Tune #123: Little Big Bee - K.G.O.

Let the horn blow your mind!

Today's track is easily one of my top 10 favorite tunes (in its remixed version)!

But let's start with some background information about Little Big Bee.

LBB was a production team led by Eitetsu Takamiya, a Korean producer and DJ born in Tachikawa, a suburb of Tokyo. Since his early age, he enjoyed listening to music and collecting records. The disco boom that happened in Japan during the late '70s - early '80s made a huge impact to his music taste and productions, especially by the track Boogie Wonderland by Earth, Wind & Fire.

His first contact with the clubbing culture occurred in his early teens, when his older cousin helped him to pass through the doors of disco clubs, witnessing people partying to disco music. In late 80's he started to organize with his siblings and friends his own parties called Jungle Night by spreading the word by mouth and in 1991 he made the big move to relocate to the center of Tokyo, where he had the opportunity to play music 6 days per week.

One year later he formed with Kenji Jinguji & Plaza Fujisaki a production team after a record label requested them to record a track for a compilation EP. Their alias "Little Big Bee" was coined from their producer at the time and the team decided to keep it given that they had not thought of another one. Their first track was called Sunshine released in Jazz Powers E.P. by UK label Typhoon Records in 1993.

The next logical step for Takamiya-san was to collaborate with his brother Kitetsu for the formation of an independent label, called Flower Records, in November 1995. The first artists for the label were actually themselves, called Reggae Disco Rockers. During the first years, several friends of Takamiya bros have supported the label with their own productions or remixes, but the label owners discovered in the later years via demo tapes new talented musicians, some of whom managed to secure deals with larger labels. One of those examples was Ryōta Nozaki, aka Jazztronik, who released 3 studio albums and several singles under the label. 

Flower Records celebrated one year ago a presence of 30 years, still run by the two brothers and focused on releasing music in reggae, jazzy house and electric soul. Eitetsu Takamiya remains very active as a DJ, mainly in Tokyo. Besides his DJ work, he has also served as a musical director for films such as Gerropa! and Junkissa Isobe

Little Big Bee released two studio albums in the mid 00's, Azure Lounge (2000) and Waterman (2006). KGO was first presented in its original form in 2005 as a single and one year later in the second album. It was a collaborative effort, with Eitetsu Takamiya handling programming and vocoder, Kenji Jinguji on bass, Plaza Fujisaki on keyboards, and Yuichiro Kato on tenor saxophone. As you’ll hear below, it’s a perfect track to start the day!

LITTLE BIG BEE - KGO (ALBUM VERSION)

In 2006, Jazztronik revamped the track with an outstanding remix! 

It is a totally sublime track with multiple synth layers blending perfectly together.

And that horn...

LITTLE BIG BEE - KGO (JAZZTRONIK MIX)

In 2007, Danny Howells had played music for the BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix, where he mixed Tom Middleton's remodeled version of Little Big Bee - Scuba with the Jazztronik Mix of KGO. Tom Middleton seemed to like the idea and created a slightly different version of Jazztronik's KGO, by removing the horns and making it more progressive. His interpretation was included in his mix album One More Tune released by Renaissance in 2009 and also as a single one year later in Flower Records.

LITTLE BIG BEE - KGO (TOM MIDDLETON REMODEL)

I’ll leave it up to you to decide which version you prefer. While I own the Tom Middleton Remodel on vinyl, I find the Jazztronik mix to be the best take!

Tune #122: Fluxion - Correlation

I have not dedicated a lot of time hearing to dub techno music, but I can always appreciate solid tracks of the genre...

Konstantinos Soublis is a Greek music artist, better known as Fluxion. Expressing an interest in arts since his teens, he studied art and design for a year in London. Starting briefly with photography, he dropped out after a few months to focus on music technology (the best choice of his life according to him). His presence in London during the first half of the 90's was very influential, exposing himself to the explosion of electronic music. In several interviews he has mentioned that his early influences were Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Wim Mertens, all of whom are artists that use heavily repetitive patterns. Additionally, Basic Channel and their minimalistic aesthetics made a significant impact to his approach on electronic music production.

Konstantinos' first official release was the Lark / Atlos EP which can be traced back in 1998 on Chain Reaction, a Basic Channel sublabel (what else?), and was the first time that he adopted the specific alias. One year later, his first studio album Vibrant Forms was released in the same label, spawning another two installments (Vibrant Forms II in 2000 and Vibrant Forms III in 2016) and setting the basis for the launch of a personal label called Vibrant Music, which continues to exist to this very day.

After more than 10 studio albums and multiple EPs for several labels besides CR (Echocord, Subwax Bcn, Solar Phenomena, Resopal Schallware), Fluxion has crafted his compositions combining elements from several genres, such as ambient, dub techno, minimal & score music. Besides his main moniker, he has produced music under other pseudonyms (dub techno as Unsquare Mode, deep house as Recast, IDM as Silex), following the ethos of the old days by using different aliases per music genre.

If my memory serves me well, I first came across Fluxion's music 5 years ago (I guess that I was late to the game) via his collaboration with fellow music producer Savvas Ysatis (for whom I have written some things in another blog post) as Soluce. When I had started listening to electronic music from an early age, I was not into dub techno music at all (explained in more detail here). However, during the last 10 years I have grown my appreciation for other genres as well and mainly for the ones that are not club-oriented, but for home listening (I know, I am getting old...). 

Flashback to September of the previous year, I had the opportunity to visit Paris for business, and I spent some after work time wandering to various record stores. For anyone interested, I would strongly recommend Balades Sonores, which has a vast collection in electronic music (my personal area of interest) along with other genres. Within the electronic music section, I found the latest 2 albums of Fluxion, Parallel Moves & Haze, and I decided to grab the former, mainly due to the beautiful album cover which was also curated by another Greek artist (Nikos Kakoulidis).

Listening to the entire album creates evoking memories of various sentiments and my personal highlight is Correlation. That synth...

FLUXION - CORRELATION 

For sure, I will keep a closer look on Fluxion's work from now on!

Happy 2026!

Tune #121: The Auranaut - People Want To Be Needed

Nostalgia hit me again...

It is difficult to digest that 26 years have passed since the release of this track:

THE AURANAUT - PEOPLE WANT TO BE NEEDED

The driving force behind this track is Graham Dear, a British producer and DJ with a very rich resume in music production. Following an engineering training in the 80's and after performing production duties for various bands, he managed to secure recording deals with independent and major record labels. His first moderate success was the production of "It's My Life", a downtempo / soul song performed by Maureen Walsh and released in 1990 by Urban, a sublabel of Polydor.

During his early production todays, Graham Dear got acquainted with Richard Sullivan, a fellow engineer and producer. They both worked in the same production studio in London and decided to team up, forming Power Circle in 1991. Supported by Ayman Sawaf, owner of a private client recording facility at Burhill Park, the production duo had the opportunity to produce their first works on progressive house genre, following the zeitgeist of the period.

The collaboration between the guys lasted until 1996, when the separation was amicable in order to chase different music horizons. My personal favorite from the Power Circle era is the DJ Shakra remix for Garden of Eden, a remarkable example of early progressive house ethos (hypnotic, dubby baseline with the ethereal vocals). The solid production of this track has also been appreciated by the current electronic music community, with DJ play time by Maceo Plex and a re-release in 2021 by Renaissance, along with a new remix.

POWER CIRCLE - GARDEN OF EDEN (THE SHAKRA MIX)

However, the commercial success of the band was the track "A Little Love, A Little Life" and more specifically the acapella version. But how it this possible?

Aussie DJ Anthony Pappa used in his sets a white label mash-up, combining Offshore (Disco Citizens Mix) of Chicane with the acapella vocals of Louise Barton in the Power Circle track. What started out as a bootleg, resulted to an official release, called Offshore '97. The track reached #17 in the Charts and was included on several dance compilations.

CHICANE - OFFSHORE '97

Another great trivia of the original track is the fact that it made its way to be included in the soundtrack of film Love In Paris, a poor sequel of 9 1/2 weeks.

Since 1994 and onwards, Graham started to experiment with trance music and adopted "The Auranaut" moniker. His first release under this alias was Interactive, under Mr.C's label Plink Plonk. His releases (either original or remixes) until the start of the new century can be found in the sets of famous DJs of that era, championing progressive trance (Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, John Digweed, Tiesto, Perry O' Neil).

Personally, his best works are today's track along with Yo-Yo (another progressive trance stunner). These are the kind of tracks that were caned back in the day by Oakie during the Essential tour series. Unfortunately, there was no chance to enjoy such tracks, as explained in previous post. Additionally, for anyone interested into the vocal monologue sample, it is taken from a British 60's movie "Sink the Bismarck!".

Graham Dear released in 2004 his first album, which mostly served as a compilation of his prior tracks (incl. People Want To Be Needed and Yo-Yo), under his joint label with Sullivan (Power Circle Records). Two additional albums followed (Divine Ordinance | 2006 and Under The Radar | 2013), but since then his tracks are lost...