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BOE Recordings - Ben Parkinson

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:22:25 GMT

Although only on their fourth 12” release, the small and cuddly label BOE recordings family are making a name for themselves as the standard bearers of a resurgent house scene. With whippersnapper upstarts KINK and Burnski releasing some of their best work to date on the label, and every one of their releases flying off the shelves, BOE Recordings have been touching all the bases marked ‘very good music’. Their small output has seen them release everything from deep dubby cuts to gut-troubling acid workouts with the defining factor being quality, not quantity. With the Signal EP by Kink finding it’s way into many a DJ’s box this summer, and a sack full of exciting sounds due to be released in the coming months, label boss Ben Parkinson took some time to trade questions and answers with Electronic Beats.

Hey Ben, first off can you tell me a bit about how the label started?The label started up good and proper right at the end of 2007. That's when the first release with Burnski was put out for promotion and release in January 2008. The idea behind the label started about a year before that.

Why did you start the label? What was your inspiration? I wanted to start a label because I was itching to do something in music. DJ’ing in London is almost impossible if you're not in a crowd, involved in a night or prepared to prostitute yourself musically. I have my own life outside of music, I have very good friends who like to get loose some weekends but they have other interests; music is my own private vice. A few years ago I became friends with a couple of guys (Mass Transit) and we did parties together. We had a few great guests on but we didn’t do anything more than sporadic. It was a lot of fun but I don’t think I’ll do nights for a while. About the time that came to a close I was really keen to get out and do something off my own back.

I'm a mate of James (Burnski) and we always chatted about music right from when he first started releasing on Trapez and Morris Audio. He sent me a track called Monkey Hanging and I immediately wanted to release it there and then. I thought “fuck it let's put it out on a white label” and he was keen but another label picked it up. The release didn't materialise, it came back on offer and I thought right I'm gonna start a label!

I also drew inspiration from one of my favourite labels, Morris Audio. I don’t know Stephan personally but I’ve heard great things about the guy. He has a full time job, a family and 3 great labels that release top drawer music. It made me think, “I could do that too”. Minus the family thing!

What does BOE stand for? I couldn’t honestly think of anything at the time of conception. I’m not the most imaginative of people when it comes to the English language. I cycled through my head thinking about things I liked; places, people, food, culture. Everything I came up with sounded terrible so I named it after my cat. Barry is infamous around east London. He's got one eye for a start and he's a Birman, which is an incredibly friendly breed. He also likes dub techno so he helps out on the A & R side of things.

What is your musical policy? At first I wanted to release all kinds of stuff within the boundaries of house and techno. It was a case of signing music that sounded great and stood out on its own by being original and interesting. The artists I work with tend to be emerging, or recently established and that’s how I aim to work going forwards too. Over the four releases the sound has definitely developed into the true sound I love which is deep and moody house and techno. Going forwards I'm really glad to say that Kris Wadsworth is lined up for a succession of EPs. This guy is really gonna blow up next year. The stuff I’m signing from him really reminds me of the old Herbert sound. Mid-nineties 100 lbs type material. Raw but musical, and with lots of funk.

Can you sum up the 'BOE' sound in four words? Krunk, funk, deep junk.

Tell me some more about the artists you work with - how did you come to work with them? I was pretty lucky to be honest. I knew Burnski well before I started the label. We booked him to play a mass transit night in 2005 and we got on really well. Kink is a guy who's music I loved from his first release on Odori and I really wanted him on board. Consistent, I just contacted through their Myspace page . I was also lucky to get some great demo material sent to me. I’ve also been a big fan of David Labeij since Polder first started releasing his stuff. I’m really glad that he agreed to remix Get Nervous as I think that's been the best release so far.

Trying to attract new artists has been tough though. A number of the ones I would like to work with tend to release exclusively with certain labels, so I really have to keep ahead of the game to keep the model intact. i.e. releasing music from emerging artists. That said the future looks very bright on the music front.

What about the future? What are your plans? Well, I’m currently re-assessing the way the label operates. The first year of business has been a reality check and I’ve learnt a lot. I want to have as much control as possible, and that means control in production and sales to the distributor and beyond. I want to get a larger footprint in Europe as the reach up until now has mainly been focused in the UK. Music-wise I’m working closely with Kris (Wandsworth) on his EPs, Kink is working away on some new bits and I have a couple of very bright new-comers who release straight up deep house.

If you could sign (or release some work of) anyone, who would it be? Jesus, that's a tough one! I guess it would have to be Cobblestone Jazz. I find their music truly original and inspiring. Rozzo / Peter Dildo would be someone I’d like to bring in as a remixer. And to be completely limitless.... I might ask Herbie Hancock if he has anything new & unsigned when I see him at a gig in November!

You DJ, and produce, run a label. Is it hard to find the time to do it all? Yes. The label comes first at this moment in time, after a full time job. I don’t have the time to promote myself as a DJ as much as I'd like and I havent’ had the necessary productions to my name that will enable me to get gigs. It's strange now how you become a bookable DJ as soon as you've had a few successful releases. That's just how it works nowadays. I have a monthly residency at Underbelly in Hoxton which is pretty cool, and I aim to crack on with some original music for BOE this year. Finding the time to work on it is difficult though. My first love will always be DJ’ing though - I absolutely love playing records.

What music has been making you excited right now? The music that’s been exciting me and depressing me at the same time is what I love; House music. All of a sudden it's now fashionable as though it's never been around. There is a lot of really good deep house coming out of Europe and beyond but a lot of crap alongside it. It's like the standard minimal sound had taken on a couple of chord stabs and now it's deep house!

How do Berlin and London differ from your point of view, in terms of music? They seem to feed off each other, but are quite different as well. I know you have a lot of love for music coming out of Berlin! Well I’ve only been to Berlin a couple of times so I can’t give a truly valid opinion. Both times however, I was blown away by the music on offer and the lack of pretence in clubs. My perception of Berlin is that the people there love music and are eager to work in the industry in an honest and professional way. The people are truly knowledgeable and love their clubbing, for the sake of clubbing!. London lags behind musically and is tied to the mainstream I think. There are certain crowds that are full of scenesters and bandwagon hoppers riding on the crest of the latest trendy wave. London is great though and I absolutely love living here. But that's for reasons other than music. If my life was totally dedicated to music then id be in Berlin without a shadow of a doubt.

Who is your tip as one to watch? Kris Wadsworth! Shameless plug but he has a lot of amazing stuff coming out over the next 12 months. A few artists I’m really into are Daniel Mehlhardt, Till Von Sein, Anton Zap, John Roberts, Keith Worthy and Oleg Poliakov.

A WORD FROM THE WISE - Heartbreak

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:20:28 GMT

Lex Records latest signing Heartbreak, made up of smooth as silk Argentine vocalist Sebastian Muravchix and British-born beatsmith/italo disco legend Ali Renault, are figuratively, and some may argue quite literally, on fire. Their emotive pop infused italo disco tones tempered with metal has had everyone from Aussie electro-rock misfits The Presets to Delorean-obsessed label mates Neon Neon scream their praises. With their debut album Lies due for release later this year, not to mention several of their remixes getting played on heavy rotation from London to Shanghai (check their complete remix of Bowie’s ‘Loving The Alien’ on Rapster’s remix compilation 'Life Beyond Mars' earlier this year), solo releases on Dissident and Lycra on the horizon, plus an international tour so tough it’ll make Jigga weep, it’s fair to say these chaps have it sorted. With that in mind, we thought we’d ask them to geek out with their thoughts on life, music and everything.

1 - MP3s are the equivalent of looking at pictures of a painting in a book. You can study from MP3s, become aware of music, but not truly experience its depth. For Van Gogh, get to the Musée d’Orsay, for music, get it on vinyl!

2 - Irony is an understatement. If you treat an understatement as something to use as a statement, then your discourse is poor.

3 - When you listen to music, you need to think about what is specific to music: sound, melodies and harmonies and rhythm, and its intangible emotion, energy and power. If you don’t experience these things, then you’re not really listening to music, you’re just listening to yourself.

4 - Don’t look for music to fit into your lifestyle. Let music change your life!

5 - The old - new dichotomy is OLD! The power of this binary must wane. Help us destroy all binary power!

6 - Good sex is very good for you, so it must be your aim to understand and conquer it. Love helps good sex a great deal.

7 - Every product you buy is political contribution. Kids are exploited when you buy a certain thing, families such as yours live happily when you buy others. I know you know, now stop buying Nestlé for fuck’s sake!!

8 - What you do with the power you gain within a rotten system is what makes who you are, not the power itself. What you do to gain that power is where all the most uncomfortable complexities
of morality lie.

9 - Follow your heart. Sometimes it’s good to stick to your first instincts even when you’re the minority. Don’t bow to peer pressure.

10 - It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.

11 - Water your plants. They will die if you don’t.

12 - If you’re feeling down, tune into magicwaves internet radio www.magicwaves.co.uk . It will cheer you up.

13 - Go and see live music every week if you can. It will keep things in perspective and possibly change your life.

14 - Invest in a good pair of earplugs for when you are out listening to bands or DJs. You will hear the music better.

15 - A broken heart can be what seems like the most painful experience one can handle, but it can be a true test of character and therefore inspiration.

www.myspace.com/heartbreak1

TOUGH AT THE TOP - Steve Bug

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:20:14 GMT

Poker Flat will turn 10 years old at the start of 2009 – an impressive feat in the electronic music industry! Here Steve Bug looks back at his successes and looks forward to one big party.

Let’s start with what we might know already: Poker Flat is about to release its hundreth 12” inch and at the beginning of next year, the label will celebrate its tenth anniversary, which in the electronic music scene really means something. There aren’t many labels around that have lasted like this neither in quantity nor in quality. Being one of the first labels around focusing on a minimal kind of dance music, Poker Flat became famous with their very first release (and Steve Bug’s hit) ‘Loverboy'. Their success carried on from there and so it’s highly likely that some of your favourite tracks over the last 10 years have come from the Poker Flat family. Whether it’s a Martin Landsky, Märtini Brös or an Argy-piece, a single made for the clubs or a compilation for home-use like Bug’s Bugnology-Series or an artist album: all of them feature what the label stands for.

“All the artists are unique in their style yet still there is a bond that makes them work for Poker Flat” explains Clé from the duo Märtini Brös, who just finished working on their new album, The MB Factor. “It’s kind of a traditional label focusing on a lasting value,” he adds.

The best proof for this might be the single Loverboy. It was not only a massive hit ten years ago, but some weeks ago it was still in the top-ten download charts of Beatport and in some years this single sold better than a new EP. Poker Flat’s contribution to electronic music history started 1999, when weird versions of techno music and trance where still circulating through the European charts. The label’s aim was clear already: Offering quality music that was entertaining. Since then, the label became present around the globe, getting more popular from release to release. Poker Flat became a DJ favourite and a party must-have.

And there they are, still in the record bags of all the big name DJs, almost ten years after their beginning. The man himself, Steve Bug, puts it this way: “At Poker Flat, I can simply do what I want music-wise. It’s the perfect surrounding for our output. There is not a word or genre that describes the Poker Flat music at all. There is just a certain sex in the groove.”

Although Poker Flat has a core brigade of artists, there is room for a new sound, Ryo Murakami from Japan, (one of the few not living in Berlin), or Argy who is from Greece for example. Both belong to the younger generation of the label, but fit in perfectly nonetheless. “The personality of our artists is important”, says Steve. “Actually, I wouldn’t publish a track by a person whom I dislike. You have to work together, so you have to get along. We keep it fresh and are always developing, without following a trend but sticking to our own sound aesthetic. If the label and I wouldn’t keep changing, I would get bored. I don’t like doing the same over and over again.”

Being open to the new, while sticking to a concept makes Poker Flat a constant that does fit into music-trends at the right moment, but without being too trendy. Since most of their artists
are international DJs, there is a connection to the target group. The musicians and DJs know early what the party-crowd is longing for, what works in clubs and where there is room for experiments.

Beside all the fun and creativity, it is a business. “Of course we are aware of the future. And I know that there are not many big DJs playing or buying vinyl anymore. I am not worried about our sound itself, but the whole market of course.” Selling digital music, which is much cheaper, can’t fill the vinyl-hole yet. “We are thinking of new ways to make people buy our releases”, says Steve. “At the moment, I don’t want to do something else except music! So I have to work out how to keep earning money with it,” he explains without the usual criticism of consumers, but with an openness that reflects his music policy.
But no matter in what way the industry will develop within the next months or years, some things are for sure - a super hundreth Poker Flat release, and a big bash to celebrate it.

www.pokerflat-recordings.com

Future Proof? - Get Physical’s new breed on the state of dance music.

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:58:14 GMT

Dance music is in a period of flux. Music sales are falling, the death of the major label is predicted, creating both problems and opportunities, and the proliferation of better, cheaper computers as well as equipment is changing the way music is made forever.

However where there is confusion, so grows creativity and where some people would argue that electronic music is stuck in a creative cul de sac right now, others would say that some of the most exciting examples of the genre are being created as I write. It’s all a matter of opinion.

Get Physical are one of a small number of labels who have continued to evolve. Leaving behind electro house as soon as it became a formulaic sound. Get Physical are all about diversity, forward thinking music and a family vibe, summed up by their Full Body Workout compilation series. Patrice Bäumel, Gavin Herlihy, Caitlin Devlin and Thomas Schumacher from Elektrochemie and Daniel Mehlhart - who all appear on the latest instalment - were kind enough to take some time to tell us, firstly, what they thought of the current changes in dance music and what the future might hold.

For Gavin Herlihy the future is going to be more democratic: “It's certainly going to mean more people making more music. That will intrinsically mean more good music but also more bad music. Unfortunately for the music makers the increase in music will decrease the shelf life of music. Tracks are already consumed at such a frightening rate that they're considered old hat as soon as they've been on Beatport for longer than a couple of weeks. It also means it's going to be harder for the newcomers to break through. To become a known producer you need to release more and better tracks than ever but it's increasingly hard to make a living from doing so, so the art of music making is being sucked into a vicious circle. The only real way to survive is to make tracks that last the test of time and beat the Beatport shelf life.”

Whereas for Thomas Schumacher of Elektrochemie it’s not even really an issue: “Isn't dance music constantly in a transitory period? I mean, if something becomes popular, like minimal a few years ago, people start to look for something different, something that is not mainstream. I consider this attitude amongst many producers in our scene one of the key factors for why this music is still relevant and exciting. As far as the future goes, I have the feeling the "Ethno-sampling hype" will become even bigger and more annoying…”

One of the biggest changes has been the introduction of computers, into both music making and DJ’ing, further blending the roles of DJs, artists and producers. With the decline of vinyl sales being a key factor in the current problems the issue is one close to many people hearts, but often in different ways.

Patrice Bäumel does not understand why there is so much resistance against change in dance music: “For me it is a place to escape conservatism. New technologies have liberated us. They have always driven music to new heights. If it wasn't for people willing to push music forward we would still be sitting in caves and beating on a drum with a bone.”

Thomas Schumacher and Daniel Melhart, however, still have an affinity with vinyl as Thomas explains: “What was wrong with playing records in the first place? I must have missed something.... Only so many DJs get it right with Traktor Scratch. The majority? They are lazy bastards, a disgrace to any real DJ. They can't be bothered to go record shopping and to carry the 25 kg crate around.
For Daniel it just isn’t exciting to watch. “Seeing a DJ staring into his laptop turns me off mostly. I’m very old fashioned when it comes to this topic. I like to play vinyl, and some CD's in combination with my little sampler and then I’m happy.”

But what about the creative possibilities that open up with computers? Gavin Herlihy is both a gadget geek and a lover of vinyl: “I am a complete retard when it comes to absorbing new technologies. I really struggle with computer manuals yet I can read magazines about computer music production all day long! I changed over to Traktor Scratch almost a year ago and it’s been a real creative push in developing my DJ’ing. I'd rather use Traktor with a pair of CD-Js any day of the week to using vinyl. I still love the experience of buying vinyl though. If a record really touches me then I want to be able to own the vinyl in order to feel connected to the track. But when it comes to DJ’ing I'd rather be able to manipulate the file of the track with an arsenal of technology at my disposal than be inhibited by vinyl's limitations.

MY MUSIC MOMENT - Errorsmith

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:08:55 GMT

A music obsessive to the core, Erik Wiegand is maybe an inconspicuous presence in the vastness of the Berlin electronic scene, but his productions, whether in collaborative projects like MMM, Smith n Hack or under the moniker Errorsmith (his solo project), are anything but low profile. For this issue of My Music Moment, Erik remembers discovering Colombia’s traditional sound whilst on tour with legendary Berlin video artist group, Visomat Inc.

In 2003, Visomat Inc, a VJ crew at that time, were invited to play in Colombia and asked me to join them to make an audio video concert together. I hadn’t been to South America before so I was very excited, especially about the music. While we were there, I listened to the radio a lot and there was this one track that really stood out. It was something of a summer hit in Colombia that year and on heavy rotation. We’d be hearing it every time we got in a cab.

It sounded like no other song they were playing. It had a pounding techno beat composed of carnival street drum samples. Super fast, around 160 BPM in a very ‘in-your-face’ production! Apparently, the song is about a dancing turtle. The singing interlocks with a nice thin sound from wind instruments I’d never heard before. I found out that it was a remix of an acoustic track by Los Alfa 8 called ‘El Baile de la Tortuga’; the original is nice too. I couldn’t find out who made the remix, and I don’t have a good sounding copy of it. In DJ sets I still play out the distorted radio recording I made back then!

During the stay, I found lots of other great music too, mostly traditional. I fell in love with the soulful organ playing of Jaime Llano Gonzalez. On the flea market I bought some Cumbia compilations and even found some superb field recordings of traditional music from Colombia’s Atlantic coast. The fact that I liked the traditional music so much made me wish I had grown up in a country where I could embrace and draw inspiration from the traditions more. I grew up in Germany and to me, most of the good music came, and still does come from far away, not from my homeland. I always thought that’s normal, but during this trip I realised it isn’t. It made me feel I’m missing something.

Alex Paterson / The Orb - Interview

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:55:02 GMT

Do you have any advice on how to stay on top of the music business for so long, how to be popular all the time without making compromises? Was that a question or compliment?

A question. Ok, but thank you anyway. Well, the most important thing is to be true to yourself, to have an audience that appreciates what you do and to have a chance to travel around the world winning new fans. We are not only a British band. Thomas lives in Berlin, I live in London and our collaborators in other places. Therefore we don’t have the London sound and do not reflect the music so typical of that city.

I think that your music is mainly appreciated by sophisticated, adult music fans... (Laughs) Is it really? Which album makes you think that?

All of them do. Don't you think that it is not for kids, who perceive music as just fun? Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because my daughter really loves listening to our music. Her favorite track is Little Fluffy Clouds.

Okay, but I just wanted to ask if you feel that the number of mature fans has been growing over time. In my view it has. It is all about experience. Our music appeals to a lot of fans and a number of people get connected with our world without knowing it, which is great. It's a kind of mystery we didn't even know we could expect. We all have little angels who take care of us. If you are nice to them, they are equally nice to you.

In your opinion, which track on your new album could become a hit like Little Fluffy Clouds or Oxygen? Judging from the reaction of the audience, it could certainly be DDD or Mother Nature.

I agree. I listened to Mother Nature on your MySpace page and it’s very impressive. Did you know that these two tracks would receive such a good response when you were working on them in the studio? Sure I did. The point is that if you work on something in the studio, it’s good to test it at live gigs and then adjust it accordingly. If something works live you can be sure it will also work on the album. I feel good about The Dream album overall. People like it, which always helps you as an artist.

The Orb’s music is largely based on sampling – which sampled sound are you most proud of? It's not so easy to say. I would tell you something and then someone could come running to us asking how we could do it when they didn't even know about it. Anyway, each of the sounds goes through a certain process and is ultimately changed beyond recognition. We are very careful about this. Often, we even compose a whole track based on a certain sample and then take it out completely. This is our favorite method of working and it works.

At the beginning of the 1990s, The Orb defined one style of electronic music. Do you think that you are still an inspiration for your followers or do you look around now to get inspiration from them? It's quite funny that today's music derives a lot of inspiration from the 1980s. People spend a lot of time making the bass sound like that time. But generally speaking, inspiration is a funny thing, really. You can draw it from the entire outside world, even a radio play can transport you into a totally different world. And again – you can sample it and take the samples out of the music at the right time. A lot of old music, such as funk, Led Zeppelin, and T-Rex can be inspirational too. I’m 48 and I really have a lot of experience with the music. As you grow older, you tend to go back in the past, for example to the sound you played with twenty years ago. And this brings many ideas too.

Tell me, how does one manage to live the rather hectic life of a musician for so long? It's a life path. It's not work you can go home from and switch off. Sometimes it’s really extremely difficult, but it is also the only thing I do now and I have ever done. Give me another picture, show me another path, but I very much doubt there is any. I have a good life, I regularly play around the world, and that’s the way I love it. I have nothing to complain about; it’s always about your point of view, so why not taking a positive one. I look forward to all my gigs that lay ahead, including the one in Prague.

Have you thought about how far you are able to stretch your musical limits? Projects such as High Frequency Bandwidth show that I’ve been stretching them all the time. There I do things not everybody would probably expect from me. For example, I sing. And the same goes for Rootmasters – we create a very inorganic sound, so it is again something completely different. We are now going to work on film music for an Austrian director. The limits are and have always been very elastic.

Pole - Interview

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:12:38 GMT

Heavy bass and very strange sounds are dominating a large part of today’s underground music scene. Whether it is dub-step originator Shackleton, Mercury Prize nominee Burial or Ricardo Villalobos, it seems that everyone wants a bit of the dark dub action. Electronic Beats thought then it was time to talk to arguably one of the pioneers of electronic dub music – Pole aka Stefan Betke.

I spent some time with Stephan to talk about genres, keeping on top of new music and how he translates the language of Pole into something club goers can connect with.

First off I asked him about the reasons behind re-releasing his first trilogy of albums;

Well first of all it was the 10-year anniversary of the Pole project. Secondly, the Blue and the Red albums have not been available for 6 years at least, and the Yellow one, the label stopped distributing it about 5 years ago. I really thought about it, and there were so many people asking me if I had copies of the album left, so I thought 10 years, what should I do? Revival tour? No, that doesn’t really work, as I make such different music now. So I thought a re-issue would be great and I got the rights back from Pias, so I was allowed to do that.

Was it pretty simple to get them back? Yeah, it was pretty easy. It was no big deal. I thought it was worth having the records again.

I was aware of your more recent work, but not so much these three albums, and having listened to them I was surprised at how contemporary they feel. Thank you! Haha!

What do you feel about that? Your music is not so easy to put a label on, and I guess you don’t really want to do that anyway? I think most artists of electronic or avant-garde music, or whatever, they don’t want or like names or a brand, or whatever, but it is often so difficult. As you very often have very different points of view, you think you make ‘this’ but most of the people outside of your own circle say, “nah its not electronic dub, its dub techno” or whatever, so every person has a different point of view. I think the people that listen to my music, they should decide what I make, because in the very end, I have a brand, and I can name it because it makes our lives easier to talk about it. I would say I make dubby electronic music, with a big line under dub! But, some other people may call click dub, or avant-garde or even something completely different, but you know I don’t really bother about it that much.

So it’s not actually that important to you - how people categorise your music? Not really no, so long as people can communicate about it and it works. Especially with these first three albums, they were so abstract because the beats were missing. You know if you have a four to the floor bass drum, you can at least say this has something to do with the dancefloor, or if you have a distorted guitar sound you can say it has some rock elements. In this case though, it was so abstract the only comparison you had was Berlin dub techno. That was the only niche where it would fit it.

The kind of stuff coming out on Hardwax? Yeah, this kind of context. Those were the only guys in the city who were dealing with this kind of dubby music and of course they did a totally different style. It was techno, which I didn’t do, but it was in the same context. I was going to the same clubs, hanging out with the same people. I was listening to techno so maybe on the Yellow one there was a small techno influence, but I never thought too much about it, I just made my music, and never thought about what it was. The best was when journalists came up with names for it! That was the ideal situation.

Let someone else to do the hard work?! Exactly! I remember one journalist said to me; “well the Scape label, and what you release is urban dub.” I was like, cool, now we have a name, a brand. We used that for a while, but then dropped it again, so you know…

Do you still listen to a lot of original dub music? There were some nice bits on your Resident Advisor podcast Yeah, I listen to a lot of reggae and dub. It’s not like I permanently listen to that, I listen to a lot of jazz, last year I was listening to a lot of rock music.

Really? - What kind of stuff? I was really impressed with people like TV On The Radio.

OK cool, they are really good! Yeah, it was amazing all these guitar sounds; I was really influenced by these kinds of guitar bands.

Do you like people like Battles? Yeah, I have actually played with them at a few festivals.

Your music is very abstract so I am really interested in what other types of music you listen to. There is obviously a big reggae and dub influence, but what else inspires you? Well I listen a to a lot of house and techno, as well as hip-hop. A lot of the Warp catalogue is really interesting right now. I have never been focused on one genre. I mean, I love deep bass sounds, and I love effect units, so it makes sense that when I produce my own music that I use the elements out of music that I like most, so a heavy bassline will always be in there, and there will always be a delay in the sounds somewhere. My latest work is not even that dubby like it used to be. I am very open. There are too many interesting genres, and too many really good projects and bands out there to not be interested in them.

Of course. Do you find it harder to find the music that you like, as there is so much new stuff coming out? Well, like you say, firstly there is the problem to listen to all of the new music coming out. I mean, who has the time? Secondly because of that, you miss a lot of the really good records that you might really like, and then you simply cannot find something in the stack of white labels!

Yeah, I sometimes worry I have missed something amazing, or I heard something great, and cannot find it again! Absolutely! I try to compensate this, by talking to friends more. I find people saying more, “did you find anything good last week, did you listen to any interesting or good new music?” and the answer is always the same; “not really, I’m not sure, I still have 50 records to listen to!” I mean, as a label owner, I get sent a lot of records, and of course now mp3s, at least 20 a day. Then I also go record shopping if I have the time, or I go on-line and listen to records. Sometimes I am simply lost, and it is a problem, for sure, but, it’s our business to find out way around it, to be more open minded to organise ourselves a bit better. It creates a kind of nervous life though!

Can you summarise how your sound is different to 10 years ago? I know that’s a pretty tough question! Yeah, it is! One element of the Pole project was to create a unique way of producing electronic music, and one part of that is that you have to go forward. You should not stop, just because you have one formula that works. I could of course have just done another Yellow album, and another, and probably it would have been successful, but it is not in my interest, it bores me personally if I just stay on the same step and don’t move forward. So, what I always try and do is keep certain elements in my music, and then change and develop other elements. Sometimes this doesn’t always work, like with the hip-hop record I tried.

The one with Fat John? Yeah, that was not the ideal record because now, having listened to it again, I think I stopped to early with it, the whole record. There was some really nice ideas, but not very well executed.

So, with the next album I stepped back; the Steingarden album, it was way more dry, much more concrete.

Less liquid sounding like the first trilogy? Yeah exactly, liquid is a good word. The next one will be even drier! It keeps me on track, and motivates me in the studio.

Do you produce every day? If I am here, yeah.

Do you treat it like a day job? I try to. Sometimes it doesn’t work so well, you cannot force yourself to have an idea, but I try to go to the studio every day and try. There are always things I can be doing in the studio; stuff for Scape, there is always lots to do so I am in the studio every day, even if I am not producing.

There was a big gap for you in 2004-2007, was there a reason for that? Well there was a big gap after the Yellow album as well, as I had spent so much time touring with it, so I just needed a break anyway. Then there were also some personal reasons, but then with this one it was maybe the same again, as I was touring a lot, and then I was in the studio. I was a bit scared that the same would happen with the next album, as with the Fat John one, so I just took a bit more time, just to be sure. It could have been finished a year earlier.

How do you feel about playing live? I am guessing you perform mainly in clubs, so do you tailor your set, because generally speaking your music is not really aimed at the dancefloor. My music has never been aimed at the dancefloor.

No, so that’s why I wonder how it fits into a club environment? The funny thing is in the old days; with the Yellow album, I was regularly booked into techno festivals in between Christian Vogel and Richie Hawtin for example! I don’t know why I was booked for those kind of gigs, but for whatever reason it worked. I mean of course I played for 45 minutes, not for like 3 hours. At that time, in the late 90s, people were much more open to these kind of breaks, but now that’s just not possible. It has to be four to floor all of the time.

You’re right, I wish people were still so open…. Well we have tried a couple of time, but people don’t like it. They get angry and leave the room!

So what I do, is I fake a little bit, fake the dance music. I give the feeling that you are hearing a four/four beat, but you are not, it is never there.

How do you do that? Haha! I don’t want to tell you; it’s my secret! The first time I did this was in Fabric in May this year, playing just before Kode-9 in the main room. I was scared if it would work, but it did, and it was great!

I am intrigued… I mean what I am doing live, I guess is influenced a little bit by dub-step, but it is a lot slower than dub-step, more of a house tempo but programmed in a way that works well on the dancefloor which makes me happy.

So I guess it is an extra challenge for you as an artist? Yeah as I am interested in different genres, why can’t I use elements from the dancefloor? I still want people to listen to my music, and if we don’t have ambient rooms anymore, then I have to see how I can introduce myself to the audience, using different types of production. I would never do a straight techno record, I would not prostitute myself or whatever, but I can still work around that, and stay within the language of Pole. I am allowed to jump around a bit.

So how did you come to work with Shackelton? Well of course I am following dub-step, and in this case it was pretty simple as I was lucky enough to get sent some of their records, I mean that was a long time ago though.

What the early Skull Disco stuff? Yeah, and some other bits, some of Pinch’s stuff, and I was playing these out on Radio Eins, mixing them with dub and reggae seven inches, and it worked really really well. So he [Shakleton] heard this, and got in touch asking if I was interested in doing a remix, which was funny as I was just putting together a remix project of my own. So I did one for him, and he did one for me.

You run a mastering studio as well. How does that work? Do you work with all kinds of music, or just what you are interested in? No, that is a normal company, so anyone can hire us. Of course because of my musical history, we have a lot of electronic artists, but we do punk records for example as well. We are just a normal mastering studio. I have for example a punk group from the south of Germany, who have come to us for years with quarter inch tape and these 2 or 3 minute tracks, which is you know, a bit different for me!

Pole’s first three albums – Red, Blue and Yello are available as a 3 in 1 digipack now.

Graham Massey / Sisters Of Transistor - Interview

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:06:58 GMT

The Sisters Of Transistor is the latest project of Graham Massey, one of the founding fathers of Techno as we know it today. His latest adventure however is poles apart from 808 State. Here, he joins forces with four organists for a baroque horror disco extravaganza, complete with harmonised singing matching outfits and a rather camp sensibility.

So how did this project come about? It’s quite different. Well, me and Mandy Wigby, who is one of the organists, talked quite often about doing a project that was, well let’s say we share a love of horror sound tracks, things like Goblin and Dario Argento type movies and John Carpenter, that kind of thing, and we have always talked about doing something. At the same time I collected synths and stuff from the 808 state thing for years. I have got into some of the more obscure areas of keyboard collecting, which is like 60’s organs and stuff, like the transistor ones, called combo organs. Those are the things, which we used in the Sisters. We don’t use Hammonds or anything like that. They have to be Italian sounding, a particular sound.

So you only use obscure organs? Yeah, most people would know like the Doors, the most famous usage of organs, but yeah I have collected about 14 or so. They break down all the time, so we have loads of broken ones, and ones that are slightly out of tune, and stuff. It’s quite a challenge to keep four running and in tune with each other!

So is it just four organs in your live set up? For the bass, we have found that we can use a synthesiser for that, just to give it a bit more bottom end, cause you know, we are a keyboard band.

But you have live drums as well? Yeah, that was the other part of the deal. I have just taken up drums over the last couple of years. I am just a beginner really and it was a deal that I got to play the drums!

So this was your idea, the project? How did you come to work with the other 4 girls? You seem to take a back seat in the image of the band. Yeah, well, I wanted to play the drums really, it’s not a matter of a backseat or whatever, that’s what I wanted do. I wanted to do the drums. Then, because Mandy was already an organist, she used to be in Lion Rock for instance, and she’s been in bands around Manchester for a while, she bought a friend of hers in who she met on a music project, who used to play what Dakota Oak trio. So a lot of the girls have been in bands in Manchester before, apart from one, that just started learning keyboards. So we have one complete beginner as well!

How does that work working with such a range of experiences? Well, I write it on the computer, I’m very much a one fingered guy on the keyboard. We do have the real keyboardists though, just local Manchester musicians really. There’s quite a social group of musicians in Manchester, we all stick in together really. So long as everyone could give up their Tuesday afternoons to rehearse, that was OK.

So how long have you being playing together, when did you start doing shows? About a year in all. It happened quite quickly. It started off just as a bit of fun really. One of those mad projects you dream up in the pub, and then set out about executing it really. There was never anything initially. We already had this equipment, these parameters, so we could go about seeing what we could do with it. That kind of dictates the kind of music that comes out it. Which is why some of it is quite baroque sounding. When you are writing for four keyboards, you’re going to have to find lots of intertwining lines .You know, it does get quite ornate. That’s why we came up with the idea of baroque disco!

The disco element was quite a surprise, as when we started off we were almost doing a pseudo-classical sort of thing, like you might find on Moog records, which was quite a good starting point for us.

Am I right in thinking you have some ‘classics in your repertoire? Yeah! We started off doing quite a lot of covers, but now we are playing mostly our own compositions, now we have got into it a little bit. We just needed a starting point.

Organ quartets were around bit in the 50’s weren’t they? Well, the first thing I heard about an organ quartet, what stuck in my mind, why it should be a project, was the Steve Reich piece - the minimalist, called Four Organs. I always used to see the cover of that album and that was a really appealing. That was the seed of the idea planted in my head. Also an organ quartet, called the Apparat Quartet, from Iceland. They didn’t quite sound like what I had in my head, so it was just another excuse to try and set off on our own version of that.

And how are people reacting to it live? Well, after doing a number of gigs, we found the dancey element of it. The more we have carried on, the more the club stuff has stayed and some of the other stuff has fallen away. Having said that we do quite a lot of other stuff, we don’t want to be just some disco outfit.

There has been lot of Goblin type influences over the last couple of years, but you seemed to have taken it in a completely different direction. Well if you take, 808 State, I have been doing keyboard based music for a long time now. So it’s not such a big jump for me, it does relate to techno or whatever.

Are you going to do an album? Yeah, we have most of it done already, taken from our live set, but you know there are things you can do on an album, that you can’t do live. I am quite interested to see how the album will turn out yet.

When is it going to be released? We are aiming for early next year, February, March, that kind of thing.

So what is it like working in a band with four girls? Do they boss you around? Well, I have been working with 808 state for many years, and its certainly very different. That is a very male environment, its very blokey, very Mancunian, as you can probably imagine! This is a lot more… well, the atmosphere is completely different. For instance, we had a band meeting the other day, which consisted of sitting round, eating cake, and sitting for a couple of hours signing tokens. It’s slightly less rock and roll, but it’s very enjoyable.

I suppose that makes it different creatively then? Yeah it’s a different energy, to a male thing all of the time. And a lot of the music I do is quite aggressive. With some of the other projects I do, it’s all about peaking music, very, erm hammering things home. Whereas with the Sisters, it’s very much a different energy that brings out different things in me, as far writing goes anyway, definitely.
Interview by Gareth Owen

Luke Solomon - Interview

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:57:58 GMT

Luke Solomon has been flying the flag for house music (of the bumping jacking variety) for as long as I can remember. With his band the Freaks, alongside Stella Attar, Justin Harris and Johnny Rock they bought underground house to the masses with their massive single; The Creeps. Classic Recordings, and its sister imprint Music For Freaks, set up with long term friend and collaborator Derrick Carter, were THE benchmark labels for house that was just as much London as it was Chicago. Unfortunately Classic closed its doors in 2006, succumbing to the financial pressures that plagued the whole industry.

Now Classic are back with a whole load of back catalogue remixes, some exciting new projects, and that’s just for starters.

So Luke, what have you been up to? Are you still DJ’ing a lot? Yeah! Every weekend still. I do try and be a bit more selective about what I do and when I do it, and how long I go away for because of family commitments. I also have lot of studio commitments.

Is that stuff with Freaks? Yeah a lot of stuff with Freaks, it’s taking up quite a major part of my life at the moment, just because we are trying to get a record deal and we’ve got a whole load of new stuff we’ve just written. We have just finished our last [writing] session so we are in demo mode at the moment, trying to get a decent A&R man on board and a label behind us. Taking it into a new era I guess.

How are you finding that? A lot has changed since Freaks were last around. Erm, it’s a tricky one really. From a writing side of things we have gone through a lot of incarnations as well as writing a new album when the label was being wound down; all of those financial issues affected our creativity quite a lot of course. Then there was the whole dance music not being very popular, battles with that, what can we do, where can we go. Then with Creeps becoming a top ten record, it kind of bought us some time to go back to the drawing board a bit, rediscover out roots again be a bit quirky and electronic, and a bit mad! This time we have tried to write songs with a proper top line, and a take a more pop approach to our lyrics and music and our arrangements; so it’s almost like a new lease of life for Stella and myself. We are quite excited with what we have come up with. Whether anyone is going to get it is, well… that’s another story.

Well, I think there are enough Freaks fans out there. Haha, I hope so! I think more to the point is that there is an A&R man out there that will get it, otherwise I guess we are just going to end up doing it ourselves, which seems to be a common thing for a lot of artists nowadays anyway.

I think so. There seems to be less money in the pot to go round. Exactly - It’s a hard time for everyone.
I was just reading Morgan Geist’s interview on Resident Advisor and he seems very miserable about the state of things. Haha, well maybe Morgan does take things a bit too personally, but you know when you are doing your own thing, which is exactly what Morgan does, it’s hard, it’s a battle. You want to be heard and for people to love your music, but if you are not being heard or ‘got’ because the people selling your music don’t know how to sell it, then it’s a real a struggle and I really feel for people like that.

It’s definitely a difficult time, but something has got to change. Well, they have, but to be honest I think they are already. One of the things we are looking at is the whole branding aspect. A lot of companies like Absolut or Bacardi are getting behind bands and musicians a lot more than the actual record companies and in a lot of respects there might be something to be said for that. I think the days of the major record label are really numbered. When you are a brand and you are not relying on an artist to make your money, you can support that artist.

It kind of makes it all about the music again, even though on the face of it, that doesn’t make sense [Working with a brand and not a record label]. Definitely. I think there are some good options there and it’s a bit all or nothing, so we are just going to see how it goes. We are just going to throw a lot of things up in the air and see what happens!

So is the new [Freaks] stuff going to be on Music For Freaks, or is it going to be on Classic? No, we are just waiting to see what happens – Domino are interested in possibly signing us. Whether that’s a long shot or not, I don’t know. If we had those guys behind us, that would be amazing.

So tell me a little bit more about how Classic Recordings came back to life? I know the musical landscape moved against you… [Classic succumbed to financial pressures and closed its doors in 2006] Well, I think it was a number of things. Erm the financial side of things took its toll on all of us. There were a lot of friends and family involved with label, and I think we all just needed to step away from, it in order to retain friendships, and forget for a while about how bills were going to get paid and all of that shit. I just wanted to be an artist, not a businessman, and that is what I had turned into…

No one gets into music for that! No, no, no…! Originally it was just for fun, and free drinks, and yeah it changed quite dramatically, and I think we had all just had enough. So we all just stepped back and did our own thing for a while. It took us quite a long time to clear up the fall-out and the mess from it all. Then it took me a bit of time to find where I was at creatively, and what I wanted to do and being happy in the studio. Actually being a proper producer and things like that. I dunno, things have gone full circle again, house music is in vogue again, which is not why we did it [re-launched Classis Recordings], but I think there is a whole generation of kids that grew up with Classic, and discovering there is a lot of respect for the label, that’s quite flattering. It is almost adapting to that and giving this whole new generation a platform to put out their music, or their take on the catalogue. That’s kind of where Derrick and me are at with it. We wanted to show err, we are still down with the kids hahahahha!!!

Was it that you were discovering new artists, or were you talking about starting the label again anyway? Yeah, I mean I am excited by a lot of the music that is around right now. If I were to start a new label from scratch there would be a lot of producers who I would approach for music. For a while people got a distracted by making fashionable music and listening too much to what journalists told them, instead of just thinking; I just want to make music I like. You know people like Matthew Johnson, Guillaume And The Coutu Dumonts, Henrick Schwarz, are for me at the pinnacle of this new generation. Just hearing what they are doing and coming into their own is quite exciting. Seth Troxler as well, people like that. Coupled with the fact the digital side of the industry has really kicked off now and found its ground. We have noticed that there has been a real surge in sales. That means we can invest a little bit more money back in to the label, whether that’s new music or whatever…

I really like the Rob Mello remix. Yeah, the Fabrice Lig remix? Yeah, I like what Fabrice is doing at the moment.

There is definitely a house revival on. Some of the more interesting stuff I am hearing right now is on a definite house tip. Exactly, and production is changing; it’s much easier for a producer to have a shit hot studio on their house, and sonically make things sound great which is really interesting.

So is Classic re-launching digitally only? We are going to do some kind of collectors samplers, where we put or favourites on to vinyl and spread that across a few records and make it a bit more collectable and possibly coloured or something, were it is a just a case of breaking even. We maybe want to take a bit artier.

That sounds a good idea; add some more value to the vinyl. Yeah, you know I still buy a lot of vinyl, but to be honest, with a lot of modern music, unless it is an album I really want, I generally download my music and buy it from Beatport or Stompy or wherever. I have also digitized my whole collection…

Whoah…. Yeah, it feels like a bit of a step backwards, and there are still some die-hards out there, lugging vinyl around, with an aching back, but you know I can’t afford it anymore. It’s just not possible to travel every weekend with all that vinyl and make it financially viable. It’s too difficult.

So where do you see Classic fitting in? Is it just going to be supporting new artists, or a platform for other stuff? Well there are a couple of things coming up that me and Derrick, one way or another, have managed to secure. It’s gonna be a surprise, there are a couple of quite unusual things we are obviously doing remixes of, and highlighting. There are some things we are really excited about. There is actually a Freaks record coming out, which is a Robert Owens collaboration that we did a couple of years ago. We have had some remixes done and it’s quite close to us that record. We wanted to get it out and let the kids know we haven’t sold out! We are still, in our hearts, flying the flag!

So I know you have a hectic DJ schedule, are you still going out and hearing new music? Well, it’s difficult having a kid, and I maybe wouldn’t go out now just to hear certain DJ, but I do keep my ear very close to the ground. If I am playing at AKA or The End, I make a real effort to go and hear the other DJs, so I know what is going on around me for sure.

Producer wise, Kink, I have been following him quite closely, and BOE the label he is releasing on are doing some really interesting stuff. Matthew Herbert is doing some really good stuff, Guillaume and The Coutu Dumonts, again. Crosstown [Rebels] are doing some good stuff again. Radioslave as well. Some of Layo and Bushwhacker’s new stuff. A lot of these guys have had a new lease of life and that’s really cool for me; the way it should be.

I am just about to start producing Radioslave’s new single actually.

Really? I am really into what he is doing. We are actually spending next week in the studio. Matt is coming over here and we are going to do something with a full vocal, a very Yello influenced record, almost like a Radioslave signature tune. I have just finished producing Damian Lazarus new album as well…

What’s that sound like? Aah, its pretty out there! I actually love it. For me, it’s something I have really enjoyed being part of; I think it’s a real pivotal point for me. It’s something I am really proud to part of, but its very avant-garde!

So not particularly dancefloor focused? Nah, well, there are a couple of bits on there, I means it’s quite dark, but I just like the fact he is experimenting a lot. His whole take on electronic music. I think people are either going to love it, or hate it!

Well, there is nothing worse than indifference! No exactly. I am more inclined though to become more of a proper producer, instead of just being a bedroom producer! I have actually got a decent studio now, and I am going to go and sit with some pretty well known pop producers and be ‘tea boy’ for a while and learn from the ground up again. So that’s my long term aspiration.

One last question…..what is the symbol on Classic label? Is that a dog? (Lots of laughing) It’s an elephant!

It is?! Hahaha, no! It’s actually Wind, the winged statue of victory, taken from behind. The goddess of wind!

Classic Recordings first new release, Fabrice Lig’s remix of Critical by Rob Mello is out now….

Interview by Gareth Owen

Neonman - Waiting For The Man - Interview

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Neonman is an Anglo-German partnership, in which the only thing they can definitely agree on is a mutual love for Guns N’ Roses (a rare thing and coincidently a love shared by their interviewer). They have just released their second album on Berlin’s guardian of new talent, Pale Music. With a sound somewhere between guitars and electronics, but closer to the former, they have certainly changed a lot since their early days releasing electroclash on Gigolo.

How did you meet and how long have you guys been in Berlin?
Bastian: I came in here in 2000.

Ben: Yeah in 2000 – 2001 we met at work – I came here in 1999. I’m a trained graphic designer and it was the beginning of the internet boom when I moved here. So, I taught myself HTML and internet in three months and managed to talk myself into the job at Dollar Man, which made pop music videos. Bastian was working there too and one day he just came up to me and said ‘I heard you’re into music – here’s one of my mix tapes’ – back in those days it was - I dare say - more trip-hop.

Bastian Yeah, it was on a mini-disk in those days!!
Ben: Yeah, I am a DJ as well and that’s the background I came from in London. So Bastian said if you like electronic music, listen to my mix tape. It was in that weird void time of 1999 and 2001 when everything had gone a bit strange. Especially here in Berlin, everything had gone a bit Jazzanova and people in suits. We were both moaning about the musical state at that time, so when I took Bastian’s mix tape home, I thought yeah, this is alright, it’s quite funny – so I got out my old microphone and recorded some vocals over the top of it onto another mini-disk, gave that back to Bastian, who then went on and sampled it on an Atari ST and the first track was born! Which was shit, probably.

Bastian: Yeah, pretty shit!

How long have you been into music? Was this when you started making music?

Bastian: No, no I was doing a lot of stuff – house stuff – I was writing and then computers came along and I found them very intriguing, so started to do basic things like samples on Ataris.

So how long ago was this – about nine years ago?

Ben: God yeah, it must have been! When we did that first track it was all really just for a laugh – I’d never even sung anything before. So we were like “yeah I fancy a bit of that!” So when we started producing things together, our main aim was to make the most offensive music possible – lyrically and sonically!

Bastian: You have to remember back in those days it was completely covered with dope RnB and American artists – I mean they do great stuff and everything, but after a while it was all too much. And then there were all the chill out albums and the jazzy Brazilian albums for people in suits at the time of the economic boom who could afford the expensive drinks – it was shit! So we tried to make something that was totally tasteless and different.

Ben: I mean then, at that time, even on a Saturday night at ZMF, there was loads of house and techno because in 2000, techno sort of lost its way and so did house music – like that ‘Sing It Back’ song from Moloko – it was like playing at every party! So, from making this horrible electronic music, next thing, we were watching Fischerspooner at their first live gig in Berlin, and this was long before the term electroclash had ever been used. We then became a large part of that scene in Berlin. So we had our four tracks, then we met this man about town and he managed to arrange our first gig – this was the first time I was ever on stage with a microphone in my hand. It was at E-Werk at Love Parade, and I remember the line-up well: Ricardo Villalobos, Steve Bug, DJ rock from Gigolo. It was also the first ever live gig! So we went on in front of 800 ravers with four songs playing from CD!

Bastian: It went all right. I mean the whole concept then was to take the money, be as successful as possible without out knowing anything about it. We purposely didn’t even rehearse! It was a legendary techno venue and everyone was really educated on their techno, but somehow we did it!

Ben: It was all very crass and tasteless and we never imagined that project would become Neonman and all of a sudden we had people from Sony BMG and all these record labels in the Far East saying they were interested in our stuff. Our MP3s had somehow got onto the internet and people were downloading them and they were being played in clubs! There was one called ‘Riot-Ache’ with lyrics like “boys in black boys in blue – don’t like the look of you” (laughs). It was all really funny, and then there were people offering us money and pills. This was in 2002 and we started signing record deals, obviously there was never any real money at this stage - we were still dreaming that might happen one day! So we started to take it a bit more seriously and would meet regularly and write – we both didn’t have washing machines at that point, so every Monday we would meet at the laundrette and write songs.

Bastian: Yeah, so eventually, after releasing a few of the songs on 12”, we had an album!

Ben: After all that, we discovered our love of rock songs – everything had gone a bit electronic, I guess it was a knee jerk reaction.

Bastian: We were being different cause of whatever was going around us. We were tired out, we’d been doing it for so long. So when we play live now, we have a live band – drums and guitars – that wouldn’t really go down well at a techno club these days. I play guitar, but we have a backing track still.

Ben: So now with this new album, we haven’t totally lost the electronic side to our music, it’s just a bit more in the background now than before when it was in the front.

Bastian: Electronic music doesn’t always give you a lot of room to let you say what you want to say and now we want to be able to have our say.

Ben: Now we get angry about various political things and things on our doorstep and we wouldn’t be able to express this on a nice techno track. I want to tell it in a song to get it off my chest! After writing it and practising it over and over again, it’s out of my system for good!

So how long have you been working on the album?

Bastian: About two years – it takes a long time, what with writing and record companies. It should have been ready nine months ago. Don’t sign a contract – that’s our advice to anyone out there thinking of doing the same!

Ben: We pretended it was a concept album when it first started, as some of the songs are dance and some are rock – it’s not a concept album really. There’s no concept of a story running through it – it’s just bullshit really, we’re having a laugh and doing it for fun!

Knights of Error out now on Pale Music

Monika Kruse - Interview

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Monika Kruse, is one of Germanys biggest DJ’s, playing a mix of high-energy techno and house to clubbers all over the world. From humble beginnings, DJ’ing in a local bar, she soon made the step to organising her own raves, everywhere from abandoned bunkers, to not quite abandoned military bases. Her profile as a DJ continued to grow, as she was booked for bigger and bigger clubs, culminating her being voted Germany’s 4th best DJ by the readers of Raveline.

So this is your second album? No actually it’s my first solo album. I did 2 albums under the name GTMK but this time I wanted to do something just by myself.

Was it something you’ve wanted to do for a long time? Your DJ career goes back a long way. When did you decide you wanted to move into solo production? Well, It was a wish for a long time of course, but time went by and I had some personal problems that took a while to solve and get over. Then I had to get the power and the energy to get back to myself. It was one of my biggest dreams to do a solo project.

Are you pleased with it? Yeah of course! As an artist if you do a track you can work on it forever! It got to a point when I said; “that’s it.” I’m excited; I hope the people like it too.

I know it’s a pain in the ass to listen to, with the spoilers, but it’s already on the net and. . .

That’s one of the things I was going to ask you about: MP3s and digital distribution. Being a DJ do you play with MP3s? I still play with vinyl because I love vinyl. The music is more real. For example if a play a CD with it’s like grrr, silver, nothing! Sometimes if I look at the title on a CD I’m like what is this? But when you have vinyl you can look at it and see the image or colour and know that a track you want is on it, a kind of visual connection. Vinyl is still in my heart, but I suppose one day I’m going to spin only CDs. For now though, I think well I have a record label and I put out records, so I have to support vinyl!

How do you feel about your music being available on the Internet? Well I mean of course I get pissed off with people sharing files for nothing. They don’t respect the work behind it. As a musician you have to put a lot money into your studio, put a lot of time into your music. Exchanging files for free means “we don’t have respect for your music” that’s my opinion. They [illegal file sharers] don’t know the artist they want to listen to first, but then I say if you really like the track listen to it a couple of times, then buy it.

It seems a lot of people now have an expectation that because of the Internet, they should be able to get music for free.For me now that is my biggest gripe, like I have less time, so you give something from your life through the music and people don’t respect it.

So you don’t download music yourself then?! No of course not! Sometimes people give me CD of an album, but then I go to the store and I buy the album! Sometimes even if I get the downloads from the album that I really like, I still go out and buy it on vinyl.

I prefer vinyl myself but it seems there are so many digital DJs around at the moment. Yeah there’re so many young DJs now and vinyl doesn’t mean anything to them...

People who produce the music want people to play on vinyl, but the people that want the music don’t want to pay all the money for vinyl so there’s a conflict. The good thing about digital downloads is that people in countries who really can’t afford to buy records, where there isn’t that choice, then it’s good to have some digital platforms where they can get the music. Every side has its pros and cons.

It was your birthday a while ago, and you played at Berghain? Yeah I played a couple of days after my birthday we had an amazing party haha! I left the club at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but then went onto another club. It was really great I had my friends playing there like Heartthrob, Tony Rohr playing live and Gregor Tresher. That was his first time playing at Berghain.

And you worked with Gregor on the album? Yeah that’s right, he was co-producer on the album – so it was like a little family around me, it was fun! And I love Berghain, it’s an amazing club I always call it my living room. I feel at home there, I can go there just for a little drink. It’s like if I play, I still like to dance; if you play somewhere and your finish your set you cannot have a dance afterwards as people want to talk to you and it’s impossible.

Have you always had this connection with Berghain? It was another club before called Ostgut before, but I never went there that much. I played there once. In the first month of Berghain I was going there as much as I could!

Let’s talk about you new album. It’s called Changes Of Perception and is quite different from what you’ve been doing. Is that where the title came from? Well I’ve changed musically over the years, more than one time, because as you get older you change or get bored of one style, as it’s not evolving anymore; I always need a challenge. I was getting kind of well known with loopy techno and after a while I sort of got bored as the records all started to sound the same. So I thought hey OK I can play these records from 5 years ago, but is it going to be interesting? No! And then with other productions and systems, new sounds and plug-ins, it became really interesting with new influences within minimal techno and other parts of electronic music. I found it more interesting for me with this kind of style. I was open-minded after buying techno to drum & bass, chill-out and vocal house, everything that I really liked. I thought hey I’m bored let’s make a change. Not so hardcore, so it got slower and slower and slower. So that’s where the name came from.

I wanted to give it a personal touch as I’ve changed over the years, not really as a person, but by the way I see things which is normal; you get older you get wiser, you understand more about life about situations and why people behave in certain ways. It’s like an expression for musical change or doing live music for me is in my soul. You can put a lot of ideas inside.

Listening to your old stuff and then the new album you can really hear the change. Did you plan write an album or was it just a collection of ideas you already had? Of course I had some ideas that I wanted to express on the album, my love for different styles. I’m influenced by Chicago house, Detroit techno as well as dark monotone techno and acid. So, I said I don’t only want to have one style. Even when I DJ and always play different styles. That was the main idea, but I couldn’t bring all of what I really like about electronic music together, or there would be a drum & bass track on it, a dub track. I just put the most important styles on the album.

It’s not a collection of 12 inches but all of the tracks could be used on the dance floor, do you agree? I liked a lot of the percussive sounds. Me too. I really like bongos, tribal sounds. I had one colleague I worked with in the studio and he called me tribal Monica haha! I was like “you have to put this and that sound in”. Maybe I still am influenced by funk or meringue. I really like African music with all the different elements, so that’s kind of one of my roots.

How is working with someone else producing the album? Did it make it harder or easier for you? Umm, easier because I always come to a point when I produce by myself that I doubt what I do. If I work by myself there’s always a point when I say is this any good, shall I leave it, put more energy or time into it? It’s nice to have someone I can ask ‘is it good, is there more I can do? Shall we go on?’ In the past I had not so much time to work in my own studio because I lost connection with things; synthesisers, new programmes. To be a good producer you always have to be ahead of time. So I knew Gregor from earlier productions, we did some records on Intacto, and Terminal under the GTMK and it worked very well. I wanted to work with someone who could do what I wanted, be it reverb or particular sounds. It is hard to find a producer who can really hold himself back, and just do what I ask.

What does the future hold? Next year I am going to do a new mix, but I really want to develop some new artists on my label [Terminal M]. I have decided to have not so many artists on the label. I want to have a family. That is one of my biggest aims, to find young talented artists who are consistently producing good music. Then we can on tour as the Terminal M family!

Danny Tenaglia - Interview

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 GMT

One of the most successful New York DJ’s who broke out of the city in the early 90’s, Danny Tenaglia, has championed both the tribal sound, and the mammoth set. With a new residency in Ibiza’s cathedral of decadence, Space, and a mix to match Danny Tenaglia managed to find a very quick five minutes to chat with Electronic Beats;

How is going in Ibiza? Amazingly. I've been playing for over 5,000 people each week! I'm happy to call Space home.

The new mix is titled 'Futurism', but contains a broad selection of older & newer tracks. Were you picking tracks with a futuristic feel, even if they are not recent? Nothing on there is quite "old": No Garage classics or anything like that! I selected tracks that convey what my sets are like now, in 2008, which happens to be, in my thinking, a very futuristic time.

Do trends in dance music affect you? Trends themselves don't affect me, but I am tremendously affected and influenced by how producers use new technologies to make amazing sounds. Throughout my career, that has always been what's bridged me from one sound to the next. In the '90s, when most of New York was playing anthems with big snare build-ups, I was discovering Maurizio and Basic Channel and those types of minimal German grooves.

How do you continue to be inspired? The music! The artists that make up my history are continually inspiring, as are new producers, like Luca Bacchetti, Radio Slave, Davide Squillace. Dubfire's recent reinvention is exciting too.

You are famous for mammoth sets - which goes against the current trend for 2 hour slots. Is it harder to get clubs to give you free reign over the decks for up to 20 hours? Lately we've been reserving marathons for extra-special occasions only. If every gig I played was 20 hours, I'd be a very tired DJ! Clubs are generally very willing to let me play for as long as I'd like, but an ideal set time for me these days is four hours: Just enough for a memorable journey.

What does tribal mean to you? Do you like the tag? What's there not to love about tribal? Tribal is drums, percussion, some element of darkness. The first four tracks of "Futurism" CD One are very much my tribal side.

How have you incorporated new technologies into you set? I use my Macbook Pro to organize my music files, and will be moving to a software program like Traktor from Native Instruments in the near future, but for now I stick to CDs.

MYSPACE OF THE MONTH - July 2008

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 GMT

We like the Internet and all the cool people, places and things you can find on it. It has never been easier to show your ideas and have a platform for your creations whether that’s underground Techno, street war games or just random stuff.

Here for your enjoyment are a selection of clips that have been making the Electronic Beats team push that deadline back just a little bit more. If you want to suggest a profile for next month's list, please send the link to online@electronicbeats.net . Contribution that make the list wil be rewarded!

MySpace Of The Month July 2008:

Eskimo Recordings

We at Electronic Beats have a soft spot for all things with a Disco flavour. Eskimo Recordings it would seem do too. Their output just now is propably the strongest it has ever been for this Ghent based label. Re-issues of classic New Beat (Allez Allez) - Check. Slowed down soundscapes (Low Motion Disco) - Check. Crazy, out-there Cosmic Disco - (Cosmic Disco and Cosmic Rock compilations) - Check. Not got any Eskimo recordings? Where have you been...

Finger Magazine

Another magazine? No, all your electronic music and lifestyle leeds are catered for by Electronic Beats right? Right! Except, we don't usually get to find out the inane information that finger mag get their rocks off to. Want to know what Candi Stanton likes for breakfast? What music Villalobos puts on after a heavy weekend spinning Minimal to the masses? It's all here. In list form. And nothing else. Genius.

Charlie Brooker

OK - this is this months curve ball. The Guardian is the only newspaper worth reading in the UK. In western Europe in fact. Fact. That is not up for discussion. The reason? Well, apart from an intelligent, balanced editorial a strong social conscience and coverage of news stores, important though oft overlooked by their peers, is Charlie Brooks. Their star columnist who takes all of the morals of the paper he works for, screws them up and makes toilet with them. This is his myspace. The voice of reason in a crazy country. Blogs, videos, and general ranting. And when you have finished there - www.guardian.co.uk. 'Charlie Brooker'

Senor Coconut - Put the lime in the coconut - Interview

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Uwe Schmidt, has been making Latin influenced music as Senor Coconut for over 10 years, but it wasn’t always cha-cha and bossa nova for the Frankfurt native. A drum kit, EBM and acid house all appear in a musical career that has seen him release work under 40 different aliases. On his latest album, Around the World, he takes club music ‘standards’ such as Sweet Dreams and White Horse, and gives them a once over with the Latin treatment. However Electronic Beats wanted to dig a bit deeper and find out a little bit more about where the mysterious Mr, ahem, Senor Coconut came from.

What was the first record you bought? Your background intrigues me! Well, that’s a tricky question. I think I bought my first record when I was ten, Sesame Street or something you know!! Haha! So, the answer to that would not really very substantial you know.

OK, So what was the first record that was important to you? When did you first start to listen to music consciously? I started to listen to music consciously when I was about 13 or 14, at the beginning of he ‘80’s, when electronic music was going mainstream, like the second or third wave of electronic music. After Kraftwerk and the whole seventies thing, which was a period of experimentation for these musicians; David Bowie, Brian Eno these kind of people. Then there was a moment when this was exploited with New Romantics, that kind of thing. At the time I just listened to mainstream radio stuff which was rock, not so much electronic, some punk, stuff like Adam And The Ants for example which I really liked. Back then, looking at it, it was a strange choice. Then, from there, there was a whole wave of electronic stuff that popped up like Visage. It was mainly stuff from the UK. It was nothing left-field. Depeche Mode, Ultravox, that kind of stuff, popular and mainstream. What got me was the different sound it had, I had two bigger brothers, who were listening to seventies rock, progressive stuff, my parents were into normal German pop music, which was, well still is really boring. So that was my background, and then suddenly there is something different coming out of the radio, which was drum machines and synthesisers, and of course they had different looks and a different attitude. I found that very interesting, and I switched, from the early guitar wave stuff, to the electronic sound.

So how did you take this interest in music, to then creating music? I began to make music around the same period I guess, ’82 or ‘83, because someone told me that when I was drumming along to music on the table with my fingers that you’re actually playing an instrument and I said “no!” but that was the moment when I thought maybe I could play an instrument. I was like twelve and was interested in just trying that out. So I convinced my parents to buy me a drum kit, and I just played drums in the basement, just playing by myself, I never played in bands, or with any one else, I just played for myself.

So you just drummed alone? Yeah, well I wanted to learn, so I listened to music, to tapes and tried to learn the rhythms just to entertain myself. I never really had plans to be a musician.

Then, I started to get into drum machines, with Heaven 17, that whole pop thing. The way they programmed the drum machine for example, I was like wow! What’s that? I can’t play that! And that was really what I wanted to do. So when I was 15 or so maybe, I sold the drum kit. I was still at school, I had no money of course. So I just managed to get a little bit of money together, and bought a little drum machine. Then I was sitting at home for 2 years, just programming the drum machine with nothing else, I didn’t even have a tape recorder.

I changed school at 17, and then my whole environment changed. I had new friends, new teachers, different entirely. There I got in touch with people who also had drum machines, synths, whatever. A classmate had a four-track tape recorder. They also listened to different types of electronic music, which I had not heard before, they listened to a lot of tapes, cassettes; that was in fashion, it was the only way at that time to distribute independent music. So, there was a big, big tape scene. They listened to Industrial and Electronic Body Music; that whole end of the 80’s had quite dark electronic music. Suddenly a whole universe opened up to me.

It was a completely different world underneath the mainstream and I really got into that. I was listening to abstract electronic stuff, early Hardcore and Industrial. Also, the ‘poppier’ end of underground music. These guys were like my real contacts – they had already made songs, done cassettes, which I really hadn’t done. I just used my drum computer for like 3 years!

So for the first time I thought about how to make a song, no a track, to see how it all works. Just programming a drum machine is one thing, but then making song or a track is another thing. So I began to record with some friends. We found a little tape label to release our stuff and we distributed that on Front Line Records.

It was all calling people, sending faxes, making networks and contacts, sending tapes around. We sold like two hundred tapes or something of a certain release, but it was still a hobby, I was still at school.

How old were you then? Like 18, 19. We did that for quite a while, listening to more and more music.

So how did your sound start developing? The first thing I did was very rhythm orientated, very dark EBM. I wasn’t interested in melodies, I wasn’t interested in pop. I had a certain, very mechanical sequencer sound in my head, so I just programmed sequences, and layered them on top of each other, and made long; quite dark tracks actually. Then I began to sing on top and that was the first project I did, which was called Bent House. It was also the first record I released. I was still working with friends, but I got pretty fed up about working with other people. I realised it was quite naive to think that I could just sit with someone and work, and think you have the same ideas. When you are young, you think the whole world thinks like you, I found out pretty fast that people have different work speeds, different interests. People would rather go and have diner or something that finish a track. So it was two slow for me.

So I just started to do it myself. I bought a synth and a tape recorder and started like that.

I bought an old analogue Moog, which was very unfashionable at the time, it was before Acid House, digital was coming, samplers were in and the analogue stuff was really cheap. I bought the Moog for like 200 Deutschmarks or something. Nobody wanted it. I just went to the junk shop and bought the stuff that nobody else wanted, but I still really like it. I was listening to Cabaret Voltaire for example, who still had that analogue sound which was not so popular in the mainstream. I really had this sound in my head, but I couldn’t do it with just the analogue equipment, so I borrowed some equipment from friends and just sat in my house for months, programming this stuff. Other people my age were going to parties and stuff, and I was just sitting at home, basically painting, or drawing, not even watching TV; just programming all summer. It was not an attitude or anything, it was just what I wanted to do. Then a friend, who also had a tape label listed to the songs I hade made. When he listened to the stuff, he said thought it was really good, and suggested that I should make a record. It was around ‘88. And I said I didn’t think so, I didn’t think my stuff was good enough and I didn’t know how to do it. I had no contacts, I didn’t know how to approach it in a practical manner so he said he would take care of that. He got me a record deal. He first found a studio, then a label. With the studio, we got it at the off times. The owner was a really cool guy. He said; well, I don’t get it, but I like it. He had a lot of money, as he worked mostly with advertising companies and the studios were empty at the weekend.

So music for adverts was usually made there? Exactly yeah, and this was in Frankfurt. So, this friend of mine got him to let us use the studio on the off days, late nights, weekends. He also lent us his engineer, who was very young guy, younger than I was and he was really into my kind of music, he went to the techno club in Frankfurt. So I just had these two drum machines, and the moog, and we started to record, which was really slow. As we had the off times only, we obviously had to give the studio up if they needed it for something. It took like almost two years actually to record to the album and mix it with a friend. It was finished in ‘89.

I had year off before university, so I was working in a record shop. The guy there had a couple of record companies. He was really on the pulse of what was happening as he received all the new records. Suddenly there was like Acid House, and all sorts coming in. So this guy, who had heard my stuff, said that anything that I had, he would put it out! I was like wow!

Acid House was just empty, to me it was the ‘90s and the ‘80’s was all the EBM, Front 242 kind of stuff, which had a political subtext. This was just two machines for ten minutes, and no message.

So I continued working on music, and this guy released it. At this time, I was still studying when I found out I was making money from it!

So that as a surprise? Obviously it wasn’t your motivation. Erm it was never my intention to make money from it. I mean from the first moment I thought it was a ridiculous idea to do it anyway! So ok yeah, if they want to pay me, why not? But looking back now, I think everyone just ripped me off! Like everyone I guess starting out in music. So it took me a couple of years to find out what the real figures were.

Then I started to play live, jamming with friends and stuff. I was still at home, living with my mother, but there was some money coming in which really helped in the first years. I had no pressure on me.

There were a couple of coincidences actually. I was just living with my mother; my parents had split up, so I was really free to do what I wanted. My mother was busy, well, with herself, and my brothers had a left a long time ago – they are 16 and 20 years older than me. So I was just there, studying, but well, not anything important, I was studying philosophy…….

OK…. It was like you do it, or you leave it. It doesn’t matter really with philosophy; you don’t even have to finish. I actually studied for five years, and the music was going parallel and erm, I got really bored with the philosophy when I realised I could make money from music. So I decided to leave university without finishing anything.

What did your mother think? Well, she wasn’t really that happy about it, above all because I was still living with her. As well I was like having these Acid loops going on for days… and looking back now I think I was driving her crazy! If you are making music you are in it, but for someone else it’s a real torture to listen to the same pattern over and over for days. I mean she was cool about it, she couldn’t really not be, I mean she didn’t have a plan B either, so I just continued, and things started to work, and she became really completely OK with it. She really had no money, either. My other brother, and myself were supporting her, so that was something that made the whole situation possible, and workable for us.

So this was the ‘90’s? Yeah the early ‘90s.

So how did you become an artist with so many aliases? Was it to explore different styles? It started as working method after I finished my first album. After it was mastered, when I woke up the next morning I had, well nothing to do!

So on my next project, I started to fill the time when I couldn’t mix, or be in the studio, with ideas for the next project. I tried to widen my horizons, listen to new music, as it was very exciting time. Every day there was new music coming in…

Was around the time drum and bass started to get popular here [In Germany]? Yeah definitely, and things like LFO. It was really like wow, cool, I have another idea! At that time the record industry was still operating, even on a small scale, with major industry contracts and major industry ideas. So, I was offered artist deals where I was always bound to a name, or a likeness, and I said OK, nice idea but I can’t sign an exclusive deal, if you pay me like a thousand Deutsch Marks come on! How can I survive? So people started to modify the contracts, we just signed for a name. So; Atom Heart for example. Then I could do what I liked under another name for a different label. This was a really creative time for me; I was releasing like three EPs a month or something. I was finishing an EP around every week. A lot of people were asking me for music as well, so I was doing stuff under lots of different names. It started off as a practical thing, how to get around the record companies and contracts, to make everyone happy really. Then though, I started to associate different styles of music with these names. The names, the likeness and the musical idea developed at the same time, so I started to think of different musical ideas connected to different aliases.

I wanted to do a jazz moog record for example, so I invented a name for that which was just a name, but then it kind of became this alter ego or a character. Something that starts from just a practical approach grows into something very complex. Universes of people. I had invented Lisa Carbon which is a female character, for some very simple lopped music, with infinite Moog solos on top of it. So it became; Lisa is doing that. That’s her sound. So, Once you have designed that character, you have parameters for that project. Once you have defined it, logically or subconsciously, it’s simple to get back to that.

So when did the name Senor Coconut first appear? Well with my first album, I had, naively banked on getting all of the money, which didn’t happen as the record company went bust. So my friends, wanted their equipment back as I had finished this album. I had basically no money to buy stuff or live from. Then my girlfriend at the time, who was a student went on an exchange trip to Costa Rica…. So no money, no music, no girlfriend! Then by luck, my friend the producer, who got me my first record deal, had by this time set up a record label. He said that if I could give him three albums of different stuff, he would release them all within the year, and get me all of the equipment I needed. But it was going to take six months or so to organise. So I finished these albums for him, gave all of the equipment back and with the money left over bought a ticket to Costa Rica.

Wow! So yeah, I went to Costa Rica. I was just hanging out, doing nothing travelling a bit maybe. There I started to listen to Latin music, consciously for the first time. I got really into the music I was hearing there, this was ’92, ’93. Raggamuffin, Salsa, this kind of stuff, I was really impressed with their musical… language. My background was one language, drums, programming and things, but this was completely different, it was way more complex and I was really impressed. What I wanted to do was to incorporate that into what I had been doing. I was in Costa Rica, for 3 months, and I came back in March, which was a really bad to come back. It was winter! So as soon as I got back, I bought another ticket and went back to Costa Rica for another 3 months and then came back again to Germany in the summertime. When I got back, this guy was like, ok cool, I have sold your albums, here is your money. I have a sampler for you, and you can start making music!

So you started to bring Latin rhythms into music? It was more the whole musical language, which coming from a percussive background, the whole harmony thing, was like, wow, what’s going on there? I have to get in to that! At that time, I also stopped listening to club music; I was also getting bored making music for the dancefloor. I had worked with DJ’s , which was quite a disappointing experience, on both a musical, and human level…..

Also, when I started to incorporate this stuff into what I was doing, both the dancefloor, and the record labels, were like, hey what’s going on! So people weren’t getting what I was doing, and I was starting to feel really limited by making tracks for DJ’s. There are in fact more things you can’t do, that you can do….

So, I managed to find someone finance my own label to release my stuff. They gave me complete freedom to do what I wanted, and were like OK this is good because it’s different and no once else is doing stuff like this, or not many people. I was really happy to be able to do whatever I wanted.

Then in ‘96, the label had been gong for two years, and I found that I suddenly had a five or six tracks that had this kind of sound I wanted to have, with the Latin influences…..

At this time, I had left this whole analogue thing behind, pretty much as soon as I left the dancefloor actually. Of course, by this time, it had all become really fashionable! But by then I was really into sampling.

Suddenly one day I was in bed with a fever…. I was sweating, and was really ill. Suddenly, in my head I saw the record sleeve, which said in big typography; Senor Coconut. I was like OK good name, try not to forget it!

So I wrote it down, and that became the name of the record, I just had to finish the album and that was at the end of ’96. By this time, I had split with my girlfriend and had decided to move back to Chile. I had friend, from Chile who was living in Frankfurt at the time, whom I had done some music with but he wanted to go back to Chile. So basically I packed up my stuff, all of my equipment and moved to Chile. The first thing I did when I got there was to finish the last three songs for the album.

When I sent it back to Germany, they thought I was nuts…..! The record label released it, of course, as it was my label, and we sold a thousand copies, but people thought I was maybe just going a bit over the top.

Then I got a fax from Toya Tei, from Dee-Lite, who had started a new label in Tokyo. He said he had just received a copy of the album and he wanted to release it, in Japan. Then it went crazy! I got to record with the Yellow Magic Orchestra and stuff…..

I did know about that! How did that happen? I sent them a package, as I felt that I could hear their influence in my work, as by that time I had listened to a lot of their stuff, so I just wrote this innocent little letter saying how I liked their music. I didn’t really know how big they were in Japan. My friend managed to track them down, and he was really pleased that we had. So, they invited us to Tokyo and we met, and then they came to Chile to work on me with the next record… So suddenly I was in the Japanese scene, which is actually quite small.

The plan was just to go to Chile, and be on my own I was not really interested in the scene there, or really even the culture so much, I just wanted to be on my own, and be very far away. It was pre-internet, I had no phone….. I thought that living twelve thousand miles away, no one would ask me to come and play. I just thought I wouldn’t play anymore, and that was fine with me.. It was too far away. But, the people started contacting me, asking me to do festivals, I was getting invited all over the world, and I didn’t really understand why! People were saying it was good marketing move, to move to Chile, but it wasn’t a marketing move haha!

Was it a conscious decision to cover, or reinterpret well known songs? Why do you come back to that? When I started to dig into Latin music culture, I listened to a lot of compilations, a lot of different styles to compare what I liked. What repeatedly occurred to me was that there were a lot of cover versions, well, Latin musicians would not call them cover versions, and maybe if you came from a Jazz background, you would refer to them as standards. . At a certain stage a song becomes part of a collective consciousness, and from there on becomes part of a set, its not about covering, its about taking an idea from the past, into the present and the future. When you listen to Latin musicians covering western songs, seventies songs for example, they wouldn’t now the original lyrics, or the meaning of them.

It really fascinated me from the very beginning, how when these songs are reinterpreted in this way where the musicians don’t always know the meaning of the song, or the lyrics and they adept it. Hearing songs reconstructed in this way can make you see the original in a completely different light. I don’t like the word cover so much, as it is too much of a contemporary term.

Do you care about how people perceive your music? Do you care if people see it as a novelty? Well, making music for me is a very ego-centric thing. I don’t really think about anybody but me! Really. But then, there is a second stage where I am really classifying what I am doing within the world.

I am not the kind of artist who exists just in his own head. I am aware of what goes on, but It is a case of choosing the right time to think like that, so normally when I make music, or the concept for the album, I roughly know whether it will be popular or not. I make so much music that is deliberately not popular, and when I am doing it, I know it! It is really a case of rejecting popularity; also I know how to communicate and with whom. To a certain degree of course, but I think I know where Senor Coconut works for example.

As Nietzsche said, your work selects your audience.

MYSPACE OF THE MONTH - June 2008

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

MySpace Of The Month June 2008:

Hyeno

When an envelope, within an envelope, containing three feathers, and the four kings from a deck of playing cards arrives on my desk, with just a myspace page for information I can't help but be intrigued. If Nitzer Ebb and DJ Shadow decided to soundtrack some Avant-Garde films of the 1930's I have a feeling it may sound something like this. And that's not going to happen any time soon, so satisfy yourself with Hyeno's doom filed rumblings in the mean time.

Fail Dogs

OK, so it's not even a myspace. It is certainly not as high brow as Hyeno. In fact, it's so low brow it's no brow, but sometimes that's just how we roll at Electronic Beats. If you don't find pictures of dogs failing at being successful pets funny, then perhaps it's time to look behind the sofa for your sense of humour. I love this.

Alex Forge

So if we have low brow, and high brow, we need something to balance out the stupid and the serious. Alex Forge is a young film maker based in Berlin making videos, from what I can see, mostly on his phone. And they are quite simply brilliant. Funny, poignant and serious, often in the same frame. If this guy is not famous in 5 years time, I will eat my shoes. Dirty old laces and everything.

Roland Appel - Interview

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Working as part of trio or a group for your whole musical career must be a comforting thing, especially when one of those groups is the Trüby Trio. Probably even more so when you make up a significant part of critically acclaimed Fauna Flash, and quirky disco posters Voom Voom. However, Roland Appel clearly doesn’t crave that comfort. He wants to make music with no compromises, music that expresses exactly how he feels, and how he wants to sound.

Dark Soldier was the track that bought you, as a solo artist, to everyone’s attention and now there is an album. Has it been a long time coming? Well, I started producing and writing songs, about two years ago. In the beginning I just wanted to produce and write and not work especially on an album, just to see how it would be. It was my first experience of working alone, then after a while there were a few songs and then it was a case of “ahh ok….!” that could be an album! But in the end, the process was not that long. When the album was finished, it was maybe a year in all.

That’s not so bad! No, It was quite a fast process, because it was only me. I rented an engineer, and a studio so it was very important to be prepared, as obviously studio time costs a lot of money! It was not a case of jamming in the studio, and seeing if something happens. I had a very clear picture of it, and of course I was the only one making decisions so……

You just mentioned that your original intention was not to make an album. At what point did that start to change? When I saw that the songs were all following a similar direction, I started to see how they could start to fit together, in German we say ”Roter Faden” which means that there is a continuing story, there is something that links these things together. I was working on each song with the same singer, the same voice, so it was clear then the songs were not that different. The first thing I gave people was Dark Soldier and then I had a lot very nice offers to make a record.

Everyone was like, “yeah it’s great its cool, do you have more” and I was like “yeah….” . So the next thing was; “so you can do an album right?”. I was like…. “OK, why not!” I didn’t want to sit down and have it planned before I started. I was so tired from all the other projects, where it was always, what next – contracts, albums, studio time, deadlines, all this is not good for the creative process! I still did not know what it would be like to work alone. Was I going to run out of ideas after one song? Or will there be more? I really didn’t know! So all I could do is see, and try. It was important that I didn’t want to have the record deal before… the first step was always the content, the music, then everything else around that can come afterwards.

In the end it was really good, I didn’t have to think “do the other people I am working with like it or not”. I can just concentrate purely on the music.

Dark Soldier was such a huge hit. Did you feel under pressure to follow it up? No, because most of the songs were 70% finished when I took them to the Winter Music Conference and played them to the guys from Jazzanova. I think it would have been different if Dark Soldier was all I had, but the first three 12 inches were finished and we had already decided that Dark Soldier would be first one, so we never knew what a hit it would be when we were working on the other songs…

It’s interesting because everyone in the scene knows Dark Soldier, but when you look on iTunes or something, a lot of people in places like the US, they are much more for New Love.

It was actually pretty strange that Dark Soldier was such a hit, because on one hand you have the techno guys playing it, then you have someone like Gilles Peterson who loved the tune and supported it. It seemed everyone was playing it, which for me was actually quite interesting! It was really perfect though, because it left me free to go in whatever direction I liked. For everyone it was clear; it would be different from Dark Soldier. There is no point in making Dark Soldier 2 or Dark Soldier 3, so for me it was very good!!

Your background has been working in pairs, trios, groups, for a very long time. Most people work alone first, then collaborate. Did you feel a need to move away and express yourself? Yeah absolutely! I realised when I was doing Voom Voom. I loved every project, everything was really cool but it’s always a compromise you know? There were a lot of ideas I wanted to try with everything, the artwork, how it looks, everything. I had a very clear picture of how that should be and the way it happened was a really natural process. 4 years ago I moved to Paris and we closed our studio. I sold my stuff and it was quite clear that we wouldn’t come back and work together. Then when I returned to Munich after a couple of years, it was still quite clear that we wouldn’t start again. Everyone was working on their own stuff, so I knew it was the right time.

So are these projects on hold, or completely dead? Well never say never, but for the moment I am too busy with my own stuff and remixes… and I must say, I am really enjoying this new situation. After fifteen years of living, working and touring with the others, we are still good friends and I think the reason for that is that we stopped the projects! Haha!

I was playing in Vienna at the weekend, and I met Peter Kruder (Kruder and Dorfmeister) and it was all good, but at the moment none of us could imagine working on these projects again. For me, I enjoy the travelling alone, making decisions alone and being able to write just my own music, I am really really enjoying that, but I didn’t know in the beginning if I would enjoy it because I had never done it before. It was a perfect situation though, at the moment it isn’t interesting for me to work with the others; there is no challenge in it.

Did you seek any advice or feedback from the others when you were making the album? What do they think of it? I never play something before it is finished. It wouldn’t make sense, having left a group situation, to then seek another opinion. The only person I play sketches or ideas of tracks to is my girlfriend! She is the only one. I didn’t want to start to question my own decisions; if someone didn’t like the bass drum for example, if someone had said that to me, I would go back to the studio and that would influence me! So no, I definitely didn’t want to do that. I mean, the engineer is there, the singer is there, there are other people involved in the process with me and of course afterwards, when I had finished, I gave them the stuff, but not before then!

And did they like it? Of course haha!! Of course I was happy about that, but if they didn’t like it, that would be ok too, I wouldn’t care. But they played it, charted the tracks, so that of course was really nice. However, I think it is a big mistake to try and make something that everyone should like; there should always be someone who doesn’t like it!

That’s the problem with the commercial stuff; so many people at the radio and stuff, saying “ah you know make it a bit slicker here...” and that just kills the whole thing. I would rather someone say they hated my track, than not to react. You have to be prepared to stand up and say something if that is how you really feel. It makes no sense to be everyone’s darling!