Right now is a very weird time in dance music, I’m obviously not the biggest fan of the way things are going, but I hope that my writing about the music I love will help the labels and artists survive until things settle down and the new way is established. I think local shops will still be around, but it will be a couple years until we know just what it will all look like.

Yeah, that Huckaby is nice. I’m about to write up the most recent Patrice Scott joint for my next review, then I’ll have to see if I can cover that Synth joint. I think Huck has some more stuff in the pipeline as well that I will be able to get out there in the near future. It’s about time that dude blows up.

RA is a very popular site though, and I do think that the online press is incredibly euro-centric as far as the more underground electronic labels go. I’m as guilty as anyone as a European myself, but even the US electronic journalists seem more concerned about things coming from Europe (Berlin, more specifically) rather than giving us more of an insight about the good house music that’s coming from round your way. For such a large technologically advanced country, there should be shitloads of good stuff coming out on smaller independent labels that I’m not hearing about, and I think that you writing for RA will at least redress the balance slightly.

That Mike Huckaby 12″ is the fantastic though, isn’t it? You should get a review of that up there.

well, i will say that the stuff i’m going to be covering for the most part will be vinyl only and in general is the kind of stuff that will likely be in such small runs that it will sell out everywhere, small stores and large internet shops. i’m not above using juno myself (we just got our copies of the Mike Huckaby on Synth from them a couple weeks back because no one else had it!), though i certainly wouldn’t want people thinking my reviews are associated with them. it really was a tough decision, but if things do not work well, i will quit doing it. all the labels i’ve talked to (as i will be reviewing stuff theyre not even getting at the moment) are very into having their stuff reviewed on there, so that makes me feel better about it. even though the net is supposed to be the “great equalizer”, it’s hard to hear about underground things through all the noise. hopefully having access to that large platform for these underground labels will help make the corny popular dance music trend die and we can see the real shit come back.

yeah, we do sell stuff on Discogs, Gemm and Musicstack, though they are not exactly killing it for us at the moment. it is unfortunate that the audience for record shops is going to be changing, very little will be strictly local, but we’re trying to adjust so that we will be able to use the support from out of town buyers to keep the quality level high for the local peeps.

What I’d be quite interested to know though, Tom, is if your shop shifts any of its stock on Discogs or Ebay? A lot of shops here in the UK have clung onto this as the revenue stream that keeps them in business by the skin of their teeth.

Also, cheers again for doing the mix for TAPE. Really looking forward to getting my ears round what you’ve come up with.