The Story of Tribal Confusion by E-Culture

In 1989, while I was working at Tower Records in Philadelphia, I started to really dive into my music production seriously. I guess working there amongst all my favorite artists, I felt that I could do this too.

I was living in a small room in South Philadelphia’s, Italian Market district. I had a storefront that I used for storage (not to the owner’s liking) and a small room in the back full of my keyboards. I had no bed, so I slept on the brand new carpet amongst my synths. I worked diligently on demos, using my Roland 909 & 808 drum machines, Casio FZ-1 sampler, Roland SH-101 keyboard and Moog Source.

At this time, late ’89 going into ’90, house music was beginning to really explode on the east coast as far as sales. 2 new labels popped up, Strictly Rhythm and Nervous Records. If you were to make it in house music, these were the labels to be on. As a 12″ buyer, I had a direct connection with the amazing Gladys Pizzaro, who was A&R for Strictly (later for Nervous funny enough). I also knew the legendary Mike Weiss, who owned Nervous. I told them I had some demos I wanted to send and they encouraged me to send them. Each cassette (yes, tape kids) had 2 songs on them.

In my excitement, I sent the one I made for Nervous to Strictly and vice versa, by accident. 3 or 4 days later, I received a call from Gladys, saying she wanted to sign the tracks. Fate huh?

Around the same week, I met a cat who I used to see at the early warehouse events my friend Blake would invite me too in West Philly. He was a cool jewish kid w/ blond locks named Josh Wink. He came into Tower one day and we got to talking. I actually sold him some records, one being a kinda bad one I needed to get rid of. In those days, you couldn’t listen to the records before buying them (I soon changed this rule). A few days later he came in a bit pissed off about that record. We laughed about it and started talking about music and life etc. It was the same week I got the deal with Strictly Rhythm. Josh said he was getting into production and had a Roland R5 drum machine. Back then that was like the new ish! I invited Wink to come to my studio and said yo, lets do this together.

He came over and took a listen. I felt like it needed something else and he suggested his girlfriend at the time, Kristen Deleo, who was a rapper. Hip House was a pretty big genre at the time (originating in Chicago), which had rap over house. Cats like Tyree Cooper and Fast Eddie made this famous. So, she came in a week later and really laid down a positive rhyme.

*note : Wink emailed me and reminded me we did some of the recording when we all live on 19th Street. We sampled the band Neutron9000 (Profile Records UK promo), for the pad sound, which we used for many years to come. Good call Wink

I soon got our budget ($1100) which we used all of it in studio time. Laid down all the tracks, sampling African Head Charge/Tears for Fears/Yaz, used Josh’s R5, put Kristin’s rhyme on and got my longtime friend Ron Wadell to do a mix and Jeff Turso, who is an amazing producer, to remix as well.

The song was one of Strictly’s most unique releases and went on to classic status. Played far and wide in Europe from the Hacienda to Shoom, Tribal Confusion put King Britt and Josh Wink on the map!