Side A, 1996Any raver that lived in or near Ohio during the mid – late ‘90s will be familiar with the Cincinnati Bomb Squad (CBS), a crew of generally young kids that managed to pull off some of the bigger parties in the Midwest (excepting for Chicago) during that time period; one of the factors that indisputably helped a great deal was the fact that their team of associated DJs were tight as fuck, garnering strong reputations in their own right far outside the Nati-bubble. Ria ‘Mowgli’ Matlib spun at virtually every CBS party I went to, often tag-teaming with his buddy Troll---the best CBS parties were the joints they threw at that grubby-ass warehouse downtown, and supposedly this Adam kid owned the building, or a couple floors inside it anyways, and the parties there were fucking NUTS yo, everything an “illegal” rave should be. At any rate, Mowgli and other junglists were getting sick of being stuck in tiny rooms with shitty systems, so (in his own words), “…this mix was made so that house-heads from the Midwest would get more in tune with jungle…the response I received from these house lovers was overwhelming…” Maybe that’s what it was about CBS parties that felt so good as compared to the joints we were throwing in Cleveland, a genuine belief in unity of purpose---albeit, with plenty of shade still, this was the Midwest folks. Mowgli didn’t need to convince me of anything, and his mixes continue to move my body & soul nearly 15 years on; you can’t FUCK with that Sade remix about 30 minutes in!
