Solid Steel

Solid Steel are a series of DJ mix albums issued on Ninja Tune, an independent record label in the UK.

Solid Steel also has a radio station webcast and related live concerts which further showcase the DJing talents of such artists.

In 1988, Solid Steel began as a radio show on Kiss FM hosted by Coldcut's Matt Black and Jonathan More, where they were not only able to play and mix records, but also display their cut-up technique live. The show was known for airing "The Broadest Beats in London" They were joined by PC and Strictly Kev from DJ Food in 1993. The two hour show was filled by improv, with each DJ taking sets of 30 minutes. In 1997, Darren Knott, otherwise known as DK, joined the show as producer, as Coldcut and DJ Food were increasingly away on tour.

They left Kiss FM in 1999 after playlist changes meant they would be consigned to the Tuesday 2am–4am graveyard slot. The show was still recorded each week being available online and syndicated worldwide. In 1999, they were offered a slot on the advertisement-free BBC's London Live radio station and were on the station until 2002. This unique 2 hour show has expanded to include guest mixes, regular video mixes (often the #1 video podcast on iTunes) and the additional 1-hour podcast highlights, regularly featuring in the top 10 music podcasts on iTunes with over 3 million downloads to date and hosted on the Ninja Tune soundcloud each week.

Direct-to-video

Direct-to-video or straight-to-video (also known as direct-to-VHS, direct-to-DVD, direct-to-Blu-ray, direct-to-digital, etc.) refers to the release of a film to the public immediately on home video formats rather than a theatrical release or television broadcast. Because inferior sequels or prequels of larger-budget films may be released direct to video, references to direct-to-video releases are often pejorative. However, this belief is changing, with direct-to-video releases having become something of a profitable lifeline for independent filmmakers and smaller companies.

Reasons for releasing direct to video

A production studio may decide not to generally release a TV show or film for several possible reasons: a low budget, lack of support from a TV network, negative reviews, its controversial nature, or a simple lack of general public interest. Studios, limited in the annual number of films to which they grant cinematic releases, may choose to pull the completed film from the theaters, or never exhibit it in theaters at all. Studios then generate revenue through video sales and rentals.

Ninja Tune

Ninja Tune is an independent record label based in London, England, UK. It has a satellite office in Los Angeles, California, US covering the whole of North America. It was founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More, better known as Coldcut and managed by Peter Quicke and others. Music Week has written that Ninja Tune is one of the most credible independent labels in the UK.

Inspired by a visit to Japan, Black & More primarily created Ninja Tune in 1990 as a means to escape the creative control of major labels, and to act as a vehicle to release music of a more underground nature, free from the restraints that were put on them via their brief stints with Arista and Big Life. The label has been called "visionary" and "reliably excellent". It has signed a diverse range of uncompromising artists, encourages interactive technology, embraces the audio-visual world, has created its own publishing company, Just Isn’t Music, and finds innovative uses of software.

The label’s first releases —the first five volumes of DJ Food's Jazz Brakes— were produced by Coldcut in the early 1990s, and celebrated by the music press and beat aficionados. They were composed of instrumental sample-based cuts that led the duo to help pioneer new instrumental hip hop beats genres (alongside the Mo'Wax label and Ninja Tune artists such as Funki Porcini, The Herbaliser and DJ Vadim) and, to this day, are recognized as being indispensable tools for DJs.

Radio program

A radio program (radio programme in the United Kingdom) or radio show is a segment of content intended for broadcast on radio. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series. A single program in a series is called an episode.

International radio

In Britain, radio broadcasting was dominated entirely by the BBC, which since the early 1920s had been developing a broad spectrum of programming including different genres of music and speech, including documentaries, drama, comedy, news, religious broadcasts, children's programmes, schools broadcasts and sports coverage). BBC output was a unifying force within British culture, and has been written about extensively elsewhere.

In the 1950s, a small but growing cohort of Rock and pop music fans, dissatisfied with the BBC's output, might listen to Radio Luxembourg, but to too small an extent to have any impact on the BBC's monopoly and invariably only at night, when the signal from Luxembourg was stronger. During the post-1964 period, western Europe offshore radio (such as Radio Caroline broadcasting from ships at anchor or abandoned forts) helped to supply the demand for the pop and rock music. The BBC launched its own pop music station, BBC Radio 1, in 1967.

Time travel

Time travel is the concept of movement (often by a human) between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, typically using a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a recognized concept in philosophy and fiction, but travel to an arbitrary point in time has a very limited support in theoretical physics, usually only in conjunction with quantum mechanics or Einstein–Rosen bridges. Sometimes the above narrow meaning of time travel is used, sometimes a broader meaning. For example, travel into the future (not the past) via time dilation is a well-proven phenomenon in physics (relativity) and is routinely experienced by astronauts, but only by several milliseconds, as they can verify by checking a precise watch against a clock that remained on Earth. Time dilation by years into the future could be done by taking a round trip during which motion occurs at speeds comparable to the speed of light, but this is not currently technologically feasible for vehicles.