Garage pirate stations (Pure Magic 90.2, Taste 92.5 and Delight 103)

There is an allure to the unknown, in DJ culture as much as anything—but this isn’t merely a set on which someone forgot to identify the spinner. Instead, it’s one side of a C-90 featuring snippets of three different UK garage pirates, circa 2000, with herky-jerk pauses. I found it on a long-since-disappeared message board post in 2013, early in the writing of a dance-music book, when I was downloading sets like a fiend in the name of “research,” and while SoundCloud and Mixcloud and YouTube were well established by then, I wasn’t looking for pirate sets in any meaningful way—my book took place in the States. But this proved irresistible, a perfect representative of a time and place I’d at least brush by.

It wasn’t until I began investigating UK pirate sets in earnest at the beginning of 2018 that I realized just how many of these kinds of things existed. Yet I still hold to my opinion—indeed, its provenance likely meant that it had been passed around by other traders and collectors and fans. That’s a bit different from the way I encounter these things now—on the SC and MC or YT accounts of people who, in many cases, are simply digitizing their own recordings. You find amazing things that way (and I’ve written about some of them for this site), but I appreciate knowing this had made others happy first. In any event, I uploaded it to Mixcloud myself. Now it’s your turn: Its 45 minutes was grabbed on the run and gathers momentum anyway.