Peace Pipe - Peace Tape V

These Peace Pipe tapes keep coming thick and fast, another 90 minutes operating at the deep end of 90s UK dance culture. It's funny, though Peace Pipe remains a faceless/anonymous project (i'm sure you can work out who it is), the text that has accompanied the release of each tape has provided increasingly personal insights into experiences of that era, testimony from the frontline telling a very specific story. Peace Tape V might just be the most personal of the lot, buttressing two stylistic parallels of 90s electronic music - namely UK-G and European tech house - into one newly re-imagined whole, essentially two separate things that one person just so happened to like equally. Was anyone actually playing these records together at the time of their release? Maybe, people do lots of different things. But also quite possibly not, and the 90s was, after all, perhaps the last outpost of subcultural tribalism before the internet came and made everyone an authority on everything. Well, cross pollination helps ideas migrate, which is how they change and morph into new understandings, and this latest tape does a good job in expressing that idea. And that's the real beauty of these Peace Pipe tapes - a personalised view from the trenches that in its own way speaks of the wider importance of diverse narratives and experiences. And if not that, then there's at least a reminder here of the eternal brilliance of Closer Musik's One Two Three (No Gravity): "Planet-e is faraway", but maybe not as far as you think... Probably my favourite in the series so far. Just how long will it run?