Special Request

Special Request is the side project of British producer and DJ Paul Woolford, originally from Leeds. It explores the friction points between jungle, breakbeat hardcore, techno and bass music, drawing direct inspiration from 1990s rave culture and pirate radio. Launched in the early 2010s with a series of raw-sounding maxi singles, Special Request gained prominence with the album Soul Music (2013, Houndstooth), which collects jungle classics reworks, new tracks and extended club-oriented versions. Woolford then steered the project in a more expansive direction with Belief System (2017), a long-form release featuring varied tempos, ambient layers, fragmented breaks and more industrial passages. 2019 was a particularly productive year for Special Request, with the albums Vortex, Offworld and Zero Fucks (all on Houndstooth) that range from techno accelerations and retro-futuristic atmospheres to more melodic reinterpretations of rave heritage, plus a volume in the DJ-Kicks series on !K7. Active on club and festival stages across Europe and beyond, Special Request serves as Woolford’s experimental playground for continually revisiting the rhythmic and sonic codes of British dance music.