Late last year, in the Finders Keepers Manchester vaults we celebrated our 20th conquest. It was a dignified affair with a guest list consisting of mods, rockers, proggers, hip-hoppers, teenage vampires, Welsh dragons, fly killers, escaped convicts, Turkish protesters, studio chimpanzees, and Judo experts. But when the party ended, and the guests climbed back into the record sleeves, your humble Angleterrian subjects (Votel, Thomas and Shipton) set straight back to work, underground, digging away to find the next 20 nuggets in a deep grained ongoing quest.
And we haven’t stopped digging – deeper and deeper without looking up until we’ve realised that we’re stuck in a 40 year old chasm devoid of contemporary pop culture making routine DJ trips into the wilderness, seldom distracted by rare shards of daylight.
One such shard of light that regularly bounces around the B-Music mine shaft is beamed all the way from Los Angeles (via a global DJ schedule) and we call him The Gaslamp Killer – while the FK bloodhound digs backwards, GLK sails forwards. Like many of us he was raised by a family of Japanese turntables, loops and edits with the desire to take/break and remake without prejudice or regular food and water – but as part of a culture that’s frequently sinking under its own lethargic weight The GLK is pushing the boat out and operating on full steam with a strong paddle and an open ear.
With decades of music on his mind and youth on his side The Gaslamp Killer’s endless supply of elbow grease puts him in good company. Flying Louts, Cherrystones, Prefuse 73, Cut Chemist, Andy Votel, The Heliocentrics, DJ Nobody are all fellow crew members and collaborators and his DJ mixes and sonic gifts for Mary Anne Hobbs, Hit + Run, Obey, Stussy & Dublab.com prove why labels like Stones Throw and Warp are salivating over drops of this man’s blood.
Naturally Finders Keepers didn’t really know all this until recently… We just know him as Will – a fellow attendee at Workaholics Anonymous who invited us to come and play in LA. (where he still appears every single Wednesday at his legendary club night Low End Theory). It’s ‘rare people’ like Will who remind us why we do what we do – a vinyl junkie who plays by the rules but bends them all beyond recognition with enough enthusiasm to keep the most skeptical crowd happy on either side of the DJ booth. Which is why, after 20 releases, with a choice of 2380000 DJ friends we had to ask GLK to rock our party in the form of this 64 track DJ mix.
Finders Keepers didn’t need to send GLK a bumper package of our entire discography, he’d already bought it and made continuous cross-continental phone calls to the UK to let us know how fresh he thought they sounded. We think that even though most FK records are almost 40 years old they sound more forward thinking than most of the music that’ll be made next year and in the context of Will’s new ‘All Killer’ Finders Keepers mixtape we think you’ll agree.
GLK might be the youngest artist in the FK family but he’s certainly not the greenest and in a world where if we do happen to converse with someone without having to consult a travelers phrase book its very unlikely that they’ll be under the age of 60 then he’s certainly the most gregarious sonic interpreter for the B-Music outernational modus operandi.
Scrambled, sampled, angle-poised and untangled, ‘All Killer’ hears GLK at his best – given envious carte blanche on our vast musical palette featuring tracks that have previously been savored and championed by the likes of Madlib, Oh-No, Artic Monkeys, Percy P, Erykah Badu, Jarvis Cocker, Koushek, Future Sound Of London and Morrissey amongst others!
