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BEST COMPILATION: TEED 'GET LOST VI'

Orlando's totally enormous comp for Crosstown wins the gong for best mix...

Orlando Higginbottom — better known by his ‘stage name’ Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs — is remembering the first mix compilation he ever did.

“When I was about five-years-old, me and my friend Ed used to do fake radio shows at his house and record them on cassette,” says Oxford-born TEED. “I remember we put things like Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’ on there. It wasn’t until later, when I was 13, after I got my decks, that I recorded my first-ever proper mix.”

It took TEED another 16 years to release his first mix compilation album — two CDs worth of house and techno, including a fresh tech house track he made in collaboration with Eats Everything. ‘Get Lost VI’ came out last year on Damian Lazarus’s Crosstown Rebels label.

“I didn’t want to rely on putting new music on there, because that goes out of fashion so quickly,” he says. “I wanted older stuff, that I thought would last. So I started by looking on the internet, for things I hadn’t heard before. Youtube.com is such a great record shop now.”

It was while he was searching for music for this compilation, that he discovered DJ Bone and Separate Minds. “The last tune on CD2 — Separate Minds’s ‘Troubled World’ — is a really freaky piece of house music,” he says. “It’s weird, interesting and experimental.”


The same could be said for TEED’s own productions — a pastiche of pop melodies and disco-splattered house grooves. After bagging a good few 12”s and EP releases on Greco-Roman, TEED finally released his debut album ‘Trouble’ through Polydor in 2012.

Now, he says, he’s working on new music — for himself and writing for other people too. Despite the success of ‘Get Lost’, he’s got no plans to do another mix compilation just yet. And the hardest thing about putting a compilation together, he says, is finding music that hasn’t already had exposure.

“Sometimes it does feel like everything’s already out there, and available,” he says.

“Nowadays you can listen to any song you want so you don’t need a DJ to be showing or telling you what’s good.”