Intense Records

After The Rain (Dave Lee Alternative II Mix)

£9.99 (£11.99 incl. VAT)

Gilles Peterson and Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick mine new musical possibilities inspired by the early-80s Brit-funk scene with their new project, STR4TA, it’s the first material that Maunick and Peterson have released together in over a decade. Their debut album ‘Aspects’ is the catalyst for a new wave Jazz Funk movement, snapped up by illustrious producer and label owner, Dave Lee, to capture the essence of a unique UK sound in this extraordinary Mix & Dub release.

In the same vein as Dave Lee’s iconic ‘Remixed with Love’ series, his rework of ‘After The Rain’ harps back to the classic Brit-Funk era whilst tailoring it to contemporary club culture with this spaced out Dub; conscientiously keeping the essence of what is magical in the original mix. In a welcomed invitation by Gilles, Lee shares, “I’ve been working on my own album for a lot of the last year, writing and recording new music is great but also a very long winded process, especially during lockdown - it's easy to doubt creative choices. What was nice about After The Rain is I had a new piece of music that was right up my street to play around with.” With the aim of giving more exposure to parts which are not so prominent in the original, Lee’s production process involved rearranging and rebalancing those parts, using a fading technique to create tension, moments and surprises that flow together, capturing that raw, moment to moment sound.

STR4TA is the new wave jazz funk project pioneered by Gilles Peterson and Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick, with an array of musical references that fed into their debut album’s direct, no-frills entries: each track’s parts are cut back to the bare bone. Dave Lee has been producing with love for close to three decades. Dave was one of the first artists to incorporate disco samples in house music when he began his production career in 1988. Arguably house music’s major proponent of soulful, disco-tinged, vocal records and without question instrumental is its development and popularisation, no-one treats a loop, groove or hook with as much care and attention as Lee does.