Twenty Years of Crossing Paths: How Dave Parkinson and I Finally Started Making Music Together

Dave Parkinson and I spent around twenty years crossing paths before we finally started making music together. In music, you can work in the same world for a long time without quite ending up in the same room, doing the same thing. Then, eventually, the moment comes.

That’s the heart of this story. Not a dramatic tale of a chance meeting or one magical studio session: I’m not going to invent either of those. It’s about two people whose paths kept crossing, and the value of finally getting to work together properly.

Dave is known to many as Prime Mover, and Stellar Studios is his studio. By the time I started working there with him, I’d already been learning the production side of dance music and finding my own way through it. The partnership came after years of separate work, near misses and experience. Sometimes the best things take their time. Annoying, perhaps, but there you are.

Learning to make records

I learned production alongside Alfie Bamford, better known as Technikal. That period taught me a lot about the craft behind the records: the choices, the patience and the listening that happen away from the dancefloor.

My early releases came out on Honeypot Recordings and Elasticman. They were part of the gradual process of figuring out how I wanted my own music to sound. Making a track is one thing; learning how to finish it, make decisions and put it out into the world is another.

There’s no neat line between learning and doing. You keep picking things up as you go. Every record adds something to the next one, even if you don’t realise it at the time. And dance music has always been broad enough to let you follow more than one thread. My roots run through Hardcore, House, Hard Trance and Hard House, and that range has informed the way I approach production.

Twenty years of near misses

Dave and I crossed paths for around two decades before we started working together at Stellar Studios. That span matters because it wasn’t a case of meeting one afternoon and immediately deciding to work together. There was a long stretch of moving through the same musical landscape before we finally made music in the same room.

I can’t give you a tidy timeline of every near miss, or a date for the first time we met, because I don’t have those details to hand. And honestly, the important part isn’t a fabricated roll-call of encounters. It’s that the working relationship took time to arrive.

There’s something familiar about that in underground electronic music. People can orbit the same scene for years (through records, projects and overlapping circles) before the right collaboration takes shape. The connection isn’t always instant. Sometimes you need to build your own experience first, and let the work bring you together when the time is right.

When Dave and I did finally start working together at Stellar Studios, it was the start of a proper production partnership. That meant moving from crossing paths to sharing the work: making decisions, shaping sounds and building projects together. I won’t pretend there’s one sentence that sums up the day-to-day of it, or dress it up as an easy formula. A working partnership is made in the work.

From Stellar Studios to new projects

The work at Stellar Studios was followed in time by EQ Studios, a studio I built myself. Lockdown eventually took it from me, and that chapter ended the hard way. But the thread through all of it stays the same: keeping the focus on making music, whatever the circumstances.

Working with Dave also fed into projects including Synthsonic. Synthsonic gave me room to think beyond a single genre label and bring different strands together. The idea was mine, but it was a team effort to turn that vision into a finished album.

The Synthsonic album Iconiq took more than two years to complete and brought together music across a range of dance styles. Dave was part of the team that helped shape the production. The album’s development and sound were also discussed in DMC World’s review.

That kind of project is a good example of why working with another producer matters. You bring your own instincts and ideas, but you’re not the only person listening. Another perspective can challenge a choice, strengthen an arrangement or help a track become what it needs to be. It’s not about handing over your identity. It’s about making more room for the music.

Records are the point, but people matter

Over the years, I’ve made records in different corners of dance music. Albums including Reverent, ART and Glorious all reached number one on the Beatport album charts; Reverent also reached number 36 on the UK Official Album Chart. I’ve worked on remixes such as Schöneberg, Dreams and Right in the Night, and tracks including Times Like These and Blueprint. I’ve also collaborated with Binary Finary.

Those credits tell you something about the music, but not everything about the relationships and work behind it. A record has a title, a release date and a place in a catalogue. The process that gets it there is shared, human and usually less tidy than a list makes it look.

That’s why the long lead-in to working with Dave matters to me. We didn’t arrive at Stellar Studios as blank pages. We’d each spent years making music and building our own experience, and working together was a chance to put that experience into the same space.

For trance music producers, and for anyone making hard trance music, collaboration can be a useful reminder that your sound doesn’t have to grow in isolation. You can have a clear sense of what you want to make and still benefit from someone else’s ears. That doesn’t make the result less yours. It can make the idea stronger.

Finally in the same room

When I look back at the story, I don’t think of it as a grand reveal. The title says it plainly: around twenty years of crossing paths, then finally making music together. It’s a simple fact, but there’s a lot of life in it.

There are people you meet early in your career, people you work with later, and people who keep appearing at the edge of the picture until the time is right. Dave and I had that long stretch before we finally shared a studio. Then came Synthsonic, and later EQ Studios. New chapters built on years of making music in our own ways, some of them ending better than others.

I’m proud of the records I’ve made, but I’m also grateful for the people who have been part of the work. Music is full of collaborations that begin with a shared idea. Some begin with a much longer story.

If you’ve followed my releases over the years, you can explore more in the Nicholson music catalogue. And if you’re curious about the records that shaped my route through trance, there’s also the story of Right in the Night and my route into trance.

Dave and I took our time getting to the studio. When we got there, we had plenty of music to make.