Mindprint
Mindprint was Mark Knight and Kevin Brooks, and their Red Melon record captures a moment just before one of dance music's great independent success stories took off. Billed on the release as "of Toolroom," the pair cut it in the label's earliest days, when Toolroom was still a small family operation with big ideas.
Knight and Brooks were already a studio team, releasing as K&M on Ultra Vinyl, when Mark and his brother Stuart launched Toolroom from a tool shed at the bottom of the family garden in their native Maidstone, Kent. The mantra, as Mark tells it, was straightforward: "a record label run by DJs, for DJs," the kind of record you would buy on sight from behind a record-shop counter. That idea, practical, unpretentious and built for the floor, runs through Mindprint's work too.
As Mindprint, the duo had a short, busy run. "The Hand Of God" arrived in 2001 and the Incarnation EP in 2002, followed by "Sloe Groove" and "Sing It" on Slopshop and "Story Of My Life" in 2003, and "Without Love" in 2006. Along the way they remixed "Lights Out 2" and "Let It Go," and their tracks found their way onto tribal and summer house compilations, among them Ministry of Sound's Summer Guide 2003, Tribal House 4 and Latino House 3, good company for a sound that leaned heavily on percussion.
Toolroom grew alongside Knight's own career into a global house and tech-house name, with residencies and festival stages, events, and a weekly Toolroom Radio show with a vast international audience. The Toolroom Academy was set up to train the next generation of producers, running a school for aspiring DJs alongside music-education programmes, sample packs and mastering services. "It's very much a family thing," Knight has said. "We're normal, level-headed people, but we've always dreamed big." From a garden shed to a worldwide brand is a long way to travel, and the Mindprint project sits at its very beginning.
What Mindprint brought was main-room tech house with a DJ's sense of function: big subs, tight percussion and hooks designed to work in a mix. It was music made by people who played every weekend and knew exactly what a peak-time floor needed, and it has the directness of records made to be tested on a dancefloor the following night.
Mindprint's Red Melon record arrived as a split twelve, Mindprint vs. Dano. Red Melon billed "Quickie" as a slamming main-room pounder: deep, hypnotic tech house on a rubbery, rolling sub, with filtered robotic vocal chops over offbeat hats. Dano answered on the other side with "It's My House" and its Acid Tool version.
The pairing is a snapshot of the transatlantic tech-house conversation of the early 2000s, with Kent and San Francisco speaking the same language. Two labels run by DJs, for DJs, met in the middle of a single piece of vinyl, and the result still works exactly as intended: loud, late and on the floor.
