Gimme A Breakbeat!

IN THE last edition of Hot Press, an unnamed Jobs In Music wag was quoted in The Phantom scoffing at the lack of Irish music played on the last ever Insomnia show which I presented and produced for Radio Ireland.
Thanks for the giggle and for showing yet another example of how easily uninformed opinion spreads. Many people presume that Ireland has yet to produce any homegrown dance music output and that the entire sphere of genres isn t music anyway, won t last, only sounds good in a club . . . (repeat and ad lib to fade).
The truth is that I don t honestly care about such innane column fillers and I wouldn t have bothered pointing the mistake out if it weren t for the gratitude I personally feel to the music producers whose tracks helped make Insomnia the show it was. The best thing about getting to do Insomnia was the way it enabled me to meet people from all over Ireland who were into the same beats as me and, more importantly, people who were actually doing something to enrich our musical tapestry.
Of the 40 or so tracks I squeezed into the final Insomnia, nine were recorded here in Ireland and one was a remix done in Ireland of a Howie B track. Those tracks represented the most popular tunes of Insomnia s nine month run. To those that tuned into Insomnia, Bass Odyssey and Synchronic were played as often and on the same footing as The Prodigy and The Jungle Brothers. This wasn t done because of quotas or out of any notions of the public interest. This was music producred in Ireland which was played because it was good. The fact that so many people have their act together to produce dance music of merit is heartening; the fact that an organisation such as Jobs In Music can be so blissfully unaware of such a groundswell of talent is quite confusing at the very least.
1998 is set to be a great year for Irish dance music. There are a lot of records due out which will have switched international focus here before long. Every label talent-spotter going already knows this: why aren t those experienced enough in the music business to sit on a committee aware of this?
Of the artists listed in the accompanying panel whose tracks were featured on Insomnia, Bass Odyssey have already released one single on Quadraphonic Records, with another on the way; Ill Dependence aka Hazo has a single out on Ultimate Dilemma in the UK; Synchronic have one single out on Plant in the US and one out soon on Quadraphonic; Decal are on their second self-financed album with more singles due soon; DJ Wool released his debut EP to wide acclaim on Plant with other releases ready to go; Felinic should have a single out on Influx soon and we all know about David Holmes . . . well.
Those artists, alongside a host of others, represent only one side of Ireland s dance music community, what was broadly played on Insomnia and loosely termed breakbeats. As well as all the music I was playing there s also a host of other house and techno artists releasing records in Ireland which my former colleague Mark Kavanagh played on his radio show and which Mickey Mac features on his weekly 2FM show. There are labels like D1, Abbey and Polygram Ireland s Raglan Road all releasing commercially viable dance records.
All of these people you could loosely term as Ireland s dance music industry are doing their own thing now, pushing Ireland s musical development all the time. In five years time, when the entire industry in Ireland has changed even more, that wag in Jobs In Music will be glad we bothered putting dance records out her or his job might even depend on it!
Luckily the views of that JIM wag aren t typical: with Quadraphonic Records we ve already found a lot of people in Ireland receptive and supportive of what we do. Even though we always intended most of our output to be sold through our foreign distributors, the reaction to our first release was amazing. That debut single by Bass Odyssey, only available on vinyl, was distributed nationally, sold out in every shop that stocked it and received massive support from 2FM, No Disco, 2TV, (the then) Radio Ireland, Hot Press, dSide and most of the print media. The quality and quantity of demo tapes we ve been getting underline just how much there is yet to come.
A new generation of musicians with new agendas is on the way and Ireland will be as better place for it. Stay tuned.
Yours,
Donal Scannell