about
"Souperloops was entirely made in 1995 and 96. At the time I was still focused on playing basketball but had been sidelined for 18 months with a serious knee injury. During that 18 months off my grandfather, Bill Rolph gave me $6000. With the money I purchased my first 16 bit sampler with about 2 minutes of sampling time. The machine cost $6600, it was a Kurzweil K2000. I had been making music as a hobby for many years. Dabbling with spliced tape loops, 8 bit samplers and 4 track recorders with John Riley in the band Fonke Knomaads but now with the K2000 I had the power to expand on some ideas .
The songs are all meant to be somewhat meaningful musical collages, A series of loops and one shot samples mapped across a keyboard and then played . The samples chosen often contained hidden connections. For instance Psycho Nine is a lovely song about a DJ committing mass murder on the dance floor and then eating the corpses. It contains the following snippets- the theme to Psycho, Reckless, Where’s The Sniper ( You won’t get much higher) and a sound which reminds me of a cannibal dinner bell plus a line from crazy Kool Keith oh and Watermelon man which has eerie sounds that just fit nicely with the idea of a dj committing Mass murder. Anyways thats how my mind works.
The pre production was done in my bedroom using the Kurzweil K2000 synthesiser/sampler with an onboard step sequencer and a record player (technics 1200). All the songs sequences were then dumped onto an Atari ST computer at Fraser’s house so we could control and multitrack the original songs that I played by hand on the K2000. We then went into a multitrack studio and recorded all the parts onto a 2 inch 24 track tape machine and mixed them down using lots of effects. Roland delays and an Eventide harmoniser are 2 that spring to mind.
Several tracks off the album got released on international compilations and an English label picked up the rights to do the release worldwide including vinyl. Alas it all went pear-shaped at the time due to record company wrangling and the vinyl release never eventuated.
Until now!
Thanks to Peter Pasqual and the rest of Creative Vibes for giving me the opportunity to make a record and then giving me the all clear to re-release it 21 years later.
Shouts to Drunken State particularly Smurf, John Riley (Teop), Meem, Paris, 2 Scoops , Stav, Revolve Records (Lach, Raffy and Gonz), Jack Shit, Grant Keys and the gentlemen from Wax Museum Tim, Guy and Ben. "
- DJ Soup
credits
released May 18, 2018
All songs produced, created by Soup aka John Blake
All technical wizardry, mixing and joint rolling by Fraser Stuart
Artwork Photography by Rozie Wong
Original Artwork by Andrew Maynard
Artwork re invented for double vinyl by Brendan Elliott
Vinyl Mastering by Michael O'Connell
