TAK012 (2005) - Collis King 'E.P. 2' 

Notes:

Kier and I loved the kind of vocal garage music that producers like JoVonn and Kerri Chandler made, and we wrote a song in that vein, Contact, that Joseph Ikpoh - who I met studying broadcasting at college in 1998 - could sing for us. Recording a song was really just a way to obtain vocals for a 'dub'. Kier and I would write lyrics and a melody for a love song we knew we wouldn't release in full because as a DJ you never played the full-on vocal mix of a garage tune in a set - instead, you played the dub that had little fragments of the vocal over minimal beats, psychedelic synths, samples and FX.

After we got Joseph round to sing the song we cut up his vocals and used them for our remix for DiY of Simon DK's Carbomb track, Keep Sexy, and used them again in Feel Free on TAK012. The music for the original track he sung, Contact, got used as an instrumental on TAK013.

The artwork is by Eldad Druks, who we knew from tVC parties, and it was he who generously suggested we came to his studio to choose one of his etchings to use on the label. After Kier died I found in his house a framed print of the B-side image - a hand clicking its fingers. I'll put it up above the fireplace in my own home once I replace the missing glass in the frame. 

The B-side of this record, Has Anyone Seen My Dog? was written mostly by Kier. I read online that the Detroit DJ, Derrick May, played it. It's the perfect example of Kier's production style: a relentless acid line with a soulful vocal sample - the kind of music I'd be floored by if I came back to the studio one day and heard what he'd been cooking that day.

By the time we released TAK012 Kier and I had stopped making music. He and I were living in different areas of London – Kier down in Dulwich, South London and me in Crouch End, North London. After we dismantled the TAK studio I started trying to make hip hop beats but I couldn’t get the sound right - I didn’t know the production tricks that made the music stand out as I did with House, and I wasn't involved in the culture as I had been with free parties.

Making House music with Kier was something we dedicated over 10 years to - buying kit, exploring the technology, teaching ourselves how to use it, testing our mixes by cutting dub plates and playing them on loud rigs in fields or clubs. Sampling melodies and drum hits, and layering synth chords over acid bass lines. Trying to turn little ideas into full 8-minute tunes that another DJ might somehow be able to blend in with expensively-mixed NYC House tunes by Masters At Work or Todd Terry. Kier and I listened so hard to tracks we loved, trying to decode and analyse how they made us feel the way we did. What was a compressor? How do you make a bass drum thump like a heart beat?

When we stopped producing together it was a relief. It took the pressure off ourselves. It felt like we'd spent so long doing it and there hadn't been much payback. After Kier and I stopped DJing together and meeting 4 times a week in the studio after work then again at the weekends it meant we each could start living more normal lives, whatever that might mean. I replaced one workaholic tendency with another and became a TV dubbing mixer, working late every night in Shepherds Bush, in another studio. Kier evolved into an obsessively hardworking self-employed multi-trade builder. Instead of just house tunes, we listened to everything else too, and not simply for the bits we thought we could sample.

-Tom