S P A C E C O W B O Y S

Related to the previous post, you can find a kindly and effusive post on the RIPEcast from senor Elite Force on today’s Tech Funk Manifesto

If this mutual affection keeps up we’re gonna need to get a room!

This week The Space Cowboys are pleased to bring you a very special Burning Man edition of The RIPEcast courtesy of Tech Funk pioneer and good friend, Elite Force [U&A Recordings]. Featuring several unreleased Elite Force “revamps”, this masterful RIPEcast exclusive mix is the perfect tune-up for the Playa, Boys and Girls. Don’t forget to add it to your list of things to pack for Black Rock City.

You can get this mix right now by visiting The RIPEcast on Podomatic, SoundCloud or iTunes.

And for a complete schedule of Elite Force Burning Man gigs, including his Friday night set at the Black Rock Hoedown on the Unimog inside The Temple of Flux, visit www.uaarecs.com/burningman.

Click here for a free download of the Elite Force vs. Prodigy ‘Smack the Force Up’ MP3

1. Intro – LSD
2. Seductive – Take Control (Tom Stephan Mix)
3. Djedjetronic – Bit This Thin
4. Chemical Brothers – Horse Power (re-fueled)
5. Proxy – Vibrate (Noob Mix)
6. Lee Coombs – Italo Disco (Maelstrom Mix)
7. Dom G – Work (DJ Dan & Mike Balance Mix)
8. Chasing Shadows – Amirah (Elite Force Revamp)
9. Elite Force & Various – Hangover Deep (Revamp)
10. Chems Vs Dyson – Swoon (Elite Force Revamp)
11. Elite Force – Psychotrope Jams (extract)
12. Zodiac Cartel Vs Elite Force – Devil’s Mashup
13. Felix Luker – Mechanical
14. Paul Chambers – Yeah Techno! (BeatauCue Mix)
15. Bitrok – Closest Strangers (Loops of Fury Mix)
16. JDS – Blackout (Elite Force Re-fix)
17. Felix da Housecat – Oops
18. Don Diablo – Who’s Your Daddy (Black Noise Mix)
19. Ed Rush & Plaza da Funk – Keep Your Pacman (a Revamp)
20. MJ Cole – Sincere (Nero Vs Elite Force Revamp)
21. New Originals – 1979
22. Excision – Subsonic (Elite Force Revamp)
23. Elite Force & Bar 9 – Shaolin Style
24. Outro – Now Generation
    

Simon Shackleton’s Elite Force project began way back in 1996, debuting on his own newly founded Fused and Bruised label with a series of peerless 12s and remixes. After a successful five years, he put Fused and Bruised on the backburner to concentrate on production work, and following several years with Whole9Yards and Moonshine he became a mainstay recording artist for AdriftRecordings (formally known as Kingsize Records) before moving on to set up hisown hugely successful U&A imprint.

Often credited for being a lynchpin in the developing the tech-funk genre (an amalgamation of breaks, house, techno and electro) he has released a series of highly successful singles in the past few years, finding broad support from DJs and musicians across the board, including the likes of James Zabiela, Sasha, Crystal Method, Laurent Garnier and Fatboy Slim to name but five. In 2008 released a semi-retrospective double album’s worth of remixes and re-workings of a 12-year back catalogue, with over 25 mixes coming from such luminaries as Miles Dyson, Rogue Element, Deepgroove, Dylan Rhymes & Calvertron.

In addition to these solo singles, Meat Katie has been a regular collaborator with Elite Force, a relationship that had begun in 2003 with the massive-selling ‘Toba’, and that will see their creative relationship come to fruition in 2009 with the launch of their new joint project under the name ‘Dustbowl’, as well as a series of singles under the ‘Meat Katie & Elite Force’ banner.

As a remixer, Elite Force has always been in huge demand, with re-workings for the likes of Grandmaster Flash, Crystal Method, Jungle Brothers, Stereo MCs, UNKLE, Infusion, Rennie Pilgrem, Shiloh and Dylan Rhymes all contributing to his reputation as one of the most creative and effective remixers around.

Elite Force’s music has also been the soundtrack to many a movie, with a huge list of impressive A-list credits to his name, including the likes of the Matrix, Charlie’s Angels, Arlington Road, Mortal Kombat, Crow, The Bone Collector, The Jackyll, Spiderman 2 and his music has appeared on a wide array of TV shows, from CSI to Top Gear, from Football Focus to LA Doctors. He’s also soundtracked a number of computer games, including no fewer than 5 FIFA games, several of the Wipeout series, The Matrix and Motorstorm 1, and he is currently writing some bespoke music for forthcoming games for Ferrari and Motorstorm2.

On the decks, Elite Force has been a prime mover since 1990 when he cut his teeth playing huge student nights and self-promoted acid house nights in the South West of England, before moving up to ….London…. and ultimately gravitating towards his tech-funk style, with which he now has a full diary of global bookings. He has become known as one of the top technicians on a circuit that has included massive shows in Belarus, Hungary, Australia, Italy, USA, Czech Republic, India, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and China, amongst others, as well as numerous festival slots including Glastonbury, Coachella, Bloom, Wickerman, the Glade and more recently Burning Man.

He was also responsible for the hugely influential Strongarm Sessions webcasts which became something of an institution since their inception back in 2001, receiving as they did around 20,000 downloads per show, but now put on the backburner to concentrate on other projects, such as his own blog, Tech-Funk Manifesto and his other musical projects, such as Dustbowl (with Meat Katie).

Bio courtesy of www.myspace.com/shackforce.

Artwork courtesy of Thomas Reed at Hive Management.

For more information on Elite Force visit www.eliteforcemusic.com or www.facebook.com/djeliteforce.

What is that thumping noise reverberating off the bay bridge this Friday afternoon? It is the mighty fog chopper herself, the Space Cowboy’s Unimog!

We will be hailing the arrival of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship for its temporary new home on Pier 14. Come see the Mayor, the Mancub, and the RGR crew celebrate the most recent landing of this might playa launched craft.

So I’m at home pondering this… (in a very “chill” state due to Deckard’s mix, see below) Am I over-using Space Cowboy channels to aid in the creation of the Temple of Flux? Hmmm…. I’m just kidding, you really think I ponder such things? Yes, those of you who no me, know I take such things seriously (perhaps too seriously) but surely I don’t ponder them, the answers to such things are self-evident (such as the supremacy of Arinell’s pizza in this foggy excuse for summer-in-the-city). Anyway, so I’m doing this little sculpture project with a few friends for this little arts festival in some dusty town in northern Nevada, and we need to raise a lot of money to get it done, like $50k a lot. The big problem is that we’re going to burn this sculpture on Sept. 5th as a giant piece of performance art, and therefor can’t sell the sculpture. It’s all about somehow relating that change is a natural part of our lives, both when confronting life and death, as well as understanding our relationship to the environments that surround us, both built and “natural”. See it’s all about perception and framing how you see the world. Kind of like when you look through a window and only see a bit of the world around you. You get this, windows are an easy way to see the artificial frames that we construct to shape our views, and I mean that in a deep, very deep, I mean you are getting sleepy deep, metaphysical way. So the city is a construct of our continual framing of the real (its all really just a bunch of surfaces with windows right?), in both literal and philosophical ways. Depending on how you frame things, there is either joy or pain; it just matters how you build the window.

I can go on…. but you rather just come down to Supperclub SF tomorrow (Friday 7/24) to WINDOWS: joys and panes of a metropolis. It should change how you see things…

For more info on the Temple of FLUX at Burning Man 2010 see www.temple2010.org

-pk.

(oh and be sure to check the Temple of FLUX on Friday, Sept. 2nd for the Space Cowboys’ Annual Black Rock Hoedown ! See the whole Temple of Flux thing is just a rouse to construct the most awesome HoeDown location ever!)