Let’s rewind, it’s the year 2020 and the pandemic has rocked the world more than a knockout blow from dozens of heavyweight boxers. The musical world is at a standstill and uncertainty lingers in the air like a foul stench.
UK neurofunk is at it’s quietest point with only a small handful of labels pushing the sound. With neurofunk fans having more time to think and stew within the four walls of their homes, a time of despair turned into a time of hope. Was this the beginning of the new wave of UK neuro labels?
One of those labels formed from the COVID slump, was Expedite Records. Two die hard neurofunk ambassadors, Jon Walsh and Louis Parker came together and have since been on a non-stop collision course to bring UK neuro to the forefront of drum & bass.
Championing newer artists like NIALLO, SYNE and Titan from the very beginning, Expedite have accelerated from throwing live streams to the release of PARAGONS 2, their latest VA album which features tracks by neurofunk heavy hitter like Absu, Transforma and Profuze alongside promising up and comers like SCALEZ and HackWaves.
Their next release comes courtesy of Visceral, who has been an integral part of their artist community since the very beginning. Two tracker, The Storyteller, drops tomorrow.
From the chat below, you can really see how Louis and Jon have a real focus on the Expedite community of artists, giving them full creative freedom to spread their wings ensuring they excel in every possible way.
There looks to be no signs of slowing down either as the Expedite boys continue to plot their next moves in the form of live events, which is sure to have any neuro fan in the UK excited.
So be sure to fasten those seatbelts, keep your arms inside the vehicle at all times, Expedite Records are keeping the pedal to the metal with their movements which you can find out more about below…
How did Expedite Records begin?
Louis: Basically, we were in this production group chat when I starting out as XAETIS, I’d just started releasing tunes and I was added to this chat by a mate of mine, Deadman, we were sharing ideas, tunes and helping each other grow. Jon kept suggesting we should start a label because we had a good set of artists. Jon was persistent and eventually said he had a plan and he kind of laid it all out. He would handle the admin and the backbone of it and I would handle the music, quality control, the artists and the branding. Within the first couple weeks we had the logo done, then we started figuring out which artists we wanted on board, talking to people and fast forward maybe like a month or two, we had a label launch party where Jon and I invited all the artists that we knew and we had this livestream. We got to know everyone and we all kind of started this family and everything kind of took off from there really.
Jon: This was all during COVID as well so it was when all the clubs had shut down, so events weren’t really an option either. The main motivator for me personally to start this was that I was an artist trying to convince jungle and jump up promoters to put on a neurofunk DJ and during that time, I spent a lot of time researching and looking at the Czech scene following different labels that were pushing the neurofunk end of things. Before the pandemic, the only brands that really ever did neuro events in the UK were Suck My Donk, Virus and the odd Blackout night. I had a bit of money and I thought there’s no platform for anybody like that in the UK right now. It’s really good to see now the amount of labels that have popped up in the past four or five years since we’ve been doing all of this, it’s great for the scene.
Definitely agree with this! So is it just the two of you running things or is there a wider Expedite team?
Louis: At the core it’s just me and Jon predominantly, we make all the decisions and we work together on that. We have one friend of ours, Cal, who’s working on the website and some of the other background stuff and we also commission artists to do the artwork but that’s kind of more outsourced work. Cal is probably the closest thing to a team member but the rest of the team is basically just the artists and we’re all mates in a way.
Jon: I usually handle all the legal stuff, all of the finances, recruiting artists and finding people that we can work with. Louis does all the label side of things, quality control and we meet in the middle. Cal helps us with the marketing side of things and also, Cal’s really helpful if me and Louis disagree on something, he gives us an objective opinion which is good, it helps us bounce back and forth all of these ideas that we’ve got.
Always good to have that middle man! So have you faced many challenges with the label?
Louis: Naturally there is always things that happen that are out of your control. Meeting deadlines with fifteen artists can be difficult. Sometimes other people’s lives get in the way or they stop responding for a while. Sometimes we have issues with artwork and things getting delayed on that end. Sometimes things get on top of mine and Jon’s life causing one of us to drop the ball a little bit but that’s why we’re a good team. We wouldn’t be able to do this without each other so it’s really good that we’re able to face these challenges together.
Jon: Everything we ever do with this type of thing is a work in progress, it’ll never be as perfect as you want it to be. But every time it gets better, every time it improves, and even if it’s two percent better this time round, then it’s progress. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without the artists that we work with because a lot of them give us 110 percent all the time. The artists are essentially the core of what we do, we’re here to be the platform for them to grow. It would be different if we didn’t have this big variety of talent that have stuck with us from the start and we’ve seen them go from artists that have got some potential and just giving them feedback, to then seeing them three years later make tunes that they didn’t even imagine they could make.
Love that! So can you tell us about some of the artists you’ve worked with at Expedite?
Jon: Originally, we started with eight artists, Foks, NIALLO, Titan, Process, Visceral, XAETIS, SYNE and Frannabik, some of them are still with us today. Process obviously has dropped the production front of things which was quite sad for us. Titan is going to be releasing with us again too. Our roster is building up nicely, there’s like 35 people in our Expedite chat now.
Louis: Within the first year we accumulated Tremr, Transforma, Kaizen Flow and Visceral. Kevala was year two, it just keeps going, we’ve got about 15 active artists in the group at the moment. A few others that have released with us in the past. We have people that have sent us one-offs for the VAs or free downloads.
Jon: There’s so many producers for us to mention, every producer that we work with always gives us their best. We’re not going to stop working with them, we love what they’re doing, it’s part and parcel if we can set them on the right track, we’re not exclusive either in terms of only releasing with us.
Louis: I think that gives the artists even more freedom and it makes them feel like the artists that we have want to be with us. It’s kind of awesome in a way to know that we’re doing the right thing for these people and they believe in what we’re doing.
Couldn’t agree more! You give the artists 110 percent, they give it back. Great that they have the freedom to spread their wings with other labels!
Jon: We’ve seen that specifically with NIALLO because when he first joined us, he was a very young producer and he started doing some of his first releases with us. He was the first person we did a paid release with as well and since then, he’s released on the likes of Incurzion, Dividid and Neksus. His sound is so unique and sick, it’s good to see him pushing these other avenues of sound.
Absolutely! PARAGONS 2, what a slammer of an album! Can you tell us about the process behind it?
Louis: PARAGONS 2 turned out to be a big body of work because we raised the bar a little bit with it in terms of the quality control and some of the artists that we wanted to try and get on it. We originally planned for it to come out just before Christmas, but we had some delays on some of the deadlines. We stuck by not wanting to rush it out, all the tracks were almost ready and we could have just thrown some artwork together if we really wanted to just get the music out there. However, the artwork follows a story that we’re trying to create with the VAs. You’ve got this cyborg that starts in a cryo chamber and then for the REVISIONS EP, you’ve got this fist breaking out of it. Then PARAGONS 2, the cyborg is there ready to cause some chaos. There’s a real nice storyline building with it all.
Jon: With the VAs I tend to come up with a lot of the ideas for the initial concept and then Louis can take those ideas, help refine them and give me more input. Our next VA will be something a little bit different but it will also feed into that same theme of what we want to do.
Quality, this has been amazing! Lastly, let’s fast forward a couple of years, what would you like to see happen at Expedite Records?
Louis: Definitely events. That’s our primary first goal really with what we want to do with it, we want to start giving like a live platform to these artists.
Jon: We’ve always wanted to do events but it’s always easy to lose sight of what you’re originally doing if you focus on too much too soon. In the past three years we wanted to make sure that the music that we put out was solid and people are enjoying what we’re doing. It’s a passion project at the end of the day, it’s what we put our money into. I wanted to make sure that the brand is recognised enough, and I wanted to make sure that what we’d already achieved as a label stands on its own before we start trying to promote ourselves as an events brand. Getting on more festival lineups I think too and also launching our own clothing. I think that’s our main focus, turning the brand into a fully-fledged business, not just an online entity.
Louis: We want to take it out into the real realm, show people what the Expedite experience is and try to create something truly memorable.
