WOEBOT

Latin Rascals.

My esteemed colleague Dr. Lloyd Beryl of Aberdeen (fellow graduate of Edinburgh's Pure Academy of Ambient Nosebleed, feat.Trainspotting) gave me a perfect prescription a couple of weeks back in the form of deephousepage.com. I had been before, but in the era of bounty that was Audiogalaxy had been a bit blase about the abundance of riches there.

My first target were the Latin Rascals mixes on page one, and get all four (WKTU, NY 1985 .859 and (better) 98.7 KISS FM,  NY 1985 .863). PC users choose the mp3 icon and "Save target as" Mac users (doh!) drag the mp3 icon to your desktop to initialise download. Who said I was a smug elitist snob?!

The Latin Rascals were Tony Moran and Albert Cabrera, a Latino Electro remix outfit from NYC circa 1985 (think Mantronix and Chris Barbosa's Shannon, see also Babie+Keys and Amaretto). They're often namechecked as "The Kings of Edit" by the Bay Area BOMB scratch crew and DJ Shadow, but don't let that put you off (ouch!)

This music while incredibly modern, direct from that state of mind called the future, sounds like MOR electro and saccharine pop have been beamed to the Rascals on their urban moonbase in the 23rd century who've then beamed it back to eighties New York. They've twisted those knobs labelled Spangle, Contrast and Drama clockwise and the (possibly indistinguished, but fruitily tacky) pop is stretched across digital canyons and peaks, sometimes the pop is completely lost in an abstract desert of huge drums. One of their favourite tricks being to hook a vocal snatch, pitch a loop of it up or down 15 times in an arc or just let it repeat. Breathtaking stuff and take note fans of 1997 era Glossa-Garage (Dem 2, Todd Edward etc etc)

I've only got one Latin Rascals record "It must be you"(1989) which was pegged by Music and Video Exchange as "early Todd Terry", cos of course that's where Todd emerged from, and he does one okey-doke mix on it. It features one amazing riotous stomp of a breakbeat track (assistance by Little Louie Vega) which is just so liquid and flexible it's in the proto-jungle category. Once again, so dramatic!

Posted by Woebot at January 31, 2003 12:36 PM