When the long serving Back To Basic's resident and lead visionary of 2020 Vision records, Ralph Lawson, teams up with original Mancunian b-boy record store turned label, Fat City Recordings, we know a re-fried dish of Northern cheese is not in the offing.
And naturally there's more going on here than a simple dex 'n' fx, pro-tooled mix album.
This is the second in the 'Stars on 33' series and Lawson follows Aim's debut for the series with an album that seeks to span some thirty years of production.
To enable the reasonably homogeneous but none-the-less genre hoping selection to blend, Lawson enlists Manchester-based drummer Double D to provide inter-track fillers, breaks and rolls.
It's a simple trick, but it works well, meaning that the Larry Young's Fuel classic, 'Turn Off The Lights', is able to give a slightly improbable send off for a set that includes 1983's brilliant 'Rude Movements' by Sun Palace, Scruff's 'Shrimp', Voom: Voom's b-line broken funk 'Poppen', Flytronic's jazz house on 'Shades of Jade' and ever aptly named 'The Mad Shit' groove 'n' breaks by Headtop.
The selection is varied but funky, with Dubble's 'D-Nah', Tiefschwarz's 'Acid Soul' or All Good Funk Alliance's 'Make Me' keeping the groove even where the genres diverge.
Lawson's set is breaksy, not least through the inclusion of tracks such as the subtle but rolling 'Metro Life' by Formidable Force on his own 2020 Vision imprint. But it's also housey, broken beaty and jazzy.
A welcome break from the clenched buttocks of genre conformism that reveals another, less known, corner of Lawson's house.
