The Holy Ghost Inc.* – Mad Monks On Zinc

Every track on this is a must have. Easily a $300 record back in the day and has been one of my all-time favorites since I got. Liquidation was my most played track however the Mad Monks on Zinc was played most by trance heads in the early 90's. What most younger producers and DJs don't realize is that this release was years ahead of its time when it came out. There wasn't much stuff like this out or available and if there was where would you hear it or buy it? This is pre-internet. Such an absolutely unique piece all the way down to the appropriately fitting one-of-a-kind artwork. If ever we get an electronic music hall of fame, this release needs to be presented.

Shit the fucking bed!!! Eventually found this tune after hearing it on a DJ Blackmark set from Green Apple Radio, just outside London... in 1992 ffs! Only took a cool 27 years to track it down!

That bassline!!! Dirty yet haunting. Top bollocks!

Oh, and contrary to md below, I really like the piano. Simple yet very effective at adding to the atmospherics. Faultless.

Absolute winner is Mad Monks On Zinc. Killer record.

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".