TNG EXCLUSIVE: James Welsh – The ‘S’ EP

We all know that feeling when, having heard a track at least 15 times, your heart suddenly skips and you realise, all of a sudden, you’re properly digging it, perhaps even getting up from your office chair for an impromptu laser-reach.

It’s these kind of moments that go some way to justify that ill-advised Janet Jackson and Luther Vandross duet, but they’re not much use when you’re hurriedly trawling Beatport on your lunch break, or while your boss is in the bog, counting down the seconds as you desperately seek out records that make for an instant rave if you just add espresso. Or Mellow Birds, whatever.

Fact is, many of the best tunes are “growers” and you’ll miss them first time round when you click impatiently through the waveform, getting frustrated when it takes ages to load each time on your company’s archaic PC. It’s the same way, if you’re old enough, you managed to miss a few heavy white labels in 2001 because you dropped the needle in like three or four places, for a millisecond each time, before lobbing it back at the guy behind the counter who “saved” it for you. Only, let’s face it, digital download stores are nowhere near as exciting.

But some tracks don’t need to grow. They’re like 900-year-old Californian redwoods decorated with glowsticks from the moment you hit play, and if there weren’t a few of these corkers knocking around, Beatport probably wouldn’t have raked in somewhere between 15 and 18 million dollars last year. If there were a few more of them, it might even have turned a profit, but there’s not – they’re as rare as steak tartar – and while I’m sure it’s for other reasons, unbelievably, the firm made losses of $2m.

That’s all by the bye, though, but speaking of steak, that’s the name of one of the tracks on the forthcoming ‘S’ EP by James Welsh, one half of Ocelot Mthrfckers and engineer for the last Reverend & The Makers album. Signed to Wall Of Sound at the age of just 17, he’s gone on to release tracks on Join The Dots, Wolf Music, Futureboogie and Hypercolour offshoot, Losing Suki. He returns to Hypercolour next month, perhaps after being noticed for outstanding house records like this year’s ‘Craven’. Go find it on Soundcloud, we implore you, but not before you’ve checked out ‘S’.

The EP is slated for official release on October 14th, and I can imagine Hypercolour are wetting their pants about it. ‘Steak’ isn’t necessarily the best thing on the menu here, I don’t think, but let’s get down to brass tacks – there’s more than one tune on this release that might have gone a little way to reduce Beatport’s shortfall, had it dropped in 2012.

I’ll say this: we haven’t got a laser in the TNG office (yet – donations welcome) but seconds after pressing play on ‘Sent’ we were reaching for the lampshade…

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