Deep-Diving The Todd Edwards Bandcamp Dump

On Friday 26 January 2024, I received a Bandcamp notification innocuously titled “New releases from 4 To The Floor” — 4 To The Floor being the Defected reissues sub-label curated by Classic Music co-founder Luke Solomon. I had previously bought Terrence Parker’s ‘Spiritual Warfare’ from the label’s first compilation and enjoyed playing this relatively straightforward house tune at various parties, including, from memory, Gimme A Reason in NOLA. Little did I know that this small chain of events, and that innocuous notification, would lead me to take on one of the most challenging tasks I’ve ever set myself:

"New releases" — plural — is what the notification said, and it wasn't joking around. I counted around 60 in total excluding duplicates, and I think we can forgive whichever Defected intern got lumbered with the task of putting all of this on Bandcamp for accidentally uploading some of them more than once. (Incidentally, while writing this I discovered that this digital dump of Todd's remastered i! Records releases actually took place back in 2021, ten years after he'd regained the rights to them from the label. It's possible this was the first time the releases got put up for download rather than streaming.)