Dedicated to the olden days of Kiss FM

In the very early nineteen-nineties there existed a radio station instrumental in helping a lot of young people discover a growing underground music scene that few others in the mainstream or media were even vaguely aware of. Kiss FM started out as a pirate radio station and gained its official status as a legal station in 1990. Its focus was solely on nothing but Dance Music and it was the first legal radio station to broadcast such music to the general populace. Although primarily a London radio station, those of us living in other areas of the South of England could still receive it and it became something of a cult, a word-of-mouth process spreading its underground status amongst kids.

Two of the DJs working at the station would become renowned amongst teenagers of the early 90s for bringing forth some of the most pioneering, experimental, hardest or underground techno and hardcore music around at that time. Those two DJs were Colin Dale and Colin Faver. The two Colins covered slightly different areas of techno and hardcore at the time but with a good amount of overlap between them. Colin Dale would originally broadcast for three hours on a Monday night, the first two hours being the Abstract Dance show and the last hour comprising the Outer Limits show where he would play a lot more of the leftfield and experimental music.

As a teenager I taped nearly every show that these two broadcast on Kiss. Both DJs introduced me to artists who are great influences on my own music, for example Colin Dale always playing out latest releases by B12, Black Dog, Luke Slater & Alan Sage, Juan Atkins, Leo Anibaldi, Terrace, Evolution Records and Underground Resistance and Colin Faver playing for example Lory D, Mescalinum United and a lot of European techno and hardcore. I first heard of Aphex Twin (or Caustic Window) on Colin Dale's show and one of the cassettes contained below contains the first broadcast on radio of Aphex Twin's "Digeridoo" track.

I taped every broadcast by the two DJs but obviously would have run out of cassettes pretty quickly and I didn't have many to record with back then, so I would make compilation tapes of the best tracks i'd heard during each show. So you will find that each download covers a certain period of time, picking select tracks from those periods. These are exactly as I created them as a teenager, no alterations made.

If anyone has any full length un-cut shows that could be added to the archive then please get in touch. There are also a few odds and ends in there: there is one complete show from about 1991, an interview Colin Dale did with Keith Le Blanc which I found lying around and a selection of Kiss master mixes from both Colins.

The quality is not amazing on these but good enough for a listen. I'm surprised the tapes were still working to be honest, also sometime around 1992 some **** decided to place a national radio station (Classic FM) on almost the exact same frequency as Kiss making it a lot harder to receive Kiss's signal down where we were in the south so some of the 1992 recordings are slightly worse quality.

Enjoy this trip.