How did you get to found Nervous?
I grew up in an enviroment in which I was sorrounded by music, expecially New York club music. My father founded a disco label and when I grew up I was inmmersed in that kind of culture. It was the late 80s when the New York house music sound was emerging and, having grewn up in that enviroment, when I was in a nicht club for me was very natural to go to the dj if I heard a good track. I would just go up and say hello and what´s song is that. Doing that, meeting a lot of the djs who were playing around the city became a natural thing. People like Frankie Knuckles, David Morales and Todd Terry. At a certain point I felt like I knew enough to say “I want to start my own label”. The beginning was very fortunate because the first releases were with Roger Sanchez, Louie Vega, Todd Terry and Kenny Dope. Those guys were in the first three releases. It was the best of the sound of New York CIty at that point and very unique and popular, even in Europe. It was merging the disco influences and the influence of the early house from Chicago.
The logo was also part of the success of the label, right?
Yeah! By now, when we had this label the Nervous logo became also very popular on it´s own. The first release was in 1991, that´s when the acid house scene was very big in London. Our sound was the NY garage house sound while the scene in london was into a more acid house type of thing -and I don´t want to say in direct connection with ecstacy- but I can remember being in London and that logo was all over, not only in the clubs. So the beginning was really big, it took up right away like a rocket ship. That was important because, even as an artist, you first releases have to be popular, that could be brand you. So after this great launch twentyfive years later and the brand ist still so strong. Things chance very quickly in our the industry, the people, the radios, how records get played, but our brand is so well established, always staying with the current sound and what´s popular with djs and in the clubs.
And then there´s That Nervous Track, produced for you by Kenny Dope and Louie Vega aka Nu Yorican Soul:
That was also a great thing for the label. Kenny and Louie would often do work in studio at night, doing a lot of amazing remixes for the major labels, and then sometimes when they were done with the remixes the would start jamming, getting loose and coming up with some crazy stuff. Louie called me like at 4 in the morning and he said “Mike you got to come to listen to this crazy, crazy track” and I said “let me hear play it over the phone” and he said “No way, you got to come down to the studio”. So I came to the studio and they played a rough mix of that but it was such an innovative thing. When they made that track there wasn´t that kind of broken beat sound, there was no merging. You had either house, jazz or RnB. But that brought all these different genres together. In America you had the hip hop djs playing it, the house djs playing it. it was so forward-thinking, that s why I felt like they had to call it That Nervous Track, that it will always keep the name of Nervous alive and it always be know, a hundred years from now.
Talking about hip hop. At a certain point you started also the Wreck Records sub-label, and that connected you to the hip hop scene:
That was a product of me going out a lot by then in hip hop clubs. It´s different these days in terms of finding music, because of internet has made everything so accesible, but I always gone to clubs my all life pretty much. Back then there were a lot of clubs where hip hop was been playing out but it was the cool underground independent hip hop. If you go to clubs hip hop is so commercial, back then New York had a cool underground scene where in fact a lot of djs were playing house and hip hop. So being out I knew a lot of these hip hop djs, between them Chuck Chillout. He became a good friend of mine and he found out about this guys, Black Moon he seen them playing in a talent show.
I always felt that Nervous represent everything that´s going on in the night life scene. For example with Josh Wink we made a label called Sorted which was releasing some early techno, like the first Winks releases, like Don´t Laugh. New York had a very cool undergound techno scene and I created all these sub-labels to cover all the different genres. All the different names and logos that were variations of the Nervous logo, like the label Weed, that because of the big reggae hip hop scene that was emergin in NYC back then. All the logos would lead to more t-shirt that were selling all over the place. In the Bronx, in Brooklyn and Queens.
I remember there were stories about a sort of rivality between Nervous and Strictly Rhythm. In the popular belief, in Europe the latter was more popular in Germany for example, Italy was all about Nervous and it´s logo.
With Strictly we were always very friendly because we always had a kind of different focus. They were into a sound with a bigger commercial feel, if you think about I Like To Move it I was more focused into more sub cultures. They were focused in taking house music and making it popular worldwide, I was more enthusiastic about underground stuff, like hip hop and techno. Back then the scene was so diverse, there was the opportunity to create more sub-labels dedicated to sub genres, like wreck, that became well known in the hip hop community as Nervous was in the house community.
Can you reveal which are the most successful Nervous releases, sales-wise?
The most succesfull for Nervous were Don´t Laugh by Winks, Get Up Everybody by Byron Stingly, Night Life by Kim English, Rushing by Loni Clark, Feel Like Singing by Sandy B, and then I would say there were some others that maybe weren´t selling that much but became very famous because of what they represented, like Kerri Chandler´s Rain is very well known. And then Kim English had some tunes that became famous because they got sampled subsequently, Unspeakable Joy for example, that was very big in New York, and then another song called Missing You, which was also sampled for other songs. In the hip hop department, Black Moon with the album “Enta Da Stage”, Smif-n-Wessun sold also many thousand of copies, then another huge success with Take It Easy by Mad Lion. We had songs by Funkmaster Flex, who was the biggest hip hop dj in the USA, that were very popular expecially through the radios.
And if you should pick out your personal highlights of the label, which one would you chose?
In 1992 when Ministry Of Sound London opened, the first time I went there they actually had a huge, massive Nervous flag on the all front of the club. It was crazy, I don´t even know how they gonna do that. Actually it was an USA flag with the Nervous logo where the stars and stripes are. That was a great moment.
Louie Vega is a great friend of mine and he is been very instrumental in breaking a lot of big songs. He would play a song for a crowd and just blow it up. It goes back to Feel Like Singing by Sandy B, and of course Nu Yourican Soul and That Nervous Track. And even recently, in summer he did a remix of this disco tune Bourgie Bourgie. It´s an mazing feeling when that guy plays a track. The industry has changed and there´s more attention on night life and djing. I also manage Oscar G, one half of the production duo Murk, being with him in clubs, and he s playing for four or five thousand people and the crowd is going crazy, those are always great moments.
When Byron Stingly made his top ten in the UK pop chart with Get Up Everybody and he did the the Radio 1 summer tour, he did that song in front of six thousand people. Anytime I´m in a live venue and i see all the people reacting to a song of ours those are all equally personal highs.
Which are the ways you use to find new talents for your label?
I always had a good staff. The person that who does the A&R now is Andrew Salsano. The process is very organic. Andy has a good ear for things. It´s diffent now than it was many years ago because, before the digital releases, in a physical release there was a bigger process involved, whether it was vinyl, cd or cassette each release. You could not do as many releases, you had to be very good at what you were doing and you had to push hard. The process took a lot longer but the reward was greater.
The challenge now is that so many things come out, whatever the word release means today. For some people having a release doesn´t even mean putting it online for sell, but getting it on up on a a site like Soundcloud and use that to build the personal profile. Andrew does a very good job figuring out what makes sense to go the next step. These days we do three or four releases a week, which is very ambitious but each release sells less so the company have to reach certain numbers. A lot of independent labels this days are run by dj and producers themselfs but we still run the company as it been done in the past, the company has to make sense on the base of sells. We have to put out a certain number of releases to keep the income at a certain level. Sometimes in the early 10 or 15 years we went through very dry periods, sales were really slow, and we went “Wow! How are we get to keep going, we need a hit” but when you think that nothing´s gonna come in, that´s when a great hit comes through. I always have a great desire for good music, that´s the way I keep motivated. It ´s a personal high, it´s always great for me to pick up something, take it in it´s raw form, finessing it and releasing it and seeing how it works in the clubs. Seeing how everybody dance to our releases it´s a kind of thrill that never gets old. That´s the motivating force.
Back to the pattern of doing the sub-labels. We did continue, starting 5 years ago the Nurvous which is representing a more disco-deep stuff and Andrew did a good job giving it a distinguishing vibe from Nervous while the regular one still represent the more established kind of house and techno. The two labels also have very defined and different fanbases.
As a listener, which are the artists that excite you at the moment?
As always Louie Vega and Kenny Dope, Oscar G but also Mark Lower, Lazaro Casanova, Tiger Stripes, Paul Woolford, Dense & Pika, Krystal Klear, Victor Ruiz, Enrico Sangiuliano, to name just a few.
Can you tell us something about your most recent releases or the ones that you got in the pipeline for the early 2017?
First of all, the forthcoming compilation “Dancin’’. It will include unreleased tracks by friends of our label and it will be mixed by Hector Romero. Beside we have out singles by Joi Cardwell & DJ Gomi with remixes by Fred Everything, NiCe7 and Eli Escobar. Bang, DaBeat by Samuri featuring Kevin Aviance remixed by Crookers, among the others. Teddy Douglas with To The Beat Of The Drum and also Oscar G & Lazaro Casanova with What I Need, Ant LaRock featuring Robert Owens in A Better Me, Boris Smith, Chris Child Katianshé and many more.
