A globally respected and highly accomplished artist, label boss at the seminal Hot Creations, founder and curator of the worldwide Paradise event series and member of cross-genre band Hot Natured, Jamie Jones has achieved iconic status in the electronic music world. A trendsetter and seasoned tastemaker, the Welsh dance music superstar pioneered his own distinct sound, drawing on his deep knowledge and experience to cultivate DJ sets that weave through a range of diverse, complementary styles selected to energise and enchant the dance floor.

https://drop-music.bandcamp.com/

DJ’s, Producers and label owners, Andy Riley and Laurence Ritchie (AKA Inland Knights) have created a brand name that most House heads have heard of.  Whether you like it deep , tech or more funky – when you think about Drop Music or Inland Knights a certain style of House comes to mind that is uniquely their own. Andy and Laurence’s reach is global, and their label’s continue to produce some of the finest House music 15 years after they started back in the UK, within Nottingham's party scene.

Andy and Laurence  met in ’93 and cut their teeth Dj’ing for Smokescreen, the renegade sound system from which they drew their early inspiration. Smokescreen consisted of dj’s, lighting people, sound people, a truck, a P.A, a generator and general helpers. Old warehouses, woodland, fields, quarries and houses were utilized with the sole intention of having a good time…. for free! By the mid 90’s smokescreen could guarantee a crowd of hundreds in attendance at their parties(which were most weekends), and their club nights became local institutions that ran for years with packed dancefloors. Into their 21st year, Smokescreen are still going strong and are still hosting quality club nights and parties in and around the Midlands.

By ’98 Laurence and Andy had made the inevitable step into production and the same year their fledgling label, Drop Music, was born. With the release of ‘Inland Knights vol 1’ , Riley and Ritchie undertook a busy schedule to write tracks for Drop  (almost all of the early output was Inland knights, despite many monikers). Drop Music has gone on to become one of the most highly regarded House labels in recent years (with 80 plus releases to date), and Inland Knights have gone on to become one of the most respected and prolific production outfits in the House community, carving a unique and distinctive House sound, and regularly taking on remix and Ep duties for fellow labels and producers. Highlights include the acclaimed ‘Mohammed Ali’ remix for Faithless on Cheeky Records, CD compilations and remixes for NRK and Om Records, three Ep's on 2020 Vision, Inland Knights first full length album entitled ‘Creative Spaces’, and more recently, Inland Knights album to mark 10 years of Drop Music entitled ‘Dust till Dawn’, not to mention countless Ep's on other labels over the years and a 30-minute live mix on Radio 1’s ‘Essential Selection’ show. More recently, the pair released 'Inland Bytes', a retrospective look at Inland Knights career so far.

Currently, as well as remix, production and label commitments, the pair maintain a busy international Dj schedule which takes them further and further afield as their reputation grows. Bookings have included regular slots at UK clubbing institutions such as Fabric, The End, The Egg, The Cross, Turnmills, Shindig, Back 2 Basics,  Sanky's, Chibuku Shake Shake, Ministry Of Sound, Cargo, Déjà Vu, The Arches and The Sub Club in Scotland, as well as smaller more intimate venues nationwide. Countless international trips have seen them tour the Globe. Most weekends Inland Knights can be found DJ'ing up and down the UK or Europe with regular international tours a permanent fixture in their Diaries.

Follow Us On:
Soundcloud http://soundcloud.com/inland-knights
Twitter         https://twitter.com/#!/Inland_Knights
Facebook     https://www.facebook.com/inland.knights
Band Camp https://drop-music.bandcamp.com/

For Bookings Please Contact:  
Paul@elitemm.co.uk (Worldwide)
shannon@aptentertainment.com (Americas)

For Rune Reilly Kölsch, Kompakt has become a great label to call home. In 2013 the German imprint celebrated 20 years of record releases at the cutting edge of electronic music, championed in June by one of the most genre re-defining albums and personal music projects for an era: Kölsch’s landmark long player, ‘1977’.

A melodic autobiography on black wax, the Kölsch project has seen 36/37-year-old Rune take stock of a diverse and successful production career and draw upon his own personal beginnings: a nostalgia for childhood, family, friends and the confusion of applying his split-cultural heritage to what it means to think of ‘home’. As Rune freely admits, “being half Irish, half German and living in Denmark – it was all one big messy period of my life.” 

Born to hippie parents in the freetown of Christiania (a commune-like autonomous borough of the Danish capital Copenhagen) his childhood was spent surrounded by creativity. His mother was an artist whose family had roots in German politics and his father a singer songwriter who travelled through Asia playing music in the early 70's. Kölsch, however, did miss out on building friendships and found solace in making up “this imaginary world that I would spend days in,” before the family moved to Germany – a period of memories, relations and characters from which ‘1977’ derives its titles.

For Rune, the tracks he began building from 2010 took in this personal reflection, his being “completely locked in to reminiscing about what shaped me as a kid and into the individual that I am now” – contemplating his unique past to form the brickwork of ‘1977’, one of the most future-facing techno albums of recent years.

Influenced by hip hop, pop and the incredible legacy of Jeff Mills and Derrick May, Rune started producing in 1995, embarking on a string of success stories. In 2003 he released the multi-million selling, saxophone-infused ‘Calabria’, that saw collaboration requests pouring in from artists as diverse as Nicki Minaj, Shakira and Flo Rida. He then set up Tattoorecs – releasing pioneering underground tracks with no titles, just tattoos for artwork, that garnered critical acclaim and support from minimal and techno trailblazers such as Sven Väth, Richie Hawtin, Magda, Tiefschwarz and Ricardo Villalobos.

This appreciation of the complete musical spectrum has gifted Rune with a devotion to groove and melodics and with it the dexterity to input real creative change to the genres he reveres, not least his beloved techno. “2010 was the year of the ketamine house wave, where the music was 118 bpm and everything was extremely boring”, reflects Rune. “I wanted some melodic techno, some energy back in this scene. People needed the energy to express themselves and go crazy for a bit.”

This notion faced opposition, even from within Rune’s close circles. But it was Kompakt founder Michael Mayer who had the insight to see what Kölsch was trying to achieve. Rune’s conviction that vibrations and melodics are the key to human response had tipped the balance, underlined by his experience as a hip hop DJ where he “needed something to catch me and drag me in. And that’s what techno should do!” Here too he drew on his love of Jeff Mills and Derrick May, recalling how “they used to make mistakes all the time. It would be a big mash of all kinds of stuff, but at least something was happening. That’s what I was missing and that’s what I’m trying to change with the Kölsch project.”

The result is ‘1977’, a personal collection of dancefloor destroyers that are continuing to send clubs and festivals across the globe into melodic supernova. Take this video of Kölsch’s set at Belgium’s I Love Techno festival, one of Rune’s 2013 highlights, where “people were doing sit downs, singing along to all the tracks”. Watch it. It puts the hairs up on the back of your neck. “The response was overwhelming,” said Rune in a recent interview with Mixmag (who named Kölsch as one of their ‘Stars Of 2013’), as “when you think about it, it was just a bunch of childhood memories with a kickdrum underneath.” 

Elsewhere he’s ripped up the airways with an acclaimed Essential Mix for Pete Tong on BBC Radio 1, delivered his incendiary soundscape to Singapore’s world-renowned ZoukOut Festival, boomed his live show through the heaving basement of London’s XOYO and played the hallowed Space Terrace – in his words “a boyhood dream since I started going to Ibiza in 1999. That was what I wanted from life!” So opening Amnesia in 2014 with Joris Voorn will be a bonus then...

While these are reasons enough to keep the beaming smile beneath Kölsch’s trademark black fedora, his humility remains just as striking. While tracks like ‘Goldfisch’ have taken pivotal positions in the set lists of world class DJs from across the dance music spectrum – traversing the underground with Seth Troxler, while simultaneously providing credible new euphoric highs for the likes of Axwell – Rune remains joyously down to earth. All despite producing, with ‘1977’, an album that has crossed as many cultural and musical boundaries as his own childhood past.

From the face-twisting melodic drive of ‘Opa’ and ‘Bappedekkel’, to the chord-surfing piano groove of ‘Der Alte’ and the euphoric crescendos of ‘Lorely’, ‘Oma’ and ‘All That Matters’ (all hits in different countries), the fact remains that whether in your living room, on the dancefloors of the world’s greatest parties, or simply in your headphones on your way home, Kölsch’s ‘1977’ has re-defined techno and become an achievement that speaks for itself. 

Words: Phil Dudman – Clubs & Live Music Editor, Mixmag


Born in 1935, Peggy's family connections are well-known in folk and classical music circles. She is Pete Seeger's half-sister, Ruth Crawford Seeger's daughter; partner to Ewan MacColl, who wrote First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for her and to whom she bore three children. Her best-known compositions are Gonna Be an Engineer and The Ballad of Springhill (the latter rapidly becoming regarded as a traditional song).

The MacColl-Seeger work was prodigious in its scope. From 1959 onward, they encouraged and set standards for the burgeoning UK folk revival; they trolled the USA & UK field recordings and anthologies for little-known traditional songs; they trained other singers and involved them in political-musical documentary theatre; they instigated the revolutionary Radio Ballad form. Their work was halted by Ewan's death in 1989.

Peggy has made 22 solo recordings and taken part in more than 100 more with other performers. A singer and multi-instrumentalist, she is considered to be one of North America's finest female folksingers.

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