~scape

scape03

		burnt friedman & the nu dub players
do not legalize it! Over the years we have all witnessed the hype and blather, empty rhetoric and hollow promises of ”supergroups” of musicians and programmers assembled like a top shelf soccer team from the finest craftsmen money or ego can buy. Time is too tight to recount the names on the scrap heap of failures that signpost the road to righteous rhythm ruling, but with this album we can herald that rare treat, an unmitigated success. Though the five trusty deckhands that make up the Nu Dub Players are only household names to those whose investigations of the underground have permitted them a peep below the surface, the arrival of all five of them on Great Barrier Island (New Zealand) in January 1996 caused immediate geothermal rumbles all around the musical world. DJ Booth, the first (and to our knowledge only) extreme DJ made his name by voluntarily placing himself and his decks and fx in the most dangerous and contentious locales on the globe. Club nights like ”Kool Out In Kosovo”, his Baghdad residency ”Steady On Saddam” and the peace brokering ”Bloody Well Chill Out Belfast” have seen the Booth nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize without even offering up a beatmix. Crucial Guenther is the brain surgeon of boom and bass bandito. Bernie the Bolt, the Golden Shot of drums‚n‚perc in the Nu Dub line-up remains something of an enigma. Of the little that is known it has been revealed that he is a close friend, confidante and perhaps even an influence on band leader Burnt. If Bernie the Bolt is an enigma then the Cousin Of The Sausage Smearer is but a blip. Programmer, producer and engineertician Burnt Friedman is the mucousy substance that holds the highly creative and temperamental strands of the Nu Dub Players together. Having made his name as conductor for top pop combos Drome, Nonplace Urban Field and Flanger (collaboration with Atom Heart), one could imagine that this project (with the intense demands of the individual members) could be a trying one for the Kolonic cut crusader. But it is within the dub-soaked melange of misappropriated mischief and endless echo that the smouldering one is most at home. Reining in the individual skills of each of his semi-psychotic sidekicks and channeling them through the mixing desk Burnt ensures that the Nu Dubs highly skilled musical mutterings don\'t turn into a pile of muso wank. It is also Friedman that recovered the original master tapes and lovingly restored them after Crucial Guenthers insistence on not allowing them to be flown back to Auckland in an aeroplane. Burnt Friedman and The Nu Dub Players will release an album in February 2000. The album includes ”The Big Black Other” and a version of ”Hut Selector”