Bleep

This is the moment you've all been waiting for.. Full on Mask Hysteria made available on triple club-friendly wax. Fully remastered by Posthuman (who runs I Love Acid and Balkan Vinyl - home to many post-8 Mark Archer tunes) and cut super loud by Radioactiveman!

Rave's original pranksters Mark Archer & Chris Peat return to Shelley's night club adorning the chemical warfare suits and dust masks (with a couple of pots of Vicks vapor rub) 26 years after the group's year zero, the first Nexus 21 release saw the group emerge as a heavily influenced by Detroit techno act. Full on Mask Hysteria is in many ways a 'greatest hits' package for the duo, coming in 92' it perfectly translated the crystal-filled baggie full of 12"s they had dropped on Network tunes such as Frequency, Brutal-8-E, E Vapor & Infiltrate 202.

Fusing a sound that borrowed from the Roland TB-303, 808 and 909 plus a whole batch of dodgy samples (as in lifted!) Altern-8 carved themselves out as one of the most recognisable groups in the post-acid house explosion known as hardcore. While they had the tunes to back up the image, they were also embroiled in some of the very best marketing ideas (jokes) this side of Aphex, with band member Chris standing as the candidate for Stafford in the 1992 General Election, representing the Hardcore (Altern8-ive) party, finishing fourth.

Among all the MDMA laced Christmas puddings and the giant robots, back in 92' Altern-8 represented a youth culture that didn't wait for the next punk to come along but grabbed everything they could - cheap samplers, knock-off synths, dodgy drum machines and a big crate of records - to create something new and exciting that was about living in the moment. As Andrew Harrison of Select perfectly put it in his review of the Infiltr-8 America EP: 'This is about people with Kraftwerk and Pierre, Transmat and WARP, 808, 909 and 303 encoded in their DNA. This is a live transmission of the beat you can't defeat, sampled over and over and hideously mutated. If you don't understand it, you don't deserve to. This is the phuture, right now, and THIS is the sound of Altern-8.' and listening back to this fully remastered LP all these years later, it has us asking what more can you really say other than check this next track out, you've got Asterix and Space, watch your bass bins, I'm tellin' ya...