 2002 when I made a mix that itself reached back to 1990-something. Like 1992 or 1993. (Those numbers are starting to look more and more historical, aren’t they?) The mix is titled Mortgage Music - as if I was peering years into the future and predicting the need for some healing because of the predatory loaning that has been hatched on the people. I wasn’t though.

I just remember getting inspired one day back in the lab on Jeff Ave to rock a little house from the HS days. It came off ok - a few hiccups here and there, sound a little too hot in a couple of spots, but overall, you can nod your head to it. I plugged the Numark directly into the desktop PC with some Radioshack RCA to mini-stereo plugs strung together with Radioshack connectors, so don’t be surprised at the hum you’ll hear in the tender moments. It probably wouldn’t be noticeable if I hadn’t mentioned it. Sorry.

I had to do a little bit of re-constructive work to reproduce this track as a single file to be streamed. Although I originally recorded it as one big .WAV file, I had since chopped it up into single tracks so that when burning it to CD with gap-less playback, the songs could be navigated one by one. However, the original WAV file is i-don’t-know-where. So using Sony’s Acid Pro, I took the songs one by one and strung em back together into a continuous stream, which I now present to you and the heads at iCoOpr8.net that care to listen. [Jenky] Playlist below. Big up.