As posted on LD earlier: Personally, his influence, and that of Rising High was enormous. The House is Mine did as much for my love of techno as any other song - no exageration. I used to listen to it on the radio in '91 (the only outlet around me at the time), and I'd always wait impatiently for that Chuck D sample to appear. After they stopped playing it routinely I'd harass them with requests until I finally found it on the 'Rising High Techno Injection' comp that Instinct released in the US. Thankfully, Instinct paid a great deal of attention to them, since Instinct were one of most widely available labels for CDs at the time. Those compilations opened my mind to all the stuff named above, even moreso than R&S. I quickly started to track down the Rising High originals and found some gems that totally extended my tastes. At that time in the states, very little was available on CD except for extremely cheesy novelty rave, and a few random releases that would be very hard to track down without a good store or a lot of luck. Rising High were probably the first label that got that attention (via Instinct), and they were a huge eye-opener for me.
I always loved Casper Pound and/or Pete Smith's stuff a ton, including some oft-neglected things like the New London Scool of Electronics but there was so much other amazing stuff too: Paragliders, Air Motherf*cking Liquid, the first two Wagon Christ's and that amazing Wagon Christ remix of MLO's Wimbourne (not to mention the other amazing mixes of it), Irresistible Force's 'Global Chillage' (probably the best shelf-life of any of their releases) and some trance stuff that hasn't dated quite so well but totally killed at the time, like Union Jack, etc. All of this acted as a gateway to so much other music for me. I seriously can't imagine where my tastes may have wound up if it weren't for Mr. Pound and Rising High. A very sad loss indeed. Tristan ======= http://www.phonopsia.co.uk [EMAIL PROTECTED]
