A well-worn sample and break gets the Franc Wile treatment

Blow (version 1)

Blow (version 2)

Franc Wile is a new collaboration between Crawford Tait (Cinema, bitly)and Neil McMillan (aka Chef Gourmand), erstwhile DJ partners at Glasgow’s legendary Hi Karate sessions in the nineties and noughties. Working between Glasgow and Barcelona, Neil’s new home city, Franc Wile fuses the duo’s passion for sample-based, funk-inflected dance music, envisioning contemporary genres like hip hop, broken beat and dubstep through the dusty prism of their cherished record collections.

The pair first met in 1996 through Andrew Symington, resident DJ at the Glasgow clubbing institution that is Divine!, and quickly identified  common interests in funk, soul, old school hip hop, electro and the burgeoning ‘big beat’ scene. Crawford had DJ ‘previous’ as a resident at the Sub Club’s Grow Your Own session and quickly became part of Hi Karate, which enjoyed its greatest success during a four year residency at the Glasgow School of Art.

Around the same time, Crawford’s partnership with Gregor Reid on the Cinema Recorded Music Library project explored a love of soundtrack and library music through a variety of releases and remixes on the seminal Domino Recordings (home of Four Tet). Cinema’s 2002 debut LP Before the Dark remains a neglected classic of modern instrumental mood music and even spawned a lucrative deal to provide the soundtrack for a famous Audi advert.
 
Neil first dipped his toes into production with collaborative remixes for A Band Called Quinn then later Cinema themselves. He has, however, a dark and murky indie past, having been the guitarist and singer for noisy Perth shoegazers Aspidistra. The band released several singles in the late ‘80s and early  ‘90s and are now the subject of a retrospective compilation release.

More recently, as part of the Soundcloud community, Crawford has been indulging his passion for dubstep and old school rave tracks with new productions under the name bitly, in addition to a light-hearted bootleg project as 2Tracks. Neil, in his Chef Gourmand guise, has been re-editing and remixing some of his favourite music, taking in genres as diverse as flamenco and afro-funk, and is currently seeking a Barcelona venue for his new club session, The Raw and the Cooked.

For more information, collaboration, DJ bookings, remixes or production contact francwile(at)gmail.com