Ross Couch
Ross Couch was born in Glasgow, a city with a long and serious relationship with dance music, and he fell for house and techno there in the early '90s, when the city's clubs were among the most respected in Europe. That grounding, a love of energy married to an ear for melody, has shaped everything he has made since.
His first records arrived on Bellboy and Panther in 2001 and 2002, a hard-to-classify blend of dancefloor techno and melodic tech house that drew comparisons to Deep Dish, Dave Angel, Slam and Ron Trent. Thomas Schumacher picked "Backforce," from his first Bellboy release, to open his Perlen 3 mix, an early sign that Couch's music travelled. His first twelve-inch was a remix of the Japanese artist DJ19, and his System Check alias reached No. 3 on DJ Magazine's Hype Chart with the Dirty Dancing EP.
By 2003 he had found his own voice: melodic deep house that never lost the energy of the floor. I-DJ wrote that he "straddles the line between deep and tech house with style," and that sound carried him to Siesta, Kinky Vinyl, Blaxtrax and Red Melon, and then into a long relationship with Bargrooves, which began around 2005 and saw him mixing and engineering several of its mix CDs. In 2007 he launched his own label, Body Rhythm, which has passed seventy releases and become a steady home for deep and soulful house.
His 2009 debut album, Night And Day, was warmly received, and he has since moved into downtempo too, with "From Dusk Til Dawn" spending months on Beatport's chill-out chart. He has remixed Joey Negro & The Sunburst Band, Barbara Tucker, Rasmus Faber and Stylo G, and his remix of Nayo's "African Girl" reached No. 11 in the UK Club Chart. All told, he counts more than a hundred releases. Traxsource has called him "the epitome of consistency," and journalist John Freer skipped the sub-genres altogether, calling him a producer of "astounding uncategorizable House tracks."
That consistency gets close to his personality as an artist. Couch is not a producer of gimmicks or sudden reinventions. He refines, record after record, a deep-house sound built on warm chords, shuffling grooves and gentle melancholy, music that rewards the DJ who plays it and the listener who stays with it.
On Red Melon, Couch released The Deep End EP in 2003, the year his own voice came into focus. It holds three deep-house cuts with West Coast bounce: the conga-driven swing of "Hearts and Minds," "La Musica," and the melancholy title track, built on pitched-down sighs and string pads. It is a Glasgow producer's take on the San Francisco sound, and a natural fit for a label that has always liked its house deep and warm.
Listening back, The Deep End EP sounds like a blueprint for much of what followed in his career: soulful, patient and quietly emotional, with the dancefloor never far from his mind. For Red Melon it remains one of the label's most elegant records.
