V.A.
Cartulis Music 15th Anniversary Compilation EP

Record 1 of the Cartulis Music 15th Anniversary compilation, marking fifteen years of independent activity across club culture, events, and releases.Cartulis 15th Anniversary Compilation — 15 years of rhythm, risk, and reverie. Still dancing, always forward.

Record 3 of the Cartulis Music 15th Anniversary compilation, marking fifteen years of independent activity across club culture, events, and releases.Cartulis 15th Anniversary Compilation — 15 years of rhythm, risk, and reverie. Still dancing, always forward.

Record 4 of the Cartulis Music 15th Anniversary compilation, marking fifteen years of independent activity across club culture, events, and releases.Cartulis 15th Anniversary Compilation — 15 years of rhythm, risk, and reverie. Still dancing, always forward.

Andy Riley and Laurence Ritchie are Drop Music accomplices; the label is a natural outgrowth of yesterday's Smokescreen Soundsystem, one of the oldest and best-respected UK crews to endorse (sound-) systems thinking. In case you don't know, remember this: they were early 90s stanchions of pressure-dropping UK house heft. This rare new reissue hears their hugely in-demand classic 'Party Criminals' return to fully swung, gatecrashing mode. And boy, weren't they just. Their fourth ever Drop drop, it first surfaced in 1999 and turned instant heads for its crystalline blue inners and jacking, organic sound, not to mention a cameo from fellow duo Freaked on the A2's 'Rhythm By Nature'. But our favourite has to be 'Make Me Feel' with its soft-attack hi-hats, not tapping, more fizzing like metal leaf against the ears.

Way back in 1998, following five years DJing and organising free parties as part of Sheffield's Smokescreen Soundsystem, Andy Riley and Laurence Ritchie joined forces in the studio as Inland Knights. They went on to deliver a huge amount of high-grade UK house music, but it was on this EP - here reissued for the first time in remastered form - that they first showcased their distinctively chunky, DIY-influenced sound. Check first the squelch-and-bump of soul-flecked late-night roller 'Mud Substance', before getting your ears around the dubby bass, hypnotic beats and spacey licks of 'Souldoubt'. 'Deep In' is a strutting, energetic affair full of raw analogue bass and mind-mangling effects, while 'Spent Up' is a tougher and looser slab of deep house funk.

Earlier this year, Miche launched the archive-based Daybreakers label with a fine rummage through the back catalogue of legendary New Jersey garage-house label Music Station. Here he returns to that imprint's vast vaults for a second selection dedicated to the mid-90s work of James Nathaniel Tinsley AKA Nathaniel X - or to be more specific, his eponymous 1994 debut EP. Opener 'Gotta Get Over' remains a special and pleasingly glassy-eyed affair that pairs the organ-rich garage-house swing of NJ records of the period with nods to analogue-rich Chicago deep house of the time. It comes accompanied on side A by the more bumpin' and gently musically rich 'Gotta Go Dub'. Over on side B, the jazzy, organ-rich deep house science of 'Free Yourself' is paired with the soul-fired "trad garage" joy of 'Get Up'.