The question is often asked, just how sane is The Mad Professor ?Judging by the contents of his character and by the results of his recordings, and the variety of the artistes who has passed through Ariwa studios then he is certainly one of the sanest producers around. Neil Fraser began his musical career on the technical side of things as a service engineer for mixing desks and amplifiers. That skill and a good ear for "on key" music became his asset when he began building a 4 track studio at his home in Thornton Heath. At school Neil was christened Mad Professor by friends who were amazed by the experiments he was carrying out. By the turn of the Eighties, Mad Professor launched the Ariwa label and released "Come back Again" by Sgt. Pepper, then came "Young Girl" by Family Love, "Love Power/Love On A Two Way Street" by Divinia Stone, "True True Loving" by Aquizim.
Scientist
Born in Kingston in 1960, the Scientist learned basic electronics from his TV repairman father, skills that made him very popular with the mobile DJs and their not-always-functioning sound systems. A friend suggested he visit the legendary dub producer/mixer King Tubby, not to remix records, but to get some transformers by which Scientist could build his own amplifiers. Soon the Scientist was an employee of Tubby's, fixing transformers and televisions, when one day, after an animated conversation about mixing records, Tubby challenged the Scientist to take a shot at remixing a record. Brimming with adolescent bravado, Scientist took Tubby's challenge, and that led to an extended apprenticeship in dub experimentation under Tubby's guidance. It was while at Tubby's that the Scientist developed his idiosyncratic dub style, playful and very psychedelic, loaded with echo explosions and blasts of feedback, a sound that caught the attention of Don Mais, who overheard the Scientist at the mixing board during a visit to Tubby's studio. With Mais supervising the production, Scientist, now all of 18, cut some wicked dub sides for the Roots Tradition label. At the end of the '70s, Scientist (now also referred to as "The Dub Chemist") left Tubby's to become the main engineer at Channel One Studios, and working with Henry "Junjo" Lawes, cut some best-selling dub LPs, only to leave for the greener pastures of Tuff Gong in 1982. In 1985, Scientist moved to Silver Springs, Maryland, where he lives and works as a recording engineer.
In a sense, electronic music is a vacuum - the entire damn genre started off as
nothing more than a series of electrical inventions which gained popularity after composers applied them to their own cultures. New Delhi-based artist Ravana, named after the antagonist of Valmiki’s epic poem Ramayana, follows in these classics’ footsteps to re-imagine their music....more
A story of the downfall of mankind, the 25 artists collected here use electronic music to depict a harrowing vision of a ruined dystopia. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 31, 2021
Take a trip to electronic music's shadow realm, where driving drum n' bass meets dark ambient's haunted atmospherics, on this collaboration. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 27, 2021
Oliver Rhodes, aka Paracusia, captures a spectrum of moods from dreamy nostalgia to wiry anxiety on this EP of highly textural bass music. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 9, 2021