Recently I had the pleasure to ask Houseproducer Ross Couch from Scotland a few questions about his work and label Body Rhythm Records. For many years Ross Couch has been active now, and there are just a few artists providing high quality music on such a regular basis.

From Discogs:
“Born in Glasgow, Scotland, a long recognized hotspot within the dance music community, it’s little wonder that Ross quickly became seduced by the rapidly evolving sound of house and techno in the early 90’s, and he quickly became involved in producing his own material.

His productions first came to light on the Bellboy and Panther labels where his difficult to pigeonhole brand of dancefloor techno and melodic tech house had him being compared in the press to numerous dance music illuminaries such as Deep Dish, Dave Angel, Slam and Ron Trent to name but a few, whilst DJ support came from the likes of Laurent Garnier and Colin Dale.

From there Ross stepped up a gear, pushing a more house based sound drawing from deeper and funkier styles whilst still retaining the drive and energy of his techno productions which has now become recognised as something of a trademark.

This helped secure releases on a series of highly regarded labels such as Siesta, Kinky Vinyl and Red Melon, picking up placings on the influential Hype and Coolcuts charts along the way whilst DJ’s right across the board gave their support, from Pete Tong to Laurent Garnier, Carl Cox to Deep Dish, Mazi to Omid 16B, and many more.”

Your discography is impressive with your first personal release dating back to 2001. When did you start making music?
I’ve been doing this for a long time now. I first became interested in producing in my early teens, about 1994 I think. I bought a magazine for my computer at the time (a Commodore Amiga) and it had a music package called Octamed free on the cover disc. I gave it a shot and was hooked straight away. Really though it wasn’t until the late 90’s that I began to take things more seriously and managed to buy some good equipment thanks to a student loan.

The sound of Ross Couch got more and more soulful over the years, am I right?
Yes, I’d agree – I must be mellowing in my old age! Really I’ve always had a natural leaning towards writing melodic tracks but in my early releases I think I was still trying to find my own niche. As the years have moved on I’ve become more interested in creating tracks that have some kind of meaning or feeling behind them rather than just thinking of them purely as ‘DJ tools’ to make people dance.

Your latest tracks are straight Jackin tracks, do you recognize an uprise of this genre in the UK?
I guess “The Sound Of The Streets EP” did lean more towards the jackin side of things. It’s not a genre I’m particularly focusing on, I just like to mix things up a bit and I see anything from deep through to tech house as fair game for the label. What I like about jackin house is that it can be a good way to work in musical ideas, sometimes fairly deep stuff, whilst still keeping the people on the dancefloor happy.

I think achieving that balance between melody and dance-ability is an important part of my sound in general. I don’t worry too much about the popularity of the genre in the UK though, I think there’s always room for good music regardless of the style.

Which artists influenced you in general and your current style?
House music wise of course I’m influenced by current artists but I still feel like the foundation of my sound comes from producers I listened to back in the 90’s like Black Science Orchestra, Mood II Swing, DJQ, DJ Sneak, St Germain to name just a few and labels like Paper Recordings and Glasgow Underground.
On the tech side of things exposure to artists like Terry Lee Brown Jr, The Timewriter and Terry Francis during that period also had an impact on me.

How did you get involved into the business? Did you go the classic Demo way when searching for a label or had you already been involved in Panther or Bellboy Records?
I’ve sent out a lot of demos over the years, even back in the days when you used to send a C90 Cassette in a jiffy big to the labels! I actually had my first record deal in 1999 under an alias but it was all a bit shady and ended badly so I don’t even mention it in my discography!

Around about 2001 an established Scottish label at the time called Limbo Records were showing an interest in my stuff and that had come about due to me having sent them a CD. At the same time Hook-Bellboy Records also became interested and that happened over the net. It was just by chance really, I had posted up a couple of tracks on a forum and they heard them and got in touch.

Unusually they didn’t want to release those particular tracks but they felt I had potential and so offered me a year’s deal on the strength of that. The next couple of tracks I wrote became my first 12” single for them and I went on to produce a number of singles for their labels.

You once released a Demarkus Lewis track on your very own Tekstyle label. How did this get happen?
It was a fairly simple process. At the time Demarkus would sometimes put the word out that he was shopping some tracks and asking for interested labels to get in touch. I was into the music he was putting out at the time so I asked to hear his latest unsigned tracks and signed one of them soon after.

On your website you marked 2007 as turning point, when founding Body Rhythm Records, did you think that digital downloads would flourish that way?
I certainly hoped so but at first I really wasn’t sure how it was going to work out. I had three singles ready for release and my plan was to use those to test the market and see if digital downloads were really a viable alternative to vinyl. Very early on in the process I just found it to be a breath of fresh air. I loved being in control of my own music, having access to real time sales figures and not having to worry about stock levels and costly overheads. I found it to be a much more enjoyable experience than putting out vinyl and so I never really looked back.

You seem to have organisational talent for the business side as well. Do you have any Management or Marketing experience beside the work for your labels?
I do have a Management degree but I’m not really sure it has much of an impact on how I run the labels. Really a lot of what I’ve learned comes from having been signed to various labels over the years and picking up bits and pieces from them. Truth be told, more than anything I learned from their mistakes!

What are your plans for the future, as an artist as well as with Body Rhythm?
I think it’s going to be an exciting year. The label has been gaining momentum recently and I want to build on that. In the near future the follow up to the most successful release on the label to date (‘Body Rhythm Remixed Vol.1) will be coming out with remixes from the likes of Kirby (who’s last remix for the label was a No.1 hit on the Deep House Chart at Beatport), Lukas Greenberg of Plastic City fame and the in-form duo Karol XVIII & MB Valence amongst others so that’s one to look forward to.

Also the label will see it’s 20th release in 2009 so we’ll certainly be looking to release something nice to mark that occasion. As far as my own music goes my first release of the year on the label ‘Night At The Casino EP’ has just came out on Promo at Beatport. Beyond that my main focus this year will be to put out my debut album.

It’s still very much a work in progress at this stage but hopefully it will come out later on in the year. There are other plans for the labels and myself but I’ll keep them to myself for now!

Link: Ross Couch
Link: Ross Couch on Myspace
Link: Ross Couch music on Traxsource
Link: Ross Couch Discogs

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