Kenny Ken became one of the U.K.'s more recognized drum'n'bass DJs during the mid- to late '90s, owning and operating the Mix & Blen' label. He began DJing during the late-'80s acid house movement and rose to prominace with "Everyman" in 1994, his first big track. ~ Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide (from mp3.com)
One of the original innovators in Chicago house, Marshall Jefferson had a hand in several of the music's most influential early tracks. As a solo act, he recorded 1986's "Move Your Body" -- sub-titled and unanimously acclaimed "The House Music Anthem." Jefferson also helped record Phuture's "Acid Tracks," the first and best acid-house single. Later, amidst a wave of acid-inspired records, he grew tired of the sound and moved into a more spiritual form of music later termed deep house; along with Larry Heard, he became one of its best producers.
Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1959, the son of a police officer and a school teacher. Heavily into hard rock like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple during the 1970s, he attended university to study accounting, but left after three years to take a job in the post office. By 1983, friends began taking him to Chicago's Music Box club; after being exposed to Ron Hardy's influential mixing style, Jefferson soon realized that house music had a real feeling to it, unlike the commercial disco sound he was accustomed to hearing on the radio. House artists like Jesse Saunders and Jamie Principle had begun releasing records by that time, and Jefferson felt the need to begin recording as well. He bought a synthesizer/sequencer combo and passed several of his newly recorded tapes on to Ron Hardy. The legendary DJ liked what he heard and began dropping the tracks into his set.
During the two-year period from 1985 to 1986, Marshall Jefferson released half-a-dozen of the biggest club hits in Chicago. His first release, "Go Wild Rhythm Trax," appeared on Virgo Records in 1985. Later that year he produced his friend Sleazy D's "I've Lost Control," and the track became a big club hit. "Move Your Body," another recording first introduced by Hardy, was given a full release on Trax Records in 1986; the single immediately dropped a bomb on Chicago crowds, who soon began acknowledging the track as house music's defining moment.
Less than one year after "Move Your Body" however, Chicago was forced to react to another important milestone, the onset of acid-house. The trio known as Phuture (DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb J) had recently recorded some material using the acid squelch of Roland's TB-303 synthesizer, and with Marshall Jefferson's help, they entered the studio to record a full version. Phuture emerged from the studio with "Acid Trax," one of the most influential songs in the history of house. Several months after its release, it had spawned literally hundreds of imitators and answer versions; soon the Chicago house scene had become swamped with tracks soaked in the squelchy reverbs of the TB-303.
Given the lack of variety in the scene, Jefferson quickly tired of acid house. Instead of continuing with acid, he recorded an atmospheric slice of house inspired by the original vibe he had experienced at the Music Box back in the early '80s. The track, "Open Your Eyes," took its place alongside contemporary productions by Larry Heard, signalled a new feeling in house music, named deep house for its level of emotion and organic beauty.
Unlike many Chicago house producers, Jefferson managed to make a good living during the late '80s and early '90s, when house music went global almost overnight and the bottom dropped out of Chicago's fraternal club scene. Several Marshall Jefferson productions not recorded under his own name, such as Hercules' "Lost in the Groove," Jungle Wonz's "The Jungle" and Kevin Irvine's "Ride the Rhythm" all became sizeable club hits. Also, he masterminded the career of the preeminent house vocal group Ten City from 1988 through 1992, and began DJing around Europe after being offered several high-profile spots in 1989. Jefferson spent much of the 1990s remixing and DJing, but did record under his own name for the 1997 album Day of the Onion. ~ John Bush, All Music Guide (from mp3.com)
Tod Dockstader (1932, St.Paul, Minnesota, USA) studied psychology and art at the University of Minnesota, before studying painting and film, earning money by drawing cartoons for various newspapers. As he moved to Hollywood In 1955 to work as an apprentice film editor, he became cutting picture and sound for animated cartoons.
Its compositional adventures began in 1958 after becoming a self-taught sound sound effects engineer while working as a recording engineer at Gotham Recording Studios where he started to experiment with musique concrète during long off-work hours.
Producing a slim but groundbreaking body of work possessed of a truly musical sensibility typically lacking from the tape constructions of his contemporaries, Tod Dockstader was among America's foremost composers of musique concr�te, creating electronic soundscapes informed by genuine drama and mystery. Born May 22, 1932 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Dockstader spent his childhood enamoured of radio broadcasts, intrigued not only by the popular programs of the era but also the static and noise separating stations on the dial. In time he turned to producing his own ham radio broadcasts, and while a graduate student at the University of Minnesota he studied film and painting, funding his education by drawing cartoons for local newspapers and magazines.
In 1955 Dockstader relocated to Hollywood, where he was hired as an apprentice film editor at Terrytoons Animation, working alongside future luminaries such as cartoonist Jules Feiffer and director Ralph Bakshi. He soon graduated to writing and storyboarding his own cartoons, earning renown for his "The FreezeYum Story" before relocating to New York in 1958, where he landed a job as an assistant recording engineer at Gotham Recording studios. There Dockstader began collecting interesting sounds, in his off-hours assembling his earliest musique concr�te projects. The end result was 1960's Eight Pieces, his first major work; shortly thereafter Gotham purchased its first stereo Ampex recorder, allowing Dockstader to revise piece No. 8 for his first stereo project, Traveling Music.
On May 20, 1961, New York's WQXR broadcast the world premiere of Traveling Music on a program also featuring Edgard Var�se's Poeme electronique. That year proved a remarkably productive period in Dockstader's development, as he completed two major works, Luna Park and Apocalypse. (Two Fragments from Apocalypse, also from 1961, consists of a large chunk edited from the latter.) His creations at this time reflect his increasing mastery of the studio and its endless possibilities, making use of techniques including tape-echo antiphony, channel delay, placement and panning; best labelled as "organized sound," Dockstader's radical construction and manipulation of audio fragments eschew the harmony and rhythm which typically define music, yet their flow, balance and spatial dynamics suggest an artistry far beyond the noisy experiments of his peers.
Revolutionary projects like 1962's Drone and 1963's Water Music followed, and by the time Dockstader completed his masterpiece, 1964's 46-minute epic Quatermass, he had accumulated a sound library of about 300,000 feet of tape equalling 125 hours of source material. A year later, however, his career in musique concr�te essentially came to a halt with the test-generator piece Four Telemetry Tapes -- soon after, Dockstader left his engineering position at Gotham to work as an audio-visual designer at the Air Canada Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo, where he crafted dozens of soundtracks while shooting thousands of slide photographs as well as a film. Concurrently, he also wrote music and book criticism for the Electronic Music Review and the Musical Quarterly.
Around this same time, the Owl Records label issued three LPs of Dockstader material which were reviewed favorably in a number of national publications, earning him the widest recognition of his career. The exposure, however, proved fruitless -- without his Gotham job he was no longer able to access the technology necessary to continue his sound experiments, and without the proper academic background he was denied grants and shut out of electronic music facilities, rejected by the Columbia-Princeton Center among others. The end result was that Dockstader returned full-time to his audio-visual work, in the years to follow writing and producing hundreds of educational filmstrips and videos for schools. His music long out-of-print, it was finally reissued to great acclaim during the early '80s, becoming a seminal influence on the electronic artists of the following decade. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide (from mp3.com)
A fine pianist whose improvisations are open to the influence of World Music, John Stetch has recorded regularly as a leader for the Terra Nova label since 1992. Stetch discovered the music of Charlie Parker when he was ten and was soon practicing on piano. After private lessons, he moved to Montreal and gained a music degree from McGill University. Stetch became a fixture in Montreal's jazz scene. In 1992 he recorded his debut for Terra Nova (Rectangle Man). Later in the year he moved to New York City although he still played regularly in Canada. He became a member of TanaReid in 1994, recorded several other sets for Terra Nova and an album of Ukranian folk music for Global Village (1996). In addition to his own projects and recording with TanaReid, John Stetch has appeared on records by Ed Jackson, Chris Case, Takeshi Inomata and Charles Licata among others. But staying close to his own material, Stetch released Heavens of a Hundred Days in fall 2000. ~ Scott Yanow, All Music Guide (from mp3.com)
Swedish techno producer Glenn Wilson has been at the forefront of techno since 1992 when he opened his own record shop and founded his Planet Rhythm label to promote Swedish artists. Glenn also founded the Compound & Template labels.