When it was announced last year that Blawan and The Analogue Cops had collaborated for a pair of releases, it didn’t seem like the most obvious of unisons. At the time, Blawan – otherwise known as Jamie Roberts – had just released “Getting Me Down”, the Brandy-sampling white label that was already one of the summer’s biggest underground club tracks. The Analogue Cops – otherwise known as Lucretio and Marieu – had on the other hand been pushing their own brand of militant, hardware-only techno and house since 2007. The music that came out of those first two releases – the A-side of Restoration 013 and the first 12” on Vae Victis Records – was like nothing anyone had heard from Roberts, and although weighted more towards the Analogue Cops’ sound, somehow had an unmistakable heft and energy that the Italian pair couldn’t have managed alone. Looking deeper however, the three have more in common than may be immediately apparent. Roberts’ early productions, a combination of garage, techno and dubstep, were as sparse as the Cops threadbare brand of techno and house; he himself revealed in one interview that “Fram” was made using only four tracks – synth, bass, drums and vocal. They also seemed to have a shared ear for grit; the gnarled acid line of Roberts’ “Bohla” for example is as crud-encrusted as the bottom end of most of the Cops’ productions. Speaking to the trio over the phone, who, along with Roberts’ Karenn partner Arthur Cayzer – better known as Pariah – had gathered in Restoration’s Berlin HQ to make use of the Cops’ well equipped studio, I enquired how the union first came about, amid blasts of machine-made rhythms and squealing analogue noise escaping occasionally from behind the studio door.

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