Mojo Filter releases debut LP Escape Aid

‘Escape Aid is a sophisticated statement of intent that stands quite apart from the navel-gazing crowd and says: celebrate your roots, use your imagination and don’t be afraid to dream.’

As its title and artwork suggest, Mojo Filter’s debut LP Escape Aid is the ultimate break-out from reality. It is a back-and-forth rally of heart-in-throat, petrifying excitement and then blissful moments of total release, as if embodying one nail-biting Kool-Aid acid trip at the best party humanly imaginable.

As the culmination of some years of toil, crafting, re-crafting and stewing, Escape Aid is Ben Zaven Crane’s [Mojo Filter] most important record to date and it marks a significant landmark in his music making journey.

Making his name with a prolific (4 albums!) torrent of disco edits, surrey-born producer and D.J Ben Zaven Crane is a different animal. His re-works of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Well!’, and Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’ seem to have pushed the edit phenomenon to new levels, adding new elements to the production, and that little uncertain headiness that separates the wheat from the chaff. A fact that led his piers from Gilles Peterson and The Chemical Brothers, to the dynamic Nick Warren and Prins Thomas to champion his released and unreleased productions and edits. Curating festivals and events, touring, contributing regularly to the fabled AOR label and now running his own label the crafty editor is not just in control of the tape reels, but he’s also the master of his own destiny.

The level of detail and personality worked into each of Crane’s high-end remixes has forced him out into a lane all of his own. With Escape Aid, he is posing himself the ultimate challenge; stepping out and staking his territory in the world of original material; an uncharted territory and a due moment in the sun.

As a debut album, Escape Aid is a melting pot of ideas, memories and emotions. On every listen, each track can recall different images and various life experiences: the sweet and innocent reverie of childhood, discovering your parent’s vinyl collection, falling in love, your first sun-drenched festival, that intense abandoned warehouse party where you lost your mates and got rescued by an aged hippy. However, its eclectic nature, diverse genres and component parts are successfully held together in a cohesive – albeit eccentric – arc. Crane and his sound are inexorably one-and-the-same, a sort of erudite, coherent encyclopaedia of the far out.


COLOURED DREAMS opens Escape Aid and thus begins the quest to titillate your mind and body and provides the perfect gateway into the heady universe of Escape Aid.. Coloured Dreams is a wigged-out kind of half-speed two-step, once again deftly marrying ‘60s psychedelia elements with the most contemporary of production techniques, sounds and rhythms, in the way that only Crane can. By no means a chill-out intro, Dreams is just as full of ambition and ideas as any of the other album tracks, leaving very little room for you to drift off as you run the gauntlet of giant synth stabs, squelching bassline, discordant guitar riffs and fizzing energy. However, Dreams is no less the perfect opening for an LP that is in the truest sense an ‘album’, or an eclectic ‘journey’ – terms you might more freely enjoy applying to the trailblazing electronic records of a bygone era.

BOOM BOOM owes its provenance to a casual purchase of a cheap-as-chips DVD of prayer mantras some years ago, on one of Crane’s many jaunts to India. Once brought home and promptly fed through his mangle of unmistakable fizzing psychedelic electronica, Boom Boom was created just hours after he returned to the UK. It continues to open the album like a sprawling carpet, woven with intricate dreams and Eastern ideals, sat before you, inviting you seductively to walk up, open the giant door and see what lies beyond.

And LET’S GET BRUTAL lies beyond that door. With little hesitation, the LP wades in with the crunching beats, mischievous riffs and trippy carnival atmosphere typical of Mojo Filter’s effervescent DJ sets. Though peppered with idiosyncratic sorties into weird and wonderful territories, in this case even veering playfully into cosmic breakdance from time to time, Let’s Get Brutal’s intention is very clear. It rides a chunky slo-mo groove so infectious and familiar that it leaves no room on the dancefloor for ‘foolin’ around’.

OAKY TIMBRE is the greatest homage conceivable to the UK Comedy duo The Mighty Boosh and, fittingly, the Boosh boys themselves have personally endorsed the track, such is their appreciation of it. Reappropriating the monologue of Howard Moon discovering ‘Howard’s Note’ into a dance track, perfectly demonstrates Crane’s ever-present sense of humour, and ear for an opportunity. Oaky Timbre is an idea so absurd that it should never have worked, but it has defiantly proven to rock crowds and leave revellers sweaty and stunned, in a smiling daze, quite unsure what just happened.

IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME, Crane has found his melodic self and he grips on tightly, conjuring up a new romantic synth line so simple and catchy that it remains with you way after the initial listen. Dream somehow persists in your mind with a melancholic and beautiful sort of nostalgia, evoking hazy memories of yore. It is a friendly embrace on an otherwise unpredictable journey and is perhaps the album’s most truly original composition, born simply out of an extended session with a borrowed Moog and no other preconceived plans.

L.O.V.E. takes the positive feelings abundant in Dream even further. In its sweet and innocent, feel-good groove, this is Escape Aid at its softest. Even vocal snippets of Sesame Street’s Elmo can be just about made out, murmuring through the track’s fuzzy warm glow, providing the most innocent of reminiscences, while the euphoric bed of warm guitars wails gently beneath. At its most unabashed L.O.V.E. explodes into a fluttering of flutes so joyful it’s hard to keep a smile from breaking through.

SPELL ON YOU, a tripped out cover of the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins recording I Put a Spell on You, is one of the true show-pieces of Escape Aid, highlighting not only Crane’s production par excellence, but his trademark ability to conceive and effortlessly deliver a re-rub on an old track. Weighing in at almost nine minutes, Spell on You is a cosmic odyssey dense with original instrumentation and is no mere remix; it is a cover. And with its superlative female vocal delivery, it feels like a main stage festival anthem already.

WHITE RABBIT launches off with an Alice in Wonderland riddle so mystifying, it’s enough to make your brain trip over itself… and spend the next seven minutes in total free-fall throughout the buzzing, popping, thrilling carpet ride of surreal techno. The track’s unmistakeable 1960s vocal is a sweet tribute to an era, and a mindset, that has come to provide a road map to Mojo Filter’s own path through music making. But the imprint of the raves that he cut his teeth going to with his dad as a teenager is just as prominent in White Rabbit’s supremely high-tech production, nail-biting pace and fizzing atmosphere. It’s the perfect meeting of the old and the new that Mojo Filter has made his own idiosyncratic brand.

Now that the party is in full swing, it’s time to get deep and exploratory. ACID LAND has a markedly slower, sleazier groove than its predecessor. It relies on a defiantly minimal melody, but it is rich with big room energy, as if reverberating around a huge disused factory populated with strange characters and UV lights. This is the part of the night where you lose your mind… stumbling upon a small black and white television, glowing ominously in the corner of a room with no one else in it, showing an unsettling but scarily engrossing documentary on LSD.

Lifting the mood again comes HONEY BADGER. Sampling a legendary viral video clip that extols the virtues and badass-ness of the Honey Badger, Crane returns to his playful self in this exhilarating techno ride. Honey Badger is a tune worthy of soundtracking anyone’s defining I-never-want-to-go-home moment at Burning Man, or some outdoor party equally as apocalyptic and life affirming. Indeed, this track has become something of a theme tune for Mojo Filter’s sets headlining the Artful Badger Feral Fever woods stage at Secret Garden Party; the festival’s unique forest venue, which he curates every year.

But, lest we never forget, THIS IS A SERIOUS PARTY. These words have become Secret Garden Party’s official motto in honour of the late Vito Neo Reargo, who coined the phrase. Vito was thought of by many as SGP’s greatest fan and most eccentric personality, but he sadly took his life in 2013 after a long battle with depression. Vito, a good friend of Ben’s, is heard at the start of This is a Serious Party talking to Ben’s partner Abbey, in his inimitable meandering drawl, about the merits of smoking Pachanga, before the track unfurls into a stylishly low-key punk-funk groove. This is a Serious Party is unlike anything else on the LP; littered with loose handclaps, freakish vocals and lazy guitar riffs, it could easily be a lost (!) Chk Chk Chk classic.


At the end of the LP, you are very much left thinking: it’s not over yet… is it? And for this prolific and innovative producer, it clearly isn’t. The gate is wide open.

Escape Aid is a sophisticated statement of intent that stands quite apart from the navel-gazing crowd and says: celebrate your roots, use your imagination and don’t be afraid to dream. Expand your mind. Don’t take yourself too seriously. And let’s all have a f***ing good time! Hear, hear.