Let It Slide Mark Hawkins

• 1 Let It Slide 03:26
• 2 Memory Of A Dancefloor 05:44
• 3 Rollout 05:48
• 4 Let It Slide (Original Dub Mix) 04:56
• Total Runtime 19:54

Info for Let It Slide

Coming through as a producer in the early 2000's, nothing much seemed normal. The whirlwind of 90s dance music innovation had given way to a lack of focus, with increasingly innovative and accessible technology making the sounds heard on dancefloors more eclectic but at the same time the parties had started to feel less inspired, as if it were too hard to keep hold of the magic that had swirled around us for the last 10 years.

Against this backdrop, Mark Hawkins immediately stood out by how grounded he was compared to most of the space cadets floundering with their musical calling. Watching one of his staggeringly raw live sets, ripping up the floor with a combination of jacking Chicago house and bare bones techno was to see a pragmatic idealist carving out a unique space, unashamed to reference his inspirations with humour and bombast.

It was perhaps inevitable that Mark’s boundless spirit would see him push through the barriers of the UK’s more experimental audiences to gain greater presence with his entrance to a more underground House sound. Releases followed on Dixon Avenue Basement Jams and Clone before arriving on Houndstooth, blending House and Techno in a way that reached for the sky even while their roots were clearly planted firmly in the ground. Whilst always tough-as-painted-nails, the music progressed from being identifiable through its keen rawness to displaying increasing sophistication.

During a lost year that’s been anything but normal, it’s no surprise that Mark has dug deeper, gathering his influences and ideals into a more experimental, yet relevant and cohesive whole. The Twelve tracks on this new album represent a blossoming of Mark’s creativity; freed from the constraints of immediate dance-floor delivery they explore new territory, rampaging over a landscape of electro-funk, body-rocking house, experimental electronica, euphoric pop, and reflective chill out all underpinned by his accomplished melodic sensibility.

Lead single from the album from the old ways and into the new is ‘Let It Slide’, his second collaboration with Jamie Lidell (following 2018’s “We Should Be Free”) that tears up the rulebook. Beat’s stumble and stutter, resolving in angular B-boy grooves while the bass line sounds like it’s being slapped out by a P Funk-addicted robotic jackhammer. In its sheer disregard for musical conventions, it reprises Lidell’s previous work with Cristian Vogel in their genre-destroying freakbeat combo, Super Collider, and perfectly sums up an album that challenges what ‘normal’ from now on should be.

Mark Hawkins
has had a career in music spanning the past 25 years. It has encompassed torturing Goa trance ravers with esoteric techno records on Welsh hillsides in the mid 90s, hanging with UK house heads like the DiY and Smokescreen sound-systems around quarries, fields, clubs and pubs in the Midlands, after which he found his initial niche in producing punky techno around the turn of the millennium for labels like Djax Up Beats and Mosquito.

After an 8 year stint producing, releasing and playing out proper underground house music as Marquis Hawkes on labels like Houndstooth and Aus Music, making techno records for DVS1’s Mistress imprint and Len Faki’s Figure recordings as Juxta Position, alongside other work under the names Contactless and Falcon Black Ops for Unknown To The Unknown, Hawkins now embarks on the next phase of his career, which will gradually amalgamate his broad influences into one unique sound.

This album contains no booklet.