Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Digging

One nice thing about being a packrat, (or at least as much of one as my wife will allow me to be) , is that when the inspiration strikes you can go digging throught the collection for precursors and influences. That compilation on the left was released around 1995. Ifach was a label run by Baby Ford who was already almost a decade into his musical career by the time this came out. Ford's style by this time had already evolved into a strain of dark minimalism that would be an example for today's minimal scene. In fact, Perlon records was founded by one of his early collaborators, Zip.

Ifach Vol.1 collects the early 12"s released on his legendary label by Ford himself as well as a who's who of English techno. Ed & Andy from Plaid do a number of tracks under the alias EcoTourist and Mark Broom contributes a few tracks, as well as collaborations with Ford.

The packaging resembles nothing so much as a contemporary cdr. The artwork is photocopied and the sleeve is a flimsy piece of plasticine. Still to a budding explorer this cd was a monumental find. Along with Sahko Records output and Rob Hood's work on Tresor and M-Plant, the mid 90s provided many chances for mind expanding alternative views of what Techno could be.

Baby Ford - Dead Eye

3 comments:

acidbearboy said...

Not a bad tune but what the hell is a packrat?

hector23 said...

HA!

A packrat is someone who collects and collects and packs it away in their house. Sometimes the collecting, particularly in the states, gets so out of hand that there is hardly anywhere to move in their home. I am not that bad, but I still have a sizeable collection of music that takes up too much space in my little apartment.

acidbearboy said...

I thought it might have been something along those lines. I have too many records (and video games/consoles) but personally I like to have everything easily available so the whole packing thing seems pointless to me.

I've started weeding through the vinyl recently, one more pile of stuff I proabably won't keep to sort through and then I'll post up a list on the blog I think, try and shift a few cheap.