April 22 marks the release day of a collaboration between myself and the Finnish breaks maestro Fanu titled Biscuits and Breakbeats. The collaboration started way back in the summer last year after a conversation on the mutual appreciation of the body of work of Luke Vibert, especially his Plug output. The conversation was started after turning in my Drama/Nonsense EP for a mix and mastering polish session by Fanu.
He wanted to do a remix of Drama. I wasn’t going to turn down an offer like that. The conversation quickly moved on to maybe a collaboration EP? Why not I, and thought we would get round to it someday based on my sporadic output of tunage.
The catalyst was a conversation, where I was trying to demonstrate the concept of new-old breaks/phrases made up of matched (Key or timing etc) samples from various sample packs and fuse it all together to make it sound like a record was being sampled rather than a bunch of samples. The idea would be to chop up the fused sample like the MPC heads would.
I’m not sure he was that convinced but I left my audio examples in a folder for Fanu as he would say to chew on it 🙂
From that came Earl’s Brew, Groove is the Source and Rounds. Drama is pretty self explanatory and that leaves Shaken By The Seas. Originally a sketch of a track titled “The Sun”. The track was expanded out to Shaken By The Seas. The name comes from an eventful ferry crossing back in December last year that tested the hardest resolve of many men. The beats in the second half of the track represent the power of the seas that night 🙂
The tracks were all constructed in the best DAW ever: Bitwig and I even managed to get Fanu to use Redux by Renoise on a few tracks.
What’s with the EP title? That came from the shared enjoyment of a good cup of tea and Fanu’s new discovery of the pure joy that is Marks & Spencer’s Chocolate Digestives! Better than McVities IMHO.
The EP will be out on all streaming platforms and Bandcamp on Lightless Recordings. If you can’t wait, you can subscribe to Fanu’s Bandcamp subscribers page and get it right away.
Bandcamp early access
https://fanu.bandcamp.com/subscribe
Pre orders can be found at
Boomkat
https://boomkat.com/products/biscuits-and-breakbeats
BeatPort
https://www.beatport.com/release/biscuits-and-breakbeats/3683522
Track in the box 