I was fourteen when ‘Lovers Rock’ came out. It was the year I made my first beats. By then I had been dealing with insomnia for as long as I could remember, and while I knew nothing of the romantic love, heartache and injustice contained in the 11 songs on that album, I just knew they had the magic power of making the long wait for sleep a lot less lonely. I would press play, let the album play two or three times through and slowly drift to sleep while the music melded with other records I had just discovered and that I would sample to make beats in my dreams.

Years went by. I moved from France to New York, then to Benin, and back to France. I learned what love, heartache and injustice meant, and I kept making beats. Somewhere in the back of my head I kept thinking: what if that ‘Lovers Rock’ album had a mirror image lost somewhere on a dusty shelf, hidden between a David Axelrod record and a Moacir Santos album? Or what if some obscure beatmaker from the 90s had remixed the whole album? What if a mysterious band of musicians from across the world covered every song on the album? What if all of that happened at once, somehow?

That’s how, 24 years after first listening to ‘Lovers Rock’ on those lonely nights, I embarked in the journey of reinterpreting every song on the album. I sketched ideas around the original vocal tracks with a drum machine and a few samples and percussions, then I sought out musicians to form the imaginary band I could hear in my head. I was lucky to connect with Thembi Dunjana (piano, Cape Town), Ellis Bartholomew (drums, Melbourne), Aubrey Situmorang (bass, Los Angeles), Okiel & Zoe McIntyre (horns and flute, Kingston), Gabi Guedes (percussion, Salvador da Bahia) and Dipito (scratch and percussion, Toulouse) who contributed beautiful recordings that convey what ‘Lovers Rock’ could feel like to them. I arranged them into what I imagine that mysterious record from my teenage dreams might have been like.

‘The rock that we swam to’ is what came out of that exhilarating year-long process.

For over a year, I tried to contact Sade Adu, Paul Denman, Stuart Matthewman and Andrew Hale to share the project with them. I tried everything, searched everywhere. Many times I thought I was close to getting in touch with the elusive band or their label, but it never panned out. So after much hesitation, I decided to release this project as a bootleg, an underground homage to an icon, my gift to the global music community. Without authorization or license, and without monetizing. That’s why this record isn’t for sale. It’s for you to enjoy or to gift to someone who will.

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— MATMAT