Phantom Beats - “Rumbler” Collectivism 2000 Breakbeat
Phantom Beats were a highly successful breaks and breakbeat duo from Cardiff, Wales. Consisting of Matt Callahan and Neil Cocker, the pair strung together a good bunch of singles between 2000 and 2004 and released a handful of mixes, too. They were ranked as top breaks and breakbeat DJs in the UK for the few years that they were around and played alongside Fatboy Slim and The Chemical Brothers. Phantom Beats also played a set for BBC Radio. Cocker, who’s since gone on to become a successful entrepreneurial tech start-up guy, co-founded the Plastic Raygun label, which played host to popular acts like The Propellerheads and Bentley Rhythm Ace. Phantom Beats also somehow managed to record a song with famous maker of model buses, Boris Johnson.
In 2000, a track by Phantom Beats called “Rumbler” appeared on a super rare electronic comp, Collectivism (I had to put an alert on my Discogs account to buy it because when I first discovered that it existed, not a single person was selling it), which was released by the instantly ephemeral label, Raya. As stated on their still somehow currently existing website, “Raya are a collective of film-makers, designers, visual artists, DJs and musicians whose critically acclaimed festival and club events have brought a little bit of street culture into gallery spaces and a little bit of gallery culture into club-land.” Neat idea of some class mixing at work there.
Anyhoo, “Rumbler”’s a cool tune because it’s like a sweet hybrid of punchy, distorted breakbeat with a lot of wickedly subterranean drum-n-bass-and-electro sub-bass to go along with it. As the foundational drum break smacks with scratchiness and the sub-bass takes on a bit of a squelchy character, the song wanders pretty unpredictably, adding percussive tweaks here and there, and continues to build on itself while also making room for some intermittent patches of deconstruction. However, just when you think to yourself, “this is all actually getting just a wee bit monotonous,” Callahan and Cocker go ahead and drop the string synths on it, transforming the track for the back half, which also ends up lending some unexpected emotional depth to it, too. Awesome track.
A rather rare one from this Welsh pair who were tops in the UK breaks and breakbeat scene in the early aughts.