DJ Food (present) : Strictly Kev

With nearly 25 years of DJing experience and more than a decade serving up Food for DJs, for both Ninja and Coldcut's weekly radio show 'Solid Steel', Kev is now in the Food hot seat.

At his 'Telepathic Fish' ambient parties in the early 90's he booked Matt Black on his first VJing gigs, started designing artwork for Ninja Tune and paired up with PC (Patrick Carpenter) to form the public 'face' of DJ Food on 4 decks in clubs around the world. After working on various Food and Coldcut related studio projects with PC (A Recipe for Disaster, Journeys by DJ, ColdKrushCuts and the Blech mix compilations for Warp) they released the album 'Kaleidoscope' in 2000, closely followed by the 'Quadraplex EP' in 2001.

Also arriving in 2001 was the first in a series of Solid Steel mix CDs, starting with DJ Food & DK (Darren Knott - Solid Steel's producer) and the publicly lauded 'Now, Listen'. Since then he's been constantly art directing the Ninja label, designing for artists like Amon Tobin, The Herbaliser, DJ Vadim and Funki Porcini. Mix work has included a re-score of the Monkees' cult film 'Head', an as-yet-unreleased album of vintage Sesame Street funk, and his magnum opus 'Raiding the 20th Century'. This last hour long mix / documentary was an internet only release, charting the history of the cut-up and featured journalist Paul Morley reading from his book 'Words & Music'. Not only did it crash servers on several sites that hosted it due to its initial popularity but it was later subject to a cease & desist order from EMI for multiple infringements of copyright.

In 2007, alongside DK again, he followed up their Solid Steel debut with the sequel - 'Now, Listen Again', and the pair spent much of 2008 transferring their mix into a 4 deck audio visual live show. Using Serato's video plug-in - that enables video to be mixed and scratched via turntables the same as records - they christened their efforts 'video turntablism'.

Kev is now working on a series of EPs that will make up the next DJ Food album, an exhaustive DJ Food website (www.djfood.org) and providing artwork for Ninja artists such as King Cannibal and the 20th anniversary label celebrations.

DJ Food (past):

DJ Food has been many persons, of who we will come to in a moment. DJ Food is best described as Food for DJs, simple as that, just flip it around and it begins to mean something entirely different.

Originally produced by Coldcut the DJ Food project started in 1990 with the release of 'Jazz Brakes', with 'Jazz Brakes Volume 3' being the label's most successful early album. Not only are they effective collections of breaks, loops and samples ideal for mixing, remixing and producing - but also fine collections of funky jazz & hip hop tunes, that cut it just as well on the discerning dancefloor as in the safety of your own home...

Since the growth of the abstract hip hop scene in recent years the 'Jazz Brakes' albums have proved to be ahead of their time. The latter DJ Food albums have developed with shades of latin, dub, techno, ambient, tribal, african and jungle flavouring the funk. The 2005 album 'A Recipe For Disaster' was a conscious break from the five 'Jazz Brakes' volumes to form more of an identity as an artist, and a remix album of tracks from all 6 LPs 'Refried Food' was released Feb '95.

But who made this food? Matt Black & Jonathan More (aka Coldcut) were responsible for starting the DJ Food series of 'Jazz Brakes' back in the early 90's, and along the way they met Patrick Carpenter (PC) who was commonly misconstrued as the computer that they made the tracks on for a while. A loose collaborative team began to form as more like-minded people arrived at the party; Paul Brook, Paul Rabiger, Strictly Kev and Issac Elliston to name a few.

Whilst keeping their hand in as DJs, Matt & Jon couldn't and didn't want to DJ twice in one night under both aliases of Coldcut & DJ Food, so PC & Strictly stepped up to represent the Food club-wise. This was the score for some time, until PC became so busy with his involvement in the Cinematic Orchestra that he decided to depart to concentrate on that, leaving Strictly Kev to carry the mantle.

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