Nightmares on Wax’s next full-length, Carboot Soul —its title referencing the second-hand sales where Evelyn would source many of his samples—would be another four years in the making.Tapping into the same core of musicians from Smokers Delight , and with Robin Taylor-Firth as co-producer, the 1999 album found Evelyn making the transition from collage sampler to master producer, writer, and arranger. “This whole idea of the ghost in the sample had started to emerge,” he says. “When I was expressing melodies to Robin and getting him to play them, these were things I was picking up from the samples.When those two worlds came together, it really worked.” This evolution was underscored by the opening track “Les Nuits,” which revisited the Quincy Jones “Summer in the City” motif that had opened the previous two albums, this time in the form of a fifty- two-piece orchestral arrangement. “I had that Quincy Jones album [ You’ve Got It Bad Girl ] on my shelf for three years before I had a sampler [and] I always said,‘One day I’m going to sample that,’ which I did on A Word of Science [as “Nights Interlude”],” Evelyn explains. “We then brought Robin in, and I remember me and Kevin listening on the Walkman to his beautiful version [“Nights Introlude”] for Smokers Delight, and saying,‘Oh my god, we’ve created a baby.’Then Rob Mitchell atWarp says,‘You should do an orchestrated version.’ So that became ‘Les Nuits.’” Smokers Delight had been an era-defining release, inspiring a boom in sample-based downtempo projects. Given the inherent pressure in following such a statement, I wondered what impulses drove Evelyn as he set about creating Carboot Soul. “The next record was always going to be challenging,” he says.“So I really did my best to not repeat what I did on that album.That is why Carboot Soul doesn’t have any segues or interludes, and it has song structures in there. I wanted to try and escape what I’d done [before], even though I was proud of it. From a producer’s point of view, I really wanted to expand working with musicians and vocalists.” Not long after recording the strings for“Les Nuits,”Evelyn flew to NewYork to hit the studio with his hip-hop heroes, De La Soul.The result was “Keep On,” a single included on 2000’s Sound of N.O.W. EP and, years later, the deluxe reissue of Carboot Soul .“I was on the phone with [Posdnuos,] and told him my idea for this long, old-school track. So I sent him the cassette in the post, and he was really into it,” he remembers. “Halfway through the session, Dave [Trugoy the Dove] was in the booth doing the chorus. I’d been smoking a blunt with the engineer, and I could see a reflection of me in the glass of the booth. And that kind of froze me: I was there with a group I call the ‘John Coltrane of rap.’” As Evelyn moved between different projects for Warp as its longest-serving artist, he continued to seek inspiration through organic collaborations.These took the form of In a Space Outta Sound from 2006, featuring Evelyn’s old friend and collaborator Shovell on percussion and Sara Garvey on vocals, to Feeling Good (2013) and Shape the Future (2018), which brought on Jazzanova trumpeter Sebastian Studnitzky as arranger. “Through these albums, I was still sampling and trusting my ears,” he says. “I wasn’t doing cassettes anymore, but I was still doing my
Then this KLF record came out that we could really associate with because of all the samples.” Working from an Atari ST computer and an Akai S950 sampler at his home studio, Evelyn began diving into his vinyl crates to create his own downtempo collages. “Now I [could] sample all the breaks from all this music I had been collecting, which led me into my whole record collection,” he recalls. “I was looping all this stuff up onto cassette, and we were listening to all my sample tapes at the afterparties.” After playing his chill-out cassettes for years at these gatherings, one night he had an epiphany. “I was back at a friend’s house, and I was like,‘I’m going to do my chill-out album but [unlike the KLF], it’s going to be a hip-hop, sample-based, chill-out album, and I’m going to call it Smokers Delight ,” he says.“Me and my friends had lived with the making of that album for four years.” Following the 1992 single “Happiness!,” Kevin Harper had drifted away from the project, leaving George as the sole member of Nightmares on Wax—a solo act by default.“When Kevin left, I didn’t really know what was going to happen. It was a bit of a nervy time,” Evelyn recalls. “But Steve and Rob at Warp had been at Nightmares on Wax events, and had heard all these sample tapes I had been making.They said,‘Why don’t you just do that [ Smokers Delight ] idea as the next album?’” Following A Word of Science , Evelyn had begun working with musicians across a string of 12-inches, including keyboardist Robin Taylor-Firth, who would become a key figure, if not quite a full- fledged member, in this next iteration of Nightmares on Wax.While Smokers Delight was deeply rooted in sample culture, it also found Evelyn expanding his sonic palette even further, with live elements from Taylor-Firth, guitarist Chris Dawkins, bassist Hamlet Luton, and percussionist Andrew Lovell, better known as Shovell. “That really helped the project come to life,” Evelyn says.“Robin, coming from a high-level classical world, combined with my raw, electronic hip-hop approach to things, it really worked together.” Released in September 1995, Smokers Delight tapped into the zeitgeist of a collective rave comedown that went far beyond the erroneous tag of trip-hop. “The making of the record had been so organic, created at these afters with my friends, that to now see it being relived with people in their own way at their own afters was really special,” Evelyn recalls of the response. “I feel like music is a reflection of where we are at. It is a mirror and echo—all I was doing was documenting and expressing where we were at during that time. And now kids will come up to me saying they were brought up [with] this record. So the next generation is experiencing this record in their own way.Which is unbelievable to me because all we were doing was sharing what we were living.”
- ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES -
WaxPoetics 73
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