There’s something nice about old house music, especially those releases that exist between the 1993 Detroit stuff and the disco pop boom of 2000 that we all had to endure (thanks a lot, Phats & Small!).<\/p>\n
Olav used to be the man guiding the helm of Dutch ‘tough’ house, sitting dangerously between the idiotic hardhouse fad and the regular sample driven slop that made up the staple for every 14 year old with a 1210 mk2.<\/p>\n
To me, “Moscow Street Rock” is the defining track of Olav’s sound. Stomping around with thick and fast drums, unusually edited rhythms, and a mechanical percussion section that you don’t really hear any more. What’s more, there’s no hint of software in it anywhere – this was made back in the day when people invested real money in their studios and therefore made a greater effort to create something worth while. Long gone are the days when the process itself was an art – now everyone opens Ableton, loads up their VST preset, and lets the music write itself. This is why we’re stuck in a rut of similar sounding music – everyone is essentially using the same gear, the same presets, and the same processes (fuck you audible sidechaining and autotune).<\/p>\n
It took me ages to track down this record, remember this was long before the days of Discogs.com or massive online record stores. Finding a record you wanted was an actual task, a challenge. Nothing was guaranteed – if you didn’t buy it there and then, you may never see it again in your life. I’m not sure I can convey to you in words, my excitement of finding an old copy of this in my record shop.<\/p>\n
Dirty, used, and with “Moscow Street” scrawled on the cover in thick permanent marker, it was like finding the holy grail for \u00a37.99. Man, those were the days.<\/p>\n
Moscow Street Rock is a single, featuring only three mixes of the same track. But, and this is a big but, they are The first track, which comprised the entire A-side is ‘Half The Bet Mix’. A standard house affair, which doesn’t put a foot wrong throughout it’s six and a half minute journey. It never crosses the line into spectacular, but is a sturdy production with a great hook. For my tastes though, it just hides those minor stabs a little too much, and has aged much more quickly than either of the B-side tracks.<\/p>\n My favourite of the three is the embarrassingly titled ‘Mo Fun Mix’. The majority of this mix is entirely free of drums, and instead, centre stage is a well improvised and smartly edited saxophone riff punctuated with a lovely thick bass note. Drum patterns slowly fade in, and snap back to nothing without warning. It continues teasing in the way for about four minutes before finally hitting full swing. This is a great example of how creative a basic house record can be when there’s actual thought behind the production. A bit of musicianship doesn’t go wrong either.<\/p>\n No, fuck that. My favourite mix is actually the (yet again) embarrassingly title ‘Super Funky Animal Mix’. It’s a little more stripped down, which allows a lovely mingling of samples which compliment and answer each other beautifully. There’s a lot more space in this mix, despite those heavy 4\/4 kicks, manages to fade to silence twice, before dropping the beat back in. Funky stuff. It’s a shame this is the last track on the disc, because my stylus has one hell of a time trying to track it, leaving it sounding a little muddy after the three minute mark. I guess that’s the price you pay when you buy second hand vinyl though.<\/p>\n It’s a real shame things turned out the way they did for Olav, ‘Samplitude Vol. 10’ was his last good release – I really stopped paying attention after that, but from what I can see he releases a slew of psudo-electro tracks which sound utter shit to my ears. Moscow Street Rock, Sound Of Dope, and Franky Goes To Hollywood Remix are very much worthwhile, if aging a bit faster than I’d like them to.<\/p>\n It’s a great farewell to the Dutch house genre, which came and went without anyone really noticing.<\/p>\n MOSCOW…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[62,92,100,151],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-house","tag-moscow-street-rock","tag-olav-basoski","tag-work"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2431,"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/2431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bassdress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}