Interview with Toby

“Toby’s mission with Timehri is grounded in a combination of lived experience and reading up on history. I asked Toby about what formed the base for this historical curiosity, which has inspired the awareness and empowerment anchored into the label’s journey.

“That’s how I was raised. My mum, who was born and raised in Guyana, but moved to the UK, is an activist. So growing up Walter Rodney, Marcus Garvey, these kinds of names – they were floating in and around the house. We grew up with that literature, like [Walter’s Rodney’s] How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and it gave me that outlook on things from an early age. 

Then with music, things like Drexciya, had that afrofuturist stuff. You know, slaves throwing their babies off a ship and them founding an underwater reality. I’m fascinated with that kind of thing. I imagined these realities relative to Timehri as a proxy of the reality of the history that I’ve read and know, specifically African colonial history.”

https://soundscoutmag.com/label-report-timehri-records/It All Begins Here

Timehri Dig Assistant

“The work-in-progress Timehri Dig Assistant, built by Timehri Records head honcho Toby Dunn, is, according to Dunn, literally a digging assistant that recommends similar records as you dig through collections on Discogs. It works exclusively on dance music genres such as house, deep house, tech house, prog house, UKG, grime, UK funky, techno, jungle/d‘n’b, electro, acid, breaks, breakbeat, minimal and more.”

DJ Perception - Journey To The Star

"When making music, I like to envision myself driving," Cameron Phillips, AKA DJ Perception, told me over a recent email exchange. The UK garage legend, whose name has become synonymous with slick 2-step, house and grime over the years, was referring to rides in his Volkswagen MK3 Golf GTI. For his debut album, Journey To The Star, he embraced a more otherworldly definition of driving. Inspired by Afrofuturist conceptions of space exploration, this stunning LP of UK garage and New York deep house is meant to represent an audio flight log of an imaginary odyssey across galaxies. But instead of geographical data, Journey To The Star transmits lustrous, jazz-influenced grooves, velvety tones and intuitive chord progressions with a crystal-clear signal, raising the bar for today's UK garage in the process.