Album Notes

Vertigo Deluxe is the songwriting/production team Matthew Ferry and Roger Wade. Ferry was recruited through a mutual friend to be the singer in Wade's alternative band in the late 80's, and the band scored a record deal with Orange County's Dr. Dream Records. The normal frustrations of working around everyone's schedules took their toll, and more importantly the pair discovered the emerging Downtown LA acid house club scene. They found this new form of music and culture to be far more enticing than the local live music circuit and they disbanded their group.

Ferry and Wade set aside their guitars and experimented with computers, samplers, and synthesizers. Trying their best to merge actual "songs" with this new and exciting form of music, the pair had only limited success in getting heard, and they went their separate ways in the early 1990's. Wade moved to New York and Ferry remained in California, but both continued to work independently with their own home studios.

In the mid 90's Wade had relocated to Arizona and hooked up with internationally known DJ/producer Markus Schulz. The new forms of Progressive House and later Trance were well suited to someone with a music background, and Schulz enlisted Wade's help on various commercial remixes ranging from The Backstreet Boys to Blue Amazon infusing a sense of melody that was often missing from DJ remixes.

Ferry and Wade started producing new music at first from separate studios in separate states, but in the late 90's the two merged their studios back into one in California. In two years, the pair wrote, produced and/or remixed a long string of singles on various dance labels under several different names in both the US and Europe. A few of these progressive productions were released under the name Vertigo Deluxe, but their greatest success came when they wrote and then remixed a song called "You Won't See Me Cry" for their friend Markus Schulz. The song spent 9 weeks on the Billboard Club Play chart and has been included on dozens of compilations and mix CDs.

Wade began a side career as a DJ during this phase, but they always dreamed of doing projects that were more musical and "song" oriented than the strict format club music follows. They wrote songs for other artists and produced some downtempo "electronica" singles, most notably Carissa Mondavi's debut single "Solid Ground" which became an international club hit in various remixed forms.

In early 2001 they decided to take a break from the club music and pursue their longtime dream of an entire album that incorporated some melodic vocals, but set against a tapestry of electronic and traditional textures that wove together to make a complete "album" experience. Influenced by the way the 1970's Pink Floyd albums seamlessly combined different songs into one larger composition with recurring musical themes, Ferry and Wade set never lost sight of their ambitious goal.

With guest performances by selected vocalists from previous projects, the album began taking shape, The project ended up taking much longer to complete than they anticipated, but in mid 2002 the album was completed and includes incredible contributions from singers Carissa Mondavi, Michelle Crispin, Anna Reis, and Margeaux Fernandez, as well as some uncredited vocals of their own.