Love Is The Key Smith & Mighty 10” Vinyl single

New and older music finding an audience

We’re music lovers just like you and committed to bringing the best in older and brand new sounds to people who’ll enjoy it. Music that moves, engages and isn’t simply manufactured to fit into a specific marketplace is the music we’re passionate about, and dedicate ourselves to nurturing and distributing good music.

Smith & Mighty (Love Is The Key feat Dan Ratchet)

Bristol stand up! This collection compiles trip-hop pioneers Smith & Mighty’s best tracks, plus b-sides and rarities.

Whither trip-hop? What happened to Bristol’s most famous cultural export, a sound that teased listeners with impressions of Major-era urban Britain as a Blade Runner fantasy? In the days when Tricky, Massive Attack, and Portishead were heralded as the town’s mavericks, the music seemed to be a fine cosmopolitan blues for the early 90s recession. Hip-hop beats that wander the streets every night to find God, basslines that hiss from Soundsystem bloodied from a decade of tear, and Hollywood’s spectacle of “noir”– all mourned utopian visions discarded by pragmatism and fashion sense. Cynics framed the genre’s death certificate, dated September 29, 1998 when UNKLE’s Psyence Friction was released to tin ears and demoralized souls. But in an age when hip-hop productions can sound dry-cleaned, some elements of trip-hop are still missed.

Retrospective, a greatest-hits, b-sides, and rarities collection from Smith & Mighty, could further mystify the genre. Producers Rob Smith and Ray Mighty helped import hip-hop into the city during the early 80s with their Three Stripes Sound System, which mixed soul, dub, and funk that helped catalyze the “Bristol Sound.” Later that decade, they won a cult hit by giving that treatment to Burt Bacharach’s “Walk On By” and Massive Attack’s first single, “Any Love” (1988). S&M; didn’t release their own album until 1995’s Bass Is Maternal, and later garnered sleeper success on! K7’s DJ Kicks series.