OTAD#54 - source direct

I recently had Adam over at mine for a night of beer drinking and music sharing, and we had a funny coincidence. Not sure if this law has a name, you know when you only recently learned of the existence of a word; and suddenly you hear and see it everywhere? Well exactly this, but with an artist. Adam and I have apparently independently discovered the dnb group Source Direct. I discovered it through a random repost on reddit of a drum cover of their all time classic Secret Liaison, released on Good Looking Records in 1996, label we already touched upon many times. Adam discovered them by stumbling upon an old Dutch documentary about the UK dnb scene from 1996, where SquarePusher, Photek, and Source Direct are interviewed and asked to talk about their music. And so when I played the drum cover to Adam, he was like no way!! And proceeded to show me this video.

Everything about this documentary is legendary, and as a comment points out, a treasure trove for samplers. So much so that you may recognize the voice at 01:29: “we just used to like… do our own thing”, which was famously sampled by Joy Orbison in his Ellipsis track from 2012. The very start is so funny, when he parks his car and says “this is source direct, we’re making drum n bass music for the next century… check the rims”; self-fulfilling prophecy much? ahah. This video has a similar energy to the episode 135.3dB of the Belgian documentary series called Strip Tease.

One last track before going, the track popping up at 04:10 in the documentary, a remix by Photek (which we talked about under his Sentinel alias) of Therapy? - Loose. Crisp ambient dnb, sonic painting of 1996, the part after 02:20, when the ambient chords come and the melancholic guitar riff cries and echoes around… hmmm goose bumps all over.