Bass Mekanik in FLAC! Talk Audio Is In the MUSIC BUSINESS!

Many, many years ago, I was sat in the window of a shop in Acton, North London, called InCar. I was working as distributor of Earthquake car audio in what had been a car showroom, so it had a double shop front and workshops out the back for installs work. I would get the car audio press from the UK and also Car Audio & Electronics magazine from the USA. In the very back of CA&E was an advert for four ‘˜bass CDs’. I waited until the afternoon and telephoned the number given in the advert.
The American who answered the phone could literally not believe his ears. ‘You phoned, all the way from England? Gee! I only have four titles, you need to call my distributor’ So, I called the distributor and very soon became the very first (there were to be a good few, in time) UK importer and vendor of the Bass CD genre of music. Made with massive lows by artists such as Techmaster PEB, Maggotron and all sorts of names with the inevitable word ‘˜Bass’ in them. And one of the very best and coolest of all was the Bass Mekanik. It was he who said all car audio enthusiasts who like their lows are in fact bass mechanics as they all have to design their system from box, the woofers, to the right amp. And he was going to supply the tunes. His stuff dropped deeper and was just the best.
The years passed and in time, I got some TV work on Pulling Power on ITV. One of the most fun segments I got to plan and film involved flying out to Miami to do an item called The Bass That Ate Miami (after an album title) in which we went to Bass Mekanik’s HomeBass studio and then went out on the street to meet a car with some boom.
That was some time back now and my involvement with Talk Audio and the Bass Mekanik’s full embrace of the righteous side of the new digital era have converged again, as if by fate.
For as well as the CD product, Bass Mekanik music is available to download from his site here: link
Either as the fullest-range files iTunes will ever sell, complete with all the Digital Rights Management protection, or also as other formats on a site called Bandcamp. (cultural movie reference anyone? Comments below, best quote from the film wins a random bass CD from my old collection!) The Bandcamp check out will offer you file format choice options here’s what is says on the site: ‘Download is available in MP3 320, FLAC, and more. You’ll choose your format after checkout.’ Which is cooler than cool.

And Talk Audio magazine readers and forum users get a discount of 5% across the whole Bass Mekanik catalogue for the next three months. Just click their pretty ad box on the magazine and hit the Bass Mekanik Store menu button on the top row. When you get to checkout, enter discount code talkaudio and you will get the 5% discount.

The latest album is called Lowd Slowd and is described thus:
‘A new Bass Mekanik compilation featuring 12 bass heavy cuts that have been slowed down and lowered @ the Mekanik’s HomeBass studios, resulting in bass so low and loud that your teeth will rattle and your head may really explode! Serious bass for serious bassheadz only.’
And when asked for more detail the Mekanik said,
‘There has been a trend over the past couple years of bass fans altering and manipulating favourite songs with their home computers – usually its to slow them down and/or add bass. After hearing more than a few enthusiastic but shall we say botched? versions of our material, we decided who better to manipulate our audio files than us! After all, we have the high resolution studio files and also some quite expensive plug-ins that perform much better than the semi-pro home versions and result in far fewer nasty artefacts…. The result is LOWD SLOWD, which kicks off with the most oft abused song of all, BASS BALLIN’ – and then continues to rumble down the road of sub harmonic excess with some of our personal faves from the last few years. Make no mistake, if you ever want to intentionally cook a woofer or broil some steaks over an incandescent power amp in the tailgate of your truck, this IS the Album of Choice!
Quite simply the most consistently loud deep bass that we have ever released, we are talking high level 16 Hz in some sections, particularly on SUCK MY BASS, which is it’s own little exercise in bass excess. All 12 songs are massive, not a wimp in the bunch so enjoy!’
You can go and have a listen to clips as well as buy Lowd Slowd, here: link

We’ll be putting a sticky at the top of the SPL and Streetbass forums to link back here for forum users to learn more, as well as to link directly to the download site.
My own personal two penny’s-worth is this. Buy the FLAC and keep carefully, convert to anything else you wish.
Talk Audio is way beyond proud to not only be involved with mobile electronics but also the leading edge of the music business as well, with Bass Mekanik Records. The best bass tunes and not solely from Bass Mekanik but from other artists too, as the Bass Mekanik has become a rallying point for younger bass music makers and thus a Bass Mogul as well as producer and musician in his own right. Bass Mekanik is the artist as well as a LABEL. Other acts on the roster are DJ Billy E (who I met years ago) Bassotronics (east coast dude) DJ Droppin’, Bass Launch and DJ Wuzisname.

Talk Audio will be bringing you news of new releases and taking the tunes out to the Ace Café to play them to the likes of Ian ‘˜Iceman’ Pinder and José ‘˜Quakeshaker’ Correia (both of awesome Astra van installs) to get some reactions and reviews from real bass system owners, so we can really suck on the lows and feel what the Man In Miami was wanting us to. I’ll even video some stuff from the street.
So here’s to Talk Audio being involved in the music as well as the tech to reproduce it!
I’m chasing a classical/audiophile FLAC music provider as well, for our audiophile community to do the same thing for the SQ people as has just been done for the bass heads, so wish me luck.