What Robert Curio and Lulu Mushi aka Cindy Roche wanted was an outlet that they could use to let people listen to downtempo music. Lulu was often recording at Robert’s studio, Dirty Loop in Cincinnati and after much discussion, they decided to start something small, to put out strictly vinyl releases. The response to the EPs released in 2000 was bigger than expected. After a stint in San Francisco and New York, Mush Records finally settled in at the sunny city of Los Angeles and their release schedule has grown to include more than a dozen releases per year in all formats, distributed worldwide. [more »]

Hailing from downtown Tokyo, Moshi Moshi is the home of a uniquely Japanese subculture: recordings of unsolicited tele-sales calls received by the label’s boss, set to a grinding industrial techno score. We can’t get enough of it at JUICE. Honest. Don’t believe us? Oh well, not really, but we had you going for a minute, didn’t we? In fact Moshi Moshi has precious little to do with Japan, other than the fact it’s cooler than a polar bear surfing on an ice floe. [more »]

Nothing sums up the sound of 1970s New York like Salsoul Records. With a roster of black and Latino artists, Salsoul rode the first street-fuelled wave of Latin soul, disco and block parties. Founded in 1974 by the Cayre brothers and former Fania artist and Latin soul legend Joe Bataan, the label went on to help popularize the 12” vinyl format that would eventually lead to the turntablist and DJ cults of today. [more »]

When you think of world leading hip hop imprints, names like Sugarhill, Def Jam, Stones Throw and Death Row jump into your mind. You certainly wouldn’t sail across the Atlantic to London to find your hip hop fix. And while early pioneering UK-grown hip hop imprints like Street Sounds were primarily concerned with the US underground, Big Dada came about to meet the needs of a new breed of British hip hop. [more »]

Long before the rise of punk and white power skinheads in the 80s, the subculture had its roots in Trojan Records, a label specialising in Jamaican music. Capitalising on the ska, rocksteady and reggae craze that was sweeping United Kingdom, one Lee Gopthan collaborated with the founder of Island Records, Chris Blackwell, to form Trojan Records in 1968.

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