TAK001 (1998) - Caliman 'Sprit Thing/ Too Proud' 

Notes:

The track Too Proud started off with a garage beat influenced by Roger S, but Kier told me ‘let’s do it as a jack [Chicago-style production]’ so we replaced the beat and added the acid [synth] line. Finishing the track off one night in the studio in the house in Stamford Hill, North London, where we lived, the way the filtered Earth Wind & Fire sample kept rising up made us laugh so much we couldn’t concentrate. It was as if the music itself was alive and was trying to burst out of the speakers.

We duplicated the DAT master at Dave Rowe’s office desk where he worked at Ministry Of Sound. Dave compulsively jerked his neck back and forth when he heard the KW [Kat Williams] remix of Spirit Thing.

James Beattie sent a cassette demo of Spirit Thing to record distributor Intergroove (based in Acton, West London) in 1998 and this got us a P&D (press and distribution) deal for our new label TAK Records. P&D meant they’d pay all the manufacturing costs for us up front. They pressed up 1200 12” records at Record Industry in Holland, and Intergroove sold them all in about 6 weeks. We had no involvement in mastering - we didn’t even know what mastering was.

We got an early version of Spirit Thing pressed onto dub plate (acetate) at Music House on Eden Grove, off Holloway Road in North London. We played this on the tVC Soundsystem rig at free parties in woods and fields around East Kent in the spring and summer of 1998. 

We made a list of over 50 names for our record label before settling on TAK Records. TAK stands for Tom And Kier.

All our artist names were fake. We wanted to be anonymous and underground. This was the era when nobody knew who the artist Moodymann really was (apart from a silhouette image of a person's head on the record label artwork), and of Underground Resistance, who wore masks and were equally cryptic with their artwork and credits. Self-promotion was considered bad taste by Kier and me. Some of the best house records had no information at all printed on their labels.

Kier and I made up backstories about our artists to make each other laugh. Being silly was part of our friendship, and a diversion from the serious fantasy of trying to be professional DJs and musician-producers. Teaching ourselves how to make house music we were guided by two things: what we heard on the records we played, and what we thought would sound good played loud through the speakers of a soundsystem like DiY’s or tVC’s. All the house music we created was made with free parties in mind -  those anarchic but friendly, haphazard, psychedelic, confusing, loved-up, all-night dance parties in marquees and abandoned buildings, with non-stop house music stripped of everything except rhythm, bass, and an atmosphere (a vibe, or an idea).The day after we’d get back from a free party we’d know so vividly what real house music should sound like - how it worked and what it did. This knowledge would fade over the following few days and weeks until we went to another party and got another top-up. DJing with tVC Soundsystem and going to DiY parties completely influenced how we made tunes.

There Are Many Different Vibes was the first track we did in ‘half-step’ style. Half-step was the term we used to describe music we made in a non-4/4 format. It was partly influenced by UK Garage - which was big at the time (though we never played it) - but also was just an outlet for us to have fun and make tunes for ourselves without any pressure other than to make us happy. Other half-step tunes are: T.A.M.D.S. (TAK002), T.A.M.D.B. (TAK004),  T.A.M.D.D. (TAK008) and Our Good Lord Krishna (TAK012).

-Tom