Blank & Jones

As a production and DJ pair, Piet Blank and Jaspa Jones helped drive trance toward mainstream visibility during the final years of the 1990s, even as they gained comparable notice for their remixes and wide-ranging ambient recordings. Their 1997 single “Sunrise” launched a series of buoyant, euphoric cuts that found favor on both dance floors and pop playlists, yielding substantial successes such as 1999’s “Cream” and 2002’s “The Hardest Heart.” Although they kept issuing club tracks, the duo also turned toward downtempo and ambient sounds with the launch of their ongoing Relax albums in 2003, while assembling the multi-volume Chilltronica and Milchbar collections. Their longstanding interest in 1980s pop, dance, and new wave surfaced through joint work with Robert Smith and Bernard Sumner, as well as through the so80s (SoEighties) mix series they began in 2009, before they revisited their club roots on the 2017 release #WhatWeDoAtNight.

The two first met at the Popkomm trade show. With assistance from producer Andy Kaufhold they established the Blank & Jones team in 1995 and issued their debut single, “Sunrise,” in 1997. That same year they delivered their initial high-profile remix, Moby’s “re-version” of “James Bond Theme,” under the alias Da Bomb. Commercial and international recognition arrived in 1999 via the more driving yet melodic “Cream,” which reached number 24 on the U.K. pop chart. Also that year they released their first album, In da Mix, a continuous sequence of their own material.

From the 2000s onward Blank & Jones maintained a rapid pace of 12-inch releases, studio albums, DJ mixes, and other projects that spanned club-oriented material and home listening sets alike. Monument, issued in 2004, contained their take on the Cure’s “A Forest” featuring vocalist Robert Smith, while the two-disc retrospective The Singles, 1997-2006 followed two years afterward. Starting in 2007 the bulk of their work appeared on the Soundcolours label, home to the multi-volume Relax series of original chill and lounge pieces, the Milchbar downtempo compilations, the so80s (SoEighties) collection of extended mixes, hits, and deep cuts from the 1980s, and additional singles and albums by artists such as Sandra and Medina. Their 2008 album The Logic of Pleasure featured collaborations with Bernard Sumner of New Order, Vanessa Daou, and Claudia Brücken of Propaganda. The 2009 full-length Reordered was created in tandem with Mark Reeder. Beginning in 2011 they issued so80s volumes devoted to individual artists, among them Ultravox, Culture Club, and Falco, and they explored smooth jazz on 2012’s Relax: Jazzed.

The downtempo and ambient albums Dom and Silent Piano appeared in 2006. In 2017 the duo resumed dance music production with #WhatWeDoAtNight, followed in 2018 by the dance-pop singles “Love from the Start” and “One,” and by So80s, Vol. 13 the next year.