Once upon a time, geeks like us used to rely on messageboards to discover new music. It might sounds hilariously outdated in this day and age, where you can broadcast live video feeds directly from your phone at the flick of a button, but in the 56K dial-up-days a messageboard was the closest thing to 'social media' as we know them today. I'm not sure if we ever mentioned this, but we were massively into west-coast import house back in the 90s, and undergroundhouse.net was THE hub for keeping a pulse on that kind of stuff. It's breathtaking how much time we wasted on those pages (I reckon I could have finished at least one PhD with the hours we put in) but it was also the place where we first met likeminded people like Mike from Kolour and Ben from Boe, whose brains we picked when we first started toying with the idea of starting a label.
One of the other people that frequented that messageboard was Danny "Red Rack'em" Berman, who had a radio show going on at the time. He was the one that brought the Popular People's Front to our attention, an enigmatic ensemble who were doing a string of wonderfully weird and wonky whitelabels that sounded nothing like the jacking tackle we were into. Their take on disco and boogie, which was decidedly less uptempo and polished than anything else that was doing the rounds opened up a whole new realm for us as DJs and collectors. It's safe to say that without the influence of this merry band of sample bandits, Sleazy Beats would never have happened. Imagine our excitement when we managed to track them down, asked them if they were up for doing the last in the Black Ops series, and they said yes! The supplied us with what we think is a most fitting finale to the Black Ops chapter, one of those records that we ourselves would reach for after one too many Red Stripes with a big smile on our faces. A magnificent chuggy afro-groove, a belting disco number and a proper wonky boogie workout in the inimitable PPF style.
We hope you like these as much as we do. It's the last in the series. Faulker once suggested that people should kill their darlings to keep creativity flowing, and ten seemed like a good number to us. We would like to thank you all for all the support over the years, it's been a mental ride!
Out next week and available at these fine outlets:
P.S. We're launching a new project soon called Make Believe Disco. Even if that name might suggest otherwise, the focus isn't on straight-up disco, but on soulful basement grooves that capture the spirit of a heaving party in a small, intimate club. The first release by French prodigy Folamour will be out soon, exclusively on 12" vinyl. You can keep track of what we're up to with this new venture over here.
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