User:Scuzzywuzzy/Brotherly

Brotherly are an electronic music duo from Crouch End, North West London, comprising of multi-instrumentalist Robin Mullarkey and Vocalist Anna Stubbs

They are known as early pioneers of breakbeat hardcore and drum and bass music, and the group obtained a Mercury Music Prize nomination for their 1998 album Two Pages. More recently, on their 2007 album, Play with the Changes, 4hero has experimented with downtempo and Nu jazz.

Mark 'Marc Mac' Clair & Dennis 'Dego' McFarlane continue to produce music as 4hero as well as a variety of other aliases they've developed over the years.

Early output
4hero's second EP, Combat Dancin' (1990) underpinned the sub-bass pressure of the bleep 'n' bass artists associated with Sheffield's Warp Records, such as LFO and Nightmares on Wax, with mid-tempo hip-hop-style breakbeats. Their next release, "Mr.Kirk's Nightmare" (1990), pivoted around the "Get Into Something" break (taken from the Isley Brothers) and a morbid vocal sample ("Mr Kirk? Your son is dead. He died of an overdose.") taken from the Bobby Susser, anti-drug hit "Once You Understand" by Think.

Recent material
The Parallel Universe LP (1994) is widely regarded to be the first drum 'n' bass album. It explored sounds that had not been generally associated with jungle up until that point: fusion jazz-style synth washes, chord multitracking, and oleaginous female vocals professing transnational peace and a new age discourse of unity with Mother Earth. This served as a prototype for their more recent full-length releases, such as the MOBO award-winning Two Pages (1998) and Creating Patterns (2001), which almost entirely jettisoned the tension and schizophrenia of their early material in favour of complex, mid-tempo breakbeat structures. They have also ventured in the realm of 'live' musicianship by going on tour.

The main players in 4hero first met and came to prominence in the late 1980s when they were involved in the Strong Island FM pirate radio station. After setting up the radio station Mark & Gus then set up Reinforced Records to release their own productions as 4hero. The group became known in the rave community as early as 1990 for their hit "Mr Kirk's Nightmare", and the conception of drum and bass was helped with a series of releases on Reinforced.

Goldie met 4hero at a performance in London's Astoria, from which Marc and Dego went on to collaborate and bring the sounds he envisioned to life, forming the Rufige Cru and MetalHeadz monikers.

In 1995 NME voted Parallel Universe the album of the year in its dance category.

In 1997 one of their tracks, a remix of Nuyorican Soul's "Black Gold of the Sun" was released to critical acclaim with Louie Vega himself describing it as "...one of the best remixes ever...". The next year, they rose again to mainstream visibility with their third studio album as 4hero, Two Pages (1998). Released on Gilles Peterson's Talkin' Loud record label, the double CD blended jazzy double bass, flowing breakbeats and a brew of mysticism, spiritualism, astrology, U.F.O.s, and environmentalism. Luke Parkhouse provided the drums while Ursula Rucker, Carol Crosby and Face provided vocals alongside veteran singer Terry Callier and a few other special guests. The album gained critical acclaim and a place on the shortlist for 1998's Mercury Music Prize as well as picking up a MOBO award in the same year.

Their fourth album Creating Patterns (2001), featured another Ursula Rucker collaboration, an appearance from Jill Scott, and a cover of Minnie Riperton's classic 1970s song Les Fleur with Carina Andersson as the lead vocalist. The latter was featured in a Baileys commercial in 2004, and in a 2005 Stycast.

In 2004 the group released a compilation album consisting of two discs. The first disc contained 4hero Remixes, while the tracks on disc 2 are remixes of 4hero tracks by other artists. This was released on their new label Raw Canvas.

In 2006, 4hero was featured on the track, "Bed of Roses" by Jody Watley, on her album, The Makeover.

Six years after the release of Creating Patterns, Play with the Changes was released in February 2007 to great critical acclaim. Mixmag described it as "their finest album to date" and awarded it the title of Album of the Month in its January 2007 issue.

Style
Their style was initially uptempo breakbeat house and techno, and has progressed to hardcore, jungle, and drum 'n' bass. Comparisons have been drawn between them and East London band Shut Up And Dance, with both bands evolving in the early 1990s as a rapprochement between the breakbeat-driven African-diasporic musical structures of hip-hop and reggae, and the dark, European reconstruction of the techno sound popularised by the likes of Joey Beltram, CJ Bolland, and Mundo Muzique. 4hero both embraced the dynamics of populist rave culture, and maintained an avant-garde status as innovative and experimental producers. They trailblazed genre-crossing studio techniques such as timestretching and pitch-shifting.

Discography

 * In Rough Territory (1991)
 * Parallel Universe (1995)
 * Two Pages (1998)
 * Two Pages Remixed (1998)
 * Two Pages Reinterpretations (1999)
 * Creating Patterns (2001)
 * The Remix Album (2004)
 * Brazilika (2006)
 * Play with the Changes (2007)
 * Extensions (2009)