Saturday 13th July, The Medicine Bar Birmingham UK.

Residents: Slackers Delight. Chris Read. Del'Agua,
Light Surgery performed by Johny Fu & Unknown Artist

Clubsoftly (UK)

Infomation Line: 07754 39 27 10 / 0121 693 6333 - 9pm til 3am £4 on door

   Who is DJ Food?

Who indeed? The most often asked question in interviews and most widely misunderstood concept in reality, which we will, here & now, try to clear up once and for all. First off; DJ FOOD is a person, wrong, DJ Food is many persons, of who we will come to in a moment. DJ FOOD is best described as Food for DJs, simple as that, just flip it around and it begins to mean something entirely different. But who makes this food then?

Most of you will know that Matt Black & Jonathan More (aka Coldcut) are responsible for starting the DJ FOOD series of Jazz Brakes back in the early 90's, along the way they met Patrick Carpenter (PC) who was commonly misconstrued as the computer that they made the tracks on for a while. A loose collaborative team began to form as more likeminded people arrived at the party; Paul Brook, Paul Rabiger, Strictly Kev and Issac Elliston to name a few. Whilst keeping their hand in as DJs Matt & Jon couldn't / didn't want to DJ twice in one night under both aliases of Coldcut & Food so PC & Strictly stepped up to represent the Food club-wise.

Over the years various combinations of people appeared as 'Food' in public and in music magazines the world over. Then everyone got confused. So who is DJ FOOD now? For the purpose of this album, and for the time being at least, we would like you to think of it as PC & Strictly Kev as the band leaders / conducters, in conjuction with guest performers, producers & collaborations by the likes of Bundy K. Brown, Ken Nordine, & Ali Tod. (Jon & Matt having relinquished control to concentate on Coldcut now that contractual restraints don't forbid them to use their original moniker) We hope this has cleared up any confusion & anyone asking the question referred to in the title of this little diatribe in subsequent interviews will be told to refer to this piece... thank you and bon appetite! 4 years is a long time in music.

The last official DJ Food LP, 'A Recipe For Disaster', was released at the end of '95. Since then we've seen the emergence of big beat & speed garage, the re-emergence of easylistening and old school hip hop and a million sub genres. Whilst all this was going on DJ Food have been playing from Oxford to Osaka, Seattle to Sidney and all points in between. Either that or hidden away in their London studios piecing together the spoils of numerous vinyl buying excursions. First off, hooking up with Bundy K Brown (ex-Tortoise, now Directions In Music and Pullman) in Chicago, whilst on tour in the summer of '96, a collaboration resulted from a mutual love of jazz, electronics and, well, just old records.

This manifests itself on the brooding 'Full Bleed', the albums' opener, where both parties took a drum break and fixed tempo, separately created parts and then cut & paste them into a beat battle royal. Another Chicagan to be approached was 60's Word Jazz poet Ken Nordine, famous for his work on TV & radio commercials since the 50's (one LP, 'Colours', was a collection of 24, one and a half minute radio ads for different colours of paint). His amazing voice has graced everything from late night radio to 60's Levi's commercials, and albums with the Grateful Dead. He even originally created sounds for 'The Exorcist' including teaching Linda Blair to speak backwards (but that's another story).

He appears on 'The Ageing Young Rebel' a dark tale of a boy who 'wanted to be different, whilst staying the same'. As with all Nordine narratives there's a twist in the tale, and a particularly grizzly one at that. The album has its lighter moments with a reworked version of 'The Crow...' which first saw the light of day on Ninja's 'Funkungfusion' compilation, the space lullaby of '...you' and the fusion of harps and slide guitar on the epic album closer 'Minitoka'. From the electric era Miles influenced 'Cookin' to the beatnik adventure cum speech instruction record of 'The Riff' via the poolroom poetry of 'Break' and uneasy ode to musical dreams on 'Nocturne' the LP shifts and changes its colours quicker than a chameleon in a kaleidoscope.

Which is as good a title as any for this collection of tunes from tomorrow. The temptation to name the album with yet another dreadful pun on the joys of eating has been resisted. Not an easy album to categorise, we wouldn't want it any other way, unless it was filed under 'Different Music'.