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It’s been almost ten years since we released our most infamous track to date, “Beneath the Mask”. In a genre with a short attention span like Drum&Bass this is a very long time. But it still happens regularly that when I DJ, somebody comes up to me and asks if I could play “that tune with the Chinese vocals”. And even though those vocals are not Chinese but sung in ancient Japanese language and harmonized in the style of Bulgarian folk music, it’s obvious what they want to hear. After selling 5-digits figures, we stopped re-pressing “Beneath the Mask” in 2002 to close this chapter in our musical history. Ever since then the prices for used copies on eBay have skyrocketed, and I recently saw an auction closing at 140,- Dollars! Wish I kept a couple of copies myself; instead all that I have left is the original testpressing… One thing that was obvious to us was that we never wanted to remix this track because we didn’t see how we could improve it- if it ain’t broken why fix it? When Ill.Skillz approached us in 2006 and said that they’d be interested to try their luck at remixing “Beneath the Mask”, we figured that they might be just the right persons to get the job done since they just completed a string of “classics”-remixes such as “Sicknote” by Ed Rush & Optical. Around the same time we found an unlabeled old DAT-tape, which we wanted to give a quick listen before throwing it in the trash. To our surprise we found an unreleased, alternate mix of “Beneath the Mask” from the very same session in 1997. It features the full vocal and a new C-part which was not included in the vinyl version. So now we had two very good reasons to release this single: Ill.Skillz cutting-edge remix and the vintage flavour of the alternate mix. This release is special to us in another way as well: after 28 vinyl singles and 3 CD albums we are closing shop and discontinuing our label “Precision Breakbeat Research”. This is due to the fact that we started it primarily as a vehicle to release our own music, but after being signed to V Recordings we feel it’s time to concentrate our efforts. However, it’s a good thing to leave on a high note and we want to thank all the people who were part of the PRCSN experience in the past decade: you know who you are! “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” (Neil Young)
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