We proudly introduce the first of what we hope will be many dispatches from our friend and co-conspirator Andrew Mason aka “DJ Monk One” , whose primary concern will be the will be the intersection between music and sports.

In 1983, twenty years before ‘electronica” would become a well-trodden section of HMV, the genre’s founding fathers were bored with it. Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter of Kraftwerk had taken up cycling, and were spending less and less time working on music in their Dusseldorf studio and more time adjusting the deraileurs on their custom-frame bikes. Wolfgang Flür, less bike-enamoured than his bandmates, remembers, ‘they would prefer to study cycling catalogues produced by Campagnolo, Shimano and other manufacturers of cycling accessories rather than think up ideas for new songs.” But with the purchase of one of the very first digital samplers (the E-mu Emulator), they found a way to merge obsession with profession.

The new technology enabled them to construct a song using the whizzing of the chains, clicking of the gears and even Schneider’s labored breathing to replace traditional percussion. The subject matter? What else but the Tour De France. The eponymous result, whose lyrics rapturously celebrate the peloton, Galibier, Tourmalet and other notorious stages of the race, was an immediate hit, even in the flatland of New York City, where it became a breakdance favorite.

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Andrew Mason aka ‘DJ Monk One” has spun in venues around the world, from the ritzy to the rusty. He maintains a spot on NYC’s longest-running hip hop radio show (The Underground Railroad on WBAI-FM) and weekly club residencies in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In 2001, he helped found Wax Poetics Magazine, where he is a contributing editor. He has released several records of original music, the latest as Greenwood Rhythm Coalition. More importantly, along with CI and Buddy Schmeling he was a member of the immortal squad that captured the 2001 Williamsburg Three on Three Wiffle Ball Championship.