Coldcut Solid Steel: Saturday January 13, 2018

Solid Steel (12th January) As we enter our 30th year of broadcasting, it's timely to feature the legendary Kevin Saunderson as our guest in Hour 1. An artist whose music appeared many times, including the first Solid Steel show in 1988, which also featured an interview with his fellow 'Belleville Three' member Juan Atkins. Alongside Derrick May they changed the face of electronic music and the genesis of today’s enormous techno scene can be retraced straight to Kevin, Derrick and Juan, as their formative experiments on rudimentary hardware sketched a blueprint for a genre that was yet to exist. Along with his successful project Inner City, Kevin Saunderson is the man behind the excellent KMS label that started in 1987 and has releases from Chez Damier, Carl Craig, Ron Trent, MK and Bicep, as well as a number of his own aliases.  
In Hour 2 we hand over to Sunil Sharpe, one of Europe's most renowned and well-loved techno DJs, with a mixing style that is distinctly his own. Gaining an enviable reputation for his DJing in the early '00s, he was soon invited to play at Berlin's Tresor Club, marking the start of an intensive involvement in the scene. He has recorded for labels such as Black Sun Records, Rave Or Die, Mord, Trensmat, Inner Surface Music, Violet Poison and perhaps most notably Blawan & Pariah's Sheworks. His latest release is a split 12" with Minimum Syndicat  called 'Joyless Euphoria' and his collaboration with fellow Dublin-based producer DeFeKT saw the release of Tinfoil 6 last month. He told us;
"My aim with DJ mixes like this is to make something that'll stand up in the long-term, kind of like a good record. The majority of records I played here are new or recent while the rest are mostly made up of music from the '90s, and a few from the '00s. There was no set theme but as it came together I guess it was about representing techno and some surrounding styles through a range of rhythms, moods and eras."