Opal Tapes
100% unreleased music from one of the best labels in the UK – hands down.
About this mix
Asked to write a few paragraphs about things I know and I can’t think of a single thing to write down... I broke a framed painting of a racehorse last week by throwing a US flag and flagpole at it. Not sure why I did that, maybe it had been a busy week.
I mean Boiler Room is a great platform to communicate whatever you want; I should be on a soapbox if I listen to my head. Asking questions about why we aren’t all really angry currently? I’m not a chill person. Don’t want to be. I’m not angry enough either. I throw flagpoles more than I speak my (increasingly angry) mind. Love your friends and family and tell them it. If you don’t have either then lets go out for a walk sometime. I live in Newcastle. My email address is easily found.
I hope you enjoy listening to this mix. Everything on it is coming out on Opal/Black Opal this year. I’ve been meeting people when I travel about and it’s probably the best way to find new things these days as my ears are no longer connected to any real working part of my brain. I just hear things and think “what shall we eat today?”
I’d like to celebrate my friends Lou and Steph’s beautiful human baby in some way so please let it be seen on BR and countersigned by the wonderful Umbro sports enterprise and fizzy drink sponsors “HELLO MAUD”.
Cheers to Gabe, Christian, all Opal crew new and old, my back garden for being a true friend and cursed insults and magick toward those who care not for the needy and broken.
Music is the sound that people make.
Boiler Room says...
2013 was Opal Tapes year (sort of).
No doubt Mr Basic House – surely one of the most delightfully ironic monikers imaginable – would bristle at something so emphatic, but it's true. A run of vital releases from Bleaching Agent, Manse, DJ Ford Foster, Huerco S., Ñaka Ñaka and the unmistakable / unpronounceable Skogen, Flickan Och Flaskan placed a (now upended) flagpole in the ground.
As an outpost for pounding, gristly, thoroughly weird music from the dark corner of the dancefloor, no-one was doing it better. Then after all that earth-scorching, the label went relatively quiet in 2014. More fool you for taking your eye off the ball: two of the best techno LPs of last year came via Opal and its Black subsidiary: Xosar's Let Go and Patricia's Bem Inventory.
Guess the whole 'tape' thing was just a Trojan horse to get press anyway (probably).
Judging on this window dressing of entirely in-house bits to see release over 2016/7, things are ramping all the way back up. The mix, drawn from a largely recognisable cast, has some uncommonly spry and jack-y sections, but is mostly what you've come to expect: dense clouds of choking ambient and intermittent hailstorms of curdled bangers.
All delivered in a mixing style that is, according to the man himself, "unorthodox verging on geometric." Pretty fitting, all thing considered.
Tracklisting
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