Matthew Nelson’s musical education started unusually early. In later interviews he has described playing records as a small child, recording radio onto reel-to-reel tape and physically splicing sound together before he owned proper studio equipment. By his teens, reggae, soul, electro and hip hop were feeding into an obsession with DJing and rhythm.

At school he met John Fernandez — later DJ Lime — and the pair began making music together. By the late 1980s Slipmatt was also part of Raw FM, a pirate-radio project run with friends from a flat around Hackney Marshes. The radio work mattered because it gave the developing DJ style somewhere to exist before the rave circuit became a national industry.

In 1989 Slipmatt and Lime formed SL2 with MC Jay J. Early studio sessions produced Do That Dance, while the pair soon moved toward their own Awesome Records label. The 1991 white-label period produced The Noise (Raindance Mix) and then DJ’s Take Control / Way In My Brain, a record whose reaction at Raindance helped trigger major-label interest. XL Recordings signed the group and DJ’s Take Control reached the UK charts.

The follow-up changed the scale again. On A Ragga Tip, built around Jah Screechy’s Walk & Skank, took the reggae influence already present in SL2’s music and fused it with breakbeats and rave bass pressure. In 1992 it became one of the defining crossover records of UK rave, reaching No. 2 on the UK singles chart while remaining completely recognisable on a rave dancefloor.

Slipmatt’s DJ career did not simply follow the pop success. Raindance — founded by his older brother Paul — gave him a crucial regular platform, while bookings expanded across Fantazia, Dreamscape, Helter Skelter, World Dance, United Dance, Slammin’ Vinyl and the rest of the national rave network. His tapes document the period when hardcore was splitting toward jungle on one side and increasingly uplifting four-to-the-floor hardcore on the other.

In 1993 he began the SMD series after buying an Akai sampler and taking more control of his own production. The records became central to the uplifting/happy-hardcore direction of the mid-1990s. Slipmatt has always resisted being reduced to one subgenre, though: while remaining one of old skool and happy hardcore’s most recognisable names, he also returned to house and Ibiza club culture and later built an extensive career around old-skool, rave and house sets.

That longevity is the important point. Slipmatt is not only the producer behind two giant SL2 records. He is a DJ whose career connects pirate radio, the first wave of licensed and unlicensed rave, the hardcore split, happy hardcore, Kiss FM, Ibiza and the modern old-skool revival.