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This time some fresh Drum & Bass Bisness,
I mixed this one this morning after breakfast, between about 9 and 10am. the first time I've been able to do that for several years!! We were just fresh back from holiday the afternoon before (caravanning in Yorkshire if you must know), and with 2 days to chill and sort things out before work, I just stepped up to the decks and based on the handful of new tune I had arrived before we went away, I just got onto the groove.

So, the tracklisting is:

Heist - Sprout (Breakage Remix)
Blu Mar Ten - Beyond words
J Majik & Wickaman - Crazy World (Afterlife Dancing At Sunset Remix)
J Majik & Wickaman - Crazy World (?Brookes Brothers Remix)
Shinichi Osawa - Star Guitar (Brookes Brothers Remix)
Hatiras - Spaced Invader (High Contrast Mix)
Lomax - Mercia
Sub Focus - Follow The Light
Jonny L - Microdaze
Spor - Aztec
(TC - Raise The Roof)
Sub Focus - Rock It
Jakes - Warface (D*Minds Remix)

So, what's it all about? Well, I was looking for a "Warm-up" vibe, and I had some new tunes knocking about, plus of course access to recent and old classics from my pile!

To start off I went mellow, but with a deep dubsteppy vibe - the Heist track turned up on a K-Mag (Knowledge) cover-disc a few months back and stood out a mile. Breakage's stuff usually does! Bought it from the labels parent website, Horizons music.

Blu Mar Ten, well there's a name I remember from back in the day, compilation appearances on Good Looking meant they were on the radar for me over a decade ago, although that sound was never core to my D+B interests back then. Anyway, my friend Adam came round for a mix session a little while back and brought this tune with him. To his surprise, this was the highlight of his box for me. The A-Side is a decent enough tune but this B-side just blew me away. If B12 and Derrick May were making Drum-n-Bass today, I'd like to think this is what it would sound like.

To ease me up to dancefloor tempos, I used J Majik / Wickaman, but starting with this CD-Only mix by Afterlife, who has mixed countless trance and house tunes into Ibiza beach friendly format (ref: many Chilled Euphoria mix CDs!). Building into the Brookes Brothers remix, we are now moving up a gear!

More from the Brookes Brothers, there glistening disco-tinged D&B a hit with me over recent months, this time a remix of "Star Guitar, a cover version of the Chemical Brothers tune, by Japanese artist Shinichi Osawa. To be frank, while I love the Chems' version (particularly for its hypnotic railway video!) I haven't heard his original version, but I caught this D&B version on the radio and had to get hold of it. By the way, listen to this song again, if you don't understand the lyrics, just imagine it from a clubber's perspective: "you should feel what I feel, you should take what I take", what could it mean!!??

Hatiras' "Spaced Invader" is a classic,on both house and D&B dancefloors, the latter for the J Majik remix, but on this occasion I though I would go for the more obscure High Contrast Mix, simply because it was a less obvious choice.

Moving on from there, I wanted to get some more of my newer tunes in the mix, and Lomax' "Mercia" was a good fit, with its Liquid intro and tougher insides!

This led me towards where I wanted to be for the end of the mix - the B-side of the new 12" from Sub Focus. this particular version of "follow the light" is from the picture disc and has vocals. It also tangentially lent its name to the mix "photon chaser" - geddit?

Something else that caught my ear on a recent Radio 1 show, was some new material from Jonny L , an artist who consistently breaks boundaries in D&B, primarily because he doesn't listen to the work of his contemporaries very much, he locks himself in the studio and gets on with it. This time he has come up with two old-skool inspired tracks and launched a new label, Munk.

Now we are building to the peak, and time to hand over from the warm-up DJ to the first big-name,. by playing the big tunes that everyone knows, but which the white-label-fed A- and B-list DJs are already ignoring, first up:

Spor - Aztec, and absolutely massive tune that was no.1 for several weeks in the D&B charts, and its ravey intro goes lovely over the Jonny L tune.

Next, the current big D&B tune across the land, from Radio 1's D&B show up to daytime play! It's Sub Focus again, with Rock It. By the way, that little vocoder vocal that says "Jump on it", is sampled from "Give the DJ a break" by Dynamix II, a classic piece of Miami Bass electro from about 1986.

I couldn't resist dropping a little bit of TC - Raise the Roof in at this point, as there is something about the Sub Focus track that reminds me of it.

To round things off I dropped Jakes' "Warface" (D*Minds Remix). This is a hilarious track with OTT marching beats dropped over a vocal sample from the movie Full Metal Jacket, to devastating effect. I spiced it up with an extra sample at the end just to finish off the mix with a little extra.

So, enjoy the mix, which is uploaded at this link