Brooklyn’s Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez has been at the forefront of New York’s house music underground since his first tracks appeared on labels such as Nu Groove, Big Beat and Henry Street. He’s managed to worry the mainstream while staying true to his club roots, as demonstrated on the Masters At Work project with ‘Little’ Louie Vega.
In 1994, after creating The Bucketheads as an antidote to dance music’s increasing Euro sanitisation, Gonzalez gave Chicago’s Street Player a pumping undertow and climactic peak-time makeover. It destroyed the world’s dancefloors and enjoyed chart success as The Bomb (These Things Fall Into My Mind).
After continuing this mission to embrace hip-hop, house, disco and funk on follow-up single Got Myself Together (using Brass Construction’s Movin’), an album followed with tracks based on Atmosfear’s Motivation, Wood Brass & Steel’s Funkanova and Linda Clifford’s Runaway Love: cut-and- paste beats and sample-based rough house which would be a major influence through to the next decade. On Time And Space, Gonzalez’s hip-hop background shows in his startlingly imaginative mating of The JBs with Level 42’s Starchild. In today’s laptop-and- autotune quagmire, it’s time to hear again from a real master at work.
