In April 1997, Roni Size & Reprazent had their live debut at Tribal Gathering. Roni Size created the group to perform live tracks he had been working on in the studio. The group included Full Cycle record label members Roni Size, Krust and Die, operating 'banks of equipment'; as well as Dynamite MC (vocals), Onallee (vocals), Si John (bass) and Clive Deamer (drums) taking centre stage.[3][4]
The group's debut studio album, New Forms, was released on 23 June 1997, with singles featuring the vocals of Onallee including "Brown Paper Bag", "Heroes", "Share the Fall" and "Watching Windows". The album went five times platinum,[5] won the Mercury Prize, and Roni Size returned to the studio to concentrate on his output for V and Full Cycle and Dope Dragon.
On 9 October 2000, Roni Size & Reprazent released their follow-up second studio album, In the Mode, released with singles "Who Told You", "Dirty Beats" and "Lucky Pressure".[6]
Roni Size resurrected Reprazent in 2008 with the release of a deluxe edition of New FormsonUniversal,[7] but in September 2008 announced his intention to disband the act following a third album.[8]
The band started 2009 with a tour of Australia as part of the Good Vibrations Festival.[9] Following on from this, Roni Size and Reprazent returned to North America for the first time in seven years as one of the headliners at the 2009 Ultra Music Festival in Miami. They then went on to perform at Coachella,[10] appearing as the final act of the festival.
In September 2009, Roni Size & Reprazent played a gig with an orchestra and choir to mark the re-opening of Bristol’s Colston Hall, collaborating with the BBC’s Nature's Great Events composer, William Goodchild.[11] In addition to older material, the band played material from a forthcoming Roni Size & Reprazent album.[11]
The group's music has been described as "meticulously crafted break-beats that, when slowed down, revealed themselves as hip-hop beats".[17] The most popular track, “Brown Paper Bag”, was praised in The Guardian as a “masterpiece: an essay in hyper-kinetic pace, it piles up teetering stacks of instrumental layers, their cumulative weight triggering each step in a constant cycle of demolition and reconstruction of its latticework of melody, rhythm and mood".[18]
^Hesmondhalgh, David; Melville, Caspar (2001). "Urban Breakbeat Culture: Repercussions of Hip-Hop in the United Kingdom". Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. pp. 86–110. ISBN978-0819565020.
