Dance music producers from the 80s and 90s come in three different varieties. You have your Danny J Lewis types who produced music many years ago and still do to this day – they occasionally mention their archive, but are typically more about the here and now. You have your Carl Craig types who produced good music in the 90s and now milk the archive due to not being as good as they used to be.

And then you have producers like Joey Musaphia who produced music in the 1990s and part of the 2000s before sailing into the sunset. They did what they wanted to do and had quite a lot of success – but have now moved on with their lives for whatever reasons. Which is, funnily enough, where this story begins.

Fresh from the success he had as part of the campaign to get a garage genre category on Traxsource, Danny J Lewis has now chosen a brand new crusade to get behind. And once again, it’s one which this blog would uncategorically welcome.

On Friday evening, he posted this video on Instagram, revealing that he was speaking to Joey Musaphia on the phone and is thinking of re-entering the world of music production. And Lewis, being very keen to see this too, wants to persuade his followers to say what they think…

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CZSMXGmqpKe/?utm_medium=copy_link

Well, here’s what I think. Let’s have Joey Musaphia back, by all means. Let’s see some new music and let’s also see some of those older records finally appear in a digital format.  He knew how to treat a vocal with the respect he deserved, and how to make brilliant dubs – a rare skill even in the 90s. He could help the genre make some badly needed progress.

Musaphia has quite a long history in the world of house music. One of his first release was as part of Tastes Of Paradise, a duo who had a track signed by Cooltempo in 1992 – by none other than a certain Mr Simon Dunmore. Later in the decade, he did remixes for Lance Ellington, Kimara Lovelace, Tito Puente, Michael Watford, C&C Music Factory and, well, a lot of others.

The first of what were to become the notorious Joey Musaphia remixes was in 1993, of a song called “Car Wash” by Gwen Dickey. And as far as I’m concerned, his return to the fold would be very good news indeed…