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Raggamuffin VIII Festival 2014

Raggamuffin is Australasia’s premier reggae and roots festival and features an unrivaled line-up of top international and local artists. After seven years in Rotorua, the event has found a new home in Auckland to be closer to its strong fan base.

Headliners include British reggae royalty UB40 ft Ali Campbell, Astro & Mickey Virtue, Jamaican reggae revolutionist Chronixx and iconic hip-hop legends Ice Cube and Cypress Hill. acts also set to include leading Pacific reggae artist Fiji and Jamaican queen Etana.

They will be joined by more top-shelf Kiwi acts including Katchafire, House of Shem, Che Fu & The Kratez, Sons of Zion, Aaradhna with full band, P-Money, Sammy Johnson featuring Brownhill and Tomorrow People.

Get your name down for the new Raggamuffin VIII album to listen to these fantastic artists.

DLT - Great Mixes

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It’s a mystery why DLT only has a handfull of remixes in his resume. He's clearly a man with great taste and knows how to get the best out of what's in front of him.

Those skills are obvious on Great Mixes, DLT’s radical reinterpretation of Supergroove’s Traction. The mini-album was produced in the aftermath of a Supergroove/Joint Force national tour, with DLT chosen by Supergroove to execute the project, (and thank the good lord you were spared the Strawpeople remix with that special underwater trumpet courtesy of Greg Johnson).

The tracks on Great Mixes are often just made up of a skeleton of beats and vocals but still manage to be refined, beautiful and weird, opening up whole new dimensions within the originals. Check out Depth bomb, a demented paring back of You freak me. Gone are the guitar shenanigans of Ben Sciascia and left in it’s place is the bombastic charisma of the beat (and Karl Steven’s screeching harmonica licks).

But Greatest Mixes is not just a refocousing of exisiting material, take Bloody shame, his evisceration of chart topper Can’t get enough. About half-way through, DLT hijacks proceedings. Suddenly Supergroove are ousted and the DJ becomes centre stage with a virtuo performance of scratching and track manipulation.

You can hear that those turntable skills to optimum effect on the Deepgrooves compilation track DLT meets the Projector-Freestyle Dub. Three and a half minutes in he throws down and starts gouging away at Mike Hodgsons sinister dub. Turned up way loud it sounds like DLT’s ripping jagged tracts into time not moving a piece of vinyl back and forth across a turntable. Epic.

At times DLT's treatment will highlight an aspect which is almost hidden in the normal mix of the song. Take the vocals, stripped back, without the funky Supergroove cacophony, the voices are a touching reminder that these are a bunch of teenage boys. Horny eighteen year olds who might just have the world at their feet, still a couple of years away from it all falling to pieces.