Conor Thomas

Reel Torque Vol. Douzzze Pt. Deux

Genre: TECHNO / HOUSE, ELECTRONIC

3 x Cassette (Boxed)

Boomkat Product Review:

Five years since their mix of Belgian New Beat++, ‘Reel Torque Volume Douzzze’, Conor Thomas finally supplies an unsolicited, 4 hour-long follow up and finds themselves weirdly writing in the third person again.

Returning to a cradle of late ’80s European dance music, the mix starts out in Belgium but sprawls out to encompass that sound’s contemporaneous parallels in the UK, and its influences from US dance music - mooching between myriad strains of early techno, acid house, EBM, Latin freestyle, bleep, proto hardcore and rave music, proper. It covers oddball cuts that didn’t make it to the first mix, plus a stack of new acquisitions including rucks of reissues that have been mercifully ticked off the wants list over the interim, all sequenced into a kind of fantasy, semi-uchronic session that aims to forge obvious, and oblique, links between the house and body music diaspora of the mid-‘80s to early ‘90s.

The mixing itself owes a lot to the experience of DJing regularly at The White Hotel, Salford since its inception (circa release of the first mix.) Depending what night and stage of the moon, one might catch Conor locked into a timewarp playing this sort of lark, and the selection is presented in thru takes - warts ’n all - but users may be able to smudge out the creases and better get into it with a few bevs and bifters. In that sense, and in light of the current dearth of IRL rave, it’s arranged long and unyielding for home use; building momentum with one tape of Belgian new beat suds and hard beat mutations, before checking links between early acid house and the UK’s free-rave scene, threading Miami and NYC freestyle mutations to bezzerker industrial, and checking for Detroit EBM edits alongside SoYo and Manc bleep pressure, plus a barrage of mentasm-laced breakbeat nuttiness.

Currently sequestered in the Boro gridiron, Conor intends this to be the first in a series of mixtapes spanning roots and branches of the “hardcore ‘nuum”, so long as he can hear the tunes over his neighbour’s turbo folk sessions, and stop thinking in the third person, ‘cos it’s weird as fuck!

3 x Cassette (Boxed) (0)

Triple cassette edition totalling 4 hours covering new beat/hard beat/acid/techno/freestyle/hardcore 85-93, smiley-stickered tapes and an acetate smiley insert, for yr sorrows.