REQ / Rob Euroh - TDK (2019)

Derived from the influential Japanese cassette tape brand of the same name, the TDK graffiti crew name of the 1980s and 90s, often serving as acronym for The Dusty Knights, or the mockingly British 'Tea Drinkers Krew', serves as album title here.

Having painted walls alongside REQ in the Brighton UK-based crew during the 90s and early 2000s, Rob Euroh was also active as a hip-hop DJ, human beatbox and electro producer throughout those years. Inventor of the 'Euro Scratch' - a turntablist technique akin to the more standardized 'Flare' scratch, but which enables much quicker cutting of the track via the manipulation of one up-fader in unison with the usual cross-fader - he released the 'Euroh Scratch EP' as a 12" in 2002 on the now defunct Blue Juice label, on which just a couple of years previously he and REQ had released an electro 7" together, and which also released work by such notable trip-hop artists of the time as Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky Tha Subliminal Kid.

Our second archival release for the TDK crew, the tracks assembled here form a snapshot of the sometimes playful, sometimes fuller-force phases of their UK electro and ghetto-tech experimentation, chiefly from REQ's late-90s period and Rob's early 2000s recordings. 16 of the 23 tracks are previously unreleased, with the remaining 7 being reissued from deleted vinyl editions.

Opening with the lino-cut throwdown of 'Snake in the Grass', the album immediately evokes the first wave era of b-boy beat juggling and breakdancing, with REQ hammering out a rust-flecked krush groove from a deftly chopped Steve Argüelles beat, and with whom he worked in the French Ambitronix improv collective in the early 2000s, playing turntables and loop pedal, with Benoît Delbecq accompanying them on piano. A series of lens-flared polaroids follow this phrenetic opener, hailing from REQ's cleaner, much less tape-saturated and more playful, Streetsounds Electro sessions.

These bleed hazily into a cluster of Rob's higher-octane dancefloor workouts, which up the intensity three-fold, culminating in a salvo of scorching ghetto-tech mutations, and which are re-issued here from his deleted 'Magma Man Chronicles' EP, a 12" first released in 2004 on Templedog Records. Also re-issued here are the 2 tracks from the Rob Euroh and Req1 Blue Juice 7" - bumping collaborative jams that pulse and crackle with idiosyncratic energy - plus a pair of tracks from Rob's 2002 'Euroh Scratch' EP. 'Pimp Twist', recorded under Rob's Miscreants alias is also included here, joining such previously unreleased collaborative fire as 'TDK Strut' and 'Ghettoblaster Apocalypse' - all of which sustain the merging of Rob's damp brick ghetto-tech and scratch dynamic with REQ's brittle sci-fi funk and renowned disregard for contemporary style codes.

One of REQ's earliest unreleased experiments with tape-recorded breaks from '93, 'Instant Karma', references 'IKA', another Brighton-based graffiti crew he painted in briefly with SHE1 and JADE2: chunks of rugged audio debris, raw like crumbling brick painted with fades of pink and violet, tumble heavily from the muddy ferric tape, contrasting vibrantly with the metallic beads of steely electro that dominate the rest of the collection like fresh paint on old walls - a contrast which lends this TDK crew release a full circle, off-kilter coherence. Soothing with its dubby melancholia, the final act features the serene 'Night Tagging', an inky cartoon vignette - shadowy scribblers getting up under moonlight, spliff embers glowing... chisel-tip markers scrub and squeak, rattle cans muffled on the way to some fugitive piecing.