A revered retail shop, distribution company and record label, Rush Hour Records in Amsterdam has been vitally important to the global dance music community for the past 20 years. For co-founders Antal Heitlager and Christiaan Macdonald, it’s been a particularly inspiring journey, given the business’ simple roots. The two were barely out of their teens in 1996 when they initially got into the record selling game, flipping 12" stock and collections primarily as a means of quenching their own thirst for records – particularly the exciting sounds emerging from the New York, Chicago and Detroit undergrounds. A storefront soon followed, distinguished not only by the pair’s fine taste in stock across genres, but their shared desire to make record shopping in Amsterdam a more down-to-earth, communal experience. By the turn of the millennium Rush Hour was championing such key Amsterdam figures as Aardvarck and Newworldaquarium by releasing and distributing their productions themselves.
