Dj’s, Producers and label owners, Andy Riley and Laurence Ritchie AKA Inland Knights hail from Nottingham UK, a city with a rich musical legacy, particularly for house music.
They met in ’93 and cut their teeth Dj’ing for Smokescreen, the renegade soundsystem from which they drew their early inspiration. Smokescreen consisted of dj’s, lighting people, sound people, a truck, a P.A, a generator and general helpers. Old warehouses, woodland, fields, quarries and houses were utilised with the sole intention of having a good time…. for free! By the mid 90’s smokescreen could guarantee a crowd of hundreds in attendance at their parties, and their club nights became local institutions that ran for years with packed dancefloors, and still do to this day!.
By ’98 Laurence and Andy had made the inevitable step into production and the same year the Dropmusic label was born with the release of ‘Inland Knights vol 1’. As Inland Knights Riley and Ritchie undertook a busy schedule in the studio to write tracks for Drop (almost all of the early output was entirely Inland knights, despite many monikers).
Dropmusic has gone on to become one of the most highly regarded house labels in recent years(with 60 plus releases to date), and Inland knights have gone on to become one of the most respected production outfits in the house world, regularly taking on remix duties for fellow labels and producers. Highlights include the accliamed ‘Mohammed Ali’ remix for Faithless on Cheeky Records, cd compilations and remixes for NRK and Om Records, Inland Knights first full length album entitled ‘Creative Spaces’, and more recently Inland Knights album to mark 10 years of Dropmusic entitled ‘Dust till Dawn’.
Currently, as well as remix and production commitments, the pair maintain a busy international Dj ‘ing shedule, and can be found most weekends playing somewhere in the UK or Europe, as well as regular visits to the U.S, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Andy also records under the Toka Project pseudonym , and Laurence under the alias Larry Fives.