Repress!

Another DJ Duke classic in the rebound. Escape From New York was originally released in 1996 - essential! More

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Duke about this EP: Ironically one of my very first records was a disco sample in 1990 taken from Queen Samantha. I don’t know exactly what inspired me, but likely coming from the Hip Hop world where everything was looped and sampled brought me to doing the same for house and therefore the disco, funk etc samples for the house stuff. The first techdisco EP was done in 1995. I think there may have been a handful of other house records out that sampled disco tracks at the time. Harvey Mason’s Groovin you comes to mind. Sneak also had done a few, but maybe Pal Joey was one of the originals too that used loops, particularly Dance by Earth People. Joey also came from the Hip Hop world so we likely were inspired by the same style of loops.
The main concept was the idea of fusion. I was heavily into fusion jazz in the early 90s and that is really what spawned the techdisco and techfunk series. A mix between genres that hadn’t really been done before. Not saying I was the first, but I did my best to create a new and distich style.
I did everything myself when it comes to the techdisco series. In 1996 I traveled a lot DJing, in the states but mostly in Europe. I didn’t have time for a resicency at that time like I had prior to me being full time DJ/producer/label owner. I did do some remixes back then, but maybe not as many as I would have thought. Perhaps because people looked at me as having my own label and doing my own thing.

Tracklisting (in order): A1 No Mistakes A2 Keep On Sampling B1 The Rain B2 Duke's All Jazzed Out

Artwork by Lecsicu Remastered by Herb LF, cut by Andreas Kauffelt originally released on DJ Exclusive, 1996. Copyright: Smile for a while, licensed from Power Music
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DJ Duke returns on Power Music Records with an mindblowing retro- future classic from his endless vaults! More

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DJ Duke presents another masterpiece from the past - Can You Feel It/ Disco-Tech from 1996 will be out in April with unreleased mixes!

Highly recommended! More

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Finally, the long awaited follow up to DJ Duke's house classic "Old Skool Deep Sampler Vol 1, which featured homages to Marshall Jefferson (Jefferson), Fingers Inc (Fingers), Larry Heard (Heard) and Ron Trent (Trent). This follow up E.P. (Vol. 2) features another string of worthwhile homages to the late Frankie Knuckles (Knuckles), Farley Jackmaster Funk (Farley), Chip E (Chip E.xtacy) and Boyd Jarvis (Jarvis).
Duke has always respected the pioneers that created the house/club scene and set the grounds for what's become of the biggest music crazes in the world. For example, Boyd Jarvis used to play live on air with Timmy Regisford on NYC radio station 107.5 WBLS using drum machines for the beats and then play keys on top of it. Duke tried to keep the tracks as close to the feeling of these pioneers, selecting the right drum machines, sounds, and overall vibe, but still keep the tracks fresh and not derivative.
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For house heads of a certain persuasion, DJ Duke is a name that resonates for all the right reasons. The U.S. veteran has been responsible for some of the 90’s most seminal moments, chiefly through tracks such as “12 Minutes to Do It” (under his Pleasure Dome alias), “Party Time” and the Prosumer-endorsed deep house classic, “Heard”. He returns here courtesy of emerging imprint Solo Werks, who host his latest EP, ’Green Pastures’. A momentous house-led workout, it compounds Duke’s reputation as a producer of considerable panache while also acting as an auspicious start to life for the Dublin based label. The title track is a grainy, old-school cut that bears all the hallmarks of a dusty analogue-jam and harks back to the days of vintage Chicago with the sort of zest you’d expect from a man of Duke’s credentials. The other original, 'Skyscapes', is packed to the brim with industrial motifs and is characterised by the sort of effortlessly catchy baseline with which Duke has made his name. Mysterious and ethereal, it takes the listener on an uncompromising and throughly captivating house journey from the off. On the flip side, we have two stunning remixes, the first of which arrives from New Jersey don, Ruben Candelario AKA Nicuri. A long-time favourite of NYC-based producers a la Joey Anderson, Nicuri turns “Green Pastures” into a dreamy, acid-led space, adding layers of suspense and a glittering vocal intto the mix as he goes. Last but not least are Dublin-based producers Slowburn, who serve up a stunning version of "Skyscapes". A carefully construed voyage into the deep, it caps off a fine EP with some aplomb.

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More Henry Street Music goodness: DJ Duke's take on the classic E2-E4. Backed with the "The hustler", a perfect New York house groove with balearic undertones.



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Following up on the highly successful Classic Chicago tracks E.P., DJ Duke takes us even deeper with another volume of Chicago legends and pioneers, Spanky, Danell Dixon, Felix Da Housecat and Nate Williams. Again, the raw stompers are re-edited by Duke for the ultimate dance experience. Remastered and Repressed in conjunction with Power Music Records. More

Fantastic re issue of this tribute deep house EP from DJ Duke. Containing 4 fantastic tribute cuts ... Fingers, Heard, Jefferson and Trent. Shout outs to all the people who made it happen! Re mastered from DAT for 2014.
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DJ Duke scored a massive international hit in 1993 with this New York style, tribal house anthem. This US release features two exclusive mixes, along with X-Press 2?s ?Death To Digifunk? rework. More

Following up on the first reissue of Nathaniel X Project's seminal E.P. on Music Station, slow to speak's CORE is back with its second from the New Jersey garage/underground label: Cherie Lee's "Love Me Or Leave Me," originally release in 1995. A perfect example of the early to mid 90's jazz-chord driven, bass-heavy and ingenious, sample-rooted funk, "Love Me Or Leave Me" sounds like the lost Mood II Swing D.A.T. that never was, a combination of Smack Productions style North Jersey pride with the added razor's edge of downtown Manhattan's (now extinct) grit and thrill, delivered with the smooth swing of that era's titanium-strong formula. The original full-vocal epitomizes the song-rooted, radio-house aesthetic of the time, but head straight to the "Club Dub" for what's had underground heads and deep house obscurists thirsting for over 15 years. Licensed from Music Station and mastered straight from the original D.A.T.'s, CORE presents the full reissue of this genre-defining moment of the formative years. More

Hailing from an era still ripe with optimism, Nate Tinsley's sole EP on Music Station, under the moniker Nathaniel X Project, is one of the dopest 12"s of the 1990's. Embodying the now fading dreams of a whole generation of club children, the veritable political program was everything deep house strove to be: aspirational, socially-involved, visceral dance music with raw sincerity and unashamed soul. "Gotta Get Over," "Free Yourself" and "Get Up" are special, benchmarks eluding to a temporality and circumstance as much as enviable equipment and technique. Deep organ pads, sagely arrangement and supremely swinging rhythm patterns form the backbone of Tinsley's now legendary explications on the eternal truth of the underground club gospel---these songs work, and continue to resonate with us; behind the cliches lies the shining light of a naked, nearly extinct sincerity. Whole folk cultures have been built on these words. Deep house music was one of them. So much more than the "love and happiness" dribble, Nathaniel X Project's EP sounded and spoke confidently for a whole society getting off outside the stale and jaded mainstream, when "underground" meant something more than another pre-ordained lifestyle choice sanctioned under the ever present gods of exchange. Forever under its sway and adherents since its original release, Slow to Speak have licensed and reissued this masterpiece in its full splendor, a pinnacle of the NY/NJ house sound and beyond. "Oh my people, We've gotta get over, Before we go under." If ever we've needed Mr. Tinsley's words and this music, it is now.
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Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply."
Walter Benjamin Self-determination, greatness, eternity. Make your reality and it becomes you. Put your heart and soul into what you love and others will recognize your sincerity, seek you out and reward your brilliance: from this comes greatness and glory, infinite and undeniable---a fraternity of the eternal. And yet with each successive epoch, the present greatness of our moment, our time, disintegrates and disperse---becomes the mere stepping stone, the quintessential prerequisite to a future heralded anew as "the great epoch of our time." We fight a impossible war for historical cultural supremacy, and we do so blindly and selfishly, determined to achieve that greatness that we know has not yet settled down with one generation immovable throughout time. Secretly we pity these past fetes of culture, assured that ours is the time, the moment of greatness, importance and ultimate historical worth. So our art morphs from what was once practiced at first as a matter matter of self-fulfillment, personal necessity and fraternal interchange & enjoyment to one of vein self-service & epic self-deceipt. When we continue to ignore the fact that art is no longer a social endeavor---that it no longer participates in and affects the real social changes occurring around us, it's vitality inextricably tied to our historical standing---and allow it to remain autonomous from the very real material conditions that, in no small measure, make up the entirety of our current existence, we willingly clear the path to our own irrelevance, soon to be remembered, at very best, as a shimmering piece of antiquity typical of the old world, one that once held a vital and vivacious beauty in it's moment, but nay, no longer, sentenced to the dungeon of the specialists of the past.
But, it is too late...for WE will soon become THEY... More

One of the most evasive titles of the Prescription/Balance catalog, Chez Damier & Stacey Pullen's "Forever Monna" evinces the futurism of the most forward leaning deep house music, purging itself of any relics of disco sentimentality in the sacred quest of that prophecy of infinite, intangible beauty hidden within the patchwork of electronic production. Originally released in apparently minuscule numbers on Serious Grooves in 1993, this remarkable instrumental track was re-released two years later on Ballance, a fine example of these two Detroit pioneers' tireless effort to claim a piece of that brave new world from the unyielding clutches of Techno. Slinky synth loops. eerie chord frames and a brilliantly simple low-end punctuation coalesce in the uncertain, unidentifiable prospect of soul music stripped of any links to the past or present, an inexplicably funky rendition of a deep house slow mounting contagion, infecting fatally the recollections of Parliament/Funkadelic bass-licks and warm organ progressions with a bleak, somehow comforting landscape of fresh alien-esque soul. Previously unattainable without an eighty-dollar plus price-tag, "Forever Monna" joins the growing army of CORE reissues seeking to popularize an often horded and unattainable circle of essential dance music classics, pieces of stunning vision and incomparable genius that should be accessible to more than just a few pockets capable of shelving out the capital for what is rightfully the universal property of electronic musical sublimity. More

Dream states of lust and lucidity, Slow To Speak's latest reissue of house music's halcyon years comes courtesy of Mood II Swing's visionary Lem Springsteen. Originally released on the Eightball sublabel Empire State Records in 1994, these excursionary landmarks saw Springsteen bid farewell to his usual club-saturated exercises in queeny house euphoria for a hallucinatory breach into a secret realm of desire, where the whispers of a long-forgotten hunger meld with the floating synth-work of a true practitioner of the sacred art of club music. This is the soundtrack to the chill-out room of your unconscious's kaleidoscopic sex dream, the sweet synth lines of Springsteen's ritual music still floating in your mind as you awake, alas, a little too soon. Fear not: this Dyonisian masterpiece is once more available thanks to the good spirits at Dope Jams, who remind you, "Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp!" Not without asking (or paying) first, of course. More

Dream states of lust and lucidity, Slow To Speak's latest reissue of house music's halcyon years comes courtesy of Mood II Swing's visionary Lem Springsteen. Originally released on the Eightball sublabel Empire State Records in 1994, these excursionary landmarks saw Springsteen bid farewell to his usual club-saturated exercises in queeny house euphoria for a hallucinatory breach into a secret realm of desire, where the whispers of a long-forgotten hunger meld with the floating synth-work of a true practitioner of the sacred art of club music. This is the soundtrack to the chill-out room of your unconscious's kaleidoscopic sex dream, the sweet synth lines of Springsteen's ritual music still floating in your mind as you awake, alas, a little too soon. Fear not: this Dyonisian masterpiece is once more available thanks to the good spirits at Dope Jams, who remind you, "Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp!" Not without asking (or paying) first, of course. More

Brand new music!!! This latest offering of unreleased gems played at Dope Jams' monthly parties features fresh and all-original tracks from some of NY's finest practitioners of electronic music. "Winter Sampler 2013 #1" opens with the jerky, post-punk nodding funk of "Emperor," from the promising and much hyped Brooklyn outfit Beige, an imminent anthem perched somewhere between house, techno and psychedelic pop---and superseding of all of it with its sheer scope, ambition and originality. Nifty, intuitive synth-work, extremely catchy vocals and a piercing lyrical wit filter through torrents of heavy tape delay and speed-dosed drum machines to form the perfect musical lament of post-modern futility. Next, Francis Englehardt, one half of Slow To Speak/Dope Jams, offers up his latest in a spaciously unfurled series of heady and challenging techno experimentations for the post-appocalyptic generation yet to be. "Leveling" forges a clearly singular and solitary aesthetic out of personal loss, pain and ultimate redemption---truly personal music that tests the limits and transcends the simple utility of mere body music. The sampler is rounded off with the first contribution to vinyl from newcomer Genoa, featuring the aptly titled "New Way," a well-freaked peak-time workout that recalls the energy and vibe of early 1990's vocal-sample laden house without getting bogged down in the stone-forming mediocrity of the lost-and-gone medusa's gaze. All and all, an EP of very much forward-leaning music that swells the ranks of groundbreaking new contributions to the field.
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Ethereal, haunted deep house music from beyond the grave, spirit-channeling from the deepest recesses of electro-spiritual obscurity. The Slow To Speak label presents its latest offering---a residual of the holy-era of the NY underground continuum, conjuring the ritual and pomp of the new electronic goth without abandoning its undeniable roots in the techno/deep house story. Dark-matter melodies interlock in an ever off-centering orbit of sparse percussive return, while the distorted exhortations of some wandering intergalactic phantasm whisper menacingly just beneath the surface. Trance-inducing, strangely unsettling and ultimately transcendent---further evidence that electronic music can transport its listeners into the fertile pastures of the sublime like any other high art. CLEAR VINYL Pressing with Japanese Obi. More

2XLP! A culmination of over 35 years combined experience, Classic House Grooves: Dope Jams utilizes the classic deep house sound of America?s cultural epicenter & infuses it with an uncompromising artistic militancy that screams through the mix?s full-forced party-rocking fervor. Featuring seminal work from Kerri Chandler, Mood II Swing & Chris Brann, as well as highlights from the likes of DJ Pierre, Johnny Dangerous and many more, Dope Jams? ode to King Street sets aside the delicate programming niceties of restraint & conservative listening in favor of all out party warfare, setting the correct context for the label?s brilliant output & using the music to it?s maximum effect. Classic House Grooves: Dope Jams is the definitive collection of King Street Sound?s monumental contributions?a testament to what NYC once was, and what it can be once more. More