Luke Slater - Red Alert Promotions

Shaven headed, calm and collected, Luke Slater is hidden by a plate of poppadoms in a blistering West London curry house on a scorching summer's evening. Being the only people in the restaurant, the waiters attentively hover around like court servants at Buckingham Palace as Luke S delivers the history of his life. Through his early dalliances with sound textures via his dad's 1957 Garrard hi fi system, to his drumming exploits with a prog rock outfit at the age of 12, to his early experiences of the baffling world of studio engineers. Between mouthfuls of pilau rice and nan bread he explains why things did not exactly run smoothly in those early days. "All those studios we went into were not geared to what we wanted to do. They'd be like, `We had Mel and Kim in here last week,' One engineer we had was Angelo Starr, the brother of Edwin Starr. he was a really nice guy but he had no idea. The first thing he said when we went in was, `OK guys, lets make some hits.' We didn't really hit it off after that." Understandably, a man with his own vision, a man with his own agenda, Luke Slater is a bit of a one off. Asking Luke Slater to make hits is a bit like asking Michaelangelo to paint a beach hut.

Quiet and focused, Slater delivers his speech in a careful, measured way, he converses with the reserved confidence of an individual fully self aware and in total control of his artistic direction. A true maverick with a clear focus and an untouchable ability to get to places others only dream of reaching. Turned onto music via early experiments with sounds and noises on his dad's old reel-to-reel rather than any affinity to a particular musical sub culture, Luke's apprenticeship differs to those of his contemporaries who see 1988 as Year Zero. He talks in technological conundrums and of sound collages rather than having a life affirming experience down at Shoom. Of course, the electro beat of `Street Sounds' and the clattering minimalism of early Chicago and Detroit exports connected with Luke in the late Eighties, but first and foremost, Slater came to these movements with a developed musical mind. He didn't need converting - he was already hearing these sounds in his fevered imagination.

The transition from dabbler to active participant was not long in coming. By late 1989, with his partner in crime Al Sage, Luke set about defining his vision on the fledgling label Jelly Jam, a label offshoot from a Brighton record shop of the same name where Luke was working at the time. A batch of Detroit-influenced tracks were spat out at an alarming rate, a deal with D-Jax records was struck which saw Slater adopting the guise of Clementine, but it wasn't until his link up with Peacefrog and another change of moniker to Planetary Assault Systems that Luke Slater's name became widely known and praised. Yet Luke's furious output soon started to take it's toll: "I began to realise you can't do everything, I was beginning to lose focus on what I originally intended to do in the first place." Critics and public alike began to hail Luke as the natural British inheritor of the Detroit sound with his textured, layered techno odysseys, yet Luke's talent stretched way beyond simple mimicry. "If you want to achieve something, you can't just sit around and rest on a style you've already mastered, you'd just end up going in circles, getting nowhere. You've got to keep on looking." So, after a furious few years of studio work and an equally strenuous DJ schedule (Luke has been at the forefront of British techno DJ'ing since the late Eighties) he has decided to slow down and regain his focus on the sites of his ultimate vision.

Drawing on his prison-thickness roll up, he leans back on his chair and declares, "There's a lot more I want to do musically. I know I can do it, but it's just a case of getting there." Taking time out and concentrating on his own desires rather than doing the expected and pumping out a barrage of dancefloor friendly techno blasters, Slater has joined up with NovaMute to produced a highly accomplished and highly variable album "Freek Funk", recorded in his home studio in Crawley. "It's definitely different," opines the satisfied Slater, "I feel it's a real advancement in the right areas. I didn't want to do an album people expected, I didn't want to make another techno album. But it's still a musical stop off on the way to somewhere else." Heaven knows where Luke will end up but for the time being this album is a landmark.

Breathtaking, scary, moving, funky; it's a techno album that's not techno, a disco album that's not disco, an industrial album that's not industrial, there is no way to pin down Slater's NovaMute debut. Swinging violently from nonconformist techno assaults to statuesque moments of grandeur, to funk driven rare groove workouts, the album breaks techno down to it's composite parts and then stretches them to their limits.

Opening with the funk-driven `Purely', we are then transported to `Score One', a darkly futuristic soundscape which melts into `Origin' and `Score Two', a bubbling mass of weird sounds and deep beats. The trip continues throughout the album with the warped relatives `Scores Three And Four', popping up intermittently throughout proceedings with the stealth of a John Carpenter score. Electro gets a nod with `Are You There', with it's rich string arrangements and soothing waves of bell chimes this is a `Tour De France' for the 1990's. `Bless Bless' is a different creature altogether, a spacedusted silver surfer's anthem. And onwards to `Time Dancer', where James Brown meets Liz Frazer on a car production line - ethereal industrial funk if you like. And not to forget the stellar beauty of `Love' that ranks alongside UR's `Amazon' as a track to break hearts at 40 beats and the otherworldly madness of `Walking The Line', a jazz odyssey that conjures forth the Saturnalian spirit of Sun Ra.

Schizophrenic and rampagingly original, Slater has achieved what so many aspire to, a unique and accessible album that pushes the musical envelope further than anyone else. With plans to further his transformative powers into song structures and a muted plan to take a full band out live, Luke Slater is not content to merely stay ahead of the incessant marching beat of the dance rhythm. This album owes as much to musical mavericks as Brian Wilson as to the industrial grind of Detroit, to the groundbreaking strides left by Kraftwerk, Steve Reich and Can. Future music, made today.