Imagine this:
Sitting in a darkened room in Dalston, London… the music pushes across a very nicely tuned sound system, (a la Cafe Oto). The crowd is captivated by this multi-instrumentalist maestro Jimi Tenor. He plays smoky sax, juxtaposes it with some crazy Moog, all the while underlaid by a funky electronic looping groove. It's a conversation piece! At the end, Jimi says "I'm not quite sure what to do with this track, or what to call it"….
In a moment of 'bravado' one shouts out in reply "Release Me!", the one who is releasing it now, for this is where the very long story starts…
We'll spare you the other details, for now anyway, but it's how we managed to have the one and only Jimi Tenor to grace the fl.oz roster, one of the highlights of our celebration of 25 years of Fluid Ounce Records, with a very limited edition vinyl release for anyone who wants to enjoy and play out its full depth funk and flavour.
The track also inspired Special Guest - a new guise of Chris Vogado (zero dB) to create an off kilter remix that journeys through bruk and house, as well as a super dub version for the B side. (More to come from him.)
Watch this one blow up and big up Jimi!
For the uninitiated (unlikely!), Jimi Tenor has been bending genres and blowing minds since the early '90s. After disbanding Jimi Tenor and His Shamans, he went solo with "Sähkömies" - a raw, experimental debut recorded on minimal kit in a tiny New York apartment and released on Finnish cult label Sähkö, followed by "Europa". He made waves at Berlin's Love Parade, landed a surprise hit with "Take Me Baby", and before long was releasing on none other than Warp Records. His albums "Intervision", "Organism", and "Out of Nowhere" became touchstones for a generation, effortlessly swerving between cosmic jazz, skewed synth-funk, Afrobeat, ambient weirdness and back again.
Jimi's music has always felt like it's been beamed in from another planet yet with the playfulness of pop and some seriously out-of-this-world musical skill and style. It's not just experimental, it's fun, always spontaneous, sometimes absurd, always him.