KF176 Acen - Trip To The Moon (Dubplate Mixes) - the promised record to apologise for the delays....is very delayed...Update

Hello everyone,

This is a quick blog to explain the situation with the promised free record:
KF176 Acen - Trip To The Moon (Dubplate Mixes)

To recap (because oh my god this is ridiculously late)…Due to the Acen Box Set being delayed to many buyers way back at the beginning of the year, we told those late receiving customers they would get a free record. 

We then cut and ordered the record.

And here we are, nearly 6 months later, without the record.

There is a special sort of irony in the fact that this record, to make up for the late box set, is so very much later than the box set was. It would be funny if it wasn’t so terrible. Sigh.

Now, it SHOULD have been here in July or August. It is one of maybe 10 records that we have in production that should have arrived in August. In fact, August should have seen releases from Fizby, Innercore, Dee Sub, DS1, Sub Foundation, Nutty Tax, Sandman, and New Decade as well as this record.

Since then, there have been the 8 or 9 records due in September, which include Ramos & Supreme, Dj...

New releases and updates!

Hello Everyone,

Wow, its been a while since I did a blog post. This makes sense though because it has been insane.
The last 3 weeks Lee and I have been flat out doing orders. Nearly 3000 have gone out.

At this point ALL Baraka orders, ALL NRG Box Set orders and ALL the orders we have that contain KF153 - Jonny L - Hurt You So original (but NOT the KF154 Remixes) have gone out.

We have not yet received KF154 Jonny L - Hurt You So (Remixes). We don’t know when that will arrive, despite asking. Frankly, the delays are so absurd that if we get it before Xmas I will be thrilled.
I know some of you have ordered that along with other records. So if we don’t have it in the next 4 weeks or so, we will probably go through all the orders and send out what we can. We will absorb the extra postage costs as a gift to all you loyal customers and because the wait is ridiculous.

Right, on to all the news! We have a ton of releases about to drop on Thursday 21st! First up we have two new vinyl...

All The Vinyl Problems and Solutions

Hello,

And welcome to the “depressing state of vinyl and what we are gonna do about it” blog. 

I am making this post because I find I am answering the same questions repeatedly, so instead of doing that, I can link people to this post and all will be explained nicely! 

In a nutshell: Records are delayed because there are not enough pressing plants in the world to meet the current demand for vinyl.

Vinyl has risen in popularity by an insane amount - I cannot offhand remember the figures, but it has been a steady rise in popularity for the last few four or five years, and then late 2020 into 2021 it rose by 400%, or something crazy. 
Much of this has been driven by hipsters buying reissues of Fleetwood Mac or whatever hipsters buy. Vinyl is basically the “in” format for music, and has overtaken CD sales for the first time in decades.
The problem is, in the early 2000s, vinyl was deemed dead. Even in our own scene, very few labels still pressed vinyl, and that was the same worldwide for pretty much all the music industry. This meant that many of the record pressing plants...

Liquid - Lethal

Hello Everyone!

Anyone who follows this blog regularly knows that I tend to get very excited and talk about all the things. And today we are talking about an album I have barely mentioned at all, even though it is seminal work by one of the leading artists in our scene, a legend in his own right, and all around thoroughly nice chap. I am of course talking about Liquid, and his brand new album “Lethal”.

Why Chris? Why haven’t you mentioned it until now, the day of the pre sale?

There are a few reasons, but the main ones are that I wanted this album to get your full attention,, and because Liquid and I have been working on how to put this out for a while. It has been a tough one to put together because unlike most of the releases on Kniteforce, this is both full on, proper old skool business release of the sort of quality you would expect from a master of his craft such as Liquid, but it is also more than that.

What do you mean Chris?

Ok, look. Some things are just a thing. Other things transcend the thing they...

All the news and excitement!

Hello Everyone,

Sorry for blog that is likely riddled with spelling mistakes and errors. I am writing it in a very short period of time while waiting on a phone call from Liquid about his forthcoming and stunning new album, and Jimmy J arriving in the studio. 
I meant to write this on Monday. Its now Thursday. Time is not on my side recently. 
So anyway, enough blah. Let me hit you with all the news!

First up, some updates. 
Vinyl is still being idiotic. KBN09 - Phat & Phuturistic was pressed and sent 2 weeks ago. But its not here yet. Where is it? Yes. Meanwhile, KBOGR46T - Baraka  is also STILL not here. I was told that despite being massively over burdened with orders, the pressing plant isn’t even at full capacity as they cannot get enough of the pic plastic to press the vinyl. We use MPO, one of the worlds largest pressing plants - so its not like some pokey little pressing plant. This situation? Its the new normal. Not only that, they ar enow having trouble sourcing materials for sleeves etc. In case you want to read more about all of this, here is a...

NRG, Dj Rap, Ray Keith and Baraka....

Hello everyone,

How are you today? The wife is outside in the sun, the kids are flopping about exhausted from swimming, and I am hiding in the shade writing this blog because its too hot for me! Anyway, a  few small things to go through...First up, the Extended Six Vinyl NRG Music Maker Box Set is down to its last 75 copies, and I expect that to be gone either by the end of this week or the end of the month. Sales have slowed down a little bit as they do on these bigger items, but I would say if you are thinking about getting it, now is the time as we are defintiely not going to do extras on the Extended set. We spoke to the pressing plant and moved some things around, so that once these are gone we should have stock of the 5 Vinyl version...not many, but some :)

And look, a lovely review from our friends at Life Support...

http://www.lifesupportmachine.co.uk/the-nrg-box-set-kniteforce/

In other exciting news (July is full of exciting news as it happens) we are assurend by...

Coming Soon - The Pre Sale Section of the Site

Hello Everyone,

I should have titled this "Pre Info Re Pre Site Update Re Pre Sales" but read somewhere that titles are important, and shouldnt be confusing. Anyway...before I get into the rest of it!

If you have bought:

KBOGR46T - Baraka - Nutty Bass  /  I'll Be There or

KBN09 - Phat & Phuturistic - Part 1 / Part 2

As part of the bundle or on their own, you can now download the digital files. We are still waiting for the vinyl, but as it is so delayed, I hope this will keep you going for a minute...:)

Now, onto the business of the day:

We have just configured a pre sale section on the Kniteforce Site, which is now live. This will function to solve a lot of problems at once. Before I get into whats coming when, I wanted to let you know about the changes and how this SHOULD improve things for us all.

The Pre Sale section will only have pre sale items in it. You WILL be able to buy pre sale and non presale items at the same time, but it will make the situation clearer - that is to...

I Bring You The Future!

Hello,

Bonus points if you read the title of this blog and added (the future, the future!) in your head. 3rd Party for the win. And no, I havent signed 3rd Party lol.

This blog is about upcoming releases, the when and the how. And also the why, because I know you all love a long winded explanation haha!

So...yeah...ok, a lot of things have happened recently to make a right mess of any type of scheduling I had for upcoming releases. And thats a bit of a problem, because you may or may not have noticed this but...we have a few releases coming out lol. The sheer amount and variety makes release management a challenge at the best of times, even when its just standard 12" release. But what we have coming up? It is not standard. And this is not the best of times, what with the issues at the pressing plants. Even putting that aside, the sheer numbers make things difficult, and then there is every style from 1990 old skool rave, to underground jungle classics, to new material from legendary artists, to modern hardcore, to Empyreals forthcoming gabber EP on Malice. Oh, and releases from our...

Please Answer My Question and Baraka Pre Sale updates!

Hello everyone,

I hope this blog finds you well this fine summers day? I am too hot, as is my standard position for the entire summer months, but other than that, I am great :)

So lets dive right in. I am going to assume most of you read the previous blog about the mess of the press? If not, you can find it by, you know, looking on this very page haha. Anyway, fairly shortly after I wrote that, we got hit with our first major delay, and it is unfortunately on these two titles:

KBOGR46T - Baraka - Nutty Bass / I'll Be There

KBN09 - Phat & Phuturistic - Part 1 / Part 2

These two titles are of course part of the Old Skool Jungle Bundle. We have already received one of the others - KLEG06 - Q Project - Champion Sound, and we are told KBN07 has been pressed and is on its way to us. So we have already sent out ALL the orders that we could, the ones which ordered KLEG06 but not others. And we will do the same with any orders for just KBN07. But the vast majority of the orders...

The Mess Of The Record Press - Please Read

Hello everyone,

A slight departure from my usual blogging, in that I want to talk to you about the current (and general) state of the vinyl pressing industry.

Its fucked.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Haha, I kid...well...sort of...But there are significant changes (problems) going on and it is an industrywide issue. So I am writing this so that you know what is going on when it comes to pressing records and how it affects Kniteforce, but also our dear friends at Liftin' and Blue Badger and Time Tunnel and MPS and Cantina and, well, everyone.

In a nutshell - demand for vinyl massively outstrips the availability within the pressing plants, and it has come to a fairly alarming head in recent weeks. A little history:

Vinyl is an OLD medium. We are talking everyone wearing a hat in a sepia toned world where leeches were used as medicine old. The actual making of a record is a long drawn out multistep process that has changed very little from its inception, but involves cutting the music into an acetate, “growing” the A/B side stampers in vats of chemicals, heating up plastic with a huge boiler then splatting...