Leeds & Edinburgh based duo Forward Strategy Group formed in 2008, and are seen as one of the most unique acts in techno today.

Our mixes tend to be quite eclectic, initially we played a lot of really hard 90s techno, a lot of downwards, surgeon, missile records, re-load etc and Al (smear) would often throw in a lot of slowed down doomcore & noise.

Their lo-fi approach to modern techno & attention to textural detail has been one of the key inspirations for the new wave of industrial techno musicians. Patrick Walker is resident and co-promoter of Unseen in Edinburgh, bringing the finest acts in modern techno to the capital. Smear has been resident at Leeds’ legendary Detatched & Future-Past club nights in for the past 3 years. FSG’s work on their own label, and labels like Perc Trax and Stroboscopic Artefacts, not to mention their in-demand remix work for Zooloft, Bas Mooy, Perc & Justin Berkovi among others, has seen their records firmly planted at the front of many DJ’s bags.

I think we’ve began to play a bit more across the board now, and this mix is quite a good representation of the third entity we tend to think of as being Forward Strategy Group, it builds from very terse and functional Germanic techno through some more quirky US flavours and winds up with the sort of sound typified by old favourites of ours: Orphx; very uncompromising and highly experimental broken rhythms.

The mix was created entirely in ableton, with bare bones processing (normally EQ and compression to emulate an SSL or Neve environment.) a lot of this material isn’t available on vinyl at time of recording, so we went with the format that best allowed us to present new music.