God save the British airwaves. From our 'Muhrican vantage point here in the land of the Clear Channel and the home of the Mouse, that venerable old 'Beeb looks pretty special. Radio One is supposedly the most pop offering, and it hosts Gilles Frickin Peterson. You can barely get that kind of variety on college radio over here in the colonies. Add to that the proud and chaotic history of pirates (how many old Kiss FM tapes can you brag about in your collection?) and you have some really extraordinary offerings, adding up to a perfect fertile ground for a mind like that of so:el to connect the dots in beautiful and sophisticated ways.

The Reading-based producer caught the remix bug early, making mixtapes with a radio and the pause button around the age the rest of us were learning our multiplication tables. He started futzing around with samples on an Amiga at the tender age of 14, and producing pre-sampler noises even before that, simply playing with sound. Through pirate radio, he began to discover rave-type music and drum and bass, which primed him, but didn't prepare him for his first rave.

"It was mad, I was blown away. I'd heard a lot about them but nothing quite prepared me. The queueing, the anticipation, wondering if they'd let us in being so young. And then you walk into a huge recreation centre into a wall of sound--lasers, whistles, horns and the MC doing his thing. Blew my head away. I got such a rush as I walked through the door! It was intense."

Even bigger than the influence of raving, was that of pirate radio. "I just found it mad how you would have these people risking life and limb climbing out onto the roof of tower blocks to put up there arials so they could transmit their dirty beats out across London. The sound was like nothing I'd ever heard. I loved it."

From there it was a short logical step to buying turntables and some records. It was Wax Doctor had the honor of debuting on so:el's decks, but it wasn't long before the tired formula dnb started to take its stranglehold, and he looked to pieces like Photek's Hidden Camera and KJZ for a more organic base. Soon it was on to hip hop, breaks, and then reverse engineering 70s funk with its dirty drumming and slackjaw charm. He took influence from these styles, but a reverence to the inherent rawness keeps him from sampling or trying to replicate that spirit to this day.

The mining for new sounds continued as his tastes diversified and became influenced by the wonderful and diverse sounds of Eddie Pillar's New Beats show on Jazz FM, as well as Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge's early days on Kiss FM. He took a break from production to travel the world for eight months, as these curious cats are wont to do and came out the other side hearing "bits and bobs about" of the broken sound, but Agent K's full length "Feed the Cat" was the clincher. "I have always strived to hear new, different sounds and at the moment there's no fresher, more progressive sound than the Broken/Nu Jazz sound." Not so easily impressed, this one, he keeps his ears honed for new beats and even applauds the competition that makes it more challenging for heads like himself to get recognition.

But cream indeed rises to the top, and recently after posting a link to new tracks and experiments on the Bugz in the Attic forum, he was contacted by Puerto Rico/Miami-based label Amalgama to release the track "PowerOfOne", which is currently in negotiation.

so:el gets his name from a collusion of soul and electronics, which is an elegantly simple description of the sound. His tracks range from smooth to jittery, groove-based to song-like, all with a sonic integrity honed over years at the sampler. His pieces hover around mid-tempo but prefer not to be lumped under one heading, thank you.

so:el's essential tracks: