It was the third album he released in 2019 as part of an album cycle but strangely it is probably the easiest place to start. One of the last albums I discovered in 2019 was ‘Offworld’ by Special Request. In 2020, R&S issued Spectral Frequency, an EP centered around the album’s most well-received track.Someone took a soul singer on a synth space trip. Offworld (October) was simply described by the question “What if Jam & Lewis signed to Metroplex?” Finally, at the end of the year, he self-released the hardest of them all, Zero Fucks. The album featured a taste of Woolford’s softer side, tracing a line through the left-field vibes of the ’90s to some of the floaty, understated strains of late-2010s house. The second was Bedroom Tapes, a collection of early tracks that he rediscovered on cassette during a move but didn’t release until June 2019. The hard and heavy club record, consisting entirely of “bowel-evacuating bangers,” twisted his typical breakbeat hardcore sounds into some of the harshest, most amusical forms possible. In 2019 Woolford announced that he had planned to release four albums throughout the course of the year the first was Vortex, released in May. An EP titled Curtain Twitcher, built around one of the album’s tracks and including a Peder Mannerfelt remix, appeared around the same time. Belief System also saw Woolford stretching his musical footprint by combining soundtrack-inspired atmospherics and field recordings with his now-trademark heavyweight breaks. Released once again through Houndstooth, the album featured no less than 23 tracks that had been recorded over a three-year period. A few months later, Woolford dropped the first track, “Adel Crag Microdot,” from his second Special Request full-length album, Belief System. In addition to a wide variety of electro, techno, and jungle tracks, the mix included several new Special Request productions, some of which were released (in unmixed form) on Woolford’s Stairfoot Lane Bunker EP. In 2017, he mixed the 91st volume of the Fabriclive series. Back on Houndstooth, Special Request’s speed garage-inspired single “Transmission” was released later in the year. A remix EP (including two takes by Shed’s similarly styled Head High alias) followed in 2016. In 2015, Special Request signed to XL (a label responsible for releasing many of the classic breakbeat techno tracks that Woolford took inspiration from) and released a series of three Modern Warfare EPs. In 2014, Houndstooth released HTH vs HTH, a split 12″ that featured Special Request and Akkord remixing each other’s tracks. The CD and digital editions added material from the singles, as well as Woolford’s Special Request remixes for Tessela and Lana Del Rey. After another single on Special Request and the Hardcore EP on Fabric’s Houndstooth division, Woolford released the Soul Music album in October 2013. While some of the tracks were more straightforward techno, others included choppy jungle breaks and rave synths, and were much harder-edged. In 2012, Woolford initiated a label of the same name with a trio of 12″ releases, one of which featured a remix from Kassem Mosse and Mix Mup. One of several aliases used by Paul Woolford (aka Bobby Peru, Hip Therapist, Wooly, and Skip Donahue), Special Request was inspired by the breakbeat techno, drum’n’bass, and other underground dance music forms the DJ and producer encountered on pirate radio stations in his native U.K.
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