AJ Skully is a British record producer based in Jávea, Spain. I'm originally from Oxford, England. My family moved to South East Asia when I was a kid, and I grew up mostly in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, before moving to the UK in 1980. I grew up obsessed with music and pop culture.
After many years as a recording and mix engineer, I began producing house music and Balearic chillout in the mid-'90s as Eighth Wave, Canny, Rest Assured and Astro, scoring UK Top20s and Club Chart #1s, and licensing tracks to Café Del Mar, Café Mambo and Ministry of Sound.
The music I'm releasing now is my first new music in 20 years.
In the early '80s, I began hanging out in a local recording studio after school, then caught a break aged 21 when I co-engineered Fairground Attraction's debut album, and their single "Perfect" hit #1 in the UK.
I spent the rest of the '80s as a recording engineer on the residential circuit recording albums with rock stars in country mansions, and as the house engineer at Tears For Fears' studio The Wool Hall in Bath.
By the early '90s I'd moved to London, and found a home at the epicentre of British dance music, Strongroom Studios. Home to the cream of dance music talent at the time, I spent 5 years there absorbing everything I could, producing house music for the dancefloor and pop music for the charts, in the best-equipped recording studio complex in the UK.
Eighth Wave was my first project as an artist, for which I produced "Panama Bazaar", a chillout track licensed to Café Del Mar Vol. 3 that went on to become an Ibiza classic. It remains a high-point for me, I didn't really know what I was doing at first, but it came together perfectly.
With Canny I had a great time, writing and remixing for the dance-floor with the likes of TinTin Out, Space Brothers, Wild Child, Dina Carrol and many others, Electribe 101's "Talking With Myself" licensed to Café Del Mar Vol. 5, and Mandalay's "Beautiful" licensed to Café Del Mar Vol. 6.
Canny's one and only single – "Take Me Up", released as a white label in 1997 with only a limited pressing of 1,000 copies in the UK, got a ton of plays from DJs Pete Tong and Nick Warren and became a popular underground anthem of late '90s British progressive house.
A discarded demo of an idea based on the same strings The Verve used in "Bittersweet Symphony" found its way onto a Canny showreel. A crazy and unexpected bidding war ensued, eventually won by London Records imprint ffrr, and out it came as Rest Assured - "Treat Infamy" in 1998. It went Top20 in the UK and put us on Top of The Pops.
In the early 2000s I released a couple of songs under the name of Astro – deep, spacey house music from the heart. "In the Moonlight" came out on Seamless Recordings in the UK, and "Mezz Bar Blue" on Rendezvous Music in the US. I also did a series of Astro remixes on tracks by John Paul Young, Watergate, Xpansions, Madredeus and Orinoko, before calling it a day.
By the end of the '90s the club scene in London had changed, and the positivity, optimism and energy that captivated me in earlier times had gone. I'd had a good run, but I was shattered from too many years of all-nighters in studios and clubs, and it was time for something different.
I headed to Uni as a mature student in my 30s for a degree in graphic design and digital media, taught myself web development and photography, and eventually found my way to the town of Jávea on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, where I've lived ever since.
One night I lay awake kicking myself with guilt over the two "brand new" classic synthesisers that had been sitting in my cupboard for the past 20 years gathering rust. The wasted potential was too much to bear, so I got one out just to see if it still worked ... and so it began.
Everything has changed. The recording studios I grew up in have been replaced by my laptop, and I can now release music Worldwide without a label or publisher. As this new reality began to sink in, artistic freedom slapped me hard awake and handed me my mojo.
The music I'm writing now isn't aimed at an audience or the dancefloor, nor is it intended to fit the rules or style of any genre or scene.
It's self-expression, art for art's sake, unfinished business and an opportunity to enjoy the process with complete artistic freedom.
That's all I ever wanted, and it's the whole reason I got involved in the music business to begin with, all those years ago. Life is a Circle.
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