The Brabant Shrobbelèr is a searing selection of classic and unreleased New Beat productions by James Leyland Kirby aka The Caretaker, aka V/Vm. It was selected and sequenced by Jerk van den Boschalottt and mixed and chopped to mucky perfection by Miles ov Demdike Stare, marking up a personally important 5th instalment in our 12 x 12 series, while also providing a fitting headstone to one of Kirby’s most crucial and little known projects. New Beat has long become the black sheep of Manchester’s dance music canon, wilfully unacknowledged by successive generations of DJs who continue to suckle at the entrails of the Haçienda, when in fact New Beat was a crucial part of the Manc Dance make-up, most often mixed up with Chicago, Detroit and New York house, and whatever UK bleeps and boops were bubbling thru at that time. Thanks to the influence and legendary DJ sets of V/Vm card holder, Acid Alan - whose New Beat collection spilled over the racks at a now defunct NQ record shop - its memory and place in Manchester’s rave folklore has been preserved by only a select few souls who really.cannot.be.fxcking.chuffed. with the constantly regurgitated putative history of our city’s club and warehouse culture. Now, 30 years since New Beat was syncretised and sonified by the weekending loons of Flanders from the the best/worst bits of synth-pop, EBM, house and electro - arguably giving birth to the rave techno paradigm we know and love in the process - V/Vm’s dark, sexy, and unforgiving dedications take on a new afterlife, resculpted into the oft-maligned but temporally appropriate format of a MegaMix, as was found on dozens of original New Beat and Acid House compilations and 12”s. Driving from Be-Dash’s over-the-limit jackoff, Must Do to the curdled acid gargle of Euro Hit via pure smuts in I Wanna Fxck Miss Nicky Trax, also taking in ‘Animal’ Andy McGregor’s Fxck My Pussy and Hear Me Coming, and previously unknown gold such as Russell Grant and Bajs Grotta, this is the sort of record that deserves its own plinth in the Arndale, preferably somewhere in front of the sweaty gammons and chicken elbows at Gabbott’s farm shop. Free download of Mike Pickmynose and John Rubb spoojing lyrical about when they used to tonk New Beat all night in ’88 is not included. File between your legs.