For the 15th edition in our podcast series we are super proud to present house pioneers, and special guests at our very first NiTE JAMS show no less, Deep Space Orchestra.

Dropping an hour of deep & dark house vibes are the DSO duo made up of Si Murray, a 32 year old part-time office manager and part-time domestic engineer (aka stay-at-home dad) from Glasgow via Wigan, and now living in Manchester  and his partner-in-crime Chris Barker, a 31 year old professional geek (“graphic design, make websites, that sort of stuff”) who hails from Birmingham but now resides in Liverpool.

With a slew of releases on the likes of Delusions of Grandeur, Instruments of Rapture, Quintessentials, Home Taping, Boogie Originals and More About Music, the pair have truly caught the attention of house heads the worlds over. And with their very own and utterly essential Use of Weapons imprint, a label that wholly reflects the DSO vibe.

“I think every producer has a pipe dream of owning their own label at some stage and that can be for a variety of reasons. In our scenario, we were just mightily brassed off at the time that it was taking for music we had signed to other labels to actually come out. We had a few friends like The Revenge and OOFT! who had started up their own labels and when we actually looked at the nuts and bolts of it, we realised that it was do-able. The ability to have complete creative control over what comes out on UOW is a big thing for us. Ultimately, we want it to be one of those ‘buy-on-sight’ labels where you know that it’s going to sound good and look pretty fucking good and just generally be well worth your hard-earned ducats.”

The pair list a who’s who of classic & contemporary musical influences, again many of which you’ll feel in DSO productions. “I’ll try and narrow it down to a pretty diverse threesome”, said Si. “John Martyn, Photek & Theo Parrish.”

“For me [Chris], obviously American producers like Juan Atkins and Carl Craig have had a big influence on the music we make as DSO, but I’d be nowhere without soul and jazz. Leroy Hutson, Bill Evans, Horace Silver, Quincy Jones… the list is endless, really. When I was growing up my parents were always playing blues and rock in the house but I also remember a lot of Eurythmics, Cerrone and Jean Michel Jarre, so there’s always been an exposure to electronic or club music. In the early 90s when the rave scene was enormous, I’d listen to Grooverider and Carl Cox tapes that my older siblings game me, which was probably the point when I started getting seriously obsessed with everything.”

“There’s no set formula to how we work to be honest,” they continued. “I would say it’s rare that we sit down with a pre-conceived idea of what kind of track we want to make. Sometimes it’ll be a case of switching on the snyths and having a play around with sounds, seeing what happens. Other times, we’ll have recorded a bunch of samples and things go from there. We tend to work pretty quickly due to the fact that we only have 1 night a week in the studio, so that kind of cuts down the amount of fannying around that we can get away with!”

Which is probably why they’re looking forward to coming to Belfast next weekend! “Ha, yeah! We’ve never played in Belfast before, although I have quite a few friends from the city. It looks like there are lots of good things happening over there right now, so, yeah, I think we’re going to enjoy ourselves!”

Enjoy this hour of wicked deep house vibes, and don’t forget Deep Space Orchestra headline the very first NiTE JAMS show, a collaboration between isodisco and the Twitch crew. Check HERE for all the deets.

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