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Star Gazing with George FitzGerald

I didn’t want to talk about the pandemic. For something that consumed two years of our lives and continues to take its toll, most of us – and I’m sure George FitzGerald included – want to put it behind us. Its gravitational pull remains strong however and every conversation with artists and DJs I’ve had lately seems to skirt the event horizon of this cultural blackhole. Inevitably, our conversation too, falls headfirst into the subject and it’s the context of FitzGerald’s latest LP, Stellar Drifting. “It’s not a pandemic album, by any means,” insists FitzGerald, “but it’s impossible to separate that time from the music, because how could it not.”

“At the beginning of the pandemic, A lot of people thought, ‘cool I’m gonna write my masterpiece now’ and then it went on for so long.” Stellar Drifting is not that type of album and the artist wouldn’t pander to these illusions. Like most, he “found sitting alone in a room on his own,” during the pandemic “isn’t that conducive to writing music. You kind of need the stimulus of going out and meeting people and having new life experiences.” He found “watching Tiger king and making sourdough bread, before hitting the studio” didn’t have quite the same inspirational effect so while much of Stellar Drifting was finished during the pandemic, it doesn’t tap into the solemn and introspective concepts that mark those now-stereotypical “pandemic” albums.

Back in 2018, before the pandemic, George FitzGerald was cementing a new phase in his career as an album artist with his determined sophomore record, All that must be, blazing a trail ahead from his dance floor roots. He was touring the album with a live band, playing as far afield as Morocco and the USA on the back of the record and the remix album that followed. Clash magazine, for one, called All that Must be “a simply gorgeous listen, one that displays a striking producer operating in full confidence,” at the time, with that confidence establishing George FitzGerald as an album artist.

Stellar Drifting however is no carbon copy of his last record. Instead, it marks another evolutionary notch in his sonic approach to the album. “It’s subtly different” from his last, he confirms, but it’s hard to pinpoint from the listener’s perspective. The expansive melodic and harmonic textures, gathering around stoic club-inspired rhythms remain central to his work, with the artist claiming that the whole album is “a little more major key, a bit more positive” than the last. “I wanted a broader palette harmonically than I have done in the past” and that also meant changing his approach to the creative process. “I went down a rabbit hole thinking how does my art matter in this world – what place does largely instrumental dance music have in a world where so much is going wrong?”

Relying on the tried and tested tactics from the “old friends” that constituted the familiar synthesisers and drum machines in the studio, wouldn’t suffice for this new creative pursuit. Instead FitzGerald turned his focus to “trying to build sound in different ways.” … And for that he looked to the stars for answers.

“Building synthesiser oscillators from photos (from Nasa space probes)” George FitzGerald found new textures, but more importantly new ways to “give the sound some meaning.” He asked himself: “What would it sound like if you took this photo of a nebula from the Hubble telescope and loaded it into Ableton?” And while the listener might still only hear what sounds like a synthesised pad or a bassline, FitzGerald revels in the fact that “50% of that is made of something like a nebula or Jupiter.”

Listening to Cold, the second single from the LP, there’s a warmth there that usurps its title and the origins of the album’s theme. Deep bass-lines swell, alluding to George’s dance floor roots, while melodies enchant, pulling the listener through starry atmospheres. It’s music that sits in that elusive realm of electronic music between a set of headphones and a club dance floor, where George FitzGerald occupies a space amongst other boundary-defying luminaries, like Caribou and Bonobo. There’s a moment on Cold however when everything seems to slow down, and a chopped vocal sample emerges in the stark mix during one the song’s quieter moments. It’s instantly familiar as Geroge FitzGerald, and in the wave of the deep bass that surrounds it, I’m suddenly transported back to 2012, when I first encountered the artist’s music and his breakout record, Child.

Hea had already cut his chops with six singles and EPs to date for labels like Hotflush and AUS before Child seemed to propel him to a whole new level. It seemed impossible to escape the magnitude of the record at that time, especially in the UK. It was being played in bars and clubs all over London, long before it was released. “That track changed a lot of stuff for me,” reminisces FitzGerald. “I have good memories of it.” It’s a track that still holds its own today. The chopped vocal, the keys, and the warm bass simply seems to roll through you, energising an ephemeral spirit in the pit of your stomach.

Child came at a time of great experimentation in the UK’s club music scene. In the post-Dubstep landscape, artists and DJs like Ben UFO, Joy O, Blawan, Midland and George FitzGerald were advancing to new territories in electronic club music, with Dubstep’s deep and tumultuous bass, and experimental attitudes informing new styles of House, UK Garage, Techno and Electro coming out of the region. Later these artists and DJs would all go “off into slightly different directions,” with more focussed pursuits towards traditional genres and styles, but for a moment the UK was buzzing with a creative air in the context of club music, and George FitzGerald was a part of it. He produced Child as a “deep house track made off the cuff,” while holding court over the Deep House section of a record store he worked, but it impressed on the scene and the DJ circuit a different approach to Deep House, one a fair few attempted to mimic.

“That was fun for a bit,” reminisces FitzGerald, “but honestly that’s not what I wanted starting off.” As the other artists from the post-dubstep scene grew and moved into different directions, so did he. “I stopped writing music for club sets a long time ago.” Never really one to write “four tunes in a day,” he was always looking for something more substantial in his music, and for him the album format had always seemed like this intangible purpose of his pursuits, perhaps even planting that initial seed to the questions,” how does my art matter in this world.”

“I always wanted to see if I could do it”, he says about the idea that spurned on his first album, Fading Love. “When I started, the thought of writing a ten track album on my own, it just seemed insane,” but it turned out to be something he instinctively mastered. Fading Love was an immediate success. The Guardian called it “an intimate and beautifully textured record” and it went some way in establishing a nascent crossover success. The benchmark he’d set himself it seemed had been achieved. “I really enjoyed the process,” and the confidence set him on a path, leading up to today and his latest album, Stellar Drifting.

In his continuous evolution through these records as an artist, George FitzGerald has emerged as a more-than-capable song-writer, on par with his technical skill as a producer. Over the last couple of records, the cut up vocals have matured into fully rounded pop songs with guest vocal appearances, from the likes of Tracey Thorne on All that Must Be and Panda Bear on Stellar Drifting validating FitzGerald’s song-writing skills. “I wanted to scratch the itch of writing songs,” he says. It’s an itch that has been with him since adolescence, listening to the likes of Gary Numan and Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins.

“A lot of people have asked me about the Billy Corgan influence,” he says with a laugh when I pry. “The funny thing is that when you’re fifteen for six months you’re a Garage kid, and then suddenly you’re like ‘I’m just gonna start dressing differently and go watch the Smashing Pumpkins” when youthful “tribal” instincts kick in. “The thing with Billy Corgan is he’s obviously an amazing song-writer, but there’s also this other gothic side to him. There’s this kind of grandeur to the best Smashing Pumpkins stuff and I’ve always loved that.“ FitzGerald suggests you can hear those “maximalists” elements in his first single from the new album, Ultraviolet with its cascading arrangements and bold orchestration.

It’s certainly the furthest, I’ve heard George FitzGerald travel from his dance -floor roots, and I’m curious how he would channel a track like that into a DJ set, and the answer is unsurprisingly, he wouldn’t. “I find it quite difficult,” he says about making his album pieces work in his sets. On the rare occasion he might try to accommodate a request, he’s all too aware of the “rules in clubs” and the “ways of directing energy” through a set. He started out as a DJ after all, and while he might not consider it a central node to his artistic identity today, it’s still very much there and it makes for a welcomed change to his live sets. “Djing is just a really nice counterpoint. It’s very spontaneous and a lot less heavy than a live show.”

Most significantly it’s a way of maintaining that connection to club music and the dance floor. “Writing albums doesn’t reconnect you with audiences and clubbing, and what got you into the music in the first place, like DJing.” It’s something that he was particularly aware of during the pandemic. “What I missed; travelling around and meeting new people and going to new places, was a really important part of how I write my music, I didn’t know that before.” He hadn’t been gigging much during the pandemic and after, as he was finishing off the album, and before that he’d mainly been focussed on his live sets. Through DJing, in part, he’s looking to “get that connection back with a scene.”

“Weirdly” he says, he’s “quite desperate to release an EP” too, going full circle back to his roots after a trio of albums. Stellar Drifting will arrive four years after his last, “and that in modern music is an age,” FitzGerald muses. Not that long ago it would’ve been considered a come-back record, but for an artist like George FitzGerald who is “always evolving as an artist,” it’s another evolutionary step. “So much has happened since the last record and the world is completely different,” and it’s only natural for these elements to feed into the growth of the artist. Whether he’ll eventually receive an answer to his question: “does my art matter in this world?” after the release of the album, remains to be seen, but one thing is certain; it would certainly matter in the context of George FitzGerald’s artistic legacy.

Art in activism – An interview with the anonymous dancer

We turn the attention to the dance floor to interview one of our regular patrons, and are astounded by what we find in this incredible individual and his work.

*Due to the sensitive nature of his work the subject of this interview has asked to remain anonymous. We ask that you respect his privacy.

When I see him, he is just a blur. He’s an inexhaustible source of energy and like many, I find myself gravitate towards him like a moth to flame. I’ve come to know him as the anonymous dancer that occupies the front of the DJ booth most Fridays. Some of the resident DJs have come to know him too. He doesn’t drink and he arrives early, securing a spot in front of the sauna where he’ll stay for the remainder of the night.

He’s uninhibited, always the first on the floor and often the last to abandon it. He’ll stop for a minute or two to have a conversation with a curious stranger, but he’ll get right back into it, as soon as the conversation lulls. Pumping his arms and jostling his feet, he is a frenzied movement of limbs that shows no fatigue.

Besides the odd greeting on arrival, I like to leave him to his own devices, and prefer to observe and admire his liberated movements as I sway in my own spot, some way off to the side.

Something of an enigma, he has been coming to Jaeger regularly for the past year. I’ve encountered him mostly on Fridays, but he’s no stranger to a Saturday jaunt on the tiles either. He came to us via DJ Charlotte Bendiks, but since then he’s become a welcomed presence at Jaeger, We’ve also come to know a little more of him as time progressed, and as is always the case there’s much more to him than meets the eye. So we’ve endeavoured to find out more about this remarkable man and his work.

Art in activism

“I like to be anonymous,” he says as we sit down for a conversation on a Friday afternoon. The coffee shop is an unusual setting and this is an unusual topic for any music-related media, but he immediately has my attention. I haven’t asked much about his life in the past, and was only made aware of his work within human rights through resident DJ, Ivaylo a short time before we decided to interview him.

He is a refugee and for over a decade he’s been working on educating people on the field of human rights through his organisation, Terram Pacis. “I founded it in 2010 and it’s basically my life,” he says over a large cup of hot chocolate. Terram Pacis is a non-profit organisation and he heads up each project personally. They’ve been granted special consultant status to the UN and work with various youth-oriented organisations. Working with communities in regions stretched from Sub-Saharan Africa to Eastern Europe, Terram Pacis’ main objective is to “advocate for human rights” with projects customised around specific problems.

He sees each project as “a work of art, where art becomes a form of activism” and approaches each project as a personal endeavour. “I need to see the problem and then that problem is a part of me,” he explains. There’s always an educational aspect to his work, whether he’s working with youth organisations or trying to inform older generations on the plight of the next. There’s a universal idea to “take people from different backgrounds and bring them into one space so they can learn together” and that can be applied to each project, regardless of the “problem” being addressed.

Terram Pacis “focusses on the rights that have been abused in the community rather than the broader human rights.” The organisation introduces people to the fundamental concept of human rights; their rights to protest and the due judiciary process, in an attempt to turn them into “human rights activists.” Then the “goal is to bring them to the same table” with other human rights activists in an effort to draw parallels to one another’s plight and instil the universal ideology of human rights.

“We can’t see human rights as one sided,” he stresses. “Excluding particular groups, because you are not interested in them, you can’t really call yourself a human rights activist. If we’re going to address gender-based violence for example, we then have to include everybody… an intersexed person might be 1 in 100, but that doesn’t mean you have to exclude them.” Part of his work with the UN for example is to challenge the type of language that exactly excludes these 1 in 100 minorities from the discussion.

His passion and dedication is humbling. Work consumes almost every minute of his waking life. He tries to limit “work hours” to 5 a day, but when you’re the founder of an organisation like Terram Pacis, your work consumes you. The only release comes by way of a dance floor. “Dancing is something that liberates me,” he says. “It’s a way for me to express who I am.” Whenever he goes to a new city, he seeks out a place to dance, and when he’s at home in Oslo, Jaeger is his first port of call.

It’s simply “easier to go to Jaeger,” and Fridays have particularly resonated with his own musical tastes. Fridays and Frædag offer him a “different kind of music and artists” and he’s specifically taken a real liking to “space disco” since moving to Norway. The “combination of disco and house music” appeals to his tastes “because it comes with different rhythms.” As somebody that enjoys dancing with his “mind” he prefers music where rhythms and beats vary, providing him with the mental stimulus to carry on dancing for “8 hours in a row.”

Growing up he wasn’t exposed to House music until came to Europe. Although Disco had been around, “people didn’t dance to Disco.” He was “listening to Jazz” in his youth. He prefers music with some meaning behind it and 60’s and 70’s Jazz created in that heated heart of the civil rights movement, was simply more accessible for a teen growing up in a post-war society. I don’t imagine there was much reason to dance back then.

Channeling the fear

He is somewhat reluctant to talk about those years, fearing it might get in the way of his humanitarian work, but he’s open to discuss it in general terms.

He was “very young when the war happened,” and yet one of the most tragic human events in recorded history and its aftermath is not something that leaves you likely. “It shapes who you are and end up becoming” and for him this has had a direct influence on his work today. He started “working with reconciliation” at a time when most of us were still just trying to navigate high school. Engaging young people with the same experiences, he sought to “shape a society that actually includes our ideas in the peace building process.” That’s when he started to become an advocate for human rights.

His work put him “in a problem with the government” and as a result he spent a stint in jail. When he got out, he moved to Norway as a refugee, setting in motion what would become Terram Pacis.

Between “human rights education, peace education and gender education” he is making a difference in the world, feeding on those experiences of his youth in an effort to affect important change. “You cannot overcome them,” he says of those experiences, “you just need to find a way to live them.” He prefers to channel those experiences into his work to “help people,” but it’s also been helping him. “I started my work to heal myself. You see the worst in humanity, and you also see the good, I chose to focus on the good.”

There’s a perpetual drive to what he does. Much like his dancing, he is constantly being encouraged forward in his work. I wonder if it’s the fear he might have felt during his youth. “In the beginning there is fear,” he answers. There’s “not enough food and not enough drinking water. You see people dying every day, and then fear becomes the norm. You’re no longer afraid because your mind and body is focussing on surviving.”

Today, “something is more important than that fear I had before. That’s where my optimism comes from – there’s nothing worse that can happen in my life that hasn’t happened before.”

That optimism has served him well in establishing Terram Pacis, but there are other aspects of his life where those experiences still affect him. For example, he has a “strange concept of friendship.” He always arrives alone whenever I see him and the brief encounters he has with those around him on the dance floor, never really mature into friendships or even friendly relationships. “If I have friends, I prefer them to not be in the same city,” he admits. “Being alone is what I understand.” He has little to no contact with anybody from his previous life, fearing for his and their safety, but it has done little to deter him to continue his work on human rights.

Liberation

Currently he has a few projects he is working on at the time of our conversation and the concerted focus he exudes while talking about them is quite infectious.

He talks eloquently about his work in projects that deal with subjects like internalised racism, the LGBT+ issue and the taboos around menstruation, making any problems the listener might be facing in his/her life feel trivial at best. He tries to engage the listener with subject matter in a language that is accessible from any perspective in an objective manner of speaking that makes you question why these issues remain prevalent in our society. And whenever I ask more searching questions about his personal harrowing experiences, he quickly turns the attention back to his work.

The last thing we talk about is his work in trying to eradicate the tax on menstrual products, and I find it hard to segue into a question about the night ahead. It seems so arbitrary now in the face of what he does for a living at Terram Pacis and his work seems a world away from the hedonistic associations the dance floor evokes. The dance floor doesn’t really compare to something like Terram Pacis, yet if it weren’t for the dance floor we wouldn’t have known about this incredible individual and his work. I’m suddenly reminded me of something I read recently; if there are more than two people in a room, you have politics.

We’ve been talking for an hour now, and I have more questions than what I have answers to, but I sense I might be testing the limits with this private individual. I greet him into the Oslo’s cold night only to see him later on the dance floor. He remains a blur.

If you’d like to know more about his work and Terram Pacis, please check out the website.

Greetings from Jaeger: Still streaming

We bid farewell to Retro on Thursdays and inaugurate a new Sunday concept with Olle Abstract

These unprecedented times have called for some unusual measures, ushering in a very… unique era for our culture and this music, with everything from DJs to festivals migrating to the virtual realm of streaming platforms. Even in Oslo, where we’ve seen some of the restrictions lifted early, we’ve still had to adapt to the challenging situation. With a limited capacity and seating room only we’re bringing the party to your screen, streaming every DJ set live to mixcloud from our sauna DJ booth in our backyard.

Our residents and some old friends have gathered in the booth under the camera’s lens these past two weeks to deliver sets that err on the temperate side to accommodate the nature of the situation. Frædag, Nightflight and Retro have hosted lineups featuring the residents and guests with pop-up concepts like Mutual Intentions and Big UP! jumping in where needed. For the last two weeks they’ve been playing to the intimate crowd in our backyard while our watchful eye, broadcasted sets from the likes g-HA, Olefonken, Fredfades, Daniel Gude, Kompressorkanonen, Doc L, Junior and Olanskii to the rest of the world as part of our new JaegerStream series.

In the third week of JaegerStream we do more of the same, with Frædag, Nightflight and Retro in situ for a long weekend, which sees us bid farewell to the longest serving residency on our weekly calendar and welcome Olle Abstract back to Jaeger with a new Sunday residency. Although, it’s not exactly business as usual here yet, we’re maintaining some sliver of a remanence for our culture and this music, and while the dance floor remains closed, we can at least bring a little of the groove back to our lives, through the new streaming event.

The big news this week at JaegerStream is that we bid farewell to Retro on Thursdays. Daniel Gude has been at the helm of the longest serving residency at Jaeger since opening and between international bookings and local legends, he and Retro has been honouring the roots of this music all this time. With an esteemed alumni that runs the gamut from Jeff Mills to Sotofett and from Daniel’s extensive record collection, Retro has been our unwavering guide through the classics and future classics of our scene. Daniel Gude hands over the Thursday night to Finnebassen this week, who inaugurates his new concept next week, but while Daniel bids farewell to Thursdays he and Retro will come back on some select Saturdays in the future.

Finnebassen is not the only one bringing a new residency to Jaeger this week as Olle Abstract returns to Jaeger for a new Sunday Service concept. It’s a spiritual movement in music for a different kind of Sunday mass at Jaeger with g-HA as his first guest. We use the long weekend for the first edition of Sunday Service with Whit Monday on the other end to soothe the soul. We’re still not able to go as long or as hard as we’re used to, but we’ll continue to bring the music and the party where we can, even to your screen. Thanks for tuning in…

Greetings from Jaeger.

Jaeger to reopen

Jaeger Oslo will open its doors to the public again from the 6th of May, observing the strict guidelines from the latest Covid-19 measures.

We’re pleased to announce that we are opening Jaeger as of the 6th of May at 15:00. It will hardly be business as usual as we’ll have to implement guidelines to accommodate the measures passed down from Oslo council yesterday in an effort to help contain the spread of this terrible pandemic.

We’ll be running at a limited capacity with seating room only and table service, to abide by social-distancing protocols during our new opening hours from 15:00 – 24:00. We’ll do everything to ensure the Covid-19 measures are continuously observed during opening hours. We’re still ironing out the details, so please watch this space for more information.

For now however, we’d like to welcome everybody back to come have a slice and a cut with us, as we tentatively recharge that spirit of Oslo’s clubbing community. Mamas Pizza will be back with Oslo’s best Italian Pizza during our opening hours with our residents supplying the soundtrack; albeit a subdued one.

We’re still in some unprecedented times, as the world continues to deal with this pandemic, and we’ll be doing our utmost to follow the measures in place, but we also understand the importance of social engagements, and hope to bring some semblance of normality back into our lives.

We will start taking booking for tables and you can send us requests at the info email address. We will post further details about the reopening as they come. Please bare with us as we try to work through these highly unusual circumstances. Hope to see you on Wednesday.

Remembering David Mancuso with Espen Haa

In 2003 ”Prins” Thomas Moen Hermansen asked his brother Espen “Haa” Moen Hermansen. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we got David Mancsso to Oslo.” Driven by a passion and interest for David Mancuso’s work and philosophy, Espen took on the mammoth task, not just once, but twice and through those encounters and a few more that centered around trips to the Loft parties in London, Espen got to know the DJ and Disco legend a little better than most.

Espen Haa had been DJing since the early nineties, and alongside his older brother, he has played an instrumental role in the Full-Pupp events that ran for 15 years at Blå. A dedicated selector, record collector and clubbing enthusiast, Espen has also played a fundamental part in facilitating the scene in Oslo, and has recently took it up himself to re-issue some rare and forgotten gems on the 12” format courtesy of his Neppå label.

He’s hosted, promoted and DJ’d a fair few events throughout his career in Oslo, but some of the most significant of these are two that brought over David Mancuso.

The allotted space of this introduction here would not even begin to scratch the surface of the legacy of David Mancuso on the modern DJ scene today.Books have been written about the man and his monumental influence on club and DJ culture. Disco exists because of David Mancuso. The music that he played and presented at his legendary Loft parties in New York would fuse into Disco ten years later while the philosophy of his parties would inform what eventually become Paradise Garage, the Gallery, Studio 54 and every club in existence today, and that’s no exaggeration.

His emphasis on sound and the unwavering philosophy of social engagement he brought to his events are some things that still echo through our scene today. Yet, nobody embodies this spirit more than David Mancuso and when he passed away in 2016, he left a profound legacy that no other DJ, promotor or club has, or will ever be able to amount to.

A reserved person, especially in the years leading up to his death, David Mancuso has very rarely been interviewed, and has had few acquaintances that knew him all that well outside of his inner sanctum of his New York clique. While I’ve read a lot about David Mancuso, I’ve never really spoken to anybody that has had more than a passing word with him.

Espen however, through his dealings with Mancuso in Oslo and his own interests in the Loft and the philosophy, has gotten to know the man on a personal basis throughout the years and I reached out to Espen to find out more about their relationship and fill in some blanks for us.

How did you first find out about the Loft and David Mancuso?

I think it was around the late 90s, we talked a lot about New York and its influences and in the early 2000’s me and my friend and DJ, Marius Jøntvedt (DJ Muriazz) went to New York on a pilgrimage to seek it out. We had heard about the Loft and Mancuso, but we went to Body and Soul, because it was like the closest version of the (defunct) Loft at that time. It was very fascinating and inspiring.

Was he playing at those body and soul parties?

No, but the link between the Loft and Body and Soul was there, because they tried to party in the spirit of Mancuso with downtempo and uptempo; going back to back; no alcohol license; and going from the afternoon into evening. It was very different from nightclubs and very much a private thing.

What inspired you and Marius to go over and experience it all for yourself?

We were into the whole US House, Garage and Disco thing, and it was very natural to go over there and visit all these great record stores. We went to a house party with Danny Krivit in Brooklyn and we were the only tourists there. We made it to to all these great spots. We tried to go to all these places where most of all this music is from. We went record shopping and partying for two weeks.

It wouldn’t have been as popular as today or even the early nineties at this point.

It’s hard to say, but there were a bunch of record stores still in New York and we were going to parties on a Monday and Tuesday. I don’t think it is like that anymore. It might not have been a peak for House music, but Ron Trent, Danny Krivit and Francois Kavorkian all still had residencies there.

Tell me about going to the Loft.

I was never at the Loft in New York, I was at the Loft parties in London. I don’t think David was doing any parties in New York at that time. There was a period between the mid-eighties to the late nineties that he was not really that popular. He moved the club in the mid-eighties and lost a lot of his audience. In the late nineties he started to get to know an English guy called Tim Lawrence, who wrote the book “love saves the day.“ He actually got David back doing parties in the early 2000’s in London.

So you never met David in New York?

I actually met him in Oslo for the first time and then I met him a few times after that again in London.

The Loft was such a significant space because of David’s philosophy behind it. How did it translate to a party in London?

At least they tried to create the same kind of vibe. David was always like: “if you have to do a party that’s not in your own apartment, you have to ask yourself, could I stay here at night.”

The parties in London were on the second floor of a pub in a big space. It was a rented space and it wasn’t anybody’s home, but it was a super-friendly vibe. It’s possible to transfer the same vibe if the people that are there are at the party for the right reasons. It was a community.

I think he was happy with the space in London, because they had it for many years.

And David would play his records there?

David would play his records there. It started at five in the afternoon with super-mellow, spacey music and people would arrive like a normal house party and then it developed as the dance floor got going. It peaked for a few hours and then he took it down again. He played for roughly six hours.

He was always very adamant that there shouldn’t be any mixers in his setup and that a record should play all the way through. Did he at any point change that approach in London?

No. At every party I saw David, he never mixed. He didn’t even want to see a mixer. (laughs) It just interfered with the music for him. He was very particular about playing the whole record. He saw the music as a piece of art, and thought who am I to do anything about that. He was very straightforward about that and he still respected people that wanted this flow, mixing records together, but it wasn’t for him really. I discussed it with him several times.

Was he playing LPs or 12”?

He wanted to play music as good as it could be and he preferred the 12” for that reason. He could easily play a 14 minute side from start to end.

Was it generally older stuff he played, or did he throw some contemporary things in there?

At the first parties, he was very stuck in his own music and stuff he had been playing for thirty years. I actually tried to slip him some new stuff and he took in some modern House stuff, but peak time he gave people the classic stuff.

When he was playing to people that were dancing, was it usually beat-driven kind of stuff in the sense of that quintessential early Disco sound?

Well, when people were dancing he played beat-music. Early on he played more drizzling and exotic music, often beatless. He was a master in building up, and he could play “non-party music” for a couple of hours. He wanted that. Who wants banging music from the minute they arrive at a party?

When you did get him over to Oslo, I imagine it wasn’t easy?

No, it wasn’t easy. I had quite a few people warn me about it. “Espen you don’t need this in your life,” they said. It’s this whole package that you have to say yes to.

I did The Loft in Oslo With Marius Jøntvedt, Jan Erik Sondresen and Marius Engemoen (Marius Circus). The first time we had him over, it was actually at Blå where Thomas and Strangefruit had this night called Cosmic Jam sessions and Thomas asked me to try and get David Mancuso over. I emailed David, and he wrote back a few days later; “when can I call you?” He wanted all correspondence to be over the phone.

I convinced him it was a friendly place and it was a friendly environment, and we paid him quite well. We did it in combination with one of the Loft parties in London.

It was pretty interesting having a guy like him coming to guest a night at Blå, but because he didn’t really know the music, he was very clear on opening for Thomas and Pål. That was hard to sell to the audience, because people came roughly at 23:00 like they do in Norway.

Did he just play on Blå’s soundsystem?

Well the first time he even played with a mixer. He didn’t do any knobbing, just brought the volume up and down and played the songs as he always has. The second time we did a lot more with the sound.

Tell me about the second time?

This was 2005. We decided to do the whole Loft thing, with the soundsystem, the food and everything. We rented Stratos because it was the highest room in Oslo, but we didn’t have any Klipschorns or any big home stereo rig so we rented a system from a place in Drammen.

David insisted on somebody to do the sound and I was like: “we’ll find somebody”. And David said, “no no, there’s two ways to do the sound Espen, the right way or the wrong way.” We had to get this guy called Ian Mackie from Scotland, he did all the Loft parties in London.

We had to have David here for a whole week, so he could get to know everything. We had to get a stereo installed in his hotel room so he could listen to records, crazy stuff. We did no promotion, because that’s the way they did it in New York. This wasn’t very smart, we should’ve advertised it a little more. It was a new thing to Oslo, this old-school private party, and the night went fine, but we lost a lot of money so we never did it again. (laughs)

After that I had to go to London if I wanted to see David.

You got to know him a little during this time. What was he like as a person, did that kind of pedantic thing he had about music extend to his personality as well?

We got to know him and I spent a lot of time with him. He was passionate and very idealistic, but he was shy as well. He was interested in music, but he was very political as well. He was always talking about progression, and getting the different sides of society to meet. He was very into the concept of breaking boundaries and getting people together and the parties were ideal for that. He was very concerned about the less-fortunate people in society.

He was an introvert and not easy to communicate with. It took some time to get under his skin, but after a few days and more meetings, the corners became a little more rounded. He was a bit withdrawn. This man had been worshipped for 35 years and he was used to being in the middle of things, so he was social, but not very outspoken.

We talked about music and equipment and the madness of nightclubs taking too much money on alcohol. He had stopped taking drugs and I believe he took a lot of drugs in the eighties. He barely drank while he was over here. He wasn’t very interested in having a lot of people around him but on a one-on-one situation he was an incredibly interesting man to talk to.

You say he didn’t drink much, but I always thought he was completely against drinking and the Loft didn’t allow any alcohol?

I think he had a bottle of whisky with him in the booth. (laughs) I know at the Loft parties in New York, people brought their own coolers with drinks. They didn’t have a cabaret license because David wanted to make this a party thing, he didn’t want to make any money from the bar.

I know he did make a lot of money in admission in the late seventies and early eighties. These are things I’ve learnt from Tim Lawrence: he earned a lot of money and he spent it all on Hi-Fi and his friends. He was super generous with his friends.

Did you ever talk to him about the peak era of the Loft?

A little bit, but he wasn’t really into sharing and we asked a lot of questions. He was kind of general about it. He talked about Paradise Garage and studio 54 as places quite different from the Loft, because they had a focus on celebrity and Disco.

The early Loft space was like 150-200 people and it was quite small and private. He wasn’t into the name game at all. I don’t think he even think he liked the subject.

He wanted to speak about the cause and all the things that happened in New York in the seventies and the eighties with all the gay people and the poor people being pushed out of Manhattan. These were topics for David.

He didn’t want to refer to the Loft as a Disco. He played Funk, Jazz, Latin and Afro and the Disco came in in ‘75. The fusion of everything he played became Disco in the mid 70s.

When was the last time you saw him or had a conversation with him?

That could be 2008 in London. I don’t remember when, but at some point his health deteriorated and he wasn’t travelling. Colleen Cosmo took over as the musical host in London. It was always a highlight to come to London and see him and speak to him.

It was a brief friendship, and I didn’t know him very well, but I spent some time with him. I emailed him a lot, but around 2010, he just stopped answering emails and I know he did that with a lot of people. The last 6 years of his life he had only had a handful of people around him that he trusted, but it wasn’t much more than that.

And looking back on it all, was there a piece of music that defined the David Mancuso’s sound for you through all your endeavours together?

It’s hard to pick one track, I have to name three:

Demis Roussos – L.O.V.E Got a hold of me

Brass Construction – Music makes you feel like dancing

Roy Ayers – Running away

And he never played bootlegs. Sound quality was one thing. And he thought it was unheard of to support releases that did nothing for those who wrote the music.

A new Techno utopia: Bassiani after the raids with Kvanchi

“Everybody is surprised that the club stays open” Gigi Jikia (aka HVL) told this blog in 2017. Those words ended up being eerily prophetic when in 2018, Georgian authorities raided Tbilisi’s Bassiani and Café Gallery, arresting the prior club’s founders, amongst others, and threatening the ultimate closure of the venue. Bassiani and Horoom resident Tornike Kvantchiani (aka Kvanchi) was “at a birthday party” when he received multiple messages from friends asking; “what’s happening at Bassiani?” When social media confirmed his fears of a police raid, he headed straight to the club and was faced with a police presence prohibiting entry and Bassiani co-founder Tato Getia being forced into a police wagon in handcuffs.

“Yeah, a lot has happened since then,” says Tornike over a telephone call about the events that transpired since the last time we spoke, almost two years ago. The situation was already tense back then as Bassiani rose to prominence as an international clubbing institution, promoting an alternative lifestyle in what was and remains a fairly right-wing post-soviet state. The fairly recent advent of club-culture in the Georgian capital, which went hand in hand with queer-culture and recreational driug culture turned out to be a bitter pill to swallow for the authoritarian state as they focussed all their efforts on the two actors lending agency to these cultures in the form of Café Gallery and Bassiani.

Before these institutions came along there was almost no club culture to speak of in the country and even the city, according to Tornike. When the nascent DJ started clubbing almost a decade ago “there were only one or two clubs in Tbilisi” and “it was a totally different situation.” Tornike’s introduction to the music and culture came via the internet in 2007. He had been listening to “rock and alternative music” for the most part of his youth, through what was a healthy cassette scene, but by the time the Internet arrived he had found an entirely new world had opened up to him.

*Tornike plays Frædag x 5 years of Bassiani with Mercurrio this Friday at Jaeger

“I started listening to Aphex Twin and it changed my perception and then I totally moved over to electronic music.” He delved deeper into the music, uncovering a history that extended back to New York and Detroit in the eighties and never looked back. He felt particularly “inspired by Detroit,” leading him on a path to Tbilisi’s very insular clubbing scene where Bassiani co-founders Tato Getia and Zviad Gelbakhiani were busy staking out a prescient claim on the scene. “Tbilisi was a small city,” back then for people like Tornike who were discovering electronic music, but it forged a tight-knit community, closing around their ranks, with little notice from the authorities.

“I knew everyone involved in electronic music back then,” says Tornike including the Bassiani heads who started throwing their first parties around the city in unused venues. Tornike got his first gig playing at one of these parties and several parties later he became an integral part of the Bassiani team, first as the social media guru and then as a resident and head of the Bassiani and Horoom labels.

It all happened soon after, Café Gallery became the first venue “with an underground vision” in the city, laying the groundwork for Bassiani to open, which “completely changed the situation” says Tornike. While people might have been aware of electronic music, it was mainly “commercial stuff” and it was only really after Café Gallery and Bassiani opened that “people started listening to electronic music” according to Tornike. It’s reached a point today where people refer to Tbilisi as a “Techno City” exclaims Tornike through a wry smile, with new DJs and even a record store arriving on the scene over the last five years since the club’s opening.

But with the rise in popularity came some unwanted attention. It was already “a tough and weird” political situation when I talked to Gigi and Tornike back in 2017, with unwarranted stop and searches happening outside of the club, in what Gigi believed was the police “abusing their authority” for financial gain. Tensions had been bubbling under the surface ever since and in the eve of May 11th it came to a boiling point when jack-booted officers raided the club. What were they looking for?

“Drugs, nothing more,” says Tornike, but “when they raided the club, no-one was arrested for dealing drugs and they couldn’t find any drug dealers inside the club, only finding 2 or 3 grams” on individuals. The club owners were arrested too, without a warrant on some overblown claims of obstruction, which never resulted in any charges brought forward, but what happened directly after the raid, was a force of solidarity in a clubbing community that we haven’t seen since the time of the criminal justice and public order act. People like Tornike, who had started gathering outside Bassiani as the police were carting off their friends and colleagues, were protesting the arrests. “We were trying to figure out what was happening,” explains Tornike who “didn’t even know which Police station they took them to” at the time.

The group that had gathered outside of Bassiani had started to mobilize and took their protest directly to a national level and the parliament building. It all happened quite naturally according to Tornike, a single collective consciousness in the face of oppression. They made their way to the city centre, elevating the protest . At this point the group that had gathered outside the club was working together as one body. “It was just people that were left outside the club,” remembers Tornike. “They were saying we’re not going home, we have to protest this.” From there the protest took on a life of its own, as more people started to arrive, bringing sound systems, and waving banners with a unified message of “we dance together, we fight together.” It was a scene that resonated throughout the whole region and the clubbing community around the world as images of the impromptu rave-protest flooded social media channels.

But is also brought an unwanted presence. While a fight ensued with police “who were trying to push us from the road to the sidewalk,” according to Tornike a counter protest assembled from an extreme right-wing faction, indicating that this was about much more than a simple drug bust. It’s part of a “big game for sure” intones Tornike today in a message that echoes former Café Gallery booker’s comment in Resident Advisor at the time: “It’s a fight between the Soviet past of this country and the dictatorship we used to live in, the police country we used to live in and the future we want for our country.”

“The whole country is looking at the alternative side,” explains Tornike and Bassiani, which is open to everybody from all denominations and sexual identities, has become a symbol for an alternative culture that directly threatens an incredibly conservative status quo that is currently running the country. “They are actually scared,” suggests Tornike because they don’t understand the culture and perceive it to threaten theirs. “So they stigmatise us,”with unsubstantiated claims of den of inequities and drug havens, when really their fear lies in the alternative lifestyle they promote, which includes homosexulaity and a more liberal political ideologies.

After a month long “investigation” by the authorities, which nearly closed the venue for good, and some hefty fines, Bassiani was allowed to open again. And while it seems on the surface that the issues between the factions have been quelled, Tornike insists that “it continues” and that “it’s not over.” It’s very likely the authorities weren’t expecting the resistance from the community or falling under the international media’s scope like it did, but it seems in lieu of being able to close down the scene, they are only applying more pressure.

Those stop and searches are “harsher than before” says Tornike, with a constant police presence surveilling the club at the moment. “It’s tough” for someone like Tornike who is also trying the develop the scene, running the two first ever record labels under the Bassiani and Horroom banners. “We have big barriers,” he says in a breathy laugh, “but somehow we’ve managed to have two labels.”

Those “barriers’ whether they are the authoritarian forces, or simply the logistics of running a label from Georgia, have not diminished the presence of the club in the city, the country or the continent. As they celebrate five years of Bassiani this year, they celebrate it against all odds with the determination and zeal of the community behind them. Their fight might not yet be over, but as awareness keeps growing and more people find themselves dancing on Bassiani and Horoom’s dance floors over weekends, with music selected by DJs like Kvanchi, their force in numbers only grows. And perhaps in the future those numbers will affect real change in a country dogged by the conservative views of an older generation.

Keeping it groovy with Magda

Magda has been a formidable force on the international DJ circuit for about as long as she’s been a DJ. Her varied musical background and her nomadic origins have made a favourite amongst a variety of audiences with her instinctive flair for the dance floor underpinning her sets. In recent years she’s cut down on her touring commitments to focus more on production and leisurely pursuits, but yet you’ll still find her playing at least three times a week across the globe in clubs like Fabric, Spybar and OHM, just to name a few recent.

Born in Poland, raised in Detroit, and now living in Berlin, Magda has had an extensive DJing career that spans the origins and various different phases of the all-encompassing musical movement called Techno. Growing up in Detroit in the nineties, Magda experienced various different phases of the genre, but it would be in its minimal form, spearheaded by the likes of Robert Hood and Richie Hawtin’s Plastikman alias that Magda would find her musical niche as a DJ.

A chance meeting with Hawtin installed her in what would become the M_nus family and gave her her first residency. Playing around the states and eventually moving to New York, Magda cut her teeth on the US circuit. She made the ultimate move to Berlin after she played a Perlon party at the predecessor to Berghain, Ostgut. That night ended with her playing back to back with Ricardo Villalobos and sold Magda on Berlin for life.

Refining her style in the booth further after the move, she also set off on a reserved, but significant career as a producer, releasing her debut on M_nus in 2005 followed by her now legendary mix compilation “She’s a Dancing Machine” on the same label. Magda has been a label boss alongside Marc Houle and Troy pierce for Items & Things, a resident at some of the most impressive addresses in the world and has staked her rightful claim as a monolith in the booth today.

In recent years, her more reserved touring schedule has given her the opportunity to focus more on production and since 2016 she has been working exclusively with TB Arthur on their new electro outfit, Blotter Trax. It’s a project she is very passionate about and ten minutes before I call her up for our interview she sends me the latest release, which will be out via Frustrated Funk on the eve of her set at Jaeger.

The third release in two years from Blotter Trax is “completely different than the last” explains Magda over an email before I ring her up. Between the familiar electro/Detroit beat constructions and the minimalist approach to production, a processed bass guitar looms large. It’s an unusual feature in a track of this kind where much of the focus lies on the rhythm section, and breathes fresh life into the stale tropes that earmark much of Techno and Electro today. With those tracks making a fresh impression, I call up Magda who answers with an amiable hello before we delve into an extensive and all-encompassing Q&A covering Blotter Trax, her formidable years in Detroit and her truly inspiring career as a DJ.

Magda plays Frædag tonight.

We’ve just received the latest Blotter Trax. It’s very different from what anybody else is making at the moment in terms of Electro. How did those tracks come together?

We have been experimenting and growing since the beginning. It’s been about three years and it’s evolved into this release which I feel really captures both of our past influences well, especially Post Punk and early Electro. We have been working with a vocalist and we used a live bassist for this record because we wanted to make these tracks feel more like songs.

We spent a lot of time on sound design making sure everything sounds warm, rich, and as fat as possible and that each sound has its space

I was actually curious about the bass guitar, because I could hear that it was a live bass, but wasn’t sure if it was a sample. It adds a very distinct sound to the track.

We really like to sculpt our own sounds from the analogue gear we have, or incorporate other musicians. We gave the bassist an idea and he recorded a session with his own pedals and processing units, therefore you have this incredible sound. We then took it, edited it and processed it further.

The other part of the appeal of Blotter Trax is the electronic elements, which is also very interesting, because it’s not the usual Roland X0X sounds that you get on a record, but something more futuristic. How do you arrive at these sounds?

Well, you’d be surprised but we use a lot of processed guitar. We’re both influenced by bands like the Flying Lizards and the downtown New York sound from the eighties. To this day those records sound futuristic. We wanted to see what we can do with processing real instruments, so that’s where many of these wonky sounds come from.

How did you guys find each other and what made you want to start making music together?

I was obsessing over some TB Arthur records for a while and I was talking to my friend BMG (Ectomorph) and I said; “god, this TB Arthur stuff, have you heard it?” And he was like; “he’s a friend of mine, you guys should meet.”

We hit it off right away and decided to go to the studio to see what happens. We started to jam and in a week we had three recordings done. I’ve never recorded in this way, all analogue, jam session, recorded straight to tape. That was our first release and if you listen to it, its very different from the way we sound now.

Blotter Trax 2.0 also sounded much more improvised than this latest release on Frustrated Funk.

Those were straight up jam sessions between the three of us; BMG, myself and TB Arthur. It was recorded over a period of a week and we probably cut five tapes, and used three of those for the record. I took those recordings and basically edited them down into tracks that made sense.

And I believe there’s a live show?

Yes. We have played about 8 times so far. Our first shows were fully analogue and improvised. I was on an old Roland synth which definitely has a mind of its own and TB Arthur was on the modular so we always had to do 2 hour soundchecks to sculpt all the sounds correctly for each venue. I feel like we’ve gone through different stages of experimentation and thrown ourselves out of our comfort zones to do these unpredictable sets, but also are now able to do more structured sets like the one at Fabric where we only had one hour and there wasn’t much room for much random experimentation.

Through what you’ve been telling me, it seems like there’s a constant evolution in your work, even just across the three records you’ve released together.

Absolutely and that’s what keeps it fun and exciting at the end of the day.

I want to ask you more about that editing process and the post-productiophase of making a Blotter Trax record; do you think your experience as DJ helps that aspect of the process?

I think my DJ experience helps me 100% in the way I edit.

I find there’s some relationship to the way these Blotter Trax records sound and your sets, in the way you accentuate a few simple elements in a minimalist way to arrive at a very big sound.

Exactly, that’s always something I have geared towards. We tend to start with many parts and end up reducing things quite a lot so each sound has its space and power instead of getting lost.

That’s why it was really difficult to edit those tapes because they were all 30 minutes long. (laughs) And it actually took me some time to get it right. At first I was like; “how do I do this” because the whole performance shifts and morphs and I wanted to make sure not to cut interesting movements and changes, but also keep the dynamics that would make the track interesting.

Working with TB Arthur and people like BMG, do you think It’s changed the way you make music?

Absolutely. I realise I really enjoy collaborating way more than making stuff on my own. I like the shared experience and exchange of knowledge. TB Arthur has a different approach to recording than me in some ways because he comes from an indie background so when we edit stuff, he’ll notice things I wouldn’t or vice versa. We learn from each other.

Are you producing more than what you’ve done in the past?

More than ever.

It seems that you are also finding more enjoyment out of it, more than you have in the past.

Yes, there was always a lot of touring and it became difficult to engage in the studio in a way I wanted. Now I really enjoy being home more and having time to record and living a more balanced life.

You mentioned early Electro as some of your influences in the beginning, and I certainly detect elements of Model 500 in there. You spent most of your formative years in Detroit. How much does that time still influence the music you make today?

If it had not been for me growing up in Detroit and having that exposure I would not be here right now. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to listen to not just one movement, but several at the same time. The scene was small, but you would go from an Underground Resistance party to a gay funk and soul loft party, to a new wave electro party and so on. That’s why from the start I wanted to mix different sounds in my sets.

How did you end up living in Detroit?

We emigrated from Poland to escape communist rule. My parents had a really tough time finding work in their industry; my mother is a graphic designer and my father is an engineer and that’s how we ended up moving to Detroit so my dad could work for the auto industry.

Do you think the history of the place had an affect in the way the music sounded?

Absolutely. I think there’s a lot of soul that’s captured when things are uncomfortable or scary and a lot of emotion comes out. Detroit has such a rich but difficult history and that definitely comes through the music.

I was watching a clip with you from ADE a while back, where you mentioned that it all started for you after going to Canada and experiencing some parties there. Obviously the Richie Hawtin and M_nus connection started there but was there a thriving scene there?

I don’t remember saying that. (laughs) Maybe the Plastikman parties, those were insane. I’ve never seen anything like that. They would cover entire warehouses with material. They had plastic tunnels that would lead to different rooms and it was pitch black inside except for a strobe. The music really sounded undefinable and from the future. That was properly mind-blowing.

Is that how you met Richie Hawtin and got onto the label, and started touring with him?

Actually we met through friends at a loft party. We really got along and he gave me a residency at his little bar in Canada, which had a capacity of 80. It was a really good way for me to practice and get into DJing a lot more. I started working for him, digitalising his vinyl when the whole MP3 technology started. That was an incredible job, just to have the exposure to all the promos being sent from all over the world. That’s how I discovered all the German minimal labels and a lot of stuff that changed my life.

And then you moved to Berlin shortly after that?

Actually, I lived in New York for a while, and once I came to Berlin to play a Perlon party, I was sold. I realised, ok there are no rules here, everyone is easy-going and it’s definitely more chill than New York. It just felt like the right time.

Did you feel that you had to adapt your sets for European audiences?

It was a trip, because I realised a lot of tracks that worked in Detroit didn’t work in Europe.

Why was that?

I was playing a lot of broken, glitchy stuff and in europe they preferred steadier types of tracks back then.

It was a great learning experience, to adapt to various places. I’m very thankful for that and for Richie taking me on tour and throwing me completely out of my comfort zone.

I wanted to quit a hundred times, because it was so stressful to try and play in front of people who seemed so confused (laughs). I remember having to play everything on plus eight and the hardest records I could find, and still they seemed so mellow compared to what everybody was playing at the time.

It seems like it’s back again.

Oh, it’s back.

Do you find yourself having to adapt yet again or can you keep doing what you’ve been doing?

It’s not that I have to adapt again. I think it happens naturally. When you go out to listen to other DJs or listen to the records that come out, you get the vibe of what is going on. I think it’s reflective of the turmoil that’s going on in the world. You hear music that is edgier, faster and dirtier. I like that energy, and I like playing faster at the moment.

You would consider yourself a DJ first and foremost?

Yes, definitely.

I distinctly remember listening to Magda mix CDs at a time when they were still these significant artistic statements. I think it was “She’s a dancing Machine” that was particularly prominent around that time and really put a lot of focus on the DJ as the artist. It seems that it’s something of a lost art today in the age of soundcloud and mixcloud with a kind of immediacy replacing the artistic reward.

Times have changed with streaming. Everything has become extremely accessible. Back then to make a mix, you would be asked by the label to do it and they would physically produce a disc and make the artwork so it was like a little album.Now everything is uploaded in one minute, and it’s a completely different mindset, not that one is better or worse, it’s just a different time.

Do you feel that it’s the same in the booth today, that you have to give people that immediacy?

Actually it’s funny you say that, I think it’s the opposite for me. In the past, I used to layer four tracks and mix that way and now I’m focusing more on the track selection, mixing more patiently and the edits I do.

I like searching for all kinds of tracks to work into my sets. That’s a whole process in itself and its fun to dig deep and into the past as well.

There must be some underlying sound to your set however. What do you look for in a track that sort of underpins all your choices?

I can’t say. I just look for something unique. I want something different, whether it’s Electro or Techno, or House. Something definitely with a sexy vibe. I like stuff between genres.

In Berlin where you’re playing these mammoth long sets, you can obviously take your time through a set. If you’re coming to Oslo now, you’ll notice it’s very different because of our short opening times. Is this something that your conscious of when you’re playing a new place?

I try to consider each set independently. It depends on what the venue is like and what the capacity is. I never plan a set. I usually have some folders with different genres of music and then just go with the flow.

Regarding the shorter sets, I’m really used to them, because that’s how I grew up in Detroit. All the clubs used to close at 2:00 and people didn’t really go out until midnight so it was two hours, full on.

Like every DJ out there today you have an agent that takes care of your bookings, but do you have the final say where you’ll play?

Absolutely, I think it is super important to have that relationship with the booker, where you share a similar vision and you make sure you play the right parties. For example a lot of times, people still associate me with how I played 15 years ago, and I’ve changed a lot since then.

Do you find that you can be very selective today and don’t have to take any set that gets offered to you?

Yes definitely

And I suppose you enjoy it more if you’re playing less.

Absolutely, I just have more time and I’m more relaxed and can really engage and be more creative and also build more relationships with new people and connect with old friends. In the past when there was a lot of touring it was just one big ball of chaos all the time. For me staying connected to myself and the people around me these days is very important.

And when you do want to disconnect at home and you don’t want to connect with the clubbing world, what sort of music do you listen to?

Which is every Monday! (laughs) I listen to everything, but I don’t listen to Techno. I was just listening to Shabazz Palaces. I love stuff like that and other more chill music at home.

For the people that might have seen you the last time you were here in Oslo, how would you describe your set has changed since then?

I’m playing a lot more Electro and playing faster for the most part but still keeping it groovy.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

Music sales figures for 2018 are in! According to the RIAA, sales of physical records (in the US) went up 14% last year while cassettes increased by a whopping 19%. It also says that sales of streaming services went up by 44%, but if the rest of that industry’s counting is anything like the Carters at Tidal, who seemed to be enlisting the help of their infant daughter Blue Ivy in the process – 5, 7, 20, 100, 200 000, 3 000 000 – the veracity of those claims are questionable at best.

The tangible evidence we can take from this however is that vinyl sales have seen yet another increase, which means it must be time for another Cut with Filter Musikk and it’s two-for-one deal this week on our first edition of the series out of Roland Lifjell’s hallowed hollow in downtown Oslo.

Thanks to a myopic moment on our part, the start of 2019 still remains something of a blur and although the records have already started arriving at Filter this year, we somehow passed over an entire box two weeks ago. So we are making up for that today with an extended cut with Filter Musikk.

Roland Lifjell has been tucked away in his little corner as usual and in a tug of war between the boxes of records and space for movement he’s starting to lose the battle. It’s only after navigating a maze of plastic and cardboard that we find Roland huddled over a stack of the latest arrivals, admiring his own reflection from their shiny untouched plastic sheaths.

After unpacking two boxes over the course of last two weeks, Roland has sent us the best of these for the Cut with Filter musikk. These records, selected from an already meticulously curated collection of latest arrivals, are the musical pieces that you can touch, see, hear and acquire.

There’s no hype here, with months of inane clickbait directed through social media threads and constant previews of halfarsed loops that are printed up in limited numbers only to disappear on the shelves of the distributor before they are even released. No, these are the records that are here and now, the music that matters, this is the cut with Filter Musikk.

Ansome, Umwelt – Rave Or Die 11 (Rave Or Die) 10″

O, it’s like that is it Roland? We’re just going to launch ourselves into the deep end with some no, holds barred, growling Techno? Umwelt’s Rave or Die imprint makes no concessions when it comes to club music. There is no posturing or attempt to cajole the listener with some innocuous looping twaddle. The music on Rave or Die and in extension anything with the Umwelt moniker stamped across the record is music that shouts at its listeners, foaming at the mouth like a rabid animal with vitriol intent.

Ansome and Umwelt accompany each other on this florescent 10”, providing two mammoth Techno cuts that are too big to be contained on its dinky format. Two blistering percussive arrangements twist and writhe in their constraints as they wrestle free from conformity. Ansome and Umwelt find some synchronicity between their tracks with jack-hammer beats puncturing unnerving atmospheres with all the grace of a two-ton truck.

In light of Umwelt’s ferocious kick-per-beat “Affre”s, Ansome’s “Vakuum” is almost tame – I said almost. Both producers are in a class of their own however, applying noise and distortion with the most delicate of touches that produce awe-ínspiring results.

Rave or Die 11 is not breaking any moulds and it ventures very little in terms of the sound Umwelt has cultivated since its inception, but what it does, it does incredibly well and few very prominent labels and artists brandishing the Techno badge could come close to the intensity that real Techno artists like these put forward.

Posthuman – The Snake Bites Twice (Craigie Knowes) 12″

The UK acid outfit Posthuman set their sites on Electro for the precocious Glasgow label, Craigie Knows on The Snake Bites twice. The barely-new label, which has already garnered a reputation for its bold dancefloor cuts across 18 releases over two years, turns to the east-London stalwarts, Richard Bevan and Joshu Doherty for their latest release.

With a glance in their rear-view mirror, Posthuman continue to honour the roots of club music in their sound, with infectious melodies, kinetic beats, acid bass-lines and progressive arrangements balancing their sound. On The Snake Bites Twice they don’t mess with perfection, and their modernised take on Acid, Electro and Detroit Techno fwavers little from previous releases. They bulk up the tried and tested sounds of Roland’s x0x range, but dust off the cobwebs and bring it up to date, where it completely does away with those DIY associations of yore.

Stripping back the elements to their essential parts like on “Polywater Acid” they favour a minimalist modernist take, leaving tracks like that enough room to breathe through modern scooping sound systems like the Funktion One. Where “Steal the Show” does indeed steal the show with its Electro breakbeat and engaging melodic phrases, there’s a little bit of everything and something for everybody across this release.

From “Cobra Structure’s” lysergic movements beyond the known galaxy to “Down to Jakk’s” monstrous jacking rhythm section the record goes from accessible dance floor workouts on the A-side to stripped back DJ tools on the b-sides with the TB-303 almost always front and centre in the arrangements as Posthuman’s defining character.

Birds Ov Paradise – Part 1: Bayou (Hypnus) 12″

The alluring, hypnotic sounds of Hypnus have been providing a deep alternative to the boisterous sounds of Techno since 2014, with an ambient treatment of experimental electronic sounds that drift along at tempered tempos as they swirl around, slow chugging beat arrangements. BLNDR, Luigi Tozzi and Feral have all contributed to the Swedish label, solidifying the sound of the label in those artist’s exploratory views of electronic music.

Birds ov Paradise (David Sabel) joined the roster with a three part release which saw the light of day last year and now finally arrives in Oslo. The Göteberg artist finds a natural synergy with the label directly on the first part, Bayou. Rich textures cascade over the tempered rhythm section, where they float light as air across the audio spectrum. Bass lines whispering from the depths of the arrangements ride waves of steady four-four kicks as electronic organisms swarm around their brief appearance only to dissipate back into the ether in glowing reflections of their existence.

Across four tracks Birds ov Paradise creates a mystical sonic narrative that runs through the short LP. You can almost that touch the foggy humidity of the Bayou on this release, setting the scene for the rest of the series that will venture further onto the Savannah and the Plateau. We look forward to the journey.

Mall Grab – How The Dogs Chill, Vol. 1 (Looking For Trouble) 12″

“It’s straight up party music,” reads on eager Discogs commentator on this, the latest record from hip-house / lo-fi (whatever you want to label it) producer and DJ Mall Grab. Wait, since he’s been doing this kind of music since the beginning, does this make him a Hip-House veteran? As confusing as that sounds, Mall Grab is one of the originators of the resurgence of House in this current epoch of dance music. Originally defined by distorting hats and cymbals and a quirky moniker, I think it’s safe if we just call it House music today.

How the Dogs Chill Vol.1 (I expect there will never be a volume 2) is the debut of a label that takes its name from the EPs third track, “Looking for trouble”, suggesting this might be a MG imprint. It’s got that nineties throwback, self-deprecating aesthetic that we’ve encountered across releases from similar acts like Ross from Friends and DJ Seinfeld that re-affirms this.

With an all-encompassing musical palette, Mall Grab channels everything from Jungle to Hip Hop through his work and How the Dogs Chill wavers little from his sonic dexterity. From the deep House,Trance inflection of “Liverpool street in the rain”, to the broken beat of “Get impetuous”, there’s no singular genre or style to pigeonhole his music.

There is an infectious attraction to his musical creations however and we would have to agree with that eager Discogs user; How the Dogs Chill Vol.1 is straight up party music.

Versalife – Nova Prospekt (TRUST) 12″

At the forefront of this current wave of Electro is Versalife. The Dutch producer has been making expressive electronica within the canon of Electro for the best part of a decade, but where others have favoured the DIY palette of the genres roots he’s opted for a more progressive approach to the genre. Skipping beats coaxed from a modern interpretation of the tried and trusted sounds of the Roland x0x series, travel through the alien electronic textures, skipping through the cosmos at hyperspeed as it boldly takes us into the future of the Electro genre.

Versalife returns to TRUST for Nova Prospekt, a label that has embodied this new age in Electro and electronic music, immortalising the sound for the next generation as they step into the future. Nova Prospekt is a more familiar approach from Versalife after the concept-driven Soul of the Automaton series, which saw the producer relay a cognitive narrative through three records.

Nova Prospekt is by no means any different in sonic identity, but a simpler arrangement and less-varying progression through the tracks has a more defined dance floor characater in its execution. Versalife’s futurist approach, while honouring the legacy of the likes of Drexciya, uses familiar tropes, re-imagined like an auteur looking towards some science fiction future.

“Exosuit” and its charming bleeping motive; “2A Spacts” and it’s slinky bass line; and the title track’s bouncing toms-as-bass-lines all sound immediately familiar, but as Versalife interprets these in his own unique way and frames these elements in his distinctive alien soundscapes, it retrofits these elements for the next phase of this music.

Ekman, Ola Bergman – Code Two (Propaganda Moscow) 12”

From one end of Electro to the other with Propaganda Moscow, where dark atmospheres and body-slamming beats replace the lush adventurous melodies and arrangements of Versalife. Ekman and Ola Bergman, bring it back to a primal level where music is a physical relationship between man and machine and the results are raw expressive moments trapped in a moment.

There are two sides to Ekman; the traditional Electro artist stripped down to its fundamental parts in pursuit of function above form like we heard on his debut LP Primus Motors, and then there’s this Ekman; the bold experimentalist ready to assault the senses with some abrasive sonic deluge aimed at the status quo. He usually reserves this latter part for releases on Trilogy Tapes, but on this occasion, that part of the artist has kicked a hole in the partition that divides these respective sides of his artistic personality. Murky synths cloud the percussive sections where they disappear behind the erratic synth formations screaming at you from sordid depth.

Luckily Ola Bergman is there on the flip as the sage counterpoint to Ekman’s schizophrenic sounds. Bergman however retains that mystique and allure clouding the entire release with drums and stabbing synths appearing out of leaden atmospheres. A more traditional take on the darker side of Electro, Bergman plays on that familiar dichotomy in electro, between melody and function and staccato and legato, but he strips it back to its most corporeal dimensions with two tracks aimed specifically at the DJ and the dance floor.

Free Falling with Karolinski

There’s a tense quiet, the faint sounds of a synthesiser feeding back on itself, and suddenly; a magnificent wave of sound rolls out of Jæger’s 21 inch Funktion One bass cabinets. An all-consuming focus resolves into big undulating boulders of sound lapping up against bodies pressing closer to the stage. Karolinski (Karoline Hegreness) is making her live debut in Oslo and there are no expectations, but the energy is electric as the soundsystem trembles through the opening bars of her set. In the front there is a dedicated group in Jæger’s basement, they’ve come exclusively to see the budding artist and she has pulled them close to the front, forming a tight but free circle around the stage.

Karolinski has only just released her debut record, an LP called “Abnormal Soundscape”, but already she’s cultivated a keen following in Norway. Although she has been a DJ in the Bergen scene for many years, “Abnormal Soundscape” has been her first foray into production, and it’s clear that there is an inherent understanding of the club environment when she takes to the stage. A track from the album, “Oh Lordy” spills out from the speakers and the warm surging bass washes over the audience while crystalline noise, resonating back onto itself cascades from the upper frequencies.

If pressed, “Oh Lordy” is her favourite track from the album she tells me before her set. “I made that in Australia in a beach House last summer”. It’s the “latest track” from the album and Karoline’s gesturing shapes from behind her podium of machines is her enjoyment manifested through movement. “Do you find the live show more exciting that the DJ set” I ask her. ”Of course,” she says eagerly; “You have more things to do on stage… and it’s super intuitive.”

She’s excited for the night ahead and says she will be incorporating some vocals in the preceding set. For this particularly live show at Jæger she has “started bringing in House music and vocals” to give her audience something a little “different” from the album. The album which has enjoyed a very promising critical reception in Norway only came out in December, but already she’s cultivated a significant following.

Since releasing “Abnormal Soundscape” on her own label FJORDFJELLOGDALER (FFDR) the requests to perform have started trickling in. Olle Abstract specifically asked for Karolinski when he played in Bergen recently and while she was still preparing for her live set at Jæger she jumped in head first to make her debut as a live artist. “I was already stressing about the one at Jæger which was a month and a half away,” she explains but “it went pretty well.”

She took a lot away from that first gig, and observing her on stage at Jæger it seems like she is well versed at the job at hand. Even when the power abruptly shuts down during her set at Jæger, she handles it like a pro and jumps right back into her set with grace and determination like nothing has happened. Her live set exceeds 130 beats per minute, a severe departure from the “pretty chill set” she played in Bergen only a few weeks back, she tells me. The dub influences on her work, with those deep rolling waves of bass and extended delays, undercuts the tempos of the 4-4 kicks punching their way through the miasmatic textures. Tracks from the album contort into new improvised pieces, pieces that might be the first sketches of a new track. A vocal dissipates into endless echoes and elements of House and Techno find a common ground in the live setting, including an homage to Crystal Waters at the end of her set.

Karoline is also a skydiver and skydiving instructor, and there’s always been a tactile connection between “flying” and music for the artist. Titles like “I wanna dance in the sky” and the video for her first single “ Basic Frequency” parlay this into a literal correlation, but it all harks back to her childhood. Her parents, skydivers and computer programmers created an environment where electronic music and skydiving became symbiotic experiences. She had Napster when it was still an unknown entity, and she would “download a lot trance” but with specific themes. Titles like “castles in the sky” and “dreaming of flying all the time” she remembers specifically today. Tracks like these and specifically Trance, sparked an early interest in electronic music, but it wasn’t exactly an isolated experience for Karoline. “When I heard the complexity of the synthesiser,” she explains “I connected it with my mum and dad was doing when they were flying.” Both music and skydiving became two very important aspects in her life.

“Naturally I got into electronic music after listening to a lot of Trance,” she says but through the years the associations with flying have moved from Trance to Dub Techno. “ It’s about the long dub chords, the reverbs, the delay and the space that you can create,” and that’s the parallel she draws between music and skydiving today. “When I fly,” she says, “I just hear a drone” and it doesn’t take much on the listeners part to find these striking parallels too. Through “Abnormal Soundscape” there’s an emphasis on space as simple repetitive phrases repeat on themselves, orbiting around a simple refrain from synthesiser.

Inspired by “early 2000 Echospace, Deepchord and Maurizio,” Karoline started making electronic music in 2013. She set out in search of the fundamentals via YouTube, but found the process “really confusing.” She realised that; “if I really want to learn this I have to go to school.” She enrolled in an Ableton course at Point Blank in London, which applied her with the basic tools to start making music, and a platform for her to hone her eventual sound. “Skydiving was still a really big thing” in her life at that point and she managed to travel the world with it, but she made sure that everywhere she went she could bring her portable studio with her.

When she moved back to Norway, she came back with a singular vision: to finish the recorded material, release a record and start a label. She found a makeshift studio on the outskirts of Bergen, and sequestered in her new home, began to compartmentalize what she’d made through her travels. She set herself the task of going through “hundreds of finished projects” in an effort to create a “soundscape” from a “few selected tunes” that would eventually become the album. “When I got home to the studio,” she explains “I could finally get my shit together and just focus on being here with the music.” That was the start of everything for Karoline with everything circling back to the first track on the album, “flight simulator”

“Flight simulator is the first track I ever made,” says Karoline. It was inspired by Tiësto’s “Flight 643” and Karoline’s “favourite game” from where the track takes its name. “I’ve always wanted to use a speech from a flight,” she says about the song’s origins and found a “fucked-up version of the speech” from the game to form the basis of the track, the vocal gliding up and down the looping arrangement. The speech and the subject matter adds a very eerie quality to the track that Karoline found “super strange and surreal,” but at the same time adds something literal to the abstract soundscape she creates through synthesisers.

There’s often this literal quality li to Karolinski’s music, which Karoline doesn’t try to subvert through her tracks titles. “Toget fra Oslo heim til Bergen” for instance was a track created on the train home from Oslo to Bergen exactly as the title suggests but there’s also something tactile about that trip in the music. She looked out of the window during her journey and interpreting the lights flashing past the window as sounds, she found the defining crux of that song.

“Abnormal Soundscape” is the result of some 10 years worth of music distilled into the album in this way with personal experiences defining the sound of the album. Why did it take her so long to release music? “I wasn’t ready,” she says and elaborates; “before, I was still travelling around and make music wherever I was. Now I want to have it as a career.” And what about skydiving? “I really love it and it’s a big passion in my life. But so is music and music is a bigger part of my life at the moment.”

Karoline paved her own way to success, establishing her own label, and even though she had the entire Bergen scene at her disposal, she feels that her experience with music was a “super isolated” one. She had known the “music dudes” in Bergen all her life through Djing and specifically mentions Christian Tilt as an abettance, but when it comes to her music and the label she “really wanted to understand” the intricacies of running her own label and being an independent artist. FJORDFJELLOGDALER had to be her “own platform” and Karoline “was never interested” in working with other labels.

In the future she hopes the label will become a similar platform for other artists and if offered, she might start working with other labels too. Meanwhile she’s got a “couple of EPs with both House music and more trancy stuff” on the way and some more Techno in pipeline. With more gigs starting to line up, she’ll be developing her live show concurrently as a very comprehensive package. Our conversation dwindles down as soundcheck is prioritised, but before we part ways until later the evening, and she heads off to the stage, I ask her what her set might be like. “The one tonight”, she says… “is not going to be chill.”

We’ve got some catching up to do with Cassy

*All photos by Kenny Rodriguez

Cassy (Catherine Britton) has always considered herself a DJ first and foremost. Even though she might have first made her mark in electronic music through her voice, providing vocals for other producers she insists; “I see myself way more as a DJ than a singer.” A prominent DJ figure today, Cassy travels the world on the back of her skills behind a set of decks and regularly plays two to four times a week from intimate venues like Jæger’s basement to vast cavernous club spaces like Berghain’s Säule.

She is able to go from the immediate intensity of festival crowd at peak time, to the subtle intricacies of a seven-hour set in Berlin. “That’s my job,” she told us in no uncertain terms in the past on this blog. “For me it’s a given, if people pay me to play in the club, and I should pay attention to the crowd.“ She talks from extensive experience as a past Panorama Bar, Trouw, DC-10 and Rex Club resident.

As a recording artist her career has moved perpendicular with her career as a DJ, culminating in her debut LP in 2016, Donna. She’s released records for the likes of AUS music, Perlon and Bass Culture records, and she’s collaborated with some of the most prominent electronic music artists out there. In 2017 she set up her own label, Kwench Records to collaborate with artists like Art Alfie, Demuir and Pete Moss as well as establishing a platform for new artists.

It was since our last encounter with Cassy on this blog, that she’s launched her label and released her debut LP and although she’s been a regular feature in the booth at Jæger, we’ve missed some opportunities to ask her about these developments and others in her career, her music and club culture. We were not going to miss another opportunity however, and with her next set at Jæger looming, we shot over some questions to Cassy, and she happily indulged us. So excuse us, we have some catching up to do….

* Cassy plays Frædag with G-Ha & Olasnkii this Friday.

Hello Cassy and happy new year. Do you ever make new year’s resolutions?

I don’t need to make them in the new year as I make resolutions all the time, every week!

I was just looking over your touring schedule for 2018, and you played every week, most often twice a week (that I can see from RA) and all over the world. What do you do in between to recharge?

I try to sleep as much as possible, work out and eat well. I have also gotten back into meditation again more recently.

It’s been a while since we spoke and there have been so many highlights. The release of your album Donna was one of them. Looking back on it now two years down the line, what did the debut LP affirm and how has your personal relationship with the music evolve after you got some distance from it?

It was the first step into a direction I wanted to take, and it was a very good start. My relationship with the music differs. Sometimes I feel like I can’t listen to it anymore, and sometimes I really love it!

The electronic music album is becoming something of a lost art-form, especially in this era of musical consumption. How would you approach a second LP today differently from the last?

With a more relaxed attitude. Worry less about it being an album and trying to make it fit into what an album should be, and see it more as presenting the music that I have made.

With your record label imprint Kwench Records, the first releases were collaborations. What do you get out of the collaborative experience that is different from working solo?

When you collaborate the end result is something you have no idea of, unless you work together a lot of course, but for me that is not usually the case. It’s exciting and you can learn from each other.

“One thing I have learned in my life and my career is to not look into the past, look to the future and build something.”

The last few releases on the label were solo records from other artists. Was this an intentional shift? Will you continue to collaborate with other artists going forward?

The label is a journey, and it takes time to figure out what the best route is. It’s hard to have a vision of something that lasts forever so you have to allow for adjustments. At first, I had a strong vision, but quickly figured out that that vision was not completely possible, and so I am allowing the process of letting it grow more organically, but still having one eye on the road. One thing I have learned in my life and my career is to not look into the past, look to the future and build something.

Ivaylo featured on a compilation for the label, and I believe he’ll be bringing out an EP on Kwench in the new year. What established this relationship between our resident and your label and what can you tell us about this new EP?

The relationship developed by meeting Oslo every single time I am there, and talking about music and life, and feeling a strong connection.

2018 was the year of #metoo. Have you personally experienced a change in the industry since?

No comment. It’s better this way.

For an artist and DJ like you who came up through the ranks of a predominantly chauvinist industry, were you constantly aware of the challenges and how did you approach, and ultimately curb them?

It was extremely challenging from the get-go. Personally, I think having to deal with egomaniac, greedy, and power tripping personalities is worse, and both men and women can behave like that. I didn’t need to be aware these types of personalities, they were just in my face. When people act out of fear and are very short sighted this creates problems, so you just have to do your best to deal with things in your own way where possible, and stay in your power!

You’re an honorary resident by now at Jæger and you must know the crowd pretty well. How does your set adapt to the crowd here?

I feel at home at the club. It’s so easy to adapt there because it’s such a relaxed and open atmosphere.

What is in store for Cassy the recording artist and the Kwench label in 2019?

Now I have had the label for just over a year it’s given me a chance to think about the direction, and so I will be putting more energy into its identity in 2019. I am also working on my own music to broaden my horizons and release on other labels this year.

And lastly can you give us sneak peek into your record bag, and pick out three of your current favourites

Cinthie ‘Together’

Niles Cooper ‘House Gospel’ (Black Loops remix)

Eddie Amador and Dany Cohiba ‘Crazy’ Julian Chaptal remix

Always looking forward with Teebee

Teebee discusses the origins and future of Drum & Bass in an extensive interview that traces the lineage of the genre through his own career.

The general consensus around here is that Techno is the music of the future. We’ve adopted it as our mantra for some time, and I’ve written about the subject at length, but perhaps I and we’ve been getting it all wrong, and it’s Drum and Bass that is in fact the music of the future.

Did Drum and Bass actually supplant Techno at some point as the most innovative music in the electronic music canon? A half an hour on the phone with Torgeir Byrknes (Teebee) points to a resounding “yes”. A theme that echoes through our conversation talks of looking ahead, negating nostalgia and embracing cultural development. It’s about progression, it’s about living in the future, adapting to your surroundings and about assuming everything that has come before you is irrelevant. “You’ve got to step up if you want to be a part of this,” explains Torgeir in no uncertain terms towards the end of our conversation, “because time waits for no-one.”

It’s a very existentialist perspective for an artist of Torgeir’s calibre. As Teebee he’s been a genre figurehead for as long as it’s existed. He’s released records on prominent Drum and Bass labels like Moving Shadow and Photek Productions as well as establishing his own significant contribution to the industry in the form of Subtitles. He’s also one half of Calyx and Teebee, who have been a major contributor to Andy C’s RAM records and one of the biggest crossover successes in Drum and Bass. And he’s played to audiences in the tens of thousands as a DJ, but at the heart of all of this is a humble and an almost altruistic ideology that informs his work across all these projects. For Torgeir it’s all about “the art and love of culture rather than for the financial aspects and billing on a poster” and the older he gets the “more important that becomes.”

At the centre of this culture is the idea of progression for the 40-something artist and DJ, and like every other aspect of your social structure, it needs to be nurtured and it needs to constantly evolve and adapt with its surroundings. This means “you can either change with the times or die” and in Drum and Bass this sentiment is what keeps the genre moving forward in Torgeir’s opinion before he adds “but we still remember where we’ve come from.”

Drum and Bass’ legacy is intertwined with the legacy of Rave culture in the UK and Europe. It gestated in the broken beats of early nineties Techno, and as that genre moved into stoic, minimalists 4-4 kicks, Drum and Bass grasped at the shredded beats of proto-acts like Prodigy and LTJ Bukem to make its own intense impression on the world. By the late nineties it was an international phenomenon with people like Goldie, Photek and Andy C becoming household names and dedicated scenes coming up in places as remote as South Africa and Australia, all before the incremental rise of the Internet. Teebee was an integral part of this movement by then, but for him and his peers the music and scene has its roots much further back than that, back in the ninety-eighties when as a youth living in Bergen, Norway Hip Hop came to Scandinavia.

“I have a lot to be thankful for,” he says about growing up in Bergen “because ultimately that’s where I discovered everything that lead to me doing music for life.” Torgeir’s story is a familiar story in the Norwegian electronic music scene of that generation. Breakdancing and records like Beat Street sparked an early interest in music, which for Torgeir came at the age of five. “I have never been as impressed with anything in my life,” he says about the “acrobatics of breakdancing.” Breakdancing led to music and Torgeir started buying records with his own money as soon he was able. It was a “really exciting time for us,” he says “because it genuinely felt new and history proved later that it was.” The music was “real and raw” and Torgeir still looks back at those informative years as the building blocks for what he would eventually do in his own music.

Drum & Bass at Jæger with Teebee during Romjulfestivalen

The music led to DJing through the local youth centre, and when the UK rave scene broke, Torgeir’s “fascination with broken-beats” turned him onto the new emerging sounds coming out of the UK, especially “those first Prodigy records on XL recordings.” It was “like hip-hop but flipped,” he reminisces about the sound that would eventually come to dominate his interest as Hip Hop’s golden era started coming to a close in the mid-nineties.

One of the most significant moments in Torgeir’s career came during the ninth grade after he and some friends peeled off from the rest of the class do some shopping in the white label section of a neighbourhood record store. “I found a record that just blew… me… a-way” he says dissecting the last few syllables like a chopped amen break. He brought the record home, but the white label yielded no information about the artist or the label behind this record. It weighed on him and he started calling up record shops in the UK – much to the “extreme dismay” of his parents – playing this record down the phone to anybody that would listen. “All I wanted was to hear more of this kind of music,” he says and encouraged by a youthful exuberance and a musical hunger he eventually found the title and artist behind this record. It was LTJ Bukem’s “Demon Theme” and that record sealed Torgeir’s fate and a lifelong obsession with this music and its culture.

His career in production came from necessity, rather than want, when as a youth in 1993 his record collection was still rather small. When tasked to do a DJ set, four records simply wouldn’t cut it to provide music for a whole set. “I thought, I can moan about there not being enough records to play or I can try do something about it,” he remembers of that fateful experience. He asked his dad to “front” him some money for a computer studio and what “started off as just a curiosity, turned into a massive love affair” by the time Torgeir came of age.

As Teebee, Torgeir has since released three albums, not including his collaborative albums, and countless EP’s in a career that spans twenty-odd years today. And as Drum and Bass evolved, growing through the height of its popularity in the late ninety nineties and early 2000’s and then falling out of favour with audiences that turned to genres like Dubstep, Torgeir remained steadfast. There’s an interview from around that time with Torgeir online where, posed with the question of making Dubstep, he simply smirks by way of dismissal, and says; “we don’t like dubstep, it’s a waste of time”. It is clear from talking to him and by the work he has done that Torgeir and Teebee is a lifer when it comes to Drum n Bass.

He was there for the best moments of the genre at the hype, when divergent scenes had started cropping up the world over, but he says “it’s nothing on the hype of today” stretching out the first syllable of “nothing” like the sub-bass drawl on his classic Sade-sampling track, Lifeless. “Back then the thought of going to Siberia to play to 10 000 people or Korea to play to 20 000 people” would be completely unheard of. At the height of its popularity, the people behind it were “kind of misunderstood, which made it a bit of a political statement” according to Torgeir. They were largely outcasts of society, who “bonded over something really exciting” that popular culture could never quite grasp at that time. Torgeir looks back fondly on those early years, especially the Sunday Sessions at the Blue Note in London, which he would later name a track after. He and his Norwegian peers would regularly fly over to London for the Sunday Sessions as soon as they came of age. “That’s how I spent all my money” exclaims Torgeir. “The beautiful thing about the Sunday Sessions,” was that “they started so early, so we could catch the first few hours before we had to catch the last plane back.” It was at these nights that Torgeir would get his demos in the form of ADAT tapes (this was before CD burners) “into the hands of people like Grooverider.”

“I’m so glad I was a part of it,” he says about the melting point of the scene “because you really had to go out of your way to be part of something you truly love.” He “doubts future generations are going to see anything similar” but almost in the same breath he says “it wasn’t all better before,” catching himself before he falls into some nostalgia. Drum and Bass is a technologically driven genre, and if you don’t evolve with the technology you’d “be left behind“ according to Torgeir. “My strength as a producer and an artist,” he says “is that I’m always looking forward.”

That was at the root of Drum and Bass’ ultimate demise, during a period in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s according to Torgeir; people weren’t looking forward anymore. “My main problem with how culture develops is that art imitates art,” says Torgeir of this period. “So all the new producers that grew up listening to my stuff, they’re going to make music inspired by the genre and in a sense it will be mainly watered down, because we drew our influences from elsewhere.” He believes that the scene has gotten back to those early ideals of Drum n Bass again and that’s why it’s currently enjoying such a big resurgence, bigger yet than it was even during the height of its popularity. “People have stopped looking at what everybody else is doing” he suggests, and from the young bedroom producers to the established old guard like Teebee it’s breathed new life into the genre again.

Torgeir has had to constantly evolve with the scene and the culture to still remain relevant and in that vein he is wrapping up that part of his legacy today with a couple of Archive releases, records and tracks that were previously unavailable, and re-mastering his first two albums, “Blacksciencelabs” and “Through the eyes of the Scorpion”. These records still stand as barometers of the genre and even though Torgeir is always looking towards the future, we have to take a moment to reflect on them too.

“With Black Science I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve and I went for it”, he says. “I was young, hungry and arrogant. I was brimming with confidence and the record reflects that. That record is unapologetic, it’s raw and it’s me.” It’s the record that catapulted his career, getting DJ offers all around the world on the merit of that record, which in turn left him with a dilemma when it became time to record his next LP, “Through the eyes of the scorpion.” It was “a difficult record to complete” for Torgeir, because he was “torn by what my heart was telling me to do and what the club reaction told me to do” and to “find a happy compromise wasn’t easy.” Between those two records that raw, unapologetic premise ties the two records together, but on “Through the eyes of the Scorpion” there’s a polished, cinematic narrative that very much reflects that era of hyper-modern production through the progress of computer recording technology of the time it’s recorded in. “You want to something to work on a head and body level,” says Torgeir about his music, “that’s the main challenge of writing music for me.”

And how has his music evolved since? “The ultimate change is that music sounds better,” he says. “You can take something that was made in 1995 and make it identical. If you took the same record today and made it to the best of your abilities, it would sound a million times better.”

After these releases he is looking forward to making some new music as Teebee, but he is currently committed to a contract as Calyx and Teebee with RAM Records, before he can work on any new music of his own. “I signed an exclusive three-album deal” he says and vows “never to do that again” after they complete this album together. It’s “been a tremendous stress” on Torgeir who refers to Larry Cons (Calyx) as a brother but believes: “Who I am is not the sum of the parts that is me and Larry.” They are currently finalising the album, which is just not quite there yet in their opinion. They “keep going back to it because it doesn’t feel like a record yet,” he says. “An album has to tell a story, it can’t just be a collecting of singles. You want to showcase what you can do, but you also want to showcase your progression.”

Progression, there it is again, that word that dots our conversation throughout. This ideology haunts Torgeir’s entire musical purpose, from making records to DJing. In the context of a DJ set, he hardly plays anything from his back catalogue because his role he believes is to play “the most cutting edge, groundbreaking music around” for audiences. He might play some of the more recent releases that still “hold up” from his point of view, but he “won’t even go near” his older tracks. He keeps echoing the altruist approach that brought him into the scene and in that spirit he is also raising his Subtitles label from the dead. He’s got “big plans” for the label in the new year when he is out of his record contract and it’s all intrinsically tied to the ethos that runs through his entire musical career; it’s about doing it “more for the culture and the progression of that culture. “

Album of the week: Kuuk – Live fra Blitz

“Er du klarer for Kuuk!” Screams Mira Berggrav Refsum from the stage during a live performance at Blitz in Oslo, and ironically now, that she and Ragna Solbergnes have called time on Kuuk, Norway finally is ready for Kuuk. The recording, taken in 2016, is their last artistic impression on the world and closes a chapter on one of the most exciting groups ever to come out of Norway.

From their stage personas, to the videos and the extent from which their poured themselves into their art, Kuuk will be sorely missed, and it’s doubtful that we will see the likes of a band like them for some time to come.

Conceived during an after party in 2013 – of course they were – Kuuk took the stage and Norway by storm without a single song in their repertoire. By 2014 they released their first single, “Htg” and by the time the video hit You Tube and every Norwegian social media channel, Kuuk was on everybody’s lips. It remained a side-project however for the two Oslo rappers, who called on a group of local musicians and producers like Sahrish Abbas to get their special brand of nachspiel Hip Hop to the recorded format with singles like “Hor,” “10000 High Fives” and “Klitthopp” making a sever impression on the local scene and beyond.

While they’ve always denied any political message in their music, in a recent interview with Blitz, Mira does suggest “whether we wanted it or not, KUUK is political.” They inadvertently became Gay icons, even though everybody in the band is heterosexual and it’s hard to ignore their gender in an age when Hip Hop is still dominated by homophobic chauvinists. A political message is especially hard to avoid in an age when everything is scrutinised under a microscope by social media’s amateur critics, but it shouldn’t diminish the impact that their music made (even for non-Norwegian natives).

Dark, impetuous beats grind against coarse bottom-heavy bass movements with Mira and Ragna’s dichotomous vocals going punch for punch through their music. And while their singles, EPs and videos made for titillating entertainment, their energy on stage was unmatched, so it seems only appropriate that they call end to the project with this document of their prowess on stage.

This record perfectly captures that brutal intensity they have on stage. Although unfortunately we are denied their striking visual appearance through the audio recording, the low quality recording and the raw and impetuous performance puts you right there in the moment at Blitz with Kuuk. It’s a shame it had to come to an end, because now more than ever, Norway, no the world… needs Kuuk.

From fresh disco to techno with Adolpho & Franky

Hailing out of Lausanne in Switzerland, Adolpho & Franky are the residents and the might behind the region’s clubbing institution, Folklor. A dominant force in electronic music in the western region of Switzerland, they’re unique individual experiences and visions in music have come together in a unique DJ-collaboration that regularly sees them playing abroad at places like Watergate in Berlin and Sankeys in Ibiza.

The Swiss-German duo are composed of Ramon (Vintage.Franky) and Fab (Flashfab) two DJs from different generations, who came together seven years ago to combine forces across musical genres, styles and generations. Although they’ve dabbled in production they’re proclivity remains in the booth as facilitators for the party.

They’ll be heading out to the Casino after the Jæger this Sunday as part of Folklor takeover at Det Gode Selskab and with the event looming we wanted to find out more about them and Folklor and sent them some questions via email.

Hey Ramon and Fab. How did you guys meet and what brought you together, musically?

Vintage Franky : Back in 2011 I was looking for new talent for my first club called “La Ruche”. Fab was playing as a duo called Das Hutwerk. The two sounded super fresh and I offered them a gig. The first meeting was a bit weird, I felt Flash Fab was big-headed but the second meeting, we both realized that the two of us would be a great story of love and music. Laughs.

Were you DJs before you started playing together?

Flashfab: I started playing in 2008

Vintage.Franky: I started playing in 1991 when I was about to be 17 years but before I was a breakdancer.

What do each of you bring to the duo and where do you think your tastes and styles cross over?

We do indeed have a age difference of 14 years on paper but in our musical approach, we are quite similar. Apart from the experience behind the wheels of steel, nothing really differs. We are both very hungry for music and we both have a decent musical knowledge across all styles. Also we consume a lot of parties and clubbing experiences and we look forward the future and the evolution of music with a great appetite.

Tell us a bit about your club, the FOLKLOR?

To be quick, the Folklor is a club that bears his name, all the music and electronic folklores are welcome. We wanted to make a club that revolves around artists of all kinds, we have carefully studied the interior architecture to make the place as pleasant as possible to the public, we offer quality drinks behind our bars a very normal prices for the Swiss market but the most important point is our SOUNDSYSTEM which was built around the club.

Is there a very close knit community in Lausanne for this kind of music and who are some of the DJs, artists, clubs and record stores that we should know about there?

Regarding the united scene, it is true that one of our primary goals is to unite as many people as possible around our cause. When we see potential within an artist we approach him and ask him to join the family. When we speak of predispositions we are not talking only about pure talent, because for us the behavior of the artist is an integral part of the values we want to put forward as well. We believe that bringing together all kinds of strengths allows us to benefit from each other’s synergy. We are very happy with our work now .

I spoke to Kūn and they told me there was quite a healthy scene in the region around the nineties. What are your personal experiences of DJ culture in the region?

Vintage.Franky: I think I’m the only one who can answer that question because my colleague was still wearing diapers at that time;))). Yes, the early 90s were really crazy in the area. The first Raves started at the Montreux Casino with the Dancefloor Syndroma parties, monsters like Tony Humphries were invited, I was personally very much in electronic music from the beginning. On the clubbing side we had the MAD in Lausanne with residents like Laurent Garnier and guests of the brand all weekends “Sven Vaeth, Carl Cox etc.etc. It was in 90ies . I still have a lot of shivers running through my body when I think about it.

You play abroad a lot too. Can you make any distinction between the styles of DJing at home that’s different from what the audiences expect abroad?

It really depends on where we play but actually we do not prepare our sets in the same way depending on the country or club that we visit. We can already tell you that we never play twice the same set even in our club. We are always studying the place where we are going to perform to find the best points of attachment with the public, it is very important to us.

The sets I’ve heard online are mostly of electronic nature, but span quite the depth of electronic music. What do you look for in music in your sets?

It is indeed important for us that the full spectrum is well covered by most of our selections, it is key to give emotion to our sets and the musical colors are always at the center of the spectrum. The rhythm, the swing and the groove are wonderful but without the color that the melody offers something is lost in our opinion. Then concerning our style I would say that if we were to compare ourselves to a doctor we would be a generalist and you know what, everybody goes see a generalist!

Besides your 2014 release Electronik Bomb, you’ve made your mark as DJs. What is it about DJing you prefer over production, and are there any plans to make a follow up?

We did neglect our studio time to open a restaurant and a beautiful club, Of course this took us a lot of time. We still managed to keep our gigs steady. We went back to work in the studio this summer and we have 4 beautiful tracks coming out soon on very good labels and next we are organizing to start our Foklor label by the beginning of the year.

Lastly what are you packing in your record bag for your stint at Jæger?

In our Dj Bag, we planned a melting pot of bombs ranging from “fresh disco to techno ” that always carry a positive good mood. We are really looking forward to seeing you with our friends KUN. It’s going to be a goooood one!

An unlikely pair with Kūn

No other European country encourages music quite like Switzerland. It’s embedded in their educational infrastructure. Every student is obliged to take up a musical instrument early in their education and their tuition is accommodated at every level from novice to classically trained musician. “You can skip sports if you make music,” says Cyril Pulver over a telephone call and that echoes through the entire musical landscape in the small central European country. “Switzerland is the country that has the most musical festivals per capita,” says Koris (real name: Vu Vuong Dinh). “That is a fact,” he says by way of emphasising his point in only the slightest hint of a French accent.

Koris and Cyril are collectively known as Kūn. For the past 4 years they’ve played together as part of the Attitude Nocturn crew with a residency at the renowned Lausanne club, Folklor. Koris and Cyril are of asian descent, but grew up in the western region of Switzerland where they’ve enjoyed a “rave and clubbing scene that was one of the highlights in Europe” throughout the nineties, at least from Koris’ perspective. Even though the “music changed and the people changed, clubbing is still strong” and it’s from this legacy that Kūn came to be. “We’re blessed,” continues Koris because for “the amount of people living here and the lineup we get, Switzerland has a strong scene.”

It’s from this scene that Kūn came to be, but their creation is an unlikely story, with the two halves of the duo coming from two very different generations. “I think it’s a vast mistake, we should not be hanging together at all,” says Cyril. “I think Koris should be spending his Friday nights drinking prosecco with his friends, and I should be spending my friday nights partying with my university friends.”

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Koris is Cyril’s senior by a whole generation, but the pair have bridged an unlikely gap through music. Cyril had been “doing music” with his brother, before the the latter had “abandoned” the former for Japan. “He felt bad and he hooked me up with Koris to make music together,” explains Cyril of the unlikely pairing. “We hooked up and decided to give it a go and here we are four years later” continues Koris, finishing the other’s sentence like they do when they occupy the booth together. The reason the pair seem to understand each other is that from Cyril’s perspective he is something of a “classist”, an old soul and the pair find a unique bond exactly through their dissimilarities where Koris believes they compliment each other.

“We come from different musical backgrounds,” explains Koris. Cyril, a classically trained musician had “made music his entire life” and Koris can barely decipher sheet music, but brings an intuition that only experience can bring. Koris has had quite a luminous career as a DJ. Coming of age in the nineties through that thriving Swiss scene, Koris “started djing in 1996” and took it up professionally between 2000-2007 “as a trance DJ.” At the height of his career he was playing 150 gigs a year and there are videos dotted around the Internet of Koris entertaining large audiences from his DJ pulpit in places like San Francisco.

“I have an extensive career as a DJ,” he reiterates and believes “the combination of the classically trained musician” in Cyril “and the more instinctive side of how to approach DJing and make music” from his perspective” make for “very complimentary” attributes in Kūn. “It elevates both of us.”

Koris the sager of the two describes it as such: “If we put ourselves in the shoes of the dancers, they want to discover music, they don’t want instant gratification… That’s what we crave too.” He feels they are “very blessed” with their residency at Folklor, playing for a crowd on a regular basis that they have this symbiotic bond with through music. “It’s what we are” he says about the Lausanne club that currently stands at the centre of the French-speaking region’s nightlife. In a country where people “spend a lot of money on music” according to Cyril, there’s a healthy scene at Folklor that allows the local residents to play alongside visiting international dignitaries on a weekly basis.

For the moment Cyril and Koris are quite content in being DJs in the scene, but there is long-term plan to add producer to their credits. Their approach in this regard is “a bit more conservative” according to Cyril. Instead of rushing into something, they are biding their time in an attempt to “develop” their “own thing”. It’s “something that takes a long time,” says Cyril and even though his musical training has plied the group with all the tools necessary to make music, Cyril believes they are “still learning.” While they’ve road tested their tracks in sets according to Koris they “don’t feel ready to publish them just yet.” They don’t want to get in a situation where they “spam the market with tracks.”

Their individual musical traits and experiences echo through their music. Through their first residency at D! Club they favoured a “more straightforward or immediate sound,” says Cyril. It was a result of the sets they played in the vacuous space of the club where they would naturally “make music for big rooms.” Today he believes that they honed their craft more in-line with the sounds of Folklor, where Cyril’s penchant for “classical harmonies” find a more intuitive bond with the purpose of the club floor. ”There is always some kind of harmony that’s a bit more pop, rather than abstract Techno sounds,” he explains of their latent sound.

For the moment Kūn will remain a DJ duo, a multi-generational, intercontinental, multi-skilled DJ duo, who presents the best of what all these words can offer through their selections. They’ll be arriving in Oslo later this week to showcase their proclivity , sharing the booth with their Norwegian affiliates Det Gode Selskab, which Koris says is “a natural relationship and friendship between people who like music.” It’s their second visit to Norway in as many years and Koris and Cyril are keen to return to propagate that nuanced partnership they have through music.

*Kūn play Det Gode Selskab this Sunday.

Just Listen with Philipp Boss

“You can go 300 meters” outside your door in Frankfurt and you’ve “met three DJs already” says Frankfurt native, DJ and producer Philipp Boss. Walk further down the street to your local record store, which for Philipp is GOSU, and your met with a whole community of artists and DJs like Philipp. “Every time I go to GOSU I meet a lot of artists,” he says in a broad German accent with a tone of youthful exuberance. “We show each other our music and we support each other” and “this is what I like about Frankfurt.”

Philipp Boss is still young at 24 and the brief glimpse I get of him over a video call, before it crashes, shows a stocky man with the visage of a teenager that belies his actual age by some years. Originally from a “small town next to Frankfurt” he calls Frankfurt AM Main home today, a city with an incredible legacy in electronic music and home to some of the most revered artists and DJs in the world today. Think Gerd Janson, Roman Flüggel, Sven Väth, Cocoon, Running Back and Robert Johnson, all in an area with a population of less than 800 000. The term Techno might even have been coined there by TALLA 2XLC back in the 1980’s, long before Virgin used it to describe a new emerging sound in Detroit and that legacy echoes through the entire scene today.

It’s in that environment that Philipp Boss emerges, as the latest descendent in a long line of artists and producers perpetuating the lineage of electronic music in the city, but ironically, it wouldn’t be drum machines and synthesisers that would first indulge Philipp’s creativity, but rather guitars and improvised music. Philipp first picked up the guitar as an adolescent and by the age of 12 he started his first band. “We played together for seven years,” says Philipp, jamming all manner of music and playing indie concerts around town, with his “greatest inspiration during this time” would be the act of improvisation with his friends.

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At 13 he bought his first synthesiser, and trying to incorporate it in the band he “got more curious” about the instrument. Soon he was asking himself questions like “what else can I do with a synthesiser.” His intrigue broadened to drum machines when his dad, a local Jazz musician, bought the device to practise along to. Philipp started incorporating the drum machine with his exploration of the synthesiser in what he calls “mostly experiments” as the rudimentary entry into electronic music that’s every producer’s right to passage today. “This was my beginning with production,” he says with a determined smile.

Those first tentative steps towards a career in electronic music would remain dormant however, as Philipp continued to play in his band through his teens and it would re-emerge again much later as he came of age and started going to clubs. Philipp couldn’t have asked for a better musical education than that which Frankfurt’s clubbing community offered. “The first house party I ever went to Oskar Offermann was playing,” says Philipp in a tone that downplays the significance of hearing a respected DJ like Offerman in your backyard. It would be a epochal event for Philipp, one that would prove pivotal to the career of the budding producer. It would be the first time that Philipp would experience “a DJ with two turntables making the whole room dance” and he found it absolutely “inspiring.”

He visited his first record store, the now defunct Freebase records – previously “an institution in Frankfurt” – and started buying and collecting records. He found a community of DJs and and “cool artists” at Freebase, which would later encourage him to start making music professionally. His entry into electronic music would be largely “inspired by the club culture in Frankfurt,” and through the encouragement of the community he would establish a career as a producer and DJ that went from debut to three EPs and an LP in little less than a year.

“I started making music on my computer,” he says in a matter-of-fact way but it would marred by inconclusive results at first. “I really had a problem finishing tracks,” he says. He continued to collect and play records, honing his skill and when it got to a point where he believed it was a good enough, he didn’t go the traditional route of trying to find a compatible label to release this music on, but rather go his own way. In the true DIY spirit of this music and its culture, Philipp Boss started his own label, “Einfach Horen” (just listen in German) and by “basically learning by doing,” the label’s first release emerged.

Calling on that close-knit community, Einfach Horen came into the world through a compilation CD of tracks collected from close friends, artists like Chris Geschwindner. “This is the thing about Frankfurt,” explains Philipp, “we are a very small city with so many good producers and DJs” and it was “only logical” for Philipp to start his own label out of this environment. A vinyl release soon followed the digital release in 2017 and by 2018 Philipp found an artistic stride, releasing two EPs and an LP in close succession, establishing the young artist as a rising future star of the scene and the DJ circuit.

Philipp’s first two solo EPs, “Motor Myths” and “Code North” presented a transient electronic music artist to the world. Over three tracks “Code North” traverses Garage, Electro and House without any reservations and at the core of this is a very simple ideology for Philipp. “The first time I went to the studio, I was like, ‘ok I want to do a Garage track’, because I never did a garage track before,” he says about the origins of “Sahallo”. The title track follows in much the same way as a “heavy electro” track “inspired by Drexciya.” He likes “to explore new ways of making music, new beat structures new harmonies” he says about his eclecticism in the studio. “I don’t like making stuff that bores me” and for him the whole idea of creativity is to push all the “influences I collect during my everyday life into my music.”

And what ties these tracks together? “I really like funky melodies and music that doesn’t take itself too seriously,”explains Philipp. “For me it’s about having a party, not about making super sophisticated future sounds. I really want to make people dance – this is my main motivation.”

On “Motor Myths” which is a little more confined to the House delineation, we find more of those “funky melodies” Philipp talks about, but there’s also a soulful depth that evaporates at the fringes of the funky bass-lines and syncopated hi-hats. “Soul and groove” is an important aspect to Philipp’s music and there’s always a considered effort from the artist “to put some emotion” into his music. “I don’t like functional tracks, It misses something for me.” Philipp’s music is hardly devoid of function either, and it is there if the body is willing to submit to the ear. Melodies drips like cotton candy from Philipp’s percussive arrangements and there is always an element of Funk to the way he puts these pieces together.

It’s something that he carries over to his DJ sets too. “I try to select music that connects with people on an emotional level.” When asked how he would describe his DJ sets in one word “that word would be party.” He says there is definitely some correlation to his recorded music and his DJ sets, where function plays second fiddle to some kind of human depth, and in as the most elaborate execution of this ideology he released his debut LP, Boss on La Peña back in February this year.

The origins of the LP starts with Philipp booking Robin Scholz for a label night. Scholz introduced Philipp to the head of La Peña Arno Völker (aka Einzelkind) and the pair found a kindred spirit in each other. They hit it off immediately and became friends, and Völker encouraged the younger peer to finish some of those early tracks he had been working on. The album became a “collection of the best tracks” from that period when Philipp started discovering his sound. They were some of the “first club tracks” he had made, Völker “really liked” them and a year later they were released as a LP on La Peña.

Like the EP’s there are really “many sounds” to the record, and it seems Philipp went deeper still for the purpose of the long player format. From the electro funk of “Angels GF” to the synthetic House of “Palais Orsay” and back again to Bossa Nova grooves of “Vivid Description” the album pieces together a varied kaleidoscopic sound picture of electronic club music with Philipp’s distinctive groovy, soulful touch at the centre of it.

Following the LP, came “Motor Myths” and “Code North” and in the space of a year it has taken Philipp from DIY label owner and bedroom producer to established artist that will see him release more music via “some London labels” in the near future as he rightly stakes his place in the Frankfurt DJ community and club scene.

In his immediate future he is “looking forward to visiting the beautiful city” of Oslo. He’s already seen the video footage of the rotating mixer at Jæger and he’s keen to jump on there to do what he does best… to expedite a party.

*Philipp Boss joins Det Gode Selskab this Sunday at Jæger.

No Agenda with Marius Circus

Marius Circus’ rendition of Lindstrøm’s “I feel space” didn’t merely pay a homage to a Norwegian dance floor classic, It proved to be a worthy contemporary fix on of the finest examples of Norwegian electronic music ever created. Marius’ bold analogue bass-line and lysergic interpretation of the original wasn’t merely a cover but a rendition worthy of its own plaudits. “It’s hard to touch the original” says Marius Circus when I ask him about his version over a cup coffee, but he’s “glad people like it.”

In early 2018 Marius (Øvrebø-Engemoen) Circus aired a video on social media of him taking on the “stone cold club classic,” and it proved to be so successful even Linsdstrøm couldn’t deny its appeal. When Hans Peder Lindstrøm “asked to get the stems for his live show” Marius “figured I should do something with this” and with Lindstrøm’s approval Marius released his versions via his newly founded In the Garden imprint, first as a digital release and later this autumn as a 12” vinyl version.

What merely “started as an experiment to recreate Hans-Peter’s complex chord progressions,” something Marius was merely doing for fun, suddenly had a live of its own after the video aired. Marius believes that “the original still stands the test of time,” and his version is only a “different take”, something of “an acid version” of the original, but there are unique merits to his adaptation that go toe to toe with the Lindstrøm classic. It didn’t merely update “I Feel Space”, but between the acid expressions, the sweltering bass and the original enigmatic chord progressions the idea of space resonates through the track more than ever. Shimmering murmurs, purr as they skim the surface across grainy synthesisers like an asteroid skipping its way across the milky way.

Marius recorded it as a live performance and in one take managed to capture it all for the future release. Andrew Weatherall came on board with a jack-booted remix, stomping through Marius’ version with a heavy-footed percussive onslaught. Weatherall’s “Love from outer Space” affiliate, Sean Johnston facilitated the remix, as Marius’ first and only “pick to do this.” Weatherall obliged and did two versions of it with the second exclusively available as a download from the vinyl version only. Together with the Marius Circus interpretation it was a second wind for “I Feel Space” that dusted off the cobwebs without underestimating the power of its origins.

“I Feel Space” came during a prolific time for the DJ turned producer. After a lengthy hiatus where Marius had three kids, moved out to the suburbs and practically stopped DJing, he says that he is now making “probably a hundred tracks a year” and he keeps the best of those for his young “In the Garden” label.

Marius’ career starts back in the early naughties as a DJ, where he was prominent figure in the Oslo scene. He “started buying more records at the turn of the millenium” and then “gradually started Djing” while making “friends with people from the Oslo scene like Prins Thomas and (Todd) Terje.” At some point he realised that “if I ever was going to be recognised as DJ I had to start making music.” His first effort was a remix for Magnus international followed by an EP in 2011 on Full Pupp which was the one and only EP he released on a label before going on his lengthy hiatus.

As time moved on the “whole making music thing became more important” to Marius, but it would be a slow start for the budding producer, who only started making music in his late twenties and who was “only serious about it some time after that.” He was by his own account “extremely slow in the studio” and it would take some time before he honed his craft to a point where is “a lot faster” today. “My studio process had more or less become a live process at some point,” he says by way of explaining his newfound productivity.

This new era of creativity it became paramount to the creation of “In the Garden” to “have some sort of outlet for my own music that have complete control over” explains Marius. “Tired of waiting for other people’s agendas,” Marius brought the label into the world as an exclusive vehicle for his releases. Launched in 2016 officially, “In the Garde”n sports six releases today, with a seventh primed for later this December. “Polaris” originally released digitally earlier this year, will get a vinyl release with an Ewan Pearson remix in addition.

“Polaris” features a synthesised bass line that falls on the ear like silk, while electronic textures create a wispy firmament, gently enveloping the foundation of the track. With a steady 4 to the floor beat, it’s a track born from the dance floor, but easily lives beyond its functional design. Like the intrepid Norwegian space cadets that came before him Marius Circus looks to the stars for his inspiration with space-aged synths from vintage catalogues and Disco rhythms informing his work.

It remains grounded however through “In the Garden”, which he claims is “a lot of work,” even if it’s solely for Marius’ music, but it allows him the freedom to be subjective in his own way. “At least it’s my stuff and it’s stuff I like,” he says, “there aren’t any agendas here.“ He relies on an immediacy to judge his own music, which also part of the reason he is working a lot faster in the studio today. “It doesn’t really bring anything good to work on the same piece of music for months and months,” he suggests. “You can’t objectively judge it because you heard it a thousand times before.“

He might still find it “hard to judge what other people are going to enjoy,” but having the outlet for his music is possibly more honest than posturing to a trend or other people’s tastes for Marius. “I’m in a position where I don’t need this to make money,“ says Marius which suggests that that the music like “Polaris” and “I Feel Space”, the stuff that makes it onto the label has no hidden agenda. In the Garden is a very personal label and one can sense that from the music. There’s an intimacy to the records that feel like you’re right there in the garden with Marius as he plays and in many ways you are when he’s doing his studio streaming sessions.

Although he still DJs on the rare occasion, Marius reflects that he’s “not too interested” in that aspect of electronic music any longer. He prefers playing live today the where the “risk is higher” and because “going out on limb is fun.” From his pedestal of drum machines, synthesisers and sequencers Marius re-imagines the recorded material for the “slimmed-down” live version as well as playing previously unreleased tracks.

He’ll often spend his early mornings, getting up at 5am to craft new tracks before heading off to work where his 9-5 is occupied working with notable Norwegian artists like Lindstrøm at Gram Art. As we sip at the last of our coffees I wonder if that has any affect on his creativity, working with these established artists day in and day out. He reflects for a short moment but dismisses it outright, what he does as Marius Circus lives on in its own, a one-man show all onto himself.

*Marius Circus will play Badabing this Saturday with Vinny Villbass and you can check out more of his music here.

Ni kjappe med Zweizz

Vi tok en prat med mannen bak Zweizz. Sist gang han tok over scenen i kjellern på Jaeger under klubb Øya, så skapte det buzz innen samtidsmusikk klikken i byen og vi hadde fått en nytenning av denne artisten bevæpned med en “Vuvuzela.” Zweizz spiller en bråkete og larmende type ulyd som lages ved hjelp av hovedsakelig elektroniske duppeditter. Bak navnet Zweizz finner vi Svein Egil Hatlevik, som har bakgrunn fra black metal-band som Dødheimsgard, Fleurety og Umoral.

Hvorfor heter prosjektet ditt Zweizz? Hva er opprinnelsen til det navnet?

Det er tatt fra et spøkelse om hjemsøker området Kåterudmåsan i Enebakk kommune. Skrivemåten er omdiskutert, siden spøkelser ikke alltid kommuniserer skriftlig (jeg kjenner altså ikke til den egentlig korrekte stavemåten). Så jeg tok meg friheten til å bruke hele tre stykk “z” for å stave dette navnet. Jeg tenkte som så at med en så urimelig stavemåte ville jeg kunne ha navnet i fred som Google-søketerm og så videre. Men slik gikk det ikke, så det er en fyr i Indonesia som tok brukernavnet “Zweizz” på Instagram før meg. Så det er kanskje mulig at jeg burde legge til flere z-er på lengre sikt.

Kan du kort beskrive musikkprosessen?

Ja, nei, dette er jo mye improvisasjon, så det er kanskje rimelig å svare at jeg skrur på strømmen og setter i gang. Men det er også en del mentale forberedelser, noen ganger er det en del anger etterpå. Sånn overordnet sett handler det en del om å rette oppmerksomheten mot vibrasjoner som en grunnleggende forutsetning for all lyd og musikk.

Ren energi er det jeg husker fra sist gang. Litt sånn Iggy & Stooges energi. Hva er det mest intressante response du fått ifra din performance?

Har vært gjennom både buing, latter, applaus og at folk har forlatt lokalet. Sliter å komme på noe som stikker seg ut som det mest interessante. Om det er noen som misliker det jeg gjør, så tror jeg de holder det mye for seg selv. En gang er jeg blitt spurt om jeg har en Pornhub-konto, men det har jeg jo ikke – heldigvis eller dessverre.

Hvordan takler du ett stort lydsystem som Jaeger der folk får en fysisk relasjon til det du gjør på scenen?

Den fysiske reaksjonen er mye av poenget, så det er vanskeligere å håndtere et mindre lydsystem. Da har man færre virkemidler å spille på. Av hensyn til folkehelsa er det nok lurt å si hver gang man har sjansen at det er anbefalt med ørepropper.

Sist gang du spilte på Jaeger tok du med mange interessante blås og perkussive instrument? Blir det noe annerledes denne gang?

Har ikke helt bestemt meg for hva jeg skal gjøre og hvordan. Jeg kan i hvert fall garantere vuvuzela.

Hvilke forbilder har du innen elektronisk musikk?

Det er ganske mange! Det kan være Aphex Twin, Igorrr eller Venetian Snares, for eksempel, men det kan også være Whitehouse eller Femnesz eller for den saks skyld Arne Nordheim eller Edvard Artemiev. Det spørs om det er mulig å kjenne igjen noe av dette i en opptreden jeg gjør, men heldigvis kan man ha forbilder uten å leve opp til noe av det de representerer.

Hvordan stemmer du ditt instrument er det noe forskjell på hva for mikrofoner du bruker er det noe spesielle teknikker fra for eksempel å spille et annet perkussive instrument?

Om man skal ha med seg en dass på scenen, er det en stor fordel at den er grundig rengjort. Kvalifiserer det til stemming? Ellers er nok det viktigste å gjøre mest mulig ut av de virkemidlene man har til rådighet, og akkurat den tankegangen har nok overskygget hvordan jeg tenker om hva slags utstyr som er det best egnede. Jeg synes ofte det er morsommere å ikke ha kontroll over utstyret enn det er å ha en presis forståelse av hva man holder på med.

Hvordan kan man få høre på din musikk når man ikke kan oppleve det live? Har du noen soundcloud eller sted man får kjøpt musikken din?

Jeg har endt opp med å praktisere et skarpt skille mellom det jeg gjør under opptredener og det jeg lager av innspilt materiale. Det jeg har laget av musikk som er gitt ut på plate høres derfor ganske annerledes ut enn det som skjer i konsertsammenheng. Når det er sagt, vil jeg gjerne anbefale et album jeg lagde med en som het Joey Hopkins. Han døde dessverre i 2008, så det blir ikke noe mer av dette samarbeidet. Fans av Oslo-legenden Filip Roshauw vil også kunne høre en del gitar- og basspill fra ham på denne plata.

Ni kjappe med Silje Huleboer

Hva Silje Huleboer har med seg i sekken på Sprekken kommer vi kjappt til å finne ut. Vi sendte over ni kjappe spørsmål til denne musikalske formskifter.

Vi tok en prat med Silje Huleboer innfor konserten på Den Gyldne Sprekk 4.desember.

Hvordan går det?

Hei. Det går bra. Har akkurat hatt eksamen i grunnleggende elektrofag. Det gikk ikke så bra, men tror ikke jeg stryker.

Så hyggelig at du kommer å gjør en konsert på Jaeger.

Det syns jeg og!

Du har gjort spilt alt ifra blackmetal noisekonserter til folkmusikkkonserter… Hvordan vil du beskrive det du skal fremføre på Jaeger på Sprekken?

Jeg har vel aldri spilt hverken black metal eller folkemusikkkonserter. Men jeg har varmet opp for Atilla og soloprosjektet hans som baserer seg på loopet vokal. Det gjør mitt soloprosjekt og. Så det var vel i grunnen linken der. Da spilte jeg sammen med Oslos koseligste støymusiker Sten Ove Toft som tilførte ytterligere elementer av støy i tillegg til de jeg lager selv.

Påvirkningen av folkemusikk kommer fra hjembygda. Jeg har egentlig aldri spilt/sunget en konsert med folkemusikk i tradisjonell forstand, men har brukt stev og folketoner som utgangspunkt for noen av arbeidene. Men jeg kveder en del på nach og i bryllup.

Jeg har ikke helt bestemt meg for hva jeg skal gjøre i Sprekken enda. Jeg har et påbegynt popsangerinne-prosjekt hvor jeg tar utgangspunkt i en liten del av en låt, et refreng kanskje, og lager en vokal loop over det i lavere tempo. Så fletter jeg inn fraseringer og litt deilig ad-libing og bygger det opp til et metningspunkt som kanskje går over i støy. Det er et slags hyllestprosjekt til mine favoritt popsangerinner som Mariah Carey, Whitney, Brandy med flere.

Hvem kommer å joine deg denne aften?

Sten Ove Toft blir med meg denne kvelden og det blir tredje gangen vi spiller sammen. Han er støyartist og har spilt i band som bl.a. Ryfylke og Waffelpung samt spilt med etablerte band som ALTAAR, Serena-Maneesh, The Low Frequency In Stereo og The Megaphonic Thrift. Live kan Sten Ove Toft tilby et lydinferno uten sidestykke. Så han blir med meg å glitcher litt i sprekken.

Anthony Barrat blir også med meg. Han har bygget noen pedaler som jeg bruker og så er han flink med det visuelle. Han skal ordne projiseringer av mine gamle filmarbeider og kanskje noe fra sitt eget materiale. Han laget for eksempel den siste videoen til Moon Relay:

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Hvilke er dine influenser for dette nye prosjektet? Hvilke forbilder har du innen elektronisk musikk? Tar dere en pause ifra prosjektet som du hadde med Ole?

Selve soloprosjektet er jo ikke så veldig nytt. Har holdt på så smått siden 2013. Men jeg kan jo trekke frem de mest åpenbare musikalske infuenserene og referansene i forhold til prosjektet. Den artisten som fikk meg til å begynne med looping og disse vokale lydlandskapene, eller hva men enn skal kalle det, var Noveller. Hun er en amerikansk støy/alternativ musiker med gitar som instrument. Hun gjør mye av det samme som meg, bare med gitar. Eller riktigere sagt, jeg gjør mye av det samme som henne, bare med vokal. William Basinski er nærliggende å trekke frem, Oneothrix Point Never sitt prosjekt Memory Vague og vokalt kan jeg trekke frem Elisabeth Fraser, Trish….. og Whitney, Brandy og MIMI da :)

Jeg og Ole tar ikke pause. Vi har en plate klar som kommer ut på nyåret. Vi skal spille en del konserter i desember og vi er i gang med enda en plate! Mye å glede seg til.

Liker du blackmetal eller popmusikk publikum bedre?

De er jo fine gjenger begge to. Opplever begge typer publikum som lyttende og interesserte.

Når kommer det ut noe opptak i fra dette spennende prosjektet?

Jeg har hatt en innspillingsplan for sologreiene mine lenge. Men jeg utsetter det lett fordi jeg må gå for egen maskin og noen ganger er det litt vanskelig å prioritere eget prosjekt. Og så har jeg begynt på skole. Men det skal komme noe i 2018. Det blir en fullengder med to ganger 20 min i første omgang.

Hvordan kan man få høre på din musikk når man ikke kan oppleve det live? Har du noen soundcloud eller sted man får kjøpt den nye musikken?

Jeg har en soundcloud, men det er egentlig ganske skissebaserte ting. Men ganske fint å høre på alikevel. Akkurat det som ligger der er støyfritt :)

https://soundcloud.com/siljehogevold

Download Future Prophecies – Black Dragon (Engage remix)

In 2005 the Norwegian drum&bass act Future Prophecies released their seminal album “Warlords Rising” which would turn out to be one of the most influential releases in dnb history. The duo made a name for themselves with a brutal and fierce yet melodic approach to the genre, characterized by angry breakbeats, buzzing synths and menacing bass-lines.

They haven’t performed together for over a decade but during “Romjulsfestivalen 2018” on
the 30th of Dec they will officially reunite at Jæger for what is set to be one of the biggest dnb events in Norwegian history. Tony Anthem and Richard Animashaun will be joined by dnb and jungle royalty Teebee and Psychofreud for a massive all-star lineup the likes of which has never been seen on the Norwegian scene.

To celebrate this unique event Dub Monkey Records and Jæger are teaming up to give away a previously unreleased track by Future Prophecies. You can get the download here.

“Black Dragon” is a juggernaut from the debut album and we are happy to present this remix made by St. Petersburg resident neurofunk-legend Engage (Dmitry Nekrasov) (Mainframe Recs, Icarus Audio, Ammunition Recs). We sat down with the man himself to ask some questions and get some answers.

Hi Dima and thanks for taking the time. What are your earliest memories of Future Prophecies?

Hi! Thanks for having me here. My first memories are from tunes on the radio of course but one of the biggestinspirations for me as a future dnb producer was seeing them live at The World Of Drum’n’Bass 2006 in St.Petersburg. “Miniamba” and “Dreadlock” with that electronic flute – ugh! That was truly amazing performance!

What kind of relationship do you have with the original track?

I heard the original track at a party with Kemal here in St. Petersburg back in the day and was in love from the first second of the tune because of this dark atmosphere and that scary girl’s voice. I can remember those goosebumps.

How was the process of remixing it?

For me it’s interesting to start with making pretty similar samples from scratch. With that you can learn something new and reach back through the years to get in touch with that old beloved sound. It started with meeting Kalle from Dub Monkey at a party in St. Petersburg where I said that it might be fantastic to remix Black Dragon some time. After that it wasn’t a question anymore, I got the samples and that’s it. To be honest I didn’t use a lot of them because as I said previously I like to re-create.

Why do you think that FP have such a special place in Russia?

When you are talking about Russia you can say that the biggest love Russians have is for the hardest sub-genres of dnb. That’s why Future Prophecies are so popular over here.

Any local talent that you want to big up?

Lots of respect to my old dnb friends – DJ Bes and his project Gydra, Teddy Killerz, Receptor and other guys from our Neuropunk crew.

Find out more about Engage here.

* Text by Karl Magnus Blindheim

Limitation is Liberation with Bendik Baksaas

*Photo by Signe Fuglesteg Luksengard

Bendik Baksaas + Frederik Høyer are about to embark on a “new phase” of their career together, Bendik told me over a private message. It’s been two years on since they released “Grønland Kaller”, an LP that framed Fredrik Høyer’s lyrical arias in Bendik Baksaas musical balladry coaxing lifeless machines into sentience through improvisation.

The album, which started out as a vocalist plus accompaniment arrangement turned musical group when they found an artistic bridge across their respective disciplines. Their studio collaboration turned performance and while they continued to pursue their solo creative endeavours they began finding an individual voice as an artistic duo.

Fredrik Høyer is a poet whose treatment of words take on a lyrical nature as he combines it with elements of improvisation, hip hop and literature. Bendik Baksaas and Høyer first started working together on a remix LP of Høyer’s book and album “Grønlandssūtraen” and the collaboration turned into its own fully fledged project as the pair started performing,and working on new original material together.

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They’ve returned recently to the recorded format in “Ode til alt Ute”, the first single from an impressive forthcoming “maximalist double LP” featuring 26 tracks, 9 poets and 222 minutes of music. This is the next phase for Bendik Baksaas + Frederik Høyer, directing the sound of the group towards the impulses of the dance floor.

They’ve followed it last week with the double single “Fortellinga / Fake blodmåner og England”; two tracks that play on the dichotomy of the dancefloor going from the intense narrative of a night out through the language of minimal Techno before dissipating into serene ambience of “Fake blodmåner og England.” These are the latest pieces to make it out from the forthcoming LP, which is currently in the process of being mixed by Joar Renolen (formerly Foreground Set).

“Without him I would be doomed,” says Bendik Baksaas “having the scope of work in mind.“ Bendik Baksaas + Frederik Høyer will be presenting some of these new pieces as well as some unheard material at LYD with Olle Abstract this coming Saturday and even with so much on his plate, he still managed to make some time for us for a Q&A session.

Bendik Baksaas’ career gestated in the world of improvised Jazz, but he quickly moved on to electronic music genres like House, Techno and Ambient, incorporating elements of improvisation in his music. He finds an organic pulse within the stark rhythms of machines channeling his musical experiences through music computers.

When I contact Bendik, he’s just performed with Jo David in an ambient concert for Monument, that went from abstract sounds to an imposing 4/4 kick. Bendik’s musical history, his work with Fredrik and his live performances are intriguing, bordering on something of an enigma and in the ensuing Q&A he grants us unique access into his creative processes as a solo artist and with Fredrik.

*Bendik Baksaas + Fredrik Høyer plays LYD with Olle Abstract.

In your message, you told me that your closing out a chapter of your collaboration together, and embarking on a new one as Bendik Baksaas + Fredrik Høyer. Can you tell me what this new chapter is all about?

The new chapter is about bringing spoken word to the dancefloor. I’ve noticed how vocal samples in club tracks have a very distinct appeal. Our ears are fine tuned to the frequencies of the human voice. In a musical context in a club this usually goes into the extreme in both ends. The sudden appearance of a voice will either take the emotion and intensity to the next level, or (in many cases) it kills the set by demystifying everything that was sexy about the instrumental soundscape.

30 months ago, when I first heard the sound of Fredriks voice, his attitude and his deeply sincere lyrics, I started dreaming about being on a dark dancefloor, inducing myself in his stories and the melody of his voice, while always having a steady techno groove to lean on. An anchor in every beat of the bass drum, while being led through doors to the worlds that emerge in his poems.

And that’s the new chapter. Inviting the club crowd to a dance of body and soul.

So the people that know you for your last album, Grønland kaller, what can they expect that’s different from that album going into the future?

Grønland kaller was my remix album of Fredriks book and album called Grønlandssūtraen. So he already recorded all the poems before I started making the music. It was a fun process and turned out great in my opinion, but now we work tight as a team and our output is a dialogue, rather than my take on his poems.

There’s an album primed for 2019, “Til Alt Ute” with 26 tracks and 9 poets on there. What else do we need to know about the album?

It will be the grandest masterpiece in the history of Norwegian music-literature. I believe that for all future it will be a point of reference to anyone who’s interested in how it was to be a young person in Norway in the years 2017 – 2019. That’s the reason for the large amount of guest poets. Through idiolects, sociolects and dialects we represent the reality as we live it. Right here, right now. With attention to detail and appreciation of the ephemeral.

The first single “Ode til alt Ute” suggests that you might be moving towards a more dance floor orientated sound and you just confirmed that in the first question. But is that the case for the rest of the LP too?

Yes. We are finishing up the album these days and it will clock in around 222 minutes. We describe saturday night, from the “plastic bag hour”, where you see hundreds of people in the streets running around with their beer in plastic bags that they just managed to buy before six, to the stories at the vorspiel, the intensity of the dancefloor and the big speakers, to the events at the nachspiel and the doglike retreat home in the morning.

Musically I accompany the poems with either techno/minimal house grooves OR what we call “rhythmic ambient”. In rhythmic ambient I use short samples of traditional instruments and field recordings arranged in a manner of techno. Short repetitions, light footed beat, modal harmony, absence of melody. The B-side of our new single is a good example. It’s called Fake blodmåner og England. The track is strictly built up of samples from folk musician Helga Myhr playing hardanger fiddle.

And the next single from the album, “Fortellinga” just came out. What is “the story” (pun intended) behind that track?

The character in the story tells the tale of how he was down and out after a hard break-up. He has some financial problems due to his gambling habit and he aims to stay at home to watch tennis and football games saturday night. An unlikely goal by West Ham at overtime sends his future month salary down the drain and at the same moment a friend shows up at his door with a weed vape. Reluctantly he joins his friend to the club, while dancing they start vaping at the floor and suddenly life starts to feel good again. But that’s until the whole team from work shows up at the same club, he’s tripping on the small talks and without good judgement his observing that everyone from work is trying out his vape, in the belief it’s nicotine with taste. As you can imagine, a lot of things happen further following this misunderstanding.

It’s all about the precise observations of the moment, the phrasing and timing of Fredrik’s depictions, the distraction as an essence of human nature. The poem sits well with the music, because I composed the track first, and Fredrik used every turn and build of my arrangement as a formula of the rhythm and structure of the poem. The track is in house tempo with a a lot of melodic elements. I rarely do that now anymore, but it really works well. Especially after our wizard Joar Renolen put his warm mixing hands on the entire production.

Your musical roots run very deep within the Jazz scene and going through your discography, you’ve touched on various styles, genres and sounds throughout your career. How do you think your music has evolved to this point today?

Love of improvisation is with me still. I make music by improvising hour long jams on the Octatrack sampler in combination with other machines. I cut out small parts that moves me and let them find their context. I first create music, then find out on what record or in which musical collaboration it can fit in.

A turning point in my life was around three years ago when minimal house suddenly was all around me. The realization that fewer musical elements means bigger impact per element blew my mind at the time, and is a cornerstone in my way of listening and enjoying music now. This goes for club music and ambient and acoustic music. My life mantra is limitation is liberation.

Last year I stumbled upon the old traditional music of Hallingdal, which inspires me in my creation of dance music as well as ambient. My last album Seine sviv (Jazzland) is a testament to that. The similarities between techno and norwegian folk music is many. The grooves go in 2 or 3. The music is loop based. The human touch and personal style is valued. The harmony is modal, the melodies use microtonality. The music is made for having a function, to make people dance or fall asleep peacefully.

My music evolved to this point because of other people’s music I heard and loved. I am inspired by the pure and characteristic techno of +plattform. I am inspired by the elegant sound design and emotional intensity of ambient producers Tortusa and Joar Renolen.

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When and how did you and Fredrik meet and what made you want to start working together?

We met at his release gig for Grønlandssūtraen in august ‘16. As he remembers it I was saying something like “Why aren’t we in the studio working together right now?” I was artistically in love with him after hearing his poem Kampen park at a nachspiel earlier in the summer. The best books are the books that read you, is a saying, and the precision of how that poem described my thoughts and life was stunning.

We hooked up in my studio at Påfuglen (thoughts and prayers), and immediately felt connected. We’ve been working together ever since, doing a lot of gigs and traveling together.

What were some of the ideas that informed your work together?

In that first meeting in my studio the idea of a club record with poems on beat was born. It’s not rap, it’s not singing or vocal samples either. It’s spoken word, poems for regular people, and the music is there to bring you up on your feet with your head high.

How do you and Fredrik work together through the creative process and how much input do you have on each other’s role within the group?

We are both confident in our own field, so our collaboration is much about defining the context of our work. We are both playful in our practice, an idea is never bad before it has gotten a chance. Sometimes I make a track and Fredrik writes a poem to fit with it, and sometimes it’s the opposite way. We send music and poems between each other all the time, our process is fluid and light, I trust the process and I trust his esthetic taste. Bendik Baksaas + Fredrik Høyer is a band. I grew up playing in heavy metal bands in Horten. The brotherhood and united force from the teen years is important to how I live my life as a musician today.

I recently saw you perform at the monument evening last week with Jo David. It quickly went from ambient to hard Techno. How will that differ when you’re playing with Fredrik on Saturday?

The gig with Jo David was completely improvised. It’s fun because it is risky and it makes me feel alive. The beauty of the moment is celebrated whenever something I enjoy happens. Here and now.

Fredrik and I also improvise in our sets, but on Jæger we want to just do a parade of our favourite club tracks. We will start the set with a remixed version of Ode til alt ute and build upwards from there. On a gig like that I need to make it playful and still be able to make fast changes and go to safe cues that we both agree on. I will bring my sampler, but will mainly use three cdjs plus delay and reverb machines to have a creative and playful way of performing in a classic DJ manner.

A view from the other side with Ben Sims

Where do you start a story on Ben Sims? A veteran of the Techno scene, he’s been working as a producer, DJ and label owner on the extended Techno circuit for nearly as long as the genre has existed. He’s been a stalwart facilitator for Techno and House since the nineties, an unwavering presence in the booth, both physically and metaphysically.

Do we start a story of Ben Sims at the beginning, back at the moment of conception where a young Hip Hop enthusiast turned from making mixtapes in the bedroom to the new exciting sounds of House and Techno’s golden era? Or do we turn the clock back to the late nineties where Ben Sims went from a DJ to producer releasing his first records through his own labels, Theory and Hardgroove and later for the likes of Tresor and Drumcode?

We could start at either of those barbs on his extended, intertwining musical timeline but his most significant contribution to has been in the attitude and ideology he pursues as an artist , DJ and label owner. His debut and only LP, smoke and Mirrors on Drumcode; his perpetual determination for a hard-edged sound even during the epoch of minimal Techno or Tech-House; and his refined sense in the booth as a DJ all comes from a core belief what Techno is and he is absolutely resolute in his singular pursuit.

Whether he’s harnessing all that experience in his unique style as a DJ, piecing together fragments from the diverse corners of electronic music in sound collage only he could see or making bold dance floor cuts as an artist through his various aliases like Ron Bacardi, Ben Sims has remained steadfast in his ideological view of Techno.

Without any hyperbolic implication, Ben Sims is a giant amongst men in the world of Techno. He’s always pursued a singular vision of Techno and as it moves in and out vogue, he wavers little from the path of the golden era of Detroit, only updating elements of his sound and tracks in his booth with the natural passage of time. “I’m usually older than the promoter and the person that owns the fucking building,” he muses in a gravelly working-man’s southern-English accent when we call him up for an interview, and yet he still packs a room and leaves an indelible mark whenever he is in the booth.

Ever the restless figure, in recent years, he’s established a new event series turned label in Machine; brought back the label Symbolism; established his NTS Run it Red show, which has been going strong now for 45 episodes; and started a new project with Truncate as ASSAILANTS, all while still releasing music as Ben Sims on labels like Deeply Rooted and DJing week in and week out.

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It’s a very productive time for Ben Sims. After releasing their first single as ASSAILANTS this year, he and Truncate are “working on a follow up EP which is 60% done.” It’s a project Sims says “happened quite naturally” after the pair had been friends for a few years and played together and remixed each other’s records. ”It’s not something we’ve placed any pressure on or stuck to any kind of plan,” he says “It’s just something we enjoyed working on together.” They released their first single via the new label Obscurity is Infinite this year and hope to release the next some time in the spring of next year, but while he is currently enjoying working as an artist, he’s also returned to the role of label owner through his dormant Symbolism imprint after taking a hiatus from the record industry.

Although Sims closed the chapter on his Theory label some four years back, he did “miss running” the label. “It’s great to put a bit of focus back into a record label again,” he says and releasing artists that he’s “really excited about.” With a few releases primed for this year, he chose Symbolism because it “had always felt unfinished,” a “victim of distribution companies going bust.” He couldn’t just leave it like that and wanted to “bring Symbolism to a better kind of conclusion,” but today it has taken on a life of its own and it looks like it’s here to stay.

Running labels “feels like an important part of it” to Ben Sims, and he has his fair share of experience at that level, but it’s particularly as a DJ where he’s etched his name into the electronic music legend.

It’s in that spirit that he and Kirk Degiorgio established Machine. “It was his idea,” says Sims about the concept. “He was very passionate about music as well and we have similar backgrounds.” In 2011 they were both getting really “excited about modern Techno,” and started hosting “low key parties, with a focus on only playing new and unreleased Techno.” The event grew and traveled, as they got more “ambitious” with their guestlist. “Somewhere in there we did three releases with music from us that we just tested out at the parties,” but Sims insists it was never intended to be a label, but merely an extension of the club night.

It makes sense that the next release on Machine will be a 50-track compilation and Ben Sims mix titled, “Tribology”. It frames the context of the club night, and in Sims’ opinion “it helps put (Machine) into the consciousness of those who haven’t heard it before.”

It makes sense to pick up Ben’s story here at this moment, because over the last twenty years, he’s deviated little from the same purpose that informs a club night like Machine, his ASSAILANTS project and the rebirth of Symbolism. That’s the context to which he returns to Jæger this week, and it’s with that looming in the background that we called him up for a Q&A session to talk about DJing, for a view from the other side.

*Ben Sims plays Frædag x Filter Musikk this Friday.

The last time you were here you were here as Ron Bacardi. What are your memories of that night?

I was playing outside in the terrace and it was kind of a light-hearted vibe with people drinking and chatting. It suited the music I was playing. It was nice to have the balance of doing something different now and again.

Listening to your Run it Red NTS podcast as Ben Sims, it’s very eclectic and there are often elements of House in there. Why do you feel you need to split your aliases in that way?

There are some places and crowds that are open-minded, and want to hear DJs mix it up and incorporate different genres and styles. But I’ve found over the years, unless I’m specific about what I’m going to do, people get a bit disappointed and they expect to hear peak-time Ben Sims all of the time. I guess that’s more implied in places I’ve been going a long time, like Spain and Holland and I understand that. Having a different name for it does allow me to be a little bit self-indulgent, and as Ron Bacardi I can play House and I can play Disco, and go off in tangents. I like my Techno sets to be littered with different styles, but having another name allows me to go further than I ever could before as an extension of a Techno set.

Do you think it has only happened more recently as Techno has become a little more restrictive from the nineties when House and Techno were a bit more fluid?

No, not necessarily. I come from a very mixed musical background and earlier I could play a lot more different styles in a set, but that’s because I wasn’t on at peak time. You get more room to experiment and I used to try and push it as far as I could, and when you slide into headline clubs, it is difficult to play House for an hour or play some Disco tracks. The times I did try something different and it was billed as something like a Ben Sims Acid House set, a Disco set, or even a Drum n Bass set – I’ve done a few of those – there will always be some people that would be disappointed because it had my name on the flyer and they weren’t getting what they wanted.

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Do you think your releases on staunch Techno labels like Tresor and your own Theory label, might play a hand in that you feel you have to abide to that sound, and give your fans that kind of experience?

There will always be an element of that. I always want to represent what I’m into, what my vision of Techno is. That hasn’t really changed a lot since I started making it and playing on the circuit. I have a certain idea of what Techno is and my favourite sounds or groups within it and the core of that hasn’t changed at all.

Could you describe that sound?

It’s energy, but not just because it’s fast. It’s some kind of drive or groove to it. I always used to refer to the sound as hardgroove. It’s still got to be funky, and have a raw element. A lot of it tends to sound like it was done on a bedroom setup – not over-produced. I like a different styles, but usually it’s quite stripped back and rhythmic. It’s stuff that locks you in a groove and you can get lost in it. It can’t be disposable and not just hard for the sake of it. It needs to have some sort of funk or groove.

Harking back to that original Detroit sound?

Yes, that’s still where my inspiration and excitement for Techno comes from, the first wave of Detroit stuff. It’s not necessarily the music I make, but that’s still what inspires me, and as Techno has changed and different countries and cities have become the focal point of the scene, I haven’t really changed. As this generation is looking to the sound of Berlin, I’m not really doing that, because Techno is Detroit.

It’s exactly because of Berlin that it’s enjoying another wave of popularity at the moment, but as a veteran that’s seen it go through various phases of popularity, do you feel that you have to adapt to the surroundings at all?

There’ll be be new sounds or fads that would come along that would interest me, and I’ll incorporate new stuff, but I won’t just jump on it because that’s what people are excited about. It has to interest me. And I think the reason, I’ve been doing this for twenty-odd years is that people appreciate it and that might also be why some people don’t like what I do, because I stick to the same sound. I play the stuff that I like within Techno, and as long as I’m playing the stuff that I like it’s hopefully contagious.

Just looking at the tracklists for Run it Red I know that you go through a lot of tracks during the course of a mix, but it’s not just about playing one track after the other it seems, but rather piecing together little musical vignettes to create this massive mix. What is your thought process when it comes to putting those tracks together for the sake of the radio show and this upcoming Tribology mix for Machine?

I’ve only realised this recently, but I think I attack it like a puzzle that needs to be solved. There’s an element of me trying to squeeze in as much possible, to incorporate as much as I can. It’s similar to the way I do club set where I’ll just put in the best bits of things. I’ll have a definite starting point and end point and just piece it together form there.

With the Tribology mix, it was just going to be a compilation, and me mixing it was a bit of an afterthought. It was about getting the artists involved that I play regularly and guests that have played at the Machine parties to contribute tracks. It was a compilation to support the tour and something physical for the parties we were doing. Then I thought it would be nice if I mixed it, and then from that point it needed to turn from a 10-15 track compilation to enough tracks to do a mix that was worthwhile doing. That was going to be 30-35 tracks and then it just spiralled and it became 50.

Yes, I very rarely play one track on its own, and that’s how I attack putting the music together. That’s the challenge for me, to get as much together and for it to make sense and for it to flow.

Does that mean there’s a lot of planning that goes into something like that Tribology mix?

As I was approaching artists that were going to be involved, unconsciously I was already planning some order. When they started sending tracks over some were like “o, well, here’s five choose one” and I was like “actually I could use all of it.” I was solving the puzzle of putting it together as I was compiling it. Like a DJ set, I always knew where the start was going to be, where I want to be half-way through it and what possible ending there could be, although you don’t always get there.

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You mentioned some similarities to your club sets, but how does mixtape or your radio show differ from a club set, do you miss that physical energy of a club in those kind of sets?

I do tend to feed off of the feedback from people. If I’m going in a direction that’s progressively harder or intense, that’s different according to the crowd. I don’t always do that with mixes or podcasts, because it’s not always appropriate. I do approach them in a certain way however as in the way I mix is the way I mix. To a certain extent it doesn’t really matter if someone is in the room or not. I do tend switch off from the surroundings a little bit, and sometimes I’d realise; “fuck I hadn’t looked up for ten minutes,” because I’m so focussed to piecing it together that I forget that I’m doing it for someone else.

Is it focus from being busy with your hands or focussing on the music?

I think it’s the latter. It’s my escapism and my way of relaxing and the only thing that’s important is the next record your mixing. In the end it’s a simple life and does get you away from the stresses of the world. You can really get lost in it and I do get off on that.

You must find yourself playing to younger and younger audiences, and just from my own perspective it feels to me that there’s more of an immediacy to this next generation’s needs. Do you feel you need to adapt to that immediacy and intensity of youth in your sets today?

I’m not on the dance floor anymore, but I used to be a lot through my late teens and early twenties, which is the crowd I’m playing for now, and I guess I just kind of remember that. It’s helpful to remember what it is like to be on the dance floor and all pumped up. It’s something that I’ve never forgotten, and sometimes I might approach my set by going in a little bit heavy at the start, just to grab their attention and then back off a little bit later. Whereas if I went with my plan it would be to just ease them in. It’s a bit tactical. To some extent I do miss it, otherwise I wouldn’t be out there doing it for other people.

I guess that’s what keeps the music pushing forward, not just the new music, but a new interest in the music.

Yes. if I were to play to a room of people my age, just scratching their chins that wouldn’t be much fun. You need the injection of new life. Unless you get involved in the scene or step the other side of the booth, clubbing has a shelf life and people drop off.

Where do you see Techno going next if you could gaze into your crystal ball with all your experience?

(Laughs) It feels like it’s dropping off in popularity and that’s ok with me. It doesn’t always help when it’s at its peak of popularity, it does water things down a little bit. That doesn’t mean there isn’t more work out there for a short period of time, but that’s not really promoting longevity, it becomes fashion.

I do prefer it when it’s not in that peak moment, because the crowd is there for the right reasons and the people that are making it are doing it because that’s what they are passionate about, and it feels that period is what we’re slipping into now.

After minimal Techno and Tech House was so massive, and Techno was the underdog, it kind of swapped around and I think that’s going to go away again. I’m not really too sure to what, I thought it might be Trance but that doesn’t seem to be happening. I’d be interested to see where it goes, but I doubt I will be following it.

And one last question Ben, before I ‘ll let you go: what are your expectations of the set at Jæger for this weekend?

It’s a great space. It’s been a couple of years ago that I played there and I didn’t really know what to expect. It’s great playing somewhere for the first time, but I do like to go back armed with the knowledge of what it’s like and what kind of things work and what don’t and feel a bit more comfortable with the setup. I’m just really looking forward to it.

Let it Simmer with the Hubbabubbaklubb

Between the burbling of the pots and pans on cooking shows playing in the background of various hubbabubbaklubb recording sessions, there’s one phrase that stuck with the band like a mantra. “It’s something that OP (Ollis Hergum) used to say, and that’s let it simmer” explains Morten Skjæveland, when he and Ollis Hegrum sit down for an interview on frosty evening in October. Let it simmer has since become a “hubba” saying. “We work until it’s done,” Ollis told an impatient Morten time and time again “and if it’s only in ten years time, so be it”. It would be, and even though “it was almost ten years,” in the autumn of 2018 hubbabubbaklubb’s debut LP, drømmen drømmerne drømmer finally arrived into the world.

Like a mature cheese, an aged wine or a braised roast, if you let things simmer long enough, it gives it time to bring those intricate complexities in their fabric to the surface and that has been the ethos that has been the foundation of the hubbabubbaklubb philosophy. “We’ve been talking about this album for so long” says Morten. “You can like it or dislike it, but you have to acknowledge that there are layers there.” drømmen drømmerne drømmer has never been about waiting until “it’s perfect” continues Morten but “more like: let’s see what else shows up.”

Some five years on since they released their first single “Mopedbart” everything that could have been accomplished on a debut LP has been for hubbabubbaklub and as we delve further into the dense haluccianary fabric of hubbabubbaklubb, further than any time we’ve done before, layer upon layer is peeled back till we’re at the big bang moment of it all, where a group of close friends get together for some impromptu art sessions, a band emerges and an album is born.

A time immemorial

The origins of the hubbabubbaklubb are as elusive as their music, but Ollis insists “hubbabubbaklubb as we now know it, didn’t happen until Mopedbart, what happened before then doesn’t really matter.” Mopedbart, which was released in 2012 via Australian record label Death Strobe Records, was the first release that featured the name hubbabubbaklubb, made up at that time of Morten Skjæveland, Ollis Hegrum (Olefonken), Jonas Wasa (Joystick Jay), Pål Rokseth (Gundelach) and André Bratten.

Are you Oslo’s first supergroup?

“Maybe” says Ollis with an expressive burst of laughter, “doing your own stuff, is healthy. ”

All accomplished individual artists, it was on Mopedbart where they all first clicked as a band. Originally, a fast-paced track the only thing that was carried over to its final version was the lyric “Høyfart med Mopedbart,” a lyric that had been knocking about since Ollis’ school days when he and Andre first started making music together. The track was initially recorded on a whim, when the gang went to Pål’s house to pick up some equipment for a recording session.

“We discovered he was home alone,“ says Ollis. “So we were like shouldn’t we just be here instead.” Pål’s “old house in farm country” set the perfect tone for Mopedbart. They were going for a “1979 disco vibe” from the start and the setting “helped with that vibe”. Between “drinking and having fun” André, Pål, Ollis, Jonas and Morten recorded some music.

The result was Mopedbart and an “even older” track called Lille Svøte Svanse which channeled that 1979 Disco vibe into a contemporary stepper with Morten’s abstract nostalgia coursing through the lyrics. On the other side of the record, a funky synth bass and a bouncing beat hops over a the crystal clear, harmonic arrangement of Mopedbart and Morten’s caricature of devil-may-care James Dean cliché on a scooter set an evocative and infectious tone through that song.

Jonas sealed the deal with Andy Webb over at Death Strobe Records after releasing a couple of Disco edits on the sister label, Disco Delicious. Mopedbart became a local and international sensation with Bill Brewster picking up the release early for his DJ History blog and with the track receiving the top honours in the furtive 50 in 2013 selected by the DJ History readers.

The plot thickens

Was Mopedbart ever intended to be an album track?

“I didn’t even think it was going to be a single”, says Ollis hastily. After Mopedbart, and emboldened by the success of the track, they considered ; “next easter let’s do the same, but this time it would be more planned.”

They went back to Pål’s house for the first jamming sessions, and the first track that emerged was an early version of Tommer Lommer which Ollis says “sounds way different to what it sounds like now” on the album. Rumour also has it that a really rough, early version of Et Annet Sted also emerged during this session, but this has been validated. But back to the story. Feeling “more pressured” to deliver a follow up to Mopedbart, and with every member having their own commitments, impromptu jam sessions at Pål’s house wouldn’t suffice. They started taking “hubba vacations: A long weekender where we come together cook some nice food, and do a hubba weekend“ on various retreats to mountain- and seaside cabins around Scandinavia.

This is how the album “came together over the years”, and you can hear echoes of it in the lyrics for Fjellet. “På vei opp till høye fjellet,” sings Morten. “Stjerner lyser opp i mørket. Alene under himmelhvelvet.” Those lyrics came to Morten “in the car on the way up” to his mountain cabin and the mood is perceptible in the quietude of the softly strumming guitar and Morten’s lonesome vocal.

Everything would fall into place when Pål found the band a disused sound room in a film studio called filmparken på Jar. “That’s where we made the bulk of the album,” explains Ollis. It was a space they could call their own, a place where they could just hang out and “see what happens” as Morten puts it.

“We really took our time with it” remembers Ollis and as much as it was a space for hubbabubbaklubb, it was also a place where they could collaborate with other artists, who in turn would make their own invisible imprints on the eventual record.

With the money they “earned from various concerts” they bought a “big mixer” and they were on track to record the rest of an album, but then suddenly, and without warning, they found themselves on the curb, and their hopes dashed at finishing the album.

A slim chance

“We were thrown out of the studio because there was too much drinking and stuff,” recounts Ollis and without the studio, the band were left with a portion of an album and nowhere to record the rest. “That’s really important to understand;” says Morten “it wasn’t a given that this album would see the light of day, there was a 50/50 chance that it was going to manifest itself.”

Ollis recalls when that moment came that they had to leave Jar, “that was the point we thought hubbabubba was dead.”

“That set a damper and it was not the ideal way to go our separate ways.” The band retreated into their individual projects and the album was shelved, but the work they’d done for the album, simmered nonetheless and in Ollis words they thought; “it would be a shame if this didn’t see the light of day”.He turned to the rest band with a proposal: “I told the boys I would like to finish the album but I’m not going to do it for free.” He would take the mixer in payment and it became the “dangling carrot” that he required to finish the album.

The original demo recordings were just that, demos and they were “pretty far off”. Opening up old projects, Ollis had found that some much needed maintenance was required. Pieces of inane conversations coming in and out of recordings where they had forgotten microphones in the room and similar amateur moments, had set him a big task to get the LP done. It required Ollis and the band to “record a lot of stuff”. Pål’s brother, Ole Rokseth was inducted into the band to play bass when André Bratten was committed to his solo project and even the Rokseth patriarch, Stein literally lent a helping hand with some hand percussion. People like Jonas Raabe would be brought into the recording process too and the album turned into something of a family affair for the band.

Over time the tracks matured as pieces came in and arrangements were finalised, but it was a mammoth task taking the original sketches and turning it into the album. “I did my masters degree back… I can’t remember when…” says Morten “and I always said to OP, the album was his master’s degree, but then I handed that shit in and he was still working on the album.” The “life project” finally came together after the best part of a decade.

Morten had floated the title “drømmen drommerne drømmer “at some point early during this process as a shortened version of an Eden Ahbez lyric on the song Full Moon. “It ends with the line dream the dream that dreamers dream. I felt it was really strong and it was really funny to say the same word over and over again.” It’s a song they would come back to a lot during the whole process but only Morten and Ollis knew the title at first. “I was afraid that people would get tired of it,” explains Morten, but yet it still lends an infectious rhythm to the start of the LP that carries through to the music and the artwork.

Unpacking the layers

By the time you reached Den Hvite By, some 9 tracks in an entire world has opened up to the listener. From the familiar singles Tommer Lommer, Mopedbart and Eddie Suzanne, hubbabubbaklubb transport you through the kodak moments of the bands career laid out like the collage on the inner sleeves of the record.

Den Hvite By’s afrocentric qualities mimic Fela Kuti, shoehorning Jonas’ love for the Western African music in to a space-aged Norwegian dialect. “We almost ended up in another world, not afrobeat anymore,” remembers Morten of the recording process and one of the “most magical” moments of the hubbabubbaklubb history.

One of the many snapshots through the career of the hubbabubbaklubb, Den Hvite By forms part of an immense tapestry of music that constitutes drømmen drømmerne drømmer. There’s an undeniable connection to the songs, and whether it creates part of a larger narrative is up to the listener, but it is there to be explored, suggests Morten.

Morten often makes references to the title, especially in the songs Konkylie and Fjellet, but the tracks live beyond the album, as lyrics float around in a dreamscape, untethered to any tangible reality.

There’s a charming nostalgia to hubbabubbaklubb from the music to lyrics but especially the lyrics. Morten has a way of sculpting stories that seem to arrive like an intangible memory, emphasised by his wispy alto bordering on falsetto. His words and voice fall like a shared memory projected from cathode television screen.

In hubbabubbaklub there’s a purpose to all this. “Early on when I started writing lyrics I realised I had to drop all modern references”, says Morten, and that has also helped solidify some kind of symbioses between the lyrics and the music. “When they (the band) dig up old synthesisers and sounds from the past, it’s my duty to humbly mirror that with the choice of words.”

And does the music reflect the lyrics?

“Definitely,” says Ollis and cites Fjellet as an example.

The acoustic guitar track is the furthest they step back from synthesisers and electronic instruments, with a folksy John Denver kind of song about getting back in to nature. It might have been inspired by that epoch in music but it’s not stuck in that era.

Ollis tells me that hubbabubbaklubb would have a track like that and Den Hvite by “lying around for two or three years”, and would often go back to change it, letting it simmer to evolve and grow with the band where at some point it’s reached the best version of itself. “Hopefully that’s the benefit of talking such a long time,” says Ollis “not getting stuck in an era.”

There are influences too, but besides the obvious references to Yellow Submarine, Fela Kuti and Eden Ahbez, Ollis is not willing to divulge anymore of them. Perhaps it would evoke a memory of a listener, but they don’t think it’s the band’s place to imply anything concrete, always getting back to the dream and dreamer.

In a recent interview they were asked who are the dreamers and what are those dreams, and it’s something they’ve been mulling over by the time we get to our interview. It’s “a very vivid picture of younger times and easier times, which for me at least that are what dreams are in a way” says Ollis. For Morten “the dreamers could be young, adventurous people” too striving for that imperceptible perfect version of itself, but ultimately he proffers; “you tell me?”

All the trappings of a timeless classic

So what happens next, how do you follow it up?

“At this point it’s just really nice to see people enjoying it and liking it. Hopefully there will be a couple of vacations,” says Ollis like the weight of the world has just been lifted off his shoulders. Morten is just hoping to ”enjoy this caramel, because it’s been such a long time coming. We are childhood friends and it’s a friendship manifesting itself into this physical thing.”

“That’s the type of guys we were,” continues Morten.” while the other guys came together and watched football, we came together, and we drew. We sat at Wasa’s house and made paintings. Just playing around, with no intention of it becoming a big piece, just the fun of it.” And that philosophy has coursed through the very fibre of hubbabubbaklubb since the beginning and is now physically imprinted on vinyl as drømmen drømmerne drømmer.

Ollis is surprised that he is still able to listen to the album now that it’s out. Usually when he finishes a record “it’s everybody else’s” when it’s done, but on this occasion he keeps coming back to it; that’s until Mopedbart comes on.

“I skip that one” he says and Morten winces at the thought of it. There was some serious discussion in the band about whether that song was going to make it on the album. Morten will at least listen to it, because he likes “to hear (the album) from start to finish with all the transitions”, but it’s a track that divides opinion within the band. in a recent Q&A session with Jonas Wasa he said “I’m so tired of that fucking song,” and Ollis feels he has to defend it. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t like the song” says Ollis, “It’s just form a different era.” It’s still the band’s biggest hit and whenever they play it in a set or live Ollis still finds it “crazy” that “everyone sings along.”

For the listener at least it frames the album perfectly, it’s the glue that holds it all together at the conceptual genesis of it all, forming an integral part of the hubbabubbaklubb narrative that traces a red line through the entire album.

It’s not merely an album of Mopedbart in various other forms but rather an intense and enveloping experience from start to finish that transports you the that ineffable dream that hubbabubbaklubb have succeeded in creating on this album. All that’s left to do in hubbabubbaklubb’s opinion is to “put on some headphones, lean back and dream that dream.”

*drømmen drømmerne drømmer is out now and you can pick up a copy at Filter Musikk.

*Olefonken is back this Friday in is usual residency slot at Frædag invites Âme and Morten will be back at Jæger for Skranglejazz x Frædag presents Gerd Janson and Prins Thomas on the 30th on November.

Having it all with Ra-Shidi

Olivia Ra-Shidi has gone from learning to mix to playing a stage at Insomnia festival in less than eighteen months. A precocious talent, the young Ra-Shidi has an innate musical ability, fusing organic contrapuntal rhythms with vintage synthesisers in exotic mixes forged from chimerical musical landscapes.

She’s a resident and a booker for Circa and Storgate Camping (Oslo Camping’s northern counterpart) in Tromsø. Between booking these venues and playing, Ra-Shidi has become a dominant force in the arctic city as one of the next generation of DJs breaking through from Norway’s first electronic music city, where Bjørn Torske, Mental Overdrive, Biosphere and Rune Lindbæk first staked their claim.

Under the sage guidance of her mentor Charlotte Bendiks, Ra-Shidi has joined the ranks of these legendary figures and bears the torch of their legacy for contemporary audiences.

She has cultivated a unique sound as a DJ, going from the “minimal Techno” of her early sets to the more eclectic sets we hear from her today. It’s a sound she says that she “started figuring out” after playing Oslo a couple times. Noticing “a huge difference between the audiences in Tromsø” and those of Oslo, Ra-Shidi has adapted her music accordingly with that inherent, acute sense of a DJ it takes some people years to refine.

She’s made phenomenal strides as a DJ in mere months, and very rarely takes a break from music. “You don’t have a day off in a life where you love what you do”, she tells me over a telephone call on the Monday after her Insomnia appearance. It’s her day off, but she’s put some time aside for us to field some questions about her musical history and the scene in Tromsø ahead of her next appearance at Jæger as part of the Oslo world line-up.

How was Insomnia?

I was part of the line-up through a program called ‘Cloud Exit’. DJ and producers from northern Norway could send in mixes or productions of their own, and there would be an external jury, choosing the four people to be part of the lineup. I was one of those four and it was interesting. You also get a mentor and get to be promoted through Insomnia and their festival partners. It is a very huge opportunity for up-and-coming artists.

Who are some of the festival partners?

Sónar, Barcelona and Mutek. They are part of the Shape Platform. They have a lot of huge festivals as well as small underground festivals.

I imagine Insomnia would be a bigger crowd from what you’ve been used to playing up until now?

Yes, but it’s also a safer crowd, because I’m from Tromsø. I’ve gone to Insomnia every single year since I started clubbing. I was a bit nervous because I was standing on an actual stage, but the crowd was people I’d met every single year at Insomnia, so I just felt really safe and it felt like I was home.

Ra-Shidi grew up to the music of “Mental Overdrive and Bjørn Torske”, dancing to the music her older sisters would bring home. A mere child at the time, she wouldn’t quite grasp the significance of these early musical experiences until later. As she grew older, “she would finally understand these artists are from Tromsø and that they would play” in the city quite often. She would go out to places like Verdensteatret to hear these “local and international heroes” play and dance with abandonment to their electronic sounds.

As a student of classical music and various instruments through after-school activities, Ra-Shidi found a release in electronic music that had eluded her in the classical dialect. “There were so many rules to it,” she explains, “and with electronic music you could not care about the rules and do your own thing.” When she danced to electronic she ”really felt like the true me came out.”

While some of her friends had already started DJing at that point, Ra-Shidi had remained quite impervious to a career as a DJ at first, because “I always felt it was much more difficult than it actually is.” After a few impromptu mixing sessions at house parties she was encouraged to explore DJing further and when friends noticed her impeccable musical tastes and proffered; “why don’t you play Olivia, you listen to stuff we haven’t heard before.”

With the resources of Tvibit (a local training platform for burgeoning musicians, producers and DJs, replete with studios and DJ equipment) at her disposal Ra-Shidi nurtured her own talents and found something in DJing she hadn’t really experienced with her various after school musical activities. “DJing ended up being the creative outlet that I’ve been longing for quite some time.”

Do you think the classical music training helped in terms of picking it up a bit quicker than your peers?

Definitely. From playing different classical instruments where you also counted till eight or sixteen, you already new all the rules behind music. Also the electronic music community in Tromsø is a close knit community because it’s such a small city so getting help was never hard.

What sort of music were you playing when you started?

I have not been playing for such a long time, so I can’t really say that my taste in music or style has changed very drastically. In the beginning, any genre of music as long as it has ethnic rhythms, very African and latin American vibes.

Yes I picked that up from Jæger mix too, the complex, interlacing rhythms, but also very electronic at the same time.

Exactly. From the beginning I was not (loyal) to a genre or anything. As long as I could dance to it or feel something when I heard it, I would download it. I also mixed a lot of genres and in the beginning there was a lot of minimal tech, but that eventually ended. Now, the one thing all my tracks have in common is that they are very percussive. I like tracks that are more organic.

Is that the same thing that you played at this recent Insomnia set?

Since I started the evening, I tried to keep it more upbeat, but yeah, it was definitely the same thing. It was very percussive and you had a lot of mystic and occult tracks, with some dark sounds, but then I would also try to contrast it with some more synth heavy old-school house track. I’ve always been the kind of person that enjoys irony, doing things for the sake of it, because it kind of doesn’t fit together. I like showing people the contrast and that you don’t always need that pure dark Berghain techno set if you don’t want. Break the rules and do whatever you want.

I have so many influences so I’ve never been able to decide on what type of electronic music I generally enjoy that I want to play. Maybe I’m just being a little egotistic and I just want to do it all and have it all.

I think that is very much a Norwegian thing, DJs tend to dig deeper and from a more diverse palette than anything I’ve experienced before elsewhere.

Definitely, and also just from hearing the different sets from different people like Charlotte Bendiks, who is also my mentor for the Clouds Exit program. So many of these people would show us the diversity within the electronic music genre.

The Clouds exit program is very much in the tradition of Tromsø and elevating its own. Built on a “close-knit” clubbing community where it is like “having a huge house party with our friends every time you go to Circa” according to Ra-Shidi. There’s a very DIY community-based tradition in clubbing culture there, based on the idea of dugnadsånden; the communal spirit of coming together to achieve something without the need for compensation.

The thing in itself is its own reward and in that spirit the clubbing community also come together.” We know we’ve got to do things ourselves,” explains Ra-Shidi. People and club concepts like Houseboden for example exist because of this DIY infrastructure and that’s why “if you’re out clubbing in Tromsø, you see a lot of people have a certain ownership to the night” according to Ra-Shidi, “because they’ve made it happen themselves.”

The idea of dugnadsånden is also how Ra-Shidi had her start as a DJ. “I just went up to the manager at Circa and asked if I could play there, and he just said, ‘yeah sure’.” Unfortunately, Circa is coming to an end in two months, and Ra-Shidi is hoping Storgata Camping will carry the beacon for the clubbing community, with more reserved bookings but with a bigger impact to attract the larger audience to fill the dance floor.

In Tromsø, club concepts like Houseboden have started to bring in more international acts and it seems that there’s certainly more of this on the horizon as this generation of club enthusiasts takes it in their own hands. There’s a lot of pride in the the “history of Norwegian Techno and House started in Tromsø” says Ra-Shidi even with this new generation and “especially after Northern Disco lights came out.”

That’s interesting, did that make an impact even in Tromsø?

It reached out to a broader audience in the city. I think a lot of people also started listening to the older tracks and started checking out things like Beatservice records who had the Prima Norsk series. It kind of opened their eyes to Norwegian producers I guess. As for the environment in itself that didn’t change much.

In an email exchange earlier you explained that you’re moving towards production, and especially considering your background as a musician, I imagine this is something that you would like to explore. So what’s happening with respects to making music?

So far, not much. I only started playing 18 months ago. It’s gone really fast, and it didn’t really give me a chance to think about what was going to be my next step. I’ve had a lot of good conversation with Charlotte when I asked her to be my official mentor and she said; “just start playing around with and get familiar with it.” So far I’m just playing around, getting familiar with it. I don’t have any goal like putting out an EP in the next few years. I feel like something, but it’s really hard for me to translate it in a software.

For the moment Ra-shidi is happy biding her time as a DJ, but she will almost definitely add producer in the near future to her credentials. She’s a rising star, not only in Tromsø, but in the rest of Norway too, and one to certainly look out for in the future.

House music stole my heart with Da Capo

South Africa is a House nation. For as long as House music has been around, the southern African nation, has adopted the genre in its own unique sonic aesthetic and contributed its fair share to the further development of House music through artists like Black Coffee and Culoe de Song.

Nicodimas Sekheta Mogashoa (aka Da Capo) is the next in a long line of DJs and producers to take the sounds of House and present them in a very unique afro-centric dialect, incorporating elements from regional musical flavours like Kwaito in their sounds.

Originally from Polokwane, a city a stone’s throw away from the epicentre of House music, Johannesburg, Da Capo’s career starts in the bedroom as a self-taught producer. While Hip Hop lured a young Mogashoa over to computer music, it would through House music that he would make his mark in music. He had found an early affinity for the genre, and combining it with the rhythms of regional sounds with a deep soulful vision.

Under the sage guidance of Black Coffee and Canadian House veteran and DNH Records proprietor Nick Holder, Da Capo developed his own sonic signature in the genre. Holder provided the platform for his first record, Deeper Side, on the back of which he and long-time collaborator Punk Mbedzi launched two very successful careers and the label, Surreal Sounds.

From those first bass-heavy dub House tracks like Deep Side to the more organic sounds of his Ki Lo Fe, Da Capo’s sound is diverse and he is able to adapt to a wide range of styles. An adept remixer his remixes like Freshly Ground’s Nomthandazo, had won him many plaudits early on his career, and he caught the ear of established House artists like Louie Vega, who became early fans of his prodigious music talent.

In 2014 he released his debut LP, collaborating yet again with Punk for a compilation of tracks featuring the two label partners and mixed by Dj Swizz. Shortly after Da Capo signed to Black Coffee’s label, Soulistic music, following in the shadow of his idol to carve out his own unique imprint on the parchment of South African House music history.

We caught up with Mogashoa before his visit at Jæger as part of the Oslo World music festival.

Hello Da Capo and thanks for taking the time to talk to us. I’m curious about where your interest in House music started. Can you tell us a bit about earliest House memories and what got you started on the path of a career as a House music DJ and producer?

It all started on a high school trip where one of my friends was requested to play a mix on the bus and I heard this song Franky Boisy & Kwame – Everybody wants to rule the world. It blew my mind away that’s where I started collecting mp3s and house compilations, I was more of a hip hop producer fan and producer, but then since… well I didn’t see my vision as a rapper or producer, I fell in love with house then I started producing it. It literally stole my heart.

I know that Khasi Mp3 and the taxis were influential in bringing House music to the mainstream in South Africa, but where were you getting your music from and where did you go to listen and eventually play House music?

I grew up in that society where taxis played a huge role but I wasn’t inspired by that, my inspiration comes from a couple of friends I used to study with at high school who would talk about exclusive deep house music everyday on free periods and we would share music on Bluetooth. I wasn’t really much of a party goer because I was young at the time, I only enjoyed my space by making music alone in my room until there came a point where I had to deejay which came after years later.

You grew up in Polokwane which is quite a small town in SA standards. How do you think that affected your music as opposed to the people coming through in a bigger city like Johannesburg?

I lived in an era where the internet was very useful, so for music to reach the masses it wasn’t much of a struggle, I had fans and played in Polokwane already before I played in Johannesburg but the market is more bigger in Johannesburg because it’s the centre of all cities, for every artist to sustain their career it is the city to be.

Do you still live in Polokwane and what’s the music like coming out of that region at the moment?

I actually moved to Johannesburg haha. I think a lot of us moved there because that’s where the demand and opportunity is. And the music is quite different in Polokwane because there are new artists that have emerged and which have a different sound to what we have been making years back.

From what I’ve read about you, Black Coffee had an instrumental role in your musical education. How did you meet him and how did he help and influence you in the beginning?

Black Coffee played a huge role in a lot of upcoming musicians including me, his music had a whole dynamic shift in the Afro scene. I was inspired by the sounds to polish my production. We officially met at a gig years earlier before I joined his stable Soulistic music and from there we started sharing ideas in terms of production and deejaying as well.

I know Nick Holder has also played a fundamental part in your career. What were the origins of that relationship and how did he help motivate your career further?

Nick Holder is the first ever artist to recognize Da Capo, we met on social media at that time he requested we send him my music. He only heard my music the day we sent it to him then 3 days later he released my EP under his label dnh music, he pushed my music to the international market and the local market too, that’s were people recognized my artistry.

Your music has this obvious connection to South Africa, and I specifically pick up rhythms from Kwaito in a track like Kelaya. But there’s also this European and US influences ebbing through it. How much did music from outside of SA influence you?

House music that dominated in the times when I feel in love with it was international house music. It was on every compilation and to this day I recommend some of the selections as classic music, it totally played a huge role in my music career.

I grew up in South Africa and I often go back, and I’m always surprised how little people value music from the country. The DJs I know there can’t really play stuff from home. What’s your experience with playing homegrown music there?

In my experience I think they do value music from here, it’s just that there’s a variety of markets, different sub genre and people tend to like different type of music and each of them have different followers and they all appreciated it.

I was watching your Ibiza HQ mix and there you’re able to play that kind of thing. I find European audiences are more open to that sound. Do you adapt your set playing in Europe as opposed to South Africa?

To be honest it’s very hard to adapt. Europe, it’s a very open market and SA is not so open, but you have to have followers and places that admire your craft, that’s when you can jam to whatever you like.

What are some of your favourite places to play back home?

Kitcheners bar (Braamfontein), Republic of 94 (Braamfontein), 033 lifestyle (Pietermaritzburg), Black coffee Block Party ( Newtown), Spring fiesta (Boksburg).

You‘re also part of the label, Surreal Sounds with Katlego Swizz. Can you tell us a bit more about the origins of the label and some of the ideas behind it?

Surreal sounds was a label formally formed by myself and Punk Mbedzi then we included acts such as Katlego Swizz to run management and at a later stage we decided to do a joint venture with Soul Candi records, until there came a point we parted ways and we all ventured in new careers and visions.

Is there anything on the Da Capo music front that you’re eager to share with us?

I’m currently working on the Indigo Child part 2 and unleashing a beast within Da Capo which is Aqautone dropping an EP early 2019.

If you build it they will come – DELLA interviews Homero Espinosa

The last time DELLA and Homero Espinosa got together, it was on the House scorcher “Burning Hot”. On the track a syncopated beat skips over a low-slung bass hook like it’s a bed of hot coals, perfectly poised for the dance floor where DELLA’s salacious vocal pulses through the arrangement. An upbeat key arrangement skims just above the surface, before floating off into the distance on some euphoric trajectory, looking back with a reverend nod to the deeper elements at its core.

Released in early 2018, Burning Hot was the first time DELLA and Homero Espinosa worked together, but their West Coast connection and deep appreciation and respect for the origins of House music forged a track out of the foundation of House music that went on to climb the Traxsource charts.

Homero Espinosa’s story begins at the height of House music on the West Coast, San Francisco to be precise. Like DELLA, his education starts on the other side of the booth, on the dance floor during the emergence of the budding warehouse rave scene in the Bay Area. From the dance floor to the booth he cut his teeth at ground zero during the nineties, taking up DJing and eventually production as he evolved with the scene.

Together with Chris Lum, David Harness, Ivan Ruiz, Cubase Dan, Allen Craig and Sergio Ferdanz, Espinosa established the label Moulton Music with a close-knit community at its core, picking up releases from local peers like Fred Everything and Mark Farina. It’s the label that brings most of Espinosa’s own music to the world and together with his music on labels like Strictly Rhythm it established a career as one of the most respected producers and DJs in the Bay Area.

If he’s not working on his own music or running Moulton Music, he’s collaborating with the likes of Mark Farina or Allen Craig as Yerba Buena Discos. He’s found an audience in Europe too with tracks on mixes for Fabric and Ministry of sound mix compilations, and now makes regular trips to the continent, bringing a little history of West Coast House music with him wherever he goes.

On his next visit to Europe for ADE, DELLA’s Drivhus added Oslo as another stop on the itinerary. But before the pair would be reunited again, this time in the DJ booth, DELLA sent Espinosa an email to find out a little more about his music and career and it went:

“Hi Homero, I am super stoked that you will be joining me soon behind the decks in our little gem of a club, Jæger. Like I mentioned earlier in my mail, I do an interview between myself and my guests for our Jæger blog. I am looking forward to now learning more about you musically. ;)”

Homero Espinosa obliged and somewhere over the pacific on his way to Amsterdam, he responded in kind with details about the origins of his career in music, Moulton Music and a little taste of what his set might sound like at Jæger this weekend.

Della: I am beyond excited to be joining you behind the decks at the next Della’s Drivhus. You have been both a great inspiration and support for me as an artist, would you mind to tell us now a little bit about your journey? When and how did you start getting involved in House music? Who is Homero Espinosa as an artist?

Homero Espinosa: Hi Della. First off, I’m super excited to come out and play some music with you and thank you for making it happen ☺. I was very fortunate to be part of the late 90’s rave scene in San Francisco. I grew up listening to DJs like Mark Farina, DJ Sneak, David Harness, and Doc Martin to name a few. After a couple of years of going to raves I was inspired to pick up a set of decks and learn the craft. We were pretty spoiled back in the day with all the amazing records stores, from Primal Records in Berkeley (my second home) to Tweekin Records in the City, I was surrounded by amazing artists, sharing their love of music with me. Shortly after, I started hosting my own events, small undergrounds, around the San Francisco Bay Area. I didn’t start getting into production until around 2006 and one of the very first songs I wrote, Can You Feel Me?, Mark Farina licensed for his Ministry of Sound Sessions mix comp. It was off to the races from there!

D: You are based in the Bay Area, California (San Francisco / Oakland), this area is known for its own unique influence and sound in House music. Can you give us a short history lesson on the legendary San Francisco House scene and why the Bay Area has emerged such deep/soulful vibes in dance music and continues to do so?

HE: As I mentioned earlier, the San Francisco rave was MASSIVE in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Every weekend there was at least one, sometimes, 2, or 3 huge raves with over 20k in attendance and all the clubs were packed to the gills. We had the European influence with such crews as Wicked and also the roots of the San Francisco LBTQ communities with disco and soulful house with David Harness. Mark Farina also had his weekly event, Mushroom Jazz, which was all down-tempo instrumental hip-hop and jazz. So much amazing music every night of the week!

D: Not only are you a producer / DJ, you are the cofounder of Moulton Music. A label that sends each release to the top of the House charts and is one of the strongest players in House music today. How did becoming a label owner stem out of the seed of your House music experience? What do you find is the most rewarding, and what challenges you from running your own label? To those up-n-coming djs, would you advise starting a label to help gain success in their career?

HE: I have to give it up to Chris Lum. I was renting a studio at the legendary Moulton Studios compound in San Francisco. I became close friends with Chris and it was there that we decided to launch Moulton Music along with David Harness, Ivan Ruiz, Cubase Dan, Allen Craig and Sergio Ferdanz. I’m very lucky to be surrounded with such talented artists that give me so much amazing music to put out. For the up and coming artist and labels, consistency is the key. We release a record every 2 weeks and we’re usually 3 months out. I also made it a point to build connections with the people that sell our music. Traxsource has been instrumental in our success and that all started with me reaching out to the folks running the site and building a relationship. I know everyone who touches our music and I make it a point to know more about them. This business is all about relationships.

D: Is this going to be your 1st time playing in Oslo? What do you recognize as differences from the US House scene vs. Europe?

HE: Yes, I am looking forward to it! The US scene has more soul because of our culture and the connection to rhythm and blues and is reflected in what the audience wants to hear. Every time I play in Europe I have to play a little harder, a little faster, but I still stay true to my roots.

D: You and I had the opportunity to work together in the Moulton studios last year (what a brilliant experience it was!) and you have collaborated with many talented artists, including house legends such as Mark Farina. As a producer and label owner, what motivates you to collaborate with different artists? And/or how do you select producers/remixers for the label? Is there a logistical method you use or is it all straight from the heart?

HE: The Moulton vibe is all chill and no drama and we tend to gravitate to towards artist who are the same. Of course, you have to make dope ass music, but leave the drama at home!

D: Your experience in House music runs deep back to the good ’Old School’ days of the 90’s rave scene. In 2018, it seems everyone is a DJ and the competition is thick, what do you think gives a DJ their longevity? What advice can you give those who are just starting out?

HE: I sometimes hear artists complain about the politics of the scene and yes, it can be challenging, but how I got around that was doing my own thing. I didn’t rely on people booking me for gigs. I made my own gigs, at the beginning it was hard to get folks to go out, but over time people started coming. When you look at all the big DJs, they all have their own nights and that’s how they build their following. Dirtybird is a perfect example, those cats started out throwing free parties in a park in San Francisco and look at them now. If you build it, they will come….

D: Moulton Music has released major players such as Tony Humphries, Mark Farina, Mr. V., Fred Everything, Luke Solomon, Doc Martin, and Dj Spen. Can I ask, what other artist that inspire would you want to welcome to the Moulton family? And please tell us about Moulton’s upcoming releases and your plans for 2019.

HE: Everyone on the label has a personal connection with one of the core artist on the label. David Harness and Chris Lum brought us DJ Spen, Tony Humphries, and Mr. V. DJ spen remixed the very first Moulton release. ‘Big Tool –DJ Spen Jungle Boogie mix.’ Fred Everything had a suite at Moulton Studios and he would always give me tips for mixing when I was starting out. He was one of the early remixers we hired and his remix was what put us on the map, ‘Love Say (Fred Everything Remix).’

2019 we’re really going to continue doing what we do on the label and have some special albums to announce at the beginning of the year. We’ve also started hosting our own Moulton Music events and they have been a lot of fun. We’re going to package that up and take on the road.

D: I have been inside your DJ room with wall to wall vinyl, your library holds tracks that are the definition of the House movement (it’s a soul thing). Can you please give us a selection of 3 tracks that might even school the deepest of Househeads?

HE: I can actually give you more than 3. I just did this interview for Beatport called Monitor where they ask artist to put together the sounds that make up the sounds of their city.

D: Thanks Homero for taking the time to chat with us. This edition of Della’s Drivhus is surely going to be ’Burnin, burnin HOT!’ I can’t wait! – DELLA

From the Soul with Mono Junk

Google, Imatra Finland. The screen projects a mural of picturesque views, snow-capped furs, bavarian-style castles, billowing rivers in autumn and scenic forest landscapes. Like something from a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, there’s something incredibly surreal and yet completely tangible about the Finnish hamlet from the computer screen. It’s the kind of place you’d associate with acoustic music about ancient folklore while rosy cheeked women step through ritual dances in unflattering bulky dresses. It’s not the place you’d associate with Techno, but one particular individual in Imatra’s small 30 000 population has changed that forever. Kimmo Rapatti (Mono Junk, Melody Boy 2000) is from Imatra.

He’s recently made the move back to the town where he was born and raised after a short stint in Berlin and twenty years in the Finnish city of Turku. “You get real winters in Imatra”, he says during a moment of silence during soundcheck at Kafe Hærverk where he is due to play live later that evening. He talks of Imatra and its relative size, the surrounding forest and natural splendour of the region in a matter-of-fact tone. “Do you find inspiration in your surroundings?“ I ask him when we sit down for an interview after the soundcheck. “Yeah, you could say that,” he says like the thought had only just occurred to him and then falls back into a contemplative silence.

Kimmo’s fifty years has only accentuated and honed his pragmatic Finnish demeanour. He talks in austere, succinct sentences between gulps of beer and often falls into a quiet thoughtful daze like he’s trying to conjure a particular memory, but comes up short. Whenever he returns to the questions, he answers in monosyllabic, short bursts, constructed in sentences from some metaphysical process and delivered in his heavy accent.

Kimmo has been making music as Mono Junk since the ninety nineties. In 1990 he released his first record, and two years later he established Dum records with the same solitary attitude to making music. He’s been an enduring figure, not only in Finland, but everywhere in the furtive margins of Techno and Electro for the past thirty years and has continually staked his claim throughout his career. A very reserved output, mostly on Dum records, Mono Junk’s music, much like the man behind the music, make succinct impressions on record collections, with a singular musical voice that has remained largely unchanged. With a penchant for melodic themes and robotic precision, Mono Junk’s music continues to make intense imprints on the electronic music landscape for labels like Forbidden Planet and Skudge.

Kimmo’s journey on this path begins back in Imatra, in the ninety eighties. He had “been a fan” of synth pop from a young age, citing groups like “Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Howard Jones” as early luminaries, but he never thought for a moment “there was anything special in that (style) of music”. There had been no early inclination or sign that Kimmo would eventually turn to a career in music, but that all changed during the second summer of love in the late ninety eighties when the UK Rave scene bursts forth and electronic dance music from Chicago and Detroit found its way into the rest of Europe, even to small hamlets on the southeast of Finland.

There were a “small group of guys who started to make Techno, influenced of Chicago and Detroit Techno” in Imatra according to Kimmo. In an interview with Digital Tsunami, he distinctly remembers “that I heard Rhythim Is Rhythim’s Nude Photo and Phuture’s Acid tracks when they were brand new” through a local DJ acquaintance. Although the UK Rave scene had made its presence felt in Finland as soon as it arrived and the music from Chicago and Detroit had already started proliferating the airwaves, there was one significant issue with Imatra; There was no place to hear the music. Warehouse party culture had taken up in parts of Finland, but they were still 400km away, and although there were “a few DJ gigs at local bars” available to a burgeoning DJ like Kimmo, “you couldn’t really play underground stuff.”

In 1990 Kimmo made the move to Helsinki. It was in the Finnish capital that he “got to know Finnish scratch DJ” and “DMC scratch champion, DJ Kari Kaivola” and the two struck up a friendship. Kimmo and Kari hat met at a DMC scratch championship in 1989, and when he moved to Helsinki the older and more established Kari took Kimmo under his wing, giving him access to his studio, to start making his own records.

“I didn’t know anything” Kimmo says with the advantage of hindsight. It was inconsequential however, because it was the “time of sampling” and armed with handful of records he made his first bold steps into production with Kari. “Maybe we can make something out of this”, he remembers telling Kari as he handed over the records and by 1990 Kimmo had made his first record as B-Rock. “My Mind is goin’” was released on Kari’s Dancebeat Records and it was a collage of off-beat samples, synth lines and a repetitive vocal hook brought together in an unmistakably Electro fashion. “I think I’m both the Electro and Techno godfather of Finland”, says Kimmo with a gratifying smile.

Considering this was most likely the first Electro record ever produced in Finland where acts like Morphology, Mesak and Freestyle Man continue to pursue this style of music today, there’s a lot of salient logic to this bold claim. It would be through Techno however where Kimmo Rapatti would etch his name in the annals of electronic music as Mono Junk. After releasing his first record in 1990, he got his first synthesiser, “a Roland JX 3P”, and started making what he considered his “own music” as Mono Junk shortly after. As Mono Junk he released his first record in 1992 and simultaneously established Dum Records as an offshoot of Kari Kaivola’s Dancebeat records.

The ninety nineties to many like Kimmo is still the pinnacle era of Techno, where it was first constructed as the obelisk in electronic music it was today. The genre was far less austere and functional during that period, with serene synthesisers assuaging the robotic rhythms of drum machines for hedonistic delights. Mono Junk’s music is probably the best European example of that time. Whether it’s “a generational thing” for Kimmo or just a result of the fact that he started making and listening to that music during that period, it still remains the best decade for Techno in his opinion. There were “so many good records in the nineties” he recalls today and he was responsible for a fair few of them. Tracks from Mono Junk’s discography during that period, reveal an unconformity in approach to electronic music and Techno that sounds like no other artist from that era and a fair few of them have become outright Techno classics.

Listening to “Another Acid” from 1993, a lysergic acid-loop plays like the sequential patter of rain drops on a zinc roof for 32 bars before any semblance of percussion presents itself. For his live show at Hærverk, he takes the essence of that track and channels it into an extemporised diatribe on the machine, completely doing away with the essential percussive arrangement on this occasion. The bass-line warbles on like an irrational computer stuck in time, before Kimmo eventually moves onto the next track in his live show. His music has remained fairly constant throughout his career, only developing in soundscape as technology evolved, but retaining the core essence of his musical identity that’s been there since the ninety nineties.

There’s always a sincere melodic essence to any Mono Junk track which you can trace from those first Dum records (even the Dancebeat record) to the present and records like his most Forbidden Planet releases. It stems from from being “a big fan of arpeggio”, he tells me. “Most of my melodies are out of some arpeggio.” This is the crucial ingredient to any Mono Junk track he insists, and he won’t even consider working further on a track if this “first part is not perfect.” For Kimmo every track “needs to have some melody, bass-line or some perfect loop” for him to proceed with the arrangement of it, and this has been a significant factor in why he favours a reserved output.

It’s only when he knows “it’s good” that he’ll even consider putting out a track. He keeps the best of these for his own label Dum Records and sends the rest to others for release. It’s perhaps part of the reason his music has always divided opinion. Mono Junk’s music is very secure in itself, hardly making concessions to outside influences and always standing very much on its own within the the Techno denomination. It’s very bold music for discernible tastes.

Throughout his career, Kimmo would often leave Mono Junk on the back burner while he pursued projects like Melody Boy 2000 and New York City Survivors with Irwin Berg, but even after a long hiatus he would always return to Mono Junk. There was a period in the last decade where he believed he would completely leave Techno behind according to his interview with Digital Tsunami, but that all changed in 2014 when he released new music via Forbidden Planet and the “passion” returned. FP004 and FP008 contain some of Mono Junk’s best works with tracks like “With You”, “Prince of the Night” and “Channel B RMX” dotted throughout those two releases. These records came just at the right time, when Techno had become straight jacketed into very restrictive, unforgiving moulds. Mono Junk showed there could still be some more accessible, soulful aspect to this music that lives beyond the dominating kick and brooding atmosphere.

Today Kimmo still “feels like I’m in the nineties and a little bit out of the scene, even though I have played in recent years,” but things like trend and scenes have never really affected Kimmo’s music. His music always seems to live beyond time and the only thing that ever keeps him motivated is: “I just wanted to make good records.” I ask Kimmo where he finds his inspiration and his voice, buried deep from somewhere beyond his diaphragm, says “from my soul.”

The impression I get from Kimmo through our brief conversation is that of an old soul. He was twenty two when he first started making music, an age that already “felt old” in a very youthful movement. Almost thirty years on from that moment he might have aged somewhat physically, but his music hasn’t. He still makes Techno and Electro with the same essential proclivity for music that transcends borders, scenes and trends that have outlasted the artists, producers and DJs that pivot around their surroundings. In his stubborn and arduous pursuit to make music from his soul with an apprehension for anything less than perfection he has established a lasting musical legacy that continues to make a significant impression on music.

*Special thanks to Kafé Hærverk and Jokke for facilitating this interview.

A radical shift with Hugo LX

In recent years the name Hugo LX has been spoken in some reverational terms. Although the French producer and DJ – real name, Hugo Lascoux – had been making music for a long time under various aliases, he had found his niche in the world when he adopted the LX suffix and and channelled his musical experience into a House music project.

Although built on the foundation of House, it’s House with flavours of Jazz, Hip Hop and ambient music coalescing around the producer’s extensive musical experiences from Paris to Kyoto. Following a career that started when he was seventeen, collaborating with established figures like Large Professor or Diamond D, crafting jazz and funk infused grooves with a classic trademark SP1200 sound, Hugo took a sabbatical from music to work as an architect and moved to Japan by 2011 with a lifetime experience behind him.

It was there where he was inspired by the local music scene with Ambient, Jazz and eastern Hip Hop inspiring him to approach music again, this time as a solo artist, as Hugo LX. 2016 followed and it was a very productive year for the artist as he released four EPs and an album. He followed it up in 2017 with “Akegata”, an LP that installed him as a sincere and enduring artist with a special penchant for the long player format. Dense melodic vignettes float like oil on water, reflecting textures like rainbows that bounce over skipping beats.

There’s a serenity to his music as Hugo LX, smoothing over the polyrhythmic beats that bulge under the billowing surface of the synthesised and sampled textures. In 2018 Hugo LX found his way on Motor City Drum Ensemble MCDE records, introducing the French artist to entirely new audience. “Power” from that release as it combines a strict four to the floor beat arrangement with brass horns and skittish extemporised melodies.

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I sense a predilection for the dance floor on that track and release which Hugo dismisses as he reflects on it through an email exchange, before his upcoming appearance in our booth with Fredfades and Mutual Intentions. Through our Q&A session we find an amiable figure and a sincere music enthusiast with a beguiling personality. We talk radical musical shifts, eclectic musical influences and future works with Hugo LX.

For most people your career is still in its infancy, but it actually goes back a while. Can you tell us a bit about your early music and how you moved over to Hugo LX?

It started with tapes! I used to tape everything I could; Saturday night radio shows, samples here and there, anything, really!

I still have boxes full of tapes in my storage room, I treasure them as it’s how I started. Then, I had the chance to be mentored a bit, by both DJ’s and Producers I would meet when going to the big city… I mean Paris. At the time I lived in a very remote town and access to music wasn’t so easy. Remember, it’s 2001, internet wasn’t that friendly yet!

It was not that easy to get records neither. So every time I could find a Pete Rock album, a Theo Parrish single, a MAW remix – Any piece of wax, CD, Cassette – It was a real joy. I was twelve or thirteen, filled with excitement for all that great music. That era, this excitement, that’s what I’m currently trying to retrieve and reflect through my upcoming album.And when I look back at it, it’s a dream came true, and a real blessing thaI i’m now meeting, sharing decks or even collaborating with some of the greats that I was listening to back then.

It was Jazz and Hip Hop in which you made your mark as a producer (even though you’d been listening to House music from a young age). When and how did House music make its way back into your music?

I actually started producing house and hip hop at the same time, it would make no difference to me. It still doesn’t, I approach them with the same energy. I just focused on the hiphop side of it, as the early to mid 2000s were really inspiring, the indy labels, all these producers, our favorite MC’s touring heavily in Europe at that time.

Here, House music was turning into something I didn’t really feel, either too minimal or cheesy. Fortunately American producers held down the fort and never ceased producing gems. But in Europe, the art started fading a bit, then a lot. Then, around 2012 or 2013, while I was still mostly in Japan, I started hanging out again in those house parties.

I remembered one especially; DJ Spinna was playing at Air in Tokyo, and the music he was playing that night was exactly where I wanted to go, soundwise. A blend of electronic, dance, hiphop. That energy was something else! We spent a week there, searching for records and talking like music nerds, that definitely sparked something that would materialise a year or two after.And it’s funny, we finally ended up crafting some music together this year, it’s out soon.

I also have to credit local hero and house master Nick V for constantly pushing me to return to my house and broken beat roots. Salute to you uncle Nick!

You obviously channel a lot of Jazz and Hip Hop in your production. How does that usually happen?

It’s definitely a production thing. I grew up with this hip hop and jazz polyrhythmic patterns. It just stuck. And huge part of my collection is actually jazz and brazilian music. I always wanted to replicate those soundscapes a bit, paste them into some dance music.

Genres are just about separating groups of people, and records on shop shelves! Also, I could say that many of my favorite producers such as Spinna, Ge-Ology, Waajeed, Karizma, King Britt. They would incorporate this hiphop feeling, that swing, into their dance productions. As I definitely studied them, I sure felt inspired!

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You’re not the first French producer that we’ve heard doing similar things. Is there something to the scene in France that particularly inspires this in your opinion?

I can’t really answer that as i hardly belong to that scene, my timing was different. When house started being trendy again here, I just wasn’t here. And when I was, my energy was focused on producing ambient stuff. Also, I’d like to mention I grew up being surrounded by elders. I would definitely identify with someone like Dj Deep, who’s 20 years my elder. I would see him and many other stars at the fantastic and now defunct 12inch shop circa 2002/2003. I would just stay there all afternoon and observe.

Cats today grew up in a different time span. We are the same age, but they might have a different process, different tools, different energy, and probably different visions of music. It just took me a long time to adapt, but I ended up meeting brilliant guys like Theo from La Mamie’s crew, Seiji Ono, Midori who owns the great Menace label. We connected through the energy of music, and similar sensibilities.

You’ve also lived in Japan where I’ve learnt that you were influenced by the Jazz and ambient music there. What was it about the Jazz there that you liked?

I spent quite some time there. Still do when I get time. I was privileged to land in the Kansai area, in Kyoto precisely. There was a tremendous ambient/electronica scene there, Rei Harakami (RIP), Chihei Hatakeyama, Susumu Yokota, many others every weekend performing at Urbanguild. I also digged crates, basements and thrift shops heavily there. Found a lot of gems, nobody was interested in at the time, and now it’s a big trendy market.

Japanese Jazz had a bunch of great innovators, Hino, Otsuka, Kikuchi. The whole urban soul/city pop too. That influenced my production and sense of texture. My deejaying too. Dj’s were playing jazz like we do house or techno. That was mind blowing. Production was on another level, many of my friends were crafting wonders, and also, J-Hiphop was prominent!

So I would go to clubs to listen Muro, DJ Jin, DJ Nori or the Okino Brothers grace the decks. That changed my life, really.

It’s said that you made a “radical shift” in your production style at that time. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

I found more freedom to be myself through music. The first year of your career, you are most often a copycat. Japan offered me a different take on music and on life too!

2016 was a big year for you. You released an album and 4 EPs in that same year. What happened during that year to encourage this flurry of releases?

I nearly stopped music in 2013 because my then project was shelved. I encountered a lot of huge disappointments and downfalls. With labels, fellow musicians, with myself maybe too! Music can isolate, truly, especially when demos get rejected and phone doesn’t ring anymore! I felt behind the wave of what was happening.

So I re-started it all. Opened a new folder and called it “LX Tracks”. Produced at least one track per day since. All that material finally started fleeing out of its container, naturally, hence the bunch of release in 2016.

I have to appreciate many great people came to give encouragement, support, and sometimes even offered deals. That’s how I connected Chez Damier, Patrice Scott, Kai Alce, and so many of those Djs I was, and still am a fan of. So maybe, I might still be behind the wave but at least I now enjoy what I do, tenfold!

You followed it up in 2017 with Akegata, another LP and I’ve read reviews and pieces that really admire your skill when it comes to longer format. Between LPs and EPs how do you approach those differently and do you feel more adept at one over the other?

I approach singles or EPs the same way. It’s all storytelling, in various lengths and formats. But I might still write a narrative and craft interludes for a three track EP! As for Akegata, it was a five year process, I’m usually quick to produce but this one took forever to complete.

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Your MCDE records release, Desiderata is one of the most talked about releases of this year. How did that one came together and how is it that it found itself on that label?

Don’t know how it resonated through people yet, but I’m happy Ii made it. I was a bit frustrated not releasing any new works in 2017. We had some material ready since the previous year, but the label was idle and we finally scrapped the original EP, entirely! I still have these tracks though, might get them out one day. It was great to do it anyway, was happy to work with Danilo and Pablo, they are fine music connoisseurs!

Listening to the track Power, with that steady kick, it sounds like perhaps that this record is a bit more focussed on the dance floor than your previous EPs. Did you change your approach a little for Desiderata and how much influence did the label have on the way it sounded in the end?

Funny you say this, I thought that EP was more of listening piece, but I’m happy people play it here and there! I produced some that music using parts from very old sessions and trying to get them working together. Phone Games was a slow hip hop beat at first for instance. Power was a jam I did in a vocal room in London, messing with percussions and kalimbas. I have clear visions, but I don’t like to overthink music, though

There’s also some very esoteric Jazz samples on that track. How much does records and sampling play a role in your music?

It’s actually some live horn playing by Kansas City very own, Hermon Mehari.
But yes samples… It is a huge part of my world. Tape machines, and then samplers, are the first instruments I’ve learned. It is my stomping ground, and it renders a texture you just can’t duplicate in any other ways!

What do you usually look for in a record when you’re digging for a sample?

Warms vibes, strong or soothing energy, tight productions… sometimes all at once!

Is it the same when you’re looking for music to play in a DJ set, especially a club set like the one coming up at Jæger?

Totally, I try to get every sound colours altogether. There’s so much to play. As a DJ, I only adjust nuances!

I’ve been listening to your Worldwide FM mix, which is a radio mix, and most likely very different from the type of thing you’ll be doing in our booth. How would you describe your DJ sets in three words to bring this Q&A session to an end?

Open, Colourful, Spiritual (hopefully!)

Premiere: Ivaylo – Trendy Jose (JT Donaldson Remix)

An exclusive listen to JT Donaldson’s Remix of Trendy Jose for Ivaylo’s upcoming America EP.

Bogota Records boss, Ivaylo returns to his own imprint after moonlighting on Cassy’s Kwench and Cymawax. America comes between a series of new releases with the Bulgarian/Norwegian producer, who is currently riding a new wave of creativity. It’s been a very productive year for the producer in the studio and it coincides with some changes in the way he approaches music. “The fundamental change would be the whole way how I structure a track now,” he told us via email, “evolving with strong focus on percussions and bass.”

When Ivaylo is not in the booth, he is escorting Jæger’s guest DJs around and with a birds-eye view of the dance floor every weekend, he’s adapted his music for the a “new generation of people” who have grown up with this music. “For me all together (music, people, feelings, lifestyle even politics) is a stream of growing and changeable feelings, flow – you simply have to follow, be a part of it.”

The deepness, he’s always talked about continues to ebb through Ivaylo’s productions and it’s still an integral part of this latest America release, but it follows a natural evolution in his work where Ivaylo has found a particular space “between sounds” on these recent pieces. “It gives me the freedom and creativity of involving more energy in my productions, in the form of percussive dynamic (programming drums) and still be able to combine my love for deepness.”

America comes with some tongue in cheek commentary on the state of American politics as two tracks “Jack’s Confusion” and “Trendy Jose” offer two views from either side of the… wall. “Jose is a Mexican and he likes it trendy”, says Ivaylo while “Jack is the American (obviously confused, nowadays)” in a very abstract summation of the “American” continent. Ivaylo left Jack untouched, but offered “Trendy Jose” to JT Donaldson for the remix treatment, with the Texan delivering”a warm and charming” deep dance floor cut for the EP that we’re streaming exclusively today.

Ivaylo and Donaldson share a long history with each other. The pair met “in the club” when the American DJ came over for a set to Bulgaria and a club called COMICS where Ivaylo was a resident and programmer. “JT was one of the first guys we brought from US, as well as one of the people who most touched Bulgarian clubbers and music lovers.” They’ve remained friends since, with long conversations abut their shared passion and together with Johnny Fiasco, JT Donaldson has been an ardent supporter of the Bogota Records label from the start. “The rest is history,” says Ivaylo and America is the latest chapter in that history.

America is out tomorrow via all major outlets on vinyl and on the 9th of November on digital formats. It’s one in a “bunch” of releases coming out soon that has seen Ivaylo working in the studio “full-time” this past year. “Some on a Norwegian label and a few for others,” he mentions without going into much detail. You can read an in-depth interview with Ivaylo here and we’ll continue to keep you posted on these future releases.

Mr. G – The story of a sound man

In 2012 Mr. G had become the darling of the House scene and quite by accident. Although the DJ and producer had been working within House music and Techno since the mid-eighties in 2012 it was like the world sat up and listened for the first time.

It was around the start of Boiler Room and he was one of the show’s first guests. “I’m really old fashioned, so I run everything past my missus” recalls Colin McBean (Mr G) in a n interview with Skiddle. “Benji B asked me to come down and play, and I had no idea what it was.” Colin played a live set, which unbeknownst to him was being broadcast live over the internet. “I missed the concept completely, until I saw this computer screen two, three hours later, and they told me it was all the people logged in.”

By the end of the hour-long show, the name Mr. G had been imprinted on the minds of a whole new generation of dancers and music enthusiasts thanks to the streaming platform. It was a “life changing” experience for the veteran, and soon afterwards he released a “Retrospective” via REKIDS, consolidating a career of thirty years for this next generation of club-goer. As well as introducing them to the idiosyncratic sound of Mr. G it also provided the launch pad for the next phase of what had already been an illustrious and passionate career up to that point.

Colin McBean’s life had been intertwined with music from a young age. Born to Jamaican parents in the UK Midlands, his earliest memories of music are of his dad’s collection of tapes, recorded from old gramophone recordings. He remembers “Studio One, reggae and all sorts of bits” from those tapes in an interview with Hyponik. From there he would start to amass his own collection, starting with pieces like Gilbert O’Sullivan’s ‘Clair’.

“I ended up on this road that whenever I had money, I’d go and buy records, or if my folks took me back to Jamaica to see family, I’d go to Kingston and stand at the back of some record shop and buy 7″s.” Later he would realise he had a particular penchant for the sound of “analogue bass” in his buying habits. “Whether it’s Burning Spear, Bob Marley, Studio One, or King Tubby, that bass and analog is in our heritage,” he told XLR8R.

While coming of age in Derby, Colin got a job working in a record store in his hometown to furnish and indulge the habit. Regular trips to London to the Record and Tape exchange encouraged the young Colin further and digging became second nature to him. “I’d spend the whole day in there searching out George Duke, Father’s Children, 24 Carat Black, all for fifty pence. We’d go there with twenty quid and come back with bags and bags of records.”

There was another aspect of Colin’s early musical development that would play a significant role too and something that, like the analogue bass, relates to his Jamaican heritage. Regular trips to Jamaica and the “really robust Jamaican community in Derby” embedded sound-system culture in a young impressionable Colin McBean. “I’ve been going to the island since I was about eight”, McBean told XLR8R. “When I go to where my parents are from, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday there’s a sound system.”

It clearly had an early impact on young Colin, and around the same time he started buying and collecting records, he had begun to nurture this side of his musical personality too. At an age when he was barely as tall as a speaker in your average sound system, Colin was carting them around as a box boy, a type of volunteer junior apprentice for sound systems. “It was a case of if you behave yourself, you can sit round the back, watch what’s going on and look after the system”, Colin told Hyponik. Taking what he learnt from his predecessors he too would dabble in sound systems, building his own “little system” in his living room whenever his parents were out, laying a foundation in sound that would remain with Colin his entire life. “Then as time went on it got to the point where it was my turn to have a go.”

Sound System, records and his Jamaican heritage had laid out the foundation for a nascent career as DJ and producer for Colin McBean, but it wasn’t a career that a small town like Derby could ever realistically accommodate. Although by that age he had been making regular train trips to London, he would always have to come back to Derby and play for a scene that wasn’t exactly nurturing the digger in him. “Because you can’t play your amazing rare disco gem to your local people,” he told XLR8R. “They’re not ready for that.”

A move to London beckoned and by the early eighties Colin had established himself in Kentish Town close to where Keith Franklin (Bang The Party) had a community-based studio. Colin and Keith met and connected instantly over a shared “passion” for much of the same music. The encounter came at time when Colin came to the realisation that: “I like records, maybe I should see if I can make something.” Keith and Colin decided that they would make music together and the pair roped in Cisco Ferreira and formed KCC (as in Keith, Cisco and Colin).

KCC released their first single, “State of Mind” via Hi Note, a rough trade subsidiary in 1990. A monosyllabic synthesised organ looms over an excessive percussive workout on the title track, executed with the youthful exuberance of early acid House. Various 303 phrases lick the surface of the track while a vocal sample preaches about a new state of mind lifted from the liturgy of the burgeoning UK rave scene from the time. The sound is indicative of its time, but there was something about KCC that set them apart from the peers early on.

While most were playing established clubs or congregating on the fringes of London’s M25 as the first strands of Rave culture streaked forth into the UK, KCC recontextualised it all through the world of sound system culture. Keith had been adamant that KCC will play carnival right from the outset and to that end they eventually teamed up with the Rocking Crew sound system. It was another one of those “life changing” moments for Colin according to Hyponik. “We went in there not knowing what to expect, and by halfway into the second day police were begging us to stop, every single crossroad was blocked. We were playing house, soul, funk, disco all on this reggae system, it was momentous.”

From there they set up Melange club as a permanent installation of that Carnival experience, with regular guests like LTJ Bukem, Richie Hawtin, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson coming over to play for a meager £30 – £50 to make history together. “I remember Derrick or Kevin left their records in the club, which I still have,” says Colin.

Eventually KCC disbanded with Keith Franklin bearing the torch as a solo artist while Colin and Cisco Ferreira went on to establish the Advent. The Advent saw Colin and Cisco abandon the stilted sounds of Acid House to pursue the more primal sounds of Techno and Electro with a determined fervour. They would come back to House later however as G.Flame and Mr.G but throughout the mid- to late nineties, The Advent found Colin and Cisco in the grips of a sonic assault with fast -paced percussion and Herculean industrial textures distinguishing their sound.

In the late nineties Colin left Cisco Ferreira to pursue the Advent alone, while he went on to establish his own solo career. The pair didn’t part on the best of terms according to his hyponik interview, “(b)ut everything happens for a reason and me going back and grabbing that MPC was the result of not wanting to leave without something.” He spent the next two years then learning the intricacies and pitfalls of the MPC (drum machine) and then everything changed in yet another life-affirming moment; when he got his first remix assignment for Virgin and brought Mr. G into the world.

Armed with little more than MPC, he’s able to channel all the various aspects of his musical life experience through Mr.G. Built on the foundations of House, but with disparate influences informing the music, Mr. G has over 60 EPs and 6 albums to his name today.

Using is label Phoenix G as his exclusive vehicle for music, Colin releases everything he creates as Mr. G. ”I’m a music guy, I live to make music, and hear music”, he told XLR8R when asked about his excessive output. Making music is “a way of life” , coursing through his very being and a big part of that being is “a sound man” he told Red Bull Music Academy. Colin distills everything from that sound system experience down into his music with records that were made for those kind of systems. “Everything I do sonically in the studio is not about radio or not even hi-fi. It’s about some big, bass-heavy system – it’ll talk to you.”

His music talks to you from some incredible hidden depth and you feel the entire history of the man pulse through records like a “Night on the town” and the more introspective, “Personal Momentz”. There’s always a concept or theme to his LPs, the result of being “a child from the seventies” and growing up with albums from that era. His singles are more in the moment, crafted and released in quick succession whenever he feels the creative urges at their most intense. Five pages on Discogs barely contain his output that can be found on labels like REKIDS, Bass Culture and Monique Musique, but mostly on his own imprint Phoenix G. It’s a prolific output for a veteran of the scene who is already in the third phase of his career.

He’s been playing live as Mr. G since the start of the project and with little more than an MPC and a mixer he’s astounded audiences all over the world. There’s always a deep-rooted investment in the musical cultures that constitutes him and it’s best experienced through a “big, bass-heavy” sound system.

Today Colin McBean has an extensive and varied musical career behind him and it’s all born from the simplest of ideas: “All I wanted was to make music and release records”, he once told Meoko. “It’s just steely determination. You have to believe in yourself – and trust me.”

*Mr.G plays Frædag invites Mr. G

A determined and singular vision with Reeko

Juan Rico (Reeko) is a determined figure with a singular vision. His musical output, born within a conceptual framework and pursued with agonizing precision, has been making a severe impression in the larger cannon of Techno for the last two decades.

Emerging as a DJ in 1997 and a producer in 2002 with his debut EP on Emergence records, Reeko has morphed into other titles like Architectural and Humano,established the formidable Techno imprint Mental Disorder, and helped set a benchmark for electronic music that has become the gold standard for DJs and producers working within the canon today.

Reeko’s sound grew out of themes of horror, darkness and psychology as elemental pigments he would pour over a stark, blank canvas and manipulate and shape it into the stoic mould of Techno. Where darkness prevails and melancholy clouds the firmament in a milky hue, Reeko’s music resides.

Percussive formations slogging out a hefty thump with a draconian discipline create an impenetrable and purposeful metre as if a straight jacket is trying to contain the thunderous baselines. Splintering at the edges of the martial rhythm are pieces of noise and untraceable reverberations that are unable to escape the dense gravity at the centre of Reeko’s music.

Reeko harnesses the power for the singular pursuit of the body and through countless EPs and three albums for esteemed labels like Avian, Pole Recordings, Planet Rhythm, and of course his own Mental Disorder he has established Reeko and his various aliases as a tour de force in Techno.

We caught up with the producer via email to find out more about his illustrious career and where it all started.

When did a career in electronic music manifest itself as a viable option for you and what led to your introduction to this particular style of music?

Since I was quite young I’ve been interested in electronic music, the art of mixing vinyls and everything around it. It was the eighties then and the music that reached me were megamixes and compilations of rather commercial electronic music, untill one day when I entered a vinyl music store in Oviedo, a small city in the North of Spain. This store specialized in techno and house and this is where I was acquainted with records like Energy Flash by Joey Beltram and similar things. From then on I started to mix vinyls, I was 14 years old more or less and my life started to evolve around mixing, making music, buying records… that’s when I was sure I was going to work with this professionally in one way or another. It’s something you just know is going to happen, although you don’t know the details.

I know that Reeko is steeped in some conceptual framework built on aspects of horror, darkness and psychological themes, but can you tell us a little about the origins of the project that lead to your first record and a career as a DJ?

This is the whole concept which my label Mental Disorder is based on. The general project origins are from this epoch and also from earlier years when my brother and I fanatically watched horror movies. Certain films like ’The Texas chainsaw massacre (the one from 1974 obviously) then had a large impact on me. I saw this film when I was 17 and it hit me with such force that I knew then what would be the concept which inspired me most to develop my project.

How has the initial concept adapted and changed since that first emergence record?

Well, through the years you change of course, when you experience new things and it’s possible that the initial concept has diminished somewhat, mostly because the sources of inspiration based on this theme become exhausted, but one does find new roads/ways that will also trigger my curiosity. Also the things you experience in real life are more intense so that you don’t have to resort to films or fiction as often as before.

Hard, dark and sinister are aptly used to describe your music, but how do these abstract themes affect your creative process?

That, of course, is a good question, to base your music on a concept is something that has always marveled me about many musicians and something I’ve always wanted to do with my music. This has both good and bad sides. From my point of view very conceptual music succeeds in getting a more loyal public. They follow you, they understand you, they identify with you.. etc and this is very gratifying, The downside of making very conceptual music is that besides reaching out to fewer people – since everybody does not want such an ’exclusive’ music – the moment arrives when you have to escape from this sound because if not your creativity could be seriously affected. Also it makes you slow down in the process since you only want to choose to edit very select things. But this is the price you have to pay according to my experience.

The textural layers beyond the kick and main melodic line are the aspects of your music that I find most intriguing and possibly the source of the sinister dimension to a Reeko production and it’s something that’s always been there. Who or what was an early influence that might have affected this dimension to your music?

When I seriously started to make music in the year 2000, I was very strongly influenced by the Birmingham sound, but something that undoubtedly characterised my music were the textures and the atmosphere that influenced me from watching so many horror movies. I’ve always loved the soundtracks and they have always had a great impact on my music.

With so much emphasis on these elements today in Techno I find that it is becoming more trite and very often used as a gimmick. As an artist that has been doing this style of Techno long before it became popular, how do you avoid these associations?

I know what you are referring to, and yes, I have thought the same these last few years, but I still think that my last records are free from this. Now I’m looking for a sound that’s cruder, dryer and mordant (biting),.. not so round and atmospheric. At least in my project as Reeko. I think it’s a way of saying: Hey! We have to start abandoning this kind of sound and find new roads. This kind of music is exhausted.

You’ve been releasing records consistently for the last 15 years as Reeko, what keeps you motivated and what are some of your current inspirations in music and beyond?

I still seek a lot of inspiration from films, obviously, and as we talked about earlier not always based on horror and madness but on themes that I have experienced and that awaken in me some kind of disquiet. The motivation is directly fed by inspiration, to find new roads, some work and some don’t, but they keep you alive and give you the urge to explore. We all know that electronic music has reached the top when it comes to new styles. Now there are fusions of earlier styles with some modern touches, that’s how it is, but we have to search for new ways even if we don’t invent anything.

There’s also your Architectural moniker, in which you shows the more romantic side of your personality, but where does DJing fit into the spectrum?

If with Djing you mean the dj set it fits perfectly, it’s an essential part of the creative process since especially for the extended sets you can get your inspiration in a dj set instead of in a track.

If you’re DJing as Reeko is the intention to relay some of those themes mentioned earlier through the set?

Yes and no, as I answered earlier, it depends on the set. In the all-night or extended sets I do like to emphasize the conceptual side, I try to make everything have a concrete form to make people immerse themselves in some kind of a history from the beginning. For me this has always been important both in my studio and on the dj set.

In that context you are very susceptible to external influences outside of your control, like the lighting to the audience. How much are you able to adapt through your set to react to these things outside controls, and is it something you wish you could eliminate entirely for the sake of pure artistic expression?

I didn’t know that if I were so susceptible towards this. In any case, I wouldn’t eliminate lightening all together, I think that is a mistake. Lights play a very important role when you create a set, that’s why I think the question is not to eliminate them but not to abuse of them and more important and something I don’t like at all is when a club uses a loop program all night. That could really ruin the atmosphere you try to create. I like the kind of lighting atmosphere they make in places like Bassiani or Berghain, I think they take a lot of care and obtain very special aesthetics.

So if you were to prepare an audience and a space for a Reeko set what would you insist upon to give it the full affect it desires?

The ideal for me is to have poor light in the dj booth, just enough to be able to see the mixer, I don’t have to be in the centre of the attention and on the other side a subtle play of lights and never the loop kind, so as to create a subdued atmosphere, but without putting us in complete darkness which wouldn’t create a good atmosphere either.

In any case, I am aware of that not every club is prepared for this.

The third time’s a charm – Introducing Third Attempt

“I needed a fresh start, after my two first aliases” says Torje Fagertun Spilde over a saturated telephone line. Third Attempt, besides being his chosen artistic moniker, is also quite literally Torje’s third attempt at “making a name” for the young Norwegian artist. There’s something final in the name, a certain inevitability, symbolised by the number three that doesn’t quite seem appropriate for a 21-year-old producer at what is essentially the start of his recording career.

What is his third attempt is our introduction to the artist. After a few independent releases in 2017, Torje signed to Vidar Hanssen’s Beatservice records with “Shoreline” in beginning of 2018, and immediately followed it up with “Serve Chilled.” A precocious start it marked Torje’s indubitable graduation from independent bedroom producer to signed recording artist with Beatservice validating the efforts of what had been established through those initial releases and bringing the artist’s music to a larger audience.

Benevolent chords cascading over syncopated beats and rumbling bass-lines plunging deep under the foundations of House, anchored the sound of Third Attempt while buoyant melodies and airy textures floating above the surface focussed on a contrast between space and intimacy in his music. As Third Attempt there’s a closeness at the centre of Torje’s music where the rhythm and bass reside, punctuating the wooly exterior of the empirical arrangements that have borrowed from the abstract idea of space in what has become a signifier of the “Norwegian sound”.

<a href="http://th1rdattempt.bandcamp.com/album/serve-chilled">Serve Chilled by Third Attempt</a>

“Serve Chilled” and “Shoreline” asserted the sound what Torje has cultured as Third Attempt at a point where it can pivot into other musical spheres as he attested in the self-released album of 2017, “Dreams in Common”. That album might be a world away from the sounds we heard on the Beatservice records but it still orbits around the same critical mass.”There are always similarities in the sound” says Torje ”especially in the tempo and the mood of the tracks.”

Third attempt has consolidated something for Torje that hadn’t been there in his previous two aliases, a “goal” that he felt he couldn’t accomplish through the“really commercial” projects he first envisioned for himself. He’s not willing to go into any detail about his previous excursions as an artist and refrains from naming them outright, turning all his focus, both in our conversation and his music to Third Attempt. Placing those early aliases firmly behind him in the vault of forgotten memories, Third Attempt is the “fresh start” he needed to develop what has been latent in him from the beginning, when he first encountered electronic music as an pre-adolescent teen growing up in Asker, just outside of Oslo.

Although Torje had “played a few instruments” through his childhood, including “the trumpet and the drums”, he remembers little of his tutelage today. Instead he considers the moment of his musical conformation much later in his life, placing the moment of artistic conception in the midst of some sanctimonious origins. It was during middle school, through his local youth club “in a church, believe it or not” that Torje would make his introduction to electronic music. He was “hooked” when he was first introduced to the idea of “repetitive beats,” and much like anybody his age poured his entire being into the prospect of making them. Through the youth club he “connected with a group of friends that were kind of more into experimental stuff,” spurring the youngster on to go further and deeper into the world of electronic music and especially House music.

Spending his “nights on you tube looking at sets, tweaking knobs and looking up tutorials” Torje delved “deeper and deeper into rabbit hole from there.” He downloaded a copy of Fruityloops studio (a production suite software) and “started experimenting” with sound, which eventually laid the groundwork for a career in production. “It was so much fun,” he recalls, “and it still surprises me that it’s the same amount fun, it never gets old.”

<a href="http://th1rdattempt.bandcamp.com/album/dreams-in-common">Dreams In Common by Third Attempt</a>

What started out as a leisurely pursuit turned earnest when Torje sequestered himself in his father’s forest home for a period. “That’s when I started taking this thing really seriously because there was nothing else to do.” With the closest town an hour away, Torje’s focus could turn exclusively to music and he made those tentative steps towards a career as a recording artist, releasing music independently under those first musical aliases. Today he doesn’t put much weight on those early pieces, dismissing them as little more than moments of “fun” for the sake of the amusement of friends.

It was only over the last two years that things took a more professional turn starting with the release of the mini album “Dreams of Colour”, and it coincides with a move to Tromsø. This is one of the significant moments in Torje’s musical career, because what he found in Tromsø was not only a new artistic name but also a tight-knit musical community that accepted the 19-year old Torje with open arms. “Everybody knows everybody up here” when it comes to music says Torje and “if there is a new guy / (girl) in town everybody knows about him her.” Torje found a “conscious type of scene” in Tromsø, one that would certainly have eluded him in Asker that has undoubtedly inspired his incredible output.

Falling in with a group of kindred spirits in Tromsø, people like the DJ and promoter, Houseboden, Torje established Third Attempt amongst a new generation of electronic music artists from the university town. There’s “a lot of enthusiasm around House and Techno” in Tromsø at the moment and Torje found himself “in the middle of a small movement” that would eventually lead to introduction to Vidar Hanssen of Beatservice Records. Hanssen saw Torje making his live debut as Third Attempt in 2017 and “really enjoyed it.” “We kept in touch after that” recounts Torje “and the rest is history.”

In the mere two years Torje’s been in Tromsø, Third Attempt has gone from vitualy non-existent to being signed to one of the biggest record labels in Norway. “It’s happened much faster up here than I would have imagined,” says Torje about his rapid succession, which I find is some part due to his incredible productivity. As we talk is already working on a new album, not two months on from his last EP. “I’ve got two tracks ready for that,” he claims as he expounds on some of his desires for the album, which include a narrative, “a story from a to b”. In some ways it will be very similar to “Dreams in Common”, an album that “doesn’t necessarily have to be four on the floor” with a downtempo and ambient component to the Third Attempt sound.

<a href="http://th1rdattempt.bandcamp.com/album/shoreline">Shoreline by Third Attempt</a>

It’s a direction Torje is “very keen” for Third Attempt to explore concurrently with the “club stuff”. Although his first “love” will always be House, Torje wants to “produce everything”, channeling influences like Floating Points through the project. Torje erupts with enthusiasm when we come to this subject. “It’s for home listening, it’s for club listening,” validates Torje. “He has such wide spectre of music, and I really respect him for that.” As well as Floating Points, Torje suggests he’s also been influenced by previous collaborators, Øystein Bolstad and Runther who he worked with on “Open Spaces” (on Shoreline) and “Fjelheisen” respectively.

He found it “quite special” working with Bolstad, a “real musician” who brought flavours of Jazz and Soul to the track “Open Spaces” with his remarkable key work. “When you put me in a room with a musician I’m easily influenced by the other musician,” Torje has noticed. “You really can’t be selfish, you have to go with the flow and feel the other’s ideas.” It was his first experiences working with other musicians and while he’s eager to do “more of that”, if pushed he’d still prefer to work alone. “That’s when I feel I have the most creative freedom,” he claims ”but there’s good sides to everything.”

It’s quite different from the way Torje’s chosen to present his music to an audience. Opting for the live experience, Third Attempt favours the stage to the booth, Torje solely at the controls manipulating the sound of his own, original material. “I felt that I needed to challenge myself and do something different” are his reasons for choosing the live context over a DJ set. “I can easily play it safe and go that (DJ) route, but something inside me told me to try and just go with my own music.”

The results speak for themselves; Torje’s introduction to Vidar, two EPs in and an LP in the works, the live show and Torje’s third attempt is on a course to a flourishing career in music. His trajectory has been plotted with gigs coming through almost every weekend, including his next show at Jæger for Charlotte Bendik’s IRONI. I ask him to describe his live set for the unwitting and he proffers “groovy” as the “first word that comes to mind”. “Groovy and atmospheric”, he continues in a description that I find easily transfers to his recorded works.

In his Third Attempt Torje Fagertun Spilde has found something that simply clicks, and from the EPs the album to his future works, at a mere 21 years of age he’s already found an artistic voice that eludes most artists their entire career. For an artist at what is essentially the start of a career, it’s significant. He’s a precocious talent and the third time is indeed the charm that will certainly establish this artist as a future talent.

*Third Attempt appears this Saturday for IRONI with Charlotte Bendiks.

Exploring different fields with Psyk as Maan

Manual Anós is Psyk. He is also Maan. He is a DJ and a producer, and the man behind the highly successful Non Series Techno label. Hailing from Madrid, Spain, Anós has trod a very individual path through the landscape of Techno over the last decade, walking amongst the giants of the genre like Luke Slater and Len Faki as it rose to newfound popularity.

His proving ground would be on Len Faki’s label, Figure with his first physical release “Throes” garnering the attention of DJs and enthusiasts for its very direct and cogent take on the genre. Sobering metallic stabs at a keyboard, punctuating militant kicks and puncturing nocturnal atmospheres introduced the world to the sounds of Psyk, making a efficacious entry into the world of electronic music.

Anós first stepped into this arena as Psyk, and then as Maan. Where Psyk plundered Maan sauntered and flowed, with a deeper, dub-like take on Techno strewn with influences of House. While Maan helped establish Anós’ Non Series label, Psyk was moonlighting on Mote-Evolver, Drumcode, CLR and Tresor, establishing the moniker in the highest echelons of this electronic music stratosphere.

Through the decade Psyk’s sound would evolve with the artist, but still refrained from pandering to trends. With the help of Luke Slater and Mote Evolver the sounds of Psyk would eventually find its form as the entrancing machine music we know him for today. Records like “Arcade” and “Silent Witness” are prime examples of the Psyk sound today, which carries through right into the present and the most recent release, “Voiceprint” on Non series.

While Psyk has certainly enjoyed an illustrious career, Maan has retreated to the shadows, and only comes out in the guise of a DJ set when the situation calls for it, like the upcoming Triangle Showcase at Jæger this weekend. We caught up with him via email to talk about this set, evolutions and early influences.

What struck me about your history is that you have this very defined Techno alias in Psyk, but behind it all there is a very universal approach to music with everything from IDM to Hip Hop in your record collection. What inspired this approach growing up?

I’ve always listened to a lot of different music genres. My father used to listen to a lot of Jazz, Blues, Rock and he had a huge record collection.

When I was young I was basically listening to just 90s Hip Hop so I grew up with that. Then at the age of 15 I started listening to electronic music and until now, I’ve been discovering lot of different styles, genres and artists.

What else were your parents listening to and was there any radio stations, record stores or clubs in Madrid that made a specific impact on how you as you started DJ and producing?

As I told you before, my father has always been a big music lover. My mother always liked more the traditional spanish music. Radios… I don’t think so… Radio stations were never that supportive of electronic music here in Spain´to be honest, at least that I recall… I used to go to “One” club, Danzoo and Fabrik the most I guess when I started partying young.

The first release that brought to the attention of everybody was Throes on Len Faki’s Figure. What did Throes cement for you that stayed with you as Psyk?

It was a moment when Techno was changing with this “Berghain Hype”. I was playing a lot that kind of stuff by then and I always try to make music I enjoy at the moment.

The idea of Psyk was (and still is) something mental, hypnotic and minimalistic.

A few years after that you premiered your Maan alias for the first time, and in those early Maan records, like Trow I find a lot of similarity with the Psyk stuff from the same time like Distane. How did you draw a line of distinction between them at first?

Yes. Actually, Maan came out after my releases of Track 3 on Enemy and Distane on Mote-Evolver. I felt that that kind of sound was a bit groovier and different than the approach I wanted to reach with the Psyk releases, so I decided to create a different pseudonym for this kind of techno.

Have they evolved on their own since for you?

Psyk def. yes. There is still people asking me why I don’t make more bangers like Arcade, Eclipse, Distane, Lowdown… I mean, for me it doesn’t make sense to stick in the same place for years without any sort of evolution. You have to grow up as an artist, even when people don’t like your actual stuff as much as the previous ones.

There are a lot of producers these days that prefer to grow up as a marketing brand or as social media models rather than as an artist, and I think that is totally killing our scene, or at least the one I used to like.

I think of techno as an art of expression and as a hedonist and freedom movement, and I always try to explore my limits, redefine my music and improve my sound every year…

I found that there was a distinct evolution in your work around the time of Arcade and Eclipse, where those stabbing chords of previous records like Distane made room for more melodic and atmospheric elements. What encouraged your evolutions as Psyk in your opinion?

As I answered previously, I do what I feel or what I like at the moment. Of course, there is a big impact on the equipment I am using right now and the equipment I was using by then (which was basically all software). For the last 5 years I’ve produced everything with hardware synths, or modular and that of course changes your workflow and creativity.

How much influence did the label Mote Evolver and Luke Slater have on you as an artist?

Luke has been one of my biggest influences since I discovered techno and electronic music… Releasing on Mote-Evolver at that time (the label was big by then) was the biggest push in my career. Not just because of the 2 strong Eps we put out, but with the combination between the music, the artist and the label altogether. Luke has always supported my music and I will be always grateful with him for that.

There is also Non Series of course, your label that’s featured a lot of Psyk and Maan’s music in and continues to do so with “Voiceprint”. What are you able to do on there that you can’t really do on other labels?

Well, the difference is basically the freedom that you can have. I’ve always had in mind to create a label to push artists I really liked, but nowadays I want more space on my label to put out my own stuff. I can have my vision of techno there more than anywhere.

While you keep releasing music as Psyk, Maan has remained somewhat reserved in its output. The alias is still going, obviously but where is it at the moment in terms of production?

There is nothing planned yet. The last tracks were released on DVS1´s Mistress label last year, but not an EP in the last 4/5 years. I don’t feel inspired at the moment to make that kind of music, but I am sure in the future I will take the project back and do new stuff with it.

Like Head High (Shed) and Ron Bacardi (Ben Sims), Maan is you, an artist associated with Techno making and playing House music. Why is there this desire as a Techno to also make and play House music from your perspective?

Well, I always liked house music, and me as a DJ and as a producer I need to explore different fields while playing or creating music.

Much like Shed’s Head High alias your productions as Maan tip the scales from House into Techno quite easily. How do you parlay that into a DJ set, especially a 4hr set like this upcoming one at Jæger?

Actually Maan is not 100% house, it has some house vibes inside for sure, but its a point between House and Techno as you mentioned.

To be honest, in my previous Maan sets I’ve always started playing very groovy or deep and ended playing Techno. I guess I feel more comfortable on that field while playing…

For this 4 hours set at Jaeger I will try to cover lot of fields, always between House and Deep Techno. I am really excited to see what is coming up!

Profile: Kenny Larkin

Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, Jeff Mills and Eddie Fowlkes. These were the pioneers of Techno. They were the keys that unlocked the door to this machine music and the people that etched the term Techno into the music history books. If it wasn’t for them there wouldn’t have been Techno. But equally important were the generation that followed them, the second wave of Techno artists out of Detroit, the likes of Carl Craig, Richie Hawtin, Stacey Pullen and Robert Hood. Techno could have easily come and gone with the first generation of artists, and it was this second generation that kept the momentum going and if it wasn’t for them, Techno could have easily just been a flash in the pan, a one-hit wonder. It was this wave of artists that nurtured and fostered what had been born before them and supplanted its legacy forever.

Among this next generation was Kenny Larkin, a producer and DJ that together with the likes of Richie Hawtin firmly put Detroit on the map and took what was essentially a DIY music and made it one of the most revered and respected music genres today.

Mike Banks (Underground Resistance) once said of Detroit; “You’ve got three choices if you want to get out – you got sport and athletics, you’ve got the plant if they’re selling some cars and then you got the army”. Kenny Larkin chose the latter, and after serving in the air force for a couple of years he came back to Detroit in 1986 to find Techno had exploded on the scene. Already a fan of the sounds of Chicago House, Larkin “started going to the clubs” where he “heard the new sound and met Richie Hawtin in a club he was spinning at in downtown Detroit”, he recalls in a DMC world article.

“After I met Richie”, he continues “we would sometimes drive around Detroit and listen to the radio and there was a mix show, which was incredible. Every week this DJ would have a new mix. It blew my mind…that DJ was Derrick May. I think that’s when I started getting into the art of DJing, on a more feeling level.” Although by his own accounts his first furore as a DJ “sucked” (interestingly, his first gig was with Carl Craig who also apparently wasn’t great) , he persevered. With Hawtin goading him on and with the May as a mentor, Kenny Larkin found a calling in Techno as a bonafide artist.

In 1990, through Hawtin’s Plus 8 label, he would make his debut as a recording artist with “We Shall Overcome”. Sampling the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Kenny Larkin’s debut was a raw, boisterous track that sounded like Larkin was still finding his feet and getting to grips with the machines.

Splashy hi-hats dominate the foreground with irreverent snares snapping through the chaos. An incoherent synth takes inconclusive stabs at a melody poised as a hook, with a few wispy layers of synths ricocheting between the clattering array of percussion. “Integration” followed in the same year on Plus 8 and much like “We Shall Overcome”, sonically this was still Kenny Larkin finding his artistic voice.

It was and it specifically sounded like the work of a novice and it was the Richie Hawtin’s remixes that were the better tracks on these releases. Still, in less than a couple of years Kenny Larkin had gone from the air force to a recording artist and in another two years the tables would turn again and the world sat up and listened. Ironically Kenny Larkin would opt for a pseudonym to present his unique artistic voice to the world.

As Dark Comedy, Kenny Larkin released two EPs in 1992 that would ultimately frame the sound of any Kenny Larkin record to come. “Without a Sound” and “War of the Worlds” came out as a whitelabel and although it was initially used to establish Kenny Larkin’s Art of Dance label, it was almost simultaneously picked up by Derrick May’s Transmat label as “Corbomite Maneuver”, and this release would go on to define the Kenny Larkin sound. It contained the more refined versions of those tracks as mixes and two unreleased tracks in the form of “Before” and “Siren”. Comparing these releases to the first two EPs, Kenny Larkin’s production technique has matured with a nascent musical ability flowering along with it.

Jacking percussion still dominated Larkin’s music – possibly those early Chicago influences refusing to let go – but there was a new texturally rich dimension to these tracks too, nd this is even discernible between the whitelabel and the Transmat release, suggestíng perhaps that Derrick May might have had an ultimate hand in shaping Larkin’s sound. The addition of a reverb on the claps, those vast swathes of harmony and melody brought to the fore, and just the way they all combine through the mix on the Transmat release would not only mark the next and ultimate phase in Larkin’s productions, but also the next phase in Techno.

By 1994 the next generation of artists had brought forth a sound of Techno that to this day still marks the most significant eras in electronic music, next only to their predecessors. While nothing could be taken away from its originators it was the second generation that not only held the torch, but installed it as a serious musical movement, a true artform all on to its own. Mastering their craft in the studio, producers like Larkin had fostered the genre from its amateur roots to a very technically and musically acute musical genre. His debut album, “Azimuth” still remains a pivotal moment in this corner of music history as a testament of the more cerebral direction the genre would take in the nineties.

As an album it’s simply remarkable, and today it even lives beyond the Techno parameters. It’s a classic electronic music album, playing on themes of space and the future, as this music was wont to do, and he was able to combine the necessities of the dance floor with a need for the cognizant. Larkin had provided a new soulful dimension to Techno, getting the listener closer to the music. “I’m clearly one of those guys that feel music inside of me”, Larkin told Carl Craig in an interview once and on “Azimuth” there’s this palpable introspective layer to the Larkin’s music. For the first time there was a depth to this very two-dimensional music, something this second wave of producers were able to express more accurately as they became very adept at the tools of the studio.

“Metaphors” followed “Azimuth” in much the same vein with Kenny Larkin etching his name deeper into the electronic music history books, carving out not only his own unique sound, but assisted in the development of the next phase of this Detroit electronic music. Throughout the mid to late nineties he released EPs for the likes of R&S, Distance and KMS and continued to motivate the genre through his Art of Dance label with an ever expanding discography channeling the infinite boundaries of Larkin’s artistic voice through his other aliases, Dark Comedy and Pod.

It all came to an abrupt halt though in 2000, when Kenny Larkin’s musical output ceased and although he never gave his reasons it might have had something to do with his the other aspect of Kenny Larkin’s creative personality. In the late nineties, Kenny Larkin turned his efforts to becoming a stand up comedian, moved to LA and by 2002 he had announced his official retirement from music. Between the comedy and his music it was two sides to the same coin, coming from the same creative core, which was always going to land up on its end.

After a brief hiatus Kenny Larkin returned to music with “The Narcissist” on Peacefrog records in 2004. The album harked back to a time before Techno sitting somewhere between Prince and Jean Michel Jarre. “For whatever reason, I started listening to older, funkier stuff,” he told Jonty Skruff in 2004. He combined the likes of James Brown and John Lee Hooker with his contemporary playlist on his iPod and it inspired a new take on electronic music. “Then the light went on in my head,” he said “and I thought, maybe I can be true to the music I grew up with, and add a new electronic flavour to it. I wanted to do something different that will totally differentiate this sound from what everybody else is expecting me to do.“

The result was “The Narcissist”, an album that seems to poke as much fun at itself than it does offer a serious musical rebirth for Kenny Larkin. Luckily for the Kenny Larkin fans it was short-lived sojourn and Rush Hour would soon steer Larkin back onto the straight and narrow, re-issuing some of the older tracks from Larkin’s Art of Dance label, and getting Larkin back to the sound of he cultivated during the early and mid nineties. By the the time the highly anticipated and critically acclaimed, “Keys Strings and Tambourines” came out in 2008 Kenny Larkin had re-ignited the fuse that cemented his legacy in the realm of Techno.

“Keys Strings and Tambourines” was the album that would turn a whole new generation of music enthusiasts and fans onto the sound of Kenny Larkin and although totally overhauled it was a sound that harked back to the nineties. Fusing elements of Jazz, soul and Blues with electronic music, he ventured into totally new territory again, dragging Techno out of its stale resting place and back into limelight, aided in no meagre terms by the likes of Villalobos’ organic sounds and rhythms. The title track contrasted the stark electronic palette of Techno with the organic flow of sampled pieces as large strokes across the audio spectrum. Like the opening scene of 2001, there was something in the very basic hand percussion and the acid stabs of a synthesiser that both looked back and to the future again, encapsulating yet again the unique sound of a Kenny Larkin record.

“Keys Strings and Tambourines” hold so many cues to Larkin’s earlier music and yet it was still a new phase to his artistic voice. For whatever reason, the conditions had just become right again for Kenny Larkin to make music and like a true artist he’s left it merely at that. That was ten years ago, and who knows if we’ll get another piece of music from the producer. He continues to DJ regularly, but as of yet there is still no news on any new material, but when and indeed, if he ever returns to production, it’s sure to make yet another significant impact.

Beyond the hype with DJ Seinfeld

In 2015 a new electronic musical subgenre was spawned onto this world. Springing to life through an online DJ and producer community, a new style of House music emerged, and unbeknownst to the protagonists of its origin, it would soon spread like wildfire through the music media. It was House that harked back to the earliest form of this music, embracing the DIY attitude of styles like Nu-Groove and Garage with modern technological approach to production.

A sample-based, dance floor focussed music like its forebears, it was hastily and somewhat inaccurately dubbed Lo-Fi House by the media looking for a catch-all term for music by artists like Mall Grab, Ross from Friends, DJ Boring and DJ Seinfeld, who were making House music with subtle references to the early 1990’s with distorted hats and a particularly melodic, accessible take on the genre while sporting humourous aliases. It was never their intention nor their desire to conflate the House music genre even further, merely pay homage to it, but bringing the music to whole new generation of partygoers and music enthusiasts they set in motion something not even they as its creators could curb or stifle.

It was an unstoppable force that quickly made it into everyday vocabulary as it became a unexplained and self-perpetuating Youtube curiosity. But even as the journalists and media moved on to the next thing and Lo-Fi House was embedded into the electronic music lexicon through everything from Spotify playlists to hashtags, it quickly emerged that the artists and DJs that were tagged with the term were so much more than the aphorism they were affiliated with.

DJ Seinfeld (real name Armand Jakobsson) was one of these artists, and as the term Lo-Fi was usurped by a newer trends, he remained a formidable force within the greater realm of House music. As a producer his music combined the functionality of modern dance floors with the intimacy of early House music. Softening the edges of the gritty percussion with luxurious, harmonic pads, DJ Seinfeld broke out with “Season 1” for and in the two years since, he’s made an LP for Lobster Theremin and Media Fury’s Lobster Fury imprint and four other EPs for a host of other labels, including E-Beamz and Endotherm.

At 26 Jakobsson is a precocious talent and a bottomless pit of creativity which shows no signs of dissipating. He also makes classic House as Rimbaudian and Drum n Bass as one half of Birds of Sweden, showing he is so much more than the lo-fi badge he’s been saddled with. Most recently he was inducted in the DJ Kicks hall of fame with a mix of all-exclusive material that has brought his talents as a DJ to the attention of the wider world, on equal footing with his production prowess.

He comes to Jæger as part of his DJ Kicks tour, only a little way away from his Malmö origins and we had the opportunity to call him up to ask about his roots, the Lo-Fi anomaly and what his mix might sound like as he makes his way to Jæger. We find him in a Polish hotel where he is getting ready or his set later that night.

*DJ Seinfeld plays Frædag x Svømmebasseng this Friday.

You’re two weeks into this tour, how’s it been so far?

It’s been great. So far the shows have been fun and it’s exceeded my expectations. Nothing but great times.

It comes off the back of your DJ-kicks release and it’s a tour based on that release. Why did you decide to tour this mix and not an album?

Most tours are not exactly like when rock stars go on tour, it’s more like you need something to frame or give a theme to a series of shows. Something major like the DJ kicks thing was quite appropriate way to follow as far as a tour goes.

I think you are the first DJ to tour a DJ kicks in my memory and it just makes complete sense to tour as a DJ off a mix rather than an LP.

Exactly. We wanted to do it, because it was such a big thing for me critically to do it, whatever we could do to go that extra step, and make it as big a deal as possible, we wanted to do that.

<a href="http://k7records.bandcamp.com/album/dj-kicks-dj-seinfeld">DJ-Kicks: DJ Seinfeld by DJ Seinfeld</a>

How does the mix reflect the sounds that you are playing in your sets?

There are a fair amount of breaks, breakbeat-based House and Techno in these sets. There’s an Australian wave of sound coming through right now, which I can hear coming through in Canada too. It’s a new take on the sound of House and breakbeat Techno, and I’m very often inclined to avoid four to floor House and Techno to keep it interesting for the crowd and myself. I really try not use the word eclectic, but it has some different flavours of House and Techno in there. That’s what I’m really about nowadays.

Would you say you stepped on from the DJ mix in terms of your DJ sets?

I’m always changing and for the last year I found myself getting bored with the music I was associated playing. When you do DJ quite often, you have to keep yourself interested.

Do you think DJing so much lately will have an affect on your music going forward, because a lot of your music is very album based and can be appreciated away form the dance floor?

It probably will. Part of the DJ job is trying to find new music, and I’m always looking and digging for new music so and I’ve come across stuff that I probably would not have heard of if it wasn’t for that drive to find some music to surprise people.

The club itself has never been a focus in my productions. I’ve made House and Techno tracks that maybe stay on the dance floor, but in my mind I’ll be dancing a room and not really thinking about dancing in a club. At some point it would be an interesting experiment to make something that I know will go down well in a club. For whatever reason I really haven’t consciously made those tracks.

Do you think that’s generational thing?

I’m not entirely sure. I did go out a lot when I was 17 to my early twenties, and I feel like that phase was interesting and really inspiring. After that for about two years I didn’t feel any need or desire to go to a club. And it was during those two years that I matured a lot as a producer.

The music you were associated with was quickly coined as Lo-Fi. Do you feel it was an accurate representation of the music you were making?

It didn’t really set out to make it. When I first came across the word lo-fi I was kind of drawn into it, because it was an internet community of people drawn to music that was made in the eighties and nineties, which in my mind doesn’t have the same connotations as it does today, where lo-fi has become a catch-all term for a silly DJ name and a disco edit with some distorted hi hats.

There’s still some good music coming out of it, but it’s not something I actively pursued or tried to make. I was making “lo-fi” music for quite some time, but the coincidental nature of me calling it DJ seinfeld for bit, gave journalists some ideas to put this together and try and make sense of it.

There was an interesting article that came out a while back on Thump that talked about the significance of Lo Fi on the Youtube algorithm. Is this something that you were aware of?

I read the article at the time, and I was so tired of reading articles on it. As far as I remember, I agreed to what the article said. It’s difficult for me to argue any differently, because it went in detail about how the Youtube algorithm was set up and it made a good case for it.

It was something that was very external to what I was doing though; I had very little control over who posted what on Youtube. People downloaded my tracks and ripped them from soundcloud and put it up on You Tube themselves, so I had no control over that, apart from the rare occasion where I would send my music to friends to make videos. But none of those tracks became part of a larger Youtube algorithm.

You’ve also got a couple other projects, Rimaudian and Birds of Sweden, which is a classic House project and a drum n bass group respectively. Are you still involved with those projects?

In my mind I am, but I’ve not been able to make any music for the last couple of months. It’s just been to hectic to make something cohesive, which is a common theme among DJs. I’m not entirely sure what way I will take those aliases, I’m not entirely sure what their sound will be, but hopefully at some point I will have a better idea.

There was a Rimbaudian track on the DJ Kicks compilation. Is it correct that most of those tracks were exclusive for the DJ Kicks mix?

Yes.

That’s pretty unique.

It was a conscious decision, partly because I feel like DJ Kicks is usually big stars asking other quite famous people for music. I wanted to take the opportunity to ask people who were up and coming and who have a lot of potential, and giving them that platform to show their music on was quite good.

I wanted to ask you about Malmö and from what I know is that there is quite a big digging community down there, especially centered around Disco. Did you ever experience any of that that when you were growing up there?

Part of it maybe. I was more into Techno and House than Disco. There were a couple of clubs in the city when I was still living there, but the city was still developing a scene. There was a big Techno scene in Malmö and it was run by Kontra-Musik, and they would be bring the most interesting acts that would come to Malmö. There was a slightly older generation of ravers that would introduce the younger generation to that kind of music. I really enjoyed that time a lot, because it was bohemian and a very inclusive atmosphere.

You moved around a lot. Where are you now?

I’ve just moved back to Malmö, but I was Edinburgh for three years and in Barcelona for two.

Do you feel yourself being inspired differently back home than in Barcelona?

I think every city offers a different inspiration and I think your experiences are going to be different in every city. In Malmö it’s more about this comfort mixed with a lot of nostalgia and memories of what it was like living there before. It’s a very small city, and there’s not a lot of things happening there, but I don’t feel myself getting bored by it. There’s some inspiration to be found at some point.

You said that you are currently finding very little time for production. When this tour is over, do you see yourself getting stuck into a new album or EP?

I’m working on an EP, but it’s just going slower. After this tour the travelling is still going to be continuing. My next break is hopefully something I will be taking next April.

Wow that’s still some time away.

Yeah it is, but I figured while I’m still young and healthy and I do enjoy doing it, it’s not just pure exhaustion all the time. It is a huge privilege to do it, and knowing that motivates me all the time to keep doing it. Of course everyone has a limit, and for now I’m not at that limit. Trying to balance it with a healthy lifestyle, that would be the most important thing for me right now. If I manage to do that till March I’ll be ok.

Chicago roots and NY style chords with JT Donaldson

JT Donaldson has been a consistent force in House music in the USA for the past twenty years. Hailing from Dallas, he’s a veteran and a contemporary at the same time and has made significant contributions to the genre through his music, productions and DJing. He’s lived and worked between Chicago, New York, San Francisco and LA, cutting his teeth in the cities and the scenes through which House music developed through the early and mid-nineties.

Learning his trade amongst the legends of Chicago, he moved from DJing to production with his first record coming via Green Velvet/Cajmere’s Cajual records. In New York he “hustled” through the ranks while in San Francisco and LA he fell in with the West Coast crowd, who were busy cultivating a distinct House scene on the pacific coast.

Tip-Toeing his way through the four corners of the USA through the late 90’s and the early 2000’s, he established lasting friendships with some of House music’s elite and recorded records for the likes of LowDown Music, OM Records and Nightshift Recordings, releases that merely speckle his extensive biography.

Today JT Donaldson embodies the legacy of House music, funnelling elements of Soul, Funk and Jazz through his productions in a deeper interpretation of the genre. He’s remained a steadfast DJ and regularly plays all over the states and on occasion makes a furore into Europe, spreading the gospel of House music wherever he goes.

He’s recently moved back to Dallas where he’s established a new label in the form of New Math, a “passion project” through which Donaldson releases music and artists that show “some varied influences and musical inspirations outside of the house music sound I’ve been known to release personally”, he told the Dallas Observer.

Between credits like producer, label owner and DJ, he’s also an adept remixer and in recent years he’s contributed in that regard to Oslo’s Bogota records. Built on the friendship with label boss, Ivaylo JT Donaldson is an adopted son of Bogota Records today. He will be playing alongside Ivaylo in the upcoming Bogota Records showcase this week, and leading up to the event we reached out to the Texan for a Q&A session and he obliged with more than just some answers.

An exclusive promo-mix, recorded at Mark Farina’s no-less, followed a Q&A which we are very excited to share here today.

Hello James, and thanks for agreeing to this interview. What was it like, musically growing up in Dallas?

Dallas was an interesting city to grow up in musically. When I was only a child we had an iconic 80s nightclub called Starck, named after it’s famous designer Phillipé Starck. Grace Jones performed there, ecstasy wasn’t yet illegal and you could imagine the groundwork it created for the Dallas nightlife and club culture. A decade or so later I had a job at the largest record store in the southwest United States “Bill’s Records” at the age of 17, where I learned about house music, its producers, labels, distributors, sales people and label owners. I jumped in head first.

Were there places in the city you could listen to that kind of music when you were getting into DJing?

We had a crew of people called the Hazy Daze collectif and they through illegal and permitted parties, bring in DJs from Chicago, UK and beyond. Everyone from Roy Davis Jr, Spencer Kincy, Derrick Carter, Pal Joey, Sandy Rivera, Diz, Heather, Paul Johnson… etc etc. Some of these guys first gig outside of their hometown was in Dallas. I also played a few years at Club One in Deep Ellum, opening up Saturday nights for DJ Red Eye and played various raves in and around Dallas, Houston and Shreveport, Louisiana which is only a short drive.

What was your first contact with a set of decks and what was that moment of epiphany like for you, the moment when you realised you wanted to do this for living?

I had put together a DJ set-up from my dad’s turntable which we had in the living room and hardly ever used since CDs were the wave back then, and a pawn shop belt drive turntable that had pitch control. They were not the easiest things to learn on by any means. I messed around with those for about a year and when Christmas rolled around my mom gifted me a brand new set of 1200s. Thats was life changing. I was probably 15/16 years old. She gave me a gift and inside she had printed out a homemade “coupon” from J&R music world in NYC. I don’t think at that point she was confident in spending that kind of money when kids interests changes like the wind. But she left it up to me to decide if that was indeed what I wanted…. and without question. I still remember that smell when opening those boxes.

You’ve lived in Chicago, San Francisco and New York and now you’re back in Dallas. How did your musical experiences differ throughout those cities and what brought you back to Dallas?

Family brought me back to Dallas. My mom, my brother and my little nieces. I had spent about 13 years away from home and it just felt right to come back and be close to them. Each one of my experiences and time spent living in those cities were unique in their own way. I learned and was mentored in Chicago, I partied in San Francisco and Los Angeles and I broadened my networked and hustled in New York.

How has Dallas’ musical landscape changed since?

As far as house music, it’s nothing like what it was in my opinion. Night and day. Completely new, but still amazing. We have some of the best Jazz musicians and players you’ll ever hear, we still have an underground scene that is bubbling and there are various producers and labels that are making waves out here currently. Dolfin Records, Blixaboy, Convextion, Gavin Guthrie and T.R.U. Recordings, New Math Records, Demarkus Lewis, the list goes on and on…

You’ve been making, playing and spreading the gospel of House music since the 90’s. How have you experienced the genre’s evolution?

To me it’s always kinda been the same. I’m hearing more tracks sample old house records now though, which is kinda new. Seems everything’s up for grabs and nothing’s off limits anymore.

You’ve been very consistent in the sound of your records over the years. Did you have to evolve at all with the genre, and how do you manage to craft such a timeless sound?

Thanks, although some stuff sounds very dated… lol But I’ve always just stuck to what I feel, Chicago roots and NY style chords and all that. I’m constantly being exposed and turned on to new and old music alike, all different genres… so my sound and taste do evolve over time I suppose.

Were you able to achieve the same as a DJ, or do you feel you have to buck more with the trends in that respect?

As a DJ I’ve tried to expand my sets and audience over the years. When I moved to Brooklyn I started a night with DJ Amir, Waajeed and Ge-Ology. Playing alongside those guys, we did everything. Jazz, Funk, Disco, House, Hip Hop, African, Latin…. like all of it. I still do straight forward house sets, but my range was definitely widend during that time. I also do an all 7′ vinyl party in Dallas with DJ Spinderella called Fresh 45s. We’ve hosted DJs like Rich Medina, Supreme, Ge-Ology, Derrick Carter, DJ Scratch, DJ Spinna, Maseo, Eli Goldstein and many others.

It’s interesting that you mention 7 inches. I’ve found there are always traces of Soul, Funk and Jazz in your music, while also retaining the functionality of House. What singular aspect between all these genres informs the underlying sound of your music?

Grooves. It’s all groove based for me. Basslines and keys and how they relate with the drums. I’ve always been drawn to Soul, Jazz, Disco and Funk. Sometimes I’ll sample a loop and replay all the instruments with synths and at the end of the day erase the loop altogether leaving only my interpretation. Doing that I find myself playing keys and scales I wouldn’t normally go to.

How much does DJing influence your songwriting craft?

A tremendous amount. I typically have written songs for DJs to play leaving room to drop acapellas, mix in and out and generally structuring a track for club play.

What are some of the early influences that continue to make an impression on your music today?

Artists like MK, Chez & Ron, and the Detroit and Chicago sound was one of the earliest and long lasting influences of mine.

Tell me a bit about your relationship with Bogota records.

It’s a great house music label that I’ve had an opportunity to do remixes for recently and in the past. I couldn’t be happier to be a part of the family.

You also run New Math records and you’ve worked closely with many labels over the years. From your experience, and considering the landscape today with so many labels out there, what should a record label do to stand out from the crowd?

Make your artist happy and be good stewards of the music. Try new and interesting things, take risks and just be yourself. That’s the easiest way to stand out in my opinion.

I believe you’ve put a mix together for this showcase. Can you tell us a bit about it?

I’ve pulled from some of my favorite classic house tunes, ones that have influenced me as a DJ as well as some new music that’s been coming out this year. Artist like Stefan Ringer, Ben Hixon and a few unreleased tunes from myself as well.

How does it reflect what might go down at the Bogota Showcase?

It won’t be the same track-list by any means but there may be a few tunes you’ll hear from the mix at Jeager.

Is there anything you’d like to add before we hear you in our booth in August.

Just that I can’t wait to be back and I hope to see everyone out on the dance floor!

6o6 – bbbbbb

In a musical statement that seemed to foreshadow his entire career, Icelandic producer and DJ, Bjarki (Runar Sigurdarson) burst forth on to the scene with “I wanna go Bang” via Nina Kraviz’ Trip label. The track propelled this musical talent on an immediate and decisive trajectory with three unique albums following the single in quick succession via Trip.

Together it established an artist who could move between genres effectively, comfortably weaving his way through elements of Hardcore, IDM, Drum n Bass, Techno and Electro; usually conspiring to make bold, and unforgettable impressions on the dance floor. In two years the name Bjarki would go from the obscure into the public eye with music that often bordered on intimidation, but never palled.

His biggest contribution to music would still be left to come however, and it wouldn’t arrive in the form of his own productions, well at least not all of it. In 2017 he and a childhood friend, “Johnny Chrome Silver” would establish the label bbbbbb, a platform for Icelandic artists that extended the spectrum of eccentricities of Bjarki’s music. Eight EP’s and an LP in, bbbbbb is an extension of Bjarki’s own musical inclinations, and not merely for his Cucumb45 alias.

The genre-bending nature of his music is very familiar through the various artists that have joined the label’s ranks, each adding a unique voice to the enigmatic nature of the label. From the cover-art to the artists and the music, there’s something significant about bbbbbb that in its short existence has established it as a label making and releasing music on its own terms; an isolated and quirky institution on an otherwise pallid landscape.

What follows are 6 tracks from 6 releases from the label’s catalogue, featuring Volruptus, EOD, X-Static and Bjarki.

X-static – my inspiration (Bjarki’s ‘sweet thing’ version) – my inspiration EP

The first record to make its way out from bbbbbb did so on thunderous terms, re-issuing a track from X-Static to inaugurate the label. “My Inspiration”, initially released in 1992, is a hardcore track that sampled the vocal from UK soul group The Real Thing and pushed it to hedonistic heights through the sound of UK rave culture.

Bjarki contemporised the track with his Sweet Thing version, bringing it into the present, and letting it linger on the ear for just that little bit longer. Like his breakout hit, “I wanna go Bang”, this mix also skirts that intangible line between the accessible and the obstinate.

Cucumb45 – CyXlobblObs5 – Cyclops EP

Can we just take a moment to admire the cover of this EP. Is that an action figure in a…. The bbbbbb aesthetic is what draws you the label, and it’s in perfect harmony with the sound of records like these. Although there’s a little something of everything on this EP, from the atmospheric Techno of “Aqua Elba” to the funky Electro breaks of “B.U.S.Y”, the title track and opener is that bit of crazy that you require on bbbbbb.

Cucumb45 is Bjarki’s IDM alias, the moniker where he really just spreads his wings. “CyXlobblObs5” is incoherent and yet there are appealing, accessible elements to it all, but it all comes together in a tangled mess of a collage, much like the artwork. There are five songs wrapped up in one, schizophrenic as it pursues each fleeting idea to the next.

EOD – Evenhark – Swurlk

The Norwegian artist is the only artist that appears on the label that’s not Icelandic and the first to release an LP, but more on that later. EPs on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex saw EOD establish a sound that conforms to the melodically rich, rhythmically inconsistent sounds of IDM, that really starts to find it’s form on the album EODS and this EP.

“Evenhark” has a melody that lingers and a percussive arrangement that’s incredibly dense in texture, but just seems to float through the track’s progression. There’s clearly some golden thread here that connects to Aphex Twin’s earlier works, but EOD’s sound on Swurlk seems bigger and bolder with a very analogue sound at its core.

Volruptus – Alien Transmission V2 – Homeblast

This is the big one! The acid-electro track from the Icelandic producer is the record that sparked the hysteria, or hysteria adjusent in terms of club dance music.The combination of that bouncing electro beat, the familiar squawk of the 303 and the vocoder work re-iterating the title of the track over and over again, is immediately intoxicating and hits all the right notes for an underground dance floor sensation. Whenever you put this record on in a set, there’s always a slight pause of recognition, before a frenzied skirmish ensues on the floor.

Bjarki – Drab 2 – Geothermal Sheep Vol 1

The obvious hit and the one to mention on this release would be the A-side, but bbbbbb hardly panders to the masses so neither will we here. We could have gone to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and picked the destructive, “2 Mewtwo 5 [GRX230P018] BB-) Aprilgabb2” as our choice but sense prevailed and “Drab 2” finds some sweet middle ground on this release.

Uplifting, trance-inducing synth merely caress the atmosphere , while a busy rhythm section provides the necessary dance-floor counterpoint. Yes, you can dance to it.

EOD – Y’ha-nthlei

If you’re looking for easy listening, you’ve come to wrong place, but this track on EOD’s debut LP for bbbbbb and the first LP on the label is the closest you’ll ever get. The Norwegian producer shows some restraint, and even though ratcheting snares and incoherent synth chattering remains his sonic dialect, there’s something serene to this track, like watching a satellite burn up in a distant sun. It’s no coincidence that this our album of the week.

Regis and Downwards: Sex and Ritual

Karl O’Connor (Regis) has made a significant impact on the dance floors in a very unassuming British way. Ever the nonconformist, O’Connor has made a substantial mark on electronic music history through his various musical aliases, his projects and the labels that he’s spawned. He has driven an undercurrent that continues to course through the contemporary electronic music landscape, defragmenting the established rhetoric with a petulant snarl of disdain for anything resembling orthodoxy in music.

His greatest contribution to music has been marooned on the island of Techno, but for a young and provocative O’Connor, dabbling in music, Techno was merely the scion of some greater musical pursuit that starts in Birmingham and the subversion of musical traditions deconstructed by the punk and post-punk movements in the UK and Europe.

Birmingham is “an industrial village” according to a Quietus piece written by O’ Connor, “it’s provincial England, it’s not London, just get over it and get on with it”. A city born and bred on industry, it’s easy to draw a correlation between Birmingham and Detroit, but for O’Connor these wispy threads are inconsequential. “My influences weren’t necessarily in Birmingham” he told Filip Kalinowski in the 2013.

“I always imagined about being cloned in New York in the 70s in or in the early 80s in Berlin, it’s where my influences lay.” A group that made an early significant impression on a young O’Connor in 1980 was not anything close to Birmingham, but rather D.A.F. Hearing the German group for the first time there was something “primal” and “provocative” to the German group that was just “fucking ace” to a punk kid from Birmingham. “(T)here are no choruses, they are making a whole load of records with no choruses and… I thought it was the biggest fuck you to Anglo-American rock & roll. I thought it was brilliant, it was fantastic. Those mad German bastards. That was pure sex, the music that they made was pure adrenaline, that’s what I wanted…”

D.A.F opened a door that would never be sealed again, and in the early eighties O’Connor as a teenager would completely submerge himself in the independent electronic music labels of the time and specifically Daniel Miller’s Mute and Stevo Pearce’s Some Bizarre. “That covered everything that I needed,” he told Electronic Beats Magazine in 2013.”(G)reat pop music through to what I would class as avant-garde music. Test Dept, Neubauten, Foetus, Fad Gadget, pop like Soft Cell or The The. It was all there. And it was British, that was very important. Plus it was pretty much the birth of independent music—and they got into the charts.”

It all conspired in 1985, when O’Connor, a college student and electronic music enthusiast bought his first synthesiser and set forth on his first steps towards a career in electronic music as Karl and the Curbcrawlers. “We had a synth, shared a pair of PVC trousers, and had a smoke machine” he reminisces in his Quietus soliloquy. It was 1985, but O’Connor was still bound by the constriction of youth obsessions and the likes of Fad Gadget and Soft Cell, and the music reflected that kind of early DIY aesthetic of the generation before as the rest of the world was being seduced by the more polished sounds of Duran Duran and The Human League.

He believes the music he was making then “was extremely dated” and none of it ever amounted to anything beyond a demo recording over a soundcheck session, but what was cemented in that project and Karl O’Connor as an artist has stayed with him ever since. It was about DIY, and not as a trend, but rather a necessity. “If you feel the necessity of it, then, you know. It has to become everything for you. For us, the methods were dictated by economic reasons”. Karl and Curbcrawlers had one synthesiser and no money for a drum machine and that became the essence of the group, and it was that DIY born from necessity that followed Karl O’Connor into the 90’s and into the label Downwards.

“I’m not too sure why anybody starts a label,” he ponders in in Electronic Beats about the origins of Downwards “I think it was purely out of necessity”. Spurred on by his “love of DIY” and the UK independent label ethos, Downwards came into the world. Together with Peter Sutton (Female), O’Connor brought one of the longest running independent Techno labels into the world with a singular idea: “You make it, you release it and all of a sudden you are a label,” he explained in Factmag in 2010. “The Desperate Bicycles were right: ‘It was easy, it was cheap – go and do it.’”

O’Connor and Sutton established Downwards with a fully formed idea and a “single-minded” pursuit for the label. “I wanted to make the label in my own image,” he told EB. Influenced by the labels of his youth, namely Some Bizarre and Mute, Downwards distilled the tradition of the eighties independent label down to a new generation of dance music enthusiasts for which the sounds of Detroit had started moving over to the UK and the summer of love had already transpired. It was 1993 and Downwards was born with the Antonym 7” “Consumer Device” inaugurating the label. Inarticulate vocal chattering and atonal wailing guitars swathe a militantly regular 4/4 kick in a style of music that combines the atmospheres of a post- punk industrialism with the functionality of dance music.

There’s a sinuous connection between O’Connor’s early musical adventures as Karl and the Curbcrawlers and Downwards and although the two are “completely different”, he does consider there is a “golden thread” that runs through them. “It was more about getting ideas out, most of the early stuff sounds like it was pressed on the back of a digestive biscuit, it was lo-fi and charming, but it wasn’t deliberate.” It ran perpendicular to the way the label operated, where production and distribution all came down to O’Connor and Sutton, to the point where no-one even knew who ran the label. “That total artistic freedom was its own reward” he told Factmag.

That freedom might have been its own reward but the ultimate success of Downwards was validated in 1994 when Surgeon came on board and sent Downwards on an upward trajectory as one of the biggest successes early in the label’s biography. “Tony (Child aka Surgeon) is the only bona fide star in the whole thing,” said O’ Connor looking back in his Quietus piece. “He has a fantastic attitude to everything, he puts up with quite a lot, and it was a leap of faith with me and the label.” The Surgeon EP propelled the Downwards label into dance music’s collective consciousness where it and that record remained ever since.

The EP stomps with a timeless European sound of Techno that continues to remain popular today and in many respects have become the de-facto sound of the genre in the contemporary musical landscape. It’s brash and aggressive and for the first time it defined the Downwards label as something intended specifically for the dance floor. There’s still that unwavering DIY aesthetic that first established the label, but considering the period, it’s more punk than ever. It strips the melodic and spacial elements away from Techno into an industrial-esque functional monster, born from that primal instinctiveness of the corporeal and simply explodes into the atmosphere.

It’s this sonic aesthetic that O’Connor permeates further when he eventually steps into his role as Regis when he releases his first EP on Downwards in 1995, “Hablame / Amistad Modelo”. He expounds on the atmosphere and channels everything into brash sonic textures that jackhammer through the progression of the two tracks.

For O’Connor it’s always been about the “immediacy of the moment” and that’s the ideas he transfers, to Regis and Downwards too. “Downwards is how I define myself” he told Filip Kalinowski back in 2013. “I like here and now. These are the things that interest me about music. Sex, ritual, that’s what I’m into. It’s very naturalistic, I’m not doing it because of any reason, it’s a progression of who I am.” Downwards became an extension of that centred around a core group of producers namely Surgeon, Female and Regis. Later Downwards would incorporate acts like Jeff Mills, Tropic of Cancer, OAKE and Samuel Kerridge as that extension of the artistic personality behind the label, in which Downwards would cement, a sound, a visual aesthetic, and a conceptual framework, through which an attitude prevailed.

O’Connor might have supplanted that very same attitude in his other projects, but the thing that remained constant throughout was Downwards. Other fleeting experiences with labels and conceptual projects came in the form of Sandwell District and Jealous God, but 25 years on Downwards and Regis is the only aspects that remain. In 2010 O’Connor told Fact Magazine that it “makes as perfect sense for us to be releasing a Tropic Of Cancer or Dva Damas 10″ in 2010 as it did for us to be backing a Surgeon 12″ in 1994”, suggesting that even though the label’s evolved with time, the sonic aesthetic and the attitude remains unchallenged.

It’s O’Connor and Sutton that remains at the heart of the Downwards appeal with their personal tastes adding that much needed human dimension to the often “faceless” Techno genre. “I loved the immediacy of techno but was also put off by the short shelf life and disposability of some of the music – club fodder, I guess they call it. So I just went about applying my own influences to the sound and overall operation. I imagine the things that seemed obvious and instinctive to us were alien to the way most other people in techno readily presented themselves.” This set Downwards apart from the rest and that’s why 25 years on they and all their artists remain relevant.

Downwards disrupted traditions, styles and trends to make a significant impact in electronic music, and although we can call it Techno it’s always been the odd one out, upsetting the apple cart when we try to clearly define the genre. Downwards lives beyond such nomenclature as a singularity through the years and Regis and Female have certainly left their imprint there. Before paying Unsound in 2013, which had Disruption as its theme, O’Connor told Filip Kalinowski “Interference and disturbance is exactly what I’m into. I like disruption.” And that is certainly what he and Sutton have achieved with Downwards and what he singularly permeates through his music as Regis.

*Regis and Samuel Kerridge present 25 years of Downwards this Friday.

Happy to oblige with DJ Okapi and Afro Synth

I have to tune the car radio manually to get to the place I want to be on Cape Town’s FM bandwidth. The seek button scans over the desired channel even though I’m just a few blocks away from the broadcasting headquarters. Immediately, the old, but familiar hiss of white noise transports me back to my youth and then it pops into life as I get to 89.5. A two-step punchy snare and a syllabic yelping in Zulu greets me on the other side, this sounds more like home.

“You have to listen to Bush Radio” a friend told me the night before, “if you want to hear South African music”. For the past week I’ve been driving around my hometown listening to the ubiquitous sounds of popular music from Europe and USA proliferated by the nationally syndicated stations like 5FM. This has always been the case in South Africa and notwithstanding the community focussed programming from small, inconspicuous stations like Bush Radio, this has remained the broadcasting practise for the most part of my adult life too.

Every time I return to South Africa I’m always astounded and dismayed how very little has changed in that regard, even when in Europe, South African music is being proliferated by DJs and radio everywhere. The sound of GQOM, the band BCUC, a revival of seventies era Fusion, and the newfound interest in the eighties bubblegum sound had all been largely instigated and promoted through European labels and record stores in recent years.

Limited by constricts like the lack of vinyl presses to re-issue music and the fact that most of the original records are harboured in European record collections, it’s obvious why this has happened, but it doesn’t look set to remain this way for much longer. In recent years a DJ, a blog, a label and a record store has come along, all dedicated to changing this, bringing South African music back home and making availeable on the vinyl format again. It all funnels down to one man, Dave Durbach, better known by his DJ alias Okapi, who is tirelessly and selflessly, collecting and re-distributing this music through Afro-Synth, a blog, store and record label dedicated to new and forgotten South African music.

Hailing from Cape Town, where he cut his teeth around the bars and clubs in the small scene around Long Street, playing everything from Hip Hop to Jazz, Dave had always been known as something of a “vinyl junkie” by the locals. At a time when the format was largely forgotten for the more accessible digital formats, Dave would haunt the used record shops in and around Cape Town for obscure records from the eighties. The records largely disregarded as disposable “bubblegum” music by a predominantly white music media, became an obsession for the latent digger in his teens and laid the foundations for what would later become Afro Synth; a blog dedicated to shedding new light on a lost era in South Africa’s rich music history.

Afro Synth garnered attention for its unique and largely untapped source of records from from an apartheid-era South Africa with considered reviews and articles about the artists and the records sound tracking the end of white-minority rule and the first exciting years of post-apartheid South Africa. These were the talented, mostly black artists that remained obscure for the longest time, pressing limited runs of their records on independent labels that were quickly assigned to bargain bins all over SA. He established the blog to highlight these finds and through his words, many South Africans (this writer included) were lead on an extensive journey of discovery through a very niche, and almost forgotten corner of music history.

It immediately caught the attention of an international audience too, in large part due to the enigmatic music at its core, and established Afro Synth as a serious source for diggers with the sounds of Bubblegum, Disco and obscure SA fusion moving way beyond South African borders for the first time, with Okapi’s career as a DJ following close behind.

Through the distributor Rush Hour, he was able to bring that sound to an even bigger audience with a label that has two EPs and two albums under its belt today. Two re-issues from two vastly different eras and sounds, marked the beginning of the label. “Burning Beat” is a slow-burner; a cosmic, Disco track by Roi Music, featuring the vocals of Olive Mashinga, while the second release saw a couple of Kwaito classics from the nineties pressed to vinyl for the first time. The first album on the label came via Ntombi Ndaba, a compilation of a short-lived career, that Afro Synth and Dave are eager to kick-start again in the future while the second album is from a new Cape Town Jazz outfit called Mabuta.

Alongside the label, Dave has also established a shop of the same name in the heart of Johannesburg, and through in-store sessions, his work with Ndaba and Mabuta he’s also cultivating a healthy scene under the Afro-Synth banner. On a recent visit to Cape Town and South Africa, I made Johannesburg a stopover with the central purpose of visiting the Afro Synth store.

Open four days a week, you’ll find Dave in the store whenever he’s not touring as a DJ, playing records and eager to share his musical interests with anybody willing to listen. Music from the label and dedicated African sections take up most of the store, with everything from seventies Progressive Rock from the UK to American Hip Hop dotting the small space. I’m not surprised to hear that it’s these international records that garner the most attention from local audiences, but for the first time in a long time, there’s a dedicated shop and label distributing vinyl of new- and old South African music for South African audiences in South Africa.

As we talk about everything from lost vinyl presses to the next Afro Synth release, it’s clear that Afro-Synth is something very unique and very special in South Africa. It’s providing a newfound interest in this music and even cultivating a scene around it. From the in-store sessions, the releases and his sets, Okapi and Afro Synth are bringing old and new South African records to the fore for foreign-, but more importantly local audiences.

Photo by Oscar O’Ryan

Maybe you can start by filling in a blank for me. When you were still playing at Waiting Room in Cape Town, I remember you were playing everything from Reggae, Hip Hop and Jazz. How did you get into the bubblegum thing and how did it lead to the blog?

Dave Durbach: I started collecting South African records around the same time I started Djing. But at that time in Cape Town there was no interest in SA music so I played soul and funk, hip-hop, electro, ‘lounge’, whatever… The SA records started more as a journalistic interest. I wrote an article for the Sunday Independent in 2008 that included the first few reviews that I used for the blog, which I started a few months later in 2008 when I was living in South Korea. It was only after moving to Joburg in 2009 that I was really able to play these records in public. Over the years since then as my collection has grown I’ve been able to play more local music and less international stuff.

People still refer to you as a “vinyl junkie” from your days playing in Cape Town. Did the Afro Synth blog change the diversity of your buying and collecting habits at all?

I don’t think so, I’ve always just been obsessive about digging for local records and getting as many as possible, at least when they were still cheap. Since I started selling a few years ago I don’t buy so much for my personal collection, in fact a lot of my own collection went into the store. Most of what I buy these days is for the shop, not for me.

Do you feel that you have to live up to the “bubblegum” sound when you are booked to play, or can you still easily modulate to other genres?

I think promoters in Europe expect me to stick to funky South African music so I’m happy to oblige. I might still include some American or British or other African music but that would maybe only be one or two tracks in a set. Playing in Joburg or in Cape Town I have a lot more freedom to play ‘international’ stuff, but the vibe is usually similar. This is my sound. I think my knowledge and collection of bubblegum for example has come at the expense of other genres, especially contemporary ones.

You mentioned when I was in the shop that you don’t get to play in SA that much these days. What is the scene like in South Africa (Johannesburg) at the moment for DJs like you?

Opportunities are very limited for DJs who don’t play house or hip-hop so I don’t get a lot of gigs in SA. There are other DJs in Joburg also playing old local music but they also struggle to get gigs. Kitcheners is the only venue in Joburg that is open to all of us.

You also mentioned that people don’t buy that kind of stuff in the shop. Why do you think South Africans are so reluctant to appreciate the music from home?

For young South Africans this is generally the music of their parent’s generation, so it’s not seen as cool, even kwaito from the 90s. But I think even back in the day bubblegum was looked down on by ‘serious’ music people, of all races. It was too American, too electronic, too fun. Most South Africans grow up with American music as their reference, not local music. The media is largely to blame, particularly the radio.

So when you started picking up the records that you featured on the blog, how and where were you finding the records?

I was still in Cape Town at the time so the first few local records I picked up would’ve come from Revolution Records in Observatory and a place called Vibes in the Atrium in Claremont, which closed down long ago, also Mabu Vinyl, second-hand stores etc.

Have you seen more of these records being picked up as they are finding an audience overseas?

Definitely. A few years ago no one was looking for it so it was super cheap. In recent years there’s obviously been a resurgence in demand for obscure disco from all over the world, particularly from diggers in Europe. The vinyl scene in South Africa is tiny in comparison.

Most of these records came out during apartheid, and were almost lost to music history. Was there ever a political motivation behind the blog?

Yes my main goal has always been to try to preserve this music and the legacy of a generation of musicians who’ve largely been forgotten. I’m also fascinated by its relation to the politics of the time, its role in ultimately defeating apartheid and in doing so promoting some sense of nation-building. The lyrical messages in a lot of songs from that era still carry a lot of weight today, as most of the social problems from that era still persist.

The way you explained it was that the shop, Afro Synth is very much a labour of love for you. Can you tell me a bit more about what inspired you to start and run the shop?

Initially I was wary of trying to sell records or put a monetary value on them. But more people started contacting me, particularly from overseas, looking to buy records. Over time I managed to find more stock, multiple copies of records, often still sealed. I realised that if I didn’t start buying these up, somebody else would. So I started in 2015 selling on Discogs. Then I realised that these old records shouldn’t all be sold overeas to the highest bidder but South Africans also needed to have access to this music – at an affordable price, not in a foreign currency. I started selling at markets around Joburg then opened the shop in Maboneng in September 2016.

And the label is the first of its kind as far as I know; a South African vinyl label exclusively for South African music. Besides Rush Hour coming on as distributor, what laid the foundation for the label?

That’s about it really! Without Rush Hour’s support I wouldn’t be able to put these records out.

So far it’s been mainly about highlighting forgotten releases like the blog did before it. How did you come across these pieces originally and what is it about music that makes you want to share it with more people?

I’m not necessarily breaking this music by being the first to play it, but where there is demand I am in a position to be able to license and release it in a way where the original artists and labels can benefit. For example the first release Burnin Beat I never owned the original, but there was growing demand for it after DJ Harvey and others started playing it. I know the guys who wrote the song so I was able to license it and find the original master tapes. Re-issuing music makes it affordable to people when the original versions become too rare and far too expensive.

The next release will be the first original release for the label, a Jazz album I believe. Can you tell us a bit more about it and how it might be bridge between the past and the future of music in South Africa?

Mabuta is a band of young South African jazz musicians put together by Shane Cooper, a bass player from Cape Town. It’s rooted in South African jazz but at the same time it’s full of synths and electronics. Some songs go into other parts of Africa – Mali, Nigeria and Ethiopia. It’s a very ambitious project that takes South African jazz into new territory. As a label it’s exciting to be part of a new release by contemporary artists, hopefully there will be more to come.

Besides the GQOM sound – which I’m glad to see is receiving a great reception in SA too – is there anything we should keep our ears pricked for coming through in the near future from the region?

I’m the wrong person to ask about this, I don’t get out much!

I asked specifically because I noticed that a lot of the GQOM stuff is being picked up by foreign labels, in particular. That’s what I like about Afro Synth; it doesn’t just export the sound it motivates a local scene. Is there a future for more labels like Afro Synth to come through and what do you think is needed to nurture more labels like this?

Plenty of other labels are re-issuing South African music from the 80s – labels from Europe, North America and others from SA. There’s so much amazing music that there is room for everyone to try their luck. At the end of the day it’s down to consumers and whether or not a record can sell. Ideally I’m selling albums to create opportunities for artists to get booked to perform again, that’s what I’m working on now with Ntombi Ndaba.

The story of M’BOOM

In 1970 legendary American percussionist Max Roach called up peer and contemporary Joe Chambers with an idea. Roach planted the seed for a kind of percussion orchestra and although he didn’t have a clear idea of what it would entail musically, he knew that it was something that would be very significant for the future of music. “Damn! What are we going to do? Have six guys on a drums set?”, came Chambers’ immediate response over the telephone. “No, no, no”, said Roach “We’re going to play percussion”.

Shortly after, Chambers, Fred King Warren Smith, Freddie Waits, Roy Brooks, Omar Clay, Francisco Mora, and Eli Fountain found themselves in a room together with Roach laying out the details for a percussion orchestra project that would eventually be called M’BOOM and also include Ray Mantilla in the final line-up. “Max had that vision”, recalled Waits in an interview with Modern Drummer in 1983. “(W)e all came together… and sat down and began to work out, verbally at first, what we thought this kind of situation could do.”

Max Roach was purposefully looking for drummers, not just musicians, but composers and arrangers that could “explore the possibilities of percussion in order to develop a knowledge of percussion” as Chambers puts it. It was a school of percussion in the context of a performance group, and percussion in all its various shapes and forms from the standardised drum kit, to mallet, pitched percussion like the xylophone and even the more obscure, readymade instruments like a saw or a tin can.

Max Roach’s initial idea was: “Well, if we put everybody together and form a cooperative group, we’ll have to stay together. We’d have to stay together and we could develop an original personality in percussion, that would come out of our American musical experience. It could have blues and Gospel and whatever idiom you want to name, just as long as it has that attitude of open endedness.”

And it went way beyond American borders and back in time. With Mantilla on board, infusing the pieces with elements of Latin and Afro rhythms and personality, and the textural ambiences of instruments like the marimba evoking the African continent, M’BOOM was more than just a freeform Jazz project.

It wasn’t just a bunch of very good drummers coming together and battling each other in the way of a clambering solo either. The pieces that resulted were composed, finely executed works that refined the primal action of striking a surface into fully formed compositions with great artistic weight. Their grand opus came as the self-titled sophomore album in 1979 via Columbia records and it and the M’BOOM project has remained somewhat inconspicuous in music history, but when electronic music producer, Martyn cited the album as an influence for his first LP on the Ostgut Ton “Voids”, it shed some new, much deserved light on this magnificent record.

The similarities in the way Roach and company treated percussion and arrangement and the way electronic music is structured today is uncanny, and although we can’t accurately assume the two are connected in any way there’s something to M’BOOM and specially that album that will speak to every electronic music enthusiast today.

“Onomatopoeia” sets the tone of the record with cascading bells and percussive rhythms erupting in a cacophonous meleé before it recedes into the compositional form it was destined to pursue. Marimba and Xylophones pound out a melody counterpointed by unpitched percussion sparkling in the resonant frequencies of the arrangement.

Written by Omar Clay, the piece might sound like the result of some improvised jam session through the first 16 bars, but what it is in fact is a controlled and deliberate execution of a composed piece. “Everybody has a specific thing that they’re supposed to fit in someplace in the time that we are reading it,” explained Clay about the writing and performing process for M’BOOM. The only improvisation comes in the way they play and not the structure of each composition and even in the live performance context this is how they would play it.

Martyn cited the “space” on the record as a particular influence, and that is exactly down to the way the pieces were composed. Everybody in their place and time made for a sonic texture that never cluttered the final arrangement. “All the pieces are written in terms of textures, combinations of colors, and rhythmic structure or rhythmic feel—where we place the emphasis”, Clay told Modern Drummer, specifically citing the second track on the album “Twinkle Toes”.

Players like Joe Chambers combined their knowledge of melody from instruments like the piano with their percussive training, finding a melodic dimension to something unpitched like the drum kit. “I had the theory and I had the drumming technique” he explained in all about Jazz. Every member was required to play everything and Chambers’ first role in the group would be the vibraphone, form which he composed songs like “Caravanserai”. It’s rattling percussive onslaught disperses around the mallett instruments pounding out a repetitive motif loop that modulates throughout, but always returns to to lower register repeating four chords. “To me it’s just a piano”, says Chambers of his Vibraphone. “It’s set up like a piano, so I know the theory.”

While some of the instruments encouraged this way of composition, there was some unusual instruments and techniques that also found their way into the ensemble, chief amongst which was the saw. On “Glorious Monster” there is a wailing vibrato echoing in the background, often coming to the fore. It sounds like a broken theremin synthesiser, but in fact it’s a tree saw, which Roy Brooks plays with a mallet while bending the length of the tool. It’s a completely alien sound as you’d expect and creates a very evocative science fiction space theme. “His musical saw is just an expression of something that’s inside him”, explained Fred King “and that’s what he communicates with us. That’s what I mean by it being such a deep experience.”

M’BOOM was a continual learning experience and allowed the players to experiment with their instruments and techniques. One of the most interesting techniques to come out of M’BOOM was the Timpani technique Warren Smith plays on “Epistrophy”. The instrument glides up to its pitch as Smith stretches the skin while playing. “It wasn’t so much a matter of developing it” he told Modern Drummer, “as it was that Joe Chambers asked me to play it. So I played it.” It’s luring effects are just one of the many ways the album and the project intrigues some thirty years on from its release.

There are elements to M’BOOM hat are very contemporaneous to electronic beat music. The pitched percussion; the short simple stabs at a melody; the repetitive nature of the music; and the textural space in the music. It’s something of a tenuous connection, but M’BOOM definitely needs to get its turn at the history books again today and be appreciated for what it is. It’s lucky that Martyn has turned some attention to the album again and surely it would spark some renewed interest in the album and the project for a whole new generation of musicians and enthusiasts.

* Martyn plays our basement tonight.

Hard to forget with E da Boss

Eric Cooke is a musical polymath. A DJ, record collector, producer, vocalist and club promoter; if it has anything to do with music, Eric Cooke has done it. His musical projects are striking collages of diverse influences from the known musical universe, which he channels through specific titles like E da Boss, Lucid Paradise, The Pendletons and Myron & E.

Originally from New Jersey, Cooke is now based in Oakland, California where he’s established a varied and rich musical career as an artist, DJ and producer. He has been releasing music since 2002, almost exclusively on the vinyl format. Dusty Hip Hop breaks, released largely through his own Slept on Records marked his earliest releases while later through his career he would turn his attention to the evocative sounds of the past, siphoning elements of Soul, Funk and Jazz into the present.

Later he would join forces with 90’s music icon Myron Glasper for Myron & E with singles on Timmion Records before the album “On Broadway” found its way out on Stones Throw records. Lauded for it’s stunning “retro-soul” sound, Myron & E established Cooke as a prominent figure on the Neo-soul community with The Pendletons and Lucid Paradise taking up the baton in various new musical directions for the artist shortly after.

From Myron & E’s soulful R&B to the to the sweater funk he and production partner Trailer Limon (Dan Meisenheimer) produces as Lucid Paradise, Cooke’s music spans a vast chasm in the musical spectrum. There’s always something familiar about his music as cues from music’s history touch on something nostalgic. Like a record collector with that rare B-side that holds the key sample to a popular Hip Hop track, Eric Cooke’s musical projects play on those tenuous threads between the familiar and the unknown.

There is a considered connection between his production and his roots as a DJ with a kind of dusty character to the music that sounds like it came from some forgotten box, tucked away in a corner of a second hand store. His preferred form of communication today is the 7” and he has enshrined his love for the format in a night called 45 sessions in Oakland with Platurn, Enki, Mr. E & Shortkut. Through that night he continues to DJ while his various musical projects continue to find new audiences.

He is on the road currently as Lucid Paradise and the Pendletons and with a stop at Jæger imminent we had the opportunity to send him some questions over email. Somewhere on it’s way to Manchester we find Eric Cooke on train …

*Lucid Paradise and The Pendletons are live this Saturday in our backyard with FredFades and Dirty Hans representing the Mutual Intentions crew.

Your musical output is quite diverse going through your projects. What inspired this eclectic approach to music growing up?

Like most dj/producers, I got into hip hop in the early 80’s & because that music was sampled based it took me down a long winding road of discovering old records of all genres. Funk, Jazz, Soul, Rock, etc… After many years of listening to all types of music I 1st started out DJing and then branched out into production after I slowly started to collect drum machines, samplers, effects processors, etc….

You’re playing as The Pendletons and as Lucid Paradise at this upcoming gig at Jæger. Can you tell the folks how these two projects might go differently on the night?

On this tour they go hand in hand. We do a mix of Pendletons & Lucid Paradise tunes all together. As this is our 1st time playing in Europe we had to scale down from a live band to a PA show because the price to bring the whole crew to Europe is just to expensive. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring the full crew next tour.

Both will be live sessions in a club context. How do you adapt/modify the recorded music to the context?

We modify the music quite a bit. We only do half of some songs and add in some unreleased tunes. We just try to keep it upbeat & fast passed to get the crowd interested & dancing!

Vocalist, producer and DJ, you’ve done it all. How are all these different aspects of your career connected, and is there one you prefer over the others?

I think one just lead to the other to be honest. I started as a DJ. Then got into producing & from there I was DJing & producing for hip hop acts. As a DJ I slowly got into being a hype man for mc’s & when I was the DJ for Lateef the Truth Speaker of Quannum Collective he would ask me to sing some of his back up lyrics. Then after a chance meeting with the Timmion Records guys I began singing as an artist. The main thing for me is just to have no fear & to keep trying to push my skill set forward. I’m actually taking acting classes now so who knows….. One day you might see me on TV

I was watching the Pendletons video for Gotta Get Out and the 7” records; the idea of the rent party; and the soulful elements to track all lend a kind of nostalgia to the mood. Is that something you purposefully like to bring through in your music and your DJ sets?

Definitely! I try to play music for everyone when I DJ. I always bring some known & recognisable tunes, ones that really good but have an “across the board” vibe. This tour those tunes have been Best of My Love by The Emotions, The Glow of Love by Change, Street Player by Chicago & more like these. I love to play rare tunes but for me I want to see people having a good time & that happens when you play known tracks. Same goes for making music. After Dan (Meisenheimer) & I have our tracks laid out for a song we try to insert elements from known music that help raise tension and release in music. Same with writing hooks, we try to use phrasing that can get stuck in your mind! We try to make it hard to forget!!

You’ve been running a successful vinyl DJ night In Oakland for a while now. Can you tell us about the 45 sessions?

Yes! I’ve been a part of 45 sessions from the start along with Platurn, Enki, Mr. E & Shortkut! We have always done the party in Oakland, even before the mass exodus of people from SF who moved across the Bay. It’s been a really great party & we’ve hosted some of the top dj’s in the world. Although we don’t do it monthly any longer we just do it quarterly.

I know a lot of people have moved to Oakland, because of the tech industry hiking up all the prices in the city. How do you think it’s affected the music scene there?

The music scene in Oakland is amazing now. It’s better than San Francisco! The bars & clubs downtown Oakland are jumping most nights of the week!

What is it about the 7” format that is just perfect for you?

Oh that’s an easy one. As a dj traveling the world playing vinyl, it’s just easier to carry. That’s the main reason I started carrying around 45’s in the bay area to play. I didn’t have a car & got tired of dragging around a backpack full of 12”s so I just started carrying 45’s all the time. This was years before the hype around 45’s started.

We all know about Amoeba, but what are some of your favourite hidden spots to dig in the Bay Area?

There are a few. Every once in a while you can find a few gems at The Record Man, Ashby Flea Market, or Champion Sound!

Lastly, can you play us out with a track or five?

Here are 5 for the Road!

May My Love Be With You by Phreek

My Favorite Person by The O’Jays

Let’s Get Together by Pam Todd & Love Exchange

Rip It Up by Orange Juice

Confrontation by Home Grown Syndrome

Catching up with Finnebassen

The last time we conversed with Finnebassen on this blog it had followed a flourishing period of creativity from the recording artist. He’d just finished a remix from Gundelach’s critically acclaimed Spiders EP, going to rack up over a million plays on Spotify; then offered a new dimension to the Finnebassen sound with Rotundo that same year; before Sanguine emboldened that sound as it found it’s way out on Polymath the following year.

These releases interspersed Finnebassen’s unrelenting touring schedule that showed little sign of slowing down, and as he came out of that period there followed something of a hiatus for the studio artist.

His touring schedule only intensified however and he added a live performer to his repertoire, making regular appearances at Jæger in that context. A boiler room session in our basement and various DJ commitments around the world has only gone on to cement his prowess as a DJ, studio artist and now live performer.

The recording hiatus was only ever going to be a temporary one and now he’s returned with a remix for Jos and Eli and the rumour mill is turning again with a new EP of original music right around the corner.

We wanted to hear more about this and what else he’d been up to since we last spoke so we caught up with Finnebassen over email before he makes a return to our booth this Frædag.

It has been a while since we had you on the blog. What have been some of the musical highlights for you since?

I’ve had a fair few good gigs around the world since then. On of my favourites was playing in the Amazon jungle with Gregor Tresher for 4000 people. They lit up the forest surrounding us so the atmosphere was incredible.

What’s inspiring you lately in music and beyond?

I’m listening to all kinds of music at the mmoment. We just had a trip to Morocco to celebrate a friend’s birthday, and a friend showed me a Jan Garbarek track I hadn’t heard before called “Where the Rivers Meet”. Joe Sample with “Night Flight” has been in heavy rotation. “Grandma” and “Game Winner” by Vulfpeck have been played a lot as well. Not to mention Digable Planets with “Nickel Bags”. AND Kaiwata Tsuki with “The Barren Moon”

Also I have been re-watching the “The Wire” from HBO and there is something about that show that just punches me right in the face. It’s probably my 6^th time watching it and it really inspires me aesthetically.

There’s been a bit of a hiatus for you in the studio. What was the reason behind that?

I could go on and on about this. Making music can be a lot of fun, but it can also be the most difficult thing in the world. Sometimes you have to get away from it. It’s not that I’m not working or thinking about music. But the actual process can be scary and de-motivating if you don’t have clarity and a sound idea. I think a lot when I make music. I’m not one to just go into to the studio and have muck around and just see what happens. It happens from time to time, that that way of working yields good results, but I don’t like not knowing what I’m getting into. So the reason is basically that I have been forming and developing a new workflow that can take me in a new direction.

But you’re back now with a remix Jos & Eli. How did this come together and what was it about the original that drew you to it?

I was drawn to the name. It fits my musical style and taste quite well. Not that I don’t enjoy vocals, but as of late I tend to listen to and play more instrumental pieces. I wanted to tell a story with and instrument. Which ended up being my Juno 60. So I spent a lot of time arranging midi and then I did a one take recording. Working this way allows me to manipulate different parameters on the synth in real time while the notes are triggered by midi and I can really express myself with the instrument. Making it sound unique. The middle part is taken from the original but it’s also just Midi, this time triggering my sub 37. This gives totally different feel to the breakdown of the track. Being a guy that started doing mostly sampling I’m pretty excited that I slowly reaching a new realm of music production.

Deep House Amsterdam called it a “truly chilling atmospheric experience”. How would you describe the remix?

I don’t know I don’t like to describe to others what my music feels or sounds like. But for me it’s melancholic and there is a sense of longing in it. I guess that is a feeling I have had for a while. There has been a big hole in my life and I guess that track describes and fills that gap.

You’re also currently working on a new EP, the first in a couple of years. Can you tell us one thing about it?

Yes! It’s basically ideas I’ve had for a while. But have had trouble connecting them. I have a hard time making 3 tracks fit together and I didn’t think they do at all still. But who cares; maybe some chinstroker over at RA. My goal is just to make music that feels right to me. The EP consists of 2 4/4 120+ bpm “Big tracks” and one more stripped down. Its finished and on its way to be mixed. I’d rather not say more than that at this point.

You’ve been playing live more at Jæger in recent memory. What do you like about playing live that you can’t do through a DJ set?

It’s a totally different animal altogether. First of all you prepare in a different way. Me and Martin, my live partner, have a very good connection and we read each other very well. Having that connection with another person is a lot of fun and it makes it more valuable because you share the experience with someone. You also have a totally different level of focus. For the 40 minutes you are up there, you are completely absorbed in what you are doing. I guess I have a similar focus when I DJ, but you can’t stand up there with 4500 knobs and try to read the crowd. You have to have some sort of game plan and use it as a guideline for you live set. That is how we do it anyway. And it’s really weird and scary not being able to turn on a dime if your stuff is not working with the crowd. And when you are finished you feel sooooo good, but you are completely drained for energy. Everything is left in the live set. That focus and dedication is what I like about the live sets.

Your back with a DJ set this Friday though and your sets are always special here (and we assume you find it special too). What makes playing at Jæger so special for you?

Well I see its members and a lot of the staff as family and friends. Ola has been a key figure in my career, both challenging me to do my first live gig and giving me my first residency at a proper club. I have been listening to Geir (G-Ha), Ola (Olanskii), Håkon (Vinny Villbass) and Joachim (DiskJokke) since Footfood was at Skaugum. And I always imagined myself playing with them one day. And wouldn’t you know it!!! It actually happened. And it’s happening again in Friday.

Give us three words that would sum up your next set at Jæger.

Primal, musical and driven.

Lastly, please play us out with a song.

It has to be Jan Garbarek – Where the Rivers Meet. God knows there will be enough electronic music on Friday.

One Culture: The past, present and future of Techno with Freddy K and Silent Servant

The origins of Techno

In the 1990’s a very impressionable pre-adolescent Juan Mendez had his first contact with rave culture and Techno through the LA warehouse party scene. The nascent DJ and producer, that would first breakthrough as Jasper and then later as Silent Servant would get into the burgeoning sound of Techno at these raves through an unlikely route.

His brother, a “new wave kid”, exchanged tapes of new music coming in from Europe at the time with a “bunch new wave skateboarder dudes”, and introduced Mendez to the likes of The Cure, The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen throughout the late 80’s and early nineties. Mendez immediately found an affinity with the sound that would lead to bands like My Bloody Valentine.

“We used to go and see a band and then go, ‘ok where is the afterhours’, let’s go find it”, he tells us in a distinctive West Coast accent over a slice of pizza. “That time downtown LA was a ghost town and they would have parties everywhere.”

Growing up in heart of the nineties, Mendez came of age through on the most exciting times for music and especially electronic music. In Europe the second summer of love had only just happened, bringing Acid House to the world stage and starting a movement in its wake that would eventually lead to Techno. Mendez was particularly susceptible to the sound of Techno, but not immediately. As a budding DJ, making his mark in the Orange County suburbs of LA, playing a mix of “new wave and electro stuff” for critical audiences, his start in music came by way of DJing and he remembers his trial by fire fondly.

“You had to know how to mix otherwise they’d kick you off, because it was all about keeping people dancing.” Uncle Jam’s Army, and the World Class Wreckin Crew had already established themselves in the underground DJ scene in LA opening up a path to greatness for the likes of Dr Dre and the Arabian Prince, but at the same time in empty warehouses around downtown LA “rave was happening too”.

Mendez had cottoned on to the sound at first when an Aphex Twin video appeared amongst the likes of My Bloody Valentine in an alternative music show on MTV called 120 Minutes. “This is weird”, he remembers thinking,“ this is cool” and from Aphex Twin to St Etienne, it opened Mendez up to the world of Acid House. “Then I started getting into that and going to clubs and hearing this sound” and upon making some influential friends in LA he got into the sound of Detroit, in large part due to an R&S compilation called “In Order to Dance 5”.

“It had 69 (Carl Craig), Basic Channel and Kenny Larkin. So I was like whoa, what’s this. I like this! I started going to more parties with a couple of guys that threw parties. That’s where I heard DBX and old Cabinet Records, all the stuff that was on Plus 8-, Submerge- and Telenet distribution. I was like; ‘alright, this is awesome.’”

The parties and the record stores were one piece of the puzzle, but possibly the most vital piece of the jigsaw would be the radio. Radio played an important role in the proliferation of that sound the world over and in LA they “had a really good radio station” which brought the sound across the atlantic to the US in what Mendez describes as an “idealisation of Europe”.

Freddy K tunes in

“At that time radio was also really important”, says Alessio Armeni stressing Mendez’ point. The Italian DJ, aka Freddy K, had been listening intently as Mendez talked about his introduction to Techno, and when it came to radio, it was a chance for him to distill some of his early experiences. Armeni rose to prominence through Italy as a DJ and producer, but ultimately made his mark on the radio in Rome, where he established the show Virus, which ran unopposed for eight years as Italy’s leading radio program for electronic music.

Following a similar path to Mendez as a DJ that started out playing private parties and moving into the club, Armeni went on to establish a fundamental career as a DJ; a facilitator for the scene and the music; a label manager; and head of KEY vinyl records.

He’s been living in Berlin for the past five years today, but his Italian accent is still prominent. He converses with Mendez in an easy, relaxed manner like they’ve been friends for years. The two have played together a few times since Armeni’s return to to the DJ circuit and effortlessly slip into a congenial report with each other. The Italian DJ is about a head taller than Mendez and a little older at 47, but his athletic physique belies his age, the result of being a competition swimmer in in his youth.

“I was a swimmer so I didn’t have so much time to go to parties, but then I had the radio.” Like Mendez MTV too “was so important at that time” and again like Mendez, Armeni’s induction into the world of electronic music would come through other avenues, from Rock to Hip Hop and “from kraftwerk to shitty pop”.

The radio and MTV might have been his introduction to electronic music but it would the record store that would cultivate it, and one record store in particular played a pivotal role in his musical education. It was called Remix and it was “this small shop in the centre of Rome” which was only about “twenty square meters and super loud”. Armeni would eventually become one of the proprietors of the shop later on, but back at the genesis of Acid House he “used get the flyers for raves there” and there he would come into contact with DJs like Lory D, Leo Anibaldi and Marco Passarini , seminal characters in Italy’s electronic music history today.

The “first acid house” record Armeni bought he bought from there; “a picture disc with a smile on it, and it was called Acid Party (sic) Fever”, he remembers with a smiling gesture. The radio and the record store would lead to the first Underground Resistance record in Armeni’s collection, and eventually Techno would dominate his tatses.

“It was exactly the definition of a movement”, he explains. “You listened to the radio, you know where you have to go to buy (the records), you know where you have to go to dance, you know what you have to wear if want to be part of a group. I was victim of this… in a good way.”

But what was it that ultimately drew both these DJs from disparate corners of the world to Techno?

Alessio Armeni: “Techno was new, the first Underground Resistance was incredible. It was energetic for me like punk and heavy metal, but different.”

Juan Mendez: “I enjoyed the whole escapism part. Growing up in a Orange County suburb, you want to be other places and this is a way to be other places without having to travel.”

The nineties was a very fertile time for Armeni and Mendez, and both had risen to prominence through the scenes in their respective hometowns: Armeni established Virus radio in Rome, becoming one of the most ardent supporters of the genre and a seminal DJ in the scene; while Mendez, coming through in the warehouse rave scene in LA, adopted his first production alias Jasper.

Taking his rightful place amongst the likes of Lory D, Anebaldi, and Passarani in Italy, Armeni became an “activist” for Techno in Italy. He became a partner at Remix as well as starting his own record store and took on the role of facilitator as label owner of KEY_Vinyl. He also released music throughout the nineties mostly on ACV and KEY with his only LP, Rage of Age being lauded as “the Old Sound of Rome today” by critics.

“Doing the minimal thing”, Mendez and musical cohorts Marcus Miller, Steve Tang and Kit Clayton started Cytrax in the same year as Richie Hawtin’s M_nus, propelling the sound of minimal Techno into the electronic music mainstream.

Both Mendez and Armeni would enjoy careers through one of the most prolific eras of electronic music at this point, with their individual profiles ballooning with the popularity of electronic club music. But then as the new millenium started coming of age, the bubble would burst and both Armeni and Mendez would retreat from the limelight as the music and the landscape became unrecognisable to them.

The end of an era

“Everything became hype and fashion” says Armeni. At the time when digital music arrived it marked the end for a vinyl enthusiasts like Armeni. He became disenchanted by it all. “You (didn’t) have these beautiful things to transmit your tastes (anymore)”. That made Armeni “lose enthusiasm” for the cause he had endorsed so passionately throughout the nineties.

Suddenly he was finding himself standing in a record store for twelve hours a day only to have people come in and say “I have that on digital already”. He stopped playing in Rome and only played around Tuscany and Florence and eventually came to the realisation: “ I have a lot of experience, I should do something with my experience, I can’t die in a record shop.” He completely stopped DJing and shortly after would channel that experience in the label management business K1971, retreating out of the public eye completely and hanging up his headphones… but not forever.

“I had a similar experience” says Mendez, listening to Armeni’s story. Cytrax was doing well and Jasper had found an audience beyond his hometown, but as the new millennium creeped further in and digital music embedded itself as the de-facto format for DJs, Mendez too would feel the pinch as Techno’s expansive vision narrowed to a pinhole.

“It was that era all the distribution companies started filing bankruptcy” and as Mendez’ own label started to “nose-dive” he thought to himself “I’m done with Techno for a while”. “Funnily for me I was in some legal trouble so I couldn’t leave the states. Everything kind of died and I couldn’t go anywhere.”

Marcus Miller moved to New York during that time, and Mendez would visit his old label mate, the two frequenting various basement parties around the city where albels like DFA were staking their claim. Through these bunker jaunts in New York Mendez would hear “proper post-punk” for the first time. “When I heard that for the first time, I was like this is awesome and that’s when I started buying all that stuff.” He brought it all to LA, and while “everyone endured the wave the shittiness” currently consuming Techno, he applied his skills as a DJ to this style of music. “We were playing old records like fad gadget and DAF mixed with House of the Jealous lovers.”

But what had happened to Techno?

M: “There was this weird moment, that if you played at Robert Johnson for instance, you couldn’t play hard Techno there, unless you played in the basement club, and that was considered trashy music, like Trance.”

A: “It was a moment that was very sad for Techno.”

M: “There wasn’t as much diversity. I try to be very careful with that (today). I don’t just play EBM or Techno. What happened at that time with 90’s Techno, I don’t want that to happen again. I think we can re-contextualise everything that went wrong and show it in a different way.”

A new dawn of popularity

In direct response to this lack of diversity, came a new musical direction for Juan Mendez. Friend and contemporary Karl O’Oconnor (British Murder Boys and Regis) had visited Mendez on occasion in LA only to hear records he hadn’t heard for over twenty years being played in the context of a DJ set. Both O’Connor and Mendez “saw the arc and then the crash” happen in Techno and the pair pivoted around the current state of Techno to establish Sandwell District.

Sandwell District was a collective, an artistic group, and a label made up of David Sumner, Juan Mendez, Karl O’Connor and Peter Sutton, amongst others; channelling some of that post-punk spirit and attitude into Techno. Mendez would install his Silent Servant alias into this paradigm too, bringing a little something of that diversity he talked about into the Techno genre again with music that drifted between EBM, House, Acid and Synth wave.

Around the same time in Rome, Armeni was getting increasingly disillusioned with the Techno scene. ”Where I was, the environment was negative”, he explains. The problem for Armeni was that “Rome was always one step ahead, but it didn’t have the organisation of Germany.” There were (and still is)”a lot of good artists” in Rome but “there (was) no scene”. When he talked about music in Rome people didn’t “understand” him. He thought to himself “I’m not crazy so why should I be in Rome.“ A move to Berlin beckoned and there Armeni would find the “enthusiasm for playing again”. He picked up his headphones again, and a residency at ://about blank’s defunkt gay night Homopatik followed.

It was a time of increased popularity for Techno, which in fact continues to grow today, and saw Mendez’ Silent Servant alias rise to prominence too. He and Karl had gone from Sandwell District to Jealous God throughout this era with James Ruskin in tow, and Mendez rose to underground fame during this period as Techno stepped out from the basement into the light, through superstar DJs like Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann.

Today Mendez spends three weeks at a time in Europe, playing some of the most renowned clubbing institutions on the continent and back home. Armeni’s appearances have also increased as he came back to form and his closing sets at Berghain have become something of a legend, but “it’s not that it (the environment) is better” compared to the height of the genre’s popularity in the nineties. In fact this newfound popularity where everybody has Techno on the tip of their tongue comes with a stern warning from the veteran.

A: “It’s great, but it’s missing the input from somebody that has the knowledge about this. It’s a free interpretation. Underground Resistance is not just the Carhartt jacket you’re wearing, there’s a concept behind it. We grew up with the radio show with somebody with the knowledge to explain what this is and somebody that would filter what you are listening to. That could also be (detrimental), but if you have somebody with the knowledge in the end you have one culture. Today if you go on to You Tube and type in Techno it could be so random. You have the wrong culture.”

J: “We’re still in a middle ground phase and we still haven’t seen the full extent of what it’s like to know everything. There is a beauty to it sometimes when people can come into something without knowing context and be able to contextualise in their own way. We had the nineties and the nineties were weird for a lot of things, and now we’re coming out of that and you can cherry pick the best of the nineties and you can re-contextualise them. I’ll meet these kids and they’ll know Regis, but it will be mixed up with all this other stuff, and that could be good… but I still haven’t seen it happen.”

The future of Techno

Armeni and Mendez’ combined experience stretches the entire history of Techno so far and although they might have approached it from different regions with different results they speak one language. Armeni will often return to the point of culture while he talks, and he is very critical of the effect of social media and the “superstar DJ” on this culture, where hype and popularity can be bought and proliferated enmasse without even reaching a club dance floor. “If you have a club with good resident DJ, that is culture” he drives home, “not what is written in the magazine” or appears online on your social media feed. This is the essential crux of what’s “missing from the nineties” for Armeni; the vital piece of the puzzle in a social construct of the club environment that motivates a movement.

Armeni is still a “simple DJ” he considers, “the typical example of a consumer of music that became a DJ” and in that he and Mendez share the same mind. “I owe a lot to Kit Clayton and Karl (O’Connor). If it wasn’t for them I could never have understood who I am.” Mendez “enjoys” doing his radio show, Optimistic Decay on NTS at the moment because he “can do old stuff and new stuff, and it always ends in Techno in some way.” Techno not as a singular thread concentrated down to one sound, but rather the vast expanse of the genre leading up to this point today. “If somebody can hear a Waveform Transmission record played way slower, with a new pinkman record there’s some connection between the new and the old, and they can keep it going.”

A: “If you give something, people are open. If you have a point of view, they feel it.”

J: “At the end of the day my ideal endpoint would be to end up somewhere between Andrew Weatherall and John Peel, because for me those are two of the most important people to this whole thing. John Peel could do a Peel session for the Smiths and then do a Peel session for Regis; that happened, that’s in the history books.”

Mendez always carries a few seminal older tracks on USB drive, something he can pitch way down through the modern technology of a CDJ to find some even ground with contemporary electronic music he and Armeni still acquires on vinyl. Armeni carries two bags of records with him everywhere he plays, and it’s mostly comprised of new releases. Mendez never gets “tired of hearing a new record”, but will always find something new in the old record too. In a recent studio session with Mannequin records’ boss Alessandro Adriani he heard Leo Anibaldi’s Muta for the first time; a record Armeni knows all to well as he jumps on the title of the record before Mendez can recall it. “It was kind of a brain dance record”, says Mendez with relish, “it was so sick”.

It is a moment like that that keeps the passion alive for DJs like Mendez and Armeni and even if they might lose some enthusiasm for the genre occasionally, it’s always there and it’s something they’ll continually return to, regardless.

Finally when we run out of time and I have one question left to ask, there’s only one question that remains. What keeps them going, why do they continue to cart records around for the pleasure of other people in the context of a club? The response comes in unison; “the music”.

*Freddy K and Silent Servant played the Triangle Showcase, which returns to Jæger on the 14th of September.

*Regis plays our basement on the 4th of August for a Downwards showcase.

Filter Musikk: More than just a record store

Around the time I moved to Oslo, I had become very disillusioned by the electronic music landscape and the industry around it. Bombarded by email promos, social media and the music media there had been enough music passing my way to fill a week’s worth of listening in a single day, and most of it made no impression on me at all. It had become a cluttered vacuum of prescribed formulas and media hype that had sucked all the soul and ingenuity out of this music that sparked something in me as a teenager. It had become and irreverent noise, an unbearable homogeneity of consumer music, vacuous and empty at its core.

Record stores pandering to the physical manifestation of the hype, offered little in the way of solace perpetuating the labels and artists that have staked the large majority claim on the independent record industry and its hype machine with albums from mainstream leftfield electronic artists and functional 12 inches from big independent labels clogging up vinyl presses all over the world.

Impersonal exchanges with record store staff using the job as a stepping stone to a career as a “superstar DJ” made for an uninspiring, intimidating atmosphere that didn’t encourage any discovery beyond the superficial, but that all changed when I moved to Oslo and met Roland Lifjell, stepping into Filter Musikk for the first time.

The proprietor of Filter Musikk, a DJ, producer and facilitator Lifjell is a renowned figure in Oslo’s electronic music hemisphere. He had his start in 80’s synth electronica, moving to DJing through the Oslo’s Goa trance scene, before becoming one of the leading DJs and producers of Techno in the city, both as a solo act, Audibelle and with longtime production partner Kristian Sinkerud.

Meeting Roland for the first time that intimidation of going into a new record store carried over to this experience, but after a few brief conversations with the soft-spoken, pragmatic and quite funny Norwegian, I’ve felt a welcome I haven’t felt ever before or since. As our relationship grew beyond the customer and shopkeeper dynamic into a friendship, Filter Musikk has become more than just a record store to me.

Very rarely before have I found a record store that spoke so intricately to my own tastes. Although Roland might draw strong associations with the Techno genre in the city through his personal interests, at Filter you can find everything from Afro Beat to Trance in the shelves, always encouraging an expedition in to new, untapped musical worlds. For the first time I wasn’t really finding the records I was looking for and the records made popular by their hype, but I was also finding the records and music from labels and artists unknown to me, that succeeded to make a huge impression in my record collection and my personal tastes.

Falling Etchics, Studio 89 and Delft records were some of the endearing labels I had come across at Filter for the first time, while artists like LNS, Skymax and Volruptus made impressions that continue to intrigue today. At Filter Musikk, I knew I wouldn’t miss out on the best of L.I.E.S, Semantica or Mathematics releases and could always find the latest in new Norwegian music from DJ’s and artists passing through Jæger’s booth.

But my story isn’t unique and many DJs in the Oslo community share similar stories.

Orjan Sletner (Kompressorkanonen), Ole Martin Magnussen and Jan-Fredrik Bjerk (Jan Mayan) all share similar experiences as three DJs from disparate musical backgrounds. Orjan is an old friend of Roland’s today, coming up into the Oslo DJ world at the same time through the Goa scene. He helped build the shop as it stands today – well demolish the previous interior at least – and continues to frequent the shop for new records on a weekly basis.

Ole Martin Mangunssen is a DJ and collector with his nose in House and Disco. There have been few Fridays I haven’t seen him in the shop in conversation with Roland about anything from music to the daily news.

Jan Fredrik Bjerk is the DJ behind Hjemme Med Dama, a mix series and tape label that offers a platform for Oslo’s unsung DJ heroes, which in the past year has become a prominent feature in the shop, thanks to initiatives like Cassette Store Day.

The four of us gather at Hell’s Kitchen to talk about Filter Musikk, unbeknownst to Roland Lifjell, as he prepares for a summer season at Jæger with a series of Filter Musikk showcases with Jokke Houmb. As Lifjell’s oldest friend and longest customer, we pick up the origins of the Filter Musikk story with Orjan…

Orjan, You probably know the origins of Filter Musikk better than anyone here.

Orjan: I haven’t gone back to my diary to check the details. I think (Roland) started selling records in Music Mæstro. I’ve known Roland since ‘95, that’s a long time and he’s been selling records for a long time. (In) the early 2000’s, maybe late nineties, he started selling records at a music shop called Filter, which was run by somebody else at that time. Because they were selling synths and stuff to make electronic music, and Roland sold electronic music on vinyl, they thought it would have a synergy effect, and Roland moved in. Then gradually, he became more involved, and eventually took over the whole business.

Was he selling records before he started DJing.

O: No he was a DJ first and he only started selling records later.

Jan-Frederik: He started DJing with DAT.

Orjan: He started DJing with DAT, because he was playing Psy-Trance back in the day.

Why DAT tapes?

O: I don’t known, but maybe it’s because there was a lot of unreleased music doing the rounds in that scene and DAT was the format.

Ole-Martin: It was possibly a mailing list thing.

Orjan: Could be, but that wasn’t something that sold commercially. I’ve heard stories that they couldn’t play vinyl in Goa, because it was so hot and that’s the reason, but maybe that’s bullshit.

…But for Roland selling records came out of DJIng. I got to know him just before he started working at Mind Travels. He’s been selling records more or less continuously for the last 22 years.

Ole-Martin do you remember the first time you went to Filter.

O-M: Yes, I don’t remember exactly when it was, but it was just after he moved from Opera Stasjon to his current location. If he doesn’t know the person coming into the shop, he’s kind of reserved, and only when you leave the shop will he ask, “do you need some help”. It was one of those moments. That’s classic Roland.

JF: Yeah I was terrified when I came into that shop for the first time.

It can be a bit intimidating. I went in there for the first time, looking for a job, the summer before I moved here.

O-M: Yeah, how did that go?

It was interesting, but I would go back there to buy records and as we started talking more about music, you realise that Roland is very open and easy to speak to.

O-M: Yeah, he probably won’t just give you the benefit of the doubt, and will try you out first.

How about you Jan-Fredrik, what was your first experience like?

JF: It’s kind of the same as when you go to Hardwax or something like that; you don’t particularly get a welcome, but Roland is a surprisingly vwarm, and generous guy. I’ve actually become his neighbour so we’ve become good friends in the last few years.

Something I would like to add: Roland works everyday, Monday to Saturday from 11-ish to 6 or 9-ish and there’s no holiday involved. It’s unbelievable that he’s able to focus on equipment as well as the import thing.

We’ll obviously buy stuff online as well, but why do we keep going back to the record store?

O-M: The service, the conversation.

O: It’s just a nice thing. Going to a record store is where the real knowledge is passed, not to mention the gossip. Sitting at home and buying records from your computer is not a nice experience. Going down there browsing is just better.

One thing I’d like to stress is that a shop can be as legendary as anything but if people don’t go there and support it, it’s not going to survive. That happens all the time. If the local grocery closes because the rent increases and nobody goes shopping there anymore, then everybody goes: “oh it’s a shame!”. Why weren’t you going there before it closed – support your local dealer.

I always find something at Filter that I don’t know about, but then immediately obsess over. I will go in every Friday or Saturday and there would be at least one, more likely three records that I didn’t know about, but I would instantly connect with.

O: That’s the thing, sometimes when you go to a record store like Filter where the selection is not so big, and it’s more curated it’s actually more rewarding than going to a shop that has everything.

JF: What do you think about the selections at Filter?

O: He used Next Stop distribution for ages, and they used to be really really good. In the nineties they had everything and they kept going into the naughties, but then they phased out the vinyl bit, because there’s no real money in vinyl anymore; it kind of survives on enthusiasm. At the end all they could offer was Prodigy and Roland had to change the supplier.

He started using wordandsound, Hardwax and Triple vision, and then in the last six seven eight years the shop went from being good to extraordinary. It’s the best shop this city has had bar none.

The good thing about it is that I’ve gone back to an old school way of record shopping. I just go down there and Roland will ask: “should I pick something out for you”. He usually brings me a huge pile, and I’ve never heard of the label, never heard of the producer, but I’ll end up buying it. So I don’t pay as much attention to what’s going on.

JF: Everytime I get there on a Friday, I have to find the pile that is new, because it’s usually on the floor…

O-M: …under his desk or something.

JF: It’s like he doesn’t want to sell them.

O-M: But if you know Roland, you’ll just ask, “where are the new records”, and he’ll tell you.

JF: It has a kind of High Fidelity (the movie) vibe to it.

Most people think of Roland as this Techno guy, but you can go to Filter and find everything, from UK breakbeat to House music.

OM: Yeah I’m a House and Disco guy, and Roland has something for everyone I guess.

Do you always find something?

O-M: It depends what I’m looking for, but usually I’ll find something. I think his newsletter is great and he has a great selection, and there’s something for everyone, and it will vary from month to month, but I’m quite satisfied. I don’t need to order something online.

JF: And you can order from him. When I see something from Decks or Hardwax that’s nearly sold out, he’ll order it for me.

He’s done that for me many times.

JF: It costs so much with the shipping these days, that I’d rather get it from him.

Jan Frederik as you’re the only one here that is also a supplier as Hjemme Med Dama, maybe you can tell us a bit of that side too. How did you get your tapes into the store?

JF: I guess I was a bit intimidated in the beginning, because here I come the newcomer with the rubbish name; but he was like: “oh tapes, back in the days…” And then he also wanted to sell his own tapes. Suddenly we had a connection and that’s surprising, because you tend to think of Roland as this main man, DJ and how can a newcomer just come in and sell his stuff. But he likes distributing these other things close to home, like from Stavanger and Sex Tags.

O-M: It’s your fault he has cassettes at all. (Laughs)

JF: I also thought; ‘you should have more stuff going on the shop,’ so I started doing that type of thing since it’s the only shop here that’s into electronic music. But the shop is not the best designed store…

O-M: It’s a tight space.

JF: … Then I just pitched the idea of doing these events and release parties for HMD and then there’s been releases from other labels.

OM: There was a Mental Overdrive show there too, and that was really good.

Why do you think vinyl still appealsin this digital world?

O: It’s the only format that’s good for digging.

O-M: And the details of the artwork. It’s easy to drown in a library of digital files.

O: It’s a bit awkward for me talking about the resurgence of vinyl.

O-M: It’s never gone away.

O: For me it’s never gone away and for me it’s the opposite. When vinyl was dead in other genres, It was very much alive and kicking in hip hop and dance music. In the nineties even if it was relatively unsuccessful album or EP it would still sell 1500 copies easy.

O-M: I actually have a compilation at home, that says limited edition, 5000. That’s crazy by today’s standards.

O: Now today you won’t even dare to 500. No, let’s do 300 and if it’s successful the price goes through the roof.

JF: Like that recent Traumprinz release as DJ Healer. Stuff like that, that they know is gonna sell well, they’ll just do it for the publicity.

I’ve heard of labels pressing 50 copies of a record recently.

O: Yeah it’s getting ridiculous. For me, there’s not really been a resurgence of vinyl in dance music. There might be more good stuff coming out on vinyl now than say ten years ago, but it is nothing compared to the nineties.

Roland Lifjell’s ears must have been burning, because he walks in on us talking about him. His reluctant smile beams as he approaches: “So this is where you all are?” It’s a another blistering afternoon in the city, and the conversation unravels as the thirsts are quenched. Thinking back on it, all these people sitting around the table, I’ve all come to know through Roland and Filter Musikk, and they like the store have become an extension of my professional life into my personal life. Filter Musikk is a hang-out, it’s work, it’s a leisurely pursuit and it’s a community. It reinvigorated my musical passions at a time of feeling disillusioned and today it’s become an integral part of my life. Filter Musikk is more than just a record-store.

* The first Filter Musikk Showcase sees Boris join Jokke in our basement next Friday.

A space of their own with KSMISK

While living in Amsterdam Trulz Kvam and Robin Crafoord started the working on their debut album Mechanized World; an album that launched a career as Trulz & Robin which spans a lifetime today. They were young, eager and enthusiastic and when they weren’t working on music they were savouring it at one of their favourite haunts in that city, Westergas. A converted gas tank that became an underground Techno club, Westergas was the De School or Shelter of its day with every serious Techno DJ passing through its booth. One particularly memory of the place remains particularly vivid to the duo.

It was a Techno night with Jeff Mills Luke Slater and Surgeon on the bill. When the batton was passed to Surgeon a particular mood filled the tank at Westergas. It started with loud “drone” remembers Truls, who suddebly stands up out of his chair as if the immensity of the moment is just to much to contain. “The walls were vibrating and then suddenly…” Truls trails off into a guttural explosive noise. “He blew Luke Slater and Jeff Mills away!”

They went home the next morning and immediately started work on what would become “Hypnojam”, the first single from their debut album, released in 2001 to great critical acclaim. The experience at Westergas left at an indelible mark on the start of their career as Trulz & Robin, but it has remained committed to their shared memory as they worked through three albums and an extensive collection of EPs over the last twenty years. In 2017, while working on the debut album, Mikrometeorittene under their newly formed KSMISK alias, they would invoke Westergas again as the title of the penultimate track on the album; one of two tracks that don’t perpetuate the geological theme of the album.

“Westergas” is a fast-paced Techno tremor, rumbling in the subterranean belly of clubland, with staccato synths bouncing out of rabbit holes from distant dimensions. The track rips through the centre of a psychedelic maelstrøm of sounds down to some incandescent wonderland. It’s a moment of incredible release as elements swirl around a calm drone, sucking the entire track down a lucid black hole before erupting again into a 4-4 kick and an explosive melee of synthesisers and noise.

Their experience/s in Westergas in some way provided the premise for the way this record would sound, neatly contained within that track. “Yes, that and Blitz”, says Robin, pointing to another track title on the album. The ultimate objective of Truls and Robin’s KSMISK project is a very specific club environment with Robin picturing “a big warehouse setting” or “a big dark hall” when he invokes the sound of KSMISK. “The KSMISK sound”, says Truls, “we always knew what we wanted that to be” and with their debut album Robin believes they’ve “nailed it”. Truls gestures at the sound and the feeling of KSMISK where words fail him. “You’re almost scared”, he says using the Surgeon set at westergas by way of analogy again, “because things are opening up.”

For the last year and half their focus has been primarily on the KSMISK project with two EPs, a single on a PLOINK compilation and now the album, consolidating the sound of the project. There’s a sense of trepidation to the KSMISK sound, which Truls and Robin have channeled through five club tracks and four ambient album vignettes on Mikromitteorittene.

I meet Truls and Robin in their studio along the Akerselva, Oslo where most of Mikrometeorittene was finalised before it was sent to Thomas Urv at PLOINK. Robin puts on a brand new pressing of the record while we talk. “It’s probably the best mastering we’ve ever had on a record”, he claims. At some point through my questions I lose focus and drift off, compelled towards the sounds of “Marinate”, the choppy vocals of Maria Isabel calling to mind an amalgamation of 90’s rave music that’s very specific but also incredible intangible in that moment. A collective nostalgia seeps in through the contemporary Techno aesthetic, but Truls insist it was a completely “unconscious” reference to a time past.

Robin met Truls after moving to Oslo from Gothenburg in the mid nineties while the latter was working at Music Maestro (a long-gone record store with its own stories to tell) and found a kindred spirit in Truls. They bonded over a shared love of all things House and Techno, and started DJing together, hosting parties like those at the aforementioned Blitz on the side. They were one of the few DJs playing Techno in a city dominated by House and DJing would eventually lead to producing, something Robin had already started experimenting with back in Sweden. Two weeks from the time Robin landed in Oslo, he moved in with Truls and the pair turned their living room into a studio. Three albums later and a host of EPs as Trulz and Robin, the pair have been exploring the vast boundaries of electronic music, from the retrofitted Techno of Mechanized World, to the Electro/House-funk of Kaosmatisk and the deep, melodic electronica of Dance Music Therapy.

It has come to a point today where booking Truls and Robin could accommodate any and all of these disparate musical styles and that’s informed a major part of the decision to create the KSMISK alias. “We had a lot of different styles so it was nice to do something that was more pure”, explains Truls. “This project made us realise we can separate it more”, adds Robin “and get it more structured, and that’s been a good process for us.” With their electro-leaning Robomatic project and KSMISK, joining the Trulz & Robin franchise, they divide their efforts across three monikers, cultivating a distinct sound for each.

Mikrometeorittene’s closest descendant is Mechanized World, but offering a much more contemporary approach to the Techno genre. I wonder if it is down to an evolution in their work, but Truls suggests not. “I feel in a way we go in a circle” and redefining the parameters between the projects has allowed them more freedom to explore these more purest forms of their cavernous electronic music interests. KSMISK is a “different vibe in general” according to Robin who also believes they should’ve separated these different sounds “years ago”.

After a short introduction via “Lonsdaleite”, “Silicate” sets the pace of the album in a progressive arrangement over a hefty 9 minutes long. It continually builds tension as static repetitive parts only modulate in textures before subsiding into the deep rolling waves of bass and kick. There’s a distinct progressive form that never quite resolves, leaving the listener on a frayed edge of anxiety as it rolls past every phase of the track with little relief coming from the white noise and feedback as it disperses into the ether. The rhythm is incessant and unrelenting and like a piece of psychedelia or dub it remains a constant in amongst the ephemeral atmosphere that cloud the track.

I’m not surprised to find that all tracks were conceived as a live jam, while listening to “Silicate”. There’s an organic process underpinning the progression of the track, with the slightest of human touches etching out the arrangement in a very controlled and reserved way, and I find it’s very much down to the way Truls and Robin work together. “Even if I’m sitting with something at home I’m always recording”, says Truls. From these live jam sessions at home and the studio “a lot of sketches” appea ed,which they finalised by “colouring the sound” explains Robin. The effects are a record that speaks to the body without overtaxing the cognitive. “I don’t like to be in the head”, explains Truls about their working process. “Once you start thinking about what you are going to do, I feel it never works.”

Truls and Robin came through in the world of analogue equipment and dat recorders, where if something is deleted it stays deleted or when something is recorded it can be recalled and reworked at any time. Their workflow has remained consistent even through the digital era with the live aspects of their work defining the Trulz & Robin sound through the years. They’ve never lost sight of that approach they say, and in KSMISK it’s quite prominent both on the record and on stage.

KSMISK is live project rather than a DJ set, but it’s largely been a solo project with only Robin representing the duo as Truls suffers from severe tinnitus. “They are not with me anymore, these ears” says Truls. A car accident, “a long time ago” was the cause for the affliction, but over the years it’s only aggravated its effects. “Weeks afterwards my head is (still) ringing.” He feels it’s “hard on the psyche” when he’s making music or listening to it, envisioning the party before him, but has it affected the music? “Maybe”, he suggests but “that’s hard for me to know.” What he does know is that he “appreciates it much more… I treasure it when I listen to music now”.

Although he will not be able to make this upcoming Jæger gig for fear of the soundsystem in our basement, he is hopeful that Sommerøya will see him back on stage again. In some devine fate Surgeon will be performing on the same stage and Truls and Robin are eager to share their story of the Westergas experience with him.

Beyond that…. after spending a year and a half on KSMISK they are returning as Trulz and Robin with their fourth studio album and a new bandcamp label. “We have so much more music” says Truls and they are itching to get it out there; “just do it for ourselves.”

*KSMISK perform live this Friday at Frædag x PLOINK.

The future sounds of Manchester with Ruf Dug

The city of Manchester and its border towns have played a significant role in the history of popular music and its cultural impact over the last century. A culturally diverse district with a working man’s ideology embedded deep within its origins, Manchester has contributed its fair share of cultural stepping stones and cultural icons to the world. From musical anomalies like Northern Soul, acid House, the Hacienda, Factory records, New Order, Stone Roses, the Smiths, post-punk and yes, of course Oasis, its prominence on the world music stage cannot be taken lightly. A vivid heritage pulses through the veins of the region with a myriad of outside influences informing a very distinct cultural identity in the city. “It’s very rich and very nuanced and we’ve got a massive cultural vocabulary”, says Simon Mcruff Al-duggleston from his home in the city.

Simon is perhaps better known by his Ruf Dug alias; a producer, radio host DJ and label owner who has been releasing music on Unknown to the Unknown, Klasse Werks and Süd Electronic as well as his own Ruf Kutz imprint and plays regularly for international audiences, especially from his monthly NTS radio show. Born in Manchester, with summers in Ibiza and stints in Australia, Simon’s music and sets favour a similar nomadic pursuit to his lifestyle. His NTS radio show can go anywhere from the Balearic isles to the cyber-soundtracks of video games while as a producer he similarly eschews the borders of music for a fluid approach across genres and styles in pursuit of a fleeting individual flavour. Co-owner of the ‘outlandish’ Hi-Tackle record shop in Manchester and playing sets regularly all over the UK, Simon is championed as the “original tropical cyberpunk” by his peers for his eclectic and eccentric approach to music, an approach he shares with the diverse musical heritage of the city he calls home.

With his proximation to the city and his own diverse musical inclinations as well as his experience, we called Simon up to talk about the future of the Manchester sound – if such a thing even exists. We asked Simon to pick five tracks from the city that has or ultimately will make a large impact on the future of music in Manchester.

When the digital bubbling ringtone of Skype cuts out, Simon is on the other end of the call in his home in Manchester. He is currently putting the finishing touches on a record that looks to one of the UK’s more obscure musical anomalies. “The idea was to make a Street Soul record” for the newly launched Rhythm Section label in London says. Utilising the radio show/label’s newly established London studio to record a host of vocalists, from obscure classical artists like Hannah Jones to accidental voices like Bradley Zero from Rhythm Section, Simon went into the recording session trying to seize upon that spirit of the Street Soul era. Using little more than a sampler and a microphone, Simon “wanted to capture that collaborative way of making music” with a “modern” touch and by the time I call him up he believes that has at least “two or three absolute belters just from the raw takes.”

Bó‘vel – Check 4 U

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Street Soul has played a prominent role in the heritage of Manchester and came about during a time when “there was a lot of racial division and crime” and as such “the music remained very underground” according to Simon. It had persisted to be quite obscure and was almost lost to the world, but with a recent focus on that style of music through labels like Trilogy Tapes, “it’s a sound that is starting to get more popular now.”

“Check 4U is one of the grails” of the Street Soul sound for Simon, and although his intentions were to just get a copy of the record from the artist, a few friendly enquiries to Matt Black, a Street Soul original, lead to an introduction to Bô’vel; a request for a remix; and a re-issue of the record on B with records.

What drew you to the track initially?

It’s a perfect union of quite a few core elements that I love in music. Really beautiful soulful female vocal, but it’s a really minimal electronic production. It’s also got a really heavy reggae soundsystem quality to it, that big 808 sinewave kind of thing.

Simon “has been into street soul for a while” and has been playing Check 4 U on his NTS show regularly, which always has “an amazing reaction in people”. I’m surprised to find out the track is over twenty years old, and Simon believes that’s because “it’s a really timeless tune” with a very UK sensibility at its core: “That’s what’s so good about street soul music is UK music made by people with a soundsystem mentality that want to make pop tunes.“

Bô’vel’s soulful vocal floats with an arresting grace over the sub-bass wave anchored in the oscillating, looping beat. The singer’s voice progresses through an arrangement that stays largely stationary and lends much from the UK’s soundsystem and dance music cultures.

DJ Absolutely Shit – A night at shelley’s Laser Dome

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Although Simon grew up in the city of the Hacienda, Factory records and Acid House his own relationship to club- and subcultural dance music is far more fractured than that. “Fractured is a good word” he says. While he’s “liked electronic music from an early age” it wasn’t the sound of Acid House or Techno that first caught his attention but rather the sound of some fictional future. While songs like Giorgio Moroder and artists like Pet Shop Boys had certainly caught his attention on Top of the Pops, it was the music from TV and video games that would be Simon’s first electronic love.

What was it about TV and video games that caught your attention?

All the big TV shows like Night Rider and Airwolf, had this kind of mega synthy kind of intros. Synthesizers were just spacy, science fiction devices for me.

And how did you eventually get into the club music thing?

My first real exposure to club music as such, would’ve been early 808 state. There were a couple of kids at school that would be into really cool music, and they would give me tapes. Growing up in Manchester, I was aware of the role Manchester was playing in Acid House, but I was a bit too young and too suburban to really access that properly. Because it was electronic music and I was into electronic music through computers and things, I was sort of paying attention to it, but never really engaging with it.

It wasn’t until I was at university, around the age of 21 that would go to my first House music night and heard all this amazing House music – I don’t think it was actually very good when I think about it now, but it blew my mind at the time… And then I started taking ecstasy and then it all fucking happened. (Laughs)

The music Simon had previously dismissed had found a new favour with the burgeoning artist and he started frequenting Techno clubs, and eventually found Theo Parrish and “it was all good.” Another significant factor in Simon’s musical development was also the game Wipe-Out which featured Chemical beats by Chemical brothers. Later, at the relatively mature age of 29 he would buy his first set of decks with all these influences eventually staking a claim in his DJ sets and productions today. “It’s a wiggly line”, he says about these factors, “but it’s still a line you can draw all the way through.”

DJ Absolutely Shit’s a night at Shelly’s Laser dome harks back to that era of broken beats and rave influences of the nineties Simon would’ve been introduced to this music and although a contemporary track, it seems to carry the entire of UK subcultures with it. The Housy gospel vocal and hoover synth stabs and most significantly the broken beat track arrangement has a UK sound ingrained in its DNA.

The artist behind the track is Il Basco, who runs Red Laser Records and is a “Manchester stalwart” in Simon’s opinion. An one-off release under a fleeting alias dreamt up “ at about five in the morning one night” by a mutual friend Lucas, the track was only pressed up in fifty copies for Hi Tackle and sold out immediately, in part due to current “renaissance” hardcore and breakbeat are enjoying at the moment.

Finn – Sometimes the going gets a little tough

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For many producers coming out of Manchester the hardcore genre and broken beat arrangements have given new life to the stoic dance floor genres that have resigned themselves to pre-existing formats and lifeless four-four beats. Everybody from Hessle Audio to Manni Dee are exploring those genres today, scouring the history of UK music for inspiration with their own unique interpretation of current musical tropes, and with the internet at their disposal the variety of influences can be very textured.

For Simon the young artist, producer and DJ known as Finn is such a conduit. One of the producers at NTS in Manchester, where they only broadcast over the weekend on NTS’ second channel, Simon believes Finn’s “sound is a distillation of everything coming through NTS Manchester.” With a very diverse selection of DJs passing through the NTS Manchester studios, “the variety of music you get on a given day is ridiculous, and it’s changing every two hours“ and Finn appears to have channeled this into his own productions according to Simon.

Finn pitches everything up in the recording studio in a process the young Mancunian producer calls “accelerating”. It gives his music a unique character and Simon believes it bares some resemblance to Northern Soul. “If you got into your time machine and went back 30 years to the wigan casino, you might confuse people, but I think people would get it and it would peak.”

You mentioned Northern Soul there, but do you think that Finn has any relationship to that music as a younger artist, born some time after its existence?

Yes, well that’s the next question; does Finn even hear the Northern Soul link in his music? Is aware of it, and is consciously doing it, or have I just missed the mark completely and I’m hearing something that isn’t there at all? I don’t know.

Do you think Finn is one the artists that will define the sound of Manchester for a future generation?

Yes and No. It’s quite shameful, but I think Oasis are probably the closest you’ll come to defining a Manchester sound, if there’s a Manchester sound. Finn is going to be massive and he’s already got over a million plays on Spotify. He’s got everything it takes.

Manchester is in the spotlight at the moment and there are people like iamddb – she’s a commercial R&B artist coming through and she’s my pick for the next absolutely massive Manchester phenomenon, but Finn will also be big.

Manchester City FC – Funky City

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Even though it’s hard to pinpoint the exact cultural roots of anything like a Manchester sound, there’s a strong cultural heritage running through various aspects of cultural life in Manchester and one intrinsical part of that life is football.

Manchester City had just won the premier league before our conversation, “so you gotta get that in there” says Simon with a snigger. Recorded by Godley & Creme before they became known as cricket-loving band 10cc, this track is a soulful instrumental track recorded in 1972 as part of Manchester City FC single, but confusingly (or happily) doesn’t feature a single footballer on the record.

Although Godley & Creme might not have liked cricket, they certainly loved football, and from Noel Gallagher’s Manchester City FC rivalry guitars to Baddiel and Skinner’s “three lions”, there’s a fascinating connection between football and music throughout that region.

Is there a strong relationship between those two aspects of Mancunian culture for you?

You’re getting a lecture now that you’ve asked that question… In Manchester, the cornerstones of our culture is football, music and clothes and there’s strong historical reasons for that.

We were the first industrialised city in the world. We were the first city to have a working class. The you’ve got education, you’ve got mass congregation, and all the things a city will bring. You’ve got an urban culture and football is one of the things that will come with it, because you can get together in large teams, with significant support around them. Manchester United for instance began as Newton Heath Locomotive, a working man’s railway club.

The first process to become industrialised was the spinning of cotton and that was happening in the hills around Manchester. People would bring their cotton to the city to sell it and that’s where Manchester kind of started. And because you have all this cotton in the city a secondary industry springs up, the garment trade and ever since people have been mad for clothes. Manchester’s got it’s own look and its own trends today.

And the final bit is pop music, because people have a degree of education and there are pianos everywhere, but they’re not interested in opera or classical music, because it doesn’t tell their stories.

A burning question for me has always been, how does a person decide to become a Manchester City fan over a united fan?

I had no choice, my grandad was Manchester City Fan. He grew up in the east of Manchester so he was a city fan his whole life and when I was born there was choice.

I have a very vivid memory of staying at my grandparents’ house and wearing a red dressing gown. Because I looked good in this red dressing gown I went down stairs and told grandad that I was going to be a united supporter. I can hear him and I can see him now saying: “you are not”, and that was the end of it.

Brenda Beachball Ray – Skip Hop to Bop

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Simon might be Manchester City fan since birth, but he spent his summers in Ibiza growing up and you can certainly detect something of that balearic strain through his own music on albums like Island, even though he admits, he never frequented he clubbing district on the Island. It’s something that makes it into his sets too and Brenda Beachball Ray’s Skip Hop to Bop is a very curious example of this kind of track. “It’s so rhythmic and so textured and so delicate at the same time”, says Simon who also mentions that he “play(s) it in club sets a lot”.

Brenda Beachball Ray is an artist born out of the post-punk scene in Manchester, who has piqued the interest of the balearic scene “because the Aficionado guys put out an EP from her a while ago”. Dancing through the night on the indie label Music from memory is another “mega” track for Simon who describes Skip hop to Bop as the “one to play when you’ve played like a good solid twenty minutes of Techno.”

Would you play that at the end of the night?

No man in the middle, right in the middle. (Laughs) I DJ’d with Midland at phonox recently all night. He’s got different playlists and they are all sort of mood playlists. One of them is just called ‘and breathe’ and this is what this track is.

Midland says and breathe, but for me it’s like you’re on a rocket ship, and it’s this moment of weightlessness at the top of the curve. It’s like when you take off from Manchester and it’s sunny for a second and then you pop back down again. That’s how it feels for me.

You mentioned you’re fairly acquainted with Brenda B and you often swap emails and besides Godley & Creme you seem to have a personal relationship with all these artists and their music. Did you pick these tracks because they were close to you?

I wasn’t conscious about it. It’s only now that I’m aware of what I’ve done, I wasn’t aware of it. Except in the case of Finn it’s music first and friendship later.

So what between all these tracks speak to you as n individual?

It’s the root I took to get to this music. I only got my first turntables at 29, so it took me a long time just to get to the beginning of other people’s DJ journeys. It doesn’t feel that different to me, I could have put together five much wackyer tunes. But at the end of the day, none of these you would be able to say are from Manchester unless you knew of them.

Except the Manchester FC track?

(Laughs) Except the Manchester FC one!

* Ruf Dug joins Øyvind Morken this Wednesday for Untzdag.

Introducing Fredrik Bekkåsen

The first time Fredrik Bekkåssen put on a Techno event on in Oslo, the police were waiting for him. An hour after the undisclosed Bislett opened its doors the authorities rolled in,checking through every little particular of the event to ensure it was all legal and above board. It’s the type of official formality, bordering on harassment that has become commonplace in Oslo. With an inordinate police presence at nearly every Techno event in the city, there appears to be some unsubstantiated agenda against this music and its community currently taking root. Shutting down events for minor, banal infractions like the amount of security people on the door or the cash register system, people like Fredrik take an exorbitant risk when they put a music event together with a Techno profile.

On this particular occasion however Frederic and his brother, Mats Bekkåsen we’re ready for them. “We had everything in order” says Fredrik with a smile, leaving the police no choice but to let the event go ahead.

This is just one example from a Techno scene in Oslo that is currently under scrutiny from authorities and has which has, in the last year seen Redrum and Naboens Techno Kjeller disappear from a very small dedicated scene and many venues completely refrain from adding Techno to their listings. Fredrik Bekkåsen can certainly “feel the pressure” when venues won’t let him rent a space with the usual adage “this music doesn’t fit our profile.” “If people will just give us a chance”, he urges. “All I want is to put events together so I can show what I can do, but it’s not easy. It draws the energy out of what you’re doing when you meet a wall like that.”

Swinging from the hammock at Jæger, there’s a determination and zeal of a young man in Fredrik’s that’s perfectly counterbalanced by a maturity that far exceeds his 26 years. In the last two years he’s become a pronounced presence in Oslo’s electronic music scene appearing regularly at Villa and Jæger, often alongside local Techno stalwarts like Jokke and O/E, and opening for international acts like Dax J last year and Shed this week at Jæger. From DJing his gone into production too with an original release on the Somerøya label in 2017 and a remix of Terje Sæther & Robert Solheim’s Carmen, which came out just last month.

A weighty percussive track stifling under weight of its own atmosphere, Fredrik offers a modern Techno interpretation of Sæthre and Solheim’s psych-disco-tech original. For an artist and a DJ that’s “only been doing this for three years”, and still considers himself “a kid”, the results are staggering and within the context of Oslo’s choking Techno scene it’s even more impressive.

Fredrik’s route to Techno isn’t an obvious one. Growing up in Enebakk, in the rural central outskirts of Oslo, Fredrik grew up in a family of musical enthusiasts. His oldest brother, a stage lighting technician, took a very young Fredrik to his first electronic music concert when Scooter came to Oslo in the early 2000’s. His father, who has “always been into music” without “being a nerd” about it, encouraged Fredrik to pick up the drums at an early age and even though the older Mr. Bekkåsen was “more of a Pink Floyd guy”, he kept an open mind when Fredrik “served him all the hard stuff” and joined a metal band. It was Fredrik’s middle brother, Mats however that would pave the way for Fredrik into the world of Techno when he acquired a soundsystem and rented it out to Void for a Musikfest event last year.

When O/E and Jokke realised Fredrik was a Techno DJ too, they asked him to join them for that event, cementing Fredrik’s name in one of Oslo’s most adroit Techno institutions.

Fredrik didn’t go straight from metal to Techno however, but drumming played an integral role in th DJ prowess he displayed early on. Fredrik’s acute ear for rhythm took to DJing very naturally and as a tram goes by in the background by way of serendipitous illumination, Fredrik explains; “I can hear the tram go by and I can immediately feel the rhythm.” He “always knew what DJing was about” because of his older brothers and when he turned 18 and “started partying” DJing came from Fredrik’s desire “to perform music”. He bought “some cheap decks” and through a period of “listening to commercial, shit music” started DJing.

With every good DJ there’s always that desire to dig deeper, and it didn’t remain a latent desire in Fredrik. Continually going harder and darker, Fredrik eventually “found Techno” and the two became inseparable.

But why Techno? “I think it’s the hardness of it” comes Fredrik’s immediate response. “There’s a simple rawness that doesn’t need to be that complex to drive it.“ He cites Oscar Mulero and polegroup as examples of the kind of sound he likes, and it’s certainly an influence you can hear in Fredrik’s original track “Shroud”. The brooding atmospheres and visceral percussive arrangement sounds incredibly contemporaneous to anything coming out of the European mainland today.

“The sound in my head of I want to make is very hard fast and atmospheric… and not that melodic”, says Fredrik. “That’s the hard thing making easy music sound good and sound design is a huge part of it.” Fredrik bides his time with his musical output, and although he might work on a track every spare moment he has from his home studio, he is very selective of the music he puts out. “I’m never happy”, he says with a wry smile and insist “it needs to come naturally”. He’s looked to Terje Sæther often for inspiration and advice as “the guy that got me into producing”, but even objectively it’s not difficult to discern there is a natural talent or predisposition for this music in Fredrik.

It’s a talent that’s been cultivated by those around him, chief among them, his older brother, Mats and his soundsystem, which has become an integral facilitator to Fredrik’s career. It was the same sound system that got Fredrik into Void’s Musikfest stage and it’s remained a prominent fixture at the events Fredrik hosts like that one in Bislett. It’s “some old huge soundsystem” Mats bought from a man that also rents out bouncy castles, but it makes an impressive statement wherever it goes. Fredrik remembers that Bislett event fondly as just a “wall of speakers” with little more than a meter’s wiggle room between the speakers and the DJ booth.

The system allows Fredrik to put up events when venues turn him down for fear of unwanted attention from the authorities and it’s through events he’s hosted with the soundsystem that he’s played the most. “If I haven’t put out the events myself, I probably would not have played as much” he considers for a moment, but that’s not to suggest this will change very soon.

As Techno’s popularity grows on an international scale, more young producers and DJs like Fredrik are proliferating the genre as a bonafide artistic practise that’s made significant cultural contributions to the surrounding musical environment and surely it would be impossible for Oslo to ignore its global impact much longer. What needs to happen in Oslo according to Fredrik is that “people need to do it professionally” for the dominating sentiment about Techno to change. He suggests things like “not hiring your friend as a bouncer” and to take the time to put together a “good event”.

Fredrik it seems to me is in the perfect position to sway authoritarian opinion. As a young, motivated artist with an amiable personality (who’s held down a day-job since he was 17) he does well to contradict the kind of dogged preconceptions that are embedded today in an archaic, conservative public opinion of Techno in this city. I put it to Fredrik that he is the prime candidate for changing public perceptions and that he should start a Techno label to that effect, but behind a coy smile he says” I don’t think I’m the right person to start it… not yet.”

For the moment he’s “just having fun with it” and he’s happy for it to “come naturally” both in the booth and in the studio. He’s really looking forward to opening up for Shed this weekend alongside his “mentor” Jokke, which will be a “little different” to the harder stuff he usually plays. “It’s a challenge”, he says “but that’s the fun part of it.”

Deliver or Die with Konstantin Sibold

Konstantin Sibold should already to be playing, but I see him jostling for position in the thick of the crowd in Jæger’s courtyard. The crowd is tightly huddled together in the centre of the al fresco dance floor, keeping the brisk temperatures at bay as more and more people spill out of the bar. Konstantin gives up. “It’s too tight in there” he yells over the system. Ever the professional, he’s looking for a sonic reference ahead of his set, something to sway the direction in which his set might go, but on this occasion a visual cue has to suffice. “It looks like a ski-resort” he muses before slipping past the gate to disappear into the booth, where he takes over from Olanskii. Segueing into a ravy Techno track, building on that energy the Frædag resident has been cultivating over the last five tracks, Konstantin’s presence is felt immediately.

I don’t recognise the track, but it could be the unreleased Maceo Plex he was telling me about earlier in the Hotel lobby, where our conversation started at how he prepares for a set. Konstantin is incredibly relaxed and effervescent, a great Interviewee, plying you with more information than needed and just enough to hold your attention. He takes me through a list on his phone, literally made up of “thousands of tracks” that he’s harvested for future and past sets. They are made up of new, unreleased tracks like that Maceo Plex track, to Four Tet’s Buchla, an “old one I want play again”. For Konstantin it’s an “ongoing process of being into music all the time” and it’s a process that manifested itself early in the German DJ and producer’s life.

As an 11 year-old, Konstantin had a precocious start in music, picking up production quickly through computers in the way, only a pre-adolescent teen could. Production eventually lead to DJing as a natural evolution for a 15 year-old Konstantin, and today it’s the role he feels most comfortable in as an artist. “In the end I think I’m more of a DJ” he tells me while leaning back into his chair. DJing seemed to come naturally to Konstantin and while still a student, at the tender age of 21, he became the youngest resident at Rocker 33, a Stuttgart clubbing institution that provided a platform to prominent careers for the likes of Motor City Drum Ensemble and Moritz von Pein.

Konstantin’s induction was a trial by fire and applied him with the necessary tools that made him the DJ he is today, a “highly adaptable” anomaly in the booth that is able to modulate with his audience, while retaining some artistic identity.

Later that evening after our interview the energy is electric in Jæger’s backyard, peaking at excessive levels, and then suddenly a drop in the bottom end. A wispy melody of some unknown origins builds tension and the whole crowd lurches forward, towards the booth as one. There’s a moment of inextricable pause… it’s nearly silent… and then an exhilarated whoop from the audience as the bass and drums kick back in to the pulse of the dance floor.

Growing up in Stuttgart, Konstantin’s quite familiar with how to appease a zestful crowd. A working class motor city with relatively early closing hours (compared to other places in Germany like Berlin), there’s an “instant energy” that Konstantin had to cater for as DJ. People that arduously labour in the car industry, often six times a week, require that immediacy of escapism that only harder dance genres like Techno can provide. There’s an unspoken expectation where “people in Stuttgart don’t care about genres, they care more about energy levels” and not every DJ or style of music can often accommodate this attitude. “For people like Soulphiction/Jackmate and Danilo (Motor City Drum ensemble) it’s a bit of a different vibe” suggests Konstantin, “because they are people that don’t (cater) to an instant delivery.” DJ’s like these often don’t “feel at home” in Stuttgart, and as in the case of Motor City Drum ensemble left “pretty early” in their career.

Konstantin and Motor City Drum Ensemble both came through the ranks at Rocker 33 at the same time and whereas the latter moved away for a more receptive audience, Konstantin stayed and quickly realised that it’s a matter of “deliver or die” in Stuttgart. Asked to play with the likes of “Adam Beyer, Josh Wink, Michael Mayer and Ellen Allien” during those early years, he had be able to play “everything from A-Z” while maintaining those Stuttgarter energy levels. Back then, as a vinyl DJ, preparation was key. Konstantin had to be able to adapt to a “new musical setting, almost every week” and it plied him with the knowledge and experience to “push boundaries” and to stay “open to every genre” and it’s something that has followed him through his entire career up to the present.

“As an artist I want to stay unpredictable”, he tells me back at the hotel. His ability to find a symbiotic relationship with the dance floor is something embedded in his approach to finding new music. With various playlists at his disposal in the digital format, he has everything from “wedding music like Abba” to “Techno from Dozzy Donato” at his fingertips, allowing the DJ to always “keep it open” for any situation. While walking to Jæger he tells me how during one closing set at Panorama Bar he segued a Helix track – a UK bass track from the Night Slugs label – into Madonna’s Music. “It’s the best transition I’ve ever made” he enthuses, and it says something about the whole ideology behind the DJ. “For me as an artist it’s better to stay highly adaptable, because that’s my biggest strength.”

Two years after first getting the residency at Rocker 33 and playing with big name DJs, Konstantin and his “best friend” Leif Müller established Common Sense People at the club with that same philosophy. Although they started out booking DJs that fell into specific genres like House, they quickly moved over to booking people like Gerd Janson, Redshape and Roman Flügel and more recently the likes of Avalon Emerson, Johanna Knutson and Helena Hauff; acts that occupy a kind of suspended universe between genres in music. It’s “everything that (isn’t) Techno and (isn’t) House”, explains Konstantin. “We always book the acts that no-one else is booking because (they’re) in between.” Konstantin even suggests there’s a “strictness in openness” to Common Sense People and their audience in Stuttgart “get that”. The Common Sense People audience is perhaps a bit more patient than the rest of Stuttgart suggests Konstantin; a residency where he and Leif can “hold the pace” of an entire night. “When Leif and I play all night-long sets we can keep it low for a certain time and we keep it deep and trippy, because we know it works. “

How does he transfer this philosophy to a night in Oslo and Jaæger where the nights are even shorter? “Like a chameleon I always change to suit the environment.” He’s done his research before coming to Jæger too, figuring it’s “somewhere between Berghain/Panorama Bar and Robert Johnson” and from the first track, Konstantin’s set finds some compromise between those two aspects. Combining Techno’s more energetic rhythm sections, with a very distinguishable melodic approach, the tracks touch on elements of Trance, Rave and Techno, with modern production twists. Melodies reach hedonistic heights with a functional percussive demand, that bear very close resemblance to Konstantin’s own productions.

Exploring elements of “sample house, deep house” early on his music career, he later “went into indie dance stuff”, before finding a sound that perfectly suited his style and his personality. “Over the years, I’ve found my red-line, which is ravy, kind of Techno stuff”, says Konstantin who also describes his music as “retro-modern” and “a bit trancy”. His acclaimed 2016 release on Running Back Mutter sums this up perfectly. A dynamic Techno track with rave and trance influences, it features an arresting melody that sticks with you for sometime. With long stretches of just melodic refrain and a minimalist arrangement, it favours a club context with the DJ firmly in mind.

Konstantin had been working on this sound for a while and you can also hear those elements in his breakthrough 2013 track, Madeleine for Innervisions; the track that spread the name Konstantin Sibold across Europe, where bookings followed, cementing his reputation as a DJ and a producer. Although Konstantin started out in music as a drummer, it has always been melodies that piqued his interest in the role if composer. “My songs are song-based and very melodic” he says to the point where “people say that I make pop music with Techno elements.”

I’m curious if a track like Mutter might have pigeonholed him as a DJ with promoters and venues strictly booking him for this sound. “Maybe a bit” comes his reply ” but I think every artist has that, when they have one big track, that the audience refers to; that’s why I do stuff like the Red Axes remix.” Konstantin’s Afro Remix of Red Axes’, “Sun my Sweet Sun” is a polyrhythmic percussion workout of the original, retaining the melodic nature of his own sound, but opting for a more Tech-House arrangement. While some critics close to Konstantin suggested the remix is too close to a “cheesy Dixon track”, Konstantin feels more confident in his role as a remixer than as a composer. And with over 400 000 views on the label, Permanent Vacation’s You Tube page the success of the track speaks for itself.

I’m not sure if it’s divine providence, happy accident or purposely, but going out of his first track at Jæger, Konstantin plays a Red Axes remix of Tanz Exotique. Every body is moving our in snug courtyard, and Konstantin is beaming in the booth.

Earlier he was telling me about his admiration for the DJ ND_Baumecker, and there’s something in Konstantin’s approach that he shares with the Panorama Bar/Berghain resident; an innate ability to re-contextualise divergent tracks within a singular set. Like Baumecker playing Wham into a maximalist Techno track without missing a beat, Konstantin playing an afrocentric Tech-House track from Red Axes right after the ravy introduction, is highly adaptable, but also very eccentric. He doesn’t pander, but flows with his crowd and on this night in Jæger’s courtyard he keeps the energy high and energetic.

“I didn’t realise he’d play this hard” somebody tells about halfway through his set, but it’s not as hard as it is dynamic and fervent, and on this occasion Konstantin definitely delivers.

*Frædag returns this Friday with G-Ha & Olanskii and this week’s guest Andrew Weatherall.

Influences with Soft as Snow

Soft as Snow’s debut album Deep Wave, has an inconspicuous start. A kick-hat-snare beat swings the listener into the album, luring its audience into a false sense of security. A feminine voice strains against the abstract electronic landscape that swirls like a maelstrom through an abject noise, delivering the listener finally to a humid sonic landscape on the other end. By the time the third track on the album “Drip” commences you’re completely entrenched in this new world and the sound of Soft as Snow has coiled itself into a ball under your skin. It’s a mesmerising sonic noise giving away to something primal, something tender and raw, yet refined specifically as such.

Oda Egjar Starheim and Øystein Monsen are Soft as Snow. The electronic-indie music duo from Norway, who reside in Berlin, have been making records together since 2015 and after two EPs on UK label Houdstoooth, they’ve ushered in 2018 with a debut album on the same label. Deep Wave is a concise idiosyncratic body of work that lies on the edges of Noise, DIY and Techno with provocative results. Noisy synths, drum machines and guitars establish a thorny bed of peaks and troughs from which Oda’s entrancing voice lures you towards rocky enclaves.

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Oda, a performance/visual artist, musician and vocalist and Øystein, a percussionist and visual artist, started making music together after Øystein was asked to film a performance of Oda screaming through the streets of Oslo for a video piece. Øystein, whose musical background lies in the noise/rock scene in Oslo, started playing music with Oda. They started out playing in o Oda’s installations together, before officially adopting the name Soft as Snow and refining it as its own independent musical project.

Fortified in Oda’s performance art background and Øystein’s sonic cues, Soft as Snow developed a sound that harnessed the immediacy of a live performance with the power of machines. With a couple of tentative steps in the direction of the studio with the two EPs Glass Body and Chrysalis, Deep Wave comes as the most realised adaptation of their sound to the recorded format yet. Although co-produced and partially mixed by Triangle records’ WIFE, Deep Wave has freed the group from the constricting reigns of the controlled studio format, tapping into that primal urgency that they usually communicate through their live shows.

There’s a richness to their work that clearly has its roots in an array of influences, spanning technique, art and even literature, channeled through the individual personalities and merging through their working methods. Where and how these influences merge is unknown, and with an upcoming show for Den Gyldne Sprekk, the opportunity arose for us to find out. Serendipitously, we find Oda and Øystein at Oslo House in Hackney Wick, London when we call them up. They have a show in Stoke Newington, and they seem relaxed. They appear in a more hi-definition versions of themselves from the album cover with its distorted RGB curves and its from there we start the conversation.

Let’s start with the cover art. What inspired the cover.

Øystein Monsen: I guess it’s more the technique than an actual influence. It’s made using an old Amiga computer. We had the idea of running all the visuals through it.

And that gave it that distorted effect?

Øystein: Yes and it’s kind of a mix of live video feedback and some key signals messing everything up. It’s the same technique we used for the video (Pink Rushes) too.

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Who is responsible for the look of it?

Oda Egjar Starheim: We made it together as well as the press photos and the videos. It’s a very slow, old-fashioned technique. It took a very long time, but it’s nice because everything happens live and its unpredictable and that relates to how we make music. It’s all improvised and you just tend to go with what feels right in the moment.

Yes, there’s a performance aspect to everything you do. Oda, does your background in performance art inspire this improvisational approach?

Oda: In terms of making music, how we make the music is very jam-based. It’s not sitting down and having a singer-songwriter moment, it’s the opposite. Perhaps this subconscious way of making a work is something that I’ve always been doing, which followed me into music. When I started making music, it was actually within performance work, so it was about creating sounds within installations. After a while I started using my voice inside these installations, albeit in a very experimental way and that’s how it evolved.

Were there any performance artists you were influenced by at this time?

Oda: Yes, performance-wise I was very inspired by extreme artists, like Marina Abramovic. But visually, I was more influenced by artists like Pipilotti Rist.

You mention visual influences. Is making music a visual thing for you?

Oda: It’s perhaps more about energy and moods. It’s not so much about visuals; it’s more about feeling. For me it’s quite primitive and quite primal.

And is that how you recorded the album, in that primitive, primal way?

Oda: Yes very much. And we also decided to keep a lot of the recordings from the initial jams. So some of the tracks are just jams that we edited down.

Listening to the first EPs and then the album, do I detect a slight evolution in your work? I don’t want to say its tamer, but perhaps more controlled. Would that be an accurate description?

Øystein: Yes, I think we got closer to keeping the music how it was conceived, in a way. We’ve always worked like this, but in the first two EPs, we created the songs and then recorded it and was more controlled in that way. For the album we didn’t re-record much and just used the initial tracks.

Oda: We re-recorded some vocals, because we wanted to have more refined lyrics for some of the tracks. Most of the instrumental tracks are from those initial jam sessions. We also mixed half of the tracks ourselves, so we had full control until the end. Sometimes I think the sound can change a lot in production and mixing.

Øystein: When we worked with an engineer, on some of the tracks, he made it cleaner and took away some of the rawness. We discovered that we wanted to keep that rawness.

Did you go into the album thinking you wanted to get that sound out of it, or was that just the result of the recording process?

Oda: I think with the setup we have it predetermines the sound. We didn’t use any software. We work with analogue instruments and some of them are very lo-fi. It does shape the sound.

Øystein: When we record the vocals, we just play the music live through the PA, so you have that energy (throughout).

Oda: On the previous EP we went into this very fancy studio and recorded the vocals with really good equipment, but we don’t think it made it any better, we think it kind of lost some of the energy. Because I’m used to, and familiar with a certain setup, I sound more like myself, the way I’m supposed to sound. When we start changing the microphone or the compressor, it immediately changes the voice and the way it’s shaped.

I know you prefer a live hardware setup. What was the biggest influence in terms of a machine that might have shaped the outcome of this album?

Oystein: Maybe the (Roland) Handsonic.

Oda: Really? (Laughs) I would’ve thought the little mixer.

Øystein: O yeah, because that’s what made the distortion.

Oda: We have a separate mixer and it’s just to add distortion.

What’s it called?

Øystein: It’s a Fostex mixer with just jack inputs. I’m not sure what it’s called.

Oda: I think that was very important. Obviously the Juno is very important. But to be honest; live, now we have a different setup, because before we had a 100 kilos of equipment and that is very tiring when you fly. So now we’ve been moving and changing a bit so in the live setup now, we actually include a computer.

Does the live sound differ much from the album?

Øystein: It’s an extension of the album sound, where I think it’s becoming even more raw.

Oda: For instance I play very little guitar on the album, and on the first EPs I played loads of guitar. So live I play a bit more and Øystein focuses more on the live drumming with the Handsonic.

Øystein: I think the Handsonic is really important for our sound, because it uses all these cheesy sounds that can be very interesting when you use the effects on it and we use it a lot on this record.

Øystein, you come from a noise/rock background in terms of drumming, but is there anything outside of music that informs your rhythmic impulses?

Øystein: I’m not sure where it comes from, but my whole approach to music is rhythm, and it’s more about the actual sounds than the melodies.

Is it the same as in Oda’s case, where it becomes this subconscious thing?

Øystein: Yeah, that’s where I get the most energy out of it, in the drumming.

Was there anything that inspired Deep Wave in terms of literature or films?

Oda: We were discussing this a little earlier in fact. In terms of literature, we were both really interested in magical realism. We’re both really big fans of (Haruki) Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez. Obviously in terms of lyrics, it happens on a very unconscious level, and I like that it perhaps fluctuates between something quite recognisable, and sometimes it feels more abstract like a picture or a mantra that’s corresponding to what’s happening in the music, than being the lead in the music.

Murakami is a great example, because he creates these really fantastical worlds, that seem like they stem from something real.

Oda: Yes, you are just kind of led into it, because it feels very close and then he just takes you somewhere. You are easily convinced in a way.

Are you conscious of it when doing it in terms of lyrics?

Oda: Yes, very actually, but is depends because some of the tracks are just kept like they are, like a stream of consciousness and some of the tracks we wanted to have more refined lyrics. So I needed to go into the track again and inhabit it to find more words, but then it’s really important for me to stay in the landscape of the feeling that’s been created. I always try to not be literal and more open in the lyrics.

How much influence does the label have on the ultimate sound of the record beyond just facilitating it?

Øystein: I guess they provided more inspiration in terms of Techno, as a Techno label.

Oda: It’s hard to know actually. The Techno reference was there before we even started working with them. The first EP was already done when they signed us. But we don’t really know, if we’d been working with an indie pop label, we might have sounded very different today.

Øystein: Through the process, they wanted to focus more on the pop side of the records, and take away some of the more noisy, weird elements. We didn’t want that, so it was kind of a long process.

Oda: There’s been a few discussions. (Laughs)

Øystein: We’re kind of the weird act on the label. Now with this album it makes more sense because I feel that we have found a middle ground.

Oda: Our production is more lo-fi than the other artists on the label. Now I feel like we make more sense on the label than we did before. We are more true to our sound and our vision and although they might not have been so sure about it through the process, in the end they totally got it.

So it was more like the label changing around you, than you having to adapt around the label?

Oda: Yes. We’re stubborn Norwegians.

Øystein: Because of the material on the album, it’s really important how we present it, from the track listing and the interludes. When they heard the final version, they really loved it, but in the process there were a lot of discussions.

Oda: But, that’s just the way it is in these relationships. You just want it to be the best you can do, and sometimes there are different opinions about what is best. We consciously make decisions that are technically wrong, like keeping errors that we know might provoke other listeners, but we feel it’s important in how we make music.

A queer eye view from the booth

Type in the term “Queer Art” and the first result is almost always in the form of a question. A fairly new development in the lexicon of modern art theory, the term “Queer” was only really introduced to the glossary of terms in the 1980’s – even though it now refers to art made before that time. Out of all the definitions I prefer the succinctness of the Tate’s: “Art of homosexual or lesbian imagery that is based around the issues that evolved out of the gender and identity politics of the 1980s.” It sums it up as art created and/or about LGBTQI socio-political issues. There’s either a visual aesthetic or a conceptual premise tied up with the artist’s identity that sets it apart and obvious examples would include Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe. Today there’s a clear distinction in queer art and for an up-and-coming queer artist like

Phillip Prokopiou, the line of separation for his work is obvious and welcomed. A London-based photographer, Prokopiou together with his partner and set designer Panayiotis Pimenides takes portrait photos of prominent figures active in London’s queer community. “Informed by their love of high-camp, kitsch conviction and the sub-cultural landscape of London”, Prokopiou’s work communicates queer identity through highly stylised photographs that offer very little ambiguity around their overtly queer themes.

Supplant the term to music and artists like Arca, Sophie, Kalela, St. Vincent, Peaches, Fever Ray, Mykki Blanco and Cakes Da Killa pop up in your search engine, LGBTQI artists whose music and identity are all linked to a queer cultural scene and history. Lyrics that are “largely about empowerment, same-sex relationships, love, acceptance, freedom, gay pride and the courage to ‘come out’ to the general public”, (Wikipedia) set them apart from other musicians in a very obvious way. There’s a literal interpretation there that can be communicated through lyrics from pop acts like St Vincent and Kelela and for the more avant garde pop artist like Arca and Fever Ray, there’s a performance aspect that often accompanies it. In Fever Ray’s live production for her latest album Plunge, there’s an androgynous quality to the costumes on stage, that like her voice on her records, plays and confronts issues around gender and identity politics. A female backup singer wearing a male muscle suit and Dreijer herself in a formless, padded suit donning the tagline: “I love Spanish Girls” are obvious visual cues that bolster the queer themes in her music and lyrics, which takes one step further on her current tour. In a recent show in Oslo by appointment of the artist, the venue, Sentrum Scene was also obliged to put up signs encouraging a gender neutrality between their facilities, creating an entirely queer environment that went beyond just the performance and the music.

For a pop artist like Fever Ray there’s an obvious queer identity that follows her from the recorded music, the presentation right through to the performance. There is absolutely no ambiguity to the queer aspects of the artist and her music, but how do you communicate the same ideas through music with little or no literal interpretation available, in a gender-neutral context, and a complex artistic identity that’s closer to facilitator than artist, i.e what does queer suggest in the context of a modern club setting and a DJ set?

“I think queerness is to break out of the restrictions”, says Timothy Wang (TWANG). A gay man of Chinese descent, Timothy is a London based DJ and prominent figure on the underground queer scene in the UK capital. Although he “didn’t plan to be queer DJ” he is one, regularly playing queer events around the city. There’s an obvious queer context in which he, as a DJ, finds himself when he plays an event like Kaos or Transister, but as these events place more emphasis on being mixed events and the music being played is often made by straight white men, how is he still able to communicate that queer identity? “I tend to like a sound that is different and weird, even maybe a bit annoying” replies Timmy. “I like to challenge people on the dance floor a bit, to invite people them to think when I play, that’s the attitude. That’s why I love Techno music, it’s very diverse, strange and wonderful!”

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Det Gode Selskab and Oslo DJ, Terje Dybdahl (Tod Louie) prefers a more literal interpretation through his selections. “I keep on dropping some diva House or Trulz & Robin’s ‘Gay Boys’. When the floor hears the hard-hitting electro groove and the voice, ‘I see gay boys’, it’s always fun to see people’s reactions. Sometimes they are a bit hesitant at first, but it always puts the floor on fire.” Terje identifies as a queer DJ and aside from running Det Gode Selskab, he also hosts a new queer-orientated night in Oslo with Mange Debauch called Everysome. Everysome is an all inclusive night for “straight, bi, gay, cis, trans, non binary or however you identify” explains Terje and much like like Kaoss and Transister, it is a queer event for a mixed audience. Like Det Gode Selskab, which “definitely has a gay following”, Everysome is essentially a mixed event. “I prefer a mixed atmosphere, rather than a straight or gay atmosphere”, says Terje. “It’s simply more fun and interesting.” But not every DJ agrees with that sentiment entirely.

For Terre Thaemlitz (DJ Sprinkles) the mixed audience poses a problem. In a conversation with Maya Bouldry-Morrison (Octo Octa) on Electronic Beats Terre suggests that these spaces are “‘mixed’ within certain heteronormative parameters” and the atmosphere of these spaces are essentially “very straight”. Thaemlitz feels that “if you are going to be out in these mixed spaces as something other than straight, then you will only be tolerated if you are out within certain heteronormative parameters, like a certain type of accepted gayness or a certain type of accepted transness—usually one that panders to straight audiences, or is comprehensible and morally acceptable to them.” Although Thaemlitz rose to prominence through Manhattan’s underground queer scene in the nineties, he is more likely to play for predominantly straight, white European audiences today as a high-profile touring DJ. Terre is very critical about the heteronormative aspects of queer culture that can go from gay men adopting a traditional family arrangement to the largely heterosexual audiences she plays for in Europe and often approaches it in his music and his more literal video works like Deproduction.

It seems however that opinion is divided between a high profile DJ like Thaemlitz and the DJs that still work at a local, subcultural level. While a DJ like Thaemlitz is openly opposed to mixed spaces as it heteronormalises the queer aspects of the culture, a younger generation of DJs like Terje Dybdahl and Timothy Wang are embracing and indeed welcoming the mixed orientation of the audiences. As more previously rigidly queer spaces and events like Kaos, overwhelmingly welcome mixed audiences, albeit retaining their queer identity, it appears that a mixed philosophy is becoming the acceptable norm. My first thought was that this might be predicated on a regional aspect since in Europe and the UK this music and its culture was first adopted by a heterosexual audience, but this doesn’t really concur with what US DJ Jason Kendig from Honey Soundsystem told me last year during an interview for Jæger’s blog. He put emphasis on the fact that he and the soundsystem’s “first experiences in dance music were not necessarily in queer spaces”.

In the interview the DJ, label owner and producer laid out his reasons for seeking gender neutral spaces and events as such: “For myself as a teenager, when I was finding myself at raves in Detroit, it was about freedom of anonymity, that I didn’t have to worry about being harassed.” Like Terre Thaemlitz, Honey Soundsystem play for predominantly straight white audiences when they play in Europe. Putting on their own events in San Francisco and Chicago, Honey Soundsystem are able to retain that all important queer context, but when they appear as DJs in a place like Jæger, context is an element they are not able to control so how do they communicate the queer history and ideology through a DJ set to these audiences? “You have to do it through the tracks.”, says Jason. “You have to throw a lot of energy into a track that you feel that’s gonna explain a little bit of the history of where you are coming from.”

Energy is also important to Terje Dybdal. At Det Gode Selskab Terje might often play for an entirely straight audience on a Sunday night in Jæger’s basement and besides the considered selections, Terje believes there’s a certain “energy” he has to bring to the booth when playing for these audiences that set him aside from straight DJ’s he might play with on a night. As a promoter, he can produce queer specific events through Det Gode Selskab, like their upcoming Skeiv Natt, and booking DJs like Eris Drew, a queer DJ from Chicago’s Smart bar to relay the queer aspects of his identity, but when it’s just him and the audience at a normal residency night, there’s something more abstract at play.

Unlike a gay club with a queer aesthetic or codified as such, a night like Det Gode Selskab or a DJ collective like Honey Soundsystem don’t have that literal language that follows them into the booth. Without a strong visual code, being queer is something they have to bolster through their biographies. The issue arises when these are not always universally obvious and what then, how can you possibility communicate something of your queer identity to an uninformed audience, how do you get through to the fist-pumping bros? There’s only so much people like Honey Soundsystem can do outside of a conceptual context and often what they’re trying to say gets completely lost in translation. Jason believes that “there are some rigid formats to fit into as touring DJs” that won’t allow them to place emphasis on their own queer history and sometimes “it’s just the nature of the beast”.

In Europe especially, where this music has always enjoyed a rather large white heterosexual audience this is a serious problem for some queer DJs. In a recent interview with Channel 4 news Honey Dijon proclaims that “when Frankie Knuckles died the last, great gay black DJ died with him” as if to emphasise the degree to which this music is dominated today by white heterosexual cis men and how its queer roots have become distorted. Dijon, like Thaemlitz is critical about the hetero nature of this music and its culture today. Again it seems that opinion is divided and in the case of Timothy Wang it might even have detrimental effect on him as a DJ to be defined as strictly as such.

Photo courtesy of Zbigniew Tomasz Kotkiewicz

“I obviously love being associated with queer culture, but I wouldn’t want it be the only reason people come to my gig.” Terje Dybdahl shares this more open sentiment: “House and electronic music does not judge, it’s open and inclusive. It’s about everyone coming together and dancing”. Although Timothy and Terje identify as queer DJs, their approach is not one of isolation within a strictly coded scene or environment, but rather one that can be fluid between environments. Timothy extends this ideology to the music too preferring the Techno genre for its more universal nature than perhaps Disco or House. Techno, a style of music that’s always enjoyed a predominantly hetero male audience and artistic identity, with roots in Black Detroit and recently the music du jour for places like Kaos, offers very little in the way of strict gender codes. “I would never discriminate or favour music because who made them based on their sexual identity”, says Timothy by way of explanation “otherwise I will be just as bad as homophobes”.

Terre Thaemlitz relationship with the music is more complicated than that and she went into particular detail about it in a recent Q&A session on our blog. “Growing up as a queer in the US countryside, I had limited access to different styles of music. So my sense of how certain genres or songs took on queered meanings was grounded in the fact that I was mostly stuck listening to the same shit music cherished by the assholes fagbashing me.” Like Timothy Wang’s musical selections, there’s nothing really distinctly “queer” in the music he would listen to growing up so “it wasn’t about an ‘authentically queer sound’, but rather a ‘queered relationship to mainstream sound’”. Today Terre Theamlitz largely plays his own music in his DJ sets negating this all together and allowing him to communicate something identifiably queer through either a sample or a vocal line. For a DJ like Timothy Wang however who relies largely on playing Techno made by other artists where an overtly queer identity does not always exist, he has to communicate something queer in a similar way to Terre’s early experiences; i.e finding a queered relationship with the sound which in Timothy’s case is finding something to challenge the dance floor with and that all comes down to an attitude.

So what does queer suggest in the modern club setting in a Dj set? It can be something as obvious as tracks selection or the identity of the DJ, or something as abstract as a mood, but what it boils down to is an attitude. Unlike the queer visual- or pop artist that has a broad media palette through which s/he could communicate their queer identity in various literal languages, the DJ is often just limited to one, a very abstract musical language and thus they have to wholly embody the idea of queer, and I’d suggest even more so than an artist. Ask these DJs if they think of themselves as queer, and without hesitation you’ll get a resounding yes. The history of queer culture is intrinsically intertwined in who they are as a person and it’s communicated through everything they do and there’s no ambivalence about it to them. It’s their artistic identity and it doesn’t need context or some literal interpretation to prevail, it’s truly independent of the listener and able to freely engage with people on a universal level or at more personal level for those able, and informed enough to interpret it.

A crow in the garden: The story of Gundelach’s Baltus

On good friday 2018 there’s a lamb grilling in Jæger’s backyard in the annual Skranglejazz ritual. The air temperature is at dismal -2 degree celsius, but the smell is intoxicating and a crowd drifts out on the fragrant fog of the roasting meat where they huddle around the last vestige of heat, the grill. It’s still early, but a few eager heads spasmodically break in and out of some footwork to the music being played by the Skrangle DJ Gustav Julius Viken. This easter tradition at Jæger never fails and this year there’s something quite surreal to the setting. PLO Man is in the mix talking to Magnus International. Finnebassen dons a pair of tongs, flipping over a huge chunk of lamb where Skrangle Jazz DJ Celius is hovering around a salad. There’s a kind of uncanny last supper setting to the entire scene as if it was visualised through the work of Bendik Kaltenborn.

Kai Gundelach is here too just to add to the dreamlike atmosphere, playing some songs alongside Gustav. He looks relaxed and at home in the booth. His debut album “Baltus” has just hit the shelves and he’s playing under his Dunderlach pseudonym for his friends at Skranglejazz. Later Finnebassen will be closing out the event in our courtyard, but for now the Norwegian DJ‘s priority is the lamb and he’s as focussed as he is at the decks. Between complementing Finnebassen on the lamb and another helping, I ask if he’s heard the new Gundelach album. “Yes” he says with a smile, specifically admiring it for its “consistency” between the tracks.

The album has enjoyed a reserved release, with little fanfare on a new independent label called U OK?. It follows Kai’s debut self-titled EP some two years on and although they certainly share an artistic trait, there is something unique about the album, that wasn’t necessarily there on the EP, and I’m eager to find out what that is. I manage to sequester Kai in Jaeger’s office for a few minutes while he’s taking a breather from playing and we get talking.

I was just talking to Finnebassen about your album and he said the album sounded very cohesive. Is that what you were trying to get across?

Yes, I really wanted it to be an album, and not just a collection of songs. I wanted to make a record from start to end through a journey, because nowadays most records are little more than mixtapes or a collection of songs. The album format is not relevant anymore.

Were the tracks made around the same time as the tracks on the EP?

Not all of them. Some songs were from last year, and some were newer versions of the old songs.

And it was recorded as an album, during one session?

I didn’t record everything, because I used some vocal stems from earlier. In some cases I added lyrics to some of the songs and then I had to combine the older stems with the newer stems. It was really hard to get the same tone through my voice.

So it was a bit like a collage. You can’t really pick that up from listening to the album.

Yeah. We’ve been playing “Control” live for a year or two, but I ended up using even older stems, from the first time “Control” surfaced around 2011/12. I used an old pad from that old recording that was muted originally, and a lot of the songs are like that, a mixture of old and new. It was like going back to your old studio and finding stuff you’ve forgotten about. It was a big puzzle, but it came together quite fast.

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Although there’s is no particular theme to the record, these songs, like the self-titled EP before it were all written through a period of personal desolation for Kai and although he is reluctant to call it the theme of the record, depression certainly plays its part in the way these songs sound. Around 2011/2012 Kai felt “super depressed” and it was during this period he would set the tone of the Gundelach sound. Although he is not depressed anymore, that part of his personal life made an indelible mark on his artistic voice and he feels it’s always essential to bring that across, especially when making something as personal as an album. Finding it “hard to make songs that are supposed to feel like that when you are not feeling that way” for the album, Kai would “use older songs to get that feeling across”. The result was “Baltus”, a record in name and mood that captures that feeling of anguish and sullenness, but with a silver lining streaking across the surface.

There’s a melancholic demeanour to the entire record that seeps in through Kai’s voice and touches everything from his guitar to the synthesisers. It borders on sadness, but never morose, with a kind of hopeful optimism underpinning the execution of the songs. The instruments float and skip across the arrangements in a pseudo pop-art eighties optimism, while Kai’s voice anchors the songs to a personal, emotive depth. There’s a sadness to the tracks on “Baltus”, but you’re not always made aware of the source of the sorrow through Kai’s lyrics.

Is depression or the feeling of it something that you try to bring across in your lyrics too, because for me they tend to lie on the edge of the abstract?

Yes, and there are some lyrics that aren’t that abstract either. In “Control” for instance where I sing; “you don’t know what it feels like to be alone”. I hated the lyrics that I wrote them. I didn’t listen to them for another year, and when I did, they felt more real. And that’s what I wanted from the album; that it’s supposed to feel real, and not like I constructed something that isn’t me.

How does the title relate to that?

Where I grew up in Slependen, we had this crow living outside in a tree in our garden for seven years, which my father, or mother named “Baltus”. I wasn’t thinking that much about “Baltus” when I made the record until I figured the theme (of the record) was depression. I have this thing for crows, because they have been a symbol for death and darkness, and in modern times they’ve become a symbol of depression and melancholy.

Is part of the purpose of writing songs about your own experiences about confronting the societal stigmas of depression?

I’m not dealing with it so much anymore, and in our society, I feel that nowadays everybody talks more about depression. And that’s a good thing, but it has also become some kind of sales trick. Like: you don’t have a record before you have some kind of anxiety about your own person on it. I don’t feel like I did it to show this side of my personality; I did it because I had (harboured) these songs for such a long time, and I knew that if I was going to make an album, I was going to include those songs. And If I’m supposed to sing about my life, I have to include these songs because that used to be a part of my life.

Gundelach’s self-titled last EP might have been more contemporaneous with this period of songwriting for the artist, but it feels more distant to the mood the artist relays on “Baltus”. Although Kai was struggling with the same emotional turmoil he is on the album, the lyrics to the EP offer “vaguer” cues and the general upbeat arrangements very rarely allow that sense of melancholy to creep into the songs compared to “Baltus”. Kai puts this slight disparity between the EP and the album down to a lack of confidence in his writing that has since dissipated. With none of the insecurities of a first release, he was more easily able to go back and revisit earlier lyrics and vocal lines after he had gotten some distance from them.

After working with Joel Ford (Ford & Lopatin/Tigercity) on the first EP, Kai brought the album home and while long-time collaborator Pål Ulvik Rokseth still made his mark on the record from some earlier demo recording re-purposed, a new host of collaborators joined Kai for the album. “It all happened pretty randomly” says Kai of these collaborations, most significantly Knut Sævik (Mungolian Jetset) facilitating in the producer- and engineer’s chair. Kai had worked with Sævik before when he “wanted to record a better vocal sound” for his early demos and returned to the Norwegian multi-instrumentalist, producer and engineer when the album beckoned. Before the recording of the album Sævik had gone through his own personal turmoil and “Baltus” would be his first project after a long hiatus. Kai believes “it was good for (Sævik) to work again” and it might have even helped solidify the theme of the record.

“It just felt natural” says Kai. Øyvind Mathiesen came in later as a “sort of executive producer” and Norwegian songwriter and vocalist Ary was the last piece of the puzzle that breathed life into “Baltus”. Kai and Ary had been making demos for a while together and they’d “always had a really good chemistry when writing music together.“ On the latest single to the album “Past the Building” there’s a harmony not only in register, but also feeling that makes for a sinuous thread between the two vocalists. Ary’s voice acts like a counterweight to the solemnity of Kai’s tenor on the single, while the addition of her vocal on “Games” offers a playful sanguine surprise from the rest of the album.

Games is the more upbeat track on the album, with more of a dance floor appeal. Do I detect that it comes from perhaps a more happier place than the other tracks on the album?

Yes I wrote that with Ary in the studio, and we laid the groundwork for it in a half a day. All those synth tracks come from my Juno 60, and it’s pretty minimal.

There’s an element of fun to that track, that to me seems to relate to the your working relationship.

Yes, and it’s not new to me, because I’ve done it before. But doing it with the same person several times is a different way of writing music for me.

Did any of the collaborations affect the way you worked?

I think my music definitely evolved. That’s how it is when you work with people. When I write lyrics for instance, I would usually use a couple of days to write three lines, but when I have Ary in the studio with me, I can get an immediate response to those lines, and the process goes a lot quicker.

And I suppose it gives you more confidence when writing music?

Yes I think so.

I noticed on the sleeve notes that you’re playing a lot more of the synths. Was the purpose to step away from the more traditional band construct that you and Pål had on the EP?

Yes, because earlier I had Pål playing synths, and he still does when he can, but he’s super busy as a film-photographer. He didn’t have time to be in the studio, but he’s still on the record from some old takes.

When working with different people and working with co-producers, I’ve always brought a demo that’s 80% finished. This time I just wanted to produce it myself, and I only had Knut helping me as a technician. I really enjoyed that, especially now that it’s out, I have to stand for what I’ve done, because I did it myself.

We’ve come to know you as a live artist over the past couple of years. Has performing the songs off the EP live affected the way the album come together inasmuch as you have the live context in mind when recording the songs?

Yes, and even more so now than the last EP. It is more live friendly I guess and only because I needed to play it live. Earlier I would have a lot of tracks in my projects, but on the album I wanted fewer instruments. It gets more concentrated.

Releasing the record on his management’s label, U OK? Kai was able to retain that all-important creative control on the album, leaving a personal impression on the record that would have been impossible otherwise. With LA indie label, Terrible Records distributing and campaigning for the record stateside “Baltus” is carrying the Gundelach sound on the tip of its wing towards new American audiences. The LP is enjoying more plays in the US than anywhere else at the moment, and Kai couldn’t be happier with this newfound relationship with Terrible Records, a label, he’s had his eye on for some time. “They’re a stamp of approval” for the Norwegian artist, who join people like Blood Orange and Solange on the roster and he hopes to go over there soon to “really make an impact”.

Kai shifts in the bulky faux-leather chair in the office, his sentences fleeting from one idea to the next while he talks. I forget to check the time, and realise I’ve taken up a fair chunk of his time already. Apologetically, I release Kai back into the party where he heads purposefully into the DJ booth. He cues Andre Bratten’s “Aegis” and the extended version with its soaring intro takes us into a melodic 4-4 mix from Gundelach. He tells me while he hasn’t been making music since the album was finished in November last year, he has been working on some percussive stuff that might make it out as its own Techno project, “a darker, clubby kind of thing”.

Finnebassen’s lamb has been reduced to a couple of bare bones, and as the tables and chairs clear a bigger path to the dance floor, Gundelach music sets an invigorating pulse that carries us through the evening ahead. Kai seems content, both outwardly and in the music he selects and while he no longer struggles with depression, he doesn’t believe it will change the nature of his songs going forward after “Baltus”. “I don’t like happy-sounding music. What appeals to me is an emotional depth in the music. Even though I’m happy; I’m in a relationship, I have two cats, and my life is kind of nice, I’m still an emotional dude, and I’ll always find something to write about.“

A bit too much – An Interview with Rude Lead

What are you working on at the moment? “A bit too much”, says Christopher Langedahl through a mesh of beard, delivered with hearty chuckle. When we sit down to talk about music and DJing in a café in Grünnerløkka on the first sunny day of 2018, he’s preparing a mixtape, deep into an album and putting the final touches on an upcoming EP, but still finds the time to fit us in for a chat between home and the studio.

The Stew Studio associate, Boogienetter DJ and producer, has been contributing to everything from Hip Hop to modern soul in Oslo for the last decade. His collaborations with Adept ushered a new era for Hip Hop in the city and with their debut EP, simply entitled “The EP” they’ve made a severe impression on the underground scene in 2017.

Adept’s vocals make a unique contribution to Rude Lead’s considered samples and arrangements and there’s very little there that we can draw a reference to. “He has a very particular voice”, explains Christopher. ”His voice register is very hard to fit into a Hip Hop beat, because it’s in the very low-mids, and that’s where a lot of stuff happens in Hip Hop.” Rude Lead made it work however and the result is one of the most unique Hip Hop albums we’ve heard in some time. Adept’s deep vocal lends as much from Reggae as it does and East Coast US sound, and finds an intricate harmony with the rest of the production. To the ear the production appears specifically tailored around the vocal, unlike modern Hip Hop and the beat-for-sale manner it’s produced today.

The production is a culmination of Christopher’s digging-prowess, a proclivity for vintage drum machines and a penchant for “old mixing techniques”. The EP was “mixed at the legendary high-street studios” where people like Earth Wind and Fire and 2pac recorded their stuff through a 1970’s Neve mixing console and adds a definite old-school character to the record.Combining old mixing techniques with modern production cues, Christopher managed an ineffable blend of nostalgia and progression, which has underpinned his work since 2014’s Younes Khalif ‎collaboration, “Sjalusien Dreper Oss”.

Christopher’s musical journey starts much earlier than that in the nineties when making music was far from the slick user-friendly experience it is today and the whole process was completely new and uncharted territory. “When I was seven my father bought me an Amiga computer and the guy he bought it from was heavy into the demo scene”, says Christopher with the cadence of a joke. Christopher got a few 4 and 8 track demos with the machine and after a few head-scratching years, he “finally managed to make some tracks” out of the old, cumbersome equipment. Those first tracks fell somewhere between Trip-Hop and electronica, and as Christopher progressed, House and Techno became the purview in his work when DJing beckoned. Christopher thus became Rude Lead – a humorous take on Lou Reed while also referencing his own musical disposition as “a fan of melody lines and lead synths”.

Behind every good DJ is that urge to dig deeper and further, and in Christopher it manifested into an obsessive-compulsive habit when a couple of Joey Negro compilations came his way. “A lot of the House music I listened to came from these tracks” explains Christopher and what started in House music moved into Disco, Soul and Boogie’s more obscure corners. “When I hear a sample that I know from somewhere I get totally obsessed about finding it“, says Christopher. The DJ turned collector after a digging session in Berlin. Stumbling on the originals of some of his “favourite” House tracks, Christopher started exploring the outlying regions of Disco through his sets. “Felix (Klein) did exactly the same thing at the same time” and the two DJs “hooked up and started playing Soul, Disco and Boogie together.” Driven by his desire to find the original of a sample from a House track, and looking beyond the obvious, Christopher “started spending all (his) money on records” and Disco lead to Boogie and of course eventually Boogienetter… but first there was Diskotaket.

Christopher had struck a friendship over a shared musical obsession with Dirty Hans and Fredfades when Felix introduced them to each other with: “I got this really good DJ friend and I can’t quite keep up with his record collection so you should definitely do something with him”. Diskotaket was the result, a Oslo music concept that was “primarily into digging for rare disco, boogie and soul stuff”. It was a “club concept that really focused on the rare records” and of course there “was a lot more rare-record wankery going on” says Christopher with a laugh.

On the other end of town another night would adopt a similar approach to Diskotaket, playing rare Boogie and Soul, but with more of a dancefloor appeal. It was called Boogienetter and it had already lured over a couple of DJs from Diskotaket by the Christopher joined this crew in 2015 with Diskotaket’s Fredfades Dirty Hans and Erik Fra Bergen already there. Informed by a similar musical philosophy to Diskotaket, Boogienetter would also be about digging for those rare records but as “everybody has rare records, the focus has to be primarily on the dance floor.“

The digging nature inevitably started informing Christopher’s productions too as Rude Lead, taking some of his favourite snippets from these obscure records to the studio. “I don’t want to find just the hook”, says Christopher of his sampling techniques, “I want to find parts of the song that are under-appreciated and build a tune out of it”. Christopher would first channel this into Hip-Hop about 11-12 years ago with Adept. “I’m not quite sure what sparked it again”, says Christopher talking about how Hip Hop found its way back into his work after House and Techno. “Maybe it was because I worked briefly at this youth centre and I used to record a lot of those kids, and they were really into Hip Hop.” When a friend introduced him to Adept, they started working together and had found some minor success with a couple of underground hits on the Kingsize community (a Norwegian Hip Hop blog). Falling into a Hip Hop crowd, Christopher helped establish Stew Studio with his brother around six years ago when the Skeez Tv battles were at their height. “People would come round after the battles to record some tracks at the first Stew Studio in Alexander Kielland plass.”

Part collective. part professional studio that’s currently between permanent addresses, Stew Studio became a home for Rude Lead and Ollie Twist, but it wouldn’t be Hip Hop that would bring them to the wider world. A Boogie release from Rude Lead called “Sjalusien Dreper Oss” with vocals from Younes Khalif was the first release from the studio that found its way out of Norway. A rare single run pressing of the record sold out immediately when the lowrider Boogie scene out of California headed up by DJs like Debo got hold of the record. Emails from the US west coast followed like: “hey ese, I like your record, where can I buy it” and the record became an underground hit in that community, selling out of the limited pressing and struck up highly unlikely relationship between Oslo and the lowrider scene in LA that also saw Debo come to Oslo in 2016 under Diskotaket banner.

There’s the congruous flow between Hip Hop, Soul and Boogie in Christopher’s musical identity as Rude Lead, that although they are channeled in different ways still come from the same place. It’s that drive to find and appreciate those rare underappreciated gems throughout music history that informs everything from his sets at Boogienetter to his productions as Rude Lead. At Boogienetter it’s all about the records and Christopher believes that “there’s still a lot to be discovered” in that genre, even today. Some of it is just “really underplayed” according to Christopher and you can still find obscure records, especially in the US . “I have a lot of friends that go on digging trips and come up with really great records.” With labels like Super Disco Edits and Cannonball Records still finding rare tapes from the seventies and re-issuing them on vinyl in the present day, there seems to be no end of music available for the genre. Artists and producers like Rude Lead continue to contribute to the genre with new music and at the time of the Interview Rude Lead also has an upcoming release with Jay Nemor and Tom Noble on Russell Paine’s Super Disco edits – “the first new release on the label”.

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That record was recorded in the funkis house basement that marked Stew Studio’s second last residence and with the Rude Lead & Adept album also still on the cards, Christopher certainly underplayed how busy he currently is when he said he has a bit too much going on. He talks with excitement about this release and his latest DJ mix of modern soul for Stew Studio while reading out a list of musical commitments coming up in the near future. The next day I get the follow up to the Soul Stew mix series, portending to his upcoming Boogienetter set and like Rude Lead’s music, it’s considered and distinguished take on the genre. The tracks are obscure rarities, with a lot of thought and patience going into the way they segue into each other, and similarly to the man behind the mix, there’s not a hint of pretentiousness to any of it. It sets the scene for the evening ahead and Boogienetter, when we’ll see Christopher Langedahl next as Rude Lead…

Beneath two Moons with Hodge

Out of post-dubstep era in the UK, Jake Martin emerged as an artist and DJ during one of the more fertile periods of UK music. Venturing through the deeper aspects of House with an uniquely UK take on the genre, Martin started producing music with Matthew Lambert as Outboxx in Bristol at the turn of this decade. Deep chords, broken-beat interruptions and R&B vocals informed their work, capturing the zeitgeist of the time that also saw the rise of producers like Julio Bashmore, Seven Davis Jnr, Kowton and Joy Orbison. While releasing records as Outboxx on labels like Idle hands and Future Boogie, Martin also embarked on a solo career as Hodge, with the first few releases congruous with the music Outboxx was producing at the time, but with Martin’s wholly idiosyncratic take.

A few years into his solo career, Martin’s music started to shift as Hodge, moving into darker timbres and favouring the more accessible 4-4 beat arrangements from Techno. Releases on Livity Sound, Hotline Recordings, Berceuse Heroique and Hemlock Recordings followed in this phase, and collaborations with Randomer, Pev and Peder Mannerfelt, installed Hodge in a new progressive era of Techno amongst those artists. His latest EP on Berceuse Heroique, Between two Moons, expounds on previous records yet again, with a melodic, atmospheric take on Techno that works as well over a set of headphones as it does on the dance floor.

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As Hodge, Martin’s sets bear resemblance to his production work and while his sets on Rinse FM explore the furthest reaches of electronic music for listening audiences, his club sets cater to the functional demand on the dance floor. It’s unsure how much of his production work informs his sets and just what exactly influences his evolutions as a DJ and producer, but with an upcoming appearance at Karima F’s Affirmative Action during Bypåske we jumped on the opportunity to send some questions to UK DJ and producer.

Hello Jake and Thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions for us. Where are you at the moment and what are you listening to / watching / reading?

I’m in Bristol, have been on bancamp mission the last few days mainly listening to music from labels Bedouin, Latency and Offen at the moment. I’ve just starting to read Binti by Nnedi Okorafor – still on the first few pages… the last films I’ve seen in the past week were Lady Bird; I rewatched Persona oh and I watched the new Jumanji haha.

Any of it inspiring you musically at right now?

Yeah, I take a lot of my inspiration from books and films and I’ve heard really good things about this book. it’s won the Hugo and Nebula awards so fingers crossed. I’m into it, I love the concept. Musically I’m definitely influenced from the 3 labels I mentioned – so much good music!

Talking about inspirations, the UK has always had its fair share of disparate electronic scenes influencing its artists. What were some of those early influences that continue to make an impact in your work do you think?

It depends how early you’re talking; for me I guess what resonates the most is the time I first got fully obsessed with UK music. So that would be around 16 going to college and listening to drum n bass and uk garage and then more of the obvious stuff everyone listens to when they first go to college to study – music like Boards of Canada, DJ Shadow, Aphex Twin etc

After that I moved to Bristol at 19 and got heavily into dubstep and then house and techno a few years later. I think realistically it’s all stayed with me and influences how I write for sure. Few tunes off the top of my head to try and be more specific on some influences would probably be Shimon + Andy C – Nightflight, Peverelist – Roll with the Punches and Ratty – Bells Of Dawn

What came first for you – DJing or production and how did the first affect the latter?

I first got some 1210s and a bunch of jungle and drum n bass records when I was around 16, but never really took it too seriously, just mixing with mates in bedrooms. I then started making music years later, and I guess that’s when I started taking things more seriously to an artistic level as such. So hard to say what came first, probably the production in my head anyway. The djing really influences the production – mainly as when I write music part of my thought process is always considering the dance floor and that’s started more after I’ve been playing out a lot.

We first heard of you through Outboxx, your project with Matthew Lambert, but you had already been making music as Hodge by then. How did those two musical projects differ for you?

Well Outboxx came about by a few people coming around my house to see a house mate and one guy ( Matt ) knocked on my door after he heard me making music and came in and played some chords on my keyboard. We ended up jamming and had a first track done before we’d really ever spoke much. We signed it 2 days later and then the Outboxx project was born! Really strange. The projects differed because Outboxx was jamming with new friends, and also with Naomi who sang on some of our stuff, it was just us having fun and making some music.

Around the start of Outboxx and Hodge, the UK certainly had a fertile electronic music scene with a whole host of people coming out of dubstep and moving into Techno, Garage and House. What are your memories of that period and why did you think it was so encouraging?

It was exciting, two worlds colliding. My memories would mainly be around stuff like Skull Disco for example, that was mad. I was obsessed with genres colliding like that – found it fascinating. Now I’m totally bored with trying to name everything as a genre and just focus on music and not trying to catagorise stuff,.I guess everyone, myself included, was just trying to process what was happening in real time so needed tags and buzzwords to get a handle on it. I absolutely loved that era as I was so hungry for new music and there was always something new being released.

Was there something in Bristol during this time that set it apart from the rest of the UK?

For me I’d say yes because I lived here so that immediately sets it apart from the rest of the UK for me personally. I’m sure there were amazing things happening all over it’s just I felt part of the Bristol thing and that’s an amazing feeling. I guess there was just a great community of people making music from here with lots of friends being involved in totally different scenes.

There was an Outboxx track released last year for the Disc Shop Zero tribute, but it sounds like something out of your back catalogue. Is the outboxx project still active?

Not really no, it’s an old track that Rob Smith has remixed. I haven’t actually seen Matt in a while, the project kinda slowed to a halt as my Hodge stuff started to gain momentum. I started playing out every weekend and Matt started a 9-5 job in the week so he was busy in the week and I was busy on the weekend and that basically stopped it! Plus I got super bored of house music so the Hodge stuff was much more exciting to me.

Yes, your music as Hodge dramatically shifted from the deeper kind of House you were making around 2013 to a the more atmospheric Techno your known for today. What was the catalyst for the shift in your sound?

Livity Sound. I saw those guys play live when we did a Boiler Room together (Outboxx and Livit ) and I was like omg what is this, basically drove straight home and got back in the studio. Kinda cool that I now help run the Livity nights in Bristol with Tom and release on the label considering how big of an influence it was to me

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Did your sound as a DJ shift at the time too?

Yeah totally.

In a RA interview with you from around this time it said that your “biggest influence at the moment is the techno-hungry European crowd”. I can understand how a crowd might influence a set, but how do you channel that energy into the studio?

I just ended up with 4-4 growing on me more and more, to the point where my tunes now often have a 4-4 kick – it just works so quickly. I have to go out of my way to write more broken stuff these days.

I imagine working with another producer too might be one way of distilling that energy into studio and the stuff you’ve been making with Randomer certainly has that effect when listening to it. How does working with another artist like Randomer sway your solo work?

Well Randomer is a production genius haha. He literally is amazing on Ableton – so learning new techniques from him has definitely influenced the way I work. Everyone has different techniques and methods so seeing them in use is exciting, I think working with others you will constantly grow.

I’ve caught a couple of your Rinse shows recently and they’re quite exploratory, something that works well on the radio, but not always in a club. How might a Hodge club-set differ?

Well the club set is aimed at making people dance, radio is just me playing a mixture of music I love!

You played your recent Berceuse Heroique (I still don’t know how to pronounce the label name) track on your last Rinse show. Do you play a lot of your own music out too?

Yeah I try to. When I first was going out to see artists so many would never play their own music and as I was seeing them play as I loved their music I wanted to hear it ! So I try and consider that and play some of my music when I play out. It’s hard though, sometimes I feel my own productions don’t fit in my own sets. Confusing I know.

That last release Beneath Two Moons, seems a little different from the previous releases on Hemlock which were more stoic percussive dance floor workouts. Is there a change of direction there in your work again?

The change isn’t something I’ve planned or plotted. I’m just always writing and those were 4 I wrote in a row. I guess this is the first record you can really hear the 4-4 influence hitting my music. I’ve explored a lot of broken rhythms in my previous 12s so it’s nice to have a new thing (for me) to play with.

Where do you see your future releases taking you and the listener?

I have no idea. I guess I’m making lots more music which is less direct attempts at bangers for the dance floor at the moment, experimenting more!

What track from that EP might be a good indication of what your music will sound like on the night at Jæger?

Beneath Two Moons

And besides Beneath two Moons what other music are looking forward to bringing over and sharing with us?

I’ve got lots of new unreleased tracks I wanna play out, new stuff from Bristol like Livity, Timedance and Wisdom Teeth.

We look forward to hearing them on the night. Thanks Jake and see you in the booth.

A Q&A with Terre Thaemlitz (DJ Sprinkles) – Part 1

“Liberal humanist cultures are recognizing they do not need to demand our heterosexuality. They only require our heteronormativity.” – Terre Thaemlitz Deproductions (2017)

Terre Thaemlitz has been a phenomenal artistic presence in the world since the early 90’s. A DJ; an audio-visual artist; a writer; and a lecturer, Terre Thaemlitz’ biography is extensive and encompassing all manner of art, music and art theory. Thaemlitz has been a prolific artist working within the marginal parameters of the avant-garde across mediums with works that have always “combined a critical look at identity politics – including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race – with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production.”

A fine art student, who became “disillusioned with the exclusionary politics of the visual arts industry”, Thaemlitz appeared as DJ Sprinkles for the first time in 1991 and rose to prominence as a DJ through New York’s “queer” scene. What was already a life-long interest in electronic music at that point had turned into a career when she became a resident at the transexual club Sally’s II. The event that came in its wake was DJ Sprinkles’ Deeperama, which immediately caught the attention of the wider world and can still be found on occasion in Japan, where Thaemlitz resides today. Thaemlitz quickly cemented a legacy as DJ Sprinkles early on in her career with her idiosyncratic take on dance floor genres, inspired by mood rather than function.

DJing led to production and in 1992 Thaemlitz established Comatonse Recordings as an exclusive vehicle for her musical works and collaborations. Raw as a Straw and Tranquilizer marked Comatonse.000, tracks that would later be picked up Instinct records for Thaemlitz’ debut long-player, Tranquilizer. The records and the label advocated a fusion of deep house with ambient and improvisational jazz that she designated the “fagjazz” sound and would be fostered across her various musical projects for Comatonse. It is a sound that would cultivate mood in the way of a DJ Sprinkles set and forego planned obsolescence through functionalism in favour of music that veered from formulated models. Thaemlitz’ music can go from the beatific solo piano repertoire of her Rubato series to the ambient, wistful textures of Soil and Tranquilizer only to return to her provocative club-arrangements as DJ Sprinkles.

Albums and EPs throughout her various aliases have made a lasting and succinct impression in contemporary electronic music through various aliases. Works like Midtown Blues 120, Lovebomb, and G.R.R.L are some of the more familiar titles, but mark a mere snippet of the highlights of a fertile artistic career that has combined Thaemlitz’ critical analysis of identity politics with music, film and words.

Today, her work continues to explore boundaries between dance floors and lecture halls and while her latest collaboration with Mark Fell as DJ Sprinkles had made a severe impression on the dance floor, her work as Terre Thaemlitz had moved closer to the obscure and the avant-garde of visual and conceptual art. In her latest work Deproduction, she responds directly “to the ways in which dominant LGBTQ agendas are increasingly revolving around themes of family, matrimony, breeding and military service”. An audio-visual work, Deproduction was first displayed at Documenta 14, before it was released as an SD card album on Thaemlitz Comatonse recordings. It’s a significant work at a time when gender as a non-binary construct is being hotly debated all over the world, and questions the issues at hand in a visually exciting and musically progressive work.

*All photos courtesy of Comatonse Recordings

It will be displayed at Oslo at Kunstnernes Hus this month, followed by a DJ set from the artist at Jæger as DJ Sprinkles and allowed us the exclusive and unique opportunity to send some questions to Terre Thaemlitz. Ruby Paloma, an Oslo-based independent artist agent, art dealer and freelance writer provided the questions and in her Q&A with the multimedia artist we get to peer directly into the mind of Terre Thaemlitz with thoughts on the institutional nature of art, her relationship with her work and her new work, Deproduction.

What is the relationship between your music and your other art productions?

Most projects revolve around audio, and are developed for release as “albums” on my Comatonse Recordings label. Video has become an important part of my live performances, as a means to convey more thematic content within the limited time of a concert. They also sometimes get used for video installations in galleries or museums. The texts accompanying albums also sometimes get printed in journals or books. But all of these variations are primarily about economics – just trying to find ways to earn enough money, since record or album sales never amount to much.

Are all your projects conceptually motivated? Could you talk a bit about how you communicate the context of the music projects that are not clearly conceptual?

Yes, I always have a concept. Otherwise, it is just masturbatory nonsense, and the world has enough of that already, being done by people who are far better at masturbating in public than I. My emphasis on themes is a critical rejection of the typical pointlessness of most audio productions that are either just about affect or formalism. “Musicians,” like “artists,” are conditioned to be nothing more than mute idiots who cannot explain our work even if a gun is held to our heads. I really despise the political apathy behind statements like just wanting to make “music for music’s sake,” or “music is universal.” This is homogenizing humanist bullshit that sells records, but at the expense of contextual and cultural specificity.

How can something as abstract as music relay these conceptual ideas, and how would a project like Deproduction work outside of the context of the imagery and the text?

In terms of conveying direct messages, I agree that “music” – and particularly “instrumental music” – is an incredibly limited media. I do approach sound linguistically, and structurally, but it is particularly difficult for instrumental music to avoid falling into poetic vagary. This is why I also add video and text when possible. At the same time, I also use a lot of samples – voices and sounds – which can get points across. For example, the first half of Deproduction is a track that is basically 45 minutes of the sounds of domestic arguments set to melancholic strings and other environmental sounds. I think anyone who sits through it will come away with a good sense of my intent, even without text or video support.

To what extent does craftsmanship play a role in your work? Do you find that craftsmanship is a way to build bridges across artistic practices, i.e., music, art, performance?

Well, I am not a musician. I am not trained with any instruments. Of course, since I have been doing this for over 25 years, I have refined my own ways of doing things, and I cannot claim to be so naive with gear as compared to when I started. But I have always openly insisted and played with the notion that “talent” is simply about emulating culturally accepted sonic signs – not unlike “passability” in the world of transgenderism. I often demonstrate this through piano solos. I cannot play piano, but I know that if I press up a record of me banging on keys it has a 99% chance of being heard as something improvised by someone with training. So my approach to craft is simply one of emulation and signs – much like the other forms of sampling and collage that constitute the bulk of my projects.

You are showing your recent multimedia work Deproduction at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. The work was produced with support from Documenta 14 and Akademie der Künste der Welt. To my knowledge, you are now exhibiting and working together with art institutions more than you have done in recent years. Could you talk a little bit about your relationship to art institutions, and how this might have changed over the years?

Yes, it was produced with their support, but it specifically means that the curator Pierre Bal-Blanc – who has been really supportive of my projects over the years – knew I was struggling to find time to focus on the “Deproduction” project, so he invited me to premiere it at Documenta as a way of getting me some funds to help me free up time to work on it. Showing work at Documenta 14 seems to have brought a little attention to my video works within a particular art circle, but as with many people who have participated in Documenta over the years, that momentary visibility quickly dissipates. Things fluctuate from year to year, but I am actually doing about the same amount of art related stuff as always. All of these media industries are fickle, so I try to keep actively working with multiple types of venues – night clubs, music festivals, museums, galleries, video festivals, universities… but I find them all unpleasant, I only work with them as a “critic” who tries to openly perform their limitations and problems, and I do my best not to be too dependent upon just one industry. Art is actually the area I despise most, because after more than a century of quite precise and powerful analyses of the corruption behind galleries and museums, everything remains business as usual. It’s incredibly cultic, you have to play a lot of social games, and if you get to that level of gallery representation you must ultimately speculate on your own potential value, etc. It’s ultimately a fucking con game in the service of rich assholes with whom I do not share common values, and our only relationship can be an antagonistic one of employer and employee.

As you might be aware of, Oslo has a significant number of artist-run exhibition and project spaces, which contributes immensely to the identity of the Oslo art scene. Many of these have sprung up in opposition to dominant institutions. In an interview with FACT Magazine in 2014, you reflected on the difference between “activism” and “organizing” when asked about intersectionality and ground-level organizing against dominations.

If you use this distinction between “activism” and “organizing” to reflect on the international art scene, what is your take on artist-run spaces and their contribution/ activism on established institutional and commercial scenes?

Ultra-red and the LA Tenants Union has been doing a lot of vital work around how those spaces function as probes for gentrification and investments. Their attempts to keep galleries out of low income neighborhoods has been met with massive push back from the art world, and government agencies indebted to real estate developers. It’s some pretty difficult stuff for people in the art world to digest, for sure, because it goes against so much mythology about the links between art and community, and the role of artists as kinds of public servants. I do not believe “art” is a vehicle for social organizing. I do see some types of work as offering analyses which can be food for thought, but this is very different from confusing an analysis for an actual act of organizing – a common mistake of those invested in “political art.”

Your project Soulnessless, the longest album in history, which includes both text and video, reflects on what you call a labour crisis in the cultural sector. Entertainment, art and music is often not thought of as labour, but passions, enabling promoters, labels, galleries and art institutions to not pay artists under the credo that artists are doing what they love. In Scandinavian countries, artists and art initiatives are eligible for grants. In Norway, the Norwegian Cultural Fund allocates public money to the free art sector, outside the major, government-supported institutions, and there are government stipends for artists. This, of course, does not mean that the expectation that artists should work for free has been eliminated, but a system for compensation is in place. What is your take on this model for compensating artists and art production?

I was raised in the US, and immigrated to Japan – both of which are cultures with nearly zero federal funding for art and music. So while I understand the logic of feeling entitled to a share of public funds created by one’s tax payments, I also am never surprised when those funds go to the most conservative cultural elements – like classical music halls, or galleries for housing old paintings. Similarly, I never forget futurism’s role as the official art of fascist Italy, or social realism’s role in totalitarian Chinese and Soviet regimes, etc. So both my sense of history and personal experience keeps me from ever being excited by news of countries that fund artists.

I am not really educated enough on your context to respond to your question with precision. However, it does trigger immediate reactions in me. I am sure there are limits to how funds can be used, for what types of content, etc. There is no federally funded culture that is not also entwined with the boundaries of moral acceptability within that culture – what constitutes pornography, what warrants censorship, etc. Within a highly liberal humanist society, those boundaries may appear quite open, but of course they remain nonetheless. If you are telling me that the majority of Scandinavian artists do not experience conflicts of interest between their work and dominant cultural practices, and they easily receive federal funding, then that strikes me as an indicator of conservatism. You know, that brand of conservatism held by liberals who cannot fathom their own conservatism. This is simply the image your statement conjures for me.

But yes, compensation for labor is a right – or so we are told. In reality, capitalism relies on economic imbalance, underpayment and slavery. Art is an industry, so these same problems exist for artists in various forms – only we are supposed to be grateful because we get to “do what we love,” right? As I have said many times, people in creative industries are the poster children for capitalism, precisely because we are thought to epitomize the potential for harmony between one’s desires and one’s means for income. Capitalism needs some labor group to personify this myth. It is us, in creative industries. Our labor is inseparable from this propaganda.

I suppose we could talk about this in a broader context – that of the Nordic Model. Would you say, within your discourse on a cultural labour crisis, that the Nordic Model could go some way to resolve some of the issues you have raised?

Again, I do not know enough to really respond properly, but what little I do know tells me to be skeptical. I know that most Nordic cultures are quite liberal, yet they also revolve around quite conventional and deeply rooted notions of family. Based on what I know of legalities around trans and queer issues, my sense is that most openness around issues of sexuality and gender relates to the potential for reconciliation or acceptance within dominant culture (legal recognition of gender changes, same sex marriage, etc.), and not with things that actually disrupt or refuse heteronormativity. Most mainstream LGBT culture – as something recognizable by straight and gender reconciled people – does not challenge heteronormativity. My personal sense of social and cultural mobility are always tempered by an understanding that the ways in which cultural minor experiences are manifested in dominant cultures are more about exploitation than accomplishment. Like, I can never forget this article I read in a Finnair magazine, talking about the equality and liberation experienced by Finnish women. Airline magazines are always such a cultural barometer for mainstream liberalism. So the photograph selected to visually support these statistics on women’s equality was a smiling female waitress delivering a cup of coffee. I love Finland, actually. If I were to live in Europe, it would be my first choice of places to live. But holy fuck…

Exploring that further, do you find that there is full creative mobility within such a system?

As for mobility, my experience with things similar to the “Nordic Model” have producers creatively bound to two types of income. One is the grant – a lump sum – which makes the most sense for a person like myself who develops projects on my own time, with no direct relation between my hours of labor and payment. Grants make sense for projects that cannot be realized through a salary-based schedule. It sounds great in theory, but in reality I have been doing this for over 25 years, and I have never had one of my grant applications in any country approved. That is a fact. The second type of payment is standardized wage systems, where all participants in a festival or event are paid equally. This is usually a small amount equivalent to one or two days minimum wage, which can only make sense for local people who manage to be active enough to earn a living wage – which I cannot imagine being possible, nor productive. It means working at an industrial rhythm which would certainly not allow for the time required to develop the kinds of projects I produce. And, honestly, within an inescapable capitalist system, is it “fair” for people with totally different amounts of skill and experience to be paid the same? And if so, why must it be the more skilled who accept a lower wage, instead of overpaying the inexperienced? You know, overpaying the inexperienced is an option if we really wanted it to be one! So, again, I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but I feel obligated to present a kind of pragmatic counterpoint to the optimism or potential implied by your questions. I confess, this is also in part a rejection of a subtext of nationalism and Nordic pride that I feel lurks in the background. Sorry, I’m sure you know that I have extreme issues with Pride[TM] in all forms, so this is affecting my responses to your questions, which I feel contain a lot of positivist presumptions.

to be continued…

Out of Quarantine and in to Dust – Laurel Halo through the albums

I have a distinct memory of hearing Laurel Halo’s Quarantine for the first time. Her un-processed vocals, on the edge of breaking, counteracting the sweet harmonic of a distant obscure electronic accompaniment. It delivered something visceral and provocative to the ear. There was something in her voice that stretched over familiar melodic intervals that was reminiscent of Bjørk, but touched at a depth that even the Icelandic artist hadn’t been able to reach until Vulnicura. While Halo’s vocal certainly enchanted, it was the way they played against the lattice-like textures of the abstract synthesis, that had made Quarantine an album like nothing you’d ever heard before. Parallels can obviously be drawn between the aforementioned Bjørk and the monosyllabic speech patterns of Laurie Anderson, but where artists like those relied on a wholly pop-aesthetic, Laurel Halo’s production and songwriting bared closer resemblance to someone like Shackleton, than anything from a pop vocabulary.

Quarantine made an instant impression on the listener and whether you liked it or loathed it, it was definitely not inadmissible. Critics merely praised it, and accolades for Laurel Halo’s work came in abundance, but public opinion definitely remained divided. “The record’s not meant for everyone”, explained Halo in an interview with the Quietus shortly after the release. “(I)t’s not a pop record in the slightest so I think people expecting that would be disappointed by the vocal tone and production approach.” By the time you get to the second song on the album “Years” you would either be entranced or disenchanted by the beat-less sojourn through Halo’s emotive depths on her debut album. Although Halo’s debut EP, King Felix certainly had ears pricking up everywhere, it would be Quarantine that launched her career, making a vivid statement from the music right through to the artwork, designed by Makota Aira; a colourful and humorous display of Seppuku (ritual Japanese suicide).

Musically tutored in a very traditional, classical sense, and originally from Ann Arbor Michigan, Halo was schooled in electronic music in the neighbouring city Detroit where she still has “fond memories of New Year’s Eve and going to DEMF and other summer music fests” according to a 2012 Self-Titled interview. Born into a creative family, her father, stepmother and mother all visual artists, Halo chose music as her creative outlet. “I’m not sure how it transferred really!” she muses in that self-titled mag interview, but what started as writing songs at the piano, turned into production, while at the same time she picked up DJing through college- and local radio in Michigan. By the time King Felix had reached the world, Laurel Halo had defined a sound in her music. That sound would go from the beatific avant-pop of her first EP, to the emotive drudging through Quarantine, and would eventually end up in the instrumental pseudo-club realm of Chance of Rain.

Chance of Rain as Halo’s sophomore album featured a bold move from the artist as the first recorded EP/LP completely devoid of her vocal. Channeling that raw intimacy of Quarantine into a primal urgency, Laurel Halo’s focus turned to rhythm on Chance of Rain. ”I wanted to try making some textural, rhythmic music that was anchored by a peaceful center,” she explains in a DummyMag interview from 2013. The result was a melancholic music for a David Lynch club scene. Where Quarantine loiters and idles Chance of Rain moves and plunders. Polyrhythmic percussion arrangements lie on the fringes of club music with a warm, nebulous cloud of sound engulfing the entire album. The percussive accents jut out from the smoggy textures, jaggedly piercing the timeline of tracks like the title track and “Ainnome” in a clamouring towards some ineffable movement. “When you’re feeling a rhythm and you’re in a moment, everything else dissolves”, says Halo in that DummyMag interview, but why drop the vocals entirely for the album when they made such an intrinsic impression on the debut?

In an interview with Spin Halo told Philip Sherburne that she “would only sing maybe three songs in a live set that lasted an hour, and the rest was instrumental” and while Quarantine was a studio album, Chance of Rain and the EPs around it, namely Behind the Green Door and In Situ, were Halo approaching music from a live context. “So there is a disjoint between ‘Quarantine’ and ‘Chance of Rain’ in the sense that ‘Quarantine’ is entirely a studio record and then I had to retro-engineer those tracks to figure out how to play live”, she explains in DummyMag, “so I said to myself going forward you’re going to make music for live first.”

It doesn’t quite explain why there’s a not a a single whisper of a vocal on Halo’s music from that time since she would still sing live, but something she mentioned in a recent Fader interview might give us a clue. “Writing songs is exposing an aspect of your private self”, she told Aimee Cliff in that interview while on the subject of singing. After Quarantine was released, people would often come up to her asking if she’s alright, suggesting that Chance of Rain, In Situ and Behind the Green Door were a direct response to this and found Halo taking a more impersonal, functional route, but retaining the distinct aura of her personality, albeit from a wholly instrumental approach.

What might have felt “disjointed” in style and approach between Quarantine and Chance of Rain was sonically very similar, and something Laurel Halo would consolidate on her third album, Dust. What followed the melodically acute Quarantine and rhythmically obscure Chance of Rain, was an album that combined the best of both worlds in Halo’s lattice production style as a very aesthetically approachable avant-pop record. The return of Halo’s vocals on her recorded music, didn’t find her returning to the emotionally somber atmosphere of her first record, but rather a more buoyant, upbeat disposition laced with traces of sardonic humour in her lyrics. “Well, I’m glad that you are just listening to the lyrics because then we don’t have to talk about the music at all,” taunted Halo in FactMag interview from last year. The somber and then macabre tones of Quarantine and Chance of Rain was replaced by something more sanguine on Dust. “There’s already so much dark music out there that it’s really important to make music right now that offers solace, or positivity, or empathy, or connection,” she told Steph Kretowicz for FactMag.

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There’s a definite playfulness to her music on Dust as lyrics like “sometimes I drink too much” swirl past answering message tones and all manner of quirky Delia-Derbyshire-esque sci-fi chirps. It’s an unmistakable Halo record, but expounding on her dense textural framework with a more organic approach than the previous albums as acoustic instruments and field-recordings mesh with synthesisers, drum machines and Halo’s heavily processed vocal. Lyrically it’s still a “vulnerable” record according to Halo in that Fader interview “and there are moments that are personal”. Like Quarantine, Dust is a mixture of personal and impersonal content according to the artist, but after her debut where “people got really hung up on the personal aspects of it”, Halo decided to be a “bit more mysterious or obscure” on Dust. Halo appears more approachable and accessible than ever on Dust in what isn’t entirely an evolution in her music, but rather an extroverted version of what came before it. Halo sounds more comfortable in her sound and her vocal than before and something she tells Aimee Cliff in that Fader interview resonates through the music: “A lot of the personal stuff [on Dust] has to do with how to lose anxiety, and how to lose fear, and how to feel less afraid to be myself.”

Dust marks the third in a very reserved output from Laurel Halo, that has seen an album about every two years. Each album marks its own unique statement on a discography that never rests on preconceptions. The three albums take the Laurel Halo sound into a new direction each time, and even when they appear completely disjointed there’s something embedded of the artist in every one. Out of Quarantine and into Dust her albums have made a significant mark on music in the last 7 years and each album leaves her music open-ended with a question mark as to where she’ll go next.

*Laurel Halo joins G-Ha & Olanskii and Peggy Gou for Frædag tomorrow.

A dozen questions for Call Super

Joe Seaton, the man behind the Call Super moniker, has quietly been carving out a name for himself in the modern electronic music lexicon over the last six years. As a producer he commands the album format with great skill and the two examples, Suzi Ecto and Arpo via Houndstooth, are exemplar approaches to the LP in a modern electronic framework. Cascading rhythms vie for space in Seaton’s lattice-like percussive and melodic rhythms as tracks move like a rigid organism across the temporal. There’s a cultivated touch to the production as echoes from a broad cultural palette ring through these works and re-establish themselves as electronic organisms in beatific harmony with their new digital habitat.

Seaton adopts a similar approach on EPs and singles like Nervous Sex Traffic and Inkjet, but stripping back the layers and rhythms to where they operate with a more functional design and a view from the DJ booth. Atmospheric textures crowd staunch, unwavering repetitive motions, in seductive melodic and harmonic arrangements with heady effects.

The studio it seems however is an entire world away from the decks for Seaton and Call Super the DJ is as much an anomaly as the producer, and the two seem to operate at vastly different trajectories from the artist at their core. While Call Super’s music can often be solemn, timid and introspective, his sets lend an unexpected vibrancy and buoyancy to the artist. For the most part he has favoured music from the “windy / motor / big apple cities” with a very distinct approach; similar, but not quite like to the rhythms in his productions.

His sets today are a far cry from the Hard UK Techno and Trance that started it all for a fifteen year old musician living in the UK. Although Seaton had started picking up instruments at an early age, creating little “vignettes” of songs from his piano and guitar, while at the same time exercising his creativity as a visual artist, it would be through electronic music that he would leave his most definable mark. His EP The Present Tense launched the Houndstooth label in 2013 and started a relationship that lasts up to this day with 2017’s Arpo, marking the 80th release from the UK label, and consolidating the sound of Call Super in the process.

Inspired by every thing around him and very honest in his artistic approach, Call Super’s music and DJ sets often don’t relay the extent to which he immerses himself in his work. He’s a candid character however and has laid everything bear in countless interviews, but some questions remained and we sent some of these off to Joe Seaton on a hope and a prayer that he would answer them. He happily obliged and in return we got some insightful, often amusing answers.

q* Call Super joins G-Ha & Olanskii and Burnt Friedman next week for Frædag in our basement.

It’s said you’re inspired by things beyond music. What is currently inspiring you?

Raymond Chandler, Peter Hujar, Alice Neel, Ganryu (RIP), Max Roach, mess.

You’ve had prolific recording career compared to most electronic music artists. What’s so conducive about the studio environment for you?

I’m not so prolific. A lot of people today have even fewer ideas than me so I guess they make me look good. You can get a long way on not much it seems.

Your releases centre around the Houndstooth label. How does the label influence or affect your creative approach if at all?

It doesn’t.

The singles like Nervous Sex Traffic and Inkjet clearly have more designs on the dance floor than your albums, Suzi Ecto and Arpo. What are the circumstances that steer you in the direction of a single rather than an album or album track?

I can dance to all of it. I don’t want to make so many albums because it’s crucial an album has something to say about the format otherwise it doesn’t really justify its existence: it’s just a compilation of songs.

Does a premeditated idea usually inform an album?

Maybe a few. A mix of big ones like, um, death, and small ones like maybe confusion is perhaps useful. As well as obviously having some interesting artistic ideas that haven’t been raked over thousands of times before.

What sort of evolution do you think there is between Suzi Ecto and Arpo?

Arpo is a cadmium red, Suzi was closer to blue.

Contrapuntal and syncopated/uneven rhythms are a recurring theme in your music from the albums to the singles. What usually informs the rhythm of a track?

No idea, maybe a need for variance. Sorry, I’m not doing so well at this..

From time to time this approach to rhythm makes it into your DJ sets too, but do you feel there is a direct correlation between your sets and your recorded material other than the person behind them?

I try to keep them pretty separated. I like it that way.

You haven’t taken your material to the stage yet with a live show like so many of your peers. What do you prefer about a DJ set?

I usually don’t find this kind of music so engaging live, and I would rather spend my time making music rather than trying to solve my issues with the live thing. I love playing music in clubs and I love a whole lot of music so DJing makes sense to me.

Some of my personal favourite moments is seeing you and Objekt play back to back. What do you bring out in each other that makes it such a dynamic partnership in the booth?

I guess we play to each other as well as the crowd and maybe people pick up on our love.

This will be your first time playing at Jæger and without knowing too much about the club or the night how would you usually pack your record bag?

Records, wash bag, socks, underwear, USBs, huge torch, book, phone charger, two small torches, tee shirt, passport and ear plugs. Maybe I’ll bring a hat too, it’s cold outside I guess.

Back to Back with DELLA and Danby Choi

DELLA and Danby Choi are two pieces cut from the same cloth. They might have travelled divergent paths to occupy two sides of the same two-headed coin, but their obsessive love for music all stems from the very same place… the dance floor. DELLA cut her teeth in the US, dancing to the likes of Doc Martin and DVS1 before moving to Oslo, Norway where she rose to prominence as one half No Dial Tone before setting out on her own as the producer and resident DJ we call DELLA today.

Danby Choi’s musical obsessions gestated in an era of UK Bass and Hip Hop in Norway through the sounds of the Kids Love Bass crew, where the next generation of dance floor provocateur were waiting in the wings. Dancing led to DJing for Danby, but it was the word that left its mark on Danby and in recent years he and his magazine, Subjekt have become the cultural voice of a generation of Norwegians that share similar musical obsessions.

On Saturday DELLA and Danby will be in the booth together for DELLA’S DRIVHUS, but before they do we asked them to go back to back in a Q&A…

Who is Danby Choi?

Graduated in journalism last summer and love to write. Both personally and professionally I’ve been engaged in music as a DJ and journalist, with a background in communications at festivals. Now editor-in-chief for Subjekt with s/o Live Drønen, Una Mathiesen Gjerde, Truls Berg-Hansen and other great arts and culture journalists.

Sounds like business.

OK, so … Personally, I’m very transparent. Leaking secret information about myself to just about anyone. I can’t hold myself back on opinions, and really don’t care too much about being liked. I communicate with over 30 people a day (I’ve counted lately) but still feel quite «alone». I Love dogs more than people and I Consume more culture than your aunt. I have great interior taste :) I am just a victim of the present. You would notice all these things about me the first time you meet me and also the last time.

How long have you been DJing?

Quite long now, actually. It’s been six years of playing quite regularly, I’d say. (My first club gig was when I was 18, two years before I was even allowed to be in a club. Throwback to Fugazi!)

I wouldn’t count my first gig: I used to be a dancer and said yes to play a gig at a freestyle hip-hop dance battle in 2009. I had never touched any DJ equipment before then, but just knew that it was going to be easy. It wasn’t, but that’s my take on the most.

And what was the turning point for you to why you started?

I started going out as a 17 year old (look, I’m still alive.) Uh, wait, can I just mention how much easier it was, just then, to get in to places … I mean … It’s a war these days >:( I didn’t even use a fake ID, I just walked confidently in. Anyways, I went to see Kids Love Bass at Blå, (like every time they did anything there) and saw Daniel Gude (DJ Nuhhh back then), Seth Raknes (Seth Skizzo back then) and Skankin’ Earl. They really did some great bookings, club nights and club sets, and inspired me to listen to, and play, UK underground dance music. Genres like grime, funky, bass, garage, etc. Already then I understood that great producers are not necessarily great DJs: I always thought that the Kids Love Bass crew did better than their international bookings.

Hackman used to be my favourite musician around then, he was probably the first producer that I gave a lot of plays to. It’s fast, but easy to play, easy to like. Still genius, I think. Kids Love Bass booked him, and I was like «wow, can you make a living of this». So I tried. Conclusion: No.

Still — Daniel Gude is one of my all time favourite DJs, and six years later from then, Jaeger is a club that has proved so many times for me that good producers are not necessarily good DJs. Dax J is an exception that I can remember, but like … Can I give a shout-out to Oslo veteran DJs like Daniel Gude, Olanskii, G-Ha, Nils Noa, Charlotte Thorstvedt and of course also DJs that I’ve booked, like you, DELLA, Thorgerdur and Tonchius? Boy be travelling worlds and rarely experience better music than in Oslo.

I’m always convinced that resident DJs are best at any club because they are «at home» and don’t think like «Oh, Norwegians, they are vikings, and cold, so I play hard and cold music». Maybe a little of an exaggeration, but also truly felt. I think many DJs coming to Oslo think like that. And also that they often are booked by their hits (even though good bookers should look past that). I would never book Mykki Blanco to a live show because of his songs, but because of his live shows.

Not only are you a DJ but you are a promoter, journalist, and creator of Oslo’s cultural website, Subjekt. How did Subjekt arise?

Bla, bla. I’m a drop-out, I quit high school after just one year. Was studying media and communication at a high school level, and was really bored. I wanted to prove that I could do media and communication without school and made the print magazine Subjekt (playing on «Subjective» as I made all the content and design myself.) 18 and very rebellious :)

It was launched on paper, with support by Fritt Ord, in 2013. The second issue came in 2014, and then we launched online in January 2017 (every issue with support from Fritt Ord) and now we’re celebrating one year online with Red Bull Music, presenting Mykki Blanco, Brenmar (which was an artist I discovered around 2011, at a Kids Love Bass night!) Ah, it all makes sense when you write, I love writing, circles are closing, ah, it all makes sense.

Tell us a bit about the content on Subjekt.

Status for cultural journalism is really bad, and we want to do something about it. We look up to financial journalists and want to have the same take on culture: Interview objects should be afraid (almost) of journalists, but they are all friends in culture. And the interview objects actually edit the journalists. We aren’t afraid to ask stupid questions and represent the people reading, not the interview objects. As soon as journalists are friends with the public people, the world is fucked. The independent medias are people’s strongest tool for democracy, but we take them for granted.

Now, you are fairly young and quite the newcomer in the tough and competitive Oslo DJ circuit (welcome), do you feel intimidated by your age against those who have 20+ years experience behind the turntables?

I’ve been partying for so long now, I actually look at the kids and think the same. I think DJs consider me as a grown-up, or at least I’ve begun to do. But no, I’m fan boy-ing most of you, lol. Really looking up to the great DJs of Oslo, just genuinely. I’m like there dancing four days a week, as you, my mom, my colleagues and my professors have noticed. But in the beginning, like three years ago, I didn’t feel welcome at all. Everyone were so strict. They snitched about my age and got me thrown out of clubs. I feel very welcome now.

With today’s obsession with technology, the birth of the social media PR infused DJ has given quick success to many just starting out. You being of the social media generation, any thoughts?

Yes, I feel offended. Or, I used to feel offended.

I spent 20 hours a week dancing, my whole youth, till I was 16. I actually won the Norwegian Championships (hehe) in the Junior Boys Elite class, participated in International Dance Organization’s European Championships and held weekly classes for young people that are known worldwide as dancers now (not just because of me). But music has always been my whole life. I then started blogging about music, for a magazine called Smug — and then was out clubbing, before I was legal, and am still writing about music, communicating festivals, promoting parties, booking DJs, debating for clubs, etc. No-one ever invited me in to this interest, and no-one taught me to DJ ever. But still they are like «he’s just a good promoter». Lol. Promoting their hate <3 How may anyone in my generation prove a genuine interest in music …

You really are offended.

Hehe. Maybe. I can tell a positive story, though. I chose to continue DJ-ing after playing one of my earlier gigs at Turkish Delight (RIP!!! Oslo’s best bar ever!!!) when Daniel Gude actually came and said I played some great tracks. I remember all the three songs I played in that marathon, it was this , this and this. It was like all the motivation I needed, in a sentence, by one person.

To answer your question: No-one other than myself put me onto the DJ path, I’ve always been genuinely interested in music. Ask the kids after me!

By the way, I also read the article on Vice or Fader or something, criticising the new generation’s DJs, as they are not only good DJs, they are also graphic designers and good promoters. Which of course wake questions if these DJs steal the focus. «Underground DJs», more like not DJs shared it a lot, and I felt really offended by the critique. I’d rather say these designer-DJs are just especially devoted to club culture. The poster aesthetics around clubs have always been important, and says so much about the club aesthetics and culture, and I really appreciate that. I geeked in Photoshop to make DJ posters, and I learnt promoting to DJ.

But, that said, it shouldn’t be necessary for a good DJ to have these skills, of course, because good DJs really shouldn’t have to be good promoters. In fact it ain’t even true. Best DJs are not graphic designers and good promoters on the side. I accidentally am. (A DJ that design my own posters and hype them in my channels.)

And as a promoter, do likes and Instagram followers have anything to do with decisions on who to book?

No. Or of course, for businesses, as they are designed to earn profits. But I, as a person, would never promote anything that I can’t stand for. Mostly, I do the booking for the things I promote. And the things I book is simply good music. From there I pack it in as something to sell, as the promoter. I really wouldn’t promote anything that is not qualitatively good enough for my own taste. I’m an editor and promote certain values. My job is to pick the best, offer subjective opinions and critique, and to tell people about it, arguing why they should buy it or not. Tell people why they should listen to this, when majority, money and fame says something else.

Who are your greatest influencers in dance music? And do you prefer a certain genre when DJing?

Hard one. I love when clubs or concepts reduce my very wide music taste, just so I can focus on something for a night. To mention names, I love DVS1’s take on techno, Hackman’s take on bass, Alexander Robotnick’s take on production, but am also very influenced by jazz, «world music» (South African jazz, Nigerian jazz, Argentinian tango nuevo, Malian desert blues, Ethiojazz and more), boogie, disco, what not, really …

I actually like to play at clubs or at concepts that reduce my library, so I can focus at — not genres but — a tempo or a feel. I think dynamics is the most important criteria for a good DJ set, but this night with you I’m warming up, and I’m actually happy to go in to do an «opening gig/warm-up set».

Is this your first opening gig at Jaeger? Please let us know how you prepare for your DJ sets.

Yes, it is! I’m so honoured, really.

I’m very systematic and love to place music in genres that I make up myself in my iTunes library. I’ve made so many lists, and my goal is to make them as full as possible. They are not like «boogie» and «techno» but like «rhythmical boogie without vocals». And from all these, I just make out a set that doesn’t quite respect genres (but still a build-up), but it’s easy for me to find them in that order. Besides that, I never prepare for a DJ-set, just evenly through a year complete these lists so it’s easy for me to find the tracks when I’m in the booth and spontaneously find out what I’m going to play.

Give us your top 3 tracks at the moment.

These three beauties:

Christian Morgenstern – Girl Got Rhythm

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Maximillion Dunbar – Cassette Arabic

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Auto Repeat – Needle Damage (DJ Sneak remix)

Any questions for DELLA?

I actually don’t know too much about you personally, I just booked you to our boat party after I heard one of your sets, which was amaze. Tell us a little?

Who is DELLA? Very good question. As far as a DJ, I have around 15yrs under my belt and 20+ years in rave culture. I started buying my first records at Doc Martin’s infamous Wax Records in Los Angeles (RIP) and have been influenced by the best of the best in House music over the many years of getting down on dance floors. It was especially during the years I lived in the City of Angels though that inspired and taught me the most. I was living in quite the dream (and still do).

In 2005 I moved to Oslo and formed No Dial Tone with Vibeke Bruff. We held crazy parties called Lipstick and eventually moved up the ladder in the international scene with our first major release out on Classic Music Company. We started advancing rather quickly with Defected Records PR team behind us, but paths change and we decided to lay No Dial Tone to rest.

DELLA was born in 2014. Soon after this I became an official resident of Jaeger and have added more releases to my discog on powerhouse labels as Paper Recordings and Moulton Music. I have also shared the DJ booth with, more than I can count, top DJs, and I travel often to play. I especially like playing in USA where the real House-heads live, haha. The devotion to House in USA is not like anywhere else. It is a serious soul thing and peeps know how to GET DOWN!

What was your turning point to be a DJ?

When a friend basically told me to go out, take my credit card, and buy two Technics because she was tired of me talking about all these DJs all the time. “It’s time for YOU to be a DJ.” So, I took her advice and bought 2 Technics and a mixer the following day. The rest is history.

What is a good DJ?

Someone who knows how to get people to dance. Someone who is not stuck in a safety net and pushes themselves. Someone who is NOT in it to feed their own ego, but to spread the knowledge of our music and to unite our tribe in the music we all love. Someone who musically knows how to play a story and free hearts. Listen to Mark Farina, he is the best House DJ there is in my ears (he is the king of Mushroom Jazz, need I say more?).

One of my all time fav mixes from Mark Farina – ‘Seasons’

What would you say if I play those three really hard tracks before your set? :P

Haha, I am all about bringing the energy, but one of the greatest tools to learn as a DJ is how to be a good opener. How to read rooms, how to create vibe for the headliner. It is not easy prepping the floor for someone else to take over, it is a skill that takes practice. I am giving you a shot here boy, so don’t disappoint me! :)

Hehe, I agree, exactly why I asked. I’ve shared these tracks now, so I will play an opening set. Or, well, let’s mention that we’re playing back to back from 2:45 to 3:15!

Yes!

You say house music is a spiritual thing. What values do you put in «spiritual»?

Gratitude, acceptance, light, and love. And of course, non-stop House music.

For more on DELLA:

https://soundcloud.com/delladunn

https://www.residentadvisor.net/dj/della-no

https://www.facebook.com/djdella

The language of Pop with Legs 11

Depending on which way you look at it, Legs 11 can be an infamous strip club; a promiscuous cover band; or the mnemonic caricature on a bingo card for the number 11. Ironic, funny and oft notorious, Legs 11 encourages several associations, and in Norway it’s a band, a band who have happily adopted at least two of those associations. “Bingo!” says Sigmund Floyd when I guess the parlour-game origins of the name towards the end of our an interview in their Gamlebyen studio. “We had a different name for one gig but changed it quickly back”, says Torstein Dyrnes. Comprised of multi-instrumentalists (or “zero-instrumentalists” if you prefer the band’s turn-of-phrase) Torstein Dyrnes, Sigmund Floyd, Nils Tveten, and Audun Severin Eftevåg, Legs 11 indulges a wide-arching approach to their music with results that feign traditional musical distinctions. Their music harks back to a time when Techno, House and Pop were one in the same and across six EPs and an album their music can range from the strained guitars of a post-punk anguish to the silky repetitive House beats of today in an idiosyncratic pop format lifted straight from the eighties.

“We just wanted to play catchy synth pop” says Sigmund who had found a kindred spirit in Torstein Dyrnes when the latter was still associated with the Electronica Pop act Tøyen. Torstein would introduce Sigmund to Nils, who floated around various musical project, and during one karaoke session, they simply “cliqued”, and formed the initial line-up of Legs 11 in 2002. “We were part of the same scene”, explains Torstein sitting in their Gamlebyen studio and “people that grew up in the same scene with mutual interests invariably end up doing something together.” Eventually Audun Severin Eftevåg would complete the line-up as the fourth member and Legs 11 would take its final form with each musician bringing his own musical impulses in a project that could only ever exist as Legs 11. “I don’t think any of us could make this music separately”, says Torstein.

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Legs 11 officially came together during an era of a punk attitude seeping into electronic music, where the division between vastly different musical genres started to corrode and disappear mostly appropriately and succintly explained in James Murphy’s lyrics from Losing My Edge: “I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables; I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.” Bands and DJs became indistinguishable with House and Techno merging with Indie Pop / Rock and Legs 11 stepped into this time with their own take on what bands like LCD Soundsystem were doing in New York under the influence of their eighties roots.

Inspired by the sound of New York and transporting the sound of synth-pop to the contemporary, Legs 11 would arrive at a sonic identity driven by melodic hooks, skipping beats and robot pop-infused vocals thriving in the repetitive forms of electronic dance music. “We love to sing” says Sigmund with a sincere smile and it’s the vocals that tie everything together for the band. Every member contributes his voice on Legs 11 and for the rest of it they tend to “switch it up” according to Sigmund. Each member plays some keyboards and sings on the songs with Torstein taking care of bass, Sigmund guitar, Nils melodica, and Audun saxophone on to top of that, but it all starts with the programming and that’s where Nils is the catalyst. “He’ll program the drums and he’ll bring the ideas” says Sigmund before the rest of the band add their contributions. They consider themselves a “studio band” but even so the songs will usually take shape around a live session. Playing live in the studio “as a tool to develop the song”, it’s during this process that the song will actually take shape and its there that Legs 11 get that “organic feel” to their records.

A studio band with a live disposition, Legs 11 have been performing and recording EPs intermittently since 2002, but it was only in 2017 that they would release their debut album and call in a new productive creative era for Legs 11. “We’ve taken our time” says Sigmund, who adds that they hadn’t been this active since 2007, when Masselys’ Jon Birger ”Jomba” Wormdahl revisited Legs 11’s earlier material for 3 EPs that came out in 2010 in one of the busiet recorded periods for the band. The difference between then and now however is that they “never thought the material was actually good enough”. But something changed around five years ago for Legs 11 and today “it’s more fun than ever” for Nils and his bandmates. They are “more efficient” in the studio today as a band and “much more in control, production-wise” which made for a more unimpeded workflow with the results showing on their 2015 EP, Pessimist. “The first thing we were really happy with, was the Pessimist EP” says Sigmund and the reason according to Torstein is that they “moved into House” during that EP, which felt much “freer” as a band.

It all culminated in the release of Another Wave, a 6-track mini-album with the extended dance floor cut, The Rhythm breaking new ground for the band, as a fully-fledged synth-House track. Evasive 303 Acid stabs emerge out of densely layered synths, clinging to the 4/4 beat while repetitive vocals instruct like an eighties aerobics video. On The Rhythm the band flit somewhere between Brondski Beat, Primal Scream and DJ Haus, re-evaluating the House format in the pop context and taking their skipping Electro roots to a more repetitive House format. It’s a song that’s been almost ten years in the making as Nils became “skilled enough to make House or Techno” over the years, and combining their appreciation for Synth Pop and their experience in contemporary Electronic Dance Music as DJs, they’ve hit on a unique formula in the studio on that track and the rest of the album. Slinky bass lines and provocative synth lines find a symbiotic relationship with the vocals in tightly produced tracks with a wholly organic feel on Another Wave.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://legs11.bandcamp.com/album/another-wave"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Another Wave by Legs 11&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

As lyrics ponder everything from music and relationships on the dance floor to changing seasons, there’s a new-romantic approach to Legs 11’s lyricism which the band fuse with a very Norwegian sense of “humour or weirdness” that starts out with “some irony, but ends up sincere” Nils explains. They naturally slip into English as their chosen lyrical form, which Torstein feels is “the language of pop music” and the music they grew up with, which feels far more “natural” to Legs 11 than Norwegian and its contrasting rhythmical structures. The lyrics are always the last part of the puzzle for a Legs 11 track and the most difficult part of the song process for the band. “We really have to squeeze them out” says Sigmund with pained expression and what starts out as phonetic gibberish usually takes shape as a familiar trope or random line they can latch on to and turn into a song.

A trip to a mountain cabin studio often consolidates the writing process for the band, where they ingratiate themselves in the music and tie up the loose ends for the songs to the completed versions. A mixture of old songs, revisited and new songs usually make up a Legs 11 record and for 2018 they already have twenty such songs prepped for a new album. But first there’s the vinyl release for “Another Wave” on Beatservice Records and a host of live gigs, starting with their show at Den Gyldne Sprekk. The band are currently enjoying the journey up the crest of a wave in that regard. “I don’t think we’ve been booked for as many gigs as we have today without working for it” suggests Nils. In the past it was always more “difficult to reach out” for the band, who were closely associated with the small scene around Mir and Grünnerløkka, which today has expanded way beyond its borders. Today as electronic music venues like Jæger and Villa seem to be returning to a time of the Hacienda with bands and DJs sharing the dance floor, there appears a fluid exchange between these two worlds. “I really enjoy playing clubs with DJs”, says Torstein. “We always wanted to be part of that kind of scene and now it’s easier than before.”

As a programmed studio band with a live dimension, Legs 11 and their music are able to occupy both contexts in the present and it’s still the stage where the group really come alive. With an arsenal of instruments, drum machines and synths and their penchant for live vocals they are really able to bring a “little more edge” to the music on stage than they are able to do in the studio, which sets them apart from both their electronic and traditional peers. Legs 11 have followed a natural evolution to this point, where today they are very much in sync with their time and place. They admit they are more comfortable as a band today and the music that we’ve heard over the last few years have held the fruits of their new equanimity. With news of a new album and more shows in 2018 it is clear too that they are only at the cusp of a new wave that looks certain to be frenzied creative period for the group, going forward.

Strictly Underground with Didier Dlb

Can an underground truly still exist in the age of the internet and social media? With everything available at a swipe of a screen, there’s very little left to be discovered and that extends from information, to the clandestine acts of governments all the way to culture and music. What used to be the coveted secret of a few has become common knowledge and what became of Techno, its artists and its DJs was a familiarity and popularity that extends way beyond its origins. Few are still able to honour its underground roots with the likes of Ben Klock and Dixon becoming common household names, but even in Berlin there still exists pockets of a community, the clubs, the artists and DJs that embody that original spirit of the underground movement that started it all.

Tim Brüggemann is such a figure and whether he’s DJing under the alias Didier Dlb; producing as one half of Turmspringer with Robert Gallic; running the label Compute Music; or hosting is legendary 5vor12 nights at Golden Gate, he is one of the few figures that maintain that ideology, an ideology that he he’s carried with him all over the world, with its roots in Berlin where he’s been propagating it since the 1990’s.

At 45 today, Brüggermann is an elder statesman for the scene, but he’s been and remained an immovable figure on the scene. Starting out in the world of Funk, playing all manner of events, he found a calling in Techno in the mid-nineties and established the Didier Dlb moniker. A fortuitous meeting with Robert Gallic set him on the path to production as Turmspringer, while in the early 2000’s he became a significant figure at Golden Gate, establishing his 5vor12 after-parties some 15 years ago, which to this day are spoken of in revered, hushed tones all around the world. He remains a prolific observer of the underground, and is able to travel the world, spreading its gospel through his selections and his sets, wherever those might take him.

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He continues to produce, DJ and host events and has cultivated an established career from his home in Berlin. As Golden Gate’s popularity keeps growing and Didier Dlb and Turmspringer continues finding new audiences, he remains grounded in the scene that started it all, the last exemplar of an ever-diminishing underground. We caught up with the DJ, artist and label boss when he stopped off at Jæger last week for Mandagsklubben for a Q&A session and he shared significant insights in the underground and the industry through his experience.

Hello Tim, how was your night at Jæger?

It was good, though not many peeps showed up, but we could eventually get them all together.

Was there a track in your set that you felt particularly captured the feeling of the night?

Not particularly, but the people went really well with the Tech House part of my set.

You’re career stretches all the way back to the 1990’s in Düsseldorf, and playing a venue like Jæger on a Monday night must seem an entire world away. How have you seen the scene evolve and what is that integral consistency that’s remained in your opinion?

As I said, it wasn’t as packed as when I played there last about a year ago, back then I was downstairs and probably represented the Oslo scene at its best.

Is it true that you started out playing funk? How did you arrive at electronic music?

Well without funk there wouldn’t be any good Techno nowadays I believe. I got infected with the Acid House scene right away, went to Berlin in 1995 after a year in New Zealand, and from 1999 I started playing Techno.

You can certainly hear a degree of funk in your production work. What do you think it adds to the music that’s unique to you?

I am a bad musician, everything starts with a sample, that actually dictates the harmony.

What inspired your initial move to Berlin and how do you think it’s affected your career?

The narrow minded scene at Düsseldorf and my stay in Auckland probably. Though I have basically played with all the big boys out there in the biz, I never had a career like theirs. I am making a living from it and can say I strictly stayed underground if such term exists today.

Berlin is the epicentre of electronic music today. As person that’s always been there working in the underground how have you appreciated or regretted the scene’s rising prominence?

I appreciate that the city brought me out to pretty much all the continents besides South America as being a part of the underground scene that everybody wanted to get involved with.

But I regret telling everyone about it , but hey nothing stays the same … I am ready for another City … so please tell me…

Golden Gate has been an immovable presence in Berlin all this time and you’ve played significant part there both as Didier Dlb and Turmspringer. How would you describe the venue to the uninitiated?

Well it’s a bit of how it was back then, free without attitude.

There are a few people I know from Oslo that make Golden Gate the only stop on their trip to Berlin. What do you think is the crux of its appeal, setting it apart from other Berlin clubbing institutions?

The family vibe , our door policy maybe …

Your 5vor12 night there is in its 15th year and is spoken of in revered tones. What is the night all about and what does it usually sound like?

Well I guess it was the start for Golden Gate as a “ Techno Club”. I first tried Friday Nights inviting the local heroes in 2003, but it simply wouldn’t work out that way and I also wanted to present myself to the scene and got tired of paying money on other djs. At the time I was still playing Funk stuff mostly for the film industry, and even weddings. So we started the afterhours simply because nobody did that at the time. A close friend was working at Ostgut and he would promote our parties, without him, I believe Golden Gate would be very different place today. It was the time when Ostgut closed and a lot of party peeps where basically on the streets homeless and made the Golden Gate their new home, a living room of sorts.

Do you have a preference between production and DJing and how do they influence each other in your experience?

Well as a dj you should know the structure of a Techno track but from the finished track to actually putting it out is a long long time; it took me almost 10 years. The track that Robert (Gallic) and I did on his album for Jazzanova in 2002, was only the guy with the idea, which Robert made into a track. I think they are two very different things; there are a lot good producers that are shit djs and the other way around, I would consider myself in the second group of people.

How does it compare working in the studio alone and with Turmspringer?

Well it’s very different, Turmspringer has two minds, opinions, feelings towards the result.

Can you tell us a bit about your label Compute Music?

Well Robert started tonkind in 2005 and I joined it for our first releases as Turmspringer but tonkind was his baby from the start and I was into partying too much, getting to know the people just getting involved somehow. Compute was launched in 2015 when I was 42 years old and the reason was all the good producers around me having the same problem; a lot of tracks but no idea how to get it out there. The big labels closed their doors many years ago, it’s a hierarchy you won’t get in to.

For example after our first release on Get Physical we joined the agency for 5 years without a single gig. Promoters just wanted DJ T & M.A.N.D.Y, cause that’s how it works pretty much in all the big cities. I had a funny experience last year on my little Mexico tour. I asked the promoter what kind of music the people of Tulum are into and he proudly replied I shouldn’t be bothered; he is doing parties with Dixon & Solomun. I just thought the easiest way to make a successful party is to book Dixon (if you get him of course ) but basically you just need money. What’s much more difficult is to sell a nobody to the people, particular in parts of the world where there was no underground and Techno directly became mainstream thing.

The label’s focus is clearly on the dance floor and computer music of course, but what else do you look for in music and artists for the label?

The focus for Compute Music is not just on the dancefloor, nor on any particular style.

Is there anything your really excited about in the label’s near future you are eager share with us?

Well I am working on my album right now, it is a collection of tracks I did over the past 15 years and it will be a not for the dancefloor at all.

And that’s all the questions we have Didier. Thank you for visiting us and until next time, can you play us out with a song?

I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was her footloose man
No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need
I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she was gonna meet her connection
At her feet was her footloose man
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might find
You get what you need
But I went down to the demonstration
To get your fair share of abuse
Singing, “We’re gonna vent our frustration
If we don’t we’re gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse”

Introducing Joggebukse

In David Byrne’s book “How music Works” the Talking Heads singer outlines the band’s motivation for wearing suits on stage at the start of their career, as a way to counteract the extroversion of the glam period that came to before them, and land major Tom back on solid ground. Wearing suits like everybody else during that period, Talking Heads could engage with their audience at eye level, and draw the eye away from the band and the ear back to the music.

Transport that idea to 2018 where suits have been replaced by comfort wear like hoodies and tracksuits and we arrive at Joggebukse (Norwegian for track pants) and a trio of established musicians that are looking to redefine the band in the era of the club. Mats Oven, Syver Breiby and Petter Helland-Olsen are Joggebukse; an instrumental live band that bridges the gap between the dance floor and the stage and who are going about music and the industry in a wholly unique way in this era.

Joggebukse is a brand new project, with only a few gigs behind them and before they’ve even released a single bar of music, I meet Mats and Syver in the rehearsal room in the centre of Oslo. Instruments and empty beer cans give the floor an unnatural geography and I manage to kick over a guitar on my way down to a vacant chair facing Mats, before Syver enters the room wearing a luminescent pair of white adidas track pants, the very same pair that were the inspiration for the band’s name.

Is that what you wear when you play out Syver?

Syver: Yes, I think that was the whole point of the theme. I just want an excuse to wear my “joggebukse” everywhere. I feel like everyone looks down on you if you wear sweatpants everyday, but it’s just a social norm that doesn’t really mean anything; Why can’t I be comfortable everywhere?

Mats: It relates to the whole concept of how we make music and play the gigs too.

Mats, Syver and Petter have been playing together since high school, where they attended a vocational school for music. When Petter left for university to go on to do a master’s degree in classical guitar, Mats and Petter and some kindred spirits went on to form Tuba Tuba. Comprised of a few key players and a host guest musicians, Tuba Tuba took the road and the stage with great force over the course of the last ten years. Tuba Tuba’s sound can be summarised as a kind of indie pop made for DJs. That group consolidated elements of Disco and indie rock in one project that called to mind the quirk pop of Hubbabubbaklubb with a more comprehensive approach to instruments and a determined focus on the dance floor.

Joggebukse came in the wake of Tuba Tuba when the latter couldn’t commit to an unnamed arts festival in early 2017. Faced with a decision, Mats called on Petter to take up the gig, albeit under a different name that Mats and Syver are reluctant to share. The gig was to be little more than an impromptu jam session with Mats and Petter improvising bass and guitar respectively around pre-recorded samples and it immediately found the favour of the captive arthouse audience, encouraging them to explore these themes further, while enlisting the help of Syver and Joggebukse was officially born.

Has Tuba Tuba disbanded?

S: Not exactly, we’re just taking a break.

M: It’s just nice to play something else.

S: We’ve been playing together for ten years so it was cool to take a beat and just do some other things, and perhaps come back as a stronger version of that band.

How does this project differ from Tuba Tuba?

M: In some ways it’s very similar, but Tuba Tuba is also very schizophrenic.

S: It’s a little easier to do things when there are only three people instead of six. It’s easier to make decisions and get songs done. We were pretty democratic in Tuba Tuba.

And that’s not always the most efficient way to work in a band?

S: Yeah, the bureaucracy doesn’t help.

As Joggebukse, Mats Syver and Petter, are re-contextualising the idea of the band. They’ve avoided the traditional band orientated club venues in favour of dance-floor venues like Jæger and Villa, and have started incorporating visuals in their live show in the same way an electronic act or DJ might do in a club setting. For their last gig at the Villa they moved their setup outside of the DJ booth onto the dance floor where they played at eye level with their audience, and that line of distinction between performer and the dance floor disappears. Unlike Tuba Tuba where, they seemed to be disconnected from their audience with the usual security detail or fence between them and their audience, Joggebukse are more at home playing in close approximation to their audience.

S: I like the idea of playing on the floor with people dancing around you.

M: You have to show that you’re playing your instruments.

S: I don’t like watching DJs, I like to watch people play something and that’s not around much in clubs, or even concerts lately. I figured, why don’t we fuse those two things by jamming over a DJ set.

M: We are more compressed and we choose to play at places like the Villa, which makes the biggest difference I guess. The small venues where it’s so much more intimate, you can give something back to the audience.

S: I think that’s where we work best, in a small club with people dancing behind me and in front of me. It was a pretty loose concept, just making beats and doing gigs, and now we’ve consolidated it more like a band.

Syver mentioned a DJ set, but I imagine that is not in the same sense of what the club will understand as a DJ set?

M: Yes, that’s a bit misleading, because we only play original material. It;s our samples that make up a backing track. Syver will create a song, record the various parts, and remove the parts we play for the live show.

Those initial recordings are secreted away on a hard drive somewhere, unavailable to general public for now, but Syver assures me, “they’re coming”. There’s a video in the works that will see the light of day on the 10th of February as Joggebukse make their official debut in the recorded format, but they’re going about the band in a completely unique way. Joggebukse like so many of their peers are in completely uncharted territory. The traditional model for the industry of music can’t be sustained in the age of streaming services and an independent record industry that holds no financial value for the artist. Even releasing a record, be it independent or through a label today is merely for the purpose of getting gigs and people to the gigs, which is the only real viable source of income for a band today.

Even a band like Tuba Tuba, which at the height of their touring schedule had some critical success as a live group and played over a hundred shows to this date, were in no way a success according to Mats and Syver. The only money they’d ever really made was the 640 kr they got to split at one particular gig and for the most part they were barely covering costs. It puts bands like Joggebukse in a curious position where they really have to be be able to justify the time, effort and money it takes to create a record.

In the age of social media that means a video is probably more effective in that regard than releasing a pristine new album. “It all depends at which stage of your career you are” according to Mats and even with Tuba Tuba they never really thought they were anywhere near that next rung in their career ladder, a band able to sustain a living from just music.

M: We put a lot of work into Tuba Tuba and at the end when you’ve played for ten years and barely broke even, you do get tired.

S: I don’t feel like people picked up the Tuba Tuba the singles or the albums. It felt like we were almost making music just for ourselves.

M: I guess there’s not much point on using a lot of energy and money on the physical form at least and probably do it as indie as possible with any of the releases.

S: I really love the vinyl format, it’s a whole package and you can make a concept out of it, but it seems that there’s really no point anymore. People just want singles, which they chew up without much consideration.

M: In that case it’s cooler to make a video and just release it without much fuss and use that to get other bookings.

For the moment Joggebukse are for all intents and purposes a live band, harking back to an era before soundcloud and spotify, cutting their teeth on the stage rather than the studio. It’s an interesting situation and besides a few short instagram clips, there’s no way of knowing what they actually sound like without seeing them live, putting the audience in a position we’ve not really experienced post-internet.

There’s a degree of anticipation there you can’t really explain in a modern context, as you experience a new band for the first times. With no recorded references to their work, there’s only the band on the night, much like Talking Heads would’ve been discovered, playing at CBGB’s during the start of their career. People can’t get “disappointed by what they haven’t heard” suggests Syver.

But how would you describe your music to the uninitiated?

S: Funky is a keyword. Or Neo soul, something that you can really dance to…

M: …but with cool chords.

S: Sometimes I’ll just make a Hip Hop beat and it ends up being something you can dance to.

What are some of your influences for Joggebukse?

S: I thought of that on the way here and I wrote down Herbie Hancock and Mario Kart.

Mario Kart?

S: Yes the 64 version. There’s some really great tunes there, especially at the loading screen and where you get a star.

M: We actually use the star theme on a song.

S: Yes, I sampled the star theme and we use it in the live show. It’s really cool jam over.

Is the live show about improvising or playing fully composed songs?

S: Both actually. A lot of songs are the product of a lot of jamming and the songs are the best of the jam sessions.

M: When the beat goes a round a few times it’s the same thing we always end up jamming. We know the framework and we just jam within those limits.

S: We’ve been jamming for a really long time together so we have a collective memory.

M: In the future, we want to keep the distinction between the live set and the studio.

Although they never go into much detail, there is almost certainly a record on the horizon for Joggebukse, but without having heard a bar of music from the group as of today it’s still fairy uncertain to what that might sound like. Tuba Tuba on a Nintendo tip is the closest conclusion I can draw at the moment, and the rest is up to the night and the next show at Jæger.

*Joggebukse play Den Gyldne Sprekk next Tuesday with Legs 11.

What’s in Rudolfs Kontainer

Combining elements of Krautrock, Disco and New Wave is a new group out of Oslo called Rudolf’s Kontainer. A soundcloud sensation that also caught the attention of Olle Abstract’s Lyd podcast in January, Rudolf’s Kontainer is the brainchild of Mikal Lillo and consists of Ulf Moen Denneche, Pablo Guerrero and Eivind A. Haugen.

The band dwell in the icy digital world of 80’s pop-rock where vacuous reverbs and delays echo forth from a meleé of guitars and synthesisers while tight percussive arrangements bounce of the dance floor. Toe-tapping beats and ear-worm melodies stay with you long after the fact, and late last year the group put forward some of their best tracks as the debut album, Eclectic Rudolfland.

Eclectic Rudolfland finds its way out into the world through the Oslo-based eclectic label/collective MarsMelons, containing some of the most impressive moments from the band’s already burgeoning catalogue. The album’s debut also marks a new phase in the group’s biography as it takes them out of the studio and onto the stage for the first time.

Rudolfs Kontainer officially release their album via Olle Abstract’s LYD showcase this week at Jæger, and as they prepare for the show we aim to find out a little more about this new group and send over a few questions to frontman and guitarist Mikal Lillo.

Who exactly is Rudolf and what’s in his Kontainer?

Rudolfs Kontainer is the result of making a bunch of demo-recordings in my home in Oslo over a short period, releasing probably the best of them in December 2017 on the Oslo-label MarsMelons. I don’t know who Rudolf is, but I went too the Rudolf Steiner school and the kontainer is where all the songs go….

There’s four of you in the band, I believe. How did you all come together and what was the sole inspiration for starting a band?

There are five in the band now. Rudolfs Kontainers’ bass player Ulf (electronic musician known as Boblebad) and I grew up in Bærum and went to school (Rudolf Steinerskolen) together for a short time in the early 2000s. We exchanged some music last year, and he was so impressed by the quality he decided to contact his friends at MarsMelons.com to release Rudolfs Kontainer there. Me and the drummer Pablo had been jamming on the songs for a while and decided to play with Ulf on bass and try to play the music live, and gathered some people to make that happen (Eivind on synth and Henrik on percussion). Then Olle asked us if we wanted to play at this event.

Your soundcloud account describes the music as Dance-punk, Cold-wave, House, Electro-pop, Disco, Krautrock and Lo-Fi, but how would you describe it in non-musical terms?

Maybe as happy-go-lucky? My sister thinks its good music for cleaning the house.

What are some of the band’s influences?

Rudolfs Kontainer is influenced by a lot of different music made in the 1980s, such as disco, but also krautrock and electronic club music. Bands like Talking Heads, Kraftwerk and New Order are bands I want to mention.

Olle Abstract tells me that Rudolf’s Kontainer part of an collective out of Gamlebyen. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how it affects your music?

I don’t know anything about the collective out of Gamlebyen…

I must have misunderstood Olle. What could he possibly be talking about?

Olle must have mixed up the music collective Euforisk with MarsMelons. The only connection is that Rudolf’s bass player releases his own music on both labels.

What is MarsMelons and how do Rudolf’s Kontainer figure in there?

MarsMelons Is a label for experimental music from Oslo fornebu. Myself and Ulf sent Eclectic Rudolfland to Morten who runs MarsMelons and he really liked the album, so that’s what happened.

Your upcoming gig at Jæger for Olle Abstract’s LYD is also the official release party for your debut album, Eclectic Rudolfland. Eclectic is certainly an apt description, but what makes it distinct in your opinion?

I want people to have a good time when they listen to Rudolf. I think the music is kind of feel good and the process of making it makes me relax. I myself love a groove beat and a funky guitar.

Why an album and why now?

Because I had about 200 unreleased demos and about time too make an album for fun.

You said “I” there. Can we assume you are the creative force behind the band and how do the rest of the band figure into the writing process?

That’s right. The rest of the band are my favourite robots, making Rudolf come alive through playing the tunes live for an audience. They are perfect for the jobb! All of us are a bit out of tune; losing shoes all the time.

Out of the 200 tracks, what was it about this selection that works particularly well in the album format?

It’s a mix of the songs that got the most love on soundcloud and me and the guys in the band liked the most! It’s a bit random.

What will the album sound/feel like from the stage?

The music will sound more alive from the stage, more like a “rock” band, arranged differently, but very recognisable. We try to keep the groove and the beat.

* Rudolfs Kontainer join Olle Abstract and KSMISK for the inaugural LYD showcase at Jæger this Saturday.

New Norwegian Music and Run DMC with Olle Abstract

In Joddski and Tommy Tee’s music video for “Æ E Old School” from 2016, Olle “ Abstract” Løstegaard’s cameo doesn’t go unnoticed. Amongst peers like Strangefruit and Hele Fitta, the six-foot something Norwegian DJ is as much a physical presence as a symbolic one. One of the original protagonists in the story of electronic music in Norway, Olle Abstract’s 35-year career as a DJ and radio jock has left a lasting impression on electronic music in the region through a nationally syndicated radio show, countless events and more recently a podcast series. In the video for “Æ E Old School”, Olle appears wearing a leather adidas shell suit like the long, lost member of a RUN DMC cover band, mock-spinning some records alongside Tommy Tee. The garb, the scenario and the the context of the track speak a thousand words, which Olle puts into perspective when we sit down for a coffee at Jæger just before christmas.

Olle is relaxed and his cheeks glow a healthy hue of pink after his daily swimming session. Olle is a formidable presence in any room, both in stature and spirit and his voice easily matches the levels of Ivan Ave’s latest record playing over the mini Funktion One system in Jæger’s café. “Growing up in the eighties I was obviously a big fan of RUN DMC” he says in his burly baritone.

Olle’s start as a DJ is concurrent with the story of electronic music in Norway. Hip Hop and breakdancing laid the foundation to an interest in DJing that he could cultivate as a talent at his local youth club. Where Olle’s story diverges from the similar threads we’ve heard from countless Norwegian DJs is with the influence of “radio music from New York” from the likes of “WBLS and Kiss FM” which would eventually lead a very young Olle on a path to broadcasting. When tapes from the radio stations in New York started infiltrating Europe in the eighties, Olle too would be on the receiving end. “Everyone wanted sound like WBLS”, he remembers as he mimics the sound effects of eighties radio programming

Olle would get his first shot at radio when his neighbour offered him their vacant Jazz slot on local radio after the younger Olle sat in for a few sessions. Olle “ended up doing a youth hour on the Friday night instead of the jazz program” when he took the reins and enlisted the help of Tommy Tee as the local Hip Hop expert. They “played the whole spectrum” of early electronic music, a genre that was still in its infancy and still featured few releases. “Everything from Strictly Rhythm to Gabba” made it into their programming as they begged, stole and borrowed records in search of that “raw energy” they were hearing from New York. They modified turntables to play at twice the top speed so they “could play the dubs on Strictly Rhythm at 135BPM” and with the second summer of love knocking on their door, Olle and Tommy Tee were at the right age, at the right time in the eye of the storm of a electronic dance music coming into its own.

It was surely a time of unbridled youthful enthusiasm and the radio show harnessed all the energy and excitement of the time for the pleasure of a captive radio audience. The show came into its own during one of the most innovative times for electronic music and when it came to a point when it could no longer be merely sustained in the margins “NRK called and wanted the show for national radio”. In 1993 Olle took the show to the national broadcaster’s P3 station and between 1993 and 2009, the show featured the latest in electronic dance music to the airwaves. For a while it was the only show on radio that focussed on this type of music and when Olle would eventually leave P3 and NRK it undeniably left a hole in their programming which has never been filled with Olle declaring “there’s not much room for new underground dance music on national radio at the moment”.

“It’s just people and it’s just music and you just try to make them go together.”

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It would be with that sentiment that he would lead into the next and latest phase of his broadcasting career with Lyd. Now, in its third year, the podcast series presents new Norwegian music to the world with an emphasis on electronic music and the dance floor, without feeling obligated to any one genre or stylistic trend. “It is important to get the few thousand that listen to my show to hear something different”, says Olle about the driving ideology behind Lyd. Between the submissions and his own diligent research which sees Olle often “just dive into the interwebs and just stay there for a few hours”, Lyd is the only podcast series strictly focussing on new Norwegian music today, without the lumbering persistence of the DJ’s ego in the foreground. Olle’s broadcasting experience really comes to the fore in Lyd as he adopts the role of facilitator and selector, yet all grounded in Olle’s experience as a DJ.

While Olle might be unilaterally known for his work in radio, it’s a career that runs perpendicular to his work as a touring and resident DJ. Between 1990 and 1993, while still working in youth radio and before working with P3 Olle came of age in a time of raves and the counterculture of dance music, playing a significant role in the presence of both in Norway. Favouring the more functional over the engaging, the “raves were about making people dance while radio was playing all the new music” he could possibly get his hands on. Through experience and a fair bit of talent he has developed an innate ability to read a floor and is able to adapt to any context from a large outdoor gathering for the clandestine Techno scene to playing Disco at a christmas party. He is one of the only DJs in my experience that is able to find that untenable middle ground on a Saturday night at Jæger – accommodating the unapologetic commercialism of Nightflight without getting down and dirty with the conformists. “You don’t have to drop a cheesy record to make people dance; it’s enough to drop a cheesy sample of a record” says Olle when I ask him about this unique ability. It doesn’t ever feel like a compromise however for Olle and he is just as happy playing “Chaka Khan in the right setting, because that’s just good music” as he is digging past the trenches into House and Disco from the States.

When I ask Olle about some of the thought processes that go into DJing, he proffers: “It’s just people and it’s just music and you just try to make them go together”. Experience also has its part to play in my opinion and Olle Abstract has that in droves and besides radio he’s left some lasting impressions in the benchmarks that make up Norway’s musical legacy.

In the late nineties and early 2000’s his largest contribution would come in the form of Skansen. Even an established figure like Olle is very much aware of significance of the period and place in Norway’s musical history. “Those years were really important” he concours. Skansen, an internet cafe turned club, owned by some “freaks and hippies”, could not be further from the imagination when you think back to one of the most significant eras of House music in Norway, but everybody from G-Ha to Bugge Wesseltoft passed through the doors and Olle had a large part to play in those bookings and the ones from further abroad. People like Luke Solomon and Idjut Boys were guests who later became “good friends” and helped shape the sound of Skansen that continues to live on in infamy. With financial aid from clothing cowboys Levis, Olle and Skansen could “have 80 people on the door, spend 12000 kr and still break even”. It meant they could be daring and everything from a Wesseltoft jam session to a Paper Recordings night could find its place in Skansen, laying a foundation for the future producers and DJs in Oslo, that Olle defines as “Skrangle” – sonically informed by Norwegian producers.

Olle suggests this is still informing the next generation of DJs and producers which is making a large contribution to the Lyd podcast. “There’s loads of producers between 19-28 making music with their take on House, which is deep, but more skrangle than it would be if it came for Germany or England for instance. So they’ve definitely been listening to Norwegian music.”

“It took me a while to get comfortable, and it’s not that important, because it’s just people having a good time or not.”

In its next phase of evolution this podcast will be coming to life on the stage with a new series of events at Jæger planned for 2018. Lyd at Jæger will “present, and give a platform to some new and some established acts”. Olle is specifically looking to “present new groovy music that fits in the club environment” for this event’s series with Rudolfs Kontainer and KSMISK billed on the first evening. Olle is very enthused by Rudolfs Kontainer, an Indie-House type of band” out of the “digital collective” Mars Melons. KSMISK will be presenting some new music from the next album on PLOINK, while Olle digs through his vast record collection, finding that bridge between new Norwegian music and the rest of the world. “There’s no problem playing a night of good Norwegian music”, he offers in repose, “but I’m not going to force myself to play just Norwegian music”.

Instead Olle looks to his extensive record collection sprawling from his home to a storage facility where some 25000 records live between a constant influx of new digital music. “I always spend fifteen hours a week looking for new music, this is my job”, but whereas in the past Olle would come home with about 100 records a month, he only buys “30-40 tracks a month” today. Some weeks he might not find any new music, and will go back to his storage unit to exchange one crate for another, because Olle feels; “it’s not like I need new music.” He is quite content playing some old favourites and mixing it in with the new, often overlooked records.

Doc L Junior and DJ Haus are current favourites for Olle Abstract and he specifically likes DJ Haus because “he’s fucking up the rules again”, something that is reminiscent of another Olle Abstract favourite, Basement Jaxx. “ I’m still into the Basement Jaxx. I played ‘rendez vu’ here (Jæger) the other day and people went mad, because nobody’s touching it at the moment.” There’s more of that non-conformist attitude in Olle Abstract as a DJ, which often makes what other DJs perceive as obvious or tawdry far less so than it needs to be. Again he mentions Basement Jaxx as an example and particularly their 888 project. They have an “amazing House-Trance track which nobody picked up on and it’s been my biggest track all year” he says and adds in a sidebar kind of contemplative way: “A lot of DJs play for other DJs, and it’s a good way to get a lot of respect from them… if that’s important.”

And does Olle think it’s important?

“It might be depending where you are in your career.”

Olle is far too experienced and as an established DJ across platforms, I sense that these trivialities don’t much concern him. It takes me back to something Olle mentioned earlier when we were talking about feeding off the crowd.

“It took me a while to get comfortable, and it’s not that important, because it’s just people having a good time or not. Worse case scenario, they leave. If they don’t leave you’ve done a good job, and if they applaud you, you know you’ve done a great job.”

At heart however Olle is still the 11-year old that got into electronic music where it’s always been about “the groove and the vibe” and very little else. Whether he’s donning the leather shell suit, reliving something of the youthful excitement when he first heard RUN DMC or looking for “new kicks” to incorporate in his Lyd podcast or event’s series, regardless of any which way you view it, Olle Abstract’s presence has made a formidable impression on music in Norway and it shows no signs of dissipating just yet.

* Olle Abstract, KSMISK and Rudolfs Kontainer play te first LYD at Jæger on the 27th of January.

Resolutions and Aspirations with Moscoman

Moscoman arrived out of the Tel Aviv scene into Berlin five years ago with the dynamic and esoteric sound of the Israeli beach side city as the eastern Mediterranean’s answer to the Balearic call. Clattering between guitars and drum machines in a musical dialect with flavours spanning deep into his cultural roots, Moscoman’s sound has found its way on labels like I’m a Cliché, ESP and Eskimo.

References from New Wave to House dot Moscoman’s releases over the course of an extensive discography across labels. In 2015 he established Disco Halal, a platform for an eclectic group of artists like hometown friends Red Axes and mutual spirited, recondite figures like Yoshinori Hayashi.

As if the challenge of running a label and producing music wasn’t enough, in 2017 he set himself the milestone of releasing 12 releases over 12 months and established the Treisar label. Nine releases in and three more on the cards in the near future saw Moscoman in an uncanny creative flurry with tracks that expounded on his idiosyncratic sound as an artist.

As a DJ he deconstructs the sound of his productions into the eclectic sources of his influences. In demand and ductile, Moscoman’s record bag stretches far and wide and since his next stop is Hubba Klubb at Jæger we were in the fortunate positions to ask the DJ and producer some questions over email. With new year beckoning us and Treisar coming to its conclusion we ask Moscoman some questions about resolutions and aspirations.

Moscoman joins Hubbabubbaklubb DJs for the first Hubbas Klubb of 2018 this Saturday.

First off, happy new year. Are your resolutions still holding strong, or have you, like me, already given up on them?

Actually, I don’t have any yearly resolutions, rather lifetime resolutions and I’m trying my best to keep them! But don’t give up hope.

Where are you at the moment and what are you listening to?

I’m on my sofa listening to upcoming music on Disco Halal, good stuff is coming up!

In 2017 you exclusively released music on your newly established Treisar label, and there’s been nine releases on that label thus far. What were the circumstances around establishing the label for your music?

Treisar actually is just a one off or more likely 12 off project, a record a month which 3 got delayed and will come in the following week. It was a fun project but now it’s over and Treisar will stay on ice till I find another crazy artist that can and wants to release 12 records in a year!

Although you had one cameo on Disco Halal, it appeared to be a label for other artists. What are you able to do on Treisar, that you never imagined you could do on Disco Halal or any other label?

Disco Halal was and still isn’t my personal playground, while Treisar was. I tried to show a work of a lifespan, I made all the decisions myself, which is never easy, but it worked out great.

It’s been quite a creative period for you. What has inspired/encouraged you lately in music to release so much music?

To be honest, I don’t do much other than DJing and sitting in the studio, so I try to make as much as possible from both, and the inspiration usually comes from the fact I really love it and enjoy doing it, thats all, inspired from being inspired.

What does inspire you creatively outside of music?

Japanese food, and books.

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One of the most captivating releases of last year for us was “Nemesh”, in a large part due to the second B-side “Walls of Jericho”. It’s quite a loaded title, considering your own origins, but was that your intention with that track?

First of all thanks! And yeah I must admit I had the image in my head when I worked on it. I’m intrigued by the history of the region and it’s important for me. It has no political aspect though it’s just an image of a difficult time that was once and has returned sadly.

Part of it’s allure is its haunting textures, which has some effect on the provocation of the title. It’s something that’s been concurrent with your music, since we first heard Misled Loophole. What were some of your early influences that might have affected this musical disposition?

Wow, I feel like my influences is usually from outside of the music world, it’s movies and pictures, and colors and feelings mostly, which subconsciously influences my work I’m guessing.

In a 2016 interview with Radar radio you mentioned that you and your friends Red Axes just “wanted to play guitars” and be “kind of rock & roll” in Tel Aviv. How has this attitude changed if at all, since establishing Treisar?

It didn’t really change I still want to be rock&roll, and most of Treisar music was created before this year so it conquers with my saying, I hope.

Between you and Red Axes, you really compartmentalised a sound of Tel Aviv for an international audience. Is there something to the city for you that influences artists from there?

I feel like the history of Israeli music has a big influence on us, especially stuff like Minimal Compact and Yosi Elephant, and these sorts of post punk sound, plus the regional sound is a very big thing in my sound, meaning the middle east and the mediterranean vibes. Tel Aviv is very different than it use to be, it’s way more new rich and American, but the heart of the artists keeps on banging like in the 80s.

In 2016 you had one of the busiest touring schedules according to your RA mix Q&A. How did it affected your approach to DJing?

The more you tour, the better you get, so I enjoy it more and more, these days I feel like I produced most of the tracks I play (because I get to play them alot) and I love it.

If you could put the sound of your mixes today in three words, what would they be?

Dashi Broth Bliss

And lastly, can you play us out with a song?

Ten years of Macro with Stefan Goldmann

In the ten years of the Macro, the label has pulled at the seams of contemporary electronic music, unravelling preconceptions across genres to become a label of great distinction and perpetual intrigue. Founded by Stefan Goldmann and Finn Johannsen in 2007, the label sprang into existence at the height of computer music’s dominance and turned the music on its head with honest-to-goodness bands like Elektro Guzzi making their presence felt in Techno and DJ/producer hybrids like KiNK turning that very notion inside out with his extensionalist live shows and productions.

A reserved but sincere output, Macro has ebbed under the surface of the popular consciousness with minimalist and micro Techno and House arrangements that feign the obvious for something concrete and has stayed the course over the last decade.

Regularly making his own impression on the label over the course of the existence of the label is label head Stefan Goldmann. Son to classical composer Friedrich Goldmann and raised between his mother’s native Bulgaria and Berlin, Stefan’s musical influences are a rich tapestry of various European traditions and popular culture references. Stefan’s career in electronic music has its roots in the drum n bass scene in Berlin in the late nineties as a DJ, but would cement itself in the world of Micro House and Minimal Techno by the early 2000’s when he started producing music under his own name for the likes of labels like Perlon, Ovum and most notably Classic.

Not content with the freedom and release schedule afforded to him working with other labels, he and kindred spirit, Finn Jonannsen founded Macro in an effort to take back creative control and leave a unique imprint on electronic music.

Stefan Goldmann is also something of a musical polymath, and from releasing music to writing about ideas of how we gauge quality in music, he’s an intriguing character in himself. He created the ‘Elektroakustischer Salon’ nights, opening up the club, Berghain to experimental formats in 2006. Since 2011 he’s contributed regularly with a column in the Berghain flyer as well as authoring the book, PRESETS – Digital Shortcuts to Sound.

It’s not often we get a chance to entertain the notion of a Q&A with a multi-faceted individual like Stefan Goldmann, but indulging us here , Stefan shares some of his thoughts on music, Macro and why he thinks being a Berliner is boring through some very in depth and entertaining answers.

10 years of Macro… that’s quite a feat for any independent label. What do you think has been the quintessential ingredient to the label’s success?

Time on our hands and cash to burn. Just kidding. I guess we were lucky. At some point I was fed up with dealing with other people’s labels. The waiting time until they fit your record into a schedule, the arguments which track should be the A or the B side, the cover design. We had a very vague idea who our other artists could be. From the start our overheads where low. We saw labels that needed to release a record every week or month because they needed the turnover. We never were in this situation since our office has basically always consisted of our laptops and that’s it. Everything else is handled by outside people. We were lucky because our initial setup lasted us ten years without hiccups. We have the same design, mastering and distribution guys, the same lady handling our manufacturing. Then the artists mostly found us, or we stumbled over stuff by total chance. Pretty early on we just went for things not knowing how they would work out in terms of revenue, but where we felt they don’t already have a place out there or already belong to somebody else. I’m not talking necessarily about big musical revolutions, but little ideas and bents and fixes that lead to music that’s not represented by a hundred artists or labels already.

You clearly put a lot of thought and effort into what you do at the label and beyond, through everything from your own music to the events you host and even writing. What universal idea drives you creatively across all these various aspects of your career?

You can have a very interesting time in this. I don’t mean everything is always fun, like accounting or logistics or other chores. It’s more than just the music. I think this culture is so rich with opportunities to go out and meet people and see places, in more than one way, that it’s worth our time and effort. The quality and bandwidth of possible encounters is what really thrills me. If you just DJ or just produce or just press records, you’d miss so much of it. After touring for two months I begin to feel some fatigue, but I can add a week or two to my journey somewhere and just take the time to reflect and write down some texts. Then I can spend four month in the studio working on a project, and then tour again. I’m never tired. It’s a bit like in agriculture. If you sow the same crop on the same filed year after year, your yield goes down because the soil ‘tires’. If you do tomatoes in year one, corn in year two, and nothing in year three, your overall harvest is actually much more effective. Same with music. I don’t really have ‘universal ideas’. I just like doing all that stuff and meeting the people who are connected to all these different things.

It seems to me that when Macro started out there was a wealth of development and progressive attitude to electronic music which has stagnated somewhat as people rely on a formula of a formula and have gone back to utilising the very same thirty-year-old tools they used when this music was created. What effect do you think this had on electronic music and what do you think will encourage the development of music on the label and your own music, moving forward into the future?

Most people have always relied on a formula. Give somebody a 303 and a 909 and there you go. This is exactly what happened. It’s astonishing to what a degree particular machines or software or presets shape genres. People are happy with this. You still have people picking up the guitar and playing their three-chord, twelve bar blues form. Maybe around 2005 was the first time that a lot of people could afford to experiment with more than two or three pieces of gear. While in 1992 you’d either get a sampler and a drum machine, or a DX100 and a 909, in 2005 you could use plugins, buy some multi-effects units, multitimbral synths (synths that can play several sounds at once), AND a sampler. It was an interesting time, but I tend to feel the earlier generation made music that remains more significant and influential than the next generation’s. On average the production quality was better in 2005 than in 1995, but the 90s definitely yielded more influential output than the 00s. I tend to think that due to limited means they ended up delving deeper within one or two machines. Think of Robert Hood and the DX100, or Jeff Mills and what sounds to me like a Jupiter 8, or Plastikman with whatever reverb he was using. Around 2003 stuff began to have a tendency of sounding too cluttered. And some people recognise this, so they want to go back in time. Of course this doesn’t work out neatly.

I recognise how much electronic music is defined by the state of technology. Basically all the novelty there is always has followed what was just becoming available in the form of tools. Too much has been defined through sound design, rather than structure. Personally, I think I’ll be caring much more about altering structure than perfecting sound in the future.

Can an inflexible model for a label be sustained over the course of ten years or do you constantly feel you need to adapt to stay relevant?

Try saying the same thing again and again, and eventually people will tell you to just shut up. If it has been pressed to a record once, that’s basically perfect enough. A second record with the same approach is just for emphasis really.

KiNK (who regularly features on the Macro roster) is a perfect example of an artist that maintains his popularity without adapting to current trends or being a media darling/pariah. How do you explain an artist’s like KiNK’s continued success and do thoughts like these ever inform the artist roster at Macro?

I think he adapts a lot. Change and adaptation is not the problem. What doesn’t work is attaching yourself to a trend that is already established. It’s the mistake I see over and over again, and nobody who is successful has ever done this. For Kink, I guess its 20% talent, 10% luck and 70% sheer, meaningful effort. He spent ten years in a room building his skills in handling machines. Then he spent a few years on the road remodeling his live set three days a week. Others do that a little here and there between handling their Facebook account. At least in the long term, you can’t substitute substance with marketing effort. As for Macro, we do like people who have some level of skill. You might be a total amateur and make something extremely valuable once, as a chance find. But as a label you prefer to work on projects which have the potential to unfold over five or ten or fifty years. I believe it’s a waste of time to chase “the record of the day.”

What exactly do you and Finn look for in music or an artist to make it onto Macro?

Something we haven’t seen or heard elsewhere already. I mean this on a rather modest scale. Seen from far enough we’re all just monkeys flying on a rock through space. It’s mostly just techno. Typically it isn’t within the powers of any individual artist to invent and establish a genre. To invent techno as we know it, it wasn’t enough to be one of those guys in Detroit. You also needed Kraftwerk, Disco and the Roland Corporation and around 500 other factors to come together in time and space. We’re just looking for something within our area of competence which moves us and whose makers show some curiosity to tweak things a little bit here or there. It’s all about some tinkering, really.

There’s a world behind all of this that the reader doesn’t often get to see or hear and it can go from making sure promos lad on the right desks to something as simple as agreeing on a flyer for an event. I found it very interesting when we labelled you as a Bulgarian DJ you found it funny. You also said labelling you as a German DJ on the flyer was boring. Why did you think it was boring?

It has become the most regular thing for a DJ or techno artist to be based in Berlin. It’s almost what you expect to see in a program of any club anywhere in the world. You came up with “BG” for Bulgaria behind my name. It’s funny. I’m half Bulgarian and half German, but I was born in Berlin. Usually people try to put “Berlin” there.

You thought it was a PR move, and maybe at a subconscious level it was. What has been the effect of PR on music over the last decade in your opinion and how does a label like Macro continue to find its space in this world between hype, trend and the institutions that govern these aspects?

There are five million people out there who want to be artists, and an audience that can’t be bothered with caring about more than a handful of these. That’s totally natural. Nobody can evaluate 80 different varieties of melon or cherry jam or orange juice before settling on the variety they’ll like best. Nobody listens to 80, let alone five million, bands before settling on a favorite, or even just on whom to listen to on a night out. So all these musicians need to scream into the marketplace that their melons are tastier than those of the others. Nobody ever could possibly check all the competing claims against each other. So basically our idea has been that it makes no sense whatsoever to try selling melons. Most PR is just futile, as long as it concerns “me too” products. There everybody just cancels each other out. To give you an example of how hype or press don’t matter all that much: we have those two bands, Elektro Guzzi and KUF. They do live band concepts within styles typically associated with electronic gear and DJs. They might not be Depeche Mode, but they get to play consistently and people enjoy seeing them and end up buying their records. I’d say that’s so because they are damn good, but they also hardly have a lot of competition. Effective PR is easy: don’t go where it’s crowded. Go where it’s empty.

You’ve written at length about the influence of media and social interaction on music and in the current landscape it seems that a social engagement is essential to proliferating music. How do you predict this will affect “club” music (for lack of a better phrase) of the future?

Has it really been different? For 99% percent of its history music needed to happen right in front of people who’d just walk away, or worse, if you couldn’t engage them. The recording musician was a brief historic aberration, where you could create something totally detached in a studio and then a record company wouldn’t know how successful it would be unless they released it and watched. You sometimes even needed to buy it without listening to it first, and then could try to get used to it at home. This way a unique array of all sorts of studio ideas came into the world, and they still mostly clutter the $1 bins at thrift shops. On the other hands certain concepts got a firm hold in music history that wouldn’t have had a chance if they only had to rely on a live audience. That’s, say, 1960 to 2000. That was a unique era. Now we are kind of back in 1840. The recording doesn’t matter all that much again.

If I have to guess, the same two forces that have always shaped music will keep ruling. That is, we like to hear what we already know, and we get bored if we hear it too often. Thus, in all likelihood music will continue to change gradually. Also, we can’t actually repeat the same thing. No imitation is perfect, so change is inevitable. You can hear this with all the people who try to produce like its 1988. It’s just impossible. They get all the original gear, but some element of a circuit has aged and this changes the sound. Or they just can’t help and set the compressor right rather than wrong, as it was done in 1988. And there you go.

What then causes abrupt changes and cultural shifts, rather than the inevitable gradual changes, are new technological means and people’s reaction to them. Like when Willie Kizart’s amp fell down and the speaker membrane was torn, but the studio had already been paid for. That’s when distorted guitar came to be recorded, and 70 years of guitar rock followed. That defect couldn’t have happened if there wasn’t the technology first – the electric guitar, the amp, the studio and the record – and somebody hadn’t put down the money for these. Chance events that get perpetuated, or one phenomenon that affects a lot of people at the same time, like dozens of 808s and 303s washing up in pawn shops – those instances may lead to abrupt changes. Otherwise we just prod along.

I’ve read that you too don’t like categorising music. I find that in recent years most artists or labels feign categorisation like genre. What are the perils in your opinion of labeling music so categorically?

Actually I love to categorise. The conflict is usually when person A says “this is like that”, and person B is convinced it’s like nothing else in this world. Both are looking at the same thing, but see different aspects of it. You can’t expect to tick ten or fifty or a thousand boxes and to have no match with anything else. For something to be fresh or different, sometimes one little aspect shifted is totally sufficient. I love that idea. You can cook a dish you’ve cooked a hundred times and change one ingredient and the whole thing tastes differently. It’s the same with music. You’ll never need to be bored in this life.

On the back of that last question, how will you then explain the sound of Macro to the uninitiated?

That’s what we have initiation rites for.

You seem to occupy this space between the highbrow (your excursions into classical music, writing and experimental music events) and the “lowbrow” (everything from Drum n Bass to Techno). How does one side inform the other in your creative output and Macro and how do you find a balance between these two worlds?

I’d need to rant about this horrible distinction of “high” and “low”, and I think we’ll both have a better time if I don’t.

In your RA exchange from 2011, you mentioned that you had found a hard time to play just one style of music, which was very much the trend back then. Today the landscape has changed and the popular DJs are the ones that can be a bit more eclectic with their selections. How have these paradoxical shifts affected your DJ sets?

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Do you refer to the “expert digging DJ” variety, where they are expected to line up records in increasing time/cost ratios of finding those records? It may appear eclectic, but it’s also predictable in another way. I believe Finn wrote a piece about this some time ago. I guess the other 98% of DJs keep sticking to their formulas. Of course there are exceptions. Nina Kraviz is ridiculously successful, but she also pulls off incredible mixes between things few other people would dare to play or even know about. There’s no preconceived category for this. That exist too.

Personally, of course I adapt to the people I play to – how else would it be an exchange? – but I basically stick to playing what I’d love to hear at 100 dB, and I keep phasing out the things I did hear often enough. I wouldn’t like to get bored. I don’t like gimmicks and I don’t like stuff that sounds dated. I like music that sounds good now, and maybe sounded well ten years ago and will still do so ten years from now. I believe there is music which transcends the moment.

By now I’m comfortable to play out things very few other people play out. Take Vladimir Dubyshkin. For the last two years, I’ve played that out consistently, and very few other people did. Probably because it’s at 140 bpm, but has this slightly silly feel to it with all those rave elements. It’s too freaky for the hard techno crowd and to fast for the more daring DJs. I just pitch it down to 130 bpm and it sounds even better. It’s strange that many DJs seem to have forgotten there’s pitch adjustment on their decks. They probably check the file on their computer and say, “Nah, too fast.” So I play it and people go nuts over Dubyshkin all the time. It’s pretty great to have stuff at your disposal that stands out glaringly but isn’t all over the place already.

Following on from that, how might your set unfold at Jæger next week?

Who could possibly know the future?

Flex your muscle – nine years of Bicep

In 2017 Bicep’s debut LP is released the history books will read – that phrase still sits somewhat awkwardly on the tongue, considering the Irish duo and their idiosyncratic musical tendencies are already firmly ingrained in House music’s lexicon today. Bicep are a sound all onto their own, and where other similar acts have ventured and fell short Bicep succeeded and thrived. They are known for their blend of big-room House percussion and R&B melodic contrails coming together in effervescent arrangements that push and pull at something primal in your DNA. Their tracks heave, rather than lure, their unsuspecting victims to the dance floor, a culmination of their efforts in the booth as DJs compressed into the 5-10 minutes of a DJ tool. Today they’ve already left a lasting legacy on House music, and yet their debut LP is only released in 2017.

Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson met in school in Belfast and while a friendship was formed on the field playing mini rugby their interests soon shifted to music. Moving into their adolescent years Matt and Andy’s musical education started on the club floor at the age of fifteen with the Belfast club Shine playing a pivotal role to the story of Bicep. It was at Shine they would hear “likes of Underground Resistance, Richie Hawtin, Laurent Garnier, Green Velvet and Dave Clarke on pretty much a weekly basis” and it’s undoubtedly on that floor where the seed to a career in DJing and music was planted.

Growing up in Ireland had especially played an important role in their musical education. “The scene there is much more insular and underground”, explains Matt in a 2012 interview with Scion A/V. “I think the fact that Ireland is so separate makes it more compelling for young people to hunt elsewhere”, elucidates Matt and that perhaps justifies the one aspect of their careers that launched them into public view.

In 2008 Andy and Matt found themselves living in two separate regions in the world and started the Feel my Bicep blog as “kinda like one big long dj mix” according to Andy in a Ransom Note article. With Matt living in Dubai and Andy in London, and unable to DJ together, the blog became a way for the pair to continue collaborating around their shared musical passions – a kind of abstract DJ set. Feel my Bicep was a place where they “could share music with a close group of friends” who had split up, living throughout the UK they explained in that article. It was also “a chance to share much weirder, more left field and obscure tastes”. A mix of old and new music, the blog indulged the boys’ more adventurous side and “was always more about synth music, Italo disco, ambient soundscapes, ’80s electronica, re-edits, soul, funk and older hard-to-find house”, according to an interview in The Quietus than it was about catering to a dance floor. With nothing but a pure love for the music pushing them forward and at a time where the blogosphere was at a peak, Feel My Bicep found a fairly large audience early on and it brought the DJ duo to the world’s attention even before they’d officially appeared together in the booth.

Working remotely between Dubai and London, Andy and Matt started producing records together at about the same time the Feel My Bicep blog surfaced. “The music wasn’t organic” they explain to the Quietus. “It was produced digitally and generally had no feeling at all.” They regarded that period as a “steep learning curve” and found it a “very tough way to work”; collaborating across time zones and communicating through text rather than creative impulses in each other’s presence. After a few releases they took the step to consolidate the Bicep project and Matt made the move to London, at the time when the city’s music scene was flourishing, especially around House. Amongst the likes of Julio Bashmore, George Fitzgerald and Floating Points, Bicep’s early releases immediately stood on their own for their uninhibited design, where tempos pulse at 125BPM or higher and audacious kicks pounded out concise rhythms. Those first few releases on AUS, Throne of Blood and Feel My Bicep were the purview of House DJs all over Europe and by 2012’s Vision Of Love, hardly a House mix made it onto the internet without a Bicep track featured.

Bicep weren’t an immediate success however, and even though all manner of blogs, DJs and labels were picking the Irish duo up for releases they still had to toil at their craft, putting in 7 days a week for the gratification of the dedicated few. Their releases kept on coming on labels like AUS and KMS and the the Feel My Bicep label grew at the same rate. They were constantly touring, and their DJ sets were synonymous with the sound of their work and the label; unrestrained high-energy affairs that slotted perfectly into peak time hours. The one aspect of Bicep seemed to inform the other, with the dance floor firmly represented in their productions and their productions implying the sound of their sets.

Their blog remained active through their rigorous touring and studio schedule, but Bicep remained an underground treasure, the want of a musical minority, that defied trend-informed movements in the House genre for something determinable and idiosyncratic and that’s what they found in Bicep. It wasn’t however until 2016’s “Just” that the boys started noticing a shift in their career. “(It) was one of those tracks that really changed a lot of things for us and how people viewed us and it’s probably been the most important one in terms of our career so far”, they explain in a Q&A with XLR8R earlier this year.

The half-time beat and the melodic countenance of “Just” wasn’t anything Bicep hadn’t done before, but the memorable uplifting hook and the toe-tapping beat, moved them away from the dance floor and into the living room. With elements acknowledging 90’s downtempo Techno and tempering their music around a more accessible formula, “Just” harked in a new era for Bicep, without departing completely from the distinctive character that had marked Bicep’s initial appeal. It coincided with a new approach in Bicep’s working habits, where they went “from fiddling with samples and editing on a laptop to a fully working hardware studio”, and that contributed a new impulsive, creative workflow too. “Our approach now is to play as much stuff as live as possible and use our hands and try and get feeling into it” they explain to The Quietus at around the same time “Just” was released.

It’s almost as if they only really started working as duo around that time and the results are presumably a more tactile and human execution. “When there is two of you, you need to find a kind of organic feeling where you bounce off one another and create something. Looking back, working from a laptop felt very designed and contrived for us personally.”

This new approach called in the next phase of Bicep, and they cemented it in 2017 with the launch of their debut, self-titled LP. Bicep broke new ground for the duo, channeling their sound from the dance floor to the living room. “It’s very much home listening or for listening on the train, not a club album” they told XLR8R back in July. “It’s certainly more restrained or gentle, but also a lot more dynamic we feel. We’ve spent a lot more time on the little details.” Bicep feature almost no club tracks, and the songs are composed and arranged in a way closer to popular forms. They engage with listener on a different level, doing away with the base corporeal function of the beat and rhythm and focus on melodic and harmonic parts that tap into something visceral and emotive.

Not merely content with playing edits or remixes of these album tracks in DJ sets, like they might have done in the past, Bicep have taken their music to stage for another first for the group, touring a unique live show to accompany the album. Unsurprisingly it’s an ostentatious hardware affair, with Matt and Andy beefing up the album originals for the dance floor, channeling that unbridled energy of a Bicep set into a live show, that’s already left the critics swooning and the audiences captivated.

From their charismatic DJ sets, their dancefloor filler productions and now their album and accompanying live show, Bicep’s presence in electronic club music is comprehensive. They’ve upturned every stone in the near-decade they’ve been around, and show absolutely no signs of slowing down today. Over the course of the last nine years they’ve established something unique and through the album they’ve introduced an entire new phase to their music that will almost definitely install them in the popular consciousness in the years to come… and to think, it all started with a blog.

* Bicep play our basement at Retro. Advance tickets on sale here.

Ten Questions for Kate Miller

Over the course of the last few years the name Kate Miller has been passed around the DJ booth watercooler in hushed tones like a coveted secret. A firm favourite amongst DJs and tastemakers alike, Miller’s sets are far-reaching and noted for their diverse brilliance. Whether she’s playing in the broken beat residue of early House or rising to celestial heights on tribal plains, Miller’s mixes evoke mood and occasion, and moves freely between the basement and the open air, depending on what the situation calls for.

She spends her time between Melbourne and Berlin today, taking on all manner of influences from these two remarkable cities as she evolves through her career. As a youngster she played piano, which formed the backdrop of her musical education, before moving into DJing. While living in Melbourne, Miller found herself in a residency at New Guernica, but with limited possibilities in a small scene, she made the move to Berlin around 2011 and a DJ career beckoned.

Shortly after moving to Berlin, Miller got her first gig at Golden Gate and from there it didn’t take long before she became a resident for Stattbad. Venues like ://about blank and Ipse followed suit and even in the competitive landscape of Berlin’s DJ world Kate Miller’s star was on the rise. She eventually caught the ear of Oscillate and joined the crew’s ranks, helping call in three years of the Berlin event series at ://about blank recently.

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Her last mix for Oscillate’s podcast series was RA’s mix of the day and she’s been lauded by DJs and media outlets alike for her uncanny ability to jump across genres over mixes. “Her choice – cold, funky Electro cuts – surprised us a lot more than all the good taste that went into it”, said Groove Mag of the mix that she did for them while her mix for I.D traversed the world in search of unknown musical curiosities.

Kate Miller is nothing but a musical chameleon and with her featured appearance at Jæger coming at some short notice we were eager to find out more so we asked her ten questions in preparation.

How did you get involved with Oscillate and how has the event series influenced your career?

My partner and agent, Mato, started Oscillate 3 years ago with his best friend. At the beginning I was just throwing booking suggestions out there and they slowly started coming to me more and more for advice. After Mato’s partner stepped out of the project I slipped into that role. Being able to play at a party that you also organise, in a club so close to home, where we would normally spend our weekends off anyway, feels so comfortable and gives me more freedom to explore new genres and sounds whenever I play there. It’s definitely inspired me to be more daring with my selections and I am so grateful to have a solid base and residency in Berlin. Something which is becoming rather rare these days.

It seems you split your time between Melbourne and Berlin. How do those two cities compare musically for you?

6 years ago when I first left Melbourne, I don’t think it had really found it’s feet yet, which is one of the reasons I initially left. But over the last few years it’s become by far one of the most inspiring, rich and musically diverse cities in the world (in my humble opinion!) There’s a lot more live music, and the club-crowds seem hungrier for new sounds. The sunny weather means things still err on the side of house and disco while Berlin is still very much techno-focussed. That darker energy in Berlin also feeds into a stronger base for the avant-garde with festivals like Atonal and CTM. They’re both incredibly inspiring cities for different reasons. I like the fact that in Berlin you can spend hours in a club and not feel guilty because it’s grey and cold outside anyway. But then Melbourne has fantastic day parties and festivals! They’re like night and day. I love having both of them in my life.

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I believe you started playing the piano at a young age, but what was it about electronic club music that first caught your attention?

I still play the piano and I love classical and jazz music very much, but after a couple of teen angst years listening to Radiohead I discovered Ministry of Sound (ha!) and thought to myself ‘I’m allowed to be happy’. It totally changed my outlook on life. I went from a mopey kid to a cheerful little raver overnight. As the song goes: “not everyone understands house music, it’s a spiritual thing, a body thing, a soul thing”.

What were the tracks, the artists or the labels that lead you on a path to a career as a DJ?

That’s a big question! I started DJing 10 years ago. The people who put me on the path to DJing were mostly Australian DJs and artists. Seeing DJ Kiti and hearing HMC and Late Nite Tuff Guy tracks all the time. I used to play almost exclusively house music. I was really into Move D, Moodymann, all of the Chicago and Detroit ‘godfathers’. As well as some other things I’m not so proud of. My taste in music has changed dramatically since then!

What was the catalyst in Melbourne that took you from the dance floor to the booth?

The first DJs who initially inspired me to take up mixing was Otologic. They put on a monthly club night in Melbourne at The Mercat (RIP) called C Grade where they would play b2b with Lewie Day (now known as Tornado Wallace) for up to 12 hours at a time. That sort of thing was unheard of in Melbourne in those days. It was so inspiring to listen to those guys digging through their endless bags of records playing everything from disco, to wave, house, acid, electro, techno and more.

How has that traditional musical education factored into your selections as a DJ, if at all?

It probably set me on a musical path and got my ear tuned in to rhythm and tone early on, but the two are pretty separate, I think. What I learnt technically from playing the piano doesn’t really translate into DJing, I think mixing and beat-matching is pretty technically simple, I don’t muck around much with looping or effects. It’s more about taste and being able to tell a story than anything else for me.

There’s a rumour that you’ll be moving into production soon. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Oh, where did you hear that?!

There was mention of it in your interview with The Commission.

Well I have been playing around at a friend’s studio lately but don’t get your hopes up too soon. I am making progress slowly, but not putting any pressure on it :)

I like music which is both optimistic and melancholic.

Your mixes are quite diverse and are spread across genres from House to Techno. What’s the common denominator through your selections?

It’s really a feeling more than anything. I’m terrible at describing music with words but I think in general I like music which is both optimistic and melancholic. I never want to be a DJ that gets stuck in one genre. I really like all genres of music and I like staying open. I rely on feeling rather than genre to guide me. At the end of the day I don’t think there’s a huge difference between house, techno, electro, as long as you find a common thread and play them together in a way that makes sense and develops into a complete story.

How would you describe your sets to the uninitiated?

Oh that’s a tricky one. Every song is unique and beautiful to me for different reasons. I hope that the way I put them together makes sense and forms a tale, leading the listener to a place they weren’t expecting to end up in, but are happy to be there all the same.

Lastly, can you play us out with a song?

Premiere: Carisma – Con Sombras (Charlotte Bendiks Remix)

Streaming on our blog today is the premiere of a “raw and direct” remix of Carisma’s Con Sombras from Charlotte Bendiks. The remix follows the Buenos Aires outfit’s debut album, “Gratis” on Dengue Dancing with Charlotte’s contribution appearing alongside Theus Mago (Mexico, Correspondant, Kill the DJ), Djs Pareja (Buenos Aires, Cómeme, Turbo), Ana
Helder (Rosario, Cómeme, Mustique) and Rous (Mendoza, Sanfuentes Records). Carolina and Ismael from Carisma “asked some friends and producers from different cities around the world to bring their magic touch to their favourite track. Each
musician from a diverse group of artists, featuring regularly in Carisma’s DJ sets, chose a track from the album, which Carisma split the remixes in a series of 3 EPs”, according to the Argentine duo.

Carisma and Charlotte enjoy a long-standing relationship and have in the past often shared a booth or a stage together, whether playing in Buenos Aires, Tromsø or Berlin. “Charlotte is a good friend of Carisma’s”, says Ismael who also suggests that “somehow these three producers and DJs have musically grown together.”

Charlotte Bendiks takes the full-bodied original of Con Sombras and peels the layers back to the bare bones, revealing a skeletal framework of percussion and the sequenced synth that’s at the bow of the original. Charlotte beefs up the percussion to where it takes centre stage and proffers a perfunctory role morphing the song into a DJ tool, without deadening the central appeal of the original’s abstract vocal or bass synth line. The original Con Sombras appealed to Charlotte for “the raw bass and the weirdo jacking feeling it had.” It offered something she could “understand emotionally” and allowed her to bring something of her own into it. She followed what she likes to call her “Sami Intuition” and the result was this Con Sombras remix we’re streaming today.

* Gratis Remixes is out on Dengue Dancing records on the 8th of December.

An Unlikely Legacy: A brief History of Roland’s TB-303

In Roland Company’s labs in the early part of the 1980’s Mr. Tadao Kikumoto was toiling away under the instruction of the synthesiser manufacturer to find the perfect accompaniment for their new TR-606 drum module — an electronic drum machine intended as a guitarists practise tool. Needless to say with a drum machine already in the works, Mr. Kikumato’s mind (possibly influenced by the traditional composition of a band during that time) immediately went to bass and with that set about creating the Transistor Bass 303, or TB-303, much to the eventual detriment to guitarists everywhere, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

When the TB-303 was launched alongside the TR-606 it was an immediate flop. Hard to program, and with an incredibly tacky synthetic sound, no respectable guitarist could justify the crude concession over a real bassist. Hell, even a complete bass novice and his untuned instrument would suffice over the plastic module. With that and the short production run between 1981 – 84 that followed, the machine would eventually be resigned to bargain bins the world over, laying dormant until a new type of musician would lay their hands on the inconspicuous, obsolete device….

As Disco turned to all manner of electronic aids to extend their breaks and eventually drop the rest of the track completely, a new type of music would be born. In Chicago, Detroit, and New York in the early 1980’s, drum machines went from being a DJ tool to an instrument, and where they were firming up the beat over Disco records before, they became the quintessential rhythm composer for a new kind of music that would soon be coined, House music. The machines that were previously intended for instructional/rehearsal purposes would be repurposed as compositional tools for the music of the future.

For the first time musical laymen all over America, who before the advent of the drum machine, could only aspire to the career of a DJ, were now composers and producers, thanks to the advent of accessible drum machines, almost exclusively Roland’s TR-808. Although artists like Prince and Kraftwerk had been using drum machines in their records for a while, it wasn’t until Roland’s TR-808 that it had it been so widely accepted as an instrument. Accessible to musical novices and unique for its alien, adjustable sounds, the Roland’s TR-808 changed the musical landscape and with that the whole range of Roland’s x0x machines would follow suit, including the TR-606. But, like every bassist in every band ever, the TB-303 however would not be appreciated at the same rate its time-keeping cousin rose to fame, and even in the electronic music sphere the machine would have to remain content in bargain bins, biding its time for a new kind of band to realise its true potential. It would take three young Chicago DJs, individually known as Spanky, DJ Pierre and Herb J, and collectively known as Phuture to see that potential, and true to their namesake they called in the future of music with the TB-303 harking their destinty.

In 1985 DJ Pierre had seen the TB-303 being used in its intended purpose, chugging away at a bass-line of some unknown proto-House record, and he admired it for its texture more than anything else. He encouraged his bandmates to purchase the machine and it wasn’t long till DJ Spanky (Earl Smith Jr) eventually picked one up in a second hand shop for less than $100 and invited Pierre over for a session. DJ Pierre takes the story on from here in RBMA’s mag: “I started just tweaking knobs and turning stuff, and Spanky was like, ‘Woah woah woah. Keep doing that, keep doing that.’ So, I kept twisting knobs, and the next thing you know, we were there for like an hour or two, just twisting knobs and programming things. The funny thing is, that first day, we made ‘Acid Tracks’”.

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In a single afternoon the group had gone from improvising on a new instrument, to defining a genre, but again not quite, because it would take another year for the track to be released and although Phuture and the TB-303 were instrumental to defining the sound of Acid House, Ron Hardy and Marshall Jefferson still had instrumental roles to play in establishing the genre, and without them we can only but wonder if the track would have garnered the same success in establishing a genre.

Ron Hardy had broken a much faster version, recorded straight from the jam session DJ Pierre had handed to him a week after its creation, way before it had even been picked up a label, and it was he Ron Hardy that coined the name of the track. Before it was even called anything, the Phuture unedited, pre-production original was commonly referred to as Ron Hardy’s Acid track, because it was Ron Hardy that would play the track 3-4 times a night, getting his audiences accustomed to this new unusual sound that before the end of the night would have them all squirming on the dance floor to the gestures of Phuture and the TB-303. House legend, Marshall Jefferson took the track from the dance floor to the studio and his production credit on Acid Tracks is also no mere courtesy. What had been little more than a jam session had been moulded into a realised track through the producer’s midas touch when he slowed it down and gave it its ultimate form.

At the same time a special mention should also go to one Charanjit Singh, an indian musician who in the 1982, actually preceded Acid House by five years when he released ten ragas to a disco beat, incorporating the TB-303 in much the same way Phuture did some years later, but in a wholly different stylistic approach.

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In 1987, when it was eventually released, Acid Tracks had completely changed the face of House music and in an instant the TB-303 became the go-to tool for electronic music all over the world. The improvised manner of using the machine, brought a psychedelic nature to the dance floor and added that much needed human dimension to the oft quantised and stoic nature of machine music before. It envisioned a bio-mechanical future and ushered in a new era for music that would install electronic dance music in the popular zeitgeist like never before, and in Europe, especially the UK, it would change the landscape forever. In the UK they adopted the Acid House nomenclature as an all-encompassing signifier of the music that was soundtracking rave culture with a smiley face constituting its countenance and the TB-303 defining its voice.

Going from sharp, squelching stabs to sludgy bass riffs, the TB-303’s appeal lied in its theretofore unusual sounds. Nothing that came before it nor after has come close to sounding like a TB-303 and the machine became to House music what the Marshall stack was to rock or the Stratovarius was to classical music, a musical icon for for an electronic age. It’s unique circuitry gave its distinct sound and although Mr. Kikumato’s intentions might have been quite different, he had inadvertently created one of the most creatively versatile instruments for the layman, by adding those simple adjustable parameters to his machine.

Things like cut-off frequency, resonance, accent and portamento controls, meant that non-musicians with little knowledge of musical theory could impose his/her own creative impulses through uncomplicated gestures like turning a knob or flicking a switch, gestures that come naturally to anybody, unlike playing an ostinato on a keyboard. As a piece of technology based on little musical prowess, non-musicians had found an even playing field, and with no academic premise swaying their creative impulses, a new kind of ingenuity and innovation swept across popular music. Established forms, harmonic- and melodic practises played a small role in the TB-303’s make-up and ushered in one of the most inventive and fertile moments in music history.

The TB-303 in some vengeful irony had laid absolute waste to the dominance of the lead guitar in popular music and charged on to become one of the most unique and domineering instruments in electronic music and beyond for the last thirty years.

Ubiquitous today in House music, but with few working examples still around due to it’s short and meagre production run, the TB-303’s garnered a mythical status, and continues to encourage, inspire and motivate electronic dance music across the sub-genres. Necessity has given rise to demand and several hardware clones today exist of the machine, with dedicated music enthusiasts dismantling the machine to create accurate, and affordable hardware copies of the original as well as countless software emulations. You can even play a 303 online today if the mood strikes, which is very much consistent with the TB-303’s original appeal.

At any given day in any record store you can pick 5 -10 records featuring the machine and they will all be quite different. From House to Techno to Electro and even Nu-Disco, the TB-303 continues to be re-purposed in innovative new ways. Roland recently has launched a new physical, digital version of the machine and it seems to already be inspiring a new generation of artists as a very affordable option for the next burgeoning musician. More than that the original TB-303 still manages to indulge the curiosities of artists like Andreas Tilliander and KiNK who keep the machine close in their extensive arsenal of equipment.

It’s curious how a guitarist’s tool came to define an entire genre of music and how it continues to inspire and indulge the creative melé of electronic music. There’s no way Mr.Tadao Kikumoto could have envisioned its success in this repurposed way, and especially not after it’s dismal performance on the market, but never before nor even after has one musical instrument been so integral to the advent of a musical style or genre.

Enlightened: A Q&A with Violet

Radio programmer; label owner; successful recording artist across genres; and a DJ Inês Borges Coutinho must be one of the busiest people working in electronic music today. In 2017 she debuted her new label Naive, with “Togetherness”, a three-track EP under her House and Techno-leaning Violet moniker, but NAIVE001 is only the tip of an iceberg. Her musical career in fact stretches back to her adolescent years where she and her cousin first started making music as A.M.O.R, a Portuguese Hip Hop outfit that went on to find success over the digital airwaves for its extensive sonic range and its exoticism.

At A.M.O.R she honed her production and songwriting craft while nurturing a varied palette of musical influences, with club music always keeping a close proximity to everything she did. Around the same time as working on A.M.O.R’s 2013’ album “Infinity” Inês developed her admiration for club music into a fully formed project under the Violet moniker.

As Violet, her productions and remixes have found themselves on One Eyed Jacks, Cómeme, Paraíso and Snuff Trax, and more recently her own label, Naive. In recent years, Violet has also taken to the airwaves with her own Rádio Quântica, an independent, online radio station for which she curates shows and hosts regular night for at Lisbon’s Lux Frágil, but it would a more politically motivated project that would bring her to our attention.

In 2014 for international Women’s Day, she released the first in a series of classic club tracks, covered by the artist and a host of international collaborators. Violet’s version of Underground Resistance’s “Transitions” immediately caught the attention of the world, no less UR themselves and the series has been running for three years today with versions of classic’s like “I need a Freak” and “Let there be House”, featuring the likes of Charlotte Bendiks, Debonair and her A.M.O.R bandmates, with all proceeds going to gender equality NGO’s.

Inês Borges Coutinho’s accomplishments are clearly many and it’s hard to imagine one person finding all the time to do all these things let alone find time to indulge some curious questions, yet she still managed to find time for us and our panadantic questions before she comes out for IRONI this weekend.

Violet plays IRONI this weekend with Charlotte Bendiks.

I want to start by asking you about your earliest musical experiences, because from your Hip-Hop project A.M.O.R to your production work as Violet and of course your DJ sets there’s a vast array of different sonic elements that I hear when listening to the music.

I started making music more seriously (but still in a playful way) in 2006 as A.M.O.R. – writing lyrics and trying to come up with beats on Fruity Loops and on an MPC2000XL. Before that my only experiences in music making were improvising with a guitar and coming up with vocal melodies – really, really basic stuff.

Besides you (the central figure behind it all) where do all these different aspects find an equal ground in your musical personality?

I guess just the fact that like every human I go through lots of different feelings and am exposed to all these things that influence me: people, places, sounds, experiences, conversations. So perhaps it just boils down to my openness to integrate all of these inputs into my music. I’m not too in love with the idea of staying in a specific lane, sonically or genre-wise.

When you moved on from A.M.O.R, which was largely a group effort as far as I can tell, to Violet, what did you find you were able to express musically that you couldn’t really do as part of A.M.O.R?

A.M.O.R. is a rap and DJ crew more so than a production team, so we kinda explore different angles of music making. I convey different energies in each project, although none of them is really limited in any way.

Why did you move into House / Techno music specifically?

A bunch of reasons. I’ve loved clubbing since I was a teenager, started going out at 13 – in the mid-nineties dance music was super popular in Portugal, we had a couple labels and quite a few successful DJs – DJ Vibe and Luis Leite being the main influences for me personally. So listening to Luis Leite Alcantara-Mar mixtapes and going out was a big part of the early wiring towards

Is the A.M.O.R project still active?

It is! We haven’t released new music in a while, but we still DJ together regularly and we run a radio show and a night called Summer Of Love.

I find your Violet project is a very collage-like assemblage of a variety of different musical colours, but what do you look for in sample and how much of a sample informs a track?

When I decide to use a sample, I normally do it because it resonates with my sensibility: it’s either sonically intriguing (or I can see myself making it more so with fx) or makes me feel some type of way. Sometimes I just sample loops from classic drum machines I love for that archetypal referencing that still teaches so much to dance music – especially if done in a subversive way. As to how much a sample informs a track, I guess it depends on the track to be fair – but it mostly informs texture and colour, rather than structure or melody.

I suppose an extension to that question would also be what do you look for in a track in your DJ sets?

That is a very hard question, as my sets are a real collage/patchwork so I can look for many different things at different times. Again, as with the samples I decide to use, I certainly look for emotional impact, sonic interest, sometimes for hardness, sometimes for softness. I love rough synth textures as much as I like dreamy pads, I love techno as much as acid house or jungle or electro or even boogie – so it’s hard to put my finger on it. I guess when I’m looking for music, I let it play and see if it speaks to me.

I’ve read that your work starts with samples and then moves into some improvisation on a 303 clone; processes that are very much instrumental to House music. How much influence do things like genre and instruments have one your music?

It depends. That could definitely be a process for one of my tracks, but it’s always different really – most times I’ll simply use Ableton, other times I’ll use some home recordings of instruments or synths. I don’t really think about genre when I’m making music, although it is true that so far I’ve made mostly house and techno music, influenced by various subgenres. But I’ve also written a few songs, and some chilled electronic stuff. I feel like my music is an immaterial extension of myself so it can be lots of things (just like I can be lots of things).

How much of a conceptual or initial thought is there before you even approach your instruments?

It’s quite rare that I approach an instrument with an idea in mind, although it has happened – like having a melody in my head and trying to write it down, or occurring to me that I could experiment with using a specific effect on a specific element. I tend to pick up whatever I’m using and start playing, having fun, experimenting. Many times I start recording right away, jam a little and then trim everything down and work with my favourite bits.

Your International Women’s Day project has been going for three years now. Tell us a bit about what inspired you to start this project?

The main goals were to have fun re-interpreting beautiful male-led classics with women, to raise awareness of how many of us are active and helping create dance music history, also at its core was a collaborative spirit.

We’ve just been made aware of a series of gruesome cases of sexual harassment and misogyny in Hollywood. How much of an effect do you believe artistic projects like yours have on serious gender inequality issues like these?

I try to humbly raise awareness about gender inequality, racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism and other inequalities via not only my music and free DJing/production workshops I’ve been running for girls and LGBTQIA+ folk, but also through the way I program my nights and the radio station – and even through my online presence. My reach is quite limited, but imagine if everyone raised their voice about these issues using however little time and resources they had – I think things would probably change faster and I think some dangerous habits that reinforce the status quo would be dissolved because I believe awareness really does change most people’s behaviours with time. So, as much as I know my contribution is very small, I can’t help but do my bit.

I recently spoke to our resident Karima F about issues of gender inequity plaguing the music industry. She believed that part of the problem was that men tend to institutionalise making music and DJing in a way that this very accessible thing becomes their exclusive domain. As a successful recording artist and DJ, what are your thoughts on this and is it something that you still experience?

I agree with Karima: the status quo is unfortunately still very male-led and the preservation of privilege is very much present – as it is in many other cultural and professional landscapes. We definitely need to make a joint effort as a society to stop reinforcing that imbalanced status quo, starting by educating children in a different way, teaching them about parity, and men need to unlearn the gatekeeper philosophy that has been fed to them by societal expectations so that we can all benefit from the same structures and feel welcome and safe in all of them.

Apart from making music and Djing, you also program shows for Rádio Quântica, host nights at Lúx, create mixes for fashion shows, and this year you’ve also started a new imprint Naive. What’s the singular thing that motivates you across all these projects?

Mostly people and how good they can be – how inspiring it is to work with people you love, admire and believe in. And how together, people really can change this weird world for the better.

Will the label feature any other artists or will it solely be vehicle for your work?

It will feature other artists as well.

What are you currently looking forward to in your own music, DJ mixes, label and Radio show?

I’m just finishing the second naive release, I’m really excited about it. I’m also finishing demos for labels I’m in touch with and will continue to feature guest mixes and new material I’m feeling on the radio shows.

Your sets are quite diverse from what we’ve heard online. How might your set at Jæger differ and be similar to those more eclectic sets we’ve heard online?

I always prepare a different selection for each city/club I perform at, so it’s always different in terms of what I play – but the energy I’m going for can also change in intensity depending on what’s going down in the room and the DJs playing with me. So I think it will be a lovely co-creation between my dear Charlotte, the dancers and I.

I think I’ve asked just about every question there and just have one more request… Can you play us out with a song?

Sure :) Here’s one of my all-time fav songs. Not something I play out very often but definitely a favourite at home to help me get my spirits up. See you soon everyone!

Between two worlds with Rudow

It was an informal meeting on a park bench in Kreuzberg that brought Alexander Rishaug’s newest project Rudow to life. Initially pinned as a “lost tape” project and released as an unknown release through Hardwax channels, Rudow is experimental artist, Alexander Rishaug infiltrating the club floor from the inky subterranean where intuition and intrigue dwell. Rudow is Rishaug’s first concerted effort at club music, channeling his extensive experience, as sound artist, musician, producer, remixer and conceptual artist into a singular execution with designs on the DJ booth.

Rudow bucks the trend in Freakout Cult’s discography, with a sonic mire of layers flowing through progressions whose closest relative is Techno. Although a rhythmical output, Rudow’s intentions move away from the genre’s percussive insistency and channels it to a textural dimension closer associated with the drone and ambient genres that Alexander Rishaug is often associated with.

Rishaug’s musical career begins in ‘95 with a series of self-released tapes, bridging the gaps between noise and electronica before releasing his now classic debut, Panorama on Smalltown Supersound. A fleeting figure, Rishaug has indulged all encompassing corners of the electronic music sphere and beyond with music that feigns the obvious and thrives in the obscure without alienating a listener. 2014’s Ma.org Pa.git illustrates this most effectively as a work born out of the harsh tonalities of a church organ and guitar, inspired by Doom and Black Metal, but executed in a most subtle ambient arrangement, bringing out only the tenderest sonorities from those domineering instruments.

In the six tracks that make up the new Rudow release, a bridge exists between these works and Rishaug’s more club-leaning influences, carried over by tracks like “Floating Point” and “Slow / Grow”. “Contrary Motion” and “Manifesting the Unreal” lead us out of these worlds again, but remain tethered to Rishaug’s artistic identity which is ingrained in a kind of textural atmosphere defined by a succinct mood.

Where does Rishaug end and Rudow begin and how did the record end up on Freakout Cult? We attempt to unravel these burning questions and more when we sit down with Alexander over a coffee to find out where the thin red line exists between two worls..

Tell me a bit about the Rudow project.

It’s a parallel project to the more experimental stuff I do. For me it’s been there from the start; there’s always been an interest in rhythms in my experimental music, but when I had found the name Rudow, I realised that I wanted it to be its own project. It has a clear framework and a direction, and when I met Fett Burger from Freakout Cult, I decided to finish the project.

How did you meet DJ Fett Burger?

I knew him a bit from the art and Techno scene in Norway, and he also knew my work, but we weren’t really friends. I was sitting on a bench in Kreuzberg in Berlin and this guy was locking his bike up, and I happened to recognize him. We started talking about experimental music and the Berlin scene vs the Oslo scene and after a really nice chat we cemented the beginning of the release.

You mentioned you found a framework for the project, but besides the rhythmical aspect what did that entail for Rudow?

I wanted to have that rhythmical aspect, but I also wanted to have it a little more open towards textures and ambient spheres. When I started listening to club music I was always more interested in the leftfield electronica like Basic Channel, DeepChord and Warp. That was kind of the plan for it, but then I had no idea how it would sound in the end. I remember when I made that first bass line on the first track on the album, I knew that this is the Rudow sound I was looking for.

One thing that makes this release stick out from any of the other releases on Freakout Cult is that is very layered and the textures are quite rich, which kind of ties in with your more experimental stuff.

Yes, I guess that’s where my experience as a composer comes into it. I like to work with details and layers and develop small changes over time.

So you’re background is in composition?

Actually my background is as a visual artist, so I’m not academically skilled in composition, but self taught. I started composing/improvising in ‘95 and had my first tape release in ‘97 called “Rainy Days Forever”, which was a kind of lo-fi, guitar synth album. My first electronic music album came out in 2001 on Smalltown Supersound, titled Panorama.

What was the instrument that started it all for you?

I played the flute, but in the end I hadn’t gotten any joy out of it, because I had to practise and do big band rehearsals. It wasn’t quite as free as I would’ve liked it, so I stopped playing music for a couple of years. Later I started playing the guitar when a friend of mine introduced me to classic guitar. I started playing around with interesting textures and melodies and that was the way in to working with transforming and processing sound, to use an instrument or a field recording and turning it into something else.

Tell me a bit about your early musical influences, away from the club music hemisphere.

Before I went to art school, I didn’t know that much of the history of experimental electronic music, so I started digging a little further into that side of the world with John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Eliane Radique and Terry Riley.

One of the reasons I went to Trondheim University was because Helge Sten (Deathprod) was at the academy. There was this rumour that the academy was focussing on new media and technology. Today all of the Norwegian art academies do that, but at that time Trondheim was the multimedia hub. So that was the reason I wanted to go there.

I had also heard this Motorspycho album, Demon Box in which Helge had quite a central role as the producer. This was a big influence in terms of turning rock or popular music into something else, and that took me from listening to punk andhardcore to other, more experimental things. I was listening to a lot of metal stuff, so in a way I came from metal, but moved into electronic music.

Do you still listen to metal?

Sometimes, but I don’t go to every metal show, and I don’t often listen to metal at home, but I still enjoy the power of it.

Do you ever reference it in your music in terms of trying to recreate something from metal in an electronic landscape?

I guess so. In the beginning I was very influenced by black metal and the more emotional/melodic part of the noise genre; that dirty and beautiful distorted sound. My last solo album for instance, Ma.Org Pa.Git which I released in 2014 was based on church organ and electric guitar. For me It has this kind of connection between ambience, doom and folk music and was a tribute to where I had come from.

Getting back to Rudow. Are there any plans for a live show around the EP?

Yes I hope so. I also made some other tracks at the same time and I have some ideas for a live show incorporating these pieces. One of the ideas is to have Eivind Henjum alias Sprutbass from the Dødpop collective to play bass and incorporate that with the synths. I actually played some of the tracks when I played at Sunkissed Live at BLÅ, so I think it definitely could work on a dance floor.

I don’t actually call it an EP by the way, I’m calling it an album.

Do you prefer it as an album because it consolidates the project?

I guess so, it’s not just two tracks, which is more like a teaser, I think of it as a fully -fledged album, that can stand on its own.

Did you sit down with the idea to create an album?

It had a different idea from the start, because when I sent it to Freakout Cult, it had only four tracks, so the last tracks on either side would not have been there. I had the idea to make one more rhythmical track and then an ambient texture track, but they (Freakout cult) wanted two more tracks that were kind of similar to what I do as an experimental artist, to create a bridge between those two worlds.

I’ve been listening to your album shadow of events recently and thought the Rudow project might be a complete departure but was happy to find that there’s a red thread between them, and that it wasn’t adapting to that Freakout Cult sound, which is a bit more lo-fi, more dancefloor orientated.

I guess it’s a bit different to the other releases on Freakout Cult, but since Dj Fett Burger is into it and wanted to release it, I don’t find it problematic at all. I think it’s great that the label can have that wideness to it, and it might be that their regular listeners might find this a bit dark, but I think that’s ok.

I remember seeing the Sex Tags guys many years ago in Bergen and I felt that their live set was quite vibrant and full of surprises. They can take it to many different directions. It’s playful and they don’t try to copy just one style of music. They are present, listening and always pushing what’s possible on the dance floor.

Where do you usually start off with your music; is it concept or an instrument?

I use field recordings and some analogue equipment, and then I process it in the computer, the Rudow project starts off on a Juno 60.

Will you be going back to the experimental stuff after this Rudow release?

Yes, at the moment I’m actually working on another project in ”Regjeringskvartalet” (the empty parliament buildings in Oslo). I had this idea of recording the emptiness and current state of the building. They want to tear down the two top floors and build four new ones and the “Y-block” will most likely be demolished and I wanted to record it before it goes, but it’s incredibly strict. After trying for half a year to get permission we finally succeeded. It’s interesting to see how these power structures function.

After recording two nights in ”Høyblokka” I got some really amazing material, which you can almost use it exactly as it is, with just some simple tweaking. I see the building as an organism, a living instrument and placed out microphones in various pipes, cavities and spaces.

Are you setting any part of the building into vibration to capture the results?

No, and that’s why we recorded it at night too. I wanted to make sure there was a lack of human interaction. We went there around three in the morning to record, and I noticed when people started arriving to work in the morning, the strength and the intensity of the sound material died. It was supposed to be about the lack of humanity and just this empty building. Even silence is something when you record it. I’ve often found that when you enter an empty space and go into a deep listening mode, you often hear frequencies and sound qualities you wouldn’t hear normally.

So this is going to be an album?

Yes, I want to make an album and a sound installation, but one of the other ideas is to give the raw files to the National Library for their archives, for future generations.

How would the sound installation work?

I received URO funding for the project from KORO, who supports art projects in public spaces and I was trying to figure out how to use it in a public space, but realised that because it comes from a public space it could be re-appropriated in a gallery or something similar. Maybe that’s even stronger than to present it there? We’ll see, this is still just a thought process.

Was there a point where you moved out of creating music for the sake of music like your 2001 smalltown supersound album and moved into a more conceptual framework?

I never really moved out of that phase. I believe I can work in between the two, and I did that, even at that time. When I released that album, I was still doing things in art galleries and theatres, but I guess when you have a very broad interest in sound, people often find it hard to understand. I’m not a Techno artist, and I’m not a classical composer either, so that’s why when people ask, I refer to myself as a sound artist / musician, because then I have the freedom to go in between.

Machine Music with Andreas Tilliander / TM404

Unpacking the history of Andreas Tilliander’s immense career is unsnarling the complexity of an artistic identity that has known no bounds. From his eponymous work to his better known Mokira moniker and eventually TM404, there appears to be a limitless horizon to invention in Tilliander’s creative drive. A Swedish native, he’s featured on the country’s big three labels, namely Kontra-Musik, Börft and Skudge as well as Raster-Noton and his own Repeatle records.

A diversely talented figure who is able to move from hard-hitting stripped back Techno to dubby acid records, Tilliander’s work is defined by a brooding atmosphere and an ingenuity that stretches across his monikers. His 2000 album as Mokira, Cliphop on Raster Noton became an instant success and later defined the sound of Mille Plateaux’s glitchy Hip-Hop sound that was eventually branded the “click & cuts” genre.

In recent years his TM404 moniker has garnered the most attention as a sound that carries on the traditions of Techno and House’s origins for its ingenuity and resourcefulness. Exclusively using Roland’s x0x series of machines, Tilliander expedites the legacy of those machines’ influence through TM404 to the present, where he uses them in the same ideology of the founding fathers of Techno and House. He finds new musical dimensions for these 35-year old machines that has created some of the most innovative recordings in recent years, chief amongst them 2016’s Acidub.

Although a DJ too, Tilliander can be found most often playing in the live context, modulating between some of the recorded material while feeding off the impulses of a dance floor. His intricate knowledge of the machines and the primacy of the club floor fuel an explosive performance hinging on elements of Acid, Techno and Dub.

Although for a while, Tilliander “was always in Norway, it has been awhile” since he’s been back and with an upcoming show at Prins Thomas’ Rett i Fletta night we jumped at the opportunity to ask Tilliander a few questions about his machines, the live show and dancing, and called him up on the spur of the moment…

I recently saw you in Tokyo at a Kontra Musik night where you were billed as TM404. Prins Thomas has billed this show as a TM404/Andreas Tilliander performance, but those are quite different projects. What can we actually expect in terms of the performance?

I have no idea really. (Laughs) TM404 started as a project concerned with 80’s and 70’s Roland gear as you well know, and most of the music I put out under that moniker is kind of slow music. It’s rather closer to 100BPM that 125 BPM. The TM404 project was never been anything else other than me having fun in the studio and I had no plans to perform those songs live, but then I got a request to perform at Berghain… I did that show and I played really really slow music, but it still sounded great.

Since then I’ve always been booked to play clubs, like at Unit in Tokyo, where I played a Techno set and I’ve played several times at Tresor, so lately it’s difficult for me to say what is Andreas Tilliander and what is TM404. Especially live, because the records still use the same 80’s 70’s Roland machines, but when I do it live I tend to do it more club music. But on Saturday you won’t be hearing anything around 100BPM at least.

When I saw you in Tokyo you did appear to have some newer equipment on stage.

When I played in Berghain the first time I only brought the Roland stuff, and I’ve done that a few times since too, but when I play as TM404 today newer equipment like the Electron Octatrack is super important to me. That way I am able to bring a lot stems from jams in the studio along with me and then use the TB303 over it live. I have to say it’s live but it’s not as live as it used to be, but then again I guess it’s still more live than most electronic “live” shows out there.

Why do you particularly prefer a live show over a DJ set?

So far I’ve not done any DJ sets as TM404. Sometimes I do get asked to do DJ sets as Andreas Tilliander, but even then I tend to bring my drums and synths along too, because I have no intention to become a DJ. I was always more interested in making music, but I love the DJ culture and although I consider myself a part of it, I don’t consider myself a DJ. When I do get asked to DJ however I tend to do it on the Octatrack, with a couple 303’s and 606’s, doing some lead lines and beats over the top.

There are currently a lot of electronic music producers/DJs packing their records away and taking to the stage in live shows like these.

Yes, I have noticed that a lot of DJs play a lot more experimental music as well, which I really enjoy. Even at Ibiza today you can hear DJs like DVS1 and Marcel Dettmann playing really strange music. DJs like Rødhad are also incorporating effects pedals and hardware into their DJ sets, adding their own elements.

Do you think it might be because the idea of a DJ has become more stilted and perhaps the live show offers more of dynamism that wasn’t there before, especially in Techno?

I’m not really sure. The most important part is the dance floor. I know the old Detroit guys used to say: “the only time we noticed the DJ was when the music stopped”. Apart from that they didn’t care who played in the DJ booth and that’s a great point of view in my opinion when it comes to club music; the DJ isn’t really important. First and foremost it’s the music that counts. I’ve seen pictures of me playing as TM404 and there’s always this circle of,mainly guys standing around me to gawk at what I’m doing.

Would you be one of those guys if the situation were reversed?

Yes, I’m one of those guys that go to clubs to listen to music. I do dance, but in Stockholm for some reason I never dance. If someone I appreciate comes to town I go, but I’m usually standing in the back, listening. If I go to Tresor I might dance, but I sometimes get the impression in Stockholm that people are watching each other rather than getting into the music and dancing.

I get the feeling in Stockholm, from the other artists I’ve interviewed and going there myself, that it might be a kind of a pretentiousness there when it comes to the dance floor.

Yes there is. I often quote the singer from Bob Hund when it comes to that, and he once said that “Stockholm is the only place in the world where the audience is more nervous than the band on stage.” (laughs)

From my point of view it looks like the 303 and the 606 is the integral essence to your live show, and my experience is that those machines are particularly famed for the intuitiveness. Is that why you prefer those machines, to retain that DJ-dancefloor dynamic?

Absolutely, and it’s also the ability to change a lot of stuff while dancing, because when I’m on stage I have to dance and enjoy the music. If I had to bring a laptop and a mouse I’d have to stop dancing. When I use the machines I’m able to do that, tweak the sounds and patterns on the fly. One night can be completely different from the next.

About two years ago an American programmer updated the OS for the 303 and recently I’ve installed this new software on the 303, which is pretty incredible considering the 303 is about 35 years old. For the first time ever, you can actually program the 303 while it’s running, so now I can program melodies while performing. Three years ago this was impossible.

That’s amazing, and especially considering that particular instrument was initially intended as a guitarist’s practise tool and repurposed by the dance community. I was just about to ask you too whether you think that all possibilities have been already explored, but clearly it has not.

No I don’t think so. The 303 is probably the most important instrument for me. There’s very little you can do, but it won’t sound the same every time, because it’s all about the person programming it.

I saw a video of you using a whole bunch of 303’s on their own and it really put into perspective the endless possibilities of that instrument.

Absolutely.

For your live show do you start off with the recorded works and modify it for the stage?

I know there is at least one or two from my previous TM404 record that I tend to live. I also did this collaborative work with Echologist from New York recently and I try to do my version of those tracks when I play live, which is a proper Techno 12”. So on Saturday there will be no music at 100 BPM… it will be Techno.

That’s a relief and it’s a long overdue visit, so we’re looking forward to it.

The last time I was in Norway, I played at Echo festival in Bergen, but it’s been a long time I played in Oslo. I was playing with Familjen and we were really popular in Norway because of Tellé Records, so we would come to Norway four times a year, but I haven’t been there for many years, so I’m really looking forward to coming back.

No More music, No More dancing in Iran

In 1979, after a protest that saw not a single act of violence, Iran disposed of a despot shah to move into a new era of democracy and social freedom… or so it seemed. The time of the shah was a time of great inequality and the revolution was thought to bring about social changes to the effect of democracy and a liberal freedom in Iran. It soon became clear however that Iran had merely swapped one dogmatic regime for another, and through the course of ten years the entire fabric of Iranian life would change as theocratic democracy installed itself in the country. “It was big change for us,” says Mr. Amir Zamani who was just coming of age in Iran during this transformation. Mr. Zamani, an older, distinguished gentleman with thick strands of grey hair, wears a serious expression while remembering his youth in Iran, his dark forehead furrowing and extending as some old memory comes back to him from his youth.

“We thought the worse was going and the good was coming” says Mr. Zamani of life just after the revolution. Iran had gone from a monarchy to a Theocratic-republic overnight and what should have been an era of “more freedom and a democracy” turned in on itself and became an autocracy ruled by sharia law. In the two years succeeding the shah’s departure and the ayatollah’s rise to power, Iran “became very strict about everything from clothing to social behavior” as dictated by Islamic law. Restaurants closed, all alcohol was forbidden, and everybody in the entertainment industry left for places like a LA. A morality police was installed to uphold the strict religious laws imposed by the regime, which prohibited anyone from committing haram, an act or practise that defies Islamic law. “In 1979 we could go to a bar and drink a beer, but after the revolution there was no beer”, says Mr. Zamani in a simple, yet effective analogy for the extreme change in circumstances that happened almost overnight.

Immediately following the ‘79 revolution, Iran plunged into a costly battle with Iraq to expedite the ayatollah’s vision of an Islamic state across Iran’s borders and over the entire middle east. “We could have stopped the war in the first year”, says Mr. Zamani “but they (the Guardian Council) said no, because they had to go through Iraq to Palestine to Israel” for a bigger stake in the region. It would’ve been considered sacrilege to go against the state during a time of conflict, where the entire nation should be devoted to their country. “The regime used the war to enforce more of the Islamic law” on their people and with that there was “no more music or dancing”.

In 1985 Mr. Zamani remembers having to go to some unsavoury lengths to listen to western music. “Music was not allowed at all in the eight years during the war” so “people had to smuggle in music from the west, reproduce it and sell it”. Mr. Zamani and his peers would have to revert to underground channels to get cassette-reproductions of new records from the likes Dire Straits and Bob Marley. “You had to get it illegally and pay more” if you wanted the latest music from the west and listening to it was a clandestine act, severely punishable by varying and unknown degree, an uncertainty that just ads to the fear. You could get a night in prison or be strung up from a lamp pole, for any number of “lewd” acts. In the eighties Mr. Zamani’s wife was “imprisoned for two days because she wore red shoes and white pants”.

It was a frustrating time for people like Amir Zamani who had been raised on a fairly liberal, although impoverished regime, and who had received nothing but the empty promise of democracy at the end of the revolution. “We didn’t have real freedom”, says Mr. Zamani. For him and many others who refrain from taking part in any organised religion, sharia law was taking away the freedoms they’d known earlier in their lifetime and replaced it with a kind of draconian religious orthodoxy. With their backs to the wall, all that was left to do was to take to the streets and protest. Mr. Zamani is very guarded about his political activities during that time and only confirms that he was “politically active”, but to what degree he won’t quite divulge. For a country operating under sharia law during a time of war, protesting your regime was considered a great treason and you were immediately sent to jail with a much harsher punishment to follow. In 1988 over 30 000 prisoners loyal to the People’s Mujahedin of Iran opposition group and other leftist groups were executed by order of the then ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In 1991 Mr. Zamani, “not able to get a job” and “move freely within the city” for fear of persecution, he left the country with his wife and their one year old son, Nima as political refugees, never to return to Iran…

“Has nothing changed since (Hassan) Rouhani”, says Anoosh from the DJ/production duo Blade&Beard in the critically acclaimed documentary, Raving Iran. Hassan Rouhani is the latest in a line of Iranian presidents that seem to be very little more than a distraction to keep the masses occupied while the religious leaders enact their master plan. In this particular scene of Raving Iran, Anoosh and bandmate Arash are trying to obtain a permit from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and are met with something I discern as disbelief by the bureaucratic official. They try to persuade her, by handing her a copy of their new album, which they call a Rock/House album, and this just perplexes her even more. Very little has changed since the Iraq war in Iran and while western audiences have enjoyed a great evolution in electronic music, in Iran they are still struggling to perform and hear electronic music in any way shape or form – even the guitar is considered prohibited. Raving Iran follows the story of Anoosh and Arash as they struggle to produce and play the music we in the west now consider pedestrian. In the documentary Anoosh is arrested at a house party; they put together a “rave” in the desert; and eventually find themselves playing a festival in Switzerland. “We don’t want you to come back” says Arash’ mother over the phone to her son in Switzerland in one of the more poignant scenes in the documentary.

Raving Iran depicts a country where youth culture and music is embraced no differently than anywhere else, but where the risk is far greater than a splitting hangover the next day. “They do everything we do, but they’ll have to do it low-key,” explains Nora Zamani, daughter to Amir Zamani, when I sit down with her and her brother Nima for a conversation a week earlier. Nora was born and raised in Norway and became a political activist in her teens when she joined the NCR-Iran, the current embodiment of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, the very same leftist organisation that held protests in Iran in the eighties and are still focussed on liberating the people of Iran from the theocratic power, albeit from a safe distance in France. Nora has talked at seminars for the group and joined protests around Norway, Germany and Paris all for the sake of the affinity she feels for her homeland and its people. “I feel sorry for the youth of Iran, because they don’t have the same opportunities as we do here” explains Nora about her reasons for taking up the cause on behalf of the Iranian people.

Nora and her brother Nima have never lived in Iran, but both are very aware of the ongoing situation there through their parents’ stories and regular communication with their relatives that still reside there. Although “they don’t have clubs, they’ll throw parties in their basement” says Nora and in Raving Iran it’s exactly at such an informal gathering that Anoosh gets arrested. In the same way Mr. Zamani got his Dire Straits and Bob Marley records, the youth in Iran are getting everything from music to alcohol and even weed through back channels, much of which is smuggled over the borders at great risk by kurdish nomads. The internet provides its own services with access to sites like Beatport and Traxsource available through VPN channels, which keep DJs like Blade&Beard informed about what’s happening musically in the rest of the world.

Through apps like Whatsapp and Instagram Nora and Nima get privileged insights into daily life in Iran and although they might have access to the music and DJs and sound systems, it’s a superficial freedom. “They are living in a bubble” proffers Nima. Nima a gentle-giant of man stands about 2 feet taller than his father, but the resemblance is clear. A doorman at Jæger, it was Nima who un-surreptitiously gave us access to his family and their informed insights into their homeland.

“They’ve accepted the community they live in, and they just want to make the best of it”, elucidates Nora. Girls in the street might be able to wear their hijab towards the back of their head today thanks to large scale corruption from the police, but any sign of the morality police, and they quickly have to cover up for fear of a reprimand, which could mean anything from imprisonment to a public beating. The same reprisals extend to making and listening to music that has not been approved by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Nima and Nora relay a story of Iranian pop artist, Sasy Mankan who was beaten, stripped, publicly humiliated, and paraded around town on a donkey. His crime? Writing a song containing a lyric roughly translated to “I’m so drunk.”

Sasy Mankan, like so many of his contemporaries now lives in Los Angeles, USA and the closest he gets to Iran, is performing in one of the border countries. Music in Iran is still the preserve of the theocratic leadership, and amounts to little more than two annual public performances as prescribed by the regime according to Mr. Zamani. He is of the opinion however that change is in the air, and the people are “fed up” with the current regime. In 2009 about two million people came out to protest during the election and he hopes it “happens again in 2019”.

It’s hard to clarify whether the underground, cultural activities of the likes of Blade&Beard have any relationship to the possible grievances of the Iranian people today from our remote point of view, but both Mr. Zamani and his son believe it’s taken a severe toll on the people of Iran. “They think their way of life is normal”, according to Nima, but that life is lived in constant fear, where you have to conform to great degree for outward appearances, and the small freedoms you can enjoy, you enjoy illegally and at great peril. Sharia law has become so ingrained in the Iranian psyche today that even if the regime collapses today, Mr. Zamani will hesitate to go back. “Because the mentality of the people has changed” he believes. “They’ve learnt that this is culture, the Islamic culture”, and for Mr. Zamani who “thinks like a Norwegian” today, it’s a step in the wrong direction.

As a departing word, Mr. Zamani shows me a video of a father and his daughter playing a traditional persian song from the time of the shah. They play it behind closed doors in the privacy of their own home, away from the strict gaze of the morality police, and it’s hard to believe that this little innocuous tune, with it’s perfectly innocent phrasing, is illegal and that if anybody in an authoritarial position in Iran saw it, it could have dire consequences for that family.

Blade&Beard play Jæger this Saturday as part of the Oslo World Music Festival.

Nima Zamani can be found most nights keeping us safe at Jæger… even from ourselves.

A Quiet Noise – A Q&A with Æsthetica

From the densely wooded suburbs just outside of Oslo a deep, dark sound has emerged with the sonic intensity of armageddon and the wistful sonorities of the birds. Æsthetica are a self-styled doom, post-rock band from Kolbotn whose live shows have mesmerised audiences for its fierce fervour and great big swathes of sound that envelop the listener like a mysterious mist. Combining elements of doom, progressive blues rock, eastern scales and even tubas, Æstethica have cultivated a sound uniquely their own and their first single La Paz has just brought his to the recorded format for the first time.

Theirs is a bold new sound lifted from the petrified footsteps left by rock icons like Black Sabbath, Swans and Godspeed! You black Emperor and shaped by a stark coldness that lies beyond the tundra. Æsthetica’s textures are dense and powerful and without provocation they lure the listener into a calm noise that lies just beyond the superficial. It’s a quiet noise that’s best experienced in the live context, which the young four-piece group dominate with a sonic presence that could make an act like Motörhead appear tame.

They’re bringing this sound to Jæger’s basement for a halloween special of Den Gyldne Sprekk, so we took the opportunity as pretence to fire some questions at Tobias Huse from the band in an effort to uncover a little more of the Æsthetica, the band and the sound.

Let’s start with introductions. Who make up Æsthetica and who plays what?

We are four teenagers from the outskirts of Oslo, three from the Metal-capital Kolbotn and one from Ski. Tobias Huse plays guitar and sings, Simon Dahl plays lead guitar and does backing vocals, Vetle Rian has the low frequencies covered with bass and tuba. Last, but not least, is Petter Moland, our drummer.

How did you meet and who or what encouraged you to form a band?

I (Tobias) and Simon met in school and started playing together around the age of 13. After several musical projects we wanted to go deeper and darker with our sound, and teamed up with Petter and Vetle, who we knew through our musical studies in Kolbotn.

Listening to the opening of Haze I’m reminded of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs. Who were some of your musical influences when you started out?

As for all doom-styled bands Black Sabbath is obviously a huge influence. The late 90s/early 00s doom scene has also been a huge inspiration, primarily the band Electric Wizard. We also draw a lot from Post-Rock bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the later Swans records. The earliest songs we wrote have a clear doom-structure and sound, while the later ones drift more towards Psych and Post-rock.

What inspires you outside of music?

A lot of music seems to be inspired by nature, and the deep, dense forests that surrounds our hometown Kolbotn have definitely been an inspiration in the writing process. Trying to capture the feel of those woods has always been our goal.

Who does the creative process usually begin with in the band and what defines your sonic signature?

The writing process will most of the time start with one riff, or one chord that sets the ground structure for the song, that defines which sonic landscape we are visiting. Most of our songs feature eastern sounding, exotic scales, and untraditional time signatures, such as the opening melody of La Paz, which is in 11/12. Using crescendos, building intensity, volume and speed, is also something a lot of our work include.

The textures in your music are incredibly dense and expansive and sounds like the whole band rushing out at you through the speakers. How do you get to this point in the songwriting process?

When writing the more fuzzed out parts, we tend to think more of the sounds texture than which notes are being played. Asking how does the sound feel, rather than asking how it sounds, or how the melody progresses. The unique distortion sound found in doom-style music (also known as every sound guys nightmare) feels so much more alive and organic than those found in other types of metal. The dense production helps the listener achieve the intended state of mind, to get lost in the fuzz. Once the listener is in, one can build and expand on the sound, and drag the listener through the sonic landscape.

Who is the lyricist and what might influence your lyrics?

All lyrics are written by me, Tobias. During the first year of playing, there were no written lyrics, and the vocals were improvised during every rehearsal and live set. Over time, certain phrases and words stuck and the lyrics were finally written down before we went into the studio december 2016. The lyrical content revolves around nature, occultism, trance like experiences and existential questions.

Although there is a recorded version of La Paz, most of your recorded music are live sessions. What is it about the live context that just can’t be relayed through a recording for Æsthetica?

As mentioned earlier, we attempt to let the listener into the storm of sound. The extreme volume and presence necessary for this immersion is hard to recreate in a living room.

What do you bring to the stage that’s unique and sets you apart from other bands?

When possible, we use a projector instead of a traditional logo-backdrop, where we display a distorted and edited clip of a 1950s television show called Desert Life, which was the original title of La Paz. A group of scientist examine animals living in the extreme conditions of the desert. Using this, instead of blinking “disco” lights, calls for a darker atmosphere, and a higher grade of immersion.

Besides La Paz are there any other recordings in the works to be released soon?

In combination with the release of La Paz and the gig at Jæger, we are announcing big news related to our coming studio album (hint: physical release)

Lastly, do you have any final words you’d like to say before you hit the stage at Jæger next week?

Be prepared. Bring enough water.

Bassiani: A Safe Space

The early 1990’s in Europe: Raves were a burgeoning trend consuming suburbs and undisclosed roadside destinations every weekend; Techno and House music had found a vigorous youthful audience; and everywhere artists and DJs were abandoning stoic musical traditions in what was to be one of the sonically richest eras for electronic music in living memory. It’s an ear most of us today are only able to live through archives and the recorded music of the time, but for an entire generation of 20-somethings in Tbilisi in Georgia, the 90’s has only just started. “We kind of skipped the ’90s the first time,” says Zviad Gelbakhiani to Resident Advisor in a feature interview from last year. One of the founders of Bassiani, a club in the Georgian capital, Gelbakhiani might have exaggerating slightly, but as Bassiani has become the name on every avid music fan’s ips over the last few years there’s definitely something to explore further in that statement.

“I’ve read some books on the history of what happened in Berlin when the wall fell, and for me there is a lot of similarity between happened there 20 years ago and what’s happening in Tbilisi now”, says Hector Oaks. Héctor is the Madrid via Berlin DJ and producer famed for his OAKS imprint and as Cadency he is also the newest edition to Bassiani’s resident roster. Héctor Oaks is in a very fortuitous position of an objective view of what’s happening in Tbilisi now. Selling records out of the Record Loft in Berlin and producing uncompromising Techno music, almost exclusively for his OAKS imprint, Héctor is a prominent figure at the current epicentre of this music in Berlin, but even he is taken aback by what Bassiani has achieved in such a short time. “They are doing it at a level that not that many cities in Europe even have” he says in his unmistakeable Spanish accent. Bassiani’s rise to prominence is a story that borders on club fantasy, the story of Tato Getia and Zviad Gelbakhiani who went from throwing parties on a whim and a prayer in 2012 to creating one of the most established clubs in the world in a matter of a few years – and all before they’d turned 25. “In the late 2000’s deep house scene was too repetitive and empty of context in Tbilisi, and clubbing was deeply perceived just as entertainment, thus the scene was stuck”, explains Tato Geita. The time was ripe for a new club to exist and “people were ready and eager for changes”, and Bassiani was born.

The visitor enters Bassiani through cavernous concrete subterranean maze of the Dinamo Football arena in Tbilisi before s/he is spat out into an olympic size empty pool that’s been reborn as a dance floor. A setting so perfectly suited for its new function it had to have been kismet that brought Geita and Gelbakhiani to the future venue when the lease on a temporary venue had gotten too expensive. The new premises fitted like a glove, tailored perfectly for their tastes and their booking profile and they quickly became one of the leading lights in Europe’s clubland, and all in spite of the political pressures they face.

In the current political landscape in Georgia where homophobia is rampant and drug policies target the individual rather than the infrastructure with some pretty harsh punishment it’s nothing short of a miracle that Bassiani can and does survive. “Everybody is surprised that the club stays open” says Gigi Jikia, who is better known as Bassiani resident and DJ/producer HVL. It’s a “tough and weird” political landscape for Gigi, who is often stopped and searched without any probable cause (other than being a clubgoer) for the suspicion that he might be in the possession of illicit substances. Gigi, who “doesn’t do drugs”, believes the “police is abusing its authority” for profitable gain. A person can face up to eight years in jail and acquire a hefty fine for carrying as little as a milligram of MDMA on them. “The drug users are the only criminals they (the police) are able to catch” according to Gigi who also believes “the police are using more resources on arresting drug users than fighting violence or organised crime” in Tbilisi. They’ll even go as far lie in wait outside Bassiani to “stop you for no reason”, but “somehow the Bassiani guys are managing to keep the out of the club”, which means for Gigi, and other clubgoers in Georgia that Bassiani has become a “safe space”.

Coming into their own in this political landscape Bassiani defies all odds to exist and remain that safe haven, and together with their residents they’ve set a new standard for clubbing, one that even exceeds many of its more established European neighbours. “Five years ago there were only two small clubs and after Bassiani the landscape totally changed, says (Tornike) Kvanchi, the longest serving resident at Bassiani today. Tornike started out working for the label when Bassiani opened and when they established the second Horoom, he became its de facto resident. I’m on a video call with him from a new venue in the heart of Tbilisi when Gigi is about to go on stage with his new ambient project, Masterknot. The nature of the performance as ambient live act and the venue is perhaps an indication of how prevalent attitudes towards clubbing and club music might be changing after Bassiani. Tornike is of the opinion “it’s changed people’s views about music and the party”, which today in Georgia has become a critical component of the social infrastructure of the country. “It’s not just about dancing or hanging out, it’s more of a political thing now”, explains Tornike.

Dogged by a volatile political landscape throughout modern history, Georgia went from being a part of the soviet union to gaining independence; immediately plunging into a civil war; teetering on an edge of war with internal regional disputes; gaining some stability after a Rose Revolution; before engaging in a war with Russia in 2008. Marred by these political unrests since gaining independence in the 90’s, it’s only in recent years that Georgia has enjoyed some stability, but it’s still not without its problems. As is the “case with most post-soviet countries” homophobia is common among “80% of the people” according to Tornike, but it has become an issue Bassiani is facing head on. The gay club night Horoom (from which Bassiani’s second room also takes its name) was established in direct response to homophobia as a club night that would be “open to everyone” regardless of your sexual preference and looked to encourage a liberal attitude to gender.

As an outsider looking in Héctor Oaks is of the opinion that “people there are more oppressed than in the rest of Europe”, but while that might be true, they are certainly not assuming a passive position in regards to the situation. While the Horoom nights unequivocally condemn homophobia, by openly hosting gay events, Bassiani is also involved with White Noise, an organisation that is fighting to get drug legislation changed, with the club itself hosting talks on the subject and encouraging a dialogue amongst its punters. When I asked Hector, Tornike and Gigi, if they’ve noticed a change in the attitudes of people outside of the club I get a resounding yes. “They are doing a great job informing people about this issue” says Gigi and Tornike has seen “some action against homophobia and drug policy taken to the streets” in the years succeeding Bassiani.

Both DJs are very perceptive to the issues that surround club culture as much as the music and Gigi even poses his own questions about the Norwegian clubbing landscape and the problems that mar weekends in Oslo. Encouraging the political motivations of DJs like Gigi and Bassiani is the music of course, as it is with any similar institution, but unlike the apathetic escapism that we see across the rest of Europe’s club culture, in Georgia the two elements have become intrinsically intertwined. Bassiani might be a nightclub like any other, one with a vested interest in these political issues in order to survive and capitalize, but talking to the residents and some of the people behind the scenes, it’s clear that it’s a passion for the music and not business that motivates them. Bassiani didn’t spring into existence out of nothing and they do come off the back of a small but healthy underground scene in Tbilisi, but with Bassiani did come a musical objective that Tbilisi had not really seen before. It was twofold: firstly to bring international club acts to Georgia and secondly to promote and encourage new Georgian artists and DJs. When I talk to Tornike, he had just finished a set opening up for Roman Flügel, and talks of the experience with some reverence. “He is the one and only” says Tornike and I think back to my own experiences of Flügel’s last set in Jæger’s basement. The German DJ’s set was expansive and eclectic, perfectly suited for our cosy basement, and I wonder how the chameleon DJ might have adapted it for the stark brutalist caverns of the Dinamo Arena’s subterranean venue.

“The space is made for that industrial sound” suggests Héctor Oaks when I ask him about his first impressions of the club. Pictures of Bassiani’s main room show barren concrete pillars illuminated by modest white stage lights suspended from the ceiling by chains. It’s the perfect space for the brutal kind European Techno proliferated by the likes of Shed, Innigo Kennedy and Function, but Bassiani I learn from its residents is far more diverse than the sum of these parts. “Normally I play Horoom”, says Héctor, “and that’s the place where I’m the most free to do whatever I want.” Tornike is of a similar opinion who feels that as Kvanchi he is able to “play raw music” at Horoom, offering a contrast to the functionalism of Bassiani’s main room. “It’s refreshing for the people” he goes on saying and suggests it’s much like what Panorama bar is to Berghain; “House orientated, with some Disco and more soulful music.”

Héctor who often plays 12 hour vinyl sets in Horoom, digs through his extensive collection that can go from Nu-Beat, Electro, Synthpop and EBM to House, showcasing his broad tastes cultivated through the Record Loft. He can’t be sure if it’s him or if the people “just trust the place”, but when Bassiani closes at 10-11 in the morning Horoom carries on “and that’s when the party really starts”. Øyvind Morken, who had just come back from playing a set at Horoom while I’m writing this explains it’s “like a “smaller version of Panorama bar” with a “really enthusiastic crowd”

That enthusiasm is exactly the crucial ingredient to Horoom and Bassiani’s success. Although there might have been “some parties in the early nineties” in Tbilisi according to Gigi, electronic music was “not as big or as popular” as it is today. While that early generation might have “had an impact” on the scene there, Gigi’s generation wasn’t “even aware of it” and it was more likely the “foreign stuff” that introduced he and his peers to electronic music and motivated them. Through the internet they’d been made aware of what was happening outside Georgia and this is where Bassiani became trailblazers, booking internationally acclaimed DJs to the capital to a very receptive audience. ”Before Bassiani, I had only heard a handful of big artists”, says Gigi who enjoys the “huge pleasure” of hearing so many artists every weekend now. “The bottom line is to go for what we love in dance music”, elucidates Tato on the booking policy of the club. “Of course, there are moments we have to take into consideration the characteristics of the scene and the city but the line-up is very essential part of Bassiani and stakes are very high, it must always be equally interesting and fascinating for everybody involved in the culture, based in Tbilisi or any other part of the world.”

That modus operandi also extends to the label, which marks four releases today. Combining music from visiting producers like Varg and Voiski with music from their own homegrown talent, the compilation series showcases the diversity and dynamism of the club in the recorded format. “Our strength lies in the variety” says Tornike, the DJ behind the daily operations of the label. Sticking close to the club’s booking policy, the label’s “motivation is to be different” and refrain from being pigeonholed with “one particular sound”. It’s gone some way in inspiring the musical community around the club too, suggests both Tornike and Gigi and ultimately it has cemented the legacy of Bassiani beyond Georgia too.

“Bassiani’s definitely had an impact on people working within club orientated music” says Gigi, but crucially “it’s also affecting people outside of club” and on more than one level. What Bassiani is doing as a club is by no means revolutionary and Tresor, Fabric, Panorama Bar and Robert Johnson have set standards that Bassiani have mimicked, but none of them can quite boast to have had so much influence in such a short period and to be so culturally/socially significant.

Whether they’re fighting for their political freedoms or providing the highest level of club entertainment to a few eager dancers, Bassiani’s influence can be felt through the very social structure of Tbilisi, and in that they are innovators even in the shadow of their more established counterparts. Bassiani is effectively the first to actualise the true intentions of a club; a space for escapism through music that can also affect social change beyond its doors. Politics might have no place on the dance floor, but the dance floor and the music can certainly provide a place and language for a conversation to begin and perhaps that is what lies behind the success of Bassiani.

* HVL, Kvanchi and Cadency plays Jæger during Oslo World Music Festival.

Dance Music: DELLA talks to Tommy Bones

What Chicago and Detroit established in House, New York made its own with a sound that channeled something raw and urgent from the city into the music. The city’s conic traditions, from the aggressive assertiveness of punk / new wave and the grimy reality of Hip Hop, would leave its impression on House too, shaping the genre around the city in one of the most unique interpretations of dance music. Establishments like Limelight, Tunnel and Sound Factory became the purveyors of cool in New York in the 80’s and 90’s through House, here music from the collections of David Morales, Kenny Dope and Todd Terry soundtracked the city’s nocturnal hours.

Following in these DJs’ footsteps was Tommy Bones, but like many of his generation, it didn’t begin in the booth, but rather the floor… where else? From the age of five, Tommy had been a musical obsessive and a dancer and by 16 he was a fledgling DJ, nicknamed Tommy Bones because of his emaciated appearance. Playing the local roller rink when the resident DJ was let go, Tommy honed his craft, spending his days with dusty fingers in record stores and his nights haunting the likes of Sound Factory and Tunnel, listening to the newest sounds coming out of New York.

In ’94 he took his first professional DJ gig in New York during the city’s golden age of House music, combining his early DJ experiences with his love of dancing, to become a leading light in the city’s darkened corners. From DJing, the natural evolution into production came for Tommy when in the early 2000’s he released his first solo productions. He had found early support for his productions through legendary labels like Strictly Rhythm, Real Tone and Defected and records like his Future Classic’s EP brought the DJ and producer to an international audience.

With that distinct New York flavour punctuating his percussive productions, Tommy stayed close to the sound of the city that birthed his musical career, honouring the sound of House as established through recordings artists like Masters at Work and Kerri Chandler. Deep chords travelling lethargically across effervescent jacking beats with a vocal sample waiting along the next bar, follows the legacy of Tommy Bones through his discography. He continues to be a frequent fixture on New York’s nightlife, and while he might be occupying the other side of the booth today, he’s still a dancer at heart, much like Jæger resident DELLA.

The story of Tommy Bones is a story o DELLA knows all to well as an American DJ that’s carved up her fair share of wooden boards in New York and it’s more than just serendipity that she and Tommy Bones should find themselves in Jæger’s booth this weekend together. In a recent visit stateside, DELLA caught up with Tommy Bones for a Q&A session to talk about the dance floor, New York in the nineties and their upcoming gig together.

DELLA: Hi Tommy, thanks for taking the time to talk with us here at Jaeger. I am really looking forward to bringing your New York House sound to our basement at my upcoming Della’s Drivhus. Please, can you tell us a little about your background as a New Yorker and how you got into DJing?

Tommy Bones: I actually grew up 1 hour outside of NYC in Connecticut. I was a white kid in the suburbs that grew up on New York Radio stations. Stations like WBLS and Kiss FM played Hip Hop & R&B. As a kid in the 80’s and 90’s I was a dancer, so I danced to Hip Hop and later House. The DJing part of it came about when a DJ at a local club was fired and I took his place. I always would watch what he was playing after he was gone I would sneak in the booth and play his records. Later I got turntables and taught myself how to beat match. I had to figure it out some how. I’m pretty much self-taught in that way.

D: New York is a key city in founding House music and has turned producers like Lil’ Louie Vega, Kenny Dope, and David Morales into legends after churning up hit after hit from the reflection of the energy found in this incredible city. It must have been pretty amazing growing up during this time. Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium. Can you tell us some of your personal experiences from an era that changed dance music?

TB: My era was definitely the 90’s. I graduated High School in 94. The first club I went to was the Tunnel with David Morales. Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium were mega clubs with several rooms in each club. These places were huge, they were also places where a lot of tourists would go. They were more popular after I first heard of them. Later I ventured to some of the smaller clubs like Sound Factory Bar. Louie Vega was the resident on Wednesdays. Wednesday nights would be industry nights and Louie would break new records from other New York producers. Sometimes they were on acetate or sometimes reel to reel. People were always wondering what he was going to play next. It is important to point out that there were dancers dancing to House Music at the time, not just doing a two step, but styles like lofting, footwork, voguing and many other styles. This gave the clubs more energy for sure! In the late 90’s you had Club Vinyl which hosted parties like Shelter, Afterlife and Body & Soul. Things were changing from soulful deep house to having a more world-influenced vibe.

D: Let’s talk about NYC currently, is the energy and vibe of House still alive and thriving? Any tips for club-goers on spots to hit up next time they are in The Big Apple?

TB: Yes for sure though more clubs have moved to Brooklyn. You have Output, TBA, House Of Yes, Good Room, Brooklyn Mirage (A 5000 capacity outdoor venue with an indoor club opening this October), Analog, and Black Flamingo. These clubs have opened doors for more diverse crowds that are now listening to dance music.

D: In your biography you mention that you are a dancer and that it was your dance moves that kept you from being harassed as a young skinny white kid. I too share this passion of yours, but I rarely hear or read about DJs expressing their love for the actual movement itself, dance. I mean it is called ‘Dance Music’ after all, yet the actual dancing part is hardly mentioned by those conducting it. How does dance influence you both as a producer and DJ? And, do you feel that those DJs who shake it on the dance floor vs. those standing along the edges or in the DJ booth actually make for better DJs and/or producers?

TB: As far as dancing and DJing it is a part of me from when I grew up. I never really understood why DJ’s would just stand there, though I have heard many rock it either way. I think it is amazing to watch someone having fun and being free with the music. As far as in the studio I produce tracks that make me want to stand up and dance to my own music. If it doesn’t make me dance I’m not doing my job!

D: Since moving from the wooden dance floors of NYC, as both a dancer and DJ, into the production area in the 2000s you have released on quite impressive labels: King Street, Real Tone, Strictly Rhythm and Defected. How did you approach these reputable labels or did it all fall into place through your years of involvement in the scene? Any tips for young House producers on how to get recognized by epic labels such as these?

TB: I had been passing around a few demos of tracks I had been working on. My first project on King Street was a remix given to me through a friend that believed in me. I produced the record with fellow NY producer Louie Balo who taught me how to use Logic. From there I taught myself keys as well as the whole production process. I later solo produced South Africa Deep in 2006 for MKL’s Lion1music label. South Africa deep landed me some licensing deals with Kerri Chandler and Dennis Ferrer compilations. This gave me more confidence in the studio. I’m still learning every day. The best thing for new producers is to learn basic theory and learn how to play keys. This will help you make musical music and shine above the rest.

D: Weekly, you host a live DJ podcast on ReelHouseTV called ‘4-4 Studio’s NYC.’ Can you tell us a bit about your show and how you prepare for these broadcasts? Also, does your broadcast only feature you weekly or do you bring guests into the studio with you?

TB: Broadcasting live is amazing! You can reach a whole different audience by going live. It actually is really inspiring and I look forward to it every week. There is an opportunity to reach thousands that you have never reached before. Musically, it takes me up to 6 hours a week researching to find quality music. I can go through thousands of songs in a few hours. It is difficult as there is so much music being released every week. Somehow I pull it all together soulful music all the way to Techno! I have brought in a few guests so far and I’m looking to have more!

D: Recently, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on “vinyl only” club nights or “vinyl only” DJ sets. How do you feel about this debate over format? Do you have a personal preference?

TB: Vinyl only is cool. It does have a sound that is it’s own thing and on a proper system it sounds amazing. I’m not much of an audiophile in that way. I just like to hear music that makes me want to dance no matter what the format is.

D: Since we are on the topic of vinyl, what are your favorite spots for digging in NYC (or worldwide)?

TB: I haven’t been digging in a while. I did stop by A1 in Manhattan recently. I was impressed by their selection so I would definitely make a trip back.

D: Luck was on our side for bringing you up to Oslo because we were able to catch you on our side of the pond while attending ADE. Tell us little about what you have going on at ADE. Is this your first attendance? Would you recommend this journey to be made by those working in the dance music industry?

TB: This is my first time here… I’m out here to help promote some new music I have coming. One is on Kenny Dope’s new Dopewax and friends 6 disc vinyl compilation. I also have 2 Dopewax EP’s set to come out this fall as well as new material on Nervous Records. I would totally recommend ADE. It seems to be more of a place to schedule meetings with people you don’t normally get to see face to face and get some serious business done.

D: Lastly, can you give us 3 selections in the kind of sound we can expect to be hearing from you at this upcoming Della’s Drivhus?

TB: I can tell you this… It will be amazing. I play soulful to deep and all the way to techno NY style. NY Style meaning we like to play it all, genre free!

D: Thanks again Tommy for taking us inside your world of House music. Personally, I cannot wait to get my groove on to the raw cuts you will be delivering this weekend in the basement. My dancing shoes are ready and waiting!

TB: Thank you for having me… I will have my dancing shoes ready as well. Just in case!

Here more from Tommy Bones at:
Traxsource: https://www.traxsource.com/artist/1223/tommy-bones
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/djtommybones
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/djtommybonesmusic/

In the Studio with Karl Fraunhofer

There are many faces to Karl Fraunhofer and over the course of the last few years I’ve come to know at least two few of them through the music he produces. “I have a split personality when it comes to music” he says with the white noise of the Akerselva gushing past the window of his loft studio.I consider the sound as a sample, but push past the thought to get on with the subject at hand.

I’m calling on Karl for an interview and a studio tour during a time he has assumed his Dortmund personality and find him in a creative flurry, putting the finishing touches on what will no doubt be a future Techno release. It’s an unmistakable Techno track; repetitive with just a hint industrialism as melodic instruments find a new purpose as percussive parts.

During the day he can either be found working the counter at Deluxemusic or installing some AV system in one of the many nightlife spots in Oslo. At night he might moonlight as an audio engineer, fixing and modifying synths for those close enough to ask, but on the occasion I meet him he is clearly in a more creative mood as Dortmund, with a Logic project file illuminating his face in the hue of a single ceiling light, dimmed to the horizon of a void.

Dortmund is the spasmodic Techno project Karl shares with French producer and Florian Grisard, but for this track he’s assumed the captain’s chair and his flying solo. Karl’s taking “break from the eighties stuff” after releasing Santa Cruz on the UK Sprechen label, and picking up the Dortmund project where he left off earlier this year on Thomas URV’s Ploink label.

“I haven’t really signed it”, elucidates Karl on the track he’s working on, but it “ is probably about 80% done”. Karl is very much engrossed in the track when I meet him in his studio, as he keeps turning to it, referencing it as we talk. The studio is a comfortable musician’s hovel, neatly arranged to accommodate a small arsenal of synthesisers and an impressive studio console. Everything is at arm’s length from Karl’s position, ready to be pounced on with tremendous ease, including a bottle of vodka, lying idle next to his desk.

“It’s all about the creative process” says Karl, and the impressive array of tools are just that, a set of tools to manipulate and realise his creative will. The equipment around him is enough to make any synth-obsessive salivate, but Karl defers from calling himself a collector.

“There’s a lot of people that have a museum at home and they make like pling-plong music, and they never release stuff. I could probably do that stuff too, but I like to produce and DJ and I like people to hear my music.”

There’s never “really any goal” with the music Karl produces, except perhaps “playing your track in a club and watching people have fun to it.” He feigns the thought of finding a particular context for his tracks, and enjoys hopping from the bouncing eighties House arrangements of Fraunhofer to the more brutalist Techno club tracks of Dortmund, and he does so with the ease of a musical savant. Both worlds however come together in his studio by the river and it’s here, through the machines that we attempt to form a picture of a producer and artist that’s more than just a sum of his machines.

Yamaha – TX7 – “R”

Let’s start with your first synth…

My first synth? It’s not actually here right now, but it’s a DX7. I have a rack version of it in the studio today, which is called the TX7-R. The TX 7 is a desktop version of the DX7 and this old Norwegian guy built it into a rack with a steel frame.

Is that where the music started for you, with the synths?

I started making music when I was 14/15. I always had a computer at home and it started with FastTracker and cuBasic. My dad is a musician so there was always some audio stuff going on, but it really started when I got my first copy of Fruity Loops, which was my introduction to synths through VSTs.

That’s also when I started listening to the bigger producers, and realised they had real synthesisers, objects you could touch and feel. The first proper synth I bought was actually a moog. I was living in Australia and my friend bought a Little Phatty and a Virus Ti and he didn’t really know how to use it, and because I already new synthesis, through the VSTs I got to borrow it. At the time it was all about Electro and that’s when the bug actually bit.

That was around 2004/5 I guess?

I started doing a little before then, but that was all in the box. I was enrolled in an audio course at the conservatory in Australia and it was when I started using hardware when a studio career started.

Tell me a bit more about your Dad.

He is a Jazz musician.

And his instrument of choice?

The trumpet, It’s a mono instrument as well, you know. (Laughs) I do like my mono synths… but then again I like my poly synths as well. As you know I have a split personality; Karl Fraunhofer takes care of the eighties stuff and then there’s the Dortmund Techno project, which is mono again. (Laughs) I’m not into Jazz though.

You have that musical inclination there through, when it comes to the Fraunhofer stuff. The arrangements and the composition of those tracks show a very adept musical ability.

I suppose the eighties stuff does, yes.

What was some of the first music you produced and released?

It’s really awkward, but this is before I started with synthesisers, and I was doing Hard Trance and similar shit… that was back in the day though. My first serious release came when I was 16/17 and it was released on vinyl. It’s so awkward I won’t even mention the label or the track, because that’s not me, it was my twin brother. (Laughs)

Another personality?

I did it because all my friends liked it and it was the cool thing to do at the time. I was always into House music and Techno and I was always trying to persuade them over. Ultimately, I was moving in the wrong circles before I met the guys in Australia who were really into House music, and I was like: “Finally!”

Roland TR- 909

When you started picking up on a sound that you liked, what was the instrument that sealed the deal for you?

It was always the 909. There’s something about the hi-hats and the kick, and I can never get bored with it. You could use it in brutal Techno or in smoother House and it always sounds cool. It’s interesting, because there are these rules about it that if you do Techno you don’t engage the shuffle, but if you do House you engage the shuffle, and it gives the machine an entirely different personality.

Every 909 I’ve tried sounds different, and the one I’ve got was from DJ Geronimo, who used to be the man back in the day and the boss for EMI in Norway. And the way he tells it, is that he got it from Boy George, so there’s a bit of history to it. When I got it, it was completely ruined, it had a birds nest in it and clearly had not been loved for some time, so I had to restore it.

That’s also another part of what you do, you restore these instruments?

Yes, I’ll restore or fix things for friends. Right now, outside on my service table, I just did a Korg Mono/Poly and retrofitted a midi kit for Martin Horntveth from Jaga Jazzist. I don’t always have much time to do that type of thing, because of work and music.

Knowing the inside working of your synthesisers, must put you at an advantage when calling up sounds that you want to use.

Yes, I can kind of smell this is not the right synth, when I’m working on something. And when I don’t get the sound with analogue synths or digital synths, then goddamnit, I’ll turn to the VSTs. Sometimes you just can’t get those fat digital basses, even through a DX7 and you just have to turn to a VST.

Oberheim Matrix 12

For the Fraunhofer, eighties sound, which is the synth you turn to first?

The Oberheim. It’s quite a rare synth. It came in two revisions, the American and the Japanese, and the Japanese version is very shit – it even has fans in it – but this is the American one, and fun fact; Todd Terje also has the American version. The Oberheim is actually like a hard-patched modular, with a matrix you can tap into and change.

When you go to it, is it about using it for its keyboard and arrangements, or is it a specific sound it has?

When you do the eighties stuff it’s all about a brutal chorus and this has that in spades. Other things like sweeps, it does those very well when compared to samples or VSTs, and you get a sound that almost nobody has. It’s a pretty exclusive synth.

Roland TB-303

Where are you most likely to turn in here for the Dortmund project?

It depends, it can start with a bass line on the mono poly, or a sample from the 606. When you work on a Techno track, you work a lot with samples. You can record one sound or you can record a sequence, but you work with it very much on a sample -based workflow. I’m also a big fan of Acid and if I’m not feeling particularly creative, I can just switch on the 303 and it does all the work for me.

And where does Florian Grisard come into the picture, concerning Dortmund?

We used to work together a lot, but the last three years has been me solo all the way. Florian has a wife and a kid and he moved way, but I hope he comes back again. We are still talking and he often helps me out with tips or tricks, but he’s a busy guy too.

What are your thoughts on Techno in its current state, especially in Norway?

There’s a lot of cool people here that play great music, have a great selection and produce a lot of cool Techno. But there are also these guys that are basically Tech-House people, who do that Ibiza sound, and they misinterpret the genre. They call everything Techno, but it’s not really Techno. I’ve even booked to gigs as a Techno DJ where the promoter doesn’t seem to understand what Techno is.

How do you differentiate between Techno and Tech-House?

Tech-House sounds very digital. It’s also more static compared Techno. Even old Techno, which was made in a garage using shitty gear, sounds so much cooler.

Universal Audio Apollo

Much of the appeal of your sound I find is not particularly in the characteristics of the machines you use, but in the way they sound when you’re done with them in the post production process. Where do you start off with that process, and I’m particularly thinking of your last EP, Santa Cruz?

Most of those tracks start with the shittiest machine ever. I’ve got my favourite there, the TR-505. You can pick one up for $100 today, but there’s something about the hi-hat, kick and a snare on that, that just sounds so tight. I run it through the LA 610 and just compress it a bit to add some flavour to it. It just sounds right in the mix, and then I might do some post processing with EQ and layering. I’m a big fan of the universal audio soundcards with the DSP. They’ve saved me a lot of money because I’ve A-B tested them with the analogue stuff from Universal Audio and it sounds 99% the same, so yeah… go digital!

I think that conversation is pretty moot now, because the benchmark for sound is mastering, and that is all digital today.

There’s like super-high-end and then there’s digital and at the end of the day 90% of the music is going to end up in shitty Iphone earbuds anyway. My practise is to use the best of both worlds.

A Korg Guy

What’s the most recent addition to the studio? I notice that there’s some new looking modular bits.

That’s not actually mine. That’s Tod Louie and Solaris’. I’m really afraid of modular stuff, I’ve played on it and I love it, but I realise I’ll go broke very soon if I start delving into that world.

Yes, and it’s not the big things that add up to that much, it’s the little things, the utility objects you need that take the biggest chunk out of your wallet.

That’s why I like my Korg MS-20. It never disappoints; it’s simple raw and old school.

It’s got a very distinct sound.

Yes, the high-pass-filter defines it.

But getting back to your latest purchase?

I’ve not bought that much lately, because I’m really happy with my current setup, but I guess the last thing I got was the poly 61. I’ve had it for a year now, but I also work in an audio shop, so I get to try a lot of stuff. My next purchase is going to be an Roland/Studio Electronics SE-02.

Do you also keep your eye for new developments, it’s not just about collecting old synths?

I’m not a collector, and I sell anything I don’t use. I sold a lot of stuff in recent years. I’m a Korg guy. I love the Mono/Poly; I love the Poly 6 and the poly 61 hasn’t disappointed at all so far. I’ve also got the ∑, and that’s probably the craziest synth I’ve ever used.

I noticed that immediately when I walked in, and I’ve never seen or heard it.

It has two joysticks and it even has aftertouch, and it’s from ‘78. It’s one of the first performance synths and it has like 20 oscillators. It is the predecessor for the MS-20 and it has the MS-20 oscillator and filter in there. It looks like an organ, and even has a place to rest your sheet music. It’s got CV / gate, but what’s really cool is that it has a ring modulator for all the oscillators. You can do a lot of quirky stuff with it, and it’s probably one of the most underrated synths, because when you try out, it can be a little boring, but when you play around with it a little more it opens up a whole new world.

It sounds like it might be gracing some future projects. But as far as the Fraunhofer/Dortmund projects go, how do you see them evolving in the future?

There’s a lot of stuff going on. Two years ago I signed with Ploink, and I’m still working with Thomas (URV). I hope to release a bit more on there and take it to other labels too. I did a release on Spectrowave in France; I tend to do a lot through the French scene.

Is that Florian’s influence?

Yes. We also did some stuff through Sony in Italy, but I think it’s cooler to do the local underground stuff at the moment. Maybe the big ones will pick me up later… I don’t know, we’ll see. I don’t have any plans set in stone, I like making music and we’ll just see what happens with the rest.

Great, I’ll let you get back to that then… making music.

Reykjavik & Beyond with Viktor Birgiss

Reykjavik has cultivated and inspired some of the most enduring leftfield artists in modern times. There seems to be some imperceptible charge in the creative air of the Icelandic capital producing familiar artists like Bjørk, Sigur Rós, and Bjarki, but so much more too. Even though the city holds the highest concentration of the country’s population, it’s still merely 334 000 strong, but a sizeable portion of that seems to be engaged in some creative endeavour or another. Even foreign visitors can’t escape it’s allure, and we know Damon Albarn and Ben Frost have called the volcanic landmass home at one critical point of their career, unlocking the mysterious charm of the creativity it inspires.

“Maybe it’s just the landscape” ponders Viktor Birgiss, a House producer from the city. “Everything from the weather to the time of year” might have an effect on his creativity he suggests, and somewhere in there the ingredient exists for one of the most creatively rich environments in the world.

In 1988 Viktor Birgiss was born into this environment. In the year succeeding his arrival into the world, Iceland lifted its ban on the selling and distributing of beer. “We’re still beer-drinking amateurs” jokes Viktor, but I suspect with drinking beer also came a more sociable society, one that engaged more with each other in the context of a bar and usually in the presence of music.

It was a dynamic time in the city’s history and when Viktor came of age, it had created a landscape allowing for electronic music to flourish in all its different shapes and forms. In or around 2007 his “interest in DJing and making music” was first piqued when he got a “DJ gig in elementary school” . It had planted a seed in the burgeoning producer and DJ, but it would remain mostly dormant until after Viktor left school and got his first job.

By the time Viktor’s interest was re-emboldened a colleague had implanted the idea “ that if you wanted to get DJ gigs, you had to produce music.” Viktor took that sentiment “all the way”, taught himself Ableton and in no time he was making his own mirthful House edits of popular songs. “I had no musical background, so it was all trial and error stuff”, remembers Viktor, but after a “long journey” he had become incredibly “comfortable in the digital working space”, gaining the respect of his peers in Reykjavik early on his career through this skill.

At the same time, Viktor had found a job at Kaffibarinn, the venue that lives on in infamy as the popular Icelandic haunt owned by Damon Albarn, depending on which rumours you believe. “He might have put some money into it in the beginning”, suggests Viktor, “ but I’m pretty sure he’s not one of the owners today.” By the time Viktor started working there, no trace of Albarn was left, but that was of little concern to Viktor, who had sought out the position merely to “observe other DJs”. Viktor’s clubbing experiences had been ”minimal” leading up to this point and Kaffibarinn was the perfect place to learn from other DJs and like many of them it would also be the launchpad for the incipient DJ’s own career.

Viktor would “annoy the booker” and resident DJ, Alfons X with requests to play, but the only way Alfons would allow that would be with a back to back set, allowing Alfons to take over if needed. It was not needed, and Viktor’s DJ education became a trial by fire with the patient and open-minded crowd at Kaffibarinn playing an integral role in his evolution.

Viktor: “Growing up as a DJ was really healthy at Kaffibarinn because we were playing really long sets, about 6 hours of music. The crowd that came to hear the DJ really trusted the DJ; there were no song requests and that really boosted my DJ self esteem.”

When Viktor had started in music, he had “no direction” and frequently stepped into new genres, but with the his confidence bolstered at Kaffibarinn, he eventually ”found a place in Deep House and House”. Heavily “influenced by old school 90’s House”, Viktor went into a new golden era of House circa 2011 and became one of Iceland’s leading lights in the genre after one of his edits caught the attention of his downtown peers. Intended “as a joke” Viktor’s edit of Bjartmar Guðlaugson’s eighties yacht rock anthem “Týnda Kynslóðin” gained the DJ some popularity as a producer when “every DJ downtown started playing it in the early evening.“

It all “snowballed” for Viktor from there as he got more comfortable playing at Kaffibarinn. His tastes would also broaden and his tolerances relaxed, affecting his sets and his music as he grew into becoming the esteemed producer he is today. Internet radio stations like Breakbeat, Techno, and Party Zone had already some influence on broadening the producer’s tastes, with Party Zone being “probably the biggest influence”. His became more inclusive than a single genre and during this early evolution, he started to solidify his craft as he went from edits to creating original songs.

With House influences and his expertise in digital work space established, Viktor’s sound was soulful and melodic and showcased a more-than-adept craftsmanship for songwriting. “I never end up doing something that’s just going to be a banger for the dance floor”, says Viktor when I ask him about his songwriting process. “I just loop until I find the middle of a track and then I make something around it.” Melodic passages building on the last, bring a depth to the music as it chugs along the tracks laid by the House rhythm sections. A vocal sample is often around and lends that much needed human dimension to Viktor’s music.

Most of his music can be found on he and Jónbjörn Finnbogason’s Lagaffe Tales label, a label that’s been surreptitiously working away in the underground House scene in Iceland since 2012, providing a platform for new talent resembling Viktor’s to come to the fore through a record. I’m surprised though that Viktor doesn’t play his own music out, even during the label’s bi-monthly label night at Kaffibarinn. “I leave that to others”, he says and if he does feel the need to showcase his musical prowess, he prefers the stage. Using a couple of machines, a midi controller and a laptop, he prefers the role of live performer. With improvised sets based on his own productions, Viktor is always looking for “some element that (he) can change in respect to the dance floor”. Improvising on his machines he approaches it much like his DJ sets, working through the dance floor, and letting it dictate the narrative of the night. Each “live set always turn(s) out different” as a result, much like his DJ sets would.

He is most comfortable on home turf and “playing live at Kaffibarinn is always really special” to Viktor. Like his DJ sets there, where he is more “comfortable playing something that is a little obscure”, and “playing longer sets like that have to jump into Funk and Disco and slower things”, Kaffibarinn is where Viktor finds he is able to fully realise the vast extent of his influences and his tastes.

A new father, he doesn’t “really have the pulse of the scene” anymore however, devoting his time to family, and although music is still a passion, his reserved gigging schedule makes each gig a special event. He lives in the “outskirts of the capital”, working at a local youth centre, where he has used some of his “musical background” to encourage a new generation of music makers. His soundcloud page is still a hive of activity with many jam sessions and one-off recordings lining the feed as well as DJ sets. He often plays abroad, getting gigs through friends he’s made along the way, friends like Vinny Villbass, who stay in touch and create their own musical scene through the connections they’ve made.

Through mutual friend Simon FKNHNDSM, “a Kaffibarinn legend” and “one of the driving forces behind the place”, Viktor and Vinny struck a friendship based on mutual respect and similar musical personalities, and it’s a friendship that has seen Vinny play Iceland and Viktor play Dattera Til Hagen in the past. “It’s all about networking” in a very honest traditional way for Viktor, away from the impersonal business of agents and bookers.

As House music yet again goes through another phase of evolution, people like Viktor Birgiss are the immovable figures that remain true to the spirit of House music, as a DJ avoiding the obvious and the hyped; a producer that feigns the functional; and a performer that looks to the audience for his cues. His extensive career might have been propelled through one of House music’s more popular phases, but his approach both in the booth and in the studio, has cemented the reputation of Viktor Birgiss.

* Viktor Birgiss will be live in our booth this weekend for Vinny Vilbass’ Badabing residency.

A Conversation with a Stranger, with Harri & Domenic

Harri & Domenic (James Harrigan and Domenic Cappello) are in uncharted territory and hold a position many of the world’s most successful DJs would certainly envy. They are a clubbing institution in their hometown Glasgow and their reputation precedes wherever they go as the residents of Sub Culture – a residency that’s been held every Saturday for the best part of Sub Club’s thirty year existence. They are the residents of arguably the most successful residency in the world, at one of its most successful clubs.

Sub Club’s biography moves perpendicular to House music’s history with its roots in the various precursors to the genre and an attitude rather than a style or trend. In the working class Scottish town Sub Club offered escape from the mundane through the dance floor. Starting out as club night, before moving in permanently into the premises in Jamaica street, Sub Club established itself as the pre-eminent House club in the summer of ‘89, the second summer of love.

A year later, Harri would join the ranks of Sub Club with a new residency called Atlantis., establishing a relationship with the club that lasts up to the present. Domenic joined the fray after playing a few warm up sets at Atlantis, and when Harri would part ways with the rest of the Atlantis crew, he and Domenic would create Subculture, a weekly residency that spans almost the entire existence of the club.

Harri & Domenic, Sub Club and Subculture have defied all odds to exist as long within this trend-informed industry and culture as they have done and they continue to remain on point. They’ve continually inspired and cultivated new talent through their ranks, with names like Optimo (JD Twitch & Jonnie Wilkes), Slam, Jackmaster and Numbers all passing through its ranks. It’s a legacy that endures today with Harri & Domenic and their Subculture residency leading the charge.

Their sets and bookings remain on cue, capturing the spirit of House installed all those years back, not as a genre but rather a mood or an attitude. Their sets wander through styles and eras with the weight of their extensive knowledge pulsing through their selections. They are the closest we get to possibly personify Sub Club and on one morning in September we called them up to ask some questions about it, and their enduring appeal.

You’re celebrating Thirty years of Sub Club this year, and I can’t even think of any bars that have been open that long. What has been the staying power behind the club in your opinion?

Domenic: Harri, you’ve been there long enough. (Laughs)

Harri: I have no idea; it just seems to have passed in a flash for me. It’s slightly surreal, but it’s all about people trying to do something that seems interesting and fun rather than being about making money.

Harri, I know your career started with Atlantis at Sub Club, but what was your introduction to the place before you held a residency there?

Harri: It was the strangest thing. My brother’s friend was a resident DJ at Sub Club in Jamaica street, and asked me to stand in for him one night. He took my phone number and started inviting me back.

Was it always a House club?

Harri: It was always kind of alternative. House music was coming through, with tracks like Colonel Abrams and proto-House records like Jack your Body. We also had James Brown rare groove, Soul and Funk playing there at the time.

Domenic, what was your introduction to the club?

Domenic: I did warm-ups with Slam for Atlantis. Harri and I played at an after-party together before and we started talking about music. Harri got me to do the warm-up and Harri and I just always musical cliqued.

What made you clique?

Domenic: What attracted me to Harri was that it was so bad it really sounded good. (Laughs) Seriously though, Harri came from a Reggae background and I was really into blues when I was younger, so we both came from black music, and went through tangents of of black music. We came from a similar place, but just had our own ideas of what we played. It wasn’t like we were playing the same records, but there was a foundation there.

Have you had any effect on the other’s playing through the 30 year evolution of subculture?

Domenic: It probably has subconsciously.

Harri: We join the dots in the middle somewhere.

Domenic: There are some records that overlap, and we usually argue about who’s going to play those records.

House music has gone through so many phases over the course of the thirty years of Sub Club. How do you adapt a residency through these phases?

Harri: You just play the records that you’ve found that week and you just trust those records. We have to make it up as we go along, because we’re there every week, and we have to go record shopping every week.

Domenic: The music is always moving forward, so you’re listening to new music all the time to keep it fresh. You’re looking for something new that’s new and different, but you’re also respectful of the stuff that sounded good in the past.

Do you play a lot of older tracks too?

Harri: We often drop old tunes, but they are old tunes that would sound relevant, like a new record that reminds you of an old record. I’ve got a son who’s a DJ and he’s of the opinion, I waste my time looking for new music, when my old music is better than most of the new music coming out. I don’t really agree with it.

It seems that perhaps the younger generation isn’t motivated by their own generation as much as it was when you guys were starting your careers.

Harri: I don’t think a lot has changed, personally. Here in Glasgow, we’ve been fairly lucky that every few years a younger generation comes through and changes the landscape. For instance a lot of younger people today play African music. I love African music, but there’s people much younger than me that know a lot more about African music than I do.

Did you ever feel that you had to adapt to younger audiences for subculture?

Domenic: I think we can keep on doing what we’re doing. It’s still the same now as it was back when I was young. There are people that are into underground music, and then there are people that want the more popular stuff. The kids that want the more popular stuff, they read RA and are like: “I like that because I’ve been told to like that”. But then there are still people that will rebel against that and find their own individual tastes and DJs. There are still people that will look for something different and we don’t need to play to a young crowd, they come and find us. The popular thing isn’t always the popular thing young people will hear, you’ll always find that group that will splinter away.

Harri: I agree with Domenic. You’ll always find people that want to pursue their own avenue. I don’t necessarily feel that we have to adapt to other people. I suppose it seems a bit arrogant, but people adapt to us, because we’re looking forward all the time, and not getting stuck in a rut.

Domenic: And not falling for hype or fads. We’re not playing records because they are supposed to be popular, we’re playing records because we like them.

What exactly speaks to you on a record that you like?

Domenic: We both like melody in our tracks. I don’t like records that are just a drum track for 62 bars. I still like songs, music that has a beginning middle and end in terms of a story. It has to move, it has to have a story, and not just be a loop.

Harri: Yes, it has to have a narrative. It kind of takes you somewhere.

This harks back to your early influences listening to blues and reggae, where the music was so much more than just a functional track.

Harri: Yes.

Domenic: I think we still kind of look for that in new music.

Could give me an example of new music that speaks to you in this way?

Domenic: For me at the moment I like a lot of the new Electro, because it’s still sounds futuristic. When we first got into House and Techno it was regarded as futuristic music made by robots, and a lot of that’s been lost. I’m finding a lot of Electro I’m buying is giving me that feeling like it was made twenty years from now. Guys like Convextion/E.R.P, every record he makes has got that story, but it’s still got beats and it still makes you want to dance.

Harri: The new Innervisions, Toto Chiavetta stuff I really like. It’s not replicating something old, it’s taking us somewhere else. Sometimes you can get a new record, but it’s little more than a replica of an old style. I like something with a modern twist.

We’re hoping some of that stuff makes it into your set when you visit and that brings me to my next question; How do you compare playing a residency to playing abroad?

Domenic: You’ve got to watch crowds more when you play away and the reactions. You build on the information that you get from the floor, but when you’re at home you can just do your own thing and relax. When you’re playing away you’re more conscious, it’s like you are having a conversation with a stranger. You try to find a common ground so you can have a conversation.

Harri: It’s like Domenic says, you just need to be conscious of what’s happening in front of you.

Domenic: It’s funny when you play abroad and you play a track you’ve been playing at home that you’ve tried on the dance floor and people loved it and then you play it abroad and people haven’t heard and they’re looking at you confused. It’s a total different reaction. I know now that that even though something is popular with our crowd, it might not be the same abroad and you have to get used to that.

Subculture also do a lot of bookings. To what end do those booking serve a purpose at the residency?

Domenic: The reason we got guests was that it was something different; somebody we wanted to hear. Our first guest was Stacey Pullen, when he was seventeen – I had his first couple of records. The original idea was to hear somebody we wanted to hear, somebody new to us, but now it’s become something completely different. It’s more like, giving people a break from us. Booking is a whole new ball game today. Barry who does all the bookings asks us every month who want to book, and Harri and I will send a list and Barry will pick four off the list. The people we put on the list are people that we would’ve heard before and you have a similar ethos to what we do, similar but different again.

Do you find it entertaining and informative as DJs to hear these DJs?

Domenic: Yes, we play before them and we’re basically getting paid to hear them play. (Laughs) It’s a win-win situation.

Harri: And quite often you hear somebody play and you think; “that’s quite brilliant, I would’ve never thought to play that.”

I want to ask you about your tour, because it’s billed as Sub Club XXX. Is there anything that you want to relay in your set that maybe encapsulates the ethos of Sub Club?

Harri: It might be billed as Sub Club XXX, but every set is different. It’s all about the night and what would work there; you can’t make any preconceived plans. Thinking about playing specific tracks because it’s thirty years, just sounds a bit contrived. Over the thirty years we’ve just been playing new music, so why not just do that.

I only have one more question. Out of the thirty years what have been some of your highlights?

Domenic: There’s been so many we always forget these anecdotes. I think we’ve forgotten more good nights than most people have good nights… definitely due to alcohol. (Laughs) There was one night that Harri was DJing the first time Roy Davis Jr DJ’d with us, and Roy was so inspired he wanted to sing. He’s got one of the most soulful voices you’ve ever heard and when he started singing it was a pure off the cuff moment. I talked to him afterword, and he said he didn’t know what came over him. That was one of those moments.

Harri: It’s those spontaneous moments that really stand out. It’s those rare moments when everybody starts reading off the same page and go; “wow this is amazing”. Most of the best stories are often unrepeatable anyway.

Domenic: I think another one that was a classic for me was when we did a string quartet on new year’s eve, way before Jeff Mills and Carl Craig started doing it. I got hold of the guys in the Scottish Orchestra and gave them four tracks and they did an amazing job of transcribing them. We mixed them in live and they played “knights of the jaguar” intro live and when the beat kicked in from the record, the whole club jumped ten feet in the air. It was such a beautiful, soulful moment.

Harri & Domenic represent Sub Club XXX at Frædag with G-Ha & Olanskii

Raw Sole with Mr. Scruff

In 1999 an album hit the shelves that would etch a name in the electronic music history books eternally. The album was called “Keep it Unreal”, an album that became revered for it’s quirky idiosyncrasies, but also for its incredible level of artistry. As musical genres converged and common tropes exorcised from their banality through the course of its narrative, it established a new musical landscape. It would cement it and its creator into the electronic music annals and go some way in traversing that great divide between the accessible and the progressive.

It was an album that certainly caught the zeitgeist of the era where acts like The Avalanches and DJ Shadow were revered for their cut-and-paste diatribe style of music making and like “Since I Left You” or “Entroducing…”, “Keep it Unreal” has stood the test of time.

Keep it Unreal was Andrew Carthy’s second only album as Mr. Scruff, but it solidified the artist’s style and sound as a collage of various musical traditions, channeled through a singular artistic voice. Combining elements of Jazz, House, Hip Hop and just about any sample he could lay his hands on, Carthy harnessed the full potential of electronic music and its various origins to create one of the most endearing albums on the Ninja Tune catalogue. It combined Carthy’s very English pythonic sense of humour with a very considered musical effort, harnessing the eclectic musical approach from his early experiences through the radio.

It was the radio that laid the foundation for a career in DJing and production when Carthy, raised in Manchester, heard the likes of John Peel, Stu Allen and Greg Wilson through stations like Piccadilly, Radio Lancashire & Southside. When a friend played Carthy an uncle’s electro records at a pubescent age, Carthy was hooked and a pair of tape decks would lead to a rudimentary introduction to DJing. With no education other than his favourite jocks on radio, Carthy’s career took him from the bedroom to his first gig in Manchester and almost concurrently his first 12” release.

Carthy’s approach to music has always been a “consistent with different results” he says over a telephone call early one Monday morning while dealing with the admin activities of the week and since making his first mark as a DJ and producer, he’s been on a path all his own. Carving out a career of those early influences and adapting through the different eras, Mr. Scruff’s five albums and countless EP’s are distinct and prominent features in electronic music history.

He carries that individuality through to his incredible DJ sets, and his Keep it Unreal residency in Manchester has been going strong since 1999. He often packs up his show to bring it on the road, and his next stop is Jæger’s where he brings his special brand of humour and expertise to our basement for a night with Mr. Scruff. We were curious to find out more about this and what exactly defines his artistic personality, and in the context of the show looming ever closer, we called the DJ and producer for a Q&A session. As expected from an intellectual talent like Carthy’s, and as we were already quite familiar with his extensive bio, our conversation took us to some very abstract ideas about music as we discussed what restrictions defined his artisic drive and to what end his music and DJ sets operate.

Hello Andy, where are you at the moment and what are you up to?

I’m just getting some exercise after dropping my daughter off at school. I’m spending the day doing admin stuff, getting all the jobs that I don’t really want to do out of the way. (laughs)

Have you been playing abroad a lot lately?

Yeah, I had a heavy summer. I usually have one heavy month followed by a quiet month. It’s all about finding a balance at the moment, so you never feel like you’re doing too much.

And you’re still doing the unreal nights at band on the wall?

Yes, we’ve been doing it monthly since we started in 1999. It’s still going very strong. I think it’s important to have a good residency, it gives you a sense of purpose and focus.

What is that purpose and focus?

A residency stops you repeating yourself, because if you play the same venue every month you’ve got to keep pushing forward. I’ve had many residencies over the course of my career so having a residency is something I’m very comfortable with.

I’m always trying new things, playing music I’ve never played before, taking risks. If you know system, you know the crowd, you know the acoustics and you’re in familiar surroundings, it’s the perfect environment for a DJ to try new things. I’ve put in a lot of work to make sure I’m comfortable and when I’m relaxed, I experiment.

Can you have that same level of comfort when you’re playing abroad in unfamiliar places?

I try to repeat that everywhere I go, yes. I rely on my experiences and always have a few hours before to set up. I think Jæger is coming from the same level I do, like Sub Club in Glasgow and Plastic People when that was open. You know it’s been set-up from an obsessive perspective of playing records. I’ll move speakers around and gain access to the processors to and make any improvements wherever necessary, but ultimately I enjoy playing different venues.

So when you play at a place like Jæger is it like an extension of it keep it unreal nights?

The attitude with my residency is that I take it everywhere I go. You should be yourself as much as possible wherever you play, while at the same time adapting to the theme. Like if I play a Soul and Reggae night, I will cater to that night and sometimes I enjoy doing a specialist night too.

You adapt and decide what you’re doing as you get on. How you feel, how the room makes you feel and how people behave; all play a role in how the night unfolds so you’re not really thinking about residencies, you are thinking about that night at that moment.

That’s why I like warming up for myself; that’s how you get to know the crowd you see individual people coming in. It’s important for every DJ to get to that peak where everybody feels satisfied, and it’s just about getting to those peaks. You’ve gotta come away from that night, thinking, yeah I played some records I didn’t think I’d get away with.

I know you insist on playing longer sets wherever possible, and that was the acceptable norm when you started out. So how do you feel in this era where shorter, festival/boiler-room sets have become the accepted norm?

I think you are going to adapt to what you do. Club DJing has almost become like a DMC showcase – tight and quite prepared. When you only have an hour on the festival stage, you are at least going to have a half a set planned and the shorter you are going to play, the less risks you are going to take. I’m very careful about being critical however, that’s the attitude of people that are frightened of change and think everything was better in their time.

When you’ve got a specific sound, doing short sets can be quite cohesive as long as everybody is listening to each other. It’s a long way of going back to back at the end of the day and I like playing two or three records each with someone all night and seeing where that takes you. How sensitive you are as a selector and making sure you do what’s right for that time, is what will set you apart.

One of the negative things of playing short sets, is that generally the least experienced DJ will be on earliest, and they’d be most eager to please, so that’s when you get peak time music at ten o’clock, which doesn’t work for anybody.

All I can say is that I prefer to play longer, because I’m old and that’s how I learned to DJ. I play most of a tune, and If I like a tune I’ll play all of it. I spend a lot of time looking for obscure music and trying to play music that’s not being played a lot. In older music with lots of dynamic shifts, the structure of the record can help you move around in terms of style and energy and tempo. So I’d like them to hear the whole tune and I like to let music breathe, and dictate the course of a night.

That reminds me of something you once said in an interview. You mentioned that the only criteria for a record to make it in a set is for it to have soul. If I could press you to put that in more pragmatic terms, how would you explain that?

Content over style. It has to be an honest document of what the person or the band were feeling at the time. It should be raw, not just sonically and it could be hard brutal Techno or just a Soul ballad. It always speaks to me in a clear quiet way, then I can put that person’s vision in amongst other people’s musical works, and make something that’s cohesive.

You’ve also mentioned in the past that an album should be like a DJ set. How do you capture that soul in the studio?

In the studio that means capturing those moments and mistakes. It’s not about proving how good you are technically, but rather about capturing the spirit of what got you excited in the first place. If it means capturing the first take with a few mistakes, then that’s what it’s supposed to be about for me. When I record other musicians, I don’t let them know what the idea is, and I just press record. Hearing them go from not being sure to completely confident, that little change in attitude, I find that’s a beautiful thing.

From there, the music tells you what to do with it, whether that’s in the studio, or a record in a DJ set. You need to keep things free and push yourself. In the booth I’m just gonna let the music tell me how to make the transition into the next song. When you’re playing so many genres together you have to go on the history of the music, but you also have the history of the presentation of how that music lives in its original culture. The music I play has very common roots with subtle differences and once you start learning all these connections, it makes it easier to hop between them in a very natural way.

It’s my job to get people excited, touch different sections of the crowd at different times of the night. There’s all these different elements you try to juggle at once. The records have to fit together like a jigsaw, but that jigsaw isn’t rectangular.

You touched there on that eclecticism in your sets and I’ve often heard you talk about your early influences and especially radio’s influence. Is that eclecticism a result of those early influences?

Yes, John Peel was very influential, but I’ve been into all different kinds of music since the eighties. It’s taking the freewheeling aspect of a radio DJ, but applying a very technical DJ approach to it.

And how does that apply to your creative work in the studio too?

I’ve been a heavy (record) collector across different genres, so in the studio it’s about letting a sample dictate the track. For me to be stylistically restricted in the studio I find quite frustrating.

… It’s always strange talking about something that you’ve been doing in a very natural and intuitive way for many years. You end up running out of words.

I am very familiar with that conundrum of course, I mean how do you take some ineffable and abstract thing like music and put it into words.

Yes exactly.

An aspect of your music that’s perhaps a bit more literal is that famous English sense of humour that is often found on your records. Where does this come from and what do you think it brings out in the music?

It’s just part of who I am. I might be quite silly sometimes and that comes out in a very particular way. It’s about making combinations that might just make you smile. Music is about socialising and I love hearing the sound of a band having a great time in the studio. By doing that you are passing on a good energy to the audience.

With recording you establish a context and create some kind of twisted meaning which creates the humour, and that kind of friction between the words and the music keeps people engaged. It’s always a happy accident.

Is that also the function of the artwork, which is so central to your work and yet another aspect of your artistic personality?

When I started putting records out I just happened to design the sleeves. The silly cartoons seemed to work really well and that humour in the music comes out very much in my cartoons. It helps to keep quite a light hearted atmosphere at the gigs too. It’s about not taking yourself too seriously and creating relaxed atmosphere with no unnecessary politics. We’re all just gonna come together and have a good time.

The cartoons are something that’s unique to me and I’m glad that people still like it after all these years. And because this is deep music, it also serves a function in getting people into some quality music, without having to compromise.

Slightly off topic, you mentioned in a recent interview about how the high publishing costs of samples today has meant that you don’t often use samples anymore. I find sampling such an intrinsic part of your music. How has it affected the way you work?

I’m definitely using less samples and recording more. I’ve spent many years using a crazy amount of sounds lifted from other people’s records, but lately I’ve been recording things and treating them as samples.

When it comes to sampling others you’ve got two options really: You can be like a small label and you sample away like it’s 1990 or you find another way to deal with it. In my opinion, you might as well write some original music or content and chop it up in a sampler. Every time I hear a good noise, like a building site or a train, I think “lets record it and turn it into something like a snare”, so sampling a record becomes irrelevant.

My ear is always attracted to sounds, whether it’s on a piece of vinyl or in the act of washing up. I might be sampling less from vinyl, but that ear and that process is still integral to it. It’s the sound which appeals to you and keeping it raw and in the way you combine different sounds that makes for a good dynamic combination.

I’ve spent years for instance looking for clean hi-hat samples on records. In the end I’ve just set a hi-hat up with a mic and played along. It makes little difference because those ears will work in the same way. The tools might change, but that ear is integral. In the late eighties, when I started making music, the samplers had ten seconds of memory, and that type of thing pretty much dictated the sound of the music of that time. Every new generation that comes along is not really all that precious about how music was made before them. If we all had Playstations in the eighties I’m sure we would’ve just made music on that like this new generation. People used what was at hand and those tools painted the sound of it.

Like the sound of a 808 on a House or Electro record.

Yes exactly. It took me five years to learn how to DJ for example, because I had no-one to teach me and I was learning off the radio, because I was 12 years old and couldn’t afford records. Everyone’s artistic style evolves from how they deal with these kinds of restrictions. The equipment defines what the music is going to be. Eventually it’s all about the context and how they execute it.

On my own Time – An Interview with Whodat

Cologne: the leading automotive centre in Europe; birth place of Nico, Can and Wolfgang Voigt; and home to clubs like Gewölbe and Heinz Gaul and the Kompakt label. Detroit: USA’s leading automotive centre; birthplace of Motown and Techno; and home to Moodymann, Theo Parrish, Jeff Mills, Derrick May and Juan Atkins. Two cities, stretched halfway across the world, speaking foreign languages, with so much in common, and that includes club music. Throughout electronic music’s discourse both cities have held a seat of power for Techno and House at different and similar points, and in early 2017 they consolidated their relationship when a creative exchange between the two cities was documented on a Meakusma record that brought Viola Klein and Whodat together for the aptly named Exchange EP.

“I really like Cologne”, says Terri McQueen, the woman behind the Whodat moniker on a call from Germany, taking time out of her tour for an interview. A regular visitor to the German city since 2007 in the capacity of a DJ, Terri admires the city for its “laidback” and “soulful” air. In “Love for Köln” a track from her 2013 Recovery EP she documents her affections for the city quite openly. Today whenever she comes to visit, it’s like she’s coming home to family. “It’s like Whodat’s here… damn we gotta go”, says Terri with a deep chortle in her midwest drawl.

It was through Viola Klein, the Cologne-based House artist that Terri would make a connection to Europe. After meeting Klein at a “birthday party in the motown mansion”, the two quickly struck up a friendship and in 2007 Klein invited Terri to play at her “Bring you Ass” party in Cologne. It was undoubtedly a success and in 2009 Terri returned, this time with Kyle Hall making his debut in the city that welcomed Terri. It’s not in Cologne however that I find Terri when I call her up, but rather Berlin. She’d just played an event at ://about blank the weekend prior and was in good spirits, reeling from the energy of the night. An accident in the shower has left her slightly immobile, but not lacking in jovial spirit or mood, and her only real regret is not being able to enjoy her favourite pastime in Berlin – digging for records.

Terri had “always been into records” and some of her earliest memories are going record shopping with her mother. As a kid she “listened to a lot of Jazz on AM stations” and as she grew into adolescence and eventually adulthood she “was still buying and collecting records”. Inheriting crates of records from her aunt and cousin her tastes expanded from listening to Prince’s Erotic City and the B52s to “some Detroit stuff” with “a good edit and a bootleg” always piquing her interest. Those “jazzy elements” from her earliest musical experiences would remain central to her tastes, but a career as a DJ had never even remotely occurred to Terri until much later in life. And then only with some peer pressure from some very persistent and notable characters in Detroit.

After losing her job while in hospital and through a period of “dealing with a lot of personal issues”, Terri had found some solace in House music and through a colleague had been introduced to the scene at the latent TV Bar, which was then still known as Half Past Three then. “I ended meeting Marcellus (Pittman), (Rick) Wilhite, Raybone, E-Smuve and Theo (Parrish)”, remembers Terri. Wilhite still had his Vibes record store (a store she sorely missed today) and Terri soon found herself falling in with a clique of some of the most noteable selectors to ever come out of Detroit, through a shared love of music.

One particular day at Vibes “Theo (Parrish) walked in and said, ‘are you a DJ, because you look like one’” and handed Terri a record, but even at that significant moment she “was still very resistant” to the thought of becoming a DJ. “I was turning thirty and I was like that’s just too old to start.” Terri breaks out in laughter over the phone, mocking the significance of the moment with her pragmatic humour. The moment’s gravitas however is superseded by what would happen next and eventually lead her on her path to a career as a DJ.

“Marcellus (Pittman) was the one that was like; ‘when you gotta stop bullshitting and buy your turntables’, and I was like man, ‘I aint fucking with you and no turntables.’” Hoping to stop Pittman’s constant nags and taunts, Terri made a bet with the man, agreeing to start DJing if she could find a pair of Technics 1200’s for $400 or less. With kismet smiling down on her and the rise of the popularity of CDJs in the wind the first link that cropped up on Ebay was a Texan man selling a pair of decks for $375 and a $25 shipping fee, Terri’s fate was sealed. “Marcellus just slapped me on my back and said ‘I guess you are about to start DJing’”.

Terri had never really been part of a scene and just “kind of fell into it” and although today we think of Detroit as this Mecca for Techno and House, throughout the years the music was very rarely appreciated back home at the same level as it has been in Europe. “Even when I was old enough to hang out, if I happen to be at an event that was playing House, I would be like, they are playing some House music, but I didn’t necessarily know I was part of a scene.” Artists and DJs remained dedicated however and today it’s still the dedicated few “that want see things happen in Detroit have to make it happen”. A big part of that is to encourage a new generation DJs like Whodat to break out. What Pittman, Wilhite and Parrish laid down was a foundation of support for Terri, and new DJs and artists like Kyle Hall and Jay Daniel to carry on that legacy of what they established back in the early 1990’s. “To see Jay Daniel start at (Theo Parrish’s) Sound Signature, while they’re celebrating twenty years… that’s really a beautiful thing” for Terri,. Although she might be Parish’s contemporary in age, Terri can also count herself as a big part of this latest motivation out of Detroit, bringing “Kyle Hall, Jay Daniel, Sector 7-G Ben and Mike, Vanity Press / Dave Marroquin, Zach (Shigeto) and his brother Ben (Bassist for Ritual Howls) Saginaw, who started Portage Garage” to the attention of an international audience.

With the help of the Sector 7-G guys, Terri started getting bookings in Detroit and found an early audience in her hometown. “People were like, ‘you weren’t shitty when you started’” says Terri about first tentative steps towards a career as a DJ. Starting out with a large record collection she’d amassed at that point, Terri was goaded on by her love for the music… and finding a bargain. In a suburb of Detroit she had found a store with a section dedicated to 12 inches at 50 cents each. Terri would scrape together $20 every week by returning bottles for their deposit and “would take that $20 to buy a crate of records every Sunday.” “The store owner would be so happy people were buying them, he’d bring out more” every week whenever Terri exhausted a section of records. Records from “Masters at Work, Mr K and Kelly Hand” remain in her collection today and in Detroit Terri is still known as the “queen of finding records really cheap.” A recent addition is Patrice Rushen “Forget me Nots” which Terri picked up for $1 and I wonder what are some of the other records in her bag at the moment? “I got a little Disco: Phyllis Hyman ‘You know how to love me’; Linda Clifford’s ‘Runaway Love’ was just playing in my head so I had to bring that; Waajeed’s Winston’s Midnight Disco; a Mike Clarke edit on third ear; and D Train ’You’re the one for me’ is one of my favourite tracks.”

Terri’s love for the physical format was also once channeled into Ya Digg recordstore, but “another illness” meant she had to close it prematurely before she could properly get it off the ground leaving an ever growing hole in Detroit where only “one pressing plant and one distributor” remain, making “it difficult for anyone” to make a career out of the business end of music. Terri claims there “really isn’t any support for the industry” in her hometown where even the thrilling prospect of playing in Europe is met with some cynicism. “You’d think people would get excited, but most people are like; ‘what are you doing that for?’” DJing is still not considered a “real job” in Detroit, an unlikely reality granted for a city that birthed so much of this music, but a reality nonetheless.

Terri is currently considering re-opening her record store and also perhaps starting her own label, but needless to say there’s some trepidation. “There is no room for error” she explains as limited funds and no support structure means she “can’t afford any mistakes” and “the people working with you need to be as dedicated as you are”.

“Nevermind” thinks Terri as she ponders these points. These are future concerns however, and for the moment Terri seems content on DJing at regular intervals in Detroit and playing abroad as well as making music. Much like DJing, producing came somewhat unexpectedly after avoiding it for years, determined in the thought that she’s “not doing that” for the longest time. One MPC3000 later and a Rhodes Piano bought on layaway and Terri has released an EP on Uzuri, appeared on two of Viola Klein’s EPs, and is about to release a third collaborative work with Klein on the Meakusma label. As a person who “loves gadgets and tinkering with gadgets” Terri found an affinity for machine music. Hers is a style all her own, calling on the innate human expression outside of the fixed grid of the machine. She relies on her “own time” out of necessity as she often finds herself unable to “keep up with the metronome” and mostly discards it for the sake of an internal clock. A lot of the first Uzuri record, Recovery “was mistakes” she admits, but they were welcomed mistakes. “If you make a mistake, just leave it and see what you can do with it”, explains Terri and that adds a very human dimension to Whodat’s sound, a sound where it’s not difficult to pick up those early jazz influences from Terri’s childhood.

An avid collector; a DJ with an innate capacity; and a producer who’s only reserved output hides a nascent talent, Terri McQueen not only looks like a DJ, but sounds like one too and who knows, perhaps if she caught on a little earlier she might today be sharing the spotlight and the legacy left by her peers Pittman, Parrish and Wilhite. She’s not spending a lot of time between Detroit and Berlin quite like her peers yet, but as she reminisces about her last event at ://about blank she’s optimistic and hopes like Cologne, Berlin marks the start of yet another new relationship as a DJ and yet another “new beginning” for Whodat.

* Whodat joins Charlotte Bendiks for the second instalment of IRONI.

Energy, Space and More with Roi Perez

Rising to prominence through the queer scene in Tel Aviv, Roi Perez had found a nurturing environment to establish a career as a prodigious talent. A precocious youth that had found an early skill in the booth Roi Perez would cement his career when moved to Berlin. Catching the ear of Berghain / Panorama Bar in 2013 he was soon inducted into Berlin club as a resident where he would light up dance floors in Berghain’s notorious queer basement Lab.Oratory and Panorama Bar.

With sets that can cover a wide range of style and genres, Roi Perez is a noted selector that has travelled the world to play for all manner of audiences. He is also the official Berlin selector for London’s Phonica records, sending rare and obscure finds to the UK capital from the German capital while bolstering his own collection. With sets that range from these obscure finds to the accessible, Roi Perez is able to entertain and enlighten at the same time. An established talent today, he is one of Berlin’s most exciting exports at the moment, focussing all his attention on the job of being a DJ at hand… for now.

A rare entity, who feigns the ubiquitous DJ/Producer amalgam, Roi Perez’ focus is squarely trained on the dance floor. He joins the rest of Ostgut Ton for the upcoming Ostgut Ton Nacht takeover at Jæger and before we get the DJ in our booth, we wanted to ask him more about the Tel Aviv queer scene, moving to Berlin and just how his set might unfold in our basement.

You started out in the the queer scene of Tel Aviv as a DJ. Can you give us a little insight into the scene there and what it entailed when you were coming through?

The queer scene in Tel Aviv is definitely out there, I think the gay parties are still some of the best in the city. When it comes to Tel Aviv it’s a lot about the midweek scene, where you can just enjoy a casual drink at a small bar or club and get to talk to people. Things usually turn into a party later in the early morning hours and the surprise effect is what makes it all more fun.

My personal experiences with queer events are that they are quite politically charged (in subtext at least). What was the queer underground scene in Tel Aviv’s response to the political situation in Israel?

Even though I don’t live there anymore, I’m still aware of everything that’s going on politically through social media and my activists friends. And yes, I agree that queer events are naturally politically charged. But in my own experience back when I was there the connection was very much in the subtext, and you would not see a direct link to the general political situation in Israel, if that’s what you mean. Everything was super diverse, maybe some people would think that’s political in and of itself. I can only say that in times of political tension and anxiety, people are more eager to go out and dance. Music provides a way out of the daily political and social binaries. I think mentally it was never easy to live in Israel, especially for certain minorities and groups. People need this relief that you can get through a night out. People also want to be together and the club scene provides a platform for that.

Moving from Tel Aviv to Berlin, what changed in terms of the clubbing and club music for you and how do you think it affected you as a DJ?

I think the nightlife and the whole club experience in Berlin is much more intense than in Tel Aviv. As a DJ in Berlin, I get to practice and experiment more through playing more. Generally speaking, Berlin has an extreme level of diversity, the variety of different scenes, cliques, people. I’m not sure if I can pin down how exactly that affected me as a DJ, but it certainly taught me a lot and I’m grateful for the environment I live in today.

It’s clear from other Interviews and your sets that you have a natural talent for DJing. What do you believe cultivated the talent?

I don’t really know what natural talent is, I’ve been practicing DJing a lot and I put a lot of emphasis on the creative process behind it. It’s important for me to be in this state of mind of developing and I’m still learning a lot as I go.

Listening to your sets, there’s an eclecticism to them that moves quickly between styles and genres, but what do you look for in music that defines you as a DJ today between these diverse corners of the dance floor?

I believe there’s no real definition. I guess I mainly look for the energy of a tune and the atmosphere it creates or can create in my imagination. It can be musically diverse, I mean the tracks can come from different musical landscapes, but the music will still have a certain similar groove.

I believe you’re also a Berlin selector for Phonica (recordstore). Coming into contact with so many records on a daily basis must be incredibly exciting and also very challenging. How do you decide what goes to the store and what goes into your collection?

Thing is, even though I’m working at a record store, I’m not buying a lot of recently released records. My current focus is on discovering older stuff / other genres that aren’t house which I find in second hand shops or online, mainly on Discogs, that can fit into my sets. When I choose music for the store I have different factors in mind and it will also be aligned with its general concept. Everything that is purely good music, or has good soul, will also find its way to the shelves.

You prefer the vinyl format as a DJ, and I saw in an interview with That Special Record, your collection is quite diverse and not all particularly focused on DJing. What does it take for a record to make it into your bag?

I have quite a few records that I didn’t buy thinking I would play them on the dance floor, if that’s what you mean. But even those sometimes find their way into my bag, so frankly there’s no particular order here.

Today, you’ve stayed mainly away from the studio. Why is that and might it call to you in the future?

I’m not producing my own music. I actually never did, but this world is open for me.

We’re looking forward to having you come to Jæger. We had such a magical time when the Ostgut Ton came through two years back. What does playing under the Ostgut Ton banner change in how you might approach a set?

I’m also really looking forward to it. I’ve been to Oslo as part of a trip through Scandinavia back in 2013, and I’m glad to be back in the city, together with the Ostgut guys. The banner doesn’t change my approach towards a set. It’s always appreciated and good to be able to talk with the well-experienced folks that are behind Ostgut and I’m really thankful for the opportunity to be part of it.

I’ve been listening to your crack magazine mix while typing out these questions. It’s so dynamic and there are so many moods, It feels like it would suit any context. How much does the context influence your set and is it ever something you can prepare for?

Context is very important and influential. The context can be a factor of people’s energy, space and more. Sometimes you can imagine how things would be like, and then it’s possible to play with this idea, but sometimes not at all. I’ve never managed to predict it really well, there are so many nuances that I’m sensitive to, and for me it’s a lot about the actual moment and the balance between external things and my own energy. That’s basically the context.

And if you could make a prediction of how your set might unfold in Oslo, what would it be?

Tribal-Percussions-Groove-Acid like.

Lastly, can you play us out with a track.

Yes! It’s a remix I really like that Avalon Emerson made for Octo Octa on Honey Sound System. It’s a powerful 118 bpm atmospheric and brakey tune.

At Work with Nick Höppner

Nick Höppner’s career is one that has been entangled with the Ostgut Ton family since day one. A resident at the precursor to Berghain/ Panorama Bar, Ostgut and the man behind the creation of the Ostgut Ton label, Höppner has been a steadfast figure throughout the Berlin clubbing institution’s history. An integral part of its rise into mass consciousness, he has avoided popular tropes and negated preconceptions around every turn through the mmusic he picked for the label and his own work. He concentrated the eclectic sound of the Berghain/Panorama Bar into one consolidated voice, Ostgut Ton and has released countless classic electronic LPs and EPs during his tenure there; a versatile and diverse approach that can still be felt through the label today.

His work has made its own innumerable impressions on the label’s discography and the electronic music landscape with titles like “she parked herself” and “as above so below” (with Gonno) considered alternative dance floor classics today. With influences ranging from Dub, Punk and House, Höppner’s music is always a rich medley of styles and genres coalescing around a DJ’s perspective. Cutting his teeth as a DJ on the sound of UK Garage, Höppner couldn’t be pigeonholed for long as his sets called on an eclecticism that has made him the sought-after DJ has become today.

A few years back he left to offices to Ostgut Ton to focus on his own music, and in a short time he’s output exponentially increased, with a host of 12” and EPs and probably most significantly two albums under his belt since. “Folk” and “Work” are debut and sophomore LPs, that suggests that Nick Höppner’s creativity might have indeed been stifled while at his day job, and have individually propagated the sound of his productions while also allowing for some rarefied album cut moments on each record.

An intriguing music personality and a permanent fixture in the Ostgut Ton / Berghain / Panorama Bar family, Nick Höppner is an artist and DJ whose career extends way beyond a mere introductory paragraph. He continues to be a prolific contributor to the Ostgut Ton repertoire and after the release of his second album earlier this year – the second LP in as many years – Höppner also appears to be enjoying a tidal wave of creativity at the moment. We sent over some questions via email to find out more about where this new spate of creativity is coming from and just what work might be like for Nick Höppner.

You left your day job as Ostgut Ton’s label-manager a few years back to focus on your own music and since, you’ve released two albums and a few singles and EPs. How did that move away from the label affect your creativity?

Simply speaking, It has got more time and room to thrive.

“Work” is the latest release. Can you tell us a bit about what went into the album in terms of ideas and concepts?

I didn’t have a greater idea or concept when I decided to do a second album, but as it wasn’t really planned at all, I allowed myself to go with the flow more and to not think about if what I was doing was usable in a dancefloor context or not.

“Work” follows closely on the heels of your debut LP Folk and suggest a period of creative flurry for you. Besides stepping away from the label what else has inspired you recently in the studio both musically and beyond?

That is a tough question to answer. I can’t tell you exactly, what influenced me and what not, but I believe that everything happening to me and surrounding me has an effect on how I’m approaching my work in the studio on a particular day. Having said that, in retrospect I think there is a huge amount of sincere emotion on my new album which has to do with my wife and me eventually breaking up.

What have you found you’ve been able to express something in the album format that’s eluded you maybe in the 12” and EP releases in the past?

Generally speaking, with my albums I didn’t want to cater for a huge amount of functionality needed by a lot of dancefloors these days. Working on a collection of more than two to four tracks also provides a different premise for me as a producer: It’s a different narrative, an album is a bigger space to fill with different colours, atmospheres, states of energy etc. Ideally, in the end it works as a whole.

You almost exclusively continue to release records on Ostgut Ton. What makes it such a conducive outlet for your music?

Well, I have a long history with the company running Berghain and the label. I even set up the label myself and managed it for seven years, so of course it is my first choice as a home for my music. But I’m also not the most prolific producer out there. If I made a lot more music worth releasing, I’m sure I’d started my own outlet already or I’d work with other labels, too.

I know you cut your teeth on UK garage as a DJ, and I can often pick that up in your productions. How conscious are you in referencing styles and genres in your records?

I think that UK Garage reference is the only easily recognisable reference I put into my music now and then. But then again, I’m mostly a House producer and I’m certainly not reinventing the wheel, so there are a lot of influences or references in my tracks anyway. Take “Clean Living” from my new album, for example. It’s kind of my take on Chicago House/Wild Pitch…

From your recent Playing Favourites article I gathered you have quite a diverse musical tastes and influences. How might those musical experiences, especially the earlier stuff like My Bloody Valentine, have influenced or continue to influence your own work?

My Bloody Valentine actually still continues to influence my way of producing until today. My music mostly consist of endless layers, some of my tracks feature 50+ tracks. I mainly layer synths and also atmospheres in the background. Every single element has its own modulation, its own movement. In combination with each other they interlock and create an effect that I couldn’t really have planned for.

There’s a remarkable moment at the end of “Work” in which Randweg join you for the incredibly serene “Three is a Charm”, a track that fuses acoustic elements with electronic elements. How did that track make onto the album and what does it signify as the outro to the album?

Before I started to work on “Work” I made a remix for Randweg, which I enjoyed doing a lot, so I just asked them if they would like to work with me on a track for my next album. They said yes and I sent them a simple demo soon after. As I said earlier, I wanted to allow myself more freedom with “Work” and that is exactly what we did with this track. It’s at the end of the album, because it made the most sense there. Again, there’s no greater idea there. But I would love to collaborate with real instrumentalists more in the future, that’s for sure!

I can imagine that track being played at the end of a night and everybody leaving on this uplifting moment. Does it have any associations with a dance floor or a club night for you?

Not at all. I actually haven’t played it out once. For me it’s a bridge into my musical interests and influences outside of electronic dance music.

The title of the album “Work”, are associations most will make with a kind of humdrum life, but for you work is probably a set or a studio session. What associations does work imply for you and does it have any relevance to the album?

Well, a studio session can be very dull. More often than not it is just that: work! Starting a track is easy. With a bit of experience and talent ideas also flow constantly. The hard thing is to finishing it: arrangement and mixdown. In my experience, work is a requirement for creativity. If I’m not going to the studio on a regular basis, I won’t be creative. It’s as simple as that.

Does it ever feel like work in a traditional sense when you’re in the booth and when you do get bogged down in something that feels a bit like routine, how do you keep it interesting for yourself?

Frankly: Yes, it does and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, because it doesn’t mean I’m doing a worse job because of it. On the contrary: It makes me constantly try harder to keep it interesting, for the crowd and myself.

This year marks twelve years of the label that you helped develop and almost twenty years of Ostgut, the club that became Berghain and where you rose to prominence. It’s a significant career through one of the most significant chapters of electronic music. How does that history perhaps affect you when you go into the studio or the booth?

It still makes me feel a huge commitment to the levels of quality the clubs and the label continue to stand for. It’s not so much a sound or an aesthetic, I’m rather trying harder than ever to express my own voice.

You played the last time Ostgut Ton had an event at Jæger two years back. What are your memories of that event, and what do you remember about the venue that might inform your set coming back?

It got going really quickly, which I absolutely loved. Sound and booth are quite unparalleled, of course and I played a demo of a track which ended up on my Box Drop ep released just before the new album, which went down really well.

And to round things up Mr. Höppner do you mind playing us out with a song?

As I’ve complained about the fact I couldn’t find enough contemporary techno I like in a recent interview, here are not one but two slices of extremely fresh contemporary techno ;)

*Nick Höppner plays alongside the rest of the Ostgut Ton delegation at Jæger this week.

Not watching, Listening – An interview with G-Ha

Geir Aspenes was flicking through some records at Filter Musikk in Oslo when I bumped to him earlier in the summer. Somewhat dejected, he had felt slightly disenfranchised with the state of new electronic music that he’d been exposed to at that time through his usual digital channels and had turned back to the format that started it all for him in the hope of finding some inspiration. “That was one of those periods, in which I was really frustrated and could find anything” and it was “really hard to find new music” for the veteran Oslo DJ.

Little more than two months on and the situation is vastly different. I found Geir on spectacular form playing to a packed courtyard the night after our interview, the speakers flexing under the strain of the energy of the set and the crowd bulging at the seams of our courtyard. Geir’s musical interests “comes and goes in periods”, like most people, this writer included, but where few of us would ever face the intimidating task of playing to our musical selections out to a wanting crowd, Geir’s ability is unmatched. Even during a period where he might not find the tracks that speak to him, he is still able to pull a set out of the bag, that makes most of us, even the DJs go; “ok Geir we submit to your power”.

Geir Aspenes is of course, Jæger- and Sunkissed resident G-Ha, a DJ whose distinctive style in the booth has earned him a reputation as one of Oslo’s pre-eminent selectors. Rune Lindbæk once substantiated this claim during an interview for me, in which he praised the younger G-Ha, admitting he would often turn to Geir for new music in his own sets. With a noted musical personality like Rune Lindbæk looking over your shoulder, it’s safe to assume G-Ha is no mere facilitator.

A prominent Norwegian DJ, Geir’s reputation precedes him and has found him occupy booths in Fabric, Panorama Bar and Renata as well as play festivals like Malmö’s Backyard sessions and Reworks in Greece. With duties as both G-Ha and one half of G-Ha & Olanskii, Geir can play up to three to four nights a week. It’s an intense schedule in which Geir is always in the throes of a balancing act between the contemporary and the enduring while at the same time merging it all through his distinct and very prominent DJ persona that defines him. And what sound defines that persona? “I still don’t really know” answers Geir in his usual modest, soft-spoken way over a beer, but if one thing is certain over the last two years I’ve come to know Geir and his DJ style is that no-one sounds like G-Ha.

Over the course of twenty-odd years Geir has refined a style in the booth all his own and like most of his contemporaries, his DJ history begins at the local youth club. In Geir’s case this was the Holmlia youth club, where he learnt the tools of his craft alongside Full Pupp’s Omar V. “This was before House music” and Geir was digging through a “box of seven inches with things like Kool & the Gang”. He eventually amassed a haul of break-beat seven inches that took him from Holmlia and his youth club to Oslo and a “club”, whose name history has forgotten, to play his first professional gigs. He soon moved on to Marilyn, a venue that used sit where Jæger sits today, and as House started sneaking into his playlist, Geir’s sets were deemed too progressive for that archaic institution. “I got fired, because I played too much House music” says Geir unable to contain his amusement at the memory. It’s no surprise that Marilyn “closed shortly after that” and Geir would move on to the next step of his career, one that would propel him into the Oslo scene and garner the attention of an international audience. House music’s dominance in Oslo was too big to contain and Geir became one of its leading champions.

This was around 1996, and with no venues in the city to cater for the new sound of House, the then newly established Skansen would quickly filled “a gap in Oslo” and Geir would make up an integral part of its appeal. Initially intended to be the first Internet cafe in the city, the computers “never even had a chance to move in” as an opening party proved just too good for Skansen not to completely change its objectives. At the same time, “Deep House started to become more established, so the music was more diverse, more progressive” and Geir’s sound started to evolve and became a fundamental part of Skansen’s music policy alongside key players like Olle Løstegaard (Olle Abstract) who would bring Idjut Boys amongst others to the venue and the world’s attention.

Geir would harness what the sound of Skansen and his tastes into one of the most distinctive DJ sounds we’ve heard in the city. “I just kind of play what I like and I still have some difficulties explaining what I like”, says Geir when I probe him for an eloquent explanation of what his sound might be. Geir’s extensive experience, means he can pick up on a record immediately, knowing instinctively if it’s a sound he is going to like through the opening bars of a track. He might not be able to put it into words, but for this listener a G-Ha’s sound is born out of a nebulous emptiness through which ephemeral moments puncture functional tracks with some emotive dalliance with the dance floor.

Able to call on a diverse range of musical styles in the House echelon, from Micro-House to Nu-Disco, Geir finds intricate ways in crossing that bridge between one musical moment to the next, with each track surrendering to the DJ, rather than the other way around. In the way he narrates an evening whether it be the start of a night or peak time, he’s able to play with his audience like a set of marionette puppets, orchestrating their movements from an instinctive impulse he’s been harnessing since the days of Skansen.

Skansen had quickly garnered a reputation that exceeded the city and country borders for the five years of its existence and with Geir being so vital to its allure, when the time came to close its doors, Geir was approached to mix the official mix CD, “Skansen Music” for Glasgow Underground. It’s a mix CD that stands the test of time and seals the legend that publications like Mixmag and labels like Glasgow Underground caught on in a very neat record. After Skansen “it was a really quiet period in Oslo” for nightlife suggest Geir, but still it wouldn’t be long before Geir would enter the next phase of his career, and like Skansen this too would become an Oslo institution.

It was called Sunkissed. The brainchild of Ola Smith Simonsen (aka Olanskii), who had been “involved there at the end of Skansen”, Sunkissed was an answer to the dogmatic approach to House music. “Ola had came from doing more student parties in London which were more diverse in music” and brought that diversity to Oslo, joining forces with Geir, who had amassed a dedicated following already in a music policy that would span the width and breadth of House music’s transient descriptions. “When we started to play together it was the era of Headman and Gomma records”, recalls Geir. Feigning any “particular direction” in their bookings and their sets, Sunkissed would play host to everybody from Alter Ego, to Robert Hood, Kenny Larkin and it’s still going strong with bookings like Moxie and DJ Seinfeld today. It’s an approach that has served them well all these years and today they’re still a leading light on Oslo’s electronic music scene and nightlife.

In Ola, Geir also found a kindred spirit in the booth and the pair formed a formidable DJ force in the duo G-Ha & Olanskii, one that would also form the crux of Ola’s next adventure… Jæger. “Jæger is the heart of Oslo” for Geir. “I think I’m really spoilt. I’ve been doing it for so long and there are so many good DJ and promoters around and I’m really fortunate to be able to do it week in and week out.” Alongside his partner in crime Olanskii, Jæger’s Friday residency Frædag is something of an extension of Sunkissed without being that obvious, bringing guests from Carl Craig to Vril to the city every week, while G-Ha & Olanskii soundtrack the night around these guests.

They rarely get a chance to play back to back as often as they did in the past, making it very special when they do indeed get a chance to do so. Geir mentions a recent event in Malmö where hey had the chance again to wear the G-Ha & Olanskii badge, and even though the early crowd had been thin on the ground, “it went really well.” As a duo they easily slip back into old habits as a single entity and as Geir says; “even though we had period where we play different kinds of music, we compliment each other.”

Whether playing as G-Ha or G-Ha & Olanskii, Geir’s skill in the booth is unwavering and he can adopt various approaches. At Jæger, during the winter months he looks “forward to the summer” when he’s able to play the peak time hours in the courtyard to a full floor, but then again as the end of the summer draws near, he looks “forward to playing the early set in the basement” again so he can catch a glimpse of some of the visiting DJ dignitaries. “Not watching, listening to” he insists. I’m surprised to find Geir enjoys hearing new DJs, and he lists Leon Vynehall and Ben UFO as some “very inspiring” DJs today.

It’s curious since Geir is from a time of the DJ as faceless facilitator, and a time an audience would focus all their intentions on the dance floor and the party. Names like Leon Vynehall and Ben UFO are DJs that travel the world as DJ personalities that people go to “see”. There is no sense of a “party” happening and rather like going to see your favourite band in concert, we go to see DJs today. “It’s like watching music”, explains Geir about the state of the situation. “There so much more focus on the personality in the booth than the music.”

As a DJ whose only focus has ever been the music and whose loyalty is solely directed at the dance floor, it’s a scene that is an entire world away for Geir. It’s something that extends from Oslo to the rest of Europe too, and even to a place like Panorama Bar. “When you play Panorama Bar, and you see people eyeballing you” Geir, the DJ is not able to process that into anything other than an awkward hello. What used to be “about the dancing” has morphed into hype and hubris, and Geir prefers the anonymity of the past.

It’s part of the reason he likes playing Reworks festival, the next stop on his summer calendar. “I guess the general clubber might not have heard of me there ” says Geir, but featuring on the line-up for the second consecutive year at Reworks, its clear Greek audiences too now know the appeal of Oslo’s best kept secret by now. Last year Geir was the anonymous guest at closing party, playing with David August and has fond memories playing in the “35 degree heat” overlooking the city of Thessaloniki from the rooftop venue. He is looking forward to his next visit and in the weeks leading up to the festival he has certainly found a groove in the booth and even though Geir might have been frustrated with current selections, there is no audible sign of it in his sets.

From those early years in Skansen to the diverse approach of Sunkissed and finding a home at Jæger, Geir Aspenes legacy is enshrined in Oslo nightlife and he wears that badge of honour with a sense of humility and sincerity that escapes much of a younger generation. He might be a veteran of the field today, but like Prins Thomas, Pål Strangefruit and Bjørn Torske Norway’s electronic music scene has to doff its cap at G-Ha for his unwavering presence in club culture in the region and his determined resolve keeping it exciting and relevant.

* G-Ha & Olanskii play every Friday at Jæger and G-Ha plays Reworks Warehouse stage on the 16th of September.

On the Road with Olaf Boswijk

I first met Olaf Boswijk in 2013 during the annual ADE event in Amsterdam. I was there in a professional capacity covering the event and where I had found nothing but a cold impersonal business-like atmosphere, Olaf Boswijk and Trouw had opened me up to a completely different world in Amsterdam’s nightlife. They’d shown a sincere devotion in their cause rather than a calculating shrewdness, and it seemed to seep out of every pillar and vestibule in the impressive former printing press that housed the famed club.

Earlier that evening Olaf had taken immense pride in showing a group of us around the club he helped establish and as we talked at length about Trouw and its aspirations it was clear Olaf’s was a musical pursuit and even though the business acumen was clearly evident in what he had established in Trouw and its predecessor 11, music and club culture had formed the underlying purpose to it all.

Through 11 and Trouw, Olaf Boswijk had established two significant eras in Amsredam’s clubbing history, and a legacy that can today be felt through venues like De School and Shelter and through DJs like Young Marco and Job Jobse.

Throughout the last year of Trouw our paths would often cross and Olaf’s was a prominent presence, cropping up in some unlikely places at a diverse array of events. From the aggressively leftfield noise of Ben Frost to the more joyous and transcendent beats of Seth Troxler, Olaf Boswijk could always be spotted in the crowd. The intense musical curiosity behind Trouw’s booking were mostly his and a world created for dance music could just as easily lead to an art music or an indie band. On the rare occasion, when Olaf could, you would also find him in the booth easing into the role of a DJ, where he would play an eclectic warm-up set or create a musical dialogue with a young Job Jobse as they go to and fro.

It was common knowledge that Olaf would hang up his hat after Trouw, but not before setting the wheels in motion for De School, yet another incredible chapter in the 11/Trouw story, but one that would not include Olaf as the yearning of a different life called the Dutch native. Since the end of Trouw, he has been travelling; driving from Canada to Patagonia in a yellow Mercedes bus anointed Balthasar. He’s has been on the road for two years now, documenting his travels with a podcast called Radio Balthasar, a show that narrates the journey through music, interjecting with stories on the road from Olaf’s words. He’s taken his DJ bag along and has been enjoying some regular set times in the booth again too, away from the pressures of running a club.

This summer he’s back in Europe playing Dekmantel amongst other things and as fortune would have it, playing at Jæger, giving me some pretence to call him up. I find him in Cornwall, where he’d “just spending a week with the family”. He’s been “surfing, running around with the kids, and cooking” in the “beautiful countryside” of the UK’s Southwestern coast. I realise it’s been about three years since we last spoke, and as the vague memory of that last encounter starts flooding back, I find Olaf Boswijk visibly relaxed, the same imperturbable presence I had encountered back in 2013 and we simply slip back into a conversation we’d forgotten in the distant past.

The last time I saw I was standing in line waiting to go see, I think it was an all-nighter with Seth Troxler. You were on your way out and I asked if you weren’t staying and you said something like: “no, you’ve got to choose your battles wisely”. And that was about six months before the end of Trouw. What were those last six months like for you?

Wow, that’s a long time ago. They were probably the most intensely beautiful months I’ve ever experienced. I could finally relax more into just being there and enjoy it; spending time with people, rather than always be working.

Did you make up your mind then that you won’t be going back into that world or is that still an open book for you?

I think we already knew a while before then, and as we knew the end day of Trouw was coming up, we already decided to travel. I was already pretty sure that I didn’t want to start a club again. The trip was also very much about letting go of things, process all the memories and experiences. That’s basically what I’ve been doing the last two years, because the trip of a year became two years and now it might become even longer. We’re slowly thinking about the next steps and new projects, but it’s definitely not towards the club life anymore.

You did play a hand in De School’s existence I believe. What was your role in those fundamental stages?

In the last year of Trouw, we were looking within the group of key players and the management for people who wanted to continue the project. I had done my part, and I already said I wasn’t going to take part in the next project. At the same time, just like 11, we wanted the project to continue, to extend the life and always be contemporary.

Part of it was trying to find the right people to form a team and my role was to put them together, making sure they were talking about the right things, and challenging each other to come up with a good idea and a good artistic vision. The other part of my role was finding the building and making sure we actually got a license from the municipality. We were lucky enough that even before we actually opened the door, the mayor already promised us a 24 hour license.

It’s the same company, which was in a large part my company, so I kept half the shares for the first year, and last year I sold everything, so I’m not involved anymore. I still feel very at home there amongst staff and friends – It still feels like family, but I’m not involved.

Getting back to you and travelling and the extent of your journey. What is the purpose of all of this for you?

That’s a good question. In the beginning, it was just travelling seeing the world, having different experiences, and to try to have a more quiet, balanced life. Now, I think we’ve done that and we still love travelling, but the list of places we’d like to visit gets longer the longer we are on the road. More and more it’s become also a form of research as to where we might want to live, and where we might be able to start the next phase of our lives. We have a specific idea for that, but I can’t go into any details just yet.

Something that’s cropped up through your travels is the radio Balthasar show. That’s a really cool show and I’ve enjoyed listening to it, and the way you intersect music with the narrative of your travels. Was that one of the goals before you set off travelling?

It kind of just happened. I missed working with music, and that was one of the first things I did feel along the trip. I’ve always been heavily interested in making sound recordings. A lot of people that travel, they either blog it or take pictures, and I thought for me, it would be quite natural to make mix tapes of the music we were listening to a lot on the road, and mix it with experiences on the road.

I really enjoyed it, but for me it’s also an incredibly difficult process, getting round to making them, because I have this idea that the music needs to flow and needs to be nice for anybody to listen to. At the same time when I say something it needs to be interesting and meaningful. So it takes me a long time to make them, and I want to make more of them, but it’s hard, because I need to spend to or three days to do them.

Balthasar is also the name of the yellow Mercedes van you drive around. Where is Balthasar at the moment?

It’s in Chile, and in a month’s time we’re flying back to Chile, to take it further south to Patagonia and Argentina, and then maybe back up to Brazil for while.

One thing I found really intriguing was a conversation you had with a man in California about climate change, because within the context of the music it really makes you think about the subject. Do you think bringing an issue like that to light in the context of a radio show and the music, will possibly have more of an effect on the listener?

I hope so. During the trip, climate change has become very real for us, which it wasn’t before. It’s very easy if you live in Amsterdam and in an urban environment to turn a blind eye, because you don’t really experience it. On the trip it became very real and that meeting was the first time I saw an older person being really emotional about it, and talk about how he could take care of his family and kids, and where they would go if things got really bad. That touched me and he recommended some literature, so I started to read some of the books and articles he recommended. That has definitely changed the way I feel about it, and in that way I want to share it with whoever is listening.

The music obviously plays a role in engaging with the listener in the first place. You mention in the first show that it is mainly music from an old ipod that you had rediscovered. Are you also collecting music as you go through these locations?

Yes, I’m always collecting music, but it’s not in the way that you think. A lot of people have this romantic idea that I’m going to record stores every week and digging South American gems. First of all it’s not like that at all there, there are not that many record stores there apart from the big cities. I don’t have the space for it and I don’t have a record player on the road. I did consider getting a portable record player, but then I got scared, because half the time you just become a digger instead of travelling and all the other stuff that I enjoy. So I’m just collecting music online.

Has the radio been a constant companion too?

Yes, definitely in North America, NPR is amazing radio, not specifically for music, but definitely just for human interest and news. Some of the South American radio is nice, but I must admit there is just a lot of bland reggaeton stuff out there too.

You’ve been DJing a lot through this trip too, more so than when you were at Trouw even.

Yes, more so. It’s kind of funny. As I said, I was missing music, and I thought perhaps I could just DJ along the way. I got in touch with some people I knew and they put me in touch with some people in Costa Rica, Panama and Columbia, and suddenly I was DJing in those countries.

To me it felt really refreshing to be DJing there, because nobody knew my history. For instance when I was playing at Trouw, there was always this tension or pressure and I didn’t want to play there too often, because I didn’t want to put myself in that position. But now I’m in a position where I feel free, because Trouw doesn’t exist and I’m not the owner of a club anymore, so I feel freer to express myself.

I guess from that people in Europe started noticing, and I don’t know… perhaps what comes from afar looks more attractive, so I got a lot of invitations this summer. Octopus (DJ agency) invited me to join them too, and from that I got a lot of gigs, so I’m having a very busy summer actually.

You must be enjoying it more with the pressures of Trouw not there breathing down your neck while your playing.

Yes, that is something that still makes DJing in Holland harder for me. I enjoy being relatively anonymous, because I still have to focus, and really have to get into it. I’m not an artist that plays three gigs a week, so it’s not quite routine yet. For me it’s still quite new. I’m enjoying riding the wave and we’ll see where it goes.

What are your sets sounding like these days?

My sound has always been quite diverse. I enjoy doing every part of the night, in a sense that I enjoy doing very slow warm-ups; I enjoy moving into Disco; I love playing hours of House; even going into Techno; and finishing with songs.

I think this summer has been good for me, because I’ve been exploring music within my selection, that I haven’t dared to play out, or play in certain combinations. It could be quite different. I’ve played small clubs where I need to keep it a bit warmer and then I’ve played bigger stages where I’ve gone into more Techno (stronger House) territory. I really like that variation.

You mentioned diversity there and I must admit hew first place I really picked up on an eclecticism in the booth becoming popular was at Trouw. Do you think that was a part of the legacy it left on the DJ scene?

I think it’s definitely something we contributed to. It’s not something we started as such. Somebody like Antal has always played like this. I remember being 17/18 going to the first Rush Hour parties and he would be playing that set, but today the context is there.

Young Marco has always been playing like this too. He used to do VJ at 11 with Orpheo (the Wizard) from Red Light and Meeus van Dis, and they would do really small parties that nobody went to, but that gave him the opportunity to master his craft.

I do think maybe within Trouw and Dekmantel and Rush Hour, all these forces created a scene where it is appreciated today if you dig deeper and if you follow those really weird Turkish- or African records for example. The scene has been going for a long time so people just tend to look further and further. Yes, in the last two years of Trouw I did see that happening, but it’s become even bigger now.

It just proves that Trouw did indeed leave an immense legacy in Amsterdam to me.

I was Dekmantel a few weeks ago, and it was just incredible the diversity of music and the way the audience just approaches everything, and receives everything is just amazing. I don’t think there is any city in the world like it now.

Yeah, if that’s part of what we’ve done… then I’m pretty happy.

* Olaf Boswijk will be playing alongside Finnebassen next week at Frædag.

DJ talk with DELLA and Tonchius

Jæger resident DELLA and newcomer Tonchius grace our booth for DELLA’s Drivhus this weekend and had an opportunity to share some questions and insights with each other before the gig. Talking about their beginnings, the role of a DJ and gender inequality in the booth, DELLA and Tonchius talk DJ to DJ, but first a word from our resident….

Hello everyone, DELLA here. I am super excited that Saturday is just around the corner and another edition of DELLA’s Drivhus will commence.Who is ready to dance? I know am!

For this next episode of Della’s Drivhus, I will be inviting a new DJ on the Oslo scene, Tonchius to join me in the booth. Two truly devoted House-heads coming together under the stars, filling Jæger’s backyard with nothing but delight. Make sure to have your dancing shoes on, because we are going to be bringing the beats for your dancing feet.

Today on the Jæger blog, we are have created a narrative between myself (DELLA) and Tonchius, the headliner and the opener, the established and the up-and-coming, the experienced and the curious.

DELLA: Hey Tonje (Tonchius), how exciting that we are going to be playing together this weekend. I am really looking forward to it. It also makes me happy that I am able to help open the door wider for you, and your talent, by bringing you in on your first gig at Jaeger with me.

Tonchius: Hey DELLA, to say I am thrilled and excited to be playing my first gig at Jæger is an understatement. I cannot wait to join you in the booth, but before we join forces I’m curious about who you are as an artist. When did you start DJing and how long after did you play in public for the first time?

D: I first started djing when I was living in Los Angeles. I bought my first turntables around 2002. The story behind the purchased is quite sweet. I was a fashion design student at the time and working at The Standard Hotel. I was blabbering on about my favorite DJ, Mark Farina, to one of my best friends. In the midst of the conversation she cut me off, grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, “I am so tired of you talking about all these DJs. It is time for you to DJ. Take your credit card and go out and buy some turntables, TOMORROW!” I took her advice and did that exact thing the very next day. The rest is history. My first public gig came several months on. It was in a small and happening restaurant called, North. I remember being super-nervous, but loads of friends showed up and supported, which eased my nerves. Apparently, I did a good job because they offered me a weekly gig and it all started from there.

T: Yes you’re from the States originally, why did you move to Norway? Is it easier to be an established DJ here than in the States?

D:I fell in love with a Norwegian in Los Angeles and moved to Norway in 2005 to follow the love. I think it is a struggle everywhere to establish yourself as a DJ. I have been very lucky that I have a strong group of friends who have helped nourish my talent along the way, and still am today. There is a huge difference between family and those who are just in it for their own ego. Stick with family always, that is my advice.

I’m also curious about you. Tonchius is a relatively new name that I’ve encountered frequently around Oslo at venues like The Villa, Elefant, Sommerøya, and now at Jaeger. So tell me, who is Tonchius, what does Tonchius mean and how did you get into DJing?

T: My real name is Tonje, something non-Norwegians often have difficulties pronouncing and instead called me Tonch. When someone later added ‘ius’ to it, it became a nickname that stuck. I have always been interested in music. I played the trombone for many years, and have a classical and jazz musical background, before I entered the clubbing scene. Now I have found a way to express myself through music, and it is fun to do so in the scene that really is blooming in Oslo these days.

I have only been DJing for about two years. I had been hanging around in the club scene for a while and have spent a lot of time with other DJs. A friend asked me why I wasn’t djing, so I guess that was what made me start. Also, it helped that my boyfriend already was a DJ, so I got easy access to turntables and a mixer.

D: Tell us who Tonchius is outside of the club. What are some of your interests and passions other than music?

T:I love traveling, to see new places, meet people and experience other cultures. I have a Masters degree in Development Management, so I have done a fair amount of traveling around the world because of my studies. Clubbing can be really intense, so I also really enjoy disconnecting from society for a while and go for a hike in the nature.

D: My first encounter with you behind the decks was this summer at the Subjekt boat party. Your sound is a wonderful blend of House, both new and old, and is mixed with ease. I am curious, how do you find and select music?

T: I have always been very open to different music styles, trying to find elements I like in every track I listen to. I think this openness is the clue to be able to select both old and new tracks and not just follow trends. I spend many hours online on pages like Discogs – a database for vinyl – where I always search for the cheapest records and stuff that goes under the radar. But, my favorite way to find music is in secondhand record stores. I just go through the piles of records and pick things to listen to based on the feeling I get there and then; either if it is because I know the artist or label or if it is an interesting artwork on the cover that catches my eye.

D: Yeah, I have only seen you play vinyl. Is there are reason you choose this medium over digital, and do you feel it is important for DJs to promote mixes or to promote nights as vinyl only sets? If so, why?

T: For me, it is about the feeling. It is something you can physically touch, so you feel you actually touch the grooves. Also, I think it is easier to get a personal attachment to a vinyl record over a digital release because of that. I also really enjoy this organic and imperfect sound the vinyl makes. I think the reason that many DJs promote their nights as vinyl only sets nowadays is because there are so many DJs out there. So it might be a way to stand out in a crowd. But, in the end I think promoting mixes is the most important, because it gives people an idea of what you might sound like in the booth.

D: Della’s Drivhus will be your first gig at Jaeger. Are you feeling nervous about the gig? How do you prepare yourself mentally with your nerves before a show?

T: Yes, I’m indeed feeling nervous. But I think it is good to be nervous, it makes you more focused and the performance will be better. I listen to the records and pack the bag as far ahead as possible so that I know I’m well prepared. It is very important to know your tracks. And I tell myself ‘ok, you are nervous. Appreciate that feeling for a short moment then eventually overcome it’.

How about you Della, did Djing in public make you nervous or did it come naturally?

D: I get nervous before every single gig. It is probably confusion between excitement and nerves, but these nerves are a strong reminder that music is my true passion. Knowing that I am going to be putting my heart out there, vulnerable for all to feed on, can make my knees quiver. But it is all part of the game. Also, when I am booked to play with my idols such as Miss Kitten or Ellen Allien, my nerves are beyond. For these types of gigs I try to do some yoga beforehand to keep me calm and focused.

T: While we’re on the subject of idols, what is your biggest influence, or who has inspired you musically?

D: I find inspiration in many things. I am very sensitive and am intensely connected to my environment. I find inspiration for creating my music from nature, long walks in the forest, fellow artists I admire, or the aesthetics of space that surrounds me. Even the scent of flower can trigger a lyric for a song. But, I gain most of my inspiration through dance. The trance I go into under music and into dance opens many visions for me. It is the main reason I continue to move forward with what I do. When I dance, I am free.

There are SO many artists that have inspired over my years in dance music and that continue to inspire me. If they have touched my heart through their DJ sets or productions, each and every single one of them is taken along with me being reflected in my sets and in my own music. It can be everything from Jazz artists to raging Acid House tracks. I find inspiration everywhere and channel it through music.

T: Does that include emotions? Many great DJs say you have to be very sensitive/emotional to be a good DJ, would you say you’re an extra sensitive person?

D: I am an incredibly sensitive person. I am the type of person who sheds tears for the pain of the world. Sometimes it can be really overwhelming feeling so strongly, and here is where music comes in. It is my mechanism of shedding this pain and can turn it into love, the love that this music is built from. Music = love, period. I think this is what makes a good DJ a good DJ, having a full understanding of what this music about.

T: So what does it take for you to be happy about a set?

D: It can be everything from seeing the dance floor going bananas, mixing well, or just healing my own soul through the vibrations.

T: How do you get to that point where a set just flows? Is it just experience?

D:I think it comes down to talent of selection, either you have it or not. Also, knowing your tunes. I have read some DJs prepare set playlists for days before a gig and some just wing it, riding the vibe. I use both these tactics. I am still personally trying to find a method that works best for me though. But, I think it is most importantly about riding the energy of the room. A good DJ knows how to connect to the energy of the room and takes it from there, a good DJ needs to touch the crowd.

But as an up & coming DJ in a very saturated and competitive arena today, I imagine before you can even get to that moment you have to get heard. How did you break through from your living room to the club?

T: I am a really shy person myself, so to actually break-through from the living room to the club was really hard for me. I did have to get out of my comfort zone to both put some mixes out there and to actually tell people that I’m a DJ. I still find this challenging, but this shameless self-promotion is a part of the game. You can’t just sit around and wait for someone to ring on your doorbell, right? No one would hear you otherwise. What advice would you give to someone who wants to be a DJ or other up & coming Djs?

D: I say, go for it. Follow whatever your heart is telling you. Remember to always be humble and lose the ego. I have learned the hard way in the past when my own younger ego took over. The industry can be very tough on the soul and really frustrating at times. It is incredibly competitive, so you will need to grow a thick skin and learn not to take things personally. By approaching situations in a humble manner, it will get you much further than thinking you are the best or that you deserve it more than others. Also, never lose track of what this movement is all about, music & dance.

I’m curious, how do you feel about women in dance music, do you feel that we have to work harder and push ourselves more to be respected for what we do more than men, and what do you think about the current on-going discussion in dance music about line-ups needing to be 50% male / 50% female? Have you been booked solely because the promoter was looking for a “female” DJ?

T: This is an interesting question and debate. The scene is definitely male dominated and it wouldn’t hurt with more females in it. But, if a 50/50 line-up is the way to deal with it, I’m not sure. As an up and coming DJ, it might even be an advantage to be female. I feel that people are ready for change and I guess the feminine subtleness we bring into the music is part of that change.

Other than the “all female DJs” stage at Musikkfest, I have not been booked solely because the promoter was looking for “female” DJs, at least not to my knowledge. However I would prefer to be booked because of my music and not because of my gender.

D: How about the production arena, is this something you want to tackle? Have you released your own productions?

T: Yes, this is something I want to tackle and I am already on it. I have released on the Amsterdam/Berlin label Low Money Music Love, and I’m still producing. So, there is definitely something more coming up soon.

D: We look forward to it, but I think it’s time to end this conversation and since you’re our guest of honour Tonchius why don’t you play us out. Sadly, summer is coming to an end and it has been an enjoyable 3 months of sunshine here in Norway, so what about playing us out with your top 3 tracks for summer 2017?

Markus Sommer – “Mystic Blues”: A Great producer from Frankfurt.

TAR 1337 – “Lovers Fight”: This is really summer 2016, but I still think it is relevant for summer 2017. Also, this is my track that I made together with Rub800

Gemini – How can I: An old one. But I do get a real summer vibe from this one.

Follow Tonchius on Facebook.

I am really excited about this pairing of DELLA & Tonchius this Saturday in the box at Della’s Drivhus. See you all soon on the dancefloor!

Join the Facebook Event

Sayonara for now!

Love,

DELLA

Read the story of Filter Musikk over on Monument

International Techno blog Monument has published a story today of Roland Lifjell and his Oslo record store Filter Musikk. In it Roland talks about his dedication to vinyl culture, the history of the store and the local authorities’ cultural war on the genre that chose him. Roland takes over our basement this Friday for a 4-hour set. Read the full article here.

Back in the booth with Ison

For 13 years Reworks festival in Greece has been a highlight on the festival calendar, combining an uncompromising attitude to the dance floor with an exotic location. With Dixon, Paul Kalkbrenner and Ben Klock on the bill for this year’s edition, Reworks continues to bring the cream of the crop to Greece shores, while at the same time motivating the scene around them through artists like Andreas Athineo and festival mainstay Ison.

Ison, aka Anastasios Diolatzis and one half of Actor One is the figurehead behind Reworks and a tireless contributor to electronic music both in the booth and the studio. As Ison, his sole focus is the mix, bringing a diverse selection to a wanting crowd, channeling his years of experience through the dance floor.

A facilitator and DJ “first and foremost”, there’s some congruity between his career as a DJ and working behind the scenes at Reworks, holding up a light to the underground and the timeless and sincere artists and DJs that make up the electronic music scene.

A year on from his last visit that saw Ison join us in the booth for a Sunday mix, he makes his return to Jæger, this time sharing the Frædag bill with G-Ha & Olanskii. In a different context, we’re eager to see how his set might unfold this Friday, and thought we might send him some questions to that effect and ask him a little more about Reworks and what they’ve accomplished over these 13 years.

Thanks for answering a few questions for us. What are some of the highlights that you are expecting for this upcoming reworks festival?

This year is very special for us for various reasons. Not only it is the second year that Reworks will last for 5 days but we are introducing some new projects and artists that I am very happy about. I am also happy and honoured with the artists that will honour us with their presence again this year and they are many. So obviously well known artists such as Paul Kalkbrenner, Solomun, Bicep who return on Reworks once again will create high moments but also artists who have never performed before in Greece or Thessa such as Ata Kak, Aleksi Perala, Tijana T, Adriatique, Trikk.. I am confident they will create a stir.

G-Ha is making a return appearance at this year’s Reworks. We are very familiar with Geir’s distinct sound. What is it about his style and sound that you think works well at the festival and speaks to Greek audiences?

I first and foremost like Geir for his wonderful character and i think this reflects a lot on his music as well. He holds a great selection of tracks in his sets and has a smooth gentle mixing style. As I am fascinated by the Nordic sound, we constantly invite artists from Norway to perform during the last few years for the Greek audience to discover. Last year Geir played so beautifully, that we immediately came to the conclusion to repeat the booking.

Geir is in good company yet again, with the likes of Dixon, Ben Klock and Recondite. There is a lot of continuity between the artists on the line-up. What was the theme or thoughts behind the major bookings for this year?

Being the only international electronic music festival in Greece, Reworks holds a kind of responsibility; it is important to maintain a balance between presenting established artists but also to propose artists that the audience never had the chance to see or hear before. At the same time it is also important to present the domestic scene and artists that do not have many opportunities to perform in the country to experience playing at a festival. So those elements consist the general mosaic of how we design Reworks, musically. Considering that Greece suffers from a crisis which is on its 7th year the longest post war economic crisis a country has ever experienced in Europe which is now also a social crisis, Reworks carries also a symbolism around it. We are fortunate to have artists supporting what Reworks stands for and we are grateful for their support

Techno makes quite a significant contribution to the line-up this year. I imagine that in Greece, like in Germany and Norway, this genre is really at the height of popularity. But with that kind of popularity there’s always a danger of people just jumping on the bandwagon. What do you look for in artists/DJs you book, that set them apart from the hype?

First and foremost Reworks tries to present the wide spectrum of electronic music, it is our duty to do so here in Greece. So it basically presents from Modern Classical to jazz and indie associated to electronic music, downtempo, electronica, abstract, disco to house and techno of course. All these genres share a common element. They last in time.

It is true that on a first glance the line-up this year there are more techno acts, but in general I would say that techno was always on our agenda. Reworks has been representing this genre since day 1, and in fact as I consider it, it is a timeless genre. It is true, that globally the genre is enjoying some glory days again and I fully understand the nature of your question. When I design the line up though the last thing that I take under consideration is the hype. I think it is more important to have artists that present timeless performances, music that you can hear 10 years from today and it still sounds fresh and inspiring. It is a hard task but we try our best to meet this standard… we hold a certain ID musically and there are genres that have popped up during those years, hyped ones, that we did not include in our programming.

It marks 13 years for reworks this year. How do have you seen it influence the Greek electronic music scene outside the festival?

I think this is a question that needs to be answered by the audience or the artists in Greece. All I can say is that we try our best to keep the spark alive here even on the darkest days. And I am happy that after 13 years Reworks is still here holding the same principles that it started with.

What have been some of your favourite moments over these last 13 years of Reworks?

Oh there so many. I would definitely pick Autechre, Mika Vainio and Alva Noto in 2010. They were all so amazing.. Moderat on their first tour ever but also Apparat and Modeselektor back in 2005 and 2007 respectively. Ben Klock and Maceo Plex playing 6 hr sets unscheduled with the audience in tears smiling at the end.. Last year it was KiNK that totally blew our minds playing for 5hrs live not stop till 9 in the morning.

What’s happening in terms of the studio around Ison and Actor One lately?

Actor One is actually on a hiatus since last year. We still make music with Chris but we always do it on a very relaxing way actually. When we feel like it. To be honest with you I consider myself a DJ first and foremost; making music is like my escape on a personal level… So most of the music stays at home..

Your mix last year recorded at Jæger floated around Micro House and was very much about catering for a Sunday vibe. This year you’re playing the Friday slot. What can we expect this time around?

Something different… I come from the 90s and during that time there were no boundaries regarding the music that was played. That’s why I love playing long sets where I can share everything. It can be house, techno, ambient, electronica simply everything..

Is there a particular track that would sum this up for you?

Lhas – learning to live

Everything goes with Fred Everything

Fred Everything has been a timeless figure through the epoch of House music. A seasoned DJ, Producer and performer, the French-Canadian artist has made his mark on various electronic music genres since the early nineties, going from the stage to the studio to the booth as one interconnected piece of the same puzzle. Fred Everything was there before the impasse of genre distinctions took root in electronic music and was consecrated with the “everything” moniker precisely for his ability to go from House, to Techno, to Ambient and Drum & Bass through his live sets.

Harnessing the energy of his live shows and his innate ability for music in the studio, a visceral mood and emotion seeped into his recordings, finding a sympathy with the Deep House genre through his recorded work. Rising to prominence in the late nineties first as a live performer and then as a recording artist, Fred Everything became a distinguished fixture in the electronic music echelon and garnered a reputation that precedes him everywhere today.

A regular contributor to the 20:20 Vision label amongst others, Fred Everything’s music has made an invaluable impact on the electronic music landscape for twenty years today. As a remixer his contributed to discographies from Derrick Carter to Roy Davis Jnr. touching tracks with his kaleidoscopic palette and keen ear. His is a severe talent, a producer with a midas touch and a technical ability that has influenced a whole new generation of producer.

Something of a veteran today, Fred Everything continues to make his mark on the current musical landscape with music that digs deep through the trenches of the soul and although he no longer performs live, he can still be found expressing himself through the music of others in the booth. He joins us and Ivaylo for the Bogota Showcase this weekend, allowing us the opportunity to send over some questions and query an experienced hand about House music, playing live and the depth he manages to communicate through his recorded works.

As a seasoned hand in your field how have seen electronic music- and club culture evolve through the years?

This is a pretty wide question. I started going out and getting involved in music in the late 80’s. Back then, it was more of a “private club”. Everybody knew each other and it felt like you were part of something special. Nowadays, it has reached Pop Culture level. But what’s great, is that there are still amazing music being made. There’s just even more to choose from.

What do you see the benefits and drawbacks in the extensive popularity it enjoys today?

The benefit is that there could be more work opportunity for artists, but the drawback is this constant sense of competition to get “there”. Sometimes, people lose the purpose of why they started to do this thing in the first place.

Deep House, a genre which you are generally associated with, has been at the forefront of all this, acting as that bridge between the club and the radio. What are your thoughts on the popularity the genre is receiving today and how does it compare to when you were starting out?

I don’t think about this too much. Genres and labels are important for filing and for people to be able to find you easier. Deep House is so wide these days. It’s hard to really tell what it is anymore. I’m happy that it gets recognition outside the underground world, but it doesn’t affect me or how I create.

What is the essence of Deep House for you that you try to convey in your music and your sets?

I don’t think that way. In my sets, there could be elements of Disco, House, Techno, Electro. Anything that I’m feeling at the time. I like a pretty wide range of music. But If you ask me to name a tune that represents Deep House, I would say something like Round Two “New Day”.

You started out performing live with your instruments, which was very much the reality for most electronic music producers back then. What do you think it laid down in terms of a foundation for producing music and DJing?

I was playing live at the beginning because that’s all I knew and couldn’t afford records, since I was spending everything I had on equipment. I stopped because I never felt I was able to really do what I wanted to do with it. DJ became a better outlet for me in a Live situation. That way, I could concentrate on studio the rest of the time.

When did and how did a sound or sonic aesthetic cement for you when you were starting out?

Probably towards the mid-end 90’s when House Music became more interesting to me. Before, I was more into a slightly more Techno sound (Warp, Bio-Rhythm/Network…) and wasn’t so into the generic organ/diva sample house. Things started to shift when people started to integrate more influences in their music, especially in the UK where they were fusing house with dub, latin, jazz, funk, etc…

There’s that obvious visceral feel to your music and whether we go from your club singles to the album cuts, you bring a lot of emotional depth out in your music. Is it about you conveying your own emotional state or something more?

It’s really what comes naturally. I try not to think too much when I write music. I guess you could say that it is a direct reflection of who I am. I don’t start off with a specific intention.

For the more dance floor tracks, what do you hope it encourages in the dancer?

I guess the easy answer would be to dance! But hopefully they can get lost in the music a bit and forget everything else for a few minutes at least.

Do you think there’s some connection there between playing your instruments, much like your live sets from the past?

Except for a live show at the Jazz festival in Montreal in the early 2000s, I haven’t played live since the early 90’s, so it doesn’t really inform how I make music in the studio. Although in the past few years, I’ve set up my studio so it could interact more with jam based sessions, making all my analog instruments talk to each other. I then record in Logic, like a tape recorder, and use moments from it to create something that breaths a little more.

Listening to your latest release,”Colors of Dawn” there’s a definitive sense of joy in the music, that extends back to your earlier releases like Diggin’ too, but at the time it seems more content than those early releases. What’s consolidated in your sound over the course of your career for you?

Joy is good! Although I think there’s also a sense of melancholy. Which are probably two emotions that are very present inside of me.

As part of the first generation of this music, where do you think it needs to go next to keep that original sense of awe and uncharted territory it began with?

It needs to remain an honest expression.

And where do you see yourself fitting into that paradigm?

This is what I try to do.

How do you see your music evolving over your next most recent releases?

I can’t really answer that but lately, I’ve been writing different style of music in the studio. Some slower moments, lots of ambient music that I still haven’t released, some broken and even electro moments. I haven’t written much typical House Music in a few months now.

I know Deep House is just one part of a pretty diverse musical identity, so if you were to move completely away from the dance floor which areas of music would you like to explore further?

I answered a little bit in the previous question. But I would say that I have a soft spot for ambient electronic music these days.

There is an association with Bogota records that goes way back with you, and yet there hasn’t been a solo release from you on the label thus far. Do you see that changing any time in the near future?

I’ve know Ivo for a very long time now, from my first times in Bulgaria, and we have remained friends since. Although, it’s very difficult for me to release original material outside my own label, Lazy Days Recordings, and a very few other ones that I already work with. So that might explain why.

Playing at the Bogota showcase how do you hope your set will unfold?

I never know what’s going to happen musically, as I like to follow the vibe of each night without a preconceived expectation. But I’m very excited to be back in Oslo after so many years, and heard great things about Jaeger and the sound system, so that should be fun!

As a seasoned hand in your field how have seen electronic music- and club culture evolve through the years?

What do you see the benefits and drawbacks in the extensive popularity it enjoys today?

What is the essence of Deep House for you that you try to convey in your music and your sets?

I was playing Live at the beginning because that’s all I knew and couldn’t afford records, since I was spending everything I had on equipment. I stopped because I never felt I was able to really do what I wanted to do with it. DJ became a better outlet for me in a Live situation. That way, I could concentrate on studio the rest of the time.

When did and how did a sound or sonic aesthetic cement for you when you were starting out?

It’s really what comes naturally. I try not to think too much when I write music. I guess you could say that it is a direct reflection of who I am. I don’t start off with a specific intention.

For the more dance floor tracks, what do you hope it encourages in the dancer?

I guess the easy answer would be to dance! But hopefully they can get lost in the music a bit and forget everything else for a few minutes at least.

Do you think there’s some connection there between playing your instruments, much like your live sets from the past?

Joy is good! Although I think there’s also a sense of melancholy. Which are probably two emotions that are very present inside of me.

As part of the first generation of this music, where do you think it needs to go next to keep that original sense of awe and uncharted territory it began with?

It needs to remain an honest expression.

And where do you see yourself fitting into that paradigm?

This is what I try to do.

How do you see your music evolving over your next most recent releases?

I know Deep House is just one part of a pretty diverse musical identity, so if you were to move completely away from the dance floor which areas of music would you like to explore further?

I answered a little bit in the previous question. But I would say that I have a soft spot for ambient electronic music these days.

Playing at the Bogota showcase how do you hope your set will unfold?

Make the people dance with Molly

A Rex Cub resident that’s worked her way through the ranks from the PR offices to the DJ booth, Molly (Emeline Ginestet) represents one of the new faces bringing French House music back into the spotlight. Alongside peers like Le Loup, French Fries and Seuil, Molly has brought a breath of fresh air to the scene with mixes that dig deeper through rare archives into the abyss of the soul. Able to go from the deeper corners of House to rarefied Techno, Molly’s DJ identity is tied up with digging and her inquisitive attitude to music has lead to very diverse sets on the floor.

Molly’s ability to weave together tracks from sultry House to tougher Techno has found her playing gigs at clubs such as Panorama Bar (Berlin), Concrete (Paris), Space (Ibiza), Amnesia (Ibiza) and Robert Johnson (Frankfurt). Not to mention appearances as far afield as Japan, Canada, Peru, Russia and Chile. She’s caught the ear of her peers too, and has been asked to remix and edit established producers like Radio Slave, Spencer Parker and Mr Tophat in the past.

In 2017 Molly released her first solo 12” under the Aku banner, and as “SB relief” churned through the popular consciousness, Molly established a reputation in the studio that has found a happy equilibrium with her career as a DJ. Deep and soulful with an engaging energy through syncopated beats, “SB Relief” feels like an extension of Molly’s personality in the booth, a definitive sound that the DJ has filtered and concentrated down into the recording of the 12”.

Molly joins us for Nightflight during our annual Øya Natt rituals this week and we took the opportunity to send her some questions about her work in the studio and in the booth.

Tell us about your earliest memory of listening to a piece of music and thinking, “I want to do this”.

The first time I heard to electronic music was in London. This is where I faced a DJ playing and told myself, “I want to do this”. It was the atmosphere, the whole vibe… something you almost can’t explain, but it inspired me to start my journey into the world of music. If I had to name a track that really inspired me I’d say “Idioteque” by Radiohead really got me into electronic music and gave me the will to make some of my own stuff.

Not taking into account the remixes and edits, your first solo effort came out this year, SB Relief. Tell us a bit about how that release came together and what it means to you to get it out into the world?

After last summer, i decided to get back to the studio in a more efficient way, and I focused all my attention on the production…I took the time to explore a few gems I had and I think it was also the right time to finally concretise ideas I had in mind.

I spent the entire winter away from home, touring in the US and based in Miami. A place with the sun and the ocean, where you really relax and take the stock and this really helped me to find my sound and work properly on some music…

I made a couple of tracks there , without the pretention to release them but when I sent it to Benjamin from Yoyaku (someone I knew from before) for some advice and feedback, he told me that he wanted the tracks! I did it because it did not put any pressure on me … I want to do the music I want when I feel like doing music … The more you put some pressure on you, the less you’ll be able to express yourself properly through the music and create something good!

What similarities and differences do you find going from the booth to the studio?

In the booth and in the studio is 2 separate things. That”s the reason why it’s hard to be at an accomplished dj and an accomplished producer at the same time. These are 2 differents process to approach the music … The only similarity is that in both you must create a Story and put your emotion into it.

How does SB Relief reflect what a Molly set might sound like?

Oh … well… Good question! I would say something smooth, with emotion which takes to a journey? This is my goal, and I hope people feel it like that.

What do you expect your set to sound like when you play at Jæger?

It’s gonna be my first time playing in Oslo! I never prepare my set and always try to read into the crowd and feel what they want and need to dance … So right now I can’t really tell you… :) ask me maybe 5mn before my set and I might be able to tell you more !

We will, but for now give us peek into your record bag. What are some of your favourite tracks you’re playing out at the moment?

I play many new records but also old records … There is some old Atom heart tracks, also some old Octave one, but also some from this label, Mörk,

You are a resident at Rex Club, but before that you were also involved in the PR side of things. If you would have to explain Rex Club to somebody that hasn’t been there before, how would you put it into words?

Rex club is the institution of electronic music in France and the oldest club in europe fully dedicated to Electronic Music. The club will celebrate its 30th anniversary this year! All the biggest artists in Electronic Music have played there.It’s only one room, not that big at the end, for about 700 people, pretty dark, low ceiling, with a soundsystem so clean that you feel like you are in your living room. Everything is about the music there! Once you get into the club, you really feel the history of the club, and the passion behind it.

The French House scene seems to be burgeoning again. We’re coming across a lot of new artists that we really enjoy here at Jæger. How have you seen it blossom through your career?

It’s true that the French house has seen some many new talents emerged recently… it’s really inspiring! It pushes you to create and explore different things… with the apparition of so many talents I think the world started to look toward the French scene again. It’s nice to see this interest and I‘m also very proud to be in the scene surrounded by so many talents. Why this interest? I think we have a different touch and groove :)

What, in your opinion should the role of a DJ be?

The role of the DJ is to make the people dance, no? Let the people forget them self into the music, give them a proper journey.

Play us out with a song please?

Tracey – Earthrise -Beautiful one !

*Molly joins us at Nightflight as part of Øya Natt and you can find out more about Molly on her social media page.

Profile: Young Turks

In 2006 the London Police raided an illegal party in an abandoned TFL building in Shoreditch, unknowingly setting into motion what would become one of the most impressive UK labels the world would ever come to know. The night was called Young Turks, and “it was a total disaster” recalls Caius Pawson, the promoter, but as the police were confiscating the money, the liquor and the sound system, a fortuitous meeting would take place between the then 19-year-old Pawson and one Richard Russell founder of XL Recordings. As some of the revellers took action, pelting police officers with ice, Russel looked on amused and offered the young Pawlson a job at XL. “He advised right then that I should set up the Young Turks record label as part of XL,“ remembers Pawson in an Interview with medium.com “So that’s what I did.”

Pawson set up shop in XL offices in Ladbroke Grove and went to work in establishing one of the most unique voices in English music, walking in the footsteps of XL who had by then established themselves as an axis for innovative new music in the UK. Using XL’s resources Young Turks bided their time, tentatively releasing records from guitar wielding groups like Jack Peñate, Holy Fuck and Kid Harpoon. The label would buck trends and breach the muddling noise of the music industry with a group of artists that all harboured a unique talent and artistic voice, but it would be a young band from Croydon that propelled them into popular consciousness.

They were called the XX, but when Pawson first met them their raw sound suggested to him they weren’t quite ready to make a record, but Young Turks “gave them time to develop their sound” and even became instrumental in the final line-up, introducing the band to Jamie Smith. Young Turks gave Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim and Jamie Smith the time and room to mature, building a studio for the group to record their debut album in what was XL’s MD’s garage at the office and when the time was just right they gave The XX to the world with the self-titled debut that made one of the most remarkable impressions, considering it was their debut.

Moody, wistful and melancholy, The XX sounded like no group that had come before it and they were incredibly well received, catapulting the band and the label on the tip of every tongue and making an irrepressible mark on the musical landscape. Combining guitars with synthesisers and more significantly programmed beats, The XX also marked a shift for the label, incorporating electronic music artists to their roster that avoided traditional band line-ups.

Artists like SBTRKT and John Talabot followed where The XX ended with strains of music that took its essence from underground roots genres like House and Dubstep and transposed it for a more populist listening audience. John Talabot’s “Families” EP was one such example. Featuring vocals from another Young Turks signee, Glasser on the title track, Talabot programmed elements of balearic beat like a pop track with a joyous resolve, billowing through the track in big clouds of synthesisers. Similarly, SBTRKT would take elements of dubstep and work with vocalists like Sampha, who would also later go on to release a string of successful solo releases on the label too.

Young Turks operates more like a musical academy than a label, nurturing young artists through their ranks to eventual and inevitable success. Their roster stretches far and wide in terms of genre and style, emphasising unique voices in and around the UK. FKA Twigs and Sampha today mark some of their most recent success stories, two artists that embody and imbue unique and innovative sounds and an artistic perspective that sets them apart from their peers.

But they are only the most recent additions to a severe legacy Young Turks have established in their short existence. They’ve only been around for a decade, but in those ten years they’ve managed to go from an indie underground event to a label that everybody associates with innovative pop-centric, but not always mainstream music whose reputation precedes them wherever they go.

* Young Turks make an appearance at Øya Natt this week Retro.

Profile: Rush Hour

Hiding in plain sight on Spuistraat Amsterdam, some 100 meters away from the tourist bustle of Damstraat, a modest building in n a restrained art deco style leers at passers by through its huge open windows of some calvinistic proportions. The simple square light with the letters RH emboldened in black and white, give little to no clue to the shop’s purpose and it’s only when you press your nose right up to the glass that it reveals its true form as a record store. Nonetheless if you were not informed, you would not be aware of its significance as a self-effacing beacon for impressive House and Techno music, in whichever way you’d like to interpret that sentiment. RH abbreviated from Rush Hour is symbolic of a record store, a label, a music distributor and most importantly a community of DJs and producers that have banded together under its banner – a group of individuals based in Amsterdam that include San Proper, Cinnaman, Hunee, Tom Trago and Awanto3, lead under the sage guidance of Rush Hour’s central public figure, Antal.

Inconspicuous and far from ostentatious Rush Hour has made an immutable mark on House and Techno music without ever falling victim to hype and always wandering a path less trodden. A demure exterior in Spuistraat holds its clandestine treasures close to its chest, available to whomever has the patience and the spirit to uncover rare gems, but completely hidden to those in favour of the obvious and the safe choices in music.

Launched in 1997 from a much smaller cubicle storefront just down the street from their current building, Rush Hour began life as a record store, that looked to dig deeper than the obvious American imports that were distributed by the other record stores in Amsterdam. “We started the store to step into that void” says Christiaan Macdonald in an interview with Richard Campbell in 2007 “and offer the music that (our competitors) didn’t supply any longer.” Although the Dutch legacy in electronic music was well and truly cemented in the early part of the 90’s as House music went through its own mutations on the continent, by 1997 it had also fallen for a sort of populist form of the genre and Rush Hour stepped into a void, immediately becoming a beacon for dusty fingers around the city and later the world. “We always did fine, with a good amount of freaks coming to the store”, Antal tells Skiddle in an interview two years back.

Those “freaks” constituted the heart and the soul of the store, many of them like Hunnee and Cinnaman, modulating from the role of customer to employee and establishing a formidable hub of a scene in the city. The original store was small and compact, with the latest releases and most recent editions filling two rows of shelves, while for the more adventurous diggers, willing to get down on their knees for music, there laid a treasure trove of undiscovered material in plastic containers below them. Crammed into this small alcove space, the expanse of House and Techno awaited the patient enthusiast and for those that intent to dig deeper, there was a cornucopia of eclecticism lying in those boxes, from Disco to Afro-Beat and even progressive rock.

Where most of their contemporaries were focussed on the instant gratification and popularity, Rush Hour opted for a more humble approach, keeping their store small, but effective and setting up a distribution centre to get those more rarified gems out of the States and into record bags in Europe. There was no posturing and even though it was in their name, they hardly rushed into anything biding their time and establishing something long-lasting and concrete on the scene in Amsterdam. It was during the great vinyl slump of 2005-6 that they would truly stand the test of time, and even though the entire world en-masse decided to go digital, Rush Hour remained and continued on their individual path, and in fact even welcomed this new era as Antal explains further in Skiddle. “(I)t was a period where all the nutters and opportunists left the game. So I enjoyed it.” With those “opportunists and nutters” out of the picture, Rush Hour soon became one of the only places around where you could still buy good underground House and Techno records. During the same time the Internet came into its own as a consumer’s paradise, RH would also become axis for collectors and fans throughout Europe.

It also cemented the Rush Hour label as an eclectic influence on the Amsterdam scene and beyond as it released music from people close to the organisation like Aardvarck and reissued classic albums like Carl Craig’s “The Album formerly known as…”. Those re-issues invariably influenced institutions like These Guys and Dekmantel in Amsterdam while the original releases helped build a community around artists like Hunnee, Tom Trago, Awanto3 and San Proper (who even sports a tattoo of the label’s logo on his arm). The community has spread even further abroad with artists like Recloose and Soichi Terrada making impressive marks on the discography, but at the epicentre of its appeal still lies the store.

They might have expanded somewhat, still only relatively little compared to their stake in electronic music today, but it still upholds the essence of the Rush Hour mantra of forging ahead on the road less travelled. So central is the store to their identity, that they’ve also established an instore serious for their customers. Rare one-of releases from the likes of Interstellar Funk and Faster Action hold incredible music for those determined to visit the store, and hidden in the shelves are endless days worth of digging for the discerning music fan, with many treasures still left to be found. With Antal’s eclectic influences still driving the store today, any person with a penchant for this music is sure to find something you haven’t heard before that would certainly make an impact in your record collection. Antal’s mixes play a vital role here too, and more often than not they hold unbelieveable pieces for open-minded music. His mix of South African music from earlier this year opened up a new dimension of South African jazz from the seventies that had escaped this South African writer’s ears before.

As they celebrate twenty years in the game this year, Rush Hour have curtailed the short-life span of similar institutions and have become something of phenomenon in this world. They are an enigma in many ways, but they’re not pretentious or oblique about it, and have found many kindred spirits along their way that continue to revitalise and perpetuate the Rush Hour ideology. When everybody said vinyl is dead, they continued to pedal their wares and mission upstream ready to pounce on when the media form would rise to its inevitable popularity again, and they did it without being snobbish or furtive about their love for the format. They remained close to their roots and very rarely drifted into the mainstream, holding their course underground, and remain to do so today, and even though today Rush Hour is an internationally recognised label, distribution outlet and record store, you would still be forgiven to undermine its significance as you pass by its humble epicentre in Spuistraat. But for those who know what Rush Hour is, it will always be a self-effacing beacon for impressive House and Techno music.

* Antal joins Øyvind Morken for Untzdag next week, kicking off our Øya Natt weekend.

Would I lie to you – a Q&A with DJ Boring

With music entrenched in the visceral and the dance floor, born out of array of very eclectic and diverse influences, DJ Boring is of a new generation of producer and DJ that harks back to a time of new groove and DIY simplicity. With a sincere and determined focus on the raw fundamental elements of dance music and operating on an emotional depth, DJ Boring’s sets and music can go deep, but remain playful. Its insistence on the bare minimum has encouraged the media to coin the phrase Lo-Fi House, where DJ Boring occupies similar territory to DJ Seinfeld and Ross from Friends, but with the fundamental outline dating back to Nu Groove and Deep House DJ Boring cannot be that easily pigeonholed nor defined in this current musical landscape.

Real name Tristan Harris DJ Boring fell on his peculiar DJ moniker when a Swedish friend pointed out that his real name means ”boring” in the native Scandinavian language. A tongue in cheek gaff at DJs who take themselves too seriously, Boring is by no means a reflection of the DJs ability in the booth and in the studio.

Following the success of “Winona” on DJ Haus’ E-Beamz sublabel, DJ Boring has become a household name since its release, while at the same time bringing a incipient selector and DJ to the world’s attention. A sought-after DJ today with a new 12” “Sunday Avenue” fresh off the press, DJ Boring’s precocious rise is only still on the incline, and as he makes his way to Oslo this weekend, we thought it pertinent to find out more about this talent. He obliged to answer some questions for us on his way, and we get the opportunity to delve a bit deeper into his musical concepts and naturally his record bag.

Hello Tristan and thank you for taking the time to field some questions for us.

Thank you for having me!

Where are you at the moment and what are you up to?

I’m currently in West Sussex winding down from the crazy weekend I just had, spending some quality time with my family.

Your name DJ Boring, I believe is from your real name Tristan, that means something like “boring” in Swedish. In Norwegian it’s a bit closer to “sad”. What’s the saddest song you’ve ever heard?

A Silver Mt. Zion – Mountains Made of Steam.

What would define a DJ Boring set and how do you keep it from being “boring”?

DANCE! I want everyone to have as much fun as I am having, so each set is different and I try to tailor each to suit the crowd.

Your track Winona brought DJ Boring to everybody’s attention last year. How did you arrive at that point and what is it about that track that defines your sound as a producer?

In all honesty, that track came together with different sounds and emotions that were going through my head at the time. I don’t think it defines my sound specifically because my sound to me is very versatile, different things influence me all the time so it is hard to distinguish exactly what my sound is.

Yes, I believe Winona carries quite an emotional weight for you. Can you tell us a bit about it’s back story?

In the interview Winona Ryder talks about the difficulties she endured during the beginning and the height of her career, her words reminded me of the hard times I had growing up and being bullied. We went through so many similar emotions and it made me feel at ease because I finally felt like I wasn’t the only person who felt that way.

How do you go about conveying a sense of depth and feeling through your music?

My emotions do all the work, I just go along with how I feel at the time.

You followed it up this year with Sunday Avenue, with tracks that bare similarities to Winona, using acid lines or short melodic to puncture a wispy atmosphere. Is it a conscious decision on your part to create a specific sound, and what influences/limits your sound?

I produced Sunday Avenue long before I created Winona, I think that it is a coincidence that the two were similar and had that nostalgic feeling to it. I did go through a stage where I experimented a lot of with acid sounds, and I still like to play around with it now.

The bongo drums were something very prominent on that release. How do you see that and other elements developing later in your music?

I have always had a varied taste in music, I’m constantly listening and looking for different influences that I can develop into my own productions.

We know from previous interviews, you started as a record collector. What sort of records were you digging and what inspired your move to producing?

My parents were both very much into music, so from a young age I was introduced to artists such as Curtis Mayfield, David Bowie, Deep purple etc. Those were the types of records I had at first, when I discovered house music and a more modern sounds, I wanted to attempt it myself.

Can you give us a peek into your record bag and tell us what are you digging at the moment?

My three favourite records at the moment are:

OEIL CUBE- versatile records
OYE – Edits 003 uffe
THE UNDERGROUND SOLUTION- Luv dancin’

What continuation is there between booth and studio for you?

My studio is my laptop, which I carry with me always. Because I am constantly on the road going from show to show, I use this time to work on music.

A lot of producers never play their own songs out. How do you feel about your own tracks in the context of a set?

I try to play my own music when I can. Once again I analyse the audience to see whether it would work or not. Winona is quite chilled, So when I start playing heaving techno, it’s hard to slip it into my set. Most of the time I play new music that I haven’t released and no one really knows, and It’s nice to get reactions from the audience especially when they don’t know it is me.

Play us out with song.

Profile: Jesse Rose

During a summer vacation in Greece, Jesse Rose made the magnanimous decision to retire from one of the most successful and lucrative careers. After a pensive moment, cut-off from the outside world, the UK DJ decided to leave a career as a sought after international touring DJ with one last world tour, and for completely admirable reasons. “I see retiring as a positive thing that lets younger people come through,” he tells the New Miami Times in an interview from earlier this year. “I wouldn’t want to sort of stay around a lot longer until I was 60 and (be moaning) about kids.” For any DJ to retire takes an incredible will power, because as a DJ it’s quite easy to stay around until you’re 60 and still remain relevant as a selector of recorded music. There’s no need to retire if people keep releasing new music. It means retiring DJs are a rare oddity, which makes it so significant that Jesse Rose is leaving the DJ Booth, and especially considering the length and breadth of this House music DJ and producer’s extensive career.

At the tender age for 14 when most of us were still trying to form some musical identity, Jesse Rose had already cemented his and began regularly DJing in Bristol. According to a recent Ransom Note interview, it was listening to Giles Peterson at the age of eight that got the young Jesse Rose into electronic music, and through pirate stations this love matured. Encouraged and supported by his father and with a lot of access to this music, Rose’s trajectory to a career in music had been a smooth and rapid one, seeing the DJ quickly go from playing as a teenager in Bristol to moving on to London where he would cement a career as a House DJ and producer.

As House fell out of favour in the early to mid 2000’s with the sound of Tech House and Minimal Techno infiltrating and dominating dance floors all over Europe, Jesse Rose was determined in his resolve, and continued to pursue House at it’s most fundamental roots, through jacking beats and collage-like samples that would bring him to the world’s attention, through his productions and his DJ sets. He soon found residencies at some of the world’s elite clubs like Fabric and Panorama Bar with his Made to Play residencies a favourite outlet for no-nonsense House. From London to Berlin to LA, Jesse Rose dominated the the House scene through this period, bringing the unadulterated sound of the genre to new audiences and providing a platform for emerging artists like Riva Starr through his labels “Made to Play” and “Play it Down”.

With 300 odd remixes and over 100 original releases to his own name over his extensive career, Jesse Rose has been a prolific purveyor of House music with very specific intentions in mind. “It wasn’t about making the biggest records” he explains to Scion AV in a 2009 interview. For Jesse Rose the labels and the music was always about “cutting edge House music” from the recording to the DJ set, setting him apart from many of his peers. Although he might have been booked as a peak time DJ, Jesse Rose always had an eye on the proceeding of how a night unfolded taking everything into account from the warm-up set to the record that would end the night. “There’s a formula” he explains to Scion AV and it starts with the “first four hours of a set” – “that’s the lead up to the rest of the night gonna be.”

It was always about setting the tone of a night for Jesse Rose, something that he took from his experiences at his residencies to the way he put his records together, starting deep, building it up and going deep again. A true professional in any terms, he has been at the forefront of House music all these years and even though he is still what many determined to be at the height of his career he’s making the magnanimous decision to step aside for a newer generation. “I didn’t get into this industry to be like the most famous DJ in the world or the biggest producer and earn the most money, or anything like that”, he explains to the New Miami Times. “I really just had a dream to be able to make records that the people I looked up to for their records would enjoy, and to be able to play the clubs around the world that would love the music I love. And I realized that I kind of passed that point years ago.”

And now for something completely different: Clubbing in the UK

2008 London, and I’m standing outside the George & Dragon (a cultural fixture that sadly got lost in the gentrification that still ensues in London today), with a flat pint in my hand on an unusually warm summers evening. It’s my first weekend back in London, after a long absence and I’m determined to find a new club experience in the city. The big established clubs like Fabric, the Egg and the End were there and always an option, but they would be there later still, and I was hungry for something new and exciting. Literally down the street from the George and Dragon, Plastic People was there too, flexing with the sound of dubstep, and although aware of the genre I had not yet been convinced yet, skeptical of its lo-fi swelling sub-bass and it’s half time rhythms. I was after something a bit more energetic, and a bit more curious on this Friday night, and like a flash, it passed me by on Hackney Road at that very moment.

Walking down the east end high street in broad daylight, a group of early twenty-somethings, dressed like Michael Alig and James st James before the comedown, strode with confidence and swagger. They had the air of people bucking trends and known perceptions their entire life and the street seemed to part ceremoniously at their feet as they took determined strides to their destination. Loud insults flung from open car windows speeding by and shrewd remarks made under breath from passing pedestrians had no effect and carried little weight in their ill-confidence. You knew these kids were cool and shouting insults at them only undermined your own social standing – You would never be as cool as they. I manage to catch up to one of the gang as they traipsed around a corner and find out they’re going to a night called Trailer Trash, where I would later find exactly that which I desired.

Trailer Trash was a sight out of this world. Kids from all manner of backgrounds, packed in like sardines in a old working men’s club, listening to ear-bleeding ghetto tech through broken speakers (I assume broke during the course of that night, and would happen on several occasions again after that night). The sprawl of club kids, music enthusiasts, people just out for a good time and the surreptitious “naked guy” created a colourful and effervescent living diorama that took the essence of club kids in New York in the eighties and made it into something more accessible. Where New York’s club kids would need to work at creating that aura of mystique and drama through planned performances and installations, in the UK these club kids just had a natural disposition for the drama, and just occupying a working men’s club on Friday night transformed the place into some hedonistic den of iniquity and escapism with little more than a DJ, groups of friends… and of course a bit of makeup.

Trailer Trash would eventually lead me to Nuke’em all and DJs like Buster Bennett and Hannah Holland were instrumental figures in creating a scene in London’s east end for a fairly new population of cool twenty-something residents, still making use of the cheap rent and burgeoning night life that started cropping up around Shoreditch. It was a time before the property speculators moved in and established huge loft complexes with pretentious names like Art Nouveau or Avant Garde, filled with clueless stockbrokers and hedge fund capitalists, who desperately longed to be cool by association, but couldn’t hold a candle to those kids from Trailer Trash and Nuke’em all.

Trailer Trash and Nuke’em all were effective rudders for what was cool and constituted as close as you could come to scene, with a mixture of art students and established socialite figures, taking that spirit of nineties New York; the music from present day Chicago; and the ruins of an eighties electronic scene in the east end of London, and morphing it into something completely different. Although it referenced a scene from the past, nothing quite like it had been before it and nothing would follow it, and in that fleeting moment in London for about two years a true club scene existed and would disappear just as soon as it arrived, in the way that any youth scene should. For me this became a testament of nightlife in the UK where they toe their own set of jumbled lines. Techno in the UK never quite sounds like its American forebearers nor did Dubstep sound like anything before it and from the club-kids and their Ghetto Tech soundtrack to the instrumental Grime I’m a big fan of today, there’s always been a unique groove to UK club music.

Although there had been Northern Soul, the working man’s answer to Disco in the north of the UK, in electronic music it would be Acid House, that all arrows point today as the definite character of that UK groove. Not to be mistaken for staunch and specific Chicago sound of Acid House, the UK’s interpretation of the popular trope was a little more irrational and schizophrenic than a 303 walking bassline and a four-four kick and has it’s roots in Ibiza and Balearic. Drug fueled trips to the Spanish island and Amnesia to listen to Alfredo, inspired DJs like Paul Oakenfold, Trevor Fung and Danny Rampling back in the UK. They brought the music (a mix of Chicago House and Balearic Classics), the clothes (careless holidaymaker ensembles) and the drugs (ecstasy) back to the UK for audiences still enamoured with rare groove and ignited a musical and cultural explosion that probably still goes down as the most significant periods in House music.

What started out as Balearic, a playful mix of eccentricities, would move almost exclusively into House through clubs like the Haçienda in Manchester and The Trip in London. It swept through the country and brought the music from Chicago and New York to the UK. Where House in the states was a small, exclusive scene, House in the UK reached everybody and anybody. It inspired a cultural youth movement like no one has seen since the hippies, and consequently 1988 became the “second summer of love” and House would be its soundtrack. This new machine music from the states had been wholly and completely accepted in the UK psyche and had completely changed the way people listened to music, danced and even socialised. A continuous, repetitive music encouraged by the drug ecstasy induced trance-like atmospheres for the sole purpose of rhythmical movement and as the crowds grew venues, had to accommodate them and all over the UK tents and sound systems cropped up and rave culture was born.

“Dancing is political, stupid” says Bill Brewster and Frank Boughton in “Last night a DJ saved my life” and for a generation living in the landscape of conservative politics of Margaret Thatcher it became a rebel call that still echoes through the ages. Nowhere since Woodstock in 1969 had there been such a musical roots movement quite like this. Acid House became the battle cry for millions of disenfranchised youths unable to live and work within the orthodox and ancient system they’ve been born into and even if it was just for one night in a muddy field outside the M25, they’d do everything in their power to escape it.

I was only an infant in 1988, but going to a club today and listening to a DJ segue one track into the next in Europe all comes down to what they were doing in the UK in the eighties and the second summer of love. It’s always felt like I was born too late or too early to be part of any significant cultural movement and although the social circumstances in the UK in the eighties would have been anything ideal for a migrant worker like myself, I would have loved nothing more to travel back in time and experience just a moment of that time and place, from which everything concerning European music culture stems. But until the time-travelling delorean stops at my door, I am quite content in the fact that the spirit of UK clubbing lives on every time I am on the dance floor, in the company of others, listening to a DJ soundtrack the night.

One event I was in the right time and place for however was Dubstep. London 2008/9 and I’m at CDR night at plastic people, a Sunday night where a community of music producers, that had met on social forums on the internet, test out new creations through the clubs now legendary sound system. I’m just there as a spectator and the warm bass on the back of my spine is soothing. It’s an unknown track, by an unknown artist, making no real impression on me, but there’s a definite sense of community there that I’d not quite felt before. Although there’d been no escaping Dubstep after Burial’s first album and I had certainly fell for the listening experiences the genre had to offer, clubbing and Dubstep were two completely different things to me at that point. Dubstep with its 140BPM rhythms playing at half time, it’s sluggish rolling bass lines and innovative sonic spectrums had piqued an early interest and tracks from the likes of Untold, Joy Orbison and Kode 9 were interesting developments in electronic music, but reserved for a lazy kind of head-bopping listening experience. It was urban kind of roots music, taking elements from Dub, Reggae, Techno, Drum and Bass and House to make a wholly original style of music, and probably the last truly new genre to crop up in electronic music.

Like UK Garage, Drum n Bass and Bleep that came before it this wasn’t House or Techno as imported from the states, but rather a distinctly UK music with roots in its own urban environment. Featuring some elements like the two step arrangements from UK Garage; the low sinister rumbling bass-lines lifted from the sound system culture that came over with the Jamaican community; and the rapturous tempoes of Drum n Bass, Dubstep was a product of its environment. It was incredibly UK and when the Americans started bastardising the sound of Dubstep, the original purveyors abandoned the style completely and moved into genres like House and Techno taking elements of their music into these genres to create very unique interpretations of these genres. Tracks like Objekt’s Cactus and Joy Orbison’s Hyph Mngo became crossover success stories and consolidated elements from Dubstep into established genres like House and Electro, establishing them as artists today with a penchant for innovative interpretations of club music across genres.

One of the most interesting developments to come from this was instrumental Grime. In 2013 and in the humid oversaturated world of Deep House’s most prominent year, Instrumental Grime would arrive in the subterranean depth of London with a sinister snarl. It would be Logos and his debut album Cold Mission that would win me over to the dark side where acts like Pinch, Mumdance and Randomer dwelled. Percussive and minimal instrumental Grime took Grime’s dark and menacing attitude and combined it with machines from the palette of Techno and House to create an entire style of music onto its own. Instrumental grime continues to put forward some of the more interesting and completely unusual progressions on the dance floor in a way only the UK could. They defy barriers and spin a thread through all of electronic music with specific pressure points in UK music culture. It will undoubtedly never be quite as popular as Acid House in the eighties, but there’s a crossover potential certainly if collaborations like those between Mumdance and young Grime MC Novelists keep happening.

Theirs is the latest chapter and the future in the UK’s ongoing traditions and lack thereof in club music. They continue to pursue club music as this flexible, amorphous entity that pick and chooses across genres, influences and social movements to consolidate a UK sound and attitude. Even though I’ve merely picked through a mere handful of chapters and details in UK music, the results are congruous between them. Defying characterisation, but with something similar running through it, clubbing in the UK is and always will be an anomaly, an significant one at that.

Chaos is a force with Rune Lindbæk

Throughout my life, the decisions I make are based on what is enjoyable and I only follow the path towards what’s fun. That’s how I ended up here, today, talking to you…

We meet Rune Linbæk on an unusually warm summer’s day in Lillestrøm. The unassuming Oslo suburb is raptured in a new vigour of development and progress, preparing for an incipient exodus from the city, as new apartment complexes rise to the occasion amongst the established wooden houses that once made this town an idyllic little slice of Scandinavian living. Today the new population is noticeably absent, and the high street is desperately empty of life, a quiet before the storm perhaps, or just the usual holiday lull.

Beyond the high street we find the Fagerborg Hotel. A simple rectangular building, unimposing, but rather awkward in its suburban surroundings and modern apartment blocks. You wouldn’t think there was anything interesting history to the building. There’s no blue plaque or anything really intriguing about the architecture, but Rune Lindbæk knows of some great significance concealed in the subterranean depths of the hotel where a bar and dance floor lies dormant at the moment, and a wooden pulpit for DJ booth looks suspiciously out of place.

Not too many people know that this little hotel was the first four-four club in Norway. It used to be called Project and it was the first House club in Norway. It was a time in the eighties and the early nineties when there was absolutely nothing happening in Oslo, where roots music, a semi kind of country music, was really big and for most of us from Tromsø, Oslo was just a stopover on the way to London. Børre, the guy who owns and runs the place today, used to play at Café Del Mar in Ibiza in the eighties, at a time the DJs on the island were mixing Front 242, Chris Rea, Sade and Chicago House, but Børre brought the sound of Ibiza to this place along with the DJ booth (see pic above); and for a while people went from Oslo to Lillestrøm to party. Bjørn Torske, Per Martinsen and I even played with the idea of renting a bus from Tromsø to come to this very address, just to visit this place.

It was after they had liberated the airwaves in the eighties when Norway had just one radio and one TV station.. You could hardly ever listen to good music before then, the long ruling Arbeiderpartiet (Labour Party) had monopolised it with mostly Oslo dialect voices – but then suddenly bang, you had the communists, the seven day evangelists, the students, and most importantly the Ungdommens Hus all on our local airwaves. The radio station happened when me, Bjørn Torske and just about every person you heard about from the Tromsø techno scene got together, all staunch music enthusiasts and DJs. Bjørn was an old friend by that time. He was a year behind in school even though he is only born 7 weeks after me, but we didn’t socialise much until in our teens. He was into Heavy Rock music early on and wore these ridiculously tight stretch jeans labeled Levis 666, before coming to dance music via EBM (Electronic Body Music).

We were barely a radio station. It looked like a shithole. There were walls there, just about, and a wire and two decks and a mixer. There was a skip on top, so there was all this shit just lying over our heads, but when we started the radio station you could finally hear music that wasn’t controlled by the state, and electronic music was a big part of that. We played Detroit Techno at drive time and the big reason it spread was because we had some great music enthusiasts in the city.

Tromsø had turned into quite the party town, and until the end of 1987 English DJs would come to play in Norway, because they didn’t have to pay tax as long as they just stayed in the country for 3 months. One such DJ was Andy Swatland who had met a Tromsø girl and relocated to the city, and we owe him a lot. He established Rocky Platebar, a record shop that was very pivotal to all of us, everybody used to live out of that shop. Andy imported records to Norway and Tromsø that would land in London at the same time, and sold it to DJs all over Norway. So we had sources of getting music in and sources for getting music out.

Per Martinsen (Mental Overdrive), Geir Jenssen (Biosphere), Bjørn Torske, Rune Lindbæk, Ole Johan Mjøs, Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland (and too many more to mention) all came to prominence during this period of electronic music in Tromsø and most through that Radio station. Biosphere’s first album, Microgravity many believe to be his radio show captured on record, combining ambient sounds with Techno records while playing on themes of space and science fiction.

Rune had played a significant role as a DJ and later producer throughout all of this, and in many different guises too. Rune was born in Vardø, a small fishing island in close proximation to the iron curtain before moving to Tromsø aged 4. He was born in 1970, a year that saw the birth of the microchip, the first Minimoog synthesizer and Norway strike oil, all significant factors in backdrop that would inform Rune’s career. In the 1970’s a musical curiosity had taken an early hold on Rune through influences from his disco-enthusiast mother and record-collecting grandfather, who had amassed quite a collection of records that Rune remember distinctly.

His taste was shit, but those records were always there in my grandparents basement. He didn’t have a 78 rpm record player to play them at the later part of his life, but his record collection were not to be touched. He was among the first record collectors in Norway already back in the 1940s in the days of the 78 rpm shellac pressings, before vinyl records came along, and I’m sure he passed some of that collecting gene on to me. A bunch of vinyl is all it takes for me to get me into my own world, but it was breakdancing that got me into electronic music and DJing.

At 14 I got my first set of decks, and then I started going to second hand shops and Rocky. Today I have 3 ½ tons of records, and incidentally I’ve never had a car and I don’t often go on holiday… but then again my life has been a holiday. My musical palette is huge and there’s hardly anything I don’t listen to. It’s been there since the start and I always took chances on the records that was on the floor and other awkward places in second hand shops were few people are looking, based on things like “this cover looks interesting”. I pile all these influences into my music too.

At first I wasn’t making music, because my first attempts with Bjørn Torske wouldn’t yield any results since we had nothing to record with. I remember one night we jammed at his place, trying to recreate Electribe 101’s “Talk to myself”, the Frankie Knuckles remix. We had managed to recreate the sounds of the record on a Juno 106, but nothing more came of it because we had no way to record it. That was before Ismistik, which Bjørn would start with Ole (Mjøs) when the latter got a sampler. I think they wanted me to be part of it, because on every track I was the one pressing the “record button”, so I became the mobile DAT operator for the group. I didn’t see myself as a music maker at all back then, I was a DJ and I had no intention of making music.

Eventually Rune would cross that divide and started producing music with Bjørn and Ole as Volcano. Described as a “commercial vocal house/club project”, Volcano produced high-energy House with layer upon layer of synthesisers, drums and percussion, a visceral melee of 90’s sounds.

I started studying in the UK, when the first record came out from Volcano, after we had released a record on the proto jungle label Reinforced Records as Open Skies. The first Volcano track, “Let Your Body Be Free” became a hit in Hacienda in Manchester, and that was the first time I thought I could make a “career” out of it. It was never an option before, because I come from a family of fishermen. My grandad had bought records as I mentioned before, but nobody had cared or shown any interest. The success was a big thing for Bjørn, Ole and me. We followed it up with “More To Love” and it became an even bigger success, the third only UK hit by a Norwegian artist in music history by then. Pete Tong played it five times on BBC is as many weeks and after the successes of those records, BMG threw some money our way to start a label.

By that time Bjørn Torske had moved to Bergen and Ole and I had started making music as Those Norwegians with Torbjørn Brundtland (later to form Royksopp with Svein Berge who we both had been working together on as Alanïa). Thorbjørn, Ole and I started Flamingo Records. We thought “Flamingo”, because underlining everything we do is humour and that’s always been very important to us. We were really into kitsch because it was the nineties and flamingos made us think of those plastic statues dotting gardens in Las Vegas.

I wanted my own label on the side of this, to express a serious deeper side, and I had this idea for a label called Tromsø, or Tromme Ø i.e Drum Island. Today, it’s a very inconsistent label and extremely badly organised and everything I do for the label is for the love of the music. Once I even made a mistake with labelling a track because I couldn’t find the the last track and messed up the running order, this was before Discogs. It’s a label reserved for friends and I must really like a track to put the effort into it.

Drum Island coincided with a time in Rune’s life when his own music really began to flourish, both through Those Norwegians and his many aliases he adopted along the way. Labels like Paper Recordings latched on early and in the late 90’s it saw a very “Norwegian” sound really explode on to the scene with a fair portion of it being led by Those Norwegians and Rune Lindbæk’s aliases. These aliases mark 26 today as he releases Rune Lindbaek & Chris Coco’s “Weekend Billionaires”, a dance tracks with balearic, acid, disco and dub influences all coalescing around reserved tempos, all informed by Rune’s incredibly diverse influences. .

It proves Rune’s remarkably versatile influences and formative musical experiences with an innate talent for it all. Those Norwegians would eventually disband as Torbjørn formed Röyksopp, while Rune continued to be involved in many different projects and various different sounds, all encouraged by Rune’s eclectic musical sounds.

Later Rune would lay claim to two tracks on Melody AM through a very publicised lawsuit, that Rune would lose, but make up for when Rune and Röyksopp settled out of a court later on a libel charge after the duo released a slanderous account of the trial.

None of this ever deterred Rune in his creative outputs however and he continued to tap into those influences and his eccentric personality, making new music all the way throughout and garnering a reputation as a formidable DJ, playing the world over..

In 97 the name Rune Lindbæk made its first appearance as a solo artist with a track called Ok, Kjør Romskip, a low slung disco beat with various psychedelic elements flitting in and out as layer upon layer piles on and moves away to outer dimensions.That track would later open his debut album, Søndag, cementing Rune’s place ahead of the Nu-Disco scene that would spring up later around that time.

With an inherent talent for music and an encyclopedic list of influences Rune’s music modulates with its surroundings without falling for obvious trends, and his rich palette has created some of the most timeless pieces out there.

The way I see it is I have long term project, and whenever I see people doing something easy and cutting corners, all for the sake of shameless self promotion, I’m not interested. What’s relevant now will not be relevant two years from now so I never do the same thing. For Ok, Kjør Romskip for instance I had this idea of slow druggy disco as there were hardly anyone in the world who made that style then. But then again I’ve done music for many short films, ballet, theatre, TV and a myriad of music styles. The thing that keeps me relevant is that I do different things and that extends to DJing too.

I like to play the best clubs in town, and not the biggest. Most people have one name and one sound and I think that’s boring. I only make music for myself, and it’s fun to have a little variation in life. I like doing different things and working with different people, because you never know what will be the chain reaction of two parties collide and I approach everything differently depending on context.

It’s all about a gut feeling of what you want to do, like for the upcoming live show at Grefsenkollen, I’m doing this live Techno thing. I’ve always dabbled with Techno when I’m at home, but I’m definitely not a Techno artist even though I´ve released music in that genre as Altalab. I like to do it for fun and the first time I had tried to do it live last year, I was searching through Youtube videos, looking for tutorials on how to use Ableton.This was on a Thursday morning in Ibiza and I was playing that same Saturday in Oslo, taking all day Friday to teach myself how to do it.

There’s never any plan in what I do and I want people to go: “Fucking hell, we didn’t know you could do that!”. I’m chaotic, but that chaos is a force and that force and making mistakes are paramount to my creativity.

Amidst the chaos an order prevails and that philosophy extends from Rune’s music into his everyday. Becoming a Techno artist in a day; the lawsuit with Röyksopp that saw him come out on top somehow as they settled out of court; the urban legends of Rune and his adventures on trains in the Ukraine; it all features Rune on the other end with a beaming smile at the end, unperturbed by the events that lead him to this point.

We leave the soon to be demolished Fagerborg Hotel, making our way down the lonely high street, and Rune continues the entertain with his tomes of money woes, and having to learn the intricacies of internet banking (he started with it last year along with getting a credit card), all the while trying to sell me on the idea of Lillestrøm and the Urban sprawl it is set to become being only 10 minutes away from Oslo S by train.

Incredibly entertaining and very intriguing Rune Linbæk is a chaotic force you definitely do want to get swept up in. There’s never any posturing or falseness about his eccentricities and idiosyncrasies and whether kismet, divine intervention or luck, his methods in following the most enjoyable path possible has certainly paid its dividends.

His music however is no sheer luck and is the combination of influences talent and ideology coming together for Rune in the studio. And when he’s not making music, he’s living life to its fullest with a most enigmatic fervour. There’s no telling what or how Rune will proceed to the next chapter. But whether it’s the working on his next projects, a remix for Roxy Music or achieving a ten year pursuit of writing a book, it’s sure to be interesting.

I’ve been here a long time and I’m going to be here a long time…. and hopefully relevant.

Rune Linedbæk plays Grefsenkollen this Saturday alongside Vinny Villbass, Øyvind Morken, and Det Gode Selskab.
Catch the official afterparty for Grefsenkollen at Jæger on Sunday with Det Gode Selskab.

What we like – An Interview with Dimensions Soundsystem

Nestled on a small peninsula in the Adriatic sea, Dimensions Festival is a retreat for the sincere electronic/club/urban music fan, a true escape from the pressures of everyday living for any discerning music head. Sun, sea, location and culture combine for one of the most exciting features on the festival calendar… it reads like something of a travel brochure, doesn’t it? But it’s absolutely no exaggeration of what Dimensions offers for one weekend at the end of the festival season each year.

Since 2011 they’ve been bringing an eclectic array of music producers and DJs to Fort Punta Christo, Pula in Croatia to an open-minded international audience. They seem to be an effective tide mark from which to gauge the current musical milieu without falling for shallow fashionable incongruities. The artists on their roster are timeless purveyors of their craft and although a good portion are established, they make sure to include a healthy section of new artistic voices. ”People always discover new things” at Dimensions says lead booker and co-founder David Martin from a “very rainy London”, where he’s just finished putting the final touches to this year’s festival line-up. They’re still a couple of months away from Grace Jones opening the festival from a 2000 year-old amphitheatre, but it’s been “all systems go all year, all the time”, for David and the Dimensions team.

The seed for Dimensions was planted when David was invited over to Outlook festival and saw “the potential to do something unique in addition to Outlook”. Bringing Andy Lemay and Simon Scott on board, they laid a foundation for Dimensions on the the infrastructure of Outlook, expanding on the Dub, Reggae, Hip Hop and Grime genres of that festival to include House, Techno, Disco and everything in between from the less obvious corners of dance music. Since, there has been a natural flow through the musical identity of the two sister festivals, with even some cross pollination occurring between them as Dimensions book artists that didn’t quite fit the Outlook idiom. ”It just grew naturally from there” explains David over the phone, and the rest is a seven year history plotting some of the most unique festival experiences at an equally unique location.

A 19th century fort, replete with moat and beach, serves as the annual destination of some thousands of punters from abroad and as far away as Australia. There’s something incredibly exotic about the location and its enticing history. Overgrown with various fauna for most of the twentieth century, the fort and its grounds were only discovered quite recently and those first settlers maintain the fort all year round. They are a dedicated team of guardians who run a bar from the main building when they’re not playing host to the Dimensions/Outlook festival for an extensive portion of the summer. Always “well received” by the locals David and the team try to “contribute something” to the local infrastructure wherever they can, be it through promoting a local artist or even a just providing a utility. This year is the first year that the main building will run on its own power and as always it features a host of local talent from the region. “It’s really important for us to feel like we are supporting the scene”, says David. “It would feel really wrong to go over to Croatia to be an isolated thing, because there’s some incredible music out there.” This year also sees the inauguration of Dimensions recordings, a new label from the people behind the festival and with the first 12” slated for Croatian artist Cuisine Dub, there’s no doubt that David and Dimensions are true to their word.

The location and the local investment aside, Dimensions’ main draw each year as an award winning, internationally acclaimed festival is its booking strategy and that’s where David Martin and his team come in. David, an accomplished DJ and promoter from Leeds has been doing this for a “long, long time” and each year he manages to find that unique balance between established- and new artists/DJs. And what ties these artists together? “It’s just a kind of feeling you get from the artist really” explains David. “It’s not really forced and it comes quite naturally, so we manage to avoid fashion and trend.” Often bringing new voices to Dimensions, David also finds that many of them make a return to the festival’s bigger stages when they’ve become successful. Names like Ben UFO, Helena Hauff, Floating Points and Nina Kravitz are all returning superstars, not based on hype but on merit. David and his team never “rush into a booking like this is the next big thing”, but rather “look at the quality of what (each artist) is producing and performing” and at the core of their booking strategy is a beautiful simplicity: “it’s based on what we like.”

David finds what usually “connects the acts is a purity and even with the bigger names like Massive attack or Grace Jones” there’s a sense of “counterculture” running consistently through them. It’s not a conscious choice, but rather something David “observes in what (they) do”, and an ideology that’s driven by what they “love” and new discoveries. There’s no stylistic trait to any of it and their approach is eclectic, something they like to showcase when David, Andy and Simon get together behind the decks as Dimensions soundsystem.

“In terms of musical taste we’re all pretty broad between the three of us” suggests David and as Dimensions Soundsystem he Andy Lemay and Simon Scott like to really stretch their musical muscle, playing everything from Afro to Techno depending on the context. DJ’s first and foremost, the incredibly vast range of situations they’ll play “keeps you on your toes a bit as a DJ” says David. Dimensions Soundsystem “playing Rex with Floating Points is a completely different experience to playing Ampere in Belgium with Ben Klock” and they “don’t really change the way (they) do things going from a club to the festival” either. Going from the beach to the moat, playing before Dopplereffekt will be two completely different sets and reflects the extent to which their musical knowledge proffers. For their upcoming gig at Jæger for example David expects to bring a “really big bunch of records” with a broad reach, bringing a little of the eclectic spirit of Dimensions to Jæger’s crowd alongside Andy Lemay and Simon Scott

Dimensions soundsystem is an “opportunity to spread the word a little more” and alongside the newly established label Dimension recordings it’s consolidating the idea of Dimensions. “I think just having the soundsystem, gives a clearer identity for people” explains David, a distinctive identity akin to the discerning music heads behind Dimensions. For David Martin at least there’s no distinction between running the festival and his enjoyment of the music and although he covers a lot of ground each year because of his role, he admits, “that’s probably what I’ll do if I was there as a punter too”.

Natt & Dag and Jaeger presents Øya Natt at Jæger 2017

For one week in the year, Jæger pulls out all the stops, with things like budget and practical realities set aside to help celebrate one of the most exciting weeks in Oslo, and in fact Norway’s, musical calendar. As the world’s most profound musicians conspire on a hill in Tøyen during the day for Øya Festivalen, we’ll be prepping our two dance floors for Øya Natt, the official after party where our weekly residencies play host to a star studded international guestlist like no other and 2017 is no different. Today we are happy to announce our official Øya Natt listings which kick off on the 9th of August.

Wednesday 9 August
Untzdag & Antal

ANTAL (RUSH HOUR) | ØYVIND MORKEN (Moonlighting/Full Pupp/Hauketo)

Thursday 10 August
Retro & Young Turks Night with Talaboman

TALABOMAN (JOHN TALABOT & AXEL BOMAN, R&S) | YT DJS (Young Turks) | DJ NUHHH!

Friday 11 August
Frædag invites Vril and Tijana T

VRIL (live / DE) | TIJANA T (RS)| G-HA & OLANSKII | RLOC

Saturday 12 August
Nightflight Invites Molly

MOLLY(FR) | VIBEKE BRUFF| JAN SVERRE | MC KAMAN

Pistol Pete is in the House

The name Pistol Pete might bear associations with Basketball and a notorious gunslinger from the wild west, but in Sweden it’s a name associated with the sound of House. Inspired by a graffiti artist, Peter Eriksson took the name Pistol Pete when he made the move from Hip Hop to House and joined the dub Techno outfit Spektakulära System, his first foray into the world of electronic club music.

From the decks to studio, wasn’t much of a stretch from Eriksson, who had taken that knowledge from Hip Hop into the sample based world of House through an MPC 3000. His releases have been sparse but solid with EPs and 12”s on Lampuka Records, Woodsman & Lady Log and Svedjebruk, focussing on House, but incorporating elements from the broad expanse of electronic club music. His latest 12” sees him join forces Omar Santis in a funky jackin groove called Snowbar.

When he’s not working on his own music he’s also making music for Monochrome, soundtracking some of the best graffiti artists on their Youtube channel. A busy artist, producer and DJ, the name Pistol Pete today is synonymous with a true “underground” House aesthetic out of Sweden and before he joins Tellstrøm in our basement this weekend, we shot over some questions via email and ask him about his transition from Hip Hop to House, Spektakulära System and inspirations in the studio.

You came from the world of Hip Hop. Tell us a bit about earliest musical experiences and how Hip Hop brought you into production?

Well in the 90´s its was almost impossible to not get dragged into Hip Hop. I come from a small village up north in Sweden where you don’t really expect to have a Hip Hop culture, but we were a handful that were really into it. And it was kind of impossible to not connect with the people that were into it. So I started as a dj behind rappers during live shows and then evolved to playing records in clubs. This was around 98/99 ish. A few year later i bought a MPC 3000 and started to make beats.

When and how did you make the transition into electronic club music?

Around the year 2002 Hip Hop had changed its whole sound from boom bap to that jiggy sound, which I hated back then… but now kind of enjoy. Anyway that wasn’t anything I wanted to be a part of and the beats didn’t appeal to me. Around the same time I moved to a different city and met a lot of new people that showed me what they were into and I wanted to try that out as well. I got some gigs at Banken Bar and Brasserie and started buying House records instead of Hip Hop basically.

House is a pretty obvious direction to go into from Hip Hop, because the focus on sampling they share. What did you take from Hip Hop into House with you?

I see it as the same thing really. But yes the sampling part is of course a big part of it. I think that Hip Hop, House, Drum n Bass is the same thing basically. It’s all based on sampling some really great music, flip it and present it with your own touch to it. I started out making beats on a MPC3000 and I still use a MPC in the studio. And that’s usually how my session in the studio starts. Turn on the MPC and take it from there. Unfortunately I sold the 3000, but i still have all the floppys from it somewhere in the studio.

At about the same time you adopted Pistol Pete you joined/created Spektakulära System, which is dub Techno outfit, as far as I understand. What brought you all together and why has it mainly remained a live outfit?

Spektakulära System started out as an alias for Adam Craft but he involved me in it at an early point and we started to make music together. He was a big part in the transition from Hip Hop to electronic music. I was studying sound engineering at university at the time and we had some real fancy studios there and we invited some of our closest friends to jam there and it kind of evolved from there. Later on I moved to Stockholm and joined the studio that they rented there.

And it became kind of natural for us to make tracks together and we really enjoyed the jamming parts of it and I think that’s why it kind of remained as a live constellation. Me and Adam still share a studio, but a different one. And all of us have different constellations and projects. But maybe some day spekta will rise again!

Did you take up DJing at that time too, or had that been with you since Hip Hop?

Djing came first. I Started out with one 1210 and a really crappy belt driven turntable and a mixer that I bought at store that sells stereos for cars. And I think it lasted for a whole month before I destroyed all the faders.

You have quite a reserved musical output. Do you feel DJing should be extension of your work as a producer or are two completely distinguishable for you?

For me that is two different things. Djing to me is for the crowd and the people who want to have a good time at the club/bar. When I make music I do it mainly for myself and can do whatever I want to. But I also make music for commercials and clothing companies. And there is a graffiti series called Monochrome where I make almost all the music. And most of the music I do in the studio I use later on in my live sets. I don’t really want to make the same record twice either so I try quite a lot of different things in the studio and that takes time as well. I never send out demos to labels so maybe that’s why?

How would you describe your sound in the booth for the uninitiated?

I would say it’s based around House, but I always try to mix it up a bit, old stuff with new stuff. Different rhythms and moods. My attention span isn’t that good so I always look for something different than my last gig.

How does that relate to your productions do you think?

I always get really inspired the day after I DJ. And the first thing I’ll do in the morning is to start Ableton and try to capture some of the vibe from the night before.

Your last solo 12” came out via Svedjebruk. Can you tell us a bit about some of the ideas behind that release?

They guys at Svedjebruk heard me playing a live-set before Don Williams here in Stockholm. And they contacted me after that and said that they wanted to release some of the stuff that I had in my set. So “Montana” kind of started it and we took it from there.

This year you followed it up with collaborative work with Omar Santis. What was it like working with another artist and what do you think it brings out in your music?

Most of the time it’s better to work with someone. You get a different flow and don´t sit and tune a hi-hat or watch youtube for 2 hours. So that definitely helps. But if you don’t have the same vision about the track it can get quite complicated. But me and Omar come from the same Hip Hop background and both know when we have something good to keep going on. The downside is that we drink to much wine and have to correct everything the day after.

These releases followed quite quickly on the other while there’s a bigger gap between previous releases. What can we expect from you in the near future?

Omar and I have another track that’s going to be released later on this year and I’m working on a follow up to Stockholmska Ryggdunkarsällkapet. I have some plans with U.E.S and I’im gonna keep on doing music for spraydaily as well.

Can you play us out with a song?

An old acquaintance with Harvey Sutherland & Bermuda

Two years on from playing Jæger’s courtyard one sunny summer’s Wednesday evening, a lot has changed for Harvey Sutherland (aka Mike Katz). The project has expanded to a trio, featuring Tamil Rogeon on strings and Graeme Pogson on drums. They go by Harvey Sutherland & Bermuda today and have captivated audiences with their dynamic Disco/House hybrid live performances going from clubs to festivals the world over. They’ve managed to channel that energy on two records for Katz’ Clarity Recordings, a label which is the exclusive vehicle for Harvey Sutherland creations, marking yet another chapter in the extensive Harvey Sutherland project.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://clarityrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/expectations-crc-02"&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Expectations [CRC-02] by Harvey Sutherland and Bermuda&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

With Bermuda Katz has opened up a whole new dimension to the Harvey Sutherland project with a very human trait expounding on his own improvisations at the keys and relays an entire different energy to the club floor. With Rogeon’s processed string arrangements – which we first encountered in the recorded format on Harvey Sutherland 2015 hit Bermuda – and Pogson’s stoic four on the floor / syncopated hat rhythms, Mike Katz has found a vibrancy in Harvey Sutherland & Bermuda, that has eluded the project from the cold aesthetic of machines as a solo project. .

With an intense focus on an improvised form, and merging that grey area between a live performance and a DJ set, Harvey Sutherland & Bermuda have carved out a very succinct sound and show in the draconian world of electronic music, one that is winning audiences over to the stage without taking anything away from the club experience.

Before their performance at Jæger as part of a six week European tour, I catch up with Mike Katz, Tamil Rogeon and Graeme Pogson to grab a drink and talk about touring, the live show, the records and Jean-Luc Ponty. Mike, Tamil and Graeme are gracious enough to accommodate me on a rare free day, and we carry on from where we left off two years ago, when Mike last played at Jæger as Harvey Sutherland and our last interview together.

Two years ago you were in Oslo all alone and now you’re back, with a band. Tell us a bit about the ideas behind the band, Bermuda.

Mike Katz: Yeah, I just got a bit tired of travelling on my own, tired of playing club music in that form so I thought I’d do this thing for awhile. I’ve always wanted to put this kind of vibe together. We got a couple of interesting bookings at home, which allowed me to expand the project into a stage show. Tamil and I had been working on stuff for a while before then at least.

That’s right Tamil had been on the track from which the band’s name was taken, Bermuda.

Tamil Rogeon: Yeah, I did a few sessions on that and then we did a couple of gigs where we’d just dip our toes in the water with a few club shows, to see if it worked, and it did, and then we got a drummer.

Yes, Graeme of course. How did you get onboard with this project?

Graeme Pogson: I’ve got another band and we kind of worked in the same circles. I had met Mike a few times.

Mike: We were on a lot of line-ups together.

Graeme: I got a twitter message the one day and I was stoked because it was a request from Mike to play at Meredith, a big stage at a festival with 12000 people and my band was booked to play there anyway. I had gone to see Mike and Tamil do a few shows together before that, and it all just kind of happened organically.

Tamil you come from completely different world that these guys with a film and classical music background. How did you arrive at electronic music?

Tamil: I studied Jazz, and I started doing film scores and music production, which got me interested in music technology. Jazz and technology then naturally came together. I did a few records under the Raah Project, which is a large scale orchestral pop remix project, so I’ve always been interested in that merger between modern production and orchestras from my background as a violin player.

Whenever I see you perform as Bermuda Tamil, I notice that you also do a lot in the electronic realm. What exactly is the purpose of that secondary process?

Tamil: Yes, I grab samples and loops and just manipulate them, which is far more in line with the aesthetic. It was always our idea to do that, and Mike and I spoke at length about that in the beginning. If I played the same thing over and over again, that’s not really the aesthetic of electronic music. I can only evolve it a little when I play, but it doesn’t give me much flexibility. I can play with it more in the electronic realm instead of just having to be locked into the same thing repeatedly.

Mike, what do you believe this adds to your show that might not have been there before as a solo live performer?

Mike: It’s just a completely different dynamic. The solo show was very club focussed, and I always treated it more like a DJ set in the way I interacted with the crowd, so the improvisation and the movement of the set was very pre-determined by the audience. It still exists in what we do in terms of the band, which is very flexible and we treat it like a dance floor, but I think the biggest difference now is that it’s also an interaction between people on stage. It’s another level enjoyment for the audience, but it’s also another level of enjoyment for us, because the more we play, the tighter we get.

We know that Disco goes down well here in Norway and people here still like to go out and see bands, but is this something that you find common in Melbourne.

Mike: That is the impetus for the idea of this crossover between the club and the band. In Melbourne, a lot of the venues are multi-purpose and they’ll do a band show in the same space as a club night. There’s a lot more space for crossover and there’s a lot more acceptance for that. It just fits, and that kind of cross-pollination between the scenes is a real mark of Melbourne.

Improvisation and the live show was an integral part to Harvey Sutherland before Bermuda too. How has it changed with the band?

Mike: It’s more subtle. I’m not crafting as much new material on the fly as I am with this project. It’s more about taking what we’ve been doing and playing with arrangements and some new things might come of it, but not quite like me just looping up a new idea.

Talking about new ideas, there have been two EPs that came from this project. Why make the move to the recorded format at all, why not just keep it a live show?

Mike: It gave more of an effect to what we were doing as a group. The recording processes for those records was completely different to how I had done my previous records.

Tamil: It makes sense to tour a record that reflects what the ensemble is.

Mike: Yes, and I wanted to push this as the project, and having a record with our name on it, helps. I wanted to have a different feel to what I was doing and stepping away from House music as this strict electronic music.

Graeme: It might not make sense to (Mike), but maybe his taste in music is changing too, and he’s not listening to that much electronic music anymore. Whenever I hear him listening to music, it’s always Jazz.

Were the records completely improvised in the studio?

Mike: No they came out of jam sessions. I had a few ideas before we had come together and we had a really good three day session of recording drums and the rhythm bits, and then I kind of took it away, pieced it together, and took back to the guys. We revised it, and added the strings later on.

Tamil: We did some string writing together, actually.

Mike: It wasn’t really recorded in a classic fashion, it was still very much recorded as an electronic music recording.

Is the live show fixed around specific songs from these records?

Mike: Yes, It’s the material we’ve done, it’s a couple of old tunes, which we interpret and a few open ideas. We have live arrangements that are not studio versions which is true to the spirit of the project.

Graeme: There are parts in the live set that are not on the records. We’ll make the song by improvising, but then it will be turned into a form thing.

Mike: The live forms are far more consolidated than the records are.

For you Graeme and Tamil who come from other, more organic musical worlds, do you feel constricted at all by the ideas of House music?

Graeme: I don’t personally, because I love playing repetitive music. When I play, I only use a kick/hat and cymbal arrangement. I never really studied much Jazz and I’ve always loved playing repetitive grooves. For me it’s ideal, because it’s all four on the floor, so I can embellish a little bit, but there’s nothing I hate more than having to do a drum solo. (Laughs) Yeah that’s one of my fears in life, that and playing brushes.

Tamil: For me, there’s a couple of times I get to play a Jazz solo, which is great. I’m a firm believer in that all music is about improvising. In Classical music the way you turn or shape a phrase is an entire world, and it’s the same while playing with Mike. The scope might be a little bit narrower but you’re still improvising.

Do you think that going on tour has an effect on how you work together, being in such close quarters all the time, and becoming more of a unit, than three individual musicians?

Mike: Yeah you learn a lot more of each other. (Laughs)

Tamil: I learnt that Graeme and I both love Jazz rock fusion and that we’ve been sleeping on it for a long time. (All laugh)

Graeme: I found myself being drawn to Jean Luc Ponty all of a sudden and I don’t know why that is.

Do you think that working so closely together, getting to know each other, and consolidating these ideas in the live context, might affect which direction you go in your next record?

Mike: I think any record I do will have a strong live show behind it, whether it’s with these guys, or some other project or some expanded idea of Bermuda.

So no Jazz fusion project.

Tamil: Not if we want to keep touring. (Laughs)

Mike: I want to stick to groove music, whether it’s in the House idiom or something else that I don’t really know at this point. There are a few directions I could go in.

How about you, Tamil and Graeme, how far do you see Harvey Sutherland & Bermuda taking you?

Graeme: I’m involved in a few other projects and last year was my first tour in Europe, so I’m really stoked about doing it again a year on. Mike and I have a studio together and whatever happens with Harvey Sutherland, I feel that we created a strong musical relationship. I feel that we’ll keep working together in any capacity. Judging by the reactions of people, we’re all amazed. There are no lyrics to this stuff, but people are singing along to the melodies in the crowd, and they seem to be enjoying this kind of music at the moment.

Tamil: It’s a really good moment. It’s weird when everything clicks and that click is on a number of levels with Harvey Sutherland and Bermuda: How much people buzz off what we do and how much we buzz off what we do. There’s an “x” factor and at the moment it’s got a lot of momentum and no-one can really define it.

The last time we actually interviewed you Mike, we asked you what was the next step, and your answer was to record some drums in a dry room. Now that you’ve done that, what’s next?

Mike: It’s going to be a six person female choir… I know that much.

An Intense Obsession with Johanna Knutsson

Back in 2008 Johanna Knutsson made a conscious decision to leave an established profession behind to follow what she thought would be a mere temporary indulgence.Taking a year sabbatical from a successful career as a hairstylist at the age of twenty four, she left her home town and made the journey due south to Berlin. She had fallen in love with the city through the sound of electronic music earlier that year, and felt that she simply had to immerse herself in the music and the culture, to see if it could lead anywhere. Nine years on and she is one of Sweden’s most distinguished DJ exports, runs two successful labels and has made her own contributions to the dance floor both as a solo artist and as part of the eponymous and obvious Johanna Knutsson & Hans Berg.

Spending her time between DJing every weekend, the studio, and the office, Johanna Knutsson has established an earnest career out of what she thought would be little more than an inconsequential “hobby”. Still, she manages to find some time in her very full schedule on a Monday to field some questions from us, preceding her appearance at Into the Episode (Jæger). We catch her while she’s “unpacking (her) record bag” and dealing with the administrative side of her labels UFO Station (which she runs with Hans Berg) and Zodiac (which she runs with Luca Lozano). It’s early for a Monday following a weekend of gigs for the DJ, and Johanna says: “Saturday to Sunday hasn’t had an effect on me till this morning”, without audibly conveying any sense of it.

Nine years might not seem a long time in the career of a DJ considering the lifetime of musical knowledge it requires today, but in that time Johanna Knutsson has established herself as a formidable DJ, bringing an idiosyncratic sound to the booth through the more eccentric corners of the dance floor. Playing on the dichotomy between the functional and the unconventional Johanna’s sets are bold and adventurous, but also engaging. There’s a kind of spacey theme to her style in the booth, hovering around the twilight zone of House and Techno, drawing the listener in through the peculiar and persuading the body toward the intuitive. Her early solo productions through Luca Lozano’s Klasse recordings were tentative steps towards the same sonic proportions, but it would be alongside Hans Berg that she was able to realise them completely. Their music epitomises the UFO station recordings name as music made to reach the outer regions of the Techno and House universe.

In the expanse of this career, Johanna Knutsson has established herself as an acclaimed figure in the DJ and electronic music community in Berlin, holding her own amongst her more established peers. She took to DJing instinctively and has made a lasting impression wherever she’s gone, both in the booth and in the record bags of other DJs. We take up her story in the midst of this life-altering decision, where everything is still new and fresh…

When and how did you make the move from Mälmo to Berlin to embark on a career in Djing.

It was pretty late in life. I was about twenty four before I got in contact with this type of electronic music. When I found it I realised I’d found what I’d been missing musically. It became an incredibly intense obsession, and that’s why I moved to Berlin, to get closer to the music.

Usually I find new hobbies or interest and I really get into them for a few months and then something else comes along, but this is the only interest that stayed with me, because you couldn’t possibly learn it that quickly.

Was there a previous obsession in terms of playing an instrument or a genre of music?

No, not really. I’ve always been into music in one form or another and went through a lot of genres in my life, mostly hovering around Rock, especially seventies stoner Rock, which doesn’t have any relationship to what I’m listening to now. (Laughs) I still enjoy it, but there was no smooth transition into Techno. When I got in touch with this new music, I realised I couldn’t be in Sweden, because I was working seven days a week at my previous job. I decided then that if I want to do something new I might as well get started. I took a sabbatical year from my job as a hairdresser to go and live somewhere else for a year… and that turned into nine years.

At what point did you know that DJing was what you wanted to do for the rest of your life?

Somewhere I still have this plan that when everything stops working out, I can still do this hairdressing gig, so I keep that in the back of my mind. But I did know from the beginning, that this is what I wanted to do. When I signed my first rental contract, I thought: “why would I go back where everything is four times more expensive”. It felt like everything was falling into place.

As a DJ that’s only been involved in electronic music for a relatively short period of time (in terms of the extensive history of this music), do you find yourself constantly having to catalogue the history of it while going forward too?

Yes, and I think that’s what keeps it interesting. The first year when I started building my record collection, going to record stores, and finding new music and going out dancing to hear DJs, that was the most interesting time for me. Everything was so new, and you have so much passion and so much energy. After that first year I realised I had put so much time and effort into this and I’ve only just scratched the surface. It’s so overwhelming and I had to take a step back and tell myself:” I don’t need to figure everything out right now”. It’s much more interesting now, when I find that one really cool track on a record in a sales bin with three other tracks that are not anything special.

We’re talking about nine years ago to this point. DJing has this timelessness to it, but you probably have to keep on top of it constantly.

I know there’s so much new stuff coming out all the time, and it’s really hard to grasp. You can get lost in what other people are doing and trends, because you try to adapt, involuntarily. I really like going out dancing, but I’m very unaware of who’s super popular right now.

And I buy a lot of old music, so I feel that I often miss out on trends. For me, it might be good thing, because something might be trendy that you love, but if that phase is over will you stop loving your music then?

How do you usually stumble across tracks. Is it a artist, a label, or just a cover?

I’m not sure if this is something good to go public with, but I have such a bad memory, so I have a really hard time to recall artist names or labels or histories. My partner for instance could relay an entire history of a release just by looking at it, while I’ll go: “I just picked it up because the cover looked cool”. So I often have to listen to a lot of crap music, but sometimes I’ll stumble across something other people might not think to look at.

You got into production pretty early on too, and I read in another interview, it was because you were advised to do so. I also read that you felt more comfortable working with a production partner Hans Berg, later on. What is your relationship with those first two releases?

Those first releases were so early, at a time I couldn’t really express what I wanted it to sound like. It was impossible for me to get it to sound like it was in my head, because I just didn’t know how. Hans has a much wider knowledge of production, because this has been a career for him all along. So it’s a real advantage to be working with him, because we can create much faster together, to get to the end result.

So looking back on those first two releases, knowing what you know now, would you still release them?

I know a lot of people enjoyed them and there was a good reception, so I don’t regret making them, but I wouldn’t do it again, no. That’s also because I’ve changed musically quite a lot.

Do you find your productions need to be an extension as your sound as a DJ?

That’s how it feels now, yes. I feel that the productions we put out now is much more similar to the sound both Hans and I have when we perform. It’s also similar to the music I buy. I don’t have any trouble playing my own tracks now, and I don’t think I ever played those first releases.

So for me personally, yes, I feel like it should be an extension of what I play. It doesn’t have to be like that though, because I’m starting a new ambient solo project, and unless I’m booked for an ambient set I wouldn’t play any of those tracks.

Ambient music really? It definitely feels like the genre is coming into prominence again, at least in the recorded format. Do you think it’s a trend?

I’ve noticed, or read about it too, but I’ve bought ambient music since the beginning, because they were just beautiful pieces of music. Having a project of my own, was more of an idea, after I made a mixtape of ambient music. I’ve done radio shows too focussing on only ambient music. Perhaps it’s an age thing. I feel it’s very comforting to listen to electronic music when it’s not dance music as well.

Yes, we can’t be listening to pounding kicks all the time.

I would be so annoyed. (Laughs)

Yeah me too. That’s why I miss the chill-out room in clubs.

Exactly, what happened to those? Why is that not cool anymore? I feel like I wouldn’t go home a lot of the times, if there were a chill-out room. Maybe you find yourself in a situation where you didn’t want to go home, but you also couldn’t be in the club anymore, then you could hang out in the chill-out room, and find some new energy and then go back.

Back to the main room though, and specifically your DJ sets. I would describe them as spacey for lack of better simile. How would you describe them?

I always find it very hard to describe what my sound is because I don’t know myself. It follows my mood, but spacey is a good description. I’ve said this before, and this is not to offend anybody, but when I’m out dancing and it gets too generic for me it tends to lose me. I want to be like: “what’s the hell is this!”. That’s what I want a set to be, I want it to not make sense. It doesn’t always have to be fun, but it’s good if it’s strange or weird. It’s cool to space out, but the music shouldn’t just be about dancing, it should surprise and make you feel something.

You split your time between DJing producing and two labels UFO station and Zodiac and I wanted to ask you a bit about Zodiac, because it’s an interesting concept. There’s six out and you’re definitely cutting it off at twelve, representing each sign of the Zodiac. Is that right?

Number seven is coming now, but yes, we’ll definitely cut it off at twelve, then we’ll probably start a new project.

Do you have the other six artists lined up, or do you take it like it comes?

We take it as it comes. There’s no stress with this label, we’ve had one to two releases per year. For the last release there’s gonna be a bit of a secret, but it will be fun.

Do you find running a label has any sort of correlation to being a DJ today?

I see it almost as a business card. Running a label is way to present yourself in a more professional way, unlike a performer. It’s also a way we can give something back to the artists that we play out. We release tracks from artists that we enjoy; that’s how we find them. It’s music that we would play ourselves.

Do you think that having a label, is the same as being a producer, something you need as an extra piece of the puzzle to sell yourself as a DJ?

Sometimes when everything is going well I really love it, but sometimes stuff doesn’t go as planned and then I wish i was just DJing. When someone writes me a strongly worded email, I take it really personally, then it’s a bit boring having to deal with these things. If I knew I could be DJing without producing or running labels then I would’ve just stuck to Djing. Now that it’s gone this far it also brings a lot of joy. I’ve grown a lot doing this.

I think that’s an excellent place to leave it. Thank you Johanna. I’ll let you get back to the labels now and unpacking your record bag. We look forward to having you here.

I’m really looking forward to it. So many of my friends have played there and I’ve heard so many good things, see you on Friday.

How you living Ivan Ave

In the last couple of years there’s been a voice in Norwegian Hip-Hop that has become instantly recognisable for its honesty and ability to take the mundane of everyday living and whip it into an engaging narrative, tackling everything from a day in the sun to the underlying socio-political landscape that lies beyond it. It’s a voice that has a very significant presence in the Mutual Intentions choir, appearing on records from Fredfades and Yogisoul in the past year as well as producing a solo effort in the form of Helping Hands. That voice is Ivan Ave (Eivind Øygarden) and as well as featuring on a few records in 2016 and playing live shows and DJ sets under the Mutual Intentions banner, he’s about to drop his second LP, Every Eye which gave us the pretense to ask the artist to coffee and delve into the identity that informs the music.

The first single from the album “Young Eye” was released recently as another Mutual Intentions concerted effort, replete with a quirky video made by members of the crew. With lyrics that fall somewhere in the abstract void of meaning between seeing something with a fresh outlook and the innocence of adolescence, Ivan sculps a very universal plot while his slothful vocal hook lures you into a dreamy soliloquy.

His distinct voice, an amalgamation of nineties soulful US Hip-Hop, sitting somewhere in the middle between Mos Def and a Tribe Called Quest, flits perfectly between the Jazz instrumentation and gritty MPC beats to create something acknowledging the history of the genre while extending it into the contemporary as something unique and new. There’s an unforced Americanism to his accent that even sticks out during conversation – something I learn might have cemented itself when a young Eivind lived in the US for some time – but it’s only a small part of what informs the artist’s sound however, and it’s something I hope to uncover more when we sit down to talk about his music.

He’s dressed in casual training garb, not in the Bogstadveien workout-chic style, but rather as functional accessory. He’s a part time phys-ed teacher and meets me between that job and a squash session, where I’m eager to find out how a kid from Vinje, Telemark came to Hip Hop and why exactly the current environment for the genre and its extensions in Oslo and Norway is such an inspiring scene.

Why do you think Norwegian Hip-Hop and the scene is so strong today?

I don’t know if I would I agree with that.

It seems that there is a lot going on though and it’s all very good, from the Mutual Intentions crew’s releases, including your own, Rude lead and Adept’s recent release, Nosizwe’s album…

There’s a lot of good people doing their thing. I feel like it’s pretty divided by factions that are super different and almost not even in the same scene or genre. It’s not something I would express myself, that Norwegian Hip-Hop is doing really well. I rarely even think about Norwegian Hip-Hop as a genre anymore, I think it’s just become all these different things that I can’t explain as a scene or a culture anymore.

There are obvious exceptions however with Mutual Intentions particularly creating a little scene around the group?

Yeah.

Do you feel isolated?

Not so much isolated, but more like comfortable in a corner, over here. There’s too much noise to really pay attention to all these different factions. We are definitely very comfortable doing this little thing that we’re doing and trying to build on that. I’m not good at staying up to date on new music and especially local new music, because that’s never really been a source for me. I’m KIND OF a bad patriot. I tend to seek out stuff regardless of where it’s from or how available it is.

So when you were growing up and listening to Hip-Hop there wasn’t much of a Norwegian influence?

Well back then there was more of a central scene and there were a lot more common denominators.

Can you give me some examples?

Because Hip-Hop hadn’t evolved yet into being so many different things, that meant that even if some dude here was west coast inspired and somebody else was east coast inspired they still somehow felt part of the same sound and the same vibe. Whereas now the sounds are so vastly different even within the Urban category. Growing up, there were Tungtvann and the whole Tommy Tee crew, there were definitely a lot of acts that inspired me, but then I found all this other music through Hip Hop, like Jazz and Soul. Gradually I became a music head more than just a Hip Hop head.

What was your entry into Hip Hop?

It was through very select CDs that my sister or my friends would have. Discovering music in the late nineties, especially if you didn’t live in a big city, was very random. I moved to Sandnes in Rogaland when I was ten and there was a little bit of a skate scene and a graffiti scene, some kids were interested in Rap. Moving there and going to Stavanger a lot was kind of an entry way into Hip Hop for me. But it was always there, even if it was just the two or three CDs that were in my village.

When did you realise this was something that you wanted to do seriously?

I didn’t really decide to do it for real until like 6 years ago when I was 21, but I did perform at UKM when I was 17 with my friend Pedro. I had this wish to be in the music, so I wrote his verse and my own verse to put that performance together, that’s how bad I wanted it. I guess from my late teens I felt like rap was just the coolest thing you could do. It wasn’t until I moved to Oslo that I really started pursuing it.

Did you have a natural affinity to lyricism, or is it something that you really had to cultivate?

I think the natural knack for wordplay and painting pictures was always there, but like any writer, there’s a lot of years that go into figuring out what is corny and what is stupid and what resonates with people, and what’s gonna resonate in five years with people. It’s definitely been a long process and I don’t feel like I’m half way there even.

What sort of people inspire you today?

Fredrik Høyer, a slam poet. He’s my current source of inspiration, a local act that I really look up to. There are some older guys, MCs and Hip Hop poets, but I think trying to emulate that is just a dead end, so I try to find inspiration from all types of lyricism. Robert Wyatt from the early soft machine years is one of my favourite lyricists. I get a kick out of writers who are able to create an atmosphere through words, instead of stating “this is this and that’s that” – a lot of rap is concrete like that which is cool and that’s why I fell in love with it – but as you get older you start looking for new ways to use that tool. That’s where I’m at right now.

Does it start with lyrics or with a beat?

It always starts with the beat, although I might have a few bars lying around. I’ll get a beat and if that beat really pulls stuff out of me, that’s really when a song starts to take shape.

Since you’re a DJ, and you have this entire music knowledge of Jazz and Soul behind it, do you make your own beats too?

I just dabble with production, but I’m trying to get more into it and maybe produce more in the future. I think I’ll have one beat on the next record, but the problem is that I just have too many friends that are so good at making beats, and I don’t want to rap over something that’s almost as good as what they make.

Fredfades being a good example of that. What I also find with the MUTUAL INTENTIONS sound, if you can call it that, is that there is this sinuous relationship between the music and the vocal.

I’m glad it sounds like that, but there’s rarely any dialog about how a certain beat should be used. Fred makes a bunch of beats and I pick one and write to it. It’s very free like that.

Maybe it’s just the relationship you have with each other.

All these shared references, interests and tastes, I think that’s why it works so well.

Talking about references, American Hip-Hop has this whole urban ghetto environment from where it gets all its references and Norway seems like a whole world away. What exactly are your references?

I try to keep it very honest and close to home, other than my choice of language. If you can manage to be yourself somehow through your music, rap or otherwise, there’s gonna be some universal truth to it, and people from all walks of life and backgrounds would be able to relate to it. It’s important to me that I’m not some Norwegian dude that’s trying to rap like he is from the Bronx or the south side of Chicago. I just try to be honest when I write.

And you’ve got the new album about to hit the shelves, a follow up to helping hands. Can you tell us a bit about the themes behind the album?

It’s called Every Eye, and the last record was Helping Hands, so I’m very interested in the intersection between our physical selves and our lives in all these less concrete facets, like relationships and political structures. For this album I’m using the eye and the “I” as a starting point. I think there’s something about using a very concrete thing in talking about higher concepts. Like using a hole in a sock to talk about a black hole in the universe, that type of juxtaposition usually makes shit easier for me to comprehend.

Do you rely much on humour in your writing?

I guess that’s a question for my listeners. I rarely try consciously to be funny in my songs, but sometimes life is just fucked-up and funny. There might be moments where we can both laugh, but I’m not trying to be funny in a battle rap way.

Why have you decided to express yourself in English exactly?

I think first and foremost that I learnt about rap through American rap and I’m lucky to have lived in the US for a while. I also watched stupid amounts of TV as a child, and I’ve always had an interest in the English language. In starting to pursue this idea of being an artist, I didn’t even consider confining myself to Norway, because that would just defeat the purpose of the type of music I wanted to make. This particular style of Hip Hop has a small following here, so it only really makes sense for me to travel outside of Norway.

When you say this particular style of Hip Hop, how would you define it?

Oh Shit, I got myself into trouble now. (Laughs) I never have a good answer for that. Hopefully it’s because I deal with my songs on a song to song basis, and I follow my ears, I try to keep it non-political in terms of what is Hip Hop and what isn’t; what’s a trendy style of production, and what isn’t. I try to keep that at arms length, ‘cause I need to be in a zone where I just listen and write. I would say my style of Hip-Hop is pretty free, but I know a lot of people that follow current commercial Rap, might call it nineties-inspired or jazzy hip-hop. There’s a lot of terms you could throw at it, but I don’t have an answer yet. This next album is going to be eclectic.

What sort of references do you have as being influences to your style?

Stones Throw, early Rhymesayers, all of the New York and Philly legends from the nineties. I really fell in love with it through the Roots, De La Soul, the whole Native Tongues movement and the Soulquarians. It’s kind of a standard answer for any person that does music in this lane, whether it be Rap, R&B or Soul. Seems like we’re just never gonna be able to answer anything but Dilla. But if that’s your answer, that’s what brought you into it, I think it’s because those guys had so much other music in their own music. sounds, grooves and tonality from the sixties, seventies and eighties. It feels like a richer format than a lot of other styles of Hip Hop, which is very confined.

Yeah it feels like Hip Hop today is far less digging through the past through samples than it was at the time of Dilla.

There’s actually gonna be no samples in my new album, but it’s still gonna be based in the musicality of samples. It’s not gonna sound too different, but as an idea it’s there to challenge me and make sure that this album has its own vibe. The idea was to stay away from samples to make sure I don’t make the same album twice, but it also helps you sleep at night, because you are not too worried about getting sued.

When you are looking for samples and a sonic aesthetic that they might represent through the records of others, where do you usually dig?

I’m fortunate right now, where I’m in a position to reach out to other producers. That’s usually where I start; this dude is doing something that I think would be good for my next record, let’s talk and see where it goes.

Is it still a record digging thing for you?

Yes, I still go digging, and I might even find a sample and take it to one of my Jazz friends and he might interpret it, and then we sample our own instruments. It’s just a way to always stay inspired, so digging is definitely still part of my process of making music, but not as straightforward as earlier.

You mention politics earlier and I’m wondering how much of that you tend to reference in your music directly and how that informs your lyrics just a social reference coming through?

I think for the most part it’s the latter, but for this next album it’s gonna seep in even further, maybe even get more of a centre stage focus.

Are you very conscious of these things going on around you.

I think I have the same cognitive dissonance that we all have. You look at the world and you go “OK, that’s all fucked up”, but you have to keep living your life, you have to function as a human being. So I read the sport news instead of another article about the war in Syria. We all need those breaks, also I don’t want my music to be a purist political activist thing. Forcing that into my diary-like music, I wouldn’t be true to myself. But I also feel that with gaining a platform, it would be a waste to not speak on some of those issues, that we seem to ignore most of the time.

* Catch Ivan Ave with the rest of the Mutual Intentions crew for Musikkfest 2017.

Following instincts with Renaat Vandepapeliere and R&S

Renaat Vandepapeliere cuts quite a sophisticated figure. A demure background featuring a white wall with a couple of ornamental shelves frames a thick grey sculpted mop of hair; round tortoiseshell spectacles and a simple crisp white T-shirt. His face and frame suggests a much younger man than his sixty years should imply, and something about Renaat’s demeanor and surroundings insinuates a comfortable life, not free of worry exactly, but at least not perturbed by it. It’s an image without much context, a blank canvas devoid of any meaning or purpose with no real indication of the orator’s life beyond this point, except for the Ferrari memorabilia adorning the ornamental shelves behind him, the prancing horse alluding to Renaat’s most significant contribution to the world, the record label R&S.

In conversation Renaat is pragmatic, and the Belgian constructs poignant sentences out of simple language in perfect English, doing away with the superfluous and allegorical for an unbridled honesty. There’s an instinctive belief in everything Renaat says, and even when he’s being critical there’s no sense of vindictiveness or posturing with the DJ and label owner merely talking from experience, practical knowledge, and the wise disposition of living the thing.

Renaat Vandepapeliere is of course the “R” in R&S, a label which has over the course of three decades established a reputation for forward thinking electronica “in order to dance” (as their motto implies), and was responsible for some of the most iconic Techno, Ambient and Electronica releases over their expansive career. Featuring an incredible list of artists, including Joey Beltram, Aphex Twin, Mental Overdrive, CJ Boland, Biosphere, Model 500 and more recently Blawan, Paula Temple and Talaboman, R&S is a label whose reputation precedes it. Today its prancing horse emblem on a backdrop of grey and blue, bring up associations with Techno in the nineties and beyond, but for Renaat and Sabine Maes, the “S” in R&S and Renaat’s partner both in business and in life, the concept behind the label has never quite been that concrete.

“Still to this day there is no idea behind the label” opines Renaat, “it’s always travelling”. It started life in Ghent in 1984 as a direct response to the “awful” covers of American imports saturating the Belgian record stores. Renaat, working in one of these stores at the the time “didn’t feel so great about” playing a hand in this market and said of the situation at the time: “Respect the artist. License it in, and let’s have the original track”, he explains in a 2009 interview with Clash Magazine. That sentiment planted the seed for R&S, while the new sound of New Beat offered Renaat and Sabine the unique chance to act on their impulses. At the time he started the label his “youth was pretty much over”, but the eclecticism and progressive musical tastes of an adolescent youth raised on everything from Classical Music to Jazz and Led Zeppelin would hone Renaat’s ears for a new electronic sound and he began “looking for music with that same quality to build a label around”. As New Beat laid the foundation a new sound out of Detroit would emerge and the progressive label couldn’t escape its magnetism, “The first track that really grabbed my attention is ‘It Is What It Is’, by Derrick May”, remembers Renaat, a track that would pull the label into a direction that would become its most recognisable commodity, Techno.

“When that came it was not that obvious” says Renaat of Techno’s origins. “It was a shock, it was quite fresh and I felt this is what I had to do, look for cutting edge electronica.” Joey Beltram’s Energy Flash in 1990 would lead the charge for R&S and this new cutting edge electronic sound known as Techno in Europe, and propel the label to notoriety during a decade where an experimental aptitude and new, ‘affordable’ technologies created a formidable hotbed of creativity. “It was small, it was new, it was not on the radio” says Renaat of Techno’s appeal at the time, and R&S was perfectly poised to create some of the most memorable musical experiences of that era. Aphex Twin and his Selected Ambient works; CJ Bolland’s Ravesignal series; Jaydee’s Plastic Dream; Mental Overdrive’s 12000AD and The Love EP, Biosphere’s Patashnik and Microgravity on the ambient Apollo imprint; Model 500’s Deep Space; and the list just goes on for 53 pages on Discogs. Sifting through R&S’ back catalogue is like staring into the sun of electronic music history, and with a legacy like that you’d expect an over inflated ego to match its gaseous glow, but none such thing exists with Renaat. He’s a humble figure, and when I mention a recent interview with Mental Overdrive and the importance Per Martinsen placed on Renaat’s sage guidance through the start of the Norwegian producer’s career, the label owner is quick to dismiss this. “Everybody did what he wanted”, insists Renaat, but they did that around the community Renaat and Sabine inadvertently had created when they built the R&S studio, a first for its kind. “I was the first to build a studio”, remarks Renaat, “ We went to bank, put ourselves in serious debt and we were just having fun.”

Renaat is not a nostalgic person, and for him it has always been “about today and tomorrow” when it comes to R&S. In his very direct and matter-of-fact way he adds; “I don’t piss on it, because there is no future without a past”, but I get the sense a revisionist kind of story-telling history of R&S holds absolutely no appeal for Renaat who’s he’s very much invested in a musical present and future. “It was always about the love for the music” says Renaat and that love has always tied into to need to “keep it interesting for myself, challenge myself” and “follow instincts”. Those instincts might have produced some of the most memorable Techno moments of the 1990’s, but it was also instinct that led to R&S into what at the time seemed a permanent hiatus, in 2000. Citing a disillusion with the industry and a banal repetition creeping into electronic dance music, Renaat closed down R&S and a left a very great void in electronic music for nine years before returning to the business in 2009.

Renaat’s ear remained close to the ground throughout however, and after an extended hiatus R&S would return in 2009, picking things up where it left off, looking for the future of electronic music. It was dubstep and the music of “Burial and Mala” as “a unique mutation in electronic music” that Renaat was eager “to be a part of” again and brought R&S out of retirement. This new music, represented something “fresh and new” tying in with the R&S legacy, and at the same time it offered R&S the freedom to explore music beyond the categories of Techno it had been pigeonholed with. “Variety was always the dream” and although R&S had “tried this in the nineties” with groups like Boom Boom Satellite, and their unique brand of “punk Jazz electronica”, the label was never quite “in a position then to have that freedom”.

Acts like Vondel Park, Lone, Tessela, Paula Temple, Blawan, Egyptian Hip Hop and more recently Talaboman, called in a new era for the label, where R&S could spread those wings that might have been clipped by public opinion and the people that considered them a Techno label, and little more. R&S’ second life would not be as stringently defined by prevalent attitudes as before and an eclectic approach followed where Renaat could easily his “pick highlights, travelling through music”, bolstered by a pragmatic flair where he felt “old enough” to do what he wanted. “I just said I’m going back and I’m doing it”, explains Renaat in a resolute tone, “I really don’t care if we sell or don’t sell.” At a time when “financially it doesn’t make sense to run a label” and “it’s stupid to run a business”, Renaat is not concerned about the logistical practicality of the label, preferring today a complete uncompromising personal approach to running the label. “I’m a music fan, it’s my food, it’s my air it’s my passion” he exclaims. “I cannot do without it. This is what I do, I couldn’t do anything else.”

Leaving the daily business of the label up to a London office where Renaat and Sabine can be free of the daily constraints of running a firm, Renaat has the luxury of space to think freely with not “too many influences” coming from the office. He is still the last word, and his A&R duties are always at “2000%”. Much of this portion happens at a practical level for Renaat, who is “spending a lot of time in clubs listening”, something that has always been there, but more so today as he’s taken up the DJ baton again after a long absence from the booth. Renaat had “stopped playing when R&S started because for me it was principle that the artist comes first”. But “now that R&S is established the old man can go out again” he says with a taut smile. In that context, much like the label, he likes to “push the limits, play as eclectic as I can” without being “pretentious” about it. He realises “people are the most important thing there and they need to have a good time”, but at the same time there’s no sense of compromising for Renaat. His records are “totally unorganized” and he prefers extended sets where he is able to say a lot more with the music than a two hour set could ever afford. “It’s you putting yourself out there naked”, he explains “not afraid of making mistakes.In two hour sets there’s nothing I can do. I can just say hello, give me two vodkas and then goodbye.”

Through his sets Renaat intends to have a “conversation with the crowd”, a conversation that stretches back to R&S and informs the label again. He wants R&S to remain approachable, especially for a “younger generation” where he can “get a lot of information back from them”, which all invariably filters back into the label. They might have a few questions for the elder statesman of electronic music, but Renaat always has more questions. “I’m much more interested in them, than telling my story”, says Renaat. Obsessively looking for that next thing to “try and catch” Renaat is always unhappy if he misses it. “I’m really hungry for the next generation, and this is what R&S was always about”, reiterates Renaat. It would’ve been “fairly easy to just do a Techno label” for Renaat and just sell records with the old guard he helped established, but this holds absolutely no value to the elder statesman of music. “There’s so much good music out there today in the subcultures of electronic music that musically I prefer it now. It’s much more dynamic today with so many different forms of music informing the landscape, much like a Renaat Vandepapeliere set, and Renaat clearly prefers it that way allowing him and the label to “to be as ‘creative’ as possible” and in the way it is structured today with its offices in London and Renaat in Belgium, he can be completely focussed on the music.

Where will this take R&S in the future? “I don’t want to think about it”, says Renaat. “What happens in the next 30 seconds will happen.” In new unfamiliar territory where “records don’t sell and there’s streaming” R&S has to adapt too and “the business platform needs to be rewritten.” But Renaat or R&S is “not here to please the market, there are 5 billion labels trying to please the market”, and everything R&S ties back into the love of the music and the search for the cutting edge in music, whether it be Jazz, Indie, Techno or Ambient today. From the “hybrid techno-punk” of Paula Temple to Joey Beltram’s classic Energy Flash, taking a detour through the post-dubstep records of Airhead and Lone with a wide curve around the indie-ambient records of people like Cloud Boat, R&S has always been an accurate rudder from which to watch the changing winds in electronic music. Their legacy is cemented, but Renaat just “hopes to survive” and that the label allows to keep doing what he wants for the love of the music. If there ever does come a time that R&S will indeed have to go into permanent hiatus, Renaat and Sabine will continue to live their romantic musical dream and they’ll “buy a guitar” and perhaps you’ll find them “playing under a bridge in Paris” somewhere, but the music will always be there.

Dark clubs with suggestive bodies: A Q&A with House of Traps

Lindsay Todd, who assumes the name House of Traps in the booth and for his NTS radio show “Into the Outer”, is also the man behind a collection of the most iconic best to exist in recent times. Firecracker recordings and its subsidiaries Unthank and Shevchenko, is a label that has established itself with a very unique identity from its Edinburgh headquarters, where music and visual art conspire to create some of the most fulfilling and complete recorded musical experiences across three labels.

Firecracker and Todd brings the music on record to life through engaging visual presentations, and limited special packages that adds a dimension to the diverse musical pieces that quite rightly stand on their own as unique expressions from diverse corners of electronic music subcultures.

Firecracker recordings and its subsidiaries revolve around a core group of artists like Lord of The Isles, Vakula and Linkwood, artist who all bring their own stylistic traits to genres from Ambient to Deep House and Techno. Artistic relationships have been forged at Firecracker Recordings where a definite attitude prevails if not a sound. It’s an attitude that steps beyond the familiar as pre-conceptions fall to the wayside, and Vakula’s Techno experiments on Shevchenko to Rings around Saturn’s most recent off-kilter interpretation of Deep House on Unthank finds a common ground exactly for their aberrant nature.

Everything is validated, and the label is able to move in wide births around gentrified notions of the dance floor, with Todd’s visual work allowing these diverse pieces to coexist under one banner. And although Todd is an adept hand at music himself, with his Linkwood Family project co-producing some of the first releases on his label with Linkwood, he seems to prefer the role of facilitator, as a label boss and DJ. For the most part it seems his time is taken up by Firecracker and to find out a bit more about the label, and how it might infiltrate his set this Wednesday for Untzdag, we shot over some questions to the Scotsman.

Firecracker (and its imprints) have been around since 2004, What has been the ambitions for the label/s since its inception?

I never had any major ‘ambitions’ as such other than exploring possibilities in music and art. It seems that other people also dig this so I’m eternally grateful for the opportunities provided from the support of fans and artists alike.

It’s featured quite a diverse output, from the deeper stuff of earlier releases from the likes of your Linkwood & family project to the more ambient, experimental-electronica like the recent Lord of Isles release. What’s the central musical policy to all of it?

We’ve always had a fairly diverse output from the start. Even in the first EPs, we tried to create these mini worlds where you could get lost in the art and different music styles. I was careful not to commit to any one style or genre, in order to open up the field for future releases. For example, two of my favourite recent projects were ‘Mac-Talla Nan Creag’ (FIREC015) and Les Gracies ‘Low Doses’ (FIREC020), are both pretty far out, but also with some common threads of previous projects; this in turn allowing even weirder doors to be opened in the future. So, it’s hard to pin down any sort of central theme but I’m definitely drawn to music and artists experimenting and pushing what’s considered to be ‘dance music’ out the traditional ‘scene’.

&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://firecrackerrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/firec001"&amp;amp;gt;FIREC001 by Various&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;

The sub-labels Unthank (which appears to be more of dance-floor orientated imprint) and Shevchenko, an exclusive vehicle for Vakula it seems, just add everything from Techno to Breakbeats to that diverse list. Where do they take over from Firecracker and why did you opt to make them sub-labels?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. Ha! At the time, there was some music I wanted to release but felt it didn’t fit in with what Firecracker was at that time. I set up Unthank to be an outlet for more surprising club stuff but it became it’s own thing as well. And yes, you’re right about Shevchenko; it was pretty much exclusively for Vakula who was prolific back then. With hindsight, it would have made sense just to release it all on Firecracker but it’s fun to have some different identities to play with visually.

Vakula, Lord of Isles and Linkwood have all been regular features across the labels. What emphasis do you place on working with the same artists throughout?

We are friends firstly. The core crew back home are Nick Moore (Linkwood), Neil McDonald (Lord Of The Isles) and Gav Sutherland (Other Lands, formerly Fudge Fingas). We all live pretty close and see each other regularly so there’s no way to avoid a long-term relationship! Everyone’s on their own trip and it’s cool to see that evolution, whether it’s on Firecracker or their own projects. And if an artist wants to get on board long term then that’s a bonus.

Although you are a part of the Linkwood family group, your own music very rarely makes it onto the label. Why do you prefer to keep that distance as a label boss?It’s not really a conscious decision. At the time of the Linkwood Family tracks myself and Nick were flatmates so it was easy to collaborate on ideas. Music production has always taken a back seat for me because of dealing with artwork, printing and day to day running of the label but I have a few things in the pipeline. I’ve just worked with Jonny Nash on an LP of strange sounds from Bali, which we recorded and mixed there in November last year. It’s out this Summer on Island Of The Gods (who released the amazing Hipnotik Tradisi by Black Merlin).*

There’s a lot of emphasis on a visual presentation. What do you hope the visual accompaniment brings to the releases away from the music?

It’s always been massively important to me to have the artwork co-existing with the music, to explore new and weird techniques in it’s production, just the same as approaching the music making. I hope this experimentation and results inspires current and future artists, as much as the music does for me! From 2007-2015 I used to do all of the artwork myself. Since then Al White (from Glasgow’s 12th Isle label and crew) has worked closely with me, collaborating on projects and recently handling design and print himself (Lord Of The Isles FIREC021, and with Roos Dijkhuizen on DJ Sports FIREC023). Big up that talented man!

The artwork has developed from those comic graphics during those first Various releases to the psychedelic stuff on those recent unthank releases. Is it something that develops with the music, the label or just personally?

It’s definitely a combination of all three. Just as a musician or dj constantly digs, finding new inspiration and in turn creating a story, I hope the same thing happens with the evolution of the artwork and covers. It would be really boring if, thirteen years on from our first release that we were still making those 10”s with the female character on them! At the time, it felt right and that was our source material then. It’s important to keep trying new stuff, but also to refer back to older and more successful visual ideas. One of the main things I’ve always been conscious of is not to pay too much attention to what is going on with trends in design and our ‘club scene’ which can be hugely self-referential and cyclical. By using techniques like collage, automatic drawing and found imagery, I find it’s easier to work fast and without pretension. The same can be said of approaches to music making; the early pioneers of ‘acid house’ used sampling techniques that had more in common with the immediacy of ‘musique concrète’ than it it does with today’s gentrified and self-conscious dance music scene.

&amp;lt;a href="http://firecrackerrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/unthank011"&amp;gt;UNTHANK011 by Rings Around Saturn&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

The Rings around Saturn release, which was a special edition laser cut version is probably the prettiest piece of packaging I’ve seen this year so far for a record. It’s definitely a bit of a lost art I find with all these basic brown cardboard sleeves I’ve seen. What labels/artists do you draw your inspiration from in your artwork and the importance you place on the art?

Thank you. Yes, this militant Hardwax-style approach to packaging a record has never really appealed to me. In that same way, being a ‘serious’ collector or a purist. I mean, you’re collecting dance music after all. Wasn’t that meant to be ‘fun’? Any artist and/or label that can combine humour/artwork/melancholia/self-deprecation etc etc in music or artwork inspires me. And that includes a one sided recording of a bass drum or even a special edition latex dildo! By the way, the Unthank special editions we make aren’t laser cut. You might think so, but each one is handmade with the holes being ‘punched’ using a metal tool (originally used for leatherwork) and hammer. Each one takes about one hour to complete.

Wow that’s a lot of effort. Do you still produce all the packaging personally by hand?

Yes, absolutely. Every single record is hand printed and assembled in our studio.

With so much effort going into the style of a record, I imagine that the music needs to be very special indeed before you even attempt a release. What are the absolutely essential characteristics of a piece of music before you even consider a release?

It really does vary. Sometimes, like the Lnrdcroy LP, it had already been released as a cassette. So everything was there and only a few tweaks had to be made. Sometimes, we’ll start with nothing and build a release, which might take months or years. That’s when it’s a careful, back-and-forth process of selection and evolution of tracks by myself and the artist. I really can’t say there’s any essential characteristics because each release has it’s own vibe entirely. I just have to be 100% feeling it.

Do you approach it at all like you would a DJ set? What would you hope the records on the label suggest about your DJ sets?

I never plan what to play, or in what order, only selecting from the vibe that particular night. So in that respect yes! There’s this Bakey Ustl record (UNTHANK001) that I still go back to because it reminds me of the importance of a few things while playing records in a dark club to suggestive bodies. That is to not take yourself too seriously, approach from as many weird angles as possible, combine influences to create something new, speed it up and slow it down, don’t be scared of moments of silence in a club (the energy should be there to carry it) and most importantly make those bodies dance hard!

* You can hear a couple of tracks from that release on the NTS show streaming above.

Welcome to the world of Space Dimension Controller

Travelling through the musical cosmos on the sound of off-kilter electronic beat music, Space Dimension Controller has found a niche on the dance floor through a retrospective sound of a intangible future. Traversing galaxies between Techno, House and Electro, SDC plays on Science Fiction themes through album narratives like The Pathway To Tiraquon 6 and Welcome To Mikrosector-50 for labels like R&S and Ninja Tune and often extends that narrative to the dance floor with countless 12” and EPs for those labels and Clone.

An esoteric figure in electronic music, SDC is the creation of UK producer Jack Hamill, who also answers to Mr.8040, a concept that began its life as a lo-fi-ambient electronic project and grew into an extensive conceptual artistic pursuit, replete with space-age narrative. His most recent release, Orange Melamine catalogues the artist’s earliest expressions as music made by an eighteen year old Hamill, a singular release from a time before the birth of Mr.8040 the complex world he has created around that character, who is also known as The Space Dimension Controller.

SDC has crafted two albums for R&S based on an imagined screenplay taken from this complex narrative, experimenting with many different forms of music as he channels it through the artistic character and his own musical instincts. These are bold pieces of incredible dexterity that engages at some weird psychedelic level with visceral effects, at times purposefully positioned for the dance floor cuts, away from, but extensions of his overarching theme.

In a live show about to hit Jæger as part of an R&S showcase, we’re curious to see how he develops the sound and the narrative for the stage, so with this and other burning questions on our mind we shoot off an email to Mr.8040 in the hope of unraveling some more of this eccentric artist behind the music.

You’ve seemed to have found a home at R&S. What is about the label and the people behind it that keeps you there, and how do they inform the sound of Space Dimension Controller?

I wouldn’t say a home as I’ve released on Clone & Ninja in the last few years but I have a huge amount of respect for the label. Its heritage in dance music is second to none and Renaat is a crazy lovable genius. They don’t inform my sound at all, but I do love to make a more dancefloor focused record for them.

In the early years of the label I’ve heard it was very much about a community and it revolved around an R&S studio. What is it like today to work with the label and is that sense of community still there?

I mean I’d say it’s very different as community now, which has a vast digital platform known as the internet. The label is great to work with and super friendly. The old R&S studio days must have been legendary!

Albums like The Pathway To Tiraquon 6 and Welcome to Mikrosector-50 are eccentric, bold, nebulous electronic music pieces that often avoid strict designation. How would you describe your music for the uninformed?

I wouldn’t want to label my music but “esoteric’ seems to come to my mind. Thanks so much for the kind words.

There are often strong Sci-Fi themes to be found on your records, in the abstract and the tiles. What is it about sci-fi that inspires you and how do you go about putting it into music?

My youth was really geeky and I spent loads of time watching these old sci-fi films. I guess i just draw ideas of my own that are set in that spectrum of genre and the overarching narrative to my music is definitely inspired by certain science fiction themes. The musicality side is different and I draw inspiration from vast amounts of places.

Which Sci-FI books/movies/series do you currently draw your inspiration from?

Rewatching ‘Primer’ definitely got me thinking about time travel again. (Laughs) I’ve not checked that much new stuff lately.

I’ve always thought Mikrosector 50 would make the perfect soundtrack for a film like that or Total Recall. If you could score any sci-fi film from the past what would it be and why?

I love Total Recall so thanks again for the kind words. I’d probably score the original ‘Solaris’ as its such a beautiful film and I think still stands up as a modern piece of art.

I know you’ve expressed an interest in filmmaking, and I’ve read somewhere you’re working on a screenplay. Can you tell us a bit about that side of your creative identity and how it informs your music if at all?

My albums have an overarching narrative so it’s essentially writing a detailed screenplay but depicting it via audio and not so much the visual side. It’s a huge part of what I do and I’ve been trying out some ideas on the visualization but nothing I can reveal just now.

Through your albums that narrative might unfold mostly through the titles, but do you think in terms of a story when you’re putting your songs together?

Yes it has a complete story written and the music depicts what happens.

In “Introduction to Mr.8040″ the vocals mention Tiraquon 6 and on that album, during the last track we hear the name Mr. 8040 for the first time. Is there and ongoing creative concept throughout your albums?

Yes through the narrative it is apparent throughout my albums (not orange melamine though).

Mr.8040 is also said to be the space dimension controller. Who is Mr.8040 to you?

A space cowboy I guess. A rogue hero and a smooth guy.

&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://spacedimensioncontroller.bandcamp.com/album/welcome-to-mikrosector-50"&amp;amp;gt;Welcome To Mikrosector-50 by Space Dimension Controller&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;

What do you think this sort of plotline or character adds to the music and how does it inform your music, if at all?

It is the entire concept of the music so definitely adds a lot! It helps me guide the album process and structure the tracklist.

Your last album Orange Melamine, was a collection of music made when you were eighteen, so it was like a flashback, like the second series of the Star Wars movies are proposed to be. How does that tie into the grand narrative of your albums?

It doesn’t and was made before the grander scheme was conceptualised. I’m still very proud of it though.

* SDC stops by Jæger as part of the R&S roadshow with a live show.

A space for art by accident with Mental Overdrive

Per Martinsen’s 7th studio album as Mental Overdrive sees the artist yet again in some beginning/end part of a cycle, a cycle that with each revolution finds a new trajectory as if Richard Feynman were trying to circumnavigate the globe. It “hints back at early releases” explains Per over the receiver in a thick Norwegian accent shaped by the amiability of his Tromsø dialect. “The technique made it sound like the early stuff”, explains Per. It was the producer/artist merely “rigging up some hardware to put down some jams” and it was a “dogmatic” approach, based on Per’s working methods. The album came about when Thomas’ (URV) requested some new music from Mental Overdrive for his PLOINK label, and when Per had no new music to give him, a two week recording session through little more than a stereo channel yielded “Hardware”, an album with a very pragmatic, minimalist approach. Little more than a synthesiser and a drum machine were recorded and edited over the course of a mere few weeks in the spirit of a jam sessions, harking back to Mental Overdrive’s earliest working methods. Tracks like “Descent” and “Dissolve” are redolent of earlier tracks from Mental Overdrive like “Tetris (The Game Of Life)” and “Please hold one”, not as some nostalgic throw-back LP, but rather a sound defined by one artist, but constantly in flux with its contemporary environment. It’s an album shaped by technology, but allowed to thrive in the uncluttered mind of an artist continuously in search of a unique experience through experimentation. Hardware is an extension of Mental Overdrive’s early development not as an evolution or a revolution, but rather an honest artistic voice. “I can experiment all I want, but it’s always gonna be my output” explains Per about what defines the Mental Overdrive sound, a sound that is informed as much by the equipment he uses as by the artist’s early years, growing up in Tromsø.

Whereas the younger generation growing up in Tromsø like Bjørn Torske, Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland (the latter two as Røyksopp) started making music in the city for lack of anything else to do, Per suggests his exposure and desire to make music was born out of something quite different. The “information revolution” of the 1980’s and Tromsø’s unique standing away from the noise of an urban environment, plied Per with the necessary formative experiences for a career in electronic music. “In a big city you spend a lot of time protecting yourself from all the impulses, but in Trømso you can get that headspace you need, while still having access to any of that information.” As such Per got an extensive “overview of what’s going on in different subcultures” around the world and since the “mainstream was so not too loud” in the the isolated north of Norway, he could really immerse himself into the music, first as a drummer playing for various post punk bands, and later through experimenting with electronic instruments.

Influenced early on by “EBM, coldwave and the stuff bleeding through from the cassette scene” and with “access to NME and melody maker, when they were still writing about all kinds of music”, Per’s formative years were spent indulging in the more “industrial” noises of synth music. He cultivated his musical tastes while working at Rocky Records in Tromsø, where he could get access to “a lot of music that people didn’t have access to”. Bypassing the the established distribution networks, Rocky Records and its owner Andrew Swatland, an Australian DJ, who like so many of his counterparts became a permanent fixture in the city through the lure of a woman, was responsible “for a lot of stuff making it to Norway’.

Encouraged by this style of music and his experience as a drummer, Per would eventually lay his hands on a drum machine, a Roland TR808 to be exact. I wonder if he still has that machine? “No I’ve been broke too many times in my life”, comes his response with a chuckle. But I digress, let’s get back to making electronic music in the eighties… At a time where everybody “had the expectation of making songs” and “you had to have a vocalist even when you were in a synth band”, Per’s time on the drum machine then would be little more than a pastime pursuit. “I would just trigger single hits and make what I thought couldn’t be used for anything”, remembers Per. It was only when moving to London in 1987 and getting access to a studio in Brixton, that these little “loops and beats” would eventually grow into something distinguishable as music for Per, and has much to do with a new musical trend that was infiltrating London at that time. When Acid House broke on the squat scene, a scene Per naturally gravitated towards as a young music enthusiast living in its urban expanse, he realised that “there is space for the type of thing I was doing” and that “you didn’t have to make ‘songs’” in the traditional sense anymore. Giving the studio access to his Atari recording system and Emu sampler in exchange for a few evening slots, Per was free to experiment in a nurturing environment. “It was a great studio, with a lot of clients I was into at that time” says Per and during the spring of 88 when “everybody wanted House music, and anybody with a beat got a record deal” Mental Overdrive too would start making its first impressions on music, somewhat tentatively at first. “Daytime clients would hear me do something from the office and then ask, ‘what’s this?’” What started as short extemporised expressions on a sampler or drum machine, would be instantly recognised as something rather exceptional by the right people, bolstering Per’s confidence. Eventually these pieces would become tracks and fall on the ear of a label which coincided with a move to Brussels, where his first couple of records were released on a Crammed Discs imprint, SSR. From SSR he moved on to R&S, Per finding some happy coincidence in the shared vowels between the two labels, but it would be at R&S where Mental Overdrive would make some of the most significant contributions to electronic music in the early nineties. R&S meant another move, this time to Ghent, where he would begin to work closely with label through their studio. Through them and with the the help of R&S frontman Renaat Vandepapeliere’s practised ear, he would start to define and refine a Mental Overdrive sound.

“I was bringing this industrial thing to it, because of my history from that eighties synth sound”, recalls Per, but “Renaat was really good at giving you feedback” and that “was very helpful in shaping the sound” of Mental Overdrive through those first EPs. From 12000AD to the Love EP we hear a development from the tougher industrial sound of the eighties to a nineties Techno sound, retaining that raw energy of previous releases in the rhythm tracks while synths offer a melodic counterpoint, much closer to the sound of Detroit. The progression is less stochastic and combining all those things we start hearing a more concise, complete sound of Mental Overdrive. In Per’s methods we find that nineties approach of endless possibilities and everything goes, an unceasing experiment with machines and music, through a singular artistic voice. “You didn’t have a template” emphasises Per, “we were just fumbling in the dark and that’s how the music evolved.” After a few successful EPs on R&S, Per, favouring a reserved output with sincere bold recorded statements, turned to the album format in 1995 for his critically acclaimed Plugged album, which also inaugurated his Love OD label.

What started out as Per “and mates discussing what would make a good album” turned into one of the most significant Techno albums of that age and beyond, as it enjoyed a 20th anniversary re-issue last year for Prins Thomas’ Rett i Fletta imprint. Plugged showed in Per an uncanny ability for the album format, an ability that surpasses many House and Techno artists still today. “You are forced into a zone”, says Per about working within this format, but his affinity for the long player is also something that extends beyond working. ”I grew up with that format” says Per who still prefers the listening experience of an album to accompany daily habits, like running. “If I go out running, that’s how I usually listen to stuff and one album is usually a good length for a good run.” I ask for a peek into his current running playlist and Arca, Lawrence English and Monolake are amongst the artists cropping up in there. His current listening suggests Per is very aware of his musical surroundings, something that perhaps ties back to Tromsø again, where he’s been residing these past nine years, having always preferred the open spaces of the arctic city over the noise of an urban sprawl.

I naturally think to Biosphere when I hear Tromsø and music and in Biosphere’s music there’s a definite sense of the environment informing the music, something Per suggests sounds like “the sky is very high”. Is it something we can ascribe to all Norwegian music, that sense of an infinite sky in defining what we know as a Norwegian sound? Per’s just been asked the very same question by Radio Nova in Paris recently for the premiere of Ben Davis and Paper Recordings’ Northern Disco Lights documentary and although Per won’t hazard an exact definition of a Norwegian sound, he believes “space is consistent in a lot of Norwegian electronic music”. It’s something he believes even informs his own music, albeit at some subconscious level. “There’s always something in your DNA that if you are true to yourself will shine through.” It’s more than just a simplified idea of a Norwegian sound that defines Mental Overdrive however and whether he is working in the industrialised stylised Techno, or endeavoring an interpretation of House, it’s the insistence of constant experimentation that is consistent in the creative processes of the artist throughout his extensive discography. It’s that idea of “stumbling in the dark” that has defined Per’s music through 7 albums and countless EPs and harks back to that most fertile of ages for electronic music, the early 1990’s. In the present age, where we’ve neatly cordoned off all these defined musical genres and templates, featuring elements like “the right drop and the right duration of a hi-hat”, Per’s getting “really bored with designed music” and prefers the “stuff that just evolves”. It’s also the reason he’s returned to “live gigs being totally improvised and not this planned execution”, preferring the performance aspects of a live show, even in the studio, as we can deduce from the working methods behind his latest album, Hardware. “I’ve put out more twenty second snippets through my Instagram than tracks over the past two years,” he says “and they are just these snaps of what I’m into at the moment”. It’s Per “going back to playing” and Per’s instrument of choice today? The modular synthesiser.

He’s been using “modular gear since the early nineties”, but with the explosion of eurorack modules recently, and the endless possibilities they’ve introduced in a digital age, even an experienced musician like Per, can still stumble across the odd surprise. He refers to it as “art by accident” an idea that “you can’t design your music”, says Per. “If you can audiolise music, then it’s based on your experience and it will never be something new. I think anything a human can imagine will never be surprising. The ‘what if’ is crucial in discovering something.” It’s a creative pursuit that isn’t resigned to any one method, and in the past has made use of digital, analogue and software tools, but it’s the modular synthesiser today that has captured the imagination with Per proclaiming today; “the most creative scene is the modular scene”. And even though Hardware has some allusions to earlier work through its methods it’s never about recreating a sound of a previous era or record for Per – he’s “been there done that” after all. “Why would I buy a TB303 in 2017” he asks not waiting for an answer, and suggests that it’s exactly “this mimicking of an old sound that’s making music claustrophobic today.”

Once again we fall into this idea of space in music; the space for outside influences to thrive, the space for music to find a voice through experimentation, and even just that idea of a physical space in music. Everything Mental Overdrive ties into these various ideas of space and it’s something that will invariably inform his upcoming set at Jæger too. While he suggests it might “sound deeper” than recent sets, it’s still very off the cuff and can change depending on what equipment he packs for the trip, leaving him enough room to experiment even at the preparation stages of the performance. Per likes being “more dynamic” in his live sets today, approaching it very much like a DJ, with things like the venue and sound system affecting his performances, and that’s why he prefers it “improvised and open-ended”, leaving him enough room to “respond to these things”. It further propounds the complicated and complex entity that is Mental Overdrive, and we’ve not even delved into his soundtrack work, the music he’s “been working on in between all this rhythmical output”, including a new ambient album. All I know for the moment is that it will be released in June on a new label called waveform, and I suspect this is another story in itself, much like his collaborative work as Frost with Aggie Peterson. That’s yet another trajectory that informs another aspect of the Mental Overdrive’s sum over histories, a thing that takes place in yet another dimension in the immense artistic entity with its own story to tell. We forego this path on this occasion, having taken up a fair chunk of the producer’s studio time. I imagine I hear the hum of a synthesiser waiting to burst free from its forced hibernation in the background as I say goodbye.

* Mental Overdrive is playing live during next week’s PLOINK showcase.

Welcome our new resident – DELLA

It gives us great pleasure to present to you Jæger’s new resident, DELLA. Kristina Dunn, formerly of No Dial Tone, assumed the DJ moniker DELLA for a solo career two years ago, extending back to her roots in the USA where she went from the floor of early US rave culture to the booth in one fluid movement. She carries that quintessential attitude of a dancer with her as she traversed from the west coast, playing alongside the likes of Doc Martin and Brett Johnson, to Oslo where she’s accompanied everybody from Ellen Allien to Seven Davis Jr. in the booth.

A regular feature at Jæger on the dance floor and a most frequent guest DJ, DELLA’s residency at Jæger is mere formality, and the DJ assumes a position that she was born to occupy. In the booth we’ve come to know DELLA for House, remaining close to its Chicago, New York and Detroit roots, foregoing nostalgia in favour of a contemporary sound, her focus never wavering from the dance floor. In many ways she embodies exactly the entire concept of Jæger’s intentions to uphold the roots of this music in a modern context.

The residency, which starts this Saturday with the first event Dellas Drivhus will undoubtedly emphasise those characteristics that make up the DJ: her early experiences listening to Halo, Hipp-e, Jenö, Garth, Heather, Doc Martin, Frankie Knuckles, Derrick Carter, Dubtribe Sound System, and Mark Farina; her West Coast influences, where she first cut her teeth as a DJ; and her work as a DJ and an artist working out of Oslo. Her recorded works have found love on labels like Classic, Apollo Music Group, and Paper Recordings, and she’s worked with artists like Justin Harris and De Fantastiske To, sharing a proximity to many prominent artists and DJs in Oslo and the states.

It is rumoured that DELLA will be joined by a few of these artists and DJs during her residency, but who they might be is still very unclear. With that and a few other burning questions, we sent over an email to DELLA for a little more insight on just what her residency might entail. Welcome, DELLA.

I feel like saying (insert bad imitation of Marlon Brando) “welcome to the family”, but that doesn’t sound quite right, because you’ve been an integral part of Jæger as a regular guest for some time. What does the residency cement for you that might have not been there before?

Hehe, yes sometimes it is confusing who are the actual residents and who just plays regularly as a guest. I have been playing Jæger regularly since the opening, but as a guest not as an official resident. It was a real honor when I was recently asked to become one. Officially representing Jæger as a resident DJ is a great accomplishment for me in my career, and I believe it will open more doors along this crazy journey as an artist. Jæger is like a second home for me, so when I was asked to join the other incredibly talented DJs, and the rest of the team, it felt like a perfect match. I already felt great pride as an Oslo DJ for our gem of a club that has established itself internationally for being one of the best clubs in Europe. I mean, who can complain about a custom-built DJ booth, impeccable sound, and weekly line-ups with the best of the best? We are incredibly spoiled. Also, the dedication that Jæger gives to our dance music community in Oslo is something to be really proud of, and I am happy to have been asked to help lead our community forward by being a representative of the club.

What will a residency allow for you that you might not have been able to do as a guest?

I will have the opportunity to bring in artists that I admire and respect. For me personally as a DJ, I will gain more skills by having the chance to play regularly in the magical spaceship.

What does the term residency define for you today in general?

A representative of the club as a DJ both here at home in Oslo and internationally.

Tell us a bit about the concept of your night.

My concept is called Dellas Drivhus and will be launching on 06.05.17. (Drivehus means Greenhouse for those non-Norwegian readers.) The concept will showcase House DJs who are both up and coming and those who are founders of our movement. It will combine the sounds of the new and the classics of House music (all genres). The name itself is stemmed from the root of club music, House, born from Disco, and the primal dance, sound, and vibration of the drum. It is also in connection to the nature that grows and gives us life. House music for me is one of the greatest gifts of life. It creates a safe place for us all to unite where we can enjoy pure self expression and freedom together through song and dance. That is what this music is all about.

I imagine that the night will have quite a Stateside focus through your early roots and what we’ve heard from you as a guest, but can you go into the details of the music you’ll be bringing?

Jæger and I are only in the development stages of the concept. From my roots being from America (the birthplace of House), yes there will probably be much American influence, but as we all know House is feeling, not a border issue. I will be booking talent alongside myself that give pure dedication to the dance floor and the music that drives it.

If there were a track that could sum up your night, what would it be?

Music is the Answer (Danny Tenaglia’s Tourism Mix) – Danny Tenaglia feat. Celeda

Ola was talking about guests. Will you be inviting a few people to play with you and can you mention any names yet?

I can not mention any names yet, but let’s just say the list is a good one.

You’ve released a bit of music recently too, will there be more to come in the near future and will we be hearing more of your own music at your residency?

Yes, since going solo after No Dial Tone two years ago I have had several successful releases, and yes you will definitely be hearing more from me in the future. I have some secret projects in the works right now and am looking forward to getting these out. Dellas Drivhus will surely be playing DELLA from time to time.

You know on Saturdays requests often happen because of the MC Kaman show on the other floor. What’s the weirdest request you’ve ever received?

First of all, NO ONE should make a request to a DJ. The DJ is hired for a reason, they are the DJ. The club is not a wedding reception. But with that said, I thankfully can not remember the name of the song of the worst request I’ve had. Let’s just say it had the word porn in the title.

Play us out with a track, please.

My favorite jam ATM: ‘Mr. Wu’ – Lewis Beck on Audiophile Deep

You can read an extensive interview with the artist and DJ here.

Hear more from DELLA here:

https://www.mixcloud.com/djdella/

Follow DELLA on Facebook to stay updated on upcoming gigs:

https://www.facebook.com/djdella

It never feels like compromising with Medlar

Informed by a UK sound palette in the digital age of accessibility, Medlar’s DJ sets are an eclectic blend of an extensive dance floor catalogue, through a selector which is as much speculative archivist as he is entertainer. The DJ born Ned Pegler, approaches music in a continuous explorative method, with everything from youtube to the warm-up DJ informing his musical selections which today span the width and breadth of the dance floor.

His own House productions which have found a home on Wolf Music is no clear indicator of the scope of his work in the booth, where today Electro can live side by side with a Disco track. In the booth there’s a constant symbiotic relationship between him, this records, his own music, the audience and the environment. The roots of this are embedded in the DJ’s origins, which were congruous with his rise as a producer, but whereas the DJ became defined by a singular sound, his sets have continued to explore the endless factions of dance music, with Medlar often digging extensively through phases as he comes into contact with new and old forms unfamiliar music. Known to take notes in the booth and the dance floor alike to broaden his scope, he is constantly assimilating new pieces that will take Medlar, the DJ, into a new journey of discovery and expand his already extensive DJ sets.

Growing up in the English countryside but coming into a career in music in Brighton, then London, Medlar’s affinity for House and Disco came into its own while working at Mr Bongo, a record store known particularly for these genres. At the same time his DJ career was cultivated playing student parties, and while House and Disco was and is still a prominent fixture in his sets, that aspect of Medlar’s creative aspirations would lead to include everything from Jungle to Acid as I find out when I call the DJ up at his home in London.

He’s joining Leon Vynehall for the first of a series of residencies at Jæger this year, the two DJ’s having met at a festival at Croatia through a mutual friend, Ashley Dong from the now defunct Well Rounded Records. “Since then we’ve played the occasional show together and we’ve always got on pretty well” says Medlar about his relationship with Jæger’s latest resident. It’s a unique event for Jæger and I’m curious what goes through the mind of a DJ in that context and how his early experiences imbue what he is today. We set aside Medlar’s extensive recording career which include an album and a formidable discography on Wolf Music, to talk DJing, requesting Happy birthday and what it means to be a resident today.

At the the start of your DJ career, you were playing Student nights which was a bit of baptism of fire, I imagine. What were those early years like for you?

I moved to Brighton when I was 18 and I’ve always been DJing in my bedroom while I played a few illegal free parties in Somerset. I grew up in the countryside basically and when I moved to Brighton there was more of a infrastructure for a DJ – I played for free at various clubs, doing graveyard shifts or warm-ups. Then a friend of mine started a student night in a terrible bar, a basement that hadn’t changed its sound system since the eighties. It was every Tuesday for five hours and I did that for four or five years.

As you said, it was a real baptism of fire, you really cut your teeth at a place like that. The kind of place where you’ve had every terrible request ever. I remember the sound system went once and a football chant started up; “the DJ is a wanker.” You got asked for Happy Birthday every two or three shows, but there were some people that actually enjoyed it too, because it was listed as an underground student night.

What did you take from experiences like that into the DJ you are today?

I think mainly that I can relax in that setting even if it is a bit overwhelming and crazy. Everything went wrong that could possibly go wrong, so it kind of prepares you. I still get nervous before gigs, but the setting of the club isn’t so intimidating anymore.

I imagine your confidence has bolstered because people are there to actually see and hear you in a club setting as a headliner DJ?

I think if I’m actually headlining a show I get more nervous because I want to tick boxes of what people expect from it. I want to do something surprising as well. I almost prefer gigs when there’s a headliner and then you can pack a bag around them. That’s a bit more free. It obviously instills some confidence when you are a headliner DJ or an invited guest. I must be doing something right…

In the early years it was also lot about Drum n Bass and UK urban genres for you. How did you get into House from there?

I didn’t really have any preferences. Today everything is based around dance music cultures like House, Techno or Disco, but when I grew up I was into grunge and post punk stuff and then I got into Jungle and DnB and from that the other UK genres that people call the hardcore contingent.

About ten years ago I quit my college course and started working at Mr. Bongo records – there was a government scheme that would give 100 pounds a week to volunteer for someone, I doubt it exists anymore. Mr.Bongo records introduced me to some House music I actually loved. Up until then the only House music I was exposed to was chart House music.

What was the House music like that pulled you over to that side of dance music?

Chicago stuff, and a lot of the nineties stuff and soulful House thing. Even not just specifically House, but things like Disco too, and a lot of Latin stuff – introducing me to good examples of stuff I’ve heard, but not really liked up to that point.

I’ve read in an interview with skiddle that you go through phases, and at that time you were very much digging for Disco. Do you still do that and what phase do you find yourself in today?

Sometimes you can oversaturate a genre if you didn’t know it beforehand. When I got into Disco, I didn’t really know it and just went all in on that for ages, and after a while it becomes refreshing to dig something else for a bit.

At the moment I’m into a lot of Detroit- and New York Electro, Italo and a lot more newer electronic House stuff. And the more industrial stuff.

By industrial do you mean Techno?

Just stuff with a darker sound palette I guess. Even more EBM. At the same time, I have too short an attention span to focus on one style of music.

Is that something that extends to your Dj sets; that short attention span?

Yeah the most interesting sets, from a playing perspective and being in a crowd, is when there’s no two tracks of the same style in a row after each other. DJ’s like Maurice Fulton for example I really admire. There will be like a Disco track, then an Acid House track, then an Electro track. I guess there’s a coherent theme but it keeps the interest. There’s also exceptions like the time of a set. When I’m playing later at night I wouldn’t veer around so much and probably keep it more electronic, a House or Techno kind of thing. Generally up until two or three am I’ll be happy to go all over the place. That’s what I enjoy doing when I go out too.

I’ve noticed this a common consensus with your generation of DJs. Even as recently as 2012 when you went to go hear a House set you heard a House set, but DJs like you, Leon Vynehall, Ben UFO and Lena Willikens certainly are a lot more eclectic. Why do you think that is?

It’s interesting and you’re definitely right, it is more of a thing. I think it’s because music is more available. We’ve had You Tube for while now, but people are way more exposed to music. Like I said before you discover tunes every time you hear someone else DJ. It’s so much easier to source music now. Maybe a few a years ago it used to be more challenging to be an eclectic DJ, whereas now it’s more challenging to play one sound.

You mentioned packing a DJ bag around another DJ earlier, and I imagine with Vynehall you’ve got that in mind too. So what sort of stuff are on your mind when you’re thinking about packing your bag around that night?

To an extent he is an eclectic DJ as well. I’ve played all night with him once or twice and I’ve done a few back to backs with him, and it always ends up quite varied.

A venue the size of Jæger you can be more forgiving switching out genres. Whenever I’ve played huge thousand- to two thousand capacity venues, it’s fun, but it doesn’t allow for much experimenting like a smaller venue. In a 200 cap venue playing with Leon Vynehall I’d probably bring what I normally bring because it crosses over well with what he brings. I guess something a little less Disco than usual, I’ve been playing less of it recently. Maybe some darker edged stuff.

You mentioned the capacity of Jæger there. Do you think a lot about that kind of thing before you even pack your bag?

I try to, yeah. I always try to find out the set time and how big the place is. That’s what dictates the nights to me. If I’m playing in a hundred capacity event all night anything goes really, but when I’m playing an arena, I’ll play quite a flat set.

I suppose with a bigger venue, you’d need to find the tracks that would appeal to as many people as possible.

Yes, and I think in a small place, it allows for more peaks and troughs and it’s just more forgiving. Smaller places are just more relaxed, that’s probably why they are more forgiving.

I’m reminded now of how your Solid Steel radio show of 100% original material. How much of your own music informs your DJ sets?

To be honest I forget to play a lot of my own stuff. A lot of time I test out new things to see how it works. It’s quite random and usually I try to play a couple in a set, more so oversees. I don’t why I guess some people enjoy hearing a track from the artist that is playing. Generally there’s too much other music I discovered in the weeks or months leading up to the gig that I’m itching to play.

What is your association with the term residency today?

I think the idea of the resident DJ is overlooked a lot. In London for example there isn’t much of a residency scene except maybe for promoters and places like Fabric. A residency just allows for a DJ to get comfortable in a space. You just know it will inevitably be better really. It seems to be a bit of a trendy idea again which is great. There needs to be more of it.

For a visiting DJ taking on a residency in a club, what does that entail for you?

There’s only so much you can prepare. A lot of the time you can’t tell until you put the first record on. When I turn up it all becomes clear.

I suppose that all falls on instinct and going back to your formative years where Happy Birthday could be a request?

Yeah, I’m not really selling myself well when I’m talking about that… (laughs)

I think a lot of people don’t realise just what a DJ’s job entails, and cutting your teeth on those student parties left you with that ability to find compromise and the acute balance it requires… probably the reason that not everybody can DJ.

I think I’m lucky that I like a lot of music and don’t need to compromise. Sometimes you can be really excited about a gig and you can turn up and it’s not as you expected so you just have to adapt without compromising. It never feels like comprising.

Chances are you’ve heard this track before: An interview with Red Rack’em.

Chances are you’ve heard this track before. It’s a track instantly recognisable for its quirky bass-line hook, House form, and collage-like cut-n-paste sampling technique that blurs the boundaries between genres. It was the best selling House record of 2016; has received several represses and has seen its fair share of play time at Jæger over the last year. It’s called Wonky Bassline Disco Banger and you’ve definitely heard it before, but its creator Red Rack’em (aka Hot Coins), real name Danny Berman is a name that might have eluded most, a name that has enjoyed the shadowy limelight of the underground for an extensive career with a fair few seminal moments for the informed music fan.

Wonky Bassline Disco Banger might have moved said artist more into a new echelon of notoriety with media outlets like Thump professing “it took Berman a quarter of a century to make it big”, but Red Rack’em is certainly not a one hit wonder with a discography that spans three albums, thirty five singles, and twenty remixes (as Red Rack’em and Hot Coins) since 2008. How does Danny feel about a track like Wonky Bassline Disco Banger? “I’m really glad it blew up as it’s given me the chance to present the music I love to a much wider audience” says the Uk DJ and producer in a glitching staccato as the digital stream buffers, his friendly bearded face frozen temporarily on the computer screen. It might have been the track that introduced the established talent to a larger audience, but for Danny it “was just me doing what I have always been doing really”. More than that it was just the latest addition to an extensive career, which in Danny’s opinion had already had some “minor hits”. How I Program”, “In Love Again” and “Kalimba” on Dixon’s Philomena label – a track that the Innervisions supremo played everywhere on cdr for a year before before even realising who had made it – had already cemented Red Rack’em as a tour de force on the dance floor for the music head. The success of Wonky Bassline Disco Banger might have catapulted the artist to the next level, a level that Danny believes “involves doing a lot of things that don’t have anything to do with music”, and it is only as relevant as the broader context of Red Rack’em and Hot Coins in a career extending back to the 90’s.

Growing up in a “Scottish fishing village 50 miles from civilisation” Danny’s start in music strikes a familiar tone. Skateboarding was an entry way into Hip-Hop and Indie punk rock, through artists like “A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Bad Religion and Dinosaur Jr” where an interest in music and production blossomed. With Danny it matured at an earlier age than most when he was eighteen and his high school band ‘The Wizards’ made their first record for a prominent label. The track found its way onto the Stereo MC’s Natural Response imprint, a label that might have been little more than a “tax write off”, but gave Danny his first “great taste” of a career in music and working with professionals like Joseph Malik from Blackenized and (many years later) Compost records. It laid the foundation for a career in music that went from Hip Hop and Funk to Nu Disco and House, with an eclectic musical taste listing between genres.

In that regard, Danny is undeniably a child of the nineties and like period contemporaries his musical tastes would be invariably informed by those close to him. “It’s always the case when you are young, you have a friend or family member introduce you to new things”, he explains. His older sister was an introduction to Acid House when he was 14, giving him his first experience of a dance floor at a house party replete with “beautiful, half naked girls and Scottish football hooligan men with a lot of stuff to help them have a good time”. Later through a friend in Bath, Acid House and Hip Hop would lead to an affection for Jungle/Drum and Bass and a sound he refers to “Ecstasy Tears” with a wry chuckle –“not uplifting House and not raw Techno, but something in the middle, emotion for hard people”.

Before Danny even got a set of decks and a studio, music has always been broad and vast experience, but releasing music was not always a priority, Danny preferring the versatility of a set of decks, after that tentative start early on. “In the early days the priority was just to get 400 quid a week (to) blow on partying and records” says Danny. Later in the mid 2000’s productions for the dance floor started again much in the same way as it did for a lot of DIY artists back then with Danny releasing “a series of successful Hip Hop bootlegs called Smuggler’s Inn”. Not quite confident yet to release his own music, the bootlegs used acapellas to probe audiences about the appeal of future releases by standing on the shoulders of giants. “It was kind of a way to test productions” but by bridging a gap between the unknown and the familiar. By taking an unknown track and adding something like “Q-tip rapping on it” people were more likely to “accept it”. Danny’s confidence surged as a result, and it wouldn’t be all that long until he was playing his own tracks out more frequently, even if it was just for the punters at his local record store in Nottingham at that time. Saturday mornings would see the DJ and producer take newly made exclusive tracks down to the record store and play it to the customers on the floor through the store’s system… with some mixed results. “Sometimes it was only on for five seconds before the guy in the shop started shaking his head”, remembers Danny, but there were also other times when it clearly gave an indication of what was to come for Danny, “One day this guy was like ‘can I buy that track’” and that track ended up being “Jazz Ending”, which would find its way onto Tirk records as the second Red Rack’em presents Hot Coins release. “It got to point where I had to take the plunge because the quality of my music was definitely good enough”, says Danny and that led to his first brush with fame in 2008 with his Hot Coins remix of the Joubert singers “Stand on the Word” originally done on spec for Tirk with no plans for an official release. It was a track that brought him to the attention of Gilles Peterson (amongst others), who played it on BBC Radio 1 often. “I was everywhere with that track”, adds Danny, even sharing the stage and the spotlight with a young Floating Points (Sam Shepherd) when Peterson invited the pair to his worldwide awards event as his up and coming talent for 2009. “Sam obviously went on to be mega famous, and I’m still working on that” says Danny with a knowing smile.

Stand On The Word was an early indicator of Danny’s collage House sound, a sound that uses sampling techniques passed down from Hip Hop, with a distinctive squelching bass sound which has become something of a Red Rack’em trademark. For Danny it’s all about improvisation in his music, and “people like Isolée, Herbert and Theo Parrish” are notable sources of early inspiration in music where “atmosphere is very important” and the idea of found sounds and sampling form the basis from which he builds his tracks. Today Danny believes he’s pulled back from the melodic approach of his early work, mostly found on his debut album “The Early Years”, absconding from the midi keyboard completely. The sampler has become central to his work with his early Hip Hop references and influences coming to the fore yet again. His latest album, “Self Portrait” is exactly that, Red Rack’em “expressing (a) funky side” and is a direct nod to the influence of Hip Hop on Danny’s music. Featuring some “mad samples, things off youtube you wont believe”, the album creates the most abstract pieces from the most obscure places, like a “college metal band” on a “House track”. Self Portrait is also a self-referential personal work for the artist as the title intones, “an album that wasn’t pressured to meet dance floor banger needs” but rather allowed Danny to explore all these different elements that make up his artistic identity. As such it finds itself of Danny’s Bergerac label, as music he doesn’t “trust other labels to release” and while it might feature Wonky Bassline Disco banger, the attitude to the entire album was quite different. “I wanted to make dance floor tracks that are more musical” explains Danny and not just a bunch of DJ singles which often gets to be a “quite mundane” experience for the artist. He won’t take anything away from the lead single however, which for Danny “exists because of a magical moment” in the studio and has its own merits exactly for those reasons. “Making music to stop rampant paranoia” at the end of a 72 Hour party session, Danny made that track without any preconceived notion of what it might become and it was exactly successful because he “didn’t try to make a successful record” suggests Danny. In the larger context of the album and the discography Danny boasts today, it’s no more significant than the the DJ sets, the 10 years of cult radio, running several labels and all the other tracks he’s produced.

There’s so much more that informs Red Rack’em than a single track and as point of reference of how diversified the artist is, Danny turns to the analogy of a DJ set… where else: “I can play a Techno set, a broken beat set, I have a good jazz selection and I have a broad musical taste.” This is the result of those diverse formative years, going from Hip Hop to House and Drum & Bass and is probably also informed by the UK urban music scene in general. “It’s the influence Jamaican people and reggae sound system culture” remarks Danny, “the communities that mixed and got together” to create this awesome and extensive thing we call UK bass culture. “The thing that I loved about all that bass stuff, be it grime, drum and bass or jungle is the drama and the emotion in the music”, explains Danny. I’m glad to hear these things still make it into a Red Rack’em set with a “no-holds-barred” approach where “Sylvester’s Body Strong” can live right next to the “Ragga Twins”. Danny feels more “emancipated today” in the booth than ever and prefers to hear the “three percent that’s really good in every genre, than the other ninety seven percent which is just filler.”

Danny very much lives in the moment as a DJ too, suggesting he improvises when in the booth much like he does when creating music and when I ask him what that he means he says: “When I DJ I never plan anything and play the tracks in whatever order.” When he packs his bag he realises “a choice has already been made, and obviously that music is hopefully good”, but it’s in the booth that he “really gets a chance to test things out” with little or no preparation and it’s here where audience feedback is vital. “Playing in a club when the audience is in tune with you, they’ll dance to anything” suggests Danny. “That could work in a good way and a bad way.” In some ways Danny prefers radio in this regard, something he did for ten years with his much-loved Smuggler’s Inn Radio show (which he’s recently stopped to concentrate on ‘less frequent radio spots’). “Radio is more of static environment, more of a test” proposes Danny. “Radio is more music based, and the club is about the power of the sound system, the power of the intoxicants”. It’s there he often tests out new Red Rack’em and Hot coins tracks, relying on that audience feedback yet again as a vital component to his work. “When I do radio shows and when people are asking what a track is that’s obviously a good sign” he muses. Like the guy in the record store that asked after “Jazz Ending”, the five represses “Wonky Bassline Disco Banger” required; or the Radio 1 playtime his Joubert Singers remix received, Danny’s music is certainly informed through the reception stage, but it’s not merely defined by it’s bolder successes. There are certainly these very distinct moments like Wonky Bassline Disco Banger where the Red Rack’em or Hot Coins sound found a large audience, but these moments are isolated “magic moments” as Danny says, and he never considers repeating them, preferring the continuity and the “creative integrity” he enjoys as an artist and a DJ working within the underground. Where those seminal moments exist we only find the tip of the artistic iceberg that lies below the surface, a surface we’ve only just begun to scratch through the 30 odd minutes we had with the artist, but look forward to exploring further when he takes to the booth this Thursday for Retro.

Nosizwe – Defragmented

“I am mother, child, daughter of the soil, born and raised in the north…” croons Nosizwe Lise Baqwa in the opening introduction of her debut album “In Fragments”; her lyrics unravelling the complicated identity of the person behind those earthy vocalised tones. “We have all these different identities, and we have these fragmented experiences and I wanted to sing on those”; explains Nosizwe of the concepts behind the album over a telephone call this last week. “In Fragments” was an album made up of songs that “exemplified singular moments or experiences” for the artist, brought together in the context of a long player as individual pieces juxtaposing and synchronising with a multi-faceted whole. It’s a “deconstructed concept” proposes Nosizwe, an album that simulates life as “many fragments brought together” in an undetermined way, which in turn “becomes your experience of being alive.” Underpinning all of this, the very existence of the artist, and the human experience of it all, is that “quest for wholeness, the bigger picture” which is tied up in the long-player format of “In Fragments” and putting all these tracks in the same context.

Much of this was achieved on the production table for Nosizwe through the work of the album’s producer, Georgia Anne Muldrow. With some pieces already in existence before work on the album commenced, Nosizwe and Georgia “tied a red thread” through the music of the album as they brought it together from disparate corners. “There wasn’t necessarily an organic process in terms of creating the sounds specifically for the album”, explains Nosizwe, but once she started picking through Georgia’s beats, she found that they co-existed in a very harmonious way although they were very different from one to the other and through that, she could begin to “tell the story of this fragmented existence”. In a way, Georgia’s sample-based production style and breakbeat grooves, played perfectly to these ideas and and gave “In Fragments” that wholeness, that sense of a bigger picture which made the album such a prominent feature in the releases from last year.

Expounding on this is the artistic presence on the record, Nosizwe’s singular voice touching on a raw honesty and openness through empirical experiences that made the album a very “personal project” for the artist. The title of the album, taken from a book called “Life in Fragments” (from her mother’s library), does exactly that and as Nosizwe explains through those opening lines on “Songs of Nosizwe”, it is about the artist at its core and decoding all these different identities through individual songs that will eventually inform the artist’s identity as a whole. Nosizwe pours all of herself into the music of the album, and as I learn through the course of our conversation, and the little I knew of the artist going into the interview, it is a formidable collage of life experiences that inform her very existence.

Born to South African parents who fled the apartheid regime to Norway, Nosizwe makes up yet another fascinating addition to the complex socio-political landscape of a next-generation Diaspora. She might have been born in Norway, but much of who Nosizwe is, is informed by her South African heritage and spending her formative adolescent years in Cape Town. “I was a teenager, doing the whole house party scene, missioning about, being dirty and enjoying it”, she reminisces with a dry chuckle. From her defined Cape Tonian accent to her very open and laid-back approach to a conversation, there’s very little doubt that Nosizwe is a South African.

Moving to South Africa in ‘94, Nosizwe, came to the country after the first democratic election, which saw Nelson Mandela be inaugurated as the first black president and a sense of hope and rebirth envelop the African nation and one of the most culturally explosive eras in the country. Raised on the music of her parents which included Brenda Fassie, Sade and Bob Marley, there was “very little influence of Norwegian or Scandinavian music growing up” for Nosizwe with South African music pouring in the abundance. Through listening to artists that “grew up in pretty tumultuous times” and incorporating all that is them into their music, Nosizwe it seems started to define her own musical identity pretty early on. Her brother, Tshawe Baqwa, who would later go on to form the hugely successful Madcon, would bring “a lot of Hip Hop” to Nosizwe’s formative listening environment alongside her parents’ soundtrack, but a musical career was never prescribed for Nosizwe. “My mother had very clear goals for everyone, and I was going to become president”, says Nosizwe with a laugh. A political science student at the University of Cape Town, Nosizwe “fucked up the natural order of things” when she followed in her brother’s footsteps and a career in music ensued in Norway, first as a guest vocalist and musical collaborator to very many prominent Norwegian musicians, and finally as solo artist with her first single “Do You” in 2012. “I still get to hear, that there is still time, and I can still come around” says Nosizwe about her mother’s political aspirations for her daughter, but as “In Fragments” matures, it only goes further to cement her musical voice and a long career in music, overshadowing the presidential hopeful’s career for now, but who’s to say what the future will bring Mrs. Baqwa…

I fall into conversation with ease as one South African to another in a foreign land, and her sense of humour is very palpable even over the telephone. But as with any South African, politics are always somewhere at the back of one’s mind and even before we breach the subject of music at the start of our conversation, there’s a murky cloud hanging over our heads. The political landscape in South Africa is currently very volatile, with a student uprising in light of proposed national education fee hikes; a presidency fraught with corruption, scandal and abuse of power; and a recent suspicious cabinet reshuffle that plunged South Africa’s credit rating into junk status with Standard and Poor, a 17 year low for the country. These are topics that Nosizwe and I fall into like familiars and while Nosizwe is still trying to form an opinion of the cabinet reshuffle with the little information that’s available to us on the opposite hemisphere, she opines without hesitation, “Jacob Zuma is an ass” and finds solidarity with the student plight. “African people are a very politicised people. Politics happen on many different levels simultaneously, and I think the student protests has its place and it has a value and it needs to be included in a discourse.”

She’s vocal, yet fair on these issues and obviously very conscious of what’s going on in South Africa, and when I ask how much these issues inform her music she offers an example from “In Fragments”, the song Breathe, which she “wrote and dedicated to the student uprising.” The visual accompaniment to the single, a picture of two boys running away from a smoke grenade, which removed out of context looks like two younger men dancing, which Nosizwe brings back to the reality of the situation through her lyrics for Breathe. “I can’t breathe, I can’t see the sun for the light of day”, does not talk of a joyous occasion and after really studying the picture everything falls into its perspective. But as much as that song is about the student uprising, something that “deeply impacted” the artist, it also works in the context of American politics: “That song was definitely a reflection of the politics of SA, but also the United States with all the cop killings and the black lives matter movement.” Political issues are also moments of hope and encouragement for the artist, translated into acknowledgement and a deep seated respect in her music as inspired by the people of South Africa. “Hiya” from the album speaks of feminism and spirituality, not as a “pseudo philosophical” construct, but as a message of an openness that reflects an ingrained history between the people and the earth in South Africa and in the subtext it’s about empowerment. That “song was a thank you to my deeply spiritual and hippy sisterhood” explains Nosizwe. It is a “completely different access and entry to spirituality” for the singer and one that makes it “totally acceptable that you can acknowledge the ancestors on Saturday, go to church on Sunday and smoke weed on top of Devil’s peak on Sunday” with no contradiction between those spiritual elements, much like her album pieces together different, often contrasting things to make a whole.

It’s quite clear that her South African identity is quite a prominent fragment of Nosizwe, but it would be completely amiss to not acknowledge the Norwegian fragment in this extended collage of the artist. Today she finds much of her inspiration in the people she collaborates with, people like Georgia Anne Muldrow and Moe Chakiri, amazing people that “aid in opening the vessels to inspiration” for Nosizwe. Very much a burgeoning community today, Hip-Hop and Nuo Soul in Norway is at a very exciting era and as an album like ”In Fragments” can attest, it “definitely feels very inspiring” not just for an outsider looking in, but for an artist like Nosizwe working in the field. Although she might not have the same cultural connection to Norwegian music than her peers – her only point of reference her mother’s odd appreciation for the music of Arve Tellefsen – a large fragment of her makeup is encapsulated in this Norwegian connection.

She feels much of this relationship is based on the “strong club community” in Oslo and as she’s about to perform at Jæger there is that sense of her music coming home. “Planned improvised moments, trying to capture more fragmented moments in between the song while trying to tell a larger story” is how Nosizwe describes her live show. Using some of that strong imagery from the album, including the cover of Breathe, she intends to paint a fuller picture much like her album achieves, playing mostly material from her new album, but not exclusively. “I find it challenging and exciting that the album is more slow moving than what I’ve normally done”, she says as we wind down the interview. “I can’t rely on the happiness of dancing just to keep the audience going and that’s really interesting to explore and tap into in a very sexy and fun way for a live show.”

A bit more Honey… Soundsystem

A DJ collective and events series that today also encompasses no less than three labels and a monthly podcast, Honey Soundsystem has been a significant feature for no less than the ten years they’ve been around. Praised by critics, heads and partygoers alike they find that unique balance between entertainment and enlightenment, bringing a tangible energy to their sets and their events, while also making sure to stay close to their deep roots. Born out of the San Francisco queer scene, the DJ collective made up of Jason Kendig, Jacob Sperber (aka Jackie House), Josh Cheon, and Robert “Robot” Yang (aka Beziér), came together to acknowledge the history of the queer dance floor as individually respected DJs simpatico with the roots of this music and the origins of club culture. With a strong conceptual framework at their core, they set out to produce events that recognised the legacy of the dance floor, without losing sight of its contemporary appeal, achieving an immutable notoriety which today spans the globe.

What started out as small events in makeshift venues, with a very fine attention to detail in establishing something concrete, the Honeys soon became an institution in San Francisco. Inspiring and encouraging queer artists from the region, including Avalon Emerson no less, the Honey Soundsystem grew into bigger venues and events like the annual closing party for the Folsom street fair. Eventually it was something that couldn’t merely be contained in the bay area and the Honeys quickly became a touring DJ collective that brought the Honey Soundsystem name not only to places like Chicago, but to events like Feel my Bicep and clubbing institutions like Panorama bar in Europe. They propagated their sound and their ethos even further through three labels in the form of Discaire, Cheon’s Dark Entries and the flagship label HNYTRX, labels that today stand on their own as invaluable contributors to DJ bags and record shelves the world over.

With 6 to 7 annual Honey Soundsystem events in SF still going strong; their podcast series on its 222nd episode; and a new album by transgender artist Octo Octa about to hit the shelves, the Honeys are stronger than ever in maintaining their ideology, but how have they evolved over their decade long existence, you might ask? “This is the year we’re feeling the evolution the most”, says Jacob Sperber from San Francisco over a clear internet call. “As we start touring more, and the label becomes more sought after it becomes difficult to bring that energy to everything. I think that’s the interesting thing for us, is maybe paring things back a little bit. More than anything else we’re trying more to define the collective.”

With the Honeys spread between SF and Chicago and constantly on the road, defining that collective is more important than ever to the Honeys. Jacob had in fact just gotten back from Europe at the time of speaking, playing Panorama bar and understandably he is a bit bit jetlagged. “I am everything but the girl right now”, he adds with wry chuckle, but shows absolutely no sign of it throughout our conversation, producing very thoughtful and acute answers as we delve into what makes the Honeys tick. Joining us on the call too is Jason Kendig, who is the Chicago connection today and currently a resident at Smart Bar alongside the Black Madonna. He is more “caffeinated” than his counterpart with two hours on the bay area and what unfolds throughout the 40 odd minutes of our conversation is like their DJ sets, entertaining and enlightening, serious and fun, a world of contrasts making a very complicated although complete picture that only Honey Soundsystem could represent today.

Jason, with you in Chicago and Honey Soundsystem’s crazy touring schedule, you’ll often yourselves in different locations. How do you keep the Honey Soundsystem ethos alive?

Jason Kendig: I’d say we find ourselves in the same city pretty regularly. I did move away but I go back to San Francisco pretty regularly. We communicate via this handy app called slack and email…

Jacob Sperber: …and memes, what’s app. (laughs). San Francisco is definitely the homebase for our parties and our label. When we work on some projects they center around San Francisco and we are definitely still supporting San Francisco artists.

We have a lot of friends who’ve moved over the last decade while we were all living in SF, and even though they might have taken on the identity of the new place they are living in today, a lot of what they were trying to achieve as musicians or artists in SF was still what they were trying to achieve as they moved. So many times when we are travelling, we are encountering people from SF that are in the same situation we are. It keeps the ethos alive in that way.

That ethos is obviously focussed on the history of the queer dance floor, but what was instrumental in making that the focus of Honey Soundsystem?

Jacob: In many ways it’s just the dance floor. We came together on dance floors and San Francisco itself brought us together. We were all in the right place at the right time. It was a very exciting period in SF’s nightclub culture where there were opportunities to make things happen cheaply and easily and a lot of the creative people that were living in the city, and maybe little bit older, were very supportive of what we were doing. They brought a lot of experience and things like photos, posters or stories to the table so we could understand what the city wanted, needed and the queer history behind it.

Jason: I just read an interview and it’s basically a conversation between Octo Octa with DJ Sprinkles (Terre Thaemlitz). When DJ Sprinkles was living in Oakland, she was describing the scene as all these repressed mid-westerners that had come to the west coast to live out their fantasy of what they thought it was to be queer. I was like “fuck”, I’m a midwesterner who moved from Detroit. I wasn’t closeted at this point, but I was like; “Was this the call to come west, was this the fantasy of what it was to be queer that I wasn’t getting in Detroit?” I don’t think it was the case, but it was definitely food for thought.

I just read that interview too, and I was actually going to ask you about that exactly. What I also wanted to ask you about that interview, is that DJ Sprinkles also mentions that playing in Europe is not much of an enjoyable experience for her, because it’s a very straight white male, dudes fist pumping type of thing. Perhaps Jacob you could weigh in on this since you just came from Berlin.

Jacob: No… I do think that one of the unique parts of being a queer artist from America going to Europe, you get to play these spaces that are really focussed on incredible sound systems and these nightclub spaces that are unique not only in the way that the country allows people to party, but also the rich inner-continental history of partying that happens there. I think that need to be on a dance floor that’s specifically queer or specifically open in certain kinds of ways, sometimes for me gets superseded by the idea of how different and how enriching just the musical element of those dance floors can be in comparison to America. There’s just so many more fun facets to those dance floors that get distracted and I think a lot more people are falling into those details rather than just needing a place to be sexually free.

Jason: I think the way that question was posed to Terre (Thaemlitz) was that she wasn’t getting to play some of the queer / low key type parties, because since they were smaller they didn’t have the budget to fly her all the way from Japan. And I feel that in a way that we have been given this opportunity to show what we’ve been doing in SF, giving our perspective on our own little musical niche on the west coast. I think perhaps because of our age, our first experiences with dance music were not necessarily in queer spaces. For myself as a teenager, when I was finding myself at raves in Detroit, it was about freedom of anonymity, that I didn’t have to worry about being harassed.

Jacob: I think there are opportunities that you find yourself playing parties as a showcase artists and not necessarily an artist as a part of a scene and we get to do a little bit of both. For example, playing the Chapter 10 parties in London feels like a Techno thanksgiving where everything is just right and there might even be some family drama. (Laughs) And then there will be a gig like playing Studio 80 in Amsterdam, where it was just a club night, and there were certainly people excited to be there to hear us, but there was an idea that Amsterdam was just out on the town that night, and it was our job, to not just make people enjoy themselves, but also not be too noticeable. You could be on any dance floor in any part of the world, and that is also your job as a DJ, just to work.

On that point, you put a lot of effort into your parties, in keeping the history of queer club culture alive, so how do communicate ideas like that in a situation like Studio 80?

Jacob: There is only so much you can do without losing people a little bit. There are certain spaces where you can get really conceptual. When you are out in a place like Studio 80, you have to do it through the tracks. You have to throw a lot of energy into a track that you feel that’s gonna explain a little bit of the history of where you are coming from.

At the same time we actually can’t either. There are some rigid formats to fit into as touring DJs. Clubs that are very specific about what they want and how they want it and in many ways we are just honoured to be a part of it. There’s only so much time you have to present yourself and even some of the most conceptual artists we’ve booked, just brought themselves to DJ. For example, Lena Willikens who recently played with us, was telling me about a puppet opera she’s involved with. I was like “you can’t present your opera puppet project at our post sex-party party tonight, I don’t think it would go well”. Sometimes we have the pressure to have the artwork look more representative of Honey or have the crowd look more like the people we want there. We want to draw those people out in the city, but we can’t always – it’s just the nature of the beast.

In terms of music and communicating the ideology of Honey Soundsystem, what was the music policy behind it all when it started out?

Jason: I don’t know if there was a specific music policy. It always sort of ran the gamut. It was more about having a party, showcasing the tracks that you were excited about. We’ve always been jumping around from Disco to Techno to House music.

Jacob: Certain record stores were informing what we wanted to do musically. There were records that you would dig in SF that would generally come up. Hi-NRG stuff, especially when we started and some of the Disco stuff, were still in the stacks and still cheap here. There were some parties that were informing the sounds; like going to hear Solar DJ and kind of explaining the history of Bay area raving, but also his particular take on it. And just the idea that we wanted our friends to be having fun on the dance floor. That required some divas, that required some heads and even some contemporary diva stuff, like Roisin Murphy; she was a very big character in our circle of friends.

Did you feel that there was a particular hole in San Francisco that you needed to fill at the time?

Jacob: I think we’ve answered that one a lot, and since then the hole has been filled again and again. We even created some holes ten years later, that we’ve been watching other people fill. I think it’s just inevitable, you find your opening in a competitive field and you try to fill it. It was pretty natural to us. At the time it was a very large social group of people that wanted to get together every night of the week and we were filling all those spots. Musically we were all really interested in pushing the boundaries even further.

In terms of clubbing, and its very mainstream appeal today, do you feel that history Honey Soundsystem represents gets lost a lot in this contemporary environment?

Jason: People have different ways of associating a night out and what it means to them: Some people just go to get fucked-up, dissociate; some people just go to meet up with friends, let loose; some people go to listen to music that is foreign to them and they might latch onto it, and it takes on a deeper meaning to them; some of them go to find a community. So, it’s not fair to write off the people that aren’t connecting to that deeper aspect. The way people are connecting right now with social media and the world’s history at your fingertips, when something really connects with them, I feel that they’ll choose to peel back the layers and delve further into the past. You have new kids that might not have any context of why a track from 30 years ago was so popular, but it resonates with them now and juxtaposing all of that together and creating fresh experiences on the dance floor. You might have been dragged to a sports bar with an EDM soundtrack, and decide this is shit I need to leave, and then you find yourself in a nightclub, and possibly becoming part of a new community of friends.

In terms of music and what you guys represent as Honey Soundsystem, what are your feelings of the current socio-political landscape in the US after the elections?

Jacob: I think in terms of music, it’s an important job for us, now more than ever, as touring DJs to ensure people that their instincts about the Americans that they’ve met, that are involved in more conscious levels of art are correct. And that we are as shocked as they are to find out about Brexit and any fascism in the world, and certainly we’re shocked that we have to deal with Trump in a position of power that he’s in today. We just intend to do our part, not only when we are at home, but to come back at everything that awful man does and we’re representing the country when we go places to do it with class, to re-ensure people that he doesn’t represent us.

There’s been a lot of talk about the club being the best environment to oppose those views and come together as a united front, a community.

Jacob: I’m on the fence about that. As Jason mentioned, I think the club is more complicated place. It is traditionally a place of lawlessness within law, and many ways that can be a fire starting place for some political or social issues to leave that place and insight a conversation. But there are bouncers protecting people from going inside and leaving that place for a reason. It’s been a kind of place that has a walled experience. And this is stuff that needs to be dealt with outside in the street.

Jason: I’m finding it a challenge between remaining upbeat and championing the things that are exciting when you feel the sense of dread that this current administration represents. The levels of corruption seem to go deeper and deeper. It’s easy to feel consumed with anxiety. I’m struggling to find the balance, because you don’t want to become that person that’s just constantly yelling about every grievance but you also don’t want to allow this to become normalized. At present I try to retain faith in the system of checks and balances in this country. Hopefully these people will get their comeuppance.

How do you think something as abstract as club music could, if at all, make difference in the end?

Jacob: I think there is a fun example of that. Matias Aguayo and some artists that he’s involved with made a dance track version from one of the speeches from the women’s march on Washington. It came through, and it was one of those experiences as a DJ that was like: “do I play this track because I feel obligated to play this track even though it’s not necessarily a track that will fit into the set I’ve been working on”; On the other hand you feel that sense that I should be playing this track all the time.

We were in Washington DC days after that track was sent to us and I decided to play it at the very beginning of our set at this club called Flash. The club itself has a lot of foot traffic. It definitely draws queer crowds, but it’s pretty straight. Opening the set with that track, which had this really intense narrative against facism and sexism while using Trump’s words against him, might be too harsh, but after the track made its point the room felt so electric and it felt so right. Everyone that was in there that might not have known what we were about, knows that we don’t necessarily support Trump. Maybe some people left and I actually felt this superpower and I felt that everything can go right from that point on, like everybody was with me.

That’s every inspiring and lets hope you can bring a little of that feeling to Oslo when you visit us. Thank you for talking to us.

Jacob: We’re super excited. It’s such an awesome club. I’ve been to Oslo once, Jason hasn’t been before. It’s such a beautiful city, and we have such a connection with the music that has come out of it over the years.

In a creative mood with Dorisburg

Between the dance floor and the visceral dimension exists a sound all onto its own. It’s a sound based on a minimalist aesthetic that visits contrasting corners of the dance floor from House to Techno and has found its way on labels like Aniara, Hivern Discs and Northern Electronics. With a focus looking towards the ethereal dimensions of the dance floor, it’s the sound of Dorisburg – the solo alias of Swedish producer Alexander Berg and one half of Genius of Time. Dorisburg sees Berg harness that universal appeal of Genius of Time into his own artistic voice, speaking of something personal and human through the language of machines.

Born around the same era as Genius of Time, Dorisburg has been a fundamental piece of Fabian Bruhn’s Aniara puzzle as the label’s second only release in “Sinai Hypnosis” and a prominent fixture ever since – coming into his own as an artist within that community. From there he sculpted the Dorisburg sound into something completely unique, with music that lives on the enlightened plain of subconscious reverie and finding an eventual form in the context of club music. Even so Dorisburg’s music often defies classification, but whether he’s playing in the rhythmical Garage motifs of “Mima”, the functional Techno of “Business Propaganda”, or approaching the album format as in “Irrbloss”, there’s something distinctly Dorisburg about the music he produces.

The music breathes within a minimalist landscape, and through very little, Dorisburg can inflect a lot. He’s a musical consistency today, producing music at a staggering rate without wavering from his singular voice. Although an excellent DJ too, his music is best experienced in the live context. It’s in this live context that he’ll be visiting Jæger’s basement very soon, and this presented us with an opportunity to ask the artist some questions. We wanted to know how the sense of community at Aniara affects him and how exactly he uses his machines to communicate something so human in his music. Through an email, we posed some of these questions and more and get a glimpse at what makes this talented artist so appealing.

Let’s start with Genius of Time. With both you and Arkajo (Nils Krogh) very busy with solo projects, where does this leave Genius of Time at the moment and how do you find a balance between these two projects?

I don’t find it too hard to balance the two projects in terms of knowing what ideas would work for one or the other. Genius of time is really all about the energy that me and Nils have together working in the same room, so naturally Genius of Time is what happens when we get together and Dorisburg when I´m working alone.

We’ve been working quite a lot this past year on new stuff so you can expect to hear new things once the tunes start rolling out. We’re also preparing a new live set to premier this summer and will do a few special shows with that :)

I read somewhere that you are often inspired by books and visual arts. What are you reading at the moment and what work of art is really inspiring you?

William Blake and Horst Antes are examples of writings and visual art that really gets me inspired and make me wanna run over to the studio to make sounds.

How do you know if something like that will make its way into the music?

I don’t know if it will but it certainly puts me in the mood for making music. I don’t think I know exactly how that works myself. Reading other people’s interesting thoughts and reflections often puts me in a creative mood where I feel an urge to express new thoughts or feelings through sound.

In a recent XLR8R interview you talked about your need to be surrounded by creative individuals when you are working, even on your solo work. What is it about a community that propels your own work, and is it a tangible feeling or something more abstract?

I don’t think that working without interaction with other people would give me enough motivation to push myself to develop and learn new things.

Is it about their music influencing or inspiring you at all?

Yes definitely. The people close to me inspire me a great deal both musically and as people.

You are quite close to people like Fabian Bruhn (Aniara) and you’ve mentioned before how you might discuss something with Fabian, which will then even affect the outcome of a track. Can you give us an example of that at play?

Fabian is really good at seeing potential in something that I otherwise might have not continued working on. Sinai Hypnosis is a good example of that. The demo would probably have been lost and forgotten on my hard drive if it wasn’t for him.

You often talk about feeling in your music, and journalist often talk about it too. At what point does the feeling start to exist and how do you maintain it if you have to revisit or finish it after that initial encounter?

Often the emotional content of a track is there in the first recordings, so revisiting a track is more about polishing and carving out the core idea. Maybe realising what elements are the core of the track and taking away stuff that doesn’t support that idea fully. Sort of like removing the scaffolding after finishing a house? You needed it to build it, but once ready it´s not necessary anymore.

You work in a fairly minimalist aesthetic. How does that inhibit and/or encourage what you’re trying to put across?

I’m quite interested in exploring how to get much emotional content through with simple and minimal elements.

Your music can go from evocative moments on Aniara to the more experimental melancholic pieces for Northern Electronics. Is it about relaying something specific to an audience in each case and/or encapsulating a feeling from the start as influenced by the label?

It’s probably more that I get inspired in different ways when working with different labels. And it’s a good way to explore different vibes in the music I make.

Your music lies somewhere between the functional and the transient. Is there a particular ideology that you adhere to when you are making music?

Functional dance music is very interesting to me. There’s something almost magical about how sounds can be groovy and make people want to move their bodies. So I’m inspired by a lot of music that is probably more functional and minimal than the stuff I make, but I really like to have that sort of drive in my music as well and make something both for the mind to transport and the body to move.

Is it something that extends to your live shows?

I’ve had moments myself where dancing in clubs really is a healing experience almost like therapy and if I can provide that to someone else then I’m very grateful.

Both as a solo artist and as Genius of Time you often favour the live context. What does that bring out in you that a DJ set can’t and what aspects of a DJ set do you miss in a live show?

What I really like about DJing is spending more time with the audience and going in directions that I might not do through my own music.

I’ve seen images that feature a lot of hardware. Will you be bringing this out with you and what do you consider absolutely crucial to your setup?

For this show I will bring some drum machines, one vintage and one modern. It’s cool how you can make these machine talk to each other even though their 30 years apart in age! Then I’ll have a sequencer and a sampler with some effects.

Some of those images feature a Buchla. As synthesisers go it’s quite an abstract musical tool, that encourages a gestural kind of playing. How do you find this particular synth suits your live show needs specifically?

The Buchla is really cool to improvise with but you can’t have too much of a premeditated plan! But it will stay home this time as I wanna improvise more with the drums this time and after all I’ve only got two hands to work with!

This is your first time you’re gonna be in Oslo in a live context and since we’ve seen you DJ both as Genius of Time and Dorisburg, what should we expect of your live show?

It’s actually the second time I’ll play live at Jaæger. But I’m glad I’ve tried it out once before because knowing how amazing the acoustics and sound is in that room, I know I can make it sonically more interesting and work more with the ambiences and details that would not really come across in other sound systems. So yes getting that opportunity is really exciting and motivating. Thanks for inviting me – I really look forward to it!

Palms Trax through the Tracks

Palms Trax is a modern incarnation of nu-groove, a lo-fi synth sound with ethereal melodic lines and corporeal rhythms. His work is uncomplicated, demanding only an impulse from the listener as it gets to the point effectively and effortlessly. His releases have been tagged by Lobster Theremin and Dekmantel, where he has made a sizeable impact on both labels with four releases to date. His is a story of an epic rise to prominence in a very short time, but before Palms Trax, there had to be Jay Donaldson. A young music enthusiasts from Saltford, UK, Donaldson’s musical appreciation was passed down to his blues guitarist father and a mother with her penchant for the talking heads. An eclectic musical personality, inherited from his parents, Donaldson’s is a varied taste and through things like his Harangue the DJ appearance for the Guardian and his Berlin Community podcasts, we do get some sense of just exactly how immensely vast his selections can get.

After some early attempts making music under a Drop/Dead moniker, an IDM like sound that did draw some attention in 2011/12, Donaldson eventually moved to London to embark on a music technology course. “I wasted three years of my life” he says in A DJ Broadcast interview. Miking up drums for spoiled rock stars didn’t really appeal to him, but a synthesiser course did stick and was probably quite a significant influence on a young Donaldson, alongside a new internship at Phonica records. “I owe so much to Phonica, and as such have to mention them in every interview I give”, says Donaldson again for DJ broadcast. It’s also there where he would meet and play alongside Jimmy Asquith, the future head of Lobster Theremin.

After a spell hosting events in London called Etiquette, and a trip back home to Saltford, to pay back his student debt, most of which was squandered on Etiquette, he made the move to sunny Berlin like so many of his peers. “There was a lot of grass and people just seemed to be lying on the grass in the sun”, says Donaldson in his” breaking through” interview on Resident Advisor. ”I was like, ‘This seems alright.’ I thought I’d just give it a go.” Not quite as whimsical as all that, Donaldson had a PR job waiting for him on the other side, and a few months on his arrival in the German capital, Equation, too found it’s way out into the world. His first record established something unique in a world consumed by the retro-fitted sound of Chicago functionality and through the course of 4 EP’s Palms Trax has established something that we’ll now try to unravel through the tracks.

Late Jam

The first track to introduce Palms Trax to the world, is also quite different from anything that would follow. A drum-machine jam in the style of Funkineven’s earlier stuff with a simple descending bass-line, it’s only about half-way through that we hear the first melodic synth line creep in, only to retreat back into the mælstrom of jackin beats. Acid grumblings fill the empty spaces between the beats and an abstract synth whimpers somewhere in between, but none of that sweet melodic impulses that define Palms Trax is there.

On the Surface it appears to be little more than a drum machine jam, and we imagine Donaldson hunched over a 808 and 303 for the most part, but it’s more likely that the UK producer is sitting at a desk, with light beaming from a computer screen. “Even if I could ever afford an 808, I’d probably still find a way to make it sound bad”; he explains to Electronic Beats magazine ”so why would I not use these samples that are recorded by a professional that you can rip off the internet?”

Equation

That sets the tone for Equation; a polished, masterfully executed dance floor track, where 808 kicks swell in the current of reverb-laden sinewy strings and rubber bass-lines vie for your attention as they ebb and flow through between the beats. It’s the song that not only propelled Palms Trax’ career but also the label Lobster Theremin.

This track is all Palms Trax. Lo-fi, but not amateur, House music in its simplest form, as established by people like Burrell Brothers. The title “Equation” is actually a direct reference Ronald Burrell’s alias of the same name. This is again Phonica’s influence as he explains in an interview from 2014 with Boiler Room.

Forever

The success of Equation almost immediately led to this follow up EP on Lobster Theremin. What was evoked in Equation was then ingrained as that unmistakable Palms Trax sound. What makes it stand out from the Nu groove classics of the late 80’s and 90’s? Besides the obvious contemporary production quality, there’s a beat-focus, that goes way beyond Nu-Groove’s simple 4/4 accompaniment. Perhaps it’s because it takes more of a front and centre role. Ye is is a contemporary production technique, but there is something unique to Palms Trax’ use of the snare, sticking its head out from the minimalists atmospheres created by the barely-present synths.

Osiris Resurrected (Palms Trax Remix)

It was inevitable after Equation that Palms Trax would start remixing other artists too. A platform for him “to try different things” according to the breaking through article on RA. It’s here where his diversity really shines through. What was established as Palms Trax, gets completely broken down and finds its way through and beyond other genres, styles and practises. From his darker and denser synth orchestrations for Johannes Regnier’s ‎Hilbert Space to his transient marimba moments for Hivern Discs and Herzel, remixes allowed Palms Trax to explore that whimsical, eclectic side of his musical personality. A youth spent going to see absolutely performance coming through Saltford with his father, resulted in a broad musical appreciation and his remix of Osiris’ Resurrected, with its breakbeats and jungle themes is about the perfect example of his versatility in the production chair.

Sumo Acid Crew

2015, a year after “Forever” and enter Dekmantel, who take Palms Trax into their extensive family, which make-up some of the most significant figures in modern House music. “It feels like a dream come true”, says Donaldson in an interview with DJ Broadcast. “In Gold” is the first EP to make it’s way out and its closing track Sumo Acid Crew, shows Palms Trax retains his unique sound, but with a production aesthetic that’s evolved in terms of experience. A denser textural atmosphere exists, with each part squared away in its designated space. The snares are not as upfront, and the contrapuntal melodies very rarely conflict with each other as much as they did on Equation where everything jockeys for your attention constantly. There’s certainly a growth there, without losing or in any way subverting the Palms Trax touch.

Cloud City

It all culminated to this point, and Palms Trax’ most recent EP for Dekmantel, which came out last year. Fuller, denser, but at the same time more refined than Palms Trax has ever been, “Cloud City” features Moroder-esque running bass-lines, evocative pads and that steady 808 kick that hasn’t left Palms Trax over the course of his career. It leaves with an open-ended possibility of what the future might bring for what is still a producer at the beginning of a career, but as the strings and stabs at 80’s keys can atest for, it could only be a Palms Trax sound.

In the space of four years, Palms Trax has made a significantly impact on modern House music, and has even set a tone alongside similar artists like Fatima Yamaha and Tornado Wallace for what might soon become the sound of House for this generation.

Baya – Behind the Mask

There’s something intimidating, yet captivating about Baya’s new double EP, “Oslo – Harlem” before you even get to the music contained within. Even just sitting on the shelf, the artwork provokes with the audacity and virility of its imagery, the African mask in all its magnificent presence. It touches on something visceral and primordial in the viewer. It carries with it a weight that’s intrigued artists for centuries; from Picasso to Jim Carrey the mask has been decoded and deconstructed time and time again to reveal layers of incredible depth that unfolds as much through the viewer as it does through its own physiognomy. It’s quite bold to the point of being almost menacing, but there’s no one aspect of its being that should provoke. It’s a feeling a young Andrew Murray (Baya) too can relate to from the time when he was first introduced to the vision of the African mask. “As a Norwegian kid you’re like ‘what is this’”, says the young Norwegian artist over a coffee at Bare Jazz, and what made his first encounter more significant than any other was that this was not to be just an ordinary mask viewed in the context of a museum or a gallery but rather a creation of Andrew’s father, Bruno Baya Sompohi’s. So to know the story of “Oslo – Harlem” we must familiarise ourselves with Bruno Baya Sompohi’s story first…

A talented young artist from the Ivory Coast, Mr. Sompohi found himself in Rome and then Bergen on scholarships to study sculpture in the eighties. It was in Norway where he would have the significant encounter with Caroline Baardsen that brought Andrew into the world, but it’s also here where he expounded on his lifelong work; delving into the concepts of the African mask through a thoroughly western image.“He found the African mask at Sagene kirke”, explains Andrew, “where he saw the mask in the church door, and he saw the parallel between the African mask and western society.” He calls the concept Gla, shortened from Glalogy. “Gla is the manifestation of the African spirit tradition, African society”, explains Mr. Sompohi during an interlude on Oslo-Harlem, his voice a rich mixture of French accentuation and a booming African tenor. “Gla is the music, Gla is the fine art, Gla is the everything” and the artist focuses all these elements through the aesthetic of the African mask. Visually, the results are striking works of immense proportions with concepts that go deeper and deeper with each idea revealing the next in conceptually dense works of art with the mask as foreground. “There’s always something” says Andrew of his father’s work, work that’s consumed “45 years” of the artist’s life, which Andrew feels he has barely scratched the surface of.

Andrew’s familiarisation of his father and the work has only been a recent occurrence, because Before the birth of his son, after a “racial incident” in Norway, Mr. Sompohi “had to leave the country”. From there on in, he and Andrew’s relationship, would be a strained, distant relationship, mostly conducted over the phone. “It wasn’t the right way to build a relationship” says Andrew regrettably as he recalls his father’s “dark african voice” over the phone, a strange intimidating thing to a Norwegian adolescent growing up in the suburb of Bærum.

Not fully aware of his father’s work and having only a distant, almost estranged relationship with the patriarch, Andrew would embark on a journey towards a musical career almost by accident, without realising he and his father “had the same thing in common”. Andrew’s introduction to music would come in the form of his “neighbour playing ‘Sweet home Alabama’ on his guitar” and from there Andrew would nurture his musical voice through the that same stringed instrument with a penchant for the “heavy stuff” from the likes of “Iron Maiden and Turbonegro” at first; tastes that would evolve and mature with the artist. The unlikely setting of Bærum would prove to be a perfect environment for the gestation for an artistic personality, and like Kai Gundelach, Hubbabubbaklubb and Skranglejazz, Andrew Murray would turn to music as a direct opposing reaction to the stereotypical “Bærum, rich man’s blues” individual and the stereotypical sport-enthusiast conservative personality it nurtured. “That in combination with the fact that you are from Bærum and do have the means to buy you your first guitar” seems to create a most fertile environment for the artist to spring into existence. From the heavier stuff, Andrew would move into Jazz and beyond, spending “every second Friday, buying records from George Benson, Jimmy Smith and Miles Davis” not five foot from where we sit for our interview, before heading off to Jæger across the road to experience electronic music in its natural habitat.

While Andrew was in the mitts of informing a vast musical dialect through the experiences of Bærum, the guitar, heavy Rock, Jazz and everything in between, Bruno Baya Sompohi was also on a journey of new discoveries of sorts; relocating to Harlem and establishing a family in his new home. “I gathered when you are different and curious you’ve got to see the world” surmises Andrew about his father’s relocation to the cultural “melting pot” that is New York. After a few years and staying in touch with his father, and more importantly getting to know his siblings, Andrew too eventually decided to visit Harlem not particularly to visit his father but rather to visit the siblings that he had never met in person, people that shared this “common link” through a father, but whose own relationship, shouldn’t necessarily be dictated by it. “I wanted to meet them” thought Andrew, “and at the same time, let me meet my dad.” There are a lot of people that “share a similar story” according to Andrew, people that form part of “the third culture kids” phenomenon and he set off on his mission in a very objective manner. “Let me be open to this”, he thought “and not get too personal, because this is how the world is moving forward.”

The “consequence as an artist” for Andrew and what would become his artistic moniker Baya was “the most real thing that’s ever happened” to him, a very personal experience that would shape his musical identity irrevocably and formed the basis of Oslo – Harlem. It was through his father’s work and the resulting interviews Andrew conducted with his father about his work that informed the vague conceptual framework for the music that followed.“I need to have this in my music”, recall Andrew of those experiences. What was intended to be a just a meeting of father and son for the first time, became a meeting of one artist to another. A “common interest” then lead to a collaborative work, where Mr, Sompohi’s visual works work would inform and play counterpoint and accompaniment to the younger Baya’s musical work.

The result is Oslo – Harlem, a double EP in a versatile musical dialect that explores the notion of contemporary pop music through a more adventurous sonic palette that has been coined “experimental” by more conservative media outlets. Oslo – Harlem is a musical collage made up of contrasts and chance encounters between disparate musical sonic structures, funneled together as one distinct musical dialect through the artist at the centre of it. Andrew uses the image of his studio to explain his creative methods. Between one “wall of guitars and another adorned with synthesisers” Andrew’s music as Baya finds a perfect balance in the middle. “Everything is a combination, it’s combinations that I’m playing with” muses Andrew. Even when I pick up an African identity in his music through the polyrhythms in his music, Andrew is hesitant of confirming it as a “parallel that’s genetic”. It’s more likely to be just another combination of various disparate influences, rather than an African heritage he downplays as something distant he doesn’t have any relationship with yet. “I’m as white as Olanskii down there” he considers with a dry chuckle as he points across the road to Jæger.

Like Mr. Sompohi’s work that finds this parallel between western society and the African mask, Baya’s music draws parallels between various aspects of music and of course the theme of the mask through Oslo-Harlem. “I’m excited for this record to have this face” says Andrew of this visual element to the album. It will also be a theme running through the live shows I learn, as Andrew collaborated with his father and Red Bull to create masks that will form the backdrop to the stage, an experience Andrew quite “inspiring”. “It was like going to art school for a week.”

Andrew shows me a video of the masks, verbosely colourful statuettes that peer at you with some intensity accentuated by the colourful lights that frame and possibly softens, o humanises their bold appearance. It’s an aspect to Oslo – Harlem and the succeeding live show that emboldens the musical narrative, not in terms of a defined single concept but rather a concise musical and visual aesthetic that influences each other. And although it’s quite a pronounced at this stage of Baya’s music, it might also just be a fleeting thing. “It’s something that might only be this record” suggests Andrew. “What’s fascinating for me now is that it feels like the first layer of an onion has been peeled off” says Andrew. As he evolves as an artist, Baya is certainly to make quite an impression perhaps even as much if not more than the elder artist of the same name.

It’s unclear whether he and his father will be working together more in the future, and Andrew is already suggesting that he intends to “move on” from this into his future works, but there certainly is a parallel there that looks to perhaps inform the further development of Baya s a musical artist.

*For more on the artist, follow Baya here.

Bill Brewster: The Archivist

My computer screen blinks into live with; “Mischa are you from Oslo?” I confirm, thinking it’s a question of residency before I get the reply: “wasn’t sure who was contacting me and I often get weird porno people trying to add me!” In a few characters and an emoticon, Bill Brewster instantly lights the mood for one of the most immense and quite intimidating interviews I’ve had in awhile. “Hello”, says a disembodied voice over a clear connection when I call him up moments later – a voice I instantly recognise from the interviews and DJ history podcasts featuring the DJ, music historian, journalist and record collector. It’s a reedy tenor, with an English accent slightly neutralised by the years spent in the States, with an amicable and approachable timbre distilled down from a working class upbringing and refined in experiences of an amenable personality. The pretext for our conversation? An upcoming trip to Oslo, where Bill Brewster will play at the upcoming Hubba Bubba Klubb at Jæger, and an unmissable opportunity to ask one of the foremost thinkers and critics of dance music culture some questions. It’s not his first visit to Oslo either.

Bill Brewster: I’ve been there a few times. I’ve played at five different clubs over the years.

And you know quite a few people here too.

I know quite a lot of people in Oslo and Norway, from people coming over to London, me going over to Oslo and conversing over the Internet.

Was it mostly through djhistory.com forum that you met these people?

It was, yes. It was pretty instrumental in getting to know, Prins Thomas and Strangefruit and through them I got to know other people. They also introduced a lot of people to the forum, like Todd Terje when he was just a teenager.

That forum really played into the hands of the nerdy culture that exists around buying records, especially here in Norway.

It’s a very very nerdy culture and that’s why we get on so well.

… says Bill with a wry chuckle, knowing full well the extent the djhistory.com site played exactly into that nerdy DJ culture. Topics like “ is Phil Collins balearic”; “what’s your favourite Italo Disco record to play at the wrong speed”; and “Cliff Richard’s funky B-sides” were common threads on the djhistory.com forum, which came to it’s conclusion in 2015 after years of bringing various communities together over a shared love of records. A self-stylised “record nerd”, Bill was also an avid contributor to the site forging countless significant friendships in his perpetual quest to explore music’s unlimited dimensions. Djhistory.com would ultimately acquire a life of its own, but it its roots took form in the first ever concise documentations of the history of the DJ: “last night a DJ saved my life”.

Co-authored with Frank Broughton, “Last night a DJ saved my Life” is Bill’s legacy to the world as the first thorough history of the DJ and the various cultures that existed around the DJ through different eras – an Encyclopedia Brittanica of dance music and its culture that not a single other book has been able to surpass. It’s a constant point of reference for this writer, and possibly any DJ. I recently spotted a copy sitting on Prins Thomas’ shelf and am not surprised to hear that Øyvind Morken often picks it up to re-read a chapter from its archives. It’s a history of DJing and in extentionsion, of club culture as told from the voices of those that were present and accounted for during each seminal era of DJ history. “ It’s had an amazing impact on people”, says Bill “much more than what we had expected.”

It’s seventeen years old, and it’s crazy to think it’s still so relevant, but I can’t help feel a sequel should perhaps exist.

We don’t really plan to do anymore, because everything that’s happening now and everything that’s happening post House music, has not made any difference to the culture of DJing or where DJing has come from, or how DJing was presented. All of that was really solidified in the late sixties, early seventies. If you think of Disco and Hip-Hop and in particular Disco, all of that stuff that we come to think as DJ culture was established in 1974 – 75 In New York. There isn’t really more to add, except new names.

Don’t you think there might be something to the post-Internet DJ culture, that took shape around things like djhistory.com?

I think what the internet has been important for, is uniting disparate communities around the world into one solidified whole. For example that kind of Balearic sound that a lot of the Norwegian DJs are connected with, and I suppose I am as well, really came together through djhistory.com pulling different parts together. It definitely has had an influence, and an impact on how dance music has developed over the last fifteen years.

But not enough for another book?

I don’t think you could justify writing a book about it. Then again, you’d be surprised what people come up with for book ideas, so who knows. When we were putting together the idea for a book about the DJ there were still publishers more interested in publishing books about Grunge. I remember my friend Matthew Cohen who wrote the first book on Acid House said he had no end of trouble getting a publishing deal, from publishers who were still more interested in writing about Grunge.

So really, the more you write about the subject, the more it becomes embedded in the culture, but although it felt like an important book to do for us personally, it didn’t feel like anyone was waiting for it to be written.

It feels to me that there is still very little in the way of books about dance music and its culture, when you compare it to something like Punk rock, for instance.

There are a lot more than what there used to be, because there didn’t used to be any. But yeah you’re right. You look at how many books had been written about the Beatles – there are probably a hundred times as many books written about the Beatles than the history of dance music. It does lack respect amongst a lot of professional music writers, and I think that’s partially because with rock standards from the likes of Leonard Cohen, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, there are a lot of lyrics to deconstruct. You don’t really have that in dance music, dance music is much more about physicality and often the music is instrumental, so I think for that reason it’s not really an attractive thing for a lot of journalists.

And also given the fact that most journalists are white middle class men, who are not necessarily known for their dance moves, it doesn’t necessarily attract a lot people to want to write about this, which is sad, but that’s how it is. And on the plus side, people like me and Frank have had more of a free range to write about what we want, without much competition.

“Last night a DJ saved my life” came at a time when nobody before them had quite approached the subject as comprehensively as Bill and Frank. Kismet had brought Bill and Frank (who grew up in Grimsby, UK not far from each other) together at legendary New York club, the Sound Factory, a regular haunt for the two music journalists who were both living in the city in the early to mid nineties. It’s there they encountered the first stories that would form the basis for “Last night a DJ”, stories from people that lived through the gay nightlife culture of New York in the seventies, and still participated in club culture in the nineties. It led to hundreds of interviews with the leading lights of DJ culture, from Disco to Hip-Hop, culminating in what has become to go-to reference guide for DJ culture since. Bill and Frank captured a story that spans decades in an approachable narrative that just jumped off the pages at you and speaking to Bill over the phone that narrative voice is just as strong and engaging and you can’t help but hang onto his every word. He’s a natural raconteur and a cultivated conversationalist on the subject of music.

As we talk about music Djing and club culture we naturally fall on subjects like he and Frank’s Low Life events (which also came to their conclusion in 2015), and club-culture’s future in the gentrification of London. Intriguing subjects all to their own, especially coming from such an experienced and enlightened voice on the subject, it’s actually when we touch on Bill Brewster’s own biography that it intrigues the most. It’s through his story, we find an unbreakable thread through the writing the music and the records, starting with an inquisitive younger Bill Brewster, enraptured in the sonic grumblings and DIY culture of punk.

From there Bill fell into club culture by pure necessity. “I got interested when I was a chef”, he recalls, “I would finish work at midnight and the only places that were open were nightclubs”. It opened up to a world of post-punk, black music and electronic music. Artists like “a certain ratio and 23-skidoo” would lead to black american music from the likes of “Funkadelic and a certain ratio”, while the “odd-ball Disco” label, Z sounds and UK synth-wave act The Human League piqued and interest in electronic music that would encourage a more unorthodox approach to listening music for Bill.

It seems that you have a very varied and eclectic musical taste, even from a young age.

Yes, I did. I didn’t have an older sibling that would say; “have you listened to this or have you heard that”, but I had John Peel. John Peel was really important in informing the kind of music that I would listen to, because he would play a Punk band, then he would play Little Richard, and then he would play a Krautrock record. He just played such a huge variety of music, particularly in the 1970’s and early ‘80’s. I was a devotee of John Peel. I would tape his shows and edit the down to his greatest hits.

If you could put that taste into words, especially from a personal perspective, what were the underlying factors that would put all these disparate genres together for you?

Just good music really. What I learnt or took away from John Peel, is that it didn’t matter what clothes people wore, what they looked like, which country they were from or how trendy they were. If he liked them he would play them. The only time he really rejected songs were when they became really successful. It was really about introducing you to new music you haven’t heard before, so what would be the point of playing an ABC record or a Simple Minds record before it was in the charts.

Was it about finding something that you can claim as your own?

That was appealing, but I always enjoyed going out and discovering new stuff. It might not be new to everybody else, but it would be new to me. Before I was Djing, I would make tapes for friends of interesting music, but for me it was always about introducing people to music that they might not already necessarily know, and really that’s what Djing is. It’s you spending two hours, telling people what’s good.

Bill had fallen on a rudimentary form of DJing before House music, which took him from Punk to House, back to Disco and to Balearic with the two fundamental eras in Bill’s development being Punk rock and Acid House. Already 28 at the point House had made an appearance Bill had left many of his friends behind “who were still listening to the Stranglers”, in favour of this new black dance music emerging out Chicago. ”For me Acid House was like a black Punk rock and that really appealed to me. It was anti-establishment; it was non-musicians trying to make music on rudimentary equipment.” By that time he had already unknowingly been buying House records, but it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. “I hated it”, says Bill of his first experience of House music.

I just moved back to London. A friend of mine used to be a warm-up DJ at the Fridge and I used to get in for free. I remember it was September 1987 and Mark Moore (S’express) was playing and Adrian (my friend) played the usual stuff, a bit of go-go, some Hip-Hop, maybe some House and Electro, lots of stuff mixed together. Then Mark Moore came on and just played House records for two hours, and I was like: “What the fuck is this!” It really was confrontational, because nobody was doing E; it was way before that. It really put me off House music for a year and then an ex-girlfriend of mine took me to a gay Acid House club called troll and then that was it.

And When exactly did the DJ bug first bite and you found the urge to play records to a bigger audience?

Well I started going out seriously to clubs 1981. I used to go to a couple of places in Nottingham. One was Rock City and another club called the Garage. The Garage was amazing because they used to play everything from psychedelic sixties records in one room to Graham Park in another room. Graham Park was an early champion of Electro and then House music. That’s when I really caught the bug. I didn’t really start thinking about Djing until House started. I accumulated enough records and had started being asked to play at people’s house parties, and then it developed from there kind of organically.

When you started getting records together, and started playing them, what were your intentions for buying music; DJing or just listening?

I think from ‘87 to ‘93 I was mainly buying records with DJing in mind and then after that I reverted back to buying music that was just interesting. I still buy as much music not for DJing as for Djing. I still buy music just because I find it pleasurable.

Are you still finding old music that is is new to you?

I doubt whether there is a week that goes by without buying records that are completely new to me that are 30/40 years old. There’s just so much music out there and what’s incredible, because of the Internet, is that suddenly we know now that they were making Disco records in Indonesia and Funk records in Turkey. Prior to the Internet, I had no idea these little scenes existed around the world. You just arrogantly assumed that the people making music were in Britain, America and a couple of other countries. I’m always on the lookout for stuff I don’t know.

Which is kind of a continuation of your archiving of music, and extension of your writing work?

Yeah, even though I don’t have a purpose for the interviews I do now, I interview people because I find them interesting, not because I think i can sell it to a magazine. I’ve done interviews with people that have never been published, simply because I find them interesting. I’m fortunate enough to do that and still earn a living.

So we were talking about music there, and suddenly we’re talking about writing. Those two spheres seem like one and the same for you.

Actually at the centre of what I do is collecting records. All of the things that I do, are offshoots of collecting records. A lot of the ideas I get from compilations are from collecting records; a lot of the motivations for interviewing different people are from collecting records; and DJing is a by-product from collecting records. So I’ve somehow made a living from collecting records. That’s what I love doing, and all the other things I do are spinoffs from that.

At fifty seven, Bill “still really love’s finding new music” and feels there is “still a lot of new interesting music coming out”, enough to keep a severe musical appetite at bay and allow him continue pursuing his first love, collecting records. It ties a thread from his writing to his DJing to the many compilations he’s brought out on the likes of “Late night Tales”. He might not be such an avid clubbing enthusiasts as he was during the nineties in New York, but whenever he plays out he still finds that fundamentally club culture remains unchanged since David Mancuso’s Loft. “The ingredients are still nice people, good music and a strobe light in a basement.” Djing might be a bit more ”trendy than it was in the 1980’s”, and you might get a more populous interpretation of it in EDM, but for Bill club culture is still very much about “people doing interesting things off the beaten track.”

Bill has always been one of these individuals, and approaches this idea from various perspectives. As a DJ he leaves few roads unexplored; as a music enthusiast he immerses himself in every aspect of music (even for the sake of just learning more); and as a writer… well let’s just say he and Frank Broughton wrote the book on it.

As we start delving into Bill’s love for late 80’s Hip-Hop from the likes of Schooly D and De la Soul, we’re an hour into our conversation and there’s no sense of letting up. Bill’s extensive knowledge coming to the fore again and again through each sentence he utters. It was once opined that what Bill Brewster didn’t know about music was not worth knowing, and what was left unsaid when we have to end our conversation is just the entire history of the DJ. Although, if there ever were a chapter in “Late Night a DJ saved my Life” that desperately needed to be added, it would be the story of Bill and Frank’s superb efforts in tying the entire story of DJ together, and how,through djhistory.com, Low Life and DJing, they have made a remarkable contribution to DJ culture and in Bill Brewster it shows no signs of letting up soon.

Off the Score with Hilde Marie Holsen

Hilde Marie Holsen, since her debut album “Ask” hit the shelves with critical acclaim, has carved out something very particular and niche in music. Processing her trumpet in the electronic realm, she blends the mournful tone of the brass instrument with the explorative field of electronic music to make music that lists somewhere between Jazz, the contemporary and drone music. Releasing her debut album under the direction of Maja Ratkje, while she was a still a master student, her music unpicked the frayed boundaries of traditions, calling in a new generation of artists that abandoned stale and repetitive conventions in favour of establishing something unique, in the realms of contemporary music.

Since the release of her album she’s gone on to perform on a number of world stages, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with other musicians, while also continuing her work in the recorded field. Although she “hadn’t expected to play more concerts” since Ask, her album definitely paved the way for her to be more “established me in the contemporary, in the Jazz and the improvised, free stuff”. It was a notch on her belt that was necessary for her to progress from being a student to working in the professional field. “My study years were just about solo work and now I’ve started collaborations with people I work together with more or less regularly and also these small projects.”

One of these smaller project is her upcoming performance with Stian Balducci, where they will be unravelling the idea of ambient music in the contemporary, through elements of Jazz, electronics and free improvisation. After playing Punkt, she met Stian who had reached out to her and was eager to work with Hilde. A gig on a friday at Jæger was the last thing on her mind, and she remembers saying something like: “Are you kidding me, I’m not going to do that.” But her continuous efforts to explore new territory for this music left her curious nonetheless and with little further persuasion she eventually agreed.

I hadn’t spoken to Hilde much since the release of her debut LP on Hubro and was eager to catch up with her and ask her about her evolution since, so we met up over a beer, and we pick up the conversation as we discuss her upcoming performance with Stian Balducci and playing with other people.

When you play with somebody like that, somebody you’ve never played with or hardly know, what sort of thoughts go through your head?

More or less the same as when I play with people I’ve played with before or when I play alone. I think I’m responsive and focussed, because that’s the general idea behind improvised music.

Even if you play with a musician you’ve played with before, you might know which direction you’ll head into, but then you tend to explore the other directions. You’re always asking; Can we go somewhere we didn’t go last time? But when it’s the first meeting, I guess it’s more about feeling each other out.

I believe you will be having a rehearsal before the show. If the concert will be live and improvised, what is the purpose of the rehearsal?

I guess it is about talking things through and getting to know a little more of each other’s ideas. We’re also going to play on Saturday with a drummer, so I’m not really sure what’s expected of me playing at Jæger on a Friday night. (laughs) For me it’s also about security and knowing what we are going to do, what we’ll both find comfortable.

And how does it differ when you’re playing solo?

This of course varies between musicians. Some musicians like to have clear thoughts or ideas, I don’t. I like to be as free as possible. I just want to let the music evolve by itself. That’s my preferred way of working, while some musicians like to have a sketch.

Are you ever really completely free? When I saw you play a few times since Ask, I imagined I hear little extracts from the album.

I think that’s more elements of who I am as a musician and the soundscapes I create. There is never any clear plan towards playing some elements from the album.

Aren’t also bit restricted by a musical education that brings with it its own muscle memories and traditions?

For that, I’m exploring new ways of playing the trumpet, more unconventional ways, like turning the mouthpiece around or learning to control what I call the beginners tone. It’s almost like multiphonics – maybe as close to multiphonics as you can get on the trumpet without singing?

Does something like that come to you in the moment or is it something you develop over time and practise sessions?

A bit of both. I teach students and sometimes they play that way, that’s why I call it the beginners tone. So I figured, we’re trying to take this away from the kids, but it’s still kind of interesting. It’s supposed to be wrong, but to know what they are actually doing, might actually be interesting. So now I’m trying to play small melodies in an effort to learn to control it.

So you’ve started doing it in live performances?

Yes, but I’m not completely confident in it yet. It’s still an unexplored field.

Do you feel a bit freer in the electronic realm as a result?

I think I feel free in both the electronics and the trumpet, but at different times. I can be really inspired by electronics and then the next month I feel like i just want to play the trumpet.

You’re a trained/educated musician on the trumpet, while the electronic component is something you taught yourself. Is there perhaps something innocent to that component which helps you in achieving something different in the improvised field.

Maybe, but for me improvisation was also quite innocent in the beginning. Then it became a lot of theory and then I had to go into the free and contemporary aspects just to get away from it all. It’s maybe easier technically to play music on the computer, the trumpet demands hours of basic rehearsing for me to produce the sound quality and tone register that I want.

Do you ever feel like you’re perhaps limited by both “systems” and that you might want to start working inside a piano for instance to get back that feeling of unbridled freedom?

I do, but I think that’s a limitation you might feel occasionally regardless of which system or instrument you’re playing. I’m not gonna start bringing a piano on stage… not yet anyway. (Laughs) I think it’s nice to keep my set-up, the trumpet is there as the main source, while the electronics allows me do everything the trumpet (or I on the trumpet) can’t do. For me electronics and trumpet are very connected, both as an improviser and a performer.

*Re-blogged from The Formant

In another room: A Q&A with Stian Balducci

Stian Balducci approaches music with a keen intellect. Whether he is orchestrating his scholarly pursuits at Kristiansand conservatory, working with the Punkt collective, or in the skin of his Techno moniker, +plattform, there is an inquisitive consciousness to the way he produces, plays and listens to music. His instincts and ideas about music are born from that grey area between everything, where genres and schools of thought amalgamate and find no unique distinction as they conspire to blur the lines. As +plattform and the head of the Techno label Gråtone, his perspective germinates from the thin borders that try to define Techno while his work with the Punkt collective and his academic pursuits is the work of Stain Balducci, performer, avant gardist and live improviser. There is however no clear distinctions as to where one musical identity ends and another begins, these disparate areas of musical exploration coming together in the middle in one big “X”. “Everything is one big thing” he says over a call and elucidates, “there aren’t any clear lines between school and everything else.”

Using the computer as his exclusive musical vehicle, Stian adopts an eccentric, inquisitive approach to music that spans the dialect of everything from music concrete to drone. His work is an intriguing mixture of marvelous, alien landscapes and the familiar, whether his attention is turned towards the dance floor, or the more abstract ideas created within/through improvised performances. A few 12” under his belt as +plattform and some recorded material as Balducci, most significantly the experimental folk album Hildr, which he recorded with Karoline Dahl Gullberg, Stian is also no stranger to the live context. Often working with people like Jan Bang and Erik Hónore, fellows at Punkt, Stian uses live sampling techniques and electronic media, to create evocative sonic landscapes that envelope the listener, and plots an unknown destination each time he performs.

It’s in this context where we’ll meet next, so I’ve called him up, as he prepares for the stage again, a live improvised showcase with Hilde Marie Holsen, to ask some questions about improvisation, playing with others and what the term ambient music implies.

What are you particularly focussing on in music at the moment?

I want to do quality stuff. It needs to have a certain weight behind it, either if it’s Techno or if it is something else – It needs to be defined, clear ideas. It sort of cross-pollinates. When I’m doing the extended Jazz stuff, I still have my foot in Techno and the other way around.

We spoke a little about that the last time we had an interview, and about Gråtone’s intentions for operating in that grey area between the functional and the cerebral when it comes to Techno. But what of the improvised music? Is part of your ideology to perhaps move that area of practise into the more accessible plain?

It depends on how accessible you consider Techno to be.

Or to put it another way; are you looking to move the world of Jazz into the club environment?

Well, we do Punkt klubb, which is Techno with instruments, featuring a new line-up everytime. And that’s four hours straight, with people that come and go. There are no dogmas on instrumentation so it’s not only machines or only live sampling. For example when we did P Klubb at Mir with Robin (Crafoord), we were two guitarists, two percussionists and Robin and myself. I had my live sampling computer plus another one on the side spitting out four channels of DJ tracks, so I could DJ a backbeat whilst playing and sampling. As a result everything sounds a bit Krauty.

From Kraut to Ambient is not such a far stretch. When I mentioned the upcoming gig and that it’s focus will be on ambient music, you immediately jumped at the chance. What struck a chord with you when I mentioned ambient music?

The possibility of creating stuff in the moment. Often my role in these live settings, is based on live sampling, as I normally don’t use any sound sources of my own. I can make stuff with Hilde in that moment, without having to prepare a live set. It’s open and it’s close to home within both fields.

How important is it to have another person there in the improvised live setting?

Very important. As soon as I feel safe with the other person, then my role can be fleeting. It’s easier to not play, and hand over controls for a while, to see what happens and then join in again. You can sit back a bit more and listen, while you get a stream of inputs.

The listening part is an important factor?

Yes, absolutely.

Do you feel then that you miss out on something when you play solo, as +plattform, for instance?

It’s different. The +plattform thing is a continuous experiment in how to perform that stuff by myself in a way that is not boring, yet keeping true to the material.

When you are working with somebody like Hilde who plays an acoustic instrument that you process in the electronic realm, what do you believe you bring out in their music that might not have existed there before?

It’s deeper, the perspective is longer and it gets more interesting, more alive if you do it right.

Do you find a feedback-loop starts to exist between you and the musician where they are in turn affected by what you are doing?

Absolutely. If you do short quick movements with electronics, then that definitely makes a difference. Like if Hilde is playing a note and she hears that exact note being played back again, either while she’s still playing it, or just after, and maybe with some pitching on it, or small variations, then that will create an immediate response.

Will you have any pre-meditated idea of what you’d like to achieve during the performance?

Nothing concrete, but there are some vague ideas. I don’t know what it will sound like, but I know that I will probably use certain techniques at certain points of the performance with Hilde. But they’ll be based on the variables of what she’s playing and I don’t know what it will eventually sound like.

Will you be discussing any of this with Hilde beforehand?

We might talk about structure, in terms of a time-frame. For example in the live remix situation for Punkt in London recently, we agreed on one sample of the live concert from Mira Calix ,a violin going crazy, and we decided this would be our end point. We have cues, just to make sure everybody is on board, but it also depends on the setting.

Was there any reason you wanted to specifically work with Hilde on this occasion?

I’ve been a fan of her stuff for a long while, and I think her album (Ask) is really good. I think the electronic component in her work is very interesting and I would like to explore that further. I’ve also seen her live and I think it will be a good match.

Do you think she might be able to bring something out in your music, that you might not have considered before?

Probably, yes, but it’s hard to do it in just one gig. You have the immediacy of stuff, but the immediacy of stuff is based on muscle memory and approaches and techniques. So getting fresh perspectives and ideas, they come in and they groove for a while and then they come out again at a later point as a part of yourself.

I suppose that’s why improvised movements are collective movements with changing musicians to keep things fresh.

Yes to have new influences. I think within the luxury of doing freer electronic music, is that you can “fake it”, by just dragging one track in and treating it on the fly. For example in London again, the opening set was an ambient set I did with a guitarist friend of mine. Towards the end of that set I chucked in some Ethiopian folk music that lasted for nine minutes. And it worked, and this completely threw Johannes, the guitarist who immediately changed his sound on his pedals to resemble the African instrument, and it made me more passive. In reality we didn’t have another musician on stage, we did it with an MP3, but it opened up a new world.

With your electronic system, do you ever feel yourself being limited, more than the musician?

I feel musicians who are constrained by traditional training, more limited. I don’t find my system limiting. It’s the only instrument I’ve ever played. It’s a matter of taste and technique and the fact that you can always change.

Getting back to the ambient component. You are very much a futurist for me when it comes to this music, looking for that extension of where this music could go next. In terms of ambient music, where do you think this music will lead to in the future?

That’s a difficult question. Again, it’s how you categorise it. How far are you gonna stretch that term, because it can stretch quite far I think. A lot of what’s happening in Techno at the moment could be called ambient, because it has this flat thing going on.

How do you intend to approach ambient music in the live context?

I’ll focus on creating rooms or spaces – It’s quite easy to do when I’m playing with another person. Hilde has these textures that are more sporadic and scattered. So I can take her unprocessed trumpet, and in a few clicks make a drone, something liquid. That’s how we find ourselves in one room/space, and where do we go from there? It depends on what she does. At a certain point we’ll need to enter a different space.

I think quick changes can be more powerful than some slower ones, which is something that might be missing in a lot of ambient music today. You see people on You Tube uploading one hour sessions of a single Brian Eno track. In that case you have the same thing going on for a long time, but when we do it live, we can possibly open a door for sudden changes into another room.

And that’s something you can only really achieve in the live context, that unexpected thing.

Well, i think it;s doable in recorded music too, but it’s all to do with expectations. People might for instance think that you fucked something up when silence kicks in. When you are in a musical room you are comfortable as a listener and as a musician, and if you cut or change something quickly you run into a different space, you wake up again. That’s also perhaps an answer to the question, where will ambient music go?

In this live improvised world of the unexpected.

Yes, it’s all about balance, and to avoid it becoming stale.

More of an active listening experience perhaps than Brian Eno’s pursuit of making music that is there and not there at the same time?

Yes.

Prins Thomas: Catching lightning in a bottle

A mere 20-minute journey by train from Oslo’s central station and the city’s grey, urbanite landscape opens up to a suburban winter wonderland where a few feet of brilliant white snow cloaks the suburban setting of Asker. Reflecting the sun’s rays in a luminescent bright light, against a backdrop of fir trees and and young pupils making their way to school, pairs of ice skates strapped to their person, a more picture perfect moment of a Norwegian winter you could hardly paint… that is until you look out the window of Prins Thomas’ duplex window. From this vantage point the Oslo fjord lies under a thin layer of fog just beyond a mountainous range that hugs the coastline, and Norwegian nature poseurs in one of the most spectacular views of the region I have ever seen. “We bought the place on a cloudy day”, says Thomas, with a rye smile as we rolls back the blinds to reveal more of the Norwegian landscape “so we didn’t even know that view existed until we moved in”.

Standing in the living room of Thomas Moen Hermansen – the Prins by name and by standing in Norwegian electronic music – is a surreal experience. A cozy, home environment with the distinct footprint of children at play, there is no mistaking it as anything other than the home of a working recording artist and DJ. Instruments, records, children’s toys and books live side-by-side across two floors, where the noticeable absence of a television suggests that there is enough here to keep Thomas busy during an average day without the distraction of a visual stimulus. Thomas looks as comfortable here as he does at a pair of decks. He is in the process of moving his secondary studio, the one where he keeps the bulk of his records, closer to home, enjoying the process of finally settling into his surroundings after years of travelling and moving around. “I finally have a place I can call home, not just a crash pad”, says Thomas as he puts his feet up on a chair. It’s an environment that makes quite the contrast to the club spaces, festival fields, DJ booths and swarming crowds we’ve watched Prins Thomas come to dominate club music and DJing in our lifetime, but just like those situations, he is incredibly comfortable in his surroundings, adopting the the role of father and homemaker just as easily as he has commanded the role of DJ and electronic music figurehead.

In his living space, we are surrounded by more records and cds from the likes of “The Beach Boys, Pat Metheny, Neil Young and Elvis ”, pieces that never leave this allotted space. ”I try to put aside records that I really want to spend more time with” he says of the records aligning a shelf across one corner of the floor and grabs Babe,Terror’s recent release on Phantasy Sound, “Ancient M’ocean” as the musical backdrop for our conversation. I stole Thomas away from a studio session, where he is currently refining an album from 60-odd musical sketches made on planes while travelling to and from shows. These pieces will eventually make an album, but one that’s still some way from being finished, with his next album V only just moving into the final stages of production, while he establishes a new label for this project. “Prins Thomas music will cater to all your Prins Thomas needs” he elucidates through a broad smile ”and be an outlet for me to just bring out everything I have.” The label came into existence on something of a technicality, when Thomas realised he had already asked a couple of international producers to remix some tracks from the new album. Instead of destroying the Full Pupp “Norwegian-only” legacy or letting those remixers down, he found a compromise in Prins Thomas Music, an exclusive vehicle “for all your Prins Thomas needs” as he so eloquently put it, with a slightly more flexible ideology, where Thomas could explore the depth of his creativity even further.

“V” will follow “Principe Del Norte” the fourth LP from Prins Thomas, a concept ambient album that came out last year under the Smalltown Supersound banner. “I wanted to call the ambient album IV”, explains Thomas on the inconsistency of album names “and then Joakim (Haugland) insisted I find a title to do it differently from what I usually do, to try and make it stand out.” Initially slotted to be released under the pseudonym to stay loyal to Full Pupp ethos, the label that begins and ends with Prins Thomas, Thomas abandoned the idea, preferring rather to “stand by everything” he produces. “If this record broadens people’s perspective of what kind of music I make”, he says of Principe Del Norte, “it can only be a good thing.” V, however sees Prins Thomas return to the continuation of his work in the studio from the last chapter, III. “My idea is that my albums are just a documentation of what I do in the studio. There is no agenda, no master plan. I make music, and when I find a batch of music that fits together (sometimes not even particularly well) I put out.” He considers his recorded work an “audio diary” a mere reflection of a creative period. “The records I make starts with when the last one was done, and then it’s just about what I’m able to make listenable in that short period.”

With one album following close on the heels of another; a future LP already in the works; the excellent Paradise Goulash mix album still quite fresh in our memory; and a continuous string of remixes that appear to have no end in sight, Prins Thomas seems to have hit something of a creative stride, or is this just what it’s usually like for the Norwegian artist? “I don’t know why, but I feel that when you’re inspired you just have to keep on working – catch the lightning in a bottle. When I sit down to make something it usually turns into something. It feels like I’m dying of some sickness and need to make as much as possible before I leave the planet.”

It’s an idea that I find also informs Thomas’ approach to listening to music, when later during our conversation he remarks: “I’ve got limited time on this earth and I need to absorb everything I can.” From Neil Young to Jeff Mills, Thomas’ record collection is a living entity which is a direct result of the DJ’s pursuit to try everything at least once. “It’s better to buy (records) all the time than to miss stuff”, he explains. A consummate consumer of music, Prins Thomas would rather get a record, only to let it sit for a while, instead of missing out. “Sometimes a lot of the new stuff I buy, will be old stuff when I play them.” I imagine that puts Thomas at an advantage to some other DJs who are always looking for that next hype thing, but he is more critical of the execution than the methods. “Rubbish is rubbish no matter how genius you are in putting them together”, he says and perhaps giving the music the time it deserves to mature before incorporating it in a Prins Thomas set is indicative of the DJ’s intrinsic artististic voice. “To me it’s more fun to find your own stuff rather than playing the same ten new records that every other DJ is playing.” It’s this particular aspect to Prins Thomas and his sets that has made him the critically acclaimed phenomenon that he is today, captivating audiences from Norway to Japan, with mixes that are individual and eclectic, often wavering on the orthodox, and never afraid to even give the obvious choice its dues. “If there’s something I should worry about, it is that I’m playing way too obvious things sometimes”, he says with a dry chuckle.

A Prins Thomas selection is always a rarefied experience, something crafted from a unique disposition that has been there since a young Thomas first met the older Pål Strangefruit who saw something special in his younger Hamar neighbour. “He was one of the older kids that took my passion seriously” remembers Thomas of his pre-teens. Strangefruit had given Thomas his first glance at putting two records together, making his younger nine-year old friend mixtapes from a selection of records, but he’d also handed something down to the young Thomas that has informed his eclectic tastes ever since. “I think we bought a lot of the same stuff from the same bins”, reminisces Thomas as he tries to unpack his musical education. “We had this import store on the west coast who would just dump all these records further up the country and (in Hamar), we used to get stuck with these records that nobody else wanted. The options at the time were stuff like the Thompson Twins with a Shep Pettibone remix or something, and then for like 5 or 10 kroner you could get Gunchback Boogie Band or D Train – all these really cool boogie things.” Stuff that’s really sought after today? “Some of them are, but to the people collecting Disco they are established classics. Today it seems that everybody is playing records that everybody else has, which to me only begs the question, how good could it be.”

Thomas has always tried to avoid this digging mentality, preferring to remove the blinkers that often come with some obsessive compulsive digging while looking for that rare one-off record. Thomas opts for eccentric, rather than the established, and it opened up a world where few wondered. As a child when he would spend weekends visiting his father in Moss, he would use the train journey as a convenient excuse to hop off at Oslo and run through the Karl Johann shopping street in search of the stuff records other people might have passed over. “The really cool stuff I had to get in Oslo, because I wasn’t on the top of the food chain when I started buying records.” Second hand record stores became a popular haunt for the teenager, which followed Thomas into his twenties when he took up DJing in a more professional capacity in Oslo.“During that time it was me digging for second hand stuff in Oslo all by myself. People were playing new House and Techno so when I moved to Oslo, I would go nuts in these second hand stores. You would get Arthur Russell for 10kr and I probably bought like 10 copies of Macho City by Steve Miller band and sold them off to other people later. People just weren’t buying it back then.” He would opt for a more eclectic approach always, “mainly playing old stuff” where others preferred to play the latest Techno or House craze from the states or the UK. “At the time I was more interested in the stuff James Lowell was doing than Jeff Mills.” Disco was not yet a thing in Oslo then, but by the time Thomas released his first record with Lindstrøm a few years later it had become a thing, an unstoppable thing.

Thomas quickly felt however that he was being neatly squared away in a Disco box, being booked for gigs with other DJ’s loosely based around that genre, and it’s here when a significant change in approach happened that perhaps informs more of Prins Thomas the DJ than anything else today. “That’s the first time I felt damn, I’m stuck if I don’t escape this.” Thomas, conspired with Lindstrøm to “sabotage” the Disco tag forced on them with a sophomore album that sounded very different to the first and at the same time he adopted a new unconventional DJ philosophy. I decided to travel less against the advice of my agent and other DJs. I thought I’d rather do that and keep enjoying this than be on the road all the time in that black hole that sucks you in, especially if I’m gonna get labelled as being Nu-Disco.”

Thomas interjects with some laughter as he says this with the confidence of 20/20 hindsight. Nu-Disco’s fate sealed in the dead-end of trends and fads, managed to spare Prins Thomas the indignity of getting stuck in the same rut, precisely for his eclectic approach to music and DJing and going against the grain of DJs that established a fortified template. At a time when he felt he might have “been stuck in the Disco loop”, too “focussed on the sound being organic” he realised that he’d “rather be less successful to be able to move between different things”. Playing on an international stage where things can become routine quite quickly, “the artwork suffers when people get too professional and to comfortable with it.” Thomas has avoided this by “always bringing something else, starting with something else” and “taking risks”, forever operating in the context of the mix. “When I DJ I usually think of the end result –The feeling people have when they leave the club.” With that in mind what makes a good record for Prins Thomas? “It’s got make itself useful in a story. There would be records that might not be of any use to another person, but for me would be the main record.” This is where Prins Thomas reigns supreme and many other high-profile DJs falter, finding that record that might not even work at that time, but when it does (and it usually does) it pays off quite handsomely. It brings a dynamism to every Prins Thomas set that resets the tone every so often and surprises the dancer, keeping him/her on his feet just when things might become too formulaic. Records “jump out and scream, play me!” and Thomas complies even if it might be the “obvious” thing, and yet it all comes from some very abstract idea, a feeling rather than a conscious effort. “I don’t really think too much about it anymore, because there’s so much music out there, anything can be bypassed.” he uses and example by way of explanation: “I’ve been playing ‘erotic city’ by Prince since 1985 every 5th gig at least. For me it’s a great record and there’s very little chance that any other DJ will play it that night since it’s one of the lesser known Prince tracks”.

Tracks like that however are not to be found amongst the collection in his living room where there’s a more of a reserved approach to his collecting. It’s here amongst the 2000-odd records that you’ll find Thomas’ more intimate listening moments, the records that don’t have any place in the club environment, segregated by a floor from the records that go into Thomas’ bag week in and week out. Yet like Thomas the home-body and father can’t really exist without the touring DJ, or the label owner can’t really exist without producer, Thomas is very much the sum of all these diversified parts conspiring in the one of a kind personality, that personifies his Dj mixes. “To me it feels like there’s a synergy effect to everything I do”, he says when we talk about Full-Pupp and his role as facilitator for new Norwegian club music. Thomas needs all these different aspects to be the larger than life character (to paraphrase Gerd Janson) that he is.“I wouldn’t feel comfortable concentrating on just one of these things and just doing that. It feels like someone is taking half of your crayons away. Sometimes even the most boring task could help something creative come along. All these different things, they all contribute to make me… at least happier.“

A Helena Hauff Thing

Helena Hauff’s music and the music she plays in her sets exudes a kind of beautiful raw savagery that speaks to something primal, a unique instinctive music that can’t be curtailed into generic boxes and relays an obscure feeling that can’t be described in any literal language. Helena Hauff instills something uninhibited in her sets that go from Techno to EBM and Electro that has made her a unique entity in music and has taken her from a residency at Hamburg’s iconic Golden Pudel onto the world stage.

A DJ first and foremost Hauff’s musical education begins at a library scouring the local archives for tapes as she formed her musical tastes in the countercultural forms of electronic music. Early attempts at putting her favourite pieces together into a contextual narrative eventually led to DJing in Hamburg, where during a most fertile time for Deep House in the city, Hauff became a disparate voice in electronic music, an exciting satellite figure that brought a forgotten energy to music made reticent by stylised genre distinctions.

What started as admiration precipitated fabrication,and Hauff approached production with the same opaque and vigorous nature she did DJing, finding a uniquely distinct voice as an artist. Her sound, born in the raw beauty of a machine aesthetic, predicated what she set forth to establish as a DJ and found favour on labels like Lux Records, Werk Discs, Solar One , Ninja Tune and her own label Return to disorder. In 2015 she would go on to release her critically acclaimed debut LP, “Discreet Desires” and established herself as an dissentient luminary in her field.

Her music and sets garnered the utmost respect from peers and critics alike, a sought-after DJ that stands some distance apart from any other reference point in the DJ world. In 2017 she’s already got an “ep ready to go” and looking forward to “work on another album”, while she continues playing all over the globe.I first interviewed Helena Hauff in 2014, before her debut album, but already turning the right heads. She’ll be coming to Oslo and Jæger for the first time in February and with that I took the opportunity to catch up with the German DJ via a video call and ask her more about DJing, her album and what’s next.

Hi Helena, Are you still in Hamburg?

I am at home in Hamburg.

What have you been doing there while the Golden Pudel is still being restored?

Well, I don’t really do much. I do my work, but I don’t DJ much in Hamburg at the moment.

Will you be picking up your residency again after its restoration?

The thing with the Pudel is that there are a lot of resident DJs. When you say, you are a “resident DJ” it’s like yeah, I’m one of 50 resident DJs. It used to be open every day and every day there was a different DJ with different styles of music. When it reopens, yes, I definitely want to play there again, but I have no idea what’s gonna happen now. It was always a really good place, and I’d love to do a few nights there a year again.

And I imagine you’re still making a lot of music.

I do have time for it, but a lot of the time I’m not in the proper mindset for recording music. Coming home from touring, you are a bit knackered and tired and then you just want to relax and not do anything. I’m a bit lazy, but I feel sometimes you just have to think about making music in a different way; just think of it as a time for relaxation and not as something you have to do and you have to work on something and I have to get that in your mind at the moment.

Obviously a lot has happened since the last time we spoke, most significantly you released the album. Can you tell us a little bit of what went into making it and the reception?

I think it went pretty well. I got some good feedback from it, which is cool. I made the album in 2014 and parts of it I made in 2013. It just took a while to come out. I didn’t really know what I thought about it at the time it came out, because it took so long and when it came out, I was like “finally I got rid of all that stuff”. I am happy with it still.

It definitely has that timeless quality to it. It has that Helena Hauff sound, but you can’t really put it in a box. Do you feel however, since the album that you might have been labelled with a sound, that might have restricted your eclectic influences and musical tastes?

Not really actually, because I don’t think the album has a specific genre or anything like that. It’s kind of in between a lot of things. It’s kind of difficult for people to put me in some kind of box, which is a good thing. I’m playing a lot of Electro, fast Electro stuff and I really enjoy that, but I still play tons of different styles. I feel like I’m in a good position at the moment, because I get booked for a lot of different things. I get booked for big gigs and festivals, but I also get booked for tiny underground places and that’s pretty cool.

Although the genres and the styles you pick from is pretty broad, there’s definitely a Helena Hauff sound that brings it all together. I think somebody coined the term Punk Techno to describe your sound and it’s very distinct, not the type of stuff most record stores will stock. Do you find it hard to come by records like that?

I have mixed feelings towards that. I feel that there is more and more rough stuff coming out, but it’s not necessarily all good, because just a little bit of distortion doesn’t necessarily make a good track. So you’ve got a lot of rougher sounding tracks out there, but that’s not my main focus, and I actually like playing cleaner produced tracks as well. I just want this energy about a track, well I want it to be banging somehow. (Laughs) It doesn’t have to be distorted or rough although I like that stuff.

There’s a lot of good stuff coming out, a lot of little labels doing great stuff. I find it fairly easy buying that kind of stuff on-line. In record shops it gets a little more difficult. In Hamburg we have some good record shops, but we’ve got two million people living in Hamburg, but it’s still a fairly small city. I find stuff, but not enough good stuff for me, because I play every weekend.

Talking of small labels doing great things, your label, Return to Disorder has steadily been putting records out for the last couple of years, including your “Children of Leir“ project. When I spoke to you last you mentioned it was purely a vehicle for your eclectic musical tastes to find a way out into the world. Is that still the case?

Yeah, I want to put out everything I like, and it is mainly Techno, because I get a lot of Techno from people. The next release is Zarkoff quite soon. And after that, I’ve got a band from England called Bloodsport, and they do this post punk, with a touch of Afro, a little bit prog rock.

For my label I just want to do what I feel like doing, I don’t want to put any restrictions on myself, but I don’t have a concept for it.

Is it a side-project mostly or do you spend a lot of time and effort on it?

I kind of see it as my little hobby. (Laughs) I’m not very good at promotion. If the artist is happy to make a video for the tracks or something, yeah we can put it out, but I don’t do much promo shit. So, it’s gonna stay a fairly small the label. I really enjoy it. I really enjoy selecting music and I think it’s because I come from this DJ background and I just really like to pick things and put them together. I do spend a lot of time on it, but as I said it’s my little hobby.

I wanted to ask you about the Umwelt release specifically, because his album Days of Dissent was a personal highlight for me last year.

I had been sitting on those tracks for a year before, because it takes so much time to get stuff released.

Is Umwelt something that you came across because you played it a lot in your sets and how did this particular release happen?

Yes. We met in Lyon once when I played there. He came to my party and we had a chat and he’s a very nice guy, obviously very talented. He said: “I’m just gonna send some stuff over, maybe you want to release it”. And I was like… yeah!

That’s kind of odd though, right… since I he only releases on his own labels?

How many labels has he got?

Four, I believe.

No, he definitely he releases on other labels. I’ve got a few records from him on other labels. He releases a lot of music though. I don’t know how he does it.

He’s such a good DJ as well. He’s like a machine. He starts to play all this hard Electro stuff, non-stop, and all on record as well with really tight mixing.

And apparently a lot of what he plays is stuff he cuts on his personal lathe at home, stuff that never gets released, so pretty exclusive… but I digress, because I want your opinion on something.

When we last spoke you talked about when you started playing everything was Deep House and you were looking for something a little different and found it in Electro, EBM, synth Wave and Techno. How do you feel about the current landscape, where we’ve come full circle and Deep House is the dominant force again?

First of all, I don’t mind Deep House. When I started going clubbing in Hamburg the Smallville people and Dial people used to organise a lot of parties in the city. It was pretty cool, and there was a proper little scene around them. There were people playing other stuff, but they weren’t as prominent. It was mainly House music, and from there I got into House music and the rougher stuff, and I was buying a lot of Electro at that time as well. And now, Deep House has never gone away. It’s always gonna be there, which isn’t a surprise, because people really seem to like it.

I feel at the momenta lot of the Techno stuff is going into a more Transy direction. I think the next big thing is going to be some kind of modern Techno version of Trance.

Like The stuff coming from Dekmantel UFO from the likes of Voiski and Peter van Hoesen?

Yes, I have the Voiski one.

I’m not really into Trance, but I like the kind of early Trance before it really was Trance. It had all the elements in there, but it was quite rough and raw sounding, and it hasn’t got the big room thing about it, and it’s got all those little Trance elements about it. I started playing that a lot, three or four years ago and I realised I’m really into it, and I saw a lot of other DJs playing similar things. I like parts of it, but if it goes too Trancy I’m out of it. I definitely like it, and I think it’s about time that it comes back, because it’s not been around for awhile now.

Can you give us an example of what sort of new music would fall in your wheelhouse?

Konstantin Sibold is a good friend of mine from Germany, and he had this track called “mutter” from last year. I remember him asking me whether this is too much, and it got released and it was a big hit. It got quite big, and that’s not the only one. You mentioned the Voiski one and there are plenty of examples, but I just can’t think of any at the moment.

It certainly is a contrast to the droning functional Techno we’ve been exposed to since 2013, but do you think it will have a lot of staying power?

It’s hard to say. It’s gonna be a bit like the Acid thing or the distortion Techno and House stuff, where people use certain elements and blend them in with other things and make a more modern version of that old sound.

The thing is though, I wonder if Electro is ever going to get big again.

I would love for 2017 to be Electro’s year.

It happens more and more to me, that I play after support acts and they play a lot of Electro and that definitely didn’t happen to me three years ago. There were people around doing Electro and playing Electro and you had loads of release. That never stopped, because you had nerds sitting around making one Electro track after another, and they are all great, but I didn’t see a lot of people playing it. Now it feels like a lot people are taking it and mixing it with Techno and stuff and I’ve not seen that before, so it seems like there is some kind of little movement. How big it’s going to get that’s another question.

I think Electro itself is possibly a bit too weird for it to be a really big thing and have really big Electro artists, like the Ben Klock of Electro. I’m not sure if that’s ever going to happen. Perhaps there will be another electroclash movement, rather than a pure electro movement, because that can appeal to a wider audience.

Because the vocals often bridge a gap for a more populace crowd.

Yes, the catchy synth lines and stuff might catch on in a couple of years, lets see.

While we’re in the future and it’s probably time to end this interview (I’ve taken up enough of your time), where do you see yourself in that musical paradigm?

As I said earlier, I’m playing a lot of electro at the moment, but I’m playing a faster version of it now. I used to play 130-135 BPM, but now I often find myself playing 145 BPM and up and I sometimes I think might be a little bit too much for the people, but I tend to do that thing over a longer period of time, so you start slower and you slowly go a little bit faster and faster and people don’t even realise how fast you are until the act after you takes over and starts playing at 120 BPM again. I don’t think I’m gonna change that much, I’m just gonna keep doing what I do.

Moving forward with XXXY

XXXY (Rupert Taylor) came to prominence in amongst the last original musical movement, Dubstep. Hailing from Manchester with early musical pursuits in the world of Indie rock, Taylor found in the community of Dubstep a musical voice that first took the form of Forensix [mcr] ten years ago.

After a mere two tracks and three years on, he would establish the XXXY moniker, which would see Taylor re-invent himself in an echo of Dubstep’s own dissolution into the something unfamiliar and schlocky, a genre diluted to a tawdry wobble bass-line and a R&B vocal. In the wake of Dubstep’s demise, Taylor, like so many of his peers, moved into the opaque dimensions of electronic music finding a space between genres for a new creative voice. Between House, Techno, Bass and Electro XXXY exists as a unique entity, honouring his UK roots, through the rhythms of Bass music, while forging a new sonic dialect from the vast expanse of the dance floor.

His music has found favour with labels Ten Thousand Yen and Rinse, through whom he’s released tracks like “Goldfish”, “Thinkin Bout” and” No Matter”. Referencing everything from Electro to Garage, XXXY has found an engaging electronic voice where melodic refrains bounce enthusiastically amongst vivacious beats through concise musical structures.

There’s a playful dexterity to his musical creations which inform and extend into his DJ sets. It goes some way to subjugate a serious musical talent behind the craft, leaving an access port for the listener to engage with the music without any sense of trepidation. XXXY coaxes feeling out of a detached electronic world, avoiding banal functionality in favour of something a little more immersive than a simple dance floor cut.

The producer then channels this into his DJ sets, where he finds connections to the music of others through his own, bringing pieces together in sets that reflect the eclecticism of his productions. He’ll be in our basement Friday, the 27th and before he arrives we got to ask him some questions about finding a voice through Dubstep, his eclectic production qualities and how a XXXY sets come together.

Happy new year Rupert, and thank you so much for taking the time to answer some questions for us.

Happy New Year to you and no problem.

What’s on the cards this year for XXXY that you can share with us today?

Well I am just finishing up a few records that will be out this year. The first will be on Ten Thousand Yen, which should be being pressed up imminently.

Last year marked the tenth anniversary of your first release as Forensix [mcr]. Looking back on that, what have you taken away from the entire experience?

Wow ten years? Does this make me veteran now? I think looking back, it’s always important, as a producer, to make music for yourself first. There have been occasions when I think I have been trying to live up to other people’s expectations with regards to my musical output. I now realize that it’s much easier just to make the music I want to make and to not worry too much about what anyone else thinks.

We know that you went from playing in a band (indie I believe) into electronic music. What was that catalyst for you, musically or otherwise, that turned you to electronic club music?

Well the transition was being able to make songs on my own. When I left school and went to university my music tastes changed and I wasn’t so into being in a band or making band music. I was going out to clubs a lot more and immersing myself in dance music but I still wanted to write songs so it was logical for me to make music on a computer and be able to control the complete output, initially unsuccessfully, all by myself.

What instruments did you play in the band, and what did you take from your early musical experiences into your production work as Forensix [mcr] and XXXY?

I was a guitarist and vocalist. I was always a songwriter so arrangement came quite easy to me in the beginning as I was making electronic music.

You grew up in Manchester, which has this huge legacy that comes with it, but what was it like for you and your generation growing up and making music?

When I was growing up I felt like the history of music in Manchester was a curse, you had all these people making great music but people just wanted to go out to shite nostalgia nights. For a few years the club scene was awful, it felt like there were about 2 good clubs (Sankeys and the Music Box (RIP to both)) and a handful of OK clubs. The rest were filled with students drinking 50pence Vodka Red Bull and listening to Happy Mondays, Stone Roses and Oasis. It was like the history of music in Manchester was an albatross around the neck of anyone trying to do something different with music in the City. Thankfully things are much better now in Manchester.

You rose to prominence around Dubstep, which today seems like the last original musical style. What sticks out for you of that time that made it so special?

It felt like a proper movement, you had all these producers who knew each other and were making music and the people buying and going out to this music at the beginning mainly knew each other so it felt like something you were invested in with other people.

What drew you to that genre initially and how much did that sense of community through things like dubstep forum and FWD>>> play in your induction?

It was the fusion of different styles, the kind of “anything goes” mentality of it. I was growing tired of Drum and Bass and was looking at all styles of dance music and dubstep just clicked with me. The forum was a great place, when I registered, you had the producers, DJs and promoters on there, you could just ask anyone anything. FWD was a great night but I only managed to go a few times when it was at Plastic People.

Forensix [mcr] was the first taste we got of your music, but you soon dropped that moniker and started making music as XXXY. Why the change, and did you feel it reflected a change in your music?

The Forensix record that came out was the first two songs that I finished. I was overwhelmed by having a release so soon and wasn’t able to make anything else that I liked. So in the meantime I had to get a job and I was working long hours and not having much time set aside for making music and producing. Fast forward a few years and because of the housing market crash I ended up working for Manchester City Council, the hours were shorter and so I had more time to make music again. So I have a bunch of new music and I feel like I want to make a fresh start so I sent the music to some djs and it started to get released. I think in the in between time my musical tastes had evolved and Dubstep had started to become something different than it was when I started.

Was there something particular you wanted to express that the dubstep genre couldn’t achieve for you at this time?

I think it was a conscious decision to try and make music, which was removed from the aggressive wobbly dubstep that was so popular at that time.

The shift from Dubstep into other genres is something that many of your UK peers adopted too. Was there perhaps something generally in the air that you feel might have been responsible for so many artists making the move from Dubstep?

I think the vibe changed with the music, so you had all these people who were in a similar music space and it felt as though they didn’t belong to any scene anymore so started to look towards other genres or push things in their own way.

This is where XXXY certainly appealed to me – the opaque approach to musical styles where everything is possible. What do you think is mainly responsible for this eclecticism in your music?

I am into all sorts of music and I think I would be bored making the same thing constantly and I think that it’s the same with my djing, playing only one genre all night almost at the same BPM can be a little tiresome, so I try to involve different elements into my music and different genres into my djing.

House has obviously been a cornerstone to your work, but elements of Garage, R&B and even Techno also find their way into your work much of the time. Is it something you consciously approach as such, and where does XXXY exist for you amongst these and other musical styles?

I think it’s a reflection of my influences I don’t start a track thinking “this will be an RnB thing or a Techno thing” it comes from the inspiration for the track whether it be a synth patch I have made or a sample that I have found.

Your earlier releases were very much accommodating different labels, with sounds specifically crafted for said labels, but in recent times you’ve mainly stayed on Rinse and Ten Thousand Yen. What is it about those two labels that keeps you coming back to them?

At the beginning it was just me trying to get as much of my music out as quickly as possible. Now it’s about working with people I trust will get my music out in the best way possible and getting it heard by the right people.

How do you find that your sound might be honed differently to each of those two labels?

I don’t think it is, I just make songs and send them to the labels and then they A&R as they see fit.

Has Djing ever had any effect in the way you approach music in the studio?

Naturally, if I am playing in big clubs I want some big warehouse bangers that are my own alongside other peoples’ and if I am playing in an intimate space I want to have some of my tracks that reflect that space. Even 10 Years after my first release, there’s very little that pleases me more than people reacting well in a club to one of my tracks.

Your recorded music has that eclecticism I’ve mentioned, is this something that seeps into your sets too and what usually ties a XXXY set together?

My sets are currently tied together by my record collection, I have been getting back into playing vinyl again in clubs as there seems to be a bit more respect when it comes to turntable setup now. After years of digital djing (serato and usbs) I find that a pile of records can evoke more inspiration.

I believe from older interviews, that DJing came after producing for you. How do you feel you’ve evolved in that respect since the early days?

I’m constantly evolving, I am mainly just more confident in my ability and this means that I can adapt my sets to where I am playing and take more risks sometimes.

You mentioned that your music is the thing that ties your music together. What do you look for in music from other artists in your sets?

I still play a lot of my own music in my sets but my sets now are longer I need more and more music from other people, I just look for music that would make me want to dance

Hooked on Benoit & Sergio

Benoit & Sergio create music that engage with its listeners on a personable level. There’s an approachability to their music that loves nothing more to loiter in the serenity of a melody, while it surges with the energy of a packed dance floor. Frenchman, Benoit Simon and US statesman Benjamin Myers (Sergio Giorgini) crossed paths in DC, where they bonded over electronic music as they curated House party playlists for mutual friends, before combining their musical skills in the production chair.

Making music together was inevitable and what started in an nondescript studio somewhere in DC found its way onto labels like Spectral Sound, DFA and Visionquest, the music’s charming allure finding a home amongst acts like LCD Soundsystem, Matthew Dear and The Juan Maclean.

Dance floor grooves machinate with seductive vocal exaltation, while magnetic harmonic movements works their way through the conscious, impregnating your memory where they can be recalled later in a happy reverie. It’s illuminating music made for the dark corners of the dance floor, and Benoit & Sergio’s preferred method of interpretation is the live context, where vocals and rhythms pulse with the energy of the club experience, opening up a direct channel of communication between them and their audience.

It’s in this context we’ll receive them at Jæger this week, and before they arrive we were given the opportunity to ask them some questions while they were on tour in South America. So without further delay… Benoit & Sergio

Thank you for answering some questions for us guys. We really appreciate it. First thing’s first. What brought Benoit and Sergio together and where did you as individual artists and musicians find a common ground in music?

We met in Washington DC, back in 2008, which is hard to believe. The time has gone by very quickly. We were working in normal jobs. A mutual friend told me that I should meet Benoit because we were both into “electronic stuff” (she didn’t really know much about electronic music, but her hunch was a good one). Benoit and I were also both new to DC, so we hung out. Then we started working on music in Benoit’s home studio where there were lots of old synths. We just were doing it for fun then we got more serious.

Sergio, I believe you were a school teacher, before you made the full-time leap into music. In some aspect that seems a whole world away from what you’re doing today, but in the same breath you’re also standing in front of a captive audience, relaying something to them, albeit something abstract in the case of music. Is there something in the performance aspects of music, that being a teacher helped bring out in you?

I think that being a teacher is a performance, absolutely, and being able to keep the attention of pubescent teenagers each day in class was, without question, helpful in thinking about keeping the attention of a dance music crowd. I mean, there might be no tougher crowd than a bunch of 16 year olds in the Spring, all of them wanting to be outside, hanging out with girls. Rocking a club has never been as tough as that.

Benoit, what were you doing before music and at what point did you both feel you had something special that could eventually lead to a career in music?

I was working in an Internet venture before going full time with music. I had always loved all things related to music/sound since very young and up until before the startup, I had always tried to align my studies and work to music and/or sound: I had worked on speech synthesis, speech recognition, voice encoding and music services before. But I don’t know if we ever realized that we had something “special” to pursue a career in music. Music is just our passion and we were lucky enough to be able to live from it. There was no question really. No realization.

Was there a particular sound or spirit you tried to capture before you even sat at a keyboard?

We used to go to this now defunct little basement club in DC called Napoleon. On weekends, it was packed and dark and hot, with horrible sound, and the DJ would basically play 30 second mash ups of tracks before trainwrecking into his next mix. But the vibe in that place? Wow. That’s one of the things we wanted to capture.

There’s a melodic focus in your music, that adds a very engaging dimension to the dance music you create. Can you give us some insight into your creative processes and how these two elements come together in a Benoit & Sergio track?

Yeah, we like hooks and melody. But the genesis of a song comes from any place. It could be a one bar percussion loop that has some magic to it. It could be a snippet of a vocal loop. It could be a fully fledged bass line that comes to you when you’re working on music on your computer on a flight to Uruguay for a show. Whatever the element is, it has to captivate both of us enough to begin the long process of sequencing an entire track around it or part of track around it. But if there is no magical seed to begin with, then it’s hard for a track to grow into a tree that shelters us from the harsh light of the outside world. Once we lay elements down—bass, groove, whatever—we are ultimately looking for that final epic hook to rock on top. Sometimes we get that hook. Oftentimes we don’t. But you’re always looking for it—that big, fat, juicy hook.

Neither of you come from a DJ background, and yet you seem to exude a natural talent for club music. Where and how did that bug bite for you both?

Benoit has been into dance music a long time—disco, funk. It runs in his French blood. I grew up four hours from Chicago in Iowa and a lot of us got into the Dance Mania/Cajual/Relief Records sound coming out of Chicago. I loved Paul Johnson, DJ Funk, Cajmere etc. I still do.

I got into the newer iteration of dance music around 2004/2005 during the Perlon peak. And then I visited Berlin in summer of 2006 and that blew my mind. There is a joke in real estate: when is the best time to buy property? Five years ago. This joke probably applies equally to any music scene: five years earlier is always when the scene was better. So for people who were going to parties in Berlin in the late 90s, 2006 is probably way past its prime moment. But that was the moment for me. It doesn’t matter when something inspired you, just that something did.

Watching some live performances of yours on the net, I noticed that vocals play an integral part in your show. What dimension do you think that adds to a dance floor in the live situation?

There’s this classic scene in the wonderful mockumentary, “This Is Spinal Tap,” where the dimwitted lead guitarist Nigel is showing his guitar amps to the camera. All the amps go to 11 (instead of 10). When he needs that extra boost, he goes to 11. Vocals sometimes can do that. Take things to 11.

And why are vocals such an integral part to your music in the recorded format?

For better or worse, vocals add a sense of the human to things. Given how you feel about humans, though, this might not always be best strategy. We do get the strategy of erasing the voice and traces of the human from music, of returning to a field of sound without the intrusion of subjectivity, selfhood and the apparatus of the voice interfering with it.

If you could sum up a Benoit & Sergio show for the uninitiated how would you describe it?

High octane, bouncy, positive.

And that’s all the questions we have. Can you play us out with a song.

Here is a nice one: Rod Modell, “Mediterranea, Part 1.” Not club but pretty epic.

Eight of Eight with Alex.Do

Alex.Do has always perpetuated a kind of shadowy presence in Techno, bordering on obscurity, but yet very familiar to those who walk the road less travelled. As a DJ and an artist, those who’ve come to know the Berliner, expect a stripped back minimal sound that thrives in the darker corners of the dance floor and treads that fine line between House and Techno effortlessly. It’s a sound that has found a home at Dystopian, the Rødhad label that embodies the spirit of JG Ballard and George Orwell’s most disconcerted fantasies and although Alex.Do has also featured on other esteemed labels like Life and Death, Dystopian is his spiritual home. With two releases under his belt at Dystopian, including the critically acclaimed Stalker EP it’s within that crew that he continues to carve out a niche career as a DJ and a producer.

He’s constantly on the move from one gig to the next and when he’s not in a booth he’s in a studio, very rarely taking a beat to field questions. As such very little is known about the artist, but with his imminent arrival in Oslo this weekend for Frædag x Amenta, we were told we could send him some questions on the grounds that were kept to a minimum. So we put eight questions together in an attempt to find out as much as possible through the shortest possible methods.

First off, what’s your earliest memory of a musical experience that peaked your interest in the art form?

I think it the moment when I went for the first time into a nightclub and discovered the nightlife of Berlin. I said to myself that I wanted to understand how DJs create these atmospheric moments. That’s how it all started I guess.

Is there any song or musician that particularly influenced your decision to start making music yourself?

No not really to be honest. It was the whole thing that influenced me. There were plenty of musicians and moments that were important to me.

How would you describe your sound for the uninitiated?

As something you could lose yourself to – in a positive way. I really like to create a certain undertow, which could suck you in.

Which musical instrument is central to your creative processes and how do you think it affects your work?

I guess it’s the Roland SH-101. I think I’m using this machine in every track in this or that way.

Where does your musical tastes and work in the production chair find even ground and how do they relate to your DJ sets?

…

How exactly have you found a mutual spirit in Dystopian and how do you see your role in that family?

Actually we all knew each other before the whole thing even started and at some point Rødhåd asked me if I want to join the crew.

How do you think the label affects your work and your DJ sets?

Of course I play our own releases so I guess there is a definite influence to my DJ sets.

If you had to sum up what to expect from your DJ set at Jæger through one track, what would it be?

…

Roots Music with Arild Lopez

Arild Lopez, or Arildo (if you ever get the chance to bump into him in Barcelona) is the type of man that wears his persona completely on the surface. Before I even call him up a to and fro via messenger reveals a weekend of playing music and “falling in love” without any hint of insincerity.* He is approachable in every sense of the word, and immediately likeable to any stranger that might have the fortune of meeting him. Behind the glasses and the goatee – that seems to have its own living purpose on his face as it morphs into moustache occasionally – lies a wry sense of humour and an intelligible wit. Although genial in character, it also belies a very serious musical personality, where the roots of electronic music conspire in a DJ, label boss and at times producer that lives and breathes everything about the underground culture of this music.

Born in Barcelona, Arild grew up in Norway where as a young adult he engrossed himself entirely in the cultural aspects of music, throwing “hundreds of parties” at places like Brenneriveien and Blitz in the nineties, alongside friends like Trulz & Robin. “We were trying to do more of an underground Techno thing, because there weren’t any – we wanted to do more Detroit soulful Hi-Tech soul kind of thing.” In a city dominated by Disco and commercial Euro Trance and with the Internet still being in its infancy this was no easy feat and they worked hard to promote it “the old school way”. Through flyers and posters they eventually succeeded – by underground standards – in creating a “true electronic scene” in the city. It wasn’t enough to keep Arild in Oslo however because although it was the city that raised him, he was never going be anything other than a Barcelonan and the call of home beckoned stronger than ever. “It was never where should I go and live in the world, it was more like, when am I moving to Barcelona. I promised myself the next time I didn’t have a project or a girlfriend I would move to Barcelona.” When serendipity intervened and neither project nor girlfriend could restrain him, he made the permanent move to the Catalonian capital. “I moved everything down to my last sock. There was nothing left and I’ve never looked back.”

Today he’s called Barcelona home for the last twelve years and has neatly carved out a career for himself there as a DJ, a producer and a label boss. When I call him up, it was at the end of something of a “gig marathon” for Arild, but the eternal music enthusiast says he “could always play a little more” through what I discern to be a wry smile on the other end of the receiver. The last time I was in Barcelona Arild’s residency at Switch Bar was shut down, and he still laments its absence as he recounts the cause of the small club’s closure. “There was article in the Guardian that it was the best place in Barcelona, so it suddenly got too full with screaming Englishmen and they couldn’t really control it. When they finally got everybody to either to leave or come inside instead of standing outside, smoking cigarettes and screaming, the police arrived.” The venue was closed for exceeding its capacity over four times, and has resulted in something of a “shitty moment” for Arild and the venue as they await the bureaucrats’ decree on the future of Switch bar. It’s part of an ongoing saga in Barcelona I learn from Arild with “a kind of a war going on between the neighbours and the bars”, where it seems Oslo is actually in a better position for once as our venues operate mostly out of the city, where residents are few and far between. But even that won’t persuade Arild in returning to Oslo”. Na, na, na No”, he exclaims mockingly when I ask him if it’s enough for him to make the move back to Oslo. Arild clearly is at home in Barcelona where the vibrancy of the city’s cultural nature suits his personality perfectly and I find it difficult to imagine Arild anywhere else.

It doesn’t mean he’s a stranger here however and since a large portion of his musical family still residing in Oslo he’s created a very unique bridge between Oslo and Barcelona one that gets every stronger as the family continually appears to expand through his label, Cymawax), which has seen five releases to date and a sixth coming soon from Barcelona mainstay and Bogota associate Usmev. “We are all friends, and we all help each other out”, says Arild about the core ingredients of the label. Thanks to his connection with Subwax, the store and distribution outlet which Arild has worked in a bit over the last three years when they moved from Mälmo to Barcelona, Cymawax is able to steadily produce music on a regular basis from this group of core friends. Featuring Trulz & Robin, Camilla Luna, KSMISK and now Usmev, the label keeps it in the family so to speak with releases that can go from Avant-Pop to Acid to deep droning Techno. It started life as a digital only label called Cymasonic for Arild with 9 releases and an album, but when Arild’s bank was feeling generous with a mortgage, he invested some of that money in setting up the physical arm of the label, Cymawax. There’s no particular sound to either label, but it maintains something of a unique identity through the artists that feature regularly and the people that would pick up a Cymawax release. It’s a very personal investment I find as a customer of a fair few of these records and it extends from its origins to the way it’s distributed through Subwax’s close-knit network. That sense of closeness you get from Arild and Cymawax is perpetuated through everything, until you realise however that Arild himself has yet to feature on the label. ”I haven’t had the balls yet to put out my own music on the label”, explains Arild about his obvious absence, but thanks to the extended family that includes Ivaylo, Arild has found an outlet for his production creativity through Bogota records. “Ivaylo has become a really good friend, so it’s easy to make stuff for Bogota, because I think about him and I don’t think about me. My brain is pretty schizophrenic.” Arild’s relationship with Bogota has lead to several remixes on the label, including a very schizophrenic, but exciting and intriguing remix of Sound Solutions’ “It’s all About”. It’s a very organic and left-field take on the original, bubbling up like a brook, exposing new sounds continuously, swathing others in a sense of mystery and featuring immersive textures that I learn from Arildo is sampled from Gaudi park. “Sometimes you just have to go out and record stuff. There’s no particular reason for it; it is just food for the soul – the heart wants a certain sound and I just try to find it.” It’s a mantra he applies to everything he produces, and often these textures will result from an inherent need to find new ways of musical expression. “I just try to make something that I haven’t heard before.”

There’s usually however “a bit of dubby funk groove and bass line” to Arild’s music and that extends from his DJ sets where he is always looking to the roots of it all. “The whole feeling of the first stuff I listened to – Aphex Twin, Carl Craig and all the Basic Channel stuff. It’s the roots of the tree and for me it’s an emotional and rhythmic trip as well as paying tribute to where it comes from. It’s kind of studying the history of art. When you see a painted picture, and you haven’t studied the history of art you don’t see the same picture as if you had.” This is not some nostalgic reverie Arild is trying to communicate, but rather how he recognises the origins and evolution of this music for the sake of the visceral qualities it brings across. “When I listened to Jeff mills the first few times I heard Techno and when I listen to Jeff Mills now, I hear Disco and Industrial and a whole bunch of other things.” More than that it’s the funk that inspires Arild mostly when he’s at the decks or at a machine. The DJ and producer likes to carry the traditions set forth by Detroit and Chicago through his sets and his music, preferring the groove over the “metallic kind of vibe” that most modern Techno favours. “When the guys that came from Disco and Funk got synthesisers and drum machines it got funky, and it looks like right now the modern Techno is losing all of that.” Arild needs that “emotional content” that only a pad or strings can communicate and finds “a lot of new Techno kind of boring” for its lack of these innate fundamental parts. It can sometimes even evoke extreme actions from Arild when he’s in the audience. “I get pissed off, I get angry”, he says while recounting a recent anecdote of just such an event. “I feel that I’m wasting my time here and I don’t get it.”

What might however appear as some form of subjective cynicism is quickly debunked as just a passionate uncompromising view of music when Arild says something like: “Maybe if I were born twenty years later and grew up with different music, maybe I would have a different sound.“ For Arild it seems it’s more of the personal investment of the artist and DJ in this music; a very important and significant part of his life. It’s not about exclusively perpetuating one genre of music, and listening to his mixes – including a recently new residency for Barcelona City FM – which can go from House to Techno to Disco, Arild is nothing if not eclectic. Yet it all seems to stem from the singular onerous root of it all, which can be felt through all Arild’s mixes and his music. It manifests itself in the groove and the funk of the music, but it’s not resigned to any concrete style. For instance, on the same weekend he’ll be visiting Jæger for the Bogota Showcase he’ll also be playing alongside O/E for Darkrooms, who’s informed Arild that the night will start at around 128BPM. Arild laughs when he mentions this: “I’m too Old! I either have to play all my records at plus 8 or find some old stuff from the nineties.” Regardless of the way he goes about it we can be sure that from that Friday night to the following night, we’ll see Arild venture into various different categories of music, all in an effort to uphold and honour the roots of it all.

* A few days after our initial conversation, Arild also wanted me to make clear that: “I fall in love easily but have no girlfriend as in free on the market. Always looking for a girl I can bring with me to Barcelona.”

It’s Alive with Dave Harrington

Dave Harrington is on his way to a musical appointment when I call him up. His breath is measured, but accelerated; like he’s walking with purpose and in his greeting I hear cheerful humility in his voice. I hear the faint distant echo of birds twittering and the hum of many voices rhythmically pull in and out of the sonic tapestry of the background noises. It sounds like Dave is walking through a park and I imagine for a moment I can feel the heat of summer’s day in New York radiating through the receiver. “It’s hot, but it’s nice out”, he says between deep breaths. He sounds urgent, but not rushed as he tells me that he is on his way to do a show on Lot Radio, an online community station run by friends. I find it an apt opportunity to ask about his current musical indulgences and he says he’s “veered mostly away from Techno” recently, but amongst the records in his bag of ”70’s ECM records, and early 2000’s downtown New York like John Zorn, Steve Bernstein and Medeski, Martin & Wood” he’s also packed an Ellen Alien and Field record. “I just play whatever I want.” Just this tiny inconsequential factoid speaks volumes of the character of the artist most of us were introduced to as one half of Darkside, where he shared the production chair and stage with Nicholas Jaar, and in the down-to-earth American manner he speaks it’s hard to remember that he was an integral half one of the biggest live- and recorded acts from the last three years. Perhaps this is because Dave is on a brand new musical journey today, one that has seen the humble guitarist, organist, bassist, producer and DJ embark from a new fulcrum point in his career, taking centre stage on this occassion, and that’s why were talking. I’m not calling him up to talk about his latent Jaar-collaboration which has gone into a permanent hiatus, because in the vestiges of Darkside today comes the Dave Harrington Group, and the reason for our interview; the debut album, Become Alive and the live tour that will be making a stop at Jæger.

The album cover features a young Dave Harrington at the base of a waterslide and when asked in past interviews about this project, he claimed that it offered him the opportunity to unpack his musical training, which starts with that boy frolicking in a pool, or perhaps more accurately the youngster in his home surrounded by his father’s Jazz records. “My farther had an incredible vinyl collection that was all Jazz, but no Almond Brothers, or the Doors. (laughs) I picked up the guitar when I was really young and was listening to the same alt-rock that was on the radio that everyone liked. REM, Nirvana and Pearl Jam. At some stage I picked up the bass, and that’s when I got serious about Jazz.“ From there, a career as a multi-instrumentalist session musician unfolded organically and thanks to a mutual friend named Will Epstein, a fortuitous introduction led to Dave being inducted into Nicholas Jaar’s touring band in 2011 for that artist’s first album. “I kind of auditioned, I guess”, he says while chuckling, making light of the serendipitous encounter that would eventually lead to Dave Harrington forming Darkside with Jaar. Although a compressed version of the Dave Harrington biography, it’s exactly these different elements that conspired in Dave “unpacking” his musical training for The Dave Harrington Group. “It’s been an evolution through touring so much with Nico in tandem with working on remixes, but also while doing live performances in the electronic context”, says Dave about the groundwork that was laid for the Dave Harrington Group. It’s a project that came together when Dave invited some of his friends together for a three-day recording session guided by the impulses of pure improvisation in between touring with Darkside. When I asked whether there was a pre-empted theme to the recording session, Dave remarks that the “musicians themselves were the theme.” These were all people he worked with closely in the past through different periods of his career, and found that these different characters highlight different aspects of his own musical personality. “Everyone who came to play with me, were people I knew. I was just trying to bring together people I wanted to spend time with.” There were no expectations, no limits, and only “loose direction” from Dave himself and the end result was hours of recorded music. “We just wanted to record as much as possible and see what happens.” Then came the hard part, to “turn this improvised music and turning it into something else, something more considered than jamming.” Alongside co-producer and close friend, Samer Ghadry (who also plays in the live band) Dave went to work “manipulating and editing” the raw material to turn the record into what he wanted through electronic post-production processes. “I was seriously influenced by the Tony Hancock records and ECM records, where they use a lot of post-production but it’s still live improvised music. That was the one thing I knew going in I wanted to explore.” Dave soon realised there was “more than two hours that were interesting” in the raw material, which then saw him call on his experiences to bring it all together as an album. “It’s been an evolution through touring so much with Nico in tandem with working on remixes, but also while doing live performances in the electronic context” says Dave of all the elements that influenced Become Alive. From the different musicians that brought out different elements of Dave’s own musical biography, right up to his time on stage as Darkside, everything Dave Harrington seeped into the project. A big part of it was also in “finding unconventional ways to make the guitar fit into the electronic context that was more meaningful” for Dave. “Part of the post production on the record is mostly influenced by the way I’ve come to treat my guitar with electronics while I’m playing live. I think of my guitar as the first point of a modular synthesiser. Considering the same for the big structures and the individual instruments on the structure. A saxophone can be saxophone and be purely solo, or can be re-constituted and chopped up and turned into something that is texture, but that isn’t necessarily related to the saxophone, but starts from jumping off point that’s dealing with the inconsistency of improvised playing and meshing worlds.“

That sentence reminds me of that Ellen Alien record sitting next to John Zorn in his bag and I imagine for a moment that I can hear these elements conspire on Become Alive more than ever now. Subtly orchestrated guitars sitting next to Rhodes chords and dotted with feedback and synthesised noise in which ghostly melodies seem to appear out of a fog of ambient textures. The saxophone is there right in the front of a track like “Slides” too, while processed beats also lie in wait just around the corner in “Cities of the Red night”. It’s often difficult to remind oneself that these tracks are improvised sessions, as they come together in these very acutely composed events throughout the album. “Musicians will bring out a lot of intensity while people from the electronic- or indie world will bring out a structure”, remarks Dave on the composed nature of the record. “I was trying to let these different characters influence the proceedings.“ Dave also puts a lot of emphasis on Samer’s involvement who he says was “indispensible in helping” the album come together during that second vital post-production stage. It was in this refining stage that everything came together and achieved that finalised construction, which honed those raw improvised moments into these “considered” compositions. It’s exactly because of this phase that it deserves a place amongst some of the greatest improvised moments in recorded history, because like those moments it almost never merely ended with the initial stroke of a key or pluck of a string. Become Alive has been associated in the press with Bitches Brew since its release and mentioned in the same breath as Mingus or Hancock. It’s all there and Dave wears all these influences on his sleeve for the album, but it’s hard not to forget that it all conspires around a group with the individual merely the catalyst in allowing for an environment for this music to exist and this seems to come apparent in the live show.

“I like to connections between the individual players” says Dave of some of the best live performances he’s witnessed, and this is something he likes to bring to the stage through the Dave Harrington Group. “It benefits from the possibility of change” with some musicians interchangeable throughout the line-up. As soon as a new player comes into the mix everything is going the change and it will be a completely different vibe.” Even when a member of the band’s role changes within the group, it can lead to some interesting new developments, like when Andrew Fox, who did some abstract vocals on the recording and co-produced the record turned to manipulating electronics on stage. “Rather than having a bass player he’s bringing all these interesting electronic moves into the set, like arpeggiated synth-bass that we all free-improvise around.“ The live show takes the recording process of Become Alive and finds a way back to its origins through the compositional framework that was applied during the second post-production stage of the album. “We are relearning these improvisations as compositions, and using them as touchstones for new improvisations.” The result is a unique show every time with the only fully composed track on the album, “All I can do” staying as close to the album version as possible. “Yes you can still hear the songs from the album”, says Dave when I ask about how far they move away from the album when they take to the stage. “Usually brand new things happen by accident, and usually one of them we really like and keep and add into the next show, but if you go to two shows you’ll notice some similar moments.”

This process of revisiting the material; re-contextualising it for the live show; and inventing new compositions from them, is already influencing Dave’s next album. “From playing live I’m thinking about what I want my next record to sound like.“ I ask him what we can expect then from the live show, and he offers three words, “live, free, intensity” – words that all do very well to describe the debut album too. The Dave Harrington group is thus a very multi-dimensional construct, which comes together under the name Dave Harrington, but is a result of something far greater than its leading man. It’s something that stems from Dave’s childhood and education listening to ECM records and extends to work as Darkside. It’s a sum of its parts however with the various musicians involved in the project conspiring to execute a record in the studio, and taking it to new conclusions on the stage. It’s Samer Ghadry and Alex Fox in the production chair and Dave Harrington orchestrating it all as the central figure. It’s much like those two records in Dave Harrington’s bag occupying the same context. The Dave Harrington Group exists on various different levels but conspire on an album and a live show that is uniquely theirs. We end our conversation as Dave almost reaches the door to the radio studio from which he’s about to broadcast his show. The faint distant echo of a Brooklyn landscape in summer is the last thing I hear intersecting Dave’s hearty farewell.

Listen back to Borusiade & Charlotte Bendiks for Cómeme at Jæger

This weekend saw Borusiade & Charlotte Bendiks close off Øya Natt at Jæger and the two Cómeme affiliates brought a rainbow of colour to our backyard, digging deep for tracks in which function only ever only follows form. Luckily we were able to hit the record button just before their set and got everything from Charlotte Bendiks’ playing Rekid’s “Lost Star 6” to Borusiade signing off Ghibli’s “I’m looking for you”. It was a great testament to the Cómeme label It was such a fitting end to a great weekend and for those that were on the dance floor till the end, urging the DJs for one more track, and for those that were there on any of the other days, this one is for you.

Album of the Week: Arthur Russell – World of Echo

What is it: A classic avant-disco record
Why is it so significant: It’s innovative while remaining accessible and has influenced countless careers.
Who says its so important: Magnus International, Øyvind Morken and Olanskii

Arthur Russell’s World of Echo is a record we’ve been eager to make our album of the week for some time, but even re-issues arrive infrequently and in small numbers with price tags that match their exclusivity, but Jæger had a good week, so we thought we’d spoil ourselves. It’s a record that you’ll hear being talked about in revered tones amongst many of our residents and in Oslo it’s certainly influenced a few careers – Magnus International’s Echo to Echo even pays tribute to it in its title. So why is it so significant. Arthur Russell is seminal figure in the development of Disco and electronic music, recording with the likes of Nicky Siano and Walter Gibbons in the late seventies, while at the same time walking amongst New York’s most avant garde talents in music. With a sound that managed to push the envelope of the music while being able to speak to a major audience, Russell’s music occupied that hallowed ground between pure innovative artistry, without alienating the average man on the street. Why it should be so popular is still unclear. A classically trained cellist, Russell never succumbed to the easy thing, preferring dissonance over consonance and using awkward rhythms, but yet his music has an amazing allure to it. It has a lot to do with the inventiveness of his creativity and that this album, originally recorded in 1986, still sounds as far out as it would have done back then, stands testament to this talent.

Russell coaxes most of his sensual sonorities from his cello on this record, but you’d hardly know that without really listening intently. He manipulates them in the electronic realm alongside his discordant vocal and with that he managed to create an album that seems to speak directly to its listener, perhaps mostly due to his unique voice. On paper there would be nothing to this record that you can pinpoint as the defining aspect of its character, but the end result just bounds with enough charm and sincerity that even the most hardened musical critic would be hard-pressed to deny its presence and even magnificence. Sadly Mr. Russell is no longer with us and it was shortly after this record that he fell victim to that most devastating disease of the 70’s, AIDS and passed away, leaving us with this record as his last musical words. It may have taken us two months of waiting around for this record to finally arrive after we ordered it, but now we have it, and will take up a special place on our shelf.

Body Talk with Charlotte Bendiks

Charlotte Bendiks describes the music she makes and plays as body music – Music that works on a corporeal level, moving your body through contrapuntal rhythms and frequencies that pulse with the speed of the ritualistic drum circles that have been ingrained in us since the beginning of time. Charlotte likes the sensuality that body music imparts, allowing her to operate on a most intimate level with her audiences. She moulds her evenings at the decks around the audience’s desires, and when she turns to the production chair she calls on this experiences at the decks and the folk traditions of the north to create minimalists percussive focussed tracks that have found their way on Per Martinsen’s (Mental Overdrive) Love OD and Correspondant.

Her connection to her hometown, Tromsø is strong and like Martinsen, Biosphere and Torske she leaves traces of a frozen arctic north in her music, even if it might not lie on the surface like the artists that came before her. But like those artists from the region there is something of a universal appeal to the music that reaches bigger audiences. Recently Bendiks has caught the ear of Cómeme amongst others and has appeared on Electronic Beats and Boiler Room behind the decks, her star always on the rise. It was on the latter outlet where she and Borusiade represented Cómeme for a studio mix, and offered us a taste of their upcoming Øya Natt Cómeme showcase this Saturday. And with the artist visiting us soon, it gave us the opportunity to send her some questions in the hope of finding out more about this reserved talent. So we talk Tromsø, Cómeme and her upcoming gig at Jæger…

When I spoke to Bjørn Torske about making music in Trømso, he said it was because there was nothing else to do there. Is this a sentiment you share?

Not exactly. One of the things I love about Tromsø is that there is so much to do outdoors in the nature, which is the absolute best part of Tromsø and it is for free. And I do think Tromsø has a very thriving cultural life, but I know that it has blossomed a lot after Bjørn moved to Bergen. I remember one story he told me after he played at the Insomnia Festival in 2007 (I think), where he was very impressed that we were able to gather so many people at an event with underground music in this small city. He said they tried something similar in the early 90s, and to put together a rave party. Only about 10 people showed up, 5 were on the guestlist and 3 wanted their money back… So, I do think Tromsø has developed a lot since Bjørn was living here and making music.

How did your physical environment shape music an interest in music if at all?

The wintertime and the darkness up here are always very intense for me. It does affect me somehow, but it is very difficult to explain, as it is a very indefinable feeling I get. I somehow enjoy diving deep in to the darkness and giving up to it, musically and emotionally.

Tromsø is quite remote and isolated and yet the music that comes out of the region has a very uncanny universal appeal. Can you ascribe anything to the momentum the music from the region achieves around the rest of the world?

I really can’t. Somehow I feel very inspired by a lot of music from all over the world, and many of my friends up here who are also musicians, for example Kohib told me that he can tell that I have a different sound than a lot of other Norwegian musicians, but as Per aka Mental Overdrive says, he can still hear the arctic sound in my music. And I have no idea what exactly they are talking about.

You caught the ears of Cómeme. Do you know what drew them to you, and how has your relationship with the label and radio channel evolved since?

Actually we met as friends. Maximo one of my closest friends, moved from Germany to Tromsø to work as a chef, until he met me and we started making music and parties together – The Moist parties. Maximo was a very good friend with several of the Cómeme guys and introduced me to them and their music. I met them and we also became friends who started talking, sharing music and moments together. The relationship grew because of our mutual interest in same musical feeling and ideas about the music world.

While most of your Tromsø musical peers have moved away, you still call the city home. What keeps you anchored there?

Tromsø is a very special place and will always be my home and a place I will return to, even though I sometimes spend time in other places of the world.

Is there anything that would compel you to move away?

Of course. Curiosity, experiences, friends and who knows what, where and when.

I’ve heard you describe the music you produce and like to play as body music – music of a physical experience. When and how did this idea take root in your musical development?

Playing body music is also playing with sensual physicality. Music has always been an audiovisual physical experience for me, I want the frequencies to hit my body and the rhythms to move me, and I want to move everybody on the floor.

I find a lot of ritualistic minimalist percussive elements to your music and DJ sets. Has this some direct correlation to the idea of body music for you?

It sure has. It has everything to do with the ritual of moving your body to rhythms and letting the rhythms move you.

Is there a modern track that perfectly embodies the idea for you?

It could be many and none. I don’t think I can answer this question.

Listening to your mixes it suggests that body music exists across various styles and genres for you. Is there something inherently yours, which influences your selections and ties it all together in the concise manner your mixes come together?

I started using body music as a description of my music after my friend Maximo wrote it in one of my first biographies. I found it very hard to describe my music with styles or genres. I can’t commit to playing one style, tempo or genres because I am inspired by and enjoy playing so many different types of music, so I wanted to describe my music like a feeling and as an experience instead of locking it down to one specific style. Playing body music is about musical freedom.

I’ve only heard the recorded mixes however and when you come to Jæger it will be the first time I’ll hear you in the flesh. How would that experience differ from your recorded mix, and what similarities could we expect?

When I am in a club I have an audience who respond to what I play and there is definitely a communication between the crowd and me, and it shapes the selections I make. I want to connect with everybody in the room and share a euphoric moment together with them.

You’re playing alongside Borusiade, who you’ve played alongside before for a Boiler Room studio session earlier this year. What similarities do you think you share with that DJ and artist?

I am very happy to play together with Borusiade, she is one of my favourite Djs and a very good friend. We played together many times since we met for the first time last may in Dresden. We were actually introduced by our very good friend Lena Willikens.

Are they similarities that can be considered defining characteristics of Cómeme, which relates to this event being a showcase for the label?

I don’t like describing musical similarities, I prefer to think of music and musical expressions in a very free and open way.

It also suggests that your future might be intertwined with that of Cómeme’s. What exactly is to come from this relationship?

I will always be a very big fan of the label and it’s artists and continue sharing music with the Cómeme family that I am very happy to be included in.

And what will its immediate effects be when you take to the booth on Saturday?

You will know when it happens.

Versatile with Gilb’r

Versatile, as the name suggests is a label that’s eluded categorisation for all of its twenty years in existence. From the first I:Cube release, born out of the very same French House scene that introduced Daft Punk to the world to “Cham”, a Gilb’r and Sotofett collaboration which marks the label’s latest release, there’s a wide range of sonic expressions that encompass the label over the course of its existence and yet there’s something deeply entrenched in everything the label is and connects all the dots between I:Cube’s “Yes Mama” and the Latin percussive brooding Technophile House track that is “Cham”.

<a href="http://shop.versatilerecords.com/album/disco-cubizm-venus-ep">Disco Cubizm / Venus EP by Various Artists</a>

Versatile’s roots is intertwined with its owner Gilbert Cohen (aka Gilb’r) who, while working alongside the likes of Ivan Smagghe at Radio Nova in Paris, set forth to start a label after hearing the production work of I:Cube, one Nicholas Chaix. What was to be a Radio Nova imprint soon became Cohen’s passion project and with the first release “Disco Cubizm” a template was set in which Versatile was established. The label came at a time and in an environment that gave rise to a Parisian sound that would quickly take the world by storm, and saw Disco Cubizm become an instant underground success. There was the obvious connection to what was happening around them at the time, with Daft Punk on remixes duties for “Disco Cubizm”, but at the same time Versatile established its own path very quickly. Listening to I:Cube’s “Picnic Attack” or Chateau Flight’s “Puzzle” you come across a timelessness that many of their contemporaries have not been able to achieve in the same way. There’s a deepness there that even artists like Joakim with tracks like “Come into my Kitchen” embody and transcends trend genre and styles. From fully fledged bands like Zombie to Zombie to the two DJ/artists at the centre of the label Gilb’r and I:Cube, very little is left to explore in Versatile’s extensive discography and in its twenty years it’s achieved some remarkable success while staying firmly rooted in an underground frame of mind.

Today Versatile’s appeal is universal and unanimous amongst dance music enthusiasts regardless of their predilections. So what does it mean for a label like Versatile when it reaches a twenty-year milestone and how does it keep things interesting for itself as it continually evolves? It’s questions like these we asked label head Gilb’r over email, and he obliged by giving us further insight into this remarkable label celebrating its twentieth anniversary with us – something we can ponder on while Gilb’r and Jan Schulte join us this Wednesday for Øyvind Morken’s special Øya Natt Untzdag residency.

Your celebrating a landmark 20 years of Versatile with us. Other than the obvious durability of the label, what does that anniversary symbolise for you?

Weirdly, it’s a kind of reset. 20 years is a long time (even though it passed so quickly). I’ve been working with some artists for a long time, and it is interesting to see their evolution over the years. I’m also happy to be talking to different audiences today. Some kids that were just born when I started the label, I now see at the gigs I play.

How have you seen Versatile evolve since that first I:Cube release?

Totally. If you don’t evolve, then you die. It’s a rule of nature.

If I stuck to the “french touch” filter thing, we would have disappeared, for sure. I think the label slowly opened to other types of sounds. It started very “floor” orientated and when Zombie Zombie, Jaumet or Joakim (even he’s not on the label anymore) joined, it opened me to other styles of music. Also, the fact that we have a live band on the label, which actually comes from the indie scene, gave us some new perspective and freedom to release more in an open and diverse way. And it was mutual – I never thought Cosmic Neman (Zombie Zombie drummer) would ever play Techno or put a DJ set together, which he is doing today.

I:Cube has been the common denominator throughout its existence. How has artist developed alongside the label, and how has he shaped what Versatile is today?

My meeting with I:Cube is almost unreal. He was the 1st signing, and at first, he represented what I wanted to do with a label. We also made some music together as Chateau Flight, and which was very fun, deep and intense in the studio every time. We had a lot freedom. I wish we’d recorded everything. Sometimes, before a track was completed, it went thru 6/7 completely different versions.

He shaped what the label is today by constant work. Basically he has a very unique universe and he actually shaped it so much. I love what he’s doing today. He’s all around from trippy Techno to rich ambient stuff, from distorted Disco to solar House music. I’ve rarely seen someone, after such a long period of production, still being able to push his own boundaries. Every time I receive any new music from him, I wonder what I’m gonna get. In my DJ sets there is maybe 15% of unreleased music from him.

And how has the label shaped you as an artist?

I don’t see a common point between those. What shaped me, as a producer is the people I met on the way and who I’ve worked with.

<a href="http://shop.versatilerecords.com/album/plays-john-carpenter-ver069">Plays John Carpenter - VER069 by Zombie Zombie</a>

The label’s releases are quite broad ranging in style and even genre. Was there ever a sonic aesthetic or ideology that you’ve wanted to particularly capture with Versatile from the beginning?

It’s more a mood thing, my mood. So it is very empiric and presents music in one category with some ramifications. I have been trying over the years to link sensibilities together. I can sometimes listen to a new-wave beat and production and find it very very funky, where some old friends of mine, that stuck to disco or funk think it’s glacial music…

Radio Nova seemed to be quite an incubator for future talent during your residency there and I know Versatile was supposed to exist initially as a Nova label. What importance do you place on that period and environment for the development of Versatile?

Basically, Versatile is the consequence of all those years I stayed and worked there. Those people completely opened my mind. I arrived from Nice, with some ears and not too much culture, and I left there after 5 years, with some amazing meetings with musicians, cineastes and I had the chance to have mentors that played me so much stuff. That’s also the place where I had the chance to work on my DJ skills daily. Thanks to Jean-François Bizot. RIP.

The label and the artists it’s released seem to stay anchored to their underground roots, where many of your contemporaries ventured into more popular avenues. What’s been the key ingredient that’s kept it all grounded for you?

Maybe not to have success (I mean commercially). I always thought our music could have a much wider audience, but if after all those years it didn’t happen, it must be for some reasons, which is totally OK. I don’t see any of the artists on the label doing something they wouldn’t assume to do. Even though some wouldn’t be wholly against being bigger.

Yes, I imagine that must be the artists too and one artists that has continually been cropping up on the label, and one you’ve also collaborated with on other labels like Honest Jon’s is Sotofett. We’re curious, how is it that you two found each other?

I didn’t collaborate with Honest Jons, I collaborated with Sotofett. I met him through I:Cube who suggested I book him maybe 6 years ago, for his release party. It didn’t happen then, but I booked him later at the Rex. The man said ok, but I want to stay 3 days and go to the studio… I found it weird and gutsy so I accepted it. And I found a very good friend and someone I’m very connected to, which is rare. Every time we see each other, we do some music together and that’s very refreshing to me.

<a href="http://shop.versatilerecords.com/album/gilbr-cham-version-one-two">GILB'R - CHAM (VERSION ONE & TWO) by Versatile Records</a>

He’s on Cham too, the latest release from you and Versatile. Can you tell us a little about how those tracks came together as this mixture of dark brooding whining sonic elements alongside the Latin percussion and Techno beats?

Simple. We were playing at De School together in Amsterdam – All night long. Sotofett stayed at my place. I had those tracks for a while and I couldn’t finish them. I proposed Sotofett to jam them in my studio, and 4 hours after we had those 2 versions. Pretty much as they were recorded. I always work better when my mind is challenged.

What’s it like working with the mysterious and enigmatic figure of Sotofett in the studio?

Super fun and free.

Versatile also recently released a compilation celebrating its twenty years. What did you most enjoy about the process of putting that together with I:Cube?

The fact that we could look on a large period and also the fact that Cube has been in charge on selecting the older stuff – avoiding the “big tunes” made me rediscover old gems.

They were all highlights from the discography, but was there any, one track that was particularly special to you?

It would change every week but I really like the Jonathan Fitoussi and Clemens Hourrière – Five steps

It must have brought back great memories for you. What is one of the happiest moments from running the label for you in the last twenty years?

The 15 years anniversary in Paris has been magical, really. I’ve never seen so many smiling faces – from the DJ’s to the audience. And there were more than 2000 people and maybe 12 DJ’s!

And where do you see Versatile in the next twenty years?

…

Digging for Carl Craig

Carl Craig’s magnanimous presence in electronic music, machine music and Techno is no insignificant thing. His body of work as a producer is large and diverse, accumulating over a broad range of styles, venturing into various genres, and come together as something distinctively his, even through his various aliases like 69 or Psyche. His extensive and comprehensive discography has featured on labels like Transmat and Planet E with his distinct musical nature at the centre of it all. O yeah, there’s his label too, the label that has contributed so much to music and then we’ve still not even gotten into the various sub-labels like Planet Rhythm. As a DJ Carl Craig is an unparalleled Techno selector, one that puts him amongst that Detroit upper echelon of DJs and has resulted in residencies all over the world. In his tireless pursuit for a futuristic aesthetic he continually evolves a sound around current temperaments of trend and style, while pushing them forward at the same time. He keeps his roots firmly planted in Detroit, the city that remains the source of inspiration, collaborating with various artists from disparate corners in music and presenting new artists through his various platforms and channels as a label boss and DJ. In his continued efforts in finding new and original methods in music, he combines elements of electronic dance music, Jazz and sometimes even classical music and it’s resulted in an immense body of work, that discogs even struggles to stay on top of. Approaching Carl Craig´s career is like standing at lowest base of Everest, preparing to climb it with little more than a pickaxe and a pair of well-weathered boots. It looks like I am going to need some help here, so I called in the help of some friends, some of Oslo’s finest DJs and selectors to help me scale this mountain. I asked Jokke, MC Kaman, Roland Lifjell, Ørjan Sletner and Joachim Krüger to pick their favourite Carl Craig or Planet E moments in an effort to help me form a complete picture of this remarkable artist, DJ and facilitator through the only thing that matters, the music.

Joachim Krüger – BFC “Please Stand By”

One of Carl Craig’s first ever releases, “Please Stand By” adopts his BFC moniker, in which he fused the sound of Detroit and the future with the break-beat rhythms, made popular through Europe’s rave and Hardcore scene at the time. Craig transposes it to something more palpable through lower tempos and subtly orchestrated pads and synths that speak more of his Detroit roots. They eddy and swirl around the ratchety beats that flow and at the time they introduced the world to the talent of the producer. 26 years on and that track still holds on to those qualities and what’s more it showcases Carl Craig’s talent for the production chair that cements for Joakim in the second track he chose for our list.

Joachim Krüger – 69 “Microlovr”

“Listen to the production quality”, says Joachim, “so many details, so airy. WOW!” Tracks like Microlvr reveal Craig’s dominance as a producer and between this track as his 69 alias or his work as BFC it shows an eclectic personality too. Whether it’s pure unadulterated Techno his producing or venturing into deeper visceral territory, there appears to be this constant drive to Craig’s music that won’t be pigeonholed. “Microlovr” could be described as a Deep House track, but at the same time it’s not and its often in these grey areas that Carl Craig thrives as a producer, pulling all these influences and styles together as music that floats between everything as a single, albeit schizophrenic musical personality.

Roland Lifjell – 69 “Desire”

Roland Lifjell will be providing the DJ support for Carl Craig during Burn’s Dagslys event and has pressed upon another track from this 69 release as his favourite Carl Craig release, seemingly making this quite a significant moment in Carl Craig’s career for many including Joachm and Roland. Roland is no stranger to the Planet E boss’ music, his own record collection hiding a few Craig gems in its vaults and his Techno-inclinations naturally finding equal ground to Craig in his mixes and music. There must be something to this release then if this collector and DJ calls on this release too.

Ørjan Sletner – Rhythim is Rhythim “Kao-tic Harmony”

When I asked Ørjan about he’s favourite moment from Carl Craig’s discography the Oslo DJ and avid collector – who gave discogs its first record to sell – took to his immense record collection with a caution: “I don’t have anything from Carl Craig after 2000.” Nonetheless, he chose a significant moment in Detroit history as his first selection. Rhythim is Rhythim might have been the moniker of another Detroit legend, Derrick May, but on this release he called on the writing prowess of Carl Craig for two tracks. A melodic ambient-like track that truly captures that early Techno sound as a futuristic construction through melody and rhythm in the machines. It is what’s always been at the heart of that Detroit sound and very few finer examples of it exist than this track. On this occasion May and Craig might even forego the impulse towards a percussive element, letting the synths provide the pulse for the music, but incorporated within this track is everything Detroit Techno has always been and will always be.

Roland Lifjell – Rhythim is Rhythim “Icon”

Roland concurs with Ørjan’s pick here, much like he did with Joakim’s before (great minds think alike), but calls on the A-side as a significant favourite for him. Here the densely layered textures that simply boil over with melody and harmony is accompanied by a laid-back break-beat percussive track the drives the serene melodic developments along, which in their own turn pull everything back through long legato movements of harmony and jazz-like melodic bursts from a thin whining synthesiser. Craig has never been afraid to dabble in other musical forms or styles and it really shows on this track.

Ørjan Sletner – DBX “Losing Control” (Carl Craig Remix)

Besides being a formidable producer, Carl Craig is also an avid remixer, applying his own significant touch to the sound of others. He has broken many new careers through his remixes and this track for DBX is very much a highlight in his remix discography.

Jokke – Ultramarine – “Hooter” (Carl Craig remix)

VOID resident Jokke too prefers a remix from Craig’s discography, with this interpretation from Ultramarine standing out amongst his other records.

“MC” Kaman Leung – Moodymann “Silentintroduction”

Carl Craig’s benevolent and altruistic nature when it comes to the music from his hometown is famous in its own right. He’s an industrious facilitator for everything Detroit and in music he’s always provided a launch pad for new artists through his various labels, which centre around its flagship label Planet E. The label broke one of the most significant artists of our time, Moodymann and his debut album Silentintroduction introduced the world to a cut-and-paste House sound that took the world by storm as something undeniably Moodymann. “It is the Sgt. Pepper of electronic music”, says Kaman about the Detroit native’s first album and yes, there’s some truth to that statement. Even Carl Craig saw the appeal of the artists right from the beginning and today that Moodymann sound has won over an international audience and inspired just a few careers in the process with it’s focus on the deeper end of House, assembling collages from disparate corners of music, much like Craig’s own inclinations.

Mischa Mathys – “Recomposed” by Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald

Yes, I too have moments in Carl Craig’s discography that have made a significant impact on my listening experiences and I also want an opportunity to share these with you before the man of the hour puts in an appearance this Friday. For me, nothing captures Craig’s relentless pursuit of a future aesthetic more affectively than this release, in which he and fellow Detroit Techno stalwart Moritz von Oswald recompose Maurice Ravel and Modest Mussorgsky’s music for electronic instruments. At times subtle and at others more vigorous, this record shows how Techno and Classical music is often cut from the same cloth. The minimalist nature and uncompromising nature of Techno has always found some similarities with modern Classical music and with Carl Craig’s ability to jump between genres, styles and trends, they make perfect bedfellows.

Mischa Mathys – Carl Craig “A Wonderful Life”

And to conclude things I’ll leave you with this little ambient masterpiece from 2002. We’ve gone through quite a few tracks in Carl Craig’s discography, but together they make a mere drop in the ocean for this truly remarkable and inexhaustible talent. To get a truly complete perspective of the artist there’s only one thing left to do. Join us in our basement on Friday and see the man at work .

It just aint Disco – The legacy of Disco considered

New York in the seventies was an unimaginable mixture of artistry and dissolution coming together in one the most vital era’s for popular music. It was a period of great economic stagnation, urban decay and poverty, elements that can make a great Petri dish for new creative minds to flourish. People that pushed at the edges of convention and taste in their pursuit of unadulterated and free form of expression became the city’s new inhabitants and formed the basis of so many new movements in art and music that were incredibly influential in today’s landscape and are often taken for granted. I’m not sure what is it about a society in decline that inspires and nurtures creative movements like these, but like Berlin in the fifties and Detroit in the eighties, New York in the seventies has a hotbed of ingenuity and imagination that not only inspired individuals, but also bred entire genres. In music alone those genres include Hip-Hop, Punk, and of course Disco. Today Disco might elicit the addition of “sucks” when mentioned, but before it became overrun with Swedish pop sensations, falsetto male vocals and cocaine habits that would make Elton John blush, it was something far more significant, not only in the discourse of music, but in the socio-political landscape of the seventies in New York and perhaps even further afield to the point where it’s impact is still relevant today. This is not going to be a biography on Disco however, since if that’s what you’re looking for, the minefield of false starts and opposing rhetoric will leave you in the middle of no man’s land, staring at a mirror ball through Bootsie Collins’ star studded sunglasses. You can pick and mix your own history of Disco, depending on your perspective, but there are three significant developments in Disco that are probably the most important to our story today when we trace back the idea of the DJ, the Club and the Sound System. It all goes back to New York in the seventies and four specific venues: Sanctuary, The Loft, Gallery and Paradise Garage, which incorporated names like Francis Grasso, David Mancuso, Nicky Siano and Larry Levan as fundamental orchestrators for what we’ve come to know as club culture today.

It existed not so much out of a chronological sequence of events with each establishment and player occupying a position on the timeline, but rather more of group of events that sprung to life independently out of the same circumstances with very little to no influence on the other. What would eventually become known as Disco, was never really called Disco until the media classed it as such with the arrival of pop sensations like Donna Summer and venues like Studio 54. There was something called a discotheque but even that’s as fluid as the Rivers of Babylon and the discotheque wasn’t really even that… it was in fact a loft apartment. Yes, although Sanctuary was strictly speaking the first in the chronological order of events, what would become known as Disco – and we’re the talking the underbelly of the genre; the thing that spawned it all and has no relation to any other aspect of Disco; the underground that never bubbled even close to the surface – would be David Mancuso’s Loft parties. Mancuso, who has always described himself as a “communal minded-person” set up the Loft parties in the early seventies as a venue to bring together people from all walks of life through music and informal gatherings in the context of a rent party taken to the extreme. It wasn’t a club, which in those days required a membership, nor was it bar, since no alcohol was served there. It was first and foremost his home, the place he would “eat, sleep and dream”. It was a place you could have a meal and a place where you could leave an IOU instead of the usual two dollars in rent contribution, and never be expected to pay it, but you’d pay it, because of the principle of it all. But first and foremost, it was a refuge for the liberal music enthusiast where s/he could look another individual in the eye as an equal, regardless of a disproportionate social standing as dictated by the conservative norm. When you “mix economical groups together, you get social progress” according to Mancuso, a quote that he’s echoed through countless interviews through the years. Off the back of the Civil Rights movement and Stonewall in the late sixties this is a significant moment in club history. During a time when minorities were being persecuted for being black, Latino and gay in New York there wasn’t much room for people or any person in these categories to express themselves freely without serious repercussions from the authorities who still deemed these actions as illegal and sneered at them from their obtuse ideological soap boxes. Even the very recent Stonewall riots, which saw a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay (LGBT) community against a police raid that today remains the catalyst for the gay liberation movement, didn’t change much on the face of it back in the seventies with the LGBT community still not truly free to express themselves in public directly after. Instead they sought safe havens through nocturnal activities, and they found that in places like the Loft, and Sanctuary, which coincidentally reflected it’s attitude in its name.

While The Loft came after the Sanctuary there was never any direct influence of one on the other but rather two independent institutions that sprung to life born out of the same social circumstances. There was however a direct interaction between the two with Mancuso having visited Sanctuary and many of the latter’s patrons often finding themselves at the Loft after hours, including on Sanctuary DJs and one very significant actor in the story of the DJ. His name was Francis Grasso, and although names like Steve D’Aquisto, Nicky Siano and Larry Levan would effectively follow in his footsteps, it was Grasso who would be the first person we’d know as a DJ in today’s terms. He would be the first person to segue two records together, beat-matching them to create a single undisturbed piece of music with records that come together to create a unified feeling. The music Grasso was playing was not Disco. “You had Booker T and the MG’s, you had Sam and Dave, you had your Memphis sound, had your Detroit sound, the Motown Sound. You had to mix it all up”; says Grasso in an interview with Frank Broughton. Even Rock would not be out of bounds with Grasso sighting Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song as a personal favourite to play. Grasso, like everybody at the time, was playing 45’s, the little 7” singles that had a about 2 minutes of music on it and required a lot of work from the DJ, but he still managed to invent the skill of mixing as we know it today, even though some might question the legitimacy of his claim that he could do it right from the beginning of his career. He was the first person we would recognise as a DJ today, but unlike many modern DJs, who seem very disconnected from their environment, Grasso was truly ingrained in his. He came from dancing to moving behind the decks and when he played it was all with one purpose in mind, getting the people on the dance floor. Sanctuary was a gay club that was a direct result of the Stonewall riots, after the original Sanctuary, a prominently straight club in an old church, made room for the first gay bar with a DJ in the world. New York was probably one of the most progressive places for gay rights in the seventies at a social level at least, and places like Sanctuary and Mancuso’s Loft were the venues that orchestrated much of this liberal attitude in the context of music. They were a refuge for young, black and Latino gay men “breaking their backs on the dance floor”; says one anonymous commentator in the documentary Maestro. The only intimidation came in the form of your peers and their ability on the dance floor it seems. It was an evening’s entertainment where the focus would not be on the DJ, but rather on the people on the floor. They, the dancers would create their own entertainment, and the DJ was merely the facilitator.

During this time the focus also turned to another important aspect in club culture. It was an element to the atmosphere that went mostly ignored, but soon turned out to become a fundamental element of the clubbing experience. No, it’s not the drugs – that’s a story for another time and an entire book in itself – it’s the sound system and the way we understand its role in the club today is a direct result of the seventies new obsession with sound in New York. For David Mancuso it all boiled down to “listening to the music like the artist intended”, but like everything else during this era it was indicative of a contemporary universal focus on sound quality that had also made it’s way into Sanctuary thanks to a Mr. Alex Rosner, who would also later go on to work with Mancuso to develop the Loft’s home system into a full-blown legendary club system like no other. “You don’t want to hear the sound system, but the music” was David Mancuso’s mantra. “He put the Klippschorns in such a way” recalls Nicky Siano in Last night a DJ saved my Life, “that they put out the sound and reflected it too, so they covered the whole area and exaggerated the sound.” This was when the Loft was in Princess street, it’s second, bigger location, and Nicky Siano, a mere teenager at the time was already a DJ and would party there alongside other young gay men like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles. The Loft would be a major influence for Siano’s Gallery, which opened in ’71 as a seventeen-year old Siano’s commercial answer to the Loft’s appeal – a space where counter-culture can thrive. By the mid-seventies there would be up to 200 clubs thriving in New York, many of them a direct descendant of the Loft’s influence and with this rise in popularity of the definitive club, came the rise of the DJ too and what Francis Grasso set out to do through beat matching two records eventually spilled over into the record industry and with it came three fundamental developments in club music and the music industry; the remix, the 12” single and the DJ-producer.

Very early on with the advent of the DJ came the record industry’s realisation of DJ’s promotional ability, with David Mancuso’s record pool, an organisation that bridged the gap between the DJ and the industry, aiding in the development of the DJ’s influence on recorded music. It didn’t take long for DJ’s like Larry Levan, Danny Krivit, Walter Gibbons, Shep Pettibone and Francois Kevorkian to require more than what their limited 45 7” records had to offer. An extended break, a introduction that went just 4 bars longer was something that would have not gone amiss in the DJ’s toolbox and with the advent of affordable reel-to-reel recording and the ability to print them straight to vinyl thanks to the close partnership between DJ’s and the record industry the remix was born. Although it was technically an edit rather than a remix and the first remix is actually attributed to Tom Moulton – not a DJ, but rather a producer and dance music enthusiast – it set about tracks that extended their three-minute average to 8/10/13 minutes. With the longer tracks and the audiophile-nature of music at the time came the need for a new format since the 7” could not reproduce the remixes to the extent that the DJ required and with that the 12” single was also born almost instantaneously.

In the context of the significance of the Loft, Gallery and Paradise Garage which also sprung into existence around the same time, with Larry Levan in the booth, these quite significant developments in the story of the music we’ve come to know as club music are still mere footnotes. It was the characters and institutions more than the developments that would make this an important time for music and like David Mancuso and the Loft, Larry Levan and Paradise Garage were key players in this story of Disco and club culture. So significant would Paradise Garage’s influence be here that it would even attribute the latter part of its name to a new style of music known as Garage. Not to be confused with UK Garage, which came much, much later, this New York version thrived in a raw passionate version of Disco that favoured longer edits and a higher energy that catered to their predominantly black, and Latino gay clientele. It had all the ingredients that defined Disco: a mixed audience, an impressive sound system, and a DJ that provided a segued music experience for an entire night, and this DJ, like Mancuso, Grasso and Siano is regarded today as one of the legends of the DJ world. Larry Levan came at a time when Disco was at the height of its popularity as an underground culture and in some ways he, alongside Frankie Knuckles provided the stepping-stone from that genre into House. “He got behind the turntables like he was always meant to be there” says Nicky Siano in one interview about the rise of his protégé, Levan. It would actually be Knuckles who introduced Larry to Nicky, and although the latter taught the former everything he knew it would be Levan, through raw talent, that would develop the music further than anybody before him and would make Paradise Garage the legendary institution it is today. It’s no coincidence that so many DJs, including Prins Thomas and Pål Strangefruit here in Oslo would reference the Garage as an influence, even though they were on the other side of the world at the time and had never come in close physical contact with it. Larry Levan and Paradise Garage took the music into new territories, based on those fundamental aspects set forth by the loft, Mancuso and Grasso, while pushing at the boundaries, with Levan specifically making his mark as one of the first DJ-producers alongside names like Tee Scott and Walter Gibbons. Levan’s affect on his immediate contemporaries like Danny Krivit and Tony Humphries is undeniable and with DJs like these and Knuckles taking Disco from Garage to House, there is an unbreakable thread that worms it’s way right through the present day.

Stories of the DJ’s sets, the club and Richard Long’s sound system are today legends in their own right, but in many ways Paradise Garage also spelled the beginning of the end for this underground counter culture. When the venue started splitting events in to gay and straight nights, Mancuso’s vision of a mixed social group was lost and when the AIDS epidemic reared it’s ugly head, club culture took a significant blow with this club at the centre of it all. When the disease eventually consumed the proprietor Michael Brody, the closing of Paradise Garage was somehow also symbolically the death knell in Disco’s coffin, aided in many ways by the commercialisation and hedonism of the music that was introduced by the likes of Studio 54. But that’s another story altogether, another parallel timeline in the story of Disco and it’s something that definitely tarred Disco’s reputation beyond some. That’s also not the legacy of Disco. No, Disco’s legacy today is an immersive sound system, a mixed crowd and DJ providing a continuous stream of music for everybody’s listening and dancing pleasure. Disco’s legacy is also the 12” single and the remix, but it’s also about giving counter culture an opportunity to thrive. When you walk into a club today and a sound system greets you with a warm fuzzy feeling inside, that’s Disco. When you hear one of your favourite tracks extended through another, that’s Disco. When you hear a DJ playing a different version of a familiar track, that’s Disco. When you stay on the dance floor the entire night and your dancing-neighbour, who is from a completely different cultural background, has never left your side, that‘s Disco. In light of recent the events surrounding the killing of two black men in Dallas and Baton Rouge, and the mass killing at a gay Florida nightclub, it’s more important than ever to remember what Disco actually was and what it’s legacy is today even in its socio-political context too. Disco was always more than just the music, and even though some of us, this writer included never go to experience it in it’s original form, we are still living the legacy of Disco every time we step out onto the dance floor.

Album of the Week: DMX Krew – The New Age Travellers

What is it: Lo-Fi ambient electro
What does it sound like: 90’s video games and b-movie space operas
Our favourite moments: Family Time and After the Battle

DMX Krew (aka Edward Upton), better known for his funk-inspired, retro, space-aged electro releases on labels like Rephlex and Abstract Forms, is back with yet another long-player to add his extensive discography. Delving into any DMX Krew release, always presents a minefield of unknown territory waiting for you past the sleeve of any record, and on The New Age Travellers he’s outdone himself again with a record that either pokes fun at the subject of the title or attempts to elevate its image. He proposes the theme as whimsical electronica that stretches between 80’s sci-fi b-movie soundtracks and old-school ambient tracks from TV shows, which might not on the surface appear to be a DMX Krew release, but certainly reveals an image of the artist from an obscure angle. DMX Krew, like Aphex Twin and Legowelt is one of those rare intellectual talents that define a sound only he seems capable of conjuring without ever really conforming to a singular style. Yes, a broader stroke could define the artist by the Electro tag, but on New Age Travellers he’s proven yet again that his blend of Funk Electronica, Synth Wave, Techno and Electro is everywhere, but can only exist in one place. For this latest album, DMX Krew has revealed something of a subtler side, where melodic and harmonic pleasantries are the point of focus that see the artist turn slightly from his beat-music roots.

It’s still very much a machine-based album, with Mr. Upton favouring a lo-fi aesthetic that would not feel that distant from an 80’s soap opera in space. Whether he’s playing in the folksy realm through Ritual, or venturing into the sonic palette of 90’s video games with Dayride A303, there’s a playful aesthetic there where the innocent sonic elements combine with quirky upbeat melodies. It’s not like any other DMX you’ve likely to have heard, and listening to Family Time seems like an entire world away from Electro Worm or Eastside Boogie, yet there’s a consistency that reflects DMX Krew’s unparalleled electro-kitsch style of music and shows his audience a side to his creative ability that we do not get to see very often.

Between the lines with Pål Strangefruit

There’s a name spoken in revered tones amongst Oslo’s clubbing community. It’s a name etched into clubland’s history books, and yet it is as contemporary as it is timeless. It’s a name synonymous with names like Øyvind Morken, Prins Thomas and Olle Abstract, but it’s also a reference of influence. That name is Pål Nyhus, but it’s also Strangefruit and sometimes it even goes by Mungolian Jetset. It’s a name that I’ve heard countless times at Jæger, but it’s only a name and what’s in a name? No, I want to get to know the man, the producer, the artist, the DJ behind that name, and with Strangefruit cropping up in Jæger’s calendar a fair few times over recent weeks, I made it my business to find out more. After a short email exchange, we meet for a coffee one rainy Saturday afternoon in Grunnerløkka.

I find a quiet corner in a sparsely occupied café, a momentary ray of sunshine breaking through the grey skies streaking in through the window to illuminate it like some ecclesiastic platform for a dramatic encounter in film. There’s some jazz/muzak interpretation of “Bridge over troubled water” playing over the whimsical PA and for a moment I consider where this spirited interpretation would fall into in Brian Eno’s idea of background music, but before I come to my conclusion, Pål walks through the door. He’s wearing a red bowling shirt, and his unmistakeably deep-set eyes that stare intensely at you from some hidden depth is instantly recognisable under a thick tussled mop of blond hair. It’s the face I recognise from countless appearances in Jæger’s various DJ booths and when he greets me the voice, which I’ve only heard through the telephone receiver, suggests a humility that belies the magnitude of his presence in the booth and in this quiet café space. He’s due to play that night at Jæger and I immediately ask about the records he’s recently purchased and which will make it into his set that night. “I always buy new records before a gig. I play more House at Jæger than I would in other places. In the House movement I think there’s a lot of boring formulaic stuff, which works but it doesn’t have any personality.” Pål likes a to float between genres preferring a fluidity to the music he plays, rather than being dependent on a specific style or genre. As a DJ he likes to work in the “crossover between ethnic music, abstract music and funk music” and he mentions names like Dekmantel, Call Super and Multi Culti as artists and labels he is currently digging. “The stuff that I’m talking about looks back, but also looks to the future, but I think it also has a lot to do with the producer’s creativity.”

Looking back is part of the reason I wanted to meet up with Pål and there’s one question I’ve been specifically looking to ask the DJ. Why is it that whenever I speak to a DJ of some import his name is almost always certain to crop up as an influence? “ I don’t know, it’s probably because I’ve been here for a while “, he remarks with a modest flatness in his voice. His response, like his general demeanour, possibly suggests something of his humble origins growing up in rural Norway, a town called Hamar a few hours north of Oslo. His history runs perpendicularly to that of “Prins” Thomas Moen Hermansen, the younger Thomas learning his craft alongside an older Pål, whose basement provided the scene and whose confirmation money provided the funding for a couple of decks and a mixer when both DJs advanced on their chosen career path. Pål would spend his summers working in the fields to save enough money to make journey into Oslo to buy new records. “When we had the September holidays, it was always for potato picking, so we called it potato holidays – that’s how rural it was.“ Subscribing to magazines like Melody Maker and NME, he became aware of an American sound and something about the sound of places like Paradise Garage and DJs like Larry Levan just stuck with a young impressionable Pål. “When I heard some of the electronic music from New York, it felt like a spaceship. Growing up in farmland, you had to use fantasy to associate with the music. The music didn’t fit into my environment, I had to create my own space to make it fit in.” Although Italo had began to make its mark in the region thanks to a Swedish label called Beat Box, this alien music from the US was the reserve of only a few “like-minded kids” in the region, which included Pål. But Pål also stood out amongst the crowd favouring a more eclectic taste, that meant he could adapt to any style and hone his craft given any environment, even his Hamar. “My most valued Boogie records I bought in my hometown for next to nothing because no one else bought it”, he quips. From US House and Disco to the Italo records from Sweden and the Boogie records he picked up in his hometown, a picture starts to form, a picture of an eclectic musical personality, but what sets Pål apart from your average run-of-the-mill collector, is not just a broad taste, but also a trait he shares with Prins Thomas, a tendency to look for the music between the borders of disparate musical styles. “And that’s something Øyvind has, which I guess is about like-spirited DJs.”

Alongside Thomas, Pål taught himself to DJ calling on these eclectic influences and eventually made the move to Oslo in the early nineties. “To me you had Oslo before and after the nineties, and I obviously can’t talk much about the club scene in the eighties in Oslo, because I wasn’t really a part of it. When I came in, it was mainly split between two rave organisers. You had Hansa and Lars, they were doing these big rave events in the east side, and then you had The Tribe, which were more like a west- end thing – more melodic smoother and funky. All that stuff was bigger and harder at that time. In ‘92 and ‘93 Ole Abstract and I were part of Excess to the Rave Zone, and they were like northern people. I remember Ole and I were always more fond of the American House and Techno sound, a deeper sound.” Pål’s love for music regardless of his, would eventually go from playing records to making records and in the mid nineties he released his first remix alongside Torbjørn Brundtland and it put into perspective Pål’s role in future creative endeavours. “I was never really a technical minded person. I’m an old school producer who has ideas and theories about making music, but I’ve always been dependent on working with technically skilled people.” He learnt to play with other musicians during a period spent behind the decks in a Jazz band and met his creative spirit in the form of Knut Sævik through Oslo’s club environment around the same time. Pål and Knut formed an artistic union in the late nineties after Knut performed on the formers radio show as part of John Storm N Da the Kid. “There was something that I liked which had these enormous dimensions to it in the way it was layered, which triggered some of the same ideas I had for music.” Knut’s playing spoke to Pål’s own eccentricities when it comes to music and Mungolian Jetset became the physical manifestation of Pål’s yearning for the music that bridges disparate musical borders with the edition of Knut’s own conspiring ideas. “What I like about Knut is that he’s totally open minded. His background is kind of a weird mixture. He’s heavily into Russian Classical music, but at the same time he has kind of an open ear for pop music.” They bonded over a shared love of Shpongle’s single, Divine Moments of Truth, which “is a keystone for the Mongolian sound”, according to Pål.

I notice while listening back to recorded conversation that Pål starts humming the tune playing in the background. The Muzak covers of folksy songs have shifted into the hemisphere of light Jazz, only just enough that it must have recalled something buried deep in the DJ’s subconscious. It’s evident that Pål has a musical ear and even though it might not manifest as something technical, it’s something he’s been able to direct through the turntables as both a functional medium, in creating entertainment for a dancing audience, and as an artistic medium, in creating new music. It might have started with a record collection, but has morphed into a creative personality, that goes far beyond mixing two records together. He has gained an intrinsic knowledge of music, which any Oslo native with even the slightest inkling of music has come to know, and in some cases, drawn on as an influence.

As Pål continues to reminisce about his early career and Oslo during the nineties, I notice the rain has reached a new level of ferocity – you have to admire how Norway ever hardly does anything in half measures. As I’m always I’m looking for titbits of club music in Norway’s history, to create a rounded perspective of the scene and it’s history, I hang onto every word Pål speaks. But it doesn’t take long before a giant elephant enters the room and we find there’s no way around. As a veteran DJ with the experience of playing abroad to audiences in places like Panorama bar, his opinion on the current situation with Blå is something that immediately crops up when we start talking about club culture in the city. By this point Pål’s girlfriend, Inger Lise Hølto has joined us with a toy poodle, which’s whimpering under Pål’s chair from the cold wetness of his curly fur. Both Inger and Pål give a sly chuckle when I ask Pål on his opinion of the situation and he says: “What do I think?… I think it’s very clear that the politicians and the police are a very long away from where we are.“ It has by now appeared to me that authorities have an agenda when it comes to clubbing in the city and Pål concurs. “Yes. In a way the police people are FRP people. I’m not saying every cop is a racist, but it seems like the mindset is a lot more conservative. Oslo is a growing city. To my understanding it’s one of the fastest growing cities in Europe right now, which means Oslo is way more continental than ten years ago. It means we have more people with different desires and I think the way the police are working now is in the opposite direction.” Inger and Pål suggests that creates a catch-22-situation whereby “it seems like if you have to call the police enough times, they just close it down, which means you don’t want to call the police.“ Pål thinks positively of the fact that people are reacting to it, but at the same time it seems the effects of a state trying to control a lifetime’s worth of drinking habits has had an adverse effect on the entire club scene here. “There’s a certain amount of time you have when you DJ to three o’clock. Sadly a lot of people come at 12AM or 1AM. If Norwegian club culture were people coming out at eight in the evening it would be fine. But it doesn’t work like that. Norwegians don’t come out early and a lot of Norwegians have to get drunk to start dancing.” Pål still believes it’s better than the nineties however, when it “was more about playing as loud as you can” than the focus on sound quality there is today. As a DJ that’s toured abroad, I wonder if the appeal of the touring DJ ever calls to him, and again that humility in his personality shines through. “Maybe my time is still to come, or maybe I’ll just be there as the underdog.”

There’s clearly no sense of him being the underdog when he’s in the booth however and later that evening, I get yet another taste of what a true professional selector sounds like. He’s jumping between House, Disco and Techno with a natural ease that only comes from knowing your music intrinsically. The crowd float on and off the dance floor through waves of people, Pål eclectic tastes speaking to various personalities at different times. A group of very young girls have particularly taken a shine to the early part of his set, where Pål’s mixes the latest electronic sounds with some organic pieces. Even though Pål is a self-professed crowd pleaser, there’s a definite thread that runs through the music he’s picked for the night, something that has been there at the previous residencies he’s played over the course of these last two/three weeks and will undoubtedly be there again the next time he plays at Jæger for a different night with a whole different crowd to cater for. “Even though I’ve been playing different nights, there’s obviously a similar thing that comes through every time I play. I am aware that a crowd on a Saturday might be a different crowd to the Wednesday.” What remains when you transcend the genres and styles, is Pål’s desire to “push as much as possible” within the confines of a night. “I play a lot of gigs where I don’t play House, because when it comes to electronic music it’s only really Jæger and Villa you can play it in Oslo, and when it comes to other places, you have to play more organic. I love a lot of organic music. When you are generally into music you are always looking for a place to play all kinds. For instance, I’ve really been looking for a place where I can play ambient music for 5 hours.“ Pål and I start on the subject of ambient music, and I mention Lucy’s Self Mythology, an album Pål “just discovered a week ago” and “which is really like a tribal album”, but it brings us full circle in our conversation. That album, like Pål’s DJ sets and music as one half of Mongolian Jetset, embodies the DJ’s desire to look for the music that comes to life between parameters. It’s in this grey area between everything that Pål exists and exactly that reason when you hear the name Strangefruit there’s no way it could be mistaken for any other name. We wind down our conversation talking of the night ahead, but Pål needs to go to a birthday party soon and although there’s still much more I’d like to ask him, I have to let him and Inger get on their way. But I’m content with the idea that this will not be our last meeting, and when we meet again, there will be a whole lot more to reminisce about and discuss. Until next time Pål Strangefruit Nyhus.

Pirupa on the Web

The Internet. The Internet is a treasure trove of useful and useless information floating around in an ethereal cloud just waiting to be pounced on by some tiresome adolescent living in his ex-girlfriend’s basement with nothing better to do one Tuesday afternoon. Information about our favourite musicians and popular DJs are particularly bountiful and can range anywhere from a thoughtfully constructed biography to their most worrisome guilty pleasures – perhaps part of the reason many of them don’t to do interviews anymore. With that in mind I fire up Deloris, my midnight companion in my lonely hovel, also known as a computer and set to work to find out more about the guest joining us at Jæger for Frædag, Pirupa. The Italian producer and DJ has been making waves in clubland since 2007, gracing many charts and event listings throughout Europe. His sound can be described as floating somewhere between the richly rewarding plains of Tech-House and Minimal, which has found its way on labels like Desolat, Defected and his own Nonstop records with titles like Party Non Stop and Fireworks. Tracks like those have seen him grace many booths from Ministry of Sound in London to Space in Ibiza. His success both in the studio and the dance floor has seen him chart at #11 of RA’s Top100 Most Charted Artists of 2010, but did you know…

Pirupa is his surname

His full name is Piero Pirupa according to Resident Advisor.

He was an upholsterer

Before Pirupa became a successful touring artist and DJ he used to work in his father’s furniture store according to an interview with Defected. He deserted the furniture business and abandoned his father in 2009 with good cause when Sweet Devil and Get Funky propelled him to number one in the overall Beatport chart and kickstarted a career in music which has lasted to this day and includes many more number one positions.

Beatport used to be relevant

It was during 2009, when Beatport were still in their infancy and still paid their artists that they made a significant contribution to clubland, by bringing the underground to the foreground allowing truly independent artists and labels to make an impression without the logistical and expensive nightmare that was vinyl during those years. Charts and especially artist charts, which were more exclusive back then provided a great platform to discover new music based on individual tastes and a novel idea that has today, like pop music, eaten itself.

Pirupa doesn’t think highly Party Nonstop

Pirupa’s 2012 hit Party Nonstop might have charted in RA and propelled the DJs career to thew stratosphere, but in this very awkward interview for Egg London, the Italian DJ debunks the success of the single as a fluke, and says it wasn’t “the best” track of that year for him.

Faux-leather white sofas were a thing in clubs once

Yes, as this video quite clearly shows they were and it wasn’t always very pleasant sitting in the pools of sweat of others.

Pirupa likes a vocal hook.

In the interview with Defected Pirupa also the says “best ‘ingredients’” to a song “would probably be a strong vocal hook, a fat and groovy bassline and/or a memorable synth/sound”. It’s an ideology he makes good on at least one occasion when he teamed up with Ninho for “Spin me Round”. The track features the memorable and infectious vocal hook taken from Dead or Alive’s “You spin me Round” alongside one of those fat and groovy basslines.

It takes 30 minutes to make a track

In an interview with Bizarre Culture, Pirupa gives us an insight into his working process for that track, and it apparently took 30 minutes to put the whole thing together, after inspiration hit with a visit to the beach in Ibiza. He jumped on his computer and had a rough version ready that night. “When I tried it that night people went completely mad!”

Ibiza is a chill place

Wherever we look on the web for Pirupa, there’s mention of Ibiza. According to a Pulse interview, he spends almost the entire season there and according to Q&A for DMC world if you spend your summers there, there is no reason to garner grudges.

Essentially Pirupa

Lets hand it over to the man of the hour then to sign off on Pirupa on the web with his Essential Mix, recorded in January this year and get a little taste of what’s coming our way tomorrow for Frædag vs Sunkissed, Ciao.

Listen to Daniel Gude’s Skrangleteip

Next up on the roster for Skranglejazz mix and event series at Gaasa is Jæger- and Retro resident Daniel Gude, aka DJ Nuhhh. Gude captures something of that early Saturday afternoon feeling of a Skranglejazz event putting his own stamp on it, drifting through an eclectic House and Disco set that ventures into rhythms of an afro-beat and latin persuasion before arriving with infectious dance floor results. With Gude there’s always a melody just around the corner and the DJ’s impressive skill to find a balance between the wayward and the approachable in left field dance music, marks a distinct style that can go from Axel Boman to Red Axes while retaining the core feeling of a set, which is undeniably influenced by Skranglejazz in this set. Daniel Gude has allowed us to release the track list for this special mix, which reaches us before the DJ is included in the next Skranglejazz line-up and a few days before he is back in Jæger’s booth for his weekly Retro residency.

Tracklist

Weval – You Made it(Part II) [Kompakt]
Axel Boman – The Chains Of Liberty [Correspondant]
Vangelis Kostoxenakis – Zha Zha [Snatch! Records]
DJ Sotofett – Tribute to “Sore Fingers”[Fit Sound] 12″
Mike Steva – Pelagonia (At One Remix) [Yoruba Records]
Young Marco – Darwin In Bahia [ESP Institute] 12″
Pender Street Steppers – The Glass City [Mood Hut] 12″
Red Axes feat. Abrao – Sabor (Isolé Remix) [Crosstown Rebels]
Øyvind Morken – Distinct Dialect [Moonlighting] 12″
Usio – Pamoja [Studio Barnhus] 12″
Mark E – Plastic People (MEDIT) [Merc]
Bjørn Torske – Nitten Nitti [Smalltown Supersound] Red Axes – Sweet John Gang [I’m A Cliché] 12″

Stress Music – In praise of L.I.E.S

The leather clad punk in skinny jeans and a fuck-off attitude that sneers at conformity while biting down on the edge of knife’s blade isn’t some pseudo punk band today, it’s a dance music label. Rather it’s a particular electronic music label known as Long Island Electrical System or L.I.E.S as it’s more commonly referred to. The brainchild of one Ron Morelli, L.I.E.S has been making a severe impact in dance music’s more unconventional corners for the best part of a decade today and its presence can always be felt in the dusty corners of your local record store. Whether it’s the functional DIY design of their record sleeves or the other labels that try to mimic their crunchy unadulterated sound, the label is always there, pushing the envelope for House music and club culture in the most profound ways. Ron Morelli steers the course of his all-encompassing tastes in a singular direction that is L.I.E.S and of course, it starts and ends with the man behind the label, but it also incorporates the network of artists he has cultivated from the label’s initial base in New York. It’s a city Morelli has previously referred to as an “overrated cesspool”, but it’s exactly the “overrated cesspool” that allowed the label to germinate and even gave it its acronym of a name. “I wanted to have an outlet for myself and a tight knit group of people here in New York”; says Morelli in an interview for Juno about the origins of the label and immediately it’s evident the city of New York’s role in the label is an integral part of its existence.

A 1980’s version of New York pulls into focus when you conjure an image of the city through the music on the label. There are pieces of trash propelled into the air through open sewer grates; hazy smog so thick you’d need a jackhammer to pound through it; and an apathetic disposition to the world that borders on the malevolent. That feeling of the city is what’s been behind everything L.I.E.S since that first Maloveaux record back in 2010, but there was another element stirring the pot that informed the sound of L.I.E.S during its initial stages and that was the sound of House in the Netherlands. More specifically it was the raw sound of House and Techno from Bunker records in the Hague that inspired Morelli and L.I.E.S with acts like I-F, Electronome, DJ Overdose and Legowelt – the latter two names appearing on the label in 2011 and 2015 respectively, still acting like some sort of invisible and indirect rudder for the progression of the label. It’s “more of the attitude than the sound that is pushing me forth these days” says Ron Morelli in that interview with Juno about Bunker’s influence. There’s an undeniable sonic connection there too in the raw visceral sound of any L.I.E.S record, but nothing concrete enough to pinpoint, and perhaps it does in fact just boil down to the attitude. What does however make it very different from, say a Unit Moebius release on Bunker is in the sporadic energy and the versatility of a L.I.E.S release, which can go from the down-tempo acid work of Gavin Russom to the aggressive noise of ADMX-71 before taking a detour through to the ambient corners of the dance floor with someone like KWC 92. In the American tradition of classifying all electronic dance music as either House or Techno, L.I.E.S refuses to be pigeonholed and even in those two categories the label is both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. While the label has always catered to a club environment, the music that features on the label is diverse and flits between albums that focus on the listening experience, to EPs with straightforward club-killer tracks whose function is to enlighten as much as it is to propel. Although they occupy two very different spheres at times, one word we’d never associated with L.I.E.S is boring. There’s a raw industrial aesthetic to the general sound of the label that sounds like it was all recorded through the same old dusty mixing desk in a concrete basement somewhere, the worn out equipment unable to give quarter and layering everything a warm driven sound always on the brink of cracking up. Like drinking malt liquor out of a brown paper bag, there’s no frills or fuss to the label, tying the music together without pandering to any particular trend or style.

Ron Morelli and L.I.E.S are always going to do what they do, and that thing might not always be for everyone, but there will always be a little something just around the corner thanks to their Bunker-inspired excessive release strategy. “The music is there from the artists, so if I can get it out, I’m gonna get it out as fast as possible”; explains Morelli about the very-active release schedule of the label for Fact. “Some stuff you’re not gonna like, but then there’s gonna be another one coming soon”, Morelli justifying the sheer volume of records the label releases. Without any real defining characteristic to the purpose of the label, besides perhaps locality, L.I.E.S presence is a deafening one and speaks to various musical tastes on different levels. Whether you like the more album formatted listening experience of last year’s very popular KWC92’s debut on the label, “Dream of the World City” or the more dancelfoor focussed exercises by Jahiliyya Fields or Willie Burns, L.I.E.S will have something for you, centred quite obviously on the unique personality of Ron Morelli. “There’s no real aesthetic. I put out what I like and what’s around me”, says the label head in a video interview with Basic Replay early on in the label’s existence, a small portion of his extensive record collection surrounding him at his home office. “If there weren’t all these people around me I wouldn’t have started a label”, he continues, emphasising the “I” that ties the label and the music together. It would have you believe that Ron Morelli, the central figure in the label, would also be its most significant contributor, but that is not the case. Although his work as one half of Two dogs in A House, a project he shares with Jason Letkiewicz (Malvoeaux), contributed to the second only L.I.E.S release he’s very rarely flexed his creative muscle on his label, and even his debut album Spit was released on Hospital in 2013. It’s an album that could easily have slotted into L.I.E.S discography with its penchant for a darker sonic aesthetic and assertive beats, elements that conspire in what Ron Morelli calls “stress music” in an interview for XLR8R. He goes on to say that his music is unrelated to anything on the label, but I’d have to disagree and say that it is impossible for the creative personality to completely dissociate itself from the head of a label. That idea of “stress music” is what basically lays the foundation for the appeal of L.I.E.S. Even a release like Terekke’s YYYYYYYYYY utilises the idea of stress in creating ample amounts of tension in the music with a simple Deep-House palette with timbres that linger in the darker end of the spectrum and hints at something malicious brewing beneath the surface. Put it down to New York, trend or similar tastes amongst these artists/friends, elements like these conspire to the core structure of L.I.E.S and like every good label out there, it unifies the music under one umbrella, and in this case this umbrella is Ron Morelli and his very esoteric musical tastes.

There’s no stopping the trajectory of L.I.E.S today with this fundamental approach pulling it along. This year has already seen the release of Gunnar Haslam’s third brilliant album, Lebesgue Measure on the label; giving the world a new reason to enjoy ambient music in KWC’s Iran; and seen the return of Jahiliyya Fields’ collaborative project, Inahlants to the label. Morelli might have left the cesspool of New York behind for Paris, but he’s still very much keeping L.I.E.S ingrained in the sound of New York with these artists on the label. “There’s no real vision. (I’ll) just keep doing what the label’s doing. Put out records by the people around me.”

Quaaludes in Africa with Olefonken

Olefonken (Ole Petter Hergum) has had an incredibly busy year. 2016 has seen the producer and DJ hit a new creative stride with the release of two exceptionally beautiful EPs on Snorkel and Ille Bra records, including one spectacular moment in the artist’s career and our 2016 in the form of Quaaludes, a track created solely to soundtrack an orphaned music video created by Thea Hvistendahl. The track, which featured the mesmerising vocals of Ary, emphasised the hidden depravity of humanity visually constructed in the video to great effect with Olefonken translating the storyboard into a serene musical event that was as much soundtrack as it was pop song. It highlighted some of the eclectic personality behind the music that can often be found in Jæger’s booth floating between House, Disco and Afrobeat with ease.

It reflects something of Olefonken’s, musical heritage that runs through Botswana, where he undoubtedly spent most of his childhood encountering the rhythms of Africa, moving through Oslo as an adolescent, where he would’ve invariably been exposed to the spacey synths of disco, and today finds the artist in London, where who knows what musical adventures awaits him. Olefonken’s first release Ubuntu Tutu introduced us to this diverse musical personality whose music extends from the contrapuntal rhythms of the original dance music to a frosty sound palette, often carrying a playful melody on its wings.

It’s something that he’s reflected time and time again in his sets, and will be bringing to Oslo again when he plays at Hestival this weekend, and takes to the booth alongside Lindstrøm, Loveless and Oliver Rottman. But before Hestival kicks off and establishes a new kind of music festival in Norway that combines Gambling Horse Racing and good electronic music, we got in touch with the artist via email and he was gracious enough to answers some questions while he was packing his bags for the trip. Ole is a man of very few words, and often just lets the music do the talking, but on this occasion he’s allowed us the opportunity and we jumped at it, and the results…. well you’ll see.

What inspired the move to London and what have you been doing with yourself there?

My girl kind of packed me in her bag. It was a comfy ride, though. And it was time for a change. The move made it seem like the right time to pursue my dream of starting my own label. So my friend Ibrahim and I started ‘Snorkel Records’. To my roommates’ great enjoyment, the living room is now filled with boxes of vinyl. But it’s great fun, I have just been biking all over the city – pushing the vinyl to various shops. I actually just came back from Brilliant Corners where I dropped a copy into Phil Mison’s record bag. Happy days!

You’ve certainly been releasing more music since the move. Are you making more music too and how has the move had an affect on your creativity?

Well to tell you the truth, the ‘Til Hanne’ release is just a bunch of old demos dating back to like 2010 and it was only meant to be a Soundcloud thing. Kenneth Bager asked me if he could release it on Music for Dreams, but I was a bit hesitant due to the fact that it was so old and scruffy. Later on I got a nice long email from Jonas at Ille Bra Records and it just seemed cool since they where such a small label and that would mean more love for the release, so I figured what the heck! The Quaaludes video and release I worked on before the move as well, though I had to postpone several flights back to London on various occasions so I could finish it up in the studio in Norway. I hoped the move would make me buy a baseball cap and sit on the laptop with Beats by Dre making music all day. But I just find that pretty boring, so I’ve usually ended up playing Samorost instead. Haha!

You grew up in Botswana and I’ve always wanted to ask you about your experiences there, especially when it comes to music?

Well, the school days often started with an assembly and the music class would play these big marimbas and all the kids would just dance and be all crazy. Even the teachers. I remember I was really looking forward to be old enough for music class. I already played the drums because of my older brother and the marimbas seemed like the next step, but then again we also had a pool at the school – and the swimmers where the cool kids, so yeah you see where this is going.

That being said though, I just remember it seemed like music was a more natural part of life there. People got together. Let loose. Clapped their hands, stomped their feet. While in Norway and similar places, it often feels like music is a background thing – people listen to Kygo or whatever while they’re showering or driving their car to work. But in church on Christmas eve, it’s a total mumbling choir. It’s like we’re not there to celebrate, it’s just to pass time so we can get home to that rib! That’s the most vivid memory I have of music in Gabarone, when my Mom took me to the local church down the street, which was made of cow-dung. It was only lit up by candlelight, and all these big African women were just singing, dancing and playing drums for hours. The Christ knows how to throw a hell of a party down there, I’ll tell you!

There’s something to your music in the sweet kind of melodies you use and the percussion that definitely reflects something of southern Africa for me. Would you say there’s something fundamentally African about your music?

I definitely envision it a lot while making music. My dad has worked in Africa since long before I was born, so he would often bring some mbiri’s, shakers, small marimbas and drums and so on when he came back to Norway. So yeah, playing the mbiri easily takes me back to when we lived in Zimbabwe.

Is Ubuntu Tutu, your first release as a solo artist, supposed to celebrate this connection or am I reading too much into those track titles?

Haha, nah, that would have been a nice little story though. I think I just had been back to visit Botswana and South Africa at that time, so I figure that’s when I heard Desmond talk about Ubuntu, which just stuck.

At the same time much of the music on that album and Til Hanne (To Hanne), reflects more of your Norwegian heritage, especially in the disco-leaning foundation of the tracks. Where do you take your cues from in Norwegian music?

Well, it’s all the obvious ones. But I have also been very proud of when things hail from Norway, especially since Norway is so small – so the possibility of someone making a kind of quirky disco song back in the 70s is so rare, that when you hit on something after hours of digging is just the best feeling. I still remember the day when I came across Frank Aleksandersen’s Circus Diskotek and Huckleberry Hound. It wasn’t a 300 kroner record at Råkk & Rålls back then, more like a 10. Actually, I remember the D2 spread about Titanic’s disco hit Sultana. Strangefruit had a top 10 of old Norwegian disco songs and I thought he missed out on some of the best ones. It made me realise how many undiscovered gems must still exist, which led me to make some mixtapes of only old and rare Norwegian music under the alter ego Sure Sivert. Norwegian lyrics only! Volume 3 and 4 is soon finished btw – don’t sleep on it.

Fettburger is on the remix of Speilegg on this last release and he turned it into this very quaint subversive version of the track with little more than a bongo drum in there. What did you expect he would do with that track, and is that level of uncertainty he has in his music specifically the reason you sought Fettburger out for the remix?

Actually it was all Jonas from Ille Bra who got that little shindig together. I was familiar with him and Sotofett of course, but I hadn’t really found the time to properly listen to it. So it was when the remix came that I was let in to his world, and I really enjoyed it. Those bongos have this great Light in a Miracle vibe to it.

Fettburger played at the Skranglejazz event recently and it seems there’s a close connection between that DJ and the musical community that you’re a part of here in Oslo. How did this connection come to exist?

Yes, and what an event that was! I really enjoyed his selection.

I think Skranglejazz has had him on the radar for some time and since it was the release of ‘Til Hanne’ on Ille Bra Records, which also hails from Moss, I reckon it just seemed natural. I’m not too sure about the inside facts on Skranglejazz, I just smooch on their free beer and enjoy the good vibes.

Has being separated from this musical community had any affect on you since your move?

Dude, they hardly recognise me when I am home now. Pretentious pricks!

A big part of this community is centred on the hubbabubbaklubb. How has your time with the group affected your understanding of music?

Being in a group can be very tough – no doubt about that – but when everybody is onboard it’s the best thing, really. Just being friends, jamming and having a goodtime is priceless. Not to mention the input of others and the collective vision. But at one point one just has to be a McCartney and re-record those fucking drums while Ringo is sleeping.

Is there any talk of doing something together again in the near future?

Actually the first release on Snorkel was meant for some new hubba stuff and long overdue remixes, but since Thea Hvistendahl asked me to make music for her video we had to re-think and make an Olefonken release instead, just to squeeze the juice out of her beautiful video.

But yes back to the klubb – it’s gonna be a busy summer is all I can say.

And getting back to your music and Thea, the video and music for Quaaludes was probably a musical highlight for most of us this year. We know a little about how it came together as this orphaned video looking for music, but can you tell us a little more about what you wanted to bring across and emphasise in the video specifically through sound?

Thank you. I mean that movie was already a piece of art before I stuck some music on top of it, but I do like to think I underlined the subject a bit and helped to get the mood right. Which was pretty different from the original song, I guess. I asked Ary, who was hanging around outside my studio, to lie on some vocals. The goosebumps were immediate. She’s such a pro. I remember after the first take I was like, shit I think we got it. Haha! But yeah, I don’t know – I asked Thea a lot what the deal was with the family in the video, and she was being a bit cryptic about it. I just felt they kind of had a shady bit of Bill Cosby about them and that’s why it ended up being called Quaaludes. The lyric ‘give me a glass of milk’ is a bit of a homage to Clockwork Orange, I wanted to try to evoke that feeling when they sit in the milkbar with Walther Carlos playing Bach on a Moog. Such a scene!

I really like that these sexually depraved characters are supposedly just this “normal” family. The music very much plays on this for me, with some very obscure elements coming together into a very digestible execution in the music. Is this what the suppressive Quaalude effect sounds like to you?

Yes, I guess that was what I was getting at. I just got this prescribed drug feeling from watching the mom and dad in the video. Like, ‘We are a happy family, but we cheat and do S&M on the side to stay together.’

The imagery was there before the music. How did the writing process change as a result for you and is it something you’d like to do again perhaps?

I had done something similar before, with the ending of the long version of the Mopedbart film. When I edited that movie I would go back and forth to get the music to sync with the pictures. If the shot was too long, I would shorten it and vice versa with the music. In contrast, Thea’s movie was already done in the editing room, so I spent much longer tweaking it and getting it just right. Moreover, the visuals were already so good that I didn’t want the music to be any less. But of course I would love to do that again.

For most people there would’ve been some pause for reflection before releasing the next thing, but you’ve been incredibly busy, and just a month afterwards you premiered a new track, Cousteau. Where is all this creative inspiration coming from at the moment?

Well, actually I think it’s always been there. It’s just that everytime I get a new computer I always copy the same folder with old demos over, but then I read a story about how Lee Scratch Perry burnt down his studio and started fresh, so I thought, fuck it, I’ll finish some of the best stuff I’ve got lying around, render it to disk and never look at that folder again.

And I imagine your DJing a lot as well as a result. Does the DJ personality ever inform the production side of your work?

Definitely. But it’s pretty rare that I run right into the studio after a gig. I’m more likely to do that in the morning, like if I put on McCartney II with my coffee and listen to the mucking around with synths and snares recorded in a toilet. That’s what I enjoy – the random fun in the studio. And then it somehow often ends up being suitable for the dancefloor.

There’s definitely an eclectic nature in your sets that can be felt in your music. What do you look or when you’re digging for new music lately, and is there anything special you’ve found recently that you’re looking forward to bring to Norway next week?

Ah man, it all depends really. Sometimes I come across something on the internet and I run to the nearest shop. But most of the time I just like to be in record stores discovering stuff. I usually find myself in the rare/library/world/new age category or something like that. I have a soft spot for old stuff that sounds modern. But then I’m suddenly in this house mood and end up with a bunch of new 12”s. The stores in London have such good soundsystems, so you find yourself going: ‘What is this? Give me four copies please!’ Of all the stuff I’ve been finding recently, I can definitely say the house genre will be pretty well-covered in the Skranglejazz mixtape I have coming up. But I can add that when my girl came home with a copy of Al Dobson Jr volumes 2 & 3, and the Disco Mantras from Mood Hut, I haven’t been listening to much else. She knows me far too well!

*olefonken will be playing at Hestival this weekend, with Jæger hosting the official afterparty. Find out more here.

Album of the Week: Lucy – Self Mythology

What is it: Avant Garde Techno.
Who would play it: Jokke| O/E
When are you most likely to hear it: As the first rays of the sun start creeping back over the horizon.

Occupying the space somewhere between ambience and Techno, Lucy’s third album Self – Mythology draws a new line in the sand for club music. For the Stroboscopic Artefacts label head, who’s rarely content in remaining musically stagnant, Self-Mythology shows the tireless innovator take us one step beyond the club dance floor to a higher state of conscious. Trading in the pounding industrialised percussion of Techno for the subtleties of a hollow drum, Lucy has taken Techno out of the club and into the jungle. At the heart of this Lucy album, like every other piece of Lucy’s work, is a focus on sound design with the producer venturing further into the manipulations of exotic instruments, where they get all that much closer to the rapturous improvised sounds of a modular synthetic palette.

In this album Lucy’s created some kind of hybrid world where city landscapes are transformed into new environments for spiritual transcension where the erstwhile exoticism of music from foreign regions go hand in hand with the driving pulse of the city. A track like “a selfless act” with its plucked midnight strings or “a circular membrane” with its ritualistic dancing percussion occupy the same space as a track like “meetings with remarkable entities” with it’s synthetic sonic atmosphere that morphs and mutates under the strain of human influence. It all results in an album as an intricate listening experience that refuses to be labelled as anything other than a Lucy album, and hints at an artist whose constantly evolving against popular, trend-informed waves of music to toe his own line. You can read a more in-depth review of the album here from me and watch a recent RA Session from the artist above.

In the Summertime with Fredfades

This week saw Fredfades put out a recorded mix that captured the feeling of summer perfectly as the sun made its first considerable appearance in Oslo. Fredfades’ down-tempo beats and evocative melodic silhouettes drip with the sultry feeling of a summer’s day and you can’t help but get caught up in a feeling when you listen to it. It came to us on the very same week Mutual Intentions take over our stage for three special sets during Musikkfest this Saturday, so we thought we’d get in touch with Fredfades from Mutual Intentions and Touchdown to ask him about these upcoming sets, that mix and more.

You just put out a mix to celebrate the beginning of summer. Tell us a bit about what inspired the mix, besides the change of weather?

Don’t know really, I do mixes all the time. I like to stick to a subject when doing mixes, which is the opposite when I DJ, cause then I’ll usually just bring a mixed bag and go bananas. I like to make mixes that sound specific so if I wanna listen to jazz I put on one of my jazz mixes, and if I’m going out to DJ soul/disco/boogie , I’ll listen to the Touchdown Sound mix first. This time I wanted to put out some soul sounds. Nothing too dancy, more like headphone music.

It‘s made up of music from your seven-inch collection. What is it about that format that appeals to you?

All my favourite shit is private press releases made by artists who did like one or two 7” records. Amateur modern soul & boogie sounds. Lo-fi bedroom recordings. I never cared too much about the sound of professional soul records really, as most times it doesn’t hit me at all. Back in the day you had no label, no money, no Soundcloud, no iTunes, no nothing. You had to make incredible 7” singles and ship them out to the American radio stations if you wanted to make it out of your little state or town. People would literally do free warm ups for bigger soul act and throw their 7” singles into the crowd as giveaway’s, crossing their fingers, hoping to be discovered by people and radio DJ’s. 7” had fewer expenses for the producers/artists: less production costs, no cover, lower shipping costs. Unfortunately the authentic spirit of these soul/disco/boogie gems was overlooked by the record industry when they were released as they didn’t sound as professional and huge as the big soul sounds from Detroit or Philly or whatever.

It’s the type of music that would not be unfamiliar in a Mutual Intentions showcase. Can you tell us more about the ideas behind Mutual Intentions and how it came together?

It’s just a bunch of friends, we’ve been hanging out forever and we’re into the same type of stuff so we put our heads together and tried to make our little Norwegian special force unit so we could reach out internationally and get in touch with new listeners and musicians. We felt like we were already in touch and had control of our Norwegian market and did what we had to do to reach out internationally and it worked out perfectly. We do music, and all the stuff that should come with it, such as artwork, videos, clothing and photography. Our first project was bought by people over at the Boiler Room & Stones Throw family and it made sure we got some nice international connections which we’re really thankful for. We’ve had more international gigs, Ivan did a European tour recently, Charlotte is doing shows in NYC, I’m doing a beat set & DJ set in Moscow next week, we’re doing music online with some of our favourite musicians and we do get to release our music through bigger international labels. Charlotte Dos Santos has gained a lot of international attention as a singer lately and will be releasing a video + song I produced for her through Stones Throw Records pretty soon, and she is currently working on her debut project which I’m sure will be very popular when it drops.

There’s something of social implication with the name Mutual Intentions that you also mention there. Where for you, does the balance lie in playing / making music, and bringing people together?

Yes, it’s very humble and including, just like us. That was the original idea. We just want to team up with like-minded people and have great fun.

You were recently on Boiler Room. How did you find the experience and do you find anything particularly different with the feel of the night when it’s being documented like that?

Boiler Room was fun for all of us, and we did a 21:00 – 03:00 long set, with Sofie from Boiler Room doing the warm-up sets at the beginning. A lot of stuff could have gone wrong, but we made it through the night with some minor fuck ups that we believe most people didn’t even notice. It’s fun to watch later on, but there’s something with the camera angles of our set that I don’t like. When captured from above it looks really slow and laid-back, which it actually was not.

So is there any ambition to do it again?

We’ll see : )

I’d also like to ask you about Jazz Cats. It’s you and Kristoffer Eikrem on that record. How did you meet and start making music together?

We met at a party through mutual friends in 2012 I think. I just told him that I had a lot of grooves (drums, chords, bass lines) laying around that sounded jazzy (fender rhodes type of stuff) that needed leads, hooks, and proper arrangement. He was ready to go and we just made a bunch of stuff. We actually did a whole lot more, but I decided to scrap a lot of the songs as they sounded a little too experimental/progressive and did not fit the majority of the sound too much. I started out making an instrumental project, but ended up making a “jazzy” instrumental project.

What were your individual rolls in the making of this album?

I laid down all the groove work/foundations for the tracks, and Kristoffer Eikrem did overdubs, and I edited, re-arranged some of his playing, plus mixed it and added additional musicians. A couple of the songs on the record is without trumpet, but features additional pianists, sax players, vocalists etc. It’s not a straight beat + trumpet album. It’s a jazzy instrumental project, featuring a bunch of instrumentalists such as Dr. Kay, Mette Henriette, Trevor DeAndre Grover, Bendik Hovik Kjeldsberg, Tarjei Kierland Lienig, Vincent Velur, Deckdaddy + vocalists.

The Hip-Hop connection can be felt through out your work. What other musical influences play a role in your music?

I don’t listen to a lot of hiphop records anymore. I like some of it though, and I am very thankful for getting to work with a lot of my favourite artists. There’s a lot of great young rappers coming up that I’ve discovered through the Internet which are so much better than all these “old legendary dudes”. This goes for beat makers as well. Suddenly hiphop stopped inspiring me as I felt that the small parts of the genre I still liked does not evolve as fast as it used to. I get a lot of inspiration from jazz records, as well as electronic records such as house/techno, lo-fi modern soul and boogie records. I look for grooves and sounds that can inspire me to work towards a conceptual direction. It can be everything from a weird drum pattern I want to steal to an obscure combination of electronics and acoustic instrument that will make me feel weird when I hear it.

It sounds like you like you use samples from similar tracks to that mix you just released. What do you look for in the samples in the music?

I’m not really sure what I look for, I just listen to records and a certain piece of the music can inspire me to steal/re-play a certain part, or I can try to completely tear something apart. A lot of my beats I will define as groove music. It’s heavily based around the groove tracks (bass, drums, chords). I enjoy creating a groove that feels natural out of, for example a set of chords from a two-minute keyboard solo. I will chop out a set of 16-32 chords, pitch them around and play with it, filter it, and sometimes I select certain chords that will change the key of my work to another key than the original work. I don’t study or write notes, and when magic stuff like this happens I feel really complete with my sample works. I like to show people the samples I’ve used for my songs, and see how people never recognise it. “Breathe”, “Fruitful”, “Focus Point”, “All The Way Down” and “Hands” are all songs like this. I won’t even recognise the original sounds myself when I listen to the original records as the pieces of music I stole has been manipulated so heavily.

For the album Fruitful, you worked mostly with Ivan Ave, and on Jazz Cats you worked with Eikrem. What is it about recording with other artists that you enjoy?

I don’t know. People have different approaches to music and we push each other out of each others’ comfort zones into new directions, which makes us do stuff we wouldn’t have done on our own. It can be everything from what songs to scrap, what songs to keep, how to mix stuff, what beats to work with, etc. Some people are easier to work with than others, all depending on musical habits and political views. Right now I’m working on a Norwegian rap record called Tøyen Holding and a dance record (house + boogie cross-over) with Tom Noble, a instrumental project with S.Raw from Mutual Intentions as well as my own solo record. which features a bunch of vocalists I haven’t worked with before.

You’ll be playing with some of these artists and more when you come to Jæger for three performances. The DJ and Live set are pretty obvious, but can you tell us what you plan to do for your beats set?

The beat set will be the greatest part, as we will bring new guests from our circle in Oslo. We’ll bring John Rice (electronic beat maker which we want to release some music from soon) and Ol’ Burger Beats (sample based beat maker who has released a few records internationally lately).

Yogisoul’s debut has just been released by Mutual Intentions, but what’s next from the label and the events after Musikkfest?

No, it’s released by KingUnderground (UK), which also released “Breathe” & “Jazz Cats”. Next stuff from us will be Mutual Intentions Vol. II on vinyl + tape, and we’re also hoping to put out some 7” records and an EP by John Rice in the near future. We need to not over estimate ourselves as a publisher as we do not have enough contacts yet to sell as much records as Jakarta (hey Jannis & Malte) and KingUnderground (hey Dan) which are releasing bigger projects by me, Ivan Ave & Yogisoul. They will sell like 750-1500 copies of a project without distribution, which we could not have done ourselves. In the beginning Mutual Intentions will only focus on limited releases. Events: a bunch of shows during festivals this summer, plus more. Ivan Ave + Mutual Intentions at Øya Festivalen; Ivan Ave daytime concert and Mutual Intentions night time club concert at Moldejazz; Jazz Cats at Oslo Jazz Festival; Ivan Ave at Roskilde, Splash & Kongsberg Jazz as well this summer. Touchdown, featuring a late night Leroy Burgess concert at Ingensteds (PUT THIS SHIT IN YOUR CALENDAR,) during the Øya Festival week. Charlotte will be doing a bunch of fun stuff also, such as the Norwegian festivals with Mutual Intentions and being a part of a Opera in NYC. And the whole crew will be DJ’ing everywhere as usual.

Fredfades: Touchdown mix soul 4

Fredfades new mix is out. It is perfect for hot summer days
Fredfades will join us on Saturday during musicfest as part of Mutual Intentions collective.

Summer is here so I wanted to treat myself and my listeners with a new soul mix to enjoy this summer.

Mostly slow jams & steppers, all from my 7″ collection.
Booking: fredfades@gmail.com

Secret track #1
Secret track #2
Secret track #3
Morris Lewis – The Enchzatress 7” (1982)
Ricky Lance – Clown In A Room Full Of Tears 7” (1977)
Mandisa – Summer Love 7” (1980)
Merger – You Pick Me Up 7” (1983)
Mass Transit – Starting All Over 7” (197?)
Pamoja – Only The Lonely Know 7” (1975)
The Movements – You Don’t Know 7” (197?)
Ice Water Slim – Supersonic Megatonic Flash 7” (197?)
Depths Of Love – I Just Can’t Find A Love 7” (197?)
Bodacious – For The Rest Of Your Life 7” (197?)
The Fabulistics – Abscence 7” (1975)
Gloria Taylor – What’s Your World 7” (1976)
Fantastyk – I Love You, I Love You 7” (1984)
Wilbur Lewis & Unique Experience – I’ll Come To You 7” (1981)
1988 – Life Is A Question 7” (1974)
Larry Dixon – The Only One 7” (1981)
Larry Bailey – Thinking About You 7” (1980)
Family Of Eve – I Don’t Want To Pay 7” (198?)
Climax Band – My Love 7” (1977)

The Void Talks

The Void operate outside of the boundaries of popular convention, always avoiding of the comfortable, easy thing in favour of the road less travelled. Established as an all-nighter event that went against the grain of everything in Oslo, including the law, it didn’t take them long to become the byword for uncompromising, raw Techno in the city. Revered in hushed tones, their statement on the scene was a short, but impressive one, leaving a hole in the city that no one’s been able to fill ever since. The brainchild of Ole-Espen “O/E” Kristiansen who had found a mutual spirit in Joakim “Jokke” Dahl Houmb, The Void came together as an all-night event right around the time when the world was crying out for something new and exiting and Techno provided the answer. Unintentionally setting the Techno scene in Oslo, The Void offered the marginalised musical populist an escape from the tyranny of Deep House that had saturated everything for some time, internationally.

Ole-Espen and Jokke brought in some of the biggest names in Techno to the city, names like Lucy and Ø [Phase] – artists that have gone onto remarkable acclaim, but at the time were fairly inconspicuous. It all came together with Ole-Espen and Jokke’s impeccable shared tastes and ability to create a rounded clubbing experience. The Void’s existence on the scene might have been short with only 5 parties ever, but their impact can still be felt today, and the good people of Oslo couldn’t be deprived of their existence much longer. The Void makes a return with their 6^th event at the Vulkan Arena this weekend, and with Techno’s prominence in Norway at the moment they didn’t have to look further than their backyard to book some of the most impressive names in music today, booking the likes of +plattform, Weideborg II and Pagalve for this event. It precedes the appearance of Jokke and O/E next week at Jæger alongside Kobosil and when I found out that The Void had never recounted their story, I felt it necessary to jump on the case and make my way to Jokke’s so he and Ole-Espen could enlighten us further on The Void.

Why did The Void all-nighters come to an end?

Jokke: A lot of other people started putting all-nighters together, with a really shitty quality, so the police shut down a couple of parties and the fire department…

O/E: They started to focus on all-nighters.

J: We wanted to just chill for a bit. We were really trying to be pro. When we were looking for locations for parties, the first thing we were looking at were how many exits there were, and can people get out if needed. That was the first priority and then came all the concrete and metal and you know… Techno kind of things. We just stopped because some other people trying to arrange parties fucked the scene.

O/E: To use an extreme example, one event built a bar in front of the emergency exit. How stupid can you be? And for my part, The Void was becoming exhausting. Jokke and I actually built the club every time.

J: Every time we changed location, we built a new club.

O/E: We worked every day for a month and by the end of it, we were just like, why can’t this be over now. The last party we did at Helsfyr, some idiot smashed the fire alarm five minutes before we closed, so the fire department came, but we managed to talk ourselves out of it, because they were going to call the police.

J: Yeah, because they were really happy about the fire exits.

O/E: It cost us a lot of money in fines. At that point there was also this student magazine, who asked us the day after if they could ask us some questions about The Void. They sent us the questions and it was just all about drugs and we weren’t interested in talking about these things. They actually wrote an article after all and it was all about drugs and that was tits only focus. People didn’t give a fuck and they didn’t appreciate what we did. I was so tired.

If the law were to change and allow parties who take the necessary precautions like The Void to pursue these events would you go back to doing all-nighters?

O/E: But they wont.

J: And still it will be hard to get a place where you wont disturb the neighbours, because they are building apartments everywhere. For void’s 2,3,4 and 5 we had to insolate the ventilation just to get the sound a little lower. A single mom, who had just had a baby, was complaining when we had the party at Tøyen. I went over and just asked if we could send her to a hotel, because we’re just going to have one last party. She was just happy that we had talked to her.

A bit of a dialogue goes a long way.

O/E: Yeah, that’s important in those parties.

J: You can’t just be punk rock, and do what you want; you have to work with people.

I have to ask, why go through all that effort for a party in the first place?

J: Ole-Espen and I, when we met, we felt like outsiders. Nobody was digging Techno. We tried to get a couple of gigs. We asked some promoters and they asked like what kind of Techno and we showed them some stuff, and they were like…

O/E: Way to hard, woa.

J: they were like this is not going to work in Oslo, you need to move to Berlin. Then we decided; ok nobody wants us to play, so we’ll have to take matters in our own hands. It was actually Ole-Espen’s idea to start The Void.

O/E: I was working with Christian Fish and he had these parties called Primal Behaviour. That was my introduction to the all-nighter scene in Oslo.

J: mine too.

O/E: Christian and I did like four parties together but it didn’t work out because we had different visions. I learnt a lot from him, he’s a great guy, and I have a lot of respect for him, for what he did for the scene. At that point I had this idea for The Void and pounding die-hard Techno. I had asked Christian Fish, but the he was like no. He was almost there but not in to the Tresor, Berghain type of thing I was into at that point in 2010/11. I went to Fisk & Vilt, and I didn’t know Jokke at that point.

J: It was one of my first gigs ever.

O/E: And he was playing the stuff I had just started to buy. Then a week later I went to his studio, and said: “hey do you want to start a Techno party.”

So basically you saw a need that you just had to satisfy?

J: And we also we realised we completed each other, because Ole-Espen was good at sound at lights and I was a carpenter and together we could make things happen without to rely on any other people.

2010 was still pretty much dominated by Deep-House as far as I can remember.

J: Yeah, Nobody played Techno.

O/E: We actually had Lucy in a place that could take 150 people. That was pretty wild. It was so packed.

Right from the beginning then there were people in Oslo in the same frame of mind as you.

O/E: They’ve always been there, but there were never any opportunities to experience this in Oslo before.

Ole-Espen, I know you like a lot of the EBM and synth-wave stuff from the early eighties. How and when did you come across that music at first?

O/E: Ah, in 2004 I was sixteen. But I was always into electronic music and always, the harder stuff. A few months ago I found this Sven Väth CD at my parents’ house. It was a compilation disc he did in 2000 or something, which I bought at some point. I remember I didn’t like it, and I checked it now, and it’s got Terence Fixmer on it – the stuff I play all the time now. And I’ve always been into the more, some people call it cheesy, eighties synth pop stuff too.

So everything kind of connects early on. Nitzer Ebb, DAF and Front 242, I liked that stuff for a long-long time and when I was at Berghain in Berlin, and suddenly I heard that stuff, I was like wow, this just feels right.

It’s funny that you mention “cheesy” synth-pop, because if you go back far enough, you end up at Human League and Depeche Mode, and if you listen to their earlier stuff that was like prototype Techno.

O/E: Europe started really early with electronic music, and then it went to the US and they developed it further.

Jokke, was this something that similarly spoke to you when you caught the Techno bug.

J: No I picked this up later, Ole Espen introduced me to the good stuff. He showed me the Apoptygma Berzerk stuff when we first met.

O/E: I was like: you need to listen to this! (Laughs)

J: Yeah it took me almost a year while we lived together. He tried to show me as often as he could, and after a while, an understanding of industrial and EBM came along with our friendship.

O/E: You love it now. He sends me stuff all the time I hadn’t even heard of.

What sort of stuff were you into then at that first gig in Fisk & Vilt?

J: Mark Broom, the Klockworks stuff. I remember I actually played with a mask. I didn’t want to call myself a DJ at the time, because I didn’t want to be influenced by the scene here. Even now I struggle to call myself a DJ, because I’m just collecting music and mixing.

O/E: And it’s the same for me, it is just pushing stuff that I think is important.

J: Never try to please anybody if it doesn’t reflect your taste of music.

You guys always seemed more like facilitators to me.

O/E: It’s really important. For me the appeal is in the technical aspects of it and of course the vibe.

J: There’s a lot of sound design in Techno

O/E: Not only that, but the technical thing, do what you can with what you have.

J: And also the BPM. Stuff under 130 isn’t Techno.

O/E: I can play slower. He’s getting more and more BPM horny. (Laughs) For me it’s always been about the technical part.

What do you actually look for in the technical aspects?

O/E: A groove, is the first thing. Lately I have been into more melodies. In the beginning I loved all the tools more. Now I’m more interested in actual songs.

J: We’re both a bit tired of Techno tools; we’re missing arrangements, because tools are so easy to DJ. I’m missing actual tracks, where something is actually happening in the music.

O/E: …when you almost have a verse-bridge-chorus. I’ve always been into that kind of music. It takes me five seconds when I’m browsing for new music.

Which tracks or artists are particularly speaking to you these days?

O/E: I’m really into Shlømo and Antigone as well, but Shlømo.

J: And Boston 168

O/E: Yeah, amazing acid stuff. For me it’s really been Shlømo. And of course the +plattform stuff. I was also into super cheesy Ferry Corsten Trance as a teenager for a while, and I’m not afraid to say it. The fun thing is that Techno has started to have this epic thing on top of these pounding beats. I can really relate to that, and that’s interesting I think.

When you guys started The Void it was all about bringing in international acts over. Why did you mainly focus on bringing these foreign artists in the beginning?

J: Because we felt like outsiders. There wasn’t actually a tree to pick DJs from. Nobody here actually played what we liked at that time.

O/E: At that point nobody, I knew, played that kind of music. I was at Tresor and Berghain right before, and I had never heard this stuff before. The Ostgut Ton label was into this strange vibe then for like two years, and then they changed. Remember the first Marcel Dettman album? Maybe in my mind it connected to the EBM industrial stuff I was doing at the time. Then I started to dig, and no one did it, so what to do? We need to bring people in that knew how to do it.

J: Of course we had Roland Lifjell; he played at the second party. He was on the list from the beginning.

It became very successful quite quickly.

O/E: The funny thing is that when this was a success everybody wanted to be a part of it suddenly, after the first party. Everybody hated it before, now it was suddenly cool. Natt & Dag suddenly wrote about it every time.

J: They nominated us for best club and stuff.

O/E: Yeah, that was the worst thing we ever did.

J: We just felt a little appreciated. We got a lot of attention we never wanted.

O/E: We were actually stoked that we built something that no one believed in, so we just said yes to everything.

But today you’ve got only Norwegian acts in your next line-up. Norway today is a different place for Techno than what it was back then I Imagine, possibly just part of the international hype.

O/E: It’s an international thing for sure and we jumped on it at the right time, without knowing it.

Where do you see it going next, especially since your taking the legal route for this next event?

O/E: We’ll see. I’m kind of nervous about it. Because there’s a lot of cash as well, because we’re focussing on video and light stuff.

J: And running extra PA building feedback solutions for turntables. (Laughs)

O/E: For me personally, I’m also focussing more on producing and working with sound. If this works out, we’ll do more parties. But I don’t know we’re just gonna do what we do.

*Photo by Lina Wensell

Gesamtkunstwerk – Sunkissed and Me

Back in two-thousand-and…oh…I-don’t-remember, I arrived in Gardemoen with a bag full of South Africa’s finest 20 kroner wines and a hunger for a new musical experience that I hoped the civilised western-world could depart on a bug-eyed savage like myself. I had been sampling the delicacies of a new European electronic sound at the time, one that had been in some part influenced by a new Scandinavian presence from the likes of Prins Thomas, Lindstrøm and the Knife, and could not wait to sink my teeth into the musical delights a new city and continent had to offer. Immediately Upon my arrival in the fjord I set about to find this “new-disco” sound. I turned over every rock, conquered every grassy knoll to stem this hunger for this new club-informed music, and while I found an abundance of a guitar-driven LCD sound, my thirst for the clubbing experience was left noticeably unquenched. I would stalk the back alleys of Skjokoladefabrikken; pounce on any bar with an echo of a sequenced synth; and haunt the more seedy locations for a mere hint of a measured kick. These activities, although they have their own intriguing back-stories, very rarely bared any fruit and my hunger went unsatisfied, except for one day of the month when a club night would sweep into town and offer that rare glimpse of what I was looking for. That night was Sunkissed and for one glorious Saturday in Oslo every month, my thirst would be quenched with G-Ha & Olanskii programming a night with the music and artists that spoke to my own musical weaknesses during an exciting time for music.

Oslo wasn’t to be my home for very long back then however and after a short residency I left the city in search of new experiences in, first London then Amsterdam, but eventually the hedonistic existence of a badly self-styled clubkid caught up with me and I longed for the distant echo from a Norwegian mountain range, and for the simpler things in life that nature, and more importantly, a decent salary could afford me. So I packed up the van, quite literally, and made my way back to the only city I thought could help me, but that simpler life was not to be, because what waited for me was something of a second breath for a matured clubbing enthusiast. The wealth of music and all the new venues that sprung up in my absence was refreshing, and the intimate clubbing experiences that the city had always offered became something truly unique from the 3000-odd capacity commercially focussed venues I’d gotten bored of in the big cities. What surprised me however was not that I had found this resurgence of electronic music in the city, because this was something of an international trend of late, but what I had found tucked away in the mitts of all this, an old friend. Sunkissed was still there, existing with the same determination, and the same appeal that introduced me to Oslo’s club-music scene all those years. It was always about how “a single-track mind can develop into a night where everybody dances” and “the force of the night dragging everybody along”, explains Ola “Olanskii” Smith-Simonsen about the fundamental idea behind Sunkissed that existed then and now. It’s some weird sense of fate that Ola is my boss today, the steady hand that controls the cogs of Jæger, but that he is, and although I’ve been dying to sit him down and talk about Sunkissed, work has always gotten in the way, that was until one particular day in February when the stars aligned and by some magical coincidence Ola actually had some time free and wanted to talk about the night that first brought us in direct orbit of each other. My mind struggles to paint the scene quite coherently, but I distinctly recall the dust… so much dust, coating my tongue with a muddy residue from the construction work in an office slightly overturned by what could only be described as a situation of controlled chaos. But Jæger was far from my mind that day and even though its own transformation is a story in itself, Sunkissed was the reason for my visit to Ola’s office that day and it, has remained the common denominator throughout Oslo’s fervent clubbing history, one I believe certainly played a bit part in the existence of a venue like Jæger.

Sunkissed’s origins are quite vague, but Ola distinctly remembers the event becoming quite significant when Geir “G-Ha” Holger joined what was to become the Oslo institution. “He doesn’t remember or put any significance to it, but for me it was a sign of what’s to come”, recalls Ola of a time Geir played at Sunkissed, before he would become an intrinsic part of it. “As he was leaving I told him; ‘you have to hear this song’ – it was the first Headman ten inch. In my head, there was something going on that sounded both old and fresh.” It was the sound of Electroclash, and it defined an era for music, one that brought me back from the brink of “trendy” guitar music while I was still in South Africa, and re-ignited an interest in electronic music that was first installed in me as teenager, staying up late, listening to broadcasts of Carl Cox on the radio while watching Chris Cunningham’s skewed visual interpretations of Aphex Twin’s weirdo music. Electroclash was the punk to electronic music’s conformity, a conformity that had seen the likes of Starsailor and Sonique rip the soul out of the music in favour of an accessible bland sound that could find its way on MTV’s bland programming schedule. “When we started House music broke its back for a while, certainly in this country” says Ola, but like me, it was this thing that we called Electroclash that piqued the people’s interest again. In no way, did Sunkissed set the president for this, even in Oslo, but G-ha & Olanskii certainly became the pulse of Electronic music in Oslo from this moment on and set about creating an open night where you could hear everything from Maurice Fulton to Alter Ego to LCD Soundsystem, all under the banner of a single night. It wasn’t about trend or genres or even a particular DJ back then, it was going to an event where you’d know the people behind the event had similar tastes, while at the same time introducing you to new music.

“By 2005 things changed again”, says Ola. “This open night started to focus, which really took form when we did Magda and Richie Hawtin.” It’s around this point my timeline gets intertwined with Sunkissed, during a time when Techno appropriated the minimal prefix, and brought back a little of the experimental, futuristic attitude that had been lost somewhere in the late nineties. It was specifically Ola’s booking strategy that first drew me to the event as an ideological know-it-all with a taste for the obscure, but it soon turned out to be more than that too. It was a period that saw Sunkissed reside in Fabrikken temporarily, and in its cavernous spaces I found something more than just the music setting (or more like redefining) trends. “Maria Veie described it as a Gesamtkunstwerk, developing space rather than just a club sound. The DJs were important, the bookings were important, but the space itself was the final goal.” Sunkissed established itself as an all-encompassing experience very early on in me, with the venue, the lighting, even the decorations, coming together in a cohesive night, one that an international journalist would coin the Hacienda of Oslo. ”It’s not just about the music, it’s about what happens when you close your eyes and all these elements come together.” The bookings were an essential part of the appeal, and Ola’s ability to gather, not necessarily the most popular DJ’s, but certainly of the most significant DJ’s around stood out as a formidable presence in Oslo at the time and even the outside world took notice. “We’re not minding what’s the most popular thing. What we find as credible is what we listen to. I’m always trying to create something that I would like to go to myself. The choices become intuitive and the only unknown is the outcome; whether people respond to what you do.” People responded in a big way, and during my first era in Oslo, I don’t ever recall going to Sunkissed and not finding a queue or fully packed venue. People like myself enjoyed the rounded experience that it offered and that went from something as simple as the placement of the DJ booth to those imposing stars hanging from the ceiling. “Attention to detail, that is necessary to create the experience” and Ola remembers one example in particular. ”The significance of Ritchie and Magda was more than just about them playing and more than just about the sound, it was also the first gig we did where we had a light technician that intimately knew what was going on.” Ola places a lot of emphasis on the people behind Sunkissed, from the lighting guy to G-Ha, the social glue, which holds it all together. “Geir’s social network is intrinsically linked to Sunkissed.” Without it, Sunkissed would not be the social space it is today. “All these people at Sunkissed came along by acquaintance. The idea that you realise I need someone, wondering who the fuck should it be, and you turn around and he’s standing there.”

Sunkissed worked on various levels like these, but yet something still felt wrong back then, like we were all constantly swimming up a stream that was being constantly intensified by some outside force. Sunkissed felt like a lone stranger in a city trying to eradicate any semblance of a counter culture in favour of the comfortable, boring thing. “It was packed; the cue at 7:30 went from Blå all the way to Maridalsveien”, recalls Ola of specific Sunkissed live event when Paul Thomas from BBC Radio 1 spent an evening with them to record the event. “People spent two hours getting in. I remember calling P3, telling them we’ve got his guy from Radio 1, do you want to do some collaboration and they were like, no it’s so much money getting a truck down there. I mean a truck, who even talked about getting a truck.” It was this kind of attitude and this close-minded mentality that dominated the club and electronic music scene in Oslo that in large part influenced my exodus for the greener pastures of a more open-ended club experience…

O how things have turned around in the space of a few years. London is now struggling with its own eradication of clubbing culture and Amsterdam has entered something of an era favouring the more commercially accessible version of the music and gentrifying club culture in favour of commercial success. In Oslo however things seemed to have moved on and even though the powers that be are still trying to stem the tide of discontent some new palpable energy is invigorating the club music scene and I find myself most often spoilt for choice. Although some attitudes prevail – “the lack of pick-up on Finnebasen is a telling thing” – Oslo is in a much better place today than it was back in 2005/6 and for me Sunkissed has played an integral part in this, but Ola tends to disagree. “The fact that we are there is important to the scene but I think these clubs have paved their own way.“ Club culture might still be a minority in the city and excessively marginalised further by the authorities, but it’s not going away and I’m sure Sunkissed today will be yet another benchmark in the future ahead for the city and club-culture. A couple of extra faces have joined the Sunkissed line-up since my absence with Vinny Vilbass and Nico Coltsfoot expanding the social network and Sunkissed seems to just go from strength to strength. “It had a trajectory. Through baby steps it turned into what I wanted it to be a club with an international vibe. You can profound experience with just a few friends drinking in a bar or you can have a profound experience on a dance floor.” The focus is still there on creating the perfect night and I find Blå two completely different experiences before and after Sunkissed. Ola’s efforts are in getting “more and more PA on stage and getting more people dancing on stage” while the expanding social network with Geir as the glue, remains the thing that tethers it all together. Attending a Sunkissed event today is like attending a private party where Coltsfoot’s birthday is the cause for celebration and a DJ like Move D’s presence is just a welcomed bonus. It’s elements like these social engagements that make Sunkissed the familiar thing it is from my perspective.

What’s to come from Sunkissed is an unknown, except for what we know of the next event, but I have a suspicion that it will remain the constant denominator, it is for some time to come, even if it might not always be the most popular event, and in fact Ola would have it no other way. “I want a place where it will be fun rather than cool. Ideally Sunkissed’s place is not always running the a-list but somewhere where you can put the top names in. I think that one of the tricks for the longevity of Sunkissed is that it’s always taking breaks from itself… rather than being on it all the time.”

Expanding Horizons with Francis Inferno Orchestra

Griffin James is still getting used to the fact that he’s a newly wed. When I call him up in his home in London, his spouse had just left on an errant. “My girlfriend has just left to for the grocery store“ he says before correcting his error through the smile I can hear from the other end of the line: “sorry I meant my wife; I’m still getting used to that.” Griffin James’ Australian accent is unmistakeable, bounding with the friendly approachable demeanour only an Antipodean could deliver. At the same time however Griffin is a also a Londoner, enjoying the vantage point the city offers him to pursue his career as Francis Inferno Orchestra, the reason I called him up.

The name has been a staple in electronic music with a dancing persuasions since 2010, when a debut 12” hit the shelves with an edit house/disco sound occupying the space somewhere between MCDE and Arthur Russell. Since then Francis Inferno Orchestra has gone on to release countless EPs’ and 12” and an album, “A New way Of Living” on labels like Let’s play House and the label he runs with Fantastic Man, Superconscious. The studio work however is only the tip of the iceberg and behind it all lies a deep-seated enthusiasm for music, in any way shape or form – one that distils right down to his dusty fingers. James is a fervent digger of music and his horizons are broad, something that we learn has been carried through to adulthood from his youth and his parents. It’s something you could hear in his productions, when you really concentrate, but something that’s incredibly hard to ignore in his DJ sets.

We take up the conversation with the artist as he prepares for the interview, plugging in his hands free set and getting comfortable in his own home…

Are you plugged in and ready to go?

I’m plugged in mate.

How long have you been London?

It’s coming up to three years.

You started making music in Melbourne though, right?

I’ve been making music since I was a teenager, like really badly. I started with the whole hip-hop thing and I got more into dance music when I was 17/18. The first release I did when I was 19 and I was still in Melbourne?

I know you are quite a prolific digger, but what came first, the production side of it or the collector side of it?

I’ve always been collecting music, because we’ve always had a huge record collection at home, so it was drummed into me from a young age to hunt music down. My parents would make my brother and I just watch music-video channels non-stop on a Saturday as spending some quality family time together. We always had a lot of music at home.

Was there anything that specifically stuck out for you at a young age?

Before I was a teenager, it was everything my parents liked – so everything from David Bowie to Madness or punk stuff, like The Sex Pistols. And then I went through the rebellious teenager phase; just hating everything my parents would listen to. Now it’s come full circle again, so I’m listening to music and my mom’s like; “o yeah, I like that stuff.” Skateboarding also played a big role for me as a teenager because skate-videos always seemed to have very well thought-out soundtracks, and introduced me to a lot of different styles of music.

When did the name Francis Inferno Orchestra appear?

It’s funny because it’s really not an interesting story. I get asked this a fair bit, and I wish I had an interesting story, but basically at the time I was sampling a lot of disco music. I guess a lot of bands would have long names like KC and the Sunshine band and I was like, “I want a big name”. And then my friend just thought up the name off the cuff, and I’ve used it ever since.

You should make up another story about it then, like most of those bands did?

I have tried to think of something, something to do with mythology – like “someone Francis III with Nero burning down the coliseums.” (Laughs) I’ve never come up with something that’s quick and good, so I’ve just got my old boring story.

We’ve mentioned your start in making music, but I’ve always thought of the name Francis Inferno Orchestra more as a DJ. Do you side of you that that trumps the other?

I go through waves. I always collect music, but was never that serious about it – it was just something I did for fun. I got really into production first, and I took that really seriously for a while. It’s only been since I was nineteen that I really got into digging. Sometimes I feel like I take my production a little more seriously, and then sometimes I’ll take digging a little more seriously. I’ll go through waves where I’ll think; maybe I should write my next record now. And then I’ll finish that and I’ll be; “ok I don’t really need to make music for a while so I’m just gonna concentrate on finding new records – expanding my musical horizons.

What do you specifically look for, when you are looking for new records.

I guess it’s weird, because getting booked so much to do the headline is making me subconsciously buy more party music, but I also make a conscious effort to buy a lot of ambient stuff from innovative communications or afro, or Japanese stuff. At the moment I’m really into getting 7 inches and 45s because I find that they’re cheaper and way more fun play. The song is usually a summed up version of 12”. There’s no fucking around on it – you’ve got 3 minutes and it’s fun because it’s really quick.

And it adds to that eclecticism in your sets.

Yeah. I kind of get bored really quickly. Someone else could DJ House music for an hour straight, whereas I just want to change it up. It’s a little bit of fucking with the crowd, but it’s also me trying to challenge myself – If I could make this gay disco song go into this weird, mind-bending acid track and sound really good together, I feel really good about it. It’s me entertaining myself. Most of the time it’s just me challenging myself to see what can go together.

Do you prepare your sets that way?

I never plan anything out. Whatever I pack for a gig, it’s always in terms of what vibe I want to go for. If I know it’s gonna be a crazy party I’ll just pack all my high-energy records – high-energy in terms of high-energy Techno, or high-energy Caribbean music, or high-energy Disco – and just make them work together on the spot for a bit of fun.

Does that eclecticism seep into your production at all?

It’s funny because my agent has this thing with me where he says: “you write one style and you play completely differently, and you need to start making music that makes sense in your sets.” But I don’t know. When it comes to production I’d be listening to a really dreamy atmospheric album and think to myself, “Ah I really want to write that.” And then I’ll try to write all these songs, but I’ll never play them. There was a long time where I didn’t play any of the songs that I made, and it was only in the last year or two that I started playing my own songs out.

Really, because I can definitely hear a song like Rap Beef working in your sets.

I think I’m gonna make a longer version of that. That and “The More You Like”, I want to make longer versions of so people could play it more. For the album, I was going for making 3-minute songs, album songs.

Wow, a couple of longer versions would sound great.

Yeah, maybe just a little off the cuff white label.

Besides that are you working on any new music?

I’m writing what will be my next record at the moment. It’s kind of weird, there’s some jungle in there. And I’ve been working on my label that I run with Fantastic Man a lot. He’s got the next release coming out which is really cool, and then we also did a release on our label by a guy called Luis CL. He’s done a follow-up EP that’s really good. And I’m also trying to write that atmospheric ambient album, which is coming together really slowly.

I find there’s quite a lot of ambient stuff coming out recently and in the near future. Is there something to that do you think?

There’s definitely a thing there. There’s that label I mentioned, innovative communications that’s also a bit like library music as well; two-minute songs that are just dudes sitting jamming out on pads, with little sound effects. I’ve been doing a bit of that as well. On my last EP, the first song, Kalamari Desert is library record inspired.

You’ve mentioned Superconscious earlier. How is it going with the label?

The good the thing about it is that it’s cemented itself already. It’s always daunting because you hope it goes the direction you want it to go. I hope people are into it. We’ve had five releases, as Superconscious and we’ve done little edits as Suco, which have all done really well. We had a bit of a slow start, but it’s fun. I don’t have a job, I just do music fulltime so it’s nice to be able to get around the artwork and things, because I used to do art when I was younger, but didn’t have a reason to do it anymore as I got older. Now, Mic and me are really getting into the artwork and having a lot of fun with it. Making a product is really nice and we’re bouncing off each other really well. I’ll send him some crappy Photoshop art and he’ll make it look professional. He’s more grounded and I’m more loose, and when I hear a song I was want to release it, and he’ll just sit on it for a week, and then I’ll be “yeah you’re right, actually it’s not that good.” It’s a nice professional relationship.

Talking about professional relationships, you’ll be playing back to back with Øyvind when you get here.

I’m really excited about that because Øyvind is such a dude. I met him when I played last with Leon Vynehall, and we just got chatting after the gig. And then he came to London and we hung out. I’m really excited, because I love the music he makes and he’s a pretty solid DJ as well.

Do you approach your set any differently since you are doing a back to back?

If I didn’t know Øyvind, I’d be a bit more hesitant, but I know what his vibe is. He’s gonna teach me some stuff and maybe I’ll teach him some stuff. He’s got a lot of knowledge and he knows his shit, so he’ll be fun to play back to back with.

And are there any new records you’re looking forward to bringing to Jæger with you?

I got the new, Hunee remixes. I played the Mick Wills one and it’s pretty wild and pretty dark. I don’t know if I’ll be able to play it at Jæger…maybe.

The Perfectionist – In Praise of Luke Hess

Raised in the dystopian Techno environment that was the city of Detroit’s most significant contribution to the world of music, Luke Hess carries with him a tradition of music that stretches back to the origins of the genre. Alongside the musical history of the city, is a penchant towards a side of music that seems an entire world away from the soundscape of the motor city. Dub, a style of music that has it’s roots in the warm Caribbean, extenuating the resigned pace of island living should have no place in the technologically-inspired, sci-fi referencing music we’ve come to know as Techno. And yet it is there, informing some of the progressive nature of Hess’ music – something the artist sees as a definite part of his musical temperament, but one that doesn’t define him, as he explains in an interview with RA. “I’m not sure why I was labelled a dub techno producer. I think it helps people sleep well at night when they can push an artist into a certain genre and leave them there. Sure, it has elements of ‘dub’, but it’s mainly based on my influences from artists in Detroit, not from dub Techno.” Luke Hess and his distinctive brand of Techno is familiar for its inclination to loiter in the repetitive and restrained aspects of this loop-based music, often meandering around progressive elements that need time and patience to gestate within the listener. If you give Luke Hess the opportunity, his music opens up to a synthetic landscape that assimilates the history of Techno in Detroit in a language that determines its future.

“Detroit always contributes to my productions in some way. I’m in and around the city almost every day. The city’s hardships as well as its positive aspects are affecting everyone here in some way, whether its work related, or life related. The people of this city are affected in many ways by what is left of the city and what is slowly growing out of its rough past, whether it’s our ability to commute from one area to another, where we have the freedom to eat and live, it effects how we choose to express our creative ideas, and where and how we choose to spend our time.” But like most of Detroit’s legacy in Techno, Luke’s history doesn’t originate spontaneously with the music, but like so much of his peers, has its roots in the synthesiser music of European acts like Depeche Mode. Originally the influence of his parents this music would have a profound effect on Luke Hess – like it did Jeff Mills and the Belleville Three before him – and when the teenager was old enough to start attending the warehouse parties in- and around Detroit, it filtered into an individual taste in music, inspired by the scene around him. “There were so many great DJ’s in Detroit in the mid‐90’s” Luke tells Richard Fearless in an interview for the Ransom Note. “I think I was very spoiled. Heckle & Jeckle, Robert Hood, Jeff Mills, Daniel Bell, Rolando, Richie Hawin etc….

However, I think one of the longest and most technical sets I’ve ever seen was Richie Hawtin Decks, FX & 909 show at The Works at a show called 1. I think Rich played for about 10 hours with 2 decks, vinyl, fx and a 909. The front room was a chill out room and there was a large screen that had a camera on the Vestax mixer from the main room Rich was playing in. When it became too packed in the back room, I’d just sit up front and watch the screen and his hands on the mixer. It was a very inspiring night.” It seems to be a seminal moment in the career path of Luke Hess, and one that acts as a catalyst from which a career spawned. “I started collecting records in 1997” says Luke in that same conversation. “Between 1997 and 2005 I DJ’ed vinyl at local events around the city, but I wasn’t part of any crew, so it was difficult to play out often. I started producing music in 2006, mostly with software at that time, taking lessons from my good friend Brian Kage. We were all feeding off technical ideas from each other including Seth Troxler, Ryan Crosson, Lee Curtiss, Brian Kage, Joshua Mathews, Keith Kemp etc. I then bought my first synthesizer at the end of 2006 – the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 and was given the RE‐201 from some friends who found it cleaning out someone’s basement. With these two pieces of gear I formed a 5-track demo that I sent to some European labels with no response. So, I just continued to make music. In the mean time, I was still shopping for records, sometimes at Melodies and Memories on the East side of Detroit (9 mile and Gratiot). At the time Seth Troxler worked at that record store. He would pull records for me and call me when new 12” arrived. One day we were sitting in the back room listening to records together and I told him about this demo that I made. He told me to bring it into the store and we listened to it. He then asked if he could keep the demo and I agreed. The next day Omar S. called me and asked if he could meet me and put out some of the tracks on the CD. This was Dubout #1 on FXHE records. He said, ‘Don’t give my number to nobody, you don’t know it!’ I figured he meant business. Haha! Since then Alex and I have become great friends and he has been a huge mentor for my music career.”

An EP followed on FXHE boasting the EP1 catalogue number and introduced the world to a sound of Techno that lies further on the progressive spectrum than it ever did before. It’s a sound that also caught the attention of Danish label Echocord, whose own philosophy ran perpendicular to Hess’ inclinations to dubbier and warmer end of dance music and Techno. A few EP’s naturally followed, which eventually culminated in the decisive mark in Hess’ discography, his debut album Light in the Dark. Like the EP’s before it, the music did away with the shackles of obvious common denominators in music, and played in dub moments as much as it played in the sci-fi world of Detroit Techno. There has always been a very surreal spirituality in Luke’s music in which it unwinds rather than unravels easing the listener into some heightened consciousness as it travels through the progression. It’s something that’s been marked in his DJ sets too with the word perfectionist often thrown around in association with Luke in that context. “As a DJ I think it’s important to stand out and tell your own story – not blend in to secure gigs or (please the crowd)”, says Luke in another interview for 160g. “Underground music is the perfect platform to tell a story and open up people’s minds. A DJ performance should take people somewhere unique and push boundaries.” This sentiment can be experienced as a natural extension of his work in the studio, but also what you’d expect from a live show with Luke Hess. He is a perfectionist through and through, and even when we got in touch with him with some questions for an interview, he tried to oblige, but couldn’t let the music suffer as a result. “I’m so sorry” he says in a reply email. “I won’t have time tonight after all do complete the questions. (I’m) prepping music for the show and it’s taking longer than I thought! But better the music be right than the interview”.

It’s this kind of professionalism that’s hard to ignore in Luke’s music, his sets and his live shows. It’s the same reason he graces the presence of labels like FXHE and Echocord, and remained friends with both Kenneth Christiansen and Omar S after the fact. They certainly recognised something in his talent, enough so to keep releasing his music and invite him to their parties. We might not have been afforded the opportunity to interview Luke Hess, but at least we know that the music will be there, at the end, doing all the talking, and all that’s left for us to do is sit back, listen, and enjoy the show.

Solaris mixes Steve Bug

Inspired by the forthcoming visit of Steve Bug, Det Gode Selskab’s Solaris took to the decks and put together a mix celebrating the music and the sound of the German producer, DJ and his labels. The mix sees Solaris go deep and minimal as he looks to the weekend with music that underpins the aesthetic of the underground veteran through an hour of lush soul searching harmonic progressions at reserved tempos and restrained beats. Expect deep Rhodes progressive chords, minimalist percussion and the odd 303 bass line squiggle in this mix from Solaris, which includes his “all-time favourite track from Bug, Loverboy.” As on ode to Steve Bug, Solaris gives us a glimpse behind the curtain of what’s going to be a very special Sunday night at Jæger this week and invites you on a journey through the music of Steve Bug for this mix.

Dubby and Warm with Kenneth Christiansen

Danish label Echocord has become synonymous with a sound of Techno that’s entrenched in the subterranean layers of Dub, slowly churning away at simple repetitive motifs that swell with the restrained feeling of an attentive dance floor. The sound of Echocord is subtle, biding its time, avoiding any fleeting ostentatious impulses for the sake of a rounded apathetic experience. Throughout the label’s discography you’d never encounter the rise of a presumptuous break-down nor the existence of and impetuous build-up. The music takes place in more than just the moment, preferring rather the extended investment from an attentive listener. At the core of the label and its axiom stands Kenneth Christiansen, a DJ, producer, club-promoter and label boss, that personifies everything Echocord is today. His skills behind the decks have taken him everywhere from Sonar to Panorama Bar and his next stop is Jæger where the soon-to-be 15 year old label, will host a very special showcase in our basement. Luke Hess will be joining Christiansen for this event with a live show, with cuts from his album, Light and Dark on Echocord, bound to make an appearance at some point in the night. Christiansen, although also a producer, most notably as part of Pattern Repeat, will take to the booth for this event, bringing the sound of the label to Jæger through new and old material, featuring artists like Mike Dehnert and Mikkel Metal. It was the latter artist that inspired Christiansen to establish Echocord in the first place, and the sound of dub in Techno that set it part from many of the other Techno labels cropping up around 2002. It’s remained an institution in Europe and alongside Christiansen’s club endeavour, Culture Box, it has become a bastion for electronic music in the Danish capital. Echocord’s biography is well known today, but when we got the opportunity to ask its distinguished creator some questions, we sent off the email post-haste.

You started the label with the purpose of releasing music from Mikkel Metal initially. What was it about his sound that encompassed what you wanted from a label?

When I started Echocord I was working in a record shop in Copenhagen receiving many demoes form the local talent. I have always been a big fan of what came out of Berlin in the 90’s, the new dubby minimal sound, from labels like Din, Elektro Musik Department, Basic Channel, Chain Reaction, Scape etc. I wanted to release electronic music that has that deep dubby warm feeling, but still powerful. So when I heard material from Mikkel, and already had the good distribution contact at Kompakt in Cologne, it was the time to start.

There’s has always been a strong dub focus from the label. How has it influenced the label, and what was the connection between this style of Techno and Copenhagen when you started the label?

Yes, it has always been about Dub. Today, after all these years, you can still always here the dubby elements in all the releases, but it can also be more for the dance floor, or go in other directions as well. There was not really any connection with Copenhagen at that time, but we already knew a lot of the producers in Berlin and the Hardwax Crew.

The label is celebrating 15 years this year. How have you experienced it developing from those first releases?

It has all changed a lot over the years. The electronic scene is much, much bigger and there are many many more labels. But for my label (s) I think it got bigger again like 5 years ago – the more dubby kind of music got bigger again. I also started the sublabel Echocord Colour for more Techno orientated stuff, and it got some extra attention overall.

Tell us a bit about culture box, and how it might influence the label and your work as a DJ.

Culture Box is my main job. I run it with Loke Busch, and there’s a nice crew around us. I use most of the time booking the music program – it’s a big job. It hasn’t really influenced the label or my DJing that much.

You’ve never donned the producer cap as a solo artist and your music as part of Pattern Repeat has never branded the Echocord badge. Why is that, and do you find it’s important to retain that distinction between label boss and artist?

Hmm good question. The first release we did actually was released on Echocord Colour, and it includes a Ben Klock Remix. My partner and good friend Dennis aka Resoe and I thought that it would be good to have this platform for our Pattern Repeat stuff, so we started the label also. We will continue releasing on that, but also try other labels, we will do something on Tresor Berlin soon.

You’ll be playing a set at Jæger. How much of the label boss influences your sets and how does that change with an Echocord showcase?

Yes, I’m looking forward to play at Jæger, especially to do an Echocord Show there with my friend Luke Hess from Detroit. We play Concrete in Paris the day after, so its gonna be a great weekend. Of course I always play some Echocord tunes in my sets, and try out new stuff, and when it is a showcase I think it’s very naturally to represent the sound even more.

Yes, you’re bringing Luke Hess along with you. It seems that Echocord is very much a family affair, with the same artists always returning to the label. How did the label’s relationship with Mr Hess take shape?

Yes, well, I have known Luke for many years now. We got in contact long ago, I heard his early stuff on FXHE and I was blown away! He did some remixes, and then he wanted to do an album, and that was a very big thing for me. He also did a lot of releases on Echocord Colour. We have been playing together for many years now, all over Europe and in Detroit and New York. Luke is definitely like a brother to me, he is the most amazing guy. You can say Echocord is a family affair. I really like to invite artists back to release and to play at shows. Of course, we also have new artists releasing music on the label, and already this year Arovane and Tomas Rubeck are in.

What was it about Luke’s music that particularly stood out for you and how did uphold the motto of Echocord do you think?

I really like his warm deep sound, the Detroit elements, there’s so much “music in the music”. It’s perfect for Echocord.

Listening to Light in the Dark in the context of the latest release from Mikkel Metal (Resemblance), you can hear obvious similarities, but yet each artist has his own signature. What makes Luke Hess so unique amongst the other artists on the label?

I really think many of the artists are very unique. Mikkel is really one of a kind, you can always hear when it’s him, and it’s a little bit the same with Luke.

You mentioned earlier that the label today has developed with more focus on the dance floor. How much of that development is influenced by the artists and is it something you witnessed develop in your work as a DJ too?

Well, the sublabel Echocord Colour is very much about the dance floor. But yes the artists usually produce more dance floor minded music, I like that as well, especially when you can have both on an EP or album.

You must have some highlights through the discography of the label. Which of these will you most definitely be including in your set on Friday?

On Friday I think I will focus on the newer stuff, plus the unreleased new stuff coming up. After summer when we do the “15 years with Echocord” tour/shows, I will focus more on the entire catalogue.

You’ve obviously seen Luke Hess’ live show. What can we expect from him?

You can expect a very warm, dubby, sexy, powerfull, erotic trip.

Will he be featuring any future Echocord material in his live set?

See that’s a good question. I hope so. I know he’s finishing his new track for the “15 years with Echocord” compilation and I haven’t heard that track yet. Well, let’s see.

And will you be featuring any new music from the label in your set?

Yes I will play some brand new stuff from Arovane, Tomas Rubeck and Mike Dehnert plus some surprises.

In the Booth with Willie Burns

Willie Burns, MC Kaman and I have taken full advantage of the crisp evening air, sitting outside in Jæger’s courtyard. It would still be a few weeks till we see our backyard open, but there’s a definite hint of warming weather in the air, although its still a mighty brisk -4˚C outside. We’re engaging over all manner of topics from the appeal of CDs to the benefits of Internet Yoga. Will is in a speculative mood, watching the crowd ebb and flow in and out of Jæger’s front door with the clock slowly creeping closer to his appointment with our booth. Karima and DJ Nuhhh have set the tone all night, playing the best in their back catalogue of House and Techno, and with Mike Dunn’s Freaky Motherfucker still ringing in our ears from DJ Nuhhh, Will takes to his set going through the annals of electronic music with everything from Disco to Electro to Techno making an appearance in his heavy handed mix. After leaving us gobsmacked with the final track of his set crunching through our Funktion One system upstairs, we had no other alternative but to share it with you. A few emails between the DJ and Jæger followed, with Willie Burns finally agreeing to release his set with a sentence that read…

“goddammit.. you fucker…do it..”

Going Deeper Underground with Steve Bug

Steve Bug has been an ardent club goer since 1987, a time when the DJ was still a faceless facilitator for audiences that came with one purpose in mind… dancing. “One of the clubs that I went to a lot in the past was a club in Hamburg where the DJ was playing behind a dark blue coloured glass, so you only saw the silhouette of the DJ.” Various videos from that time show DJ’s usually obscured from the audience, with immense crowds moving as one to the anonymous selector. Steve might not have featured in those early videos, but he can definitely feel some affinity with that time, being raised on that same idealistic approach to the DJ and the music. “To me this music was always a bit more about being on the dance floor and enjoying it for yourself – kind of a spiritual thing getting lost into the music and getting rid of the tension of the week.” It came at a time when “House music was brand new in Germany” and incorporated everything from Hi NRG, Chicago House, to Germany’s own body music from the likes of Front 242. “But it was the same speed and it was the first time I heard a DJ mix non-stop music, which got me hooked“, reminisces Steve. It was around this time that he would start buying House records, mainly early House compilations and a seed was planted, which came to bear fruit in 1991, when he adopted the moniker Steve Bug and took off on a DJ career that spans 25 years today, including a string of renowned mixes, remixes, tracks and labels, all of which has played seminal role in the development of underground club music. But I didn’t ring Steve up to talk about his biography or his fame, but rather about how he has maintained the integrity of that kid who “always loved dancing” through his work as a DJ, producer and label boss, and keeps the spirit of underground music alive through everything he approaches, through all the success he’s experienced.

For Steve music and DJing was never about the individual, but always the shared experience. Even trivial matters like who produced the tracks from those House compilations never overshadowed the appeal of the dance floor and the music. “I didn’t really care about the artist behind it, I just really cared about the music. I had no idea who was producing these records I just loved the music.“ Steve would go to his favourite Hamburg club not for the DJ or the faint prospect of hearing a particular song he liked, but for the encounter and spending his entire night on the dance floor with this new, uninterrupted music. “That brought me back and it was more about the club itself and not the event. Later you found out about the DJ, but it wasn’t that important. The emphasis was on having an interaction with other people on the dance floor. The point was getting into the music, instead of looking at the DJ.” Later, during a time Steve would establish himself as a DJ that focus shifted with the rise of the superstar DJ, an attitude Steve never could quite understand. “Some people expect you to entertain them from up there. If people enjoy it there’s definitely a market for it, but it’s just not what I like, or do.” During the nineties, that trend even started infecting the underground scene, with some DJs adopting the hype-like mentality of commercial music in their pursuit of their own commercial success, and although Steve’s own popularity would grow at the time, he remained grounded, going deeper into the music as his career continued to develop. Steve’s own productions at the time would find acclaim for it’s melodic Techno, built on it’s simplest components, and tracks like “Mein Bug” and “Volksmusic” found some critical acclaim in the media and amongst his peers. But unlike his fame-hungry contemporaries, Steve rather preferred the infamy of the underground, using aliases like Traffic Signs to release music in an effort to avoid popularity in favour of sustenance and the appreciation from “the people that really understand the music.” How does he maintain that integrity? “It’s just my taste of music and being scared of becoming too popular. I always knew if you want to attract more people you would have to compromise.”

His years of experience as a DJ coming up through the ranks while keeping true to his altruist underground roots, has applied Steve with the type of knowledge of a dance floor that escapes many new DJs coming through onto the scene and when he talks to new artists and DJs alike, he likes to offer some words of advice. “ If you don’t have the time as an artist to develop your own sound, and play smaller places before you get thrown into bigger rooms, it’s going to be very difficult for you. It’s always easy to go for the functional tracks that are big at the moment, but that has never been my point.” Steve says that for him it’s always been about making the tracks work both on smaller dance floors and bigger rooms with the audience the common denominator between you, the music, the sound system and the club. “It’s part of the job to connect to people and always bring the music personal to you.” Steve should know all about the tracks that breach that personal connection between you and an informed audience, since he’s produced a fair few of them over the years. Tracks like “Wet” and “Loverboy” have found are classic dance floor cuts in their own right and it’s exactly because they remain true to the artist, becoming an inseparable extension of his personality through sound. Steve’s labels Pokerflat, Audiomatique Recordings, B Series, Dessous Recordings and Traffic Signs all form part of his personal investment in the music, providing a platform for his own music and the artists that appeals to his musical sensibilities. Pokerflat recordings was the catalyst to it all in the late nineties giving acts like Trentmøller and Märtini Brös many of their first hits with a sound that’s built on Steve’s own approach. Beautiful harmonies and sparse atmospheric percussion would always be at the centre of what Steve looked for in music, both his own music and that of others. It’s a sound that would make his parent label Pokerflat instantly recognisable, but it’s also something you can hear come through on his Deep House label Dessous and even his work as Traffic Signs. It’s a sound that became so familiar and unique at the time that the media stuck it in the minimal corner alongside the likes of Robert Hood, a label Steve has never been to eager about personally. “I don’t consider any of our stuff that minimal. Labelling music to me was always a bit stupid, because people jump on the bandwagon and they only listen to one type of music.” This attitude has its roots in Steve’s own pursuit for new music as a DJ and the German prefers to find his music organically, avoiding “weird labels”, that deter him from finding new, interesting artists when he himself is digging for music. “Digging music is what I find a lot of DJs don’t do anymore. You have to ask yourself is there something else out there that I need to find. That may be my connection to the underground, because I’m always looking deeper into it, and I’m always trying to find these tracks that nobody else knows about.” In this quest for new music, Steve Bug refrains from doing more than two gigs a week, spending his time rather getting his fingers dusty looking for the latest and newest in electronic music so when a Steve Bug show does come to town, it’s always something special and unique. “I’m always trying to find what else is happening other than the thing right in front of my face.“

Steve is certainly not a DJ and a producer that takes things at face value, and that is part of the reason he also produces under various aliases. A ne allias will go a long way in helping the music’s audience get over the personality behind music. He’s always looking for that “fresh vibe and fresh energy” in the music he plays and produces. When I called him up he was actually taking a little break from playing to make some new music and although nothing has quite come out of it yet, he intends to apply that uncompromising search for something new and fresh even to his own music, swapping out some gear in his studio and finding new evocative melodies which to develop. “Doing another” Loverbo”y track would be awesome, but it just doesn’t work like that. It’s more about what’s touching me and I can’t think of what other people want. The longer I’m in the business, the more I write what really comes out of me.” He prefers to start everything with a simple piano sound, finding a melody and harmony that works for him personally before expounding on it with a beat, while avoiding the familiar throughout. He uses “Wet” as an example of how he rarely looks back nostalgically in the hope of recreating a moment like that. “I don’t feel like I ever want to do something similar. These moments may come back, but I can’t reproduce them, because they are just not there. Never rest on the work you’ve done and try to recreate it. Always try to move forward and try and do something else.” Even so Steve Bug’s music never conforms to trend, and his unique signature has remained the constant stamp in his work since the nineties. Once again everything points to the personality behind the music and personal investment Steve has in music from production all the way through to reception, and playing these tracks out in his DJ sets. It will be the third time he’s joined Det Gode Selskab for an event in Oslo, and he remembers the previous occasions as “super special. I always had a good time and I’m looking forward to coming back.”

I ask him if he’s found anything special while digging recently that he might look forward to bringing with him, but he says he’s had something of dry spell recently with very little piquing his interest at his local record shop. With that kind of investment in looking for music, we can assume that Steve will once again bring the uncompromising attitude we’ve come to expect from the DJ and producer to Jæger. We round off the conversation talking about Steve’s latest venture into the world of Mescal production, and I realise we’ve hardly talked about music at all. Our conversation has revolved around the world of the DJ and bridging that gap between people through music, uncompromising music that’s an extension of the artist, but while we’ve done that a clear image has started to form in my head, and without referencing a single piece of music, I know exactly what Steve Bug’s set will sound like in a few weeks time.

Body Music with Marcel Dettmann

Marcel Dettmann has been a selfless facilitator of Techno since his teens. When his hometown, the former GDR, a small suburb outside of Berlin, lacked the facilities to buy and sell records, he took it upon himself to distribute his favourite records from the likes of Depeche Mode, The Cure, Front 242 and a wave of post punk industrial cuts that spoke to his tastes him at the time. Even back then, it was obvious he was destined for greater things, something that would combine his love for the records, nightlife, and his ear for music, and that point came when a job for Hardwax and a residency at Ostgut (Berghain’s predecessor) encouraged Dettmann to make the move to Berlin, which in turn sealed his fate. It coincided with a time when Techno, always the musical underdog, saw a newfound interest in the genre facilitated by the likes of DJs like Marcell Dettman and the clubbing institution Berghain.

Following releases on Berghain’s Ostgut Ton label, Dettman would also go on to establish MDR (Marcel Dettmann Records), tirelessly working towards promoting a sound of Techno that would be raw, but not crass, channelled through a German sensibility for the sound as influenced by the Dettmann’s exquisite ear for music and the influences from his youth. Marcel Dettmann is an enabler of Techno, which today takes on many different forms. As a DJ he promotes the genre diligently; as a label boss, he offers an equal platform for new artists working in the genre to make an impression on the scene; and as an artist, he brings a unique voice to the genre through labels like Ostgut Ton, 50 Weapons, and of course MDR. His reputation precedes him today, and any discerning music fan will know the name Marcel Dettmann even if Techno is not their genre of choice. With a musical education that includes not one but two institutions in club music in the form of Berghain and Hardwax, his knowledge is not to be taken lately and when we, at Jæger got the opportunity to ask him some questions before he comes to our basement next week, we jumped at the chance, and here’s what transpired.

You were buying and selling records as a teenager from your hometown, Fürstenwalde long before you made the move to Berlin. How fundamental was that era to your development as a DJ and artist?

First I got to know my friends and label mates Patrick aka Answer Code Request and Norman Nodge. Secondly I was able to build up my record collection, which is still kind of a musical basement for me today. And I started learning much about what happens behind the curtain, things like the vinyl productions process or just all the administrational stuff, which comes along by selling records.

You focussed on a lot of synth-wave and post-industrial punk during those years, I believe. What was it about music from the likes of Depeche Mode and Front 242 that particularly struck a chord with you?

The best way to answer this question is taking a quote from Patrick Codenys, the singer of Front242:

In my opinion, you look for what you have inside. We called our style “electronic body music” because the body is also the brain. It’s not only about groove, swinging and dancing. It’s enjoyable but it’s also mental. Our body is also a great instrument that uses the senses. I think when you work with a machine you create an interface between yourself and the machine. I could symbolize this by a big arrow from the machine to you and you to the machine. You try to understand and manipulate the machine and try to get something out of it. The machine is giving it back to you.

You eventually made the move to Berlin and got a job at Hardwax. What did you pick up while working there and how did it filter into your own development?

Working at Hard Wax was the next logical step back then and it was kind of a lucky coincidence. I was learning a lot, gaining musical bandwidth, learning how to filter music, and above all I got to meet a lot of inspiring artists. I was stepping through all the processes that need to be solved while working in a record store and gained al lot of inside knowledge about the music market.

Another monumental moment was your residency at Ostgut and then Berghain. You’ve said in another interview that Berlin, Berghain and Hardwax basically “created” you. How do you think the club and city influenced you?

These three things, Berlin, Berghain and Hard Wax are the most influential things to my career as a DJ and musician. I grew up in Berlin, personally and musically, so these things made me to what I’m today.

What do you look for in music specifically today when you’re looking for something to play?

The point is: I don’t look for something to play; things open up to me when I hear it. If I like a certain piece of music I always try to work it into one of my sets. Sure, I’m mostly orientated to techno music, but I’m having a hard time dealing with borders, especially in music, so I don’t really care.

How has having your own label had any influence on your career as a DJ and a producer do you think?

When I started the label 11 years ago, it was about releasing music by my friends and me, there was no plan behind it, no business model, it was just about releasing the music we made. In the end it helped focussing on my kind of style, there was no need to arrange with other people’s opinions. I was able to produce and release just the music I liked, no compromises had to be made.

Your set at Jæger is billed as an MDR 4 hour long set. Firstly, I know you prefer an extended set. Why is that?

Long time sets give you the opportunity to unfold yourself much more. I got more time to develop things and emotions, I don’t have to „function“, I can build up my set more intuitive, it becomes more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Secondly, how does an MDR showcase set differ from a straightforward Marcel Dettmann set?

Usually an MDR night is a showcase with several acts from the label, but in this case we only have four hours time, so I’m coming all by myself. I’m quite excited how this will work out and what will be special about that night. I’m really looking forward to that.

Who are Sweaty Palms?

Some have credited the moisture in the air in Oslo to change of seasons, but we know the real reason everything has started getting a little wetter this week. Sweaty Palms are coming to town and that dampness you’ve been feeling in the air all week is just them making their presence felt before their official Natt & Dag Norwegian launch. Recently they’ve been spotted in the basement bars of Berlin and on the shores of Panama, living it up on a banana boat made of shellac with the sound of uncompromising House and Techno blasting from her bow. Some have accused the DJ duo of being the source of the recent leak of sensitive documents, while others suggest it was all just a ruse to distract the Norwegian authorities from their imminent arrival. All we know is that they are coming to town so we sent out a carrier pigeon to their boat with some topics of discussion, in the hope that we can find out a little more of who they are and what exactly makes their palms perspire.

An introduction to Sweaty Palms

Sweaty Palms would not have existed hadn’t it been for the excellent show Rick & Morty, which is the sole reason for the foundation on which Albrecht and Karima’s friendship is built. Discovering a picture on Instagram of Karima wearing a t-shirt from the show, Albrecht was so amazed and intrigued by Karima’s devotion to what happens to be his favourite TV show show, he couldn’t resist inviting her to play with him at about:blank in Berlin. The invitation from the experienced label boss and DJ auteur left her startled and, as the name implies, with Sweaty Palms. They’d barely exchanged words with each other when they met for the gig, but faith had it that they were a perfect match musically and so they decided to form an union.

Berlin and Oslo

We’re currently living in Dresden, but commuting between Albrechts hometown and Panama City for leisure reasons.

Sweaty palms vs Hairy palms – what’s in a name.

Neither of us have particularly hairy palms, unless you look really closely – then you can see that Albrecht has little stubs of what might be mistaken for hair. It’s actually vinyl residue from playing so many years in various clubs like Robert Johnson, Panorama Bar, TBA, or about:blank.

DJs with the sweatiest palms – Influences and aspiration

Influences: mind-expanding M&M’s, bus ticket’s to heaven and ski slopes.

A guide to drinking with sweaty palms. (Because I imagine it would just slip out of your hand)

Drinking with us can be a bit of a mess. None of us are particularly good at opening the mouth to the extent which is needed to direct liquid from the glass to the esophagus, therefore we spill a lot of drinks both on the floor and ourselves. It’s not a good look, but the more we look in need of help and care from grown ups, the more impressive our DJ-sets seem.

Favourite dance floors from around the world for sweaty paws.

Flooded bathrooms and pongy backstages

Digging for records with sweaty palms.

When not playing records from one of the labels Albrecht manages – Shtum, Uncanny Valley or Rat Life – we always dig in the cheap bins. Our favourite record stores are zippyshare, wetransfer and soulseek.

Playing Jæger with sweaty palms.

We’re gonna give away drinking tickets to the audience, accept all requests and ignoring closing times.

Beyond the horizon with De Fantastiske To and Flash Atkins

De Fantastiske To’s Monokrom spills onto Jæger’s basement dance floor to the cheer of an enthusiastic audience. Ravi and Marius have saved the best of De Fantastiske To for last, revealing the title track of their forthcoming EP during a live show celebrating the release one Saturday in March. Ost’s instantly recognisable vocal cuts a clear path through the stripped back house production, emasculating the sticky forward bass-line and pounding minimalist percussion. Across the room, ready to cue a track in the booth, stands Flash Atkins (aka Ben Davis), and through the hazy darkness of the dance floor, I see a smile creep across the UK producer, label boss and DJ’s face. The vocal in the track certainly brings a heap load of charm to the functional dance track and I’m reminded of Ben’s words on Monokrom, from earlier that day when he, Ravi, Marius and I sat down on the swings in Jæger’s courtyard to talk about Paperecordings, Norwegian House music and De Fantastiske To: “It’s always good to hear vocals, and the production on Monokrom is a step on from everything else. It’s a slightly different sound. It’s stripped back more, and a little tougher, but the vocal softens things up a bit.” Ben signed the track to Paperecordings, like he did “Folk & Ferie” before it, not a surprise with Monokrom coming to life on the cutting room floor of that previous release. Ravi and Marius first enlisted the help of Ost for Folk & Ferie, but when they just couldn’t get his vocal to work around that track they sculpted a brand new track around the singer’s vocal track instead and Monokrom came to life. “We really wanted to work with Ost”, says Ravi while Marius nods his head quietly in agreement. “The vocals he had done for Folk & Ferie were sublime, so we really wanted to make something out of that. Monokrom was basically the end result of that process.“

After which, Ben donned his Flash Atkins suit and hit the studio with a transcendent remix of the track, focussing the direction of the track to a more percussive destination while upholding the stripped back functional appeal of the original. “I was just trying to lay down some parameters as in: not spending too much time on it, and simplifying things. I like that the synth is played in and not quantised. It’s kind of rough, but then I still get twitchy with the Latin section at the end. It’s always tempting to pile more stuff in, and I was consciously trying to pull things back on this.“ Flash Atkins certainly channelled his super-alter-ego powers into the right direction for this interpretation, and Marius and Ravi couldn’t have been happier about the end result with the latter exclaiming: “The percussion on that, God damn, it just blows me away!” And sandwiched between the original and the remix are two tracks that try to “convey some of that late summer vibe you get in Oslo” says Ravi with Marius adding: “We wanted to do something warm, deep and lush.” Litt Dristig and Sensommer continue on the path set by Monokrom, Ben’s words that the EP is a “step on from everything else”, still ringing true, but on this occasion leaving the big-room house sound behind for something cosier in the second room. Through deep pads and chords, they take the music under ground again, where things are subtler, but remain accessible. It’s what’s at the heart of the appeal of much of Norwegian Dance music, and although when you listen to De Fantastiske To “they are less distinctly Norwegian” than artists like Prins Thomas and Bjørn Torske in Ben’s opinion. There is something there that has been carried through to this next generation and like the generation before it, Paper have been there spreading the gospel of this music like it did back in the nineties when Those Norwegians got Ben and the Manchester-based label hooked on that Norwegian sound for the first time. “They sent us a demo during the early days of paper”, remembers Ben “which was great so we signed them, and from there, the relationship with Norwegian music, has grown.”

Ben always get’s excited when a tape from a new Norwegian artist passes his way and when Marius delivered a tape to him after a chance meeting in Oslo, Ben “actually took the time to listen to it”, appreciates Marius. “When we had our first four tracks ready we were trying to get someone to listen to it and that’s not always easy”, but Ben not only listened to it, he signed them on and a new connection between Norway and Manchester was born with the De Fantastiske To leading the way for the next generation of artists, while carrying the tradition of Norwegian dance music inadvertently through to the present. Ben describes that tradition and the Norwegian sound as “grown up dance music” with “a lot of depth, a lot of soul” and something that’s always fitted neatly on the roster at Paper. It’s a sound and a scene the Mancunian producer / DJ turned filmmaker outlines in a forthcoming documentary Northern Disco Lights, which is “about how the dance scene started in Norway”, explains Ben. “In the far north of Tromsø, you had a bunch of kids, geographically isolated, making music that ultimately spread all over the world and changed the sound of Disco and House music.” The documentary traces a lineage from the origins of Norwegian Dance Music in Tromsø through artists like Bjørn Torske, Per Martinsen (Mental Overdrive) and Biosphere, which ultimately laid the foundation for the likes of Todd Terje, Prins Thomas and Lindstrøm today, and De Fantastiske To beyond them. “There is a lineage that you can follow all the way” believes Ben, with Ravi and Marius representing “the next generation” through the “doors (that) have been opened before them”. Northern Disco Lights essentially tells the story of how that “Norwegian Disco sound got distilled” and how it laid down the blueprint to music that has “an accessibility and a cheekiness” behind it. “There’s something strange and otherworldly, about Norwegian music”, says Ben. “There’s a broad range of influences. In Prins Thomas and Lindstrøm, I hear Dub, Krautrock, Disco and Techno which all goes into this big stirring pot. You’ve got these scenes started by a few individuals and they set the template, and that kind of explains the Norwegian scene to an extent.”

I wonder if De Fantastiske To follow this template or blueprint in their music and get the answer from Ravi. “I don’t think you can really escape that. I haven’t listened to what everybody’s been doing. For instance I got into Bjørn Torske pretty late, but he’s probably influenced a lot of things I was listening to.“ There’s always definitely been something accessible and cheeky to DFT, hiding behind the serious and professional execution of their music and looks to be subconsciously shaped by their environment and their tools. Part of the Norwegian sonic aesthetic I find in their music, is encouraged by their use of atmosphere in their productions. Its not quite spacey, yet there is a palpable sense of space in their music, where minimalist elements fill out the tracks with icy reverbs and glacial delays. Marius doesn’t “know if it’s intentional” but confirms they make “tracks with atmosphere” and Ravi suggests it comes from having “a lot of the same references when it comes to House music” when they work as a duo. Parallel to that is their love of the machines, which has also played a role in their development from 2014 and their first release Smile. With new equipment comes a new evolution for the duo, and both Marius and Ravi can agree the tactile experiences of their machines adds a new depth to the sound of De Fantastiske To today, encouraging me to echo the words of Ben once again, when he suggests that Monokrom is a step on for the duo. I learn from Ravi, that the rig they brought to Jæger that night is by all accounts the rig from the studio, and it’s in this live context that De Fantastiske To really shine, bridging the gap between them and their audience by trying to convey some of the fun they’re having in their creative process to their audience. “If the audience is having half as much fun as me, that’s still a success” to Ravi. Marius is a bit more tentative when it comes to performing live, with the experience an entirely new one from his sixteen years behind the decks. It’s a new challenge for Marius, and it puts the “studio in a nightclub setting” which means Marius and Ravi have to solely rely on their own music to get people to dance and can’t just switch out a record at the drop of a hat.

Standing on the sidelines watching the live show later that evening, I can confirm they’ve set out what they’ve intended and the people cheering along to Monokrom, I assume are in agreement. As if I needed further confirmation, I see Ben with that huge grin on his face, his years of experience picking up some of the best in underground Norwegian music once again hitting the ball out of the park with this latest release. Today, Paperecordings have hit a new stride in promoting Norwegian Dance Music abroad with releases scheduled for Diskobeistet, including a remix by Vinny Villbass and an album by Ravi’s Rave-Enka moniker. Paperecordings are also celebrating their 200^th release too this year with a Flash Atkins / Crazy P 12”, keeping De Fatnastiske To in good company in Manchester while in Norway they’ve got releases scheduled on Beatservice’s Prima Norsk series, Bogota records and a new EP on ISM records out soon.

2016 marks an exciting time for Norwegian dance music and the Monokrom release party almost stands as a catalyst to it all, it seems. With Flash Atkins and Ben making the trip for this special event there certainly is some new palpable electricity in the air around club music in Norway. For the moment it’s not something as concentrated as the Tromsø scene in the nineties or Disco through Full Pupp, but there’s definitely something there and in De Fantastike To and Paperecordings we are clearly looking towards the future and beyond the horizon.

In to the woods with Bjørn Torske

There’s an omnipresent force that’s been pulsing through Norwegian electronica since the nineties. It’s a passive force with very few obvious signs pointing in its direction, but it is there nonetheless. It’s in everything from the latest André Bratten record to the next Ploink release, and although I’ve been struggling to put a finger on what exactly it is about Norwegian electronica that ties it altogether, there’s a man that’s been at the centre of it for best part of twenty years that might be able to help. That man is Bjørn Torske, and he’s had a fair stake in this omnipresent force since the late nineties as both a DJ and a producer.

Bjørn Torske’s presence can be felt through everything today in Norway and even a new act like De Fantastiske To mark his influence on their work today. He’s had a significant hand in shaping Norwegian electronic music as one of the catalysts of the scene. Four albums and a host of EPs / singles have made a severe impression in the history of Norwegian electronic music, both on the dance floor and off it, but Torske remains a unique entity throughout it all, bringing a timelessness to his music to the point where Nedi Myra still sounds as fresh as the day it first came out on Tellé records almost twenty years ago. Like the artist’s physiognomy his music is without any indication of age and an integral part of this is the vast references he falls on both in the booth and outside of it, which has been inspired in large part by the community and DJs like Pål Strangefruit.

These influences and this eclecticism goes someway in explaining the thread that runs through all of Norwegian electronic music, but for a more information we have to go straight to the source. It’s with that we got in touch with Bjørn Torske via email before he arrives at Jæger on Friday for Bypåske med Skranglejazz. We sent a few questions to get a little closer to the origins of the artist and the scene and we uncover a few hidden Easter eggs in the process.

I’ve read somewhere that you’re a fan of The Residents. “Duck Stab” is one of my favourite albums and “The Commercial Album” is one of the greatest concepts ever brought to live in music in my opinion. What is it about the band that you like?

You mention Duck Stab and as far as I remember “Laughing Song” was the first Residents track I remember hearing that I instantly liked. Previously I had only heard their dance version of “Kaw-Liga”, which is okay but a bit too commercial in my view – I mean we’re talking about The Residents. Next I came across a mint copy of “Eskimo”, and the ball started rolling. As for your last question – what is there not to like about The Residents? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who stood on middle ground regarding them. Either they love them or loathe them. Anyway, for me their visual concept was perhaps the first thing I noticed, and then I’ve been diving into their sounds through the years. My favourite album is “The Big Bubble”. I saw them live some years back, which was a nice experience – maybe a bit too nice, in my honest opinion. The Residents after Snakefinger is like AC/DC after Bon Scott.

You’re also a big fan of field recordings I understand. How have these influences shaped your own music?

Field recordings have kind of always had a place in my idea of music and sound production. I mean it is a very easy trick to use when you want people on the floor to get into a certain mood. Everything from chirping birds or crickets through to thunder, sirens or a party crowd. I am also quite drawn to the sounds of trains, both in itself and as an accessory in a DJ setting. I remember my dad brought home a record with recorded steam locomotives when I was a kid. Not a “sound effects” record of sorts, but a record for people who enjoy listening to steam trains. It’s really high fidelity recordings, long tracks of just “puff-puff-puff”. It’s called “Steam in all directions” and was released on Argo. I still have it.

Tromsø must have been an interesting place for these influences to take shape around your music. Looking back on it, how did your environment play a role in your music and can you see its effects today on your contemporaries from that time?

Basically, as far as I’m concerned, the ultimate motive for getting into music during my youth in Tromsø was to escape the senseless boredom of that town. I had a good childhood there, lots of snow and room to play, but getting older I realised there was nothing to do but try to create some entertainment for oneself. So, with the conveniences of a vacant radio studio at night, there was a good foundation for experimenting, both with mixing and production. The main influences came via imported music that was hard, or even impossible, to find in Norway (maybe with the exception of Oslo). We were a little gang of friends who would travel to London and pick up what we could of acid/techno/house, which then was brought back and played relentlessly on the radio to the utter dismay of about 99.9% of the listeners.

There’s a sense of community that played a role too, I believe and artists like Pål Strangefruit had a tremendous impact on the scene then, especially as a DJ. How did you all influence each other to eventually create what became this remarkable “scene”?

For me, with the exception of the guys I knew from Tromsø, the encounters with other likeminded people came after I moved to Bergen in 1992. Here things were already starting to happen outside of people’s bedrooms, in a way that there was, albeit small, an actual scene where people would go out and dance. In comparison, Tromsø was still a place where dancing kind of meant asking the ladies for a little turn on the floor. A bit exaggerated yes, but the contrast was obvious. So there were other people with similar tastes, which of course meant exchanging ideas. I met Strangefruit around this time I believe it was when he worked in a record shop in Oslo called “Music Maestro”. He would play me a great variety of underground disco and boogie sounds from late 1970s / early 1980s, which were considered the blueprint for house.

It made sense, especially hearing the early works of people like Francois Kevorkian and Walter Gibbons. Pål had been buying these records since he was 13 I think, when he lived in Hamar. And then he had this younger friend who was at that time considered his pupil in a way, who would go on calling himself Prins Thomas. Back in Bergen we were busy flying over a lot of the DJs from the UK, among them Basement Jaxx, Harvey, Tim “Love” Lee, Idjut Boys, Simon Lee etc. – all very influential to the creative music scene both in Oslo and Bergen at that time. They used to play the Friday here in Bergen and the Saturday in Oslo or vice versa. Olle was doing his nights at Skansen while Jazid had their parties going every week. At some point you’d have Idjuts, Goldie and perhaps Derrick May in different spots in Oslo during the same weekend. Getting to hear these people in a domestic setting was very important for the scene as a whole, as well as quite consolidating for the creative drive of the local artists and DJs.

You probably get asked this a lot, but how has it developed for you and can you see any resemblance in what’s happening in Norway now, compared to back then?

Well, yes. I guess it has been quite the same now for many ways. Young people are “joining the force” all the time, picking their influences in very much the same way we did – while having the main influence from one certain genre (i.e. house). They add their own twist to it and push it forward.

While we’re in the present, there’s a clip of you playing live on Tromsdalen for the Northern Disco Lights documentary. Can you tell us bit more about that experience and what the purpose of it was?

It was just happenstance for me. I was having two gigs in Tromsø, with a few days in between. Terje and Ben where already there to work on the film, and they got the idea of having me doing a “live show” in the snow atop the mountain. It was exceptionally cold. I think perhaps it works visually, but taking sensitive equipment like a laptop outside in such temperatures is not very smart.

Having lived in Norway for just over a year now, I know that getting out into nature is quite an important part of Norwegian culture. Do you ever feel inspired by nature and how do you think it comes through in your music?

I’ve always been inspired by nature. As you say, it is part and parcel of the Norwegian lifestyle. Of course, being mainly into dance music, the floor and the dancers are the first inspiration. But yes, outdoor vibes play a role too. Being in a quiet space in the woods or mountains is very cleansing. Not least when I spend a lot of time with sounds pouring into my ears for hours.

I discern you have quite a sense of humour from previous interviews and track titles. Something that is quite true of a lot of people making music in Norway. Do you think there is something to that?

Not taking oneself too seriously is a good prerequisite for all DJs or artists who want to make a party happen. Regarding track titles, that is the last thing I ever think of when I’m making music. I usually write things down when I get a nice sentence or word in my head, and then use it a title later on. I remember making up titles in the post office as I was packaging a master tape to send off to England.

That sense of fun definitely creeps into your music, but there’s also often a serious dance element to your tracks too. Between field recordings and The Residents, what has been driving force behind you and the dance floor?

It is always about trying to create something new. Try to give people the impression they are in unknown territory, so to speak. Nostalgia is not my thing, even though I play a lot of “old” sounds. I don’t want a club experience to be too familiar sound-wise. This varies, of course. So there is room both for field recordings and The Residents. Think of it as a science fiction novel or an expedition into Amazon, and the anticipation of what kind of strange plants or creatures you’ll encounter along the way. Then, to your great surprise, there is a party happening somewhere far off in the jungle.

This gives your music a timeless quality in my opinion even though each release has slight differences. Did you approach each release differently and what is the underlining factor (except you of course) that ties it altogether for you?

As I said above – the lust for exploration. Trying out different methods to create music is an important factor. As technical possibilities are exceptional today, I usually create my own (contrived) limitations to the creative process. In the beginning, it was all about squeezing as much juice as you could out of a limited source of equipment – One AKAI sampler with 2 seconds recording time; an analogue keyboard; a Commodore 64-based sequencer; and a 12-channel mixer that took in signals from the local airport control tower. Today, on the other hand, recording time is unlimited, and most obstacles toward a technically “perfect” sound are removed. Thus there is, in my opinion, quite a danger that a lot of music will end up sounding the same, whereas earlier, one was subject to individual creative ideas to overcome quite banal problems. Like for instance, one MIDI cable may only be one meter long – so either the computer or the keyboard will have to be placed in a very awkward position to be able to have all the things connected. Problems like that are rare these days, with everything already hot-wired inside a computer. The personality that might get included in solving technical or procedural problems is obliterated. Of course, people said this when electric guitars came on the market, too.

Let’s get to your set for Friday. There’s an obvious eclecticism in your music, which hints at everything from Afrobeat to reggae and 90’s Techno. Is this something that you carry through to your sets too?

It is primarily my DJ sets from which this eclecticism comes. I always state I’m first and foremost a DJ, then a producer. My explorations in the booth and on the dance floor will often be transferred to the studio. Not so much the other way around, although a good studio session might influence parts of my selection later on.

Which brings me to my next question. You haven’t released any new solo material in recent years, but you’ve been active as a DJ. How do you find a balance between these two elements of your musical personality today?

I’ve been doing a good share of remixes, which I find nice to do, but it prevents me from really getting going with my own music. For me, the studio process of composing/producing my own music is tedious and time consuming. I’m not a musician, and I’m reluctant to involve too much “outside” force. I will only ask someone to play something, if I can’t manage it myself first. So a lot goes into trying and failing. Music production is also a typical week-thing for me, as opposed to DJ-gigs, which are for the weekends. Getting older doesn’t help much when you’re off on a flight from somewhere on a Sunday night and you’re supposed to be mixing a track on Monday morning.

So what’s in store for the near future?

A good run of DJ gigs coming up this year. And quite a good deal of studio time as well. Whatever comes out of it, will be heard through Smalltown Supersound. There is already a 12″ in the pipeline; it’s been handed over to Joakim at Smalltown. He will be able to tell you when it’s out.

I better leave you there before we cut more into your creative time. Is there anything you’d like however before we see you on Friday?

Well, people should come early and join in on the meal before they start dancing!

For the love of machines – The Trulz & Robin story so far

Trulz Kvam and Robin Crafoord share an intuitive bond when it comes to music, one that was initially informed through similar tastes, and eventually nurtured through the existence of Trulz & Robin. They have formed a single entity as this musical alias that transcends the individual in favour of the multifaceted project that’s as esoteric as it is diverse, calling on a wide range of influences, channelled into the singular voice of Trulz & Robin. They “are like one person with four arms in the studio; pushing buttons and tweaking knobs like a troll”, says Robin, “but we have different personalities so the output is very varied, it’s amazing to share this passion with another person.”

They have an instinctive understanding of their machines, from which they coax infectious dance music through raw feeling. The Scandinavian producers and DJs found a common ground in taste when in 1996 Robin met Trulz in a record store called Music Masetro. Robin would buy records from the latter and he soon realised they had something in common. “We had the same taste in music, and we immediately started throwing parties and DJing together.” An immediate bond formed over a shared love of House and Techno, which eventually led to the formation of a DJ duo and a series of parties at places like Månefisken. Robin remembers the scene not being “as mainstream as it is today”, but “very alive, and the few clubs that were there were super cool, underground places.” It’s here amongst others like g-Ha & Olanskii and Prins Thomas that Trulz & Robin would be established amongst the underground elite in Oslo. With Robin making the move from Sweden to Norway at the time, the two found a shared studio space where they integrated their equipment with other musicians’, and it didn’t take long before the duo carved out a unique production alias with a yet unheard sound echoing from their basement studio.

In a city dominated by House at the time, Trulz and Robin forged a distinct path as alternative tastemakers through a hybrid of Techno, House and Acid, anything that piqued their interest, and it soon became obvious they were destined for great things in the world of electronic dance music. Robin believes those earliest productions sounded like “fast forward Techno / Breakbeat something”, but at the same time it planted the seed for something that always grew and modulated between trends, a machine or just inspiration. In 1998 their fate was sealed with their first release, “Hypnojam” taken from the album, Mechanized World, which would see Trulz & Robin combine their experience as DJs and producers in the form of a mixed album. “I don’t know if it’s unique but it still have a fresh vibe listening to it”, says Robin of the mixed CD. Songs from the album saw airtime on BBC radio and cemented Trulz & Robin’s sound in which mechanised world is an appropriate signifier for their sonic aesthetic and their unique understanding of their machines, which is the most fundamental element to the group other than their personalities. Trulz & Robin love “how machines can make new styles of music and determine how you express yourself. We never learned how to play any instruments so for us the machines were the only way for us to compose songs. We still get goosebumps when we hear how much soul a drum machine can bring to a simple vocal track with some reverb.”

In this way, Trulz & Robin make music that stems from organic improvisation, refined in the circuits of the machine and what follows, are visceral executions of sophisticated tempers from the world of Techno, House and Acid. The duo’s productions feature a razor sharp polished edge that are the product of ingenuity as much as it is experience. They give their machines a glossy shine on the surface of the raw materials they work with and it can already be heard through early releases on the likes of Electronic Be and Planet Noise with tracks like “Acid Cake” and “She’s Dancing” cementing the sound we’ve come to know as Trulz & Robin early in their career. They continued work as DJs after establishing themselves as artists, but at the same time they became well known for their technically magnificent live shows. It saw them opening up for the likes of Peaches and playing for packed audiences at home and abroad, including a mainstream festival like Roskilde. Their live show became an integral part of the appeal of Trulz & Robin, especially considering that much of their music is born this way in the studio, and I had to ask how much one part influences the other. “We almost always make a new show for each appearance. Sometimes we reuse parts from earlier live sets, and usually we meet up in the studio and jam for hours to get in to it. We also realise that we always have at least one new album with any new live set so it’s a great way for us to make new tracks, as well as playing the songs that have just been released.”

In 2007 Trulz had to take some time off to have a family and Robin moved to Spain for a moment, and a temporary hiatus followed. Their presence was sorely missed in Oslo, but the duo were always destined to return and when they did in 2013, it came with a new determination and a whole bunch of unreleased material absolutely bursting to make its way out into the world. During their break they continued to produce music independently and Robin says it was “super inspiring to be releasing music” again after the hiatus, and since they have been “getting more and more studio time together”. Releases followed on Full-Pupp and Eskimo almost immediately after their break, while they also set up their own label, Cymasonic with long time friend and occasional production partner Arildo Lopez. Their EP Agent Acid marked one of the many highlights of this new label and cemented Trulz and Robin’s dominance in their field for this generation just as it did for the previous one. An album, Dance Music Therapy, followed again in the mixed format just as it did before with Mechanized World, and it seems Trulz &Robin have hit something of a creative stride today, a stride that can’t seem to be contained in just one project. A Techno-leaning project called KSMISK and electro-purist alias called Robomatic has also become part of the duo’s repertoire and has been presented in releases for Full Pupp, Ploink and their own Cymasonic label. Today Trulz & Robin are an unstoppable force, one that seems to no limits for either individual. While Robin is busy with various other projects like SYNC and Redrum, Trulz can often be found in the studio working on the origins of the next Trulz & Robin track. The duo is never that far away from a stage either, and synthesisers often crowd Robin’s hallway or dining room table, always prepped for that next performance. That also means they are constantly working on new music and we can look forward to some new Trulz & Robin material too. “Some Acid releases on Full Pupp and a KSMISK Vinyl on Cymawax“ is due with us this spring according to Robin, and “a new Robomatic mini album is also on its way.”

It’s been an exciting new era for Trulz & Robin, one that seems to have no end in sight and as they continue to go from strength to strength, their timeless music will undoubtedly find new ears and new audiences. It’s a remarkable feat for these seasoned artists, a new productive era, where their sheer capacity never suffers a lack of quality and each following release appears to trump the previous one. At the moment the Trulz & Robin story reads like the opening paragraph of the sequel, a story that looks set to better it’s predecessor while holding a firm grasp of the charm of its authors. This is the Trulz & Robin story so far, and what lies ahead is any one’s guess, but rest assured it will be eventful…

In the Booth with Daniel Vaz

Daniel Vaz is a regular face in Jæger, both behind the decks and in front of them. He is an integral part of the Jæger community and instinctively knows the vibe of the place inside and out. He’s an incredible personality, one whose talent seems to know no bounds and come through his DJ sets. We’ve interviewed him before and it was only ever gonna be a matter of time before we’d get the opportunity to track one of his sets for our in the booth series. This last Saturday the opportunity finally presented itself when Mr. Vaz stepped up for Te Dans. His eclectic set went afro-beat rhythms to the soothing tones of the deeper side of contemporary house, with the odd classic thrown in for good measure.

Stream an exclusive track from Prima Norsk 4

Beatservice Records’ Prima Norsk series was an underground dance music staple in Norway in the early 2000’s. The compilations, which numbered three in total gave people an opportunity to sample the very best in Norwegian electronica through artists like Bjørn Torske, Prins Thomas and Todd Terje – household names today in Norway and further afield. “When we released the CDs back in 2000 to 2005 there were a lot of things that were released on small labels on 12” which was hard to get hold of”, says Vidar Hanssen, the man behind Beatservice Records. “The inspiration with Prima Norsk was to make these tracks available to everybody.” During that period, the Prima Norsk series had a hand in much of the newfound interest in Norwegian electronic music and introduced many people to the sound of dance music from the region like no other media before it. “Prima Norsk introduced me to the local scene as a little kid,” says Marius Sommerfeldt of De Fantastiske To, who is helping Vidar re-launch the series. “I remember buying the CDs in my local record store in the suburbs of Oslo. The loopy, dubby, kind of DIY approach to making House music differed a lot from the more international big-room counterparts like Defected, Subliminal and Ministry of Sound.” Representing a new generation of artists in Norway, Marius and De Fantastiske To also stand as a testament to the influence of the series on a younger generation at the time. “I guess you can hear the influences in both my DJ sets and with Ravi in our De Fantastiske To productions. We try to recapture the organic, yet ‘deeper’ side of things.”

It was an endearing series, one which came to an end all too soon, and we’re happy to hear, will be making a return in 2016, although with a slightly different take on the original. “There’s a lot of stuff going on from various artists, but the main difference from then is that everything is available in the digital format”, explains Vidar about his reasons for re-launching the Prima Norsk series. “I hadn’t thought of making a compilation where I collect tracks that are already released, so I talked to Marius and we came to the conclusion to release a compilation with only exclusive tracks.” And as such the Prima Norsk 4 is finally with us and we get an exclusive stream of Vinny Villbass and Ando’s “Moneymaker” from the new compilation. The track embodies the spirit of the compilation, in which Prima Norsk 4 is a little bit of the original series mixed in with the new, featuring artists like Vinny Vilbass and Kohib – artists that featured on some of the first compilations – alongside up and coming artists like De Fantastiske To and Ando. They’ve all contributed new and exclusive releases to this latest chapter in the compilation. But why only now, Vidar? “Between 2005 and now, there have been releases, mostly centred around the Full Pupp label, so to do a compilation with half the artists from the Full Pupp label would have been pointless. But now there are a lot of things going on with many new artists releasing stuff on different labels, so I find the situation a bit similar to the early 2000’s.”

It’s not just about new artists however, but relevant artists participating in the underground – some of which who have always been there, happy to toe the line in the marginal aspects of electronic dance music. “I didn’t want to include artists like Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas this time around, because they are artists that have already found success”, explains Vidar of his selections. Instead he hopes to bring a renewed interest to new Norwegian underground music and the artists that established the scene, in the hope of shining a “spotlight on the scene”, in Norway and abroad, like it did during its first run. It’s contemporaneous with a renewed interest in underground House music from within Norway, one which has seen a healthy increase in club music and -culture and many new artists coming to the fore. “There is so much raw talent coming out from Norway these days and we wanted to showcase that in the ‘Prima Norsk’ way”, says Marius. “There aren’t that many labels focusing on underground club-music in Norway at the moment, so we wanted to build a platform for the artists, which we hopefully could build for the future.” A kickstarter campaign is under way to raise the funds for the physical releases, and both Marius and Vidar see the potential for more Prima Norsk compilations in the future. For the moment however their main focus is Prima Norsk 4 and they’ve been kind enough to give us a taste of what we can expect, before its eventual release.

You can pre-order your physical copy here through the kickstarter campaign.
Catch the De Fantastiske To Friday, the 19th of March at Jæger.

DJ Food with Jennifer Cardini

Jennifer Cardini doesn’t require an introduction. She’s been an integral part of the underground electronic dance scene since the nineties. She’s paid her dues on the DJ circuit, lugging record cases all over the world and if you ever needed proof of her prowess in the booth, it’s been documented in the past on labels like Kompakt. As a producer, she’s featured on the likes of Mobilee, and her own label Corresponadant, which itself is releasing a record a month today. Like I said, she doesn’t need an introduction, but she’s coming to Oslo, and after falling in love with the French DJs style last year during our “Into the Valley” pre-party, we’ve really been looking forward to inviting her back and couldn’t resist the temptation of calling her up to ask some questions about her DJing, her productions, the label, and André Bratten, but somehow we get sidetracked by food. It’s a Monday when I dial her up in her home in Cologne, and her buoyant French accent breaks through the receiver with, hello.

Hi Jennifer, how are you?

Like a Monday.

Were you playing over the weekend?

Yes, I was playing in Spain and if you don’t go to Madrid or Barcelona the situation for travelling in Spain can be such a nightmare as Iberia is not the most organised airline. You need to fly to Madrid and then you have to wait for hours to get on a little plane to fly to Gijon. But it was all worth it as the party was really nice.

It’s a shame about the travelling, because it’s such a lovely country.

Yes, totally! I went for a walk on the beach and it was beautiful but I have to say that I’m more an Italy girl than a Spain girl. Sorry (Laughs)

Do you go to Italy often?

Yes, Uh now you’ve got me on the subject of Spain vs. Italy. I actually don’t like Spanish food that much. I always find it’s really heavy, and you really need to know the good places, to find good food. For example when you go to Sonar, and you don’t know Barcelona, you’ll eat like shit the whole week. It’s all really greasy and In Italy you can eat almost anywhere and it’s way more delicate. But I’m half Italian so maybe that’s why, (Laughs)

We had this conversation with André Bratten, because we are really good friends. We made a list of best countries for food and Spain was not in my top ten.

I’d be interested to hear what André’s top ten was.

Well he tried to squeeze Norway in there, but I was like ‘hello dude’. I mean you’re very cute and we love you, but this is really not going to work.

Japan and Israel came first and then Italy and France and also Cambodian and Vietnamese food. I just came back from Japan when we had this conversation and I had the best dinner of my life, I nearly cried. It’s one of the best sushi places in Tokyo, but it was like 200 Euro per person, and that’s where I nearly cried (Laughs)

And speaking of André, how did you get to know each other?

I just bought the ‘Be a Man you Ant‘ album, and I was totally flushed by it. More by the tracks that were more electronica and slow compared to the dance floor hits that were Aegis and Be a Man you Ant. I wrote to him and told him I really liked the album and that I was running a label called Correspondant. We have this annual compilation and it’s a mixture between, artists from the Correspondant family and crushes that I have in the year, and for that reason I got in touch with him and was hoping he’d have a track for us. The communication came direct. We started exchanging emails and I booked him. And then it was love at first sight.

Trommer and Bass was such a big hit too.

Yes, I still play it. It’s one f those tracks: you know it’s a hit, but without all those tricky things of a hit. A hit can only be played for a certain amount of time and then it gets washed out. Trommer og Bass took like six months before Dixon, Harvey or Seth Troxler played it, from the release. It totally grew on the dance floors. I remember I played at this festival and everybody was playing the track suddenly, and it was in June and the compilation came out in March.

Have you heard Gode yet?

Yes, it’s brilliant. Everything he does is brilliant.

He’s incredibly talented.

And not only in a creative way, but also in a nerdy production way. When we got Trommer og Bass, I wrote to him and asked; ‘hey can we get a premastered version, because the version you sent has a compressor and limiter on it.’ He wrote back to me saying no it hasn’t, ‘that’s the premaster actually.’ The sound was so powerful; the sound was so big. I sent it to the sound guy that masters at kompakt and he wrote me back directly saying; ‘what the hell, who’s that’.

You’ll be following André with a dj set on Friday. Do you ever adapt your set to accommodate a live show?

Not really. Sometimes I plan a little bit of what I’m gonna do, and when I’m there it depends on how many people are there. I know André plays this type of Polygon Window kind of thing at the end of his set at the moment. I don’t play as hard, so I’m probably gonna start with an intro to try and change the vibe. I prepare a lot at home and I always think about other possibilities. There is what I like to do, and then if the setting is not perfect for that I adapt a little bit.

Are you still predominantly a vinyl DJ?

No. I do buy a lot of vinyl and I do go to a record store once a week and I encode a lot of stuff. I’m 42 now and I’ve played since I was twenty. I did carry vinyl around enough for a lifetime. I know people are having this vinyl over digital fight, but I find it so stupid. As a label we produce vinyl and always will, the idea that the only thing remaining is a mp3 on a cheap hard drive is too sad. Laurent Garnier plays digital; Barnt plays digital; Job Jobse plays digital. It doesn’t mean that they are less talented than before. Still I think it’s important to dig, because it gives your selection character, but I don’t believe it’s important to carry 25kgs of vinyl every weekend.

I ask, because when you pack vinyl it also limits the direction a night like this can go I assume?

Yes, and many times my bag got lost. I remember days when I was in my hotel room burning CDs because my records never arrived. I had to download everything I had in my record case by memory. Burning CDs for 5 or 6 hours; that’s something you don’t want to go through.

Well that’s why technology advances in the first place, to make things easier for us, right?

Yes, and I had huge back problems and they’re all gone now. I would go to a set with one of those big metal record cases without wheels; you know the ones we had in the nineties. I was carrying two of those.

Didn’t you have the luxury of the guard carrying your cases for you?

No. That goes with the position of woman in the electronic scene. (Laughs). I had to carry them alone. Sometimes it was really crazy, and I would pick them up from the belt, and go out to the lobby of the airport, and the promoter would greet me, but he would never offer to carry my cases. I would walk to the car, and would think; is there a moment he’s gonna offer to carry my cases? (Laughs)

I carried them for a while, so I’m really happy now when I can carry three USB sticks, a computer, and an external drive as a backup in case something happens.

While we were trying to set up this Interview, your manager mentioned that you were currently in the studio. What are you working on at the moment?

I’m trying to finish remixes, but the problem is that the label is taking up a lot of space in the time that I have in the week. So it’s going really slowly. Right now I’m trying to finish a remix for some artists for the label. I won’t tell for whom, because if it doesn’t happen, it sounds a little bit stupid. (Laughs) I’m also just playing around to see if something happens that I eventually want to bring out. I always consider myself more of a DJ than a producer. I know I want to make music more than I did before. Before I was really focussed on the DJ part, but I don’t want to stress with that.

You mention that your work a lot with the label. Does it distract a lot from making music, when you have to check emails and that type of thing?

Yes, that’s why it’s so very difficult to make music. I have a very good label manager and we are getting on a better rhythm that would allow me to shut down all communication for two days. We produce one record a month, and that’s quite a rhythm, but we don’t live in the same city, so that always makes things difficult.

Are you still based in Cologne?

Yes, but we are leaving in July. To Berlin.

Is that for accessibility?

Yes, because the label manager is there and the booking agency is based there. And I also have a lot of friends there. More than I do in Cologne. My wife and I just want to move. The social life is much more interesting there. When I was living in Paris, I was very involved in the queer scene and, without any disrespect; the queer scene in Cologne is terrible (laughs). So I’m also looking forward to taking a bigger part in the Berlin queer nightlife.

Getting back to being a label boss. How has it influenced your music and your sets?

I think it made me a better DJ, because you learn to listen to the music differently. I can feel that in my selection. It’s getting more into a direction that’s weirder. I actually have a selection now called weirdo, because I can’t really classify it. It’s House, but it’s not House; it’s Techno, but it’s not Techno. That comes from the label. Most of the things in there are things from my label, or things from Discodromo records or things from Optimo, which are leftfield and Techno at the same time. This has really shaped by my work at the label.

Do look for something that could both work on the dance floor and work on playing a record at home, for instance?

Yes, some tracks can cover both, and I actually like those. You know, on a big sound system it will totally destroy the dance floor, but at home it’s not aggressing you. That’s the case with the Mr TC release of Optimo tracks. It has this indie mood to it, which is quite suitable for home, but the bass is quite massive so it’s also quite danceable.

Almost like André Bratten’s music.

Yes, exactly.

It’s funny that you mention your taste in music, because recently I saw one journalist describe your sets as experimental Techno. Do you care to weigh in on that?

The description of my sets in the last twenty years is quite weird. First of all, I got this big sticker on my back which was minimal or Tech House, because of releasing music on Mobilee and releasing music on Crosstown Rebels, and everybody forgot that as a DJ I’m more of a Clone girl. This sticker on my back followed me for many years. I play so many different things. I play Chicago house classics. I play left field stuff. I’m not such a big fan of trying to pencil what genre will fit. I can play slow stuff’ I like some Berghain stuff; and I also like MCDE. In a two or three hour set I like to jump from one to the other. It can really go from Techno to House, from House to the weirdo folder.

Can you give us an example and give us a little preview of your set at Jæger on Friday?

I got some remixes from Lena Willikens that she did for Golf Channel. The track is really making me crazy.

…She was at Jæger last weekend actually.

Yes, I know. I really like her. We are starting a party together called nicotine, because we both like to smoke a lot….

I also finished a compilation that would be finished in June so I guess probably some Correspondant stuff like the new Man Power, and a new Vox Low. I also got a as promo a new Digitalis and there is a fantastic remix with Roman Flügel who is also one of my favourite producers and remixers, so that might also make it’s way to Jæger. Also Benedikt Frey who is producing outstanding stuff at the moment and a lot of stuff from Dark Entries probably.

Maybe we should not give too much away, and leave some surprises for the audience on Friday…

I’m really looking forward to coming to Jæger and hanging out, and this is my last gig before I finally go on holiday, so I’m really going to enjoy it.

Excellent, we’ll try our best to get you into that holiday mood.

Dancing with Della

Kristina Dunn is at an interesting point in her career. Previoulsy established as one half of DJ- turned production duo, No Dial Tone, she is currently embarking on a new chapter in her artistic life as a solo artist and DJ under the alias, Della. Having made an inimitable mark on the dance music scene with No Dial Tone and their releases on Derrick Carter and Luke Solomon’s label Classic Music Company, alongside the likes of Herbert and Isoleé, Della has now arrived and she is “getting back to where it all came from – understanding where the root of it all is.” It’s explained in its simplest terms as a pair of decks and a dance floor.

Della might have actually experienced more in House music and Rave culture than most would even begin to understand. Like many of her contemporaries, it doesn’t start with a studio or a pair of decks, but rather on the other side of the booth, with the likes of Hipp-e and Halo bringing this thing called House music to the rural parts of Minnesota. “My first rave experience was in a barn made for square dancing. It was the coolest place to dance ever, because it had this polished hardwood floor and you could just slide around. A dancers paradise.” But it was a DVS1 party in Minneapolis that stands out as the catalyst for most of it, it’s here where Della “learned to dance“ and appreciate the music, she would adopt wholeheartedly as her own. This was a time when dance music was still an underground thing, held at secret locations, sneered at by the general public, and marginalised cultures that made it the scene it is today. At a time when a rave event was exactly that, an event, “we would sew costumes for days leading up to the party, and then set off on a mission to go find the ticket office, which would send you to the map point, and eventually to the venue where someone like Plastikman would be playing. It was a whole other experience, which made the venture so much more crazy,” remembers Della, who marks these events as an important chapter in her own development as an artist.

She might not have started DJing during that time, but it certainly planted the seed and when she moved to LA in the early part of the 2000’s, she also made the move to the booth. She settled in LA at a time when “corporations started getting involved in Rave Culture” throwing massive events that gathered unwanted attention from authorities in LA. “These massive events, and the police involvement in them, blew out the light for ‘dance music’ in Los Angeles and House music went underground again.” Della, like her contemporaries, retreated along with it, moving back into warehouses and small clubs with DJs like Marques Wyatt, Mark Farina, Garth, Heather, you name them, playing on a regular basis. LA’s leading House record store at this time was Wax Records, which was Doc Martin’s shop, “and that’s who I hung with – The Wax boys. I was then later introduced to a group of DJs from Dallas, JT Donaldson, Lance DeSardi, Cle Acklin, and Brett Johnson, which then led the trail up to San Francisco and the Sunset Crew, Solar & Galen. DJs that influenced me in ways that I am grateful for today.”

It’s around this time that she met partner in No Dial Tone, Vibeke Bruff, and the sound of Scandinavian electronic music was introduced to her. “I was really into this Scandinavian sound, Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, Rune Lindbæk, it was something fresh and new and different than the American House sound. I remember one of my first records was Ost & Kjex, Eaten Back To Life EP, with this amazing Maurice Fulton remix of ‘Have You Seen The Moon In Dallas.’ I played that record on repeat. It’s still so good to this day!” LA was a time that marked the beginning of Della’s creative artistic career, one in which she would move to Oslo; establish No Dial Tone and a studio; and eventually release records on labels such as Classic Music Company, Leftroom, and Twirl. No Dial Tone’s blend of Scando-Pop, electro, House, and Della’s vocals, was welcomed with open arms during a period that would see acts like Miss Kitten and Ellen Allien rise to fame through a scene/genre that would eventually be coined electroclash by the media. For a DJ it meant no taboos were in play and for Della it meant that she could “mix this sound of Space Disco with something like Patrick Cowley and XTC” – a rebellious disregard for any kind of generic signifier that would play a fundamental role in the appeal of No Dial Tone too later.

But then again, I didn’t come out to Della’s studio – where she produces her organic skin care line, RUE – to talk about No Dial Tone, I came to talk about Della, and although her previous project did make a significant impression on her career, Della seems to be an artist on the rise, remaining true to herself and her origins. “When I split from No Dial Tone I really started solely focusing on my DJing because that is what I really want to do. I’ve reconnected with a lot of people that influenced me when I was younger. With No Dial Tone, it was more about getting records out and promoting ourselves, and now… I just want to play. I have no idea where this is going, I am just enjoying the ride.” It’s a very interesting situation for an artist that’s succeeded in establishing a career as one incarnation, only to have to “start form the bottom again.” It’s been “a challenge” in Della’s own words, since the two incarnations are “two different things”, but it’s a challenge she is all too happy to accept. “I think a lot of great things are on the way, and it’s exciting.” Some collaborations are in the works with several profound producers, we can’t mention just yet, with Della taking care of both vocal- and production duties. As such, it doesn’t deflect from her work in the DJ booth at all. “I personally don’t enjoy the studio that much, because I enjoy being behind the turntables and I enjoy listening to- and finding tracks, rather than using those hours to sit on a loop and make a beat out of it.“ This passion for DJing has led to some great moments where Della was featured alongside names like Ellen Allien and Magda, names that have inspired a younger Della and now have become peers. One highlighted gig, includes playing alongside Doc Martin at the Miami Music Conference with the House legend looking over her shoulder, saying; “What is this track, it’s so hot!” Playing alongside artists like these has started rubbing off on Della. “For me the preparation of the sets has changed a lot. I play from the heart, but I also put a lot more planning into what I want to play.“ Della spends hours sourcing and putting tracks together when playing with someone like Ellen Allien, with the organisation of the set becoming a key part of handing it over to the next DJ. “It pushes you to another level. You don’t want to match them, but you want to make sure that the two of you really work together with the flow of the night.” In the process she finds new music that she might not have come across before, and as such it becomes a time consuming practice, but also the mark of a hard-working DJ.

With this in mind, it’s hard to believe that Della, an artist that’s paid her dues at an international level, is still subject to the kind of adversity that women still face in the booth. It’s a dark cloud that still looms over the DJ world and it’s only natural that it should be approached through an extensive interview like this. “It’s not easy being a female in a very male dominated industry.” She’s had punters approach her, saying things like: “I didn’t know girls could play like this, I didn’t know girls could be DJs.” She does however also see a silver lining to the contrast where a lot of women are happy to hear a female DJ play. “I think girls are more dancers, and they feel a lot more comfortable on the dance floor when there’s another woman behind the decks.” Della believes there is a “different type of connection” in this situation, and as a DJ that started off like the women on the dance floor, she talks from experience. “When I look back at rave culture when I was young, the dudes would always be around the DJ booth, watching the DJ like hawks, and all the girls were on the dance floor dancing. And that was my experience too. I didn’t care who was playing what, I just wanted to dance and be free. Maybe that’s why there’s still a division.“ I wonder if she, and a person like Ellen Allien would ever discuss these matters while handing the night over to one another, and was happy to find that they do, and that the subject only goes to cement a bond between female DJs. “Ellen Allien’s reaction was, ‘we need to stick together.’ There’s a lot of women DJs out there, but quality music is quality music, and it’s not a male versus female issue, but there’s definitely not the level of respect a lot of female DJs should be getting.”

I can think of Della as an example of just such a DJ. Having heard Della on the decks in the past at Jæger (last year’s Øya Festival specifically stands out here) I can say Della is an excellent DJ, and has a remarkable ability to play the music you didn’t realise you wanted to hear. It’s music you want to dance to and there’s always that human element to her sets that she brings through with her love for vocals. In Oslo, her American influences are clearly felt through her selections and marks as something very unique on the scene. After hearing her story and knowing what she’s like at the decks, I can put it all into perspective too as something stems from her origins on the dance floor and flows through her experience as a DJ in LA and Oslo. It seems also that regardless of some adversity, her star is incrementally on the rise with sets lined up alongside Erol Alkan and a new monthly radio broadcast spot on Deep House Radio. She’ll be well on her way to achieving what she’s done before and the name Della will soon be just as familiar as No Dial Tone.

To hear more, check Della out here:

https://soundcloud.com/delladunn

https://www.mixcloud.com/delladunn

https://www.facebook.com/djdella

Catching up with Prosumer

Prosumer is more that just an artistic moniker for German DJ Achim Brandenberg. The nominative determinative is a way of life for the artist, in which he both produces and consumes media between his creative output and his skill set as a DJ. Very few people can lay claim to the title of Prosumer quite like Brandenberg, who had his start in music amongst the shelves of Berlin’s most famous record store, Hardwax. He understood early in his career the importance of immersing yourself completely in your chosen art form before attempting a career in the desired field, and it’s something that’s carried through to his work as a DJ and producer to this day. He’s esoteric knowledge of music is multi-dimensional and he never limits himself to any era or genre in dance music, catering to broader tastes with his idiosyncratic personality tying each set together.

His DJ work sees him travelling each weekend and while he’s productions are rare, calculated releases, they are great examples of a perfectionist at work. It all stems from a deep-seated appreciation for music and sharing this appreciation with like-minded people. As a result, Prosumer’s music has featured on labels like Playhouse and Running Back, while his skills behind the decks has been well documented by the likes of Fabric’s Mix series. It won’t be the first time he’s visited us in Oslo, and his sets at Jæger in previous years are still talked about today around the water cooler. He’s very much the DJs DJ, with an acute knowledge of the dance floor, which sees him in tune with the atmosphere of the evening, and it always comes as a surprise to find out it stems from a very introverted personality. It makes us all that more curious to find out what drives the man behind Prosumer and so we wasted no time in calling him up at his home in Edinburgh.

Hello Achim, How have you been?

Pretty good. I had a bit of a wild tour and now I’ve got some days off from DJing and I had friends visiting this weekend. This week I’m going back to work, so I have my first gigs Friday and Saturday. Tomorrow I go to London to see Floating Points live and I’m looking forward to that.

His album was so good?

I love the album, and what I’ve heard so far from the live show has been amazing. I think he cannot do anything that is not amazing. Once, when I was playing plastic people we had food before at his house. Sam (Shepard) was cooking, and he got up at six in the morning, to start a BBQ, and it was amazing food. He can never do anything mediocre.

He’s also a neuroscientist if I’m not mistaken?

Yeah

And he designed an amazing DJ mixer last year too?

Exactly, on the side. (Laughs) He’s a fabulous producer and DJ and he’s ten years younger than me. He makes me look bad in front of my parents! (Laughs)

How long have you lived in Edinburgh?

It’s been three years now.

So you’re quite settled?

Right now it feels great and I don’t see a reason for moving in the future. The thing is the balance I get here, that I don’t get in Berlin anymore. It takes me 20 minutes to get to the airport. I live in the city centre, but it’s quiet like somewhere in the countryside. It’s just perfect.

When I think of Edinburgh I immediately think of the Edinburgh festival. Comparing the creativity, are you influenced any differently in Edinburgh in relation to Berlin?

It’s much smaller than Berlin, but I wouldn’t have lived in Berlin for 15 years if I didn’t enjoy the grittiness of it, and Edinburgh has a bit of that, but differently. It’s a very creative city. Look at the output of firecracker records – what Lindsay is doing there and the guys releasing music on the label. It’s a creative city for the area I’m working in and not just for the Edinburgh festival and comedy.

Your name Prosumer, which is about producing music as you consume it. Has the idea behind that changed at all after Berlin?

I haven’t thought about it at all. I don’t have much time for producing nowadays. I’m a terribly slow person. What takes me the most time, is basically being able to take a step back. I need to have the feeling that I’ve had enough time to think about stuff, and to be honest; I don’t have that at the moment. Making music is always an expression of your self and for me the big thing is always wondering, is there something that only has a meaning for me, or is it something that has the potential to be out there. So I always wonder, does it only make sense in my head, and then I need the distance and I don’t get that as much.

Do you find yourself more active /creative when working with other people then, like you’ve done in the past with Murat Tepeli and Tama Sumo in the past?

No. Of course it’s inspiring to work with others. I think it pushes me to bypass what I just described, the thing that only makes sense in my head. It is already filtered, because I worked with somebody else on it, so that makes it easier to put stuff out.

So, for you it’s important to makes something that’s not only for yourself, but will bring others enjoyment too?

Sometimes you have this thing where your head gets really really excited about something and then you find out that everybody knows about it already, and it totally blows your mind, because to you it’s new, but to everybody else it’s like whatever. It’s maybe a bit like that. God, it sounds horrible, how complicated am I (laughs). Is it about not embarrassing myself? I don’t know. It’s something like that. Is it in my head or is it a thing.

And is it the same for you when you DJ, because I’ve heard you describe yourself in other interviews as an introvert when it comes to playing music?

I’m still terrified when I DJ, but the thing is it’s music of others. It’s easier for me to trust that, because it’s music that moves me, otherwise I wouldn’t play it. I think it has the potential to do the same thing for other people, so it’s much easier. I don’t second-guess that as much as I second-guess my own production.

Is DJing essentially a way then for you to communicate directly with the audience as an introverted personality?

Lindsay from Firecracker, he describes DJing as being a bit like the Wizard of Oz. So, it’s all smoke and mirrors and, in a way, it is like that. With playing the music I love it is a very personal thing and it is a very intimate thing, and I have this smoke and mirrors in front of me, but I can communicate with the audience indirectly.

It’s more of a feeling that you communicate.

Yes, you resonate with the music and ideally others do as well. The same thing that makes you smile in a record will make somebody else smile on the dance floor.

Another thing that came across in other interviews is that you have a penchant for guilty pleasures, like karaoke, pub quizzes and most importantly deep fried Mars bars.

O, that’s what everybody refers to as typical Scottish cuisine, which is a bit insulting, because we definitely have better food than that. Deep fried Mars bars, I’ve had twice in my life. One time I had it and I thought it was amazing. I was drunk and it was the best thing ever because it was greasy and sweet. And then I had it sober, and I’d have to say, I didn’t enjoy it so much.

Have you ever seen a Scottish person eat one?

I have, but definitely not when they were sober.

Do you have any guilty pleasures when it comes to music at the moment?

I just had visitors and my friend started humming a song. It took us two days to figure out what it was. The three of us were signing along, humming along to some apps on the phone to find out what it was, and couldn’t for a day and a half. It’s a song from 1968 and the band is called, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch. The song is called “Legend Of Xanadu”.

Wow, that’s quite a title. Do you ever sneak stuff like that into your DJ sets?

I wouldn’t with that track. Yesterday we were joking about it, because there’s one sound in there, a bit like a metallic whip. It’s a very unusual sound that is actually quite interesting, but I probably wouldn’t go as far to sample it and use it in a way. It depends on the night, but there is stuff I throw in that might seem a bit silly.

Do you prepare your sets like that, or does it all just happen in the moment for you?

Sometimes I have an idea of what could happen, but usually that’s over-thrown by a million factors. Of course, since I don’t have all my record collection with me, it is a preplanned in a way, but in my bag there’s always ten records where I will know it’s very very unlikely that they will get played, but if I get to some point where I could get away with playing them, it could be fun.

Do you have any set ideas for your upcoming set at Jæger, any records that you’d like to play?

I spent three weeks at home and I was listening to new records, but also going through some old stuff, so a pile has been building up here of stuff that I hadn’t played yet, or haven’t played for a while. I think some of those will definitely survive in the bag until I go to Norway. I remember the club being intimate and dark, and gives me some idea of what to play.

The Baron of Techno – Dave Clarke

It’s no small feat when a radio legend like John Peel refers to you as the Baron of Techno, a title Dave Clarke has certainly owned over the years. The jock should’ve known, he was a connoisseur of music after all and there wasn’t a trend or a mainstay of a genre he couldn’t spot a mile away, and he saw Dave Clarke’s star rising, before most of us even knew of the artist. If Peel saw it as such it would have been true and calling Dave Clarke the Baron of Techno is truer today than he could have ever known back then. Back then Clarke was scrawny idealist with no money (he still has the picture to prove it), but a talent for machines and this music we call Techno that labels like R&S had no problem seeing in the young Clarke. Today Dave Clarke is a pillar of Techno, and where others have compromised Dave Clarke has remained headstrong in his pursuit of bringing a serrated edge to the genre. He follows a punk approach when it comes to kind of music he proliferates and produces, and although he’s best known as a Techno juggernaut, he’s able to easily drift into the neighbouring music worlds like Electro without missing a beat.

After taking a short hiatus from recording music in 2006, Dave Clarke has returned with a remix album in 2016 that will be followed shortly after by new and original material in the months to come. During his hiatus he was hardly a slouch, touring extensively as a DJ from his newly adopted home in Amsterdam, bringing the raw edge of Techno to ever bigger audiences. Always the staunch supporter of new electronic music, during this time he also established “Dave Clarke presents”, a cutting edge event at the heart of Amsterdam’s ADE that sets the bar for large scale Techno events the world over. It’s behind the decks where Dave Clarke is at his most uncompromising. Techno’s most ardent provocateurs appear tame in the light of Dave Clarke set and you can be assured one of the most unadulterated experiences of your life. In all these aspects he truly owns the title as the Baron of Techno and nobody could possibly take that away from him.

We caught up with Dave Clarke through an email exchange before he travels to Oslo to try and get a glimpse of what makes this Baron of Techno tick over lately and what we could possibly expect from his set next week in our basement.

As a purveyor of Techno that’s seen the genre go through many phases, what stuck as its major appeal throughout the years?

The true Techno just has a feeling that, for me, cannot be equalled, it is both exciting and challenging to the status quo, a truly edgy form of music that has adapted with technology to become even more vibrant.

Trend aside, how have you evolved alongside the genre as an artist and more specifically a DJ?

As a person I am far more open to other art forms than just music, which is surprising to me, I think Amsterdam opened something up inside me.

There was picture of a young Dave Clarke that cropped up on social media last year, mentioning how you lived from hand to mouth at the start of your career. What do you think is the reality for new artist in the same position today?

Poverty is poverty, drive is drive, each generation has their hoops to jump through in the name of being an artist, to get into making music is a lot cheaper these days – finding out about info, about how to make it, or your favourite artists is also a lot easier. But then making a living out of being credible is probably a lot harder and a dream that seems even more unobtainable than in my experience.

What would you have said to the person in the picture if you could?

Nothing as I got here career wise, country wise I would have said that was a German Flag not a flag from Belgium (which I thought it was).

You’ve been quite outspoken on the music industry in the past. Have you seen it change for the better at all since then?

A very long question, there are pro’s and cons in all changes, the better ones are the technology that is available to us now is what we dreamed of, we were before powerful computers, internet, connectivity, but those very things also give us ADHD and distractions.

Would you say there’s still a fundamental flaw in the music industry, especially in light of electronic music’s current dominance?

The flaw is that everyone now has to be on the road to earn a decent living compared to 15 years ago, music is a freebie now to sell a tour for most people.

Since 2006, you’ve been on a sort of hiatus from recorded music – not considering remixes and re-issues – as a solo artist. What made you go on hiatus?

I got divorced, changed country, wanted to wait and see what would happen with the recording industry and had to start a new studio from scratch.

Do you ever feel the urge to get back in to the studio as a solo artist and what would an original Dave Clarke production sound like in 2016?

There are quite a few albums due to come out in the next period, the first one “Charcoal Eyes” will be a compilation of all my remixes from Soft Moon, APTBS, I am Kloot, Gazelle Twin, Placebo, and I will be heavily in the studio this year.

You’re a prolific touring DJ too and I imagine at some point it all becomes quite a blur. How do you keep things interesting for yourself?

I love (most of) the gigs, that keeps me going plus not staying very long in any place but always quick to return home, I love being home, the whole idea of touring non stop and being away for a few weeks is not for me, so being grounded helps me a lot.

I had the pleasure of catching your set at ADE a couple of years back and what struck me was how vigorous and dominant it was, to the point where Karenn (who are by no means a subtle act) almost sounded a bit weak in light of it. It’s something that you’ve also displayed a lot in your recorded works. Where does this attitude come from?

I do not know any other way, I grew up a bit late for Punk, but I definitely learnt from it, I just want to own the stage and the people for those few hours one of my friends says I look like a boxer before a match…I hardly speak to people before a gig as i am there to DJ not socialize, I could not be a Tech house dj, I think coming from the UK also adds something to the spice

And what new music best exemplifies this attitude for you?

Just listen to my radio show called White Noise, I play so much new music there.

* Dave Clarke joins Karima and DJ Nuhhh in our basement for Retro on the 25^th of February

Magnus International, The Happy Amateur

A wave of bodies eddy up and down through the vast music cathedral that is Blå, pulsing to and fro to Magnus (Sheenan) International’s remix of Sex Judas’ “Big Sex Thing”. The Norwegian producer’s visage is illuminated in a pale blue from behind the computer screen where he twirls his red bushy beard like some sneaky wizard of Oz ready to pounce on his unsuspecting audience with yet another dance-floor filler. We’re clearly not in Kansas anymore. We’re in Oslo and this is raw Norwegian House music at it’s best. If you’re still not convinced, Prins Thomas is there to persuade you, lurking behind Magnus, shooting fleeting glances over to the computer screen, a smile creeping across his face whenever Magnus plays something off the new album, Echo to Echo. It’s why we’re all here after all, at the official release party for Magnus’ debut LP. Echo to Echo has been two years in the making, and sees Magnus International step back in time to the nineties, capturing that raw feeling of the records he grew up with and those that inspired him towards a career in music. It’s actually quite appropriate that we are here at Blå and that Magnus is behind the controls manipulating the music in a live context, because that is exactly how Echo to Echo was born, with Magnus jamming out each session until he got the perfect take; a very hands- on and physical approach. “It’s always good to feel like you work with music”; says Magnus a couple of weeks earlier when I visited him at his studio.

The attic space is stuffed with the kind of equipment that would make any electronic music geek salivate at thought of touching it. A modular synthesiser sits idly on a table while a Super Jupiter hums in the background. There’s an old MPC on a shelf and tucked away behind layers of gear that’s currently out of use, while an Octatrack just lies under an old box, patiently waiting to be touched. But Magnus couldn’t care less and is nonchalant when it comes the importance of these tools. “The freedom to work wherever you want to work is greater than this fucking equipment.” Magnus is not one to indulge any romanticism around the machines, because like the producers that popularised the machines when they first came around, they are only there to fulfil a purpose and functionality is more important than myth for the artist. It boils down to “a state of mind“, and for Magnus that state of mind can come at any time, even when he’s in his “underpants at home” staring a laptop screen. On the record however he uses “all the equipment”, refining those initial ideas later in the studio using the plethora of machines, going through “takes and takes and takes and takes“ until he lands on the best possible solutions, all in the hope of answering the question “how can this easy thing feel more organic?” This is in part where Echo to Echo gets its raw edge from, and something that Magnus really brings to light through his live performances. It’s something that’s ingrained in Magnus from those early influences of his youth and listening to the type of music that was defined by the very same necessity he likes to indulge. “I think a lot about outsider art when I think about House music, because DJs and early producers, and myself, have never been schooled in this music. There’s the DIY culture behind it.” It’s exactly here where Echo to Echo gets much of its charm. The syncopated hats, the break-beats, the pads and those slinky Juno bass lines, are all entrenched in the DIY aesthetic of dance music’s earliest practises. “The DIY thing is what speaks to me and I think it speaks to a lot of people. Modern house music would have never been the same if the happy amateur hadn’t made those mistakes.”

It was those happy amateurs that inspired Magnus in his pursuit on Echo to Echo to capture some of the music he encountered as a youth, listening to mixtapes like “Detroit’s third Wave.” It’s through compilation albums like that where a young Magnus fell in love with tracks like Claude Young’s “Impolite to Refuse” and particularly the atmosphere they created on those early releases, padding the textures with light synthesised sonic landscapes. “What seems to be the common denominator are the pads and strings. It’s the Carl Craig strings. I was always thinking about making a ‘songs of the revolutionary art’ type album, but I think I failed. I’m not Carl Craig talented.” Magnus breaks out in a hearty laugh as he says this while reclining back in his studio chair. He pulls out Detroit’s Third Wave from a bag of records lying on the floor against the wall, referring to the Impolite to refuse as the Petri dish from which all his music evolved. “A lot of my stuff comes from that song, it really blew my mind.” It’s not necessarily the type of reference you’d expect from a Norwegian artist if you follow the music media’s advice.

I’ve really been surprised lately to see how much of the music media still grasp at the last shreds of the Nu-Disco label when they refer to Norwegian music and especially to Echo to Echo. As Magnus mentions more of the influences on the album – artists like LFO and Carl Craig – it’s obvious that his debut album is so much more than a sub-genre. Echo to Echo is ingrained in a simpler time when “everything just melted together” says Magnus and sub genres hardly existed. “We have so much more music now that you can be rather more snobbish about your style. Ironically the things that were eclectic have become a sub-genre. We have made a monster!” Magnus couldn’t be happier when Echo to Echo confuses journalists. “When I get asked the question, is this really a House album, I get really happy.” His intent was in part to get back to that time, before labels like nu-disco and Tech-house existed, a time when genres occupied merely two, perhaps even one dimension, and all the eclectic stuff in between were appreciated just for that reason. “What does Nu-Disco really mean? You can play Trance and pitch it down and it would be Nu-Disco. Genres in the old days were there to sell music magazines, and now it seems to be a way to index things on Beatport.” But they are here, and it leaves us asking what would Magnus International classify his album as on Betaport? “Balearic Downtempo. That’s where all the guys that mislabel their albums end up.”

Magnus again breaks out in a hearty laugh, that now appears like an echo from a few months earlier, when he and a few friends were sitting in Jæger’s courtyard, trying to come up for a name for his debut LP. “I make music and I call it like ‘test 4/8’.” After some unhelpful titles like “Magnus International’s Schlager hits”, Magnus eventually settled on Echo to Echo as a reference to Arthur Russell. “World of Echo was always a favourite album. I really loved the quote (and I’m paraphrasing here): ‘In the future dance music will not have drums, it will have space.’ I find it to be so poetic and I thought I would have a word play on it. It’s also an homage to the Underground Resistance. It’s a crossbreed between galaxy to galaxy and the echo.” At the time Magnus’ was unaware of R. Kelly’s “Echo”, and we soon drift off into conversation about the controversial American R&B star, which raises another interesting fact about Magnus, and something I hadn’t realised influenced the artist as much as it did. “He’s like a professional wrestler. That’s the other thing; I really wanted to do only wrestling names for the album. Everything I know about promotion and talking, I learnt from wrestling.” Magnus often spends Mondays in front of his computer screen watching the three-hour weekly show, and when he can’t invest the time, he’ll catch up on the latest wrestling news through podcasts, from all over the world. “If you want to be a hipster, wrestling fan, you watch the Japanese stuff.” His favourite wrestler is Japanese acrobat Shinsuke Nakamura whose “character is like a coked-up eighties Michael Jackson impersonator” and I get a clearer impression of Magnus and the entertainment value he appreciates. It’s something I can discern coming through on Echo to Echo too in fact.

Titles, like ‘Zap the Cat’ and ‘A man called Anthony’ are playful yet seriously engaging, much like a wrestler that’s happy to break his back doing stunts for entertainment value. Every track on the album contains some of that quirky charm Magnus is known for and even though we get the odd dance floor track in the form of ‘Synths of Jupiter’ what we get in the end is a listening album that can be enjoyed at home as much as it can liven up the dance floor. “This is music I can do my dishes to.” Although Magnus’ initial sights were set on creating an album of “Dixon” tracks, we was soon persuaded otherwise, by none other than Prins Thomas’ unwavering experience and learning that the track Dixon actually played was “the ambient interlude, Zap the cat – that’s the one he liked.” He cut down some tracks to fit the album format as a result and in his work he soon came to realise that the “more you try to make that club sound, the more clichéd the track gets.”

It’s fortunate for the listener that Magnus came to this realisation, because this gave us the album experience on Echo to Echo that would’ve not arrived on its own through 11 “dance floor” tracks. It’s the most rounded Magnus could’ve been for an album, but it’s also just one of the many ingredients that made it such a significant album. As I speak to Magnus and I witness his live show the following week, I realise that Echo to Echo is not just merely the result of Magnus stepping back into time as an homage to the music grew up with, but it’s more like a convergence of various aspects of the artist coming together as a form of expression, and isn’t that what a debut album should be every time? In Magnus’ case it’s the DIY aesthetic he loves, alongside his focus on the live aspects of the music – the spacey synths and airy strings. It also features the influence of Prins Thomas, guiding him towards, the shorter more concise delivery of songs like “Metroid Boogie” and growing up outside of trend, where almost everything electronic fell under the House umbrella and eclecticism was finding something different within those parameters. Echo to Echo can even lay claim to some influence from Magnus’ favourite past-time, wrestling, and when all these elements converge, it’s not just an album that paraphrases the history of electronic music, but more accurately an Echo of the artist behind the music. Echo to Echo is Magnus International, wrestling fan; the live computer musician; and above all the happy amateur.

* Now go buy Echo to Echo here.

Stream Rave-Enka’s Rett i Kroppen (Track by Track)

Rave-Enka (Ravi Burnsvik from the Fantastiske To) is on the cusp of releasing his sophomore effort on Paper Recordings, following 2015’s Påfulgen. It continues the machine aesthetic set forth on that release where musical sensibilities are transposed to the machine aesthetic, bridging the gap between genres to find Rave-Enka’s instinctive talent behind the tracks. It sees Rave-Enka go from strength to strength through three tracks with a polished production hand and an effervescent energy. In the following article we go track by track with Ravi while you listen to Rett-i-Kroppen in this exclusive stream.

Rett i Fletta

Is the title a reference to Prins Thomas’ label?

Not intentionally! It’s a great label though. The title is a reference to an expression that’s been floating around in the studio.

How would you describe this EP to a listener that doesn’t know your music?

It’s electronic music with inspiration from Brazil, 70s disco and some Jazz.

How does this track relate to the track later on the EP, Rett i Kroppen?

I made them both in succession, over a day or two, and was originally planning an EP with just those two tracks.

You’re quite a talented keyboardist, and I noticed there is an ascending – descending chord movement during the latter half of the track, but for the most part it feels a lot more sequenced than your stuff with Marius. How did your skills at the keys play a role in this release?

Apart from some leads and arpeggios here and there, not all too much really. Part of the plan with this EP was trying to move away from using the piano as a base.

Honningen

I know on Påfulgen you were essentially sampling various eras around dance music. What were the essential ideas behind this EP?

I guess you could argue that it’s the same idea, just with expressions from other decades. Also, groove. The three tracks share similarities in groove, I feel.

How does Honningen fit into this picture?

Hopefully quite well!

What did Richard Seaborne bring to the track through the remix?

Richard flipped the whole thing over, made something entirely his own from very little material, and gave it another dimension. He made it a lot more danceable, in my view.

Rett i Kroppen

The title – That’s your love of puns… cropping up again, right?

I see what you did there, he he. Yes. I’m afraid it is!

This EP was ready a while back already. How has your music evolved since and what can we expect in the future?

I’ve been working on some deeper material, some of which might pop up on Friday. Apart from that, well, there’s the album I’m working on, and a couple releases with De Fantastiske To that I’m really looking forward to.

*Rave-Enka will be playing tracks from Rett-i-Kroppen at our DJ Marathon and the Ep will be available from Juno Download from the 18th 0f February.

Communicating a feeling – In praise of Lena Willikens

Few DJs embody the idea of a rounded forward-thinking selector quite like Lena Willikens. Yes, there are DJs that are as eclectic as the Düsseldorf native – Ben UFO and DJ Harvey immediately come to mind – and yes, there quite a few DJs that display the very same esotericism in their selections – Nicholas Jaar being obvious example here – but no other DJ combines it quite in the way that Lena Willikens does. She is a landmark DJ in that regard, garnering the type of notoriety in a mere fraction it took many an established DJ, and with good reason too. Her tastes are varied and broad and she has a very unique ability to create an extensive narrative through her sets, imparting something of her own personality through combining the music of others. Although her rise to fame (by modern day social media standards) was steep, going from local resident DJ at Salon Des Amateurs to an internationally sought after DJ, it was something that was certainly cultivated and refined through years of experience and her intrinsic tastes. It’s something Lena explains in an interview with Ransom Note as such: “What I like the most when I produce or DJ is the moment when my brain stops working and I don’t think anymore.” This is also the reason she often feigns interest in doing interviews, preferring to let the music speak for itself, instead of conflating it with a trivialising literal interpretation of what she does. But there is something unique to what she does and it’s not something that could be described in a single sentence. To consider Lena Willikens appeal, is the resolve of getting to heart of all of Lena Willikens.

As with any artist, it starts with the influence of her parents and for Lena this would have planted the immediate seed for her penchant for the road less travelled in electronic music. Citing the new wave electronica Grauzones’ Eisbär as an early favourite – she was five – thanks to her mother, it seems that Lena‘s nonconformist tastes, manifested early in her life thanks to the influences of a previous generation. As a result she found her way into artists operating on the periphery of cool, artists that start with the likes of Lee Scratch Perry and end today with Carter Tutti Void. In her own music you can even hear an outer dimensional reference like Grauzones making an appearance on a track like “Phantom Delia”. This diverse taste for unconventional music followed her into her teens, where as an ardent collector of music her record collection grew as the physical manifestation of these tastes. Where a record collection begins a career as a DJ usually follows and while she was an art student, wherever there was a party in Düsseldorf, you’d find Lena Willikens at the decks. Eventually leaving a career in visual art behind for the most part because she “just couldn’t stand this intellectual talking anymore” (according to an interview in Juno) Lena channelled all her creative expression into music starting with her record collection. But Lena’s ability has never merely been about her personal tastes or being able to mix one record into the next. There’s always been something unique to Lena Willikens and her DJ sets, something that tends to transcend trends, genres, even mixing, and can rather more accurately described as a feeling.

It’s what Lena Willikens refer to as “journey” in an XLR8R interview from 2015, in which the magazine considered her as one of their “bubbling up” artists of the year. Even her recorded mixes, like the one she’d done for RA, is not always technically magnificent, nor is the song collection all that mysterious, but the way she takes the listener from point A to B is what truly stands out. It’s not a mere build up, taking you through the ubiqutous course of a night; it’s more of wave, a wave that simulates the mood swings of a manic depressive – there’s never a dull moment in the course a Lena Willikens mix. “I really try always [to see] how far can I go, and of course the farther I can go, the better,” says Lena in that same XLR8R interview. Combine this with her eclectic nature and the word boring is never one you’ll hear associated with a Lena Willikens set. I doubt that this is something that just came to Lena, and I think a lot of her nature in the booth has to do with being able to read a crowd, and much of that has it’s roots in Salon Des Amateurs, the Düsseldorf establishment who gave Willikens her first residency. “It sounds clichéd but for all the residents at the Salon it was never about a DJ ego,” says Willikens in an interview wit Resident Advisor. “It was about sharing music we love and music which was hard to find on other dance floors.” Starting her career there as a bouncer, what becomes evident is Lena has always had an acute awareness of her audience, looking from the outside in – going from a bouncer and clubbing enthusiast to a resident DJ. It seems she is not about playing to a crowd, but rather more about sharing the experience with a crowd. It doesn’t mean she’ll placate the crowd either. She expects her audience to share her open mind when it comes to the music she picks, and her vinyl-only sets are as much about her record collection as it is about forcing herself into unknown territory and taking the audience on that journey again. “Some friends of mine stopped playing vinyl—it’s too uncomfortable to carry all that heavy shit around,” quotes XLR8R. “I like the challenge sometimes, when you are like, ‘Oh no, I packed totally the wrong vinyl and I’m playing peak time.’ I don’t like to have the records with me where I know they work every time. I don’t want them to get boring for me.” So devoted is she to playing the records that won’t always work, that when she coincidently played the same record as DJ Koze at the same time, at the same festival, she never touched that record again.

You’ll be guaranteed to hear something different and new each time you encounter Lena Willikens at the decks. And yes, her sets are almost always a journey. All you have to do is tune into her monthly podcast, Sentimental Flashback on Radio Cómeme to catch a glimpse of this dedication to the musical journey. She spends hours putting that show together out of her record collection and as the title suggests, it’s not for a particular purpose in mind, but rather a feeling. It’s that same feeling she instils in every mix she approaches, with a special personal reflection conducting her choices of music she selects. In a way, Sentimental Flashback is probably the closest we’ll get in putting Lena Willikens’ music and DJ sets into words, and even that won’t necessarily do it justice. From her residency at Salon Des Amateurs to her Radio show to her record collection, all of it forms part of a special ingredient that makes Lena Willikens the forward thinking eclectic personality she is and makes her one of the few DJs that could actually communicate a feeling through the music.

* Lena Willikens will be joining Ben UFO on Friday, the 19th in our basement.

Catching up with Syntax Erik

The last time Syntax Erik graced us with his presence at Jæger we were left in awe at his remarkable skill with a live electronic set. There was hardly a stationary body on the floor, and the few that were, were most likely trying to capture the moment on their phone, to savour again at a later date. His live show marked the release of his EP on Beatservice, and while we knew we liked “Keep it Deep” we saw it’s true potential when it arrived on Jæger’s dance floor through a set of Funktion One speakers. We’ve been itching to invite him back and when we heard he was releasing a new EP, coinciding with our reopening, we jumped at the chance to have him repeat a little of the magic from that night last year.

EP3 is more of the same of what we’ve come to expect from Syntax Erik, with a little more attitude dusted into mix on songs like “Don’t wanna dance”. Once again Erik has made electrifying tracks for the dance floor and there’s never a dull moment on this EP, much like “I can feel you” before it and “Keep it Deep” before that. We are very excited to hear some of this new material at Jæger, for what will also be the official launch of the EP, but before we get round to that, we thought we’d send some questions over to Syntax Erik ahead of his show, and he obliged by sending us back some answers.

Where does the name Syntax Erik come from?
The very first Syntax Erik-release was the “Echelon EP” back in 2002 on Rune Lindbæk’s label Romklang. I think it was Rune who came up with the name during a phone call with me back then, but I don’t exactly remember because it was too early in the morning and I was half asleep. Only thing I remember is that he was in a hurry to get the artwork done for the EP, and I told him I didn’t want to use the name K.Y.D/Kyd anymore. I had previously released some 12″s and an album (“High Above”) with my friend Kango Stein Massiv as the duo Kyd & Kango. And my debut EP (“Retroheaven”) was back in 1997 on UK label Ten Pin Records using the name K.Y.D. I often helped Rune with his computer problems aka “syntax errors”. So the name might also come from that. Lately I had to make a track called “Hello My Name Is Raymond” because some people think Erik is my real name. But now they all just ask me who this Raymond-guy is…

So no relation to Erik from Bergen then?
Nope, no relation to him. And also no relation to Syntax TerrOrkester.

EP3 is your… uhm… third release as Erik. Can you tell us a little more about how it came to be?
It’s my third EP in a series of three 4-track EP’s released on Beatservice Records. The first was “Keep It Deep EP” and the second was “I Can Feel You EP”. I’m still undecided on the title for the third one. It will be released digitally on all platforms in March. The concept of the series is an exclusive selection of tracks from my vault with additional remixes. Kohib and De Fantastiske To did great remixes of the first two EP’s and Doc L Junior is currently working on a remix for the upcoming third release.

Like your last release, this music sounds like it was made for the dance floor. Was there any particular dance floor you had in mind and how do you capture that energy in the studio?
My music is absolutely made for the dance floor, but not any particular venue in mind when being produced. I don’t often find myself in clubs anymore, but I listen to House music everywhere I go. At home relaxing, when walking, taking the metro etc. To capture the energy in the studio I jam for hours at night, using headphones while enjoying some beers.

To me this release sound a lot more vigorous than your previous release, with a few grittier elements piled on the functional dance foundation. Has anything changed in your music since ‘I can feel you’?
In the early days I tried to make my tracks as clean and polished as possible. But it was difficult to do because my equipment was shit. Now I have great equipment and all the technology in the world, but use a lot of energy and time to make stuff sound real dirty again – because listening to a clean production is very boring to me. But the degree of grittiness varies from track to track.

It seems that you are referencing a lot of the history of dance music with elements of acid, break beats and the deeper stuff thrown into the mix.
I started making tracks in my bedroom in the early 90s and I’m still very inspired by that era in electronic music. I like to mix old samples with new synths and effects. Some of my newest tracks are originally based on 20-year-old ideas and samples from my beloved Amiga 1200. That also automatically makes it sound dirtier because of the crap 8-bit sampler I had.
I have experimented a lot with break beats in the past, but have never made it work in a House track before. I guess it does now. I just love a squeaky 303 over a busy break beat. That really takes me back.

Where did the vocal sample for downright deep come from?
From a surreal movie called “Wrong” by French director and musician Quentin Dupieux aka Mr.Oizo (Producer of “Flat Beat”). The movie is about a guy in search of his missing dog – pretty weird stuff, but great atmosphere and fun dialogue.

Was it a deep track before and you just added the sample, or did the track come about from the sample?
I had this unfinished idea just waiting for the final touch. I got inspired to complete it when I watched the previously mentioned movie. I added the sample, rearranged some parts, and the track was done. It’s probably a cliché to use a vocal phrase saying “deep” in a House track to make it sound deeper, but I think it’s all part of the old school sampling history. The track actually isn’t really that deep…too much stuff going on. It’s an ironic sample perhaps.

What do you hope the listener will get from EP3? Where would be the best place to listen to it?
The third EP, like the other two EP’s in the series, is for the House lovers – young and old – Someone who enjoys the sound of dirty beats with hypnotic 303 acid, and classic synths with nice melodies. Hopefully the girls will love my acid ballad called “Don’t Wanna Dance” which is a tribute to 1980s Whitney Houston. Maybe some boys will like it too. Best place for listening to this new EP has to be in the club dancing – or maybe in the car.

Your set at Jæger last year is still ingrained in our memory. Do you have any fond memories of the event?
Wow! That night was really amazing and a great release party for the “Keep It Deep EP”. It was my first time in a club doing a set with my own tracks in almost 12 years, so it was extremely fun for me to see how well the people reacted to the music. I really look forward coming back to play at Jæger once again. Love the sound system!

What can we expect from your next show at Jæger.
1980s Whitney Houston back from the dead! Maybe not in person, but in spirit and sampled. It’s basically the same procedure as last year – Me and my gear. It’s a busy night so the set will be short and tight. I will play the new tracks from the upcoming EP, maybe try out some unreleased stuff and probably one or two tracks from the earlier EP’s if I have time left.

*Syntax Erik will be be bringing his live set to us yet again during our official re-opening DJ Marathon.

Accidental Dance Music – Øyvind Morken in Profile

It’s a frosty winter’s afternoon in Oslo, and I’m in the company of Øyvind Morken, searching for a quiet-ish spot to conduct our interview. I walk in the shadow of his tall lank figure, a plastic bag hanging by his side, the outline of a 12”sleeve visible through the white bag. I’ve been trying to interview Øyvind since the day we met, but the Jæger resident has always required some premise to talk about his production and dj work, and as of yet we’ve not found one. Øyvind is not one for crass media attention, but rather utilises his time more effectively in the studio and behind a set of decks, only ever indulging the media when he feels he has something important to say. He’s remarkably astute when it comes to music and although we’ve often talked casually on the subject, I’ve always wanted to get some of it down in writing, in an attempt to get to know the man behind the music further. An opportunity finally presents itself when Øyvind, on the cusp of his fifth release, Invisible Objects, agrees to an interview, but we’ve yet to find the perfect spot to conduct the perfect interview.

It’s a frigid -9 outside and the snow that fell the night before is glistening in the sun, crunching under our feet as we look for place that serves coffee. “I’m actually in the mood for a beer,” says Øyvind when the first coffee shop we enter is full, and we make our new destination Hell’s Kitchen, a lively bar just off Oslo’s Youngstorget. The news of David Bowie’s sudden and unforeseen passing is still rippling through the air and every shop or café we pass has the thin white duke’s records blasting out from marginally open portals across the city centre. “I like some of his music, but I’ve never really been a Bowie fan”, remarks Øyvind as he opens the door to the venue and Rebel Rebel pours out an obscene volume from the empty bar. It’s still early, and in Oslo, this kind of place is usually quiet before the acceptable evening hours of consuming alcohol. We take a seat and one of the unreserved tables, looking out from the window to the dense layer of snow outside. Øyvind says he doesn’t much care for the weather. I’m of a different opinion, but then again I guess this is still exotic to me. Øyvind gets his beer, while I settle into the vinyl seat with a coffee. I press record and we try to start from the beginning. “1979 and I popped out”, comes Øyvind’s grinning reply to that question.

Are we starting that far back?

Øyvind grew up in Hauketo, a small quaint suburb of Oslo that hugs the border of the county. He spent his youth amongst “loads of kids” and “people from different countries”. Although musically stagnant, with the town’s musical interest largely focussed on mainstream Hip-Hop at the time, Øyvind picked up a taste for music from a very early age. At the age of eight he remembers hearing Kraftwerk for the first time in a friend’s car and admiring a track called Walk the Dinosaur by Was not Was – a track he still plays today. “I loved that song. What I found out later is that Ken Collier was mixing these records and Ken Collier is a forgotten figure, but he was to Detroit, what Ron Hardy was to Chicago and Larry Levan to New York. It’s quite funny now that I was listening to this music when I was seven or eight” An interest in djing naturally followed and he played his first records at a local youth club, aged 11, when an older friend asked young Øyvind to stand in for him while he went behind the bridge to “smoke cigarettes and make out with his girlfriend”.

What were you playing back then?

“I remember playing Holiday Rap. (MC Miker G & DJ Sven). The B-side is a super cool proto house record, which I still play today. That was the first record I remember playing, but it was also early House, like Shep Pettibone’s mixes of Madonna. When I was 13 or 14, I was eventually allowed to dj the whole night for a couple of months until they threw me out for not playing what they wanted to hear. It was an old dj booth so you could lock the door and the people that worked there couldn’t get in. So I locked the door, and played hardcore Hip-Hop and early house music, and rave stuff, like prodigy – stuff I liked. I couldn’t mix back then, I would just play records. I also remember hearing M.A.R.S’ Pump up the Volume at a friend’s house on MTV and I was amazed how funky and cool it sounded with that bass-line. After a while I remember going in to a record shop in ’95, and they played Slam, Positive Education and I was just blown away, and bought it on CD. I was also into some cheesy House Music and some Trance.”

When did your career officially start as a dj?

“There was a six-year break before I bought my own turntables at twenty and then within a year I started playing clubs. I was listening to music the whole time in between and I wanted to dj during that time, but I didn’t have the money. I had my first residency in 2004, a Thursday night residency at Sikamikanico. “

Skipping ahead to the future and a residency at Jæger is the latest chapter in Øyvind’s career. He has an incredible knowledge of the music he plays, to a point where mixing the records together is almost irrelevant, even though he can apply it expertly to go from a Café Del Mar record to Nitzer Ebb, without missing a beat. He’s a purveyor of varied styles of music, with his diverse tastes remaining central to his sets, and without ignorance blinding his selections. On the table the bag of new records lie dormant while we talk. He opens the bag to pull out Echoes by Wally Badarou, the second copy he now owns, and it’s a rare first pressing. The sophomore album, by Island Records’ in-house keyboard expert, and unofficial Level 42 member, will be unfamiliar to most, but not Øyvind who knows more about this obscure figure from the eighties than even the wikipedia biographer could put together. He recites some facts about Badarou like a musical encyclopaedia, and suggests that “Echoes” is something of a balearic/cosmic/ambient classic. The record, released when Øyvind was only three years old, is a perfect example of Øyvind’s eclectic digging’ personality, which I learn is born out of necessity…

Where do your eclectic tastes comes from, having an open mind?

“It comes from starting to DJ in Oslo at a time when electronic music was not that popular. They were into Hip Hop. If you didn’t dj at specific events like Sunkissed or Monkey Business, you had to adapt. I was playing Basic Channel records next to disco records and funk and Hip-Hop. If you wanted to survive as a dj you had to do everything. I would always play music that I liked, but I found my taste is pretty broad, and if I wanted to, I could make stuff work. I could actually play Basic Channel at a night that I would also play some Q-tip, without it sounding forced. I also don’t like playing a Techno set for 5 hours. I don’t like playing banging music at the beginning. Like upstairs at Jæger, you have to go from being a bar to a club.”

You have to ease the audience into it, but what I also find in your sets thanks to your eclecticism, is that it will introduce me to music I wouldn’t necessarily enjoy, but works in the context of the other tracks.

“Yeah, if you listen to four Techno records before playing a great disco record that Disco record is gonna sound amazing, because you’ve just come out of this flat thing.”

How do you keep things interesting for yourself, especially with a weekly residency?

“Using my record collection. There are times when I don’t feel that inspired, but I’ve always wanted a residency. I think that’s the ultimate thing you can have as a dj – a weekly residency. You might travel the world, but for the music’s sake and your own development, I think a residency is the best way to learn.”

So you have to keep buying new music all the time.

“Yes, exactly.“

What do you look for when you’re digging?

“It depends what I’m into that week. Like today, I found stuff in five minutes, and sometimes you can spend four hours. I buy records every week. During a recent two-and-a-half week vacation, I bought like 50 records. And I found like 100 new records on my Discogs list that I couldn’t afford buying just yet. I buy loads music, but I always buy things that I can play, but not because I need something to play tomorrow. I’m professional dj, it’s a job, so sometimes I’ll play on a rooftop in summer, and I will play for wealthy people in Oslo, so I won’t be playing house music. I’ll be playing soft-rock, boogie records and Jazz. I enjoy creating a vibe with that stuff as well.”

That’s one thing I’ve found people take for granted when they talk about djs in Oslo. Professional DJs need to be able to play an eclectic mix, because the city is small and there aren’t enough nightclubs, so you need to fill out your stamp card with every type of gig.

“Yeah. I think I’m lucky. I don’t get tired of it. One day I’m playing a club, the next I’m playing on a boat. I have a huge record collection and I love the music, and I get to play it all. It’s not an ego thing. I don’t need to play to a dance floor that claps when you’re done every time. I can also play to a bar where nobody even knows who I am. I’m just creating a vibe.”

At your level, do you ever learn something new when you dj?

“With these four years at Jæger, what I learnt was that only now, am I a good dj. I used to think I was a good, but I really wasn’t. You think you can read people, but it takes such a long time to master it. It’s easy to go bang and make the club go off, but to play those weird records, during peak – to go into something and not loose the dance floor – that takes so many years to develop those skills, and that comes from just doing it. You have to dj loads, to start understanding stuff, and that’s the way I like learning stuff. I go home sometimes and I realise; ‘wow, I managed to play this record at peak time.’”

It’s not just about mixing two records together flawlessly for you?

“No it’s about the program of the night. I mix, but what I think about is the selection – what and how I’m playing is much more important than the mixing. Mixing is just a tool to get from A to B. Sometimes you can play three records over each other and have fun with them, but it’s just tool.”

Speaking of playing three records at a time: You often play with Prins Thomas too at Jæger, probably the best DJ in the world at the moment – according to a lot of people. Do you ever pick anything up from him?

“Yeah, he uses a CD-players loop function really innovatively. I would play a record, and he would loop something over it, while mixing in another record, and then I would trigger another loop, and basically he would be playing two turntables and two cd players at the same time, for several minutes. I always tried to keep away from the cd players, but after seeing him use it like that, I was like; ‘shit I need to learn that’. To me Thomas is probably the best dj I’ve ever heard. He’s selection is amazing, and his mixing is awesome. He has this calm.”

That’s years of experience.

“Yes, and it’s also personality. We’re quite similar in personality in some ways, and especially when we dj, even though we sound pretty different. He’s a huge inspiration; he’s always been that, from when I was younger. He and Pål Strangefruit – Their way of djing influenced the development of my own style.”

Which is also about an eclectic nature. I imagine Thomas is quite open to various styles, and the disco label is often just overused to simplify the music for some?

“Yes, he’s like a librarian, with music. It’s just the British media that need to put things in categories to write about it. Trulz and Robin’s Froskelår, for instance is a Techno record that sounds like early Detroit stuff, but that’s been missed by every Techno DJ, because it was on Full Pupp, and they didn’t go check it out. When I dj, I don’t see genres. I’ll buy a trance record if its cool. I’ll find somewhere to play it. If you start doing that you’re going to get boring, when you limit yourself, because it might be a bit too cheesy or not underground enough. You know the people on the dance floor, they don’t judge you like that. It’s gonna be a couple of chin-strokers at the bar who are like bedroom djs that will say something like, ‘ah you shouldn’t have played that.’ You’re not playing to them, you are playing to the people on the dance floor. “

Influenced by the likes of Thomas and Strangefruit, Øyvind’s musical expression couldn’t be merely contained in a mixed set and the next natural progression would be for Øyvind to make the leap into production. Like every producer / dj this started with a computer and Øyvind trying his hand at software like Logic. A few failed attempts later, and Magnus International and André Bratten persuaded Øyvind to send his tracks to Prins Thomas, and it wasn’t long after that his debut EP, Kakemonstret hit the shelves through Full Pupp.

What were those first tracks like?

“Horrible.”

But Prins Thomas helped on the production side of things I believe?

“Thomas showed me how to EQ stuff and leave space for stuff. I basically learnt by sitting with him and doing it. It’s a nice way to learn. I gained some years just by working with him.”

For me, your productions have a very specific moroder-esque sequenced feel with elements of house and techno cropping up intermittently. How would you describe your music?

“The music I make comes out because of the way I listen to music and the way I dj. I don’t play one type of music. I’ll play a Jazz record in a Techno set if I think it can fit. Like this record. (Øyvind points to Herb Alpert’s Beyond lying in the pile of records he’d purchased earlier that day.) It’s like a Jazz record, but also a proto Techno record. I would listen to stuff like this and try to make something that sounds like it was 1981, like a Techno record that wasn’t supposed to be a Techno record – accidental dance music. I try and make that type of stuff, but because I’m not a super producer something else comes out of it. “

How has your music evolved since that first release, Kakemonstret?

“I think it’s evolved more on the technical side of things – knowing more about and learning more about things like gear, and incorporating it in my music. I recently bought some hardware. I know a lot of people think my music is all made with hardware, especially the first releases, but I was only using software then. I think it’s because I’ve listened to all this music for so long that even though I didn’t make music with hardware, it sounded like it, because that’s the stuff that influenced me. “

Hardware vs. Software – Does it make a difference these days do you think?

“What matters are the ideas you have; whether you have something original or not. I know people with hardcore studios, who’ve never released a record. Their basically just gear geeks.“

It’s like people that collect records and don’t play them.

“Yes, I have so many friends that don’t dj and have more records than me. I’m not a record collector. Yes, I buy a lot of records, but I dj and I like to play records.”

To me, Øyvind the dj and Øyvind the producer are two completely different things though. Your work in the studio feels a lot more focussed towards a particular sound, than your eclectic style behind the decks.

“Probably, it’s like two jobs. I don’t connect them. djing is my occupation. That’s what I’ve been doing for years, and making music is more like a hobby, but it’s something that probably benefits my dj career. That’s also the reason I wanted to release a record on my own. I wanted to have full control.”

I’ve had Øyvind’s Invisible Objects knocking around my music for the best part of a year, and am able to recall it whenever I hear Øyvind playing a track from the release in his sets at Jæger on a Wednesday night. It’s a functional dance release with Øyvind’s distinct character swelling through the three tracks. The delay with the release is essentially what held up this interview, and it’s one of the reasons Øyvind wanted to take full control of his music by starting his own label, Moonlighting. The first release on his newly established label arrived last year (a mere two months since it was conceived) in the form of a 7” with two tracks that featured Øyvind’s unmistakable slinky rubber bass-lines and sequential swinging lead hooks. Slightly down-tempo from his other releases, External Processing and Jungelerotikk also ventured more into the eclecticism he displays as a dj, leaning towards Balearic tendencies, especially in the case of Jungelerotikk.

What’s the idea behind your label, moonlighting.

“It’s a way to release my own stuff, when I want to and how I want to. “

It’s exclusively a vehicle for your releases?

“Yes, just me.”

Do you approach the music any differently?

“Yes, Jungerotikk was inspired by soundtrack music. Both sides, actually. I wanted to do it on 7” because they were short tracks, and I felt like that was a project for a 7”. I just finished another release for Moonlighting, which is deeper house. That record sounds like the Burrell brothers if they just got their heart broken by the same prostitute, and did loads of heroine in the studio while crying. That one will be more for clubs, for the early morning tripped out crowd. If it’s like 6 or 7 in the morning and you’ve been dancing all night long, you are much more open to other sounds.”

That’s something we don’t really get to experience in Oslo.

“Not much. It would take a long time to adapt the audience to that here. If you had a club that was open till eight, the club would be empty by 4.”

People would just be drunk, right?

“It would take years to develop, but it would be good, because maybe people would stop drinking so much and take it a little easy and just enjoy the music and enjoy each other. It could just be about people talking without constantly having to poor alcohol or drugs in their system. It’s like; ‘lets get drunk, it’s quarter to three, lets get laid’, you know the Norwegian mentality.”

Dance of the drunk, especially reminds me of Jæger at 3:30 on a Wednesday night and that “mentality” you talk of. Do you ever take something away from your DJ set and put into your music like that?

“Basically that track, yes. It’s about people stumbling around at 3AM. It’s a tribute to all the drunk people – the 2:45-I-need-to-get-laid people – this one’s for you!” (laughs)

That’s the last track on the next album, which will be released on Full-Pupp shortly, but it’s probably time we get to the end of this interview, and the reason Øyvind and I wanted to get together for a conversation in the first place. Invisible Objects sees Øyvind taking Full Pupp into the next fifty releases of the label’s existence and it’s immediately recognisable as Øyvind’s music. We order two beers to the table when the coffee I’ve been sipping on for the last hour still hasn’t quenched my thirst and head off into the last part of our interview.

What was the theme for this new record?”

“It’s quite depressing. I made it around the time my father died. The one track, ‘The new age of faith’ was just after the funeral. So I went home and made the record. It turned out to be a cover of LB Bad, a nu-groove artist from ’89. The record almost didn’t come out because of that. He’s known to be a bit harsh, and sue people, but I sent him an email and told him the story, and he liked the version. He was super nice and gave me his blessing.”

Would you say it is a very emotional record for you then?

“It’s dance music, and some of its happy, but yes it means a lot to me. I’m very proud of the record and I also think it’s a pretty good record. I made it almost two-and-a-half years ago and I’ve had the test pressing for ten months, but when I play it, I still love it. It stood the test of time.”

That record brings Øyvind’s musical profile up to date, but like his dj career, it’s a malleable biography that is constantly informed by Øyvind’s expanding musical tastes and knowledge. This knowledge I learn towards the end of our conversation, is from an informed mind too. When Øyvind is not playing the music he loves or creating new music, he’s learning more about the history of music through books like, “Last night a DJ saved my life”. His knowledge on music flows as effortlessly as the beers and I stop trying to keep up with noting down all the artists he’s mentioned – some very obscure artists – and just sink into the seat and try to absorb as much as possible. David Bowie is still playing over the sound system while we finish the last dregs of our beers as the sun sets over the horizon, the last rays of sunshine illuminating the city from where they are reflected in the snow. (I do like this weather) Our conversation winds down with MC Kaman and DJ Hooker joining us for some boisterous anecdotes about everyday subjects, like lost airline luggage and cars, and Øyvind reveals that he’s also a bit of car fanatic, having been a trained mechanic in his youth, like Detroit artist Omar S. This is not Detroit, it’s Oslo and Øyvind’s eclecticism; his way of making music; and his dj sets are all informed by it. It feels like we’ve covered anything about Øyvind Morken up to this point and take my leave before I ask one last thing…

Did I miss anything?

“No.”

* You can catch Øyvind at his weekly residency Untzdag and Invisible Objects is out now. Get your physical copy at Filter or a digital copy here.

Keeping it in the family with the Bravos

The Jacksons, the Osmonds, the Hansons, the Carpenters and in some way I suppose, even the Mansons – all these families displayed the kind of musical talent in a single generation that some families take years to nurture in just one descendent. Some were super groups of their time, others famed for the infamy, but all talented musicians getting an early start at a career in music during a time when the group was still an essential formula to making new music. But what of today – what of a generation brought up on the idea of the solo artist and electronic music? Can families like the Osmonds and the Jacksons still exist in a time where music and djing is the sole pursuit of the individual? The answer is irrefutably, yes and the Bravo siblings are the finest example of just such a family today.

André, Dan and Jennifer Bravo are a new generation of musical family, one brought up on their parents’ record collection and a set of turntables. André Bravo, known for his residency at Jæger’s Mandagsklubben was the precursor to Dan and Jennifer’s introduction to the world of the djing, with each member of the Bravo family forging ahead in distinctive styles. Dan and André often step into the role of producer, with André appearing on Deep-House labels like Bogota and the name Dan Bravo should already be familiar to you, from his releases on Armada Music and Sony. Like the Osmonds and the Jacksons, each sibling in the Bravo family brings something unique to the clan, and while André and Dan look favour the deeper end of House and R&B respectively, Jennifer likes to dwell in the pulsing corners of the Techno genre.

The Bravo siblings are certainly a unique anomaly in electronic music and djing, but I wonder where it all started and how they all influenced each other on their path. So we sent over some questions via email to find out more about this unique family.

How did the Bravo family get into djing?

André: I got into djing through one of my best friends in the 5th grade. His older brother was a dj, so we used to borrow his records to play at the weekly youth disco in the 6th grade. We also got into it through watching MTV and later getting a hold of DMC Battle Video tapes and ITF Battle tapes.

Jennifer: And I was influenced by Andre`.

As the big brother, did you have the biggest musical influence in the house, and what were you listening to when you first realised you wanted to be a dj?

André: I think our father probably had the biggest musical influence, but at the same time I know that I have influenced my family just as much. I was listening too stuff, like Jungle Brothers, Wu Tang, EPMD, Prodigy, Shamen, Massive Attack, Stevie Wonder, Goldie, Aphex Twin, Orbital, Underworld. Grooverider. Q-Bert, Squarepusher , etc…

What do you remember of your older brother’s first sets?

Dan: Cool question! But I actually can’t remember, must be some kind of urban hip-hop set somewhere around Oslo city, maybe at the legendary hip-hop club Barongsai? I don’t know, but I would like to remember it!

Jennifer: I remember André and his scratch sessions at home. In the clubs, I remember that he played diverse sets – not everyone can mix from R&B to Braindance.

Besides big brother, what else inspired the younger siblings to dj?

Jennifer: The love for music inspired me.

Dan: I’ve been into music as long as I can remember, being raised with various styles of music playing from every room in the house – my brother, sister & dad constantly played music. So music got into me really early and it’s been a big part of my life ever since. After years and years of just being a “houseparty-dj” or “selecta” for every house party in my hometown, I finally bought some decks. My brother pushed me for years, so this was definitely all on my brother, but it felt natural as well since I was already the “party/music” guy throughout my teenage years.

When you guys started playing, was is it about following in André’s footsteps, or did you immediately want to start doing your own thing?

Dan: I’ve always believed I did my own thing when it comes to djing yes, but we did share a lot of influences at the start. When it came to Hip-Hop/R&B club music, he’s the one who got me into the urban club stuff, but after that I really just followed my own thing and discovered new sounds and genres that he didn’t and visa versa. So I think we both inspired each other at that point. Even though he showed me like early deep house stuff, jersey club, dubstep etc. I really just became a fan of the music so I followed my own sound, and still do, to this day.

Jennifer: It inspired me to follow in Andre`s footsteps, but I wanted to do my own thing, essentially.

Jennifer, I think I’ve asked you about it before, and you mentioned you are drawn more to Techno in your sets. What draws you to it?

Jennifer: The driving nature of the music.

And André, I know you’re quite eclectic from what I’ve experienced at Jæger, picking on elements of R&B, House and Techno. But what do you usually like in a track when you’re looking for new music?

Its not always the same thing with each track its more like different weapons of emotion that I can use to manipulate time. (Laughs)

Dan, what are your musical preferences behind the decks?

????

Besides getting you your first pair of decks, what role did your parents play in getting you into music and djing?

André: My mother helped me a lot with equipment and my father was a big musical influence. They both had a lot of soul in their music collections, like George Benson, Bobby Womack, Luther Vandross, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, etc…

Jennifer: Well our father is very passionate about music, and we’ve been listening to his music collection from when we were very young.

Did you spend a lot of time going through your parents’ record collection?

André: Yes, and we still do on occasion.

I know Jennifer also dabbles in the visual arts too. Did you guys grow up in a very artistic environment?

Jennifer: Our family has been collecting and buying paintings since we were kids, yes.

Besides learning to dj, did you guys pick up any instruments together?

André: I don’t play any instruments. I’m still trying to learn the keys and chords.

I know André and Dan are also quite prolific in the studio, but what about you Jennifer – Any ambitions to make music?

Jennifer: Yes, there’s some ambition to make music in the future.

Dan, you just put out a track a few days ago on Soundcloud. Can you tell me a bit more about “Lost my Mind”?

Dan: My sister told me to do a Deborah Cox remix of a song that I’ve always liked and the acapella was online, and from that “Lost My Mind” came to life!

Dan, I’ve never really had the chance to hear you play. What would a Dan Bravo set sound like?

Hmm, I would say a mix between commercial and non-commercial dance music with Hip-Hop / R&B influences. Easy going house music, happy stuff!

Do you guys ever dj together when you get the chance?

We haven’t really been djing that much together but we should definitely do that some time this year.

Ever thought about forming a dj super group?

Hahaha.

And the last question, if you would have to compare yourself to another musical family would it be more Hanson or Manson?

MMMBop…

*André Bravo will be joining the rest of Mandagsklubben for our opening DJ marathon and you can see some of Jennifer’s visual works here.

February / March line-up

Our February / March line-up for 2016 starts with an epic two-day DJ Marathon, which will see some of out favourite local DJs run in our newly refurbished venue. We open the doors on the 12th of February with this event, featuring our residents and a few local invited guests. We get a late start to 2016, but once again Ola and Kaman has selected some of the best DJs to pay us a visit in our opening months. We finally get the chance to see Erol Alkan, after he was unable to attend last year’s Øya festival. Ben UFO also returns, and the British DJ will be joined by another eclectic personality in the booth in the form of Lena Willikens. Our weekly programme returns too, without any major adjustments, and Retro bring Dave Clarke over for a night of uncompromising Techno that will be sure to break up the monotony of our usual Thursday nighst. Old friends Frank & Tony and Mike Hukkaby is sure to bring the very best in House to our two floors, while Prosumer also drops in with his blend of Techno and House from Berlin via Edinburgh.We also some live music for you over the course of the next two months, with André Bratten and Trulz & Robin sure to impress with their respected electronic live sets. Bratten will be joined by Jennifer Cardini on the decks, while Tin Man will provide the support for Trulz and Robin. They also take us into the Bypåske Festivalen where a stellar cast of DJs await to be announced. There’s a little bit of everything in this February / March line-up and we look forward to seeing you all again on our dance floor. Until then, save the date.

Stream a live mix from André Bravo

Mandagsklubben resident André Bravo stretches his DJ muscle for the first time this year in this live mix. Recorded at Gudruns, Oslo on the 12th of January the extensive mix is buoyant with effervescent hi-hats pulling busy rhythms and deep bass-lines across the mix. The comprehensive Bravo has focussed on House on this occasion, digging towards a darker sound for the most part of a mix dedicated to a club at peak hour. It might still be a while before we get Bravo back at his regular Monday slot at Jæger, but this mix will definitely keep us company while we enter phase two of our renovations.

Oslo and Electronic Music in Conversation with REDRUM

In 2007 Oslo was starving for an electronic music scene. Dominated by rock and the last remnants of a death metal scene wearing out its welcome, Oslo’s electronic music landscape was little more than a blip on electronic music’s radar. I was here in 2007 and besides Sunkissed and the odd occasion at Villa, there was very little here to quench my first for new and exciting electronic music. Save for Nu Disco, which was getting a lot more attention elsewhere, electronic music in Oslo was very much still an underground experience in the city. Electronic music in Oslo was by and large a taboo and clubbing in the city was met mostly with disdain from Norwegian peers. I recall mentioning going to an after party at Sjokolade Fabrikken to a colleague only to be welcomed with a disapproving grunt, like I was partaking in some sort of criminal activity. Even though electronic music in Oslo was somewhat niche, there were some great moments – like said after party. But moments like those were few and far between and if you were looking for electronic music at the time, you were better off booking a ticket to Berlin or London.

Fast-forward to today and the scene is vastly different. The number of venues featuring electronic music has notably increased, and there’s a healthy electronic music program in the city seven days a week thanks to places like Jæger and the continued efforts by places like Villa and promoters like Sunkissed to bring electronic music to the city. It’s mostly a result of a global increase in interest for electronic music, propelled by the established artists and DJs, but it’s also very much a result of Oslo and Norway’s continued –albeit subsidiary – involvement in electronic music since the nineties through artists like Biosphere, Mental Overdrive and later more pop-orientated Royksopp. It’s in this era that Robin Crafoord (Trulz and Robin) would arrive in Oslo in 1996 and be introduced to a scene that “wasn’t as mainstream as it is today”, but included many of the same faces, like g-Ha. Like in 2007 there were very few clubs to choose from, but unlike 2007, the scene “was very alive, and the few clubs that were there were super cool, underground places.” The strict alcohol laws were just being introduced and although you couldn’t buy a drink after 3am, you could at least stay out till 5am if you knew where to go. “People felt a lot more free than are today”, says Robin about the nightlife at the time, but at the same time, “people had to know about it.” It was a small yet dedicated scene for those informed, but it was based on something completely new and exciting, with electronic music still very much in development stages as dance music. “Now it’s a bit easier to find”, according to Robin as electronic dance music today is far more ingrained in popular culture than it was ever before and with that comes a sort of mediocrity, where that excitement of something new is overpowered by the monotony of being able to experience the same thing over and over again, with little diversion from the acceptable norm. It’s here where Robin and a group of friends, including Jon Ole Flø come into the picture with a new event called Redrum. Robin and co wants to bring back some of that excitement he first encountered around electronic music, and in a landscape where electronic music is the dominant form of music today, this means retreating to the shadows in search of the unusual and the progressive. They want to bring a unique experience to people that are now familiar with electronic music, and looking for something a little different, something that a younger generation of electronic music aficionado like Jon Ole Flø might not be familiar with.

Jon Ole represents this generation, as an electronic musician and DJ, who was raised on electronic music, unlike Robin and I who would have had to arrive at it. “Electronic music started quite early” for Jon Ole, when as a kid he would get recorded electronic music as Christmas gifts. Being familiar with electronic music from a young age and studying classical percussion, Jon Ole quickly garnered a taste for the alternative side of the music through artists like Aphex Twin and Authecre. Coming from a small island in Norway populated by fewer than 1000 people, Jon Ole’s first experience of clubbing only came later when he moved to Malmö, Sweden in his early twenties. “There were a lot of underground (illegal) clubs and many of them were located on one particular street in an old industrial area. “Jon Ole’s introduction to clubbing and electronic music is quite the opposite of Robin’s. For Robin’s, and in part my generation, clubbing and electronic music were one and the same, and because it was still fairly marginal, everything about it was new and exciting. For Jon Ole and his generation, who had been raised on electronic music, clubbing has become commonplace, and with that, the excitement of experiencing something new in that context has been exhausted from the experience. Robin suggests that “everything is so established and professional it can also be a little bit boring sometimes”, and Jon Ole agrees. “There’s a lot of good clubs in Oslo, but I think this opens up new possibilities, to explore a different clubbing experience.”

Although they’ve experimented with this before, together and independently with nights like their 7-hour Drexiya listening event at Mir, the group involved with Redrum, which also includes Asbjørn Blokkom Flø, Astrid Einarsdotter and Andreas Mork (Sannergata) are looking to create a clubbing experience that is set to call in a new era for Oslo, based on the scene’s origins and Robin’s early experiences with electronic music. At the same time, Redrum will also offer a new experience to a younger generation of electronic music fan, like Jon Ole. They’ve opted to host the event on the second floor of a restaurant, bringing in a custom sound system for the event. In some ways this embodies the spirit of Robin’s early years in the city, but it also brings something new to Oslo’s clubbing and electronic music landscape, something that’s already found a home in places like London and Berlin. “Nobody’s done that for a long time in Oslo,” says Robin. “There’s been some parties in weird pubs, but then it’s only been around for short a period of time before it disappeared.” Jon Ole believes a venue like the one they’ve chosen is one of the “good places in Oslo that’s not being used”, but it’s not just about the unusual venue they’ve chosen, but also dependent on the music policy Redrum will look to implement.

“Now that there is a big scene in House and Techno and you can experiment a little more with House and Techno,” according to Robin and that is exactly what they intend to do. As electronic music grew in popularity all over the world, and the scene exploded with new music, the music that would often feature in the clubs, would for the most part be of a functional nature that could accommodate dancing, without alienating a populist audience, especially in Oslo. “It’s not often I feel like I can’t get away with playing an Autechre track in Villa or Jæger”, says Robin whose experience as DJ is two decades in the making. And for a younger audience, who’s only exposure to electronic music comes in the club context – because lets face it, the radio is still quite conservative, and the internet is quite a minefield if you don’t know where to look for new electronic music – this means that coming across forward-thinking electronic music in Oslo is difficult. Even places like London and Amsterdam, whose bigger venues are no different from Jæger or Villa, requires some digging to find events and venues catering for an alternative audience, with the major difference being that such an audience is much larger than it ever will be in Oslo. Robin, Jon Ole and co want to “open the curtain and dive into the unknown” with Redrum and they want to take Oslo with them, playing the kind of music you won’t essentially hear out in the city at the moment. Jon Ole hopes people “come for the music” and even though electronic music is today far more established than it was in 2007 or 1996, Redrum offers yet another development in the city’s remarkable growth in electronic music and the culture that follows it.

I’ve hardly been back a year and already the face of Oslo and electronic music is a complete contrast from before I left. There are incredibly exciting things happening here all the time, and each weekend I’m faced with making difficult decisions as the where to go to get my fill of electronic music in the city. Everywhere I go I find audiences more eager to participate in clubbing excursions in the city and a general attitude towards club culture and electronic music that’s far more liberal than anything I’d witnessed in the past. It’s the perfect time to experiment then and an event like Redrum gives us the opportunity to do just that. Now that most of Oslo is on very familiar terms with electronic music it’s time we take a step outside of the mainstream and have a peak behind the curtain where the unknown lurks and a new adventure in electronic music awaits.

* You can find out more about REDRUM and their opening event on the 16th of January here.

Questioning Daniel Vaz

Daniel Vaz is the first DJ I came to acquaint through Jæger and I remember our first encounter quite clearly. His signature drink, a glass of white wine in a tumbler nestled on his lap with a warm personality greeting you behind his handsomely gruff voice. If you’ve ever met the DJ it is unlikely that you’d forget him and if you were fortunate enough to meet him while at the decks, the name Daniel Vaz will be ingrained in your memory ever since. He represents a new generation of DJ in Oslo, one that’s shed the idiosyncrasies of a small city for the universal language of House music in an international landscape. In the past year it has seen his star significantly rise, including his first headlining set of his career for the Villa and a load of memorable appearances at Jæger. He achieved all this while embarking on a new developed academic career, leaving a comfortable job in his own company to pursue his dream of becoming an industrial designer, and it’s hardly put a damper on his DJ career in the process. It’s something that’s likely to continue into the New Year with Daniel being given the significant task of opening Oslo’s clubbing season for 2016, with another headlining slot at the Villa tonight. We caught up with him before that to talk about the New Year, the music, his academic career, and the year that’s been in this Q&A.

How was 2015 for you?

2015 was great. I got to meet and know a lot of great people, and make new friends. I’ve been able to play music for a bunch of people in many different and cool places.

Any highlights, musical or otherwise

I was able to go to Murmansk in Russia to play a club there. That was a particularly cool experience.

Which track summed up the year for you?

Hehe, that’s always a hard question to answer. But I’d have to say feeling-wise, I would be Kornél Kováks – Pantalón perhaps. It’s such a fun track and it does sum up 2015 in a sweet way.

You also headlined for the first time last year – for Villa, if I’m not mistaken. I’m sorry I missed it. How did it go and what did you take away from the experience?

Yes, it was my first Saturday headliner, which was a pretty big deal for me. The Villa was always a big milestone venue for me to play, and to be a part of. So after playing for The Villa for a while now, to be trusted with doing a headliner gig, really means a lot to me.

It was also the year you decided to leave a comfortable job in a company you partly own to venture into an academic career towards industrial design. Can you tell me more about it? (It sounds pretty amazing.)

Yeah! It’s exciting. I’ve been working in the movie business for about ten years, and between that and playing music, I spent my spare time on thinking about and appreciating good design. So I’m going to pursue that.

You seem to have a natural affinity for the arts judging from your skill behind the decks. Why did you opt for a visual course rather than and venture further into music?

Thank you! I do want to study music as well, and am still going to venture further into the world of music while on my new mission.

How did you get into music in the first place?

Hah. It started when I was a kid. I saw some DJ on TV and thought that it looked fun and cool, and I loved the sound he made with his record players. So when I was at a flea market a short time after, I found a record player and was amazed when I actually had the thirty kroner it cost. So I bought it and ran home. After my parents seeing how much I tried, I got some DJ slipmats for my eighth birthday and two records with some hip hop beats and some vocal scratch stuff to practice with. I was lucky to have such supporting parents.

And the rest is history, I suppose, making it’s way up to today where you are calling in Oslo’s clubbing new year at the Villa. What track will be the first you lay down?

I have no idea. That’s the fun part, if you ask me :)

And now for the obligatory end-of-year hand off question. Any new-year’s resolutions?

Naw, I just try not to look back and continue to look forward with a healthy mind.

Diggin with Alexis La-Tan and Øyvind Morken

Alexis La-Tan and Øyvind Morken are listening to Peter Gordon’s “That Hat” when I finally get a chance to join them to talk about their latest record store finds.

Alexis: “That’s an amazing track with Arthur Russell on vocals.”
Øyvind: “You know strangefruit from Mongolian jetset? He’s like the godfather of the Norwegian scene; he’s been like a mentor to me. Strangefruit was asked by NRK to do an Arthur Russell mega-mix and he asked me to do it with him. It was really cool, because it was like 2000/2001 and I was into house and techno at the time. I thought disco was cheesy and then I discovered Arthur Russell, which completely changed my mind about the genre”.

Alexis arrived in Oslo with little more than a USB stick – he’s vinyl collection currently inaccessible from under the mountain of renovation work going on his house in Paris – and already he and Øyvind are finding common ground through the records they’ve picked earlier that day. Alexis hardly had a chance to unpack his overnight bag before the pair took off on their shared leisure vocation in the hope of finding a record they’ve been looking for, or just stumbling onto something unique. Alexis is in town for the Oslo world music festival and when I ask the DJ whether he’s come prepared to perform as such, he smiles and says, “I have enough music with me that could be considered World Music.” But if that fails… he pulls Ganghas Orchestra’s The Dream out of the bag of records he’d just bought and puts the needle on the record. Immediately a swarm of plucked strings rattle loose from the sitar and you’re carried away by syncopated beats from the tabla drums. It’s Disco as only it could be in India. Alexis bought the pressing for Øyvind as a gift and Øyvind is happy in finding a record he’d been in search of for a while. “Actually I think I might have this already,” he says as the first bars from a discernable modern kick joins in. Øyvind takes a sip of his beer in Jæger’s lounge while Alexis scans the back of a Rolf Trostel record. “This record is from Norway,” he comments as if the significance of that is something of a happy coincidence. I ask him his opinion on collectors who collect records for the purpose of having every pressing from different countries and he shrugs his shoulders alongside the reply: “I have nothing good to say about those guys.” For DJs like Alexis and Øyvind the record is still a form of entertainment and it’s function is to be enjoyed. They want to let the music free from its shiny plastic confines and their only propensity is to share it with others. Their inherent musical knowledge and desire to find new music all the time – even if it’s old – puts them in a significant category of DJ, the digging DJ. Here they walk amongst greats like Harvey and Andrew Weatherall, people who like to share their eclectic, yet esoteric taste with an audience in the dual purpose of entertaining and educating. Alexis puts on Hell by Thick Pigeon, a new wave track from the 80’s and the DIY artwork pops out me immediately. “They are a DIY band”, he quips.

Øyvind: That’s funny because I’ve seen this record in the store.
Alexis: you definitely know you’ve seen it when you’ve seen it.
Both: Laugh

Artwork has always been a crucial element to the vinyl format and large part of its appeal. The size of the disc and its sleeve creates a vast open space for artists to explore literal visual components to an abstract musical work. For Alexis, who also has a career in design, the appeal lies in the “overall feeling” of a cover. “It’s more what’s represented on the cover than actual design. You can always tell whether a record is special from the cover.“ Thick Pigeon screams at you through bright colours, while small collage-like images pull you further into the design, where specific unknown codes are waiting to be unlocked. It goes hand in hand with the music where the vocals are veiled behind crisp metallic synthesisers, drawing you in to their artificial aesthetics through a human feeling. It reminds me of an earlier record Alexis pulled from his bag. It shares some similarities with Drinking Electricity’s Superstition, an 80’s synth wave arrangement that suggests something of Alexis’ tastes, which he confirms when he says: “I’m mostly attracted to electronic stuff.” He has a particular fondness for New Wave because he’s “naturally attracted to the darker stuff” and likes acts like Thick Pigeon for their electronic sound that is steeped in the organic expressiveness of the human musicians playing their electronic instruments. It’s an era of electronic music that Øyvind too has started digging, but feels hesitant about playing for an audience. “People are too young to have a memory of that kind of sound.”

Alexis: Usually when I’m playing somewhere, unless it’s a venue like the Salon des amateurs in Düsseldorf, I don’t go for the complicated weirder stuff. I bring something different to the table, but I keep the right elements so people stay interested.
Øyvind: “You’re still a DJ and you can’t just disappear up your own asshole.”
A: “Well, you can if you want to clear the dance floor.”
O: “Which is OK at times. I think you should be able to clear the dance floor every now and then, because it’s a good thing, unless people go home. That’s a problem today: that if you play the wrong record loads of people just leave.”

It’s very rare for people to just leave during a Øyvind Morken set in my opinion. His style is eclectic enough to hold the attention of the most hardened heads, while his focus never drifts too far from the mood of the dance floor. “I don’t plan anything. I try to just feed off the energy,” he says and proclaims to be schizophrenic both in personality and Djing when it comes to putting a mix together. Here he and Alexis display a different approach, with Alexis preferring to set his mixes up with a common thread running through the music he prepares. He makes sure the tracks are “are all interchangeable” so he can flit between them effortlessly at the drop of a hat. “I like to mix and match and I never play a track for the beginning to the end.” Alexis favours playing short sections of tracks, to avoid “getting bored” and when he mixes in this cut paste kind of way, he likes to “to build things that have a similar vibe or energy”, the listener usually unaware of the French DJ’s transitions. “I tend to improvise most of the time, and it’s more to do with how you’re feeling the music and what you’re adding to it rather than knowing when it starts and when it stops, and when the break comes. You can see all that on the way the record is cut. That part is all visual and getting it right is all about intuition.“ It’s that intuitive drive that makes it a special occasion when Alexis records a mix and which inevitably catches the attention of other DJs like Øyvind. “I don’t often listen to mixes, but I really liked your ‘when sound becomes colour’ mix.”

A comfortable silence ensues while Øyvind puts on the next record. Jah Wobble’s Voodoo pours out from the speakers and the tropical rhythms infuse with synthesised punk in a way that reflects both DJs ability to tie diverse pieces of sound together in singular musical narratives. Voodoo is Alexis’ find and it also stands testament to that gratifying moment when you discover a “record completely by chance in a completely random place”. Voodoo is the reason people like Alexis and Øyvind do what they do, flicking through dusty shelves to find pieces of music they can eventually share with people like me and talk a little of the history of that music within their own biography. Alexis and Øyvind consider some of Jah Wobble’s other works like Snake Charmer, with Øyvind emphasising the “mix-mash vibes” to the music…

Alexis: The other classic is “How much are they” which was an amazing hit on the dance floor in the eighties.

They dispatch their second beers. A short silence is followed by the rhythmical click of the needle witting Jah Wobble’s central label.

Øyvind: Should we end it there?

Kwaito – South Africa’s House

As a kid growing up in South Africa, I remember my first experience of a uniquely original beat came from a ritualistic television habit – a Friday night of flicking through the four channels available out of sheer boredom. It was the early nineties and there was very rarely anything to distract the public from their beer drinking ritual around an open fire on a Friday night so the kids were left to their own devices and the Television offered the escape from the monotonous drone of guitar music playing in the background. I would sit on the floor flicking through the channels like this until one evening something stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the sound of a peculiar rhythm, counterpointing the lazy rhythms of a blues guitar coming from somewhere outside. There was a 4/4 kick, but it was unusual in the way the snare accented the offbeat and more than that it was completely mesmerising for a young music fan like myself. It was an infectious rhythm accentuated by the rhythmical expressions of the Zulu dancers in their colourful attire, moving to this provocative percussive musical language. It was a musical language I would come to know as Kwaito.

Kwaito, although influenced by the sound of Chicago, is South Africa’s own with the development of electronic music in the country almost perpendicular to that of the states. House music found an immediate audience in South Africa in the eighties, with the percussive music especially enjoying popularity in townships like Soweto, but much of the basis that formed Kwaito came from local music, and House merely offered the electronic means for it to exist in a modern context and develop. It went hand in hand with Stokvel parties –informal gathering in townships – and Pantsula, a popular dance form, which displays a kind of athleticism very rarely encountered on the dance floor. In the context of this social gathering and the time of House music’s arrival in South Africa, many scholars believe it offered a platform for people to unite in the perpetual struggle against apartheid. People were dancing in the street when Nelson Mandela was released, and Kwaito was the soundtrack. People would celebrate deep into the night when the ANC was elected in 1994 and Kwaito would be on the jukebox. Kwaito was in some ways more about the celebration of the achievement than fuelling the fire of discontent, and the music delivered that message in upbeat arrangements with a very accessible party narrative. The music expounded in the nineties as the sanctions of apartheid lifted and exposure to “western” music increased everywhere in the country. But Kwaito was as much about R&B and Hip Hop as it was about House, and it grew as a completely independent anomaly, influenced, but not determined by the genre’s development elsewhere. More so, Kwaito offered an accessible platform for those who didn’t enjoy the white privilege of being able to entertain a leisurely pursuit like music. The political agenda was not contained within the literal form of this soulful music, but rather in the convenience of this music. House music was the bridge to equality through cheap keyboards and a simplified musical language that the average person tapping his foot to the beat could understand and Kwaito was South Africa’s interpretation of this form of accessible music.

Kwaito took on the rich musical heritage of South Africa’s many local cultures, and stirred it into a variably mixing pot of influences channelled into something uniquely South African. Music from “western” developments was appropriated for local audiences, incorporating elements like those offbeat snares from indigenous musical developments, and arrived at music that was distinguishable, yet universal enough to lose the kitsch exotic tag, where by western music is the standard by which all other music follows and anything from the Africa is considered of an “other” dimension. South African House music as Kwaito excelled in this regard, because it became impossible to stick it with that “other” tag, where it’s appreciated for its exoticism like a tribal mask. In House music, South Africa found a level playing field with the rest of the world, and as the professionalism grew, artists like Black Coffee emerged at an international level –more so than at a local level even – without adopting the form of an unusual curiosity to be admired by the rest of the world. Many of these artists overcame a life of poverty, discrimination and life-threatening events, to get to the point they arrived at, but they’ve never played on this aspect for the advancement for the sake of their careers. For these artists it is, and it’s always been about the music.

With the advent of computer music, Kwaito and House music was made more accessible than ever in South Africa and the genre grew to overshadow the magnitude of its US counterparts, locally. In the early to mid 2000’s I remember almost every bar in Cape Town was playing House in one form or another. They weren’t exclusive, playing everything from Kwaito to Deep House, to a type of Lounge House where live instrumentation would often accompany the DJ set. It’s towards the end of this era, on the back of the first decade of this new millennium, where South African House music and Kwaito would find larger audiences in the rest of the world. DJ’s like Culoe De Song, DJ Mujava and DJ Clock would emerge out of the country on the back of the path paved by Black Coffee, with each generation inspiring the next in a type of upward social mobility through music. Two strains emerged at the same time, with some DJs like De Song preferring an European and Stateside aesthetic to House, while others like Clock stayed true to the Kwaito sound that started it all in South Africa. And where the two distinctions meet, you’ll find a new artist like Sipbe Tebeka, making stripped down House with a slight Kwaito influences running through it in the same way Mujava’s Township Funk bridged that gap between UK Funky and Kwaito for a international audience.

Today House is the biggest music market in South Africa with the distinction between it and Kwaito becoming ever more conflated. It’s the most popular form of music practised by South Africans, and has taken on something of an umbrella term for those that make electronic music. And while the rest of the world turns to Techno, it’s still House music making the most waves in South Africa, with artists like Spoek Mathambo and Felix La Band flying the flag for South African House and Kwaito. It might have been modernised along with rest of the world, but to me that first experience I’ve had with music falling upon it one lazy Friday evening has stayed with me for the rest of my life.

Futuristic sex – An interview with Rørstad

“Shouldn’t we all be having futuristic sex?” That question seems to have more relevance than ever when I phone Brede Rørstad on October 21^st 2015. It’s on this date that Marty Mcfly and Doc Brown made that fictional trip into the future in Back to the Future and found flying cars, hover boards and lace less shoes, a post-modernist utopia for any child of the eighties. Although it would be a bit of “a stretch of an imagination” to say that Brede’s lyrics might have been influenced by this movie’s entertaining vision of the future, he does find some poignancy in the reality of our future prospects compared to the film’s. “For me that song is about taking a step back to look at ourselves. Sometimes we think that we’ve developed so much, but we still make the same mistakes and we are driven by the same impulses. Hence the question: If we had gotten that far ‘shouldn’t we have futuristic sex?’

It was Brede’s second single as is eponymous Rørstad moniker, a name he adopted shortly after putting his Heartfelt alias to rest, and follows a new age of music from the classical composer and pop musician, in which he attempts to make music with the emphasis to “create something that reaches out to people.” He creates a transmittable danceable brand of electro, disco-pop in this way, music that takes his classical motivations and strips them down to their core where emotive expressions lie, with a universal appeal. It’s in an electronic aesthetic but then Brede argues, “isn’t all pop music electronic today.”

It’s found its way in live show too, a live show that Brede will be bringing to Jæger this Friday, packing an extra long chord to get down at the audience’s level. We caught up with him just before his show to find out more of the man behind the moustache.

Where did start for you.

That goes way back for me. I started playing guitar when I was eight or nine. I started taking lessons, got into classical music and played in bands in junior high. I went on to studying composition and classical orchestration, while playing in bands all along. A few years ago I started making electronic pop music and developing what is now Rørstad and the music for that project.

Why did opt to go into pop music and not forge ahead in the classics.

Even though I’ve been in classical music circuits for a long time and studied classical music, I’ve never really felt at home there, and I think I’ve always been a child of pop music, growing up in the eighties and nineties. So for me, I’ve always had that pop gene even in my classical pursuits. Even in the symphonies I write, I feel like I always create something that reaches out to people, you know communicates on an emotional level with people. I guess, what I’m doing now is music in its purest form. What I’m doing now is trying to make and produce good pop song to get people excited and get their dance moves on.

Is this why you had to get the longer guitar lead for your show at Jæger?

Exactly

Is it always about having a connection between you and the audience?

To me creating music is such a solitary process and experience, at least working the way I do. From the point of conceiving a song or an idea and bringing it to completion for recording is a long process and for me working with a co-producer that’s not in Oslo, it’s a very solitary thing. So playing live is a reward in a sense. Music for me is about reaching out to people and there’s no more direct way of doing that on stage and in front of an audience and even better if I can get a good connection with the audience and have a good time while we’re doing it. It’s all about having a good time.

You mention your co-producer is not in Oslo. Is that the Paris relation?

One of them. I’ve been working in France and Paris on and off for a while and parallel to that I’ve met a French producer. It’s an interesting process and it’s becoming more and more French, from different angles.

Is any of the work you do in Paris of a classical nature?

That’s quite sporadic. I think the last thing I did with classical music was in 2011, when I had my first symphony premiered. And that was in Norway. But I haven’t pushed the classical thing that hard. When I write music of that nature it involves a lot of people and that’s part of the reason I started playing pop music, a situation where I could play and create the music on my own.

A few years back when I lived in the States I founded my own chamber orchestra, and we played concerts around town. It was like twenty other people and me, a big ordeal to keep that going. For me right now it’s all about electronic pop music. There are plans and ideas to bring the two together in the future, but it has to be the right time and place for that.

Has classic music and pop music every occupied a common ground for you?

Yes and no. There’s definitely an intersection between the two, but I feel that they are both musical to so many different premises. Finding a common ground between the two is possible, but listening to classical music can be such a different thing than the immediacy of modern pop music. With classical music there’s a much greater degree of nuisances that may not be as clever to bring into pop music. I think there’s definitely an interesting meeting point between the two.

What I’ve also been doing recently is writing chamber music arrangements of my own songs. For instance, performing with a string quartet or a woodwind trio’s completely stripped down chamber arrangements of my pop songs. It’s a fun exercise.

Do you play any other instruments?

Guitar is my main forté. Primarily, I’m a singer. I have studied a few instruments and I can make my way around other instruments a bit, but I try and stick with guitar, keyboards and vocals.

And so far there’s been two singles.

Yes, it’s been a long process. I used to play under the Heartfelt moniker a few years back. I then went through a writing period where I took my own name. It’s been a long process, not of re-inventing myself, but of getting to the core of my music. It’s been a long process and so far there’s been two singles out and a new one coming soon that we’ve just shot a music video for and there’s an EP in the pipeline for January/February. There’s a lot of new music in the works for 2016.

You mentioned the video. I believe you had to learn some choreography for that?

It was really fun. I got to work with a choreographer and a total of seventeen dancers. I love going into a process of stretching out of my own comfort zone, which I was at this point. It’s quite fascinating to work with people that are really good at what they do, and I can get a little taste of that and maybe join in a little bit. It’s definitely something I want to do more of.

20 Questions – An interview with Ali Schwarz from Tiefschwarz

Ali Schwarz is in his home in Berlin when he answers the phone. After sending him a ‘few’ questions over email, the older of the Schwarz brothers, insists I call him up. The situation is a “bit complicated”, he explains in a polite German accent and he doesn’t really have the time to sit down and answer 20 questions “within questions” (an excessive list in retrospect), between prepping a live show and running two studios. When I call him he’s going through his record collection in a attempt to ”get rid of all the crap that’s been sitting there for decades.” I imagine a dark-haired Ali Schwarz in some Berlin warehouse sifting through endless shelves of records, records that have travelled with the producer throughout his life, and some of which have been there since the very beginning when Ali, as a young adolescent, ran around Stuttgart savouring the nightlife of the city. “Stuttgart is huge bag of memories. Everything that shaped my character and personality is based in that time.”

The German city lies in a valley 207m above sea level and “looks a bit like San Francisco without the sea”; says Ali. Steep steps dot the city in extreme elevation changes and with the Black Forest only an hour away the city is surrounded by “super beautiful scenery.” It’s also the city from where Mercedes and Porsche base their operations and where Danilo Plessow started his career as Motor City Drum Ensemble. Although Danilo might have found some affinity with Detroit in picking his artistic moniker Ali says; “besides the cars, Detroit and Stuttgart have nothing in common”. Although Stuttgart has a very working class population like Detroit, it’s far richer than its American counterpart, and while Detroit went through an impressive slump at the end of the eighties, Stuttgart inconspicuously carried on with business and amongst other things, nurtured a young Ali through the start of a musical career.

It was in this environment where Ali’s eclectic musical tastes first blossomed as he earmarked everything from “Abba to Zappa” in his youth. It would lay the foundation for an easy transition into new wave when Ali started experiencing Stuttgart’s nightlife as an adolescent teen. “I started going out when I was very young, listening to the original new wave stuff in the eighties, stuff like David Bowie and Prince, when it actually happened in a way. I was hypnotised by everything.” Ali, being the older Schwarz brother, naturally influenced his younger brother’s tastes, but before they eventually came together as Tiefschwarz, the two followed individual directions with Basti favouring the role of punk drummer, while Ali ventured deeper into club culture and its music.

It would a be short leap for Ali when he made the jump into the role of club promoter, hosting illegal parties in disused locations with the emphasis on bringing people together. “The first party we had like three hundred people, the police came it was a big mess, but it was amazing.” Through these parties Ali found some affinity with a group of people that were passionate about the same music and it wouldn’t take long till they opened the first club ON -U in the beginning of the end of the last millennium, 1990. Based on the Adrian Sherwood’s sound system of the same name, ON -U is where this group of friends, which now included Basti (after moving his drum kit into the basement), would learn their trade as young apprentices. “When we started our club, we couldn’t even mix records. I was just fascinated by the nightlife, the temptation of crossing borders, the music and everything.” The brothers would get their musical education from friend Jan, a self-proclaimed music nerd that took the brothers on a musical journey every week through his impressive record collection and knowledge. “We would go to his house Sunday afternoons for ‘lectures’ and listen to records for eight to ten hours.” Jan always went deep avoiding the obvious as he taught the Schwarz brothers about the value of music. “It’s like when you learn to like cheese.“ At the same time the whole ON -U team would also be educated in mixing, with another friend passing on his experience from playing “fancy” disco clubs in the city.

It took the group about a year to master the basics, with Ali and Basti soon displaying the type of virtuoso talent we’ve come to know today. Their eclectic tastes were given absolute freedom to explore their every whim and desire at ON -U with like-minded audiences encouraging the brothers to discover new music like Richie Hawtin and Rare-Groove through their DJ sets. “There was so much new stuff coming out. It was kind of a new era and the people were super enthusiastic about everything.” It’s an unfamiliar era to the present, where the Internet and mobile phones have jaded the average clubber; something Ali says has been the result of the present’s emphasis on marketing. “It’s so crazy what you have to take care of instead of just playing good music and taking care of your audience. It’s all about how you position yourself in social media today.” Ever the chameleon he accepts this new period of club culture, but misses the “intimacy of you and I” in the clubbing experiences from his past. “It was about the moment and the experience. There was no recording.”

It was a time when the music would be the glue that brought the people together, and a time that saw Ali dig deeper and deeper into the music too. He started spending a lot of time in Chicago, getting “really addicted to Chicago house”, and an obsession grew that would invariably lay the foundation for his next club. With Basti on board again, the brothers opened Red Dog in 1993. Taking its name form the Chicago record store, it ushered in a new era for Stuttgart and the brothers Schwarz, an era where they would turn their focus on the deeper end of House and Techno, and eventually attain their first production credit as Tiefschwarz, the deep black having some relation to the music they end up making.

“Over the years we got more professional and more certain about what we wanted to do.” This newfound certainty would see the brothers enter the studio for the first time at the end of the Red Dog’s career and with the help of Peter Hoff, they would lay down their first single ‘Music’, and what else would it be than an instant deep-house classic. An album followed in 2000 and RAL 9005 garnered much critical acclaim after it was released on Classic recordings in the UK and François Kevorkian’s Wave records in the states. With Guitars, vocals and even elements of Krautrock funnelled into neatly packaged House tracks, Tiefschwarz displayed the kind of eclecticism in their music that had always been there in their DJ sets. “I can play Techno, I can play Disco and Deep House. I love to combine things, and come with something unexpected to keep the things interesting.“ It’s something you can clearly hear on Tiefshwarz’ Misch Masch compilation from 2004, where everything from code 6 to Mylo make an impression. What it also shows is that Tiefschwarz are able to effortlessly adapt to any situation, going from deep-house to electro without even batting an eyelid, in their DJ sets and also in their productions. “We are always aware of trends for inspiration, because we never wanted to get bored with our own music.” Ali says Tiefschwarz likes ripping off old layers to make room for new ones and moving with the flow without losing focus on yourself.” That self Ali refers to is Tiefschwarz’ “versatility”, the essence of what the brothers grew up with and the element that’s always there no matter which era of their discography the listener samples. “Music is too rich and too beautiful to focus on one corner. For some period of time it was good for us to be all over the place, and it never felt wrong. It was our own development within the music.” From the heavy guitars on ‘Eat Books’ to the minimal approach of a track like ‘Whistler’, Tiefschwarz always seem to take some aspect from the current zeitgeist and manipulate it along with all their other influences to arrive at something new each time.

Right now they are at the next phase of their continual development with Left, their fifth studio album, an album that highlights Tiefschwarz’ ability to adapt to the present mood yet again with Techno at its core. “Right now it’s all about Techno and Techno revival number 200 and I love Techno, but I like to keep things a bit open so it’s not as obvious. And that’s also our philosophy; to keep things interesting.“ Left keeps it open with syncopated hats, some very interesting electronic arrangements and a human voice that can go from robotic synth-pop expressions to sweet melodic refrains. That voice belongs to Kahn and in it, Tiefschwarz have found a common ground too obvious to ignore. “He’s also this kind of Chameleon.” It was Kahn that inspired the brothers to take the group back on the road, the first tour since 2010’s Chocolate. They’ve toned down the ambition of that tour, to get back to that intimacy of the clubbing experience and with Kahn on the podium, it brings an intuitive human dimension to their electronic set. “He’s an amazing performer, and he doesn’t take things too seriously. It’s all about quality, but he’s grown up enough to see that sometimes people are just too serious about this shit.“

It’s a show I’ve been looking forward to for some time, and realise now that I might have not even asked Ali about the new album or the show in the extensive list I sent him earlier. A true professional in every regard, he doesn’t mention this at all, and entertains the same questions he must have heard a million times before. Questions like will he ever start a club again. “Under certain circumstances I might consider a night.“ He mentions how he loves going to day parties and how they are currently flourishing in his adopted home Berlin. He still hangs on to that “bag of memories“ from Stuttgart though, the things that shaped his character and personality, but he calls Berlin home today. “Stuttgart is my ‘Heimat’, and that connection will always be there, but my actual home, where I’m at home, is Berlin.” Ali can’t care less about the opinions of others when it comes to his city.” No matter what people say, I don’t give a shit, because I love Berlin.”

Our time together draws to a close, and I have to let Ali get back to sorting through his record collection, but somehow my list of questions look longer than when I started. Those twenty questions that I had to begin with have just expounded to a hundred more, but they’ll have to wait for another time…