The latest project from the camp of musician/ producer Simon Ward a.k.a Dr Rubberfunk is the first in a brand new mixtape series Ectopic Beats Volume 1 containing a host of unreleased recordings. It seems that like fellow musician/producer Lack Of Afro recently, Rubbers realised he had a whole lot of stuff from a career in music (twenty-five years of so) that had just got lost by the wayside. A pandemic-era studio move prompted a trawl through old stuff and resulted in a ‘Hey, why the hell did I never finish any of this it’s good!’ epiphany. Decision made, Rubbers ropes in producers Titeknots and Buddy Peace in to help with the business of getting everything album ready from polishing nearly finished instrumentals to doing something constructive with groovy 2-bar loops. Out came all the LPs covered in Post-It note memos of stuff not to forget to sample that he then forgot to sample and before you know it, our man’s fallen back in love with sampling to the extent that he even starts sampling stuff he has previously released, ends up finishing his unfinished tracks (not to mention knocking up a few new ones besides) and Ectopic Beats Vol. 1 is finished in double quick time.
While Rubbers humbly refers to the finished work as a ‘mixtape’ many of the cuts are much longer than the sort of truncated rapless beats that producers use to advertise their wares to beatless rappers and the complexity of the tracks is arguably much more interesting than your run-of-the-mill beat tape. Indeed, those who love dusty, soulful, jazzy breaks and samples and remember a time in the 90s when you couldn’t move for them will love this effort and very likely see it as a rather late entry to the Mo Wax, Ninjatune, Dope On Plastic canon. Available as a digital download or in limited edition of the ‘devil’s format’ of the cassette tape!
(Out now HERE)