Well, it happened at last, it took quite a long time but in the end it happened: some of the music I recorded under my Lips Vago alias in the mid ’90s has caught the interest of a label and got released on vinyl.
I must admit that when I first heard from Jorge from Fluyo Records back in late 2022 I was quite surprised: he had discovered a few mp3 files on the Afe Records website – excerpted from some old Lips Vago CDr editions – and he was interested to listen more for possible inclusion on an upcoming compilation on his label. I did not have high expectations but I trusted him and gave him access to a large part of my archives.
Right from the start he seemed to have quite clear ideas about the type of tracks he was interested in, they would have to be ‘dancefloor oriented’. I have hours and hours of unreleased ‘music with a beat’ in my archives, but those which are really meant for the dancefloor are just a few.
He immediately fell in love with “The Mobility of Her Features” – a 1996 very melodic ‘trance’ track which I’m also still fond of after all these years – and in the end he decided that, instead of including it on a compilation, he wanted to release a full Lips Vago EP!
I let him choose the other tracks that suited best the mood he wanted to achieve, with absolutely no further input from my side. He slowed down “The Mobility…” to 130bpm and edited it a little bit – the original had a veeeeeeery long ‘ambient’ intro – and also took care about having all tracks properly mastered for a vinyl release.
When it was time to create the artwork I made a few proposals. The two images that were used on the center labels are real photographs – with no post-production or editing – that I took with an old Fuji digital camera just a few days before it ceased to function; its CCD was corrupted and the images had this sort of ‘melting’ quality, making people look hardly reassuring, almost ‘possessed’ I would say.
So, most of the ‘dancefloor oriented’ tracks in my archives are no longer unpublished, but I still have many hours of IDM / Leftfield / Downtempo unreleased stuff and I’m quite a nice flexible guy. All archival / reissue labels out there are warned: get in touch before all this music is buried with me! (8-)