blackvelvet: Recent Episodes

House Music has always been about a feeling. For me it is a feeling infused with Nostalgia, Happiness and Excitement because wherever you find a beat, you'll find there is rhythm, where there is rhythm, you'll find soul, now combine that with vocals and you have something special that brings that warm feeling inside. And so it began in the late 80's I heard a brand new sound coming out of Chicago called “Garage” or “Warehouse” Music due to the names of the clubs Ron Hardy, Larry Levan & Frankie Knuckles played in. In England we had our own name for it, Acid House! All due to the yellow smiley face RevoIution that exploded across the country at the tail end of the 1980s. I have to give a lot of credit to the pirate radio station "Fantasy FM" www.thepiratearchive.net/fantasy-fm-london. It was London's first ever dedicated House music station circa 1989 – 1992 it became a source of much inspiration. Staying in on Saturday night's with my finger waiting to press the "record" button became normal for me because, I'd do anything to get hold of a special track for my cassette collection.

After hearing "Sueno Latino" for the first time aged 17 I was pretty much sold! It was my first taste of Balearic House and I was hooked, there would be no way back...... ever! The first tapes I bought were Guru Josh's "Infinity”. “Voodoo Ray” by A guy called Gerald, “Barefoot in the Head” by A Man called Adam - (still love that to this day) and of course the simply AMAZING "Pacific State" by 808 State. "LFO" was something that seemed to come from outer space. No one had ever made anything that sounded like that. From there onwards I literally devoured anything that sounded different to my staple diet of Jazz, Soul, Funk and Hip Hop. Definitive tracks like Mr Fingers’ “Can you feel it?” in which the very philosophy of House Music was spelt out word for word to the masses was as inspirational then as it is today, "this then became Our House and House Music was born!" In September 1991 I went to the opening of London’s Ministry of Sound where I was fortunate to meet Mark Moore (formerly of S Express), whose vast library of music left me speechless. With opening sets from American house DJs such as Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan, David Morales, C+C Music Factory, Roger Sanchez and Tony Humphries, it was the UK’s first 24-hour dance licence nightclub, and had a 150dB(A) sound-system built by Austen Derek. Ministry of Sound London quickly grew in popularity as THE clubbing venue to be at for House music lovers. Despite all this, for the first three years you could not even buy a beer at the bar due to the lack of an alcohol licence and their notoriously strict door policies kept long queues outside even at 7am. You literally always breathed a sigh of relief and felt as though you'd really achieved something special just to get past the security guys at the entrance!

1992/93 was more about "Fun City" and The Astoria with the sounds of DJ Hype, Slipmat, Fabio, Grooverider, LTJ Bukem and Carl Cox but last but not least was a DJ named Pete Tong (back then he was just a name I kept hearing on Judge Jules' and Paul "Trouble" Anderson's shows on Kiss Fm). From 1994 onwards my focus shifted back to the traditional vocal Gospel Inspired uplifting house music like the sounds of the sublime Robert Owens (I’ll be your friend) Victor Simonelli's (Do you feel me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI6ka-OPP6I), India -Love and Happiness http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay89SX8fuqo ) and of course the most awesome Lil Louis' “Lonely People”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O9TOB0P_6s . A huge Inspiration was the classic Frankie Knuckles’ Anthem “Tears” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rd0Zo1WAk5I (which features on my "For the Love of House 1" mix) this was simply mind blowing and still gives me goose bumps to this day! These were the artists that laid the foundations to my soundtrack of the mid 1990s. All this was set against a backdrop of my deep love of Acid Jazz, Hip Hop, Rhythm and Blues and Soul music, none of this was ever for one second left behind or ever forgotten.

1999 – 2003 saw the birth of The Hedkandi brand which to me was like a breath of fresh air, they simply blew the doors off with extended plays of what I call Soulphuric or “Disco House” music. It was a celebration of everything I had previously known and was credited with a collection of Disco Kandi, Disco Heaven and Beach House CDS all of which I bought with religious dedication. House Music was returning to it's original roots at the end of 1970's Disco era and it sounded absolutely AMAZING! All this was complimented by the weekly Friday Hedkandi show on Jazz Fm by Chris Coco. Massive thanks to him for doing all my late night "shout outs" to my friends across London!

In August 2008 I was invited to a certain Balearic Island known as Ibiza and since then my love of house music has gone through all kinds of enlightenment, revolution and EVOLUTION. This place introduced me to a certain sound I would have never considered as “my type” of Electronic music before and I LOVED it! Since then "Fantasy Island" as I call it has provided endless musical Inspiration. I'm not a professional DJ but you can be guaranteed that anything posted here will be the very finest of the sounds I have available, specially selected and served up purely for your listening pleasure .

Blackvelvet