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The pair first met in 1987, both living on Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford, England and brought together through a mutual love of hip-hop. Distracted by the arrival of hardcore in the early nineties, record collecting was quickly followed by DJing and eventually production.
Greenhalgh was the first into the studio, with "[r=319804]" as Q Project launching his career in 1991. However it was the establishment of the Legend imprint and specifically Greenhalgh's track "Champion Sound" from the "[r=84127]", which really took their profile above and beyond the slew of anonymous white labels that were dominating the music at the time.
In 1994, the pair started recording together, with "Got To Believe" the first in a series of records which pushed the label away from the fizzling darkside movement and more towards the epic string sections and rolling beats which started to appear on labels like Lucky Spin Recordings, Basement Records and Good Looking Records. They... Read More ... also worked Saturdays in the Record Basement shop in Reading.
After six years of recording singles for others, the pair established the C.I.A. label in the closing months of 1997 with the help of Brillo from Timeless Recordings. The release of "[r=5570]" for Goldie's label Metalheadz, breathed a new lease of life into the project, and the pair achieved a further boost with a well-timed Bad Company remix of "Champion Sound" which conjured further interest in what they were doing at their own label.
Their debut album "[r=129273]" exposed a further field of interest, with downtempo experiments logged as a series of 'breaks' on the majority of their early EP's extended to some superb deep house, this breadth taken a step further with their Skindeep imprint which has forged broken beat to considerable acclaim.
Their pioneering of a revival in old-school sounds and arrangements, together with labels Digital UK and Reinforced Records, dominated drum & bass throughout 2001 and beyond.
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