Moda Black’s Little Black Book series was inspired by the desire for a new, more diverse, more personal platform for artists to express themselves. An album, remix album, compilation, mix series, autobiography and photo-book all rolled into one - a chance for artists to reveal a wealth of new material, whilst also dipping into their back catalogue and allowing it to be re-imagined by new artists. The Little Black Book gets inside the artists’ minds and looks to the future and what’s to come.
For the second edition of Little Black Book, the reigns have been handed to the prolific and much loved Groove Armada. From early inspiration courtesy of 90’s rave collective DiY to the worldwide success of six albums, long summers in Ibiza and global live tours - with such a storied history, it’s hard to image where they’d even begin with a project like this. The boys brought the curtain down on their live tours at Brixton in 2010 because they wanted to go back to basics; House music and the warehouses where GA started - cue a series of releases on labels from Hypercolour to Hot Creations.
The mix on CD1 Groove Armada seven new original pieces of music as part of a 77 minute journey that also includes Tony Allen, Candi Staton, re-edits of a host of GA classics and their rework of Arthur Baker anthem, Rockers Revenge.
The second disc then sees 12 excellent producers redefine classic Groove Armada records, resulting in some spectacular new versions of tracks like ‘Love Sweet Sound’, ‘Superstylin’, ‘Chicago’ and ‘I See You Baby’ from the likes of Kolsch, andhim, Huxley, Jaymo & Andy George, Joris Voorn, PillowTalk, Emperor Machine, Marco Faraone, Chaim, Hauswerks, Walker & Royce and wAFF.
Included in the special notebook version of the release is Andy Cato's account of the GA journey from Castlemorton to L.A too - one that has taken them right back to the start. "People were saying if you're going to write new material you need to put it out on a major, get the band back together, unleash the machine. But we don't want to do that. We want to play and make house music, and that's all”.