Warp Records are attempting to bring together the interconnected bass music scenes of four cities for their latest compilation, entitled North/South/East/West.

The project was initially conceived as a collaboration between photographer Shaun Bloodworth, designer Stuart Hammersley (who is responsible for the sleeve artwork of labels such as Tempa and Apple Pips) and Warp's Bleep.com subsidiary, with Shaun and Stuart setting out to acquire striking images of the artists that they've become close to in the London dubstep scene. However, their direction changed once they'd travelled to Los Angeles to document the thriving beatsmith scene at nights like Low End Theory, and it was decided that their photographic work should accompany a collection of tracks that showcased not only these two scenes, but also the current activity in the north of the UK (Glasgow) and the East Coast of the US (New York).

Of the twelve tracks in the collection, only Hudson Mohawke, Flying Lotus and Rustie's inclusions have been previously released, with new material coming from Skream, Geeneus, FaltyDL, Headhunter and Daedelus amongst others. The CD release will come in two varieties, with both offering 14 high quality photo-prints and custom-made packaging. The more expensive of the two (which will be limited to 100 copies instead of 500) features previously unseen portraits and extra shots from the project as well as an A2 poster from Give Up Art. Samples of all twelve tracks have now been made available over at the Bleep site.

Tracklist
01. Daedelus - A Bloodwort
02. Hudson Mohawke - FUSE
03. Geeneus - Ultrafunkula
04. Flying Lotus - Comet Course (Matthew David Alternative Mix)
05. Headhunter - Collecting Butterflies
06. Falty DL - Some Day My Queen Will Come
07. Flying Lotus - Rickshaw
08. Skream - Slumfunk
09. Mike Slott - Giants Meet
10. Kotchy - You Know You
11. Rustie - Bad Science
12. Taz Buckfaster - Au Revoir

Warp Records will release North/South/East/West on December 1st, 2009. 5 Comments