The connection between different music styles of a unique script is an accomplishment and art all together. Ian Simmonds from the beginning of his career belongs to those music makers, who create something all their own, a finished product. Crafted from those prior and to create an incredible value, so that something really new now stands.
It all began on the bass with the extraordinary combo, the Sandals (1992-94), whose proliferation anticipated the (at the time) British-isle club innovation. As Jurymann he began to plumb the intersection of modern music with traditional. From there came unbeatable productions in the form of 12” remixes, albums on renowned labels like SSR, Ntone, Studio !K7, Pussyfoot, G-Stone, Compost, Poets Club, and JCR. His discography belongs to a timeless innovation of entertainment bordering on analysis and passion.
As a regular guest in Jena, and being taken with the creative spirit of the city, he moved his place of residence to Germany on the city sitting on the Saale. A perfect radius he found here, to color his musical canvas full of urban depth. His primary home was with the Freude am Tanzen brothers Musik Krause, where he has enchanted connoisseurs of his craft with the medium of sound.
Parallel he started the live-jazz-poetry project, Wise in Time, which he has run with diverse live musicians. The first album “The Ballad of Den the Men” appeared in 2006 on Crammed Disc. He demonstrates also here, that “ordinary” is not his bag, harmony and wisdom shine their rays in a tangible form for his listeners.
With passion and attention to a deepening of beats and tone, these also direct his activities as a DJ. From the kingdom of soul, jazz and funk he brings a table full of electro-acoustic ripeness, which various stations of club music patrol, where the end result is a drowning in such. There is a maximum of mind and movement in unison - a wonderful free-play dub-tech-jazz-step’n-Detroit-house-Afroelectric-bodysoul trip. A mental-rave-culture which can be appreciated best as a whole. The people have always with him immediately and comfortably taken to his feeling… he brings it!
His in summer 2009–born album, „The Burgenland Dubs“ is the until now Simmondsish quantum–cheers in regards to beat fiddling sound research plus orchestral radiance with a humane worldview and ethos. This results in a castle located in the idyllic North-Thuringia; Simmonds brush-strokes a moving manifest full of listening peak time for home and the open dance floor against a backdrop of stylistic prudishness. In a better sense, for the masses without the masses - electrical world music without the world, from a man of the world for the world!