Toka Project was born with the release of Swungbeats ‘King Sized Blue’ep in… Read Full Bio ↴Toka Project was born with the release of Swungbeats ‘King Sized Blue’ep in early 1995. Originally a collaboration between Nottingham d.j’s Steve Walker and Andy Riley, Toka Project’s early output was released on Nottingham’s ‘strictly 4 groovers’ label, now better known as DiY Discs. Steve and Andy went on to remix a number of artists on the labels roster at the time, notably Gibby Music of crash records fame and Fred Everything amongst others.
By 1997 Jay Cowley had joined and with some financial help from friends Toka Project started to put together a studio of their own. The following year saw the release of the much acclaimed ‘Be Free’ep for Chicago’s Guidance records, the title track also appeared on Guidance’s’ High Fidelity House Imprint Vol 2’. These two releases helped to push the Toka Project profile abroad and in 1999 Andy and Jay embarked on a three-month tour of the U.S and Canada with Andy Macari, stopping off in New York, LA, San Francisco, Pheonix, Philly, Tampa, Seattle, and Washington D.C amongst other places, and Montreal, Vancouver ,Whistler and Victoria in canada.
Over the course of the 90’s, Andy had been dj’ing with Smokescreen soundsystem and by 1998 had started writing tracks with fellow Smokescreen dj Laurence Ritchie, who had just moved over to Nottingham from Sheffield. As Inland Knights Laurence and Andy undertook a hectic production schedule to write tracks for Dropmusic, Laurence’s fledgling house label. This proved to be very successful with Dropmusic becoming one of the most highly regarded house labels in the world and Inland Knights becoming one of the most prolific production outfits in the house community. However Toka Project releases have continued on a parallel to Inland Knights and over the last few years have put out music on labels such as Transport, Naked Music, Sosound, Silver Network and Viva amongst others. Jay has also recorded solo as Lo-Motion for Tilted records, and Steve has undertook numerous solo projects including tracks for DiY’s ‘Nott’s Landing’ series and an ep for Filter Flow as Suburban Traveller.
The last couple of years has seen the Toka project brand as busy as ever with a multitude of releases including exclusive digital downloads on stompy.com, ep's for fellow smokescreen buddy steve Lee of the Littlemen, ep's for san fran's Tango imprint and Phil Weeks Robsoul recordings, all released to critical acclaim globally.
New projects in the pipeline include remixes for up and coming label Phobic, remixes for san francisco's Amenti records, and remixes for Agave .