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Helskanki is a word that comes to mind when thinking funk, rhythm and melody. Pete began his search for the perfect beats on a sunny thursday afternoon when he returned from a boring lecture with his classmate and friend Joe from university. The two friends sat there comfortably drinking beer in the backyard discussing music when Pete remembered he had a pair of barely used Numark turntables and a commercial hip hop and RNB collection collecting dust in his room.  The decks were unpacked and the tunes were unfortunately heard in the whole complex. As fun as it was, the music was terrible, it just would not do for future sessions and the next two years of Uni were spent collecting old school and nu skool breakbeat records.  The reason for the breaks was that this skanki individual was also a bboy dancing on weekends, the rhythm of the break was essential.  The focus on breakbeats would later shift to the House music so synonymous with the clubbing scene.  Many nights were spent listening to essential mixes from the BBC Radio One show in the UK.  This helped him understand the structure of mixing and individual tunes for that matter.  Failing to dj in any of the top spots around the city forced the music enthusiast to turn his passion into an obsession and become a producer. This move forced him to also drop out of Uni and enroll in a bachelor of audio engineering degree at SAE Institute.  Two years later and the degree is complete, it is now time for Helskanki to concentrate on making original sounding music that reflects his influences including
Plump DJs, Soul of Man, Spirit Catcher and Sebastien Leger to name a few.  Analog Synthesisers, Deep and Heavy Drums and Crunchy, Punchy Snares are his band members and with them he will take his rightful place in Australia’s music community this year.  The future has never looked so skankalicious.

Ollie began his forays into production at the tender age of 14. Armed with his trusty Amiga 600 and a copy of Octamed, the world of trackers proved an alluring one.
Tinkering around with various forms of, what could best be described as, experimental happy hardcore, his tastes and ideas were to take a few years to mature.
Fast forward 5 years and Ollie’s DJing career has begun and, as his Amiga had died, his focus trained firmly on this discipline for a number of years.
Production soon returned to the fore with various tracks and riffs being laid down in the form of mp3s on his hard drive. It wasn’t until emigrating to Australia that he actually decided it might be worth investigating the concept of actually releasing some of his material.
With that he saw his first release, “Barleycove” on Next Dimension Music. Having worked on the track some 4 years earlier with cohort john Coakley (back in Ireland) he recruited the services of Balage who laid down a sumptuous guitar riff for the release of the track.
Well since then Ollie has had 3 more releases on NDM, Hello Mr. Robot was the B-side to Barleycove and received a remix package that brought it onto tech label Surge, while Infusion was his second deep house release of the year.
Now poised to work with some of the scene’s bigger names, the future looks to be wide open for Ollie’s brand of soulfully deep house music.

Deep down under by Ben Jam