Dennis Young

Dennis Young, a percussionist, helped launch the New York City quartet Liquid Liquid in the early 1980s; the group’s experimental tracks built around grooves went on to shape hip-hop, post-punk, and dance music. The band issued a handful of EPs through 99 Records, and in 1983 Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel constructed their landmark hip-hop single “White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)” around the underground Liquid Liquid favorite “Cavern.” Once the quartet dissolved in 1983, Young launched a solo career on his own Day Light Music label with the 1985 album Concepts. His individual recordings pursued free-form funk and dub textures comparable to Liquid Liquid while also drawing on folk, jazz, blues, ambient, and worldbeat influences, at times spotlighting his dusky vocals in the manner of Leonard Cohen. The 1997 self-titled compilation that collected the band’s complete output led Young to collaborate with neo-disco and dance-punk artists such as Tussle, Kasper Bjørke, and Headman, each of whom had absorbed the quartet’s sound. He kept issuing solo material on the label, now operating as Day & Nite Music, while Rush Hour and Relish Records issued 12-inch remixes drawn from those releases. Domino presented another anthology, Slip In & Out of Phenomenon, in 2008; the collection prompted a reunion that brought festival dates in the U.K. and France as well as an opening slot on LCD Soundsystem’s final concert in 2011. In 2015 Staubgold released Reel to Real, a set of previously unheard Young solo recordings from the early 1980s. Bureau B followed with Wave in 2016, a collection centered on his ambient and new age pieces from the mid-’80s, many of which had originally appeared on cassette under the name Dennis Andrew.