10 years ago he was all about the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang… Now he’s just straight up swilling his mouth with shooters.
How times change for High Contrast…
The original Shotgun Mouthwash dropped on January 25, just two days before it soundtracked Trainspotting 2’s fast-paced, instant peeper-popping opening sequence. Mic-fronted by the man himself, everything about it seems timely… The lyrics not only fit the film perfectly but also the weirded-out times in which we live (“I’m an American nightmare hiding in a Mexican salad bar”) Yet they were written at least a year before either Boyle announced the long-awaited sequel and Trump declared the long-derided border wall.
“I made the tune one night quite randomly,” explains Lincoln. “I recorded it in one take and put it to the side for a while because I didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t feel it could be used as part of a High Contrast album. Underworld liked it, though, and passed it on to Danny Boyle. It was a great way of bringing it into the world and stretching the idea of what High Contrast can be.”
Another thing that expands the idea of what High Contrast can be is his own remix. Dropping just days after the original, it’s a ridiculously rough, distorted, fucked-up jungle version that adds even more chaos to the original. Anteing up excitement levels for his new album later on this year – and reaffirming our suspicions that he is, in fact, the biggest badboy to ever emerge from south Wales – it shut the mercifully lesser-spotted original-slaying D&B purists down once and for all.
“It wasn’t a concession to the fanbase, though,” Lincoln corrects us. “It couldn’t be… I’m not known for jungle and I’ve never made something so literally jungle on this level before! It’s at 152 BPM, like the original, which is a great tempo for an amen lasher. I wanted to make the track in the same way the original was made… Not over-produced but raw, simple and older. I tried to make it quickly and not over-finesse it and tried to distort it using an old mixer.”
The mixer, and a selection of other 70s outboard curios are at the heart of, or at least play an influential role in, Lincoln’s latest endeavours. Working with a less-is-more, hands-on, live recording approach, there’s a refreshed air, energy and attitude to everything he’s doing in the studio right now.
“Yeah I have been being buying quite a few things lately,” he explains. “Not expensive gear, though. I’m trying to find weird old things form the 70s, but not in order to be a slave to the past. It’s more than the sound, it’s the whole process. When you record a take live you’re adding FX live in that moment – you can’t keep going back over it. Not to be a slave to the past but just trying to interrupt the smooth workflow of doing everything digitally. I’m trying to shock the system to get unexpected results.”
System-shocking, gun-toting, mouthwash-slugging, genre-burning fusion… Lincoln’s on a next level trip in 2017. And that’s without even remarking on the fact his live show will be headlining Electric Brixton on March 18. We’re hyped to see how this develops…
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