The Lost Works of MK: Strider (Mojuba Underground)

This is the sound of Marc Kinchen, trapped between Disco and Techno and on the verge of breaking out.

“Strider” is not new – it was produced before at least some of the people who play this were even born – but it’s probably new to you. While never officially released, “Strider” has circulated on acetates and a white label release from 1991 with “Get It Right” from “Mashahiro Records” (properly, “Masahiro” – an early iteration of MK’s Area 10 Records).

“Strider” was dropped from the release when the release became official for unclear and probably uninteresting reasons, and it’s been a cult classic ever since. A few of the acetates show up on eBay from the time to time (discogs’ records indicate that they’ve never sold a single one); the white labels aren’t quite that rare but still run into three figures.

If you played this for me blind, I’d probably guess it was one of the foreign imports to Plus-8 or something equally exotic – American electronic music transplanted halfway across the world and let grow wild. This is how many of us in our 30s now first experienced “Detroit Techno” – as something carried off to Brussels and Berlin and then brought back for domestic consumption. As such, it does have a bit of that transitional sound that so many in the Midwest associate with the rave scene – a bit of sludge on the sound that wouldn’t be entirely stripped off until Cajual and Prescription set down roots. Mojuba did a bang up job cleaning this up and piecing together a longer edit of this for the B side, carefully constructed from one of said rare acetates that fell into their hands. Phenomenal from start to run-out – and selling out, though there are still some copies available via clone.

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Update: When this was first published, I wrote that none of the acetates had ever been sold on discogs. This is still true, but one copy has since been added for sale – for 1000 Euros, or $1,584.46.