Hi everyone! FWD has been largely out of action for 5 years and we are now back and ready to pick up where we left off. I wanted to write about the FWD story so far and what we hope to accomplish in the future.

I founded FWD with some friends in 2007. We released some of our own sets but mostly found ourselves curating exclusive mixes from other artists we admired. As we grew our crew changed, I became the only remaining founder of three (turns out having a family takes a lot of work!) but later had the privilege of working with a new staff that was really passionate about music and generating great content. We expanded from our base of exclusive mixes and written interviews to audio and video interviews and new music reviews. Everything was going really well and the site was building up a lot of steam. At our peak we had 75,000 unique visitors per month!

Unfortunately that all came crashing down in early 2012 when our server got attacked by hackers. Additionally there was an issue with our web archive and we lost everything except for the mixes I backed up on my hard drive. Overnight all momentum stopped. I wanted to rebuilt right away but I was too occupied with my other company (I’m a food scientist/product developer) to expend the resources and time. Eventually the team disbanded and FWD.DJ went dormant save for the Soundcloud archive uploaded a year later.
Well now the dormancy period is over. My love for well-crafted electronic music has only grown stronger in the last 5 years and I’m more excited than ever to showcase artists putting out good work. I’ve completely reworked FWD’s branding and built a new site from scratch.

We are going to start this new chapter by focusing on the things we started with: great mixes and interviews, along with some occasional commentary and music suggestions. As we rebuild our momentum we might expand again and consider throwing parties and generating more complex content. We are also going to expand our musical pallet a bit. Historically we almost exclusively focused on house and techno, and while those will still be big parts of our site we are expanding to include more varied genres including bass, downtempo, leftfield and ambient. Finally, I will personally be contributing mixes via the FWD Founder series, a place where I can showcase music I really love in a format that encourages my growth as an artist.

We are very excited to scoop up today and tomorrow’s best electronic music artists and share them with our listeners. We hope you enjoy what we come up with and encourage you to get in touch with any suggestions or collaborations.

Ben Goodwin