Dave Angel announces new album 'A Time And Place' with first single 'Reflexion'

Jul 29
3 min read

Moody portrait of British electronic music pioneer Dave Angel wearing glasses and a red bandana.

Dave Angel has announced his most personal album to date, 'A Time And Place', alongside its first single, 'Réflexion', featuring trumpeter Steve Waterman. The single is out now through R&S Records, the label that has shadowed most of Angel's career, and it points toward an album built on Jazz, Soul and a lifetime of musical experience rather than another straight club record.

'Réflexion' offers the first real insight into where the album is headed. Waterman's playing first caught Angel's attention on Paul Hazel's album 'Out Of This World', aired on Bamboo Radical; drawn to a tone he heard as Miles Davis-inspired, Angel approached Waterman after a live performance and the two began working on the track together.

The single's home is significant in itself. Angel's relationship with R&S Records goes back to 1991, when label founder Renaat Vandepapeliere heard his 'Rolling Thunder' project and brought the young London producer out to Belgium. What followed was one of UK Techno's more prolific early runs: between 1991 and 1993 Angel built a catalogue of club records for R&S and Outer Rhythm, with 'Rolling Thunder' and 'Bounce Back' becoming genre touchstones. More than thirty years on, 'Réflexion' marks a return to where that story started.

The Jazz influence running through 'A Time And Place' is not a new direction so much as a return to one. Angel is the son of a Jazz musician and the elder brother of British hip-hop artist Monie Love, and grew up around musicians and live performance before electronic music entered the picture at all. That background sat somewhat in the shadow of his better-known chapter: co-hosting the pirate station Phaze One alongside Fabio and Grooverider, championing Acid House to a UK audience discovering it in real time, before a 1989 edit of Eurythmics' 'Sweet Dreams' — sanctioned by Dave Stewart himself — reached number 23 on the UK charts and pulled Angel toward production. 'A Time And Place' is, in part, Angel reconnecting with the musical foundation that came before all of that.

Artwork for Dave Angel's single Reflexion featuring Steve Waterman on R&S Records, showing a coastal water-texture collage.

Steve Waterman brings his own considerable pedigree to the record. A British Jazz trumpeter, composer and educator trained at Trinity College of Music in London, Waterman has played with Loose Tubes and the National Youth Jazz Orchestra and worked alongside John Surman, Andy Sheppard and Mal Waldron over a long career. He now leads his own quintet and an eighteen-piece jazz orchestra, and teaches jazz trumpet at the Royal Academy of Music, among other institutions — the kind of grounding that explains why Angel sought him out specifically rather than working with a session player.

Collaboration runs through the rest of the album too, which features vocalist Robert Owens, guitarist Merv Carswell and Aurii Sky alongside Waterman. Angel has described the record as moving between personal reflections on rave culture and community and broader commentary on the world today, giving 'A Time And Place' both an intimate register and a wider one.

'Réflexion' is the first chapter of that story. The full album, 'A Time And Place', follows on 18th September, again through R&S Records.