BY MISS ROSEN Emerging from Brooklyn with a myriad of sounds and aliases, Victor Simonelli Victor Simonelli rose to become one of the most innovative forces in New York house music.
I f you don’t recognize Brooklyn-born DJ, producer, and label owner Victor Simonelli by his government name, that’s just fine by him.Working under a wide range of pseudonyms, including NY’s Finest, Cloud 9, Solution, Sound of One, Creative Force, and Instant Exposure, Simonelli has blazed a singular path, drawing inspiration from funk, disco, gospel, new wave, classic soul, rock, and R&B to create a house sound that’s wholly his own. Simonelli arrived on the music production scene in the late 1980s while working out of Arthur Baker’s storied Shakedown Sound studio, where his edits made it onto remixes for Quincy Jones, David Bowie, and Debbie Harry.At Baker’s suggestion, he teamed with hometown partner Lenny Dee as Brooklyn Funk Essentials; “Change the Track,” the duo’s 1988 single featuring rapper Prince Charm, was an early foray into hip-house on Baker’s Minimal Records. Breaking out on his own in 1991, Simonelli set the club scene aflame with Groove Committee’s “I Want You to Know,” and, suddenly, his name was not just known, but in high demand. An early proponent of sampling, Simonelli’s penchant for blending the familiar and the experimental set him at the vanguard of house music, right as the genre’s reach was exploding in the early 1990s.Whether lifting Chicago’s anthemic “Street Player” for “Gonna Make You Move” from ’93’s Street Players Volume One EP —a year before Kenny Dope’s Bucketheads project dropped “The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)”—or pulling from Inner Life’s “Moment of My Life” to create “Do You Feel Me” by NY’s Finest, Simonelli’s productions have a way of taking fleeting moments from classic soul and disco records, and expanding them into something completely fresh and new.
His restless creative spirit and urge to share music, meanwhile, have led him to form a half-dozen of his own record labels, including Bassline, West Side, Big Big Trax, and Unkwn, many of which are still active today. Speaking from his second home in Sicily—where he leaves the world behind when he’s not on tour, or in New York working on new projects—Simonelli revisited his distinctive journey that began under the tutelage of his father, James. Could you take us back to the early ’70s and share your memories of listening to music with your father? Victor Simonelli: My father [James Simonelli] has always been a passionate music lover and collector. He didn’t have lessons, but he began collecting 78s, 45s, and LPs in 1950s Brooklyn at a young age. I would go through his vinyl collection and pull out something I was interested in, and he would play it and act it out as if it were being performed live. After we listened, he’d ask what I liked and didn’t like about it, what instruments or lyrics stood out, and what I would change. He would play Tchaikovsky, then the Rolling Stones, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Pink Floyd, and early Kraftwerk. It got me into the music in a way that I wasn’t only listening, I was experiencing it.
When did you first discover 12-inch singles?
It was around 1975; 12-inch singles were a new thing at the time. One day, I came across “Dance and Shake Your Tambourine” by the Universal Robot Band. It had a really simple cover compared to the others, and I thought to myself, “Why is this so different?” It was
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( opposite ) Victor Simonelli at the Mono Bar in Warsaw, Poland, in 2009. Photo by Karol Grygoruk.
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