A guide to Masters at Work - aka the most influential duo in dance music. Part two.
First, some news: I have a new book coming out next year: It’s called Space Age Batchelor Pad Music: The Story Of Stereolab In 20 Songs and it pretty much does what it says on the cover.
Waterstones are offering a discount on the pre-order until October 17 with the code OCTOBER25.
You can order it here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/space-age-batchelor-pad-music/ben-cardew/9781916829329
…. and if you want some more info, here’s the blurb:
Stereolab are one of the most fascinating guitar groups of the past fifty years, a source of constant reinvention and illuminating contrasts, where political ideology meets the sweetest pop melodies and driving guitars rub along with space-age jazz. They are perhaps the greatest Anglo-French collaboration since Concorde a hugely respected, highly influential group whose fan base grows larger by the year, stretching from chart-topping hip hop artists to underground indie stars. And yet their appeal remains elusive. What kind of music do Stereolab make? What s their best album? Their greatest song? There are no easy answers.
In writing this book, Ben Cardew spoke to more than fifty people from the Stereolab universe to trace the history of the band from the depths of 90s indie London to their all-conquering reunion tour of 2025. Using twenty of their songs as jumping-off points, he examines in loving detail what makes this most fascinating band work, unpicking the cultural references, stylistic contradictions, and brilliant ideas at the heart of the group. Space Age Batchelor Pad Music is designed for dedicated fans and interested newcomers alike, going deep into a band of infinite jest, excellent fancy, and spiralling contradiction. It s a story of restless creativity and human endeavour spanning more than three decades of enigmatic artistic life.
Please do give it a go!
Now, on with Masters at Work. Last week I have you part one of my guide to the most influential duo in dance music. This week, it’s part two, including the song that invented Broken Beat and the Stairway to Heaven of house.
PS This newsletter is going out a day early this week as there is a general strike in Spain tomorrow in support of Palestine.
Masters at Work present Nuyorican Soul - The Nervous Track (Ballsy mix)
AKA MAW invent Broken Beat, half a decade early
1993 - what the hell is going on? In just 12 short months Masters at Work released I Can’t Get No Sleep, When You Touch Me (again, with India), their debut album and The Nervous Track, a song that changed the course of dance music.
One of the many things I have always loved about MAW is the division of labour between beats and melodies. And so a song like I Can’t Get No Sleep, while it does have a raging beat, is more about the melody than the drums, while The Nervous Track is percussion through and through. It’s all about the drums, the leaping, creeping drums, the rolling crashing drums; drums so great that MAW had to come up with another name just to be able to contain them. (This was the debut of the Nuyorican Soul moniker that the group would later adopt for a classic album.)
Sure, there’s more to the song that just drums: that neatly dinky Oberheim melody, the eerie pads and the huge brass hits. But really it is all in second place to the irresistible wave of jazzy, Latin-breakbeat and undulating congas, a tsunami of percussion that makes dancing inevitable.
Kenny Dope told Beatportal that the track was inspired by watching jazz dancers at the UK’s revered Southport Weekender. “We go into this jazz room and everyone’s dressed up,” he said, “they’ve got their shoes and suits on and they’re jazz dancing and I’m like, ‘Wow! It’s fast but alright, let’s take that and flip it.’” (I’ve heard it said that he dreamed up The Nervous Track beat in his head, on the spot.)
Thankfully, the duo decided not to use this monstrous new drum pattern on the Ultra-Naté remix they were working on at the time. “Kenny did a really unique thing there because he sampled like a bunch of drummers, jazz drummers from these jazz beat records,” Vega told RBMA of The Nervous Track. “If you listen, there it’s drummers on top of drummers and just the way he puts it together was amazing.
When I spoke to Louie Vega for Line Noise, he told me some more about the genesis of the track. “I was playing around with a synth module called the Matrix and I heard this pad sound,” he explained. “I was just playing these three chords over and over again; it was so hypnotic. Kenny said, 'Oh, I have an idea for that.' That's when he started laying down beats.
“He was making so many house beats at the time that he said, 'I'm tired of doing house beats. I want to do a different kind of beat.' I said, 'Well, do it. Let's go.' So we started working on that. I laid down the bass line, the little organ melody line and the top bass parts. We added a percussionist, Tony from Brooklyn, who came in and played percussion. Then later, Paul Shapiro, a sax player who also plays flute, and who also played on The Whistle Song for Frankie Knuckles, came in. We had some fun with that track.”
The reaction to the song was instantaneous - and surprisingly across the board. “When you hear the track, The Nervous Track, we were blown away because we had people that liked drum & bass, that liked hip hop. We had like Funkmaster Flex, Roni Size, Goldie, of course the house scene, everybody calling us about this track,” Vega told RBMA. “When we did this track we said, ‘Wow, this appeals to everybody.’ It’s at the tempo of house, but it’s not.”
Perhaps the scene where The Nervous Track had its greatest impact, though, was on broken beat, the jazzy dance sound that emerged out of West London at the end of the 90s. Listen to The Nervous Track today and it sounds exactly like the work of New Sector Movements et al. This is no coincidence, as Louie explained to Beatportal.
“I’ll never forget,” Louie said, “I was in London sometime and - may he rest in peace - Phil Asher invited me to this club in the West End and he testified! He was like, ‘Louie, I just want you to see how the music you’ve made influenced us,’ and it was that whole broken beat scene. That’s a really good feeling, that you can be part of a creation of a sound that touches a lot of people and influences people to make that kind of music in their way.”
Björk - Violently Happy 12" Mix by Masters at Work
AKA so many classic remixes
1993 also saw the release of one of my favourite MAW remixes, Kenny and Louie’s take on Violently Happy by Björk. Although, good God, I could have picked a few. According to Discogs, MAW have 1,201 remix credits to their name, from hard-hitting Chicago house (Cajmere’s Brighter Days) to the light-weight Manchester funk of Simply Red (Thrill Me in 1992.)
And Christ do they do a great job of it, to the extent that Thrill Me is both celebrated on national TV variety shows (as Louie Vega told me, when I interviewed him for Line Noise) and Derrick carter’s favourite MAW production.
In the same piece, Dimitri From Paris names the Masters at Work mix of The Braxtons’ The Boss - an infinitely slinky disco house number - as his favourite MAW tune. “With that remix they proved that disco could be recorded in the modern age and still sound pretty close to the real thing,” he said. “They also enlisted legendary disco producer Vince Montana Jr. to work on it, which was a huge inspiration and an eye opener for me.”
At the same time, many people name Masters at Work’s perfectly bumping mix of Saint Etienne’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart - a song that appeared on the same release as Andrew Weatherall’s classic remix of the same song and can still hold its head up proudly - as their favourite. And it was, apparently, this song that really started to make waves for Kenny and Louie in Europe.
It is perhaps no surprise that MAW are so incredibly good at remixes: Louie Vega got his start in music making mixes for Warner Bros. and the duo had such experience as DJs that they knew instinctively what would work on a dance floor. There’s also the fact that pretty much anything - from pop crap to drum & bass roller - is going to sound fabulous with Kenny Dope’s beats behind it. A lot of Masters at Work’s original songs apparently originate in remixes, too, when Kenny and Louie come up with an idea so fabulous that they just can’t give it away.
If I had a label, MAW would be the first people I would call if I wanted a remix that I knew would work on a dance floor, rather than risking an Aphex Twin-style evisceration (which, for the record, I also love.) Of course with MAW you also tend to end up with a relatively straight remix for the A side and something more devious for side B, which is incredibly selfless value.
“Remixing can be tricky,” Louie Vega told me with I interviewed him for Line Noise. “You can do something that's more of a 'tracky' vibe, or you can work with the full song. You're supposed to obviously follow the artist and the song and come up with a great version. So we would do a nice version for the artist with the full song and on the B-side, we would just take it to that other level.
“There are different steps when you’re remixing. The first thing I do is listen to the song to see if there's something catchy - it has to spark an idea. If it doesn't, we pass on it. We passed on a lot of work back in the day, as much as we took, because we just weren't feeling something for the song.”
The MAW remix of Björk is maybe an unusual pick from all the duo’s work, in that Violently Happy is already perfectly set for the dance floor. But I find the mixture of Björk, one of my favourite vocalists, and MAW’s peerless production just too irresistible, especially the brilliant vocal cut ups, which ranks among my favourite moments in the entire Björk catalogue. Plus I just love the house-y side of Björk and wish she would do more of it. Sue me.
Barbara Tucker - Beautiful People (Original Club mix)
AKA The fine art of knowing a hook
Masters at Work have so many fabulous tunes as a duo that it seems totally nonsensical to take up space with any of their solo tunes. And yet it ALSO seems nonsensical to talk about Kenny and Louie and not mention Deep Inside, The Bomb! and so much more.
OK… so for Kenny Dope you have The Bomb!, a global chart hit and one of the smartest disco house songs ever made; House Syndicate’s sneakily jacking Jam The Mace and 2 Dope’s A Touch of Salsa, aka the record that started it all off for MAW and definitely helped to nurture Latin house.
Louie Vega, meanwhile, may well have invented filter house, with his 1993 track “Little" Louie Anthem Part II; dropped his own global hit with Hardrive’s Deep Inside - a song that may not have had the same immediate commercial impact as The Bomb! but has gone on to become one of the most widely recognised house music songs ever - and the dreamily funky 2019 track Cosmic Witch with Anané, a song that shows Vega has lost absolutely none of his class over the last 30 years.
And yet the song I have picked to represent the duo’s solo work is not really a solo song at all. Barbara Tucker’s ravishing Beautiful People is more gang hang out than solo effort, featuring India, Byron Stingily, Kenny Bobien, Carol Sylvan, Connie Harvey, Earl Robinson, Eddie Stockley, Karen Bernard and Michael Watford on backing vocals, writing credits for Tucker, Mood II Swing’s Lem Springsteen, India and Louie Vega; production from Louie and Strictly Rhythm’s Gladys Pizarro (the latter an executive producer) and mixing by Kenny Dope. (In fact, I’ve only really included it here on a loophole, because Kenny doesn’t feature in the writing.)
Beautiful People is an early highpoint of MAW’s family vibes, generosity of spirit and incredible skill at drawing the best out of their collaborators. “It was actually India, Lem Springsteen, [vocalist, arranger and songwriter] Derek Whitaker and myself who had written the song and the next thing Beautiful people was born,” Vega told Spirit of House. (Whitaker isn’t credited on Beautiful People, although he did work extensively with MAW so Vega may be misremembering.)
But it also shows Louie’s incredible ear for highlighting a hook - or as he says, in an interview with 15 Questions for “creating hooks within the groove itself”. And we can definitively see this in the journey from the disco-y, song-based groove of Beautiful People to the more tracky (and now infinitely better known) Deep Inside, by Hardrive, which gets its quintessential “deep down inside” hook from Beautiful People. (Although, bizarrely, Deep Inside apparently came out before Beautiful people.)
“I came up with this hot groove and I wanted to do something for Barbara Tucker because she was always singing at the Underground Network,” Vega told Spirit of House. “So I said I got this song for you. When she sang this song she sang one little part that really stood out for me that was ‘Deep down inside, deep, deep down inside’ and I was like, ‘Wow that gave me an idea.’ I went back into the studio I wrote this new groove to it and it became Deep Inside, the track.”
Obviously, much of the credit here must go to Tucker, one of house music’s all-time best vocalists, who absolutely sings her posterior off and wrote the hook in the first place. But credit, too, to Louie for identifying precisely this part of the vocal as the essential hook.
It sounds obvious, now that Deep Inside is such a well-worn classic and has itself been sampled by everyone from Kanye to Pearson Sound. But it probably wasn’t at the time. And it took Louie’s ears to hear that this small part of a much larger vocal could be so fundamental, thus birthing at least a couple of house classics. This is part of the art of producing music, a skill that is often overlooked but really shouldn’t be.
River Ocean Featuring India - Love & Happiness (Yemaya Y Ochún)
AKA the Stairway to Heaven of house music
Masters at Work never lack for ambition. Their catalogue is packed with elaborate, guest-filled epics, where hordes of musicians are sardined into the studio in a way that seems almost inappropriate in an age of limited sales and bedroom recording. If MAW need to get five people in on backing vocals then they get five people in on backing vocals and let budgets be damned. They are, perhaps, the Brian Wilsons of house and I love this way of thinking
Among all this, though, one song towers over the rest, like a colossus of groove. River Ocean Featuring India’s Love & Happiness (Yemaya Y Ochún), released in 1994, is quite simply one of the most jaw-droppingly epic house music songs ever to hit vinyl. This is a monster of ambition.
Where do you even start? Love & Happiness - which has its origins in India’s 1992 solo record Llegó La India... Via Eddie Palmieri - features a devastating vocal from India, in English and Yoruba (Yemayá and Oshún are sister Orishas in the Yoruba religion); four backing vocalists; live percussion by Tito Puente and Anthony “Starvin T” Cordero; Kenny Dope on drum programming; a sample of the salsa classic Aguanilé (by Willie Colon and Hector Lavoe - Vega’s uncle) and one of the most stirring vocal melodies in all house.
So we have, in one song, the influence of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean running head-long into one of house music’s greatest producers, a legendary vocalist and one of the best drum programmers in the business. Somehow the song’s 10 minute (plus) run time seem too short for the talent on show. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Love & Happiness’s brilliant percussive onslaught became an immediate staple of the emerging (but horribly named) tribal house scene. The result is amazing: soulful, uplifting, deep, dramatic, grandiloquent and so much more.
Put it this way: the next time someone tells you that house music is boring old boom-tish play them Love & Happiness and watch those tired old arguments collapse. It’s like the Stairway to Heaven of house music, except far less clichéd.
Some listening
Mutant dancehall x throat-clearing phlegm spit? It can only be the The GL Lights, the opening track on Blawan’s next instalment of electronic freak pop SickElixir, a record that splits the difference between uneasy machine filth and huge pop hooks in a way I find insanely alluring. Blawan himself has called the record “aggressive” but I don’t really get that; combative, sure, and always ready to question but I find SickElixir both welcoming and incredibly potent. How I would love it, if Blawan could play something like this at the ever-more-business techno festivals he seems to find himself booked at.
Gwenno - Utopia (Cornelius mix)
Cornelius, it turns out, has acted like a real piece of shit in the past. Can we separate that from this absolutely gorgeous remix of Gwenno’s Utopia? Perhaps not. On a musical level, though, this towers above anything else on Gwenno’s (excellent) recent album of the same name, easing out the original’s ever-so-slightly anxious vibes in a shimmering stream of afternoon Valium, like Wichita Lineman via Cardiff (via Japan).
Former Line Noise guest - when I could get a word in edgeways - and Spanish superstar Ralphie Choo, takes another left-turn on PIRRI, the first single from his forthcoming second alum, creating a song that falls somewhere between 80s stadium pop anthem, autotune rap, indie rock and weird electronics. The impact is utterly ecstatic and totally addictive, probably my favourite thing Ralphie has made to date.
OK, so now I understand why Stereolab got Bitchin Bajas’ Cooper Crain in to produce their recent studio album Instant Holograms on Metal Film. BB sound a lot like Stereolab - but only in the sense that Stereolab sound, at times, like almost everyone else (minus, I dunno, Megadeath and Rotterdam Termination Source) and so do Bitchin Bajas on their fabulous new EP (mini LP?) Inland See.
More specifically - as I suppose we must - climactic album closer Graut sounds like Autobahn-era Kraftwerk cruising down a Californian mountain path, all sunny glimpses and gorgeous open spaces, as framed through the motorik perspective of a car window, the tempo slowly ratcheting up as the flute blows its peaceful course, like the Pied Piper of Krautrock. You could perfectly see Graut occupying a side of vinyl on a mid-period Stereolab album and I can think of no greater praise than that.
Goldfrapp - Koko (Sun’s Signature remix)
Do I like Goldfrapp? Not really. Do I care that their Supernature album is getting a 20th anniversary deluxe reissue? Tampoco. But I DO love Elizabeth Fraser and all who sail in her and, for the moment, that means Sun Signature, her much underrated duo with Damon Reece.
Sun’s Signature haven’t done a great deal, so far - their eponymous 2022 EP comes highly recommended but you won’t get much further than that - so this makes me welcome their debut remix (I think) like the last drippings of honey from a dilapidated bee. I’m not even sure to what extent Fraser is on the remix, given that Alison Goldfrapp is doing her best Cocteau twins impression on the original song but the duo’s dubbed-out and echoing take on Koko is infinitely more palatable than the cheap glam original.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - Telepathic Fish special with Strictly Kev
Last week I spoke to spoke to Kevin Foakes - aka Strictly Kev aka DJ Food about Telepathic Fish: Trawling The Early 90s Ambient Underground - a fantastic compilation album tracing the history of South London’s premier ambient party. We spoke about the dreaded “chill out” term, the influence of The Orb, chatting to Aphex, the spirit of London and people dancing to ambient DJs.
Oh and can you please follow Line Noise on Soundcloud? Please? I’ve been stuck on 999 followers for a few weeks and it is driving me mad. https://soundcloud.com/line-noise-podcast
The Playlists
Apple Music users! You can now access my two main playlists of new music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.
Please do keep your opinions coming in about where I should host these playlists. For the moment, they are both also on Spotify: The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest. But I personally use Apple Music.