Influences: John Daly

What a mindblowing album. All the way. Just the deepest vibeyest shit ever.
“I tell you this, no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn”
I mean holy shit. It doesn’t get much rawer than that. This was the first Doors album I got, I had it on double cassette. I was about 13 I guess. It was doors mania because that Oliver Stone movie had come out. Light my fire was back in the charts. The movie was over 18s in the cinema but we paid to see the Lion King or something like that and then snuck in.

Miles Davis – Spanish Key (from Bitches Brew)
If you could take the sun and somehow distill it into a musical experience, It would sound like Bitches Brew. I’ll always remember the first time I heard Spanish Key. It was about 8 o clock on a perfect late 90s summer evening, I was standing in my friend’s garden on a cliff overlooking the sea, sun going down, the album blasting out the open windows, and that intensity building and building, until the drop, with those big rhodes chords. It completely blew my mind. A whole other level of deepness revealed itself to me when i got into that album.

I had this on cassette single, It was the instrumental B side to the single “Weirdo”. I guess we’re talking 1991/2 here. I had only really been into metal up to this point, but was building a small stash of shoegazey indie music on the side, which I kept on the serious down low. I was obsessed with this tune. Over and over and over. Even listening now for the first time in 20 years, I still know it inside out. There was a mad deepness to a lot of that post-manchester/pre-britpop indie stuff. People like Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream. Creation anybody?
I guess its just that early 90s flavour. Ive always thought that all that IDM stuff was basically indie melodies played with synthesisers, a lot of that UK stuff from the early 90s has that kind of melody. Melancholic yet comforting.

Theo Parrish was important because he showed our generation that house music didn’t have to be slick to be the real deal. It could be rough too. And it could be sloppy, and still bang. At the time we were all coming from that MAW/Blaze thing where you had this really super slick studio production. Near impossible for a dude in rural Cork with just a sampler and a couple of novations to make that kind of stuff, so when that beatdown sound came out first, I was all over it. It all sounded like it was made by someone like me, in a bedroom studio. And if they could do it maybe I could too.

Or basically anything involving Ron Trent. The absolute master of this deep house shit as far as I’m concerned. Impossible to choose a favourite, so I picked this because lots has been said (and rightfully so) of the Chez and Trent era of Prescription, but the second era, when Anthony Nicholson became heavily involved is just as essential in my opinion. All of the releases in this series are totally unique tracks, nothing else sounds anything like them and they still all hold up in todays clubs, they can hold their own with any of this modern pumped up stuff.

Yeah baby. Now that’s what I call Music. This is exactly how I want to sound.

Me and couple of my friends are pretty obsessed with the guy. A connection to the source that pure is a rare thing indeed. This is his first solo album, and its also pretty much a who’s who of that scene at the time. Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia, Neil Young, Jefferson Airplane, all on there. Super album, totally unfiltered. Music for music’s sake. Dude is still going too.

Moodymann had a few years on that beatdown thing. It’s the same but on a higher level. This was one of the first Moody records I got. It fitted so well with all the disco I was playing at the time, like Candido, Cerrone, all that stuff. All those early KDJ releases are perfect for that, bridging new and old stuff in the mix. This was a big influence on me keeping an emphasis on sampling in my own music. It was cool to see him sampled on the new Drake album. Imagine what Moodymann could do with a platform like that given a chance. I’d love to hear him producing some A list rapper.

My copy is completely worn out. I don’t even have the 12”. I have it on this double pack bootleg of Larry Levan remixes that I picked up when I was getting into him. The delays and the idea of bringing the dub element into non-reggae dance music was new to me. I was already into delays from the Pink Floyd days so this was an instant hit for me. Still is.

And so Francois K. Probably my biggest influence as far as this dance music shit is concerned. Djing and producing. You see Francois was there at the very beginning of this shit, ie David Mancuso’s loft. And in some heavy jazz shit even before that. But then Prelude and the Paradise Garage era, and then Wave Music and Body & Soul in the 90s. And now Deep Space, which is going I guess nearly 15 years at this stage. Holy shit man. So anyway to then get signed to his label for an album, and DJ over there with him a bunch of times, as you can imagine I was pretty happy about how that all worked out.