We’re proud to announce a new artist to the Mixpak roster: London via St Louis producer, Mr One Hundred. Despite the new name, Mr One Hundred is a veteran of the dance music scene who started out underage raving in St Louis, set up a label with its heart in Detroit and hit the performance art circuit in Chicago before moving to London, UK. It was there, living next door to a Trini BBQ shop and attending Carnival, that his interest and love of soca music grew. A genre with an intensity not far from his techno upbringing, Soca began to work its way into his sets & productions.
His first digital release, “Palm Tree Destruction” is a journey through this history and his influences, resulting in a record that is as unusual and exciting as his musical past. Describing the EP as “power soca music from the future,” the 5 tracks feature his own original productions with, we’re proud to say, officially endorsed samples from the three biggest names in soca: Machel Montano, Fay Ann Lyons and Bunji Garlin. Reaching to the upper limits of techno’s bpms and nestling nicely into the uptempo tradition of power soca, “Palm Tree Destruction” is hyper-energetic club music like no other.
Each track invokes the spirit of carnival through techno tinted glasses as Mr One Hundred adeptly melds the highly compatible rhythmic and percussive foundations of both. “Axis Jab Jab” crescendoes into a trance, while “Head Gone’s” ferocious syncopated drumline powers into Machel’s powerful vocal that encourages you to lose yourself in the music. Layered with synths, cowbells and drums that draw from the hip hop – grime spectrum, the instrumental “HOW Riddim” is an uplifting rave track, while “Hundred Wind It” takes its vocal cues from instructional soca and is perhaps the only soca song to ever feature a 303 acid breakdown. With a title apt for the whole record, “Soca Workout” begins life like a sparse juke joint, building until the steel pans join the party and Fay Ann’s vocal marks its entry into the Trini tradition.
With this first EP, Mr One Hundred has beautifully crafted five dance tracks that make the techno-soca synthesis as natural as a flag-wave in Port of Spain. Energy flash!
