Seminal: Photek "Ni ten ichi ryu"

No surf. So I'm starting a recurring column on this blog about music. The songs featured are ones that I find motivational, new and old. These tracks kick me in the ass and get me to write, run, surf, skate, create. I call it "Seminal" because when I was a music writer, people (girls) said it was a very un-pc term to describe music...

This first cut is from the mid-90s, during what I like to think of as the "golden age" of drum 'n bass. I was living in LA, and my boss at the time, Randy Kaye (RIP), used to bring tons of music back from the UK during his A&R trips there. There was a jungle night on Sundays at Pink in Santa Monica called "Science." Randy and I would go religiously, every Sunday. Sometimes there was herb involved, which isn't something I would normally do, but it enhanced the music somehow. This track would always fill the dancefloor with an ecclectic crowd that was just discovering D 'n B at the time. Indie rockers, hippies, hip-hoppers, rastafarians, blacks, whites, asians. It was a big, sweaty, inclusive, bouncing mess of people in a very tight space. I would always close that place out.

A few years later, I got to interview Photek (it was probably one of my first interviews) and was blown away by his knowledge of all kinds of music: jazz, hip-hop, world, etc. This will always be my favorite track of his, if not my favorite of that... screw it, I'm going for a run.