The Angel Blog | No Gravity…

With Jhelisa In The Mix… All Is “Ultra Light” In The Angel Camp

Nothing beats working with someone whose talent is so remarkable, so pervasive that you can feel it from light years away… Jhelisa is such an incredible spirit, not only a phenomenal vocalist, arranger, writer, producer… She’s a fireball of energy, a catalyst of intensity and a creative being like no one I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

We go way back… In fact, Jhelisa and I were both living in London when I produced and recorded my very first album for Delicious Vinyl; the ill fated, never released, “A Message From The Angel…”, but that’s another story. I was singing back in those days, but never happily… The voice that I heard in my head, as I wrote and produced those songs, was way more soulful than I could ever manage and knowing my own limitations, I was keen to bring in guests to fulfill the potential that I felt I couldn’t reach on my own. When Jhelisa agreed to sing on a bunch of the songs I was in seventh heaven…

So that was then, and you’ll probably never get to hear any of that material for a million different reasons, however, earlier this year Jhelisa and I teamed up in LA and the first of two very different tracks are about to be released, “Ultra Light” by The Angel feat Jhelisa on September 22nd and “Words Like Daggers” as 60 Channels… But the icing on the cake is additional Jhelisa flavour on my upcoming instrumental album, “Xtra Sensory Goodness”. For a little extra background on Jhelisa, here’s a mention in this August’s Spin:

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More info on “Ultra Light” in the coming weeks!!

Beats & Pieces – Some Angel History In The First Person Pt1

It was April 29th 1992 when Mike Ross, head of Delicious Vinyl, flew me from London to New York so that we could meet and discuss a record deal. He and his team would fly in from Los Angeles and meet me there.

They booked me into a recording studio in the city to check me out in action. I always suspected that they just wanted to make sure that I really was doing all my own programming, writing and producing. So armed with some vinyl and dats (those were the days) with my library of sounds and created samples, I headed over to the studio where they had rented in an Akai S1000 Sampler, an Atari 1040ST and Cubase. It was there, that I wrote, “Freedom Is A State of Mind”.

So there I was in the studio, like I was on another planet… but late in the day I was shaken out of my creative cocoon, when we switched on a TV in the control room and saw Los Angeles in complete chaos… the riots had broken out and Mike & the Gang had barely made it out on one of the last flights to leave the city that day. This was one of my early introductions to LA while I was feeling back at home in NY, but still living in London… The images came with such foreboding and it’s been a bittersweet mixture of loveliness and trauma ever since…

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