From a Black Sea Festival to Black Hole Recordings: The Story of F.I.69
Updated: Sep 1
F.I.69 was not the beginning of my work in music. By the time the project took shape, I had already spent about five years producing records, creating arrangements and performing as a DJ.
What F.I.69 changed was the reach of that work.
It was the first electronic project of mine to develop a recognizable catalogue, connect with artists outside Russia and release music through an established international label network. Our releases on Rub-A-Duck introduced our production to an audience far beyond the regional scene where we had started.
Building F.I.69
Igor Maksimenko and I began working together in 2010. Igor performed under the name M.I.P. and was already a familiar figure in the bass-music community in Novorossiysk. He was particularly committed to developing drum and bass in the city and creating a stronger local scene around it.
I was based in Krasnodar and brought my experience in music production, arrangements and broken-beat electronic styles. The combination worked naturally, and F.I.69 grew out of that collaboration.
Our music moved between drum and bass, dubstep, glitch hop and the heavier side of electronic dance music. We were influenced by artists including The Prodigy and Noisia, but the objective was never to imitate a particular act. We wanted to make records that could work in our own DJ sets and stand beside international bass releases.
We wrote original material, produced remixes and collaborated with artists including Subges, Suga8 and the California vocalist and rapper L’Raquel.
Building a Bass Festival on the Black Sea
F.I.69 was closely connected with “Блага” (“Blaga”), a small bass-music festival held on the beach in the stanitsa of Blagoveshchenskaya on the Black Sea coast.
Beginning in 2010, Igor and I were part of the team that organized the festival. For five years, F.I.69 also remained one of its regular headliners.
It was a modest local event, but it was important to the community around it. The festival brought DJs, producers and listeners together outside the usual club environment. It also gave us an opportunity to test our own music in front of an audience and understand which production decisions actually worked on a large sound system.
We performed in clubs around the region as well. A recording from Club VIP in Novorossiysk, filmed in January 2012, preserves one of those early F.I.69 sets.
At that stage, producing music, playing it live and helping organize events were all parts of the same process. We were not waiting for an existing industry to appear around us. We were helping create the environment in which our music could be heard.
Releasing Music Independently
We also started our own label, Dubooz 69 Records, to release our music and records by artists around us.
One of the tracks from that period was “I Need You Right Now”, recorded with Invisible Brothers and Sunn and released in 2012. The track has now passed 240,000 streams on Spotify.
That number was accumulated over time rather than through a major promotional campaign. Its value is in the longevity of the recording: music created during the early years of F.I.69 continues to find listeners more than a decade later.
Other early releases included “Launch”, featuring Sergey Oblomov, as well as “Slapstick” and “Vampire.” Together, these records gave F.I.69 a real catalogue before the project entered the Rub-A-Duck roster.
Entering the International Label Market
The turning point came when our music was released through Rub-A-Duck, a bass-oriented imprint within the Black Hole Recordings network.
Black Hole Recordings was founded in the Netherlands in 1997 by Arny Bink and Tijs Verwest, professionally known as Tiësto. It had grown into one of the best-known independent electronic-music companies, with international distribution and an extensive catalogue.
For producers working in southern Russia, entering that label network was meaningful. Our music was no longer circulating only through local events, personal contacts and our own label. It was being released and distributed alongside electronic artists from different countries.
It also changed the standards we had to meet. A track intended for an international label had to arrive as a complete product: the production, arrangement, mix, master, credits and delivery all had to be ready for a professional release process.
When John B Played Our Remix
One of our Rub-A-Duck releases was a remix of O.Crow’s “8 Bit Robot.”
In April 2013, British drum-and-bass artist John B played the F.I.69 remix during a live set in Lucerne, Switzerland. His official Podcast 100 tracklist places the track at 32:44, between releases by Frankee and DJ Craze with Bro Safari.
Hearing our work in that context mattered. John B was not involved in the production and there was no arranged endorsement. He had simply selected the remix for his set because it worked for him as a DJ.
That was one of the first clear signs that F.I.69 music could travel independently of us. A record created in Krasnodar was being played to an audience in Switzerland by an internationally recognized drum-and-bass artist.
I wrote about that moment in the original 2013 post, “John B Plays Our F.I.69 Remix in His Lucerne Set”.
Working with L’Raquel
Our next important international collaboration was “Mind Ya Bizness” with L’Raquel, a vocalist and rapper from California.
The release connected an American vocal performance with bass production created in Russia. The original version combined L’Raquel’s direct delivery with heavy synth stabs, programmed sub-bass and trap and dubstep rhythms. We also produced an F.I.69 remix with a rougher and more aggressive club sound.
Rub-A-Duck released the project in three versions: the original, the F.I.69 remix and a dub mix. The release was presented through the official Black Hole Recordings YouTube channel.
The F.I.69 remix was later selected for “Bass In Ya Face 2”, a 15-track Rub-A-Duck compilation. Its inclusion gave the record another life beyond the original EP and placed our work inside a broader selection of international bass music.
The “Destroyer” EP
In September 2013, Rub-A-Duck released the two-track “Destroyer” EP.
The title track, “Destroyer”, was created with Suga8. The second track, “Do Not Stop”, was a collaboration with Subges.
These were not remixes commissioned around someone else’s finished record. They were original F.I.69 productions created with other artists and delivered as a focused bass-music EP.
“Do Not Stop” was later included in the label retrospective “Rub A Duck 3YRS Best In Bass”. That follow-up placement was important because it showed that the label continued to consider the track part of its catalogue after the original EP campaign had ended.
From Clubs to a Racing Game
Another F.I.69 production from this period was our remix of Faberlique’s “Sleep Blind.”
The remix was later used in a build of the racing game World of Speed, developed by Slightly Mad Studios. It is preserved in the Racing Soundtracks archive, while surviving uploads identify it as the game’s bass soundtrack or “WOS Edit.”
I describe this as an in-game music placement rather than part of the official score. We did not compose the game’s original score, and the surviving public documentation does not establish that the track belonged to a worldwide soundtrack album.
Still, its use in a racing game was another example of the music moving beyond our immediate scene. A remix originally produced for an electronic release found a second context inside an international game project.
What F.I.69 Changed for Me
F.I.69 did not make me a household name. What it did was more practical and more important for the career I was building.
The project took my work from clubs and beach events in southern Russia into an international release system. It taught me how to develop an electronic act, build a catalogue, collaborate across countries and deliver records that could meet the expectations of an established label.
Rub-A-Duck gave that work wider distribution and professional context. The John B placement, the collaboration with L’Raquel, the “Destroyer” EP and the use of the “Sleep Blind” remix in World of Speed all showed that music produced in a regional studio could travel much further than the place where it began.
That experience still informs how I work with artists today. A strong record has to do more than sound good in the room where it was made. It needs a clear identity, a release strategy and the technical quality to compete wherever it eventually reaches.
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