Ahead of the release of Defected In The House Ibiza ’12, we asked mixer, compiler and label head Simon Dunmore to pick out a couple of tracks that have particularly impressed him during the selection process.
Ben Westbeech with ‘Inflections’
Ben is a soul-jazz vocalised from the west country, Bristol, but now living in London. The lyrics are about the contradictions you have going on in life; I think he sums it up so well in the song. It is produced by Henrik Schwarz, who is someone that doesn’t try to be recognised or to have his time in the limelight, but just continues to make astonishing music that has real depth to it.
I played this record several times throughout last season in Ibiza. I had it as a demo because we were partly involved with the A&R on Ben’s album from which the record is taken. The beats don’t even come into the record until five minutes into the track and it’s an absolutely what I would view as a Balearic record, with an amazing Spanish guitar, real tension, live strings, big orchestral moments. Even when the beat eventually comes in its not like it takes your head off, it’s just a real solid groove.
I think you have got to pick your moment to play a record like this, I think you’ve got to have balls. I’ve wanted to play it several times before but the club wasn’t in that frame of mind, but I’ve also dropped it several times, and every time I have played it, it felt like I’d just given the club a piece of music they weren’t expecting, which is pretty unusual in clubs these days. Most of the time people went with it and it worked. Even a year on it’s kind of unknown but it’s just a great piece of music, and it sets the tone for the second disc of the compilation perfectly.
Romanthony ‘Bring You Up’ (Deetron Remix)
There are very few records that after 12 years that you can still remember the first time you heard it and what you first thought of the record. Louie Vega played it at the WMC in the year 2000 and it absolutely stopped me dead in my tracks.
The remix from Deetron brings it into a club-friendly environment, but the original production of the track sounds like James Brown in his heyday. It just starts off with these mad horn stab arrangements with Romanthony speaking in between, a monologue about how he is going to take you somewhere and bring you up. I initially thought that it might be a rare groove record that I had missed, but the production was so big and punched through so much so that really I knew it had to be a new record, but it just sounded like something that came from the 70s.
It has so much funk and so much soul, and it’s a record that still commands attention. I have tried to work with Romanthony many times over the years but he’s kind of a crazy cat, hard to pin down. I also tried to sign the record back in the day, but we could just never get to a point where all the details were agreed. So it just remains a record that I love and I was really happy to be able to include it.
Deetron is so happening at this moment in time and someone who is going to be a huge name in years to come. He’s done a great job on the mix which is always hard on such a classic track.
