John Whittle
Rugby
It's the early 1980's, and Morgan Khan has just released the first of his seminal "Street Sounds Electro" series. A short lived collection of compilation albums that bought the underground soundtrack of an emerging culture from New York & Los Angeles, to the small rundown towns of Maggie Thatcher's Britain.
From that point on, John was hooked on this "underground" music culture as it quickly evolved from Electro to Hip Hop. Gathering and soaking up any information he could find about, DJ culture (scratching & mixing), the clothing (tracksuits & trainers), and even it's art (graffiti).
Like any addiction, many things were sacrificed in the pursuit of awesome.Paper Round money got diverted from the ‘normal’ social activities of a young teenager, towards more important items…. such as vinyl records. A couple of cheap belt driven records players (with no pitch control) and a cheap audio mixer from the local Tandys Electronics store were purchased. Not a perfect set-up, but it provided hours of entertainment. Beat matching was not particularly important for Hip Hop. Beats of different tempo’s could be dropped from one to another easily without being too jarring. What was important was scratching and beat looping. These skills were learnt. Mixtapes were made.An after school job brought in better money and so the turntable set-up got replaced with better equipment. Still belt driven, but proper DJ decks with pitch control and more robust needles… and with that came the knowledge of beat matching.
Shortly after leaving school a new cultural shift was beginning to stir across Britain.
Whispers of things called Acid House Parties or “Illegal Raves” began to creep out in the media. The weird shop that sold joss sticks, extravagant smoking contraptions and second-hand Reggae records began to also sell strange cassette tapes. Ordinary household TDK-D60’s but with a homemade inlay sleeve made from a cut up event flyer, and a white sticker on the spine with names like Carl Cox, Ellis Dee, DJ Seduction, Grooverider, & Micky Finn.These tapes would be Johns introduction to a new obsession. Where and what is this music being played? And how do you get hold of it? Not in this town, that’s for sure!
The music was amazing. Experimental beats, monstrous basses, insane synths….
A year on he discovers specialist shops such as Bang-in Tunes in Coventry and FibreOptic in Leamington Spa. Shops run by actual DJ’s & Artists on the rave scene, stocking vinyl with white labels with track names written on them in black marker pen. A new vinyl collection begins to take shape.
Distrax starts to go to the early legal all night venues such as the Eclipse in Coventry, and Equinox @ Milwaukees near Bedford allowing him to witness and indulge in the rave phenomenon first hand.
In 1991, a friend of John introduces him to a home computer called a Commodore Amiga 500, and in particular, what the Amiga can do musically. With the addition of a cheap and simple analogue-to-digital convertor plugged into the back, the Amiga could be turned into a fully fledged Audio Sampler.
John quickly grabbed his mother’s Littlewoods catalogue and bagged himself an Amiga 500+ at a bargain few quid a week. This was John’s first foray into the world of music production.
Tooled up with a set of technics SL1210s, he first dropped on the radar through the hardcore / techno scene, sharing flyer space for events with the likes of DJ Unknown, Clarkee, Billy Bunter & Vinyl Junkie. He soon branched out with original productions released on Rancid Records, Euphoria Records and Bluebeck Records. At present Distrax can be located keeping up the good work with frequent releases, collaborations, and foraging for undiscovered talent deserving of a platform as an integral part of the Red Alfa Records crew, along with a regular internet DJ slot on www.globaldnb.com
each Wednesday 2-4pm.
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