Since Simon Shackleton’s move to Denver back in the summer, it’s fair to say that the creative juices that were simmering away for the last couple of years while in the UK, have now hit boiling point! No fewer than 12 new pieces of music have been written, recorded, mixed and mastered since landing in the States, both under his own name and his Elite Force alias. It’s his brand new Futureshock – Sci-Fi Re:Constructed mixtape featured that has commanded the most amount of time of late, however, and soon you will find out why.
Now, if you know where to look on the internet, tracking down a decent mixtape worthy of your time doesn’t take too long. On those rare occasions, however, you come across one that’s a little bit special, one that grabs your attention and keeps you locked every second it’s playing, one that you know you’ll be listening to for many, many years to come after just one listen. If you’ve not guessed already, Simon’s new mixtape is one of those special ones, and if I were to call it a masterpiece, I’d still feel like I was selling it short.
So, what’s making this a must-listen mixtape, I hear you think? Well, to make his mixtape stand head and shoulders above anything else you’re likely to listen to for a while, Simon has painstakingly deconstructed hundreds of tracks from his vast library (using some of the new AI tools where needed) and pieced them back together to create a journey quite unlike any you’ve been on before. Using Ableton Live to trigger up to 16 individual channels of audio at any one time, Simon generously spreads basslines, lead lines, vocals, and drum loops over a bed of breakbeat, house and techno, and the result is a magical 2-hour mix that he best describes as “a hugely addictive, compulsive and compelling blend of music that’s often new, often familiar but always utterly unique”.
Thanks to its sci-fi theme, retro-future aesthetic and choice movie samples, it only takes a few minutes of Simon’s mixtape to feel like we’re going somewhere, somewhere new, somewhere vibrant, somewhere with an abundance of respair. After take-off and reaching cruising altitude, the breakbeat, house and techno beats fire us towards new horizons while the components of the deconstructed tracks enter the fray in a way you’ve never heard them before. Pieces of different puzzles fit together like you never expected they would. So much so, in fact, that your mind can often be so blown by the last 5-minutes, that the next 5 just pass you by. Do not despair, though, because if you feel like you have missed a bit, you’ll just have to go back and listen again, which will more than likely be the outcome after your first listen anyway. Give it 100 listens and you still might not get your head around what Simon has masterfully put together here. It’s a work of pure genius! A mixtape from the gods, or a mixtape from a god, you decide…
Links Simon Shackleton :
Soundcloud / Facebook / Website / Bandcamp / YouTube / Twitter
