Nu Groove Records
Nu Groove burned brightly for only four years, but its records travelled far beyond New York. Founded in 1988 by Frank and Karen Mendez around the extraordinary output of Rheji and Ronald “Rhano” Burrell, with Judy Russell helping shape the A&R, the label became a laboratory for deep house, garage, dub, jack tracks, ambient excursions, breakbeat experiments and rave records — exactly the kind of twelve-inch culture British pirate radio and warehouse DJs could absorb without caring about later genre borders.
R&B frustration becomes house freedom
Nu Groove’s story starts with artists discovering that underground twelve-inch culture offered more freedom than a conventional major-label career.
From Virgin to a flood of aliases
Rheji and Ronald Burrell had already made music in an R&B context, but a frustrating major-label experience with Virgin pushed them toward a faster and looser way of working. Frank and Karen Mendez, who managed the brothers, created Nu Groove as an outlet for those more experimental ideas.
The result was not one Burrell “project” but dozens of identities: Bäs Noir, Aphrodisiac, N.Y. House’n Authority, Metro, Tech Trax and many more. Pseudonyms let the brothers move from soulful garage to sparse jack tracks, dubby house and stranger ambient material without asking one artist brand to explain all of it.
Judy Russell’s A&R role helped widen the label beyond the Burrell family. By 1989–90 Nu Groove was releasing music by Bobby Konders, Joey Beltram, Kenny Dope, Frankie Bones, Tommy Musto, Viktor Simonelli, Joey Negro and others — less a signature sound than a map of New York’s underground production culture.
Four years, hundreds of directions
The original run is short enough to hear almost like one compressed burst of New York house evolution.
Nu Groove creates other histories
Deep, raw, dubby and sometimes completely unhinged
From Bäs Noir to Joey Negro
Six records trace the label from the Burrell brothers’ early house experiments through Bobby Konders, Kenny Dope and the British Joey Negro connection.
1988Aphrodisiac — Your LovePirate radio turned imports into shared memory
Nu Groove is particularly useful to UK rave history because the transatlantic connection is not speculative. The label’s own modern history describes UK pirate radio and warehouse culture relying heavily on its steady output.
That route was practical: specialist shops imported the twelve-inches; pirate stations repeated them; tapes carried those broadcasts further; British producers learned the drum programming, bass movement and dub space by ear. Nu Groove was therefore part of the education of the UK scene before many listeners knew every New York producer’s name.
The revived catalogue tells the old story unusually well
Defected’s stewardship provides detailed historical notes, while the Burrell archive pages anchor release dates and versions.
