Some Freak died of a broken heart. It never mended.

He left no note… just this mixtape:

Some Freak FINAL MIXTAPE – Not Dead, Just Sleeping

Good Bye Some Freak We Will Miss You.

The End.

And, so it was that I left Australia and came back to the northern hemisphere. A few intensely crazy months checking out some of the world’s cultural power centres and then bang – back at mum’s house, dreams shattered, broke, alone, as if the last 10 years had never happened.

Thus the Dane Bank Observatory came about; quite simple really, Dane Bank is our little anonymous east manchester suburb, and it’s an observatory because this year I’ve been paying attention. The idea came to me in Berlin as I was leaving, tail firmly between legs. I knew it’s what I had to do.

So, here from the DBO are a bunch of observations. I didn’t make a massive amount of tracks this year but I’m pretty happy with what I did. These are my favourites (my favourite Some Freak tracks anyway).. quite a mixed bag I reckon, a pretty good effort.

It’s my first ever Album as Some Freak. And my last! Many of the tracks I’ve shared before, but there are a few exclusives on here…I think these tracks really tie up the whole Some Freak project neatly; they act as a very elaborate punctuation mark; a sweet synopsis!

SOME FREAK – DBO (68.3meg ZIP file)

Tracklisting:

1. Reflect
2. Cheeky
3. Eggplant Betrayal
4. Crucial Decider
5. Warehouse Rumpus
6. dech c
7. Tropic
8. Almost Twelve Months Since I
9. latenighteggs
10. Joanna

And now, I think, it is nearly time to die.

Space Is The Plaaaaaace

Me and Prize made a wicked party together! Indulging our deep space stoner noodling, we were entirely uncompromising in our approach, played super weird stuff in nightclubs and threw a bunch of really great parties… we brought Flying Lotus over for a killer show, which was many people’s first exposure to his incredible sound. We managed to get Theo Parrish to play an extended set in the Mandarin Club to a couple of hundred heads (and I got to play before him!)

killler end to a killllllller night.. Mark P, Prize & FlyLo

And then, we went intercontinental… as I left Aus, Sofie and Benny joined the crew and brought Gaslamp Killer to Sydney’s shores and gave him a welcome he still raves about to this day. In the meantime I teamed up with the amazing Mooken and we pulled Cinnaman, Tiago and DâM-FunK to Manchester for their first solo gigs…

The Lion roared big time!

So me and Prize and Sofie all managed to get to go out for dinner with Theo Parrish, a couple of nights before his show in Sydney. We were all buzzing like madheads afterwards, and we went back to Prize’s joint, fired up the machines and jammed till 3am… We invented Paolo Rossi, and here is his only ever tune, conjured up on that hazy night…

Paolo Rossi – In The Night

Oh, what can I really say about this time of my life… Bodega is perhaps the adventure that I have been involved with that I am most proud of in my whole life. We built it on love, total love. Real hippy shit!

A bunch of us came together to do a system at a massive squat party. We decided that instead of just going balls out and playing, well, squat party music, we would go for a different vibe, present a nice space and sell sangria and play weird shit and stuff. An early recce of the site happened with reps of all the crews and we discovered we were allocated a basement room. When deciding what to call ourselves we decided Basement Bodega, on account of us servin Sangria.

So it was that we made sangria (gourmet sangria, recipe courtesy of Danks Street Depot), got together a load of incense and mellow lights and plastic flowers and went up to the ABC studios and there were FUCKLOADS OF COPS everywhere. No ABC party, but the drum and bass maniacs had already broken into another warehouse in Marrickville and everyone was en route… word on the street was that there was no room for the Bodega tho… but we set up our sangria stall anyway and took enough cash to cover our costs.

The next day, we overran a local pub in Redfern with all our incense and mellow lights and had a raucous day that became the afterparty for the squat party. It was after this party that I gave up drinking.

The bodega was BORN

bodega @ the ABC party – bonus MCK

A successful return to the ABC studios a month or two later cemented our position as crazy fuckers with sangria, beautiful-feeling spaces and strange music. We did a few more squat parties and then started getting invited to more legit warehouse spaces, where we would take over the whole space and do our thing there. Some epic parties took place, that practically no pictures exist of!

Bodega @ The Chocolate Factory (RIP)

We would spend DAYS beforehand dressing the spaces, making them as beautiful as possible. We named the parties strangely – “The Barefoot Peacock Ritual“, “The Mysterious Passtimes of Mohini-Murti“. We served magic mushroom tea at these parties and got everyone slightly sideways, in order that we might bombard them with psychedelic jazz, brutal jungle, birdsong, free-association scat singing with space echo, and disco favourites.

We made the stellar decision early on to stick the decks ON THE FLOOR with a big double bed behind them, and to have the DJ ‘booth’ loaded up with LOADS of effects units and light controllers and smoke machines and stuff so that everyone could get involved in the tweaking if they wanted. We were able to manipulate the whole environment. We could make all the lights in the room (and we had standard lamps and spot lights and rope lights and desk lights) pulse in time to the music…

And the place always smelled amazing, and everybody was awe-struck, wide-eyed like kids, the strangeness of everything, the amount of love, the mushrooms – we made a little crazy world for them!

And the sheer amount of creativity that went into things! It was such a potent idea and it inspired a LOT of people to do lots of great things, safe in the knowledge that there were going to be these crazy parties that were like nothing else.

Because it wasn’t about the dancefloor, really. Even though nearly all the music was danceable, and there were usually people dancing to the music at any point in time, most people were just hanging out, checking out the incredible visuals – for one party, called the Digital Hysteria Remedy, Chris made a giant vagina out of fabric and foam, with a mirrorball for a clit. It was as big as a human!

And in the mornings, we bribed the stayers with nitrous bulbs to help us tidy up, and the party never finished until long after I’d gone home to bed.

It was sheer heaven to be involved with such a wonderful bunch of creative people in such a sustained, successful, innovative endeavour that brought absolute joy to so many people. It was simply the best time of my life.

Here’s a tune we made in 2008… it sums up for me the joy of bodega!

Bodega Clan – Bodega Theme (Splendour Compliant)

What to say? In 2006 I got to go to the Red Bull Music Academy. I wrote about a million words about the whole experience on a blog which can be read here. (Scroll down to the bottom and make sure you’re sittin comfortably.)

Briefly, it was one of the most incredible experiences I think I am ever likely to have. Maybe if I make it into space or go to an orgy that is like they are in my head, well then either of those would perhaps be more incredible but short of that I don’t think it will be beaten. I made friendships there that will last my whole life, that have already enriched my life beyond imagination.

I recorded this mix while I was there, and it seems to be a perennial favourite of some folk so I thought it relevant to include it in this little saga. What I like about this mix is that

a) it was recorded just after breakfast at about 9:30 on a Thursday morning.

b) it has my favourite ever mix between two tracks that I have EVER done and it happened right there, it wasn’t planned or anything and I shall never forget how I felt when it happened. It’s the mix just after 45:00, it’s a lovely key mix, it just fuckin works… that it happened when I was recording this mix is just a fuckin bonus.

Some Freak – RBMA Mix

The DJin had lead me to play around with Ableton… me and K.Bliesner had a couple of outings where we both DJed off our laptops running Ableton. We both had a fantastic time; I’m not sure how well everybody else received it!

Nonetheless, the seeds were planted in my head that actually there wasn’t much more to get my head around to begin actually making my own tracks, and so it was that I found myself on the producer pathway.

When I first started making tunes I had this grand idea that I would name all my tracks with just a single letter, and that letter would have some relevance to the track. This idea lasted for 4 tracks – E, D, C and this one, named for Basic Channel, to whom it owes its entire existence. It only occurs to me now, seeing them written down, that the tracks are all sequentially lettered. I didn’t make them in sequence though!

So here it is, the first ever Some Freak track, featuring the mighty MAM MB-33 on bassline duties… Some Freak – B

Jinky The Robot. BOW DOWN

Yep, I had some decks and now it was time to start playing gigs and the only way to do that was to put on parties and so it was in December 2003 that me and Bryn and Chris aka THE HIGH-JINKS THREE started up a quite stupid party indeed.

High-Jinks was mostly geared around drinking. It was in a pub with cheap beers and a not very good sound system. We sorted that second problem by bringing in extra speakers and for about two and a half years non stop every month we drank shitloads of booze and partied our heads off. We got pretty much every Sydney DJ we liked to come and play for free and there were some legendary nights. Ahhh it was great fun ya know and anyone who can remember much will remember that we always had big smiles and silly laughs and nobody took anything too seriously even though many of us were great big music nerds with VERY strong opinions.

(It was all the cheap piss you see, everybody got so fuckin wrecked that they weren’t able to do anything much besides dance or wobble in the corner.)

fair few drunk ppl in this pic

Amidst all this, I was also forging the beginnings of an approach to DJing in terms of the music I was collecting and the mixing techniques I was practising.

In May 2004 I finished the Winter Warmer mix, my first decent mixtape EVER.

It was a fucking effort and a half! I think it took me about 6 weeks to make. It’s the exact opposite of a one-take mix; I think there’s probably at least 20 discreet takes in this mix, all edited together in Sound Forge. I just didn’t have the consistency of skills to pull this mix off in one take, and at the time acknowledging that was crippling to me. I remember I nearly gave it all up about 4 or 5 times during the course of recording this mix.

I didn’t pack it all in though; I perservered, and listening back to it for the first time in ages today I’m pleased that it still stands up well.

So, please help yourself to a good chunk of Some Freak’s Blood, Sweat and Tears in this mixtape: The Winter Warmer Mix.

it’s this man’s fault

So, some freak was definitely born in a volcano BUT he actually genuinely came into existence after Rob Fangle read this.

It’s a review of a party I went to that Rob put on. I had bought my first set of turntables about a week before this party and blagged my way onto the decks at the very end of the night. When writing about the party I didn’t really want to mention the fact that I’d played at it as well so I just referred to myself as some freak.

It got capitalised by the subeditor and Rob read the review and as I’d just got decks and didn’t have a DJ name, he said ‘Well then Si, that should be your DJ name then.’

And Some Freak was born. Thankyou Rob Fangle!

PS This was a big night in more ways than one – I met Sofie that night for the first time, who became my mentor and dear friend. And later on, in the pub the following morning, Dub Cricket was born. What a momentous 24 hours indeed!

Is true though, Some Freak is going to die…

dead – soon

A bit more than a year ago I made a bunch of really rough, quickly-made disco tunes. I set up a little myspace under the name Ruf Dug and added a bunch of disco ppl as friends. I mailed them as they got added and offered to send them copies of the tunes.

I got a really good response! A bunch of DJs that you’d have heard of got in touch asking for copies of tunes, and one of them who runs a very well-renowned label got in touch just before Christmas last year and said he wanted to sign one of the tracks – ‘Dirty’…

In the meantime, Chris Duckenfield had a copy of ‘Dirty’ and at the Electric Chair party in Manchester last Xmas he dropped it, prompting Luke unabomber to ask him for a copy, and for Chris to subsequently write to me, also asking to sign ‘Dirty’ to his label.

This little tune was causin a fair bit of trouble!

For my part, I was in the depths of a heavy depression; nearly all of my plans had died in the arse and I was back in my mother’s spare room with no cash (in fact I was in debt), I was bloody miserable, the weather was shit, I was lonely and didn’t know what the hell was going to happen next…

I resolved I had to clean myself the fuck up and so began a long process that started by going totally straight – no cigs, no herb, no booze, fuckin NOTHIN for three months straight… this was a brutal start to the journey, and soon after came a job, a car, even a girl for a moment (brief moment tho! wrong time…)..

still my favourite beauty… got better pedals now tho

I bought a bike and started to take more notice of the way my body worked, exercising it and feeding it properly, warmly, with love and good food. No longer being addicted to nicotine was amazing.

And from time to time, some tunes came, reflecting my various moods.

And in the background, this Ruf Dug tune continued its life, I heard about it being played at Optimo, at Horse Meat Disco, at all these places I’d read and heard about… while I was nurturing myself, rebuilding myself in so many ways, this little baby of mine was living the life I dreamt of. It even made it over to Australia!

BUT, the famous label never got back in touch and so it was some time in May that I wrote to Chris and said look, if you still want to sign the tune, it’s yours.

Within a matter of weeks he’d gotten the remixes done – The Goddam Unabombers coming in with one! As a Mancunian, as someone who’d only been able to admire the Electric Chair from (VERY) afar, this represented a sense of homecoming, of acceptance to me – the completion of a circle, as I return to my hometown now knowing what it is I will do on this earth, for some of the true dons of this place to remix me tune – is that fuckin portentious or WHAT?

And as summer dawned, and I started to feel settled, and the sun came out and the depression melted away, the record arrived.

window @ piccadilly records… this was MASSIVE for me, still is…

And it did pretty well man… #1 at Rush Hour, record of the week at Piccadilly, made it into a bunch of charts and we sold 811 copies (and I only bought 1 of them myself!)

And the timing of all this was just so right… and here I am at the end of the year, surrounded by the first pressing on my very own record label, Ruf Kutz. I’m releasing only 200 of this record, and it’ll only be available in five specific record stores. I’m dealing directly with each store, so I am the producer, the manufacturer and the distributor, and by handpicking the retail outlets I can make sure that your Ruf Kutz experience is nice and RAW like it should be.

thanks Col for the logo!

Heheheheh check me and my sales rant.

Anyway, point is this – Ruf Dug is something I am feeling VERY strongly… there’s a sense of a developed and specific aesthetic surrounding the whole Ruf Dug idea… the label, the mixtapes, the tracks and the DJ Sets… and fuck, there’s a bit of heat there right now and if you got some heat why not do a bit of cooking, hey?

BUT see Ruf Dug is not doin too badly but then what about Some Freak? At first I thought maybe Some Freak could be the producer behind the Ruf Dug project but that just isn’t working out, and Some Freak is too dear to me to simply just let languish.

And so he must die.

Some Freak will die before 2010. This is his last week. It’s basically me having one last hurrah as Some Freak before concentrating on Ruf Dug full time. I have a bunch of treats for you coming, a bit of a retrospective, some old DJ mixes, a couple of rare tunes, AN ENTIRE NEW ALBUM FOR FREE and a lovely mix to finish things off.

So pull up a chair during this holiday season as I bring you The Death Of Some Freak.

Some Freak vs Brut 33… aaaahhh

So I just had a nice few days in London – Pixar 3D movies and LOADS of Pop Art thanks to the Tate - goddam their recreation of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop is AMAZING! Obviously the place is like standing inside Haring-world but the MUSIC!

Keith Haring in the original Pop Shop in Tokyo

They have a little sound system CRANKING out the tunes of the day… ‘One For The Money’ by Sleeque was playing when I went in (the acapella version too!), and then Adonis’ ‘No Way Back’ kicked in… boy I wanted to stay for ever but there were huge lifesize statues of Jeff Koons fucking La Cicciolina to go and perve over so I bought some goodies and off I went…

Koons’ Big Bunny

Some other great LDN business – going to a great club called Village Underground to check Harmonic 313 x Daedelus, the delight of meeting up with Brut 33 and BBK for some Lamb’s Testicles in Dalston (they actually taste great, but I couldn’t get past the ewwww factor), subsequent killer market action with the Brutal one at the FANTASTIC Columbia Road Markets and also some quite nifty finds on a digging mission around Soho.

A rare weekend in MCR coming up; we have Brennan Green playing in town on Friday night and I ordered a bunch of crazy legal designer drugs, is all very cyberpunk, should be a funnnnn weekend!