I've always had a borderline obsession with Ninja Tune. As a school kid in the early noughties, the label provided me with my first taste of dance music outside of the suffocating confines of the soulless trance and commercial house that saturated the airwaves. Copies of Roots Manuva's Run Come Save Me and Mr Scruff's Keep It Unreal would be passed eagerly around my school common room and it was through acts like The Herbaliser and Amon Tobin that I learnt that it was possible to enjoy the rough breakbeats of hip hop free from the inane bragging and posturing that I naively assumed defined the genre.Intuitively my friends and I realised that there was something uniquely British about the way these artists approached making music, irreverently throwing together dub basslines with jazz flutes, bizarre sound effects or maybe even a monologue about fish. Perhaps it's for this reason that as I've grown older I've always felt a kinship with the label and it was through Ninja Tune that I was I first introduced to genres like grime and dubstep, scenes that I might initially have allowed to pass me by.
So to celebrate the label's twentieth anniversary, I’ve compiled my ten favourite releases from this auspicious label, which the nice guys at FACT magazine have been kind enough to publish. While the list is by no means definitive, I hope it will give a flavour of the diverse array of talent on a record label that has immensely enriched my life. You can read the full feature here.
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