As I’ve ventured further into the world of electronic music, more pointedly – BASS MUSIC – I’ve noticed an incredible gap between the accessible and the challenging. It seems the entry-level stuff gets discarded quickly in favour of darker, harder-on-the-ear music. The artists that newbies and vets can agree on get further and further away from one another. Sometimes though there are artists, DJs, who dwell in that vast chasm, building tiny bridges so friends on either side of the divide can find each other once again. Jimi Needles is one of these DJs. His mixes and mixtapes are places where people who aren’t familiar with the increasingly large world of bass music can sit comfortably with the ones who need the harder stuff after years of the easy shit. His soundcloud has become an invaluable tool in my life for finding a quick solution as to what to put on when the downtime in a group comes, or even better, when trying to listen to something new with people who have less clue than I and still want their electronic music rooted in the comfortable rhythms and grooves of real life. This is all a long way of saying Jimi Needles makes bass music that everyone can love. If you’re having a party and need to get asses shaking, I promise, you can’t go wrong.

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1. Do you remember the first album you bought with your own money?

Fatboy Slim, You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby. That album was fucking sick and it’s still the sickest thing ever.

What’s your favourite track on there?

One is “Praise You.” I don’t know about you, but you know when you get older and you just want to investigate where the DNA of these songs comes from? For instance, you go onto Who Samples and type in any song and it’ll tell you who and what was sampled. As a 10 year old I had never had anything like that and now it really appeals to me. I was kind of aware of hip-hop at the time because I had a CD I was given around 1996, it had Public Enemy and stuff on it and I was just like, “Whoa, what the fuck is this?” It was a compilation disc and I thought it was completely sick. I could make the correlation that I really liked the funky beats and aggressive lyrics then I heard Fatboy Slim and thought, “Okay, I still like this but it’s not hip-hop.” I didn’t even know what it was called. I mean, it’s breaks, but when I was a kid I didn’t know what the fuck it was. But that album, when you take samples and arrange them, you still can’t make it the same as it is on the album. It’s absolutely mental how someone does that. It takes the most extensive musical mind to pull that off. And Norman Cook, Fatboy Slim, paved the way. There was also scratching on there and scratching was something I was aware of but not being cool or a DJ, I had no fucking idea what it was really was. So, there’s “Praise You” and there’s also a track on there called “Fucking in Heaven,” that I used play really loud. My parents would come upstairs and say, “What the fuck is this?”

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