iDJ
May 2002

Next up for UK garage’s perennial outsider is an album for Locked On under his Phuturistix moniker (due for release late summer), followed by a period of sustained work on a new project with Italy’s DJ Rocca: Da Luq. It’s the latter that he’s clearly the most excited about, explaining that it will signal a return to the days of speaker-busting heaviness - albeit with a more musical edge.
“We did five days of recording last week, and the stuff we’ve done sounds great”, he enthuses. “They’re club-oriented tracks, with the same amount of jump-uppiness as one of Zinc’s Bingo tracks, but with this jazz fusion thing going on. There are bits of flute, lots of soundtrack noises and stuff. It’s more edgy, funky and heavy than the other stuff that’s coming out. It’s heavy, it’s loud and it’ll scare your granny!”

Jockey Slut
August 2002

Da Luq
Supafine (Soulja)

In which Jockey Slut’s favourite garage DJ, Zed Bias (on sabbatical this issue), dons one of his many disguises. But we’d know those beats anywhere. Both “Supafine” and “Oriental Express” are rough enough to please the dark side garage heads whilst being kooky enough to find favour with west London types who like their beats broken (and finding favour with the latter is no mean feat, believe us). Fine and, indeed, super. CB

MixMagazine
August 2003

One To Buy
Da Luq “Supafine” (Soulja)

Zed Bias seems to have been working hard on his anthem stockpile of late and this one slipped out. After Bia’s amazing Maddslinky album comes a collaboration with Italy’s DJ Rocca featuring a crispy jazz break, some blaxploitation mumbling (”Easy my man, we got business”) before a swerving bassline gets dropped from hell. For both jazz-headz and b-line brehrs, this gem from “Bingo Beats Vol 2″ is simply doing it.

Wire
July 2002

Various
Dj Zinc Presents: Bingo Beats Vol 2 - Mixed By Zed Bias

Zed Bias - aka dave Jones, who records under the appropriate alias Maddslinky for Sirkus -plays selector for the second mix CD on DJ Zinc’s breakstep label, Bingo Beats. Especially for the vinyl-challenged, there may be no better introduction to the current state of darkside Garage: the mix is thick with sinister, bottom heavy tracks from Jammin (Zinc), Ras Kwame, and Darqwan, representing labels like Bingo, Soulja, Big Apple, and Sidestepper. Leaning heavily on upfront tracks on dubplate, this collection presents a percussive strain of Garage that veers ever closer to the singleminded skeletalism of drum’n'bass, albeit at that just-a-hair-past-House tempo. Maddslinky’s “Reasons” kicks things off with a wobbly low end, underwater keys and scattered chipmunk vocal bursts, and for the next hour the disc staggers between this kind of molasses funk and the Runnin label’s chunky breackstep. Paradoxically, the real action’s in the details hiding behind the breaks: just check Daluq’s shivery bass harmonics, ras Kwame’s airbone vocal divots, and the schizo laugh track that ricochets through Jammin’s closing “Tug O’War”.