Raves Of Future Past is a reflective, historically informed musical statement from an artist who can never stop moving toward the future, but perfectly tuned for the present moment. Unless you’re a Cretaceous rock formation (shout-out the Pierre shale) twenty years is a fairly long time to be doing anything, particularly in the ever shifting world of underground music, and unless you’ve been sleeping under one of the aforementioned rock formations for the past twenty years you’d be hard pushed not to know the name T.Williams or as part of the legendary Black Ops under his former grime alias Dread D.We won’t bog you down with a list of his career highs and achievements right now (if you want that you can read it here) but long story short during a period of an enforced (but much welcomed) hiatus from touring as an in-demand DJ and club music hero, brought about by the global shitshow / internatty bread baking tournament that was known in the trade as the COVID 19 pandemic T.Williams, like the best of us, found himself locked down with time on his hands.Using it wisely he spent countless hours reconnecting with and cataloguing his extensive vinyl record collection, diving headlong into twenty five plus years of rave music ranging from UK Garage and grime to jungle, D&B and everything in between. Listening to records end to end, trawling liner notes and generally doing it like he used to do it before the world became a much busier place and every piece of information and art in your life was served up to you algorithmically and in (compressed) high-definition by a little black mirror.Whilst embarking on this sonic journey through the past Tesfa also bought himself a futuristic new tool: an Elektron Digitakt which he says “saved me during lockdown” and got to work on a bunch of music arguably unlike anything he’d made before, which, a couple of lost hard drives and cosmic interventions later, we at Purple City are now proudly presenting to you now in the form of T.Williams debut album Raves Of Future Past. “Proudly presenting” … Who are we pretending to be? We don’t actually talk like that: We’re gasssssed to bring you T.Williams debut album Raves Of Future Past.Jungle, breaks, grime, garage, UK Funky, eski, sublow, deconstructed blog bullshit: it’s got all of that in it, but it’s not really any of that. At heart the album is simply straight rave music: Check out the grimey square wave bassline on Love All You Squares, listen to the expertly chopped jungle breaks on She Loves or You Will See or maybe just try and guess how much time platforms like Beatport are going to waste categorising T4000 or Cheery Coke… organic house / indie dance category we see you. To quote Tesfa Williams himself on the album “This is the album I wanted to make when I was 20 years old, but didn’t know how” Cat no. PURP008Released: 5th April 2024
