Heads up on the new King Cannibal 12″ OUT NOW out on Combat Recordings. The digital release ( to follow ) will also feature an exclusive remix care of Blackmass Plastics. Audio clips can be heard by clicking the titles below.
A1 Badman Near Dark (original)
Android snarls, a charging, filthy bassline and superbly fierce drumwork make this the bastard crossover between hard electronic dancehall like The Bug and Stereotyp, and late 90’s techy jungle dons of Dillinja, Nico, Ed Rush and Optical. Fierce and heavy on the bass yet rhythmically agile and laced with dissonant atmospherics, Near Dark is mutant tech dancehall for Predator skanking, amid burning cities and the total collapse of civilisation. It’s no surprise that his menacing tearout beats have long been championed by the likes of Rag and Bone Records, Mary Anne Hobbs, Amon Tobin, Kid 606, Bong Ra… just to name a few.
A2 Badman Near Dark (Stormfield’s Burning Cities remix)
Combat boss Stormfield mutates the 105bpm original into a 140bpm assault track that sits somewhere between the filthy rolling breaks and beats of Rag and Bone Records, and the deep electro of Monolake or acid excursions of Skam’s Rob Hall. Caging a militant riddim around the original rolling bassline to give a broken, yet powerful dancefloor effect that that stops just short of being 4/4 techno, it kicks into full sprint from the first drop. A sombre mantra permeates the track, providing total stillness amid the frenzy of snarls, slashes and clattering drumwork, much like a samurai who enters with a serene mind into the absolute chaos of battle. A scorching, syncopated acid line cuts into the breakdown, dirty metallic hi hats keeping the tension, before it all kicks back into the 2nd drop.
B Badman Near Dark (Komonazmuk remix)
Bristolian Kieran Lomax (aka Ice Minus of legendary labels Moving Shadow / Renegade Hardware) steps up in his Komonazmuk guise to rework the track into a colossal dubstep monster. An early version of this was previewed on King Cannibal’s Radio 1 set courtesy of Mary Anne Hobbs, during the Scorn vs. King Cannibal sound-off. Similar to his co-production with White Boi on COMBAT13 and COMBAT14, he builds an expectedly powerful and menacing soundsytem track, like some snarling alien beast trapped behind an impenetrably solid wall of bass and drumwork. In the track’s early stages, even a test mp3 of this tune managed to out-blast most finished tracks in the club… imagine what damage this final version will do.
