Chino gears up for album launch

Dancehall deejay Chino is gearing up for a double release of his sophomore albums in the United States and Japan this summer.

Hailing from the Big Ship camp, Chino has been one of the young stars blazing a scene in the industry in recent time and is ready to take his music one step further with the release of two versions of his sophomore album - one for Japan and one for the United States. This will be the deejay's first album released in the United States. When The STAR spoke with him recently, he explained that the albums will have different names which have not been officially decided on as yet.

He said, "they are slightly different albums, the US one will be out by the second-quarter of summer and the Japanese one immediately before that. The Japanese version has mostly the popular songs like Protected, Pon Yuh Head, Ruff It Up, while the US version will have more exclusive unreleased tracks."

For the albums Chino went the extra mile translating his hit song From Mawning into Japanese for Japan and Spanish for the US. He said, "we did the Japanese version of the song in one day, I got a Japanese girl to assist me translating it and we did it. The same ting for the Spanish version." According to the deejay, he is listening to the translated versions earnestly so that he can perform them on stage while promoting the albums.

The albums are produced mainly by Chino's brother, Stephen 'Di Genius' McGregor, but also features other producers such as Shane Brown with Phone Gallis on the 'Boops' rhythm. In 2007 Chino released his first album in Japan called Unstoppable, which peaked as the fourth best reggae album there. For this album he says there is definite growth in his style, vocal abilities, lyrics, performance and shows a more mature artiste. He said, "this album will definitely be a classic and a collector's item."

To promote the album the artiste will be touring in both Japan and the US and has a number of dates overseas prior to that, such as 'Best of the Best' in Florida in May. "I'm looking forward to going on the road, Big Ship definitely has a huge following in Japan and From Mawning is a big dancehall song down there, so doing it in Japanese will give it an even bigger push," he said.

The artiste is still busy in studio with a number of singles coming out for Big Ship, TruckBack, Tony Kelly as well as International remixes. Presently he is hoping to do a video for his song Find It Hard featuring Dean Fraser soon.

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