Jestofunk - Straight To You (feat. James thompson) b/w I’m Gonna Love You

TESLA GROOVE RECORDS

£19.78

Format: 7" Vinyl
Catalogue No.: TSL020
Release Date: 7 Jul 2023 [back in]
Genre: Funk

33rpm - 250 units strictly limited run

Now that he 8th Anniversary is out of the way, let’s work our way through the next 8 years. As announced a couple of months ago we’ve started a brand new collaboration with Italy’s most seminal independent outfit Irma Records. While seminal labels like Kent for “traditional” soul and Acid Jazz’s forward thinking new approach on black music were taking the world by storm, in the late eighties a new italian label, Irma Records, set off to a brilliant future from the premises of a small record shop in Bologna by the hands of Umberto Damiani and his lifelong partner Massimo Benini. Those were the days of the seminal House Music productions and the idea of the two Maestros proved to be utmost right. White labels were relentlessly flowing from Uk to Italy both ways, and our Country expressed a generation of deejays, producers and bands who made their way to the best clubs around the world, from Miami to Ibiza, from sanctuaries like the Ministry of Sound to NY’s finest underground dance spots, further than keeping domestic clubbers busy with allnighters and after hours every weekend for the following twenty years. In the good company of other great international prime movers like Nuphonic and Ninja Tune just to name two, with the years Irma ventured into the then unknown territories of new funk, drum and bass, trip hop and chill out sounds eventually becoming home to glorious expressions of the italian creativity that made it to international lenghts by selling literally hundreds of thousands records and placing a so called “independent” label on the global map of dance music almost at the same level of the powerful majors, bringing it to establish uk and usa branches and being distributed from Alaska to New Zealand. It’s exactly the case of the two artists we are presenting on these new two releases here. Jestofunk's acclaimed Long Player “Love in a Black Dimension” hit the international charts and stayed on top for months. The tracklist is a sublime example of the creativity of those times, none of the songs ever saw the light of the day on a glorious single and here’s where we come into the equation with our signature 7”/33rpm solid wax nuggets. The other new release oj offer today comes from Don Carlos, one of the very first italian deejays to wrap his productions up in that Deep House aura that was gripping on european clubnights and fast became the soundrack of sunday after hours with sunglasses on and beautiful dawns in the background. Both Don Carlos tunes sold by the loads on 12”s and LPs but never ever came out on a 7”. I’m quite sure many of you already know Mediterraneo while the Flute House take of Alone is an off-the-radar version played systematically by Tony Humphries for ages.