Optimo Podcast 12 - Adrian Sherwood On U Sound mix part 2 (dub)

Optimo (Espacio) Podcasts

For my ears, Adrian Sherwood is the most sonically innovative producer the UK has ever given birth to. If you don't know anything about Mr. Sherwood or his ON U Sound label, either do a bit of Googling, have a listen to this mix or read this interview I was fortunate enough to conduct a couple of months ago (when he was in Glasgow) that is on the Racket Racket website - racketracket.co.uk/music/jd-twitch-meets-adrian-sherwood/ This mix covers music from the years 1979 - 88 and focuses on Adrian Sherwood's dubwise productions, most of which were released on his ON U Sound label (a great overview of the label can be found here - www.skysaw.org/onu/) The mix is DUB in the widest (and wildest) sense of that word and veers from beautiful, heart-melting songs to cavernously deep, hard bass pulsations to the odd bit of brain melting sonic radicalism. To this day I don't think any other producer has pushed the envelope so hard which is partly down to a general lack of balls on the part of other producers and partly due to the fact that these productions were all recorded to tape and mixed on a desk with 100% outboard gear, so that pushing the tape way beyond its intended limits forms a large part of the character of the sound. His totally deranged dub techniques are perhaps a little more prevalent on part 1 (see below) of this podcast while this part is in the main more of a continuous heart throb with odd moments of sonic destruction, offering a masterclass in dub mixing techniques many of which Adrian Sherwood pioneered. In my late teens and early 20s, Adrian Sherwood's work impacted on me more than anything I had previously heard and made me think about sonic possibilities in a completely new way. I would buy any record he had been involved with unheard and got into a lot of other artists purely because he had been involved with making their records. Indeed, my nom de plume "Twitch" came from a record he produced and our Optimo slogan "We Love Your Ears" came from the sleeve of a record he remixed. I hadn't listened to a lot of these records for many, many years and fell in love with them all over again while putting this together. It was a complete labour of love to do and a revelation to hear how fresh and wild this music still sounds. The tracks are mostly mixed together but this podcast really isn't about my mixing at all - it's all about the 25 sonic missives included on it (several of the tracks are different versions of the same rhythm edited together). All the tracks were taken from vinyl so any unintended sonic imperfections are a result of the source records having been played countless times in the past. This is part 2 of this podcast. Part 1 which focuses on his more electronic wild side (Tackhead, Fats Comet, Keith LeBlanc etc.) will be available later in the month from here - onehandedmusic.com/ Should you so desire, the 2 podcasts can be synced together to provide one continuous mix of around 3 and a half hours. As usual we aren't making a track listing available for the podcast, simply because we feel that knowing the contents often precludes actually listening to it. But, if you want to know what anything is, feel free to get in touch and I will let you know. The mix is a 320kbps mp3 (230mb) and is 101 minutes long.