Paper Recordings – The label that made me dig deeper

My story with Paper Recordings started in 1996. At the time, I was visiting a record shop almost every week. I was still discovering House music and all the different directions it could take, so I relied a lot on the people behind the counter. They knew what I had bought before, played new records for me and pointed me towards things they thought I might like.

One of those records was Papermusic Issue One.

I bought it, and one track in particular stayed with me: Downtime. Even today, it is one of my favourite Paper tracks. I cannot really explain what exactly caught me at the time. Maybe it was the warmth of the production, the groove or simply the combination of all those little elements that made the record feel right.

Sometimes music does not need an explanation.

From that point on, Paper Recordings became one of the labels I looked for whenever I went record shopping. I listened to the new releases that came in, bought the ones I liked and, after a while, sometimes bought Paper records without even listening to them first. I trusted the label.

That meant something very different in the 1990s than it does today. There was no instant access to almost every record ever released. If you heard something at a club or a party and wanted to find it, you had to go looking for it. Sometimes that meant visiting several record shops and hoping that somebody had a copy. Sometimes you found it weeks or months later. Sometimes you never found it at all.

I remember hearing records such as Reset’s Robodisco / Pickpocket and Crazy Penis’ The Way We Swing at clubs and parties before eventually finding copies for myself. That search was part of the experience. And Paper became part of a much bigger process of discovery. Once I found a record I liked, I wanted to know more. Who made it? What else had they released? Which other labels were they on? Who else was releasing similar music? One record led to another.

Paper led me towards artists such as Salt City Orchestra, Shaboom, Crazy Penis, Kenny Hawkes, Solaris Heights and Paul Hester. At the same time, I was discovering other UK labels such as 20:20 Vision, NRK Sound Division, Nuphonic, Glasgow Underground and Low Pressings. They did not all sound the same, and that was exactly the point. There were connections, overlaps and different approaches to House music everywhere. Following those threads became almost as important to me as finding the records themselves. It still is.

I continue to search through old catalogues today, often finding records from that period that I somehow missed the first time around. Nearly three decades later, there is still music waiting to be discovered. Paper Recordings was one of the labels that taught me to look that way. The records themselves have stayed with me too. There is something about many of those Paper releases that still feels remarkably natural. Warm, deep, melodic and driven by groove, but without everything following the same formula. A bassline, a drum pattern, a filtered melody or some small production detail can be enough for me to recognise a record I have not heard for years.

And they still work. When I play at a party today, there are often two or three Paper releases somewhere in my record box. Not because they are classics that have to be played, and not because I want to recreate the 1990s. They are simply good records.
But playing them also brings something else back. Records have a strange ability to hold memories. A track can bring back a particular party, a funny moment with friends or a place I have not thought about for years. Sometimes the first few seconds are enough, and suddenly a memory that has been quiet for decades is there again.

That is part of what these records mean to me today. Paper Recordings became part of those memories. But perhaps its biggest influence on me was not a particular record at all. It was curiosity. The desire to keep looking, to follow artists from one label to another, to search backwards through catalogues and to find music I did not know existed. That same curiosity eventually became part of the idea behind The Tribute Mix Show.

A mix might start with one artist or one label, but it does not have to end there. If it makes someone curious enough to search a little further, perhaps they will find another record, another artist or another label that means something to them.

That is how Paper Recordings worked for me.
It started with one record in 1996.

And I am still digging.