It is necessary to invent a new scale, something that can adequately serve to measure the resounding advances that DJ Ride’s career has made since he appeared to show that two platters and a mixing board are tools for building the future.
There’s a lot to tell: models cooked in real time with turntables and a sampling pedal, sent from his laboratory in Caldas da Rainha to anyone who wanted to listen; an ITF championship won in 2006; a thunderous debut album that revealed him to a thirstier audience with “Turntable Food” in 2007; another championship, this one from DMC, won in 2008; the debut in the field of dj tools on vinyl in 2009 in collaboration with the Red Bll Home Groove platform; the hug felt by the living legend mulatu astatke after listening to his remix as part of the Red Bull Music Academy’s LX Taster.
The milestones are too many for the available space, but they also include his collaboration with the Supa project, his live DJing for the Rocky Marsiano collective or sharing stage and studio space with Portuguese jazz giants such as André Fernandes or Mário Laginha .
It would be a case of saying “uff!” If you could have guessed a drop of sweat on his face, but no… Ride has just started giving us music and doesn’t seem to have any desire to end it anytime soon. Fortunately. The “Beat Journey” that Ride now presents to us is another result of a prodigious mind: breaks chosen with surgical precision, a superior understanding of production science, arrangements that reveal a mind in effervescent concentration: Ride designs the future in each new beat and This is where the most recent references come together – from the fracturing basses of the most advanced dubstep to the most acidic synthesized lines created in Los Angeles by aesthetes like flying lotus, passing through the freedom of jazz, the rigor of electronics and the weight of more traditional hip hop.
The incredible, the unexpected, is that Ride combines all of this in unprecedented proportions, offering us music that has never been heard before: anywhere on the planet. His imagination is a much more important tool than any MPC, laptop or Moog keyboard, although all these artefacts serve him to translate what is in his soul, in his brain and in his veins. Make no mistake – “beat journey” is music of the future made now.
