It seems I spend most of my energy railing against what travesties digital “download & dump” labels are doing to the music business, so here’s a good example of one doing something right.
Every label releases compilations, but only a handful are worth listening to and fewer are worth paying for. Rather than participating in the ritual of dumping fourteen tracks into Beatport and hoping for the best, Lost My Dog Records created a series called Family Affair, with a friend of the label taking some back catalog releases, blending them together and getting his claws into some material that both highlights his own body of work released by LMD and gives the DJs in the audience a bit of a treat.
And along the way, you get to put a face to some of those names that appear on your favorite slabs of Deep House. Case in point: Dominic Martin (aka Domsko). Dominic has curated and mixed the second installment of Family Affair, released on January 23rd.
“At the time of our first Lost My Dog release, I had just had some successful boompty-sounding releases with Chris Harris on labels such as Nordic Trax and Guesthouse,” he told me. “The Jazzmag EP coming out on LMD with Chris was a natural progression. I also had some deeper solo material that the guys at LMD liked, so a solo EP, Touch of Soul, saw the light of day.
“From there, the relationship between myself and the label has grown pretty organically – the East Glasgow Deep EP followed, then the Hard Yards project with Astral T.”
The aforementioned Hard Yards release – reviewed rather glowingly by D-VO last April – features a fantastic remix from Chicago’s own Johnny Fiasco. “It’s always great when one of your tracks gets interpreted by someone else and they make a great job of it, exploring areas where you would never think to go,” Dominic says. “It’s the whole point of getting a remix done in fact!”
This particular fourteen track mix features no less than eight new tracks made specifically for Family Affair, as well as a new remix from Giom. “Of the new tracks, I think ‘Homage New Jersey’ is the standout club track,” Dominic says, “and ‘Side2Side’ is a nice building warm-up track. I also enjoyed doing the hip-hop intro and outro – ‘New Context’ and ‘Last Exit’ – which book-end the project quite nicely. It was fun to work on producing something other than House Music for once, and took me into new areas of production. Hopefully people will enjoy the end product!”
A Family Affair was released on Lost My Dog in late January; available from Juno Download and other online shops.
