Music : House, Alternative Dance and Techno
Friday 15th June
@ The Buttermarket Cellars, Howard Street, Shrewsbury
Traffic Presents:
Room 1 - Traffic
KING UNIQUE (Curfew Time / Junior Boys Own)
MEAT KATIE (Bedrock Breaks / Lot 49)
+ Residents Taylor J & Alex Evans
Room 2 - Get Together
Miss Devious
Matt Wedderkopp
Big Dave
Jon Harvey
Colon
KING UNIQUE BIOGRAPHY
King Unique = Dirty House
That’s all you need to know.
King Unique = Dirty House
You need details? OK, let’s get started…
King Unique are two guys called Matt who make rough-edged dirty house music, Matthew Roberts and Matt “Watkins” Thomas, a pair of studio junkies with a taste for bulldozer beats and sick synthesizers.
Over the last five years their records, remixes and re-edits have hit home with house-heads, nu-ravers and electro-rockers alike, being championed by everyone from Sasha to Soulwax, Danny Howells to Tiesto, and Pete Tong to Zane Lowe. Their music has turned up everywhere from Hollywood soundtracks to mobile ringtones, not to mention countless compilations and mix albums.
Their decks’n’fx DJ sets have made them regulars in some of the world’s most respected clubs and biggest festivals, while the "King Unique Broadcast" radio mix series regularly airs to countries across the globe. 2006 has seen them starting their own residency, "Curfew Time" at London's Turnmills, bringing Loud Electronic Dirt to the capital.
King Unique hit the floor running in 2001, claiming the title of Undisputed Remix Champs by scoring five Essential New Tunes in five months on Pete Tong’s BBC Radio 1 show. The King Unique sound has been in constant demand since, appearing on dozens of remixes including King Dong sized floor-fillers such as Underworld’s “Two Months Off”, Las Vegas rockers The Killers’ “Somebody Told Me”, Planet Funk’s “The Switch”, Mutiny’s “The Virus”, Jamiroquai’s “You Give Me Something”, The Freemasons’ "Love On My Mind", Luke Slater’s “Nothing At All”, and Chable and Bonicci’s “Ride”. Most recently King Unique have reworked Teamsters "Feels Like Love", Mish Mash's "Speechless", and Suicide Sports Club's “I Don't Know”.
The productions make for an equally impressive line-up; "Dirty", "Sugarhigh", "Lighters" and new cut "Flashing Lights". “Obscene, dirty, filthy, immoral” set out the King Unique agenda on “Dirty” by Dirty, the first of a series of singles released on Junior Boys Own. Next they raised the stakes with “Sugarhigh”, a track dreamt up in a tiny techno bar in Tokyo whilst under the influence of too much vodka and too little sleep. A melodic powerhouse of a track that fused classic house and melodic Detroit vibes, “Sugarhigh” gave KU a sixth Essential New Tune. The next King Unique single “Lighters/Music Please” followed in early 2003 and saw KU experimenting with new sounds. “Lighters” poured out a relentless cascade of slow and heavy electro-house that “sound like it’s raining synthesizers on your head” (Mixmag), while the DJ-friendly “Music Please” delivered a slice of psychedelic breakbeats favoured by Danny Tenaglia and James Zabiela. KU closed 2005 with “Flashing Lights/Curfew Time” another double A-side release. "Flashing Lights" is a big room grunge-house monster with a dumb bass line that’d make The Kinks proud; “Curfew Time” kicks out a spiky slab of riff-house, then throws in a jungle-flavoured break down of Amazonian proportions. (The full list of more than 40 releases can be found on the Trax page)
King Unique's renowned DJ sets have made them regular names in the world's biggest clubs and festivals, playing everywhere from ultra-hip blacked-out sweat boxes in Tokyo to euphoric crowds of thousands on the tropical beaches of Madeira. Since their first shows in 2001 they have consistently blown minds (and speakers), bringing more than just record boxes into the DJ booth. By packing their studio into a pair of laptops, KU are able to re-edit and re-work any track on the fly, creating a four-armed, twin-headed, single-minded mash up of CDs, custom made re-edits and live samples. End result? You may know some of the records, but you won't have heard them sound like this before.
This hotly demanded sound has made it’s mark at all the best UK clubs; Turnmills (home to KU's own "Curfew Time" nights), Tribal Sessions, Renaissance, The End, Ministry Of Sound, Godskitchen and Lush. Worldwide demand for the King Unique sound has seen them playing Tokyo, Paris, Reykjavik, Amsterdam, Malta, Moscow, Athens, Auckland, Bucharest, Singapore, Sydney, Milan, Kiev, Buenos Aires, etc.... (you get the picture). Not forgetting the festivals; the huge Skol Beats in Brazil, the UK's Global Gathering, Weekenddance in Madeira and the renowned Exit festival in Serbia amongst others.
On the very few days they aren’t making tracks in the studio or diving into DJ booths the Matts can be found chopping up the very latest cool and dirty music from across the globe, reassembling it into the "King Unique Broadcast" radio mix series. Broadcast through an ever increasing network of stations from Argentina to Iceland, these are no ordinary radio mixes; each KU Broadcast features dozens of tracks, with single tunes built from pieces of three or four different records, cut up and re-assembled into exclusive King Unique edits and mash-ups. Many of the biggest tunes in King Unique's DJ sets started life as tracks for the KU Broadcast shows; the re-edit of Mylo's "In My Arms" that was picked up for the single release, and "Big Dirty Dreams" that mashed up the Martini Bros with the Human League. Despite huge support for the track from Soulwax, Tiga and Erol Alkan it proved impossible to clear "Big Dirty Dreams" for release - guaranteeing it legendary status. DJs eh? Many more custom made edits and mash-ups are locked away in the King Unique vaults; the Nine Inch Nails and LCD Soundsystem collision of "Nine Inches Of Love", Tiefschwarz and Soulwax butting heads on "Any Muthafucking Excuse" and Alter Ego doing battle with Midnight Mike to create "Hot In The Bush" - to name just a few.
So that's the first five years, not a bad start. What are King Unique cooking up next?
King Unique = Dirty House
That’s all you need to know.
MEAT KATIE BIOGRAPHY
Born
"Kingston, 1971."
Family
"I'm not a confident person, but I am confident in what I can achieve. I don't walk around thinking "I'm the shit", but I know that I can do things if I put my mind to it. I can make things happen just by sheer determination and being relentless, it's just a matter of making things work. When I think about how I started, you know, all my friends ended up in prison or dead, and now I'm doing the things I'm doing. It's shocking and incredible, but in a nice way, because if I can do it I know that anyone can. I got kicked out of my house at 15 and I left there with no shoes or socks. I never went home since... but everyone has their problems. Now I'm 33 and I have my own family, I run my own record label, have my own studio and I DJ all over the world. I have to turn work down now. And that's all from sheer commitment. I haven't got a qualification to my name. So the good thing for me about music in general is the creative thing, and no one can say that there's a right or a wrong way, or you can't do it. It's all down to personal taste."
Roots
"The first music I was into was hip hop. I was an artist when I was young, and I still paint and draw. I got into graffiti as a teenager, and through that I was introduced to the music. From hip hop I got into funk, jazz, soul; grooves in general. I was trying to find the samples from the hip hop tracks, so from there I got into the original tracks. I wanted to join a band and I played bass guitar. The only bands I knew played skate-punk. I was about 17 when I joined my first band Trafalgar. From there I signed my first record deal with a band called Sandladder to Iggy Pop's Kill City label. I toured really heavily doing that, we supported people like the Manic Street Preachers when they first started. That was when I was really young, but at the same time we were going out to clubs. It was all about acid house, I just happened to be in a band. A friend of mine introduced me to Sean McClusky, many many years ago, when he was doing Love Ranch in Leicester Square. Sean started managing our band and it all started escalating from there really."
Projects
"While I was still in the band a friend of mine bought a sampler, and we started playing around with it. When the band split up, because it had run its natural course, I just started sampling drums and I had a big funk collection so we were sampling breaks and stuff. I made a few tracks and then got signed to Wall Of Sound. That was the early days of big beat. We were called Ceasefire and my partner in that was Derek Delarge, with Jason O'Brien who does Dub Pistols with Barry Ashworth now. So we all kinda came up together when samplers came, we were just fucking about with them really. I did the Wall Of Sound thing for a while, but things didn't work out because, needless to say, one of my partners was Derek Delarge. He's a really good friend of mine, but he's not the most honourable of people (chuckling). I left when Ceasefire was peaking. Just as the label was booting off, I left and it was terrible because I was back on the dole. So I've had a few false starts with my career! Straight after all that I started working on new material as Meat Katie on Kingsize, and shortly after R&S signed me under a completely different name, Avenue A. I worked with Holly Golightly who does garage trash lo-fi stuff, Kurt Wagner from Lambchop, Imogen Andrews the jazz singer who's Julie Andrews's niece. I also made an album with another guy called Greg Garing, who's a country singer from Nashville, we done some mad shit... R&S just said make an album, any album you want and we'll release it. So I did it about 8 years ago; a mad garage, lo-fi album with samples, using alternative country singers."
Labels
"Even though I'm only 33 I've been involved with music since I left school. I started Meat Katie to do my own project and for it to just be my own thing, whatever I wanted it to be, and whatever it may be in the future. So I only have to worry about myself, because all the problems in my career were never of my own doing, I was always completely dedicated to everything I've done. I'm very single minded in what I want to achieve, but I've made bad decisions about who to work with, labels to work with... After the W.O.S. thing, I released my Meat Katie project on Kingsize. At that time Kingsize was just a record shop that I went into in Kingston, but I went there one day and they said they were going to start a label and did I want to make some records for them. This year they're going to be 10 years old, with their 100th release. They're really good guys, they now manage me, they're my friends and I trust them... When I had the money I set up my own label, Whole 9 Yards, and I signed Dylan Rhymes, Elite Force, and Dark Globe who have all gone on to do really great things. I ran W9Y until last year. Then my partner moved to Sweden, but didn't want to sell his share of the label. I turned round and said I can't do 100% of the work for 50% of the label, so we had to put W9Y in limbo. It's basically just sitting there. I could release music on W9Y tomorrow, but I just choose not to... So I started Lot 49, again, all on my own! I should probably have done all this stuff a long time ago but maybe it's taken me 15 years to realise that if you want to do anything, you have to do it on your own. It has to be a DIY thing, if you want it your way that's what you have to do. Maybe I just wasn't ready to do it until now! I think I've always kept it real. If what I do becomes popular, then great, but if all my records keep selling the same as they do now and it never gets any better I'll be really happy, because I can live off music. I don't need any more than I've got right now. But the fact of the matter is that the breaks scene is still evolving, it's still moving. The sound is evolving, there's newer elements coming in. I'm getting influenced by different things, from going to different places and meeting different people. Even talking to people can influence the way that you view music, I think. So it's certainly not over yet, it's just starting really."
DJing
"I started DJing in clubs 5 years ago, people started asking me off the back of my productions. Where ever I lived when I was younger, there were always turntables in the house. It wasn't like I just started and hadn't done it before. In the last 3 years I've started DJing as a professional, now it's a major source of income. I've probably done 160 shows in the last year, which is pretty good for someone who never wanted to be a DJ! I've found that balance, over the course of time my delivery and my mixing have become better, because I'm still relatively new in the scheme of things. So I had to find my feet technically, and I probably bit off more than I could chew by choosing to mix so much shit together, because not all of it goes together! I could have probably made my life easier by sticking to one but I'm pleased that it's developed. I like music for music, and I don't want to be too scene-y. I'm a DJ who plays breaks and over the course of time, I've spent more time in breakbeat than anywhere else and I'm definitely drawn towards the scene. I don't like people moaning because I play other stuff but what kind of personality would I have if I didn't play stuff I actually liked... My first album as Meat Katie has got three or four 4/4 tracks on it. I haven't just decided to introduce these elements into my sound; it's what my sound has always been, these eclectic elements and different ideas. It'll always be about whatever's influencing me and making me move. It's a really good time for breakbeat at the moment but I'll play a blinding house track or electro track or techno track over a mediocre breakbeat record, just because it's breaks, any day. Nowadays there's a lot of narrow-mindedness, there's the people who listen to a track with a 4/4 beat and say "oh, this'd be blinding if it had a break underneath!" and you feel like going, "yeah, but it's blinding anyway what's the matter with you?" It would only be better in their mind because it would be more acceptable. I've always found that quite a naïve attitude to take towards music. The person who made it would have put a break underneath it if he'd wanted to. You have to appreciate that the artists who make this music, and they are artists, that's their artistic statement that they are making, and you can't fuck with that! Don't just dismiss it because there's no break, put one underneath it if you really have to. I do re-edit tracks, normally I just mess around with the arrangements not the content. It's just for my own sets because I might need a longer period to mix something in... A lot of DJs do that now."
Website - Excession
Website - Lot 49
Website - King Unique
Website - Meat Katie
Myspace - King Unique
Myspace - Meat Katie
Starts 10pm, £8-10 entry, 18+ R.O.A.R
Info : 07944517270 / 07854615441