max 404 – the last days of house music

Originally released in 1999 on E3 Recordings
This is the first digital release of the EP.

Right after I finished my Before & After EP I started working on the follow-up for Evolution. The three track EP was finished, mixed, mastered and cut early 1998. The sleeve art by Tim Drury, in the same style as the first EP (it was going to be series of EP’s), was even ready.

Unfortunately the label had to stop it’s operations before the record was released, due to circumstances out of Mark & Tom’s control. The cut master disk of both my record and one from Circulation spent a year in a box. At that point Tom generously offered to set up a new label to get the music out into the world: that was E3 recordings, which only ever released these two records.

Around that time my interest in house/techno music was waning, so I cheekily named the EP in the vein of Whit Stillman’s film “The last days of disco”. Well…how wrong I was! My interest might have been waning, the rest of the world apparently felt otherwise. Over the next years I’d be exploring less dance-oriented music together with Jan Vanderlest (who I already worked with on 3 of the 4 tracks on this EP).

One of the first tracks to go into a more pop-oriented direction is Dissolve in Blue, which is previously unreleased. The track was created during the same sessions at Daltoon Studio, together with Jan, Edward Capel and the frontman of Dutch Americana band The Watchman: Ad van Meurs.

It would take 4 years before I produced another max 404 record and another 3 before I really refound my love for dance music, when I started working as TJ Kong with Nuno dos Santos.