3. JOAKIM ‘Oleg Dans Les Bois’ (1999)
Bending my Hip-hop style and rap beat-making techniques to dance music has always been a head-wrecker to me. Making the transition from producing french ghetto MC’s to rock it in Ibiza and Miami with Busy P sure was a career challenge. But nothing obsessed my mind more than finding new ways of forcing Ultramagnetic MC’s aesthetics into a (Boysnoize) DJ set. Let alone make a whole album out of it. Many of my DJ friends were telling me “Keep on doing what you do best!”, but of course they would’ve never played a 96 BPM french-speaking rap track at The End in London, which is where I wanted to hear it. Things started to change when Timbaland, Rockwilder and Swizz Beats appeared on the scene and started to alter misconceptions people on both sides had about the other. When The Neptunes set the whole thing on fire, everybody was obliged to understand the truth: it’s always been the same music, produced by the same people, using the same tools and instruments. After 20 years, Afrika Bambaata was finally right. At the time Gilb’r asked me to remix this ‘Oleg’ track of Joakim, I was still clueless. He played me this DJ Spinna instrumental that he really liked and noted how much he thought I could be going in the same direction. Retrospectively, a) you can definitely hear the heavy Spinna influence on this track, and b) he was, once again, so right.
- DJ Mehdi
Bending my Hip-hop style and rap beat-making techniques to dance music has always been a head-wrecker to me. Making the transition from producing french ghetto MC’s to rock it in Ibiza and Miami with Busy P sure was a career challenge. But nothing obsessed my mind more than finding new ways of forcing Ultramagnetic MC’s aesthetics into a (Boysnoize) DJ set. Let alone make a whole album out of it. Many of my DJ friends were telling me “Keep on doing what you do best!”, but of course they would’ve never played a 96 BPM french-speaking rap track at The End in London, which is where I wanted to hear it. Things started to change when Timbaland, Rockwilder and Swizz Beats appeared on the scene and started to alter misconceptions people on both sides had about the other. When The Neptunes set the whole thing on fire, everybody was obliged to understand the truth: it’s always been the same music, produced by the same people, using the same tools and instruments. After 20 years, Afrika Bambaata was finally right. At the time Gilb’r asked me to remix this ‘Oleg’ track of Joakim, I was still clueless. He played me this DJ Spinna instrumental that he really liked and noted how much he thought I could be going in the same direction. Retrospectively, a) you can definitely hear the heavy Spinna influence on this track, and b) he was, once again, so right.
- DJ Mehdi
- Cassidy
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