Hed Kandi Records

There was a time when I awaited the next Hed Kandi release with bated breath. It has to be said: Mark Doyle WAS Hed Kandi! Nothing worth getting excited about has happened since he left except a flicker of interest in the Nu Cool resurrection. I did think their treatment of Stereo Sushi (Sashimi) was little short of a disgrace though!

Fierce Angel has tried hard to fill the void but the void isn't a void? Hed Kandi are still there and blurring the public perception of what it is. Fierce Angel is tarred with the same brush?

I appreciate your comments Mark and totally agree. You outgrow it and move on, it ain't worth bitching about?

With the greatest respect Mark, I suggest you do the same. Move on from the Hed Kandi/Fierce Angel concept and create a completely new idea. Just make sure that I know about it please.

Mickey P. ;-)

Hed kandi is now out of the dark and into the light. since the acquisition by ministry of sound records there have been a lot of changes.. and for the better. More money has been piled into g tracks, fabulous production of the club nights. i mean the amount of custom decorations just for a few nights until the next theme comes along is immense, giant ipods at pacha!! gorgeous dancers the ideas are brilliant i could go on.. and they have a great team behind it all. not to mention the return of jason brooks the original artwork designer.

The cds have been really fantastic.. adding different flavours to the existing styles of cds i really do urge people to look at serve chilled, beach house, disco kandi the mix, the brand new disco heaven, back to love there are some brilliant and hard to find tracks on these.. There are some commercial cds like the summer mix which is well put together and to be honest i woud rather have a few commercial stuff put into the summery cds which funds some bloody good other cds.. Hed kandi has apparently for the first time last year made a profit and if no one makes a profit then there is no music.. They have dragged themselves back out and are bigger and better than ever.
Most say its not cool or underground, But at least it doesnt pretend to be, or never has pretended to be. Even in the early days. Most people who have an oppinion about it. really know nothing anyway, just like to stick their noses in.

Want the best driving funky piano vocal house lots of classics? diva vocals? latin tinged disco house? Want the best most friendly crowds who dress up and want to have a good time? then really give it a try or really have a listen to some of the cds or samples online because u dont know what ur missing. its the same baby. Just as it always was.

Like it a bit deeper and cooler but still soulful? try stereo sushi hed kandi's little sister

peace out

Personally, I love Hed Kandi. I own most of their disco releases, a few releases from other series, and am actively getting the rest. The Beach House, Disco Kandi, and Disco Heaven series are just the kind of modern House and Disco I love. Living where I do, there's hardly a club scene, and the CDs are a great way to hear some songs I never would have heard otherwise (and the complete versions no less!). I would definitely recommend them as a starting point for House, and a good place to get some great songs.

Back To Love is especially great, as it allows me to get a lot of those classic House songs that are otherwise hard, or expensive, to obtain. The other series have their ups and downs, but Back To Love, Disco Kandi (the most "commercial of the releases, showcasing disco house and U.S. garage), Disco Heaven (an extension of Disco Kandi, focusing more on the house side of things), and Beach House (house songs, with some deep house thrown in) are definitely the high marks of the label.

Recently, however, I've been disappointed with them. The first Disco Kandi release after the purchase from Ministry of Sound was lackluster, with only a few good songs on the first disc, and a terrible second disc that consisted mostly of electro. The second disc didn't fit under any kind of definition of disco I've ever heard. Not that I have anything against electro, but the songs themselves were very mediocre, and nothing worth seeking out or listening to again. I plan on giving it a second chance by buying the newest Disco Heaven and Disco Kandi sometime soon, both of which have been released by this point. However if I'm as disappointed as I was with the other recent release, I'll be thinking twice before I buy more.

Overall, I would recommend the label's early days, and releases back when Mark Doyle was still running it. The new installments have some good songs, but hardly enough to warrant a purchase. The lack of the actual full length versions in lieu of a truncated version is a turn-off as well. Unless things improve, I will be buying solely Fierce Angel releases, the majority of which remind me of the good days of Hed Kandi.

About HedKandi: I have purchased the lastest of their releases, Disco Kandi 06 and so far I only found two good songs on it which is sad... I have nothing else to say about it. I'm missing all those HK old releases that made me worship them for so long. I hope a miracle happens and it gets better 'cause i believe whishing that it goes back to be what it used to be is too much to ask.

Fierce Angels: I found it pretty good and its (to me at least) what HK used to be. I so missed listening to Moony and Bonnie Bailey on a house music compilation and i'm really glad Chanel and Solu Music/Kimblee are not within... I was tired of 'My Life' and 'Fade'. Don't get me wrong, these are nice songs but just too overrated to me. It's a very good job - It made me fall in love with House music once again. But i'm not sure how long will it last for, I really hope fierce angels never get to commit the same mistake their predecessor fell for.

I couldn't agree more with the last few comments. To be fair to the Ministry of Sound (libel laws would preclude a frank description here of this label and the individual who founded and still runs it), Hed Kandi started going downhill even before the sale to MoS. The previous corporate owners (Guardian Media Group and, before them, Clear Channel Communications) just didn't have the creative wherewithal to nurture the JazzFM and Hed Kandi businesses, and the sale to MoS, though shocking to many, was an entirely predictable business decision.

The "Serve Chilled" and "Winter Chill" series had gone into precipitous decline by 2004, and by 2005, on the eve of label head Mark Doyle's departure, even the redoubtable "Es Vivé" release had become trash. Fortunately, the Beach House series seems to have survived both Doyle and MoS fairly intact.

The recent release "Beach House" (2006) seems to have maintained some semblance of quality, although the false advertising on the sticky label (which misleadingly states "2XCD FULL 12" MIXES") is a problem, albeit one that's perfectly consistent with the modus operandi of MoS. To be specific, the versions of "The Way You Love Me (Dim's T.S.O.P. Version)" by Ron Hall & The MuthaFunkaz and "Swimming Places (Original Mix)" by Julien Jabre on this unmixed compilation are only 6:39 and 5:37 in length, whereas the real 12" versions (that you will find uncensored on various releases by Defected) come in at 9:14 and 10:43 respectively. Chop off, if you will, the drum intro and outro, but don't call it the "Full 12" Mix" after doing so.

The sad thing is that Mark Doyle and his new Fierce Angel label are doing no better. They have simply continued the lousy track record of his last year at Hed Kandi by issuing trashy compilations and mixes, often rehashing old Hed Kandi material, albeit priced at a discount to Hed Kandi's current crop. Unfortunately for those of us who adored the original "Es Vivé" in 2002, the relationship with the Ibiza hotel seems to have followed Doyle, who has promptly issued a 3XCD mixed compilation this year also called "Es Vivé" to cash in on what's left of the goodwill.

MoS founder Jamie Palumbo and his financial partners at 3i are shrewd operators/investors (the purchase price of Hed Kandi was not disclosed), and so I doubt if Hed Kandi will fold any time soon (the same cannot be said for Fierce Angel). That said, the shady commercial values espoused by Palumbo et al., which don't seem to fool contributors to these pages, will make it very unlikely that Hed Kandi will be receiving my further custom going forward.

HedKandi -it seems- has gone in a downward spiral. Now been bought by MoS will only bring a darker tone of tragedy to its reputation. As much as I once respected ministry of sound, from 5 years on their istrative decisions have turned a well-established label into a "milking-the-cow" entity. Hed Kandi once released great albums, but I can't say the same thing right now. I also find disrispectful (and non-dj-friendly) the fact that, in most of their double CD releases they chop the ending part of the extended versions, making the tracks almost impossible to mix properly. That's a sad thing due to the fact that many of these songs were previously available only as vinyl.

I'll be looking forward to the future of HedKandi, hoping that it'd be a bright future. But maybe it won't be that way.

Once upon a time I loved Hed Kandi. Don't get me wrong, I still like them, but nowhere near as much. In the beginning, they released full-length, un-mixed double CDs of quality tracks you could usually only find on Vinyl, or chopped to pieces amongst other commercial garbage (like Ministry of Sound). We would patiently await the next release every three or four months. Now HK is releasing a new CD every few weeks it seems, and saturating every corner of the market they can think of. As a result, the quality is diluted and the finesse is gone. I'm glad I bought decks so I can still get the quality I crave, vinyl-style.

Hed Kandi started as a good idea: to release a bunch of extended House tracks, unmixed, on 2 CD's. In the beginning, it was pretty good. It covered the House genre well with tracks by The Ones, Hakan Lidbo, Class A, Masters At Work to name a few. But it seems it couldn't last long. Soon, they started to edit the 12" versions, removing sometimes 2 or 3 minutes to a track to make it fit in the lot. They expanded the series to make you buy everything ("Winter Chill", "Beach House", "Twisted Disco"...), and began to include publicity in their sleeves. The quality of the tracks included decreased enormously as a small group of producers and DJ's made low hand on the label to release their own stuff.

As these compilations are very expensive, I re-evaluated my to this label, which quietly forsakes its first fans to grow rich. Too bad.

Hed Kandi has done precisely that: commercialized house and downtempo in a very sophisticated way. They were one of the first labels that turned me onto the electronic scene, actually. True, they have their bad moments, but they do maintain good overall quality.

Another thing: their marketing strategy has created such a great aura about their music that people buy even their crappiest comps just to make sure they have all of them (i, for example, have consciously bought one comp — one of the Twisted Discos — that doesn't have a single good track on it).

Hed Kandi is a pretty awful label which releases endless badly produced compilations of commercial house. Their own artists aren’t exactly great either. LnM Projects latest is so cheesy it makes me sick. That Fleetwood Mac song has been sampled/covered too many times already. If you want to see how the same sample can be used well (& in a less cheesy way) check out the Robbie Rivera & Axwell track 'Burning'. BTW what’s the story with their latest Winter Chill compilation, featuring Sugababes (????) & Natalie Imbruglia... Rubbish