Review
Genre and Mood
OOFT! made Love & Soulsaving (Original Mix) for the slow end of the dance floor. He files it under deep house, disco and house, and adds two more tags that say how it moves: pitch down and slomo. The mood is groovy and, as the title promises, soulful, a title about love and saving souls on a track in no hurry to get anywhere.
Song Summary
Love & Soulsaving is side A, track 1 of The Pitch Down Jamz EP, a 12-inch catalogued FOTO-007 on Foto Recordings and released on 1 October 2012. The EP gathers four producers, OOFT! beside La Tuerie, Luvless and Cole Medina, and its title echoes the tag OOFT! gives his own track: pitch down. No review describes the track in detail; what we know of its sound comes from its maker’s own tags and from how he works.
Musical Breakdown
No source walks through the track part by part, so the breakdown is a guide for listening rather than a description.
Intro
At 5:43 the track has room to set up its groove. Listen for how slowly it seems to move from its first bars.
Main Section
The body rides the groove. Listen for where the disco in its tags shows up and where the deeper house sound takes over.
Outro
The ending leaves room for the next record. On Bandcamp, a Special Intro Version runs 6:33; compare how it starts.
Concepts in Focus
The groove is everything in a slow-motion house track. When a record is pitched down, it gets slower and lower at once, and a groove that would race at full speed starts to sway. OOFT! has described the method on another track: “playing it a lot slower and pitched down than the original source.” Listen for that heavy, unhurried swing here.
The Special Intro Version is an alternate version: the same track by the same artist, offered only on Bandcamp beside the digital copy of the 12-inch. Comparing the two shows how much a change at the start can shift the way a track lands.
Artistic Context
OOFT! is Ali Herron, a DJ and producer from Glasgow who runs Foto Recordings and has held residencies in some of the city’s best clubs. Bolting Bits calls him a “Glasgow house music veteran” with “low-slung deep house leanings” and numerous edits; The Skinny calls them his “signature disco-heavy edits”, and he speaks of moving on “from my early disco editing days” towards more original work. His debut album, Intricacies of Modern Life, followed in 2018.
Impact and Reception
Love & Soulsaving is the track that opens its label’s various-artists 12-inch, and it has stayed in circulation on OOFT!’s own Bandcamp. For a disco-flecked deep house cousin, try Session Victim – We Want To Thank All Our Friends. Play this one slow and late.
