Daniel "Blackbelt" Andersen has been active in the Norwegian dance music community for a number of years. He got into electronic dance music in the early 90's, and first started emulating the sound of Detroit techno on his father's home computer. In the last half of the decade he bought his first turntables and a mixer, and was soon DJ'ing around Oslo. His first releases were on Canadian label Restructured Recordings and Prins Thomas' first label Tamburin, under the name Kalle Magnus & Daniel, a collaboration with his childhood friends Kalle Sandås and Magnus "International" Sheehan. Through the last years he's enjoyed success with his releases on Full Pupp, Trailerpark and Claremont 56 and recently remixes for fellow Norwegians Fjordfunk and the lowlands disco kings the Glimmers. His productions has been licensed to a number of compilations like MOS Balearica(yes, a shit name...we know...) The Glimmers Fabric Live 31.
He's a co-resident on the monthly Full Pupp Oslo and has also had a number of international DJ gigs from Berlin to Beijing. The Blackbelt sound can be described as Juan Atkins jamming with Airto Moreira, with a bit of Larry Levan thrown in for good measure.
A few words from Prins Thomas:
The raw material which became "II" has the same DNA as Blackbelt's debut. His ideas might lay around for 5-10 years before that crucial missing "middle part" pops out of nowhere(or in this instance:2 old ideas gets combined into a new one) but essentially they all come out with the same colour, taste and smell... and they all sound like nothing but Blackbelt Andersen. Over a 3 month period in 2011 I invited Daniel into the mess that I call K16 Studios for a hectic but creative reworking of the material that he had piled up. The idea was to use Daniel's tracks as templates and use whatever kind of tool we had at our disposal to colour in the white fields. Kalimbas, cheap old throwaway synths, guitar amps and effect boxes... Some tracks needed little more than a sprinkle of eq'ing or some re-arranging and others where reworked from the bottom up.
I know we might be blowing our cool by blowing our own horns, but it´s hard not to get excited listening to this brilliant masterpiece. Toot toot toot!!!!
Tracklisting:
CD(Partially mixed)
1 Åpenbaring
2 Delta Tango Alfa
3 Kosmos
4 Mann på Mars
5 Resten av ditt liv
6 Lagniappe del 1
7 Indre demoner
8 Postkort fra Berlin
9 Stressa ut
10 Lagniappe del 2
11 Haiku
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