LTJ Bukem – Producer Vol 5

DJ, label boss, club night visionary, musical entrepreneur, standard bearer. For well over ten years now, Danny Williamson has been at the forefront of the “intelligent” drum’n’bass movement in Britain. Under the moniker LTJ Bukem, and armed with his Good Looking Organisation record label, ‘Speed’ nights at London’s Mars Bar, and phenomenal talent, Williamson helped take a scene dogged by an unpopular and violent public image, and made it cool.

Packed with a broad range of rare and previously unavailable material, Bukem uses this ‘Producer’ LP to guide us through his ground-breaking career, from where he started, through where he’s been to where he’s going. From his first ever release, ‘Delitfol’, a mix of the ambient and the full-on, bleeps and beats, through to a modern day remixing of jazz master Herbie Hancock‘ s ‘Essence’, it’s the life and work of one of the UK’s dance pioneers.

The birth of Good Looking Organisation is marked with a reworked ‘Demons Theme’, the track that helped launch the label, and previously unreleased material is given an airing with the funky Latin-orientated beats of ‘Dream World’.

Not just a producer but also a remixer, Bukem’s extensive remixing is represented by his original mix of ‘The James Bond Theme’ for David Arnold’s ‘Shaken and Stirred’ project as well as the Herbie Hancock mix, Bukem taking on a legend and a hero and coming out victorious.

Packed with the old and new, the rare and the slightly better known, ‘Producer 5’ is a fascinating journey into the mind and the influence of LTJ Bukem, the jazz, house, ambience and breakbeats that have becomes Bukem’s trademark sound that has always been ahead of its time. As the sample on another featured oldie, ‘Bookworm’, goes: “If you have a quality let it define you, whatever it is.”

LTJ Bukem definition: genius.