by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

A lot has changed in the five years since the founding of Montreal-based label Bombay Records, which has dropped records from soulful house heroes Roy Davis Jr. and Derrick Carter, and top-shelf locals Fred Everything and Miguel Graça. While the label saw its star rise, the CD industry as a whole, and electronic dance in particular, have taken a beating. Patrick Dream (co-founder with Nav Bhinder) may be older and wiser, but looking back over the stacks of Bombay wax, a spread of high-quality, richly organic grooves, he's hard-pressed for regrets.

Mirror: How did the label get started in the first place?

Patrick Dream: It was a vague idea for a while. We just went for a little visit at Miguel Graça's studio and found that he was sitting on a mountain of unreleased music and didn't have a label at the time. There was a lot of gold in there. Also, the previous year, Roy Davis Jr. was shopping "Gabrielle" to us. We didn't have the label set up at that point - then "Gabrielle" went on to become one of the biggest dance songs ever. That got the wheels spinning. Had things been set up, we would have been able to capitalize on that and do stuff with one of the best songs the genre had produced in years.

M: Where, at the time, did you see the label being, five years in?

PD: We were quite bullish. Those were different days, when electronic albums would regularly break gold status. Some of the artists we were working with had had quite a bit of success - Roy, Fred, Miguel and Derrick Carter. So we were envisioning multiple offices and total world domination, being an established label in the CD market in the U.S. A lot of those things went haywire as the market went in the last few years. For the first half of the label's life, we grew astoundingly, and we've been idling for the last couple of years - but still putting out product. I'm proud. We've had 11 albums and close to 40 releases overall, and I'm happy about that.

Fred Everything, Miguel Graça, Patrick Dream and Nav Bhinder are at Stereo on Friday, Nov. 19, 3 a.m., $35

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