Track-By-Track: O/B #20
I mentioned Strobe Records in this previous post when talking about Hi-Bias, Bigshot and Blast. Hayden Andre Brown and Ron Allen's label stands alongside those powerhouses of early 90s Canadian house and techno, despite having such a compact catalogue. There were 14 releases in the space of 3 years, ranging from deep vocal house heavily indebted to Fingers Inc. ('The Voyage', 'Broken Chains', 'Dreams') to No Smoke-inspired percussion workouts ('Tribal Life'), Detroit techno-house hybrids ('Luv N Happiness') and, on this their first release, the kind of Bleep-not-Bleep that Nick Holder was simultaneously exploring over on Hi Bias under his Z-Formation alias.
'Calibrate This' is the track that most fits that latter description, and it'd be interesting to know exactly how the sound made it from Sheffield over to Canada. In the case of 'Calibrate This' it even brought a British accent along with it (the woman's voice saying "This is not just any sign").
Check out 'Metamorphasis' on the flip if you're feeling brave, as it's the latest example in these series of a track being utterly ruined by spectacularly #gashvocals.
Infra-Red - Calibrate This (Strobe, 1991)
(Discogs)
Note: this is an entry in the Track-By-Track series for my mix for O/B.
Track-By-Track is a series that looks back at records you will have heard in my mixes, one by one in the order they were played. Who made them, and when? How did I come across them? And what do they make me feel?