Ratking’s Sporting Life announces album

Ratking's Sporting Life announces new solo LP '55 5's

Today, Sporting Life, the mind behind the production of Ratking is announcing his debut solo project. After two releases alongside Wiki and Hak, Sporting Life (aka Eric Adiele) is now gearing up to share his first full length release with 55 5’s. To coincide with the announce Adiele is also sharing the video of his Boiler Room live set. 55 5’s will arrive on September 18th via Belgium label R&S Records in both digital and cassette format. This will be the first cassette tape release from R&S in over 18 years.

Comprised of 10 tracks of mind-bending beats, twisted up samples and fuzztones chords, taking influence from the likes of Arca, Actress, DJ Rashad and Aphex Twin, 55 5’s is a natural addition to R&S’s tradition of forward thinking electronic experimentation.

Busting out of the traditional long player format, 55 5’s fits more snuggly into the beat tape/sampleadelic tradition that has long proven a fertile font of creativity. From the slurping, spiraling filter-funk of “Looks Good On You” to the frenetic 808 drum n’ bass of “Badd”, the day-glo bounce of “Pre-Order The Dope” to the airy, crystalline “We Three” – 55 5’s is spontaneous and loose, filled with sketched out constructions that vibrate with promise and originality.

Despite having produced two albums for Ratking, it’s still Adiele’s feeling that he’s just begun. “When you sense your production techniques and approaches improving it always feels like you’re just starting out, like the feeling before a game.”

“Fan-made YouTube basketball highlight videos were a big inspiration for the project as a whole,” Eric explains. “I was trying to make tracks that you could put images of athletes playing sports to, because when I watch sports set to certain music it gives me chills sometimes, or might bring a tear to my eye because of the emotion the players might be showing at the same time some ill track is playing.”

A large part of hip-hop and electronic music’s storied history has been driven by technology, in Sport’s case, to make 55 5’s he utilized the Roland SP-555, primary weapon of choice of the likes of Panda Bear and MF Doom, which is instrumental to his creative process: “It’s the main instrument that I used in Ratking. It’s so easy to use and has really dope effects to process samples. Our album So It Goes was made from loading samples into it, applying the onboard effects then resampling the outputs until you could hear the essence of what the sample was but the 555’s effects turned it into a cool “distant cousin” of the original.” He adds, “Our practice space got burgled right before we went on tour to Australia and my original SP-555 with the SD card with all the samples got jacked, so naming this album after the drum machine that helped me so much seemed like the right thing to do.”

Sporting Life
55 5’s
(R&S Records)
9/18/15

1 Aloha
2 Triple-Double No Assists
3 A.I. Style
4 Sports Nation
5 My More Rounds
6 Badd
7 The Sopranos
8 Pre-Order The Dope
9 We Three
10 Looks Good On You

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