- Known primarily for their forward thinking breakbeats, bottom heavy bass manipulations and overall originality, Tipper's Fuel records are back once again with Sound Off Volume 2 - the second installment of their famed mix series. Tipper was on the ones and twos for volume 1, now for volume 2, Fuel Records has enlisted the skills of Miami's master of bass, Salim Rafiq.
Don't expect a mash up of Miami bass/ghetto-tech tunes, Salim Rafiq has selected some beefy Fuel Records cuts from his crates for use on the mix from the abstract quirkiness of Cold Fusion Mafia's Rinds Goulasch to the militant drum breaks and ducklike basslines on Tipper's remix of SI Futures' Eurostar.
Tipper himself gets the remix treatment for this mix with two tunes lifted from his well received Holding Patterns album from 2001. Remixed by Radioactive Man, Donut gets turned into a thudding, high pitched bassline monster while Furlong gets the remix treatment from Si Begg AKA Buckfunk 3000.
Other tunes worth mentioning are the ones licensed from other labels such as The Dexorcist's Connect One which, out of all the tunes on the CD, is the one that sits closest to the Miami bass end of the breaks spectrum and also Soul Oddity's melodic bleeps and bloops on DJ Tokyo - remixed by Tipper, it's quite catchy in a weird way!
Just like volume 1, the mix finishes off with subsonic bass lines - 22 of them too! Perfect for use in a lowrider with a "fully sick" system installed mate - a bootful of 14" subwoofers please to properly feel these! If you don't have that, play it on your PC and set up the oscilloscope on your media players for some freaky sine wave action.
It's a mix for those who like FreQ Nasty yet crave for something darker and a lot more abstract, in fact the closest FreQ tunes I can put up for comparison are SE15 from his FreQ's, Geeks and Mutilations LP and more recently Goose, to a certain extent. It's a little hard to listen to on it's own - I personally found great accompaniment for playing computer games.