Andy Blake’s World Unknown label is back after a few years with a new improved big rig warehouse sound to reflect the recent changes and upgrades to the parties. As always with Andy’s releases it’s been mastered via tape by Lawrie at Curvepusher for extra warmth, depth and pump.



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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

Shit the bed, it’s been over a year since the last WU 12. After 2 tracks appeared on Andrew Weatherall’s Masterpiece comp and Apiento’s Orange Place became a bona fide underground anthem most labels would have piled in with a slew of releases to capitalise on the interest. Not Andy and Joe tho, they withdrew to their mountain-top contrarium and feasted on a diet of laudanum and Turkish delight while watching Game of Thrones on repeat and drawing detailed topographical outlines of lands they plan to conquer. Finally breaking cover once more, this 12” sees Joe Hart’s vinyl debut. In collusion with his good friend and fellow high class rent boy Youngtee he has fashioned a pounding peak time stormer. Rumours of celebrity involvement on bass guitar can be neither confirmed nor denied at this time. On the flip Andy Blake supplies a big grinding brute for sweaty, hairy men sporting leather straps and heavily pierced undercarriages. This has been a mainstay of his sets in dubplate form for nearly 2 years now and finally all those ‘what the hell is this and when can i get one’ questions have an answer, to the second part of the sentence at least


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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

The first World Unknown 12" of 2012 is a double header of throbbing midtempo techno and as with all World Unknown releases from now on both tracks have been mastered for vinyl from ½ inch tape for maximum sonic excellence. On Side W Semtek from Don't Be Afraid joins forces with his afterparty alter-ego Chardonnay and a certain rather well known OG hipster poet on 'Tacos For Dinner', an extremely modern and massively psychedelic trip into the outer mind. This clicking, bleeping, fizzing and throbbing ten minute excursion has been road tested from acetate by Andy Blake for many months and always sends the club somewhere very special and ever so slightly scary. On Side U Scott Fraser delivers 'Remains The Same'. It's a notch or two less pacey than side w but no less powerful or psychedelic. It's earthy vibe and pounding, throbbing tones have been part of Andrew Weatherall's sets for some time now and it's not hard to see why. When the full percussion finally comes crunching in like a breakbeat on top of the ever-present heavyweight bassline it's disco pandemonium time. In short, possibly the best 12" so far from WU. Let's see where 2012 takes the label.


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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

The third release on the World Unknown label is a very meaty affair that coincides with the second birthday of the club night in Brixton. On side w Timothy J. Fairplay fuses ancient Egypt with late 80s Belgium and drops it slap bang into the near future with the monolithic techno beast that is 'Cleopatra Loves The Acid'. It's already been played in discos and on the BBC by Andrew Weatherall, for whom Tim handles engineering and co-production duties in his day job, and is set to become a pounding anthem on the more adventurous dancefloors over the coming months. Side u is a more throbbing psychedelic affair. Kalidasa is the production alter-ego of Tim Rivers who runs the always excellenttheacidhouse.com website. It's exactly the kind of heavyweight midtempo tune that causes sweaty pandemonium at World Unknown. If the word Balearic still meant now what it did to from 87-92 then that's precisely what you'd call this, most likely with the prefix 'heavy'. But it doesn't so you can't, or can you?


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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

World Unknown is a monthly underground party held in a railway arch in Brixton, South London. It’s a post-industrial pleasure dome full of strange and often exotic music that pumps and throbs and shimmers and shakes. The 60s and 70s vintage projector-based lighting and roomful of disco-fog adds to the otherworldliness of the night which is totally unlike any other club in London, and quite possibly the world. Noting a distinct shortage of contemporary record labels releasing the kind of music that they play at the parties, organisers and resident DJ’s Andy Blake (Cave Paintings, Dissident) and Joe Hart (Bodyhammer, Bloc) decided World Unknown should have it’s own 12” only label. Each World Unknown release will be a split-artist 12” and there will be six coming out in the first year of it’s life. Here are details of the first two, due to hit the shops in the first week of July 2011. The first World Unknown 12” kicks off with a slamming piece of prototype house from Glasgow’s Naum Gabo aka Jonnie Wilkes from Optimo and his production partner James Savage. Showing that a relatively low pace doesn’t mean any drop in energy levels and dancefloor pump power, Whop! cracks along like something from an alternate reality version of 1980’s Chicago. It’s as easy to imagine it rocking the house at Medusa’s or the Box as it is to envision it in the present day soundtracking some kind of bizarro fetish party or a particularly intense session at Berghain’s Lab-oratory. This is jacking in the true sense of the word.
On the flip side Italian born Berlin resident Franz Underwear ups the tempo with a stunning piece of slamming European musclebeat. Shades of Ibiza 88-89 pervade here; the kind of pumping, chunky synth action, Teutonic vocal exhortations and vaguely menacing but ultimately benign vibe that sent thousands of potty European kids totally round the bend and changed the world of dance music forever. Fuse together ideas of glamorous open air Mediterranean nightclubs full of sex-crazed hedonistic Eurotrash, sweaty, strobey, smoky South London acid-house basements with walls of bassbins at one end, and your first decent E – that one so strong and clean that your brain nearly popped out of your head and ended up on Mars, and you’re getting somewhere near what this record sounds like. Savage, joyous and teetering on the edge of sanity.

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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

If you were to cut Neville Watson he would bleed acid house, he’d also quite likely knock you flat on your arse for having the temerity to wave a knife at him, but that’s a whole other story. For his first WU contribution he ventures down the ethereal proto-house boulevard. Jacking 707 patterns, a bouncing Juno bassline and outer-space synth lines take you into the upper atmosphere for a glorious airborne joyride. As ever, Neville manages to evoke those 85-89 feelings without ever sounding merely retro or like some kind of pastiche, something that many attempt but very few manage to pull off. Over on side u Apiento, the force behind the magisterially brilliant testpressing website, chips in with a heartfelt homage to the new beat sound. Another testimony to the fact that a lower tempo doesn’t have to mean diminished energy levels, The Orange Place simply oozes class from top to bottom. Like some lost Ancienne Belgique classic it pounds and pumps along, building up the tension all the while until the quasi- Eastern refrain lets loose half way thru and all of a sudden a mystic portal opens up in the space-time continuum that leads all the way to Southwark Street in late 87.

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More