If you listento the side B of 4 Hero's first release from May 1990 (Rising Sun), and compared it with tracks from their most recent album ("Play With The Changes", 2007), you'd think that it sounds like a perfect link, like the band had been true to their flavour and honest and authentic to their sound for so many years. But boy would you be missing a lot of what happened in between !!!

4 Hero is simply one of my 5 fave artists of all time, any genre considered. Not exactly 4 hero, the band, but rather the ensemble of permutations that these two producers..skip that I prefer the term "compositors", Marc Mac And Dego (as they seem to prefer being called) have employed over the years to cover for their experimentations with a wild array of musical genres, from good old rave techno to drum and bass to cosmic jazz to nu soul, hip hop and whatnot.

The first four ep from 4 Hero released on their own label Reinforced in 1990 were already experimenting with fast breaks at the time when most artists and labels who have been pretending to be at the core of the then slowly emerging "jungle" and drum and bass scene were not yet, well, technically existing as far as publishing is concerned.

Whatever was their musical influence was at the time, I think that by pretending to humbly participate in the general rave scene, 4 Hero and Reinforced actually were developing their own scene without even realizing it, and as soon as that new scene was getting by itself, 4 Hero were already exploring new territories, like they did since their first album in 1991, and are still doing these days, if you manage to lend an ear to the myriads different projects that they keep unleashing each year,
pershaps somewhat to make certain that they remain cool forever. 4 Hero are perhaps geniuses, it takes another genius to tell and that's not me, but they're certainly visionarists, "artists" to the core of the word, and invariably talented.

Jesse Saunders has been too often uncredited. So, he got influenced by a certain Frankie Knuckles who used to loop beats so that he could better mix whatever he was playing at his club. So, he participated in the production of the Fantasy 12" above weeks before he released "On And On". But if I'm Mr Jo Blow from Canada, what is the first ever typical "House" record that I could have bought and own? "On And On". So IT IS the originating house music track. Period. It is telling also that the first ever release of TRAX Records, which claim to be the first house music label ever (I wonder what that makes of Jes Say Records) was by Le Noiz, a nickname for Jesse Saunders. I'm pretty sure Saunders know what part of what he did was influenced by Knuckles DJ-ing techniques, and what part was purely his own music, but this one should defenitely go down in history.