Salda Dago - Apurtu Kateak (Thunder Clap Records 2017)

Independent label based between London and the Basque Country specialising in high grade reggae & dub.

Producer / Beat Maker / Keyboard player / Dj

I started playing the piano, guitar, violin and clarinet from a very young age thanks to the musical heritage handed down by my father who is an accomplished pianist. After having lost interest in playing any instruments, I rekindled my love for the piano and started playing along to the music I was crazy about at the age of 16 : reggae. I started a band along with a few other local musicians from Bilbao (The Basque Country / Spain) called Chalwa and began to make beats on whatever software I could get my hands on. After moving back to London, I met Ross & Bob and we started 'The Upper Cut Band' which worked closely with the Reading-based record label Reality Shock and we began to rehearse with artists from the local scene, some of which would go on to become some of the Uk's most popular artists including Solo Banton and Deadly Hunta. After a year of rehearsals we hit the road and toured up and down the UK and around Europe as a backing band for international reggae artists. It was a very important time for me as a musician and later on as a producer as I made many friends and learned a lot about the music industry from people a lot older than me at the time. 

After 4 years in the Uk I then moved back to Spain with the idea of starting a traditional reggae sound system, which I did along with two other founding members, called Thunder Clap Sound System. Over the next 8 years we successfully built our sound system, toured Spain and organised countless events in our own city, Bilbao. In the midst of constantly buying records and multitasking in order to ensure the survival and success of our sound system, I began to make beats and record one off vocal tracks for our sessions ( dub plates ) but the tracks I was building were never intended for release and were only played as exclusives during our sound system sessions. As a collective, we began to book professional studios and enlist the guidance and skills of seasoned producers such as Russ D, Dougie Conscious & Roberto Sanchez. 

I was fortunate enough to meet one of the pioneering figures in Jamaican music in Spain, Inyaki Yarritu, who invited me to play with him and other london-based musicians, including Chris Lane ( co-owner & producer of the legendary Fashion Records ) and I met a young spaniard called Jaime Zugasti who was working as a sound engineer at as many venues as he could. We soon became friends and Jaime invited me to his studio in North London, which would be where I would begin to learn about analogue mixing desks, recording and other aspects of music production which I had not dabbled with yet.

2016 marks the birth of Thunder Clap Records, which branches out from Thunder Clap Sound System. I am the in house producer for the label and we have released our first EP and we have some very exciting projects which we are about to release, working closely with emerging and established artists from Jamaica, Spain and the UK.

Salda Dago - Apurtu Kateak (Thunder Clap Records 2017)

Carlos Thunder