Music
Never Heard Of XTC Garage? These 8 Tracks Will Help You Find Out
Some of garage’s deepest selectors hand-pick its most ecstatic tracks.
Given the myriad of micro-scenes, subgenres and bombastic bending of styles, you’d be forgiven for not being in the know about some of the more obscure labels given to contemporary brands of electronic music. While some genres are—sometimes absurdly—new, many are derived from the dedicated DJs and selectors who prefer to dig deep into dusty record crates. These are the people who carve out new meanings for old, obscure and forgotten tracks.
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XTC Garage fits into this latter category. The brainchild of underground selectors Truly Madly, Miles Simpson & Jersey Sound and Miles Probyn, XTC Garage is the painstaking reconstruction of musical styles such as house, disco and New Jersey garage into a rich, deep palette of dance floor grooves. Many of these tracks don’t even appear on Discogs, let alone on YouTube.
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But how to get a feel for this new reconfiguration of dance floor music? The three diggers nail it perfectly when they describe it as “Easy Street B-sides, Bobby Konders deepness, Burrell Brothers’ finesse, Red Zone dubs and Dead Zone dubs, it’s Ace Beat, Movin’,Quark and uplifting New Jersey vocals, it’s Tenaglia ballroom bliss, it’s DJ Pierre pitching wildly, it’s Jovonn, it’s Kerri AND KCC, it’s rough Brooklyn basslines, it’s Blue Jean reigning supreme, it’s Italian doing it better, it’s proto UKG from Zaki D or Zak Toms, and most of all, it’s Tony Humphries.”
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Now that you’ve read about it, it’s time to listen up. Check out three sublime cuts above to get a feeling for XTC Garage, then head to the Ransom Note here to hear the rest of the songs selected for this brilliant eight-track primer.
Read more: 15 essential Wild Pitch remixes from house music’s ’90s golden years
