We had the pleasure of interviewing JODA over Zoom video.
Anjunabeats is pleased to announce the release of the self-titled debut album from JODA, aka Jono Grant and Darren Tate.
Grant is one-third of Above & Beyond who, over the course of a two-decade career, have established themselves as one of the biggest electronic groups in the world. Eight studio albums (including one as vocal trance group OceanLab and two acoustic reworks), 17 compilation albums, a film score, and nearing 100 singles speak to output as varied as it is prodigious. Their label Anjunabeats is home to a bustling community of artists with over twenty years of catalog.
As a classically trained musician, songwriter, producer, and hitmaker, Tate is an OG Top of the Pops-botherer. In the early Noughties, at the outset of his career, he appeared on the show three times, once with Angelic, his collaboration with Judge Jules and the latter’s wife, performing classic trance banger It’s My Turn, then twice under the name Jurgen Vries. The following years saw more musical adventures, more Top 40 UK hits (12 in total), and more pseudonyms, including the trance-facing DT8 Project.
In 2003, the pair managed to sync their schedules to work on a couple of tracks, 'Let The Light Shine In' and 'Nocturnal Creatures'. Clearly, there was chemistry here. But as the pair’s respective careers subsequently took them off around the world in opposite directions, reconnecting other than fleetingly was never easy. Then in 2019 Tate returned to his trance roots and signed to Anjunabeats for his DT8 Project releases. Around the same time, Above & Beyond received an offer to score an environmental documentary, 'The Last Glaciers'.
Jono and Darren got stuck into composing together, and it became a dream project all-around – not least because it sparked further ideas. So, JODA was born. Working in Tate’s studio in suburban north London, and A&B’s south London HQ, the pair were in a creative bubble during the early days of the pandemic. And the partnership proved fruitful.
An artful evocation of electronic music’s decade-zero, 'Try' is "rooted in classic songwriting", according to Grant, taking a page from classic synthpop. Then there’s the glitchy instrumental 'Dark Strings', influenced by darker sounds.
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