ARTIST: VARIOUS
TITLE: ‘FLUID OUNCE PRESENTS…’
CAT NO: UNFOLDDVD005
DISTRIBUTION: PINNACLE
LABEL: UNFOLD
RELEASE DATE: 27.10.2008
The brainchild of Fluid Ounce head honcho Chris Vogado - aka one half of Ninja Tune’s Zero dB - ‘Fluid Ounce presents…’ is a groundbreaking compilation: 90 (yes, nine-zero) tracks of exclusive, exciting,original and genre-rampaging music presented in high quality formats on one DVD.
And here’s how it came to be…
It’s 2008; you know how it is; the music industry is flickering in its own embers; compact discs dangle to scare off birds whilst vinyl gathers dust; recordings of music can be heard but not seen.
Chris Vogado struggles back from another gig, another airport, another journey, with two excessively heavy record bags full of vinyl gems. As he enters Fluid Ounce HQ and relieves his sloping shoulder
s, he detours into the vaults where demos bulge off every shelf and remind him of the mammoth task in hand. For years he’s been receiving, auditioning, reviewing and ransacking an ever rising flood of demos, sent with care from around the world. And for the past two years, he’s concentrated great efforts into scooping off the cream and liaising with the artists to optimise their often already exceptional if sometimes under-nurtured sounds. But to release all of these nuggets on 12” heavyweight vinyl, as the quality of the music deserves, when no miserable sod can be bothered to put their wallet where their appreciation of this unsurpassable format is? NON! NO! NO MORE! NOT IN THIS GAME! Chris Vogado, realising he is shouting at nobody, gathers his thoughts and calmly vows to make a change.
Suddenly, through the haze of sunlit dust specks a vision appears (and for once, it is not a naked lady). It could just be the solution: put out a massive collection of the very best of a damned good lot and show the world that quantity and quality can coexist in a small, neat package. Si, si, señores y señoras, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls - Fluid Ounce Presents… these 90 exclusive, outstanding tracks, from no less than 29 different, mostly new, but always uniquely fresh artists, all carefully plucked and finely tuned by the clean and unforgiving ears of A&R guru Chris Vogado.
“I know I’m hard to please”, sighs Vogado now, “and I know I’ve been a real pain in the arse for most of the artists featured here, meddling to the point of great interference, but it really has been worth it, as they, we - and hopefully you - will all agree.”
In the words of Benedic Lamdin: “Skeletons is a made up band. I kid you not - it doesn’t exist. These musicians never stood in the studio together, they just passed through my house or left some scraps of sound behind after sessions we were working on… “Some of the music here started life as commissions for a library music company, pastiches and forgeries paid for by the current vogue for a certain style of African jazz. Once I’d done a few though I couldn’t stop, it was my default preoccupation, something for me once I’d finished working on other people’s albums. It was relaxation, something that didn’t matter whether it worked or not. The whole LP was made like that, done in the time between recording jobs.
