The Disco Express | Toy Tonics | Whiskey Disco
Roux Records | Fresh Take Records | theBasement

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Bookings: bustinloosedjs@gmail.com

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Hailing from the depths of South London Bustin’ Loose, aka Tom Lilly, is the founder of highly esteemed, hedonistic loft party and label The Disco Express.

With a penchant for dance music born out of a collection of dusty 45’s, Bustin' Loose is a dynamic DJ, prolific producer and budding writer for Le Visiteur.

Having already released under Toy Tonics, Whiskey Disco, Basement Discos, Roux and Fresh Take Records within a year, the burgeoning artist continues to go from strength to strength. With a new vinyl out soon on The Disco Express, expect Bustin' Loose to light up dance floors all over the globe.

I'm a DJ and musician who makes records in Scotland and runs the labels I Love Your Edits (for my edits/reworks) and I Love Your Energy (for originals), which is also the name of my club night too.
Labels I've make records for: Percolate, Phonica White, Classic, Kookoo, Me Me Me, Delusions Of Grandeur, Defected, Futureboogie, Razor-N-Tape and more

Bookings: 
EU/UK: joe@remoteartists.co.uk

GutterFunk: All Subject To Vibes.
All info: if.khan@transmitsignal.co.uk

• Booking: christian@vdhaardt.com
• Management: seb@iwaad.de

The tale of Danny Tenaglia's love affair with music, and the world's subsequent romance with him, is one of the critical veins in the body of dance music. He is every dancer's secret discovery; a random purchase at the record store, a reluctant night out that unexpectedly turned magic. Explosive success came not behind a major label release, or a world tour, or a radio hit remix: It happened when enough people had the private Tenaglia experience for themselves.

The momentum started building in early '70s New York, when a barely 10-year-old Danny first got the feel of vinyl in his hands. Enthralled by the music of artists like Philly Soul's The Trammps, Motown's Marvin Gaye, African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and disco producer Giorgio Moroder, he started to collect records, plumbing the depths of each one, and frequently finding that he preferred the B-side to the A. It was 1979 when he discovered legendary nightclub Paradise Garage, where DJ Larry Levan's rich, genre-less blend of music seemed to mirror his own "no boundaries" policy. It was here where Danny found the club model he would one day emulate: Levan's bold style, the venue's plain décor, and the party's warmth and inclusiveness.

Danny left New York in 1985 and launched a successful DJ-ing career in Miami as a resident at Cheers nightclub. There he schooled the locals in classic New York and Chicago house, but five years later he returned home, tired of only playing other people's music. He started to assemble an impressive roster of remixes, including Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" (1991), Jamiroquai's "Emergency on Planet Earth" (1993), and Madonna's "Human Nature" (1994). But his first epic was The Daou's "Surrender Yourself" (1993): With the kick in the bass and the underlying rhythm as the foundation, Tenaglia blanketed Vanessa Daou's wispy vocal with grand, thick chords, a combination of classic groove and modern club-ready depth that was, at the time, entirely new. The title of his 1995 debut artist album on New York's Tribal Records described it perfectly: Hard & Soul. But even if the cocktail was his own, Tenaglia never hesitated to declare how heavily his influences weighed in his productions - everyone from Patti LaBelle to Kraftwerk, with countless lesser-known Soul, R&B, Latin, Samba, and Disco artists in between.

In 1996, after a brief stint at New York superclub Roxy, Danny landed a Saturday night residency at white-hot Twilo, a position that upped his profile but didn't satisfy his expanding artistry as a DJ and producer. While New York swooned for big-room diva anthems, Danny was turning his ear toward the more minimal, tech-y grooves originating in European production studios. This period produced solid remixes like Grace's "Not Over Yet" (1996) and Janet Jackson's "The Pleasure Principle" (1996), but by the time he moved to Tunnel in 1998, Danny had already created "Elements," an instant classic that caused the dance scene's collective jaw to drop. With his own warped voice providing the narration, "Elements" (one track off full-length Tourism) walked the listener through the different components of a dance track in real time, going from kick to drum loop to snare hit, letting each layer over the other until the track exploded with dark, drum-heavy energy. Next to ostentatious radio anthems, its simplicity was a revelation. 

It was around this time that the murmurs started to get louder: Who is this Danny Tenaglia, and just what does he do to people? Clubbers reported seemingly inhuman mixing capabilities, booth-to-floor telepathy, and the grittiest "modern yet classic" grooves they had ever heard come out of a speaker. A trio of label compilations - Mix This Pussy (1994) and Can Your Pussy Do The Dog? (1995) for Tribal, and Gag Me With A Tune (1996) for Maxi - were the first Tenaglia sets clued-in clubbers could take home to dissect, but the release of his first installment in the UK-based Global Underground series of DJ mixes, titled Athens (2000), lit the international fire. Athens (meant to reflect the set he played at the Greek capital's club King Size) remains one of the darkest, strangest, sexiest sets ever released, and its tame cover photo of a gentle-looking man in a Yankee cap just didn't seem to fit. DJ dates across Europe dispelled the mystery and started the spread of the infectious Tenaglia fever.

Back in New York, Tenaglia was tiring of the cavernous gloom of Tunnel and longed for a weekly home that better resembled where the DJ bug first bit him - the Paradise Garage. He landed at Vinyl, a black-walled, single-environment, no-liquor club about one-quarter the size of Tunnel. He named the night "Be Yourself," after the self-affirming, heavy-bottomed vocal track he had recently recorded with Chicago's Celeda. And he took the name to heart: Without the pressure of bar minimums or an expectant crowd, Tenaglia spread his DJ wings. Next to new tracks by young producers like Rui Da Silva, Peace Division, and Saeed & Palash, he played the artists of his youth, with nary a beat dropped. If he wanted to launch into a two-hour set of straight-up techno, he did. If he wanted to play old Michael Jackson records, he did. If he wanted to get on the mic and tell the crowd the name of the sound he was about to play, or who next week's guest opening DJ would be, or just give everyone a "verbal handshake" to welcome them to the club, he did. And a city tired of drama embraced the barebones, music-centered night. 

The world caught up to Tenaglia in 2000. His annual party during Miami's Winter Music Conference outgrew its home at the cramped Groovejet and moved to just-opened superclub Space. DJ giants like Carl Cox danced on top of the speakers with the Deep Dish boys, Fatboy Slim mingled on the patio, and for a day the ego inherent to DJ culture evaporated: Tenaglia was hailed as the undisputed king, the "DJ's DJ." His roof-raising revamp of Green Velvet's "Flash" won "Best Remix" at the UK's Muzik Awards, where he was also awarded the "Best International DJ" prize. 

In the two years that followed, Tenaglia released another Global Underground installment (London); toured the world, took the party island of Ibiza by storm, remixed Billy Nichols' "Give Your Body Up To The Music" (a Garage anthem); got nominated for a Grammy (for his remix of Depeche Mode's "I Feel Loved," also nominated for Best Dance Song); returned to Twilo for two special gigs - a President's Day marathon with Carl Cox that shattered all its attendance records, and the club's sixth anniversary party with John Digweed, which turned out to be even more meaningful than it seemed at the time (Twilo was shut down permanently a week later); graced the cover of every major dance music magazine; and won a Dancestar Lifetime Achievement award... all while keeping Be Yourself buzzing every Friday. 

In 2003, Danny came full circle with the release of Choice: A Collection Of Classics, a two-CD mixed compilation that let him pay direct tribute to many of the artists who had influenced his sound and style. It featured everyone from Blaze to Adeva to Imagination, as well as hefty liner notes explaining the significance of each track, penned by the man himself. He also remixed another Garage classic (Yoko Ono's "Walking On Thin Ice," which became her first Billboard number one ever), opened another Space during Winter Music Conference (the new location down the block), and took another Dancestar award, this time "Best Party" for Be Yourself. 

Be Yourself took the same honor again in 2004, but this time the win was bittersweet. At the time of the ceremony, Vinyl, now called Arc, had already been sold to developers. Danny closed the classic club on Sunday, April 25, 2004, with an emotional set that lasted well into Monday afternoon, and culminated with his mix of Kings Of Tomorrow's paean to unending love, "Finally."

And as in every year since his DJ odyssey began, all across the globe, from Acapulco to Tokyo, more people experienced their first night with Danny Tenaglia, that clubber rite-of-passage that forever changes how you listen to music, go out to nightclubs, and think about DJs. 


Ransom Note is an online music, arts and culture magazine. We provide a home for readers and writers with boundless enthusiasm, esoteric knowledge, fierce opinions and impeccable taste.

With our core team immersed in all aspects of dance music, we publish news, articles, and interviews covering the greatest in innovative, underground culture from across the globe. We offer regular, exclusive music and mixtapes from our favourite artists, and publish features shining a light on everything from the freshest new artists to the untold tales from rave history.

Alongside this we offer musings on film, books, life, and art, generating some context and controversy as an antidote to the reheated PR that clogs up the internet. Our office is fuelled by Tunnock’s Bars, cat memes, hangovers and a ridiculous, never ending love for our culture.

We're always interested in getting new writers on board – feel free to get in touch if you’ve got a story to tell.

With love until the grave.

Being one of the most in-demand Techno DJs of our times, Ben Klock needs little introduction. His name has been closely associated with Berlin’s legendary club Berghain since 2005. His monthly residency has formed the backdrop to his international success, providing an invaluable platform for his ability to create a room rather than just play to it.

Much of his early career was marked by marathon sets – a signature that played a considerable role in nurturing his skills and reputation – but even the more compressed sets he shares today evidence an intricate narrative and sense of flow that defines him as a DJ. It was these inherent abilities that led him to compile the fabric 66 compilation in 2012, before winning the BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix of the Year award in 2015.

His releases on Ostgut Ton have become landmarks in the imprint’s history. 2009’s “Dawning”, the first of his collaborations with Marcel Dettmann kickstarted the label itself and remains a stand-out track in its discography. Another release of particular note is the Before One EP including “Subzero”, which many techno lovers still refer to as their gateway track into the whole genre itself. For many, however, it is his album One (2009) that best captures Klock’s talents as a producer. His skills as a remixer have also seen him rework tracks by a wide variety of artists, including Kerri Chandler, Depeche Mode, Robert Hood and Kenny Larkin.

Additionally, Klock curates with great passion his own label Klockworks, founded in 2006. With releases from DVS1, Stef Mendesidis, The Advent, Sterac, Etapp Kyle, Temudo and many more Klockworks became a synonym for unique, high quality Techno.

In 2017 Ben started his own event series PHOTON which is a unique concept show that blends light, architecture and music. Since then he toured PHOTON at special venues in major cities around the world such as Printworks (London), Gashouder (Amsterdam), Arca (Sao Paolo), to name a few. It quickly became a new standard for audio visual electronic music events. In 2023 the project returns after a pandemic induced break with a brand new visual and artistic concept.

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


A true artist in every sense of the word, Layton Giordani stands firmly as one of the most popular tastemakers of techno’s new school, with his pioneering musical vision serving as a contemporary voice for the younger generation. Spending years acquiring knowledge from musical greats, the 28 year old possesses a wealth of experience far beyond his years and has now undeniably earned his rank in the upper echelon of techno. With a repertoire that knows no bounds, the dexterous New Yorker has explored a new dimension of scope with each passing year, nurturing a monumental discography that echoes staunch dedication to his craft. Giordani’s palpable successes can be largely credited to his extensive stock of knowledge, garnered through an insatiable work ethic and years spent earning his keep in the industry. Solely focused on his passion for music from the age of just 13, Giordani’s path forever changed at 19 years old after watching Danny Tenaglia perform live at Pacha NYC. Deeply inspired by the formative experience, Layton began to master his craft behind the decks, landing a pivotal residency at Brooklyn’s Output NY that would consequently steam-roll his career into quick maturity. Thanks to the faith they instilled in him, Layton turned heads and began making a name for himself through his deft touch and sharp ear. Seeking further guidance from another of the long-standing greats, Giordani spent countless hours under the mentorship of Adam Beyer, honing his composition talents and studying the cardinal cuts of techno’s rich history. The affiliation resulted in Giordani’s first releases under the Swedish maven’s storied imprints; an EP titled Unspoken on Truesoul followed shortly by Rivington, his input to Drumcode’s celebrated A-Sides series. News of the untapped star’s fresh sensibilities circulated and in 2017, Giordani erupted onto the scene with his aptly-named debut album contribution to Drumcode in the form of Where It Begins. The 12-track LP served as the first seismic indication of his capabilities and subsequently received critical acclaim from artists, new fans and industry specialists alike.

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