Mysterious London trio Hardway Bros is a production collaboration between longtime club DJ Sean Johnston, record producer Jake Davies (who’s worked with Bjork, William Orbit…and KCRW’s very own Liza Richardson on her Femi Kuti Soundclash remix) and a mysterious figure known only as “Rico.”
Longtime friends and collaborators with Andrew Weatherall (who in my opinion is the “all-time boss-of-it-all” and may or may not be this so-called Rico,) the Hardway Bros have typically released their wobbly, downtempo dance jams at their leisure. However they’ve been pretty busy within the last 2 years with a flurry of 12″ singles for a host of labels (Is it Balearic?, History Clock & Astrolab.) Their latest is a monster chugger on NY’s Throne of Blood called, “A/B Musique.” With hints of Industrial, Techno, Post-Punk all the elements of the track float in and around each other like a confluence of different coloured smokes, and at a leisurely pace of 111 BPM. This is slow dance music for the discerning listener, party music at a mature tempo.
Years ago, they introduced a digital mixtape on a blog with the following statement:
“Hello – we are the Hardway Brothers. We like to muck around with sound. Once we were House, then we were Balearic, then we were Techno. We fought the Acid House Wars and lost. We made records. We rested. Now we work again…”
For the Hardway Bros seems like all work is play. Below is a new mix which includes a number of remixes and snippets of the new tracks.