Selector Afterdark – Monkey Wrench by The Selector on Mixcloud
Introduce yourselves and tell us about the part of the UK you’re from?
Hi! Our names our Liam and Declan. Liam is originally from Brighton and Declan is originally from Newbury. We both met at University in Bristol and have been living here for the last 4 years.
Can you tell us a bit about what you’ve been working on recently?
Towards the end of last year we finished off our ‘96 Grind’ release and produced a track for the Stripes Records x Red Bull Studios EP. We are currently finishing off our next release, which will be coming out on Stripes too. There’s no title for that one yet.
And can you talk us through the mix?
We wanted to make this mix a bit of a journey, starting off with some of the deeper tracks we have been enjoying at the moment. It then builds up to heavier, darker, UK sounds with tracks from ourselves, Benton, Diemantle, Roy Bar, Silas & Snare Surgeon and Ryan Wick.
Nice, give us a taste of some of your favourite British artists at the moment?
The first British artist to feature in this mix was Kamikaze Space Programme. We stumbled across his tracks online and immediately bought a load of his tunes. It turns out he’s also from Bristol, so it made sense to put that tune in the mix. Silas & Snare Surgeon sent us a nice big Zip of tunes recently – all bangers! ‘Patience’, the track featured in the mix, was one of our favourites in there. Roy Bar sent ‘History of Air 2005’ to us the day we were recording the mix. We know him from playing with P.T.S boys in Bath & Bristol. He’s a sick DJ and has made some wicked tunes recently too, he’s one to watch out for. We’re big fans of Digital Soundboy so we added one of the tracks from Mella Dee’s new beat tape as well as the DJ Die & Dismantle collab that came out last year. There is also a couple of tracks in there from our next release as well as the lead track from our current EP ‘96 Grind’.
Cool, tell us about some of your British DJ Heroes and influences in general?
Between the two of us there are so many to name! We grew up listening to Garage and Drum & Bass, so back in the day it would have been: DJ EZ, El-B, Wideboys, DJ Luck & MC Neat, Shy-FX, Andy C, Shadow Demon Coalition, Breakage, Fabio & Grooverider.
Then onto Grime and Dubstep: Skream, Benga, Mak 10, Spyro, Mala, D1, Joker, Plastician, Youngsta, Riskotheque, Von D, Headhunter, Caspa and Rusko.
Then more recently: Oneman, Loefah, Klose One, Chunky, Erol Alkan, Jus Now, Chimpo, Monki, B Traits, Boddika, Joy O, Ben UFO, Tom Demac, Eats Everything, Alex Arnout, Night Slugs, Dusky, Butterz, Kahn & Neek.
Its always fun to watch our friends play too! – Dismantle, Hugo Massien, Kinzy, Stanza (True Tiger), Spoils, Henry J.
Quite an extensive list… and we still feel like we’ve left some names out!
And what’s on the cards in the immediate future?
We’ve nearly finished our next EP. We wrote the lead track a little while ago and have been busy writing the rest of the tunes. We’re excited about it!
We’re playing in the Stripes room at Motion in Bristol this month for ‘The Blast x Black Butter’ event. Then later on in the year Stripes are also taking over a room at Fabric in London.
And finally, where is the best place in the world you have DJ’d and why?
We feel lucky to have played in Bristol as much as we have. It always goes off. Motion is our favourite and Blue Mountain as we got to play there a lot when we were starting out.
Last year Bestival and Secret Solstice in Iceland were wicked experiences. Roadhouse in Manchester with the B.P.M crew was also sick.