Celebrating twenty-five years of Aficionado as a place to play away from suffocating mainstream club culture, DJs Jason Boardman and Moonboots have compiled a contemplative set of 16 tracks that holds a deep meaning to both themselves and attendees of their now legendary parties. The compilation includes two new tracks exclusive to the release: J Walk’s ‘Cool Bright Northern Morning’ and Begin’s remix of Canyons ‘Akasha’.
Reflecting on how it all started 25 years ago, Moon considers their no-plan-plan to be a makeshift plateau which evolved organically: “All we did was try to play good records one after the other without any consideration for fashion. And people wanted that”. Alternative approaches were not unknown at the time, but Aficionado, as Jason and Moon’s Sunday sessions became known, pressed the reset button with unique resolve.
Jason elaborates: “It was 1998 when we started. It was our own 'fuck you’ to the Super Club regime - almost everywhere then. The ‘anything goes’ Balearic ethos was in abeyance. It wasn’t cool at the time, but we both just wanted to keep that original spirit alive. ‘Keep it open’ had always been my approach to DJing - even from playing at Youth Clubs as a teenager. No rules or generic constrictions. Play anything that you like from any era, any style from any time. We always encouraged our guests to dig deep and play outside of their comfort zones, their usual styles”.
Regular contributors quickly realised there was a freedom here which expected exploration of the most cobwebbed corners of the collection. The trick was to do something that hadn’t been done before - to play a record which might make these genuinely genre-less sonic adventurers double take. Aficionado reserved the right to apply the brakes and offered the same opportunity to their guests in terms of avoiding stultifying ‘sets’ and routine dance floor button pushing. At the same time, Jason and Moon were also adept in responding to the hedonistic excess that often erupted by playing music likely to facilitate random outbursts of dancing on tables on a school night. Aficionado never settled or coalesced into something readily identifiable and easy to sell.
While there were many Manchester venues, for Jason Sundays at Zumbar were special: “It would get very deranged. A cranky Citronic double deck console and very lo-fi, but a real vibe. Free pizza! At Fat Cat we got offered a proper wage - credit in the straight world! A basement by the Canal”. Moon concurs: “Zumbar was crackers - Sunday became the essential day to go out for our lot. But my two favourite ’Nado venues were Arch in Hulme and Fat Cat. People who’d been up all weekend would turn up spangled. Some bods stopped going out on Saturdays and made Sunday their big night out. Did these people have jobs? Very, very funny times…”.
The lovingly crafted musical mystery tour of this compilation, considering its pleasantly hypnagogic intent, may not reflect the madness of these now distant memories. This is an older and considerably more responsible collection and this is what we need right now - a temporary respite from a world almost capsized. A mood, a meditation created by masters of their craft. Odd socks from disparate global locations making new sense side by side. An assemblage, if you like. A thread through many different kinds of thinking. A new picture pieced together from the lost pieces of many jigsaws.
