"These are the places I try to find"... Getting To Know Antal and his 13 Bangers in 30 Minutes Mix

Rush Hour is one of those labels with an undeniably strong mass of underground credibility. From reissuing lost classics and re-presenting them for the next generation of music appreciators to unearthing their own local talents - like the beat crushing tones of Aardvark or more vintage analogue house of Tom Trago - there doesn’t seem to be such a tangible way to possibly pigeon hole them. I guess you could say Rush Hour’s music is underpinned by a simple reliance on quality music with elements of house and techno to it but much of the meat involved in the definition comes courtesy of the principles of the imprint’s founding father, Antal. Next Saturday night he will be bringing this anything-quality-goes ethos to Room Three with label favourite San Proper so we took the opportunity to get to grips a little more with the Rush Hour story and also present Antal’s ‘13 Bangers in 30 Minutes’ mix as an insight into how he interprets his ethos on the dancefloor. Download: Antal's 13 Bangers in 30 Minutes Mix To go right back to when you founded Rush Hour can you tell us about what first inspired you to start up the label and record store? Around the time I was already into dealing records and actually the city of London opened my eyes to the possibility with shops like Fat Cat and Atlas. I loved the vibes they had and as I was wanting to work with music my ex-business partner anyway so I opened a store in Amsterdam to create something similar What've you found to be the biggest challenges in the world of running a record label? Nothing in specific to be honest. You just do what you want to do. What would you say motivates you to keep giving your energy to putting out music when the culture of illegal downloading seems to be so prevailant? It's not that big a problem for us or to us. I wouldn’t encourage people to download illegally, but for us, it's more of the best of both worlds - we do vinyl, CD's and downloads and we are ok right now. I have the feeling with alternatives like Spotify are getting a little bit better, however the share on streams is very low. Also the amount of music that people listen is much more than say 10 years ago. So it’s a good time for music, less good for the industry, but for our company is still doing ok. It might be different for an artist. They might tell you a different story depending on the profile and the amount of shows they can do for instance... Rush Hour's output is quite varied with artists from Aardvark to Virgo Four releasing with you - what do you think is at the core of the label's sound? We come from a house & techno background but we expanded on that quite quickly into a few different directions. The Rush Hour label stays very much in a house & techno direction, but our sister label Kindred Spirits releases lots of African, Brazilian or jazz music. New and old. How do you go about sourcing your more wordly music? I read you physically journey to discover it yourself...why do you think that's important? I love travelling, meeting people, their stories and sharing music and just hanging out in a recordstore to discover new things but I also browse online to find things. I think when you get it so easy via the internet it's also important to put more effort into it and find things via different routes. They all work to me. It's about how much time you want to put in as well and how deep you want to go...Behind every store, person or entity there is a little door that opens up to a new world you might not have known about. These are the places I try to find. Why do you think it was important for you to go through Anthony 'Shake' Shakir and Virgo Four's back catalogues and re-release them? Re-releases are important to us because the albums we have done for instance are the foundation of our company, it’s music we were looking to sell when setting up the store or it is music that we just recently have learnt about, but they are so obscure or hard to get that you have to create reissues to share and to work against the influx of bootlegs. So it's better to do it properly and have the artists paid as well. Plus new things might grow out of it. How did you make those connections these guys are so well respected did you have to earn their trust to take care of their catalogues? Lots of connections we have are from older relationships formed out of the parties we've put on in Amsterdam or because of us buying their music directly to sell in our store. If the connection wasn't there yet, we would just reach out to the artists directly. Like we used to ring up Grammaphone in Chicago and ask for certain Chicago artists records. Soon after that we got calls. Now with Facebook it is so much easier to get in contact, but at the end of the 90’s, most of the time you only had a faxnumber that you could find on a record. I remember all of sudden getting a 20 page fax from Cajual while sleeping. It was quite exciting when all of a sudden that thing started running. But from day one we have been travelling, a lot to London, Belgium & Germany in the early days and onto Japan and the USA and many other countries. Do you feel that Amsterdam is a good place to be in musically at the moment? How does it fit into the scene there? Amsterdam gave us the possibilty to do what we are doing. There is a nice scene of people that appreciate all this music and we do nights at clubs like Trouw or have festivals like the Amsterdam Dance Event. It's a blessing these things all happen in our backyard, just like one of the biggest record fairs in the world that's held in Utrecht twice a year, or stores like Redlight records. All in our area which is great obviously. There are plenty of DJs and producers.Next to that our focus is very international really. And so is the music I think. We've talked about this huge expanse of ground the RH covers - do you think that also translates into your DJ sets? YES, sometimes more radical than other times. It's also nice to play house or techno for a couple of hours, but I can also easily blend in disco or afro... Is DJing something you'd like to take further? Do you feel your responsibilities at RH in a way can limit where you can take your DJ career it seems like a really demanding occupation? Of course, always, but I am already very fortunate as long as the sound systems are good and the people are receptive I am very happy to select and play music. Sometimes it feels like two jobs and hard to manage, and sometimes you can combine different elements. That's what I aim for and next to that the RH team is very dedicated and it works well as a team. I am very satisfied. In coming to take over RM3 here with San Proper what do you hope to convey about Rush Hour presenting your sound in London? To have fun and make people dance!