Boom Boom Bashment: Killer Ragga Riddims 2001-2004

dope tracklist! i.want.broadband.now.

Send me a PM and I'll try and sort you out with a CD, mini!

Good stuff! Liking the time indexes as well.. But i cant help but notice your missing the best piece on Double Jeopardy, the Beenie Man fast talk tune: Reasoning.

Anyways - Tracklisting looks great, look forward to listening, if its half as good as the last one it should be great!

Just checked out the blog entry and Ive got 5 words for you...

Ragga Ragga Ragga Volume 12!

droid said:

Just checked out the blog entry and Ive got 5 words for you...

Ragga Ragga Ragga Volume 12!

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Heh! Yeah it is a bit cheeky that...

Good album, which predates the mix by some years. Jeremy Harding's Medina Riddim on there is classic stuff which I need several 7" on, if anyone sees them about...

this looks great.
hats off to you, men.
also reminds me that i need to get another mix up, pronto.
it's been ages.

i'm listening to this as i write

sounds really good -- not heavy & hard & testosterone, but also not slow & boring & narcotic -- and, yes, as someone who's never felt entirely at home on the dancehall terrain, i tend to judge the tracks by what they're not

or rather, i don't necessarily seek "edge" in dancehall -- it's more about groove & poppy catchiness

(only complaint is the vocodorized voice on one of the tracks -- i.e., the vocodor thing was a really vicious virus a few years back, not sure who too blame -- perhaps daft punk? -- which spread through all of house and hip hop and then dancehall apparently -- the only context in which i've ever liked vocodorized voices is electro, and even there not all that much)

(and the "we want pussy" chant is a bit obvious -- i prefer to have to figure out what they're going on about)

dominic said:

(only complaint is the vocodorized voice on one of the tracks -- i.e., the vocodor thing was a really vicious virus a few years back, not sure who too blame -- perhaps daft punk? -- which spread through all of house and hip hop and then dancehall apparently -- the only context in which i've ever liked vocodorized voices is electro, and even there not all that much)

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Ah the 'Cher' effect... this was a big ting a few years back and I cant stand it either!. The one on this mix is 'Devonte & Tanto Metro: Give It To Her' on the liquid riddim...

Had a chance to listen to the mix last night. Another good one lads! I dont think it has the dynamisim of lyricmaker, but its got a nice delicate touch (esp on the sirens), and a good choice of off kilter riddims.... have you thought about using an effects unit (as well as the sirens) to get between the riddims? A chaoss pad would do the job nicely, and they're only a couple of hundred quid...

My only (minor) complaints are all sins of ommission... as I mentioned above 'reasoning' shoulda been in there! and where was 'Mystery is the Mystery' by Bounty on rice and peas, and 'must get ahead' by cobra on the Amhartic riddim? Im also suprised at the lack of 'log on' on the liquid, but i can understand why you left it out....

its all down to personal taste anyway, Im just being picky because I caned most of these when they came out, and my own hierarchy of tunes for each riddim is set in stone at this stage.... you know when you make a mix, or listen to someone elses for so long, that you expect a certain tune to come on?

Thanks for your comments as ever Droid! Especially good to get feedback from people who’ve heard some of this stuff before as quite a lot of the comments we get are from people who are new to it and are hit by the freshness of it all (which is great and is probably the main reason we do it – to spread the word and all that…)

droid said:

Had a chance to listen to the mix last night. Another good one lads! I dont think it has the dynamisim of lyricmaker, but its got a nice delicate touch (esp on the sirens), and a good choice of off kilter riddims.... have you thought about using an effects unit (as well as the sirens) to get between the riddims? A chaoss pad would do the job nicely, and they're only a couple of hundred quid...

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Yeah, I think I’d originally thought of this mix as being a bit more linear and technoey than the jump up madness of “Lyric Maker”.

“Only a couple of hundred quid” – LOL! 80p for a CD out the library was pushing it a bit for me during some of this…

droid said:

My only (minor) complaints are all sins of ommission... as I mentioned above 'reasoning' shoulda been in there! and where was 'Mystery is the Mystery' by Bounty on rice and peas, and 'must get ahead' by cobra on the Amhartic riddim? Im also suprised at the lack of 'log on' on the liquid, but i can understand why you left it out....

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“Reasoning” I dunno, I’ll have to listen to it again, but I deliberately chose a rasta opener followed by two tunes which rip off pop hits to ease people into it all…

Can’t recall the cobra track of Amharic either but Paul seems to have left off most of my favourites and gone his own way with that one anyway!

But yeah, I have no idea why “Mystery is the Mystery” was left off either… weird.

“Log on” isn’t really for public consumption in my book! Tho I do recall some debate on UK-Dance were someone was trying to say that homophobic records were musically bad as well as lyrically, and I think the Liquid cuts on the mix certainly put paid to that idea.

droid said:

its all down to personal taste anyway, Im just being picky because I caned most of these when they came out, and my own hierarchy of tunes for each riddim is set in stone at this stage.... you know when you make a mix, or listen to someone elses for so long, that you expect a certain tune to come on?

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We’ve left it wide open for you, Droid! The ball is in your court now

Aw Man, is “Reasoning” the one at the start of the riddim album which is basically spoken word? I thought about having that on there as the introduction but then decided it against it because the Jah Mason worked loads better. Plus it was difficult to interrupt Beenie Man’s flow and I didn’t want to have the whole thing on there!

This looks excellent. Will d/l it, transfer it to cassette and take it down to a friend's stall* at the flea market tomorrow to spread some niceness around in the sunshine.

Once again, big thanks to John E. and Paul M.


* equipped with an old 40W bass amp and two computer speakers.

Sorry for leaving you hanging lads. Had a pretty hectic one in work last week.

john eden said:

“Only a couple of hundred quid” – LOL! 80p for a CD out the library was pushing it a bit for me during some of this…

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- I know the feeling. Im a bit spoiled at the moment cos Im surrounded by studio equipment... turns out that the Kaoss 1 aint available anymore anyways, and the Kaoss 2 is £399 or so.... still - if you ever come across a bit of cash, its a great all purpose FX unit thats totally suited to DJng..

Can’t recall the cobra track of Amharic either but Paul seems to have left off most of my favourites and gone his own way with that one anyway!

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Its the one were he does impression of all the other DJ's 'Mad people time, mad people time, mad people DJ and drop mad people rhyme'... interesting to see a commentary on the scene without all the usual clash bullshit..

“Log on” isn’t really for public consumption in my book! Tho I do recall some debate on UK-Dance were someone was trying to say that homophobic records were musically bad as well as lyrically, and I think the Liquid cuts on the mix certainly put paid to that idea.

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Isnt that the whole problem with them? They're usually the best bloody cuts on a riddim! But yeah, totally get you on this... you could of course spin out the offending passages - but then youd be left with almost nothing of the tune!

We’ve left it wide open for you, Droid! The ball is in your court now

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I know I know! - its well overdue... started encoding and editing some old mixes a couple of months ago, and Im hoping to get something up this week...

Aw Man, is “Reasoning” the one at the start of the riddim album which is basically spoken word? I thought about having that on there as the introduction but then decided it against it because the Jah Mason worked loads better. Plus it was difficult to interrupt Beenie Man’s flow and I didn’t want to have the whole thing on there!

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Yep - killer tune, but as you said, a difficult one to get out of in the mix...

2stepfan said:

Cheers fella! "Making Droid happy" is always a key objective of our mixes .

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aww! Well you're doing a great job - keep it up!

Yeah, the dynamics are different from Lyric Maker. It's in three sections really: off-kilter beats that sound olike the occult roots of Grime, voodoo-flow dancehall, and slamming ragga. Then Big Up grounds the energy. It's carefully put together so the tempo increases all the way to Forensic / Fuck Face, but you don't always realise it's getting faster -- the energy moves around. (I could go on at length about the esoteric influence behind the mix and sequencing but I'll leave it up to the listener to make of it what they will...).

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The one thing about the sequencing that makes it seem more like a 'showcase' than a live mix' per se, is IMO, the rhythm of the sets of mixes themselves. There are about the same amount of tunes/seconds in each set of riddims, and they're spaced out relatively evenly, with the 'troughs' occourring at fairly regular intervals, between tunes with small variations of tempo... unlike lyricmaker, which was a lot more unpredictable, both in terms of tempo of tunes and progressions of blocks of mixes, as well as in the gaps between the mixes.... but good for newbies as John pointed out.

A Kaoss pad doesn't quite fit our working method, but there's a shit load of VST fx in there, different delays and reverbs... I was trying to keep the fx minimal this time, though admittedly there's some wild timestretched / cut-up / effected / filtered sirens on there, four audio tracks worth actually.

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Aha! So thats how you do it! Thought that was some very fine siren control. Do you have a Jah Tubbys soundbox? I just send that through the pad and Im pretty much sorted... it can be a divil to get subtle effects out of though. (and as youve pointed out - its better suited to totally live mixing)

This one was fairly quick to put together -- Lyric Maker was four months work, spending three of four nights a week on it, Boom Boom only a couple of months interspersed with other stuff. I dunno when we'll have time to do another one; we've both got some other projects to get on with (like, bar-b-qs in the summer!).

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Thats not keeping Droid happy! Sort it out!

You should've said, I'd have put some different selections on if I'd known! Actually I think the Amharic section is one of the best bits.

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Its a lovely riddim alright - but check out that Cobra tune again... Its a killer..

Hmmm... wonder if we could do a version 2 -- a special edition for Droid (with more of John's favourites on there...)

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No need for that - You can just consult me in advance next time!

Yeah! About time we had a mix from Droid!

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Oh the pressure! As I mentioned above, Ive got a couple of things on the boil that may interest you two. Hope to get them online by the end of the week... though I dont know if theyll stand up the scathing critiques they surely recieve after all my recent mix related diatribes!

It is apparently mirrored here now:

http://www.leechers.herejezus.nl/Music/BoomBoomBashment.mp3

paul - do you mind if i host lyric maker so a few american friends can get hold of it? i won't put it on the blog or anything, just have it on my server space for a select few

Do it Dave! No worries.

Paul - I can't check it cos I'm at work. But I would guess not