Holy Ghost Inc., The* - Mad Monks On Zinc

For many years the title track from this record sat on a tape recorded from Colin Dale's early 90s KissFM radio show. Highly revered by my friends and I and known only by its arbitrary and onomatopoeic title "the drainpipe track" - derived from the strange stuttered vocal effect audible at the start of the track, like someone chattering at the end of a plastic drainpipe - it wasn't until as late as 2003 that I finally discovered the correct title and who it was by. I swapped a whole pile of records for it with an acquaintance, so keen was I to get hold of it. Despite since discovering that several of those records (which I’d practically forced onto the aforementioned acquaintance) were worth quite a bit of money, I don't regret it. Every time I hear this track the hairs on my arms stand on end.

From a time when there were few "rules" in the production of dance music, this track combines all sorts of elements that were heard in the music of the time. Subtle use of a sampled breakbeat, layered over the deep pulsing kick, give the track an irresistible energy on the dancefloor. This carries the listener while the gorgeous heavy atmospherics completely entrance them. The use of a simplistic single hit piano line at a couple of points could put the integrity of the track in jeopardy, but it's not so cheesy and lasts for a short enough time that once the deepness kicks back in it just forms a strange memory, like passing lights leaving a fading trace on the retina. At the track's climax the "drainpipe" sounds rise up again, and are for a few seconds enveloped in one of the most intensely beautiful synth washes I've ever heard. I'm sure that several years before I acquired the record I heard this wash of sound during some kind of celestial scene in a film, recognising it from the taped copy I had - so it may be a sample - but in any case, it works. You want that moment to last forever, but as quickly as you have been lifted up, you are dropped straight back into the beat, and that snappy break sample sets you off again.

With a track as powerful and as special to me as this, it's little wonder that I hardly have an idea of what the B-side sounds like, as every time the record is pulled out it lands with the A-side up. I vaguely remember some kind of ravey breakbeat material, far more reminiscent of the music coming out of the UK at that time than the wondrous sounds of "Mad Monks On Zinc".