It’s getting in touch with yourself and looking outside your own mind and into the world… We want to create music that is the most wondrous thing, that changes people’s world and gives them hope and helps them find love and all those beautiful things… We want to be optimistic about life.”Īmazingly, given how utter pie-in-the-sky that declaration was, they succeeded-and did so nowhere more handsomely than “Red Alert,” the song that announced Basement Jaxx to the US. Well, music is a remedy and living life is a remedy and love is a remedy. “We are approaching the millennium, and there are many people we know that have been through the drugs and lost hope, and they haven’t found their way. “Our record is a remedy for people’s depression, lostness, and negativity,” Ratcliffe told Request magazine that fall while discussing Remedy. In the spring of 1999, Simon and Felix appeared at Winter Music Conference, where their debut album, Remedy, issued on XL in the UK, was “the center of a bidding war,” Spin reported, between Sony, Interscope, and Astralwerks for American release (the latter won).
Their 1997 12-inch “Fly Life,” full of the kind of ravey synths that had supposedly disappeared years earlier, reached #19 on the UK chart. What they did was to ratchet up the music’s drive. “We thought, ‘What else can we do now? We’ve done it.’ He was a god to us for so long-untouchable.” “When that happened, we thought we’d reached our goal,” Ratcliffe told URB. Two years later, MaW’s Louie Vega called to compliment their work. On top of it, as “Red Alert” demonstrated, they wrote killer hooks.īasement Jaxx met in 1993, when Ratcliffe rented Buxton and some friends time in a basement studio, bonding over their shared love of Masters at Work, who became their model-a production duo releasing on their own, as well as working with singers. “We liked polished roughness,” London house producer Simon Ratcliffe told URB magazine in 1999, while his partner, Felix Buxton, professed to still believing in “the hippie ideal of out-of-body experiences, freedom, and everybody coming together.” As Basement Jaxx, they made music to match both statements, too: rubbery grooves that felt raw, even when they were overloaded with overdubs, the vibe communal even as it was definitively urban.
Through our From the Crate series, we’ll be breaking out both seminal and obscure cuts alike, imparting some knowledge in the process. And with that came a burning desire to crack open our collection and dust off the classic records we couldn’t live without. The birth of our underground brand, Factory 93, not only brought on an adrenaline rush reminiscent of the renegade warehouse-era of raving -on which Insomniac was founded-but it also had us thinking back to all the people, places and parties that made this whole operation possible.
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