“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.
