In Strict Tempo: Ceremony #5 Foggy Snares' Kraked Tribute
When I interviewed Sandwell District at the start of last year Karl O’Connor said something that really resonated with me.
…this is the whole problem with the world now. Nothing can happen at a local level anymore, because you've been told to look globally. Well, no. It was great. Being local's great.
In a world where we can reach anyone, anywhere at the tap of a screen it often means artists and labels are expected to have a global vision, after all - why constrain yourself to just your local area when the world is your oyster? But things don’t work like that, and pretty much any artist would have started off in their local scene, playing clubs and bars nearby to them, building an audience in the surrounding area.
Sometimes that audience grows outwards, from one town to the next, to a bigger city, to national and continental popularity, but sometimes it doesn’t - sometimes a local scene stays that way, burning brightly and inspiring people to do their own thing, to make their own tunes, start their own labels and put on their own nights.
This Ceremony mix comes from Amsterdam-based DJ Foggy Snares, and pays tribute to the Kraked night that took place in Reading in the early 2000’s. You probably won’t have heard of it unless you happened to live there in that time, and even then it might have passed you by. But the importance of Kraked to those who attended still resonates to this day, and there’ll be a thousand other scenes across the country that were just as influential on a local level.
In his own words…
Foggy Snares is the ghost of a former resident DJ at Kraked - a monthly event (in fucking Reading of all places) of live electronics and lazy DJing. Fuelled by hash cakes, real ale, and a lot of goodwill from the friends and volunteers, the night ran in it’s original form from 2001-2004. The locals were joined by the likes of V/VM (pictured here in pig mask), Venetian Snares, Duplo Remote, Shitmat, Wrong Music, Mira Calix, Wevie Stonder, Team Doyobi, Jason Forest, DJ Scotch Egg, Mike Teknoist, The Producer, μ-Ziq, Global Goon, and a host of other guests. All of this went down at the Rising Sun Arts centre, which still stubbornly sits there amongst new-build flats for transient professionals, designed to fall apart in next to no time.
Editions followed elsewhere (somewhat illegally) - on small beaches along the Thames in central London, in backrooms of Tekno parties and on countryside rave sites. It all culminated in the now legendary in ‘The BIG Dirty Squat Party’ (Acton) , where the majority of the crew and other hangers on were arrested and carted off in a rozzer hired coach just after sunrise.
The mix here was recorded live during a Big Toilet event at W139 Gallery, Amsterdam a few years ago. It was meant as a tribute to those silly times. It was originally broadcast on Big Toilet Radio. https://www.bigtoilet.radio/.
Foggy doubts anybody in Amsterdam that afternoon would have given a much of a shit about all of the above... but they seemed to be getting into the beats.
Shout to Mikerak, Tizz and the B.Y.O.S. crew...