- what / Label
- likes / House, Drum and Bass, Jazz
You can never keep your eye off the music scene for long, before some label or artist emerges to shake things up a bit, and one such label that is sure to make a big impact on the global scene this year is Inspirit Music. The reason? Inspirit is a label that emphasises musical quality, but over a broad spectrum of music, be it deep house, soulful broken beats or downtempo. Whatever your preference though, with these guys, you just know it's gonna be good.
It all started back in 1999 when Inspirit founders Bob Haynes and Max Beard returned from a trip of a lifetime to New Zealand. So good in fact that Bob returned with his newfound friend, lover and companion Noeleen, a radiant tongan from Auckland. After both studying music and business, the duo were keen to take their activities up a notch to a more professional level and began searching for premises in their home town of High Wycombe. They were interested to discover that the local record shop had recently closed down and decided, along with several close friends and Bob's brother Dave, to reopen the shop and house the studio upstairs ... selling vinyl to DJ's to pay the studio rent.
Since then the shop has grown from strength to strength, also expanding online to sell quality music to a worldwide customer base on their own site www.inspiritmusic.com as well as leading deep house portal www.deephousenetwork.com. Meanwhile Bob and Max, tired of solely producing music for other people, decided that it was necessary to find an outlet for the music that inspired them and Inspirit Music, the label, was born.
The label philosophy from the outset has been to put out soulful, song-based music. Inspirit material released to date comprises mainly of deep house, but refusing to be pigeon-holed into one genre, the label occasionally enjoys forging it's soulful sounds onto a wider base of music. Debut release 'Someday' by The Beard immediately picked up favour with a variety of key players such as Laurent Garnier, Rui Da Silva and Jori Hulkonnen and was immediately followed with the much acclaimed 2-step remixes from Bobtrax (Bob Haynes himself) and Phuturistix (a.k.a Maddslinky / Zed Bias) - which picked up radio plays from Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge, as well as featuring on several compilations.
In fact it was one such license request from San Francisco's Om Records, for its Om Lounge 6 CD, that led to Inspirit Music hooking up with Andy Caldwell. A DJ from the age of 18, Andy completed his first release back in 1994 with label mate Gabriel Rene and they soon formed a strong partnership with San Francisco based band Soulstice, who have just celebrated the release of their album, 'Illusion'.
During the last few years, Andy has seen releases on Om Records beginning with Mark Farina's Mushroom Jazz series, five consecutive Om Lounge releases, and more recently 'Sounds of Om v. 2', a full length mix cd of deep house grooves. On top of this his dreamy house cover of the Brazilian jazz standard 'Quiet Nights' , featuring the vocals of Gina Rene, was touted by Hed Kandi's Mark Doyle as 'a perfect example of cool and soulful deep house.'
Following on from a series of superb remixes for Inspirit Music, the label has invited Andy Caldwell to mix the very first CD in their forthcoming compilation series: 'In Soul Sessions'. After a heavy year of US gigs and an ever-expanding presence in the European club scene, Andy was the obvious choice to launch this series - designed to encapsulate and bring to you the ethos and sounds of Inspirit Music Ltd. Each mix will explore one defining element of their overall sound, with volume one examining the smooth, deep house end of the Inspirit Music Spectrum. Here Andy effortlessly blends vocal talent from Amma, Soul Sista, Gina Rene and Omega with the undoubted production values of the scene's leading artists, creating a perfect blend of Deep House music from around the world.
The 'InSoul Sessions' series allows Inspirit to fly the flag for good music and gives them a platform to continue to push the diverse range of sounds that they enjoy listening to. As Bob Haynes explains, 'at the moment we are enjoying putting out deep house, but we're also keen to push the more soulful intelligent side of other exciting genres such as 2-step and broken beats. We're quite confident these genres can exist side by side and Inspirit Music will push them as such'.
One thing is for sure, the future looks very bright indeed for this small but ambitious label. 2002 looks set to bring Inspirit Music the success it has continued to work hard for.
