Road Kahan

It’s not often you find a drum & bass powerhouse or a bass administrator gently apply the brakes, but that’s exactly the case when Bardo ‘DJ Nymfo’ Camp settles into the groove alongside Daan van de Pol as the Dutch duo Road Kahan. The pair’s debut for Armada Electronic Elements swoons at the seductress wearing ‘Blue Velvet’, a mixture of UK influences raising the game of pure pop, and welcoming luxurious horns drifting in from a distance.

DJ Nymfo’s credentials in the drum & bass arena are straight up top tier. Releasing simmering singles on the UK’s holy trinity of D&B labels – RAM Records, Metalheadz and Hospital – and a string of upfront imprints besides, Nymfo’s appetite, as insatiable as his name suggests, has taken him across the world. Voyaging across the festival lands that matter most - Tomorrowland, Mysteryland and Lowlands – the Red Zone roughneck has pushed his D&B brand as a self-confessed party pleaser slash preacher (“I hope to convert some people to the lovely music that is drum & bass”) across the Americas and Southern Hemisphere. His ‘Characters’ album came out in 2012 on Commercial Suicide; two Nymfo remixes have appeared on the legendary Fabric mix series, as dropped by marquee names DJ Marky and DJ Friction, and the award for Best Dutch Drum & Bass DJ proudly takes its place on the mantelpiece.

Daan van de Pol’s road to Road Kahan began with a typical route of teenage guitar kicks being brought under the spell of hard hitting electronics. Seeing the light thanks to the sound of Boys Noize, Justice & Kavinsky, the six string went back in its case and out came the production tools and turntables to take him across his home base of Amsterdam. Under the aliases of Incive Music and hideandscream, with mixtapes played in their thousands on Soundcloud, and associations with Armada Music, Touché Records, Shake Your Ass and more, van de Pol then happened upon another sonic epiphany. With a musical education at the Herman Brood Academie in his back pocket, his bass blueprints went the same way in favour of a more carefree attitude to music: hence his pulling up into Road Kahan.

Tony Bennett, Bobby Vinton and Lana del Rey have made the fabric of ‘Blue Velvet’ their own. Road Kahan’s vision is to redress the boys and girls of summer as a sunset serenade summoning you from the VIP area. Romance beckons from across the dancefloor, with deeply sunken bass testing your speakers and emotional core.