Here is “The Soldier’s Story”, my first truly original cd for the prestigious American electronic music label Moonshine. For this release I was given complete control of choosing all of the music and really went out of my way to find the best future thinking, unreleased and heavy as hell drum and bass at that time. This one was not just for the dancefloor and really started to establish the way I would approach choosing music for all future mix projects. Some of the key tunes on here would be my collaboration with Technical Itch “Atlantic State”. The bassline was born out of a keyboard glitch and the cool pads in the intro are from a Skinny Puppy sample cd. The name was a nod to the classic 808 State tune “Pacific State” (the Atlantic ocean separates the USA and the UK ;). Jonny L “Bellz” was just a white hot smasher that I loved to death. And “The Stalker” was a weird super minimal tune that eventually became the anthem for my drum and bass weekly “Platinum" in Philly (everyone used to love that track!). For the intro I used a bunch of samples from the videogames Half Life and Quake (I found the sound libraries and broke them up and mined the shit out of them). At one point I was contacted by some people who worked on Half Life and they said they used to play my mix at the office. That was awesome. This mix sounds fast because I mixed it on my home turntables that were modified to play faster than normal. I always thought faster was better. The artwork was done by the late Todd Baldwin of Airline Industries. He hired famous Marvel comics artist Paul Gosier to draw me as a super soldier for the cover. Most people didn’t really think it looked like me ;) Finally, I lifted the title from the movie “A Soldier’s Story”. In the drum and bass scene a “soldier” is a die hard fan of the music. That pretty much sums me up to this day. Enjoy! — TRACKLIST Dieselboy - Precautionary Procedure Konflict - The Beckoning Usual Suspects + Fierce - Sawn Off DJ Friction - Photon Remix Future Cut + Mark Da Intallex - Plastic Technical Itch - Deception Technical Itch - Stack Moving Fusion - Sex Drive Jonny L - The Bellz Usual Suspects + Loxy - Stalker Vertigo - Drained Danny Breaks - Dissonance Peshay - Vegas Kosheen - Yes Men (Decoder Remix) Technical Itch + Dieselboy - Atlantic State Decoder - BS9