A guide to Masters at Work - aka the most influential duo in dance music. Part one.
Putting together a Masters at Work best of is like trying to force a particularly obstinate tent back into its bag: you think you’ve got it in hand only for another angle to inevitably pop back out.
A case in point: on a recent No Tags podcast, co-host (and Local Action founder) Tom Lea mentioned that Masters at Work’s 2001 banger Work had been all over London’s clubs this summer. I love Work, a spicy soca house roller that features Puppah Nas-T and the very well named Denise “Saucy Wow” Belfon; but had I considered it among my best of Masters at Work? I had not. And so Tom’s revelation sent me into a state of wondery.
I’ve been meaning to write about Masters at Work for some time on Line Noise. I love “Little” Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez and I have done since - well…. I can’t even be sure. When did I first hear them? Was it I Can’t Get No Sleep in 1993? The Nervous Track, the same year? Was it even earlier? I genuinely don’t know. But Masters at Work have been there, in my life, for at least three decades.
What held me back about writing about MaW was the sheer scale of their achievements. The Ha Dance is a voguing classic; as Nuyorican Soul Louie and Kenny made one of the best dance music albums of the 90s; they have AT LEAST three of the greatest vocal house records ever to their name; they helped bring Latin, African and Caribbean influences into dance music; influenced UK Garage, jungle and broken beat; bridged the gap between house and hip hop; produced for Robyn and Will Smith; and they have remixed everyone from Debbie Gibson to The Beatles.
You could, in fact, put together an argument for Masters at Work being the most influential artists in THE WHOLE of dance music and it would be pretty watertight.
And the music keeps coming. This summer alone there have been storming remixes of two MaW-adjacent classics - Lood’s Shout-N-Out and Louie Vega’s recent Robyn collab. All My Love. And now Work is all over London clubs? What’s a fan to do?
But I knew I had to do something. So rather than try to put together anything like a definitive guide to Masters at Work, I thought I would write about some of my personal favourites, loosely based on the 10 song structure but actually pulling in a lot more.
All the same, the piece became so long - because I just couldn’t resist - that I have divided into three different
articles that will be released over the coming weeks. I hope you enjoy them.
Masters at Work - Blood Vibes (1991)
aka The Beat Classic
The origins of Masters at Work are a little obscure and ill-defined, with even the duo themselves telling slightly different tales as the mood takes them.
Then generally accepted story, however, relates that Kenny Dope started out DJing at neighbourhood parties in Brooklyn in the mid 1980s; Louie Vega was also DJing around New York at the time but the two didn’t meet until 1990 when Kenny put out a A Touch of Salsa, under the 2 Dope name, a tough but fantastically house record that sampled Celia Cruz.
“I played [Kenny’s] music,” Vega told RBMA in 2013. “And when he did this record where he sampled a disco artist and a Fania Records Latin artist and made this cool club groove out of it. I was really interested in what he was doing and I said I wanted to remix it.”
Todd Terry - a mutual friend - made the introductions. By that point, however, Terry had already released two records under the Masters of Work name, 1987’s Dum Dum Cry and Alright Alright, while Kenny had also put out the Power House 12 inch as MAW.
Vega never did get the opportunity to remix A Touch of Salsa. But the duo started working together, initially on major-label remixes for the likes of Debbie Gibson and Michael Jackson (I’ve heard it said that their remix of Gibson’s single One Step Ahead was their first work as a duo).
“I said, ‘Kenny, let’s do these remixes together but on the B-sides let’s try to get our name out there and do these things that we’re coming up with in the studio that’s different,’” Vega told RBMA.
The remixes were huge hits in New York clubs and Kenny and Louie soon released their first original record as a duo: Blood Vibes in 1991. It’s hard to think of many acts who have managed to get things so entirely right, so early on, as MaW did on their debut. The record’s B side, The Ha Dance, would soon become iconic, its bizarrely perfect Trading Places sample and hard-hitting drums making it into perhaps the voguing / ballroom anthem, its influence still obvious today.
I love The Ha Dance - who wouldn’t? - but for the moment I want to concentrate on that record’s A side, Blood Vibes, which mixed Junior Reid's reggae classic One Blood with MC Shan's The Bridge and a low-slinging hip hop beat to devastating effect. And if you’re thinking, ‘Well that doesn’t sound very house music’ then you’d be right. Blood Vibes isn’t house music, at all, it’s (largely) instrumental hip hop.
And that shouldn’t be a surprise. Kenny, especially, came from the world of hip hop and, much like Todd Terry, would help to bridge the worlds of hip hop and house in the 90s. Or perhaps re-connect the two worlds might be a better way of putting it, given that house and hip hop actually got along pretty well early on. Kenny, who provides the beats in MAW, has made a lot of straight-up hip hop tracks and the duo’s house productions have something of hip hop’s forceful strut to their drums, which fit like a dream with house’s elegant swing.
(Listen to MaW’s Pienso en Ti or Freestyle Orchestra’s Odyssey for examples of just how hard Kenny’s beats can go, even when the song itself is silky smooth.)
On their debut single Kenny and Louie decided to show their growing fan base two sides of the MAW coin. “We came up with this idea because we loved hip hop, we loved house. So for us it was about, ‘OK, let’s take one side of the vinyl, put out a hip hop record, and the other side of the vinyl, we’ll cater to our house crowd,’ Vega told RBMA in 2013.
Blood Vibes is a very simple song: a couple of nagging samples and a strutting, lurching, almost menacing drum groove. But it is incredibly energetic, the kind of record made by two people who are masterful DJs and know exactly what will drive a New York club wild, without catering to the lowest common denominator. It’s music that makes you feel at least 10-foot tall, music for putting on your headphones and rolling through a city.
According to Kenny (in a 2021 interview with Harold Heath for Beatportal) Blood Vibes also got played at 45 RPM in the UK’s bubbling proto-jungle scene. Fabio and Grooverider, certainly, are huge fans of MAW, although I have heard the same claim of Jump On It, another beat-driven monster on the Blood Vibes / Ha Dance 12 inch, which seems a little more likely. As we will see, MAW had an enduring influence on the UK’s dance culture, from jungle to broken beat and UK Garage.
MAW would ease up - but not abandon - the hip hop instrumentals as their house productions started to take off. But Justa “Lil” Dope, from the group’s second 12 inch Justa “Lil” Dope / Our Mute Horn, is similar to Blood Vibes in its gleeful borrowing and sounds absolutely VAST, the kind of song that makes you bite the pulp out of the corner of your cheek if heard loud in a club. It was also included in Coldcut’s classic 70 Minutes of Madness mix.
Masters at Work featuring India - I Can’t Get No Sleep
AKA Tracks Become Songs
“In those days, for the first, let’s say six years of Masters At Work, it was just Kenny on drum machine and me on keyboards,” Louie Vega told RBMA in 2012. “That’s what it was.”
Things may have got slightly more complicated over the following decades, as music production advanced and both Kenny and Louie sidelined in solo careers. But this, essentially, remains the Masters at Work magic to this day: Louie on melody; Kenny on beats.
Alongside this, though, the duo have pulled in an amazing range of collaborators, from Tito Puente to DJ Jazzy Jeff. And yet their most iconic collaboration has to be with India, aka vocalist Linda Bell Viera Caballero, who sang on many of the duo’s greatest hits.
India first worked with Vega - who she would go on to marry and then divorce - in 1988, when he co-produced her track Dancing On The Fire with Jellybean Benitez. She first collaborated with MAW a few years later on the classic I Can’t Get No Sleep, a song that was crucial for the duo in their pivot towards more song-based styles.
“From doing all those dubs we said, ‘Man, we need to put a vocal, a song, where people can identify with our dubs. Not just one little hook,’” Vega told RBMA in 2013. “We tried to do a song on these type of tracks. That’s when we did I Can’t Get No Sleep with India back in ‘91 and that was a pivotal point for us because we started doing songs on our style of music.”
According to Vega, I Can’t Get No Sleep - which actually came out in 1993 - is “a Masters At Work dub with a song on it, with her [India] singing, sort of ad-libbing.” Kenny and Louie then took India’s vocal ad libs and chopped them up. At times - such as on the intro - this approach is obvious. At others I Can’t Get No Sleep sounds like a proper song, India telling a tale of a romantic obsession that is playing havoc with her sleep cycles. It is a fantastic vocal, yearning, expressive, soulful, slightly desperate and addictive as hell.
That, alone, would make I Can’t Get No Sleep into a house anthem; but when you add the emblematic saxophone line, trembling bass, Kenny’s bugging-est house beats and that key change, it transforms the song into something transcendent, an all-time classic that I can never get bored of.
If you listen closely, too, you can start to hear the distinctive MAW style that would later influence UK Garage in I Can’t Get No Sleep, a kind of tough swing to the beats and chopped funk to the production that would later, in the hands of British producers, become a whole new type of dance music.
Some listening
Montell Fish, dj gummy bear, John Glacier - Ostentatious
A truly delicious combination, as US singer Montell Fish - under his dj gummy bear alias - and British rapper John Glacier get together on this icily deep house numbers. The synths remind me of Wiley’s earlier work, when he conjured up perfectly glacial electronic patterns and left them to play, while Fish’s vocal are airy to the point of transcendence and the drums tick along in a modest deep house pattern, all this undercut by Glacier’s dead-pan vocal. Ostentatious resists easy categorisation - always a good thing - but if I had to, I’d call it a deep hip house / R&B fusion, the kind of thing we could definitely do with more of.
DJ Babatr - 1234 Ladys on the Floor
I don’t know as much as I should about DJ Babatr, raptor house and changa, the eclectic range of dance music that Babatr used to play at Caracas street parties. But I do know what I like and the classic, wind-up-your-nightie rave stabs on 1234 Ladys on the Floor are right up my postcode. It’s kind of comforting, as well, to know that exactly the same kind of sounds were shaking Venezuelan minitecas in the 2000s as had once vibrated around British raves.
Not, of course, that 1234 Ladys on the Floor is a straight rave track. The song feels like a perfectly natural fusion of Afro-Venezuelan percussion, high-energy Chicago house and T99’s Anasthasia, while riding a hardcore sample of the classic No Sukkaz's song from which Babatr’s track takes its name. 1234 is sticky as glue and twice as headrushy.
Bendik Giske - Start (Hieroglyphic Being remix)
… in which the ever resourceful Hieroglyphic being turns Bendik Giske’s thoughtful album opener Start into a stomping jazz techno number that floats off into astral planes like classic Underground Resistance, albeit slightly dirtier and more roughed up. It reminds me, in fact, of those grimey exoplanets that sometimes pop up in darker sci-fi films, looking grim and scary. But a lot more danceable.
There’s something of classic Sheffield Bleep to this new track from Pépe, a kind of ringing metallic melody that suggests dark satanic mills and liquid steel. To this, though, the Valencian producer adds a subtly stuttering beat that seems to blow a cooling fresh air into proceedings, making Fen’d Out the perfect song for dreaming and dancing, on a fresh October day.
Mimikyu, by Dorset-via-Manchester producer Josh Griffiths aka Ship Sket, is the perfect mixture of rousing classical strings and cut-up electronic clatter, a song that sounds like it exists in two places simultaneously and yet perfectly in its own place. Mimikyumuic has the class of expensively bound new books and box-fresh designer trainers. Give Ship Skep a film soundtrack, right now. For the moment, though, his new album for Planet Mu, out at the end of the month, will suffice.
Last week I interviewed Strictly Kev about the new Telepathic Fish compilation, Trawling The Early 90s Ambient Underground, an album that rounds up some of the laid-back anthems from the best ever 90s ambient party to start off in an East Dulwich kitchen.
it’s a fantastic record that takes me back to my childhood and a very specific - but not limited - strain of “chill out” / ambient music that was big on melody and colour, rather than today’s more fearsome and drone-y strains. Think The Irresistible Force’s remix of Barbarella and Global Communication’s Incidental Harmony and delight.
That interview will be coming to Line Noise soon. In the interim, though, I present you with this stunning piece of work from house originator Marshall Jefferson, as fed through the ever-active musical mind of Joakim. During the interview I asked Kev about the prospect of doing more Telepathic Fish parties and what music he would play if they did so. And this was the tune he highlighted.
And what a tune it is. The original Yellow Meditation features Jefferson vocalising lyrics from Ian ‘Snowy’ Snowball, a writer who also runs Club Chi, specialising in Shibashi Qigong, over a new version of the Chicago producer’s 1985 track Vibe, which he used to take to the Music Box for Ron Hardy to play but subsequently forgot about. It’s lovely - and doubtlessly great for guided meditation,
However Joakim’s Horizontal remix is the track for me, a warm-breeze flurry of arpeggiated synths that drifts on for 18 gloriously dramatic minutes and could go on for a lot more. It is 100% the Telepathic Fish vibe (as I understand it, anyway): melodic, enveloping and colourful, early Orb crossed with Tangerine Dream, but eternal rather than nostalgic.
Fusion Flats was originally a 90-second funk curio on Dexciya’s 1999 album for Tresor, Neptune’s Lair. The following year a slightly longer version of the track - almost three minutes! - was released alongside remixes from Octave One, Kaotic Spacial Rhythms and 043 Chaos and it is this that is getting a re-release this November. (In fact, rather excitingly, all Drexciya albums and EPs from the Tresor lair will be getting a repress in November.)
The strutting Octave One mix is probably the choice from the EP, although I love the original Fusion Flats as one of those odd little experiments that Drexciya did when they weren’t producing sweeping aquatica (see also The Mutant Gillmen (An Experiment Gone Wrong)), its idiosyncrasies and live sounding, rock-electro feel suggesting a band that was having the time of its life in the studio. Fusion Flats is kind of majestic and kind of silly, all odd corners and weird shapes, which is a magnificent combination.
Louie Vega (Feat. Robyn) - All My Love (Honey Dijon remix)
As a house master and very nice guy, Louie Vega is able to attract the very best talent to his records, including simpatico Swede Robyn, whose All My Love collab. was one of the many highlights of Vega’s 2022 album Expansions in the NYC.
Now Honey Dijon has remixed the song for 2025, adding in a Mr Finger-ish bass line, drums that seem to nod to breakbeats without ever going full Funky Drummer and a section of strange whooshing sounds. The result is a perfect cake slice of pop-leaning house that is as tight and tuneful as a snug piano dress.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - With Carrier
On the latest Line Noise podcast - episode 231, would you believe? - I spoke to Guy Brewer aka Carrier (and formerly one third of Commix and all of Shifted) about insane drum & bass production skill, Cambridge Hardcore, Berlin and Antwerp, primal feelings and a lot more. His debut album as Carrier, Rhythm Immortal, is released on October 24.