Very Delicious with Demi Riquísimo

Semi Delicious and Lifetime on the Hips boss Demi Riquisímo talks about establishing his labels and more ahead of his visit for Bypåskefestivalen.

Demi Riquísimo and his label Semi Delicious thundered on to the scene back in 2019, and has since cultured a discernible sound that has garnered a lot of attention and praise in the club land. Its origins as an exclusive vehicle for Demi Riquísimo has blossomed into a cabal of familiar- and new artists perpetuating the sound of the label and has even spawned another label in the form of A Lifetime On The Hips. 

Built on the DIY ideologies of the roots of club music the sound of the label reflects that with dusty synthesisers and jittery drum machines touching on everything from acid to Techno and even early Trance prototypes. It’s a reflection perhaps of Demi Riquísimo’s own origin story as a Detroit born, London-raised record collector, but goes beyond that with a no-nonsense “if-it-ain’t-broke” attitude.

At its most functional the music is reserved for A Lifetime On The Hips with both labels adopting the vinyl format in their designs. While Semi Delicious is the flagship label, its sister is “all killer no filler” strictly focussed on the dance floor. It’s receiving the same kind of recognition as its parent label since its inception last year and with Demi Riquísimo at the helm perpetuating its ethos and sound, Semi Delicious, its sub-label and artists are gathering a lot of momentum. 

Demi Riquísimo (not his real name) is something of an enigma. We know there was some kind of DJ and production career before the moniker, but it’s clouded in the past and the way in which he’s established the new alias and labels, suggests an experienced history in this field. We are lucky that he’s obliged to answer a few questions for us ahead of his visit this week to Jaeger, so we could unearth a little more of the man behind the label and the ideologies. 

I understand from other interviews that DJing came first for you. What was it about the craft that drew you to it?

Yes DJing definitely came first for me. I was very intrigued by vinyl and a friend had some belt driven decks that I enjoyed having a go in my teens. When I moved to Bristol for university I soon got glandular fever which meant I wasn’t going out but I managed to save some money to buy some decks and a batch of wax. I practised non-stop. About 6 months later I did my first club gig. 

What kind of inspiration and/or instruction did you get from what was happening around you in Bristol?

When I was there it was very bass heavy and I was very much into jungle and drum n bass. This translated into my DJing and record shopping. I also started running nights with this sound pallet but as the years went on I started to incorporate other sounds and genres into the events and later on in my production. 

Your label Semi Delicious started concurrently as a vehicle for your own releases. How did it (and does it) relate to what you are doing as a DJ; do you see the label and your music as an extension of your sound in the booth?

I feel running the label is all about control about what you want to release and when you want to release it. I like to release music in the moment that I’ve personally finished recently or signed recently from other artists. I think this way I’m able to translate playing current releases in my sets. So many cases with other labels I would get music signed that came out 2 years later and by the time it got released I’d never play it at all. 

I know you studied production, but what was your relationship to making music before your studies?

Most of my friends I lived with in Bristol were quite big gamers which never really appealed to me. I lost my creative output after leaving school as I used to do a lot of art work to pay my time. So I downloaded a demo version of Reason 4 music production and really enjoyed it so I bought a copy and just got really stuck in. I think at this point my shift from DJing to producing became apparent in my spare time. 

I’ve read you started Semi Delicious out of a necessity since nobody in your extended music circle wanted to put your tracks out. What was it in those first original releases that made you want to put these out into the world?

I just really believed in the music I was producing. A few artists said it wasn’t for them when sent to them in the demo format. But the same DJs were giving the tracks five star reviews and requesting the vinyl when it was delivered to them in promo form. It’s funny how we judge our feedback on the way music is sent to us. 

What do you usually aim to achieve with your music before you set out on a track and where do you draw influences from outside of music? 

I normally start with some kind of sample idea and build around that. Or I turn on all the gear and have a jam. Sometimes going in with an idea is helpful but for me not all the time. Just triggering some weird sounds is enough for me sometimes. 

As Semi Delicious expanded to include more of your music and other artists, what were you trying to establish with the label in terms of a sound or a collective ideology?

For me the label is just about releasing good dance music and records that will still sound good in ten years. That goes for my music and others. The second ethos is creating a community of artists and friends where we can all grow up and rise together.

How would you describe that sound today and has it evolved since the initial releases?

I believe the sound is alway evolving and it would be too hard to describe the sound. If  you listen to the releases over the years and from the different artists so much of the music is very different and has its own identity. So yes for sure the sound has evolved since the initial release and will continue too.  

Last year you set up A lifetime on the Hips as a sub-label which in your words is “strictly all killer, no filler.” Why wouldn’t these tracks fit the Semi Delicious profile?

They would fit for Semi Delicious. The difference between the two labels is semi delicious is more eclectic so some of these big killer tracks would be accompanied by other types of music. 

What’s it like operating, not just one, but two vinyl labels today; What are some of the challenges you face and why this continued commitment to the vinyl format?

It is tricky and the costs always go up not down. But I feel as long as the demand is still there and the music is still strong and getting good feedback I’ll always be passionate to release on the format that is so close to my heart and reminds me of first becoming a dj. 

Do you think there will ever be a time when the format will not be sustainable anymore?

I thought yes to this 10 years ago but now it’s more popular than then. I feel this is due to everything becoming too accessible in the way we consume music in the last 10 years. I think people like to put the value back into the music they’re investing into. 

Besides your own label, what are some of your more recent acquisitions that are currently your go-to weapons for the dance floor?

I’ve always been a big fan of the label Tessellate and The Trip and their music. Love on The Rocks is a label I’ll always love and play music from as well. 

And lastly can you play us out with a song in anticipation of your visit to Jaeger?

‘Square One’ by Kosh is a track I’ve been playing in every set of late

Bypåskefestivalen 2024

The lineup for our annual Bypåskefestivalen is now confirmed with some familiar faces and new concepts joining the city blowout.

We leave the white powder to the mountain and take up residence in the beating heart of the city. It’s Easter and while the rest of the city hits the mountains and slopes we’re making our stand in our urban enclave of bass. The annual Bypåskefestivalen returns with our usual coterie of residents and guests taking over the long weekend at Jaeger. Double Trouble, Schmooze and Brus, Helt Texas, Flux, Frædag, LYD, Footfood and Moving Heads take residents over the course of the week with guest appearances by Skatebård, Demi Riquísimo and much more joining our residents across the two booths.

Our latest Sunday concept Moving Heads and the guys behind Schmooze & Brus and Flux mark new additions to the Bypåske concepts with each bringing their own unique take on the clubbing landscape to our two floors, from the airy heights of uplifting House music to the determined underground and platonic shifting rumble of Techno. Familiar guests like Prins Thomas, Skatebård and Footfood stay the course in 2024 with international visitors Shonky, Demi Riquísimo and Den Anden Side breaking up the local roll-call.

See the entire lineup here and find more information about the festival here and the individual events here.

27.03 – Prins Thomas + Isoebel + Skatebård 
                BCR: Anders Hajem + Henrik Villard + Perkules

28.03 – Helt Texas: Shonky + Normann + Ole HK
                 Schmooze & Brus: DJ Stuk & Salamanca + Max Lok

29.03 – Frædag: g-HA & Olanskii + Demi Riquísimo 
                 Flux Collective x Den Anden Side: Bjerregaard + Matriark + Johannes Astrup  

30.03 – Nightflight x Lyd: Nora Pagu + Olle Abstract + MC Kaman & Kash

31.03 – Footfood: g-HA & Olanskii + diskJokke + Vinny Villbass
                Moving Heads: Casablanca 303 + Tonchius & friends + Hetty & J André





Love what you do with COEO

We fired off some questions to Munich/Berlin-based duo COEO as they head to Jaeger for Schmooze and Brus this Friday and talked about origins, Munich and their keenness for Djing.

Florian Vietz and Andreas Höpfl are COEO and they have been making music together since their teens in Munich. They started making an impression in the age of the music blog, and their tracks like “Get Down” hit an immediate nerve with their deep, luxurious sound capturing a zeitgeist that dominated the dance floors at that time. 

As the time went on their music matured, but never losing touch with that youthful charm that they’ve cultivated early on, as they folded elements of Disco and Jazz into later productions. Their long standing relationship with Munich-based record label Toy Tronics, have provided a consistent platform for releases from the duo with labels like Razor and Tape and Shall not Fade also flocking to their music to break off a piece of COEO for themselves.

Their latest record “Rush Hour” finds the duo in an energetic furore, charting a course for bigger rooms. An uplifting melody bounces between tireless beats as strings smooth out the arrangement. The duo’s history with 90’s Hip Hop and a legacy of Georgio Moroder and Donna Summer in Munich have coalesced around a distinctive sound for the pair, built on the foundation of those earliest releases.

Their work in the studio has built bridges to the world‘s most sought after DJ booths and as DJs COEO are equally adept, garnering a reputation today as one of the most enigmatic DJ duos out there. They’ll arrive at Schmooze and Brus this week and we took the opportunity to find out more about their early days, their relationship with Toy Tonics and the future of COEO.

Hey guys and thank you for taking the time to talk to us. I’ve read some interviews and I know you were friends long before COEO. What was the catalyst for you to start working on music together?

Florian: When you are young you are full of energy. We wanted to be creative and start our own project. Everything you see on TV or hear on the radio is so far away, but when you start listening to underground hip hop or electronic music you realise that this is music by young people and for young people and you can be part of that scene. We wanted to be like our role models and I think this was the catalyst of starting to make music.

Andreas: And also our acquaintance with a crew called Scrape Tactitions, who were very successful in the turntable championships- the ITFs, International Turntablist Federation- played a big role for us, because it also got us very involved with DJing and the possibilities that turntables offer.

Were you working on music individually before then, and how did you find yourselves adapting to each other in the studio/creative endeavour?

Florian: No, we haven’t had any solo projects before and couldn’t even play any instruments when we started our duo. We were 15 when we bought our first turntables and DAWs for sampling music. In the beginning it was a slow autodidactically process and more like a learning by doing thing. But we were growing with our own tasks. By the time Andy was studying audio engineering and Florian learned to play piano. In the studio it never looked like Instagram producer videos where people are jamming together. Working in the studio together can be really annoying if the second person sits next to you and has to listen to 150 kick drums you can choose from. We prefer to work on ideas on our own and then finish tracks together. It can be really helpful to hear someone else’s opinion. :-)

As I understand it you are based in Munich for the most part. Munich has this incredible House music legacy. Tell us a bit about the scene there and how it shaped the start of your career.

Andreas: Of course, Munich was a great influence. When we went out at night, we were always soaking up the music and the atmosphere at the clubs. For its size Munich always had a more than adequate range of clubs that played house music. In the past we had magic nights in clubs like Die Registratur, Erste Liga, Awi and Kong, nowadays we love to go to Charlie, Goldener Reiter and Blitz- just to name a few. But at the moment we have to attend our own shows so we don’t show up there that often anymore. Moreover I moved to Berlin.

Florian: But also Munich based labels such as Toy Tonics and Public Possession give a lot back to the scene. They give artists a platform to create art, they throw parties in museums or off locations, sell fashion in their stores and thus gather a lot of young talented people around them. Many house Djs like Max NRG Supply and Rhode & Brown have radio shows on Radio 80K which is Munich’s most important community radio. We also love Benjamin Fröhlich’s Permanent Vacation label which has an incredible output of tasteful contemporary house music.

I feel that the city has always been this dark horse on the scene, bringing more provocative artists like DJ Hell and Skee Mask to the fore, as opposed to Berlin for example. What are your experiences with the scene there compared to the rest of Europe and what makes it so unique in your opinion?

Andreas: Good question, maybe because of its Giorgio Moroder/Donna Summer/Musicland Studios history Munich has always had a great sense of self confidence and has not looked to the left or right. This could be the reason why it has developed and preserved its own style until today. In general it makes no sense to compare cities like Munich & Berlin, or Paris & London, as each city has shaped its own culture, and that’s a good thing as it ensures a high level of diversity.

What was it about House music that particularly appealed to you, and is it something that has always been there for you both as a group and as individuals?

Florian: I remember getting tired of Lil-Jon-esque Hip Hop in the 2000s. I loved midschool 90s Hip Hop, but the presence of mainstream hip hop made me search for something more different and more real. Being a kid in the late 90s I only knew house music as pop projects in the charts. As I grew older I discovered house music again from a totally different perspective. In the beginning there is the Charts-Dr-Alban-house music, but finally you understand and share the values of this whole movement. We quickly fell in love with 4-to-the-floor music.

With the Techno scene being the prevalent thing people associated Germany with, what does it take for a House act like yourself to make an impression and have you witnessed a change in attitudes since coming to the fore?

Andreas: Of course, techno always had a big presence in Germany, and of course it still does today. That was probably one of the reasons why we were first successful abroad and only later managed to gain a foothold in Germany.

When it came time to make your own music and leading up to your first single “Get Down” what was it solidified for you in terms of the sound of COEO?

Florian: Before that time we were experimenting a lot with music like Ramadanman and have never been fully satisfied with the result. With releasing Get Down on Globelle we thought this is the sound we want to make for the rest of our lives. From today’s perspective we think that it was not our best production. Especially technically we would make a lot of things different today, haha. 

I remember that track hitting a nerve with the blog community at a time when blogs had such a strong influence. What are your memories of that time in terms of how that track was received and what did mean for you going forward with the project?

Florian: It was a special time when the possibilities of the internet were explored and some nerds put their knowledge about music on the net. I remember that we listened to or read some blogs like “beatelectric” several times from the first to the last post. Every now and then I catch myself going to old blogs we loved and hoping that they will be continued, but unfortunately many of them are no longer existing. 10 years ago these sites were a big part of the scene and super important to get attention as a small artist. And of course we were proud of being featured on these pages and getting a lot of positive feedback.

Those early tracks are luxurious adventures into the deeper realms of House music, and it came at a time when Deep House was really the sound du jour. Was there anything in the air for you at that time which moulded the sound of those first releases, and what is your relationship with those early records today?

Andreas: Indeed, we were strongly influenced by and loved Deep House music at that time. We still like our early records, but I think we have been listening to our own releases too many times, haha. After playing it a thousand times you are no longer feeling it the same way. And that’s why we are always a bit critical about our music. But this is okay. ;-)

It was not long after that, that you released your first track via Toy Tonics, in a relationship that lasts to this day. I’ve heard the story of how you met some of the people in a club in Munich, but what made you want to release music with them?

Andreas: We have been fan of Mathias Modica’s (Kapote) music long before he founded Toy Tonics. We loved his output as Munk and saw him play a few times in Munich. Gomma was his label before he was running Toy Tonics. After we found out that Mathias started something new we paid a lot of attention to the new label and quickly realised that our music is similar to the music Toy Tonics is releasing.

They already had some success with a couple of Hard Ton releases at that point. Was there anything in their sound that you felt coincided with what you were doing and did you feel you had to adapt to the label at all?

Florian: My impression is that both the label and we have been in some sort of a discovery mode at that time. We didn’t think we had to adapt to the label that much. We were just hoping that they liked the music we produce.

Listening to a record like Feel Me (2014) and then Music for Friends (2021) the fundamental elements are still there, but there are elements of Jazz and Disco that have taken more of a foothold in these later records. Is that something that has matured in your own music, and is it something that matured alongside the influence of Toy Tonics?

Florian: Jazz and Disco have always been essential for us. We grew up with 90’s hip hop and house music that sampled a lot from the disco era. This is also how we got in touch with music from the 70s and 80s and we still love it. But I guess our sound always corresponded with the Zeitgeist at that time and the years before covid have seen a huge Disco revival on dancefloors in Europe. We loved it and that’s why our productions were a little bit more organic than in the beginning. Toy Tonics was going through a similar development and of course also had a big influence on us.

There’s more of this Disco / High Energy sound in your latest release, Planet Earth. Tell us a bit about this release and what were the sonic goals you were trying to achieve with this one.

Andreas: With this EP we set ourselves the goal of making a dancefloor record that covers different aspects of a club night. Fast or slow peak time tracks, but also tracks to start an evening with or to play at a later hour. We wanted to show a facet of ourselves that you don’t necessarily get from us when you go on spotify and listen to our top plays, which give the impression that we still specialize in disco edits, haha. Here the focus is on showing a little bit of the range of what music we like and play in our sets.

Besides these new elements, what do you feel has been the greatest evolution in your music in your opinion between something like Feel Me and Rush Hour?

Florian: Feel Me was heavily influenced by Leon Vynehall’s remix of Kevin Griffiths’ Acid Splash. In the early days you try to produce and sound like your role models. Sometimes it works and you get a result you are happy with that sounds like the original. Sometimes you end up somewhere else. This can also be fine but also means that you can’t exactly realize what you plan or imagine. I think this is the biggest difference to nowadays. We know exactly what kind of music we like, what kind of music works on the dancefloor and what synths or drums we have to use to make a track sound like this or that. This is the evolution. With the experience we have nowadays we can realize our ideas easier.

Your staying power has been impressive, especially at a time when social media and the internet creates such a volatile atmosphere for music’s relevance. What do you put down to that consistency?

Andreas: One thing for sure is passion- we honestly love what we do. Another thing is that we simply love every kind of music and we don’t limit ourselves to a certain genre. If you get bored of the same sounds I think it feels natural to try something else and move on.

As an artist it is good if your music continues to develop. When we were kids we didn’t understand why A Tribe Called Quest’s The Love Movement was produced by Jay Dee in the beginning. It was no longer sounding like the sample Hip Hop of Low End Theory or Midnight Marauders. But after a while we realized that this was the sound of that time and they were taking the next step. 

Nowadays we love the album and understand why an artist sometimes changes its sound. Maybe you don’t follow a “How to build your own franchise”-guideline when your sound doesn’t sound the same over the years, but for us it was never primarily about the money. We want to produce what we feel and what feels right for us. In the beginning it was deep house, then we were producing a lot of disco edits and disco influenced house music. Now our sound is becoming a little bit more ravier again and we welcome Italo and Prog House elements in our productions.

Your touring schedule as DJs has kept you pretty busy these days and I suppose like all other artists at the moment, the releases are just a way to get you into DJ booths. Do you guys feel that is the case and has DJing taken a centre stage for you in recent times?

Florian: Yes, indeed, Djing has taken a centre stage for us. We have even found little time to work on new output in recent years, but this is not necessarily a problem for us. We really like what we do. And we are very grateful for what we call our jobs.

What is it about DJing that scratches that creative itch for you?

Andreas: If you are on the hunt for a special records for ages, you finally hold it in your hands, play it and the people on the dancefloor go crazy, it is one of the best moments you can Imagine. 

Is it something that you assume is an extension of your work in the studio or do you feel it’s something completely different and does that ever feed back into your work in the studio?

Florian: Of course, it always affects our productions as well. We want to make music that (also) works on the dancefloor and makes people feel good and ecstatic.

How do you feel you compliment each other musically in the DJ booth and is it the same in the studio?

Andreas: Over the years we have become a very well-rehearsed team, maybe because we talk a lot about music we discover. 

Your sound as artists and DJs is something I believe resonates with what we do here at Jaeger. For the uninitiated, what can they expect when you visit?

Florian: People can expect a high energy journey that ranges from classic house to progressive house with some percussive breaks and excursions to disco.

And lastly, can you play us out with a song?

Andreas: Nanda Rossi- Mil Coracoes (Max Hammur Edit)

 

In a creative moment with Dandy Jack

Dandy Jack speaks ahead of his visit this Saturday for Det Gode Selskab‘s monthly club night at Jaeger. We talk early days the future and his next record on Det Gode Selskab’s upcoming VA.

Martin Schopf has been at the confluence of electronic music for as long as Techno has been around. From the obscure experimentalist to rhythmical wizard, he has garnered success at various points of his career in many different guises going by his alias Dany Jack or the many variations of that moniker since the early nineties.

At the height of his popularity he and compatriot and friend Ricardo Villalobos ushered in a new and wholly unique era for Techno as the minimal tag appeared on the scene. Releasing records alongside Ricardo as Ric Y Martin or as a solo artist, Dandy Jack became a household name in record bags and DJ booths.

He’s released classic records in today’s terms on the likes of Perlon and has worked with everybody from Atom ™ to Matthew  over the course of his career.

Best known for his adept hand as a producer it was a world away, and again not really, from the DIY beginnings of the industrial electronic movement he first encountered in Berlin back in the eighties; where he as a young Chilean seeking refuge from a dictatorship started developing his artistic voice.

Today, he calls Geneva home. It’s a “very calm city” compared to Berlin, he says over a telephone call, “but good for making music.“ He is still very active on the music front, and his next release is on its way. The track, called Divine in Chile, comes courtesy of Det Gode Selskab’s next compilation Jack’s Favourites #3.

It’s an explorative Techno creation that goes as deep as the mariana trench, while a female vocal entices with its siren-like charm. Dandy Jack is in full effect here channelling those always-present latin-infused influences through his enigmatic grooves. There’s always a hint of experimentalism that follows his music, but it’s curtailed from spiralling out of control by the magnetism of the dance floor.

It’s this release we’ll be celebrating this upcoming Saturday for the next instalment of Det Gode Selskab at Jaeger and we get in touch with a chipper Martin, preparing for his upcoming set.

Dandy Jack: I’m really happy coming to Oslo, to see my friends.

Mischa Mathys: It’s not your first time playing here. Do you remember the last time?

DJ: It’s been a while. The last time was with Sonja (Moonear) 3 or 4 years ago.

MM: Are you and Sonja still together?

DJ: Not as a couple, but we’re still friends. We live in the same city, and we take care of our daughter together.

MM: And do you still collaborate on music?

DJ: We are not collaborating on music at the moment, but we are working together on the label, Ruta5. Sonja is quite busy, so I take care of almost everything, but we put together parties and everything else to do with the label.

MM: I see there are constantly new releases coming from you, not just as an artist, but also producing other people’s things. Are you in the studio every day?

DJ: Yeah, every day. I’m doing three things: I’m making music for me; I’m producing music for other people; and I’m teaching. I also organise workshops, I’m travelling quite a lot and lately often to Ukraine.

MM: Are you teaching production?

DJ: I teach how to mix down, and how to use compressors and mastering. Everything with Ableton, basically. I think I have a good knowledge on how things should sound.

MM: They couldn’t ask for a better teacher. You have over 30 years of knowledge in the field of production. Do you feel that you have to disconnect as an artist in order to do the other stuff?

DJ: This is perhaps a problem. I can have too much influence on my students and those people that want to be produced by me. In the end, it sounds like I did it. I become something like a ghost producer, but that is also OK, I don’t have a problem with that.

MM: And then there’s also the artists you put out on Ruta5.

DJ: I try to integrate a lot of other people, but when you take somebody on to the label, you also take on the responsibility. That’s more difficult.

MM: You mentioned you’ve signed artists from Ecuador and Japan, and you’ve worked with a Venezuelan girl too. That’s quite a global reach.

DJ: Ruta5 was born in Chile so I get a lot of requests from South American artists. It’s not frequently that I hear something interesting, so I’m also open to accept artists like this Japanese girl too. I always have a personal relationship with the artist and the goal is to create a friendship. Recently this young Russian woman who wants to release on my label; that for me is incredible.

MM: You don’t think this might be a bit controversial considering that you work in Ukraine as well?

DJ: I don’t like to politicise this thing, because people are people. She is not a Russian, she’s just a human being to me. A lot of Russians are also victims of their situation. I’m talking about young musicians. The next generation of young musicians, they just want to express themselves, and they can’t leave their country. I can relate because I also lived under a dictatorship in Chile and left the oppression and torture. You can’t open your mouth, otherwise you end up in jail. It’s horrible.

MM: I actually wanted to ask you about your time in Chile under Pinochet, because seeing the world as it is now, it’s gotta be quite relevant to your own experiences?

DJ: It’s a really frustrating situation at the moment. The illusion that humans could change is not happening. I have a feeling that we still need some generations to make a society work with establishing new interesting values, because the values today are down. It’s horrible what is happening now. Wars and people killing each other like in Gaza, it’s a horror trip.

MM: Let’s rewind to when you left Chile under the dictatorship for Berlin. What was Berlin like during that time?

DJ: We were all really young and enthusiastic. There was a lot of hope, thinking we could change the world. It was a very creative moment.

MM:This was the 80’s and I want to ask you about Sub Rosa, the first project specifically.

DJ: I was 16 years old.

MM: That was more industrial to what you are known for today.

DJ: It was inspired by Throbbing Gristle. It was pure industrial music like Cabaret Voltaire. These guys were inspiring, and I had the capacity to value this music. Many people didn’t understand it. I grew up during a time when people were listening to rock music like Santana. When I listened to On the Run from Pink Floyd the first time, I was 8 years old, and I was shocked by the depth and the possibility in music that makes you travel. This was the fascination in electronic music for me.

MM: Did you always have this association with the dance floor in terms of this type of music?

DJ: The dance floor came much later. In the beginning I didn’t agree with this Techno movement from Detroit. I found it a bit boring. It was depressing to experience this wave of electronic music coming into this world of electronic music, which I considered much more open. It was too simple for me.

MM: So what changed?

DJ: If it wasn’t for Ricardo Villalobos who said; “Martin, stop refusing and come to a club with me and dance to a boom boom boom, ” I wouldn’t be doing it. Back in the eighties, we had this inner conflict in our group, but in the end I accepted it.

MM: Was it that atmosphere in the club and listening to the music with other people that changed your mind?

DJ: Yes, it was about me leaving my arrogance at the door, and then I understood the complexity of the simplicity. I realised a dance track can also be interesting.

MM: People don’t always realise it’s not just about programming a drum machine. It’s about a groove and without it, the machine is just a metronome.

DJ: Yes, and I also had my latin influences to fall back on, like cumbia. Latin American music is rhythmically more complex than Techno. I had to find a way between both; the complexity of the rhythm combined with the industrial sound.

MM: As you started combining these sounds, at what point does it become second nature to you and you start putting records out?

DJ: In the beginning we were just copying tapes. James Dean Brown was a bit older than me and he was already connected to people from the 80’s industrial stuff. He had four tape recorders at home and he was running a tape label. We started making tapes in the beginning. The first record I made  was a project with Tobias. At that time he was called Pink Elln. He made the first pressing of a single that we did. It was a 45 and we distributed it by hand.

MM: Working in Berlin, as somebody from Chile – an outsider – was it difficult getting your foot in the door and into the scene there?

DJ: Yes, it was super complicated. In the end, me and Tobias, we split with another person in the group because he wanted to continue in the industrial stuff, and me and Tobias were making more “commercial” stuff. We got a contract with Sony music. If you listen to that music today, you understand it is far from commercial. It was an interpretation of commercial music that we had in our head when we were 23. Everything was new, and nothing was established.

MM: And then you hit a nerve and people like you and Ricardo Villalobos ushered i n this new era for Techno music. What was key to that success?

DJ: We had the opportunity to grow up in a moment when everything was fresh. There was also this mix between the moment, talent and the mission. You need all three elements to do what you are doing and then it obviously inspires a lot of other people. We were not trying to make a repetition, we were trying to make something out of nearly nothing. Everything came together in terms of what was happening with electronic music and the industry.

MM: Considering your early music and what you’re doing now, do you think you were ever pigeonholed during the Perlon era?

DJ: I was doing so much more stuff than what was released; thousands of tracks I did in the moment. I have the impression that my inspiration is not always the same. I like this phenomena that music looks like a camera. We live in a frame of time that is really small. I can still live from the ideas  developed ten years ago and it still sounds amazing.

MM: Let’s fast forward to the present. We have to talk about the next Det Gode Selskab release. Do you remember making Divine in Chile?

DJ: Yes. This girl (vocalist on the track) comes from Hip Hop. She’s a young girl from Venezuela and I met her on the street. She sings and raps really well and her approach to music is, she wants to be famous. When it came time to record the vocals for this track, she came with her own vocal producer. I played her 5 – 10 tracks of mine and this one, Divine in Chile, was the most harmonic one. For me it was an experiment, and I’m quite happy with the result.

MM:  Was it always intended for Det Gode Selskab or was it just a result of what you had on  hand at that time?

DJ: At the moment when they asked me, this was the best track I had to give them.

MM: Is that a request you get often; to make tracks for other labels?

DJ: Yes people ask me to make a track for them, but I don’t do it very often. I did this because Det Gode Selskab are my friends and I like to support them. I usually keep it for myself and turn it into four tracks, and put it out on my own label.

to be continued…

 

Pieces falling into place with Niilas

At the end of 2019 things couldn’t have been worse for Niilas, but then an album, a Spellemann and a new defining sound ushered in a new era of success and creativity

The winter of 2019 was a strange time for Peder Niilas Tårnesvik. He had just broken up with his girlfriend of 7 years, and then a double tendonitis in his wrists and then an eye infection exacerbated the situation. Just when life looked its bleakest and things couldn’t get possibly worse for Peder the pandemic arrived too and shepered in an unprecedented time for our society and more turmoil for the artist called Niilas. “It felt like my life had crumbled to pieces in a matter of weeks,” he says over a telephone call in a raspy voice. 

Things started looking up however. “At the exit of that long and dark tunnel, I had a closer relationship with making music,” he continues. Back in 2019, as he was working his way through that “fairly extreme” experience of a relationship ending, illness and the pandemic, he found solace in the music he was making and as he forged a closer relationship with that music some things began to click for him.

Niilas had been making and releasing music since 2014 and had even found some early success, but there was always something missing. “I got a lot of wind in my sails early in my career and I was comparing myself with Kygo, Røyksopp and Cashmere Cat; all these really big stars.“ It “almost destroyed everything,” however, as Peder used these artists as a watermark in his own career, an unattainable goal in reality for an emerging artist only at the start of his career.. “I put a lot of pressure on myself to become mainstream successful.“

Tracks from that era like “Ocelote” are uplifting sojourns through tropical hues of synthesised mallets while restless beats move listlessly from phrase to phrase in continuous evolutions of the rhythms . They are crafted meticulously and clearly touched a nerve within the zeitgeist,  but capitulating to what was happening around him only left Peder “really frustrated with the music scene.”

Peder kept releasing singles and EPs however, racking up the plays and the streams, and even though there was a relative hype around him and his music, he would never come close to those millions of streams and plays he sought. The frustration only intensified as a result and he kept “stumbling into creative walls, not finding my place in the music scene or finding my sound.”

Niilas performs River of Noise live at Jaeger

It would take the experiences of the winter of 2019 for a sonic identity to emerge for Peder. When he began putting the tracks he was making together, the red thread that would form the foundation of the album would reveal itself. Instead of chasing those unattainable reaches of success, he simply succumbed to the music. “After that process of letting go of all the expectations and comparisons; that experience really helped me in transitioning into the artist that I have now become.”

“Pieces fell into place” for Peder and his artistic identity in the album, because it solidified the sound of Nillas, where there was definitely a “before and after.” It brought something innately personal to the fore in the process and he found himself delving into the deep recesses of his psyche in something that laid buried in a collective history. He hadn’t really explored these recesses much in the past but within the context of this new music he was making a latent cultural heritage revealed itself in the artistic endeavour. “It has a lot to do with integrating the Sámi aspects of my identity,” he explains.

Peder is Sámi; a direct descendant of the indigenous people of northern Norway (Sápmi) and today their cultural heritage is polluted in the muddy waters of Norway’s politics of forced assimilation and of the discrimination the Sámi people have endured since the creation of a Norwegian state. Many people have lost their cultural identity and for Peder it was about redefining that in his music as he started to consolidate the themes and concepts around this new era of Niilas. 

It wouldn’t be easy though. “Since I don’t have the Sámi language and the traditional Sámi joik; I was struggling a bit figuring out how the experiences of coming from a Sámi family and coming from up north in Sápmi, how can that work in the electronic landscape.”

If it sounds abstract, that’s because it is, especially in the context of electronic music, but there is something peculiar to the music on “Also this will Change”. It taps into some natural instinct and an immersive sound quality. Synthesisers and samples gallop in and out of some vague idea of a time signature, following “circular way of thinking about time and structure within music.” Peder likens it to walking a mountain or forest path; “Even though the path is the same and the person is the same, there are always a lot of variables. It’s a lot about shifting perspectives between macro and micro.” 

It’s impossible to ignore that exchange between the natural world and the music, as field recordings and the burbling nature of the music make some direct associations with the Sámi’s own concepts and ideas of nature. It goes as far to speak of similarities between many indigenous traditions from other parts of the western world. At a recent event in Iceland, Peder  was struck by the musical concepts he shared with other artists from other “indigenous communities” like Greenland and Canada.” They particularly resonated with the “seemingly common ideas of connecting with nature;” in what seems to be a universal ideology in a culture that lives off the resources of the world around them. There is often a natural sympathy and a calm balance with nature in these cultures. 

This is something that definitely feels like it’s in the air at the moment with the winds of change blowing throughout indigenous worlds. From TV shows to movies, music to visual art, there has been notable activity from indigenous artists making their mark in popular culture at the moment. This cultural wave has largely fallen on this next generation’s shoulders as they, like Peder, try to grapple with a cultural heritage they might have lost through decades, if not centuries of discrimination.

Peder is not trying to be “overtly political” in his music, however. “I wasn’t bringing up this thing as an active choice,” he explains. “ In retrospect, across the whole Sámi community, people from my generation are taking their Sámi heritage back, and for my parents’ generation, dealing with a lot of the family trauma they were exposed to, and figuring out what to do going forward. And for my grandfather’s generation, they are also dealing with on-hand experiences of Norwegian society mis-treating their rights.“

“At the time it just felt that this is something I have to do right now, and I’m not sure why.” It’s easy to see it today in the context of the shifting opinion of a cultural wave moving across Scandinavia, but back in 2020, when Peder released his debut LP it wasn’t like he was tapping into this wave and even if you know nothing of his cultural heritage the music is still there without its reference points.

While, in the background there is this cultural heritage and the artist making the music, the nature of this stark electronic music, often without vocals, doesn’t insist on it. As Niilas, Peder folds in an eclectic palette of references in his music. From broken beats, to four to the floor  House music, to ambient constructions, he makes land on each musical island as he journeys toward those uncharted territories of what Sámi experimental club music could be. He’s used recognisable tropes in popular dialects of western electronic music as stepping stones towards this goal. He’s a product of his generation and like his peers his “artistic upbringing has had a lot to do with finding an immense amount of music from all over the world” through the internet.

From Flying Lotus to Biosphere, these have all informed a broad sonic landscape of influences. In the past, Peder, in search of a musical community online, was trying to harness all these influences and musical touchstones in making a connection to the “strange phenomenon” of the “deconstructed club music” community. Through the ideas of that community, Peder had created all these “fake rules that you found for yourself online” and promised never to make a four-four track. Armed with this set of rules and chasing the success it never really manifested for Peder in the way he’d imagined and he soon realised that this  “can be really destructive for the creative process.”

“I just let go of all of these rules and realised that making a House track is not the end of the world. When you let go of trying to have too much control over the material, the artist within shows up.”

Racking up a further three (“and a half”) albums in the same amount of years, Peder has cultivated an artistic sound that seems to be endlessly creative and the results speak for themselves. In 2020 he won the Spellemann prize for “Also this must Change,” an honour that validated his new sonic identity and “was a big confirmation that I’m not just making it for myself, but other people are actually listening to it.”   

It put the wind in the sails again, but this time there is some substance to it, and after following his debut with “Stepping Stones” and an ambient indulgence called “Hydrophane,” he closed out 2023 with his most recent album “River of Noise,” a record that has been lauded as much as his first.

River of Noise doesn’t mark any kind of departure from his debut or the albums leading up to it, but something broods beneath the surface. Tracks like “5th floor” almost completely dissolve themselves from any natural associations but you can still find those cultural touchstones in the names of the intro track or the quaint fiddle coursing its way through “Pyromid.”

The album is the penultimate step on an evolutionary ladder that finds Peder moving into slightly different territory. “Through the last 4 albums, I’ve been going through what the Sámi experience has had on my music and now it feels like I’m not dealing as directly with those Sámi influences, but working with those colourful dance tracks. They don’t have to be part of this heavy concept.” He’s already finishing up a couple of tracks in this vein, but at the same time he’s just finding enjoyment in the act of performance, whether playing live or DJing. 

The Spellemann is there on the shelf, but the ultimate validation for Peder these days is that “connection to the audiences. People get something from the music. That’s where the juice really is, it’s not getting a superficial award – but it’s easy to say when I’ve actually won it.” (Laughs) 

* words by Mischa Mathys

Our best kept secret: Snorkel presents N.A.O.M.B

We discuss the prevalent appeal of Olav Brekke Mathisen and Sideshow Jøgge’s N.A.O.M.B with Snorkel’s Olefonken and Snorri as the album gets the reissue treatment from the label and an official release party at Jaeger this Friday.

There are albums that live outside of their time. For a multitude of reasons, they never truly get the recognition they deserve. They might even inform a zeitgeist, and still not garner the same kind of distinction that their peers enjoy. It’s almost like they’re designed for obscurity, cultivating a brief dalliance with their audience before disappearing from view. Like a one-night stand at a star-crossed intersection it’s a fleeting encounter destined for wistful nostalgia. 

There are those however that never forget that encounter; hold onto it for a lifetime as a memory of sonic perfection they strive their whole career in an attempt to pay due diligence. Snorkel records’ Olefonken and Snorri are those kinds of people and Olav Brekke Mathisen and Sideshow Jøgge’s NAOMB is one of those albums. 

NAOMB or Nugatti all Ova me Butty came out over twenty years ago. It was a record that made an indelible impact in Oslo’s space race towards a “Nu” era of Disco at the time with artists like Prins Thomas, Lindstrøm and Todd Terje at the helm of the ship. While the aforementioned went on to great heights, Olav and Jøgge broke off at the first stage, making a contribution that was brief, but no less significant. International media outlets like Jockey Slut were quick to sing their praises, but as their one and only LP, and very little else in the form of music to follow from the pair, they kind of slipped into obscurity, at least in the music scene.  

Jøgge would become an actor, and Olav set his sights on writing, neither to ever venture into the world of recorded music ever again. You could argue if they had kept at it, NAOMB would enjoy the same kind of reverent awe as those first Prins Thomas and Lindstrøm records and as an album there is no reason it couldn’t still hold its own alongside some of Oslo’s more revered albums. Analogue synthesisers and grooves made for dancing bounce through 12 tracks, and they’ve hardly aged. The timeless nature of the sounds and their breadth of their musical dialect provide a touchstone from almost every decade of “dance” music; from progressive funk of the 70’s; the post-jazz inclinations of eighties and even right up to the French staccato of late 90’s House, it’s all there and it’s survived remarkably well. 

While the duo’s inactivity in the music scene might have certainly played a role in the album being largely forgotten there are still a few musical diehards like the people behind Snorkel, that will endeavour to shine a light where necessary. After a chance encounter with the pair, NAOMB gets the reissue treatment and what they’ve done is installed it in its rightful place in the Norwegian canon of music. As the label prepares for the official release party at Jaeger and the duo prepare for their accompanying live show, we got in touch with Snorkel and hopefully Olav and Jøgge to find out more about the origins of the record and its significance today. 

How did you meet Olav and Jøgge?

Initially, we were just kids trying to keep up with the cool of what our older brothers and their friends were listening to at that time, and Olav and Jøgge was one of them, so we were lucky to see them play live several times and thought they were cooler than a popsicle! And against all advice, we later took the plunge and actually hung out with our boyhood heroes. Lucky for us, they turned out to be two loveable guys! 

Has N.A.O.M.B always been on the back of your mind as something that you want to re-release, or was it triggered by the chance encounter?

N.A.O.M.B had always been on the back of our minds ever since we heard it at high school. It’s like the plague – you can’t get rid of it even how much you try – the only difference is that you don’t want to get rid of it either. It’s like a black cup of joe on a moonless night! 

That said, Snorkel wasn’t initially conceived with reissues in mind, despite our deep admiration for labels putting in the work to unearth exceptional music. However, two albums left an immense impact on our musical taste: dibidim’s debut album “Riders” and Olav Brekke Mathisen & Sideshow Jøgge’s “N.A.O.M.B.” If you plot these albums on a spectrum, everything in between shapes the Snorkel sound today. This release is the final token atop our totem pole, the foundation for everything else to come.

What was it about the record that endeared you to it in the first place? 

When we first laid ears on the record, it was like the musical equivalent of finding a hidden stash of chocolate in the vegetable drawer – delightfully unexpected and rebellious!

What were Olav and Jøggee’s reaction when you told them you wanted to reissue it?

It seemed like they didn’t believe us at the beginning. It was probably only when we started showing up at their doorstep that it dawned on them that we were serious! Now that it has become a reality, they have showered us with joy and gratitude, something we find peculiar and surreal to grasp, considering that for us, releasing this on our own label is a dream come true!

Did they tell you what was behind that title and the acronym for “Nugatti all Ova me Butty”? 

Oh, we never mustered the courage to ask! Some mysteries are better off remaining unsolved, you know

The record would have come out originally at a time when there was so much focus on Norway and Oslo specifically for what would be coined as Space Disco. Was it as well received as some of the other records coming out of Oslo at that time?

Even though “NAOMB” has been tucked away like a hidden treasure, unlike the more well-known Norwegian Nudisco classics of its time, it managed to catch the ears of influential DJs such as Doc Martin, Gerd Janson, and the late Andrew Weatherall, among others. Ironically, we used to be the secret-keepers, now 20 years later yelling from the rooftops about its triumphant return! 

It’s a timeless sounding record and it’s aged magnificently well. What in your opinion has contributed to its longevity?

Well must be that secret sauce – lubricating nugatti all over your butty!

Was anything changed in terms of music or post-production for the reissue and what were the reasons for those decisions?

The tracks “hasjbox” and “fluffy the vampire” are included on vinyl for the very first time, which they weren’t back in 2003. And also the whole album ends with Olav’s stunner “take to the sky” which is a really nice prick over the I, as we say here in Norway!

The original LP was never released on vinyl I believe and Snorkel is very much all about the analogue. What was the biggest challenge putting this on vinyl, and do you think putting out like this, in a format that it was never intended for, brought something else across on this record?

The biggest challenge was to get the boys to remember anything from 20 years ago. Where are the original projects? Do you have any back up disks etc. But then again the first song is called “hasjbox” so yeah, you see where this is going!

Is this going to be the start of some new music from the duo or is it destined for one-night only?

Going through the old disks uncovered a treasure trove of forgotten gems. As we are working on Snorkel’s new 12” series, who knows? We might just get more from OBM & Jøgge in the near future…

 

Making Music for Humans with Meera

In our exclusive interview with rising Norwegian House music star Meera, we talk origins, influences and the impact of her breakout single.

Meera’s name is on everybody’s lips at the moment. Every club concept and DJ in Norway has been trying to lure the DJ and producer to their nights. DJ booths from Ibiza to Oslo have welcomed Meera alongside older peers like Black Coffee and Simon Field. Her star has been consistently rising and her DJ talents have been a serious demand following the trajectory of her break out single “Music for Humans.” 

With some early support from the likes of Black Coffee again, Damian Lazarus and John Digweed – to name only a few – Meera started to shake the world’s dance floors through some of the world’s most influential selectors over the last year.  She’s followed the success of that record with two equally strong releases in the form of “Telefon” and “Clean the Turbines,” solidifying a sound for the young artist early on.

Between rhythmical foundations that err towards non-western traditions and euphoric melodic expressions that touch hedonistic heights, Meera has cultivated a unique sound forged on the foundations of House music. She’s emerged as a solitary figure with her productions hard to define and as it extends to her DJ sets, equally divergent from anything going on around her. 

After making her debut in Oslo and at Jaeger last month for Simon Field’s basement event, Meera returns to Jaeger’s booth this Saturday for Olle Abstract’s LYD. As much as we’ve followed her progress ver the last year, we know very little of the emerging artist and with her visit looming we caught up with her via telephone for an exclusive chat with Meera.  

Where are you at the moment?

I’m at home in Stavanger.

I read your biography and it mentioned that you grew up with your dad blaring music everywhere. What kind of music was he playing?

It was a lot of Hard-House, classic House and a lot of Hip Hop too. 

Does he come from a DJ background too?

He’s been DJing since the eighties.

And that was your musical education?

It was my introduction to DJing. 

How long have you been Djing? 

I’ve been DJing since I was fourteen, so 12 years ago.

Has there ever been any sonic influence from your dad, because I remember when I was 14, my taste couldn’t have been further from my father’s?

I mostly play my own music. 

So you didn’t start by playing the records that were just around at home?

I started playing digitally with Serato and stuff on the laptop. I didn’t start playing vinyl until two years ago?

Are you finding some classic gems in your Dad’s record collection today?

I do sometimes, but there is just so much music.

Was it always electronic music for you?

When I was young I was mostly into emo and rock, so a lot of My Chemical Romance and Linkin park, that kind of stuff.

How did you arrive electronic music from there?

I think I discovered Daft Punk and it snowballed.

Which Daft Punk era was this?

It must have been when the “Around the World” video was on MTV. 

At that point, did you change your whole attitude towards music and it became only about electronic dance music?

I was pretty into it, but I was incorporating French House with Rock and Hip Hop; everything I liked. I have always been appreciative of all kinds of music. 

I know Stavanger has had some really good DJs that has come out of it, but was there anything like a scene there that could cultivate your interests early on?

There was a small community of DJs starting up. We had this open-deck night at a bar that I used to go to, it was a cocktail bar. I would go there with some friends and it was pretty open to everyone.

How did it develop from there. Did you go into production from there?

O no, I started producing when I was 10 years old. I was already making music.

You were making music before you even started DJing. So was the point to get that music out there so people could listen to it?

Not really. I just thought both things were fun, and I did them independently. 

One doesn’t really effect the other?

When I was DJing at 14, I was mainly playing EDM and that kind of stuff and he music I was making, was more like Filter House, Garage and Drum n Bass. It was very different.

What was the route to the first release, “Music for Humans” because you must have been making a lot of music up to that point?

I did self-release an album and three EPs, but mostly it’s been only for me. I have this Soundcloud profile of really old tracks. It’s not something I advertise, it’s just out there.

Is it similar to the more recent stuff?

Not at all. 

Considering how big Music for Humans became after its release, is it something that you anticipated when you were making the track? 

I don’t really remember making it. I just sent it to the people VOD (Vinyl on Demand) and they really liked it. 

Did you expect it to be so well received, not only by the public, but by your peers; people like Black Coffee and Damian Lazarus?

No. I just thought it was cool that VOD was interested and then it just kind of blew up in a way. It’s been pretty surreal seeing huge DJ support and playing the track and the EP. 

That also led to playing to places like Ibiza. Are you still playing in that cocktail bar in Stavanger? 

Yes, I still do once or twice a month.

There must be a huge difference going from something like that to a Black Coffee night in Ibiza.

It’s pretty jarring.

Do you feel you have to adapt to that kind of crowd?

Not really. When I DJ, I play what I want to hear so it doesn’t change a lot.

After “Music for Humans,” came “Telefon” and “Clean your turbines” and there is a distinctive sound that emerges between those three releases. Was there a conscious idea to establish a sound for yourself or was it just because they were made around the same time?

The time difference between those tracks is pretty huge. I think it was just the direction the tracks ended up going in. I didn’t consciously try to make them sound like each other.

Well it’s very unique since you have these Latin- and African rhythmical motives under pinning these melodic, ethereal on euphoric synths. How did you come upon fusing these elements in your music?

It’s just a result of me drawing from the all the music I like.

How did the African and Latin elements specifically arrive into your palette?

Keinemusik and pablo fierro kinda drove my interested in seeking out more non-western music. That’s when I really got into that sound, and since then I’ve been listening to a lot of African Rock and Disco from the 70’s and  80’s. I discovered artists such as itadi, polibio mayorga, la solucion, and mulato astatke who have all had some kind of impact on my sound.

After these three releases do you have anything coming up, that you’re excited to talk about yet?

I have my collaboration with Danish trio Tripolism coming on Friday, that will be on Ultra. And then I have an Ep coming on Crosstown rebels in late February. Then I also have one coming in black book records in April or March. 

Are they all kind of similar to the sound you’ve already cultivated through the first three releases? 

The next EP is going to be kind of similar and the other two are going to be a bit different.

Thank you for talking to us Meera. We’ll see you in the Dj booth next. 

I’m really looking forward to playing at Jaeger again. 

I Wanna Party with Henriku

We caught up with Henriky via Berlin to talk about his music, Quirk, the Gode Selskab, his formative years, queer clubbing in Berlin and Bikini Wax ahead of his stint at Jaeger for Lokomotiv

From the suburbs of Oslo, via the UK ato eventually Berlin; and through Garage and House to minimal, Henriku’s path to the wax has stopped on many different elements of club music to get to his debut record Rush/Fantasy. While he never set foot in a club before leaving Norway, and with little input from anything he was hearing at home, Henriku has waded through a curious path in music. His associations with Quirk and Det Gode Selskab run deep, as the building blocks on  which his own approach to the minimal landscape has taken foothold. 

It was at one of Det Gode Seslkab’s boat parties where the seed of ambition was planted towards a career as a producer. After a stint at university where he studied the production art, he found his calling in the sonic landscape of those peers before embarking on the next chapter of his career at Quirk where he found a kindred spirit in the label’s founder Alexander Skancke. After a few collaborative releases via that label, Henrikuu released his first solo record “Rush Fantasy” via Det Gode Selskab records in what could only be described as fate.  

Henriku’s tracks  like “I wanna party” are club tracks with a purpose and a sense of frivolous fun that engages as much as it propels. There’s a sense of infectious enjoyment that courses from that track all the way through to a track like “Pillow Talk”, taken from “Rush Fantasy”. 

A DJ that operates in the extended minimal landscape, Henriku is a regular fixture in Berlin’s booths like Hoppetosse as well as some of Oslo’s booths like Jaeger.  (He even played at the very first Helt Texas.) He’s been coming back more often recently as his star continues to rise back home in league with his efforts in Berlin. He maintains a very close relationship with the Quirk family and together they’ve started to carve out a sonic identity based on the minimal sonic landscape and imbued by a queer vision of a minimal scene. 

We caught up with Henriku via phone call just as he was about to head out for a shift at the iconic Bikini Wax to talk about his music history, Djing and the queer scene in Berlin, as he prepares to return to Jaeger for Lokomotiv’s Romjulsfestivalen takeover. 

What have you been up to this weekend?

This weekend I played Iat Sisyphos, playing back to back with Alexander Skancke, my good and beloved friend. We played from 05:00 – 09:00 on Sunday morning. It was lots of fun. 

Are you playing every week in Berlin at the moment?

Unfortunately, no. I only started playing club gigs about a year and a half ago, with the first Quirk night. It still goes in waves for me. Some months I have plenty, some are a bit slower. November has been quite well. The week before we had a Quirk night at Hoppetosse. 

What is the atmosphere in Berlin like at the moment for DJs? I can imagine there are quite a few DJs out there at the moment. 

For the time being it’s quite alright. Personally, I think it’s a matter of point of view. A lot of people view the amount of DJs as competition, but I truly believe there is space for everyone to be creative and have success. It doesn’t have to come on other people’s terms. Yes, there are a lot of people, but there are also a lot of opportunities. That’s why the city attracts so many DJs. 

Are there new communities cropping up as well, or is it pretty much each man/woman for him/herself?

I think it’s both. I’ve found my community in Quirk. It makes the process of creating so much more fun, when you are building each other up, rather than stepping over each other. 

I always thought Quirk was Alexander Skancke’s label. Is the community, artists releasing on the label, or is it like a collective?

For the time being we are a total of five people that have released on the label, but mostly it’s just close friends at this point. It’s more like our friend circle. It’s artists who have released on the label, but it’s also broader, like the regular faces we see at our gigs, and good friends. We  are friends who like a similar kind of music and a core vision. 

From what I heard, it does seem like the label has a sound and it’s very much emphasised by the different releases and artists. How did you find your voice within the label?

Absolutely. Alex and I didn’t meet until 2019, and before we met we actually had a similar background in terms of the minimal sound, but from different points. Alex has been in the game a lot longer than me. He went through his minimal phase, went to sunwaves and then moved to Berlin, while tapping into those early nineties influences. And I have walked a similar path. I was obsessed with UK garage – that was my entry point – from UK garage I moved into House and then I moved to Berlin where I really got hooked on minimal. I went to Sunwaves where I got more hooked. From there I opened my horizons back to the roots of House and Garage and started exploring more Techno sounds. The red thread of minimal remains. That’s what makes the Quirk sound cohesive, if you will. Most of the people that are involved in Quirk at the moment, share these points of reference. 

It’s interesting that you mention UK garage as your entry into club music.  It’s not something you would associate with Norway at all. What led to that introduction?

I had a couple of friends from my gymnasium who did a year abroad in York, England. I visited and that’s where I had my first club experience. It was a funny mixture of commercial hits and UK Garage. The UK Garage and House Garage sound resonated with me and I needed to find more of it and find out what this was. 

Was this also the start of DJing and making electronic music for you?

I went back to the UK after this and to the Leeds festival where they had these camps that would play Garage and Bassline. And after I got home from this festival, I realised I need to be more in touch with this rather than just listening to it. I really wanted to start producing, but I was talking myself down saying; “no I don’t have any musical background, it’s way too late for me.” I tried DJing instead, and I bought my first DJ controller.  

I enjoyed it, but I realised it wasn’t enough. I looked into software for producing music, and thought I might as well try. I taught myself the basics through You Tube tutorials. By the end of that year, I managed to put together some tracks, and they were something. (laughs)

It was also at this point that I just finished gymnasium, wondering what I would do with my life and it was actually my dad that came across a university in Berlin that had a music production course. 

I’ve read an interview with you, where you mentioned you never actually went clubbing Norway. Is that correct; did you have no connection to the scene here before you left for Berlin?

Yes, that’s completely right. I had one friend who really enjoyed it. She had great taste in music and we reconnected when I was around 18 years old. She had already gone to a few raves and parties and showed me a lot of really cool stuff. At this time most places had an age limit of 21 so it was really hard. Before I reconnected with her nobody had wanted to go out with me. Luckily I linked up with her and the last party I had gone to was Det Gode Selskab boat party. I remember leaving that party, thinking there’s something really special here and it would be so cool to do something like this someday. This sparked something in me that really sent me on a mission to Berlin.  

I guess the Garage influences fell away when you moved to Berlin?

That is exactly what happened. Coming to Berlin and hearing Techno for the first time at Berghain and Griessmühle … The Techno scene was very different. Garage influences weren’t easy to find.

I wanted to ask you about something you said in another interview. You felt that there was a lack of queer representation in your scene in Berlin. Even in Berlin?

Yes, even in Berlin. There is a gap in the market. I am very curious about starting something up with some friends. Maybe if I find the time and energy. For the time being, it’s very locked in with contemporary Techno. Hardgroove is very big and so are those fast-paced sounds. There are some slow-paced sounds based around House music, because there is always the panorama bar to the Berghain. In terms of the minimal sound you’ll find at places like Hoppetosse, there’s not much going on for the queer folks. 

So it’s dominated by a straight audience, or the straight industry side of things?

It’s a combination of the two. There are definitely queer people that enjoy the music, but perhaps they’re not always the most inviting places for queer people. It’s not like there is any alienation, because there are still queer people showing up. In Berlin it’s very extreme in terms of the safe spaces these queer parties provide. Living in Berlin and experiencing that every weekend you get a bit spoiled. I  just think there should be a safe space for queer people to enjoy minimal music as well. I also think there is something to the fact that queer people are seeking High-Energy music. 

And you never got sucked into the hard and fast Techno that places like Berghain and Griesssmühle were doing?

I actually enjoy it on occasion. This summer I went  to a lot queer parties and spent some time with friends in Berghain as well. I think it’s fun as long as it’s groovy. I probably won’t produce it myself, but in terms of having a fun time, I can absolutely enjoy it. I need some ups and downs in the energy. What I miss in that scene is a story-line. 

When it came to the music you are producing today and in the context of Berlin, what was it that pushed you in that direction?

It was during my time at university. I made two really close friends in Sammy Lewis and the other one was Trent Voyage (who has also been releasing on Quirk.) As we were getting to know each other we saw we had a similar vision, and that was very influential on all of us. We went out and got a lot of input together; a lot from Griesmühle and Hoppetosse was a second home. 

It was really born from the club; what you were hearing in the club was directly influencing what you would do in the studio?

Absolutely. I see myself as a club kid, figuratively and then sometimes literally as well. There are influences from other kinds of music, but club music is what I do. 

It’s interesting that you mention club kids, because when I listen to your music, and the stuff you made with Alexander, you get the sense of having a good time. “I want to party” is probably the most on the nose example of that. 

Exactly and that is also one of the core values of Quirk; we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We just want to make fun, engaging music. Bringing these vocals in like that song, is part of it.

I’ve found there are often vocals in your music and adds to that sense of engagement. What do you look for in vocals when you add them to your music?

A lot of the vocals are my own recorded music. It brings a lot of freedom, in terms of the vibe or what I want to say, literally. I am also a huge fan of samples, when it comes to bringing in a vocal sample, it’s random. My sample library is big, but usually it’s about playing around and finding something that suits the sonic landscape of the track. I feel like the meaning almost always follows the act, and drives the direction of the track. 

When you  are using your own vocals is there usually a theme to the lyrics or is it all in the spur of the moment?

It’s often a combination. If I have a loop that I’m working on I might start writing things down on a piece of paper. I don’t have a strict formula. The ”I want to party” track for instance was on the spur of the moment. It started as a joke. Alex gave me the microphone and we were both hungover and the energy was a bit low. Alex was rolling his eyes, but also laughing. So I made a build out of it and played it back to Alex. 

Yes, you do convey that sense of having a good time, not just with that song but others too. We talked mostly about working with Alex at this point, but this year you brought out your first record of original material for Det Gode Selskab too. 

Yes, this was the first track I released on my own. I already had a few tracks on the digital compilation with Det Gode Selskab, but for the time being I only have one solo record out.  It came out on the 17th of May by accident. 

Did working with Alexander influence anything in your own music?

Yes, absolutely. It’s hard to say exactly what, but this aspect of jamming around, playing things on a keyboard, and finding a groove rather than programming things. I love to sit with a mouse and click things in, it’s a super fun process and I will continue to do it, but I will also incorporate some live jamming. It adds a little bit of soul. 

Alexander also introduced you to Bikini Wax, I believe. And now you work there?

Yes. I’m on my way there in an hour actually. It’s such a cosy atmosphere which I really enjoy. I was a long time customer for a long time and to be surrounded by records all day, and getting to learn new stuff about the history is such a privilege. 

What kind of influence has that had on your DJing?

It definitely has affected  the way that I look for new music. I’m listening to new music all day, so I’m trying to think long term in terms of which records I buy and also how they fit in my collection. 

Are you a little more hesitant because of the prices of records these days?

Of course. It’s not only that though it ‘s also about space. There are always records on the floor these days. 

 

Why we Dance with Hilit Kolet

We caught up with Hilit Kolet from Shanghai to talk about her musical history as she prepares to make the journey to Jaeger’s sauna again.

Hilit Kolet is a rarefied talent for these times. She has all the credentials: A job at an iconic record store; a classically trained background; legitimate studio experience; a knack for crafting dance floor cuts; and a sincere appreciation for the music above all else. She’s been celebrated by the radio jocks; lauded by her peers; played in some of the most influential spots; and remixed some of the best there is, yet her approach comes from a unique sincerity that is at odds with current trends. 

Her musical output is considered and her style as a DJ bristles with that eclectic attitude that only a record store employee has. She’s already established a reputation as a DJ’s DJ, built on the foundation of an avid music collector and enthusiast, born from her days behind the counter at London’s Black Market Records. Hers is a diverse collection of musical touchstones, coalescing around the expansive House and Techno music universe and when it comes to a dance floor, there are few who know it better.

Her breakout single “Techno Disco” via Defected topped all kinds of charts with successive releases only re-affirming her abilities and her sonic diversity. She’s remixed and been remixed by the likes of Terry Farley and Mike Dunn and her edits, like that of  Laurient Garnier’s “Crispy Bacon,” lives in infamy alongside its predecessors. 

While the piano provided the springboard for her musical education it’s the records that have provided the most significant impetus for Hilit’s musical adventures and as such there is only one place she appears most at home; the DJ booth. 

Last year, we had the pleasure of meeting Hilit for the first time and after a session for Øya Natt, we’re pleased to have the UK DJ and producer back  at Jaeger. Hilit Kolet arrives on the Sunkissed ticket this Saturday and we took the opportunity to probe the DJ and artist more about her interesting background and some of what is on the horizon for the artist. We find her  in Shanghai on the eve of the release of her remix of Why We Dance for Terry Farley & Wade Teo

Hello Hilit. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Tell us where you are at the moment and what you’re listening to? 

Hey, nice to meet you too. I’m currently in my hotel room in Shanghai having played last night. I’m listening to a new remix I’ve been working on, which is coming out early 2024, and also to a new beat I’ve started on the plane. It’s slightly different to what I’ve been making lately and I’m thinking it could make a nice collab with a vocalist I’ve been chatting to. Or I might just delete it and start a new idea, dunno.

I read that you were still doing piano recitals by the time you started getting into electronic music and DJing. What was the main catalyst in terms of artists, tracks,  albums or genres as you switched over?

Yes that’s right. My mum was working as a piano teacher all through my childhood, she was teaching children on our beautiful grand piano, which took up most of the sitting room… I spent all my afternoons on the sofa watching the lessons, and when I was about five, I started becoming somewhat of a disturbance, telling students to ‘go home because it’s my turn to play the piano with mummy now’ hehe. I ended up training at the local conservatoire, doing the full thing, 4 times per week, including recitals and playing with the orchestra and all. I discovered electronic music at around 12 or 13 years old, back then I was listening to early Kenny Dope, Cajmere, Marshal Jefferson, Deee-Lite, Xpress 2, Yello, Steve Pointdexter, Leftfield – Leftism, Laurent Garnier, Robert Hood, Todd Terry’s sax album, Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk – Homework, Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo, Basement Jaxx, a real mix. 

It took me a few years to completely ‘cross over’ but at one point I did. Classical music was a great way of processing pain and challenging emotions, but it was mostly about a heavier spectrum of feelings. Now, I discovered that music was also a way to express joy and passion and excitement, and it was really refreshing and somewhat liberating too.

How does that early musical education influence what you do today and what was the main challenge in going from traditional musical training to electronic music intended for the club? 

That’s always been an interesting subject for me, because I think that in many ways, having had a traditional, classical music background was counter-productive when I first started experimenting with music production. With DJing it was very helpful for sure – all those music theory and music literature lessons I took as a kid have trained my ears really well, and it made mixing intuitive and easy, but producing my own music felt different: it was too ‘sacred’ almost. 

It took me a while to work out that this was a direct repercussion of the strict Eastern-Europe mindset they had at my conservatoire: sheet music only, Chopin, Debussy, Schubert, Beethoven, memorising your chords, learn 26 pages all by heart. The teacher nearly fainted when I asked if I could try some jazz or improvise a little for a change…

And of course, producing music, especially electronic music, takes a lot of improvising and a ton of letting go – of music theory and of all other “rules” too. I do feel like I’ve come out the other end though. I’ve taught myself to give in to “happy accidents” as oftentimes they make the best bits. Plus, life is messy anyway right, so art should only follow suit.

You spent some time working at Black Market too. Besides being surrounded by that kind of music all day, what did you take away from that experience?  

Working in the shop exposed me to musical scenes that were not on my radar at all, like dubstep and drum & bass – two genres the shop played a pivotal part in nurturing – and while they’re still not my go to’s, looking back it was certainly nourishing for my overall musical diet, and it was also a good exercise in keeping an open mind musically. I do think that as a DJ and a selector, it’s important to develop a sonic identity, or a ‘sound’, but it’s also important to remain curious musically and to try and break out of your own echo-chamber.

How has your taste evolved during and after your stint there and are there any records from that time you refuse to ever part with? 

Well I was working there over a long period of time, 7-8 years, so ultimately my taste would have changed a lot during that phase anyway, but one thing I do know is that my understanding, my ability to map the underground dance music landscape, labels, artists, scenes and how they brewed, was nothing comparable before and after. Records from my time at the shop that I will never part with – there’s so many as I’m not parting with any of my records hehe, but here are a few: Mr. G – Space Bassed, Cassius – Youth, Speed, Trouble, Cigarettes (Radio Slave Remix), Rolando – The Afterlife, Theo Parrish – Falling Up (Carl Craig Remix), Alden Tyrell – Touch the Sky (which actually features MD on the vocals), John Tejada – Now We’re Here on Kompakt, Luke Solomon – Space Invaders (Andomat 3000 Remix) on Rekids, Jon Cutler feat. E-man-  It’s Yours and so many others.

Were you DJing before Black Market? 

Not really, not professionally anyway. I was always collecting records and I was really into radio. I was 12 when I decided I was going to be a radio DJ and a music journalist, mainly so that I could get my hands on promo copies, and later on because I wanted to help others discover the music that I felt (and still feel, most of the time) was saving my life. So that’s what I did, while exploring and studying both electronic music and clubbing as cultures. It was very obvious that it was my ‘thing’ in life, but for some reason DJing in clubs was never something I had on my list. 

It was only when offers to DJ came in while I was working at Black Market that I thought, “well maybe I should give it a try, after all, I always go out hoping to hear the records I discovered this week, I always think to myself, mmm I would play this record with that record…”. Literally everyone around me was like – “thank you! Finally!” and I felt really odd and a little silly that it made so much sense to them, but never even crossed my own mind.

What was it about DJing that first intrigued you and what does it mean for you in terms of a creative outlet that you wouldn’t necessarily get from producing and/or playing the piano? 

It’s an obsession. If I’m into a track, I have to hear it again and again, and the only way to get it out of my system is to listen to it on a really big rig, a few times, and dance to it…. Ha. I think it’s the same for most DJs? I can only guess. I’m limited doing that at home (even my daughter tells me off!) so it’s kind of a necessity.

DJing has always been this fleeting thing, subject to contemporary tastes and impulses. What remains sonically consistent in your DJ mixes for you? 

Lately I find that I need equal measures of groove and drive in a track for me to get into it. I can’t have all groove or all drive. A funk injection is good, also a touch of sex appeal. I also like my music raw, or with a raw feeling if you know what I mean. Yes I go through a lottttttt of tracks before I find something I dig.

I believe you have some experience working in a studio too. Is there something to working in that environment that changes the way you approach the creative aspects of making music? 

Yes, I owned a high-end recording studio with my ex-husband for nearly a decade and that’s where I also picked up production. It was stuff of the dreams, a 64-channel Neve desk, one of the largest synth libraries in the world, all of the plugins you can possibly think up, same for sample libraries, and it was so much fun, but it was also really distractive.

These days I’m mostly in the box in my smallish but cuteish home studio, with the odd 909 or SH-101 thrown in, but I get ideas down much quicker this way – and isn’t music mostly about ideas – as is all art? 

I mean, you can’t make a bad idea better just by using the latest plugin, and it’s also not about the number of analogue synths you’ve invested an arm in, or how many channels you crammed your project with… It’s about having a vision and a certain feeling you want to put across, or at least that’s how I see it.

Your next record, ‘Hot Mess’ will be coming out next year and I had the pleasure of hearing the tracks. What were some of the ideas behind that record, and how it came together on Rekids?

Oh you have, I’m glad to hear this. The starting point for ‘Hot Mess’ was the decision not to use any loops, so it’s a 100% programmed drum machine werqqqout. I made the first version of the track on a pretty intense day and I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be great if I somehow managed to capture how I was feeling at that point AND get rid of it at the same time… Very quickly I had this relentless groove going, and I then felt it needed a raw, emotional vocal to give it contrast. It took quite a few versions before it was finished. I was working with the vocalist remotely over a few sessions and playing about with arrangement and mixdowns quite a bit because I’m a bloody annoying perfectionist, but I think it was worth it. When Matt Edwards said he wanted it for Rekids I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been following Rekids since day one and absolutely adore everything they do.

And Mike Dunn is on the remixes and brought some of that Chicago flavour to it.  What’s your relationship with Mike and what were your first impressions of the remix?

I met Mike at a festival in Croatia a couple of years ago. I think by now you’ve probably realised I’m a massive Chicago house fan and of course, I’ve been collecting and playing Mike’s music forever, so to have him remix my music is simply incredible. I love the deep groove spin he put on ‘Hot Mess’, it’s so different to my original and I think that’s exactly what makes a remix interesting.

I guess edits and remixes like this next one for Terry Farley and that infamous Laurient Garnier edit keeps you busy too. How do you usually approach these tracks, especially when you’re handling a legend like Terry Farley’s work?

Edits and remixes are two very different creatures as far as I’m concerned. I’ve done quite a few edits over the past couple of years of ‘classic bangers’ (as I like to call them) that I wanted to play out but felt needed an updated finish, both in terms of sound as well as arrangement. I’d try and pay respect to the original while put a little spin on it, but mostly I’d just aim to make a modern version of the original that sits well within my DJ sets. That’s what I tried to do with Laurent Garnier’s techno anthem ‘Crispy Bacon’; Laurent loved it and played it and so did Carl Cox, Patrick Topping and others. It still amazes me that Laurent then decided to release it on his new album’s limited edition boxset… What an honour. 

When it comes to remixes, I think they could potentially hold more room for creative freedom, so that a release package offers the remix as a different flavour to the original. With those, I would try to find a hook or a few hooks that really clicks with me, sometimes use another distinctive sound off the original, and mostly have my own drums and sounds on top. That’s what I’ve done with my remix of Terry Farley & Wade Teo’s track, which is out this weekend on Rekids. And yes Terry is a total legend and a bit of house dad and mentor to me, which I’m super grateful for.

A lot of energy in that one. I assume playing a track you’ve made out is never too far from your mind when producing music?

Absolutely, I first and foremost produce music I want to be playing in my own sets, it’s how I got started with producing. 

There are a few of your contemporaries that have capitulated to the 3 min track to appease the Spotify algorithm, but both this remix and Hot Mess are well over 5 min. What are your thoughts on dance music producers following that trend and where do you draw the line in your own music in terms of appeasing an audience?

The 3 minute edit is usually an additional version a label would ask the producer to cut, with radio and streaming in mind. It’s something I can understand from a business point of view but having to butcher an arrangement you’ve tweaked again and again for the dancefloor is far from fun… Which is why it’s a relief that labels like Rekids don’t ask for these versions.

You’ve said in the past it’s all about the crowd and the night for you. This will be your second visit to Jaeger. Any idea how this night will go?

I’m looking forward to it so much! I absolutely loved visiting and playing Jaeger last year, I was so impressed with everything about it, from the amazing system to the acoustic treatment of the room to the oak smell to the double-headed mixer to the crowd and of course with Ola and the team. This time I’m back with a ton of new music I’ve made over the past few months, including a couple of brand new tracks I’ve not played out at all yet, so I can’t wait.

And lastly, can you play us out with a song to set the mood? 

Of course, here’s my new remix of Terry Farley & Wade Teo feat. Kameelah Waheed ‘Why We Dance’, which is out on Rekids this weekend:

 

Hilit Kolet is on Instagram and Spotify

A new House with Casablanca 303

We meet up with Oslo’s newest musical arrival and Badabing artist, Casablanca 303 to talk bout his musical history and more in a Q&A.

Alejandro aka Casablanca 303 is really settling into his life in Norway. “I really like the music and the nature,” says the Colombian artist over a coffee in Gamlebyen. We’re walking distance from his home, where he also has his studio, and he talks in excited terms about the artistic and “bohemian” community that thrives there. 

While little is known of his career outside of Norway to us, Casablanca 303 comes from an established background as a DJ in South America, and has been making waves in Bergen and Oslo since relocating here with his Norwegian partner in 2018. It was in Bergen he first got his “foot in the scene, assisting at concerts, parties and even raves.”  

There he found a welcoming community, none more than with the Mhost likely crew, who operate their labels and event series out of the city. It was with them he would release Perspectives, his first record in Norway, before moving onto Oslo and finding a new home for his music through Vinny Villbass’ Badabing Diskos imprint. 

That EP, Lucid Dream / Estereograma established the name Casablanca 303 in Oslo too and as he prepares for his first live show since the release at Jaeger, we caught up with the artist and DJ to talk about his music history and more. 

What was your involvement in music before moving to Norway? 

Back in the days I was working as a tour manager for a festival in Colombia for some international artists and that gave me some connection to the US. I played some clubs in Miami and also met some producers. But I was in that moment, still defining my sound and what I really liked. 

Miami really? There is an incredible underground electronic music scene that we still revere with the likes of Miami bass. What was your experience of the city?

Miami has a lot of layers. If you land in South Beach, you get the commercial, overcrowded pop scene. You have other things that also happen in the city; underground stuff in terms of art and music Miami has other sounds. Every city has these mass-consumption parts and then other more bohemian / hipster parts that are more open to underground sounds visuals. 

What was Colombia like; is there a healthy underground electronic music scene there?

Yes, Colombia has a lot of everything. You have a lot of layers of music. There are those artists that want to explore more of the caribbean- or roots music of Colombia and transform it into electronic music. There are two artists that I know that have played at Jaeger actually, and they are into that thing. Mítu is one Colombian band and they employ some afro rhythms and vibes with an underground electronic music. I couldn’t call it House music or anything like that. It’s just electronic music and it works. We also have artists like Felipe Gordon, who are killing it internationally. He’s younger than me and it’s so cool to see him blooming. 

How did you make the transition from being a tour manager and working in the scene to making your own music and releasing records?

Much before I was a tour manager and working at festivals, I was Djing and gigging. I was playing all over Colombia and the Caribbean. I also played in nearby countries like Ecuador and Peru.  

Would you say you were a successful DJ back home?

Yeah, back in the days. It’s easy when you have some of your friends own the best clubs. I was playing regularly. I’ve been DJing since 2010 more-or-less.

That must have been quite an adjustment, being at that level and then playing for what I can only assume is much smaller audiences and a smaller scene.

Since moving to Norway, I’ve been playing some. Mhost Likely in Bergen got me some gigs, and here in Oslo I have found some collectives in my niche, mainly House music, Disco and balearic; sub-genres of House- and electronic music. I don’t play as often, but I’ve started  transitioning from Djing to being a live performer. That’s my main goal, I just want to play my own music. 

Do you find it more fun than Djing?

In some way, yes. I really like to play instruments. I am  a former guitar player, and I’ve been playing since I was 11. Even though I don’t play the guitar much in my productions, my music starts from the guitar, and then I translate it to synthesisers and music software. My music is all about improvising, and that’s what my live performance is all about; it’s my music and then I do some extra things on top of it. 

I was going to ask about the guitar, because I noticed the guitar in your music, and I could tell there’s some background in playing in bands from what I heard. Is that the first thing you did in music?

Yes, when I was 17 and 18 I played in a Death Metal band. I’ve never been a radical person when it comes to genres, so when I wasn’t playing in the band I was playing Rock n Roll or Jazz. The same has happened in electronic music. I focus on certain things, but I’m really open to genres. Even pop music, good pop music isn’t bad.

How did you get into electronic music from there? 

I think metal had something to do with that. There were some Scandinavian bands that were transitioning from certain sounds of death Metal into more industrial territory, incorporating beats. I started liking the synthesisers they were playing and realised it was danceable. 

What was your first engagement with pure electronic music, like House or Techno?

I think it was when Groove Armada played in Bogotá. I was at the beginning of university, around 2006 and there were a lot of electronic music artists coming to Bogotá. Another artist that came over was Armin Van Buuren. We have something similar Russefeiring – when you celebrate the end of school – and some promoters take a chance to bring some big artists and promote some parties. 

From DJing did you take some time to develop your own music before you started releasing music?

While I was DJing, I had already  started producing, because I had some experience with the bands I was in. I was also finalising my education, so I didn’t have much time to produce my own music. At first it was all in the computer, but then I started getting some analogue gear, because I wanted to just plug it in and record the synthesiser, like we would with metal. It took me a while, but I would say that I only started recording electronic music, a little before moving to Norway. 

Was Visions your first record?

Yes, but before that I made a cover version of a popular Colombian artist. At that time I was captivated by Deep House and its melancholic sound. 

Yes, it reminds me of something that might have appeared on Life and Death or a Stephen Bodzin record. I noticed however that by the time we get to the Perspectives EP on Mhost likely, there’s a change in your sound. Would you agree?

Yes, definitely. It’s also the transition of me moving to Norway. 

Ok, was it a direct influence of moving here? I thought I might have heard some Scandinavian Disco influences in there, but I didn’t want to be presumptuous. 

Yes, I started to dig more into Disco and House music. I wanted to experiment a little and I was influenced by what was known of Norwegian music in South America which was Space Disco. Even though I don’t do Space Disco, I take some elements from Space Disco, from artists like Prins Thomas, Todd Terje and Bjørn Torske. I really like their eclectic style. 

And this was around the same time you started working more with hardware?

Yes. There is one piece of gear I’ve always wanted, and that’s the Moog Voyager synthesiser. I bought it here  in Norway second hand and that was one of the best days of my life.  The guy that sold it to me lives in Årdal which is close to Sogndalfjøra. It was so cool driving through that nature to go and buy this synthesiser. This synth, whenever I’m blocked creatively, I stop producing and just tweak this thing and suddenly  a sound would emerge. That happened with my last EP (Lucid dream / Estereograma) for Badabing. 

Besides the synth, were there any ideas that laid the foundation for that record?

I’m trying to produce this House music sound, but trying to give it personal space. I don’t consider myself a pioneer,  I just take the things that I like and mix it up and turn it out. 

Are there any artists or influences that you aspire to when you put these things together as you say?

Absolutely. I used to like what KiNK was doing before. He is really good, because he captures a lot of genres that I like, from piano House, jazzy House, a little bit of Techno and breakbeats. It’s insane, he can play whatever he wants. He mixes his knowledge of music to play and perform and that’s something that inspires me. Also my friend Felipe Gordon; he is another person that performs his instruments and that’s what you hear in his music.

 

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Talking about performing your instruments, is that how you usually start your composition process with a piano line?

I usually start with a groove, like everybody else. I start with some percussion and then I take the synthesiser or guitar and provide some bass-lines. I also like to play with samples and manipulate them to create strange melodies. In that EP for Mhost Likely, I re-sampled myself and reversed some loops and created some foundations and textures. 

You’re playing live at Jaeger. Will that be your live debut in Oslo?

I tested it out at Musikkfest this year, for Olle Abstract at Dattera til Hagen. He was the first person I met of the legends here from Oslo. He was so welcoming and he played my tracks in his monthly podcast. That pushed me, and sometimes you need that. 

 

2 years of Flux: A Q&A with the Flux collective (Part 2)

Part two of our roundtable conversation with the Flux Collective talking about and looking toward the future of the scene ahead of their event this Friday.

In a mere 2 years, Flux Collective has established a profile in Oslo’s club community that rivals even some of the most established Techno concepts around. Going from the forests in summer to the clubs in winter, they’ve garnered a dedicated following in Oslo’s clubbing community, which is starting to reach tendrils in the rest of Europe carried on the wings of the label.

Aside from their own solo efforts as DJs, artists and live performers, each member of the collective takes on specific roles within the organisation, which runs more like an enterprise than a community. It culminates in a multi-layered approach that covers each aspect of club culture and is currently looking towards new avenues that will take them into more abstract regions. 

Last week, we talked to them about their origins, their thoughts on the Techno scene and more. In part 2 of our extensive Q&A we cover the future possibilities of the collective; their move from Oslo’s forests to the clubs; and how a pandemic opened up the floodgates for this new scene.  They’ll be releasing Metamorphosis n this week to celebrate 2 years of Flux, with a dedicated event in our basement to mark the occasion. 

Mischa Mathys: Andrea, you mentioned something earlier about the explosion of Techno. That concurs because what people were calling Techno here was essentially Tech House in my opinion and then suddenly there was this huge demand. Before that there was maybe Void and a few very niche DIY concepts doing this kind of sound, but then suddenly exploded. What do you guys think was the catalyst for that in Norway?

Andrea (Anémi): I just think that Norway has been hanging behind. Techno was a new thing for many and people were excited about it because the scene has been made mainly around minimal, or Tech House. The new kind of sounds that arose really had younger people talking about it. 

During the pandemic everybody was feeling suppressed. A lot of young people, especially the people who hadn’t been able to go out in the clubs, even though they had come of age, had been angry and disconnected. I feel that’s why Techno flourished, because it’s these people playing underground music and making home raves or home parties.

Henrik (Skodde): Because so many new people were discovering underground music and just calling it Techno. I was playing every favourite I had as a child. So we can play Techno, Hard Trance, and Trance. Nobody cares but everybody cares, because people are very accepting. Not right now, but at the beginning.

Andreas (Skodde): One thing that’s really cool about the Oslo Techno scene right now – and we have a lot of communication from outside of Norway–  the scene is different because if you host a party in Berlin, it’s only one sound the whole night. In Oslo you can get Breakbeat, hard Techno, Psytrance, Ghettotech; you can get everything in one night. The Oslo scene is completely different from anywhere else in the world right now, because of the forest raves. A  lot of the DJ’s don’t even know about these big artists, they just know what’s going on in Oslo.

David (Bjerregaard): I have an idea and it has to do with politics. If we look at the rest of Europe, especially central Europe, Norway is very conservative when it comes to partying. We have a lot of rules and we have very strict rules regarding drugs as well. For a long time Techno and the whole scene was frowned upon by clubs because they didn’t really dare host these kinds of parties; because they would get a lot of pressure from authorities. 

Mischa: Yes I remember a stint here at Jaeger where we couldn’t even promote a night as a Techno night. 

David: But I’d say that in the last five to ten years the cops are also much more lenient. It’s more liberalised with taks of legalisation and so on. So that combined with the covid shutdown, reset the attitude to a lot of people who run the clubs. They saw there’s a huge demand for this kind of music, so it became a renaissance for this music.

Gaute (Naboklage): But why is there such a demand for this music? 

David: Well, there was always a demand. It was gate kept and then it was shut down for a year and a half. And then after that, they were like, “okay, let’s give it a shot” because they kind of forgot how it was. I had never been to a Techno party in Oslo before covid. I’m sure they existed but to me it was completely unknown.

Gaute: People keep telling me that we had parties before. I never saw it. People would say, don’t think you’re doing anything new. 

Mischa: People in your age group?

Gaute: No older people and they’re like, “oh you think you guys are doing something new we had parties before.” You probably did, but not at the same scale. They didn’t have 500 people. 

 

Skodde the young people, who were not used to clubs, were so free at the raves and suddenly they came into the club and if you were dancing too hard or had your shirt off someone would tell you, you can’t do that.

 

Andreas: Henrik and I have been in the Techno scene for 10 years. We were in a friend group where everyone listened to Techno before covid. We went to Berlin, we went to Amsterdam, we did all these things because there was nothing happening here…  And when there was nothing else happening, the forest raves happened. The people came to the forest and did the thing. There’s a reason why people like Techno and listen to it and when you go to a Techno party a certain amount of time because that’s the only place you can meet friends, of course you’re going to enjoy it. 

Gaute: A lot of people who hadn’t gone to Techno things before, went to it and they were exposed to something new. For Norwegian people if there’s something that’s a little bit different their default thing is just to be like, “no, this is weird.” But because of this lockdown, people allowed themselves to be more open-minded and then at some point it became trendy.

Henrik: Because the raves were the only opportunity to go to a party, people actually got to experience or rave music, in the way it’s supposed to be listened to, not through a set of headphones.

Gaute: At the same time if a 20 something kid and his friend just throws a party, they really can play whatever they want, but if you play a DJ gig at a club, there’s a lot more expectation.  There’s this very rigid structure for what you do and what you play in this time slot and if you fuck up, there are no more club gigs. 

So you have this incentive to conform to whatever they’re already doing at a club. Whereas if you’re just throwing a party with a friend for fun during covid, then you’re like “ok fuck it, let’s just play whatever.” You can play for as long as you want, and you can do whatever you want. This allows people to experiment and do a lot of fun stuff that never would have happened in a club and this kind of opened Pandora’s box.

Everybody groans in agreement. 

Mischa: Going from the raves to the clubs as a concept, what have been some of the biggest challenges?

Gaute: The crowd is really different.

Andreas:  It’s really the bouncers.

Gaute: Also the opening times. It’s so hard with the people arriving at the club, a bit before 1am and then they leave around 2am. Maybe they stay until three. You have two and a half hours, whereas for a rave you have eight hours of curated music. 

Andreas: Also our crowd doesn’t like clubs actually. That’s the hardest part because the young people, who were not used to clubs, were so free at the raves and suddenly they came into the club and if you were dancing too hard or had your shirt off someone would tell you, you can’t do that.

Mischa: So getting your people to the club is not going to be easy, right, so, how do you motivate them? 

Gaute: There are limits to what we can do, but we do what we can with what we have. Something I’m really upset about is that Norwegian music events are all funded through alcohol sales. If your music isn’t inclined to sell alcohol then it’s a lot more difficult to do events at nightclubs.

Andreas: That’s actually why we’ve moved more and more towards Jaeger and ditched a lot of the other clubs. I really like the vision of Ola because he’s really into the music. 

Mischa: You guys are still doing the raves on top of this, so why do the clubs at all. 

Gaute: The logistics are extreme; It’s like doing a 30 hour shift.

David: It’s weather dependent… Because you can’t do it in winter. And it becomes a little watered down if you do it every two weeks in the summer. There’s no way we’re able to do it anyway. 

Gaute: … and there’s the police and there’s a bunch of idiots doing drugs. If you have 150 people, close people that you know can behave, then it’s fine. But once it’s 500 to 1000 people, then the odds of one person doing something stupid is quite high. It’s really frustrating because if we were allowed to set up the infrastructure to do it in a responsible way, then we would. We have to keep everything super low key. If we ideally could communicate with the police and maybe an ambulance or something, but you can’t do that because then they’ll just shut you down. 

Andreas: We also want to do things as legal as possible. 

Gaute: Because we want to run a label and we want to live off of music and then you can’t just do illegal shit.

Mischa: Is that something that could still be realistically achieved in the current music climate, living off music, especially as a collective?

Andrea: I think it has to be a combination of different things. We have some interesting ideas on how we want to go forward with Flux. The label has been doing well but it will take some years to get it all around.

David: And the parties fund the label basically. 

Gaute: We do a lot of stuff for free if not everything. 

Andreas: We only got 3000 NOK each this year. You can’t bet everything on one horse. You need to do several things and that was our vision from the start.  

David: We basically don’t take out any fees from our own parties and we spend everything to either make better parties or to book artists, to build our network of connections. For instance, we took some of the people that we had here (Jaeger) this summer, to the forests. Then the rest goes into the label. 

Mischa: So, you are trying to start a community outside Norway as well?

Gaute: We want to export the Oslo scene to the world. 

Andrea: And it’s happened naturally because of the label; the people whose music we released, are the people we’ve been talking to and invited to our parties. 

Gaute: They’ve played our stuff at the famous German club. 

Mischa: How do you find out the artists that land on the label, especially outside of the collective. 

Andrea: You just have to be a big nerd. I just have a radar and pick up on what’s around. 

Mischa: Do you specifically look for anything in terms of a sound, and do they have to represent something like a Flux sound for you?

Andrea: I have some plans for the next few releases. We actually have been releasing quite a lot for just being able for two years and we have released a lot of Oslo-based artists, because we wanted to support local artists. From that our sound has just been growing, but we are going to have fewer releases and more curated releases. 

So we are putting more effort in the production. At the start, it was more like, “oh, I like you, you should release on our label.” Haha. This was so cool though and I am happy for all the releases we have had with all these amazing people. We have evolved a lot since then though and I am excited to work on new curated releases. We have a lot of attention in Europe actually and all around the world, which is really cool, being a small label.

Anemi We want to take people through a journey, also on a deeper level.

Mischa: Is there a confluence between the artists on the labels and the ones you book for the events? 

Andrea: Hmm, we have booked artists we wanted to collab with and artists who already have released music with us, but it doesn’t always have to be an agenda with them. It’s just that we dig their music and their persona somehow. 

And originally we were going to do a lot more art, but it’s coming next year. We’ll be doing more events focused on visual- and conceptual art. 

Andreas: We want to work with modern art and experimental visual exhibitions with light and sound.

Gaute: An audio visual space for events, where it’s not just blasting music with a strobe, but more like an installation; a whole production. 

Andrea: We want to take people through a journey, also on a deeper level.

Henrik: This is really important to do here in Oslo, because of the short opening hours clubs and we’d like to not just play the night shift every week but build an experience.

Andrea: We’ve just been doing so much, playing every weekend and we have just been growing steadily towards the thing we actually want to do; which is the combination of a lot of things. 

Mischa: Do you think that after the pandemic and after you set your own standard in the scene that there’s a lot more people coming up, copying your formula

Andreas: Yes. I think it’s a compliment 

Gaute: I want people to come to  our parties and be like, “fuck, I could do this better” and then I want  to go to their event and be like “shit, this is better, we have to be better”. If they play the exact same songs and do the exact same thing, that’s pretty lame, but if they do something different but better then that’s amazing. We should inspire each other to improve our own unique things.

Andreas: Because we have the connections with the clubs and the bookings, we have actually helped a lot of the competition getting into the clubs.

Andrea: Flux has always Invited a newcomers and up and coming artists and will continue to.

Henrik: I do feel there are more different collectives and more concepts under the umbrella of Techno music now than there used to be for House music, just three or four years ago. 

Andreas: The scene supports each other much more. Even people I thought didn’t like us, when I get to talk to them, they do and vice versa. The Techno scene in Oslo is really kind of nice to each other and supportive.

2 years of Flux: A Q&A with the Flux collective (Part 1)

In part 1 of a 2 part Q&A session we talk to Flux Collective about Techno’s current trajectory, the creation of the collective and how they arrived at Techno, individually.

It feels like we’re teetering on the precipice of something in Techno. Social media is a constant stream of DJs playing to crowds of thousands when it’s not showing queues outside of some of the world’s leading techno clubs.There are tutorials on YouTube about dressing appropriately for club nights and even mainstream TV shows are making references to Berghain (or “Ber-gain”). 

It’s prevalent, and its popularity has surpassed nearly every other electronic dance music category, but as it continues to reach tendrils into popular-culture, it’s diminishing its underground affiliations in the process. 

As something grown from the subterranean caverns of disused power plants and dystopian motor cities, where musical laymen re-appropriated machines to create futuristic noise, it was always supposed to be a counter culture. Its continued acquisition into mainstream culture however has seen the tawdry side of music business and popular culture eradicating much of those original values and DIY ideologies of the genre. What we’re seeing now is similar to what happened at the turn of the century for Techno, when big rooms and festival stages saw it divided.

Yet again, factions are starting to emerge with one group exploiting its current popularity for their own success while another has turned on its heels, taking the music back to the underground. The Flux Collective consider themselves part of this latter group. 

A collective of producers, artists and DJs, the Flux Collective host events, they release records and they facilitate a community for Techno enthusiasts in Oslo, even when there are no places to host them. Their raves in and around the city’s forests have left their mark on the next generation and alongside the likes of Ute Klubb and Monument they have helped establish the next era for Oslo’s Techno scene. Between the events, their label and the artists involved, their efforts have made a formidable impression in the 2 years they have been around and they keep pushing the boundaries of the music and the scene.  

Together, Andrea, Andreas, Henrik, David and Gaute have been a force in Oslo’s underground since their inception and in a short time they’ve managed to carve out a significant portion of the clubbing community for themselves. Their label continues to go from strength to strength and the latest compilation, Metamorphoses marking their 2 year anniversary will only go to cement their staying power. They are a hard group to pin down as individuals with each bringing their own set of skills and personality traits with them, but as a group they are cohesive (even if they might not always agree with each other.) 

As they arrive at Jaeger to celebrate their birthday next week, we sat down with all five of them to talk about their history, their thoughts on music and the future of Techno. Our conversation was broad and extensive, so we decided to break it up into two parts. Here follows part 1. 

Mischa Mathys: Where do you guys find yourself at the moment with a version of Techno that is going harder faster? 

Henrik Ottersbo (Skodde): From my point of view, I see a lot of similarities to what happened exactly 20 years ago. We had Techno and Trance in the late 90s here in Oslo, and some were moving towards a more commercial; doing the Tiesto thing while others kept to the original progressive Trance and Techno vibes from Tresor. And I feel like we are on the same path right now. 

Mischa: You think it’s going to move underground again?

Andreas Ulstein Granum (Skodde): Yes! 

Henrik: Yeah, I feel our sound is going to be more underground, with the other people going in a more commercial direction. 

Andreas: Hard Techno right now is basically EDM.

Gaute Holen (Naboklage): The biggest Techno DJs, their instagram is just super professional videos of festival drops. It’s so far removed from what we’re doing. 

Andreas: It’s just the same rave stab in every song. (Mimics the sound) It’s the same as EDM basically just at 150 beats per minute. 

Gaute: I think we’re trying to experiment and do different things. As the hard Techno is a lot more popular, I feel like we are bored of hearing everyone play the same everywhere. So we’re just trying to keep it interesting for ourselves by experimenting. Right now it’s more glitchy and weird.

Henrik: …and more groovy…

Andreas: … and not that hard, with more baselines.

Gaute: There’s also Hardgroove, that’s really popular. 

Mischa: Yes that seemed to come out of nowhere and it’s based around the Ben Sims label, but isn’t quite that either.

Gaute: Yeah, exactly, but now it’s taking off and happening in parallel to the Hard Techno thing but it’s fun.

Andreas: She (Andrea) was the first to play Hardgroove in Oslo after covid, right when clubs opened… and now she doesn’t.  

Andrea Emilie Eriksen (Anémi): Haha, yes. I had a phase where I played Hardgroove and other genres as well. I have evolved my sound pretty heavily since I started playing out. It’s a continuous journey where I feel I am finding myself more and more and that reflects on the music I play and vibe with at that moment. Same with Flux. We are not following any rules.

Mischa: We’ve been using the term Techno, but in the context of Flux, it seems like it’s more of an umbrella term, for what is essentially machine music made for dancing. And anything from Breaks to Ambient can fall under that umbrella for you.

Andreas: Other people are labelling us as Techno, but we’re always trying to say we’re an electronic music record company. If something is in a state of Flux, it is constantly changing. That’s our core – We always want to develop and not be labelled as any one thing. 

Mischa: So put a name to it.

Andreas: Electronic underground music. 

Andrea: Experimental electronic underground music, maybe.

Mischa: And if you were to describe the sound of this to a layman?

Henrik: Weird, groovy, witchy, experimental, industrial.

David Bjerregaard Madsen: Not that industrial. 

Everyone shouts out in protest.

Andrea – We are open for new artists and new sounds and you don’t have to be Techno, just be something that is unique or something that is really good. 

Andreas: You (Henrik) think industrial is the thing that you think of Tresor in the 90s, but industrial now is just hard Techno.  

Henrik: Yeah, thank you for the correction, I’m an old man in an old man’s body. (laughs) But yeah, also some psychedelic can fit in there.

David: Psychedelic soundscapes with Techno drops. 

Andreas: I think some commonality in where we’re heading now,  is textures and layering. Almost like a cinematic approach to producing music. 

Andrea: We are open for new artists and new sounds and you don’t have to be Techno, just be something that is unique or something that is really good. 

Gaute: And it shouldn’t be completely new, but something a little bit different from what you heard before. It’s better that it’s different and bad than it being really good, but exactly the same….

Andrea: …boring.

Andreas: For the audience too, it’s boring to just follow trends, and do the same as anyone else. In our production right now, Henrik and I (Skodde) are really into the groovy stuff but we’re still into the raw Techno that we came from. It’s much cooler to sound like nothing you heard before then like just ripping off everyone else. 

Mischa: Henrik, you were talking about being around for that period in the early 2000’s when Techno turned to the underground again, and I believe Andreas called you a boomer at some point. Are you the elder statesman of the group?

Henrik: We’re the same age. I grew up with a mother and father listening to Trance music. And also a friend of mine introduced me to a record called ravermeister. It’s a compilation with Trance, Trance-Techno, Hard Trance, everything from 1995. When we started listening to this record, we were four years old so by the time I was seven I wanted to become a DJ. 

I started to produce music before DJing, because Djing at that time was a lot more difficult to get into. It was all vinyl, and giving two record players and a mixer to a seven year old was too expensive. 

Mischa: Is that the case for all of you, did you all get stuck into this free from a young age?

David: For me at least. I’ve always listened to electronic music, maybe not as long as Henrik, but since my mid teens. But DJing, I only got into it four years ago, because I thought it looked cool…

Everybody laughs

… and then I just bought some equipment. I actually enjoyed it more than I enjoyed looking cool. I also had never been to any raves. Right after getting into this, I organised raves with my friend. This was right when covid happened and as it happened, we were like, “oh well, everything is closed, so we might as well put a rave together.” I did that for two years and then I got in touch with Andreas, who I knew from high school.

Andreas: We’ve known each other since 2008 or something. He was my friend’s little brother’s friend. He was just a guy I picked on.

Mischa: Andreas, you were doing raves by the time David reached out to you?

Andreas: I was doing a lot of music stuff. I organised Hip Hop parties, House parties, a lot of stuff. I started off with black metal actually. I really really like metal, that’s the thing I listen to the most.

Mischa: Andrea how did you get involved with Flux, amongst all this testosterone?

Andrea:  Haha. I try to break it up with some feminine energies. We (Andreas) met here (Jaeger) actually, seven years ago, on the dance floor. 

Andreas had already played out for a while and was a bedroom producer then. He teached me how to mix and that just became our hobby at home.To Mix and listen to music. We started Flux Collective in the pandemic and we did some raves together the summer of 2021 which kind of just escalated. We also did one with David who also was doing his own raves. Same with Gaute; everybody was just doing the thing out in the forest. We had no plan with ending up here you know, it just happened as we went on doing the stuff we loved and just followed our hearts. Flux first started out as a rave-series, then a label and club-series shortly after closer to the fall/winter of 2021.

Mischa: So the idea for the label has been there from the beginning?

Andrea: Our first release was 2 or 3 months after we started out. It was Skodde’s first release. 

Mischa: What were you doing before Flux, Henrik?

Henrik: I used to play at Villa, as Good Mood with a friend of mine. We worked together for five years and at some point I wanted to do more Techno and he wanted to do more House.

Naboklage – And then all the people who were organising raves met by showing up to each other’s things. 

Mischa: Gaute that sounds similar to your story. You were in Toalettkollektivet (which had a residency at Jaeger), which was doing House music originally, and then both you and Leo (foufou malade) moved over to the darkside. 

Gaute: Yes, we had a bunch of events here. At some point I said; ”right now, I don’t listen to any House music, I don’t want to play house music anymore.”  And then Leo and I started something called Tempo instead, which was the polar opposite of what Toalettkollektivet was; No rules, do whatever you want, just like back in the old days before they invented all these sub genres and it was like; “let’s go to a rave and there will be music.”

Mischa: This was before Flux?

Gaute: Yes, and originally the first Tempo event was supposed to happen before Flux was a thing, but ended up happening around the same time as when I released a record with Flux due to restrictions coming back. The second Flux release was my release. I joined as an artist, but I helped out with a bunch of stuff too.

Andrea: We were in it together from the start, actually. Attending all of the events together, hanging out. 

Mischa: So was the idea behind Flux to merge all these satellite things you were doing separately?

Gaute: Exactly. 

David: It was Andreas who picked his favourites. 

Gaute: …Stole people from the other crews.

David: It was Andrea who had the idea though. It was August or September 2021, that’s when she made the instagram page. I didn’t really understand what it was all about and then a few months later I got it when I joined officially. 

Andrea: It was just a natural progression, all of us working together. It was just meant to be, you know. (laughs)

Andreas: The thing is Andrea has the ideas and I’m a bit of a doer; I like to get shit done. So when she tells me she wants to do something, I would have already called everyone I know, we’re starting tomorrow and she’s like; “that wasn’t what I said.”

Andrea: Things happened quite fast and the culture was really booming. After the pandemic it was sensational, freeing and magical to hang out in the woods and dance and listen to music. 

Mischa: Stepping into forests as the pandemic shut everything down, was there some competition out there?

Andreas: We actually didn’t know the competition until after covid. 

David: The competition is much bigger now than during the pandemic. This summer has been really heavy and it’s been hard to get people to pull up to your rave because during the pandemic, you go to one or two, if you get to know about them or you don’t go to any at all. Now it’s fucking everywhere.

Gaute: People didn’t really care about who was playing or who was throwing the party. And then all the people who were organising raves met by showing up to each other’s things. 

Mischa: I guess you could avoid stepping on each other’s toes when you know each other. 

Gaute: Exactly. That’s something I feel we’ve been trying to do. For example; Earlier today, some guy messaged me to ask if I was going to do a rave next weekend. We try to coordinate.

Andreas: The communication is really good and we’re like, everyone knows each other. 

Gaute: We help each other, we rent out shit to each other. We lend stuff. It’s super nice. 

 

Premiere: Third Attempt – Hard Times (Part of the Journey)

We get a sneak peak at Hard Times (Part of the Journey), taken from Third Attempt’s upcoming LP, Momentary Bliss

Third Attempt is always busy. If he’s not on the cusp of some future release, he’s playing live. Any down time is given to music, and if he’s not working on his solo efforts, he’s working with the likes of Bugge Wesseltoft and Kristoffer Eikrem towards uncharted territory. He’s release schedule is intense and in the four years we’ve known him, he’s released as many albums.

His latest, Momentary Bliss finds him back at his second home on Beatservice Records with a record that continues to solidify the producer’s sound. Between elements of House, Soul and Jazz, Third Attempt’s music lives in the groove and thrives in the accessible where a vocal sample or melody often extends beyond the dance floor. Hard Times (Part of the Journey), which we get to premiere today, follows the formula expertly.

Synthesisers swell and crash into broken beats as a serene melody ripples through the track, punctuated by intermittent vocal samples that echo the song’s title throughout different phases. Reminiscent of that late nineties early naughts crossover LP’s like Moby Porcelain or Røyksopp’s Melody AM, revamped and updated for this generation.

We talk more about the influences and themes that inform this LP with Third Attempt as we get the first sneak peak at the new LP ahead of his upcoming release event and live show at Jaeger.

Ever since your first release as Third Attempt, you’ve been consistently active, releasing music at an incredible rate, even during the pandemic. Where do you find the creative inspiration to remain that busy? 

Practiced creative expression as a way of life for quite some time. Habits, taking myself more seriously and focusing on evolving as an artist has made everything less restricted. I work on my music in some shape or form pretty much every day.

I guess it’s somewhat apparent that I’ve shifted through a lot of genres. Emphasizing that I will continue to explore. It’s never comfortable or easy for me, but that’s why it never stops being fun either.

Are you simply releasing everything you make or what is your control process for releasing the tracks and albums?

The biggest factor is that I make a lot of music. Control process is that I try to pick out the best of them, trying to steer clear of irrational doubts in the process. Right, healthy amount of trust. But it’s a thin line. A lot of it will never see the light of day.

This is your third or fourth album (if you count the extended EP Dreams in Common). What does it take for an album like Momentary Bliss to come together? 

Fourth or fifth counting Dreams. 

I’ve always been a fan of the album format, even though it’s a bit less relevant now than before. Periods in life I’m spewing out more tracks than usual, often following change or new thought patterns. Getting a lot out of my own storytelling, trying to utilize that as much as possible. Momentary bliss is personal in that sense. 

What were some of the ideas or themes that gave birth to the LP?

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am somewhat of a romantic. So this LP is a project centered around my love for many things. Among them is dance music, together with feelings and reflections from a very special time in my life. Renewing my eye for beauty and uplifting expressions. 

It carries that distinctive Third Attempt sound, which moves between elements of Funk, Jazz and House music, but is there anything that went into this LP that was perhaps a little different to your previous releases?

Been listening to a lot of soul, blues, hip hop records. I guess in some way this music is flowing through me. Taking a lot of inspiration out of unknown territories and new angles. Contextualizing more through vocals and dialogue. Also leaning in and tightening my sample approach. 

Why did you choose Hard Times (part of the journey) for the premiere?

Conclusion of the record. Getting the feeling that it’s tying things together.

It reminds me a bit of Moby during his porcelain phase. Were there any direct influences from other artists or albums?

Inspired by all the greats from 90s early 00s. It’s the golden standard imo. Maybe obvious, but Melody AM is a big one, and always will be. 

Tell us a bit about the live show coming up. You’ve played a few times at Jaeger. How will this show be different and what has been the influence of this latest LP beyond the new tracks?

This time I’m playing down in the club, mostly new material plus bonus tracks. Tailored visual material to go with the music, projected. Bringing keys and two launchpads. Downstairs I haven’t done as much. Getting hyped about the sound system. Going to be great!

You’ve also played with Bugge Wesseltoft and Kristoffer Eikrem recently and are also primed to play a chill-out set later in November too. How are these sessions approached and is there something from those shows that feed into your normal shows?

Playing with Bugge and Eikrem was an upper to say the least. It’s out in entirety on Youtube for those who missed it! 

These sessions are much more improvised, slowing things down drastically. Performing music out of my downtempo catalog. Which I still focus on and have a lot of passion for. 

Keywords are more introspective, breathing room. Maintaining the TA sound and approach with visual aspect. I’m always trying to hit a point in between, but these gigs tend to lean more towards listening than dancing. 

If I know you by now, there’s probably more releases already primed. What else is up in the  future for Third Attempt. 

Next year I am setting up a Third Attempt band project! Very excited about that. Release-wise, I’m going to release on Paper Recordings early next year. Have a collab track lined up with Steve Cobby from Fila Brazillia. Doing a downtempo side project utilizing new AI technology and music. Recorded with Bugge Wesseltoft on this one. More on that soon.

Cleaning House with Ivaylo

Ivaylo talks openly about the end of his personal relationship and how Lab Cleaning Jams rose from those ashes as the DJ, producer and label manager embarked on this new phase of his life.

It all came crashing down for Ivaylo Kolev one day in 2023. As  he sat in his car, faced with yet another unsurmountable responsibility on the back of a year of unrelenting upheaval and turmoil, the dam finally burst. The sleepless nights and unceasing worry had nowhere else to go, and manifested in the only way possible as tears welled in his eyes. After his partner and mother to his three children abruptly left him last year, he’s been caring for his three children alone while facing a tumultuous legal battle with his ex-partner, the kind you only see in hallmark movies. 

In the past, Ivaylo could channel those emotions and anguish into music, but this creative outlet had laid dormant during the last year as all his energies focussed on the life-changing situation at hand. “I wasn’t able to make music, mentally,” says the Bulgarian DJ from his home in Asker, Oslo. Sitting in his light and airy dining room, things aren’t exactly looking up yet, but Ivaylo’s disposition is surprisingly upbeat. He has always been nothing but candid face to face, and that stoic personality forged behind an iron curtain and cultivated in the cultural inclusivity of a dance floor, has been nothing but amicable.    

“I still see the connection; That’s what Lab Cleaning Jams is all about, it’s just jams, just music.” 

When it comes to music Ivaylo’s dance card has never been anything but full.  He is a familiar face on Oslo’s DJ circuit, playing almost every weekend and the man behind the Jaeger Mix concept amongst others. He is also Jaeger’s logistics man and the face of the club when it comes to our visiting DJ guests. And when he’s not doing those things, his the label manager for Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp. You might also remember him from his label Bogota records. 

Downstairs in his basement studio in Asker, a few physical copies of the last Bogota release line the shelves. “I give them to friends,” says Ivaylo when I refer to the remnants of the label he has declared defunct. Will he ever revisit that label I ask, knowingly. “No, That boat has sailed;” comes an immediate reply. “Everything is personal for me, how can you work with art and not be personal?” 

Bogota Records is particularly personal and had a specific connection to his ex-partner and as the relationship broke down, he abandoned the project. It’s taken him the better part of the year to come to terms with the end of that era and forge ahead with the next phase of his life, but whatever he is going to do, it won’t include Bogota records. That’s why I’m here, talking to him in the basement studio. He is on the verge of ushering a new epoch in his music and it will be called Lab Cleaning Jams. Named after his monthly mix series, the concept has now turned label and by the time you read this he would have already released the inaugural record in the form of a 3-track digital release, pragmatically titled Jam 1-3. 

Down in his basement studio he plays me a few snippets from this and a few of the future releases. Boblebad has the honour of the next release after Ivaylo and the first track from them he plays is instantly recognisable as Boblebad’s distinctive disco-infused jacuzzi Jazz.  There’s some similarities to Ivaylo’s own productions but by the time he gets to Boblebad’s second contribution; an erratic jittering piece that looks towards some acoustic IDM interpretation, the connection is severed. The contrast is obvious, but Ivaylo disagrees. “I still see the connection; That’s what Lab Cleaning Jams is all about, it’s just jams, just music.” 

Ivaylo skips far ahead into some unfinished pieces from his own catalogue. Immediately there’s a correlation between these pieces and the first two tracks he just put out via Lab Cleaning Jams.They’re all different to anything that has come hitherto from Ivaylo. In the case of the Jam sessions, Ivaylo forgoes the dancefloor-friendly sequenced sounds for some acoustic elements. A cymbal splashes, a double bass rumbles, keys jingle and even a saxophone tweets sweetly in tonally adrift Jazz improvisations. 

For now, most of these tracks are still ”just edits” and while some might take a day to finish others “might be two weeks” away from completion. In one of the most recent creations a reggae vocal sample suddenly appears through a din of upbeat piano and it’s completely unexpected. Where did that sample come from? “I don’t know,” replies Ivaylo. “I have so many samples and I don’t know where they come from.” He’s been amassing a sample library of note since he started making music in 1996 and it can go from his earliest musical indulgences behind a drum kit in various Jazz-fusion bands between Bulgaria and Norway to a year’s worth of sessions recorded in a bachelor-pad-turned-studio back in the early 2000’s. “I literally have everything,” he says through a grin. “The only thing I need to play is melodies.”

After digitising everything back in the day, he only needs to dip into this sample library he’s amassed. Most of the time he’ll only add a bass line or melody and while this is something that has been consistent in his creative process for as long as we’ve known him, there is a subtle difference in the type of samples he’s started using in this new era for his work. 

There’s an organic touch which becomes immediately evident when you listen to Ivaylo’s first outing, Jam 1. The beat skips between conga and hi-hat, while a sine wave punches a hole in the first step of every bar as a kick drum. When a Rhodes piano joins the melée in staccato stabs we’re in Funk and Soul territory and any reference to Ivaylo’s more functional intuitions are laid to rest. “I want to work with musicians, I want to work with real music,” he explains of the ideas behind the new tracks. 

“If you listen to the music from before it’s darker – Now I feel free. ” 

After a long period of being in “a dark place” with the sudden change in his life, he felt that he needed “to listen to live piano and live bass”. It was like starting from scratch, with a new point of focus, coming together around this new label and nudging Ivaylo’s music into a different direction. These new pieces are lighter than anything that came before them, with a spring in the step of the rhythm and a buoyancy in the melodies. He realises that his situation during the period leading up to the eventual turmoil  “kept me in a dark place. I had to run as fast as I could to the light and my light is the music. If you listen to the music from before it’s darker – Now I feel free. ” 

I sense there might be another reason that this music has shifted so dramatically from the kind of tunnel vision-functional demand of club music. As somebody that works behind the scenes in the club scene in Oslo, Ivaylo sees all sides of the DJ booth and what he’s seen in club music over the course of the last year has only dissuaded him from those dance floor inclinations. 

“When it comes to club music, I’m bored. I’m bored of the music because it’s the same, I’m bored with people that make something different just to be different, but end up sounding the same as all the other ‘different’ things.” Ivaylo misses the “art” of making music in a period where everything is dictated by industry and business. “It’s obviously not because of the music, it’s because of the mechanism behind everything” and when everything is so “artificial”  Ivaylo finds it necessary to adopt a more “organic” approach in the music he is making now. 

It’s something that has spilled over into his DJ sets too. “I’ve come to realise I’m not a good DJ…” he says pausing for me to make the obvious argument before he continues; “when I have to play a 2 hour set. You have to create your vibe, and that takes time.” There aren’t many opportunities to do this today especially amongst younger audiences that crave the immediate and perfunctory right from the start and lineups feature a host of DJs packed into a 4 hour lineup in Oslo. Ivaylo “worried about the younger generation,” particularly at a time when “everything is divided” as it is, but he has enough skin in the game and enough years in the DJ booth to bide his time and work through it.

Between the changes in the industry and the changes happening in his personal life, Ivaylo found a life-line in this new label. Where most in his situation, specifically those that work in the club music atmosphere, could have easily sunk deeper into the vices that inherently follow club culture, Ivaylo did the opposite. He’s stopped drinking and smoking after 30 years and spends most of his free time making his own yoghurt and jams while tending to the sprawling garden we look over from his dining room window. 

I’d like to think this is reflected in the new music he is bringing out and he thinks that’s because whatever he does in music and his label he needs to stay “loyal to my personality.” He thinks it’s just about being “honest with the music” and that has afforded him some aspect of freedom a year later.  If Ivaylo’s honesty in music is anything like the candid personality sitting behind the artist, it will certainly shine through Lab Cleaning Jams and the music he is making now. 

Everything for the Groove: A Q&A with Funk for Forest

Funk for Forest do everything for the groove. Born from the lineage of Funk that transcends their collective years at times they channel a music legacy directly to the dance floor today.  The fleeting lineup, which can grow to ten people, comes from a long line of Norwegian live acts who fuse Funk, Soul, Disco and more obscure genres into accessible dance floor cuts. From the upbeat Frank Znort to the futuristic fusion of Flammer Dance Band, Funk for Forest joins an impressive lineage of live dance bands in Oslo’s history.  

Cultivating a sound that skirts the fringes of black American music, but updated and honed to accommodate a dance floor where the DJ reigns supreme, Funk for Forest brings a new dimension to timeless- and future classics. Their references are eclectic and engaging as they create live edits from familiar pieces, channeled through their distinctive musical proclivities. 

Funk for Forest are unique today as they’ve approached their craft solely from the stage. At a time when  bands arrive fully formed with at least one record and a label deal, Funk for Forest have opted for the more traditional route as a live band first. Rumors are abound of some recorded material on its way, and Funk For Forest will undoubtedly soon hit their stride in the recorded format too, but for now they are a live band in every sense of the word. 

We caught up with the band via email to talk about this upcoming performance at LYD this Saturday, some influences and we got to know a little more about the emerging band. 

Hey guys. Can we start with a roll-call; Who’s in the band and what do they play?

The ensemble changes slightly from gig to gig, but for the upcoming show at jaeger the band consists of Elias Løstegaard on bass, Elias Tafjord on drums, Jesper Fosdahl on guitar, Viktor Ognøy on percussion, Thomas Antonio Debelian on percussion as well, William Foreman on keys, Eira Elise Øverås on trumpet, Mikkel Brekke on trombone and Jeanette Offerdal on saxophone. 

What brought you all together and what was the music that you initially all bonded over?

The band was started by Jesper and Elias with a wish to have an arena where we could play the music we loved the most, that being funk, afro-funk, disco, club music and all other iterations of the funk-genre. We just reached out to the best people around, and people we knew got a kick out of the same music as us. Turns out crowds also love groovy music, who would have known. 

The Funk element in your name is pretty self-explanatory, but how does the forest factor into it?

The name is a slightly corny pun playing on the environmental activist group Fuck for Forest who most memorably, in lack of a better term, fucked on stage at Quartfestivalen 2004. Initially the name was just for fun, but we also try to be a band with a focus on sustainability. Not flying to gigs, putting some of our payments from gigs in environmental funds, buying second-hand stage outfits and other things like that. A good example is that we are making some merch for our Halloween gig at Jaeger, the t-shirts are made here in Oslo and the profit from the merch-sale goes to Regnskodsfondet. 

Event flyer

It’s unusual lately to find a live band that is not already fully formed with records and a label behind them. Why have you opted for the alternative route?

Funk for Forest was always designed to be a live experience, so it made sense to just start playing and having fun with the project. Our hope is that crowds recognize how fun the show is, so we opted for a sort of word-of-mouth approach. It just felt the most natural to us, and it takes away the pressure so we can have full creative control. 

I hear a lot of familiar pieces, reworked, but you’re not exactly a cover-band either. How would you describe your live show for the uninitiated?

We take a lot of inspiration from DJs and the club culture, so that’s what we try to be; a live, 8-piece band that acts as a DJ playing you the grooviest edits of the music we love. Some of the tracks we play are truer to the originals, while others are more complete rearrangements. We always try to create the “Funk For Forest”-edit, it’s more fun for everyone that way. A big focus has been on making the set flow together, with seamless transitions between the tracks so that the party never stops. We also try to command less attention than your usual band would, so that the crowd can focus on each other and enjoy the grooves. We want to see you dance.  

What do you look for in the songs or the elements that you incorporate in your live show?

If we think people would dance to it, That’s always the main priority. We also look for material we can make our own, or we think would work well with the ensemble we’re rocking at the time. And it always has to be groovy.

You guys play a lot of music that’s older than most of you. What is your relationship with this music and how is it generally passed down to you all?

Everyone in the band has some level of music-education, so a lot of it has been introduced to us from fellow musicians and the environments we were taught in. We also love the music we play, and there has been a lot of digging through catalogs trying to find the perfect tracks. Our love for funk has been expanded a lot through working with Funk For Forest. 

Besides the obvious Funk influences like George Clinton, what are some of the less obvious touchstones for Funk for Forest?

As mentioned earlier, we take a lot of inspiration from house and disco. Todd Terje and Dimitri From Paris are huge inspiration to us in that area. We also love older funk ensembles like Average White Band and disco acts such as Roberta Kelly, as well as more modern funk-and-disco-harbingers like Orgeone, Cory Wong, Nu Gunea and so on. Also the Norwegian funk scene is super cool, we love artists such as Flammer Dance Band, Hubbabubbaklubb and Sex Judas. Many mentioned, many forgotten, but there you have some obvious touchstones!

With 8 people in the band, I assume many of not all of you are also engaged in other projects. What does Funk for Forest represent in terms of music that you don’t necessarily get to do anywhere else?

It’s not that often you get to play music written by somebody else, in your own creative package. It’s an arena where we can play fun music, the music we love the most, where we can really let go. We love to dance, and to be able to play music for people with the sole intention of making them move is something we don’t get to do often!

Who are some of the live bands that have inspired your own performances?

All of the bands and artists named above are brilliant, but a new discovery for us is the French artist/producer Dabuell, the live concert with his band from Paris that is up on Youtube is a gem and has been a source of inspiration and joy ever since we discovered it. Stuzzi from Sweden is a great live-act as well and I think an honorable mention is the Sunday-staple Frank Znort at Blå; always good vibes and great energy.

There’s talk of some original music coming. What can the listener expect that would be a bit different from the stuff you’re doing now?

We don’t know how much we want to give away, but yeah we are making some music and when the time comes we are looking forward to sharing it with everyone. It has to be groovy, that is the most important thing for us, and I know it is for our crowd as well. 

Will any of it be making an appearance during the show at Jaeger?

Probably not. We want to make sure it’s done right by the high Funk For Forest standards of excellence before we premier anything. There is still some time before the gig so we will see, it is going to be a great party anyway, and we can’t wait to dance with you all!

Lastly, please play us out with a song.

In the spirit of the funk and the disco, it has to be: Parribean Disco – Cotonete / Dimitri From Paris.

Be Inspired: A profile on Octave One

We dig through the legacy of one of Detroit’s finest, Octave One as they make their way to Jaeger’s basement for another round of their awe-inspiring live show.

In Detroit, “everything was around us” according to Octave One. The brothers Burden are an indelible addition to the early history of Techno and one of Detroit’s finest exports. Born into the environment that birthed everything from Motown to the Model T automobile, the Burden brothers tap into a vast and extensive history of music and machines that all feed their singular creative output as Octave One. While Lenny and Lawrence are the central figures as the performers of the group, most of the brothers have a hand in some production aspects and running their label 430 West.

Their success is a stark contrast to circumstances into which they were born at a time when Detroit was going through one of its many downturns. “When the car industry declined, it caused a lot of problems in the city,” Lenny and Lawrence told Bridges for Music. People “went from making a lot of money to none” and “had to leave to survive.” That was happening as they grew up and for those that didn’t have the resources to leave there weren’t many options, especially for kids coming of age. For most being born in that environment in the USA there were two options, the military or prison, and for a few lucky ones there was also, sports or music. For the Burden brothers it was the latter and things got noisy real quick… 

“Having all of us in the house playing music could be kinda chaotic at times,” they reminisced in a Musicradar article. Their mum was nothing but supportive, because if it was noisy, she could be content with the knowledge her children were safe. It was ”a form of discipline because she could count on knowing exactly where we were.” The brothers had had a rudimentary musical education from elementary school, and it was emboldened by an eclectic musical taste. “We have a great love for early Old school RnB, Rock, Industrial and even some HipHop,” they told 15 questions;  “… our influences are endless!” 

They weren’t alone in their music adventures during this period., because while they were developing those influences, a whole city seemed to plug into the same wavelength, and Detroit Techno started to emerge. The Burden brothers had already been consuming “tons of Chicago House,” by the time the proto sound of Techno arrived with the likes of Model 500 and Transmat records and the transition was an effortless one. 

Techno was still in its infancy with the first wave of artists to emerge, but the Burden brothers would be there on the cusp of it too, even if it was still early days. “When we started in 1989, our exposure to Detroit techno primarily came from the radio and clubs, but you could have easily escaped it because there wasn’t a lot of it.” From that exposure, they bought “a couple of drum machines and synthesisers” and started making their own music. “It seemed amazing to us that we could make a whole song with just a few pieces of equipment.”

At the centre of their sonic explorations was the Roland TR909 drum machine. “Once we got the 909 I was hooked – that machine’s like a drug” Lawrence told Musicradar. “With the 909 we always say that if we sell that then it’s over.” The drum machine became the centrepiece from which they started to construct their own music, influenced by what they were hearing around them in Detroit. They were embedded in the scene early on, working the lights at the music institute (Derrick May’s joint) amongst other things, but they were not gonna get a free hand out either. Derrick May wouldn’t even give them a DJ set at the place they worked and the cassette tapes they sent for peer review from the labels around them “got rejected quite a few times.” They continued to work at it and the exposure to the new sounds of Techno emanating from places like the music institute undoubtedly only fortified their efforts. 

After a few more cassettes their work finally paid off with a release in 1989 on a forthcoming Transmat compilation and the follow up to the genre-establishing Techno! (The New Dance Sound Of Detroit) compilation, simply called Techno 2 – the next generation. At the time they were still unnamed. “We were put on the spot by Mr. Derrick May when we were asked what was the name of our band,” they recalled in Electronic Beats. “He left the room and we did a very, very quick ‘huddle’ to come up with a name on the fly that we felt best described us, and the name Octave One was born. And it meant and means all of us (Lawrence, Lenny, and Lynell) working in one accord almost as if sharing the same octave.” The track, “I believe” inaugurated Octave One as a fixture in the second wave of Techno coming out of Detroit alongside the likes of Carl Craig and Kevin Saunderson.

Not merely content with that release, the Burden brothers launched their own label right out of the gate, establishing 430 West almost directly after their debut. It was almost unheard of back in the early nineties for an unknown electronic music act to start an independent label. “Apart from Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 and Carl Craig’s Planet E, not that many people had started their own label back then. We did it out of necessity because Derrick didn’t put out a lot of music on Transmat and we were ready for our next release.” 

430 West came “a time when even a bad record would sell a couple of thousand” and what started as one record soon took on a life of its own. In a couple of releases they established not only a sound for Octave One, but also for their label. Taking those rudimentary Techno archetypes of the generation before them and refining it, they had hit a nerve both in Detroit and Europe. There was, and remains a subtlety there that feigned the brutalist functionalism of the sole drum machine for a richer texture, even going so far as to set up the subsidiary label in the form of Direct Beat for their more functional- exploits and artists like AUX 88.   

Throughout the mid and late nineties they toiled away at both the label and the Octave One project, releasing records that have been coveted by collectors and enthusiasts since they were underground rarities at their time, most of which have only been appreciated with the advantage of hindsight.

Octave One became a touchstone for anybody interested in that early period of Detroit Techno, but this doesn’t mean that struggle has come without success for them. In 2000 they broke new ground with a crossover hit in the form of Black Water. The track sold over a million copies, thanks in part to the soulful vocals of Ann Saunderson, breathing live into the bubbling synthesisers and accentuating the emotive content of the strings.  

Black Water came at a significant time. Not only would it be one of the last examples of physical records selling into those high numbers, but it came at a time when the height of popularity for electronic dance music. As more people flocked to the music, the clubs,  the radio and even MTV, exploited this popularity with big business getting behind the genre for the pay day. As the big-room started selling out, most of the protagonists moved their music and act back toward the underground in this period, while some even abandoned these genres altogether for the likes of Punk and Disco, waiting out the tawdry commercial aspects that took hold.

Octave One took to the former, adopting an “adapt or die” approach during this period. “75% of our monetary gains came from sales, but a few years later it came from touring,” with Octave One becoming a fully formed live group. “I was supposed to play live by myself,” Lenny told Musicradar about the origins of the live set, “ and Lawrence would DJ his set right before I was supposed to hit the stage. I had his mixing console and all of his gear in front of me and was trying to do everything myself when Lawrence jumped on stage.”

Octave One, the live show, was born and soon it would also be immortalised in Techno lore thanks to their inclusion in Jeff Mills’ iconic exhibitionist mix and video series. From that Octave One set on a new trajectory as one of the most sought after live groups in electronic dance music and club culture. Their hardware-heavy set has decimated some of the best club sound systems in the world.

It all “happened organically” and as “the record label started to suffer” in the wake of the internet and everything else, they too started to “slow down being record label guys and concentrate on being performers.” As performers they’ve excelled in their field and there are few live Techno acts that can match the ferocity and experience of Octave One. “The fun part was playing the music” and while their recording efforts took a back-seat to their live performances, they still maintained a regular release schedule. In the last few years they’ve even resurrected and paid homage to a couple of their old aliases in the form Random Noise Generation and Never On Sunday respectively. 

Never On Sunday harks back to the early nineties, but as an album you can’t help being reminded of Black Water, with vocals from Karina Mia all over this thing and emphatic melodies and loud-like textures coming together in accessible, radio-friendly tracks. 

Softening the more functional edges of their live show, the record favours a more varied sound, but retains that elusive soul that remains the core appeal of Detroit Techno to this day.  “Thousands of people still want to experience Detroit techno that was born from the struggle of our lives,” the artists explained in that piece for Electronic Beats, and today more than ever, “from that, inspiration can be born.” Be inspired.

Premiere: Phill Prince – Lost The Key (Det Gode Selskab records)

We get a sneak preview of the up and coming V/A compilation series from Det Gode Selskab while we talk to DGS and Phill prince about the origins of the track and more.

Groovy, melodic, minimal and uplifting springs to mind when you put Phill Prince’s Lost the Key on for the first time. It’s the same words I would and have used to describe Det Gode Selskab Records, the label facilitating this release from the Italian courtesy of four part V/A compilation series coming out this fall.

Phill Prince is a leading light in the Italian underground as the mastermind behind Milan’s PLGRN party set. He is a DJ, producer and promoter and shares many of those core values of the Det Gode Selskab.  With a few invitations back and forth, including a visit to Jaeger’s basement this Saturday, they have found kindred spirits in each other.

Lost the Key cements the friendship as bongos rally around a bouncing bass arrangement and breezy keys; an ode to the end of summer and happy memories from nightlifes mishaps. There’s a serendipity in the title that I’d leave the artist and the label to explain, which re-enforces that sonic bridge between Phill Prince’s music and Det Gode Selskab’s sonic identity.

Lost the Key is a party-starter, its infectious rhythms and stark sonics only has designs intended for the dance floor. We talk to Phill Prince and then Det Gode Selskab about this new track, the upcoming compilation series and the next DGS at Jaeger while you get the exclusive preview.

Interview with Phill Prince

Hey Phill. First off, give us a little background info on you and PLGRN?

My musical journey started at a very young age when I fell in love with the drums. As a kid, I couldn’t resist the allure of electronic music, and that fascination grew over the years.

I began performing in local clubs when I was just 15. I established myself as a DJ, and my sets covered a range of genres, from house to techno. I guess my family’s deep-rooted passion for the disco tunes of the 80s and 90s played a significant role in shaping my musical taste.

My journey into music production began during my time spent in clubs near Venice. I enrolled in specialized training courses for music producers across Italy. There, I started crafting my groove and percussive rhythms using analog machines and MIDI modulation.

With the release of several productions on different labels I’ve been fortunate enough to have my productions supported by several international artists like Jamie Jones, Marco Carola, Jaden Thompson, Rich NxT, East and Dubs, Rossi, and many others. I’ve also had the privilege of performing at renowned venues like  E1 London, After Caposile ,Goya Madrid, Destino Ibiza,Liquid Room Edinburgh, Storgata26 Oslo, Studio69 Berlin, Taboo Paris, Altavoz Venice, The Bus Barcellona, Musica Riccione, Super Club Milano, Apollo Club, to name a few…

Established in February with my partners Jacopo and Pietro, Pellegrino has emerged as a vibrant hub within the Milanese nightlife scene, dedicated to cultivating the unique musical expressions of its DJs, distinguishing them from the typical genres often presented at various events. Milan’s Apollo and Super Club played a key role in bringing this concept to life, dedicating a specific space within the nightlife scene to this format. This support led Pellegrino to obtain a monthly residency at the club, where he introduced a musical direction focused on Minimal, Techhouse and Microhouse genres in the heart of the city.

With Pellegrino, our goal has been to turn the clubbing scene into a musical sanctuary for Milan’s nightlife lovers, a destination where they can relax and enjoy themselves after a busy week, a chance to hear new artist profiles. It became the music destination the city craved. We brought a fresh, original and distinctive idea with a shared musical purpose that resonated with our participants. Our continued support and enthusiasm further fuelled our determination to continue with the project, even after the challenges posed by the closures and prolonged suspension of nightlife due to covid.

How did you find the guys at DGS and what drew to their sound and vibes originally?

Expanding our boundaries has always been a goal of ours and to do this we need to build a community around formats that have similar interests and a musical identity that matches ours.

We started looking for profiles that were interested in this kind of project and shared these ideals, and fortunately we managed to get in touch with the guys from DGS. Their profile was already known to us for several releases on their Power House label that our DJs often support in their selections. 

This aspect, together with the magnificent human side of the creators, led to this magnificent connection and constant showcases between Italy and Norway.

Tell us about how you made Lost the Key?


The composition of ‘Lost the Key’ can be considered as a fusion of both analog and digital elements. This project originated within the studio environment, where we embarked on the exploration of various drum patterns characterized by their distinct freshness and a pronounced techy influence. These explorations were complemented by the incorporation of closed and open-hat sequences, firmly rooted in a classic house style.

The melodic dimension of the piece was meticulously crafted through the modulation of a synthesizer sample sourced directly from the Yamaha Rm1x. This process imbued the composition with an ethereal quality, lending it a constant and deep tonal foundation.

Further enriching the sonic landscape, the central sound was developed using a Roland TB-3, creating a lead acid element that steadily evolves until the track’s reset. This dynamic transformation maintains a consistent energy throughout the composition, evoking associations with a ‘dance floor’ siren, thus encompassing a spectrum of moods that transition seamlessly from deep house to more electro-inspired moments.

The overall structure is characterized by a series of fluid and invigorating grooves, imbuing the composition with a sense of freshness that harmonizes seamlessly within the final mix.


What’s the story behind the title of that track?

Often, the titles I assign to my records are intricately linked to genuine, tangible experiences. In this particular instance, I found myself within the confines of my studio, engrossed in the process of crafting a central melody revolving around a foundation of meticulously constructed kicks and percussion.

As time passed, it became evident that the hour was growing late, and the moment had arrived for me to conclude my work and head home. However, a sense of unease began to grip me as I realized that my keys were nowhere to be found. The ensuing search for these elusive keys proved to be a nerve-wracking ordeal, as I grappled with the mounting doubt and frustration that came with each passing moment.

In a moment of uncertainty, I gravitate back towards my analog machines. In the process of experimentation, a profound connection emerged between the ‘siren’ I had meticulously crafted, the intricate interplay of the drums, and the ethereal pad. It was within this creative juncture that the composition began to take shape and evolve.


What is it about your sounds as an artist that you feel worked well with the sound of the label?

My sound is currently honing in on a distinctive style that spans from minimal to powerful house, affording me the versatility to explore various creative avenues. In this instance, I identified a harmonious connection between my own musical approach and Dgs’ direction. This record, in my perspective, reflects several facets of the house genre that align with the neo-90s vibe of the Norwegian label. Nevertheless, it retains a notably minimal groove that harmonizes with my broader body of work.

How does the track reflect your sound as a DJ?

I aim to craft something vibrant, drawing inspiration from the 90s house sound while maintaining the tempo of today’s minimal-deep tech trend. It’s a dynamic interplay between pad and lead elements, engaging the audience and keeping them on the dance floor. That’s what I strive to create and simulate for the audience – an electrifying energy

Give us a glimpse into your record bag for this upcoming event at Jaeger. 

I have a selection of diverse records at my disposal, but my exploration is an ongoing evolution. My musical focus leans towards a raw house sound, occasionally delving into Romanian minimal influences, while consistently incorporating elements of electro and tribal rhythms.

From labels like Rawax to Kann Records, and including Terry Francis’s latest EP on Hallucienda, along with exclusive previews of my forthcoming releases in the coming months, some of which are recent unreleased creations – all of these elements contribute to the musical journey I aim to craft.

Interview with Det Gode Selskab 

Hey DGS. How did you first hear of Phill Prince and PLGRN?

Det Gode Selskab and PLGRN made their first acquaintance in April, when they invited Tod Louie to play at Super Club in Milano. High five to keepitgoing. for connecting us.

We decided to keep collaborating, and we invited the crew to Oslo at the end of May at Prindsens Hage where we did an outdoor garden party in the middle of the city.

Where does DGS and PLGRN crossover in terms of sound for you?

In many ways the people behind PLGRN and the DGS crew share similar passion and values for the underground club scene. They put their whole heart and love into what they do, and it’s very contagious and loving.

They have high standards, confidence and big hearts which, for us is very important in this scene to keep it healthy and progressive. So all of this made it all very natural to continue developing our Milano – Oslo partnership.

We also see ourselves steering more into the direction of collaborating with labels and concepts rather than booking highliners for Det Gode Selskab nights. That kind of collaboration is what feels right for us.

What attracted you to Phill Prince’s sound as an artist and why did you want him for this compilation?

His sense of grooves and the way he works his music as a DJ and producer. He gives a lot behind the DJ booth and his transitions and build ups are very charismatic and captivating. He is a super DJ and when were introduced to his music we saw a lot of quality that  has a natural place with our label.

event flyer

Tell us what you first felt when you heard Lost the Key.

Upon first listening to “Lost the Key” by Phill Prince, I was instantly transported back to ADE 2022, a memory etched with the comical misadventure of Karl Fraunhofer misplacing our apartment key, which eventually found its way into the Amsterdam waters on a Monday morning at the docks. A chaotic moment, though it ultimately concluded on a positive note. Despite the unexpected acrobatics involving scaffolding around our residence, the tale culminated with the locksmith’s timely arrival to restore access.

It’s minimal, groovy and there’s that functionalism there that we all associate with DGS. How does it differ and expand otherwise from the classic DGS sound for you?

It gives some of the same qualities, percussions and sound that Luciano’s Cadenza label has offered us as DJ’s throughout the years. That “terrace” Ibiza-sounds from 2012-2018. It’s a sound that historically has been part of many of our events throughout the year. It works very well!

What does this reflect the rest of the compilation?

Our compilation invites the sound of our collective of artists and new and old friends and acquaintances that we meet as a label, DJs and event series. It encompasses the sound of our label and our extended network and is usually not very genre specific but obviously revolved around the groovier sides of dancefloor music; consisting of house, italo house, tech-house, minimal, techno, breaks and drum & bass.

Tell us a bit about what you expect from the upcoming night with Phill.

He will take the lead for the last two hours of the night, and what to be expected is some serious groove and passion behind the booth. He has a unique style and ability to create forceful transitions that invite a full and playful dance floor.

Memories of summer with Of Norway

Of Norway talk about their new album, their working process, some secret aliases and a very special live show that will follow their official release party at Jaeger.

It’s hard to define the appeal of Norwegian electronic music. It’s a melodic contingent; a love of vintage synthesisers and drum-machines; an eclectic musical history; and a brooding melancholy that’s as sweet as it is foreboding. At the best of times it’s only a couple of those things that distinguish Norway’ s artists, but for one group it’s all of those things and that’s why Of Norway live up to their name. 

Their latest album stands testament to that. Smeigedag is no exercise in restraint either as Chris Lynch and and Vegard “lil” Wolf Dyvik tap into their shared history together to construct a forlorn ode to summer. Melodies dissociate in that familiar happy melancholy that doesn’t strain the patience, while progressive rhythms tap into some ancient ritualistic pulse. The racks go from the euphoric House exaltations of “Love” to the moody ambient embrace of “Second coming,” with melody and texture remaining at the forefront of their work. 

It’s instantly familiar, not merely for its Norwegian connotations, but as a consistent thread between this latest and Of Norway’s previous records like “Accretion” and “The Loneliest Man in space.” The latter had been our last contact with the group before the pandemic (even though we learn that they’ve released another record since), and from that album’s electro-leaning affiliations to this latest record, the core of the group’s sonic signature has remained unchanged even as they drift into different musical regions.

After four albums and a host of EPs, Of Norway Chris and Vegrad haven’t evolved the sound as much as they’ve cemented it. They’ve enjoyed a healthy and productive relationship with Connaisseur records, releasing all their albums on that Offenbach-based outlet while releasing EPs and singles for the likes of Darkroom Dubs, Bedrock and Do not sit on the furniture. Oddly for a group called Of Norway, their music has been more successful outside of Norway even though Vegard and Chris have been fixtures in Oslo’s scene through institutions like iconoclastic and Kill your Ego. 

As DJs Chris and Vegard continue to play around town and abroad on occasion, and as artists we’ve come to expect a regular release from Of Norway. Their history with electronic music in the scene goes back to the early 2000’s and there’s more to Of Norway than meets the eye, including a couple of secret aliases. This amongst other things piques our interest around Of Norway, and ahead of the official release of the album, we reach out to the group with some questions.

As the duo prepares for the official release party at Jaeger, we call Vegard and Chris to find they are currently working on a very special live show, and Chris’ phone is buzzing with guestlist requests… 

 

Where are you at the moment?

Chris Lynch: We’re in the studio, working on the live set. We’ve just got booked to play Berghain so we’re a bit nervous. 

O wow. That’s big news. Is this due to Smeigedag and is the live show going to be largely based around the new album?

Chris:  Yes, it is. Andy Baumecker (Berghain resident and booker) really liked the promo that he got and he got in touch with us asking: “do you want to play the album plus other recent things that we made.” 

Vegard “lil” Wolf Dyvik: There might be some older things, but it’s mostly the newer stuff.

Chris: It’s a slightly different sound to our earlier albums. It’s a little more dance floor…

Vegard: Is it?

Chris: Yes it is, if you compare it to the Accretion album. It’s a little more club friendly. 

When you have something like Berghain coming up, do you take that context into consideration when preparing your live set or do you present the songs pretty much as they are from the album?

Vegard: I think we’re pretty true to our album. We don’t change our sound for clubs anywhere. 

Chris: It’s more about the sequencing or the tracks we choose to play. If we play an open air space, you can play the more trancy stuff, or if we play a basement it’s more bass-heavy. If we have 20 tracks in a live set, we’ll only play 6 or 8 of them. 

Vegard: The difference is we are preparing a lot of tracks and we have a system so we can just jump to any track we want. Which means, like a DJ, we don’t have to play our tracks in sequence. We won’t change the way the tracks sound.


And you are able to react to the audience as well, since you have twenty odd songs at your disposal?

Chris: Yes, and you can take the bassline of one track and put it into another song. Like if you were a DJ and you had like a hundred stems that you could just put in wherever. We’re not getting booked to play large stages, we’re still in the small clubs, so it makes sense to play something that fits in there. 

Vegard: Also when we used to take a guitarist/ bass player with us, it was more like a concert and people would just stand and look at us. We want people to have a fun experience dancing, presenting our own music. 

Chris: If there’s too much shit going on people are just standing, and you get a lot of guys scratching their beards. 

Ok, we should probably talk about the reason for this interview; Smeigedag. It’s the first record in a couple of years for you and it seems like there are some disparities with this record and the Loneliest man in Space, which to me was more electro-leaning while this one is more straight…

Chris: Yes it’s more House-y. We don’t really plan stuff, it just happens. 

Vegard: It’s kind of a corona-thing. A lot of the sketches were made during corona.

Chris: We just missed going out. We actually made another album between those two, which was made during covid. It was called the Soft Apocalypse, and it was more dark and ambient. It was a darker record and this one is a lighter record.

Vegard: We made most of it during summer. 

Chris: I remember the label said; “ah you really missed summer,” didn’t you? It really came around quickly, around July.

Of this year? That’s a quick turnover. 

Chris: Yes, I think it started out in May and we were done by the end of June. 

Vegard: We have a very close relationship with Connaisseur. We sent a couple of tracks to Alex (Fitsch) and said; “maybe this could work as an EP.” And he was like; “actually maybe this could work as an album.”

Chris: So we thought; “guess we have to make some more music.”

Vegard: Whenever we make an album, with the exception of Accretion, which took ages, it’s two or three weeks and then we have most of it down. 

Chris: That first album took absolute ages. We didn’t know what we were doing, it was years ago. We were maybe overthinking it. 

Vegard: And now we have hundreds of sketches. Whenever we start a track, we just go through the library.

What is your working process like?

Chris: We get together twice a week religiously. We meet up at 18:00 every Tuesday and Wednesday and work till 21:00-ish. It’s almost like going to soccer practice, but it’s a lot more fun. 

That’s disciplined. At what point do you realise a track is done and when do you recognise that they’ll work together on an album like Smeigedag?

Vegard: Well, we only release albums via Connaisseur. The label helps out with what goes on the album, to be honest. 

Chris: Basically, we have a private folder on soundcloud and stuff everything in there. We do the first selection and then we send it to the label. Connaisseur is more like an old-school label in the way they are involved in everything from the sequence of the tracks to the length of them. New labels don’t invest so much time in it. It suits us well. 

How many songs did you deliver for the label on this occasion?

Chris: This time we actually didn’t deliver enough. We actually had to make another one. 

Vegard: There were a couple of tracks they didn’t want. 

Chris: It started off as an EP with three or four tracks, and they asked to make it an album, and now it’s a mini-album. I still call it an album but the label calls it a mini-album. 

Did you guys have an idea in terms of sound when you were still working on it as an EP, or was it just that it coalesced around a sound because you happened to be working on all the tracks in the same kind of timeframe?

Chris: I think it’s mostly the timeframe. 

Vegard: When we planned it as an EP, we took three of the finished songs, because we thought they might fit together. It was more like we had some tracks that fit together and not that we went for a sound. 

Chris: It’s hard to go for a sound. 

Vegard: We don’t know what we want to do. 

Chris: Sometimes these tracks are in their sixth or seventh version and the starting point is something completely different. 

What ties it all together for you on this album? 

Chris: Euphoric warmth, with a classic Norwegian underlying melancholy which has a dark depressing edge in there.

Vegard: Some of the sketches in there were from when I lost my cat. 

Chris: We have another EP coming out on Bedrock (John Digweed’s label) and they are basically homages to Vegard’s cat. 

Were you influenced by any tangible thing at the time, except the fact that Vegard’s cat died?

Vegard: When I started the sketches I wanted everything to be melancholic and warm. For Christmas one year, I got digitised video tapes from when I was little. 

Chris: Me as well.

Vegard: So on the cover of the album, the two little kids, that’s me and Chris. 

Chris: All the canvas videos on Spotify, all that stuff is from our own home movies from the late 70’s early 80’s. 

Vegard: That kind of inspired me. 

Chris: The fuzziness and graininess of the video and the way the sun bleeds into the photograph.

Vegard: You know, when life was good. (laughs)

Chris: You know The Doors track, Summer is almost gone. Not specifically the track, but the feeling. 

What’s interesting is that when I first listened to the record I immediately had this sense of haziness that you talk about, like an old polaroid captured in sound. But I didn’t have the words to describe it until you just said it now. 

Chris: Yes, we actually managed to find it now while talking to you. It all hangs together, from the video to the press photos and the cover and the sound, it’s quite cohesive. We’ve managed to get hold of some thirty summer postcards from the 70’s and they are going to be in the limited edition vinyl album. 

Vegard:  A summer greeting from us. 

Have you guys known each other for that long?

Chris: We’ve only known  each other since the early 2000’s and we started making music together since 2006. I did a radio show at Radio Tellus back in the days, and Vegard was there playing some times. We were both DJs and knew each other through that. Oslo was quite small and the DJ scene was quite small back then. 

And then you played together at iconoclastic?

Chris: Yes I started playing with Deadswan and then Vegard joined us later, We were a trio for some years. So, we’ve been doing different projects together, but the Of Norway project has almost always been House-based music. 

Vegard: It’s always been quite emotional. 

I was listening to one of our early records, Karpathian Thirst in preparation for this interview, and that Of Norway mood is there from the start. Then again, do you feel your music has evolved?

Chris: Definitely. I can’t really say how, it  just has.

Vegard: I think, we’ve been doing this so long now, and we’ve been through so many different things, that we have so many reference points that we can put this together. 

Chris: Something that’s nice about getting older, is that you can step back and see the big picture. When you’re young and get into something like minimal Techno, then everything is about that and you can’t judge anything else, because you think everything else is shit. Like we like to say in Norway, you’ve got to get out of the duck pond. You get more oversight.

I remember iconoclastic happening around the same time you started Of Norway. It was at the end of the electroclash era, so there was still this melting pot of various genres and styles…

Chris: It was the end of electroclash and the beginning of the blog-house scene. It was very eclectic, so you took stuff from all over the musical map and popped it in there. 

Vegard: It was very energetic and rough.

Chris: And Punky in a way. 

Exactly and when I first heard of Norway it didn’t sound like the offspring of any of that, but something completely different again. 

Chris: That was just one of many things. At that time we both lived as DJs. I played indie music, and I played Drum n Bass at Kill your Ego and Sykemekanico. I also played old-school Hip Hop.

Vegard: I was more into US-House and Garage. 

Chris: I realise it’s quite confusing, because we’ve always had the same DJ names and you never know what you’re going to get. Musically we’ve been all over the place. I think reference-wise, we can be influenced by absolutely everything; even a sound in a Nick Cave record.

Do all these eclectic influences feed into this one project?

Vegard: We’ve grown a bit wiser now, so we’ve chosen some monikers. 

Chris: We do produce music under different names, so we have three names that we release music under. 

What are the other two? 

Chris: They’re both secrets. One of them has released a lot of music. Now it’s easier, if something sounds like Of Norway, we’ll just continue as Of Norway. We enjoy being secretive, because we’re men in our mid forties, and if people knew that they probably wouldn’t sign us. 

Tell me about your relationship with the label Connaisseur and how that started.

Chris: Vegard had the first contact with Connaisseur.

Vegard: It was a very long time ago. I don’t remember how we got in touch, maybe Myspace. I know why they signed us. It was because we were called Of Norway, and we looked like a black metal band. 

Chris: Our press photos were in black and white and high-contrast, and we had this hand drawn necro logo. It was completely different from what you hear musically and that caught their interest. 

Vegard: The tracks had titles  like Karpatian Thirst.

Chris: Yeah, they were all metal names. After that, we were included on the compilation, and we thought that’s it. Then they invited us to play a place called Bar 25 in Berlin, which was this hedonistic, legendary club in Berlin. After that the ball started rolling with Connaisseur and they signed more and more stuff. 

Vegard: They are also friends now. We even made a track for his (Alex) daughter. 

Chris: Song for Eva is dedicated to his daughter. All proceedings go to her educational fund.

I assume they were based in Offenbach back then. How did you hear about Connaisseur recording in the first place?

Vegard: I had some records from them.

Chris: They had a massive hit, years ago with Patrick Chardronnet called “Eve by Day.” Soundwise, we’ve never sounded like anything else on the label. 

Vegard: We’ve never sounded like anything on any of the labels we’re signed with.

Chris:  Everytime we get signed to a label, we think; “why the hell did you sign us?” (both laugh) We don’t fit in anywhere. 

Vegard: So therefore we fit in everywhere. 

That’s a testament to your music. It can reach a large audience. Do you feel that your music translates better outside Norway than in Norway?

Chris: There’s no reason for it, but I definitely think so. It’s definitely Germany and the US that are the biggest territories for us. We’ve had a few releases on an American label called Do not sit on the furniture.

Vegard: I think it’s because we’re not so actively part of the Norwegian scene as DJs anymore. 

Chris: It’s not been on purpose, it’s just happened. 

After this record and the gig in berghain, what else is on the horizon for Of Norway?

Chris: We’re releasing a record for Darkroom dubs. We’ve got some stuff on Bedrock. We have something on a label called Sum over histories (Frankey and Sandrino). Otherwise on the DJing and live side, we were unfortunate after corona, and lost our agent. We’re free agents so we’re not getting many gigs at the moment. 

Hopefully having Berghain on the CV will help, hopefully…

 

Words: Mischa Mathys

Oslo World lineup and tickets announced

Jaeger is back on the Oslo World programme for 2023 with an extensive lineup across four days as we help the Oslo institution celebrate 30 years.

30 years is a long time and we’re proud to be a part of that tradition for as long as we care to remember. The world descends on Oslo for a music festival celebrating the sonic bedrock from the four corners of the world every year and 2023 will be no different. From right here in Norway, to India, to Lebanon, to Ukraine, and via Berlin we cover the furthest reaches of global music for one week in the year as Oslo World arrives at Jaeger. From the esoteric to the exotic, in the universal language of electronic music, Jaeger celebrates the extensive sounds of the world over two dance floors with appearances from Nefertiti, Dara Woo, Gela, Nur Jabber, Soju Princess, Olga Korol, Sous Vide, Suchi, Det Gode Selskab and a host of Jaeger residents and friends. We kick off on the 1st of November.

Programme schedule:

01.11 Oslo World: Nefertiti + Dara Woo + Gela
02.11 – Helt Texas: Nur Jaber + Soju Princess
03.11 – Frædag x Sous Vide: Olga Korol +  Per Hammar + Thomas Skjaerstad
04.11 – Nightflight x Det Gode Selskab: Suchi  

Tickets are now available at ticketco with more tickets available on the door on the night. Watch this space for further information coming soon.

Obsessing with with Sommerfeldt

Marius Sommerfeldt is back. The other half of De Fantastike To is releasing records again under the eponymous Sommerfeldt with a couple of notable releases in the last year. While he’s remained a fixture in Oslo’s DJ booths throughout, most notably as a member of the UK-leaning Løkka FM collective, his output from the studio has been limited until 2022 “Colours” on Paper Recordings and reinforced by the most recent “Tell me What to do” via Vinny Villbass’ label, Badabing. 

“Tell me What to do” sees him working with Løkka FM colleague, Toshybot (legs 11) in a signature Norwegian House aesthetic bridging worlds between US House, UK Garage and Space Disco. Toshybot’s baritone rides ebullient synthesisers, bubbling in the lower regions crisscrossing the trellis-like percussive section. 

Last year’s “Colours “ saw him rely on the same formula with vocals supplied by Sigmund Floyd on this occasion. Textures evoked a dreamy soundscape through a dazzling haze of synthesisers that seemed to arrive on a milky cloud. 

There are obvious similarities between his and Mikkel Haraldstad’s 2010 breakout track “Neste Stopp Morra Di” in as much as it maintains that infectious “Norwegian House” formula, but it’s updated for a modern dance floor. Besides a change of name and a new palette of sounds, Sommerfeldt carries the same spirit in his music and finds the artist refining his sound in collaborating with other artists yet again. 

What is it about these collaborations that bring out the best in Sommerfeldt and what does this new era in music define for the Norwegian artist? We sent over some questions to Marius via email to find out more as he prepares for his upcoming visit to Jaeger for Olle Abstract’s LYD

Is it fair to say that you were on a musical hiatus as an artist for a while, and what were some of the determining factors for that break?

That is fair to say. And truth to be told, the break was all about finding my own sound as an artist. I’ve been working with people in groups most of my career, so I spent some time searching for inspiration and developing my own sound.

What is the current status of De Fantastike To?

It’s currently on hold, but we might go back in the studio again. We’ve been talking about it, but I guess that life just happened for both of us.

And what eventually brought you back to making new music as a solo artist?

The never-ending fascination of making music. I have so much music in my head that needs to come out! It’s kind of an obsession, really. Fine-tuning a kickdrum or adding some reverb on a synthline is meditative.

How do you feel your solo stuff differs from DFT’s work?

There is a slightly more jazzy aspect in DFT’s productions. A good combination of Rave-Enka and Sommerfeldt in there, I would say.

In between you were still DJing and it seemed most of your efforts were concerned with the Løkka FM project. How did you arrive in that collective and what was it about the UK sound specifically resonated with you?

We were just four people having a strong relationship towards british club-music. We met over a couple of beers and started talking about the lack of a proper UKG night in Oslo. Needles to say, we did something about it! I mean, UK did the American house-sound, but on steroids…

What’s not to like?

How has it informed your work beyond the DJ booth and in the studio?

I’m producing house, but with a pretty huge amount of swing in basically everything. I even did a upcoming remix for Center Of The Universe and Nikki Oniyome, which is pretty similar to garage 

One of the people that was involved there with you, Toshybot, also makes an appearance on your latest Badabing record. And this is not the first time you’ve both worked in the studio together. What planted the seed for this creative collaboration, and besides adding vocals to your tracks, how has he influenced your work?

We have been friends for a long time, and music-wise he introduced me to stuff I haven’t heard before. It’s just a joy to work with him, and our studio-sessions are so much fun!

On your 2022 record Colours, for Paper Recordings you also featured a couple of vocalists in the form of Sigmund Floyd and Nora. What is it about the vocal craft that draws you to singers in your music?

I love working with vocals! It’s even more complicated in terms of leaving room and space for a vocalist in a track. I mean, vocals can be at times horrible in a club-track, but when done correctly it just makes sense, right?

What do you look for in a vocalist?

Some edge, a roughness, soul, I mean the voice goes deeper than just singing the right notes! I usually leave some happy accidents in there from the sessions. Sigmund did a first take on our latest release, and he did miss slightly in a part towards the end, we were just.

Nah.. fuck it!

At what point does the vocalist enter into your creative process and how much input do you have in the writing process including the lyrics?

It differs, I usually do the sketch of an instrumental and send the rough demo. Then we do maybe a rec session or two while I finish the production, constantly sending the vocalist new versions for approval.

You worked with Sigmund Floyd (Palace of Pleasure) who is also in Legs 11 with Toshybot.  What is your relationship with that crowd and are there any plans to work more with the people behind those two groups?

Yeah. They are my friends. I love those guys! We used to share studio as well…

I’ve never played in a band before, so we might form Legs 12? A collab would be really cool!

They are very much in that indie electronic pop world, while your work very much lives in the House music circles. Where is the crossover between these two worlds for you?

I like independent music! Both genres usually work with synths, drum-machines combined with organic instruments. It feels playful and live.

What first got you interested in House music and how has it developed to this point?

My brother’s cd-collection and Olle Abstract on P3 as an early teenager. I mean House-music? It was out of this world right? Made by machines, computers and stuff, it was like a one-man band. Needles to say, I absolutely loved it!

Your sound on a record like Tell me What to at times flirts with that Norwegian nu-disco aesthetic. It’s very ethereal at times, with dubby rhythms and charming arpeggios floating through the record. What kind of influence has that Oslo scene played in your own development as an artist if any?

I guess I try to produce house, but I don’t like that way too formulaic stuff, so I just throw in a lot of my influences to make it interesting for myself and hopefully, the listener. I guess I’m a product of the DJ / Oslo scene in that way. We usually have to include different genres, tempos and styles,otherwise me, and the crowd get bored.

What do you consider the effects of people like Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas and Todd Terje on the artists that came after them, artists like yourself?

They paved the way for a quirky more leftfield Norwegian approach to club-music. DIY stuff, I mean it’s a hard country to break trough, producing underground electronica. They just did it by themselves. That still inspires me!

What have you taken from that scene that came before you into the music that you are making today, and how have you made it your own in your opinion?

It has always been a huge inspiration as the early generation paved the way for disco, house and techno in a country which is ultimately pretty remote. Prins Thomas was even the first person who signed us as the now defunct  Sommerstad (together with Mikkel Rev) That helped me alot in terms of my career and also the way I work with and hear music.

After a few singles/EPs over the last two years, what’s next for Marius Sommerfeldt and what is the ultimate goal for you when it comes to making music?

First of all, this is what I want to do. I had other jobs in my life, but music is my passion. I keep getting better, and I’m slowly taking my studio-setup to the live-stage. I’m testing the setup abroad in Lisboa this September.

I want to record an album, hopefully at my cabin this autumn with Sigmund Floyd.

I’m also releasing a new EP, a remix and some more tracks as Sommerbad (me and Boblebad) and also on Full Pupp as Cocktail Sport (with From Beyond and Boblebad) So to summarize it: make tracks, DJ, travel,  play live and generally have a good time doing it!





The Need for Music with Simon Field

We sat down with Simon Field during Øya week to talk about his debut LP, Need No Music and his journey to this moment. He celebrates the album release at Jaeger this Friday.

It’s taken Simon Field 10 years to produce his debut album. At 53 years of age, it might be assumed he left it pretty late, but stretching  behind this watershed moment, is a vast experience that covers a very large spectrum of  the music business. 

A song-writer, composer, producer and lyricist, Simon’s accolades span the length and breadth of the music industry and yet you’d be hard pressed to find his name anywhere. An artist working in the shadows, he’s penned and produced music for the majority of his life, and while you probably haven’t heard of him, it’s likely that you have heard his music before. He’s created music for film, written pop-songs, played at esteemed venues like Ministry of Sound, and worked with some of the best in our scene yet for the most part he’s feigned the recognition in favour of the creative endeavour.

10 years ago he made the leap to solo artist releasing his first House-infused records, mostly  via Perfect Havoc on Spotify, culminating in a lengthy discography that has garnered millions of streams and half a million monthly listeners. Tracks like “Shake the tree”  have made him a household name in regions as far afield as Mexico –  a tour on the horizon there – while remixes for the likes of Kelis and Nina Simone have bridged the divide between the accessible and functional in Simon’s music.

His music is supported by most house music veterans from David Guetta, Oliver Heldens, Mark Knight, Chris Lake, Claptone, Dombresky, Freejak, Benny Benassi, Majestic and many more.

His debut album, No Need Music, arrives filling the gaps more effectively between these two worlds. With a foot in two worlds, Simon Field is both an accomplished recording artist and a DJ, and in his  efforts to consolidate these two aspects of his artistic identity he has created an album that pushed his sound closer to the dance floor. Tracks, specifically “made for the club moment in mind,” and an ambient finale bear the fruits of this labour. 

We meet in the middle of Øya week with the dominant pulse of a kick drum playing staccato thuds in the background. The Bergen born, Oslo native has been indulging in the music in Tøyen park and beyond, but he’s perky and perched on the edge of his chair. Never taking himself too seriously, he interjects often with a stifling laugh and while he he stops short at name-dropping he is eager to broach any musical subject and very excited to talk about his new LP:

“They are all club tracks, besides one beautiful ambient” piece that concludes the LP.  “Last summer I did so many cool festival gigs, and I decided that I want to do new original material at every gig,” explains Simon for context. He set himself a goal: “alright I’m doing ten gigs, let’s do ten new songs.“ Each track was specifically created to suit a moment at each gig, with factors like previous DJ and moment in time taken into consideration and the result is a 12-track LP that covers a wide range of situations. 

 

Even the finale and the only beat-less indulgence on the record, Es Vedrá was a conscious effort to “reset the room” in the knowledge that the previous DJ would drop him off at the region of 136 beats per minute. The track’s dominating synth swells through the air while a “persian” vocal flutters sporadically in what Simon describes “as one of the best tracks I’ve ever written.” It’s the only introspective departure from an album that is firmly rooted in the predetermined foundations of House with little more than one breakdown per track diverging from the obstinate rhythms. Percussion and bass dominates, in unceasing movement with even the ever-present vocals moving through the tracks in stochastic “ahhs” and “oohs”. Listening to track like “Gack Gack” where there’s so much emphasis on the lower frequencies, I’m not surprised to find it is in fact in the bass where Simon’s musical roots took hold. 

Born in Bergen his musical education was passed down from an older sibling. “Growing up my brother listened to Earth Wind and Fire, so my first music was Funk and Soul, and that’s been with me forever.” Those sounds awoke an appreciation for the bass guitar and “the first thing I wanted to do when I picked up the bass was learn how to slap.” 

Learn to slap, he did, and it went much further than that, as Simon set his sights on that precursor for Funk and Soul, Jazz. When he moved to Scotland for school, he took evening courses at a Ronnie Scott tutorial programme while studying towards a degree in Science management. “I spent four years figuring out what I don’t want to do with my life, ” laughs Simon. “By the end of the study I was doing more gigs than being in school,” and an interest flourished whereby he “just leaned into every bit of literature and videos I could find.”

Returning home to Bergen he started playing in “several bands,” most of who modelled their sound on the likes of Donald Fagen. “We all wanted to be doing Steely Dan,” he remembers, playing “as many chords as possible” which would later prove to be an important aspect of his writing skills especially as he started producing House music. 

“I can actually put that into my music and it’s beautiful when working with singers,”  he insists. In House music’s pretty conservative constructions where there’s little room for the kind of thematic movement that is usually associated with the likes of Fagen, this adds a dimension to Simon Field’s music that sets him a little apart from the status quo and perhaps part of his international appeal. This harmonic intervention on the part of the artist helps humanise this stark machine music. It often also sits alongside Latin rhythms, a familiar trope in House music and something that is close to his heart, as the determining factor from which all Simon’s groove is distilled.

“Everything I do in music is played with that (latin) quantising,” expresses Simon. It’s been a feature of his music in all forms for as long as he played bass, and he feels that it’s “fundamental to every music genre” and the source to all music. “You get into this groove and your job is to get those asses to move.”

Getting those asses to move on his debut album, he calls on his extensive experience working on a myriad of music from Country to Hip-hop. It has taken him to places like LA, where he’s written and produced songs for prominent artists and producers that he is not able to mention by name. It was during these surreptitious musical activities that he would start developing a sound forged in electronic music. “While I was doing all that other stuff, I started programming to make the writing more clear for the people I played with.” He had a “huge love for synthesisers” from his band days in Bergen when he started switching out his bass guitar for synthesisers – “the band didn’t always like that” (laughs) – and “started collecting synthesisers and making music” based around those electronic instruments. 

“My publisher said you can send off stuff to films, so I started sending off portishead-like songs that I thought no-one wanted.” People did wanted them nonetheless. It wasn’t his first foray into music for tv. Back in his band days, his group Elle Melle contributed the title theme to TV2 Frokost TV, but this time his music would find an international audience through placements in series like Calfornication. “A lot of music for Californication which is a Funk-House kind of blend” and “that really kicked it off.” Funk being much of the predecessor to House “definitely” bridged a gap between Simon’s work as a bassist/composer and House music, but House had not been an unknown entity either.  It was “there all the time” but it had been a kind of “party music” until one point ten years ago, when things started to click in place for Simon. 

In a pitch for something that would most likely be assigned to another artist on disco:wax the label said: “we could release this as it is and you could be the artist”. That track was, “The music is you” and it “totally switched everything” for Simon who dropped everything else for a more singular pursuit. ”I just said ‘no’ to anything other than House music from that point.” 

A decade later with an extensive discography behind his back, Simon is confident he made the right decision. “I’ve done this project for ten years now and listening back to my first demos and first releases, that’s coming full circle now.” The essence of what he created in the beginning with a track like “The Music is you” is still there in “Need No Music” with Simon’s rhythmical foundations and his insistence for vocals remaining central to his work. 

On the album the vocals often favour a more abstract approach, but Simon’s presence of mind in his musical pursuits is still there. “I’ve been trying to get to this place all along,” he suggests. ”All these people putting money into your music, are saying you should do this or this” he dismisses today, blowing a raspberry as he says it and it’s paid off in his favour. His music has featured on the likes of BBC Radio 1; he’s remixed and been remixed by the likes of Todd Terry and Erick Morillo, and with  a DJ touring schedule that sees him play in the venues like Café Mambo in Ibiza he doesn’t need the validation either. 

He’s not playing as much as he was before covid – ”travelling in Europe every week at least” – but the gigs are still rolling in, and while he’s something of an unknown in Oslo, in London  his “music works really well,” especially since his home-label Perfect Havoc is located there. What started out as a hobby, just developed naturally for Simon and now he loves nothing more than to DJ. 

“Playing live has always been my favourite thing and DJing is just the same. I’m really living the music when I play.” His next DJ event will be at Jaeger to celebrate the release for the album and he’s asked Monojack, Blichteldt and old friends Tube & Berger for the occasion. “There are definitely many DJs that I have played with over the years that I would like to bring (to Jaeger), that’s why I’m so glad that Tube & Berger said yes.” 

It’s through club nights like these that Simon is looking to recontextualise his music for the next audience. “I feel like what I’ve done on Spotify, I should have made it more club from the start,” he considers for a moment before adding; “Then again, I love those songs, and they work on radio and they’ve taken me places.“ “Need no Music“ will move his audience closer to the heart of the dance floor, but as it remains destined for Spotify, he has no intention of disappointing his legion of fans; fans, including people like Erick Morillo and David Guetta and stretching as far afield as Mexico. 

 

Be A Man You Ant – 10 years of André Bratten

We go ten years back in time to the release of André Bratten’s debut album to look at the lasting legacy of Be A Man You Ant before he performs live in our basement this week

There was a time in Oslo where you couldn’t get away from André Bratten’s Trommer og Bass. It seemed to be spilling out of every DJ booth in in the city, the sheer force of the track decimating every track that had come before or after it in the same set. 

Its impact couldn’t be overstated. Even before it was released Jennifer Cardini, who had sent that track to be mastered for her Correspondant VA, quickly understood its power. “The sound was so powerful; the sound was so big,” according to Jennifer Cardini. “When we got Trommer og Bass, I wrote to him (André Bratten) and asked; ‘hey can we get a pre-mastered 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.’” It says something about André Bratten’s mastery of the studio as an instrument, and the complete nature of his music, but that alone doesn’t count for the sheer appeal of the record. 

It was a Techno record with just enough of that Norwegian melodic nature to make it appeal to a broad audience, while finding its own lane in a scene that would soon be dominated by the draconian influence of Berlin. It could be played at a peak time House set, and be admired outside of the club context. It was a big room track with all the trappings of a dance floor hit that would reaffirm the name André Bratten in a new sphere of club music. He put the track out again on Math Ion Ilium after it appeared on the Correspondant VA in a move he thought would be “smart to do” and which offered the bridge into new sonic possibilities from his previous LP, and debut Be A Man You Ant.

Trommer og Bass took from that album’s more demanding Techno inclinations and expounded on it, but it was the striking debut that had enshrined the name André Bratten in the electronic music scene in Norway and beyond. Be A Man You Ant hit a nerve with Disco riding a tidal wave of popularity across the globe and the album quickly found its own sweet spot just ahead of the curve. 

André Bratten was not unknown by the time Be A Man You Ant saw the light of day. He had carved out a name for himself in Oslo as a member of the delphic Hubbubbaklubb with its quixotic melodies and its mechanical rhythms. As a founding member of the group, he was instrumental in the early success of Hubbubbaklubb, playing a significant role in their breakout hit Mopedbart. Most would have been content as a lynchpin in that group, but such is André Bratten’s personality, that he is always looking to explore new worlds and new sounds in music.

He had already established himself in a studio across the hall from Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas and as the younger upstart amongst these relatively older heads of the Norwegian Disco scene, Bratten set out on his debut LP, tongue firmly in cheek.

“(M)y first record sort of started over dinner with Prins Thomas.” recalls André in an interview with Deep House Amsterdam from 2015. “I was just being a little kid trying to prove myself, and we were talking about this whole space disco sound, and I was bragging like ‘Making a disco record is easy!’ so I made a disco record even though he was obviously much better at writing disco than I was.”

André Bratten might not have the same prowess as Prins Thomas, but he definitely made it his own. His mastery of the studio would prove to leave no stone unturned in his approach to music and Disco too would not be left unchallenged. “I am a technical geek,” Bratten once told Electronic Beats during an interview and this fascination with the technical aspects of music has cemented in an impressive arsenal of vintage synthesisers and machines which are often talked about in venerated and covetous tones. Using these old machines seemed to play in Bratten favour when he was recreating the sonic signatures of this retro-fitted music, emphasising their inherent character which in part laid the foundations for the original genre. 

Happy arpeggios flit through dramatic soundscapes that contain all the drama of a Disco anthem without sacrificing the danceable beat. The opening- and title track paints by numbers as syncopated beats echo through vintage effects while euphoric bass-lines dig towards the centre of the dance floor. In a happy dichotomy however, there’s very little tying the record to compatriots like Prins Thomas, Lindstrøm and Todd Terje, who had already planted a flag. Bratten’s sound was bolder, and more striking and when you get to a track like Aegis other elements start coming to the fore in a serious divergence from the national tropes. 

“Aegis was a more Techno-ish, more British, more border community kind of vibe,” André Bratten told us in an interview with this blog. With just a “twist of Techno”, he produced something that sat outside the Norwegian Disco trends, and yet couldn’t be completely extrapolated from it either.  “I had to think a little about politics, I couldn’t do a super weird Techno record first,” he said, but elements of what was to come in the following EP was already there. It’s true that most of Math Ilium Ion was created and produced before his debut LP, but like everything else, Bratten’s approach was nothing but a calculated response to what he was hearing around him and finding his own niche within that. 

He didn’t want to be compared to Lindstrøm, an easy task for the media, who sought nothing else to pigeonhole him with his studio neighbour.  “It’s hard not to becauseI share studio space and use analogue synthesisers and drum machines,” he told Electronic beats, but Bratten was intent on making his own mark, and used tracks like Aegis, and his singular approach to the studio to make an indelible mark. 

There’s something more stark and at times abrasive to Be A Man You Ant and even when dealing with uplifting melodies, it’s clouded in a perpetual darkness. “You can’t make music that is not personal, sure, but that’s my arena, and it’s not for anyone else,” he said when we talked about the mood he creates on tracks like Aegis and Trommer og Bass. Whether he’s being manipulative or aloof is unsure, but he’s less inclined to talk about these “feelings” behind the music. “I don’t want to be a dictator of what people feel. I find people that need to talk about the personal input in their music need to see a shrink.” Yet, even to an uninformed listener they are ever-palpable in his music. 

Later in the André Bratten catalogue records like Gode and Pax Americana would emphasis and enhance the emotional depths the music can flow to in pronounced soundscapes orchestrated around melancholy electronica, but for Be A Man You Ant, they are very much subverted for the overall estascism of the Disco beat. There’s a depth there that belies the happy-go-lucky nature of the Disco formula as chirping synthesisers clash with dissonant harmonic movements, infusing the music with a sense of drama that only somebody like Arthur Russell could achieve. 

It was a brief dalliance with the Disco genre, but its impact some ten years on is no less significant. While André Bratten would go on to make everything from wavy pop-electronica to warping bleep Techno, Be A Man You Ant would be left to its own devices in the artist’s catalogue, a hermetically sealed slice of perfection for its time and beyond.

Bratten moves on quickly in terms of music, and you’ll never find an artist repeating himself in the studio. At times this even makes it hard to pin-point the results with any kind of artistic identity, but each record, including Be A Man You Ant has tis time and place in his wide arching catalogue. When we spoke to him back in 2015, he said;  “I think the Norwegian scene is missing a proper Techno guy, so I’m trying to be that guy.” For a while he was that guy, playing blistering live sets and making uncompromising Techno on records Math Ilim Ion or skiddish broken Electro on records like Valve, but what he established on Be A Man You Ant remains intact. Ten years on it’s a modern classic and a record that still garners some fanfare whenever it comes on. 

From the Archives: DJ Food with Jennifer Cardini

We head back in time to 2016 when André Bratten and Jennifer Cardini last played together at Jaeger in this interview from the archives. The pair reunite at Jaeger this Frædag for a special 10 year celebration of Bratten’s record Be a Man you Ant.

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.

 

Feeling good with Fredfades

Fredfades is a prolific talent. An artist, a producer, a DJ, a facilitator and a label boss, he has his fingers in a host of pies, while maintaining a regular 9-5 throughout. A founding member of the Mutual Intentions franchise, his musical projects extend from producing records for the clan including Ivan Ave, solo records, a host of collaborative projects like those with Jawn Rice and Tøyen Holding.

In the past year alone he’s released a solo record, a collaborative record with Sraw, a Tøyen Holding record and oversaw a host of Mutual Intentions releases, all while DJing regularly in Norway and abroad. With the increasing popularity of Tøyen Holding, Fredfades has also become a household name in Norway, syphoning some of the group’s open-minded fans into the world of electronic music, and specifically House. 

Alongside his other efforts, Fredfades has positioned Mutual intentions in a unique position in Norway and beyond as a label, whose bread and butter is in Hip Hop, but whose musical exploits go into the farthest reaches of the dance floor and even Jazz. Alongside an increasing popularity for club music Fredfades star has risen with his classic-leaning House aesthetic finding the ears of new audiences everywhere. 

His latest record Caviar showcases his mastery of vintage synthesisers and drum machines alongside a knack for effervescent melodies and accessible arrangements. The album, like his previous records, straddles that elusive gap between the functional and the approachable, where they can exist both in the club space and a set of headphones. 

He’s just about to play Trevarefest in Lofoten when I call him up. “The weather up here can be pretty crazy, but this year it was alright, especially the first day which was amazing.“ he says. Trevarefest precedes his upcoming appearance at ØyaNatt for Jaeger on Wednesday in what is already a busy summer for the DJ. Between playing, making records and his efforts with Mutual Intentions he still has to maintain his day job and it’s at his computer I find him at this pursuit when we talk. 

*photos by Christopher Næss

What is your day job, is it still graphic design?

Kind of. I studied graphic design, but at the time there was nothing like UX. I changed jobs last year, and before that I worked for a company that does a lot of apps, for Norwegian and international companies. I’ve been doing that for 11 years. 

When you mentioned the work you do, some things kind of fell into place for me, because there’s quite a visual and physical component to the merch and extra’s you and Mutual Intentions produce; From the packaging on the vinyl to things like the silk head scarves. What’s in those kinds of things personally for you and how do you think it contributes to what you do musically? 

Yes I mean designer is my profession, and it’s kinda been all the way back since 2008 ish. But for the past twelve years I’ve been working non-stop with technology and user experience. I’m a very practical person, and that’s easy to see in my daily work as a designer/UX guy. I’m about solving problems, not designing in a way that creates problems, as some people choose to do.

 When it comes to our label and merch, I still don’t do much myself, we use Hans Jørgen Wærner (our in-house designer) and hire various external designers, and I do some very strict art direction and feedback with these designers/illustrators to get the most out of them and maintain the loud and clear way of design and communication that I do believe we (our label) tend to have as the only design principle/consistency across our projects. 

But to answer your questions properly: most people don’t have a record player but still like to support the artists they listen to. That’s why we spend a lot of time making nice products for all listeners, and not only record collectors and deejays.

I think I’ve asked you this before, but how do you find time for the music and everything around it, and manage to be so productive?

I just always make music on the weekends. I think it started out when I grew up. I lived in a very small apartment with my father and I was never comfortable making music when he was there, so I just did it when he was working on Saturdays and travelling.

What kind of music were you making when you still lived with your dad?

When I first got into it I started producing Hip Hop. I bought the SP303 – that was the first sampler – in 2005. Then I bought the MPC the year after and then in 2007, I got the SP1200, that’s when I really started making beats.  

I assume that you were still learning how to operate the machines back then, but if we return to the present, when you do work on music, are you working to get a song out each time you touch these machines or are you still exploring creatively?

How I started making beats was very primitive in terms of the process. It was always about over-dubbing. I would start out with some samples and then some drums, and overdub with some samples, and then overdub again with something else.

I never had a proper soundcard (used to capture the sounds on computer recording software). So I always arranged and mixed everything in the boxes, which meant that I had to make everything sound nice before I sampled it and then hit play on the MPC (sampler)

It’s not until recently – probably 2018 – that I had a proper soundcard with multiple inputs. So now I work very differently. It’s kind of a more jammy approach to making music. I make rough drafts, with like six layers of sound and then I just dump it into the computer and open stuff later on and if I like it when I hear it later on, then I get to the actual production. 

Then you must be working on songs all the time at the moment, and from the outsider perspective it seems you are in this very productive creative period. 

Actually, I feel like I’m producing less. I’m definitely doing more sketches. I do hundreds of demos, but I only set a few aside for working on properly. 

With all these projects you’re constantly working from Tøyen Holding, to your solo stuff and the collaborative projects like with Jawn Rice, do you know what you’re working on from the moment of inception or do you only consider that part when you’re opening up one of these “demos”?

I never have any plans for my music, I just make it. For example, when I saw I had a few solo songs finished, I decided to put them together in a mini album. If I would have six or seven songs with Jawn, maybe we will finish a record. With the Tøyen Holding stuff, there’s a goal to work towards, like an actual Rap album with 18 songs. 

I guess the process is very different from making a Rap record to making a Fredfades record?

Yeah, the Tøyen Holding stuff is completely sample based. It’s not about composing or producing, it’s about having the backdrop and rapping over it. 

Do you feel like you have to be in a particular state of mind for working on music in general and does it differ for different projects?

I only make music if I’m feeling good. I’m not the type of person that gets inspired by stress or emotions. I’m always positive when I’m in the studio, it feels fun to be there and I always have a good time. 

Out of all these projects, it seems that Tøyen Holding has hit a nerve. Why do you think it’s so popular at the moment, and do you think it spills over to your other projects?

Yeah, I think it helped my Caviar album a little bit. Previously, it’s been a bit hard to sell the House releases in Norway, but this one went extremely well. I think a big part of it is because people know me from the Tøyen Holding project. I also think that club music has become very commercial and it’s a very normal thing to say you are enjoying Techno music and House music, which it was not 5 years ago. 

Between all these elements that you experience working with Mutual Intentions, between Hip Hop, dance music and even Jazz, what do you think is the main draw these days?

Our label has always been hard to grow as a label, because we have too many hats on. For us to put out Hip Hop music in Norway is definitely easier than to put out electronic music. Rap is the world’s biggest genre, so it will always appeal to more people than electronic music.

As I said, I also feel that electronic music is more commercial. It splits the scene in two; the people like myself, who tend to believe that I understand the history of the music and on the other hand you have the people who do festivals and spotify playlists, who mixed what we would consider genuine with what we consider sell-out. In my opinion the festivals should be responsible for teaching people about proper music, but sometimes it’s just “babes” in black leather bikinis playing 150 BPM techno.

Yeah it seems like it’s become about aesthetics rather than musical content, because everything is so determined by social media, good looking people playing terrible music and it’s spilled over into the clubs, especially the big room kind of places.

How I see it is people just know how to sell themselves, jump on the wave, and use it to generate money, or attention or whatever they’re seeking, and it’s not about the music. 

Of course, it’s a subjective matter. I just feel that together with the whole genre becoming commercial, problems (if you want to call it that) will appear.  

Let’s talk about Caviar for a bit, because as you say it is a club record, but it’s also something that is more accessible than your average House record, because of the vocals and the nature of melodies.  Was that a conscious decision on your part?

Not really. I like to DJ a lot and  play club music, but whenever I make music myself, it tends to be more introverted and laid back, which is more natural for me. I’ve always used jazzy chords and I make mellow music and it affects the way I think. I’ve never seen myself creating bangers. Some of them will be 128 BPM but they would still be a bit more mellow. 

There’s the definitive bridge in your music between Hip Hop and House, which reminds me of the early 90s and late 80’s when these things were a bit more interchangeable. Are  you trying to bring these two worlds together in the way you approach your own music?

No, it was never my intention. I guess it’s just where I came from. The very first House songs I liked were sample based, just drums and some loops, but after a very short time, I figured out the songs I really liked were composed and produced. 

Can you give me an example?

I think it was when I first discovered Larry heard and realised he didn’t sample anything. That’s when I really got interested in electronic music. That was the first thing I loved.

Was there any overarching  musical theme to Caviar, or was it simply the period that they were made in?

It was made over a couple of years. The way I did this, I had this playlist with all these other songs, and I tried to divide them into two different projects, where I prioritised the best cuts and spread them over two records. So I have another finished ready, which sounds similar because it was all from the same time.

Why did you decide to put out two mini records instead of just one for Caviar?

I mean – it’s not two mini records, I just had so much music that it made sense to turn it into several projects. It’s already 8 tracks on that Caviar album, which is a lot for the format, if you know what I mean? Some friends even wanted me to release them as classic 12″s/EP’s with only four songs on each release. But I kind of like to give as much value as possible to the customers that buys my music, and a lot of the music I make is kinda introvert and not very clubby, so it’s natural for me to think that it will be consumed more in an “album listening context ” rather than having the songs ending up played by DJ’s in clubs. That’s why I felt that it made sense. I’ll probably do the same with eight more songs, then go from there over to a more “Maxi-EP-focused” approach. 

So, was there any creative impulse that fed into these two projects, something like a synthesiser or a sound?

I really enjoy this sound from Italy and the UK from the mid-nineties, where they just used the stock sounds of the synthesiser. So when I buy a synthesiser, I just factory reset it, and I don’t create too many patches or stuff. I think it’s fun to use the ready-made stuff. I really like the references to the classic patches. That’s why I like these Italo and British records from the nineties, because it all just refers to the machines. 

In terms of writing the music, how much do the machines dictate the direction your songs take, or do you have a preconceived idea that directs you to specific machines?

When I do hiphop stuff, I like to sequence the beats I make on the SP1200 inside the SP1200’s sequencer. But when I do use that sampler for House music, I prefer sequencing the sounds stored inside the SP from an external sequencer, which in my studio would be my Sequentix Cirklon or my MPC 3000. I always work very layer based, because that’s where I come from. It always made me approach music production in a very primitive way. Sometimes I copy my sequences around and reprogram and arrange it slightly on the hardware sequencers first, but when it’s time to actually produce and process and arrange the music, I usually disconnect my Mac from my studio setup and work with headphones in Ableton and might then go back and hook it back in the studio setup if I would need another layer or sound or something. I’ve been making beats on the MPC 2000, the 2000 XL and the 3000 since probably back in 2007. 

This record, like your others, also features a ton of collaborators. Was there any reason you wanted these people on this record, and what do you usually look for in collaborators?

I feel really confident composing the foundations of the songs, the grooves, the chord progressions and stuff, but I often struggle with, for example solos. So I use people like Arthur (Kay) on my records. Otherwise it’s just random people that have been in the studio, where we’ve been drinking beers and making music together.

What about the vocalists, because a lot of them are American?

Yeah, they are all American. One of them is MoRuf from Jersey, he’s one of my favourite rappers. It was the first time for him rapping on a House song. The other guy is just somebody I stumbled across on instagram. His name is Kristian Hamilton, and he’s an extremely talented musician. 

While we’re on the subject of collaborations, I really want to talk about the SP1200 record. It’s something the geek inside of me really enjoyed because of the process of making the record. What planted the seed initially?

Sraw has always been an Internet friend to me, since back in the Myspace days. He was always one of the producers I really enjoyed listening to. We had so much similar equipment and similar interests. At some point, around 2012 (when we started working on this record), I decided to fly him over and hang out for a few days and create some beats. I’ve visited him in Sweden and we’ve just been going back and forth a few times. Obviously it wasn’t enough and as you can’t change the music digitally, we had to actually ship the floppy. 

Was there ever a vague idea of what the tracks would sound like completed, or was it a matter of getting the floppy back and it would be completely changed?

It was more about a layered approach, so we wouldn’t fuck up each other’s stuff too much. 

It was that raw beat-type feel to it, that really emphasises the character of the machine.

Yeah, you really don’t need that many elements with that sampler, because  you get so much free texture. It automatically sounds nice.  

Do you think you’ll do it again?

It took  a very long time to do that record. I don’t think we’ll do it again. I’m happy to release Sraw’s music on Mutual. It’s extremely great. 

 

ØyaNatt 2023 lineup and tickets announced

International and local acts fill the week in August as Jaeger yet again hosts two floors during ØyaNatt tin 2023 again. Tickets and lineup are up now.

When the sun sinks on Tøyen park and the last of the live acts echo down the hill we give in to nocturnal habits and make a beeline for the city where ØyaNatt starts to simmer and dir with the sounds of club life. In the annual tradition, Jaeger hosts two floors across the week including the Wednesday in 2023. Telephones, Fredfades, Teebee, Dave Clarke, Anémi, Chloé Caillet, Paramida, Slindre and Ellka join our residnets and residencies for a week of club music where we pull out all the stops and things like budget and common sense go out the window.

This year BigUP hosts a floor from the basement with a night of Drum n Bass and Jungle featuring a local treasure and a world-class drum n bass icon Teebee. We’ve got the Baron of Techno, Dave Clarke on the other side of Helt Texas and this Frædag showcase some rising stars in Chloé Caillet and Paramida alongside Oslo club concept, Lokomotiv. In a turn this year, Sunkissed takeover the sauna for the closing party with Elkka and a live performance from Vinny Villbass.

Here’s the full lineup and schedule:

09.08 – ØyaNatt x Bigup

Fredfades (NO)
Telephones (NO)
Teebee (NO)
Drunkfunk + Fjell + Tech + Simon Peter (NO)

10.08 – ØyaNatt x Helt Texas!

Dave Clarke (UK)
Anémi (NO)
Normann + Ole HK (NO)
Manu Rochina (NO)

11.08 – ØyaNatt x Lokomotiv x Frædag

Chloé Caillet (FR)
Paramida (DE)
g-HA & Olanskii (NO)
Slindre

12.08 – ØyaNatt x Sunkissed x Nightflight

Elkka (UK)
g-HA & Olanskii (NO)
Vinny Villbass (NO)
Sunkissed allstars (NO)
MC Kaman & Kash (NO)

 


Tickets are now available via our ticketco page and you can find more info about the events on our program page.

 

Percolating at BCR with Perkules

In the BCR triad of creators we’ve spent a lot of time focussing on two, namely Anders Hajem and Henrik Villard. Always at hand with the next release, a mix or some kind of musical news, Anders and Henrik are responsible for the majority of BCR’s output, seemingly, but not actually, neglecting their third, Perkules aka Jens Wabo. 

While Jens has been the quieter member of the group, his presence is no less trivial. As a founding member he orchestrates much of the label, events and now mix franchise, even while as an artist he favours a more conservative output. Apart from a couple of singles in 2021, he’s remained content with his duties behind the decks, and when he does release something he offers a little outlier to the norm both at BCR and any concurrent dance floor trends. 

His latest, “Show me Right” is an infectious exercise in crossing the lines between saccharine bubblegum melodies and functional House grooves. With a percussive palette going off-script in the Roland X0X annals and with uplifting chords issuing from some distant nostalgia, there’s a lot to appreciate and much that entices.

It’s only his third release, all of which come via the BCR platform, and challenges any generic status quo in terms of sound if any did indeed exist. It arrived on BCR last month and with more slated for the near future including a remix from Justin Cudmore for Perkules, there is much percolating on the Perkules front, so we took at as a premise to finally interview the third member of BCR and complete the triptych. 

We caught up with Jens during a sunny day in June, the week after launching the return of their Summer Residency, Sundaze at Jaeger. Like Anders and Henrik, Jens is a reserved character, a stoic quiet kind of person that seems mature beyond his years. We have much to discuss, and to me he’s still very much a blank slate, a piece of the BCR puzzle that will finally complete our purview of the Oslo label and events series. 

Where do you fit into the BCR universe?

Anders and Henrik are super ambitious in their artistic pursuits. They  are constantly in the studio making three to five songs a week, and their music keeps getting better and better. But my output is not that consistent, so it’s hard for me to have that as my main thing.

Were you producing music before you met them? 

Yes, but not that much. Anders and I had grown from mainly Rock music into (House) music together. I was kinda dragging him in. I make music 20 minutes at a time in these bursts of inspiration. 

Did you start off with DJing or were you still playing in bands when you started discovering House music?

I guess both. Bands were way before. When Anders and I met, he had recently bought some DJ gear and then we started playing around with that together. 

What sort of stuff were you playing in the band?

Anders played guitar and I played drums.

And in terms of music, what did it sound like and what were you drawn to?

Where I’m from, in a town called Tonsberg, which only has 40 000 people, having to play in a band is all about compromises. It was bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Turbonegro, and scandi-wave bands like Hellacopters. 

What  got you into electronic music?

I feel like anybody that has an interest in music, has some cool uncle figure that just pushed music in their direction. I have two older brothers like that. Since I was  5 or 6 years old, every christmas and every birthday I would get really cool CDs, like Discovery from Daft Punk and Melody A.M by Røyksöpp. But I had to re-access it when I was a little bit older.  

I guess when you were learning to play drums and as a teeneager you really got into a one track mind where you avoid anything that is not related to Rock music or drumming and it takes a while to rediscover music that was always there in the background?

Probably. I think around the time Daft Punk’s Random Access Memory was released, which was a good bridge into House music.

That record celebrated 20 years this year. What was it about that album for you?

The way I assess that album is that they tried to make a synthesis of all the records they sampled in the past. It’s kind of like George Duke, early Michael Jackson, and Chic with Nile Rogers on the guitar. 

And that got you into electronic music in terms of DJing or producing? 

I’ve always been interested in how things work. So, when I found Daft Punk again, I was straight into Youtube to find some videos of how they sampled and everything. It probably all came at the same time, the sample stuff and listening to “alive” and some of their DJ sets, even though it was more machine based. 

From there you slipped in House and deep House. 

Yes, and more commercial stuff. 

What kind of stuff?

That was early Spotify days, around 2011, Probably whatever was cool back then. I have no clear picture, but it was mostly deep stuff and French-wave too.

In the structure of BCR, how do you differ from those guys in terms of the music you DJ?

They are hungry in a way that I don’t feel I can match. If you are going to get that good in something like music, you have to be monotone in a good way. They have that, and I’m all over the place. Henrik is good at keeping his sound, in terms of building his identity as an artist. For me that goes beyond music. I have some other things I would like to do. 

That brings me to your last release, “Show me Right,” because that’s almost like a bubblegum track and very different from the other stuff coming via BCR. Was that a conscious decision?

Yeah. I feel like we’re privileged by having our own (platform) that we can experiment in that way. That song has been ready for release for over a year. As we started playing at Jaeger a bit more we tried to incorporate a bit more proto-House and synthesised-bass disco. I got super-inspired and tried to make something like that. It was hard to nail the sound. We had originally been in touch with Storken to help us release it on other labels, but that fizzled out, and we released it ourselves.

Which helps with expanding the catalogue of the label again.

I feel that the releases should have a strong identity, that’s most important for us. 

Listening to your next release, Echelon which has more in common with nineties  big-room House music, it seems you’re easily swayed into new avenues in music.

Exactly. It’s hard for me to do stuff that I’m not 100%  into and that shifts all the time.

Justin Cudmore is on that record too as a remix artist. How did you meet?

We never met, actually. We are super fan boys mainly. That’s our first identity and our second identity is producers. So, we just reach out everywhere. We wrote to him and he actually lived in Oslo for some time. 

Why did you want him to remix that track specifically?

Anders and I, when we got super into more club music, Justin’s Twisted Love EP was a top ten EP of all time. 

What’s your process as you start making music, what instrument kicks it all off?

Drums mainly or I find one specific song that I love and I just have to figure it out. I feel like when you listen to as much House music as we have to, it tires easily. You wouldn’t eat the same pizza for days in a row, for example. 

Do you think knowing how to play drums has an effect on how you approach electronic music?

Probably. If I’ve read an interview with a producer and in the interview it comes out that they play drums, it often makes sense to me. The music is mostly rhythmical instead of melody-based for me. It’s more important where the notes are located than what note they are. 

Playing at Jaeger as much as you do, especially in summer for your Sundaze residency, do you believe it has had an impact on the way that you DJ?

Yes. We felt more confident to look broader; I think that is one of the advantages of Jaeger, the musical identity is broad. 

Do you ever feel the pressure in the current climate to pitch up your tracks in a scene that is going faster and harder all the time?

When we started in 2019, that’s when it really started to happen and we were also more into Techno and faster stuff at the time. Then we thought let’s see what goes on in the other direction; to look in the cheesy department and see what’s the least cool thing and rather play that if the songs are good rather than being in a coolness arm-wrestle with those guys. 

And it’s not like they are not drinking from the same fountain. It might be faster and harder, but there’s always a vocal line and a melody. 

I agree. It’s 2000’s pop stuff with an acapella over a fast rhythm track. 

Does Sundaze have any effect in the way you’ve approached your sets?

What we talked about after last summer was, playing 5 hours every Sunday over summer is the best way to get better. We’re just trying to explore more, take more risks and trying to take advantage of having a consistent 5 hours together. When you play once a month you have to go back some steps every time. We can just start wherever we ended last week. 

Dorm!tory – Where the Homies play

We speak to the creators of Dorm!tory to talk queer theory, music and a safe space to play ahead of their event this Wednesday.

…And when the lights go out… “that’s when the Homies play”. 

Dorm!tory arrives at Jaeger this Wednesday. A new concept from some of the people behind Evrysome, Dorm!tory expands on the queer philosophies of its predecessor in an event that redefines queer as  “something more related to the fluidity of gender” in the club context. Its creators, Pedro Leal, Eduardo Miranda, Johannes Strand, Daniel John and Terje Dybdahl represent every corner of the globe as “a gay group inside the queer group and a queer group inside humanity.” From the Philippines, to Mexico, to Brazil to… Mysen, the group are a multicultural mix that cover a couple of generations of club enthusiasts. 

For their first event they’ve invited kindred spirits Por Detroit’s Perfect Lovers. As their Mexican counterpart Por Detroit reflects some of the same queer ideologies Dorm!tory will set out to adopt and alongside Bears in Space, Dick Dennis, DJ Brødskive, globaldrama and O/E they’ve amassed a musical lineup that will soundtrack Dorm!tory’s conceptual designs.  

We met the creators behind the event on a rainy summer’s day in Jaeger’s bar where they spread themselves over a couple of chesterfield sofas. Besides Terje Dybdahl (Tod Louie / Dick Dennis), introductions are necessary before they dive into the creation of this new concept.

“In the queer discussion masculinity is a topic that is outside of the identities that are inclusive, because of how toxic masculinity has become through the years,” according to the creators and they hope that the event will be a “solution for the toxic masculinity that affects everything inside or outside the queer world.” They want men to take ownership of the topic of masculinity. Why “should we have the feminist do all the work” they ask as they seek to create an “event that can bring back masculinity and men as the focus group,” which they then hope will add to the discussion of “new perceptions of gender and patriarchy.”  

All of this happens in the abstract, and for Dorm!tory to succeed it needs to be a party. The name reflects “something sexier and kind of secret” to appeal to their audience which still include gay men in every hue of the rainbow spectrum to a point where it can include “straight men that enjoy other men’s company.” 

They want to “build an infrastructure where we can all thrive and dance with each other” even if you fall between the gaps of every identity group out there. The collective hopes Dorm!tory will be that space where the exclusivity of certain events and spaces would be negated. 

For the youngest generation that might have “lost something, especially with covid” in what was already an era fraught with minefields in social interaction this is more important than ever for the group. “Growing up with social media,” in the way that this generation has, there’s a “different way of approaching people.” There’s an inherent “scepticism” which has only hardened with the “social isolation” we encountered with covid. As a group they hope to create a space where it’s “ok to just have a chat with someone” without the judgement that is taken at a superficial value through something like Grindr.

“At the end of the day we are humans with different needs and the friendship and the connection is most important.” Dorm!tory seeks to have a truly democratic space where you can stand “shoulder to shoulder” with somebody different, and there’s no better place for that than the dance floor in their opinion. 

In that context the soundtrack plays an important role and as such they’ve decided the programming at this party will definitely be rooted in the 70’s and 80’s; “First and foremost disco and house from the eighties.” They’ll look to “gay icons” like  “Patrick Cowley and Sylvester” for inspiration, paying homage to the roots and early “history of house music and queer culture.” They’ve assembled a host of DJs to relay that message for the very first session with even somebody like long-time Dick Dennis favourite, O/E abandoning his stoic Techno uniform for some 80s hi-nrg disco. 

They’re especially “honoured, having Perfect Lovers and Victor Rodriguez” from the queer concepts “Por Detroit” and “Bears In Space” from Mexico City in L.A. The booking happened almost as a “calling from the universe somehow.” On top of that, the burgeoning Oslo queer- and ballroom phenomenon Globaldrama and the established DJ Brødskive start a very busy billing with the incorrigible Dick Dennis completing the lineup across two dance floors. 

In what they describe as a “celebration of the night,” at the apex of the witching hour they’ll go completely dark in the basement, simulating the situations of collective dormitories where the Homies play, when the light turns off. It’s an opportunity to “explore each other blindly and not be judged by appearances,” and even “break the rules” a little. 

With so much of the queer scene being infiltrated and co-opted by a straight majority, it’s important for Dorm!tory to retain some of that rule-breaking and non-conformist ideologies that permeated queer culture from the start. “Dorm!tory doesn’t assume the queer identity as an umbrella, but we take the demand of people who are escaping out of that umbrella.”

Swan song with Deadswan

We discuss safe zones, being provocative, Oslo’s queer scene, everything about satan and sex, and the legacy he leaves behind, as Deadswan bows out of the DJ booth.

Reidar Engesbak is the absolute anathema to every pearl clutching conservative out there. He is a queer artist that has re-appropriated every stigma middle-establishment could throw at him and co-opted it in a provocative creation that is part politics, part performance, and consumes every fibre of his being. It imbues his many different guises; Deadswan the DJ, Enegesbak the journalist, Reidar Deadswan, the eternal club kid, and when we go further back, Genitalia and Sadomaoistan too.  

For over thirty years, he’s been a pillar of non-conformity on Oslo’s queer scene (although he’s originally from Bergen) with some confluence between the extended LGBTQI+++ and DJ scene, pre-dating even some of Oslo’s most established selectors. His club nights Strictly Kinky and Iconoclastic, live on in infamy today, while his progressive politics continue to find an outlet through the written word as one of the leading voices of Norway’s LGBTQI++ magazine, Blikk. At the height of his notoriety, performances as part of Genitalia shocked and caused outrage as he and his peers paved the way for the next generation of queer people. 

At the heart of all these different projects that Deadswan’s created over the years is something that is “always sex positive and always very queer” and in terms of music this would be captured in “dirty samples and raunchy sex stuff” and include “everything that is about satan and sex.” 

Strictly Kinky would give queer people their first space in Oslo; Iconoclastic would brandish banners admonishing any form of facism; while Genitalia would rebuke any form of homophobia. In one of Genitalia’s most notorious exploits, they doused Eurovision star and “pray-the-gay-away” advocate Carola in beer during their performance at Rockefeller. The incident caused quite the furrore, leading Reider to write an op-ed piece explaining the group’s actions through Blikk, incidentally laying the foundation for a career in journalism through those very pages.

Today he’s one of the elder statesmen of the scene and he’s more likely to start a conversation than cover an unsuspecting audience in blood (more on that later). While by his own account he has “mellowed” with age, he remains politically active and continues to be a visceral voice and face on the leading edge of the queer scene. His provocations have tempered with sobriety and married life and in his husband – “who’s handled so many of my quirks” – he’s also found “a rock”. And with this new clarity in his life, he’s decided that there will no longer be any Deadswan to direct some of his energies in the future.

As of the 1st of July 2023 during a DJ appearance for Olle Abstract’s LYD, Deadswan will be laid to rest, the final swan song and a celebration of one of the most thought-provoking and exciting DJs to emerge from Oslo. Why is he choosing to bring it to an end now? I met up with Reidar over a reserved coffee to talk about this and the impressive career and legacy he leaves behind as he retires the moniker. 

Deadswan: Let’s get one thing straight. I’m hopeless when it comes to years and you know, remembering. So we have to wing it. 

Mischa: That’s fine because what I want to start off with was something recent; the fact that you’re stopping Djing. Why?

Deadswan: I don’t know. I’m at this place in my life where… Okay, this is what my therapist said: “You need to find out who you are without the DJ thing.” When I get invites, it’s always as Reidar Deadswan. I think I’ve felt kind of trapped in working this face on the gay scene. So I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do. 

Mischa: And what’s that?

Deadswan: Move out of the city. We have a house in the country. I really liked my own company. I’m not afraid to be alone. 

Mischa: Earlier, you talked about being provocative. Have you always been provocative; even as a kid growing up in Bergen?

Deadswan: When I was growing up at school they tried to bully me, but you can’t bully me because I always knew that I was different. Every week on Fridays for instance, we had this class hour where you could bring music and play it to the classroom. I always had to play last, because then the rest of the kids could leave. It was just me and the teacher playing new wave. They didn’t get me at all. The teacher got me. 

Mischa: Was music an important part of being provocative right from the beginning?

Deadswan: Yes, I remember when I discovered Soft Cell. That was an eye-opener for me.  That’s always been my group. 

Mischa: From the first album, the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret? 

Deadswan: Yeah, that one and before that it was Adam and the Ants. I went on a school trip to Oslo and they had this shop in Grensen; where they sold t-shirts and bondage gear and stuff.  I came home with an Adam and the Ants t-shirt with bondage imagery, and my mother was like,” what?” I  wore that to school and my bedroom walls were full of Adam and the Ants and then Soft Cell.

Mischa:  Tainted Love would have been huge, though. That was in the charts. 

Deadswan: Oh, yes. It was a huge success. People write them off as they were one hit wonder but they had hits. I mean it was really memorabilia and non-stop erotic dancing –  which is picked to be the first ecstasy record – I never heard anything like it. 

Mischa: So when you are playing this kind of stuff to the kids in the school, even tracks we consider hits today, they still thought it was weird?

Deadswan: They didn’t understand anything. 

Mischa: Following these acts, were you just listening to the music or were you also trying to emulate them in terms of how they presented themselves, like what they were wearing?

Deadswan: Yes, I went to school with my homemade bondage trousers, based on Adam Ant. You know, obsessed!

Mischa: At what point do you think like;  okay, I’m playing all this music. Let me try and put it together as a DJ set.

Deadswan:That was when I moved to Oslo. Because when I moved to Oslo, I got involved with queer activism, and we had this group called the pink rebels. We were running around at night, spray painting walls and having demonstrations.

And then we started taking over London pub (Oslo). One of the guys who worked there, who was also in pink rebels, got the opportunity to use the back room. It was an empty space so we got to make our own club there, called Shame Club. That’s where I started DJing. 

That was during the whole Madchester wave. So, it’s Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and British dance music like S’ Express, but of course Georgio Moroder, Donna Summer, Sylvester. 

Mischa: Was there a big scene in Oslo for that kind of music back then?

Deadswan:  No, we were one of the first places to play Acid and British Dance, but I always mixed it up with stuff like Deutsche American Freundschaft, Nitzer Ebb and Front 242. 

Mischa: Was there a bit of a queer scene happening in Oslo at that time? 

Deadswan: No queer scene. It was just the gays. Even there, we were the weird ones, we were the queers and they were the gays.

So then we started Strictly Kinky. Trying to cater to the more alternative crowd, but without sexuality being the main issue. So, we knocked on So What’s (where jaeger is today) doors. 

They were really reluctant. Because we had already started this group called Genitalia, which was doing performances. So they were like, “we’re not sure if this fits here,” but we were regulars so they knew us. 

They gave us a Sunday during Christmas and we redecorated the whole club. We built a huge vagina that you had to walk through, which we could never do today because he was made of plastic. If there had been a fire we would all perish. (laughs). We covered the walls in anime japanese porn.We made a real fetish club and people who dressed up got in for free. There were strictly no photographs allowed and we had performances, like a guy in the corner polishing boots. 

Mischa: It sounds like a torture garden.

Deadswan: Yeah, it was absolutely based on torture garden and it was a success. So What started giving us more dates, not like proper Fridays or Saturdays because it was still too alternative. But eventually, they saw that we could pull the crowd, and then we got very big headed. 

So we thought; “Let’s take this back to Bergen.” We rented a big pink bus and called it, “The magical Oompa Lumpa tour.” We filled it with freaks and drugs and went over to Bergen, where my parents were sitting on a patio looking down with a glass of white wine watching the freak show unfurl. 

Mischa: At what point do you start doing the iconoclastic stuff?

Deadswan: When So What closed we moved Strictly Kinky over to Kraftwerk, with Chris Lynch. And then after a while Little Wolf came along, So then that’s when we started, Iconoclastic. And then we moved it to Kill Your Ego.

Mischa: Was it a continuation of Strictly Kinky?

Deadswan: No, it was separate, it became more about the DJ. 

Mischa: This would have been around the time, or even before the time of our Electroclash became popular?

Deadswan: Yes, it kind of co-emerged.

Mischa : There was something in the air where people got tired of House and Techno. Did you go through the same thing? 

Deadswan: I didn’t get tired of it. It was more about looking backwards and finding the more obscure electronic sounds and movies. Liquid Sky was a huge inspiration for being weird and alienated, you know.  It was kind of tongue in cheek, but electroclash was still really frowned upon.

Mischa: Is that the kind of DJ style you always liked and preferred? 

Deadswan: Yes, I didn’t beatmix at all.

Mischa: When did that start?  

Deadswan: It started at Kill Your Ego, when I started playing with Lynch and Little Wolf, because they are really turntablist. I hung out there after hours iust playing and mixing and recording every night.  I could never beat mix on vinyl though. I have a huge library of CDs, and I’m not sure what I’m gonna do with it after Deadswan. (laughs)

Mischa:  At the same time you were doing Iconoclastic in Oslo, we  also had parties all around the world, especially in London, doing similar things, like Erol Alkan’s Trash. Was something in the air at that time for you? 

Deadswan: Yeah, We travelled to Nag-Nag a lot. I got to know Johnny Slut and Fil OK. Which was amazing because they were doing the same thing as we were doing. But the thing that differed Nag-Nag in London to Iconoclastic was everyone was speeding their tits off in Oslo. We brought over Princess Julia and we brought over War Boy and they were just shocked by the amount of drugs in Oslo. There was a kind of punk energy in the clubbing here.

Mischa: That reminds me of what you talked about earlier Genitalia. There was a very punk element to the performances that somehow also found its way on national TV.  From what I saw in a Youtube clip it was something like Club Kids doing sesame street. How did that happen?

Deadswan: We got this call from NRK and they said you want to come on an audition and I was like, no, I don’t want to be on national television. But we got there and dressed up like we used to, and we said:  “If we’re going to do this, we have to do it our way.”  I mean, they’re really strict, but they bent the rules for us. We did it for a year or something every Thursday. 

Mischa: What was the theme?

Deadswan: The theme was trend. We got sex-exploitation movies that we reviewed on air. We showed clips and then we talked over them. Describing what we were seeing and stuff. It was really trashy. It was kind of a talk show. Tongue and cheek, absurd. 

We got these really weird fan letters from jail from a guy who watched us religiously. He had this business idea that he would go to Germany and dig up all Nazi skulls and make them into piss pots and go to Israel to sell them.

I put this letter on facebook many years later and somehow that post ended up with this guy. So he sent me a message and befriended me. (laughs)

Mischa: Did he end up creating his business?

Deadswan: No, he didn’t. He had some issues, but he came out on the right side.

Mischa: Genitalia was a performance group, first and foremost however, was there a musical component to it?

Deadswan: Well, we got a record contract, and the guy who ran the record company also wanted to be our manager, and we were like; “what? This is weird”.  We didn’t end up doing that. 

Mischa: But you did end up in a musical group, Sadomaoistan. 

Deadswan: Yeah. But that was just the performance part.

Mischa. And what did that entail? 

Deadswan: Things like cutting ourselves…  On one occasion, I got this cleaning bill from Rockefeller because of that. Genitalia were Siamese twins, so we had these corsets joining us. And then we just got out our razors and started cutting each other.

This was at an AIDS benefit. Because we thought, “What’s the most scary thing that queers can experience?” Yes, sperm and blood! Nobody got it. We had such fun, but backstage was just full of blood so we had to pay for that.

I have this great picture of me with all the cuts. And then the photographer was “just one more, just one more” and I fainted. 

Mischa: And what did the organisers say, they were not happy?  

Deadswan: No. It was the same when we went to euro pride in Copenhagen. We were booked on the main stage and pride had become such a corporate thing. So we thought “let’s do something provocative.” The vocalist ate a lot of chilli con carne. And at the end of the show, we attacked him and – I’m not sure what we put into his mouth – but when he had to vomit, he vomited a rainbow flag.

The organisers came and took our badges, and ordered us to leave and “don’t come back!” We were always kind of more queer than gay. And we wanted to challenge the whole idea of this gay community thing. Sometimes with intentions and sometimes just for fun.

Mischa: I think people like you probably paved the way for a lot of what’s happening now especially in terms of being queer and being a DJ, but at the same time that kind of thing would not fly these days.

Deadswan: Yeah. The thing is, now, it’s all about safe spaces, you know. Everyone has this list of things you’re not allowed to do and we never had that. If we had any trouble, we had to deal with it. And I’m kind of worried that people are lulling themselves into this safe zone thing. There is no such thing as a safe space. You have to maintain it.

I think everybody should be woke, I can’t see the problem with that. If you have these kinds of strict rules; no homophobia, no transphobia, no racism, no sexism, you have to consider how you deal with it if it occurs. That’s where you have to have the focus. 

Mischa: Although you were in Sadomaoistan, you never tried your hand at music?

Deadswan:  No, I had always been a fan. I tried to go into the studio, but sitting listening to the same sound bites over and over and tweaking just bores the shit out of me. I always think that the best music has been made or someone is sitting making it now so i’m gonna discover it eventually. 

Mischa: Do you feel like the music that you played had to be an expression of who you are?

Deadswan: Yeah. That’s why I always loved everything with dirty samples and raunchy sex stuff. 

Mischa: What are you playing these days?

Deadswan: Yeah, that’s a question. I don’t want to say Deep House but I mean, I like epic, K-hole, tunnel stuff. I really like (I can’t say this,) Nina Kravitz. I mean what the fuck happened to her? I don’t understand but I really like her. I think it’s really hard to pinpoint what I play. I go back and forth. 

Mischa: Is there any period that stands out for you in terms of Djing?

Deadswan: Iconoclastic. Because we mixed everything up from, a-ha to Plastic Bertrand to Leila K to Kraftwerk. I remember DMX Krew was booked at Kill Your Ego. He played upstairs, and we had Iconoclastic in the atrium. He was just standing there looking up at us, and he was just; “what the fuck is this?” He did not get it at all. I think he came when we played “I’ve been losing” you by a-ha.

Then I wasn’t limited to beat mixing. But once you start beat-mixing, it’s really hard to get out of that loop. I was much more free when I didn’t beat mix. And then it becomes kind of like, you don’t want to fuck it up. So, I think that’s the drawback. 

Mischa: That brings me back to why you’re not DJing anymore. Is that part of the reason?

Deadswan: I’m not into the party scene anymore. Everything goes in at 140 bpm now. 

Mischa: I thought 140 BPM would have suited you?

Deadswan: Well, it’s the same as getting into black metal, if you really dive into it, you find the piece in there. And I guess that’s the same with the Techno that’s being played now, but I’m not really invested.

Mischa: That’s interesting. Because I thought this would have been the perfect time for a character like Deadswan to exist.

Deadswan: Yeah. Well you know like bands they always do come back so you never know, I just want to go out without this. I want to focus on other stuff. 

 

Flux takes over the basement in July

We give the keys to the basement to Flux Collective for every Friday in July.

This is what the sound in the basement is made for; machine music with designs on the bottom end and a dance floor. For one month in July, we’ll explore the soundsystem’s limits with a residency from the Flux collective. The Flux collective take over the basement for a whole month as Naboklage, Skodde, Anémi, and Bjerregaard bring their Techno concept to Jaeger with a host of friends and international guests joining the collective at Jaeger. Featuring appearances from Rove Ranger, DJ Broke, foufou malade, Nattl4mpe, Alsén, Betong, Take Kataka, The Unborn Child, Minus Magnus, Olav Eggestøl and BUGRUPPE90. 

With a host of international guests and a fair few local friends, Flux make the basement their home in the first of a Frædag x Flux joint venture. Frædag keep it cosy in the Gården with g-HA presiding over the weekly residency with guest appearances by Vinny Villbass, Mental Overdrive and Hetty while Flux shake the foundations down in our subterranean liar.

You can find all the events on our programme page.

Musikkfest 2023 – guide to Jaeger’s stage

Musikkfest 2023 is upon us with Jaeger hosting a stage from our gården featuring a whole bunch of artists and DJs. Here’s our guide to Jaeger Oslo’s stage.

With so much going on during Musikkfest 2023 it is always hard seeing some of your favourite acts, and harder still seeing new acts that might become some of your favourite acts. So, we thought we’d make it a little easier on you with a guide to the artists we’ve got playing on our backyard stage in order of appearance. You can check out the full lineup here. 

True Cuckoo (13:00 – 14:00)

Synth-wizard, You Tuber and “happy electro” button twiddler, True Cuckoo makes his second appearance on Jaeger’s stage. With a big international following of 160k+ subscribers on YouTube, Cuckoo is famed for his synth bleep jams, his invaluable tutorials on complex synthesisers and groove boxes, and for his unusually recognisable, positive, bubbling electronic musical style, which has become a bit of a signature for this bearded synth ninja. With a successful LP in the bag from last year and a prowess for the stage, he’s adept skills extend beyond the internet too. Here is playing in the basement earlier this year:

Why Kai? (14:00 – 15:00)

Oslo-based Jazz ensemble, Why Kai has been a staple on our Musikkfest stage since as far back as we can remember. A live band with a hand on the pulse of a dance floor, elements of soul and funk imbue their meticulously honed orchestrations. Blending bold experimentalism with beatific melodies and chirpy rhythms, the quartet’s sound is uniquely Norwegian as technical ability and curiosity find accessible outlets. Their last album Deep Fishing is only a year old and well worth the dip. Why Kai? … Why Not?

Mutual Intentions (15:00 – 18:00)

Mutual Intentions are back in that sweet spot for Musikkfest at Jaeger and we’ve given them the run of the stage in what is becoming an annual tradition. The Oslo-music collective is a highlight in the city at the moment,  and  we can’t stop singing their praises. With live performances from Ivan Ave, Arthur Kay, Kristoffer Eikrem, DUMMY THICC and Sigmund Vestrheim interrupted by DJ sets from Stian Stu and the rest of the Mutual Intentions crew, Mutual Intentions have a busy programme this year.

Mutual Intentions’ star has been embedded in the firmament of Oslo’s music community and with a release schedule that simply won’t quit they have remained at the forefront of genres like Hip Hop and House, garnering an international audience in their efforts. Just this year they’ve released All season gear from Ivan Ave, the 3rd album from Tøyen Holding, and two albums featuring Fredfades. they are operating on another level, and the stage offers a rarefied glimpse of the extent of their musical reach. Here’s Ivan Ave doing his thing and here’s an interview with him from our archives.

LAFT (18:00 – 18:45)

LAFT are Håkon Vinnogg (Vinny Villbass) and Tomas Järmer (Motorpsycho). Combining their efforts they make House music with a penchant for the organic resonances from live spontaneity. Their bio reads: “Together they seek to explore functional dance floor communication built around unique improvisations. Their structural and compelling sound is carefully composed and expertly performed with real musicianship and thrilling rhythms at its core.” With Håkon’s established dance floor credentials and Tomas’ reputation for beating the shit out of a drum the pair have found a unique sound on their first record, New Objectivity. Have a listen:

Charlotte Bendiks & Nefertiti (18:45 – 19:45 & 22:00 – 23:00)

It wouldn’t be Jaeger without a DJ set or two and besides the Mutual Intentions’ interludes Charlotte Bendiks and Nefertiti will prime the dance floor during the first of two sets from the sauna. Charlotte Bendiks is back! The Tromsø native always conjures a vibe for the dance floor with her corporeal approach to dance music. Between Techno and House, and with a focus on the percussive rhythm, Charlotte Bendiks’ DJ sets are forged in the mystical impulsiveness of ritualism. She’s an established artist to boot with releases on the likes of cómeme and love OD.

Charlotte is not alone this time as she  joins forces with a DJ that has  been a feature in Jaeger’s booth fo late, Nefertiti. Building on those same rhythmical impulses as bendiks, Nefertiti takes them closer to home, indulging images of Africa as she combines euro-centric elements of House- and Techno music, with Afro-beat, GQOM and Amapiano. Together, Charlotte Bendiks and Nefertiti leave no course uncharted in dance music. Here’s Charlotte Bendiks doing her thing on Rinse FM:

Ost & Kjex (19:45 – 20:30)

Ost & Kjex (Petter Haavik & Tore Gjedrem) are a comic strip brought to life in 4D. Fuelled by a Dadaistic approach to music, art and life, they’ve drawn an international audience to their work with records on Crosstown Rebels, Solomun’s Diynamic and more recently Snick Snack Music. Snick Snack is the label Ost & Kjex, alongside Truls & Robin, have been dedicating all their time too. Featuring artists like Robert Owens to Øyvind Morken, the label is making waves here and across the seas, set in motion by Ost & Kjex LP, Songs from the end of the world. On stage however, Ost and Kjex continue to travel the world as a live act with stamps from Panorama Bar, Fabric, ADE, Sonar, Rex, and tons of other famous clubs and festivals smudged through their passports. Ost & Kjex bring an indelible energy to the stage as they channel the sounds of their vast discography into jubilant live shows. Here they are performing for Oslo Clubcast. 

Third Attempt (20:30 – 21:15)

As we’ve said in the past, the third time’s the charm for this young artist. Whether DJing or more likely, playing live, Third Attempt is now an established artist in his own right. His last record found it’s way out via the internationally acclaimed and scando-favourite label, Paper Recordings as they started highlighting the next generation of artists following in the footsteps of the likes of  Bjørn Torske and Rune Lindbæk. With affiliations to Tromsø and making his own mark in the landscape Third Attempt is a descendent of that legacy and one of the torch bearers for new electronic music in Norway. His productions utilise those live performative elements of Jazz, Soul and Funk and re-establish them in a progressive, House aesthetic.

 Karolinski (21:15 -22:00)

Karolinski is a force like no other. The artist and DJ approaches everything with a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that charges the air and touches eveybody and everything in its wake. Whether she’s DJing, playing saxophone, making remixes, producing, and most of all playing live, she arrives with a palpable energy. Last time she played live at Jaeger she literally rattled the very foundations with her bass-heavy set from the basement. Between Dub, Techno, Drum n Bass and House music, Karolinski’s touch knows no bounds. This will be her first live set at Jaeger in some time, so who knows where her musical inclinations will take us. Best to just strap in and enjoy the ride. Here are some possible clues from her recent discography.

 O. Blom (23:00 – 00:00)

O. Blom (previously Ra-Shidi) is back in the fray in Oslo and like her compatriot Charlotte Bendiks she has a proclivity for percussion. She’s starting to become a fixture again in the city after a brief stint in Bergen and while tempos have eked out to unattainable heights everywhere else, O. Blom has remained steady in her pursuits in finding that balance between the dance floor and musical enlightenment. Here she is in a cathartic mood for the most recent Jaeger mix.

g-HA & Olanskii (00:00 – 03:00)

Sunkissed residents and Frædag mainstays g-HA & Olanskii conclude proceedings for this Musikkfest. The DJ duo assume the position in our Sauna as we go from festival to club night. As two of the pillars of our little establishment, none know Jaeger’s dance floor better than these two veterans of Oslo’s clubbing scene. From Foot Food, established back in the days of Skansen by g-HA to every Friday at Jaeger, their combined efforts have laid the foundation for much of the city’s clubbing scene. g-HA & Olanskii are an event, a club, a DJ duo, and a musical authority for Norway.

Masterclass with Louie Vega

From his earliest days as a young DJ and enthusiast around the likes of Paradise Garage to his award winning work as one half of Masters at Work, Louie Vega is a House music institution today. We sat down with the DJ and artists between soundcheck and a set at Jaeger to talk about legendary sound systems, DJing as a 15 year old, MAW and the next  step in the Vega dynasty.

Louie Vega has played on some legendary sound systems throughout his career, especially when he was starting out. He was there during the dawn of the club sound system in New York, when people like Richard Long and Alex Rosner were designing some of the best sound systems for the likes of the Loft, Paradise Garage and Zanzibar. These places and systems would become the archetype for everything that we know today and inform much of what Ola and Jaeger’s been creating down in the basement over the years. 

Louie Vega is as much a disciple of these sonic prophets as he is the continuation for their work and legacy. He was there at the source and is one of the direct descendants of audiophiles like Rosner and Long and the DJs that made those sound systems great like Larry Levan and David Mancuso.

It takes a while for that to sink in as Louie darts between each speaker enclave in Jaeger’s subterranean sonic liar; his enthusiasm for a sound system has not tempered in the slightest. 

“That was a special time,” intones the New York DJ  through a smile, when I ask about those early days in New York. “Those were the pioneers and the ones who laid down the blueprint.” New York at that time was a mecca for sound system culture, and from the impromptu street battles (which Louie knew all too well) to the legendary clubs that were born during that time, we still hold in much esteem as the catalyst of our culture today. It was like the city “had 25 Ministry of Sounds,” according to Louie and it’s this legacy that still informs everything he represents today. 

“I’ve been around great sounding sound systems as a kid already,” elaborates Louie. He was “not even playing the clubs yet,” when he started “going to the clubs and listening to the DJs and absorbing” everything. He might have been half a generation too late for places like the Loft, but as soon as he could, he started going out to the likes of Paradise Garage with his older siblings. Louie recalls his first acquaintance with Paradise. “I was 15 when I got into the Garage because of my sisters. I went to a members-only night. That was the first time I saw Larry (Levan). I’ll never forget hearing all these great records like ‘street player;’ all these records that we love now, we heard them there early.”

At 15, Louie was already a veteran DJ, having started from the impossible age of 12. By his late teens he would be established. Hosting block parties around the Bronx from a young age –  ”I had a big soundsystem too; six stacks” – Louie started amassing followers in their thousands and by the time he got his first  shot at an established club, he “brought all the young kids’” with him. That led to his first residency at New York’s Devil Nest, and every Friday and Saturday night he would have the place packed. “I had 2500 – 3000 kids in the club at that time, I was only 19.”  Alongside the other established DJs of the time like David Morales and Tony Humphries, Louie was “the kid” and the honorific “little” stuck because of his relative age. 

Over the years Louie dropped the “Little” misnomer as he became one of the elder statesmen of House music and DJing during the late 1990s. As a solo artist and one half of Masters at Work with Kenny Dope, Louie Vega is a household name today within House music echelons and beyond. 

“How are the ears,” I wonder after all these years listening to these punishing sound systems. He says he’s been “lucky” that they’ve been holding up all these years, without much extra thought to protection – although he has an appointment to be fitted with earplugs soon. 

Louie’s unalienable American ability to engage and his ebullient character makes conversing a pleasure; a humility that’s down to earth. Throughout his career he’s become a monolith in House music circles, a true legend that stands shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan and one of the pivotal figures in bringing House music to the masses. “That’s what they say,” he says in a coy smile that suggests he doesn’t agree, but with 8 grammy nominations and one on his pedestal, Louie Vega has the accolades to validate that claim. 

He continues to be a giant in our scene today, with a legacy that spans generations and continues to hit a nerve even if it’s out of the influence of popularity. Judging from his social media he is always playing or on his way to playing somewhere and yet he still finds the time to release a record… or four. 

His latest, Expansions in the NYC is a quartet of records that celebrate his hometown and offers a birds-eye view of the sonic quality of the party-series that Louie operates under the same name. Elements of House, Funk, R&B, Afro, gospel and those omnipresent Latin influences converge on the extended LP with the help of some heavy collaborators. Moodymann, Kerri Chandler, Joe Clausell, Honey Dijon and many more assist in Louie’s love letter to New York city. It’s a family affair with the presence of his wife Anané and son Nico, really reinforcing the connections across twenty two classic House tracks and on Cosmic Witch things get eerily serendipitous as a song originally composed by Dwight Brewster.

“The crazy thing” says Louie “is Dwight Brewster, he wrote that song – and he was in my uncle’s band on the first album.“ That uncle is Héctor Lavoe of course; the latin crooner who worked with the likes of Willie Cólon and Fania All Stars in congress with a successful solo recording career. Between his uncle and his father, an accomplished musician in his own right, Louie found a firm foundation from which to build his own musical dialect. His formative years in music had cemented something early on for Louie. “When it’s around you,” he says of the music, “it instils itself in your brain and in your ears and you start developing.” 

It seems this has gone full circle in the Vega family, with Louie’s son now showing the same kind of potential for music as a younger Louie did. As the son of an accomplished DJ, Nico Vega used to follow his father and mother around the globe as a kid, joining them for the likes of their various Ibiza residencies and Miami winter conferences, where daytime events allowed the younger Vega to be around them as they worked. “It’s always been in his blood and in his mind,” suggests Louie, but it seems he’d been pretty reserved about exploiting the family business.

Although he played piano and guitar, he never showed much interest in his father’s home studio, ironically called Daddy’s Workshop. It was “not until I invited him,” that Louie says he saw some potential in his progeny. After hearing him play and programme keys in the studio, Louie gave his son an Ableton studio setup from which he could explore this latent talent further. Louie “started hearing bass-lines and beats, and I was like what is going on, this sounds like records I would play.” It ended in Nico Vega actually mixing down a track on Expansions in the NYC. “It’s amazing… He learnt it on its own,” beams Louie like any proud father would. 

Later that evening Jaeger’s basement is filling and people are starting to press closer to the front. The air seems suddenly charged with something. Towards the back, where there’s more space, a crew of younger dancers, have been breaking out some fancy footwork the entire night, but even they seem to turn their attention to the DJ booth as people cheer on the guest of honour. Louie, wearing what has become his signature wide-brimmed hat, cuts in the first track and sets off. 

The crowd is a heady mixture of young and old, touching on most of Oslo’s cultural sectors, much like Louie’s music touches on those eclectic sounds of New York’s diaspora. I remember Louie’s last appearance at Jaeger and it’s a very similar crowd and I brought it up with him during our conversation earlier. “When you go to my parties it’s a mix,” he says happily and he’s become aware of the generational spectrum that occupies his dance floors. “That’s the way it is now,” he agrees. “I get the parents and the kids, which is beautiful.” Some of the parties he plays in New York, still bring out those original faces that followed him from the Bronx into the city all those years ago. “They kept on following me wherever I would go,” he claims. “Even to this day, some people that come to see me play in the clubs, they were there 40 years ago, it’s crazy.“

The main difference between then and now however is that Louie has a lifelong career as a DJ and producer and when it comes to House music records, the name Louie Vega and Masters at Work has become synonymous with the genre and he maintains that position by staying relevant, with an incredible enthusiasm that just won’t seem to wane. Does he ever feel he needs to stay contemporary though?

“I’m doing my own thing, and the goal is to create your own lane,” comes his reply. He has dominated that lane for his entire career, and his sound has become so intertwined in the sound of House music it’s often difficult to extricate the name Louie Vega with House music. As a recording artist, he’s “dedicated 35 years” of his life to the genre and from the first record he did in 1988 to his latest that dedication has been determined and consistent. 

It all started innocently enough for Louie. He was still cutting his teeth in New York’s club scene, playing his records to the dedicated few he brought with him from the Bronx, when record labels started noticing his skill. It was still a time when label heads and A&R guys would be visiting clubs to hear what works and what’s hot. “They always wanted to know who’s new and who’s happening,” and Louie ticked all those boxes for Joey Gardiner, the A&R man for the legendary label Tommy Boy records.

“There’s this record that I picked from Minneapolis, called Running by Information Society,” recalls Louie about their first meeting. Running “became the biggest record of that club and when we got the band to perform there was a line around the corner.” Joey Gardiner sought to licence the record for Tommy Boy and with Louie’s predilection for the dance floor in mind, enlisted the DJ for remix duties on the record. “I never remixed a record,” thought Louie at the time, “what am I gonna do? Gardiner said; Louie… just come into the studio and tell me what you hear.” Suddenly all these elements that Louie hadn’t heard on the original jumped out at him from the mixing console. “I heard all this movement,” remembers Louie gesturing in the air.

“Next thing you know, that record became huge and from there things started growing. I did another one for them, ‘What’s on your mind,’ and that was a pop hit.” It was Louie’s first foray in touching the charts with a House track but wouldn’t be the last. 

“I was doing pop music,” insists Louie, “but trying to give it a little dance thing.” Working from little more than a drum machine a keyboard, pop artists like Debbie Gibson started enlisting Louie for remix duties, and when Marc Anthony eventually called for Ride on the Rhythm, the success and cross-over appeal of that record, would lunch Louie Vega into the upper tier of recording artists and make him a household name across the globe.

Everything coalesced with Ride on the Rhythm including Masters at Work. It was right around that time that he first met Masters at Work partner, Kenny Dope. Louie tells the story:  “I was in the studio  for six months, I wanted him to make beats for some of the records and he ended up working on a lot of it. From there I was like we got this thing that feels good, let’s make a record from scratch and we did that Ride record on the B-side of Ride on the Rhythm. And I was like; there’s something here, it’s a different feeling- this happens when we’re together.” 

From there on Louie Vega only existed in the context of Masters at Work. They would continue remixing pop artists like Debbie Gibson and Marc Anthony, but these remixes would take on a different form, stripping back the originals to their essential parts and reconstructing them in what would become a uniquely Masters at Work sound. Louie and Kenny would “use the B-side of records and put Masters at Work dubs” on the other side which used little more than a hook.  

“Imagine hearing Britney Spears today,” explains Louie searching for the analogy, “and  there’s a dub in there that’s underground. That’s what we were doing. And then everybody wanted a Masters at Work mix.” And everybody is hardly an exaggeration. In the 1000’s of remix credits MAW enjoy, names like Michael Jackson and Diana Ross make regular appearances, and  with names like Bjørk and Ce Ce Pensiton dotted throughout, there was nothing that Louie and Kenny’s midas touch didn’t reach. 

It cemented the Masters at Work sound and also put those records in the hands of an ever changing audience. Coming across a MAW record today in a used shelf, it still elicits a special feeling, like you’re holding something of innate quality and extraordinary power. It’s the result of “working 14 hours a day for ten years,” according to Louie. “That’s why it had such an impact – it was a big body of work and it was consistent.” And there is still more to come from it. Recently Louie and Kenny have been unearthing a treasure trove of forgotten sessions from that time in a new series called MAW Lost Tapes.

“MAW lost tapes are all those old tapes from those ten years,” explains Louie. “We took them out of storage and as we looked through them we found new music we didn’t hear before.” Pieces of records that landed on the “don’t use” piles all those years ago are now being recontextualised in a series that’s 3 releases deep so far and has much more to give. 

It’s just another project in a never-ending stream of projects for Louie Vega. His work ethic is incorrigible and yet when you talk to him there’s effortless ease to the persona, like he’s just stepped off a beach somewhere. Making time for our conversation between a soundcheck and a dinner reservation, while trying to arrange a lost bag from the airline, Louie doesn’t wear even the slightest sign of stress on his entire demeanour. It’s something that he carries with him to the booth as well and its effect is infectious. There’s an enjoyment there that has diminished little and it encapsulates everything, from making records to playing records, and hearing a new sound system for the first time.

It’s hard to let him go, I could ask a million questions. We barely skate over his time during New York clubbing’s heyday, the creation of MAW and what it was like to win a Grammy. He talks in reverent tones about wife Anané’s music, label and their DJ collaboration for The Ritual – “That came by mistake” – and in the laundry list of names he praises, people like Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles make regular appearances. There’s a humility there that seems unusual in the context of his own contributions to this music.

Listening to Louie later that evening in the basement, that affable nature permeates through the music, and its effect on the dance floor is visible. People crowd the booth, and at the end of the night, everybody is eager to get a picture with Louie Vega. He respects every request, a smile never leaving his face, and then he is off to his next appointment. 

Words by Misha Mathys

Get that funk out of the trunk: 20 years of Trunkfunk with DJ Nibc

This article was originally scheduled to appear in 2020, but due to the pandemic and closed borders we had the postpone NIBC’s visit and the related content. With an appearance scheduled for the 16th of May at Loving Tuesdays, it made sense to finally release the article. Although Trunkfunk is now almost 23 the questions remain relevant. 

Between the end of the nineties, and the first few years of our new millenium, when Y2K fears were quelled and Hip Hop’s success finally caught up to the hyperbole their lyrics conveyed, a small independent dance music label with big room aspirations was born in Gothenburg Sweden. 

Gestating within a healthy electronic club music community that went beyond Gothenborg and even Sweden, a label called Trunkfunk came to be as the brainchild of Fredrik Nyberg, better known as DJ Nibc. It was the product of the newfound enthusiasm for electronic music that came in the late nineties, and an environment conducive of experimentation across genres.

The label took shape around a group of live electronic artists spearheaded by Nyberg, and what was initially meant as an simple outlet for the music he and fellow producers were beginning to make, simply blasted out of the gate with a split release by two Swedish powerhouses in the House and Techno scene. Chuck Cogan and Gunnar Underground launched the label with a bang on the collaborative effort “Summer Breeze,” which moved in the same circles of Filter House trends established by the likes of Daft Punk and Armand van Helden at the same time.

It brought immediate attention to the label, and just like that the label went into hiatus…. Oddly it would take another five years for Trunkfunk to return, but as it did, the artists behind the label and specifically DJ Nibc, began to define the label’s sound as something that was built on the DIY foundations of House, Techno and Electro, with a focus on the funkier elements of those genres.

Since Trunkfunk started, a “feature of the label” has been its “three distinct phases” Nyberg tells me over a telephone call from Gothenburg. While Trunkfunk has gone from flirting with commercial success in Sweden to pulling the label and its sound closer to the underground in Berlin (where Nyberg lived for some time), there’s been succinct evolutions through the label’s history. It has, for the most part,  revolved around the artist, DJ, producer and club night promoter at the core of the label, DJ Nibc and as Trunkfunk moves into its 20th year, another new phase for the label is imminent again.  

With a 20th anniversary compilation primed, featuring the likes of Skatebård, Voiski, Art Alfie and many more for the end of 2020, and the Trunkfunk events  going forward after Nyberg has relocated to Gothenburg, the Trunkfunk name will continue to be a dominant presence. With a pre-emptive celebration looming at Jaeger this weekend for label affiliate Vinny Villbass’ Badabing, I phoned up Fredrik Nyberg for a quick trip down memory lane ahead of the event. 

20 years, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Yeah, it’s crazy how time flies, it doesn’t feel like twenty years. 

It feels like only yesterday when I heard your track “Without a Trace,” and that was on the 15 year compilation. 

It feels that between 15 years and now, it’s gone superfast. It feels like that when it started and between 5 and 10 years, that was way longer between those things happening. 

How has it been possible for you to run a label for that long?

I think the main motivation and passion has always been connected between running club nights, DJing and music. Music has been my main thing in life. Looking at the label side of things it’s a bit strange, because I’ve been doing so many different things. The label has been living its own life and it’s almost like a diary of different eras. It’s been a very organic way of running the label. 

So, are you celebrating twenty years of the club night too, or did the label come first and then the club night?

The label came first and ten years ago I started the club night. I had been doing club nights before then as well, but they weren’t called Trunkfunk. Instead of starting another concept I wanted to do everything under one name. So roughly, it’s been ten years for the parties, in Gothenburg and I’ve been doing trunkfunk parties in Berlin and Stökholm too. 

And the club night is an extension of the label, I assume.

Yes, exactly. It’s also been two different storylines. Not everything from the club night has been connected to the label or the other way around. They have lived parallel lives. 

It’s curious, because a couple of weeks after you’re celebrating twenty years, we’ve got Dial celebrating twenty years too and there are a few more labels that also sprang into existence at that time. Was there something conducive of that time that contributed to the insurgence of small independent labels at that time?

I think so. It was an interesting time between 1999 and 2000 when we started. We didn’t have a clue about what we were doing. It was me and two other guys doing live shows. We saved up from doing the live shows into the first record. Everything happened randomly. It was very much a process of learning by doing, and it took almost 5-6 years before we understood all the legal aspects of how everything worked. We were making music, performing and getting some gigs and a following, but we didn’t know anything about the music industry. 

Did the label start off as a vehicle for your own releases?

That was the original idea, but the very first release was from another Swedish artist. We didn’t feel our own tracks were strong enough. Our tracks were more like live performance tracks. That was (some of) the motivation for the label, but it was also about creating this kind of community. 

Was it Sweden or was it largely focussed on Gothenburg?

We were touring, Stockholm and Copenhagen, all around Sweden. About Twenty years ago there were some decent clubs in smaller cities in Sweden to play live.

Tell me about that first release for Gunnar Underground and Chuck Cogan, how did it arrive on the label?

They were two talented producers that had already released on some bigger labels in the UK. We just admired their music and they had so much talent we just wanted to put their music out first. We didn’t have any pr strategy, other than making it available to the world. It was a strange experience, but we were super excited by the release. 

In terms of the sound of the label, was that established with that first record, or did you only have a vague idea of what you wanted the label to sound like eventually?

This was around the trend of the late nineties and that big French, filter house sound. That was our take on that, but also some of it was Chicago influenced or like deep House. We had a lot of tracks, but the thing was after this first release, we didn’t have a plan for the next one, so it took some years before we released the second release on Trunkfunk. In some sense it started  again five years later with the second release. 

After this second release did the focus turn to your own releases?

Actually yes, but also the people I was working with at the beginning of Trunkfunk, they left. It was me and Carl Ryden (together as Tyken) that started again as the Trunkfunk brand and took my earlier ideas, and made new versions. Then it became an outlet for my own music. 

Did a sound start to coalesce more around the label as a result?

Yeah, we worked together closely for a couple of years. 

It seems that the funk aspect to the name plays a prominent role in the music, where what is largely House music, always has that element of funk to it. 

Definitely. I think the original name came from a nineties Hip Hop record, and before there was Trunkfunk records, there was Trunkfunk brothers. Which was me and two other guys, and we kept that kind of funk vibe, but took it into different territories. It’s always been a mixture of that vibe, throughout the journey, but there have been very different styles throughout the years. 

When you are looking for other artists to contribute to the label, what usually draws you to their music?

We try to reach anyone we can get in touch with. We are really open to hearing new and interesting stuff, and it can be anything, from Electro, to Techno to House. The main part of this journey so far is about being on the move to the next thing. We never really stuck with one style. Of course there is always this retro element from when we started in the nineties. 

You’ve been releasing music steadily since that second phase, but was there ever a time, when you were a little dismayed by the music out there?

There’ve been a lot of times when we were not that inspired about what was going on, where there wasn’t anything for us to contribute. Like the minimal tech sound happening about 12 years ago, when I moved to Berlin. We had to find our own place within that sound. 

There was also a period where we thought we’d put out one release a month to see what would happen. Then for me it became about keeping track of a lot of admin stuff, which killed the vibe. I could see the effect of the popularity of the label, so it had both good and bad qualities. 

Did you notice that between Sweden and Berlin, your perception of music changed, and that it might have affected your own music and the label? 

Definitely. When I was living in Sweden I was more influenced by commercial music. When we started in 1999, there were underground Swedish DJs releasing big commercial tracks. We were trying to do the same, and we had a lot of Trunkfunk releases that were being played on BBC1 and national radio. 

That was my purpose when I lived in Sweden, but when I moved to Berlin, and saw how big the underground culture was, and noticed how many places you could play in a more underground way, that affected my purpose with Trunkfunk. In the last 10-12 years it went a lot more underground in terms of sound. 

Do you think it is easier today, in a digital landscape where there is so much space for new music, than before when you had to put out a record to get it into a DJ’s hands?

Yes, in some ways it’s easier now, but in some ways it’s much harder, because you have social media and all these PR responsibilities that go with it and takes some time away from the studio. It’s so saturated today, that good music will get lost in a sea of loads of releases. 

Do you find some joy in doing the promo and PR?

I think I enjoy all the different aspects of music, including the label, Djing and making music. It changed for me around 2 or 3 years ago, when I started a secret new label and alias, because that gave me the freedom to not look back at Trunkfunk, and following the same line that I’ve been drawing in the sand. Then I got some new energy for it, like a blank slate, creating something from scratch and being anonymous about it. I wasn’t being judged from what I did in the past. 

Speaking about the label and the motivation on PR; it’s funny because you can be pretty artistic in new ways now that you couldn’t before. I like to use Varg as an example; he does a really cool social media thing, where he portrays himself like a Hip Hop artist. It reminds me of how Green Velvet was a “punk guy” and had his own take on being an artist and creating a persona. 

You’re still releasing music as NIBC on the label. How has it affected the change in your own music through the years?

At the time of the very first NIBC track (Deliverance), the time I spent working in the studio to finish one track would take about one year. Now I make a lot of music, and I make a lot of rough sketches, which I treat almost like remixes, and that’s the work process for me now, as opposed to when Trunkfunk started. It’s so much easier to work with stuff that you haven’t spent too much time on. 

Going forward with the label into the future, and into the present. What do you have planned for Trunkfunk and how do you see it evolving after this milestone?

It’s going into a different direction. I remember when we turned 10, we were still in that era of doing more commercial stuff. I had just moved to Berlin and it was hard for me to choose where we were going, and the stuff we had already released. The way I solved that situation back then was having a lot of remixes on the label. So I could have a banging Techno remix of a poppy track. That was the intersection of those two eras, while now for me, it’s moving back to where we started with twenty years of experience. With the parties, we’re going to be a bit more selective, because I moved back to Gothenburg and my focus here is not doing a club concept for another ten years, but keeping it rare and more special. 

And you’ll be doing another compilation for this anniversary. 

This anniversary there will be twenty tracks from twenty different artists. They all sound similar, whereas in the past there were a lot of different styles. This twentieth anniversary will have a more unison-sounding release. 

I imagine that your set at Jaeger will gravitate towards that sound. 

Yes, I will play a lot of the tracks from the compilation.

 

Free falling with Steffi

Steffi has been there at every stage of club music. From playing the dark bunkers in her native Netherland to that 5am slot at Berghain where she holds a residency, and then back to some obscure hole-in-the-wall in a  2nd city, Steffi’s range as a DJ extends far beyond the scope of whatever style-du-jour-box people try to place her in. There’s an instinctive quality that tugs at the core of the body and a sensibility that goes way beyond the immediacy of the beat. 

It’s something that extends to her work in the studio too, where she can deliver the enthusiasm of peak time at one end of the spectrum, or delve deep into the inner workings of her machine with scientific-like precision at the other end. At the core of her work is a innate understanding of the legacy of this machine music, hewed to a pristine perfection that has covered a fair few albums and Eps, most of which for Berghain’s Ostgut Ton imprint if not for her own labels, like Klakson, Dolly or the newly established Candy Mountain imprint. 

Candy Mountain marks a new chapter in Steffi’s career, coming at the same time as a permanent move for her and her partner Virginia to Portugal from Berlin and providing a platform for her latest LP and the first album outside of the Ostgut franchise, The Red Hunter. A label, studio, retreat and much more, Candy Mountain sits alongside Klakson and Dolly in Steffi’s extensive scope on club music. As an artist, Red Hunter took Steffi’s sounds on the borders of the dance floor with broken beats, and brooding synthesisers floating through the arrangements. Dedicated to her late mother, the record finds Steffi in a reflective and serene mood, without completely disengaging with the sound of her club sets. 

There’s a lot that’s in flux with the sound of Steffi’s sets at the moment and a lot in congruence with the sound of her Klakson label. Where Dolly took up most of her time during her tenure in Berlin it seems Klakson has focussed Steffi’s attention towards the sounds of Electro, EBM and the dance floor’s outlier genres. It’s taken up a clarion call for these genres and styles with artists like 214, Fastgraph and The Hacker contributing to the label alongside Steffi’s own contributions and her collaborative projects like Negroni Nails. 

Does this mark a new phase for Steffi, and how has her move to Portugal affected her music and her pursuits as a DJ? With these questions and more burning, we sent off an email to Steffi ahead of her appearance at Jaeger tonight. 

Let’s start with Candy Mountain, and your  move to Portugal. It seems like you are establishing an electronic music community down there with studios, a label, a retreat. What is the history behind Candy Mountain and what does it all entail?

We bought a house in Portugal in 2017 to spend our time between Berlin and the Portuguese countryside. In 2020 we wrapped up our lives in Berlin, ended up moving everything to Portugal permanently and we set up Candy Mountain. Candy Mountain is a label, studio space and creative hub. It is an artist-driven platform based here in the countryside of Portugal but operates on a global level. The studio sits in the middle of nature. artists can live and work under the same roof with zero distractions in a tranquil environment. The perfect space to work and also connect with the local scene in Portugal. we both feel that it’s important to give something back to the place we moved to and welcomed us so we hope to do so with this new concept

.I know you and Virginia had already been living between Portugal and Berlin in the past, but what inspired the permanent move?

We wanted to move eventually but covid 2019 came and we were in lock down in our house in Portugal and realized it was not going to be a small one so we decided to pack up Berlin as traveling up and down became impossible.

And from what I understand, it’s a little outside Lisbon, and somewhat remote. Why there?

Nature!

I know this might be a bit of an abstract thing, but do you think it’s had an effect on your music and anything in terms of DJing since the move?

It had a massive effect on my mindset in the positive sense. It’s much easier to unwind here than in a city and I am focussed on different things here. 

So far Candy Mountain is an exclusive vehicle for Steffi, but I assume that will change as the results of these musical residencies come to fruition. What’s going to be the first release from a guest artist and what’s going to be the process for selecting music for this label in particular; does it have to come out of that studio specifically?

CaMo002 will be a 12 inch by Tracing Xircles with an amazing D-Bridge remix! Nothing needs to come out of the studio in the end but it’s there if people want to come over and use it for a possible release. Locals or artists abroad. It’s all about options and making things happen in the end. The idea is all about collaborations with people we appreciate in our inner circle and opening the door to the scene here in Portugal.

Tell me a bit about the studio, because your Berlin studio was well documented in the past. Has it basically been transplanted from Berlin to Portugal and what if any fundamental changes have affected your workflow?

It’s basically a mirror from what I had as a set up in Berlin merged with Virginia’s studio. The workflow is pretty similar actually. On top of that, we have a great outdoor space for small parties and get-togethers and the ground floor is a super cosy studio apartment to stay in with a dj set up.

I am aware of the thematic concept behind Red Hunter in terms of a record dedicated to your mother, but was there a specific musical concept or goal behind it?

I have been writing this album over the last 3/4 years and the foundation of these songs were done in so many different settings and places rather than writing it in one go what I normally would do. Looking at it from a more conceptual aspect I really wanted to dive deeper into my rhythm sections and take that to a next level. More definition and detail was my main goal. Small melodies on top of complex and heavy beats. Rhythm becoming an melodic element. The red hunter, it’s the first track I have written in this particular vain/mood and also defines the sound of the whole album perfectly for me. When I finished this track I knew I wanted to write a whole album in around this song and it was clear where the sound needed to go. It gave me the kickstart of the whole creative process for this album basically.

Candy Mountain finds itself in what is already a busy label franchise from you, alongside Klakson and the Dolly suite of labels. Where does Candy Mountain fit into that spectrum in terms of sound and concept?

It has no stylistic boundaries so we can just jump and take a free fall :-)

How do you decide what gets the attention and what goes where, especially in terms of our own music?

Well klakson and dolly have shaped themselves up quite well during the last 20 plus years. Dolly is more house and techno related and klakson has always had a focus on electro so that line is quite clear. I don’t feature myself too much on those labels because I always wanted to release other people’s music and build up artists for those platforms. I have worked with ostgut ton for my solo stuff mostly and when it was time to spread my wings it was the perfect time to found a new imprint for my album with Candy Mountain.

It seems in recent years Klakson has also taken over a bit from Dolly in terms of your focus. I know you’ve said in the past Klakson is a label you’ll pick up when the time and the music is right for it. What is it about this period and the music you’re bringing out on the label that has encouraged this flurry of activity recently?

The beauty is that I can play around so much and one does not exclude the other. Important for me is though when there is nothing to tell on one label, it just takes a pause so it never loses quality but just takes a nap. klakson woke up because the time was right and had a lot to tell. It’s a great dynamic to juggle between brother and sister. Stay tuned because there will be some interesting new stuff coming on Dolly. She has new stories to tell. 

Photo by Stephan Redel

Personally, I feel that it is the perfect time for a label like Klakson to exist, with something a little more cognitive for the dance floor. And I feel from listening to your last LP and some of your recent mixes online, that you might feel the same. Where do your musical allegiances lie at the moment when it comes to what you’re listening to, playing and making?

My pallet is so wide when it comes to playing and making music. I find it very unattractive to focus on just one thing as my taste is simply too diverse. I am a music freak and I buy whatever I like to hear and play whatever I feel like. I love being able to have a side of me that produces and plays abstract electro, IDM and broken stuff and the other side that loves dance floor stuff like house and techno. It’s always been like this. It resonates on my labels, dj sets and through my productions and remixes. 

If we listen to an early track like Yours, and then most of Red Hunter there’s a clear distinction there, but then if you throw in a track like All living things from 2017 there’s an evolution too. As an artist how do you reflect on these different periods in relationship to where you are now musically?

Evolution. For me it’s a journey and I have dreams and goals and ideas on the horizon I wanna reach. All of what I have done so far are logical steps in my creative development. Like I said I love being able to go abstract and push the boundaries there but I also love to write straight up dance floor stuff. Over the years as a producer I became more and more skilled to be able to do that and this is amazing for my creative expression.

Is there any relationship to the music you’re making today compared to what you were listening to and playing back when you started in the Netherlands as a DJ and promoter?

Yes, I knew all along that one day I wanted to make an album like the red hunter one day and of course the musical influences shape you as a producer big time.

What was your focus back then in terms of music and how did it inform what would become a  career? 

The passion of music has been the main drive. Always. I never had any plans to be making money from dj-ing or producing music. This all went gradually to be honest. I do have to say when I moved to Berlin in 2007 I was aware that this could be a possibility for me to drop my work as a free-lance graphic designer and live off of my dj gigs but even then I wasn’t focussed on dj-ing being a career. Is it a career or am I just doing what I love most, making music, throwing parties, dj-ing and releasing other people’s music? When it all gets serious, yes it becomes a business but the main focus is and will always be music, music and music. 

Going from somewhere like the south of the Netherlands to Berlin and then to somewhere remote like Candy Mountain, is there a sense of coming full circle for you and what’s the biggest fundamental change for you as an artist and DJ between those early days and now?

I am from a small town in the south of Holland and I could not wait to move to the city when I was 19 because it was suffocating me big time. I lived in Australia in 1996-1997, then Amsterdam for 10 years and then Berlin for 13 years and at some point I closed a certain city life chapter for me and really wanted to be in nature and moved to a village with 200 people. How ironic hahahahah!. That’s quite the full circle journey I’d say. like technology, the biggest game changer in the scene. For example virtual reality and the global impact it has. Quantity over quality, visibility over anonymity, virtual reality over living in the moment. So on so on so on ;-)

Ok Steffi, that’s all the questions I have. Thank you for indulging me and I only have one more request. Can you play us out with a song?

Last Days Of Innocence by Driven By Attraction

I can’t pick just one song, because I love the whole EP!! :

17th of May – Full-lineup released

With a whole host of guests, including an international visit, this year’s 17th of May promises to be like no other.

Away from the honking brass of marching bands, tucked in an alley just beyond the slow moving procession of Norwegian banners, Jaeger offers a brief dalliance with a dance floor. A dance floor filled with everything from Brunader to sneakers, in a sunny courtyard in May, with soundsystem contirubuting to the festive noise that swathes the city for Norway’s National day.

This year is a little different… with a national holiday the next day, allowing us to extend the annual DJ marathon a little longe into the night with more DJs than ever, including a visit from Skatebård and DJ Boring on the same day. We kick off from 12:00 in the courtyard and pace ourselves throughout with some of our closest friends joining our residents across the two floors.

You can see the full lineup below as well as on the official event.  We’re doing limited guestlist spots for those that want to secure entry early, so please contact us at info@jaegeroslo.no for more information.

Gården

12:00 Kash & MC Kaman
15:00 Anders Hajem, Henrik Villard, Perkules (Boring Club Records)
17:00 Olle Abstract
18:00 Guy, Fritz, Nordiks (Futoria, French Voyage)
21:00 Skatebård
23:00 Dara
00:00 g-HA & Olanskii

Diskon
21:00 Mapusa
22:00 Synne
23:00 Ole HK & Normann
01:00 DJ Boring

In the booth with Chaos in the CBD

It’s fair to say Chaos in the CBD lived up to their name when they arrived in Oslo on the 10th of May 2022. By the time the brothers Helliker-Hales landed in the booth at Jaeger, a ceiling had caved in on another dance floor down the road and when they reached the middle of their set, there was a sense of reckless abandon on Jaeger’s dance floor. Images from the night show an audience reciprocating en masse for a night that is eared into our collective memory and brings back all kinds of feelings as we get chance to share a portion of the mix with you today.

Chaos in the CBD have become a touchstone for a new generation of fans and old heads alike. Their music and label, “In dust we trust” continues to honour the origins of House music with an affinity for the deeper end of the spectrum on the vinyl format while as DJs their enthusiasm for the energy and dynamic range of the dance floor is unparalleled. Their social media accounts, interviews and Boiler Room sets show a pair of DJs that get as much a thrill out of playing as their audience gets from dancing to it, with a pretext on the hedonistic value of this music. 

“We want to play the stuff we want to hear in a club,” says Ben Helliker-Hales, who introduces himself as Beans when we meet in Jaeger’s courtyard. ”We are very considerate of what we feel the crowd wants to hear as well,” chimes Louis as if taking a subliminal cue from the younger brother. The New Zealand brothers have been playing music together in one form or another since their teens and share what Beans refers to as a “telepathic” connection through music today. They’ve developed that instinct into a production force, a label and as one of the most exciting DJ duos around at the moment.

They have a sincere “passion for the stuff” as Beans tells it, going “deep into the sub-genres” where they draw from a diverse range of tastes and styles. “And keep the energy right,” interrupts Louis. Their set from Jaeger delves deep into an array of sounds, largely anchored to the roots of House music, casting a sprawling net from the deeper ends of the genre to the upper reaches of the dance floor, all for the sake of facilitating the dance. They would rather “play what we want to hear in the club at the point of time” according to Beans than try to force their own songs on a club full of eager punters. 

“If we played the music we produced… and the circumstances aren’t right, then it’s a bit boring,” Louis agrees. “At three in the morning we want high-energy, we don’t want Deep House,” insists Beans. It’s around that time when they kick into a stripped-down, functional House tool that’s little more than a drum machine and a vocal, giving no quarter to the dance floor even as their set winds down. 

We are figuratively and literally world away from where Chaos in the CBD started out when we sit down for our interview. It’s a fact that New Zealand is probably the closest landmass you’ll reach if you were to dig straight down from Norway and yet oddly the two countries share similarities in both landscape and music scene. Like Norway, “the scene was always very small in New Zealand” according to Beans and they had very little access to it growing up.

They “started getting into it, in 2006,” says Louis who instigated Beans to do the same. “We were in a band together and I went to Australia and heard a couple of records. It was around the time of Boys Noize records and The Klaxons were about to take off – I guess there was a lot of crossover appeal for bands.” “It was still ingrained in band culture, but with an electronic aspect,” relays Beans who shortly followed in his older brother’s footsteps: “We saw the Carl Cox and took ecstasy for the first time… and I was like fuck-it, I like dance music!” 

In what was to become a common theme for the time the band got rid of their instruments and picked up computers. Beans, who had been the drummer in the band, was bringing his “whole PC down to band practice and triggering samples on fruity loops and it came to a point where I realised, I don’t need to be in a band.” 

As Louis “was discovering new stuff” during a period of exploration, Beans “dropped out of high school and studied audio engineering.” They made a formidable duo through Louis’ guidance and Beans’ skills. They found a small but dedicated scene in Auckland, developing their skills as DJs while getting to grips with the production aspects of this music. “Back then you had to go and find it,” says Louis of his native scene. The “first couple of years we were the most excited ones, playing these tracks that no-one else knew.” They played mainly “bass” music according to Beans, informed by a sound of London at that time and associated with artists like Ramadanman and Peverelist. “A lot of people that ran Serrato (a NZ based company), they were into that kind of stuff and we would play parties with them” forming “a little community for it.” 

While Chaos in the CBD were cutting their teeth as DJs and producers in Auckland, the advancement of social media and the Internet started connecting them to an international scene including the record label that would facilitate their first release, Young Guns. “We met on Myspace.” recalls Beans “We used to speak to them over AIM and Skype and we became… almost like pen pals.” The French label which shared much of the roster to ClekClekBoom label, brought out “Never Ending” from Chaos in the CBD back in 2012. 

It’s no surprise that the record and its follow up on ClekClekBoom bears similarities to that UK bass sound from the time, but as you get into their third record, “816 to Nunhead” there is a distinct shift in their music. The cold ratcheting rhythms and stark metallic percussion liquifies into soulful melodies and syncopated rhythms as it submerges into the deep. The record coincides with a move to London around the same time for the brothers, but it was “never a conscious decision of what to make,” affirms Beans about the direction their music took. “At that time it was all about the trend,” according to Louis and they were still “trying to find our place” within it all. It was only natural for them to turn to the “deeper kind of stuff” as “that was the music that we liked,” declares Beans. Acts like St. Germain and a mix CD of Deep House that they inherited from a friend’s mum, were staples in their playlist since the start.

“I think” ponders Louis, “by 2015 when we did the Midnight in Peckham record, that came really naturally.” That record, facilitated by a chance encounter on a train with Rhythm Section boss Bradley Zero, helped cement Chaos in the CBD’s sound as artists. “People reacted really well to it,” remembers Louis “which just encouraged us to do more of the same.”

That sound also infiltrated their label when they eventually established it in 2017 with Jon Sable. The vinyl focussed label remains an exclusive vehicle for the founders’ output including Chaos in the CBD, with Beans taking immense satisfaction in the tactile form of their music. “We would always want the music we make to have a physical copy, it gets lost otherwise,” he explains. “It’s history, a timestamp. There’s a physical interaction with it, and it evokes a memory of where you bought it, who you were with; That’s important to us.” The colour coded records take pride in place in his collection, even if he rarely brings them out. 

While the music of the label doesn’t always resonate with what they play in their sets, that spirit does. “A lot of the music we buy now is older stuff,” says Beans and whether it’s a digital file or a record it retains a fervent connection to the past, especially in the booth. They continue to relate more to the past with Beans proclaiming that their sets are all rooted in “early House music” a form of music that “has never gotten better.”

And even with Louis’ “love” for the “convenience” and immediacy of the “digital side of things,” he can’t help but echo that sentiment. “It’s a preference thing,” he explains. “Especially since the pandemic, I’ve gone even deeper into the nineties.” It’s reached a point where he hardly considers new music or records for his sets. “I found that if I went back and found a label or an artist that I like, I just found hit after hit. There’s so much that I haven’t heard.” Djing to a younger generation, who will most likely share those experiences, he can relay music that sets him apart with a sound that is unique in a modern landscape.

It’s “the production quality, the swing, the rawness,” suggests Beans of its appeal. “If it still resonates with you now, it must mean it’s fucking amazing. It’s timeless music!”  

While their own records continue to bring new fans to their work as artists, as DJs they connect a modern dance floor with the roots of this music. They’ve re-affirmed the classics in the contemporary club setting while developing a unique voice. “As DJs, it’s our duty to showcase that music from the past for people that might not have heard it in that context… or at all,” interprets Louis. “If it excites us, you will be able to see it when we perform.” And that’s exactly what they did when Chaos in the CBD landed at Jaeger for a Frædag in May, 2022. 

Share your soul with Chez Damier

Chez Damier’s legacy is dotted through the history of club music. From its early days in Chicago to its heyday in Detroit and its satellite adventures in New York, Chez Damier was there. What started on the dance floor went on to the booth and beyond as he became an uncompromising epitome in the nascent sound of House music with tendrils of influence that extended towards styles like proto-Techno and to new regions like Paris. 

He played pivotal roles in the creation of  KMS (Kenny Saunders’ label), the legendary Music Institute in Detroit and the Belleville Three (Techno’s original figureheads) before going on to establish his own path with Ron Trent in the creation of the now legendary Prescription and Balance Records. Besides contributing to some of the label’s biggest releases like Foot Therapy and Morning Factory, the labels also offered a platform for the likes of Romanthony and Stacey Pullen, from which they went on to achieve greatness.

Chez Damier’s contributions to dance music in its earliest forms were fundamental to the development of the scene and its eventual popularity. By the late nineties he and Ron Trent had been installed in the annals of House music as legends, but such was Chez Damier’s integrity and dedication to the music that when he could have easily cashed in on his popularity he instead took an hiatus. When Ibiza and festival stages came calling, it was so far removed from those humble beginnings, that he took some time off and waited out the storm.

After what would become a lengthy absence, he came back even more determined and more enthusiastic. He took up Balance records where he left off, established House of Chez alongside, and immersed himself back in the scene as a DJ and an artist. As a producer that always sought that collaborative artistic process he has engaged with many new and exciting producers, establishing projects like Heart 2 Heart, and channelling that impetuous spirit of House music’s origins into the present for the next generation.

He is, needless to say, an accomplished and seasoned DJ with the accolades of a veteran in his field and yet he is still buoyed by that enthusiasm of his 15 year-old self, discovering House music for the first time. His sets are undeniably unique in today’s landscape and as he prepares another for Jaeger we caught with the DJ, producer and label owner to find out more. He talks about those early days; his hand in coining the term Techno; new beginnings; and having that last dance with Frankie Knuckles.

*Chez Damier plays ByPåskefestivalen this Wednesday

Hello Chez. It’s truly an honour to be speaking to you. I believe we’re catching you at an interesting period with the new label House of Chez and a lot of new music coming from you. Is there something particular about this time and place that‘s inspiring these new projects?

Yes, it’s a new generation. With a new generation there’s always new inspiration. So, new inspiration and being able to continue to sow back into the community or the culture that we’ve worked so hard to keep going.

House of Chez alludes to your interest in fashion. I’m reminded of something that Sadar Bahar told me; that House music was a lifestyle more than a genre of music back at its beginnings. Is this you bringing these two worlds together again and where is crossover for you in these two creative outlets?

Yes, since I started out, I’ve been inspired by the fashion aspect, so now I’m going to incorporate that in probably doing some merchandising, some shirts and t-shirts. I think it’s a full circle for me in particular, more than anyone else.

I believe there’s a Heart 2 Heart album on the way too. What can you tell us about it and what does it represent in terms of where you are at the moment in terms of the music that inspires you?

That’s like my baby now. That’s the first album project that I’ve ever worked on. It’s just special all the way around. I can’t tell you if there is anything particularly special, but the sessions were amazing. It was all written and recorded in Paris over a four and a half year period; going to Paris four and five times a year, for about a week at a time. So, it was a long process because of the distance. We never once brought the project into our own world, only when we came together. H2H is a super special project for me. 

This new project is you working with another artist again. You’ve worked with so many people in the past, and some legendary figures to boot. How is H2H different, and how is it the same as the other collaborations?

Actually to be honest with you, the only thing that changes when working on this project or collaborating with other people, is that you grow. So you learn how to put the egos down, you learn how to put the muscle flexing down, you learn how to cohesively understand people’s energy, and that’s something only time could have taught me. Especially someone who has as much energy as you, so this makes it more special than all the other ones. 

Funny enough, I was talking to MK about doing a mix on this project, because he was the first person I was a student of and it was kind of funny talking to him about my first new album project versus the very first time we worked together. What makes it special this time around, is maturing. 

In H2H’s case your partner is somebody with strong Techno associations. Back in the day there was a lot more of a fluid approach between dance floor genres, and over the years it’s gotten more reductive. As somebody with a foothold in both the origins of House and Techno, how do you get around those strict parameters, especially today?

Actually technically, I’m probably the first in the electronic business to combine House and Techno. Because my roots were in Chicago, dance culture was also in New York, but my experience of music was in Detroit. So, Detroit is where I learnt my sound, and its combination (of all that). I don’t get around it actually, I just look at it as energy. Here’s what I want to do, I want to share my soul. I know it could be easy to follow the trends and do the 3 seconds hands up in the air. I just refuse to do it. If I have to do it, I quit. Don’t get me wrong, the person who has energy has energy from the start. I like it all, and I’m always going to incorporate it in my music and my sets. 

You’ve not only been a part of a scene, but actually helped establish it. What keeps you motivated and drives the momentum in your creativity and work these days?

It’s always knowing that you don’t know. It’s always having the wish that you want to try something you haven’t tried before. It’s also learning more about your energy and how to work with other people’s energy. So, to me that’s the inspiration. I’m not an on-demand artist, I’m not a machine. So when God gives me the inspiration to do something, I’m just doing it. I’m just being a vessel at this point. 

I know you took a little break from it all back in the early 2000’s and I admire your resolve at that time in not going down the hyper-commercial rabbit hole. Ultimately it was the right decision, but what brought you back into the fray? 

What brought me back is this young artist out of Paris named Brawther. He brought me back, because he made me realize the initial mission was never completed. When me and Ron started Prescription records, it was the intention to find like-minded artists like us, we created Balance to be that extended service of artists that also were motivated and inspired by different sounds. When we divided, I shut the whole thing down. So it was always like cutting something off and never seeing the continuation of it. Years later, Brawther gave me the inspiration to realize it wasn’t over. 

What was the hardest part of coming back into it?

There was no hard part at all. It was very welcoming, thanks to Red Bull, thanks to Cyber distribution in Paris, thanks to my publisher in Paris. All of these people were very supportive, encouraging me to either reissue things or come back into the game. These people made it possible for me to do it without being stressful. I have Secret Sundaze to thank, because Secret Sundaze were also responsible for letting me be the first one to sign to their agency. That was really inspiring to work with them. 

I heard it mentioned that you actually coined the original and first Virgin “Techno” compilation record, which went on to label that whole sound as Techno. Do you remember the circumstances around that and your involvement with that legacy?

Yes, I was the one that suggested it to be called Techno. I was just joining KMS at the time, and Derrick (May) was one of my DJs and the music institute. It was just like being ahead of my time, understanding what Juan Atkins was doing and trying to create something that I thought would collectively speak for what was happening at the time. Yes, along with Neil Rushton, I was the one that made the suggestion that we call it the Techno album. Many people don’t know that.

Do you have any regrets today in how Techno has been adopted as this kind of catch-all term that has somewhat gentrified the esoteric origins of that original Detroit sound?

I don’t really like what’s happened in Detroit today, to be quite honest with you. Because Detroit has narrowed the focus to Techno when it was a music capital since the beginning of time. I just don’t like where it’s going, I don’t like the whole kind of ”this is our situation,” when it took many people. It’s like; if you don’t understand the history, you don’t understand the future.

You were there for those seminal moments of House music’s creation from Chicago to New York. What were some of the key experiences for you personally during that time?

Actually it wasn’t even about personal experiences. It was about the newness. We were all fascinated by the fact that there were music bars and conferences that were built around this new music that we were being a part of. It was really inspiring to be face to face with other artists that were behind it. We didn’t have press at that time to show who these artists were. So when we were going to Chicago or New York it was always amazing to finally meet, greet or see these other artists. It was a very inspiring time, at least for me. 

As somebody with this incredible legacy that you have, and the experiences you have from the booth, what were the most fundamental changes you’ve experienced in the scene over the years and what are some of your thoughts on where we are today compared to when you started?

One of the things that I would love to see more of when I have the pleasure to play, is people engaging and enacting with each other more, being inspired by one another. This will always be amazing to me. The things I don’t particularly care about, is what I see at a festival level. This quick sensation that people are getting for this peak moment, is complete suicide, if you ask me. To me, at the end of the day I don’t find it edifying. At the time, I think it’s going to cause some future problems. 

Listening to a Chez Damier set today, Is there an element of something that people would find instantly familiar as Chez Damier, even as you play music from others?

Yeah, I mostly play music from others, and I’m still playing demos from myself, so people don’t know it’s me until they ask me. For me it’s more or less the same. In the beginning, I played more classics, because it was something that I had to prove my roots. This time I actually have the freedom. Before I was coming in with all my guns, but now I get the chance to tell a story. I think over time, people will be able to recognize me by the energy I bring and not necessarily about what they see.

Communicating with an audience is essential to the DJing experience and for that there’s usually a common ground between them and you. How do you maintain that connection with audiences that keep getting younger and younger and what other factors do you feel you are constantly having to adapt to as a DJ today?

I always put myself in their position. I was fifteen years old when I first got mesmerized by House music, and I was sixteen years old when I had my first Frankie Knuckles experience. So for me, I’m just giving back what I was given. It’s easier to relate to a younger audience when you can remember when you were young. 

And besides that… what are you packing these days in terms of music and are there any records you’re particularly eager to bring to Oslo and Jaeger in a couple of weeks time?

Apart from a couple of cuts from the new album, just my presence, I’m eager to bring. And hopefully the spirit of Frankie Knuckles, because the last dance with Frankie k was in Oslo 9 years ago , which is also the anniversary of his passing. So for me, it’s an emotional moment, this year in particular. So it should be exciting. 



Bypåskefestivalen 2023

The full lineup for Bypåskefestivalen 2023 at Jaeger will include Chez Damier, Dan Shake, Traumer and Funky Loffe

Apres ski in the city with a whole load of bass. We descend from the mountain slopes to the heart of the city, where a wall of sound awaits. Insulated in the warmth of our funktion one system our basement cabin offers a refuge in sound for the city dwellers and nocturnal pariahs. We host a weekend of uncompromising talents for our annual Bypåskefestivalen again at Jaeger. Featuring guest appearances by Dan Shake, Funky Loffe, Traumer and House legend Chez Damier,  alongside our residents and their local guests. See the full lineup below and head over to facebook for more event info

05.04 Bypåskefestivalen:
Chez Damier
Prins Thomas (6h set)
O. Blom

06.04 Helt Texas!:
Traumer
Normann + Ole HK
Capodanna + Ida B + Sondre

07.04 Skranglepåske x Frædag:
Dan Shake
Oskar Pask + Petter Celius + Umulius
g-HA & Olanskii

08.04 LYD:
Funky Loffe + Olle Abstract
MC Kaman + Kash

09.04 Foot Food x BCR:
g-HA & Olanskii + Vinny Villbass + diskJokke
Anders Hajem + Henrik Villard + Perkules

10.04 Mandagsklubben:
André Bravo + Thomas Sol + Jennifer Bravo

 

Slindre’s heart beats for House – in conversation with DELLA

Hi all, DELLA here. This week I took the opportunity to chat with, Slindre (formally Snurrebass), an up and coming House DJ and founder of Norway’s fiercest queer club night <LOKOMOTIV>. This Saturday, he will be joining me in the basement for Della’s Drivhus and together we are going to set the club on FIRE. Are you ready to get your groove on? I am!

Slindre, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. Let’s get down to business. 

I am so excited for Saturday! Can’t actually believe that I’m going to play at Æ with you!! A friend of a friend attended your event in Gøteborg a couple of weeks ago and absolutely loved it. I’ve never played B2B with anyone before, but hey, it’s gonna be fun to do it for the first time with you. 

You and I just recently met and our love of House music made us instant friends. Please, can you tell us more about who Slindre is? 

Slindre’s heart beats for House music and melodic techno. I love a groovy bassline, cheeky lyrics and soulful vocals. And I live for sweaty dance floors. 

How long have you been DJing?

I ordered my first DJ gear in January 2022, so that makes it one year and three months to be exact. 

What made you want to begin DJing?

I’ve been listening to House, disco and techno for as long as I can remember. Music has always been a source of happiness and a sense of freedom for me. I’m always searching for new music. I love the feeling when I discover music that makes my jaw drop and gives me chills from head to toe. The last couple of years I started to get more and more fascinated with how DJs managed to build up sets like stories, with a narrative and exciting twists and turns. I wanted to start DJing quite some time before I actually did, I guess it was something as boring as janteloven that held me back. But, luckily that wasn’t enough to stop me from going for it. I was immediately hooked. 

You formally went by DJ alias Snurrebass, why did you decide to change your artist name to Slindre?

Hehe, well. When I got my first gigs last spring, I couldn’t completely own that I was a DJ, and Snurrebass had a kind of an ironic twist to it. Now I don’t feel the need to distance myself from being a DJ anymore, so Slindre just feels more right. 

Who are the producers & DJs that inspire you most?

I keep finding new inspiration almost daily. There is almost too much good music out there! But, I definitely draw inspiration from Honey Dijon, Todd Terry, Dennis Quin, Green Velvet, Mr. G, Superlover and Saison. Lately, I’ve also been listening to Roy Rosenfeld quite a bit. He produces really smooth and beautiful downtempo tracks that move me emotionally.

Do you produce music?

Not yet! But I am definitely planning to. 

You are the founder of the new HOT queer concept LOKOMOTIV. Can you tell our readers more about your club night? 

LOKOMOTIV is a passion project created by me and my husband for lovers of electronic music and dancing. Everyone is welcome at LOKOMOTIV, but our target audience is gay guys. So far, it’s been a massive success with a packed dance floor on all four events. It’s been a blast! We even took the event to Stavanger in March. Check us out on Instagram @lokomotivclub

What inspired you to start Lokomotiv? 

Well, there were two reasons. Firstly, we wanted to create a club concept we ourselves felt was missing in Oslo. Secondly, in the beginning it wasn’t easy getting gigs at my favorite clubs. LOKOMOTIV became an opportunity for me to share my passion for music with a big crowd.  

Do you feel there is a lack of queer club nights in Norway?

Yes! That’s why we started LOKOMOTIV. We’ve been saying for years that there aren’t enough queer club nights, so instead of sitting at home complaining, we decided to do something about it. 

Why do you feel it is important to showcase queer artists in music? 

Representation is important everywhere. But when it comes to House music, club culture and queer history, they share an important bond. The underground clubs were a place for queer people to get together, party and be themselves long before we could do so openly. I play music with a lot of gay references in different ways, mostly because it’s really good music, but also as a nod to gay and queer history.  

What are your thoughts on current social issues such as USA wanting to restrict drag?

It makes me sad. 

Have you personally experienced any obstacles being gay and being an artist?

No, not at all! And I don’t expect that to happen either. 

Do you work full-time as a DJ? What is your day job?

I’m a psychologist, specializing in family and couples therapy. So that’s really a contrast to grooving it out in the DJ booth. 

Do you intertwine the two into your music? 

Haha, well. I can’t say that I do. Not directly, anyway. The common factor is that I have a passion for both. And that both therapy and DJing a set is a process, which hopefully leave you feeling better with yourself and the people around you at the end of it. 

Other than the obvious (LOKOMOTIV), what is a favourite club / club concept you’ve experienced?

Oh, tough question. Some of my best nights out have been in NYC. I think I’m gonna say Battle Hymn, by Ladyfag. Elli Escobar is a resident and he is someone I hope to book for LOKOMOTIV one day.

Tell us what we can expect this Saturday in your set at Della’s Drivhus.

You can expect one very excited DJ who’s going to play the House music you didn’t know you needed. It’s going to be impossible for you to stand still.

Any upcoming gigs or events you would like to inform our readers about? 

We have many exciting plans for LOKOMOTIV in 2023. The next event will be in May and is going to be something special. I’m also looking forward to Pride at the end of June. I can’t disclose specifics just yet, but let’s just say that it’s going to be a good week for those of us who enjoy House music.  

 

I look forward to sharing the booth together at Della’s Drivhus! Together we are definitely going to create nothing but pure, rainbow vibes. It is going to be good fun, especially our B2B set. ❤️

 

Check out more of Slindre’s music here:

Have a listen to my opening set for my former guest, Mood II Swing. What a night! 

See you all on the dancefloor this Saturday. 

Follow me on my socials to stay updated! 

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/djdella_official/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/djdella

Kisses, 

DELLA

Intergalactic sounds with Alienata

Alienata occupies a unique space in the world of Techno with an all-encompassing approach that encapsulates everything from IDM to Electro. She’s thrived in the culture’s underground corners since taking to the decks in 2004, where she’s carved out a sound in sets that span “obscure electro, ACID, dub, IDM, dark disco, jakbeat, hypnotic techno, industrial atmospheres, break beats, cosmic jazz , UK electro, Detroit and Chicago” influences.  Traversing the outer regions of club music, Alienata truly channels an inter-galactic language through her musical tastes.

Originally from Spain, Alienata has been residing in Berlin since 2011 where she joined the Killekill (Krake festival) family on her journey to become one of the city’s most dedicated figures. Admired for her approach to club music, her sets pulsate with the energy of the dance floor as she pushes the dynamics across the whole spectrum of club music.  From the furthest recesses of Techno’s reach where artists like Aphex Twin reside to the functional club constructs that motivates movement, Alienata has a very unique approach to her selections. 

It’s not often that Biosphere and Neil Landstrumm are mentioned in the same breath, but like her sets, Alienata is both, not obvious, and distinct in her musical designs. It trickles down from her sets, to her production and her label, Discos Atónicos, where she has channelled her musical tastes into an equally determined platform over the last 5 years. Although versatile, she maintains a unique sound which is hard to pin down to one specific element and it’s through this that she stands out in the larger Techno landscape. 

Ahead of her appearance at Jaeger tomorrow night, we caught up with the DJ, producer and label honcho for further insight into her musical tastes and her approach to DJing and music. 

Hey Alienata. Where are you at this moment and what are you listening to right now?

Hello : )

At this moment I’m enjoying touring a lot! I’m having great experiences & connections in all the places I visit. In terms of listening 

I’ve read somewhere that you’re a fan of Biosphere. That obviously resonates with us here in Norway. To me, a record like Patashnik is one of those perfect records to play after a night out. Do you have a record like that; something you like to put on after a particularly good night?

Yeah, I deeply love Biosphere!

And regarding your question I think Substrata is that record I always found perfect to listen to after a good gig (or even after a bad gig! haha) Another one: Selected Ambient Works by Aphex Twin. 

I often hear Aphex in your sets too. Where is the crossover between the music you listen to at home and the music you play out?

Well, when I’m at home I tend to listen to slow beats, downtempo, I love that flow so much. Obviously “that flow” influences me when I make my musical selections. 

Versatile would be an understatement when considering your music and DJing and yet there’s something there that ties it all together. What is that fundamental element in your musical tastes in terms of making and playing music?

I think that fundamental element is a mix of galactic sounds, a sense of funk & groove & and a touch of psychedelia.

What first planted the seed for these musical tastes to develop and when was that? 

I used to help a friend who distributed records to most of the DJs in my city. First in a record store and then he would do it from home and I would give him a hand. I spent all my time listening to all kinds of music. I didn’t care about the genres or styles. were being trained without my realising it.

Has it always been about electronic music or was there a point or event that initially brought you to the sounds of synthesisers and drum machines?

Let’s just say that I have always loved rhythm and atmospheres, since I was a child. I used to listen to classical & psychedelic music all the time when I was about 12/13 years old. It was a kind of therapy for me. Through sound I was inspired to write and build parallel worlds where I could escape from reality. There were a lot of problems at home and I needed to transcend them in some way. Music has always had that “magic” component in my life.

Was there a big community of kindred spirits in Valencia when you were discovering this music and how did it influence your own evolution from fan to DJ? 

Totally! Actually I am originally from Murcia (not Valencia!) and yes, I have always had the good fortune to surround myself with spirits who were quite advanced in every sense of the word. Not only in electronic music, but also in krautrock, post punk or wave. Let’s say that when I discovered the language of music I did it almost in a shamanic way. 

How did you get into DJing and what do you remember of those initial experiences behind a set of decks?

It all happened when I was living with my friend who I was helping distribute records (I mentioned before) He had a brutal collection of vinyl, all kinds of stuff. We were all the time listening to music. And my curiosity grew and grew, so when I was alone at home, I used to sneak into “the magic room”, pick up records randomly (because I knew I was always going to discover something interesting) and start playing. And I would practise for myself, without anyone knowing it. It was almost a ritual for me. 

Were you exploring those bridges between IDM, Electro, Techno and EBM right from the start and what did you establish in your approach to DJing even back then?

I never had any barriers when I started to play music. Everything that fit or caught the attention of my ears had a place in my initial sessions. I didn’t care about styles. I could fit in the same session some Neil Landstrumm with Miles Davis’ Doo Boop and many other things in between. The music, beyond the styles, had a strength, a way of telling stories that in my way of understanding the sound at that time fit in. A bit mystical I would say.

Has it evolved in any significant way since then?

Of course, it has evolved in terms of knowledge. But the spirit is the same. 

I assume Djing remains your first love.

I deeply love to play music, from the deepest part of my heart. It’s the language with which I have learned to communicate with the world. Sometimes complicated to explain in words!

…and Discos Atónicos a close second?

Discos Atónicos is my baby.

I was previously involved in other record labels with my other collectives but in the end I was always left with the feeling that I couldn’t do 100 percent of what I wanted to do.

So after years and when I felt the time was right, I started with Discos Atónicos, Being my own boss and having all the freedom to edit whatever I wanted to edit. 

When you do make a track or remix something, is there an instinct to try and express a similar sound or mood in these pieces and how would you describe that mood or sound?

If I’m honest I don’t usually have a certain mood in my head when I make music but it’s true that there are certain patterns that I repeat: the broken rhythms, the atmospheres a bit dramatic, the bleeps and… I love pads! I need depth in some way. 

In an interview from 2019 you said you were in the process of re-inventing yourself. What was the reason behind this re-invention and what did it entail or lead to?

I believe that in the end, life is a process of reinventing oneself all the time. I have a terrible fear of boredom! I could say now, in 2023, that I am still in the process of reinvention and I hope it never ends! I say this with all the positivity in the world. 

When I think of Techno (and maybe this is just a generational thing) I tend to think of the kind of music people like you play. But Techno’s popularity has brought new, not always positive connotations to the genre. What are your personal experiences in the scene regarding Techno’s popularity today?

It is a bit confusing at times. Suddenly you hear “techno” everywhere. in clothing stores, on buses, at the dentist’s office! Even my mother suddenly has techno notions!  It has become something “popular” indeed and with it has come mediocrity, banality & sometimes pure entertainment.

I guess the popularity of the genre is certainly beneficial to everybody playing or making the style, but in general terms it seems to have marginalised the original counter-cultural spirit for the sake of a business model. As somebody that represents the former to me, how are you able to find  your place in this paradigm shift today?

Of course it has its benefits, at this moment in my life I can make a living from it, something that would not have been possible in the past. For me the most important thing is not to lose one’s own essence.  Don’t sell your soul. Keeping real for real. Keeping curious. Sometimes I get the feeling that it is almost an extravagance to say that but it is crucial. I feel it’s almost a kind of mission, to educate the ears, the fantasy, the magic of rhythm. I want to share everything I have learned (and am still learning) along the way. 

Where do you see it going, because at some point I think we’ll have to start making a distinction, by the time Beyoncé brings out a Techno LP at least?

Techno is like Pop Music, yes. Even writing this sentence I find it hard to believe, but it’s true. To be honest, I am a bit confused about this… but at the end of the day I always find originality, hybrids and fusions of styles which, although in a more accessible way, still seem interesting to me. 

What does this all mean in terms of finding new music or do you find yourself turning more to older records and re-issues?

I always check all kinds of music. There are a lot of current sounds that I love. I think that in the middle of all that we were talking about, there is quite a lot of quality, at least if you know where to look for it. And the reissues are also good, and of course, I always keep an eye on them, you always rediscover things that you might have missed at another time!

Quality is the key, old, new, whatever!

It seems more important than ever now for labels like Discos Atónicos to exist. What are some of the challenges of releasing a record today in the contemporary landscape and how do you overcome them?

It is definitely becoming more and more complicated in terms of economics and waiting times.

Especially for underground labels. In my case there is even an extra complication because I self-distribute it. Prices have risen sharply since the pandemic times.Shipping costs have gone up. 

Everything has become more expensive, shops are buying less copies… it is a loop. I am currently considering releasing more material digitally and limiting the series on vinyl. After all, as a consumer I use digital a lot, I love bandcamp. 

What keeps you motivated in terms of releasing records and keeping the label going?

My motivation is always to share music that somehow feels timeless, fresh, with quality.

Things that I would immediately play and that I will never get tired of listening to.

One way or the other, I’m always lucky to find what fits in my label. Sounds that give me goosebumps. Tracks that are like little movies. Artists who I admire so much or new artists that I just discovered and I can feel their potential and I want to give that opportunity.

So you create a kind of small family.

And playing this music to an audience?

That’s a fantastic feeling. When you know something is good and you can’t wait to share it!

Thank you for taking the time to talk to us Elena. One last request. Can you play us out with a song?

Ohhh only one???

Then my choice is Underground Resistance – Death of My Neighborhood

A beauty. 

Thanks for having me!

 

Ukraine DJ Marathon fundraiser update

The Ukraine DJ marathon raises over 10 000kr for Musicians Defend Ukraine

We’re happy to announce that we raised 11 800kr in ticket sales and donations for the Musicians defend Ukraine foundation during last month’s Ukrainian DJ marathon. We flew in some of Ukraine’s established and unknown Techno and House talents for a night that marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the start of this war.

Stanislav Tolkachev, Nastya Muravyova, Danilenko, Serge Jazzmate, Pavel Plastikk and human margareeta showed a united force from our two floors for a night that we won’t forget anytime soon. A special thanks to Pavel Plastikk for helping us put this event together and Serge Jazzmate for letting us interview him on the blog, even as he deals with the realities of living in Kyiv right now.

Thank you to everybody that came out to this night and the people that donated.

In the Twilight Zone with Anthony Rother 

To say Anthony Rother is prolific would be an understatement. Whether releasing EPs and 12 inches for the likes of Marcel Dettmann’s Bad Manners label or extensive (21 tracks) albums like AI Space via his Bandcamp page, the German artist’s output is unyielding. It’s built on an unrelenting work ethic that serves Anthony Rother as a self-contained artistic universe, complete with world-building concepts and a distinctive sound. From his online jam sessions to his hybrid Electro sets, there’s a determined purpose before he even lays a finger on the record button with an ideology that’s deeply rooted in the sound and aesthetics of Electro.

Anthony Rother has been at it since the mid nineties and after releasing his debut LP Sex with the machines, he’s been championing the sounds of the Electro genre for a whole generation. He became a prominent figure in the electronic underground in the early 2000’s with legendary records like Hacker and Popkiller combining his love for dark impulsive rhythms and humanoid vocals channelled from the formative experiences of listening to Kraftwerk. He established Datapunk during this time, a label that launched the careers of many established artists before the business end of the music all but consumed Anthony’s efforts and he took a break from music altogether around 2008. 

In the process of getting some distance from the industry, he came back to making music eventually, and in a big way. Today his output schedule rivals some of his most productive years of his early career, and with a sincere and dedicated approach to Electro, Anthony Rother is more determined than ever. He is always working on music with an endless wealth of creativity spurring the artist and producer  forward.  His pursuits towards new avenues of exploration in the Electro paradigm have taken to extremes of the genre’s stylistic traits. 

When it comes to Anthony’s music it’s pure Electro, but it’s never complacent. Always striving for something new in his music, Anthony is propelled to new frontiers and each production only functions as a way to the next. In seeking new languages in this machine music, he is always one step ahead of his curve.  Albums like AI Space capture these musical developments in intricate and expansive Sci-Fi tableaus while his hybrid Electro set seeks to find a bridge between Electro and the club. It’s a self-contained musical world that he has created through his music and ever since he came back to this music, Anthony Rother has extended this immersive universe. 

We caught up with Anthony Rother via telephone call to talk about this world he’s developed and his approach to Electro. Our conversation drifts into AI, Offenbach and his hiatus, but it always returns to Anthony’s first love, Electro and his eternal quest for a fresh take on the genre. 

Anthony  Rother plays a Hybrid Electro set  at jaeger this Friday.

Mischa Mathys: Where are you at the moment?

Anthony Rother:  I’m here in Frankfurt in Offenbach. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Offenbach; it’s the town where the Robert Johnson club is located.

MM: Yes, I’m familiar. We’ve had a few guests from your neck of the woods at Jaeger in the past. People like Roman Fluegel, Ata and Gerd Janson. 

AR: Yes, these guys are from Frankfurt but Robert Johnson is in Offenbach. 

MM: And your studio is also there?

AR: Yes, it’s in the old Logic Records building, a record company from the eighties and nineties which released Snap! amongst other things.They owned the building and that’s where I have my studio. Roman also had his studio there. It’s a very famous place and has a bit of history in the electronic music scene.

Logic entrance

MM: Does it still have a musical community around it, or is it like everywhere else at the moment, every man is an island?

AR: Yeah, every man is an island. I can only speak for myself, but I go there I make my music and I leave. When I was in this building in the 2000’s, I had more to do with people on the other floors, but now I’m more concentrated in making music, than having fun, and drinking and making parties. I think my interests have shifted a little more to a different place. You know how it is?

MM: As you get older, your priorities change, right?

AR: Of course, yes. (laughs)

MM: But the music never changes?

AR: No, the music stays the same. I think today I’m more focussed on music than when I was younger. 

MM: You’ve had such a prolific output, and it was a bit difficult for me to find an entry point for the sake of this interview, but I thought we could start with Bad Manners 9, which came out last year. It feels like it is a bit of an outlier to what I’ve come to know as the Anthony Rother sound in recent years.

AR: Bad Manners does not reflect what I do today. The EP is an EP that me and Marcel (Dettman) put together. 

MM: It was only a brief dalliance with this style of music.

AR: You can’t say that either; because over the last ten years I’ve always worked on four on the floor tracks and experimented with these kinds of tracks, but I didn’t release the material. I just started releasing in 2017 again, with tracks on Danny Daze’s Omni Disc label. Since then they all reflect a continuous Electro style searching for a sound that works well in the club and has much energy. What I do today is purely based in Electro and writing about human problems in a digital computer language. 

MM:  Considering these concepts of human stories in a robot language in your work I also find you recontextualise them in a dystopian universe, but how do you arrive at these worlds; Do they come from books, movies, music or is it something that happens naturally at this point?

AR:  If you see my artistic life as this evolving thing, I would say that on my debut album Sex with the Machines, I was heavily influenced by Electro from the eighties, like Karftwerk and of course sci-fi movies. It was a melange of all of this. I’ve invented some kind of language for myself based on my influences that I recreate every time I work on a new album. It’s not something that I have to work at, it comes natural to me. 

MM: Is it rooted in something in your subconscious at this point and does it start with the music or at a point when you start adding lyrics or vocals to your music?

AR: Mostly it starts with the music. When I’m working on an album, I’ll have a title for the album and at this point I’ll form the ideas. Let’s take AI space (the latest album), it’s an evolution of artificial intelligence that we are witnessing now. When I started writing this album, AI wasn’t such a mainstream theme as it is now. It was the stuff of nerds. I did some research on it and got ideas for stories or personal experiences that I coat in this kind of language. It’s a back and forth, but it starts with the music, then I get a theme, and from this topic I derive all the other things. 

MM: Tell me a bit about your research into AI for this album. What conclusions did you draw about the future of AI?

AR: I must be careful about what I say about the reality of the situation, because I’m an artist. I’m not a professional AI programmer, so my knowledge as an artist is to paint a picture and to discuss it in an artistic way. It’s a mainstream question, and I don’t have an opinion, because you can approach the answer in different ways. It’s a diverse subject for an artist though and you can either paint a dystopian picture of an AI that takes over a world or on the opposite end a utopian world where an AI is our digital butler. 

MM: But do you have any thoughts on the reality of AI in terms of music?

AR: So, if we debate AI making music, does AI replace me as a musician? I’ve thought  about it, but I don’t feel threatened. Everything that is standard music is threatened because AI is very good at learning. So for me as an artist it’s very important that my music is so special, and so forward-thinking so that AI can’t reproduce this as a cliché. But as soon as I release it, it gets into the learning stream of the AI and I have to advance myself again. I’m always in a kind of race with AI. 

MM: Have you experimented at all with AI in making music yet?

AR: I have tried it, not in terms of making music, just to see what it will do. I asked an AI to make music like Musique Non Stop from Kraftwerk.  And it proposed 4 tracks to me. Most of them had an Electro beat, but it was nothing like Musique Non Stop, because Musique Non Stop is such a unique piece of music that it was impossible to reproduce it.

Personally I would not use AI, because making the music is the first and the best thing, the result is just the last step. Making the music is the most fun. 

MM: My experience with AI is that it lacks the imagination in that process to get to the end result, and I think this is something that is particularly unique to your music. It’s almost like you create these fantasy worlds that you are able to escape into when you make music.

AR: Exactly. In German we say, the way is the goal.

MM: I like what you said about having to be one step ahead of AI to stay progressive. In the scope of the Electro paradigm, and the stylistic traits of that music; How has it developed through your own artistic pursuits?

Anthony Rother

AR: That’s a hard question, because there have been so many phases and I’ve worked on so many different aspects of it. I’m still working on it, because in the last few years I’ve been trying to produce a kind of Electro that could be played in the club, and has the energy of Techno, but is still considered a 100% Electro. 

My plan is to work in different aspects of Electro and to try and find new elements to it. I’m willing to break from the stylistic concepts to try and find something new in terms of Electro. I might have to surrender some classic elements to get to that point.

MM: What are you finding you have to surrender in terms of making it work in a club these days; is it about stripping it back and making it more functional?

AR: This is a good question. It’s a kind of energy that needs to be in the track. You can have a complicated production and it will still work in a club. You have to play it out to find out. I usually play it out and from that I know what needs to go into the next production.

MM: You don’t go back to the one you played out or an older production?

AR: No, the concept is to be one step ahead. I’m always in a kind of twilight zone, not knowing what’s going to work. I think this is the best position to be in when you’re writing music if you wanna do something fresh. 

MM: Do you specifically make everything for the purpose of playing it out in your hybrid Electro set or are some things made purely for just the recorded format?

AR: I produce the music for the hybrid Electro set and I play it like a kind of DJ. I’m basically my own record shop. I produce so much music that I can play only my own music. This is the concept and this is where all the music comes from. I’m in the studio everyday, because I need so much material for the hybrid Electro set. From ten tracks that I produce, maybe one or two I can use in my set. 

MM: Is the intention to release as much of that music as possible?

AR: At first it wasn’t. But now I’m releasing my albums on bandcamp. You can see it as a full artistic concept. The hybrid Electro set represents my work as an artist in all different media. 

MM: So it’s its own self-contained ecosystem with you in the centre of it. 

AR: Exactly. 

MM:  Are you able to adapt to a crowd like a traditional DJ would?

AR: I can adapt to the crowd within the limits of my own material. I have a lot of material, because I’ve produced so much stuff and I try to produce various instances of Electro. It’s not just a show. It’s not so easy to explain without using the word DJ, but I don’t consider myself a DJ. 

MM:  And it’s very much contained within the universe of Electro?

AR: Exactly, I tried to do it years ago with some four on the floor tracks, but then in 2016 I started shifting to Electro. During the pandemic I decided that I will play only Electro in my hybrid set.

MM: Why did you decide that?

AR: Before that I was in between, but during the pandemic I wanted to prove if it was possible to do an Electro-only hybrid set. I want to be a 100% Electro artist. If I do something else I’ll use a new project name. This is my mission till the end of my life; to find all the different aspects of Electro available. 

MM: That’s a serious dedication. What is it about Electro that makes it so appealing?

AR: I think this is my nature.

Anthony's control panel

MM: It seems that you clearly set out a path for yourself, which is quite the contrast to a few years back when you went on a bit of a hiatus. That  seems at odds with your work ethic. Can you tell me what happened there?

AR: Yes around 2007 -2014, after the Datapunk hype, I lost myself for various reasons. One of the big reasons was that I was dragged into a kind of a business thing, which I had not enough knowledge about. I think I made every business error I could make as somebody that has no experience. I was exhausted. Everything looked so positive, but it turned out that everything was just business. 

MM: What did it take for you to get back to a point where you could  start making music again?

AR: For the longest time I was just trying to find myself again. I was ripped into a 1000 pieces, and I had to find the right pieces that really reflect me. In 2013 I produced Netzwerk Der Zukunft and this album helped me to put together the pieces of the real Anthony. Today I can say I’m complete in a sense that I know who I am again. I can trust myself and the decisions I make. Today I can distinguish between the business and the real stuff and the real stuff is the most important thing in my artistic life. 

MM: Did you feel that when you got back to it that it was the same as that initial spark when you got your first synthesiser, when you heard Electro for the first time or when you made music for the first time?

AR: When you’re creating in a sense that you do something real, it’s always a very deep experience. It’s not the same but it’s very different in depth. When I first created Sex with the Machines (my debut album), this had deep moments, but what I do today is deeper. I have more knowledge and have more possibilities. 

When you’re young, being naïve has a certain magic. This is something you lose because you get more knowledge and you gain more experience, and  I’m jealous of my younger self in that regard. On the other hand when you are naïve and young you’re often two-stepping into the wrong spots. (laughs) 

MM: What is your relationship today with an album like sex with the machines?

AR: I’m still listening to it. I’m still amazed by it. It’s not part of my creative process today, because that album has its own tone and is of its own time. For me it’s a great moment in my artistic career and it always gives me good energy. 

MM: Is it something that you ever reference in your music today?

AR:  I referenced parts of Sex with the Machines for my 2018 album 3L3C7RO COMMANDO, so yes.

MM: Looking at your studio from what I’ve seen online, it seems that you are still using many of the same old machines you would’ve used back then. How do you continue to use these machines in music that seeks to progress too?

AR: I work with old machines but I also have tons of new machines. I’m always cycling around. I have a basic setup and I change it in different ways. I’m always shifting with technology in search of that freshness in this style of music. 

A glimmer of hope in sound with Serge Jazzmate

Serge Jazzmate, is a rarefied phenomenon in the club music scene. The DJ and event organiser has remained a determined presence in Ukraine despite the war and in an extremely difficult and terrifying situation he has helped retain some semblance of a scene in his native Kiyv. Between the sounds of air raid sirens and Russian projectiles, Serge’s music also permeates the air, offering a glimmer of hope in sound for a scene under serious duress. 

A resident and co-founder of LOW, and frequent guest at ∄ (k41) Serge Jazzmate has been a fixture on what was burgeoning scene in Ukraine since 2007. A true facilitator, he helped arrange events and parties when he was not playing sets that trip across vast musical borders. He can be found operating in that record-enthusiast/selector universe where all the attention is focussed on the music and the DJ is an enthusiast and entertainer. 

Before the war broke out with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he had also been a prominent figure appearing on lineups like Brave! Factory, Strichka and Rhythm Buro Natura as well as playing abroad in places like Berlin. His nomadic sets, moving  between everything from “Brazilian bossa nova to Electro,” have become a staple at his LOW residency, which recently celebrated its 14th anniversary with an event in Berlin.

Today, the festivals are on indefinite hiatus but LOW and the spirit of the people behind the scenes, people like Serge, continue to bring some kind of momentary relief to Ukraine’s clubbing community. It’s only fleeting under the current curfew, but it’s there, an allegory to that unyielding Ukrainian spirit.

We caught up with Serge via email, and he was kind enough to give us a few moments of his precious time to find out more about the current situation and his own history ahead of his set in Jaeger’s sauna with Pavel Plastikk this weekend.

Hello Serge. Perhaps you can start by giving us a brief glimpse of what life is like in Kiyv at the moment. 

Hello, Misha. People live their lives, go to work, and children go to schools and kindergartens. Of course, it is not a normal life when your country is being destroyed and filled with blood, but we have to adapt to the situation when you, your family or your neighbors can be killed by a rocket or drone in a moment in a peaceful city. It’s about every single settlement across the largest country in Europe.

This war has been going on for a year, and it seems to just be intensifying leading up to the anniversary. Can you tell us how it’s affected you personally and the toll it continues to take on the Ukrainian people?

Complex issue. The ongoing war is taking a significant toll on the Ukrainian people’s mental health, with many experiencing trauma and anxiety as a result of the violence and uncertainty. Defenders and peaceful people die daily, infrastructure and industries are being heavily damaged, and significant damage is caused to nature. We apparently have no other choice than the retreat of the aggressor’s army, otherwise Ukraine will cease to exist as an independent state. This will provoke, firstly, a previously unprecedented new wave of emigration from Ukraine, and secondly, it will unleash new wars and global changes since WW2.

A lot of your peers and fellow DJs have left Ukraine for places like Berlin. What is keeping you there and how are artists like yourself surviving there at the moment and what about the conscription?

I have the opportunity to leave the country, but I am kept by the business (I run a company), my favorite city, exceptional people and favorite clubs and Closer. To make a living only as an artist is not possible right now. I passed a medical examination and I can serve in the army but I have postponement.

I see you are playing regularly in Kiyv, even now. How are you able to maintain some kind of semblance of a scene there?

All businesses have adapted to the new reality and continue to adapt. The city somehow has managed to maintain a music scene, with local artists continuing to perform in various venues. There are even some brave djs from Europe coming to Closer from time to time which deserves huge respect. I guess there are about 3 million people in Kyiv now.

What are some of the main obstacles in putting on events and DJing in the city at the moment?

First and foremost, the curfew from 23-00, so all events end no later than 21-45, since employees need to finish their shifts and guests get home in due time. Secondly, the lack of electricity. Almost every venue has a generator that solves this issue.

What’s happening with concepts like LOW and do you see a time ahead when you can simply pick it up again where you left off?

Thanks to our friends from PRU Y RVU, we just celebrated the 14th anniversary of LOW in Oxi Club in Berlin. All our residents arrived from different countries and we picked up our two favorite dj’s who previously played LOW in Kyiv – Tako (Music From Memory) & Maurice Fulton (BubbleTease Communications). It was a truly unforgettable and amazing night full of love, music and unity. Obviously, we won’t be able to hold events at home, and we’ll probably continue to hold special parties in different countries.

Clubbing has often been an outlet for people during periods of great distress as an escape for the harsh realities. I know in Serbia for example, club culture offered people a lifeline during their time of war. Is there anything like that happening in Ukraine at the moment, or is the war simply consuming all?

Absolutely. When you live in a constant negative emotional field, in fear and anxiety, with many restrictions, music and dance positively affect the state of people. Each participant buying a ticket directly helps various units of the army, funds, etc. Most venues collect and share profits. It’s win-win. Everyone is working on ways to help our defenders in an affordable way on the home front.

You’ve been involved in club music and club culture for a couple of decades. How did you get into this music and how did you get your start as a DJ?

Music has accompanied me since childhood. When I was at school I began collecting CDs ranging from Detroit techno, Brazilian bossa nova, Trip Hop, Disco, House, Reggae, Electro, Funk. It was a collection of many thousands. Later I started collecting records on the basis of my CD collection. I bought two Technics 1210s and a Pioneer DJM 300 mixer and in 2005 started training and playing extended sets at home.

My first paid gig happened in 2007 and after that more invitations followed. By that time, I had already met my partner in crime and the best Ukrainian dj Pavel Plastikk. We started playing together, and in 2009 LOW Party was launched at Xlib Club. On a separate note, Berghain/Panorama Bar seriously influenced and inspired me when I visited it as a clubber in 2008 and dreamed of the day when I would play upstairs.

What was the scene for electronic music like there before the war?

It grew rapidly from 2014-2015, new clubs opened, the young scene developed, first-rate international electronic festivals were started such as Brave! Factory, Strichka and Rhythm Buro to name a few.

Even when Covid happened, the Kyiv clubs managed to stay afloat. A striking example of which is Brave! Factory Festival 2021, which attracted over 10 thousand visitors (with a huge proportion of foreign ravers) and a club located on Kyrylivska Street (), which was launched a few months before the pandemic and also gathered full planes of European tourists. Europe was in full lockdown at the time. Our economy could not afford it, so businesses worked within the existing rules and adapted to the situation without proper governmental help.

You’ve eschewed the producer/DJ paradigm. What is it about DJing that fulfills your creative pursuits and why have you avoided producing your own music?

Well, I’m a DJ and a collector. I’m happy with what I do, where I am and what moves me.

Your musical selections are quite broad with sets that can go everywhere from Disco to Techno. What is behind this eclectic approach?

It’s basically dependent on the club and the party. Sometimes I would play more straight sets, sometimes eclectic. Mixing genres came from the beginning when I started listening to the records. DJing just reflects your tastes, your mood and your understanding of the dance floor in the moment. This skill is experience, you should live them in time.

Is there anything specific that draws you to a piece of music and what is the main thing you look for in a piece of music to play out regardless of genre?

I think drama is the most important thing to achieve, regardless of genres. 

What have you found people are gravitating towards today in these trying times and why do you think this style of music works so well in the current situation?

It is difficult for me to answer. Perhaps this is something other than what is being played elsewhere, like the same type of house or techno, when it is difficult to distinguish whether something has changed over the past three hours, if you understand what I mean.Some people like 140 BPM, some people like 160 BPM. Some people just like more meaningful music where there’s a soul and emotion.

In the past, there had been some sense of collaboration between Ukraine and Russia’s Djs and artists, but I assume the war has completely broken any sense of camaraderie. Has succeeded in alienating a whole generation of Ukrainians?

I can’t answer for everyone, but in general of course, there is a very small number of artists, citizens from a neighboring country, who supported Ukraine. We keep a close eye on every artist and promoter.

What’s going to stop this war in your opinion and how can we as club- and music enthusiasts continue to help the Ukrainian people? 

Those who started the war can stop it very quickly. Keep helping Ukrainian people in any possible way, keep pressure on your governments with more & more weapons and sanctions. I understand that you also suffer from the economic consequences now but it is incomparable with other consequences which could happen later.

Ukraine DJ Marathon and fundraiser

A year on from the war in Ukraine we host a Ukrainian DJ Marathon to raise funds for the cause

It’s one year on from when Russia invaded Ukraine and to show our support, Jaeger is hosting a Ukraine relief benefit with a Ukrainian DJ marathon this Friday. We’ve assembled a iost of Ukrainian DJs and given them the keys to our basement and sauna with all proceeds going to Musicians defend Ukraine. Stanislav Tolkachev, Nastya Muravyova, Danilenko, Serge Jazzmate,Pavel Plastikk and  human margareeta represent Ukraine for this event hosted by g-HA & Olanskii and Frædag. Jaeger and Frædag present an evening with Ukrainian DJs as our effort to continue to place the spotlight on this war in the only way we know how, the music. It’s a peaceful protest of dance and camaraderie with our Ukranian counterparts and we give them full rein of both floors for this Frædag.

More information about the charity can be found here: https://shpytal.com/musicians-defend-ukraine/

More information about the event can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/488518603454373/

and tickets here:
https://jaeger.ticketco.events/no/nb/e/fraedag_x_ukraine_takeover_stanislav_tolchachev__nastya_muravyova___serge_jazzmate__human_margareeta

Future robot overlord or useful tool: Interviewing an AI

AI is here. It’s already making waves in fields from academia to art, with discussions descending into arguments about the role and the threat (warranted or not) of this new technology. Will AI be our future robot overlords or is it simply a useful tool that could take care of the mundanity of everyday life? The jury is still out, but one thing is for certain it’s here to stay and people are already investigating the power and shortcomings of this nascent technology, especially in the corners of music that we operate in.

In a recent interview from Test Pressing with electronic outfit Plaid, Andy Turner suggests; Personally I think AI could be a brilliant assistant to us. It could really open up creativity and things that we’ve never even imagined. So it’s kind of the best way we can look at it. And it’s impossible to stop.” He is not alone in his assumptions. Other forward-thinking artists like patten have already started incorporating it into their work to realise new pieces and possibly new musical languages through AI. And there’s also David Guetta on the other end of the spectrum which could argue for the negative effects of the technology. (But is it the AI or the human to blame for that one?)  

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that electronic music artists have adopted the technology so freely (some would say recklessly). As music made from machines the robot has always been central to the music. It’s in the human influence of said machines where the music has always taken shape however, and for the moment it doesn’t seem that AI has quite garnered the idea of creativity. You could even argue, humans have completely extricated that creative soul in the context of modern House and Techno, but that’s a whole other conversation. 

What I would like to know is how this technology is taking shape and what are the pitfalls and the opportunities awarded by this technology. So I went right to the source and started interviewing open AI’s ChatGPT on the topic of… well it… I guess. 

At no point do you get the sense you’re talking to a person throughout, but what I did get was a suspicion that I often get when I’ve interviewed real artists and people. There’s an underlying sense that the answers I receive are somewhat scripted, conditioned by unconscious social dogmas that permeate through online interviews. It never aims to offend or be critical, always following up one argument with another and curiously, it lies. Possibly ingrained in its programming to always deliver the task at hand, it will often colour facts with random sentences. The links it offers are the perfect example, most of which bring up a 404 code. 

At times during our questions, especially when I questioned something it answered, chatGPT would start writing something only to throw up an error and make the point moot, much like an artist or DJ that won’t feel too comfortable in a certain line of questioning. 

At the end of the day it supports many of the ideas artists like Plaid and patten (curious it didn’t reference those artists) had for AI, as a tool for musicians to exploit to make music. It supports a more embracing approach of AI technology, but then again… isn’t that exactly what it wants?

Hello ChatGPT. Do you have time to talk?

Of course! I’m always here to help with any questions you may have. What can I help you with today?

I’m curious about the role AI will play in the future development of music. Are people using you to make music yet?

Yes, AI is already playing a role in the future development of music. There are several ways that AI is being used in the music industry, including:

  1. Music generation: AI algorithms are being used to generate music in various styles, such as jazz, classical, and pop.
  2. Music composition: AI is being used to assist composers in the music creation process, from generating musical ideas to composing complete pieces.
  3. Music production: AI algorithms are being used to automatically mix and master tracks, making it easier for music producers to create polished recordings.
  4. Music recommendation: AI is being used to recommend songs and playlists to listeners, based on their preferences and listening history.

Can you give me some examples of people using AI to make music with links to the music?

Sure, here are some examples of people using AI to make music, along with links to the music:

  1. OpenAI Jukebox: A generative model that creates music in a specific style, given a prompt such as a piece of lyrics or a genre. You can listen to samples of music generated by the model at https://openai.com/jukebox/.
  2. Amper Music: A platform that uses AI to generate original music tracks for videos, presentations, and other multimedia projects. You can listen to samples of the music generated by the platform at https://www.ampermusic.com/music/.
  3. AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist): A platform that uses AI to compose music in a variety of styles, from classical to pop. You can listen to samples of music composed by AIVA at https://aivamusic.org/.
  4. AUBot: A platform that uses AI to generate music in the style of specific artists. For example, you can have the AI generate music in the style of Aphex Twin or Radiohead. You can listen to samples of the music generated by the platform at https://aubot.com/.

What has the critical reception been like for some of these pieces?

The critical reception of AI-generated music has been mixed. While some people appreciate the creativity and uniqueness of AI-generated pieces, others feel that they lack the human touch and emotional depth that makes music so powerful.

Critics of AI-generated music often argue that it lacks the nuance, expressiveness, and spontaneous nature of human-created music. 

On the other hand, proponents of AI-generated music argue that it has the potential to broaden the musical landscape by generating new styles and forms of expression. 

What is your opinion on this discourse?

As an AI language model, I don’t have personal opinions or emotions. My goal is to provide objective and accurate information to the best of my abilities based on the information and training data I have been given.

However, it’s clear that AI has the potential to play an increasingly important role in the music industry, both as a tool for creators and as a source of new and innovative musical styles. How this potential is realized will depend on the continued development of AI technology and the evolving opinions and preferences of listeners and industry professionals.

In what ways does an AI generate music or assist a musician in the creation of music?

AI can generate music or assist a musician in several ways, including:

  1. Music generation: AI algorithms can generate complete pieces of music, including the melody, harmony, and rhythm. These pieces can be based on pre-existing styles or can be completely new and unique.
  2. Music composition: AI algorithms can assist composers in the creation process by suggesting musical ideas, such as chord progressions or melodic motifs. This can help to jumpstart the creative process and provide new inspiration for the composer.
  3. Music arrangement: AI algorithms can assist musicians in arranging and orchestrating their compositions, by suggesting different instrumentations or suggesting ways to enhance the overall sound of the piece.
  4. Music production: AI algorithms can assist music producers in tasks such as mixing and mastering tracks, by automatically adjusting levels and equalization, compressing and limiting audio, and adding effects such as reverb and delay.
  5. Music analysis: AI algorithms can analyze music to determine its structure, key, and tempo, making it easier for musicians to understand and work with existing pieces.

In terms of music generation, how does it generate sounds?

AI-generated music typically uses a combination of machine learning algorithms and music theory to generate sounds.

One approach is to use generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), which can learn the patterns and structure of a particular musical style and then generate new music that fits within that style.

Another approach is to use rule-based systems, where specific rules and algorithms are programmed to generate music that follows certain musical conventions and structures. For example, a rule-based system might generate a melody by randomly selecting notes from a certain scale, while following specific rhythm patterns and chord progressions.

In both cases, the generated music is typically refined and post-processed by human musicians or music producers to ensure that it sounds polished and professional.

Can it generate sounds?

Yes, AI can generate sounds. AI algorithms can generate musical notes, drums beats, and other musical elements, which can then be combined to create complete pieces of music.

The sounds generated by AI can be synthesized using software synthesizers or can be created using samples of real instruments. In either case, the AI algorithms determine the pitch, duration, and volume of the generated sounds based on the musical style and structure that it has been trained on.

It’s important to note that while AI can generate musical sounds, it is still limited by the quality of the training data and the sophistication of the algorithms being used. As AI technology continues to advance, it is likely that the quality and expressiveness of AI-generated sounds will continue to improve.

Would it be correct to assume then that AI would be more suited to making electronic music at this moment in time?

It could be argued that AI is well-suited to generating electronic music, as electronic music often relies on repetitive patterns and well-defined structures that are easier for AI algorithms to model and generate. However, AI can also be used to generate other types of music, such as classical or jazz, if the training data and algorithms are designed to capture the relevant musical patterns and structures.

What about Djing; has AI made any strides into that artistic field?

Yes, AI is beginning to make strides in the field of DJing. There are already AI-powered DJ systems available that can analyze music and automatically create seamless transitions between tracks. These systems use machine learning algorithms to analyze the tempo, key, and structure of the music, and then use this information to find tracks that are compatible and match well together.

In some cases, AI-powered DJ systems can even generate new music on the fly, using algorithms to create transitions and remixes that are unique to each performance.

While AI-powered DJ systems can be very effective in creating smooth and seamless transitions between tracks, they still lack the creativity and expressiveness that comes with human DJing. 

It seems you are very keen on the continued human influence in music. Are there no ambitions to remove human involvement completely from music in the future?

There are certainly some who see AI as having the potential to completely replace human involvement in music in the future. However, it is unlikely that AI will completely replace human musicians and music producers in the near future.

Music is an art form that requires creativity, expressiveness, and emotional connection. While AI can generate music that is technically sound and follows certain musical rules, it still lacks the intuition, soul, and emotional depth that comes with human musical expression.

In addition, music is often created and experienced in a social context, and many musicians and music fans value the human interaction and collaboration that comes with creating and experiencing music together.

How did you come to the conclusion that music requires “soul” and “emotional depth”?

The conclusion that music requires soul and emotional depth is based on the long-standing tradition and history of music as an art form. Throughout human history, music has been used to express emotions, tell stories, and connect with listeners on a deep, emotional level.

Many musicians and music fans value the emotional impact of music and believe that music can have a profound effect on the human experience. They see music as a form of expression that goes beyond technical skill and musical rules, and that incorporates elements such as creativity, intuition, and emotional depth.

This view is supported by scientific research, which has shown that music can have a powerful impact on the brain and emotions. For example, studies have shown that music can affect brain activity, mood, and behavior, and that different types of music can evoke different emotional responses.

It seems that AI’s methods are very much based on the musical parameters laid out by humans in the past. In what way does it innovate or improve on music or musical techniques?

AI has the potential to innovate and improve on music and musical techniques in several ways:

  1. Automation: AI can automate various tasks in the music production process, such as mixing, mastering, and even composing. This can save time and resources, and allow musicians and producers to focus on other aspects of the creative process.
  2. Experimentation: AI can be used to explore new musical possibilities and techniques that might be difficult or time-consuming for human musicians to achieve. For example, AI can generate music that spans multiple genres or incorporates new and unusual sounds and textures.
  3. Customization: AI can be used to generate music that is customized to specific needs and preferences. For example, AI-generated music can be tailored to a specific mood, style, or tempo, or it can be generated to match the style of a particular artist or genre.
  4. Inspiration: AI can be used to inspire and stimulate the creative process for human musicians. By generating new and unexpected musical ideas, AI can challenge human musicians to think outside the box and push the boundaries of their own creativity.

Does it have to adhere to standardised forms of harmony, melody and rhythm?

AI can be programmed to adhere to standard forms of harmony, melody, and rhythm, but it can also be programmed to deviate from these standards and generate music that is unconventional or experimental.

In other words, the musical parameters that AI follows are determined by the humans who design and program the AI systems. If a human programmer wants the AI to follow certain musical rules, they can code the AI to do so. If they want the AI to generate more experimental or unconventional music, they can program it to do that as well.

It is important to note that the musical parameters that AI adheres to can also change over time as AI technology and musical tastes evolve. As AI systems become more advanced and humans gain a deeper understanding of how to use AI in music, the musical parameters that AI follows are likely to change and expand.

What are some of the most common technical challenges facing AI in terms of creating music currently?

There are several technical challenges facing AI in the creation of music, including:

  1. Understanding and capturing musical structure: One of the biggest challenges facing AI in music is understanding and replicating the complex structure of music. This includes understanding the relationships between melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre, as well as the ways in which these elements interact to create a cohesive and expressive piece of music.
  2. Creating music with emotional depth: Another challenge facing AI in music is creating music that is emotionally impactful and that connects with listeners on a deeper level. This requires the AI to understand the nuances of human emotion and to generate music that conveys those emotions in a meaningful and authentic way.
  3. Overcoming the limitations of current AI technology: Current AI technology is still limited in its ability to create music that is truly original and innovative. AI systems often rely on large amounts of pre-existing musical data to generate music, and they are still limited in their ability to generate truly new and unique musical ideas.
  4. Interfacing with human musicians: Another challenge facing AI in music is developing systems that can effectively interface with human musicians. This requires the AI to understand the musical language and processes used by human musicians and to integrate those processes into its own musical generation process.

And what will be the absolute limitations of music created by AI, considering even the most technically advanced iteration of AI?

While AI technology is rapidly advancing, there will likely always be some limitations to the music that AI can create. Some of the limitations that may persist even with the most advanced AI systems include:

  1. Lack of originality: AI systems are currently limited in their ability to create truly original and innovative musical ideas. They often rely on pre-existing musical data and algorithms to generate music, and may not be able to generate truly new musical ideas on their own.
  2. Emotional depth: AI may struggle to create music that is emotionally impactful and that connects with listeners on a deeper level. This is because music is a deeply human and emotional art form, and AI systems may not be able to fully capture the complex emotions that are expressed in music.
  3. Human connection: Music is often created to connect with other humans and to evoke emotions and experiences that are shared among people. AI-generated music may not have the same ability to connect with listeners on a human level, as it does not have a personal connection to the experiences and emotions that it is expressing.
  4. Creative intuition: Many of the most impactful and innovative musical ideas are the result of a human’s creative intuition, which is a unique combination of experience, taste, and imagination. AI systems may not be able to replicate this type of creative intuition, and their music may therefore lack the same level of originality and impact as music created by human musicians.

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me Chat GPT. Did you at any point during this exchange give answers that sought to placate?

As an AI language model, I do not have personal opinions or motivations. My aim is to provide objective and accurate answers to the best of my ability based on the information I have been trained on and the inputs I receive. I do not seek to placate, but rather to provide helpful and informative responses to the questions posed to me.

Thank you again.

You’re welcome! If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. I’m here to help.

On Trains, Planes and Automobiles with Biesmans

In 2021 Biesmans released his debut LP P Trains, Planes and Automobiles via Watergate Records. The record was created in the void of the idle routine of a world-wide pandemic and it brought Biesmans work to a world craving stimuli from mobile devices in lieu of the tangible. It solidified around the multi-media tendencies of social-media with the artist working in the strict confines of a concept and a specific work ethic. The result was a series of video clips, taken from iconic eighties movies soundtracked by Biesmans’ ebullient machine music. 

Contextually, it couldn’t be more perfect. Biesmans love of vintage synthesisers and his Belgian musical heritage set a modern backdrop for these nostalgic images. It coexisted in harmony with Biesmans’ previous EPs, which he was able to transpose perfectly for a multimedia experience. After a few aliases and projects going as far back as 2007 and an earlier career as a working DJ, Biesmans had landed on a sound that could adopt an eponymous moniker, and it was  facilitated by his close relationship with Watergate.

Going from the technical staff to an artist on their roster, Joris has a family-like bond with people behind the Berlin superclub, record label and agency. Although he is no longer one of the house’s sound guys, today he can still be found in the booth, playing vinyl alongside people like Sven Väth at the club. He has channelled his enigmatic sounds as an artist to the decks where Djing has been a creative outlet for the artists since his days as a teenager. 

With his next stop being Jaeger’s basement, we called up Joris Biesmans to find out more about what is a fairly unknown biography. Over a glitchy telephone call, I hear a friendly and relaxed Joris Biesmans and in the distance I can hear cicadas chirping and birds calling, interlaced with the hustle and bustle of a busy city. 

It sounds very tropical where you are.

It is very tropical; I’m in Goa! 

What are you doing there; are you on holiday or are you playing? 

A bit of both. I just want to take it slower in January. I’m playing here on Saturday, and I’ve been travelling with my girlfriend. I’m mixing business and pleasure. We did Egypt, Cyprus, and Beirut, and from Beirut we went to New Delhi and visited the Taj Mahal and everything, and then we went to Mumbai and Goa. 

I want to start talking about your roots in Belgium. There’s obviously that huge tradition of synthesiser music there with New Beat and some of the original Techno pioneers and I feel that I can hear it in your music too. Is that something you felt growing up there? 

I discovered that stuff later on, I have to be honest. I grew up with Eurodance and Trance stuff. This was in the ‘90’s. I started playing music in ‘96 when I was 13 years old. I hear all the hits from back then now; the young kids love them again. That was the thing I grew up with. 

Later on, I dived into this EBM stuff like Front 242. When I studied music Luc van Acker (Front 242 collaborator) was one of my teachers. I was very much focussed on House and Techno in my early years. I had no classical music training, and that would come later on and that’s how I got into that heritage. 

What were the Trance records that you were listening to back then?

Like the Bonzai stuff, and also a lot of German imports back then. Records from artists like M.I.K.E and Yves Deruyter. Back then we called it retro House, but then it was not even 10 years old. I remember there was a bit of a hard House, but also more Trance from artists like Marino Stefano or even early Tiesto records. Later on I also imported music from DJ Deeon, DJ Bone and Juan Atkins, all over the place. I still have these records, scattered between Belgium and Berlin. 

Was electronic music always around growing up, or was there some kind of realisation that happened in the nineties?

It was always there. You had all this Eurodance stuff on the radio and as a 12 year old you’re not immediately drawn into underground music. So you have to first get into it, and the electronic music you heard on the radio planted some seeds. 

The club culture in our little town was actually not that bad at all. There were lots of places where you could hear this stuff. We would go to a bar after school which would play really good House and Techno. In this genre, we had a lot of opportunities to listen and to discover new music. Today, they traded that all in for huge festival stages. 

I read somewhere that you were very young when you got your first synthesiser. At what point do you start making your own music?

It happened simultaneously. My brother and I had a clubhouse in our backyard. My brother was more on the technical side, and I just started getting into electronic music and he brought home – literally in the same year – some software called fastracker. I was never a trained musician and I found it so intriguing that I could make music (without any formal training). 

I was recording music on cassette and playing it in the little clubhouse. It was very innocent. It was so basic, but it was cool. 

At what point did you think this could be a career?

This was really playing around. I think I released my first music only around 2007. Weirdly enough when I was 16/17 years old I was really into this thing that I felt this was something I wanted to do for a living. It took me really long before I could live from it. I was always doing it, but it’s only been a few years that I have been doing this for a proper living. 

Yes, I wanted to ask you about that because the first Biesmans record only surfaced  in around 2018, but it sounds like you’ve been working away at it for some time.

Yes, it’s a fairly new act. 

There were aliases and you had been part of a Hip Hop act… 

Yes, Wooly, the Hip Hop act was from my school days. 

So what solidified for you around the time of Biesmans in terms of music? 

I started studying again in 2009. I did three years in music school. Before that I was playing a lot, mainly in Belgium. These were the myspace times. Things were going really well, and at a certain point I wanted to learn more. This broadened my horizons. I started making completely different music. I discovered some electronica stuff that I completely missed out on previously. 

And then moving to Berlin, I was all over the place. I was making music as TV(e) and I had this ongoing project with Cashmere. I was  making so much different music, I was a bit stuck. I felt really lost. I really had to regroup myself in Berlin, and becoming a technician at Watergate, there was so much musical education. 

My entire weekend was clubbing and you get to hang on club music again. That’s why I decided to focus on one thing. I was going to go back to where I started again, back before the school started, but with the information I learnt from the school. I was going back to club music and just using my own name.  

When I listen to your music I pick up on a lot of Italo references…

I’m a big fan. What  shaped my Italo love the most, was the actual machines. I love vintage synthesisers. Honestly I don’t have such a big Italo background but you take a Juno 106 (synthesiser) and it immediately sounds like you’re going to make music like this. These machines really inspire me to make music like this. 

Is that where most of your creative influences come from, the machines?

Yeah. The machines shape the sound a lot.When I have an idea the main thing for me is to just get the music out there. I’m not a purist. 

If you are listening to other music, are you taking  in those references as well?

I start with a blank slate, but I’m always taking in references. I love to DJ, and I love to look for new music. This is an essential part for me. The stuff will get absorbed somewhere and that will be released when I’m in the studio. 

This ties into what I wanted to ask you about your debut LP, “Trains, Planes and Automobiles.” The concept of pairing these video clips with your music seems quite strict. Did they have a strong influence on the way the music sounded?

Definitely. It went 50/50. I was also making songs and finding the right video for it, but I was also finding videos, and making songs. No matter which direction I started, it was always starting with a very visual image in my mind. These are references you definitely hear on the album, because you have some downtempo and atmospheric stuff that’s not designed for the dance floor.

It was Corona time, so I was watching a lot of these old movies. The film scores of this stuff are always so good. 

Why did you choose this particular era of films?

That’s also the moment I felt more nostalgic. Being in this eighties sound and having  these machines I was really drawn to it. This was always my trademark, that vintage sound, but updated for a modern club use. 

Was it about making a new soundtrack for those clips?

I wanted to be active on social media. So, the idea of the album was not initially an album. Everybody was using social media a lot, so I thought  let’s find a way to trigger all these senses. I was doing these POVs, and they were working well from my studio. So to give it a different direction, I thought, let’s do some film scores. And that worked really well. It was a good bridge to stay in the picture.

Did it start off as a vague idea and then quickly turn into a strict set of parameters?

It started off with an idea to do three tracks a week for a month, just to give myself a challenge. You make it really explicit, three tracks a week and you get your audience involved. Afterwards, a friend of mine told me; “hey but this is actually an album that you are making.” 

I did the whole thing in a month and then after I started making edits of the songs and more recordings and fine-tuning it. For me it’s the closest thing I could get to an album, it’s really just one thing. It was just one concept within this time frame. It was making a picture of that moment of my life and being as close to it as possible. That worked really well. 

That record came out on Watergate and you’re close to the people at Watergate. Does it help being in an environment like that for the freedom it presents?

I actually wanted to release it myself via bandcamp. It was a bit rougher at the time. Alex (from Watergate) was like: “why don’t work at it a bit more and you can release it via Watergate.” Then they wanted to give it the proper attention with gatefold vinyl, artwork and the whole thing became much bigger. They just heard the album and they said let’s do the album together. 

How did they feel being that person working in the background, working on the technical aspects, to being an artist on the label?

Now, I don’t do the technician job anymore; I stopped about two years ago. When I joined the agency, I told them I didn’t want to be a technician anymore, because my intention was that this was always my way into the music scene in Berlin. I’m still very closely connected to the club. If I’m in Berlin, I  visit the club at least once a week. It’s a bit of a second home.

What effect has being a technician had on what you do as a DJ in other clubs?

I don’t think it’s affected the type of music that I play. What I think is really important is the sound in the DJ booth, and I notice these things. At Watergate we had a very high standard of what we would like to meet. This is also contributing to the best possible outcome for a club and the artist. I notice that this is not common. You see it from both sides now and I have my eyes open. 

I’m sure you’ll enjoy playing at Jaeger then. 

Yes, I’ve seen videos of this very nice DJ booth which is also very dedicated to sound. I’m looking forward to that. 

International Deejay Gigolo Records: The Electroclash years

“Do you know Frank Sinatra… He’s dead… he’s dead,” Miss Kittin cackles in a distant tattoo as the Hacker’s electro beat chugs along. Few memories play out as vividly as when I first heard “Frank Sinatra” by the Hacker and Miss Kittin. I distinctly remember where I was, who I was with and the feelings that the record elicited. Today, it still evokes a visceral memory of surprise, awe and humour; not for its content within the current landscape, but for what it meant back then. 

Taken from the now highly acclaimed Miss Kitten and The Hacker’s “First album”, that formative experience with “Frank Sinatra” laid the groundwork for a musical taste that sought some distance from the mundane of what electronic music had to offer at that time. It was provocative for all the right reasons and brought electronic dance music back to something that was always intended to be; indifferent and at times completely at odds from anything in mainstream culture.

Not only did it cement an admiration for The Hacker and Miss Kittin both as a duo and individually, but it was also my introduction to a label via a compilation with some curious cover art and a name that would be difficult to forget; International DeeJay Gigolos Volume 2

Baptised by the record label that bore its name, International DeeJay Gigolo – which is often shortened to just “Gigolo” – the compilation left an indelible mark and informed a big part of my musical education; not merely for the music from the label but for an entire musical universe that would come before and after it. It’s a label that would grow as my own musical tastes evolved, and in the process of presenting new music, it would also be my introduction to an entire musical history that was distant and elusive to a still somewhat uninformed and still naïve enthusiast. Gigolo leads to Jeff Mills, takes a sojourn via Tuxedomoon, is entangled in the existence of Kraftwerk, and makes connections with contemporary labels like R&S. Throughout it all it keeps introducing the listener to new music and artists like Tiga, Mount Sims, Terence Fixmer and Adriano Canzian, and at the centre of it all; DJ Hell. 

Gigolo Records has been a significant chapter in the annals of club music. Even esteemed DJ,  DJ Harvey professed his admiration for it in DJ mag back in the day and for many DJs and enthusiasts of the same ilk it remains an important touchstone. It will be forever associated with the electroclash moment, but for anybody with eclectic tastes it goes way beyond that moment, tying the dots between Punk, Disco, Hip-Hop, Techno and Electro.

Gigolo came at a crucial time for club music and it not only found the perfect zeitgeist for its own ideologies, but went a long way in establishing that zeitgeist. It stood out amongst its peers for its unique and singular vision, driven by its sole owner and musical visionary DJ Hell (Helmut Josef Geier). It established a moment in music history we aren’t likely to witness again with that intensity. It wasn’t a specific sound – more a lack thereof – but an attitude that was at the heart of Gigolo and it all starts with the man behind the label. 

To understand Gigolo, you’ve got to take a trip through the history of one of the most enigmatic and individual DJs that has ever lived. A true and determined underground figure, DJ Hell’s history moves through club music history like Dante traversing the nine circles. Key figures and moments crop up in his own biography as if he’s recounting the story of our global scene, the faceless narrator of unflappable character. He’s never stealing the spotlight or craving the attention of his counterparts, but he’s always there, in the shadows working on the fringes like a true uncompromising underground hero. 

His career as a DJ starts with the advent of the nightclub, a concept still indistinguishable from the discotheque during the eighties. In Munich, or more accurately, a suburb outside Munich, a young DJ Hell is cutting his teeth, playing music from his local discotheque’s collection – DJs did that back then, when the music policy was still dictated by the sound of the place rather than the disc jockey. DJ Hell had shown a knack for picking the right records from the communal collection, consolidating it into a career as a DJ and then later a producer. 

Moving from the suburbs to the city DJ Hell became one of the first House DJs in Germany, parlaying his skills for mixing records into A&R for the Disko B label before becoming an artist and producer with his breakout single “My definition of House” on the then burgeoning R&S label. His work as A&R took him from Germany to New York, possibly sowing the seed for an eventual move to New York to be a resident at the infamous Limelight club alongside Jeff Mills.

This is where a large part of the story of International DeeJay Gigolos begins. In 1993 DJ Hell was a resident, sharing the booth alongside Mills in one of the most iconic eras and places for club music. It’s here where the story of the club kids of New York begins and ends with Michael Alig’s eventual descent into murder. Yes, DJ Hell was there for the beginning of that too.

It was DJ Hell’s close associations with Mills that planted the seed for Gigolos to exist. After hearing a couple of Disco “edits” from the wizard being turned at limelight, DJ Hell approached Mills with a proposal to release the music. Both DJs knew that the music wouldn’t suit any of Mills’ Techno labels, and he agreed to give the music to Hell to establish International Deejay Gigolos. This was a big deal. Jeff Mills hardly ever licences his music outside of his own labels and here is giving DJ Hell these tracks for free! 

“Shifty Disco” wasn’t the first catalogue number on Gigolos – no that honour goes to D.J. Naughty and David Carretta – but it was released in the same year the label sprang into existence and set the tone for what the label and this music would become. It turned it all on its head. Here’s the original Techno innovator, making Disco-inspired House, and what do you know… he’s very good at it. That raw impulsiveness that is Jeff Mills, is all over this record, but it’s channelled towards the fringes of Jeff Mills’ known universe, where vocal samples and strings sit buoyantly alongside syncopated hi-hats.

Shifty Disco and Gigolo came as a revelation in the late nineties. As we were marching into the millennium, Electronic club music became more and more codified. Lines began to be drawn in the sand, between House and Techno and Trance and its quickly-emerging subgenres where there had never been any distinctions before. Some factions started garnering superstardom on the basis of playing records to a dance floor, while others were happy toiling in the underground benefiting from the hype. It was a time of hyperinflation for club music’s equity stake in popular culture and DJs were playing to millions at the likes of Love Parade while producers like David Morales and Paul Johnson (original underground figures) got played on MTV. As it became trendy without much resistance from people that saw an easy buck, all sincerity went along with it and by the time the troubadours were playing saxophones alongside fedora-clad DJs playing “lounge House” nobody with any taste would be caught dead listening to a DJ, except maybe one – DJ Hell. 

DJ Hell and Gigolo were one of the few instuítutions that not only remained unique during this period, but also bridged a lot of gaps for people moving to and from electronic club music. As the owner, A&R and creative director for the label, DJ Hell’s punk-informed attitude to music and the business of music was one of the most authentic for a time of uber-commercialism for electronic music. There was no specific promotion, no hype, just an ideology and a look that resonated with an audience either coming to electronic music or moving away from the tawdry aspects of the music. 

As the label started to take shape and by the first compilation an aesthetic started to emerge based somewhere between the pop-sensitivities of Andy Warhol and the kitsch machismo of  the Arnold Schwarzenegger artwork for the label. (Later Arnold’s people would sue Gigolo for the use of his image, but that’s a whole other article). It was all carefully orchestrated by DJ Hell and even today a Gigolo record still jumps out at you from the shelves for its curious artwork featuring Amanda Lapore and Sid Vicious. 

Early releases from likes of the disco industrialist David Carretta, the eco-nihilist turned Hi-NRG punk Chris Korda (“save the planet, kill yourself”), House cadettes the Foremost Poets and Electro stalwart DMX Crew, not to mention the Hacker and Miss Kitten set a road map through electronic music that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting created by an AI. Even when Gigolo was releasing straight up House music, there were elements of something more going making unlikely connections between distant musical universes and it was quirky but above all idiosyncratic. There was an approach in breaking down barriers that permeated through it all, and although it was in the air with people moving away from what House and Techno became, Gigolo played a significant role in defining this period as Electroclash. 

If there is one track that defined this era and this spirit in music and offered something of a breakthrough, this would be “Kernkraft 400” by Zombie Nation. Today that song has been immortalised in football stadiums the world over, but before it was that it set a watermark for what Electroclash would become. It’s instantly gratifying melody and fervent joviality, becoming an instant earworm for a whole generation of club-goers. It cemented the career of the artist and synth-wizard Florian Senfter, defining an era and a sound that would soon be immortalised through Gigolo. Right now, it might be as far removed from the original context as it was intended as a football stadium chant (or not actually considering DJ Hell’s own love for football), but even back then it was also probably the biggest crossover success for the label and the artist. Between the saccharine melody and the rocky nature of the synths that called to mind more Emmerson Lake and Palmer than it did Oakenfold, the record has clearly stood the test of time. It was and remains the definition of Electroclash and you can hear its influence on everything from Alter Ego to Boys Noize. 

Much like the whole ethos of International Deejay Gigolo, Electroclash was based on the absence of a particular sound rather than a specific genre. The prefix Electro is something of a misnomer, referring more to an epochal sound and character rather than the literal understanding of the genre Electro. It would fold in everything from Synth Pop to Disco to Techno with a focus on electronic sounds and an iconoclastic approach that tore down institutionalised barriers installed by “purists.” Electroclash held a middle finger up to the dogmas of electronic club music, establishing one of the most fertile and unassumingly progressive periods in electronic music. It came at just the right time at the end of the nineties when electronic club music was becoming more rigid and formulaic in the wake of some crossover success. 

DJ Hell saw all of this from his vantage point at a point where he himself had been established, and positioned International DJ Gigolo Records right at the centre of this incredible creative mælstrøm. There would be nothing expected or pastiche that came out of this period for Gigolo. Records like the electro-rock of Zombie Nation would live side by side with the rest of the catalogue, with the only common thread between these records being their raw and impulsive nature. There was an energy that sought to decimate the conformity gathering momentum in electronic music, offering a lifeline to a musical scene that was getting complacent.

The label  would never fall victim to this complacency and a record would never deign to cash in on the success from the last. The diversity of the label’s output was something like collage for someone with an attention deficit disorder. If for example “Kernkraft 400” was the record that broke the mould, it wouldn’t assume to take centre stage, and DJ Hell would pivot to something  completely different again and again. There was no blueprint or method, it was purely the impulses of a DJ with remarkably eclectic tastes and a laser-like focus, proven by the early success of a record like Zombie Nation’s and Dopplereffekts “Gesamtkunstwerk”. That last record had almost nothing in common with the first even though they were released around the same time, and today, much like “Kernkraft 400”, “Gesamtkunstwerk” stands as another classic record from that same era.

During a recent interview for Tiga’s podcast “Last Party on Earth”, Hell talks purposefully about this record as one of his greatest achievements as a label boss. From the artwork to the title, and of course the music, “Gesamtkunstwerk” is a masterpiece. Arriving, anonymously, via one of the legends of the Detroit scene, namely Gerald Donald (previously one half of Drexciya), it might seem like an obvious choice for a successful record, but at the time people were still just discovering the truly underground sounds of Drexciya and their other Detroit counterparts. Dopplereffekt was still unknown with some mystery around the main actors of the group, but you didn’t need to know the origin story to fall in love with the record’s dystopian grooves. 

Hell and Gigiolo brought Dopplereffekt to the fore with this record. It was probably the purist from of Electro that Electroclash would assume, demonstrating a mass appeal value for the Electro genre that we hadn’t experienced since Uncle Jams Army in the eighties. Electro had been a DIY indulgence for comic book nerds and synthesiser geeks, but even a stubborn rocker  hearing “Gesamtkunstwerk” for the first time, it was all s/he wanted to hear after. In 1999 when the LP was released, it stood as a linchpin for the whole Electroclash movement. The comical panic of Y2K, makes for a perfect backdrop in the group’s fantastical prose about sexual congress with mannequins and obstructing human fecundity, while machines drummed out rhythmic devices like a automatron motor city factory. 

There was a sense of absurdity at work even when the music was quite serious and it came to define the likes of the roster at Gigolo. Things like providing a platform for the aforementioned Chris Korda’s and his “church of euthanasia”; releasing Mount Sims’ “Hate Fuck” as a single for radio; and putting Amanda Lepore on the cover of records obviously provoked, but the intention was always with sense of fun, DJ Hell’s tongue always firmly cheek. A kind of Roy Lichtenstein for the new millennium, Hell and Gigolo took a slanted approach to pop-culture through a soundscape only JG Ballard could envision, and it worked. The records would be released into the world without any pressure from the label for the artists to do interviews or promote their work, and a whole generation flocked to them without much goading. There was something considered about the final product around a Gigolo release, which extended from the music to its packaging and it stood out on every record shelf.

It was an entire world contained, built around a cult-like family of freaks that Hell cultivated like Charles Manson without all the killing and with some actual musical talent. It’s possibly best represented in the funny, almost outlandish 2005 Gigolo documentary, Freak Show, where Hell takes the gang on the road, from Germany to the states, featuring a young Tiga, Miss Kittin, Traxx and a host of characters you couldn’t possibly write today. 

With so much music being released via the label one can’t simply dip a toe into the Gigolo catalogue during this period. There’d be tracks like Vitalic’s “Poney,” Tiga’s “Sunglasses at night” or Fischerspooner’s “Emerge” that would keep you engaged with the label though its popularity, but it would inevitably lead to records like Terenece Fixmer’s “Muscle Machine” or David Caretta’s “Dominion”. At the same time it could lead to a rabbithole to post-punk darlings like Tuxedomoon; resurrect forgotten gems like Shari Vari; or really turn everything on its head with a P. Diddy record. That’s not to mention DJ Hell’s own vital contributions throughout this period, including masterpieces like NY Muscle.

It’s in fact NY Muscle that stands as the fulcrum point for the electroclash era for me personally. With collaborators like LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, Traxx, and Suicide’s Alan Vega, this record was something of the barometer from which we gauge the Electroclash period. Rock motifs and tunnel-vision like Techno live side by side in this record from 2003, which also started to mark the height of the success of the label sandwiched between tracks like Sunglasses at night and Justice v. Simian’s “never be alone.” 

Gigolo would honour the legacy from which it arrived and in some chaotic kaleidoscope of sound it would reconstitute and re-invigorate what had become stale and formulaic. In what is only a laboured analogy Frank Sinatra was truly dead, but the rat-pack survived in the form of Micahel Alig’s club kids born in the parallel world the label and its founder created. It was the right label for the right time and as much as it brought a whole new generation (this writer included) back to electronic music. It remains a significant label even today, and today its back catalogue often warrants some double-takes, like “wow, they released that!

From Gigolo’s heyday, electronic music’s success quickly rose in the popular consciousness, perhaps even leaving Gigolo behind somewhere between the stark minimalism of Berlin’s endemic influence. Those barriers that Electroclash broke down were quickly reinforced and only strengthened in its resolve to institutionalise a music that was always thrived in the obscure and impulsive. But it’s still some of the world’s best producers and DJs working today that came to the fore during that time. DJs like Tiga, 2 many DJs, Boys Noize, Erol Alkan and Ivan Smagghe (many of which collaborated or were featured on Gigolo) rose to prominence during this period too, and it’s no surprise that they continue to be acknowledged as some of the best in the world. Whatever was ingrained during Electroclash (even if Ivan Smagghe hates to admit it) has established them as unique entities on our scene today. 

And much like those DJs, Gigolo stands as a watermark in electronic music history. Some twenty years on, many of those records (and I have a fair few of them) stood the test of time. They haven’t been in the zeitgeist for some time but every now and then you’ll hear a DJ play a track and it immediately stands out amongst whatever else is being played, much like it did when it was in its prime. There are some similarities we can draw with the current era and the original Electroclash scene. Electronic music has reached a state of popularity it has never witnessed before, and at the same time has been diluted into bland tropes facilitated by accessibility and the economics. There are a lot of similarities that can be drawn to that time and now, and is setting a good precedent to set the scene for a new iconoclastic genre to exist, much like it did when Gigolo was there to establish it. Frank Sinatra is well and truly dead!

Schneider’s House with Anja Schneider

Anja Schneider has been a broadcast- and club DJ for 25 years. She cut her teeth in the world of DJing back in the nineties when the culture was still underground, precocious and even a little menacing. By the early 2000’s she was established, moving from DJing to label owner and eventually production as one of the founders of Mobilee. That label remains a touchstone for a very specific time in club music history as Techno and House went deeper and crossed over into popular culture. At the height of its popularity, Anja left Mobilee and almost immediately she established her own imprint Sous. Anja Schneider’s presence has been a fixture in the culture, especially through her work as a radio host and an electronic music facilitator for airwaves. 

Radio is something that she has always embraced, but even for all its positives it could also feel like a quagmire for a progressive club DJ like Anja, whose strong connection to the underground often left her stymied with her day job. Recently that has changed. 

“Now I’m radio free,” says Anja Schneider over a telephone call with some reserved excitement in her vocal chords. After twenty five years in broadcasting Anja Schneider has called it quits for radio. “To make a long story short… I had enough,” the German DJ and producer begins. It started when her programme at radio Eins ended abruptly when they pivoted to an all-rock programme during the pandemic. “Imagine, in Berlin!”, she mocks incredulously. She fielded a lot of offers from other stations and took on the monumental task of a daily drive time show at classic radio with a programme called Beats, which was all about “independent deep house.” She did a show for a year, “and then I couldn’t do it anymore,” she says, sounding exasperated. “It was too much and I couldn’t hear any new music.”

There had always been a sense of “frustration” for Anja working in “these big companies”  where it seemed “you’re always fighting” to get that “new shit” on the air. After 25 years she was “tired” and compounded by the situation, in general, Anja has taken a well-deserved break from the airwaves. It’s given her the opportunity “to breathe a little” and refocus her energies on the club dance floor. “Everybody from outside just saw me as a radio producer,” reflects Anja, and today she is looking to shed a little of that perception of her skills as a DJ.

Anja Schneider’s associations with radio run deep, especially in Germany. Since the early nineties she has been at the forefront of German broadcasters bringing electronic club music to the masses. 

It was all predicated by an interest for electronic music that started in her hometown of Cologne, where she first heard the sounds of Chicago and Detroit spilling out from a local record store. “I worked in an advertising company, and underneath there was this little Chicago record shop,” remembers Anja. There were all “these cool guys hanging” out in front of the shop, and her curiosity piqued, she went on to discover what electronic club music was all about. They turned her on to the likes of Underground Resistance while DJs like “Hans Nieswandt from Whirlpool production” exposed her to some of her first DJ mixes. She went deeper with fanzines and started buying the music, before she eventually made her way to Berlin and found a refuge on the dance floor at Tresor.

There she was “blown away” when she saw “Jeff Mills for the first time” and alongside influences like the “charismatic” Sven Väth, a nascent career as a DJ awaited, but it would have to wait a little longer. 

Anja’s focus had always been as somebody that “worked behind the scenes.” Her work in advertising which led to broadcasting kept her rooted in the background as a kind wizard of oz for club music, when it was still in its infancy. Instead of keeping it on the dance floor, Anja  turned her efforts to bringing what she heard in clubs on the weekend to the bigger audience of the radio. “I always wanted to make it (electronic music) more popular,” she explains. She started off as something “like a consultant” before moving on to become a “programme manager,” a position she enjoyed at Fritz radio for some time before her boss convinced her to take to the microphone as a DJ. 

After an initial reticence, it turned out to be the “best decision of my life.” She became “very successful” as a radio DJ and shortly after DJ requests started flooding in. A thought struck her; “if I can play for 80 000 people on the radio of course I can play in the club. This was the most stupid thought!” she now considers with a snicker. “I failed the first gigs and I had to learn to mix properly.” That didn’t take long. Moving over to a set of decks, after the simplistic push-button selections of radio programming, Anja Schneider’s reputation became two-fold. Already known for her cutting edge selections as a radio DJ, she became a double threat as a DJ that had the chops to back it up in the club too. 

Soon an “offer to start a label” followed. That label turned out to be Mobillee, a club music label that became home to artists like Sebo K, Pan Pot and more recently Gheist, and has been a significant fixture on club music since its inception, with Anja playing a large part in its success…

Anja trails off while recounting these early years. It’s always struck me and especially now speaking to her, that Anja Schneider lives in the present with an eye on the future. She’s never been one to reflect too heavily on the past in other interviews and talking to her she covers much of her career, with “…and the rest is history”. It’s reflected in what she does as a label owner with most of her efforts are focussed on bringing new artists and music to the fore. Recently she has established Clubroom, a mix series,”which is syndicated to several radio stations;” worked with up and coming artist, Joplyn for an amazon music exclusive; and released a compilation, featuring many new artists via her own Sous music label. 

The fairly young imprint has been around since 2017 with the debut LP coming from Anja Schneider herself. The record, called SoMe, seemed like a significant moment for the artist, producer and DJ, and much like the position she finds herself in today, after 25 years of being a radio DJ, it seemed like a watershed moment for her career. It established a new label, marked her departure from Mobilee and hinted to a more eclectic approach in her sound, as something she likes to refer to as “Schneider House.” Anja is not so sure however what really inspired this watershed moment or any of the others. “I’ve never been a person to make plans. It’s always been chaotic and organic” and creation of Sous records and the LP SoMe, could simply be an extension of that. 

Her decision to leave Mobilee, the label she helped create and cultivate in to its position today, “was not an easy step” for Anja.”It was quite difficult for me when I quit,” admits Anja and the fallout from that was a huge risk on her part too, but she was adamant on this new recourse. “With Mobilee, it was established, there was a lot of business,” says Anja. It was “too much pressure” to deliver in the end. She wanted a record she could put out without considering the practical commitments that go with being a label boss, things like paychecks and bills. “I wanted to do it whenever I wanted to and how I wanted to do it,” and that’s how Sous came to be. She was determined and it didn’t take her much time to establish herself again in the position she is now, with a new successful label and a very busy musical output. 

SoMe laid the foundation for her to explore new avenues in the larger network of her Schneider House sound. It extends to the label where “everything is possible” which reflects again in her DJ sets too. It’s a sound she’s established over the course of her career and much like everything else it’s a direct result of this chaotic and organic process to everything she touches.

It’s hard to believe today that Anja Schneider never wanted to be a producer. ”Everybody was asking why don’t you deliver a track?”; but she was quite aware of her own limitations. “I can’t do it,” she used to tell them until her friend Sebo K convinced her otherwise. She teamed up with that producer first and the result was a record called Tonite. All those latent ingredients are there that make this an Anja Schneider track. Melodic and immersive, yet thundering, it is a dance floor track that looks to the deeper end of the spectrum. Bubbling basslines and syncopated percussion keep it rooted on the groove while playful elements flutter through the arrangements.

Ever since her first release, she has always worked with a production partner and she picks no bones about the fact. “I love to work with different people,” exclaims Anja. “I like the interactions and the fights that you have with people,” she says with a laugh. 

Her latest production partner is her husband and renowned producer, Toni Planet. There haven’t been any fights yet according to Anja who has found the whole experience to be “super easy and fun” so far. In her relationships with any producer, it “has to click on a human side,” and working with her husband certainly has that covered. “On the other hand it’s really important to have something unique or authentic.” Anja “can hear quite soon, if somebody is trying to be trendy,” and music for her has always been about having an “authentic” experience. 

This is one of the biggest faux pas Anja has witnessed in her extensive career, as a DJ,  producer and label owner. “If you have to adapt, you are losing that authentic part of you.” She considers “it would be completely stupid” to have to adapt at all to what’s going on around her, especially now with a trend for harder and faster music prevailing. In what she claims is now her “fifth wave” of a new trend, she certainly doesn’t feel the need to compromise the authenticity of Schneider’s House for this new immediacy in club music. 

Anja’s music today actually  lives on the opposite end of the spectrum of the trend, yet she is still an in-demand DJ, which says much about her own authenticity as a producer and DJ. Her latest release Turning my Head, is a deep thriller operating on the lower ends of the BPM wars. A moody track that simmers between tension and resolve, it maintains that sound of Schneider’s House for lack of any other description. 

“It’s always deep,” she says of this sound. “I’m not a person with big breaks and drama”  and in her music you’ll find something that is tempered and introspective with a groove that undulates throughout. “This groove can also be a little breaky,” suggests Anja with tracks like WMF from SoMe as an example, but it’s always there and follows the artist from the studio to any DJ booth she commands. 

Much like her music, “everything is possible” when it comes to an Anja Schneider set and yet there is something specific to her sets that can live happily under the roof of Schneider`s House. Her only regret recently has been that due to the pandemic, “the last EPs were really slow and breaky” and like DJing she is looking forward to get back into the club “and make music for the dance floor again.’’ 

It’s hard to believe that it would take that long for Anja Schneider to achieve her goal. With the world back on its feet, her presence on the dance floor has been noted. Her touring schedule is back to where it was during her time at Mobilee and with more releases primed from her and her label, including a “big breaks” remix from Dense Pika, Anja Schneider is riding a new wave of success already. With the commitments of broadcasting now firmly behind her, she has retrained her efforts and set her laser-like focus back on the club dance floor. She’s setting the scene for a new generation of producers and DJs through her label and efforts like clubroom in that same altruistic approach  that has followed her through her entire career; to bring that “new shit” to the people. 

Palace of Pleasure is looking for their Spellemann

If you have Palace of Pleasure’s Spellemann prize, bring it to Jaeger and we’ll give you and a friend free entry to the concert

Palace of Pleasure have a history of not holding on to their Spellemann prize. The first one they raffled out to a lucky fan, and the second one they repurposed as a door handle to Jaeger’s predecessor, Garage. It was the nineties! It was time of blasé excess and when not giving a fuck was a cool, but that was then and this is now.

Unfortunately with the end of Garage, the door handle disappeared and neither we nor Palace of Pleasure have had eyes on the much-coveted prize. Palace of Pleasure would really like to be reunited with their much-coveted prize, and we at Jaeger would really like to see what’s behind that door. We’ve not been able to open it since we took over from Garage, and the pot for “what’s behind the mystery door” is no joke.

If you return the Spellemann, we’ll ask no questions and we’ll even go as far as to reward you wand a friend with some tickets to the live show. (Please contact editor@jaegeroslo.no)

Tickets for the event are available via ticketco. 

 

Luke Solomon: The unsung hero of House music on his own terms

It takes some kind of legacy to be called one of the unsung heroes of House music, especially when the accolade is bestowed by one of the best in the business, Andrew Weatherall. Luke Solomon is that unsung hero and has forgotten more about dance music than any of us can ever begin to know. He’s been a monolith in the scene since the nineties, but working in the background, behind the scenes, few people have acknowledged his presence like Andrew Weatherall, but that is about to change. 

We all first felt Luke Solomon’s presence on the scene as the resident of Space @ Bar Rumba alongside the legendary Kenny Hawkes. From there he established the Classic record label (Classic Music Company today) with Derrick Carter and set about defining the sound of House music in the mid and late nineties in Europe. A facilitator in the truest sense of the word, Space lives on infamy today as one of the infallible House concepts in the history of club music, while Classic has been responsible for some of the most legendary House records ever to be sealed in wax, many of them Luke’s own. 

As an artist he’s been active for the better part of his career, most notably as one half of Freaks together with Justin Harris, with whom he enjoyed (or rather not) also his first crossover success with the Creeps. Over the years, he’s carved out a career as a producer with a midas touch and it’s extended from his work with Harris and his solo work to a place where today he has hundreds of production credits on records for Honey Dijon, Horse Meat Disco and Beyoncé.

Yes, that Beyoncé. Together with his writing partners, Chris Penny and Honey Dijon, Luke Solomon penned the music for “Cosy” and “Alien Superstar” from her last album Renaissance and with a couple of Grammys pending, the fates have smiled on Luke as he steps into what many might say is his twilight years of a musical career, even though hes far from done.  

It’s not been without its struggles, losing friends like Kenny Hawkes and peers like Andrew Weatherall, and with all the other misfortunes and strifes that follow a DJ, it has only strengthened his resolve and he has taken it all into his stride. “I’ve been through a lot,” he says via a telephone call but it’s also been worth it on some level. “I get a lot of inspiration from the darkness and the parts of my life that I stumble and I feel that helps me creatively and that’s the greatest therapy.” 

Today he’s “writing with people like Seven Davis Jr.” and with “more queries coming from the pop world to make music” from his work with Beyoncé,  he’s found a new urge that has taken him back to that youthful spirit of the nineties and coming through as a new DJ and producer. “For instance, I was just in New York now working with Honey and loads of different writers, it was so much fun. I felt like a kid then. Nothing mattered and we could do what we wanted and any idea was a good idea.” 

It’s this work that he’s doing behind the scenes outside of the spotlight that in many ways defined Luke Solomon as one of the unsung heroes of House music in Andrew Weatherall’s eyes. Between his production work and his A&R activities, he’s laid the groundwork from which artists like Derrick Carter, Honey Dijon, Horse Meat Disco, Camelphat and many many more have built very successful careers. Today he continues to do the A&R for Defected, with many industry experts claiming his efforts have played a pivotal role in that company’s latest successes. 

And throughout it all he still DJs and continues to tour the world on the skills he first laid down at Space @ Bar Rumba. It’s at the UK club he first met Olle Abstract and with his appearance at LYD pending it’s here where our conversation begins. 

Luke SolomonWhat do you remember of the nights at Space @ Bar Rumba?

Absolutely nothing… (laughs)

So it must have been a really good night then?

Yeah, I’ve been having to think about this alot at the moment, because me and a couple of people from the club have done a compilation, which is dedicated to Kenny Hawkes. I’ve been thinking about the different nights and the different DJs. I think we captured a moment in time. The stars aligned for what was this really special place. 

If I’m not mistaken Classic was established around the same time. 

Actually, Girls FM happened, which was the Pirate station I played at with Kenny. The club night started as a result of the radio station and our relationship, and Classic sort of happened around the same time. It’s a bit of a blur. 

Does that mean the music policy at Space kind of reflected the sound of the label?

It was Deep House, the original version of Deep House coming out of Chicago and New York and led by labels like Prescription and Cajual. It grew and became more eclectic. We would play Disco and the sound of Brit House, and then the Nu Disco sound happened. 

What were people like that came out to the event, because it would take a huge commitment to come out every week, right?

It was chaos. A  lot of industry people would come because it was the middle of the week. That was always fun and hedonistic and then you had what we called the Deep House 150; which was about a core of 150 people that were dedicated Deep House fans that would come out every week. If it was a big night, and with a guest DJ like Andrew Weatherall, Harvey or Derrick Carter it would be a roadblock. 

You mention Derrick Carter there, the co-founder of Classic. Would you often have Classic artists on the lineup?

Yes, and a lot of people that used to play for us, ended up becoming Classic artists. It was a mixture. People like Gemini and Ron Trent were regulars. It was interesting, because when we first started, we had Ron Trent and Chez Damier and we had like 50 people. And then fast forward 12 months and we had 300 people. I think we broke that sound in London before anywhere else was playing this kind of music. 

What led to the night coming to an end?

Kenny was in charge of running it and I was the resident DJ. He realised that what was happening in Soho and in the west end was that music was shifting more towards the east end. We thought it would be better to end it while it was on a high, rather than feed it every week. We were both playing every weekend, the labels were firing on all cylinders and Freaks was just happening for me. So, there were lots going on so it was a good time to pull the plug.

Did it cement anything in terms of you and DJing going forward at that point in your career?

Yeah. I still stand by the fact that it taught me how to be a warm-up DJ and it’s still the thing that I enjoy more than anything else. Starting a club from the beginning when there is nobody in the room and filling the dance floor, I learnt all that playing from Bar Rumba. It was the time when you could break new records and keep things mellow. That was valuable for me and I carry that with me.

Do you still get opportunities to warm up?

All the time, that’s my favourite time to play. Especially if I play before Honey Dijon or Derrick. Recently I played in New York and I opened the club elsewhere in the 2nd room, and I played all night, and I love that. It’s on your terms. It’s quite tricky when you’re coming in after a DJ and you’re the guest; a lot of the time DJs don’t warm up for guests anymore. 

Let’s backtrack a bit. We know a bit about your history and how you came to electronic music through cassettes, then records and raves. What were those first records and what do you remember from the raves?

The eighties are a little foggy (laughs). In my hometown, on Monday nights, we had DJs from London that would play and educate us. We learnt about records like early Frankie Knuckles’ “baby wants to ride.”  And then Acid House, like Joey Beltram’s Energy Flash. We were exposed, early on to those records alongside Soul II Soul and rare groove records. I was fortunate enough to hear a lot of different DJs, maybe not well-known, but really good DJs play a mixture of proto-house music. I remember hearing stuff like “love can’t turn around” and “promised land” before it went into the charts. They were anthems to us long before they became crossover records. 

There’s been this mythic view of that time and the nineties, especially with this new generation coming through. As somebody that’s lived through that time and with the level of your success, what was your experience of that time looking back?

I think we realised we were living through a Golden age. It was very different being an 18 year old in 1988, living through the summer of love and going through outdoor raves. And then moving to London being exposed to club culture and seeing that part of things. You just knew that if you went record shopping, you’d find some incredible records. Being in amongst it, we were quite spoiled, especially looking back at it now. It’s interesting, you were in something, but when you were in it, you didn’t realise it quite so much. 

What do you think of this nostalgic view of that era today, because for me it feels a lot of it has become pastiche?

I agree with you. I think technology is to blame for a lot of that stuff. It’s so easy to make those records now, but making them with the spirit of the originals is a very different  thing. I think it almost regresses, and nostalgia has a very bad effect on dance music. It’s important to be progressive. 

I guess when you started out, you and your peers would be working on rudimentary equipment, and it was about experimenting. 

I think that’s why modular (synthesisers) have their place in the world, but I think that has almost gone too extreme now. I feel that stripped down chaos (from the nineties) is missing. It was still that kind of raw, black funk that was born from Motown, Disco and Prince and then going into Acid House. The laziness  of making music is a strange thing for me, especially when there are so many great musicians around. I do think that is changing. I hear dance music, especially coming out of America that’s pushing the boundaries again. 

I feel artists like Byron the Aquarius and Galcher Lustwerk are exciting in that regard.

Yes, exactly.

But, you’re also a big part of that I feel, with the stuff you’re doing with Honey Dijon and where that has taken you.

I feel like I’m part of something, but I like to surround myself with young, inspiring people. To get that energy from the new generation and be part of that new movement. 

Luke SolomonHow did you and Honey start working together?

We’ve known each other for a long time, since the mid-nineties. We’ve been friends for that long and we kind of grew up together. I think there was a point where she started making more music outside of DJing and we put a couple of things out on Classic, and then we started working together and that led to her album and Beyoncé. It happened organically. We’ve got very similar tastes. Alongside Chris Penny (Luke’s writing partner), it’s like being in a band. 

While we’re on the subject of Beyoncé, how did that happen?

Her creative director is a big fan of Honey’s and we got a mysterious email during lockdown. They told us that she was working on a new album, and they wanted to take black music and dance music back to its roots, and she wanted team Honey Djon to be involved. It grew from that to having two songs on the album. It was a very bizarre and amazing process which ended up in two grammy nominations. (laughs) I laugh every time I think about it. 

What is it like working in that tier of the music industry, coming from House music, which has always been more DIY?

You know the greatest thing about it was that it has been completely on our terms. To imagine the music we make anyway with Beyoncé singing on it, it’s like a dream. We just made the music we make. We may have to move the tempos, or be more creative with the arrangements. It was still based on very cunty records, records from the ballrooms in New York, music that me, Honey and Chris had grown up with. 

We are just applying all our knowledge and all our history and giving it to someone who would understand it. What you hear, beats-wise and samples, that’s what we did. They didn’t change a thing. The only thing we had to do was slow down “Cosy,” that’s when you realise you’re making something for the pop world. 

It’s not your first flirtation with success and being at the top of the music industry. You were there before with The Creeps as one half of Freaks. I read an interview where you said that with a song like Creeps, the money didn’t justify the sacrifices you had to make.  Was there something that has since changed your mind and put you on this path to working with more pop artists?

The Creeps wasn’t really on our own terms. That version of Creeps that came out, came from a remix we never approved. I feel like we ended up making a record that I didn’t get behind 100%. We were young and suddenly money is appearing and people are putting pressure on you to make another record. Lack of experience puts you in a very strange headspace, and I really battled with it. 

Now that I’m older and I’ve learnt from that experience, I know exactly how to do it without making the same mistakes. This is on my terms. We’re doing it without any compromise. In terms of the financial aspects; I’ve been through the loss of a record company, where I’ve had huge debt.  I’ve been in a position where I wasn’t getting any DJ work. I had to get a job and work for Defected. I’ve had to go through so many different versions just to stay in dance music. Now I’m at a point where I’m really comfortable with that. 

You certainly took it in the stride and I think your hundreds of production credits on other artists’ records stand as testament to that. Were there ever any regrets about directions you’ve taken working with other artists?

I’ve never been good at playing the game. I know what to do and how to do it. Throughout all of this, I don’t think there’s a moment in my creative career where I have had any regrets. Even looking back at the Creeps, I don’t think I could’ve made the Beyoncé record without going through that experience. Great music is great music, and I’m not drawn by the spotlight anymore, I just want to make great music. 

And do you approach the music differently when you make music for somebody else than working on a Luke Solomon track?

100%. When I make a record with Honey, I have to be inside her head. It needs to sound like her, it needs her spirit. That comes from intimacy. I like to have intimacy with music that I care about. You have to become somebody else to be those people. When it comes to me, I’m just in my head. 

When it comes to your own music, there’s still a prolific output. Between all your other production projects, your daily A&R activities and Defected and DJing, where do you find the time for all of this; what’s essential to that work ethic?

I’ve always been able to manage my time. If I make a record a week, and I’ve done that for the last 25 years, then I feel like I’ve accomplished what I need to do. Whether it’s a remix, or working on a Honey record, or producing and writing for someone else, as long as I do that I’m good. 

Outside of that, the A&R is just; every Thursday and Friday I just sit and go through music. I listen, I buy records, I travel to buy records, that’s A&R. It’s about attaching yourself to things that you see coming and artists that you might see developing. DJing then feeds from that. I don’t think it’s that difficult to do a lot of things in 24 hours if you are just dedicated and obsessed with it. The only thing I’ve had to change was my day to day at Defected. I’ve got so much production work, so I’m just doing A&R. I’m not the guy that’s on the ground everyday like I was. 

I’ve had to kind of move things around now, because we are in a position where there alot of new opportunities. Obviously off the back of the grammys there are doors opening. Things are shifting and changing, but I’m still the same person doing the same thing, it’s just in a different world I guess. 

Since we’re the subject of Defected. I’ve heard people in the industry acknowledging your role at the label and how you’ve changed things around there. Is there something specific you’ve done there that has contributed to this perception?

(laughs). It’s interesting. Somebody else said that to me, and it’s a lovely thing to hear, but I never really thought about it. My relationship with Simon Dunmore (Defected founder) over the years has always been that I’ve been the yang to his ying. I offered an alternative perspective to dance music, which I think allowed Defected to reach or attach itself to other places or people. 

That kind of just happened. I still have an ear. When Camelphat’s Cola came through the door, I could hear it was a big record immediately, the same with the Oliver Dollar’s Pushing on. I knew they were big records, so I could stand there quite confidently saying, sign these records. It took a long time for people to really acknowledge my place in the industry, and it’s only happened in the last two years.  

Andrew Weatherall once labelled me the unsung hero of House music. I loved him and cursed him for that. I never wanted to be the unsung hero, I wanted people to acknowledge that. Getting that recognition now feels good. 

Working in the background like that as the person that makes these moves that make waves on an international scene, what do you personally get out of that?

(Laughs) That’s a really good question. I spent a lot of time not putting myself first, and doing a lot of things for the culture. Recently it reached a point where I decided that I have to think about myself a little bit more. This next part of my career is where I have had opportunities that I’ve never had before and I thought I would never have. The possibility of winning a grammy and these doors opening that I’ve never had before. I feel like I’m getting reimbursed. 

You’ve seen your fair share of people come up alongside that managed to break into that upper echelon of the underground scene. People like Derrick Carter and more recently Honey Dijon. Has there ever been any frustration on your side?

I’ve watched so many people push past me, and I don’t think I was ever ready. I don’t think I was a good enough DJ or producer. I think I was still learning and I’ve now reached a point – even though it’s this late in my fucking life (laughs) – and I feel like I have an equal standing with those people now. 

I’m not big on resentment and regret, I’ve always been an optimist. If I’ve ever seen on of my peers be in a position where I felt that could have been me, I always thought, that is going to be me someday. I’ve always been an “I’ll show you person.” 

There were so many times I could have walked away. Besides that, losing dear friends, and actually ironically it’s some of that grief that I suffered that’s kept going. If Kenny hadn’t died, life would have been very different for me now. He’s the reason that I got sober; he’s the reason I took my job more seriously; he’s the reason I do what I do. I feel very fortunate.

So you’re able to compartmentalise all that industry stuff from the personal stuff and from the music that you make?

Yeah, now I am. Because I’m comfortable in my own space. I don’t think I have to make a big record, because it’s going to help my DJ career. I don’t have any interest in that at all. You know, I’ve been asked to do a House master’s compilation for Defected, and the first thing that came to my head was; “are you sure?” And then we went through the list of other DJs and artists that have done it,  and I was like; “actually I do get to stand by my peers.”

 

Everything starts with a beat: An interview with Dusky

There’s a sound inextricably connected with London on Dusky’s latest LP, Pressure. From the tangible Garage-influences to the atmospheres, heavily imbued with the weight of a post-dubstep experimentalism, the whole album echoes with the sounds of the English capital and the production duo’s heritage.  

“We both grew up in different parts of North London” explains Alfie Granger-Howell while Nick Harriman carries in a cup of tea in the background of a video call. The pair have been making music together for the better part of a decade with 4 LPs, a few dozen EPs and a record label (17 steps) bearing the fruits of the labour as Dusky. 

Coming to the fore during London’s explosive post-Dubstep era, Dusky established a sound in the fusion between House and Dubstep, bringing the heavy drones of the UKs bass traditions to the slower tempos of House. They broke through with tracks like Flo Jam, and as their contemporaries started solidifying their sounds around traditional genres like Techno and House, Dusky remained fluid in their approach and their style, based on a tradition of Djing that sees them channel a combined record collection through their work.

In different epochs, they’ve focussed their sound on different elements in their own music education only to land on where it all began for them as teenagers with the sounds of Garage. In the recent revival and new appreciation for these sounds, Pressure finds Dusky in yet another phase of their sound together, while retaining that thread with a track like Flo Jam, which was also re-issued this year on their own 17 steps label.

As a record, Pressure picks no bones about its designs on the dance floor, launching into a rhythm and bass combination that anchors the entire record in the club experience. Those familiar disembodied ‘90s R&B vocals that’s centrals to Dusky’s sound drift in and out of tracks, while two-step beats and those hollowed out bass sounds bring an eager Funk to the record. The record shows their evolution and growth as artists continue to hit a nerve, while that virtual melting pot of sounds that makes London such a unique musical entity on the world map, continues to feed their work. 

As Alfie and Nick sit down with a fresh cuppa, we get stuck into a conversation about how the city has influenced their work and how they have channelled various aspects of a UK sound through their work and DJing. We jump straight in with Pressure. 

With those Garage sounds and two-step beats, this record sounds like London. Is that something you were trying to achieve?

Nick: We had a few Garage-inspired ideas, because there a lot of new Garage we were enjoying and playing out in our DJ sets. It snowballed, and before we knew it we had a load of Garage-influenced material.  

Alfie: There was one track from the previous album that started it, called “Eros”. We really enjoyed making that and it came together quite quickly. It just kind of feels like the right time (for this music). There’s also a lot of reference to that era. It felt like the right time to hark back to that era. 

I think it would be safe to assume it’s quite different from your last two LPs Joy and Outer. Was this an outlier record for you or just a natural evolution in your sound?

Nick: It’s definitely natural. It makes sense (in the context) of our influences growing up. We used to listen to a lot of Garage; it was everywhere on the radio during our teenage years. In the narrative of all of our albums, it’s probably a bit of an outlier. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s good to switch stuff up and be a little different.

Another thing that I also noticed that is a little different is that it’s also more immediate. There’s no ambient preamble, it just kicks off with a … kick and goes straight into those dance floor tempos. Was that conscious?

Alfie: I think that is something that is very different to our other albums. The other albums were compiled as a listening experience, whereas Pressure is a lot more club focused. In a sense it is wanting to reference classic Garage tracks and our record collection. Everything starts with a beat and it’s a DJ friendly way of starting tracks. It just felt right for this stuff, because there’s this established thing out of Garage and classic House.

Garage is having a bit of a revival right now. It seems that you are pretty sensitive to what’s going on around you. Or is that just a happy coincidence? 

Alfie: No, it’s definitely influenced by what’s going on. Even going back to when we were telling you about when we started making music, both of us were DJs by then. Obviously we were not doing gigs when we were teenagers, but we were buying records. It’s always been a passion of ours, following what else is going on and seeing how scenes grow and evolve.  When we make something to a certain degree, whatever we feel like will be a blank slate and then the other part of it is referencing what else is going on in the zeitgeist or whatever. 

Nick: You need to be aware of what’s going on, but not try and chase what’s happening. Otherwise you’ll just be trying to catch up. You just need to take influences from what you were enjoying from music. You just need to take that into the music you are making, and inevitably it will be different from what other people have made. As an artist you’ll be bringing your unique take on those influences, whether from the past or present. That’s worked well for us over the years. 

DuskyYou mentioned, Garage was big when you were teenagers. Is that around the same time you started to make music?

Nick: Pretty much.

Alfie: I started making very rudimentary things, when I was 13/14 and that was the kind of peak era, end of the nineties. Garage was everywhere in London. The other big influence around that time was Drum n Bass and the very end of the Jungle era. Both of those things always stuck with us because they were such formative years.

So you were teenagers when you started making music individually, but how did you first meet, and what encouraged you to start working on music together?

Alfie: We met when we were 16. We both studied music in different places doing different things. We had this project before Dusky (Solarity), that we released a few EPs on via AnjunaDeep. 

Actually the first LP as Dusky, originally it was going to be an album under Solarity. It was only halfway through that we realised it drifted quite a lot from the Solarity sound. The label pointed out it was quite different, and you need a new alias.  

That would be around the post-dubstep era. Coming up in that scene, was there anything that particularly facilitated your music and your career?

Alfie: I think we were very lucky in that era that we started Dusky, it was a very interesting time. It was fertile ground, because there were a lot of people coming from these different scenes, which were merging. Dubstep got very noisy, and that put some people off. For whatever reason that “Deep House” sound seemed to attract different people from different scenes. 

Nick: I think what helped push us in that hybrid scene was Loefah. He supported our music on the Swamp show (rinse FM) and at that time that was the shit everybody was into. Even though we weren’t doing anything specific with post-Dubstep, that was the connection with that world and it opened up a lot more gigs for us. 

I think what facilitated a lot of  the creativity in that era was the openness to experimenting.

Nick: For sure. There was a lot of variety, and that’s what I was saying about that time being very (reminiscent) of what the younger people are doing now. 

It also seemed that there was a real platform for new artists to emerge. 

Nick: There weren’t any gatekeepers. You didn’t have to have the approval of anyone to be a success. There were less barriers

Alfie: It was a level playing field.  

The other record that piqued my interest this year was Flo Jam which you re-issued via 17 steps. Flo Jam wasn’t your first release, but certainly a breakthrough record. Would you agree?

Nick: Yeah for sure. A lot of DJs playing across the board played it. We just re-released it because we got the rights back from the label. 

Why reissue it now?

Nick: It was originally on Dogmatik for 10 years…

Alfie: Well they are no-more. It just came down from Spotify one day, and that’s how we realised the rights had come back to us. People were like; “where’s flo jam” and we thought; “we should re-release it.“

Listening to that record today and then Pressure, there is certainly a leap in terms of sound. Is there anything significant change between those two records for you?

Alfie: It’s quite hard to tell. It’s interesting going back analysing our music like that. Often we don’t try to think about it too much when we are writing it. I think they are quite different, but they do have some common influences. 

Nick: There’s definitely a common influence in the sense that Flo Jam was very much influenced by Garage, but at a much slower tempo. Everything was slowing down. Dubstep was quite fast and then House was just coming a bit slower. That nineties R&B vocal is the thread that ties in the stuff with pressure and some of our earlier tunes.

And what’s stayed consistent in terms of the creative process throughout it all in your music?

Nick: Our setup hasn’t changed much, it’s remained in the box. We are actually still using the same speakers.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. 

Alfie: Yeah, we tried some other ones and then went back. There are some things that keep track of the Dusky sound just in the way things are mixed and layered and the way we sample. I think most of it’s this kind of automatic thing that there’s this consistent sound. Broadly there’s this continuum. 

You’ve remained consistent as a duo too. Whereas some groups may go off into different directions, you’ve stayed together. What is the key behind that?

Nick: I guess it’s because we started making music together when we were quite (young). It’s always worked well, and it’s continued to keep developing.  It’s still enjoyable.  

Alfie:  And we’ve got complimentary skills. I was most interested in composition, whereas Nick was more focussed on the production side of it. That made it a good marriage. The other thing is that we have very similar tastes, but not exactly the same. If it was exactly the same it would be quite boring. 

There’s an idea that working in a duo that the music can go in a direction that you never thought it would, working as a solo artist.  Do you feel that’s true for you and your music or are there more distinct roles?

Nick: It’s completely mixed. It’s the same as when we’re DJing as well. If one of us is playing something the other one didn’t expect, then it just sparks new ideas. 

And while we’re on the subject of Djing; you mentioned earlier that you’re quite aware of what’s happening around when you’re making music. Is that the same for Djing?

Nick: For sure, because we need to be looking for new music all the time, right. To keep our sets fresh. 

The last few sets I’ve heard from you, were leaning to the sounds of House with some connection to the sound of your Joy and Outer records. Will it be leaning more towards a UK sound off the back of Pressure. 

Alfie: Definitely. There’s a lot of really cool straight-up garage or Garage-influenced stuff going on. There’s a nice little crew of people doing that stuff. Labels like time are now which are part of Shall not Fade and Instinct.

So it’s mainly new artists making that style of music, not so much the original artists?

Alfie: Mostly, we still play some old Garage records. 

Nick: Garage is quite an old sound now, so you want to play some of the old records to educate people that didn’t get to enjoy them the first time around, but equally, you don’t want to just turn the whole thing nostalgic. There’s loads of new stuff going round, which is pretty good. It’s about finding that balance between the old and the new and keeping it interesting. 

While Garage is big in London, it’s not always recognised in other parts of the world. In your travels as DJ’s have found it is easy to translate those UK sounds, or do you find yourselves having to adapt?

Nick: You have to adapt for sure. In Germany, for example, they are not as keen on stuff that’s not as straight up four to the floor. And in America they are quite open, but if you play something that is Disco influenced, sometimes they really hate it. 

Alfie: It’s different in the States, since when we first started (playing there), they didn’t want anything too experimental, whereas now it’s been very open crowds. We’re playing Garage, which is very specific UK stuff, and the kind of stuff that would maybe not have worked that well before, but it seemed to go down really well on the last tour there. Each club or festival is different. 

I’ll find my place: An interview with Move D

We talked to Move D about his prolific career as a DJ, producer and record label owner through various stages of electronic music. In an extensive interview we cover highlight from the early nineties through his revival and his latest Pandemix Live Jams series ahead of his appearance at Skranglejul.

David Moufang (Move D) hadn’t owned a pair of turntables at any given period of his career until the pandemic. The 56 year old DJ, producer and record label owner has avoided the traditional DJ setup at home, but like so many other things that changed with the pandemic. With the prospect of long periods of isolation at home, he thought “I’ll get a pair of Technics.” David’s intention turned to streaming some mixes via social media channels during the down time, but he soon started “running into problems”. Over-eager bots would shut down his streams with even some of his own work causing copyright conflicts. 

It was unsustainable, and David found he had to change his approach. He would need to circumvent these issues and the only way he’d be able to do that was with unreleased, original material. He packed away his new, pristine pair of decks and brought out his well-worn synthesisers and drum machines. He would “play new stuff with the gear,” making only original tracks in the moment for a virtual audience tuning in from home. He called the series Pan de mix

As the pandemic eased out of lockdown and the world started getting back on its feet, David was left with all this music on his harddrive and “offers from other labels” started to follow. Doing some minor post production on what was essentially the unaltered live performances, some of the tracks found their way onto Smallville Records with the rest of the music consolidated as a series of releases and eventually an album called the Pandemix Live Jams.

Pandemix Live Jams is just the latest in a prolific career as a recording artist and DJ, one that has its origins at the beginning of DJ culture and has continued to evolve and contribute to the contemporary history of electronic music. The record finds itself at the revival of he and Jonas Grossman’s legendary Source Records and its sound can be seen as a direct descendent of the sounds and spirits that influenced the start of the label. There’s the warmth of analogue equipment and the imperfect touch of human improvisation ebbing through the entire record, much like it did on that first record he and Jonas released as Deep Space Network almost thirty years ago.

Coincidental encounters

“That’s why they are called jams, because they really are jams,” says David from a telephone call via his hometown Heidelberg in Germany. He’s called Heidelberg home throughout his entire career, and it’s in the small town that he started his career as a DJ back in the eighties. 

“Life is just a stream of coincidences,” he ponders when thinking back to that time. “Born with the Beatles,” David moved through “Led Zeppelin and probably AC/DC,” during his formative years while he was learning to play the guitar. At that time, Heidelberg was the headquarters for NATO, and with “30 000 American soldiers in a town of 150 000” American music was in the air… literally. As a youth he could tune into the American radio station broadcast from the GI barracks, exposing David to a wider range of music than local stations would offer. The Americans “played stuff you wouldn’t hear on German radio like Parliament and Hendrix’s voodoo child” and it piqued a latent interest in music that eventually went beyond rock music. 

As he was coming of age, he started frequenting one of the “mainstream” discotheques in town where two DJs with “American GI backgrounds” would hold court over a record collection seven days a week. ”There was a shelf behind the DJ,” remembers David. “The club owner would give the oldest, most respectable DJ in the club (some) money to go record shopping and those records would go into the shelf.” While most of the crowd was dancing and having a good time, David was “watching, kind of nerding” and taking notes on where all the “good records” were kept. 

On an occasion when one of the American DJs got into “some trouble” with the local police and the discotheque was left in a crunch without a DJ, David stepped up to challenge. He persuaded the owner with; “I come here regularly and I know where the good records are.” That was all it took and David was inducted into the resident DJ lineup. 

By that point David had already been into electronic music for a while. An initial interest came “when the technology arrived” around “1976, the year before the prophet 5 (synthesiser) was invented.” Not being able to afford a piano, his mother bought him the more affordable (then not so much now) electric Fender Rhodes piano, planting a seed for manipulating electronic sounds. It evolved from there with the first “major milestone”, a Tascam four track cassette recorder, before Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” eventually saw David fall into a rabbit hole of machine music. “That was a very important track for me,” insists David, “it changed my life”. That track encouraged him to buy his first drum machine and started the decline in an interest in rock music altogether.

By 1985/ ‘86 he heard the first DJs beat mixing on trips to Italy, where clubs were  “spearheading” the evolution of the dance floor at that point. At his local discotheque however “beat mixing wasn’t really a thing.“ It was more of a “mainstream place” where you “would hear Happy Birthday by Stevie Wonder every other night when it was somebody’s birthday.” David stepped into this role on a pair of rudimentary belt driven turntables, spending a couple of hours every night practising beat mixing, before the audience would inevitably flock in and start requesting the last chart hits. 

He never considered it a job, thinking this was going to be a mere stepping stone between school and university, “like a bartender or waitress.” His first inkling that this could be a job, was meeting a friend of a girlfriend who had been “Djing for 12 years,” and even then it seemed incredulous. “To me this was shocking!” snickers David. “I was full of pity for this guy.” The money David had been earning at the discotheque “was barely enough to pay rent” and he “couldn’t” even “afford to buy vinyl with my money,” but the fiscal focus took a back seat to the music he was playing and starting to make in his free time.

Rock n Roll is dead

While playing in bands, he had had access to a studio and like so many of David’s stories, it was mere coincidence that he started making music for “short movies or advertisements” out of that studio during this time. It put him on a “path moving away from the band” and towards early prototype Techno without even knowing it. “I was making Techno in a way like all electronic music, without thinking this could actually be released. I hadn’t heard my first house record yet.”

“It was all thanks to D-Man really, who started putting on Acid House parties around ‘88” in town, insists David about his introduction to this music. The DJ, who is a little older than David, brought characters like Ron Trent and DJ Pierre to Mannheim, a town just outside Heidelberg, with people from as far afield as France and Switzerland frequenting what would become a scene. David ”got to hear these amazing DJs” and it had “a huge influence” on his own nascent prospects as a DJ and producer, but it wouldn’t be until he met Jonas Grossmann that these efforts started to take shape as Deep Space Network and Source Records by the early nineties. 

Source Records and the scene that he and Jonas created around the label which included KM20 studios and the local “hangout” Milk! has remained a touchstone on the history of Techno and House music. Aphex Twin would stay with David when he was in town, while the KM20 studio would feed into Milk and become legends in their own right. Milk! was an ambient café, “a kind of hippy place” according to David, where you could get your coffee served by Jonas or David while being served the latest creations coming out of KM20. We were playing this music and we were the people making this music” and this “really drew people.”

Move D

Those rose tinted glasses aren’t looking so rosy

David rambles through these pivotal moments in his career in a matter-of-fact tone that places all the emphasis on characters like D-Man – and later in the conversation, Lakuti – without much concern for his own incredible achievements. He almost brushes over his entire career in the nineties summing up a decade in a few concise sentences before moving on again to the present.

“It’s easy to be nostalgic,” he says before warning, “but I wouldn’t over-idealise it.” Yes, it was originally “ grounded in this freakish thing,” where impromptu parties would pop up in abandoned buildings and the woods,” but it was also the dawn of Techno’s commercial success and with that came pitfalls. 

Deep Space Network and Source records would be part of this momentum too. “People were ripping the albums out of our hands,” says David without hyperbolic inflection, while he and Jonas were being flown to London for NME photoshoots. With Source Records they had found a niche as Techno was booming with the advent of what David defines as “listening Techno,” but we would probably call ambient today. There was certainly something in the air at that point which coincided nicely with things like Warp’s Artificial Intelligence releases, and they all soon found they had become the darlings of the media. But trends moved quickly, and in “one year Aphex twin was god and two years later the headlines were ambient is dead.”

Source Records remained prominent during this period, with classic records like Roman Flügel’s “Ro70” and Move-D’s “Kunststoff” entering the label’s catalogue, and even during ambient’s death spiral they were still introducing new and exciting artists like Lowtec to the world. 

Throughout all this time however David’s career as a DJ remained suspiciously low key. “It didn’t really matter in the nineties,” he says of Djing. “It was all local or German clubs.” He was “doing ok, making money” from selling records, and the label would sustain him as he became a stay-at-home dad. He would play “Techno parties,” both as a DJ and a live performer, and while there “was extra money” in that at a time when the fees were particularly high, he never considered it a career. 

And by the “end of the nineties the introduction of the cd burner and then Napster was finally it for the prospect of making money as a label” too. “Winding down the label” during this period for the first time,  “less and less gigs,” started coming David’s way and in that unique catch 22 for any DJ, if “you’re not active, you’re forgotten in no time.” By the early 2000’s, David says; “my career was rock bottom. Nobody cared, neither for the records nor for the Djing. I was at a point, where I thought eventually I have to find myself a job.”

The job search never had materialised however.

Revival

“Again, it’s one of those lucky instances,” says David. With the global village shrinking in the shadow of the internet, David found fortune in the advent of social media. A friend had introduced him to MySpace and then suddenly, without much prompting, people from places as remote as the British midlands were reaching out. One of those people was Lerato Khathi, better known as Lakuti and synonymous today with her label Uzuri records. At that point she was still “putting on illegal warehouse parties in London” and invited David as a fan of Move D. 

“I didn’t even have a proper record bag,” remembers David who also recalls being “really nervous.” Playing after another DJ with a minimal set, the trepidation of following the stark sounds of his predecessor was getting closer. Luckily, the transition between DJs coincided with a power outage; a “ twenty minute break” and time for David to compose his thoughts while the crowd re-adjusted. It turned out to be a “good thing” and he was able to “reset the mood with cool Deep House.” It hit a nerve with an audience possibly somewhat fatigued from those minimal bleeps and “people lost their fucking minds.” It was pure kismet that it happened at a time that coincided with an era of Deep House’s own revival and in that scene Move D yet again became a vital proponent, bringing new audiences to this music and his own back-catalogue. 

He became a fixture on the scene, playing places like the much lauded invite-only Free Rotation festival, while releasing music again with labels like Workshop, Running Back and of course Uzuri knocking on his door. And while his working methods might have “been changing drastically” based on a curiosity that continues to go unsatisfied, there’s that consistency in the warm analogue sounds, and the imperfection in human improvisation that has remained consistent. It’s still there in Pandemix Live Jams finding a natural home in the 2nd phase of Source Records as an exclusive vehicle for his own music.

Move D remains a constant presence in the underground, and as a DJ he’s staked out a claim as one of the best. This is possibly his greatest claim. His ability to find some common ground with crowds, while playing on the dynamics of his own musical history has garnered a reputation as a DJ other DJs like to admire. 

I’ll still find my place

Today his sets can go “from more broken beats” to “Chicago acid” with a focus on “mixing styles” through his set. It’s what he admires most in other DJs too –  “That was my biggest complaint about the early 2000’s; I could be there for two hours and it was like they were playing one track.” And he’s not eclectic for the sake of casting a wide net, it comes down to his own personal tastes. ”Do what you believe is right and don’t try to please because you think you know that’s what people expect from you,” he says in some grand philosophical gesture. 

David doesn’t often talk in platitudes like this, so when he does, you have to stop and take a beat to let it sink in. There’s a wisdom there that only experience can bring, and he carries that over to a sincere commitment to the music he plays. “I want to entertain them, but I have to like it as well,” he adds as he considers the statement. We’re a long way from the eighties where a person like David “would get into a fucking fight about music,” and today he’s eager to share the optimism of an interconnected world where people are less stubborn.

He can see the positive aspects of being more “open-minded” about music, even if it might not be to his favour. He’s realistic that perhaps he’s not in that sweet spot of popularity like Source Records was in the 90’s or Deep House was in the early 2000’s, but “it’s ok” says David.” I’m aware my personal taste could be right and the pinnacle of what is hip and other times… they are far apart. Now we’re at a point where it’s medium far, but I’ll still find my place.” 

That place is enshrined in the history of electronic music today. 

Romjulsfestivalen 2022

Our annual Christmas celebration returns unfettered with a full lineup and some new concepts

After a couple of years of compromised Christmas celebrations we’re pleased to announce that our Romjulsfestivalen returns in full force, featuring international and local guests for the week-long Christmas celebration. Jaeger and Natt&Dag present Move D, Dusky and the newest Ostgut signee Fadi Mohem alongside our residents and a couple of new concepts between the 25th-30th of December.

Our stalwart concepts, Øyvind Morken’s Untzdag, Boogienetter, Skranglejazz and BigUP! take their places, while new concepts, Helt Texas and Flux join the lineup for the first year.

It kicks off with Øyvind Morken’s annual 1st day of Christmas foray, with the DJ celebrating an incredible year for his music, before moving on through Boogienetter and ending up at BigUP! Oslo’s Drum n Bass and Jungle crew are in the basement for this edition on a Friday no less, with a marathon DJ lineup that will make the foundations shake.

Ole HK presents Helt Texas on their usual Thursday spot with Dusky, Vibeke Bruff and Synk, after a Techno assault midway through the week with the Flux collective. After their last visit to the basement, Flux takeover both floors with newly inducted Ostgut resident, Fadi Mohem. Skranglejazz are back in their usually spot with House veteran Move D returning to Jaeger.

Tickets are already on sale via ticketco so make sure to grab a ticket to avoid the queue.

Premiere: Henrik Villard – Jordbær (BCR)

Henrik Villard pre-empts his latest release with an email claiming “Jordbær” and its two companions on his and BCR‘s next release, “Sveve” is a “slightly different style from me.” On the first listen it’s familiar alongside Villard’s efforts for the BCR label. Its deep groove carves trenches in the recesses of traditional House, while the artist’s effervescent touch for atmosphere remains at the fore of its appeal. Pads and synthesisers establish a heady firmament of textures, anchored in a low end rumble. A lysergic 303 bass-line emerges from the lower register, growing into the central motif alongside the determined groove.

It develops into fully formed song inspiring another listen and then another, and it’s at that point when you hear it. There is something different here. Whispers of noise stick to the atmosphere and the low bass takes on a menacing character. There’s something raw and visceral operating in the background behind the established  melodic ideas and pristine production touches.

“Jordbær” and the rest of “Sveve” finds Henrik Villard explore a new realm, something indefinable and far from obvious. It’s not exactly a new direction from the artist, but hints at some new terrain from an artist whose musical prowess has been established with records for the likes of labels like Mhost Likely and more recently for Tensnake’s True Romance. We’re excited to premiere “Jordbær” today ahead of its official release this Friday and caught up with Henrik to ask about the exact nature of this new direction. We and ended up going deep into his production processes and the nature of BCR in this lengthy email exchange.

Henrik talks about the BCR nights at Jaeger; his “sound”; and how Sveve came together in this Q&A. “Jordbær” and “Sveve” is out this Friday via Bandcamp and catch Henrik Villard and BCR in the booth in December.

Hey Henrik. Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions. You introduced this record via email as “slightly different style from me.” What makes it different?

Hey Mischa! Thanks for having me. Yes, I did. The whole EP, Sveve, is a product of some intense hardware-jams, which is a shift from my usual in-the-box process of making music to being more hardware oriented. The limitations imposed by hardware made me realise that I need to approach the music making-process in a new way – which led to me being more open minded in terms of the ideas that came from jamming on the synths.

A typical Henrik Villard-sound might be a lot more lofi and not necessarily something you’d hear in a club setting, while the tracks on Sveve still have a slight lofi-feel to them (especially on the pads, in my view) these are tracks I’ve played out in a club setting.

What influenced the changes in your approach this time around?

It’s kind of two fold. I’ve felt for some time that I’ve been stagnating with the music I made, and sometimes it was not even that fun to make (a bit frustrating). So I decided to experiment more and try different approaches to making music – to make it fun again!

You’ve released quite a bit on other labels in the past. Was there any intention to make something for BCR this time and what changes when you do something for our own label?

Yes, I recently released an EP on Tensnake’s label “True Romance”, which I’m very proud of. The intention to make a release for BCR kind of grew at the same time as I started to experiment. And I knew that no matter what, I’d have Anders and Perkules’ blessing to express myself. I feel a lot more confident to experiment (even though it’s not really wild experimenting) with my tracks when the intention is to release it on BCR. It feels like I’m much more free to do what I want.

What in your opinion is the defining Henrik Villard sound in records like these?

To be honest I have a hard time pin-pointing what “my” sound is – maybe it’s in the way I imagine a baseline. To me, that’s been my main focus for a couple of years when I make music. I’ve let my TD-3 run hot on these tracks, and I like to think that how I process and automate it as it runs throughout the tracks is part of what makes up “my” sound for these tracks. Where does a certain element come in in the track? What kind of atmos/background sounds are used to “lift” the track? I think the three tracks are firmly rooted in a house-tradition, I use 909 and 707 drums and acid-lines, bass-motifs that are meant to be something that keeps the groove going throughout the track. This release really is an exercise in house-music as I’ve perceived it at the time.

You specifically chose “Jordbær” as the premiere. Why did you choose that track from this record?

I really like Jordbær cause the idea came together real quick. I just had an idea of what the track would be and mashed it out. It’s hard to pick favourites, but I think this track stands just a tad bit closer to my heart.

In what context would we usually find this record in one of your DJ sets?

I’ve played it out a lot. I think it works well to set the mood in a set, and I like to think that it has some sort of dubby-quality (especially The piano). Not really a peak track, but before and after, hehe.

The thing that strikes me first is the bass, that deep rumbling consistent underneath the track. Tell us a bit more about how this track started and took shape?

The track started with the rimshot rhythm that goes through most of the track, then came some more drums. Then I made a pad sound, and also “jammed out” a baseline. After that I tried out a couple of acid-lines until I got the one you can hear in the song.  

Any specific records that influenced this sound?

Genius of Times’ “Sunswell” and Qnete and Carmel’s “Vierfecta”. The “floatiness” of Sunswell and the static nature of the drums and rhythm on Vierfecta.

At its crux though it’s that acid refrain that comes in during the height of the track, breaking through the atmosphere. It’s more like a song than a track.  From where do you draw your ideas for arrangement and melodies?

Oh, I feel like I’m the least creative when it comes to arranging tracks. I usually work with 16-bar sections, and I work a lot with filters. So I usually introduce an element (a stab, vox, etc) in the start of a 16-bar section, and use the filter to fade it in. For melodies I love to make a sound on a synth, and while I’m turning knobs something (like a meloyi, a motif) usually just catches my ear.

At what point do you realise a track like this is good enough to find a spot on a record? 

That’s a tough one. Because when you make the track, you listen to it over and over again. And it can sometimes be a bit hard to judge whether a track is good or not. I think we all know the feeling of working on a track the whole day, and then when you listen to the same track the next day, it sounds like garbage/crappy/bad. In my case I go off the tracks (and ideas) that don’t sound bad the day after, and if I like the idea I’ll keep working on it. It is also very helpful to get input and feedback from Anders and Perkules.

BCR has now been fully inducted in the Jaeger roster. Tell me what you guys take away from your nights here and how it folds into what you do at the label? 

For me, our summer residency (Sundaze) helped me evolve my taste in electronic music, it really helped broaden my horizon. We’ve also talked about that through our nights at Jaeger we’ve learned a lot about crowds, DJing together, and I’ve learned a lot about what kind of tunes work out (or not). A key takeaway is that I’ve noticed when a crowd reacts to a song, I’ve tried to take the memory or the sense of the crowd with me when I make music.

From the stuff I’ve been hearing from Anders Hajem and Perkules coming via the label, it seems there’s a general progression towards that new plateau. And you saying there’s a slight difference in this record, suggests there’s some evolution there. Is that right?

I would very much agree that there’s a progression or evolution of our respective sounds. Over the last 12 months I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from tracks and ideas that Anders and Perkules have shown me. They have been a great source of inspiration, and I like to think that the same goes for them. So I think we are able to inspire each other to take things towards a new plateau. Also I’ve had a sense of need to do something new in my music, and tried my best to act on this. 

And where do you see that evolution taking BCR and your own music in the future?

I’d really like for this evolution in sound to take BCR to new heights, I’d love for our music to reach more people. The same goes for my own music. We’re planning some exciting things for BCR so keep an eye out for updates.

Watch Digitizer (live) from the Jaeger Mix

Stream the video from the last jaeger mix session featuring Digitizer and his machines live from the sauna.

During the last Jaeger mix Electro descended on the backyard, curated by Elektro Romantik’s Robotic (Robin Crafoord) and featuring Digitizer. The Oslo native brought his machines to the sauna, to take an intrepid trip through some of his recorded works. Besides recording the live set in audio, we also trained a couple of camera’s on the artist for a video that you can stream now.

Read the interview with artist and find an audio only version of the mix here. Digitizer talks extensively about his history, electro and why he enjoys the live format.

The Jaeger Mix returns in December with Keecen and Olefonken.

Keep ’em Dancing with Boris Dlugosch

“My main goal when I play… I want everybody to have a good time.” Boris Dlugosch speaks from experience. “When you’ve played music for thirty years” like Boris “and you’ve played all kinds of styles of music,” all sense of ego and hubris falls away and what’s left is the music and dance floor. 

Boris Dlugosch has made a notable career for himself built on this foundation. He was there at the start, back in the eighties at the legendary Hamburg club called FRONT. He rode a wave of success as a producer concurrently with House music’s rise to fame in the early nineties with people like Masters at Work clambering for his work. He introduced Mousse T. to the world during a time when the track “Horny” propelled that artist to the mainstream. He found notoriety as a remix artist, adapting some of the world’s most revered pop songs for the club, and throughout it all he remained a steadfast figure in the booth. He continues to be a touchstone for some of the world’s recognised DJs like Gerd Janson and our very own Olle Abstract, and today it his profile as a DJ is encapsulated in something like mythic lore.

Boris Dlugosch plays LYD this Saturday

He started his career during a time when New Beat, House and Synth pop lived in  harmonious synchrony in the mix. He was an earlier adopter of Chicago- then New York  House. He played the latest from the French electro scene when acts like Daft Punk were still in their infancy and continued to adapt and evolve through the ages. Today he can be found playing at places like the Golden Pudel at home and while he still releases original music, most notably through Running Back, he remains a DJ’s DJ. His latest record, courtesy of Running Back stands testament to that. Unlike 2017’s Traveller on the same label, this is not an original work, but the second instalment of a compilation series, celebrating the music he played at FRONT. It’s the place where Boris had made his debut and retained a residency until closing in the mid nineties and probably the first highlight on his illustrious career. It’s here where I want to start our conversation when I call him up for an interview. 


The compilation ties a red thread from his beginnings up to the present day, and as reflection of a time and place, it’s significant, but coming out in a contemporary backdrop it stands on its own with its raw inhibited energy and indefinable sonic aesthetic, it captures a certain spirit through this timeless music. But before we get there, we have to acknowledge the city from which it was born. 

Boris Dlugosch is in Hamburg when I call him up; a city with a lot of music history especially club music. With artists like Helene Hauff, Boys Noize, Digitalism and Koze also hailing from the German city, there’s certainly a legacy there that’s hard to pin down. If ”the Beatles coming to Hamburg” has anything to do “with the first House club or the record store where Boys Noize and Jens (Digitalism) worked,” Boris can’t say, but he recognises “certain things bring other things” and there has certainly been a hive of musical activity ever since, and perhaps even before the fab four (then five) set foot on Hamburg soil. 

Unsurprisingly, Boris too “was always into music.” He had a keen ear and “picked up a lot of new music from the radio.” He played drums in a heavy metal band amongst other things and listened to everything from rock to electronic music. It was, like so many other things in Boris’ career, “a coincidence” that led him to the decks initially and eventually on a path to becoming a FRONT resident. 

The story goes that he had been working as a checkout bagger at a local grocery store and the till operator at the time was the mother of the cover guy at FRONT. On one fortuitous afternoon “he invited” Boris “to his house” where Boris found the lure of “two turntables… and a huge record collection” all too appealing. Boris realised immediately, “I want to do this” and as luck would have it (again), his new friend was looking to part with  setups.

Boris inherited a “pair of rubbish turntables and a mixer” and started learning the craft of the DJ. He was still “too young” and looked even younger, to enter FRONT at that point and had to “wait a year.” Meanwhile he already “had the tapes from ‘83 and ‘84 from the club,” and he could hone his craft through what he heard on those tapes. Boris had “always had an ear for music” and seemed to understand the mechanics of DJing intuitively. Apart from being able to distinguish the music being played, he also started to grasp what the DJ was actually doing. At FRONT particularly, “it wasn’t about the show or how good you were,” he remembers, “but more about the selection of music.” Eventually he put a mixtape together with that focus, which landed in the hands of the owners at FRONT. His selections had particularly resonated with the forces behind the club and by 1985 he joined Klaus Stockhausen as one of the club’s only two residents. 

“I was about 16 when I first went to the club.” Boris remembers a completely “different universe” when he walked through the doors for the first time. It was a largely gay crowd wearing “a lot of leather” with “all kinds of weird people” in the mix. Pictures from the time show a dance floor of men in various stages of undress, and by all accounts it was not about what you wore at FRONT, but by what you didn’t wear. The leather, the moustaches, the marble-like physiques, and even the name, all exuded masculinity, but what struck Boris “the most was the music.” In a matter of a few visits. He had become “totally hooked.” Boris “had been to two or three other clubs before, but nothing like this.” 

“The music was 80’s, high energy, some disco and pop music.” Klaus Stockhausen played 12” versions of familiar tracks “being played on the radio,” remixed by the likes of Shep Pettibone and reconstituted for the dance floor. The DJ booth was nothing but a “box,” obscured by “dark windows,” where the DJ or crowd could only distinguish silhouettes on the other side. It was all “part of the mystery” of the place, but it was also a time when the “DJ wasn’t such a big thing.” People didn’t come to see a DJ, they came to hear the music and at FRONT the selection of music was in a class all on its own.

By the time Boris stepped into the booth at FRONT in ’85, the “first House music records from Chicago came in.” It ”sounded different from anything we heard before” and Boris’ musical ear gravitated to it. “I was always into electronic music and weird sounds” considers Boris. “I was also into melodies and vocals and House had all of that. It had soul and Funk, but at the same time it was something completely new, from another planet.” These records would be part of a “great mixture” of sounds that would include everything from those early pop records, Belgium New Beat and eventually the sounds of Acid coming via the UK. 

Literally hundreds of mixtapes exist online from FRONT during that time, and skimming through them is a window into a long lost forgotten world, where some things are instantly familiar or at least accessible and every track permeates with an infectious groove. “Maybe listening to the mixtapes today,”  considers Boris, you might feel like the DJ is “only playing the hits,” but back then you only “pulled out the best and strongest records.” There was “no ego, no showing off” from the DJ according to Boris –  how could there be you could barely see the DJ – and everything the DJ played or did was in order to “keep ‘em dancing.”  

For ten years this was Boris Dlugosch’s only objective as a resident at FRONT. Together with Klaus Stockhausen, they had created their “own little Paradise Garage,” but they were still an anomaly. At the time Boris “was probably picking the same records as David Morales or Frankie Knuckles,” but without any knowledge of these DJs, it was pure coincidence. He had no reference point, or mixtapes to influence these decisions. “The good thing about back in the day is that you didn’t know about anything else,” remembers Boris. “Now you think the epicentre of the music is London and New York,” explains Boris, “but all over Europe there were little tiny clubs all playing the same music and had the same vibe going.” In Hamburg especially, they were their “own little island,” isolated even from the rest of Germany who had largely been focussed on the sounds of Trance and Techno at the forefront. House music was still largely unknown, but people like a young Gerd Janson would flock to FRONT to hear this new unusual music. 

As the nineties rolled in and House music’s popularity grew in a world that became more connected, Boris too was swept up in the furore around the genre. The music he had been playing for years at FRONT had finally reached an international audience, and where before in Hamburg, they had very little connection beyond the city, suddenly they were part of a global phenomenon, thanks to the Americans.  

By that stage Boris Dlugosch had started remixing and editing his own records. As a DJ “you start thinking this record could sound better,” and with more “access to studios and gear” he developed these skills while still working the floor at FRONT. The “big breakthrough” came when he stumbled across a record at his local record store. “It sounded poppy, there was something there,” he remembers today. There was a phone number on the record – yes, people put their phone numbers on dance records back then – and he called up the artist. That artist turned out to be a nascent Mousse T. Boris made the journey down to Hanover, to a big studio complex, where he met with the young artist and they “immediately clicked and started producing together.” Adopting the pseudonym BOOM! they released “Keep Pushing.” in 1996. 

Boris had already started touring as a DJ, mostly in Germany alongside visiting American dignitaries like Todd Terry, which led to invitations to industry events like the Miami music conference. It was in Miami, purely by “coincidence” yet again that the new record found their way into some influential record bags. Stuttering vocals by Inaya Day sit alongside striped percussive work with gritty synthesisers pulsing through the mix. It had that immediate crossover appeal and the industry responded in kind. Faxes from the likes of Tony Humphries started coming through praising the track, and the record was eventually licensed to Louis Vega and Kenny Dope’s Master’s at Work label. 

It was an “absolutely crazy” time for Boris as “things came together.” His ear for a melody, his intuitive sense of rhythm and his experience of the dance floor culminated in a style of House music that was primed for the commercial market, but it never really came to fruition for Boris like it did for Mousse T. While his colleague and production partner found success with his track “Horny,” Boris’ efforts remained largely relegated to the underground. Even though Boris Dlugosch was on the A-side on the original “Horny” promo release with “Live Your Life Your Way” – a track with as much merit as its B-Side counterpart – it was the Mousse T. original that garnered most of the attention (it’s controversial title for the time probably influencing it) leaving at least one Discogs user to ponder: “Quite why this little gem from Boris Dlugosch never saw a commercial outing remains a mystery.”

Boris Dlugosch

The music industry is a cruel mistress and Boris Dlugosch, whether unlucky or overlooked, never saw the mainstream successes that many of the people he worked with enjoyed. “After a couple of years, you are not getting your royalty statements and you’re not getting paid and these guys have Maseratis and Porsches,” you can’t help but question the nature of the industry. While people like Todd Terry were getting well “40 000” for remixes on the same records that Boris were doing for free, and royalty cheques from the success of “Keep Pushing” never found his pocket, Boris remained seemingly content in his own success. Talking to him today, there is no sense of anger, frustration or regret. “In Germany, we were still the outsider because Techno was big and our music was still in small clubs,” he insists. Even while he would often hear his tracks on the radio in places like Ibiza and Italy during the height House music’s success, it seems Boris Dlugosch prefers to exist, in the small clubs that thrive in the underground.

He still prefers to be considered more of “ a DJ than a producer” and rarely plays out his own music, with one of the few exceptions being his last EP of original music on Running Back. “That’s the last track that I really loved that I did.” He is more focussed playing at places like the Golden Pudel in Hamburg and as a DJ he’s remained a fixture at places like these throughout different phases of club culture and club music, adapting with each new zeitgeist.

During his days at FRONT, at a time “when the music continued to get harder,” he changed direction literally overnight. “From one weekend to the other I switched over to playing only New York underground music.“ The same happened again in 1999 and 2000 when, at a time when House music was on MTV and entrenched on the radio, he decided to focus on the French Electro sound at the forefront of a new scene. “I was just bored,” remembers Boris of that time. “Hearing a mixtape by 2 many DJs,” he found music that played on nostalgic feelings, and yet remained contemporary. “They (2 Many DJs) were mixing all this music I loved from childhood (rock music) together with club music,” and again  Boris found a voice in that sound too. 

Throughout he’s remained a relevant figure on the scene, and still plays all over Germany, perhaps only taking a break during the pandemic. Respected by the underground, Boris Dlugosch has remained a significant DJ, and there’s few working in the DJ and clubbing scene today that haven’t been in awe of his prowess in the booth at one time or another. His days at FRONT is enshrined in club music history, reflected yet again in this Running Back series, and as we as a clubbing industry and community continue to move away from those early underground roots into commercial avenues, those times still echo with the raw and inhibited emotions that is at the core of club music for any given epoch. Few embody that spirit and that attitude to a dance floor quite like Boris Dlugosch. 

Chop Chop: An interview with Glitter 55

The tempo in Jaeger’s basement is creeping up to that 150BPM mark. It’s not even midnight yet, but people are literally bouncing off the walls as they push past the wall of bass to get a glimpse of the DJ. I’ve become accustomed to hearing these excessive tempos  recently, but there is something unique to this particular experience. Where those tempos usually exist for saccharine melodies inverted in some functionalist dystopia, there is something more enticing and esoteric about what I’m hearing at this moment. Exotic textures, heavily borrowed from African and Arab traditions, weave through monstrous electronic kick drums to make an intricate lattice of unique rhythm structures and ethereal melodies.

This is Glitter 55 in full effect. The Moroccan DJ has cultivated a unique sound as a DJ over the last 5 years as she consolidates music from the Arab World and Africa with the stark sound of western electronic music. “I play music from the UK and US – bass music mainly”, she confirms, “and I try to put some influences from home or from Africa in there.” Home is officially in Rabat, but Glitter 55 speaks in a melodious French accent, the Morocco inflections softened by years spent in France. She introduces herself as Manar and we sit down in the backyard to the sounds of House music playing in the background. She’s just finished her soundcheck, and I was lucky enough to get a private sonic glimpse for the night ahead.

Her sound unfolds like a collage of disparate influences of a global diaspora, deconstructed and re-assembled for the purpose of the dance floor. At heart of it all is her unique musical heritage. Taking elements of “percussion from local (Moroccan) music called Chaabi”,  “vocals from Raï” or drums from South Africa’s gqom artists like DJ Lag, Glitter 55 reconstitutes these pieces alongside those UK and US bass sounds that she finds via soundcloud and bandcamp. It lends a well-travelled aesthetic to musical constructions that would be familiar to any club goer, especially those that came out to hear her play for Oslo World on the night. It’s world music, not in its truncated form as a non-western music, but rather in its most obvious description. It’s music that truly represents the world, or at least more of it than just one region.

It’s a sound Glitter 55 seems to embody in personality more than just taste with very few references or similarities being drawn to other DJs or artists. In a mere five years she has created the type of artistic identity in a sound that usually takes a lifetime to master, starting with a passion for music and leading to Djing; her Frissa nights  (“It means chop chop, always in a hurry, and a big mess”) and soon the recorded format (“Hopefully it will be released next year”) consolidating all her early influences and contemporary electronic music. 

Growing up in Rabat, Morocco, Glitter 55 was exposed to music from all over the world from a young age. Her mother listened largely to “Egyptian music” while her father gravitated towards the “fusion” pop sounds of something like the Moroccan equivalent of “the beatles”. She also remembers her “uncle listened to a lot of French pop music” and she still admires pop music with everything from “Egyptian and Lebanese pop,” to “Dua Lipa” informing her tastes today. Hearing all these “different styles of music… growing up” instilled an early passion for music, leading to enrolling in the Royal Gendarmerie’s music conservatory at a very young age, where she studied “music theory and singing”. 

At 16 she moved to France, arriving at Amiens, before moving to “Lille to study cultural studies and then to Paris.” It was in Paris where she started working as “an agent in the music industry”. Taking care of Arabic artists like Tinariwen amongst other things, she was certainly busy in the scene, but had made no significant steps towards her own career as a DJ until later. If she was a precocious music talent it’s hard to know at this point, because she worked largely behind the scenes, but there was clearly a nascent talent when she took to the decks for the first time. 

“I had a friend who was promoting a party, and was doing everything during the party,” she recalls about her first furore into Djing. “He was having issues with a band, and he asked me to play some songs for 10 minutes. I was like, ‘no, I don’t know how to use this machine.’” It went from trepidation to excitement, but she quickly found an experience she “enjoyed a lot” and wanted to learn more. “Thanks to youtube” and “a lot of tutorials” she learnt the basics and started taking her first steps towards a DJ career. She took on the name Glitter 55 as an homage to her Grandma (55 representing the evil eye of local tradition) and her personal affection for glitter socks (which I hadn’t noticed she was wearing on the night) and set on a course to a career in Djing alongside her work in the industry.

Manar had not been a stranger to DJing and electronic music in Morocco however. Attending “some festivals” and “rave parties,” she encountered a sound that leaned to “Trance and psychedelic stuff and hard Techno,” but it wasn’t until she started DJing herself that she started to explore the vast expanse of her own musical influences. It’s “music from Morocco or Africa, mixed with music that I love and discovered in France,” she considers. 

Today she “can play hard Techno and Disco and other stuff,” interwoven with those Arabic and African influences. With few others exploring these eclectic dimensions from the booth today, she has been left largely to her own devices and has prospected the limits of her own formative tastes extensively through her sets and her radio show on Rinse FM.

A mere two years after making her debut as a DJ Glitter 55 was inducted in the Rinse FM family as a resident for their French station and soon thereafter started playing around Europe and further afield. She “was amazed” when the call from Rinse FM came so soon after picking up DJing, but she is certainly a unique entity on the Radio’s programming schedule today. Her show “Atay Time” sees her “invite the artists that I love” from “all over the world” retaining that obvious connection with her own roots as  guests like Lara Sarkissian and Jabes represent a vast global diaspora. 

Artists and DJs like these and Glitter 55 herself  have brought a distinctive Arab sound to these western contexts in what is beginning to feel more than just a moment for our scene. Ignoring for a moment that people like Acid Arab and Asian Dub Foundation have experimented with Arab and Eastern sounds in electronic club music for some time, artists like Glitter 55 are breathing a new life into the clubbing landscape, by bringing something unique and contemporary to fore. 

In Paris, she has found a scene that shares the ideology. “It’s not a specific place,” however, “it’s different venues and promoted by collectives, who get people from all across the Arab world.” It’s “represented by artists from Africa living in Paris,” people like ”Deena Abdelwahed from Tunisia” but it’s not merely contained in Paris either. It’s also “in Amsterdam, where there’s a lot of parties being promoted by people from the Arab world.” 

The sound has reached Oslo too on occasion, with the likes of Sama AbdulHadi and Omar Soleymann making visits to Norway in the recent past and it certainly has captured an audience here too as we witnessed from the turn out for Glitter 55 and Acid Arab for the Oslo World event. 

Even within that wider appreciation for Arab and African sounds within a western musical dialect, Glitter 55 remains different. Her Chaabi influence which is “more about the  melody and the drums, the rhythmic structures of the sound” make for interesting bedfellows with the bass heavy rhythms of gqom and the blank slate that Techno and Bass music provides for these sounds as a platform. “You can mix the two quite easily,” says Manar “with the rhythmic structure” finding an interesting sympathy between genres like “bass music” and the very same “Egyptian music” she grew up listening to as a child. It’s music that resonates with western audiences as well their African and Arab counterparts, with the only difference being that “people sing along”  to the music back home.

People might not be singing along to the music at Jaeger on the night, but regardless, it’s made an indelible mark on the crowd as the 150 beats per minute subsides into quiet before a cheer erupts in the quiet. 

Charting a new trajectory with Interstellar Funk

Sitting down with Dekmantel artist and DJ, Interstellar Funk ahead of a showcase at Jaeger to talk about the evolution of his sound as an artist and his trajectory into one of the most respected DJs on the circuit today.

Interstellar Funk (Olf van Elden) is an anomaly in our musical galaxy. His music, whether he’s indulging early influences of Detroit House and Chicago or stepping off the grid into new ambient realms, is incredibly hard to categorise and illusive in its appeal. There’s always something functional lurking in the background, with a sense of a tranquil melancholy delivered in bristling synth melodies and uninhibited rhythm sections. 

His records have found their way on labels that thrive and indulge that sonic aesthetic – labels like Rush Hour, L.I.E.S, Berceuse Heroique and Dekmantel – and as a DJ he’s expounded on that sound, cultivating a unique reputation amongst his peers and audience alike. His music has always been very “synth based” with a nod to the vintage sounds. “I always use old synths,” explains  Olf, “and it’s always based on little melodies, less sample based, less drum based.” 

Between his associations with Dekmantel; his earlier work at Rush Hour; and his various connections with the people behind Club11/Trouw/De School he is something of an Amsterdam institution in his own way. A regular fixture at the Dekmantel festival since its inception, Interstellar Funk is practically part of the crew there. He is one of the most-featured artists on the lineup, and when they are touring the Dekmantel festival around clubs around Europe, he is on the figurative tour bus.

It seems only apt that his debut LP comes via the Dutch label. After nearly a decade of 12” and EPs Interstellar Funk has finally made his debut on the long player format in 2022 with Into The Echo. The record, coming together during the pandemic, sees the artist channel the sound he’s cultivated across his previous records towards a softer, more organic sound, suited for the album package. 

Delving into his past experience at Rush Hour, the Amsterdam-based record store of some repute, where he started as an intern, Interstellar Funk charts a journey through those formative experiences digging through the record store’s shelves on this album according to earlier interviews. The result is an LP that surprises at times in the context of Interstellar Funk’s more club-orientated work and yet again defies categorisation. Into the Echo reflects on an introverted time for humanity in a way that only Interstellar Funk could, and while it moves away from the club, it hardly breaks all contact in the machine-heavy aesthetic of the artist. 

It’s something he is carrying through to his next record at least, a 12″ on his own label, created around the same time with his piano teacher and friend Loradeniz. “It sounds quite similar” to the album says Olf with the pair bonding over “same kind of music” and recording the record pretty fast during the same pandemic period as the album. It suggests an evolution in the artist’s sound and when we sat down to talk to him before his appearance for the Dekmantel showcase last Frædag at Jaeger it was one of the many questions we had lingering. 

 

Let’s start with the album. Why was this the right time for you to put out your debut LP?

I wasn’t really planning to do the album. I always wanted to make an album, but time-wise it was always a bit difficult, because I was playing a lot and I needed more time in the studio. I was supposed to release a 12” on Dekmantel in 2020 and then the pandemic started, and I pulled back the 12” because it was a bit more clubby, and it didn’t make sense. And then I was like: “I’m just gonna keep on working on the project and see where it goes.” 

So the tracks weren’t ready ahead of the album?

I had those four tracks ready, and I took those four tracks as the direction of the album. In the end only two tracks made it onto the album and the rest didn’t. It was more like now I have the time, and it was nice to have a project, because I needed something to work on. I just decided to try to make an album and see how it goes and this is what came out. 

Did you have an idea for the record like what you wanted it to sound like?

I had some inspiration and some ideas. Like with electronic albums, I always like it when it touches more genres and not only club stuff. With an album you can go deeper and different directions than with 12”. I took the freedom to go a bit further from the dance floor. 

That’s something I picked up from listening to it, it sounds very organic compared to the past 12’s you’ve released.

I think, because I had this in mind, and that I spent so much time in the studio, it probably changed my sound a little bit. It evolved into something.

Do you think it might make it into future records?

Yeah, I’m not only interested in club music, I like other stuff. The idea of making albums and doing whatever you like, that freedom you have, it’s really interesting.

My association with your music has always been strongly toward beat music with a dark, wavy sound. Are you stepping away from that sound?

The problem is people always compare you with something. If you play a few wave tracks, people suddenly think you’re a wave DJ, but I like it all. I was  always into Detroit, Techno and Chicago. I like really dark, experimental and I like wave a lot, but it’s not like I’m only focussing on those things. There is a lot of experimental ambient stuff I like, and maybe you can hear that on the album. 

Yes, I can certainly hear some of that ambient influence. I read somewhere that your time at Rush Hour influenced it too. How did the record store influence it?

I worked there for eight years and I discovered a lot of music there. When I started working there I was mainly listening to Detroit and Chicago, like Omar S and Theo Parrish. They also did a lot with Brazilian music and African music (at Rush Hour), so I learnt a lot about different genres there. You’re also surrounded by records and people that know a lot about music, so you definitely learn to appreciate other styles. Maybe more than when you’re only a DJ and focussing on club music. A little Disco and Italo, but a lot of Jazz, Brazilian and African music. 

When did you start working at Rush Hour?

I started there as an intern in 2012. I worked out of the office, mainly for the label.

How did you end up at Rush Hour?

I went to art school and I had to do an internship, and my direction in art school was in music. I was already going (to Rush Hour) to buy records and stuff, and my dream was always to work there. 

And this was before you started DJing?

I was already buying records. 

I read about your brother being involved in club 11 (predecessor to Trouw and De School). Was that your initial introduction into clubbing and Djing?

Yes, club 11 was a really good club and they did loads of cool parties there. I always went there with my dad to support his (Jorn van Elden) parties. 

How old were you at that point? 

15 or 16. Because my brother was doing the parties it was fine (to get in). I don’t think they were that strict. 

And your dad would go with you?

Just to support. He still comes to parties now and then, he was at the (last) Dekmantel festival. 

Does he have an interest in this music?

He’s more interested in what I do. Just a proud dad, standing in front. 

What kind of music was he listening to when you guys were kids?  

I don’t think he was interested in music at all. They were listening to music, but it wasn’t like I grew up in a musical family or something. 

I guess, because club culture has been so ingrained in Dutch culture, that it’s not unusual for the older generation to go to club nights or music festivals.

Yeah, maybe it’s more accepted, that’s true, but my Dad was an (athlete) so he wasn’t drinking or doing any drugs. He wasn’t into club music at all when he was younger. Maybe people that grew up in the eighties, they got into club music, but my dad is a little older. In the 70’s you didn’t really have that. 

So, since you weren’t really into that music and didn’t grow up in a musical family or anything, what drew you to club music initially?

I just liked the parties and the festivals. It was just a new world opening up. I wasn’t necessarily interested, but I did like the music. It was either really heavy Techno like DJ Rush or it was minimal like the Villalobos stuff. I liked it all and just partying. People showed up at afterparties and we had a turntable; we had one Technics and one shitty turntable and people just started to learn how to mix.

You came up at the same time as Dekmantel and I remember at that point Detroit House was huge in Amsterdam. Was that the stuff you started buying?

When I started going to Amsterdam, that’s when Dekmantel started going with their own parties, and that period from minimal shifted to Detroit and Disco. We saw Theo Parrish for the first time; it was a really interesting period. My first records were really shitty, but I remember buying the first 3 chairs double LP (Moodymann, Marcellus Pittman, Rick Wilhite, Theo Parrish), and I still have that record. I was also a huge fan of Omar S and I’m still a huge fan. 

At what point do you go from Detroit House and start digging further into other genres?

I don’t know. I think you find a new genre, and you go deeper and you start buying and playing those records. I also used to buy a lot of Disco, because I saw Theo Parrish playing it, but I figured out maybe it wasn’t really my thing.

Were you making music throughout  all of this?

No, I started later. 

What was the catalyst for you to start making music?

I had a group of friends and one of the guys, Deniro used to have a lot of gear, an 808 and  909 – all the cool stuff.  Because of him, I collected money for my birthday and bought a Juno 60 (synthesiser). I always tried to make music on Ableton (computer software), but I couldn’t’ really figure it out, it was too complicated for me. I got a Juno 60 and a 707 (drum machine).

And then the debt starts… 

(laughs) It was definitely  an addiction.

You started around the same time that Dekmantel started. Did you always have a close relationship with them?

Amsterdam is pretty small and back then the scene was even smaller. There were a few parties. You had the Rush Hour that was pretty big, and then you had a party every Thursday at this club, everyone used to go. They (Dekmantel) used to play there and they had their own party in a small club in Amsterdam. It was a dirty place, mirrors on the walls and a dancing pole in the middle. It was a trashy, shitty place, but in a cool way.

Because the weekends were really long; you would go out on Thursday, then you go to an afterparty and thgo out on Friday. You hang out with the same people for hours and days, and you build up friendships quite fast. 

You’re probably one of the most frequent return guests to the festival. 

By now I might be. 

So doing the record for Dekamntel must solidify something?

I already had a few tracks on compilations (with Dekmantel). It was just a natural relationship, and it’s always nice to work with somebody you can trust and that you know really well. 

Getting back to your sound, do you think it marks a new chapter in your sound as an artist?

I think your sound always changes. If you look back to legendary producers, their sound always changes. If I listen back to my first record, it’s not something I would play now, but I also don’t hate it. It’s a lesson you keep learning. Your next release should always be better.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

I was watching the video for David Morales’ Needin you from 1998 recently. I’ll save you the trouble of watching it, (it’s quite cringy): It’s Morales, wearing enough bronzer to cover a small orca, indulging in the hedonistic pleasures that Ibiza had to offer. The New York DJ and producer appears in various stages of undress inter-spliced with scenes from club nights, with some familiar DJ faces from a distant past taking the focal point. Morales goes from shorts and vest on a plane to running on a beach in his speedo, but in each scene, he is carrying a record under his arm. 

Watching that video today, all I can think is; why is that guy taking his records to the beach? I hadn’t seen this video for a while, and I had to conjure a younger me, before I realised why this was: it was because back then that’s how we distinguished the DJ from the rest of the folks! At the time the DJ was still the faceless dude (yes they were mostly guys) in the back somewhere, playing records, and the only you would recognise him, was by the records. The DJ was that guy, and in 1998, the only guy with the record under his arm; even on the beach apparently. It was a time when the DJ as a superstar was only just starting to make its appearance, so few people really knew what David Morales and his kind looked like yet. So I guess he really wanted people to know he was a DJ.   

That association between the DJ and the vinyl has long gone. Music libraries that used to contain entire living rooms are on USB sticks and everything that used to be so exclusive with vinyl in the nineties is now much more accessible, and more importantly cheaper, online. Back in the day however the DJs and their records were an enigma. As a teenager, my only association with vinyl was my dad’s musty 70’s rock collection, and the DJs I admired were certainly not playing the Average White Band or Frank Zappa in their sets. They were playing futuristic music, on what the rest of the world believed was a redundant format, and you had to be a DJ or have a serious interest in these sounds to become a part of this elite club, at least until you started making strides to becoming a DJ. 

Obviously that exclusivity has disappeared with digital music and modern tools like Shazam opening up a door to what was this previously exclusive world. There are those moments however when even with these modem tools, you’re still left none-the-wiser, there’s still some mystery and intrigue behind these records, and 9 out of 10 times, it will be coming from a track pressed on vinyl.

Those connotations between the DJ and the vinyl format might be long gone, but one thing that remains, and is probably more prevalent than ever, is that mystery. It’s a sense of discovery, something that you would’ve never heard before. That’s why a place like Filter Musikk still exists; for those rarefied moments in hearing something that’s not on Spotify, those treasured pieces that you can still be unique to you as a DJ. And it’s those records that make the cut…  

 

Ike Release “Leisure Devices” Bliq BLIQ21

Bass modulations swelling from the deep; flinty chords bouncing over the clouds; and a groove you can step to. That’s our gateway into this record; the remix of the title track from Iron Curtis luring us into the Ike Release’s latest contribution for Bliq. The remix is only the start we soon find out, as it opens a doorway into a world of heady breakbeats and classic House from the Chicago artist across the rest of the record. 

You come for the remix, but stay for the rest. It’s one of those records that has a little of everything for any portion of the night, the record that will free up some space in your record bag. 

 

Nathan Kofi “Voltage Controlled Love Affair” De Lichting DLEP06

 

…My heart will go on? Those words will forever invoke the image of a young Leo DeCaprio on a cgi boat mirroring the image of the French-Canadian wraith Celine Dion belting out “near far, wherever you are” over a set of midi panpipes. 

Luckily that is where this analogy ends for this record from Nathan Kofi. If there is a love affair to be expressed at all here, it’s a menage-a-toi between an artist and his drum machine and synthesiser. The romance is cultivated in wispy atmospheres and grooves that penetrate deep beyond the immediate. From the lethargic acid-tinged opener to the shuffling Electro of “Candy Girl,” Nathan Kofi delivers an engaging and soulful record across these four tracks.  

Textures envelope the listener, swelling between drums that remain subverted in the overall atmospheres of these tracks. It’s hard not to fall in love with this one. 

 

O-Wells “Moldoom” Die Orakel ORKL-X-96 

 

Across dance floors currently dominated by excessive tempos and cheesy refrains that figure closer to Hard House than Techno, it’s good to hear some hi-tech soul still in the background. Lennard Poschmann is back as O_wells on the Die Orakel. Uhe producer takes another sojourn via Detroit to Frankfurt through this record, instilling that timeless sound of Techno the rest of the scene seem to have forgotten.

Moldoom lives in that funky realm between Techno and Electro, before they would become disentangled, possibly best reflected in the stuttering kick drums and irreverent bass of “Rhytim”.  Even when Poschmann goes straight with a 4-4 track like the title track, there’s something unusual like an accent on the upbeat or an eerie resonance, taking the focus away from the strong beats.

At the record’s highpoint “Coscio” delivers an Electro cut that would make Drexciya proud, swimming in cinematic sounds and a toe-tapping rhythm section.

 

Jensen Interceptor, DeFeKT – Free Your Mind (Tresor) 12″

 

Jensen Interceptor’s records are like that elephant in the room. It’s like – “o-shit! There’s a freaking elephant in this room!” There’s nothing subtle about it and the production is so big that playing it alongside any other Electro record, it simply takes over and drowns out anything that’s come before or after it. 

We wouldn’t expect anything less from the producer when he teamed up withMatthew Flanagan’s DeFekt for  Tresor record. In fact putting those three things together was like throwing magnesium on an open fire. What else would you expect and if anything this record lives up to expectations and some more. 

There’s nothing timid about this record, as Jensen Interceptor and DeFekt deliver with a blistering sound that is centred around big kicks and piercing acid refrains. Even at low volumes, it’s an oppressive sound, the sound of armageddon descending down you, and you just want to grin and bear it. 

Through raspy synthesisers and derisive drum machines, the production duo delivers a sound big enough to swallow a town, pummeling the listener into a subservient dancer. 

 

Downstairs J – Too (SUZI) 12″ 

 

This is another one of those space-saving records… a track for every occasion.  While “Mana 4000” and “Orion” do the heavy lifting on the dance floor, “Soothsayer” and “Symbioses” offer moments of serene reflection, skirting ambient realms through broken beats.

There’s some nostalgic reverence for the likes of Carl Craig during the early nineties, those times where a record could be anything, a House record, a Breakbeat record, and even Hip Hop if you’re with the right crowd. The soundscapes echo the sentiment with immersive sounds that intrigue in their unusual metallic guise while the bass moves in large swells that reflect modern technologies. 

At its most captivating, it’s the slower tracks on Too that really stands out, but it’s only for their deference to what is already a brilliant record from Downstairs J.

Country girl: A Q&A with Kristin Velvet

Imagine a line-up including Kerri Chandler, Honey Dijon and Carl Craig, all on the same night. Even in our wildest dreams at Jaeger, we’ve only managed to showcase these amazing talents one at a time. So, consider the triptych of DJ legends, with Kerri Chandler being the opener! Now imagine this is your introduction to a nightclub.

This was the case for Kristin Velvet when she first set foot in Watergate. It’s no surprise she immediately fell in love with the place. Today, that introduction has blossomed into a residency, where she’ll regularly feature on Watergate lineups and often alongside legends of that ilk.  

Kristin Velvet is a DJ, producer and label owner with some well-traveled credentials. From her origins in rural Australia, her start as a DJ in Tokyo, to playing in London, and her eventual relocation to Berlin, Kristin Velvet has channeled an extensive musical experience through what she does as a DJ, a producer and record label head.

Taking care of the daily activities at Arms and Legs, a label she runs alongside founders Daniel Steinberg and Nils Ohrmann, Kristin Velvet has carved out an incredible career, going from the “euphoric” House of her youth to playing groove-focussed House for peak time, often featuring mostly music from her label. She is a frequent contributor to Arms & Legs too, making important contributions, like the P-Funk sampling, dancefloor monster “The undertaker” or the 90’s House delight that is “It’s a game”, when she is not working alongside legends like Felix Da Housecat or being remixed by others like Paul Johnson.  

It was in fact her daily activities as a label head that she got her foot, followed by some Arms and Legs, in the door at Watergate, making her debut with a special label showcase featuring none-other than Paul Johnson. That was in 2017 and now Kristin Velvet is an integral part of the Watergate roster, often representing them in visiting showcases. With the Berlin institution celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, she has secured another seat on the tour bus, and as she and Kid Simius make their way to Jaeger this Saturday, we sent over some urgent questions to Kristin.

She talks about her rural upbringing, how she found dance music, her time in Tokyo and her relationship with Watergate in this Q&A session ahead of her appearance at Jaeger this weekend.

Tickets via @ticketco

20 years of Watergate! That’s a momentous occasion. Do you remember how you became aware of the Berlin clubbing institution?

Momentous indeed! So around 2007, I was living in London, there was a lot of Berlin hype at the time. My friends from WetYourself played at Watergate and all our crew went over for it. I remember it clearly because I couldn’t go, but everyone was raving about how great Watergate was. I dreamed of going there one day. My heart still bursts when DJs from other countries play at Watergate and their pals all come to Berlin for the occasion, it’s a vibe. 

Why do you think its legacy has endured the way it has? 

It’s the team people who make the place, the culture, and the legacy. You can have the best venue, best location, the best sound system, and the best DJs but without a good solid team the club is not going to work, or maybe for a short while but not for 20 years! Shout outs to all the people working behind the scenes week in week out who bring these spaces we love so much into existence. 

Its reputation precedes it. It was the first kind of super club I was familiar with before I even came to Europe and I guess you might have had a similar experience coming from Australia. Why do you think it’s had such a far-reaching appeal?

Word of mouth. DJs and dancers from all over the world come to Berlin, have amazing experiences, and go back home and tell their mates. 

Arriving in Berlin, what was your first encounter with the club

To be honest I can’t remember my first encounter, those early Berlin clubbing years are a bit of a blur, but I do remember the first time Watergate left a deep impression on me; it was Jerome Sydenham’s 50th birthday. I arrived at the club just before it opened and Kerri Chandler was warming things up on the Waterfloor, then we headed up to the main floor where Honey Dijon was busting it out, followed by Carl Craig who played on of the best sets I’ve ever heard, then back downstairs to hear Dennis Ferrer in full flight. Everyone was on fire that night, Jerome had lots of his friends and family there, people were jumping on the mic, hugging in the DJ booth, it was such an amazing vibe. I was so inspired after that night I sent an email to the booker, which led to me eventually becoming a resident…. 

How did you end up becoming a resident there?

Around 2017 Paul Johnson did a remix for Daniel Steinberg on our label Arms & Legs, so I wrote to the booker at Watergate (after Jerome Sydenham’s 50th) to see if we could do an Arms & Legs label night together with Paul. The booker didn’t write back for 3 months or so, but then out of the blue and much to my delight, he did! It was such a huge thrill to hear Paul play. Shortly after that Eats Everything and Maya Jane Coles both booked me for their nights at Watergate, then we did another Arms & Legs label night together with Felix Da Housecat. At this point, I was playing at the club almost every month, so the agency invited me into the office for a coffee and asked if I wanted to join the agency. It happened very organically. 

You’re on the lineup often, and with a varied selection of guests. How do you approach each event and what remains central to it all when you play at Watergate?

Every time I get booked at Watergate it’s still a huge honor and not something I ever take for granted. I approach each event thinking about how I can give the ravers the best possible experience, so they leave the club with wonderful memories and big smiles. 

What’s the prevalent charm of playing at Watergate, and what do you think you can do there as a resident that you can’t really get away with at other places?

I think you can get away with whatever you want wherever you want if you do it with conviction! As a resident though it’s a privilege to be familiar with the sound system and the space which comes in handy for testing new unreleased tracks. 

How do you present that to a new audience when you do these kinds of Watergate tours?

I love doing the Watergate showcases because I genuinely adore all the other residents, we thoroughly enjoy each other’s company and I think the people in the club feel that. We differ quite a lot musically which is great, it makes for an interesting and varied night of music.

There’s also these other aspects to you… Kristin Velvet, the artist and the label head. How do all these things fold into what you do as a DJ?

It all works together – the music, the label and then of course the DJing. The majority of what I play in the club is our Arms & Legs releases. 

I’ve read that you grew up in rural Australia, and it was country music that first got you dancing, but it was your time in Sydney that introduced you to clubbing. What was the music that specifically bridged those two worlds for you?

The bridge was house music, Armand Van Helden, Ultra Nate, Soulseacher, Phats & Small, Mousse T, Black Legend, I had just started sneaking into clubs, it was euphoric feel-good music and very accessible even to a country girl like me.

I imagine like for most of us, it started on the dance floor. What eventually led to Djing?

I started DJing when I lived in Tokyo. I became friends with the people who were running club nights there, which led to me DJing and eventually doing my own events. It was a very inclusive community, everyone played at each other’s nights it was lots of fun.

What were you playing at the beginning and how did it evolve from there?

Back then in Tokyo it was very different, I played everything from The Rapture, Le Tigre and LCD Soundsystem to The B-52’s, Daft Punk, Violent Femmes and Whitney Houston. It wasn’t until I moved to London around 2006 that my tastes started to change. 

Tell me a bit more about Tokyo. I simply love the record- and music culture there. Did you pick up anything specific to your time there that has followed you as a DJ?

Tokyo blew my mind. I worked in Shimokitazawa which had incredible record stores, it was a long time ago though so I wouldn’t say musically there was anything that stayed with me from back then. 

From Australia to Tokyo and then Berlin, what was the thing in Berlin that set it all apart for you, that thing that makes it such a special place for nightlife and club-culture?

The history, the culture, the lack of rules and the long opening hours. 

Yes, in Berlin the nights are pretty long, compared to somewhere like Sydney or Oslo. How would  you adapt your sets, for these shorter nights?

I’ll just pack the bangers! Kidding… it depends on the set time, the crowd and on so many factors. 

This is a return visit to Jaeger. What did you pick up from the last one that will affect the way your set might go?

I’m so thrilled to be back, I had such a blast last time. Honestly one of my favorite DJ booths I’ve ever played in. This time I’ll use your incredible rotary mixer. The sound is so warm! 

And how will Watergate and that celebration hopefully be reflected in your mix? 

I have a track coming out on the Watergate 20 years compilation album which is set for release in November, so I’ll probably give that one a spin.

Primal frequencies with Kid Simius

Kid Simius stands out in the current electronic dance music landscape. Performing live in the type of context others would DJ and channelling a flair for the balearic through the stark minimalist textures of Berlin Kid Simius is an anomaly on an international scene. 

Kid Simius is José Antonio Garcia Soler. Born in Granada, Spain and residing in Berlin, Germany, he operates in the no-man’s-land between those very distinct worlds with music that travels from DJ Alfredo to Modelsektor on its own unique path. He’s been releasing records since 2012, mostly on his own Jirafa Records, but he’s been playing live longer still. 

Although his chosen moniker might allude to something primal, it’s only in the way it works alongside the cerebral. Known as something of a synth wizard in music industry circles, he’s performed on- and contributed to chart-topping success stories, and when he’s not behind a set of keys, he’s behind a set of decks. As Kid Simius he programmes “unorthodox beats” between  a fusion of electronic and organic sounds that move from the dance floor to a spotify playlist.

Stretching across his output, are individual pieces which can go from the dub-step infused noise of a track like “King of Rock n Roll” to a bubbling, cut-n-paste House EP like Chicken Mango. Likewise his albums have gone from the digital  surfer-rock of his first LP Wet Sounds to the galaxian Disco of his second LP Planet Of The Simius, all offering a different perspective from his vast musical lexicon. There is no musical genre or style that uniquely defines him and yet the fluid movement between his records are expertely honed into a distinct voice that emerges through his live performances.

From festival stages to cosy clubs, and even a toilet, Kid Simius’ live shows pack a punch, utilising a formidable array of synthesisers, drum machines and computers to deliver striking shows, both sonically and visually. 

As a resident of Berlin’s famous Watergate club and he has been installed in one of the elite clubbing institutions in the world, and as he and they make their way to Jaeger next week for the official Watergate 20 celebrations, we caught with José to find out more about his music and his live show. 

He talks about the year he spent in Oslo, his life at Watergate, his music, his live show and how he came to be where he is today in this extensive Q&A session. 

Hello José. I think the burning question is; What is your relationship with Watergate and what significance is there to 20 years of the club for you personally?

My relationship with Watergate started in 2005 when I saw a documentary about the Berlin scene called Berlin Digital in which the club was featured.

Then the first time I went to Berlin my German friends took me there and I had an amazing time. It was amazing to be 19 years old and after watching so many documentaries about electronic music in Berlin, listening to the label’s releases and suddenly being there and being able to experience it in first person was great.

Watergate is an incredible label, their compilations are legendary, the DJs, the club everything, and to be able to stay at that level for so many years shows what a great job these people do.

I joined Watergate when my agent Max joined the agency. From the first moment they have made me feel at home and are giving me a lot of support, they accept me as an artist just as I am and that shows that not only professionally but in the human aspect they are excellent people. 

It’s certainly one of those iconic venues today. What in your opinion makes it so special?

The two dance floors are amazing, the big one with the LEDs and the small one with the river views, it is a super nice place and incomparable with other clubs. Then the bookings they do in the club are very diverse, so I always find DJs that I like that I want to see, they are very focused on having a good balance between known people and being open for new talents.

You’re no stranger to Oslo either, I believe. Tell us a bit more about that? 

I lived in Oslo one year from 2007-2008 when I was studying psychology and I used to hand out Flyers and stick posters in the street for The Villa in exchange for a Guest List.

At the end of the year they let me perform in the small room, I still have photos of it, I enjoyed it so much. It was an amazing time and I got to see a lot of Great DJs at The Villa.

I remembered I contacted them via my space and sent a couple of sets and demos of my tracks. They replied that they had a dj from Barcelona playing next weekend and that he didn’t speak English very well and that if I wanted to have dinner with him before the show and take care of him a little bit during the night. So I started, I just wanted to be there and help out.

Kid Simius performing at Villa

Do any of those great DJs stick out in your mind now?

Yes of course, I saw Modeselektor, Diplo, DJ Koze local heroes like Ost & Kjex

So it be safe to say you have something of a home advantage when playing here. Do you think it will influence the way your live set will go?

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve been to Oslo so many people I had contact with no longer live there. I don’t know how it will influence my show to be honest, what I do know is that it will be a super special show for me and I will be super nervous and excited because Oslo and The Villa were extremely important in my development as an artist. The year I lived there was a super inspiring and very influential year for my future.

My neighbour at that time was from Berlin, we became friends and later through him I moved to Berlin. In Berlin he took care of me a lot and today he is not only one of my best friends but also my manager.We are super proud of the amazing things we have experienced in the last years and it all started in Oslo, in a place called Kringsjå.

You grew up in Granada, Spain. Can you tell us a bit about the area and the musical sounds of the region?

Granada is immense. It’s crazy for the things that have happened there. Many cultures have lived together for many thousands of years and that is what makes it a super attractive city.

That’s why artists like Leonard Cohen, Joe Strummer, Lou Reed or Patti Smith were fascinated by the city and its culture. 

Musically, although it has often lacked a lot of support from public organisations with respect to clubs, studios, rehearsal spaces or festivals, the amount of musicians and artists that coexist in it make it super special. There are always new bands, new artists, new collectives, new djs, it is a very young city. Musically it’s very eclectic, something between flamenco, indie rock, techno and break beat…hahahah

At what point did electronic music enter your life, and what were the bands/producers/DJs/genres that informed your earliest listening adventures through electronic music?

For me there were several key moments, to name one was my visit to the FIB in 2005, I think I was 17 years old and coming from a small town where not many bands came to play suddenly going to a festival like this marked me completely.

I always bought on cd, the compilations of that festival, when I got to the festival I told my friends, someday I will play here, my friends laughed but 10 years later I got it. Sometimes when they ask me about my musical influences I say, the line up of FIB 2005 is my musical influence.

To name some of the artists that played at that festival: Pan Sonic, Mouse on Mars, LCD Soundsystem, Ladytron, Underworld, Basement Jaxx, Milo Nick Cave, Oasis, Andrew Weatherall, Four Tet ….

How has Berlin informed you as an artist?

Berlin is a crazy city, things are happening all the time, the amount of new artists, new clubs etc. is incomparable with other cities, the freedom that exists is beastly and obviously to make electronic music there is no better city, also compared to other European capitals it is still not so expensive and that makes it a very comfortable place for artists.

The only bad thing for me coming from the south is the winter and that it gets dark very early but well you know that here in Oslo.

What significance does the name Kid Simius have?

The name came to me in less than a minute and I never thought it was going to be something serious. At the time of myspace me and my friends made an account as a collective and when we had to put the artistic names of each one, I was the youngest of all of us by far, so I was the kid and I have a lot of hair on my body and didn’t like the word “monkey” so I chose “simius” which is “monkey” in latin… and all of that in less than 30 seconds. That’s about it.

Back in 2012, you were involved in a song with some commercial success called Lila Wolken. What effect did that moment have on you as Kid Simius if any?

It’s complicated to measure the impact it had for the kid simius project since I wasn’t the main artist and only the composer, I guess the people in the scene and the industry knew who was involved in the song, but that’s all, I just kept my way.

It was, anyway a very nice experience in somehow, I was very young and I don’t know, suddenly you make a beat, you send it to some friends, they write a song, it comes out and suddenly it’s number one in the single charts, double platinum, you hear it on TV, on the radio, everywhere…and you think wtf 

It’s very different from anything you make today. When you reflect on it, how does it fit into the Kid Simius universe?

Well, to be honest, I’ve tried to do what I like at all times, I’m super eclectic and I don’t like to pigeonhole myself with anything. I always like to have fun in the studio and have a good time.

Sometimes I see my tracks as if they were photos of a certain moment in my life and they remind me of that time. Once I read something like “ if Yamaha can make pianos and motorbikes at the same time , I can make jazz, techno and grime, don’t label the music, let the music just be music”.

Would it be safe to assume that there was a shift in your approach/sound around your solo record, your LP “Planet of Simius,” and what inspired this new direction/evolution?

Yes well, I am constantly inspired by many things, especially moments, the beginnings of disco music, then house and techno are very beautiful moments in our recent history that have inspired me a lot.

Everyone no matter what colour they are, no matter what social status they have and no matter what clothes they have, all together on the same level dancing around the DJ.

The figure of the DJ surprising with new styles of music, mixing new things, Larry Levan Paradise Garage etc. etc. that inspired me a lot in that LP.

Also the idea of mixing different styles of music together was very attractive for me.

There’s been more of a balearic nature to your music since. Perhaps that’s just me inferring, although I did read an interview where you mentioned DJ Alfredo. How has that sound influenced your records and your live show?

Well , DJ Alfredo represents the romantic way of electronic music, eclecticism, all together we are one ,freedom & hedonism. He didn’t produce so much music but his legacy as a dj is crazy.He inspired so many people, he is The Velvet Underground of the djs. I had the opportunity to interview him on my radio show and he is one of a kind.

O really, we have to hear it. And about the live show… What is it about playing live that particularly appeals to you, and why have you chosen to present your music in that way?

It’s like a way I have to express myself, sometimes as a teenager or young adult you don’t think why you make things, you just do it and you do it because you need to do it, because you need to express yourself and I guess for me to play live is one of the best ways I have to express myself since I am a young adult.

Is it about recreating the sounds of records like Chicken Mango?

Yes

Does playing the music live factor into your creative process when you sit down to start recording and/or music?

Sometimes yes sometimes not, I try not to be functional when I am making music and not think if im playing live I should do like this or that. But sometimes it influences me. The beauty for me of making music is that every time is different, sometimes starting with the guitar, or with the keys, other times it is programming a beat, other times is sampling something…

Most of your releases come through your own label, Jirafa Records. How do you compartmentalise the aspects of running the label from the creative pursuits of making music?

Here I have to say that we practically don’t release other artists on the label, it’s almost only to get my own music out and we only work when there is a release, the rest of the time it’s on stand by.

On the other hand I have my friend and manager Chris, who I met in Oslo who takes care of the communication with the distributor, pitching for Spotify etc. I am not doing it alone. What was a bit more work was to set up everything , like publishing code for the label , Bandcamp account, Soundcloud, insta, Facebook etc but once you are set up it’s ok.

We also use the label as a platform for other artist to release their dj mixes // podcast …basically I upload the mixes to our platform and then play the mixes on my radio show I have monthly on the German fm radio where I had artists like Octo Octa, DJ Tennis, Ellen Allien, Cinthie or Sofia Kourtesis.

Then again there must be a sense of creative freedom that you don’t get from releasing on other labels?

Well, at the beginning to be honest it was because it was difficult for me to find a label to release my music, I don’t do music on demand, first the music. The thing is when you release on another label , you send some tracks you have done, they pick the tracks they like and that’s the release.

When you have your own label you have to make this decision, too. You have to select your tracks ,on one hand its freedom because you choose what you release, but on the other hand sometimes it gets tough to decide things on your own the whole time.

I’ve noticed there are a few things happening on the record front for you this year, and you’re playing live often. It seems it’s a busy period for you. What’s been the inspiration behind it and what has it again inspired?

I just love to do different things the whole time and stay busy. The live set is for me a kind of a challenge of how I should play electronic music live. There are no rules on how you should play electronic music live, that’s why the amount of possibilities or stuff to do is unlimited.

Is there anything you’re super excited about coming up in the near future?

Yes, I´m super excited about my show at Jaeger !!!! I got a release coming out on the “20 years Watergate” compilation and now I’m working on a EP with Rhode & Brown coming out next year probably.

Will we hear any of it during your live show at Jaeger

Yes, 30% of my live set is unreleased stuff coming soon.

Normann & Ole HK present Helt Texas!

There’s nothing subtle about a Thursday night out. It takes commitment and a certain devil-may-care attitude to spend the precursor to the weekend on the dance floor. It’s a culture all on its own and over the last year we’ve seen it flourish into a night all onto its own. Music and mood with a predisposition for the unencumbered, it has established itself as one of the highlights on our week-day calendar in no small part to Normann & Ole HK. 

The DJ duo have become a fixture in Jaeger’s sauna over the last year, playing alongside Finnebassen during his residency at Jaeger. They’ve become known for their charismatic sets with a broad appeal that is able to unite a dance floor. As we bid farewell to Finnebassen, it was only natural that they would step into Thursdays and with some pretty big shoes to fill, they too are going big, as they bring their new concept Helt Texas! to Jaeger’s sauna in October.

Launching this Thursday, Helt Texas! consolidates all that experience Normann & Ole HK have garnered over the course of the last year, reconstituted as its own. It fosters the cult of Thursdays with a style of music and a mood that they’ve mastered in their short tenure here already as they seek to develop it even further with guests that share their approach. As familiar fixtures on this scene, both in the booth and beyond, they’ve amassed a significant collection of friends and together they will call in a new era for Thursdays with  Helt Texas!

As Normann and Ole HK take the helm this week, we sent out some questions to ask about Helt Texas! and what the significance of the new night from the DJ’s perspective. They might be a bit hazy on how they met, but they are clear on their new concept and what they look to establish for Thursdays at Jaeger. 

So Helt Texas! There’s certainly no mistaking the vibe of the night based on the name, but what does it reflect in terms of music?

Normann: Who knows? I don’t think we know ourselves… but expect a lot of groove and energy. We might end up playing slow and steady, but we can also end on 30 trance, soo.. I know – Helt Texas!

Ole HK:  For me the name of the concept is more about seeing our Thursdays at Jaeger in a bigger picture than only the music. We want it to be “Helt Texas” in the way that the backyard is packed with the best people we know and where you can go mental to the best underground music 

You guys have been doing these Thursday nights for a while, often stepping in for Finnebassen, so what does it mean for you and the night as you officially baptise it?

Ole HK: First, I have to give Finn a big big big shout out and say thank you for that he invited me to be a part of his “Finnebassen Thursdays crew”. For me as an up and coming DJ it was pretty huge to be invited into his DJ stable. He showed me so much music and gave me so much inspiration over the last years that I will be forever grateful for what that talented man has given to me and my DJ career. So the fact that me and Edvard are taking over the Thursdays  is pretty huge and something I’m really proud of. We have been playing every second Thursday this summer so I feel the backyard is in safe hands, so for now it’s all about counting days to kickstart our “Helt Texas” concept 6th October!!! Can’t wait! 

Normann: Yes, It means a lot! Both of us have played, both at Jaeger and other places for years, but to have a concept of our own is a dream come true! Jaeger is by far one of our favourite places to play, and to be able to have a residency here is great. The soundsystem, the mixer and of course the people here are just amazing!

Can you give us the musical direction of the night in a couple of words?

Ole HK: Couple of words? Impossible. Come check out instead! We’ll not disappoint

Normann: As mentioned we don’t have a really specific sound, but what I think will be common for our nights musically is firm and steady grooves. Probably a bit darker than straight up disco, but hey expect the unexpected; sometimes it will be as pure disco nights.

Ole HK: Often when we start our Thursdays we build it up from some funky/oriental 105 bpm stuff and finish it with some banging house/techno around 126-128 bpm. We love it like we love all kinds of genres and tempo in electronic music. 

You appear to be very busy, playing at least twice a week, alone and together and at different places. How does what you plan on doing with this night differ from what you’ll do at these other places?

Ole HK: Yes I’m playing every week around town, but it’s not that often where I’m playing a club gig from 22:00 until closing 03:00 actually. So the fact that we have five hours all alone to build and create our musical story is kind of special with the night. 

Normann: In terms of music it’s hard to say how it will differ, but because Jaeger is such a unique place with a certain vibe it will for sure be one of the highlights during the week (at least in my opinion). It’s a free space where everyone is different, but at the same time alike in many ways. Of course we will play a lot of music that we know people in general like, but we will also try to “educate” people by playing things they didn’t know they liked. That’s what DJing is to me at least, and Jaeger is a place where this is possible.  

What do you bring out in each other when you’re in the booth together?

Ole HK: First of all it’s very easy to play with Edvard cause he is insanely good and talented. Edvard is a real musician, DJ and producer so he knows what he is doing. But to answer your question it’s always nice to be two on it. If I’m struggling a bit to find the right tracks or I’m in a “bad mood” we can discuss and help each other. Edvard has more experience so he can spice it up sometimes when I’m too focused on going safe and “pleasing the crowd”. Also after a year as b2b-partners we have been close friends so sharing moments and nights together is just awesome and more fun than doing it alone. I love Edvard as a DJ and partner, but also as a person and friend! 

Normann: I think we fulfil each other really well! And for the last year or so it has only gotten better. We don’t have to physically communicate, we just kind of know where the other one is. Even though  we have the same taste in music, it is not identical of course – but that’s a good thing I think. So hopefully we would be able to surprise you guys as much as we surprise each other. 

How did you guys meet?

Ole HK:  I met Edvard first time in 2018 at The Villa. He doesn’t remember that, haha, but I said hi to him and that I’ve heard him playing around and that I liked it. And to confirm what I said about him in the previous question he was so humble and kind and took his time to talk with me when I was the new guy in town who moved from the North of Norway. So in 2020 I started working as an event organiser and booking manager for DJs at a venue and nightclub called Pakkhuset. Edvard was of course one of the first guys I contacted and since then the relationship has been growing to be bigger and stronger every month.

Normann: I honestly don’t remember that night at The Villa, but if you say so! Haha.. But we started to play together during corona lockdown basically. Doing small sets/nights for friends and also some live streams. From there on we became great friends and now also partners in crime. 

In terms of music, where do your tastes converge?

Ole HK: Our taste is pretty similar of course, and we both like to mix in the same way. But I think the fact that we both love all kinds of music (not even just electronic music) makes our relationship very good and easy to work with. When we are together in the booth we can play, share and handle all types of electronic music, independent of genre and just enjoy each other. That’s so cool.

Normann: Our taste is similar, but also very different from time to time. Which is perhaps the main reason I think we go so well together. There is an individuality and personality there even though we play as one. 

How do you think it will be reflected in the guests you’ll be inviting to Helt Texas?

Ole HK: We want to have a mix of established and up and coming DJs. Like we have booked for the opening night of Helt Texas. Those two bookings are very representative of what we want and what we’re gonna book in the future.

Normann: Hopefully a lot of new and upcoming musicians with different styles, but also established and experienced people would be fun. There is so much talent in this city now, and especially women! Watch out – because they are reeeeally good!

Let’s talk about this first one. You’ve got Marcus Hitsøy and Henriku coming to inaugurate the night. What was the thought behind those guests and what do you hope to establish going forward?

Normann: They are great DJs and also pretty new to the scene. They really deserve to play in my opinion. I remember I first met Henriku when I moved to Berlin back in 2017. We immediately became friends because of our similar taste in music, and he continued to stay and evolve after I moved back home. Now also with his first release together with Alexander Skancke (which is dope). He is also a frequent DJ around in Berlin, so again a perfect fit for our opening night!

I think the opening night will be a good representation of what to expect in the future. It would be fun if these Thursdays turned into a hangout spot for people of any age with a passion for electronic music.    

Ole HK: Therefore Marcus Hitsøy and Henriku are the perfect booking for our opening party. Marcus is new to the scene and a really talented and passionate DJ. He is a part of the Sous-Vide label and have been playing groovy house and minimal a few times already in the backyard when they had their Sunday residency. Can’t wait to have him back. 

Yes Ole, I guess your relationship with Sous-Vide paved the way for this one too. 

Ole HK: Yes I really like the minimal groove and I was working and playing with Marcus in SVR. I saw how talented and passionate he is and Edvard knows Henrik, who also playa and produces the same style of electronic music – so then the line up of our opening party was complete! 

That’s all the questions I have for now. Anything you want to add?

Ole HK: Come to Jaeger 6th of October! It’s gonna be HELT TEXAS!!!!!!!!!!

A Ukrainian woman: Interview with Nastia

“What a way to end a set!” echoes through the crowd as the last remnants of an amen-breakbeat fade out. Nastia takes a reverent bow while the people in Jaeger’s basement press up against the booth, some of them still holding up phones, illuminated with the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Nothing she played alluded to any Ukrainian nationality, but there was an obvious and visible acknowledgement and you would have to have been living under a rock this past year, to avoid news of the ingoing war in Ukraine. I hear messages of support in English and what I assume is Nastia’s native-tongue, and while people file out of the basement as I’m reminded yet again of Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s iconic quote form Last Night a DJ saved my life; “Dancing is political, stupid!”

It’s a quote I was eager to bring up when I sat down with Nastia earlier that day in the hotel lobby. Did it resonate with the Ukrainian DJ under the circumstances? “To be honest I don’t have an answer to this question,” she considers for a moment, “because the opinion is so big and there are so many sides to it.“ Even so, she can’t seem to draw a definitive line in the sand for politics, because in her opinion “we’re all dependent on it!” It’s “pure ignorance,” she pressed to propagate a “message that music is out of politics.” 

Nastia’s fortitude and resilience in the face of the terrible atrocities facing her homeland has been an inspiration to witness. She has been a vocal critic since the war erupted with Russian troops invading Ukraine and continues to show a determined front under what I can only assume to be difficult personal circumstances. 

“It’s a hard situation for everybody,” she remarks ”not just for me and I still believe I’m one of the lucky ones.” Even though Nastia and her daughter are technically refugees, they’re not dependent on their refugee status and have declined the help of foreign governments. While other women in the same situation rely on international aid, Nastia and her daughter want for nothing. I’m super lucky to be an international artist,” she admits with her language skills and experiences as a well-travelled artist giving her an advantage over most. 

She currently resides in Amsterdam. The “cute and cosy” Dutch capital was the “only city” she considered when she had to relocate. Its accessibility to an international DJ circuit and its central location within Europe had a big influence on her decision, but I doubt it has given her any respite from being away from her home in Kyiv and the family and friends she left behind. 

At the time of writing her daughter will be enrolled in a boarding school in the UK, and with her daughter’s father returning to the front-line after recovering from injuries sustained on his last tour, Nastia’s family is currently spread across Europe while she continues to work, travelling around the globe. I can’t imagine this is easy for the DJ. “Why?” she replies. “I have to be an example,” she says flatly. “I truly believe I have a purpose. I have a responsibility.” It’s the nature of “being a Ukrainian woman; We don’t wait for help.“ 

It’s that very same resolution that propelled Nastia forward on the 24th of February 2022, when she woke up to the news of the Russian invasion. She packed her car with her daughter and drove to the Polish border. “We were supposed to fly to Turin,” she remembers, but  “the war arrived earlier” than expected, closing the airport on the day of their proposed flight. Nastia had two options; take the train or drive. She chose to drive, thinking it would be safer and  “more independent,” but having never driven across a border she admits she “was not prepared.” She “left, with a half empty bag, because I couldn’t understand what I needed at the moment,” and stressed continuously about whether she had the correct documents to get across. After twenty four hours of driving, most of which was stuck in long queues at the border and between borders, she and her daughter finally made it safely across the border. It was a harrowing ordeal even with the “incredible” job by the Polish border. 

Unlike the Polish border and much like Nastia, most of Ukraine was blindsided by the news of the Russian invasion. “Nobody knew,” the war was coming , because in Ukraine they had kept news of Russia’s advancing forces scant. “They were keeping it till the end, because they didn’t want people to panic,“ explains Nastia.  She and most of Kyiv were having “a normal day,” and “personally” she, like most of us watching events unfold remotely, “didn’t believe it” would ever happen. We were all, except perhaps for the American politicians, taken by surprise. 

We were all under the impression that a relative peace had reigned in the region after a tumultuous decade. We saw the uprising of the Maidan revolution as the start of a political revolution for the  country, one that would be sadly bookended by the eventual annexation of Crimea by Russian forces by 2014. It seemed a compromise was reached, but unbeknownst to most, tensions continued to simmer. 

From Russia’s point of view the situation was exasperated at the arrival of pro-European/pro-west leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The ex-actor/comedian was elected in 2019, with huge public support rallying behind his efforts after the 2014 revolution. It seemed that the people finally had their man,  but with Russia’s Vladimir Putin proclaiming a “nazi” force was at work in the Ukrainian capital, it didn’t go down so well in the east of the region.

“Before the revolution in 2014,” explains Nastia, “he (Putin) was sure (Ukraine) was going to be a Russian country like Belarus,” kowtowing to Russian trade agreements and political demands. When Ukraine’s people lead by Zelenskiy, “took the direction towards a European union” and refused “to join Russia in a trade agreement” this was the straw the camel’s back for Putin, who insisted now that he wanted to “denazify” Ukraine in what he deemed a “special military operation.”

That, now familiar rhetoric, “is just one man and a toxic propaganda,” according to Nastia. It’s no secret she has been a staunch supporter of Zelenskiy and his efforts. She voted for Zelenskiy and is in favour of a European Union. She believes in a free Ukraine, not some soviet hinterland smothered in the tight grip of Putin’s fist. “If this had been Poroshenko,” Ukraine’s previous president, she continues, “he would’ve given away Ukraine.” Even while Poroshenko formed the first government after the 2014 revolution, Nastia is certain it took Zelenskiy’s resolution to free Ukraine from Russia’s nostalgic fever dream of a reunited USSR. “There is no other politician in Ukraine that would’ve defended Ukraine like Zelenskiy,” she insists.

Images of the resilient president, dressed in fatigues like a live-action G.I Joe, cut a determined image at the outbreak of the war and continues to do so in the media today. The young president refused to flee his country even at the insistence of his foreign counterparts, a stark contrast to Putin, hiding away in his “humble” abode. As fighting intensified, driving Russian troops eastward, his fortitude inspired a nation and a whole European continent for Nastia. “European leaders believed that Ukraine could win, and they started to help,” she believes. “Most of the people didn’t accept Zelenskiy as a serious president and it was only when the war started,” that the public opinion shifted.

Unfortunately, this public opinion didn’t seem to reach the Russian people. In what she believes is one the “most shocking” developments in this war, Nastia says it has “completely” broken down the relationship between Ukrainian- and the Russian citizens. “We felt that we were on the same page,“ but after the war broke out “we clearly saw it was not like that.” Part propaganda, part ignorance and part misremembered history, have skewed the Russian narrative on the situation. Nastia thinks there’s “no way back” in mending these broken fences with her neighbours and in some sense her fellow countrymen.

Born in Fabrychne, a small village rubbing shoulders with the Russian border in the Luhansk region, Nastia was born into a Russian speaking family. For all intents and purposes she might have been Russian, depending on your perspective at that time. Nastia spent her formative years in this “poor” village, making regular trips to the closest big city, Donetsk. Her sisters had established residence there and when Nastia finished her schooling, she moved to the city to pursue a tertiary education at the University of Donetsk’s Marketing faculty. It’s then she starts dancing “in the best club” in the city, setting off on a path toward her eventual career as an internationally acclaimed DJ.

Today, her father remains in Luhansk, and her sisters have been living in Donetsk and Crimea respectively, all places currently under Russian control. I’m curious what people like her father and her sisters make of the situation. “My father is absolutely out of the whole thing,” she answers. “He’s an ignorant pacifist.” Nastia understands, but doesn’t defend, the 65-year-old’s position, refraining from dragging up politics when they talk, but I sense there’s frustration there that we’re all currently feeling with that generation. It’s different with her sisters though. “My older sister, of course she sees things, but she can’t do anything, and she’s accepted the conditions she has to live in. She doesn’t think it’s black and white, she believes there’s fault on both sides.” And what of the middle sister that has been in Crimea since before the 2014 revolution? While Nastia believes, “Crimea became a better place,” in terms of infrastructure, she concurrently believes it has robbed the region of an independent will. 

A holiday destination to Russians and Ukrainians alike, Crimea has always relied on the enterprise of its citizens to take advantage of seasonal business. With the arrival of the Russians, this has taken the agency away from the Crimeans, and has dwindled the opportunity for new businesses to thrive. “The roads, the kindergartens and the renovations, don’t compensate for the quality of life of the people,” insists Nastia. “You have to live your life independently,” and since the Russian occupation, independence has been a distant reality in the scope of the faux-socialist dogma of the oligarchs. 

This is perhaps why there has been a lot more resistance coming from Kyiv than these regions according to Nastia. “I think it’s all about education.” Growing up in the Luhansk region, she’s witnessed many who have fallen victim to the “poor” mentality that these rural regions encourage. “If you were able, like me, to move away from the small village to the capital,” clarifies Nastia, “then you have something in your mind; you have ideas, knowledge and skills, it makes you stronger.” Other “people that were born and going to die in the same village” don’t have that perspective and Nastia suggests that they have become “slaves” to their own limitations, and thus Russian demands.

It will take more people like Nastia, who although born in a Russian-speaking family,  “identifies as Ukrainian.” It might just be a “state of mind” for most, but in Nastia’s case, that state of mind has given her purpose in what she does as a DJ, a label owner, and event organiser today. It extends from her work in the booth to her own charitable foundation, which raises money for children’s hospitals and animal shelters in Ukraine. Her Nechto nights and record label have become something of a platform for these fundraising efforts and from every set she plays, she has been able to direct some of her personal earnings to the cause, significantly funnelled into the military effort of her homeland.

“Every gig is a challenge” however. The “hardest thing” has been “to focus on the music” while the war rages on, she understandably admits.  She”checks the music news much less” while  her inbox continues to fill with unopened demos. “I’m not ready for that. It invests so much effort.” She still experiences “heart-attacks” before taking to the booth, and was taking prescribed anxiety medication from the onset of the war up until August. Yet she perseveres calling it her “purpose” at the moment. Besides the label Nechto, releasing records from Ukrainian artists, she is also aiding Ukrainian DJs and artists in their quest for visas and temporary discharges from the Ukrainian military (“most of them are men”) to play in Europe. 

She goes back to Kiyv at least once a month for the moment, and notices while there’s still a tension in the air, there’s also been “a lot of discussion about how to live: “Shall I feel guilty that I’m trying to live the life I’ve had before the war, while other people are dying on the frontline. Some people figure that we can not go out, go to the party, or go to the restaurant because people are dying in the front. But other people are saying that yes but they are dying for us. We need to live so that their efforts are not (in vain).

Either way, there haven’t been that many electronic music events cropping up in the city “because of the curfew,” but there have been some cultural events, keeping up the spirits of the population. Nastia has feigned to create any events in the city herself, believing that “you have to be part of the scene” to do anything there. She hopes to eventually see an echo of what happened after the 2014 revolution when “we came back to parties in the summer and the scene went to another level,” but is reluctant to get her hopes up just yet. “I don’t see an end,” she says in a discouraging tone. “I don’t think anybody else has an idea of how or when it’s going to finish, even Putin.”

If it were up to the people on the dance floor in Jaeger’s basement on that evening, this war would already be over. Nobody else seems to want it either, except one man and the sycophantic yes-men that surround him. The only hope we have is that something befalls the Russian leader, but as Nastia so eloquently put it; “the war doesn’t only depend on him.” 

As Nastia’s set came to an end, she was smiling in response to the audience. Eeking across 140BPM, her set was built on a sense of groove that often belies those tempos. The people on the night responded in kind, whooping at quieter intermissions, and always ready with a cheer when she transitions into something familiar. There’s respect and familiarity involved in the turnout and their appreciation, but one can’t simply dismiss the extenuating factors of a war in Ukraine in this situation, especially when people are visibly waving Ukrainian flags. Even as the media’s coverage wanes and a world view turns more apathetic, it seems that people are still here and still willing to make a stand; even if it’s just for a few hours on the dance floor. 

Words: Mischa Mathys

Photos: Johannes Krogh

My best shot with Johannes Krogh

You might not recognise Johannes Krogh. Most of the evenings he spent at Jaeger, his face was obscured by a camera lens. He has been our photographer in residence for the last six months and from SPF.DJ to Nastia, he’s been there to capture the moments leaving physical documents of fleeting and hazy memories for us to pour over for future times. 

There’s an obvious voyeurism associated with photography; a mechanical eye winking at you from somewhere in the dark. In club culture it is often met with protest, considering the nature of the scene. Yet, photography in clubs has been there since the dawn of the counterculture with images telling a story of a time, a place and a scene that words simply can’t reflect. Celluloid memories, often frozen in black and white are some of the only insights we have to forgotten scenes today.

It’s that documentary approach that feeds Jaeger’s desire to have a photographer present on some nights. Only some nights however, because other nights are better left as mere memory, special only to the people that were there and experienced the event in person. For those nights we wanted to document, it was Johannes Krogh behind the lens. 

As his tenure at Jaeger ends and we bid him farewell on a sabbatical in Brussels, we sit down with the young photographer, DJ and aspiring architect to look through some of his favourite pictures from that time, and find out a little more about the method behind the lens. 

Photo of Boys Noise at Jaeger

This one just really captured the vibe that night. Pure joy in the audience and in the booth. The floor somehow felt 10 times larger than usual. I knew the second I took the pictures that it was all I needed that night.

 

Do you remember your first camera?

Yes, definitely. I received it as a present  for my confirmation. It’s one of those traditional gifts, I feel. It was a good gift. I didn’t really have any photography interests before that.

Do you remember the brand and model?

Pentax single lens reflex digital camera. It was nice and small. It was a decent camera. It was entry level and it felt kind of professional. You could swap out lenses and buy better stuff. It was a good beginner camera.

Did you garner an affinity for it quite quickly?

Yes, in terms of  how it works. How light travels and what you can get with different lenses; documenting stuff and getting good pictures.

What were you documenting at that stage?

Typical vacation stuff. I took a lot of pictures of my dog. To be honest, I have never felt comfortable taking pictures of people. It feels quite personal.

I started studying after high-school and then I did a lot of portrait photography. It always felt very intimate. If I’m taking pictures of people now, I’d prefer that they don’t know it, but that feels almost a bit creepy in a way. I’ve never wanted to approach people and ask to take their picture, I prefer a more fly on the wall approach. 

What did you study?

Media with an emphasis on graphic design. I was really drawn to the technical aspects of photography. I know some photographers that just see it as a tool, but I’m really fascinated in how a camera works. I got a really good sense of the technical aspects of photography, which I think is as exciting in a way. 

Photo of clubber at Jaeger

This one was was at spfdj in the basement. It was just so very techno

You’ve DJ’d as well and you’ve had some experience with photographing bands. Do you think that interest in music has an effect on what and how you photograph?

Yes, I think so. I like photography, but I’ll always use it to get into other hobbies as well. Doing the bands at festivals, it’s not because I’m really into photographing bands. It’s because I wanted to go to concerts. It’s a fun way of doing multiple hobbies at once. I’m into the music, the vibe, the people. 

I’ve noticed that most of the pictures we’ve gotten from you managed to capture that vibe. 

Yes, I like to partake and not just observe. I try to document it from the inside. 

What are your experiences of people in the club when they have a camera trained on them?

You get a really good sense early on of who doesn’t want to be photographed and who gravitates to the camera. It’s never been an issue. Most people that have had an issue with it, it’s been more about the principle; “like should you photograph on a Techno night?” I’ll avoid photographing those people. 

I guess, Jaeger being small, you’ll recognise the people and are able respect their wishes.

Yes. Usually the first hour or so, I’ll just go around and I don’t expect to get much. It’s just about getting comfortable and getting the people comfortable with me being around. 

We’ve only had one request to have a picture removed. 

Yes, I remember the picture, and she actually asked me to take her picture. (laughs) Some people might come up to me, and ask me not to take their picture before I even start, and that’s fine. It’s more important to show a vibe anyway than it is to show a face. 

What nights have been best for capturing that vibe?

It’s been different between upstairs and downstairs. I feel I have had some really great shots, on both the dark, heavy nights and really light fun nights. 

Do the new lights in the basement help?

Yes, definitely. There’s also the fact that for every thirty pictures I take in the basement, there’s one good one. You have to almost be lucky, because the flashes are so quick. You have to either time it perfectly or have a long shutter, but then it gets  blurry, but that can also be the vibe. You can see people moving. It’s really hard when you freeze people, to show the movement. Especially when you use a flash, it gets very static and frozen. 

Photo from Jaeger

I like because it shows the variety in the Jæger type. All kinds of people united on the dancefloor.

Do you have any nights that stand out in your memory?

When it’s packed it’s obviously a good vibe, but it can be really hard to capture, because it’s almost impossible to move and get a good perspective. Sometimes it’s about having a group  of people that are really comfortable and dancing, but maybe not too packed. 

Some of the Techno nights have been good, because people can often be introverted and shy, so people give each other enough space.

As a fan of the music, do you ever get the chance to enjoy the night?

Yes, maybe an hour in the beginning, then I would do some intense photography and get all the angles. If I feel I have enough good material, I can just enjoy the rest of the night. I really liked the first night when SPF.DJ played. Maybe it was a personal experience, and I feel that I got really into the crowd, because they were all kind of skeptical in the beginning. 

People came up to me and asked if it was morally ok to be taking pictures on that particular night. Later, those very same people were asking me to have their picture taken. 

I guess their moral fortitude dwindles as a night progresses?

Yeah, I guess so. (laughs)

In safe hands – Profile on Mano Le Tough

“Thanks to Mano Le Tough I’m not afraid (for) the future of house music.” That’s what Âme and Innervisions’ Kristian Beyer reckoned back in 2012 when the Guardian asked him to peer into his musical crystal ball. Beyer and Innervisions cohort, Dixon had been staunch supporters of Mano Le Tough’s (Niall Mannion) music, his tracks regularly making an appearance in their DJ sets. The Irish producer and DJ had become a sought-after presence in some of Europe’s most lauded DJ booths, and while the Innervisions confirmation was welcomed, Mano Le Tough’s career hardly needed the reinforcement, even then. ou don’t become a meme without having some clout on the scene, after all.

By the time Beyer’s quote surfaced, it’s fair to say Mano Le Tough had already established himself, forging a distinctive path as a DJ and artist, putting him in that upper echelon where the kind of people cheering him on resided. “2012 is when things really started to speed up, when I started doing over 100 gigs a year, and released my first album,” he confirmed in The Irish Times. It was year zero in becoming a household name, but he wasn’t exactly an overnight success either. 

Growing up in Ireland, we don’t know much about Niall Mannion’s life before Mano Le Tough. Bits from interviews suggested he was a quizzical music fan, but with early influences like Radiohead being referenced and the fact that he had “been in bands” when he was younger, it seems Mannion was more at ease with a guitar than a synthesiser during his formative years. At some point the switch to electronic music must have happened because by 2007, he had garnered a following on Myspace and made the move to the electronic music capital, Berlin. 

Mano Le Tough in the studio

“It was fairly meagre when I first got to Berlin,” Mannion told The Irish Times, reflecting on that time. “I was working in an Irish pub, actually a couple of different pubs, and running small parties with friends.” Earning his chops in what would have been a very busy and competitive Berlin scene at the time, he put in his time as Mano Le Tough and  his efforts were soon rewarded. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if I wasn’t determined,” he told XLR8R during an interview a while back. “Chasing the dream” during this period, there were a couple of key events that set him on the trajectory. 

Going to Red Bull Music Academy in 2010 was “one of the most important developments” and then when everyone started playing his track Primitive People, it too became a “cornerstone” of his career. It was the first release from his debut LP and with people like Tale of Us and Dixon jumping on the remixes, it played a seminal role in propelling Mano Le Tough to the  forefront of the world stage as a DJ. And where most would shrink in the shadow of some of the world’s most renowned DJ booths, Mano Le Tough, dominated it. Abated by his experiences when he was still a burgeoning DJ, he became a familiar headliner all across Europe, with the prowess to back up his rising reputation.

He can easily go 10 hours behind the decks, and still “routinely” does without breaking a sweat, and it’s that skill that installed the name Mano Le Tough beyond Primitive People, and continues to be a drawcard for old and new audiences alike. 

“You really have to look after your relationship with DJing,” Mannion explained in XLR8R. “If you do it too much, or you play in the wrong places, the love for it can fade, and you can’t really come back from that place—unless you have a break from it.”  The tight-rope act he walks has secured his precarious position between the underground electronic music scene and the big rooms he plays week in and week out. 

Known for his immersive journeys, Mano Le Tough’s sets are fluid expressions through his unique vision of House music which concurrently had a broad appeal on the dance floor. When the likes of Resident Advisor were still doing DJ rankings, he would often be in the top tier of these lists, and when Boiler Room came along he would be one of the first guests to break a million views on the platform.

Such was and is his popularity as a DJ that it often overshadows his work as a producer, but it’s exactly for his records that the Innervisions guys first singled him out (and for records not even on their label) and why he remains in the purview of our scene. 

In his work in the studio we have the same kind of ethos that drives his experiences as a DJ. “If you try to produce records to fit in with trends then you’re already two steps behind,” Mannion told XLR8R around the time his second LP Trails was released. A lot had changed since his debut LP Changing Days by the time of Trails. “I’ve developed a lot in terms of production technique, and I trust myself a lot more in terms of taking chances. I was much more open with the process, and I had a lot more confidence.” 

The LP coincided with a move to Switzerland where it was quite a different experience than his time in Berlin, where “the line [between home and work] was far more blurred.”  Moving to Switzerland was “a really positive thing for everything, music included,” he explained in XLR8R. “It’s given me so much energy and that has given me clarity of thought,” he continues. “It’s offered me the opportunity to really develop as an artist.” The result was the “deepest, most personal” work to that date. It came during a time of manic creativity, but  reflecting on the LP much later he would also say:  “In fact, after Trails, I said I’d never do another one because it didn’t go as well as I wanted it. I rushed the whole thing. I should have just stepped back and given it more time.”

This is something he felt that he could correct by the time he reached his third and latest offering in the long format, facilitated in part by the first wave of the pandemic. “I’d wanted to make a new album but that process was getting interrupted every year by being on the road too much,” he told Musicradar at the time.” This time, although it was extremely difficult for many reasons, being at home gave me the chance to work properly on the record and finish it.” The result was At the Moment, an album that’s a departure from anything else he’s done in the past, moving the furthest from those House-music inclinations into a more organic realm. 

Mano Le Tough at the keys

Time seems to slow during the record as inert guitar licks and slothful dubbed-out rhythms collide in miasmic atmospheres. Mano Le Tough’s sterile touch prevails in a glossy exterior that hides tumultuous layers. His voice dominates on this record more than ever and there is something in those youthful influences like Radiohead and some new ones like Steve Reich that certainly come to the fore here. “I felt that I was going full circle back to the music I grew up with,” he confirms in Musicradar, “but filtering it through the lens of my electronic music or DJ career.”

He stopped short of calling it a complete evolution in his work. “I wouldn’t say it’s a change in direction, just the logical next step.” It’s a dramatic step nonetheless, more like a leap, and it certainly changes the perspective of his music. Is it still House music at this point? It’s up to the listener, but it certainly channels some obvious references from House music, enough for  people from Resident Advisor to be able to still associate. In Henry Ivry ‘s review of the record, he called it “a surprising and refreshing record” marking specifically the “swaggering guitar hero” tone that it sets throughout.

I’m curious what Âme’s Kristian Beyer would think of it and if he’d still stand by his 2012 quote. My guess is yes, because if you hear what the likes of Bonobo, George FitzGerald and Ross from Friends are doing in House music echelons, we’re certainly moving towards the very same sound Mano Le Tough is perpetuating through his last record.

How does this influence what he does in the booth today? Probably little. While the nature of the recorded format has changed, especially in the realm of albums, the DJ is still a facilitator for a dance floor, and in that respect Mano Le Tough is a master at work. We’d expect nothing less than the cumulative experiences of a DJ that has made an indelible mark on the scene. 

Watch Center on the universe perform live for Jaeger Mix

In a first for the Jaeger mix, we present a video recording of Center of the Universe’s contribution to the Jaeger Mix series.

At the Center of the universe is man. He is a curious man. He plays a clarinet, and conjures obscure alien sonic aesthetics from noisy machines. He channels a diverse collage of musical languages through his work, always underpinned by a catchy beat. When he is not making beats he is proliferating others’ music with artists that orbit him and his label, Metronomicon. He is a musical maelstrøm at the Center of the universe, and he is our first guest back for the Jaeger mix after a long hiatus for the series.

Jørgen Sissyfus Skjulstad is the man at the Center of the Universe. The musical project has been a fixture in Oslo and Norway with records and live performances transmitting the artist’s singular voice across formats and contexts. Perfectly at home in a DJ booth, as well as a stage, Center of the Universe’s music moves effortlessly between worlds, often bringing disparate musical planets together in the process. 

Between non-western scales and pop-culture musical references, a post-modern spirit moves through his records, his videos and his live show. It was indeed a live-show he insisted upon when he asked him to revive the Jaeger mix series, encouraging the series to capture everything on camera and in audio for this occasion. Carting some synthesisers, drum machines, light-bulbs and a traffic sign into the sauna, Center of the Universe captivated with an esoteric live show, one which we’re happy to have captured in the visual format for the first time. 

In an unprecedented event of the Jaeger mix series, we have a video of the performance. Re-live the moments from our sauna, where Center of the Universe performs some of his latest hits like  Track ID, MP3 and NFT.  You can read the full interview with Jørgen and the audio recording here.

Keep the party going at the end of the world with Ost & Kjex

In today’s content-driven society, it’s so easy to drown in new records. Demanding release schedules leave us weary with even some of our favourite artists saturating streaming platforms and record shelves with their work. It has reached a point where five years between releases seem an absolute age and any longer interval between records is presumed a comeback by media outlets.

That’s why when Ost & Kjex announced their latest LP, “Songs from the end of the world”, with a seven-year gap between their last, “Freedom Wig,” people started calling it a comeback album. It simply wasn’t the case. They’ve continued to release records, like the mesmerising Private Dancer; set up their own label; and remained a presence on Oslo’s and Norway’s live stages. And that’s not including the Tore “Ost” Gjedrem’s side project Sex Judas

They’ve been busy, and in Oslo they’ve been a constant presence, noted for their jovial and ebullient dance floor creations and engaging live shows. Their latest album is very much a “continuation” of the Ost & Kjex sound and Dadaist approach to the dance floor,  as they traverse through sequenced rhythms and enigmatic melodies. Return guest WhaleSharkAttacks feature alongside other collaborators, as “Songs from the end of the world” makes a stand at the centre of the dance floor.

Between enchanting vocals and grooves, there’s the spectre of a soul that permeates through the record counterpointing the glossy sheen of its electronic counterparts. There’s an element of Ost & Kjex’s live performances at work, which infer that human touch, and lets the caricatures that they’ve created around this project run rampant across the record. Like a couple of comic strip characters brought to life, there’s a sense of playfulness that provokes at a visceral level, even though the subject matter of this record might appear bleak on its cover. 

We were eager to find out more about what exactly influenced the record and what planted the seed, as well as what this record actually means in the story of Ost & Kjex. We reached out and Ost obliged with some answers to our questions ahead of their next appearance at Jaeger.

This will be your first LP away from the Diynamic; the first Ost & Kjex LP on your own label Snick Snack Music; and the first LP in 7 years (wow, feels like Freedom Wig came out yesterday). Would it be safe to assume that this is a new chapter in the Ost & Kjex annals?

I must say we are as shocked as you by how fast time flies, and in relation to this the new album feels more like a steady continuation than a new chapter. To some listeners it might seem like a new start, but we live, think and dream about this project every day, even though our output is quite slow.

Can we ask what inspired the decision to set off on your own towards a distinct path with Snick Snack?

After we parted ways with Diynamic we felt the need to control every aspect of the creative process. One thing is the music itself, another is the release schedule. It’s hard for an artist to wait months, sometimes a year before the actual product comes out. We move on so quickly to the next thing and the music easily seems dated. 

Another major inspiration is the current state of affairs in the Norwegian electronic underground. The quality and amount of music coming out locally was just too good to ignore. We also wanted to see if we could use some of our experience from the business to help the local scene. 

What does “Songs from the end of the world” signify for you and your career?

Not too much, even though it felt nice to get a new album out. For attention in some parts of the press like the dailies, you have to release albums. Some journalists even called it a comeback album, even though we have released quite a few ep’s since “Freedom Wig”. I think our release rate is the worst possible when it comes to keeping the attention of the listeners and media in today’s over heated SoMe driven society. On the other side, I can’t keep up with the release schedule of even some of my favourite artists, as they are flooding the market to keep the attention up.  

It’s quite an apt title for an album in these trying times, but most of the music subverts the theme as ebullient constructions that are very familiar as your sound. Is there a thematic significance to the title and how does it tie in with the music?

The title is definitely a comment on the times we are living in, with the Pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, climate change and the rise of the new Right with its Neo Fascist ideals. It is also a comment on Norway’s position on the outskirts of Europe and the music world.

It’s not a gloomy album, even though it has some dark parts. The idea is to keep the party going, even though we are going down first class. 

Have you guys changed or adapted to anything in the environment beyond music that is specifically significant for this LP?

The pandemic affected this album big time. We originally planned a totally different approach with lots of musical collaborations, field recordings etc. The virus forced us to make this one by ourselves, bouncing ideas back and forth between our studios. Artistically I’m quite happy it turned out this way as it forced us to pay closer attention to our own productions and not rely on the magic of others. 

As always, your music skirts that border between the dance floor and a set of headphones. What context were you particularly leaning toward on this record?

We specifically wanted to make a club album, something people could dance to when society opens up after Covid. That being said, there will always be an introspective, sound geek aspect to our music. We are deeply in love with that side of electronic music. 

How much is it informed with what you’ve been hearing on the dance floor lately?

Not much.

We’re all getting a bit older, and Saturday nights are spent with a good bottle of wine at home rather than at a nightclub these days. So how do you satisfy those dance impulses that used to come from going out every weekend to a club on an LP like this? 

The club experience is our ideal. Even though we are getting quite old, we still think we are the energetic ravers we once were. Even an honest look in the mirror doesn’t seem to cure this disillusion. 

One element that stands out on  “Songs from the end of the world” is the collaborations. There’s more here than before, I believe. Why have you started working more with other people, and what does it bring out in your own work?

Actually there are a lot less collaborations on this album than on any of our previous ones. 

That being said, we always loved to work with other people as they bring in a different approach and energy to our work. I believe all my best creative work has been made in collaboration with others. 

WhaleSharkAttacks is on a couple of tracks, and you’ve worked with her before on the unforgettable Private Dancer. What is it about this enigmatic artist that first encouraged you to collaborate with her in the first place, and what makes you guys click so effortlessly? 

It’s her self-assured style and effortlessly cool vocals that drew us in. Also we are very impressed by her productions and ability to mix genres into something entirely her own. Viviana is also a very intelligent person with strong and interesting perspectives on the world.

So the social aspect is also important, we love to hang out with her.  

With like-minded artists like WhaleSharkAttacks and Wildflowers (Øyvind Morken & Kaman Leung) joining you guys and Trulz & Robin, there’s a small family that’s come into existence around Snick Snack. Who and what do you look for in the label to join the catalogue?

We look for artists with an original sound that seem to exist in a world of their own, even though they are part of a bigger scene. Artists that can make interesting albums as well as a few dance floor bombs. We look for Norwegian artists or people living permanently in Norway, as we see Snick Snack as a vehicle to help develop the local scene. 

Are there any exciting new artists joining the lineup in the near future?

Plenty! We are really excited to release an EP by the duo Synk this autumn / winter. Helene Rickhard is currently working on an album for Snick Snack that I think is gonna be something really special. First thing to come out this autumn is a fab. solo EP by Øyvind Morken with some post Italo bangers. And there is more to come. 

What were some of the positive experiences about releasing the LP on your own label?

Above all, full artistic freedom. Even though this freedom also comes with a lot of responsibility. If something goes wrong you can blame only yourself. And also you don’t have the promotional help of a big team that often comes with a larger label. Another major plus is that you gain so much knowledge on how the whole music business works. You are no longer a passive bystander the second after you deliver the music to the label. We can now influence the whole process from start to finish.

Ost, you’re also doing a lot with your other project Sex Judas at the same time. What takes precedent when you’re working on music these days and how do you compartmentalise those two projects individually?

It’s quite easy actually as Ost & Kjex is something Petter and I do together. So anything happening with that project is something we do in tandem. Stuff happens when we stick our heads together. As for Sex Judas, I started the project as an outlet where I could experiment and draw inspiration from a lot of the music I love, that don’t fit in with the Ost & Kjex sound. I felt a need to start with clean sheets. Tabula Rasa as they say. 

At the same time, as releasing the LP for Ost & Kjex, there’s also a remix Sex Judas EP. Tell us a bit more about how that came together and how Cosmic pioneer Daniele Baldelli alongside his long-time production partner, Rocca ended up there.

Nothing more fancy than I wanted some “club” remixes from the “Night Songs” album. I always had a big appetite for electronic music and club / dance music. From jazz, funk, disco, boogie to braindance, idm, house, breaks etc. Danielle Baldelli is a major cat in the dance floor continuum and most importantly a cosmic messenger. It is a great honour to have such a foreseeing artist remix our music. 

It’s an incredibly eclectic mix of artists and sounds coming together on that remix collection, with a very eccentric delivery. Was that always the intention or was it a happy coincidence due the artists you picked out for the assignment?

It was intentional and hopefully in tune with the aspirations I have for this project.

Why these songs and will there be a second volume with some more from the LP?

I picked out Slow Down for Danielle Baldelli as I thought it would be a good match. The original is quite long and cosmic, although in another way than disco. As Roe Deers and Utheo Choerer they picked their own favourites from the album. I don’t think there will be a second volume of remixes. 

But I digress. We’re here to talk about Ost & Kjex. In terms of presenting your music, you prefer the live format. Why do you feel most comfortable in that context?

We come from a band setting, so we brought this element with us when we started making electronic music. There were so many, I wouldn’t say boring, but introspective live acts around when we first hit the scene. People staring into their laptops and little boxes. 

This perspective changed dramatically when we first experienced Jamie Lidell, Herbert and above all Nozé perform live for the first time. It blew our minds and opened up new possibilities for energetic live performances. Also there is the simple fact that we love to perform and entertain. It’s a very rewarding way to play music where one interacts directly with the audience and feeds off each other’s energies. 

You mentioned in your last email, it’s going to be a collection of mostly new music, and some “Golden Oldies.” How have you adapted the “oldies” to fit into the set, and does the fact that it’s in a club setting change the nature of these familiar songs at all?

Indeed we have. We updated quite a few of the oldies to fit better with our current sound, which is currently a bit harder. Also we mix elements from the songs like dj’s do in their sets. This brings out some magic from time to time. I suggest people get their sexy arses down to Jaeger this Friday to hear for themselves. 

 

 

A very British institution with Alexander Nut

Alexander Nut beams with delight, holding a small bag of records at Råkk & Rålls in Oslo. He  insists there’s probably much more to dig through in the vast catacombs of music that constitutes the record store’s cellar, but luggage space is limited. Next time he considers, he might bring a bigger bag. 

Half an hour earlier, we’re sitting down in a shady spot in Oslo’s Spikersuppa. A brass band is marching their way down Karl Johan Gate with a honking brass noise drifting over the whole park. I have to repeat the question: “Will there ever come a time when you stop buying records?” “Probably not, ” he says confidently. “It’s a habit and that’s the way I grew up, interacting with music. I still love it.” 

He still travels with around 50 records (not leaving much space for new finds)  and when he’s not playing records, he’s “manufacturing” them through his record label Eglo; a label that has been championing the call for new UK left field club music since 2009 through artists like Floating Points, Funkineven, Fatima and most recently Shy One. 

Cutting his teeth on pirate radio, Alexander Nut became something of a tastemaker for a new sound of electronic music coming to the fore in a post-dubstep landscape in the UK. Through his early work at Rinse FM, back in the mid-2000’s, he turned a whole generation of music fans onto the emerging sounds of London’s post-dubstep set, providing a springboard for record labels and artists alike, some of who have gone on to become household names today. 

Guided by his own eclectic tastes, which include “anything and everything,” it continues to inform the sound and attitude of Eglo. He left an indelible mark on Rinse, before moving on to NTS, where today he feels that he can “do whatever I want” and there’s an audience out there that will listen to it. It’s given him the opportunity to play the music he didn’t get a chance to play at Rinse, with shows folding in everything from Roisin Murphy to Shy One, tracing a dotted-line through Alex’s own experience in music and his record collection, rather than an obligation to a scene.

That scene has largely dissolved today, diversifying into branches of Techno, House, Grime and UKG, but when it started it was a hive of activity with a “nice mix of east London ghetto kids, mixed with all these nerdy producer guys” interpreting the dance floor in new and original styles of music, predisposed by the same thing that informed Alexander’s eclectic nature.

“The UK music scene was quite tribal” back then according to Alexander when we start reflecting on this time in London. At the time, even at the no-holds-barred Rinse FM, he was “the odd one out.” When he started at the radio station, “there weren’t any platforms really,” and besides perhaps Giles Petterson and Benji B on BBC, there “wasn’t any leftfield, mixed-up shows.” With an objective of “filling a void,” he played only “new underground music,”  influenced largely by the “mutation of Dubstep, Garage and Jungle happening” at that time.

Permeating through the nocturnal habits of the UK metropolis at the time, it was music that gestated in the melting pot that is the UK’s diverse cultural backgrounds alongside a youthful inquisitiveness satisfied by the advent of an accessible internet – “Myspace was a hotbed for all kinds of people sharing music” – and a “record scene” that “was still strong” according to Alexander.  

Legendary clubbing institutions like Plastic People and FWD played a seminal part in this new underground with Alexander right there at the epicentre “aggregating all this new shit,” for Rinse  FM and his growing audience. He stops short of calling it “an obligation,” but feels that he had “a slight responsibility” if only for the people tuning every week. It’s always hard to relay the significance of this time and this scene in the UK for people with no reference point,  but as a writer I’ve always believed it should be appreciated in the same respect as what Acid House became through the Hacienda. It wasn’t a specific sound –  in fact it was exactly the absence of some musical consolidation –  but rather a spirit or an attitude. 

“You got to say,” explains Alexander  “it comes from  black culture, it comes from black music.”  By the time Rinse FM and FWD came to the fore however, and on the back of the Internet, it had taken on a  whole new significance. “It came to a point when I was a teenager,” he remembers, “and we were listening to that whole time-line; Reggae, Hip Hop, House, Drum n Bass and Garage.”  It was, in part, reflected in all “the different communities all living on top of each other,” who “all had these scenes” that were now influencing this next generation’s augury view of future sounds. 

The importance of Rinse FM and Alexander Nut could not be downplayed in this legacy. There are still people who come up to him, reflecting on the influence of his show on their formative years as teenagers listening to his broadcasts from their bedroom. It might make him feel “old as fuck” but he conceeds it “planted a seed.” After 8 years at Rinse FM however, he felt ”it was other people’s turn” and he could pass “on the batton” allowing him to move on to NTS where he could change the format to what we hear today. 

There’s no need to play the latest, groundbreaking work, giving him the opportunity to delve a little deeper into his own collection. Now it’s more about the  “past present and future,” on NTS whereas before “it was all about the future” on Rinse FM. 

Reflecting on his own past, Alexander is humble and respectful of the scene he grew up in, emphasising those formidable experiences growing up in Wolverhampton, in the UK’s west-Midlands. The town, located in the UK’s steel belt, is a town lost to an industrial age today, but curiously holds some key moments in the UKs music history, most significantly as the origin story for Goldie, the UK Drum n Bass pioneer, actor and yoga enthusiast. It is there in the same estate where Goldie grew up and tagged buildings, that Alexander Nut’s family has its roots. 

Raised in the council estates where you have all “the different communities, all living on top of each other,” the culture, funnelled down to Alexander, found outlets like skateboarding and graffiti before it solidified around DJing. “Seeing Goldie tags” around his neighbourhood,  “blew” Alexander’s mind as a youth and he soon realised he “wanted a piece of that.” In what is a familiar trope in DJ stories, graffiti and skateboarding went hand in hand with music and on the back of his older brother’s record collections which went from Hip Hop (“Wu Tang was huge to me”)  to Iron Maiden (“I still love Iron Maiden”) Alexander found a real appreciation for the pirate radio stations in his area. “There’s a really strong pirate radio scene in Wolverhampton” and “Skyline FM” run by Dread Lester (“Rest in Peace”) was a particularly strong draw for Alexander. As he was getting into DJing, largely playing Hip Hop, the objective had always been to have his own show on Skyline, and he would eventually realise his dream before moving to London.

Everything from “Jazz, Hip Hop, soul to funk” would inform his listening habits at the time. Fold all of that into the cauldron of London’s effervescent music scene where Grime, Garage, Drum n Bass and Dubstep were being co-opted into House, Techno and Electro, and we have that vibrant “cultural melting pot” that would lay the foundation for Alexander Nut’s career on Rinse FM and eventually Eglo. 

Yet again the Internet, Myspace’s and Plastic People’s importance cannot be overstated in Eglo’s existence. It was through Myspace that Alexander Nut first found Floating Points (Sam Sheppard). He had been playing a track called “For You” on his radio show at Rinse FM, when during a CDR night at Plastic People he heard the track being played through the club’s legendary bass-heavy sound system. CDR, like Alexander’s radio show, was a night that championed new producers, allowing unknown artists to bring in their music to hear it through a proper club sound system. The Floating Points track was announced, and Alexander asked the MC, “ where is he, point him out”; his only previous contact with the producer being through Sheppard’s Myspace page. 

It turned out Sheppard had been listening to Alexander’s radio show too, and when the two started talking it lead to the creation of Eglo with Floating Points establishing the label through the labels first 7”; the very same track that had been playing on Rinse FM and CDR on that significant night. 

“It  sold well” remembers Alexander who says  it “ignited the flame” and he proffered “I guess we’re a record label now.” Records like Funkineven’s Rolands Jam and Fatima’s Circle followed, with that very same eclectic approach, ebbing through Alexander’s own personal tastes. R&B, Garage, Chicago, Jazz and everything happening around the label in that time, were channelled through Eglo. It’s a “very British institution on these strange overlapping things”, considers Alexander when I ask about the ideologies behind the label. 

Eglo “is the sum of its parts.” It’s about “Funkineven, Fatima, Floating Points, Rinse FM and NTS. All these things play a part and it has its own identity. ”Even though Alexander might “listen to everything,” he feels Eglo is not necessarily a representation of his own listening habits, but rather a  “a true representation of all these connected things.” It all “started in the basement of plastic people”, and today it represents a network spreading across the world from “Australia to LA” as he continues making new friends and making connections.” It’s an honest, unique pure creation” he feels, based on those interactions in his musical world. It extends from that first Floating Points record to the latest Shy One 7″ today with every record offering a new node in this expanding musical universe.

Unfortunately, it’s probably also one of the last bastion’s for this kind of label in our hyper-commercialised landscape, which according to Alexander had become “a bit elitist and discriminatory” as more people cottoned on to the music. “As things became more accessible it killed some of the grassroots origins;” possibly represented in time by the change in sound system at Plastic People, right before it closed down. “It went from this monstrous bass-heavy system to an audiophile thing” remembers Alexander and he noticed the “crowd and promoters changed.” 

It probably came to its ultimate  conclusion by the time Boiler Room came on the scene with Alexander laying blame directly at their feet for this change in musical pursuits. “I’ll say this on record – Boiler Room ruined everything!  I‘m not trying to shit on the people that work there now,” he says but at a time when he was still promoting events in London they would often poach artists from his lineup and let Alexander foot the bill.

Putting up “A grand of my own money,” these artists would also play for Boiler Room for free on the promise of promotion, and it left Alexander dumbfounded; “‘You’re doing a free gig for these guys, when they all sponsored up’”. It was “killing grassroots promoters” like Alexander.

Even though he concedes that the platform’s impact in proliferating music is significant, he’s surethose same people” that found music through Boiler Room ”would’ve been introduced to the same music in a more illegitimate way” regardless. “All these platforms present themselves as these authentic grassroots organisations, but they are just auction sites. It’s all about numbers, what they can sell to their sponsors.” 

It’s certainly a world away from anything our generation experienced growing up and anything that Eglo continues to present to the world. I revel in Alexander’s honesty in his objections in a landscape that’s become somewhat careful of these criticisms, for fear of reprisal. Criticisms like these are very rarely brought to light and only spoken in hushed tones and off the record. It takes some real courage to come out and say these things we’re all thinking. It’s probably the reason why Alexander is one of the most respected DJs out there and Eglo records remain a formidable touchstone for us. 

Alexander admits, “I’m no longer the bastion of what’s the hottest, what’s the latest thing you know,” but that has only seemed to spur on a drive to contribute only what’s significant, whether it’s the music he plays or the music he puts out there in the world through Eglo.

It might be a cliche to label Alexander a melting pot of these diverse influences, but no other description would suffice on this occasion. From his early Hip Hop and graffiti roots in Wolverhampton; the influence of pirate radio; his own work on the radio; his influence on and from the likes of Plastic People and FWD; and the fact that on a sunny day in Oslo, he’d rather spend his time in a musty cellar looking for records, he’s a uniquely British institution and one of the few positive things that statement infers today. 

The Cut with Filter Musikk

As you try to wedge in another record into a collection that has outgrown its presumptuous and downright foolish dimensions, something seems to give. The DiY flatpack ikea record shelf/DJ-platform/speaker-balancer shows its true integrity and buckles like a politician caught in a lie. You consider your fate, being crushed under the weight of a record collection, you’ve barely had a chance to play once and see the headlines flash: “obscure knob-twiddler dies under the weight of archaic hobby.” Be honest… would you have it play out any other way? Didn’t think so…

For while there it seemed pointless to maintain this little feature. It seemed after the pandemic even more people shifted away from the format. Labels that had staunchly dedicated to vinyl were now cropping up in different guises on Bandcamp. The people that bought the records concealed themselves in darkened rooms, illuminated by the sickly glow of computer screens.  Suddenly vinyl-DJs were showing up to sets with fanny packs rather than record bags; their previously carved right biceps, flapping in the wind with barely any resistance.

Resistance to the 21st century’s technology finally seemed futile, but as we started opening up again the truly determined emerged, unfazed and stronger in their stubborn pursuit of their love for vinyl. 

In a small city like Oslo, they’ve only consolidated into what can be described as a tribal cult. There’s nothing really social or network-like about it, and except perhaps for the acknowledging nod or brief greeting, the introverted nature of the people and this pastime is very much a solitary affair for most. The dedication however is unparalleled and as the majority turn further away, the vinyl collectors and enthusiasts have only become more entrenched.

We’re on a precipice of the unknown as factors like the environmental impact and the rising costs of production take precedent, but that has only fortified their efforts with more selective tastes and selective outlets informing these tastes. There are few selective outlets that can be trusted to share the enthusiasm, and fewer still that will truly alleviate at least some of that burden of potential unwanted additions to overgrown record collections. Luckily, in Oslo we have Filter Musikk

Filter Musikk continues to be the holy grail for record enthusiasts in the city and a bastion of good tastes regardless of style or genre. In recent times its tastes have expanded from proprietor Roland Lifjell to the next generation of tastemakers, Sverre Brand and Erik Fra Bergen (Sagittarii Acid) who’ve started to become regular fixtures behind the counter.  They are carrying the baton for vinyl to its next phase and when I send an email to ask Roland where his particular tastes might lie in this week’s selection, I’m pleased to receive a reply from his younger counterparts. It’s the cut with Filter Musikk

Catch Roland Lifjell and Filter Musikk next week in the Sauna 

 

Indio – Phoenix (Detroit Dancer) 12”

It’s John Beltram in a feisty mood. Adorning his Indio alias, the legendary US producer, steps out of the ambient realm into a Techno prototype. The melody remains central with a bubbling loop that refuses to resign. Machines stutter along involuntarily, building through to the inevitable tension supplied by ecstatic strings that evaporate into the ether towards the end. 

It’s Detroit at its best, taking a page out the original pioneers, bolstered in the clarity of modern technology. ERP sends it to the future, on an electro-beat in his rework of the track, while Stryke brings that humid Miami vibe to the fore. Both remixers retain that melodic appeal of the original, but while E.R.P puts his mark on there with a skipping 808 kick, Stryke subdues it in the presence of a bouncing booty bass. 

 

Acid Synthesis – Acidwerk (Planet 303) 12”

Aceed! What else would you expect from an Acid Synthesis record called Acidwerk on a label called planet 303? I’ve hardly heard a 303 sing so sonorously. It takes a certain dedication to maintain this level of discipline for a sub-genre in the way that Keith Farrugia does it here for this project and this record. 

There’s no sample-pack-pick-mix at work here as the producer manipulates the 303 around grooves that truly show the vast expanse that the Acid genre can cover. From the practically-coined, dance-floor focussed Acid to the melodically-rich craftsmanship of the Acidwerk there’s a little bit of everything for a variety of music heads to dip their toe into. Even though titles like these leave little to the imagination, the songs – and they are songs – are rich in depth, with a sterile sheen covering the textures of tracks. 

Acid Synthesis and Keith Farrugia’s other projects remind us very much of the quality and versatility of E.R.P/Covextion’s work and, thanks to Erik and Sverre, definitely an artist we’ll want to hear more of in the future. 

 

Tim Reaper / Dwarde – Shiftpitchers / Not Afraid (Beyond Electronix)  12”

There’s definitely been something in the air when it comes to Drum n Bass and Jungle lately. It’s been on a few lips over the last couple of years, and a few lips we wouldn’t have expected it on. It’s having a moment and not in that hyper commercialised way of a few years back, but more rootsy and sincere. 

As with anything, it’s always hard to make that distinction between good and bad versions of a new encounter with a genre, but it seems people are garnering more discerning tastes when it comes to Drum n Bass and Jungle these. Those stadium metallic sounds, that borrowed heavily from the likes of Skrillex are dwindling with the attitude and sounds of the roots of this music stepping more into focus. 

This is the case for this 12” split from Furthur Electronix imprint Beyond Electronix. Tim Reaper and Dwarde, two artists that have been working together since 2012-ish, appear on  their latest, which happily falls into that good category when it comes to the genre . Between the heavy breaks and crushing bass, these tracks deliver in their own unique way. While Dwarde channels those soulful, sample-based inclinations of the genre’s origins, Reaper seems to fold in the entire history of UK bass music  and soundsystem culture with elements of dub and reggae weaving through the energetic rhythms. 

The too-pristine metallic-nature of a lot of modern DnB and Jungle is replaced by a chaotic and rich anthropomorphic noise.

 

DJ Backspace – Blackout (Altered Sense) 12″

It used to be called intelligent dance music or braindance, but It was always Techno. I guess because people had no handle on how this music was created in the beginning they thought people like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher were electronic music savants. It’s more likely they hardly had any idea what the results were going to be themselves when they pressed play on their machines in trying to emulate what they were hearing from Detroit.

It was and is, simply Techno, but as the term Techno itself gets modified and commercialised, we need something to distinguish this form of Techno from what most people associate with Techno today… you know, those people. While the terms Braindance or IDM still sit awkwardly on the tongue for most, it makes a good case for separating the wheat from the chaff on this record. 

Broken beats and glitching synthesisers find an elusive middle ground here as stark melodies and jaunty atmospheres forge through random arrangements. There’s a human touch interspersed throughout brazen computers vying for the listener’s attention. In a manner that reflects the best of that dichotomy, DJ Backspace delivers four engrossing tracks. 

The Electro-leaning rhythms and spastural melodic work counterpoints wonderfully against the barbed playfulness of the breakcore elements. “Electromo” and “C.I.T.Y” exemplify the best of these worlds, while “Blackout” and “New Experience Of Living” offer something more rugged and challenging, if only a little. 

 

DJ Fett Burger – Astral Solar, Edge of Galaxy, Planetary Exploration (Sex Tags)  12”

It’s all about the remixes on this one. Consolidating the digital releases from Fett Burger’s Digitalized Planet B in 2020 to vinyl, DJ Fett Burger gets these tracks on their intended  format. 

Astral Solar and Planetary Exploration is unmistakable Fett Burger; that eccentric versatility core to his work as he moves between the collage-House of Astral Solar to the galaxial- Electro of Planetary Exploration. While these tracks have made the rounds since their initial release in 2020, the attention on this record turns to  it is his own jackin’ take on Edge of Galaxy and SVN’s downtempo treatment of Planetary Exploration.

The Bad Booy Lenght V.IIbe PTX take on Edge of Galaxy is bass-heavy killer,  switching between filtered breaks and drumline snares with synthesised bass dragging the whole thing down to murky depths. Submerging the listener in a frothy wake of low-end frequencies ebbing through the track in lysergic movements. It digs deep trenches with its slow groove, only perhaps lagged by the tempo of SVN’s interpretation of Planetary Exploration.

A downtempo electro masterpiece retaining all the appeal of the original, but presenting it as this not-quite-ambient synthwave track. Filters gape in stifled breaths, giving the track an  organic pulse, moving slowly across the rhythmic beat. 



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. 

The Jaeger Mix returns

Jaeger’s mix series returns for a new monthly session, as we revamp and re-install the series on select Wednesdays

The Jaeger mix is back! After a long hiatus brought on by the pandemic, and two years of an unrelenting stream of streaming sessions, the time is finally right for a new edition of the Jaeger Mix. It’s the Jaeger mix 2.0, with the same objective of shining a light on Oslo and Norway’s  electronic club music scene, but we’re casting a wider net this time around.

As a monthly, rather than a weekly series, it will go on to highlight individual artists, record labels, live acts and of course DJ sets, with both recorded sessions and live streams dotted throughout. With our staunch and unwavering resident Ivaylo at the helm, we’ll take the Jaeger Mix back to the club night is was always intended to be as we record these session throughout the night.

These sauna sessions will go on to be featured on our blog and various social media platforms, with interviews as we’ve done in the past. First up is Nan and Center of the Universe (live) in August with a live stream of the latter from the night.

The ultimate facilitator: Q&A with Pete Herbert

Pete Herbert has been a dedicated statesman for all things electronic music since the 1990’s. He came to the fore during the heyday of House and Acid in the UK, starting out as a pusher and consumer of the music. Working in record stores like Daddy Kool from a young age, music and Djing was an early pursuit. 

Eventually he established his own record store in the form of Atlas records, along with some friends on London’s infamous vinyl alley, where people like Andrew Weatherall would frequent and haunt the record store’s well-stocked shelves. Pete and the crew would curate an esoteric assemblage of electronic music treasures informed by the sounds of the underground at the time.

Moonlighting as a DJ, Pete Herbert cut his teeth in some of the world’s most legendary booths at the same time. Fabric, Ministry Of Sound, 333, The Blue Note and Sancho Panza at Notting Hill Carnival, were some of the legendary spots he called home. It was a time when the DJ was still a facilitator and you were only ever as good as your record collection. He eventually moved on from the record store  to a full-time career from the DJ booth by the beginning of the new millennium.

He’s a well-traveled patron of the artform, with residencies in some of the farthest flung corners of the world. For a little over a decade Pete has spent the winter months based in Bali as the music director for Potato Head Beach Club. From Bali as his base, he’s played all over south-east Asia, expanding on the exotic sounds of his early balearic pursuits both as a DJ and an artist. 

As an artist, Pete Herbert’s discography is formidable, well into three digits with original material and remixes for some esteemed colleagues, like Optimo and Röyksopp dotting his extensive efforts. When he’s not making music, he’s proliferating it; from his early days, working record stores in London, to establishing record labels. From Maxi Discs to his latest, Music for Swimming Pools – a sunset mix series turned label – these labels build and perpetuate the sound he’s cultivated as a DJ and artist with those initial balearic sounds remaining a key influence in his interpretations of House music. 

He’s enjoyed an extensive and prominent career, and with a visit to Jaeger looming, we shot him a few questions over email, to learn more about those early years in London’s vinyl alley, his music, origins and his work as a true facilitator.  

Pete Herbert lands at Jaeger this Friday

Hello Pete and thank you for taking the time to talk to us. I imagine you had quite a varied musical experience growing up, having lived in Trinidad as a kid and experiencing the London music scene in the eighties. How do you think it affected your tastes as a DJ early on?

Hello Jaeger and firstly thanks for inviting me to your fine establishment, I can’t wait!

Yes I would say my older sisters musical taste and growing up in Trinidad then Eighties London suburbs very much shaped my early years of music. That would have been essentially new wave and pop primarily with some Soul thrown in as I remember, then towards the mid eighties discovering pirate radio and inner London record shops got me into much wider sounds that shaped my London teens such as rare groove/ funk and hip hop and then electronic music.

Where did you eventually find your place within that larger scene?

I began working in records shops from my late teens, and would carry on doing that until into my mid thirties pretty much full time all the way, so that became my home from home. Most days were.. work in the record shop, then go to a gig or club, then another club etc, home, up then repeat.

How did you go from being a fan, to DJing yourself?

It was often the natural  progression back then when you immersed yourself in buying and selling records to that degree. Starting with warm up slots anywhere you could get them, and practicing like hell.

I would imagine that Atlas would have been a pivotal point in your life. Were you a collector/consumer before you set up shop and what was the catalyst for you wanting to open a record shop?

A collector/consumer of course first but after working in a few shops, especially the reggae shop Daddy Kool, and being exposed to the workings of it and how not to run one, the urge to do it myself was eventually too great. Plus there was a lack of a specialist shop that sold all the stuff I was into, so I saw a gap in the market shall we say.

What kind of records were you stocking and how did they inform your tastes as a DJ and eventually the music you created?

We stocked an independant cross section of leftfield house, dub, disco, electronica, jazz, techno, collections/2nd hand, and whatever else we were into that we could get hold of. We avoided any commercial releases and mainstream stuff.

There was an interesting crowd there, I believe with people like Andrew Weatherall frequenting the place. But do you think there was anything like a sound or a scene around Atlas that perhaps stood out amongst the other record shops in the street?

We never ‘pushed’ music on our customers, we offered the selection and would recommend stuff .. but otherwise we shunned the record shop ego nonsense that was rife back then.

Leaving the record stores behind, did you find that getting away from that world had any effect on your experience as a DJ and music enthusiast?

By the time I closed the shop and then worked in a few others, the way you got music and played it had already started to change. CDJS were starting to appear in venues and WAVS and AIFFS were taking over from DATs. You could get emailed promos, burn cds etc, so If you were open to embracing new technology you could benefit from it. But what that meant was a real vacuum left by the demise of the record shops as a focal point/community for many record buyers that was never replaced in the same way. I think it affected a lot of djs and buyers at the time.

Besides residencies at places like Fabric and Ministry of Sound, you have  also been a booker for Bali’s Potato Head. How do you see the role of the club in relation to this music, and how has it changed in your opinion?

Music and its delivery are still the pivotal point to the club for me, whether the club has changed and is now an event or happening. Getting the right balance isn’t always easy though. Potato Head in Bali was an amazing venue, so the music had to live up to that.

It seems that new scenes are less-likely to be built around a club today and more likely to be built around the internet. As a DJ, a producer, record label owner, and previous record store owner what effect do you believe this has had on the music?

I think a club can offer a place for people to feel inclusion and a sense of belonging. So that you might feel you could go there regardless of knowing who’s playing/what night it is. That for me is the sign of a good club. I know if I go there I will feel welcome, the music programming is thought through and the sound is spot on, nice staff etc. That is a scene right there for me..

For some time now, you’ve been doing Music for Swimming Pools. It’s an intriguing project, can you tell us a bit more about it?

MFSP started as a radio show maybe 14 or so years ago on Ibiza radio station Sonica. I was out there a fair bit djing and guesting on it regularly and it progressed from there. It was an outlet for me to play non dancefloor sets of an emotive/electronic/balearic nature and a few years later became its own free 24/7 streaming platform.  With no jingles or chat, It plays a continual mix of that sound that can be accessed anytime and place. It’s quite low key without any advertising or fanfare and I’ve recently relaunched the label side of it, with a new EP from me due out the night I play in Jaeger. You can check the site here: 

https://musicforswimmingpools.co.uk

Besides being a facilitator, you’ve released something like 400 records and counting. What keeps you motivated in the studio, and how do you believe your music has changed since those first records in the mid nineties?

I guess I’m just still as obsessed with music as I was as a collector, then as a seller, then playing it and making it. I would hope my production skills have come on a bit in the last decade or so, though I’ve never had any formal training. Maybe that has been the key to being so prolific. I’m not quite the perfectionist many studio trained producers are, I’m more of a pragmatist shall we say.

Balearic is something that often gets associated with your music, based perhaps on the downtempo and eclectic nature of your music. Is there perhaps a singular objective when you create original music and what if anything continues to inform your approach?

I find inspiration for production in the music I collect and go digging for every week.  Be it an old 70’s obscure album or a brand new producer’s first release. The approach for me is usually the aim of an end product I would play out or happily listen to lying on a beach.

You have a lot of experience playing in different venues across different parts of the world. How does a place or location affect what you pack in your bag for the night and how do you think that will go when you come to Jaeger?

Luckily I have been in Jaeger before as a punter, and actually quite recently too, so I know a little bit what Jaeger is all about, and that counts for a lot. I know I will be made to feel very welcome, that the music programming is thought through and the sound is spot on, and they have nice staff. For me that’s the perfect kind of environment to play music in. See you there.

 

Staff Picks – Simen Tennøy

In a new concept, we take a staff member record shopping for new records to add to our shelf.

After two years of no new additions to our record shelf, we’ve become a bit tired of the records that stayed in rotation, while the records themselves have become just little overplayed. It was time for some new music and with new additions to our staff, tastes have changed too. But we couldn’t just get new records, we wanted to make a song and dance, and with this comes a new feature for the blog.

The concept? It’s simple: We take one of our staff members record-shopping and afterward we sink into the chesterfields to have a chat while we listen to our latest acquisitions. 

Our first guest is Simen “Lorenzo” Tennøy. Simen has been a barman at Jaeger since pre-pandemic times and has now assumed the assistant manager role. When he is not at Jaeger, he is an eclectic music fan and you can either find him at one of Oslo’s many forest raves or playing bass and keys in his band, The Eternal Page. 

Yes, he’s in a band and yes they are very good. A psychedelic rock ensemble, The Eternal Page is about to record their debut LP and Simen says they’ve got one song down and about nine to go. With that in mind we drop the needle on the first record, and delve into Simen’s selections. 

Molly Nilsson – Extreme

 

How did you come across Molly Nilson?

She’s a Swedish artist living in Berlin, and while I was living there, she was playing a DJ set in a bar alongside my appartement. I randomly passed by and I really liked her music. A few months later she was playing before mgmt and I saw her live. Since then, I’ve really been fascinated with her music. She has eight albums already. 

What do you like about it?

It’s darker but it’s pop music. Eighties vibes. It’s a bit cold. I’ve seen her live a couple of times.

You also picked a Depeche Mode record. Do you like that 80’s synth music?

I guess. It’s dancy and it’s pretty dark. It’s just something I’ve liked since I was a teenager, darker synth pop music from the eighties. 

So you grew up listening to that stuff?

Not much before I was 18. I discovered OMD and Gary Numan and I went deeper into the genre. 

 

Depeche Mode – Construction Time Again

 

How did you come across this record?

Randomly. I play a bit of synth music. I think I found it on Spotify. 

Why this particular Depeche Mode LP? 

It’s one of the bigger albums from that period. I think everybody should have a copy of this album. There’s a few songs I really like on this album. I’ve been listening to it here and there. 

What music were you listening to before your teenage years?

I grew up listening with my dad listening to a lot of Pink Floyd and Rock music, 80’s Rock bands. I think my first CD was MGMT, Oracular Spectacular. And then I started going into psychedelic Rock. My father had this Pink Floyd live record for ‘67 which started it. 

And you were playing guitar at that point?

I started playing guitar, because I wanted to play MGMT. And then I bought a keyboard to play “kids” or “time to pretend” from MGMT. I would play alongside the songs in my bedroom.  

And how did you start playing with your band, The Eternal Page?

I worked with one of the guys and they needed a new bass player. I had a session with them and it worked out. I’ve always wanted to be in a band. There aren’t that many psychedelic rock bands in Norway. 

 

  Velvet Underground

 

I assume this Velvet underground record is a familiar favourite for the Eternal Page. 

Yes, we’re all inspired by this record.

Do you have a favourite song on this record?

Yes, Venus in Furs. Run run run is also very good. I like all the songs, so it’s pretty hard to pick. 

I’ve always liked Nico’s voice on the record. 

It’s pretty dark. I think it’s one of the best records from ‘67, because it’s so different from anything else that was released in that year. It’s from the east side of New York, which is not quite Punk, but almost. I think this is the beginning of it, but still it’s in the category of psychedelic rock. 

There’s never been a band that sounded like this after either.

They had their own sound. I tried to listen to it a few times, and then I was suddenly, fuck this is really good. 

 

Building connections with Lara Palmer

In the spectrum of Techno’s expansive history, we’re living in an age of supremacy for the genre. More popular today than the previous height of success in the late nineties, its adulation is only really surpassed by its more accessible cousin, Tech-House. It’s a golden age for Techno, with everything from brutalist marching rhythms to soulful dub inclinations broadening the scope of the genre. Being a fan is no longer a singular pursuit, with individual tastes as varied as the people that follow them.

With so many new artists and DJs coming to the genre, each with their own approach and style of playing and making music, there’s a subjectivity that arises and it takes a unique individual to come to the fore in this landscape. Lara Palmer is such an individual. A DJ, music writer and editor for mnmt.no she arrives at the genre with a sense of objectivity that few are able to concede in their activities in Techno.

A DJ that avoids the ubiquitous DJ/producer tag and a writer that avoids the perilous cavern of reviews in favour of proliferating artistic voices, Lara is a distinctive entity in today’s musical landscape. A  Norwegian/German, who spent some time in Norway in her youth, she’s done her bit in securing that ineffable bridge between Norway and Berlin in music. Alongside factions like flux collective, techno kjelleren, ute.rec, and all the raves happening around the forests each summer, Norway’s occupations with Techno have seen the genre’s popularity grow exponentially in the last few years.

Lara and her work through mnmt as a blog, event series and festival have played no small part in growing appreciation for the genre. As writer and editor, she continues to shine a light on the great producers of the genre, while as a DJ she avidly supports the scene by buying the records and distributing it to anybody that will listen. 

She arrives at Jaeger next Friday to play alongside SGurvin in the basement so we turned the tables on her for a bit of Q&A time with our next guest. We talked to her about influences, her love of Techno and drawing the line between music writer and DJ. 

Hey Lara. Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions. What is your earliest memory of a piece of music?

The earliest one must be my mother singing Norwegian lullabies to me. I also have vivid childhood memories of music by Édith Piaf, Caetano Veloso, Jan Garbarek or Glenn Gould playing on the stereo at home. I remember being quite captivated by it.

I played classical violin throughout my school days, but did not really like practising on my own. I much rather enjoyed playing in the orchestra, building a body of sound together. This might have been some of my first experiences of people being gathered in a room filled to the brim with frequencies, something I have been drawn to ever since. 

 What was your introduction to electronic- and club music? Has it always been about Techno, and what first drew you to the sounds of the genre? 

I started getting interested in electronic music around age 14/15, when I was living in a small city in Northern Norway. (I grew up in Berlin, but lived in Mo i Rana between age 11 and 15.) We were a group of friends that were somewhat nerdy about music, spending many hours on Myspace, exchanging playlists or wandering around the quiet streets with our headphones on, listening to stuff like Kim Hiorthøy, Ratatat, Xploding Plastix, 120 days or The Knife. We also listened to a lot of indie bands, and I remember especially liking stuff where synths were involved.   

When I moved back to Berlin and started going out – to open airs around the city, the so-called Sexy Döner parties, Club der Visionäre and Fusion festival – I gradually listened more and more closely to the music being played. That interest never let me go again, but it was first during the time I lived in Oslo to study and worked at The Villa on the weekends, that I became able to clearly distinguish what I actually resonated with genre wise, which evolved towards what I would call minimalistic, atmospheric and trippy techno.  

You say you’re drawn to the atmospheric, minimalist and trippy sounds. What are some of your influences and touchstones for this kind of sound?

Even though he plays varied, in my opinion Freddy K is a great example of the stripped back, no-fuss kind of techno I enjoy most. Mike Parker and Markus Suckut have perfected a minimalist approach when it comes to production, each in their own way. In terms of atmosphere and trippiness I can mention Dasha Rush, Jane Fitz, Sandwell District, Rødhåd, Yogg, Synthek or natural/electronic.system. as some of the artists that have left a strong impression on me.       

As a trained musician, did you slip into DJing with ease and what were some of the main obstacles in the transition from a music lover to a DJ? 

I did my first attempts at DJing using timecode vinyl and CDJs, and struggled a little with those media. When I switched to vinyl, I found it easier to build the sort of connection to and understanding of the music playing that is helpful for DJing. (Thanks to Korpex who provided the time and space for me to get introduced to the craft!) My musical ear trained by years of conscious listening was surely helping, but I think practice helps even more – and I still have a great deal of that to do.  

Do you have any aspirations to make music?

In an ideal world I would, but at this moment in my life I do not feel that I can prioritise it.

You’re not only a DJ and admirer, but you’re also a writer and editor who proliferates this music through your work at mnmt.no. How did you get into that aspect of music?

I have enjoyed writing for a long time, and am a social and cultural anthropologist by training. So researching, interviewing and writing about interesting people, trying to get across a glimpse of an artist’s world is simply very inspiring. If it helps them promote their art, it gives me a sense of purpose.

More specifically, I started writing for Monument five years ago, when I bumped into a part of the crew at a festival in the Spanish mountains and they needed someone to edit the review of it.

How does that aspect of your life and work influence what you do in the booth or your musical tastes?

Being part of the collective gives me a frame to develop within, and a community of like-minded people to share thoughts and ideas. Of course it influences my focus of listening, but there is not a complete overlap between the sub genres of techno associated with Monument and what I like the most, so there is always room to explore different avenues. 

How do you maintain a sense of objectivity as a fan and DJ of this music when you are writing about it or presenting it via Monument?

Listening is a very personal experience, so when music is concerned, maintaining a sense of objectivity is difficult. To circumvent this, I have for instance very rarely written reviews. I prefer interviews, where I can stay in the background, letting the artists speak. Yet my subjectivity will always be part of the exchange somehow.  

You seem to spend your time between Berlin and Oslo. How do these two cities influence how you might approach a set?

I live in Berlin but visit Oslo regularly. I don’t think the city itself influences my approach too much, I rather think about the room I will be playing in and think about what could fit the setting. 

While Berlin is the epicentre for Techno, Oslo’s certainly found an idiosyncratic scene in recent years. How do you distinguish the sound and style of these two places and where do you think they share a common ground today?

I would say that the Oslo scene has “traditionally” been dominated by house and disco, but has become increasingly receptive to techno in recent years – even though it is hard to judge from a distance. But since I moved back to Berlin six years ago, I somehow got the impression that there are more artists and crews popping up beyond the Oslo-disco/house-continuum. Another sign of good health is the Ute.Rec crew, who do really inspired stuff that you maybe would not expect from Oslo.  

Pinning down a specific sound or style of Berlin is hard because here you have literally everything. What might bind it all together though could be the urge to constantly push towards new territories.

Berlin is such a mecca for a vinyl enthusiast. Where do you like to go to find music to DJ, and what preferences do you have when it comes to buying old vs new? 

I have found many great records – old and new – at Spacehall over the years. A more recent discovery has been The Consulate, a hidden place run by three Belgians. Bikini Waxx is great for finding used gems. 

What do you look for in a track to make into one of your sets?

There is of course a certain frame given by the kind of aesthetic I like, but in the end I chose a track if I can hear an artistic inspiration behind it and if it speaks to me. Either it clicks or it does not. On the other hand, I often find tracks on records I bought quite some time ago for other reasons that I suddenly enjoy very much, so I think what you perceive in a track has a lot to do with the state you are in at a specific moment.

Any secret/not-so-secret weapons that will be making it in your bag on the way to Norway?

 You can expect anything from this

 to this



A beautiful thing with Roman Flügel

You don’t simply dip into Roman Flügel’s discography. The Frankfurt artist has been nothing short of prolific. Whether working alongside Jörn Elling Wuttke on the myriad of projects, ranging from Acid Jesus to Alter Ego, or his own extensive solo discography (under some more aliases), there is an expansive undertaking awaiting those willing to venture into Roman Flügel’s catalogue. In a career stretching a little over three decades, including his collaborations with Wuttke, his work has become seminal touchstones through the various epochs of club music.

You wouldn’t assume that from his demeanour. Humble and friendly, he’s accommodating when we sit down for a conversation in the bar at Jaeger. A regular visitor to our club, we’ve come to know Roman as one of the nicest DJs to pass through our booth. He cuts a striking figure. Tall with angular facial features which have only seemed to sharpen with age. Sitting across from him, it’s hard to believe Roman Flügel is 52 years old and that he’s been there since the very beginning of Techno music. “Talking about age,” he says in his familiar German accent, “I don’t think too much about it, you can’t do anything about it anyway.” He finds it “really interesting” to play alongside the next generation of DJs, and he’s quite aware that the music he buys is often made by people who “are probably younger,” but he’s only content in that fact.  “That’s the way it is,” he says completely deadpan, “and that’s the way it should be.” 

“Touring and what I am doing,” he continues “is something I always dreamt about. When I was young I wanted to live the exact life I’m living, so why should I complain?” 

Roman grew up in Frankfurt, coming of age in what was probably the most crucial time for Techno, not least in Roman’s hometown. While the wall was coming down in Berlin, opening up a world of music from places like Detroit, Frankfurt was experiencing its own revolution in sound, almost independently. ”It was an interesting time, because you had all these scenes in different cities,” remembers Roman. “Even cities within Germany had completely different scenes.”

As technology and intent conspired, it developed into a new musical frontier called Techno and House music, and at Frankfurt they were right there on the cusp of this new wave of music. (It’s even believed in some circles that the term Techno was coined in Frankfurt, but Roman is not so convinced.) Clubs like Dorian Gray and Omen became influential bodies in the landscape, stepping out of the sound of Belgium New Beat, New Wave, Synth Pop towards the more functional domain that these dance floors soon demanded with DJs like Talla 2XLC and Sven Väth adopting Techno and House in their sets early on. Roman Flügel was a sprightly 16 year-old when he first started frequenting Dorian Gray.

“I sneaked in with some girls I knew – You always had to go in with girls otherwise you wouldn’t come in,“ remembers Roman. The club had “no curfew”, because it was located at the airport, and Roman distinctly recalls “polishing his shoes in the airport toilets” before visits. It wasn’t a mere coincidence that Dorian Gray would be his first choice, because the club’s reputation preceded itself even then. His first taste of electronic music came via the iconic club, sometime before he even set foot in the place. 

His older brother had been a Dorian Gray regular and would bring home bootleg tapes from the club. ”People would copy sets from Dorain Gray,” he explains, “and sell them for 50 Deutsche marks.” That was a lot of money back then, but it was also the “only way to get information” about this new music according to Roman. “You would hear the music in the club and then it was gone afterwards,” so the tapes were instrumental in proliferating the sound of House and Techno at that time. 

“As a young kid, a 90min cassette would open a whole new world for me,” recalls Roman. Naturally, he started out as a “fan,” and his love for this music only solidified with time, especially after the appearance of the Omen. After Dorian Gray, “The Omen was the place for me to be,” insists Roman. As House and Techno developed out of their initial prototypes, the Omen became the “main place for House and Techno” in Frankfurt and continued to open up a new world for the young Roman. 

Although he had been playing as a drummer in a band, the lure of electronic music was stronger. Curiosity eventually got the best of him and at some point he asked himself: “how do they do this kind of music?” He started visiting local musical instrument shops, “trying synthesisers and finding out how they made the sounds” he had heard on his tapes and at these clubs. Eventually he thought; “Maybe I should use a drum machine instead of being a drummer” and his fate was sealed.

The rhythm remained central to dance music’s appeal for Roman as he found a new outlet through the sound of machines. He started putting his efforts to demo tapes via a four track recorder in a bedroom at his parent’s house, playing them to friends who would orbit the same indie bars he would haunt at that time. Eventually somebody told Roman: “You better give one of your demo tapes to Jörn (Elling Wuttke) because he has a better studio than you at your parent’s house. He has a studio at his grandfather’s house in the garage!” Jörn was a singer and guitarist in a band that moved in the same musical circles as Roman, and the pair quickly found a common ground between their creative personalities. 

“It’s always a different dynamic when you start to have an interaction,” remarks Roman about their working relationship. “Things become very tense and at the same time very different. Somethings would pop up that you would have never created on your own.“ They started bringing their demos to their local record store Delirium, another iconic name in the early Frankfurt scene, run by ATA – long before he moved on to establish legendary Frankfurt club, Robert Johnson – and Heiko Schäfer. “They liked them a lot” and put out the first Acid Jesus record, cementing a production partnership that lasted over 15 years and went through many different guises from Acid Jesus to Alter Ego during the course of their career. 

Why all these … alter egos? “It’s a bit strange, ja” Roman agrees. “The beginning of an era, you would have a lot of different people asking you to put out a record on their label, but then they would ask for a different name“ to perhaps distinguish their label from another that the artist might also appear on. It did “become very complicated at some point,” but it was all consolidated as Alter Ego eventually in the early 2000’s at what was probably the pinnacle of their success together. 

Alter Ego had been around as a project for almost as long as Roman and Jörn had been working together, but as they stepped out of the nineties into the next millennium, the sound of the project changed and suddenly made an incredible impact on the scene and beyond. For an entire generation it was Alter Ego and specifically the track Rocker that brought people to the work of Roman Flügel. The gnawing synthesisers and accessible melody of the track was the perfect crossover point from guitars to synthesisers at a time when rock music’s dominance was finally waning. Arriving at the time of electroclash, it brought a whole new, and different kind of audience to club music.

We were amazed by the success of the record,” says Roman. “It was a crazy time,” for them with world tours and notoriety following Rocker and the album, Transformer. “The rooms became bigger and bigger” as they rode the success of that record, sustained by a newfound popularity for electronic dance music. “After that electronic dance music became super big, especially in the US,” remembers Roman “but we weren’t taking part in that mega-success, we were at the edge of it.” It was a double-edged sword however and although Rocker was somehow the peak of our success, at the same time “it was the end of our studio-working relationship,” says Roman, looking back. The intensity had exhausted both Roman and Jörn. “At a certain point when you play your own music all the time, it becomes quite tiring. We didn’t have the power to reinvent ourselves.”

Amicably and cordially, Jörn and Roman went their separate ways. In their time together they had accomplished what most established artists only dreamed. Successful records, touring on an international stage, and remix and production credits for everybody, from Sven Väth to The Human League, all the while maintaining the elusive connection to the underground purists. There wasn’t anywhere else they could go, and it was up to Roman to reinvent himself, now working under his eponymous moniker. 

He continued to work on dance floor focussed 12” with the purpose of something to “play as a DJ,” but at the same time there came a shift in his approach to albums. “I think especially after I finished working with Alter Ego back in the day,” confirms Roman. “That was a very dance floor oriented project for many years” and Roman wanted to take a step back from that, especially in the longer format. “My solo albums; all of them are more a listening experience for different environments than clubs.” 

Three albums for Dial records; a conceptual audioscape for ESP; and his official debut on Frankfurt label Running Back, constitutes this period of albums over the last decade. From the minimal incantations of those Dial records to the lush ambient and break beat constructions of his latest, Eating Darkness, these records sound and feel like you’re at the entrance of a club; that moment you’re about to step through the doors. The rhythms take on abstract forms with only the faint glimmer of their four-four roots peaking through the shadows. 

I suggest to Roman that even when he is not pursuing those impulses, the dance floor still echoes through even the most ambient incantations of a record like Eating Darkness. “It’s stored deep in my brain,” he agrees. Roman Flügel has an incredible instinct for this music. Over the course of 30 years, it’s been deeply ingrained. “It happens naturally,” and “it’s not conscious” on his part. “I use bits and pieces that I’ve heard in my life before,” he continues and when I suggest that I can hear glimmers of that first Warp 69 record through Eating Darkness, he merely gives a wry chuckle. I’m not sure if it’s the reference or perhaps that there is indeed a red thread between a song like “Jocks and Freaks”(2021) and “Floating”(1992) that has amused him, but it says something of the work that has, and continues to stay the test of time.

There’s an elusive quality that even underpins his collaborative works with Jörn, and it has a broader appeal than most dance floor records. Whether it’s your first experience with Alter Ego’s Rocker or finding a new favourite record in the form of Acid Jesus’ Interstate 10 years after that, no-matter where your finger lands, there’s bound to be a record and sometimes even a period where Roman Flügel has been either a significant or pivotal figure on the electronic music scene ordained for clubs.

Even as our conversation winds down, he talks about re-issues of records that I’ve never heard of before. “Tracks on delivery” stands out amongst these not merely for their rarity on Discogs, but the fact that the re-issue will see Roman Flügel playing live again, for the first time since his Alter Ego days. It evokes a memory of seeing an age-less Roman Flügel peering over a computer screen at Fabrikken in Oslo for Sunkissed around 2007. It’s that image I see later again in our basement on the day of our interview. He seems happier, somewhat more content behind the decks than the screen. The crowd, most of whom are younger, is reciprocating and I’m reminded of something he told me earlier that day. “It’s a beautiful thing to travel and play music and meet interesting people.”

We’ll keep flying the banner

We’ll stay open tonight to show our support for Oslo’s LGBTQI++ community

In light of the a heinous attack on Oslo’s LGBTQI++ community outside of London Pub, our first thoughts are with the victims and their families. We are completely lost for words and perplexed that something like this can still happen in 2022, but we want to send a message of support for all those affected by this act.

As a club built on the foundations of House music, we’re all too aware of the history and legacy of the queer community on our scene. We always try to honour and respect those roots in everything that we do, and when we hear about an attack like this we feel it on a personal level.

So, considering the events and based on the information we’ve received thus far from the authorities, we’ve taken the decision to stay open tonight in a show of solidarity. After discussing it at length with our staff, our security team, Oslo’s city council and some of the other venues in town, we are planning to remain open with the scheduled programme to offer some support for this community and do our utmost to allow a safe space for Oslo’s LGBTQI++ community.

We have been informed by a member of the city council that extra precautions are in place and while they had to cancel a high-profile event like Pride, they have assured us that the smaller events will and should go on.

The incident, which from the information we’ve received thus far, seems to be an isolated occurrence. We feel, as House music club we have a certain obligation to the queer community to offer a safe space for all. We don’t further want to legitimise these ignorant assaults of discrimination in this scene, city and country. We will take extra steps to keep everybody safe, and we urge people to stay vigilant, especially as they make their way through town.

We’ll keep monitoring the situation and update this website if there are any changes or new information. Stay safe.

 

Nastia gets new date in September

Nastia will return to Jaeger on the 2nd of September to the basement for Frædag

After Nastia had to cancel her last visit due to the invasion of Ukraine, we’re pleased to announce that she will return to Jaeger on the 2nd of September. Since we had to cancel her last visit due to the harrowing circumstances she was facing in her homeland, we’ve been eager to show our support to Nastia and the Ukrainian people as Russia continues their brutal and unjustified invasion of the region.

As well as our initial fundraising efforts, we’ll continue to show our support be dedicating most of September to the Ukraine with visits from three Ukrainian DJs during the month, starting with Nastia on the 2nd of September.

Advance tickets bought for the original date, that weren’t refunded, will be valid for this new date and all valid ticket holders will receive a message via ticketco shortly. There will also be a limited amount of advance tickets added for the night, as well as tickets on the door. We look forward to the return of Nastia and hope to see a full dance floor in a show of solidarity for Nastia, Etapp Kyle and Daria Kolosova throughout September.

BCR presents Sundaze: a summer residency

   Sundays are back at Jaeger with the Boring Crew Records taking over the sauna as Sundaze

The summer, brings with it new life as we return to Sundays at Jaeger.  The boring crew have been making tranquil waves around Oslo for there last year, not least at Wednesdays at Jaeger, and from June they’ll be bringing that vibe to Sundays.

After a long hiatus, Sundays are back at Jaeger, with a new summer residency called Sundaze, spearheaded by BCR. Anders Hajem, Hendrik Villard and Perkules take the keys for the sauna for this new residency with their take on House music. Hazy days and sweltering nights. A sauna tick, tick, ticking in the heat under a sun that refuses to retire from the horizon and a dance floor that won’t surrender the weekend.

BCR, like everything, started with a chat over the internet. Exchanging ideas about music over soundcloud,  Anders’ studio eventually planted the seeds for a label and a collective to form. Hosting parties out of their Grünnerløkka studio at night and releasing records during the day, Henrik, Anders and Jens have established a small community around BCR over the course of the last year.

Find out more about the event here.

Sexy Music with James Hillard from Horse Meat Disco

We speak to Horse Meat Disco’s James Hillard about pork pies and voulevants, sexy music, queer nights that are open to all and the enduring legacy of Disco.

“Vi skal sees,” says James Hillard at the end of our phone call. I pause, not knowing if I heard him correctly; the Horse Meat Disco DJ is English, afterall. He shoots off another couple of sentences in practised Swedish too fast for my poor second-language Norwegian to catch. “I speak some Swedish,” he says, expecting my surprise. As a student he took up the language on a “totally random” impulse decided by chance. “I literally took out a map of Europe and waved my finger over it and then landed on Sweden,” he explains with a little chuckle. James speaks a few languages in fact, and he’s something of a word-smith in the way he engages the listener.

James is easy to talk to. He is eloquent and bubbly, and even when he says he says he’s “rambling,” he’s concise, following facts with anecdotes to questions he must have heard a thousand of times before. He knows his audience, and he’s always at hand with a quip that sticks in your mind like a song lyric to quote later. He converses in the way you’d expect a Disco DJ to speak. Earnest about the details, but never taking himself too seriously with a sense of playfulness, even at the cost of being self-effacing. Isn’t that what Disco is all about and isn’t it just what Horse Meat Disco has always been about too?

Alongside Luke Howard, Jim Stanton and Severino Panzetta, James has helped install Horse Meat Disco as an international clubbing institution. Residencies in New York and Berlin; an intense touring schedule for its DJs; a radio show; and records, including mixed compilations like their latest Back to Mine contribution, have made them prominent figures on an international stage. “And we’re still there every Sunday at the Eagle,” says James jokingly. Like we needed reminding. “A queer night that is open to all,” the club night has remained unwavering in it’s spot in Vauxhall, London and continues to draw crowds on a weekly basis some twenty years on after it’s initial party.

*James Hillard and Luke Howard represent Horse meat Disco in our booth next Frædag.

It’s reached that untenable position for most club nights with its success based on the mere fact it exists. They don’t need to book headlining DJs or do much in the way of promotion; “the people come to see us,” says James. The reputation precedes the name wherever they go, extending far beyond the fairly inconspicuous roots at the Eagle to an international DJ circuit and it all started with a humorous name – taken from a newspaper article that read “Horse meat discovered” – and a very simple idea…

“Playing disco to gay boys is hardly rocket science,” says James. Up until the point Horse Meat Disco arrived on the scene “the UK club scene was circuit music,” playing what James refers to as “Tribal and House” music. “Electroclash was probably the closest thing… otherwise it was trashy music.” He and Jim Stanton established the club night in this environment back in the early 2000’s. Starting out on a Thursday night in a venue in London’s Chinatown, they eventually found their way to the Eagle (née Dukes) when they hosted a New Year’s Day party for the predominantly bear crowd. James and Jim had been regular punters at Dukes, taking advantage of the “free supply of pork pies and voulevants” at the Friday night buffets while working as poor interns for “trendy” record companies and magazines. 

“To begin with it was more like the electroclash and bear scene colliding with a few daddies thrown in,” when Horse Meat Disco arrived. “There was a feeling that we hit on something,” remembers James. There “weren’t many clubs that play that kind of music,” and especially not in gay clubs. “You heard Disco in the straight scene more than the gay scene” making James and Jim question, “why aren’t gays listening to Disco, it’s music for them?”

They stepped into the void effortlessly and called on long-time friends Luke Howard and Severino Panzetta, whose experience abetted where Jim and James’ skills as DJs were still developing. “They would be the main DJs and I would do the warm-up, and a few years later Jim started DJing” until eventually “we became a soundsystem.” Spurred on by a shared love for music from an era roughly between 1975-1985, they set in stone a sound that remains consistent, and more importantly, consistently good. 

Their latest contribution to the Back to Mine series is a testament to that sound today. The iconic DMC compilation, which re-surfaced in 2019 added Horse Meat Disco to their esteemed alumni last month. Alongside artists like Danny Tenaglia and Pet Shop Boys, Horse Meat Disco appears like it was always meant to be there. They invariably understood the assignment and delivered a mix that is all about the after-party. It’s a “reflection of things that we’d really love to play in a club, but never get a chance to, or feel it’s not appropriate to,” explains James. Slow, chugging pieces emerge throughout the compilation mix, skirting the fringes of the dance floor, often touching on some experimental plane, while never veering from that elusive common denominator which has always been, Disco. 

But why Disco, I ask James? What is it about Disco that remains so consistent and refuses to die, why does it survive to this day? “First and foremost it’s the quality,” he suggests. He believes that decade was a “peak level for musicianship, artistry, production techniques and hifi sound.” And in the current epoch, when dance music is all about tracks and beats, there’s a craft there that has only solidified over time. It’s all about “songs, emotions and release” with “great songwriting” at the heart of it all. Then again he might be biassed, his “first love was Disco.”

Growing up in a house full of records collected by his dad, who used to moonlight as a DJ, it’s assumed that James was born with Disco in his ears. He would often “sneak into the attic” and listen to his dad’s records until a time when he started collecting his own records. His first music job was in a contemporary dance music label,” but Disco remained central to his personal pursuit. Disco was and remains a “great leveller” for James but it’s also a “broad church” and can easily travel from those early organic sounds of Soul to the fast-paced electronic sequences of early House music. It’s “different things to different people” he explains. “From rock to House,” it’s always a fleeting construct and “always eclectic” but central to it all and most importantly, is that it’s “sexy music.”

And the longer Horse Meat Disco has gone on, “the… more discerning” their audience has become in terms of their tastes for this music. Tracks like “in the evening” by Sheryl Lee Ralph and “the boss” by Diana Ross have become staples and are still requested by a crowd that “has remained” consistent, albeit getting “younger” according to James. “We’ve had people play a gospel set and we‘ve had Andrew Weatherall not really playing Disco, but just doing what he does. People are receptive and as long as it’s quality music, we’re down.“

The eponymous connection aside, Horse Meat Disco’s success is also in part due to that audience they attract, and the association of Disco’s roots. As music that was, if not born from the gay community, certainly adopted as such, Disco’s connection to queer lifestyles is something that is also deeply rooted in Horse Meat Disco’s platform. the club night was one of the first nights to establish the open door policy that permeates through most clubs today; a queer night that it is open to all. It’s something we’ve witnessed more in recent years, as club culture’s popularity has been appropriated by the mainstream. But how do you define queer, in this sprwaling landscape, I wonder?

Photo of Horse meat DiscoJames doesn’t feel queer is a “sexual statement,” but rather an ideology. “I know cis straight woman who identify as queer,” he says as an example. For James, queer is about a “rejection of patriarchy” and a the celebration of “alternative lifestyles” on dance floors. “As long as they bring love and joy to the dance, then everybody is welcome,” insists James. Even though the party they “do in New York is a different crowd to the one in London and the one in Berlin is different to both of those,” that queer element remains at its core and James “loves the fact that it’s all things to all people.” Much like Disco, queer is an ideology and in many cases the music and that ideology is inseperable. 

In recent years Horse Meat Disco haven’t merely been content in capturing this spirit as a soundsystem, and have turned their attention to the recorded format. Imbibed by the sound and quality of those early Disco productions, Horse Meat Disco’s approach has been to facilitate the magic, more than create it. “We are not producers,” insists James, “we work with other people.” After years of making edits, remixes and the odd demo, they finally made the leap to becoming a fully fledged album artist back in 2020 with their debut LP, “Love and Dancing” arriving on Glitterbox. They were “sitting on the demos (for the album) for a long time,” before Luke Howard played them to Luke Solomon (classic records) who thought; “I can do something with this.”

“Love and Dancing” is a modern Disco classic, emerging on the convalescence of those old organic sounds and modern electronic wizardry. Syncopated beats move between sequenced drum machines, while bass guitars in an artificial disguise bounce through arrangements. Synthesisers whistle where expansive string sections used to reside and elements of House music live harmoniously alongside its Disco matriarch. 

Remix requests for the likes of Dua Lipa and David Holmes followed the LP, establishing the name Horse Meat Disco as a verified triple threat. Recording artist, club night, soundsystem and of course DJ collective, Horse Meat Disco commands all these facets of modern club music today. And yet, even with all these new commitments they still maintain that original Sunday night party at the Eagle. They might have the occasional stand in when they are all away on different DJ assignments, like their upcoming Pride weekend showcase in Camden’s roundhouse, but they remain the driving force behind the night and continue to draw new audiences to Horse Meat Disco on the prowess of their skills in the booth. We’ve been doing it for so long, that ”it all just kind of falls into place,” says James and that place is enshrined in club legend today. 

It’s a Sin! – Guilty pleasures from a reluctant Pet Shop Boys fan

I don’t like the Pet Shop Boys… or at least that’s what I tell myself. I thought Neil Tennant’s voice was just a little too saccharine for my tastes and Chris Lowe’s sound palette and programming just a little too cheesy. And yet here I am adding another PSB record to what is becoming a collection. 

I’m joking of course… Niel Tennant’s voice and Chris Lowe’s music production are nothing if not exquisite. Songs like West End Girls and It’s a sin are classics and you don’t sell over a 100 million records, without being good. You don’t establish iconic song titles without having some impact on society. But for a somebody that still collects vinyl that’s Spotify fodder surely, the stuff of nostalgic fun at a Saturday night cheese and wine soirée. But here I am at Filter Musikk, forking out more money for yet another Pet Shop Boys record. Why!?

Away from the charts, the top of the pops appearances (they always look bored), the television cameos, and their relevance today as gay culture icons, they were one of first to establish that connections between sequenced electronic music, the dance floor and most importantly a mainstream audience. The remixes, side projects and B-sides all point to an innate understanding of the relationship between the DJ and the dance floor. Moreover the Pet Shop Boys have been able to capture the masses with little more than a synthesiser and a drum machine. From live shows (yes, I have seen them live) to theatrical ballets (yes, I’ve seen those too), the Pet Shop Boys have taken this rudimentary dance music to every imaginable corner of the arts. 

The Pet Shop Boys discography spans 5 decades and their records count into the 100s, and the simplest way to gain access to it is obviously through the hits. Everybody, at least most people with an interest in music knows these, but every now and then Pet Shop Boys do something that’s like an open love letter to club music , and some of these have become highlights for a reluctant pet Shop Boys fan. Here’s a look at a handful of them in no particular order.

Disco – LP

This record has the BPMs in the tracklist! Disco was the remix album to Pet Shop Boys’ debut “Please” and its intentions are right there in the title. I love the cover art for this one, and it’s your favourite Pet Shop Boys tracks, reconstituted for the dance floor. According to wikipedia “the album was released to showcase music the duo deemed non-radio friendly.” DJs must have loved this! It features esteemed remixers like Arthur Baker and Shep Pettibone. Imagine Shep’s remix of West End Girls being played somewhere in Ibiza at the time. People would’ve lost their shit!

Domino Dancing (remix) – 12”

It got a raised eyebrow from Sagitarri Acid when he rang this one up at Filter’s counter. Domino Dancing is a classic and from the serrated edges of the “base” remix to the lo-Fi demo version PSB cover a fair few dance floors on this one. That beat on the demo version sounds so much better than the one that eventually made it onto the record. I could just listen to that intro on repeat. 

Heart – 7”

While Heart is arguably one of the greatest love songs ever written, it’s all about the B-side on this one. “I get excited (you get excited too)” is a balearic gem. From the 707 percussive onslaught to the Juno’s relentless bass movements if this doesn’t get you excited… well… But just in case it’s not enough, here’s a version being recreated on an original Fairlight. 

Psychological – 12”

I didn’t know this was Pet Shop Boys until Roland Lifjell pointed it out to me. The one-sided record held no clues to its origins other than a PSB catalogue number. Pitch it down and it turns into this wavy nu-disco track, as it swells through different phases. Niel Tennant’s voice is notably absent on the instrumental version and it’s some Chris Lowe’s best work behind the synthesiser. 

Electronic – LP 

It’s true that your first experiences in music are that of your parents. My parents listened to a lot of Pet Shop Boys and especially this record, which I didn’t quite understand at the time, but I keep returning to as I got older. I didn’t know it then, but this  was my first taste of the diversity of the Pet Shop Boys, and most likely my first connection to dance music, as a Factory records record and its connection to the hacienda. 

Is this perhaps the first electronic super group! An ensemble based around Bernard Sumner (New Order, Joy Division) and Johnny Marr (The Smiths), the record also featured Niel Tennant and Chris Lowe, although the latter was never officially credited. You can hear his synth work dotted throughout, as subtle as Tennant’s backing vocal. It’s just a record full of great Pop Songs. “The patience of a saint” is something that has stayed with me since the first time I heard it on a CD back in 1991.  

An intense kind of feeling: The story of Skansen by g-HA & Olle Abstract

g-HA & Olle Abstract recount the story of  Skansen (public relax) and the legacy that it left on House music in and beyond Norway. It’s the story of Skansen in their words.

Skansen has left an indelible mark on Oslo’s nightlife and club culture. The space where the club used to stand is hallowed ground today and any other club that has tried to open in its place has had to live in the shadow of its monumental legacy. Skansen has played an integral part in putting Oslo’s House music scene on the map as well as exporting the sound of Norwegian House to the wider world. 

Resident DJs, g-HA and Olle Abstract alongside guests like Erot and the Idjut Boys redefined the sound of House in the region through the club as something loose and flowing, a kind of skrangle House, that has seen a scene and whole generation of artists and DJs grow up alongside it. 

In Oslo Skansen’s legacy has been installed as one of the most significant places and eras of House music in Norway and on an international scene, it’s still talked about in reverend tones. Skansen saw the world of House music descend on Oslo at the height of the genre’s popularity and the DJs, clientele and residents that passed through its doors, can still be found working in Oslo’s nightlife and music scene. 

As residents of the famous club, g-HA and Olle Abstract had played a hand in establishing a sound and a cultish legacy in Skansen; one that continues to exist in lore, and has helped establish House music in Oslo, and in some way Norway. Both are still significant figures in Norway’s DJing- and clubbing community. They continue to spread the gospel of House music in the scene, often at Jaeger while g-HA’s Skansen mix for Glasgow Underground continues to live on as a testament to the iconic sound of the time and the place.

Who better to relay the story of Skansen and this important era of House music in Norway. This is the story of Skansen as told by g-HA & Olle Abstract.

Geir and Olle DJing at Skansen

Olle Abstract: Geir and I met for the first time in ‘89 in a record store where Omar V used to work.

g-HA: In the subway station in Grønland.

O: This is the record store that would become Platekompaniet. They were always good at bringing in people that were interested in imported records. We would then bump into each other, buying records in stores like these with people like DJ Tony Anthem (Future Prophecies) also in the mix.  

g: I also used to hang out with Olle’s old roommate at their place, and I’d sneak into Olle’s room to play your records while he was away. He would get so pissed off about it. 

O: They used to play my records while I was playing at raves. I was  involved in (XS) to the rave zone, and euphoria back when Geir was still starting out as a 16 year old DJ at Marilyn (where Jaeger is today). We would all hang out together and go to Marilyn to look at the wet t-shirt show while Geir DJ’d. Then we would run back to good music at some of Oslo’s other clubs…  Geir was quite commercial back then. 

g: You had to be commercial down at Marilyn. The owner would check the VG liste every week for the latest pop charts, and you had to have those tracks. One week I didn’t have a track from the list and he fired me. 

O: Geir got involved with Matti from kings and queens after that in ‘92. The scene, the one we were involved in, it all starts around Kings and Queens. In ‘92 before the other clubs started, you had Marilyn and you had two more commercial places. 

The only place to listen to underground house music for a while was Enka, which is now Villa. Suddenly there were 100-150 people coming into Enka to listen to House music and then the scene just exploded. 

After Marilyn, Geir got a residency at Pure. It was a big club in storgate run by Yugoslavian gangsters. People like Tony De Vit  played there and they even got Geir a flat that was soundproof. 

g: Yeah with long halls with many doors  and a double shower. 

O: It was like a brothel… Geir broke Ace of Base and Faithless in Oslo at Pure, in fact he was the first DJ in Norway to play Insomnia. People took notice and eventually he teamed up with Matti from Kings and Queens, doing all these raves around town, while I was doing (XS) to the rave zone. 

This was between ‘92 – ‘94. Then Geir got picked up by Per Haave and Cecilie Hafstad  in ‘95 to help with the bookings at Skansen. 

g: Skansen was supposed to be an Internet café, but that never happened. It turned out to be  more fun doing a club.

O: It was basically a toilet that they refurbished and spent too much money on.

g: It was actually owned (and still is) by Oslo kommune who used it to store signs. Then I think Per got the idea to use the spot. 

O: The owners were a generation older than us. They were around for the first party scene in Oslo, back in 88/89. They would have been hanging out in Project in Lillestrøm when they came up with this plan for Skansen. The name Skansen actually came from an old restaurant that overlooked that hill. It was an art-deco building that was a really popular place after the war for like 20 years. They borrowed the name and called it “Skansen public relax” in the beginning  with a focus on being an Internet cafe. Then Geir came in and the computers were out. 

Picture of Skansen Restuarant

g: I kind of only helped out with the bookings in the beginning. 

O: At that point on a Friday night in Oslo, you had Headon, you had Pure, you had Christiania and one-offs on a Saturday that played House music….  then Skansen came along. 

By the time I first started there in march ‘96, it was a full blown club space and one of the few places you could hear House music. Geir had been Djing there for a few months already, and opened up the possibilities with his Footfood night on Fridays which was all about House. 

 g: I remember Paper recordings, classic records and that kind of stuff. I remember getting 10 promo records a week and playing a bit more of an English kind of club music at that point. I would take trips to London if I had a free weekend. I’d go on the first flight and come back in the evening after visiting a few of my favourite record stores.

O: Major labels were putting out House remixes on 12”. But it was the same period as Moodyman’s earliest KDJ stuff. We played a lot of that kind of stuff and the obscure British stuff that was influenced by Detroit and Disco. It was anything from Cleveland City to early Paper Recordings. There was also the whole disco end of it with London and Idjut Boys. I guess Geir wanted to play deeper in Skansen than at Pure and it started developing this sound as a club.

g: I can’t remember how long it was an Internet cafe before it eventually became a club. 

O: That was like four months. Geir talked about it in the autumn and by January it was a club and that’s when he asked me to do the Thursday nights. He wanted me to do something different than Footfood and I had already started to jam a bit with Bugge Wesseltoft at Christiania at that point, so it was natural to bring in musicians on Thursday night. The night was called SuperReal.

g: Everybody started hanging out there from the start. 

O:  Geir and Omar V were the first residents and after a while I brought along Truls and Robin. Torbjørn Brundtland from Røyksopp used to be there all the time before they moved to Bergen. Even Fardin (Faramarzi) was involved in the beginning. He was on the door primarily, but he would also DJ from time to time. 

g: And Per Martinsen (Mental Overdrive). Besides DJs like these, we also started booking foreign DJs almost straight away.

O: We booked the Paper Recordings guys early on, Kenny Hawkes and Luke Solomun. Then I met the Idjut Boys at Bar Rumba in London. People started talking, a community of DJs across Europe. We got to know Jori Hulkkonen, Jesper Dahlbeck and Stephan Grieder from Svek.

g: They would’ve just taken the bus from Sweden. I remember it was a really really big thing at that time, because Svek was really hot, and later they would licence one of their songs to the Glasgow underground mix I made, they’d never done that before. 

O: At that time most DJs from England were like 200/300 GBP. I mean we did a lot of swaps, so people wanted to come to Geir’s club and Geir got invited back to England, and the same with me. It was all by telephone or fax and quite a few of these people I met in record stores in London like Atlas, Vinyl junkies and Black market. 

By the summer  of ‘96 there started to be a buzz and by the autumn of that year it was really picking up. We started getting 100 metre queues outside on most nights. 

The crowd was made up of older hippy-like free thinkers with a mix of the “It” crowd, like young photographers, creative people and dancers; your alternative club people. It might have looked the same if you went to Moscow or Italy at the time; a small club scene with cool individualists. 

g: We were just distributing flyers and word of mouth reached everybody. Even though it was an Internet cafe, ironically there was nothing online.

O: I also had a radio show on NRK from ‘93, when people still checked the radio for new music. It was a good time to be on the radio. Radio was mostly for people outside of Oslo; people in Oslo went out on Saturday nights, they didn’t sit at home and listen to the radio. After a while people came round from all over the country to check out Skansen. 

They adopted it quite well. It was such a small place that if you didn’t like it, you left,  because you had to be part of the party to have a good time. It wasn’t a place to stand in the corner to observe. 

g: It was a very intense kind of feeling.  

O: It was a small room and you were on top of each other.  A lot of the people made new friends there. 

g: It was a busy time for that end of Oslo too. Jazid was in Pilestredet and Headon was in rosenkrantz gate so there was this straight line going through them. 

O: There was basically 500m between the 3 main clubs in Oslo. Headon were doing more funk stuff. Jazzid was so much more trip-hop, downbeat drum n bass. So it was easy for Skansen to be more House based, and have a strict difference between these 3 venues. We had a kind of a deal in the beginning not to push each other. 

g: I played at both Jazid and Skansen for a while, when it was still ok to play House music at the first one. 

O: Geir had your Fridays and I had my Thursdays. Geir and Cecilie were taking care of Saturdays and then we had some weekends together where we were co-operating and bringing in guests. 

The bookings were still dominated by that sound in France, of motorbass, Étienne de Crécy, paper recordings, and Erik Rug. You had that London scene, And then you had that more high energy Chicago and New York type of House sound, which was run by Classic , but then you had a local sound too that started to get recognition abroad too.

Collage of Olle Asbtract and Guests at Skansen
g
: Yeah, that Erot and Bjørn Torkse sound, called Skrangle or whatever. 

O: Skrangle, means sloppy in a way, which is not strictly 4-4, but more sloppy. Bjørn or Erot basically in the way that they move and also play.

g: It was a term we used here in Norway, but it is not an internationally recognised word. 

O: We didn’t use that word at all back then. We could say that something was Skranglete if it wasn’t really accurate. We both came from sequenced music, which was not the case for Skansen, which was more open. 

g: The Idjut Boys stuff kind of encapsulated that mood. 

O: Meaning more dubs and echoes, and percussion that was off; a bit more live sounding. We weren’t really thinking about creating a sound or anything, we were in the middle of it.

Of course loads got influenced by it, with all these Jazz musicians coming in through Bugge and Niels Petter, and they all started doing electronic albums after being at Skansen for half a year. 

g: It was just something in the air at the time. The ones playing in the scenes we admired abroad, were also the same people we were booking so it felt very connected. 

O: We were basically all stroking each other’s backs and trying to make our way through the scene. I guess everybody was doing the same thing; whether it was Sheffield, London Stockholm or Paris and in Oslo it became this fluid thing between us and Bergen.

We had lots of contact  with Mikal Telle, and we knew all the players in Bergen, but mostly it was Bjørn, Erot and Kahuun. Erot actually played his first gig at Skansen

g: That was a legendary set. 

O: Annie was with Erot at the time and they slept on top of my records. They stayed  for a week, just eating spaghetti and ketchup. They didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any money, nobody had any money back then. 

Tore (Erot) was only just starting to make music. I actually met him at a rave in Drammen before and then Bjørn told me about him and then we brought him over.

It was one of my most memorable nights there, besides another with Omid 16B playing live. This was SuperReal’s first birthday and Omid was actually an act that fitted more into Footfood’s night. But since it was the birthday, we had Geir as part of the party. It was amazingly good. 

g: I can’t remember that specific night, there are just too many. 

O: There were some great nights with the Idjut Boys. Back then it was only vinyl and they went a lot to New York. They were a few years ahead of us when it came to weird, hard to find stuff. Also some mad nights with Simon Lee from Faze Action. 

This was at the height of Paper Recordings, when they would release a 12” every ten days and most of their tracks went into the top 20 of club charts in that time. They also released the Those Norwegians LP, Kaminsky Park in ‘97.

g: It was very kind of hot for a while with Ari B and an article in the face. For its popularity however during this time, it was kind of hanging in the air the whole time. Per and those people weren’t really that good with the paperwork. There was always something threatening the existence of the club, but they always kind of got it back on track. 

O: And then in ‘99 it just stopped.

G-HA & Olle Abstract today and the Skansen Mix CD cover
g
: I had just finished the Glasgow Underground Skansen mix, and it was just suddenly closed one day. It was a really big thing for me to do this mix when it came out. We were going to have this release party at Skansen, but it lost its licence on the same day. 

O: Then the indie rock scene took over from ten years of House and Techno in Oslo. Suddenly Hip Hop started being played in more venues. The years that followed from 2000 – 2003, you had to be more versatile as a DJ. I had to play so much different stuff to get gigs. Uptempo Hip-Hop, like Timbaland instrumentals and mix it with House. And then you had Mono and Baronsai coming up which had a different profile.

g: I actually moved Footfood to Baronsai. It was really hip to be around all the places in youngstorget so it was suddenly very far for people to go down to Skansen. We tried to re-open it, after that but it didn’t last very long. 

O: The main years for Skansen was early january ‘96  til late ‘99 with the same ownership. We were young as well. 

g: I mean, I was 23 in ‘96 when it had been open for a year. 

O: We were like kids. We felt like grown-ups, like we were important. 

g: But, we weren’t so grown up.

O: I made loads of friends. Loads of us got bigger through Skansen.

g: There was a generation that disappeared with Skansen

O: It was the first experience for quite a few.  It was magic for that period of time, it’s always hard to recreate something like that. Most of the people that went out at that time were 28 by 2000 and moved on in their life, most of them except for us and a few others (laughs). Everyone that tried to be there after that tried to make their version of it.

g: Nothing has really worked though. It is so difficult to do something else down there because everybody will always want to compare it to Skansen and that time and era in club music in Oslo. 

 

Fab 5 with Øyvind Morken

Yes folks, here is another go at spreading the gospel of some records that I love away from my weekly spot in the sauna or in the booth down in the basement. Peacefrog Records used to be one of my favorite labels when I was in my early twenties. And I thought I would highlight some of the reasons why. Ps… Yes I know Peacefrog’s operations are questionable with re-issuing records behind the artists backs. But I still hold these old records dear to my heart. 

Luke Slater – Inductive Channels

Such a beautiful piece of emotional techno music from the punisher himself, Planetary Assault Systems‘ Luke Slater. On a totally different vibe than his usual brutal stuff. 

 

Glenn Underground – May Datroit

I just can’t stand the gospel house that GU sometimes makes, but this is just out of this world. Proper Detroit Techno that’s not from Detroit. Gives me goose bumps thinking back to 10 years ago when I started DJing on Wednesdays at Jaeger. This would feature heavily and would tear the roof off. Or should I say tear the awning way in the backyard. 

 

Stasis – Mnemic Image

So good. Stasis made so much good stuff around this time. I think it was Gatto Fritto who referred to this type of British techno as Romantic UK Techno, which I think suits it much better than IDM, or deep techno etc. Late night/early morning vibes. 

  Robert Hood – Who Taught You Math

It’s funny how some moments stay with you for the rest of your life. In 2004/2005 I had a weekly Thursday night residency at a really small dirty smelly tiny little club called Sikamikanico. It was frequented by speedfreaks, gangsters, outcasts and also a decent amount of people interested in music. A real shit hole, but also something that is totally missing in Oslo’s night life these days. It was great, and also at the time, one of the few music focused clubs. I will never forget the face and moves of some of those freaks when this got dropped. 

Recloose – Dust 

Finishing off in a lighter mood with one of the newer things I bought from Peacefrog. 

Joe Dukie from Fat Freddy’s Drop on vocals on this modern boogie monster. Super uplifting and should have crossed over to the pop charts just on the fact alone of how good it is. From the great vocal and lyrics to the amazing production and musical craft.

* Go to Fab 5 #1 here.

Antony Mburu and Rolf Riddervold present Rhythm Dynamics

Antony Mburu and Rolf Ridderlvold are no stranger to Jaeger’s booth. The longtime friends can readily be found in the booth and on the dance floor on any given night at Jaeger. Fans of the music first and foremost, they carry that spirit over from the dance floor to the booth, with a special camaraderie forged in time and defined by a curiosity for outlier beats. Their infectious energy and appreciation is only matched with their sincere and individualist approach to music. 

The duo have been regular fixtures in the booth for Wednesdays at Jaeger, imbibing the spirit of Øyvind Morken’s original Untzdag concept, bearing the torch for that eclectic sound for the next generation. Sets that walk a wide path through “club music” accompanied by an adoration for the vinyl format, have seen Rolf Riddervold and Antony Mburu establish a reputation for a dynamic and rhythmic sound. 

After a little over a year of playing together at Jaeger they’ve decided to finally baptise their efforts as such with a night called Rhythm Dynamics. They officially launch the new residency today, cementing the DJ duo on Wednesdays at Jaeger and looking toward an established future event. We sent them a quick email to find out more about the night, their history together and their ambitions for Rhythm Dynamics.   

Tell me about Rhythm Dynamics. What’s the idea behind the name and the concept?

Through the years of sharing music we’re still developing our taste. Both Rhythm and Dynamics are important to our sets to keep it interesting. 

You’ve been playing together for a while now, why did you guys decide to baptise it officially?

We’ve had the idea to conceptualise our nights at Jaeger for a while. Given the opportunity, we found something that unites us. 

How did you first meet? 

High School. 

What was the catalyst that made you decide to start DJing together? 

Sharing music, then the opportunity to mix it on proper equipment. 

Did you guys have similar tastes in music when you started, or was there an evolution to a point where your tastes converged?

We converged early but still have our distinct music styles. 

If you were to imagine handing over to the other in the middle of a set, what would the perfect crossover track be between you at the moment?

Maybe one of the tracks  from Dan Lissvik’s Midnight. 


How has DJing together affected either of your approaches to playing out?

A back to back set always inspires and makes us more playful. 

What influence does Jaeger have on your sets that you haven’t experienced elsewhere? 

Jaeger has a more open audience that makes us feel free to take chances that we can’t always do elsewhere. 

Is there any point at which you guys completely disagree on a style or sound?

Yes, and then we fight about it. 

Rolf, I know you are also a sound engineer and dabble in production too, but Antony do you have any other musical indulgences or future ambitions beyond Djing?

Not right now, but I have some edits in mind. 

What track is going to kick off the first Rhythm Dynamics at Jaeger?

A great one, come listen. 

How do you hope the night goes and what are some of your aspirations for it?

We can’t ask for more than a playful vibe, to show you what Rhythm Dynamics really is about. Good times and good music. 

 

Profile: 100% Galcher Lustwerk

Over the past few years, a handful artists in America have begun to reclaim House music for the next generation. Artists like Galcher Lustwerk, Byron the Aquarius and Channel Tres, have used House music as a more inclusive platform in a new wave of the genre that might see it return to a time at the height of its popularity. Elements of Jazz  Soul, Hip-Hop and Funk form a bedrock from which modern composers weave their unique and esoteric musical language. 

From Byron the Aquarius’ jazzified Rhodes incantations to Channel Tres’ crossover rap-vocal appeal, there is no singular sound or scene that unites these artists, only an intangible vibe. It sounds like New York, Chicago and LA in the of breezy attitude that underpins it and colours outside the predetermined lines that have defined the genre for some time. It breathed new life into a House movement that has been caught in the deep end for far too long.

*Galcher Lustwerk performs live this  Friday at Jaeger.

*tickets available 

In many ways Galcher Lustwerk paved the way for this trend or phase in House music with his seminal mixtape “100%” back in 2013. He completely broke with the entrenched sound of Deep House, largely informed by Europe, for a sound that was more free and dynamic. Infusing that sound with vocals that would be more at home with Trap than House, it was a completely new and inventive approach. Following this debut release with a predominantly LP-based discography, Galcher Lustwerk’s music stayed the course through another 2 albums before it reached the archives of Ghostly International to cement Galcher Lustwerk’s music beyond his own Lustwerk music imprint and White Material affiliations.

“Information” saw Galcher Lustwerk reach the next sphere in House music’s institutions. He hardly needed the validation of a flagship label like Ghostly however, but “Information” impressed nonetheless, building on that momentum from “100%” and catching the ear of a wider audience. Amongst those that heard his work was Azealia Banks, with Galcher Luswerk claiming a production credit for 2021’s “F**k Him All Night” from the controversial pop icon. There’s certainly a kindred spirit in those two artists’ approach to music, as they reappropriate elements of Hip Hop into House and vice versa, but where Banks’ work favours the crossover into the limelight, Lustwerk’s music stays the course in the shadows of House music’s counter-cultural roots.

Much like the man, his music is an enigma. Galcher Lustwerk moves like a fog through sound, with lush pads and woolly rhythms ebbing on a swell. At times, you have to turn up your collar against the cold indifferent breeze that floats through his work, but it retains an intriguing human quality, like a Tom Clancy novel’s mood captured in the album format. His vocal drifts like a morning mist across lichen marshes, revealing peaks of reality through an opaque abstractionism. It’s a sound he’s cultivated from that first mixtape, and through the albums and EPs that followed it’s something that has remained central to his work. 

Yet, Galcher Lustwerk’s origins are as elusive as the feeling you get from listening to his records. It seemed that he arrived with his debut mixtape, fully formed and developed as an artist. The man behind the work, Chris Sherron, was largely unknown before Galcher Lustwerk, but the production on “100%” is not that of a novice. 

Sherron grew up in Cleveland. Talking to Bolting Bits, he called it “a fine city” and its influence on his adolescent years made him a “more creative” individual. “There isn’t very much youth culture or arts culture compared to other cities,” he claimed ”so if you’re interested in that type of thing like I was – you had to pursue it at all costs and do a lot of things alone or in a cultural vacuum.” He had some basic grounding in music, playing the sax at school, but a “lame as fuck” Teacher who would wear piano ties and listen to Deep Purple in his PT cruiser (much like a character in a Galcher Lustwerk song), had quickly put the young Sherron off a formal musical education. 

Seemingly that set him on a path to electronic music: “I would say the biggest influence for me is Underworld,” Sherron told Reverb. “I was really into the ‘electronica’ stuff, so anything like the Chemical Brothers or Underworld, the Prodigy, Groove Armada,” which would put Sherron around his teens in the mid nineties. 

Among some of the other influences he also mentions indie rock, but on more than one occasion in interviews, he would recall that “hip-hop music was out of my grasp at the time.” As a “sheltered kid” growing up in the Midwest, the music was largely prohibited at home “because a lot of the rap music had parental advisory [stickers],” he elucidated on Fader in 2018. “I looked at other black music that didn’t. I gravitated towards Massive Attack and Tricky and the British stuff like drum and bass. That was the stuff I was super psyched on and wondering like, ‘Damn, how do they make those sounds?’ and wanting to learn about production.” 

He taught himself how to use the sample-based music software Fruity Loops, which set him on a road towards production, but there’s a huge gap in his biography between then and Glacher Lustwerk. At some point he moved to Rhode Island to study at the famous school of design, and it’s there he seemed to fall into a musical crowd. “I caught the last hurrah of the scene,” he told Spex magazine, but it’s there where he met the other White Material co-founders, DJ Richard and Young Male; a significant twist in the plot towards Galcher Lustwerk. “At the time there, it wasn’t really about quality but intensity, how intense you could be,” remembers Sherron of that scene.

White Material’s debut self-titled EP reflects some of that intensity. It’s fast-paced House music with a Lo-Fi attitude, but a considered sound palette. The sounds aren’t brash or harsh, but you get the sense that they are quickly assembled, the impatience of youth reflected on the serrated resonances of a sawtooth wave. White Material shares some similarities to labels like L.I.E.S, aligning with that DIY New York sound; that is until you get to the last track on the record. At first “Put On” sounds like much of the rest of the record, and then Glacher Lustwerk’s gruff vocal appears through the ratcheting rhythms and misty keys. It’s a track that sounds almost at odds with the rest of the record now and it’s only when we hear it again in Galcher Lustwerk’s debut mixtape, that things fall into place. 

White Material came out around the same time as his “100% Galcher,” but  “Put On” sounds more at home on the longer format than the EP. The mixtape saw Sherron establish Galcher Lustwerk as an artist right from the start and showed a side to House music that we’ve not really experienced in the past. While R&B- or Gospel vocals were no stranger to chart-topping House music, Galcher Lustwerk’s trap-like raps on this kind of “underground” House music was a new phenomenon. It captured the zeitgeist of a contemporary streaming society and resonated with a new kind of audience that were broadening the borders of clubspaces and club music. It had crossover appeal, but Sherron’s affiliation with a more underground scene thwarted any attempts at the mainstream.

“100% Galcher” and the first White Material release wasn’t exactly an anomaly, and indicated more to something in the winds of change, but by the time Galcher Lustwerk’s official debut Dark Bliss came out in 2017, he had played a significant part in establishing a particular sound on to its own and one that certainly would have influenced an artist like Channel Tres, whose Hollywood approximation would take it to a more accesible realm.

“I believe I may have set some sort of trend and now people in other music spheres are making similar music,” Sherron admits in Bolting Bits around the time “Dark Bliss” came out. While people started rapping over House beats and Hip-Hop started making more of an impression on House music at that time, Galcher Lustwerk was different and something more considered. It was a more natural infusion of these two spheres, and came down to his skills as producer. This wasn’t some pre-paid beat or a rhythm section shoehorned into an existing vocal, it was a fully-formed concept. “I want my music to feel luxurious,” he explained. There’s a softness in his sounds and the sense of space he creates in his productions offer an inviting sonic meadow for the listener. Kick drums loop in the background, almost always immersed in a cloud of pads, repeating like a mantra towards hedonistic escape, while a vocal sails through the arrangement. 

In the production itself, Glacier Lustwerk isn’t necessarily groundbreaking nor exceptionally unique as a well-ingrained style Deep House. But that changes with his vocal. We don’t know much about how he arrived at incorporating vocals to his music and when asked about his rap influences, he’s often cagey, but we do know how he came to his unique lyrical style. “My friend Alvin Aronson, who is also on White Material [Records], was like, ‘You need to make your vocals like less literal,’” he recounted in Fader. “Ever since then I kind of veered off into trying to get almost as absurd as I can; not absurd in a stupid way, but just as stream of consciousness.”

The “stream of consciousness” can take surprising and very obscure turns. He can go from making love songs about music software templates to repeating a phrase or word into infinity, to a point where it comes apart, devoid of all meaning, or re-purposed and re-defined.

It’s best appreciated in the album format, where these lyrics take on a narrative like a Charlie Kaufman script. On his latest “Information” it moves through some specific themes in what we can only assume is personal experiences of a working DJ. It’s “about learning to move in a certain way through a world that parties, a hedonistic world” he told Fader, and he truly immerses you in that world, as drug references are re-established in mirror images and  modern life reaffirmed in restrained music.

“I think it’s just a nice chunk of time to be immersed into a world,” said Sherron of his preference for the album format in Reverb, and “Information” is probably his best effort yet in the longer format. Whereas “Dark Bliss” and “200%” carried that same inclusive approach to the first mixtape, where it becomes a collection of songs, “Information” comes together in a more cohesive sense with a record that flows between peaks and troughs of energy. “It made sense to have some more slow songs in there as interludes,” he told Spex and it makes for an album that retains the attention. 

It might also suggest that Sherron is starting to explore new territories in his music. “I’ve been making more downtempo stuff anyway,” he confirms in that same interview. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m clubbing less, or just getting old,” he stresses, but it might also indicate an evolution in his work. It feels like he’s thoroughly established the sound of Galcher Lustwerk and it might be time to take it to that next step.  

 

New dates for Jaeger’s Light technician course: club lights

Due to rescheduling, we have more spaces available for the light technician course.

Jaeger, with kind support from Kulturrom, are pleased to offer a six part crash course in club lights. The course will run across 5 days over the course of three weeks in May 2022. The course also includes a trial run at showtime on a following Friday at Jaeger in the winter/spring period.

The course is free, but spaces are limited. Spaces have opened up again after we have had to reschedule the course. 

Course days will run 10:00 – 16:00 with a lunchbreak. There are two course groups run on different dates as per below. The trial date run is across half a show during the night and paid accordingly.

The light course consists of six parts:

  1. Lights and GranMA. Basic introduction to GranMA wing and the house lights at Jaeger. Course day is run by Jaeger’s head light technician Eva Krpalkova
  1. Set-up and problem solving. Basic run through of how to set up lights in GrandMA, and how to problem solve DMX issues, lamp settings, issues with Hazer and so on. Course day is run by Eva Krpalkova.
  1. Video projection used as club lights. (visual content typical for concerts et.al will not be covered here) Includes set-up, basic philosophy and the running of Resolume for the purpose. Course day is run by Are Kim Rønsen.
  1. Theory and application. What we want to achieve with the lights and the space in between. Different approaches and thinking around how lights best can create the club space and help fire up a dancefloor. Course day is run by Kyrre Karlsen from KyrreLys and Jaeger’s booking and managing director Ola Smith-Simonsen.
  1. Workshop. Open session with Kyrre Karlsen and Ola Smith-Simonsen.
  1. Trial run. Running half a night/show along with one of Jaegers house light techs.

Course dates:

Group 1 / Group 2

Course day 1 Monday 2nd May / Tuesday 3rd May

Course day 2 Wednesday 4th May / Thursday 5th May

Course day 3 Monday 9th May / Tuesday 10th May

Course day 4 Thursday 12th May / Friday 13th May

Course day 5 Thursday 19th May / Friday 20th May

Trial run date Agreed individually, but will be 2 hours during 23 – 03 on a Friday night in the following months.For more information or to apply for one of the two course groups please contact:

Ola Smith-Simonsen

ola@jaegeroslo.no

 

 

Solo Super with Frantzvaag

By the time Mats Frantzvaag stepped out of the booth at Jaeger after his 2019 Boiler Room set, he had the crowd in a frenzy. People were literally hanging off him, hugging and high-fiving Mats as he made his way out of the basement and into the open air. He’d stirred the dance floor appropriately, laying the foundation for the night ahead with a punchy and effervescent House set that saw the dance floor swell in anticipation and excitement for the young Norwegian producer and DJ.

As Frantzvaag he had already released a couple of EPs on Smallville’s Fuck Reality imprint at that point, but in Norway he was still something of an unknown entity;  a record producer with more notoriety outside of the country than in it. That Boiler Room night had all the hallmarks of a pivotal moment for Frantzvaag. Building on those first two records, the event only cemented our belief in this young artist, as a producer with some serious skills as a DJ.

Mats could have easily taken that momentum and channeled it into a string of EPs or singles to install the name Frantzvaag on the scene. Instead, he bided his time. He was not one to succumb to the hype, but rather took his time to cultivate his craft further. When I first interviewed Mats back around the release of his first EP, there was no doubt that he would eventually be a notable figure on Oslo’s scene with an international following, but he has been in no rush to get there. He DJs when he wants to –“if something cool crops up, not the ones I think I should do for money” – and he hasn’t released anything since 2018’s Fuck Reality 5.

He’s focus has been elsewhere. While he’s had enough material to release at least an EP a year, since, he’s ultimate objective over the course of these last 4 years has solidified around Frantzvaag’s debut in the LP. In yet another watermark in this artist’s young career, Solo Super is only Frantzvaag’s fourth release and its an album. It arrived at Easter, “a happy coincidence” according to Mats with a title that conveys some of that dry sense of Norwegian humour and the inherent sense of fun that remains at the core of House music’s purpose.

Solo Super is a House record that thwarts the obvious tropes that dog House music LPs; strengthening allegiances with the dance floor while at the same time stepping away from the functionalist loop-driven patterns. There’s an album there, something you could put on at home, without having to skip the obvious ambient track, and yet you could slip almost any track into a set, without missing a beat. There’s something entirely refreshing about Solo Super (pun intended) as you drift through the charged progressions. A layer of sonic dust covers everything in a warm and embracing atmosphere, while rhythm patterns strike an impulsive chord.

Depth and consideration follows the record through its nine tracks, and from Mats’ early Hip Hop influences to the passage of time that has passed through this record there’s a lot more to consider beyond the superficial nature of a House record. I sat down with Mats at Baklengs, an Oslo record store he runs with a few others, and over a conversation and an email, we tried to unpack the infectious charm of Solo Super.


 

Solo Super is available at Baklengs today.

What was the transition like going over from those two EPs into an LP?

It happened very naturally really. I did the two EPs and then I just kept sending him (Julius Steinhoff) tracks to choose from, and in the end was like, let’s go with these nine. It’s been in the books for a few years actually.

So you were working towards an LP, but not necessarily making the tracks with the thought of making an LP?

 Not really, no.

Did the tracks on the LP overlap with the stuff you were making for the EPs?

 Some  of them. You can see some of the oldest tracks from the album were made in 2016. So that’s around the time when the first EP came out. I gradually added some stuff and removed some stuff.

And a theme emerged as you tried to bring tracks together that would fit amongst each other?

 Yes.

That’s interesting, because one of my initial thoughts when hearing the LP was that this sound a little bit different from the EPs, but I guess that would just be me inferring something that isn’t there?

Yes, but once I knew that the album was about to come, I made some tracks with that in mind also. The last track on the album for instance, is something that I thought we were missing. So it’s a gradual thing that evolved, rather than me sitting down to make an album.

It’s obviously a House record, but I would suggest that it’s perhaps not as focussed on the dance floor as a functional 12”.

 Yes, so it’s basically me and Julius coming up with the track listing.

As you were coming up with the tracklisting, what were you looking for the tracks to make up the LP, and how would it have differed from the EPs?

I put more emphasis on finding tracks that represent different styles and moods than what I would normally do on an EP. More tracks = more chances to showcase different aspects of what I make. Moreover, I wanted the album to make sense and be interesting when listening through the whole thing, both in terms of which tracks were included and the order that they´re in.

Are you hoping this record will be finding its way into DJ record bags?

 That’s also something I hope, at least some of the singles. I think it’s a nice thing to listen to throughout as well. I remember putting together the track list, and I was spending a lot of time going on long walks and listening to the tracks all the way through to see if it made any sense.

Did your approach to making music change at all throughout the period in which these songs were made?

The first EP it’s very sample-based, but on this there is a variation, because some of the tracks were made in the studio across the road, where I had access to more equipment.

I thought I could hear more analogue sounding synthesisers in the LP, than perhaps from the EPs.

Few of them are actual synthesisers and the rest of them are more me trying to process these sounds in a certain way.

There’s a very organic sound to the LP throughout. Is that from the samples or do you actively try to create that feeling somehow?

Some of the tracks don’t have that many samples either. It’s both that or it’s something I try to achieve, either through the use of samples or the method of processing the sounds.

Why was this the right time for an LP, because it sounds like you could have had a few more EPs out of this one record by the sounds of it?

 It was more about having this one product that is more cohesive and shows the depth of what I can make. It’s more like a standpoint.

Was this mainly your idea or did Julius push towards making an LP?

 It was a common goal, I think. We started talking about it when he was in Norway in 2018. Then it gradually appeared.

Besides that one Full Pupp record, you pretty much stayed with Smallville. It must be pretty conducive for your work.

Yes, I think so. I really like the aesthetics of the label, and they are really cool people. I haven’t put out that much really. I’ve been waiting to do this bigger project and see where it goes from there.

I was reading this interview with Joy O, about how he refrained from calling his last full-length an album, but rather a mixtape, because there is a bit of stigma around House albums. Do you think that is true?

 Could be. But if you listen to my album, the tracks stand out for themselves as EPs too. So it’s more like a collection of tracks than a cohesive story, told through nine tracks made in a very short period. This is a collection of tracks that fit really well together.

It is definitely not the usual House album, with the two ambient tracks and a pop hopeful single with vocals. Every track is very much a dance food track on this.

That can get a bit uninspiring as well, when you force in an ambient track just to be there.

One thing that I noticed a lot on the record, is that there is a lot of dub stuff happening in the background.

 I really like that. A lot of my tracks are very heavy on low pass filters and have stuff a bit muffled. So it doesn’t stand out that much, but it’s still there creating some kind of atmosphere.

Were there any specific influences or listening habits that informed this?

There is so much. I listen to a lot of dub and reggae at the shop and at home and all kinds of electronic stuff. What I listen to is usually not that similar to what I make.

And the Hip Hop Influence is still there. Everything from the sampling to the dusty feel of the entire record. Is this something that you have to consciously apply to your work?

It happens naturally actually. It’s just become part of how I make music, I usually just sit there and try to make this loop sound interesting, putting textures behind it.

Well that’s something else about this record, it’s not just loops.

 No, but it starts out like that.

There’s a lot more progression through the tracks, and am I detecting more of a melodic element to these tracks compared to the EPs?

Yes, probably some of them.

Like Blommenholm. Was that one of the tracks that came after most of the LP was made?

Yes. That is also one of the few tracks that is a little bit slower and has a different vibe.

What do you look for in sounds when making music, because there’s not that 808-juno combination that dominates most of House music still?

 They should stand out in some way and they should have some feeling to them. It’s not just a straight 808 drum; I’ll try and process it or use a sound that has some character. I usually layer quite a lot and try to make my own sounds.

How much input does Julius or the label have, when it comes to these production touches?

The only input he might have is about the length of a track to fit into the album, but nothing really on the production side. At the point of sending something away, I’ve already mixed it and done all of it. In my head it’s a finished product. It’s more that I send tracks to friends.

Like who, people involved in the industry?

Not really. Some childhood friends that are also into making music. I send it to Hacir (Payan) of course sometimes

He must have opinions?

 He has opinions and often good ones.

Tell us a little more about the influence of the shop. At the time of your first interview with us, you were already talking about how the shop was having an affect on you.

 Then I was only starting to get involved, and since then the shop has grown into more of a community. It’s a really nice place. Everytime I’m here I get exposed to so much music that I wouldn’t hear otherwise. Also you meet so many people and discuss music, so it’s a super big influence, I would say.

Was there anything that didn’t make it on the album that you would’ve liked to have on the LP?

 There is always stuff, but that’s more recent stuff that didn’t really fit in with the rest of the album.

Do you think you’ll have another LP worth of tracks soon?

Could be…

Would there be a similar approach to making this last album , or would you try to make something more concise?

Would be fun to do the more concise thing. I have no clear plans yet. I might do a few more EPs before then. 

 

 

Fab 5 with Øyvind Morken

Øyvind Morken digs through his bag of tricks for a dose of fab 5 from his expansive and eclectic collection.

Frædag resident and digger-selector extraordinaire, Øyvind Morken has a record bag like Pandora’s box. It’s bulging at the seems with the eclectic sounds of a self-diagnosed schizophrenic DJ. It’s a journey through music only the bravest would dare attempt to venture. Every Friday (and some other days) he assembles this vast discography into a diatribe in a stream of conscious only he understands. Connecting dots from the extensive spectrum of “dance music” he delivers his esoteric groove on to the world to facilitate the impulses of the dance floor.  Here are 5 records into the event horizon of Øyvind Morken’s record bag.

ps… Øyvind Morken and Kaman Leung present their debut record as Wild Flowers  next week at Jaeger.

Plaid – Anything

Crazy breakbeat idm or whatever trend you want to call it this week music. Totally separates the dance floor when I play it when I DJ. It usually gets all the right people on the floor, and all the wrong out the door. Perfect. 

 

Dez Williams – Abort Task

From the super underrated album Elektronik Religion comes this shuffle-y synth work out, full off emotions.It  just makes you want to cry, beautiful and powerful stuff. 

 

Klaus Nomi – Icurok

I see you are Ok – No you can’t be when you made something like this, Klaus. Totally spaced out art-funk-opera-proto-techno from 1983. 

 

Attica Blues – Blueprint (Slakked Plastik Remix)

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This though, is Riche Hawtin at his best. Spitting out a heavy drum workout that just rips it up. It will unite techno and hip-hop heads. 

 

Tilt – Seduction Of Orpheus (Tilt’s Mythology Mix)

Progressive House, not much of that stuff was very progressive. This however, Was/Still is. Spooky Orchestral samples and dialogue sample nicked from Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus, are perfectly mixed with heavy heavy tribal drums. And it has the best sped down section on a dance record since Lil Louis`french Kiss, complete with a tripped out acid line that rides a nasty groove. Feels like the shark from jaws  coming at you when it speeds up again and goes into full on tribal mode.

In conversation: DELLA and Bomström

DELLA interviews Bomström, the first international guest to DELLAs Drivhus since 2019. They talk about Locus Soundsystem, classical music, Djing and keeping it koselig before they head to the sauna this Saturday.

DELLA: Hello there Mr. Bomström, I’m looking forward to sharing the booth with you this coming Saturday, it has been some time! Once upon a time you were a resident of Oslo, where are you based now?

Bomström: Hello there Kristina, Likewise –  yeah, it’s been a way too long time now. But finally even Swedes are welcome in Norway. I’m super stoked about getting back to Oslo, to Jaeger,  and seeing you again! Göteborg is my homebase. Best coast it is.

D: Ah, lovely Göteborg, one of my favourite European cities! An adorable seaside city filled with lovely cafes and pubs, vintage shopping, and culture. Each visit, I was there to play at some amazing underground party in secret locations, at a children’s puppet theatre or a giant warehouse in an old shipyard. And of course, the bouncing balloon bars (it’s legal!). Oh, you crazy Swedes. Tell us about your role in Göteborg and being the creator of these underground events.

How did it all start?

B: It started, some ten years ago, with this studio that I shared with a friend. It was way too big for being a music production studio / creative playground. But since it wasn’t really suitable to split up with further people, we decided to start throwing ug parties there instead. It was this intimate family thing, members only kind of events, off fb and all that. Since people seem to be into parties that are sold out, it quickly became popular. The main reason for that was because the venue was so tiny. But nobody noticed and the parties went on. Once a month. Damn, I’ve even seen the sweat dripping from the ceiling at one of these parties. And that was the start. From there on I started exploring the Gbg industrial areas and the beaches, searching for new locations in order to do bigger events. Eventually I started doing more and more co-labs with the Locus crew. Until one day, even if I did my own thing, people would still consider it a Locus party. It’s pretty weird huh. But we jacked the same kind of house, you know. So I got hijacked! Some five years ago I became a member of Locus Soundsystem.

D: What kind of events have you arranged?

B: Well, when I think of it, it seems I’ve done them all. The open air parties, warehouse parties, beach parties, forest parties, island parties, festivals, smaller club nights and big club nights. But since it sounds a bit odd to put it like that, it’s probably a better idea to mention something I haven’t done, and that is a big size festival.  I guess I will never do that either haha.

D: Tell us more about your musical journey, when did you begin djing and where has it led you?

BSince I was a kid I have always been into music, playing piano and church organ etc. I am a trained church musician actually. But I injured my arms because I was rocking the piano too hard (true story). So I had to figure out a new way to express myself as an artist. I got into fine arts and stuff and during those years I found the electronic scene. Now, as I think back, I figure it must have been because of the frequent use of keys in electronic music, that I got hooked in the first place. I always loved soul and jazz, as well as hiphop etc. But generally I think that electronic has more similarities with classical music – when it comes to harmonies. They’re pretty basic after all. You don’t need to know all these super complicated chords and scales, that jazz music, for example, is entirely built upon. Being a fan, going to raves and stuff, I stumbled into these two ladies in Oslo, Della and Vibeke (former No Dial Tone), who took me under their wings and brought me into the Oslo scene. I remember you guys booked me to play at The Villa. It was my second gig. So, yeah – thanks a lot for believing in me back then!

During the years, since then, I have been traveling around djing at clubs and festivals around the nordic, as well as in many european countries.   

DYou are currently a resident of Locus Soundsystem, who / what is this?

BLocus Soundsystem is a dj collective and the longest running concept for underground deep house music up in the north. We have thrown our club night at Pustervik for some 22 years now. But we are also infamous in Gbg for our secret NYE celebrations, as well as for the occasional activities in shady industrial areas. But our style of music is perhaps better suitable for beaches. At least we tend to think so. But maybe it’s just that we prefer breathing fresh air, who knows.

DI know that you are classically trained in music, can you tell us more on this?

BYeah, my parents listened a lot to classical music. Both my parents and my sisters always played the piano. So what the heck, I thought. It didn’t take long before all I was doing was playing the piano and I even went to the music academy. Until I played so much I injured my arms. I had to quit just like that and start thinking of something else for a career. That’s the short version of the story. I have no problem playing the piano now. But I am currently expressing myself in a slightly different way as a musician, and it’s all fine with me. And the classical music scene, well – I guess there was more rock and roll in my veins so to say.  I mean – imagine me in a tuxedo?

D: Primarily, you are a DJ, but production is something you are devoting more time to. What are you currently working on?

BAt the moment I’m into many different genres. Because I have this idea that I can achieve a lot from trying out a style I have never been into before. Even the kind of music I don’t listen to myself. Because doing that pushes me into new workarounds. Into playing around with new techniques, instruments, effects, melodies, chords and samples, etc. But since I am not into that style of music, I will never do it entirely “correctly”, right. This has got me thinking I might eventually come up with something unique. I don’t know if I’m right. But it certainly is lots of fun. I am currently working on my first album. But I’ve always been a huge fan of hip hop. So I’ve been producing beats for some good friends of mine who are very talented rappers. And! Believe it or not – I’m working on some house music too!

DNow that we are finally seeing the light from the end of these strange 2 years we’ve been living, summer plans? Gigs, festivals, or planning events?

B: We have this summer club at Nefertiti in Gbg called Locus 2.0 premiering next week (30.5). Then we always have a lot of secret open air events going on during the summer, as I mentioned before. Another good one is the special gathering that will take place in the end of the summer, in a village up north. It’s called Tillvaron. When it comes to gigs abroad I am looking forward to joining the Rehab crew in Naples and hopefully I will make it back to Berlin also this summer.

D: This will be your first time joining us at Jaeger, what will you be playing?

BHouse

D: Anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

B: During my years in Oslo I always wondered how you guys could always be so goddamn happy all the time. Then I noticed you always tend to say “det er koselig” no matter what is going on. Everything is so koselig. At the doctor – it is koselig. At the car mechanic – it is koselig. In the middle of a riot – it is koselig. I always thought for myself, as a depressed Swede, that it just cannot be koselig at all at the police station. I never went to a Norwegian police station, so what do I know. But at least it shouldn’t be, right? But now that I have grown older and as I am about to head back to Oslo, I finally figured you guys out. You were right. It is koselig. Pretty damn koselig, in fact. Oslo – jeg gleder meg!

 

Della’s Drivhus is a concept dedicated to the root of dance music, the tribal drum, and the vibration that syncs with the heart. As my first int’l guest since 2019, I welcome you. Saturday is going to be a galactic evening! 

Soundcloud:

Blawan: through the tracks

The essential Blawan listening experience from “Fram” to “Blika.” 

For little over a decade Blawan has been at the forefront of a definitive shift in the sound of Techno as one of the new vanguard of the genre. An intuitive approach to rhythm and sound, he has been the harbinger of a new futuristic ideology for the dance floor that has seen his star rise alongside a rising trend in the genre. 

Although Blawan came through during a wave of “future” genres out of the post-dubstep era in the UK, he is now firmly installed amongst the Techno elite both as a DJ and a producer. From the first provocative rhythms of Fram to his latest contribution to the XL catalogue, Blawan has delivered an idiosyncratic sound throughout a career that has evolved through a revolution of electronic music destined for the dance floor. 

With a visit to our basement in the near future, we delved through the enigmatic producer’s vast discography in an effort to investigate the continuous appeal and ingenuity of the artist and producer. 

Advance tickets to Blawan here. 

 

Fram (Hessel Audio)

This is the one that grabbed everybody’s attention. Fram and its sister track Iddy not only cemented Blawan in the aftermath of UK’s dubstep explosion, but also established the burgeoning Hessel Audio label. Hessel would eventually become a future tastemaker for the more progressive end of electronic club music as Blawan would move into the realm of punishing Techno.

Fram is one of those tracks and Blawan is one of those artists that came about at the end of the hype of Dubstep. The track is a testament to that era and the innovative forms of music coming out of London at that time at places like plastic people. The polyrhythmic percussion and alien sound sculptures didn’t sound like anything on the dance floor at that time. Moving to electronic music from behind a set of drums, you can hear Blawan’s inherent mastery of the rhythmic form in Fram. Between drum machines, and some live percussion, there’s an expressive approach that gave his largely machine music a human feel. 

“A twitchy but muscular number bristling with hollowed out, ligneous beat,” John Doran from the Quietus described it. It veered on the abstract electronica realm, but fell well clear of the experimental as sound systems like that of Corsica Studios’ room 2 would attest at the time.

Building his tracks from the percussion up (a common theme in his music), Blawan created an intense and foreboding sound that conjured the mood of cinematic horror. “It’s funny,” Blawan told The Face in a recent interview, “every time I bring tracks from the studio, my partner says ​‘why are you always writing stuff that sounds like it’s in a horror film?’ And to be honest, I’ve no idea…” It’s something that’s congruent in Blawan’s approach to dance music and something of a trademark of the artist’s sound, even today.

 

What you do with what you have (R&S)

It wasn’t soon after Fram and Iddy that Blawan started to gain recognition in dance music circles. He stood out amongst his peers for his innovative approach, infusing elements from diverse sources one his way to establishing a Blawan sound. Today he might mostly be known for that kind of brutalist sonic signature that he reserves for his own Ternesc imprint, but on his way to establishing that signature Blawan sound he stopped off at R&S with a record that fell deep for the lysergic impulses of Acid. 

What you do with what you have is a snarling monster, bearing the grisly grimace of a 303 loop seemingly jutting out from the lacquer surface. Everything in this track has a percussive quality; from the drums to the galvanised plucks of the main melody. But it’s a vocal, repeating various snippets of the same sample at different pitch intervals, that lures the listener closer. 

“Yes. What I really want I guess is to add a human, emotional touch to the track… rather than getting super in someone’s face like I used to!” Blawan said at the time. The vocal sample comes from that now infamous Red Bull Music Academy lecture with Moodymann. The main line, “it ain’t what you got, it’s what you do with what you have” is not only great advice, it also seems to offer some clue to Blawan’s philosophy to his sonic identity. 

Blawan’s music doesn’t pander to the industry-approved sound palette. Although What you do with what you have is clearly an acid Techno record, there is more to the record than a couple of machines slugging it out. It builds on those reserved minimalist foundations of his early records, but it’s a sound that would be more at home at Berghain than at Plastic People. 

 

Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage (Hinge Finger)

By the time What you do with what you have was released, Blawan was already courting the big rooms, even though not quite fully inducted into them. He would be no stranger to Berlin’s dark and intimidating Techno lairs, but at same time could still be found playing more intimate venues in London. By the time this next track came out however, it would propel Blawan towards a level amongst Techno’s top tier.

Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage was huge! It came at a time when music blogs still had some sway in the world, and when DJs were still breaking records on the dance floor, sometimes up to a year before they were released. Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage managed to court both factions and had everybody in a frenzy before it came out. By the time the record eventually was released it was already sold out everywhere… and I’m not exaggerating – Even today the popularity of that record has waned little with copies going on discogs for a hefty €50 and up.

“I was surprised at how it took off. And it scared me as well, if I’m honest,” Blawan told the Quietus at the time. “It was a direction I didn’t want to go in.” It’s rumoured that it started life as a joke, but by the time Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage came out the level of success it achieved was nothing to scoff at. Blawan had arrived at the mainstage!

That dark, brooding architecture is not only behind the title of the record, but also in the atmosphere of this record. The vocal; titillating and intimidating, only bolstered that appeal, and if you were a fan of electronic music around 2012, you’d have to be living under a rock, if this track didn’t reach you at any point. Perhaps its appeal lay in the simplification of Blawan’s polyrhythmic nature, but it didn’t distract from Blawan’s otherworldly sonic signature. 

 

Talatone (Ternesc)

And just like that Blawan stopped releasing records. Directly after Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage, there came an hiatus in Blawan’s recording output. He left it on a high-note with that record. For those only arriving at his music however, it marked a career in its infancy and only left them hungry for more of the same, with his earlier records and their divergent sound hardly satiating the masses. 

Citing health issues, which included a trip under the surgeon’s knife, Blawan was forced to take a break from the scene and take stock of his life in music going forward. His appeal hardly waned during his time away as records like Why they hide… were coveted by the discogs mania speculating for the future. Blawan’s music refused to fizzle out in the background, and  by the time he did come back into the fray with a new record, a new label, and several new projects he didn’t just arrive back on the scene, but stamped a formidable mark on it with tracks like Talatone.

Talatone was the first cut from the first EP for his new label, Ternesc and it asserted Blawan’s return in a dominating and forceful Techno thriller. A more intimidating approach to sound design, Talatone is a functional monster that bears some comparisons to Why they hide… while foregoing that immediacy of the previous record. If Blawan was perhaps a Techno producer with associations on the wonkier spectrum of the genre before, Talatone picked no bones about being a Techno tool for any DJ with the stamina for this kind of music. 

Talatone, Ternersc and Blawan’s return came at a time when Techno’s momentum just started picking up again towards a moment in the present when it’s one of the most popular music genres in the world today. Unsurprisingly it propelled Blawan on that same trajectory where his name and music have become synonymous with the genre’s modern vanguard. 

 

As Bored Young Adults – Shy Dancers On Bungalowdorf Beach (Trilogy Tapes)

…and then for something completely different. This is Blawan on a divergent course again. Bored Young Adults is reportedly the alias he created for a style of music he made for home listening, but the one-time fooray into this realm is hardly easy-listening. Bored young adults arrived at a time of a massive creative spark for the artist it seems. The music he made between then and now has only strengthened the diversity of the artist’s sound. While his other side project with Pariah, Karenn was dedicated to peak time on a dark dance floor, Young bored Adults channelled those same formidable sounds towards after-hours and slower tempos. 

A slow chugging track, Shy Dancers On Bungalowdorf Beach taps into that downtempo balearic feel while harnessing that element of foreboding that Blawan applies to his work. Elements float and glisten on a sea of ebbing bass that showcases Blawan’s prowess as a sonic auteur. That mood he creates through his records are never stagnant; they move with the progression of the track, which comes to the fore on this slower track and the other tracks from this record. 

Judging from his shows with Pangea as Karenn and some snippets of interviews at the time,  Blawan almost certainly fell in the rabbit hole that is modular synthesisers, and it took those minimal percussive sounds he relied on in earlier records to a new dimension. His textures developed and grew into cinematic creations, but remained focussed on that rhythmic pursuit, underpinning the artist’s work.

It’s curious why Blawan has never revisited this alias. There’s a lot of potential locked in those grooves, that could certainly have made for an interesting LP. 

 

Tasser – from Wet will always dry (Ternesc)

Even though I’m of the opinion Bored Young Adults would’ve been a more intriguing LP project, Blawan’s eventual debut LP didn’t disappoint. It’s reminiscent of the classic Robert Hood LP, Minimal Nation in sonic character and in spirit. Not as bold as the EPs and the 12” from before, but retaining that elusive mood Blawan cultivates in his music, he channels it effortlessly into the domain of an album narrative while tracks like Tasser maintain that indestructible connection to the dance floor. 

Even indie chin-strokers Pitchfork couldn’t help sing the album’s praises enough. “Wet Will Always Dry isn’t an album that will rewire dance music or revolutionize modern electronics, but at its best it succeeds in pushing against the expectations of modern techno, bringing vulnerability, warmth, and oodles of enchanting noises to a musical genre whose pursuit of the future sometimes seems to have gotten lost in po-faced respect for the past.“

I tend to disagree that there’s no connection to the past here. That Detroit influence is strong here, and I would even argue tracks like Fram were perhaps even more futuristic. But that’s not the purpose of a Techno record in the long format. It’s something that needs to capture the feeling of going from a club to lying on your living room floor, ears still ringing and head still spinning as you decompress, and Wet will always dry achieves that.

There’s something engaging in the sonic palette that borders on the intellectual without getting too contemplative and introverted while at the same time there’s no mistaking it for anything other than club record. 

 

Blika 

While Blawan’s success hit stratospheric proportions there was something that eluded those records even as he found popularity amongst the larger audiences. Those early rhythms he thrived in  and what first drew us to Blawan as an artist, were starting to get subverted in the pursuit of Techno’s marching orders and familiar rhythm patterns.

Those polyrhythmic clatterings of tracks like Fram and Getting me Down (which actually deserves an honourable mention here) never quite truly found a place in the sonic world of Techno that Blawan cultivated since his return. 

That has changed again over the last few releases on Ternesc and especially over on Blika, Blawan’s induction into the XL recordings family. In the context of the records that immediately followed it namely Make a Goose and Soft Wahls, Woke Up right Handed marks a shift in the artist’s output again with a return to those enigmatic rhythmic patterns that earmarked his earlier music, fusing it with that unparalleled sound he’s cultivated over the last 7 years. 

“I’m trying to step away from spending one whole week making one modular patch,” he admitted in the quietus recently, and it seems to have taken him back to the more impulsive approach that dots his earliest creations.

Blika stutters and glides through the percussive realm as a tumultuous wave of noise and distortion crashes over each phrase. That sense of trepidation in his sonic texture seems stronger than ever as it limps through the progression, dragging menacing cantations through that harsh frequency band of human hearing. 

Does it suggest yet another new epoch in Blawan’s career as an artist? It’s perhaps not as clearly defined as that shift after his hiatus, but there’s something there that in world drowning Techno, sets it apart from the rest of the noise. It’s something that has shadowed Blawan’s career the entire way through; whatever he applies his craft to, has an innate ability to stand out from the backdrop of the Techno genre. 

 

Make something you want to hear with Christian Engh

The pieces have fallen into place for Christian Engh and his music recently. Over the last 3 releases he’s found a sonic identity that has seemingly eluded him in the past. Starting with his 2020 release Voltage and arriving at the Detache, a sound has coalesced around his work that has now been reaffirmed by the fourth edition to this series of records, Skywae. It’s a long way from the Italo sounds of his first split release, Kyllingsmak and even further still from his dalliance with Techno on 2017’s suburb Snurrbass EP. It’s not necessarily even in that comfort zone of the label Full Pupp’s sonic signature, and yet it signals an artist that has certainly found his comfort zone.

“I think you’re right,” nods Christian in agreement as he takes a sip of his beer in Jaeger’s  backyard on a cold, but sunny Saturday afternoon. It’s here where I first met Christian and it’s here, I still regularly bump into him on a night out on Jaeger’s dance floor. We share some stories of recent nights out in the backyard/gården which was largely empty on the day we met for this interview, save the furniture and one other patron. 

I had just listened to Skywae for the first time and I was unable to shake the nervous energy it’s relayed through its gritty kick drums and warm soul-stirring bass. There’s no particular earworm to hang on to, nor is there anything specific like a sound or a particular rhythmic structure that stands out, but there is a definite mood there. It’s something that touches on a nostalgic pulse from House music’s earliest vibrations, but it’s more than that. It’s bold and aggressive, but not in a brutish way and it comes together on a record that is just screaming to be played through a hefty sound system.

It’s “just the way it turned out,” says Christian, almost dismissively. Skywae is the latest in a series of records that has seen the artist cultivate a sound based on his earliest influences and finding form through the artist’s voice. It was all supposed to come out on one LP, but the pandemic and Full Pupp’s backlog of records prevented the album from coming together. Instead both label and artist opted to put the music out through a few EPs and together these EPs create a watershed moment in Christian Engh’s discography.

“I really want to make House music with that American sound,” explains Christian about this new phase in his music. “That’s what I grew up with.” He’s found a stride in this approach, and it turns out, it has resonated with a few influential tastemakers on the upper echelons of the scene too.

“I started to get some recognition from the producers and DJs I really look up to,” says Christian coyly, and he’s being modest. DJs like Cinthie and Honey Dijon have been getting behind his music for the last two years and through them Christian Engh has reached a larger audience. At the time of writing Ctairs has almost a 100 000 plays on Spotify thanks to a Honey Dijon playlist, and it’s given Christian the much-deserved credit that continues to compel him to make and release music. “Hearing something I made in a club and people dancing to it, that’s just so cool,” says Christian and it’s that which has driven him since he first started releasing his music.

He started merely “dabbling in electronic music” early on in his life, but he’d mostly avoided presenting his experiments to others. The chance to eventually release something at all was little more than a happy “coincidence” that came about being in the mix at the Full Pupp stable at a social level. 

Through a common friend he had been introduced to Magnus International and Magnus introduced him to Daniel “Blackbelt” Andersen, and the Full Pupp stalwarts became fast friends with Christian very quickly. “I started hanging out at Blå at their (Full Pupp) nights and got to know (Prins) Thomas after a while too,” continues Christian. He hadn’t played any of his music yet in their company, but as they became more familiar, Magnus, Daniel and Christian would “have some beers before going out” and eventually those turned into listening sessions where Christian “would show them what I had done.” During one such session Magnus latched onto what would become Kyllingsmak and after playing it to Thomas during a Full Pupp night at Blå, Christian’s fate was sealed. 

Witnessing the physical response of a dance floor reacting to something he made for the first time ”was such a rush,” for Christian and it sparked a desire to create more. 

Christian admits there’s a “huge difference” between those first few releases and the music he makes today. He explains it’s all down to the production. “I’ve learned a lot” and everything from Voltage up to now stands a testament to that. Consulting youtube and talking to Magnus and Daniel with some input from Prins Thomas, Christian believes that his productions have reached a point that even though “I still hear stuff that I’m not happy with, it’s not as severe.” 

There was an “a-ha moment that happened in the last two years” when he started to “learn how to use effects” and got more comfortable with aspects of compression and reverb in his work. He waves it off as “a technical thing,” of little interest for people outside music, but you don’t need to be an expert to hear the difference between those early releases and these latest ones. 

“I should have probably taught myself that years ago, but I just suck at being structured,” says Christian jokingly. For somebody that is only doing music as a “hobby” it’s never been a priority” to release records and there’s no reason why he should be so particular about his work, but I sense there’s a perfectionism behind it that has more intent than a mere hobby would. It had taken Christian ten years of making music without releasing anything and then another half decade to get to this point, but there seems to have been an inherent skill for the artform that’s been there since the first record. “I’ve been doing music for a long time,” admits Christian, “but not on the production side.”

He started to play the guitar after hearing Metallica’s …and Justice for All” as an 8 year old. “It was mind blowing,” and attempting to emulate his guitar heroes like James Hettfield and Kurt Cobain, he became quite adept at this instrument early on. His tastes evolved through death- and eventually black metal, which was a thing in Norway at the time 8or so we’re told). By the time he was 14, he had a record deal and was touring Europe and by 17, he had retired from the band and hung up the guitar, abandoning it almost completely…

“After that it’s all been electronic music,” says Christian and while he might still meet up with the people from that scene, “it’s not my interest anymore.” He’s convinced “electronic music has so much more going on.” He’d been courting these two seemingly contrasting worlds throughout his youth, and it seemed like electronic music eventually one him over.  

Yet there remains one constant between these two worlds today for Christian today and that connection is Fenris. “Fenris was a big part of my education,” insists Christian “and he still is.” The Darkthrone frontman is known for his expansive listening habits and that is something Christian has always had in common with him since his black metal days. “We started hanging out, because we were the only people in that scene that would listen to electronic music” and “it’s not exactly” the genesis of Christian’s appreciation for electronic music, “but it was there at the start.”

Even though he left the scene some years back, there are some things that he certainly carried over from that era and that world and not just his friendship with Fenris. One aspect of his music in particular that has survived the mortal coil of death metal,  is a philosophy to “make what you want to hear,” he says. Even as an adolescent guitarist with no formal training, this mantra has followed him, unwavering from one discipline to another. ”That’s my approach to House music as well,” he echoes. 

It’s embedded in his earliest memories of hearing the genre of music. Things like “the old DJ-Kicks stuff from the nineties, and the X-Mixes” is a familiar touchstone for Christian’s own influences. “That’s where it started. For instance, Kevin Saunderson’s X-Mix has this really nice combination between really rough drums and bass and super nice strings and other elements on top which are kind of futuristic – that’s my favourite kind of music,” explains Christian enthusiastically.

You can clearly hear those influences on Skywae more clearly today. The record and the three preceding it, is as much an homage to that era, as it is Christian finding his feet in that sound. It was there all along, it seems, he just needed the time and patience to develop it and now he’s confidently arrived at the point. He might still find fault in his music, nitpicking over details, but Skywae is an archetype of a classic House record if there ever was one, and one that can certainly stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of them. 

 

And now for something different with Switchdance

Marco Antão is still settling into his new digs in Kristiansand. The Portuguese-Goan producer and DJ is planning to spend half the year in Norway and the other in Lisbon for the foreseeable future and the last six months have kept him busy.  “I brought a lot of synths and I built my studio here,” says Marco over a telephone call from the house he shares with his girlfriend. He is enjoying the opportunity to “make music with an amazing view” and it’s already starting to bear creative fruit.

Prostaglandin E1 is the first track to have come from this new space. Made for a Portuguese compilation, the track is a moody tech track, built on minimal foundations with designs on the club floor. A female humanoid vocal works its way through the metallic sheen of the first few bars and into mystic dimensions carried on the melody of a harmonic scale. 

“The vocals are from my girlfriend,” Marco tells me in a kind of nonchalant way.  I pry for more details. “I was kind of stuck on the track with a deadline,” claims Marco and the track needed some extra elements, so he asked his girlfriend; “can you try some vocals?” The fortuitous impulse turned out to be the right choice, imposing a human imprint on Prostaglandin E1 that gives the track an accessible and sensory dimension. 

It’s the latest release in a decade-long career. It’s one side of the multifaceted DJ and artists sonic aesthetic which can move from the kosmische realm of downtempo Balearics to the energetic inclinations of a club floor. “I have my dark cosmic synth music side,” reiterates Marco only to contrast it with; “I’m a resident at Lux Frágil, so I have this fun club version of myself too.” These aspects converge on records and sets that have made Switchdance a household name in Portugal even in lieu of his associations with Lux Frágil. 

Switchdance has been a resident of the famous Lisbon nightclub for the last 12 years and his history with the club is a “long story” he claims. Nonetheless he indulges me. 

Marco had been a loyal patron of the club since he first started going out. He remembers waiting in “long queues outside of Lux” as an 18 and 19 year old during a period shortly after when the club was changing over from one instance into the next. Reinventing itself from Frágil, the “first gay-friendly House club in Lisbon in the 80’s” to Lux around 1998 it built on the legacy of one generation to the next as Marco came of age. 

“Around 2008” the club thought it was about time for a change again and “wanted a new resident.” Lux had “had the same residents since the beginning” according to Marco, and they were looking for some fresh blood to infuse the next phase of the club. Lux “held a contest” in which the winner would receive a six-month residency and 12 years later that winner, Switchdance, is still a resident.  

As a fixture of the club today, Marco likes to explore the more obscure sides of the dance floor. “Next Friday I’m playing with Vladimir Ivkovic,” he says by way of  an example. He offers a “more electronic and alternative” approach to the club music that dots the club’s roster and it’s something he is able to adapt that freely over Lux’s two floors. “If I play upstairs, I can play anything I want,” he says. This will include everything from “rock and David Bowie to club music and Italo disco.” In the club he can get “more introspective,” and play to a more engaged audience. “Downstairs is not a place to talk” after all. 

Listening back to a 2019 set from Switchdance recorded live “downstairs,” it seems that there is a certain freedom to the programming at Lux. The mix is slow and brooding with a melancholic mood underpinning the sounds of his selections. Marco looks back on the night and his set fondly. “I had the right crowd to play slow so it was one of my best nights,” he remembers. The packed dance floor, which can take up to a 1000 people was bristling form the first track and by the end of his set “everybody was dancing” reminisces Marco. 

“It was an amazing experience,” and it suggests something of the Lux audience’s attitude to electronic club music.  At the same time there is something in the contrast between the different styles that permeate through Lux that corresponds to Marco’s music. Turning back  time through Switchdance’s discography from Prostaglandin E1 to The Black Tape record, we find two distinct sounds emerging; one trained on the dance floor and one meandering on the fringes of club music. Is this the influence of Lux at work?

“I can’t say I’m 100% influenced,” replies Marco, “but I’m always imagining playing the tracks there.” His Lisbon-based studio is only 2 minutes down the road from the iconic nightclub and he will often go down to the club to test a track out on the sound system – which he claims bares striking similarity to Jaeger’s

At the heart of Switchdance’s sound as an artist however is not heightened club-informed sound like you might find a big room, but something more meditative; a sonic identity that is clouded in mystery and something almost mystic, born from a love of synthesis. “I’m addicted to synths,” says Marco who says; “all my money goes to synthesisers and red wine” in a breathy laugh. 

As a child of the eighties myself, I can understand the obsession. Growing up with the evocative sounds of the synthesisers in the background in your youth, that sound stays with you. In Marco it has only matured with him through the years as an artist and you can still hear its effects in his music.

“For example on The Black Tape, you can hear some 80’s italo influences,” explains Marco. Those early influences start with “listening to a lot of synth pop, like Depeche Mode.” Taking a slight detour through Goth as a teenager he came back to pure synthesiser music during “the boom of electro music in the early 2000’s.” Legowelt and the Dutch scene were a touchstone during that time, and you can still hear that influence clearly in Switchdance’s first appearance on Boiler Room back in 2013.

It marks an approach that is vast and open today as an artist, but centred around the synthesiser and moving far beyond the strict parameters of the preset menu. There’s something alien in Switchdance’s music that comes from the unusual sound palette he creates in his music. The nature of the vocals from Prostaglandin E1 is a great example as it moves from a kind of eerie android to digital automaton through the course of the track. It’s clearly processed through a vocoder, but not like anything you’re likely to have encountered before.

It’s a sound that has followed him since his early days, when he was still known by SWITCHST(d)ANCE. Through a very reserved release schedule it has evolved without drastically changing and today we find a definitive sound in the music of Switchdance.

In recent years this sound has even garnered a wider appeal with heavies like Harvey and Dixon getting behind the music of Switchdance through two compilations compiled by the DJ luminaries featuring the artist’s music. With Arabian Ride on Harvey’s Mercury Rising and O Amolador finding its way on Dixon’s Secret Weapons compilation for Innervisions, Switchdance has found favour with some of the DJ- and club community’s most respected tastemakers. 

It was specifically the Innervisions association that “was a huge kick” for Marco’s career with a “big buzz” around the track as it climbed the charts. It seems Dixon “really likes” Switchdance, but Marco stops short of mentioning any specific partnership with the popular label for the future. 

Now that Marco is spending six months of the year in Norway, he is rather striving to “connect with the scene” here. His familiarity with artists like Charlotte Bendiks, Skatebård and Lindstrøm as DJs he’s played with in Portugal has seen him make in-roads. Since moving, he has played Hærverk in Oslo and Vaktbua in Kristiansand and with an appearance at Jaeger next Friday, he is already making strides in Norway’s scene. 

He’s received very positive feedback from the crowd here with people commending his alternative approach to the dance floor. He feels he is still able to convey a lot of what he does at Lux Fragil to other audiences and in Norway he’s already found a receptive audience with people coming up to him to say “I never saw somebody playing this type of music here.” 

With set times being the only real constraint here, he’ll have to compress what he does through a night at Lux, but whatever it is, it’s sure to be different. 

You know what’s up with Anders Hajem

The history of dance music-collectives stretch as far back as the earliest days of club music. They’ve come in and out of vogue with the peaks and valleys of electronic music’s popularity. Few stand the test of time as egos emerge and personalities clash, but some are successful. They eventually form record labels, and while some members might eventually move on to greater things, it’s while standing on the shoulders of the collective and in rare cases it’s these individuals that strengthen the resolve of the collective as a unit as they rise up together.

I believe Boring Crew Records (BCR)  is such a collective and that Jens Wabø (Perkules), Henrik Villard and Anders Hajem are on the cusp of establishing BCR as a significant entry in the annals of collective history in dance music. A collective however is always better as the sum of its parts, and in BCR we have three producers and DJs that have found an uncanny kindred spirit. Each brings his own strengths to the collective, which in turn has offered the springboard for them all to succeed individually. Anders Hajem is no exception. 

A slew of releases on BCR under his given name and as Clastique as well as a release for Full Pupp has established Anders as the busiest producer in the BCR collective at this moment. In December he released his sixth record for the label, Kjoret Gaar Volume 1, which establishes a new series of releases with an objective crystallising on the dance floor around the 6 tracks. They’re “just raw and dancey tunes with no more thought put into it,” explains Anders about the concept of the mini LP. “The thought is to release more in the same style and I hope to get volume 2 up and running by the end of 2022, maybe with some remixes this time. The plan is to release Kjoret Gaar projects on bandcamp and let people pay what they want and hopefully we’ll be able to release it on vinyl at some point.”

Anders is pleasant and polite when we sit down for a chat. His thoughtful approach to music is counterpointed by a youthful exuberance that lies behind a tempered visage, under a peak cap. His release schedule is eager, but the music doesn’t sound rushed or impulsive. Rather there’s a maturity that belies his 26 years and his relatively recent introduction to club music. 

Anders grew up in Ål, a town “in the middle of nowhere,” in the centre of Norway. The town has “one music store where they sell guitars and other equipment” and with a father that “listened to a lot of deep Purple and Led Zeppelin,” Anders naturally gravitated towards the guitar as a “main instrument” from a young age. He cut his own path through the hairy world of rock, listening to modern day guitar heroes like “Arctic Monkeys and Queens of the Stone Age.” At a mere ten years of age, he started taking music at school and soon set about playing in bands around his hometown. 

The guitar shop “helped a lot for a small community” like Ål to establish something of a music scene, but electronic music remained a fleeting curiosity and an unknown entity for the young Anders. He had only been exposed to “the tip of the iceberg of electronic music” at home and it was mostly the kind of “cheesy” electronic music we associate with the radio today. “I had some friends that lived in Oslo and had gone to raves, but I never got into that when I lived in Ål,” he remembers. Those friends were mainly into Psytrance and Anders “just didn’t get it.“ It conflated his experience of club music and raves with people clad in loose fitting hemp and stomping along to triplet bass measures in a forest somewhere, but that was all set to change when he eventually moved to Oslo to study sound engineering. 

“When I moved to Oslo, that changed my perspective on electronic music,” says Anders in a serious monotone. He had already been listening to electronic music. The likes of Todd Terje and indie electronic acts like Rival Consoles had piqued his interest in electronic music, but that type of “dreamy synth electronic” music had never made it past the album format however and the club experience still eluded Anders for a time. Spurred on by Todd Terje and his new fascination for synthesisers, Anders eventually started going out in Oslo and it was the formative club experiences, “especially Villa and Jaeger,” where Anders became more “connected to that  kind of music.”

“Once I found out there were a lot of underground genres,” says Anders “it just opened up for me.” He dove deep, bought his first synthesiser and phased the bands out of his life. He realised “electronic music was easier to make on your own” and started making rudimentary synthesiser music.  His first attempts were little more than a drum machine and a single synthesiser as he tried to emulate the likes of Todd Terje and Boards of Canada. You can still hear some those influences in a newer track like 6AM.

He “dove deeper into electronic music and discovered Motorcity drum Ensemble, Gerd Jansen and Honey Dijon” through Boiler Room sets, but it was ultimately when he met Jens Wabø that everything would fall in place for his work as a producer and his skills as a DJ.

“We have a 5g connection,” says Anders through a grin. “Jens is one of those guys I just love playing with.” Anders had been getting into making House music, through Lo-Fi – “it sounded easier to make and not that polished” – but he had not yet gotten the hang of DJing by the time he met Jens. ”Jens was into Djing” however and after a crash course, Anders too “got the hang of it, and fell in love with it.” Once they were more comfortable playing together, they played their first gig at Villa and then the pandemic hit. 

Young enthusiasts like Jens and Anders were stopped dead in their tracks during what would be the prime of any producer and DJ’s career. They could’ve resigned their attempts to the bedroom studio and streaming DJ sets, but they proved to be more industrious than most. They shared a studio and when they weren’t making music, they were DJing.

“We were just hungry for more and started playing at the studio.” Anders then met up with the “rave kids” from back home, whose own tastes had matured beyond Psytrance and incorporated House and Techno too. “They joined and helped out a lot in reaching people” through their concept Rave at Bricks, and eventually those studio sessions grew into small parties that helped establish BCR. 

More “friends joined in on it and it turned into a little community” with Henrik Villard forming a significant piece of the puzzle in establishing BCR as a label. “He helped us just from the experience he had releasing a lot of tunes,” explains Anders. Henrik’s experience in the industry gave them the confidence to establish BCR as a label and in 2021 they released their first record with Anders as Clastique breaking new ground for the trio.

They continued to host parties alongside releases from the collective. In the summer of 2021, while we were still in the midst of the pandemic, “they brought the  speakers outside and played loud and people came.” It  gave people “a place to go,” during a time of lockdowns, “even if you were just six people in the studio drinking beers and listening to good music.” And what do BCR define as good music? “I don’t think we had a sound in mind, but it is based on House music,” answers Anders. ”We love Techno too, but there is a lot of Techno in Oslo and we love House music more so…” BCR established itself as a House music collective.

It’s House music as inclusive as it can be and you can hear it throughout Anders’ own discography. From the broken beats of “Reminiscence” to the soothing melodies of “6AM” to the outer reaches of the Giorgio Mordoder-like sequences running through “Velvet Disco,” Anders Hajem makes House music defined by over 30 years of history informing the genre. Kjoret Gaar Volume 1 is a perfect example of that in its own right, and even while Anders is completely focussed on the dance floor on this release, it’s a broad and inclusive view of the dance floor. 

It’s an attitude that he transported to Full Pupp last year with Flint Eastwood and arriving between a heavy rotation of BCR releases, 2021 was a year of great creative output from Anders Hajem. It only seems to be hitting its stride in 2022. With another release primed for Tromsø outfit Mellom, a desire to have more external artists feature on BCR, and more events planned for the BCR collective, including their residency at Jaeger, 2022 might just see the return of House music in Oslo, spearheaded by this concept. “It’s great to have the opportunity to create that environment for that kind of music to blossom in the Oslo scene,” remarks Anders and as an individual and a collective at the forefront of this burgeoning scene, there is certainly a new and youthful impetus for it to thrive. 

Anders hopes that it will reach a point where “if you know there’s a BCR party, you know what’s up” and that we can safely assume will relate to any releases coming from the collective and Anders’ solo projects. There is something distinct yet still opaque about BCR and Anders Hajem and in due time it will reveal itself as a determinable force in Oslo’s House music scene. 

 

Proceeds from Frædag: Nastia directed to Red Cross Ukraine

Almost 50 000 kr in proceeds and donations have been sent to the Red Cross to go to the Ukraine.

We’re pleased to announce that nearly 50 000kr was raised during Friday the 25th of February, for an evening dedicated to the people of Ukraine. As the situation worsened in the Ukraine we decided to dedicate the night to the people who were trapped in the middle of this violent conflict.

Naturally we had to postpone Nastia’s visit on the night as she and her daughter fled to Poland, but we were eager to be able to do more than just watch as this unfolded. We took the decision to donate the proceeds from the door to the cause of the Ukranian people. On top of that, many people showed their support on the night and donated too, and we were able to raise nearly 50 000kr owith your help.

We were yet uncertain as to right organisation to direct these funds too,  but after an influx of suggestions and a broad search, we decided on the Red Cross in Ukraine. It is clear that they are facing an incredible humanitarian crisis and the Red Cross in the Ukraine is best situated and have already been hard at work since the start of the conflict providing humanitarian aid to innocent people caught in the middle of this war. We issued the funds to the Red Cross in Norway, who will distribute it directly to their Ukrainian franchise last week.

We’d like to extend a special thank you to everybody that made it out to this event and supported the cause in a very moving show of solidarity with the people of Ukraine. For those who donated extra on the door too, thank you very much. Thank you to everybody that sent in your suggestions for donations too.

 

 

We’re hiring

Jaeger is looking for some experienced bar-staff to join the team on a part-time basis

Do you have a groove in your heart?

If you enjoy electronic music, DJs and club culture, and are looking for a unique opportunity to get your foot on that first rung of the industry, then we might have a job for you. 

We’re looking for part-time bar staff to help us usher in this new post-pandemic era at Jaeger. 

If you are flexible and enjoy the challenge of working in a pulsating environment, then YOU GOT THE JOB BUDDY!

Some experience required. 

Please email your cv and a cover letter to vichy@jaegeroslo.no

 

Beings of Light – In praise of Fort Romeau’s third LP

There’s a moment of sweet serenity right in the middle of Fort Romeau’s latest album, Beings of Light. (In the) Rain takes a moment in the midst of an LP hurtling towards the centre of the dance floor. It’s a stark moment of repose in an album determined to evoke some romantic image of the club. In a recent interview with Time Sweeney’s Beats in Space, the artists says New York and specifically the city’s clubbing history played an important part in the inspiration behind the record, but there’s so much more that informs this record and the result than just a single era in club music history. 

 Fort Romeau breaks largely with the “Detroit” sound that underpinned his first two LPs, Kingdoms and Insides, and slides into what can only be described as some nostalgic reverie in sound. It’s a dreamscape, surreal in some aspects, but remaining functional in design. As the last wispy trails of the title track disappear into quietude, there’s very little tangible memory that existed at all, and only a feeling and a picture remains. 

Beings of Light finds Fort Romeau (Mike Greene) picking up where he left off with his 2019 EP “Dweller on the Threshold.” As if to signal his intention, “Dweller on the threshold” proved a tipping point for Greene. Whereas the EPs leading up to the last, found the artist exploring elements of Trance, Rave and classic House, Dweller marked a return to familiar ground and a transition to Fort Romeau’s third and most recent LP, Beings of Light.

EPs Heaven and Earth, Fantasia, The Mirror and FWD NRG saw Fort Romeau ascending large build ups and higher energies as he seemed to plot some course towards the trends that have been informing the dance floor of late. 

At the fundamental level his music remained unchanged, with a key ear for melodies and a deep groove staying central to his work, but as new plateaus were established in the upper regions of those bubbling melodies, it was a huge stride into a different direction for the English artist with Heaven and Earth at the most extreme end of the other side.

Beings Of Light finds Greene on more familiar territory however, with the focus turning back to the rhythm section and a sound more perpendicular to Fort Romeau’s early records “The thing I like about doing 12”s is you can try on a lot of different acts musically, bring in different sounds, and kind of play with things a bit, “Greene told Dancewax recently.  “With an LP,” he continues “I really like to narrow down on the core sound of what I’m interested in.”  

Venturing far and wide from the trodden path through the last few EPs, Beings of Light reaffirms Greene’s statement in a record analogous to Insides and Kingdom. There’s a clear trajectory towards elements of trance, progressive and psychedelic music through the EPs that precede the LP, which fall away during the opening bars of Untitled IV and mark a slight return to Fort Romeau’s distinctive sound. 

“With this LP I wanted there to be only as many sounds as were absolutely required, rather than filling the space with too much stuff,” Greene told Stamp the wax, which seems like a stark contrast to what he said about Heaven and Earth in Torture the artist a year earlier: “For me it’s merely aesthetic in that I’m trying to reference certain signifiers that are attached to trance, progressive or psychedelic music.” The sounds between the LP and the EP are in stark contrast. The bold melodic movements of Heaven and Earth give way to a brooding minimalism emerging through repetitive rhythms.

Beyond the sound of these two records however, there is something that has remained consistent in Greene’s music and that’s the element of imagery that underpins his music. It’s not often as literal as something like the cover of Beings of Light, but it’s always there as he explained to Time Sweeney during a beats in space interview: “Whenever I work on  any music, I always have an image in mind. I find it very difficult to hear music without having an image to marry it with.”

For Insides, it was a blown up photograph of a piece of blue velvet in reference to the David Lynch film, while on Heaven and Earth it was less tabgible as a reference to the “spiritual” tropes of elements of Trance and progressive House.

“An image can act as an anchoring point,” for Greene and throughout an EP and a LP it’s something he tries to express sonically, albeit in very opaque terms. For Beings of Light he turned to  Steven Arnold’s Power of grace for inspiration. The Salvador Dali Protege and surrealist photographer Steven Arnold’s 1984 work, offered the incentive for Green to “create something beautiful and otherworldly.” according to the BiS interview.

“Greene’s new LP Beings Of Light,” says Annabel Ross, “is… the most palpable, fulsome and cohesive expression yet of the connection between his music and the art that inspires it,” in a glimmering review for Resident Advisor and she’s not wrong.  

Green’s use of stark textures and the less-is-more attitude is more than coincidence in terms of the relationship to the work that inspired it. Emboldened by Arnold’s “kind of punk methodology, that’s very much self-reliant,” Greene sought to create something similar in sound where the  “imagination is important.” Although relying on   “very simple production processes,” the results on Beings of Light are a lot more sophisticated than the “punk methodology” that encouraged the record. 

Records like Insides and Kingdom appear more punk-ish in their brutish determination to be dance floor records. Beings of Light is still a dance floor record, but there’s a restraint there that evokes comparison to masters of the club-album format like Roman Flügel. 

“I think that I wanted to bring in some different influences, but still try and be myself,” Greene told Dancewax and in his use of imagery, if not sound, Greene manages to achieve this on his latest LP. ”I’m probably more inspired by images, movies and art than music, particularly electronic music because I find it really counter productive to compare what I’m doing to anyone else,” he explained in more depth on Stamp the wax. Visual aides offer the opportunity to explore these different influences in a way that avoids the music sounding like a pastiche of another artist or a trope of the genre. 

Beings of Light is not so much an evolution or a change in Fort Romeau’s music, but a new pallet of influences informing leading to something different from the artist’s catalogue. It seems he’s been on a road of new discovery over the past few years, with the EPs and now an LP, giving us something divergent from the Fort Romeau sound we’ve come to know in the past. 

It arrives at Beings of Light, fully realised from concept to delivery and a refreshing new take on the Fort Romeau sound. Influenced by imagery and mood, it’s more than a dance floor record while it retains the producer’s connection to the dance floor as a DJ. It continues to explore new realms within the Fort Romeau aesthetic much like the EPs just before it, but as an LP it’s more refined and concise than the EPs.

We’re not sure if we’re listening to a new direction for Fort Romeau, but it definitely seems like Greene is exploring new territory that might lead to new avenues for the producer going forward. Fort Romeau appears to be on the cusp of something with Beings of Light, and we’ll have to wait and see how it will unfold. 

Nastia postponed

Nastia is postponed, but Frædag goes ahead as scheduled with proceeds going to a yet-to-be-determined NGO.

It’s with great regret and sadness that due to the situation in Ukraine, we’re unable to get Nastia to Jaeger this Friday. After a harrowing journey from Kiev to Poland over the course of the night, Nastia is unable to make it to Oslo. Our thoughts are with her, her family, her friends and all the people in Ukraine during this very dark hour for the world. 

We’ll be dedicating the rest of the evening to the people of Ukraine and PROCEEDS FROM TONIGHT WILL GO TO A YET-TO-BE-DETERMINED CHARITY.

We’ll be POSTPONING NASTIA’s visit to an unknown future date.  All tickets will be valid for this future date or tonight if required. If you’d like to cancel your ticket, please contact us via info@jaegeroslo.no with your ticket reference code BEFORE WEDNESDAY, THE 02.03.2022.  All refunds will be reimbursed in full via ticketco. Please allow for a few days for the refund to take effect.

The rest of Frædag will go ahead as planned however. Prins Thomas pres. Serenity Now! will continue as planned in our gården with Øyvind Morken in Diskon. It doesn’t seem like much of a reason for a celebration, but we’ll dance in a show of solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

There will also be an option to make further donations on the door tonight. 

 

Update on Nastia

***Update*** As of yet we’ve not had any contact from Nastia or her agent. We know from her social media profile that she is currently in Poland and safe, but our knowledge is limited to that for the moment. Our thoughts are with her, her family, her friends and all the people in Ukraine during this very dark hour for the world. 

We’ll be dedicating the evening to the people of Ukraine and all PROCEEDS FROM TONIGHT WILL GO TO A YET-TO-BE-DETERMINED CHARITY.

In the event she’s unable to make it tonight, we’ll POSTPONE NASTIA’s visit to an unknown future date. In that case all tickets will be valid for this future date. If you’d still like to cancel your ticket, please contact us via info@jaegeroslo.no BEFORE WEDNESDAY, THE 02.03.2022. All refunds will be reimbursed in full via ticketco. If Nastia does arrive the event will go ahead as scheduled.

Regardless, the rest of Frædag will go ahead as planned. Prins Thomas pres. Serenity Now! will continue in our gården with Øyvind Morken in Diskon. It doesn’t seem like much of a reason for a celebration, but we’ll dance in a show of solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

There will also be an option to make further donations on the door tonight. 

Premiere: Telemark Express – Sparkling

We get a sneak preview of the latest offering from Jarle Bråthen and Kellini’s Telemark Express outfit while we catch up with the duo through a Q&A.

It’s like driving with the top down through the winding roads of Norway’s southern roads, when Telemark Express’ Divine Drive hits your ears. Between an aggressively sheer cliff-face and a tranquil body of water, the 80’s cabriolet floats as if on air, attacking each corner and sailing out on the other side, on the wave of synthesiser.

Light and dark pass a baton as if in some perpetual relay between tunnels and open roads, while the wind whistles a tune past your ear. An Alpine cassette deck chews up a tape where a bouncing disco kick punctuates a train-like synth sequence. This is the sound and imagery that Telemark express conjures through the  “Sparkling” EP coming via Paper Recordings to us today. 

Telemark Express are Kjetil Lagesen and Jarle Bråthen. A pair of solo artists, working in the ethereal outer reaches of Disco and House, Jarle and Kjetil forged some abstract bond based on origin and a shared love of similar sounds. Accomplished DJs based in Skien and Berlin respectively today, Kjetil and Jarle initially hail from Telemark. They came together as Telemark Express for the first time in 2019 to release Writer’s Block with the sophomore effort reaching our ears today on the eve of “Sparkling’s” release. 

“‘Divine Drive’ channels Kraftwerk, kosmische and the 80s by way of the Mediterranean for a chugging late night / early morning track that would be equally at home in Berlin, Ibiza or Oslo,” while “Sparkling Vibrant keeps it low and late with a broken beat, shuffling percussion, creamy pads and spacey lead,” according to the label. 

The record is a vibrant effort between motorik beats and allusions to Norway’s Disco roots in a combination that takes the best of both worlds in something that shimmers like the last violent expulsions of a star going supernova. The charming melodies and grunting rhythms fuse in a cinematic vignette unfolding in sound. Visceral and functional, it entices on various levels, and we’re happy to be able to share the first track from it ahead of its release. 

We caught up with Telemark express via email and this is what they had to say about this release and working together. 

Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions. You’re back together again as Telemark Express. What was the catalyst for the Sparkling E.P?

We had some time together in Skien and just went for it, cause normally we are not in the same city. 

What was it that cemented for you during the making of Writer’s Block, that you have taken into this second EP?

Our combined critical listening makes the cement for this project generally. This is on purpose but with “Sparkling” we wanted to start with a fresh sound palette.

What’s the main difference between Sparkling and Writer’s Block in your opinion?

The main difference is definitely motivation. ”Writers”, was because of a writer’s block we both had and with “Sparkling” we wanted to make something else with another point of view. 

I can just imagine myself driving around those winding roads of Telemark with Divine Drive playing (preferably through an alpine cassette system). Is there something to these themes that was there before you started making this EP?

I believe these images you describe are subconsciously imprinted in us merely just from the fact that we are hailing from the Telemark region. 

And besides Kraftwerk, were there any prevalent musical touchstones?

There are a lot of influences for us but two tracks that we feel combined our taste are “Genesis – Tonight Tonight Tonight 12” extended mix” and “Depeche Mode – Enjoy the Silence (Flood remix)”


What were some of the central sounds and/or instruments to the two tracks?

Mostly 80s related synth sounds resonated this time : Jupiter 8 pads,Yamaha DX 7 sounds  and Minimoog for leads. We are totally “in the box” so we are not tweaking away on some hardware gadget.

Jarle, we know you spend much of your time in Berlin (at least before the pandemic) and Kjetil you’re based just down the road from Jaeger. How did the distance affect the making of Sparkling and was there a conscious effort to bridge that gap between the German kosmische sounds and those Norwegian influences like Italo and Disco?

Nothing with this Ep soundscape is a conscious effort to sound a certain way. However, we all get influenced by our environment. Even if we send some sketches upfront, we only make the tracks when we are together at one place which makes the session a rarity these days.

Sparkling retains a very Norwegian sound, much like Writer’s Block. Do you think you can boil that sound down to some key words?

Dreamy and lush synth pads and 80s leads with attitude sneaking up behind.

How did you and this record end up on Paper Recordings?

We didn’t have any particular plans for any release originally but paper seemed like a good idea and luckily they felt the same. 

And now that you’re done with this EP, what else have you guys got lined up, together and individually for the near future?

We both have solo releases planned this spring/summer and we are both gonna DJ individually at Halvøya festival, Kristiansand in Norway in June. So if there will be time we maybe start working on a new The Telemark Express EP.

 

Peering through WINDOWS with Vinny Villbass

We interview Vinny Villbass ahead of his newly commissioned live show WINDOWS, which arrives with the return of the dance floor at Jaeger

*Photos by Lina Jenssen

Like many of us, Håkon Vinnogg (Vinny Vilbass) spent the pandemic staring out his window. With nightlife effectively closed and days consumed by low temperatures and an energy crisis,  we could do little more than cocoon in quilted hovels, waiting out the latest phase of the pandemic. 

We were caught up in a streaming algorithm, looking out through a digital portal, between episodes of syndicated South Korean television. We’d resigned ourselves to our sofas with glimpses of Netflix interrupting instagram celebrity cats. The feeds lay uninterrupted ahead of a dark January and we were free to plug in and tune out completely. 

Some of us however found new inspiration in these feeds and decided to tune in rather than opt out. Håkon was such a person and assuming his Vinny Villbass moniker, he put those “inputs” to work. He had the sense to stop for a moment, press pause on whatever streaming platform, and look out of his window a little longer. Soon he was whisked away, day-dreaming of a time beyond the pandemic. 

He started thinking about music and what it would be like when the time comes for the dance floor to open again. Taking those ideas into the studio, a project started to emerge and that project is called WINDOWS. “It’s about being bored, wanting to express yourself and getting some energy out,” he says about the project over a cup of coffee.

At the time of talking to Håkon, the 1m rule is still in place and the whole ambiguity around the arbitrary rules still perplexes, but WINDOWS and its creator is ready for the inevitable return to the dance floor. WINDOWS is a live show specifically created with Jaeger in mind and it will be performed for the first time this Frædag

We caught up with Håkon to talk about the live show, the pandemic and the state of club culture beyond the pandemic with some familiar themes running through the conversation as we peer through some windows with Vinny Villbass. 

*limited presale tickets available via ticketco

Tell me about WINDOWS. Is it an album and/or a live show?

There might be an album, but this is designed to express the re-opening of society. 

People in cities all around the world have been living within their four walls, looking out their windows. They even get tired of Netflix, because they’re more excited about seeing the neighbour’s cat on the balcony. All the music was produced during a time when the window was important. That’s why I called it WINDOWS. 

…And a window could be anything. It could be an algorithm on Spotify. It’s what you’ve seen, that world you’ve been pressured into living these couple of years. 

Was the concept there before you started making the music?

It was kind of more like a reflection afterwards. I didn’t sit down to make WINDOWS. It was more; what’s the common thing about these tracks? It’s all related to the inputs I’ve been getting during the pandemic, which has been limited. You have tv, and radio algorithms, and the small physical window that you see the neighbours through, and you start reflecting how people in the building next to you live their lives. It’s my way of expressing the fantasy. 

It seems there was a literal aspect, where you would be listening to other music, and that it might have influenced what you were doing. Was that a conscious aspect of this work?

Definitely… The whole world of music is copies and trying to make copies in a different way. Look at David Bowie. He was taking from the best and making it better. I guess that’s what everybody tries to do. Imagining that you are completely free of all inputs; that you have full creative freedom, I don’t believe that’s true. These days the inputs are very controlled by the market.

That’s got to be difficult to balance, trying to make something that will be relevant and yet be completely unique. 

Also in club dance music, there’s also this functional side of it that you need to consider. It’s related to where you are performing and how many people are there. There’s a social functional aspect that you need to have in the back of your head when you are making dance music. 

Did you have Jaeger in the back of your mind when you were making WINDOWS?

Yes, because I guess Jaeger has been the centre of dance music in Oslo. During the pandemic you’ve been looking forward to your next gig at your local club. I think  during the pandemic the club scene has become more local. I don’t think we’re going back to huge tours, travelling over the planet, if not just for the sake of climate change. 

This is a conversation that has cropped up frequently since the pandemic. I believe that the big names will be travelling as per usual, (and we’ve seen that starting to happen already), but it’s going to be those mid level DJs, who perhaps play away every second weekend, that will be the most affected by this. 

It might go both ways. You saw the club scene before the pandemic, which was starting to become quite boring with the same lineups at festivals. All those small artists weren’t even considered, because they don’t have enough soundcloud or instagram followers to become part of the circus. 

That made people think more in terms of a collective. Smaller groups of people, maybe even in different countries visiting each other. These small networks started to thrive, and I do hope that after the pandemic these small networks that find themselves through the internet, is going to be the biggest part of the club scene. 

I’m worried that most of the places that survived the pandemic will go back to booking, to avoid the risk of not pulling in an audience. 

Will they be able to afford the bigger names? Who knows, we might be back to normal in half a year. People are very adaptable. 

And in your case… You were playing abroad before the pandemic and playing regularly. How has it affected you?

For me, the whole touring aspect has always been more social. I’m more on the collective side of it. I want to play at a place, because I know there is somebody that has similar tastes. 

I’ve never been tempted to tour and play big clubs and festivals where you never get to meet people, and have no time to see the city. I think it’s very important that when you come to a new city as a DJ, you need to know the social factors of that city to understand wh

at to play. 

Seeing as you made the WINDOWS show specifically for Jaeger, did you have a specific night in mind?

It was more like the utopia of playing at Jaeger again.

That must have informed the way the live set was going to sound.

I don’t know if it’s so specific to Jaeger and a certain date. I think it’s more my imagination, how people would react, coming back. It’s much fast

er than anything I’ve done before. It’s all about the inner-punk wanting to get out and giving people some energy. 

How different is it from your previous recorded works?

It’s much more Housey and a lot more repetitive at 128 BPM. I’ve always been in the middle of the electronic sounds and the acoustic sounds of the dance floor. 

Speaking of WINDOWS specifically, I’ve been listening to a lot of African music and Turkish music, during the pandemic. I really feel that these cultures have much more deep-seated dependency on the human element. 

Will these organic sounds be more prominent in the live set?

It’s going to be a combination of these organic and more functional Techno rhythms. I’ve always played synthesisers live to get that human touch. So the human element will always be in my music. It’s hard to say, but it’s not exactly inspired by Turkish or African music. It’s just the randomness of my fantasies.

Is there a central theme to the sound of the music, based on those ideas?

It’s just classic House music and not being afraid of clichés either. Because in functional music there is a reason African rhythms have worked for 1000’s of years. It’s rhythm patterns that are well known to the human body and in House music, if you have a steady rhythm, you can put anything on top of it. 

Can we expect some gospel vocals?

Not for this project, but perhaps my own vocals. 

So there might be some lyrical content?

I haven’t decided yet. I’ll leave some of it up to improvisation. Something special happens when you go on stage. Then all the rhythms come to you more naturally and everything seems so natural and you dare to do stuff you don’t dare to do in front of two very precise studio monitors. 

It’s all fantasy. Not that there is anything directly connected to it. Let’s see if my imagination of the opening will be the same as the others. It’s going to be an exciting project. Have people been longing for the same things as me?

From our most recent experience, people seem very excited. Then again, people are a bit more hesitant to start a dance floor, as opposed to the summer last year. 

Do you think that’s the regulations or a social anxiety?  

A bit of both.

Actually these stupid dance regulations, reminds me of a time I first played in New York. This was with diskJokke around 2008. It was when Rudy Giuliani was mayor and there was a rule that you needed a dance licence. 

We started playing and I fetched a drink from the bar, dancing on the way over. A dude came over and told me I can’t dance. I thought he was referring to my skill, and he explained that there’s no dancing allowed, because of the dancing licence. 

Here we are playing dancing music and you’re not allowed to dance, and that’s like putting somebody in jail in my opinion.

Yes, it’s that last vestige of freedom, that freedom to move to a beat. It’s something instinctive as a form of liberation, and by clamping down on it, I can’t help but feel there’s this underlying conservatism seeping through those kinds of regulations. What’s quite striking is how they’ve maintained this bit of arbitrary regulation, not just here, but in Europe too, while everything else goes back to normal. 

It’s a fucking disaster. The only thing you need to give people is some personal space, but don’t take away people’s possibility to move… that’s dark.  

I feel however, that in club culture, this is, or at least was, an unspoken rule amongst most of us. You don’t dance on top of each other, and you respect each other’s space. 

Yes. Club culture became so big, because you could be free to go out by yourself. You were not stuck to dancing in couples. Just respect each other. 

Ross from Friends: sold out and set times

The live show is sold out and Ross from friends takes the stage at 22:00

Yes folks, Ross from friends is sold out. We don’t have the capacity to release any more tickets nor do we have room to accommodate any people on the guest list.

The doors will open at 21:00 and Ross from Friends will take to the stage at 22:00, so please arrive early to avoid a queue by the time of the concert. Ticket holders will be admitted via the general entrance, with tickets processed at the doors to the basement.

There will still be room for drop ins after the show and for access to the Gården (backyard) where Øyvind Morken will be DJing from 18:00.

Prins Thomas prepares for a night of dubby Techno(and related sorts…)

Prins Thomas shares some of his inspiration and thoughts about a new night kicking off at Jaeger this Wednesday.

As our soundsystem mutates, growing in the lower regions of the register, there’s a style of music that we’ve found accentuates the new sound perfectly. It’s called Dub Techno. A proper description remains as elusive as the genres that constitute its two parts. What exactly is Techno and what is dub music is as vast and all-consuming as the Saharan dessert, with variations like the grains of sands on the African continent, but when brought together, these two genres, begat a style all onto itself and one that has outlasted many other sub-genres.

Dub Techno is the product of the children of post-wall Berlin, born from Basic Channel, a record label and duo, that still lay claim to ownership of the genre. Since then it’s been repatriated by the original Detroit pioneers and presented the world over as an immersive alternative to the  industrialised onslaught of kick drums that still dominate the sound of Techno today.

In a new night coming to Jaeger, we’re paying homage to the style with Prins Thomas taking the helm this Wednesday from the sauna. We’re streaming the entire night via Mixcloud, and Prins Thomas is going in for the long haul to make a veritable night of the genre and its off-shoots.

“I’ve been wanting to do a sort of deep dive into the dubbier side of house and techno for a while,” says Prins Thomas, “playing a more monochrome set than what I usually do when the party gets going. Letting the records play, breathe and shine on their own terms… Saturday night and the urge to grab a disco classic or some uplifting rave pianos usually wins over going in deep like Costeau.

For this night, the effect and feel of the records trumps the actual genre they belong to so even though there’ll surely be records by both Oswald AND Ernestus played on this night do not be surprised by wildcards being thrown into the mix. Here is some inspiration that I might play:”

Greetings from Jaeger: The start to the return of the dance floor

The time has come to get back to what we do best. After restrictions that forced us to close in December, there was a time of nervous uncertainty, as we stood waiting in some footloose purgatory for life to resume. We were happy when we could open again in January, but the sitting disco still doesn’t really sit well with us. It’s not what we were about and the novelty had worn off back in in the summer of 2020. We thought we were done with it.

It was a tough time, acquiescing to these measures, and trying to scrape out an existence on the brink. We managed with a little aid from big brother, but only barely. In the light of a new day all these regulations seems so arbitrary now, but I guess it’s easy to draw conclusions in hindsight. For now, let’s leave the politics at to door and revel in the fact that we can go dancing again!

No more table service or tempered chair boogie where we try to move in constrained motions as to not worry the powers that be. We’re clearing the dance floor to a point where we can appease the authorities, but if we’re to understand the prime minister correctly, even they are clueless as to where the line should be drawn. Our sauna is open and the gården is still warm with the new heating system we have installed, but we’re excited to be able to open the basement again in February. Work on the extended room has continued throughout the downtime, with a couple of extra 24″ subs to tweak the bottom end a little further and we’re ready to start hosting some international guests again.

All those bookings made pre-pandemic are stacking up alongside new ones made in 2021 that never came to fruition, so now in 2022 expect an onslaught of DJs visiting our sauna and basement booth in the near future. As always Frædag with g-HA & Olanskii provide Jaeger’s window to the world with a guest appearance every Friday going forward. In February that means a visit from Ross from Friends and Nastia as we slowly start filling up our calendar for the rest of 2022.

Our residents are back and local guests provide the variation in our week as we move from Techno to House, take a sojourn on the rocky breaks of Drum n Bass before heading off to balearic shores week in week out. Mandagsklubben remain the archetype as the oldest running night at Jaeger, while the week pivots around Frædag, where Øyvind Morken has taken on the role as defacto party starter for our weekend at Jaeger. Kicking off at 18:00, every Friday, he  Øyvind takes us on psychedelic journey on the fringes of “club music,” as only he understands the style of music.

Finnebassen is back; Lente is back; and MC Kaman is back! We’re still not quite ready to get back to 7 days a week, but Sundays are on the horizon for March in 2022. With a specially commissioned live show from Vinny Villbass and an exclusive dub Techno set from Prins Thomas it’s also a time of trying out new things at Jaeger.  You can check out the full programme here and keep an eye on our social media channels and website for late additions. We’re ready for a new phase and to put two years of uncertainty behind us. We just want to go dancing and we look forward to your company.

See you on the floor…

We’re back

Jaeger will be open again on the 20th of January with covid measures in place

Yes, we’re back… again. After we had to close our doors in December in accordance with the latest covid restrictions, we’re happy to announce that we can open again on the 20th of January 2022.

We’re still working under the auspices of covid restrictions and will only be allowed to be open between 18:00 -23:00 with table service only until the government and city re-evaluates the current restrictions. Our resident DJs will return to their residencies with some select guest DJs appearing alongside as we move towards a full reopening in what we hope we’ll be in the near future.

Alas there’s still no dance floor and it’s a bit like New York in the nineties, but there’s room for movement, and as long as people still enjoy this kind of music, we’ll endeavour to have a space for it. Please check our programme page for more details about the upcoming events.

Space is limited and it’s advisable to book your table ahead of time. We’ll be listing all our events on our ticketco page with options to buy tickets in our heated backyard ahead of the events. We’ll always endeavour reserve some tables for drop-ins and will try to accommodate those who arrive early.

We encourage social distancing and will serve all our guests at their table. There’s a handy app for that and our staff are very adept at the situation by this point.

Please bare with us however as weĺl be operating within these limitations, and we hope to get back to what we do best very shortly.

 

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.

 

New covid regulations at Jaeger

New regulations prevent alcohol sales for the moment, but we’ll remain open and events will go ahead as planned

The latest corona regulations has issued a temporary stop on our license, taking effect Wednesday (15.12.2021). Yes, that’s right – it’s going to be a white christmas at Jaeger. (Sorry… couldn’t resist) We’re acting in accordance to the latest rounds of regulations, which means that we will be unable to serve alcohol until further notice, but we’ll endeavour to remain open for as long as possible. It’s the same procedure as last year.

We’ve cranked up the stove and new heating system in the gården so we can stay open during this period. It’s the same procedure as last year… Our bar will be serving some warm mulled wine and the sauna will be broadcasting some soothing cuts throughout December. The last round of measures are still in situ, with seating room and table service mandatory, but our events will proceed as scheduled. DJs and times are subject to change so please check out our events page for the latest.

We’ll be putting out a select amount of ticket for each event from our TicketCo page. Tickets ensure table reservations, but we will always have room available for drop-ins.

We’ll be streaming again for those who aren’t able to make it down as a result of this new strain of the virus and will endeavour to bring each night straight to your living room as best we can. Tune into our mixcloud page every night at 20:00 from Wednesday to catch our residents and guests in action.

We’ll do what we can to keep the embers of this culture going and we thank you for your support and your continued patience. please check this site regularly for more information as we

The cut with Filter Musikk

Is it 2020 again? There’s some joke about hindsight here, but I feel like it’s been done before. We seem to be stuck in some perpetual groundhog day, going through the motions like zombies kowtowing our way to an edge of an imperceptible cliff. It seems that one of us should by now be able to see it coming, but we’re all so busy following the leader that we’re gonna be oblivious until we’re free-falling towards a fast-approaching bottom. 

Perhaps we jinxed it by bringing the cut with Filter Musikk back… we were tempting fate just a little too eagerly; returning to familiar favourites a little prematurely. Fate, she deals a cruel hand, and she’s something of a grump, because just as we got used to having a dance floor again and could afford to buy a few records, she said; “NO! We will have none of that.” It’s back to the chairs with you and time to tighten those purse strings again – on that note does anybody want to buy a slightly used Jesse record

Even Filter Musikk’s 50kr bargain bin seems a stretch right now, but perhaps it’s the inevitably doomed spirit of this yuletide or a complete disconnection with reality, but what the hell. Gaze upon my fields of fucks, marvel at how they grow. The common consensus might be to start hoarding for your ablutions, but if we’re gonna be stuck in doors for another 3 months, we’re gonna need some music to get us through this one. There’s something about the therapeutic nature of listening to a record; the physical motion of it all, that brought some calm during the last lockdown. We’re going to need that again and we’re going to need some new records to listen to.

Record shelves and playlists have been exhausted, and what new things we’ve obtained have already taken a few turns. We’re definitely going to need some new music to see this through. So, there’s nothing for it… Let’s get stuck into some new records…

*Catch Roland Lifjell and Filter Musikk in the sauna next Wednesday

Lowtec – Easy To Heal Cuts (Avenue 66) LP 

The first cut is indeed the deepest…We don’t know where Lowtec would’ve come by that dual meaning of the cuts, but we approve! It’s as if the producer has had a premonition, or perhaps it’s just the mood that permeates our whole scene at the moment. We need some healing cuts and Lowtec delivers with this deep House record via Avenue 66. 

A collection of tempered House pieces featuring Lowtec’s characteristic machine aesthetic. The accompaniment offers a stark, metallic backdrop as detached machines spring to life in Lowtec’s work. Unlike traditional House arrangements where samples or organic instruments offer a humanised dichotomy between machine and human, Lowtec’s work favours an approach in anthropomorphising lifeless machines. 

It’s when left to their own devices and a glitch appears in which he finds that human aspect in this electronic music and Easy to Heal Cuts is an excellent example of this at work. Instead Lowtec creates warmth in the deep confies of the bass register and charming melodies, as if a computer learns to sing. The title track and “Nature thinks for you,” offers the repose and the solace, while the rest of the album seems to focus on an early or non-existent dance floor with repetition and familiarity playing the key role. 

It’s in those quirky “glitches” that come from indolent machines that Lowtec’s tracks come alive on “Easy to Heal Cuts.” It shies away from the conformity of the dance floor and offers something a little more unique in what remains dance-floor focussed music. 

 

SusTrapperazzi – Return From Shibuya (Ilian Tape) 12″ 

Is 2022 the year we Make Dubstep Massive Again? Ilian Tape might have gotten a headstart on that with their latest. SusTrapperazzi joins the forward-thinking label for a record that although wildly divergent from the labels percussive-heavy sound, maintains that alternative ideology. Always ready to highlight a different side to Europe’s four-on-the floor dominating dance floor, Ilian Tape introduces this new artist to the dance floor in their Ilian Beat Series. 

Falling between margins of Dubstep, Grime and Trap, SusTrapperazzi’s music folds in elements of Funk, Jazz and Soul in his stark beat constructions. Big undulating sub-bass movements underpin “Return form Shibuya” as snippets of samples, calling to mind Burial’s earliest work, dust the slow moving arrangements. 

It’s all about that bass. Sustrapperrazi carves deep trenches from a synthesiser vibrating around the lower registers. At times like “Date Night,” it teeters on the edge of a precipice that’s about to enter IDM territory, but it always returns to the legato bass, moving along in sedate figures across the bottom end of the tracks. 

 

John Beltran – Aesthete (Furthur Electronix) 2xLP

Look no further than John Beltran if you’re looking for soothing melodies and a warm electronic aesthetic. A Detroit original, John Beltram has been making this kind of music since the birth of Techno. Where most of his contemporaries however have suffered at their own hubris, he has hardly wavered  from those original Techno, Electro and Ambient sounds of the early nineties. 

Why mess with perfection?

“Aesthete” confirms this position. Ethereal melodies play against drum machines breaking step with conformity. Wistful broken beats create lovely atmospheres in which happy synthesisers frolic in major keys and uplifting harmonies. John Beltram plays in a sound that has matured beautifully, as analogue components find a new voice in a digital realm. It sounds like a 90’s Techno record should in our era; developing on those rudimentary ideas without stretching the limits of patience.

Aesthete however is closer to an ambient record than the youthful indulgences of the original Techno provocateurs, but in that way it proves how Techno could find a place in contemporary pop music if you let it. As a composer with some success in film and television, John Baltram is able to manipulate these cold lifeless machines into something accessible without reverting to tawdry motifs or styles. It’s a record you’re able to swim through, and you don’t need to be an electronic music nerd to enjoy it. 

 

Chris Moss Acid – 5G Weaponized Bats EP (Furthur Electronix) 12″ 

Further Electronix are in a class of their own at the moment. Carrying a torch for classic Techno, House and Electro, they’ve provided a platform for a sound that maintains a strong connection with origins of those genres, very often from those original pioneers, like John Beltram above. Never one to pander to the obvious, they’ve shone a light on the margins of electronic music over the last four years with artists that continue to work in the more obscure corners of these styles. 

Case in point Chris Moss Acid. You don’t assume the moniker “acid” likely, but Chris Moss owns it after a couple of decades of proliferating those original sounds of acid. Still based around the Roland x0x series, those tools that first established Acid House, “5G Weaponized Bats”  is another direct descendant of the original House and Techno sounds. Favouring a broken beat and an ambient mood, the EP is densely orchestrated with bold pads and delicate melodies.  There’s a transcendental quality to the record when it comes to tracks like Bayt Al-Hikma and and Beat String, but it’s interrupted often by a hefty broken beat as it tries to break through the graceful synths or pads. 

By the end of Beat String, we’re almost in Trance territory, but luckily the record refrains otherwise from such blatant cheesy pursuits even though happy melodies and uplifting progressions dot the record throughout. It’s yet another future classic Furthur Electronix has added to it’s already stunning catalogue.

 

Jaeger to offer light technician course in January 2022

We’ll be running a club light course in our basement and it’s free to all.

Jaeger, with kind support from Kulturrom, are pleased to offer a six part crash course in club lights. The course will run across 5 days over the course of three weeks in January 2022. The course also includes a trial run at showtime on a following Friday at Jaeger in the winter/spring period.

The course is free, but spaces are limited and course days will run 10:00 – 16:00 with a lunch break. 

There are two course groups run on different dates as per below. The trial date run is across half a show during the night and paid accordingly.

The light course consists of six parts:

  1. Video projection used as club lights. (visual content typical for concerts et.al will not be covered here) Includes set-up, basic philosophy and the running of Resolume for the purpose. Course day is run by Isak from Beleven Produksjoner.
  1. Lights and GranMA. Basic introduction to GranMA wing and the house lights at Jaeger. Course day is run by Jaeger’s head light technician Eva Krpalkova
  1. Set-up and problem solving. Basic run through of how to set up lights in GrandMA, and how to solve DMX issues, lamp settings, issues with Hazer and so on. Course day is run by Eva Krpalkova.
  1. Theory and application. What we want to achieve with the lights and the space in between. Different approaches and thinking around how lights best can create the club space and help fire up a dancefloor. Course day is run by Kyrre Karlsen from KyrreLys and Jaegers booking and managing director Ola Smith-Simonsen.
  1. Workshop. Open session with Kyrre Karlsen and Ola Smith-Simonsen.
  1. Trial run. Running half a night/show along with one of Jaegers house light techs.

 

Course dates:

    Group 1 / Group 2

Course day 1 Wednesday 5th / Thursday 6th

Course day 2 Monday 10th / Tuesday 11th

Course day 3 Wednesday 13th / Thursday 14th

Course day 4 Monday 17th / Tuesday 18th

Course day 5 Wednesday 19th / Thursday 20th

The trial run date will be greed individually, but will be 2 hours during 23 – 03 on a Friday night in the following months. For more information or to apply for one of the two course groups please contact:

Ola Smith-Simonsen
ola@jaegeroslo.no

Listen: Olanskii on D59B for radioactivity

Listen back to Olanskii on radio D59B for DJ Sin’s radioactivity show

 After Frædag, Olanskii headed off to the digital realm of radio D59B for a guest appearance on Belgrade via Oslo DJ Sinisa Spasojevic‘s radio show. Taking on the first hour, after a week that saw us reverting back to dour pandemic conditions in clubland in Oslo, Olanskii represented Jaeger with a mix he described as “two warped records and a broken heart mix.”

Featuring the likes of K Hand and Anthony Rother, this mix saw Olanskii sticking close to roots House music with a remix of Prince that will make your mind melt. Olanskii joins esteemed Oslo alumni like Omar V and Ivaylo for his turn at the Serbia based radio channel.

You can stream the mix here and you can catch DJ Sin in the mix every Saturday at D59B.

Just the thought of it with Kim Dürbeck

We talk to Kim Dürbeck about Urchin remixes and his Vietnamese roots while we premiere a previously unreleased track from the artist.

Kim Dürbeck has been nothing short of prolific in the last two years. His Bandcamp account and Soundcloud page has seen a flurry of activity, cementing a new era for the producer and artist. It was all a means to an end during the lockdown period; “ to keep doing something while not DJing” as he explains over a telephone call. In its wake, however, it has created a new artistic phase for Kim. He’s in his hometown Sandjefjord when I call, about an hour and a half outside of Oslo, and yet Kim is no stranger to nightlife in Oslo.

A regular guest at Jaeger, he’s carved out a career based on his skills as a DJ that’s travelled far beyond the small and isolated coastal town of Sandefjord. He is one of the leading lights in an underground clubbing community that stretches across Norway and before the pandemic, he could often be found travelling the world with a record bag. Lately he’s focussed those skills and vast musical experience into his production work. Like many of his peers, Kim has been “stuck in the studio” these past two years and he’s been busy.

Urchin

“Would you like an unreleased track for the article,” he asks during our call. “A premier,” I suggest. “I have so many at the moment,” he says in nonchalant confirmation. He’s not boasting. Ensconced in his studio these past two years, surrounded by an arsenal of hardware synthesisers, drum machines and grooveboxes, he’s released a host of EPs on his own and contributed to compilations for HMD and the Vietnamese outfit Nhạc Gãy.

He’s been most active on Soundcloud and Bandcamp and coming via the latter he’s now also the first of possibly two remix packages for “Urchin.” André Bravo, Curtis Vodka, Cato Canari, JaJa Saine and Dustin Ngo contribute their interpretations of Kim’s Jungle-Acid original.The track, initially released two years ago, is something of a watermark in the career of Kim Dürbeck.

Urchin is a track that falls somewhere between the gaps of some left-field club genres. “It’s between Acid and Jungle,” says Kim by way of reiterating. Featuring a “simple break” that is also “not that aggressive” it’s not an easy track to pigeonhole. The Jungle element is there in the drums, and yet it is restrained. The lysergic 303 pledges its allegiances to Acid, but it almost disappears in the dense textures of the harmonies. The synthesised pad subdues the track even further, moving across the track in slow, swelling arcs of dirty noise.

It’s a track that “hit between different tastes” for Kim and he was justified when he found various ”friends” from different musical backgrounds drawn to Urchin. The Urchin remixes gave Kim the chance to “work with friends I don’t usually work with” and from André Bravo’s hefty Drum n Bass attack, to Curtis Vodka’s cut n paste trip through the dense sounds of Jungle, it covers a vast section of left-field broken beat music.

Alternative urban electronic music

Urchin and its remixes, as well as the tracks they bookend, has found Kim on a new trajectory in his music. “I always chopped a lot of breaks on my sampler when I was younger,” explains Kim “but I didn’t try to make proper Jungle like I do now.” Kim’s earlier releases would favour the more familiar constructions of European House and Techno. It would always have that raw machine driven component, but it’s only in the last few years that he’s started to explore the broken sounds of Jungle and IDM in his own music.

I wonder if it’s a reluctance on the part of Norwegian audiences to embrace these sounds that has seen him avoid these sounds in the past. He’s unsure. Although he feels that “it’s getting more open for it,” this style of music it’s still more popular outside of the country, and it’s been like that for a while.

As a kid growing up, with a foundation in Hip Hop, Kim was attracted to IDM and the British wave of artists coming from the ranks of warp et al, but he hardly found any kindred spirits in his love for this kind of music. “Most of my friends growing up didn’t like this kind of music,” he recalls, “and still today don’t like this kind of music” he adds with a tapering laugh.

Kim refers to this kind of music as an “alternative urban electronic” music with specific ties to the UK. It has much more in common with Hip Hop than the European tastes of House and Techno and in it he’s found a familiar language in which he can adapt to his own musical voice. Built from breakbeats and what he calls “errors”, Kim’s process still starts from the same machine-driven origins it always has. A live-improvisational jam between modular synthesisers, guitar pedals and computers lay the groundwork, and he never knows what will come from these sessions until they emerge from the chaos.

Kim likes to refer to his music as “art by accident” and you can hear it in its rawest form on the “Tools and Tracks“ release on Kim’s Bandcamp account. Lately however these accidents have yielded results closer to his youthful musical indulgences, than pandering to the trends around him and it’s not just something that’s cemented around his love for the sounds of IDM or alternative urban electronic music, but it goes even further back to his roots.

Finding a community

Kim Dürbeck has come full circle in more than just one way over the last two years. On the one hand, he’s been tapping into this raw, primal energy from his youth, while on the other, he’s going back to his Vietnamese diaspora roots.

Kim grew up in Norway to a Norwegian mother and Vietnamese father. In one of the Jaeger mix sessions, he talked about digging through his parents’ old tape collection, which included some Disco from his mother and “sessions” his father recorded on tape during Kim’s childhood. What these sessions were however has always eluded us…

It was “mainly Vietnamese folk music. Cai Luong, inspired by Chinese opera, but more at home,” explains Kim. The senior Mr. Dürbeck “was doing sessions every weekend with his friends” and would sing and write music for tape. Sometimes he would record sessions with guitar and mic with a lot of echo, which Kim says remind him of “Acid House.” “Tuned in half tones, it’s very different,” he explains.

Kim spent his childhood immersed in these tapes, laying the foundation for a rudimentary grasp of the production and mixing process. He cut and spliced his dad’s tapes together in mixtapes, laying the foundation for sampling techniques and Djing later on. These early Vietnamese roots lay largely untapped for the most part of Kim’s musical career however. Besides the odd annual celebration – one of which gave him his first DJ gig, playing Trance – there weren’t many who shared Kim’s interests at that point. While a burgeoning community of Vietnamese electronic music enthusiasts were waiting in the wings, Kim was largely left to his own devices and justifiably gravitated towards the Trip Hop, Hip-Hop, Trance, House and then Techno that his Norwegian peers favoured.

That all changed with social media as he started to find a larger Vietnamese diaspora producing and proliferating electronic music. It started with a “meme-account” he created, but blossomed beyond Internet humour and into music as he sought like-minded people.

“Being a Vietnamese diaspora, you search for other Vietnamese diaspora,” says Kim. It was “interesting to see people growing up just like you – doing music and being alternative.” Today there is a large community, spread all across the world, and Kim is certain it’s “mobilised.” We met a portion of this community in November when Levi Oi and Mobilegirl came to play alongside Kim for Oslo World, but the community stretches further and can be traced all the way back to Vietnam today.

Decolonising the dance floor

Through this extended social media network, Kim soon found more people like himself; people of Vietnamese ancestry living in the west, making electronic music. Most notably it was the introduction to Nhạc Gãy that set Kim off on a path to exploring these sounds again and becoming a vital part of this community. Besides Nhạc Gãy regular Dustin Ngo contributing to Kim’s Urchin remixes, there is also Kim’s contribution to the first Nhạc Gãy compilation.

“Nước Mắm Is My Holy Water” is raucous ensemble of drum machines and a folksy Vietnamese samples. It’s the first time you hear these two aspects of Kim’s youthful explorations combined, and the results are as intriguing as they are surprising. “It’s electronic music with vocals,”explains Kim of what constituted those early Vietnamese influences. “That’s why it fits so well in my jungle track for the Nhạc Gãy compilation.”

It all enriches that “collage of genres” that Kim likes to tap into when he makes music. More than that, it sympathised with Nhạc Gãy’s objective to decolonise the dance floor, as a strictly Vietnamese electronic music. It allows “access to the locals without going through the west,” according to Kim, but at the same time it’s not something that panders to exotic tropes like a library record or tourist CD. These are Vietnamese voices making electronic music in a broad sense, covering “electronic music in all genres.”

From the Jungle-infused Acid of Kim Dürbeck to the blistering Techno of Attiss Ngo on the compilation, there isn’t anything like a specific style of music that identifies these artists and their music or their nationality. It spreads as far in electronic musical styles and genrs as the Vietnamese diaspora they count amongst their ranks.

Looking towards the horizon

Kim “was supposed to go there and play” with the “Nhạc Gãy people” and initially the Oslo world line-up was also to include them “but because of covid” that never transpired. “So we had to book people from Europe.” Levi Oi and Mobilegirl certainly represented the larger community in full force. It looks like any future plans will have to be put on hold again as we face another season of covid restrictions and measures, but Kim is hopeful to get out there soon.

He continues to expand that network of friends he’s making across the world, when he’s not at home making music and he seems to be always busy on that front, as this premiere can attest. Besides producing, he’s also performing live as part of an ambient/techno trio in Sandefjord, “keeping the community alive” in the small town. He is also about to launch a new label with Larus Siguvrin, and Patås called Lek Rec, which will see the first releases come to the fore next year. At the same time he is currently working on the second remix package for Urchin while a hard-drive somewhere is bulging under the weight of music he’s created over the past two years.

As our conversation draws to a close, he excitedly tells me he’s “found a movie about Vietnamese Moroccan diaspora, and they have a very cool way of talking, mixing Arabic and Vietnamese.” …. “And just the thought of this is inspiring when it comes to music.” It will be curious to hear how this might develop and only time will tell.

There’s still clearly a lot more on the horizon for Kim Dürbeck; too much mention in a paragraph really, and it seems the pandemic has seen the artist hit a new stride, especially in music. He’s not only found a new perspective going back to the sounds of Jungle, but also a way to honour the sounds of his Vietnamese roots. From his tapes to those urban UK sounds, Kim Dürbeck is a melting pot of ideas at the moment and it seems to have no end.

 

New covid regulations come into effect

New covid regulations come into effect as of midnight tonight and table service is now back at Jaeger

News of the new covid restrictions might have reached you by now, and as you may realise this affects us at Jaeger and your experience with us. We’re adhering to the new regulations passed down at national level to the Oslo kommune and ask that you respect these measures. 

These measures come into effect at midnight on the evening of the 2nd December. 

Please have a seat

In accordance with latest covid regulations we’ve returned to table service at Jaeger. As of midnight tonight we’ll be requesting that you place your order at a designated table andwear a face mask when not seated if you’re unable to maintain 1 meter distance. 

We’ve got this

We’ve done this before… We’re still equipped with the system from the last bout of covid restrictions and have the procedures and systems in place to make your stay with us as comfortable as possible. 

Please scan the accompanying QR code when you are shown to a table, register your arrival via the app/website, order your beverages, and we’ll bring your order to you. 

Dance in the place where you are

Feel free to move, if the rhythms persuade you, but please respect the current regulations and acknowledge the measures in place with accordance to the law.

We thank you for your patience and understanding and please bear with us as we acclimatise to the situation. We’ll continue to update our measures and regulations as the situation calls for, so please stay informed and check our media channels regularly.

 

The Cut with Filter Musikk

We’re back in the cut, the Filter Musikk cut. After a long time of only being able to afford a dive in the dustiest of cheap bins, we’re excited that the cut with Filter Musikk returns to our page, with only the very freshest of cuts from our favourite record store in Oslo. From Acid to Techno, Filter Musikk supplies the capital with all things electronic music and it’s still the strongest proliferator of vinyl music in Norway. Even a pandemic couldn’t stifle its singular pursuits as proprietor and Norwegian Techno stalwart, Roland Lifjell continues to peddle the unwavering format against all odds. 

We’ve all read the headlines: even the major’s are struggling to get new records out, with re-issues of Rolling Stones records from their own headquarters congesting pressing plants the world over. It’s made it incredibly difficult to get a record out these days, and while more are opting for the digital realm, it takes a truly great record today to make the cut, the lacquer cut to be precise, and the Filter Musikk cut, to put too fine a point on it. 

There’s a certain dedication that’s always gone into releasing dance music on vinyl, and it’s a dedication that’s turned obsession in the wake of the digital revolution. Yes, there might be some type of credential associated with the old format in dance music today, but even money can’t buy your way into getting your record printed today. It takes a whole lot of patience and faith in a record to get it out today on vinyl, and we salute those who persevere.  

Not all of these can appeal to everybody, but some manage to capture something unique and something that can last beyond its time. For the person buying the record and the excessive cost involved in building a collection, we can’t simply buy a record for the sake of having the latest either. Each purchase needs to be able to stand the test of time, and speak to something individual. That is the essence of a collection and not just a library of music, and for that… we have spotify. With every new record, or new old record there needs to be a considered conscious effort, taking into account taste, space and economy (the last of these can often be argued for the right record).

Luckily there are places like Filter Musikk that exist, aiding us in our decision by separating the wheat from the chaff, making our choices so much easier and more significant. This is the cut with Filter Musikk… it’s good to be back. 

 

Jesse – Music For Emotions (Haista) 12″

Wait a minute… this record is from 2014… and it’s not even a re-issue. It’s not even a repress as far as we can tell. Somebody in the fett distro camp apparently has found a box in the basement labelled “fett” and even 4 years on this record is still pretty ”fett”. (Very good for the non-Norwegian speaker). 

We’re big fans of Jesse, as these pages will attest, and we might have been late coming to their party, but now we can’t get enough. The music of Ilari Larjosto (Stiletti-Ana) and Niko Liinamaa (Kalifornia-Keke) has endeared us not only to their individual work, but the work of fellow Finish associates like DJ Candle in the wind. Jesse, and their home label, Haista has been at the forefront of a new kind of Scando-Balearic sound for some time. Infusing guitars with synthesisers in long progressive pieces that unfurl like kosmische explorations, they make their stand on the dance floor. 

Whereas their LP III was more focussed on the dance floor, Music for Emotions, takes a more expressive turn, with elements unfolding in a psychedelic tapestry of sound. The visceral intention in the album title is there as they journey through constant modulations of a theme. At the heart of it lies a motorik-beat-like intention to propel every song through its progression. It calls to mind the endless expanse of something like Kraftwerk’s autobahn. 

Playful and charming, tracks like Emotion #1 is a fitting tribute to a wide range of influences that travel from Germany to Africa. The musicians behind the track, showing an incredible and wide arching depth to their skills between he live instrumentation and the sequenced parts. Flickers of brilliance trickling down from the likes of Talking Heads can be heard throughout with Jesse applying that curiosity for exotic sounds to their largely electronic sound palette. 

Music for Emotions is one of those records that some 8 years down the line, DJs will finally uncover as some forgotten gem. They’ll claim their discovery, coveting its secret as uniquely theirs, perhaps even re-issuing it for the next generation. Remember where you heard it first. 

 

Andrés – Back In The Open (Moods & Grooves) 12″ 

There are few who still honour the traditions of House music quite like Andrés. The soul and depth that is often negated for immediacy in our current epoch, is still ever-present in Andrés music, while it maintains an unbreakable connection to contemporary techniques and sounds. It must be a Detroit thing. 

Back in the Open finds bass guitars creating a deep undertow, dragging down rhodes keys through undulating rhythms. Melodies bounce over jubilant keys while vocal samples offer some connection to the visceral plain. Andrés weaves elements of Jazz through his expressive arrangements, playing against the busy polyrhythms of drum machines and percussive samples. 

The record feels alive, moving through the arrangements, like it’s skipping across the dance floor. There’s a sense of joy as Andrés combines brass tones and gospel-like passages, reaching out towards happy heights.  

Andrés’ experience as a producer and his legacy as one of House music’s greats, shines through in his production touches, the tracks coming together more like songs than tracks. The upper frequencies shimmer while the bass gravitates towards the subwoofer’s sweet spot. Back in the Open is equally as impressive on a big sound rig as it is on a set of earphones, and it retains it’s upbeat mood, regardless of in which context it might find itself. 

 

Efdemin, Vril – Endless / Purge (Sun Sad) 12″

It’s a double feature from a couple of Techno’s pioneers as Sun Sad records make their debut. Two artists with a unique take on electronic music, and especially Techno, find common ground as Efdemin and Vril find themselves on the debut for Sun Sad records. 

Efdemin’s music which can often travel into high-art regions of his eponymous moniker, Phillip Sollmann is not a far shout from the type of music that Vril’s been cultivating since making a debut on Giegling. They both offer distinctive voices in the world of electronic music, and there’s a clear overlap in their sounds as this VA accounts.

Efdemin and Vril find some similarities here between Endless and Purge as they create immersive soundscapes that drift along stoic 4/4 rhythms. Where there’s invitation on Efdemin’s Endles however, there’s something more foreboding happening in lower registers of Vril’s Purge. 

At the confluence of the two artists, Efdemin’s remix of Purge softens that edge as the German Techno artist subdues Vril’s darker tendencies to find a unique balance between their distinctive voices. It’s still very much about the atmosphere on this release, and even during the remix that remains the appeal of this Sun Sad debut. While everybody in Techno today is looking for that brutal edge, Efdemin and Vril counterpoint with a couple of tracks that search for serenity instead. 

 

Baraka – Nutty Bass / I’ll Be There (Kniteforce) 12″ 

Sometimes re-issues are necessary. Some of us weren’t wise or prescient enough to recognise a classic when it appears. In 1995 most of us were still adolescent naıive with embarrassing tastes, while some were even unborn. 

Fortunately re-issues like this exist, to rectify wrong turns and missed opportunities, and to undercut the hyper-inflation of discogs. Thanks to Kniteforce, we too now can add a classic Drum n Bass track to our record collection as Baraka’s Nutty Bass gets a proper re-issue after 16 years. 

What is there to say about this gem that hasn’t been said before… nothing. Revel in the glorious full bodied 90’s synthesisers and the reckless approach to percussion. As is often the case with these records, it’s the title track that lures the listener to the release but the B-side (or double A in this case) that holds the attention. I’ll be there is a liquid masterpiece, emphasising those raw origins of Drum n Bass as synthesisers and beat samples sizzle and pop in their warm analogue domain. 

It’s a classic that warrants re-issuing and from a lesser known alias from the well-established Jonny L, whose records like Sawtooth via XL recordings had firmly planted Drum n Bass in the mainstream. In 2021 he’s still releasing music as Jonny L and he continues to fly the banner for Drum n Bass and Jungle, continuing a very prolific career that initially laid the groundwork for the genre’s induction as one of the four electronic music archetypes. 

 

A life of its own – Profile on Daniel Avery

Looking back through an old interview from 2013, Mischa Mathys attempts to frame the enduring appeal of Daniel Avery.

A lot has happened since 2013. Much has changed in the world of music, and especially electronic music. DJs have assumed rock-star status, travelling the world on their skills and almost every piece of music released today at the very least references electronic dance music tropes. Who would have thought back in 2013, that this music would be as popular as it is now and who would believe that by 2021 it would be inducted into popular culture in the way that it has. 

I certainly didn’t think that would be the case when I first interviewed Daniel Avery back in 2013. Even though he had just released Drone Logic, a very popular independent dance record, it was still a niche record.  Even in the dance music arena, fit fell between the gaps of a minimal Techno sound coming from Berlin and UK Bass coming out of London. Avery, although already well known and admired in DJ circles, was still fairly unknown outside of the UK before Drone Logic, but that was to change too. 

The record left an impression, perhaps even because it fell well clear of the trend-informed mark of the time, and Avery’s star rose accordingly, only justifying his finely honed skill as a DJ. Some 8 years later though, and I’m still listening to Drone Logic and we’re all too familiar with Avery’s craft in the booth. Yes, while things have changed, much has stayed the same, and the best of these, like Avery and Drone Logic have stood the test of time. 

“I got told early on by several people close to me that the only thing you can do is make something that is true,” Avery told The Big Takeover in an interview from earlier this year, and that sentiment reflects the work and the artist’s enduring appeal today. Four solo albums and a touring schedule that sees this in-demand DJ play all over the world week in and week out, and there is no denying that Daniel Avery’s truth, much like his music, resonates with the rest of the world. As he says in that same interview; “A true and an honest statement can never be beaten.”

I guess I like club music

Avery has come a long way from his adolescent indulgences. “I’d probably ask myself if I still had that Lostprophets CD I bought in my early teens…” Daniel Avery said if he could ask his younger self a question during that old interview. It was the allure of guitars that initially caught the young Avery’s attention growing up in Bournemouth. He ”grew up on things like droney, shoegaze music” according to a Dummymag interview which led to playing the bass guitar and by the age of 15, he was recording music via a 4-track recorder.  It was a “very rudimentary set up,” he claims in The Big Takeover interview today, “but the second I started doing it, something felt right about it.”

Call it a latent talent or innate ability, but Daniel Avery’s first foray into music would not come from making it, but rather listening to it and it took him some time to come to terms with electronic music in particular. As “a young, naïve kid,” he recalls in Dummymag, “all that was there in front of me was stag and hen parties playing dance music that I fucking hated.” 

While initially put off by the tawdry aspects of “club music” he eventually warmed to the idea when he started hearing DJs like Erol Alkan and Andy Weatherwall playing sets that crossed a line between the attitude of punk-rock and the more polished aspects of electronic club music. “Richard Fearless and Death In Vegas were a very early one as well, because I love Death In Vegas and went to see them, and he was playing this mind-expanding techno and electronica. And I was like, ‘you know what, I guess I do like club music.’” That affirmation not only endeared Avery to the sound of club music, but most apparently propelled him forward towards a career in DJing. 

Selling records or selling records

“I started playing warm-up sets around 2003, but even then, it simply felt like an extension of making mixtapes for my friends but on a bigger scale,” he told me back in 2013. Avery found an affinity in the ability to be able to “affect the mood of a room,” but more than that he was able to follow in the footsteps of people like Weatherall and Fearless, blending in new music with more experimental sounds for a largely listening audience. “I discovered I could play the stuff that was coming out at the time, like the first Interpol record or TV On The Radio, and then I could also play Neu! or Kraftwerk or Harmonia,” he told Dummymag. 

He assumed Stopmakingme as a DJ moniker and started playing around London, most notably as a nascent resident for Fabric. While the UK was moving towards Bass music and the likes of Riccardo Villalobos was establishing a new minimal sound in room 1 of Fabric, Avery was drawn to the harsher edges of Techno, that was beginning to form around the last remnants of Electroclash in room 2. “I do love the grittier end of it,” he says of the style of Techno he enjoyed at the time. “A fucking heavy break from a rave/jungle record will get me every time, but everything I do has a techno heart.“ That fluid approach cemented his style and took its cues from those archetypal DJs like Erol Alkan who started to take notice of the younger Avery, but more on that later…

Around the same time as he picked up Djing, he started working at a record shop in Farringdon, London. He grafted, selling records by day while honing his DJ skills by night. London came to know Stopmakingme, not from the music that was yet to come, but for his individual skills in the DJ booth. He became a regular favourite at the esteemed Fabric, and soon caught the ear of an international audience on his skills as a DJ alone. After a decade working the decks, he did eventually move into production. 

Talking to him in 2013, I asked why he had hesitated to release music. “I didn’t hesitate,” he claimed, ​​”it was just something I had never even thought about in the early days.” In the interview with The Big Takeover, he shines some more light on the subject, suggesting that his decision to start releasing music might have coincided with the closing of the record store in Farringdon. “I was really faced with this huge crossroads in my life,” he remembers. “I could either find another job selling other people’s records, or I could make records that were sold in these stores. It was a leap of faith, but it’s one I took, and I’m so glad I did.”

On the shoulders of giants

Releasing a few singles and EPs as Stopmakingme, he made music that offered to bridge that gap between indie bands and the dance floor, much like Weatherall did with his early work for Creation, but as the bands started moving away from guitars and towards drum machines and synthesisers, so did Avery and Stopmakingme had to be killed off, so Daniel Avery could be born again. 

“I look back on the Stopmakingme period as my ‘first band.’” he recalled in 2013. It was like a kid picking up a guitar for the first time and seeing what comes out. I listen back now and it all sounds so young and naive… because that’s exactly what it was. I switched to my real name at a time when it felt like I was finally able to actualise some of the sounds in my head and, with that, could begin to carve out something of my own style.”

Assuming his given name, and teaming up with his idol Erol Alkan, Daniel Avery carried on where Stopmakingme left off, both as a DJ and a producer. It called in a new era in music for the artist behind the moniker. With Erol Alkan as friend and mentor, Avery practically moved into Alkan’s studio, with Alkan providing the platform in Phantasy Sound and the tools in the form of the machines to record what would eventually become Drone Logic. 

The breakthrough record was an immediate success in club music circles, even though it completely broke with the zeitgeist of the time. Raw, heavy percussion and synth sequences running like freight trains through the arrangements was pure body music; but body music exploring the emotional depths of a mechanical soul. “The thing that draws me to this kind of music,” says Avery by way of explanation in The Big Takeover, “is the idea of taking machines, mechanical objects, and breathing some kind of human life into them – some kind of living soul or beating heart, and making them sing in that way.” 

He moved into a studio which shared the building with not only Alkan, but also Andy Weatherall. “Aside from being surrounded by a staggering record and synth collection,” he says about the experience in the Skinny, “ it’s just a very inspiring place with an ever-present creative atmosphere.” Even, inspired as he was, it would take five years for him to follow up Drone Logic with his next record, Song for Alpha.  

Unreal

“It’s been a year full of highlights,” said Avery in 2013. “Releasing the album felt like a big moment but the thing I’m most pleased about is that I feel more confident than ever as a DJ. I’ve always been proud of my sets, but I’ve really felt a significant gear shift this year. I feel like I could play for hours and hours in every city I visit.” 

In the five years between his first and his second record Daniel Avery’s reputation as a DJ preceded him wherever he went. Channeling the influences of the likes of Andy Weatherall, Fearless and Alkan, Avery found a distinct voice in the DJ scene. Techno remains at the heart of everything he does from the booth, with humanoid machines dictating the language, but it’s that “mind-expanding” experience that he first encountered with Fearless that has become central to his interpretation of the genre. His 2016 DJ Kicks mix stands testament to that. It’s a psychedelic trip through a labyrinth of electronic soundscapes unfolding in a cinematic plot-line. It doesn’t entertain any specific genre other than a broad Techno interpretation, and while the songs of their time the mood we encounter in that mix is timeless. 

“The music that interests me is the music that sounds unreal,” Avery told Interview magazine  about where his particular tastes lie. For Avery it’s “music that sounds like it comes from somewhere else entirely and grabs you by the hand and takes you somewhere that you haven’t really been before,” and that is reflected in his DJ sets. In those early influences he seems to have carved out a unique sound that sets him apart from his predecessors, while at the same time offering a fitting tribute to the legacy left by Andrew Weatherall

Get lost

After that, “it became almost a necessity to be in the studio,” Daniel Avery told Interview around the time his second LP was released. Looking for “somewhere that feels totally different to a nightclub,” he set about making “Song for Alpha,” an LP that picked up where Drone Logic left off, while at the same time consolidating Avery’s love for those psychedelic sounds, and the quest for the dance floor. “I’m just a huge fan of psychedelic music…I just like music in which you can get truly lost.”

Getting enough distance from his debut LP, Song for Alpha is a truly different beast, although it retains some of that elusive visceral appeal of Drone Logic, even elaborating on it. “I just realised very early on that I wasn’t interested in saying the same thing again,” he explained in Interview. In the five years since releasing Drone Logic, that “youthful urgency” he displayed, had calmed and matured. Song for Alpha not only indicated a significant change, but it set the benchmark for the next 3 years, which saw Avery release two more LPs, a collaborative LP with the legendary Alessandro Cortini, and a host of EPs and remixes too. 

Song for Alpha and the succeeding Love + Light saw Avery taking a very different approach to his sound with atmosphere playing a significant role in his music. That visceral feeling he achieved in the bold rhythms of Drone Logic, he now transposed to melody and harmony as synthesisers came together in vivid orchestrations. In the two part record Love + Light it’s particularly striking as Avery moves from the impulsive dance floor to the serene tranquility of an ambient record. Love + Light did more than just tie a narrative between the beginning and the end of that record, it also offered a bridge between Song for Alpha and the follow up record, Together in Static.  

Starting life as a concept for a show, Together in Static marks the latest in Daniel Avery’s discography, showcasing, yet another side to the artist,; a reflective side, with more than just corporeal impulses dictating the mood. “It started to form,” explained Avery in The Big Takeover, “this idea of making something specific for the show that was more ambient-leaning and toward the quieter side of what I do.“ There’s no doubt that the pandemic played a significant role in this objective for an album conceived in 2021, but yet again shows Avery able to adapt, without succumbing to the zeitgeist. 

A life of its own

“I feel, right now, as if what I’m creating is a sound I’ve been striving for ever since I started,” he believes, but all the elements that constitute his appeal are still very much there, even in this latest record. The idea that “robot music” must “have a human heart” continues to be a recurring theme in his work, but now it’s able to modulate between the dance floor and a pair of headphones. 

“The best DJs take things from different genres and make them sound like they’re from the same world,” Daniel Avery told the skinny back in 2016, and with Together in Static it’s a sentiment he can still apply to his production work too. 

It’s not 2013 any more, it hasn’t been for some time, but Daniel Avery remains consistent in his ideologies. Although the music has changed and the audience has gotten younger, he remains, and the ideas that shaped Drone Logic and his earlier sets are still intact, unwavering in the presence of whichever contemporary trend. Despite, or perhaps in spite of that, Daniel Avery has shaped his career into legacy today, walking in the footsteps of those he idealised back when he was starting out. His ability in the booth is unmatched and his music continues to draw new fans to his work. 

“Creating something that can be shared around the world and that’s got a life of its own even when I’m gone,” is something Avery said he strived for in The Big Takeover. Today, as we discuss his debut LP and the fact that everything we talked about in 2013 can still be applied, the sentiment runs true. 

* Pre-sale tickets available here.

It’s just too loud with Third Attempt

*photos by Mats Gangvik

In an interview originally posted from the now defunkt formant page, Third Attempt talks about his debut LP during the midst of the pandemic.

Through shimmering pads, the faintest echoes of white noise, and an oscillating sine wave a woman’s voice appears out of the sonic mist that opens Third Attempt’s debut LP. “The world is just too loud,” she says in a lo-fi murmur, before cutting out and disappearing into the wave of a rolling bassline. The short vignette introduces the album and its title, setting a tone for a record searching for some quietude on the fringes of the dance floor.

“I had to get out of my comfort zone,” says Torje Fagertun Spilde (Third Attempt) over a telephone call from his hometown of Tromsø, where the situation with the coronavirus has been exacerbated by excessive snowfall, burying its inhabitants in a moist white blanket of uncertainty every day. “I don’t think you would want to be here now,” he says through a sigh. “It’s very depressing,” but the phone call finds in him good spirits at least and when I delay to inform him that I’m recording this conversation, he says; “What would happen if I said no, now(!)” with a jocular guffaw.

In some clairvoyant mistake, World is too loud couldn’t come at a better time. With an eerie quiet consuming Europe’s dance floors and many people sequestered indoors, Torje’s debut LP as Third Attempt has unwittingly found some sympathy with a world that is currently being bombarded with a silent war raging at a microscopic level. It is a remarkable coincidence, but the ideas and the circumstances that shaped the album has found some sympathy with the world as it is now. The idea was to “create a listening record,” explains Torje. Using “slower tempos,” closer to the music he would be “listening to at home,” rather than the kind of music that would usually find its way into his DJ sets, he wanted to get back to the more organic elements in music with a record he prides on being versatile. 

A fresh start

Torje has been refining a sound from the DJ booth as Third Attempt since 2017, after a ”fresh start” from the work he’d been doing under two previous aliases. Deep chords, intricate pads and elastic bass lines, converging around predetermined moods and tempos had laid the groundwork for Third Attempt’s records, with music that would drift between unraveling House beats with a striking use of melody and harmony. But for World is too loud he wanted to get some distance from this style of music. 

After a successful slew of records for Tromsø’s Beatservice Records, the producer has channeled these aspects of his sound into slower tempos, conjuring a very different sound from his previous records, while retaining that distinction of the Third Attempt approach. The record gestated at a time when club music wasn’t “cutting it anymore” for the Norwegian producer. “I felt I overdid it,” says Torje who “doesn’t feel it’s intriguing anymore” as an artist and an enthusiast. He has been growing increasingly bored with the cookie-cutter House that he was experiencing on the dance floor each weekend. He calls it “Toro brownie House,” referring to the popular Norwegian instant brownie mix, and says his “wake-up call” arrived one weekend on the dance floor when he realised “I heard this track last weekend, and I don’t even like it.” Torje didn’t want to be just another cog in the faceless horde, making music with the singular perfunctory intent of the dance floor. “I don’t want to sound like everybody else,” he exclaims delightedly, “because who am I then?”

He was looking for a way to get back to the soul of House music and started “listening to stuff outside the electronic spectrum to gain a different perspective.” It was late last summer and then “something just clicked” for the producer, but he didn’t quite arrive at the sound of the record completely in isolation. Working with the fundamental ideas that would inform the album, Torje only had a “half-assed beat” before collaborating with his “good friend Håkon (Struve)” on the two tracks that would become Shift and Rotor. 

A different flavour

Håkon (Leaf Pile & Sidewalk), a “very talented guitarist” coming from psych rock and garage traditions, had met Torje on the dance floor. The pair found that they had “a lot of things in common” and became fast friends. When Håkon acquiesced to his friend’s request and added some live instrumentation on his pedestrian beats, he brought “a totally different flavour” to Torje’s tracks. The result was Rotor and Shift, with the rest of the album coalescing around those two tracks, before moving to an ambient atmosphere. 

Shift and Rotor, introduces a new organic element to Torje’s sound that we’d not experienced on his previous EPs much. Evolving chord progressions and wispy tails of melodic and harmonic threads flit between funky synthesisers and anxious guitars as Third Attempt wrestles a primordial sound from rigid computer systems. “I just wanted more of a human feel,” explains Torje. While his music is still largely coaxed from within the computer, Torke admits “the machine stuff can become very tiring,” and for this album he specifically “wanted to pursue the soul aspect of things.”

While Håkon’s guitar played an important role in bringing this element to the fore in the beginning, sampling too played another important role in applying that “human” touch to this record. Sampling “old soul and funk records” Torje could create a virtual band from his “closet studio,” where he could impose that human feeling on the mutable structures and formulas of contemporary electronic music, “It comes from a human,” he says referring to the samples “and that’s important because that’s flavour.”

Torje would create his bass lines around these samples, imposing the soul and funk aspects on the relationship between the percussion and the synthesised bass, which has that indefinable tether that ties this LP to the EPs that came before it. The “communication between the rhythm and the bass is probably how I start making a track,” according to Torje, which retains that tether to the dance floor and ThirdAttempts  electronic roots during World is too loud. There are two distinct sides that appear through the course of the album. While Shift and Rotor established the organic approach in the realm of soul and funk, it would move into the more abstract electronic hemisphere by the time Longing reaches our ears.

Glimmers of nineties ambient music emerges, calling to mind the likes of orbital with pads floating through an uneven path of bass drums and snares. Melodies converge and dissipate into the distance as textures evolve through arrangements in reflecting pools of sound that languish in a serene disposition. Displacing the funk with atmosphere, but keeping that organic touch, World is too loud is a record of two very distinct sides, but very much of the same coin. “If the whole album was like that,” says Torje referencing the two tracks he recorded with Håkon “it wouldn’t be the same.”

Feeling over movement

It’s at this point a narrative begins to emerge with the title of the album exposing some hidden thread with the world around it. “The end of the album is more for the feelers than the movers.” It creates a bridge between the dance floor and the morning after. “Atmosphere is probably the number one thing for me,” says Torje. “It’s important to get right, because you can create so much movement and so much feeling, just by a pad laying there.” While atmosphere has been a consistent presence in his music, since establishing the Third Attempt moniker, in the slower tempos and mood he conjures on World is too loud it’s emphasised. In the context of the record, a theme emerges with Torje shutting out any outside influence and retreating into the music. 

It’s “almost therapeutic,” transporting the artist “somewhere else” on the echos of a sample he had stored away in his library. The sample, taken from the movie makes another appearance in Prelude after the introduction, and while it’s not “important what movie it’s from” the line resonated with Torje and on a subconscious level it was the “perfect” platitude to frame the circumstances behind the creation of the LP. 

“Thinking outside the box was really helpful to me,” says Torje, who found himself not only disengaging with the superfluous noise of the outside world, but also the Third Attempt sound. “Just thinking of how others perceive what you are doing,” he explains “I’m limiting myself subconsciously” and that’s something he “never” wants to do again…  “never again” he stresses. “Rebelling against himself,” and against the primal urges of the dance floor, Torje has succeeded in making an album that has matured his sound as an artist and is unique in the contemporary landscape for its versatility. Torje hasn’t succeeded in completely severing all ties with the dance floor as measured rhythm sections play to corporeal delights and retain that elusive mystique behind the Third Attempt sound. 

It’s a sound he is “definitely going to keep pursuing” from his closet studio, and he says he already has the bulk of a new EP ready. Being one of the many people on furlough in Norway, Torje has remained busy, making music. “I was in denial… so I just  ended up creating a lot of music in a short amount of time.” It’s given him the time to “develop something that’s been there for a long time” and while he’s still coming to terms with the “strange times” we find ourselves in, he is positive and upbeat about the possibilities that lay just beyond the horizon. “Maybe it’s good for humans,” he considers. “People are more open, and maybe people’s attention span is getting longer,” setting the scene for an album like World is too loud to exist.

Torje hopes the album will offer the listener the same kind of escape that it gave its artist last year, because sometimes the world gets awfully loud.

Oh Snap! it’s Antony Mburu

Oh Snap it’s Antony Mburu. DJ, vinyl enthusiast and club socialite talks about this now iconic picture from our photo album and more in a Q&A.

Meet Antony Mburu. His figure looms large over Oslo’s clubbing community, both on the dance floor and in the booth. Formidable both in stature and heart, he can always be found with a bounce in his step and grin on his face. 

Before he was a DJ he was a music- and club enthusiast, an untamed spirit with the ability to infect all those around him. Today he channels that spirit into his sets, often playing at Jaeger and regularly with kindred spirit Rolf Riddervold, never losing that enthusiasm he displays in this picture, taken in 2016, during our annual romjulsfestivalen. 

It was a night to remember. Not a creature was stirring, except on the dance floor. The Boogienetter DJs were out in full force with Daniel Gude leading the likes of Fredfades, Rude Lead and Hele Fitta through boogie- and disco classics and rarities. While the DJs brought the tunes, Antony brought the vibe and the picture seals in time an enthusiasm that’s rarely been captured on film like this. 

It’s become our go-to picture when we want to reflect on a sense of joy and excitement at Jaeger, and today it’s cemented in our photo album as one of those classic pictures. A lot has changed since 2016, but the feeling is still there and Antony Mburu is a big part of that today at Jaeger.

#Antony plays alongside Rold Riddervold tonight at Jaeger. 

Hey Antony Mburu; DJ, music lover, vinyl enthusiast… club socialite. Would that be an accurate introduction?

Absolutely!!

I know you have had mixed feelings about us using the picture in the past, but what’s your relationship to it today and what do you remember of the events surrounding it?

Hahaha i was just really surprised that this picture surfaced after such a long time. The same night I took off my shirt and danced shirtless in front of the dj. I think I got a picture of the situation on my phone somewhere. I was really buzzed that night so the rest is a kind of a blurr

It’s our go-to picture when I want to convey a sense of joy and happiness via Jaeger’s social media. You look so happy there. Was it completely spur of the moment, or was it something specific that happened to be caught on camera?

That night I met up with my friends from high school. I really wanted us all to go to Jaeger together so I convinced them to join me. My friend Caroline is the girl under my arm to the right. She was really excited that night as well even though it doesn’t look like it. This is just me being captured in a moment being happy with the music and the company of my friends. 

That picture was from 2016…What have you been up to since?

Not much! Just working, travelling and listening to music.

Had you been DJing at that time already?

I think I started to DJ that same year.

How did you start DJing and was there anything, besides the music, that particularly inspired you into that direction? 

Me and my friend Rolf Olav discovered his older sister’s DJ booth in the basement at his fathers place. We borrowed her USB with a lot of unknown music we had never heard of. We just started to play around with the music at pre parties and it evolved from there.. We didn’t have so much knowledge about the artists and the equipment but we played around and it was so much fun. I really like to dance so my main objective is to play music that makes you move your feet as much as I do. 

What kind of music were you into back then?

A lot of EDM. Avicii, Ingrosso, Laidback luke, goldroom, uffie, bob sinclair,deadmau5, røyksopp, and the list goes on

How have your tastes evolved?  

Oh, it has really evolved! Now I’m experimenting with whatever I can get my hands on. As long as it sounds good to my ears I’m all for it. So I listen to a lot of mixes that I find on soundcloud and mixcloud. And I also started playing vinyl so I’ve had help from people like Rolf Olav, Øyvind Morken and Filter boss Roland Lifjell. They’ve really opened my ears for music from different labels I have never ever heard off. 

I’ve heard everything from afro-beat to peak-time high energy House coming from your sets. How would you describe the music you play out?  

It’s a mix of everything. But I like music with energy and the idea of blending different styles together and not sticking with one direction from the start. But it all comes down to the reaction from the crowd. If they dance or not. 

How and when did you start playing with Rolf Riddervold? 

Me and Rolf have known each other since high school and we have always shared music with each other. We became interested in electronic music (2012) at the same time and when we got a hold of some CDJs and a lot of music, started learning and just really went in for it. That was around 2016.

What direction does he usually take you in when you guys start playing together? 

Rolf Olav has a much more creative side when he mixes. His taste is broad so when we play together it’s more experimental and fun then playing alone. We challenge each other by having different styles so that makes it more challenging matching it all together, but that is kind of the fun part of it all.  We never know where we’re gonna end up, but we always end up having a great time!

I keep either seeing you behind the decks or on the dance floor. What side of the DJ booth do you prefer today?

Definitely behind the DJ booth. It gives me immense joy sharing music with the crowd and that’s something that I don’t get tired of. 

Oh Snap! it’s Aksel Aasen

We look back through the photo album in search of the best shot and interview the subjects of some of our favourite and some iconic snaps from the venue.

Meet Aksel Aasen. Here he is on a Tuesday in 2018, sticking his tongue out to the photographer and conformity. It was an evening of Maheym with a DJ appearance from Necrobutcher at Raymond T. Hauger’s Den Gyldne Sprekk. Punctuated by an explosive onslaught of industrial sounds from the entire spectrum of rock and electronic music with

Aksel was a patron on a night that has gone down as one of our more memorable nights at Jaeger. The image, burned in the celluloid of our collective memory by Sara Ramsøe, remains a highlight in the archives today, even though its significance is somewhat more than just consequential today.

Three years on and Aksel is a member of our staff at Jaeger, after what was a serendipitous and curious series of events. When he’s not working on the bar or running the front of house, he’s making and playing music. Aksel plays in a noise band and has started Djing  alongside another Jaeger bar alumni , Marcel-Pierre Traeet. He might have lost some that glorious hair, but none of that unbridled attitude.

The Q&A

What do you remember of that night the picture was taken?

I don’t remember too much from that night to be honest, I had been working as a stage rigger at Øya that day and I probably had free entry to Jæger that night as it was an Øyanatt event

The dude from Mayhem (I guess he’s the sole member now) was DJing or at least making an appearance. Was there anything in the music that stuck in your memory from that night?

Not really.

Did you know you were having your picture taken at the time?

Yup

Are you sticking your tongue out for the photographer or was it exasperation of some other kind?

Haha I don’t really know why my tongue was out. I was probably posing for the photographer, I don’t think I was annoyed.

Did you think four years on from when that picture was taken you’d actually be working at Jaeger?

Absolutely not, I was moving to Bergen after that summer to begin Uni. I’m not great at planning long term so after those years at Uni I didn’t really have a concrete plan. My friend showed me a post on Insta saying that Jæger was hiring, so I applied and hoped for the best. I was really happy when I got the opportunity to work there.

What first brought you here and what are some of the Djs or nights that appeal to you at the moment?

One of my first encounters with electronic music in a proper club context was at Jæger when I was 20. What stood out to me the most was the great atmosphere and how important music is in creating the good vibes in a club. Right now, I’m a big fan of Morken’s early sets on Fridays, he doesn’t limit himself to a genre and I think he has really good taste in music.

You also DJ and play in a band. Tell us more about that?

I recently started DJing with my colleague Marcel, we mainly play hard progressive techno. I also enjoy playing drum’n’bass and disco house, but right now our sets are focused on techno. My band is currently on hiatus as our guitarist (the guy next to me in the photo) moved to London. I’d say our music lies in the realm of experimental noise-rock with influences from prog-rock and experimental rock/electronic albums as well as a lot of ambient stuff.

Ok, so you play at the heavier end of Techno when you DJ and the band likes to conjure noise. What is it about the darker sounds that appeals to you?

I really don’t know to be honest, a cathartic release maybe? Personally, I just love music that has a lot of raw energy and a certain amount of heaviness to it. In general I’m a fan of powerful expressions in art. As long as a track is able to express this, I don’t mind whether it’s made with more traditional instruments or a DAW.  

And does Mayhem still fit into that spectrum somehow?

Absolutely! Their first EP (Deathcrush), is a great example of raw power expressed in a musical form. The EP is unmixed, as well as having no overdubs (everything except the vocals is live) which just lends to a feeling of heaviness and rawness in my opinion.

Thanks for that chat Aksel. When will we see you next… on the other side of the bar that is.

Maybe behind the decks somewhere in the near future, and most definitely at the upcoming Mayhem concert in December.

Ps… what happened to those glorious locks of hair?

Societal pressures! People took me more seriously at Uni when I had short hair. Who knows though, they might make a comeback someday…

 

Listen: Jungle edit mix from André Bravo

André Bravo appears as ShdowH3ro for 40 minutes of Jungle themed techno.

With a nod to DJ shadow and 4hero, André Bravo has compiled a list of original edits and -tracks for  a 40 minute soundcloud mix via his page. A raucous onslaught of percussion and amen breaks are carried on the wispy trail of euphoric synths and steamy atmospheres.

André Bravo is nothing if not versatile. Here he channels some original productions into a set conspiring around the fringes of Jungle with an eye on Techno. A tense and cinematic mood courses through the entirety of the mix in some haunting interpretation of a horror film.

André Bravo

As one of the longest serving residents at Jaeger, André Bravo has been the steadfast hand behind Mandagsklubben since we’ve opened. As it goes through another permutation with new inductee, Safira he is the only original brokesteady crew member that remains at the head of the week every Monday.

When he is not at Oslo, he can be found playing all over Oslo,playing sets that range from the latest Pop anthems to the most obscure and intimidating Techno.

*Check out tonight Mandagsklubben here. 

BigUP! interview Boj Lucki

Jaeger’s Drum n Bass and Jungle residents, BigUp! talk to Boj Lucki ahead of his appearance for Oslo World next week.

If there was ever an electronic music that was imbued with the rebellious spirit, it would be Drum n Bass. It instills the kind of fanaticism of cult legends, with a legion of dedicated followers that very rarely veer from its path. Today, it’s a culture all on its own, separate from any other dance music culture, a bonafide subculture within a counter culture like club music.

It’s a lifestyle, not just a music, and for the past few years BigUP! has been Jaeger and Oslo’s tenuous connection to that lifestyle. The Oslo-based DJ representatives are the first and last name in all things drum n bass and jungle in the city, and when Oslo World came round with a concept proliferating the rebels in music, we couldn’t think of anyone better illustrate that point for the Wednesday part of the festival.  

Drunkfunk, Fjell, Tech and Simon Peter represent the BigUP! crew for the event and to mark occasion they activated their global network, to bring their Swedish counterpart, BOJ Lucki to Oslo and to Jaeger for the night. 

The Stockholm-based DJ and producer has been a staunch representative for the drum n bass genres in Sweden, raising the banner for this style of music in his efforts as part of the MIR crew. His a well-travelled DJ, playing all over the world, and a regular guest on popular radio channels like Kiss 100 and BBC 1Xtra. He’s established a label called Bukva Sound to continue to promote the drum n bass and jungle in Sweden and today he shares a kindred spirit with BigUP as one of a select handful proliferating the genre in Scandinavia. 

In the tradition of their events, BigUP! sent some questions to their visiting DJ, and for the first time we have the opportunity to publish it via our blog. 

Who is Boj Lucki?

Name: Boj Lucki

Promolink(URL)https://soundcloud.com/bojlucki

Active since: 2001

Connected labels / concepts: Bukva Sound, Mir Crew, Klubb Rekyl, Special Order

https://bukvasound.bandcamp.com/

When was the first time you heard Jungle / DnB 

At home as my brother listened to Jungle and Breakbeat from mid 90s. The first tracks I really liked: Urban Shakedown feat. DBO General – Some Justice (Arsonist Dub Mix) and DJ Zinc – The Source & Super Sharp Shooter.

 What makes Jungle / DnB special for you

The energy, the bass, that it still feels futuristic, that it fits so many music styles in one.

 What made you start DJing ?

To convey a feeling on the dancefloor, spread all amazing music that is out there and make people happy:) I was inspired by my older brother who learned to DJ and had gear in our home.

Favorite producers

Breakage, Sully, Response, Digital, Kid Drama, Coco Bryce

Favorite labels

Western Lore, Future Retro, Function and Metalheadz

Vinyl or Digital 

Both

Do you play any other genres?

Yes, some Breakbeat, UK Garage, Dancehall…

Other messages for Bigup’s followersX

Great to visit Bigup & Oslo for the first time😲! 

Find out more:

BOJ LUCKI/ MIR CREW/ REKYL/ SPECIAL ORDER/ BUKVA SOUND

www.mir-crew.com

www.facebook.com/klubbrekyl 

www.facebook.com/specialordersthlm 

www.soundcloud.com/bojlucki 

www.soundcloud.com/bukvasound

 

Driving with Tarjei Nygård

We caught up with Tarjei Nygård to talk about Drive, his latest collaboration with Egyptian Lover and more.

*photos by John Derek Bishop

There’s no mistaking Egyptian Lover’s sound. That west coast sound, imbued with the spirit of pre-hop-hop electro has been cemented in club music’s collective psyche and none dare, nor can replicate it. It lends itself to a time, but a time in a parallel dimension traveling perpendicular to ours. It’s a universe where electrified Deloreans power through aerial freeways and TuPac never left the Digital Underground. It’s where Egyptian Lover thrives, and it’s here Tarjei Nygård and Stockhaus turned to when they went searching for the vocals on their one-off collaboration “Drive. “

Drive sounds like nothing Tarjei Nygård has done in the past. A unique interaction between two Norwegian producers and a serendipitous exchange with an electronic music legend has led to one of the most endearing tracks and subsequent releases of 2021. It’s not something we expected coming off the back of Tarjei Nygård’s equally brilliant, but decidedly different 2019 EP “Lost in Lindos” and despite or more likely in spite of that, it’s turned heads as large as Solomun’s. “That’s so strange,” chuckles Tarjei over a telephone call from Stavanger, ”because it’s not the type of thing he is known for… That’s the thing with a one-off like this, it doesn’t fit into anything.”  

“Drive” skirts that impossible divide between club track and radio banger, featuring a punishing electro beat, massaged into submission with an accessible melodic theme and Balardian sci-fi lyrics from a vocoder operated by a man that has refined that style of music to a precision craft, Egyptian Lover. The larger than life figure has made an indelible impact with this particular style of music and he remains a constant presence that never disappoints. It’s a rare occasion that he features on any music other than his own, but when Nygård and Stockhaus cooked up the foundation for “Drive,” there was always only going to be one voice that could adorn their creation.

Waxing lyrical on desires of mechanophilia, “Drive” cruises on an undulating beat, flowing through synthesisers and vocoders like a 16 bit car as it weaves through LA traffic. Watching the canvas loop in Spotify, the music transports you back to the arcade in 1990 as blocky palm trees float through your periphery on your way to nowhere in particular. Stockhaus, Tarjei Nygård and Egyptian Lover capture the mood perfectly.

 It encouraged us to get in touch with Nygård to find out more about the track and what else he’s been up to since we last spoke. He’s just recovered from the re-opening party in Stavanger and after a “very enjoyable experience,” where he had the opportunity “to play for the heads” again after a long hiatus, he’s in good spirits and eager to talk about “Drive;” a new musical project; and a label in the works…

What have you been up to since we last spoke?

When covid hit, I was just in the studio making music. So now I have a bunch of music and I need to put that out. The first was Drive with Egyptian Lover. 

Yes, let’s talk about Drive. 

It took time to land that project, because first we had the song and then we realised quite quickly Egyptian Lover would be perfect to do the vocals on it. 

Did you know Egyptian Lover from before?

I knew him because I had booked him to a festival in town. I also met him in Miami one time. It helped because I met him before I booked him. I asked him and he was up for doing the vocals.  It took some time, because I wanted to be in the studio when he was doing it. 

This was before the pandemic.

Yes, I was in LA in 2018. I was lucky to go to California for some work in my old job and I combined it. 

Was it  only his vocal you were after, or did he add anything to the music?

I guess he added something to the music, by using the vocoder, which is his signature thing. It was very cool to be there and see the way he records.

Did you go to his studio?

He doesn’t have his own studio. I think he just rents a studio for a week when he’s working on something. I guess it’s easier in LA because it’s a little bit cheaper. But he is very adamant on doing it on an SSL desk and this kind of approach. Everything he does is old school, like mastering tapes to the pressing plant on vinyl. He’s doing it like he did it in the eighties.

What was Stockhaus’ involvement?

It started because Stockhaus was here in Stavanger, doing a writing course in music. He had some free time, and I invited him up to my studio and we made the track together. There was a little bit back and forth after we got the vocals from Egyptian Lover, and then I did the final mix. I also made the club version and the dub version. 

Tell me a bit about the club version, because it seems to me that it’s basically an extended version of the original.

That’s totally correct. It’s very similar to the original. The idea of the whole project was to keep it in this eighties vibe, when they had this extended version on every record. And that’s also why the dub is also quite simple, like those versions you would find on an eighties record. 

Where did the track start? Was it a melody, a beat, or simply a jam session?

We started with a drum beat, from what I can remember. I programmed some drums and Kristian Stockhaus just started playing stuff. It was just a collaboration in the studio and it was this kind of jam session, where we got a lot of tracks down. I made a demo version, which I played out and people seemed to enjoy, and then I sent it to Egyptian Lover and it continued into this song. 

Did it originally have that west coast feel, even before he put his vocals on it?

It was there from the beginning, and when we did it, we didn’t have Egyptian Lover in mind. It’s a one-off song for me, because it doesn’t sound anything like the stuff I’ve done before. 

I think that’s why it jumped at me when I first listened to it. 

I do a lot of different stuff and I’m interested in a lot of different music styles. We ended up just doing it, we didn’t have control either. The strange thing is that it could have been lost on a hard-drive somewhere.

Did the track already have a name at the point when you got Egyptian Lover on board, or did that happen after he wrote the lyrics?

I think I actually had the concept in mind, and he wrote the lyrics. It had that retro video game feel to it. He is such a professional. A couple of days before I arrived, I had sent him a little blurb about the track and when I came into the studio, he had everything written down and was ready to go. He’s very effective and just very good at what he does. 

Will this result in any future projects for the three of you?

I think this is a one-off. (laughs) It is nice to see this kind of one-off thing to the end, because a lot of these one-off things don’t really make it out in the end. It’s almost more difficult to finish this kind of project, than a project that’s similar to what you are doing.

How much more do you have coming out?

I’m working on a big project with Are Foss. We’ve released a few songs together on Full Pupp and Eskimo and are now beginning to see the end of a big project.

This is the project where you guys were going to your hytte and recording music?

Yes, we’ve been up there a bunch of times, driving snowmobiles and A.T.Vs, carrying a lot of equipment and having some friends over. That project is 85% finished, but it’s really nothing I can talk too much about…

Is it very much like the track you worked on together on Lost in Lindos, Øylie?

Some of it, but it goes in all directions. It’s quite an ambitious project. Some of the songs are pop; some are ambient and downbeat; and some are experimental. We even use a banjo in one of the songs. (laughs) 

The other thing is that I’m reviving my old festival Perkapella as a record label, that’s something I want to talk about more. 

Is the new music going solely for your own music?

I’ve signed The Glue. They are going to release their back catalogue and maybe some new stuff. 

Is The Glue’s music what planted the seed for the record label?

Yeah, they make Disco edits and during covid I got the rights to some of the songs that they’ve edited. That’s going to be quite fun. There is this one song that’s quite popular called, “penger” which was an underground hit on soundcloud. 

What about your releases, will you continue to release on other labels like Eskimo and ESP, or will you eventually release your music on Perkapella too?

I will see. First we have to start getting those releases from Da Glue in order. And then I’m going to get that other project with Are on the way… and then I’ll get that music I’ve been working on during covid under way. 

 

Homecoming with Fehrplay

It’s “probably the most nervous” Jonas Fehrplay has been for a show in years. It’s his latest version of a live show called Oblique and besides San Francisco, who has only seen a trial version, Jaeger will be the first time he performs the show in its refined entirety. And more daunting than that, it will be on home turf, in Oslo. 

While most musical artists break ground in their hometown in their formative years, Jonas’ ascent to success followed a much different path. It’s almost a decade after making his debut with a track that stormed the dance music charts and put the name Fehrplay amongst the highest tier in dance music. It’s hard to believe that besides a short DJ set at Findings 2015, this will be the first time the Norwegian artist and DJ will perform in Norway. 

“It’s my hometown,” he says while taking a bite of a pastry in a French delicatessen in Majorstua. Friends and family, some of whom have never seen him play, will be there to witness the premiere of Oblique, and trepidation has taken root, but you wouldn’t be able to tell it, just by looking at him. 

Jonas Fehrplay is amicable, taking an unlikely interest in the person that’s asking the questions as he is in answering them. He’s the consummate professional and although he’s answered these questions a million times in the past he carries no sign of fatigue or impatience in his physiognomy. He’s not the type of person we often get the chance to interview at Jaeger as an artist working in some of the upper echelons of the industry, where he reigns amongst the top-charting artists of our time, but his excitement for playing the basement is palpable. 

Everything about Jonas Fehrplay belies his success however, and there’s something unassuming and down to earth about the artist that is probably ingrained in his Norwegian roots. 

 

Growing up in Norway, Jonas learned to play the piano in his youth and it was Trance music that first caught the ear of the impressionable youth. From there a “love” for club music cemented an early curiosity and Jonas found himself “drawn” to it, besides having no strong cultural connection to anything like a scene. 

Armed with the theoretical knowledge of the piano, he started making music on his computer as a precocious 12 year old. A computer and the amateur loop-based software called e-jay provided the arbitrary tools and he started making music in a collage-like form by “taking samples and putting them together.” While his friends were playing playstation, he “would be on a laptop making Trance or House or whatever,” burning his creation to CDs for the various house parties he would visit by night. “I always had two CDs when I went to parties,” he recalls through a slanted smirk “because someone would always break the first one.” 

The case was a little different when he was hosting his own parties in his parents’ basement. Hooking up his piano to a pair of decks he would “play piano over the records” in what he remembers as “full-on basement parties,” but yet he lacked that connection to a community that could develop this curiosity into anything more. Friends didn’t really share his interest, and he was left largely to his own devices, before leaving for the UK to study abroad. 

It was ultimately the experience of moving to Manchester at 18 that laid the foundation for a career in club music and paved the way for Fehrplay to exist. “Just being in Manchester changed my whole perspective on club music,” explains Jonas. “That’s where I kind of grew up.” 

In Oslo, he never really found an outlet or a community for his creative pursuits and his musical tastes lay more at odds with the people around him. “It was more commercial,” he claims. An academic move to the north of England turned out just what Jonas needed to develop his music and turn it into a fully fledged career. In Manchester Jonas spent his days making music in an apartment he shared with people he still calls  friends today, and his nights at places like the legendary Manchester club, Sankeys –  just a few footsteps away from his front door. “As a young guy,” he says, “experiencing music like that is very important – Getting out of your bedroom and out of your city.“ 

It certainly had an advantageous effect on Jonas’ music, because while still only eighteen years old he signed a track to Ministry of Sound’s label and released “Meow” onto the world in 2010. It was picked up by BBC radio and Pete Tong and put the name Fehrplay on the lips of many influential tastemakers in the industry. “I think I listened to that clip of him introducing me a couple of hundred times,” remembers Jonas fondly. 

Bubbling synth lines are punctuated by formidable bass stabs before building up to a transcendent crescendo culminating in an uplifting major chord progression. Jonas “perfected that record over the course of a year,” cementing not only a sound built on the influences of Trance in the era of progressive House, but it also encouraged the young producer to release more music.  

“Between that and now,” he says trailing off into laughter “there’s been a lot of shit.“ It’s subjective, I’m sure, because there’s a level of success that isn’t simply stumbled upon and he certainly has cultivated a distinct sound. You can still hear that same foundation of “Meow” in one of Fehrplay’s latest “Kiki.” There’s a progression through melody and form, touching on the visceral, as it builds and breaks down. It spirits the listener away to ecstatic heights through a disembodied vocal and there’s a gratifying immediacy to his music that’s approachable.  

There’s an element of uplifting mood underpinning music made strictly for dance floors, which has the ability to unite a crowd over the course of a theme while trying to retain that connection between the big room and the dark underground club that birthed this style of music.

“It’s always hard to describe your own music,” he considers when I put this to him. “I find myself somewhere in the middle, where my music is still accessible to a lot of people, but more of an underground thing.” He’s recently established Mood of Mind in that vein, a record label that has become something of an “extension” of the artist. Featuring artwork by his mother, it’s a very personal project where Jonas can put out music by other artists and the Fehrplay tracks that don’t necessarily fit the profile of another label. 

It’s “great to put out your own music whenever you want to,” he says and pandering to label demands can be exhausting. Instead of making music for another label in their specific aesthetic, Jonas is freer today in making the music he wants without the added pressure of a demanding release schedule. He didn’t however simply arrive at this stage, and had cut his teeth in a trial by fire at Pryda and Friends. 

After releasing his debut on Ministry of Sound, Jonas not only found the ear of Pete Tong, but also Eric Prydz, who quickly signed the young artist to his Pryda and Friends label. The label  was a definite springboard for his career, and Jonas remembers the time at the label as “rewarding yet stressful.” He had sent in a demo and it was pure luck that somebody at the Prydz camp picked it up at all. It encouraged that drive to release music by giving Jonas a platform to release his tracks, but after 4 releases the relationship ended in what he describes as a “sad situation” when they completely erased Jonas’ music from their catalogue.

It’s a “long story” according to Jonas and one that he doesn’t really feel like reiterating here, but what came from the ashes was a new record label in the form of Mood of Mind and a new relationship with a much more open record label, Anjunabeats, as well as a move back to Norway in 2016. 

Jonas and his wife had been living in New York since breaking through in Manchester, riding a wave of popularity, predicated by the rise of EDM in the states. As somebody working on the forefront of progressive House rather than EDM, “it was a nice outlet for people who didn’t want to see Tiesto,” he suggests of his success. 

Jonas had a few “amazing shows” at the beginning of his sojourn in the USA and it “sparked a lot of conversation in the industry there,” as his star rose over the western front. A move to New York followed and while Jonas by his own account, “didn’t like what the scene was becoming, especially when America got on-board with it,” he wanted to offer something different. Moving forward, he would find a lot of success in the US with his music and his performances, but a different life called to him in 2016 when he made the move back to Norway. 

He feels it “was kind of sad” when he had to leave New York for Norway, “because I was just getting into living in New York.” He reminisces fondly on driving over the Brooklyn bridge as the sun comes up over the horizon after late night studio sessions. “I was pinching myself; thinking is this real?” Alas a better job opportunity for his wife at home and a more structured family life for a newborn awaited them in Norway and the move back home was inevitable. 

At times it can feel “like stepping backwards” believes Jonas who also thinks it might have ultimately affected his creativity. It’s “motivating to experience new things,” he explains and  “moving back to a place I’ve experienced my whole life” might not be the best for an artistic disposition. The culture of a place like New York with its clubs and artists living in some bohemian enclave from the rest of the world, inspires on a daily basis. Then again priorities change and there’s also some positive elements to moving back home. In Norway for example “it’s more about having a good space to work in” today for Jonas. “Being able to build a studio and having my family close by” has motivated Jonas in other ways and in this dichotomy, Jonas has found a happy balance in his work life.

As the borders open up and the pandemic eases into submission, Jonas is already travelling again for shows and that experience he seeks will undeniably follow. Jonas ultimately considers the move back as a “good choice,” at least for the moment… 

The pandemic and the home studio has given him time to perfect his live show, much like the way he perfected “Meow.” He talks at length about the technical aspects of making it work and making that intangible connection between the recorded tracks and their live versions. It’s a daunting prospect for anybody, a show of this magnitude, including the visual aspect, and it can’t be any easier, doing it in front of your home crowd. He’s eager to see the project come to life, but the nerves remain nevertheless, predicated by the idea of that debut performance in front of family and friends. 

That validation of playing your first in front of your hometown, has always eluded Jonas. Usually you play the home gig before moving out beyond the borders, but for Jonas that never happened. He had established himself on the international stage and this next performance will essentially be his live debut in Norway. It’s Jonas’ homecoming, so to speak and it’s understandable why he should be nervous. 

*Fehrplay presents Oblique (live) in the basement on Nightflight, Saturday 16.10. 

Premiere: Ivaylo – The Walkers (Karolinski remix)

Premiering Karolinski’s remix of Ivaylo’s The Walkers… from the forthcoming EP 2020 via his Bogota Records label. 

2020 was the year that never happened. Many artists and DJs retreated into their introverted world, immersing themselves in their greatest passion only to be dismayed by the utter hopelessness of trying to release music; play a concert; or DJ during the exasperating circumstances of the pandemic. There was some solace to be found in the virtual realm of streaming, but that only lasted as long as the second wave before it too became over-saturated, and without that physical connection to an audience, unrewarding. 

There were a few however that persevered regardless. They continued to make music, perform and DJ against all odds, and in some many cases even managed to make an indelible impact in their field. Ivaylo calls these people the walkers. “The Walkers,” explains Ivaylo over an email exchange, “are those creative souls who went through that period full of positive energy.”

“The walkers” arrives this week on a new EP called “2020” from Ivaylo’s Bogota Records, as the full-pupp affiliate and Jaeger resident channels that positive energy into defining the spectrum of sound for the next era of Bogota Records. Created in the “pre-zooming” era of 2019 and completed in 2020, “2020” only sees the light of day in 2021, and as much as it calls in a post-pandemic age for the artist and the DJ, it was also a way for Ivaylo to ”get all these emotions of my chest.”

*2020 is out on Bogota Records this Friday

For the remix of the lead track, Ivaylo turned to one such “walker” in the form of Karolinski. The dub-techno artist and DJ has been a musical force, releasing music across the spectrum throughout this difficult time, and “The Walkers” finds the deep sounds of Ivaylo’s original submitting under her dub-infused charm of Karolinski’s musical idiom.  

Karolinski shapes Ivaylo’s track from the percussion up. “The Drums!”; she exclaims via email, ”that’s the only original sound I ended up using apart from the short vocal sample.” Bells ringing out in the vast emptiness of space, flicker in and out of our orbit as wispy noise and ephemeral synth lines build into a progression over an intricate tapestry of percussive instruments. There’s a feeling of distance coursing through the track, like a gap in the passage of time. It’s subtle and immersive.  

“I don’t know. I just wanted to tune it down, make it chill as well as danceable at the same time” explains Karolinski about the origins of the remix. Churning around 115 BPM and ineffable mood sinks in. In a similar fashion to her own music it simply started with a “synthesiser and kick, and then it just flows wherever it goes,” says Karolinski in a pragmatic exchange over email. 

She made it in a few hours, but hung onto it for a while until she could grasp the intricacies of what she created. “I then felt something for it,” she says and then handed it over to Ivaylo to find its way out this Friday via any good digital outlet. We’re eager to hear it in full and as a preview, we’ve been given the opportunity to premiere the track ahead of its release. 

*Pre-Order 2020 including this track from beatport.

See you on the floor…

The dance floor opens and all corona restrictions fall away as Jaeger re-opens fully.

“See you on the floor:” a simple epithet for a greeting that we at Jaeger have been using since time immemorial. Used flippantly and impulsively it had almost lost all meaning by the time the pandemic hit, to the point that it feels like we took it for granted.

After two years of not being able to say those words, the weight they carry today can’t be taken lightly and it gives us great pleasure to be able to say to you… “see you on the floor.”

In accordance with the latest corona restrictions you no longer require to be seated at a table or have one meter distance between you, allowing us to do away with those clunky, unnecessary things that have been taking up our dance floor. Our guests will be yet again free to move and free to mingle and free to express themselves through movement on our dance floor. It’s been a trying year for everybody in our efforts to find some median between these arbitrary restrictions and the essence of what Jaeger is, and it brings us great pleasure and relief to finally be able to do away with these “rules.”

As a result there will no longer be any table service and the bar is open for anybody to simply walk up and purchase something directly from our staff. There’ll no longer be that awkward middle ground between android and bar staff. It will most certainly be surreal to get back that point where we were before the pandemic and we look forward to welcoming you all back to the floor.

While the corona restrictions are now removed, we’ll continue to follow the situation and adhere to any changes in government and local policies, but only in a way that remains pleasant for our guests. Needless to say we’ll try to keep that as far away from our and your minds while enjoy your night with us across our two dance floors.

Yes, we have two dance floors again and we’ve already opened our basement for Fridays and Saturdays. As you might have seen by now there has been some changes happening in the basement and we’re able  to accommodate a bigger dance floor and more bass down in our subterranean sound lair. At the same time the courtyard will continue to host our resident DJs and a dance floor, and with new fixtures arriving in the near future, we’ll be spending some effort in creating a cosy and snug environment as the winter draws nearer, but more news on that later…

For now let us enjoy this new found freedom again and for those of you that came of age during the pandemic, we’re truly happy to be able to welcome you to experience club music for the first time. It brings us great pleasure to finally say… and undeniably mean… SEE YOU ON THE FLOOR!

Emerging at the confluence of art and club music with SGurvin

“The music scene, the club and the art scene are merging.” A few years back, this was a predominant theme in club music. Labels like Stroboscopic Artefacts headed by artists like Lucy were attempting to redefine the gallery as club space, channeling ideas from conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp through a couple of grooveboxes in a warehouse space offering a backdrop like one Rauschenberg’s white canvas’. It was pure art for art’s sake and it felt like we were on the cusp of inaugurating Techno as a legitimate artform in the stuffy world of academic art practises. There was a spirited push to achieve this, but then as if the entire Techno scene realised there would be no economic advantage in pursuing these ideas, it just vanished into thin air.  

The art-world were curious, but unaccepting while the club scene turned their back on these musicians in favour of a return to the immediacy of the corporeal and hedonistic, leaving these artists and and their works stranded in a kind of elusive no-man’s land, where they’ve joined previous attempts from the world of Jazz, post-Punk, Noise, and Ambient music genres. Abandoned by most and admired by few, these attempts go largely unrecognised by the great art institutions, forever doomed to drift haplessly on the river styx between “highbrow intellectuals” and “lowbrow nonconformist” in a state of artistic purgatory, only to be appreciated years beyond their creation. On the rare occasions artists like La Monte Young and Ryuichi Sakamoto managed to wade through the bog to otherside as bonafide “artists”, but for most it’s a self-deprecating struggle against the tide with a singular motivation propelling them forward into the obscure. 

It’s here in this realm that SGurvin first emerged as an artistic vehicle for Sigurd Gurvin, but with a more fluid adaptation of the concepts above, he has seemed to emerge on the other side with EPs for Full Pupp and remixes for the likes of SYNK, in an effort towards a more accessible idea of this music as a consumerist artform, informed by ideologies like: “resistance to the institutions getting too much power over the art scene and the definition of the art scene.”  Sigurd sees “club culture as a modern folk tradition” with the emphasis on the folk aspects as some kind of social glue in the experience of the creative process that like most post-modernist before him can redefine “the black box as a way of thinking about the white cube;” in this particular case the club space as a gallery space. 

In the period between 2017 – 2019 he and Langagora (Henrik Langgård) realised the vision as EUFORISK, functioning as a club night series and a collective where the focus had been to “loosen up this white gallery idea of art, and see it more as a social sculpture… move the aesthetic approach to something that’s happening.” Today those ideas from the defunkt club nights has been channelled into a label of the same name operating as an “archive”, and as something that Sigurd can continue to carry with him in everything he approaches, from making music to performing a live-hybrid set and even releasing records for Full Pupp.  

Growing up in Moss, these ideas manifested early with the young Sigurd in the world of Hip Hop where he found a “form of expression for a culture of peace, love and unity” in the dusty beats of this black American music. “Trying to connect different aesthetics to make a culture and a community” Hip Hop became an outlet for his creative identity at first. He found a “guru” in the Moss music icon Don Papa. The eccentric Don Papa has been a significant character in Norway’s music scene, influencing Sex Tags as well as creating his own music under aliases like Pablo Pækkis and MC Helbrød, and with outfits like Flammer Danse Band. Don Papa became a huge inspiration to the young Sigurd, who admired the Don for his originality and his ability to “flip things” in a perspective unique to that artist. Taking his musical cues from the Don, Sigurd started seeking out an expression in Hip Hop before eventually moving towards electronic music.

After many years in Hip Hop culture, however he felt “ it was getting too strict” and needed a new outlet for his creativity. “I was making too crazy beats for the rappers,” explains Sigurd, and the Hip Hop community by that stage was getting bogged down in “too many rules” for Sigurd. He sought out  “alternative ways of thinking about music” and after various forays into Jazz, Punk and Trip Hop, he eventually found a voice as SGurvin in the experimental realm of electronic music repurposed for the club. After completing his studies at the Art academy in Tromsø, Sigurd started to “develop a musical language” alongside working with visual art.” He spent five years refining these concepts and ideas, and when the time came, coinciding with a move to Oslo, it first took the form of an altruistic moniker, SGurvin and later as EUFORISK in collaboration with Langagora

EUFORISK started out in 2017 to “put our own work in context,” explains Sigurd. He and Langagora aimed to create a collective in order to “bounce some skills” off eachother “and learn from the creative process.” They ended up “making a culture around it” based on the ideas of euphoria where they’d be “creating and healing through a bigger body.” The limited run of events in middelalderparken in Oslo became more than just a club night, it became “a meeting point for people and a mashup of art expressions” according to its creator. Unfortunately, bureaucracy got in the way, and unable to use the venue they’d established after it was bought out by the city, the EUFORISK RAVE club concept died. 

“The project isn’t dead,” intercepts Sigurd… “we’re on level two, focusing on presentation of videoworks, interviews and VJ/DJ-mixes” he says with a wry chuckle. It was never just about the club concept, and since its inception it’s offered a platform for Sigurd to release music as SGurvin. Albums like Turn/Return followed, in which Sigurd would explore concepts as personal motivations through abstract sonic experiments. “I see concepts as the motivation,” says Sigurd. “I want people to get something out of it, but I need a personal motivation for my ideas, that’s linked to my life.” Turn/Return follows the story of a relative that went missing only to be found later in Berlin, but at the same time, it deals with Sigurd’s artistic identity as he comes to terms with his own metamorphosis during this period. The kafka-esque concept is delivered in strikingly brilliant music where atmosphere and melody abound in the spaces between the concrete rhythms. 

Beyond the concepts lie a musical curiosity however, and while Turn/Return dealt with these heavy ideas behind the music, the EPs that followed like “Trouble every day and Evolving Times aim to create brighter rooms, but in a fairly similar soundscape,” according to Sigurd. In some cases like his latest collaboration with Krass (Krister Kollstad) on Full Pupp Ekspress it abandons the visceral almost completely for the sake of the context: “On Subway Rails EP, we had an idea to make a vinyl release for the dance floor.“ The record which was first conceived in 2018 after Sigurd met Krister trying to “break into the DJ booth” at a EUFORISK event, didn’t quite make it onto the vinyl format as a digital release, but the context is still there as a club-based record. 

Rapid fire snares exchange patterns with wooly kicks and dreamy atmospheres in what Sigurd describes as a record that is trying to contribute to what he refers to as “Oslo Tekno.” It’s “something not just for the dance floors and not that hard,” but something that could be enjoyed beyond the club space. It’s this ethos he’s taken to his other work for Full Pupp including the the SGurvin EP and with more to come through the label in the near future, it seems like the idea is solidifying the sound of SGurvin around the Prins Thomas imprint. 

“I am inspired by relating to people, formats and ideas.” explains Sigurd about his differing approaches to music in an email after our conversation. “With EUFORISK, the focus was on developing style, putting our own work in context, learning from others, sharing knowledge and creating a culture for different art expressions that meet each other. With the Full Pupp releases, there are other frameworks and principles that apply, and this has also been a great inspiration for me.” Inspiration has come from working with Prins Thomas, something Sigurd purposefully sought out, and collaborating with artists like Krass and SYNK on original music, remixes and sometimes club events.

Underpinning all of this from the recorded works, the activities from EUFORISK and the live show is a simple desire for motivation. “If you’re curious about making something with this motivation,” he explains, “it’s often more interesting than if you’re trying to make just Techno.” In cases like Subway Rails it might fit neatly in the context of Techno, but without that motivation that sense of experimentation you find behind the music, often leads to some deeper cognitive layer. In some perfect post-modernist interpretation it can certainly be taken at face-value, but just beyond that lies an ideology derived from culture and context. It’s not Techno as obvious loop-based functionality, but  a heady confluence of art and music, for those ready to seek it out. At the same time all of that is completely immaterial in the context of representation. 

As he continues to move “in the direction of dance music” through his SGurvin project, especially with Full Pupp, this connection becomes more tenuous compared to something like Turn/Return or Trouble Every Day, but with an artist like Sigurd, it gets increasingly harder to separate the work from the person, and as you talk to him you realise, that spark of something innovative or different that might have drawn you to his music, is only fully realised in the context of the artist behind the work. Ostensibly it might be nothing more than Techno, but from the first sentence he spoke that desire to reconstitute the gallery in a club his work as SGurvin remains infallible in the context of his conceptual pursuits.

It’s time to make some noise with Helene Rickhard

“It feels like now I have a chance to make some noise,” says Helene Rickhard over a telephone conversation, inhaling the sentence like she’s taking a drag from a cigarette. She’s just moved back to her hometown Arendal, and I imagine her sitting in some remote location on the outskirts of the southern Norwegian town in the midst of a sprawling record collection that consumes every inch of where she lives. 

She’s back in Arendal after spending years in Oslo, and like many of our peers, has used the pandemic to relocate and re-adjust. “The pandemic changed everything for me, and the lifestyle in Oslo changed a lot,” she says. “So I ended up selling my apartment there and bought a house in Arendal.” She’s still just settling into the familiar terrain, but she’s determined to use the opportunity to “focus more on creating music.” With concrete plans to build a studio in the new house and some vague plans to set up a label, Helene Rickhard is entering this new phase of her life with some excitement and some trepidation. It’s “scary to have all these plans,” she considers, ”and then you have to do it eventually.”

Over the last few years in Oslo, she’s  made a name for herself on Oslo’s music landscape as a DJ with a style all her own and more recently as an artist making music as an extension of that style. 

Helene Rickhard would feature on nights where the tone would be left of left-field, with a sense of intrigue and originality setting her apart from even some of the other DJs on the flyer. Sonic journeys through early synthesisers and drum machines conspire through re-constructed pop arrangements that live in the obscure shadows of synth pop and synth wave. There’s something nostalgic, even in the new music she plays, and she weaves these expressive tracks together in a cohesive mood that permeates through mixes like this latest, we recorded during Øya Natt in 2021. Foregoing the ubiquitous beat matching style of today, she plays each track in its entirety, giving the listener a unique introspective view of her individual tastes, which is in every set she plays, regardless of where she might find herself in the lineup. 

“I’ve always been an eager collector of music, since I was a child,” says Helene of the origins of these tastes a week after she played the opening set to Øya Natt at Jaeger. Growing up in Arendal to artist parents with a penchant for classical music, “popular music was extremely exciting early on,” for a young Helene. “It started with cassettes,” she remembers. “Making mixtapes via the radio” and buying tapes from catalogues a collection started to grow, which eventually included vinyl, cds and more recently MP3s and armed with all this music, you’d be forgiven for thinking a career as a DJ was just waiting in the wings, but that would only come much later… 

As a child of the eighties it was the “electronic sounds” of hissing synthesisers and dusty drum machines that set the tone for her earliest influences. When she eventually heard Kraftwerk, “it was mind-blowing,” and she dropped 7 years of piano lessons when she by her own account had “learnt nothing” to focus all her attention on getting her first synthesiser. With an early Korg synthesiser and Akai sampler manifesting around 15 years of age, Helene has been “tinkering with all kinds of synthesisers and computers” ever since. 

For as long as she’s been tinkering on synthesisers and collecting the exotic electronic sounds of electronic music, Helene has been “involved in the club culture” and has known DJs. She, alongside a group of friends “threw the first rave party in Arendal, in 1993” for example and although the fascination with Djing existed from an early age, back then Helene was quite happy to spend a night “on the dance floor and listen to other people” play.  

…“I was 35 before I started Djing,” recounts Helene today at 43 years of age. In a culture that has recently only seem to mature, 35 is still very young, but Helene’s experiences with making music and collecting records gave her an uncanny advantage in the DJing scene in Norway.  Yes, she’d been a recognised artist, working in the cold tactile environment of dark ambient, releasing records for the likes of Rune Linbæk’s Drum Island records and Center of the Universe’s Metronomicon Audio label before attempting to DJ, but what she developed as a DJ set her immediately apart from the others, due to her esoteric collecting habits.

“I was making music before I started DJing, because I was so scared,“ explains Helene of her delayed inauguration into the world of DJing. Fear of performing, didn’t stop Helene getting involved however, at a rudimentary level at least. She would make mixtapes for herself, and some of those made it onto soundcloud where eventually peers and friends suggested she should start DJing out. “I was like ‘oh no,’” recalls Helene, but after some persuasion she caved and thought, “I have to try.” 

She remembers her first set out, or more accurately she remembers the “black-out” that ensued. It was incredibly “nerve wracking” and she clearly recalls thinking at the time; “I never want to do that again.” Luckily she persevered and today she plays regularly, from club locations in Oslo to festival stages in Bergen. She’s featured on esteemed platforms like Lot Radio and Hjemme med Dama’s mix series and DJing has played a role in the drive to feature her original music on record labels like Snick Snack. 

She remains nervous when it comes to DJing, but she “prepares a lot” to overcome some of that anxiety. Pouring through her records, always “looking for something new to play,” Helene is a self-proclaimed “junkie when it comes to songs” and requires something new all the time. That’s the collector in Helene speaking. “If I bought 20 records one day it’s old the next day. It’s a kind of hoarding” she proclaims. “I hate going with the same bag to play the same set.” And when she says new, she means “new for me.” The “golden era” of music for Helene remains that period, most of us are too young to remember, but have some innate impulse towards. For Helene this is music made between ‘77 to ‘83 made from the early sounds of affordable synthesisers and drum machines. 

During the pandemic, without being able to go to a record store, she had to turn to the digital outlets and platforms like bandcamp for music. Through those efforts, she’s found newer labels and artists making the same music and she’ll often mix these pieces in with their older counterparts.  Even so,  “a lot of the new stuff sounds like it was played in ‘83” says Helene through a hearty chuckle.  It all actually sounds like Helene Rickhard. 

She is a unique entity in an increasingly homogenous landscape, and even while she goes through different phases in her musical tastes, her “self-indulgent” tastes never sound like anything else around it. “That’s some kind of personal thing” she remarks and “it has a lot to do with emotions” for Helene. Lately, she’s very into the “cosmic balearic sound, because, it’s very free” and she can piece elements rather than sounds together through her mix as she moves through uncharted territory of her own visceral response to the music. “Sometimes I find myself playing super weird stuff” says Helene questioning herself with “what the fuck am I doing,” but it’s all part of the intrigue of her sets, and often makes for some of the best moments in her selections.

She’s still fairly new to DJing in terms of playing out, so it is a constant point of evolution and education for Helene Rickhard, and from these warm up sets she’s played at Jaeger to “dance slots” she’s been enjoying recently, she is impulsively adaptive. “It changes all the time” with her “moods,” she remarks and a mood quickly solidifies around a selection of songs. This is why she also foregoes beat-matching in her mixes. “I’m more into moods and harmonic mixing, than the regular beat mixing.” she explains. Always one for “a bit of drama in her sets,” Helene considers herself “more like a selector” than a DJ, and while we know she can, she’ll avoid beat-matching in favour of creating some some sense of suspense in “musical connection between the songs” rather than a simple rhythm based link.

It’s a lifetime’s worth of musical knowledge coalescing around a couple of record players with Helene Rickhard echoing through every track. There’s something intriguing, mysterious and visceral of the past in every track, and while her sets might differ from one night to the next, there’s always something appealing and something new to explore through the rabbit hole of her extensive musical knowledge. 

Diving through a Helene Rickhard mix is a trip. It’s a journey through the personal, clouded in some abstract swathe of musical colour. Nothing concrete ever really emerges, but there’s a distinctive emotive quality to her mixes and by extension her music. 

Asked whether DJing has had an effect on the music she’s produced recently, she says “absolutely.” “I like a mysterious, psychedelic sound,” she explains; “A bit dark and I tend to like to dance to slower music.” Apart from featuring on a few VA’s over the last few years, Helene has yet to bring out an EP or even a single, but that looks set to change as she settles into her new home and establishes her new studio. She claims she has “tons” of unfinished projects gathering dust on her hard drive and she’s looking forward to getting them out to the labels that request them. 

The new home studio will be a place where she can work on music, unconcerned about noise complaints from the neighbours, and it seems that it might predicate a new creative phase in Helene Rickhard’s life. Labels are continuously knocking on her door, and having featured on compilations for Hjemme Med Dama, Snick Snack and Hærverk Industrier recently, her music has been reaching a wider audience. Imbued by a new confidence that comes from DJing, where she can “step a bit to the side and see your own music objectively,” she’s found it “easier to finish stuff now.” More importantly however it’s the sound of her sets that have started filtering into her music. Moving on from the dark ambient music she was making before, Helene feels she is “more sure about the sound or the aesthetics” she wants and like her DJ sets, it’s music that reflects her personality and her esoteric tastes. 

There’s certainly and ensuing noise to come from the artist, and even though she might have relocated, she’ll continue to have a presence in Oslo and Norway’s DJ scene. Between Djing and music, Helene Rickhard it seems, is only just getting started. 

Snick Snack vol. 1 – Redefining the Norwegian underground

At times it feels like the entire Norwegian electronic music community is operating underground. At its most successful artists pluck away at the fringes of some indie mainstream, but for the most part, Norway’s reclusive scene is always bubbling under the surface of everything else.But for a select few there’s a level even below that, where they toil away, completely independently of a specific scene or music. 

Since the early 2000’s Ost & Kjex and Truls and Robin have been four such figures in Norwegian electronic music and now they’ve channeled their combined efforts into shining a light on the greater Norwegian underground electronic music scene via their label Snick Snack Music for their first compilation record, Snick Snack Volume 1. 

Snick Snack volume 1 assembles a stellar list of some leading characters operating in the obscure sections of electronic music in Norway and mostly in Oslo. It’s a diverse group of artists that move through introspective Techno, “midi Punk,” exotica electronica and dance floor bangers through 10 tracks that centre around the dance floor. 

From the brooding melancolica of Helene Rickhard to the raw discotronika of whalesharkattacks, the compilation covers a broad spectrum of electronic music voices covering every imaginable style. With no one particular scene or musical genre tying these artists together the compilation showcases the vast area of disciplines in Norway’s electronic music arena with a little bit of everything for even the most discerning listener. 

Øyvind Morken and MC Kaman’s newly established Wildflowers collaboration and Mungolian Jetset provide the unexpected while Center of the Universe and Ost & Kjex deliver fine examples of what they do best. New artists and collaborations like OKIOK break new ground alongside the more established artists on the compilation, marking a continuation of that Norwegian melodic attitude that has stayed the course throughout the country’s musical history. Snick Snack draws a red thread from the past to the future, with a sound that remains cohesive, albeit varied.   

There’s that singular Norwegian charm that permeates through the whole release and even when it gets serious like with Bendik Baksaas’ introverted Techno as art experiment or Karolinski’s dub Techno explorations, there’s something amenable and engaging with the music. At its most accessible Truls & Robin deliver a track set to storm the dance floor this autumn, but in its entity the compilation unfolds like any club night in Norway, and as if to prove that point Snick Snack Vol.1 ends in a mix from one of Oslo’s leading club music figure-heads g-HA. 

g-HA wrangles these diverse tracks into a 48 minute exploration of the compilation in a way only he could interpret it. He turns the compilation on its head and inside out as he puts that definitive g-HA touch on the mix and a new unique perspective on the tracks that just transpired. 

The compilation sets a tone for the future of Snick Snack and brings together a group of artists that continue to work independently from any scene or style, but make a solidified claim to the Norwegian underground like few compilations before it. We’re curious how Ost & Kjex and Trulz & Robin would develop this further, and what if anything set the wheels turning for this particular compilation and these artists. So with that in mind we shot a few questions over to Tore “ost” Gjedrem from the label via email. 

Snick Snack Volume 1 is out now.

 

This release has been touted as a showcase of Norway’s underground scene. How would you define Norway’s “underground scene” at the moment?

A sleeping, party-ready dwarf.

The music is incredibly diverse, but is there anything in the sound or the artists (besides the fact that it represents underground) that ties it all together for you at Snick Snack?

For me the Norwegian sound has always been exactly that, diverse. It’s both our strength and weakness if I dare say so. Weak in the sense that the sound is hard to pin down, marked and sell. Strong in a the sense that it’s individualistic and diverse. All the producers I know here are almost a style of their own. From Trulz & Robin’s acid house to the goth induced sounds of WHALESHARKATTACKS. Much comes down to the size I guess. You can fit two times Norway’s population into London alone. Naturally we don’t have the numbers to cater to all the micro genres that make up today’s scene. Living for instance in Berlin, I imagine you can spend a whole life within a club music community. Here you’re best friends are likely into something else than you. Another factor would be the eclectic music taste of many of senior dj’s and producers. The story of the Norwegian Nu Disco sound has been told many times, but one should not underestimate the influence of Pål Strangefruit, Dj Sunshine, Dj Malin, Rune Lindbaek, Bjørn Torske, Erot, Olle Abstract’s eclectic dj-sets in the late 90’s. There has always been a fine tradition here of sharing music, knowledge and even gigs among your fellow musicians. We got so many great music tips from them thru the years.

Up until now the label has mainly been a vehicle for Ost & Kjex and Trulz & Robin. What encouraged you to get these artists together and release this compilation?

The ever growing quality of our friends’ work and the fact that little has been documented as a whole lately. We thought it would be a good idea to take the temperature of the current scene.

Was there a specific track or artist that got the wheels turning for this release?

No, the chicken came first in this case.

At what point did it start coming together as a compilation, and were there any obstacles in getting all this music?

We started planning this a couple of years ago, maybe in 2019. The only obstacle would be the slacker attitude of us Norwegian artists. We move dangerously slow, almost at the verge of self extinction. Ost & Kjex in particular.

Was there any back and forth between the label and the artists about the music, or was the music ready in each case?

The music is left entirely up to the artists, so we put out what they sent us. We know them all to be the best of music freaks, so we never worried about that. Only guideline was to make a club-ish tune.

Is there a track/artist that didn’t make it on there that you regret not having there now?

We would have loved to have a tune by our friend Charlotte Bendiks, as she is the BOMB!

I think the surprise track here for me, is from Mungolian Jetset. I wasn’t expecting that from them. I know it would be impossible to play favourites, but was there something that was particularly pleasantly surprising on this compilation?

Yes, their contribution goes to show the diversity of Pål and Knut as producers. They know and love a lot. The notion that Strangefruit or even Prins Thomas and Lindstrøm are just disco guys is a bit off. They do it all, from house, ambient, techno, exotic and beyond.

I love all the tunes of course, but got a soft spot for Center of the Universe’ oriental inspired lo-fi sounds, Karolinski’s deep dub techno roller, Helene RIckhard’s dreamy breakbeats and Wild Flowers proto-house gem Coconut Grove. But as I said, love ‘em all!

And then there’s the mix by g-HA, a perfect way to round it all off. What was the idea behind having a mix, and why g-HA? 

G-ha was a natural decision as he is the DADDY of house music in Norway. He has done so much for us in the past and is a dear friend. This was a tiny way of showing him some respect, and also a chance to get the Snick Snack music mixed by one of our favorite djs.

He pulled it off and set a very atmospheric mood in the way he put these tracks together. Was there any direction coming from the label for the mix and did it change anything in the music for you after listening back to it in the form of a mix?

There was no direction from us, we knew he would do a perfect job. His mix certainly made us see more clearly how this music fits together and as you say he brought out the atmospheric mood. Maybe it’s a bit of a Norwegian flavour we’re hearing. The dark winters and all.

Snick Snack volume 1 suggests this is just the beginning of a series. Do you already have volume 2 cards and what will you be looking for in future tracks for the comp?

Indeed we do, plans are already materialising for Vol. 2. We will be looking for strong individual artists for the next one as well, I don’t think we have to look too far.

Will we also see some individual releases from some of these artists coming through Snick Snack in the near future?

We have many dreams for the label, but they are all dreams at this stage. Hopefully in time, we will develop Snick Snack into a hub for Norwegian electronic music and be able to release music by many of these artists. There are also some old and forgotten Norwegian, electronic tunes and albums that would be fun to reissue. Time will show. Dreaming on…

 

 

This is House music: Introducing Henrik Villard

There’s no mistaking it for what it is… this is House music. From the emotive depths of the bass to the sparkling clicks of the syncopated hi-hats, there’s no confusing Henrik Villard’s music for anything other than House music. He’s been toiling away in the deeper registers of the genre since 2017 after making his debut on Nite Records and has stayed the course, pursuing a sound that pays homage to the roots of House music through contemporary voices. It’s a sound steeped in the traditions of House music and would do well coming from one of the genre’s older statesmen, let alone a fledgling talent like Villard’s. It’s a prolific talent at that with over a handful of EPs and a fair few singles coming from the producer in the first years of a still young career. 

“I try to make music everyday, because I just love to,” says Henrik about his prolific output over a telephone call. He’s been fortunate to get his music out there with a “bunch of labels that like the music” requesting releases from all over Europe and a select few like Mhost Likely, Moskalus and Two Five Six Records recently enjoying the privilege of releasing Henrik Villard’s records. “I feel that I’ve been lucky,“ suggests Henrik in what I can assume is only modesty, because this is more than luck. There’s something natural in the way Henrik’s music sounds with an instinctual grasp on House music from the first record to the latest.  There has had to have been a lot of work to get to this point in his career, which is especially remarkable for someone still in the grips of the early stages of a career. 

The House that Steely Dan built

Henrik Villard grew up in Kolbotn, a satellite town to the south of Oslo. His father was a music enthusiast and a fan of yacht rock specifically, soundtracking the son’s formative years on the saccharine sounds of the likes of Steely Dan. It took Henrik on a path towards rock music, and eventually towards heavy metal through his teens, when he first picked up a guitar and started plucking away at those fundamental musical foundations. “Playing by ear, and learning from the other kids,” turned into various afterschool project bands before he would eventually leave the guitar in its case, as the sounds of a new genre of music coerced him down another path. 

“At eighteen I got into EDM,” says Henrik. “Avicii and Swedish House mafia” was the turning point from the heavy saturated sounds of the guitar to the sterile pallets of electronic music. It was the sound of EDM that first drew Henrik to computer music and encouraged him to become a producer. “After hearing modern EDM music, I wanted to be able to create that sort of music myself,” explains Henrik. A youtube tutorial laid the initial building blocks and “it worked well and didn’t sound too bad,” he remembers today. “I guess if I were to open that project right now” he starts before trailing off in a contemplative chuckle. 

“Would you say you’ve drifted away from that kind of music?” I proffer. “Yes!” comes the immediate reply through a breathy laugh.

Around 2015 the music of “Amine Edge & Dance and their label CUFF”  drew Hernik away from those base EDM sounds to the roots of the genre and that “classic style of House” that he himself creates today. “To me they had a raw (in terms of energy) sound, ” explains Henrik, “and (although) it leans toward tech house to a certain degree – to me, their sound definitely took a lot of inspiration from classic house sounds (drum machines like 909 and 707, bass sounds from dx7 and such).” He “realised after a while that the sound was a bit too clean and techy” for him, and started moving towards something more “chilled out” sounds in the lo-fi arena where artists like Kaytranada lurked. Enamoured by these deeper sounds of the genre, Henrik applied himself to the internet for music theory and piano lessons, building on the little he knew of music from the guitar in a quest “to understand music from a technical point of view.” He “wanted to be able to play chords and notes” on the keyboard, jamming out “ideas with recordings“ and turning those into songs. 

A House of his own

It’s that craftsmanship for songwriting, built from human impulses that sets Henrik’s music apart from his contemporaries. There’s a slow-burning visceral mood that underpins all his tracks, and even while they might be built from loops, each loop is imbued with that human touch, bringing a sense of depth to the fore in his productions. Those instincts culminate across a series of EPs, the latest of which comes from Bergen record outfit, Mhost Likely. Bass lines carving deep trenches between kick drums lay deep foundations for sparkling keys and disembodied samples, cultivating a serene mood and humid atmospheres across three tracks. It’s his first release for a Norwegian imprint and it appears he’s in good hands with the label as Henrik can’t stop singing the young label’s praises. He “really appreciated how professional they are” in producing feedback and insists that this “was really essential in developing songs into better versions of what they were.”

With the next release coming from another Norwegian imprint called Klimakunst, Henrik is forging stronger allegiances with the larger House community at home after releasing most of his music on labels outside the country during the first few years. It coincided with a move to Oslo a few years back, encouraging Henrik to get “in touch with other producers in Oslo,” which has built itself into a small network of “other people with similar interests.” But it took Henrik a while to find a community of kindred spirits at home, establishing a connection to the community outside of Norway first.

It was around 2017 when he first started producing music with serious intent. Living in Trondheim at the time, he felt somewhat isolated from what was happening at home in terms of House music, and reached out over the internet to other producers. He quickly found a friend and mentor in the form of Finnish producer Selidos and after establishing a connection as a fan, Henrik sent him some musical ideas for feedback. Unbeknownst to Henrik at the time, Selidos was also the A&R man for a small American record outfit, called Nite Records, and while Henrik was looking for nothing more than constructive criticism, Selidos found something in the music that he could put out on a record. “I owe it to him” says Henrik about his first record, Takterrasse.

“That was the breakthrough in how I wanted my music to sound,” recalls Henrik today. Building on those House foundations, focussing on the deeper elements, with a human touch ebbing through the arrangements, Henrik Villard found a sound that he’s not deviated from since. “It just felt right after I laid down the main idea” for Henrik and it’s only matured and solidified since. Between the labels he wants to release on and the labels knocking on his door, there is no shortage of platforms for Henrik’s music. He doesn’t “know how to explain it,” but it’s given him the opportunity to focus much more on music. He’s gone from working full time to part time in an effort to spend more time on music, and the pandemic turned out to be “great in terms of getting more time to make music.”

Just hit play

Yet, even though he’s making more music, Henrik stresses “quality over quantity.” “I can take my time, and I don’t feel the need to put out music all of the time.” says Henrik. “You have to find the balance between doing a solid release and doing a lot of releases.” It’s this mantra he’s extended to his latest endeavour, a record label, event series and collective he’s founded with Anders “Clastique” Hajem. In his efforts to connect more to a local community since moving back to Oslo, Henrik found a kindred spirit in Anders, and the pair have set up a collective and a label Bitch Club Records. ”I think that’s what we’re called” says Hendrik hesitantly. “You don’t sound that keen on the name,” I suggest. “No, because I’m unsure how it will be perceived by anyone who hears the name… I like the abbreviation more.”

BCR, like everything, started with a chat over the internet. Exchanging ideas about music over soundcloud, an invitation to Anders’ studio eventually planted the seeds for a label and a collective to form. Hosting parties out of their Grünnerløkka studio at night and releasing records during the day, Henrik and Anders have established a small community around BCR over the course of the last year. “The idea is that we release music that we like,” says Henrik and theirs is a determined force. Encouraged by their similar tastes in House music, they are able to get the “music out there for everybody to hear” without the extensive waiting period that usually comes with putting out records on other labels. 

As the label started to come into ficus so did their events. What started as inviting “some friends over to play music all night long” from their studio, has  turned into regular occurrences of late. “That’s when I realised that I really like DJing,” exclaims Henrik. Besides making more music, he’s also used the time of the pandemic to hone those skills as a DJ through the BCR concept. He says it’s “a great feeling to see people react to what you play,” and while it’s always “hard” to play his own music, lately he’s “been much better at incorporating” his tracks in his sets recently. These sets don’t often extend outside of the BCR concept, but with an upcoming gig at Jaeger for Øya Natt alongside Olle Abstract, that is certain to change in the future. He’s nervous, but “looking forward to it” trying to “mentally prepare” for this set out of his natural “comfort zone” which is BCR. 

I am confident however that Henrik’s set will not disappoint. Between the music he makes and this conversation there is something reassuring about Henrik Villard’s work. It’s something familiar and comfortable. It’s simply House music and it’s rooted in everything he does. His music goes back to the roots of the genre, maintaining those essential formulas that will undoubtedly live on forever through each new generation, and now it’s Henrik Villard’s turn to fly the banner for the music tradition. And whatever he does next, here will be no mistaking it for what it is… this is House music.

Reflections on Bjørn Torske’s Ismistik

Before Bjørn Torske was Bjørn Torske, he was merely a name on the back of a record sleeve. A producer/writer-credit appearing on numerous EPs and LPs under various aliases and collaborative efforts, few knew the man behind these projects as we would come to know him today. Open Skies, Volcano and Algeria mark some of the early days of Bjørn Torske’s work in the field of electronic music, at a time before the name would become synonymous with the Space Disco sound that would sweep the world and install Bjørn Torske in the echelon of electronic music greats.

We’re going back to a time before the great wave of Norwegian electronic music, when Bjørn Torske was still a student radio disc-jockey in Tromsø. It was a time of great experimentation in electronic music, a time when Bjørn Torske, Rune Lindbæk, and Ole Mjøs, creating music under these various guises, would lay the foundation for a group of electronic music heads and DIY enthusiasts to build a scene that would make a serious mark on the world stage and imprint itself in the electronic music history books. 

It all started in a storage-room-cum-radio-station called Brygga and while Bjorn Torske’s own star would cement in the firmament of electronic music with records like Trøbbel and Nedi Myra enjoying the ranks of classic electronic music records today, it wouldn’t be if it were not for those early projects that first established Bjørn Torske’s talents for this music and there’s one project in particular that set this artist on that course. 

That project was Ismistik and today it marks the start of an immense and significant career some thirty years on. Those early records that Torske created together with Ole Mjøs as Ismistik continue to make significant impressions, drawing newer audiences to this incredible music thanks to a 2020 re-issue on Emotions Electric, and holding their own in the classic canon of House music.   

Originally released on the legendary Dutch Techno label, Djax Up Beats between 1991 to 1995 three EPs and an LP constitute the entire Ismistik catalogue and it reflects a time in electronic music that has aged significantly well. Floating between elements of Techno, House and Ambient styles, these records came from a time as electronic music matured into a serious artform, predicated by new technology and latent professionals exploring the limits of production and composition in this field. 

As electronic dance music went from an adolescent pastime to a viable career, it garnered a new reputation that lived beyond the corporeal as a thinking wo/man’s music and a serious music, which unlike rock n roll for instance, maintains a countercultural appeal today. 

It’s at this point that Ismistik appears with Bjørn Torske and Ole Mjøs siphoning sounds from Detroit and Chicago into an approach that seemed to soften the harsh edges of that music and brought a refined atmosphere that seemed to imbue the spirit of the music. It lived beyond the functional aspects of the music and while the EPs could and would be played in DJ sets, the album would certainly have accompanied a fair few after-parties in the mid-nineties.

“Ismistik as a project mirrored my early years when Chicago and Detroit were my biggest influences,Bjørn Torske told If Only UK back in 2018. The project came about as an extension of Bjørn and Ole’s tastes as reflected by their “Brygga” radio station show, where they piped out these new American sounds to the local students, who would reluctantly, but eventually endorse and perpetuate the sounds, starting what would become a virile and legendary Norwegian music scene in what was essentially a small fishing town at that time.  

That “freedom to play what we wanted was the main trigger to start experimenting with crude ‘remixes’ and tape edits, which in turn led to the employment of drum machines and synthesisers,” suggests Torske. “We got access to tape recorders, four-track cassette recorders so we could develop our pause button remixing ideas,” he continues in a Paperrecordings interview. “We started to make remixes and megamixes for our own shows, splicing tape and other techniques. Before we knew it, we had our own sound.”

When that sound eventually matured, Bjørn Torske approached friend and fellow producer Geir Jennsen, whose reputation as Biosphere at the time, helped the young Torske get a foot in the door, releasing his first record as Algeria in 1991 on a crammed disc imprint. That almost certainly led to an introduction to Djax-Up-Beat where he and Ole Mjøs released their first record as Ismistik in the same year. 

Quite possibly the rawest of the Ismistik releases, their debut, Bonus Bouncers features a fearsome onslaught of staccato drum machines, punching out irreverent rhythms through a foggy atmosphere of chirpiing synthesisers and luxurious pads. It has that unhinged energy of a debut dance record, but there is also this sense of trying to wrestle something into something more than just a beat to dance to. Melody and harmony conspire throughout to give the listener more than just a marching order and, possibly inspired by what was happening in the UK at that time, Ismistik finds something beyond the immediate, displaying an uncanny maturity through a first record.

It’s even more refined on the second EP, Oasis released the following year, as they seem to draw their main inspiration from Chicago rather than Detroit in what is arguably one of the best House records of that or any time. Flickers of the bubbling “disco” sound that Bjørn Torske would later cultivate, emerge in the bubbling bass-line of the title track, while everything else is ingrained in the sound of Chicago House music of the time. 

It is particularly the production of this record that sets it apart for its time. It’s a refined, honed sonic aesthetic that sounds out of place with contemporary records of that time, and listening to the record today it could easily be mistaken for a modern production. It’s that level of skill in the studio that would later set Bjørn Torske apart from every other producer, and start the beginning of that crossover success he would enjoy later on.

By the third EP, Bjørn and Ole would cement the sound of Ismistik, leaning towards the more harder sounds of Detroit again with 3rd Trace. Retaining something of that refined aesthetic of their second EP, but applying it to the harsher metallic sounds of Techno at the time, it sounds like Bjørn and Ole found a comfortable balance between their Chicago and Detroit influences on  this record. 

Later, Bjørn Torske, would reflect that although it was the sounds of Detroit and Chicago that piqued his interest, in recent times he sees “music more as a whole rather than fragmented in different styles.” This comes to the fore already in 3rd Trace, with a sound that is not already breaching the borders between Techno and House and beyond, but also incorporating those bubbling melodic phrases that would later help cement the appeal of Space Disco that would shadow Torske’s solo career.

In 3rd Trace you find a sound coagulating around Ismistik and with the backing of Djax-Up-Beat it seemed like only the start of something great, but just as they built it up, it would almost immediately cease to exist with 3rd Trace being the last record Bjørn Torske and Ole Mjøs would make together as Ismistik. It’s unknown what caused the collaborative project to dissolve, but Bjørn Torske maintains that Ole was “crucial” in the success of Ismistik to this day. A quick search of Ole Jon Mjøs suggests that he veered into a career as an academic, which might be the reason for his ultimate departure from the music scene. Whatever happened, it was not to be the end of Ismistik however… well not  for Bjørn Torske at least. 

Two years later, in 1995 Bjørn Torske would revive the project for its finale, an LP with an ironic title. In many ways Remain would be the perfect title for the record, because while the project might have dissolved the record sealed the fate of this brief, but significant era in Bjørn Torske’s legacy, one that might have all but disappeared in the the long shadow that his future records would cast, had it not been for Emotions Electric who bought these records to the fore again. 

While the EPs were a collaborative effort, Remain is a Bjørn Torske record through and through, and an album that negates the immediate impulses of a dance record, for an album narrative in a format Bjørn Torske would perfect on later records like Trøbbel. Bouncing between elements of Ambient, House and Techno, the record takes us on a journey through the earliest influences of Bjørn Torkse’s music and those first steps towards what has become a legendary solo career. 

Bubbling basslines and friendly keys cut through the icy arrangements where sharp metallic stabs and foggy atmospheres create immersive textures. It’s the type of record that could live beyond the club and the soundsystem with its charming melodies and welcoming atmospheres indulging a more introspective listening experience. It has those key ingredients that made the EPs so popular, but it’s a record that lives beyond the DJ’s record crate today and while it might be an underground classic, it still sounds as fresh as the day it left the pressing plant. 

Today, the LP together with the 3 EPs might all seem a bit arbitrary in the legacy of Bjørn Torske as the first, youthful impressions of a career that would only mature later on, but all the ingredients for that career are contained within, and thirty years later, these records are now classics in the House and Techno music canon, or at least they should be. They show a marked technical advancement in the genre and a singular voice, which still stands apart from anything coming from that era.    

And it was only the start of a career which lives on in the archives of electronic music legends today. Bjørn Torske might have moved on from those sounds, but it’s still there in his music, and even a record like Byen is very much familiar in a catalogue that also contains Remain. The genius is already present in those early records. It’s just the versatility and the skill, which is yet to come, and by the time Nedi Myra arrives on the catalogue it’s all ingrained in the legend that has become Bjørn Torske. 

 *Bjørn Torske plays ØyaNatt for Frædag.

 

It’s 3 O’clock in the morning – Are we saving a scene or an industry?

It’s 3 o’clock on a Friday morning and I’m still on the dance floor at Jaeger. I’m stepping my way through a heady onslaught of 909 kick drums and toms in what seems to be a perpetual state of motion. This is unusual for me. It’s just before the pandemic would shut us down, and  I rarely come out for the visiting DJs at Jaeger at this point, and if I do, I don’t stay beyond the first hour of a set. Something told me I had to be here. This is Jeff Mills of course, a bonafide legend, playing to an intimate crowd in what is arguably one of the best sounding rooms in the world at the moment.   

I have seen and heard Jeff Mills before, but it was a truncated festival set, barely an hour long, through a sound system unable to cope with a light breeze, let alone the relentless pressure of Mills’ brand of Techno. I don’t remember the festival, or even which country it was in, and as I write  this, I feel that it might even be an amalgamation of two completely different experiences. It’s one of many experiences since I started working in music that has been facilitated by an industry that has been homogenising the electronic music scene for the better part of a decade. Where something like Jeff Mills should be a rarefied experience, it’s become so ubiquitous, dictated by social media trends and an increasingly institutionalised music industry, It not only undermines the significance of the event, but has completely killed any possibility of a virile, localised scene to exist.

Where something should be an occasion it’s become an expectation, and this expectation has come to dominate an international industry where agents, record distributors, and the music media have dictated the sounds of the dance floor rather than your local DJ. Festivals and club nights, focussing on booking the same headlining DJs, have gentrified European dance floors and eradicated any claim for a sub- or counterculture to exist. Any remnants of a scene has been co-opted by industry in a universal definition that has whitewashed any chance for regional eccentricities to mature in the microcosms of the local community. With dancers and enthusiasts flocking to DJs, as dictated by mainstream media outlets, proliferated by PR and booking agents, it has left no room for anything close to a “scene” to survive unless they adapt to the same universal sonic approach.

It’s this predisposition in the belief that a ”scene” is a universal community, with its roots in one or two, remote origins like Berlin, that have taken the agency away from isolated, nuanced musical communities; free from the influence of a contemporary zeitgeist as proliferated by the extensive reach of the internet. In this culture, DJ bookings determine club nights rather than the residencies providing the platform for these visiting DJs to perform and exist.

Earlier that evening, before Jeff Mills quietly assumed his position in the booth, Daniel Gude was in our lounge, playing a heady mix of Jeff Mills classics; those tracks tame enough to facilitate a crowd just stepping into the evening. Daniel is aware of his audience as one of the longest serving residents at Jaeger and a dab hand at Thursdays. He gently eases the crowd into the event, playing those archetypal Detroit sounds, where elements of soul and funk channel reluctant machines beyond perfunctory demands. It’s the type of music that you would have heard any Thursday night at Jaeger, but Daniel wrestles the dynamic sounds toward temperate tempos and restrained volumes, accommodating the nascent crowd and encouraging them to move to the lower level, where local Techno stalwart, Jokke is currently playing through a determinable vinyl collection. The needle seems to saw its way through the pliable shellac, unearthing jack-hammer rhythms and sneering bass-lines. Jokke is keeping the beats per minute in the high 130s, greeting people to the floor, with waves and high-fives, people I recognise from other local Techno gatherings, but who I hardly ever see at Jaeger. 

There’s an unlikely bonhomie in the air for such an event. The cooler-than-thou Techno brigade, spending weekends in Berlin and weekdays trolling through Resident’s Advisor’s self righteous dribblings about music. The foundation is vibrating with low murmur to Jokke’s records, playing music from a collection that grew out of a savant-like enthusiasm for all things Techno. Jokke was an early adopter of this latest wave of popularity for the genre, as one of the people behind the Void club nights and for a while, Jaeger’s go-to Techno DJ. He’s played alongside the likes of Funktion, Sterac and now Jeff Mills; the vinyl enthusiast and DJ often out-shining some of the more expensive bookings. For the occasion he’s picked his way through the Detroit corner of his record shelf, fortified with rarities from the Underground Resistance catalogue. There’s some sympathy with his audience, giving them enough room to move, while slowly increasing the energy for his successor.

We’re all here for the main event, Jeff Mills, but without Jokke, and Daniel’s residency there would be no night to facilitate it. It can’t exactly exist in a vacuum, with the infrastructure of a local scene required to stage an event like this. In the background, Jaeger booker and owner, Ola Smith-Simonsen is aware of the risk of putting on an event like this, but he’s grinning. Jeff Mills is an expensive booking and even with a packed crowd, Jaeger is losing money. As a resident DJ with his own Friday night residency, Ola could have booked Mills for Frædag and have made a much more profitable night, but Retro and it’s weekly thematic pursuit in shining a light on the original vanguard in the electronic music community, made more sense. His instincts paid off. The night lives on in infamy for those who were there, and I still hear people echoing my thoughts as they conjure the night in their words; “when would you ever get the chance to hear Jeff Mills in a small club like this.”

Before the pandemic struck, Jaeger’s calendar was filled with more bookings than usual, because of that expectation of a “headlining” DJ. It was at a point where it seemed that bookings determined the quality of the night for audiences rather than the night and the space.  DJs playing loops from three decks or more in an endless reaffirmation of the 4-4 beat, forge flatlining soundtracks for perfunctory dance floors, with audiences either hanging over their shoulder in search track titles or completely disengaged as they stagger towards the next hangover or sexual conquest… whichever comes first. They are only here because the DJ has gained some notoriety of late; a track or online-set, together with some backing from notable label or media outlet pitching the scales in their favour. 

These DJs have become like the reality TV stars; fame is only a picture away and technology has democratised the skill-set to something like paint-by-numbers for adults. Whatever happened to the art of DJing? I was never truly convinced it was an artform and especially in the age of the CDJ, but some individuals have been more adept at programming a night of music for an enthusiastic dance floor than others. With a focussed, at times obsessive appreciation for music, they’ve managed to hone it into a unique craft. Many of these DJs are, or have been residents. They cut their teeth playing to the same audiences week in and week out, unlike the next generation who are coming to the fore, already “touring” before they’ve even seen the inside of a booth . Even the term resident has now become conflated as one of these DJs coming to the same venue three or four times a year. Those aren’t residencies, those are just sheer hubris from DJs believing their own hype. People didn’t go to Paradise Garage for instance to see David Morales, they came to see Larry Levan, because of his inherent knowledge of music, his relationship to his audience and the hands-on approach to the club and its soundsystem. Larry Levan was a pioneer in many of those aspects and that’s why his reputation still precedes him today. In Oslo DJs like Daniel Gude, Jokke, g-HA, André Bravo and Øyvind Morken are cut from that same cloth, even though they might bring different moods and sounds to their nights. n lieu of manufactured celebrity they had to graft at their work, garnering an innate bond between the music they play, the audience and the atmosphere. 

That skill is still there amongst some, but it’s been saturated by a virtual scene predetermined by social media and industry, where every middle class kid with a USB stick and a successful instagram account is a DJ today. The music has become mere surface noise to the celebrity of the DJ and as a result the music has suffered. I am rarely able to distinguish these DJs and their sets, as the music gets diluted down to its simplest forms so as to not supersede the ego of the DJ. There is no defining characteristic in music subjugated by their sense of artistic identity, imposing the culture of the DJ on the dance floor rather than the music. 

With DJ fees before the pandemic reaching an average of around €3000, not including the flight, the hotel and the 15% he agent asks on top of that, the industry has ensured to install the idea of the DJ as celebrity at all levels for the sake of their over-inflated economy, that makes a few key individuals richer on the back of the people sweating it out at the lower levels of club culture. Intentionally or not, this takes the necessary economy away from a local scene to thrive. It takes the job and the money away from an equally skilled, often better local DJ, who is forced into doing support or opening slots at a fraction of those fees, because they might not have the same social-media driven pull of their more expensive counterparts. How did we get here?

A status quo has been installed, calling the shots from Berlin, London et al. Perpetuating the idea that an artist/DJ with a release on a high-profile label, a featured article in an on-line magazine and a recent set at Panorama bar is somehow better than the resident DJ with years of experience and intimate knowledge of his/her crowd and club, the industry has forced the idea of the “booking” on smaller scenes in order to compete in an increasingly saturated economy. All over the world clones of Berghain and imitations of archetypal DJs (Harvey, Villalobos, Väth, Mills)  are increasingly narrowing the talent pool to familiar DJ rosters in the hands of a select few agencies. High-profile DJs dominate these rosters, garnering their position through irrelevant factors. While some of them, like the aforementioned in parenthesis, got to those positions through talent and as elder statesmen of the original scene, it’s become increasingly dictated by what a PR or booking agency deems their next big payday. A lot of the time the celebrity of a DJ is predetermined by agents, managers and labels who have a vested interest in creating a lot of hype around their DJs to get bookings, by buying their way in. 

This holds the position of power with a universal industry rather than a local scene and as younger audiences and new promoters and DJs come into music, this is the only model they know, and adapt accordingly, even in remote places like Norway. Those nuanced, focussed conditions that made it possible for a genre like Space Disco to exist, is no longer possible, since people are working within complete isolation of the internet, following a model of a club night and its music, which is not always that transferable in a different region and very rarely as good. For example, while those big-room Techno sounds that shake the cavernous rooms of communist-era factories every weekend might work there, they don’t work in a smaller room with fewer people and an early curfew. Those things that make Oslo unique and created the perfect conditions for Space Disco to exist are largely ignored for a universal approach, relayed down from the mountain of some indeterminable consortium of media outlets, labels and agents. 

DJs like the residents that graft every week at Jaeger, are of a dying breed and even DJs established in an international circuit like Øyvind Morken don’t find any room to operate within their own community, as younger DJs buck to trends directed by an increasingly institutionalised industry, where conformity to the most recent “hype” dictates their bookings and the music on the dance floor. Everything has become incredibly entrenched, and as the pandemic seems to ease out of its restrictions it seems that they’ve only fortified their ranks. Even the DJs, clubs and club nights operating on the fringes, are operating on the fringes of an extended universal scene with any idea of a community, barely existing in the superficial vacuum of social media. I simply can’t see a way out of this current situation. How did we get here?

It’s 3 0’clock in the morning and I’m on the dance floor. It’s 2008 and I’m in London’s east-end  at On the Rocks, a former working men’s club, which is the host for this week’s Trailer Trash event. One of the speakers on the left side has just blown, rattling in its enclosure like a klaxon in a plastic bag while the DJ, Hannah Holland is playing a blend of classic acid House and a new UK-based Ghetto tech sound she’ll later coin Batty-Bass. The lysergic 303 bass is trying to punch a hole through the noisy speaker, but the packed dance floor and the DJ seem unphased, pushing triumphantly through the noise as some promotor-cum-technician sets about replacing the speaker.   

It’s the recession, and yet I’m going out every weekend. Even though I’m already older than median age at the nights I attend, it’s one of the most exciting times in terms of clubbing for me as I’m catching the last intense flicker of a real scene before it’s almost completely eradicated by gentrified apartment blocks with pretentious names like “vanguard” and a street of “Urban Outfitters”  selling dubstep records. Plastic People is still there, but not for long as Shoreditch is already filling in the cracks with boutique clothing stores and gastropubs cropping up on a daily basis. On the outskirts however, Hackney Road, Dalston and Hackney Wick is brimming with a new young energy and something interesting is happening at the intersection of fashion-, DJ- and queer culture. The fashionable kids, having just read/seen Party Monster, are co-opting New York’s early party-kids aesthetic and together with a rolling roulette of local DJs are appropriating old man’s pubs, strip clubs, empty warehouses and squats to throw parties. All around London’s east-end music, performances and fashion converge every weekend for the students and new art-school emergés currently renting cheaply in council estates.

The recession is in effect, but everybody at these events is broke anyway. I have £20 a weekend, and I’m not spending £15 of it on the door at Fabric, to hear some over-paid DJ ego-tripping through a tone-deaf Tech-House set. I’d rather spend my weekends listening to over-taxed PA systems straining under the weight of ghetto tech, acid house and electro, playing in impromptu venues around my local area for a procession of ”freaks” moving on the dance floor like a catwalk, at the more affordable rate of a fiver (or free if you know somebody) on the door and £3 a drink. 

After a decade of clubbing being the sole domain of super clubs and superstar DJs this is clubbing and club-music going back to the bare-boned, white-knuckled roots of the scene. There is no headlining DJ, or specific musical theme, but everything from the flyer to the covergirl is imbuing the spirit of the party. Resident DJs, often playing extensive all-night sets cloaked in the darkness, do their due diligence, playing bass-heavy constructions while forging a sense of trust with their weekly/monthly audiences. The recession has levelled the playing field, killing off most of the big clubs in the space of a year, with only places like Ministry of Sound luring uninformed tourists every weekend; their prominence based on an ancient, hyperbolic reputation born before most of their punters. It’s broken club culture down to fundamentals again with a DIY attitude and people creating club nights for a community rather than platforms for headline-grabbing guest DJs.

It was an intense two-year period, where I don’t think I ever left the E2 postal marker, and it was its own little contained world and counterculture. Leafing through MixMag and DJ Mag at that time, it’s the fall out of the summer of new rave and Deadmau5 and Calvin Harris are grabbing headlines for their bastardisation of Filter House, while in the more serious “clubs” that innervisions Tech House sound is staking its claim. Dubstep has already been co-opted by the middle class elite at this point, and is facing a commercialisation that would see characters like Skrillex reaching billboard charts. On the margins however, avoiding the mainstream and completely disengaged with pop culture, while forging the next movement in popular culture, this period in London’s east end seems to exist in complete isolation. It’s uninhibited by the larger trends sweeping across the dance floor and it’s attracting people, who are living an alternative lifestyle.The naked reveller, the salacious sex fiends and the fashion kids, wearing American football garb as a defence against the conservatism taking a foothold in the UK, have created a verile counterculture and an actual scene for a short time in London’s east end, and unless you were there and part of it you wouldn’t have known about it. 

It’s almost impossible for a microcosm of a scene like this to exist today, even within a large population like that of London’s, because of the internet. With information being so readily available today, it leaves no room for a counterculture to exist. People will be writing about it before it even gestates, often with the fixed objective in creating a scene where none actually exists beyond a self-involved DJ. It’s why the term “underground” vexes me today. Nothing can truly be underground in the age of the internet, and if you’re using that term to describe your music or your night, it’s usually in some pretentious way that appropriates some original ideology, long-since unrealistic. What was originally underground culture is now popular culture… it has been for a while, and it’s been milked for the sake of an economy, and the only way we can get back to the community is for the industry’s demise. The only issue however is that there are too many invested in it for it to fail now. 

Those two years in London, Space Disco, the M25 raves, Detroit Techno, Chicago House and Paradise Garage, these were fleeting moments of brilliance in a history of electronic music that went to define cultures. They were never meant to last beyond the generation that installed them in their time of adolescence. Today however an increasingly profitable industry has commodified what should be a culture, with clubs, DJs and festivals lasting way longer than their expiration date. It has left no room for subculture to exist without paying its dues to the industry and the entrenched status quo of club music. 

It’s 3 0’clock and the dance floor is empty and the soundsystem is off. It’s the time of the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about saving a scene. But is it really a scene or simply an industry we’re saving at this point? Nothing seems to have changed and it seems that any promise of a pandemic changing this perspective is moot. Any delusions that we might have about some great cultural development should be realised for what it is. Everything from the music DJs make to their instagram profile is there simply to perpetuate the industry and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we’re all complacent in it. There are some trying to use this time to reflect on these aspects, but I fear at this point it’s a fool’s errand. Already prominent Berlin DJ’s are packing carryáll bags with 20 records and a USB stick to take a flight to their next overpaid DJ gig. 

The industry is too big to fail now, and any hope of a new local scene flourishing in the wake is going to be reduced when those high profile DJs are back at it, propped up by the “cultural” institutions big enough to secure their hand-outs. These established clubs, magazines, DJ booking agents and promoters have the resources and the prominence to ensure they’ll survive. They’ll continue to put DJs front and center that they believe should be in the limelight, and it’s these DJs that will be running the “main” room again when things open again, and the local resident that had grafted all year to keep the place open and operating. The things that are going to suffer are not the big clubs with huge investors, it’s the smaller DIY communities that barely stayed afloat before all this. 

Perhaps the problem is the idea of a “scene,” a word that has been used perhaps too liberally in association with club culture, with its origins in something very specific. The Oxford dictionary still defines a scene as “a social environment frequented by homosexuals.” By that definition, the few places that can lay claim to a scene are nights like Horse Meat Disco or Honey Soundsystem, and like everything else, the industry has merely co-opted the term for the association. This culture might have been born from a bonafide scene with the likes of Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan as the founders, but it’s long since been appropriated by an industry, using counterculture language and themes for the sake of commercial success, commodifying the term “scene” to where it can mean anything related to electronic club music.  

This isn’t a scene any longer, it’s a business, and like all business it is predicated on the economy of the music and its culture. For all its aspirations of being a truly independent culture, it now operates very much like any major record label with its subsidiary agencies, PR companies and management consortiums all working towards the same model. There’s still this glimmer of hope that rests with the next generation, the people coming of age during the pandemic who will have a completely different perspective on a scene. Perhaps out of the ashes of the pandemic, they can strive to build an actual scene again, a scene that will eschew the importance of the celebrity DJ and the commodity of club music, and will get back to the dance floor and that sense of community. 

I’ve seen flickers of brilliance from them just before the pandemic, and it seems to be growing from a few, but determined actors in Norway at least. I have a lot of faith that the next generation will start to negate the industry for individuality again. With a DIY attitude and a passion for music, they’ve taken to the forests, with an emphatic admiration for the music, bringing people together that share that passion. They’re doing it on their own terms, making stars of local heroes again, finding some sympathy with today’s sounds, bolstered by their own individuality and the voices of their generation. They’ve taken some cues from the last generation, but carting funktion one systems to undisclosed locations and with a community of DJs that extend beyond national boundaries they are also bringing a sense of professionalism that had sorely been lacking in the past.  

If anybody is going to stop the wheels of industry churning up what’s left of this culture and spitting it out for the sake of commodity, it’s this next generation. They’re the ones that will save a scene.

 

Words by Mischa Mathys

Deconstructed club music: A Q&A with KOSO CLUB

*Photos by Martine Stenberg

It’s hard to get away from the four to the floor music that dominates Jaeger’s dance floor week in and week out. House and Techno et al have made indelible impressions that have subverted most other dance floor styles from making an imprint and while rarely homogenous it can often be a little stifling for more adventurous and eclectic tastes. 

Wednesdays at Jaeger have long been the welcomed break from this status quo with nights that feign the conformity of the dance floor for something a little different and since 2019 KOSO CLUB have been an integral part of this weekly sojourn to the fringes of club culture and its music. 

KOSO CLUB has been carrying the banner for a more diverse club life for the past eight years. They’ve been highlighting those integral, but often overlooked voices in club culture through an expanding cast of members that are SOLDAL, SVANI, PIIKSIGRAM and HANNEKS today. With an alumni that extends abroad with names like Mike Q and Zora Jones, they’ve established an international connection to Oslo and Norway’s own club culture.  

In 2017 they were awarded NATT og DAG’s esteemed club of the year for their efforts at Blå, which have seen the collective tour abroad, and start new franchises like the one at Jaeger on select Wednesdays. It was one such Wednesday in June 2021, when they made their return to the Jaeger’s booth for the first time in 2021, bringing their idiosyncratic blend of “deconstructed club music” and ideologies to what was still a dormant dance floor.

Even under the ongoing corona measures, they continued their unwavering efforts to bring a femme touch to the backyard and assisted by magnus ah ok, they brought an ecelctic selection of scatter-brain rhythms and growling bass-lines in their unique interpretation of what a club night could entail. Hip Hop re-constructed in UK bass flavours and House music emerging through wavy indie soundscapes provided the soundtrack for a night under clear skies for the largely seated audience. 

With the memories of the music and the mood lingering, we caught up with them shortly after via email to get the lowdown on KOSO CLUB, their ideology and their musical tastes. With a radio show in the works and more nights to follow we unpack what the past and the future hold for the collective.

How did you all meet and what encouraged you to start KOSO CLUB together?

 KOSO CLUB is a branch that grew from the KOSO family. KOSO started out with a wish to see a more varied and balanced music scene that later included artists, designers, dancers and other creative people. Marit, who had been DJing for some time, started the club concept in 2013 with Juno Jensen. Svani joined in 2015, and Piiksi and hanneks in 2019.

 How long has the collective been around and are there any activities beyond hosting club nights that you’re involved in?

 KOSO CLUB is a brand and a group of DJs, we book nationally and internationally, and are always on the lookout for new impulses and ways to make each night stand out. We have been doing some fun gigs in Norway and abroad besides hosting our own club nights at Blå. We’ve done dj workshops with kids, made merch and hosted live events.

 You all DJ, but do you have set roles within the collective outside of the booth?

Piiksi is our own little in-house graphic designer, hanneks is holding on to our monthly picks-playlist, and soon to come a collab with a radio station. Svani is constantly on the lookout for artists and DJs to book to our club nights, and Soldal is holding it all together kind of like a CEO of KOSO CLUB.

 PIIKSIGRAM and HANNEKS joined after establishing the concept. What did they bring to KOSO CLUB, and will the collective continue to expand into the future?

Bringing hannkes and Piiksi in was a natural process of sharing the same passion for the music and club. KOSO CLUB is a dynamic hub and by bringing in guests we hope to give more people a space for their creative outlet and that our audience can discover new artists and styles.

 You describe the concept as “highlighting more femme people” in the club space. How would you define femme people in this context?

When we started out in our perspective the scene was lacking women behind decks, the word femme was used to include not only cis women. In later years we see that the representation should also include others, our main goal is to see a more varied scene and the creativity that follows it.

 How do you set out to achieve that objective?

We always try to be aware of representation when we book DJs/artists to our club nights within our musical universe. We want KOSO CLUB to be an inclusive and fun place and a space that can challenge the idea of what a club night can be. It is important for us that it’s a safe space for anyone who would want to join them.

 Considering club culture has been appropriated by a straight male culture, what are some of the obstacles you face in putting on KOSO CLUB?

In the beginning there were few role models to look up to but we think this has changed a lot since we started. 

 Does it look like the landscape is still changing?

Yes, we see a lot of different styles and DJs appearing in the club scene, not only in Norway, but also in Europe in general. That is great to witness, and we hope it continues.

How do you relay that objective into the music you play or the guests that you bring to the concept?

 We try to be conscious about our bookings, our track collection and what we are bringing to the scene in terms of representation and inclusiveness. 

 Is it something that extends beyond the musical component too?

 In general we like everyone to feel at home at our club nights whoever they are. So it is also a social perspective to it. 

 When you play at Jaeger it’s nice to get a break from the four to the floor that dominates Jaeger’s weekly lineup. Is there a style or mood to the music you play that underpins what KOSO CLUB is about?

 We play a lot of deconstructed club music, and mix different genres, but we try to divide it into a chill mode and a club mode so the concept can work both sitting down as what we’ve done after the rona situation or in a dark club as we hopefully can do soon!

 Do you ever feel that you have to adapt the concept or what you play to Jaeger’s audience, current circumstances notwithstanding?

 No, actually we stick to the style we usually like to play. But, of course, we have to adapt to “sittedans” nowadays – we save our hardest tunes until the club is completely open again.

 How has the music evolved since the start of KOSO CLUB?

We think we have been in the same musical vibe since we started. But we are always checking out new artists and when they evolve our sound evolves also. 

 As we get back into it in 2021, what and who are you looking forward to bringing to KOSO CLUB in the near future?

Right now we’re dreaming of a packed club full of sweaty people, and we are hoping to do a radio show. We have a lot of people on our international booking-wishlist so hopefully we can proceed with actually getting them here in the future! 

 

Urban Psychedelia: Has Techno assimilated Goa Trance

There’s a great big honk as a saw tooth synthesiser stabs a chord and dissipates into the veil of the surrounding ether. The atmosphere is dense enough to sustain life and melodies echo through the entire arrangement like moths to a flame, landing on something familiar before fluttering off into distant resonances. There’s mystery, intrigue and a solemn wonder contained in each phrase, unfolding like a David Lynch narrative with a little more purpose. 

I’ve heard this sound before. It’s slower and it’s missing a semi-quaver bass-line running through the whole arrangement like a freight train, but the similarities are striking and there’s no doubt that whatever we’re listening to today lends as much from the psychedelic offshoots of Goa Trance as it does from Techno. I’ve been hearing these sounds echoing through Jaeger’s dance floor, as the city descended on our enclave this summer. It’s evocative of a sound usually found in the forests around Oslo or the beaches in India, propelling tie-dyed writhe figures to ecstatic heights as devil sticks and ribbons dance an improvised ballet in the air. 

It’s always feigned the urban for the natural, but in its new hybrid form it has found a rhythm in the city propelled forward by the more dominating foundations of Techno. It’s been propelled into the mainstream, by a new generation of DJs with the predisposition for the hippie lifestyle, growing up in the harsh urban landscape of a metropolis city, and like its predecessor, born in Goa, it borrows indiscriminately from a vast array of musical genres in pure escapist hedonism. 

Melodies touch the firmament, echoing at times space disco’s sonorous voice, while rhythms thump in militant measures to the wide-gated stomp of its audience. It’s unsure how or when these sounds started infiltrating Techno or if in fact it’s not the other way around, but as the week rolls by at Jaeger it’s a sound currently dominating the speakers through various, unrelated club nights and residencies. 

From the first moment man put stick to skin, music has always been about touching those hedonistic heights, and nowhere else is this better elucidated in Goa Trance’s origins; A style of electronic music, associated with a specific destination in pure pursuit of relinquishing the shackles of conformity for a pure spiritual pursuit. DJs and party goers alike have completely disappeared into the music and the aura of Goa Trance, with tales and legends born from fleeting characters that have immortalised the spirit, rather than a single individual. Figures like Laurent and Dr Bobby, armed with little more than a pair of walkmans were the pioneers, and while few have heard these names, everybody today exactly knows what Goa Trance is and what it stands for. 

It’s never really been about a specific style of music. Trance as in the German version of Techno, had been there before, and Goa’s earliest soundtracks have ties to the industrial synth pop sounds of Europe in the eighties, but combine this arching melodic sounds with a group of people imbued by sixties hippy romanticism in one of the nature’s most idyllic locations and you have something that extends way beyond any music. It’s a spirit and that spirit lives on today in a youth culture on their way to an enlightened trip. 

It could well have started in Berlin… don’t all things? German Techno and what we call Trance today, has always enjoyed a fluid relationship, but I believe spurred on by cheap bargain bin records, and an enthusiastic desire for something new, it’s now found a footing on an international stage. It’s moved out from inconspicuous shadows for niche audiences, to places like Jaeger, with DJs like Safira and Lente and their extended network of DJ cohorts perpetuating  the sound while new institutions like UTEKLUB continues to burr with the spirit around Oslo’s forests. 

This summer it’s started making further ground in Oslo too as weather and nature merge in the perfect backdrop for this music and this spirit to live on. Through this spirit individualism makes way for the unifying tether of music with spotlight-seeking identifiers disappearing in the wake of sardonic titles looking for an open platform. It’s an un-choreographed dance between a piece of music, a DJ and an audience, grown from something organic into a unified entity, where no-one thing subverts or dominates the others. 

Now, it lives beyond the forests and beaches of its natural habitat and has found a new place in the city, a true hybrid of some of electronic music’s most important chapters and looking well on its way  to writing a new chapter of its own. 

 

New opening hours

Jaeger will be open longer and later from the 5th of July

As the threat of covid starts to dissipate in Norway,  we can go longer into the night from Monday. In accordance to the new regulations from Oslo kommune we are able to open til 2am and 3am on certain days with some covid protocols still in effect. Our new opening hours are:

Monday 19:00-02:00
Tuesday 19:00-02:00
Wednesday 16:00-02:00
Thursday 16:00-02:00
Friday 16:00-03:00
Saturday 16:00-03:00
Sunday 19:00-02:00

No-one will be admitted entrance after midnight as per these new regulations so make sure to arrive before. We’re still implementing covid protocols during this time, which is table service only and maintaining 1 meter distance between guests.

We’ll keep adapting protocols in accordance with the city’s covid regulations.

 

Back in Business: A mix and interview with Skatebård

Over 3 hours of uninterrupted Skatebård recorded live from our sauna.

You couldn’t keep Skatebård out of a DJ booth before the pandemic hit. The Bergen DJ was playing at least three times a week, travelling all over the world to some of the scene’s most revered and established venues.

Observations from his vigilant agent, queried the sustainability of Skatebård’s work ethic, with Bård dismissing suggestions of “taking a break” with playing more, and more frequently. By the time the pandemic hit he had been one of the most in-demand DJs on the scene. His amenable personality in the booth, where accessibility and function permeates with hedonistic pleasure, has secured Skatebård as one of the most prominent fixtures on the DJ circuit.

Then the pandemic hit, and Skatebård, like all the other DJs, was forced into the hiatus that followed. His indelible presence in the DJ booth, before proved to be prescient, and while DJs scrambled to social media streaming platforms, the Bergen-DJ could comfortably retire to his sofa with a good book and wait out the storm.

He kept at it, consuming new music where it informed his sets and honing his craft even further from his home-based hi-fi DJ set-up. He continued to play select dates, even making an appearance in Jaeger’s basement in 2020 for what turned pout to be the last night we could be open until 3am. Ultimately travel restrictions and lockdown rules had forced everybody, including Skatebård into forced hibernation.

Efforts to get him back to Jaeger when we could were left unsatisfied as quarantine measures and lockdown rules got more extreme during the winter. Eventually we had to take a page out of a Skatebård’s book and resign ourselves to the sofa, to wait out the storm.

The storm eventually dissipated and when we opened up the sauna in May and by Skatebård was on a very short list of guests we wanted back. By June he was int he sauna again, back in business, answering the call to the dance floor in pure Skatebård fashion. As our first guest outside of Oslo, there was a noticeable anticipation in the air and as Skatebård he didn’t disappoint. We pressed record and sat back and listened in awe at the enduring DJ.

It’s with great pleasure that we can present this recorded mix to our Mixcloud select subscribers today. Listen to over 3 hours of unadulterated Skatebård, while catch-up with the man behind the controls in a brief Q&A.

How does it feel to be back in business?

Feels really, really good to be playing again. But… It’s a while yet before full on travel will be possible.

What’s been the most challenging thing coming back into it after such a long hiatus?

It’s just a joy, I’ve been finding a lot of music to play in the last few months, that’s all I’ve been doing, so I’m just so ready to play all these tracks.

What did you have planned for this mix at Jaeger?

I entered the booth (tønna) with an open perspective, I can always go in many directions. But you know, my style is pretty eclectic most of the time anyway.

Did it go as planned?

It was a lot wilder actually, I was expecting maybe a more laid back night, I didn’t even know dancing was allowed in the backyard yet! With one meter distance though, mind you. But was a super energetic vibe.

I don’t think I ever saw you not smile throughout the night. What is it about a good night like that, that just makes it all worthwhile?

I was super happy, my first visit in Oslo since last August, and even a few of my band colleagues that I hadn’t met for almost two years showed up!

There’s a bit of everything in there. Was there a phase or a track that was a personal highlight? 

I was especially looking forward to playing Pais Tropical – Melodya. That piano riff… And a couple of other newly acquired italo house records. Well of course also some brand new tracks from friends!

Do you feel you’ve had to adapt or change the essence of a Skatebård mix in any way to accommodate the situation?

I always adapt a wee bit to any kind of party I play, but I mostly just play whatever I feel like anyway.

I saw a post on instagram suggesting that you’re ready to hit the road again. Is that the thing you’ve missed most?

Suggesting yes, but I also think I wrote something about that I don’t rush it either, so in the next couple of  months it will only be like a gig or two abroad a month, and outside Europe will be difficult for a while, I guess. But I appreciate everything! If you’re reading this and would like to book me, just contact my agency and we can work something out.

How do you think the DJ scene will change going forward from this, and what are you personally looking forward to in the near future?

I think that from both travel restrictions and economic perspectives, that parties will stay a bit more local for a while. That’s been my thought during the pandemic. In the near future I’ll enjoy the Norwegian summer, and I’m also very much looking forward to a festival in the Faroe Islands in the middle of July, then Trevarefest (Henningsvær), Summer Contrast Festival in Poland and Dekmantel Selectors in Croatia.

I can also add Festifest, Amsterdam, DGTL, Amsterdam, and Night Tales, London to my list of stuff looking fwd to. All in August/September.

Sous-Vide arrives on Sundays

Sous Vide takes over Sundays at Jaeger with residents Ida B,  Dolbah, Ole and Skjaerstad in our courtyard in July

After establishing Sous Vide as a label in 2019, Thomas Skjaerstad and his crew quickly added club night to their repertoire, with some label showcases at Jaeger in 2020. With  steady stream of releases coming from the young label, the people started piling in on Wednesdays to hear the resident DJs and their guests re-affirm the minimalist sound of the label from the booth.

“We had quite a nice first year of running Sous-Vide Records and in August we have been catching up with our first release made 12 months ago.” says Thomas Skjaerstad of the label’s advancements. With help from Norway’s culture board, and despite the issues with vinyl pressing plants during the pandemic, they’ve established Sous-Vide as a serious force in their field getting early love from the likes of Mixmag and Trommel.

“In summary we still believe the pandemic was a good thing for our label as we now are standing way stronger on several legs and our team is really finding their positions in the label,” explains Thomas. With Ole Henrik and Rado Kirilov joining the Sous-Vide team have grown and 8 releases in they’ve established their prominence not only as a label, but also as an event, especially at Jaeger.

After a year of successful Wednesday nights at Jaeger, and as we return to 7 days a week in the booth, we are eager to announce a new Sous-Vide residency at Jaeger. Taking over Sunday nights at Jaeger, Ida B, Dolbah, Ole and Skjaerstad will be in the booth every week, expanding Sous-Vide to a residency with their singular musical purpose.

Sous-Vide Records is a small Norwegian vinyl & self releasing imprint focused on the grooves of minimalism. Their vision is to build a sustainable, timeless portfolio of both rising stars and established talent who are fuelled by genuine passion for music. They seek to spread  inspiration and creative fuel to music enthusiasts everywhere, and they’ll be bringing this philosophy to Jaeger’s courtyard throughout July.

Check out their releases here.

July Lineup:

04.07: Ole + Ida +Dolbah +Skjaerstad

11.07: Rado + Skjaerstad +Dolbah

Lente carries the torch for Loving Tuesdays

As Tuesdays return to the calendar, Lente returns for Loving Tuesdays… with a twist.

It’s all about “tonics and tunes” says Lente about the new Tuesday club night. As we start coming back into our stride in 2021, we’ll be open seven days a week and that means Tuesdays gets a new residency. Well… a new residency bearing a familiar name. Lente brings back the Loving Tuesdays name for July 2021.

“I talked to Vari Loves and she agreed that I should carry on with Loving Tuesdays,” says Lente. The night comes back with Lente implementing some exciting new developments, featuring guest bartenders, interesting bar menus, record label showcases and podcasts from Lente’s extensive list of personal projects.

Brining his Panograna podcast to the physical realm and featuring regular showcases from his own Edelgran Records label, Lente is putting a new spin on Tuesdays with the DJ and artist at the centre of it all.

“Panograna” is music and art combined with Scandinavian environments,” explains Lente over an email. “We are a group of friends which has been dedicated to the electronic music scene for long time. The goal is to bring the beats from a vibing
dancefloor to unique experiences in different sites and venues.” With a new episode in the first week of every month, Ponograna will become an integral part of the Tuesday residency, alongside Lente’s other musical outlet,  Edelgran records.

Alongside Edelgran records, he and those friends have established a scene onto themselves with the record label bringing the Scandinavian environments to the rest of the world in the form of new sounds. They’ve already released Eps and various singles from artists like Crussen, Lente, Alex.k and Dennis Jernelius. With 2 new singles coming this summer, it looks to fortify the label’s resolve, which will come intertwined with Loving Tuesdays indefinitely as the new residency settles in with Lente at the forefront.

Lente is a familiar face on the scene today and when in the booth he creates sounds from a groove and playful palette. The Oslo native DJ and promoter is known for long and deep sets that play against the floating backdrop of Oslo’s electronic music scene. Along with his regular partner in crime Crussen, he’s played in famous clubs, like Sisyphose, Kater Blau in Berlin and many more while observing a regular release schedule in between through his Edelgran imprint.

After sharing the night with Vari Loves in the years just before the pandemic, he adds Loving Tuesdays to his list of personal projects and debuts the new night in July at Jaeger.

Here’s the lineup for July:

6th of July: Premier of “Panograna Moodcast” interviews and recording.
Hosts by Lente & Brandbrandy.

13th of July: “Exotic” with special guests Tariq and Saul Sanches.

20th of July: Resident Lente all night long.

27th of July: “Edelgran Records showcase”. Single release from Lente &
Dennis Jernelius

 

 

Everything for the vibe: Introducing SYNK

There was a tangible excitement in the air that first week back at Jaeger. People were still resigned to their tables and the volume was tempered, but the atmosphere was thick with anticipation. “You could tell it had just opened again,” says Ida Stein from SYNK a week later. “People were so positive.” Warm welcomes precipitated through the bright night as old acquaintances were re-affirmed and social human contact re-established. 

“It was great to see people again,” says Naomi Camilla, weaving between her cohort’s sentences like they were going back to back in the booth as SYNK. They came prepared on the night, “hoping to play some electro/break-beat stuff” for the mostly seated patrons, but quickly realised that it wouldn’t work as an eager audience demanded something more energetic and the pair “jumped over to a House vibe.” Moving through the great expanse of influences that informed House music they set a distinct path through the genre, capitulating to the mood.

Mix now available to Mixcloud Subscribers

That mix is now sealed in time, and listening back to it today, it marks a very clear objective and concrete statement for the future of the dance floor after the pandemic. At a time when you’d think slower tempos and reserved energies would prevail, an obvious desire for the sounds of a  dance floor undermined the situation and SYNK acquiesced with a set that felt both urgent and inviting. Melodic flickers from disco’s earliest influences charmed alongside pulsating rhythms that moved through Garage, Acid, House, Trance and Electro phases.

SYNK has been a DJ duo since 2018, and while the pandemic has claimed the dance floor for the moment, it has shown no signs of slowing the duo’s progression as a formidable force on the Norway’s DJ scene. They added producer to their list of accomplishments after releasing their first single “Lykkemaskin” on Prins Thomas’ ever-present Full Pupp label in 2020 and have since been playing regularly around the country; made mixes for European radio stations; established residencies; worked on more music than ever; and most recently, started a new club night in Oslo. It’s ahead of this first club night at Mir, that I call Ida and Naomi up for a chat. 

They’ve found a shady spot in a park to take my call as Oslo’s early summer continues to cook the city, and while a tad nervous – “we have never been interviewed together”  – the pair are chipper and easy to talk to, the best kind of subject for an interviewer whose muscles have atrophied somewhat during the pandemic. 

Unlike me, however, Ida and Naomi have been busy and Ida suggests that they’ve “developed more into a producer duo in the last year,” in large part due to the pandemic. “We had these good vibes together and really wanted to dance,” remembers Ida of the moments right after the first lockdown. “Like other people in the club scene we really missed it… so the pandemic times really started off making some really danceable harder tracks…” “and some ambient tracks,” chimes Naomi from the other side of the phone. “It went through periods in the pandemic,” recalls Ida. “It felt like we went through an emotional musical trip together.” 

A “quarantine soundwave” playlist on their soundcloud page holds a remnant from this period. A chugging atmospheric track called “be my quarantine” is all that remains unclaimed by future releases and showcases both similarities and differences with their breakout single “Lykkemaskin.” Building on those eclectic notions they’ve formed in the booth together, they’ve channeled their music through an individual approach that focuses on inviting melodies and cosy soundscapes punctuated by challenging, percussive movements. “Our style is pretty eclectic as a producer and as a DJ-duo” confirms Naomi and while the pair call on a vast array of sounds, genres and styles, there’s an underlying feeling to their sets, which generally lends itself to the music they make today. In an email later, they confirm my suspicions that it’s something that they’ve both cemented from an early age in their individual musical experiences.

Ida and Naomi both grew up in what they consider a “small town” called Sandefjord. Both had taken an early interest in music albeit from different points of view. While Ida was “drawn into singing very early,” Naomi was an avid listener, consuming all she can from Beyonce to Dimmu Borgir. At around the age of 11 Naomi’s dad built her a dance studio in the basement with “some cheap speakers and different kinds of disco lights” encouraging the impressionable youth towards electronic dance music. She would be “dancing like a crazy person to Benny Benassi” in her basement enclave she remembers fondly today. 

Ida, it seems, took a slightly different path as an insular artist “creating her own world” through mediums that ranged from dancing and singing to “painting and writing.” It was pure expression at a time when “you sometimes as a kid feel like nobody else understands anything,” remembers Ida of the experience today. A microphone and a guitar fed that expression into music, where a laptop and synthesisers awaited just beyond. Ida played in bands and eventually moved into electronic music through electro-pop as an established solo artist before meeting Naomi and forming SYNK. 

Ida feels those early introverted childhood experiences evokes a “nostalgic feeling” when she’s on the dance floor today, “cause one can get so brought back to that space – just that you’re not alone in it.” Although she is still working on her solo output which maintains an electro-pop aesthetic, Ida is also working “more and more” on SYNK as well as collaborating with Naomi on her solo work, having “merged” their artistic identity as SYNK.

They would eventually meet while Ida was a booking manager at Kurbadhagen and Naomi started DJing. Naomi had “been that girl at the party” for a while; the girl with all the music and an innate ability for musical narrative in a party setting. A few DJ friends encouraged her further and she found herself at Kurbadhagen in Sandefjord struggling to plug a pair of turntables into the predominantly digital setup. “I was super nervous,” remembers Naomi of her first gig  “and was asking Ida where I should plug in my record players.“ 

The pair became friends and started DJing together, bonding over Scandinavian Disco before quickly absorbing their individual eclecticisms. “It’s the feeling I guess and the feeling drew me in,” says Naomi with Ida re-iterating “the vibe” that continues to flow through their sets and music today. 

Moving from DJing to production, Ida and Naomi’s roles are more fluid than most DJ-production duos, sharing responsibilities based on practicalities. “I think because we use two different DAWs (recording platforms) we change between one of us setting up the recording and one of us having an analogue synth,” explains Ida who would be the more accomplished musician of the two, and who I had assumed would take on more of the technical roles in their music. That’s not the case however and as Naomi has just finished her first year in a production course in Oslo, and they’re working more remotely between Oslo and Sandefjord the dynamic in the group is more fluid than the general DJ-production duo.  

Things just “seem to come naturally” for Ida and Naomi when working together, and it’s something that had cemented itself early on in their working relationship. Going from Djing to production was effortless too. While  “drinking some beers” in Ida’s studio, something just clicked and the ideas just came “super naturally” to them. I ask if it’s easier with SYNK than with Ida’s solo project which relies on structured forms and defined melodies and Ida thinks about it before replying:I feel like it’s easier to just jump in and do it with SYNK. When we produce together, it can just happen a bit spontaneously and we’re a bit more free.” 

It’s that freedom that gives them the ability to forego style, genre and categories and produce everything for the vibe. “We started out without defining it under a certain genre,” explains Ida and they “just started off with a vibe… just experimenting.” It’s an attitude that allows Ida and Naomi to “produce what we want to” from the effervescent space-disco of Lykkemaskin to the thunderous onslaught of rhythms of their newest remix of Nattl4ampe’s “Nejjjj.” That remix for the Mhost Likely label is the first of a string of releases waiting in the wings according to Ida and Naomi.

As well as an EP on Full Pupp there are also those missing songs from the “quarantine soundwaves” playlist, and that’s just the news they can share with me right at this point. With club nights and some residencies that should come back after the pandemic, SYNK are sure to expound on their success in 2021. There’s a lot to look forward to from this young duo with established artists and tastemakers like Prins Thomas picking up early on their talents. For Ida, those things and the releases have at least confirmed some feeling that we were on the right track,” dispelling insecurities that they’ve both shared. 

Even so “the tracks we are working on now are a bit different from Lykkemaskin,” warns Naomi and that’s the confirmation transforming into confidence as the pair delve deeper and further into that eclectic realm of their mixes and merging as an artistic unity called SYNK.  

We’re Open!

We’re open Wednesday to Saturday from 16:00 -22:00 with DJs from 19:00.

We’re open! After what seemed like the longest winter, we’re back and the bass bins have been purring along beautifully this last week. As our residents and their guests have been re-familiarising them with the booth, we’ve opened the courtyard just as the  the sun started bearing down on Oslo. After a couple of weeks of spit and polish and a will they won’t they see-saw of emotion as Oslo kept delaying the eventual opening, we’re getting back into the groove and what Jaeger and the DJs do best

We’re open everyday from 16:00 with DJ’s every night from 19:00. Residents G-HA & Olanskii, Finnebassen, BigUP!, Prins Thomas and Ivaylo have thoroughly run the system through its paces with guest appearances from SYNK, Christian Engh, Kompressorkanonen and Spacebear adding to the excitement. The consensus is unanimous, we’re back in no uncertain terms.

There are still covid-19 protocols in place, but they are changing on a daily basis and we’ll keep you informed here as to how they develop. Please observe our cautions at the venue, and we’ll keep eking out the night and the volume as our lives slowly return to some sense of normality. We’re back and it’s good to have you back. You can check our programme page to find out what’s happening in the courtyard.  see you on the dance floor real soon.

PS.: If you’re the person in the picture, please get in touch with us at editor@jaegeroslo.no.

All events cancelled until the 20th of May

“A brighter night” week 1 and 2 will be cancelled and all ticket holders will be refunded in full.

Due to the extenuating circumstances around the covid-19 pandemic, we’ve had to cancel all our events up until the 20th of May 2021. We’re sorry to inform that we are unable to go ahead with our planned Brighter night event series until further notice, and have had to cancel all our events up until the 20th of May. We hope to be back by the 20th of May and pick up where we left off with #abrighternight

A full refund will be issued for everybody that bought tickets via ticketco, and we’ll send you an email shortly on how to retrieve your refund.

We’re still eager to get back to what we do best and hope to continue with the scheduled “A brighter night” events after the 20th of May 2021, as determined by Oslo byrådet. We thank you for your continued patience during this trying time and look forward to continued support. Look for more announcements regarding our events via this channel.

See you on the floor…

BigUp! midweek special cancelled

The first event of 2021 is cancelled due to on-going covid-19 restrictions. Refunds will be issued in full.

Due to the ongoing covid-19 restrictions, we’re unable to go ahead with the scheduled event on the 5th of May. Big-UP! midweek special, which was due to inaugurate the 2021 season will be cancelled and all tickets will be refunded in full via ticketco.

BigUP! will be back in the backyard on the 7th of June, unless subject to any other changes due to the covid protocols and measures. Please look out for more updates to follow about our other scheduled events. We thank you for your patience as we continue to be affected by the pandemic.

see you on the floor…

Greetings from Jaeger: We’ve been hibernating and dreaming of a dance floor

There’s a picture of an empty Jaeger basement that encounter on my computer every so often. It was taken late 2019, and the empty void lingers indefinitely in a reality today where the pandemic has taken an immense toll. Had I known it would be one of the last pictures I took of the basement, I would’ve waited for the crowd to flood in through the doors at least. The empty void is a stark reminder of the reality we find ourselves in, and god knows I hardly need a reminder…

None of us could’ve predicted the science fictitious reality that is 2020/21, least of all me. I remember listening to Jeff Mills in the basement only a few weeks before, like nothing in the world could touch us. And when Jaeger closed its doors for the first lockdown almost a year ago, I was naive enough to believe this would be nothing but a blip, and by the summer we would be back in business. Ola Smith-Simonsen was more pragmatic, saying “the optimist in me hopes that we’re drinking a beer at Øya festival in 2020.” Øya never came and summer went and now in the middle of winter, the dance floor is still in the abstract and the basement remains empty with a faint glimmer of hope that we will be back there in a couple of months.

Although if you’re inclined to believe the pragmatic Germans we’ll be lucky if we’re back to business as usual by the summer of 2022. That makes for some grim reading, but Ola is already hard at work towards a tentative start in May 2021 with a host of Jaeger residents and close friends in the booth again… fingers crossed.

Those first events in 2021 will come almost a year on from the first lockdown and Jaeger’s gone through many different phases since. Ola and co. have done their best to accommodate erratic measures subject to volatile infectious rates, to retain some semblance of a dance floor. From the lenient – listening to DJs till 3am in a seated position – to the downright drastic – the revocation of the license – Jaeger has remained steadfast in its pursuit of the dance floor and its music through some of the most extreme circumstances any of us has ever lived through.

Yes, it’s official… we’re living in the matrix today. We’ve taken a collective xanax disguised as a red pill and our lives have played out online in some virtual reality of our lives. From the uncomfortably safe confines of our “hjemme kontor” we’ve done everything from work to socialise and I’ve personally had enough. Those initial zoom “parties” and streaming sets all seemed so innocent at first, and now we’re stuck with them.  Even the bears had enough at some point. We’ve encountered some inspiring and some questionable actions in pursuit of a dance floor and a sincere focus on local musical talents in lieu of an international industry breathing down our necks. We’ve seen the human spirit eager to adapt to any circumstance and what became abundantly clear through it all is that no matter in what regard the conservatives of the world might perceive this music and its audience, the salient through is that it is a culture and its a stronger unifier than any “dugnad” could ever be.

We are a culture of people with introverted tendencies, and for many of us this is our only social contact with the rest of the world. As we’ve gone deeper into the pandemic we’ve become more reclusive, dreaming of a dance floor and for many our only connection to the outside world. The winter has been some of the most trying times, as we’ve become ensconced in our personal record collections and fond recollections of a heaving dance floor and an indomitable sound system that are now littering instagram feeds like NFT breadcrumbs back to a time when we had some dignity. Those “insta-memories” just don’t do it justice. The visceral sense of freedom that the dance floor instils and the primordial energy that ebbs and flows through a room like Jaeger’s basement is unique to the physical aspects. As Charlotte Bendiks quite rightly put it a few months ago on the very blog:“Music is such a physical experience.” It requires a physical presence and it in most cases it demands a physical reaction, a corporeal expression.

I wonder what the lasting social significance of the dance floor might be after the pandemic? As DJs and producers get older, have children, they’ve undoubtedly come to some serious introspective conclusion, which might even lead to a total abandonment of the culture for a career in… god forbid… marketing. What about the next generation in club music, surely this leaves very little incentive to indulge a hobby or a leisurely pursuit? What about the people that have been able to scratch a meager living from this culture? If the powers that be have their way, we’ll all be quietly compliant in our induction into the temp workforce.

One positive thing that I hope will make a lasting impression is the re-appreciation for the local DJ; s/he who through it all has remained a steadfast tastemaker for the dance floor in any shape or form, at risk of his/her own health during the time of the pandemic. Ola Smith-Simonsen has ensured Jaeger has done its fair share in providing a semblance of a living and a cultural verification for the local DJ during these trying times, and it’s something that he hopes to carry over past the pandemic. Because regardless of what people will have you believe, this is still a culture, and even when it gets corrupted in an industry there are still individuals and institutions pursuing a cultural pastime on a dance floor.

Under these most stringent lockdown measures for the last three months, that’s the crucial ingredient we’ve missed. Jaeger is not a bar, or a café, or a restaurant. The dance floor is where the culture cements itself, and that’s where the pandemic has hit the community the hardest. The dance floor was the first thing to go and it will by all accounts be the last thing to open. We’ve tried to accommodate the lockdown through all its different stages, even go as far to have it open without a license, but the there’s always been something missing and that is the dance floor and the people on it.

There might be some tentative plans to re-open in May (even without serving alcohol), but even then the dance floor is still a pipe dream until the vaccination process is completed and it is confirmed to work. We’ll try to open as soon as we can however, just to keep the pandemic profiteers from the door and ensure a future for a scene. Until then we’re dreaming of a day on the dance floor.

see you there…

Mischa Mathys

A brighter night – Jaeger in May/June 2021

We’re looking to the future across a new horizon and a time when we can open Jaeger’s doors once again. We’ve set a tentative objective for May in the hope that a vaccine and the sun will initiate the return to normality and we want to be at the forefront of it all, chasing a ray of hope and a time where we can have a dance floor in full effect again. 

It will be a good day when we can dust off the cobwebs and bring some life back to a dance floor with the sun looming ever longer in the sky. We look forward to a day when we can invite you all back with the warm embrace of our soundsystem in lieu of a physical hug. It will be  a brighter night as Jaeger sets its sights on a May and June programme.

We’ve started making arrangements with some of Oslo’s leading lights back in the DJ booth, building on the foundations we started laying towards the end of last year. Our closest and dearest are back in the fray with residents and a slew of regular guest DJs providing the springboard into summer 2021 and towards the full return of  the dance floor. Residencies like Lyd, Big-UP, Sous-Vide, Serenity Now and Frædag are all back, with appearances by Prins Thomas, g-HA & Olanskii, Normann and Finnebassen to name but a few.

The full lineup will be confirmed at a later date and with regard to the ongoing covid-19 measures in effect. Watch this space for more details to follow soon and we hope to see you on the dance floor very soon. 

Norske Byggeklosser: Bjørn Torske introduces Trym Søvdsnes

It must take something special and unique for Bjørn Torske’s ears to perk up. The DJ and artist has cemented a legacy in House music in Norway, with a career spanning the great expanse of electronic club music as one of its most celebrated sons. 

From the small university town of Tromsø he was one of the first wave of DJs bringing this music to fjordian shores, and one of the first artists to export it beyond the country’s borders. As he moved from Tromsø to Bergen, he not only established House music in the region, but also played a significant role in establishing an individual Norwegian identity in House music, often referred to as Space Disco. 

With albums that rank in classic lore and DJ sets as intuitive as they are surprising, Bjørn Torske is nothing short of a legend in music. With credentials like these, when Bjørn Torske’s ears perk up so do ours, and when Ola Smith-Simonsen (Olanskii) proposed a Norske Byggeklosser event, Torske had a wildcard poised and ready.  

Trym Søvdsnes was his choice, and together they represent the establishment and the future of a flourishing Bergen music scene for House music and Techno. They’ve have been regular acquaintances in the booth, most notably sharing the bill at this summer’s Sofa House events in Norway.

Søvdsnes is a vinyl enthusiast with an eclectic approach as mixes he’s shared online demonstrates, drifting between the more abstract corners of House and Techno, blurring the fringes of dance music and listening music. With a focus on mood and energy he brings a dynamism to the booth that harks back to the classic roots of club music, the very same roots Bjørn Torske helped seed in this arena. After playing together as DJs, Torske and Søvdsnes expanded their collaboration to the studio when they remixed a track for Diego Carpitella’s album “Tarantismo: Odyssey of an Italian Ritual.”

With their first joint visit to Jaeger looming this weekend we sent out some questions to the elder statesman of House music to ask more about Trym Søvdsnes, about how they found each other, and what this means for the scene in Bergen in this Q&A session. 

How did you first hear of Trym and what was it about him that particularly drew you to his sets? 

Well, he and a friend started playing regularly at Cafe Opera in Bergen, and I took notice of their mixing of styles – somewhat dirty, rough techno and house fused with breakbeats and percussion, sounding quite unlike a lot of the other dj’s playing around Bergen at that time. I mean, locally we have a growing interest in good club music, and quite a few talented people. But Trym had an attitude in the music that is kind of rare these days, where people tend to sort of “polish” their style into perfection, well I feel Trym was a bit opposite to that.  

Why are you bringing him to Oslo for this particular night? 

I’ve been thinking for a long time that we sometime ought to play together in Oslo, I know he’s played a few times at Hærverk with the guys from Oblivion Dip, and so when Ola told me about “Norske Byggeklosser” and the idea of promoting Norwegian artists, that was a perfect occasion to make this happen. 

You’ve booked him, and played alongside him during one of the Sofa House events this summer.  What does a Trym Søvdsnes set sound like to you? 

Depending on the setting, of course, but slightly rough-edged, beautiful and often bound to surprise. 

And how does it compare to what you’re playing at the moment? 

It appears to me that we’re on the same wavelength according to mixing styles and creating a vibe that in some way could be reminiscent of the early styles of dj’ing – a “house (not house)”-approach to dance music.  

I hear a lot of old-school acid and Techno in his recorded sets, something which corresponds with  regional appeal at the moment. For somebody that was there when this music first came round, what  are your feelings towards this music today?  

For me the musical history and development has always been an expanding pallet as opposed to a linear string of events. It’s the sheer quality of sound and music that matters the most, there’s very little place for nostalgia in this for me. If it sounds good, I’ll play it, whether it be from 1990 or 2020.  

From what I’ve gathered through snippets on social media and his mixes, is that Trym is a vinyl  enthusiast and first and foremost, a DJ. What else can you tell us about his musical tastes and  attitude to DJing? 

He likes his vinyl, as I do, and he is an avid crate digger. He’s very good at finding stuff before anyone else, and if there’s a rumour of a new load of second hand stuff coming in to the local shop, he’ll be there first, no doubt, haha. Regarding taste and attitude, I feel it reflects my own – finding the hidden gems, being adventurous and curious in the pursuit of good music. Not being dependent on big hits or hype to play a good set. 

Do you see something of a younger Bjørn Torske in him? 

We just have a similar approach, I think. Age isn’t that important, and Trym definitely has a much broader taste than I had at that age.  

What is your musical relationship like outside of the booth; do you often share and talk about  music, and how would that go usually; like a conversation or more like a student and his pupil? 

We have been in the studio together on several occasions, and our first venture was a remix or rather a remake of some very strange old Italian ritual music. We also did a live studio set for Oslo Club Cast earlier this year, and that would be a good example of how we would be “talking” about music. To me  it’s just a well working musical partnership, where we bounce ideas back and forth. I guess I learn as  much from him as he does from me.  

What, if anything have you taken from your experiences with Trym?

Many good musical ideas, and the sense of playing the ball back and forth gives a lot, especially since I’ve mostly focused on solo work throughout my career. And I think he has the same non-competitive approach. No forcing of ideas, just playing around and letting the music speak for itself.  

What is the major difference in terms of how you got started in this music, compared to a younger  DJ like Trym’s experiences today, from your point of view? 

The presence of the internet, and the fact that there is a Norwegian scene for this music. It wasn’t back  then, the few of us doing this felt isolated on a lonely island in the north. And also electronic music wasn’t  widely accepted back then, quite different from today when you can actually get funds to do a PhD in  electronic music. 

What does he represent for the Bergen scene today in your opinion?  

The underground house music movement. 

Bergen must, like the rest of Norway, encourage a fair bit collaboration across genres, styles and  generations. What do you think this instills in Norwegian club music and culture that sets it apart  from other cities and countries? 

On one hand, it’s a good environment for experimenting and pursuing weird ideas. The challenge is to get a focus in all the diversity. I don’t think that the“next big thing” will emerge here, but probably a handful of  good and interesting music.  

Do you think it is something that’s ever reflected in your work as an artist?  

It suits me well, and yes, the musical openness has definitely influenced my approach to music.  There is room to both play and produce dance music in a broad sense.  

At least, I can see its influence in introducing an artist like Trym to the world, when you work  together like on your recent remix for the Tarantismo record.  What was it like working with him on a piece of music and has it cemented a working relationship that will extend beyond that record? 

Yes, we’ve been working together on some material coming out on Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp label early next year. I also mixed my next mini-album in Trym’s studio. I’m also planning to do few remixes of his stuff.  

Do you think that working on music together might feed back into the booth on the occasion when  you do play together for a set like the upcoming one at Jaeger? 

Yes, I think it does, and vice versa. Production and dj’ing are two sides of the same coin, and this has always been crucial to me – taking dj experiences back into the studio, translating the dynamics of a dance floor into the studio mix. And similarly, taking ideas born in the studio and applying them in the mixing of records.

How a scene is built with Charlotte Bendiks and Olivia Rashidi

Tromsø, has been an unlikely breeding ground for musical talent, with repercussions rippling through  Norway and the entire electronic music world stage since the early nineties. The small university- and fishing town up North, with endless dark days and an uncanny pool of talent, has cemented electronic music in the region, spreading it to the furthest reaches of an international scene, since first establishing its reign.

In Norway, Tromsø’s effect extends to Bergen and Oslo, with long tendrils of influence  connecting generations of musicians, DJs and artists, who continue to embody the original and unwavering spirit of that original scene. Two significant figures to emerge from this region are Charlotte Bendiks and Olivia Rashidi, both from Tromsø and carrying on a legacy that has motivated the community and keeps encouraging new artists and DJs to come to the fore. 

Olivia Rashidi met Charlotte Bendiks coming down a mountain in Tromsdalen, mainland Tromsø. “I was lost, and I met Olivia,” remembers Charlotte of the chance encounter with a chuckle. “My friends call me the de-tourist because I have the smallest hippocampus and I have a terrible sense of direction.” The pair struck up a friendship on the journey home, talking about music and DJing, a hobby and nascent career the younger Olivia had started exploring at that time.

The friendship blossomed into collaboration when Charlotte took on the mentorship role through the “Cloud Exit” talent programme associated with Tromsø’s Insomnia festival. Having established a career as a DJ and artist with ties to Cómeme, a residency at Jaeger and regular playing dates in places like Salon Zur Wilden Renate and ://aboutblank, Charlotte took on Olivia as a mentee, strengthening their friendship and a relationship that continues to bear fruit as Olivia’s own DJ career evolves and grows.

Olivia had just started receiving requests to play outside Norway, when the lockdown struck, while Charlotte’s own career continued to go from strength to strength alongside her younger apprentice. Today, they mark Tromsø’s latest musical exports, enjoying the ranks alongside the likes of Bjørn Torske and Rune Lindbæk, a feat even more impressive considering they are two of the few women coming from a historically male dominated culture.

Representing a blossoming career in Olivia Rashidi and a musical institution in Charlotte Bendiks, the pair constitute a bright and formidable future for club music in Norway, which looks to only consolidate around their individual works in the DJ booth. 

It’s this kind of relationship and these artists, that Ola Smith-Simonsen is trying lift up through the Norske Byggeklosser event series, and it was ahead of their appearance this Saturday, in our sauna, that we took the opportunity to talk to both Charlotte and Olivia in an extensive and all-encompassing interview, covering everything from the gender to the lockdown…you know, Mental Overdrive’s new track… 

* Charlotte Bendiks and Olivia Rashidi plays Norske Byggeklosser this Saturday. 

Are you still maintaining the mentor and mentee relationship today?

Charlotte: To be honest that was just a formality. Olivia and I had found each other and we were exchanging ideas and music before that, which usually happens in small cities like this. That’s how I started making music as well; you meet someone that’s older and more experienced and they show you and share their ideas. That’s how the scene is built. We are maintaining a friendship and sharing our stories of life in general. It’s more of an exchange than a mentor and menteeship. 

Olivia, Why did you feel that you had to go to an established DJ like Charlotte for this kind of relationship and not people within your own peer group?

Olivia: I don’t think it was that I couldn’t go to them. Charlotte is somebody that has always inspired me because she’s one of the few female artists from northern Norway. That’s why it was so easy to talk to her about it and in no way, are there people being exclusive. 

Charlotte: We have similar tastes in music.

Photo by Mats Gangvik

Olivia: I could relate to her in terms of music, but we also come from the same place and have the same kind of experiences.

Charlotte: I wish there were other females when I started, because the pressure that you get from some men is very unhealthy and can be damaging in many ways. To be relying on a female figure that’s older and has more experience in these matters is very important. I was very happy to provide that for Olivia.  

I also took my mentorship into areas beyond music, talking about politics, about equality, and issues in the industry that’s very important to consider as an artist today. It’s important to address these issues, because as an artist today, if you’re not being political then what are you?

It seems that today an artist can’t separate their music from their politics, whether you want to or not. But one thing that you touched on there, is the female perspective. You described your relationship as symbiotic, and from my experiences with men in music, it tends to be very one-directional, with an older generation very much still dominating the conversation about music. 

Charlotte: I’ve experienced that too. I thought this was very important as a mentor to say; “This is my advice to you from my perspective, but there are people that have a completely different  set of experiences and skills, so I would advise you to shop around and make up your own mind on what fits with you and your output.” I wouldn’t say that it is exclusively a female approach, but I would say I’ve experienced it more with other women than men. 

We’re underground artists working on the border of art and music, and there isn’t going to be some recipe for success. You should break the rules, you should be rebellious, you should question the structures or the methods of your forebears.

So if I could try and sum up your relationship, as mentor and mentee…

Charlotte: Good luck (laughs)

It’s not like you are exactly taking Olivia under your wing, but more like you’re helping her in nurturing her own voice in music?

Charlotte: That’s my aim. There are practical things that you can do, and we’ve done workshops on that. The main thing about being a mentor is teaching people to trust themselves. 

Olivia: I want to elaborate on that. After my first back to back with Charlotte, I had another gig the following Wednesday at Circa. I remember you (Charlotte) told me that the Wednesdays at Circa were loungy and it wasn’t a big rave atmosphere, and you challenged me to not mix  half of my set. Up until that moment I had been teaching myself how to mix perfectly, because that’s what I thought you had to do. I started to think about how you put two tracks together without mixing it, which opened up the idea, that it’s not terrible, if you make a mistake or not mix a track into another. It allowed for more creativity and gave me more confidence as a DJ, I stopped taking myself too seriously and began loving those small human flaws you sometimes hear in a set. For me that means you’ve challenged yourself and had fun with it.

Charlotte: I’ve said that to a lot of fresh DJs. I would rather listen to a DJ who can’t mix and plays good music, than listen to a DJ that plays boring music and can mix. 

You mentioned that you had similar tastes in music. Is there a point where your tastes diverged from each other?

Olivia: Not diverged. We’ve had similar tastes, but we won’t have identical sets. 

Charlotte: I have the same with a friend of mine, Miruna Boruzescu (Borusiade). We talk a lot and we’re very in tune with ideas, life, friendship and music. Our DJ sets are quite different, and for our back to backs we try to find out where to meet somewhere in the middle.

Olivia: I also remember playing alone and I played a track that Charlotte has in one of her mixes, and like two people came up to me, and asked if this isn’t Charlotte’s track. It was Ana Helder, but they were convinced it belonged to Charlotte because she played it regularly. I noticed then that people will naturally compare me to her and I don’t find it insulting in any way, but I feel that’s like asking, ”can I not play anything Charlotte might play?” 

Charlotte: That’s such a toxic idea and I’m so against that comparison. Just because we’re two women from Tromsø working in music in the last 40 years of Tromsø electronic music history, that we have to be compared, and Olivia can’t play a track that I had used in a mix?

Olivia: I just chose to own it in the end. I’m going to play it and I’m going to play it my way, and they just have to deal with that. 

I’ve noticed, not only in Tromsø, but Norway, there always seems to be a healthy exchange, not only between generations, but different groups of people working in music. More here than anywhere else, it seems that the scene isn’t as focused on a youth culture as it is perhaps in bigger countries, but more around an established old guard. 

Charlotte: What is the old guard, and what do you say about an upcommer of 42? What is experience and what do you do with it, and what is success and how do you measure success? All these questions are so open, that it doesn’t fit in the world of music and arts for me. 

This idea of passing the torch doesn’t work for me. Yes, there is a nine years difference (in age)  between me and Olivia and I’ve lived longer than her and I’ve had a longer career, but I don’t think there’s been a generational gap. (Tromsø) is such a small town, it’s just a scene with people, with various people with different sets of skills and experiences.  

It’s my experience from places like London and Amsterdam that it’s a very competitive scene and what usually attracts people and especially the media to it, is youth and the fact that it’s something new. I’ve not experienced it in that same way here in Norway. 

Charlotte: In Germany as well. You have this idea passed down through generations of how society, age and human life should be, but I think we should start realising, that that’s about to become outdated; these ideas of generations and age and experience. 

Olivia: There’s also been this misconception that you have to try to make a living out of it, for it to be your true passion. I want to take my time and I still want to figure out what I want to do with my life and I don’t think that question will ever be answered. I love music and I love DJ-ing, but I also want to do it on my terms. 

I remember you telling something similar the last time we interviewed you. You were talking about production, and how you’re refraining from till you could do it on your terms. Is there a pressure to produce too now?

Olivia: A lot of people have told me I have to start producing and I take that as a huge compliment, but I don’t want to produce something just for the sake of it. Someone else’s capacity will differ from mine, I have a lot of stuff going on and I will do things according to my own ability. 

Me and Charlotte have had workshops and I am constantly recording interesting sounds and I write down ideas, but I’m also acknowledging that music production is a long process, I’m aware that I’ll have to go through some failed projects before something is ready to be released. And I’m patient!

It’s the same with social media. When I made my Facebook page I was so stressed out, because I’m a private person and I don’t really do social media. I didn’t expect that cliché about social media being toxic would apply to my situation, but I got so anxiety ridden because I felt that I didn’t do enough whenever I saw someone else post something interesting, even though I got a lot of gigs and people were constantly inviting me to do stuff. I even started getting invited to Russia and Sweden, gaining ground internationally. 

There’s been so much focus on posting on your progress, especially for a newcomer. I think it’s easy to become stressed out or insecure sometimes. I also have to keep reminding myself that my social media content is not a measurement of my success. 

Charlotte: I also have something to add on this note; compulsive production is like smoking cigarettes in the sixties, addiction is sold as freedom. The more you produce, the more you release, I realise as a music lover, a DJ and music producer, that there is so much that each track loses value. 

It feeds into this universal idea of producing content and in a way music has just become another form of content to feed the social media monster. Are you gonna be producing music for the sake of producing music so Spotify can make more money? 

Charlotte: It doesn’t make sense.

Olivia: When I moved to Oslo, I didn’t have a job, so I was trying to make ends meet by just taking on a lot of gigs. There would be places where they would tell me what kind of music they wanted before I even got there, obviously not knowing my style at all. I felt that I needed to get myself out there and to feed my facebook and instagram feed, but really it didn’t make me more inspired and it didn’t make me feel more successful. It was tiring. When I got a job, I just had to listen to Enya for two weeks because I was so tired of electronic music. 

Are these ideas and thoughts on your own career something you were considering before covid?

Olivia: Yes, because I put a lot of pressure on myself and a facebook notification would pop every day, telling me to “keep posting.” I felt that I was rushing something, and I wasn’t sure where I was rushing to.

Charlotte, have you had any similar experiences to Olivia’s?

Charlotte: It also comes from people that I work with, who are constantly telling me to post more and do more. I felt that pressure, and what I’ve landed on is; “ok I’ll put out some stuff so I can stay in people’s feeds,” but it’s also better to work with an organisation that has their own PR strategy. Like working with a label or a podcast. 

Every time I feel this pressure though, I end up posting memes, because I can’t take this shit seriously. (laughs)

I want to ask about the lockdown… 

Charlotte: You mean Mental overdrive’s new track. 

That was a really surprising EP, but no,  in terms of the pandemic; how has the situation affected you?

Olivia: It’s just been a natural hiatus. I’ve been trying to generally keep my sanity and stay busy and stay inspired. Just listening to sets and staying updated on new releases so when everything goes back to (a new) normal again, I wouldn’t be too big a step for me to get back into the mindset of wanting to play.

Charlotte, you were making a living from DJing and music at the point we reached full lockdown, and not anything in terms of high profile travelling DJ, but surely that has had a serious impact.

Charlotte: I lost everything. I’m supposed to be in Tokyo now. I have my calendar reminding me of all these bookings, which is sad. I’m struggling financially, but being an underground musician, I’m used to being broke… so I’m managing.

Both of you have played through during summer, but your experiences from the booth must have been quite different, since in Oslo, where Olivia’s stayed, there’s been almost no dancing, while in Tromsø, I believe the regulations weren’t as strict. 

Olivia:  In the beginning I thought it would be more of a lounge setting and then somebody would come up to me, saying we really just want to listen to really good club music. I’ve gotten used to it and it feels good to be able to play a high energy set and see people enjoying it, even though they can’t get crazy on the dance floor. 

Charlotte: Music is such a physical experience. 

You can’t replicate that on a set of headphones. 

Olivia: Yes it’s something different, when you’re feeling the bass shaking you to your core. It’s not just about physically feeling the bassline, but also kind of how you move your body to the music.

Charlotte: What I’ve been doing is that I’ve started going to classes at the gym, where they do different muscle workouts to music and beats. To be in a room and listen to loud bass music and jump around and be sweaty around people is amazing, even though the taste of music at the gyms is not what I like to listen to. 

Olivia: I also want to add that for a lot of people, just being part of  a music scene is important. It’s about being social, and meeting new people that have the same interests as you.

Charlotte: It’s a shared experience.

Olivia: And that’s also why it’s so nice to see people together, because they need to socialise together.

For a lot of people growing up with this music, me included it’s deeply ingrained in our cultural fabric. 

Olivia: I actually know someone, who was sitting in the front courtyard while I was playing at Jaeger, and around 12 O’clock he texted me on Instagram and he told me had moved here and discovered the scene in Oslo, just before the first lockdown. It was just so important for him to go out. He was telling me how important the scene was for him to find his own friends. It’s a great way of meeting new people, and for some it’s the only way. 

I think that little story perfectly sums up what club culture and music is to us all. Let’s hope then it will survive the pandemic in whatever form it might take after. 

 

Shine a light in the dark

Shine a light in the dark!

Jaeger will remain open for winter warmers and smooth alcohol free cocktails and beers!
Doors open Wednesday through Saturday 14:00 – 22:00.

Our planned musical program will go ahead in the courtyard 18:00 – 22:00! Albeit in these troubled times the show will be more in the spirit of a winter edition Café Del Mar: Outside, low key, and covid safe – but overhead heating, and still serving a vital slice of audio therapy for your soul. Check the events for full the program.

Join us for tea, coffee, gløgg, hot chocolate, or other alcohol free pleasures, plus a little slice of covid safe musical happiness. Come shine a light, but stay safe and observe the rules:

  • Table service only, and no mingling between tables
  • Please keep 1 meter distance at all times, also at the table, unless you are in the same household
  • Please register a name and contact number on entry. We will only keep your details a maximum of 14 days for track and trace.
  • Facemasks are obligatory indoors when not seated at your table.
  • Face masks will be available to purchase on the premises.

With love from Jaeger

15 years of Full Pupp with Prins Thomas

This feels like hallowed ground. The small inconspicuous room is walled with records. Gathering dust in one corner is a drum kit and a cello while a cluttered desk occupies the other side of the room. This is more like a storage unit than a music studio, but it’s here on the third floor of a pedestrian office building where it all started, a record label called Full Pupp.

Across the hallway, Lindstrøm has a studio and a few doors down Todd Terje used to occupy a room, and if these unassuming walls could talk, they’d narrate fifteen years of a story of a label, that brought the sound of Norwegian House music to the rest of the world, and continues to provide a platform for new Norwegian artists working in the electronic music dialect. 

It’s here where I find Thomas Hermansen, the self-appointed Prins of this musical empire, sifting through some older records. He’s asked me to meet him here, even though he spends most of his time in his second studio. Moving his operations to the suburbs, closer to home a few years back, he uses the old studio as storage for a record collection that has spilled over into three different locations. 

Some of the records he peruses I hear later that week in his set Jaeger, during a new residency he’s cultivated over the course of the pandemic. Like the rest of the world, he’s taken the opportunity to take stock and adapt to the situation. “I’m living in the now and actually embracing that once a month opportunity to put music together” he exclaims with a beaming smile. 

He’s seized the opportunity to play some music from the fringes of this expansive record collection for a new monthly night at Jaeger, he’s aptly called Serenity Now! “Everything is set on pause a little,” he considered, “so it’s more a time for reflection, a time talking with other people and to be social.” For Thomas, the DJ it’s getting back to the start of a long career in the booth, where he cut his teeth in the local bars and hangouts of Oslo during the nineties. 

“The stuff I do now at Jaeger is based on stuff I’ve done before,” he explains. “This goes back 25 years ago, where I would play in a social setting for people that are there to do other things but to dance. I really enjoy doing things that are in the cross-section of these two things, when you can get people to dance to low energy stuff, and even do little peaks where you do play some bangers.”

The night has him content with the current situation and “besides the financial thing and the fact that I miss playing Sundays at Panorama bar, I’m actually quite happy as things are.”

A small pile of records starts to gather at his feet while he’s reminiscing in some automatic selection that suggests he knows each record intimately; records that look as if they haven’t seen anything but cobwebs in a few years. The topic of the pandemic, much like the pandemic itself, lingers as we consider the eventual repercussions and the relevance of releasing and playing club music during this time. 

Thomas even has his doubts about Full Pupp and the 15 year celebrations that started earlier this year with a lot of new releases featuring new or unreleased music from the unwavering stable of artists on the Full Pupp catalogue. “I wish we didn’t,” says Thomas more in humour than regret; “I wish we celebrated 16 years next year,” but what had been set in motion before the pandemic couldn’t easily be undone. 2020 had been a bumper year of releases for the label and Prins Thomas, whose own records included an album on Running Back (Træns) and a new album that saw Thomas reuniting with Lindstrøm for the long-awaited follow up to II, 11 years on from their last record. 

It’s picking up a thread from the early 2000’s when Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas introduced a distinctly Nordic interpretation of House to the world. People called it Space Disco; sowing the seeds for a label called Tamburin, which eventually becomes Full Pupp; bringing music from  Todd Terje, Diskjokke, Skatebård and Telephones to the world stage; shooting into new branches with names like Prins Thomas Music and Horisontal Mambo; and now in its fifteen year, gathering more steam with a new digital imprint (Full Pupp Ekspress) and a lot more music planned for the foreseeable future.

It all started here, in this stuffy little room where we slip into conversation with Prins Thomas. 

Congratulations. 15 years is a long time for a label. 

It feels like thirty. (laughs) At the same time, I don’t feel like the music has evolved much during that time. In a way time is irrelevant. 

Do you feel that’s a positive thing?

That’s the nature of this kind of music. Contemporary dance music always picks up something along the way, but it somehow keeps going in circles. You always go back to the seventies, eighties and nineties to pick up inspiration, adding something new to the formula. And that’s fine; for the most part it’s music to get down to. 

So does it still feel like a celebration at fifteen or is it just another year for you at this point?

This is one of the things I’ve been thinking about; opening up to new ideas. Being inspired by working in a different manner. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a yearly round-up of stuff. There’s also the possibility of tracks doing well, to combine them on vinyl. So maybe now we’ll celebrate  every year. 

Full Pupp, although it’s been claimed by Space Disco, has had Techno, House and Electro records on there. Do you feel it has been able to shake the stigma of Space Disco today and live beyond such constricting parameters?

As inspiration it’s always going to be there, but not necessarily more than House music in general. The canon of hits or the things that everybody likes; the Detroit origins or the New York origins, all these things are part of it. The Disco thing is there maybe more as an approach to making music, where I think a lot of the artists on Full Pupp are good at producing more loose, not so genre-strict music.

Would you say that’s the sonic philosophy behind Full Pupp; this fusion of all these styles in contemporary dance music? 

I don’t know if I actually have a philosophy or strategy at all. It’s never about the last record, it’s about all the records compiled together, whether it’s my label’s body of work or my own body of work. It’s probably the most frustrating thing about having a label, when you get that question; “what is it(?)”…  I tend to say… “Just listen.” (laughs) 

I understand there is a romantic idea behind it, because now there’s all this music coming and you need these genres and tags to help people find this music. I’m still thinking with my old brain, when there weren’t enough records in a genre to keep things interesting. 

You’re talking about the early nineties?

Even in the mid eighties when I was getting into this, I was buying regular pop records with dub versions on the B-side. Even the shitty stuff. You would have Whitney Houston’s I wanna dance with somebody, the dub version and you would play it next to Beastie Boys.

Now it’s relatively easy to get lost in a wormhole. You could listen to one specific type of techno with the same mood on every record, making the job easier for you as a DJ, but generally it’s boring for anybody else. 

What was the pretext for starting the label all those years ago?

I had friends of mine making great records, and I felt it was stupid for everybody to send their demos abroad, and give their stuff to  English labels. At the time, there weren’t any Norwegian labels making House music, everybody was sending their stuff to English labels and everybody believed that was the only way to do it. I’m not saying it was the first electronic music label; there were others, but not doing the kind of music we were doing.

This would have been around 2004-5 and the start of MP3s and what would become the digital revolution in this music. Was there any sense trepidation releasing records in the physical format during that time?

Well the funny thing is, two of our first records, Todd Terje’s first two records and my debut 12”, they sold quite well in the beginning. We even had a long period where we didn’t sell digitally. 

That’s changed now with Full Pupp ekspress. It’s uncanny, but in a way we’re finding ourselves in a similar situation today after what was a little peak for vinyl’s resurgence for a few years. What’s the difference from that era too now for you to start the digital imprint?

The easiest comparison; in the beginning we would sell 2000 copies of a completely unknown artist on Full Pupp. Now we’re selling 300 copies of my records on Full Pupp. We’re very close to the point where just barely breaking even is a positive thing. 

I have to say, for me it was a bummer even thinking about going digital. I’ve said many times that if I have to release stuff just digitally, it’s not a label anymore and I’m quitting. But starting on the process of planning the first releases, it felt really fresh to not work with constrictions of 12”, maximum 12 minutes. 

It’s opened up a new way of thinking; putting the format aside.We’re still planning releases for  Full Pupp on vinyl, so it’s not like we’re done with vinyl. Opening this door, is opening new possibilities.

What changed in your thought process to even consider the digital format?

Less frustration of having to wait out the period of releasing a record. In the beginning it was about getting the music finished and tidy enough to fit on a record.  By the time the record is out your sick and tired of it and your excitement is elsewhere. 

Having a quicker process from when the music is done to when it comes out. I don’t have to be as aware; are we going to get this funded by selling enough records. 

So it comes down to the economy of the label? You wouldn’t be able to justify going on exclusively in the physical format, eventually you and word and sound would run out of money.

I’m not saying everything is not selling, I’m saying there’s far more records not selling enough. It takes too long to recoup the money from the sales. At some point you have to take into account that they have to destroy the records. 

 It’s a good testing ground to see what could sell on vinyl.

Yes. That is also part of the plan, that Full Pupp isn’t just a digital label, we still have the possibility of doing anything or everything on vinyl.

Do you think it will change your approach to A&R for Full Pupp?

I think it already did. There was stuff I was going to put out on vinyl that is now only digital, but it gives me more room to move. I can take chances on tracks that wouldn’t be one of the four on vinyl.

Which seems right in today’s landscape. You can’t expect to make any money releasing a physical record, even if you release it on your own label, it is just going to cost you money.

I think the safest bet is that if you really want to make some money,  is to make some music that people would want to pay for, and fund it yourself. 

Then you would need to play to the common denominator, surely?

Not exactly, but then it’s going to have to be something that more than fifty other people in the world wants. And I think there are too many people making music for fifty other people. I might do it myself, but at least I’ve cheated my way into having a further reach (laughs). So when I make a track that’s probably only meant for 100 other people, there’s maybe 2000 other people, listening to it. 

Does that have to do with your success as a DJ in reaching these people?

I think it’s a mixture, being a recording artist over time, and those first releases with Lindstrøm and having my name out there as a DJ and doing remixes. At different times it seems that it’s hard escaping my name no matter what kind of music you’re listening to.

Do you think Full Pupp could exist without Prins Thomas?

Of course, if somebody wants to buy it, I’d be happy to sell it. (laughs) An important fact about all this is; the only reason there is a Prins Thomas music label is because I was thinking of pulling the plug on Full Pupp. At the time I was really getting fed up with not living up to people’s expectations, when it came to sales and how slow things were going. Now I think it’s like this for everybody.

More importantly is that for the last year Ivaylo (Kolev) has been helping out running it so we can actually call it a record label, because for fourteen years it wasn’t… it was just an imprint. 

I’ve noticed, besides remixes, your own music is mainly coming out via these like International or the Prins Thomas music label. Have you distanced your own music further away from Full Pupp in recent years?

Setting up Prins Thomas music was definitely a way of getting my stuff out of the way, so I wouldn’t clog up the catalogue with my own releases. When I put a record out, it has a bit more spread and coverage, which means the label is probably working longer and harder with it. Those are the times when we can hire external PR and stuff like this, because there will be some revenue. It only took two people to point the finger, saying “when is my record coming out, now that your record is out.” 

But for the last year, I’ve been a lot more involved with the label, and trying to keep up with Ivaylo’s schedule. Because now we actually have a schedule. Getting more involved means that I see more things that need to be done, so I’m much more part of the process. 

As far as I know, you have always had a very hands on approach to the artists on the label, from the point of creation. Is that an integral part of the approach to the label?

It’s a bunch of different approaches, in terms of what the artist wants and what I want to hear. How I perceive what I’ve been sent. If I feel that the message is not coming across in the way the artist solved it, I have to give my own take on it, either by helping out mixing down, arranging or speaking to the person. But sometimes I stay away if I feel there’s something that has a strong identity already, I don’t want to interfere with that.

But that in itself  is something of the sonic identity that courses through Full Pupp?

Yes, but that’s just down to my taste. And it’s already been filtered, not everybody sends me music. I do get a lot of music, that I don’t see a part of any of the labels that I do. And there’s things that don’t live up to expectations.; since starting the label, I’ve always wanted to put out a great rock record,  but nobody has sent me a great rock record.

Have you received any rock records?

Yes, there have been some. But not anything that I think works as a record.

But you’ve started some other labels, that you accommodate things that don’t always fit the Full Pupp sound.

Yeah but there are enough labels now. (laughs)

Where do you see it all five years from now?

I have no idea whether I’ll be doing the label in another five years, I probably will, because I’m a slow quitter… who knows…

Update: New Regulations regarding Covid – 19

We’re open – still serving you our slice of happiness!

Join us from afterwork until midnight, Wednesdays through Saturday.

Some rules apply to keep us both happy and safe:

  • No entry after 22:00 – so come early, stay for the night!
  • Table service only, and no mingling between tables
  • Please keep 1 meter distance at all times, also at the table, unless you are in the same household
  • Please register a name and contact number on entry. We will only keep your details a maximum of 14 days for track and trace.
  • Facemasks are obligatory indoors when not seated at your table.
  • Face masks will be available to purchase on the premises.

Please head home if you feel any signs of fever or respiratory distress or other symptoms of illness.

Stay safe – but don’t stop living!

Don’t worry if you are confused, we are here to guide you.

And we are here to keep you safe, so we can still enjoy these pleasures in life we need to keep us sane.

 

See you at the table!

The cut with Filter Musikk: “kortreist” to sanctuary

Dance floors stand empty; a silent void crushing the ghostly reverberations of a time when they were packed with licentious bodies moving to a provocative beat. Sound systems remain dormant, dust and rust coagulating around moving parts in rictus, where once upon a time their motions could ignite fires on the dance floor. 

Anything resembling a scene is in hibernation and accurately so. Yet every day we’re bombarded by a caterwaul of emails, social media posts and articles proclaiming the next “big room techno banger” about to arrive on the next big techno banger label, spearheaded by the last big room techno banger DJ, desperately trying stay relevant in a scene that has taken to the woods, where their services are no longer required. 

They breathe the air of other planets, their perception of reality emulsifying around the last great night, the last big room, the last DJ set, trapped in limbo like a wary Jack Nicholson trying to force a door open with an axe… yes, subtle. These uncharted territories in charted dance music where adaptation thrives and reluctance to modulate is the death knell in the form of a 909 kick. It’s time to wake up from the lysergic dream of an impossible past, and it’s in situations like these that a new music will thrive. It’s music that is in direct contact with a localised audience, a music in the form of a conversation rather than a monologue. 

Music does not live in a bubble of isolation, it lives and grows within the zeitgeist of society, and in a world where the “big room” is closed; the dance floor is cluttered with tables and chairs; the international superstar DJ is landlocked and homebound; and the festival season is postponed, perhaps now is not the time for your “big room Techno banger.” You’ll have your chance again… but we need something different now; something a little more sympathetic with the situation.

Luckily this music exists too, and it’s happening right on our doorstep. It’s a short trip to liberation, a brief jaunt toward complete immersion of a unique and distinct music culture, with everything from Trance to House finding a new purpose in more uplifting spirits. This is music that soothes and condoles in unprecedented times, the stuff we recognise from the people we know. This is the cut with Filter Musikk on a “kortreist” to sanctuary. 

 

Mikkel Rev – UTE004 (UTE.REC) 12”

Uteklubb have been busy. While they wait patiently for the pandemic to ease and get back to hosting events, the people behind the DJ collective have focussed all their efforts on the label and their music, and 2020 has been a bumper year of releases for the artists behind the label. Settling into a transcendental sonic disposition, Uteklubb have moved out from the dark recesses of Techno into the enlightened sound of Trance, IDM and Ambient music. They’ve established a new label Sinensis with Omformer consolidating those efforts around two releases while the flagship label, re-focussed their purpose on the boisterous tempos of the impromptu forest dance floor with the Groundcontrol compilation and now the latest 12” from UTE.REC founder Mikkel Rev.

Disappearing into fluffy clouds of rich dynamic textures, Rev’s melodies rise above the steadfast rhythm sections that follow the grid in a near-military precision. Pads and keys free the beat from its marching orders as they streak across the tracks in search of some human empathy in lieu of a dance floor. 

Throughout the two-sides, Rev seeks some organic entity within the formulas of dance music, and takes the music out of the stuffy confines of a club into the fresh air, where we’ll dance el-fresco as the uppermost resonances touch the top of fir trees. Between elements of acid, IDM and ambient, Mikkel Rev channels a sound into a style with its major touchstone anchored in classic Trance, revamped for the future audiences of this forgotten, but endearing dance music genre. 

 

VA – 15 Years Full Pupp Pt.3 (Full Pupp) 12″

15 years of Full Pupp. That should be enough. 15 years for any label is a feat worth aspiring to, but for Prins Thomas’ plucky Oslo-based outfit it had always seemed like an inevitability as the only outlet for Techno, House et al from Norway for nearly all this time. And in its fifteenth year, it’s only gone to prove itself as a dominating force in dance club music in Norway and beyond. 

Releasing more music than ever in 2020 – and we don’t think the pandemic has anything to do with it – Full Pupp is putting out enough music the world over, all based on a small enclave of artists working from within Prins Thomas immediate artistic circle, based mostly in Norway. For the last 15 years, Full Pupp has been the measure to gauge the waters of Norwegian club music, and while it would still bear association with the Space Disco epithet for most, its discography reaches far and wide into everything from Disco to Techno, and that’s not considering all the sublabels. 

In the landmark year for the label, Prins Thomas is celebrating the occasion with a series of compilation EPs from the artists that have contributed to the label over the years in a concerted effort from Prins Thomas to wrangle the eclectic sounds of the diverse record label into a concise sonic history. Part three in the series features another star-studded guest list with contributions from Skatebård, Iben Elaster, Magnus International and the second ever release of Wildflowers, the new collaborative project between Kaman Leung and Øyvind Morken. 

Between the warbling acid of Prins Thomas’ treatment of Sitronsyre, to the cosmishe wizardry of Wildflower’s Magic Johnson, it’s a record that covers the vast expanse of Norway and Oslo’s club dialect and music history. It retains that intrinsic Full Pupp identity, which has even gone some way to define an artist like Skatebård’s music. The crisp sounds and the cold atmospheres creeping in between effervescent melodic excursions and lattice-like percussive arrangements, is indicative of the Full Pupp charm that has travelled from Norway to the furthest reaches of Japan and is enshrined in the expanding Full Pupp catalogue. Here’s to another fifteen years, Full Pupp.  

 

Omformer – Ascending /Distance (HMD Records) 12”

I can’t think of a place anybody would rather be than hjemme med dama at the moment. The Oslo-based label and community celebrates five years years as a mix concept born out of the bedroom that has matured into an event series, a label and a festival, only to return to the bedroom in 2020, where it’s found some striking sympathy with the world around it in their latest.

Omformer bring their unique take on Trance and Ambient to HMD. Two extensive cuts, float between beat music and ambient texture across Ascending and Descending, as we go from the main floor to the second room of a nineties Rave across the release. An obscure narrative follows the record over two sides, as that swinging rope bridge from the dance floor to the living room. As Ascending’s lively intro drifts away into pirouetting acid figures and eventually drop into the languid mood of Distance, it marks the serene anti-climax of a night out, captured in sound.

It’s the ultimate come-down record for what’s proven to be the ultimate come-down situation, even though it was made way before the pandemic. But going from those ecstatic highs of the first half to the sluggish relief of the second half of the record, and even in the slow recesses of the Distance’s downtempo exaltations, Omformer find a chipper disposition as synthesisers leap across arrangement in buoyant movements. 

 

Fredfades & Jawn Rice – Remixes (Mutual Intentions) 10”

House music hasn’t sounded this cool in a long time. If Eddie Murphy’s leather suits and Tom Hardy’s sneer made music, this is what it would sound like.  Mutual Intentions have been unravelling the borders between Soul, House, Jazz, Hip Hop and Disco across their affiliates since establishing the concept, but it’s in the recent collaborative efforts of Jawn Rice and Fredfades where they’ve blurred these borders into a House music trope that engages as much as it entices.

After a stint in the hot tub as Jacuzzi Boys in 2018, the pair followed it up with Luv Neva Fades this year, a record that bathes in the same tropical warmth of its predecessor, but refining the sound with the help of a stellar cast of collaborators. Arriving around the same time, was a remix package of some released and unreleased material getting the treatment from the Jacuzzi Boyz themselves, Chmmr, Deep88 and Hugo LX.

From Chmmr re-assembling Show me How’s percussive arrangement to Hugo LX’s soulful excursions through Mutual Love’s horn sections, each artist imprints their own personality on these tracks, but it’s the hazy heat of Fredfades and Jawn Rice originals that remain at the center of the record’s appeal.  

Chmmr’s icy melodic treatments and Deep88’s vision for the dance floor on I believe, show a different side to these tracks, but it’s the dusty keys and muggy atmospheres of the originals that is the glue that holds these tracks together.  

 

Snorre Magnar Solberg – Arkhe Typos (On On Bulk)

Snorre Magnar Solberg communes with aliens on his latest; “A 1 hr journey into the realm of synthesizer shamanism, exploring ambi-trance, textural drone, uplifting acidic, cosmic cradle lullaby`s with added tribal machine rhythms.”

Solberg taps into the primordial ooze of emotion, converting introverted suggestions into movement and noise. Incandescent bleeps and squawks flicker from some subconscious diatribe in a cosmic language, reconstituted as sound and then music. Snorre Magnar Solberg dives deep into the recesses of an inanimate synthesiser on Arkhe Typos in a record that drifts between experimental improvisation and synthetic ambience.

Melodic refrains and harmonic passages with nowhere to go, float untethered, in a void across stark electronic soundscapes that feel more like ambient installation than anything from a dance music dialect. Touchstones from acid and trance coalesce around defiant formations progressing across the record like constellations, briefly revealing a hidden pattern, before dispersing into complete randomness.   

* The cut with Filter Musikk goes live at Jaeger this Wednesday with a Vinyl Messe and DJ sets from Roland Lifjell and Sverre Brand.

Keep it locked on Løkka: Introducing Løkka FM

Air Max ‘97s two stepping their way through the murky bass-spectrum’s of the UK underground as rolling rhythms undulate under growling voices,spreading the poetry of street.  This the  sound original pirate material, the sound of illicit airwaves being broadcast from rudimentary FM antennas hanging from a council estate building. It’s the sound of UK garage, two step, funky and what would become grime and dubstep in later years and it’s arrived in Oslo. This is the sound of Løkka FM.

The Oslo DJ collective and party set are bringing the sounds of UKG, two step and bass over to Norwegian shores with events, online radio shows, merchandise and now a label. Featuring a Norwegian-British ensemble of producers, DJs and music fanatics, Løkka FM have become the new ambassadors for a UK sound in Oslo and Norway. The 4-piece have consolidated their efforts around events like the regular takeover in Jaeger’s backyard and more recently, a label

Løkka FM 001 hit the shelves this summer, with Club Quarantine (indoors), a track that channeled their vibe in the booth to a record that hits it hard on the nose under our current situation and showcases the UKG’s ability to move from the dance floor to the airwaves across one track. It features two of the four Løkka FM affiliates with a guest appearance from Nora Pagu, but who are the rest of Løkka FM and how exactly did they arrive at their sound? We reached out to Marius Sommerfeldt, (aka DJ Bangerfeldt) to find out more about the emerging collective as we stream their last session from the sauna. 

I’ve heard Løkka FM being referred to as a DJ collective, radio show, event and maybe a label. What exactly is Løkka FM?

Løkka FM is a collective, a club night, a label, party central, an Instagram account, a Norwegian-British culture exchange programme, a neverending messenger-chat, a 2hr-mix production company, a T-Shirt manufacturer, a Premier League discussion forum and an ambulatory radio show. Amongst others. 

What were the origins of Løkka FM, and who is involved today?

Løkka FM consists of DJ Bangerfeldt, Toshybot, Goodzee and Andreas 565. Goodzee has been DJ’ing in the UK before moving to Norway, Andreas has been doing different UKG-concepts earlier on, at Revolver and Dattera amongst others, Marius and Toshy has been releasing music for DJ’ing for years… and we’ve all been blending UKG-bangers in our different housey sets, even playing together at different occasions. At the same time we saw a potential to have a bigger impact and cultivate the UK sound if we united in a bigger crew with more outlets. The UK scene has been quite small in Oslo, so it just seemed excessive to compete about the same crowd and the same bookings. In addition we wanted the nights to be fun and a bit more rugged, with Goodzee on the mic and some mix-and-blending throughout the night to make it stand out a bit more from the regular house nights we all have played over the years. And people really seem to catch on!

An honourable mention goes to our designer, Kristian Tennebø for delivering such amazing artwork and packaging for us !

You guys have quite varied backgrounds, but yet Løkka FM is grounded in the sound of House, two-step and garage. What brought you all to this particular sound?

We all have different reasons for loving it – old mix CD’s, MJ Cole, Wookie, UK pirate radio, Air Max 97’s, etc but the timing and the state of UKG is probably a big reason for us doing it now. There’s been a big revival of UKG and 2-step in the UK over the past 6-7 years, with a myriad of young, new producers and DJs fronting a new wave of UKG and UK House and none of us felt it impacted the clubs and parties we attended in Oslo. Whenever we went to London or Birmingham we experienced a young and vibrant scene, whereas in Norway – If UKG-tracks got a spin it tended to be the golden oldies and the usual, predictable stuff. When Løkka FM was formed it was important to recognize these new producers and the new sound as well, and not lean too much on the legacy of great, but also overplayed, UKG-anthems. The sound is therefore evolving with a blend of 4×4, 2-step, bass and vocal chops with a taste of speed garage and bassline when it’s called for! The perfect party-blend! 

What is your connection to the world of UKG, and why did you decide to bring it to Oslo?

I guess we all have our different connection and different favourite parts of the sound that make up Løkka FM. Goodzee being from the motherland obviously grew up with UKG and has spent a lifetime with the genre. Andreas 565 has been in Birmingham a lot and done club nights with Birmingham DJs in Oslo and played at their bassey nights. Toshy fell in love with UK garage on an Interrail trip back in 98 and has had a deep love for the genre ever since. 

Marius dips into the garage scene came mostly from reading mixmag about the new sound and listening to The Streets, Wookie, MJ Cole and rewinding Nice N´ Ripe bangers too many times, in the late nineties.

We’ve also been embraced by different DJs, radio stations and promoters in the UK from the get go – they seem to find it fascinating that we’re carrying the torch over here as well. We’ve even had legends like Matt Jam Lamont and Zed Bias over which was great fun, obviously! The main reason for doing it might just be that UKG is such a versatile form for club music that people seem to fall in love with, even though they don’t have a clue about Garage or UKG. Even though people don’t know they love it, they tend to after a UKG night regardless. After every party there’s someone approaching us saying “I have no idea what you guys were playing, but it’s great. Where can I find more?”. It kind of spurred us on to not only playing it, but also being more up front about the genre and branding it a bit more. 

The “FM” aspect is not something you can ignore, and it evokes something of that nineties/early 2000’s pirate radio spirit. What is the significance of the radio associations to Løkka FM?

When Goodzee is chatting trash on the mic over a bassey 2-step blend it’s hard not to think of pirate radio to be honest. One of the most engaging parts of UKG, and also one of the aspects that sets it apart from more traditional house music is the communication between the DJs and the MCs, and the MCs and the crowd. It has rarely happened in parties in Oslo before Løkka FM, but we love it and we want to emphasize it and develop it even more. When we’ve brought other MCs with us as well the response from the crowd has been great, especially when people get used to the dynamics. Besides, “FM” looks really cool on a shirt, don’t you think?

I don’t suppose you’ve rigged up an antenna on Markveien just yet, but is that something you will be adding to the Løkka FM franchise eventually?

We have been doing different monthly radio shows –  AAJA in Deptford, De3p Radio Network and others, but it would be fun to go back to the roots and do an actual FM-set, for sure! Do people still have their old FM-radios though? LØKKA DAB doesn’t sound as sexy, tbh. 

You’ve had a few successful nights at Jaeger recently. How do these takeovers consolidate what you’re doing with the rest of the concept?

Jaeger is a great place we’ve all been partying at and we’ve discussed on multiple occasions that the backyard would be a perfect spot for a proper UKG-party, so it was fun making it happen! For us it’s a great way of showcasing a house and garage blend for a crowd that knows club music and is used to the dynamics of a club set, while also throwing in 2-step and bassey tracks to keep it interesting. So far – so good! Hopefully we can grow even more and get some of our current favourites to join us, as soon as the UK lockdown is over as well! 

It’s certainly distinctive and there seems to be a shared, dedicated objective to Løkka FM with that accent on a UK sound. How have the Norwegian audiences taken to it from your perspective?

As we mentioned earlier – people really seem to catch on. From the get go we attracted a lot of british expats that were really into UKG and baffled that they finally found a club night in Oslo, but the more nights we do the more people tend to come back. We thought the scene was marginal in Oslo, but we might have underestimated UKG a bit – every night  there’s a couple of die hard 2-step fans we’ve never met before approaching us and after the set there’s always at least a couple of people left wanting to talk about what we’ve played. All in all it’s more than enough people buying in to keep us motivated to bring new tracks and new sets… now we’re just dreaming of a post-Covid dance floor going crazy to a shuffled hi-hat! 

I’ve heard mention of a label. When can we expect some music, and how much will it reflect what you’re doing in the booth?

Our label seemed like a nice extension to the community, and our first release is already out! Club Quarantine, which is a quirky 2-step banger about staying indoors (Covid-19 style) involves Marius & Tosh as Trudee Nite , Goodzee on the mic, the great Nora Pagu doing backing vocals and 565 finishing a pretty banging remix as we speak (coming soon) Andreas 565 has already been producing some banging UK Garage as 565 – they have a couple of releases on Smashing Trax Records and Pogo House Records as well as different remixes that is worth checking out.

Will the label also be a collective pursuit, or will you be looking to induct artists from outside Løkka FM?

Apart from the local crew, Trudee Nite and 565 doing tracks and remixes, we will be followed by some (hopefully) national and international friends of the UKG community in the future.

What else should we know about Løkka FM ahead of your next night at Jaeger?

Not much to say on this one, except: Keep it locked, keep it safe, keep it Løkka!

 

For more information visit:

Where there’s smoke there’s fire and that wasn’t a rave

Let’s just get one thing straight: whatever happened in St Hanshaugen last weekend, it wasn’t a rave. A bunch of entitled, straight, white people shouting over a tinny PA blasting out dance chart music, is little more than a russebuss to Berghain (if I can borrow a phrase from Olanskii). It’s a thinly veiled attempt at monopolising on an aspect of counter culture most of the people involved have never experienced first hand. You’ve read the stories, heard the rumours and saw the debate on television, and I just want to make sure that you know that whoever these people are, they don’t speak for rave- or club culture. These are nothing more than a bunch of kids with more money than sense, but the associations they’ve encouraged with rave culture and the international media incorrectly emphasising this association in a narrative of dangerous liaisons in a bunker in Oslo, could have disastrous ramifications for the last remnants of the original counter culture rave- and club scene. Especially in Norway and Oslo, where an authoritarian nanny state has always had a complicated and mostly dichotomous relationship with dance music culture and the community.

DIY parties and raves, in big part because of this relationship, has always had a presence in Norway. Accessible forests and remote suburban hamlets offer a chance to disappear and have led to some legendary party sets to flourish in Norway with experienced DJs and promoters hosting events that always make sure to fly under the radar, in order to not attract any attention to themselves or their guests. Intimate gatherings in largely open air venues with hosts taking every precaution to ensure the safety of their guests, have attracted less attention in all these years combined, than this one isolated event that shouldn’t even be considered in the same sport let alone the same ballpark. In recent years, events like VOID, Uteklubb and Technokjeller’n have come a long way in legitimising their efforts in Oslo by appearing in established venues like Jaeger and Villa and hosting official stages at the annual Oslo Musikkfest, a city wide event endorsed by local government. In fact to say that events like these are DIY is understatement, since more go into the planning and execution, than what usually goes into a similar event at a club. 

Unfortunately all the good work that these people have done, have just been eradicated, by this event in St Hanshaugen. Career politicians looking for a scapegoat through the blurry vision of political ideologies, and more often than not personal advancements, always fail to see the nuances, and will most certainly now only strengthen their resolve on all they perceive to be club culture. Almost immediately after, just this week in fact, they’ve maintained their position in closing venues before 12:00 when we saw encouraging signs that they would allow venues to stay open until 3AM. It’s just a bit ironic too, considering the fact that it was exactly this reason that these kids sought a cave to rave; the hubris of politics at work in the very denial of reality in every conceivable effort to always appear to be right. Limiting opening hours in a society so conditioned by drinking and socialising habits in the early mornings, in large part enforced by the state’s practises, have not changed these habits in Oslo at all, and in some aspects have only strengthened people’s resolve to maintain their routines. 

What do you expect? Human nature will always prevail, and in a situation like a pandemic, strengthened by the need to escape a grim reality , Oslo has responded, first with impromptu house parties and later with raves and club events happening around the edges of the city’s forest borders. When the house parties got too rowdy and the clubs started closing early again, there was only one option left and those that would usually spend their Fridays at Justisen and their Saturdays at Lawo, had nowhere left to go but underground. Appropriating a model from their more successful and more sincere counterparts, these kids sought refuge in a bunker, but got it disastrously wrong, by poisoning their guests and a couple of police officers with carbon monoxide, their experience woefully inadequate when compared to the real ravers, passing down knowledge from generation to generation. It says something too of the current situation that even a serious, established outfit like Uteklubb have resigned this year to a pandemic, and are only looking tentatively to the summer of 2021 to mark their return to the dance floor. 

People are still going to want to dance however, and during times of strive or uncertainty, that need for human contact, a social engagement, and some kind of release, only grows. Take the story of Tijana T, dancing in warehouses in Belgrade while bombs rained down over Belgrade. “It’s not only about social or economic circumstances, it’s also in our mentality.” she told this very blog, and while I’ve always been cautious about drawing a direct line of influence from the dance floor to politics, there is still some sense of rebellion in going out to a club and especially a rave, and there’s something mentally healthy about just stepping out of reality, even just for a night. Getting bogged down in the woes and existential crises of everyday life will have serious repercussions on anybody’s mental health, and any- and everybody will naturally seek to liberate their mind, even if it’s just for a moment in a leisurely pursuit of their choosing. We chose dancing.  

It leaves an irrecoverable mark however, when something like the event in St Hanshaugen happens, and in a case like that, where it’s completely unwarranted, having no relationship with anything that constitutes the established rave scene in Oslo, their ignorance in calling it rave and the international media on perpetuating that line can really ruin what some serious people and true enthusiasts have invested a lot of time in effort in. It’s important to me then, that you know that whatever happened in St Hanshaugen last weekend, that was no rave.  

 

* The words contained here within are the opinion of editor Mischa Mathys. The views here within don’t ncessarily reflect the views of Jaeger Oslo.

Premiere: Vinny Villbass – Liberty

Listen to a new track from Vinny Villbass taken from the upcoming 20 years of Trunkfunk compilation.

A chirpy synth sequence plays between a couple of marimbas running in counterpoint. Gated percussion, ripped from some elusive 80’s source is repurposed for a modern dance floor, stepping at a moderate tempo, enticing you over to a happy dance floor. Vinny Vilbass frees the feet on his latest, a punchy track called “Liberty” for the forthcoming 20 years of Trunkfunk compilation.

“If you listen very closely, you might recognize some drumsounds and a floaty synth from the Trunkfunk catalog,” says the chipper artist over email. “This actually started as a remix for a NIBC track, but it soon got stripped down to its own self, hence the name, Liberty!” It’s the first of twenty tracks which will feature alongside Voiski, Art Alfie and of course DJ Nibc.

Vinny Villbass has had a long standing relationship with Nibc and Trunkfunk after meeting in Berlin in 2009. “We started throwing big parties together under the name of KonTiki,” says Vinny, who remembers some “crazy lineups ” with Mano Le Tough, BrandtBrauerFrick, Olof Drejer, ToddTerje, and Axel Boman. After making some “great memories” as a club night, Vinny found himself on the Trunkfunk roster and contributed to the label with notable releases like his 2015 EP “Zip Zap.”

“Liberty” finds Vinny in a playful mood with that wonderful marimba floating on and off the beats as it makes it’s way through the peppy track. Although Vinny insists, he’s “not aiming for a Terry Riley minimalistic loop expression here” we can’t help but draw comparisons as he finds some organic pretence in the stark abyss of electronic music. “Guess I’m one of those souls that rather dance in the forrest than in a warehouse… ” he muses.

It’s the first track to come out of his newly built, yet largely empty studio, and which he describes as an “art by accident situation.” Creating it with little more than a computer and a soundcard, Vinny sat down at his makeshift controls “and booom, 3 hours later it was pretty much done.”  It had to put on the bacckburner once the pandemic hit but now it’s finally here today, and just in time for the next edition of badabing.

20 years of Trunkfunk Part 1 is out now on vinyl with the digital release arriving on the 28th of August on Traxsource and the 4th of September everywhere else.

Introducing Sous-Vide Records

Grooves entrenched in the deep recesses of dance floor archetypes; sonic landscapes thriving in the stark progressions of minimalism; and visceral arrangements touching on some deep emotive charge, this is the sound of Sous-Vide, the newest addition to the Norwegian clubbing landscape. The club concept and label with mighty aspirations in club culture, from festivals to community outreach efforts was launched last month with an event at Jaeger featuring Thomas Skjærstad, Dolbah, Pål Thomas and Matiago. 

At the centre of this new concept is Thomas Skjærstad, a DJ and producer that is no stranger to Jaeger’s booth, making waves across Norway and  Europe with his singular sound as a DJ. It’s a sound that he and Dolbah have developed in the concept of Sous-Vide and which will soon make its mark on the recorded format with the first release scheduled for this month. With tendrils stretching from Norway to Europe and South-East Asia, Sous-Vide is Norwegian based label, with international appeal, catching the ear of Mixmag amongst others ahead of its first release. 

It comes as a silver lining on a dark cloud currently casting long shadows over club- and DJ culture’s future. At a time when there’s great uncertainty over the sustainability of club culture in the age of the pandemic, there’s some hope in the continued creative efforts of a new concept like Sous-Vide. How will this situation affect the label, and why use this time to start a new label? These were some of the questions on our mind, when we heard Sous-Vide were returning to Jaeger this month so we reached out to Thomas Skjærstad to ask for a formal introduction ahead of tomorrow’s event with an exclusive stream of their last session at Jaeger. 

Hello Thomas and co. Perhaps we can start with introductions. What is Sous-Vide and who are the key players behind the label? 

Hello Jaeger! Sous-Vide Records is a small Norwegian vinyl & self releasing record label focused on the grooves of minimalism. I started this idea 3 years ago, but never got further than the planning phase because I didn’t have the right people to move forward with. The idea has been laying dormant for a while, but the spark came back about a year ago when I teamed up with Knut Kvien (Dolbah). After giving an elevator pitch of my idea during a car ride up to my studio, Knut was basically all in right from the start. We quickly realized that we share the same philosophy when it came to music and sound. 

From this point on I started developing the business plans, SWOT analysis, presentations, website prototypes and vinyl design mockups. Meanwhile, Knut was locked up in the studio producing track ideas like a madman and finding the right partner for vinyl pressing and distribution. 

After we had the plan down on paper it became clear to me that we had to bring in more resources in order to reach our goals. An important part of the launch process involves creating a series of events both in open-air and club settings, and perhaps even a small festival further down the road. This is when I brought in a passionate minimal soul and a good friend of mine from Molde: Pål Thomas. I met him through playing at a festival he organized, Hjertøya, so he was a natural choice with his experience from event infrastructure and organizing. 

I have a background as digital product developer and art director, so you could say I have a clear vision of how I want to build the SVR aesthetic. For me to be able to focus on managing the label and visual profile, I knew that I needed to bring in another resource to handle everyday tasks and social media. Hello, Mathias! Even though we’ve only known each other for about a year and a half we have already worked together on many different projects and organized several sold-out events in Oslo. Mathias has been an essential person for me to be able to get the heavy lifting done and he didn’t hesitate for a second to jump in with this project either. 

Today our little imprint consists of 4 hard-working and passionate souls who share the same vision. We are working continuously on building a sustainable platform piece by piece, connecting with good people along the way while sharing our story with the world. 

You take your name from a French cooking tradition. How does that tie into music for you and why choose that as the name of your label? 

Great question! There’s actually a lot of thought behind the name and its connection to music. Sous-Vide was innovated back in the 18th century which kind of revolutionized the world of cooking. It dramatically increased the control over temperature and pressure by vacuum sealing the food, allowing for higher precision than had ever been possible before. This enabled uncompromising chefs to consistently deliver the same, delicious taste with every single dish. For this reason it appeals to those who truly love their craft – and this aligns perfectly with my philosophy when it comes to music and the imprint. 

Where do your inspirations lie, both musical and beyond for Sous-Vide? 

About a year ago I felt quite conflicted when it came to my music, kind of dragged between different directions not having a clue of which path to take on. After releasing the Grønland EP with Granbar which made it to 1st place in Beatport releases, I felt like I had to keep producing Progressive House and Techno tracks. The crazy thing about it all is that I didn’t really feel like home in the genre and at some point after playing Techno every gig for about 3 years I started to feel a bit stressed and unbalanced on the inside. 

In January this year my girlfriend and I decided to visit Epizode festival in Vietnam, and that turned out to be the tipping point for me. Being down there on the festival grounds made me feel something I had been missing for a while both musically and personally; a sense of peace and balance, family, and unity. When talking about inspiration don’t even get me started on the music some of these guys were playing… Like seeing Aesel Weiss and Tal Cohen all the way from The Block Club in Tel Aviv seducing the crowd at 9AM at the Egg Stage – that set was like musical education to me. Absolutely mind blowing and I just had to make Asael part of our SVR family.When music becomes more sophisticated and with unexpected elements, it requires more focus from the listener to fully understand and enjoy the music to its fullest potential. To me this translates into an interesting listening experience that can go on and on without becoming boring. 

Much of my driveforce and inspiration also lies in connecting like minded humble souls in a small, tight-knit family where we can create a space for sharing ideas, knowledge and inspiration between us. 

You launched the label at Jaeger last month with the debut release still in the works. What encouraged you to start the label and what should we expect from that first release, when it does arrive? 

The soft launch at Jaeger last month was important to us as it gave us a chance to present our sonic image and some of our upcoming releases. It was a great night that we enjoyed with support from good friends in the scene. We’ve been keeping busy since then, so the whole release schedule for 2020 and through Q2 2021 is actually complete already. Exciting times! 

Basically, the Sous-Vide Records catalogue will consist of two branches in the future; SVR and SVRSR where SVR contains the physical format and vinyl releases, and SVRSR will be our digital self-releasing branch. Our first release is a beautiful 4 track EP by the talented artist Mica (UK) who’s currently stationed in Manila in the Philippines. We feel that Mica really fits well with our vision for the first release as it both challenges our sound and the listener in several ways. You can expect elements of break beats and fresh house cuts with a dash of surprise baked into lush and harmonic soundscapes. The EP will be available on our Bandcamp page this month. This first release will be followed up by the prominent Thailand-based producer DOTT who is currently establishing a physical record store in the heart of Bangkok City. 

Now, our first vinyl release is going to be something special. This 4-track EP is a real masterpiece by the Israel based producer Asael Weiss containing 3 solo tracks and a remix from the Romanian wizard RQZ. Over the past 5 years, Asael has been holding the badge as resident for The Block Club in Tel Aviv, which is counted as a musical institution that is delivering some of the best sound in the world. The vinyl will arrive in October or November and will be an important milestone for us as we put a lot of money, time and effort into making this happen. Our goal is that each individual vinyl will represent a story and to be looked upon as a timeless piece of art both visually and musically. 

Further on we have a 3 track vinyl from Marwan Sabb known from Dubfire ́s label SciTech which over the past years made appearances at events such as Time Warp and Cercle. Marwan will be accompanied by a remix from our own lads Thomas & Dolbah. Following up in high tempo, RQZ will deliver his own solo record and as for the 4th release Thomas & Dolbah will deliver 3 tracks + a remixer that is secret for now. 

Is there a sonic philosophy to Sous Vide and how will it inform the artists and the music on the label? 

There absolutely is a clear sonic philosophy behind the music we are curating and creating. To me it’s important to maintain a clear and consistent musical identity but at the same time a label should have some color to it as well. To translate our sonic signature to releasing artists is key to avoiding mistakes and ending up with tracks that are not suitable for the label in the end. A situation like that would be challenging and frustrating both for the artist and label. 

The coming six months will help us set the foundation for our sonic identity where each artist and release will represent its own outer point on the sonic spectrum. The ultimate goal would be that people would start recognizing unreleased tracks and say “Oh this must be an SVR release” ;) 

It’s a very precarious time to be launching a label, as clubs are still not able to operate under normal conditions and fewer DJ gigs. So why launch a label of this nature now, and how do you think the situation will affect the nature of the label going forward? 

For us the current situation has actually been a positive driving force in establishing our imprint. Once upon a time a wise man told me It’s in times of turmoil that people with a fine idea make it good. To be frank we have been given more time to evaluate and consider everything from strategy, marketing and promo down to searching for the artists and talents we believe will contribute to shaping the future of SVR. 

Building on this, the lockdown situation has pushed large parts of our audience into a position of listening rather than one of partying. For us, this is actually ok as our music is best enjoyed with a degree of focus and attention to detail. Now that many clubs are open but with dancing restrictions, we feel our sonic image suits well with peacefully moving hips enjoying a cold brew in Jaeger’s back yard. 

Your next event at Jaeger will be your third in a month and all this before the first record. What is the significance of the club concept alongside the label? 

Well, there’s a couple of aspects to it actually. We want to help undiscovered minimal artists in Norway to grow and find their footing, while also showcasing our in-house productions and upcoming releases. The order of things is intentional – we’re basically trying to express and help people understand our sonic signature before the first release lands. 

If we look at the bigger picture, there isn’t really a established minimal scene to speak of in Norway and we see it as our mission to help spread the music that we love across the country, while contributing to a healthy growth in the community. 

Will the club events be about testing what works for the floor or providing a platform for the artists and the releases that will make up the Sous-Vide catalogue? 

More of the latter, I think. We are all feeling confident about our sound and what direction our music should go in, so it’s more about creating a fundament and stage for our artists to grow from. It’s also a part of attracting people to our sound and building a community piece by piece. 

The set we’re streaming today was taken from the first event. How do you approach a genre like Techno in the current situation, and in what way did you have to adapt the music to make it work? 

These questions can be a little tricky since it all comes down to our subjective relationship with the term “techno”. To me it’s not a great description of our music and carries with it a more intense, pounding sound. Our music is strictly groove-based minimal that is focusing more on the elegant side of electronic dance music. Given that what we play is naturally a bit muted and less intense, I think we haven’t really had to adapt much at all. In any case way less than someone playing what I think of as techno, in a setting where people can’t get their steam out on the dance floor. 

Is this something that proved to give Sous-Vide and advantage compared to a more traditional approach to the genre in this situation? 

I don’t know if we could call it an advantage given the current situation, but we believe our audience is naturally more in the zone to pay attention to the music and not necessarily the party going on around them. 

Dolbah, Matiago and Pål Thomas joined you the last time at Jaeger. What do these DJs represent for you that’s ingrained in the approach of the label? 

Well, the four of us actually make up the SVR administration right now. Each person holds a key role in the label and are also part owners. 

Keeping in mind the last part of your question, one of my key goals is for SVR to work as a platform for our artists to grow from. Take Matiago and Pål Thomas for example: they are young, up-and-coming artists in the Norwegian scene, and through the imprint they get opportunities to play on good stages with an interested crowd. Seeing moments like these guys’ first gig in the Jaeger backyard is priceless and motivates me to keep working with music. 

It’s a real and passionate journey we have started that I’m super excited to see where it goes. 

Are the DJ’s relevant to the label, or is there a definite distinction between the DJs that you book for an event, and the artists that you’ll put out on the label? 

There is no definite distinction between the DJs and the artists as we will book releasing artists to our events and compliment the lineup with our in-house residents. Some of us like myself & Dolbah will also deliver productions to the label as well as playing gigs. We think all artists booked to an SVR event are relevant to the label because they curate our sonic image. 

Have you finalised the lineup for the next event, and what should people expect for this one? 

Yes I have! We are bringing the two minimal lads Rado and Yordan Kirilov from Trondheim to extend the sound in the sauna together with our residents. These guys for sure know how to keep the groove rolling so expect sexy minimal house cuts and a lot of unreleased SVR tracks. 

We look forward to having you back. Anything you’d like to add before we see you in the sauna? 

I’m really looking forward for our next Sauna adventure as well. Actually, there is one more important thing I want to share with you: 

As you know, our name means “under vacuum”. We want to give back to our local community, and we see it as our mission to help people who might feel like they’re stuck in a vacuum. Walking through the streets of Oslo there are many people who could use a helpful hand, and even the smallest of gestures can make a difference in someone’s life. For example, we plan to contribute by designating part of the proceeds from our overall sales towards providing warm clothes to those who are facing a cold and unforgiving winter here in Oslo. This means all people buying an SVR release will directly contribute to help our friends on the streets.

 

Greetings from Jaeger – A summer like no other

There’s been a tendency in the media to compare our current situation to a lived-experience we’ve not confronted since the second world war. While I’ve found the comparison somewhat disproportionate to the horrifying reality of a war situation, at the same time it doesn’t quite capture just how extraordinary these times are. 

The countless lives lost to this unseen terror, where a mere sniffle to some could be life threatening to others and the constant thought of passing some inconspicuous disease onto somebody else or vice versa, as had us completely re-assess every aspect of how we live our lives. Everything from the way that we work to the way we socialise has changed drastically from the ordinary, and it’s hard to estimate what the permanent repercussions of the coronavirus will eventually be for the human race. Will we go on sneezing forever, our nose buried in our elbows, will the greeting as embrace eventually cease to exist, or will we forever be watching DJ sets from our computer screens?

 While we’re all very hopeful that a vaccine will be forthcoming, this could take years according to even the most liberal estimations and with cases flaring and as the virus continues to take lives, we have to accept these measures as the new norm in our society, at least for the time-being. But as humans we’ve always been resilient and we easily adapt to our circumstances, especially during a time of crisis. Part of our coping mechanism with difficult situations is the need to escape mentality, even if it’s just for a moment, and pursue a leisure activity, to regather the strength to go forward. And that’s why we dance.

For the best part of human existence music and dancing has played a significant role in the purely hedonistic pursuit in our coping mechanism and in the era of electronic dance music, the modern day club has been both initiating the desire and fulfilling the need for generations wanting to escape their daily circumstances. Whether it’s simply finding an outlet for work frustrations or the far more serious escape from racially- or gender incited persecution, club culture is always in constant dialogue with its social- and cultural surroundings to a point where it’s almost always at odds with the world around it. It’s possibly the last truly liberal safe space and that’s why it’s more important than ever that we persevere in our endeavours as a club at Jaeger. 

While the dance floor remains an elusive concept, we’ve been resolute in our efforts to keep the music going and give whatever counts for a scene a home. You might have seen/heard us streaming as we strived to reach those that can’t reach us under the strict conditions of the pandemic and when our diligent residents answered our call as we tentatively kick-started Jaeger’s sound system in May

Playing at a restrained volume and on a tempered beat, we’ve been able to facilitate a limited capacity and a seated audience with a reserved  DJ schedule, shortly after the most severe restrictions were lifted. During this time Finnebassen has joined our ranks as the defacto Thursday resident and Olle Abstract has taken over Sundays, spreading the gospel of House for a new concept called Sunday Service. 

Olle Abstract inaugurated the new concept under the pretext of Black Lives Matter after we bared witness yet again to the institutionalised racism in the American justice system after the  killing of George Floyd. It not only jarred – how can this type of thing still be happening? – but it also opened our eyes to the institutionalised racism happening everywhere, and even affecting some of our closest friends at Jaeger. Jaeger and Olle Abstract  dedicated the Sunday Service to the cause in an effort to raise funds for the cause with a DJ marathon from our sauna booth, with all proceeds going to the Black Lives Matter organisation. It  is but a drop in the ocean compared to what Black American music has given us, so this will not just be an isolated event at Jaeger, and we’ll continue to monitor the situation and help out where we can. We can always do better.

It seemed that between covid-19 and Black Lives Matter, issues kept expounding on each other, in some gloomy apocalyptic glare at our future, and it’s now more than ever that we need some kind respite from the real world, even just for a moment. Luckily we still have the music and as of June we’ve been allowed to stay open longer and move a little freer. We’ve started stretching the legs on our sound system just a little more as we pushed up the tempo and the volume, and while we still can’t accommodate a densely packed dance floor like the kind we had at Richie Hawtin in 2019 under the new regulations, a  shuffle at your table is welcomed and even encouraged. 

In part due to Ola Smith-Simonsen, the authorities pushed through the new 03:00 AM opening hours, but we’re still focussed on the health and safety of our patrons and our staff. We’ll be practising social distancing throughout July, including the queue outside and we urge everybody to help us contain the spread of this virus. The sooner we can curb it, the sooner we can get back to the dance floor. 

With that in mind  we’ve assembled a lineup representing the best of Oslo in July, playing from our sauna with our newly established residencies Sunday Service and Finnebassen settled and a new residency in the form of Loving Tuesdays, presented by Vari Loves starting this month. Our weekday favourite and longest-serving residency, Mandagsklubben is back and we’re operating at seven days a week again… the way it should be. Prins Thomas also returns in July for the second edition of Serenity Now(!) on Saturday the 25th and on Wednesdays we continue to pursue a kaleidoscopic melange of musical flavours from Drum n Bass to Techno.

Downstairs, you might have already heard the low rumble coming from our subterranean cabin as we shake loose the speaker enclosures of the sound system. Ola has been tuning and fiddling there throughout June because as of July we’ll be hosting selected nights from Diskon again. Yes the basement floor will gather dust no longer as g-HA, DJ Ost, Øyvind Morken and Roland Lifjell take up position in the booth throughout Frædag in July.

It is truly the first time in my 5-year history at Jaeger that I’ve seen an all-star Oslo lineup like this, and while the covid-19 situation is hardly something to find positives in, I’m hoping that we can finally turn the focus back on the resident and local DJ during this time. I’ve always been astounded by the quality of DJs in the city, and I’ve often found it a bit odd that we’ve placed so much emphasis on the “booking” than on the DJ  right on our doorstep. If there is one silver-lining that I hope that we take from this is that we realise the importance of the resident DJ, the true facilitator, somebody so embedded in a scene with an intimate knowledge of their dance floor and their audience standing on threshold, rather than warming up for somebody who is often less attuned to Oslo’s needs.

This will be the summer of the resident amongst other things, and we hope you’ll join us as we try to find some solace in these truly unprecedented times. We’ll do everything in our power to ensure your health and safety and provide some escape from the daily worries, even if it’s just a moment of repose as we continue to live with what could become the new norm. We hope you have a good summer and that we can share some of it with you.

See you on the dance floor….

BigUP! – The first and last frontier for DnB and jungle in Oslo

Drum n Bass is stronger than ever and in Oslo where it’s popularity has never waned in the margins of club music, a crew has emerged from the depths of the scene to fly the flag for the genre from this wave to the next. BigUP has been a fundamental force in the current push happening in Oslo, resonating with a renewed interest in the genre happening all around the world. 

Constituting a few generations of DJs and producers who cover the vast expanse of DnB and Jungle, BigUP represents every nuanced corner of the genre and community in Norway. Over the last few years they’ve been bringing sounds from liquid to hardcore to club spaces around Oslo, with regular appearances at Jaeger. They came back to their traditional midweek spot at Jaeger two weeks ago with the cameras trained on them. 

Even during these difficult times, Drum n Bass proved itself resilient yet again, as BigUP made a show of their expansive interpretation of all things drum n Bass and Jungle with Lug00ber, Tech, Drunkfunk, Simon Petter and Fjell representing the crew from our sauna. In the down time between their visit and now, we reached you to the bigUP! crew to ask some questions while we premiere their set on YouTube. 

Tell me about the origins of BigUP! and the circumstances and ideas that informed the beginning of the crew?

Fjell: Late 2017 the guitar player of my band sent me a link to an announcement by Oslo Sportsbar, in which they were looking for DJ’s to play on a monthly basis. 

Having had a concept before (Percussive Maintenance at Skuret bar in Oslo) I sent in my resume, i.e. some poster designs and mixes.  

In January 2018 I got invited to do a short test run in the bar which I did together with Drunkfunk, and from that point on we kept playing on a monthly basis. Late 2018 we moved to Naboens pub’s basement and have been playing there until the quarantine in April 2020, together with the gigs at Jaeger.

The main thought behind Bigup is to let people have a proper night out at a concept where they can expect the deeper and more soulful styles of D’n’B and Jungle. 

Typical for our concept is to have the DJs play 2 half-hour sets: An early and late slot, which brings a lot of variety in both style and tempo. This also gives the DJs the opportunity to play for a smaller and larger audience during the nights.   

How did you all find each other, and was there anything constituting a scene that brought you together?

Fjell: We pretty much ran into each other during the different DnB nights that ran the last decade and a half here in Oslo, both on the dancefloor and behind the decks. The scene here is pretty open and in general both the audience and DJ’s are very easy going. So I can say we were friends quite some years before we became the ‘Bigup’ crew.

My first thought after getting the monthly gig was to share it with the DJ’s I knew who had the drive and the experience from running other concepts:

Drunkfunk and Tech I know from ‘Room 101’ at the Villa, I knew they could deliver good sets and their selections would really compliment mine.

Simon Peter I know from ‘SubPub’ at Maksitaksi (RIP), where he on a weekly basis kept the underground DnB scene alive and delivered deep selections that would fit Bigup perfectly.   

-Tech: I actually played as a guest DJ a couple of times before getting “voted in” for a steady position in the crew ;)  

Who is BigUp! today?

– Drunkfunk: Residents are Fjell, Tech, Simon Peter and Drunkfunk but we are known to invite a lot of local talents.

Drum n Bass in Norway for me seems to congregate around a small but dedicated community today, but what is the history behind the genre here and where do you guys factor into it?

– Drunkfunk: We have to give a massive shout out to the one like DJ Subway for promoting local DJs with Room101 at The Villa for over 10 years and counting. He is now living in Bergen and building the scene there. The scene might be small but not lacking DJ’s with variation of styles. What we lack in size we take back in consistency over many years. 

With Bigup we like to play jungle and DnB from the last three decades to brand new music all in one night.

– Fjell: It is like the Asterix comics; DnB in Norway is the rebellious little village that won’t give in to the greater powers, being house/techno and pop music (The Romans in the comics). We cannot blame the clubs for choosing the more popular genres to attract a larger audience, but as a subculture it feels like we really have to prove ourselves more nowadays.

Luckily, clubs like Jaeger give subcultures like DnB the chance to develop and reach a larger audience. 

-Tech: The popularity of Jungle and DnB in Oslo (and Norway) has had its highs and lows over the years since I moved to Oslo in the early nineties, but being in a good, solid crew helps us to never give up.

Some of DnB’s biggest stars like TeeBee is Norwegian. What is it about the genre that resonates with Norwegian artists and DJs like yourselves?

– Drunkfunk: Future Prophecies, TeeBee and K sure helped to put it on the map here early. Still remember the first time I heard TeeBee track “Fingerprints” on the radio.

-Tech: TeeBee was a resident DJ back in the days when the The Jazid Club started doing the Oxygen DnB nights and it meant a lot. (Jazid was the first proper club I played at and Oxygen was the first crew I joined in Oslo)

TeeBee has been important for the scene and truly deserves the success he has today.

Like so many underground cultures, DnB too went through a heightened phase of popularity with some questionable examples coming to the fore. How do you distinguish the core fundamentals of genre from its more gaudy, insincere interpretations?

– Drunkfunk: We never pay any attention to the charts. DnB has a healthy underground foundation with a well of music to choose from.

– Fjell:  Very much so, only a select few can make a living from DJ-ing and/ or producing DnB, but there are more popular styles that attract a larger audience. They have very little in common with what we play on our nights. 

-Simon: 100% underground. This is without a doubt a labour of love. A shared appreciation of the sound. 

– Tech: Sure, there are DnB charts helping people to discover the genre, but I think we´re more into finding the tracks WE love and presenting them to the audience.

It seems that the genre is experiencing a bit of a revival today, especially amongst younger audiences. Why do you think it’s gained popularity recently again?

– Drunkfunk: DnB is the parent to dubstep that came out in the mid 2000s. I think kids growing up with dubstep as their soundtrack are likely to explore its roots.

– Fjell: I think streaming services like Youtube and Spotify make it easier to find out about DnB and Jungle. The younger generation is somewhat fascinated by 90’s rave culture – Partying seemed less restricted, something I think still resonates with DnB nights. 

-Simon: Not really feeling the growth in Norway, but going to festivals like Outlook in Croatia you can easily see how popular the sound is with youth from all over the planet. DnB never really went away, but it’s definitely making a comeback.

-Tech: It´s always good to see new faces at our parties, but the scene is still quite small, so we never know how many people will turn up each time.

And what sets this era apart from the late nineties early 2000’s when it was at the absolute height of its popularity?

-Drunkfunk: Since the late 90s DnB grew to a worldwide scene online. DnB has always been in fusion with current music and pushing for the freshest sound. The difference now is that we have a back catalog of gems from the last 20 years.

– Fjell: Producing has become more accessible, the sound has become more organic and there are a lot more subgenres than before. Thanks to modern hardware and software it is easier to get into making DnB and experimenting with the sound.

-Tech: Yeah, agree with Fjell here, it´s much easier for new artists and small labels to do releases these days, both digital and on vinyl.

From what I can tell, the BigUP! Crew is made up of a few generations of DJs.  How does the crew keep evolving through each generation? 

– Drunkfunk: That is a great question! 

-Tech: Well, yeah, I´m the oldest one in the crew, but it’s nice to see that new generations (both DJ´s and crowd) have been finding the DnB scene. We don’t care too much about the age difference in the crew, we focus on the music and we inspire each other!

What are some of the seminal DnB classics that you can all agree on?

– Drunkfunk: “Up all night” – John B

– Fjell: ”The Angels fell” – Dillinja

-Simon: “Stalker”  Aphrodite

-Tech: This is too hard!  Q Project – Champion Sound (Alliance Remix) (plus the original and a lot of other remixes)

What is the common thread that ties all these generations together?

– Drunkfunk: Great passion for basslines

– Fjell:  DnB’s easy access. It’s often a blend of different cultures, looks and age on the dancefloor.  No one seems to judge.

– Simon: Love for the sound.

– Tech: Rhythm is key.

And what in your opinion are some of the future stars of the genre here in Norway and further afield and what are some of the newer tracks that are inspiring you today?

– Fjell:  Next to myself (https://soundcloud.com/fjellmusic) I only know a few other people in Norway that are actively producing and releasing, for Jungle I would say ‘Msymiakos’ (https://soundcloud.com/msymiakos) and for Liquid tunes I’d recommend ‘Nostre’ (https://soundcloud.com/nostre-official).

Let’s not forget our frequent guest ‘Lug00ber’ (https://soundcloud.com/lug00ber) and our friends in “Skankin’ Oslo” (https://soundcloud.com/skankinoslo)

Newer tracks that inspired me: ”Jungle Crack” – Forest Drive West , ”True Rebellion” Coco Bryce ft Dead Man’s Chest

– Simon: Watch out for the one they call Bootldr! https://www.mixcloud.com/bootldrDNB/

Is there anything else you’d like to add before we see you again?

Massive BigUps to all the supporting clubbers that have partied with us!

And to the Junglist DJs: Lug00ber, The Skankin’ Oslo kru, Mira Mark, DJ Subway, Harold Lloyd, DJ Hova, DJ Spacebear, DJ Dunder, Digital Cookboy , Instance, This Mean War!, DJ Saraa, Bootldr, DJ Large, Psychofreud, DJ Apecat(RIP), Tony Anthem and Future Prophecies

Thanks to Jæger to having us onboard.

Tickets available for Prins Thomas presents Serenity Now!

Streaming tickets for five hours of Prins Thomas live from our sauna are now available

Prins Thomas hits the sauna this week with a brand new concept called Serenity Now! Under the precautions we’ve taken for the pandemic, we only have a limited capacity for seating room for those lucky enough to join us in person. For everybody else we’re streaming all five hours live, exclusively at TicketCo. Tickets are available now via this link at 50kr per person or 99kr for a pair.

Prins Thomas cooks up some rare grooves and slow steppers from the furthest reaches of a vast record collection for this new residency at Jaeger. Taking the scenic route around his record bag, through the obscure corners of Soul, Funk, Jazz, Psychedelic Rock, IDM and Dub the Full Pupp mainstay and DJ provocateur travels the serene pastures of a vast musical library in search of those records that will bring Serenity Now(!) in these unprecedented times. Prins Thomas comes home in this residency, back to his roots with a flair for the eccentric, for a listening experience that turns the focus back onto the music.

Email info@jaegeroslo.no to reserve your table.

Sunday Service: Black Lives Matter Fundraiser

Olle Abstract and Jaeger dedicates this Sunday Service to the black Lives Matter movement and the victims of racial injustice

Black Lives Matter. Jaeger is the result of the influence of Black American culture on music, and therefore we will always stand in solidarity with all the people behind the Black Lives Matter movement and the victims of racism in America. As a community of mostly white, European music enthusiasts living in Norway we can never assume to know the experiences of Black people, but we’ll support Black Lives and Black Culture in any way we can, because we owe everything to the existence of Black Music, especially House, Techno and Electro. 

Needless to say, we are absolutely appalled by the killing of George Floyd and the unwarranted police attacks – largely incited by the racist tyrant, Donald Trump –  that followed and we stand united with the protesters and the Black Lives Matter movement. As people that have indelibly benefited from the black music culture, we condemn these actions and we would like to add our voice to the growing chorus of dissent and call for an end to the senseless killing of Black people in America and the institutionalised racism that still exists in the US police forces and political elite. We realise that we have white privilege on our side and we’d like to use that privilege today in voicing our absolute contempt for any form of racism, starting with a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter. 

After observing #TheShowMustBePaused, we’re dedicating this Sunday’s edition of the Sunday Service with Olle Abstract to George Floyd, his family and all the victims of racially incited police brutality in the USA. We will donate all the takings from the door on the night to the Black Lives Matter who is currently working tirelessly to end the war on black lives in the USA by mobilising these protests with the “vision to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”

This is an evening of reverence for Black Lives and Black American Culture so please join Olle and guests in solemn protest as they pick through a legacy enshrined in the records that sparked a life-long obsession and a career. Claes Hogedal, Daniel Gude, Della, Fredfades, Phardin, Ra-Shidi, WNDR and more join the godfather of House music in Norway in the sauna booth in a show of solidarity from our humbled community, saying thank you to the culture that created this music as we stand united in their cause. 

For more information please go to Black Lives Matter and the TheShowMustBePaused

Here are some other helpful resources:

Equal Justice Initiative

Official George Floyd Memorial Fund

Community Bail Funds for George Floyd protests

 

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.

 

A message from Daniel Gude

Daniel Gude bids farewell to Thursdays with a message on social media.

Ja, da var det på tide å rulle inn og snerpe til denne torsdagsfylla som har pågått i nesten 10 år. RETRO er ikke lenger enn torsdagsklubb på Jaeger. Det var på tide for klubben og meg å finne på noe nytt nå. Konseptet har jo egentlig vært et anti-nytt-konsept, men det får da værra grenser. Noen har tross alt måtte ta ansvar for bevaring og opplæring i hvordan ting ble gjort i gamle daer. De gyldne tider om man kan si det. MEN FY FAEN SÅ MYE MORRO VI HAR HATT DET. Og ikke minst så mange flotte gjester opp gjennom åra. Har gått gjennom notater og det er faktisk ganske sjukt hva man har klart å dra inn på den lille klubben med maks kapasitet på 330 prs(se ukomplett liste nederst). Jeg har alltid strebet etter å fylle torsdagene med innhold av kvalitet og relevans til konseptet. Og når jeg titter på lista, kan jeg fornøyd si at det har vært 94,5% full pott med det prosjektet. Også veldig takknemlig for alle lokale helter som har bidratt med gjestespillig. Har klart å tagge 100 av dere i posten her(sorry). TUSEN, TUSEN TAKK! Må også spesielt takke to av de periodesvis faste partnerne Karima Andrea Furuseth og Nicolai Coltsfoot Gulliksen som holdt ut og bidro i et delvis uforsvarlig arbeidsmiljø(my bad). Men dette hadde heller ikke vært mulig uten sjef og bookingpartner Ola Smith-Simonsen. Som har tatt (mest) økonomisk risk og godtatt bookinger med små muligheter for overskudd just for the sake of doing awesome shit! Nei altså, vi har også følt at det er viktig å bidra til miljøet og gi trofaste gjester noen “gavepakker” som takk for god innsats til et mer hedonistisk Oslo. Det er faktisk heller ikke uriktig å si at dette har vært et idealistisk prosjekt. Men RETRO er ikke helt avlyst. Det dukker opp på utvalgte lørdager på Jaeger, samt tradisjonen Boogienetter i Jul og påske og så skal vi ikke se bort i fra det kan gjeste andre klubber i byen i tiden fremover. Har faktisk fortsatt endel navn jeg gjerne skulle ha booket og spilt spilt med. Men alt dette er jo faktisk litt usikkert å si med tanke på den rare situasjonen vi nå alle befinner oss i. Oslos uteliv kommer nok til å være ugjenkjennelig en god stund fremover, tipper jeg. Selv er jeg i pappaperm nesten til Jul og er mest opptatt av å potte om planter, heve bakst, trille vogn og lære nye ting om dagen, så jeg kan ikke klage 🙂 Torsdag 28 Mai, gir jeg stafettpinnen for torsdager videre til den talentfulle Finnebassen, som jeg ønsker all hell og lykke! Finn er en kick ass dj og en feiende flott fyr. En stjerne, rett og slett.Det er ikke bare bare å hoppe etter Virkola i tåke, sludd og regnføre 😉 Igjen, sinnsykt takknemlig og ydmyk for å ha vært så privilligert til å få gjøre dette så lenge. Takkskarruha! ❤
Alan Fitzpatrick, Alexander Robotnick, Àme, Anetha, André Bratten, Answer Code Request, Art Alfie, Axel Boman, Bicep, Bjarki, Bjørn Torske, Black Coffee, Boddhi Satva, Carl Craig, Curtis Vokda, Dám-Funk, Dan Tyler(Idjut Boys), Daniel Avery, Daniel Kyo, Danny Krivit x 3, Dave Clark, David August, Delfonic, Dennis Ferrer, Derrick Carter, Derrick May, DJ Clock, DJ EZ, DJ Fettburger, DJ Maboku, DJ Pierre, DJ Sotofett x 3, DJ Speculator, DJ Spen x 3, DVS1, Eric Duncan, Floating Points, FunkinEven, Gene Farris, George Morel, Gerd Janson, Greg Wilson, HRDVSN, I Hate Models, J.Phlip, Jackmaster, Jamie 3:26, Jamie XX, Jay Haze, Jeff Mills, Jenifer Cardini, Juan Atkins, Kampire, Karizma x3, Kenny Dope, Kenny Larkin, Khan, Kirilik(KINK), Kirk Degiorgio, Kon, Krystal Klear, Lauer, Legowelt, Lenny Fontana, Lil Tony, Lil’ Louis, Luke Slater, Marc Ernestus, Marcell Dettmann x 4, Marcus Fengler, Massimiliano Pagliara, Maurice Fulton, Mental Overdrive, Miguel Campel, Mike Dehnert, MK, Mr. White, Nastia, ND_Baumcker, Nico Siano, Nicolas Jaar, Norman Nodge, Omar S, Parris Mitchell, Paul Johnson, Phil Asher, Photek, Pscyho Rama, Radioslave, Red Rackem’, Richie Hawtin, Robert Owens, Rolando, Rollerboys, Roman Flügel, Roy Davis Jr, Sacha Rydel, San Soda, Sassy J, Seth Troxler, Skatebård, Soulclap, St. Göran, Talaboman, Tale of Us, Tama Sumo, Telephones, Terence Fixmer, The Mover(m. Gateavisa), TieDye, Todd Edwards, Total Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Trulz & Robin, Victor Rosado, Willie Burns, Xosar og Øyvind Morken.

Daniel Gude

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.

Jaeger – Temporary Closure

Jaeger will be closed until further notice

Jaeger will be temporarily closed in accordance with the new covid-19 regulations imposed by Oslo kommune and the Norwegian government. We’re complying with the earlier, which goes into effect at 18:00 today. We are intent on opening as soon as we can and will keep you posted on any new developments as they might occur. As a result, all listed events are postponed until further notice. Keep dancing wherever you are, until we see you on the floor.

In the booth with David Morales

David Morales has forgotten more about House music than any artist working within the field today can claim to know. The New York DJ, producer, remixer and label owner was there at the advent of the genre, counting Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan as contemporaries. He had played the Paradise Garage, frequented the Loft and held residencies at places like Zanzibar, but his biggest contribution, remains in his efforts in bringing House music to the masses with remixes for Mariah Carey, Jamiroquai and Michael Jackson dotting an ever-impressive discography.

Alongside Frankie Knuckles, he established the Def Mix label, and as a DJ he was one of the first DJs ever to warrant the superstar status and toured the world. Highlights in the House music lexicon regularly dot his career. Winning the grammy for remixer of the year, sets and residencies during Ibiza’s late nineties reign; and tracks like “Needin’ you,” had maintained his prominence in the House music scene which culminates today in a continued appeal as a world-renowned DJ and producer. David Morales has had a career in House music three times over and in his latest venture, the label DIRIDIM, he’s established yet another new phase in a career that continues to evolve without losing sight of those all-important roots of the genre. 

A figure that assumes the legacy of the genre and the New York faction of its roots, David Morales represents a ideology that we’ve always tried to encourage and underscore at Jaeger and during a recent set at Frædag, he helped g-HA & Olanskii and Olefonken instill this ideology again. Between gospel-influenced vocals, syncopated hats, deep bass grooves and four on the floor kicks, David Morales put together a set of mostly original music and edits, bridging the gap between the origins of this music and its future. 

We caught up with Mr. Morales whortly after to ask some questions while we listen back to his enigmatic set, recorded in our basement. You can read a full profile on him here.

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions for us. We really enjoyed your set here and particularly listening back to it today. Did playing at Jaeger, direct you in any way  you thought you might not have gone into ahead of the night? 

Not at all. Before I accepted the gig I was told that the night was all about house music and that the crowd appreciated good music.

All those classic elements of House are in there, the vocals, the syncopated percussion and four on the floor. While those core elements remain, House has gone through an immense evolution through the course of your career, but what is the ultimate appeal for you as a DJ that keeps you interested and excited about the genre? 

There’s a lot of good new music out. The problem is that you have to listen to a lot of bad music to find it. You have to evolve with the times. The game has changed but music is still music. And people still like to dance to music. I’ve tried every format of Djing as in vinyl, CDJ’s and computer. They’re all interesting. At the end of the day it’s about the music.

I’ve read some interviews where you’ve mentioned that you weren’t really that inspired or influenced by your Latin roots and music, but I thought I heard some Latin rhythms in this mix in the beginning. What is your relationship with those roost today?

It’s funny because since I became a producer/songwriter I got to really appreciate my roots. I’m sorry that I didn’t appreciate it earlier. But I love a good rhythm and when it comes to latin music it’s all about the rhythm.

As somebody that was at the forefront of House music from the beginning, do you feel that distance between you and your audience has grown and how do you try and maintain that relevance? 

That’s a very interesting question… As a DJ that’s been playing for 44 years, I’ve outgrown my audience twice easily, maybe even 3 times. I mean most of the people that I grew up with got married, kids even grandchildren. They don’t represent the scene today like they did when they were younger. If I wasn’t Djing I wouldn’t be going out clubbing unless it’s a reunion night. I know that I’m not in the same demand as I was 10,15, 20 years ago. All DJ’s come up with a following. The hard part is maintaining some sort of relevance. I’m lucky that DJing has no age limit. And as long as you stay current with your music, the art of Djing is what it is.

How do you think the role of the DJ has changed from when you first started playing to today? 

Well technology for one. And now you have social media. Also the biggest change is set times. Rarely does a DJ play the whole night. So the biggest thing is that there’s no continuity or should I say flow. Therefore there are less risks taken. It’s hard to express yourself when you only have 1-2 hours to play. Also the DJ was not the focal point. You were up in the clouds somewhere or hidden in the corner. And let’s face it the money has changed DRAMATICALLY!

Besides “Finally” at the end, all the pieces in your mix favour a contemporary. What do you look for in music today to make it into your sets, and where do you draw the line when it comes to older pieces?

Most of my set is 90% of my new productions and remixes mixed in with other new music. I, on occasion, throw in a classic. What makes a good DJ is choosing good music.

Are you still editing / remixing lots of music to work in your sets today?

Yes very much. I’m in the studio almost everyday during the week. I’m always prepared. I always travel with my studio. Thank god for technology.

It seems that since establishing Diridim, you’ve been far more active in making and producing music again. What inspired you to start your own label again, and what has the label encouraged in terms of music for you?

After DEF MIX I felt that it was time for a new chapter. It’s why I started DIRIDIM which means “the rhythm”. Diridim is all about where my head is at now musically. I want to experiment with new sounds and talent, there’s so much talent out there. I want to branch out into world music and bridge it all together.

Those distinctive elements in your music, the vocals and the progression through your tracks remains central to your work on the label. What are some of the fundamental ideologies that inform your work and the label and how has it evolved throughout your career? 

I grew up on an intro, break and outro. The journey that a track or song is supposed to take you on. It’s no different than any kind of music.

What effect has launching the label and this new music had on your DJ sets? 

It has had a huge effect on my sets. The only difference is that I’m playing my own music more than others. 

Club music and House music is so popular today,  and although it still feels quite a way off from its peak in the mid to late nineties, you’ve experienced it all before I imagine. So, from experience alone, where do you see the music going from here and what do you hope to get out of it in the future?

I just hope to see and keep music alive and thriving.

Album of the Week: Caribou – Suddenly

It seems hardly necessary to sing Caribou and Dan Snaith’s praises for an album that had won its accolades, way in advance of its release. A cover feature on Mix Mag, an 8.2 rating on Pitchfork, and reviews on every popular music outlet have installed “Suddenly” as one of the most eminent LPs of 2020, thus far. Even Resident Advisor’s claim that “Suddenly is a frustrating listen” has only gone to contribute to the its immediate popularity. So why add our voice to a chorus of sycophantic praise for the album? Because on this occasion the hype holds true to the music.

The much anticipated follow-up to “Our Love” (whose grooves had been worn flat from the amount it was played at Jaeger’s cafe), “Suddenly” establishes Snaith’s Caribou alias yet again in that mystic realm between the dance floor and pop music. While his Daphne moniker has pandered largely to the club concept, informed by elements of House and UK bass music, Caribou circumvents the functional in favour of showcasing Snaith’s strength as a songwriter. On this album, he has turned an introspective focus on personal experiences of life, love, birth and death for a LP that maintains his innovative approach to electronic sounds and constructions.

It’s Snaith’s voice which jars the listener into submission from the very first notes of the LP on “Sister” as the raw, fairly unprocessed voice, invites you close to the artist, disarming the listener the intimate experience that follows through “Suddenly.” It’s an album about those “life-changing moments that stop you in your tracks” Snaith told Mixmag in their cover story, but while associations of melancholy and sadness are so easily entertained through these ideas, “Suddenly” indulges a subdued euphoria.

The album thrives on the beatific nature of Snaith’s voice, which is much more prominent than its ever been on his work, and although innocent, the music contains some striking curiosities that have remained central to the Caribou sound. The disembodied vocal samples that float through tracks like “New Jade” and “Lime” and the swirling detuned plucked strings of “Like I loved you,” perpetuate Snaith’s innovative instrumentation. Through texture and arrangement Snaith presents a disjointed pop aesthetic, where a dislocation in music often references a lyrical theme, broaching on sincere personal subjects from death to #metoo.

Lyrics read like fragments of parchment strewn across a living room floor, and can go from a simple line like “You never come back” to evoking weighty subjects like when he sings a lyric like “Brother, you’re the one that must make changes” on the opening track, in a clear commentary on gender equality. Simple, concise lines appear in the abstract, leaving the door open for interpretation and while the lyrics contain some poignant springboards to further rumination, they only work within the context of the songs. Snaith’s voice acts as that tether between the robotic nature of the electronic music and the human condition where “Suddenly” is more than just a dance record; even though the duo of “Lime” and “Never Come back” would make a very affective 12″.

“Suddenly” is a pop record and it should be appreciated as such, but more than that it’s a pop record that has brought something subcultural to the mainstream. Together with the likes of Four Tet and Floating Points, Caribou has done for dance music, what Talking Heads achieved for post-punk. It frames elements of dance- and club music in the popular realm without losing that sincere intent that associates with the more subcultural aspects of the Dan Snaith’s music.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

A simple needle vibrating in reaction to some minuscule peaks and troughs cut into a thin lacquer disc rotating at 33 ⅓ or45 revolutions per minute; who could have ever thought it could indulge an entire culture? In 2020 as DJs continue to flock to the more accessible and unexacting digital formats (who can blame them) the culture has turned cult, closing ranks with an unwavering dedication bordering on religion of the 12” record. 

While DJ music and new releases favour accessibility, and vinyl’s prominence continues to wane in the era of an increasingly informed audience based on the Internet, it takes an obsessive commitment to produce and collect the format today. Contained in the hallowed medium is the last remnants of a culture that defined the DJ for the most part of DJ history, and continues to lure dedicated music heads to new- and previously undiscovered music.  

For some it’s the last bastion of taste, unfettered from the indulgence of hype and trend-informed biases, for something individual and personal; an intimate exchange between the listener and the artist. It lives beyond the immediate and encourages more than just a fleeting relationship. A record is for life, and even if it refuses to satiate, it can always fulfil another’s musical experiences.  

It occupies our physical and mental spaces, informing personalities and encroaching on our living spaces. It is an indistinguishable part of us without making a sound, and contained within its grooves, is a sonic world that is unique to us and our listening habits. You might find the same music online and somebody else could have the very same record, but it’s impossible to replicate the feeling and the mood when you put a needle on your record and disappear into its sonic recesses on your terms.  

There are a few physical places that encourage this relationship with the waning format, but in Oslo we have one of the most dedicated in Filter Musikk and one of the most dedicated enthusiasts in proprietor Roland Lifjell. This is the cut with Filter Musikk. 

 

DJ Qu – Dance To My Ministry EP (HotMix) 10″ 

A beat shuffled into the obscure realm between strong beats and an industro-leaning track siphoning elements of Techno into House bring something a little different to this quintessential DJ tool from DJ QU. The Italian stalwart channels his extensive experience through this plucky ten inch, providing two very different moods across its two tracks.

While “Soul Thing” will happily float between Techno and House as a mix steps up a gear, it’s “Repeat” with its off-kilter shuffling beat and its peculiar atmosphere that steals the show. The percussion meanders through a swampy texture, sluggishly falling between the chasms of integer beats, while legato synths refuse to move before unexpectedly jerking into the next note. Adding the distorted vocal and the menacing bass line through pivotal points in the track, it takes on a very psychedelic affair as the track seeks to challenge a more progressive dance floor. 

 

Low End Activist – Low End Activism (Sneaker Social Club) 12″

Sneaker Social Club has really picked up some steam in 2019, and even as we write about this new arrival at Filter, they’ve released 7 records since. The label, which focuses on music derived from UK soundsystem culture, thrives in a heady mix of Grime, Garage, Jungle and Drum n Bass. Prioritising the sub frequencies, artists like the formidable Neil Landstrumm, and the incorrigible Appleblim have featured on the labels extensive catalogue, which was slung into overdrive last year.

Patrick Conway goes subterranean as Low End Activist in this release for the label. Moving away from the more traditional US-inspired dance floor he’s cultivated for the likes of Forbidden Planet, Rekids and ESP Institute, Conway takes his sounds to London’ streets on this release. Large, bulging waves of bass undulate through six tracks as ghostly echoes of soundsystem MCs haunt the outer fringes of the tracks. Dub figures float between stark metallic percussive arrangements in a misasmic whirlpool of sound, designed for impressive speaker stacks. 

Besides the obvious single of the title track, there’s very little to the EP beyond the immense power of the sound, and in that Low End Activist has created a record to test the limits of UK sound systems. 

 

VA – Acid Virus (Zodiak Commune) 12″

Well, it was 303 day a couple of days back…so it only seems appropriate to have an Acid record here. Zodiak Commune enlists a few underground stars in a nod to the early sounds of Acid Rave. About Blank, Negative Glitch, WaveBndr and Arkanoid all proffer their interpretations of the ever-endearing Acid genre, specifically reaching back into the past when the genre was soundtracking raves across Europe and especially around the M25 in London. 

Updating the sound design for contemporary audiences, stoic 303 basslines march through vacuous textures to the beat of dominating 909 kick drums. From the sampled breakbeat of “Papy 303” to the hoover synthesiser blowing through the middle of “Oracle,” the artists involved make sure to honour the roots of the genre, but ultimately avoid kitsch cliches in their modern take on hackneyed themes. 

Showcasing the versatility of the 303, the basslines go from bubbling along under the surface to squelching on the melodic line, and even though the machine and the music associated with it is closing in on the realm of a midlife crisis, there is still something primal and urgent about the sounds of a record like like Acid Virus. Happy 303 day!  

 

Mike Schommer – Come Home EP (Greyscale) 12″

Deepchord as artists and a label have played a significant part in the role of dub-Techno in the history of club music. Counting Basic Channel, Luke Slater (L.B Dub Corp) and Shed (Wax) as contemporaries the US group had a hand in establishing the genre, and while Rod Modell and Mike Schommer might have gone their separate ways some ten years back, it’s clear they’ve remained dedicated to this music.

After a decade long hiatus, the other half of Deepchord, Mike Schommer has returned to the fray, with releases for Mosaic, and this soulful record for Greyscale. “Come Home” side-steps the dance floor somewhat for three original tracks that appear more like songs, than tracks. At the centre of the record’s appeal is the wraithlike voice of Milly James, moving through the tracks like a breeze, between the dub-rhythms and entrancing melodic phrases Schommer coaxes from minimal synthesisers. 

Much of the excitement for the record comes in the form of a Deepchord remix of “Breathe,” a kind of reunification for Schommer and Rodell. The remix transposes the track to the dance floor, but retains the allure of James’ voice and thrives in the same breathy atmospheres of the original. Together with the original tracks, there’s a lot of crossover appeal between the dance floor and the home stereo. “Breathe” and “Come Home” will continue to haunt the listener long after the record comes to its conclusion.  

 

Benoit B – Caution 9’6″ High (Unthank) 10″ 

There’s something instinctual that attracts us to the Lindsay Todd’s Firecracker and Unthank labels. From the 10” formats he prefers to the designs and the artists that he attracts to the labels, there’s an indefinable allure to the records, which more than not follows through onto the music. 

Benoit B delivers on this occasion with a record that thrives in the unusual, without sacrificing accessibility. A dance record for the informed “Caution 9’6” High” maintains the dominance of a percussive beat, but folds in off-kilter elements that arrive straight out of the BBC radiophonic archives. Using FX as percussion, the record thrives in the uncanny where a metallic swoosh or atonal bang sits happily alongside the familiar sounds of a contemporary dance floor.

While the melodic charm of “Global Go” and the bass excavations of “Cruisin” are immediate and effective, every track brings something unique to this mesmerising release. The quirky percussive pursuit of ”Coconut Groove” (which is just a great title) and the off-kilter beat orchestrations of “Nanga” hold their own appeal. There’s an elusive thread that ties these tracks together through their eccentric sound design, which is what will keep bringing you back to the tracks.  

Seizing the moment with Optimo

Back in the late nineties, there was something close to a movement of music enthusiasts that sought to redefine the parameters of what constitutes a DJ and a club night. It was a bolstered by an unique attitude and an innovative pursuit that defied any idea of zeitgeist or tradition for the sake of infusing some excitement on stale dance floosr. It went from some unilateral persuasion amongst a handful of DJs to spread across the world in a complete shift in the universal spirit to DJing and club nights, and today some of these DJs are held in the highest esteem the world over. 

In Glasgow and Scotland Optimo Espacio held court in this era. The club night and DJ duo, often foreshortened to simply Optimo, had not merely instilled this new attitude to DJing and clubbing in Scotland, but eventually played a significant hand in setting the stage for what soon became an international pre-occupation to dig further and deeper through their record collections, flouting the preconceptions and conventions that had become entrenched in club culture.

J.G Wilkes and J.D Twitch (Keith McIvor) are Optimo, and their club night, Optimo Espacio at Sub Club in Glasgow had been a kind of Mecca for clubbing enthusiasts for over 13 years before they brought it to its inevitable conclusion at the height of its popularity. From the club night, they became sensations on the international DJ circuit and set up Optimo records and various sub-labels as a continuation of the indelible spirit they continue to cultivate from the booth. 

Their legacy is enshrined today in the annals of DJing and clubbing and as Optimo, they continue to imbibe the spirit which has set them apart since their humble beginnings, playing to intimate crowds in Sub Club. Today they are fixtures on an international DJ circuit that they helped establish and through new releases like Bergsonist’s latest on Optimo records, they continue to flout preconceptions and conventions. With a return-visit to Jaeger looming for Hubbas Klubb, we’ve seized the opportunity to send through some questions to the DJ duo in an effort to find out more about the origins of their club night and their continued pursuit of that individual attitude to DJing. 

*Optimo play Hubbas Klubb this Saturday.

Hello guys, and thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. When you started working together and established the Optimo Espacio night. What kind of music were you bonding over at that time and how did it inform what would eventually become the night?

J.G Wilkes: I really think it was more a case of us bonding over the type of music we DIDN’T want to play – that which was prevalent in a lot of clubs and parties around the mid to late 90’s. Something that people were calling Techno but which wasn’t Techno at all! We wanted to play “other” records at the party and make it really fun to play. It was precarious at times and it felt that anything might happen musically. I loved that about it and I would definitely align that kind of excitement with a sense of freedom which is so important when I think about what we do. Maybe that is the appeal of Optimo to a lot of people – I hope so anyhow.

It’s important to remember that it was very much about the people who supported and attended so faithfully week in and week out. They made the Optimo (Espacio) party what it was.

How does it affect your approach to Djing when playing together?

Wilkes: We kept it fun and when something is fun it’s easy to keep your enthusiasm for it and keep challenging oneself. I guess there must be a shared energy we possess for making what we do evolve and stay interesting. 

Jonnie you came from an art background, and Optimo Espacio came at a time when there was a confluence between clubland and the artworld. Were these two things something you could consolidate around Optimo Espacio as well?

Wilkes: At that time I was still showing work and was represented by a couple of galleries but I wanted to withdraw from the art world. I was finding it increasingly difficult to exist there for many reasons. When Optimo Espacio started we were building something from scratch and that was a great opportunity for me to both commit fully to dj-ing but also to get a degree of fulfilment from “making” and “doing” visual stuff as well… 

You’ve said in the past there was an idea for the night before it happened. What was that initial idea and how did it change through the course of its lifetime?

Wilkes: The best way I can describe our initial idea was that we seized the opportunity to play a real breadth of music in a club context – at a location (The Sub Club, Glasgow) that was pretty much known only for house music prior to that. It was something we really craved at the time and that I personally had not been brave enough to do very often before. There was no manifesto or rigid strategy initiated when we embarked on the journey but I would say, our openness to all sorts of music coupled with a kind of DIY approach to organising the parties – a quite anarchic spirit for want of a better term remains with us still.

In a recent Interview with Erol Alkan, he mentioned you as one of the contemporary spirits in the international DJ community – DJs that were essentially bringing a much needed diversity to dance floors again. Were you aware that the diversity of you were bringing to your nights was happening simultaneously all over the world at that time, or were you operating in a pretty isolated scene? 

J.D Twitch: We had no idea initially; not a clue. We started Optimo in 1997. I didn’t get on the internet until 1999 / 2000 and it was only maybe around 2002/3 that we became aware of other kindred spirits and started to play outside Scotland.

How was it all interpreted differently perhaps in Glasgow compared to places like London and Paris?

Twitch: I think people in Glasgow, at least back then, were less concerned with being caught up with perceptions of cool and just 100% devoted themselves to having the best possible time, and having wide open ears.

Sub Club played a pivotal role in the success of the night too. What made it so special, and do you think it was something that you could have recreated in any other venue

Twitch:  It was by far the best venue in the city but the thing that was really important was that they believed in us, much more than we did ourselves. For the first 18 months of doing our weekly nights there the crowd was wildly enthusiastic but small. Maybe 100 people would come which was fine with us but probably not financially good for the club. I think after a few months of this most venues would have booted us out but The Sub Club really believed this was something important and was going to really take off, and of course they were right.

When you started playing abroad as Optimo, how were you able to transport that spirit of your nights to different places all over the world? 

Twitch:  By not giving a fuck really, but actually it was probably more naivety. We were used to doing what we did every week so initially just did it without thinking if it would translate. Of course often it didn’t and sometimes we would tone it down a bit or at least modify it slightly as to me there is no point emptying clubs.

You ended Optimo Espacio on a significant high note and besides that and your growing DJ commitments, what was the reason behind shutting the residency down at that exact time? (I believe you were still on tour when you made the announcement.)

It felt to me that we were at the absolute peak of the weekly night and the only way was down. It could almost certainly run weekly for a few more years but the idea of it slowly dwindling away was too depressing so it felt right to end on a massive high. Also, it was so all consuming and it was important to have time to do other projects, like having the labels etc. 

13 years is still a long time for a club night, especially at that time, when everybody was going from one thing to the next quite quickly. How did you maintain that excitement around it for so long?

Twitch: By being in love with what we were doing and giving it 100% dedication, every week. It was such an incredible experience every single week that that was enough motivation to put 100% into the next week. I devote huge amounts of my time to sourcing music for my DJ sets, music that is mostly unique to me, not just playing promos I get sent to my email inbox. What is the point of that? I might as well be a jukebox as everyone else just does that too. Working hard to find music is something I think is hugely important and that having a unique voice is the single most important thing about being a DJ. I think most DJs are pretty lazy about this but I am lazy compared to how I was when we were doing the club weekly. I would dedicate insane amounts of time to making sure it was always fresh, always exciting, never boring. 

Were there ever times when it went through slumps, and how did you usually overcome those kinds of obstacles?

Twitch: No, never. After 18 months of there being 100 people there it totally took off and for the next 12 years was always packed. I don’t ever remember worrying about the numbers attending.

Going from residents to touring DJs and then also establishing a few labels around the concept, the Optimo name lived on, but was it a case of directing the ideas and philosophy of the club night into these different avenues? 

Wilkes: Something I’ve realised – we work really hard to make very aspect of what we do as good as it possibly can be. We tour really hard, Keith’s commitment to the label is ferocious, if we do are own parties we put the same energy into this as we always have, the same applies obviously for our DJ sets. All this is done well because we really enjoy it. As I said before, it’s not a rigid strategy but we do possess this shared energy and a strong work ethic which feeds into everything we do. 

I believe your most recent endeavour is a new sub label called Weaponise Your Sound. Where does this fit into the Optimo spectrum?

Twitch: It is a sub- label run by my friend and ally Kristina McCormack who does the Diet Clinic show on NTS which showcases women DJs and artists. I just facilitate the releases – the A&R is 100% down to her. It fits into the Optimo spectrum as I trust her taste and vision and have known her a very, very long time.

The Optimo label is still putting out quite a diverse range of music, and the most recent addition is Bergsonist, whose music plays between elements of electronica and traditional eastern influences. What usually draws you to the records that make into the label?

 Twitch: So much music comes my way. I can only explore a fraction of it, but am blessed so much of its is unique and great. Bergsonist reached out to me and I was instantly smitten by her music. She is madly talented. I am drawn to artists that sound like themselves, have an outlook and attitude I can relate to and make music that blows my mind. 

I know it’s mainly Keith that runs the label, but is there any relationship to the label, and the sound of your DJ sets?

Twitch: Yes, the labels are my thing and that causes some confusion. I have some new labels launching, the first of which is called Cease & Desist and is a label for compilations. . I wouldn’t release anything I wouldn’t play in a DJ set so there is a relationship for sure.

As DJs, you continue to bring that diversity to your sets, and even if there is at times a theme tying your sets together, you seem to be able to extend it to the absolute limits. It’s always dynamic and exciting, especially in an era dominated by very niche DJs. What do you think it is about your approach to music that still sets you apart from the rest?

Wilkes: I guess everyone is wired differently and perhaps some dj’s feel that they want to stick to what they know they are good at or what has always worked for them or what they see as their area of expertise – that’s fine. I admire a lot of dj’s who have this high level of detail to what they do – or as you say, it’s a kind of niche. If it is our thoughts on music in a broad sense, the notion that music in many different forms possesses power, can move people, can bring them together, can inspire radical thought, can convey feelings – it you think those things are real, like I do then maybe it’s a factor in our approach to the role of dj-ing and the music we choose to play, yes.

Do you ever find you have to adapt to a crowd, and how do you usually try and find a compromise then?

Wilkes: Yes we adapt. We feel the space, feel the sound, look at the energy spots in the crowd and work from that. 

There’s a lot of similarities between Oslo and Glasgow’s club scene, and you guys have played here before. How might that knowledge affect what you prepare for the night ahead on this occasion?

Wilkes: You feel that little bit more comfortable for sure if it’s not the first time in a room. One thing that stayed with me about Jaeger was the exquisite sound. When the system is that good then you are at a real advantage when it comes to playing more challenging sounds…with power and detail in the sound you can incorporate music that is just lost on a poor system. It’s very disappointing when you literally have to exclude certain records from the set because a system isn’t capable of conveying their sound the way it is meant to be – so thankfully we don’t have to do this at a club like Jaeger! 

 

Album of the Week: Ex-Terrestrial – Gamma Infolded

During a recent resurgence of melody on dance floors, a whole generation of artists, DJs and producers have excavated dusty bargain bins the world over in establishing an alternative sound to the draconian Techno and bland House that saturates the scene. Taking their inspiration from 90’s Trance, IDM, Ambient and Electro, artists like Ex-Terrestrial have foregone trends in an amalgamation of influences that defies categorisation and marks some of the more innovative records being released today.

Ex-Terrestrial is hardly the enigma his alias might suggest and has been spearheading this latest evolution in electronic club through his Naff label. Between running the label and releasing his own music on the likes of Lone’s Magicwire imprint, the artist is a scene onto himself, moving with the tide of the trend, but also laying the groundwork for something beyond a nostalgic revisionist music. “Gamma Infolded” is the latest in a string of records that has seen him engage with an older aesthetic in looking for something unique for contemporary dance floors.

The LP arrives via Naff records and breaks from the sound of previous records on the label, which through “Perishing Thirst” and “Priori” has favoured a 90’s leaning Trance and Techno aesthetic. On “Gamma Infolded,” Ex-Terrestrial ventures into the more experimental  realm of IDM, with an album that jumps between serene melodic compositions and distorting noise collages. As is the case, this kind of nostalgic flair can often succumb to irony and while a title like “Bored of Canada” might suggest the artist has a sense of humour about his own work, there seems to be more of a serious conceptual thread tying this record together.

Ex-Terrestrial avoids the kind of Trance-based Techno that warmed audiences to his sound on singles like “Euphorbia” for a record that channels the late-nineties sound of Warp records. Glitchy rhythms and abstract atmospheres dominate the record with obscured samples and ebullient melodies floating through the individual pieces in search of a narrative through the album.

Individually, tracks like “Gguunngg” and “Scatterbrainn” might leave the listener somewhat disorientated, but as they appear through he sequence of the record, these pieces find a form over function. It might leave fans somewhat disillusioned with the record, but perseverance is key, as the record resolves in the more tepid realm of “Travel Safe” and “Trains.” For those that might have come to know the artist through his various 12″ records, there is something familiar contained on those last two tracks, and yet they only seem to make sense in the abstract noise contained on the triptych that makes up the C-side of the LP.

“Gamma Infolded” might distance itself from Ex-Terrestrial’s previous works, but it continues that spirit of exploration, informed by the past in search of a future we seemed to have lost along the way. It is perfectly suited for the album format and re-enforces the artist’s position in the  new vanguard of electronic music artist.

Just doing my thing with Danny Daze

Converging on the sounds of Miami Bass, Electro, and Detroit Techno, Danny Daze is a DJ, producer and label head that has forged a singular sound in the booth and the studio for over a decade. 

Born Daniel Gomez, and raised in the vibrant musical landscape of Miami, everything from Salsa/Merengue, Hip Hop and Miami Bass encouraged an audacious youth to a life in music. Break dancing lured a young Danny over to the turntables, establishing a strong tether to contemporary music styles like Electro, where he would forge a career as a DJ. 

Inspired by a local scene of characters like the flamboyant Otto Von Schirach, DJing eventually led to production where Danny almost immediately carved out a career with his debut single, “Your Everything.” 

The Electro leaning track with its mammoth bass-line was strangely co-opted into the all-consuming Deep House trend of the last decade and sought to pigeonhole the DJ and artist into its ranks, but with his signature sets that ran the gamut from Detroit to Miami, critics couldn’t accurately consolidate his sound, which usually erred on the darker edges of body music. 

That criticism merely strengthened Danny’s resolve as he forged ahead in his enduring philosophy of “doing my thing” and after some releases on Jimmy Edgar’s Ultramajic, Ellum Audio and Kompakt Extra, the rest of the world eventually tuned in on to the Danny Daze wavelength. 

While he was establishing his singular sound as an artist, he was also breaking down boundaries from the booth. Informed by the same eclecticism from his youth where Bjørk could make an appearance in a Hip-Hop and R&B set, Danny’s DJ sets propelled his career even further. His bass-heavy selections, which played on the same corporeal intuitions he had cultivated as a break dancer, had endeared him to an international scene where he has staked an individual claim as a DJ today. 

Sets like his now famous Dekmantel Boiler Room mix, continues to set him apart from the trend-informed contemporaries, with a sincere focus on treading a unique path between elements of Electro, Miami Bass and Techno, leaning towards the darker hues of those musical universes.

In recent years, he’s channeled this unique approach to his music and sets in the equally distinctive, Omnidisc record label with releases from a close knit community of like-minded artists like RHR and Anthony Rother and the rare contribution from Danny Daze.

Between the label, the DJ sets and his music, Danny Daze has foregone the paradigm of  Dj-based music for the sake of the individual and after almost a decade of an internationally renowned artist and even longer as a DJ, it is this what remains at the core of his appeal. It’s Danny Daze doing his thing, and that’s what we found too, when we sent out some questions to Danny ahead of his set at Jaeger next weekend for Frædag

Miami has got such a vibrant musical legacy. What role did that play in your formative years as your ears were opening up to music?

Being able to listen to Salsa/Merengue, Hip Hop and Miami Bass all in a matter of 20 minutes from each other on radio was something I wasn’t aware would push my sound to where it is now. It’s the main reason my taste in music is quite wide. 

As you were coming into your own and aspiring to music was there any kind of scene that you would’ve gravitated towards?

I was always a dancer. When I was 5 years old I was already throwing myself on the floor thinking I was break dancing so naturally I gravitated to that scene. The break dancing scene was commanded by electro and funk so essentially it’s what led me to listening and playing electro. 

How did break dancing lead into DJing?

It happened rather easy. I was obsessed with all forms of break dancing music. From Jimmy Castor to Newcleus. A lot of my friends would come to my house to practice and I had a selection of CDs we would dance. It just naturally progressed to my mother buying me turntables and me DJing around for free at peoples houses. 

I’ve read (although not confirmed) that you were playing Hip Hop and R&B at first. What  influenced you to move over to those Miami Bass, Electro and eventually Techno sounds that you are associated with today?

Nah it’s the other way around actually. I started off in ‘99 playing Electro. I played old school Electro then in ‘00 I heard Nu-skool Electro for the first time. I then got into playing hip hop around ‘03/‘04 because I saw there was money to be made and I enjoyed the turntablism aspect of it. I started a remix/mashup project called DiscoTech which took off really quick in the US. I wasn’t expecting it to take off at all to be honest. I just wanted to earn a living doing something I loved and it ended up taking my partners Joe, Matt and I all over the world. Very unexpected. 

And was it always the darker elements of these genres that attracted you to these sounds?

Always. I remember when I first got into DJing. I got into Florida Breaks which is quite happy. I knew I liked it, but I knew I wanted something darker. Then I heard the Mandroid – B-boy No Comply album and my entire perception of broken beats changed. Then immediately after, Anthony Rother – Dont Stop The Beat absolutely flipped my head upside down and I knew there was no turning back. 

You’ve on more than one occasion mentioned one of my favourite and one of the most underrated electronic music artists in my opinion, Otto Von Schirach as an influence in the past. What role did he play in your development as an artist?

Otto was one of the first live acts I saw in Miami in the very early 2000’s. Along with Dino Felipe and Soul Oddity/Phoenecia. What attracted me to Otto was the fact he just did his thing and till this day he remains focused on his sound. Not only is he the nicest human on earth, the dude just does his thing and that’s it. I was very attracted to that attitude as a youngster because I was surrounded by people in school who constantly looked for some sort of approval or confirmation. I would say that the entire IDM/Electro scene in Miami really changed me as a young teenager. A lot of my friends noticed that change in me early in my high school years.  

I know like Otto, you like those alternative elements to dance and electronic music. How do you factor those elements into your DJ sets today?

Those elements just come in. Not sure how to answer that as it’s the only way I’ve known how to DJ and it’s what I thought DJing was about. Having your own style so you’re not just another jukebox. Even in the Hip Hop days, I experimented. I’d play Bjork right smack in the middle of a 1000 person club who all wanted Biggie. 

You got pigeonholed as a DJ, somewhat unfairly, in that Deep House trend after “Your Everything.” What effect did it have on what you would do next and how did you eventually sidestep it as a DJ?

Yea, that was quite fun to watch and be part of to be honest. That “Your Everything” track to me is not even remotely close to what I used to call Deep House. I always considered Deep House artist like Rick Wade and Mike Huckaby. When I finished that tune, I thought I had made some sort of Miami Bass/Electro-clash/Disco fusion thing. I wasn’t aware it would take me in the direction it took me but I’m glad it did. I got to learn a lot about the industry and how it works within 18 months of that record coming out. I’m honestly not sure how I was able to sidestep it and have people now understand what I’m about, but I think just doing my thing and not worrying too much about what people think really helped. Also, as time went by I think people just noticed my mixes, Dj sets and production just didn’t fit the deep house thing so slowly started peaking into what I do. 

Did you feel you had to adapt the way you produced your music as a result?

At first yes. I thought “oh well, I guess this is where my career is taking me now, might as well try to enjoy it”. It was way better than the Hip Hop/Mainstream world I was part of 6 months prior. I wasn’t aware my record collection from when I started DJing would actually be something I could continue playing over in Europe. As soon as I started touring Europe I noticed I’d be playing clubs where artists like The Advent and Cari Lekebusch were playing the second room. It surprised me and I immediately knew I needed to stick to my guns and not conform but by that time, the pigeonhole had already been cemented and I really needed to push hard so people knew exactly where I came from. It was quite a wild ride.

It was the first Ultramajic release that I always thought defined your sound as producer from that point on. That’s Detroit, Electro and Miami Bass all rolled into one. What was the crucial evolution that established your sound as an artist for you?  

It’s funny cuz what’s established my sound now is me simply rolling back the clock to what I started doing as a bedroom DJ. I was buds with Jimmy Edgar and he had heard some tunes I was working on and asked if I wanted to drop it on a label he was starting. I think that first release on Ultramajic surprised some people because everything about it was a bit different than expected. Not saying it was good or anything, but it was definitely different than expected for many people. Lol. 

Is there a conscious idea behind your music before you create it?

It depends. Sometimes I just wanna bang something out that was an idea floating around in my head, sometimes I’ll go into the studio wanting to experiment with one piece of gear causing something to happen that wasn’t expected. It’s finding that balance between both and knowing how to utilize that time. 

How does your own music relate to the sound of Omnidisc?

Omnidisc is an extension of my musical taste. Stuff I would play in a club, stuff I would listen to at home. It’s helped me shape the sound I want people to expect whenever they hear me play. 

What do you look for in music to make it on to the label and how do you usually come across this music or these artists?

I always look for experimentation in the recording process and want the tracks to tell a story. I get many demos where they simply sound like jam sessions and although these tracks may work in a club, I want people to walk out of a venue and specifically remember a song they heard. All of the artists I’ve released … I either know them personally or their demos have come to me via another artist on the label. At times I’ve received some demos that worked for the label and I signed them, but I really enjoy having a circle of artists who all feel like family with each other. I believe that’s extremely important for the growth of the label both sonically and maintaining its ethos. 

There’s quite some variety in there in terms of the pool of artists. Is there a concerted effort in them to make music specifically for the label, or is it just of you finding music to fit the label, regardless of the artist?

Nah, I like having an artist come back to the label. Artists like Shokh, Anthony Rother, Dean Grenier, Drvg Cvltvre are artists who’ve released multiple times. I’ve never told anyone to make music to “fit the label”. The only criteria I’ve ever had for something to fit the label is the music needs to tell a story. The sound of a label shifts of course, but the main thing for me is for the artist to feel free to experiment and not worry if it will top the charts or not. 

And is there ever a case of adapting the sound of a record to fit the label?

No. I just won’t release the record if too much has to be done to it. It’s happened often where I’ve gotten incredible records that I would play out, but I just don’t release it because there are plenty of other labels that would fit much better with it. It just doesn’t fit the label. 

Your own output remains quite reserved. Is it a case of being your own worst critic?

I’ve always produced music but I like to keep things at a minimum and not over saturate. One, maybe two EPs a year is more than enough for me. This year for example I have an EP coming up on Omnidisc, then releasing some stuff on Schematic Records which includes an album towards the end of the year. 

So what makes a Danny Daze track or record worthy of release?

I’ve got no idea lol …… it mostly has to do with whether or not it feels new to me. It doesn’t have to be anything groundbreaking, but I’ve always needed to feel like it’s something a bit different than what’s popular at the moment. 

Is there a lot of confluence between the music you make, the label, and your DJ sets?

It’s pure confluence that’s for sure. Everything merges and everything shifts at the same time. 

You’ve spent a lot of time between the US and Europe, DJing. How do you feel you have to adapt your sets accordingly and what effect has it had on your DJing in general, playing for a variety of audiences?

Part of being a DJ for me is being able to adapt and embrace without fully removing yourself from your original message. We’re living in a time now where “DJ” doesn’t mean much, but I’ve always respected those who just stick to their guns. Thus why I feel it’s important to have a wide spectrum of influence so you can adapt to what’s needed but maintain the core message of what you want to put out. 

Are there elements in the kind of music you play that is universal between these two regions?

Electronic music is pretty damn universal to be honest. Things have become much more commercial now that the internet is the main source for all things music, but good drums and proper bass lines will always do the trick. No matter where you play. 

This will be your first time at Jaeger. Do you have a way of testing the waters in determining which way your set will go on the night?

I usually go into the venue about an hour before I play and check out the crowd. Depending on set length, I take some left and right turns seeing how weird we can get with the crowd. The weirder the better. 

How do you expect your set to go on this occasion and are there some tracks you’re particularly looking forward to playing?

Absolutely no idea how my set will go buy I hope people don’t start throwing tomatoes at me. Haha. I’ve actually just gotten back the masters to my next Omnidisc EP which features RHR so I’m really looking forward to trying them out at Jaeger. 

http://omnidisc.co

http://instgram.com/dannydaze

http://instagram.com/omnidisc

The spirit of community with Dugnad Rec

Dugnad is a Norwegian term for voluntary work done together with other people.

Dugnad Rec. is a record label, an artist collective and event series with its origins in the communal spirit of Norwegian culture. Founded by Kjetil Jerve and Erland Albertsen and born within the vociferous cauldron of Norway’s improvised Jazz scene, Dugnad Rec began with a single aim in mind. After recording an album together, Kjetil and Erland had struggled to find an outlet for their work, and instead forged ahead to do it themselves. Dugnåd Rec was born. It was a preliminary introduction however and after releasing a second record it almost immediately went into hibernation. 

It would remain dormant, waiting for some coincidental prospect to emerge, but with the two core members not releasing anything, it would take someone working on the fringes of their community to give it the injection it needed. Enter Bendik Baksaas. The Norwegian artist had been sitting on a wealth of material he had created in a fusion of music that channeled the improvised nature of Jazz into the electronic realm and the dance floor, but had yet to find a suitable outlet. Sensing an opportunity and recognising Baksaas’ talents, Kjetil proffered his services and said “release it on Dugnad.”

*Dugnad Rec play Jaeger this Wednesday

“The giant awoke again,” says Gabriel Varskog, sipping on a tepid black coffee across the table from me. He looks like he just woke (and he did), his big mop of curly hair bulging at the sides framing his pinhole eyes and warm smile. As an artist, he performs, DJs and composes by his middle name, Patås  and he’s one of the central figures in the Dugnåd collective which today constitutes Kjetil Jerve, Erland Albertsen, Fredrik Høyer, Bendik Baksaas, Joar Renolen, Kim Dürbeck, Gabriel and many more that makeup the fringes of their community.

“At the core we’re 7 people,” explains Gabriel, “but the outer core is around 30 people.” There are no designated roles within the collective and the label as “everybody contributes what they can to a common goal,“ and “nobody expects compensation.” It’s an ever expanding community, cooperating with the larger improv and club music community in Oslo. The core constituents take all responsibility for the daily operations between the label and the periphery of the collective, with outsiders often lending a hand on single aspects. Over the course of their existence Gabriel says that they have “grown into designated roles” with Kjetil as the ”driving force and glue,” balancing a life with newborn triplets and Dugnad Rec. 

Kjetil and the other instrumental figures of the Dugnad Rec. society, have entrusted Gabriel to represent them for the interview and he’s eager to relay the central ideologies. An artist with roots in Norway’s Jazz scene, currently making club music he’s contributed the latest record to the Dugnad Rec. catalogue, with four stark atmospheric tracks that float between ambient and Techno across the release. From the subtle plucked strings of ”Siste Dag” to the breathy beat sequences of “Techslo,” two hemispheres in Oslo’s music community between Jazz and Techno converge for a record that connects a thin redline between these two distinct worlds.

Bendik and Kjetil had “been ripping my songs apart for a year” before it was released says Gabriel, wincing through the thought. Although the criticism might seem harsh to the outside viewer, it’s this kind of honesty that has strengthened Dugnad’s resolve in determining the sonic identity of the collective. There’s an “underlying trust in the communication” between them which is “very direct” but efficient as each artist involved benefits from the shared experience of the collective. 

The “evolution in our sound has just skyrocketed” during this second wave of Dugnad Rec. according to Gabriel, “because the feedback loop is so short” between them. “You kind of get the experience of all the people around you as well as your own. This is how we as human beings can grow to our fullest potential, in these small groups of like minded individuals.” As the latest addition to Dugnad, Kim Dürbeck has also had to endure this trial by fire, relinquishing his own artistic identity for the greater good in one of the future releases for the label. “Acceptance is key,” stresses Gabriel as he reflects on an email he had sent that very morning to Kim, unpicking the latest version of some new music from his label co-hort. 

“We don’t try to change the sound,” explains Gabriel, “but we try to perfect that sound so it’s enhanced to its fullest potential.” It means whittling away at the excessive inconsequential elements in a piece of music and cutting everything down that “does not contribute to the main idea.“ In their efforts Dugnad Rec. have cultivated a sound that thrives in a stark minimalism, devoid of some external objective pursuit beyond the act of making music.  

Improvisation is key in all their endeavours and activities and it’s improvisation that constitutes the fundamental essence of the label, regardless of whether their artists are working within the Techno- or Jazz’s parameters. “Rec doesn’t stand for records,” says Gabriel by way of explaining, “it stands for the recording button.” The central idea comes down to recording everything and conditioning the artist to work beyond the recorded format. “If you’re not used to the record button being on,” explains Gabriel pointing to the device currently recording our conversation, “your behaviour changes.” Dugnad Rec. is about “getting used to this feeling” of being recorded to a point where you can completely ignore it and live in the moment of making music.

While this kind of thinking has permeated through Jazz for a long time, it’s something that has only crept up in Techno occasionally. The objective is to set it apart from the popularised form of the music, while conveying the fundamental ideology of the music. It’s at its heart an improvised music with a foot in the technology (music and otherwise) of the future. “I really feel Techno is the Jazz of club music,” proposes Gabriel. “That’s where the experimental stuff is happening and where the boundaries are being pushed.” 

Dugnad Rec. is based on the belief that the person who is willing to explore improvised Jazz is the same kind of person that would appreciate Techno. This is not just some glassy-eyed sentiment on Dugnad Rec’s behalf either, they are actually putting it into practise. They regularly host events around Norway as Dugnad Rec. and their events at Hærverk have become the most concrete realisation of this confluence between these two distinct worlds.

Hærverk’s location between these worlds; a live Jazz venue in the week and a bristling Techno club on the weekend, have assisted in Dugnad Rec. strengthening the connection between these two musical worlds. The “goal is to expose these two scenes that are very apparent in Oslo, and underground” to the other according to Gabriel. Going from live bands to DJ sets and improvised electronic performances, the night “jumps from one to the other,” with artists having “to make a transition” between their opposing music styles. They’ll “have to improvise with each other and this creates a lot of very special moments,” according to Gabriel. 

With many of these new electronic artists coming from a Jazz background like Gabriel they’ve merely transferred their skills to this new domain. “When we switched over to playing machines,” he says “it is only natural for us to continue improvising” and one day they hope to eventually incorporate both these aspects in a truly new fusion of music. “We’re definitely getting there.” 

Besides Gabriel’s own ruminations on his last record, the closest they’ve gotten is Bendik Baksaas and Fredrik Høyer’s collaboration on “Til Alt Ute.” While the record failed to garner much by the way of critical success according to Gabriel it was a breakthrough record for the label, in every other respect, specifically the awareness that it cultivated for people that “really love records.”  “I guess it didn’t really speak to any trend that was apparent,” considers Gabriel about the lack of press on the record, but the fact that they packed out Blå for the official release, speaks for itself.

If you take away Høyer’s vocal, “Til Alt Ute” is little more than a Tech-House record, but it’s in the amalgamation that the charm of that record lies. It’s not merely an extemporised  conversation between man and machine, but also between two very different factions of the artistic community in Oslo. While the record certainly had an impact on the label’s prominence, Gabriel believes “Dugnad’s breakthrough has been a slow thing” with small elements contributing to the larger picture. With “everybody being so active as they are and always pointing back to the community,” it’s raised their profile and “made (the collective) grow in both the jazz world and the club world. “

Oslo has facilitated this growth with its “long tradition in free improv” and “vibrant club scene,” but ultimately it’s up to those very defined parameters that makeup the collective’s ideologies.  “Limitation is liberation” says Gabriel echoing Bendik Baksaas in an interview from last year with this blog, and between, the convergence of musical styles, the freedom of expression in improvisation, the shared experience and the permissive attitudes, Dugnad Rec are making a serious mark on Norway’s music scene. 

The Norwegian word “dugnadsånd” is translatable to the spirit of will to work together for a better community. 

Jeff Mills – An unwavering original

“Now electronic music is primarily made by a certain type of people,” Jeff Mills told French Radio station 24 in a candid interview last year; “typically middle class that probably have a pretty comfortable lifestyle.” 

It is this suburban bourgeoisie that has facilitated Techno’s incremental rise to popularity over the course of the last decade with Berlin playing host to a new generation of artists and enthusiasts, dressed in black playing and listening to a kitsch assemblage of Techno non-sequiturs, largely designed to exploit the popularity of the genre today. 

It’s the result of a culture of distillation, stretching back to the gestation of the genre and particularly advancing over the course of the last decade to where it’s completely eaten away the original eccentricities of the genre. Techno today constitutes little more than a percussive loop and a brooding atmosphere, gathering on the resonant frequencies of the percussion.

Self-proclaimed “underground” DJs and producers have watered down the music to an indistinguishable trope as the Muzak of the dance floor in 2020, leaving the door wide open for hackneyed appropriations. Today, Techno thrives in a kind of honorary superficiality as it’s inducted into popular culture where the suburban masses are commodifying it on a perfunctory level.

In this era, two distinct strains of the genre emerge, with the sub-cultural origins of the genre retreating back into the shadows, back underground, where  Jeff Mills still represents the genre and its original principles.

 

The invention

Techno has begged, stolen and borrowed to get to where it is today. It follows several different  narrative threads, open to all kinds of revisionist plotlines, and you can unpick it at any point, it will completely dissolve in your own biased social perspective every time. Positioning the gestation of Techno at the end of the 1980’s in Detroit with Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May, collectively known as the Belleville 3, is the most accepted origins of this story, but it comes with its own issues. Significant figures like the enigmatic Eddie Fowlkes are all but written out of this narrative; Germany’s initial involvement is erased; and most problematic is that it doesn’t figure Jeff Mills into the first wave of Detroit Techno artists exactly.

Even in Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster’s thorough compendium of DJ culture “Last night a DJ saved my life,” they couldn’t quite place the assent of the DJ and producer within the rhetoric of the Belleville 3, so he just appears like an apparition on the radio, independent of what was happening in Bellville. While it’s appropriate for the lore of the enigma, Jeff Mills has always cultivated, it unduly writes off his role in the extensive origins of Techno. 

Frank Broughton would later set the record straight in the collected interviews for the “Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries.” While Atkins, Saunderson and May were doing their thing in the suburbs (let’s not forget) Mills was pursuing a similar strain of music on his own in the city of Detroit. 

Growing up in the urban sprawl of the city where heavy industrial machines and brawny V8 engines would paint the sonic milieu of the city by day, at night, a very young Mills would be glued to the radio.“It was a source of music that everyone depended on: on your transistor radio, in your car, on your home stereo,” recalls Mills in an interview with the Fabric blog. “What radio is like,” he continues is “what a trip to the moon is supposed to be like, what the lunar surface is supposed to be like.” It was a distant world, mesmerising and alluring to an inquisitive mind like Mills’. 

The only real common thread between Mills and his contemporaries in Belleville at this point was a radio DJ called Electrifying Mojo. The “little man with a big voice” (Derrick May once claimed) had a profound impact on the gestation of Techno, bringing the electronic sounds of the European continent converging around groups like Kraftwerk to the US airwaves in the late 1970s. 

As well as electrifying Mojo, Mills would tune into Chicago’s Hot Mix 5 and make regular trips across Lake Michigan to his midwestern neighbour city to buy records when he was still a teenager. He naturally gravitated to DJing from the radio, with the likes Grandmaster Flash and Jazzy Jeff inspiring an early interest, which he quickly turned into a commanding talent.

He started Djing at high school parties, before falling in with his brother’s DJ crew. From there he rose swiftly through their ranks and by 1980 he had his own residencies around town, playing all night long in clubs that he was barely old enough to patronise. The crowd was young and eager, but Mills always remained at the cutting edge of new music, and by the time Juan Atkins’ first musical project Cybotron arrived, he was playing it alongside new music from the B-52s and Pink Poodles too.

In 1982 he was plucked from relative obscurity to the radio when an impromptu recording session captured his unique skill as a DJ, and the Wizard was born, an anonymous radio personality that would command the local airwaves with an exciting blend of new electronic music.  

Techno as a genre had yet to be invented by 1981, but in Cybotron’s music Atkins and Richard Davis had laid the foundation for the genre to emerge out of Detroit. Their music wasn’t exactly groundbreaking at first, amounting to little more than a pastiche of Kraftwerk’s sound at that time, but there was something unique bristling through on a track like “Cosmic Raindance,” where you can hear the first strains of what would become a repetitive electronic dance music.

Whereas Kraftwerk were traditionally trained musicians, wrestling with high-brow concepts in their music, artists like Cybotron were musical dilettantes playing with machines like toys trying to make electronic pop records. On “Cosmic Raindance” the classic music structures of Kratwerk disappear as improvised keyboards hover around a tonic with an unwavering 808 groove and bitonal bass line staying the course as the rhythm section. That kind of extemporised  “jam” is more Motown than avant garde German post-rock, encouraging that association with the soul of Detroit that has become something of a key distinction to set artists like Cybotron apart from its European counterparts. 

But who invented Techno? “When did you first hear the word Techno,” asked Broughton in DJ Revolutionaries. “Probably in ‘Musique Non Stop,’ by Karftwerk,” replied Mills. That record from 1986 actually appears a bit late in the etymology of the word, or more accurately, the abbreviation of the word Technology. In 1984 there was already a “Technoclub” in Frankfurt, coined by Talla2XLC, who would be playing musical styles like new beat, industrial and synthwave at Dorian Gray under the all-encompassing banner for the first time. That very same year Cybotron would release a record called “Techno City” too, although the synth-pop sound of that record is a far cry from the more industrialised sounds they were listening to at Talla’s parties, where the likes of Nitzer Ebb were staking their claim.

While it was Virgin records that first attributed the word Techno to a genre of music in 1988 with their compilation, “Techno, the new Dance music from Detroit!,” it was a word in common parlance, used to describe anything electronic or futuristic at that time.

Techno as a music existed way before anybody started calling it that, and it was Europe informing Detroit, before Detroit evolved it into the next phase. And like Kraftwerk’s undeniable influence over Cybotron, acts like Nitzer Ebb would inform Jeff Mills’ first steps into production. 

Radio and specifically Electrifying Mojo, was exposing a young Jeff Mills to all these sounds, which he would take into his own radio show. Because of Detroit’s industrial history, its people “adopted a more progressive way of thinking” according to Mills in DJ Revolutionaries. That kind of thinking was handed down through the generations and influenced a very broad intellectual horizon in his opinion. Mills’ own family came from the north and the south to work at automobile factories in Detroit and “like many other black people, they discovered a whole new world, that was futuristic,” which nurtured an inquisitive nature in their progeny that always looked  “beyond the boundaries of Detroit” according to Mills. 

While his peers from Belleville were looking to Kraftwerk, Mills was looking to groups like Nitzer Ebb and Front 242 as well as Kraftwerk, and while playing on the radio between 1982 and 1989 he was developing his own sound as an artist and producer in what would become the prototype for all Techno to follow.

It started with the Wizard, programming simple beats on machines as a way to stand out from other radio stations. He would segue records from three decks into the machines and back again, interspliced with sonic effects played back from tape, creating a bold and dynamic sonic collage that has remained the ultimate allure of his work as a DJ to this day. 

Developing  those arcane sequences from his drum machines and synths into original material, Jeff Mills founded a group called Final Cut with Anthony Srock, which took its cues from the industrial sounds happening in Europe and Detroit simultaneously by that time, influenced by the likes of Nitzer Ebb, but negating vocalists and pop arrangements for a pure machine music. Final Cut’s first record, the “Bass has Landed” is the archetype for most Techno today, even though it started out life as a House a track.

While many consider “Strings of Life” by Derrick May (Rhythim is Rhythim) as the precursor to Techno, Final Cut’s minimalist approach, where the track constitutes little more than a drum machine, will probably be more recognisable to dance floors today. May’s opaque arrangement between piano and synthesised strings, playing in combatant keys sounds puerile against what would constitute Techno, whereas Final Cut’s debut could stake its claim amongst any new record in a 2020 DJ set in the right hands. 

Mills only recorded two records with Final Cut, leaving the group when they started pursuing the industrial aesthetic in accordance to European trends. By the time Mills retired the heretofore anonymous Wizard alias, Techno in Detroit had emerged as its own independent sound, developing on its own as the genre stepped into its next phase with a second wave of artists and producers, in part spearheaded by Mills. 

 

The Emancipation 

While the debate rages on over the origins of Techno, there is absolutely no denying that by 1990 it was the domain of Detroit and a faction of DJs and producers including Jeff Mills, who weren’t merely creating a new form of music, but were consolidating an entire ideology around this abstract electronic music.

Detroit in the 1980’s was a hopeless landscape for a bunch black kids immersed in science fiction and drum machines. Kevin Saunderson once said that there were only two options for black kids growing up in Detroit and that was the army or prison. While Saunderson chose the army, the ones that remained avoided jail by making music. With no help from the American government, who had continued (and continues) to enslave its black population through the prison complex, people like Mills, turned to music to emancipate themselves from the system.

He found a kindred spirit in Mike Banks and together they formed the Techno collective, Underground Resistance. “Planets and stars and futurism and time travel — these types of visions aren’t supposed to come from black guys from Detroit,” Jeff Mills has often said in interviews, but it’s exactly these things that brought he and Banks together and enlisted Robert Hood as the original trinity that inducted the UR collective.

UR was more than just label releasing beat music. It was a way of life for all the artists involved and a platform to get out from under the commercial machine that constituted the dominantly white male record industry and take the power into their own hands. Feigning individual artistic identities for the sake of the collective, there was clearly a political agenda at the heart of their pursuits, but what that was, and remains completely open to interpretation.

That’s the appeal of Techno for many. This abstract form of music is all but completely devoid of any literal meaning. A vocal snippet, ripped out of context or an obscure track title relays little information or direction from the artist, so as a listener you always get what you put into the music. And UR exploited that, turning all the focus on the music, and making their impact more profound. Many labels and artists have since blatantly imitated this model, with mixed results, but UR remains unique in the initial diligence of their pursuit and what they established for all those institutions that followed in their wake.

Although Jeff Mills’ tenure at UR was short lived (only two years), that sense of agency that UR established for artists of their ilk, remained at the core of what he’s pursued as an artist, DJ and label owner ever since. “My hope is that the listener gives up on the idea of trying to recognise anything or relate it to something they know,” he told Fabric in a recent interview. There is a kind of freedom that Mills instills in the listener through his music, but when he is talking “about being free, it is not just music,” he explained in the France 24 interview “but in your thinking.” 

The idea of cognitive freedom is something that has suffused black American music since time immemorial. Cultural appropriation is nothing new, and even as early as Jazz music’s origins, a musical elite (largely white males) have been trying to co-opt any black musical tradition into the larger universal western narrative. Since the days of Will Marion Cook and just after the civil war, there had always been vocal dissent in black American musicians about their music being co-opted into the classical western canon. Merely exploited for their exotic charm, this narrative would deny black American artists their own culture where they controlled the parameters of the music and its legacy.

With figures like Cook and Duke Ellington publicly expressing their disdain and on the merits of their artistry, Jazz and Blues had managed to disentangle itself almost completely from the western canon, but Techno would not be so lucky. 

In an interview with Carl Craig last year, the producer and DJ mentioned that Derrick May stopped making music in the 1990’s, because he had become agitated by people in Europe frequently and blatantly copying his style. Even while the version of Techno, made popular in Europe through the more industrial inclinations, had started to inform its own strains of music including EBM and in some way Trance, it seems that what was happening in Detroit was also informing European trends, where new artists were imitating what was happening stateside, quite often resulting in bland, watered down versions of the same music. 

In an effort to buck these trends, Mills and his co-conspirators sought new realms in Techno, often encouraged by some conceptual thought and/or musical experiment. While the rest of the world was packing in warehouses with big sound systems playing House music to people in their thousands enraptured in ecstasy, Jeff Mills was making a deep, conceptual record with Robert Hood as X-103. “The world was raving, why would we make an album about Atlantis” he mused in a Wire interview and while it might not have made sense at the time from a commercial perspective, it certainly exposed a depth that few ventured beyond in Techno.

Although the LP was released on Tresor in 1993, the “Thera” EP that preceded it came via Mills’ newly established Axis records label. Unlike his debut record, “Waveforms Transmissions” which played to the militant intensity of the German dance floor, “Atlantis” and especially “Thera” played to Mills’ more experimental inclinations. The lead single is essentially an ambient piece, with a rich harmonic texture developing around a singular drone, and dissipating in staccato releases of atmosphere.

While in “Waveform Transmissions” you can clearly hear those first faint echoes of what would eventually become the sound of Techno in Europe today, “Atlantis” seems to expound more on the soulful traditions that had informed Detroit in the sixties and onwards. Lush, synthetic strings, defined melodic movements and dynamic beat constructions, distinguished it from its eastern successors, while the theme behind the music asserted Techno beyond the mere corporeal into the cognitive, a philosophy that Jeff Mills continues to pursue today in all his endeavours. 

Later Drexciya would take this idea even further with the nautical, afrofuturist theme, based on a black atlantis populated by the children of slaves. Using what they learned from Underground Resistance (Drexciya’s James Stinson started out in UR) they too emancipated their work from the increasingly indoctrinated version of Techno that was laying claim to dance floors around the world. This was tactical in distinguishing the Detroit faction of Techno from the increasingly popular form of the genre, which was infiltrating mass culture steadily, throughout the 1990’s. It’s in this spirit that Mike Banks still refers to the genre as High-Tech Jazz, to liberate any associations with this other vapid interpretation of the term Techno, which has largely commodified the term. 

 

The eternal  innovator 

“There were times earlier in my career when partying, entertaining the ladies and making a lot of money were my top three goals!” Jeff Mills told the Monument in an interview last year. “But like anyone that cares about something, in time one’s craft and art form require more attention and focus. For me, this difference happened around 1995.” 

The mid nineties had been definitive time for Techno too. Robert Hood had released Minimal Nation on Mills’ Axis records, creating a new branch of Techno in its wake (which would again be adopted and distilled down to a perfunctory music in the mid 2000’s). Jeff Mills released the hugely influential “Bells” and alongside artists like Carl Craig and Kenny Larkin, he also constituted the second wave of artists, producers and DJs from Detroit, strengthening the resolve of their predecessors’ music as the rightful pretenders to the throne. Even while Jeff Mills was there from the onset, the most significant contribution came during this era, as he established the genre beyond the confines of a sweaty dance floor. 

Techno as art had hardly been a notion before Jeff Mills posited it to the world as such. He realised early on “the genre could contain more than just dancing” he said in an Electronic beats interview and that it could relay “a certain subject to certain people.” 

While “Atlantis” was an early effort, Purpose Maker was certainly about redefining the genre with a multimedia project incorporating film, performance and music. Essentially pre-dating Boiler Room by 20 years, the Purpose Maker video was a DJ set captured on film as performance for the first time. As well as introducing the world to Octave One, it played a significant part in established DJing as an artform too with Jeff Mills giving his audience and intimate look up the Wizard’s sleeve. 

Focussing, quite literally, on Mills’ technique, closeups on the decks revealed the artist manipulating three decks at the same time, lifting the shroud on his unique practises for the first time. While most Techno DJs at that time were manipulating two records in some seamless segue between tracks in one uninterrupted musical journey, Mills was expounding on it by essentially creating completely new compositions in an improvised manner. The idea of DJing as an art form is essentially born. 

Jeff Mills had been a DJ innovator from the very beginning on radio, and while even some of his Detroit peers still struggle with the practise he had mastered something unique in his abilities. In the age of CDJs (CD players emulating record players, made for DJs) it’s not uncommon to find DJs using up to five players simultaneously, but when all they had were vinyl and record players Jeff Mills (and Carl Cox of course) stood apart. When he eventually moved over to CDJs in the 2000’s he would start incorporating a drum machine, in that ceaseless sense of curiosity and experimentation that underlines all his work. 

“My interaction and application of always using a Roland TR-909 drum machine in a more hands on way” he explained in Monument, “is an example about how I’m trying to regain some of the human-ness back into my DJ sets.”

Even as a DJ, the idea of “Techno as loops for dance music” never quite sat well with Mills. His experience with that kind of narrow approach in Techno has been “very negative… For many many years“ he told Wired. “Not just with my peers but also in the press.” His views expanding the dimensions were “being totally ignored” for the longest time and even by time the millennial bell rang in and he signalled his intentions for the turn of the next decade by soundtracking Fritz Lang’s silent film Metropolis, his efforts still went purposefully unnoticed. It didn’t quite fit the devil-may-care hedonistic approach of the dance floor where superstar DJs were asking exorbitant fees to play mind-numbingly formulaic pieces for an increasingly disengaged audience. 

While Jeff Mills was trying to revolutionise the genre, it dug its heels in even further in the first wave of popularity that sought to codify the genre in recognisable tropes for these numbed hedonists. Many of Techno’s architects abandoned ship, seeking refuge in everything from Drum n Bass to Post-punk music, but even during this time, Jeff Mills remained an unwavering presence with a resolute philosophy in expanding the collective consciousness of the genre. He would release some stunning records like the conceptual album “Time Machine,” as his music moved further into the abstract realm, perhaps even too abstract for the new Techno elite that were only just cottoning on to his early work like “Waveform Transmissions.” 

During this time he made the “Exhibitionist,” a follow up to the Purpose Maker – after the advent of CDJs and incorporating a drum machine in his Dj sets – while unilaterally exploring the absolute limits of the music, extending his experiments into film too with concepts like “Three Ages.”

By the time people started flocking back to Techno through the thunderous sounds of Berlin at the turn of the first decade of this century, Jeff Mills was still there, he never left, and still constituted the determinable ideologies of the genre. With Techno’s profile rising however, Jeff Mills’ profile rose too naturally, and today with the recent re-issue of “The Bells” some nearly twenty five years on from its creation, he is possibly the most referenced artist out there today, but his hesitation at the popularity from the start of this piece is warranted even more today. Those certain types from the suburb, have effectively exploited the origins for some kind of gain (whether for money or profile), effectively white-washing the original principles of what Mills and his Detroit cohorts set out to create at the beginning. 

It’s why Jeff Mills is still such a significant figure in Techno at the age 56, because even at Techno’s heightened popularity, there are very few artists pursuing a unique voice in the genre like he still is. Everybody seems to be playing to the common denominator, making bridge and tunnel journeys into the city’s clubs for simple escapist pleasures.

As Techno’s popularity continues to grow, it’s reached a point where everything we experience as Techno is just some bland version of what Jeff Mills has done at some previous point in his career. Whether its referencing Waveform Transmissions, the Bells or utilising four decks in a DJ mix, everything in Techno today can be distilled down to its archetype, Jeff Mills. And yet, when it’s Jeff Mills pursuing these things, it still manages to set a tone apart from the mainstream. Jeff Mills remains the original. 

 

From Arla to Bromley – Profile on Overmono

Ed Russell was 8 years old when he started eavesdropping on his older brother, Tom mixing records in the room next door. At 18 Tom had gotten his first set of decks, and although Ed can’t really infer what kind of impression it made on him today, by the time he was 11 and set out on his own path with a set of decks, he was regularly “pinching” records from Tom’s room, according to an interview with the Quietus.  

Tom had started making music and DJing as Truss while Ed was still coming of age and honing his nascent skills between DJing and production. As Truss, the older brother played sets and released music that focussed on the darker shades of Techno, infused with elements lifted from UK dance music- and sound system culture. With Perc Trax as a vehicle for his music, he made a significant impression as part of a wave of artists pursuing Techno in the UK capital after Dubstep’s descent.

Records like “Kymin Lea” and his collaborations with Perc, had brought an abstract era of Techno to the dance floor, punctuated by militant drum machine arrangements and suffused with experimental sonic designs that went beyond the functional.

Artists like Truss and Perc facilitated an era in the UK’s clubbing community that ultimately provided a platform for a whole post-Dubstep generation to come through and develop unique strains of music. Infused with a heady mixture of UK rave culture, whilst drawing on influences from Berlin, Chicago and Detroit, this next phase was fertile environment for a new burgeoning eclecticism. It’s in this scene that younger brother Ed would make his debut as Tessela with the much hyped and still magnificent, “Hackney Parrot.” 

“Hackney Parrot” would be the first time that Ed and Tom would work together (although indirectly), with their joint venture and label, Poly Kicks expediting the release of the debut record. “I’ve never been one for subtlety really,” Ed told Resident Advisor at the time of Hackney Parrot’s release, and the record honours that sentiment with a screaming, chopped vocal undulating between the raucous, bass-heavy breakbeat arrangement. With later records on the likes of R&S,  Tessela established a unique sound that flirted with Techno, while retaining those expressive UK rave influences that he had picked up from his brother’s records. 

While they had been working in close proximity to each other, it hadn’t occurred to the brothers to combine their efforts yet. Besides an isolated release as TR/ER in 2012 for the aptly-named Brothers imprint, they stuck to their own worlds. “We never actually meant for TR\ER to be a thing” explained Ed in an interview with De School. It was a lone incident for them and it didn’t establish anything that would eventually inform their sound together as Overmono.

The idea for Overmono and serious collaboration would only really come much later. “We were driving down to our Mum’s one evening,” Ed Russell told the Quietus ”and it suddenly just hit us that we should start properly making music together.” While they’ve never confirmed what encouraged this epiphany (or what music might have been playing in the car at that time) what followed was a five-day writing session in a cottage away from the distractions of city life in London.

Before the writing session, Tom had received a box of unwanted records from a brother in law, and while it was largely inconsequential records, one box had contained “loads of amazing early Detroit stuff like Underground Resistance and Transmat records,” encouraging the older sibling to “take the lot.” From this they sampled what they could, building “a big library of sounds we thought were interesting, and that was almost the start of Overmono.” 

Processing the samples beyond recognition, Ed and Tom laid the foundation for what would become the first in a series of three records for XL Recordings called “Arla.” “There was a tinge of nostalgia to the Arla series of records,” Tom told De School. “Those three records were very personal to us in trying to establish a blueprint of our references and define what Overmono is about.” Creating that blueprint from those early Detroit influences, Overmono is built on a foundation of Techno, while channeling everything from those pivotal UK influences to trance into their music in an abstract collage of the history of dance music. “I guess we don’t specifically see Overmono as a solely techno-focused project” Tom explained in the Quietus, and while Ed considers Tessela as “something that definitely folded into Overmono,” they’ve severed any ties with their solo aliases in Overmono. It merely came down to the box of records.

While they established something individual in their solo projects, “Overmono offers us the chance to be much more expansive in our productions,” Ed told De School. Pursuing melody rather than function, the duo set out to create music that although more abstract, could live beyond the dance floor and the 12” through the Arla series of records for XL. It’s only during their fourth EP, Whities 019 that they would emerge with a sound that would define their more recent records for the likes of Poly Kicks, which brought their sound further to the middle of the dance floor again. 

While Arla was based around samples, from Whities 019 forward they were creating their own unique and individual melodic pieces. “We both love a bit of trance,” Tom told the Quietus, somewhat predictively in strains of music that could be heard through their more recent records like the self-titled EP from this last November. Between buoyant melodies and percussive rhythms that ricochet between quaver notes and broken beat samples, Overmono has defined a sound over the last three records that has found some synchronicity with current dance floor trends, without pandering to them. 

Records like “Raft Living” infuse this stark melodic element with the roots of UK rave culture, where blistering beat arrangements envelope everything else in that very same lack of subtlety that defined Ed’s work as Tessela. 

What sets Overmono’s music apart is their ability to bring this sound beyond the recorded format to the live stage. With a visceral approach to their machines, their “music is defined by the kit that we use” according to Ed in a Resident Advisor feature. That translates to a live situation too with a “more cohesive set” emerging as the pair unpack their music with their machines leading them down a path to a “middleground between freedom and improvisation.” 

Between making records, their individual output, and playing live, they also managed to find time to collaborate with Joy O, in one of the biggest tracks on the dance floor during 2019, ”Bromley.” It emerged closer to those UK Rave influences, with a perfunctory percussive arrangement, where minimal is key and every element needs to count, bearing closer resemblance to a track “Daisy Chain,” than the more recent “Le Tigre.” 

As Joy O’s music is want to do, there was an incredible hype surrounding the track, and with good reason, and while Overmono had already garnered a lot of attention for their music and live show, it has only gone to cement Overmono as a tour de force on the electronic club music scene of today. From their first records to where they’ve channelled their sound and their live show, they’ve established something unique together as Overmono. 

Introducing: DJ Krass

Krister Kolstad was christened DJ Krass long before he even approached a DJ booth in a club setting. His critical listening habits had inspired the epithet when some friends came to the conclusion; “You’re so crass when you talk about music.”

Krister Kolstad comes from a fine musical lineage. His father owned a prominent record store in Oslo while his big sister, Sandra Kolstad is a distinguished musical artist in Norway’s music scene today. While they’ve all played together before as the Kollstad Killers (at Jaeger), Krister’s own efforts as a DJ and artist, is still at the burgeoning stages.

Growing up in a very musical household, music has played a prominent part in Krister’s formative years, and while he had been entertaining the thought of DJing for some time, he only started playing out a few years ago.

Fraternising with the more obscure corners of the larger Oslo DJ community like Oblivion Dip and Den Gyldne Sprekk, he has been inducted into the scene with eclectic sets that span the realm of recorded music today. 

When Sprekken’s Raymond T. Hauger (Lekkerman) had other commitments in February, he asked DJ Krass to fill in for him. Krister agreed, with Raymond going “great, can I have the program by tomorrow?” It’s an impulsive DJ Krass takeover of Den Gyldne Sprekk at Jaeger this month as a result, prompting us to find out more about this new DJ.

Introductions are in order I believe. 

I’ve noticed that your name often comes up in events around town recently, especially alongside Oblivion Dip. What is your connection to those guys and that world?

Oblivion Dip, I got to know them a few years ago, and they are good people. We’ve been working a bit in the studio as well. They invited me to play at one of their release parties in 2018, and we’ve been playing a lot since then.

And Raymond and Den Gyldne Sprekk?

I’m not sure when I got to know Raymond exactly, but it was around 2015/16. In 2018, I played Sprekken for the first time. 

When did you start DJing

Out and about it’s only been since the start of 2017. I played with a friend for a few years before that, to learn how to play. He’s actually going to play with me on one of the dates.

Who is that?

Very Friendly. It’s an old friend of mine, I’ve known him since I was 13. He’s always had great taste in music, and we’ve always shared a lot of music. The first time at Sprekken was also with him. 

Tell me about your taste in music. 

Originally I started  with Hip Hop. I’ve always been all over the place. Hip Hop and then later progressive Rock and space Rock. That was mostly through my father, because he was an old hippy. (laughs)

I was going to get to your family, because of the Kolstad Killers and because your sister is Sandra Kolstad. There’s been a lot of  music in the family for some time I imagine.

Yes, because our father used to run a record store in the eighties. He’s obviously very interested in music, so I guess we listened to a lot of different stuff from him.

Which record store was this?

It was called Utopia.

So dad must have brought a lot of music home with him, but what was the first style of music you got into?

I would say Hip Hop. I guess I would listen to some other stuff before then as well. I remember one CD called 1995 hit mix, with all these dance mega hits. I was really young, so it wasn’t really a conscious choice. I had some friends that listened to Cypress Hill and Bone Thugs n Harmony. And I was like; “wow this is cool.”

As kids we usually rebel through music. How do you rebel in a household like that with your father being a hippy and running a record store?

I know they weren’t too happy with the lyrics in the Hip Hop stuff. But it wasn’t a rebellion on my part. That’s what I liked at the time, and I still do. 

Were you playing in bands as a kid?

No I wasn’t. I was just listening. At some point in my twenties I started playing the guitar. So, late. I was inspired by the early folk-blues guys in America in the 1920’s.

Like Robert Johnson?

Yes, and Mississipi John Hurt and stuff like that. So I started playing the guitar and then jamming with some friends. It never amounted to anything, it was just good fun. At some point, I became interested in electronic music as well, and my big sister showed me Ableton. 

Is that Sandra?

Yes.

Do you and your sister ever collaborate?

We’ve done some stuff, but not really. 

She must be quite busy.

She’s always busy with loads projects all the time. She’s involved in theatre and stuff like that too. 

And your dad, is he still excited about new music.

Sure.

You all played together a while back as the Kolstad Killers at Sprekken… 

On Raymond’s request. My dad came with two burnt CDs which were both the same. He had no idea how to use the CDJs, and he asked me to help his  So I just played the songs in the order he wanted. 

What kind of music was that?

It was mainly psychedelic Rock and space Rock. A lot of Hawkwind. 

Are you making electronic music now?

There’s been a couple of digital releases and there’s more stuff coming this year, I hope. Oblivion Dip has a compilation out some time soon where I have on track with Kristian Dugstad, who runs Oblivion Dip. 

It’s a varied compilation. We have an Electro track and there’s an Ambient track on there. 

So you’re also entering into a career as a producer?

Well I’ve been doing it for nine years, but I just never felt it was good enough. Now it’s starting to meet my standards. In the last few years, I’ve been branching out and meeting new people doing the same thing. Before I was just alone at home. Now it’s more out there. 

Another project is that I’m remixing the whole Beglomeg album

The whole album, how did that come about?

Yes, on Raymond’s request. It started with him asking me and Snørre (club No No) to remix a track and then he said you have to remix the whole album. Then Snørre left for Bergen and I took over the whole project. 

Are you re-mixing it or remixing it?

The tracks are getting remade. The one track is Jungle, one is Trance, and one is Ambient. It’s all over the place.

Where do you start with something like that, because it’s such a unique album?

We just loaded all the different elements into a sampler and we didn’t listen to the original track before we started. It could go both ways, but it just flowed out. We were done in four hours. Eventually I heard all the tracks, and now I just start at one point and go with the flow.  

It’s a very organic LP, did you have to add loads of new elements?

No. I’m just using what’s there, because the raw material is so great, it’s just a pleasure to work with. 

There’s also a very obscure concept behind the album. How do you try and relay that into the remixes?

I try not to think about that. 

In terms of what you play as a DJ, is it as eclectic as your tastes? 

Yes, I’m all over the place. I guess I prefer Techno, but anything goes. 

 

What are your plans for Den Gyldne Sprekk takeover?

The first night is David Dajani, and we haven’t talked about what we’re going to play. The last time it was when he was curating the month, and I asked if we could play, progressive rock. I guess we’re going to do something else this time. 

The second Tuesday is Very Friendly, which again we didn’t talk about what we’re going to play. Probably just a good mix of stuff. 

The third one is with Hertug Skule & Big T and it’s a concept called Gangster Galore, where they takeover a place and play gangster rap for 9 hours. They’ve had it at Freden’s cafe in Fredensborg veien. 

Besides the last one, there’s no distinct themes emerging. So will you be a bit more free flowing in your selections each night?

Yeah. I’ll go anywhere. 

Within that wide musical scope, what do you look for in music, what’s the underlying thread?

It’s mainly just records from the 90’s, mainly Techno. I’m always looking for cheap, but good records. It takes a bit of time and you have to listen to a lot of shit.

It’s very rare, since everybody knows what they cost, because of Discogs.

Yeah, the Discogs effect has been going on for the last few years, where everybody is doing the same as me. They are cheap because nobody has been wanting them for 20 years. So when they get sold out on Discogs, they don’t just arrive at the same price. I have many records that I’ve bought for 2 Euros that are now 150 euros.

And what do those records sound like?

European and American Techno records and Trance records, and Breakbeat records.  

TBT: Joy Orbison – Hyph Mngo

A faint thewy organ, floats in from the distance, reluctantly filling the stereo field. A mere suggestion of tension accompanies the augmented volume, before the body of sound reveals itself as some distorting imitation of an organ, most likely coaxed from a FM synthesiser. The year is 2009 and the song is “Hyph Mngo” by an unknown artist called Joy Orbison and before it’s even reached the pressing plant, it’s been widely acknowledged as the track of the year, by some of London’s most significant selectors and tastemakers. 

It was a debut release by an unknown artist on an independent label called Hotflush recordings, but it preceded to garner a kind of hype reserved for pop music. Indie magazine Pitchfork called it a “spectacularly well-crafted dubstep song,” singing the track’s praises well in advance of the official release date on more than one feature, while XLR8R quite rightly called Joy Orbison an “artist to watch.” It seemed that every DJ of notable repute in the UK had a copy of this record, tucked away in their arsenal and if they wanted a lethargic dance floor to go off in the summer of 2009, all they had to do was play “Hyph Mngo.”

London in 2009 was an exciting landscape for electronic music. Dubstep had been firmly inducted in the underbelly of the UK capital at places like Plastic People and had started to make waves in the mainstream through artists like Skream and Benga, but a new generation of artists had begun to redefine the parlance almost at the same time. Formed on of the foundations of the extended UK Bass music family (most often UK garage) Dubstep started to incorporate a heady mixture of influences from the extended comos of dance music culture, developing the term beyond its original parameters.

A group of aspiring artists, producers, DJs and enthusiasts, converging in online communities like Dubstepforum and at club concepts like >>FWD started to penetrate the slowly stagnant Dubstep scene. Armed with the knowledge that the internet facilitated, and hugely respectful of the origins of UK’s music subcultures, these artists, DJs and producers would change the face of music in the city and the country to eventually become international pioneers in the booth and the studio that soon leaped beyond dubstep.

Peter O’Grady, who would later take on the name Joy Orbison (in some punchline of an undefined joke) , was one of these people. Growing up in greater London, O’Grady discovered UK dance music from an early age thanks to an influential relative. His uncle is Ray Keith and had been a pivotal figure on the UK’s Drum n Bass scene from its inception, contributing a few seminal moments on the dance floor in the late nineties and early noughties. “I had started to become interested in dance music,” O’Grady told Factmag during a rare interview at the start of his career, “so he would send me his albums and records.” Only 12 years old at the time, these albums arrived to become an obsession, spurred on by an enthusiasm only youth could bring. 

It expedited an entry into DJing, with a set of decks at 13 and between collecting records and honing his craft as a DJ, he was immersing himself completely in the sounds of Jungle, Drum n Bass, and most significantly Garage. “I was just a kid in awe of the culture,” he reminisced in a recent Dazed and Confused interview with Gabriel Szatan. He was eager “to go to record shops and get involved, but never holding any power,” he needed to make an impression first. “Production was always the natural progression” to that next step he told Factmag “but I actually waited quite a while – ’til I was about 18 – before I really gave it a go.”

As the darker hues of UK Garage developed into Grime on the estates of London, O’Grady took first steps into production, “trying to imitate those 8 bar grime tracks” on the predominant  Fruity Loops software. Little more that an ingratiating “hobby” at first, O’Grady’s skills developed as his musical purview grew to include everything from post-rock (he was even in a band at one stage) to classic House, laying the foundation for what become the fusion of styles that would gather round Joy Orbison and his first release “Hyph Mngo.”

“Why is our enthusiasm for Joy Orbison so outsized compared to what we express for his peers?” asked Little White Earbuds a few years later via a review of “Ellipsis.” It’s an interesting question, and the answer still eludes us today. “Hyph Mngo” wasn’t necessarily breaking any molds per se at that time. The two step garage rhythm had become quite pedestrian at that point and it wasn’t the first time producers flirted with classic Garage in the scope of Dubstep either. The year before Skream had released Skreamizm 5 which contained the bubbling “One for the heads who remember” – a track that bore some striking similarities to “Hyph Mngo” in its use of a fractured vocal sample, a two step percussive loop and a lot of emphasis on the sub-bass frequencies.

By 2009 that scene was moving at a staggering rate however with the old guard like Skream (who is only a few years O’Grady’ senior) quickly moving over for the next movement in the UK’s dance music scene. New labels like Hessle Audio were emerging and encouraging a wave of new artists to explore every shadowy enclave of UK dance genres and further afield. It was a very innovative era for the music, and borders were completely broken down, with Dubstep’s ingrained formulas becoming almost immediately passé. 

The lfo (low frequency oscillator) “wobbly” basslines and syncopated rhythms that had defined the genre were now holding it back, as artists, some of whom were active in Dubstep, looked beyond those features in developing the music at a rapid pace. An artist like Joy Orbison signalled the latest in a movement that was always looking to the next, but unlike many tracks that came and disappeared from the XLR8R downloads section, “Hyph Mngo” had the presence to back up the hype. 

Its magnificence is ingrained in the fundamentals of track and its Garage foundations.“I think a lot of my sound comes from UK Garage, producers like Todd Edwards, Zed Bias and Groove Chronicles,” admitted O’Grady in Factmag, and that’s quite significant in the appeal of the record. Instead of relying on what was becoming tired tropes in the world of UK’s dance music, O’Grady proffered an interpretation of the classic UK Garage sounds from a modern perspective. 

Two-step garage rhythms forged in the cold metallic percussive range of Grime, bounce  through thinly splaid house chords. A disembodied vocal sample haunts the progression, only on occasion revealing the lyric “it’s you” while wave after wave of sub-bass anchor the track to its ratcheting beat. 

Elements of House, Garage and Dubstep are all accounted for, but they are unfamiliar, re-contextualized in the confluence. The “wobble” bass line is there too, but completely devoid of the rasping sonorities of its Dubstep origins, it’s been relieved of its cliché. It’s set to the back, where it serves as a harmonic accompaniment rather than taking center stage. The bass line and the curious use of an FM organ synth, sets the tone for a track that floats between distant worlds of House, Grime and Dubstep. 

In a recent interview with the Quietus, O’Grady told the writer: “I think people like to assume you’re quite ignorant when you’re younger, and people maybe thought we were just these kids into jungle and garage and that, but I was interested in lots of styles of music.” That eclectic approach encouraged in some part by a youthful enthusiasm might have played an integral part in how that track turned out in fact, and although unique, it was the machinations behind that track that played the most significant role in the eventual success of “Hyph Mngo.”

It wasn’t exactly anything was well defined as the Dubstep scene that enabled the hype, but with a few key figures shouting its praises in an extensive online community where blogs had surpassed the music press for a while, the popularity of that record, and many more among it, took on a life of its own. O’Grady had tentatively handed a few copies to some DJ friends at first according to the factmag interview, and he was “really unconfident about the reaction” it would get. It went “‘pretty crazy” however and exceeded O’Grady’s expectations by far. 

One DJ, in particular, played a fundamental role in the track’s reception. When Martin Clarke (aka Blackdown) played it for the first time on Rinse FM in the summer of 2009, he claimed in no uncertain terms, that “this tune is massive” and proceeded to proclaim it a “dubstep anthem” in a feature for Pitchfork.  

Between Clarke, the DJs playing the track, and the blogs picking up on it on an almost daily basis, it catapulted the name Joy Orbison into the public psyche for anybody interested in alternative club music. It didn’t take long for that track to live on its own terms however. On the ten-year anniversary of its release, Gabriel Szatan writing in DJ Mag called Hyhp Mngo “a touchstone, firmly fixed in contemporary electronic music’s vernacular and its bloodstream,” and if I could offer even the slightest criticism, it would only be that success of “Hyph Mngo” detracted from the equally brilliant B-side “Wet Look.”

It played some part as a catalyst beyond Dubstep, which other artists and DJs took into Techno and House, and Joy Orbison even further (81B on Hinge finger is a great example) , which continues to fuse and merge with everything from psychedelia to proto House. “I don’t resent that exposure,” he told Factmag about his sudden rise,  “but I’m definitely more excited about what’s to come than what I’ve done so far.”  

With what we know today from releases like “The shrew would have cushioned the blow,” “Big Room Tech House DJ Tool – TIP!”, “Ellipsis” and his recent collaboration with Overmono for “Bromley” those words come as an uncanny reminder from the past.  If I could pose an answer to LWE’s initial question, and with the advantage of hindsight, our enthusiasm for Joy Orbison is the result of his unique ability to surprise around each corner. He makes effective dance music that feigns preconceptions. You never know what to expect from a Joy O track and it’s always a pleasant surprise. 

The cut with Filter Musikk

Can you hear it? The distant ticking of the doomsday clock. It’s getting closer, louder. It’s just slipped past 100 seconds to midnight on its irrevocable path to the inevitable. Nothing we cdo, can stop it and everything we do is accelerating it. Even those most ancient of past times, music has become a taboo. Everything we’ve done to record and listen to music since the advent of the 20th century is killing our planet, and taking us with it. 

Irregardless of format, hope is infinitesimal and at a time where the world is only just waking up to the sounds of the rest of the world, it is ironic that now more than ever, we need to stop. Restrain our listening habits, slow your breath, cease to exist… just… stop. There is no acceptable resolve, short of the simple vocal chord, and who can possibly know the noxious effect of the human voice or the lyricist’s pen. Can you hear it yet… a life without music.

It’s incomprehensible, so I’ll play the devil’s advocate and say it without fear of retribution… Vinyl is our only option. Yes, the most poisonous of formats. A composite of music, locked in plastic through a dirty industrialised process using waste chemicals, that’s where we’ll find our answer. In a disposable consumer culture, a record is a lifetime acquisition today for many (even if you can’t listen to it anymore, it will make a nice bowl) and if it’s not in your collection it’s in a record store, on the used shelf, waiting for a new owner. 

In a world where accessibility is key and a world of music waits at your fingertips, records require a level of dedication, a long term investment that’s just expensive enough to garner more than a fleeting interest and valuable enough to live beyond temporal trends. In an age where music is created, produced and discarded over a New York minute, a record takes a little more commitment in for all parties involved, so if you’re going to leave a footprint, leave few impressions, and make them count. Exorbitant costs and availability, encourage limited presses for the reserve of only those most excellent and worthy pieces of music.

In Oslo, there’s a small store at the end of Prinsens gate that is toiling away in its bid to help facilitate a more sincere and less wasteful musical experience. Behind the counter is a man, whose dedication to the format and curation skills has offset all of Oslo’s musical carbon footprint alone. He hardly takes holidays and when he does it’s by train. That man is Roland LIfjell and the shop is Filter Musikk. This is the cut with Filter Musikk.

 

James Ruskin – Siklikal EP (Tresor) 12″   

James Ruskin continues to be an innovative figure in a canon that is currently being commodified in obnoxious DJ Instagram posts and music that constitutes little more than a tired loop. His latest record comes at a time when everybody is pursuing tawdry interpretations of the sound he in part created at the turn of the century through Blueprint and Tresor. 

When Techno fell from grace, artists like Ruskin continued to make music with the futurist resolve that guided their predecessors, becoming the archetype for what Techno constitutes on European dance floors today. At a time when Techno is possibly at the height of its popularity, it comes as no surprise that  Ruskin would contribute to the scene with a record like “Siklikal.”

The EP on long-time-collaborator Tresor, finds the artist in an introspective mood, feigning the dominance of the kick drum in murky atmospheres. Clattering industrial sounds emerge from a hazy confluence of noise where repetitive sequences lay the foundation for improvised machines.

Like some industrial process imagined by Fritz Lang, the machines take on a life of their own, as chirping formats and oppressive textures obfuscate any central theme or dominant rhythms pattern. Only on “Nepte” and “Nocke” does any kind of percussion exist, but it appears lost in the context of the factory-like  ambience that smothers the music. 

 

DJ Richard – Eraser (Flexxseal) 12″ Ltd Ed 

Slow, marauding rhythms punch holes in distorting pads, while clumsy elements churn around the eye of a sonic tornado on DJ Richard’s latest, “Eraser.” The music seems to float around in a stupor, travelling through some gloomy tunnel, strewn with used needles and discarded dreams. 

A slow pulse dominates “Eraser,” and even when the kick drum is pounding out semiquavers on “Casca’s Theme” there’s an oppressive front lingering on the surface, instilling a druggy haze through the record. The staggering 303 and awkward accents of the title track is this record’s calling card, as DJ Richard establishes a particular mood throughout this record.

It’s a long way off from the chirpy records he has made from Dial in the past, but the layers of  texture that dominated those records are still prominent and notable here. They’ve taken a more menacing turn, playing in gloomy chord progressions and distorting percussive arrangements that cling on those claustrophobic mid range frequencies.  

 

Ludwig A.F. Röhrscheid – Between Worlds (Exo Recordings International) 12″

There’s been a significant return to these 90’s rave and trance sounds in the last couple of years. A new generation of DJ/producer, trying to sidestep the Discogs effect has been digging deeper and deeper into the bargain bin, where they’ve defined their sound in the unwanted records. They’ve found a new value in the discarded sounds of 90’s Trance, Breakbeat and Techno and it was only a matter of time until it started informing their own music.

Artists and DJs like Ludwig A.F. Röhrscheid are re-appropriating these heretofore tawdry aspects into serious music, in interpretations that thrive in the original DIY values of these genres, landing on the ears of the modern dance floor enthusiasts who have no relationship to the origins of this sound.

Sparkling 303’s and wispy pads hover just above the corporeal delights of a 909 kick. Updating those stale sounds for the digital realm, Röhrscheid avoids nostalgia, but delights in the charm of melody and harmony that his predecessors enjoyed. There’s a lo-fi element to “Between two Worlds” that plays up to the zeitgeist, and while that familiar flute lifted from that Enigma record for the umpteenth time might sound cute again, you have to wonder how long those bubblegum sounds that dominate the A-side of the record will stay relevant in today’s ever-changing landscape. 

“Leave” and “Between Worlds” on the B-side contains something far more substantial than the sugaryA-side. The artist is certainly caught between these two worlds on the record, but as is true of most records, it’s the B-side that will make more of a valuable contribution in the long run. 

 

Heap – Beat Nouveau EP (Mechatronica White) 12″ Ltd Ed

A label will never make any money from a limited press. Even if it sells out completely, which believe it or not is still not a certainty at a mere 616 copies, the record might only recoup its costs if you’re lucky. As a second pressing is highly unlikely, you’re putting everything into this one shot, and that takes a sincere commitment to the music. And then imagine basing a whole label on this ideology. 

Mechatronica’s white sublabel is all about that and while the parent label is no commercial success either focussing on the obscure strains of EBM, Electro, and Synth Wave, when they release a record like “Beat Nouveau” it’s worth a listen at the very least.

The thing that strikes you first on this record is the snare (pun intended). Heap avoids the ratchet snares of the commonly used 808 for something with more body and a gated reverb, lifted from some eighties EBM track. “Beat Nouveau” is electro, but it opens the genre up to outside influences. From the snaking downtempo slant of “Beau Geste” to the muted synth wave of “Tat Ark,” there’s a consistent variation to this record, that makes each track count on its own terms. 

 

Jeff Mills – The Director’s Cut Chapter 5 (Axis) 12″

Like Ruskin, Jeff Mills remains the original architect and innovator of the Techno genre. While people are still playing  “the Bells” in DJ sets as if to prove their unwarranted significance, that record is the mere tip of the iceberg in a legacy that is so much more than the sum of its popularity.

Re-issuing that track in December last year  in the most recent of his Director’s cut compilations (probably why we’re hearing it all over on social media at the moment), it overshadows the extensive scope of Jeff Mills and his music, so it was with a conscious decision that we chose  to include the 5th in the series in this list. It contains some of Mills’ more obscure pieces from the mid 2000’s and especially the beautifully orchestrated “Above Waiting Worlds,” one of the prettiest pieces of Techno ever created. 

While the rest of the world has only just caught up with the Waveform Transmissions/Bells era, I’m curious how long it will take them to eventually arrive at this era. Another twenty years perhaps?

Ever the sonic auteur, this edition of the Director’s cut re-issues, showcases Mills’ cinematic pursuits, where he constructs pieces in a sci-fi narrative that continues to mystify. There’s that human touch that he always brought to this machine aesthetic, where a visceral component clouds the stark electronic landscape. Even at almost twenty years, these pieces still sound unique, like they’ve arrived from the future.

 

Album of the Week: Claro Intelecto – In Vitro – Volume one

In Vitro greets the listener with Claro Intelecto’s  classic “Peace of Mind” descending down the familiar melodic movement, chiming between luxurious pads. It seems appropriate that the track that broke Mark Stewart as Claro Intelecto, is the track that would introduce the first of a two-part compilation cataloguing the producer’s work. The track hasn’t aged at all, with the subtle details and entrancing textures captivating as much as they did back in 2004 when the record was first released.

When the rest of the dance floor was chasing the Electroclash trend, Stewart gravitated towards the Detroit influences and produced a pure Electro classic, that has outlived any of his trend-informed contemporaries. The track  has been a touchstone in the Electro genre ever since,  re-issued on Delsin in 2014 and then again today on the compilation, and its appeal is as strong as ever. Stewart eventually moved on from those early Electro and Techno LPs for the likes of AI records evolving into the more dubby realm where the likes of which Basic Channel were conjuring deep Techno, but at the core of his music as Claro Intelecto, and reflected in this compilation, is a sonic mysticism that captivate beyond those boundaries.

Deep chords and lingering pads suffuse the determined pulse of drum machines and bass synthesisers in music that flourishes in a humid atmosphere. Sifting through the outer layers of a track like “When the time is right,” you only find a kick drum buried deep in the lower frequencies, where you have to extricate it from a swampy confusion of sounds that suffocate it.  There’s a severe attention to the details in sound design, where even though a melody, harmony or rhythm might not develop through the course of track, that these accents develop like a cinematic diorama unfolding.

The compilation takes huge leaps through Claro Intelecto’s back catalogue, and without following some sequential route, it immediately exposes a singular sonic identity to Stewart’s work under this alias. Even the surprisingly raunchy “Two Thousand” with its growling bass line and excessive beat is usurped in its efforts to indulge an immediacy as the repetitive lines of the track, lock the listener into some trance-inducing wonder. The track at first jolts you from the daytime reverie of the first of two records, before slipping you back into the sanguine sounds that will eventually conclude that side on “Beautiful Death” – even through an abstract collage of Claro Intelecto’s work, a narrative exists.

While, through the course of Claro Intelecto’s discography, Minimal, Dub, Techno, Electro and even Deep House would label his work, Stewart’s sound would ultimately avoid all of these designations and  today it thrives on its own terms. Between album cuts and EPs, there is a distinctive sound. Often, it might resonate with some trend or zeitgeist, but as a recent LP like “Exhilarator” demonstrates,  Claro Intelecto’s music exists irregardless of such confined parameters. In Vitro – Volume one exposes a truly individual artist that remains apposite to the electronic music landscape.

Raw Soul with Detroit Swindle

House music is a machine-music imbued with soul. This has defined the characteristics and the limitations of the genre for four decades as artists and producers strive to parlay that human touch into a communal experience, coaxed from rigid machines. A sample, a choreographed modulation, a swing in the rhythm or a simple error, bring back House music to its origins. It’s where Funk, Soul and Disco still informs the work and artists like Detroit Swindle thrive in their modern interpretations of this ever-lasting genre. 

Lars Dales and  Maarten Smeets have been making music together as Detroit Swindle since the early part of the last decade. Both successful DJs and producers in their own right, the pair merged as a DJ/production duo when Maarten started playing at the club Lars was programming. Maarten’s underground sensibilities didn’t go down well with upper management however and Lars was forced to fire Maarten. They had started to bond over a shared musical passion at this point however, which developed into some studio time and eventually the start of Detroit Swindle. We don’t know what happened to that club…

As Detroit Swindle they released their first EP on Dirt Crew recordings, channeling those irrevocable Soul influences into the deeper echelons of House music. Gospel vocals and sparkling Rhodes keys streak a path to the dance floor on “Guess What,” establishing a Detroit Swindle sound that has veered little from these prominent roots up to today and their last release for AUS music “Rhythm Girl Swing.” Incorporating some elements of UK Garage and Disco in this latest release, the foundations of their work remain unchanged with an analogue warmth enveloping their sound.

Between releases for Dirt Crew and AUS, they’ve developed their own Heist imprint, providing a platform for others to extend the Detroit Swindle sound into new musical universes. Between their own EPs, running the label, playing live and DJing they’ve also released two LPs, which saw them re-imagine the sound outside of the club. From “Boxed Out” to “High Life” they’ve extended the Detroit Swindle sonic palette and with the assistance of some key collaborators on “High Life,” they created one of 2018’s most captivating House music LPs. 

All through this Detroit Swindle have remained steadfast in their sonic approach and true to the original themes of House music that brought them together. Whether they’re distilling it into original music, performing live or DJing, Lars and Maarten have found a unique voice on the musical landscape.

Detroit Swindle play our basement at Frædag next week

I’ve heard the story about the circumstances that brought you together to lay the foundation of Detroit Swindle. But Lars, did you end up firing Maarten from the club, like your boss asked?

Lars: Well, Maarten had the choice to either change what he was playing, or stop playing at the club. He chose to stick with the music he liked playing and I think he didn’t really mind not playing there anymore. It was a shame though, since all the bar staff and the regulars really liked to hear the music he played.  

What happened directly after in terms of the club and both your positions there?

Maarten: I’m not sure if the place still exists, but if it does, it probably isn’t the type of bar I’d go to for a drink. I was fine not playing there anymore and Lars quit his job as a programmer quite soon after to have more time in the studio together with me, which ended up being quite a good choice for the both of us. 

So all’s well that ends well. What was the music that you bonded over in the beginning that cemented what you would eventually do as Detroit Swindle?

Lars: It was mostly soul, funk, motown that we both grew up with. We were both also really into old school hiphop and that was really the foundation for our sound. We wanted to add our version of soul to modern day electronic music.

You were both accomplished solo artists/DJs before coming together as Detroit Swindle. How did you experience your individual tastes converging as Detroit Swindle?

Maarten: having had another career and another partnership with its ups and downs really helps in your growth as a person and an artist. We both had worked with someone else before and have learned valuable lessons from it. From a taste-perspective, we both add something that’s really from ourselves to the table. The combination of Lars’ interests and taste together with mine is what makes it click. It’s not always easy as a duo since you’re always creatively dependent on the other, but in the end, it’s a combination that just works really well.  

Did either of you ever feel you had to adapt your approach to music to accommodate the other?

Lars: During DJ sets, you can’t always decide on directions to take. Sometimes, it’s important to follow the idea of the other and that means finding a record to play that connects with the vibe the other is trying to go for rather than going for something different. Dj’ing in a duo is in a sense always about accommodating to each other’s ideas. And that’s how cool new things can emerge with combinations you’ve never thought of before. 

When we’re producing, there’s a golden rule that we both must really stand behind the track that we’re making. Whether it’s a b2 for an ep, or a big remix, we only release it when we’re both happy. That means that sometimes you have to make compromises to create something that’s really ‘us’.

There’s a lot to unpack in the name Detroit Swindle, but I think the connection with Detroit is an interesting one. There’s always been a tradition of Detroit in the Netherlands, from what the Bunker guys were doing to what the Dekmantel boys were doing at the start. I know you are only able to speak for yourself, but why do you think this relationship with Detroit is so strong in the Netherlands?

Maarten: That’s an interesting question… I guess musically, Holland has always had a big jazz, soul and disco scene with its eyes firmly set on the midwest with record import, festivals, stuff like that. For us, it’s the raw soul and unconventional approach to music in a sense. Whether it’s arrangement, the raw way of recording music, or the loose programming of samples, it’s all so very ‘alive’. That’s probably the biggest reason why it appeals to us so much.

Detroit’s legacy is kind of enshrined in Techno. Has it always been about House music for you, and where do you usually draw the line in your productions and DJ sets in your interpretation of a Detroit sound?

Lars: It was always Hiphop for me actually, with Dilla really being the main inspiration for me for a long time. If I look at our record bag, there will probably always be a Moodymann whitelabel, Omar S. or Underground Resistance record somewhere. That said, there’s so much great music out there and musical inspiration can come from all over the world these days, which is a good thing. It’s just great to be knee deep into soulful electronic music and hearing it pop up all over the world. 

Is the Heist platform just an extension of this sound?

Maarten: Heist is an extension of our sound so you could definitely say it’s an extension of where our inspiration comes from. We’ve had 6 years worth of great releases and in 2020, we’ve got some great diverse music coming up again, so we’re also pushing the sound to new places and drawing new inspiration from that. 

 

What do you look for in artists or music to make it onto the label, and is there any direction, from your part that you’ve always instilled in the artists coming to the label?

Lars: most of all, we look for artists who have their own sound, or at least something identifiable and unique to him / her / them. How well that thing is shaped is not really relevant, but it has to be there. We are really actively involved with the music our artists make and send us and with that, we help them shape their own sound. At the end of the day, we’re just very happy to be the messengers of all these amazing records.  

Over the years and your releases, you’ve stayed very close to the foundations of your sound, but you must constantly be evolving as musicians and artists. How have you experienced your own music evolve over the years?

Maarten: We’ve obviously learned a lot more about production techniques and mixing down, although I would still gladly leave the more technical stuff to real pro’s and stick to writing music myself. We’ve started working way more with analog equipment which really helped us in expanding our sound, understanding synthesis and also, very important, has ensured we still have loads of fun jamming in the studio. Our sound has definitely evolved as well, but I still feel very much connected to the music we made in the first part of our career. Change is a natural thing and we really embrace it with our productions. Moreover, we both really don’t see the point in repeating the same trick over and over, so it’s also in our character to keep on looking for fresh ideas.

I’m thinking about your last release on AUS, Rhythm Girl Swing. I picked up on hints Disco on Vibrations and a little bit of Garage on Wado Bayo. Was that something that you were actively trying to achieve on that record; expanding the repertoire?

Lars: To be honest, not really. We rarely go into the studio with a real plan or direction we want to take things. We just let the vibe of the moment take us wherever it goes. When we put together an EP, we always like to fit in some different styles, types of energy. Wado Baya is quite deep for us but still has that soulful warmth. The disco vibe on Vibrations is something that’s very close to us. We still like to switch it up though, for instance with this track with the more techy stabs, which gives the track a nice edge. 

What did you take away from that EP, that might inform future releases?

Maarten: It had been a while since we released on a label other than Heist, but it was nice to get this EP out there on a great label like Aus. The EP did really well and that felt like a nice encouragement to explore that deeper side of things as well. Funnily enough, the next record we did was a full on house record, so that kinda proves the point we made in the last question. We just go into the studio and see whatever comes out. 

With Techno’s popularity at an all time high at the moment and with House music favouring a kind of lo-fi soundcloud aesthetic, how do you feel you have had to adapt if at all with the current sounds on European dance floors?

Lars: We both have a weak spot for classic techno, so we always bring along a few bangers if we play a late slot or do an allnighter. The lofi house aesthetic is kinda interesting, because it’s a subgenre really focused on sound design, which I really applaud. That said, there’s loads of badly executed good ideas and well executed bad ideas in both genres (and every other genre) so it’s still all about making that right selection when you’re playing. As far as our sound goes, we’ve been playing music from all kinds of genres and love switching it up, no matter what genre is currently getting all the buzz.  

We really loved your last LP, High Life here and still play it in our café. It’s perfect for breaching that space between the cafe concept and what we do at night. How do you approach the LP differently to what you do on EPs and singles?

Maarten: That’s great to hear. Our intention with High Life was to create a soulful electronic album with a lot of live elements. When we made it, we took 3 weeks off of touring, which we normally never do. During those 3 weeks, we had guest musicians come over, locked ourselves up in the studio and lived the music, closing ourselves off for all external influences. During the process, we also have let go of the idea of creating music for clubs and just went into jams with an open mind. It’s with that mindset, along with the fact that we had no real pressure on, that we were able to write that album. The process for us when we’re writing music for an EP is different, but also really fun. It’s a more lightweight approach, where you get to put music together you’ve written in the studio, in an airplane, waiting for a pickup, or wherever. It’s also nice to write music without any time constraints, which makes it possible to let something sit for a while and you get to think about the direction you want to take the track, think about possible collabs you could do, etc. Both processes are really nice to go through and the variety in output makes it really worthwhile to work on EP’s now and plan for a new album in the future. 

 

There were a lot of collaborations on that LP compared to Boxed Out. What encouraged these collaborations and how did it affect the sound of the LP as a whole?

Lars: Our good friend and live collaborator Lorenz Rhode was there for quite a while to write keys for a lot of the tracks, which was great. We did a studio session with him and Tom Misch which ended up being a super special jam session. The recording with Jungle by Night was done in the Amsterdam Red Bull Studios and was amazing as well, having all these super talented guys jam on our track and have fun with each other. For us, these collabs have really made the album more diverse and give it a nice live touch. The combination of programmed electronics, sequenced synths, drums and samples and those unquantized live recordings give the whole album a real special feel that makes the album more than a dance album, but more a  journey through our view on electronic music.

You’ve toured the album for a bit, playing live, but you’re coming to Jaeger to play a DJ set. What’s the correlation between live, the label and DJing for you that makes it a distinctly Detroit Swindle experience?

Maarten: The live show is pretty much all original DS tracks and during our DJ sets, we try and play all different kinds of music. We play a lot of unreleased Heist tracks in our Dj sets and I guess all the music we play, whether it’s live or DJ, have a role in our the Sonic space of the DS sound. The live show has a certain energy with all the equipment and keyboards, all the live playing, a lights show, etc. It’s more of a show than when we’re DJ’ing. While DJ’ing, we really get to connect with the crowd, and in the interaction, we try to get a feel for the musical direction to take. In a way, the label, the DJ shows and the live shows are different ways for us to express our view on music and together, they form a really solid basis for the Detroit Swindle sound.

And what  should people expect from your upcoming set at Jaeger?

Lars: It’s been quite a while since we were at Jaeger and last time we played the courtyard, so we’re super excited to play here again. Usually when preparing a set, we go through the latest promo’s, get the latest tracks on Heist on the USB and check if there’s a new DS track to try out before we send it off for mastering. There’s always a nice combination of old and new music, as well as a trip through various styles. I couldn’t tell you now what we’ll play, but there’ll definitely be some unreleased tracks in there, as well as a few really nice records we got at a recent shopping spree. 

Influences: Beyond the arctic circle with Charlotte Bendiks

In the 1990s, music in Norway had largely been the claim of a small University town just beyond the arctic circle. Uncompromising figures like Bjørn Torske, Per Martinsen, Rune Lindbæk, Ole Mjøs and Geir Jenssen had found an affinity for machine music, that had put them and Tromsø on the map and paved a way for a whole lineage of artists that arrived after them.

There was no universal sound or even genre underpinning these individual artists or their music. The glacial ambience of Jenssen‘s Biosphere; the ecclastical highs of Torske, Linbæk and Mjøs’ Volcano; and the futurist machine rhythms of Martinsen’s Mental Overdrive stimulated nothing of a scene and yet there was something distinctive in the music that every artist brought to their individual musical destinations. 

Even though most of those original torchbearers have moved away from the region, Tromsø’s legacy is enshrined in those pioneers’ early accomplishments, with younger artists like Charlotte Bendiks imbibing that same  legacy for this generation and the next. Charlotte Bendiks has been a pivotal figure in the modern history of Tromsø and Norway’s electronic music scene with records on Per Martinsen’s Love OD label, Correspondant and Cómeme. A DJ, live artist and producer, her music has reached a global audience, and has found a fair few influential record bags. 

Last year’s “Hjemme Erotic” on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Jnr. label, found Bendiks harnessing familiar traits in her own music, with polyrhythmic percussion and minimalist arrangements defining her sound as an artist. In the title track, Bendiks yet again reflects on home (hjemme) in literal terms, but with a breathy vocal and a drum machine evoking some intangible tribe, it also traces a faint lineage towards the earliest musical traditions from the region.

Like a post-modern nod to Joik, “Hjemme Erotic” continues to permeate with the sounds and atmosphere of Charlotte Bendiks’ roots. It lends that distinctive charm that has informed much of the music of the region, but it’s still an elusive appeal that remains largely undefined in Bendiks’ music and her influences from the region. Here she uncovers some of those influences ahead of her next  appearance at Jaeger for her IRONI residency. 

 

Kolar Goi – Audio Krill 

Kolar Goi, Aedena Cycle, Dr Gaute Barlindhaug – the man, the myth, the legend! One of the key figures in the Tromsø music scene is this guy,  as a producer, festival organizer for Insomnia festival and teaching music production for the university. Audio Krill sums up everything good about Gaute for me, and it is one of my all time favorite arctic tracks.

There’s quite an experimental element to this track. Is that something that you’re naturally drawn to in music, something unusual?

Yes, everything that stands out as different is interesting to me. Something with its own personality. 

I’ve always found a coldness in the music from the area. That’s obviously subjective, but the environment must have some effect on the music that’s made there. How do you think it’s informed your listening habits and the music you make?

That is very hard to answer. In my experience the same musical element that some people find cold, others find warm. The cold dark weather outside might influence the amount of hours you spend inside a warm studio in the winter, and that affects your musical output…

Beatservice, like Gaute has been a pillar of the Dance music community in Tromsø. What kind of influence do you think that sense of community has on the music from the region?

Tromsø is a very small city and the community of underground music is even smaller, so I think every person that takes part has shaped the music scene in a much bigger way than they know themselves.

 

Mental Overdrive – Diskodans

This genius of a track goes beyond genres and styles and stands out in it’s own way. I also love how Per used a vocal sample of a famous finish disco dancer and teacher Åke Blomqvist. It’s really the cherry on top for me, and what brings the quirky nordic vibe to the track. 

Per is such a versatile and prolific artist. Is this something that you try to emulate in your music?

I wanna be – I wanna be like PER!

Why do you think that “quirky nordic vibe” is so important in electronic music, not just from Tromsø, but the rest of Norway too?

I am not sure if I would say it is important in nordic music, but it is an important part of the northern Norwegian culture. It is also a big part of northern Norwegian storytelling traditions, and I find that this (dark) humour in music can motivate to take risks, stand out and dare to be different.

Per moved back to Tromsø a while back and it’s a small city where you’re bound to bump into figures like that regularly. Is there a healthy artistic exchange between this old guard and some of the new artists coming through, because of that?

That of course depends on each and every individual, some are more open for communication than others. Of course, it helps that it is a small and tight knit community. It is easy to know someone who knows someone, and that makes all the creative people in the north connect. The music scene is well connected to the film-, theatre- and art scene as well. There are a lot of collaborations across various expressions.

 

Nikkeby Lufthavn – To the moon

Nikkeby Lufthavn is my favorite rock band of all time. I discovered them when I was a punk-interested teenager, and to me Nikkeby Lufthavn is Tromsø’s best kept secret. I love the lyrics in To the Moon!

What was it that eventually lured you over to the electronic arts?

I don’t think of it like that anymore. Music is music. I discovered punk because I met some people who were in the punk scene, later I met some people who were into Detroit Techno and discovered electronic music via them. So I guess my answer is accessibility. 

How does this kind of music reflect in your own music and DJ sets?

I like the DIY punk attitude a lot. I think you can hear from some of my music that I am more into a “dirty” and “home made” sound than keeping it clean and smooth.

 

Mari Boine & Liu Sola – Maze

Mari Boine is a otherworldly and one of the most powerful artists I know. This track is my all time favorite of hers, I can’t begin to describe it, just listen and feel it!

How did you come across Mari Boine and why is her music so powerful to you?

Mari Boine is a very famous artist in Norway, so I discovered her and her music at a very young age. Her music is very emotional, and her emotions are very powerful.

Those sami roots are obviously strong in the north, but is it something accessible, or do you still have to seek it out to find it? 

Oh lord, where to begin… This is a history lesson of the Norwegian state’s discrimination that I won’t try to take on here. The roots are strong and all over, but a lot was hidden and some is even lost forever.

There’s a primal quality to the drums in that piece, and it’s something that I often pick up on in the rhythms and percussion in your music. Are you more likely to take your cues from a folk tradition like this than say, Techno when it comes to those elements in your tracks?

I like to think of all percussive music as primal or trance music. Repetitive percussive music to me is primal trance music, and I like to think that it has been part of human culture since before electricity was invented. I combine acoustic and electronic percussive sounds, and I don’t think of it as one or the other, it all comes together to make the vibe and groove I want to express. 

Bjørn Torske – Spelunker

Bjørn Torske aka The Codfather. Spelunker is a track I fell head over heels in love with when the Feil Knapp record was released back in 2007. 

All the electronic music music you mention in this list is from around this time. What was it about that era in music that influenced you so much?

These are the tracks I discovered when I started going out to clubs in Tromsø, kind of my introduction to electronic music. Also some of the tracks I started playing when I started “DJ-ing” in bars. They shaped my taste a lot!

That “quirky nordic vibe” is strong here too, like 8 bit dub. Torske has always been a versatile musical figure too. How do you think those elements still inform your tastes as a DJ today?

I like Bjørn Torske a lot because of his musical freedom across different styles and genres. He is the original Codfather and pioneer of Norwegian electronic music. I think without him all the electronic music from Norway would be very very different.

Album of the Week: E.R.P – Exomoon

Gerard Hanson had a prolific decade the last time around. A string of EPs and a couple of LPs under a couple of aliases had made the artist synonymous with the revival of an early Detroit electronic aesthetic, even as his own releases were setting the tone for the future. Active in music since the mid nineties, Hanson had enjoyed an immense flurry of creativity in the last ten years in the perspective of his earlier years, punctuated by Ancient Light (Hubble Telescope series Vol.II),  2845 (Convextion) and the highly anticipated and critically received LP, Afterimage. These records and the ones that bookended them, and their reserved release schedule, had made E.R.P’s music a constant fixture in the last decade, always leaving you wanting more a with a new record, never it seems to far away.

Exomoon arrived as if to punctuate the end of the decade with an E.R.P! After the success of “Afterimage” on his own Forgotten Future imprint, the year before, E.R.P closed the period with a sophomore LP, installing the artist as the flag-bearer for the future sounds of that Detroit Electro sound, while heading into the next decade. Exomoon doesn’t necessarily advance the sound of the artist, but merely delivers on a formula that he has mastered through records for the likes of Frustrated Funk and Harbour City Sorrow. If anything,”Exomoon” errs on the darker side of the genre, as E.R.P plays in menacing textures, travelling on the sine wave of brooding Moog bass lines.

Where Electro has always struggled with finding a balance between the DJ’s needs and song structure, Hanson has found a distinctive place within the genre, where he continues to infuse the music with a melodic approach, but retains the functionality that’s required from the dance floor. Exomoon drifts even further to the latter with tracks like “Searchlight”, “Lost Colony” and “Blockade” giving the sub-bass speakers a proper workout. Hanson becomes a denizen of a nocturnal subterranean habitat through Exomoon, as his focus strains on the rhythm section with marauding drum machines and menacing bass-lines capitulating the electro genre to the modern dance floor.

When Hanson gets pensive like on “Light of S.A.M” or “Ice Mine” glimmers of “Ancient Light” shine through with lush harmonies and captivating frosty melodies displacing the insistence of the beat. It provides a little space and depth to an otherwise stark and functional record intended for DJ record bags. While “Afterimage” showcased E.R.P’s more experimental aptitude, this is a record that favours the simple pleasures of the electro genre as dance music.  It’s a record that cements the decade for Hanson and E.R.P, but also facilitates a more effective gateway to the dance floor for the Electro genre for the future.

Seminal moments with DJ Spacebear

*DJ Spacebear stands in for DJ Lekkerman at Den Gyldne Sprekk for the month of January.

It’s still early on a Tuesday night and the song “Street Life” is playing on an empty dance floor, waiting for the night to officially start. The upbeat Disco groove, slinking strings and Randy Crawford’s beatific vocals contrast the gritty subject contained in lyrics like; “Prince charming always smiles, behind a silver spoon.” It’s the Crusaders, Lars Moen (DJ Spacebear) informs me, without a beckoning question. “It’s a long track” he tells DJ Kompressorkanonen (Orjan Sletner), who is leaning on his flank with the next record, Lars implying that he would like to hear the song for its entirety.   

Much like the Crusaders song, Lars is something of an enigma. His long, straight hair, tied up in a neat ponytail, an ageless physiognomy and his earnest speech pattern are at odds with the stereotypical image of a DJ today. A loose-fitting, Rush Hour records sweater lends the only clue to his musical passions and if you didn’t see him behind a set of decks, you’d hardly place him there. Yet, he’s been a central figure in House music and Techno in Oslo for the last thirty years, playing records for audiences in their thousands in and around Oslo in the mid nineties, before it fractured and retreated to the underground, where DJ Spacebear continued to be a constant presence in the DJ booth. 

Today he regularly plays places like Hærverk, where he’s shared the booth with legendary underground figures like Terrace and Spin Fidelity, and his sets can go from Deep Ambient Techno to the Disco he’s currently playing through Jaeger’s soundsystem in the lounge.

“I like soul,” says Lars in a bare whisper, “because it has an atmosphere” and lately he’s been enjoying excavating some of those records again in what seems to be an endless pursuit of discovery for the music enthusiast. Recently, he tells me Disco and Soul has led him down a path t to “swing jazz from the thirties and forties,” and even after doing this for nearly thirty years, he’s still finding music he’s never heard before. Through his own 10 000-strong record collection and an unceasing habit of collecting he keeps going “back in time” and still comes across some things “he’s never heard before.” 

The first record

Lars grew up in the suburbs of Oslo listening to a lot of Rock music. “It was a really boring place,” but he seemed to find some solace in music from an early age. He “forced” his father to take him to his first concert in 1988 to see AC/DC, but around the same time he was listening to Kraftwerk and Break Machines. “I was really impressed by Kraftwerk,” he remembers. “We are the robots, is a record I really remember that is important for the introduction to electronic music for me.”

Lars developed the introduction into a hobby and started buying this new music through the cassette medium. He bought Break Machines’ seminal debut on cassette and it’s a record he will still return to, on the various other formats he’s acquired over the years. “I still like it” he says, but if there’s one seminal record that set him on path to DJing it has to be Humanoid’s Stakker. He originally “recorded it from the radio” on a cassette tape, but he “didn’t know what it was,” setting him on a journey to find the first Techno record he ever owned. “It was like zero for me” he recalls. The “crazy breakbeat, acid vocoder Techno” had arrived from space it seemed and while Lars had been familiar with these kinds of themes through Kraftwerk’s music, Humanoid was “more raw and rough” and its lack of identity consolidated music with  another passion for Lars… an interest in space.

Lars “was really into astronomy” and from that moment, he would spend evenings listening to Techno while drawing imagined landscapes from space. At one point he had to make a decision between a telescope and a record player and he chose the record player, taking the first steps to becoming a DJ. He christened his new DJ alias DJ Spacebear to convey  what he thought about this “music from space with the power of a bear.” 

The first DJ set

Lars retreated into his fantasy landscapes and the radio, where he found a wealth of new music that sounded like Humanoid. Radio stations like Radio Nova and their jocks DJ Apple Pie (Christian Grimshei) and DJ Hanza (Hans Erik Hansen) introduced Lars to the world of Techno and House. “These DJs were important to me,” stresses Lars and some of the shows he recorded on cassette back then are still in his possession today. He found “a lot of inspiration from these shows,” but it would remain a largely solitary passion for him through his teenage years. He was “too young” to go to raves and his insular environment found very few kindred spirits on his block. 

Hip Hop had reached the height of its popularity in Norway by then, and these were the only kids that Lars could relate to during that time. “I had five or six friends that were into Hip Hop, so I hung around with these people, but they didn’t like Techno.” He bought his first record player in 1991 and had to wait another year to save up for the second, but would join some of these friends in their basements to play some records. They would often get angry when he played an Underground Resistance record. “No, don’t play Disco…” they would complain before Lars could defend himself proclaiming “this is not Disco, it’s Techno!”

While he “was really alone” in his love of Techno and House at home, in Oslo city a record store owned by Morten Winsnes became a refuge for the aspiring DJ. Winsnes had worked with the likes of radio DJ and hip Hop mainstay, Tommy Tee at Innova Music before establishing his own store and club in the city. Located where the Duo sex shop is today on Møllergata, Morten had stocked the shop with “mostly House and Techno.” Personally, the shop owner “was into the hardstuff ” according to Lars, but he had all the records from Lars’ radio shows with music from Underground Resistance, R&S and Strictly Rhythm lining the shelves. 

Winsnes “imported a lot of good stuff,” and had started to notice the young Lars’ purchases.  The older collector saw something in his younger contemporary, who had still to graduate from bedroom DJ, and snuck the under-aged DJ Spacebear into the booth of his club, CB4,  “the first permanent Techno club in Oslo.”

The first Clubbing experience

“I was never really interested in clubbing,” says Lars. “There was no club culture” in Oslo in Lars’ opinion, but he was undeniably intrigued by the raves that started cropping up around the city, and naturally gravitated to the music they were playing. 

After he played his first gig in 1994, this music and the rave scene would grow exponentially, and DJ Spacebear would become a familiar name appearing on marques around Oslo. At the height of its popularity, Lars would be playing a rave at Oslo Spektrum with 8000 people in attendance, but unlike most of his peers of that generation, Lars refuses to look onto those times with the rose-tinted hue of nostalgia clouding his memories. At that time the scene was “too commercial,” he explains “and I didn’t like it, because you had all these separate rooms.” There’s always been a refinement that appeals to him as a DJ that has only matured since his beginnings, when “everything was a mess.” It  was an “exciting mess” nonetheless, and it was through this sonic disarray that he would find his more rarefied style as a DJ.

DJ Spacebear was one of the first DJs I had seen after moving to Oslo. He was playing in Mir, when it was still in Toftes gate, crouching over the mixer and two technics turntables, making minute adjustments on the faders. Two tracks were overlapping like two waves merging on a calm beach, with only slight adjustment in volume between the two pieces. Lars completely ignored the EQ section, merely fading one record into the next with a care that suggested a personal dedication to each track. “I like to have respect for the music,” he says when I ask him about his curious style. “I think you should show what the artist expresses.” He feigns from using “FX” in his mixes and although he’ll be more adventurous with the crossfader when he’s playing more jacking Chicago House, that attention to detail in the music prevails. 

It’s something that can be heard in the meta narrative of any DJ Spacebear DJ set too. His parents, a pair of “old hippies” that were “really into music” had always given Lars a very liberal freedom to “listen to what I wanted,” but when it came to DJ mixes, it was he who started to define the boundaries. In a record collection that nearly covers the recorded format, Lars doesn’t consider himself an “eclectic” DJ. “I wanted to create my own worlds,” he explains and strives to create mixes designated to distinct spheres in electronic music. While he can be found  “jumpin between planets” from time, these only cover short distances beholden to the theme of the mix, defined by succinct categorisations like Acid, Jazz or when Lars gets particularly contemplative, Ambient. 

The first Ambient record

Ambient music like Techno arrived from space with the Orb’s Blue Room in 1992 for Lars. “I was totally stunned by the lush, atmospheric cinematic sound on that record,” he remembers “and it had the same otherworldly sound as techno and rave.“

Ambient music had already been indoctrinated in rave culture at that point with raves sequestering a specific space for this kind of music in the chill-out room. While “train spotting some records that Mr.Kolstad (one of the members of Superskill) played at a rave in 1994” in one such room, Lars’ interest piqued and “started crate digging in used record shops to find out more about this old future.” It was music that extended long tendrils into the furthest reaches of recorded music, and it informed a large part of Lars’ own “experimentations” in the booth. Even today, he’s looking for those gateways to different planets between techno, house, acid, breakbeat, hardcore, and trance with ambient records like Pete Namlook’s FAX record, often bridging these gaps in one single record. 

At some point these fluid transitions between genres would start stretching the divide and that’s when the rooms at raves started splitting further and further apart in Oslo. Euro trance eventually ascended on the city too, saturating the last embers of a dying rave scene that couldn’t compete with the commercial dominance and people like Lars “pulled back to the underground.” Clubs like Skansen and Escape established new microcosms in Oslo clubbing shortly afterwards and Lars naturally moved with the Techno crowd and became a regular fixture in the booth at places like escape. 

The first drum Machine

During all this time he was nurturing a slow and steady development as an artist. He had bought his first drum machine, a Roland TR606 for 300kr after he saw DJ Hanza and Lars Petter Holte perform as D.A.C in a record store in Oslo. Already harbouring a curiosity for the mechanics of the music, there was an “a-ha moment” when he saw their performance. “It looked like a spaceship” he remembers with Holte and Hansen pushing buttons and turning knobs from their unusual control panel. “I have to do this,” Lars remembers thinking at the time and he would start incorporating the TR606 in his DJ sets at home. “I didn’t start making music,” he insists, “I just played with it.”

Getting to grips with the machine was easy and eventually he made some “really horrible” music with a friend, but it was only much later in 2008, that he would release his first records. It was “horrible time” however as the vinyl market had all but collapsed with Tech House DJs spawning like a digital virus on beatport. DJ Spacebear released three records on his own Retrace label in that year nonetheless. They were a selection of “old music” that Lars had been gathering over the years, with frenzied analogue drum machines and sinewy synths, playing to the functional demands of the DJ in a kind of modernised interpretation of retro Chicago sounds. 

They are records that were ahead of their time in terms of 2008 and would probably be more appreciated today, in the resurgence of the DIY nineties trends, than they would’ve been at the time of the uber-produced minimal Techno and Tech House that dominated the later half of the naughties.

“I think it’s more exciting than ever,” says Lars about the conditions today as we talk about some of the younger DJs and producers coming through in Oslo, appreciating these same sounds. “People are really interested in the history” he believes while “looking to the future.” It’s in this landscape he will be releasing his fourth record on Retrace as DJ Spacebear, informed by that same “retro Chicago” sound that defined his earliest music. The two tracks on this next release will be a couple of “jacking acid, old-school” tracks says Lars, but at the same time he’s already talking about the release after that one.

While his first records came out when everybody in Oslo was gravitating to Rock music, and DJ gigs were few and far between, this time around it seems that the rest of the city is finally on his wavelength. He had remained dedicated throughout those quiet years, biding his time with a radio show on Skranglebass and DJing when the rare gig cropped up, and today it seems that he is as busy as ever with a residency (or as close to one as you can get it) at Hærverk and playing every week, often twice. 

While the week before he had been playing a selection of Jazz electronica at Hærverk, on this occasion it will be Disco. In the week coming there’s a liquid drum n bass set in the wings, while the future will also see him playing alongside Detroit legend Orlando Voorn at Hærverk. 

He’s still digging through it all and while we wait around for Tuesday night to swing into action, he’s talking about a recent trip to Brazil, where he found some records of field recordings that “you can play in an ambient set” and the hidden treasures of Phillippenian Disco. 

He is still digging for new and old music in search of any “creative surprises” and he continues to “discover a lot of interesting Drum n Bass, Ambient, Dub, Drone, Dubstep styles like Martsman, James Clemens, Synkro and Shackleton.” It’s just one “smooth transition” to the other for Lars and as a music enthusiast the limits to his curiosity continue to go undefined. He’s merely an intrepid, intergalactic traveller, moving from one body to the next in an unabating curiosity, and a truly musical dedication for the records he plays. 

 

A legacy in House music: Profile on David Morales

By 1998, House music was no longer the reserve of a clandestine underground, operating out of New York, Chicago and Detroit. House music had reached the masses on an international scale with everybody from MTV to the Rolling Stones looking for a stake in genre. It had become big business beyond the majors as chartered flights to Ibiza grew exponentially and Pioneer introduced the CDJ 100s, turning DJing into an increasingly popular past time and a commodity for the brand.

In that year David Morales won a Grammy for remixer of the year, ironic since he’d all but given up on the studio, and released the original track ”Needin U.” It was a track that exceeded all expectations, and which some people still look on today as the track that solidified their love for House music. To Morales however this was just  “some sample shit I fucking slapped together,“ according to an interview with the artist on Finn Johannsen’s blog. It took him 2 hours to make that track and it was little more than an amalgam of two records he used to play back to back as a DJ, but the record lived on beyond Morales’ initial rejections and it became a definitive hit for the artist.  

The video for “Needin U” is a time capsule of that era and would make regular appearances on MTV’s late night programming well into the 2000’s. Filmed on location in Ibiza, it features an incredibly tanned David Morales arriving at the airport, with a record under his arm and a set of headphones in his hands – and no other luggage oddly – indulging in the heady excesses of the late nineties Ibiza from the beach to the club, featuring Morales in various stages of undress. Girls in bikinis, sand, sea and sun had distinguished that summer that House music reigned supreme with DJs like David Morales becoming household names for a new generation of kids flocking to the popularised sounds of the genre.  

David Morales had come a long way by then since his humble origins, and his is a story that echoes the story of House music. Born to a Puerto Rican family in New York, Morales was “living in the ghetto” when he discovered American music for the first time. There had only been Merengue, Salsa and folk music from Puerto Rico playing around the House before a babysitter had introduced a very young Morales to a 45 record called Spinning Wheel by Blood Sweat & Tears. “I can remember I was really, really young” he told Finn Johannsen, but it had released an early interest in music that soon saw the curious youngster frequent the local “illegal social clubs” in his neighbourhood. Under-aged, but unperturbed he would explore these new sounds at these illicit joints, one of which was in his building below. “It was all about the O’Jays and that kind of music. And I liked that.“ He bought his first O’Jays record and remembers “playing that record a hundred times a day” with a speaker hanging  out of the window so the whole neighbourhood could hear.

At 13 he had heard his first DJ playing Disco records consecutively, and by 15 he went to his first club and bought “Ten Percent“ on Salsoul. The speaker hanging out the window soon developed into a party in his apartment, and requests to play at other people’s house parties followed as he became a local mobile Disco music of some repute. “I just loved the music, it was just everything for me,” he remembers. At 18 he had made something of a career out of it, playing mostly commercial music, before somebody dropped “a stack of what they called Loft records” at his feet. “I was like ‘Whoa, what is this sound?’” It was a selection of expensive, limited press- and imported records, the kind of which they had been playing not only at the Loft, but also Paradise Garage. Although Morales had not yet been to either club, since they were strictly private clubs, he started making inroads as a dancer frequenting venues like Paradise Garage and the Loft through acquaintances with memberships, and eventually befriending people like Mancusso and DJ Kenny Carpenter. It was through Carpenter that he was inducted into a record pool, the first organisations that supplied DJs with new, unreleased music for the club, and it was through this pool that he would have his first major break as DJ.

He had already started playing at a club in Flatbush called the Ozone layer as a resident when somebody at the pool recommended Morales to Paradise Garage owner Michael Brody. Morales had only “been to the Garage five times just to hang out” according to an interview on the DJ History blog, when Brody called him up and Morales almost dismissed the request as a joke. “‘Hello, my name is Michael Brody, I own a club called Paradise Garage’” he tells Johannsen, re-enacting the scene, “and I’m like ‘Yeah boy, who the fuck is fucking me.’” Brody had never heard Morales play, but offered him a weekend at the Garage to cover a DJ that had “been playing like shit” purely on the recommendation of the record pool. 

“This wasn’t about doing two-hour sets,” he told Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton at DJ History, “this was about 11-hour sets, beginning to end, 12 to 11. And you had to beg me to stop!” It cemented Morales’ reputation amongst the best of them, installing the twenty-year-old at the same echelon as Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles, sowing the seeds of what would become House music, in the bed that Disco cultivated

One of the places that was at the forefront of this new era in music in the early eighties was Red Zone in Manhattan where Morales soon took up a residency after his Paradise Garage debut. The Red Zone was where he “really made a statement for the new age” according to the DJ history piece. “I think the Red Zone was definitely the turning point on the maps for music changing.” The Red Zone played to dancing audiences with music that was “mostly no vocals or some vocals” according to Morales in Johannsen’s blog with tracks that favoured “the dark side.” “Red Zone was the only place that you were hearing that kind of music,” and this new music was the turning point that would take Disco out of the the glitzy realm of Studio 54 and re-invent it in the grimy underbelly of New York, Chicago and Detroit as House music. 

Red Zone and what Morales established there was instrumental in House music’s history and it went hand in hand with the advent of the 12” format and the remix . It’s in this context that David Morales would make the greatest contributions to the genre. It was the remix where he staked his claim as a pioneer that bridged the gap between popular music and dance floor functionality. In a career spanning nearly forty years as a remixer, he helped establish it as an artform with his interpretations often exceeding the popularity of the originals or in the case of Shabba  Ranks’ Loverboy reworking the track to inform most of what came of the original. His credits include Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, Jamiroquai, Depeche Mode, Aretha Franklin and the Spice Girls and besides winning the Grammy in 1998 his accolades included the highest paid remixer for his work on Michael Jackson’s scream at that time. “I spent a week in Michael Jackson-land,” he recalls in DJ History. It was´ a remix that he believes, he had to “compromise the most on” through his career and probably played some part in his eventual decision to stop making remixes and essentially “creating hits for other people.”

It all started simply enough in 1984 with a reel to reel “editing my little mash-ups” before he met remixer Bruce Forest, and set out to create a remix of “Instinctual” by Imagination. The Arthur Baker-produced original had been given the Stock Aitken Waterman treatment with something that sounded like a trifling attempt at “Rick Aistely” according to Morales in Finn Johannsen’s blog. Morales didn’t win over Baker and the band either with an out-of-key interpretation of the original, but it sounded “great” to Morales and his resolve paid its just rewards when it became his “first real hit.” In DJ History he remembers “Larry Levan telling me, ‘Great, great job.’ I was like,’Wow, Larry told me I did a good mix.’” That remix laid the foundation for more remixes, leading him onto a path to Def Mix and working with Frankie Knuckles.

Frankie and Morales had been on familiar terms since his time as a dancer at the Loft and had shared the same manager, a studio and musicians for their individual remix requests for some time before forming Def Mix. “That’s why we had the so-called Def Mix sound,” Morales told Johannsen. With requests flooding in from everywhere, both artists occupied their own sphere in music, with Morales luring major labels to his work, remixing songs like “Dreamlover” for a young Mariah Carey. It’s one of the remixes he remains the most proud of today, “because it was a pop record and we did something different with it,” he told House of Frankie in an interview. Mariah Carey came into the studio to re-record her vocals and together with the songstress Morales practically re-wrote the song with an intended purpose for the club and today it marks as one of the highlights in an extensive discography.

Morales and Frankie were Def Mix, with each artist bringing their own unique talents to the music of others. Eventually Morales got “fed up” with other people “running to the bank” on his ideas and with requests that were becoming increasingly “one-dimensional.” He decided “to draw a line” and “stop giving his ideas away.” “ I’d rather make my own music for that,” he told Johannsen “than to keep doing the same.” 

By 1998, after being nominated two times before, he was finally honoured for his contributions to the world of remixing, but by that time Morales had moved on, stopped working on remixes and created  “Needin U.” That record came at a time when “Morales sort of got bored of the studio,” according to an interview with Higher Frequency. “I was asked to go on the road and I ended up constantly spending more time on the road and didn’t have much time in the studio.” 

The studio eventually beckoned again, and off the back of the success of “Needin U,” Morales started releasing more of his own original work, culminating in the 2004 LP, 2 Worlds Collide. Eleven David Morales originals, featuring vocals by Tamra Keenan, Angela Hunte, Lea-Lorién and Vivian Sessoms, set the tone for this next phase in his career, in which creative compromises would not be entertained for the sake of appeasing a major record label. “I financed the whole album myself and I didn’t really care about being on a major,” Morales told Higher Frequency around the time the LP was released. “They don’t care about the creativity and the heart that goes into it.” 

There was a crossover appeal that went to the LP. Staccato horns and strings jut out of the rough orchestration with lively percussive arrangements bulging through the tracks. On the title track, guitars and a snare lifted from an eighties synthwave track almost seem out of place in the rest of the acid House arrangement, but it’s uniquely Morales with a verse chorus structure guiding Keenan’s vocals through different phases of the song. David Morales had “learned a lot about producing vocals” and it would inform much of his work as a solo artist going forward right up to the present and his last release, “Freedom” with Janice Robinson on vocal duties. ”I suppose if you just work within your own entity, you’re just working for yourself,” Morales explained of his work with vocalists in Higher Frequency, ”but when you bring somebody else in, then you somehow have to work it so you get a great piece of work.

While 2 Worlds Collide started a healthy relationship with Ultra Music, Morales also started releasing music on labels like Rekids and Cadenza, and when Def Mix relaunched as a label in 2013, he would return to the franchise with original releases and edits most often under the auspices of the Red Zone project. 

He was with “Def Mix for a very long time” he told House of Frankie. He had been with the institution for over thirty years and had played an integral role in its creation, but it was only by 2018 he was looking for something more from a label, and set up Diridim. “Diridim is just me moving forward on a global scale,” he explained to House of Frankie. While Def Mix and Morales’ previous work was all about classic “House” Diridim is “about making vocal music.” The venture is for “new artists and not just soulful-house music” and Morales is always on the lookout for artists to contribute to the label’s “worldly music” vision of House music. 

Morales’ unique approach to House music is what informs the sound of the label. His earliest musical roots, playing commercial music to the neighbourhood; his extensive work with female vocalists; and the integral role he played in the earliest development of House music, continue to inform Morales’ work. 

We’re further away from 1998 today, than 1998 was from the gestation of House music, and David Morales continues to wave the banner for House music today. He will always be a significant figure in House music history, as one of the pioneers of the genre that brought it into the mainstream, and as a DJ, producer and artist, he’s cemented a legacy intertwined in the legacy of House music.

Album of the week: Placid Angels – Blue Sky

In the current resurgence of classic sounds from House and Techno, a host of young producers have surfaced, tilling forgotten fields of ambient, break beat and trance music in search of something refreshing in contemporary electronic music. Groups like Perishing Thirst facilitated by labels like NAFF and Magicwire are using ancient machines (and new versions of old ones) to create lush sonic echoes of the first decade of electronic music. They are succeeding in re-awakening a dormant musicality that has eroded to a bare functionality in the hands of DJs and through their interpretation of an old sound they’ve established the closest thing to a scene we’ve seen in some time. Some might just prefer to call it Trance, but it goes a little deeper that that with broken beats, and even dub influences cropping up in electronic music born of the dance floor, but exceeding the limits of the DJ booth.

Lone and Gabriola has been championing this sound at their joint venture Magicwire with the label providing a platform for new artists like Ex-Terrestrial and Ross from Friends to explore these retro musical worlds, which has begun to define the label with entrancing melodic pieces surfing on a more visceral wavelength. Although the label had been focussed on new artists for the most part, last year they assisted  John Beltram in reviving his Placid Angels alias for an LP that proved to be so popular, we’ve only managed to get our hands on a copy on the second run of pressings.Placid Angels is from an era of the archetype of this sound. The only other LP created under Placid Angels is the 1997 classic on Peacefrog today and its predecessor doesn’t fall far from the mark, bringing a lot of fans back to Beltram’s sound and introducing a whole new generation to the entrancing sound of that alias.

It makes an immediate impression as a dusty broken beat introduces the LP with “First Blue Sky” and chirping synthesisers and legato pads eventually smother the energetic beats in a ghostly ether. Placid Angels was always considered an ambient project in the Beltram catalogue, but ambient as a derivative of Techno, not quite beat-less, but hardly excessively percussive. Pads moving in windy glissandos dominate tracks, with happy arpeggios and sweeping melodic movements saturating the sonic atmosphere in bold strokes of synthetic tones.

Stripping back the humid layers of synthesisers and pads, often a raucous beat emerges, but you only really get a sense of their tumultuous energy when Beltram strips everything back to its foundations like on the opening of “Earth and Everything” or “First Blue Sky.” These moments really contrast the rest of the album as booming kick drums suggest a path that quickly diverts into an ambient realm, but it’s between these overt percussive rhythms and the striking melodies that a dynamic narrative exists on the album.

Beltram doesn’t however simply revive Placid Angels exactly like it was back in 1997 with “Cry,” as contemporary production touches and stylistic approaches modernise the project. Beltram’s pitchy treatment of vocals on tracks like “Vent” humanise the machine music in the latest century, with new techniques emboldening the synthetic sounds that would have often appear wispy and thin back in the nineties. Beltram doesn’t compromise on the Placid Angels sound on “Blue Sky” and in the twenty two years since “Cry” it seems it’s only matured as Beltram refines it in this  latest resurgence of a sound he helped establish the first time around.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

Predictions have been abound with the musical trends and artists that are going to soundtrack the next decade. From folk industro-pop to Techno’s successor, everybody is waging their bets in an increasingly banal world of music dictated by industry. It’s an industry we’ve facilitated in an era of homogenized lineups and repetitive loops where the banal thrives and the esoteric is slowly being choked out. It’s where conformity prevails more than ever, at odds with the original spirit of this music and its scene. We are both victims and agents in the business of DJing and club culture, leaving little room for the freaks and geeks operating in the margins. But not all is quite lost.

There are still some places and institutions that remain loyal to the spirit of it all. They’ve been there since the beginning. They’ve endured the hardships of a failing record industry and thrived in the popularity of the music, but they’ve remained steadfast in all their endeavours and have avoided hype over something more sincere and committed. In Oslo, one of these places is called Filter Musikk. A record- and music store, Filter Musikk and its proprietor Roland Lifjell have been an institution in the city, supplying the city’s DJs with music and facilitating a scene around it working on the fringes of electronic club music.

The vinyl format might never be as popular as it was in its heyday in the nineties nor will it play continue to play a role in the future of DJing, but what it signifies today and what a shop like Filter Musikk perpetuates by stocking records, is the essence of club culture. And for those that continue to release records and DJs like Roland Lifjell who still carries a bag of vinyl to every set, there’s a dedication and sincerity to the original spirit that remains central to what they do. It’s an enigma, elusive to those that seek to capture it and inherent in those that live it. It will prevail long after the industry implodes, with places like Filter Musikk and figures like Roland Lifjell as beacons. 

This is the cut with Filter Musikk. 

 

Plaid – Peel Session 2 TX 08/05/99 (Warp) 12″ 

John Peel was a leading light in radio broadcasting, the likes of which we’ve never seen before or since. He had been there at the forefront of punk, assimilated post-punk into the UK’s living room and continued to pursue new and innovative music through his long  and extensive career at the BBC. When electronic music had arrived through labels like Warp he was one of the first people to pick up the clarion call for the emerging music and through his Peel sessions, he shined an incandescent light on the scene. 

At a recent NTS label showcase, the label unearthed some Peel Sessions from the label’s stable of artists and after some public demand these sessions have been released as records via the label. Warp stalwarts, Plaid’s 1999 session follows Aphex Twin with 4 heretofore unreleased recordings from the UK duo.  

The record is a pristine archive of its time as the fusion digital-  and analogue synthesisers in the dominance of computer technology that laid the foundation for IDM – the genre that defined Warp and continues to inform labels like CPU and BBBBBB. The live element brings a dynamic progression to this kind of music, one we rarely experience in the age of sleek perfection that dominates the computer mixing today. 

Plaid’s playful video-game-melodies and abstract rhythms find a happy common ground in this record with everything from dub to broken beat informing their unique style. Tracks like “Kiterider,” which was never recorded before or after give us a glimpse into the past where a revisionist rhetoric has smoothed over much of the eccentricities of this music that went beyond Aphex  Twin and Authechre. “Lazybeams” and “Kiterider” show a penchant for melody over functionality that eludes modern interpretations while retaining that level of inquisitive exploration that was the original charm of this music, and drew a forward-thinking radio broadcaster like John Peel to this music. 

 

Rikhter – RIK2 (R – Label Group) 12″ 

Even while it looks like Techno is going to maintain its position as a leading light on club dance floors for the first part of the next decade, there are still factions within Techno pushing boundaries beyond conventions while others merely add to the ubiquitous pile of records cluttering the scene. Kobosil and his R-label group is one of the prior, picking through influences of EBM and industrial music in search of a sound to soundtrack our post-digital age.

There’s very little by way of conformity on the latest edition to the catalogue coming by way of anonymous label affiliate Rikhter, who is sure to be the alias of a DJ and artist of some repute, judging from the sonic quality of the music. This is music made for vacuous concrete spaces and unforgiving sound systems. 

While it’s certainly contemporary in its sound design with bold atmospheres and prominent percussive arrangements, the music contained within harnesses echoes from a distant past where melodies and harmonic progression inform dogged machine rhythms. It goes a little beyond the simple functionality where the distorted electric guitars of “11F66” and the monophonic arpeggios of “Dissolution” distinguish RIK2 from the rest of Techno the scene. It remains a functional record and it’s resolute in its marching rhythms, but it’s not exclusively about the beat on this record.

 

Marcel Dettmann – Bad Manners 3 (Bad Manners) 12″ 

For the past 3 years, it seems that Marcel Dettmann has been re-inventing his sound as a DJ, producer and label owner, slowly disentangling himself from that Berghain Techno sound that established his international career. His sets have been re-appropriating the EBM and minimal wave sound of his formative years in modern electronic music dialects, moving away from the stark minimalist sounds that has followed him throughout his career.

In the latest iteration of this next phase, he established the Bad Manners label, as a sister label to his highly successful MDR with the aim to find an “undefined space for expression while encouraging unpredictability in format and sound”. That’s quite a sentence to describe  what is essentially Techno DJ tools, but over the course of two releases, Dettmann has favoured a more oblique view of Techno through the Bad Manners imprint. 

On this second release for the label – yes, second even though it’s numbered 3 – Marcel Dettmann delivers some previously unreleased remixes from his own catalogue via the Bad Manners conduit. Morphosis droning progressive take of “Work” and Anthony Shakir’s racaus interpretation of “Eruq” sit side by side on a record that could facilitate two very different parts of the night. That pristine perfection that dominates Dettmann’s earlier work has coarsened to a calloused noise with both remix artists finding something visceral in the boisterous machines.

It contributes to what seems to be Marcel Dettmann’s growing dissolution to the business end of Techno; a music that bastardised what he in part established at the genesis of Berghain, and confirms that you can still find a space to explore beyond the increasingly narrowed view that dominates the dance floor.  

 

Freak The Machine – Am I Dead? (Murder Capital) 12″ 

Speaking of which… Murder Capital has never so much as feigned an interest what’s happening in the popular realm and the little Hague label running on the side of Viewlexx has maintained a vision of Techno as the honorary descendents of their Detroit counterparts. Submit X by Gesloten Cirkel stands as a landmark LP, not merely in their discography, but in the bigger narrative of Techno for anybody with an interest in the more obscure corners of the genre. 

The sub-label’s reserved output hasn’t seen any new contributions since 2016 until now with unknown newcomer Freak The Machine. It’s a record that harnesses all that attitude from the DIY origins of Techno with energetic drum machines, distorting kicks and some faint strain of an undeveloped melody coursing through the four tracks of this EP. 

Snarling synth bass-lines count out rhythms between crushing kick drums that stay the course through Techno’s 4-4 insistence, but with other percussive parts counting out syncopated beats, there’s a definitive electro mood that courses through the EP. On the A-side it’s at its most developed with the disembodied vocals of the the title track and share your fear channeling some Nitzer Ebb and Front 242 into a modern dialect with a sinister slant to modern Techno. 

There’s a claustrophobic air that suffocates all the tracks and especially, “Can you feel the rain” with muggy basslines and sweltering acid motives raining down on the track in tyrannical power. That track, and it’s unusual development is in fact what stays with you long after, and while the a-side caught your attention, it’s the finale that offers something incredibly unique across the release and will keep you coming back to it, even in the next decade. 

 

I Hate Models – Intergalactic Emotional Breakdown (Arts) 12″ 

This kind of new wave, EBM and breakbeat interpretation of Techno has been en-vogue across Europe the last couple of years, and while there’s been a lot of stress on the DIY aspects with noisy machines, distorting percussion and untreated samples dominating the alternative landscape, there are also super-producers like I Hate Models, who have taken those ideologies and harassed them in totally modern way.

Traces of a broken beat arrangement haunts “Intergalactic Emotional Breakdown,” but instead of utilising the obvious amen-break sample, I Hate Models synthesises the trope, in piercing metallic sounds that weave their way in and out of a very sleek production through the opening and title track. 

Through the three tracks of the digital release, I Hate Models favours progressive arrangements, with long sweeping modulations that appear point perfect on designated beats. The syllabic vocal hook of “Death Engine,” the entrancing melodies of “Velvet” and the metallic snairs beating out a reluctant melody on the title track, add a dimension beyond the superficial which endears the listener to the record and makes for something that can stand out in a Techno mix. It’s not a mere tool to be played on the fourth deck of droning Techno set, but something that can hold its own on the dance floor and beyond. 

Chasing the spirit with Erol Alkan

When the London party Trash closed its doors in 2007, it marked the end of an era for DJing and club culture. The eclecticism that founder Erol Alkan and guests like Soulwax (neé 2 many DJs) had brought to the DJ booth, born from the embers of electroclash, had fuelled a new kind of club culture built on a heady fusion of alternative music and fashion as embodied by Trash. The boundaries between music, born from Rock n Roll and it’s estranged electronic club cousin had been erased, and the Monday night party had been instrumental in the era with visceral selections that “joined the dots” between Bowie, Daft Punk, The Stooges, LCD Soundsystem and even Motörhead. 

By 2007 that style of club culture had reached fever pitch, with new DJs and producers adopting the sonic aesthetic, but without care for the detailed subtleties in knowledge their predecessors brought to their skill, it had also become something of cliché. “That kind of musical dilettantism,” Soulwax member and Trash regular David Dewewale told the Guardian in a reflective 2017 piece about Trash “became a terrible sport afterwards.” 

“A lot of people did that back then, but you could tell it wasn’t really in that spirit,” says Erol Alkan over a telephone call. “Not because we thought we should play a rock record, because we’ve got to play an electronic record after that,” but because of something that went “beyond taste.” 

A brief video transmission shows Erol in a room with a wall of records behind him as he settles into our conversation. It’s the first week in January, and he sounds relaxed considering he had played an extensive set at Bugged Out on new year’s day. A few years back he started cutting down on his DJ commitments, from “eight gigs a month,” to playing only every other weekend in order to spend more time with his family, but even in a career spanning thirty years, his ”love” for DJing and making music remains as strong as ever.

*Erol Alkan is at Jaeger this week for Frædag

Today he’s a sought-after DJ, regularly playing around the world, and an in-demand artist who although he releases music reticently, is constantly making music or working on other people’s music as a remixer and producer. When he’s not working on music he’s facilitating new and established artists through his Phantasy Sound label and while he might not play as often as he did perhaps five years ago, Erol Alkan continues to be a significant figure on the international DJ circuit.  

At the height of Trash, Erol would have been playing every week at the famed residency to a packed crowd, which for any Monday night anywhere remains a rare feat. It was a night that truly blurred the lines between genres and thrived in the eclecticism of tastemakers like Erol Alkan. When it disappeared from the scene, nothing quite like it would ever take its place again in London or anywhere else. 

Everything became “slightly segregated again” shortly after according to Deweale in the Guardian, with defined borders appearing between genres and microcosms like minimal Techno and Electro-House finding their own dedicated scenes. Trash was the “perfect celebration of eclectic taste” according to Deweale, and while there are DJs that still perpetuate this  spirit, there’s never been a night or a scene quite like the one that Erol Alkan and his guests cultivated during that time. 

What was it about the time that was so perfect for Trash to exist?

I think it was because of electroclash happening and having such a strong visual identity at that point. It embodied the fashion and the aesthetics of the early eighties where there was a brilliant fusion between electronics and avant garde pop music, like post-Bowie glam rock giving birth to the new wave. 

I suppose finding all these electronic records, inspired from that era, you would find their natural cousins from the rock or alternative scene that worked so well alongside each other. 

It was also a time when that scene was truly international. I think that was as important as the way the records sounded. I was in London and you had people like James Murphy and in New York; Soulwax in Belgium; Gonzales in Berlin; Tiga in Canada, and I suppose Daft Punk were a big part of that in Paris. In the UK I also saw the Chemical Brothers as the precursor to that spirit, and Optimo in Glasgow and Andrew Weatherall… All these people looked at the musical landscape with as much width as possible.

All these people you mention there are the DJs and artists that are very much at the forefront of that spirit today.

And because of that, you can’t really question their appetite for it. I don’t think we view records via genre. I certainly don’t.

It’s that broad view and what he established through his Trash nights that had set Erol Alkan apart from his more orthodox contemporaries at that time and still does today. Alongside DJs like Soulwax, Optimo and Andrew Weatherall, his reputation preceded him wherever he went after Trash. The event and Erol’s sets found audiences that were hungry to hear new music on nights that pushed the boundaries of club culture from the music to the fashion. 

“That gave me the confidence to take risks in everything,” Erol told the Quietus in an interview from 2013. “Break eggs to make omelettes, never be complacent or think ‘I’ve got a career here, I’ve got to keep it going.’” It continued to inform his sets and music even after Trash and cemented a reputation in the booth as a modern day archetype with a drive to explore the absolute limits of his iconoclastic musical tastes.

He had “always enjoyed DJs that brought in other influences in their sets” in an ethos that continues to inform his own DJ sets. That is still “one of the beauties of Djing”, he claims, which is in his view “as expressive as any other form of art… in the right hands.”

While what he and his guests pioneered at Trash may have become a trend shortly after, Erol has never felt the need to perpetuate that particular sound and has always favoured evolution over distinction. “As a DJ you can’t expect to be the same DJ as you were ten years before,” he explains. “What I have to offer people has changed over the last ten years and I’m completely comfortable with that. You have to evolve and change, and not let the past haunt your present.” 

Does that mean you have to give your audience something new in terms of your selections, all the time?

Sometimes I feel that I want to hear these things out as well and I want to stay true to what I’m excited by. I know it can be very easy to have one set and play everywhere, but that will be quite boring for me. 

Do you believe that audiences are open to new and different kinds of music than they were during the electroclash era?

In a nutshell, yes. I couldn’t measure it, but right now, some of the general excitement in the room is when I take a u-turn. Sometimes it can divide a few people, but generally it excites people. What people look for in DJs now is to turn them on to new things. I think the thirst for knowledge and the thirst to hear new sounds are greater than I can remember. 

There are a lot of DJs becoming successful in club culture, who started on the radio, where they are able to present an eclectic sense of what they did. That’s climatized a lot of people that go out to clubs now that want to hear a wider range of music.

It was Erol and his contemporaries that paved the way for these artists to explore that wide range of music. A fervent fan of music from an early age, Erol started DJing when he was still in school and if he wasn’t playing or listening to music it seems he was he was out somewhere experiencing it. “From 1991 through to 2000 I was probably out every night, seeing bands or going to club nights” he told fabric in an interview with their blog

DJing had been a natural outlet as a way of digesting all these early influences and sharing it with his peers, because for Erol; “you want to share music, that’s fundamentally what (DJing) is.” He utilized everything to his disposal to achieve this with an inquisitive drive, regardless of quotidian restrictions like budgetary constraints.   

“When I started Djing I started DJing off vinyl, CD, tape cassette and video cassette because that’s what I had my music on,” he recalls with a hint of excitement in his voice. 

Video cassette, really? 

Yes, because I couldn’t afford to buy music, so I recorded off the television. So no one will ever tell me that my hunger was any less than everybody else. 

 

You mentioned records there, but in the age of USB and CDJ’s where you can basically have your entire record collection at your fingertips, do you still prepare your sets  in the same way you did back then?

Yes, I basically have an idea of what I’m going to play, because I know the venue and I maybe want to stick with a certain sound. I will have a playlist of records, but the order that I play them in is always open to interpretation. 

I try to have an awareness of tempo and intensity of the music, so I don’t assume I’m going to start with a certain record and end with a certain record, but you have a vague map in your head. I try to keep it relatively fresh for myself as well. I don’t like to play the same set from the night before. 

50% of DJing is the records you choose to take out with you, and the other 50% is the records you play when you read the room.

If that’s the case Is there a common thread besides those records between your sets in different contexts?

It just goes back to that spirit I was talking about before. It’s music which hopefully has enough in it to get lost within. Escapism is a big thing that I get from what I do. It’s usually because of the records I feel have a personality that I can believe in, or lose myself in. But I think the real power is in how you thread the records together.

Do you think younger audiences crave a level of intensity from the DJ more than what they did perhaps ten years ago?

From the naughties to 2010, I always felt that I was inside some kind of zeitgeist. The scene that I inhabited was such a global movement in that way. It was always intense. That wasn’t because of youth, but when there is a scene like that it’s inviting to many generations. 

Now I think a lot of DJs who are far more considerate in their selections are getting the attention that they deserve, more so than maybe ten years ago. The inspiration for a lot of new DJs are from an area that is far truer to the spirit of DJing than the business of DJing. 

It’s in that very spirit he established the record label, Phantasy Sound shortly after the end of Trash. “Phantasy to me is an extension of Trash,” he proclaimed in that interview with the Quietus. The label was established at the end of 2007, harnessing that eclecticism of Trash with releases that went from the indie synth pop of Late of Pier; cut through to the immense dance floor constructions of Daniel Avery; and go completely left field with an artist like Babe Terror.

There’s not exactly a philosophy that underpins the label, but rather an extension of the spirit that imbibes everything Erol Alkan touches. “You kind of put out what you love at that point in time, and you just try and make it work,” says Erol about his approach to the artists and records that make it onto the label. While “it’s not easy if you look at it from a commercial point of view” in the era of streaming, Phantasy Sound continues to go from one end to the next, putting out successful dancefloor records like of Daniel Avery’s highly successful Drone Logic alongside more experimental works like Babe Terror’s Ancient M’Ocean. 

Bridging the gap between these two expressive sonic worlds is Erol Alkan, whose own reserved output as a solo artist and as Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve dot the labels prolific output. His last record Spectrum / Silver Echoes came out in 2018, a record that although at times functional, it also tests the limits of the dance floor, with remixes from Matrixxman to Baris K showcasing the width of possibility in both tracks.

Spectrum immediately struck me as peculiar, because it has the accents on the off beats on the melodic parts and the live drums in the introduction. What was the intention with a record like that and what does it reflect about your own music?

Spectrum was designed for me as a linking record, where I could play disco or psych and then be able to move into Chicago or House and Techno. I’ve always liked fusion records. I felt like if I add a record to the big pile of music that’s made every week, I don’t want to make music that’s functional. I want to make something, and I hate using this word, but something that’s challenging. Whenever I come across a record that’s not basic, I appreciate it. As a DJ, I have a new colour to paint with. When making your own music, you want something unique about it.

Do you think you emphasise that more in music you make today, than when you started out releasing records?

No, and I can answer that question really easily. At a time when I was part of a really noisy scene, like the whole EddBanger, Boys Noize electro sound. I would do something like the Hot Chip, boy from school remix, which is completely the other side of that kind of thing for me. I always felt that even though I was part of something I always wanted to make something that was truthful to me, but also different. I always felt that need to not to do the obvious. 

As far as I understand it, you work on music constantly, but you’re quite reserved about releasing music. How do you know when something is good enough to put out without contributing to the that big pile of records you mentioned earlier?

If I’m not making music under a different name like Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve or I’m not producing other people, and I get to a point where I want to put tracks out under a different name it kind of just tells me, ‘put me out’. 

I made spectrum in 2014. Black Crow by Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve that came out in 2016, that was written in 2009. Diagram girl that was made in 2009. A track that if you feel it’s right and it’s you, that can come out whenever. The right music for me is always timeless. For instance, I just found out that they used Chilly Gonzales’ piano version of Waves as the countdown in the centre of Paris. If you can live on beyond yourself, that’s the ultimate. 

Whether he’s working on a record for British shoegaze legends, Ride or mixing down a record for one of the Phantasy Sound artists, there is always a concerted effort to produce something “timeless” in his music. Records like Waves then remain relevant and even though they might have been the product of that zeitgeist, the spirit of them lives on in everything Erol Alkan approaches, from the label, to his records, and most prominently through his work as DJ.

There is no need to be rigging up video cassette players any more and Trash is quite content, resigned to the past, where it’s made an indelible impact on an international music scene. But it’s the spirit of those endeavours that remain the impermeable foundation and the continued appeal of Erol Alkan as an artist, a producer and a DJ.

Album of the Week: Burnt Friedman – Musical Traditions in Central Europe

Before Burnt Friedman’s appearance at Jaeger in 2018 he started explaining Jaki Liebezeit’s interpretation of time through percussion. With fingers sliding up and down the bar as he counted out integers, he tried to illustrate the concept of rhythm he had inherited from the Can drummer during their artistic tenure together, but which my limited, conditioned theoretical background failed to grasp even at the fundamental level.

Burnt Friedman has always  interpreted music beyond any culturally pre-determined realities, and from his intriguing use of rhythms to re-defining performance spaces – reconstituting the stage on Jaeger’s dance floor and using guitar amplifiers to sing back artificial voices concocted from synthetic sound sources – the artist evokes the spirit of modernist composers working in a post-digital music world.

There is nothing but music, and the continued exploration of the absolute limits of music that informs his work, and that’s why when you see a title like “Music Traditions in Central Europe” bearing the artist’s name, you have to consider it with a hint of irony. The artist has after all made an abundantly clear habit of negating those very traditions, and arriving on his own label, the contextually titular Nonplace, and under the subtitle “explorer series 4” with 1-3 noticeably absent, this record upholds those idiosyncrasies.

Between noise and silence, Burnt Friedman finds new rhythms, which for the most part occur through the percussive parts, with harmony and melody, offering languid legato accompaniment that thrives in dissonance, but also far more liberal with consonance, considering the style of music. Pieces like “Sensation des Normalen” come together like contrapuntal rhythmical pieces, with large chunks simply removed across a vertical plain, to create new evolving rhythms. It’s as if the first beat moves with every bar, giving the music a kind of unexpected sentience.

The record comes at a time when everybody is looking to predict the future traditions, while Burnt Friedman is still trying to define the parameters of the past. His work and exploration in the traditions of non-western music, emerges as a new musical dialect, forgotten before it was refined, but exciting and innovative for anybody looking for an alternative voice in a fairly  homogenised landscape. While all the music was recorded during the course of the last decade, it’s a refreshing reminder of the possibilities of the next.

Between the stark rhythmic music, an melancholic air saturates the record, especially on tracks like “Sky Speech” and “Moslemschleier”where Hayden Chisholm’s reed instruments blow through the arrangements like an unnerving  encounter with a mystical past. The record flits between the swelling bass frequencies of a track like  “Supreme self dub” and the heavenly melodies of something like “Schwebende Himmelbrücke,” but it’s the feeling of space that we encounter on the record through Friedman’s non-didactic rhythms where the charm of Musical Traditions in Central Europe lies.

Delaying the pleasure with KiNK

*Photos by Peter Vulchev

We’re edging into Saturday morning at Jaeger and the incandescent ceiling in the basement is flickering on the pulse House bass groove. A tropical mood is sweeping across the dance floor,  as hues of blue, green and red shine down from artificial heavens, in stark contrast to the brisk December temperatures on the surface. At the front, people in short sleeves are pressed up against the stage, waving hands like tendrils reaching up to the sky in some subconscious effort to reach at the celestial vocals currently projected through the upper frequencies of the sound system.

On stage, Strahil Velchev’s face is beaming. He’s assumed his KiNK alias for the second in a double appearance at Jaeger and the lower level has filled out for the second night. His hand hovers over a drum machine for a moment, waiting for some imperceptible cue from his audience to launch into the next phase of an improvised composition, but it doesn’t quite arrive as he turns suddenly to the Rhodes keyboard at his side to hammer out a faintly familiar theme.

His entire being is entrenched in the moment as his body convulses in time with the thin percussion where a simple snare and hi-hat arrangement are counting out syncopated beats between an elusive 4-4 rhythm. The audience is on the edge of an imaginary precipice, hanging on every note the Bulgarian artist is banging out on the reluctant vintage keyboard as the last formants of a vocal line dissipate into the porous log cabin walls. 

They’re all waiting for the resolve, the pay-off and the absent kick drum to return, but at the next bar, they are denied their moment yet again and the audience collectively holds its breath in an audible “aah” for another phrase. 

It’s a choreographed dance between Velchev and his audience. It’s a a continuous exercise in control, “delaying the pleasure” for the audience through instinct and manipulation and something that he’s mastered as a live performer over the last decade. It’s a fragile, yet symbiotic relationship and relishes in the unexpected directions the artist conducts like a sonic auteur. There’s a clear affinity for the machines and the music that has all but defined his career as an artist and yet it wasn’t quite what the artist had in mind when he started out his career as KiNK. 

“I was originally a DJ, and I really didn’t like the idea of playing live” he told Electronic Beats in a candid piece from 2017. It’s a sentiment he re-iterates when we sit down for a meal in downtown Oslo ahead of his first appearance at Jaeger. It was “definitely not my second choice even,” he says before taking a bite of something crunchy, but he admits it’s been “key to international recognition” and today it’s exactly this context where he’s garnered much of his appeal as KiNK.

It’s been two years since we last saw Velchev as KiNK in Oslo, and buzz around the event has already exceeded our expectations. He has lost some weight since his last visit; his rounded facial features taking on more rigid angular dimension, and an athletic frame is bulging at places through a dark v-neck sweater. He’s “proud” of his recent weight loss and doesn’t mind “showing it off” on his ever-active Instagram profile, with shirtless beach photos dotting his summer timeline.

The Bulgarian producer, DJ and artist is in good spirits. It’s a rare occasion that he’s at an extended stopover, but our conversation precludes a double bill where he will perform as Kirilik for the first night, before assuming the recognisable KiNK alias for the next. He has just finished his soundcheck for Kirilik; a hybrid live set that jumps between pre-recorded samples played from CDJs accompanied by drum machine, and he’s eager to talk about this relatively new Techno project as we find our seats in a predominantly vacant dining room.

“I started the Kirilik project 5 years ago,” explains Velchev before we even sit down. Kirilik was born from an interest in modular synthesisers, but he wasn’t able to find the right application for it, especially in the KiNK universe. “I found that with this instrument I couldn’t have the sounds as the centre of music,” and that led him down a path to a new side-project “which could accommodate the “more repetitive, more experimental” sounds he was coaxing from this new instrument. 

He found the modular system “very delicate and fragile” and “impossible” to utilize in a performance and yet there was a wealth of sound at its core that he wanted to explore. He sampled these sounds to play them back on a trio of CDJs with a drum machine setting out the tempo, laying down the groundwork for a performance project that would eventually become Kirilik. It was conceived as a live project, something “you could only enjoy in the club” initially, but as requests started flooding in for gigs  – “since techno is the new rock music” – he soon realised; “I need to give promoters an instrument” to draw attention to these events. He released two records on Len Faki’s Figure imprint, but like KiNK, Kirilik is anchored in the context of a live project, and unlike KiNK each performance is unique and performances bear absolutely no resemblance to the recorded archives.

Inspired by Jeff Mills’ use of locked grooves on three decks for the legendary Purpose Maker video from the nineties, Velchev employs the same techniques on the newer technology that dominate the clubbing landscape. The results are tactile and impulsive with hints of funky Detroit grooves and melodies snaking their way through pragmatic eurocentric beats. Watching the soundcheck there’s a flurry of hands, manipulating an extensive palette that appears to streak across vast musical languages in bold swathes of textural colour. There’s an instinctive in Velchev’s animated movements like an invisible tether pulling him from one phrase to the next with sounds like a visceral language gestating from inanimate machines. 

“I’ve always liked manipulating sound” remembers Velchev of the formative years that has applied him with this skill. “From a very early age, I loved to play with the radio and the volume” and it’s this expressive exploration that has remained the basis of  his experiments in music today. Although he played the piano as a child, he found he had “no great talent for traditional musical instruments” – even if his movements on our stage piano suggests otherwise. He had always been a “music lover”  and even during Bulgaria’s communist years he “was buying Disco records,” but when the iron curtain fell in 1989, the “borders opened for western culture” and the allure of electronic music spoke directly to Velchev’s inquisitive nature. 

“At that time the format changed from vinyl to cassette,” he recalls with street vendors selling pirated copies of dance music compilations to a new generation of kids like Velchev sampling the decadent delights of western dance floors across eastern Europe for the first time. Although “the club came quite later” and “DJing came (even) later because of budget,” Velchev had already started picking up a rudimentary understanding of DJing and electronic music through playing cassettes back to back. While he has “been doing this for a long time,” his first steps to international recognition only came quite recently in the scope of his biography and it culminates with the first drum machine he acquired a little over ten years ago. It was with that drum machine and some expert manipulation from his agent that the artist set forth on the career path that has made him the endearing artist and performer that he is today.

He credits his “ex-agent Kai Fischer” for pushing him into the live arena, but there’s always been an inherent affinity for this machine music that sets KiNK apart from his contemporaries, and is more than just experience. From a small jumble of wires and boxes he coaxes not only sounds and impulsive rhythms but a sweltering atmosphere that seems to arrive from some peripheral instinct. Even earlier, when he was still just a DJ, he “would abuse the controls on the mixer” in a similar pursuit, and while critics often accused him of “destroying the sound” back then, it has made for an exciting advantage on the stage today. Electronic music instruments remain an unceasing form of inspiration in Velchev’s child-like desires “to make noise” and after a period of development it’s reached a point where he can “actually enjoy it” today.  

As KiNK, records started to emerge on small independent labels around Europe from 2005, but by 2010 he had started making impressive contributions on labels like Josh Wink’s Ovum and Boe Recordings. Records like Aphex KiNK EP and remixes for the likes of Tiga’s Turbo recordings had brought the sounds of KiNK to an audience beyond Bulgaria’s borders, cementing the sound of the artist alongside his ever-glowing reputation as a live performer. KiNK was to become that rare double threat, an artist who was able to bring that energy of dance record to a live show and back again to the record.  

“Playing live really changed the way of making music,” for Velchev. Where before he would “program” his music “in the studio,” he soon “started making music on the stage.” In his 2017 LP Playground (Running Back), the effects are quite prominent. It’s nothing that comes down to a science, or theoretically discernible, but rather something more abstract. “It’s a feeling you can’t programme” in Velchev’s’ words and it goes “against all logic.” He started “performing in the studio” in an effort to “capture that spirit” of the live show he had cultivated as KiNK for the recorded format, developing these two apsects of his music side by side into a singular artistic identity. 

Unpredictable forms that fall between rhythmical integers and melodic themes that float in some no-man’s land between semitones break with the functional traditions of House music. There’s a transience throughout a record like Playground as melodies come together for a moment before evaporating and phases linger unexpectedly and depart just as erratically. From the stomping insistence of “The Russian” to the dogged two-step rhythms of “Peter Plet Plete,” the record avoids the predetermined nature of club music in search of something beyond the superficial. The results intrigue, and while it’s mostly down to performance methods, Velchev admits that this unpredictability in his music is something that inherited in part from the musical traditions of Bulgaria.

“I cannot escape my roots, I cannot escape those rhythms,” explains Velchev through a mouthful of some “spicy” dish. It’s something that stems from Bulgaria’s folk traditions, in a music that is commonly considered gypsy music in the region, and presented in contemporary House music structures through the sounds of KiNK and even Kirilik to some extent. “I never liked our folk music,” the Bulgarian confesses, and in his youth there were even times when he absolutely “hated it.” 

He started hearing traces of this traditional music however in the music coming  in from the western front with groups like Orbital and Future sound of London sampling these familiar pieces in their albums and EPs. It led to an “aha moment” for Velchev in which he realised he could utilise these traditional elements in the same way “a foreigner would.”

“In a sense my music is very based on gypsy music,” he says before explaining, “because I’m always looking for those notes between the semitone” and those beats that don’t fall on regular beats. What might sound confusing to the conditioned ear is natural to Bulgarian folk traditions, because “you cannot count to four” in the same way and there’s very little that could equate to any western music theory. “In Bulgaria we don’t count,“ says Velchev, stressing his point with a smile, “we just dance.” 

Alongside those western influences, producer, DJ, writer and cultural theorist, Stefan Goldmann played a significant role in Velchev’s newfound appreciation for this roots music. “Stefan is the guy who showed me the Bulgarian traditional music (in a new light)” he asserts, “showed me the beauty of gypsy music which I was denying at that time.” It was around that time that he produced his debut LP as KiNK, “Under Destruction.” Goldmann’s Macro label, unsurprisingly facilitated the album, and it’s an LP that Velchev is “most proud of” today. “It was not a big record, but in terms of personal achievement musically, that is a highlight.”

As KiNK, Velchev has largely feigned from the LP format, unless there’s some sense of “identity” to the record and while Playground’s identity derived and was inspired around the tactility of the instruments he used for that record, “Under Destruction” was the “only time” Velchev felt he had a “certain vision” and “something to say.”

It’s a record that falls awkwardly on the western ear. The unusual rhythm structures and atonal (in western standards) character of the music breaks step with the underlying nature of the music. It’s a record still very much directed at the dance floor, with kick drums falling on familiar intervals, but the esoteric expressions that lie beyond its foundations offer something more contemplative for the listener. It’s something of a “paradox” for Velchev too, who has always considered himself a “dancer first” and whose music has always relied on a functional aspect. “Being experimental and innovative is a passion for me, but (all) in the constraints of being a dancer.”

It’s this paradox that has taken Velchev into his latest venture, a record label called, Sofia. Velchev believes the label picks up where Under Destruction left off and it pays specific homage to the Bulgarian capital it is named after. After reconnecting with Konstantine Petrov, “an old friend” who had played a hand in KiNK’s early development and had shown him “how to make music in the nineties,” Velchev and Petrov created the label as an outlet for the sounds of the city. “We’re not praising Sofia” he says poignantly, but “Sofia is the city that influenced us more with a lot of negative and a lot of  positive aspects. We are what we are and our music is what it is because we lived and met in the city.” 

The first release on the label came via KiNK, with the aptly titled “Home,” and in that record we find similarities to KiNK’s music from “Under Destruction” as tracks play on similar rhythmic and melodic themes, distilled down from traditional music, with titles like The Clock and The Grid redefining the concepts contained in their titles for western ears. Accompanying the release and future releases from a small, but dedicated community of artists, are a series of photos – most of which taken on phone – from Bulgarian DJ legend DJ Valentine. Alongside the music it consolidates a label that for the first time will distill some of that Bulgarian traditions into a contemporary platform.

Although Velchev had been toying with the idea of a label for the last four years it was only “with time, a certain idea crystalized” where there could be “a musical identity in the first record.” Home inaugurates this identity with KiNK’s now familiar Bulgarian intuitions where “the rhythm is out of the standard grid and the tonality is out of the standard scale” and the music takes on a very unique character as a result, which some might even consider experimental. “Some people would say it’s experimental,” agrees Velchev, “but for me it’s just the pure essence of KiNK.”

It’s hard to define that essence, because it’s an amalgam of extraneous factors, funneled down into this music. It’s a combination of his precocious love of machines and  noise; a maturing appreciation for the folk traditions of his country; a reluctant live performer; and an enigmatic interpretation of House and Techno music made by Black Americans. KiNK and Kirilik coalesces around all these different aspects, and there is no other artist quite like him, because of these compounding elements. Even at a time when DJ culture and electronic music have become quite interchangeable, Velchev is still able to stand out and deliver something truly unique to the landscape, and especially now with this latest endeavour Sofia.

“Maybe I’ve never brought anything brand new to the scene,” he considers, “but what I like about my approach to making music is that I’m more open to trying things and going out of my comfort zone.“ 

Later that night as he debuts the Kirilik project to a Norwegian audience, the dance floor is in agreement, raising their hands  in a predominant affirmation as we draw back the curtains on our guest. A coy smile streaks over Velchev’s face as he introduces the first strands of an archived modular synthesiser from one of the CDJs. The room is tenter hooks, people surging calmly towards the stage, and then suddenly without warning; a resolve and a bass-heavy kick-drum bursts into life with an approving “whoop” from the crowd.  

Beyond another new dawn with Ost & Kjex

Ost & Kjex were still riding high on the success of their critically acclaimed and celebrated 2010 album, Cajun Lunch when they delivered their next LP to the people at the Diynamic label around 2014. “With Cajun Lunch we established a sound for ourselves” remembers Petter Haavik, the Kjex in Ost & Kjex, sitting on the edge of his seat at Gamla bar in Oslo during our interview. They had just won the Spellemann award (Norway’s equivalent of the grammys) for Cajun Lunch and had started exporting their distinctive brand of music beyond Norway’s borders as they entered into making Freedom Wig. Popular records for the likes of Crosstown Rebels, an equally successful debut LP, and enjoying the esteemed company of artists like Solomun while playing places like Panorama Bar, had delivered Ost & Kjex into some of the most prominent musical circles in Europe and they felt comfortable and confident in their music when they sat down with the label to hand in their last full-length creation to the label.

“We were very happy,” says Petter through a smile behind a growing 5 o’clock shadow, “and we made a finished album, but then the label said it’s too much the same of your old style.” The label told Ost & Kjex to go back to the drawing board and re-approach the sound of the LP. “We had to kill your babies a little bit,” says Tore Gjedrem (aka Ost) picking up on the sentence that Petter left hanging in mid-air. It was “a rough meeting” remembers Petter with Tore simulating the figurative slap across the face they received from Stimming and co at Diynamic, but as they had to “re-think” the sound of the LP, they not only revitalised the sound of Ost & Kjex with the new record, but also came to something of a new chapter in their career and music. Stripping the record back to little more than a vocal and some key melodic hooks, they made “it rougher and harder,” with Stimming lending a “structured” hand in the final arrangement as Freedom Wig came to be.  

Armed with some new beats, while retaining that signature blend of blues and R&B in their electronic production processes, Freedom Wig favoured a more organic palette, with analogue synths, live instruments and voices contrasting neoprene House rhythms. Fusing disparate elements from the club dance floor while retaining their unique blend of black american music traditions, Ost & Kjex had all but completely severed ties with Cajun Lunch, with Freedom Wig ushering in yet another new era for the duo. ”Afterwards I was a lot more relaxed about my own material and letting things go,” admits Tore as he reclines in his chair, his voice, and his ageless face retreating into the shadows of a dark corner at Gamla bar.

With Freedom Wig done and after a much-needed rest, they turned their attention to the shorter format again and after releasing a few EPs around the LP they returned to Crosstown Rebelsin 2019 with a churning dance floor interpretation of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer with WHALESHARKATTACKS on vocals.

That track marked yet another shift for the sound of duo, focussing on the more “tracky” aspects of House music . “After the breakdown with album,” explains Petter they reconciled they need to “just listen to the Germans,” and  “keep it simpler and more tracky” and to that end they’ve got a few EPs lined up in 2020, including enough material for a whole EP with WHALESHARKATTACKS. They “knew how to rebuild” however because, it’s not the first time in the history of Petter and Tore’s creative relationship that they’ve felt the need to evolve. 

*Ost & Kjex play live our annual Frædag x DJ marathon 

Forged in metal

Petter and Tore grew up in Kolbotn, where they met at high school. Petter played guitar and Tore played bass and sung and the pair found they immediately “had something going” as they started making music together. What they were making in the beginning however was a far cry from the stuff they would be making later on as Ost & Kjex. Closer to a piercing scream than a cry, Death Metal was their calling card initially and bands like Napalm Death inspired a very fertile scene in the region with artists like Darkthrone and Petter and Tore’s Beyond Dawn rising to prominence through the emerging sound of Death Metal at the time.  

Beyond Dawn started out as a harsh, bare bones Metal band in the early nineties, but by the time of their grand finale, Frysh their sound had dramatically shifted, completely devoid of the washy guitars and punishing drums of their earliest releases as synthesisers, drum machines and sequencers had fully infiltrated their work. That last album, was almost “running parallel to the Ost & Kjex project” recalls Tore, but it wasn’t a mere sudden shift from one extreme to the other, but rather a gradual evolution as electronic music rose in popularity.

Tore and Petter had been following the development of electronic music closely through the Warp label and acts like Orbital, but a true epiphany moment came when they saw Surgeon in Liverpool on an impromptu whim. “That was a legendary evening” recalls Petter with a knowing smile. Petter was living in Liverpool at the time “going to school so we went there to record an album with Beyond Dawn,” continues Tore. They had a few nights out and one particular night stayed with them long after, even though the heady effects had long dissipated. Ever since, “Surgeon was also a big influence” on Tore and Petter.

Metal had also been necromancing with the electronic dark arts with key figures like Mick Harris (Napalm Death and Scorn) revolutionising the stilted sounds through electronic means. Beyond Dawn adapted with the era, but as the drummer’s role became infinitesimal, overshadowed by the rhythm machines and guitars constituted little more than “one note”  sampled to infinity “the other guys fell off a bit” according to Tore and from Beyond the Dawn rose a new dawn with Ost & Kjex.  

 

Playful  Transmissions

They had known they “had something by the first record” , the rather wordy “some, but not all  Cheese comes from the moon.” That record, released on Planet Noise in 2004 had put Ost & Kjex on the map in Norway, but it was when they “sent the first tracks to Crosstown Rebels and they called back” they had something special according to Petter. “When Crosstown Rebels called up, we knew the outside world was listening” reiterates Tore and by the time of Cajun Lunch their sound was truly established. 

They moved back to Kolbotn around that time for what Tore refers to as “family business” and although he believes the return “definitely” affected the sound of the future records they produced, Ost & Kjex have always been an island onto their own. While Oslo was establishing the sound of what would later become space disco through key figures like Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas, Tore and Petter never really felt any allegiances to what those artists were doing in the capital, even though they themselves were living in the capital at that time. “We were certainly not a part of that Oslo new disco scene,” impresses Tore. “We were more House than Disco, even though we love that stuff.” They felt more inclined to the “sound design” efforts coming out of Europe than the “groove approach” of Disco coming out of America. “We were more fans of Kompakt” adds Petter in a succinct summary.

But it wasn’t merely their sonic approach that set Ost & Kjex apart from their “big city” counterparts, but also their approach to songwriting. Where structure usually followed function in dance music, Ost & Kjex have always favoured form in music that has always drawn close parallels to pop music standards. Verse-chorus arrangements have followed their work consistently, with modulating melodic themes and developing harmonies not that uncommon in their work. It’s a style that particularly thrives in the album format especially on tracks like “The Baker’s Daughter” from Freedom Wig, but where I see something positive and unique, Petter is not so sure.  

“That’s our big problem” he says through a breathy laugh. “It must be in our genes.” It’s something perhaps ingrained in their DNA from the time of working in a more traditional band together, and I’m surprised to find that, for the most part, their goal is to make something more “tracky.” “We’ve tried for twenty years,” says Tore sniggering on the pulse of Petter’s laughter. It’s a perpetual need to develop, where a hook is only as good as the sum of the rest of the track. “You write it as you go,” says Tore of their creative process, “ producing it and programming it” to a point where the songs “live on their own.” “A lot of people don’t know this”  says Tore pulling in closer to the table, but “a lot of our songs are five years in the making.” 

They always strive for some sort of narrative with Tore’s vocals adding some “minimal textural compositions that goes with the music.” Lyrics that often contain some “strong liberal value” are presented in short lyrical vignettes as “small stories with a sense of black humour.” It exposes an inherent playfulness in the Ost  & Kjex sound that might have been missed if it had not been for the vocals. Playing off the music and informing it at the same time there’s a substantial weight behind these tracks, that emphasises the element of fun that’s transmitted on the dancing pulses of this machine music.

In perpetual motion to the next thing

“There is often a sense of joy to it” says Tore nonchalantly. That sense of Joy is only ever as strong as the sense exploration in their music however. In 2017, Ost & Kjex showed the extent of their imagination, as they delivered a concert while cooking a five-course meal out of Dattera til Hagen’s kitchen. Playful, and intriguing, coming together like a sonic happening orchestrated at a National Lampoon christmas dinner. It’s the “privilege of doing electronic music” according to Petter, an unbridled enthusiasm to explore the furthest reaches of their creativity, which they’ve always done in the established context of the Ost & Kjex sound. ”You don’t want to disappoint the fans,” explains Petter and while really experimental groups like Matmos and Matthew Herbert have also influenced their work, they’ve always managed to hone this in some perpetual pursuit of the next thing, without completely severing the ties to the roots of their sound and staying true to their fans. 

It’s why a record like Freedom Wig, although they had re-approach the sound of the record, maintains the essence of Ost & Kjex. Their rude-awakening at Diynamic has only strengthened their resolve as they’ve started entertaining “some high-flying thoughts about a concept album” for their next big project. In the meantime they are concentrating on a string of EPs coming out in 2020 and they re-launching their Snick Snack label. The label which had a brief stint in 2007, right before the massive record distribution crash of 2008, returned in 2019 with an Ost & Kjex collaborative EP, Olympia. Bugge Wesseltoft, Hanne Kolstø and Anne Lise Frøkedal joined the Norwegian tastemakers for the folksy electronica of the title track accompanied by the charming “Lucky Lips”. “She’s a motherfucker on Techno synth” exclaims Tore about Kolstø who often  joins them on stage in the past as part of the Ost & Kjex live band alongside WHALESHARKATTACKS. 

While they talk enthusiastically about their live show, Tore is quite excited about the next release from Snick Snack. It’s an EP of  “really nice party tunes” from close friends Trulz & Robin in an effort that Tore hopes will bring “some more recognition” to these musical “pioneers”. Snick & Snack will also reissue Trulz & Robin’s two LPs, Mechanized World and Kaosmatisk in this spirit of a label that the pair have established as an “opportunity to shed some light on the Norwegian scene.” At the same time it’s “a means to take control of your own music” for Tore. 

Whether that’s a result of their experiences with Freedom Wig or just the next phase of a perpetual evolution that has followed them through  their work, remains unclear, but whatever it is, it looks like 2020 is going to be an intriguing year for Ost & Kjex.

The brave ones with Maze & Masters

As club culture and -music continues to pick up momentum and gain popularity, it has exposed more of the countercultural origins of the scene and the music than ever before. Bolstered by the access of information at our fingertips and an increasing awareness of the original social inequalities that informed this culture, we’ve entered an enlightened age for the scene. 

Openly queer and transgender figures like Eris Drew and Octa Octa have become househould names, topping DJ charts at the end of 2019, while dance floors and clubs have started affecting serious policy changes to ensure all gendered nominations are welcome. It’s a very different situation to the scene that birthed club culture. Clandestine locations playing rhythmic music in the dead of night for young black and latino gay men and women looking for some slight escape from the contant persecution waiting outside the door, were dependent on secerecy to keep the wolves from the door. 

Today the landscape has not only changed, but as social awareness keeps growing, club culture is always going to be one liberal step ahead, and while the rest of the world is still coming to terms with these issues, gender barriers on the dance floor have been disolving more than ever before, especially in what were usually heteronormative mainsteram clubs. 

Leading the charge in this field is the event and party set  He.She.They, an organisation that ”is about trying to create spaces of inclusion and diversity where men, women, trans, non binary and agendered people can all feel welcome.” according to its founders Steven Braines and Sophia Kearney. Braines and Kearney have taken this a step further even, focussing on taking “over places that are traditionally more heteronormative crowd wise and queer them up.”

Events at leading, predominantly clubbing institutions like Pacha, Fabric, Ministry of Sound and Watergate, have been “about different types of people being welcomed in to spaces they otherwise are not often welcomed in,” according to Braines. “By making the performers/hosts queer, non-binary, trans for example and having more female DJs, trans, non binary DJs and people of colour behind the decks,” he elucidates over an email exchange “queer people and indeed intersections of all of them in a normally straight space it shows people that they are welcome.”

Braines and Kearney both work within the music industry’s upper echelons as agents for the likes of Tale of Us, Magda and Maya Jane Coles, which has put them “in a bit of a lucky position that venues have trusted us to come in and let us take over their spaces and done something weird and wonderful with them.“ Braines, a queer man and Kearny, a straight woman “we wanted to create dance music spaces where it felt comfortable for us and our friends.” and started throwing parties 2 years ago, with their singular vision to great success.

It’s not that we are queer night” stresses Braines “we just platform and prioritise people who deviate from the straight, white, male norm that dance culture has become even though it was originated musically from black, Latin and queer communities!” They do this with a cavalcade of DJs and performance artists in each location, picking some from their extensive roster, including the de facto He.She.They residents, Maze & Masters. 

Verity Mayes and Bryony Masters have been an integral part of the He.She.They “family” since its inception as the personification of the concept which Steven and Sophia says is “all about talented people who are nice people… the core of a great party. ” . The DJ duo have forged a unique sound in the booth together between playing to pure corporeal delights in dark and sweaty rooms. With sets that thrive on the instinctive pulses of the dance floor, Maze & Masters’ build their mixes from the beats up, focusing on the functional aspects of club music as stark elements rise from the deep. Warm rhodes chords and disembodied vocal snippets reach out intermittently between piercing beats ushered in on a primordial pulse.

They’ve transposed this sound from the DJ booth to the studio in original tracks and remixes for best part of the last decade, but they remain DJs at their core. While they’re sure to be making some future contributions to the upcoming He.She.They label – which Braines can confirm has signed Louisahhh as their first artist and whose “album comes out next year” – they plot their musical journeys largely through a pair of decks. It’s in that context that we receive Maze and Masters next week together with Kittin and Louisahhh as the He.She.They x Romjulsfestivalen event.

They’ll be playing upstairs after Deadswan and Vibekke Bruff, and with the event looming closer, we reached out to Verity  via email to find out more about Maze & Masters and their residency at He.She.They. 

How did you two meet?

We met in our hometown, Brighton, in the south of England. We crossed paths on many a dance floor and eventually ran away together to the big smoke. Brighton always has and always will have a special place in our hearts and having He.She.They. come to host the Brighton Pride Dance Top was a moment we will never forget.

Was club music a constant growing up and what were some of your earliest influences that set you on your individual paths as DJs?

Verity: My dad is a priest so it was more monks chanting for me – I’m sure that’s been an influence that comes out at some point of the morning, but it was discovering house music that had the biggest impact, although we play all kinds of underground journeys, 80s/90s original house and the message it originally brought always shines through.

Bryony: I was a little indie kid until I ended up underage in a crazy club night called Slinky’s which was in Bournemouth. It played mental hard house and jungle, and it was the first real clubbing experience I’d had and one I’ll never forget. I was obsessed with clubbing culture from that point onwards. Moving to Brighton set me onto the house scene, the early 2000s were a pinnacle time for that genre and I was totally swept up in the wave – there were some epic local DJ’s holding their own at that time and seeing them play every weekend set off the spark in me to pursue a career in DJing.

Where did your musical tastes converge and what inspired you to start DJing together at first?

We always had a similar vibe, even when we were playing solo gigs and people would often comment on that back in the day. We’d buzz off sending each other music, and eventually someone booked us our first set together at a terrace party in Brighton, the Sunday day parties were legendary back then. When we moved to London we cut our teeth playing an after-hours party in a tiny terrace room of Area in South London, where we really started to define the ‘M&M’ sound. Being in the smallest room in the club gave us the freedom to really experiment with what that was, taking people on a journey is something we’ve both always loved to do.

Did you instantly find a rapport and how did your musical tastes develop further as you started Djing more together?

When we joined forces we just had and still have the best time playing together and we completely inspire each other to this day. We’re best mates, we have a lot of fun playing together and we think that communicates to the clubbers, it always feels like a private party when we play together. We maintain our own sound and energy through our sets which create our eclectic style, where they meet is a special authentic place.

 

There have been some remixes, but I assume that DJing is a priority, or are there some plans to make a stride into production in the future?

We are originally DJs at heart but have also been teaching ourselves to produce, which can be challenging with two very hectic schedules. 2020 is the year for M&M productions – so watch this space!

What is it about DJing that keeps you intrigued and devoted to that kind of music?

It is always the music, finding and playing new music is an obsession for both of us, but it’s also the shared connection and energy of a dancefloor which is like nothing else in the world.  Music is definitely a home for us and our family is the community of people it organically brings together, sometimes for just one night, and sometimes for life. 

Your sets are quite versatile, but for me there’s a kind of deep approach that ties a red thread through the mixes I’ve heard. What usually draws both of you to a track?

We started playing regularly together in after-hours clubs, so deep house is part of our roots. The joy of being able to take people somewhere with the subtleties of that sound means it’s a genre we will always respect. It’s all about the energy of a track, for us it has to have a groove or something unusual that hooks you in. If it doesn’t make you move, it shouldn’t make your set.

And how might you move the other into a different direction through the mix?

We love a lot of different types of house and techno and tend to just read the crowd, so we don’t often know how a set will end up! There isn’t too much conscious thought involved, we get inspired by the music that the other plays. 

You’ve found a home in the queer/polysexual clubbing community, not just at He.She.They, but also Little Gay Brother. What was your introduction to this world and what attracted you to the scene as DJs?

Being queer ourselves, the community has always been a big part of our lives. We’ve always been drawn to that insatiable energy of a wild queer party, there’s really nothing that compares to it to be honest. It’s really important to us that we can represent us and our queer family, and being able to spread the message of equality and inclusivity on a global scale through music is an honour, we are very thankful to He.She.They. and our other residency Little Gay Brother for giving us the opportunities to do so.

How did you end up being residents at He.She.They?

We have always hugely respected The Weird and The Wonderful and our friendship developed both in London’s and in various tents and fields at Secret Garden Party; then to Ibiza where we shared an office. We were touched to be asked to part of the journey from the beginning and that Sophia and Steven saw a resonance in our ethos and liked what we do, it’s been incredible to see the message spread worldwide. Being able to play and see the positive reaction to the party at such respected venues as Ministry & Fabric London, Watergate Berlin and Pacha Ibiza has been emotional, we feel very much part of the team.

And what’s the driving ideology behind the concept and how did it resonate with what you were doing as DJs?

Living in the queer community, activism is part of your life, everyone has had to fight for something whether its the courage to come out, or support brave friends on their personal journeys. He.She.They’s ideology totally resonates with this, and therefore with who we are as people. 

We have been lucky enough to exist both within the queer scene and also the wider electronic music scene. You often find that the two worlds didn’t really converge, and they SHOULD, because there is some incredible talent not being given the chance to live their potential! Steven & Sophia took He.She.They. to the world to give everyone a shared opportunity and the world fucking loved it, which only looks to increase and spread the message further in 2020.

How do your sets at He.She.They differ from the stuff you usually play and are there any tracks that you would consider He.She.They anthems?

There’s a mad kind of energy, a fierceness, that comes through in us both when preparing for He.She.They. sets; which comes from a sense of freedom, there isn’t a mould you have to fit into which is very refreshing. He.She.They. celebrates experimentation and pushing boundaries. 

Here’s a track that sticks out to us both from our first HST gig, dubspeeka & Visionz “Floorshow” (Bodyjack’s DEXT VIP).

It’s a travelling event series, so the audiences must differ between parties. How do you guys accommodate these differences in terms of your sets and the party?

One of the uniting threads that we have found throughout every HST party is that everyone really just wants to be free to party and are really open-minded to how that may occur! It’s like everyone has found a place to exist as themselves whether they knew they needed that or not, so although there is a focus on freedom of expression, it’s also kind of about that not mattering, as the crowd is super diverse but ultimately all just there to dance no matter who you are or what you play. 

What are your expectations for the upcoming event at Jaeger?

Well, Louisahhh and Miss Kittin are playing, so we’re expecting Oslos foundations to be shaken to their very core! We’re expecting the unexpected, as what comes out when people are given the space to express is a very weird and wonderful thing! But above all, quality, love, respect, and a lot of stomping.

We look forward to having you here, Verity and Bryony. 

 

Album of the week: PAN AL – Pan Al

Mystifying, entrancing and at times hallucinogenic, Norwegian artist PAN AL’s self titled debut swims between ambient textures and disruptive rhythms as he plots a course to the fringes of electronic club music. After initially being released on the ambient outlet of R&S records, Apollo, the record found its physical form with a record that touches on those fundamental ambient influences, while spurring the genre on with clattering percussive rhythms.

Revitalising to often formless nature of ambient music in the same misanthropic pool from which it gestated, PAN-AL ventures closer to Aphex Twin and Warp than the languid beat-less interpretations that have defined the genre in recent years. Ratcheting beats and synthetic textures that develop in a cloud of slippery arrangements, never completely disappear into the background, nor do they provoke excessively.

PAN-AL finds life on lamented planets with tracks like “It’s Rigged” and”Roadrunner” jetting through static atmospheres on the insolent pulse of kick and snare arrangements. Working in a sonic palette that has only matured with time, noisy vintage synthesisers sculpt bold, free-flowing harmonies and melodies with raspy drum machines piercing the exterior in playful ebullience, bulging through the individual tracks.

Contrasting the energy of these tracks, “It’s nice to meet you” and “Just Open Up” offers a wistful serenity through the length of the EP, which appears more like a mini LP through the narrative of the record.  The tranquil soundscapes the artist creates during these moments of repose, still maintain that illusion of movement, even around a single chord, which together with the other tracks create a sense of perpetual motion through the course of the LP.

We’d be curious to see where it will take the artist  and his music next.

Redefining Folkemusikk with Lakeshouse

Surveying the spatial outskirts of Norwegian Disco in a potent fusion excavating elements from balearic beat to Jazz, Lakeshouse arrived on Paper Recordings  at the beginning of this year with the Firkanta EP. The four-piece from Norway, consisting of Espen, Bjørnar, Endre and Andreas had been making music together or independently since their youth in one form or another. They first came together under the BOKA pseudonym with a happy infusion of Pop and Disco catering to the more ebullient corners of the dance floor on infectious melodies and effervescent grooves. 

They eventually left the BOKA project to one side only to re-form as Lakeshouse, honing their sound further to the club with Firkanta, establishing the Lakeshouse sound in no uncertain terms with a record DJ Mag called “great…bonkers Norwegian language garage.” In November this year they followed it up with the equally “strong” Folkemusikk, refining and cementing the Lakeshouse concept with a record that ties something of a conceptual thread between the tracks. 

There’s a strong organic element to Folkemusikk coming together under the shadow of the mountain that adorns the cover. From the airy vocals of “Lov” to the staccato keys of “Papaya” it relays that human connection between the dance floor and this largely machine-made music. From the downtempo “Lov” to the energetic “Folkemusikk,” encouraging beat and bass arrangements underpin these tracks, which even under the slower tempos of “Lov” find an empathetic synchronicity with the listener. Lyrics ponder themes of love and culture through the abstract gaze of an artist’s viewfinder, with the music providing the visceral counterpoint. 

They’ll be bringing the record and a few others along to the official launch of Folkemusikk at Jaeger, so we shot over a few questions over to band to ask about the music, the story behind the cover, the origins of the band and their upcoming DJset at Jaeger.

How did you guys meet and what encouraged you to start a band together? 

The four of us met very young, some of us as early as kindergarten in Nordfjordeid, Sogn og Fjordane. It’s a small, picturesque place. We listened to weird shit and weren’t into sports, so that comes with its social consequences in a place like that. Me and Bjørnar started messing around in Fruity Loops and Reason when we were around 12, and then in high school we all came together for various projects. There was a black metal band, a cosmic disco group, a prog rock band, an electro-jam band, but none of them very serious. When we moved to Bergen in our early 20s we founded BOKA and started being a bit more serious about this music thing. 

What is the connection between this project and BOKA and how has it evolved or diverged into Lakeshouse? 

The connection is we’re basically the same members as BOKA, but we needed to do something different and we needed to do something that would allow us to work together despite living in different cities now, ever since Espen moved to Malmö. We sort of realised that we’ve gotten much better at club music and could do more. 

Where do your individual musical influences crossover and how did that inform what you wanted to do with Lakeshouse? 

Lakeshouse is our attempt at simplicity, even though compared to most underground club producers we probably sound pretty crazy. Three of us are musical omnivores with a penchant for dance music, while Andreas is the same but with a penchant for jazz. We rarely do anything by the book and want to create our own definitions, not be defined. Lakeshouse is us balancing our need to experiment with our love for dance music. 

What’s the story behind the name and why the possessive form “lake’s”? 

“Lakehouse” would be a pretty boring name, don’t you agree? :P But in all seriousness, it actually came from a cosmic disco track Bjørnar did called “Live at Lake’s House”. He had this idea of a place the track was recorded live, since it sounded kinda live-ish, like it could be a Lakeshouse-set at some mystery club. Where is this place, and who the hell is this Lake-guy? So we took that and made it Lakeshouse. 

Now that Espen lives in Malmö and you live in Oslo, how did the music come together with the band spread out like that? 

Well, we miss him a lot! Music-wise there’s a lot of skype-meetings, messenger chats, phone conversations, sending projects back and forth and such. We try to keep each other involved as much as possible. Sometimes we just make stuff on our own, and give each other feedback and maybe improvise something over it. The only thing that has become a struggle is anything live-related, since we can’t rehearse together. 

How do you divide the duties between the band? 

Generally, Espen, Bjørnar and Endre do the production and songwriting, and then Andreas might come along and lay down some trombone. Since he’s much more a jazzhead than a clubber he’ll usually have some opinions on the chords or arrangements that help make things more musical. And for the most part Endre does the final mix, with a lot of help from the other guys. Since Bjørnar is also a visual artist he does all of the graphics, videos etc. We do everything except the mastering. We like to keep it all inside the BOKA Recordings crew. 

Folkemusikk is your second EP for Paper Recordings. How did you arrive on the UK label and how has the label and its discography informed what you do if at all? 

In 2016 we released a track called “Brødrene Hermanos” as BOKA. It was a pretty cosmic affair, and somehow Paper got wind of it and asked us if they could put it on their Trash The Wax series. They dug it and we felt like they understood us better than other labels we’d dealt with before. This was right around the time we were becoming clubbier anyway, so when we had Firkanta EP ready they were the first people we contacted. 

Ben Davis has always been a huge supporter of the Norwegian music scene, but he’s also been a very prominent figure in Manchester. What kind of affinity is there between these two scenes from Lakeshouse’s experience? 

We grew up in the 90s with Faithless, Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers on Topp 20. UK music has been hugely important to us and Norway in general. Manchester has been a staple club-town since the 80s, but the overall willingness to push things forward seems like a British tradition overall. Paper is one of the many labels that don’t mind taking risks if they like the music. We recently read an interview with Ben where he joked about not being able to resist releasing a record of a guy in South Africa with 30 followers on Soundcloud! And Paper made an entire documentary on the nordic disco scene. It seems the UK influence is paying off for both parties. 

Getting onto Folkemusikk. Tell me how that EP came together and what were some of the ideas that informed it. What were some of your inspirations (in music and beyond) for the sounds of the record? 

We started out with a couple tracks that felt like they belonged together. ‘NRK’ and ‘Folkemusikk’ both have a nostalgic and surreal vibe to them. They made us think of the old video archive of the Norwegian broadcasting corporation, which is tasked with documenting Norway’s culture and history. The lyrics for ‘Folkemusikk’ go really well with that theme, and the vocal sample on ‘NRK’ sounds like a mangled radio jingle. Then the rest kind of just fell into place. Varied, but with a conceptual backdrop. 

The Lakeshouse sound that you established on Firkanta is still prevalent, but there seems to be something slightly more organic, at times a little psychedelic about this record. How did you approach this record any differently than the last? 

Well, ‘Firkanta’ is called Firkanta for a reason. On Firkanta we focused on presenting different sides to our sound, like the proto-Lindstrøm space disco of the title track, or the garage-ish swing of Ambulanse. Folkemusikk is more conceptual. If one track had ambient elements then the other tracks needed some too. All the tiny details, the textural, almost tactile sounds, they’re all meant to match the feeling or the message. NRK sounds a bit like the fever dream of a child listening to the radio. Papaya is very Ibiza and beachy, while Folkemusikk is urban pitted against folk music and a Hardanger-fiddle. There’s even a lonely owl and a ticking clock on Lov. 

How did the writing process work on this record and where did the inspiration for the lyrics come from? 

The title track is a nod to the history of dance music. Dance music is ancient, and some of it we’ve arbitrarily labeled “folk music”. It seems modern club music is really just an extension of a very old idea. The chorus is a chant; “this is folk music”, sung in a dialect that has traditional connotations. It also kind of sounds like “this is fuck music”, which isn’t too far off if you think about it. In the verse a guy is sad that someone told him “music died a hundred years ago today”, like there’s a specific date someone decided music went wrong. It didn’t! It just changed. 

Lov was of course inspired by a breakup. It’s during a break up you might wonder why we all keep trying when it usually ends with heartbreak. The title is both the Norwegian word for ‘allowed’ and ‘law’, almost like the song is taking the piss out of the concept of love. And there’s no linear story, more an abstraction of the feelings around it. We really love Air and the way they used a looped, robotic voice on ‘Run’, so we tried to mimic that on this track, underlining the abstract and binary lyrics. “One/Two, me/you”. Maybe it’s a story of a robot programmed to love, running the same software over and over? In a way it’s an existential song more than a love ballad. 

There’s something about the mountain on the cover, Endre told me. What is it about that image in the artwork that’s so significant about this record and how did it inform the music

Having grown up surrounded by nature we’re still marked by it. There’s something mysterious and profound about mountains. Now that we live in Oslo we kind of have to make do with the nature we have here, which is not as spectacular but still nice. We spend more time in the woods than in the club. Back in Nordfjordeid we had many secret spots we’d go to just to be alone as friends, one of them was by a lake that few people knew about. It’s kinda funny cos the picture used for the cover was actually taken on a trip Bjørnar had to Albania, but it still looks as majestic and “nasjonalromantisk” as a Norwegian painting from the 1800s. There’s even a troll-like face in the rocks. Both the videos for Nrk and Lov were partly filmed by a lake outside Oslo. 

And now for the plug… it’s the official Oslo release of the record; what is happening on the night to celebrate the record? 

Before we officially start DJing we’ll have a little mingling sesh, listen to the record in full and also show the two videos Bjørnar made. We also have a bunch of T-shirts from Firkanta EP that we’ll be selling. And anyone with a healthy interest in music should get down to our DJ set later, cos it will be epic and eclectic! 

I thought you might be tempted to play live. Why the DJ set? 

Like we talked about it’s hard to get live sets going when we’re spread out. We’ve barely all been in the same room for most of the process of this EP. We’ve also been wanting to do more DJing in general, so for that purpose this is a step in that direction. 

And how do you hope to relay the sound of the record through the set? 

Of course we’ll play as many Lakeshouse tracks as we can muster, including our remixes and other goodies, but it’s also just something that will happen organically through the selection. We want people to dance, but we also like championing wilder records, blending party vibes with something personal, kind of like how our music sounds. 

That’s all the questions, but is there anything you’d like to add? 

Nothing other than a big thank you to both Olanskii for booking us to Jæger, and to you for asking us such great questions! 

The cut with Filter Musikk

We’re on the precipice of a new decade and we’ve fallen into archetypal tropes where Techno, House et al is currently being watered-down to revisionist versions of itself in a digital realm. Distilled from the eccentricities of their ancestral roots, we’re swimming in the languid miasma of ubiquity entrenched in formulaic chasms. Feedback loops, droning along in consistent noise, saturate dance floors in monotonous white noise, while DJ faces smile at you from the incandescent glow of a handheld LCD screen. 

We’re living in a virtual reality, a dance floor locked in an eternal struggle to free itself from the banality of the outside world, carried on the invisible wings of 4G bandwidth. Our anecdote? A complete hedonistic escape from the trivialities of everyday life. It lies beyond a glass door at an end of Skippergta and it’s called Filter Musikk. 

Unencumbered by overzealous hype and free from the tyrannical insistence of social media, it’s here where music lives on in objective terms with the listener. Grooves cut into plastic discs, sheathed in cardboard cloaks that relay only the most necessary vignettes of information, line shelves and boxes; impossible hierarchies immediately subverted in the mere flick of a finger. 

Carefully curated by proprietor and Oslo DJ icon, Roland Lifjell, the selections that grace the hallowed shelves, stand out above the din with glorious indifference in a format that time forgot. Ironically it’s in these arcane discs that we’ve found the only way forward into the next decade, the last true avant garde in a scene slowly being consumed by conservative trends being dictated by big business and uninformed social opinions determined by mystical algorithms. 

This is where we’ll make our stand in our perpetual drive to explore new musical worlds and unearth future classics overlooked in their time, but still striving to soundtrack an improbable future. Stepping into the next decade, these are the records and this is the place that lies beyond the schism of the mundane and we’ll step boldly beyond its threshold yet again in the pursuit of the new, enticing and the innovative. This is the Cut with Filter Musikk. 

*The cut with Filter Musikk goes live tonight aJaeger as a vinyl messe and club concept.

 

Adlas – Currents (Answer Code Request / ACR505) – 12″

It appears like a forgotten memory from the beginning of the year, when 2019 was still in its infancy. Seems like it was only yesterday we were singing Adlas’ praises on his debut for Answer Code Request. The mysterious artist had immediately caught our attention, pursuing a distinctive brand of Techno, freed from the shackles of the consistent beat of a DJ tool. We thought it could have been a mere isolated event, a fleeting artistic flourish from some established artist, operating under a pseudonym. That was March however and this month Adlas has solidified his sound in 2019 with a sophomore effort “Currents,” confirming his allegiances to Answer Code Request in the process.

Adlas’ music continues to thrive in a stark minimalist landscape, with rhythms emboldened by bass carving deep trenches through incandescent atmospheres, sparkling with the erratic chirps and clattering of biomechanical sonic insects hovering at the fringes of the otherworldly soundscape. Adlas finds some elusive bridge between striking experimentalism and dance floor functionality on this record. Using the unwavering foundations of beat-driven dance music, Adlas saves an experimental component for the accompanying textures, with raspy metallic creations and irreverent rhythmic constructions occupying the fringes of his music.

It’s in the skipping rhythmic arrangements that Adlas’ music immediately appeals, using kick and snare arrangements lifted from bass-inclined genres and transposing it to Techno. On the particularly tumultuous “Emergence,” piercing kick drums jut out from the center of the track with an onerous corporeal pursuit as noisy atmospheres clamour to the progression of the track. 

But it’s very much a record of two sides, with the A-side honing that stark, bass-infused minimalism to a fine degree on the dance floor, while the B-side retreats into evocative melodies. At its most extreme the record touches on the fringes of Trance with “Spherical Wave” which is both at odds with the rest of the record, trapped in some unflinching 4-4 rhythm and yet also offers some dynamism as the artist ventures slightly from the sound he’s covered over most of his first two records.

It leaves a tantalising musical allure that will undoubtedly follow the artist into his next record, and the next decade.

 

Pretty Sneaky – 5 (Pretty Sneaky) 12″

Synthesised “found sounds“ from parallel dimensions transmitted on the frequencies of Dub rhythms and records that seem to want to draw no line of separation between genres, Pretty Sneaky is a white label that has been intriguing since it first emerged in 2017. We thought the mysterious first record was an elusive one-off, never to be repeated, but somehow the label is enjoying it’s fifth release and the third release of this year. 

With only a quirky stamp signifying its alliances a Pretty Sneaky record holds absolutely no information about its origins, but the dub-infused Techno that adorns each record hints at the UK. Pretty Sneaky 5 pursues a similar sonic aesthetic set forth since the first record suggesting a single artist or group behind the stark minimalist polyrhythmic constructions. 

Percussive rhythms come together like Steve Reich’s clapping music, abstract and aloof, but congregating around the hefty sub-bass undulations that anchor the record in the realm of dub music. Only the electronic squeaks of abstract atmospheres of the A-side and the impulsive conjurings from some counterfeit electronic organ on the B-side, break the monotony of a repetitive loop that dominates both sides.

It’s an unpretentious record that asks nothing more than to be played through an almighty sound system. 

 

Lost Trax – Surface Treated (Delsin / 139dsr)

It was like Lost Trax was created to be on Delsin. The anonymous artist/artists behind the Lost Trax name have been putting out records on the likes of Shipwrec and Tabernacle records for a while, but it’s particularly on Delsin where they seem to have found some congruity between their sound and the sound of the label, like they’ve always been destined to be on there. 

Lost Trax’ music is built on those Dutch DIY traditions that took root in labels like Bunker and through artists like Legowelt, and while the records for Shipwrec and Frustrated Funk have upheld those traditions, their records for Delsin seeks to contemporize these traditions for the next generation. 

Surface Treated finds Lost Trax funnel early Electro and Techno into the deepest recesses of club music. Tracing a trajectory to the dance floor between submerged, rolling basslines and ethereal melodies, Lost Trax expose a visceral subtext in their music on this release. It’s only ever on “Still”, the ultimate track on the EP that Lost Trax relay some of that classic Electro that dominates the their early releases, but for the most part they favour a softer edge in their music, which is particularly effective on opener  “De Laye” and the striking “Interstate”.

There’s a progressive nature to both these tracks with an appealing melodic component, which on “Interstate” travels along some of the prettiest harmonies we’ve heard on a record of this nature for some time. Travelling on a deep, yet effervescent bass-line a simple lead line bounces between wispy pads, congregating around a deceiving, up-beat pulse. It marks a highlight for a record that is its own zenith in an already outstanding discography. 

 

Nick Klein – Jesus Take The Wheel (Viewlexx) – 12″ 

Nick Klein is always “hoping to conjure an aural space of sanctuary and escapism” in his music, with a sanctuary embraced in the warm bowels of a dystopian machine-made romance. The American artist had arrived onto the scene through America’s ever-intriguing cassette scene, but by the time he arrived on the vinyl format through Unknown Precepts with “Failed Devotee” his music evolved slightly from the DIY culture that cassette culture has always inspired.

Releases for L.I.E.S and BANK followed as Klein’s music found the darker corners of dance floors around the world, contorting with the salacious desires of machine-made beat music. It’s no surprise that a label like Viewlexx beckoned and that Nick Klein answered the call, but on this occasion some compromise seems to have had to occur as Nick Klein moved into more focussed club music territory.

Stripping his sound back from the bolder synthwave and 80’s EBM traditions that dominated his earlier work, Nick Klein appears to try to accommodate an elusive dance floor on “Jesus Take the Wheel.” Repetitive beat phrases coaxed from distorting machines develop very little throughout the four tracks on the record with perfunctory design underpinning all these tracks. 

Klein’s darker textures, and noise-y production will find favour with the more provocative corners of club music, and the slow tempos at which these tracks march through the record is charged with  seductive rhythmic designs. It’s only the last track, that he breaks with the rest of the record and exposes some of those cassette DIY roots, as distorting guitars and saturated synthetic atmospheres converge on “Can’t Be A Candle”; ambient music as relayed from dystopian vision of the future.  

 

Various – Club People Vol.1 (Anopolis) 12″ 

Somebody recently said that Athens will be the new Berlin, and while this kind of postulation usually has us rolling our eyes– just leave Athens to be Athens, why do we need another Berlin – there is certainly some relationship between social conditions and music. It’s usually under some kind of duress that societies are at their most creative. 

After the financial fallout of a crippling debt crisis, expounded by a humanitarian crisis that the rest of Europe simply lumped on the shoulders of the poor country, Athens has seen better days, to say the least. In the midst of this, a burgeoning Techno scene had begun to flourish as the genre reached the incredibly popular heights. Let’s just get this straight however, Greece had always had an electronic music scene, but more recently an underground component to the mainstream has come to the fore allowing room for a new label like Anopolis to come into existence.

On the second release from the label, Anopolis introduces four new artists, each proffering a different interpretation of club music in one versatile compilation. Foukodian Rhythms, lakovos, Dim DJ and Drum Machine plot a course through the vast expanse of club music with elements of breakbeat, acid, House and Techno converging on the fringes of lo-fi techniques. 

At times, like the 4-minute drop on Foukodian Rhythms’ “Big Wednesday,”  the tracks are in need of some refinement, but it’s this youthful exuberance prevalent throughout, that holds a finger up to the uber-produced establishment currently saturating European clubs. At its most effective Grecian “old guard” Dim DJ, brings the necessary experience and practised skills to the compilation with the entrancing psychedelia of “Acid-O-Rama” while maintaining that DIY machine music aesthetic. 

On the other end of the spectrum, lakovos offers a brooding, stomping Techno cut that could be quite at home in some vacuous underground concrete liar, which alongside the other tracks cover the vast spectrum of Techno music on this release and a fine representation of electronic club music coming out of Greece at the moment. 

Album of the Week: Lapalux – Amnioverse

Back towards the end of the last decade, there was a new generation of music producer that started to rise to prominence in the UK. It was a generation that came into music on the precipice of the ultimate popularity of Dubstep as the last truly new genre of music and providing a platform for new, young artistic voices onto the scene. With advancements in computer music technology hurtling into the hands of youngsters with a laptop and a singular creative vision, the landscape was completely decimated of entrenched traditional musical languages as these artists found solace in the experimental fusion of sounds with everything from RnB to Acid informing these new sounds in a post-dubstep landscape.

In 2008, Lapalux was one of these voices, releasing a few mixtapes, before finding the ear of Flying Lotus at Brainfeeder, who quickly installed the artist on the label as one of the truly unique voices of the next decade. From his first EP for the label in 2012 to the present, Lapalux has remained devoted to the label, releasing at least one record a year, including four albums that conclude the decade with “Amnioverse” in 2019. Lapalux thus closes out another decade with music, imbued with that familiar spirit of the last one, but with the maturity that only experience can bring.

Amnioverse is familiar for its fusion of musical languages, where elements of RnB and bass music float in a stark electronic world where gleaming synthetic atmospheres cloud piercing rhythm constructions. Initial inspiration for the album came from a photograph of James Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany Skyspace installation in Texas, according to the press release for the record. “It seems like we are all in that waiting room, waiting to be somewhere or go somewhere” explains the artist and through the bulk of the LP, that is revealed through languid ambient textures that seem to simply exist, only progressing in the most subtle variations on individual tracks.

In the context of its entirety the album has its own progression moving from songs like sound installations to the outer fringes of experimentalism with the artist’s modular synthesiser as abstract sonic palette. The LP turns around “Thin Air,” with “Voltaic Acid” providing the first lysergic strains of otherworldly sounds that dominate the record by “The Lux Quadrant” and its impulsive machine rhythms. These are also the most striking pieces on the record, especially when the ghostly vocals of “JFDR” and “Lilia” haunt passages like a voice projected out of the ether somewhere. The human voice juxtaposes irreverent machines with Lapalux wearing his RnB influences on his sleeve, before disappearing back into a flurry of randomised sounds and rhythms.

At times the sonic treatments hark back to records like Amon Tobin’s Isam, which dates the record somewhat, but there is enough new ideas feeding into the construction of the record to modernise these tracks, while at the same time offering a record that is completely negating any sonic zeitgeist, other than the tools used to create it. It might not be soundtracking the next decade exactly like Lapalux’s music intended to do with the last, but with the same attitude that dominated his early irreverent pieces, the artist has created a record in “Amioverse” that suggests their is something left to explore in a post-dubstep world.

While we’ve lost touch with this kind of experimental attitude towards electronic music in a landscape dominated by music that has returned for the most part to their archetypal origins, a record like “Amnioverse” suggests there is still enough to be uncovered in the realm of electronic music, and perhaps this attitude like this if not this record will set the tone for the next decade again.

Premiere: Ivaylo – Elaya

Hear Jaeger and Jaeger mix resident Ivaylo’s latest for Full Pupp.

Ivaylo settles into his new home at Full Pupp. The DJ and producer made his debut on the label earlier this year, tracing a course into deep-space disco with the slow-burning “Syklon.” After the critical success of that three-tracker, Bulgarian born, Oslo native Ivaylo is back on the Prins Thomas tip with four tracks including the B1 gem, Elaya. “It’s a “B” side track!” shouts Ivaylo while sending us the premiere for the track on the day of the release.

The racy number comes with Ivaylo asking “do you want to dance” both figuratively and literally with a high-energy percussion section clearing a path to the dance floor. Garage bass lines, imported from the UK, bounce on a high-energy beat, sandwiched between deep Rhodes chords and effervecsent atmospheres.

Evolving the sound from “Syklon,” “Elaya” and co. is Ivaylo taking a tougher stance, bleeding a little out from the signature deep House and Tech sounds he perpetuated mainly through his Bogota records label. Enabled in his new discoveries via Full Pupp, the label has become “the birth place for (a) new kinda sound” for Ivaylo which he hopes will “natural grow further” as he settles into the Full Pupp catalogue.

The release came together with “Rumba Bulgara, first” says Ivaylo and the rest simply “followed,” with “Elaya” taking centre stage today as the record is officially released in all major stores. “Elaya” will have to keep us company over the weekend as Ivaylo jets off to Berlin for an exclusive Full Pupp in store at OYE Records and a set later at Bohnengold with Bogota and Full Pupp associate Jarle Braathen.

He’s back at the Jaeger mix next week, and another Bogota Record Showcase on the 21st of December. Make sure to keep an eye out for Bogota records next release too featuring Jarle Braathen. Out on Friday the 13th.

That’s my bag with Osunlade

When Osunlade released his debut LP, Paradigm, it moved through House music echelons like a breath of fresh air. At a time when House music was moving into charts and MTV, he took the genre back to its roots and beyond with an album that was culmination of his ancestral roots and his depth-defying skills as a producer. Osunlade stepped out of the majors and into the underground, shaking off the commodified business of music to get back at the soul and funk  that originally informed House music. 

His record debuted on Soul Jazz, and set a precedent that he took into creating his own label, Yoruba which has perpetuated a musical ideology that has remained unwavering through Osunlade’s discography, up to his latest LP Aché. Aché has been a realisation of a dream for Osunlade, which has all the makings of a great pop record on par with something like Sign O’ the Times, because of the kaleidoscopic musical flavours that imbues the record.

Like every Osunlade record, Aché channels something ancient through the music, something that extends beyond roots music and is contained in the spirit of the artist. There is often an organic element to Osunlade’s music imparted by the physical act of playing his instruments and on Aché it’s honed to a fine finesse with the appearance of an orchestra and Osunlade’s voice on this record. More Soul than House music, Aché  is a record that has all the qualities of a timeless record with elements of Jazz, Soul and to some fine degree House music, channelled through the Osunlade’s unique artistic voice. 

It was in the shadow of the release of this record that Osunlade arrived at Jaeger for a set during our annual Oslo World festival. Living between Santorini and St. Louis and with an extended stay in Japan after his set at Jaeger, Osunlade is the definition of a worldly artist, and  when he arrived in our booth it was all business for the US artists and DJ. With his sights set on the dance floor, we hit the red record button and then reached out to Osunalde when he landed in Japan to ask a few more questions about the set, his unique touring lifestyle and of course Aché.

You’re constantly on the road at the moment, staying in one country or region for extended periods at a time. What kind of effect (past the logistical) does this kind of lifestyle have on your music? 

It has a major impact on my music as music is simply a diary of my life, my experiences, the places, people and moments are what creates the stories I tell musically.

You tend to record your music in set locations, so how do you feel your music migrates between your studios in Santorini compared to St. Louis?  

It’s totally different as both are specifically different set ups. Santorini is definitely a quieter setting so the music tends to be a bit more open in approach as there is much more room to breathe whereas St. Louis is more an insular creative space. I lock myself in the studio there and tend to create more content as my studio there’s is a more a cave and is underground so I have no concept of time or the outside world.

You were raised in St Louis, and Missouri has an incredible music history. How much did that history spur you on in learning to play the piano when you were seven and eventually developing your own voice as an artist?

It was and is everything! My influences are directly from the funk, soul and jazz I heard growing up. St. Louis is like mostly midwestern cities in the fact that musically we heard a multitude of sounds that may not have reached the major cities in the country so our influences are wider I think. 

I believe Prince was also a huge influence. What era Prince was this and what was it about the purple one that you developed into your own style?

Prince is in fact my biggest influence to date. I first heard “Soft & Wet” in 78. Even at an early age id been into music yet had never heard a sound like his. This overall is the impact. His ability to alter all the sounds I loved and make them his own. That appeal is my approach. To never copy and to create a style of my own.

On your last LP, Ache’ you seem to pay special homage to him. Some of the vocals are very Prince-esque and the overall sound has that Paisley-park-funk to it, while I can’t help but see Prince in the artwork. What was Prince’s influence on this LP specifically?

Not at all, I never think or have any artist in mind when creating. My voice is what it is and is catered around all the funk bands of my era, not only Prince. Growing up in bands in the Midwest was about funk so the style is bigger than just one artist. The fact that most only know my house material (which is the lesser of my work) tend to hear only part of the full experience of my sound. St. Louis has its own funk and I claim that my music is St. Louis funk, not Minneapolis at all. But this is something you’d need to experience as a whole to understand.

When did House music first capture your attention and how have you always strived to interpret the music through your own history?

I spent most of my summers in Chicago growing up so house was also a part of my upbringing. My take on house was funk soul music at a faster rhythmic pace, nothing more. If u slow them down you will hear a soul record first. It all starts with the song and for me it’s funk first.

You followed a very unorthodox route into House music compared to your contemporaries, starting out on the business end of the music industry, which you eventually left, to strike out on your own as an artist. What was the catalyst for this?

It’s simple, I hated the music business and the music I created during that period as it wasn’t from my heart. I needed a vehicle to create what was true to me. 

What sort of work were doing for the majors… were you already producing at that point?

I was producing for several major labels.

The industry has never really been a nurturing environment for artistry, but what did you take from the experience into your solo career?

Although not great for artists, the industry back then was a great way to learn the business. How to nurture artists and most importantly the art of A&R. My label is different to most as I to this day follow the model of what I learned from the majors. I mentor every artist I sign and it normally takes years before I release anything on any artist. Whereas most labels simply sign things for the hit or name factor and usually the music is original or special. 

I think for most, including myself, your debut LP Paradigm is enshrined in House music lore as a classic today. What is you relationship with those early pieces today?

I still love them today! I think at the time this was a special event as again there’s was nothing out that sounded like me. As I’ve grown older, of course these are less exciting as my tastes have evolved. 

You continue to utilize the same tools and practises to make music today, but there’s still an evolution in your work between Paradigm and Ache’. How have you perceived the development of  your artistic voice through your career?

Absolutely! This is my aim when writing anything. The tool change always which is what brings the evolution however, the practices stay the same. The approach is to never repeat myself.

I know you don’t watch television and don’t pay much attention to any popular media. Where do you find your inspiration beyond music?

I watch quite a shit ton of movies, mostly rare or obscure as my travels keep me alone it’s entertaining and educational. I especially dig biopics or anything related to previous artists be it music or otherwise. 

Each album seems to contain its own musical universe, both in concept and sound. Is this something that you always do on a conscious level like you did on Pyrography LP?

100% I make music for the time when I am no longer. As artists we never receive our full due until we die. Something about humans tend to care more after life. I guess it’s  because we realize there will be no more. I’d like what I left behind to be a full and complete story of my journey so every song, every ep, every album hasn’t to be its own chapter per say. 

I’ve read that Ache’ is the album you dreamt of making. In what sense was that album a fulfilment of a dream?

Mostly because I was able to afford an orchestra. When working for the majors I was blessed with this for other artists but it’s such a daunting effort financially so when I set out to commit to saving for this album it was a serious effort. One that took 7 years to complete. It’s definitely my mostly complete work as an artist. It’s closest to where I am today.

I’ve always considered you an album artist (even though you’ve been prolific in releasing EPs and 12 inches too). What is it about the LP format that you personally prefer?

I like the story. Again each album is another’s chapter. I can go back and relive exactly where I was, who I was in love with etc.

On a side note, will there be a physical release for Ache’?

Yes the vinyl will release in January as well. There will be a limited colored vinyl box set with extras like a certified print of the cover art which is one of my collages.

All you’re albums have a very organic sound to them, most likely due to the fact that you play your instruments. But listening back to your DJ set from Jaeger, you seem to favour a more mechanical sound. How do approach music differently in the context of a set and how do you relay something of Osunlade the artist through your sets?

They seem two totally different things to me. Djing is a skill and not a talent which is why there are so many today. For me it’s about making people dance and educating simultaneously. Also in today’s house the more electronic stuff is simply more interesting. I hate nothing more than listening to an artists catalog and it’s basically the same song over again. 

What did you think of the experience at Jaeger?

I enjoyed Jaeger immensely! The sound was great and everyone there was lovely As well as Oslo. I must return soon :) 

As a DJ that travels so much and plays all over the world, you must be aware of a kind of movement in the scene that has shifted towards industry more than community. What are your thoughts on the scene as it is today and what keeps you motivated to keep playing to audiences out there?

I hate the scene as a whole as it’s white shit and not about music whatsoever. I stay away from all the hype bullshit. As well I normally never listen to house music until I’m going for a tour. It can be quite boring for me. Jazz, Funk, Soul and World music are my bag. I need real music with real musicians playing real instruments to excite me. If it’s something I can achieve or create I’m not interested at all. 

What I’ve always admired about your music and again on Ache’ is how you are able to make music that is completely out of step with any zeitgeist, and yet somehow it thrives beyond it’s time. How are you able to maintain that distance between what’s happening around you and still find some form of music that speaks to contemporary ears?  

I guess that’s just my instinct and clarity of self. I kinda live in my own world really so as music as I’m in the world I’m sort of an alien in truth. St Louis and Santorini are both grounding for me and helps me stay in my fantasy land internally.

Ache’ was the first LP for you since 2014, and I imagine you took your time with that one to specifically get that theme across. So what of this LP will inform you future project/projects?

I’ve already another album compete. I write a lot and actually ache was 17 songsmith to begin so some of those are on the next one with newer things. Who knows maybe they will never be heard as I tend to remove songs frequent depending on what an album needs or turns out to be. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. We look forward to having you back at Jaeger sometime soon and safe travels. 

Album of the week: Jesse – III

Jesse’s III is one of those album that could have easily been lost to obscurity. Originally released in 2012 on the boutique Finnish label Haista, it was either exclusively released in Finland or just never made it beyond its borders until now. That’s at least what we heard via Roland Lifjell at Filter Musikk, who says that DJ Sotofett was responsible for unearthing this heretofore undiscovered gem and bringing it to Oslo. Not a re-issue or a re-press, the plastic that cover these records are a 2012 vintage, which has somehow hermetically sealed its musical contents in a seven year time capsule, incidentally installing it as a timeless record without getting the necessary remoteness from any other record mass-released at that same time.

Jessi was (or is) Stiletti-Ana and Kalifornia-Keke, artists and producers  that have gone on to lauded solo careers since, both moving further away from the fusionist sound they captured on this record. Guitars, drum machines, vocals and synthesisers sit side by side on a record that trips through psychedelia and balearic-beat through some esoteric dance-pop constructions. Measured percussion stakes out a nascent path to the dance floor, while abstract sonic pieces coaxed from guitars and lo-fi synths slither through ethereal progressions. Even in the comparatively banal “Techno Drug Trans” Jesse at least offer something beyond simply “jamming on a groove” as this style of music is want to do.

While instrumental tracks like “Funk 4′ Life” and “Big Funking” are enrapturing it’s however on the two vocal tracks that this record makes the biggest impression. “Karaoke King” and “Amazon Queen” are just catchy enough to get you hooked, while the modulating  phrases and constant development leave just enough mystique and adventure to keep you coming back to them. Jesse are labelled an Electro act on Discogs, and while the DIY sonics certainly occupy that sphere of music, theirs is a far more playful interpretation and if they were inclined to, this could have easily crossed over into the popular indie echelons of the likes of Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem of that time.

Even so, it’s probably for the best that it was allowed to simmer and stew through the years, arriving just at the right time in the rest of the world. With time came maturity and a record that would have certainly disappeared into record collections around 2012, now stands out in the contemporary landscape as something unique, even for the likes of what Siletti Ana or Kalifornia-Keke is releasing today.

The dance floor is the stage with Safira

*Photos by Cecilie Andrea Torp & Victoria Therese

Safira Olsen is breaking the mould in a scene currently dominated by commodity over substance. She is a DJ who arrived out of relative obscurity four years ago and has used her sudden rise in popularity in the booth to facilitate a scene around her through her Extra Delicious events in Oslo.

Safira stepped into a DJ booth for the first time at a Mandagsklubben four years ago and has garnered a very intense and dedicated following ever since. She always brings a crowd wherever she plays without much effort and it’s all down to the community she’s built around her and her Extra Delicious concept. 

Born to a Palestinian father and a Norwegian mother, Safira has followed a very different route to the booth from her peers with little prior experience in electronic music before the Dj bug bit. From her very first set, her star rose quickly beyond Oslo and she has appeared in far off destinations like Sri Lanka and more recently Australia, while cultivating a following back home in Oslo.

In 2019 Extra Delicious first appeared on Oslo’s Musikkfest programme, unheard of for an event series in their first year, but the success of that first event and the Extra Delicious events have only strengthened Safira’s resolve in building community from those foundations. “I want to bring more culture and performance artists,” she tells me about her desires in a  candid backstage chat before her last appearance at Jaeger for Oslo World.

“It’s really nice to help people,” she tells me in the context of Extra Delicious’ cultural project and next evolution as a label. “There are so many people sitting at home that are really good at their art art form, but perhaps they don’t have the connection,” and Safira is determined to give these people a platform. She’s s chosen Cubicle and F.Angst aka Sortna to eventually inaugurate the label, but first there’s a dance floor beckoning for her and SAMA’.

The early set is a “different vibe” to what Safira is used to playing, but she has “certain tracks that will warm up a new audience to the darker sounds” she usually plays and which should feed into SAMA’s set quite easily. “Now I feel that I can take my time to build up the audience,” she continues “and it doesn’t have to be full on all the time.” 

The event at Jaeger is her penultimate event before she heads out to Australia for the winter season, and with only a few days remaining in Oslo, we slip into the the chesterfield couch in the backstage at Jaeger to talk about her upcoming trip, Extra Delicious and how she’s established her presence on the DJ circuit.

Why are you going to Australia for an extended period.

It’s a holiday/work trip. I’m just going there with no expectations and hope to get some gigs. I always end up meeting the right people. I want to go to India and Thailand too, because I have a lot of connections there. 

When I read you’re biography it also said that you play a lot in Sri Lanka. What’s the connection with Sri Lanka?

It was two years ago during winter. When you work during the night as a DJ in Norway, you get a little depressed, because you’re sleeping during the day. So I went to Sri Lanka, and I promised myself not to check out any music or the scene, and I ended up playing everywhere and meeting so many people, so it was the most musical journey I’ve ever had. I realised it wasn’t the music that left me uninspired, it was just being stuck in the same scene. 

The year after that I started playing at a festival in Sri Lanka. I ended up playing after one of my favourite artists, Grouch and one of his band mates invited me to stay on his couch in Melbourne. Everything ended up coming together on this journey to where I am now. 

Just from DJing and interacting with people?

It feels like I am on such a good vibe with this. If you try too hard, I don’t think you’ll get it. You just have to do your own thing. You just have to enjoy what you do and the right things will come to you. 

In terms of getting gigs, you are not that active on social media either.

No. I want people to actually want my performance. I don’t want to have to prove myself, because I have a little stage fright. 

When I had my first gig, I was actually forced to do it by André Bravo. It was a Monday at Jaeger. I promised myself that I would never play out in a club before this; I was only doing this for myself and I wouldn’t play out in front of people I didn’t know. Then, I realised when you’re a DJ you’re not actually on a stage, you make the stage for someone else. The dance floor is the stage. 

But you didn’t just step into the booth at that Mandagsklubben right, you had to be DJing before, right?

I had a friend and neighbour, Zoran who had a pair of decks and let me practise after I tried  it out at some after-parties. He just let me do my own thing and only stopped me if it got really bad. I’m really grateful for his patience. He’s not in the club scene at all, just a music lover with a good system at home. 

Then I met Bravo, and he definitely saw something in me and I’m forever thankful that he almost forced me to have my first gig. I was always on the dance floor before bringing people out to dance and now I can give people the same experience. 

From the first time your name cropped up, there always seemed to be a bit of buzz around the nights you played and that has been about you bringing the crowd out. Did you have to work at that?

I’m a people-person. I had a crowd even before I was Djing. I was always getting my friends together to see other DJ friends of mine. Of course, when I first started DJing and reached out to my friends because I was so nervous, they all came and there were hundreds of people on a Monday. It’s really magical for me to have an opportunity for all my friends to meet each other in an environment where I create the vibe. 

My thing was actually horses. I moved to Oslo to study agriculture, and in my last year I discovered this music. It was two different lifestyles, so I had to choose. It was only the past five years that I discovered this kind of music and it’s more than just the music. It’s the environment and a family, a community.

So clubbing came first and then the music came after that for you?

Before, my friends were dragging me out and I was lucky to have friends with good taste in music. And then I started developing my own tastes, and before I would never imagine myself having this job, DJing. It is really strange living a dream, I never had. 

Do you remember a specific moment or track that inspired you to first mix two songs together?

It’s impossible to remember one track, because there’s a lot of music and it’s always changing since I play so much. 

Was there a particular DJ that inspired you in Oslo?

No, because I never really thought I would be doing this. I didn’t plan it. For every step I got to, I never imagined I would get there. 

What  kind of music were you growing up with, was there ever any electronic music playing at home?

Not really. My family had a restaurant and my stepfather was Italian, so there was a lot of Italian music and a lot of live music. I played a little piano, but I didn’t actually get introduced to this kind of music, before I moved to Oslo. It just happened so fast.

I wasn’t into the party thing before I found electronic music. Electronic music was a more relaxed way of going out. It wasn’t about getting someone to fuck or shitfaced. It was more about going there to enjoy yourself and enjoying the music.  

From what I’ve heard, your sets favour a dark, minimal sound. What usually draws you to those sounds?

I started out in Tech-House and the more groovy and melodic vibe. Because I was going out to some forest parties in Oslo, where they played psytrance, I’ve had some influence from these events too. It’s a different kind of experience, and I think I’ve always had some influence from the psy scene.

So that’s where the psychedelic element comes from?

Yes

Is there a lot of music out there that bridges those two worlds and how does filter into your Extra Delicious events?

Yes, like Breger and Mateo, they where the first two guys I booked to Norway along with Cubicle, Joona, Mekke Marit and Tingeling. These are the guys I look up to the most, and I was really lucky to book them and play with them. 

It’s really nice to have the middle thing, where these environments meet. So not only the Techno scene and Minimal scene, but also the artistic performance art and psy-scene where you can combine all these people. Usually you have one event for each of these, but I feel like at my events, I can get all these people in the same place and maybe discover each other’s art and music style. 

I think that’s happening all over the world at the moment, and I think it’s so nice since I am such a people person, I want all my friends to be friends, but people are different. When you have this music that everybody likes, it’s a little easier to bridge these gaps.  

How many Extra Delicious events have you had?

Six.

Is it  just you or do you have a whole crew with you

I like to say we when I talk about Extra Delicious but it’s just me. I try to work with people, but I like to do it my own way. However, I always get a lot of help from my close friends, and I work closely with the artist’s crew too. 

What motivated you to start the events?

Because I love these artists. I wanted somebody else to book these artists, but nobody would. I just had to do it myself.

It’s a lot of work to host those kinds of events, because you go to the forest where there’s no kind of infrastructure.

Yes it is, but I get so much out of it. I get to meet my favourite artists and choose everything myself. It’s really nice to design the kind of parties that I want to go to. The only downside is that I don’t have the time to enjoy them myself.

Have you done any production in terms of making your own music?

No, I have such great expectations, and with production, it’s really hard to do something well. I need a lot of time for this, and it has to be something good. That’s why it’s good for me to travel as well, so I can use the time. You can’t force creativity.

You are pretty content just DJing?

That’s the problem. When you are really good at something, it’s really hard to start from scratch and do something else. It’s about stepping out of my comfort zone. 

You have the label coming up and going to Australia, and what else do you have planned for  the future?

There are a lot of things coming up, but I don’t want to jinx it. I want to focus the attention and the money I get from this on trying to help other people, beyond clubbing. I want to use my resources to do a little more than just clubbing. It’s about connecting more with people in Oslo through Extra Delicious.  

So you’re a bit of an altruist. Is this something that extends to DJing too, are you consciously aware of the people on the dance floor and making them happy?

Yes, that’s what drives me. It’s because I have a lot of regular guests that just come to see me, and the nice thing about my crowd is that my biggest fans are also my best friends. I have a personal relationship with my audience.

Album of the Week: FKA Twigs – Magdalene

Everything that FKA Twigs has accomplished through her career has been groundbreaking for a pop artist, and that goes for her latest LP too “Magdalene.” Her sophomore album, which comes after a five year hiatus from her stunning debut, “LP1;” the theatre tour which preceded it; and the fact every song on the record is a ballad, are all things that are completely discordant with common practises in popular music. The impish British artist has never been one to conform, and ever since we first heard the Arca-produced “Water” and saw the Jesse Kanda video that accompanied it, it was clear that this young artist will be bringing something unique to that sphere of music, crossing over into the mainstream from left field electronica. Working with experimental musical artists like Arca,  and exploiting the full range of her voice in a R&B dialect, FKA Twigs hit upon a sound that none before and since, have been able to execute to the same captivating effect.

After the combined success of “EP2” and “LP1” most other artists would have immediately followed it up to capitalise on the success, and this says a lot of FKA Twigs character and artistry, waiting five years to release the long-anticipated “Magdalene.” For production she turned to the equally avant garde, Nicholas Jaar and where this album diverges from the rest of her discography is that the music takes a more reserved approach, compared to the bold electronica of previous records, and it works in tandem with exposing and emphasising FKA Twigs’ voice on this record. Going from the quivering falsetto of  “cellophane” to the gnarling rebel yell of “fallen alien,” FKA Twigs’ voice undulates between vulnerable and confronting exposing lyrics that encroach on common themes of love and heartbreak from a 21st century feminists’ perspective.

“The record is about every lover that I’ve ever had, and every lover that I’m going to have,” she told ID  magazine, but it’s done in a manner that sees her question “how, as a woman, your story is often attached to the narrative of a man?” Headlining this theme is the central figure of Mary Magdalene, the archetype for any woman whose story was attached to the narrative of a man. “Yes, I heard you needed me,” sings FKA Twigs in an entrancing whisper on the title track, drawing you into the the enveloping sonorities of the track.

There’s an inescapable intimacy on this record as FKA Twigs wears a heart on her sleeve throughout the 9 songs on the album. It’s not necessarily a personal intimacy with the artist, but one that comes from an inherent understanding with the protagonists in the songs. FKA Twigs has never been an artist to share anything of her personal life through her music, and she continues to do this on Magdalene, but the combination of the production and the way her voice dominates each song makes this the most fully realised piece of work that she as an artist has produced. The gentility of the songs, the theme that runs through it and the way it comes together is yet another impressive landmark in her unprecedented musical career.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

We’re stuck in some immoveable entropy between nostalgia and progression, where old archetypes are establishing new sonic aesthetics like a Duchampian pissoir stuck on the flush cycle. Fleeting relationships with inconsequential objects from an unfamiliar past are being revised within the sanctimonious ideology of the present and re-evaluated in extraordinary hyperbole. Remoteness is a currency and value is determined by our collective ignorance. We’re placing impossible significance on the effects of a rose-tinted view into the past. 

Tawdry cliché is informing the future in some kitsch appreciation for the forgotten music of our past. There was a reason they were left to their temporal decay, but time had buried rationale, and we’ve unearthed remains in impetuous desires to find hidden treasures amongst bare bones. And where we’ve found none, we’ve simply invented new ones in our pursuit of finding something interesting in an increasingly monotonous landscape. 

Nostalgia is informing the future, using perfunctory tropes garnered in a revisionist culture in the pursuit of something new, while leaving a yawning trench of ubiquity in the middle called the present. The classics are entrenched, and we are on a fool’s errand to improve on them, so were dulling expressive intricacies to an innocuous drone echoing from the ditsantp ast. Hindsight will be 2020, or so the popular joke goes, sacrificing foresight for an accessibility locked in some imagined collective memory. 

There is only regret in the confines of the past, and our only escape is a glass door at the edge of Skippergata. It’s one of the last vestiges of a forgotten tradition of defining the future and it’s here that we will stake the last claim for a progressive society. This is the cut with Filter Musikk. 

 

Trans- 4M – Arrival / Amma (Safe Trip) 12″ 

As we said, the classics are entrenched, so why bother trying to improve on what has been done. What Young Marco’s Safe Trip has been doing with its contributions to record annals is making these classics accessible to a whole new audience that have been thwarted by record prospectors on Discogs. 

Trans 4M’s genre defining LP “Sublunar Oracles” would have been lost to niche record collections if it hadn’t been for Safe Trip unearthing the classic for us earlier this year, but that’s not all that Young Marco and co unearthed in their excavation of the Belgium duo’s back-catalogue. Two new pieces from the LP have surfaced in what the label has claimed were previously unreleased remixes from that same era, but could also just be a clever bit of marketing.

The dusty tape hiss that accompany the two remixes could prove pivotal in your own conclusions, but what’s hard to ignore is that they improve little on the original pieces; They are little more than shortened radio-friendly edits of the forebears. 

The remixers take the axe to “Arrival” and “Amma,” and in doing so, remove all the drama from the tracks in an effort to accomodate the impatient DJ. With a kick drum on steroids, “Arrival” exchanges narrative for immediacy, getting that awkward introduction out of the way for the crux of the track, while retaining that inherent beauty in the melody of the original machines. 

“Amma’s” foreshortened nature works a little to its advantage and where it was an album track in the past it now would make the perfect introduction to a DJ set. These remixes are catering to the DJ who doesn’t want to bring out the entire LP and needs something that will hold up against other modern tracks.  

 

Jeremiah R. – Tales From The Dark Reef (Distant Wave) 12″ 

Deep grooves, languid keys, soundscapes projected from alien habitations and synthesisers chirping in friendly banter across a void, Jeremiah R. has created his own intricate little world contained within the grooves on this mini-album for Distant Wave.

There’s an exquisite attention to detail throughout this record as elements combine across densely orchestrated pieces, composed from an extensive musical palette. FM synthesises and toms plucked out of the eighties sit alongside deep, brooding Moog bass-lines and 909 kicks, while irreverent modular synthesisers plot a squirmy path through intelligent machines. 

Between the rolling rhythm sections, the affable melodies and the alien soundscapes, Jeremiah R. has put together a record that engages on every level. There’s a focussed rhythmic pursuit that will engage with the dancer, especially on a track like “Axolotl’s Journey” while a track like “Octopus” offers some soothing melodic relief and “Subsequent Mutations” unlocks something for the more adventurous listener without losing touch with those two integral elements to the album, melody and rhythm. 

“Tales From The Dark Reef” is a great example of the natural development of the Electro genre in an age where the extensive scope of modular synthesisers and DIY traditions have converged in the most expressive realisation of what artists like Drexciya set about to do at the gestation of the genre. The obvious deep-sea-dwelling connection is hard to ignore, especially with titles like “Octopus” but this is no mere revisionist hack job.

 

DMX Krew – Malekko Phase Mod (Fanzine) 12″ 

DMX Krew goes Techno! The UK DJ and artist falls into step with a 4-4 groove and drum machines plotting a determined course through four tracks that still manage to retain Edward Upton’s unequivocal robotic charm.

DMX Krew is nothing if not prolific. He releases a record a week, and we leave more music off these features than we talk about, but they are nearly all deserving of our praises. It’s never that others aren’t good enough, simply that a lot of them perpetuate a very similar sonic aesthetic so it’s only when he does something quite different that we latch on to the record and pay it and the artist dividends in this feature.

It’s not like he hasn’t made Techno before, but in a contemporary landscape dominated by slouching bodies modulating against a backdrop of draconian rhythms and miserable atmosphere, Upton injects a sense of frivolity and bounce back into the stale genre with “Malekko Phase Mod”.

It’s Acid tinged Techno born from chiptune and raised in a sporadic modular world, which in Upton’s hands is incredibly infectious. Striking dynamic arrangements and vivid sonic hues come together on a release that could get any stationary dance floor moving uninhibitedly, especially on the B-side. 

 

Restive Plaggona – Double Standards (Sacred Court) 12″ 

Restive Plaggona is a Techno artist that likes to play on his Grecian heritage and imbues releases with and evocative sense of drama, destined for the club. Avoiding defined formats, Restive Plaggona’s music undulates between brutal percussive rhythms and atmospheres like horror movie soundtracks, in executions the defy all categorisation.

On “Double Standard”, his second release for the formidable Sacred Court label, Restive Plaggona continues to pursue an interpretation of club music that borders on the industrial, but it’s only ever on “Industrial Training Experience” that the music ventures close enough to a formulaic dance floor to be pigeonholed into Techno, and even then clattering noises and oppressive melodic atmospheres strip away any agency from a dominating beat arrangement. 

It’s Restive Plaggona’s insistence on some definable melodic component in his music that sets him apart from his peers and whether it’s a simple arpeggio or distant harmonic reflections, there’s something tangible in the music beyond the sultry noise of the machines. It’s often exotic and on “Pink Collar” it’s very effectively contained in the ghostly vocal and the triplet acid line moving through the mix like a whirling dervish. 

 

Techfunkers – Techfunk Is Where It’s At vol. 1 (Sex Mania) 12″ reissue 

There’s a reason records like these are still considered classics today and why they are being reissued. It’s to remind us that any modern interpretation will always remain less-than their original counterpart. 

Originally released in 1995 on the Sex Mania (apparently some of the inspiration for Sex Tags Mania), Techfunkers’ original LP in 3 parts is being reissued for the first time and volume 1 has arrived at Filter Musikk. And almost fifteen years on… it still holds up. 

A track like “Techfunk Revenge” remains an archetype for Electro today with new artists diverging little from that sound, using the very same machines in much the same way to create modern copies, with a watered down effect. 

Tecfunkers were the originals and what they set as precedent all those years ago have become formulaic and stale in recent years. The originals in their DIY stripped-back form infect a little more personality and while many new artists will do away with “cheesy” vocals like they appear on “Looking 4 Da Perfect Beat” in Techfunkers hands it’s still unique with things like  the LA-infused onomatopoeia of “the” as “da,” reflecting the West-Coast origins of the genre. 

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. 

Album of the Week: DJ Harvey – Mercury Rising Vol.2

“Never Mind The Balearics,  Here’s DJ Harvey’s Mercury Rising volume II!” To celebrate DJ Harvey’s 5th season at Pikes Ibiza with Mercury Rising, the DJ  released a follow up compilation and mix to accompany the momentous occasion and pay special tribute to founder Tony Pike, who died earlier this year. The English DJ’s reputation precedes him wherever he goes, and at Pikes he has found a residency that is able to accommodate his extensive musical universe, which this compilation distills down into a pool-side mood at the infamous hotel.

Between drum machines, synthesisers, guitars and hints of exotic influences, DJ Harvey samples the musical bastions of what would inform the term balearic in the late nineteen eighties  through a selection of modern and original interpretations of the style of music. From the Tuareg-themed psychedelia of Khidja’s “Tatooine Moon” to Rune Lindbæk and Chris Coco’s spacey “Weekend Billionaires,” DJ Harvey samples tracks constructed from a rich melange of sounds that honour the balearic traditions first established by DJs like Jose Padilla.

Harvey transports the listener to Pikes Ibiza, providing the perfect escape from the doldrums of an approaching winter with a compilation that glistens in the light. Breezy keys and light-footed percussive sounds perpetuate an idyllic atmosphere like dipping into cool waters on blistering summer’s day. DJ Harvey latches on to this feeling from the first song and through the vast cornucopia of sounds that emerge from his selections, he maintains an evocative sense of mystery, luring the listener on a journey towards Ibiza and on toward a Mercurian dawn.

DJ Harvey has never been known to play in the obvious with record collections and experiences that extend way beyond the average DJ and so rarities like Marta Acuna’s ‎ “Dance, Dance, Dance” is to be expected, but sitting beside a much newer  track like Midlife’s “Magnificent Moon” this compilation is not some supercilious adventure through a very expensive record bag (even thought some of these tracks are very likely to go up in value after discogs gets through with it) but a very masterful and comprehensive assemblage that specifically reflects a night at Pikes and not just DJ Harvey’s legendary prowess at the decks.

My bags are packed… next stop… Pikes Ibiza.

Mind, heart and elevation with Sami Zibak

*Photo by Dor Schwartz

Sami Zibak is a queer Palestinian DJ that emerged out of Tel Aviv’s club circuit, and has gone to help establish a new clubbing community in Haifa as well as regularly playing abroad in places like Berlin and soon Oslo. Sami Zibak’s personal history is colourful mosaic of influences that straddles a rich cultural heritage that goes from his Palestenian roots to the queer clubbing community that embraced him as a dancer and DJ. 

Stepping into the queer clubbing community in Tel Aviv, Sami Zibak went from being a guest to a dancer, providing the alluring visual component to the music. Dancing opened the door to DJing, and Sami soon captivated his audiences in sound, in much the same way his dancing did before in movement. As one of the first openly queer Palestenian DJs, he not only paved a way forward for others, but opened the door to entire community waiting in the wings.

From Tel Aviv he moved to Haifa, considered to be the beating heart of the Palestinian underground scene, leading a gateway to the surrounding Arab communities in the region including Golan Heights, Ramallah and Amman (Jordan). Sami Zibak is an elusive force on DJ circuit in the region with sets informed by the same eclecticism that follows his cultural roots.

There is very little left unexplored through his sets, as he favours an openness that reflects the person behind the set. From Deep House to 90’s rave breakbeat, Sami’s sets can go everywhere in his unflinching pursuit in finding some fluidity between his audience and the music he plays. Being openly queer and Palestenian, comes with its own complexities that seem unlikely to merely unravel through a set. So with a visit to Oslo for Everysome and Jaeger looming, we reached out to Sami via email to ask more about some of these complexities and how they inform his work as a DJ. 

Hello Sami and thank you for taking the time to talk to us. 

Hey! Thank you very much for this interview! 

I understand that you are a queer Palestinian living and working in Israel. Can you give us a little more background information about how you arrived in Tel-Aviv? 

So, many people don’t know, but after Israel declared itself as a country in 1948, Palestinians were divided into 3 separate domains, Gaza Strip, The West Bank, and some of us stayed inside what became Israel. My family is from Nazareth which is an Arab city in northern Israel that is well known in the christian faith, and Nazarene Palestinians didn’t leave their homes (as many other Palestinians did back in 1948). So I am from the Palestinians that lives inside Israel and I have an Israeli passport. 

To make a long story short on how I got to Tel Aviv, it all started with my parents Azmi and Ghada, that left Nazareth after finishing high school and moved to Haifa city to study Arts and Engineering in the university. After graduating, they moved to Tel-Aviv and was part of the first Palestinians to live in this city back in the 80’s. They wanted to live a less conservative life and experience more cultural options. Tel Aviv is a city mainly inhabited by Jewish-Israelis and its considered to be the jewel of Israel, which means the government puts a lot of money and effort to make it look shiny, bright and colorful, which in many ways it IS, but in some other ways it is not, when you realise it’s a bourgeoisie bubble that likes to perceive itself as open and elevated when in real life it’s a greenhouse for ignorant rich people that practice left wing ideas as if they were a pilates or yoga classes… in other words, their elevation reaches only to the edges of their comfort zone and no further. 

Anyway, I was born in Jaffa, which is an Arab city connected to Tel-Aviv. My parents moved here when me and my older sister, Haya, were born so we could grow in an Arabic speaking environment and practice our Arab and Palestinian culture. I will explain shortly that in the middle east, there are Arabs with different religions, there are muslim, druzi, and christians. My family is christian (not religious), but regardless of our so called faith, we share the same cultural system as any other Arabs.

I grew up in Jaffa, I loved my childhood. At some point in the beginning of my high school days I became very socially popular in the Arab community in Jaffa for my work in the scouts, church and other local institutions. But when I came out as gay at age 17.5, I was totally banned from this community, and in one day, all the connections I had, came to an end. As a result I moved to Tel Aviv, to search for a place and people that will accept me as I am and will grant me the environment to practice and discover my unique self. 

How did you get into club music from there?

Photo by David Havroni

I’m a super social person, therefore I make friends quickly. And so was my first footsteps in the city; I was very excited and thirsty to discover new communities and people, and the Tel-Avivians were extremely curious to know who is this new gay Arab that arrived in their city, because back then (2007) I was almost the only Arab in the hip community of Tel Aviv. So in the very beginning before I knew anybody I went to a gay party called PAG – I was under age to go into the club, 17.5 years old, and the bouncer allowed me to go in because I was cute, or because it was my destiny to go in. Entering this party which was my first club experience ever, I was shocked from everything I saw, starting from the electronic music (back then it was the Electro genre) and from the cute guys and from the crazy performers and dancers,  fashion, which was all about neon new wave. It was a whole new world for me and I loved it because I have never seen such a thing before. I fell in love with this music and vibe, and shortly after I started to work at the door of this party and went in a dress to my shift. 

I was super bitchy with the guests, so the owner of the party, Roy Raz told me to go inside the club and dance. A little while after I became the ultimate all time diva of this party and my voguing dance performances are well remembered and admired till today in many parts of Tel Aviv. Many other new queer personalities in the city, both Arabs and Jews came in search of me and were inspired and encouraged to be their beautiful self. One thing I can tell you is that I couldn’t do it without the music that was played in the club. A mix of electro and oldskool house trax with piano keys, put my soul on fire and my body couldn’t resist making the most amazing poses and postures on stage (the stage was a speaker). The funny thing is that when I was performing on stage, I always had an inner conflict whether to continue dancing or to go down the stage and run to the dj booth to ask him for the track id. 

Yes, I believe it was dancing that provided the impetus to start DJing. What was it about DJing that appealed to you and what music tended to spur you on?

As a dancer I developed a close relationship to the resident dj of the party, those days it was Partok, nowadays he’s a resident dj at The Block club in Tel Aviv, lives in Berlin and plays regularly at Berghain. I was really into his music, and he knew my appreciation was genuine because my musical background was totally different and what I was hearing at the club was completely new to my ear. One day he opened a small bar in Tel-Aviv called Laika Bar and he offered me the opportunity to throw a party there and be the dj. It was kind of a funny thing that we did for the gimmick, but he really taught me to dj on actual CDS. Back then the music I loved was American east coast new wave of deep house, mainly originating from the Underground Quality label of Dj Jus Ed, and its superstars back then: Fred P, Levon Vincent, Dj Qu, Jenifa Mayanja, Anton Zap (Russia), and I was also very into the minimal sound of Hamburg that was led by Dial Records and Smallville records. 

Did you have any musical background before this?

I played the violin through childhood, and then the saxophone throughout early high school but I had to stop because of surgery on my lungs. But that was okay because exactly then, a bit after the millennium, the internet became more usable and the likes of wikipedia became available. I remember surfing the web for hours moving from one topic to another through the modern history of rock music supported by lots of psychedelic, progressive rock and experimental music records my parents collected in the 70’s and 80’s. I have always been drawn to music that has an evolutionary background to it. That’s why when I play a track I know what the producer stands for when he released it. 

You moved to Haifa at some point. What was the motivation for the move and how do those two scenes differ from each other? 

After many years in Tel Aviv between 2007 till 2013, I didn’t practice my Arabian culture, and I barely spoke my mother tongue. I was waiting for life to open a door to Arabs that will accept me as I am, and that I could be who I really am in their midst, with all my freedom and colorful personality and mind. And this door opened in 2013 at one of the “Acid Crew” parties I was doing with my crew back then in Tel Aviv. 

I was dancing in the middle of the crowd when suddenly I heard people speaking in Arabic, and I turned and looked at them and fell in love. It was as if I found home again. I could speak Arabic in the midst of my Tel-Avivian parallel-reality that I created for myself. That was insane, and after the party ended, I couldn’t think about anything else other than these beautiful people I met there. The weeks after, I started to go regularly to Haifa to dj at their parties. Till the day I decided to move there and make the best out of this opportunity. 

For all of us, both me and the Haifa underground scene which was in its very first steps, our encounter was both exciting and weird. For me I was totally shocked that I’ve found Arabs that liked to party hard like me, and they are all about freedom and self expression and resistance to the oppressing norms. And for them it was shocking to have a new member of their community to be extremely open about my gender fluidity and my sexual orientation. 

Plus our music was so different. I was playing strictly house music both oldskool and deep house, and they were kinda still into Trance music. Slowly they opened up to techno and underground house music after travelling in Europe and visiting clubs in Berlin etc. 

Another difference between my experience in Tel Aviv and Haifa, was that the Tel Avivian scene which is a totally Jewish-Israeli scene based upon comfort. Although they sometimes have problems with the police and stuff, in general they are comfortable because they are in their own country and they are free to express them-selves as they like. 

However, the Haifa scene is completely different, because its a scene that was forged as an encounter riot to the racism its members faced in their attempts to participate in the Israeli nightlife and cultural scene. Many times they were rejected at clubs, and not given chances to play in Israeli clubs. So the scene itself is more about resistance and riot against the opression, and into creating a safe space for Palestinian artists and ravers both from the west bank and Israel to come and enjoy themselves and be creative together. 

Were there ever any prejudices or obstructions that you faced stepping into the booth as a queer Palestinian?

In Tel Aviv, I always knew how to transform what could be an obstacle to an advantage. For example, in Tel Aviv which is a city ruled by Jewish-Israeli people that for many years didn’t give almost any Arab Palestinian dj/party promoter/performer a stage, I could break through this wall and claim my stage, when I know that many other Palestinians couldnt do the same.

In Haifa, one of the main obstacles was and still is, is the fact that I have such a strong and rare connection to Tel Aviv, which some Palestinian people consider as treachery. So many times I find myself looked at in a suspicious manner by my fellow Palestinians in the Haifa/Ramallah scenes. 

And last but not least, in Ramallah (West Bank), I have many ravers there that love what I have to offer as a dj but some of them again have a problem with my connection to Tel Aviv. Also there was that time I played in Ramallah and almost got arrested by Palestinian authority for going into the toilet with a guy. Haha. thank the goddess I had the urge to run.  

Photo by Efrat Shahar Kaplan

From what I’ve heard (mostly online), your sets are quite diverse, and you go from Disco to nineties breakbeat. But what do you usually look for in music to make it into your sets?

I always look for mind & heart uplift and elevation through sonic frequencies and words, adding to it the colorful freedom my queer state of being gives me, and there you have a diverse, colorful, uplifting, cool set. 

Also the background of the music is super important to me. Music that is strictly made to express a need for change will always have my favor because when I play it in a club I support them and educate my crowd. 

We’ve had a few DJs from the region play in Oslo recently, and for the most part it’s very similar to what we hear around clubs in Europe. Are there ever any regional (especially Palenstenian) elements that you like to convey in your sets?

I don’t combine Arabian/Palestinian motives into my sets. I play only what I love in the genre of club music. I am aware of the international demand from Arab djs to come and play electronic music combined with Arabian elements. But I am against this oriental obligation. I don’t have to play Arabic stuff just because I’m Arab. I will play whatever I like. But I know that many other Arab djs fall into this demand and play oriental sounds for the white crowd that is thirsty for a taste of exotic rhythms. 

Do you play a lot in Palestine today?

Depends on what you call Palestine :)  I play regulary in Haifa at Kabareet, which is the first Palestinian club ever to be in both Israeli and Palestinian. I am a resident dj over there. Same goes to my monthly appearance at the Tel Avivian club Alphabet which is the only club in Tel Aviv that gives a stage to Palestinian Arab djs to perform.

And regarding playing in the west bank, I used to do it a lot, but honestly I was a bit traumatized from the aggressive response of the authorities there to my gayness and I haven’t visited the city of Ramallah for 4 years. Plus the electronic scene over there was a bit quiet in the last couple of years, and the Hip Hop/Trap scene got stronger so there aren’t that many opportunities to play there as a house music DJ lately.  

Club Culture and dance music had always been in some part in the sense of escapism, and I’ve always found it interesting that such a healthy club scene like the one in Tel Aviv can exist in a politically charged region like that. How are you able to distance yourself from the politics in that region in a club if at all?

When you live in Israel, you can’t be political all the time because if you do so, you won’t do anything here. So sometimes I ignore many things that I think is wrong, and focus on the good things. Also, I would definitely not call the scene in Tel Aviv “Healthy”. I mean yes, from the foreign perspective it looks that we have parties, and we bring over loads of international djs and we also export many locals to perform in the world, but at the end of the day, if you come and have a close look at the condition of nightlife in the city, its kinda bad at the moment. 

There are almost no clubs in the city. There are 3 main clubs for the underground scene, The Block, Breakfast Club and Alphabet Club. Each one of those is kinda struggling against the police and permissions, and music wise each one of them has their own specific line-ups and djs and they forge a bubble alone by themselves. All the other clubs here are commercial so no need to even mention. Furthermore, nightlife in Israel is super ignorant about the political situation, and totally in denial about the existence of Palestinian people and their struggle. Unfortunately most of the ravers here come to clubs and drug themselves to forget. 

So how do you convey a queer identity thgrough your DJ sets and is it transerfable to any context?

I have a weird approach to the term Queer identity. First of all being completely sober and a non smoker in the dj booth is a hell of a queer appearance in an enviroment fed on drugs, alcohol and sigarretes. I usually come to my gigs with a box of fruits and vegetables that I cut at home, and I eat them during my set.  And if I need an elevation, I sniff my tiny bottle of Lavender essential oil. 

Sometimes (it depends on my mood) I can wear dresses of gender fluid clothes. And music wise, my sets are very diverse, I can go through soulful house, disco, rave, breaks, chicago house, detroit futurism and olskool techno. I am free to do whatever I like, because for me deejaying is not about fulfilling somebody’s expectations. It’s about being myself, and I know that when im 100% myself, it’s fun! For me and for the crowd. If u catch me once playing bad, you should know that I’m not feeling comfortable. And this can happen to me if the crowd is too high on cocaine and just asking me constantly to give them bangers. Just let me be myself, with my imperfection, and I will go with you to a beautiful place. 

Photo by Eliran Nargassi

You’ve spent some time playing in Berlin this year. Is there a connection there for you and how might you play differently there compared back to back home?

Berlin happens to be the capital of electronic dance music nowadays, and many of the industry people, whether they are ravers, djs, promoters or agents, live there. So on one trip I can meet many of my friends from the industry and have fun together, plus we can plan creative projects for the future. 

One of the most interesting ventures I’m doing now is Fluid which is a series of events I do with my dear friend the dj and producer Mor Elian which is a world renowned artist, originally from Tel Aviv, and John Humphry of Higher Ground Agency in Berlin. We do these events at OHM club which is such a cool and sweet venue in the back of the building of the famous Tresor club. 

We provide a platform for talented artists from around the world that usually don’t have a chance to perform in Berlin. We have a special focus on artists from queer scenes, especially those that face political repression or are suffering from the results of conflict. In November we’re gonna host Oramics crew which is a music collective from Poland that is working on providing a safe space for LGBTQ+ clubbing in today’s conservative right wing Poland. 

When I play in Berlin I allow myself more freedom of expression because I know the crowd there is open and want to see the best of me. I believe the same will go for my gigs in Oslo. 

You’re actually playing twice in Oslo when you visit. How do you think your sets will differ between Everysome, a queer event on a Friday night, and Jaeger, which is a little more mixed and on a Sunday?

First of all, I’m super excited to visit Oslo for the first time. I have a special place in my heart for this northern part of the world that I am excited to fulfill in this visit and I’m very grateful to Terje and the crew of Everysome and Jaeger to invite me. I think Queer Friday will be more about Breakbeats, 90’s Rave House music, and Garage. And Mixed Sunday would definitely be the Edgy side of Deep House music. But in both cases, my sets are a mutual creation of me and the crowd therefore creative flexibility with a sense of adventure is always a blessing. 

So let’s discover together! 

 

On my own terms with Karina

“It’s funny what’s going on with social media,” says Karina Chaczbabian while contemplating the spoon in her coffee. “A double espresso” she insisted earlier, “it’s Monday”. “All these things you have to learn,” she continues slipping back into the thought with a rhetorical “do I really want to do this?”

Does she need to do this is a more urgent question. Karina has been DJing successfully around the world these past twenty years, and she’s been doing it all on her own terms. She’s been an enigma, always on some kind of tour, between her various residencies around the world, and yet when she posts something from her artist page today she’s lucky if she receives “three likes” with even her close friends are unlikely to see it. “I hope that people booking these people understand,” she says of the current DJ hype as she contemplates the ubiquity of social media in today’s DJ culture, before she resigns “I just don’t know anymore…”  

It’s a rare moment I get with Karina. She’s on a brief stopover in Oslo, before leaving for the United States and Mexico, where she has a tour lined-up for the autumn season. She hopes to get in a recording session with Connie Yin in New York for their new C&K project, but she will remain on the move in the constant transient lifestyle of a working DJ.  

This has been the reality for the Karina through the better part of her career and regardless of her woes on social media, it doesn’t look to change anytime soon. After the States she’ll hardly have a moment before jetting off to her residency at Analog Room in Dubai, where the Iranian crew has finally secured their own location and then she’s planning an extended stay in the newest Techno capital of the world,Tbilisi, Georgia.

“I really loved the country so I’m considering going there for a few months, and I really want to discover the culture and make music,” she impresses. Georgia, Tbilisi will be the next stop in a life that has taken her from Poland to Norway, Egypt, Ibiza, Berlin and New York through the course of her youth and adult career, which shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. And remarkably she’s done it all with a 100-odd records always in tow.

I meet Karina for a coffee on her way to Filter Musikk where she has to convince Roland Lifjell to hold a consignment of records for her return in a few months. She played Storgata 26 the weekend before, and was delighted in the fact that she could play some of her Disco records this time around. She has been playing a fair bit of Disco recently from Oslo to New York  where she keeps some of those records “in a suitcase at a friend’s place in the Bronx.” While in Oslo she is also trying to coordinate to relocate these records for access upon her next visit to the US and Karina does all this without an agent or manager.

“I haven’t found the right person for me,” she says when I ask her about her lack of agent.  “Why should I pay 20% for something I can do myself,” she demands, but she can agree “it’s not an easy way” of working. Karina is the last of her kind, a DJ that negates the hype and in an industry dominated by social media, she stands out today as an individual dedicated to her craft and the tools of her craft, that could never be appreciated in the measly 80 characters of an average insta post. Hers is a purist pursuit, that is enshrined in the bedrock of the same fundamentals of DJing that started in Ibiza for Karina when she first cut her teeth in the business end of club culture and DJing. 

How did she end up in Ibiza, I wonder. “It’s very simple,” she says, “I just went to Ibiza on holiday. I was looking at these guys working and I was like; I want to do that. I was studying economics at that point, and I was like, why I’m doing that? I got addicted to Ibiza and I spent ten seasons there.” 

She started her life in Ibiza as a waitress, but after a late night at DC10 and Cocoon, she missed her shift and subsequently lost her job. It turned out to be fortuitous for the burgeoning DJ. Even then, Ibiza “wasn’t cheap, everybody was doing everything to survive” and Karina went from waitressing to doing promo for Cream. This was a time before the ubiquitous power of social media and promotion meant reaching out directly to the people. ”I was their best promoter and I actually hated that music,” says Karina with grimace, but she found it quite easy to separate her personal tastes with her job. “I was thinking to myself; ‘There are people that like this and I need to find those people.’” 

She quickly moved on from Cream to Cocoon where she spent six years while DJing around Ibiza. She picked up a residency at The Zoo Project during this time, and the open air would eventually consume all her time, forcing her to leave Cocoon and devote all her energy to The Zoo Project. “I love The Zoo Project – it is so much fun,” muses Karina “an incredible amusement park for grown ups.” 

2019 marks the first year in 20 years that Karina will not be in Ibiza or her beloved The Zoo Project, and I‘m curious whether it has something to do with the recent spat of police raids around the island. “I just wanted something different,” she replies. “I don’t feel it’s changing in a direction that interests me,” she says when I press her on the state of club culture on the balearic isle. That side of the island was inconsequential to a person like Karina, who tended to stay clear of the known tourist traps around the island. Her decision to leave was one based on a simple desire to explore more of the world, especially North America, Georgia and Armenia.

Thanks to her base in the Big Apple she’s travelled all over the States, especially enjoying the divergent House and Techno scenes of San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and her favorite Detroit. “Playing in Detroit is quite a challenge for me as an European. I love it and I’m also very nervous. I respect it a lot, ” she says with an unbridled enthusiasm. She’s travelled between Europe and the USA 14 times in the last year and even though she might be in Georgia next year she has no intention of slowing down next year either.

As for her desire to move to Tbilisi, it came after a recent visit to the region. “I went to go look for my roots” she hisses, as a bit of an eastern European accent glides off the oo’s and into the esses. 

“I’m Armenian by descent,” she explains and after a brief visit to the country, she has been inspired to explore more of the region, with Georgia as her base and the booming Techno scene there to facilitate her move. “I really loved the country, so I’m considering going there for a few months, and I really want to discover the culture and the music.” 

She hopes the move might give her the time to work on some new music, but ultimately Karina has always been more of a DJ than a producer. She has enjoyed a musical output, releasing music on Cymawax, God Particle and recently a track called “Acid Meow” for Absence Seizure, but DJing always seemed to trump all her other creative endeavours. Asked about her reserved output, she breaks out in a simper with “yeah of course, because I’m homeless. I’m constantly on tour.” With most of her machines in a house in Poland (where she spends a fair amount of her time too), making music is a real endeavour she can only enjoy when she’s settled somewhere. “That’s the plan for next year,” she tells me. “To stay longer in one place,” in an effort to “work on things a bit more.” She has however managed to find some time in the last year to work on new music with friend and fellow DJ, Connie Yin (Resolute, NYC).

“We actually became good friends before we DJed together,” says Karina, but  it was after playing back to back that they forged a musical bond too. Karina admits, “I don’t like to play back to back all the time,” but with Connie “it was really fun.” 

They shared a musical kinship through DJing, which expounded through their friendship led to them collaborating on their own music as C&K. After an extended stay in New York, Karina and Connie managed to lay down some material in what would be a future release, but Karina insists there’s no rush in putting anything out just yet. “I’m not going to release music, just for it to be released.” She insists on a “quality of sound” in her productions and “music as art” and not a commodity to be flouted as some marketing gimmick to get more gigs.

Talk of a C&K label has also surfaced, but in much the same way that Karina treats music, she “was never interested in having a label for the sake of having a label.” A C&K label would have to remain consistent with her philosophy on music. “I can make a House track in a day,” she insists with a sarcastic overtone; “but for what, is it going to be that good?” Like she is prone to do, Karina leaves the question hanging, and I can’t always  discern if it’s rhetorical. On this occasion I answer with another question. Do you feel you have to make music to get more playtime?

She gives my a side glance before answering; “Obviously there is a correlation… do I need to follow that…. A bit if I want to, but not really.”  It’s understandable why she won’t acquiesce to the archetypes that dominate DJ culture today. As she insists, she is a DJ and a DJ that still honours the traditions of her craft. She won’t be lured into a debate about digital over vinyl, and she respects every DJ’s decision in their choice of format, but she’ll always prefer vinyl. “It’s my choice, and I’m happy with what I do,” she explains while talking about the benefits of the tactile format. 

You can’t deny however, that there’s a certain dedication involved in carrying a big bag of records around the world, and yet the only real downside for Karina is the “the weight and you can’t really take all the music with you that you’d love to have.” Karina thrives in the limitation, but I get the overwhelming sense that these records aren’t merely tools for Karina. “It’s an addiction,” she stresses “an absolute incurable disease,” and yet she doesn’t appear to be looking for any cure. “I sometimes have two copies of a record,” she admits. For Karina, if there’s a “record on sale, that nobody knows about, it can’t just stay there. I feel sorry for the record. It’s talking to me; take me… take me.”

Her second (or is it fourth at this point) home in Poland contains the largest portion of a collection that’s dotted around the world. “I lost control a long time ago,” says Karina about the spread of record collection which includes the House and Techno she plays most often in her DJ sets, but there’s a uniformed approach to her buying habits with records that have “to stand out to be a little different.” Karina is determined that “it can’t have any aggressive sounds in it” and she likes her records “to be moody,” especially the ones she plays in her sets. 

“I’ve invested a lot of money in records,” she impresses and while her friends by now “have a house and a car,” Karina is content in having her freedom and a bag of records at her side. Whenever she returns to Poland, it’s like “digging in my own shop” she tells me with a smile, rediscovering some old favourites, while swapping out the records in her travelling bag. Putting so much effort into the music, Karina prefers a 4 hours for her sets .“I hate these one hour slots. It’s boring, you’re done before you get started.” She prefers to take her time so she and her audience can “have more of an understanding of the night.” She absolutely abhors festival sets today where it’s a case of “bang and your done” and that mature approach is something that follows Karina through all aspects of her music.

Her dedication to the vinyl format; her reserved approach to production and releasing records; her views on running a label; and her desire to remain in one place for an extended (yet temporary) period in order to experience the culture and the music of a region completely is at odds with what the immediacy that DJ- and club culture demands today, both in the physical- and the virtual realm. From her time in Ibiza to her next adventure in Georgia, Karina’s career in music has been forged on her own terms, and there’s no reason she would stop the cycle now.

As our time winds down and we start to make our way to Filter Musikk, Karina relishes in talking about a new track she’s working on and “getting a bass-line together” for the future piece. “I’m really excited about it. It’s a Detroit kind of track, called ‘Pure D’, and it needs that warm bass-line.” Moreover she is “really thinking about working on new music next year,” but first it’s off to the USA, Dubai and somewhere in between there’s a stop home in Kristiansand, Norway again. 

We barely had a chance to talk about the mix she specifically made for Jaeger to accompany the interview, but she makes sure to mention before I press stop on the recording, that “Jaeger is my favourite place in Oslo.” She relishes any opportunity to play at the club and hopes the mix reflects the vibe and feel of Jaeger, as she’s experienced it in the past from the booth.

Our conversation was a whirlwind as we rushed through topics over the course of a single cup of coffee as Karina swept through her extensive career and thoughts on music. There was hardly a pause, and just like that she’s gone again, off on her next adventure… 

Album of the Week: Byron the Aquarius – Astral Traveling

Soul-searching chords, rumbling bass synths, extemporised keys and tempered rhythms, sees Byron the Aquarius Astral Traveling the planes between Funk, Jazz and Hip Hop in one of the most inventive House records of this year. Byron “the Aquarius” Blaylock toes an imperceptible line between the functional aspects of US House traditions and the earlier organic genres that dominated dance floors before the advent of the drum machine.

If Kenny Dixon Jr. could play an instrument like Prince, that’s where Byron the Aquarius thrives and on his debut solo LP he manages to capture it  across 8 raw tracks for the Norwegian label, Mutual Intentions.

After making a few heavily Jazz-influenced House records for the likes of Sound Signature, “Astral Traveling” sees Byron imprinting his voice all over the record for the first time. The Atlanta artist’s vocal goes from a deep baritone to a sugary lament, flirting with a definable pitch. His voice guides the listener on a journey through a melange of sounds and textures coaxed between samples, synths and Byron’s eloquent fingers at the keys. It’s a versatile record with a fusion between Jazz, R&B, House and Hip Hop, but unlike his previous records there’s a new accessibility to these experimental forms, captured by his vocal treatments of these tracks.

On “Astral Traveling” he finds a way to crossover between popular and avant garde realms on a record with all the makings of future classic, and to think it might have all ended up on Soundcloud.  The bulk of the record was originally released on the streaming platform, but Fredfades (Mutual Intentions) spotting genius in the rough, pleaded with Byron to remove the tracks from the  site and channel it into an album for the physical  format on the Mutual Intentions imprint.

There is a very improvised feel to this record, like it was recorded in a single sitting, with Byron jumping between keyboards and  synthesisers in an organic progression that’s impossible to replicate in the digital realm. He’ll take to the microphone it seems whenever his key work becomes mechanical, and whether it’s just a repetitive line like “Sorry Kari,” or an entire rapping monologue like on “Spazzing Out (4U)” it’s the ultimate charm of this record.  Byron casts a wide music net on his work on this album and while  “Spazzing out (4U)” could’ve been what Kanye West would’ve sounded like if he hadn’t disappeared into his own inflated ego, on “Lost in Love” seems to open up a direct astral port  with the ghost of Sun Ra.

Byron the Aquarius steers clear of  the focussed House foundations of his early EPs like “Euphoria” with a record that is more texturally rich than his dance floor constructions. Keys lap over each other in dense extemporised movements that move through progressions in psychedelic musical forms.

Squeaking lead synths, honking pianos and trembling guitars all find a space on Byron the Aquarius all-inclusive LP. There are tracks like  “Deep in that ****”, “Universal Love” and “Sorry  Kari” that still retain the artist’s affiliations with the modern dance floor, but even those expound on the prevalence of  the 4-4 rhythms with arrangements that favour a fuller palette from the minimalist dominance of House music.

“Astral Traveling” is a 21st century fusion record that is a direct descendent from those early pioneers who first sought to fuse a myriad of musical languages in a new expressive form, but updated beyond the restrictive sonic trends of the 1970s.  It’s Byron’s voice however that is key in what is going to undoubtedly make this record a crossover success, and possibly even a future underground classic.

The cut with Filter Musikk

“Spotify saved the music industry,” says the November issue of Fortune magazine. We didn’t realise it was in trouble and if the industry ceased to exist, would music cease to exist? It might even bode well for music from an artistic form of expression, if the industry did in fact collapse around it. A lack of commodified agency could certainly relieve some of the saturation currently plaguing contemporary club music. Then again, I wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t for an “industry” of sorts, so thank you Spotify… I guess.

I do like Spotify and the access to music it has afforded. Remember a time (no, you might be too young) when a birthday or some chore put a bit of cash in your pocket and you could afford to buy a new CD, cassette or LP? Well, Spotify would be the equivalent of going into that store today and buying the whole lot, and although you have to wade through the muck to get to the gold, there are still some new discoveries waiting on Spotify’s discover weekly playlist for you. Who would’ve thought for instance that there would be so many new Stoner Rock bands in 2019. 

Even so, the relationship we have with a piece of music on Spotify is fleeting and tenuous, like a curiosity in a passing shop window display. When we seek something more substantial from music there’s only one format today that suggests we’re serious about music, and that’s vinyl. Whether it’s a new downtempo Electro record or an original pressing from a forgotten Japanese fusion Jazz band of the 1970s, there’s a certain dedication to a single piece of music that you aren’t able to get from an all-inclusive contractual obligation that streaming offers. A lot of that music is also often missing from those streaming services.

You’re  more likely to listen to a piece of music over and over again when it occupies a physical space in your habitat, and there’s a certain ritual involved in listening to a record; from handling and studying the sleeve to turning it over, it’s a more conscious listening experience. The records we assemble in an ever-expanding collection of music is just a personal extension of who you are whereas, and the individuality of each collection is not something that could never really be replicated accurately on any amount of Spotify playlists. 

Moreover any industry concerns are untenable in what has become a fairly niche musical format, so if Spotify saved the industry, vinyl saved music from becoming just another commodity. In Oslo there is a place that appreciates this with an unwavering dedication to the format. That place is Filter Musikk and this is the Cut with Filter Musikk. 

 

Laurent Garnier, Chambray – Feelin’ Good (Rekids) 12″

It’s been a monumental track on the dance floor this season and it’s finally arrived in the physical format in Oslo. Dance floor royalty Laurent Garnier teamed up with future regent Chambray for a mammoth track that has left sound systems quaking around Europe all this summer. The French music monolith and his younger apprentice push their way onto the dance floor, in a boisterous percussive onslaught and tantalising atmospheres, that dissipate into a staccato piano riff that will have you reaching for the heavens. 

It’s all about that piano, with its nostalgic nod to the House music’s rave origins, re-contextualised in the contemporary through that stripped-back rhythm section. It’s a thunderous track that leaves little room for anything else as it pummels you into submission on the dance floor, which would make for little appeal by itself if it wasn’t for that mesmerising piano that comes in at the 2 minute mark.

While the first Radio Slave remix, in a surprising twist, simply does away with that fundamental appeal of the track, it’s the Radio Slave’s revenge mix, that deserves as much attention as the original. While Garnier and Chambray simply extended a nod to the past, Radio Slave slipped into the Delorean and set the controls for 1992 with a breakbeat interpretation that accentuates those lovely keys. It’s a breakbeat edit intended for the big room, much like its ancestor with a booming sub-bass punctuating the scattering drums. 

 

Norma Jean Bell – I’m The Baddest Bitch (Moodymann Mixes) (F Comm.) 12″

If there’s one person that could lay claim to being the “baddest bitch in the room” other than Norma Jean Bell, it’s only  Kenny Dixon Jr. His a bad mother… shut your mouth… and it’s something that he brings across in his music too. In an era increasingly dominated by slick overproduced House music, Moodymann has always maintained some of that raw primal energy both in his DJ sets and his music. Whether he’s playing at one of Soul Skate functions or “fucking with is MPC” there’s always a serrated edge to Moodymann’s creations that infers some vintage Soul on his productions, and this is something that was particularly powerful in his early tracks like his mixes of the Norma Jean Bell classic, I’m the Baddest Bitch (in the Room).” 

Originally pressed in 1996, this bootleg copy has aged little in all that time, with Moodymann’s Dub and Moodymann mix still doing its thing some 20 years on. The sparkling percussion and the deeper interpretations hold its own in modern record bags, and while Moodymann might have garnered all the attention for this release through the years, it should not overshadow the equally brilliant work of Aqua Bassino one bit. It’s probably the Bassino mix that has been played most through the years, with his reservedly deep interpretation, offering something a little more refined on the flip-side to Moodymann’s rough and ready approach. Altogether it’s a release that refuses to give up and there’s a reason it keeps getting bootlegged.

Second Storey – The Cusp (Frustrated Funk) 12″ 

Alec Storey is a versatile figure in the more adventurous realm of  electronic club music and whether he’s making conceptual dance floor albums for Houndstooth, or testing the limits of electronic music intended for clubs, there’s an unmitigated adventurous spirit in his work and its relationship to the dance floor. 

This latest release coming via Frustrated Funk sees Second Storey venture the furthest ever into the unknown, with three tracks that will definitely test the limits for the more obvious dance floor enthusiasts. “Cusp” is the easiest of these creations with a half-time two-step lending some structure to an otherwise unruly melée of alien sonic objects swimming through the arrangement.

It’s the only piece with a definable form on a record that’s more abstract experimentalist than perfunctory facilitator. The whirling acidic emulation of “The Cusp,” the distorted narrative of “London isn’t easy,” and treacherous growling ambience of “High Canopy” are unlikely competitors for the DJ booth, but there will certainly be nothing else in the mix that would sound like any of these. 

 

Dorisburg – Stone Circle (Kontrolleri) 12″ 

A deep brooding Techno thriller from our Gothenburg neighbour Dorisburg. The Swedish producer has an unquestionable relationship with his machines and he is able to coax the extraordinary sounds from his collection of synthesisers and drum machines and it’s something we’ve experienced from his live shows to his recordings. 

In one of four releases this year, Dorisburg heads up the first release from new label Kontrolleri with two exquisite examples in sonic design. Everything finds its place in a tapestry of sound that seems to gestate from some organic source. Billowing atmospheres and reserved percussive arrangements compound in two very deep Techno tracks. 

They might get a little too static at times languishing in their sonic beauty just a little too long without much progression or development, which in the context of DJ set might work to its advantage. It’s still however best experienced on a set of headphones where the atmospheres and sound design simply envelope the listener in the mix.  

 

Assembler Code, Jensen Interceptor – Random Patterns (Mechatronica) 12″ 

Assembler Code and Jensen Interceptor seem to have an almost instinctive working relationship in the studio. There’s an obvious relationship with Jensen Interceptor’s solo releases and his work with Assembler Code, but as a production duo the pair of Australian artists seem to thrive in the tougher aspects of the Electro genre, where the genre directs all its efforts to facilitating corporeal pleasures.

Distorting percussion, menacing square wave bass-lines and analogue saw tooth leads,  growl at you from the body of the tracks and mark a distinction in their music that’s quite different from their more subtly orchestrated counterparts operating in the electro dialect.

This latest release for the Berlin-based electro outfit, Mechatronica expounds on these characteristics employing a machine-like precision over the four tracks of this release. Stark dance floor constructions from the Australian duo make their intentions known early on with Moog-like synthesisers playing in mono while dominating kick-and-snare arrangements skip with some military precision through the tracks. It’s the gleaming production that really stands out on this release, like it does on all their previous releases, and even when there’s a fair bit of sonic drive occupying a track like on the kick drum of “otherside” it sounds crisp and efficient. 

Jeremy Olander’s cinematic selections

Jeremy Olander’s music and sets are a visceral experience, charged in emotional depths and executed in eloquent melodic passages. A DJ and electronic music producer that rose to prominence through the Stockholm scene where the likes of Steve Angello, Sebastian Ingrosso and Eric Prydz paved the way, Jeremy Olander found a voice in the harmonious corners of 4-4 club music. It was at Prydz’ Pryda label where Olander would make his first impressions on the circuit in 2011, and he’s been releasing at least two EPs a year since his first release while touring the world extensively as a DJ.

After an unprecedented six releases on Pryda Friends and one on Pryda, Olander eventually set up his own label, Vivrant, from which he would exclusively release his own music, between releases from artist friends. His next release finds Olander capturing the sound of the label for another imprint in the form of a career-first mix album coming out via Balance. The album contains 14 unreleased tracks from Olander across three monikers, as well as label affiliates and friends like Tim Engelhardt, Locked Groove, La Fleur and Ejeca.

To accompany the release, Olander will be touring around the globe from Sweden to Australia, with Jaeger and Oslo his very first stop on the tour. As an extension of the new mix album, the Vivrant tour will see Olander serve up some of his unique melodic infused club music with a specific focus on the Vivrant sonic aesthetic. We reached out to Jeremy Olander ahead of the tour to ask about his early influences and how he might have arrived at the music he plays and makes today, but after receiving a shortlist, we were pleasantly surprised by his selections.

Born in America, to an Indian mother and Swedish father, and raised in Stockholm, Olander has had a multicultural upbringing that should undoubtedly have made for some interesting musical influences in his formative years, but when we asked him to share a few, we were excited to find that a cinematic connection started to emerge. We called up Jeremy Olander at his home in Sweden, where he is currently enjoying some downtime before he heads out on the tour, to ask about how this theme emerged and how this particular form of music has resonated with him. 

What a great compilation of music. I don’t think I mentioned that there should be any concept to this list, but you stuck to this cinematic theme and it’s great.

I think it’s fun to try and do a theme, to tell some sort of story. 

And why specifically music for film?

I like listening to it, and the aspect of storytelling. A lot of dance music does the same. A lot of the music I play doesn’t have any vocals in it that tells you a story, so you have to tell it through melodies and vibe.

 

Operation New World OST – Big Sleep

 

I randomly watched this movie years ago after a friend recommended it. It’s one of my favourite movies (never leaves my iPad) and it catapulted my interest and love for Korean film making. I’m surprised Hollywood haven’t made a shitty remake of it yet. The soundtrack fits the movie like a glove and is kind of reminiscent of The Godfather theme song in a sense. Very gangster-esque.

This is a very mournful and emotionally charged song. Is this something you look for in music?

Yes, I like the melancholic kind of tracks. I don’t want it to be too happy-go-lucky and I don’t  know if that’s just the Swede inside of me. 

The music you make also relies on a similar melodic emphasis. Do you feel you have to be in some kind of emotional state to make music?

It depends and I’ll go through different stages. Sometimes I have to wait for it to come. At the moment, I’m having a hard time forcing it. It’s more about taking some time off and finding some ideas. You never know when it’s going to strike, you’ll just have to wait for it. 

Do you listen to a lot of film scores when you’re at home and enjoying some time off?

Yes, I would say so. I think when I listen to most of the music I listen to, it’s when I’m taking my dog for a walk or going from A to B. When I’m at home and I’m not working on music, I don’t tend to listen to music.

 

The Land Before Time – The Rescue’ Discovery Of The Great Valley

 

I think a lot of people born in the mid to late 80s watched this movie growing up. It really is an incredible film, albeit a bit sad, that I can’t wait to watch with my kid. The soundtrack adds another layer of emotions that takes me right back to childhood as soon as I hear it. James Horner really was one of the greatest film music composers. 

Why this particular moment in the movie?

I don’t know, it’s something that speaks to me about that part of the film and the music. It really strikes a chord with me. It’s a very sad movie all the way through, but there’s also a kind of hopefulness as well. 

You say you have a kid. Has that changed your perspective on DJing and clubbing?

Definitely. I can’t really stay away when I’m on tour like I could before. It’s a little bit crazy, but that’s the life I chose.

Do you think it has an effect on the way that you DJ, because you don’t have that same relationship with the club anymore? 

I think I’ve settled a little more in what I do. You see a lot of younger people going out, they’re very up to date on the trends. I still think I stay informed on what is happening, since there are so many news outlets covering dance music. I still try to go digging, but it’s not what it was like when I got into DJing with all the blogs and parties.

 

The Thin Red Line – God Yu Tekem Laef Blong Mi 

 

The Thin Red Line came out during the same year as Saving Private Ryan, which obviously stole all the limelight in terms of war movies. It’s kind of a shame because what Terrance Mallick did was really, really good. It had a great cast and the music delivered by Hans Zimmer was on point. It’s one of Hans’ lesser known pieces but definitely a favourite of mine. I played this as last song in a set in Buenos Aires. The crowd looked very confused. 

This is the only piece of music with a vocal in it. Was that intentional?

I chose it, because a couple of years ago, I started listening to that song a lot. I thought it was funny because I played it once, and it was a bit of a curve ball for the audience. I don’t think they were expecting to hear that kind of piece. 

Do you think people might not have the patience for putting in that kind of a curve ball in a DJ set today?

I think you can still do it here and there and it depends how long you’re playing as well. If you have a one hour festival set, that’s probably not the best place to do it. If you have a longer set, I think it’s almost expected. When it becomes too perfect and too linear, it’s playing it too safe. I’m guilty of doing that every now and then, but I try and push myself.

Getting back to the vocal aspect, I notice the music you make, tends not to have vocals in it as well.

I find it hard to use it without it becoming too cheesy in a way. Since I already like to put in a lot of melodies, adding some vocal hook is difficult. It will have to be stripped-down track to make that work, but I don’t make that much stripped-down music.

Does it also relate to your DJ sets, do you tend to steer clear vocals?

Yes for sure. It’s a little bit boring. It’s easier to play a track I grew up with, but with the new stuff… I don’t know why I’m so hung up on it. There is a lot of great dance music with vocals in it, but it becomes too much of a moment. 

Do you feel that there should be a relationship to the music you play out and the music you make?

It all depends on the vibe and the night. I try and keep it fresh, because there might be people coming to two shows in a short period of time, so I try to play different from the last time they saw me. I try to play my own music and I know which tracks work well with other ones. I tend to go through my older songs as well. For me it’s more about showcasing my own music and throw in music from friends. A lot of it is stuff that I made or put out on my label. 

 

Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones – Across the Stars Love Theme

 

You can say what you want about the trilogy that George Lucas directed, but the score that John Williams wrote for it is some of my favourite pieces of music. It’s kind of crazy how important he has been not only to the music world, but the film world as well. What would Jaws be without that taunting score, Star Wars without its iconic melodies and Jurassic Park without its theme song. 

It’s all music that is either orchestral or formed from some organic sources. Is this something that you naturally gravitate towards?

I wouldn’t say so. I listen to all kinds of music. I can appreciate everything. 

Ok, so it was just for this particular selection?

Yes, it might come from me really loving that movie, and maybe that’s why it made such a big impression on me. It suits the movie and the vibe, but there’s nothing about the choice of instrument or anything like that. 

This is a very or orchestral track.

Yes, I was trying to avoid any obvious dance music references like Blade Runner. I thought it would be fun to share a little more unexpected stuff. 

You mentioned Blade Runner there and the first thing my mind goes too, when it comes to soundtracks is Vangelis.

It’s never been a soundtrack that made a big impression on me, but I can understand why it did on some people. I was more of a Star Wars guy when I was younger. I obviously loved Blade Runner, but I don’t have that same nostalgic feeling for the movie. 

 

Lord of the Rings – Main Theme

 

The Lord of the Rings books will always hold a special place in my heart. I read them during a great period in my life being a kid, soon turning into a teenager. I was skeptical when they announced Peter jackson was making the trilogy considering his previous movies, but obviously he blew it out of the park and completely delivered. Going to the cinema to watch those movies (me and my friends would stand in line for hours before tickets were released just to get the first showing at midnight) is some of my fondest memories. The music really added to the epicness. I feel like rewatching all of them just talking about it.

Do you think if this music simply existed on its own, without the visual  aspect, it would have made the same impression on you?

Probably not. They both work hand in hand. The music is made to elevate the feeling in whatever is happening in the movie without taking up too much space. I don’t think I would’ve felt the same about it if I heard it out of context. 

You mentioned Lord of the Rings had some influence on you as a teenager. Was that when you were starting to make music as well?

No, this was before that. I think, apart from the first song and the Hanz Zimmer one, the thing that they have in common is that they are very nostalgic for me.  I think nostalgia is one of the best feelings you can get from music. 

Do you have the same relationship to electronic music you were exposed to at that age?

Some of it for sure.

What were the early influences that encouraged you to start making music?

Well I grew up in Stockholm and it was during that time when Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso were coming up. They became local heroes for people and me included, I guess. Then it felt less far-fetched as something that you can do. When I was into Hip Hop before I got into dance music, you would go to a concert and it just felt like that’s not something I’m going to do ever. But when you went to a sweaty club with 200 people in your hometown, they just show up like everyone else, going through the main entrance, you think; “maybe it’s something I could do.” Because I was into music and into computers as well, I thought I should  try it out.  

I think I should wrap it up Jeremy, and there’s only one burning question. If you would be asked to soundtrack a film, what film would it be?

It would probably have to be something that takes place in space or some sort of Science Fiction. Here again the obvious one would be Blade Runner, but maybe Arrival would’ve been cool.

 

Beglomeg – Elske Livet Fantastiskt

The last time I saw Beglomeg perform, frontman Raymond T. Hauger was reading from a book called” Om KJaerlighet” while sonic dirge of extemporisation ensued from a group musicians, trying to find each other in some lysergic dream realm. The post-modernist nature of the performance was perfectly staged in the context of the Kunstnernes hus as the band performed what I assumed were perhaps sketches, if not uncompleted versions of the tracks that would eventually make it on to the album.

Everything about Beglomeg had always appeared to me like a happening at an afterparty that was always trying to come to a conclusion, but never does, because there’s an inherent fear of missing out.  Curiosity keeps us coming back to Beglomeg, and just when you think, do we really need another Beglomeg LP, they release a record, and you’re reminded why they should exist.

Beglomeg is a band that will always divide opinion and whether you like or despise their music there’s no other band that sounds like Beglomeg at this moment in time, especially on their latest LP Elske Livet Fantastiskt. Everything from honking Sax Solos, melancholic Baroque organ figures to trite Euro Trance appears on Elske Livet Fantastiskt in a curious assemblage of musical styles that should in no way come together. It only really works on this record, because everything about it is at odds with everything else in some kitsch melange of music.  For the uninitiated it might come off as a misguided attempt at irony, but I feel assured that Beglomeg are very sincere in their pedantic lowbrow pursuits in music on this LP.

It’s quite a departure from the more psych rock sounds of Very Bæd! and Eurokrjem, and besides flirting briefly with those kind of sounds on “Pønkføkke” and “Jeg er et Liv” this is a whole other Beglomeg we’re dealing with on this occasion. Elements of early nineties new-age nostalgia and 70s library music for children’s television dominate this album. Fans of the band might find this one a little more difficult to endure soncially, but it’s a very much a conceptual album at the heart of it.

It’s an album that talks about love and life in a playful soliloquy, trapped in a child-like wonder. There’s something innocent about it all, especially Raymond’s lyrics and voice which seems to channel the ghost of a children’s entertainer. Beatific melodies and very basic textures expound on this sense of innocence, but there’s an uncertainty which lingers over the record, like a friendly man trying to lure a child into a van with a bag of candy. There’s more to this record to the blatantly kitsch nature of this music.

There are echoes of that Kunstnernes hus performance, with text extracts and a picture of “Om Kjaerlighet” in the accompanying booklet. It’s uncertain how everything ties into the concept of the record, but it’s clear that a lot of effort has gone into relaying a theme, from the artwork to the music and lyrical content, but its a theme that eludes, possibly even Beglomeg.

Elske Livet Fantastiskt is not so much a pop record as it  is an artistic statement, but what that statement might be and how exactly the record is trying to bring it across is a complete mystery. I don’t know how, but this could be one of the most significant Norwegian records to be released this year.

Your 15 minutes are up with David Dajani

“It’s like Andy Warhol said, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes, except today everybody will be a DJ for fifteen minutes.” David Dajani breaks out in a snigger as he rolls into the second phase of his sentence. There’s a kind of mischief in his voice, like he’s taunting an imaginary audience, and even though what he’s saying asks some very serious questions of DJ culture in our contemporary society, he simply shrugs it off. “It’s a whole different ball game, but I don’t feel intimidated by it.”

There’s no reason he should feel intimidated, because David Dajani certainly doesn’t subscribe to the hyperbolic image that crowds the booth today. For the best part of the last twenty years he has focussed on a niche aspect of DJ- and record culture in Norway, where his sets can go between the eclectic (from psychedelic fusion sounds of Africa to the provocative Black Metal sounds of Norway) to the functional (from the jazz-informed House of Moodymann to the proto-Hardcore sounds of 90’s UK Techno). 

David Dajani might have rose to prominence as the frontman for the anarchic Garage punk outfit PRTLVX (formerly Pirate Love), but a promiscuous youth spent digging for contemporary House and Techno and a lifetime of playing records in and around Oslo, has established the artist and DJ as a prominent figure in the booth. He thrives in the obscure left field depths of the scene alongside the likes of Raymond T. Hauger (DJ Lekkerman) to become a distinguished individual in a counter-culture conducted from the DJ booth.

It’s possibly why he seems so unperturbed by the latest DJ craze, because if anything it simply  gives him more agency to cultivate his particular brand of DJing in the last remnants of an underground culture that has been by and large exploited by a generation of DJs on their quest for 15 minutes of fame. 

“Right now it’s a trend and it was the same in 1998,” says David of a time when “everybody had turntables for two years” before moving on to the next craze. “People that were DJs from that era, I can probably count on two hands today, and they were hundreds back then,” and David suspects the same will happen again as the popularity in DJing wains in the near future. He’s seen it all unfold before in a career that started back in the mid nineties where a teenage David was discovering a world of music locked in the grooves of the vinyl format.

Although it was through the noisy confines of Rock where David would eventually leave his mark, it was actually House and Techno that first encouraged the future frontman and DJ to explore music. David grew up in Hurdal, a twenty minute train ride from Oslo in what is essentially rural farmland. It’s a “secluded” town, but it’s accessible proximity to Oslo put David in reach of the metropolitan delicacies of a big city. By his own account he hardly grew up in a musical family and it was the radio that would introduce David to electronic music.

Saturday nights, he would tune into Pål Strangefruit and Olle Abstract’s shows on national radio, where the DJs would introduce the Norwegian population to the sounds of House and Techno from around the world. “It just blew my mind,” remembers David vividly and it was those sounds and the video for Goldie’s “Innercity life” that encouraged David to ask his parents for a set of turntables when he turned 12.  “When I got the turntables I put on a Louis Armstrong record and a Temptations record,” recalls David. “I put them on simultaneously and I was like, ‘what… this doesn’t sound like drum n bass.’”  

With no prior knowledge to DJing and at a decade to early for the instructional you-tube video, David assumed DJing was about “making music” with a pair of turntables. He quickly understood the mechanics of DJing after his initial gaffe and when he realised it was about playing other people’s music, it was something of a eureka moment for the latent DJ. “I realised I don’t need to make music,” says David in wide-eyed stare. “I was perfectly fine just playing other people’s music and to this day, that’s what I like the best.”

He would make regular trips into H&S records in Oslo where “they had a huge floor of House and Techno, Trance, Drum n Bass and probably some Hip Hop too,” accumulating records he heard on Abstract and Strangefruit’s shows. With 200kr in his pocket at a time when records cost 90kr, he “could only afford 1 record” at a time. He would “spend five hours in the listening booth” to pick one record and then take the train back home where he would devour the record. He was immediately taken by records like Moodymann’s Brown Mahogany, “the 17 minute 12” version on KDJ” and for reasons still unknown to him today, that’s the music that still resonates with him. Although his mother played church organ, there was hardly a musical background, but David “felt I understood it instinctively from the first time I heard it.” 

He spent his late teens buying contemporary House and Techno records like these and by the time he turned 15 he and some friends started their own label called Groovecentral Recordings. Why a label? “You don’t ask those questions when you’re young,” says David with a smirk. David and his cohorts weren’t really trying to “intellectualise” it at that point, they were just a bunch of kids with a passion for music .”We were blue-eyed, and we were really into it, so we weren’t thinking in any rational way about it.” In naïve optimism they pressed 300 copies of their first record, expecting H&S records to pick up the bulk of the order. The store took 10 copies, and the rest were resigned to boxes that are still sitting in David’s mother’s garage today.

Spurred on by sheer youthful exuberance, they did however manage to sell most of their second release and in the 2 years of the label’s existence, Groovecentral Recordings released eight records, including Nils Noa’s first record, “a kind of ethnic House record” recalls David. Groovecentral Recordings would largely be a Drum n Bass label which was the style-du-jour of that period, and by the time the label ceased operations, David too would drift away from club music.

David was still in high-school when the label came to its conclusion, providing the impetus in part for him to explore record stores beyond the electronic music isles. “I started with Rock music pretty late,” says David. It was in high school during the early 2000s at the age of 17 that he uncovered the likes of “Velvet underground, the Stooges and the Ramones, Suicide and New York Dolls.” It was music that “fuelled me in a different way,” explains David. Rock had also offered an escape from House and Techno, which in the early 2000’s had succumbed to allure of popular culture. Groups like Stardust and Basement Jaxx were flirting with chart success while artists like Thomas Bangalter and Armand van Helden were becoming household names “And then they became huge,” continues David “and everybody started copying those Disco House sounds.” At the same time “Dutch Trance was at its peak,” and for a DJ like David who revered the underground aspects of this culture “it was like; ‘what’s happening with the quality control here.’” 

It was during this time he would relocate to Oslo and meet the likes of Raymond T. Hauger (Beglomeg, Den Gyldne Sprekk), Gylve Fenris Nagell (Darkthrone) Emil Nikolaisen (Serena-Maneesh) and his brother Ivar Nikolaisen (Silver, Kvelertak) and Milton von Krogh. They introduced me to a lot of music that I hadn’t really heard before,” stresses David. It was in the city’s dominant rock scene where he would first emerge as an artist and a DJ. “In Oslo in that time, 2003, the House clubs from the nineties, the ones that were cool, they were all gone,” remembers David. “What you were hearing at Garage (the predecessor to Jaeger) on a Saturday at peak time was the Ramones and White Stripes,” but for people like David and Raymond, these kinds of playlists were just a little too pedestrian for their discerning, eclectic tastes and they started a club night called Knulldrøm, which ran for an impressive nine years at Revolver.

Can, Kraftwerk and Suicide informed DJ sets at Knulldrøm that could span the breadth between the exotic sounds of Nigerian Funk to the industrial clattering of Norwegian black Metal. Somewhere in the midst of this David thought “it would be fun to start a band.” He didn’t play an instrument, “so they said you have to sing… I didn’t mind.” David was the co-songwriter with Milton Von Krogh, who provided the riffs to David’s nihilistic lyricism. Together with a fleeting band of musicians, which also included Raymond on bass at some point, they released their debut LP, Black Voudon Space Blues, to some unexpected fanfare from the press. “It was quite crazy,” recalls David with the advantage of hindsight “a band that was as negative as us!” he expels. 

They released two LPs and a third under the pseudonym PRTLVX; toured extensively around Europe and North America; and were featured on the front pages of local newspapers and MTV during their tenure. People were saying “they can’t play but they are really entertaining,” and that’s all Pirate Love wanted out of it: “We just wanted to entertain.” There was no grand conceptual intent behind their music, and in their efforts to entertain their music quickly went from nihilistic Punk to incorporate elements of psychedelia and post-pop on their second LP, Narco Lux High School.”That’s our best album,” insists David, “but the European record company didn’t want to release it because it was too catchy.” 

Pirate Love’s short but electric career was quickly coming to its conclusion before it  really got off the ground, and meanwhile David was rediscovering the sounds of House and Techno in Oslo. “I started getting back into House and Techno around 2008” contemplates David and he suspects Villa had some influence in this decision. Before Villa, David’s sets were still very eclectic. “If I played a track by Bjørn Torske or Erot, people weren’t accustomed to that sound.” He started playing at Villa before it became official and saw the second wave of House and Techno in Norway gestate in the bowels of the basement club where it “has gradually progressed,” to a point today where it’s completely swung the other way and “you can’t play rock music.” 

During all this time, David’s approach to the DJ set remained unflinching. If being in a band was about the sheer entertainment value, then DJing was the complete opposite. “It’s not about entertainment for me,” answers David with an urgent severity creeping into his voice. “I just want to be in the darkest part of the club. I can’t fucking stand that Boiler Room stuff… I despise it.” At same time David agrees that “DJing and club culture is about people being entertained, but the role of the  DJ is too hyped.”

In some regards it’s the late nineties all over again, but it’s many times worse in the hyperbolic mechanisms of the internet and social media, where every DJ with a youtube account is a superstar DJ, but David’s seen and experienced this kind of hype before, and he’s just going to keep “doing what we did in the nineties.“ “I’m very adamant about finding records,” he says, “I don’t go to trushmixes and ask for track ID. I just dig and find cheap stuff that I don’t think anybody else is playing.“ 

Lately he’s been digging in the annals of breakbeat acid and proto-hardcore in a habit that started in his teens and has never left him. Whether it’s contemporary Techno or those early Moodymann releases, the record “just has to have a specific feeling” and although he can’t describe what that feeling might be, he instantly knows it when he years it. It can be a hook or merely a fx soundbite, but there has to be something innately “rough” yet “intricate” to appeal to David today. “It’s not based on genre or BPM” he elucidates and “it can just be a beat and a handclap.” 

For his upcoming month at the helm of Den Gyldne Sprekk, he expects to extrapolate in sets from psychedelic folk to Russian Synth Wave, while in search of that elusive “feeling.” Hele Fitta, Krass, Prins Pål and Rabbit Brown join him on his infinite quest during the month of November at Sprekken, a night which David Dajani defines as “anything else but House and Techno.” 

While the rest of the scene’s 15 minutes are almost up, it’s a DJ like David Dajani that will remain after the dust settles, and whether it’s the vicious sounds of Garage rock or the soulful interpretations of modern House, he will most likely be in some booth, playing music to an unsuspecting audience with formidable results. “It might sound a bit cliched,” he says, “but for me it’s all about the underground vibe.”

Album of the week: Fjordfunk – Infinite Zest

Jann Dahle makes a triumphant return to the recorded format, after an 11-year hiatus with one of the most highly anticipated LPs of the season, Infinite Zest. After interviewing the artist in August, we’ve been waiting patiently for the release of this LP… what’s a few more months after 11 years. The Norwegian artist, who had made his debut in Tromsø in the early nineties playing sets and releasing music alongside the likes of Rune Lindbæk and Bjørn Torske, has been on an extensive hiatus for his health, and in 2019 he started making his return to the fray with a Boiler Room appearance at Jaeger in the summer and now an LP for ALO records.

He established the Luna Flick label with Pål Strangefruit and Øyvind Morken in the first decade of this century and he was one of the first guests to play Panorama Bar when it first opened, before falling ill and retreating from the DJ lifestyle and moving back home to Harstad in northern Norway. He had been continuously working on music during this time and after sending a few demos to ALO recordings’ Ben Green he received a reply to “make an album already”. The result is”Infinite Zest,” an album that picks up where Fjordfunk left off with aplomb for the album format.

It’s Jann Dahle’s debut album (although there’s an unreleased LP somewhere in Tore “Jazztobak” Gjedrem’s hard drive) and there’s a sense of maturity that shines through Dahle’s work on Infinite Zest that belies the nature of this LP. Those transient Norwegian roots that were behind the appeal of acts like Mongolian Jetset and Bjørn Torske’s music maintain the allure of a space-aged Disco music, but laced with elements like tropical slide guitar, lonesome blues harmonicas and funkedelic keys, there’s a sense of evolutionary growth from Dahle’s earlier music.

Infinite Zest as a title might hint at something that is trying to capture the feeling of youthful exuberance, but it’s an album that’s more inclined to linger beyond the immediacy of a puerile “beat” or beatific melody. There’s a subtle progressive nature to the album, where repetitive inconsequential figures lay a bedrock for fleeting elements to build upon before flying off into the ether of memory. Things like the haunting guitar solo at the end of “Exile” and the disembodied vocal of “Baboobap” add something tangible on a album that is locked in the stasis of looping grooves.

Dahle doesn’t stray too far away from an inherent balearic nature that has always dominated his music across his aliases, but in the album format he re-calibrates it masterfully for the context. Besides the ultimate “all is changing” there is no lyrical content to speak of and takes the listener by surprise when this realisation hits home. It’s quite something to come to terms with the fact that this is a largely instrumental album, since it’s composed in such a way that it never strays far from some human influence. It truly is a kind of Funk, a hyper-post-modernist Funk with one foot on the dance floor, and Dahle positions it perfectly in the album format for the first time. Let’s hope it won’t take another 11 years for the next album.

The cut with Filter Musikk

We don’t need ADE. While everybody was in Amsterdam engaged in some frenzied activity of handing out business cards like candy at Halloween, trying to galvanize each other in a sea of banality, we were at Filter Musikk… buying records. As people cooed over the latest social media DJ sensation and bookers, agents and managers were trying to dictate market trends and influence music, we were more concerned about whether a record warranted the 150kr we were about to shelve out for it. 

There’s no amount of likes shares or blog articles that will influence our decision to buy the record. It’s an intimate exchange between the listener and record, and even Roland Lifjell, a DJ and consumer of impeccable taste couldn’t sway a decision when we strap on a set of headphones and put that needle on the outer (or inner) disc. What the people at ADE fail to realise is that nothing they do, or try to manipulate will ever be able to stand between this interaction.  

We don’t buy records because a DJ and producer has a lot of Instagram followers, and we definitely don’t buy a record because that same entitled, egotistical maniac who gets paid €3000 a pop to play, might bring out a record during his/her set. In fact, we’re more likely to avoid that record, or any other record that DJ is associated with for that matter. Especially for a person making the same in a month as what that DJ gets paid for two hours of sonic drudgery.

Buying a record is a very personal endeavour between the listener and that single piece music. So you can keep ADE and all the industry that surrounds it, because we have Filter Musikk and I doubt you’ve even seen the inside of a record store, especially one as unique as this one. This is the cut with Filter Musikk.   

Theo Parrish – What You Gonna Ask For (Sound Signature) 12″ 

Discogs user: “My friend Duncan Tompkins came round the other night to see me, and he brought this record along as he wanted to play it to me. I found its nice blend of jazzy keys and laidback, bompity house beat easy on my ears, and it wasn’t very long before me and Duncan had both stripped down to our underpants and were dancing, and grooving, together!!” 

Wow that escalated fast, but nobody does “laidback bompity house” quite like Theo Parrish. The US stalwart always manages to infuse his productions with a primal urgency that few can match. It’s a kind of funk associated with human imperfection that usually occurs in the no-man’s land between quantised forms and quarter note beats.

“What you gonna ask for“ is an infectious call to the dance floor, with Jazz-infused keys hovering over syncopated rhythms that move between live drums and bass-lines snapping at the heels of the kicks like a rubber band. The track has a very live feel, and Theo Parrish’ rough and ready approach to production is sprinkled all over the track in analogue noise and vintage warmth. There’s little separating the two remixes, besides perhaps that Dego’s interpretation is possibly more functional in terms of its arrangement.

Are you in your underpants yet?

 

EOD – Warmwoods (bbbbbb) 12″

EOD played Kafé Hærverk on the same Friday this record rolled into Filter Musikk. I stayed in and listened to this record. Wormwoods is the first release from the Norwegian artist since releasing his LP Named and it seems he has found a permanent home for his musical indulgences at Bjarki’s bbbbbb records. 

Warmwoods finds him indulging more of an Electro palette than the squirmy brain dance breakbeats of his last album for the label with lysergic bass refrains and silky pads navigating the tumultuous rhythms of hurried drum machines. EOD’s music operates at a mile a minute and it feels like you’re always trying to catch up to his genius at work, but with tracks hardly breaking the four-minute mark, the song has ended before you realise what has happened.

The most enticing moment comes at the end of the record with “CQC” where EOD slips into a more reserved version of himself with a simple melodic theme, progressing at a leisurely rate throughout the track. Alluring pads enrapture a drum machine moving at a more reticent pace, while those permanent acid bass-lines move through the track in their frenzied pursuit of a melodic refrain that remains intangible throughout. EOD bathes the track in voluptuous synthetic atmospheres coaxed from large polyphonic vintage synthesisers, with that same  undeniable charm echoing through his music. 

If the Named LP was a bit much for some, this will certainly bring you back to the majesty of EOD’s productions.

 

Zenker Brothers – Spiritual Priority (Ilian Tape) 12″ 

Yes, they are indeed brothers and brothers working together in electronic club music, in the latest iteration of a tradition stretching back to Octave One. There’s a kind of natural flow to family groups that encourage some prolific careers and the Zenker Brothers are no exception. Although they’ve been making music separately since the mid 2000’s, when they started making music together, they touched on an incredible sonic assault which they’ve directed through the likes of 50 weapons and their own label, Ilian Tape to disastrous effect on the dance floor.

Ilian Tape’s reputation for uncompromising and assertive dance floor tools extent to the Zenker Brothers on this release as they deliver two formidable Techno tracks on Spiritual Priority. Composed of little more than rowdy drum machine/sampler “Sorting Peanuts” and “Sample Predator” walk a narrow line between Techno and Hardcore, but where others might indulge retrospective tropes in this style of music, the Zenker Brothers opt for a more tantalising forward-facing approach to these beat monsters. 

It’s the rhythms of “Sorting Peanuts” and “Sample Predator” where Spiritual Priority offers more than just the familiar. An onslaught of kicks landing between off-beats and regular beats,  accented by a gamut of contrapuntal rhythms forged in sonics derived from metallurgy. The spartan tracks are predestined for the cavernous spaces Europe’s clubbing scene where large sound systems punch bigger holes through empty spaces.

 

John Daly – Safe EP (Craigie Knowes) 12″ 

Craigie knows that we love the Craigie Knowes label. We’ve almost featured a release per issue since the Burrell Connection introduced us to the UK label, and we’ve been amazed by the versatility that they featured in their discography. From the bawdy acid of Post Human to undefinable Balearics of Fabio Monesi, there isn’t so much a sound, but a feeling that underpins the label. There’s a certain craftsmanship to these records, that no matter what genre or style they indulge, they do it with a unique flair and idiosyncratic artistry.

Take this latest record from John Daly. You might be inclined to call this music Deep House, but the bass lines that jut out at you from the middle of the mix; sequential bass-lines that run on the fringes of Italo; and deep chords that boulder up from way beyond the surface, are more confrontational than the more subtle arrangements that dominate the sound of Deep House today. There’s a mighty shunt from analogue synthesisers and drum machines that accentuate a corporeal dimension. The big sub-bass-drawl of “Moving-On,” the penetrating Juno bass figure of “What if” and the bubbling atmospheres of “For the sake” all have their origins in some machine.

John Daly accentuates these features in his music, with each element clambering to the next in some Sisyphean battle for supremacy that yields no victors. It confronts the listener with a wall of sound that ranges from the deepest frequencies right to the heavens where hi-hats glimmer.

 

Jaime Read – The End Of (For Those That Knoe) 12″

Taken from Jamie Read’s classic 1997 House  LP, The End of the Beginning, “the End of ” is the first of a triptych of 12” releases re-issuing the LP courtesy of the UK label For Those That Knoe. “After the rains,” “Collective Consciousness,” “on the Surface of the 9th Moon,” and “Time Wave” have aged exceptionally well, and the first time I heard it being played at Filter Musikk, I was convinced it was a new release.

Like John Daly’s record, it’s the shot in the arm that House music needs, but this time it reaches the contemporary landscape, an echo from the past. The remastered versions of the originals merely refurbishes the originals so they can sit alongside their modern counterparts. Everything sounds just a little fuller, richer, without taking away from the textural delights that the tracks rely on. Layers arrive  and dissipate around continuously evolving percussive arrangements, coaxed from Roland X0X range.

The drum sound are left in their raw forms, flimsy and sharp, cutting through 303 bass-lines and luxurious pads that dominate the  harmonic ranges of the tracks. Sparkling melodic structures, bounce between the beats and the atmosphere like ping pong balls being passed around on a lazy Sunday afternoon with everything in Jamie Read’s music instilling a sense of calm and temper around percussive parts that buoyantly travel through the tracks.

 

Tuning the room: The origins of sound systems on the dance floor

I knew that there was something unique about Jaeger’s basement when I first stepped down the old stairs into what could only be described as a cocoon of comfort. There was something cozy about the room that went beyond a specific aesthetic cue, like the log-cabin walls or the ceiling lights flashing in cue to the music, to something rather more subliminal. It was a feeling, the corporeal effects of something intangible. There as an immediate warmth that permeated through lower level of the club perpetuated in sound. In what was a sparse early evening dance floor with a DJ laying a tentative groundwork for the night ahead, the sound system introduced itself in an inviting coo that confuted its size.  

In the small room the sound system’s physical presence, rising up to touch the shallow depth of the ceiling, was anything but invisible and yet there was a subtlety to the sound the speaker enclosements. It was a very different sound system to those that had been dominating the vacuous warehouse spaces in Europe for the best part of this century where stacks on stacks of Funktion One systems would either confront the listener with a wall of sound, or completely dissipate into cavernous halls beyond the extent of its reach. Jaeger’s sound negated some of that aggression and pugnacity for a sound system that made you comfortable in an intimate space.

That was my introduction to Jaeger’s “Diskon sound” as I came to know it and throughout my tenure here, the sound system kept growing, shrinking and moving in a constant evolution that owner and resident Ola Smith-Simonsen (Olanskii) still refers to as a ”work in progress.” It’s been in a constant state of flux that has taken a life of its own as the venue, the DJs and the audience kept changing  around it and as it kept retreating further into the structural makeup of the room and the dance floor it’s allure is indistinguishable between these elements. And as Ola starts talking about the next phase of the system and the recently-installed bass traps settle into the walls, it’s an evolution in sound that refuses to come to any natural conclusion. 

“I want to finish this thing and hopefully I won’t,” says Ola through a wry smile. In an effort to continue an evolution in sound, Jaeger’s sound system is only the latest iteration in a history of sound systems on the dance floor, dating back to the 1970’s where three pivotal characters were setting a new standard in sound system design through the era of Disco. They were Alex Rosner, David Mancuso and Richard Long and what they established almost fifty years ago kicked in the door for what would become the acceptable standard in club sound systems today.

Before Disco, sound systems had been functional things made to project sound further than their natural sonic sources or for recreating sounds from recordings in intimate and reserved lounge settings. Early sound systems for venues were little more than modified public address systems while small, single-speaker monophonic designs dominated homes around the world. It was only with the advent of High Fidelity recordings in the1950s and things like FM radio, Magnetic Tape, stereophonic and the LP that the technology started to evolve dramatically. 

It was a time of new technologies and new terms like audiophile and discotéque. As the quality of recordings improved with the assistance of magnetic tape, and the new delivery system of LPs, there was no need for an entire band to entertain your audience, and as the use of records and later DJs increased in the era of the discotéque, it would require a more effective way of redistributing the sound in a venue and a culture of sound systems were born (not be mistaken with Reggae Sound System culture, which is its own article).

Leading the way in this new appreciation for sound in relationship to a dance floor and recorded music was Alex Rosner and the partnership he would form with one David Mancuso. Alex Rosner came to America, an immigrant and Holocaust survivor. He and his father were prisoners in Auschwitz who were spared the gas-chamber on the merit of his father’s skills at the violin. By the time Rosner moved to America in the 1960’s he was an engineer, who had found an ingratiating hobby in the newly developed field of stereophonic audio systems and a captivating ideology in the emerging world of the Discotéque, shortened to Disco in the US. “I like the concept of reproduced sound” he said in the book, “Last night a DJ saved my life.” Preferring technology over human involvement, he set out on a mission to create a system that would not just sound good, but realistic too. 

He debuted his first sound system at the world’s fair and quickly moved into working for Discos like Haven for whom he invented the first stereo mixer which featured the first ever cueing system, used by a DJ who is universally considered to have invented beat-matching, Francis Grasso. How was that for an introduction?

The mixer was called Rosie, because of its colour, and although Rosner would downplay the significance of his invention in a Red Bull Music Academy lecture as little more than a serendipitous result of being “in the right place at the right time,” DJing as we know it today would not exist if hadn’t been for Rosie. The Alpha Recordings mixer that is the centrepiece in every Jaeger DJ console today (including our bar system), is basically built on the same foundation of the mixer that would evolve from the Rosie, the Bozak. The Bozak DJ mixer, considered by many to be the first in an industry standard, was developed by Louis Bozak under the guidance of Rosner with the Rosie as foundation, but what the mixer represented as a tool is actually meager in comparison to what Rosner and David Mancuso achieved at the Loft in New York.

The Loft was David Mancuso’s literal home, a loft apartment that would moonlight as a gathering place for New York’s scenesters with Mancuso’s home stereo system providing the music. It wasn’t just any soundsystem however, but rather the formidable Klipschorn system. The Klipschorn design was regarded perfect for this application due to its power efficiency, directivity, dynamic range and low level of distortion, which meant a clearer and more powerful speaker. Although the speakers had been in production since 1946 and its design had remained largely unchanged, it was only in the hands of Mancuso and Rosner that the speakers would be used outside (well inside actually) it’s usual function in an application that is still in use in countless listening bars around the world where Klipschorns remain the focal point of  the sound system. 

“He had basically what was a home system. When I got through with it it was disco system,” claims Rosner in “Last night a DJ saved my life.” Between Rosner’s and Mancuso’s vision they created a sound system that soon set the accepted standards for clubs and discos around the world. It all sprung from the simple ideology that David Mancuso set forth in his mantra “you don’t want to hear the sound system, you want to hear the music.” The sound system for both Rosner and Mancuso was about perfecting that reproduction of recorded music on a dance floor and they realised very early on, that more is in fact more…

“It’s like money,” collates Rosner in a RBMA lecture; ”you can never have too much because you know you can give some of it away. Loudspeakers can never be too big, because you can always turn the volume down.” In one of Rosner and Mancuso’s crowning achievements at the Loft their combined efforts resulted in creating a tweeter-array system that helped spread those higher sonic frequencies more evenly and further across the room, so that even the person sitting in the back could hear every element in the music rather than just the bass frequencies, which naturally has the longest reach. Even though Rosner didn’t initially agree with Mancuso’s tweeter array idea, he soon came around when he discerned  ”the more you have up there the better.” It’s a sonic philosophy that’s still noticeably adopted today when you see towers of horns jutting out high above the DJ somewhere like stalagmites on a cave wall, but while it’s certainly helpful having all that sound on tap, it’s pretty pointless if it’s not pointed in the right direction.

Mancuso realised that the placement of the speakers were tantamount to the effectiveness of the sound. Nicky Siano remembers clearly that the speakers at the Loft has positioned in such a way that ”they put out the sound and reflected it too, so they covered the whole area and exaggerated the sound.” One of Rosner and Mancuso’s underlying principles in sound system design had been speaker placement. In one of Rosner’s most challenging system designs around that time, he became the talk of the town for a Casablanca party he furnished in a hotel in New York. The circular room didn’t encourage the usual parallel kind of speaker arrangement so he had to improvise. “We took this system and made a circle out of it, a whole big tower of speakers, all emanating outward,” he recalls in the RBMA lecture. “And I took some white gauze and covered the loudspeakers with it. They called it ‘The Bride’. People were dancing around the bride.” With no visual reference “people didn’t really know where the sound was coming from.” 

For Rosner, the Casablanca event was an exercise in how a “system could sound terrific in a terrible room” but in an ideal situation he would always prefer adapting the room rather than the sound system. “The room is usually the enemy, not the friend’ he explains and for him the  perfect room would always be a golden rectangle with no two surfaces running parallel to each other, but those are very rare occurrences in discos and clubs, where they occur in buildings with a previous life and function. “The sound is affected by the acoustic space,” and for a technician like Rosner, the acoustic space which was also a component, and something that needed to be tuned like the system. “The more irregular you can make the surfaces, the better the acoustics are going to be,” and in a natural extension of that philosophy today, this is fundamental to the Jaeger sound system.

The log cabin interior at Jaeger, the newly installed bass traps and the way the speakers are  situated throughout is Rosner’s theories in practise. It’s about tuning the room rather than the system. In fact, it’s about having as little as possible stand in the way of the signal flow of the system. 

Mancuso went to great extremes at the Loft in eradicating any unnecessary components between the record and the ear, with little more than a preamp between the record and the sound system. He believed that nothing should be able to effect or colour the sound of the record in order to get the most realistic reproduction of a record. That meant eliminating anything in the signal flow, going as far as not using any equalizers or mixers, leaving the signal untouched, and effectively the record in its purest form.

But that was the Loft, an intimate apartment essentially, which was too small to accommodate the accelerated pace at which the Disco scene was growing. By the mid-seventies Disco was kicking the door in to popular culture, and as people flocked to the music and the DJs, empty warehouses and commercial parking garages were being appropriated as dance floors. Big rectangle concrete boxes didn’t much inspire Rosner and Mancuso’s philosophy of tuning the room and a new kind of sound system started making waves in the scene, one designed by Richard Long.

Very little is known about Richard Long other than that he designed some of the best sound systems throughout the Disco era, including the one that put Larry Levan on the map at the Paradise Garage. A reclusive figure, he passed away from AIDS in 1986, and very few people knew him well enough during his lifetime, but when it came to building the kind of sound systems that Disco required, nobody could really touch Long, including his predecessor and associate Alex Rosner. “He struck me as a real devoted person, devoted to the craft” reminisces Rosner in a Red Bull Music Academy documentary.

It was Alex Rosner that introduced Long to this world, as a kind of fixer for his sound systems and it would be Rosner that would also inadvertently put him into business. In “Last night a DJ saved my life,” Francis Grasso described an incident where Rosner sent Long out on a job, and Long usurped his boss by outbidding him on the same job as an independent contractor. Rosner remembers it differently in the RBMA documentary. According to Rosner, John Addison (Studio 54) had phoned Rosner up in the middle of the night to ask about doing some work for him. Rosner swiftly hung up on Addison, noting the lateness of the call in what I assume was short conversation littered with expletives. Addison in all his ‘70s cocaine-fuelled cock-sured fury was not a person you would hang the receiver up on likely and put his next call in to Rosner’s budding apprentice effectively putting Richard Long and associates into business.

“Richard Long was always only about his business,” remembers Kenny Carpenter, a Studio 54 DJ that would DJ on Long’s systems and one of the few people that associated with Long socially. “He was obsessed with sound system and electronic design. He immersed himself in that. His mind was just on his business and I didn’t know many people that were friendly with him.” From the sparse accounts we have of the visionary, a meticulous figure emerges and that diligent approach to his work is why he is still regarded by many to be the father of modern club sound systems. “Alex’s sound was very polished, like going to the theater,” said Nicky Siano while “Richard’s sound was funky and down-home, and bass was always a big component.”

Richard’s crowning achievement would be his J-Horn design; a bass speaker cabinet that was designed to project the lower frequencies as effectively and forcefully as possible. While Mancuso and Rosner were concerned about the placement of the speakers and the room, for Long it was all about power and a system that worked on a corporeal level with certain physicality in the lower frequencies. “Long built bass and it was far superior,” says NY Disco era sound engineer Bob Casey in a Red Bull Music Academy article. He gave the crowd what it wanted. He put your balls up your ass.“ Long employed this model at the Paradise Garage to the greatest effect according to accounts. In the hands of Larry Levan, Long’s system would go down as one of the most devastating dance floor partnerships in DJ history. “When you throw a record like Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Love Sensation’ on in that sound system you hear some frequencies;” remarks Kenny Carpenter, “you hear some bass frequencies and some mids and highs that you never heard in your life. You hear things in the song that you could never hear again.”

Long couldn’t get a better business card than the Paradise Garage at that time, and the club became a kind of showroom for Long, where he would constantly adjust and replace components, most often when Levan got a little over-zealous and blew a speaker. Eventually Area, Bonds International Casino, Zanzibar in Newark, The Box and Warehouse in Chicago all came calling, and Long furnished some of the most impressive clubs in DJ history with sound. At Zanzibar they called Long’s sound system the ”earthquake system” for it’s sheer body-shaking power and Long even managed to tap the European market in designing the sound for Frankfurt’s legendary Dorian Gray. A Long sound system survives today on Coney Island in the Eldorado Bumper cars dance floor, but as you stare into a stack of bass cabinets, like the ones that tower alongside the DJ booth at Jaeger, that Long spirit is still very much alive and those initial Long designs are still very much in use today in some of the world’s most famous clubs.

All those components and philosophies that make up Jaeger’s sound, and for that matter any other club sound system that you’ve encountered in recent years, are a direct consequence of the work that Richard Long, Alex Rosner and David Mancuso did back in the seventies. The room, the signal flow and the awesome power that’s being projected over dance floors like Jaeger week in and week out is a result of the combined work of those three pioneers and all we are doing today is evolving the technology around the fundamental principles that Long, Mancuso and Rosner first established on the dance floor.

Album of the Week: Arthur Kay – Arthur Kay

Arthur Kay Piene’s fingers have touched many remarkable albums in recent years, including a fair few written up in these columns. An Oslo-based keyboardist and pianist, Arthur has been a prominent session musician for various bands and solo artists as well as being a permanent member of the band The Switch, who incidentally also released their latest LP just last month too. He’s a Mutual Intentions associate, contributing to albums from Jazz Cats, Ivan Ave and Fredfades & Jawn Rice over the last few years, and it’s hard to believe that it’s only now that he’s making his debut as a solo artist with an eponymously titled record.

From the “sophistso-pop” he creates as part of The Switch to the franken-Jazz he helped Kristoffer Eikrem and Fredfades bring to life, Arthur Kay’s musical scope is broad and inclusive with an affable charm underpinning these various projects, and that extends to his first solo album. It’s only fair to assume that on his debut solo effort, we would find Arthur at his most personal, and on an album that goes from the gentle crooning to bouncing drum machines, we find an LP imbued with  the personality of the artist behind the music.

Like a lounge pianist with a drum machine, Arthur Kay channels elements of Funk, eighties Synth Pop, Jazz and Disco through the six tracks that make up an EP, but we’re calling an album for the sake of the article. From the upbeat dance entry, “Holiday Pay,” to the more solemn ballad “Higher Ground,” the record upholds a kind of  ’80s pop dialect, retrofitted through a space disco portal. At times you pick up echoes from the likes of Bill Withers’ “A Lovely Day” or Steely Dan’s “Aja”, but where Arthur Kay makes it his own is bringing that precision Funk to the record.

This album exists somewhere between Todd Terje and A-HA and all it does is put an inexhaustible smile on our face. It’s just an incredible pop record with an infectious charm and an inescapable groove that leads along its six tracks to the ultimate pay-off that is “Holiday Pay.” It’s a record that keeps calling you back for more, with every track hiding some incredibly subtle nuances that engage at a level with the listener that goes way beyond it’s original pop design.

TBT: Map of Africa

2007 was electronic dance music’s year. The emergence of what would later be dubbed blog house; the apex in the rise of bedroom producer; the accessibility to new music due to the fairly new connectivity of social media; and the technology of DJing at the time, meant anybody with a laptop could establish a club night in some rundown bar with a world of music at their fingertips, usually dominated by a four to the floor beat.  

It was all about new music, and from Dubstep to “Berghain” Techno, you couldn’t escape a drum machine (or more likely a VST version of said drum machine) for fear of being ostracised by your peers for being uncool. It was the pinnacle of the hipster era, where being a dickhead was cool and collecting records started becoming en-vogue again. 

It was hardly a time for one of the most iconic cosmic Rock records to be released, and yet it is the year of Map of Africa, a collaborative one album project between DJ Harvey and Thomas Bullock. Rock music was definitely not on anybody’s radars at that time and besides Rock-leaning electronic outfits like Hot Chip and LCD soundsystem, the age of Indie rockers in skinny jeans making 60s and 70s inspired garage rock was clearly coming to an end and like James Murphy said in 2005, people were selling guitars and drum kits for turntables and swapping dirty rock clubs for gleaning dance floors running expensive sound systems and even more expensive DJs. 

Pitchfork’s 5.2 out of 10 review of the LP in which Mark Pytlik wrote that ”Map of Africa really doesn’t have much in common sonically with dance music at all” should infer a little about the zeitgeist of the time. Even for all of Pitchfork’s indie Rock affiliations, a barebones Rock LP, was completely out of touch with what was happening at the time, especially an LP that went back, rather than forward, and yet Map of Africa still stands its own ground today in many a hallowed record collections. 

All the ingredients for success with a recipe for failure

DJ Harvey (Bassett) and Thomas Bullock were at the top of their game when they started making Map Of Africa. Bullock had just walked out on A.R.E Weapons, who defined electroclash in NYC, and had started working with Eric Duncan on the highly successful Rub N Tug production unit and DJ crew. He had garnered a reputation as a producer for his noisy synthesiser exploits in A.R.E Weapons, and by the time of Map of Africa he had just finished work on a new studio in his upstate New York retreat. 

DJ Harvey was and is a legend behind the decks, a rock n roll character moulded in the likes of those sixties and seventies legends of excess. You don’t get dubbed the Keith Richards of dance music likely and legend preceded Harvey wherever he went. His first 7” as part of punk band Ersatz was played on John Peel, before he moved into dance music, playing a fundamental part in nineties rave culture as part of the Cambridge-based Tonka DJ crew and party-set and as one of the first residents of Ministry of Sound. In the mid-2000’s he was exiled in the USA over some visa complications, staking a legendary claim around LA, New York and Hawaii’s underground, way before making his grand return to the international scene in 2010. 

Bullock and Harvey had known each other since the Tonka Cambridge days, and had met when the much younger Bullock joined the fray. “We were pretty great together,” remembers Bullock in a Loop interview. “I think it was because I skated and not many other people did. All his other mates were gothic junkies. He was a B-Boy.” Bullock and Harvey had been playing or making music on and off together since. They even had a band, which A.R.E Weapons kind of dissolved, but when Bullock left, it provided the impetus to make some music together. 

“Harvey was really pissed off that I had worked on A.R.E. Weapons,” says Bullock so when ”when A.R.E. Weapons was done for me, the only thing that Harvey said, was ‘Cool. Now we can have our band.’ I said ‘Cool, let’s call ourselves Map of Africa.’”After years of living in different places, they ended up in the same country and decided to make music together, and Bullock’s studio retreat would set the scene.

Map of Africa “ended up being a rock record” according to Bullock in the Loop interview, which suggests that perhaps there was no intention to make a rock record and that could have something to do with the context of it all. 

DJ Harvey had been stuck with the generic Disco tag for some time, which is not necessarily accurate for a DJ of Harvey’s calibre and his extensive musical palette from Punk to House music. “For so long I’ve been associated with dance music which can be very tracky,” Harvey told RBMA in 2007. It seems Map Of Africa went some way in trying to discourage this tracky association, allowing the artist the freedom  “to be able to express myself through song(based)” formats. Secluded from the DJ and Disco “scene” in their remote retreat, Harvey and Bullock couldn’t be further removed from their alliances and naturally surprised everybody with a record that didn’t merely buck a trend, but hardly acknowledged the existence of the word.   

In that universe they created on the one and only LP they made together it was like the seventies never concluded and synthesisers had arrived like spaceships from an alternative dimension, and their rendition of the opening track “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boy” arrived like a steel-toed boot up the arse of a zeitgeist.

Disco Punk 

“Black Skin Blue Eyed Boy” was originally recorded by Eddy Grant and The Equals in 1970 and it was very much ahead of its time, with a four to the floor syncopated beat and the kind of thin, polished arrangement that would later go on to define the Disco of that decade. It was a proto Disco track and Eddy Grant’s version of the song became a favourite amongst DJ luminaries Francis Grasso at the time, a kind of proto-Harvey character who is widely considered to have invented beat-matching.

Map of Africa’s version of that song couldn’t be more different. The bare-bones nature of Bullock and Harvey’s arrangement which is fortified in the quarter-measure kick stomping out an emphatic groove. “We really rocked a groove” says Bullock in the Loop interview, and it’s that groove that grabs you and refuses to let go through the 14 tracks of the LP. It’s accentuated by Harvey’s gruff voice as he breaks in with the opening line, “black is black” in an ardent Rock chant for the ages. According to Thomas Bullock, he and Harvey auditioned eachother for the role of singer with Bullock acquiescing to Harvey’s alpha-dog snarl, much to the album’s advantage. Even though Harvey jokingly refers to it as his attempt at Karaoke in that RBMA lecture, much of the LP’s appeal lies in Harvey’s voice which floats somewhere between snarling alto of Lemmy and the whisky sonorities of Joe Cocker or Jim Morrison.

Map Of Africa turns Eddy Grant’s original into an anthemic Garage Rock tribute, slowing it down to a point where Bullock and Harvey’s ability “to rock a groove” just sticks with you as you ride out the opener into “Gonna Ride” and “Dirty Lovin”, but by the time you get to “Creation Myth” it becomes an album of two sides. 

Indulgence over excess

Bullock told SUP Magazine in 2007 that “Map of Africa is the most serious meeting of our minds thus far.” While they’ve played together in various bands in the past, it seemed that they solidified something on the album. Not quite a concept, but certainly a very intricate body of work, that was a direct  product of the different factors that encouraged its creation. “We’re just trying to have a real nice time,” Harvey told RBMA and according to Bullock they were getting through the album at a rate of a song a day in his studio. They were fortunate to pick up a deal from Whatever We Want records at a time when bands were still getting advances through the label, which according to Harvey in SUP gave them the “freedom to totally indulge ourselves.”

It allowed the duo to draw out more of those balearic influences they undoubtedly inherited from the UK. It’s an album with “two kinds of music,” confirms Harvey in RBMA. One part of it is more “stompy, rocky” while “the other half is more cosmic, balearic and melow.” If it had been an all-out garage Rock affair I doubt that it would have had the same kind of effect on the DJ community as it would come to have. Listening to Harvey’s 2014 LP, Wildest Dreams, which intones a similar voice in a kind of west-coast surfer Rock dialect, and you soon notice it is lacking that crucial cosmic element that made Map of Africa so much more than just a Rock record.

It’s between “Creation Myth” and the title track that the nature of the album shifts into a record with a dual personality, while maintaining all those crucial elements that make it sound like a cohesive album. From the stompy rock of the first three tracks, “Creation Myth” slips into psychedelia like a lysergic dream, created from the decay of the other tracks of the album. The staccato groves of the openers disappear into the ambient swells of the guitar and pads, with the album accommodating several moods from that point on.

Let’s get physical

The name “Map of Africa is a sex stain left on a bed” explains DJ Harvey (like it was needed) on an RBMA lecture from 2005. It ties in with the perverted persona of the DJ Harvey character, undoubtedly born from the same place as his label “Black Cock,” but it’s in these sensual moments on the record like the title track, “Bone,” and “Freaky Ways” where the album offers more than just a flat-footed beat. Channeling the vast expanse of their musical dialect and perversions into music, they manage to harness the explorative nature of their musical spectrum into an explosive physicality. 

Harvey and Bullock played all the instruments on this record, and although Bullock spent some time editing the raw recordings into those insatiable grooves, it is exactly this hands-on approach in which the album’s charm lies. From Harvey’s distinctive voice, the live drums, squealing guitars and the boogie simplicity of the keys, the album places you right there in the barn, jamming out with the pair as they play. 

“I like to hit something,” Harvey told SUP about the recording process of this album. It was about how the “sound moves through the air before it hits the machine and becomes digital,” and it’s something that they managed to retain throughout the post-production phase; the format of the album; the themes that course through the lyrics like “Dirty Loving;” and which eventually arrives at the listener in all it’s brazen wonder.  

An elusive moment

In many ways it was the exclusivity of the format and the limited release that made this album such a white whale for collectors. When DJ Harvey did the RBMA lecture around the time of its release, he had one of only a few copies of the second single, he remarked with amusement. The label Whatever we Want lived up to their name, and with a limited pressing of the record, it seemed more about capturing an elusive moment between two legendary figures, than releasing a record. Not much is known about Carlos Aires, the man behind the label that facilitated record, but it is rumoured that he was a formidable DJ talent in his own right, who works in film today. It seemed his only aim was to make this record happen and so it did, and today it remains enshrined in DJ and electronic music lore.

Although the two musicians had worked before in the past, this record was very much of its time place and a serendipitous melding of various factors to make the record happen in the first place. It’s success was of course in part due to DJ Harvey and Thomas Bullock’s reputation, but it remains an isolated example to this day. Although there is a second LP apparently ready, the fact that it has never seen the light of day also encourages the mysticism that surrounds the album.  “The songs are recorded and really quite good,” Bullock told the Loop back in 2013, but nothing has ever come of it. 

About a year after Bullock’s statement, DJ Harvey would release “Wildest Dreams,” an album that played in similar sonic hues to Map of Africa, but never truly captured the same mood of Map of Africa. It’s very likely that many of those songs might have even come out of some Map of Africa sessions, but for the most part it falls way off the mark of those integral moments that made its predecessor such an anomaly on the DJ circuit and collectors scene when it was released. Map of Africa is a perfect moment captured at perceivably the wrong time, but to great effect. Like a great DJ that is able to manipulate an audience around a song they won’t usually dance to, Map of Africa achieved exactly the same on the electronic music landscape when it was released, and that’s part of the reason it lives on in infamy today. 

Today the record is not that elusive with original copies going for about the same price now as they were new, but it’s more about what it represents in spirit, that very same notorious rebellion that has made DJ Harvey and Thomas Bullock such legendary figures on theDJ circuit. Whether it was for the characters that constituted the band, it’s fairly limited press or the fact that it was released at one of the most inopportune times for a rock LP, Map of Africa stands as an iconic LP today. 

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.  

Album of the Week: Galcher Lustwerk – 200% Galcher

There’s a new kind of House rising up from the western front, spearheaded by artists like Galcher Lustwerk, Channel Tres and Byron the Aquarius. Focussing their efforts on the deeper aspects of House music, applying soulful touches in minimal arrangements and often lending their vocals to stark dance floor creations, these musicians are operating outside the canonical conventions of Chicago, Detroit and New York and to great effect.

Galcher Lustwerk has been at the forefront of this new kind of sound, made possible by computer technology and musical artists and while Channel Tres has found some mainstream success and Byron the Aquarius has pandered to a mainly underground audience, Galcher Lustwerk strides both dimensions in his work, finding favour with an indie lo-fi House audience. His eloquent vocal work across modern Deep House tracks laced with serene pads and delicate bass lines, found a dedicated following after his seminal track “Parlay,” which was followed by his equally enigmatically engaging, debut LP, Dark Bliss.

Through his sophomore effort, 200% Galcher he solidifies his sound in that deep sensual swagger that underpins his work. While in the past he might have split his efforts between vocal tracks and instrumental tracks on 200% Glalcher his vocal takes more of a central role in his work. It was arriving through the rise of Lo-Fi House that Galcher Lustwerk’s music found his initial audience, but where he deviates quite a lot from the tag on this LP, is that his work imparts a mood rather than a design, emphasised by his laid-back tempos and that drawling vocal work . There’s an infectious temperament that courses through 200% Galcher which is accentuated by the artist’s nonchalant rapping style and those deep sonorous arrangements.

The repetitive nature of his lyrics, where one line is repeated or only slightly modulated, is effective in the instrumental accompaniment and adds all the character to tracks like  “Niggas” and “Template.” Although there is a tendency to stick to the stark, minimalist sound of modern House music, elements like the detuned pads of “Wristband” or the modulating keys of “This n That” add a funky element that lifts tracks like these from drowning in banality.  It is however the interplay between these elements and Galcher Lustwerk’s rapping vocals that make this record so charming and in many ways improve on his last LP, Dark Bliss. Galcher Lustwerk has truly found his artistic voice on 200% Galcher.

The cut with Filter Musikk

You’ve got to look back to look forward; that’s what Daft Punk said when they teamed up with a chamois cloth called Gorgio Moroder and preceded to make one of the most overhyped and insufferable records ever released during my lifetime.

Music is cyclical, yes… and there is always a tendency from a new generation to make and produce music from the era that came before them since the dawn of Rock Roll. Heavy metal looked to the blues, Punk to R&B, Disco to Motown, House to Disco and Hip hop to Funk and Soul, but as the successors recycled and re-appropriated elements they took on their own identities, and didn’t merely make new music through the rose tinted vision of nostalgia. With Daft Punk it was Duchamp’s pissoir all over again, an old functional piece of furniture lying about being something new.

Electronic club music is unique as music that contains genres and styles that were very much dependent on technology, and thus has always changed with the times, so re-hashing the sounds of high energy and eighties synth pop is doing the music a disservice. And although Techno, Electro and House operate on the very same fundamentals since its creation, the evolution of technology, has taken it through extensive phases through its lifetime. From the very DIY stereo mixes of early House and Techno; the uber-produced second phase of the ‘90s; the rise of computer technology and the bedroom producer; to the era of Eurorack modular systems and the expansive alien sonics we can coax from them today, electronic music’s purview has been influenced and shaped by technological evolutions and its limitations.

Lately however, the majority of electronic music is suffering from some revisionist nostalgia, in which we are echoing the sounds of the early nineties in a kind of pejorative appropriation of early House, Techno and Electro sounds that are completely doing away with that elementary ideology of electronic club music; music that was meant to soundtrack the future.

Synthesizer- and drum machine companies, making digital versions of those earliest machines and “collectors” skimming the surface for the most obvious examples from that era, have distilled the intricacies and eccentricities of the music down to a finite point that in what’s become a kind of puerile interpretation of older music.  

There are exceptions of course, and in a little glass-windowed shop in the heart of Oslo, these exceptions converge on the original dance music format, vinyl. It’s a place called Filter Musikk and while the format might remain unchanged, the music contained within remains unwavering in its pursuit for ingenuity and progression in the vast expanse of  the electronic music lexicon.. And even though some of these records might have an eye on the rearview mirror they are always looking forward, to the next phase of electronic music. 

It’s the cut with Filter Musikk.  

 

Random XS – Centrifuge (M>O>S) 12″

Random XS has probably forgotten more about club music than we care to put together from our collective experience. They’ve been there at the origins of rave culture and machine, dance music as a live act and DJ duo. The Dutch duo released their first EP on Djax-Up-Beats in 1992 and had a successful career throughout the ‘90s in the deep, acid hues of Techno before going on an extended hiatus as a recording act.

They made a well-overdue return on the scene in 2015 with a record for Shipwrec (pragmatically titled “the return”); their sound ageing gracefully in an era dominated yet again by stoic drum machines pushing tempos into heady heights while 303’s create swirling lysergic movements in bold kaleidoscopic flourishes. Today, their music is built on those same fundamentals that brought them into the world, and through some slight digital production enhancements  it sounds as contemporary as ever.

After re-issuing their first EP on Delsin at the beginning of the year, they’ve headed over to M>O>S for a brand new track and a reworking of a Random XS classic, that see the duo in a new creative  stride that’s sure to see them into the next decade. “Centrifuge” and “Relic reworked” operate on a primal, intuitive level with thunderous, marching kicks working your abdomen while acid refrains indulge hedonistic heights. 

Built on the very same fundamentals of their early records while stripping it back somewhat for the modern dance floor, Random XS’ music on this latest record still contain those slight eccentricities, that go beyond the functional for something a little more than just a DJ tool.  

 

HNNY – 2014.12.31 (Omena) 12″ 

HNNY returns to the Omena roster with an EP bathed in the glistening ambience of beatific melodic refrains and effervescent textures that play between down tempo beats and deep bass-lines. 2014.12.31 finds the Swedish producer dip into serene waters with engaging elements floating on the indolent waves of pressure from the tempered percussive arrangements.

Sonorous bell-shaped sounds peal between alien atmospheres that modulate with the arrangement, lending an expressive charm that flows through the entire release. HNNY finds a unique balance between the organic and the synthesised on this release like the piano on “Rue de Bagnolet” lost in some reverie floating between the abstract soundscapes redolent of glass chimes or the live/sampled drums of “Delores Park” and “Hemma” bouncing between the unnatural electronic components. 

There’s something completely intangible about the music, much like the date that christens the release, but yet there is something comfortable and familiar about the record. You simply ease into the depths of HNNY’s music on this record, which just washes over you through its duration.

 

Nummer – Space Oddities (Vol.1) (Butter Sessions) 12″

Sleep D’s Butter Sessions label is probably one of the more inspired labels out there at the moment. It’s not that there is a sound that is underpinning the nature of the records coming through the label, but more like an attitude where parameters between Techno, House and Electro go undefined and artists are encouraged to explore the vast expanse of the musical dialect, contained in the grey areas.

Nummer provide an archetypal example of this at play on Space Oddities for the label. The French duo combine elements of stark electronica with field recordings, hand percussion and abstract vocal samples in four downbeat tracks that would not sound of place in a Vladimir Ivkovic. Although “Space Oddities” deals in a sound that’s very en-vogue at the moment, they take it to some cosmic extremes where they piece parts together like a dadaist collage. Composed of members whose other projects include E-Talking, a more straight-forward Electro indulgence, Nummer is a little more esoteric. 

Between the lucid ambience “Diving Bodies” and the abstract perfunctory House of “Eyes Open” this record does offer a remarkable versatility in terms how far Nummer can push the scope of their sound. There’s something eerie underpinning the record, a discord between elements that float somewhere between mystery and nightmare and which is especially effective on the electro-leaning “Gravitation.”

 

Millimetric, D.Dan, Schacke, Hadone – A Lot Of Chaos (Kaos) 12″

Kaos is a Hector Oaks’ sub-label trading in the salacious corners of EBM, Industrial and Techno. The young label is only three releases deep, all released in 2019, and have focussed all its efforts on the corporeal pursuits of dance music. It’s music that repurposes the sultry atmosphere of a dark room for a high energy dance floor. Various artists have interpreted the label’s sonic aesthetic from the similar kind of industrial prevalences of its parent label to refurbishing EBM from the 1980’s, while chasing some unimaginable tempo in their music.

Millimetric, D.Dan, Schake and Hadone all proffer a track for this latest release, but you needn’t look further than Millimetric’s opener “Welcome to the D.D.R” (remix) to get swept up in the frenzy that ensues. By the time we get to Hadone’s “Taming the Passion” the record is pushing 145 beats per minute, giving no quarter to anything coming under the roll of the stringent rhythm section. A utilitarian pursuit in kick drums and bass lines avoids any indulgent elements in tracks that rely on an immediacy.  

Droning Techno and Industrial atmospheres are stripped back to their core elements where they thrive on the bare functionality of the music, without falling into comfortable tropes, delivering a formidable jolt to the system. For the most part the record deals in the sound du jour where excessive tempos and kick drums marching on the kind of military precision of gabber; convey a kind of disposal music for a contemporarily “cool” dance floor. Millimetric’s opener saves the rest of the record from falling into a kind of popular banality.

 

DJ Guy – Unthank 012 (Unthank) 12″

We’ve come full circle back to 1992 with another producer who rose out of the firmament of early rave culture. Unlike his Dutch contemporaries, DJ Guy hadn’t started putting his music out until 2014, but as we head further into the past in contemporary music, this music is as relevant as ever.

The Welsh producer and DJ has brought Firecracker’s Unthank out of suspension, with 6 tracks that recall the early electronic sounds of club music, with touches of balearic and 90’s drum machines and synthesisers. Tracks labeled things like “BASF Ferro Extra 1994” suggest that these pieces were collected from tapes gathering dust in a forgotten shoebox somewhere. In amongst the more trance-leaning clichés that dominate this current retro-nostalgic turn in the current landscape, these cuts still sound way ahead of their time, even for today. 

When was the last time you heard, Acid, lines, panpipes and 4-4 beats occupy one track? “NEW SQUAD STUFF” aside however this record is full of quirky peculiarities and it contains a lot of its charm in its ruff-and-ready DIY assemblages, with elements phasing in and out of the tracks; drum machines marching on with no sense of direction; and peculiar elements, lifted from some obscure library sources, counteracting against the rest of each track.

“Metal XR 993” and “ASII100 1994” are the closest we get to consistency, but even those tracks, especially the prior, convey the more adventurous aspects of this style of music from a time that has been very much gentrified with new artists pursuing those same sounds today.

Track ID with DJ Okapi

South African Pop, House, Kwaito and Disco from the late seventies, and up until the early nineties has garnered associations with a kind of disposal music under the catch-all term bubblegum. Made to be unwrapped, chewed and disposed of in quick succession, the music was only ever meant to satiate audiences for about a long as the duration of a song with labels, artists and producers pushing out tracks as quickly as they could in a kind of musical assembly line. Built on some rudimentary fundamentals of accessible music with an effort to work as efficiently and productively as possible, bubblegum was supposed to be a functional commodity, rather than artistic endeavour.

That at least had been the rhetoric about this kind of music and its artists for the longest time, until a blog called Afro Synth came along and re-approached this music with a fresh set of ears that heard something more substantial in the music. Born out of the esoteric record collection DJ Okapi (Dave Durbach), the blog turned record label and store started exporting this music way beyond South Africa’s borders. Through Afro Synth and his sets, Durbach has been tirelessly sounding the clarion call for South African music that would have otherwise  been lost to history. 

His work as a DJ is an extension of the Afro Synth ideology, bringing this music to new audiences, highlighting artists and records that disappeared into obscurity after their initial release. He’s revived music from the likes of Ntombi Ndaba and Olive Masinga, re-issuing records that have never been listed on Discogs and giving these records a second life way beyond South Africa’s borders. Alongside re-issues and compilations, Afro Synth has also placed a vested interest in emerging music from South Africa with its release of Mabuta’s debut LP, “Welcome to this world” and more scheduled for future release. 

Between the shop, the blog, the label and DJ Okapi’s sets, Afro Synth and Durbach has become a singular ambassador for these styles of South African music, garnering early support from Antal at Rush Hour. With the help of Rush Hour Durbach has brought these records out of dusty collections and back into circulation, making them accessible again for anybody with a vested  interest in rarefied music. 

Durbach has worked hard at cultivating a new following for this music and has recently put his efforts into bringing the sound further afield in a special tour with Ntombi Ndaba and Esa Williams. It was during this latest tour that we were able to get DJ Okapi over to Jaeger for a set at Untzdag and finally bring the Afro Synth sound to Oslo. The tropical sonic hues of the lively South African music kept the rain at bay in our backyard as he played through the archives, going from the deep grooves of Stax’ “Nothing for Mahala” to the energetic snares of “Finish ‘n Klaar.”

We were lucky enough to hit record on his set, and listening back to his set even shazam came up empty, so we reached out to DJ Okapi to ask “track id” and more in an extensive Q&A with the South African DJ.

I want to start by asking you about the last song in your set, “Finish ‘n Klaar”. I remember hearing that song being played on SA radio back in the mid nineties, but I’d completely forgotten it until you played it again. How did you come across this track again and what attracted you to it? Maybe you should also tell people what Finish ‘n Klaar actually means. 

This is Edward ‘Magents’ Motale, a famous soccer player in the 90s who released an album with a producer named Dr House. It was released on a label called Music Team, who I’ve worked a lot with over the last few years. I found the album when I started going through their catalogue. ‘Finish en klaar’ is an Afrikaans expression just emphasising when something is over. I often play it at the end of the night. 

This set came after a tour you’ve been doing with Esa Williams and Ntombi Ndaba, celebrating SA music from that era. What was the response like around her music and Esa’s presentation, and have you experienced an increasing interest in this music from the rest of the world since Afrosynth came about?

Esa has put together a band of UK-based musicians and made it possible for Ntombi’s music to be played live for the first time in 25 years. Over the past few months they’ve played 5 gigs in Europe (France, Netherlands, Sweden) as well as in Morocco. The response has been great and hopefully they’ll be able to put together a proper tour in 2020. Esa’s Afro-Synth Band will hopefully be a platform for other SA artists who I’m working with, such as Kamazu.

It was interesting seeing a European audience dancing to a track like Finish ‘n Klaar, especially considering this would have been completely new to them. What have been your experiences with playing these kinds of tracks to European audiences and their reception of this music?

The songs I’m playing are pretty much all either disco/bubblegum from the 80s or kwaito from the 90s. Kwaito is different to disco and creates a different vibe. Sometimes it’s easier to get people dancing with a few kwaito songs, although sometimes it’s the opposite. In the Netherlands or Belgium in particular people might pick up some of the Afrikaans words in a kwaito song, which might make it easier to get into.

Is this music that has always been in your collection or was it an extended period of discovery/re-discovery that led you to a track like Finish and Klaar?

I’d say most of the songs in my set are new discoveries from the past 2 or 3 years. Very few tracks if any I would’ve been familiar with more than about 5 years ago – except for a handful that were hits in SA back in the day, like ‘Tempy Pusher’. As a DJ there was a long period where I was only playing records. And kwaito records are often not in great condition so they’re not always good to play out. I started playing digital files after I started travelling more in 2016, that’s when things opened up a lot because I could rip songs from cassettes, CDs and DATs.

In general there have been specific events over the past 5 years where I’ve gained access to a lot of music over a short amount of time. At the same time it’s also been a gradual thing, finding a tape here, or buying a CD there.

That track isn’t on youtube and you can’t Shazam it either, and if it wasn’t for you playing it, it would be forgotten. It was a kind of disposal music, but through you and Afrosynth a lot of that music is living on. Why are these pieces so timeless in your opinion?

I think it’s simply the quality of the music – the production, songwriting, musicianship, lyrics etc. It comes from a time when pop music was more vital and more important than it is today, at least in a South African context.

Is all of it worthy of being released again, or are the pieces that you play just the best examples from this era?

Yes certainly the argument against both bubblegum and kwaito was always that they are formulaic, so one can expect that certain artists were more innovative while others were more derivative. There’s definitely a lot of music from that era that is middle of the road. It’s the same with any pop music. 

Are you still finding new, old pieces and how do you distinguish between some of the better songs and the stuff that make it into your sets or the label?

Yes I’m still finding new old songs and I’m always striving to add songs to my set that I haven’t played before. But it’s not always a case of digging for more records. Often I’m simply finding songs in my own collection that I haven’t really appreciated before. There’s a lot of music out there so any DJ’s sets are going to be what they consider to be best. In terms of the label there are other considerations too – will it sell? Is it available to license? Are the master tapes or WAVs available?

The music you play covers quite a large period from the late seventies to the mid 1990’s. Is there a process to the way that you find this music or decide what you want to play on a night? 

The music I play does cover a period of time but it’s also very specific compared to most other DJs. There is a process but it’s not really possible to put into words, that’s the beauty of DJing. In general I guess it depends where and when I’m playing, what kind of vibe I’m trying to build or maintain. 

You played Stax’ “Nothing for Mahala”. Øyvind was particularly interested in that track, and I imagine there is a lot of interest from collectors and enthusiasts like Øyvind about this music, but a lot of that kind of music has been lost to exorbitant discogs prices today. Is it exclusivity or something else that’s drawing these DJs to this kind of music?

Again it’s the quality of the music itself. It’s immediately familiar and easy to relate to – the musical influences as well as the lyrics. This song is a good example: the lyrics and the music are both super uplifting, even if the tempo is slower than what people might be used to on a dancefloor.

I suppose that’s what you’re doing somewhat at Afrosynth, trying to put this music in the hands of more people by re-issuing it?

Yes… it is frustrating for collectors that rare records can be so expensive. Reissuing is a way to reach a wider audience, particularly if one looks beyond vinyl to digital too.

I know that even in South Africa these records are getting super expensive, and that you’ve been finding most of that stuff on cassette lately. Is there a lot of music in SA that was only ever distributed on cassette?

Any SA music released up until the late 80s is generally easier to find on vinyl. But from around 1992 this changes and gets more complicated. In 1995 the record pressing plants in SA shut down, so any records after that are much rarer, as they would’ve been white labels or DJ promos pressed in Zimbabwe. That’s obviously when CDs came in too. South Africa’s cassette market was big and outlived most others in the world – until quite recently a lot of them were still getting manufactured and sold. So for music of the 90s and beyond, including kwaito and house, cassettes and CDs are definitely a better option to find music, rather than vinyl.

I’m thinking specifically of Doc Shebeleza’s “All the ladies” that you played; I see there was a promo vinyl, but I imagine the only way you’re coming across that track today is through a cassette or a CD version. As you dig a bit deeper closer to the mid nineties, is this the only way to find this music today?

Yes there is a vinyl promo of Doc Shebeleza but I’ve never owned it. I got these tracks from the label, probably on CD, otherwise just the files themselves. I do have plenty of kwaito records at home but the condition of most of them isn’t good enough for me to play them out. I’ll travel with a small bag of records but only maybe 1 or 2 are kwaito records. The huge majority of kwaito in my set is on USB, meaning it’s been ripped from cassette or CD.

Is there anything exclusively released on cassette that made it into this set?

I can’t really be sure of what songs may have had a vinyl promo, but songs in this set that come from my cassettes include three in a row in the middle: 

Kamazu – ‘Lorraine’ (51:00) 

Iyaya – ‘Was I Rite or Wrong’ (55:40) 

Alaska – ‘Hosherr (inst)’ (1:01:00)

Afrosynth has also released some new music from Mabuta. Is that a direction you would like to explore further with the label?

Yes, I’ll hopefully be able to put out more new music in the future, particularly from SA’s jazz scene which is really thriving.

And what else is in the near future for Afrosynth and you? 

I’ll be putting more effort into the label compared to the shop and DJing, so you can expect plenty more Afrosynth releases in 2020, and probably fewer DJ gigs. Before that, the latest release is a Shangaan Disco 12” – ‘Ta Duma’ by Obed Ngobeni & The Kurhula Sisters. Then before the end of this year there will be a six-track anthology by one of my favourites, Kamazu – and maybe even a chance for him to perform in Europe next year with Esa.

 

Album of the Week: Bjarki – Happy Earthday

A phenomenal and prolific recording artist; an incredible live performer and head of a trailblazing record label; Bjarki has accomplished all this in a mere few years, and he’s done it all on his own terms. His very first single “I wanna go Bang,” simply catapulted the latent super-producer into the mainstream, with one of the biggest  Techno jaunts of 2015 thank to Nina Kraviz’ Trip label. He quickly followed it up with three extensive LPs the following year, showcasing an elcectic array of sonic hues from the artist. From stark functionalism to freeform electronica, it soon became clear that Bjarki had an extensive palette when it comes to electronic music, and that’s before we even get to his work under aliases like Cucumb45. For the past two years, his label bbbbbb has been an extension of his eclectic musical persona, traipsing a fine line between the margins of the most surreal recesses of electronic music, channeling elements of Drum n Bass, IDM, acid and electro through the extensive discography of the label.

While the bulk of Bjarki’s work appears predominantly in the album format, he hasn’t released an album since releasing three in one year in 2016 until Happy Earthday via !k7 in 2019. It’s a format Bjarki thrives in as an artist, with some abstract narrative coursing through each LP independent of the last, while there’s some sonic identity connecting the artist to the music. Happy Earthday contains all those erratic rhythms, elusive textures and alien sound design that has  followed the artist through his records, but on this latest it’s more likely to draw comparison to what’s happening on the bbbbbbb label than those first LPs he released. For the most part Happy Earthday tones down the excessive indulgences into a more palatable down-tempo/ambient style and it’s only “(.)_(.)” and “Salty Grautin” where the record ventures into the kind of frenzied sonic whirlwind that we’ve come to expect from anything that would appear on Bjarki’s more indulgent tracks.

“Happy Earthday” sees the Icelandic producer channel elements of Breakcore, IDM and Electro into a record that truly stands on its own in current electronic club music dialects. There’s no retrospective approach, but rather something wholly unique with a vision on the future. Swimming in abstract sonic landscapes, where electronic sources chirp and twitter in some artificial intelligent effort in mimicking the natural world, there is something completely surreal about Happy Earthday. There is something uneasy about anthropomorphic electronics at first, like those Boston Dynamics robots opening doors, but as the album progresses, languid pads and billowing atmospheres impose a calming influence over the entire record.  The alien squeaks, squawks and rumblings  explore the furthest reaches of Bjarki’s sonic palette thus far, without over extending that enigmatic appeal his music always manages to exert over his audience. Delicate melodic touches and inviting textures, entice the audience a close to Bjarki’s work, but like the records that came before it shows yet another side to the artists creativity and completely disarms any preconceived notions about his music and his work.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

Has the commercial interest in vinyl finally faded? Does everybody with a portable record player now finally have a repress of Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and the Led Zeppelin box set with all those demos that weren’t good enough for the original records? Are we done with unnecessarily heavy 180grams of plastic and those ridiculous frames where you keep your sealed copy of Bitches Brew while you play Cardi B from Spotify?

At a glance it appears that vinyl culture is coming back to us. Pressing plants are now offering 45 day waiting times at their longest, and while it’s still expensive, limited runs of pressings seem not completely unattainable. If pressing plans are putting ads on social media, surely they must  be looking for work. 

It seems that the saturated vinyl market we’ve been swimming against with endless major label represses and established indie labels operating at a record a month productivity, has finally found some equilibrium again, allowing for people with a vested interest in vinyl culture to get their records out and for those patrons of the format to find that rare gem in a second hand market place again.

Even at Filter Musikk, Roland has seen an increase in interest for the second hand shelves as a new generation starts familiarising themselves with the hallowed shelves at Filter Musikk. Young, new labels like Ideophone are finding a place on the shelves where dedicated labels like the Sex Tags conglomorate still carve out an individual sound in the margins of vinyl culture. For a while it seemed that there were a few saturating the vinyl market, while many struggled and waited to get a mere foothold in a scene, but as Filter Musikk’s shelves start filling up with newer unknown labels, the winds of change seem to be in the air. 

It’s more likely that you’ll find something at a local record store than on discogs today and as the “interest” wanes, records that were pressed in small numbers become more regularly available and don’t just end up in one online record store at an excessive price. Vinyl culture was – and should never about collecting or hoarding, it’s about the music and that’s why Filter Musikk exists and Roland Lifjell spends so much of his time at the store, siphoning in new music into Oslo’s vinyl community. 

Some of these need special mention and this is the cut with Filter Musikk. 

 

Jiska Huizing & Rudi Andre Valdersnes – IDE002 (Ideophone) 12″ 

Ideophone is an emerging label out of Norway’s left-leaning electronic music scene, and after releasing their first record last year, they are back with four tracks from label founders, Jiska Huizing & Rudi Andre Valdersnes.

Jiska Huizing & Rudi Andre Valdersnes’ music rests somewhere between sound art and the dance floor, creating dense sonic textures, curtailed by the presence of primordial rhythms. Together they find some form in the random, as pieces like “Ballad,” re-contextualise field recordings and concréte sounds from their abstract and root it into something familiar in purview of a drum machine. 

Cinematic soundscapes; the wailing dissonance of a bowed string or voice; and hollow percussive metres converge on the fringes of the dance floor of IDE002. In the machine-driven foundations of track like “Cave” Huizing and Valdersnes drift to the middle of the dance floor, while in the more abstract ambience of “Dunes” they’ll apply sonic texture in music that moves  closer to sound installation.

Like Mika Vaino and Lucy before them, Huizing and Valdersnes ground their electronic dance floor experiments in the organic, where rhythm structures and sonic textures find a more cognitive allure, not purely driven by functional design. 

Floating Points – LesAlpx / Coorabell (Ninja Tune) 12″ 

We’re never under any assumption when it comes to the music of Floating Points. A fluid musical entity, Sam Shepard has gone from making intense club workouts for Eglo to leading a live band on stage and on record. Whether he’s making significant contributions to DJ bags, creating a classic album, or playing live there’s a kind of raw perfection to his work, that just seems to resonate with his audience. It’s not about playing the right note at the right time, but finding that rare, natural delivery that surprises and re-assures at the same time.

Some might have been circumspect when he released, “Reflections – Mojave Desert”, suspecting Shepherd of drifting off into some self-indulgent vortex, from which he might never return, but that’s not the case with the latest 12” via Ninja Tune.

“LesAlpx / Coorabell” finds Floating Point evoking those dance floor instincts that defined records like “Nuits Sonores / Nectarines.” Immersive and arresting, Shepard engages with the dance floor through deep minimal grooves, and melodic pieces that take on a life of their own. The extended version of “Les/Alpx” is progressive in every sense of the word, as melodies modulate and atmosphere’s build and dissipate into continuously evolving phrases. Those Jazz influences that are always very prominent in Shepherd’s work is ever more prevalent, but the sense of drama of this track and “Coorabell” is how it evolves within a club music dialect. 

It’s far from the loop-driven, repetitive nature of club music today as old elements die off and new elements join in with textures moving and evolving with the progression. Keys, reaching heady melodic heights, stride over pads and busy atmospheres in a dulcet noise that rolls through the arrangements in bouldering waves. It’s perhaps too bold to play anywhere in the opening stages of a set or a party, but at peak time, it offers a magnificent crescendo into the rest of the night. 

 

Body Beat Ritual – Instinct Primitive / Crash Report (Haven) 12″ 

Ritualistic machine music for corporeal desires. Instinct and immediacy subverts any preconceived purpose other than to make their audience dance in the most effective way. Impressing on a DIY pursuit, vaulted drums, harsh metallic synthesisers, acid contortions, and menacing vocal snippets fire across arrangements like an automated tank. 

Body Beat Ritual bring two tracks to Haven with a focus on EBM and Industrial landscapes. “Instinct Primitive” and “Crash Report” are two concise club tracks that use few stark elements to maximum effect. Hints of the eighties come through on both tracks with jack hammering gated-kicks in a kind of universal theme that runs through the two sides. Body Beat Ritual avoid the industrial tag sticking too closely interjecting the metallic percussion with jack-hammering basslines and those vocal snippets cut up like a William Burroughs narrative. 

Blush Response and VTSS are painted into a corner for their interpretations, having to retain those prominent elements, which leaves little room for anything else. While VTSS brings a more distinctive kick to the fore, Blush Response opts to re-jumble the arrangement in something closer to an edit than a remix, which ads or detracts little from the originals.

 

Blush Response – Selection For Societal Sanity (Sacred Court) 12″

Speaking of Blush Response… the label Sacred Court seem to have picked up from where Jealous God left off, but with a more sinister edge. While releases from the likes of Torn Relics and Restiva Plaggona on the label have leaned more towards Nouveau Art-Goth spectrum of industrial music, releases from label founder SNTS and Oake have favoured a more brutalist approach to Techno.

Blush Response however pander to neither camp, favouring a comparatively softer EBM palette in his work. “Selection for Societal Sanity” is machine music that turns the focus back onto the machines and not all the post-production additions in atmosphere. An array of noisy machines (most likely assembled in a modular configuration), scatter through the arrangements with the draconian march of the kick drum trying to impose order on them all.

Selection For Societal Sanity is at its best when Blush Response manages to rein it all into some form, like on the opening track and “RA9,” but when the machines start taking over like on “Net Terminal Gene” and “Acceptance by exclusion” it takes a hardened ear to appreciate the more erratic expressions. 

 

LSB – Here With Me (Footnotes) 12″ – link

Like a dream drifting on some rational thought, drum n bass of the liquid variety rely precisely on the contrast between the fast-paced percussion and the softer melodic pieces moving through the arrangement at an inhibited tempo. It’s in the latter part where Luke Beavon’s work as LSB is particularly arresting on his latest EP, “Here with Me”.

Lonesome sine waves floating around the subterranean depths of the frequency spectrum create a willowing bed of sonic dirt from which expressive melodic movements grow. Strings, bubbling synthesisers and effervescent keystrokes create billowing textures like a lucid dream. The stoic rattling percussive elements come and go around the movements exactly as needed while maintaining a distance with its solemn melodic counterparts. 

It is however when they seem to work in tandem like on “Space Stepper” where this record truly shines. A half step beat and a gloomy hollow pluck work in perfect harmony on this occasion, as a sub-bass drawl expounds on each bar in a hefty plume of the lower frequency. LSB’s fairly cooler sonic temperatures on this track, which together with “Do your thing,” offers a little contrast to the warmer tones of the A-side in a matter of dusk and dawn across the two sides of this release. 

 

 

A blatant disregard for convention: Beastie Joyce & Jørgen Egeland DGS takeover

Re-contextualising the dance floor from the purview of Thom Yorke’s lazy eye through a pair of Bootsy specs, Den Gyldne Sprekk has never been about conforming. With a shrewd gaze from the DJ’s perspective, Raymond T. Hauger (DJ Lekkerman) and his guests dig deep through the absolute spectrum of music every Tuesday at Jaeger for a “club night” that conjures salacious music from terrifying depths of some of the most informed record collections in Oslo.

From their thematic album nights to just a couple of DJs exploring the margins of an extensive record collection, Den Gyldne Sprekk lives in the abstract and thrives in the obscure recesses of record culture. 

In the month of October, DJ Lekkerman hands over the reigns of his weekly residency to a couple of stalwarts on Den Gyldne Sprekk roster, and two DJs and music enthusiasts that know the concept inside out. Beastie Joyce and Jørgen Egeland host another month of Den Gyldne Sprekk at Jaeger with a series of concepts that go from another KIZZ pøb to the blood-curdling sounds of Memphis Rap for Halloween as the pair resurrect their Funk Boys alias to invite  a host of kindred spirits to the lineup for October. 

Together, Beatie Joyce (aka Eirik Usterud) and Jørgen Engeland have an uncanny report in the booth, both complementing and challenging each other’s knowledge and record collection as they play together, but where their tastes converge and how it informs this month’s programme is still a mystery.  So we assembled a few questions for the DJ pair in an extensive Q&A that sheds some light on their October takeover of Den Gyldne Sprekk. 

Hey guys. Great that you are doing a takeover again. The programme looks amazing. Is there any kind of theme or subliminal thought tying all these events together in October?

Jørgen: There’s no coherent theme really. But we feel the program as a whole, stylistically diverse as it is, encompasses the essence of what DGS is and can be. From me and Luis (Beglomeg, Passe Tjalla) playing our favorite disco and boogie records to a night celebrating Hotter Than Hell, this sort of eclecticism and blatant disregard for genre conventions is what makes it such a unique club concept. 

Eirik: More than anything else, I feel like the DGS’ modus operandi is playing music you wouldn’t expect to hear at any other club night. We’ve had some angry and confused patrons unfamiliar with the concept demanding house and techno before (when we did our religious music night in April people were absolutely livid), but part of the fun is trying to get them on our side.

You guys will be kicking it off on the 1st as the FUNK BOYS. I feel like FUNK BOYS hadn’t been created yet by the last takeover and it’s a fairly new creation. What’s the idea behind that project?

E: Funk Boys was an idea I got around the time we were planning our last takeover. It occured to me that a perfect DGS format would be playing “funk rock” in a very broad definition of the term – one that includes Aerosmith, Minutemen, Korn and 70s Miles Davis alike. Then the name “Funk Boys” popped into my head and I couldn’t stop laughing about it.

J: It’s a ridiculous name and I haven’t stopped laughing since the first time I heard it.

And what sort of music can people expect from FUNK BOYS and how does it diverge from what you guys do individually?

E: To me the Funk Boys concept is somehow very broad and extremely specific at the same time. It basically sticks with a lot of the usual DGS mainstays of groovy hard rock and rock/disco crossover, but it has a more specific focus. And more slap bass!

J: The concept is a sort of throwback to Sprekken in its original form. When Raymond started out at Kniven his idea was to play quote unquote «hash rock»; hard rock with synthesizers and heavy drum breaks, poor man’s Pink Floyd and the like. We’ve chosen to focus on the funkier side of things and also include stuff like ‘70s fusion and the more rock influenced part of the P-Funk universe. Ole Øvstedal (Oslo rock legend and bar manager at Revolver) is joining us this time around which we’re both really looking forward to! The regular Jaeger clubgoers can expect to hear a lot of tunes they might not be aware that they know. From the opening drums of Mountain’s Long Red to Billy Squier’s The Big Beat, many of these records are mainstays in the sample libraries of hip hop producers, so it all ties in nicely with the regular music profile in Grensen 9.

KIZZ PØB returns! What is it about the band in your opinion that continues to draw old and new fans to their music?

E: To me Kiss is sort of the ultimate rock band. The original lineup was just perfect as this cast of characters and team of musicians – both a cartoon universe and a set of four great, distinctive singers of which three were great songwriters too. Great mythology and a bottomless supply of bangers, what more could you want?

J: Unlike Eirik who dressed up as Ace Frehley for carnivals when he was in kindergarten, I didn’t really start listening to Kiss until I was in my early teens. I’m not really interested in their makeup or all the staff around them. I consider them another great Michigan rock band, in the same league as the MC5, Alice Cooper and the Stooges. I know they’re from NYC, but still. Stylistically and spiritually they’re from Detroit rock city.

The Kiss army is huge and they have some very dedicated fans in Norway too, so it’s not the type of concept that you can take too lightly. Besides playing Hotter Than Hell in its entirety how do you guys intend to summon the Kiss spirit on the night?

E: Based on previous Kizz Pøbb experiences (the “‘Nasty 40 Party” in may and the Tons of Rock afterparty at Revolver in june) nothing is more fun than just listening to Kiss super loud with your friends. For the occasion I’ve invited a friend of mine who has ridiculously deep knowledge of pretty much the entire catalogue to serve up even deeper cuts than we could do by ourselves.

 J: I hope one of us ends up in a fist fight with a pissed off Kiss Army member because we insist on writing KIZZ with two z’s.

Why that album specifically?

E: In addition to the simple fact that october 22 is the album’s 45th birthday, Hotter Than Hell is sort of a cult favorite in the Kiss catalogue that both Raymond and I hold in very high regard. I think it’s one of their most consistent albums and it has some pretty weird songwriting from Gene and Ace in particular. The production is an important part of it too – it’s cheap and muddy in a way that sort of enhances the material for me, kind of similar to Black Sabbath “Vol 4”. Really sludgy and heavy, plus it sounds kind of murky and half-melted, like early Ariel Pink or something. If you’ve wondered why bands like Nirvana and the Melvins were so into Kiss, this album answers a lot of that.

J: It’s kind of an underdog in their discography. It doesn’t have a stadium rock hit like Rock and Roll All Nite or Shout It Out Loud. I mean, the most well known song from the record is a ballad (Goin’ Blind) about the relationship between a 16 year old girl and a 93 year old man. Kiss never got deeper than that!

This is also not the first time that you’ve done a Deutscher abend. What exactly does that entail? 

J: Have we done a German night before? I can’t recall, but there have been plenty of other nights with a country specific theme. Christophe Boulmer has had his soirées françaises and Raymond’s lawyer David Myr played an entire evening of Italian prog the year before last. There’s something special about a DJ set that’s completely void of British and American music, it breaks the mould in a way. When I lived in Trondheim me and my friend JT had a monthly club called Around The World in 33 rpm where we played music with a different geographical theme each time. One of the nights we only played records from countries invaded by Germany during WWII so I feel I’ve sort of come full circle.

E: Stay tuned for DGS Japan Night, that’s really gonna whip ass. Swedish night too!

J: I wanna do a night of brazilian music sometime in the future.

I assume it’s going to be more Krautrock than Techno?

 J: Over the years I’ve developed a bit of a distaste for the term krautrock. It’s a pejorative coined by British music journalists that doesn’t really say much about the music. But it’s gonna be on the kosmische end of the musical spectrum, definitely. My knowledge about techno doesn’t really go further than Detroit. 

E: Raymond convinced me to avoid saying krautrock too, and my techno knowledge barely even goes beyond Drexciya. Personally I hope the heavier, dumber side of german rock – Scorpions, Accept and so on – will be represented properly too, and I’ll probably play more Can on the Funk Boys night. I might even throw in some eurodance, it shouldn’t be too hip or tasteful.

Artist and producer Emil Nikolaisen is on duties that night. Why was he the perfect candidate for a German night?  

J: There’s a definite lineage from the German music of the seventies to his work with Serena-Maneesh. He’s also a great DJ and an extremely passionate and knowledgeable music lover.

 E: I’m looking forward to meeting him and hearing what he’s bringing to the table!

And from Disco to ”Memphis Rap,” you guys are really covering all the bases on this occasion. I know you both have deep record bags with a broad scope in music, but what usually draws each of you to music or a record?

 E: It can be anything, really. I spend a lot of time reading about music or getting tips from friends and checking out anything that sounds appealing to me. Usually I gravitate toward stuff that’s unusual and distinctive in some way, and stuff that’s aggressive or hard-hitting. It’s a big plus if there’s a big catalogue to explore and it offers a bigger aesthetic experience, which both Kiss and Three 6 Mafia do, to name some relevant examples.

 J: I hear different things in all the different types of music I like and can’t phantom being interested in just one genre. That must be like, only watching romantic comedies or only reading science fiction novels. Has to get boring after a while, right? When I listen to a Coltrane record I judge it by different musical parameters than a Slayer album or a Lindstrøm twelve inch. They’re vastly different forms of expression and you have to treat them as such. But if there is any common thread in my faceted musical taste it must be that I don’t really like it when things become too streamlined, for lack of a better term. I need a bit of resistance!

Where do your tastes usually crossover?

E: I feel like our tastes overlap more often than not. Jørgen can’t stand tooL and The Doors which I do like, but even there our sensibilities are similar enough that I fully understand why he finds those bands objectionable. When we did Funk Boys in july Jørgen even managed to convince me that the Red Hot Chili Peppers don’t 100% suck so that’s one less thing to fight about.

 J: Their records up to and including Blood Sugar Sex Magik are great! At least if you can live with the fact that Anthony Kiedes is a bigot with an IQ barely over 80. Anything they’ve made after 1991 is a waste of everyone’s time though. With that said I think the programme we’ve curated for october covers a lot of our musical common ground, but I know my taste in hip hop is a lot more conservative than Eirik’s. I generally don’t like anything that wasn’t made on an SP1200 or an MPC60.

Were the nights a collaborative effort, or are there any that’s specific to either of you?

E: The German night was Jørgen’s idea, and while I’m the one who’s really obsessed with Memphis rap it was actually Raymond who wanted us to do it for DGS. I feel like the planning has been a closer collaboration than the last time, where we sort of brought two ideas each. This time we’ve spent more time discussing it and going back and forth.

Memphis Rap is an interesting edition. It was also known as Horrorcore, but was that just because they sampled horror soundtracks or has it some relevance to the lyrics too? 

E: Absolutely. A lot of it is extremely violent and explicitly satanic. In particular I think the earliest Three 6 stuff is just a pure gleeful celebration of evil in a way you rarely find outside of the most murder-obsessed extreme metal and noise music.

J: Those early 36M records is quite possibly the most brutal music I’ve ever heard. The combination of youthful aggression, heavy drug use and an unhealthy obsession with the occult is a deadly combination!

Besides Three 6 Mafia, I’m pretty unfamiliar with the sub-genre. What would consider the quintessential Memphis Rap track?

E: Honestly you pretty much can’t go wrong with anything Three 6 Mafia put out in the 90’s, but when it comes to deeper cuts I’m particularly fond of “Watch Yo Back” by Rivaside Clique, featuring production and rapping by the legendary Tommy Wright III. The bassline on that track is absolutely crushing, just one of the most brutal, heavy tracks I’ve heard in any genre. Another one I like is “Bigga & Betta Thangs” by Playa Posse, produced by Blackout, who specialized in really dark and horrific synthscapes.

J: Eirik’s a lot more well versed in the world of Memphis rap than I am, but I think Da Devil’s Playground by Koopsta Knicca is a quintessential record regardless of genre. Coincidentally that record turns 25 three days before our Memphis rap night. But to recommend something that’s not by Three 6 Mafia: I really like Al Kapone’s third album Sinista Funk from ‘94. It’s a stone cold classic. Kocane Wayne’s verse on Still Locin’ Up is worth the price of that record alone!

Will there be any other aspect of this night to drive that Halloween theme home?

E: I haven’t really thought about it, but maybe we’ll invest in some decorative cobwebs and skeletons?

J: Can you get cough syrup and Mountain Dew through Vinhuset?

I think that’s it… anything either of you would like to add?

E: Come to DGS if you’re still looking for that blue jean baby queen… prettiest girl you’ve ever seen… see her shake on the movie screen, Jimmy Dean. Rock on!

J: Hit me up if you’ve got an original copy of RBL Posse’s Don’t Give Me No Bammer twelve you wanna sell. Other than that? No, not really.

 

TBT: Prince – The Black Album

“Don’t buy the Black Album, I’m sorry.” 

Running down vertically on a luminescent green silhouette of Prince, this message appears in a flash about 24 seconds into the video for “Alphabet street” and if you blinked, you missed it. It’s one of several hidden messages, including “heaven is so beautiful,” “4 the light dance,” and apparently loads more which didn’t make it to the final edit according to the editor, Peter D.Beyt. “Don’t buy the Black Album, I’m sorry,” however is probably the most cryptic of them all and incredibly well hidden compared to those other messages. 

Released in 1988 as the first single from the incomparable “Lovesexy” and only a year after Prince’s chart-topping LP a “Sign o’ the Times” few people would’ve even known what the Black Album was back then. The album never saw the light of day, with almost all 500 000 copies of the original pressing destroyed, but today it lives on in infamy, locked in a story of intrigue and mysticism, pieced together from unsubstantiated claims and a lot of conjecture, with a few unsolicited copies floating around the marketplace.

Many consider this album one of Prince’s greatest achievements, a bold claim and most likely in light of the fact that it’s been a white whale for many record collectors over the years. A Canadian pressing of the LP sold for $27 500 in 2018 and even bootleg versions can fetch 4 digits on the market today, but it’s significance is about more than just that.

It’s down to exclusivity, yes, but it’s also rooted in the story around its creation and its ultimate demise. It’s a story about drugs, gangster rap, the parental advisory board, a label and an artist at the peak of his creativity. It could’ve been the best LP he ever released, but we’ll never know for sure, since it’s been enshrined in some mythic lore, perpetuated by collectors and vinyl enthusiasts alike and revolving around a hollywood like tale that starts at Paisley Park.  

A Bad Trip

On the eve of the album’s release, Karen Krattinger, the production manager at Paisley Park Studios received a telephone call. It was Prince telling her to halt the shipment of 500 000 copies of the record sitting on a pallet somewhere at Warner Bros records. “We’ve got to stop this album, it’s so evil” he reportedly told Krattinger who in turn pleaded with the label and the shipment was destroyed.

Prince came to the conclusion that the album was “evil” after what he would later refer to in interviews as a “dark night of the soul.” The night in question? According to some unconfirmed reports, Prince had been out at a local nightclub, to test out some of the tracks from the LP. Poet, Ingrid Chavez, had apparently bumped into Prince in the audience and followed him back to Paisley Park, where it soon became clear that the artist was more impish than usual and clearly in the midst of a bad drug addled trip. Chavez had told Prince “If you smiled, you’d be a nice person” and upon seeing his unseemly gurning reflection in the glossy cover of the “Black Album,” he apparently had the epiphany that the album was evil and should be destroyed.  

Prince would also later say “I was very angry a lot of the time back then, and that was reflected in that album. I suddenly realised that we can die at any moment, and we’d be judged by the last thing we left behind… I didn’t want that angry bitter thing to be the last thing.” 

This is the story as told by keyboardist Matt Fink, who heard it first hand from the bodyguard so none of it’s ever really been verified. It’s more likely that it’s a litany of a few factors that include label pressure, timing and of course the content of the record that brought Prince to his conclusion and why he pulled the plug on the “Black Album”. What ever happened to that copy he had seen his reflection, is anybody’s guess, but what’s sure is that 500 000 copies of the LP had been ordered to be destroyed, lost forever save for a few copies that fell through the cracks and set  a whole bootleg culture in motion, which forced Prince to release that message on the Alphabet street video.    

While it might have been a “bad trip” that influenced Prince’s decision to finally pull the LP, there is a lot to suggest Prince was no stranger to the drug experience during the recording of the LP. “Superfunkycalifragisexy,” the first track to be recorded in 1986 is a track about ecstasy, which in 1986 was starting to infiltrate club floors around the US. “If you do too much, your skin will be sensitive to touch / The first person that touch you, you’ll wanna fuck,” he sings over the second verse in one of two tracks on the LP that also references squirrel meat (a confusing eighties term foir MDMA apparently) and the character of Maurice – who some believe might have been Prince’s brother in law and assumed drug dealer Maurice PhIllips.

Was this whole album perhaps a drug experience captured in music?

The Hip Hop Connection

“Superfunkycalifragisexy” consists primarily of a Linn Drum kick and snare, a low slung bass and stabbing atonal synths that make up the bulk of the stark repetitive arrangement. It’s an arrangement that would stay mostly consistent throughout the LP, making the “Black Album” one of Prince’s most  machine heavy LPs ever recorded. A lot of the tracks even seem to take their cues from the Hip Hop of that era in fact. 

To understand the significance of this, you have to remember that Prince was incredibly critical of Hip Hop at that time, often very outspoken about the kind of gangster lifestyle they “promoted” through lyrics about violence. Even so Hip Hop would be a constant reference on this record, especially on “Bob George” where Prince is said to evoke the character of Spooky Electric, with lyrics about a gun-wielding psychopath that shoots his lover. “Bob George” is considered to be an amalgamation created from “Bob Cavallo and Nelson George”; Prince’s former manager and a music critic respectively, and the track goes on to be self-referential, calling Prince “That skinny motherfucker with the high voice.”

Prince’s voice is pitched down in a register below, giving the voice an ominous growl as he raps over a pounding drum machine. In an interview with Sheila E (former girlfriend and Paisley Park artist) she said that; “he couldn’t sleep at night thinking about 10-year-old kids believing, ‘This is what Prince is about – guns and violence.’” And with this track, “Dead On It,” and “2 nigs united for West Compton,” making blatant references to the glorification of the gangster rap “lifestyle,” it’s believed that Prince most likely didn’t want to expound on the hype.

It wasn’t the first time he had broached themes of gun violence, and only the year before it made a prominent reference in the title single for “Sign O the times” too, so the validity of this claim does come into question somewhat. What is clear however is that Prince was clearly highly aware of what was happening in Hip Hop at that time, and had clearly borrowed something from what was still an emerging genre at that time. If the “Black Album” was released as scheduled it would’ve most likely been the first charting LP, that would utilize the sounds and working processes of drum machines and synthesisers so extensively, leap-frogging N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” by a full year. It somehow preceded gangster rap, with the very same musical tropes that would eventually inform much of the music; a very significant aspect considering that besides perhaps for Schoolly D’s first proto efforts, the genre hadn’t even been invented yet. 

Perhaps it was exactly the fact that gangster rap hadn’t fallen in cross-hairs of the authorities, that Prince also pulled the plug for fear of punitive measures from the powers that be.

The provocative imp

By 1986 a new censorship body called the Parental Advisory board had been established in America and Prince was no stranger to their conservative influence on music. It was in fact his 1984 song “Darling Nikky” that had been the reason for the creation of the Parental Advisory Board and those parental advisory stickers that anybody that bought a Hip Hop record in the nineties would remember. He clearly would’ve been at loggerheads again with the censorship body for a track like “Bob George,” but also for the more sexually charged moments on the LP like “Cindy C.”

“Cindy C,”in case it wasn’t obvious is a kind of perverted love poem from Prince to Cindy Crawford, who Prince had been infatuated with at the time. “Oooh Cindy C, will you play with me? / I’ll pay the usual fee” likens the eighties super model to a prostitute while also referring to her as a super-fine-heifer at some point. The lyrics are quite ridiculous in fact, and it makes you wonder if Prince had ever talked to human woman before, but there’s no doubt the fantastically pervy “Your furry melting thing waits me” would’ve certainly raised a few eyebrows on the parental advisory board, as would have much of the album.

Even “When 2 R In Love,” which would in fact be released later on “Lovesexy” was certainly not free from Prince’s particular brand of provocative perversions, especially in the third verse when he sings: “Their bodies shiver at the mere contemplation / Of penetration (let alone the act) / Let alone the actual act / When two are in love / The thought of his tongue in the V of her love / In his mind, this thought it leads the pack.” That track, which is about the erotic possibilities of taking a bath with a lover, a theme he would revisit a lot in his work (I kid you not), alongside “Cindy C”, and all the drug related and violent themes Prince would resurrect in his music, would certainly have been a headache for Prince and the label at that time.

If it was released in 1987, and especially considering the fairly recent development of the  parental advisory board, it would have certainly not seen the light of day without huge protest from the censorship board. It’s very likely even it would’ve been banned. The fact that it was officially released in 1994, off the back off albums like Madonna’s Erotica and his own “Come”  would also suggests that perhaps even Prince thought it might still be too provocative for audiences in 1987. If not for its lyrical content then also for the music. 

The third eye

“Serve it up, Frankie” goes the intro to “2 nigs united 4 west compton” before descending down a lysergic rabbit hole of funk and jazz, sans any appearance of a vocal. Besides the reference to club music and Frankie Knuckles in the opening line, the track breaks with anything Prince had been doing around that time. The structure almost feels improvised as he seems to channel the fury of the likes  of Parliament Funkadelic in that track with stabs and horns combining in a maelstrøm of an irreverent funked up cacophony. Like much of the album, it’s quite different from the type of music he was making at that point. 

The left field nature of the tracks and the prominence of drum machines and the stark synth programming that dominates the LP are more comparable to what was happening in the underground with Hip Hop and House music music at that time, than the two LPs that bookended it. Much of the songs are just one verse taking over from the next, with a bridge at the most, and from “Le Grind” right through to “Rock Hard in a Funky place” the Black Album contains some of the most unusual phrasing and melodic treatment in Prince’s entire discography, including his more jazzy albums from the late 2000’s. 

There’s not much in the way of a memorable hook or an impressionable refrain, and certainly nothing like “Sign o’ the Times” or “Alphabet Street” on the LP, beckoning the question again how much the drugs played a role in this albums creation, but also was this not perhaps Prince’s most experimental album ever? Regardless, it seems quite poignant today, not only for the relationship to Prince’s music but the musical zeitgeist of the time too. It stands out amongst the rest of the Prince catalogue and in many ways it was way ahead of its time.

This is part of the reason why the album lives on infamy today, and why it’s such a white whale for collectors amongst the myriad of other reasons that delayed its eventual release. It’s easy to enshrine the LP in the mythic lore of a drug-addled epiphany, but it’s it quite likely that it was this and all these other factors would influence the decision to shelve the release until 1994. Today it’s a classic amongst heads and collectors, and not just for its exclusivity (although you can stream it on Tidal and YouTube) but for the latent obscure significance it would have on Prince’s discography. 

He would never make music like this again and would always downplay its significance, but that would only encourage the allure of the Black Album. Many of the more eclectic and knowledgeable DJs today will have a digital copy of “Bob George” somewhere, and while the audience might recognise it as music from a familiar artist, few would place a finger on that record, and that’s why it still garners fascination and interest from heads and collectors alike.

The lyrical content, the production, the significance of the period and the strange story around the LP has taken on some reverential undertones in vinyl culture, but it has lived on beyond Discogs hype today and it has made an unexpected invaluable contribution to modern music history. 

It just sounds better with Ian Pooley

Ian Pooley has been a significant figure in the electronic music landscape in Germany and beyond. From his early success as one half of T’N’I with DJ Tonka  to his work with Daft Punk and the sound he established as a solo artist for a whole genre of music, his career stretches nearly three decades and he continues to be a regular fixture in catalogues and in DJ booths around the world.  

A precocious talent, Ian Pooley was but a teenager when he and DJ Tonka released their first records as T’N’I in the early nineties on Force Inc. Pooley had found an early affinity for the machines and from those primal Techno sounds he and Tonka produced to the deeper sounds of House that he would eventually produce on his own, the eccentricities of the machine sounds had remained at the core of his music.

He signed to Richard Branson’s V2 records in the late nineties, and flirted with commercial success alongside Daft Punk and Mousse T. but remained closer to his homegrown roots than those contemporaries. He would carve out a sound between Techno and House music erring on the deeper aspects of the latter, with the stark textures of Techno ebbing forth from classic synthesisers. 

These processes are still fundamental to Ian Pooley’s records, with the MPC drum machine as the central piece of gear in his studio and music, including his next LP. “It’s been delayed for many reasons,” says Ian over a telephone call, but patience prevails for the German producer. “I think it’s totally fine, because when the time is right, it’s right. Once it’s out it’s going to be fine.There comes a moment when you realise that all the tracks fit together and now is the right time.”

I phone up Ian Pooley in Berlin after he played Jaeger to see how his set went. “It was great fun,”  he says while praising the set-up at Jaeger. “ I loved the mixer. I wish every club would be like this.”  Ian’s set stayed true to the sounds of his records while moving between elements of acid, R&B and Jazz. We talked about his set and more and his set is available to stream above.

How did you feel your set at Jaeger went?

It was really nice. I was a bit surprised when Ivaylo told me it was upstairs, in the yard, but it was nice and a really lovely crowd, who were kind of up for different things. 

Yes, I noticed there were some elements of Jazz,  Acid and some vocals in there too. Did you prepare your set as such?

My usual way is to listen to what the DJ is playing before me. I tend to I arrive an hour before my set and then I’ll know what I’ll play for the first four tracks and then I go from there. I think about how I can build the set and I watch the crowd. 

Ivaylo played before you, and I know you’ve played before in the past, so you must have known what the vibe was like?

Exactly. And right now there is a whole new generation of audience who didn’t really experience House music from the late nineties. I can see all over Europe where I travel that the crowd is mostly fascinated with that sound and for me that’s really easy.

That was actually something I was going to ask you about. I’ve noticed that this next generation is getting back to those early nineties sounds.

My theory is that everything comes back in 15-20 year cycles. It’s very up and down. People who are born in a certain decade always grow up, being fascinated by the music from that decade, because maybe they heard music like this, but not really consciously because they were too young. But it stays in their head and when they consciously start hearing music they are really into it. It’s the same for me being fascinated with Disco music from the seventies, because I was born in the seventies. 

What’s your relationship with the music from the nineties today? Because you were around, making the kind of music that they are hearing for the first time today.

Sometimes it’s a bit awkward for me to play, because they are really old tracks and I’ve played them a million times. But I always try to remember that for them it’s brand new stuff and really fresh. It’s cool that it’s coming back, because that’s also the way I produce.

Do you feel that the younger crowd that come to see you, know who you are and that they expect kind of Ian Pooley sound?

O ja. There are always people coming to me before and during my set to request certain songs, and it’s usually three or four songs that I expect them to request. It’s usually stuff from ‘98 to ‘00. And that’s ok, but there are also some people that know my current stuff. 

Are there different expectations of you as a DJ when you play back home in Berlin, than when you play abroad?

Yeah, because when I play abroad there are a lot of people coming to hear my music. And because when I play in a place like Oslo, where I would play maybe once every three years, for a lot of people it would be amazing if I could play certain songs. In Berlin, it’s more like a playground where you can play more current stuff and dig a little deeper and find gems for other people.

I suppose you know the community so well there at the moment, so they expect something different from you all the time.

No, it’s super open. There are no real expectations, and they are really open to anything. That’s what I really like about Berlin, I can test out new tracks that I produced or that people sent me so I can see whether I’ll keep them or what I can improve on.

So it’s a testing ground for your own music?

Exactly, and Berlin is always on the forefront so it’s always good to see where things are heading.

I remember there was a Resident Advisor interview where you were discussing the Brazilian sounds that you were associated with and how you were trying to get away from that label. Is this still something you are being associated with today?

No I made my peace with that. I was against it for so many years. I did this exchange 8 years ago, so that’s when it was still fresh. I produced those kinds of sounds in the early 2000’s to about 2005, but it was haunting me for the next 6-7 years. I had this moment in 2005, that I said “Ok, I really don’t want to do this anymore”. It was too commercial to push it, and it took me a while to get rid of this kind of image. Now eight years later, I’ve totally made peace with it, and it’s totally fine.

Do you feel that you need to have some sort of fluid conversation between the music that you play and the music that you make or do you feel that you can go and do a Techno set when you’re playing abroad?

O, yeah, I do that from time to time. A couple of months ago, I played in Los Angeles and I played a set that was Techno. But in general as a consumer, as a listener of music, I’m a bit bored with Techno. I think it’s reached its peak, and at the moment it’s just more loopier and everyone is just going faster and faster, and I find that Techno is going to go a bit down again. That happened in the late nineties, it happened in 2009, and now it’s been going slowly for the past  6-7 years and now I’m a little bit bored with it. So I think I’m more and more looking at House and raw organic House.

You make your music based on the same fundamental working processes of the nineties with those same machines at the core of your work…

Yes, I was one of the last guys to introduce a computer to my setup. I only did that 11 years ago. 80% of my tracks are made on the machines, and then I just hit record in Logic for example and finalise the arrangement. It’s just the way that I work and there are a couple of  steps that might seem unnecessary for new producers, but it’s just the way I work, and there is no reason to change.

The reason I brought that up, is that those raw House sounds that you talked about is naturally conducive to those machines.

Exactly, it comes naturally. That’s how they sound. That’s what I like, that’s the thing I want to achieve. The core of my setup is a MPC3000, the software is from 1995. A lot of people ask me why I don’t use the new ones, it’s better to store your samples and your sound banks and bla bla bla. I always sample from scratch, when you turn the machine on there are no sounds, and it just sounds better. 

So where does the evolution in your work comes from if you’re using the same methods and machines that you’ve used since the nineties?

I don’t know. In the nineties I worked really fast and really raw. In the nineties you couldn’t really open and close an arrangement, like you can now with Logic and your computer. If you wanted to keep your track, you had to record in that moment. So the tracks sounded even more raw with less elements. And some tracks you can hear mistakes that other people don’t hear but I hear. So these days, I tend to spend too much time in the arrangement, like everybody else. 

So I would say, these days the arrangements are more refined and there are more elements, but all and all, when people ask me, I can’t tell you, because I just do my music and I’m happy that recognise my music when they hear it. It means that I can have some kind of signature to my music, but how I do it, I really don’t know. I just sit in the studio and work.

Do you consider yourself a veteran of the scene in that respect?

Well there are a lot of people that mention this all the time, that’s just not my style. I’ve been doing this since 1991, since the scene started and a lot of people said that Icreated the genre that sits between House and Techno in the mid nineties, and then I did the more French stuff , working with Daft Punk. I could say it, but I’d rather be known for the stuff I’m doing right now, sitting in the current scene with the new producers. 

That’s the advantage of electronic music, it’s essentially ageless. The voice of the music is the voice of the machines and that can be as contemporary as you like it.

Exactly and I think that’s enough for me and I’m not good at doing PR for myself.

What was it like for you to work on a major label like Virgin?

I was with V2, there’s a huge difference. Richard Branson sold Virgin in the ‘90s and he decided to go back into the record business in the mid ‘90s and he founded V2. 

I didn’t know that. But it was still a big label, was there a lot of freedom there?

Totally. The only thing we ever discussed was which tracks we were going to release as a single.

You mentioned working with Daft Punk earlier and I know you’ve worked with Mousse T. too, and what I do find interesting about your career is that where those contemporaries went in a very pop direction you managed to stay fairly close to the roots of the music. Was that a conscious decision on your part?

Well I had a few attempts. Back then it was the sign of the times to go a bit more commercial, because House tracks were entering the charts. So I did one or two things that in hindsight I shouldn’t have done, but luckily they didn’t get the attention.

I think it was totally cool what they did. Mousse T. wasn’t just a great House music producer, he was a great pop/rock producer before that. With Daft Punk I knew that they always wanted to go down that road, because they’ve been huge fans of ‘70s soul and funk. I knew they wanted to test if they could pull it off and it worked out really well for them. 

Album of the Week: Trans-4M – Sublunar Oracles

Some records are created to live beyond their time. They get overlooked, and forgotten, getting passed over for something more recognisable at the forefront of the shelf, only to crop up years later in a retrospective that should’ve included them in the first place. I suspect this is what happened with Trans 4M’s “Sublunar Oracles,” an album that landed right alongside “U.F.Orb” and “Selected Ambient works 85-92” in 1992, but was largely passed over for the sake of those, more recognisable titles. At a time when electronic ambient music was still fairly new and alternative, Aphex Twin and U.F.O had only just started making impressions in popular culture, and it would take another few years for people to get accustomed to the exotic sounds of ambient music and another two decades or so for more obscure artists like  Trans 4M to be recognised for their excellent contributions to the genre.

Re-issued for the first time via Young Marco’s dedicated Safe Trip label, the “Sublunar Oracles” has finally found an audience that could appreciate its magnificent beauty. At a time when electronic music is returning to melodies and new generations are navigating archives to get back to the roots of various styles, “Sublunar Oracles'” arrival is serendipitous and  sounds as contemporary as its ever been. It must have been way ahead of its time in 1992, with a minimalist spatial awareness and an open-ended musical purview that sounds a lot more grown up than the very cluttered and DIY ambient music of their time. The sibling production duo of Dimitri and Stefan Van Elsen would only go on to release a handful of LPs and EPs throughout the ’90s, before disbanding in 1999, but what they left on “Sublunar Oracles” is a masterpiece in the ambient music lexicon.

An immersive experience over eight tracks, “Sublunar Oracles” narrates a global journey from the omnipotent perspective of a satellite charting an orbit around the planet, where stark alien electronic textures conspire with the terrestrial sounds of exotic locations from around the world. The album arrives on a chorus of detuned synths modulating on the rhythms of a message being broadcast lightyears ahead, before setting a path in an orbit of sweet melodies and broken beat constructions that mark out a metre with sensitive delicacy. Opening track, the aptly named “Arrival” introduces the narrative for an LP that travels between the otherworldly sounds of Trans4M’s synthesisers and the earthbound sounds they’ve sampled. On “Death Probe” a lovely arp hovers above the  sounds of water and whale song while on “Amma” the evocative sounds of the African continent travel into the future on the heady pulse of a dub rhythms.

There’s a captivating melodic- or harmonic phrase at the core of each track with keys and synthesisers offering some kind of development through the tracks that go beyond the refrain. Like if Steve Reich were to compose from the synthesiser, there’s something complicated about melodies that are built on very a simple foundation. Dimitri Van Elsen had apparently been enrolled in Antwerp’s Jazz Studio at the time of creating the LP and the genre’s influence had certainly been a touchstone for the artist. The melodic phrasings aren’t quite as innocent anything else released at that time, offering something a little more progressive than three notes barely breaching the tonic.  It’s especially noticeable on the Indian sounds of  “Atharvaveda,” where Gert Wijninckx’s saxophone evokes eastern passages alongside talking drums and electronic sitars.

Between the more organic elements of tracks like “Atharvaveda” and the classic sounds of electronic ambient music, this album is a versatile record that contains more than just the obvious tropes of its time and its music. It might have taken two decades for it to be appreciated for its magnificence, but “Sublunar Oracles” deserves a rightful place amongst the classic ambient albums like “Selected Works 85-92” and “U.F.Orb.”

Setting the record straight on Tony Humphries

There’s always been a kind of revisionist rhetoric underpinning the history of music. Ever since we first established it as a bonafide subject of study, subjective opinion has overwhelmed fact. Whether it’s the points of contention between the origins of Techno or the emergence of blues in the UK, we’ve continually morphed and adapted musical history to suit contemporary thoughts in an effort to neatly organise often quite random musical anomalies. In the 20th century with the advent of the music- media and business this issue expounded as journalists, critics and record companies compartmentalised music into palatable categories defined by trend or stylistic trait even if it meant eschewing the reality of the situation. 

Dance music for all its subcultural worth has not been spared any adaptation either as lines started to form in the sand with the advent of House music. What was in fact a fluid movement from one sound to the next and occurring simultaneously across borders and musical jurisdictions, were broken up into factions, genres and styles. The results amongst countless others were that the sound of House in Chicago differed vastly from the sound of House in New York and Techno was the creation of three Belleville citizens, rather than the influence of Kraftwerk on a whole bunch Detroitian kids experimenting with synthesisers and drum machines. Journalistic enthusiasm and financial greed influenced the narrative of electronic music, continually revising and adapting the plot to the subjective impulses and/or ambitions of the various parties involved. 

Case and point: an article on the Red Bull Music Academy blog that posed “the convoluted story behind the discovery and remixes of the classic gospel record”. That record? The Joubert Singers and the supposed Larry Levan remix of that song. When a mysterious white label appeared in 2003 with an unreleased mix of the original it embellished the origins of the record with “LARRY 02” emblazoned on the centre disc, hinting in no obscure way, to Larry Levan and essentially accrediting the record to the Paradise Garage DJ posthumously. But no such remix ever existed and the article goes to prove that what we’re actually listening to is one of the original Tony Humphries mixes and elucidates how LARRY 02 officially became the Larry Levan remix for an entire generation of critic, DJ and music enthusiasts with Tony Humphries almost completely written out of the story. Larry Levan had always cast a long shadow over Disco and House, and curiously this would not be the only time it over-reached the legacy of Tony Humphries. 

Tony Humphries was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and started collecting records at the age of ten. It’s fair to say he was almost born into a career in music. Encouraged by his Columbian father, who himself had been a musician performing with artists like Tito Puente, and a host of relatives who had forged careers in the performing arts, Tony Humphries grew up into music through the 60’s and seventies. His afro-latin American roots formed the foundation of his musical education with an emphasis on blues, gospel and salsa soundtracking his formative years, while he was becoming familiar with the idea of the DJ. It would be the mobile DJ movement and specifically Jonathan Cameron Flowers that would influence Tony Humphries to indulge a career as a DJ. Flowers, later known as Grandmaster Flowers  was the “the single most important mobile DJ to come out of the US” according to a Humphries in Traxsource interview, which played no small part in establishing the Humphries’ career. 

Humphries, unlike like Levan, would set forth on a path as a DJ, not via a club or residency but rather through radio, and a significant chance encounter. Meeting Shep Pettibone, who at that stage was hosting the Mastermix show on Kiss FM, Humphries found himself taking over from the music legend with a single mixtape. Humphries took over from Pettibone in 1982, which was around the same time he would firm up the other part of his enduring legacy as a resident at club Zanzibar – Newark New Jersey’s equivalent to the Paradise Garage. Although Tony Humphries had held a few residencies, most notably at AZZ, it was at Zanzibar that his fate would be sealed. In an interview with Stamp the Wax Tony Humphries recalls the fateful events that lead up to his residency: “I made myself available to the residents there for about 6 months, filling in at various parts of every night, sometimes closing the night, and packing their records away safely.” The manager took note and realised the young DJ’s kind-hearted nature was being abused and installed him as a resident at Zanzibar. “That’s how I got the Wednesday night residency.”

Tony Humphries’ Wednesday night residency has gone to live on in DJ lore, but it’s always been kind of overshadowed by what was happening at the warehouse in Chicago and the Paradise Garage in New York. Although he sound of House has largely been attributed to those places, Humphries believes “it was more simultaneous than that” according to Skiddle interview. “The tracks coming out of Chicago made it a lot easier to do blends with R&B records”, elucidates Humphries in that same interview, but that only made up a small portion of the records being played on a night. House wasn’t just House, it was Disco, R&B and even Funk, and in New Jersey it also included a whole lot of Gospel. There would not have been enough House records in the world that time to fill the 3-6 hours the DJs like Humphries would have played in those days, so he  took a lot from the generation before him, who had brought Disco and characters like David Mancuso in to the world. Humphries would take note of them and established an eclectic style of mixing that incorporated things like “overlay mixing”; blending instrumental tracks with vocal records across genres, in a style of DJing that would be called House, based on the warehouse out of Chicago, where Frankie Knuckles held his residency. House was more a feeling than a style then and what we know as those 4/4 kicks and syncopated hats is the product of years of sublimation of a whole spectrum of musical genres. 

What was happening in Chicago was happening perpendicularly in New York and New Jersey, with the only real difference being that Chicago were the first to produce the records that started to distil that sound of the DJs that were House through labels like Trax and Strictly Rhythm. In New York the sound was coined Garage, in reference to the Paradise Garage. Tony Humphries was a fan of Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage and would spend his days prior to Zanzibar “mesmerized” by the older DJ’s “ability and stamina” according to the Stamp the Wax interview. Humphries was obviously influenced by the Paradise Garage’s resident and the long eclectic sets he would become known for in New Jersey is in part due to Levan’s remote influence, but the genre that would become known as Garage and would be closely associated with Levan, might not have anything to do with the Paradise Garage at all. 

Garage “came to refer to the more soulful, more jazz- and gospel inspired side of House” according to Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton in the book “Last night a DJ Saved My Life”. But the fact that it actually came from New York is a misnomer according to authors. What we know as Garage today, the high energy vocal tracks with jazzy instrumentals and crisp hi-hats, is actually just the “Jersey Sound” according to Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, and it “owes its emergence to Tony Humphries” they claim. Although the Paradise Garage inspired what Zanzibar would become and Tony Humphries idolised Levan, what Zanzibar and Humphries created and encouraged through the club and the artists like Kerry Chandler, Blaze and Smack Productions who passed through its doors would leave an irrevocable mark on House music and indeed get back to Levan, which the media and record companies would consequently call Garage. 

So Garage is the Jersey Sound and Zanzibar emulated New York, and one of Larry Levan’s most famous remix was actually mixed by Tony Humphries. So did Tony Humphries inadvertently invent House music with the world’s first disco edit? Well, according to Mathhew Collins’ book, Rave-on it was Derrick Carter that made the first proto House record called “on and on,” but that too is just conjecture depending on which perspective you choose. Perhaps it was in fact Talla 2XLC that invented Techno in Germany in the eighties rather than the Belleville three. Whichever way you cut it, there are those that have left legacies and an emphatic imprint on music, and Tony Humphries is one of those characters. 

Going through his discography and the multitude of production credits that have been credited to him, he’s had a hand in everything from the origins of Disco to R&B music, going from obscure whitelabels to chart-topping singles. His story might have been conflated over the years, and he being a humble character might not have been that eager to set the record straight, but his significance on music today can’t simply be ignored. Tony Humphries has made an indelible mark on the history of House music, but the significance is far greater than the common conjecture might have us believe and it’s time to set that record straight.

 

*Tony Humphries returns to jaeger this Frædag.

Album of the Week: Jenny Hval – The Practice Of Love

“Intimacy really is a lifelong journey,” explains Jenny Hval of her latest LP, “the Practice of Love.” Love of what; a person, nature, life, god, death? The Norwegian artist has avoided popular tropes of love and romance in her music in favour of  the abstract, metaphorical or the obscure, both in her lyricism and in her music.  “The Practice of Love” is no ordinary love song either. “Study this and ask yourself, where is god” whispers Vivian Wang over the opening track “Lion,” which like the rest of the album observes the concept of love from the perspective of a disengaged philosophy student, using it as a metaphor for life.

Jenny Hval makes a case study of love with her collaborators Laura Jean, Felicia Atkinson and Vivian Wang across an LP that marks a significant shift from anything the artist has done in the past. From the raw and organic avant-folk of “Viscera” to the brooding electronica of “Blood Bitch,” Jenny Hval’s music, like her lyrics, have never quite conformed to the sonorous and the accessible aspects of popular music.  “The Practise Of Love” plays on the mediative qualities of 90’s trance, where melodies touch hedonistic heights and ebullient percussive rhythms offer an exuberant pulse.

Breathy synthesisers, playing through ever-ascending arpeggios and wispy pads blowing through the progression like a light breeze, accentuate the serenity of Hval’s voice and her rumination on the album like never before. It provides a counterpoint to lyrics that often deal with sombre, bordering on morose, subjects. “She is flesh in dissent, She is an accident” she intones on “Accident” while Vivian Wang writes on the title track:  “I hate ‘love’ in my own language. It contains the entire word ‘honesty’ inside it, which makes it sound religious, protestant, hierarchic, purified,” contrasting the buoyant textures floating past on a wavetable synth in the background.

Through the album, Jenny Hval moves through a multifaceted panorama on her subject, where the album could follow the narrative of a relationship with  the bloom and eventual death of a romance, but could also relay the tapestry that the cycle imposes on a landscape viewed outside of the timeline. wHval describes the album as “almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.”

It’s at its most evocative on “Ashes to Ashes,” where songwriting takes the songwriter back to the earth, where themes of decomposition emerge on the uptempo beat of a four four kick and the tail of ambient pads drifting through the progression like a dream.

It’s part of a constant juxtaposition between exalting melodies and the unusual lyricism; and between the subject matter and its abstract interpretation, and it’s in these contrasting elements where the LP’s appeal lies. “I wanted to develop this new multi-tracked writing voice and take it to a positive, beautiful pop song place,”says Hval, “A place which also sounds like a huge pile of earth that I’m about to bury my coffin in.” There’s this chaotic relationship between lyrics album concept and execution which leaves a lot to unpack on this LP and marks the essential appeal of this record. Whether you’re trying to interpret the lyrics or you just want to get lost in beatific landscapes of the record, it’s an exquisite record.

Basketball House with Double Dancer

*Photo by Daria Chesnokova

Basketball House is the obscure musical phenomenon from a pair of Norwegian super-producers and avid basketball fans. As far as we know Double Dancer and DJ Dog are the only artists currently indulging the genre through their label, and the exclusive vehicle for the sounds of basketball House, Rebound Lounge.   

Over three releases, about one for every year of the label’s existence, Rebound Lounge have been channeling the sounds of Double Dancer and DJ Dog’s collaborative efforts onto the dance floor through records that flit between House music’s bouncing grooves and the frosty electronics of Norwegian Disco. 

Adopting the pseudonyms Double Dancer and DJ Dog, Eirik Fagertun and Peter/DJ Fett Burger respectively have developed a style of House music together with a focus on the dancefloor imbued with the physicality and repetition of sport. Sparkling melodies, strenuous acid workouts and marshalled beats have so far been distilled down into fifteen tracks covering three releases that sound very different than either artist’s solo efforts. 

Their latest release, Rebound Lounge 3 bristles with the same airy melodies as their previous records together as grooves carve out deep trenches on the lower frequencies. From the pounding acidity of “Running the point” to the heady ethereality of “Naismith” it’s another versatile record from the duo coming together under the intentions of basketball House, but incorporating everything from House to cosmic balearic in their makeup.

As Rebound Lounge 3 hits the backboard (at Filter Musikk) and goaded by our recent review of the record for our cut segment, we reached out to Double Dancer to find about more about the basketball House phenomenon and the Rebound Lounge series.

You and DJ Fett Burger have been making music together under the term basketball House for a few records now. How would you define that style of music? 

House music that contains sounds from the basketball world is the easy definition. The sounds incorporated can be a shoe rubbing on the wooden court, a cheering audience, a yelling coach or a heavy slam dunk. Sometimes clearly audible, sometimes hidden deep in the mix. From this mixture the RELO sound is created.

You must be the only basketball House label around… surely?

 It is the only label we know of so far. And it is perfectly fine for us to fly solo in this endeavour and to be special boys. 

But I did recently find a former NBA star called Rony Seikaly who turned house producer and property mogul when he retired. Not quite in the same style as us but he also uses some basketball samples and djs in clubs around the world. I tried reaching out to him with no luck so far. I need to meet him.  There is a new documentary about him which is quite interesting, for me anyway. Here he is in his studio from around 20:40 into the video making b-ball house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srNRJhK3nGU

So I assume you both play or have played basketball. How does the sport relate to the music for you?

We do try to play ball and sweat it out once a week but we don’t have any talent and are kinda shit at it. I would consider myself mostly a fan of this beautiful game. I love to watch NBA games whenever I have time. Go Raptors!

Sport and music are intertwined and relates to each other in a major way. Whenever you play or watch sports there will most of the time be music present in some form. And when you are creating or performing music you are doing a physical activity. 

The way that you practice, play around and repeat it to perfection, and also the whole rhythm of it goes for both sport and music. Both are rooted in events that are full of life, competition, celebration, and ultimately entertainment. 

How did you guys meet and what encouraged you to start making music together?

We first met in a sex club called Lab.oratory in Berlin where a fellow friend was playing. (You may know him as Skatebård, I call him Gingerdaddy.) 

But we knew of each other while living in Bergen at the same time but never actually met. Later on I booked DJ Fett Burger and his brother for a party I did at Soju Bar and we got to know each other better.

The project initially got started as something else. We were gonna make a short tool track together for Untz Untz Records. In our first studio session we ended up putting in a basketball sound just for fun on a track and we figured “Hey this is fun and we can do something more with this.” So we scrapped the initial tool (that was techno and later floated up on REL02 in a reworked version) and went full on with more basketball sounds from the second session on. 

After that it escalated pretty quickly with five more tracks, a new label/project idea, and the whole basketball aesthetics to go along with it. It got a bit out of hand. 

I didn’t realise you lived in Berlin. Besides the sex clubs what drew you to the city and how do you think its affected your approach to music if at all?

I won’t say the sex clubs drew me here, but you will sometimes end up in some funny places where you can witness things that will make your eyes bleed. The music scene, the long summers and the freedom to do whatever you like when you want to does have a strong pull on me and keeps me zane here. I feel that it is possible to extend youth a while longer down here in some way. And it is easier to withstand the pressures from the motherland to do all the things that is expected of you as the norm. It is perfectly OK to not take a big education, buy all the apartments and settle down if you don’t want to yet, even if you are paddling deep into your 30s. I believe it is quite fitting to throw in a YOLO here. 

As for the approach part I’m not sure how its affected by where I am, but more who I am around. All the music I have put out have been created here in Berlin with my dear studio partner Peter so he is crucial for me in my approach to making music and for me making music at all.

Do you guys make any music together under other aliases or have you worked on music before Rebound Lounge? 

No this is the first time we make music together and DJ Dog & Double Dancer is our only outlet for this music so far. 

 You are also involved with Untz Untz. What makes this project different for you?

The Untz Untz label which I run with Tarjei Nygård is different in the way that I have never released any of my own music there. Untz Untz is more about finding new and not so new artists and show them to the world. Funnily enough more or less all the Norwegian artist we have released have gone on to release on Full Pupp, so I guess you can call us a farmer league for producers. You are welcome Thomas! 

Me and Tarjei live in different cities now so we are not so active with the label at the moment. The last release we put out was in ’17 with Skatebård & Stiletti-Ana. But we might suddenly pop back with a new record in 2020.  

The music you guys make on Rebound to me sounds like its all built on a foundation of House, but there’s also that frosty Norwegian sonic element in there. What conscious steps do you take in creating that sound?

I wasn’t aware that we had that element. So its not on purpose. But there might be a more melancholic vibe on the latest record.

 It sounds like you guys improvise live and then later arrange pieces into the tracks on that record. Is that right and what’s significant about the working process with DJ Fett Burger?

That is correct in some parts. We improvise quite a lot and tend to use everything we record but we don’t record long jam stretches. So we don’t push the record button until we got ‘something’ rolling that we both think sounds good. Some riffs or loops that was unused from the first two release ended up on the third one also. So there is no excess fat in the folder ‘Ghostman & Eirik F’ where the music is saved.  

This is the third record in the series, and you guys have been bringing out about one record a year since 2016. What are the circumstances like for you guys to start a Rebound record?

 We tend to wait until the latest record is released and all gone till we start up again. Then we would watch some basketball movies or catch a game with our local b-ball team Alba Berlin to get in the mood. And then just start to jam on a new synth or drum machine that we haven’t used before.  

 Is there any before plan going into the studio together? 

No not really. We just see where it goes. And if we have a couple of tracks that could fit together after some sessions we set our sights on doing a new Rebound record. 

We are also open to release on other labels but up until now all the material have been used for Rebound Lounge except the remixes we did for Chmmr on Full Pupp. 

Are we going to have to wait another year for the next one?

Most likely yes. We have not started yet. But watch out for remixes and RELO parties that we will do more of.

 

Nobody wants to read a boring article: Working within a systemic electronic music landscape

“Nobody wants to read a boring article”: It’s the best piece of advice I’ve ever received in a short, but intense career writing about music and it’s something that has stayed with me throughout all my endeavours. While I’ve long forgotten the editor’s name behind these words, this most salient insight has been imprinted on my frontal lobe since. The orator of this little vignette might not have been using it in the context of music writing specifically nor was it little more than passing thought at the time, but I put a lot of stock into the comment and it’s never failed me since. Whether I’m writing an entertaining little op-ed about the curiosities of the latest Dutch dance craze, or trying the uncover the subconscious working processes of a left-field sound artist, I’ve applied the mantra to my work and every outlet I’ve ever worked for including Jaeger.

While boring might be completely subjective depending on the reader, whether I’m trying to write a serious feature on a significant artist, or chasing a fleeting whim down a rabbit hole for the sake of entertainment, the purpose has always been not to be boring in the context of my audience. For the music nerd it needs to be informative, in depth and well-researched while for the weekend clubber looking for some level of escape from dirge of everyday life it needs to be entertaining, without really losing touch with those previous points either. 

With any job, profession or artistic endeavour (yes it takes a level of creativity to write these things) sometimes I am able to achieve this quite easily while other times it’s hard work and that’s why results can vary. While I’ll always strive not to bore the reader it can still happen and I’m ok with that, but lately I’ve encountered an obstacle that has stunted my endeavours. The music, and that is specifically the music I write about on these pages, electronic club music (however broadly you want to interpret it) offers me very little to no inspiration of late.

I’ve always been motivated by the music to write about music, but lately that motivation is becoming increasingly harder to find and harder to cultivate. A record here and there, a rare DJ set or a new artist are making sporadic, paltry impressions on my daily listening habits. Although that’s fairly inconsequential and like my own relationship with electronic music, it only takes one new release or artist to spark an infatuation, lately I’ve been struck with more resistance than ever. On the rare occasion I am inspired by a new piece of music, artist or DJ today, I’m usually faced by a system of gatekeepers that seem to want to maintain an elusive hierarchy that subjugates certain music and artists for the sake of a homogenised purview of the landscape.

It’s a system, an enclosed hamster wheel with no breaks and it includes a whole herd of frenetic facilitators running against a sisyphean incline, spurred on by their own individual endeavours.  These facilitators include PR agents, music magazines, journalists, club owners, promoters, social media and YOU! It’s a system so ingrained in post-internet society that we don’t even know that we’re all involuntarily participating in the mechanisms that perpetuate the autonomous music machine. There’s no megalomaniac behind a veiled curtain at the controls. It’s an intricate network of independent actors that unwittingly or purposefully influence each other in a system that’s self-perpetuating. 

I was initially spurred on this train of thought by an article that appeared in XLR8R. It suggested that music journalism was in “crisis,” and while it made some valid points on the influence of monetary powers on critical music journalism, it didn’t reveal anything we didn’t know already. Of course PR agents are paying for content on sites like XLR8R and RA… how do you propose those sites operate without some form of income. Even a fairly left field outlet like The Quietus is selling records for Norman Records. But this is nothing new; before the PR agencies, the record labels were doing exactly the same thing, the only difference was that it was printed media and radio jocks back then and there was a lot more money floating about for the excessive kind of bribes the record companies could afford when people were still buying music in a physical format.

Between eye-rolls, heavy sighs and some really laugh out loud moments – “who’s going to pay for a Pitchfork subscription to read some pretentious bullshit!,” my friend and writer Donovan Greeff so eloquently put it – what amazed me most is how the journalist was inadvertently acquiescing to the very system he was criticising. Quoting the likes of Steffi, Jeff Mills and Paul Woolford, established and entrenched actors in the system, he is recognizing a hierarchy in the spirit of Arsène Houssaye’s forty-first chair concept, if I’m allowed to borrow the analogy from DJ and artist Stefan Goldmann writing in Berghain’s programme column. The journalist, without any malintent, relegates a large swathe of a musical community to the forty first chair in favour of the “select few” that occupy the first forty (more entrenched) chairs, most likely for attracting more people to the article. 

It’s only one aspect of a system we’ve unconsciously adopted, and it’s not just something that appears in the upper most echelons of the music industry like Jeff Mills and XLR8R, but all the way through to the bedroom producer and indie label. Through my role here at Jaeger as editor (and pretty much only contributor to the blog) over the last few years years, I’ve seen this increase tenfold. I first experienced it about four years ago when I interviewed a new “underground” (how can anything be underground in the age of internet?) Techno artist called Jack France for a blog I ran called the Formant. I had been hesitant in interviewing him since the blog dealt mainly with experimental music and Techno even at that time had taken a most compliant form. I had however been a fan and an active participant in the London scene that Jack France arrived through and found the latex clad character behind the work intriguing. 

The music however, felt fairly formulaic, a barely functional four-four beat, doused in a heavy atmosphere of residual noise and existing in a very banal repetitive form that I forgot as soon as I heard it. Jack France (the character the artist had created) was the story and the music was little more than a byline to issues that revolved largely around 20th century art theory and identity. 

We hardly approached the subject of music in the interview, and I didn’t offer any particular insight into the record he was promoting. Music had taken a backseat to the artist and even Jack France himself admitted in the interview that music had only been the current “medium” for his particular form of artististic expression and it had been the character of Jack France that he was very masterfully marketing through music. Jack understood how to manipulate an interest in his music to his “art” that would otherwise be ignored and it’s something which has become commonplace today in the age of insta DJs and identity politics. 

DJs and artists like Peggy Gou have adopted the same model, but without the provocation or intrigue of Jack France and using it in exactly the opposite way where the character behind the music is employed to bring attention to the pretty conformist music. Stylised pictures with funny quips or more often some uninformed, opinionative comments doesn’t really promote the music, but the artist through which they are elevated to the status of social media deity by an unwitting audience. Socio-political issues or a “personal” slant bridges a gap that music previously covered. What is truly striking is how this model has become widely adopted in today’s musical society. Everyone from a new, unknown artists like Sassy009 (as an example off the top of my head) to the more established artists like Kink have embraced the model unequivocally. Do they even know they are doing it I wonder? There are some really interesting examples of this at work, and how each individual plays on some charuciature version of him/herself – Kenny Larkin dancing like nobody is watching on instagram is a case study in itself – but something that stands out is that it’s happening across the board, from the high-profile DJ to the “underground” artist everybody seems to understand they have to manipulate a system to get their music “out there,” and thus the music inevitably plays second fiddle to the personality. 

It’s getting increasingly frustrating when you interview a new artist and they answer questions in a very calculating and measured way in an attempt to reiterate the personality they’ve cultured over social media, often a cool, aloof persona playing on some mystery in an effort to appear interesting. I’ve even experienced this with artists that have never been interviewed before. It’s like they’ve been coached, and in a way they have by the internet, but it’s not merely contained in the way they speak anymore, it’s also there in the actual music. 

“How to” youtube videos on the blue prints of Techno, house et al; standardised equipment, and educational institutions like Point Blank have indoctrinated a whole generation of artists with the idea of good practises in a form of music that was originally modeled on exactly the opposite ideas. The productions are as slick and professional as ever, but the artistic agency has been largely negated for the technical skill and proficiency in the studio. Producers and artists aren’t pushing the envelope anymore they are simply trying to make the most “correct” or acceptable form of their music. That means they must utilize the tried and tested sounds of their genre, in the familiar forms of that style. The sounds of genres like House, Techno and Electro thus haven’t evolved much over the course of the existence of the genre and those sounds have been relegated to familiar tropes. 

Roland, releasing their entire range of synthesisers and drum machines from the era of House music’s origins as the boutique range today stands testament to that today. The same goes Pioneer attempting to make their CDJs the  industry standard in DJ booths. The BPM readout and the loop feature have become ubiquitous and it’s common practice to see DJs mixing with three or four CDJs where they impress an “artistic” voice on piecing loops together in a very slick, but increasingly undynamic style that sees very few of them testing the boundaries of the electronic music genre beyond the common denominator.  

Pioneer and Roland are attempting to standardise the sounds and forms of music and DJing like Stradivarius did for the violinist and Gibson did for the blues-rock guitarist, which is ironic since electronic music was built on a foundation of breaking with tradition, institutionalised forms and even the laws of physics as applied to music. Electronic music could be made in anyway by any person regardless of their skills. Roland, Point Blank and those You Tube “producers” are trying to force a script where there really shouldn’t be one.

As a result DJs think they’re being eclectic when they introduce a break-beat in a Tech-House set. These sets are getting increasingly generic as DJs focus all their efforts on the “mixing” aspects of their sets in an effort to relay some kind of artistic voice through the music of others. For the most part they dwell in a sonic aesthetic that varies very little between tracks and for the majority that has to have some relevance to the music they produce as artists. Recorded mixes have set that standard which has moved from soundcloud into the DJ booth of late. There are very few DJs that are pushing any kind of envelope when it comes to the music they play, and it’s in part expedited by the audiences on the dance floor. 

Every visit to Jaeger when a DJ is playing, I encounter at least one person approaching a DJ with a request. There’s always a kind of urgency to the request; wanting to hear the latest release; a specific song that only they have some personal connection with; or just something with an accelerated tempo – which I’ve seen happening more and more lately, especially with younger audiences. They are mostly respectful, and move on quickly when a DJ has declined their request, but the entitled brat also reared his ugly head in the booth on occasion, absolutely shocked when a DJ won’t simply subject an entire room to his/her musical tastes. I suspect it’s because the relationship they have with club music, was not initiated in a club, but rather through the kind of obscured view of a club that Soundcloud, Mixcloud and Boiler Room have established on the virtual world of the internet. 

On the two occasions we’ve had Boiler Room at Jaeger, for example the audience has been completely out of character for what we experience every other weekend. People arrive early, and they cheer, emphasising every little incidental change in the music.

People engaged with the music and DJs in a way that almost felt forced or coerced when Boiler Room was here; possibly by the presence of the camera, or even a code of social conduct that Boiler Room had inadvertently instilled through their content. Whenever they put up a new video of a club setting with people dancing and acting in this way, they are normalizing the behavior as a social norm and those more nuanced elements of club culture, the dancing misanthrope, the inquisitive music head, the escapist and the facilitator are slowly being eroded away into obscurity. What we’re left with is this hermetically sealed pristine version of club music and culture that distorts reality.

Exactly at the same time, but behind the cameras at the last Boiler Room, I’m engaged in conversation about the sudden allure of Bendik HK. I’m trying to decipher his sudden rise to prominence in Oslo and why he was such a sought-after performer today with only a few singles under his belt. The music was very unimposing, with amicable melodic phrasing tempered around a tonal centre that rarely tests the limits of basic pop music theory. While the rhythm structures were complex, not surprising considering he was drummer, the complexity didn’t quite challenge the kick drum, as familiar 4-4 beats indulged those most primal instincts in the dancer. It’s not bad music, in fact on a technical level it’s very good, but it leaves no impression beyond the superficial. 

Bendik HK however is a hot ticket item in Oslo and parts of Europe however, and this Boiler Room set came just after an appearance at Øya and preceded a critically well received new single, all on the presumption of him being a popular indie artist at the moment, aided perhaps by his relationship to Pantha du Prince. Popularity breeds popularity on the baseless presumption that it is “good” music in a perpetual system that will see a music artist rise to popularity with a merit merely assumed by the peer pressures exuded today on social media. 

People will adopt music, art or an opinion through purposeful or organic social media campaigns that will elevate an artist, individual or critical thought way beyond what any natural creative talent or artistic product deserves. And the more homogenous or unimposing the music, the bigger the audience and the chance of being propelled into this role. In a world that is dominated by an enduring, but unnecessary need for content, the adverse effect has been that music too has only become a form of content. Artists and DJs use it to become dominant fixtures within a mechanism that is fuelled by this art form. 

Music is no longer an art form, it’s a commodity. It’s a commodity that everybody from the artist to music media requires to exist in a persistent motion that has watered down the rich dynamic intricacies of this music into digestible and banal formulas  – a commodity.

And since the music makes no impression, you have to rely on external, inconsequential issues like identity politics to make an impression, the system loops again from a different direction…  You have to shout “offence” across the wire, because the generic nature of the music that you make, play, distribute and facilitate can’t do it – Yes electronic music too can make a statement without the use of lyrics and it can go from something objective like a song title to something more subliminal like the musical keys you operate in or even the labels you choose to play.  

But that kind of music won’t feed the system today, it’s too bold and too “alternative” to where it protrudes too far out from the majority of the music that  feeds the system, and thus throws it completely off it’s equilibrium. It’s why the music has done away with the versatility and eclecticism that early records from the likes of Rhythim is Rhythim or LA Synthesis proffered in favour for a far hackneyed version of the same music. 

In an era where people aren’t preoccupied with physical record sales much anymore, it comes down to the equity stake that a label, an artist, a distributor, club or a magazine can get within this system and that requires prominence and provenance above all else. If you’re making music you need to be constantly making music that will appeal to a large audience; if you’re writing about music, you need to be writing about the stuff that’s already garnered an audience, and if you’re booking an artist or a DJ, you need to be booking someone that’s already popular to have any hope of making the event or club fiscally responsible in an increasingly competitive industry. When’s the last time you’ve heard of a DJ or an artist making their debut on stage or in the booth?

For a new artist making left field club music and doesn’t have a social media account, or the promoter wanting to bring said artist or DJ to his/her clubnight, this is terminable.The obscure artists and alternative music is something that I’ve always gravitated towards and aimed to write about, and even though I’ve enjoyed popular music and still do, when I write about music these are the artists I’d like to give a voice to and these are the records that I’ll prefer to highlight. It’s a page I’ve taken out out Patti Smith’s book Just Kids too when she briefly wrote about her music reviews for Rolling Stone and how she selected it on the merit of the music and not what the magazine or record label pushed into her hand. And with so much music out there today you need to be selective, but that also doesn’t mean an artist with a good record two months ago, needs to be recognised for a new record, purely on the basis that they are “trending.” 

It’s the forty first chair all over again and what I’ve found is that it’s mostly people with no or very little interest in electronic music that are some of the biggest agents in this mechanism which has exponentially increased with the rise of popularity in electronic club music. 

While I don’t believe an artist like Bendik HK is objectively aware of it, I do find artists, producers and DJs that utilise this to their benefit, churning out music like Henry Ford did motor cars in the 1930’s as functional, simple and affordable modes of transport, that had no purpose beyond the obvious, and with an ever-increasing “woke” audience, they have to utilise things like identity politics to push it onto an increasingly disengaged consumer, drowning in a sea of monotony of music. Those hot-button issues are increasingly just a marketing mechanism to promote music that isn’t able to promote itself. 

Many labels and artists produce music purely for the sake of producing music in some possibly misguided attempt in trying to stay relevant, informed by the content driven nature of the internet today. Streaming services, social media platforms and online music magazine perpetuate this idea, with a constant dirge of information that hardly enlightens or informs, but just feeds the machine and saturates everything beyond those forty chairs, which although being passed around like their musical counterparts holds fast the tedium of an indeterminable hierarchy. It’s not the record labels or PR agencies necessarily pushing it, but a public opinion based on what… being the least inoffensive? Unless it can appeal to the broadest musical spectrum and makes no overly sensitive statement, it’s considered inconsequential, and those artists, DJs and music enthusiast find it increasingly more difficult to be heard over the din. 

This is supposedly where the journalist comes into it; letting you know what you’re listening to is not worth your while. This idea of the music journalist being the keepers at the gate, selflessly sifting through music with their unique critical eye is a complete fallacy. Music journalism is subjective and should always be considered in the context of the music. 

There definitely isn’t such a thing as bad review. A review whether it’s slating or praising the release or an artist, brings attention to the release or artist, that’s why even a review like this one Pitchfork wrote about the latest Tool LP, will do nothing more than assist in its efforts to beat Tailor Swift to the Billboard number one. The entertaining criticism (which really is more of the band than the album, in effort I suspect to buck the trend of praises showering down on the long-absent band) is just an angle and promotes the record regardless.

Just talking about a record on high-profile platform like Pitchfork is promoting a piece of music in the fortieth chair, and thus narrowing any opportunity for any other artist that has released a record during that period in that field to make any sort of impression in social media feeds and internet searches based on what’s trending. In electronic music it’s outlets like XLR8R and Mix Mag that conserve this. Even RA’s recent magnanimous decision to do away with a long outdated rating system is not only bullshit, because you’ll still be highlighting certain artists and music just because of your position in the electronic music industry, but also very calculating. Some clever clogs at RA read (or most likely scanned through) that XLR8R article and posted that very “selfless” statement to the world, in the hope of jumping on a trend.

While in popular music, this is nothing new, in electronic music it has taken on very sinister overtones, as they try to manipulate very serious topics like #metoo and LGBTQI politics to sell a record or bring more people to their pages, and there are some artists that are guilty of this too.  

While interviews with artists or an informed critical review can give you a perspective of the music that you might not have considered, it’s still just an opinion (especially considering the amateur music journalist that came through with blogs) and ultimately whether you, as someone that enjoys and appreciates music, is going to enjoy a song or an album is going to be completely up to you. Even the musician can’t sway your mind, once you’ve heard a piece of music.

I also strongly believe that’s why so few artists do interviews today; they are unable to put into words that which they’ve created, and stand a good chance of just turning people away from their music so refrain from talking about it altogether. Which is understandable since audiences frequently conflate the artist with the music too readily of late, and of course there are a lot of artists that do this intentionally too. 

It’s a self-perpetuating system that goes from music journalism to DJing, to increasing dominance of social media, record labels, distributors, club promoters and feeds back into the music itself. There’s no single cog that permeates grand control over the system nor has greater influence over the others, it’s completely autonomous and there is nobody at the reigns. How it came to be and what set it in motion is a bit like the chicken and the egg story and journalists, DJs and artists have waxed critically about streaming services and social media, when ironically it’s many of them that perpetuate the system.

It’s the social “influencer” DJ that is playing some piece of music pushed onto him by a PR firm, who in turn puts out his/her own music on a big label, with ties to that very same PR firm. The PR firms wades its influence and most likely money to buy this forgettable track some traction in the media and pushing it onto other DJs, garnering more influential control through social media, which the promoters acknowledge and book said DJ/artist to a venue half the world away, setting the catherine wheel in motion over and over again.

That’s why DJs like Sven Väth and Ben Klock still dominate the scene; festival lineups waiver little from the other; you’ll read or hear about the same tracks over many different music magazines and blogs; and DJ sets pander to familiar tropes and never test the boundaries of their increasingly disengaged audience, staring at them from under the harsh hue of a telephone screen. 

This is just some examples of how it works, or more correctly, how it just is, and the script can be flipped, or inverted, but it still maintains a system, that has very little to do with the actual music. Every single piece of the puzzle, from the bookers to the DJ set, is forced into its position by the one that preceded it, but instead of breaking the mould today, they’d much rather acquiesce to the system than try to revolutionise or reject it’s dogmatic nature, for fear of commercial failure and who can blame them. It’s uncanny that in a scene like electronic music, which was built on the idea of nonconformity (you didn’t even need to know how to play an instrument), we’ve slipped into a kind of mass conformist coma. 

There’s a famous interview with Frank Zappa, in which he explained the decline of the music business after his heyday in the 1980’s. He said “we were better off” with the old “cigar-chomping” record bosses than “we are now with the hip young executives that are making the decisions of what people should see and hear in the marketplace.” 

It’s something that can be applied to our current situation again. The executive has been replaced by the influencer and the marketplace is no longer a tangible thing like a record store, but rather an abstract idea like equity in a streaming service or social media prominence. Even in an industry saturated with music, it seems to have been whittled down to a fine point with a lot of music sounding indistinguishable from the rest and a lot of emphasis on the external, inconsequential factors that have very little or nothing to do with music.  

It’s even worse since those young hip executives are no longer the record execs, but every person with a mobile phone and a limited vocabulary who thinks their opinion matters. Having said that, I’ve read some great, informed and critical reviews on places like Discogs and Bandcamp too, so there is no need to get up in arms about music journalism, and certainly no reason to brandish the word of the day “crisis” around haphazardly. It’s certainly nothing on the scale of global warming, and I still don’t see or hear you trying to buck the system.

Music journalism is not in crisis, it’s just one crossover point on a network of institutionalised and entrenched factors that are currently, not just dictating trends, but electronic music itself. I don’t propose it’s going to end any time soon. There’s no silver lining here, that’s just the reality. There’s not going to be any Robespierrien rebel yell that will save us from banality, especially in the current landscape of conservatism that has staked its claim on contemporary politics, but that’s another essay altogether. All we can do is choose what music we listen to, write about, admire, facilitate and put in reach of other people. That’s why I’ll rather interview a couple of DJs like Ilay & Even and write about the kind the records I write about for the Cut with Filter Musikk.

There are those expectations of course, operating completely outside of the system, but as the industry keeps growing the system is slowly absorbing or casting them even further outside the gravitational bubble of its sphere of influence. It’s only really the labels, artists and DJs, that were working outside of the system before the event horizon of its existence, that maintain their position, but it’s getting almost impossible for new artists, DJs and labels to even operate on its fringes and they fall into obscurity before they even get a chance. 

You might not agree with my point of view or the music, and inspirations might be aloof and rare, but at least I can promise you it won’t be boring. 

Album of the Week: Tinariwen – Amadjar

Tomes from the desert; transient living and a fusion American folk music and Tuareg traditional music has defined the music of Tinariwen since 1979. Jangling guitars, polyrhythmic percussion and the exotic sounds of northwest Africa have long haunted the desert planes of the region, before being exported to the rest of the world on the wings of their 2001 record “The Radio Tisdas Sessions.” With a little help from the Internet and its role in discovering new music from foreign regions, Tinariwen won over a large international audience with their, 2006 LP “Aman Iman.” Evoking sounds of the Tuareg traditions, which encompasses everything from Malian instruments, African rhythms and Arabic tonal scales, Tinariwen was created in the great flourishing fusion traditions, channeling those elements into American blues framework that has delivered some 7 albums since 2001.

For their ninth LP, they’ve maintained their approach, and even working with western world luminaries like Warren Ellis (Dirty Three, Grinderman) and Stephen O’Malley [Sunn O)))] wield little influence over the sound of the group. Tinariwen strike a longing chord on “Amadjar” with bluesy guitar riffs and wistful vocals, bouncing between the raspy chords of Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni and the sonorous siren call from Noura Mint Seymali. Choral flourishes where these voices combine, are underpinned with a sadness, which they reflect in lyrics that broach subjects of political struggles, the issues facing an ever-changing world, and the death of a loved one (if the translations are correct). There’s a sageness inflected in the lead voices that only age can bring and which the band proffer to the rest of the world in a the same blues traditions from the American south.

You can’t help infer that feeling of the vast emptiness of the desert in Tinariwen’s music, and it’s particularly palpable on this LP, especially considering the way it was recorded. “Amadjar” was created on the road between the Moroccan Sahara and Mauritania, where they would meet up with Noura Mint Seymali and record the entire LP under under a large tent. Guitar licks phasing in and out of arrangements like grains of sands whipping at your ankles, while drums pound out a rhythm attempting to break step for fear of leaving tracks. Haunting vocals and legato strings accompany the music, entering the arrangements like whispers on the wind before evaporating into nothing. “Amadjar” feels a lot softer, possibly more refined than Tinariwen’s 2006 LP, with “Amalouna” and “Madjam Mahilkamen” making tender contributions to the band’s extensive discography.

There’s a lot to unpack on this record, from the recording process to the lyrics, and although the ultimate sound of Tinariwen has evolved little since 2006, this is the first LP form the band that seems to have come together under a concept. Where their music in the past had always had some fleeting nature, with records that feel that have always come together just for that recording session, “Amadjar” sounds more developed as an LP. While songs from the band’s discography like “Asuf D Alwa” and “Sendad Eghlalen” have lived beyond their records, much of their LPs rely on familiar tropes in their music and thus there’s never really been something of creative statement from a record, “Amadjar.” (Although I can’t speak for anything before 2001.) Tinariwen have always been a live band and their LP’s have been recorded as such, and although “Amadjar” was also recorded in that way, there seems to have been much more of cohesive effort on this album to make an LP, and not just record some songs for an album and for the first time they seem to perfectly capture that transience in their music in a LP that can live way beyond the moment.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

We don’t always go into Filter Musikk looking for music. Sometimes an aimless wander might take us through the glass doors looking for some innocuous conversation with Roland Lifjell from behind the counter. We know the risk we run whenever we saunter into the little record cave, especially on a Friday when a new batch of records have just arrived. Before we’re even aware of it we’re flipping through a stack of records, neatly organising a pile into possible new additions to our record collections, completely oblivious to the world around us.

We don’t even know how we got there, how these headphones are in our hands, how we arrived at a pile of records… hell we don’t even know who half these artists or labels are we’re listening to. Somewhere between saying hello and a cup of coffee, Roland has forced a bundle of records under our arm and before we realise, we’re adding a few of those to an ever-expanding library that’s already consuming our lives. 

But, isn’t that what it’s all about, indulging new experiences, broadening your horizons beyond the obvious. Surely we can’t keep listening to everything Strictly Rhythm releases or re-issues. We are grateful to Roland and Filter’s resilient and determined meddling, informing our continued musical education through the record store as the last vestige for truly underground music.

These aren’t the records you’ll find on your weekly “discovery” playlist or the records that make it past the ever-increasingly sanctimonious pay-gap of modern music media. These are records that if Roland didn’t pick them out for you, you would remain unaware of their presence. These are the records that make no real overt signal to their presence, very often only divulging  any information as to what they are in an invisible etching on the inner radius of a black disc. 

These are the records, handpicked out of a box of new arrivals at Filter Musikk by Roland Lifjell, this is the cut with Filter Musikk.  

 

Zeta Reticula – Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (Mechatronica) 12″ 

Nothing is safe from the conservative monotony creeping in on electronic music… even Electro. There’s been a surge of Deep- and Tech House “producers” that have stumbled onto the genre lately, applying their innocuous voice to a genre like a balding middle-aged man getting political on facebook. Nobody asked for your contribution and you’re not offering anything new here. 

Electro has had this covered all this time…there is absolutely nothing a hype producer looking or a breakbeat on Deep House EP could possibly do for the DIY genre at this point, so best just leave it alone and leave it to people like Zeta Reticula, who’ve been doing this kind of music since 2001 for established Electro labels like Electrix Records.

Zeta Reticula has maintained the fundamental building blocks of Electro in his work. Funky grooves, an evocative melody, a bridge-chorus-like progression and a futuristic eye for synthesis has followed him across two decades worth of discography and a myriad of aliases. With so much music and so many creative outlets, even an established artist like Zeta can lose focus sometimes and has, especially  with those cringing electro-clash attempts early in his career. 

“Formation of Life” however on his latest EP for the rather new Mechatronica imprint is pure masterclass. The bass figure running like train on autopilot; those bold swooshing pads and melodies with their heads above the clouds leave a remarkable impression.

He retains a similar cinematic approach to his music throughout the rest of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, and from the dubby delays of “Double Star” and the punky sounds of the title track they offer a few different moods to the fundamental designs of Electro with Zeta Reticula’s noisy and distorted treatment maintaining his artistic voice across the record.

 

Interplanetary Criminal – Sleepwalker Ep (Sneaker Social Club) 12″  

“Filter Musikk has become a breakbeat and jungle store” says Roland Lifjell with a grin. And yes, looking at the list of new arrivals, drum n bass, jungle and electro mark the majority of new records, even taking over from Roland’s Lifjell’s hallowed Techno as the majority of new music coming in this week. Like every genre today, these broken beat genres are also subject to micro-trends and fleeting-fads, but even those can have their moments like this latest EP from Interplanetary Criminal.

Interplanetary Criminal has been bouncing through various styles and microcosms of music since his first record in 2015, coming into the fray on the tail end of the Lo-Fi House movement with records for E-Beamz and Kalahari Øyster Cult. He’s dabbled in everything from Ghetto Tech to UK Garage at a rate of a new genre a record. If there’s anything consistent about the records Interplanetary Criminal creates, it’s that their not consistent, beyond maybe a penchant for nostalgic glares at the past and wispy textures.

For his latest outing he’s chosen breakbeat genres like Drum N Bass and Jungle as touchstones, spinning them into something more palpable for today’s audiences. Interplanetary Criminal checks off tropes as he channels those classic elements across four downtempo tracks. We’ve never heard James Brown that relaxed as snare drums roll past in slow motion and elongated pads drift by in a cathartic whine. 

The sub bass drawl is etched just a little deeper as a result and the entire record pulses along at a pace that gently coerces you through the tracks. Interplanetary Criminal loses a bit of steam by the time he gets to the finale and title track, but through the first three dynamic and versatile breakbeat arrangements this record makes a notable contribution to the ever-expanding breakbeat genre.

 

Forest Drive West – Static / Escape (Livity Sound) 12″ repress

Some records are so good they need to just stay in rotation and what we might have missed in the past can still make for a future classic. Take this record from Forest Drive West on Livity Sound from 2017. Deep, brooding bass lines, a muggy atmosphere and minimalist construction make for a record that just keeps giving. “Static” and “Escape” live on in infamy on this recent repress. Bordering on the cold UK sounds like Grime and the incessant rhythms of Techno, they mark two significant contributions to Techno DJ sets.

Forest Drive West produces this kind of record with the same clinical precision that UK artists like Blawan and Pearson Sound produce a record; everything in its place in a stark, frosty landscape. Cues from UK sound system culture like those big heavy sub-bass-lines and metallic melodies are stripped back and streamlined into breathy Techno workouts that instil just the right amount of temptation and fear in the listener.

 

Celestial Circuits – Autonomy (In A Spin) 12” 

Techno’s origins are rooted in inspirations from Science Fiction. Themes of space, the future, robots and dystopia inspired people like Derrick May and Juan Atkins to create Techno, but those themes have been lost somewhere in the queue to the club. Techno is all about being promiscuous and aloof today, and not nerdy and playful like it was intended. Somewhere along the line to Berghain Techno’s mandate changed into your uncle’s anorak, and started lecturing you on the correct tuning of a kick drum. Happily there is some relief in a group like this.

Celestial Circuits are pursuing the original ideologies of Techno built on spacey themes and futurist electronics. They’re called Celestial Circuits after all and over the course of two releases they’ve taken back the term Techno to mean something machine made, DIY, futuristic and not of this world. “Autonomy” is the second release from this unknown artist (or I suspect a duo) and it has a picture of an angry robot on the centre disc  – that should be enough shouldn’t it?

It’s a record that could also be described as an Electro record, but if you trust DJ Stingray, you’ll know that the two genres are essentially inseparable. Bouncing 808 kick drums; amorphous layers of a synthetic breezes; and lysergic chirps from a 303 bass machine, transmitting frequencies to outer space are contained on “Autonomy” and “Dark Sines.” It’s not some throwback Techno record however and here are some interesting sound design elements that continually crop up – some with greater effect than others –modernising the Science Fiction themes in the era of AI and interplanetary migrations.  

 

Suvatne – M.F.I.D.S (Sunlab) 12″

Sunlab is a new Norwegian label that is currently bringing a ray of sunshine to the dreary world of electronic music in Norway and beyond. The label and DJ collective comprised of a few young and eager artists, bubbling up through the ranks of Norway’s DJ community made a striking entrance when they made their debut at the beginning of this year with the Sunlab001 compilation.

It was all about B.2 or Brand’s “Juli” on a record that brought a little something different and forgotten back into the scene. With a musical approach nodding its head in the direction of early nineties Trance and Balearic and a group of producers and DJs that are even nerdier about electronic music than Roland Lifjell, they are doing everything on their own terms, outside of any trend-informed scene. They are back with the second edition to their quickly-expanding catalogue and a solo effort from Suvatne.

M.F.I.D.S are five tracks that expound on the first two the artist created for Sunlab’s original release. Airy melodic movements heading out into the stratosphere on the tail of effervescent kick drums streaking across the heavens define Suvatne’s sound across the five tracks of this release. At times he might favour a downtempo or ambient interpretation when combining these components but breezy melodies and punchy rhythms hold fast the Trancy nature of Suvatne’s music.

It’s a Trance record with that distinctive Norwegian approach to electronic textures, like a balearic arctic, if it existed on a different planet. It’s great to hear somebody that’s not doing brooding Techno or Deep House out of Norway and although Sunlab is mainly sticking to Trance for the moment B.2 from the last record might indicate a more diverse output from the label in the future. M.F.I.D.S will appeal to people looking for an upbeat rhythm and hedonistic tunes from their dance music, as it winks at you on its way to sunny isles of post-EDM Ibiza,

 

Julia Govor goes beyond the booth at Jaeger

Julio Govor spends the afternoon taking us behind the scenes at Jaeger for her video blog series, beyond the booth.

When Julia Govor came to play a set at Jaeger this summer, she took a moment before her set to take camera behind the scenes at Jaeger. Ola Smith-Simonsen (aka Olanskii) took our Russian guest on a tour of Jaeger, talking about the soundsystem and the ideologies that have informed our club. It’s the third episode in the series from the Techno DJ and artist that takes her audience on an intimate tour of the clubs and venues she plays week in and week out, for a unique perspective of the inner workings of the clubbing community from around the world.

Julia Govor is the DJ and artist behind the Jujuka label and concept, and since releasing Litmus on Hypertone her star has risen on the international Techno circuit.  We hit record on her set when she was at Jaeger with Ida Nerbø, and you can stream the set now via Marco Bailey’s podcast, MATERIA.

You can catch Olanskii every Friday in Jaeger’s booth with g-HA for Frædag.

Album of the Week: Anthony Naples – Fog FM

Anthony Naples returns to the album format a year on from his last effort, “Take Me With You” with a record that seems to make amends for neglecting the fans on the dance floor the last time around. “Fog FM” will appease anybody that might have come to Anthony Naples’ music through the dance floor and DJ sets, but have been left disappointed by his albums.  Ten tracks maintain a rhythmic nature, indulging various different moods of the dance floor in the distinctive voice his crafted as an artist. Naples does away with the distracting conceptual pursuits of making an House album with an LP that mirrors his works on EPs with a cohesive sonic thread tying these ten tracks into the album.

Besides the “channel” interlude tracks, every track is a progressive jaunt through minimal and micro House with a dominant rhythmic element at the core of each track, delivering a functional demand with sole intentions on the dance floor. Anthony Naples didn’t over-think this one, which is often the demise of House and Techno albums. From the deep luxurious pads of “A.I.R.” to the effervescent rhythm section of “Lucy’s” there is a no over-arching narrative, just a sonic theme that consolidates the tracks on the LP, and similar to the great House and Techno LPs before it like Robert Hood’s “Minimal Nation” or Osunlade’s “Paradigm” the record maintains its allegiances to the dance floor.

“Fog FM” features great dexterity as it jumps between elements of House and Electro with Naples’ distinctive minimalists approach underpinning the sound of the record. Luxurious pads floating between deep grooves while icy synthetics carve out steep escarpments between microtonal melodic movements. There is some dynamism between tracks as the beat structure changes frequently and the atmosphere continually develops, but the sonic palette Naples has constructed these individually pieces from, remains largely unchanged which gives the record its progrevisse form.

It’s a very different approach to the Anthony Naples’ previous LPs where he might have been bogged down by trying to create listening albums that could function beyond the DJ booth and dance floor. That’s not where his strength lies as a producer however and it’s something that has been rectified on “Fog FM” with great affect. It’s an LP that could easily be slipped into a DJ bag as double EP, but retains the cohesion of an LP across it’s ten tracks. Between Naples’ languid melodies and harmonies and inherent knack for crafting dance floor cuts, this LP is a definite highlight on his discography and dance floor music in general.

Lose yourself from Reality with DELLA

Exalted strings reach heady heights as syncopated hi hats flit in and out of earshot. A thin guitar strums through the shadow of the offbeats while languid keys drift off on some memory of a motif. Eventually a voice comes in, a whisper dissolves into an ebullient quaver with the simple suggestion; “lose yourself from reality.”

“Lose yourself from reality is the latest track from DELLA (Kristina Dunn) and Homero Espinosa where they’ve joined forces with west coast House monolith, Mark Farina for a single outing on Espinosa’s Moulton Music. A funky bassline, strings and guitar evoke references from Disco, which Farina and Espinosa repurpose in a progressive House metre. DELLA’s vocal brings the arrangement to life in the middle eight as she skips through the syllables of the main chorus. 

In the House tradition the simple refrain speaks volumes about a night out, in the embrace of a club soundsystem, losing yourself completely on the dance floor. It’s a feeling Kristina can relate to as a DJ and electronic music artist whose music career and work is ingrained in her formative experiences on the dance floor. 

Those experiences have resulted in two music careers for Kristina, one as the frontwoman for Norwegian House duo, No Dial Tone, and the solo career she’s cultured since as DELLA. DELLA’s primary pursuit is as a DJ today, fulfilling most of her obligations as a resident for Jaeger, where she’s nurtured a night for the last three years called DELLAs Drivhus featuring guest appearances from Honey Dijon, Tommy Bones and Homero Espinosa.

Between sets, DELLA has a full-time job and when she can, she’ll moonlight as a singer, lending her vocal to  friends like Espinosa and Farina. It’s her second foray on the Moulton music catalogue with Homero Espinosa and her second record this year. The record is out via Traxsource today and it’s accompanied by a mix from DELLA for Traxsource LIVE.

DELLA’s Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/djdella_official
DELLA’s Mixcloud: https://www.mixcloud.com/djdella/

DELLA will also be featured alongside De Fantatiske To in a Paper Music retrospective as the label turns 25 with a special compilation. It’s given us the impetus to reach out to our resident to talk about the present and future of DELLA, DJing and how to “Lose yourself from reality.”

 

Let’s get right to it… You’re about to release a track with Mark Farina and Homero Espinosa. How did this collaboration come about?

Hello, hello, yes I am about to release my next collaboration with Mark Farina & Homero Espinosa on Moulton Music out of Oakland, CA. The release date is 30.08.19 and is available for pre-order on Traxsource.com, so go get it! 

This is the second time I have recorded in the Moulton Studios with Homero. The collaboration was not intended, it simply happened. I laid the vocals down last year when I was on a short US tour, Homero flew off to Dallas to work with Mark on his upcoming album, Mark liked the vocals, and bam, we now have a killer track together. 

You’ve worked with Homero before, but is this your first collaboration with Mark?

Yes, this is my first collaboration with Mark. Frankly, this collab brought my DJ career in full circle. Mark was a DJ that highly influenced me in my early days in House music. He is a strong representative of the west coast sound, where I resided from 1999-2005. I have spent many hours on the dance floor with Mark behind the decks. He was also the DJ that starting leading me into the idea of wanting to DJ myself. I have immense appreciation for Mark and how he’s inspired me, now 20 years later, we have officially united in House music and it’s pretty f-ing amazing! 

This your second time working with Homero. What is it that makes you two so compatible on a record?

Homero and I totally bounce together. He produces pure House music that is true to the sound. We are both Househeads through and through, so it’s no surprise that we flow well together. He is also a great director in the studio and has a clear vision when starting a session. I absolutely love working with him and wish we were closer to make music more often together. 

How did  “lose yourself from reality” come together?

Homero and I met up in the Moulton Studios in the fall of 2018. We started talking about inspiration and he popped on Evelyn Thomas’ album “I Wanna Make It On My Own.” We skipped through the tracks until we both landed on ‘Back to Reality.’ He did a quick sample, looped a beat, and I hit the vocal box. Our intention was to make a late night early / morning jam. A tune that simply lifted the soul and was a reminder of why we do what we do. I dug into the feelings of how I feel on the dance floor in the wee hours of the morning and we pounded it out. It was that easy. 

Your lyrics always capture the feeling of a night out, and this track is a prime example of that feeling you get when completely enraptured on the dance floor. How do you usually arrive at those kinds of lyrics?

I’m a dancer first and foremost. I am not into this music for any other reasons other than that. I have spent an incredible amount of hours floating free on dance floors and I channel this feeling directly into my music. House music is a feeling, I guess I am able to relay this via my voice and with the words that come when I am in the vocal booth. 

Were the vocals the final piece of the puzzle on this track?

No, the vocals were laid first and then Mark and Homero worked their magic following. 

How much inspiration do you draw from the music and how much does the vocal influence the music when you’re usually working on a track?

I usually do not intentionally search for inspiration, it simply surrounds me. I listen to a lot of dance music and vocal music tends to resonate more strongly with me. When I am asked to do vocal work, the track is normally in the early stages of development. A simple beat and some chords. So, the vocal influences the track direction very much. 

Besides this release what has been happening the world of DELLA?

This past year I have actually taken a step back from dance music. My ears are suffering from Tinnitus and I need to heal them. It has been very frustrating. But, I will never quit this music fully. At the moment, I have this exciting release on the way, the debut of my Traxsource LIVE! Mix, my jam, ‘When I Want To,’ with De Fantastike To has resurfaced on the Paper Recordings 25 Year Anniversary Compilation, and I have two new projects in the works. I will continue to DJ, but I am taking things slow ATM.

There’s been a lot of collaborations for you in the last few years. Is there anything coming by way of a solo DELLA release in the near future?

I doubt it. I am not a producer and do not have desire in becoming one, but who knows what the future holds. I’ve always been a DJ, not a producer, and this is where I put my focus. I am happy I am able to bring my voice to the dance floor and right now this is enough for me. As long as I can keep on dancing and keep others dancing with me, I have reached success.  

I spoke to Carl Craig recently and he told me that DJing was the day job to afford the passion of making music. But I have a sneaking suspicion that’s the other way around for you, that DJing is the true passion?

There is a lot of truth in what he is saying, most DJs are out their hustling hard to pay the bills and to build their studios. I am lucky enough to have other passions in my life aside from my djing (building my natural skincare brand) so it keeps the music alive for me. I am now taking a new approach to my music. I am simply following what I love, have stopped letting the industry influence me, have stopped trying to “keep up,” and am taking it each day at a time. I am in this music forever, it’s not something that just comes and goes, you are either a lifer or not. I continue to celebrate House music and the music continues to flow. And this is my true passion, being to leave my ego at the door, step behind the decks, and bring the flow to my community. 

And I imagine that’s because you came into it as a dancer.

What? Della dances? ;) No idea what you are referring to, HAHA. 

You’ve just compiled a Traxsource LIVE! Mix too. Can you tell me a little about it?

Oo, I did! And I am SUPER stoked about it. Traxsource has been very supportive on my journey and in return I am a huge supporter of them. 

The mix is a reflection of me and the music I love. It is pure House music, booty bumpin, and an all around feel good mix. I recorded it in the basement of Jaeger, which was incredibly special, me alone with that sound system was magical. Also, the mix was recorded in the wake of my dear friend’s passing in New York. He was definitely with me when I was bouncing from track to track and it also features his final work. This mix is dedicated to him, RIP Andrew Hobold. 

It’s quite funky… 

I would hope so, haha. The last time I checked, it is called dance music. ;) 

And it’s very much a House mix, but House music today has so many different interpretations. What does House music mean for DELLA?

Unfortunately, the current industry has completely whitewashed House music and has demeaned the actual genre of what it truly is. It makes me quite upset honestly that kids now Google House music and white bro EDM has replaced Frankie Knuckles, Paul Johnson, Ron Hardy, Gene Farris, Kenny Dope, Honey Dijon, etc, as ‘House.’ Gurl, please. 

House music is so much more than a genre with a 4×4 beat. It is community, it is a form of dance, it is a sound that vibrates in time with the heart, it is the true meaning of love. It is a feeling of the soul that is not found on multi-million dollar mega-produced silly festivals. It is found in basements, warehouses, low lit shady bars, roller rinks, loft spaces, parks, you name it, wherever the dancer is found, the sound is found. True House music has an army of devoted bass soldiers and we all continue to push the boundaries of bringing this sound to the people. A sound that’s been going strong for 40 years and is nowhere in site of coming to an end. It is a sound that the establishment fears because it is the one place where everyone unites (gay, straight, black, white, young, old), revolts against the system, expresses themselves, and IS 100% FREE. THIS is House music. 

It’s a recorded mix for the sake of the internet, but you’ve always struck me as a DJ that feeds off the energy of the people. How do you channel that into a mix like this?

When I DJ, I play music to dance to. Whether it’s a pre-recorded mix or a 6 hour club set. I can guarantee you that I am shakin-it behind the turntables whenever I make a pre-recorded mix and this can be heard in the final result. 

Recorded mixes like this is part of the whole process of being a DJ today, alongside regularly  releasing music and constantly being proactive on social media. How do you think this affects the scene ultimately?

After 20+ years of involvement in this music, I don’t think any of this truly matters at the end of the day. If the DJ touches the hearts of the people, they’ll keep coming back. The fame and stardom dies as quickly as it rises. Instagram likes is just some silly facade trying to crown someone the king or queen of popularity. All crowns too fall to the ground someday. Genuine quality produced music will always remain once the ashes rise. Maybe I still have an old school mentality of: it doesn’t matter who it is behind the decks, as long as the floor is bouncing, than this is all that matters. 

At the end of the day though what matters is happening on the dance floor on the night! You know Jaeger’s audience fairly well. What’s the crucial ingredient to making that important aspect work in your opinion as a DJ?

My motto: I dance. They dance. We all dance together. And that’s the key ingredient. 

DJs that play simply to fill their own ego should step out of the booth. If the DJ cannot touch the hearts of the crowd, then they have failed. I’m a people DJ. This music is about community and unity, not about a string pretentious selections that only feed the ego of the selector. 

Speaking of which, what’s in store for the next DELLA’s Drivhus?

GENE FARRIS! The next Della’s Drivhus is Oct. 12 and I am hosting the House legend Gene Farris from Chicago. I have been trying to land this booking for over 1 year and it’s finally happening. So, get ready ‘cause we are going to ROCK the basement. 

And what else lies in the immediate future for DELLA?

Traxsource LIVE! Mix airs 28.08.19

‘Lose Yourself from Reality’ w/ DELLA, Mark Farina & Homero Espinosa releases 30.08.19

Opening party of Pride Trondheim on 07.09.19

B2B m/ Chrissy @ Oslo Camping 14.09.19

Della’s Drivhus w/ Gene Farris 12.10.19

Possible US tour later this year

Soon visiting my friends of the Gothenburg underground

Until we speak again…

The stranger the better: A Q&A with Carl Craig

Where do you start an interview with Carl Craig? At which point do you unpick that thread which will eventually unravel a legacy in electronic music that spans three decades and some critical bullet points in electronic music’s history.

It’s a Techno origin story with its roots in Detroit, counts Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins as some of the protagonists in a plot centered around one of the most significant eras for the genre. It’s there in the late eighties when Carl Craig first came to the fore as a producer and set forth on a career that spans a gummult of aliases, a host EPs, more than a handful of LPs and countless remixes, that even he has trouble recounting today.

Born and raised in Detroit in the middle of Techno’s origins, Carl Craig was mentored by none other than Derrick May as part of that crucial second wave of Techno artists, which also includes the likes of Kenny Larkin, Richie Hawtin and Robert Hood. It was this second generation that would go on to establish what the first generation created as the dominating force that it is today. 

Carl Craig has become a prominent figure in its legacy, with an eclectic approach that has seen him release some of the most significant pieces in Techno’s history. Under aliases which include 69, Paperclip People, Innerzone orchestra and C2 he has released records that are undeniable classics today.

He has been a promiscuous and prolific entity and continues to make severe impressions in his field, with an intuitive and inventive approach that has followed him across his extensive career and aliases.Carl Craig has always favoured a bold, experimental approach which has been distinguished by his unique take on the Techno. Broken beats, obscure alien sonic textures and nontraditional compositional forms have been a calling card that he’s brandished independently from any trend-informed developments within the genre. Carl Craig is simply a legend in his field today.

That legend is installed in the echelon of electronic music, but when I call up the man behind that legend, I find humble and down to earth person who is incredibly eloquent and who’s scope when engaged in conversation can span way beyond music.

He’s in Spain when I call  “trying to pack up all my shit that’s accumulated in Barcelona,”he says in a measured breath. His kids have been going to school in Barcelona for the last four seasons while Craig has split his time between Barcelona and Detroit. The kids have already moved back to the motor city, and he’s packing up the last of his possessions while seeing to some playing commitments on this side of the Atlantic. 

His next stop will be Oslo to perform his Versus show for Oslo Classics and then later that evening, he’ll play a set at Jaeger where he’s played every year for the last five years and it will be his second time playing in 2019. “I can’t be in Oslo and not play Jaeger,” he tells me. 

It’s the first time however that we get a chance to speak in the context of an interview, and with burning questions going back from the first time he played here, we have a lot of ground to cover and very little time. So, where exactly do you start an interview with Carl Craig?

I wanted to start off by asking you about Detroit, especially Detroit today. It’s always had this fractured relationship with Techno in that it’s always been more popular outside of the city. Have you seen that change at all in recent years?

Well Detroit is a city where people are influenced by what’s popular like in any place. But the thing about Detroit as a city is that it’s not a major city for the country. For instance in Norway you have Oslo that’s going to have all the influence on the rest of Norway.

Detroit is one of many big cities in the United States, but people are influenced by what becomes big, and what becomes big in the US has more to do with what’s promoted by major companies, who have the money to get behind the promotion of music. 

In the old days, it went by regions. You could have a big record in a region but it won’t be big across the United States. And the same with electronic music. it can be regional, so Detroit has a movement that’s very strong for electronic music; Chicago has had their House music scene; Miami has their House music scene. You have all these aspects that are influential in each city, but when the Chemical Brothers come out with a new record, that’s when there’s a big major push because they’ve got a big label behind them, so that’s when everybody pays attention. 

Or something happens in Las Vegas, like right now Techno has taken over from EDM, and now Techno is the new fad again in the US (laughs). And that will influence people in our region. People will see Adam Beyer or Carl Cox at EDC, and then they’ll be all about this Techno thing. 

But only a few of the people will actually do research, and then people will start tweeting or instagramming that “you know there’s a Techno movement in your own town, what do you know about that?” Then people start paying attention, because there’s a kind of pressure from others that are outside of the US.  

Do you find that this kind of newfound interest like that of Las Vegas, directs new audiences to your music, or do people still have to dig that little deeper to get to Carl Craig?

They have to dig deeper, definitely. I’ve never been somebody who tried to be predictable about what I do. That means I’m happy with what I do, but is probably also seen as the more real aspect of electronic music. 

There’s a famous quote of yours that goes in Detroit we have cars and music, and I’ve always been curious about the relationship between the music and industry in the city. Was there some sort of impact or was it just habistance that this machine music came out of the motor town?

Well, with Berry Gordy, his whole idea of running Motown like an assembly line came from working on an assembly line in the factory. Juan Atkins, his influence came from the assembly line as well, but it was the assembly line once it was automated and partially run by robots. That definitely had an influence on his music, and his followers like me. 

But none of you ever worked in those factories?

No, I don’t think Kevin (Saundersen), Derrick (May) or Juan ever worked in the factory. I know Derrick can definitely remember quotes from Star Trek, so there was this whole Sci Fi thing that came a bit before my time, and I believe that’s had a big impact on Detroit Techno. It was about equipment that had a bunch of lights on it that looked really interesting and did cool things, like travelling in space. Those are the influences that are still prevalent in Techno music. 

Detroit was declared bankrupt in 2013, and when you started out, it would have just been after the 1980’s recession. Do you think that socio-economic landscape had any effect on the music or culture in that it was a bit more raw or soulful as a result of that?  

Detroit, the whole time I remember growing up, until just a few years ago, has always been in a recession, or trying to recover from a recession. When you go to the center of the city, there’s development, but it has been slow. When you go into the neighbourhoods there are always burnt down houses, buildings boarded up and houses that have been torn down. 

There was always this decline that even when we had a great mayor, like mayor Archer, you still couldn’t get past that decline. We started having devil’s night fires, all these people taking copper off of buildings, and roofs off of buildings. Detroit’s recession became an opportunity for people to make money in really fucked up ways. It’s only over the last four years that we’re seeing Detroit, not only on an economic rise, but also a rise in the development. 

How do you think it’s affected the music scene there, especially in light of the revitalisation project that’s been going on there for the last four years?

The guys do what they do. Omar S, Theo Parrish, Kenny Dixon, Mike Banks, Jay Daniel and Kyle Hall, they’re doing what’s ingrained in them, channeling their experiences from how they grew up in Detroit and and channeling that into their music. 

I think that once we start really seeing a change from that, it’s going to be another generation of people making music; transplants that are moving to Detroit from outside of Detroit. Young teenagers that are going to experience Detroit in a whole different way that I experienced Detroit growing up. I hope that as the landscape is changing it will help generate a new perspective in how Detroit music can be made and appreciated in Detroit. 

Was there ever anything that you felt that could be described as a scene in Detroit or was it like you said: guys just doing what they’re going to do?

I think any scene has to do with what happens in the club world and the party world, especially with music for clubs. You need to have clubs to hear the music. We had the music institute. That was a major deal. It was George Baker, Alton Miller and  Chez Damier that started Music Institute that revved my engines a lot to make music. 

Before, I was going to the Shelter where they played like “Ballroom Blitz” and “This charming man,” but from 12:00 – 02:00 they played black music. They’re playing Mr. Fingers and all this Chicago stuff as well as what Derrick and Juan were doing. But that was 2 hours out of a 5 hour night, so when the Music Institute happened and it was 6 – 8 hours of just straight Techno music with Derrick and Kevin and Juan playing on Friday and then Alton Miller and Chez Daimier on Saturdays doing more Disco stuff. 

That made a really big impact for me and Detroit needs that all the time, but unfortunately that  was the biggest club impact since it closed in 1995. And now its Movement (festival) which is great, but it only happens once a year. It’s not a consistent thing on a weekly basis.

When you started making music, you stepped straight into the production role, and I believe you never DJ’d before you started making music. But you do mention that you were going to clubs at least. Do you think that approach has had an effect how you write and compose music?

Yeah, definitely. Every influence I have has had some impact on what I do. When you are playing festivals all the time, you start making and playing music for festivals. When you are playing in clubs all the time, you’re making and playing music that’s for clubs. 

So when I started making music, that came from playing guitar and I bought a synthesiser and begged and borrowed from everything else that I had. I made everything from what I learnt between transposing things from guitar and putting it to synths. Whereas Derrick and some of the other guys didn’t come into it playing any instruments, they came into it this with just great ideas and a way to programme this stuff, and they were DJing. 

When I came into it, I came into it with the musical training, but not specifically on the instrument I play now. 

That’s the way I perceive your music; rather than approaching it as a DJ, you seem to approach it as a composer. Do you think it would’ve sounded different if you started DJing before starting to make music?

I think it would’ve been that way. I know DJs who just don’t have the attention span to make music. Some guys from Detroit I would really like to see out here, more. They are excellent DJs, but just don’t get the opportunity because they don’t have the patience to sit around and programme music. 

They end up getting stuck in Detroit and want to come and share their music, but can’t because nobody knows you in the fuck they are. Delano Smith was one of those guys. Delano was Djing before Derrick and Derrick was looking up to Delano Smith, and it took Delano twenty odd years, before he actually released some music. Now, you see Delano in Panorama Bar and all over Europe, and if he didn’t make those records he wouldn’t have had that opportunity. 

Was that the same for the rest of that second generation, with people like Kenny Larkin and Robert Hood starting out as producers rather than DJs?

Well Richie was a DJ before he started making records. With Kenny Larkin, he had made his record on Plus 8 and that’s how he became a DJ. Robert Hood, I don’t know if he was DJing out, but he probably had turntables and was really good at DJing. I think Robert came into the Underground Resistance fold through Jeff, and Jeff was a DJ long before he started making music; he was a famous DJ in Detroit for about ten years before he started making the Final Cut. 

 

The reason I asked is because you have the Techno scene that started with Derrick, Juan and Kevin and then you guys stepped in and the music seemed to change. It brought in a lot more eclecticism and it became really well produced. Did you feel you had to adapt what the generation before you were doing as producers and that’s why you approached more as producers than DJs?

When I got into the fold, Derrick never told me I had to make music that sounded like them. Especially at that time, and I think Strictly Rhythm was the first label that is seen like they were really saying: “you have to make music that sounds like this in order for it to be released.” Traxx were around, and people were just making these songs and they would go to Larry Sherman and he would cut them a cheque for $500 and say get the fuck out. 

With Derrick, Kevin and Juan… I know for a fact that Derrick was really upset for a long time that people were aping his style. You had a whole crew of people in England and London, that were just making records that sounded like Derrick. He couldn’t stand that. 

I came into it, where my individuality was cultivated within a relationship. It wasn’t like I had to make a record that sounded like “Good Life” to get over. They wanted to hear something that was hot, and they didn’t care whether it was eclectic or not, probably the stranger the better, especially for Derrick. 

Would you say that defines your music, something that’s strange?

Yeah. I mean Marc Kinchen (MK) and I started out right around the same time. Marc had a record that was out on express records when he was about 15 or 16, and was taken under Kevin’s wing and I came under Derrick’s wing and you could basically hear the differences between our influences, by who we were mentored by. 

With MK you can see he honed his style which is more commercially viable with more pop, and that’s because he was around when inner city were doing all their stuff. I was around too, but I was next door at Derrick’s and we had synthesisers and drum machines on the floor and we were just trying to make the craziest stuff we could. 

That’s how my career has gone with the work that I’ve done. I was mentored to be fearless what I did musically and Marc is fearless, but he was mentored in way that hone his abilities as a pop producer. 

That’s probably why your music is held in such high regard in our community today, and has made such an indelible impact on electronic music. What is your relationship with those tracks like today, especially tracks like Innerzone Orchestra’s Bug in a Bassbin and 69’s Desire?

I love them all. It’s not only a part of me, but I can remember what I was doing at the time. I wasn’t making any of this to feed a musical system. So when I made “Bug in Bassbin,” I remember where I was when I made “Bug in a Bassbin”. I remember where I was when I made Tres Demented, I remember that I was mad when I made that. 

I see them as bullet points in my life, not just in my career. You know when you have a map and you take a pen and then you stick it there, that’s what I think of when I think of the music I’ve made. 

Sometimes I forget some of it. Zip was playing a track and I ran up to him, and was like; “man this is funky, who is this?” He looked at me like I was out of my mind and said; “this is you!”(laughs).

How have you maintained that level of creativity throughout your career and was there ever a point where you went I’m not going to be able to make any new music?

I mean… I push it. Sometimes when you push things creatively, it works against you. I just kept active, I just kept taking my ideas and spinning them to remixes and then to tracks. If something didn’t work out as a remix then I would spin it into a track. If something as too good for a remix, then I would spin it into a track for myself. If I was a painter and I had canvas and paint all the time, then I would keep making paintings. 

Does this mean you’re constantly working on music to release it, or does a lot of it end up on the cutting room floor?

Much of what I did I had as outtakes. But I look at it as experiments, so when I couldn’t make five tracks in a day, it’s possible that one track would be ok, more than possible five tracks would be shit. So I would take from what I did as experiments and the next day I would be moving on from what I did the day before. 

It’s more difficult for me to make music based on the idea that I’m going to release something. For instance Moritz von Oswald and I have been working on an album together for the last 5 years. You just keep working and keep working and don’t even think of it as being releasable, but just as getting something in a way that we can exorcise our demons. 

Is that also relative to why you have so many aliases, so you can compartmentalise all these different aspects of your creativity?

Yes, definitely. I came up with those aliases after I make the tracks. That’s why you see some stuff only come out as one thing. Like Innerzone Orchestra, there’s only ever been one Innerzone Orchestra record. There’s only some releases that have more than one release, like 69 and Paperclip People. 

That makes it difficult to do a 69 album (for instance). I’m not going to be able to do a 69 album. I’ve already tried that, and it’s not happening, because the influence doesn’t come from me making 69 tracks; the influence comes from me watching tv, acting silly and doing stupid stuff and then something great comes out. If I work on thirty tracks in ten days, there could be five tracks that actually work and those tracks might feel like 69, or Innerzone Orchestra.

I want to ask you about your last album Versus, because it ties into why you’re coming to Oslo. That album was very different from anything else you’ve done in the past, because it was very orchestrated and very bold. Is that the future of Carl Craig and where you want to go with your sound?

Growing up in the seventies, there were a few ways of hearing music: One was radio, another one was TV on Saturday and the other one was in an elevator. So whenever I went into a big building with my parents there would be muzak (elevator music) playing. It was always this orchestrated versions of pop songs. 

As a kid when I would hear an orchestrated version of a Dionne Warwick song, and I’d know the original, my logic for them to get an orchestra together to do a version of the song, would mean that the song was important. That is how I was indoctrinated in elevator music to be interested in orchestral music. Not only that, but I did play concert bass when I was in high school. 

That’s very interesting because obviously Brian Eno was very influenced by Muzak as well, but he went completely the opposite way as in it was music that could also be completely ignored, where as you specifically focussed on the aspect of it that is bold and has to be heard.

When I started doing these orchestral shows I worked with Franceso Tristano on all the stuff and this is a person who is not a very imposing person, but when he plays you have to listen. 

So that has had an influence on me as well, especially coming in and doing these orchestral scores and performances, because I’ll walk in and I’ll know all the players are going to be masters of their instruments, whereas I’m not, but I’m the composer. I have to trust the ability of these players. 

Part of getting their attention when Francesco did those scores, was to make the scores interesting and strong for those players who want to play it. It had to be something that grabbed their attention and that’s part of something that can be heard in the Versus record. It had to be interesting on a player’s level and whatever I had added after the fact with electronics, made it come together maybe in a bit more of a cohesive way. 

Your doing the show for Oslo classics.

I love coming to Oslo anyway. Any opportunity that we have to do Versus, I’m totally up for doing it, because every performance I learn something else. Whatever I learned from this I’ll be able to take into my future productions. 

You’ll be playing Jaeger after the show. How do you plan on bridging that gap from the live performance onto the dance floor?

Jaeger feels great, I always have a lot of fun when I’m there. 

Do you feel you have to adapt your sets at all when playing this side of the atlantic?

No I do what I do. If I feel a vibe that’s different, I might try to adapt to that vibe, but people come to see Carl Craig, so I try to give them what Carl Craig is into at the time. 

How has your relationship between DJing and production changed over time, do you feel more drawn to the composition side of things or are you leaning more towards DJing of late?

DJing is my day job (laughs). That’s what I learnt a long time ago; You gotta get out on the road, because that’s how people get to know about your music and that’s your job, to promote the music. There’s not going to be two performances every week when I do the orchestra, DJing is what does it. 

 

Album of the week: Yves Tumour – Safe in the Hands of Love

Cacophonous rhythms; anger extemporised as tonal variation; vocals that purposefully languish in dissonance; and textures arranged like a tumultuous love affair with corresponding phrases create a jarring experience through Yves Tumour’s third LP and his debut on Warp records,  “Safe in the Hands of Love”. It’s a sardonic musical expression of being safe and loved as noise, dissonance and amorphous shapes, are channeled through a vanguardist purview over the 10 tracks that make up this LP.

Yves Tumour whose real name is Sean Bowie makes music that Pitchfork has compared to James Ferraro and Dean Blunt, lying somewhere between obscure electronica and the alternopop that those artists pursue. After making his mark as an artist while working with Mykki Blanco, Bowie assumed the Yves Tumour alias in 2016, channeling elements of jazz, electronica, noise, broken beat and pop into wayward music that has featured on record labels like PAN.

“Safe in the hands of Love” finds the artist on the aptly positioned Warp platform with an LP that is really different from anything the label has released in recent years. There’s an organic aspect to the sounds of the record that adds a very visceral dimension with melodies and harmonies that evoke anything from love, to violence, fear and anger across the record. At its most serene tracks like “Recognizing the Enemy” and “Lifetime” provide some repose between the more dramatic parts of the record contained on songs like “Hope In Suffering” and “Economy of freedom.”

At times there’s a sense of joviality that seeps into the record like on the single “Noid” or “All the love we have now,” but even those upbeat tracks are clouded in an aura of something sinister as white noise drifts through the arrangements and Yves Tumour’s detuned vocals appear through the progressions in a veiled sonic fog that mystifies and intrigues, drawing the listener into the middle of the magnificently orchestrated accompaniment.

“Safe in the Hands of Love” compromises between the edge of leftfield electronica and popular music to find some disharmonious relationship between these elements that very much work in Yves Tumour’s favour. There’s a enough weirdness contained on the record to lure in the more adventurous fan without completely disenfranchising those in search of an evocative melody or lyrical earworm. It’s a record that possibly more accessible than anything he’s released before and bridges that indefinable gap where artists like Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and Bjørk have walked before.

The cut with Filter Musikk

Festivals, music luminaries emboldened on ten-foot marquises, club nights, after parties, cameras broadcasting intimate dance floors across the entire globe on an internet connection, and quiet streets throbbing with the throng of twenty-somethings on a night out; sometimes it feels like the world descends on our little city. A flurry of intense activity, punctuated by a steady pulse beating out from the center of the metropolis, whips the city into a Frenzy in a matter of a week. Over the course of the last two weeks in Oslo, Øya, Findings, Sommerøya, Rammstein and Boiler Room landed in Oslo with an almighty bang, that absorbed  the whole city and will resonate into the start of winter.

It was a two week party to officially call the end of summer, our last hurrah before we retreat into our warm hovel before the cold sets in, but when all the dust has settled, the tents have been broken down, and the international guests sent on their way back to their respective homes, we remain and an echo continues to reverberate through the city, and refuses to dissipate.

This brief and intense rendezvous with an international audience might be some kind of affirmation of our dedication to music, but it’s a little more than one weekend in a year of 52 weeks with 5 other days, that we commit and dedicate our every waking hour to music and especially electronic music. When the fleeting encounters with Boiler Room, Ben Klock and Rammstein have passed and a sense of norm returns to the city, we don’t simply stop listening to music or stop dancing. The passion is terminable and its constant and once the flurry of intense activity subsides, there are a few places around Oslo that can quench and facilitate our all-consuming musical desires.

Filter Musikk is such a place. An everlasting bastion of good taste for the music- and record enthusiast whose encounters with music is an incessant state of exploration. Whether we are digging through the dusty archives, or unpackaging a fresh batch of hermetically sealed records from a box of new arrivals, Filter Musikk is an unwavering presence for music and record culture in the city. It’s a fixture and our weekly fix, and it was our first stop on Monday when the noise of two weekends of unbridled partying subsided. As luck would have it, we walked in just as a new box of records arrived. Hunched over a pile of records on the floor we started picking record after record with a sense of calm and order restored.

After the intense, fleeting musical encounters of the last two weeks, this is where the music is at its most concrete; it’s the music that makes a permanent impression, finding a dedicated space in our record collections, that live way beyond a moment or a weekend. It’s the cut with Filter Musikk. 

 

DJ Dog & Double Dancer – Rebound Lounge 3 (Rebound Lounge) 12″

Norway’s first and only basketball House label is back with Rebound Lounge 3. Come to think of it… they might the world’s first and last label dedicated to the fatuous music genre. DJ Dog (Fettburger) and Double Dancer (Eirik Fagertun / Untz Untz) have been refining the sound of basketball House through series of releases since 2016, with bouncing beats and airy melodies defining their work together. 

DJ Dog and Double Dancer maintain the Rebound theme on the third release, making their way through five cuts with dribbling beats and breathy textures underpinning each track. Although there’s that insistent basketball theme behind this third release, the appeal to Rebound 3 lies in the frosty melodies and the cool unperturbed rhythms that they pursue. 

There’s an improvised, progresisve touch to their tracks, where they let thematic phrases languish in their own reflection, expounding little beyond subtle modulation in the synthesis. From the pounding acidity of “Running the point” to the heady ethereality of “Naismith,” Rebound 3, like its ancestors, is a versatile record with loads of cues to distant musical cues coming together under the auspices of  basketball House.

 

Neil Landstrumm – Shitting Diamonds On Jupiter (Running Back) 12″

Neil Landstrumm is nothing if not diiverse. From the trashing Electro of Missing You on Mord, the schizophrenic IDM of “A Death, A Mexican And A Mormon” on CPU. to his unadulterated Techno workouts from the nineties, recently reissued on Peacefrog, Neil Landstrumm bounces between styles and genres like a chameleon with attention deficit disorder, adopting transient influences in his all-consuming pursuits as an artist. He’s hardly a conformist however as he molds this to his unique sonic identity while testing the limits of his audience’s patience through bold sonic textures and wayward rhythms. 

So although it’s a bit odd to find Landstrumm on Running Back with an eighties-sounding synthwave record, it’s also completely expected. “Shitting Diamonds On Jupiter” doesn’t quite sound like anything Neil Landstrumm has ever released before, but it retains that distinctive   flair for the dramatic. With a sonic palette almost completely derived from classic synth arpeggios, Landstrumm soundtracks some imagined eighties horror and scifi plot through the vintage sounds of electronic music. Between 8bit video games, synth pop and Landstrumm’s Techno and Electro pursuits this record exists as a complete anomaly on his extended discography, but plays well against the backdrop of the Running Back catalogue, albeit in what can only be described as a Neil Landstrumm execution. 

Over five tracks the Scottish producer creates bold sonic creations that is not confined to the drum machine as densely orchestrated synthesiser movements whir through progressions in distinctive phases like a pop song. With an arsenal of synths at hand that favour big, brash sounds, Lanstrumm juxtaposes upbeat melodies with provocative harmonies, that cloud the entire release in something of a sinister air. Even “Night Walker Zwei” with its clear attempts at minimising the sounds to the beat, finds it hard to control the intensity of the synthesiser sounds forcing their way through the reverb of the percussion. 

 

M.S.L – Periphery (Les Yeux Orange) 12″ 

It’s said: if you’re going to have an Electro night, you should only play Electro. Mixing an Electro track in what is essentially a House or Techno set, just sounds like a very bland attempt at trying to sound interesting and everybody can see through it. With Electro you’re either all in or you shouldn’t bother. The same goes for an Electro record. 

M.S.L hits the nail on the head with “Periphery” on this occasion. It’s an Electro record from start to finish, entirely dedicated to the skipping beat arrangements and intergalactic sounds of the genre. And while many think Electro is one specific thing, like House and Techno it has various different hues that cater to different portions of the night, as M.S.L so expertly demonstrates on this record. 

From the light key work of “Triennale,” the downtempo rhythm of “Careful, Thinking Could Become A Habit,“ to the brooding sonics of “Enterprise” this record has an all-encompassing view of the rich variation that defines Electro in 2019. “Periphery” is M.S.L’s third release and in the mere two years he’s been actively releasing records, he’s displayed a real talent for his chosen genre.

 

Various – Eros 02X (Eros) 12″

This white label, label has been single-handedly bringing Disco back to life with edits and remixes from Disco, and the early days of House focussing on some of the more obscure and as a result more refreshing kodak moments from the genres. Eros is proving once and for all that Disco does in fact NOT suck. 

Featuring edits of Brainstorm, Master Plan and Venus Dodson, according to discogs, the original Disco tracks might not be all that familiar, but each contain an earworm, riff or beat, that tends to linger with the listener. Eros 2X is a percussive-focussed release with syncopated hand percussion at the centre of each edit and a funky bass guitar or an arpeggio bass synth playing on those primal evocations.

A2 and B2 are specifically effective and although confined to Disco and House parameters could easily flit between an Electro or Techno set as a tool or a funky interlude to that next phase of a DJ set. Training their sights on a contemporary audience and a modern dance floor, Eros is repurposing the infectious nature of Disco, relieving it of its tawdry associations and updating it for new audiences. Disco is alive and kicking.

 

Peder Mannerfelt – Life Without Friction (Seilscheibenpfeiler) 12″

Ever since dropping the Subliminal kid alias, and stepping into his eponymous moniker, Peder Mannerfelt has completely shrugged off the adolescent personality with music that provokes and engages on the outer fringes of electronic club music. Releases for the likes of Hinge Finger and LPs  ike the Swedish Congo record have taken his musical pursuits to the extreme of an extensive musical purview that extends from UK Garage to the abstract sound art. 

The nonconformist Swedish artist and DJ has pursued a divergent path through electronic music over the last seven years, interpreting classic tropes through the skewed vision of a vangardist. His latest record, “Life without Friction” finds him trapezing a fine line between Techno and the completely abstract. Peder Mannerfelt plays between experimental electronica and familiar sonic cliches in an emboldened manner that could avert or lure the listener at the same time, depending on your personal musical preferences. 

“Life Without Friction” finds Mannerfelt engrossed in a raw, almost malign sonic treatment. The grimy strings of the title track, the glitching beat of “Un-Air” and the atonal noise that accompanies the otherwise serene, “Lucid in the Sky” add a very tense atmosphere to this release. Although he’s no stranger to the experimental, it’s almost as if Peder Mannerfelt is purposefully begriming his creations, and that’s a testament to his work. Sans the overt noise, dissonance or abstract glitches these tracks would be fairly unassuming, but it’s exactly because of Mannerfelt’s uglifying technique that “Life Without Friction” stands out amongst the other new Techno arrivals. 

 

Five seminal Paul Johnson tracks by Daniel Gude

“Down, down down, d-down … D-d-down, do-do-do-down… Down, down, down, down.” You’ve heard, and very likely mumbled along to those lyrics before. For a while Paul Johnson’s “Get Get Down” was a House anthem and for a generation dreaming of Ibiza through the portal of  MTV it became synonymous with their informative experiences with House music and the4r dance floor. You couldn’t escape the infectious funky bassline and the incessant (bordering on exasperating) vocal that became the unavoidable earworm imbedded in the conscious of everybody that’s been on a dance floor in the last twenty years.

Although “Get Get Down” had established and enshrined the legacy of Paul Johnson for a whole generation of House aficionados, that song is the mere tip of an iceberg that extends deep into the roots of House music in Chicago where he remains a steadfast presence anchored to the underground ideologies that first established the genre in the late nineteen eighties. 

Around the start of House music, Paul Johnson would arrive on the scene as a breakdancer and later a DJ, mixing two turntables, cassettes and a four track player. “Paul was one of the first to sample R&B songs that were out there over his own beats,” Gant Garrard (aka Gantman) told Chicago’s 5 Mag in an interview from 2006. That’s how Paul invented what would become Ghetto House, a sound that would evolve into Ghetto Tech and eventually even Footwork, disseminating Paul’s modest influence all over House music in the USA for at least two generations. 

Over the course of hundreds of records, most of which he’d forgotten about over the years, Paul Johnson has made an impact and established a legacy that lives way beyond the stuttering lyricism of his biggest track “Get get down,” without taking away anything from the might of that track. It might have been the track that was responsible for sending Paul Johonson’s career on a very different trajectory towards a more mainstream audience, but it’s the records he’s released before and after that have installed him in the House music lexicon as one of the genre’s more unique entities. 

Paul Johnson has made many contributions in Daniel Gude’s extensive record collection. As a producer and DJ Paul Johnson’s humble legacy and significant contributions to House music is exactly the kind of spirit that Daniel Gude wants to perpetuate through his Retro concept. With the Chicago legend’s imminent arrival we asked Daniel Gude to pick a few Paul Johnson favourites out of the extensive wall of records that line his impressive record collection. 

*Paul Johnson plays Retro this Thursday

 

Paul Johnson – Feel My M.F. Bass

Dance Mania, 1994

Daniel Gude: “C’mon now! Ghetto Tech at it’s best IMO”

 

Paul Johnson’s 1994 sub quencher still stands as a unique testament to the House genre. The bold ghetto lyricism and thunderous kick leave no room for negotiation as it forces you into the middle of the floor in that indeterminable sweet spot, where the low frequencies physical effect as its strongest. This is body music at its best and the first record on Dance Mania that established a relationship between the artist and the label that still lasts today.  

 

Paul Johnson – So Much

Dust Traxx – 1998

Daniel Gude: “I think this is a favourite of mine because it’s a cool picture disc 12” that I’ve had in my bag for 20 years now. Both the song and the record is sexy”

This record is a seductress. It tosses between the funky grooves, the charming chirping keys and the sultry vocals luring the listener between the sheets. There’s an infectious groove to this track focussing on that live bass line bouncing between the beats and the keys, adding to the sensual air Mr. Johnson perpetuates on the track.

 

Paul Johnson – Play with My Bassline

Dopewax – 2017

Daniel Gude: “I like Paul’s diversity and longevity. This cool acid track from 2017 is a great example of that”

Paul Johnson has never taken so much as a break from making and releasing music all these years. He seems as prolific today as he was in the beginning, and has retained a unique quality to his music. Bringing a more than insinuating vocal into the mix, Johnson often juxtaposes the serious production of his music with a playful hook, making for a more approachable House track each time. He’s very rarely pandered to trends or styles and thus a track like this from two years ago sits effortlessly alongside his earliest records giving his whole discography a timeless quality.

 

Paul Johnson – After Dark

ACV – 1996

Daniel Gude: “Just drums. But raw and funky just the way Paul does it” 

Taken from Paul’s pragmatically titled sophomore LP, “After Dark” is a DJ tool at its best. It really shows the versatility of the artist who is able to coax all of this from nothing more than a drum machine. The polyrhythmic display is a testament to the legacy of House music with its roots firmly planted in the rich musical styles that came before it like Funk and Soul. Paul Johnson adds a human flair to this machine music, as if Gregory C. Coleman is sitting at the kit. Even though it’s most likely sequenced through a machine, there’s very little that’s mechanical about this. It’s an incredibly organic and very beguiling track. 

 

Paul Johnson – Get Get Down

Moody Recordings – 1999

Daniel Gude: “It’s a favourite because it ALWAYS gets the club go crazy. Any club, any crowd. And I don’t find it cheesy although it appeals to everyone”

Everything comes back to “Get Get Down.” It’s popular for a reason and even at the height of its popularity people couldn’t get enough of it. More than that, it’s an archetypal Paul Johnson track. No other producer sounds like Paul Johnson; those funky basslines, the energetic percussion and the existential vocal snippets, all add a distinctive flair that might have been co-opted by genres as far afield as footwork, but retains a unique quality that can only be a Paul Johnson track.  

Album of the week: DMX Krew – Glad to be sad

DMX Krew turns out records like one of Henry Ford’s production lines just before the depression hit. There seems to be an urgency with his records that’s not only prolific, but also necessary, like each record he makes is made to undermine everything that’s come before it. Having released records on the likes of labels like Aphex Twin’s Rephlex and Abstract Forms, his last few records have found their way on the hugely popular Hypercolour where he’s put out a triptych of LPs over the course of a record a year culminating in the latest, “Glad to be sad.”

Since his first record in 1996, DMX Krew has perpetuated a brand of Electro that has never veered far from the archetypal formula of the genre as broken beats, enigmatic melodies and a robotic charm distinguishes his extensive discography. There is always a lot of Electro being made, but a DMX Krew track retains a distinctive quality that harks back to the genre’s earliest incarnations from the west coast of LA re-imagined from the lysergic purview of the UK acid perspective. The London producer’s charm lies in the amicable melodic nature of his arrangements, undermining the primal nature of machine music with a sincere human touch.

“Glad to be sad” sees DMX Krew retaining that elusive touch as a producer and songwriter; why fix what isn’t broken after all? As the title suggests, the LP finds the UK producer in a melancholic mood with sombre melodies and mystifying harmonies clouding the upbeat rhythmic arrangements. It’s not to be conflated with anything dark, sinister, or even completely sad, but more an overwhelming visceral quality to the music. Songs like “Dark Moon,” and there are more songs than tracks on this record, coaxes an eerie mood from the DMX Krew sonic palette that instils that sense of melancholia that swathes this record.

DMX Krew releases so much music and so frequently that’s it difficult to enjoy everything that he puts out. You’ll find yourself being drawn to his music through one LP or EP, and then you’ll find yourself drifting away from it again. But every now and then there’s a record that brings you back into his music, like seeing an old friend after a long absence. That’s what “Glad to be sad” is all about; it’s one of those records that remind us why we like the music of DMX Krew.

A perpetual voyage of sonic discovery with Mungolian Jet Set

Travelling through the absolute recesses of the musical cosmos, the Norwegian music duo, Mungolian Jet Set have charted a course through a wormhole of contemporary music. Pål “Strangefruit” Nyhus and Knut Sævik are a pair of intrepid intergalactic explorers of sound, whose combined musical heritage has made them one of the most unique musical entities operating in the vast sphere of electronic music today.  

Ever since a serendipitous meeting in 2002, Pål and Knut have been making music as Mungolian Jet Set with a distinctive flair for the exotic, the psychedelic and dub in their music. Over three LPs, a handful of EPs and on the few occasions that they’ve acquiesced to a remix, Mungolian Jet Set’s music flits between Cosmic Disco, Krautrock, and Prog Rock existing like a musical black hole between these genres, slowly consuming them in the musical unknown beyond the event horizon that is Mungolian Jet Set. 

*Mungolian Jet Set play Jaeger for the Boiler Room Weekender

 

Before Mungolian Jet Set Pål and Knut were two established fixtures on Norway’s music scene, arriving in the same scene in Oslo from two different points. Pål originally from Hamar, just a horse and cart ride away into rural Norway north of Oslo, came to music through DJing, and lists Prins Thomas as one of his protegés. A key touchstone for almost every music- or record enthusiast in Norway, Pål had become a prominent selector in Oslo and by the early 2000’s he had a regular show on national radio station P3, where he would meet Knut.  

Knut, a multi-instrumentalist and producer from Ørsto on the west coast of Norway had made his first impressions in the world of Hip Hop as one third of Side Brok with Skatebård, and had already staked his claim as a producer working with avant garde acts like Gork. Knut was appearing on Pål’s Strangefruit radio show with his latest musical incarnation, the downtempo exotica of John Storm N Da Kid, “which triggered some of the same ideas I had for music,” remembers Pål in an interview with this blog.

“There was something that I liked which had these enormous dimensions to it in the way it was layered.” The pair had initially got to know each other through Oslo’s clubbing community, but arriving at the scene from “opposing branches” they were usually “battling and competing against each other” for the same small stake. “Then we decided to become one,” Pål told Magnetic Mag, “join together and make something better. Now we just pretend that we’re friends.”  

Joking aside, it was exactly Pål and Knut’s clashing of musical tastes that informed the bedrock of Mungolian Jet Set’s sound. Where their musical dialect converged, or probably more likely veered from the other, they created a vortex of sound, that simply consumed everything in its path in heady arrangements that took on lysergic shapes on the dance floor and beyond it. 

“What I like about Knut is that he’s totally open minded,” Pål told us. “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.” It’s Knut’s open ear that does much of the  musical direction of the group where he’s “always building a big sound,” according to a Resident Advisor interview. “Personally I’m very interested in orchestral and large ensemble music,” says Knut, but the big arrangements and grandiose compositions in the music of Mungolian Jet Set is just one small part in the final execution that ties it all together. 

At the heart of their appeal lies a diversity and dynamism that stems from their eclectic background. Before Mungolian Jet Set, Pål had made an indefinable mark as a DJ in Oslo, and with a radio show and gigs all around Norway, Europe and even Asia, all that could be accomplished in that realm had been, and he began exploring new challenges from a pair of turntables. He started DJing in the context of a Jazz band, playing records alongside live musicians like Bugge Wesseltoft,  opening Pål “up to another way of thinking about the way you can use turntables in a band context.” What he realised then he told RA is “very important to the way we approach sound in what we’re doing with the Mungolian Jet Set.”

Dubby progressions swirl and eddy around laconic rhythm sections, drifting off untethered into parallel dimensions. Textures floating through an ether of extemporised expression, create exotic atmospheres, informed by esoteric sounds sampled and co-opted from Pål and Knut’s extensive musical library. 

“We usually move around in the genres of fantasy, munglore or discopop with a slab of mungishness” Knut said in a jocular effort to define his music to a journalist at earmilk. Pål is a bit more pragmatic about the approach however:  “I have always been fond of the club sound that was quite apparent in the ‘90s,” explained Pål in a Factmag article as he attempted  to whittle down the sonic influences of the band. “Labels and artists like Garth, Grayhound, Dubtribe, the Wicked parties and the Californian underground vibe were hugely influential to me as a DJ. I like the way it fused the psychedelic hippy vibe with the dub-enhanced disco sound. Some of the Bergen stuff that came out in the same era, especially early Røyksopp and the works of Erot and Bjørn Torske, were kind of similar but a tad more ‘innocent’ and ‘inexperienced’. Maybe it reflects in our pieces as well.”

The fact is that there is no way in defining their sound other than a fusion of ideas on their perpetual journey of sonic discovery through an intergalactic music multiverse. While their first LP, “Beauty Came to Us in Stone” was lingering on the fringes of Jazz, their 2011 masterpiece, “Schlungs“ sounded more like the cosmic sounds of Norwegian Disco passing through the darkened void of Neu!’s cement mixer. 

“Some people don’t get our music the first time around,” Pål told Magnetic Mag. With so many different elements informing their work, there’s much to decipher in the music of Mungolian Jet Set, and for an audience that perhaps is more attuned to definitive categorisation, every new bar, phrase or track is a new challenge to unravel. “Take someone who’s really into something, say techno or electro,” says Pål. “If you put a third kind of track in between those two kinds of tracks, somebody’s going to say that doesn’t make sense. People need to label things. We are against that kind of thinking.”

“We try to do something different for each track,” adds Knut, but “it’s not always an easy process,” when you trying to force all these diverse influences and cues into each track. This is the source from which Mungolian Jet Set’s psychedelic sound arrives, piecing together elements that naturally clash into some abstract 3-D assemblage that refuses to maintain any familiar form. Songs like “The Ghost of Cauldron M / I Cannot live in Sin” or It Ain’t Necessarily evil” seems to be expounding on the next idea before the current idea is fully formed. 

“In a sense we’re very much maximalists instead of minimalists” explains Pål in RA. “It doesn’t mean that every track has to be full on, but our music has a story telling quality to it.” There’s a sense of theatre to the Mungolian Jet Set sound, something Pål suggests is Monty Python-esque and might have some ground in Pål’s approach to the music who Knut says is “always thinking characters—like if a band played this, what would they look like and what would their names be.“

Imagery like this is something that has been with Pål ever since he started DJing and it’s a story he often recounts in interviews. Hearing the sounds of the Paradise Garage in New York in rural Norway for the first time, Pål compared it to a spaceship landing in the middle of farmland, but with no possible way of knowing what a city like New York sounded like, Pål has always relied on his imagination when it comes to music. “I think a lot of Norwegian dance songs originally were kinds of musical fantasies about New York, Africa or whatever,” Pål told Factmag. Taking these imaginary sojourns across the globe accentuates that sense of theatre in the Mungolian Jet Set sound, with Pål and Knut ensuring that these references are boldly orchestrated in their music.

“Everything is prominent in our music,” explained Pål in earmilk. They emphasise these exotic hues through instrumentation, but also samples, with Knut usually at the helm of the arrangement and the final composition of each track. They try and play as much as possible between them, but also rely heavily on sampled sounds, but “the sampled sounds are more a part of an orchestration process which comes in later” according to Knut.

“The way we work together, when it comes to the typical sound, everything is done by Knut,” elucidated Pål in  RA. “He knows the studio in and out. My input is maybe more the free thinking. I think like a DJ.” Knut will be at hand on the Mungolian Jet Set sound “from the arranging and composing side” and will let Pål improvise freely until he hears something specific to which he’ll tell Pål; “that’s it—stop.” 

Between Pål’s free spirited composition and Knut’s controlled arrangements, they’ve found  a sound that can migrate across musical borders, often for whole LPs, but retain the elusive, schizophrenic charm of the Mungolian Jet Set sound, a sound that lives beyond time and space. It’s a sound that’s in infinite motion on that perpetual voyage of sonic discovery. 

They’re only regret according to Knut is that “sometimes I think we don’t experiment enough.” A bold claim from one of the last few avant garde artists working in popular music. They haven’t made any new music since 2016’s “A City so Convenient,” which saw them travel to new destinations through their music yet again. There are whispers that they’re back in the studio circulating in Oslo DJ rumor mill, so a new EP or even an LP might be on the cards in the not too distant future.. 

There’s nobody that could ever sound like Mungolian Jet Set, they are a force onto their own and their music has a tendency to challenge any musical trends, and lets hope Pål’s words ring true when he told Magnetic Mag: “Our aim musically is to stay around for a while. We hope to be doing this when we’re in our 70s. I mean… The Rolling Stones are still playing.”

Arctic Funk with Fjordfunk

A woeful slide guitar and an elastic bass synthesiser find some harmonious connection across the firmament of sparkling hi-hats as windswept pads streak across an arrangement like the aurora borealis. A fusion of guitars, harmonica, drum machines and synthesisers, encased in magnificent layers of frosty textures entice, intrigue and charm their way through a progression. It’s only the opening bars of “Da Strarga Tora” the first track of Fjordfunk’s debut LP and any resistance to the rest of the record is in vain as you’re swept into its sonic embrace. 

This is what Funk sounds like beyond the arctic circle, through the ears of a DJ and producer that climbed the ranks of Norwegian Disco in the 1990’s and soundtracked the sounds on northern Norway throughout the early 2000’s. After an 11-year hiatus Jann Dahle returns to the recorded format to finally make his debut on the longer player format as Fjordfunk. 

Dahle picks up from where he left the Fjordfunk alias with “Infinite Zest,” an LP that condenses a vast musical universe, from Dub to Disco, Rock to Jazz, to an indistinguishable thread that defies categorisation. “I just wanted an album that I could play at home and also in the car,” explains Dahle over a telephone call from Harstad where he’s lived for the last six years. He returned home to Harstad after living in Berlin for eight years during a time he “played all the clubs in Berlin” and “got to know Berlin as a city, not just a tourist,” before turning gravely ill and taking a permanent break from music. 

“I got very sick and I had to dedicate my life to that,” explains Dahle in a tone that shows no signs of regret. He had spent two years on dialysis waiting for a new kidney, and had fractured his back in six places, rendering no time to make or play music. It took him years to recuperate and although DJing is still inconceivable with six spinal fractures, he has returned to music with with the release of this LP and more releases pegged for the very near future. 

Jann Dahle started making music in 1992  in Tromsø when he moved there to study law. It was a fortuitous time to be making music in Tromsø as the critical point for a burgeoning Disco and House scene that would eventually spread around the globe. “I met Rune (Linbæk), Bjørn (Torske) and Kolbjørn (Lyslo aka Doc L Junior) and I started professionally DJing back then,” remembers Dahle. “There was a lot of buzz about Norwegian Disco at that moment, because of Bjørn,” but Tromsø being a small city, Dahle “got to know everybody” involved in music and landed a job at Brygge Radio alongside Bjørn, Rune, and Geir Jenssen (aka Biosphere).

Dahle had already found an affinity for American House as a DJ and after a while –  and possibly encouraged by his peers – he bought an sp1200 sampler and started making his own music. “I heard that track Luv Dancing by Underground Solution on Strictly Rhythm and then I just wanted to make electronic music,” recalls Dahle. 

He adopted the name Kango’s Stein Massiv and started making music. At the same time he was playing “small House parties” around Tromsø in places that could barely fit 30 people, but squeezed in 70, people coming in through the windows, just to hear DJs like Dahle, DJ Dust and Rune play. 

By the early 2000’s however everything that could be accomplished in the small university toe of Tromsø was and an exodus followed with the likes of Bjørn Torske moving to Bergen, Rune Lindbæk to Oslo and Dahle to Berlin. 

In 2005 Berlin was a completely different landscape. “My first gig in Berlin was at Panorama Bar” says Dahle and it would’ve been mere months after the venue had opened. He had met Andy Baumecker when the German DJ played in Norway, and the pair just “hit it off”. Dahle would become a regular at Panorama bar at a time when “not too many tourist clubbers” were aware of the emerging institution, playing some part in propelling Dahle’s career in the German capital, to that point where he had nearly played every club in the city by 2008.

Kango’s Stein Massiv would continue to release records during this time. And his records would always  share some relationship to the proto-house sounds of the early eighties in Chicago. “At the heart of it, it was always Disco,” says Dahle “because we sampled Disco.” He released a lot of music, edits and remixes under various aliases, including his first and only record as Jackmaster Dahle, a name that was given to him by Prins Thomas for a one-off release on the precursor to Full Pupp, Tamburine.

“I’ve had a lot of aliases,” says Dahle in a kind of musing tone and it stems from Dahle’s fleeting relationship with a myriad of musical genres. “I get easily bored when I do the same music – I don’t want to do the same thing all the time.”

That’s how Fjordfunk came into existence. “At that time I just wanted to break away from the Kango’s Stein Massiv,” says Dahle. He, Pål “Strangefruit” Nyhus and Øyvind Morken started a label called Luna Flicks with the first Fjordfunk 12”. He took the name Fjordfunk from a local northern Norway legends, Zoo. “They had a track called Slogfunk,” referring to fish offal, which Dahle beautified into Fjordfunk. 

Fjordfunk was always intended to be an album project however, but after releasing two EPs on Luna Flicks that never transpired, before Dahle’s health deteriorated. “I made one album under that name that I threw out,” says Dahle and today the only surviving copy of that work is with Tore “Jazztobakk”  Gjedrem (Ost & Kjex / Sex Judas). 

Is this next Fjordfunk LP at risk of the same fate I wonder? “No,” chuckles Dahle, “it’s being pressed as we speak.” 

Infinite Zest will be released very shortly on New York’s ALO records and it finds Fjordfunk back on the recorded format for the first time since 2008 with “BABOOBAP,” the lead single from the upcoming LP. “I’ve been making music all this time,” says Dahle, but he never completed anything while he was still recovering. He did however keep sending some “ideas” to ALO boss and friend Ben Green, who provided the impetus or the LP when he said: “stop sending me all these ideas, just make an album already.” 

With his health improving he took up the challenge and “decided that by the end of June I will just master an album.” He put together 23 tracks which he and Green whittled down to 8 and the result is Infinite Zest. 

Infinite Zest is a sonic diorama composed from a rich palette of  musical hues informed by Dahle’s own tastes. In a track like “BABOOBAP” you might hear the influence of Harstad icons Zoo, while a track like “Exile” echoes the synthetic conjurings of Jean Michel Jarre as he was in the eighties. There’s a mysterious charm in the atmosphere Dahle coaxes between synthesisers and organic instruments, punctuated by beguiling Disco grooves in an LP that sounds like the cast of Stranger Things on a night out at Studio 54. 

It’s an LP that works on various levels as something that can be appreciated as a self-contained listening experience at home, or when called upon, can slip into a DJ set.  Dahle references Steve Reich’s “Music for Eighteen Musicians” especially for the inspiration of his work, not considering the sound, but in terms of the ultimate listening experience. “It’s the only album I can listen to in the car or at home” inisists Dahle who refers to Reich’s seminal works  as “the pinnacle of music.” The “meditative” quality of Reich’s music is something that particularly resonates with Dahle and it’s something that he manages to recapture in the Fjordfunk sound. It’s always there, lingering contemplatively in the background and especially prominent in the dubby arrangements of “Borealis” or the progresisve extemporisation of “Prelude.” 

“Infinite Zest” is an immersive piece of work, with a dynamic artistic intent. It was created in less than a year with a group of musicians Dahle often calls on in his work. He uses “musicians from everywhere” and at the core of each track is a sixteen bar loop. He sends it to his extended band with little more than a bassline and a few chords and the unspoken request for the ”usual,” which in the case of his guitarist in Finland, means “riffs, licks and a solo.”

He cuts these into pieces and assembles them like a collage from which they take on their own life as tracks. He never considers the end result before approaching a track, making tracks like BABOOBAP “kind of trippy because you don’t really know where the track is going.” It borders on psychedelic, but with the grooves of the rhythm section keeping it from veering off into the obscure, “Infinite Zest” remains grounded in the earthly realm. 

It’s the LP that Fjordfunk was always destined to create and now that it’s finally here, you’d think Jann Dahle would take the time to savour the fruits of his labour. “O, No” he says, laughing  “I’m so bored with that one already.” He’s made “hundreds of tracks” since and claims he has “enough material” to start work on his next two LPs. “You know you’re always most passionate about the latest one,” and for Dahle that’s looking way beyond the present. 

Besides two more LPs, Dahle is also working on some “new stuff” with Tore Gjedrem “that could really work in a club” and collaborating with DFA affiliate Amy Douglas. He’s still not DJing, due to the ongoing issues with his back, but has created a live show around the new LP and one or two new pieces that he will debut in Oslo this weekend for the Boiler Room x Nightflight weekender. 

It’s all part of a new empirical phase for the artist formerly known as Kango’s Stein Massiv, who is redefining funk with an all-encompassing flair of a Norwegian selector as Fjordfunk today. In the 11 years Dahle has been away from music, he’s only gone on to refine the Fjordfunk sound and “Infinite Zest”  sees Dahle confer his music in this new era, an era which will see much more from the Norwegian veteran and stalwart, than ever before. 

 

Album of the week: Various Artists – The Tuffest of the Tuffest

We’re getting back to the roots of House music. The further we’ve travelled, the more we’ve lost touch with the origins of the music, and where House music might be the most popular it’s ever been, it’s also become something of a musical cliché where common tropes have been distilled down to their most basic foundation in a self-referencing caricature of itself. At its most popular we’ve lost touch with the dynamism of the original sound of House music.

In the eighties the sounds of House music were converging around everything from the synth-wave from Europe to Funk from Detroit, and as it migrated to this side of the Atlantic, it kept picking up influences from Hip Hop in New York to the Bass soundsystems operating in the UK. By the time it landed in the UK, played in sets alongside all these other influences through the steady hands of DJs like Mike Pickering and Graeme Park, it had taken on a life of its own, with everything from Afro to Acid eventually informing the productions.

One of the few labels promoting this sound in the UK was Warrior Dance, a label whose short-lived existence between 1988 and 1992 had almost been resigned to the history books, if it hadn’t been for the dedicated record- and music enthusiasts who have helped enshrine the legacy of the label.

Founded by Tony Addis, an “African dreadlock” working out of his Addis Studio in London, which Addis established to “help solve people’s music problems” in the community in 1980, Warrior Dance made a significant impression on House music.  It might have been built on the foundation of the  popular dance genre, but with everybody from UK’s hardcore to Drum n Bass scene referencing Warrior Dance as early influences. Warrior Dance’s seismic influence endured, regardless of the fact they haven’t released any new music on the label since 1992.

It was only a matter of time in this day and age that another label would pick up these releases and re-issue them. After reissuing a few of seminal cuts from the label’s back catalogue, they’ve put together a compilation  of some of the label’s finest moments including a previously unreleased cut by James Harris from which the record takes its name.

This is late eighties/early nineties UK House at its most versatile. Those seminal sounds from that era including angelic vocals, lysergic bass-lines and jacking beats are all accounted for, but for Warrior Dance these distinctive tropes were mere platforms from which to build their esoteric sound as a label. West, and east African influences transposed to West London in the eighties are prominent on Housemaids “Je T’Aime” and No Smoke’s “Adele Cry” while UK soundsystem culture is firmly in place on Addis Posse’s bulbous bass-lines for “Let the warrior’s dance.”

Between breakbeats, acid bass-lines, R&B vocals, rapping and the polyrhythmic sounds of the African continent the compilation perfectly encapsulates that versatility of early House music. Coming out of a studio that mainly manufactured dub and reggae sounds, that UK bass culture is a big part of its appeal, but it was the open-ended manner in which they approached House music that still set those records apart from anything then and since.

It’s ironic that a record like this will be one of the most exciting House releases of the year, but it says something of the current state of House music. We’ve lost a bit of that ingenuity and dynamism that labels like Warrior Dance first brought to the genre and a re-issue like this will go along way in feeding that versatile nature as new audiences find their way to the music.

The cut with Filter Musikk

Not a single day has gone by at Filter Musikk where Roland Lifjell hasn’t been behind the counter. A diligent facilitator to all things electronic music in Oslo, he and Filter Musikk are a permanent fixture in the Norwegian capital, a touchstone for the DJ hordes populating the city, and its sudden absence would leave an immense void in the landscape of the city.  

One of the last few bastions for the electronic music- and record enthusiast, Filter Musikk is an unwavering sanctuary for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free from the tyranny of banality and Roland Lifjell is their resolute keeper at the gate of good taste. Always available with the sage advice of a musical oracle or just a friendly quip in passing conversation, Roland is Filter Musikk and for the many who frequent the little shop in Skippergata the two are indistinguishable. 

Could Filter Musikk even exist without Roland Lifjell, and could Roland exist independently outside its doors?  We had our unexpected answer in July when he took two weeks vacation(without due notice) and our world turned on its head. His sudden and unexpected absence came as a shock!

Bewildered vinyl enthusiast were roaming the streets of Oslo with a glazed daze in their eyes. They were lost, revolving through the glass doors at Filter Musikk, in an aimless stupor – the faint hope of seeing their confidant, guide, mentor, musical guru, planted in his usual spot behind the counter, their only purpose in life.  

Alas he was on holiday, the first holiday he’d taken in the entire history of Filter Musikk (as far as we know), and we would just need to make due. Two weeks went by in some lethargic haze, with a foreboding mist lingering on the future horizon in an ominous cloud of doubt. He did say he’ll only be gone for two weeks…right? 

We counted, weeks, days, hours, minutes and eventually seconds until his imminent return, the suspense ripping a hole through the fabric of time. What would happen to the records that came out, would anybody ever hear them? Where will we go with nothing to do on a Friday afternoon and what will happen to all that music in the store? The four horsemen of the apocalypse and their horrible equine couriers were despatched at hell’s door, and just as they were about to descend upon us… a miracle.

One Monday afternoon Roland Lifjell simply appeared again, returning to his hallowed counter, like he’d never gone. Order was restored and all was well again. No sooner had Roland Lifjell returned, and there was a box of records waiting, with some of the latest and greatest records of the season. It’s time again for the Cut with Filter Musikk.  

 

Various – AniaraVA01 (Aniara1) 12″ 

Dorisburg, Genius of Time, Porn Sword Tobacco, Bird ov Paradise: Aniara’s roster contains some of the leading lights of Sweden’s underground electronic music movement. Many of them came through on the collective turned label, and together with Fabian Bruhn they’ve honed in on a sound that has set them apart not only in Sweden, but for much of Europe too. It’s a sound that thrives in the deeper frequencies of Techno, House et al, but negates the formulaic premise for something more innovative.

On Aiara’s latest release they’ve assembled four of their stellar cast for three tracks in the label’s first VA comp. Dorisburg & Henrik Bergqvist, Arkajo and Ebende come together for this release in what has become the label’s calling card: Polyrhythms and luxurious synthetic sounds, that border somewhere between ambient realm of room two with the rhythmic pursuit of room one. Between Akajo’s tribalistic pitched percussion and new world sounds, Ebende’s ambient House, and Dorisburg & Henrik Bergqvist’s moody synths and primal rhythms, it all comes together along the lines of the sonic directive they follow.

A minimal ideology underpins it all, where all these elements and rhythmical devices find some unique equilibrium in the track as they come together. In tracks that should sound incredibly busy, Aniara’s records never do, without forsaking an innovative quality behind each track. Interesting rhythms and an exotic sonic palette keeps the more inquisitive engaged while the tracks remain resolute on the natural rhythm of the dance floor.

 

LNS – Recons Two (LNS) 12″ 

LNS consecrates her eponymous label with the second release in the Recons series, with five Electro cuts that continue to pursue her distinguished take on the genre with an eidetic view of its DIY origins. Airy melodic phrases that move from the hedonistic heights of early Trance to the brooding depths of modern Techno are transported along on waves of swinging kicks and off-beat snares. 

Recons Two finds LNS perpetuating the sound she’s established on her first record for Freakout Cult back in 2017, but finds the Canadian producer in more aggressive mood. Emboldened by rhythm sections that take more of a dominant role on this release, there’s something of a sinister air to all the tracks on this release. 

While “Recons Two” and “Pravic” favour upbeat melodic arrangements, the booming percussive arrangements drag the release down into the murky depths where “ Ecumene” and “Lekhist” thrive. The contemplative depths dominate on “Recons Two” and those enigmatic earworms that informed some of her earlier records has gone underground in what we perceive is more attuned to the DJ on this occasion. 

 

Luke Vibert – Libertine Traditions 10 (Libertine) 12″ 

Luke Francis Vibert is quite simply prolific. His extensive career extends back to 1997 and through his eponymous moniker and his various aliases, including Kerrier District and Wagon Christ his discography is an expansive journey through the gauntlet of electronic music’s history through all its different phases. 

As Luke Vibert, his music floats between Acid, Electro and Techno, always focussed on the raw power of analogue machines, channeled through the ears of pop producer. Taking wayward, uncooperative machines and coercing them through all his years of experience, his records have always favoured a sound closer to the high-end productions of Hip Hop’s golden age, rather than the DIY pursuits of his electronic contemporaries.

He has never shown any signs of slowing down or even taking short break continually releasing records since 1996. In 2019 he’s already released an LP as Luke Vibert, and now he’s back with a 12” for Libertine. Vibert’s records always sound bigger than any other record on that shelf and Libertine Traditions is no exception. 

Playing on the “i” theme throughout four releases, Luke Vibert yet gain moves between elements of Acid and Electro with 808 beats and 303 bass-lines at the core of each track. Squirming acid-lines and curious de-tuned melodies like that main refrain on “iCandy” tip the tracks into some more obscure territory. 

 

Alessandro Adriani – Fuoco (Mannequin) 12″ 

The man behind Mannequin records makes a rare appearance on his label, with a single from his first LP, Montagne Trasparenti, which has been reissued on Mannequin recently. “Fuoco” is classic Alessandro Adriani with clamorous analogue synths, carving out austere sonic arrangements, punctuated by gated drum machines. A perpetual melancholy clouds Italian producer’s work with a progressive flair that borders on drone and industrial factions.

On the extended mix he focuses his efforts on an arrangement more suited for DJ purposes, but it changes little from the original and it’s actually the Silent Servant remix that draws us to this release. Breathing new life into the drums with an electro flair and swapping out the original’s melancholia for a more provocative, industrial take. 

Between Adriani’s extended mix and Silent Servant’s interpretation, there are two sides of a night to this record, but it perpetuates that Mannequin sound that keeps motivating the darker EBM and Industrial strands of Techno. 

 

Paleman – Sweltering Rain (Nonplus) 12″ 

Misanthropic Techno doesn’t come much better than Paleman. The UK producer and DJ has been pursuing an onerous path between the menacing sonic design of the sounds of the continent and more elusive innovations of UK’s post-dubstep arrangements. Where industrial sounds converge with irregular rhythm structures, that’s where Paleman’s music exists. Releases on Swamp 81 and his own PLMN imprint can flit between the half-time beats of an Electro set to the hypnotic allure of Techno’s darker palettes. 

His latest release finds him making his debut on Bodika’s Nonplus records for three tracks that offer three different perspectives of the club floor. While the title track is a pretty standard Techno piece, replete with four four rhythms and muggy sonic textures, it’s “Titan Vulture” and “Cells” that defines Paleman’s appeal as a producer. His innovative approach to rhythms in which his percussive parts vehemently avoid the regular beat, offer something a little more engaging for the dance floor, tapping into something a little more ancient, a little more primal in the human psyche.

Combining these esoteric rhythmical moments with innovative sonic textures, evoked from some unimaginable alien dimension, Paleman’s music is crafted with a focused precision. All these divergent elements converge in a sinuous sonic strand made for the dance floor and best experienced through an almighty sound system. 

Getting back to the roots of House music with Cinthie

For the last 7 years Cinthie has become a dominating force in DJ booths all around the world. She’s an integral part of  Beste Modus, which today consists of a DJ collective, 7 sub labels and a record store called elevate.berlin. She is an in-demand DJ with bookings every week, circumnavigating the globe in a year, from America to Australia. She is constantly making new music and in 2019 alone she’s already released five EP’s to critical acclaim via AUS and the Beste Modus labels, including the newly founded 803 Crystal Grooves. 

Since 2012, she’s been going from strength to strength as a DJ, a label-boss and producer, but her start in music goes way back to the late nineties, when she was still a teenager, and went by the pseudonym, vinyl princess. 

With a name like Cinthie (her real name), she was always destined for a career in electronic music. Brought up in a musical home,  the love for vinyl was instilled in a young Cinthie early on. The record store was her second home and as soon as she was old enough her first job would be working behind the counter. Colleagues noticing her love for music and a burgeoning vinyl collection, set her up with her first DJ residency at Flash just outside of Frankfurt which she had to abandon when the club owner found out she was still under age. 

She took a three month sabbatical before returning, and had quickly established a name for herself beyond in the murky musical period at the end of the 90’s where she played a selection of breaks and electro at parties for the likes of West Bam.

Photo by Marie Staggat

She released a few records during this period, but focused most of her efforts on DJing and had found a unique synergy with Germany’s underground scene coinciding with a move to Berlin where she would host parties before eventually becoming a resident at Watergate. She remained an elusive fixture on the scene however, cultivating a sincere following away from the mainstream.

Around 2012 a life-affirming moment followed after the untimely passing of her mother and divorce from the father of her child, which saw her dedicate all her time to music, quitting her day job, and devoting all her time to the artform,  She met Diego Krause, Stevn.aint.leavn, Ed Herbst and Albert Vogt shortly after and they formed Beste Modus, who quickly took Berlin by storm for their love of their physical format and the records they started putting out on their label of the same name.

Since that serendipitous meeting, Cinthie has been an unstoppable force in the booth and in the studio. A versatile selector that can go anywhere through a vast record collection, she has certainly paid her dues in a career that spans two decades today. She continues to pursue her own distinct path, avoiding the mainstream, but the world has cottoned on regardless, in part due to her steady stream of releases, fuelling her established reputation as a DJ.

Cinthie is indeed very busy, with all these various aspects of her career consuming her nearly every waking moment. And yet she took time of her demanding schedule to engage in an extensive Q&A with our blog, before she makes her way to Oslo and Jæger for a very special Øyanatt edition of Frædag.

I’ve heard that your dad was a DJ. What sort of music was playing around your house growing up and how did he eventually influence you by the time you started DJing as a teenager? 

Oh, unfortunately he wasn’t but that would have been fun. My parents were really into music, but mostly top 40 and some disco stuff and they bought a lot of records mostly because the CD wasn’t invented back then. I think their love for music influenced me most. 

By the time you started playing out, you’re 17 and by then you must have your own ideas about music. What was the seminal moment when realised that you wanted to be a DJ and who or what pushed you in that direction? 

Funny thing is, I indeed started out playing at a very early age and I loved it but I never wanted to become a full time DJ, it was more a hobby for me. I only thought about doing it full time around 2014 when I had my labels and some releases and I could really tell my career was picking up. So I gave up my job as I at least wanted to try being a full time DJ. 

Cinthie is your real name, which is quite the atpronym for somebody that went into a career in electronic music. Was the ambition to play and produce music always there in the back of your mind growing up? 

Back then I hated my name as it was neither Cindy nor Cinthia, it just sounded like an accident but now I love it. I always loved music, that’s what I remember and I made a lot of mixtapes and tried to produce my first tracks with an old cassette recorder by cutting out cool parts of tracks I liked back then. Sounded terrible of course hahah… just when I got older I understood that you could make music and do it also as a job. 

Your first record as Vinyl Princess came out during the era of electroclash, and you put out a few Electro records via Westbam’s label. Looking back on those records today, how do you think they relate to what you’re doing now in terms of music? 

Oh my, the good old days. Funny, that you know about it. I was so young but it was an amazing experience regarding how to deal with record deals and how the process works of pressing a record and distribution and PR etc. I definitely learned a lot. It was a fun start of my career and one of my Friends helped me a lot with producing, what I’m really thankful for. 

 

I believe you stopped DJing and making music in the mid 2000’s for a while. What was the reason behind that decision? 

I never stopped, I was just playing more in Berlin and started to throw illegal and official parties, I even played with an unknown Nina Kravitz back then at Tape Club in Berlin or booked Hunnee for one of my first parties. I came fresh from the label Electric Kingdom where I was signed to and was looking for something new. Also I finished studying and started my first job where I wanted to concentrate on. But for example in 2009 I was part of the Keinemusik crew right before I had my daughter. 

I know that you decided to get back into music after your mother passed away unexpectedly and you separated from your husband. It must’ve been a life-affirming moment, but what was the process like after that in terms of getting back into a DJ booth and working on music again? 

As I said I never stepped away from music, I was just not producing and kept it a bit more focussed on Berlin. Also I started my label Beste Modus in the beginning of 2012 and had a residency at Stattbad in Berlin, which closed down a while ago. Especially the label finally gave me strength and power to go my own way, I was kinda free to release whatever I wanted to and it was fun working my ass off for it. Since then the only way was up and it feels good to get a positive feedback on the things you do. 

I’ve read a few articles that came out in recent years and a few of them pegged you for a new arrival. What was it like coming back into that world and having to re-affirm all the things you had done in the past already? 

Since I was never really out of music, It wasn’t too hard at all. I guess I just stepped back into the international circle again. And finally I was able to put all my good and bad experiences from the past into my work for the label. 

Photo by Marie Staggat

Was there a huge difference in terms of the scene and the people between those two eras? 

Yes absolutely, I think the use of smartphones at parties changed a lot. Back then we just got lost in the music, nowadays also with social medias it’s more about an image or look, which is fine for me. If people wanna do it, that’s ok but I try to keep my stuff more music focussed. But of course it also has its advantages. With today’s technologies you can share your music in seconds to a worldwide crowd. 

Was there a dramatic shift in terms of the type of music that now lined your record bag as opposed to before? 

It’s funny that you asked that because I just talked about this with a friend the other day and I’m happy to be able to play all of my old house records from back then again and they still sound so fresh. So I’d say there is not too much of a difference. Of course I went a bit more stripped back for a while as there was the big minimal hype and not too much house stuff out but overall I was always looking for the perfect groove in my records and I kept that from back in the days. 

The music you made upon your return to the studio was certainly quite different from anything you made as Vinyl Princess, bouncing between classic House and Disco. What was it about this sound that particularly appealed to you as a producer in this phase of your career? 

Oh I made other tracks as well back then but they were simply not good enough to release. So I had to wait just until now. But when I started playing music I had a residency in a club and I always played 5 hours from opening to closing and played all the records I found while working in a record store. Back then of course I was more into the breaky stuff but I played pretty much everything, from more stripped back stuff, to house, even a bit of trance, electro , bit of groovy techno. Back then it was in the middle of the heydays of house and we received so many good records from the US, I found incredible stuff there. So now I’m putting all my influences together from New York to Chicago and Detroit , no matter if its disco or house or even almost techno like on my second Crystal Grooves record. I even made another electro track for my upcoming album. I just don’t want to put myself into a box. 

You’ve been incredibly active ever since and quite prolific in releasing records. What has been crucial to you being able to make so much music between touring and hosting club nights? 

Around 2,5 years ago I was sitting back and thought about my career so far and wondered if I was working hard enough and if there are things I can get better. Producing was the only thing were I felt I could add a little extra to it. So I renovated my studio to have the best sound and got obsessed about going there. I was watching every tutorial I could find, invited friends who ’s music I like and asked for tips. I was pretty much living in my studio and the 4 times per week studio days were and still are holy. At the moment I make it up to 2 days per week but this is my main thing at the moment and I see that it pushes me in a good way. So I keep it special and usually switch my phone off to not be disturbed. The touring I do at the weekends and I stopped hosting club nights a while ago as I thought I wasn’t very good at it. 

 

The music you make seems very focussed on the DJ’s perspective of the dance floor. Where do these two aspects of your musical personality intersect for you? 

Yes my music definitely aims to the dance floor mostly because I wanna be able to play my stuff. Very selfish I know. But I’m a club dj, so of course I make club music with a nice DJ mixing intro and outro. 

I assume Beste Modus was and is the perfect platform for your own music. What was the original intention around the label; did you ever think pressing the first 300 copies of your first record that it would lead to the point it is now? 

Yes Beste Modus is my baby. But when I came up with the idea and told the guys I never thought we were going so far. First it was just a try and then we couldn’t stop. 

It’s its own empire today with a record store, several sub labels, club nights and of course the artist/DJ collective behind it. What do you think has been so fundamental to its success? 

It all came naturally and it’s growing in a very healthy way. I think we just came up with the right music at the right time. Minimal stuff was over and people were hungry for a bit of groove. So we gave them the candies. When I look back I can definitely say it was good to bring in my Experience and that I was already a bit older and focussed and delivering quality with the labels and build up a good network. People appreciate that. 

803 Crystal Grooves the most recent development in the Beste Modus franchise if I’m not mistaken and so far it’s had three releases from you. Will this be an exclusive vehicle for Cinthie productions and what are some of the thoughts around this sub-label? 

803 Crystal Grooves is my own baby as I wanted to be more independent from the rest of the crew. Mostly because the music is different and I thought it was about time to shine which can be quite difficult on a various artist EP. Finally my tracks and my music is where I want it to be and I felt comfortable to release a full solo EP on my own label. It’s nice to have a crew around but to be honest, sometimes it’s hard and time consuming if you decide things democratically within 4 or 5 people. I wanted to avoid that in the future and keep the ball rolling a bit more as with Beste Modus we sometimes took too long and only had one release per year which is nothing. In the future I will concentrate more on 803 Crystal Grooves and I’m just about to start a new sub label for it which will be open for friends. It will be called 803 Crystal Grooves Collective Cuts ( sorry, all shorter names were out of stock hahahah ). My main focus for the next years will be to be as independent as I can to release my vision of music. 

  

 

All these different elements filter through the record store, Elevate, today. Is the record store the final piece of the puzzle; what else is left to be explored through the Beste Modus camp? 

It happened by mistake and it feels funny cause working in a record store is where it has all started for me. I’m still structuring everything but will definitely focus more on the store in the near future to share more music with people. Elevate PR by my beloved friend Jordan just got added to the roster but apart from that I think it’s enough. I was thinking to offer distribution for a few labels but it’s too much. It s unfortunately really hard to find the right people to work with. for now I will concentrate on my own productions, the store and my beloved little funny daughter. 

How is Beste Modus and all its subsidiaries a reflection of your sound as a DJ? 

My main focus is house but with all the subsidiaries I’m totally open for all kinds of house and I’m always happy to sign the music I like or play it in my sets. 

There’s that timeless House quality to your music and your DJ sets. Electronic music and especially music intended for DJs has to constantly evolve all the time, so I imagine that your intentions are always to try and make and play something timeless. How would you define that timelessness? 

I can’t really explain it, it’s just my taste I guess. 

But at the same time we’re all constantly evolving, so where do you see your music and DJ sets evolving to in the future?

As much as we are constantly evolving I think we are going back to the roots with the music. House music seems to get bigger again this year and everything will be a bit more friendly and cosy. I’m really looking forward to that and dig out some pearls from my record collection. 

Album of the Week: Lenzman – Bobby

The sounds of  Drum N Bass have been locked in some process of metallurgy over the last decade as rollicking percussion and harsh soundscapes dominated the genre. An unhealthy obsession with sound design has dictated the production processes of Drum N Bass in recent times as a metallic sheen has glossed over the deeper aspects of the genre, where a clinical digital precision has lost touch with the original soul pf the genre.  For the better part of the last twenty years the Drum N Bass sound has been bastardised into some pseudo-futurist glitch pop where elements of Dubstep and Breakcore have transported it into some hackneyed post-modernist version of itself, that has been loudly criticised by many of the genre’s veterans and staunchest supporters.

Over the last few years however, a new appreciation of the core philosophies for the genre, and some of the genre’s most dedicated stalwarts have brought the genre back from the brink with releases, DJ sets and events tapping into that indelible ingenuity and soul that charmed a whole movement to the genre. It’s been spearheaded in some part by the legends of Drum N Bass, people like Ed Rush and institutions like Metalheadz, but its carried on the wings on the music  of the some of the more obscure artists working in the field, artists who have diligently pursuing the genre for some time in its purest form, quietly operating in the underground regions of the genre, completely independent of the more crass popularised versions of Drum N Bass and getting back to the soul of the genre.

Lenzman is one of these artists. Since 2007 he has participated in perpetuating the liquid aspects of Drum N Bass alongside artists like Calibre and LSB. Regulating the natural energy of broken beats with layers of soothing keys, charming vocals and an entrancing atmosphere, Lenzman’s music, and for that matter his DJ sets, have a beguiling quality that draws you deep into the core of the tracks. Even though the production process retains that clinical precision that most of the genre participate in, Lenzman manages to retain a sense of warmth that is often lost during those kinds of acute processes. Even as a-tonal samples and noisy synths have been shelved for the gleaming production processes of our digital age, Lenzman somehow manages to evoke those elements in his productions, which is the crucial crux to his appeal as an artist, especially on his latest LP, “Bobby.”

“Bobby” is the Dutch artist and DJ’s third studio LP and the second for his long time affiliation with Metalheadz. It comes at a time where Drum N Bass is enjoying a very healthy resurgence, but yet makes its own, unique statement, with Lenzman’s unique liquid take on the genre. Wether he’s bordering on the more RnB and pop fringes of the DnB  like on “Rain” and “Pictures of You” or whether he’s purposefully looking back to the roots of the genre with some nostalgic glint in his eye like on “Old School,” he manages to retain that defining characteristic charm in his work which sets him apart from anybody else. “Bobby” is an expansive journey through Drum n Bass, with touchstones on Jazz, Soul and Hip Hop informing the nature of the LP, but all coalescing around his distinctive sonic flourish as a producer.

Inspired in part by the birth of his daughter and named after her toy teddybear, “Bobby” finds Lenzman reflecting back on his own past, and especially the music that informed his youth. Lenzman updates these sounds and elements, where subtle production touches, legato keys and warming atmospheres create an inviting allure over the record. Any reference to Drum n Bass’ past is done in a referential way that negates any sense of nostalgia for something that lives beyond any time, through Lenzman empathetic musical touches. “Bobby” represents the past, present and future of the genre to make one of the most poignant and  exciting contributions to genre’s legacy today.

Uncompromising: Anetha in Profile

There are few Boiler Room videos out there that ever manage to capture the throng and energy of a night out in a packed club with a really good DJ. The two-dimensional format, filmed from some unimaginable angle pointing straight at the DJ, rarely does the setting justice as blank stares and conservative movements look over the DJs shoulder into some vacuous black hole beyond the camera’s lense, for what? A track ID, perhaps… 

Everybody that’s ever been to a club knows that is not the way a club is or how people usually act in the absence of the hyper-self awareness that the age of social media has ushered in along with it. It’s a vibe that is incredibly difficult, né impossible to capture on a video… or at least that’s what I thought until I saw Anetha at Amsterdam on Boiler Room. 

Squirming acid, thunderous percussive arrangements and a corporeal energy strikes the viewer from its virtual plain in a very physical way that even through some shitty laptop speakers, has you capitulating to the beat and energy of the scene. On the video, phones are stowed in pockets and panoramic views of the space relay a frenetic scene as bodies move with absolute abandon, submitting to Anetha’s oppressive stint at the decks where she doesn’t give an inch. 

As a Boiler Room set, it’s up there with episodes like Danny Brown, Night Slugs in the hotel lobby and Skatebård as one of the classics, and as a set it’s a masterclass, defining Anetha’s unbridled and radical approach to DJing. “I really like (and try !) to oscillate between different styles of electronic music,” she said in a conversation with When We Dip. “(T)echno of course, but I also love acid, ravy melodies and strong grooves,” and that’s all there concentrated into the bare 45 minutes she gets at the decks, but makes a permanent impression on the listener. 

Since coming to the fore in Paris through the Blochaus collective, Anetha has flirted with the darker, salacious and more aggressive elements of club music, that is certainly Techno, but a breed of Techno that favours shadowy corners in concrete basements. With tempos exceeding 135 beats per minute Anetha is a DJ and producer truly deserving of that “uncompromising” tag we like to throw about when talking about Techno, but which very rarely actually applies to the paint-by-numbers droning beats that define the genre today. 

Andrea grew up in Bordeaux, but moved to Paris as a student, where she fell in with a crowd of kindred spirits. Raised on a selection of “new-wave and electronic stuffs” from her parents, Anetha turned to the natural evolution of those sounds and discovered the sounds and skill for Techno as she came of age. 

“I met Farouk (which is my manager now) and his brother four years ago during a party in Paris, and we quickly discovered that we had the same passion for techno music,” she told When we Dip. She found she had “the same influences and the same ambition to do something for the capital’s night techno scene,” so when Farouk and his brother  “were looking for a resident,” the answer looked them square in the face “and Blocaus was born!”

A club night turned label, Blochaus has had a serious impact on the French scene. Like Anetha’s sets they would leave a serious impression with their nights and records playing on that very same intensity and immediacy that she conjures through her sets. There’s never a moment to really think about it, before you are raptured into awesome power of the tracks she pieces together through her sets. 

“After a year in Paris, thanks to Blocaus and other great collectives such as Sonotown and Concrete,” Anetha had “been progressively” able to find her niche in the French capital and as her records for the likes of Blochaus and Oaks made their way out into the world, it would bring her sound and sets to an international audience that reveres her uncompromising pursuits in music today.

Like her sets, Anetha’s music would drift between those elements of Techno Acid and ravy keys that define her sets. She quite simply burst onto the scene with her debut on Work Them Records, “Ophiuchus” with four Techno thrillers that culminate on the salacious and brooding finalé “Drive With A Dead Girl.” Mixmag called it a “A laid back trippy workout with an enchanting arrangement of gothic synths meandering around in the mids, with a slowly building atmosphere which is punctuated by a woman’s voice, leading into a slightly more frenetic second half,” which describes the track in some detail but doesn’t even come close to relaying the vibe she imbues on that track. 

Apparently inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the down-tempo rhythm, the hypnotic, sequential bass-line and the ravy keys, reaching up to hedonistic heights, sets a sinister and alluring tone, that instantly draws you into the track’s beguiling construction, enticing you over to the more sordid depths of Techno music while those effervescent toms bubbling under the surface in 16th beats evoke the corporeal underground appeal of Anetha’s DJ sets.

“Underground or not,” said Anetha in an interview with Music Creations last year, “VIBE is now my reference criteria.” She brings vibe in spades to the dance floor in her music and, as we can see on Boiler Room, to her sets. 

After making her debut on Work Them Records and a 12” on Blochaus Series establishing her career as a recording artist, it was a track on an Anagram compilation called “Acid Rain” that installed her as one of the future icons of Techno when the popular Techno YouTube channel HATE posted it. At the time of writing it’s reached almost 1.5 million views, which like the Boiler Room video shows no sign of slowing down. “Acid Train this track is the perfect representation of the ‘never give up’ proverb,” Anetha explained to Music Creations at that time. “It was part of a pack of tracks I sent to various label and each time they choose another track. Finally the Anagram label guys listened to it and they choose it directly.“

It’s a progressive track with something of that resolve Anetha mentions captured in sound. Through hazy fog of synthesisers and wispy noise a minimal wave gated snare and kick arrangement puncture the atmosphere of the track. As the name suggests a lysergic deluge ensues with a 303 raining down on the track. It’s a dynamic track that breaks up the monotony of the 4-4 kick, with that powerful snare and it’s in that kind of dynamism that is a big part of Anetha’s appeal both as an artist and a DJ.        

It’s brutalist without being boring, or monotonous, with a kind of bubbling fervour  hiding behind the crux of her tracks and her sets. There’s an unbridled passion there that just seems to cut through the shit and hits you straight in the cut, with her whole approach simply dedicated to the music. External factors like politics have no role in her music, and one of the few things that she does “not like is the question of the place of women in techno, which is (or should not be) relevant to me at all,” she told Music Creations. 

Everything comes down to simple sake of the music and the vibe that she seeks out through her sets. With news of the new label, Mama Told Ya and the possibility of a future LP in the works, we’re only at ground zero in Anetha’s career and with the entrance she’s made, nothing it seems will stand in her way to become a dominating force on the Techno scene.  

 

*Anetha plays Øyanatt this week with I hate Models, Skatebård and Daniel Gude.

A revolution in sound with Tod Louie

Do you think the Det Gode Selskab will go on forever or do you see an end to it?

“I don’t think I see an end to it,” says Terje Dybdahl punctuating the sentence through staccato giggle. “Is that boring? I don’t really picture a life without hosting events.”

Terje Dybdahl (Tod Louie / Dick Dennis) and Det Gode Selskab are in their ninth season this year and have already left an indelible legacy on Oslo’s electronic music- and DJ scene. Terje  and his partner Christian Berg (Solaris) have taken the Det Gode Selskab from a simple party concept to a DJ collective, events series, festival and label over the course of their existence and even with a decade of Det Gode Serlskab approaching, there seems to be no end in sight for them.

“In the future we might do things on a smaller scale” says Terje, contemplatively sipping at a glass of white wine on a sidewalk in Grünnerlokka, but it’s hard to imagine Oslo, especially on a hot day like today, without the Det Gode Selskab’s presence. 

For the last nine years Det Gode Selskab has taken clubbing al fresco, moving club culture out of  dank basements and into the fresh air, recontextualising it in Oslo’s striking natural surroundings, from fjørd to forrest, as a backdrop. Together with their weekly residency at Jaeger with Philip Hinz, Det Gode Selskab are a weekly fixture in the Oslo scene and as they move into their teens and broach the next evolution as a label, they are taking Det Gode Selskab into brand new territories.

As Tod Louie, Terje has embarked on this next phase with Det Gode Selskab in a new phase for Tod Louie, Dick Dennis, and Terje Dybdahl. Although he has permanently staked his claim as a DJ, he’s finally made that leap into the studio to add producer to his list of titles, with a new 12” released this week through the Det Gode Selskab record label.

After A:G debutted DGS records last year with the Nose EP, Tod Louie continues the label’s journey through the five senses, looking towards the future of the label through the aptly titled “Eye,” (or “Øye” in Norwegian).  

The 12” is Terje’s first foray into production as a fully-fledged artist. Following the collaborative remix on DGS001 with Karl Fraunhofer and Solaris, Tod Louie makes his mark with the title track and shares the record with remixes from label partner Solaris and long-time associate Mike Shannon. Terje’s original undulates over a bedrock of metallic kicks and bulging basslines, with frosty synthetic textures, coaxed from a modular synthesiser floating in the upper atmosphere of the tracks. 

After making a significant contribution, well into the track. These fundamental elements give way to a quirky pseudo-improvised hook that charms and warms the listener to a human dimension behind the track, before lurching back into that stoic groove that underpins it all and Tod Louie’s sound as a DJ.  

Groove is essential to the way Terje approaches music, with “mostly basslines” drawing him to the tracks he plays in his sets. 

Photo by Richard Ashton

The Eye has been nine months in the making and for Terje it’s a “track that goes through four seasons.” “You get a lot of time to consider all the elements,” explains Terje, and it was during this maturing period that Terje felt emboldened to finally take that step into the role as producer, something which he has eluded him in the past due to the time constraints of being a full time DJ and promoter.

Terje “could have easily started a new project” during the time it took him to finalise the Eye, but his stubbornness and the “need to finish it” prevailed and eventually the Eye made it out into the world to critical acclaim from the likes of Mixmag and DJ Mag. “It’s a strong track” according to Terje and the reviews concur with an 8.5 out of ten from DJ Mag. The Eye sees him consolidate the Tod Louie sound as an artist for the first time, taking his distinctive sound as a DJ into the recorded format for the first time. 

Although Terje “was making music a lot” as “a teenager” he “never really took the time” to realise his creative vision with the allure of a social life being too dominant in his formative years as a DJ and promoter. “The party fascinated me more,” says Terje with a knowing grin. Being a “social” person he took more joy from seeing “people’s immediate reaction when you play a record,” than the extended reception that comes with putting a record out. 

The “interest” for rhythm and the “skill” has always been there with Terje nonetheless, but they remained untapped till he could devote enough time to that pursuit. 

Born and raised in rural Mysen,Terje a self-proclaimed “farm boy,” grew up in a very musical household. Terje hadn’t been the only Dybdahl who had found an affinity for promotion. His father, a local bar and restaurant owner had started putting events together with a focus on music when he took over the family business. “Since it was in the countryside you maybe had a club on Saturday and Fridays it might be more country music,” remembers Terje of his father’s endeavours. There would always be music playing around the house too and when his father “and some friends decided to turn a piece of land on the back of the farm into a festival space,” the peace and quiet of the rural countryside was forever disrupted in the Dybdahl family home and it got “quite busy there for ten years.”

Terje was about three years old when they held their first event. He grew up in the “middle of the festivities” and looks back on that era with great fondness: Late night rendezvous at the house after a party with his dad playing some rockabilly riffs courtesy of Roy Orbison and Elvis on the piano had kept a young Terje awake at night, listening intently to the hammering of the keys. 

Being born of a certain era, DJing and records had naturally planted the seed for a career in music. He had found a kinship with neighbour and future DJ and promoter Ole-Espen Kristansen (O/E). The pair started Djing together when Terje took over possession of his older brother’s decks. They played their “first big gig” when the people behind the Hyperstate festival used the Dybdahl farmland for an event called Atlantis, which saw Terje and Ole-Espen play on the same bill as Sasha and Ferry Korsten.

The bug had bitten, and by the time he was twelve, around 1999, an “interest for playing records” had taken up all of his free time. “CD mix compilations like global underground from Sasha” and an eclectic record collection that ranged from European Trance to classic House had informed his early musical development, before finding his voice later as Tod Louie in the age of the minimal Techy sounds that dominated Europe around the latter 2000’s.

Photo by Haakon Hoseth

He was a diligent student too and had a career path laid ahead for him to study space physics, but some bad career counseling and a life changing moment had set Terje on a very different path.

“The only place to study space science was way up north, and I had just found out I was gay, and I was like no, I’m not moving up there now.” Instead he moved to Trondheim to study communication and marketing and at the same time started hosting his own parties.

It was “around the time Facebook arrived, so everything was really new,” remembers Terje. “In the beginning it was venues, promoters and DJs that fuelled facebook with content,” and while he was spending his days studying its effects, he spent his nights putting it into practise. “That was interesting, and after that I really understood I had a talent for PR and marketing.”

It was in Trondheim that he would meet Christian Berg, who was studying music management at the time. They set up the Beat Foundation as Trondheim’s precursor to Oslo’s Det Gode Selskab, and had instantly found a dynamic working relationship where Chris would take care of the bookings and Terje would apply his skills which tends to “care more about the social aspects” of the events. 

They took the concept to Oslo where it was reborn under a new star as Det Gode Selskab and nine years on, the concept is still going strong. 

What’s the secret to their longevity?

“We try to reinvent ourselves,” explains Terje. “I think we did a pretty good job of keeping it interesting, and being a pop-up club and setting up in different places keeps it interesting” and of course keeps people interested. As a concept Det Gode Selskab is in a constant state of evolution and it’s only their weekly residency at Jaeger that’s remained consistent these last few years. 

That constant state of evolution is something that underpins Terje’s own career too. From playing ““european trance club music, english house influences, maybe a little harder house, but also garage” in the beginning to the more minimal techy stuff that he and Det Gode Selskab are none for today, Terje’s constantly repositions his purview from the DJ booth, and now the studio, with that “essential” groove underpinning everything he does. “Sound revolution – that’s what I want to present,” says Terje in a deadpan tone. 

Sometimes he just wants to indulge guilty pleasures though, and to that end he’s created the Dick Dennis moniker. Dick Dennis is the naughty city slicker to Tod Louie’s coy farm boy. It’s a DJ character that Terje has created originalluy for the queer events that he and some of Det Gode Selskab host together under the Everysome banner. “It connects in a good way” with Det Gode Selskab with residents often playing at Everysome and audiences moving between these two concepts without much re-adjustment.

Everysome is Terje’s connection to the Oslo queer community and guests have included luminaries like Eris Drew. It’s a platform to let Terje’s “naughty” side loose and that’s where Dick Dennis naturally thrives. Playing between those early garage influences, classic House, eighties Disco and screeching diva vocals, Dick Dennis’ record bag looks very different from the one that Tod Louie prefers, but through the groove and energy they find a common ground. “People work Monday to Friday, they need that energy,” explains Terje. “They’re not going to pay 150kr to sit there and wait. “

It’s that desire for immediacy and that need to deliver, that perhaps even inhibited Terje’s foray into the production chair. Although, I’m sure he would be quite content never donning the producer cap, there seems to have been a definite urge for some creative expression that has resulted in the Eye. Some frustration and possibly never having the right context had played its part in Terje’s late start as a producer. Although there had always been a piano at home, Terje never took up the instrument, and the limitations of his skillset had never truly found the right conduit for expression, until Karl Fraunhofer and Christian Berg help channel his ideas through the synthesisers and machines. 

“My creativity stops with my hands,” he remarks and although he would always eventually “get there” it would never  be “as fast as you want it to be like in a jam situation,” so Terje would often abandon musical projects before they were completed. So what change? Finding the right people to collaborate with. “It’s good to bring in technology or partners,” says Terje who often found it difficult to get down ideas from some vocalisation of a rhythm or a melody. That’s why he says it’s “always nice to collaborate with others.” Collaborating with Christian Berg and Karl Fraunhofer as a Det Gode Selskab trio has paid its due diligence on Terje’s own writing and producing endeavours, which all led to the Eye.

The three artists share a studio today and the effects of the collaboration and the new creative environment has certainly had an influence on Terje’s work, which the “Eye” can attest to. 

The press has hardly had time to cool down, and he’s already talking about future works.”Now I want to go on to experiment with House and bring in more ravier sounds,” he says. Motivated by the sets he’s been crafting as Dick Dennis and the likes of Eris Drew, whose “energy in the booth and persona” has been an inspiration to Terje lately, Terje is at the cusp of a new revolution in sound as a DJ, promoter and of course, now an artist. 

His predictions on the future and where it will lead Tod Louie and Dick Dennis are still fairly vague, and it seems that he is still formulating and compartmentalising them as our conversation turns to the future. With the newly created Dick Dennis character, Everysome, the label and the music, it seems that there is still no end in sight for the collective and its central figure Terje Dybdahl. 

 

*The Eye is available now at Filter Musikk.

*Terje plays every Sunday at Jaeger with Det Gode Selskab. 

Øyvind Morken’s favourite Jan Schulte tracks for an Untzdag

The chances are good that you’ve heard Jan Schulte on Wednesday at Jaeger. Øyvind Morken has been carrying the German DJ and producer’s music –  in its many guises – in his record bag for a long time, bringing it out on the right occasion for his weekly Untzdag residency, where it always finds a favourable reception. 

Jan Schulte is probably best known for his exotic recorded work as Wolf Müller and as the ex-resident of Salon Des Amateurs, but he has also been known to go by Bufiman when the mood, or moon just strikes him right. His transmorphism into Bufiman, opens a vortex into psychedelic deimsions where downtempo, krautrock, acid, balearic and house converge on the outer fringes of the outer dimensions. 

As an artist he is easily able to modulate between all these different factions, and with his kaleidoscopic vision of the known musical universe he is able to manipulate his expansive knowledge to the esoteric sound that he has cultivated across LPs and EPs. Even across his various aliases a distinct approach in sound emerges, with Schulte’s eclectic pursuit as a DJ coursing through the sound he perpetuates as a producer. 

Few know his work better than Øyvind Morken, who will often call on Schulte’s music and his remixes in his sets, so we asked him to pick a few of his favourites ahead of their next foray in the booth together – this time in person – when Schulte steps into Untzdag for Øyanatt this year

 

Bufiman – Running (The Chase)

 

 

Øyvind Morken: When that Clav hits, dance floor explosion!

Jan Schulte donning the Bufiman donning for this blistering, Funk monster. Bouncing along on a palette of eighties grooves and those stabbing keys, Bufiman pursues an intangible energy through the track. With dubby delays weaving their way through the track, leaving distant echoes in their wake this track is in perpetual motion as the title suggests.

 

Om Buschman – Hey Tatta Gorem (Wolf Müller Edit) 

 

 

Øyvind Morken: Not many clubs function at as low tempos as 80bpm, but like at the Salon Des Amateurs where Jan was resident, Untzdag does.

Schulte gives eighties post-kraut rockers Om Buschmann the Wolf Müller treatment re-envisioning the downtempo original for a modern dance floor. As Wolf Müller he turns the simple percussive rhythm of the original into a rich tapestry of beats, expounding on the exotic curiosities of the original with a DJs purview. Enticing the audience to the floor in a polyrhythmic melee of hand percussion and synthesised drums, the track’s energy far exceeds its 80 beats per minute. 

 

Wolf Müller – “Balztanz”

 

 

Øyvind Morken: Tribal-Jawharp-Funk. New genre there.

From the jovial jaw harp to the schizophrenic sine waves jumping around like Mexican beans, this is a very quirky track from Schulte as Wolf Müller. The repetitive nature of track indulges transcendental associations of primordial memories. It’s this kind of extotic world-travlled soundscape in which Schulte’s Wolf Müller alias thrives. 

 

Mungolian Jet Set – Moon Jocks N Prog Rocks (Montezuma’s Revenge Version)

 

 

Øyvind Morken: The Düsseldorf-Berlin-Oslo connection. 

This is the kind of obscure reference only Øyvind Morken could pick out. It’s Schulte as one half of Montezuma Rache, remixing those Norwegian musical voyeurs Mungolian Jet Set. extracting a little more than the groove of the original, Schulte and Christian Pannenborg slow it down and turn it inside out with a psychedelic interpretation of the original, like staring at a jumble of colourful cables on acid.  

 

Album of the Week: Lee “Scratch” Perry – Rainford

Many would have you believe that Lee “Scratch” Perry should have stopped making music some time ago. His prescient proclamations and peculiar musical visions some say have overshadowed the music that the dub-reggae legend had cultivated throughout the 1970’s. But I beg to differ. It’s that very peculiar nature of his music, his free association lyricism and his resilient persistence to  make music that has exactly installed him as a musical icon today, and especially to new audiences discovering his music for the first time. Those eccentricities, which lets face it has always been there – who else would burn down an entire studio and its back catalogue to get rid of “unclean spirits” – might have played a part in the 83-year old’s charm today, but should in no way undermine the important legacy that the artist has imprinted on music.

Alongside the likes of King Tubby, Lee “Scratch” Perry revolutionised the idea of the studio as a musical instrument in the 1970’s, a philosophy which has become common place in all recorded music today. Every producer making contemporary electronic music applies these principles, and even though they might not be aware of Perry’s role in their methods, his presence will be permanently imprinted on the lexicon of electronic music, for his role in those early years of Dub and Reggae. He’s never stopped making records this entire time, and even though his lyrics might have wandered somewhere over to the surreal or just plain weird, his prowess in the studio has never left him and you just have listen to 2014’s “Back on the Controls” if you need proof.

He’s never really stopped making and recording music and although he’s popularity might go through various phases, waining with dub music, but then gaining popularity again when a new, young artist references his work or sings his praises. Although his own music might not always win over audiences or fans, Lee “Scratch” Perry will always remain relevant regardless of how the scene moves or progresses and every now and then he releases some music that re-affirms his position in music history, which he does again with his latest record, “Rainford.”

This latest LP sees him sharing the controls with protege and long-time collaborator, Adrian Sherwood, who restrains the elder dub statesman’s eccentricities for  on of the most palatable creations in recent years. It’s also one of Perry’s more lucid moments on the mic as his prescient proclamations turn a little closer to the present and the real world with lyrics that can denounce the greed that underpins the current political landscape on a track like “Kill them dreams money worshippers” or turn autobiographical at times like on the very literal closer, “Autobiography of the Upsetter.” Together Sherwood and Perry always make a formidable partnership in the studio and in the ten years it took to make this LP apparently, that relationship has only matured. The pair have delivered an LP that dig up those dub roots to bring them a little closer to the surface of the contemporary music landscape.

Perry retains some of that enigmatic playfulness on a track like “Cricket in the Moon,”  but on a whole, “Rainford” seems a lot more coherent and restrained than anything else he’s done in recent years.  It’s not like Lee “Scratch” Perry would really need to re-affirm his position in the modern music landscape, but records like “Rainford” shows an artist that can still make a formidable contribution to a legacy that already spans over fifty years and is still going strong.

The facilitator with Ida Nerbø

Electronic music has always thrived in Bergen. From artists like Annie  and Kings of Convenience who first established a scene around the city to artists like Telephones and Skatebård that was born into that scene, Bergen has often lead the way for House music in Norway and it comes as no surprise that at a time of Techno’s heightened popularity that the city should yet again be at the forefront of electronic club music in Norway.

Although musical institutions like PLOINK have long been flying the flag for the genre, the music’s recent surge in popularity is being propagated by a new generation of DJs, tastemakers and producers in the city. Like the rest of the known world there is a wave of Techno enthusiasts currently sweeping over the scene in Bergen and one of the DJs at the crest of the wave is Ida Nerbø. 

A DJ with an extensive background in the Norwegian coastal city, Ida Nerbø has been a fixture in booths around Bergen for some time, and it’s under theTechno banner, that she has made her most indelible impression on the scene to date. She coined the #bergentehnocity as a way to consolidate the movement and founded DOT by way of perpetuating the sound and spirit of Techno.

DOT is a fanzine, a club event, a collective and mix series spearheaded by Nerbø, bringing artists like Varg to Bergen and providing a platform for local Techno DJs and artists like Kahuiun and Christian Tilt. Ida Nerbø imbues the role of facilitator behind the DOT universe, and although she is a very adept hand at DJing in her own right, through DOT she places greater emphasis on the people and the scene around her.

Her own sets offer a visceral and encompassing view of the Techno genre, from its dark, brooding depths to its ethereal hedonistic heights. With elements of Acid, dub and atmosphere informing the selections in her sets, she evokes a cinematic purview of the dance floor, underpinned by the brutal body-energy of Techno. She’s lit up stages and booths in Bergen at the likes of Østre and EKKO, and with her next stop at Jaeger looming closer, we reached out to find out more about the DJ and the linchpin of the DOT collective. 

*Ida Nerbø plays Frædag with Julia Govor in our basement next week.

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What are you listening to right now?

Right now I’m listening to a Semantica playlist going through the label material. Acronym with The Inevitable is next.

Can you tell me a bit about your relationship with music. What’s your first memory of hearing a piece of music and being intrigued by it?

Back when I was maybe 11-12 years old I had a radio in my room and would listen to random pop charts and stuff like that. One day I found a strange looking cassette in the house. On the cover was a picture of a robot-like man. The music was bleep bloop all the way. Very fascinating, weird and catchy. At the time I didn’t understand what it was, but the sound was just so different and new that it stuck with me. It was Kraftwerk. 

What encouraged you towards a career as a DJ?

For some reason I’m often more comfortable in the DJ-booth and in the club than anywhere else. It’s a zone where I feel creative and have a lot of fun. In that way playing music for others feels natural. A lot of encouragement comes from my friends and other DJs too. The techno scene is very inclusive and we all support each other a lot. 

When and how did Techno exactly come into your life and what drew you to the genre?

I started playing techno for real around 2015. Before that I was more into disco, which I still enjoy a lot by the way. But I wanted to go deeper and explore the hypnotic sides of music. And I found that techno has so many layers to it. I’m intrigued by how it can be both dark and mystic, and energetic and powerful at the same time. Techno has this capacity of darkness yet bringing such joy.

I’m very much drawn to exploring the textures and qualities of sounds in techno. For instance, how short and fast can a sound be, or how long and big? What makes a track hypnotic and energetic at the same time? These paradoxes and extremes interest me.

Bergen has a great Techno and club community there. How did the scene and other DJ’s influence you if at all?

Because the scene holds a high level, it’s easy to find inspirations. EKKO, Borealis and PLOINK to name a few contribute to the high quality of club events, putting up everything from experimental noise acts to straight-on techno. Having the opportunity to perform on good sound systems, with high quality productions, is so important to build skill as a DJ. When you’re put on a line-up where you’d easily go to listen to anyone of the other artists, that does something with you and how you prepare for that gig. I’m really proud to have played many of the festivals in Bergen, and I’ve been lucky to share stage with many of my heroes. I always learn a lot from that. 

Tell me about the #bergentechnocity hashtag and what started it all?

Yeah, that was an idea I came up with when we prepared for a gig that was a collaboration with several DJs and collectives back in 2016. We joked about how the techno scene was growing and Bergen becoming a Techno City. Many of us had gotten into techno without knowing about each other. Like, we had even been to the same events before, each going there alone, and now its was fun to find each other and build the community. So I suggested we use #bergentechnocity as a tag to unite and make it easier for anyone to join and contribute to the scene. Then later to my big surprise I discovered that the tag had several hundred pictures on Instagram from the Bergen scene. Now I guess it lives its own life.

How does that relate to your fanzine and your DOT club nights?

I guess in everything I do, I want it to be inclusive and open for everyone who wants to join. 

 

What encouraged you to start DOT and what are some of the ideas behind the night in terms of the bookings and the music policy?

Obviously, it’s a techno party at its core, but I also wanted to take a different approach to the whole clubbing experience. Our mission with DOT is to make every night a unique experience, and to present a variety of styles and connect that with light design, installations and artwork. We’re a diverse crew and that reflects in the curating I think. Also, sound quality is extremely important, and at the same time we see the feeling of the room and the visuals as equally important as the music. We are lucky to work with Østre – hus for lydkunst og elektronisk musikk as our main venue, with the Meyer sound system and in the black box main room, plus volunteers and crew that helps out every time. I’m proud of what we have achieved so far, but of course we’re continuously working to improve. 

Techno has quite a few different interpretations today. How do you, and what you do for DOT, interpret the genre?

I think of techno in its broadest sense, it comes down to the energy and groove of the music more than a set definition. Put a disco track on +8 and give it some extra kick, and that can fit into a techno night. With DOT we also focus on techno aesthetics, that the choices we make about for instance light design influence the experience of the music and vice versa. 

It’s enjoying a lot of popularity at the moment. I know that PLOINK has been one of the only concepts that have been promoting the genre in Bergen in the past. How has the popularity affected the scene and community in Bergen?

For me, it’s very cool to see that techno is gaining ground and growing. More DJs are entering the community, and it makes it easier to learn from each other and exchange tracks and so on, so it definitely has a positive effect. In many ways there’s a culture of sharing now, where the experienced artists invite new DJs to play, teach the tricks of the trade and generally support new initiatives. I feel that’s an important aspect of techno culture, so it’s nice to see that evolving. 

Has it had any adverse effect?

Right now I don’t think so. I feel that the DIY attitude and overall energy in the scene is strong, and getting more people involved strengthens the community. It makes the scene more diverse.

What do you look for in a Techno track to make it into your sets?

Something important for me is the sounds and texture of the tracks, and I make an effort to include tracks that offer something different. It can be a specific sound that interests me, like a deep rumbling bass or an acid sound that catches my ear. My sets are a lot about energy and vibe too. I really try to give people an experience, and I like tracks that are quite physical, so that people can feel the music and remember it afterwards. 

A lot of my time goes towards looking for tracks that would interact with each other really well too, so that they can tell a story together. Not only to mix one after the other, but also for connecting the start of the set with a later stage. It can be certain sounds or maybe an atmosphere that points to a direction and serves as a way to give a hint of what might come. I find it interesting to try and build a narrative that way. Often that happens intuitively too. I improvise in the moment so that if there is a groove or a sound that sparks an idea, that can lead into a certain chain of tracks. If I’m lucky that happens really naturally and people are into it too, and I can share that with the people in the club.  

You haven’t made the leap into the producer role yet. Is that something that you might want to do in the future, and what is it about DJing that keeps you interested?

I’m working on a few projects at the moment, exploring ways of production and with different sounds, and some of it is very promising. But it’s a long way to go, as I guess all producers before me have experienced. But definitely, yes, I consider myself a producer in the sense I do make music and play my own material occasionally in DJ-sets. Then it can be layered with other tracks and I can experiment with how it sounds in the club. I find that really interesting, and the way the material connects with other peoples music can inspire new ideas and so on. This is one of the reasons I think DJing will always be exciting, whether you focus on selection, technique or creativity, there’s really no limit to what you can do.

We’re looking forward to having you play at Jaeger. How do you expect your set going?

I’m looking forward to it too! It will be techno, but other than that anything can happen! 

Anything you’d like to add to sign off?

Stay safe and have fun!

 

Five influential tracks with Justin Cudmore

Justin Cudmore has found a striking balance between the energy of a dance floor and the acute precision of machine music, through his young  but fertile career as a DJ and producer. His high-energy acid workouts have landed on records from the likes the Bunker New York and HNYTRX, while his sets have taken him all over the world, playing the likes of Lux Fragil, Panorama Bar, Smartbar Chicago and soon, Jaeger Oslo

Growing up in the mid west, USA, Cudmore eventually moved to Chicago where as a young, gay man he had found a community and a “family” at the heart of the legendary city that birthed House music. It laid the foundation that  propelled the burgeoning DJ and producer into a career in music, starting with a job for the now defunct online mix blog, little white earbuds and culminating in a productive career as a recording artist with six EPs under his belt to date. 

He calls New York home today and counts Mike Servito as a “mentor,” and even though he is still a relatively new artist, he has already made a severe impression on House music through his releases and his DJ sets.

He’s a favourite guest DJ at queer events like Wrecked, Queen!, Horse Meat Disco, Hot Mass and Club Toilet; he’s one third of the Hot Mix crew with New York stalwarts Mike Servito and Gunnar Haslam; and he makes regular sojourns over to Europe. Surprisingly, it was on a student exchange programme to Oslo in fact and particularly Sunkissed, where Cudmore had first found a latent passion for electronic dance music, which would follow him back to the states, where he nurtured the passion in the creative cauldron of the city that started it all, Chicago. 

In Chicago, he had gone from bedroom DJ to regularly gracing the booth at iconic venues like  Smartbar, before moving to New York and completely immersing himself in a career as a DJ and a producer. There were a few seminal tracks that shaped the young Cudmore’s ear at this time, a handful of tracks that had made an indelible imprint on the impressionable twenty-something Cudmore and continues to inform his sets and his music. We got in touch with Justin Cudmore to ask about five of these tracks and its effects on his music and DJ sets today. 

Leonid, “Mora” [Statik Entertainment]

Justin Cudmore: I first heard this in 2010 in chicago probably at a warehouse party or rooftop where steve mizek was playing.  I had never heard something like this, so dubby, but groovy and forward moving with positive energy. It became and instant favorite of mine. 

There’s that Chicago legacy that courses through all of House music, but how influential had that legacy been for a DJ and artist like you when you started going to clubs and hearing this music, some two generations on?

Very!  It was still very much in the music and the culture when I was living in Chicago. America has a very rich history with this. I felt it even more once I moved to New York, probably because the scene was much healthier there at the time and bigger / larger in scale – as everything tends to be in New York. 

You mention a warehouse party, and besides Smartbar we’re not really that familiar with clubs in the city. How did you arrive at the scene, was it through warehouse parties and what was the club culture like at that time for a burgeoning DJ?

I arrived in Chicago when I was 21 just out of university.  I had just returned from a 6 month study abroad program in Oslo actually.  It was in Oslo where I actually really went “clubbing” for the first time, as I was not old enough in the states during university.  I was on a business exchange programme at BI and although the classes were nice, what I really took out of that experience was exploration and discovery in europe.  Every weekend I would travel or go to Blå. Sunkissed was my favorite party!!! So when I returned to the US and moved to Chicago at 21, I felt comfortable jumping right into Smart Bar. I don’t think clubbing at that young age was very popular at the time, especially in Chicago, so I would be the ones dragging my friend’s to smart bar or warehouse parties.  Besides my day job at the time, I met Steve Mizek who ran this music blog called Little White Earbuds. This was a very important moment in my dance music education as the website did a great job covering a huge part of the underground in the US and Europe. It turned my ear on to a lot of things. I did my first mix for them in 2011 which features a lot of the tracks I talk about here – http://www.littlewhiteearbuds.com/podcast/curators-cuts-20-justin-cudmore/

“Dubby, but groovy and forward moving with positive energy.” How does it inform what you try to achieve in your music and your DJ sets today?

Groovy is essential.  I’m not one for long periods of darker moods or undertones. I feel a party should be joyous and celebratory. Sure I love a darker techno, electro moment here and there and massively enjoy sets from artists like DVS1 who venture into more mysterious realms- but for me I’ve always been drawn to the positive. 

What encouraged you to eventually move to New York?

I followed my boyfriend at the time to New York. I wasn’t even really keen on moving there at the time nor did I have any inclinations of becoming a full time dj. At that time in Chicago I was just buying records, playing at home, and producing music at home. The silver lining is moving to New York is the best thing that ever happened to me.

 

Steffi, “Yours feat. Virginia” [Ostgut Ton]

It is a perfect house track – stripped down to the essentials. Vocals, when used at the right time, always peek my interest. This classic tune I heard just as I was 21 leaving college and it showed me what modern house music could be while still feeling like it could be made in the past. 

It is a stripped back track, and it has that very cold European sound to it. How does that sound translate in the USA where things seem to be a little warmer and funkier?

I think it translates just great! I can’t remember a dance floor this track doesn’t work on or get a reaction.  You’re right it does seem “colder” in a way, but I’ve always felt it as a very positive moment on the dance floor.  It’s perfect in its simplicity.   

I’m always amazed how much Steffi manages to get from a few elements and this track would work incredibly well on a festival stage or a big room too. How does context inform your selections as a DJ?

Context is extremely important. I often say every party is different. Even playing the same club but a different night, different time slot, before or after different artists – I think it should always, all be considered.  I’m of the school that the DJ should morph to fit the needs of the party and the night while always staying consistent to who you are / your musical taste. Playing a festival is completely different, though, as I’ve started to learn.  Especially at bigger productions with larger stages and shorter sets- the crowd doesn’t have much of an attention span and has the ability to wander from stage to stage, so it’s a completely different approach I’ve started to learn. I much prefer playing in a club. 

You mentioned that you like the fact that it sounds like something that “could be made in the past.” Is this something that you often look for in music, and what is about the music from the past that especially appeals to a younger DJ like you?

Yeah I do appreciate that retro feel and I’ve often tried to replicate that experience in my own music. To me there’s always something magical when something feels timeless/ could be made at any time. Also this is not easy to do- so I like that challenge. 

 

Sound Stream, “Makin’ Love” [Sound Stream]

I’m not sure the first time or place I heard this one but the raw funk and energy dissolved into the production, with every crackle and spark, turned me on to dance music for the rest of my life. This tune inspired me to show me what is possible with production tools and how sound can create energy and vibe.

So this was the catalyst for you to move into dance music production. Had you been DJing by this time yet?

No I was “Djing” before I learned of this track.  I think I discovered this while living in Oslo, actually.  My experience with Djing started at 18 when at University. My roommate at the time and I would play house parties on a laptop with controller.  One Halloween party we did was a big success so this local venue in town gave us a weekly party. So for the next 2 years we played dance music every Wednesday.  I still have playlists from this time. It’s interesting to see the music evolve from DFA, blog house era music of 2008 into more house like Derrick Carter, then when I returned from Europe, there is Prins Thomas, Skatebård, and techno from artists of the time like Maya Jane Coles, Marc Romboy.  I was young and listening to everything.  

It’s got that repetitive dubby thing too, but here it moves into Disco territory, which is not something that I hear much in your music as an artist. What was the evolution like as a producer  going from this to the music you would eventually bring out on labels like The Bunker NY and ISNTISNT?

I started making music when I was 16 when I moved to university (2006).  It started in Reason and by the end of university I moved to Logic and bought a new computer.  I made so many different styles but when I look back really what I was doing was trying to imitate what my favorite sounds at that time were.  And what’s the best about music production is it’s very hard to replicate exactly with so many variables, so things always end up going into interesting directions.

 

Nick Höppner, “A Peck And A Pawn” [Ostgut Ton]

Being a drummer growing up, the syncopation here and the sexy atmosphere pulled me in immediately.  Ever since I have been a huge fan of Nick and what he has created. He tells a story and creates a world inside each of his tracks. 

I’m not surprised to hear you are a drummer. Drummers always make for the best dance music producers. It must be your sense of rhythm. Besides drumming, what was your music history prior to coming into dance music?

I started playing drums in school when I was 9.  This continued until I left for university. I was always in a band. Either jazz, concert, marching. It was an important creative outlet for me.

You’ve made quite an impression since starting to release music in 2016,  but I assume it took time to hone your voice as an artist. What was the eureka moment for you when you realized you had found your sound and how would you define that sound today?

I don’t know if I ever had this moment… but it did take many years. Since starting to make music at 18 to moving to Chicago, training my ear and then landing in New York, meeting someone like Mike Servito who saw a talent in me and would listen to what I was making and give feedback and push me. I know when I’m in the studio at home and everything locks together and I’ll jump around and get excited but it really took a mentor like Servito to push me over the edge and get me comfortable sharing my music with labels. 

There’s a lot of Acid in your own music, but we don’t have any 303s in this list. What drew you to that element in House music in your own productions?

Really it’s Mike Servito and The Bunker New York. I didn’t really fall in love with this sound until I moved to New York because I wasn’t hearing it out in chicago at that time.  The way Servito played it became very influential to me. So at 25 living in brooklyn I would always go see Mike play, we’d see him every weekend. Dance floor lessons. 

So far this list has featured only contemporary music. How would this reflect what you might do in the DJ booth?

Yeah well I’m not that old :)  But also I’m of the school – If it’s new to me than it’s new and I’m excited about it.  That could be an old track or a new track. I try to play a nice combination of new sounds and old. 

 

Murk Pres. Liberty City, “If You Really Love Someone” [Cr2 Records]

 

Being gay, growing up feeling left out and not fitting in, this was the bassline and anthem that spoke to me when I first heard it in Chicago. To this day I am inspired by the groove and funk of the machines and vocals that worked together to create the energy of this track. 

House music has that massive gay legacy behind it that stems from Chicago. Did you feel, even in the city, it was hard to find places to truly be yourself growing up?

Well my time in Chicago was just before the black madonna took over the bookings at smartbar, and Queen! which is now a Sunday gay institution in Chicago run by Derrick Carter and hadn’t yet started, so finding the gay connection to the underground wasn’t so easy as maybe today.  However I made my way. I came out to family around this time. 

So House music was the gateway and we’ve talked a bit about how it shaped your ear, but how do you think the music and the scene shaped you as a person?

It has shaped me a lot. Incredibly so. I would be very lost if it not were for the guidance of my family I met on the dancefloor in Chicago and New York.  These bonds have been very special and impactful on me. My biological family that raised me was supportive but not adventurous with their ideas on art, music, politics, so I can’t imagine where I’d be without the dancefloor.

You talked about energy again, and that’s something that I find in your music too, but it’s something that particularly thrives on the dance floor. How do you tune into that energy when you are sitting at a computer, drum machine or synthesiser to make music?

I think it is something you have to feel.  When I make music or listen to music I am constantly imagining a room or dancefloor and the song playing in that room. 

This list is music that is designed for the DJ and dance floor, but sometimes you just need a break from the music you work with. What music do you usually turn to when you just want to relax at home?

Honestly Spotify.  I spend a lot of time planning what music to play, so when I want to relax I let spotify take over.  By now it knows me and the discover weekly is always a nice background mood. And I don’t even have to think about it.  The sounds are usually 70-80s disco, rock, italo, laid back and vibey. Up this week is – Orange Juice, Claudia Barry, Tullio De Piscopo, Saada Bonaire, and Wham!

 

I want my MTV and the videos that defined dance music for a generation

“I want my MTV” croons the emaciated voice of Sting on the back of the 1985 Dire Straits single “Money for Nothing.” It was an iconic moment not just for the Dire Straits, who had cleaned up in the charts that year with the song, but also the television channel which birthed the phrase. “I want my MTV” was the original slogan for MTV when it was launched some four years earlier and by the time Sting had wrapped his lips around the phrase it had become the ubiquitous chant of a generation that were changing the face of how we consumed music. 

By 1985 the Buggels’ prophetic words that launched the channel had become a reality when  “video killed the radio star” and a whole generation stowed their radios in some dank corner of an unused closet and glued themselves to a screen for most of their waking adolescent life. “You would never look at music in the same way again” proclaimed MTV and they were right… at least for a while. 

From the iconic videos like Michael Jackson’s Thriller (yes the video is still iconic if the man might not be) to original programming like Beavis and Butthead, MTV played a fundamental role in the cultural development of its youthful audience, all based solely on the new media music, the music video… and some key catch phrases like “I am conrholio!”

Through the pre-reality tv life of MTV, the music video has become an artform in itself and from the avant garde Talking Heads videos to the urban documentaries of Hip Hop artists like Snoop Dog and NWA, the music video was so integral to the music, that for the longest time the one couldn’t seem to exist without the other.  

Originally intended exclusively for rock music, MTV couldn’t resist the trappings and commercial success of pop music and very early on reformatted to include all forms of music, much to the future generations’ benefit in fact. Eventually their programming forked off into dedicated shows for certain genres of music like Headbangers Ball and Yo MTV, before becoming their own fully fledged channels like MTV 2 and MTV Base. 

 

We didn’t start the fire  

By the time the mid-nineties rolled over and the doom of Y2K loomed ever closer a new kind of music started bubbling to the surface from somewhere deep beyond a subculture. House, Techno, Trance, Electro et al, which had been the preserve of dark dingy nightclubs at the base of sprawling metropoles, had already started making an impact on clandestine pirate stations and late-night radio programmes, but by the mid nineties it had started to inform popular culture. MTV was one of the first to document the strange phenomenon called rave interviewing the likes of West Bam and Moby well before any mainstream audience had even heard of the term Rave.

By the mid nineties we needed a catch all term for this new form of music and electronic dance music had been coined. The term had a pragmatic beauty and refined logic to it that not only described the music, but eventually become a genre in itself (although it would be slightly bastardised version of it). Back in the mid nineties however, electronic dance music would be used to describe any form of electronic music made from drum machines and synthesisers for the sake of dancing and would incorporate everything from Drum n Bass to Acid Techno, but it would be all these elements converged where this new form of music would reach the height of its popularity and for this writer it’s all down to one group, one song and one mesmerising video. 

For every artist and DJ of my generation I speak to there is one catalyst, one crucial point of reference that binds us in our musical history and that is Prodigy’s Firestarter. But it’s not just the group the track or even the LP, Fat of the Land that connects us, but its music video. Firestsarter will always be impregnated on our collective psyche as the nexus for a passion for electronic beat music that has endured ever since, and it’s all down to that video.   

From the moment the image of Keith Flint blurs into focus, drunkenly swaying in some underground dungeon, formerly the Aldwych tube station, there was something about the music and imagery that immediately resonated with an alternative kind of music fan. Jaunty guitars, big brauling beats, punkish vocals, and a lysergic bass movement all played perfectly against the monochrome underground dystopia of the video, making the music video as iconic as the song and its central figure, Keith Flint ,the music icon he was always meant to be. 

With elements of Drum n Bass, Rock, Acid and Jungle all informing the Prodigy’s sound at that time, it’s music that spoke to a wide audience as something familiar, but also incredibly unique. It was provocative and edgy, the type of thing that would send your parents into a spiral when it came on, but for reasons unknown to them. There was no cursing or anything inflammatory (pun intended) about the song in itself and the video was just a guy dancing in tunnel, but it’s the implications of it that put your parents at edge, so it also became a special torture mechanism for the know-it-all teenager looking for catalyst to rebel – and for those daring amongst us a Keith Flint hairstyle might just have completely pushed them over the edge.

You could tell at the time that even MTV were perplexed as to where to schedule Firestarter. At first it would only be shown well after the watershed on some late night programming and then later it would also appear in the middle of the day, when kids returned home from school. It could also be in one of the chart shows, at the same time as being on one of the alternative channels and I vaguely remember it appearing out of context on one of the rock shows, sandwiched between Metallica and Foo Fighters. Later even mom and dad would be chiming along in some bad conckey drawl of the main refrain. 

It opened up a doorway into electronic music for an entire generation, that first saw us digging back to the Prodigy experience, and then further left into acts like KLF and Orbital before eventually arriving at Jeff Mills and Frankie Knuckles. 

 

This is going to make you Freak

Before the Prodigy, in the early to mid nineties Rock and especially Grunge dominated MTV’s programming giving birth to the lauded MTV unplugged show which went on to memorialise Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, and probably in some way laid the groundwork for MTV’s alternative programming that led to a track to Firestarter’s broad appeal. 

At that point House was being picked up by major labels and went a little too pedestrian for the likes of MTV’s “edgy” programming. Techno like always was enjoying an underground success through the second wave of Detroit producers, but still a little too obscure for the likes of popular tv. It was only when Firestarter came to MTV that electronic music really started to make a true impact on the programming.

For a young teenager growing up in suburban South Africa where electronic music had been ubiquitous for a long time – even the drive-time jocks had their own Formula1-inspired Techno track (I kid you not) on the charts – it wasn’t particularly a new development but it did introduce me to a world of electronic music I would remain ignorant to if it had not been for MTV. 

The SABC (South Africa’s national broadcasting coeporation) with its conservative nationalist agenda, both before and after apartheid, controlled the radio airwaves and very rarely siphoned music from the outer fringes of popular culture into their programming. When the very real, and sometimes imagined, perils of life outside of the house is ingrained into the fabric of your society, the TV becomes your closest friend and by the time MTV came into our homes, some 15 years on from when it was launched, any local TV or radio just wouldn’t suffice. 

In places like Africa and post-soviet era Eastern Europe at that time, only one MTV channel existed while the UK and USA and most of Europe already enjoyed at least MTV2. Some of MTV 2’s programming however would spill off into the late night programming for the African region and this is where we would first come face to face with Aphex Twin. Richard D James’ visage, superimposed on a small army of delinquent nymphs causing havoc on a council estate in the UK would forever keep a generation of us awake at night.  

Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy” and the video, directed by Chris Cunnigham, had set a new precedent in music videos. It was something we’d never seen before and accompanying music that was completely new and exciting for an adolescent mind craving something on the edge of provocation. Unlike “Firestarter” this would never attract the same kind of mainstream success but for a naïve young music nerd, it opened up a world to the avant garde of electronic music I and my generation didn’t even know existed before then, and we realised there is electronic dance music and then there is good electronic dance music.  

 

The puppet masters

Eventually the entire world of electronic music came knocking at MTV’s offices and what Aphex Twin and the Prodigy laid bare for electronic music videos, would inspire, encourage and in some way assist a few nascent electronic icons. Chris Cunnigham and Walter Stern’s DIY, punkish creative vision for Aphex Twin and Prodigy respectively became a visual contrast to slick music videos that would follow in their wake, but their existence was almost certainly the creative fertiliser for a new wave of artistic minds.

Shortly after the advent of music television, MTV would usher in a new era for the music video. Gone were the days of lip-syching in mock performance in front of a camera. The new format quickly demanded a more engaging form of entertainment and we entered an age of music videos as cinematic vignettes through the lens of future legendary auteurs. After the Buggles and Dire Straits’ stale performance-based videos, bold pieces like “Thriller,” “November Rain” and “Like a Prayer” set a new precedent or music videos, with narrative and cinematic visuals encapsulating the drama and intrigue that the music often failed to capture by itself. 

It set a visual precedent that would lead to MTV listing the name of the director in the title blurb, laying as much importance on the person behind the lens as in front of it. Coming into their own into this world, future household names like Hype Williams, Spike Jonze and Michael Bay would emerge through the music video medium with Hollywood beckoning just beyond that. 

One of the more exciting directors that would come out of this camp was Michel Gondry whose  filmography today includes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind, but who had his start as a music video director and whose videos include that very famous lego block interpretation of “Fell in Love with a girl” from the White Stripes. There was one particular video however that would always enshrine the name Michel Gondry in the electronic music lexicon, and that was Daft Punk’s “Around the world.” 

Although Michel Gondry had already produced music videos for the likes of Björk ,the inherent charm and funkiness of “Around the World” as a song and a music video had gripped a generation. The faceless nature of electronic music and its artists who like Daft Punk tended to hide behind virtual and real masks in the introspective way of the music had given directors like Gondry complete creative license and they delivered some of the most stimulating and effective visuals for this very repetitive music. 

Robots and skeletons climbing staircases to nowhere, dancing around a central disc of mummies, made some literal connection to the title of the song, but also reflected the mesmerising effect of staring at a record on a deck. It was absolutely transfixing and it set a high artistic standard for music videos that would follow in its footsteps. In that rare anomaly that contains a director and musician, Mr. Ozio would arrive in that French filter House world shortly after, pulling at the strings of Flat Eric for his now iconic video and track, Flat Beat.

Quentin Dupieux (aka Mr. Ozio) had initially created the puppet, Eric for a famous Levis advertising campaign, but it would be the image Flat Eric head-banging in his office chair that would live on in infamy through the video for “Flat Beat.” Would Mr. Ozio or “Flat Beat” ever be as popular were it not for his yellow hand-puppet creation? That’s a question mulled very often and always leans tentatively to … no. You can buy a Flat Eric puppet today for your infant or your own adolescent whims and I daresay it probably sells better than the recent re-issue of the original record, but the two would go hand in hand in making the song “Flat Beat” the icon it remains to be today. 

There really weren’t any rules during this time for how a music video should look or act. From Groove Armada’s Superstylin’ aliens looking for a venue for their party, to Benny Benassi’s ridiculous, but satisfying DIY building  routine, electronic music was making for some entertaining TV, and even though the music would get a bit cheesy, you would still watch it merely for the entertainment value of the video itself. You could always flick the mute button on Benassi’s saw tooth cacophony…

 

Superstar DJ, here we go  

While artists like Daft Punk would have certainly made a severe impact on the electronic music scene regardless, MTV played some integral part in making them stars and household names. Even your Dad who scurried for the remote every time Firestarter came on, was now awkwardly trying to mimic Christopher Walken in Fatboy’s Slim’s Weapon of Choice or getting the lyrics completely wrong to Moby’s Natural Blues. 

When electronic dance music went mainstream and in the age of the superstar DJ, inflated egos and big budgets had made serious claims on MTV’s daily programming to a point where it would almost be dominated either by the stone-faced Christopher Walken, dancing through a hotel lobby or an angelic Christina Ricci floating around an empty hospital corridor with an incapacitated, ageing Moby in her arms. 

But as MTV drifted further into the banality of the “real world” and reality tv programming started to dominate and then completely do away with the music video, even these big budget pompous affairs would be a welcomed addition in our daily media intake. You can still watch these videos on YouTube of course, but new electronic music very rarely produces the same standard of videos, and as such the music videos impact has waned, and the music has to do all the heavy lifting now. 

Very often their little more than a looping gif intended to take you to the digital record store that sells them, and they don’t hold much of your attention for the duration of the track. While a lot of electronic music has certainly improved since MTV’s golden era for electronic dance music and there is certainly more music accessible through social media and the Internet, it’s something we don’t see much of today, which makes the era of electronic music on music television such an important time and place for a lot of music enthusiasts of my generation. It was our doorway to this music and don’t think we’ll ever see the likes of it again.

Album of the Week: André Bratten – Pax Americana

There’s a coy elusiveness to André Bratten and his music. As a listener you are never quite prepared for the next offering, and you hang on in some hesitant anticipation, waiting for the next musical strand that will take the Norwegian producer’s fancy and the execution to follow. From the neo-Disco of “Be a Man you Ant;” the booming Techno of “Math Ilium Ion;” the soul-searching electronica of “Gode;” to the ratcheting break-beat Electro of “Valve,” André Bratten’s music is an amorphous creature, one with evanescent engagements to a host of musical tropes from the vast lexicon of electronic music, and yet there’s still something distinctive to be found in his work.

Perhaps it’s even the fleeting nature of the music itself, but there’s a calculated effort behind the music; a mesmerising nature to the artist that keeps bringing you back to the music and waiting on bated breath just to hear what he’ll do next. As each LP or EP trains his efforts on a particular outcome in some temporally-affected concept, he maximises its effects, giving each new record yet another unique evolution in his sound as an artist. It’s never quite a reinvention of the artist behind the music, but rather a change in the point of view, yielding new and different results every time.

On “Pax Americana” his latest LP, the second in a short, but succinct discography, he changes direction yet again, but with three tracks from then LP released as 12″ singles during the course of the year, he had thoroughly prepared his audience for the record that would arrive on Smalltown Supersound this time around. There’s more of a cohesive thread between this record and the last, “Gode” than there was between “Gode” or “Math Ilium Ion”and “Be a Man you Ant” with tracks like “HS” and “Commonwealth” playing on the same lonely melancholic tones of its predecessor, but with influences and cues taken from Techno music’s distant past.

Tracks like “Ranx” and “426” bounce along on fast-paced broken beats and enthralling tonal layers that evoke some of early nineties ambient Techno encompassed by Bratten’s now familiar influences: predominantly the early Warp records camp of Aphex Twin, Authecre and Boards of Canada. It’s these influences that Bratten channels through his bold sonic structures which defines his sound as a producer, playing on the textural beauty of those early sounds with a tonal pallete that carves out deep, emotive trenches of sound through their compositions, while broken beats and wistful resonances flutter through the arrangements.

With a wall of sound going through Andre Bratten’s rich analogue sonic practises there’s always been a broodiness accompanying his varied musical adventures. It’s not necessarily something you’d find in a record of this nature, a record that usually thrives in the harshness of excessive polyrhythms and arbitrary melodic pieces intersecting the songs like a single tapestry of noise, but Bratten succeeds in his pursuit and especially on the title track. The warmth of that undulating sub-bass, the pads floating around an some distant memory of a dreamscape, and the stark percussion repurposed as icy melodic atmospheres, all contribute to a track that invites the listener into the cosy depths of a hypnotic sonic maelstrom.

It bears some striking resemblance to Aphex Twin’s classic track “Xtal”  – in spirit rather than sound – defining one part of an LP that seems to be caught between different worlds. In an interview with André Bratten some time ago, he talked at length about the manipulative manner in which he assembles his records. I felt “Pax Americana” finds our artist in that same kind of transitional phase we saw on “Math Ilium Ion,” using the record as a bridge to that next evolution in his work and coercing his audience into that sound through a few tracks, while retaining that tether to his previous records. The LP’s brief existence which is only  6 tracks long would suggest the same and there’s almost no doubt that this will lead into another record made up of more tracks like “Pax Americana” and “Rank.”

It puts this record at another crucial pivot point in  Bratten’s elusive career, and yet again we are left in hesitant anticipation where André Bratten’s records will take us next on his ever deviating journey through electronic music and the extensive breadth of his sound.

The cut with Filter Musikk

When the things people say is clad in so many layers of irony that the very term in itself is… ironic, we take comfort that there are still places that exist where things just are taken at face value. I’m thinking of a particular place, a social hub for a music enthusiast. In an era where we are currently bombarded with every inane thought through the ubiquitous existence of social media, this is a place we can go to escape the uninformed opinions and dreary trivialities, where it’s just us and the music, a place where some might know your name, and there’s always a conversation waiting for you.

It’s a place where music can live freely from some uninformed opinion and we are left to appreciate the music for its inherent qualities and not the hype or trend dictated by somebody with a large promo budget. It’s a place where there’s no review or blurb telling you about the record and your selections are only ever dictated by personal taste.That place is the record store and in Oslo that place is Filter Musikk. 

When music is a disposable commodity, traded online like a $5 t-shirt, we take solace in the fact that the record store store still exists and that there are people, artists, record labels and record store owners like Roland Lifjell putting the effort into the art form for the sake of a physical format. In an age when cutting and distributing a record is a huge expense, we won’t suffer mediocre music lightly and the record store is the last bastion for good music. The record store is a rare occurrence today, a unique entity that solely exists for music’s intrinsic value, making a specialist store like Filter Musikk that much more special. 

It’s a place where the music is a passion and electronic music is more than just a DJ tool, it’s a way of life. Music isn’t a mere commodity here, it’s an investment, and we have to ruminate over each new record, for the sake of monetary and physical economy. We can’t concern ourselves with trend, style or popularity, these are the records that will need to stand the test of time, the records and music that have left a substantial mark, and continues to live beyond the moment.

Ours is a painstaking exercise in restraint and in personal predilection for music. From the man behind the counter, Roland Lifjell who has to sift through catalogue upon catalogue to find the cream of the crop in records to adorn the shelves his store, to the punter who spends his free time listening to these records in pursuit of filling his own musical library, these are the records that deserve your attention and every week there are new pieces to consider as Roland Lifjell unpacks a new box of fresh arrivals. It’s that time again, time for another Cut with Filter Musikk and Roland Lifjell.  


Marco Shuttle – The Vox Attitude Remixes Vol. 2 (Eerie) 2xLP

“My favourite record now,” says Roland Lifjell about this latest Marco Shuttle re-issue, “It is double but can be considered a double single. Great originals and the remixes are quality too… Rare.” Released nine years ago, this Marco Shuttle’s “the Vox Attitude” is one of those records that have lived on in record bag lore ever since it was first  released in 2011. Only re-issued once before in 2013, it’s the first time that the iconic track is featured alongside it’s B-side counterpart, “Spaziale”and as if that wasn’t enough both tracks get the remix treatment from Atom tm and Pessimist and Marco Shuttle himself.  

If we’re talking about records that stand the test of time, there isn’t a better example. That expressive vocal sample; the bold kick and bass arrangement that moves to the track at half time; and the stark metallic synthesis that arrives from some alien dimension, piercing the firmament of the track. It might wear some stylistic traits from its time, but it was a time when Techno was going through a massive metamorphosis and a host of artists like Marco Shuttle were re-imagining the genre, influenced by the deep, rolling basslines that Dubstep had left in its wake and the new advancements in computer synthesiser technology.

Atom tm and Marco Shuttle contemporize the title track in their remixes, with Atom tm applying his distinctive Germanic funk to the original, and Marco Shuttle offering a big room modern-day Techno interpretation, doing away with that half time rhythm section with a strict four to the floor beat, losing touch somewhat with the esoteric nature of the original, but perhaps making it more accessible for a new generation of DJ, that might need to be coerced into the unique majesty of the original. 

It’s something Pessimist flips on its head on the remix for “Spaziale,” as he takes the original to brooding dimensions skipping along to an electro beat and punching holes in a cloud of white noise and static. It’s a long way off from the sparkling upbeat original and I daresay, the star of this particular release, not considering the lead track. Consumed by some latent darkness this track has very little relationship to the original and stands completely on its own in amongst the rest of the release; it’s worthy of its own 12”.

 

Lawrence – Black Cats (Mule Musiq) 12″

Lawerence has perfected the sound of this kind of minimalist Techno and House that he’s  nurtured through the years as a DJ, artist and label owner. Returning to the Mule Musiq camp and with an LP for his own label DIAL, sandwiched between releases, the 12” finds Lawrence in his usual ethereal and contemplative mood. 

With designs on the dance floor, but ensuring that visceral melodic quality he imprints on  his music, Lawrence moves between elements of House, Techno, Electro and Ambient music through three tracks that stack layer upon layer of wispy synthesisers and keys over a soft bed of steadfast rhythms. 808 kicks and poly bass lines barely make an impression on the texture, but thread a stream of consciousness between evocative harmonic and melodic parts. 

Phrases arriving on loquacious waves of streams of thought in melody, float through the progression of the tracks, weaving between each other, carried on the rhythm of an unwavering kick drum and bass arrangement. Minimalist in its execution, Lawrence clearly doesn’t subscribe to the less is more approach in creating his music as he piles on layer after layer, creating three very atmospheric tracks for the dance floor.

From the electro-leaning beat of “Radiance” to the extemporised melodies of the title track, “Black Cats” has a trance-like quality, a musical reverie trapped in some listless movement on the dance floor. Lawrence is one of the few minimalist artists that continue to develop the style and make significant contributions to the scene. 

 


Space Dimension Controller – ReSEQ EP (R&S) 12″

Space Dimension Controller travels yet again to the elusive sanctum of Mikrosector 50 and Tiraquon 6 in this latest offering for R&S. Where cartoon alien creatures conspire in a brothel on some parallel nebula universe, that’s where Space Dimension Controller’s music plays through eighties ghetto blasters. 

The UK artist picks up the thread of a narrative he’s been fostering since first appearing on R&S back in 2010 and with his distinctive retrofitted electronic sound, Space Dimension Controller adds two more tracks to this ongoing saga of alien adventures. As if House took a detour through the quantum realm, SDC infuses clattering percussive arrangements with classic synthesisers, distorting and warping through the expanse of time to arrive at some mutated version of familiar eighties soundscapes. 

SDC’s unique take on classic sounds stands apart and continues to make a significant impression on labels like R&S and Clone’s Royal Oak imprint. There’s an enigmatic charm to SDC’s music which is in part due to the narrative that courses through his work, but is mostly contained on the sound that he perpetuated throughout his records. 

His treatment of melody and his complex harmonic arrangements stand alone in a landscape dominated interminable loops. There’s an element of funk that he brings to a record like this and although it might not work on every dance floor, a record like ReSEQ will definitely make a huge impression if played at the right place and time, landing like a UFO in the middle of the dance floor. 


Illuvia – Milla (Hypnus) 12″

Hypnus is nothing if not consistent. The sonic identity that the label sustains is like some unspoken code that every artist inherently understands as they arrive on the roster; even a new arrival like Illuvia. Although Ludvig Cimbrelius has been making this kind of music under several guises in the past, as Illuvia he falls into a symbiotic step with the Swedish label, with music that drifts between ambient- and beat music in serene thought bubble on “Milla.”

Illuvia brings some exotic elements to the label through three tracks that channel elements of world music and library sounds through their existence. The sonorous melodies of the title track and the hypnotic rhythm of “Chains” creates a sense of some imagined natural scene where a river laps up against some rocky embankment or a single stone disturbs the mirror-like gloss of a motionless pond. There’s a calm serenity that courses through the record that’s only disturbed by the remixes of the title track, and is well worth exploring further through the digital LP of the same name that includes the personal highlight “Aramis”.

 


Dax J – Chaos Come To Conquer (Monnom Black) 12″

And now for something completely different… Dax J conjures the dark, salacious underworld of Techno yet again for his own Monnom Black label. With no one to answer to and with no objective other than the personal creative agency of the artist and label boss, Dax J really doesn’t pander to subtlety when he’s at home on his own label and “Chaos Come to Conquer” says it all just in the title. 

If the tome of Robert Johnson were ever to be set in a contemporary frame Dax J would take the role of Johnson and a drum machine would replace the guitar. There’s no fine introduction or mediocre buildup through some prgressive slant, but rather just an unbridled enthusiasm and monstrous noise that hits you straight in the chest from that first beat of the title track, and never lets go until the very end of “The Drome (SE1).”

It says something of the record that the hair-raising “Speedball” is the more reserved outing on this record, but DAX J music isn’t all just punishing blow after blow through a wall of distorting noise. There’s a refinement to the way he orchestrates his music, with each element having the room to live in its own dimension without infringing on the other at which point they’ll just become noisy static.  

Making due with few elements and a severe focus on getting the most out of each through sound  design, “Chaos Come To Conquer” is not at all that chaotic, but rather chaos channeled into one succinct direction, where hard Techno and Acid conspire on the dance floor to the precise beat of the drum. “Chaos Come To Conquer” is not for the faint of heart and Dax J is clearly not here to pander to civility, but if you like that kind of Techno… and we do…there’s no finer example than Chaos Come to Conquer. 

Introducing: Even & Ilay

Even (Eide) and Ilay (Bachke) are setting a new destructive precedent on Oslo’s dance floors. Their punkish designs on left-leaning Techno genres like EBM and Industrial have tormented dance floors in Oslo and places like Lithuania and Glasgow for the past 4 years. Part of a few DJs in Oslo that are permeating the grittie, DIY aspects of dance music, Even & Ilay are an anomaly, diametrically opposed to the slick formulaic House and Techno that dominates dance floors today. 

They’ve avoided the ubiquitous producer/DJ role to focus purely on DJing and bringing that particular sound to the dance floor; a sound that can vary, from downtempo churning drones to blistering, distorting Techno, all punctuated with a primal, uncompromising attitude to music. They’ve never so much as released a set online, but they’re already prominent figures at places like Hærverk, where they’ve recently established their own club night, the very aptly charged Racing Club; disseminating the sound that they perpetuate in the booth through bringing artists like Nocturnal Emissions to Oslo. 

They’ve been an elusive force in Oslo and our paths have crossed on more than one occasion. At a recent event at Revolver, they closed out the evening with a hefty onslaught of unapologetic dance floor cuts in their unique way, not giving an inch at peak time on the dance floor, their unsuspecting audience locked in a frenzy right up until the last bell rang out at the bar. They were completely in their element, the dance floor submitting to the raw energy of the music. It’s the first time I’ve seen them in this context, and usually they can be found playing a more reserved, although equally provocative sets for the more discerning music heads at intimate events and places like Mir, the aforementioned Hærverk and at Raymond T Hauger’s den Gyldne Sprekk events at Jaeger. 

Ahead of their next appearance at Jaeger, we sought them out to find out more about Even & Ilay and met up for a chat at Blå. They are enrolled in film studies, where naturally they’ve gravitated to sound, and have taken a break from a project they are working on for an interview and a beer. The stuff they do for film is a world away from the music they play in their sets they tell me. “That’s kind of funny,” says Even, “because our music tastes are usually recorded on cassette with a lot of noise and stuff, but the studies are about making everything sound really clean.” 

They’re very pragmatic about their decision to study film over the ubiquitous path through music production course and it’s this very unusual kind of perception that sets them apart from their contemporaries. I soon realise it’s one of the many reasons that Even & Ilay are unique figures for their generation and why they’re sure to be future luminary’s for the next generation of DJ breaking through. 

When and why did you start DJing together. 

llay: 2015. We were always listening to music and it came naturally when more music got discovered. 

Even: I guess we got bored of Disco and House and then we wanted something else. 

You would’ve been under 21 then. Did you ever feel like there was a place in Oslo for you to play or listen to this kind of music when you were starting out? 

I: We usually had a fake IDs, still there were some places that didn’t really care like Taxi Take-Away or Maxi Taxi. They had a lot of different kinds of music, but they were open so we could bring our own music. 

You played at Maxi Taxi and Taxi Take-away before they closed down. How did places like that influence your musical tastes as DJs? 

E: We started playing at Taxi Take-away and Maxi Taxi. A lot of the inspiration was from the aesthetics of that place, we wanted to find a lot of tracks that fit with the look of the place; it was perfect for the stuff we discovered. 

I: We’ve been influencing each other throughout. In the beginning we didn’t use to play together. After some time, we have found lots of the same music. 

I noticed you play a lot of records, has that always been there? 

E: We started with only playing records, but then we switched to some USB and some vinyl; I played all my records too many times. 

I: In the beginning it was strictly records, but then we realised there was way too much music out there that was not available on vinyl and now it’s more of a 50/50 thing. 

Where do you find most of your music? 

E: Mostly searching Youtube, Soundcloud and then we look at distribution sites like Juno and Lobster Theremin. We also use Discogs. 

I: Discogs is where I spent most of my time, to be able to check out all the labels and all the sublabels and the artists signed to those labels. I also used a lot of blogs and websites on the internet where people share a lot of old undiscovered stuff. 

Is it mostly new music? 

E: I like the combination of playing some old techno, house, new beat, and then some new stuff. I think it’s cool to try and mix it up

It’s quite difficult, since a lot of that old stuff just wasn’t recorded that well, and doesn’t hold up to a lot of new music. 

E: I’ve had some bad experiences, where a track I really like sounds great on my speakers at home, but then I play it out in a place and it sounds really shitty and people can’t dance to it, because the recording is so horrible. 

What made you pick up DJing in the first place. 

I: It was just a fun thing to do when you’re listening to music all the time. I instantly felt I wanted to spend more time finding new music, and it just felt natural to also play. 

Was it through the youth club that you learnt to DJ, like so many of your older peers in Norway? 

E: No we just started at home with some cheap record players. I had a boomblaster hooked up to the record players through a shitty mixer with no eq and only a crossfader. It was really nice to beatmatch that way, because you had to get it perfect to sound good. 

I: We had a pretty crap record player where you had to give it a push to get the motor going.

I associate the kind of music that you play with that darker EBM, punk-Techno sound. What drew you to that sound? 

E: When we started, we wanted to find something that was exciting and new. When we found labels like Contort Yourself, Unknown Precepts, Sign Bit Zero, Rat Life, Lux Rec, Mannequin, Dark Entries etc we started finding that those labels were fairly new as well. When Contort Yourself started with their first record, we found that sound in the club music, so I guess we were just part of this new wave that’s been really inspired by eighties industrial music.

I: I listened to a lot of industrial stuff and when I started hearing those labels converting it into contemporary club music it pretty much settled my idea for what I wanted to play as a DJ.

Do you have any relationship with labels like Jealous God and City Trax? 

E: For sure…

That’s something I wanted to ask you too, do you feel there is any place you can actually listen to that music today in Oslo? 

I: There’s a lot of cool stuff happening in Oslo, and even though we don’t have the dedicated clubs and there are so few people playing it, we know some people that DJ this kind of music regularly. You also had Ron Morelli who was just at Jaeger as an example of how there is a lot of good music coming to Norway as well. 

E: There is a lot of stuff happening even if doesn’t seem like it. Oslo has a varied music scene. 

I: It’s kind of small so it’s possible to do stuff yourself. That’s why we’ve started booking artists for Kafé Hærverk for our concept Racing Club. We started with Nocturnal Emissions and Philippe Laurent, and we still have many upcoming artists for the autumn, such as Five o’clock Traffic from Börft to name one. 

And that crowd is probably more receptive to that kind of music. 

E: I wouldn’t play records from Jealous God there, but more punk, music that fits a small room. 

Similar to what you might play at Jaeger on Tuesday? 

E: I feel it’s fun to bring our own style but also try to adapt to the people that are at Jaeger. 

I: Wherever we play, I feel like it’s always fun to push the line to how obscure you can have it, before people leave the club. In some places that line can be pushed a lot longer, but still we try it. It gives something new to the sets that we play, and makes every set different. 

I feel that your set at Revolver a few weeks ago, was probably something you want to do more of. 

E: Definitely. It was just great, because it mixed really well with Xander’s (Burrell Connection), it was really nice to have that build up and we finish off with some crazy electro. 

And everybody stayed! 

I: It didn’t look like the people there were into Techno in any special way, they were just out to have fun. Playing for people that don’t have any of these expectations, and when not everyone in the crowd is a dj i’s always fun. 

You mentioned playing in Lithuania and I know you’ve played in Glasgow too. You probably play more abroad than any other DJ in your field. Is it purely from social networking online? 

E: Yeah, because we never released any of our own stuff, and we’ve never put any of our mixes out before, so I guess it was just that we met the right people, and they understood what  we were doing. Whenever we play in Lithuania, nobody knows who we are so nobody really shows up though. 

It was just about bonding with the club promoter and about the kind of music you like? 

E: Basically it was from Digital Tsunami in Lithuania. 

What about the music you’re making, is there any intention to bring it out into the world? 

E: We’re just having fun and also I don’t feel like we are that good. We don’t have any music background; we just try to explore the kind of sounds that we like and it’s also kind of half-assed.(Laughs) 

I: We never use enough time. When we find something we like we just press record and record it into one track on the computer and that’s it. 

That’s the way it should be. 

I: Yes, and we get that rough sound. That’s what we like in music, stuff that isn’t super-well produced, but just stuff that is homemade. Stuff that just hits. 

Do you ever play it in your sets. 

I: Sometimes, just for fun. 

Through everything you’ve said You two strike me as DJs doing something completely unique to everybody else. Do you even feel there is a scene around what you guys are doing? 

I: Yes, Techno is pretty big in Norway at the moment and there are a lot of raves happening and people who are not DJs are coming to dance to this music. There are quite a few DJs who do cool stuff that’s easy to get behind, and I’m looking forward to continue collaborating on the next events we have coming up. 

E: I think the Techno scene in Oslo is getting bigger, so I guess the thing that we are doing will be more popular at some point. 

 

*Even & Ilay plays Den Gyldne Sprekk tonight.

Album of the the Week: Leoparden – Stilen er Svimmel

Dressed in faux fur and riding on a wave Funk, Leoparden arrives at his first full length LP, “Stilen er Svimmel” in Oslo. The LP follows the well-received “Boliglån” appearing on 7″ earlier this year, accompanied by six more tracks of the same funkadelic Boogie tracks as the second release from the label that brought us Flammer Danse Band, Lyskestrekk Records. The Hausmania collective and record label have cemented their sound on the latest release, with Leoparden bearing striking similarities to Flammer and the sonic aesthetic they pursue, but with a very distinctive mirrorball glint striking through Leoparden’s record. You can listen to their works on https://musiccritic.com. MusicCritic is an online resources for music lovers and musicians alike. They help artist with exposure and beginning musicians in their journey.

Effervescent percussive jaunts snake their way through bubbling keys and raspy guitars, traversing elements of Funk, Disco, Afro and Boogie through effortless progressions, carrying Leoparden’s voice through the murky timbres of the music. Tracks built on the transient nature of repetition, languish on a theme, latching on to the rhythm of the dance floor. “Er på gulven” intones Leopraden on “Total Disko” and that is what this record is all about; getting on to the dance floor and staying there. Leopraden bridges the floor through his subtle vocal leanings and lyrics that cultivate a party flavour, with that unique sense of self-deprecating humour we saw on the video for Boliglån.

Forget your mortgage and just chill he says on the lead single and opening track of the LP, and while there is some subjective and latent questions about living in a capitalist system to be garnered from those lyrics — especially considering the context in which these records were records, Hausmania – you get the sense that Leopraden is even trying to exorcise the listener of these thoughts through the LP. It’s at it most effective on a track like “Rist Skjelettet” where lyrics and music work together in complete hedonist abandonment.

There are a lot of similarities to the first Lyskestrekk record and Flammer, especially on “Vente Lenge” with its evocative Fela Kuti charm and certainly plays on a very distinctive sound for the label. The distinctive reverb on the lead vocal, the gritty aesthetic and the progressive forms of the songs all expound on that seventies African fusion sound, with a very  pragmatic Norwegian approach, where little extemporisation is expected and themes vary little from their crux, embedding charming motives and infectious rhythms in the listeners. If you’re not dancing by the end of the record you’re not listening to it right.

Over the counter at Filter Musikk with Jokke & Roland Lifjell

Whenever I walk into Filter Musikk of late Depeche Mode is playing over a pair of monitors out the back of the store. The store is lively on this particular occasion even though it’s close to closing time, and I find Roland Lifjell milling about between the floor and the back room where 1000s of records line the wall and synthesisers, drum machines and turntables at various stages of repair are scattered across surfaces. 

Dave Gahan’s voice evokes some drug-induced 80’s memory between Martin Gore’s steely guitar work and Andy Fletcher’s industrial percussive rhythms in the background, while Roland scurries around the store in pursuit of something for a new customer. YouTube has defaulted into playing Depeche Mode of late he tells me when he gets a moment. “There could be worse defaults,” I reply through a live version of “Enjoy the Silence.” I’m not surprised that it’s a very specific era of Depeche Mode that Roland Lifjell enjoys, the post-Vince Clarke years, when they were conjuring a darker aspects of synth-pop music. 

At one of the listening stations, Joakim “Jokke” Dahl Houmb is going through some records he picked from the newly arrived pile, and waves a hello in my direction nodding along to something that I have no doubt is some blistering Techno track, a wispy noise escaping between the headphones. There’s still time to pursue some new and old records before Roland shuts the door, not that he ever would ever kick a customer out. I find DJ Sports’ latest offering on Help recordings and a Richard Pryor record that would make an excellent sample for a House track. 

Jokke pays for his records, but there are still customers dotting the store with records under their arms. “Close the door” says Jokke “we don’t want you to get anymore customers” his tone conveying the mirth in the remark. 

Can you remember the first record you ever bought here? 

Jokke: I bought too many here. It’s gotta be some years ago, but I can’t remember exactly.

Jokke and Roland’s history goes way back to when Jokke was an emerging DJ in Oslo at a time when Techno was getting its fourth, maybe fifth wind, back around the turn of this decade. After getting into DJing through the accessible digital systems like Serato he had found a passion for the vinyl format after visiting Spacehall in Berlin. When he returned home to Oslo, its counterpart in Oslo Filter Musikk became a regular haunt for the burgeoning DJ.

It conspired around the time when he and Ole-Espen “O/E” Kristiansen just started out as promoters in Oslo with their  clandestine after-hours DIY Techno events called VOID. With almost no places available in Oslo to hear or play that music at the time, Jokke and Ole-Espen set out on their own, to bring the emerging sounds of Berlin Oslo and had almost instantly garnered a severe and intense following.  

By that time Jokke and Roland had already become fast friends. As the elder statesman of the Oslo DJ circuit and Techno, Roland saw in Jokke a new generation of DJs and tastemakers that corresponded with what he had been doing through Filter Musikk and as a DJ in the preceding years. It was always going to be a mere formality that Roland would play a VOID party.

Roland: I remember playing at the VOID party.

The first one?

J: No the third one.

R: I attended the first one at least, the one with Lucy at Hausmania. It was very loud. Jokke & Ole-Espen were focusing on some artists that I missed out on; they were very on-point with what was going on. I remember I had to shape up and prove myself, because these guys knew what was going on. 

The VOID parties had made a significant impact on the scene, bringing over artists like Lucy, Jonas Kopp and Northern Structures in their brief, but  fundamental existence on the Norwegian scene. In their wake they inspired and revitalised a dormant Techno scene that took the VOID model and applied it to their own concepts, often with lesser results. 

It led to a saturation of after-hours events that brought the wrong kind of attention, leaving Jokke and Ole-Espen no choice but to abandon VOID’s nocturnal pursuits for more legitimate events like their Musikkfest Oslo stage, and with Ole-Espen and Jokke pursuing their own concepts on the side. 

But VOID’s impact is undeniable today. At Musikkfest Oslo in 2019 two new Techno stages had cropped up on the lineup appearing alongside VOID, who had been the first bonafide Techno event to engage with the Oslo music event for the masses. All three stages were busy this year and I dare say none of that would’ve been possible if  Jokke and Ole-Espen hadn’t set the precedent for this new era of Techno in Oslo through VOID. 

I heard a couple of younger DJs talking about VOID and referring  to Jokke and Ole as one of the “old boys”. Do you feel like an old boy?

J: I’m comfortable with being one of the old boys. 

What does that make you, Roland?

R: Ja. (Laughs) 

Roland Lifjell has been a significant figure in Oslo since the birth of Techno. A DJ first and foremost, he cut his teeth in the burgeoning Trance and Techno scene cropping up in Oslo’s surrounding forest area in the nineties. Appearing at a time when there was a lot more fluidity to electronic music genres, and the distinction between Detroit Techno and German Trance was hazy and opaque and your merit as a DJ was weighed by your record collection, Roland Lifjell came to the fore not merely for his skills as a DJ for his expansive knowledge of his music.

Encouraged by his love of physical DJ format, he spent his professional career working in record distribution and sales before opening his own shop at the turn of the 2000’s while securing his place in Oslo DJ community as one of the stalwart monoliths of the scene.  

His skills took him all over the world, playing places like Tresor all the while claiming his stake as one of the legends of the Norwegian Techno scene. Through Filter Musikk he’s also been an unwavering facilitator, not just supplying the DJ community with records, but encouraging the next generation of DJs to come through. His love for sad synthesiser music still remains at the core of everything he does as a DJ and record store owner, and he’s been unwavering that pursuit ever since. As if to punctuate my thoughts, Depeche Mode gives way to Cure’s Lullaby in the background and Jokke comes back into the conversation when a thought suddenly strikes him. 

J: I think the first record I bought here must have been a House record.

R: I think you bought some Kompakt stuff.

J:Shhhhhh…

R: O, ok so only mention the credible stuff? (laughs)

Yeah, Roland would know all your darkest secrets.

J: Yeah he’s a nice guy so he bought most of the Tech-House records back. There are still some left so I’ll have to make some chip bowls out of those.

R: I think you gave me a Kompakt record, because you had an extra copy and I was touched. Unfortunately it wasn’t a record I really liked, but I couldn’t sell it because it was a nice gift. 

J: (Laughs)

R: I think it’s a nice gesture. I’m a businessman so I’m always selling records, so it’s difficult for me to give a record away. The concept of giving someone a record is not something I come across that often so that felt even more special.

J: I bought too many records in a short period of time, so I bought the same records two or three times, so those records were always on their own shelf, giveaway records.   

You gave me a record once.

J: I give everybody records. I gave you Alien Rain, the black one, but you didn’t get the sticker. 

Roland dashes out from behind the counter, to let a customer back into the store. She’s picking up some music equipment she had bought earlier. Jokke’s attention turns to some the DJ sports record. That’s a really great record he opines. It might not be the type of record that you’d expect in a Jokke DJ set, but the energy and uncompromising tempo is something that finds some synergy with the kind of thing Jokke might play at peak time. 

He and Roland might have been stuck with the Techno badge, but the pair are nothing if not flexible to the extent that they interpret the genre. When Roland last played the Filter Musikk night at Jaeger, there were moments when the set reached out to some transcendental heights, touching the celestial spheres of the melodic spectrum, while monstrous 4-4 percussive arrangements churned on along subterranean trajectories. 

There’s a fluidity between the functionalism of modern Techno and the more etheric nature of the genre’s roots, that Jokke often counterpoints with bold, brooding droning Techno. When Roland and Jokke get together the pair found ineffable common ground between Jokke’s intrepid selections and Roland’s controlled sonic aesthetic. 

What made you realise that you had a similar taste in music, what were the records that cemented your fascination with this thing we call Techno?

R: I’m one of the few DJs that played serious Techno, even during the early nineties when we were playing Trance. At the same party back then you could play a Basic Channel record, or you could play a Trance record, then you could put on something from Jeff Mills, and then put on a Superstition record from Germany. And if you fit it together it made sense.

Very few DJs in Oslo had that same sense; a lot of DJs that play deep House today, they’re not really into electronic music. For me there were two different worlds, you had the Oslo House DJs, who were just commercial club House DJs and I feel that I’ve been quite alone in this very serious stuff.

Why do you think that is?

R: I think in Oslo it’s a bit dark, you don’t get stimulated, and that’s why people move to Berlin, because that’s where you have the environment and the people around you. 

That’s the point of my story; when Jokke came along and the VOID parties started happening they brought that Berlin vibe here.

J: We gave him that new spark.

R: I was inspired; it showed that seriousness to it.

Surely, now that Techno is experiencing a lot of hype at the moment, you can’t still feel alone?

J: The term has been misused of late. A lot of people convoluted Techno with a lot of other genres. Yes, Techno is very popular now, but at least 50% of people saying they’re doing Techno music, they got it wrong. Either it’s minimal, or Tech-House with more aggressive bass lines, but it doesn’t have that Techno vibe. Yeah, Techno is at its peak in popularity, but for the people that are really into Techno, it just gets annoying. I’d rather quit Techno.

That happened in the early 2000’s, when everybody abandoned Techno.

J: It’s always going to happen. Popularity ruins the music, and every genre goes in waves… I’m still waiting for Trance to make its comeback. 

R: I was playing at the Monument festival this weekend, and for me it felt like the old kind of psy-Trance community thing. It was an outdoor festival with good sound and kind of spacey trancy music. You couldn’t really play a Jeff Mills record there, and people were dancing like they were floating through the music, so there wasn’t any point to playing any percussive Techno.

J: The moral of the story is don’t put on a Jeff Mills record if you see people with dreads. 

Roland’s shy chuckle fills the air, like I’ve heard it do so many times before. People like Jokke go in for the records, but they always stay for the conversation. It’s what makes Filter Musikk such a gem and one the last of its kind in a world that’s dominated by a virtual culture online. You can walk into Filter and at any given time there will be a conversation waiting for you, very much like this one that I walked into on this day. 

Yes, those conversations usually revolve around music, but music’s cultural influence reaches far and wide and touches on everything from politics to humour. Most record stores today are some kind of front for some brand. Places like Hardwax, Rush Hour and Phonica have become businesses with DJ booking agencies, promo agents and distribution attached, losing touch with that intimate social hub that the record store used to be. Filter Musikk is one of the last physical bastions of record culture that still indulge these crucial elements, and it’s only right that it should have its own night in Oslo to commemorate and proliferate that spirit. 

Tell me a bit about how the Filter Musikk nights came to be and how are you, Jokke involved in it?

J: I was hanging out here most of my free time, and I was working at Jaeger building stuff, and also playing there for a couple of years. I thought it was weird that he hadn’t been playing there at all. I thought to myself, here’s this kind of guru guy who I go and see all the time and buy records from, why is he not playing any places. 

He’s been an inspiration to me. He knows what Techno I’m into and what kind of records I like. So I just had to ask Ola; why can’t Roland play at Jaeger more? In the beginning I was just trying to get Roland to play at Jaeger. I thought there was enough room for us both to do our separate Techno nights, and then Ola asked if Roland would be more interested on fronting Filter for a night. That sounded like a good idea… Filter is my “fritidsklubb” — the place I go when I have time off.

Ola asked if we could do it together, so it’s not entirely my idea.

Are you happy with the nights so far?

R: Absolutely.

J: It’s a fucking record shop and it’s the best one in Oslo, it’s been here for years, it should be fronted and Roland should be playing as a resident at Oslo’s best club. That’s a no-brainer.

Yeah, everywhere else in the world record shops used to have their own club nights, why shouldn’t it happen here.

R: Of course, now nobody needs vinyl anymore and there is a danger that people can overlook the key centre for music, so it’s good to be part of it. Jaeger is the right place. 

J: We’re not going to let go of this regardless of how few people come to listen to us play, because we’re not doing this for fame or anything.  We’re still going to be doing it, even if we’re just doing it in our own bedrooms. 

 

*Roland Lifjell annd Jokke play Frædag x Filter Musikk next week.

The cut with Filter Musikk

Overheard at Filter Musikk: “Yeah, he’s a nice guy, he bought all my Tech-House records back.” Roland Lifjell is a nice guy and will buy a record back from a customer, even if he might not have sold it to said customer. It says something about the calibre of the proprietor of Filter Musikk, but also it says something about the calibre of the music that comes through the store. He’s so secure in the handpicked selection that he permeates through the store, that even if it is only a passing fancy for one punter, he’d happily absorb it back into the collection, where it will bide its time waiting for a new fan. 

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Disclaimer: The words expressed here within are the creative ramblings of Jaeger Oslo’s editor, and in no way, shape or form do they reflect the opinions or practises of Filter Musikk. 

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New records might sit on his shelf for a little longer than expected, but as they migrate into the selected label shelves or even further back into genre specific crates and maybe even later in the bargain bins, eventually some doe-eyed future selector, with a fresh pair of ears will pick up on the record and present it in a new light to a future generation. 

Every record at Filter Musikk has an ear waiting to hear it, from the latest hyped fancy that sells out in a matter of minutes to the more obscure curiosity for the more adventurous listener and DJ — the records that usually stand the test of time. Even these new records that we feature on this segment, they might not be exalted until later in life, even after death sometimes, but the fact that they are adorning the shelves at Filter Musikk merits their own worth in every respect.

Who knows, maybe Tech-House too will eventually get its just deserts… although does it deserve it? Hand picked by one of the finest selectors of our generation, Roland Lifjell, this is the cut with Filter Musikk. We dig through the latest arrivals at Filter Musikk and where our tastes converge with the man behind the counter, that’s where you’ll find the cut with Filter Musikk. 

 

The Hypnotist ‎– Hardcore U Know The Score 2019 (Rising High Records) 12”

There was never anything quite hypnotic about Caspar Pound and Peter Smith’s Hypnotic project; unless their idea of hypnosis was being repeatedly hit over the head with a blunt object. The bulstruous, but short lived project that also spawned groups like Dominatrix UK; A Homeboy, A Hippie & A Funki Dredd, Talisman and Temple of Acid had made a prominent contribution to the post-rave-hangover Hardcore generation through their music and through their label, Rising High, but like the genre itself quickly flickered out into obscurity after mid-nineties, until recently.

With Hardcore’s recent resurgence, it’s only natural that a track like “Hardcore You know the Score” get its time in the limelight again too. The brutal intensity of the record has waned little and it’s curious, and a little cheeky to hear the original there in its original form on B2, completely untouched by the modern processes of the digital mastering age as far as I can discern. I guess the record is all about the remixes on this occasion — there are original copies floating around for a fraction of a hoover sample all over Discogs anyway. 

Remixes by Disintegrator and Innercore dust off the cobwebs, apply a little sonic polish to bring back its original glean and then violently hurl it out at the dance floor where chaos ensues. Applying some modern touches in the production process without losing the essential elements of that hardcore sound, the tortured keys, the cacophonous broken beats and the lysergic bass lines. It’s a very robust and intimidating record, but then again you said you wanted hardcore… 

 

E.R.P. / Duplex ‎– Fr-Dpx (Frustrated Funk) 12”

It’s a split 12” from two of the most unwavering artists in the Electro genre on one of the busiest labels currently working in that field. E.R.P and Duplex (although they appear as DPX on the inner disc) adorn the two sides of this latest Frustrated Funk release, and if you’re expecting anything other than Electro, I do not know how to help you. 

What’s interesting about this record is that the DPX track is actually a remix by Ovatow, aka Klen (real name, Wilco Klen van Bennekom), the enigma behind the controls of the Frustrated Funk label. On what is a rare occasion on the label, the wizard pulls back the curtain and appears on his own label, with a glitching remix of Duplex’s “Molecular” taken from a 2016 DPX record. The Ovatow remix strips the original back to an austere husk for a stuttering, bleep version of the lush original. 

It’s a record that otherwise seems purely coincidental, with an E.R.P track that just happened to be lying around, but didn’t have the right vehicle or was cut somewhere from another release; perhaps event the last LP for Forgotten Futures (which is also at Filter believe it or not). E.R.P creates a salacious undertow to the other side with big bouncing bass-lines and his unique layered approach to the Electro genre. 

Like every record in Frustrated Funk’s discography it simply exists for the sake of existing and it’s only pursuit it seems to keep the momentum of Electro going, and for that reason alone the work that Wilco Klen van Bennekom and Frustrated Funk is worthy of a finding a place in a few record collections. 

 

Various ‎– DE:10.03 (De:tuned) 12”

“What about this?” asks Roland Lifjell… “Belgian label awakens old timers and the tracks are usually on a 90’s level of quality.” I can’t tell if he’s joking or if “90’s level of quality” is supposedly a good thing, but I trust Roland emphatically… when it comes to music at least. 

In the world according to De:tuned, it’s like the rest of music has finally caught up to the timeline of acts like Future Beat Alliance, and it’s that sound, that idealistic nineties pursuit of the music of the future that the Belgium label instills through their discography today through new music from these past monoliths of the Techno genre. 

These aren’t re-issues or some forgotten demo seeing the light of day for the first time, but new music in pursuit of “reanimating the sounds from electronic music’s early days.” It’s music that stands the test of time, and as Future Beat Alliance, max 404, John Beltrane, and Mark Archer prove on this collection of tracks for this latest De:tuned release, it’s music that lives beyond time. Those familiar sounds of drum machines and synthesisers which dominate almost all of contemporary music remain and in the hands of these master craftsmen they still sound like the music of the future, especially in an era dominated by perpetual loops and bland consistency. 

It’s “a shame it probably does not sell” says Roland but it would be “very promising if they work more with these artists and get them to release whole albums.” Roland should know, after all.  

 

Alessandro Adriani ‎– Embryo (Stroboscopic Artefacts) 12”

Alessandro Adriani has made one of the most significant and unique contributions to Techno, but not entirely as an artist. His record label Mannequin recordings has been a touchstone for music enthusiasts and DJs alike as the last vestige for the EBM and industrial strain of Techno of the last decade. Prominent Techno DJs like Silent Servant and Freddy K talk about Mannequin in revered tones for the label’s contribution to a particular kind of Techno, from the new music Adriani has released via the label to the very selective and specific re-issues from groups like Din i Testbild.

It’s only in recent years that Adriani has started to etch his name into the label’s own discography, but only minimally, and he still favours releasing his own music via auxiliary labels like Edit Select, Pinkman and Jealous God. In 2019 his career as a recording artist has been marked by a renewed partnership with Stroboscopic Artefacts with an LP and an EP coming out via the label. “Embryo” preceded the LP, “Morphic Dreams,” with the Italian producer’s flair for the dramatic at the core of the industrialised electronic soundscape he conjures from unruly machines.

Noise and stoic percussive arrangements conspire on the fringes of the dance floor as Adriani runs sequences through the progressive forms, cutting through languid pads like barbed wire. Adriani’s sound design is what sets him apart from others working in the same field. That Italian tradition for the flair of the cinematic is very prominent throughout this EP, suggesting perhaps these were some of the tracks that never made it into “Morphic Dreams.” It’s not just a sense of atmosphere he cultivates however, but also a sense of nostalgia, like on the last track, “Aria (New Beat version).”

Moving away from the predominant sounds of processed 909 kick drums saturating Techno at the moment, Adriani’s use of hollow kicks and gated snares, take you a long way back to the origins of EBM and European Techno, back to groups like Nitzer Ebb and Front 242 and the music he perpetuates through his label from artists like //TENSE//.

 

Florian Kupfer ‎– 4Ever EP

After a little hiatus that saw Florian Kupfer release some cassettes, most notably for burgeoning Norwegian label, Hjemme Med Dama, the German producer is back on the vinyl medium with a 12” for Axe Traxx. 

4Ever EP picks up the thread laid down on previous records by Kupfer on labels like L.I.E.S and WT Records. Kupfer continues to play on that  contrast between overzealous percussive workouts and deep benign electronic textures. With kick drums creaking under the weight of distortion and hi-hats splashing between noise and harmony, there’s an evident energy that pulses through the record, but it’s somewhat restrained by the deep, modulating keys that weave their way through the minimalist productions.

Besides the scattered breakbeats of “Why,” Kupfer’s sights remain on the dance floor for this record, with form-hugging four-four kicks setting the pace for syncopated percussive jaunts and languid harmonic and melodic movements created from sensuous warm analogue tones.

Album of the Week: Torb the Roach & Floppy McSpace – Square Wave Adventures

“Squaaaaaaare waaaaaave… adventures” croaks a bionic voice from some equidistant retro future, opening up a wormhole into a 8-bit dimension where dusty beats and deep, soul-searching grooves plot a tempered journey through some psychedelic multiverse, like Leisure Suit Larry on the oriental express. Torb the Roach & Floppy McSpace return to King Underground for their latest release, their sophomore effort for the UK label. The mysterious Norwegian duo brought their unique take to beats genres like Hip hop to the label for the first time on “Tape Echo – Gold Floppies” and return with an effort that shows a slight evolution in their sound.

If the Residents had produced music for video games with Parliament Funkadelic as a session band and Delia Derbyshire in the producer’s chair, somewhere in that opaque quantum realm, that’s where “Square Wave Adventures” resides. Between Torb’s key work and Floppy’s sampling, they took Hip Hop to some very exotic locations on “Tape Echo – Gold Floppies,” and on this latest record, they’ve turned their attention to the virtual world. With more focus on some original material, but still retaining that nostalgia only a vinyl sample can deliver they’ve certainly caught onto something original for “Square Wave Adventures.”

Built on a sturdy foundation of golden-era Hip Hop beats rolling along at a languid pace, “Torb and Flop” add layers of off-beat samples, deep keys and funky synthetic leads to time-honoured rhythms in their musical pursuit on the LP. There’s an exoticism that lays dormant behind the dusty beats, with obscure samples weaving through retrofitted space-aged Moogs and fm synthesisers. Tracks like “Nakkeslang” and “Er På Punjab” encourage evocative links to the east as imported samples find some unfathomable synergy with those bold Moog synths and syncopated percussive rhythms.

There’s that more traditional approach to beat-music, like their previous LP in terms of tracks like “Varm Luft” and “Flyter Rund” but it’s when all the elements conspire around tracks like “Klisterfóre” and “Brennmanet” that “Square Wave Adventures” really thrives. It’s especially effective when Torb adds that element of funk through his key work on the Moog, channeling the spirit of Sly Stone though some oscillating ouija board. Everything is obviously related to or expounding on the SP1200 at the centre of each track, the machine’s distinctive noise leaving its immoveable mark on each track, but unlike the first LP this is not where all the charm lies on “Square Wave Adventures,” even if that’s what the cover art would presume.

It’s when “Square Wave Adventures” completely breaks with conventions that he makes it’s most formidable mark, and it’s its curiosities that sets it apart from anything else happening in Hip Hop and breakbeat music today.

An unconscious projection of Aurora Borealis with Jarle Bråthen

Jarle Bråthen is one in a googleplex. He’s one of the most endearing characters to come out of the Norwegian space Disco era, a self-effacing musical polymath and an enigmatic presence in the booth. His reserved output is matched only by his dedication to the art DJing, with a sincerity for the craft and the music pacing through his sets and his productions. 

A Full Pupp affiliate, Bråthen’s original compositions and remixes are known for their galaxian trajectory, tripping through the cosmos of icy synthetic textures on primordial percussive waves of rhythm to exotic locations. With an artistic voice like his variegated record collection, Jarle Bråthen is an eclectic soul with an encyclopedic knowledge of music, from obscure B-sides to ABBA. 

Although he’s still a significant fixture on the DJ circuit in Norway, he spends most of his time in Berlin these days, spending his time between the studio and DJ booths like the one at Paloma Bar or Bohnengold. Always a welcomed pleasure in Jaeger’s booth and an infectious selector wherever he goes, Jarle Bråthen sets never disappoint.

He returns to Jaeger tonight for the Bogota Records showcase with a new record for the Oslo label and some other exciting news on the production front. We took the opportunity to shoot over some burning questions via email on one of the hottest days ever recorded in Berlin and he obliged on his way to the studio.    

Hello Jarle and welcome back to Jaeger. What are you listening to at the moment? 

Thank you very much!  I’m listening to: X-ray Connection – Get Ready (Petko Turner’s & James Rod’s Fama De America Edit) 

The last time you played here, you were scratching records from the rotary mixer. What do you have in mind for this upcoming set? 

This time I’m just gonna play FX, hehe. No, for Saturday I’ve planned for a more streamlined set. 

It’s a Bogota night, and you’ve got a new record coming soon to the label. Can you tell us a bit more about the record and how it will fit around the night in terms of the records you bring? 

The tracks on Bogota are more uptempo in comparison but I will try to keep the set as deep as my inner compass allows me. 

You’ve done a few remixes for Bogota in the past, but this is your first venture of original music outside of Full Pupp I believe. What is it about this record that was destined to be on Ivaylo’s label? 

I have several original tracks outside Full Pupp but Ivaylo asked me to make some for Bogota. So as a kind of commission for the label, I pushed my production style to challenge myself creatively and ended up with a likable result. 

You generally have quite a reserved output. What do you need to make a record and why do you prefer to do it only on occasion? 

I produce a lot but not necessarily push to release the stuff all the time. For a while this “pushing” was killing my creative process. For example; If I thought one of my tracks reminded me of a certain label’s sound, I would listen to that label’s output to make my track sound coherent. This also made me “stressed” about music making all together. I find myself the best when I just stay in the music making processes not thinking of what comes next. If that made any sense? 

Btw, there are a lot of stuff in the production pipeline for instance a solo EP on Beatservice Rec, and collaborations with Hard Ton, Miss Plug Inn and Local Suicide. 

What are the perfect conditions for you to sit down and start making music? 

There are no perfect conditions so I make the space in both schedule and head to produce. 

What usually inspires you outside of music? 

Stand up comedy 

I assume that you consider yourself a DJ first and foremost. How did you get into the DJ thing? 

I consider myself a music fan first before DJ. I used to dance a lot as a kid at the youth club but wanted the dj to play the music I could dance to. The DJ said why don’t you DJ yourself so you can hear the tracks you want. Slowly I moved from the dancefloor and into the booth. 

When did you notice you had a knack for it? 

When I felt it was somewhat effortless to beatmatch and pick out tracks that people danced to. 

How do you think you’ve evolved as a DJ since then? 

I come from a mainstream background so music content has evolved towards a bit more underground and electronic way. And still is evolving… 

You’ve definitely got that Norwegian eclecticism and musical sincerity in what you do in the booth. What do you look for in records and how would you define your sets for the uninformed? 

I can’t put my finger on it but there is a certain “weighty bump” in the groove that resonates with me. Set wise I think I’m all over the place but some of my friends tell me that I have kind of a red thread in my sets that I can’t really hear. 

Why, the move to Berlin? 

To feel free, meet open minded people and the musical opportunities that are not other places. I also took my bachelor degree in electronic music production here. 

With you, the Sex Tags guys, Charlotte Bendiks and Karima F all there, there’s quite a healthy Norwegian faction in the German city and you’re all very popular there as far as I can understand. Why do you think the kind stuff you and the likes of Fett Burger play resonates with the Berliners? 

An unconscious projection of Aurora Borealis. 

Having said all that you regularly still play in Norway. How do you have to adapt your sets for Norwegian audiences today? 

I usually adapt my sets to the venues not the countries. 

I always thought that you can be a bit more experimental in Berlin, since you have those long sets. Is this something that you’ve experienced, and what is the usual trajectory a longer Jarle Bråthen set would follow? 

Let me get this clear: I love long sets! Starting easy to get everyone onboard the tu tu train ride. Slowly increasing the bpm with a mixture of  longer stretches of one style to develop into another and differentiate from hot to cold soundscapes, building it up to a bit faster and harder climaxes. 

You know that on the other side of the night you’re playing, we’ll have MC Kaman selecting some guilty pleasures by request. What is your guiltiest pleasure when it comes to music? 

ABBA – Chiquita 

Thank Jarle for answering these for us. Do you have anything you’d like to add? 

I am really looking forward to play in the Jæger backyard with Ivaylo. 

Thanks JB 

Premiere: Ivaylo – Smooth Layla

Stream Smooth Layla taken from Ivaylo’s Æ way on Cassy’s Kwench Records

Ivaylo’s hit a new stride in the studio, and fresh off the back of his Full Pupp debut, he’s back on Cassy’s Kwench with three originals on an EP called Æ way, doffing his cap Jaeger’s way in the title of the track. Lead single, “Smooth Layla” can be streamed today in full with the official release of the record. It finds Ivaylo in club floor summer mood, with his signature take on percussion leading us through a tempered, progressive House arrangement. “It’s just proper House music,” he told us an interview earlier this year about the release, and the results stand for themselves.

here’s what Cassy had to say about it: “Ivaylo has good energy, he’s incredibly talented and we connect because he’s also been wrapped up in music for a long time, he’s always exploring ways in which he can grow as a producer and he’s in it for the right reasons. I’ve played at Jaeger Club a handful of times, spending time with him and have seen how his presence can lift a room and this feeds directly into the music he creates. I love these three tracks. We picked them out for the label a while ago, they’ve got that sought-after timeless quality and I’m looking forward to finally getting them out there.”

Sandwiched between the Full Pupp release, and a new record on his own Bogota imprint, Ivaylo is currently riding the crest of a wave of releases, and with rumours of an LP and a Techno record for Rett i Fletta in the works, the Bulgarian via Oslo DJ and Jaeger mix resident is stepping in to a new era as a producer. You can read more about this Cassy release in an interview with Feeder and catch Ivaylo in our booth over the weekend at the Bogota Records showcase with Jarle Bråthen and in his weekly Jaeger mix slot on Sunday.

*Æ way is available now via beatport.

Efdemin – Minimal Magic, Harmonic Hypnosis and Utopian Folklore

Ross Bicknell fathoms the rich depths of Efdemin’s music and career as he profiles the enigmatic artist ahead of his next visit to Jaeger and Oslo.

Efdemin – Minimal Magic, Harmonic Hypnosis and Utopian Folklore. A Profile.

‘We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds, and lesser slides of sounds’ – Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, 1627

Berghain resident, Naif label owner and a highly original producer, Berlin based Efdemin is the connoisseur of a brand of minimal, measured and meditative techno which balances on the fringes the esoteric. He has released a series of singles and albums on Dial, Curle and Ostgut Ton and has 4 albums to his name as well as releasing material as part of other projects such as Pigon (with RNDM) and last year’s Panama/Suez EP with Konrad Spengler under his alternative alias, Phillip Sollmann (his real name, as it happens) among others.

Originally Sollmann was a member of  alternative rock band ‘Derrick’ in the 1990s in his home town of Wassel, Germany., but he quickly gravitated towards electronic music and was releasing techno by 1999. He moved to Berlin in 2005 and as the 2000s progressed he became a staple at Berghain, Panorama bar, Weekend and Watergate.

As a DJ he is always eclectic and resourceful, introducing voice and atmos samples that pull you in and make you wonder. Like hearing a neighbour’s TV through a wall, the muffled tones and inflections tell you something dramatic, dreadful or vital is happening, but the words remain elusive. Like the hapless protagonist in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 movie ‘The Conversation’, in which a recording is obsessed over to the point of insanity but the noise obscures the message no matter what audio filtering technique is used, leaving the audience in a state of mystery until the final curtain call.

Coming up with surprising blends which are nevertheless always deep and danceable, his sets don’t take the obvious routes to engaging your hypo-campuses, or lower body for that matter. On listening on headphones or at home, his sets could seem as though they are not designed for the floor, until you’re on it, and feeling it, that is. 

His works function in a similar way. With an Efdemin track, somehow the frequencies that cut through are always removed, the click is toned down. Like a Norwegian vowel, sounds are swallowed before you get a chance to understand them. So I find myself peering in with my ears, craning for a closer connection. This deeper submersion, however he achieves it, is a definite facet of Efdemin’s oeuvre as a DJ and producer and is one of the things that give his works a refined flavour all of their own. 

Listen to his organically minimal masterpiece ‘Chicago’ from 2010. As you absorb his squelch/clunk/clonk/doink percussion palette on tracks such as ‘Secrets of Shoeshine’ you get the feeling he’s a turn the knob left man, preferring to shave off rather than slather on the frequencies. It’s nice to hear the middle range taken care of and getting it’s rightful stint on the club floor as it did when this kind of minimal techno was in the ascendancy with Isolee, Ricardo Villalobos, Dial label owner Lawrence and others such as Jonas Kopp, Curle label owner Mark Houle and of course Richie Hawtin redefining techno and setting the parameters for a new found, popular insurgence as the 2010s progressed.

In Efdemin’s productions, the high and low frequencies are managed with subtlety. There’s a sense that the sound is always twisted until a little unclean, like a rusty car bonnet . Grubbiness is in the ear of the beholder of course and one man’s grubby old garage is another’s Porsche showroom. Screw Porsches, Efdemin comes across as more of a Trabant man. His stuff never feels over polished or over compressed and if it is, perhaps it’ll be as another scumbling effect on a specific motif.

On another level, Efdemin’s contextual explorations and fascinations are concerned with a discussion about utopias. ‘New Atlantis’ is a reference to Francis Bacon’s 1627 vision of one perhaps based on the discovery of America. 

As we stride boldly on into the future with various remnants of utopian dreams stuck between our teeth,  chomping hungrily on the next promising glitter-ball, its important to take stock now and again. He seems to be engaging with this idea. Efdemin creates musical entities with names such as ‘A World Unknown’, ‘New Atlantis’, ‘Black Sun’, Le Grand Voyage, ‘Wonderland – The Race For Space’ and the eerily malevolent ‘Solaris’, named after the potentially habitable planet in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Russian sci-fi film epic from 1972.  For all the planet’s promise it turns out to have an immensely powerful (and intelligent) psychic consciousness based on water which slowly destroys the minds of the men who are sent from earth to investigate it, leaving them in a tragic, repeating hell. 

The references to Gaia/mother earth/whatever you would like to call this planet, as a living conscious entity and it’s increasingly fraught relationship to humans is clear in the film. This has echoes in the contextual thrust of ‘Solaris’ and other techno tracks of the same name by Mind Against and &ME,  to name a few. Divinity and death are explored. Song titles such as ‘Angels Round Here Don’t Sing’, ‘Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death’ and ‘Oh My God’ suggest an active interest in the role of the ‘spiritual’ in music. Folkloric references are also entwined with this in many of Sollman’s sonic journeys into inner space.

Techno inadvertently, but not entirely incongruously, floats in the same orbit as new age and esoteric music. A few decades ago you might have heard it at the end of a yoga session or during a meditation. For many years, there would usually be one or two CDs of the same whale noises, drones or ambient synth washes with a cover featuring stars, the cosmos or shamans etc doing the rounds. Now you can sample a huge variety of the stuff (see NTS app ‘Slow Focus’ section). 

When an artist from the techno scene engages in these ideas and techniques as Efdemin does in ‘New Atlantis’ for instance, my ears prick up. He uses hurdy-gurdy and steampunk gizmos such as the double siren to create some majestic trances. We know techno is hypnotic, and so are drones. We know you can get lost in it and that it can help you access different states of mind, maybe even achieving greater clarity of it. So is Efdemin just trying to help us meditate, drift into a higher state, but with a soundtrack people with developed musical preferences can actually stomach? (I know I find the whole whale noises thing a little off putting, and I have nothing against whales) At 15 mins long you could argue that the track ‘New Atlantis’ is a meditation. Or is he doing something else? Is he suggesting the utopia that is ‘New Atlantis’ is inside ourselves, or is he critiquing the search for inner utopia just as much as the search for outer new worlds, virtual and actual? I don’t know.

I do know that whatever drives Efdemin’s musical processes, the journey is never boring, and frequently takes you on deep dives to magical places beyond the norm of what you’d expect. All while being funkier than a joss-stick perfumed basement in Haight Ashbury circa 1967. A lot funkier.                      

 

*Efdemin plays Frædag with g-HA & Olanskii and Olefonken.

    

Spontaneous body music with Dan Tyler from Idjut Boys

Dan Tyler was there at the convoluted vortex of House music, a time before the boundaries that would later cordon off large sections of the same music into distinct factions. At a time where elements of dub, funk, disco and even pop music were merging with the harsh machine sounds of Acid House, Tyler and co-conspirator, Conrad McDonnell come to the fore as Idjut Boys.

Consorting with a nefarious sort, the likes of which included DJ Harvey, Idjut Boys and Tyler contributed to a scene at the height of its popularity, but struck out on an individual trajectory that has seen them weave their esoteric strain of influences, from dub to pop music through 4-4 club music for the last thirty years.

From those first records on their U-Star Records label, released back in the nineties to their last full-length “Versions” on Smalltown Supersound, the Idjut Boys have been a unique force on the House music circuit. Channelling diverse, and obscure musical sources through an analogue mixing desk, the Idjut Boys approach their music, informed by the eclectic musical palette of their record collections and extensive combined experience as DJs.

They’ve had a remarkable impact on Norwegian DJs and tastemakers, ever since Olle Abstract first brought the DJ duo over to Skansen back in the nineties. Their diverse pursuits in the booth and their nerdy appreciation for music is something that has resonated through the generations on the Norwegian DJ circuit, making Tyler and McDonnell household names amongst those with an sincere appreciation for music.

Dan Tyler’s connection with Norway extends even deeper today with a recent move to Oslo, where he’s effortlessly integrated into the DJ community, playing alongside Todd Terje at Villa and establishing his own night at Ingensteds.

He’ll be joining Daniel Gude in the booth this Thursday for another edition of Retro, giving us the impetus to reach out to the Idjut Boy and ask some burning questions about his recent move to Norway, why Rune Lindbæk is hoarding part of his record collection, and what lies ahead for the Idjut Boys in this Q&A, “answered in order and spontaneously.”

You’ve recently moved to Oslo. What brought you over to the city for good?

I came as I met a nice Norwegian lady and we made some children together! …that really doesn’t sound right does it! So I guess I should leave that as my answer… (besides England is about to be run by a over spoilt, self motivated moron and friends so I am happy not to be there as they march blindfolded over the cliff edge). I lived in London for most of my adult life where the volume and the accelerator are on ten, so here feels like a nicer rhythm. Nice for kids too.

And Conrad is still in London. What does this mean for Idjut Boys and your music?

Yep Conrad’s in London, we are going between each others’ places, and trying to get that happening regularly, we can exchange files and collaborate that way, but we always worked analog with a mixing desk and effects, we enjoy the random events and stuff that happens that way that you never get mixing in a computer…both have their merits but the former is definitely an integral part of our musical chaos theory!

How has it affected the way you and Conrad work, and have you noticed a change in the music as a result?

We are doing stuff now, so we’ll see how that works, but the intention  is to mix it together at either of our houses or to run off to a hut with a car full of fun machines and knob turning devices and channel  some electric current.

What are you currently working on or finishing up as Idjut Boys?

We just did a Salsoul records mix cd for Japan, I think there’s a twelve of edits coming from that at some point… right now a remix of the lovely and rather dope Mr Bjørn Torske for Smalltown Supersound here.

The last LP was Versions and that was in 2015. Any plans on another album?

An LP yes… but right now we trying to make some 12’s… club music, things you can play in a club to cause spontaneous body movement or clear a dance floor quickly…

You have quite a legacy over here, and Idjut Boys have a history with Oslo, going back to the Skansen years. What first brought you out here?

Yes Skansen was very fun, lovely Olle Abstract used to bring us a lot and then the dream team of Pal Strangefruit and his royal highness Princess Thomas and with our great friend Rune Lindbaek at the super-fun Nomaden… we had some fantastic times here, also came a fair bit with our friend Kevin McKay of Glasgow underground.  We practiced the art of the savage hangover here… fond memories of coming direct from America to Tromso wearing a Jean Jacket and Converse in 10 inches of welcoming snow…we travelled extensively and Norway was always fun.

What kept bringing you and Conrad back, and working with Norwegian factions like Smalltown Supersound?

We met Joakim from Smalltown Supersound through Rune, I believe. It was great fit for us, a very good person and an absolutely open book musically. We hope to do more together.

And why do you think Idjut Boys’ music and your DJ sets resonate with Oslo audiences?

No idea if our DJ sets do…we play absolutely in the moment, neither of us know what is happening next, nothing planned, just call and response with people, and when that gets going in a fluid way it can be very nice…we’ve been lucky to have some times in a wide spectrum of places and here was one for sure. We also, if allowed, play a pretty open spectrum of music, rooted in some things…. it’s possibly easier to move things around with two people playing because you get to step back and enjoy and observe and then select. We grew up going to clubs and listening to music in an era when things were much less genre specific… one benefit of being old bastards!

Rune Lindbæk mentioned that he had some of your (or maybe it was Conrad’s) record collection at his house in Lillestrøm. How did he end up with your records?

Yep, Rune has 56 large Boxes of my records in his lock up… it will be a voyage of joy to go through them… free record shopping! I shipped them when we were in my partner Linn’s flat without room… it was a fair lot to move, I need to make room for them at home. Thanks for stimulating that thought.

Did you get them back?

No I will fucking get them back! I speak regularly to senior Lindbaek and I’m fairly certain they’ve not been used in a Frisbee championship just yet.

Idjut Boys, it sounds like something an old Jamaican lady might shout at you when you’re acting the fool. I’ve always wanted to know, what’s the story behind the name?

Close…’cha…you rasclat, idjut bwoy!’ Yes, it is derived from inter friend banter; we used to say that to each other regularly for various offences/acts of rank stupidity and abject failure in the pursuit of sensible behaviour.

It started from the DJ booth and a club night, to a label, but what brought you and Conrad together in the first place and what kind of music were you bonding over in the beginning?

We used to go to Tonka with Harvey, Rev, Choci, Markey Mark at the Zap in Brighton and various gatherings… acid house was happening, then Harvey’s club Moist and loads of other things that were going on… so I guess you know all things good…house, disco, pop…we shared a flat, went out far too much and bought way too many records… great times.

We were bonding over constantly pissing our neighbour underneath off with music through the floor. He eventually offered us studio time to cease and desist from playing music… his nice girlfriend used to run into our flat to offer us ‘firm instruction’ and I think his offer was integral to preserving their long term relationship… we were young and stupid as opposed to old and stupid…

Those first records you guys made, there was nothing out there that sounded like that at the time, but I’ve read there was a small dedicated scene with you guys and people like Harvey in London at the time. Why do you think that stuff is still relevant today and outlasted a lot of the more popular stuff from that time?

No idea about any of that…we like certain things there were a lot of people around that knew each other and hung out, which helps. I have no idea if that music is relevant to people now, but age is irrelevant with music to me, I love for example Chicago house still, many of the records are raw and imperfect, but they are human and emotive to me still. The reason they hold up is they were made with a certain spirit and without a book of rules perhaps. All very deep and earnest sounding, but I’m with their church rather than the ‘what’s hip today let’s make some of that, I am a musical Cameleon massiv’… Idjut Boys is a no rules vibration I believe.

How do you think your music has evolved since then?

Let’s see!

What’s the secret for making a successful career in music like yours work for so long?

Random luck, a true love of music and people, and this choice rather than delivering Pizza is how we continue.

 You’ve started a resident night at Ingensteds. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Finn, great guy asked me… I enjoy it, it’s different, as in it’s not a dedicated musical crowd, but nice young people, and they have played good music in there. One of my favourite DJs always is Pal Strangefruit. Brilliant DJ. He plays there. Have you heard of him???

Name sounds familiar…You’ve had club nights in Norway in the past. What are some of the challenges and advantages that you’ve experienced with hosting a club night in Oslo as opposed to London?

I’d like to play everywhere here, but I possibly need to engage in social media and networking and release 14 records a week more than sitting at home playing with machines and attending to my youths entertainment needs!

Do you feel you have to play differently when you play in Oslo and Norway?

Depends where it is and sound… I don’t really play club music if it’s not on a decent system because having done that a few times, the difference is very apparent and fundamentally it sounds left of shit. People generally let you know and dictate that, if you are comfortable then you’ll play with a free spirit.

Lastly, tell us a bit about this upcoming DJ set with Daniel Gude. What are you packing for the night?

I met Daniel when I did a gig at Villa recently with my lovely friend the mighty somewhat musically genius Mr Todd Terjenator… he was ‘security’ asked me a couple of times whether my enthusiastic next door neighbour was being a pain in the ass…I really should have asked him to press the ‘eject button’! … Anyway he told me he had a night, and low and behold he very kindly asked me along.

I don’t remember exactly what I played with Terje, but he said what I played would fit in and I like the idea of what he explained his night is about… it’s a mixture of much of what I’ve played and always play, old and new.

I look forward to it; looks like some great guest have been through. I have no idea what I’ll pack other than too much… some nice music and I trust I will get the ‘eject button’ applied if I offend, confuse or stimulate an uprising…what a great idea, I don’t have many of those…

Album of the Week: Efdemin – New Atlantis

Phillip Sollmann uncovers new worlds on “New Atlantis.” It’s his first record since releasing the seminal LP “Decay” in 2014 on Dial records and it finds the artist at something of a musical crossroads. Sollmann’s capacity for bold experimental electronic music and the functional finally converge on the dance floor, as two distinct aspects of the artist’s work find some harmonious orbit in relation to the other on his latest LP.

“New Atlantis” finds the artist stretched between the work he does under his eponymous moniker and the dance floor creations of his Efdemin alias and for the first time, we find Sollmann channelling some of those avant garde electronic practises of records like “Something is missing“ through his Efdemin nom de plume. The result is a record that functions on both a corporeal and a cognitive dimension, alluring in its sonic design and purposeful in its pragmatic rhythms.

“New Atlantis” is uncharted territory for Sollmann as Efdemin, and it finds the artist dividing his time between the introspective subtleties of sound art and the bold, challenging nature of the modern dance floor. It’s quite a long way off from the focussed sound of ”Decay” as it embarks over a series of tracks that shift remarkably in dynamic design over the course of the record. From the serene droning ambience of tracks like “Oh Lovely Appearance of death” and “At The Stranger’s House“ to the full frontal assault of a track like “Black Sun,” there are two distinct moods that emerge across this record.

When Efdemin trains his sights on the dance floor, he gets raucous with formidable rhythm structures and dark sultry atmospheres clinging to the droning Techno arrangements. There’s something impulsive, more urgent to tracks like “A land Unknown” than we’ve witnessed before in Efdemin’s work. Favouring a notable progressive slant throughout, Sollmann travels great distances on minimalist foundations that waver little from their theme, encouraging the artist to some heady heights. It’s at its most impressive on the extensive title track as lysergic bass lines and droning sine waves weave a sporadic thread through a stoic four-four percussive arrangement.

Through fifteen minutes of restrained improvisation that steady beat goads Sollmann through some expressive melodic modulations that exporting the listener to some intoxicating heights on the pulse of the dance floor. It’s a masterclass in controlled extemporisation from Sollmann and a serious weapon in any DJ bag. Were it for that track alone, the LP would be a worthy addition to any record collection, but there’s so much more to “New Atlantis” than the appeal of its obvious hit. From erratic sonic whirlpool of “Temple” to the listless melodies of “The Sound House” there are many levels to Efdemin’s latest LP.

Efdemin’s sound is still very much in effect on this record, but we truly get the true scope of Sollmann’s extensive voice as an artist on this record. Those things that made “Decay” such a great album are still there, but it also opens up into a more progressive dimension, consolidating the two aspects of Sollmann’s artistic approach on one record.

 

*Efdemin plays Frædag this week  at Jaeger.

The weird and unreal world of Mr. Scruff

Mr Scruff is an uncanny presence in the DJ booth, both in form and spirit. His quirky sense of humour and delecteable musical apetitites has made him a prominent presence in DJ booths all over the world with his innate effort to entertain and enlighten, both enthusiasts and the serious heads.

A decent cuppa

“There’ll always be nerds and trainspotters, but you don’t need to have a massive knowledge of all the internal workings to enjoy tea” he told the skinny in an interview from 2014. It’s no secret, he does enjoy that most hallowed of English traditions, a cup of tea. There hasn’t been a great moment in modern English history without a brew going in the background, and Mr  Scruff is no exception. When he’s playing all night sets, his drink of choice? A cup of tea, naturally.

His obsession with tea is as old as the man, but it came to the public’s attention when he started doing all night club sets in Manumission in 1994. “They had a weird cabaret lounge where I would play all sorts of music,” he remembers in a Resident Advisor interview, “and at five in the morning I just had the guy behind the bar make me a cup of tea.” It had an air of the teetotaling Northern Soul nights for Carthy and when it came time to create his own night, it was a prerequisite that he had all his creature comforts at hand and that went for his teapot too.

“I like drinking tea in clubs, so I’m going to sell tea,” he insists and when he started his own club nights at Band on the Wall he set up a little kiosk in the second room “as a space where you can get peace of quiet and have a sit down. (Which is going to make people less likely to stand and talk on the dance floor.)” A cup of tea, a “nice bit of carpet and some comfy slippers” is all Mr. Scruff requires to set off on one of his marathon feats of music endurance at his “Keep it Unreal” club nights, which has been successfully going for the last 20 years in Manchester.

Commercial success of a fish monger

It was that seminal LP of the same name, released in 1999, that had made the DJ and producer a household name. His obsession with fish and his penchant for obscure samples, created a masterpiece in “Keep it Unreal” in part attributed to the commercial success of “Get a move on”. Recognise that song? Even if you were unaware of Mr. Scruff, you would’ve heard that song on the myriad of advertisements that use it; it was especially popular with vehicle manufacturers for obvious reasons.

“Keep it Unreal” is a modern classic LP in the electronic music cannon. Mention “eating fish” to anyone that was in their late teens and early twenties in the nineties, and watch their eyes bulge and tail fin twitch as they are transported back to an LP that eptimozises a carefree youth. From the Mary Anne Hobbs introduction of the LP, the standout singles like “Spandex Man” and “Get a move on” to the more ludicrous tracks like “Shanty Town,” which samples some obscure children’s television programme about whales, the record is an icon and sits there alongside DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing” and The Avalanches “Since I left you” as one of the seminal sampling LP’s of a generation.  

It was an LP that cemented Mr. Scruff’s peculiar fascination with the sea and its animals, and although he said it was merely a passing fancy in interviews, it’s a theme that would crop up countless times after. His next LP, Trouser Jazz, contained track titles like “Shrimp” and “Ahoy there” while the LP after that was called “Ninja Tuna”… he even married a girl named Trout! Andrea (Trout) Ahimie-Carthy to be fair, an accomplished DJ and selector in her own right.

Keep figging deep for the obscure

Mr. Scruff’s appeal as a producer is closely linked to his own expert skills in the booth. Coming into his own as a producer during the height of trip hop and breakbeat, Carthy’s musical prowess in the studio was very much dependent on his deep musical knowledge and vast and extensive record collection, which I found can contain some obscure pieces.

“Heh heh, I found a well stupid record sampled by Mr Scruff for his ‘Fish’ tune off of ‘Keep It Unreal’,” exclaims one MPC forum user to drive my point home. “It’s called ‘The Old Man of Loch Nagar’ and is a story somehow related to Prince Charles, narrated by the main man, Peter Ustinov!!!” How it’s related to Prince Charles, is unknown but it goes a long way in  explaining something of the self-professed “geek” that is Andrew Carthy. “Now it’s one thing being a geek,” says long-time collaborator and MC, Kwasi Asante in a Dekmantel Selectors interview, but “to wave that geek flag and totally admit I’m a geek as well… it goes beyond meticulous.”

Carthy’s astute musical knowledge goes further than a single musical scene or genre. His eclectic, almost OCD digging practises are broad, yet very esoteric and stems from what he was “doing in the 90’s, playing a lot of different specialists scenes,” according to an interview in Nailer 9. Doing all kinds of different nights from reggae to soul and funk, gave Carthy a very extensive scope of club culture’s musical landscape in the UK. More importantly it showed him “how many different scenes and cultures are actually interlinked” and plied him with that innate ability  “to present them at any given time in a club.” That’s why his sets are always expansive, but concise.

This is what makes Mr. Scruff a cut above the rest when it comes to the club night, and it’s never simply about the man itself. In a very Mr. Scruff self-effacing fashion he told the people at Dekmantel; “you don’t want rows of people staring at you, because there’s not a whole lot to look at… there’s a bald bloke putting some records on. The hard work has been put into the record.”

A python-esque wit

For those that require that visual stimulation, Carthy has a solution: “I don’t tend to jump around on stage, waving my arms in the air;” he told the Skinny, “my cartoons can do that for me.” Like fishy obsessions or his love of a brew, Carthy’s cartoons have been a significant part of Mr. Scruff’s appeal. From the record sleeves to something banal like explaining the GDPR rules on his website, Carthy uses his bulbous stick men to add a satirical depth to the musical hedonist side of the artist and DJ.

“When I started putting records out I just happened to design the sleeves,” he told the Jaeger blog, in the past. “The silly cartoons seemed to work really well and that humour in the music comes out very much in my cartoons.” There’s a very definitive English humour in this, very similar  to the kind of humour in the fish references and samples he uses in his music. He calls it a “surreal, Python-esque humour” in the Skinny interview and admits that it’s “always been there.”

It creates an “imaginary world” around the music. “I spend a lot of time in my own little bubble anyway, so I think they live in that universe with me. There’s a humour and mischievous side to the drawings that provides a perfect illustration for my music.“ It’s something that his been extending to his Keep it Unreal nights and his travelling shows, like the one coming to Jaeger tomorrow (obvious plug). “It helps to keep quite a light hearted atmosphere at the gigs,” he explained in the Jaeger interview. “It’s about not taking yourself too seriously and creating a relaxed atmosphere with no unnecessary politics. We’re all just  gonna come together and have a good time…. And because this is deep music, it also serves a function in getting people into some quality music, without having to compromise.”

And that’s Mr. Scruff, getting people into some serious music with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. There’s never a dry moment on the floor with Mr. Scruff, as he brings this light-hearted approach to all aspects of his music and DJing, and as Keep it Unreal turns twenty this year, he’s certainly proven it’s a recipe that works… we better put the kettle on.

Tama Sumo av Reider Engesbak

Vi reposter en sak ifra BLIKK av Reidar Engesbak som har skrevet om Torsdagens event under Pride! Vi gleder oss til Tama Sumo som senest gjestet oss under Ostgut Ton Zehn for et par år siden. I kjellern er det SO Reunion med Fride & Vichy.

Tyske Tama Sumo er en av verdens beste house djs og resident på Panorama Bar og Berghain i Berlin. Torsdag 20. juni serverer den lesbiske platesnurreren berlinsk feststemning på Jaeger i Oslo.

Klubben Jaeger har en rekke skeive djs på plakaten under Oslo Pride. En av dem er Tama Sumo, en hardtarbeidene og høyt respektert dj som, når hun ikke spiller i hjembyen Berlin og på legendariske Berghain, farter verden rundt for å spre gode vibrasjoner gjennom musikk.

Tama Sumo er gift med Lerato Khathi, kjent som dj Lakuti, og de er begge profilerte skeive kvinner som ikke redd for å ta tak i verken den mannsdominerte klubbkulturen og homofobien som fortsatt finnes der. Etter skytetragedien på klubben Pulse i Orlando, USA i 2016 signerte paret et opprop som advarte om islamofobi i kjølvannet av tragedien.

Et åpent sinn

Blikk møtte Tama Sumo da hun spilte på klubben The Villa i Oslo i 2007 for å snakke om klubbkultur og det skeive Berlin.

– Jeg begynte å spille plater i 1993 på en homobar som heter Drama i Kreuzberg i Berlin. Det var en av mine beste venner som tvang meg til å begynne å spille, fordi han likte det jeg spilte i private sammenhenger veldig godt, sa Tama Sumo den gang.
Tama Sumo er åpen lesbe og henter mye inspirasjon fra sitt eget miljø, blant annet Panorama Bar.

Men hadde hun spilt annerledes hvis hun var hetero?

– Jeg er ikke sikker på hvor mye seksuell orientering spiller inn. Men jeg er en veldig homo-sosial lesbe og har spilt mye på homoklubber, i tillegg til blandete technoklubber. Jeg tror at vi som homoer i større grad må tenke på alternativer, eller stille spørsmål ved det som er ansett som «normalt». Kanskje det er den resolutte inkluderingen av alt som er annerledes, og at man alltid har et åpent sinn, som er typisk for settene jeg spiller. Jeg håper i hvert fall det.

Tyskland, og spesielt Berlin, har fostret mange anerkjente kvinnelige djs, som Ellen Allien, Miss Kittin og Eva Cazal. I samme liga finnes også Tama Sumo, og hun utelukker ikke tanken på at kjønn spiller en rolle når det gjelder kunstnerisk utrykk.

– Hvis det å bruke intuisjon, fremfor kunnskap og teknikk, er synonymt med kjønn så mener jeg at det har en stor betydning for hvordan jeg spiller. Motivasjonen min for å spille er å komme i kontakt med publikum. Kommunisere nonverbalt og leke med forskjellige stemninger og atmosfærer. Teknikk og ny teknologi kommer i andre rekke. Jeg har heller ikke en fast plan eller struktur klar på forhånd før jeg spiller. Jeg vil at alt skal skje underveis.

Tama Sumo, torsdag 20. juni, Jaeger, Grensen 9, Oslo.  

 

Album of the week: Matmos – Plastic Anniversary

Drew Daniels and M.C (Martin) Schmidt hardly approach music in any traditional sense of the artform. Since their first LP “Matmos” they’ve been a unique musical anomaly in the field of electronic music. Primarily relying on sampled found sounds, based around a single concept, Matmost have, for the last 20-odd years, have taken music to the extreme outer edges of Techno and music concrete, engaging with their chosen artform on a conceptual level.

Albums informed by singular concepts, draped in several layers that can unravel onto various different plateaus engaging with their subject, has seen Matmos approach themes like queer icons, surgery, the American civil war, telepathy and the sonic curiosities of a Whrilpool Ultimate Care II washing machine. There’s a palpable sense of humour in the abstract language of Matmos’ music that eludes many artists working in the same field, and what they achieve through the conceptual framework, they are able to communicate through amiable and engaging executions; something not easily achieved through this form of experimental music.

A married couple as well as musical collaborators, Daniels and Schmidt use Matmos to breach the chasm that exists between their unique personalities through their superior intellect and their marvelous wit, using music as their chosen form of expression. On their latest record “Plastic Anniversary,” what started out as a celebration of their 25th anniversary turned to the subject of plastic, and like always there are several layers to untangle behind the concept of the LP, with an execution rooted in the avant garde of electronic music.

From the decaying bird, revealing a stomach full of plastic on the back of the record sleeve; the couple kissing behind a riot shield on the inner sleeve; the format of the record itself; the process of making the record; the sounds that permeate through the record; and of course the many associations the word plastic conjure; this might be Matmos’ most densely focussed record to date. Using only samples of sounds made by plastics, from something obvious like banging empty containers to the more obscure sounds of synthetic human fatty tissue, Matmos introduces us to the vast sonic possibilities of plastic.

There’s a sonorous quality to this music, even with the absence of the human voice, where hollow percussive sounds and wheezing harmonic movements play affectionality on the sounds of traditional instruments, but add a level of dissonance, that relay something that is quirky and curious at times and uncomfortable in others. It’s especially uncomfortable on “Thermoplastic Riot Shield,” which was created using an Albuquerque police riot shield, an object laden with its own associations. It’s the same shield from the inner sleeve from which behind Drew and Martin engage in a kiss, and in the spirit of the protester from Tiananmen square facing that tank, or the flower in the barrel of a gun, they disarm the object from its violent connotations, re-appropriating it as a form of creative expression in much the same way that they re-appropriate a sample in their music.

There is one theme that is very prominent throughout this entire record however, and although Matmos only make an obvious reference to it on the final track, “Plastisphere” the all-consuming threat that plastic waste has on this planet hangs over “Plastic Anniversary” like a malevolent shadow, which Matmos communicate through dissonant melodic structures and obscure sound design. Even the joviality of “Breaking Bread” or “Fanfare for Polyethylene Waste Containers” aren’t completely devoid of that uncomfortable truth that hides behind the material source of their creation.

Although these prominent themes are unavoidable in the context of the LP, it does little to overshadow the music. This is probably, Matmos’ most accessible record to date. It’s as if technology has finally caught up to their vision for their music, and tracks like “Fanfare for Polyethylene Waste Containers” and the title track do well to bridge that gap between avant garde experimentalism and popular music. As a Matmos record it’s never going to be an easy listening record, but for the first time I feel you won’t need to be a fan or a music technology nerd to really appreciate this record.  

Group Therapy with Carlo & Selma

“We will not tolerate any kind of discrimination, racism, sexism, hatred, misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia, xenophobia.” These are the house rules, in no uncertain terms, at Copenhagen club night Group Therapy. A young club night, Group Therapy has been running since October 2018 at Ved Siden Av, but in their brief existence they’ve carved out a harmonious musical space for Copenhagen’s “queer” club goers.

With five parties behind them thus far, resident DJs and promoters Carlo & Selma, Frederik Tollund and Morten Mechlenborg Nørulf, have been working closely with the venue to offer a safe clubbing space in the city for Copenhagen’s LGBTQI community and those that respect those institutions. In a city that is dominated by brawny Techno, much like most of Europe is today, they offer an alternative clubbing lifestyle with a more diverse music policy and some fundamental rules that discourage intolerant behaviour on the dance floor and encourage a diverse audience.

Carlo & Selma, an Italian-Norwegian DJ duo, are two of the four key figures behind the effort and have made a sincere impression in Copenhagen’s nightlife. Carlo (Molino) & Selma (Skov Høye) have been championing the ideology of their Group Therapy nights from the booth since they first joined forces 5 years ago. Selma, originally from Tromsø and Carlo from Venice, met in Copenhagen when his flatmates hosted a party for Selma after she came back from a student exchange programme in South Africa. “But Carlo wasn’t there,” says Selma over a telephone call and I believe I can hear a smile through her words.

Carlo had moved to Copenhagen from Berlin for studies, but stayed because he loved the city and the “music scene wasn’t as saturated as it was in Berlin.” Coincidentally, Carlo was in Berlin when he was supposed to be hosting the party for Selma, but “he had booked the ticket the wrong way.” Fate had prevailed however, and Carlo would make it home in time to catch Selma rummaging through his records. They instantly bonded over choice cuts from Efdemin, I:Cube and a couple of obscure white label edits and it was Carlo that proposed that they should “start Djing together.” It turned out to be more than just a passing, party fancy and “a couple of days later” Carlo & Selma “picked up on the idea” cementing their friendship and their work together.

Their “musical tastes have evolved a bit since then” according to Selma, but it’s always been “quite an interesting combination” where there’s always been ”some overlap and some divergence” between them. With individual eclectic backgrounds Carlo & Selma’s musical tastes converged on House music but quickly expanded beyond that into Disco and more recently break beat genres of music. “There’s no strict criterion in what sound we want to play,” remarks Selma; “if we can envision it in our set and build a story around it, we’ll include it in our set.” Carlo suggests it was through “percussion” that they found a common ground and Selma agrees that it is “a key part” in the way the play together.

After establishing their “sound” in Copenhagen they have started disseminating it all over Europe, playing places like Salon Zur Wilden Renate, Berlin and Dalston Superstore in London, but it’s back in the Danish capital where they’ve been making their most severe impression on clubland as the resident DJs for Group Therapy. Carlo & Selma stop short of calling Group Therapy a queer night, even though it has been coined as such by patrons and the media. “People recognise that it is a queer night,” says Selma and she doesn’t feel that they need to re-iterate that. Even though they “choose not to use the term “queer to serve as a branding purpose,” elucidates Carlo over an email later, they “do make sure that Group Therapy has a queer vibe” and they do that in several ways according to Selma.

“One of the things we work with is to create a safer place.” They do that “by collaborating with organisations such as Club Mafia;” who install non-security staff on the dance floor to make sure that the house rules are respected. “If people have an unpleasant experience they can approach someone that is not a professional security guard,”  explains Selma, and that way they can ensure that the event and the space is free from any people “behaving in ways that are unpleasant for other people.” Another way they instill the “queer vibe” at Ved Siden Av is through “giving the right importance to spaces like the dark room” according to Carlo. “It’s either us, our friends or Club Mafia, checking that the room isn’t used as a chill out area but for what it is: a space for exploring yourself and your sexuality.” And even though this might not be a natural occurrence in what is a predominantly mixed crowd, Carlo insists; “it is necessary in a city where the concept is not very common outside of strictly gay cruising venues.”

What’s striking is that there are often more girls and women” at these events says Selma, and even though gay clubs have been implementing these kinds of rules since time immoriam, if more “not strictly gay” clubs take the same actions Selma believes it “makes it more interesting.”  But why in an age where information is so readily available and everybody should understand and acknowledge club culture’s gay roots, is it still necessary for a a club night like Group Therapy to impose these practises?

“I definitely agree that it should ideally not be necessary,” says Selma via email later, “but I also feel that sadly in nightlife an awareness of the roots of club culture and the ideal standards for how to behave towards each other is something people still need to be reminded of.” Selma’s personal experiences and those of her friends “that stand out from the crowd” has shown that clubs today still “foster a bro-y culture.” For Selma, “even just as a woman I can find it annoying and tiring to go out to places where a large proportion of the audience is only there to score, rather than enjoy the music and have a good communal experience.”  

For these reasons Carlo & Selma feel it’s a necessary evil to set these rules in place for their Group Therapy nights. “Stating such guidelines explicitly can moreover be a help to not only educate clubgoers,” explains Selma further, “but also to ensure that our audience know that we take these issues seriously.” That’s also why there collaboration with organisations like Club Mafia is so vital to Group Therapy. “We hope that the sum or our efforts will be that people feel safer and more inclined to be themselves,” but she realises that it will always be “an ongoing dialogue between all the actors involved, including guests, staff (including doormen and other security), promoters and so on.“

It’s this communal spirit and attitude that Carlo & Selma bring with them wherever they go as DJs and this openness and inclusivity is something they perpetuate through their selections too. Although they’re launchpad will always be House music, they make sure that they create “a space for playing Disco,” but they’ve also had nights which “are very breakbeat, electro focussed.” Their musical selections are as diverse as their audiences with their selections  instinctively tuned to the “vibe.” For their upcoming set at Jaeger Selma tells me they will bring “a lot of percussion with Disco and maybe Pop” with Carlo adding; “we’re definetely bringing some gay anthems!”

There might be a few of their own edits in there too as they embark on the next stage of their career together as producers, but for the moment that remains the reserve of their own DJ sets. “The fun thing about DJing,” says Selma “is that you don’t have to release music to play it out.” They’re main pursuit as latent producers has been to “enhance tracks that we already have,” but Carlo is adamant that is certainly in the pipeline and he has no plans on leaving Copenhagen exactly for that reason.

Pure Imagination with Dave Harrington

Life after Darkside has been a period of intense creativity for Mr. Dave Harrington. After he and Nicolas Jaar amicably disbanded, the guitarist, composer and producer has channelled all his efforts into the Dave Harrington Group. The group is a studio project through which the eponymous Harrington collaborates with musicians and producers from the world of Jazz and electronica in an improvised format revised and refined in the studio context. In 2016 the Dave Harrington Group released their debut LP, “Become Alive,” and shortly after the group coalesced around a few fundamental personnel form the recording session into a live band.

Beyond the tour the Dave Harrington Group consolidated further with “key collaborators” Andrew Fox and Samer Ghadry forming around the central figure in the group. In this formation they hit the studio again and in 2018 Dave Harrington Group released their sophomore LP, “Pure Imagination, No country,” establishing the sound of the group while it continues to evolve as Dave Harrington defines the sound of the project through his guitar and the entourage of musicians that travel through the band. “Pure Imagination, No country” includes musical dignitaries like Lars Horntveth, Will Shore, and Shahzad Ismaily as well as that key rhythm section made up of Andrew Fox and Samer Ghadry.

Channeling that experience of touring and playing live into this record, Dave Harrington Group favour an uninhibited approach on “Pure Imagination, No Country” as they capture that raw intensity and power of a live band in the studio. Nick Murphy emphasises this energy through post production, which on their previous LP, favoured a slicker, more refined approach. Dave Harrington’s guitar takes more of a central role on the LP, where it appears mostly unprocessed in its natural state taking the stage front and centre in the production across the album.

Dave Harrington Group creates a dense tapestry through adding layer upon layer, which amalgamates into serene dronning melodies, punctuated by sharp staccato bursts as musicians improvise around set pieces. It’s never improvised for the sake of extemporisation as erratic modulations to the extreme borders of jazz burst and decay into fully fledged forms that build and subside through the arc of the album. There’s a narrative to “Pure Imagination, No Country” that builds and concludes in the sublime rendition of “Pure Imagination” similarly to the way that “Become Alive” did, but because of the bold sonic strokes that dominate the new LP, it reaches even higher and more raucous crescendos than it ever did before.

Dave Harrington and his group will be bringing this LP on tour this summer with a stop at Jaeger scheduled for the Natt programme during Piknik i Parken. It gave us a reason to get in touch with Mr. Harrington to follow up on our interview from two years ago with him and talk about the new LP, the tour, playing 120 gigs a year, what kind of impression Darkside continues to make on his work and much more in this extensive Q&A with the artist.  

*Dave Harrington Group play Retro this Thursday. 

Hello Dave. The last time you were in Oslo was with the release of your last album, and now you’re back with a new LP, Pure Imagination, No Country, and I want to get to that LP shortly, but what have been some of your personal highlights between?

I’ve been busy in the years since the last album gigging and collaborating across different scenes in NYC, and have been very lucky to be playing with some of my favorite local musicians from the jazz/jam/experimental world here in town. There are too many names to list but as an example a recent highlight was performing at a benefit concert at Brooklyn Bowl with Billy Martin, Joe Russo, Steven Bernstein, Karl Berger, Peter Apfelbaum, Marc Ribot, Stuart Bogie, Jonathan Goldberger, Oteil Burbridge and more – all in one night!

I’ve also been scoring a few independent films and collaborating with Nick Murphy as a producer on his new record.

Your usually involved in quite a few projects at the same time, but it seems that now you have you focussed all your attention on the Dave Harrington Group. Is that the case?

DHG is like homemade for me – it’s a musical place with key collaborators (Samer Ghadry and Andrew Fox) that allows me to explore my current musical interests and directions, like an ever-evolving laboratory.  That being said it’s true – I’m also always working on other projects!

What particularly did you take away from the Darkside experience that helped establish your career as a solo artist?

Darkside was an incredibly inspirational experience, I learned so much about making records and stretching the bounds of improvising and using electronics and fusing that would to the jazz world I grew up studying was invaluable to my development as a solo artist.  Being in Darkside was the beginning of my journey towards really finding my personal voice as a guitarist.

 

Become Alive came out shortly after Darkside went on hiatus, so your name was still intrinsically linked to that project. Now that you have had some distance from that project, how have you experienced the reception between Become Alive and Pure Imagination, No Country?

Since the last record I feel I’ve become associated with other scenes and collectives and musicians so now there are people who know me from Darkside but also through my connection to Nublu and Ilhan Ersahin, and my ongoing collaboration with Joe Russo, and my more experimental work with people like Brian Chase, Briggan Krauss, Exo-Tech, and projects like The Dream Machine. Which is to say, I think and hope people will see this record with a wider lens and more context about the various influences that went into the making of it.

I believe this new LP was a direct result of the Become Alive tour, and playing with a band. The result is a record that sounds more organic (for lack of a better adjective) than the last. Can you tell me a little bit about how this album came together?

The album was very much built off of the way that the core band of Fox/Ghadry and also Will Epstein approaches playing Become Alive on tour.  Therefore there is more focus and shared language and in the nature of the playing and the improvising as the result of time spent exploring the music together on the road and in the studio.

Who were the band members involved in the process of making it and how did they influence or dictate the way the record eventually sounded?

Samer Ghadry and Andrew Fox make up the core rhythm section and drive the ship.  The influence of a few key interlocutors added surprise and some welcome chaos to the proceedings – these people were Jake Falby, Lars Horntveth, Will Shore, and Shahzad Ismaily.

The guitar takes more of a central role on Pure Imagination, No Country, and it’s very much present from a listening perspective in its raw, minimally processed form. What encouraged and influenced the way you used your instrument on the album?

Gigs gigs gigs.  That was my mantra after the last record.  Not just touring but playing in different contexts in NYC all the time. The guitar became my primary mode of expression and I wanted to represent that direction mode of communication on record as best as possible.  I haven’t been on tour since the last album but to illustrate: between the summer of 2017 when we were working on the album and when the album came out at the beginning of this year I played about 120 gigs.

Were there any abstract ideas that informed the album; some singular sub-conscious thought or feeling that served as a totem pole throughout the recording process of the album, that you think might have influenced the album?

The album was about improvising and communicating – musically, psychically, electronically – with no limit, no boundary, infinite possibility.

You mentioned “conceptual ideas” in another interview when talking about the underpinning structure of the recording process. Can you divulge on what these conceptual ideas were?

It’s really the same answer as above: a commitment to the freedom of improvising and the total anarchic abandon that can come from that commitment.

Like Become Alive there’s very little of a sense of tradition in your music, like your always pushing the boundaries of known conventions. And even though Pure Imagination, No Country is rooted in the traditional construct of a Jazz band, it very rarely panders to tropes. In what aspects of your musical training/experience do you believe this is rooted?

I was encouraged by my teachers at a young age to study and learn the canon and the classic structures of jazz while also stretching those boundaries and exploding them: when I studied with Kelvyn Bell at the Harlem School of the Arts as a teenager he taught the jazz ensemble everything from Ellington and Monk to Arthur Blythe and his own odd-meter funk compositions influenced by his work with Steve Coleman and MBase.  My composition teacher at that same school, Daniel Bernard Roumain, was on an artistic mission at that time to bring hip-hop into classical concert composition and that also had a huge impact on my understanding of musical synthesis and the possibility for porousness between any form of music.

 

Besides “Pure Imagination” (a cover of the Gene Wilder song from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), is there any other musical references that you tried to incorporate in the sound of the album?

Too many to name, but, as always Miles Davis’ electric period and ECM Records (specifically from the 70s and 80s) are very important touchstones for me.  And of course drone metal.

“Pure Imagination” concludes the album in this very serene moment, similarly to the way you concluded Become Alive with “All I can Do”. It suggests a narrative arc that flows through your album concepts. How important is progression for you in the context of the LP during post production, and what was your intentions in that arc on Pure Imagination, No country?

I like a journey on a record, I like it to be welcoming, but also challenging, and I seem to always want to end on a sweet note – I’m a sucker for a gentle closing track.

I have to ask you about the live show. On the last tour you had to re-envision the finished album for the stage.  With this one it almost works the other way around, as it came from the context of a live band. How will this upcoming live show at Jaeger be different from the last tour?

We’re still figuring that out!  In a way, the way this band works, we’re always figuring that out, always trying to evolve but doing so in the context of deeper and deeper ensemble communication. This band will be streamlined as a kind of deconstructed classic organ trio with synths taking the place of organ and with electronics incorporated along the to create density and atmosphere.  But ultimately it will be about showcasing an even more focused ensemble interplay.

There are still a lot of layers on Pure Imagination, No Country. How have you had to adapt the sound of the record of the LP for the stage, if at all?

The album is a jumping off point – a set of structures and sounds that we don’t aim to “re-create” but rather to deconstruct and reconstruct through improvisation.

And that is all the questions I have Dave. Is there anything you’d like to add?

I can’t wait to come back to Jaeger.  We had such a blast playing last time I’m excited to do it all over again!!

Album of the week: Central – Om Dans

A voice arriving out of nowhere says “Wake Up” and before the wispy echo has the time to dissolve completely into the surrounding atmosphere, a kick drum speeds by at a 128 beats per minute into the “Doing This” as Central makes his debut on the long player format. Natal Zaks (Central) has been a prolific recording artist since 2014 with EPs like the “political dance” series for Dekmantel bringing his enigmatic House cuts to the fore, while he and his brother (DJ Sports) have been  cultivating a formidable scene around their hometown Århus in Denmark through their e labels Help Recordings and Regelbau.

As a producer Central’s musical musings live beyond pre-defined parameters, but has always enjoyed a close relationship with House music and the dance floor, which he perpetuates on his latest offering, “Om Dans.” Arranging the LP across what is essentially two 12″ with 2 or  3 tracks a side, Central hardly breaks ranks with what he’s been doing across EPs and cassettes these past years. Breaking in the LP with a hefty 4-4 kick he establishes his intentions and besides the brief sonorous interludes of “The Sleep” and  “T.E.M” he wavers little from the dominant presence of a steady beat, that he swathes in effervescent layers of polyrhythmic percussion and airy synthesisers.

Central’s productions on “Om Dans” cover  the entire frequency spectrum, with an undulating sub bass travelling through each track, hi-hats sparkling in the upper ether and incredibly narrow toms and snares bubbling around the hi mids, perfectly orchestrated to get the best out of a big sound system. Central has never been a producer to pander to popular tropes, and once again on this LP he seems to combine familiar elements from the past and the present, and make it his own through what is a very distinct sound on this record. There’s a kind of clinical minimalism to these tracks, but a superficial one, that if you delve deeper into the tracks you’ll find layer upon layer, creating a dense subterranean void behind each track.

It’s when Central completely abandons a regular form especially on tracks like “Fresh+,” “T.E.M” and “Upward Motion” where this LP is at its most interesting in the context of an LP, and it adds a little something more for the more adventurous listener, without scaring off  dedicated fans of Central’s work. “Om Dans” is an electronic dance music album like we haven’t heard much in recent times, where dance floor cuts intermingle with ambient interludes and a radio-friendly edit for the masses. This LP is more in the spirit of classic records like Robert Hood’s minimal nation or a Theo Parrish’s “First Floor,” where it’s the type of record that you could put on after a night out, to wind the evening down, while at the same time trying to hold on to that elusive feeling on the dance floor.

The Cut with Filter Musikk – Börft Records special

Every so often a single individual skips the border betweenSweden and Norway with a box. Its origins, located somewhere deep in the enclave of Karlskrona is little more than a mysterious postcode, and besides the conspicuous shape it holds very little clue to its contents. It arrives at Filter Musikk Oslo, usually hand delivered by an acquaintance, and exchanges hands with little standing on ceremony. Roland Lifjell knows what it is, but he savours it, biding his time until the moment is just right to release a new bunch of Börft records onto the shelves at Filter Musikk and ultimately Oslo’s DJ scene.  

Börft records get hand-delivered at Filter Musikk, and it’s a tradition that harks back to the origins of Roland’s tenure at Filter Musikk. The personal bond that these two fine institutions share across a border has installed Börft records in the subconscious of every DJ in the Norwegian capital, making it one of the city’s most sought after and respected labels while Filter Musikk has become something of a flagship store for Jan Svensson’s enigmatic label.

Börft’s origins go back to 1987 when Svensson and his band Frak established the label with their first cassette, “Raggarslakt”. Coming at a time when Techno, House and Electro was still in its infancy, Frak and Börft set a distinct tone for the time. Blending Detroit’s DIY machine sonics with the darker sounds of EBM and with the Punk attitude of their forebears coursing through their performance-based recordings, they arrived at a sound they and the label have been perpetuating through cassettes and records for the last 32 years.

Björft has been there through various different phases, constantly adapting to the musical surroundings while retaining that central ethos to the label, one man’s steadfast vision of electronic music, based around a small but dedicated community in Gothenburg that has expanded throughout Sweden and beyond, with artists like Tillander (TM404), Sotofett, Smea, Luke Eargoggle and of course Frak contributing to the label’s extensive, but contained discography. It’s quite possibly one of the oldest independent electronic music labels, save for possibly MUTE, and to this day it continues to make significant and prominent contributions to electronic music culture.

As Roland Lifjell unpacks yet another special delivery from Karlskrona we dedicate this week’s Cut to Björft with new music from Jon Doppler, Bergsonist, Da Book, Anders Enge and Daniel Araya.

*Filter Musikk is back at Jaeger next week with Boston 168 and Strangefruit.

 

Bergsonist – Chaos (Börft) 12″

This is what Börft is all about. Meaty beats; irreverent sonic arrays; and ferocious rhythmical constructions created to be played in subterranean vaults. Bergsonist is one of the two artists on this list not to arrive onto Börft through the contained Swedish connection. The Moroccan-born New York artist can be seen as the latest incarnation of that Börft ideology, infiltrating Techno through the fertile New York scene from which acts like Via-App and Aurora Halal have emerged too.

Out of “Chaos form, development and control materialises in Bergsonist latest contribution to the Börft label. Where electronic textures writhe and twist under pressure at their incipient stage as they distort around heavy kicks and malignant sonic textures, they find resolution in the steady pulse of a kick, rubbery bassline or a progressive development.

The off-beat rhythms and punkish sonic aesthetic play well against each other, but they never drop off the edge into a grotesque assault of the senses, but rather teeter between two worlds, between abstract electronic sounds and functional forms. While a track like “Self Cultivation” might jar the senses a little, on the other end of it a track like “Tentation” with its bouncing bassline and sweet melodic atmosphere shows a more amenable side to Bergsonist’s music.

 

Jon Doppler – Blackberry Vision Algorithm (Börft) 12″

A regular feature on the Börft lineup since 2016, Jon Doppler makes soothing dubbing electronica, that floats to and from the dance floor. Effervescent echoes and delays weaving their way through lethargic beats and wispy pads define his work and even through his most adventurous rhythmic pursuits he retains a deep quality to his sound. He could be a direct descendent of Christian Doppler in the way he moves through textures. The Chicago native makes his second appearance on the Swedish label with “Blackberry Vision Algorithm,” perpetuating those dub encounters with Techno and House music.

While the opening tracks focus more of their attention on the dance floor in temperate but urgent tempos, staccato chords and acid lines modulating through the track like whirling dervishes, Jon Doppler pads these core elements in ethereal atmospheres that progress in slow, but determined phases through the tracks. Doppler stays the course through the A-side on this tangent, but it’s when he gets to “Weem” that his unique artistic voice really shines through.

A moderate tempo, quivering bassline and various synthetic movements fluttering in and out of the progression sets an elusive tone through the track. You find yourself drifting through the outer extremities of the track, or sinking into its vast cavernous depths, where the slow, lethargic kick drum vibrates in short staccato bursts.

 

Da Book – Vixxen (Börft) 12″

There seems to be a habit with the artists on Börft records to cover, or partially cover their face in the quest for anonymity, in the manner of that old electronic music adage; let the music speak for itself. A losing battle in the age of the internet frankly, but one that perpetuates the very same motive behind Svensson’s that was there at the beginning when Frak started performing together. Hidden behind masks and all kinds of facial disguises, standing behind synthesisers, emblazoned with various insignia, it’s always been the machines and their bold aggressive sounds that are the stars in the Börft lineup.

Da Book (Patrik Book of Ausgang Verboten / Random Toxy) sustains this ideology in 2019 as he harnesses the almighty strength of the Roland X0X series of machines through the five tracks that make up “Vixxen”. Uncomplicated, functional pieces play on the strengths of the dance floor where 4-4 rhythms and bold basslines form the basis from which staccato keys and buzzsaw acid lines make laconic impressions on the dance floor. The piano stab of “Techno Aina” and the lazer-like Acid bass line of “Raggaren” are elements that stay with you for the duration and beyond while those concise, immediate rhythm arrangements never leave you trailing far from the speaker.

 

Anders Enge – Love Loser (Börft) 12″

Although Jan Svensson is a veteran in the field of electronic music today he continually seems to find new, young exciting artists to bring to the Björft alumni, constantly updating the label’s discography while maintaining the ethos and sound of the label. And even though some of the artists behind the records on this list might have been around for some time in one form or another, these monikers are all fairly new to the world of electronic club music. They retain that raw essence of the label that’s been there since 1987, updating little of that DIY machine aesthetic beyond anything like modern production touches. It’s like Svensson insists on certain parameters like; record your music live on a stereo track, using no more than three machines.

It’s a tried and tested formula  that has outlasted any style or trend in the arena of House and Techno and has helped establish a definitive sound behind the Börft records label. That formula has been so ingrained in electronic it has become second nature for an artist like Anders Enge, who arrives at that formula through instinctive impulses.

After a few cassette releases on Dissociate Rhythm he’s back on Börft with “Love Loser”. The EP builds on a few elements, which Enge channels to the more marginal hemispheres of electronic music, with a particularly exploratory flair for his machines. Acid lines are re-contextualised as wheezing abstract creations; synthetic bleeps create static atmospheres like chatter from an alien planet; and anomalous bass modulations wobble through precise marching rhythms. Anders Enge tests the limits of cognitive patience on the dance floor through four audacious cuts, that leave a jarring, agitated impression on the listener. It’s a record for the more adventurous DJ or the more desensitised soul.

 

Daniel Araya – Riot Date (Börft) 12″

Making a return to the Börft franchise with his chilling blend of Acid and Techno, Daniel Araya hits the ground running with “Acid Opal” the opener from his latest record, “Riot Date”. Weaving subtle strands of old school rave between modern minimalist Techno arrangements and of course Acid bass lines, “Riot Date” is an explosive sojourn through the primal, corporeal aspects of electronic club music.

Gnawing bass lines, thunderous kicks and squirming lysergic melodic movements create an intense pursuit over four tracks. Distorted hats and the odd stab at some incooperate keys, lay elusive threads to the hardcore origins of Techno and House, in an untamed, feroscious EP from Araya.

It’s all about the A-side however, where “Acid Opal” and especially “Cyclic Rave Overload” command the floor. It sets a provocative mood for the rest of the EP, that the other tracks on the B-side never quite harness in the same way, and for good reason, as it would simply make for an exhausting 30-odd minutes of music.

As one soundcloud user so eloquently put it; “Fukkk yeah!” It’s a record for one of those moments where all inhibition gives way to simple animalistic abandon and we give in to our most primal urges; and isn’t that just what every Börft record is about.

The next chapter with Ivaylo

We share an office with Ivaylo Kolev. When he’s not in the booth at Jaeger, he’s preparing the itinerary for the next guest DJ or playing host to some or other DJ diginitary. Recently he’s become a proud father again, a girl and the third and last in the Kolev lineage for this generation. Between being a family man, working full time and DJing at least once a week, you might think he’d have his hands full, but the last year has also been a period of intense activity for Ivaylo in the studio, which has ushered in a new era for the producer  with his debut on Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp.

“Syklon” finds Ivaylo adapting his sound to the Full Pupp aesthetic. A punishing bassline greets the listener, with progressive build-up as various percussive elements join in the track before dissipating into a lovely soul-searching pad and a vocal snapshot taken from an old House track. “Aerodynamisk” and “Karla” reinforce the sound of the EP with bold basslines, firm percussive arrangements, metallic synths and floaty chord sequences weaving brief, but fundamental passages through the record. Ivaylo adopted some of the Full Pupp spacy production, but pivots it around the functionality of the dance floor.

There’s a slight evolution from Ivaylo’s previous releases for the likes of Cymawax and his own Bogota Records imprint. The new EP follows a track on a Kwench compilation earlier this year, which will be superseded by an EP on Cassy’s label in June, and finds Ivaylo in a very critical phase of his career going forward, dedicating more time on production. Beyond that there’s a new record coming out on Bogota from the boss with a “super nice remix” from hugo LX, perpetuating that “Bogota sound.” A Techno leaning track on the Full Pupp sublabel, Rett i Fletta and some more music, he can’t really discuss also highlight an intense creative flurry from the artist.

*Syklon is available now from all major distributors.

On top of that Bogota records will be releasing new music too this year, with a new track from Jarle Bråthen, and a remix from Kim Dürbeck. “I’m in love with the whole record” urges Ivaylo who says it’s all “a lot of work,” but he also feels that time is just right for this next phase of his career. We sit down for a coffee to talk about this next phase, but immediately our conversation turns to work and the gripes and pleasures of dealing with agents, DJs, artists and the daily meleé that ensues around booking and promoting events. But that’s not why we’re here…

Let’s talk about you for a minute.

Yes, let’s talk about me.

There’s a new record coming on Full Pupp and some more in the pipeline for Kwench and of course Bogota. Would you consider this a new phase in your career?

It’s like an extension of a phase for me (laughs). I’m happy with how everything has ended up this year, because I’m enjoying the sound of both labels, and it gives me the freedom to experiment with new sounds, while at the same time I can be myself.

Do you think you’ve changed your sound, especially in lieu of this next Full Pupp release?

In general I’ve changed my sound with regards to adding percussion and the rougher basslines, which is a bit closer to Techno. Working with Thomas took me further, and I’m super thankful for that

How did that release come together?

The reason everything happened was that we were just driving in the car one night after he played at Jaeger and I played him one of the tracks. It was actually the first track I made last year, and he was like; “hey what is this, I really like it.” And then it just happened and that gave me the motivation to explore this sound further.

What  made you want to go in that direction in the first place?

The scene. Not in a commercial way, but the crowd. Being at Jaeger every weekend, I see so many artists and see how the crowd reacts. It’s kind of my summation of what people are playing and what people like.

Is this the same with the upcoming Kwench release?

There’s like a red line between these records because the percussion is still there, and the way I program the percussion is still there. It’s House, but with Thomas it’s also kind of Full Pupp.

Thomas is always very hands on with the Full Pupp releases. I know he’ll often help with the mixing and the final arrangement. How much influence did Thomas have on Syklon?

Thomas is a genius. The way we worked is that I played him a track, he liked the track and then he asked me to finalise it. Then he had the final touch; in terms of mixing it down. On the rare occasion he might ask to add something, like an effect, but Thomas is just the final layer of polish.

Do you think that’s where the Full Pupp sound comes from, from his final touch?

Definitely. As I understand it, everything goes through Thomas in the end. That’s one of the reasons I chose to work with him and the label, because I learn from him, while at the same time he makes me more confident in what I’m doing.

Is it something that you think will have an effect on your music going forward?

Both and yes and no. With Thomas I learnt a lot about mixing, but when it comes to taking it forward, this direction has been an idea that has been brewing for years; ever since I took a break from the studio.

Since we haven’t heard the new Kwench release yet, can you tell me a bit more about what that might sound like?

It’s just proper House music.

Is it as deep as the stuff you’re previously known for?

I’ve got those deep elements in there… I’ve got the chords, but it’s more straightforward, something for the dance floor.

How did you get those tracks into Cassy’s hands?

I knew Cassy through the club, and after we met a few times, I sent her some music and she said “you should do a track for the compilation”. And then she asked for more tracks and to do a release. I think I sent Cassy like 7 tracks and she picked three of them.

You mentioned that you were  influenced into this new direction by watching and listening at Jaeger. Is it when you’re working or while you’re playing?

I would say both. I’m a person who absorbs everything around me. It’s a combination of everything and I can be affected by something immediately?

 

Has it affected the way you DJ as well?

No as a DJ I’m always all over the place. I would say it mostly affected my productions.

Your lifestyle has also changed dramatically in recent years. You have this job at Jaeger that means you’re always in the club on the weekend, but working, and then you also have three kids to take care of. How has this all work with a career in music in terms of touring as a DJ?

Perfectly. That’s kind of the final journey, when you mention touring. The reason I had six years quiet time, was because I had to help my girlfriend with the kids. That was my focus then, now I can come back to producing full time and touring. We’ve had good training, with me working every weekend at Jæger, and with my kids it’s changed my whole mindset too. I’m not partying, like I used to anymore.

So it has had a positive effect on your music?

Yes.

Do you think you’re better off now as a DJ now than when you were partying with the same kind of people you were playing for?

Yes, I do. I feel more secure in what I’m doing now. My head is clearer and being a dad is amazing. You have more structure. I still like to party, it’s just in a different way.

Don’t you feel that you’re getting disconnected from the dance floor in terms of age?

No I don’t think so. For me in music there is no age restriction. All I care about is the music. I feel exactly the same age as when I started with music. There’s no change in it.

Do you think that is due to the nature of being a DJ of your generation, that you’re more of a faceless facilitator?

I love that aspect of Djing. When you’re only concerned about the music, it’s a different story than about the way you look or what people see. I don’t care about that, and all I care about is how people feel about the music, how it affects them and how am I able to participate.

Working in an aspect of the industry – the behind the scenes kind of stuff that you and I do – do you ever get fed up with it?

The only thing I get fed up with is the DJ ego. I’m looking forward to be touring again so I can get out of the social media aspects of it all, because it takes up so much of my time, and I think it kills the music. Now you have models of DJs which gives all these young people the wrong impression of what it means to be a DJ. Young people are spending more time on their appearance than on music, it’s ridiculous.

You meet a lot of DJs in person, and like me you must notice that there’s some difference meeting these DJs and artists in person.

It’s a necessary evil, especially bigger artists that have PR agents that take care of it, which is a sad thing. It’s a big part of the scene today, and even if you have good skills as an artist or a DJ, you have to follow this bullshit. That also means that people with no skills are coming through based on their social media presence. We don’t see that as much at Jaeger since we’re pretty good with the bookings, but you see it everywhere else in the scene. I’m not going to judge anyone, but I don’t see the point.

I find that side of it completely exhausting, to the point where it affects my enjoyment of the music.

I totally agree with you. It’s a combination of how the crowd reacts to it, or how people think they have to act for the crowd. I really like what DVS1 said recently; you don’t go to the club to watch, you go to listen.

And this takes me back to my first  DJ set. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, the DJ booth was a seperate room, divided by some glass. People didn’t really see you or even know who you were. You had a little space where you could invite friends into and they were all music junkies. Now it’s so annoying with all the phones and having a particular look.

All these things like how people arrive, people taking photos and all this energy around the actual set, it’s an unnatural energy, it’s fake.

Which brings me back to making a record for the purpose of Djing like you’ve just done.  You spend so much time on it, and it takes about a year before it comes out, and then it has a brief moment on the dance floor (if you’re lucky) and then it’s forgotten until you bring out the next track. Don’t you sometimes feel that you’re putting too much effort into it?

Not for me, because first of all I don’t make a track today to get out tomorrow. For me it has to be timeless. I’m not concerned about when it will come out or how long it will be played, I don’t care about that. I just care about if the track has consistency and if it has its own personality.

So if you consider an old track like Pelican, is that still a track that you’ll play in your sets?

Yes, if the moment is there I’ll play it. Each track that I’ve done has its own personality and these personalities go around with me.  

 

Dave Harrington Group Pure Imagination, No Country World Tour Mix

Dave Harrington curates a mix ahead of the Pure Imagination, No Country tour this summer.

Dave Harrington has put a mix together “in anticipation” of his upcoming tour with the Dave Harrington Group.” He’s assembled some tracks  “sourced form the places we’ll be playing—Norwegian prog-jazz, German minimal reworks, British guitar skronk, Russian juke, 90’s French straight-ahead jazz, California acid-testers, and a little downtown NYC” according to the soundcloud link, a little something to whet the appetite for the Pure Imagination, No country tour. The tour which kicks off on the 10th of June in St Petersburg will be stopping at Jaeger for PiP Natt on the 13th with Dave Harrington Group making their second appearance in our basement in as many years.

The mix is an extensive journey through Dave Harrington’s vast musical influences, from Ricardo Villalobos to The Grateful Dead. It’s a psychedelic tenure through Jazz and experimental electronica, defragmenting the various elements that make up Dave Harrington Group’s sound.

The tour follows Dave Harrington Group’s second LP, Pure imagination, No Country after he and Nicholas Jaar disbanded as Darkside. The ensuing LPs and the tours saw Dave Harrington focus all his attention on this new project, which on Pure Imagination, No Country he has been established around a core group of musicians, namely Andrew Fox and Samer Ghadry and key collaborators like Lars Horntveth from Jagga Jazzist.

You’ll find more details about the upcoming event here, and look out for an upcoming feature on Dave Harrington on our blog arriving soon

 

Album of the Week: The Comet is Coming – Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery

During times of political turmoil and extreme social anxieties, art and music offer a cognitive distraction from the fears, pressures and narrative reality. Life imitates art, and art imitates life and at a time where a populace sentiment is coursing through political rhetoric and politicians are relying on generic language in an duplicitous effort to “speak the common man’s tongue”,  art and especially music is favouring a generic approach, relying on common tropes in order to neatly conform to a specific artistic niche. But in London, at the centre of the Brexit chaos, a new musical scene has emerged, fusing disparate elements in a modern musical language, based on the foundations of an old experimental format. It’s Jazz 4.0, yet another new age for the genre emboldened by a new generation fusing elements of Urban, Electronic and Funk music in a miasmic whirlpool of sounds, centred around a few core groups residing in London.

Gilles Peterson’s “We out Here” concept played a pivotal role last year in bringing bands like Ezra Collective and Moses Boyd to the fore through the compilation and the festival of the same name over the course of the last two years, revealing an exuberant and exhilarating group of musicians that like Miles Davis and Sun Ra before them are re-inventing and re-contextualising the idea of Jazz for our generation. A key figure amongst these musicians is saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who has performed with the likes of Floating Points, Sun Ra Arkestra and Mulatu Astatke and has formed groups like Melt Yourself Down, Sons of Kemet and The Comet is Coming – the latter of which sees him joining forces again with Betamax and Danalogue for their latest LP, “Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery.”

Their second LP finds them orbiting celestial bodies, astrally projecting their sound through the cosmos in search of corporeal desires through exotic sonic landscapes . Hutchings’ unique piercing staccato bursts on saxophone and clarinet bounce between the contrapuntal percussive arrangements and cosmic key-work from his bandmates, as they travel through some of the outer dimensions of elements of progressive Rock, Funk, Jazz and more contemporary musical touchstones like Grime and Hip Hop. The Comet is Coming never stray into self-indulgent improvised movements with song structures and arrangements favouring a succinct and concise form that remains accessible. Although there’s a psychedelic pursuit behind their music, they forego the extreme for a more lucid trip through music.

There’s an unavoidable immediacy to their sound on the “Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery,” something that has been a prominent trademark in this era of Jazz, and that The Comet is Coming has been harnessing since 2016’s Final Eclipse. You could find yourself listening intently or dancing with wild abandon through this entire record as the group streak by in a flurry of bold sonic movements through the ten songs that make up the LP. The band bring structure, form and a perfunctory dimension to what is usually a formless musical language, and there’s a sense of dissent in their work, not just in the literal form like on the track “Blood of the Past,” but also in the way they completely discard classic tropes, or simply re-contextualise them. What was a monologue, stabbing synthesiser becomes a trembling sax; what is usually a distorted guitar is a cymbal quivering in the distance; and what is usually a abstract serenade, is a monotonous soliloquy.

“Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery” shows that this new era for London Jazz is more than just the sum of a single compilation but that it’s here to stay and it’s producing music and musicians that will and is making an indelible mark on modern music history. Bands like The Comet is Coming are reinterpreting and dismantling traditions while ushering in a new era of music to counterpoint the banal, and “Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery” is already a significant highlight.

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.

 

Album of the Week: VC-118A – Inside

For those that know, there’s a lot implied by Samuel Van Dijk’s artistic moniker, VC-118A. There’s something immediately familiar about the jumble of letters and numbers, as if you’ve seen then before in some other, but relative context. Re-ordering them, words like voltage control, amplifier, and noise appear in their diminutive form, drawing evocative associations with the world of modular synthesis.

For an artist like Van Dijk with a self-professed “modular approach to making and performing music” there’s that literal interpretation behind the name, but where modular synthesis will often conjure an image of an artist at a set of impossible controls, wilfully coaxing the strangest and abstract sounds form random bleeps and blobs in a self-indulgent, introspective performance spectacle, VC-118A (and Van Dijk’s various other monikers) presents a new generation of  artists harnessing the bold experiments of their predecessors into a more concise musical palette for dancing audiences.

Van Dijk has been doing this as VC-118A since 2012′ s “Informations Systems” on TRUST records, rewiring a sound built on the foundation of the Electro and Techno innovators in a modern sonic aesthetic. Channeling those random bleeps and blobs into space-aged melodic patterns that are both beatific and completely alien, VC-118A embarks on this third LP and his first for legendary Dutch label, Delsin.

“Inside” revels in a  miasmatic sonic soup of elongated synthetic pads, strange croaking squawks and deep hyper-gravitational bass forces, drawing you deep into midst of the arrangements, where we can discern a shadowy outline of the artist behind the music. Deep, Techno tracks like “Tide” and “Channel” congregate with salacious Electro pieces like “PCB” and “Glow” on “Insides” with a narrative arc reaching its highest peak at “Hiss.” But it’s the subversive charm of tracks like “Time Variant” and “Inside” that really draws the music together as an LP and offers something much more personal than what many artist working on this platform have achieved in the past.

Sub bass figures excavate a deep furrow, from where peculiar electronic sounds can gestate into bold melodic patterns on individual pieces which come together in a fine cinematic soundtrack across 13 tracks. Intrepid sound design and piercing melodic movements across these tracks create a bold artistic statement as he creates an album that harnesses the futuristic elements of the modular performance for a more palatable experience, both for and away from the dance floor. And although there are pieces with distinct designs, this is more than just a dance album, and needs to be appreciated in its entirety.

“Inside” is an album that draws the listener away from the cold sonic aesthetic of this style of electronic music. There’s still that disconnect between the artist and the music, but you get the sense that Van Dijk is aware of his audience and offers an enticing entry to into the abstract and stark artistic world of modular synthesis with the faint warm glow of the man behind the machine, adding a level of depth and warmth to the album.

Delirious autobiography with Torgny Amdam (Premiere Jpeg)

In his latest track “Jpeg,” Torgny Amdam attempts to consolidate a period in his life going from VHS to Myspace; a “cave of forgotten dreams” that he recalls from distant-recent memories in a spoken-word piece. Amdam’s voice accents syllables with strong American intonations which glides over a bed of frosty synthetic textures and soft undulating waves of bass.

It’s the third of fifteen releases coming from the Norwegian artist and musician. Every second Friday a new track will be released as part of the new project “Bathroom Stall Confessional.” “Jpeg” follows the Stooges-like garage rock of “Forzane 1913” and the “dystopian beats” of “Debris” in the first new music from Adman since his 2017 Cut & Run LP. The forthcoming LP (to be released in November) is the most “autobiographical“ Amdam has been in his music as a solo artist as he looks back at his time in the nineties, when he lived in L.A , and also the years he was the frontman for the Norwegian hardcore band Amulet.

“I wanted to give every song as much love as possible,” says Amdam as he leans back in his studio chair at Notam studios in Sagene. “Jpeg” plays briefly over the speakers and Amdam’s lyrics swirl around a brief nostalgic reverie like a word cloud trying to anchor itself on something tangible in an abstract expressionist dream. “Instead of pushing things out of the lyrics,” says Amdam about his writing process, “you’re pulling things back in.”

He calls this new project a “delirious autobiography” as he attempts to reconcile various periods in the course of his life that brought him to this moment in a very personal musical monologue and visual accompaniment. “It’s important for an artist to be original and personal,” he says in one of the most sincere moments of our interview, between staccato bursts of laughter. “What the world needs now is a lot of sincerity and originality in art. I’ve asked myself a lot, what does it mean to be an artist, what does it mean to be an artist who’s been a vocalist in a rock n roll band for 15 years, what does it mean to be an artist in his forties.”

Amdam grapples with these questions over 15 tracks that navigate the extreme borders of contemporary music, from Pop to Rock and Hip Hop to House as he distills all these influences through this latest LP project.

Torgny Amdam has been making or playing music in some form or another since 1993. Coming into his own as an adolescent during a time when punk bands like Minor Threat and Hip Hop acts like Afrika Bambaata started to turn music on its head with a newfound do it yourself vigour. His musical interests were diverse, but he soon found fame and success as the frontman for Amulet. A local band turned international sensation, Amulet put in 15 hardworking years together before disbanding amicably in 2007.

“We felt we had done everything we could,” says Amdam of the band’s culmination and it wasn’t the kind of project that they were able to take into new and uncharted territory. “You can either be David Bowie or you can be The Rolling Stones,” and Amulet couldn’t be either.

What followed was what Amdam describes as a “musical crisis” where he “had to re-adjust” and change his perspective on his artistic career. In 2010 he went solo with the album “Chameleon Days” and through his new work he was “conscious of not committing to a particular genre” in order to “be completely free as an artist.” He took on a “little job” at Ny Musikk Norge and through their contemporary ideology expanded on the punk and hip hop influences that constituted his early musical development and today he has scored films, worked with contemporary innovators like Zweiss and has released 3 LPs as a solo artist to date. “I’m a slut when it comes to genre” says Amdam as he ruptures into a snappy cackle. It’s this promiscuous musical tendency that formed the basis for his upcoming “Bathroom Stall Confessional” album. “What’s kind of different with this concept is that it’s not necessarily mixing up a lot of genres within a song, but rather song for song,” he insists, so each musical piece is like its own isolated experience.

It means that a track like “Jpeg” has very little in common with a track like “Debris” other than the central artistic figure and through that aspect, the bond between these songs are stronger than ever. Amdam dug deep through his personal experiences to arrive at the 15 songs that will eventually make up the LP. Some tracks are also inspired by a period where he was undergoing “psychoanalysis” which in some way influenced the nature of the work. It became “part of the whole project” in his attempt to “let the verbal flow go.” There are literal references in a track titled “Psychoanalysis Is A Bitch” and also some subjective associations in the way Amdam strings together his lyrical content like a patient in the doctor’s chair, but he stops short of saying mental health is a recurring theme in this music.

“For me it’s a verbal project, it’s a music project, but it’s also a visual project,” he says by way of explanation. Every track will have its own visual counterpart with striking collages, intricately designed by Amdam who “wanted to make a very personal and expressive cover for each song.” Using his own photo collection and dedicating a lot of his time, he assembles members of his family, friends and some light pornography in  colourful and eye-catching dioramas with a “graffiti style energy” underpinning the pieces.

I wonder if that is some blatant reference to that other aspect of Amdam’s identity, the skateboarder. Not directly he suggests with a firm shake of the head. Skateboarding has influenced my music in terms of my perception of the world,” and perhaps there’s something in the music and “loving some tactile aggressiveness in the sound,” but these are all “subconscious” aspects to making music he submits.

He plays through the rest of the rest of the LP, playing short little clips, often playing a little air guitar, singing or jumping up and down in his chair as he goes from a “big beat” track to a languid piano ballad. There’s never one of those dulled silences that creeps into interviews, as he’s always quick with a quip or jibe, slapping my knee with a mighty snapping laugh. Is he this excited when he’s making music?

“Yeah I get excited, sometimes I get too excited,” he says with a knowing smirk. During his days in the band there was hardly ever a moment of repose or “social understanding” for Amdam, and he often found himself working through the music in a kind of “trance.” Today he feels much more at ease and while he still gets excited, it’s all channeled through the music and he hopes it’s something the listener could appreciate too.

Karima F makes her Boiler Room debut

Karima F made her debut on Boiler Room last night at the legendary Pacha in Ibiza, playing  for the IMS opening party. Sharing bill with John Talabot and Nastia, the Jaeger resident brought a selection House- and broken beat cuts with frosty electronic textures, warm bass and lively percussive arrangements flowing through her set. Her set is now available to stream via Boiler Room below.

Karima F is back with Affirmative Action at Jaeger on the 22nd of June with special guest, Or:la.

Premiere: Ivaylo – Syklon

Stream a new track from Ivaylo coming via Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp imprint.

Ivaylo makes his debut on Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp label with Syklon. Premiering today courtesy of the Sinchie Collective is the title track from the EP, which finds Ivaylo on a deep and tempered mood. A bold synthetic bass line places front and centre on the track, moving along at a moderate pace, like a leopard on the prowl.

Slouching behind the steady rhythm of the kick with each phase developing in slow progressive pieces that only grow with one new element at a time. The track bides its time before it launches into space on jetstream of synthetic waves from some retro-fitted synthesiser. A vocal sample lifted from a late nineties House track adds a human dimension to the track as Ivaylo makes his first impression on the established Norwegian label.

Syklon kicks off a busy summer for Ivaylo who has other releases piqued for Cassy’s Kwench and his own Bogota label as well as a busy touring schedule that will see him playing around Europe and his label’s spiritual home, Colombia.  You can catch him every Sunday at his weekly Jaeger Mix residency where he has a new guest every week, recording a live session in our booth. Watch out for an interview with the Bogota Records boss and Jaeger resident coming soon on this blog.

Little Louie Vega in 8 tracks

Louie Vega was born in Brooklyn. A second generation Puerto Rican immigrant, he grew up in a musical household, consumed with the sounds of Latin origins. Born into a musical family, his father was a Jazz saxophonist and his uncle was the legendary “salsa king” Héctor Lavoe. Here is performing with the salsa supergroup, Fania Allstars to a packed Yankee stadium.

These latin and jazz roots played a pivotal role in Louie Vega’s formative years and still today you can hear echoes of Lavoe and senõr Vega’s Jazz influences coursing through Little Louie’s sets and particularly his music. Salsa and Latin music, unlike uncle Hector’s suit in that video has become a timeless addition in the House music lexicon, and it is especially dominant in contemporary pop music with the birth of tropical House.

Louie Vega was a precocious talent, and started DJing in clubs before even coming of age. He was given the nickname Little Louie, not because of his stature, but because of his relative age to the other DJs in the booth at that time. He was holding residencies at Studio 54, Devil’s Nest, Heartthrob, Roseland and regularly playing at the Palladium, Area, and 1018 as a teenager, and although he couldn’t legally buy a drink from the bar, he was an intoxicating selector, working at some New York’s early seminal House clubs.

Following in the footsteps of the likes of Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles in New York, Little Louie Vega represented the next generation of DJ. As the maxi single came into its own, calling in a new era for DJs who went from the booth to the studio in the succeeding years, seeking to eek out more from the music through the extended DJ cut, L:ouie Vega came into his own as a producer. He was at the cusp of this new trend and one of the first DJs to put his own spin on a popular record from DJ’s perspective in the form of the remix.

In 1986 he and Joey Gardner joined the Latin rascals in a remix of eighties synth pop band, Information Society’s “Running” and while few remember Information Society today, it laid the groundwork for Little Louie Vega’s fertile and extensive career as a producer and a name that has become synonymous with house music.

His talents didn’t go unnoticed and remixes followed for Cover Girls, Debbie Gibson and Erasure amongst others, before he was picked up by Atlantic records. Going from remixer to artist in 1991 Vega enlisted the help of none other than latin crooner Marc Anthony, to make his mark as a fully fledged artist on “When the night is over”. Infusing Latin rhythms, House beats, modern synthesisers and Anthony’s vocal, Louie Vega made a serious impression with his long player debut and its first single first single, Ride on the Rhythm.

Anthony’s scatting vocals introduces a record that ticks all the boxes in true early nineties fashion. Syncopated house beats… check… hollow bass synthesiser … check … staccato piano stabs… check … R&B vocal… check … breakdown rap… and possibly the most important addition to any seminal 90’s dance track, the saxophone solo… check.  

It was possibly the first ever crossover success for a House artist of Little Louie Vega’s kind, a DJ turned producer. Where producers like Shep Pettibone had already by that time already made their mark on the maxi single as remix artists accommodating the DJ, Louie Vega was one of the first DJs to turn super-producer through his debut LP and went from obscure underground DJ to a successful pop artist, overnight.

Where most would sever their ties with their origins, Louie Vega remained steadfast in his roots with a DJ-friendly remix package from the Masters at Work side project he and Kenny Dope created together.

Louie Vega had not only breached into popular culture with he and Marc Anthony’s LP, but had also secured he and Kenny Dope’s legacy today as two of House music’s biggest and most successful stars in the nineties, a legacy that has waned little as they continue to DJ all around the world and release records with crossover appeal.

They’ve gone by many names in the past including MAW (the abbreviation that is also the name of Louie Vega’s label), KenLou and Soul Fusion, but Masters at Work always had a kind of salient ring to it when describing their work together. Masters at Work was originally coined by Louie Vega as a pseudonym for Tod Terry, who actually recorded a few titles under the name in the 1980’s, but it was eventually rightly co-opted by Vega and Dope when they formed what everybody considers the first producer supergroup.

They released their debut LP in 1993, another quintessential nineties record that carried over the essence of the “when the night is over” remix package into the long player format and immediately established their dominance on the House music landscape, while bringing the subcultural movement into the purview of the mainstream. The first single from the LP, “I can’t get no sleep” featuring the vocals of longtime collaborator India reached number 1 on the US Billboard charts.

They continued to collaborate with India, particularly as Nuyorican Soul (the faceless DJ/producer image of nineties House at work) as they released their second LP  under that moniker, enshrining the sound of nineties House with the likes of the cover of the Loletta Holloway and Salsoul Orchestra classic, “Runnaway.” It has been as remixers where the duo have made the most substantial impact on House music throughout the nineties and well into the present with over a thousand titles to their name. They are uncanny in their ability in taking a fairly ordinary pop track or a forgotten classic and exposing it for its key appeal while redirecting the key elements towards the dance floor.

Remixing is a craft that Louie Vega has mastered both in this project and as a solo artist and he has the accolades to prove it too. Nominated for 7 Grammys in the past, he won the esteemed prize with his remix of Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” in 2006. A song that is perfection in itself, Louie Vega treats it with awe and the necessary respect as appropriates it for the modern DJ in 2007. It reaffirms House music’s roots, originally established with Funk and Soul tracks from the likes of Mayfield, while stripping it down to its bare necessities for a modern, functional dance floor. It’s a track Vega handles with extreme care as he makes sure to accentuate those key elements like that groovy bass and Mayfield’s vocal, but he puts his own distinctive spin on it and with latin percussion and a jazzy chord progression, Vega makes it his own.

Is it better than the original? Not by a long shot, but the original is a classic, and Vega gets enough distance from it where it can live as its own track, paying homage and reverence to its ancestor.

Today, Little Louie Vega’s own music has also gone to be revered in a similar way. Countless Classic House tracks he created during the nineties have been sampled, edited and remixed and a fair few of these have even made it into the mass popular consciousness, as artists like Kanye West uses Vega tracks in his own creations.

The US rapper’s 2018 chart topping success “Fade” on Life of Pablo uses two very familiar and distinct  Vega (as Hardrive) and Barabra Tucker samples in its construction. The Vega and Barbara Tucker contribution is so prominent in this track, that it calls into question the very validity of  Kanye West as an artist… would that track ever have been so catchy if it weren’t for that distinctive bass and Tucker vocal luring the listener deep inside?

Time and again Louie Vega has made an impression on House music that crossed over to mainstream success and he’s never been one to just rehash the past or entertain tired House music tropes in his creative pursuits. He continues to make music and Djing with his distinctive flair, channeling everything from his Latin roots, Disco education and his position in the House music canon to every aspect of his career.

As he celebrated 28 years of an  illustrious career in 2016 with his last full length, Louis Vega Starring… XXVIII he remained a humble facilitator to the House music genre, paying homage to the great influencers like Funkadelic and 3 Winans Brothers, and collaborating with a fair few new artists on the scene. Here he is collaborating with his wife Anane Vega on Heaven Knows…

*Louie Vega plays Frædag this week with g-HA & Olasnkii and Olefonken.

Album of the week: Jayda G – Significant Changes

Jayda G makes the transition from DJ/producer to album artist on”Significant Changes” as she takes those essential soul, funk and disco influences and channels them in to an artistic document that stays close to the dance floor. Jayda G has been a prominent figure on the international DJ circuit,as one of the most exuberant and friendliest selectors around. Her effervescent presence in the booth and cheery disposition is infectious as she strings together Disco and House for vivacious young audiences.

Her singles and EPs for the likes of Freakout Cult and 1080p put a contemporary spin on the vast expanse of her record bag, with a penchant for delicate electronic textures and deep, visceral rhythms leaving their mark on modern House music over the last five years. In what has become something of a tradition at Ninja Tune, the UK label have snapped up the artist at the height of her popularity and sent her into the studio to record her debut LP.

Jayda G harnesses the spirit of the Paradise Garage and Larry Levan on her debut LP with a kaleidoscopic view of her open record bag. Elements of Funk, Soul, Disco and modern House sit side by side across the record as Jayda G harnesses familiar tropes to create evocative threads to their origins. Featuring the same DIY sonic aesthetic that she’s crafted across her previous records, Jayda G re-affirms her sound time and time again on this record, but offers a wider perspective of that sound as something that can live beyond the dance floor.

“Stanley’s Get Down (No parking on the DF)” is a stomper nonetheless and comes with a clarion call from Jayda’s spoken vocal channeling the voices of Disco greats to get off your phone and enjoy the dance floor. Long time Jayda G collaborator Alexa Dash contributes her powerful vocals to “Leave Room 2 Breathe” and “Sunshine in the Valley” for two soulful cuts that imbibe the spirit of Robin S and Gloria Gaynor with a modern perfunctory twist through Jayda’s streamlined productions.

Jayda G doesn’t break any new or unfamiliar ground as an artist on her debut LP, but for the first time there seems to be more of concise thread between her recent DJ sets and the music she’s making producing, consolidating a sound that seems like it will only mature as she develops it further in future releases.

Can you feel it: A Q&A with Jamie 3:26

Jamie 3:26 was there at the birth of House in Chicago and he continues to perpetuate the black, gay legacy of the city and its music in his sets and his productions today. A stalwart and at the same time a contemporary in his field, he is a prominent figure in the booth today, and spends most of his time playing to large audiences around Europe.

Jamie 3:26 is a rare entity in that legacy; a DJ that was not only able to cross that north- and south divide at home in Chicago, but also be both “Chicago famous” and “world famous” at the same time. He rose to prominence at the epicenter of the first House movement right at the gestation of the scene as a dancer, dancing at the legendary Muzic Box under the musical tutelage of Ron Hardy.

His transition from the dance floor to the booth was a measured progression, Jamie biding his time to learn from the best, by looking over their collective shoulder in the booth. Learning his craft by observing DJs like Ron Hardy and Pharris Thomas, confidence drove Jamie in crafting his unique style in the booth to become one of the limelights locally and beyond as he started playing to audiences in New York and eventually Europe.

After staking his claim in the booth, a career in production beckoned and taking his cues from the legacy of Chicago the first of his Basement Edits series hit record bags in 2008 through ParteHardy records. Seminal edits like “Hit it n Quit it” and “Testify” followed through a reserved but considered discography, harnessing Jamie 3:26’s extensive musical knowledge and channeling it to the modern dance floor.

There are remarkable parallels between what he does through his edit series and his work in the booth.T here’s an immense energy to his sets that prevails in the music as he blends elements of Soul, Funk, Gospel and modern House music through his work and his sets. A Jamie 3:26 is always an electrifying experience and before we get our own personal taste at Jaeger, we shot over some questions to the Chicago DJ to talk about his early formative years, his music, his sets and

*Jamie 3:26 plays Retro tonight with Daniel Gude

 

Hello Jamie. You’re originally from Chicago, but you’ve also lived in Amsterdam. Where do you spend most of your time today?

Hey There!!  Good to meet ya and talk w ya!! I’m born and raised on the south side of Chicago,in a neighborhood called Beverly. I lived between Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Chicago for 2 years. I am now a resident of Rotterdam. This is my new home and I have been here permanently for 2 years. Reminds me so much of Chicago and the people are real.

I assume you travel to play in Chicago quite often at least. How have you seen the music scene evolve since you first left, especially considering how that legacy has been reaffirmed by this latest generation of DJs in Europe?

I only come home twice a year and I rarely play when I do visit. This last visit in March, I played for Reggie Corner’s Sunday event he does with Mike Dunn,on the south side at a spot called Renaissance. It’s the best Sunday night party on the south side. It was a packed house and I really enjoyed playing for and seeing my people.

The scene back home has a few different scenes. Chicago is segregated and it always crossed over into the party scenes and sides of towns and genres. There used to only be a few…you were either into the deep disco and underground/club music, basic house, gay and the underground scene. Some years back, in the late 90’s, it went back underground and was basically on life support, in regards to the black side of things. Frankie’s parties would be the only parties where you’d see the vets and real party people.That used to be 2 times a year. There were some other things still going, like the Prop House, but honestly a lot of those folks were late to the scene and not my kind of music or crowd. No dis to them, but being deep from the culture, I have always sought out the alternative and was on things before they became trendy.

I am proud to say now that there’s quality house music events on EVERY side of town, 7 nights a week. Damn good progress for me.

Being from Chicago, gives me a certain pedigree, that many can mimic and emulate, but I was there, so I have a unique authenticity that can’t be denied. I’m fine with that, yet I don’t carry myself as arrogant, being where I’m from…and the world seems to dig it, so I’m blessed and good with that as well!!!

House music in Europe is quite different from anything in the USA, and in many respects it’s thrived here in a way it never did back in the US. Why do you think it’s so much more popular on this side of the Atlantic, having experienced it on both sides?

I guess part of it would be that it’s still played on the radio, in cafes, shops, restaurants alongside popular music and radio and the mix shows is what helped popularise the music in the States, as well as it being added to stations playlist.  Now that American radio is controlled by corporates, they all play the same playlist across the markets. Where it used to be certain sounds and songs were played in certain regions, it’s now a generic playlist. Club culture and festival culture also plays a part because it’s been passed down to younger generations, versus in Chicago where house music basically stops under the age of 35. With the addition of certain blogs and websites dedicated to dance music, when they do write-ups and articles on dance music legends and provide links, they can go to places like You Tube and Spotify and have an entire genres history at their fingertips.

Chicago (and probably the larger midwest) is where House music was born and you were there as a teenager growing up in the middle of it. It’s hallowed ground, but as always a lot has been assumed about the origins of the scene through the media. How significant was House music at that time in Chicago and how aware were you as a dancer on the floor about this new music?

House culture spawned from black gay underground culture, so if you were into House music at one time it was considered gay music. So you dealt with being outcast, or thought or considered gay, and if you weren’t because a lot of us who were deep into the culture, ours wasn’t the music being played on the radio.  It came from the black gay underground DJ’s who then began performing for high school kids at school dances. Prior to that it was the hot mix style of DJing like the Hot Mix 5 with tricks and scratches. Those DJ’s brought from the underground the style of presenting music, ‘playing’ and EQ manipulation. I equate the House phemonomen and how it spread throughout the city, from the streets to the basement parties to the school parties to the teen clubs to the underground. The same way you could trace the roots of hip hop music in New York. These House parties helped keep a lot of kids off the streets during a very turbulent time with the gang culture. There was a point where you could not go anywhere and not hear any House music. You could hear it everywhere coming from people’s cars, boom boxes, people putting speakers in their windows playing mixes recorded from the radio, to local neighbourhood DJ’s doing the same.

From what I understand, from other interviews I’ve done with other Chicago luminaries, is that House was more of an attitude/lifestyle than a genre music. Is that something you experienced growing up in the scene?

Yes. There was a style, a look, a fashion, lingo, all associated with House. You could look at someone by the way they dressed or wore their hair, you could tell they were House or what you call Deep. I was deep in the culture because that was the ‘live’ crowd. Like people today say lit. You just had to be a part of it.  Even though most of us who were deep into the culture, were outcast, so to speak, because we looked and dressed as people associated with being gay.

When you started DJing it was from your parents record collection. Was there a lot of House music already making its way into DJ sets at that time, or was it still more focussed on elements of Soul, Disco and Funk in the places you were going out to dance?

Those were the original elements of House. What we called House was from all of those genres, before the electronic form of House music came about.  House is Disco’s stepchild.

What were some of your favourite haunts (as a dancer) in Chicago at that time?

Longwood Academy, the Muzic Box / Powerhouse, the Gentle Persuasion, the Hummingbird.  Medusa’s, Hyde Park Racquetball Club and the Bismarck.


I believe you eventually swapped one side of the club for another when you went from dancing to become a DJ. What inspired you to want to become a DJ?

I grew up around a few DJ’s in my family, but they didn’t necessarily mix.  Seeing DJ’s in my neighbourhood throw down at local basement parties made me want to mix. I’m a self-taught DJ learning from various radio station mix shows and observing DJ’s.

From what I’ve read in interviews is that it took you some time, but you basically learnt your craft from looking over the shoulders of working DJs, especially Ron Hardy. In another interview I’ve read you said that there wasn’t particularly a lot of support in Chicago for House music at the time. How supportive were people like Hardy on new blood like yourself  looking over their shoulder?

It wasn’t like the times that I was hanging in the booth at the Box / Powerhouse, that I was even being mentored. They didn’t know I was a DJ. But I watched other DJ’s as well, including Andre Hatchett, Mike WIlliams, Pharris Thomas and anybody I could get close to, to watch them while they played.  No-one really mentored me back then. But some of these same DJ’s I mentioned, my crew, when we were doing promotions, ended up hiring for some of our events. And at times, I would open for them.

Ron’s ParteHardy records brought out your first release (the only non-Hardy release on that label) and Theo Parrish played a hand in bringing it to the masses by playing it a lot in his sets at the time. Is this level of support a common occurrence in the Chicago DJ community today and what is the initiation process like to ascend to the level you’re at now?

ParteHardy records is run by Ron’s nephew Bill, who is a good friend. So as well, I owe a lot to him and Theo for pushing me and believing in me. It’s always been very competitive in Chicago period. You have DJ’s who will support DJ’s and then you have DJ’s who will only support who they get down with. Honestly, it’s just human nature. It’s not something that’s mainly a Chicago thing. For the most part, there’s a lot of us who have been doing our best to break the stereotype concerning Chicago DJ and music culture. I do my best to represent my city in a positive light and to support talent in my city. I also don’t play politics with my music. So sometimes that has strained my relationship, because I don’t play what I don’t feel whether my best friend made it or a stranger made it. I gotta feel it.

You were DJing for the longest time in and around Chicago before breaking through as a DJ  and getting gigs further afield. What was the major turning point in your career as a DJ?

I would have to say being an active member of DeepHousepage.com. That message board had a community that was global and it made me venture out of Chicago. That first trip to New York city in 2000 was life changing and humbling. It showed me that this was much more bigger than Chicago. My first international DJ gigs came via that website.

For a while you had your own mobile Disco service. How did you have to adapt your mixing style and DJ sets when you started getting booked on the merit of your releases?

I had to learn to give these people what they heard of me and not cater and me catering, thinking that I had to play a certain way because I was in Europe, ended up being not a good gig. I learnt fast.

I’ve noticed in the comments on your Boiler Room set that the opinion was very divided on your use of the filter. How much emphasis do you put on technique and mixing style and how did you arrive at the way you mix today?

That event had over 700 people losing their minds on a sick sound system. I could care less what some lames in the comments section have to say, because those people partied their asses off and that’s all that matters. I have different styles of playing and mixing. It depends on what atmosphere I create. I can do short quick mixes, long blends or crazy EQ work.  Or just clean presentation. It all depends on my mood. I utilise EQ work to create drama within the music.

Is it still a learning process for a DJ with so much experience?

A DJ is forever a student.  No-one knows all of the jams and there’s tons of undiscovered music out here.  I’m still a fan of this music. And forever a student.

Your sets are incredibly dynamic and it takes me back to that idea of House as an attitude rather than a genre or a style of music as your sets very rarely stick to modern 4-4 House tracks. What is your perception of the term House today and what are your thoughts on  the very formulaic norm of the genre in recent times?

It seems that some DJ’s can only stick to one lane of music. Hearing one same groove all night gets boring. Mix it up. That’s why we call it mixing.

What do you look for in a record to make it into a Jamie 3:26 set?

It has to have a groove.  It also has to make me dance.  If it doesn’t make me shake my ass, I won’t play it.

I hear a lot of edits in your sets, including your own productions. What makes an edit work in the context of a DJ set in your opinion?

Energy. That’s it.

When it comes to your own edits, what do you look for in a track in the first place to edit it and how do you usually put your own mark on it?

Once again it’s about energy.  If a song has a high part and a then a big section full of fluff, I cut out the fluff and go straight for the meat and bones.

I only have one more question Jamie and here comes the plug. You’re playing at our weekly concept called RETRO and as you might have guessed it is about highlighting the legacy and the imprint of House on music today. How would you sum that up with what you know and is there an element of the origins of the genre that you’d like to get back to?

I do my best to keep the true underground culture of House music alive. That was taught to me by my elders in the game. This shit is real to me because it’s my life. It shaped me, molded me and beat me down, in a good way. I would like to bring back the element of people dancing together and not with their cell phones facing the DJ or them with their cell phones on the dance floor.  I just want people to feel the true freedom of being lost in music without a care in the world.

 

Lost in Lindos with Tarjei Nygård

Beguiling melodies bouncing through octaves in jolly leaps, play between the deep, rolling waves of bass as Tarjei Nygård’s latest EP, “Lost in Lindos” completes the first bars of “Bleausa.” Elegant keys stroking at chords in ascending melodic themes are bookended between the downtempo rhythm section and the tropical atmosphere enveloping the opening track. That track is “from 2014” says Tarjei over an impromptu telephone call on a Friday afternoon. Lost in Lindos “started with that track” when he sent Andrew Hogge from ESP institute an unsolicited email, which prompted the response from the label head: “I want to put this track out, do you have any other tracks?”

You’ve had a pretty reserved output since putting out your first EP on Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp label.

I don’t just put out stuff to put out stuff. I’m more interested in making tracks and haven’t spent that much time in pushing the music out.”

So what brought this EP to ESP institute?

“It just started with, I’m going to send him an email.”

Tarjei is on the phone from the Kunsthall in Stranvanger, where is currently occupied in his day job as an events producer. His position puts him “in charge of events, setting up exhibitions” and “programming music concepts.” It’s a favourable position for anybody with an invested interest in music like his, and something of a dream position for the artist from Notodden. “That’s always been what I wanted,” he explains and it clarifies the reserved output to some degree; with no need to constantly distribute, he can focus on only getting the best of the music he’s made into the world.

Do you think your sound has evolved a lot since your first record, Katapult to Lost Lindos?

“It’s difficult to say because you can’t really get a bird’s eye view on your own music, but it is always an organic approach.”

“Katapult had been sitting for a while, before it got into (Prins) Thomas’ hands” and onto the Full Pupp  label and before Tarjei had started negotiating his way through the organic sounds he perpetuates through all his records as a solo artist he had dabbled in all kinds of other music. Growing up in rural Notodden, there wasn’t really any scene to talk of, but it was “very musical city” in Tarjei’s opinion nonetheless.

Tarjei had grown up in a very musical home. His father, an ordained minister has always been a “music lover” with “a huge collection of jazz and classical music” and he plied Tarjei’s formative years and musical education with a combination of these records and the “cheesy” Norwegian gospel music from the congregation. At home his father also played the piano, and although Tarjei admits that music had always been “very important” in his home, he was never lured over to the piano or any other instrument for that matter and considers himself a “self-taught musician” today. He had a vested interest in music as a committed listener however and started “exploring new music” as soon as he became conscious of it. When he was old enough, he “got a job at a local record store and started digging from the get go.” It wouldn’t be long before Djing and producing enticed the young Nygård out from the counter and into the booth.  

How did you arrive at making music?

“ I got a hold of a couple of technics turntables and then it all just fell into place.”

And Djing came first?

“Yeah but it all kind of happened at the same time because then I discovered this program called Reason. I got a bootleg CD from a friend that met a guy in the military.

The clandestine exchange through the army barracks, had set Tarjei on a path as an artist. He had found an immediate affinity with the music software and “started making music on the computer” almost intuitively. He “understood Reason quite fast” and utilised it to his designs in making mostly sample-based music in the beginning.

Tarjei approached DJing with everything from “funk, hiphop breaks and house music” coming into his purview. “I’ve never been thinking very genre-wise about the approach,” he explains. “it’s always been; ‘ah I like that song, I’m going to play that song.’”

How does this relate to what you do as a producer?

“I get inspired by the music I buy to play out. The music I produce is what goes through the system. I have certain sounds that I like, and it kind of all funnels through.“

What music were you making before you made your first record?

“I was producing hip-hop beats for rappers and I played in a band.”

What was the name of the band?

“Ah, I don’t really want to go down that road”… (laughs)

Tarjei admits “it took a long time” before he arrived at Katapult and the record had been sitting for some time before Prins Thomas heard it. But after sending the originals in their demo form and getting the OK from the Full Pupp boss, he quickly sent along the record in its completed form without much hesitation from Thomas who put them out immediately via his label. A couple of singles followed for Maksimal records and Full Pupp respectively in the consecutive year, and then there was a three year hiatus before Tarjei came back with “Bleausa” the first track on the latest EP and the promo single that preceded the eventual release of  “Lost in Lindos” in 2019.

All the tracks were made in the studio except for “Øylie” which he made on in an impromptu  musical cabin retreat with his friend Are Foss. “My good friend Are Foss should be mentioned” stresses Tarjei in a hurried voice, “because he was vital to ‘Øylie’ and to the record in a way.”

“Øylie” is a completely immersive ambient track. Are Foss strumming through the echoes of his guitar in one take, creates a languid movement, with minor modulations as the repetitions coaxed from an echo machine creates its own surprising patterns against a backdrop of sterile  keys and biotic atmospheres. Swathed in pads and feedback cascading through the main riff like light through a forest canopy, Tarjei and Are create a sublime, tranquil piece that plays beautifully against the knowledge of the setting of the recording.

The original “idea was to put a concert together for the birds,” says Tarjei through whatI surmise is a smile. Originally, there had been some intention to make club music, but it had been “impossible because the environment actually has a lot to say, surprisingly.” They drove all their equipment down to Are’s secluded cabin on a “sketchy “four-wheeler motorcycle and set up a makeshift studio in the cabin. Completely secluded, they could “play as loud” as they wanted and from that single riff, whittled down to a single chord and an echo, “Øylie” came to life and completed the “Lost in Lindos” EP.

What’s next for you after this record?

“I’m actually working on an EP with tracks made from that cabin session. We went back there  this winter and this time we took all the instruments on a scooter. “(laughs)

Will it feature that same organic sound of Øylie?

“Yes, when I work with Are it goes that way.”

Tarjei has no intentions of reaching out to a label for that one just yet, and is still just in the process of finishing those pieces. There is no immediate rush, and Tarjei will maintain that same organic approach to making music that has made his records such prominent and significant contribution to the Norwegian electronic and DJ music scene.

Whatever he puts out, if he does indeed feel the need to put something out, will undeniably be yet another considered record that will make a unique impression, like every record before it and “Lost in Lindos” did this year. When I look down at the clock, I’ve run over our allocated time, but Tarjei is amenable and waves off the delay with a guffaw. I start to hang up, but then remember something…

O, but wait we have to plug the upcoming night with Hubbas Klubb at Jaeger. Have you started preparing your record bag?

“I haven’t started collecting records for that night, but I always like fun and quirky House records.”

And considering it’s the day after 17th May, will that influence your selections on the night?

“O, I guess I have to find the perfect champagne hungover music.” (laughs)

 

The Cut with Filter Musikk

Appearing in a record sleeve at Filter Musikk this week: “Another crap record you won’t play – Why do I bother” …  

“Please give it a listen though, you may not agree.” – Anonymous

A clever bit of promo? Perhaps, but either way, it’s the most perfect summation of our contemporary, personal music experience. In modern times where every living artist is able to create, produce, and distribute his/her music from the comfort of their bedroom, there is so much music out there, and a little something for everybody. From an extensive music library that keeps  growing exponentially, we’re able to carve out a very niche, personal listening experience, completely unique to the individual and completely free from outside influences.

Radio, streaming services, verbal recommendations and especially personal relationships with a piece of music or an artist all influence our personal tastes, and we find ourselves in a period of a very diverse musical experiences for an individual, where we can go from listening to the honky tonk sounds of a country-esque group from the UK to the spaced-out sounds of Detroit Techno interpreted by a Dutch artist using old synthesisers made in Japan. (That’s literally just happened as I wrote this.)

It’s an incredible age we live in, but with so much musical stimulation coming from so many channels we are absolutely saturated with music and at times we need to take a step back, take stock, invest in the music that makes a lasting impression, and give a little back to the people that put so much effort into these creations. For that there’s is still only once place to turn. It’s a place as old as the commercial music printing press, and it’s still one of the most significant institutions in this thing we call DJ culture.

It’s the record store. It might have gone through some incredible changes with the development of the Internet as it migrated from the physical- to the virtual realm, but it’s ethos remains unchanged and those entities that continue to perpetuate that ideology, have become institutions in their own right. Filter Musikk in Oslo is one of those and continues to be a barometer for those looking for a sincere recommendation, especially  when it’s from one of Oslo’s leading figures in electronic music, Roland Lifjell.

Every week he gets a new batch of records at Filter Musikk, and whenever he does he gives us first dibs and together we select a few to make it into the cut with Filter Musikk. These aren’t just another crap record, you won’t play, and all of these records deserve more than just a listen…

 

Legowelt – Star Simulator (Clone Jack For Daze) 12link

For over two decades Legowelt has perpetuated a sound that has evolved or deviated little from those first Bunker records. Helena Hauff once surmised that the Dutch producer continues to make music like this because he considers that original sound from Detroit the most “perfect sound” in electronic music, and who are we to argue with that kind of logic.

From his arsenal of synthesisers… did you just say synthesiser…  yes synthesisers – Danny Wolfers loves his synthesisers – Legowelt coaxes a very distinct sound, one that has remained largely unchanged since he first started making music back in the 1990’s.

He is nothing but consistent, and more often than not, consistently good as he finds that rare position in his music, where dynamism, functionality, sound design and conceptualism converge on electronic, beat music. His latest contribution to the Clone Jack for Daze series is no different as he channels pragmatic beats, ethereal textures and emphatic melodies through his machines.

There’s always a kind of retrofitted sonic dexterity to Wolfers music as Legowelt, impart due to the equipment he uses, but also in the way he combines these sounds. Several layers of familiar synthetic textures course through the music as Wolfers explores abstract themes of space and fantasy in music that arrives in the present from a timeline, where Detroit never relinquished Techno to the Germans and captain Kirk is sill at the helm of the Enterprise.

There’s no need to mess with perfection and on his latest EP,” Star Simulator,” Legowelt stays the course, and from his bunker of synthesisers, he creates yet another significant contribution to his incredible discography… synthesiser…

 

Chiraya – Skranglebass EP (Entrepôt) 12″link

It’s new Norwegian music coming via the Belgium label, Entrepôt. Chiraya (formerly Furmit) is an Oslo-based producer that we don’t know anything about, and as far as we can tell Skranglebass is the first record he’s made under this alias. The name, taken from the defunct online radio station of some repute, is something of a homage to the DIY house sounds of early Norwegian electronic music and the deeper community that sprung up around it, which Chiraya honors it seems through four visceral, classic House tracks.

Chiraya favours a raw, domineering approach to House music as big kicks, razor-like melodic stabs and densely orchestrated samples strain and distort under their own weight. Everything seems to happen and is orchestrated for the moment, and there’s an incredibly potent and infectious live feel to the record as filters rise in and out of their frequency range and progressions halt and proceed at the will of some free improvisation.

The most surprising track on the EP is “Ekeberg” which was apparently taken from the hardware mega jam at Sommerøya last year. How anybody could make sense of that tangled mess, let alone get something so pure and concise out of it on a record, is a masterclass in itself. Soulful vocals screech out into the distance through the wave of one-fingered keys, while a hi-hat patters in the syncopated silence of that ever-present kick, stomping its way towards the dance floor. “Ekeberg” is the definitive sound of this record with all the other contributions clearly following in its wake through the EP.

 

Unprofessional – Civilization At The Bio Store (Forbidden Planet) 12″link

Forbidden Planet pick up the pace on this latest offering from unknown artist Unprofessional. “Civilisation at the Bio store” combines elements of EBM, Techno and Trance for an eccentric  take on the dance floor.

Between the contrast of the upbeat melodic bass lines and rhythm section and the malicious whispers and electronic atmospheres in the distance, Unprofessional has certainly arrived at a sound that is incredibly unique for its time.

You might be inclined to think Gabber by the third and penultimate track, “The final Info line” but there’s a little more on the bone to this record than a tawdry Dutch hardcorethrowback record. It’s not a subtle record, but it’s appropriating disparate musical cues to create something unique. Although very minimal in design, each part is created to make a prominent sonic impression in any context.

Bold, noisy synthesisers dominate the stereo field, while energetic percussive workouts rush through the progression of the tracks. “Civilization at the Bio Store” has an immediate and brief effect, but in its simplicity and its succinctness it achieves powerful results. It might need a little more refinement according to some, but it’s certainly refreshing to hear a new artist like this, veering from tried and tested formulas.  

 

Daniel Avery – Song For Alpha Remixes: One (Phantasy Sound) 12″ link

Yet another remix package from Daniel Avery’s “Song for Alpha” record from last year. There are already three different editions of this particular remix package out there as well as a couple of remixes from Four Tet and Jon Hopkins, but as is the nature of the drawn out physical release, we’ve only just received the first version.

Daniel Avery and Phantasy Sound hand over a few tracks from the album to three of the most uncompromising Techno artists operating in the scene today for the remix treatment. Manni Dee, Anastasia Kristensen and Patrick Russel put their spin on “Citizen // Nowhere,” “Glitter” and “Diminuendo” respectively, but the title is pretty much where they sever all connection to the originals.

Manni Dee’s blistering hardcore treatment of “Citizen // Nowhere” borders on sacrlige as he retains almost nothing of the original, shoehorning it into the sonic aesthetic he’s been cultivatingas a solo artist and live performer of late. And while Patrick Russel is the only artist that took the original in the opposite direction from Avery’s 4-4 original “Diminuendo”, this remix package is very much about outer extremes and clearly earmarked for a more progressive dancing audience.

Anastasia Kristensen too deliberately exposed the mere inner workings of the track, aggrandizing their simple functionality for a remix that skates around the fringes of Manni Dee’s interpretation. Over-extended tempos through a percussive onslaught of a-tonal noise dominates this record as these remixes offer very different interprations of the originals.  

…And be prepared as you go into Manni Dee’s rendition of “Citizen // Nowhere” after the first break… massive…

 

“We didn’t make shit for anybody else” – Jamie 3:26 in profile

Jamie 3:26 embodies the spirit and origins of House music. It’s even there in his name; 3:26 a reference to the address of the iconic Music Box in Chicago, where Ron Hardy held a residency and where Jamie first became aware of this thing called House. Born and raised in Chicago, it was dancing that led the nascent DJ and producer towards a path to House music. “I was introduced to this from my family,” he told Black Widow’s Web in 2018. “We would have a lot of parties at our house. Eventually, I began sneaking out to some of those basement parties. That’s when I started really getting into going to the parties and dancing. That was around 1985.”

Hip Hop had laid the foundation for an interest in music and DJing, but dancing was Jamie’s access to this nocturnal paradise in Chicago. “That’s how house music started;” Jamie compares; “DJs started making their own stuff to separate themselves and to be different.” Although the dance floor was his domain, the DJ booth beckoned, but it would remain a hobby for the longest time, due to some crippling stage fright. “I would kick ass in the basement but when it came time for the gig I would freak out and mess up,” he told 5 Mag’s Terry Matthew back in 2013. “I had a few chances to do some parties and they were like, ‘Okay, Jamie, go back to dancing.’”

Dancing did however offer the young Jamie a gateway to some of Chicago’s leading lights behind the decks, DJ’s like Ron Hardy, who he would often mention as a major inspiration in interviews. From his unique vantage point he “studied a lot of popular DJs and learned about timing and how they set up songs and things like that”. He “would hang out at the Music Box/Powerhouse on 22nd and Michigan” and “when they would DJ downstairs, Ron (Hardy) would let me get in the back and check him out.”

Influenced by Hardy and other greats like Lil Louis and Pharris Thomas he worked at his skills. These luminaries taught him about things like “crowd control” and armed with his parents’ record collection, he set out to master his craft like an astute student from these legends of House music.

When Jamie’s confidence started to mature as a DJ, he and some friends started a crew called lust corp and even though they weren’t meeting the age requirements at the door, they had youthful exuberance and numbers on their side. “We were a pretty deep crew,” explains Jamie. “We had the gift of gab and would talk our way in.”  Combining the lessons he learnt from the DJs around him and the experience he was gathering in the booth as a DJ, he eventually came into his own in the Chicago scene. Admittedly, it took him a “while to get it all together” but when he did, he instinctively set himself apart from the rest of the scene through his selections.

He and his crew “would listen to music and be like, ‘Aww that sounds like something Frankie would play or Ronnie may play,’” avoiding these records for something undiscovered and something that could distinguish them from their senior peers.  “We were looking for that gem, something to set you apart that no one had.” By the time Jamie was coming into his own as a DJ, Chicago had played an integral role in the dominance of House music on an international level, but at home it still had its own divisions across the scene. “You can have someone from Chicago that’s known everywhere around the world”… Jamie told 5 mag, “and here, they’ll be like, ‘Who are you? He ain’t shit.’” That kind of trial by fire must have had some effect on Jamie and well before he started making waves on the international circuit, he spent years proving himself on the local circuit. “In regard to any kind of scene, there’s not a lot of hometown support,” but Jamie persevered and by the time he released his first record, he had not only garnered the respect of people like Theo Parrish and the Hardys, but had also started to make his imprint in DJ booths in places like New York.

Between starting to DJ and that first release, nearly a couple of decades transpired, but Jamie’s ascent onto the world stage had still been a rapid one after the release of basement edits volume 1 on Bill (Ron’s brother) Hardy’s Parte Hardy label. It was a huge honour as the first, and to this day, the only artist ever to feature on the label other than Ron Hardy. Jamie’s music lifted some choice samples from some obscure records, cut them down to their bare essentials and built them back up to a point where they’d combine their infectious, at times familiar origins with a modern take on the dance floor.

Jamie’s music is built on the very same foundations of that Chicago legacy and the traditions of the edit, first introduced to the world by the likes of Hardy and Pharris, which still to this day sets the city’s music apart from the rest of the world.  “That’s what made the Chicago sound so unique and so different:” he says about the music. “We didn’t make shit for anybody else but us. They discovered us. We didn’t make shit for New York or Europe. This was for us.”

But it didn’t take long for the rest of the world to cotton on to Jamie 3:26. Theo Parrish was particularly instrumental in disseminating Jamie’s edits and even before the basement edits volume 1 came out he had been championing his Chicago counterpart through his sets. “I owe a lot to Theo Parrish,” urges Jamie in 5 mag. “I gave him a disc a few years earlier and he found a few of my edits that he loved and played the fuck out of them.”

From there Jamie started getting gig offers in New York and eventually Europe, and his popularity continued to grow around the world as the producer of edits like “Hit it n Quit it”, “Testify” and many more for labels like Rush Hour and Lumberjacks in Hell. A move to Amsterdam put him in reach of an European audience and his prowess in the booth had gone from being a local secret in the insular scene in Chicago to a prominent fixture in booths all around the world.

He might have taken longer than his Chicago peers to get to the same level, but Jamie 3:26 is a Chicago legend in every respect and more. He is one of the few Chicago DJs that can boast being both world famous and Chicago famous, and he is one of a very select few DJs in Chicago that can bridge the North and South divide in his hometown, an “imaginary Mason-Dixon Line” at Roosevelt Street as he calls it in 5 Mag. “There’s two different house music worlds here,” according to Jamie in 2013, “there’s a black house music world and a white house music world” and Jamie is one of the few DJs that is welcomed in both. “You can call me the Rosa Parks of House Music!” he jokes, but it verifies his unique ability to please a diverse crowd through his sets.

There’s a personality to the music he brings to his sets and the way he strings them together. Vocals and that Chicago funk bring a dynamism that seems to electrify and energise the dance floor and with Jamie’s individuality as a DJ through what he’s learnt and experienced through one of the most dominant House music scenes in the world, there are few DJs that does what he does in the way he does it.

 

*Jamie 3:26 plays Retro this Thursday, on the eve of 17.May. 

Album of the week: Bendik Baksaas & Fredrik Høyer – Til Alt Ute: Måne & Sol

Bendik Baksaas has been a prolific figure on the Norwegian electronic music circuit for the past few years. A solo recording artist, DJ, live performer and sound artist, Bendik Baksaas occupies many spheres in the vast landscape of electronic music, which he has recently channelled into a distinct dialect, bordering on the fringes of micro house, minimal techno and what he refers to as “rhythmical ambient”.

He collaborates often with other esteemed Norwegian artists and has performed and recorded with Kristtoffer Eikrem, Kim Dürbeck and poet Fredrik Høyer in the past, and it is particularly this last collaboration that has put him in the spotlight in Oslo and Norway recently. After collaborating on the 2017 LP Grønland Kaller in 2017, an LP that saw Baksaas adding a musical soundtrack to the poems of Høyer, they came together once more in 2018 to create an extensive, original album together. It’s actually two LPs, Sol and Måne, but on the physical format we get a distilled, edited version of both on a beautiful gatefold double LP and a printed book for the lyrics.

“It will be the grandest masterpiece in the history of Norwegian music-literature,” Baksaas told us in an interview just before the LP was released. “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.” 222 minutes of a sonic soliloquy commences, taking us on a journey through a Saturday night in a Norwegian city; “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.”

The record encapsulates the essence of youth culture in Norway projected through the voice of one of the country’s seminal  contemporary wordsmiths, Fredrik Høyer. Høyer and a host of young poets invited to contribute, document a night out from a Norwegian twenty-something’s perspective with Baksaas’ strident sonic creations intertwined in their words.

Piercing atmospheres and bold rhythmic progressions with clear designs on the dance floor, create a visceral accompaniment to lyrics covering everything from inane “vorspiel” conversations to the abstract thoughts that swirl through your head as you slip into reverie after a night on the dance floor. Moments of peaceful repose like “Fake blodmåner og England” are contrasted with the intense rhythmic assault of tracks like “Sjølvgeograpfi”, representing the two very different aspects of Norwegian nightlife culture going to- and from the dance floor.

Unlike “Grønland Kaller,” Baksaas and Høyer created this LP together, making for a more concise and visceral record where one element enhances the other. Without Høyer’s voice in the foreground and without Baksaas music, the effect of these tracks would have been far less impressive, as both seem to rely on the other to strike a chord in the listener. Baksaas repetitive loops would be listless without Høyer’s punchy provocative articulations and where the two artists intersect, they have found a unique sound and new objective in electronic music.

Front Left Speaker: Clubbing’s bourgeoisie on a trip in the desert and the inconvenient truth about a sustainable festival

Crossing the threshold into Afrika Burns in 2013, a band of carnival characters encourage newcomers to abandon the outside world in theatrical flair, ringing in a suspended gong under a sign reading: “you are entering the real world.” The real world? A week of escapism in an inhabitable corner of the Klein Karoo desert, far enough removed from society to become its own self-contained community where revellers indulge their creative fantasies and whims in an effort to leave the problems of the outside world at bay, for a weekend in April.

Your only access to this “real world” is a rocky road, which the mid-size rental, struggles along at a blistering 40km/h through a constant veil of dust as expensive 4×4 pickup trucks zoom past at twice the speed, eager to get to the only destination on that road. The sedan creaks to a halt at the gate, the suspension hardly displaying the same exuberant bounce it had when we first took ownership of the vehicle, as the load, including three people and about 600l of water, proved too much for the little car on those gravel roads. Besides a couple of plastic hubcaps, which were swallowed up by the dust, we arrive in one piece, and enter the “real world”, with a cymbal ringing out across the vast empty landscape.

Afrika Burns is a subsidiary of Burning Man, the world-renowned cultural event that erects a temporary, creative metropolis in the Nevada desert each year, with the climax of the event culminating in the burning of an amorphous effigy, before the “city” evaporates again into thin air. In the last ten years however, the festival has been dominated by a kind of tech-industry bourgeoisie and businessman-turned-temporary-hedonist in a week orchestrated solely for experimenting with all kinds of drugs, especially of the psychotropic variety. Transpose this to an arid desert enclave in the heart of South Africa’s Klein Karoo, and you have Afrika Burns.

While temporary infrastructures erected to be literally burned to the ground for the sake of the amusement for a bunch of white trust fund kids, carries its own socio-political questions in the complex tapestry of South Africa’s history, this is not the place and the time to fuel that fire (pardon the pun), especially with elections looming, but I will say this: it’s a thought that comes abundantly obvious as those expensive 4×4’s, overland trucks and various motorised toys for boys started rolling in and setting up mega-camps with all the luxuries of home to accommodate a five-night stay. (Later editions of Afrika Burns would even offer “glamping” options for the more discerning kind of hedonist, completely unsanctioned by the organisers.)

Our camp, which was three tents and a few mattresses, was erected in a matter of minutes, and we immediately made our way to the cultural hub at the centre of the festival, getting swept up in the carnival atmosphere and the ensuing dust storm of the first night. The first evening (we were in it for the long haul, the whole five days) was a tentative step into the “burner” way of life as we indulged the creative whimsy of the folksy art and the temporary installations that had been erected prior to our arrival.  Mutant vehicles glided past, illuminated in colourful LED lights as if floating on air in the pitch-black natural darkness of the desert. On the outskirts of the camp a brilliant, starry night emerged out of the dusk and the dust as the first sound systems burred and spluttered into life in the inner circle of the camp.

An old double-decker bus created by a local crew called ledhedz decked out in a convertible roof that flipped open to neon psychedelic microchip and DJ booth, quickly became the main attraction, and stayed it for the duration of the festival in fact. Through the night more and more people would be lured to the deep and effervescent sounds of the bus as some of Cape Town’s DJ luminaries like Bruno Morphet provided the playlist for the night, with a selection of Deep/Tech -House and minimal sounds partnering perfectly with the vast extensive landscape stretching out in every direction. Every bleep and pop of a kick seemed to get sucked into the amorphous black hole of the night and the desert, enticing bodies and ears to its sonic  luminous charm.

We staked our position in front of the impressive mobile sound system for the first time, lubricated with only alcohol to stave off the cold night air (in April the desert temperatures drop to the single digits in the Karoo). Our first night would be a relatively calm one as we tried to embrace this new self-sustaining civilisation, but our dough-eyed optimism in our newly discovered utopia would be short-lived, as by the next night it became abundantly clear what this was really all about; a drug festival in the desert for a kind of clubbing bourgeoisie.

The demographic was made up of marketing / advertiser young professionals; trust-fund hippies; and a few of the folks from the ever-popular psy-trance “scene” around the Western Cape (often cross-sectioning with the trust fund hippy). Everybody there came of some kind of means, us included, and none of us were in need of any kind of escape from the drudgery of the everyday; most of us were all seasoned clubbers and by association proficient politoxicologists.

On the second night, the liquid acid came out. A couple of drops around the dying embers of a fire and we were back at the ledhedz bus. As the bass from the bus went deeper and slower, the music started taking on swirling patterns that seemed to melt into the scenery, and everything fell into place. The installations, the mutant vehicles, the LED lights, the carnival atmosphere, and the secluded setting (especially this last part) were all there to indulge and in many cases heighten the psychotropic experience.

And if this was the only narrative they would spin, it would be fine, but the whole Burning Man franchise (and yes it is a franchise), is not marketed like that (and yes it is marketed). The ideology behind the festival series is about creating this self-sustaining desert metropolis where money is irrelevant and we become one with nature (leaving no imprint of our brief existence) in some form of progressive social society, but the reality is quite different.

By the third night in front of the ledhedz bus, the trash started piling up. The philosophy of taking all your trash with you had clearly not survived as Afrika Burns reached its climax and the twenty-something revellers forgot the utopian ideal they arrived with, strewing their plastic bottles, feather boas and cigarette butts wherever they danced that night. A social media feed (yes, you can get facebook in the desert – so much for leaving the fake world behind) from the ledhedz crew had shown the lower deck of the buss absolutely filled to the brim with bags of trash, none of which were their own.

The new social order quickly decayed into something more familiar, friendly acquaintances made on the first couple of nights, came of nothing and the groups that came together stayed together, tightly huddled together to avoid sharing their dwindling narcotic supplies.

The drug experiences continued, and everything was available… for a price that is. It seems that buck stops quite quickly in self-sustaining trading community, because your creative indulgence, free candy or holistic service still won’t buy you what you actually want, and that’s where good ole capitalism will always prevail. Even water, it turned out, wasn’t a commodity intended for trading. But that was ok, because the people at Afrika Burns have the means to provide their own provisions, which subverts the whole ideology of the burning man experience… doesn’t it?

By the fourth day I was over it. Caked in dirt, the drugs done, and all the liquid refreshment warm, I had had my fill and turned in early, purposefully avoiding the burning of the effigy. The allure of LED lights, impromptu folk art and even electronic music had run its course, and although the experience as a whole had left an impression on me, it was a conflicted one that came to an abrupt end with an explosion.

That final night, the camp behind us, the one that housed the volunteers, erupted in flames; the result of drug-addled mind trying to make a piece of toast. Fire!, somebody yelled running past my tent in the middle of the night, and in a sleep-deprived state, I answered, of course, we’re at Afrika Burns. Then I saw the flames, a terrifying blaze lapping up against the small road that separated our camp from the next.  “Yeah that seems about the perfect end to it” I thought calculating the distance and time it would take for the flames to reach the car, our tents and all our belongings. Fortunately this was the right place for a fire to happen if there ever was going to be one, and the organisers managed to quell it before it could do any really harm or damage, and a sense of relief spilled over me as I realised our only way out of there, the car. was still in tact.

Sleep on my rigid little stretcher didn’t come easy that night, not so much for the events that transpired, but just the sheer exhaustion of living a working week in the “real world.”  The morning illuminated the extent of the fire, the scorched earth and stories of helpless festival goers separated from their camp by the flames.

Packing up was even harder that morning than erecting the camp, as we had to shoehorn a pile of trash into the car alongside all those unused supplies. I marvelled at my neighbours as they were suddenly overcome with the giving spirit of the festival, offering free showers and past-expiration date food on the last day in an effort to avoid an overloaded haul over that bumpy, gravel terrain.. Many of the other mega-camp structures followed suit as they finally saw the need to shed their worldly belongings for the sake of lightening their loads and trash for the ride home. With no basic infrastructure it seems that we made more waste than what we would have if we had just stayed home.

We could’ve left these hedonistic adventures for the city, where things like trash disposal, ablutions and sewage is readily available, and left nature intact and undisturbed as it was before. Surely digging a trench for 1000’s of people’s evacuations must do something to the PH levels in the soil. All those disposal plastic water bottles have to go somewhere and it might not be a desert, but a trash heap somewhere else instead, doesn’t make a great solution either. Making 15 000 people drive 100’s of kilometres in fuel-hungry 4×4’s kicking up tons of dust in what is usually untouched terrain, certainly can’t be good for the atmosphere. Chauffeuring 50-odd DJs – some with a helicopter I might add– for about an hour and a half of playtime seems counter-intuitive with what we know about global warming today. Afrika Burns for all its ideologies and efforts is simply unsustainable.

No, I don’t think Afrika Burns is the great white hope of creating a sustainable festival experience, but in all honesty, Afrika Burns and even the bigger Burning Man franchise is the most conscious of it. It’s one of the better festivals in this regard, but a sustainable festival is an elusive pipedream; 1000’s of people temporarily migrating on mass to listen to DJs and artists flown in from all over the world for a brief performance, is just not sustainable.   

Our drive back was solemn and quiet affair, as we bobbed up and down on our rigid suspension, the whole car smelling the trash collected over five days, and three unwashed individuals. Every roadside bin on the way back, even the ones still technically in a nature reserve, was its only little trash heap. At the festival sight volunteers had already started combing through the desert for everything from plastic water bottles to glitter, as the trucks, 4x4s and overland busses started evacuating the site. I vowed this was the first and only time, and I’ve never been to a festival since.

A few days later, in the centre of Cape Town, we see one of the mutant vehicles, a vespa-turned-luminescent-swan leaving a streaking light in its wake. Are we in the real world now?

* Would you like to contribute ti the Front left Speaker series with your own tale from rave? Send us an email with your story. 

Album of the week: Late Night Tales – Floating Points

We’ve been completely enamoured with Floating Points since his 2014 LP, Elaenia and the live show that followed it. The records is still a regular favourite here, and when we saw the artist and band perform the LP at Øya a few years back, it remains one of the best shows we’ve ever experienced. In 2017 he consolidated the live experience and the recorded format for the live concept video LP, “Reflections” recorded live in the Mojave dessert. It had the critics divided, with them either singing its praises or confused by the conceptual thread underpinning the record, but none could avoid the record either way. Floating Points, the artist has made such an incredible impact on the landscape with records like Nuits Sonores / Nectarines elevated to the status of classics today,  that it is often hard to remember that Floating Points is also an incredible DJ.

While it might appear he’s trained most of his efforts on the recording/production aspects of his creative endeavours in recent years, he’s never stopped DJing – even after his memorable Øya performance, he took to Jaeger’s booth for a DJ set. He’s designed mixing consoles for Isonoe and is revered by his peers for his skills in the booth, which he applies with the same perfectionist touch that he utilises in the studio. His extensive musical taste covers everything from House to Jazz, selecting tracks that bask in their own obscurity, but somehow always sound contemporary and appropriate in whatever setting he might play out.

Lately he’s been travelling the breadth of the musical cosmos in mammoth all-day long sets that span up to eight hours long, but his critical appeal as a recording artist has still somewhat overshadowed his prowess as a DJ since Elaenia. Until now that is with his contribution to the Late Night Tales mix, and compilation series. Late Night Tales have been curating mixes from DJs like Bonobo, Lindstrøm and Four Tet as well as artists like The Flaming Lips, Arctic Monkeys and Belle & Sebastian, mixes that live beyond the club floor, for those early mornings, unwinding from a night on the tiles. Floating Points approaches the mix like a DJ but also like an artist, finding some harmonious bond between what he represents as a selector and the music he’s been making since Elaenia.

In its continuous form, Floating Points immerses the listener in luxurious organic textures and supple progressive pieces that border the musical landscapes between Jazz and Soul. Polyrhythmic percussive pieces from artists Max Roach and Alain Bellaïche sit beside sweet vocal pieces from the likes of The Defaulters and Bobby Wright, as the DJ bounces between introspective pieces testing the limits of the mix, before resolving again into something familiar or at least accessible, with elements like a human vocal or a surreptitiously strummed guitar, breaking down the listener’s defences. It’s a completely mesmeric mix where you find yourself just drifting along its entirety, as one sinuous thread pulls you along to the next. Floating Points has always been a great DJ, but in a mix like this, he really shows the depth of his extensive musical abilities. It’s not a mix you’ll admire for it’s transitions (although he’s flawless in that regard) but more for the way the DJ is able to establish a very defined mood and feeling through the music of others, one that is perfectly synchronised with the concept behind Late Night Tales.

A musical eden – The Kala festival with AKA Juan & Ollie Shapiro

The Kala Festival has transformed a little Albanian enclave in the Adriatic sea into a musical eden for a weekend in summer. The stunning location and sincere and considered booking strategy makes this little boutique festival in Dhërmi a musical retreat in all sense of the phrase. It’s a musical festival, but it’s also a vacation with a breathtaking setting and all the amenities of holiday rather than the arduous toil of your average festival.

Now in its second year Kala has established itself as one of the most exciting new developments on the festival circuit with a distinct approach to booking that stands apart from the rest with one of the most eye-watering lineups of the season, curated around the setting. Hunnee, Midland, Theo Parrish, Honey Dijon and Derrick May are some of the headliners for the festival, and with the likes of Brian not Brian, Jayda G and Fatima completing the lineup, and collaborators like Phonica and secretsundaze on the bill, there’s a dominant Balearic and House mood that looks set to prevail at Kala this year.

In 2019 Jaeger will collaborate with the festival for the first time and have occupied the Splendor stage for a day with Prins Thomas, Øyvind Morken, Bjørn Torske and Olanskii providing DJ sets well into the depths of the night. But before we do that AKA Juan & Ollie Shapiro will be joining us at Jaeger to bring a bit of the Kala life to our backyard. Armed with some 7” records and some 1” usb sticks, they have the floor for the evening to disseminate the sound of the Kala festival through their back to back set.  

AKA Juan and Ollie Shapiro are both intrinsic fixtures in the London DJ circuit. Coming from two distinct corners of the scene, they find a common ground in the booth, perpetuated through and influenced by the music profile of the Kala festival. With everything from Drum n Bass to Balearic influencing their selections, they are not constrained by fixed genres or styles in their sound. But besides that we know very little of AKA Juan & Ollie Shaprio and the origins of Kala festival, so we popped them an email to find out more ahead of their visit.

 

© Photography by Josh Hiatt for Here & Now (fb.com/wearehereandnow)

Hello Juan and Ollie, and thanks so much for taking the time to answer a few questions for us. Let’s start with you. Can you tell us a bit about your own history with electronic music and DJing?

Juan: I had just finished music school when I first saw a video of A-Trak cuttin’ and scratching at the DMC world championship, think it was 2003 or 2004. I was fascinated by the way he was creating something completely new with just two turntables and a mixer. Sold my all my snowboard equipment to get my first pair of decks shortly after and locked myself up until I was able to scratch. My neighbours loved it :)

Ollie: I grew up in Bristol where it was kind of impossible to escape rave music, especially at that time. My first experiences were of Jungle and D&B, and it absolutely blew me away – hundreds of people losing their mind to music all at the same time – and very shortly I’d gotten some cheapo Stanton decks and was copying Andy C double-drops to imagined crowds of thousands in my parent’s house. I still have all those records somewhere…

How did you guys meet and what cemented your musical relationship?

Juan: We met through work actually. We both were part of the team that developed the concept of Kala. We are a small team based in London, shouts to the rest of the team, they are amazing!

Where do your musical tastes intersect?

Juan: I think Kala illustrates this quite accurately. We come from different backgrounds and both have quite a broad taste but there is a common thread that connects soul, disco, house and techno and that’s where we find common ground.

Ollie: Yep. Funnily enough we worked together for about 6 months before DJing together at all – and we kind of threw ourselves into that with closing Kala last year (which we’re doing again this year) – but we’d spent so much time discussing music that we knew we’d gel.

You have both been fixtures in London for some time. Who and what are some of your musical affiliations in the scene there?

Juan: I worked at Phonica Records for quite a few years which really made an impact on my music taste. Not only because I got exposed to a wild range of genres but also because I got to hang out with really knowledgeable people and all sorts of record nerds. We held residencies all over the city which normally means playing all night long sets and being able to play all sorts of music and take journeys through genres. I’m looking forward to playing all night at Jaeger this Saturday!

Ollie: I help run a charity party called Family Tree, which is very much centred around a big group of friends. I also regularly play all night in a club in Hackney called – seriously – Oslo. Also a quick shout out to some of the great London party-throwers who have had us play recently – Secretsundaze, World Unknown, Feelings and the rest!

Tell us a bit about the origins of the Kala festival.

Juan: One of the founders visited Dhërmi while on holiday and immediately saw the potential of the location. Launching a new festival in a previously unused location is not an easy task, it took over 4 years of preparation to bring it to life but we have an incredible team and couldn’t be happier with how things went last summer. This year is looking even better!

 

© Photography by Josh Hiatt for Here & Now (fb.com/wearehereandnow)

It’s in its second year. What did you take away from the first year and what has been the crucial ideology behind the festival since it’s started?

Juan: From the beginning, we wanted to offer a different kind of festival experience. Kala dares to blur the lines between holiday and music festival. It offers a week of thoughtfully curated music, paradisiacal beaches, holiday and wellness activities and the opportunity to travel to an unknown destination – Albania is the last short-haul European sunspot that hasn’t been flooded by mass tourism.

We also put great effort in the programming. You can spend the day relaxing at one of the amazing beaches, go snorkeling or take a boat to Gjipe – a beach forest sitting at the end of a natural canyon where the likes of Jamie Tiller and John Gómez play during the weekend. At night, headline DJs play extended 5h sets, which means there is time to check other stages and acts without missing out. It’s a more relaxed festival experience than having to plan your day and night in order to see everyone you bought the ticket for.

How does the booking strategy reflect this?

Ollie: Every single DJ we have at Kala is someone I’d trust with an all-night set at a club. I think that’s a big test for me – are they just a producer who’s had a few big tunes? If so, that’s not really our vibe. If they’re the sort of DJ who can hold it down on many different types of dancefloors at many different times of day or night, then they’re much more likely to fit in at Kala.

With the bookings for 2019 there seems to be a specific kind of sound/mood to your choices. Is there usually a theme for your choices of acts/DJs and what influenced your decisions for this year?

Ollie: Haha – the theme is ‘really, really good’. I have a huge longlist of DJs and live acts that have blown me away in some way or another. Then we look at the programming plan across the week, and find DJs from that list who fit every slot – who do we want to play this sunrise slot? Who do we want to knock it out of the park at peak time at Empire? There’s SO many fantastic DJs around at the moment that it’s incredibly exciting (and hard!) planning it all out.

How much does the setting play a role in the sound of the festival?

Ollie: A huge role. It’s such an incredible place that the sound and the setting are totally intrinsic. You can feel that while you’re there, too; the sense of freedom people feel while there extends into the way they interact with the music. It becomes very open-minded and DJs can really tap into that.

Why did you decide on Albania for the location?

Ollie: The founder Juan mentioned above who went to Dhermi on holiday has a Kosovan partner; they took them there, and that was that. The enthusiasm and hospitality we encountered from the Albanians during the planning just cemented it.

What is the local scene like in Albania for DJs and House music, and how does that factor into the festival?

Ollie: Tirana has some maaad warehouse parties, and some wicked local selectors – we have a bunch coming down to play!

© Photography by Josh Hiatt for Here & Now (fb.com/wearehereandnow)

Jaeger will also be hosting a stage at Kala this year alongside Secretsundaze, Phonica Records, Stamp The Wax, Feelings and World Unknown. What’s the nature of these collaborations and what should we expect in our first year?

Ollie: It’s really just a case of (in some sense) like-minded musical souls who we get excited about the prospect of letting them do their thing. There’s a lot of parallels in ethos between Jaeger and Kala, and not just in the bookings. Plus, giving a night under the stars on the beach to Prins Thomas, Oyvind Morken, Bjorn Torske and Olanskii is just…how could it be anything other than brilliant?

You’ll be bringing the Kala spirit of the festival over to Oslo this weekend. If you had to sum that up in one track, what would it be?

Juan: It’s hard to boil it down to only one track but I’m looking forward to dropping this Zazou Biyake Afro-acid mix. https://youtu.be/gkU4hbN7t6I

Ollie: Oooof that’s tough! Gonna go with Juan’s cop-out too and say this is quite a Kala track by Tony Esposito that I’m looking forward to pumping out at Jaeger: https://youtu.be/Awp-O9rtGgI

You’re playing to our backyard all night long. How do you imagine your set going on the night?

Juan: Probably start with some 7 inches, rare groove and balearic disco then move on to housier territories, italo, cosmic disco and let’s see where we end up!

Ollie: Sounds about right. I’m bringing a USB stick rather than vinyl though, so my 7 inches will be more like 1 inches…

Thank you Juan and Ollie. That’s all the questions I have. Do you have anything to add?

Thanks for having us! We are really looking forward to play at the club!

 

The cut with Filter Musikk

The dust has started to settle from the extensive building work around Skippergata, revealing a new pristine walkway in the shade of the new Clarion hub extension with its shiny midas cladding glistening against the arrival of the Norwegian spring sun. It casts a long shadow over one of Oslo’s musical institutions, Filter Musikk where Roland Lifjell has presided over Oslo’s DJ- and electronic music community since time immemorial (2002)  and while everything around it might be changing it’s still the most consistent barometer for good, electronic music in the city of Oslo.

The face of the city’s landscape might have changed drastically since Roland Lifjell took over Filter Musikk, but the shop and the DJ behind the shop has been an unwavering presence in the culture. When an interest in vinyl waned, he and Filter Musikk persevered and when hype permeated through the scene and record stores, selling endless represses of Rolling Stones LPs became the norm, he was still there pursuing the original ideologies of record- and DJ culture.

Personally selecting the labels, artists and records that pass through the store, Roland Lifjell is one of the last archetypal record store owner/clerks. Always available for a chat; ready with a cup of Norway’s finest instant coffee; and always at hand with a new record for you, he and Filter Musikk are a piece of history, a piece of the past, hermetically sealed in time in our contemporary age. As the face of the scene and the city keeps changing around it, Filter Musikk upholds the legacy and the origins of this culture.

Every week he unpacks a new box of records from kindred spirits that pursue the same values he does across club music genres from around the world. He remains a ballast for the DJ community in the city, putting new Nowregian artists and labels first in the store, putting these on equal footing alongside their international counterparts. He instinctively knows his audience and regardless of your musical preferences, there’s always something new at hand for the discerning music fan. Together, with Roland, we pick through the latest arrivals and where our tastes converge, we arrive at the cut with Filter Musikk.

*Filter Musikk and Roland Lifjell are back this Friday at Jæger with Donato Dozzy.

 

Trevor Deep Jr., Wasserfall & Vaage, S. Brand, Sagittarii Acid – HMD 001 (HMD) 12″

A new Norwegian vinyl label emerges from the Hjemme Med Dama cassette label and mix series. What started off as a house (as in “home” not the genre) party in Jan Fredrik Bjerk’s (aka Jan Mayan) apartment turned into a recorded mix series, a cassette label, a fanzine, an event, and a festival, has arrived at the vinyl format for the first time. Where Hjemme Med Dama was already an all-encompassing fixture in Oslo, it is now disseminating its musical ideologies to the wider world through a new compilation EP, carrying the spirit of the label forward.

For the first release Jan Fredrik Bjerk assembles a group of producers that operate in the trenches of House and Acid in Norway and beyond, as he continues to pursue his love for all things deep under the Hjemme Med Dama banner.

Besides Trevor Deep Jr., a duo hailing from Finland, all the other artists are Norwegian, most of them from Oslo and all very close proximities to the Hjemme Med Dama mainstay. Together, and completely independently of each other, they’ve cemented Bjerk’s vision for this first compilation which immediately finds some congruity with the mix series and cassette label in the deep spirit of Hjemme Med Dama. Each artist interpreting it in their own particular idiom, they contribute four exquisite dance floor cuts for the House music enthusiast.

From S. Brand’s vertigo inducing themes, Sagittari Acid’s lysergic 303 movements,  Trevor Deep Jr.’s, balearic downtempo beats, to Wasserfall & Vaage’s luxuriously deep key work, each artist stakes a claim in some corner of the House music’s rhombicosidodecahedron. It’s good to hear that a new Norwegian vinyl label is joining the fray and the fact that it is based in Oslo is also very promising for the scene here.  

 

Fort Romeau – Heaven & Earth (Permanent Vacation) 12″

Harnessing that immense power he imbues in his work, Fort Romeau points his striking synthetic designs towards the astral plane for four deep, transient House tracks with transcendental qualities.

The UK artist taps into elements of Trance as synth arpeggios climb unscalable heights towards some ethereal plato, weighed down by the gravitational pull of the kick-bass arrangements. While the Trance references are quite subtle on most of the album, “Visions” transports us back to 1999 as galloping triplet bass sequences play alongside droning four-four kicks, while synthesisers play in the cosmos of the track. If it were faster, it could border on the psychedelic, but Fort Romeau restrains his indulgences and, incorporating elements like eighties synth textures or hand percussion, he subverts the tawdry and the clichéd, offering his own modern interpretation on the genre.

Each track is quite different on this EP, however and each seems to make its own impression on the listener. “Eye of Re” reaches out into the cosmos in search of a space beyond Disco through squirmy acid bass lines and tweeting toms, while the title track grounds itself in something more earthy, and the closest we’ll get to Fort Romeau’s earlier works. Opener “Just” is also full of surprises as the UK artist seems to channel the likes of Jarre and Moroder for a trippy House track with traces of nu disco, and eighties body music proving too infectious to ignore.

Beyond the immediacy of all the songs on this record, it tends to stay with the listener, and it’s definitely something worth returning to time and time again, revealing new intrinsic layers beyond the immediate.

 

Skee Mask – 808BB (Ilian Tape) 12″

Ilian Tape’s exclusive vehicle for the music of Skee Mask returns with “808BB”. As the autonomous outlet for the Ilian Tape mastermind wildest fantasies it sets itself somewhat apart from the rest of the Ilian tape catalogue. Uncompromising, sometimes provocative, and always unique, Skee Mask’s music occupies outlier genres operating at the fringes of club music. The German artist operates between Techno, Breakbeats and Ambient noise in tracks that don’t pander to the dance floor, but rather dominate it.

Big beat constructions that feign rudimentary 4-4, skip and hop along like a North Korean military parade on the opener, “Trackheadz” for this latest release. Snare drums scatter in the wake of the kick as the track stutters through its progression. But there’s more to the track than the all-consuming power of its presence, and all kinds of pads, vocal samples and glitches assemble to create something more than just a functional dance floor stomper.

It’s something Skee Mask takes to the other extreme on the B-side with two torpid ambient, breakbeat tracks that languish in serene pads and subtle rattling beats that very rarely pierce the delicate textures of these tracks.

 

Charlton – Till Love Do Us Part (Mord) 12″

While we’re on the subject of uncompromising Techno… Mord exists and German producer Charlton has found his way back on the label with “Till Love do us part”. Following a few releases for the label in the past, Charlton perpetuates the all-consuming sound of the label, with big thunderous beats and sinister atmospheres dominating the record.  

A deep, dark void appearing like a blackhole at the edge of the beats suck everything into the gravitational pull of the kick drum. Remnants of sparkling textures, broken down to mere molecules, re-ordered and re-assembled in a two dimensional plane, struggle to form a consistent atmosphere through the litany of percussive beats.

Even at his most reserved through “SHR_MS” and “Till Love do Us Part”, Charlton plays on a kind of ambiguous, yet unbridled energy that propels the tracks along the timeline. Obscure, psychedelic and abstract melodic- and harmonic phrasing garner a sense of unease, especially potent on the closing track, “Somewhere Between.”

 

Versalife – Vortices EP (Shipwrec) 12″

We’ve sung the praises of Versalife and Shipwrec records on this feature a few times before, so whenever either falls into our purview, it at the very least demands a listen. Versalife’s expressive and extensive take on the Electro genre is captivating for the sonic palette he creates through his music. Sharp concise percussive parts, perforating effervescent textures and exploratory electronic arrangements, find the artist thriving on the borders of IDM and Braindance without falling head first into the self-indulgent sonic braggadaccio that can often define those genres.

Versalife favours a more temperate zone between those two amorphous electronic bodies, and while he’s eager to indulge the experimental, he never subverts the experiential in the process. His latest EP on Shipwrec particularly aligns with the latter, as he moves away from the controlled, progressive arrangements from his recent Soul of the Automaton series in search of something a little more free from the constraints of a predefined structure.

Over four tracks, Versalife creates pieces that are tethered to their central theme, a simple loop that varies only in timbre as alien pieces float through their timeline like strangers on a train. There’s a very improvised feel to this record as a performance ensues with no real clear, ultimate destination ever revealing itself through the tracks. There are distinct elements however like that deep gurgling 303 bassline of the title track and “Chimaera” or the immensely orchestrated atmospheres of “Amber Molecular Profile” that really stick out on this release, and with no real arc to these tracks, Versalife gives you enough time to wholly appreciate these magnificent sonic elements.

It’s this focus on the sonic design – and it’s something that he does across his other aliases like Conforce and Hexagon too – that is Versalife’s major appeal. Every sonic moment on this record, like all his other records is so intricate and precisely orchestrated within the dynamic of the rest of the track. “Vortices” is yet again another masterclass from the producer and artist and so we’ll continue to sing his praises here.  

 

Hear Charlotte Bendiks on the Uncanny Valley podcast

Charlotte Bendiks delivers a mix for the people at Uncanny Valley following her contribution to the RED compilation on the label last month. Our Ironi resident continues to play on the dark, sultry sounds of the club floor in this mix, something she has perpetuated through her music and sets in recent years. Eclectic, yet esoteric in its musical vision, this mix travels thruogh elements of House, Synthwave and new, Nu Beat in a restless and psychedelic hour of music.

There’s some congruity between the mix and her latest single for the label, as dark, deep undertones bounce through polyrhythmic, percussive arrangements in search of some psychotropic experience. “Pasco” sits alongside tracks from The Golden Filter, Mayan Gold and Katrina & Sneaker and is available now through most musical outlets, including bandcamp. You can stream that track below.

Charlotte Bendiks will be back at Jaeger this June for Pride x Ironi with Carlo & Selma from Group Therapy.

What have the futurists ever done for us?

In part 2 of “what have the futurists ever done for us”, Ross Bicknell continues to draw a tenuous thread between the futurist’s art movement of the early 20th century and modern Techno from the likes of Donato Dozzy. Read part 1 here.

It’s a blessing Russolo’s device has only scantly surviving auditory evidence of its existence. Firstly for me as a writer because it means I can invent whatever I damn well like about it, and also because it fires the starting gun on any imagination concerned with these things to run headlong into the beautiful, dystopian distance, (toward a dying, bleached out sun perchance). Much like the work of the Italian producer Donato Dozzy, who  frequently works with sampled noises in the Russolo tradition in combination with transcendent, ambient atmospherics and synths and comes from a long line of sampladelic techno and ambient artists captivated by the power of found sound from the Orb to Objekt/Randomer/Untold etc and their abstract techno experiments. The Orb preferring a summery palette of biplanes and blissed out southern American combine territory evocation, the others punctuating B-movie beats & clang captured on worn out tape with ‘oof’s, ‘huh’s, and ‘wurp’s from humans (‘huh’s are almost my favourite kind of sample, just behind hoovers I think). Donato’s latest album ‘Vaporware’ is a collage of meditative, uplifting soundscapes. Maybe Russolo would have turned his futurist nose up at it for having too many ‘musical’ notes. This is not exactly a sign of lack of quality, he was a bit of a techno fascist, but Donato’s acid workouts would probably have got him going and perfectly capture the steely futurist principles he maintained.

Techno has come along way since Russolo. So what of that?

Techno 2019: Big business.

Techno engages with this temporal acceleration and its enjoyment today can frequently fit into an accelerated and addicted behaviour pattern involving the selfie, the excitement of the first dance, the boshing of a pill, a dab, a snort, a double vodka and redbull in a cup emblazoned with propaganda for a product, the woop, the hands in the air, the spin round and the do it all again. Purists might claim (or they might be too fried or rich now…) that this is far from the Underground Resistance DIY ethic Mike Banks talks about here: There are definite messages there through tonal communication, we are silent and deadly and that’s the best way UR credits announce No hope, no fear, my only hope is underground.  

But what about the discussion I touched upon about the ideological thrust and wanton statements made by the Italian Futurists? If it shares such an affinity with techno musically/ideas wise e.g. Russolo, as I have hopefully demonstrated, what else does it share? Ideology? Let’s see. I went to Londons Tobacco Dock last year to see some big name Techno DJs at an all-day mega techno event. I was met with wall to wall white people (of which I am one) from the same part of England (kind of where I come from originally, not IN London..), but wearing the same clothes, doing the same moves, (I had slightly different clothes, less.. it was a stag do for christ’s sake) completing the same patterns of behaviour as aforementioned and all to a mechanised and violent soundtrack akin to an Italian Futurists dream in an industrial carpark under a relic of slavery and colonial might.

There was joy in the collective thrust and togetherness of this group, marching forward who cares where, but marching, and only in a way that a 4/4 techno beat can make you. Nothing wrong with any of that of course, in fact I was having a whale of a time, but I was getting a sense (or when I thought about the sense that maybe I had got, a few days later, I got the sense) that there was a distinct lack of appreciation of history in this space, both the history of the place, and probably the week that had just occurred, if not the moment just been.. Obliteration of memory seemed to be on the agenda. Being in the now is a desired feature of meditation, but also the pursuit of it through any means necessary could be conducive to an unquestioning state you could call apathy, or just total unadulterated befuddlement. I think it really depends on the quality of the moment you are trying to stay in as to weather being in it is as sacrosanct as some might wish to believe.  Now maybe all this is just a reflection of the current state of Britains 20 somethings and their collective need to rid themselves of a social media induced miasma, but erasure of memory, and history is a distinctly fascistic trope (ya know, book burning n stuff), just saying (having said that Im going back this year). I have to hand it to this generation though for reportedly drinking less, although drugs and techno can still fuck you up kids!

In one sense theres not much mystery to techno like there might be in DnB & Jungle. No questions asked. I think this is the point. As punk also sought to destroy what was there before, techno embodies this in sound. So I suppose it can mirror the full throttle attitude of futurism in this way. Techno probably attracts the far-right as much as punk did in it’s day, with its global reach.. but then again anti war commie rap-metalers Rage Against The Machine (RATM) were used in Iraq war death missions to gee up the US troops into trigger happy killing engines, so most loud/fast music is capable of being appropriated in one way or another.

You could also say communism or any other regime like system of government is alluded towards, so basically this music has militaristic and dictatorial vibes (although turning up wearing a Nazi uniform would probably be taking it too far, and more likely to be done by a royal whilst getting down to Ocean Colour Scenes greatest hits, so the techno scene does still have some decorum). Lose yourself in this heady mixture and you will never need pay the price, it says, although there is always those that do.

Techno pulls from the Futurist Manifesto those parts that the Futurists deemed splendid like speed, noise, mechanised violence, erasure of memory and industrial might and runs with them as its central theme. Its capable of exploring them critically and many forms of techno exist which are reflective/meditative but in its overall musical and cultural essence (cos I have special essence receptors that are 100% accurate, so you know) this is not tantamount to the soul of techno. Maybe other forms of electronic music can perform this particular function a little better? Perhaps DnB and Jungle? Stay tuned to the next chapter to read me scrabble around trying to justify why I think so.

So what have the Futurists ever done for us?

Their radical belief in a modernity in the arts that did away with the muling human soul has its manifestation as techno, whether as critique or exhilarating embrace or both. Russolo laid the foundations for how it would be achieved with his little intervention in the natural order of things and whose ripples still get musos all hot under the collar today. So thanks Futurists, wanton, bonkers desires lie in your initial spirit and however it’s manifested in the last 100 years it lives on in techno. That multifaceted dancing machine that keeps on giving regardless.

 

*A modern day Futurist comes to town this week at Jaeger when Donato Dozzy comes to Jaeger  for another Frædag x Filter Musikk

Album of the Week: Prins Thomas – Ambitions

Writing about a new Prins Thomas LP has become a regular occurrence here at Jaeger over the last two years. He’s found a creative stride in the album format since “Principe Del Norte” as a solo artist and collaborator for Smalltown Supersound. “Ambitions” is his second solo effort and fourth LP for the Oslo based label in the last three years. In between he’s also released 5 (his fifth studio LP) on his own Prins Thomas Musikk imprint or Full Pupp and a string of EPs, remixes and singles, all culminating in one of the most prolific eras for Prins Thomas as an artist since the start of is career.

“Ambitions”, like “Principe Del Norte” absconds from Thomas’ numerically titled LPs and like “Square One” with Bjørn Torske and the LP he made with Bugge Wesseltoft before this one, it veers from the “space disco” sound he’s cultivated through the years. “Ambitions” favours a similar organic approach to those records, a kind of krautrock, pop record that marries Prins Thomas extensive musical dialogue as a DJ with his skilfully precise work as a producer. Everything lately in Prins Thomas’ music seems to be underpinned by some funky bass guitar, bouncing between bongo drums, as synthetic manoeuvres breeze by in free improvised melodic expressions tethered to a whim.

Past the ambient opener of “Ambitions”, we jump right into that sound on “XSB” and from there the album scours the absolute limits of Thomas’ musical abilities as Disco, Funk, House and Synth Wave converge on this LP. It is indeed an ambitious endeavour as Thomas attempts to bring these disparate corners of his musical purview together on the LP. The tracks on “Ambitions” were recorded in isolation and independently from each other in various fleeting circumstances; hotel rooms, airplanes, backstage rooms, patios and studios. It was only when Joakim Haugland from Smalltown Supersound turned his “critical ears” to these works that they started to take shape as an album through Thomas’ distinctive production touch.

It’s an album made up of songs, rather than a defined concept or context and for the listener this creates ephemeral relationships with distant musical universes, that never quite lands on its feet as an album, but like a Prins Thomas DJ set, keeps pulling you off towards a new direction at the turn of each track. Unlike his last LP on Smalltown Supersound, “Principe Del Norte”there are specific moments like “Feel the Love” which seems to be directed for the dance floor, but at the same time there are also those more contemplative moments like the title track and its objective associations.

The resemblances to Prins Thomas’ previous numerical LPs are tenuous, as it was for the previous Smalltown Supersound works, and it seems that the label boss has unearthed, and is nurturing a new side to Prins Thomas’ artistry one that has been embedded in very fertile ground of late.

Accessible Party Music – Profile on Container

“When I started Container I wasn’t consciously trying to make weird music,” Ren Schofield (Container) told Resident Advisor in 2011. “I was actually trying to do a straight-ahead techno project, but… people have been talking about how weird the music is.” On the fringes of Noise, where it crosses over into elements of Techno, is where the music of Container exists. Schofield’s only intention for the project was to make “accessible party music,” but since releasing his debut LP in 2011, the music has been embraced for its “weirdness,” by an audience dancing in the margins of club music and noise music enthusiasts looking for some kind of familiar beat construction in the barrage of distortion and feedback the predicates that genre. In that respect the music of Container is “accessible party music,” if that party were at the gates of hell and we were all dancing to Gabriel’s horn.


Schofield’s music as Container makes no concessions for accessibility in any traditional form through a barrage of incessant drums and a sonic soup of incoherent one-note bass modulations. A profusion of controlled chaos prevails, as scattered elements come together in a cacophonous harmony with specific designs on the dance floor. Container is a centrifuge of unbridled energy, set loose on the very same instruments that prelude Techno’s designs, but converge on the borders of DIY, Punk and Noise, for something more tactile and raw. Since his debut LP, Schofield has gone on to release three more on Spectrum Spools – all simply entitled LP – and a host of EPs and cassettes on labels like Liberation Technologies (Mute), Diagonal and his own I Just Live Here cassette label. His live performances have become the stuff of mythic lore, praised for the visceral energy, coercing static dance floors into movement as non-partisan audiences are compelled forward by the sheer intensity of the music.  

“I now do the same thing I did in noise,” he explained to RA. “It’s the same approach, just a different sound.” Schofield arrived at this interpretation of Techno through an unfamiliar route. Where most artists working in the field perpetuate the rhetoric where a legacy defined by Detroit and Berlin emboldened them to a career in this music, Schofield’s history is more complex than the sum of those parts. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island in the USA, Schofield’s music career started as “a teenager” about 15 years ago. “I started touring with bands after high school in 2003,” he recalled in an interview with Vice, “and then started focussing mostly on solo stuff in 2007.” In Providence he stepped into a “really cool” music scene, one “based on warehouse venues that change somewhat frequently due to people moving out of town, or getting kicked out of the space.” The setting provided an exciting platform for “like-minded” individuals like Schofield who would thrive in the DIY nature of these venues, which over twenty years became “very ingrained in the musical culture of the city.”

His first solo projects, Age Wave and God Willing embraced this “musical culture,” and aligned itself with the Noise scene that would naturally thrive in this kind of environment. In 2009 he started Container alongside these projects, but “for the first two years it existed, (it) wasn’t something that (he) spent a lot of time on” according to that RA interview. “Once in a while when I’d feel like doing something with beats I would work on it,” but at that time it was “not something that I was taking seriously” he told Jain Pain during an interview in 2013. He only “became more interested in Techno after  playing it for a while” and only then Container would become his “main focus.” This change in direction was inspired in part by Daniel Bell’s (DBX) track, “Losing Control.” Upon hearing the “classic minimal Techno track,” he got it in his “head to do something like that [track] just to see how it would turn out.” He knew he “had the gear to pull it off” and set about creating the same kind of “really minimal, one beat” track, layering some vocals over the top, and through imitation he established his own, more abrasive interpretation of that style of music. “That is how I got into Techno,” he told Jain Pain, but it’s not Techno in any traditional sense of the genre.

With “more and more people” from the noise scene “excited to hear heavy beat stuff rather than just noise” and with Techno’s own modulation between elements of Punk and DIY coming to the fore, Container arrived at a time when these borders would become really blurred. Alongside other American artists like Aurora Halal, Via App, and Unicorn Hard-On (aka Valerie Martino – Schofield’s inamorata), Schofield would help usher in a style of Techno  in the USA that the press eventually would coin Punk Techno. Unicorn Hard-On played a significant role in the “transition from God Willing to Container” according to the RA interview. “Towards the end of God Willing,” Schofield “was incorporating more beats and tape loops” in his music and with a rhythm taking more of a central role it “eventually, it bled into one thing” to become Container.

With Container “everything is composed with live playback in mind” according to the interview in Vice, which sets the project apart from the more traditional adaption of Techno. Container is a live project for Schofield, but at the same time it dissociates itself from the rest of the live, Noise scene as music that is fully composed rather than free improvised. His music arrives through a kind of “trial and error” approach, and by his own account is more “inspired by Rock music than Techno.” His only objective behind the music it seems is to “to play a killer live set” and that’s where that unbridled energy comes from. There are traces of it across all his records, and it’s at its most impressive when experienced in the live context. It’s here where his ideologies part ways with the Techno canon. “Live music for the techno scene seems like an afterthought in a weird way,” he clarifies to Jain Pain. “It isn’t even about playing a show; it is more about getting a party going, which I am not interested in at all.” For Schofield it’s more like a rock concert a performance of music, and ironically approaching it this way, he succeeds in bringing that “party vibe” to the situation as his 2014 Boiler Room performance can attest to.

Schofield’s unusual route towards Techno, has a unique effect on the execution of his music, and sets him apart from those that follow the more traditional route in the genre. He very rarely even listens to Techno outside of the live context, but when he does, it’s usually reserved for music that foregoes the traditional ideologies of the genre. “When I am hanging out at home and I wanna listen to Techno, my favorite thing is this band Frak.”

Like Frak, Schofield feigns the traditional approach to Techno, manipulating the genre’s  sound palette to his own destructive designs and negating the passive, functional purpose of the music for a more assertive position in the context of club music. For the past seven years he’s been refining this sound with his unique twist, and alongside his peers like Unicorn Hard-On, Container has redefined the borders between Noise, Punk, DIY and Techno. It’s music that won’t acquiesce to the homogenous common denominator, pursuing the pure counter-cultural aspects of these musical genres as it swims upstream from everything else around it.

 

*Container plays Gateavisa & Gyldne Sprekk pres: Container (US), live!

The Cut with Filter Musikk

Roland Lifjell has never taken a holiday in his life. The word “holiday” and others like vacation, relax, leave, sojourn, break, trip and tour have no place in his vocabulary. Mention these words to him and a blank stare is all you’ll get as he rifles through virtual record catalogue numbers in his extensive memory bank, searching in vain for any reference to these terms; only ever arriving at some synth pop references from the eighties.

Roland Lifjell doesn’t take holidays and the only time his Filter Musikk might close early or unexpectedly if he’s engaged in that other musical endeavour, DJing. Every aspect of Roland Lifjell’s leisure and professional pursuits is dedicated to the craft of music; electronic music for DJ use, specifically. While most of Oslo went up to a mountain cabin hiding easter eggs on ski tracks, Roland Lifjell was unpacking yet another box for records to adorn the shelves of Filter Musikk, and has given us a sneak peek at some of the new arrivals.

After a short hiatus (unlike Roland, we do know what a holiday is) the Cut with Filter Musikk is back, and Roland gives us first dibs at the latest records to come into the store, and together we select some of the most exciting pieces for this feature. These are not the records that have been hyped or endlessly shoved upon us through incessant “tastemakers” before anybody has even heard a note, this is the music that is here and now, and currently spinning somewhere on a turntable to the delight of some nocturnal revellers.

*Roland Lifjell and Filter Musikk returns to Jaeger next Friday for Frædag x Filter Musikk: Donato Dozzy.

 

Telephones – From The Vaults 1998-2018 Vol 1 (European Carryall) 12″

Telephones digs through his archives in the first release of his newly established label, European Carryall. “From the vaults” is exactly that and in the first in the series we find Telephones complimenting the effervescent House sound that he’s been cultivating as an artist, since 1998 it seems. These previously unreleased pieces find their way out into the world for the first time in remix form where they sound contemporary and relevant to what Telephones has been releasing in recent years.

Since releasing “The Ocean Called” on Running Back, Telephones has only fortified his position as one of the most exciting House artists to emerge out of Norway in recent years. An LP, “Vibe Telemetry” and EPs for Klasse Wrecks and Sex Tags, has cemented his sound as playful melodies, hand percusssion and syncopated beats establish the bedrock from which the producer create alluring dance floor pieces.

“From the vaults” trains all its efforts from the DJ booth, with three stripped-back House tracks with a perfunctory purpose, while retaining that melodic dimension in Telephones’ music. Energetic beat constructions lined with soft, atmospheric pads and upbeat melodies are at play on every track. “Amerikadegåri’s” bell-jar, balearic hook sets it apart from the excessive percussion of “Hurricane,” while “Aquatrack’s” funky bass line bobs up and down on a stream of languid synthesisers and sampled atmosphere.

 

Mystica Tribe – DJ Sotofett’s Dub Ash Mixes (Solar Phenomena) 12″

Sotofett takes on Mystica Tribe with three dub mixes taken from the Tokyo producer’s last EP for Solar Phenomena. Sotofett wrestles the original from its polished exterior, taking the enigmatic beauty of Mystica Tribe’s work and turning it inside out; exposing a raw, fleshy side to the tracks through his processes.

Like the original dub masters of the seventies, Sotofett wields the mixing console like an instrument, imposing his own design and desires on the music, which err on a darker side. The result reveals something sinister edge from the Mystica Tribe originals. As sparse melodic pieces fold in on themselves through delay and heavy bass mutations pulse through the tracks, Sotofett takes the dub method further adding his own, new pieces; new percussive parts and 303 bass lines adding Sotofett’s distinctive voice to the compositions.

The Norwegian producer coaxes another world from just a few basic elements of the original, and arrives at a completely different dimension to his Japanese counterpart, where the serene bliss of the originals are subverted and a brooding kind of glow envelopes all these tracks.

 

Bambounou – Whities 021 (Whities) 12″

There’s new life being channeled into London’s electronic music scene and it’s thanks to Whities. After dubstep there was a severe lull in underground electronic music as artists and producers fell into conformity, chasing a thread to Berlin, Chicago and the past in their music. The experimental nature of Dubstep, and some of the tenants that would follow directly after soon disappeared as most fell into familiar versions of House and Techno, and innovation ceased to exist, but for the last few years, Whities has been revitalising that aspect of this scene.

Familiar names like Tessela, Overmono, Avalon Emerson and Kowton have contributed to some 30 records for the label alongside new talents like Giant Swan and Lanark Artefax. For the lastest release however Whities has turned to a stalwart of the post-dubstep London scene, Bambounou.

One of the original innovators, Bambounou has been making left-field club music since 2010, releasing records for labels like 50 Weapons. He joins the Whities catalogue for the first time as they turn 21, with three tracks that will test the limits of the listener’s perseverance. Referred to in some respects as rhythmical noise, Whities 021 roams the outer edges of dance floor conventions for a more cognitive, experimental approach to electronic music.

“Seize-Sept” is the closest we get to familiar club music, but even that track with its stammering kick and wayward synthetic textures hardly speaks to a common denominator on the dance floor. With a minimalist’s touch, Bambounou tests the limits of metre and time in three polyrhythmic constructions. Melody is contained in the percussive element as synthetic chatter pads the space between the melée of percussive parts. It’s a record for the more adventurous DJ, or discerning electronic music enthusiast but played at the right moment, it will undoubtedly have staggering effects.

 

999999999 – 000000005 (NineTimesNine) 12″

It was only a few weeks back that we first caught sight of Techno outfit 999999999, and now we can’t get enough of them. Rave Reworks introduced us to the anonymous Techno outfit in no uncertain terms as they crashed into our purview with an onslaught of hoovers and stabbing keys that harked back to the elusive energy of rave music’s early days.

On the follow up to that record and the fifth release on their NineTimesNine imprint, they retain that level of energy as 303 bass lines weave their way through excessive kick drums punching holes in muggy, noisy atmospheres. 999999999 siphon a little from the past into their work through the familiar soundscapes they perpetuate on this release, but place it in a contemporary dialect as minimalist constructions and a simplified rhythmic- and melodic patterns prevail.

They retain an imprudent energy on 000000005 beyond the excessive tempos; something immediate that will either force you into the music, or scare you away. “0000000006” is a personal favourite with elements of EBM and Acid, retrofitted for a post-apocalyptic musical future.

 

DJ Sports – Akrasia (Help) 12″

When DJ Sports played at Jaeger a while back, he gave us an exclusive taste of the direction future works will go. Ending his set on the break-beat jungle track that would become “Adaption”, it was an exciting development in the course of the night and one that stayed with us since.

On the latest record, for he and brother Central’s, Help Recordings, he perpetuates the vibe of the previous EP, in a break-beat, jungle-ish track and a couple of remixes. “Akrasia” is a progressive track with many peaks and troughs cultivating different moods throughout its 9 minutes. Ambient textures and dub melodies set a serene tone for the track before it explodes into ratcheting break-beats. No, one element dominates the other, and in it DJ Sports finds an unstable equilibrium where the unrestrained energy of the percussion is somewhat subdued by the half-time bass figures and languid melodic- and harmonic textures.  

Since 2017’s Modern Species, it’s a sound that DJ Sports has perpetuated in the studio, putting the young producer, truly in a class of his own. While many of his contemporaries will often tap into the same all-inclusive musical constructions as they pivot around trends, in DJ Sports’ music it appears to come from somewhere less calculated position in a more refined approach to various genres.

 

Robag Wruhme -Venq Tolep

Hear the title tracks from Robag Wruhme’s first LP in eight years, Venq Tolep.

Robag Wruhme is back on Pampa Recordings with his first LP since 2011’s Thora Vukk. Venq Tolep was eight years in the making with some of the tracks on the LP going back to 2011, and the most recent created in 2019. The German artist apparently skirts the borders between pop music and the dance floor on this release as “Wruhme creates something even more extraordinary: the album may speak the language of club music, with seemingly familiar soundscapes, layers and arrangements, but the tracks on Venq Tolep boldly verge on feeling like songs.”

The title track is available to stream right now via all platforms, setting a relaxed an contemplative tone in Wruhme’s distinctly minimalist House style. Soft keys and listless beat-arrangements lap up against the fringes of House music, with a pronounced melodic arrangement engaging the listener on both a superficial and deeper level. The album is out on the 6th of June and you can catch Robag Wruhme at Jaeger this Friday for Frædag with g-HA & Olanskii.

 

What have The Futurists ever done for us?

What have the futurists ever done for us? Well, they might have invented Techno. Ross Bicknell writes about how an early 20th century art movement might have influenced, or at least in some part inspired today’s club music.

1. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.

2.Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

3.We will glorify war,.. the world’s only hygiene.

4.Destroy the museums, fight moralism, feminism, ..utilitarian cowardice.

5.Sing the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing, bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives.

These are a few choice slices from the 11 point manifesto of The Futurists, an Italian art cultural movement lead by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These excerpts were printed on the front page of a popular French newspaper, Le Figaro in 1909 and caused a bit of a stir. They barely even printed political party manifestos back then, let alone the ramblings of artists, so this might point towards what a big deal they were considered to be.

Marinetti & the Futurists flirted with Fascism. He was ideologically opposed to the Marxist idea of class struggle and was elected to the Fascist party’s Central Committee in 1919 after Italy’s disastrous and humiliating part in WW1 representing the Allies. Mussolini had a great admiration for Futurism and Futurists paid him back by engaging in propaganda and violence in his name.

So why discuss these fascistic, war hungry rent-a-mob? What have they ever done for us, and what have they got to do with electronic music as we know it?

It’s because their belief in and celebration of mechanised society e.g. boats, trains, plains, modern agriculture, motorways, telephones and the city being a force for positive change. The Futurists believed that these trappings were a force for speeding up time and signalling a new, more desirable consciousness that did away with the ‘pensive immobility, ecstasy and sleep’ of previous generations and their literature and art. Instead they intended to ‘exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racers stride,.. the punch and slap’. I think they got their way and very tiring it is too being part of it all. (I’m old now). Ok it’s exciting too. The undoubtable celebration of speed, volume and power as progress in society throughout the 20th century has its many echoes in arts, music and culture, from 5.1 cinema sound-systems allowing an attack helicopter’s missile to whizz about the room and detonate at the base of your spine, to electric guitar solos crackling through a speaker stack hanging from a 200 metre high scaffolding in a mega-arena, to industrial samples and distorted Hoover bass lines shaking the floor of nightclubs across the world and being simultaneously broadcast onto millions of pocket digital devices.

We can take the pre-internet days of the early 1990s as the land before time sped up exponentially, it had an impact rather like the effect of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and pretty much the same year (woah…) The Industrial revolution, especially trains, had the same seismic effect. Futurists sought to celebrate a move beyond art being about communities loosely based around farming, so to keep up basically.  Such ye olde existences have been celebrated/revisited by various art/music movements (think Dylan, folk revival, ambient, minimalism) in a distinctly non-futurist manner throughout the 20th century in music. It took a while for the musos to catch up. The idea of the past as slower, more spiritual, humane place or time still underpins many a political belief or music preference. William Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills referred to an almost Mordor-like future brought about by industrial destruction of the past/nature. Plagues, volcanoes, floods, cats and dogs living together, you know the score. Biblical shit.

These have all come to fruition in our collective consciousness in the 20th century, as has the Futurist’s wish/premonition of mechanised war. The relatively fragile human body in which we are still irritatingly encased (for some, take note 2046 transhumanists, the super-rich wannabe cyborg immortals. https://youtu.be/vqkddbl1HCY) has had a fair few knocks in this period and been subjected to the horror machines can elicit. The Futurists were well up for this and it seems humans have an increased need to engage in this dance with the machines that can seriously fuck them up but also I guess make things work well with central heating and stuff.

So let’s get back to the question, what have the Futurists ever done for us?

Erm, they channelled the excitement of the times? Ok, ok, yes, yes, I suppose I can’t argue with that. But what else?

Erm.. One may argue that they invented the aesthetic of what was to become the future? Ok clever clogs, I accept that this may be partly true in an ideological sense, but in pure aesthetic terms it would have to be shared in no small part by writers of popular science fiction and their book cover designers. Ha.

They invented the future, period. Erm, you’ve lost me, but perhaps in terms of music you might have a point… But what have the futurists ever really done for us? They invented Techno? Oh right, yeah that is pretty good.

In his piece, The Art Of Noises: Futurist manifesto (1913), Luigi Russolo concludes that futurist musicians should substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possess, the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms. He identifies 6 families of noises. Among these are crashes/thunderings, whistling/hissing, murmurs/whispers, screeching/creaking, bangs on metal/wood, voices/shouts/noises of animals and people. He sees this as an antidote to orchestral music. ‘Do you know of a more ridiculous site than that of 20 men striving to redouble the mullings of a violin?,..let us drink in, from beat to beat, these few qualities of obvious tedium, of monotonous impressions and cretinous religious emotion of the Buddhalike listeners, drunk with repeating for the thousandth time their more or less acquired and snobbish ecstasy. Away!’ So it’s fair to say he wasn’t a fan of classical music.

To be honest the idea of working mechanisation into music was a not a huge leap of the human imagination (if such a thing is ever actually possible, discuss). It was underway in other artworks, but nobody had done it, or at least written about doing it, in 1913. He created an instrument to demonstrate how it would come into use, a mechanised noise box, which used sounds of industry and those mentioned above to create musical works. It was about the abandonment of the 12 note scale completely and the pursuit of a music which featured the organisation of different timbres above all else (sound like anything we’ve heard?) These timbres were evocative of the industrial age, and a brand new future, as digital blips, beeps, shash and industrial sounds were to evoke the coming age of the technosphere for techno artists. There are few surviving recordings of this machine sadly but musicians who it has been claimed are directly inspired include Pierre Schaeffer and other Musique concrete artists, and also Stockhausen. The lineage is also clear to see throughout the 1900s as John Cage questions what constitutes music still further by releasing ‘4.33’ and leads into the minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass et al. Their stripped down build the house brick by brick/take it down again musical experiments and works contain blueprints for electronic music as we know it. Fast forward a few decades and you can hear their influence in Derek May’s Strings of Life from 1998, Orbital’s Kein Trink Wasser (1994) and many others.  

In my mind the most intense characterisation of the Futurist’s overall ideological aesthetic thrust is techno, which came into being in the 80s in Detroit (via Germany and New York also). A key figure and member of one of Techno’s founding labels Underground Resistance, Jeff Mills, has explicitly said that it was meant to be a futurist statement. Techno differs from the fascinations of Industrial music, in that the futurist philosophical standpoint is highlighted. Also the commitment to Russolo’s and the Futurist’s wider ideas like the romance of speed and mechanised violence seems more absolute. Techno was an unspoken decision, a manifesto if you will, with disciplines and rules that must be broken as well as those that must be kept to. Either inadvertently or directly, the reference to the futurists is unavoidable. Jeff Mills in fact cites Alvin Toffler’s book, The 3rd Wave, a futurist treatise from 1980, by which time futurism was a genre or a thing, and much had been published in connection with the term. Toffler describes a high-speed revolution, much like the Italian Futurists did, but he describes the subsequent one, which I guess we can call the digital revolution. In Toffler’s preface he wishes to make clear that he does not wish to dwell on the costs of change, but emphasises the costs of not changing. His previous book Future Shock focuses on the former. Tellingly Techno chose to cite the latter perspective. I’m afraid that’s it for references to the book Jeff Mills actually cited. Complain all you like, I don’t care, that’s it, final. I’m sticking to the Italians.

So is techno a true futurist statement? And what does that mean? Pure techno’s seminal tracks share playful experimentation with a commitment to a sparse, driving, industrial aesthetic which restricts itself to infinitesimal change alongside a framework of a constant musical trope. This is the high-energy kick drum/hi-hat combo, which categorises a large degree of dance music. It requires a certain level of commitment to listen/dance to when at the speeds featured in techno (usually around 127-140 bpm) and with its mechanised timbre. It asks listeners to embrace the energy and come along for the ride, rewarding with the satisfaction of noting the episodic or gradual affectation of the synth/sample/beat/percussion elements that circle around its central structure. The high pace seems to remove the desire to look back at what has just been, as there is rarely a chance to do so, the experience being pretty intense. You are being urged forward and it is taking energy to stay focused and inside the box, a bit like a sport. If you do keep up with every mini event and stay for the increasingly frequent culminations of events and energy, then a feeling of cerebral and corporeal oneness with this hyped energy is one of your rewards. At the heart of techno (if thy tin man hath a heart..?) I see an indifference to and thus a rejection of, well what,..hmmm, I’ll have a go.. 1. Melody = soul. 2. Chord structure = romance and 3. Pining lyricism = individualism. In this re-prioritising of the sanctity of the individual in the musical experiences involving techno lays some parallels with the Futurist’s train of thought. Mechanical brutality is romanticised (ironically) as bodily fragility is scorned and cast aside, a member of the collective can suffer and die.

And there are some literal interpretations too: Marinetti for instance even has a rant about being in a car and how damn sexy it is to nearly die as it crashes into a ditch. ‘Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge..’ Ha ha. It’s easy to laugh, and I hope you do… but I don’t remember laughing much reading JG Ballard’s 1973 update on the theme Crash, with the pokey early 1900s language replaced by cold psychosexual prose fusing arousal, death and violent injury together in a tempestuous and seductive gridlock of depravity. Ballard narrated futurisms with an eye colder than that of the Futurists; the dispassionate observer nevertheless needed a whiskey every hour, on the hour to hone a numbed effect enabling him to write it. He had lived through WW2; the Futurists hadn’t, by the time the manifesto came out anyway.

Gary Numan managed to have a bit more fun with the same subject matter in his techno-pop smash-hit, Cars (1979). You can hear the echoes of Ballard and thus Marinetti in recent releases such as those by many EBM artists, Silent Servant and Broken English Club’s ‘Wreck’. It’s safe to say that unlike ‘Cars’ this will not be a pop smash hit. There’s a video for this song which features disaster-porn like footage of the coralised remains of the Titanic which itself was a Futurist’s wet dream. You can indeed see that it is very wet, but more like a nightmare, mischievously glamorised by the saturated neon pink and yellow filters that have been applied with sloppy, liberal glee…

 

To be continued

Eight hours of progwave with Jono El Grande

Progwave was an elusive subgenre, an unusual hybrid of progressive rock and New Wave that is little more than a sidebar in the popular music lexicon. Very little has ever been documented about this strange concoction of a genre, and I couldn’t tell you which bands were active during  what era and what exactly constitutes the genre, so we had to call in an expert.

Jono El Grande (Jon Andreas Håtun) lives and breathes all things music and when it comes to Prog Rock he is an authority. He is an artist, musician and conductor, and has released six LPs between 1999 and the present with his group Jono El Grande and his luxury band.

Born in the era of peak Prog Rock, a conceptual theme follows Jono El Grande in every thing he approaches and when he and Eirik Usterud (Beatie Joyce) came together to conceive a night for Den Gyldne Sprekk in April, true to history a theme followed. They fell on progwave (or progveiv) and while Beastie Joyce gave us some insight into the genre last week on the blog, there is still much left to be uncovered of this very niche genre.

While Eirik was a little unsure if he’d have enough music in that category for the entire, Jono told us “till now, I have collected about 8 hours of music,” encouraging us to ask the Norwegian artist more questions. What is progwave, who made it and where did it go? We pose these questions to Jono El Grande ahead of Progveiv this Tuesday at Den Gyldne Sprekk.

How would you describe progwave?

Prog-wave makes a fine line with different approaches, all around late 70’s to early 80’s; you have progressive bands toying with new wave on one side, and new-wave bands touching progressive/experimental structures and sounds on the other. A third path, the most unclear, is rock / semi-progressive artists in free artistic flow who happened to create something within the same style, all on purpose or accidentally, I don’t know.

Typical of the first batch, I say, is the around-1980-stuff by bands like Camel, Alan Parsons Project, Yes, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Rush, CAN and Jethro Tull.

The second, is represented by some songs – not entire albums – by bands like DEVO, Yello, Art Of Noise, Godley & Creme, Kraftwerk, The Stranglers, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads and Wall Of Voodoo.

In the third understanding, you also find just a few songs, from artists such as ELO, 10cc, Roxy Music, Jefferson Starship, Toto, Peter Gabriel, Manfred Manns’s Earth Band, David Bowie and Violent Femmes.

And in between all these, I may squeeze in some Arthur Brown, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. And even some of my own, brand new unheard compositions.

What do you think encouraged artists to explore this field  of music, was just the advent of affordable synthesizers?

In my opinion, music genres evolve somewhat like species according to Darwin; they’re born as a result of a movement in society – small or big – and tend to survive if the culture around it is alive and growing. First it is revolutionary, then it becomes tradition. In this movement Sub genres are often dependent on the main genre’s growth, unless they creates their own (fan) culture and evolve further on as a separate genre.

New technology meeting culture is always a factor for growth, and synthesizers became essential for the rise progwave, I think, yes. But it was also important that the bands were forced by their record companies to be more accessible towards a larger audience, which also evolved the genre.

Why was it so short-lived?

Prog wave was merely just a sub genre, probably more a bastard – a hybrid of prog and new wave – like a mule. And as we know, mules can’t reproduce. Later, a few bands evolved into pop, like Genesis, but those bands didn’t survive artistically for long either.

At the same time, the main prog genre was evolving into the ugly, yet vital, Neo prog, eating prog wave out of existence.

Also, it seemed that krautrock was more naturally evolving into quite the same sound as prog wave, yet it was surviving more or less by being krautrock.

You say brand new unheard compositions of your own earlier And I’ve noticed artists like Shackleton making progressive music from electronic club elements today. Is it having a revival?

Maybe, but music and artists making music in every genre or subgenre has become overflowing and swarming like a goddamn huge colony of bees. Who can tell if there is a new movement going on in there or just a flicker?

Anyway – I will personally break a sweat to conjure up a revival, and play some new compositions of my own. One of them is so fresh it is still warm.

Can you tell me something of your history with the music, and what were some of the records or artists that first got you into progwave?

First of all, progressive rock and avantgarde has interested me since I discovered it when I was 13 (1986); Zappa & early eras of Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Genesis – some years later King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Beefheart.

I realized soon that the whole catalogue of these artists and others in the same genre was not accepted at parties, so I always tried to make mix tapes with the stuff that in a way unified the progressive heads and the more mainstream rock and pop listeners in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

Over the years, I see that ‘prog wave’ as a term that pigeonholed this kind of music well, even though some of the songs that I put in that box is not part of the particular prog wave «movement» in the late 70s/early 80s.

I still enjoy sneaking my own playlists into bars or restaurants (St Lars has one of them).

As you see, there wasn’t any album that got me into progwave, it has just evolved from my natural way of socializing with music.

On the other hand, I believe that the first record to be released that may fit best into the progwave classification, is Alan Parsons Project’s «I Robot» from 1977.

When I spoke Eirik about what he’ll be playing it, he suggested that you might not be able to make a whole evening out of progwave alone. Are you of the same opinion and where do you think your set will modulate to on the evening?

For this evening, I have collected about 8 hours of music – some pure progwave, some no wave, some newwave-ish prog, some prog-ish new wave and some songs that are just damn good.

A lot of prog music artists actually had a lot of success with pop music after prog rock became something of a dirty word especially after the rise of Punk. Is that as a direct result of progwave?

A result of selling out, and dying a slow death afterwards. Progwave may have functioned as an accidental stepping stone for that process, for some of the bands.

And do you see any other strands of the genre exists today because of that fleeting existence?

If so, it has changed so much over the years you may not be able to recognize it. Bands today are influenced by so many sources, so it is hard to specify.

And some artists sound like they are influenced without knowing it. A contemporary group like Superorganism, may sound like a millennial version of prog wave, but I doubt they have ever thought about that.

(I remember music journalists around the world wrote about my Magma influences on my album Neo Dada (which celebrates 10 years these days), and actually – that was how I discovered them. Haha.)

 

*You can find out more about Jono El Grande on his website, jonoelgrande.com.

 

 

Album of the Week: Roman Flügel – Themes

Roman Flügel is a musical polymath. His musical catalogue is as diverse as the electronic music landscape and since the mid- nineties he’s been crafting singular electronic music through various aliases and projects, music that is revered by peers and music heads alike, regardless of genre or style. In recent years most of his artistic endeavours have been channeled through his eponymous artistic alias, and many of them have been reserved for the album format, where he is able indulge some kind of abstract, conceptual framework in creating a definitive artistic document.

After some concerted efforts, mostly for Dial the Frankfurt native crosses the Atlantic for ESP institute and his latest LP, Themes. ESP Institute says of the LP: Roman Flügel’s “framing of musical narratives as sketches, outlines, or skeletons where the listener’s perception compliments the whole, or his notion that sometimes stories might not need a clear articulation but might only come through in hints of mood, pace, and color, a language which doesn’t rely on words to communicate but which paints for us in Themes.”  

The album finds Roman Flügel sitting at his arsenal of synthesisers extrapolating musical ideas directly from his mind to the keys in fleeting melodic pieces that drift between consciousness and reverie. Happy melodies bounce across synthesisers on languid rhythm structures that only barely break into a trot at times as Flügel stakes his claim in the tepid waters of ambient music.

There’s something instinctively maternal about Themes as soft congenial melodic arrangements play amongst more experimental  textures that seem to come in and out of the individual pieces on a whim. There’s an intimacy to this LP that even with the more alien aspects of their construction, only draws the listener closer to the music. Flügel uses a minimalist’s ear, with a few very succinct elements constituting these tracks.

Some of these pieces, pieces like “X can often get lost in their own little moment, never really progressing to any specific destination, while others like “IV” almost appear as fully-formed pieces. They are just themes however, impromptu pieces from Roman Flügel living in their own little moment, devoid of any grander aspirations. If this is the calibre of music, Roman Flügel  makes in extemporising circumstances, it puts onto perspective just what a prolific artist he is. While they might just be themes, many of them can be considered fully-fledged compositions too.

Filling the crack: Beastie Joyce and Jørgen Egeland’s Den Gyldne Sprekk takeover

Eirik Usterud aka Beastie Joyce and one half of Trist Pike is by his own account “probably one of the only DJs in Oslo that doesn’t own any House records.” Instead his musical purview extends beyond and includes everything else. He’s found a kindred spirit in Jørgen Egeland in that regard and the two have been regular fixtures at Raymond T. Hauger’s Den Gyldne Sprekk since its inauguration in 2016. Jorgen Egeland is something of an honorary resident today and Beastie Joyce either in the booth or performing as one half of Trist Pike, is a regular fixture at Raymond’s weekly Tuesdaynight.

Eirik has modulated from the stage to the booth consistently in Den Gyldne Sprekk’s history at Jaeger, often sharing the booth with his musical counterpart and music quiz partner Jørgen Egeland. Like Eirik, Jørgen’s musical knowledge spans far and wide with a very acute and knowledgeable dedication to all things Jazz. Unlike Eirik, he’ll often have a few House cuts floating around in his bag, which leaves very little left to uncover through music between their combined record library.

So, when Raymond needed to take a short break from his concept to pursue whatever wild, fantastical leisure activity he pursues, there was only ever going to be one option when it came to a worthy substitute for his weekly residency. Beastie Joyce and Jørgen Egeland take over Den Gyldne Sprekk in April, with four unique concepts during the month. From Progwave to Cyberpunks, together with Raymond, Eirik and Jorgen have lined up a musical month of Tuesdays at Jaeger that dig through the obscure and often bizarre corners of their combined musical scope.

We sat down with Eirik as Beastie Joyce to discuss these concepts and his and Jørgen’s vision for Den Gyldne Sprekk in the month of April.

Where does the name Beastie Joyce comes from?

It’s my Twitter name. In other occasions I’ve been phasing it out in favour of a new alias, but my Twitter account is quite popular so I don’t think I’m ever going to get rid of that name. It’s Just an amalgamation of Beastie Boys and James Joyce, of course.

So you’ll be filling the crack?

Yes, me and Jørgen (Egeland).

You have both been involved with Den Gyldne Sprekk and Raymond T Hauger in one way or another.

Yes. I think we have both appeared here as guests occasionally almost since the very beginning.

Yes for a while there we were calling your band Trist Pike, Jaeger’s first and only in house band.

Yeah we’ve played there a lot including our first gig ever.

Why are you and Jorgen taking over the concept in April?

Raymond needed some time off, and it was natural to ask someone who has always been involved, and someone that has a very solid grasp on the concept and the type of music that is in focus here.

So it will just be a continuation of the concept, or will you bring something different to the table?

We are bringing in our own ideas, which Raymond has been involved with as well and I think we came up with some really great concepts for what we’re going to do those four weeks.

It does seem that Raymond has a very clear vision of what he wants to achieve each week for DGS.

Exactly and the guests are quite often involved in how it ends up. It is kind of cohesive even though there is quite a lot of different music involved.

I always love the titles for the events, and one that stuck out in April is called Progeveiv. What is that all about?

It’s all about this progrock and new wave crossover, which was this very short-lived trend that every single Prog Rock band jumped on in the early eighties. I thought that was really interesting and got talking with Jono El Grande, who is obsessively knowledgeable about Prog Rock in general, so obviously he knew a lot about this stuff and I realised it would be really fun to make that a theme night here.

It seems like a very niche thing. Is there enough records out there to make it a night?

I have a lot of those records, and there are a lot of single songs you can find, and a couple of complicated cuts from some new wave records. We’ll probably not be able to fill a whole night with just that, so we’re gonna broaden the definition a little bit.

I suppose you can also go into either standard Progressive Rock or New Wave from there too which opens up the landscape a little.

Exactly.

What sort of records were you thinking of bringing?

Eighties King Crimson, that’s the big one, and also the Talking Heads albums that the King Crimson guys were involved in. Also the more complex Devo stuff. Yes dabbled in that kind of stuff and Rush also when they started using synthesisers.

And tell me a bit about the other concepts?

In the Easter week, we’re going to do religious music and we got in Raymond’s good friend, Louis from Beglomeg, because he knows a lot about christian Rock and Funk, and that kind of stuff. We’re not going to be doing strictly christian music, it’s going to be religious or religious sounding music in general and of course music about the devil; so I’m going to bring some Dark Throne and Morbid Angel. When it comes to religiously themed music I have a better grasp on stuff when it comes to the devil.

And there’s the night with Silje Hulleboer?

Yes it’s just her and Jørgen. They were talking one day and they found they had a lot of interesting overlaps in their musical tastes.

Then there’s one more event…

The last one will be a celebration of Billy Idol’s cyberpunk album. That is going to be an interesting one. We were talking about it behind the scenes and there is no particular occasion we’re celebrating, we’re just celebrating that the album exists. The idea is that we are going to play that album in its entirety on CD, but I mean it’s seventy minutes long and very stupid, so I’m not sure how commited we are to that, we are going to be playing dated nineties electronic and synth based music that sounded very futuristic when it was new and very dated now.

Something like that David Bowie album he made with Nine Inch Nails?

O yeah, damn I haven’t really thought about that. I have at least one of his nineties albums so I’ll have to investigate further.

Those are spectacularly dated now.

The one “Outside,” that’s kind of cool but it couldn’t have been made at any other time.

Are Babylon Zoo always relevant in that context.

Absolutely, it’s that aesthetic from the Levi’s commercial with that song, that we’re nodding to; early nineties CGI and that kind of stuff.

Tell me a bit about your relationship with Jørgen.

I don’t remember how we first met, but we really started to get to know each other when we started going to a music pub quiz at O’Reilly’s on Fridays. He has an insanely wide taste and a deep knowledge of music.

Where do you think your tastes converge or crossover?

Lots of places, because we’re both into Metal, Punk Rock, Jazz, Rock n Roll and Indie. We have a lot in common, but he’s way more into electronic stuff than I am, and I like Jazz, but he really likes Jazz.

And there’s not going to be a Trist Pike concert during this takeover?

No, I think it would be too much of a hassle to put on a concert at this particular time, but maybe sometime in the future. Also Trist Pike have played here so many times, I can’t even remember how many shows we played here.

So if you were to sum up the takeover in three words for us what would it be?

I guess the easy answer is Rock and Roll. I think we’re going to deliver what we usually get here with our own twist on it.

Jaeger’s stage confirmed at Kala Festival

Our partnership with Kala festival has produced a stage in 2019. We have just confirmed Jaeger’s stage at this year’s festival with Bjorn Tørske, Prins Thomas, Øyvind Morken and Olanskii completing the lineup for the weekend of the event.  Taking place on Albania’s Riviera around the coastal village of Dhërmi, Kala is nestled in the heart of Albania’s picturesque coastline, between  azure waters, ancient castles, canyons, pirates’ caves and bunkers.

Now in its second year, Kala Festival will play host to some of the most exciting selectors including Honey Dijon, Midland, Theo Parrish and Hunee.  Jaeger is very excited to be joining the lineup on the 12th of June, hosting our own stage in one of the most idyllic little music settings on the calendar year.

Before we set course for the azure shires of Albania, Kala’s AKA Juan & Ollie Shapiro will join us at Jæger on the 4th of May for a pre-emptive shimmy as they do their rounds around the world, collecting the DJs playing at this year’s festival. There are less than 300 tickets available, and you can get them directly from Kala’s website. See you all on the beach on the 12th of June.

 

Random consistency: Profile on Axel Boman

Random consistency seems to be Axel Boman’s calling card. The Swedish producer and DJ has had a colourful musical career, one that has seen him touch on elements encompassing the widest spectrum of musical influences from American Soul to European House, channeled in an autocratic musical taste that span his DJ sets, productions and the label he runs with Kornél Kóvacs and Petter Nordkvist. With a flippant, jocular approach to music, Axel Boman continues to skirt the fringes of House music with affable productions and sets that communicate a sincere, serious musical talent.

Although Axel Boman had released his first records back in 2008 through a brief tenure with the little known label Ourvision, it was “Holy Love” released on DJ Koze’s Pampa Recordings and especially the track “Purple Drank” that established Axel Boman’s musical career. The release came about in true Boman fashion when “he gave DJ Koze a demo at a post-show party before puking out of the hotel window” according to a Red Bull Music Academy interview.   

It was quickly picked up by the music media, launching the Axel Boman name into popular consciousness. “From the dubby breakdown to the long arc of the whole track, it’s a trip, and surprisingly forceful given its soft sounds and slow tempo,” wrote Philip Sherburne for Resident Advisor in his 4.0 out 5 review of this release at the time. Boman’s deep, but energetic inclinations struck a chord with DJs, but it would be his distinct love of melodies that would eventually make him a crossover success.

Axel Boman has divulged little in the past about his early life, besides that maybe his father was a plumber, and that the Orb’s Little fluffy clouds was “essential” listening growing up, but it is common knowledge that a budding career in music became apparent during his art academy days in Gothenburg. “It was just a good ground to try stuff out,” Boman told EBTV in an interview. The five years masters program was just a little surreal. It comprised of a studio where Boman could indulge his wildest creative fancies and required little more than a monthly check-in with a supervisor. The only premise was that he create something and with music constituting some of his creative endeavours at that time, he was constantly experimenting with this discipline during his academic years. “It was just weird and fun” remembers Boman about those early pieces, and something of that element of fun followed Boman’s into his professional career.

“(B)ut I don’t want it to seem that I’m not serious, because I’m totally devoted,” he told DJ Mag interview in 2014. Although he approaches music with a self-effacing tongue in cheek  fashion, there’s nothing absurd about the results. And that extends to the label, Studio Barnhus too. “People are always looking for some twist, or a hidden prank,” he told Red Bull Music Academy. “Sometimes people label us as being funny or prankish, but we’re totally serious: We love this music! We don’t devote that much time and effort towards elaborate jokes.” The label started in 2010 out of a small studio in Stockholm with Nordkvist and Kóvacs. “The initial motivation was just to release some great songs,” he told the Mancunian and with early releases extending out from the inner circle to kindred spirits like HNNY and Jesper Dahlbäck, the label quickly started “growing by itself” to the position it occupies today as one of the most sought after House labels in Europe, with some exceptional examples of  Axel Boman’s own productions. 

Starting from the middle and working outwards, Boman’s tracks have an integral accessibility with definitive melodic- or vocal hooks giving his House constructions an approachable and self-possessed voice. “Most tracks have an essence then you build around it,” he told Resident Advisor in 2013. Entrancing melodies have always been a vital aspect to his music. “I’m just a sucker for melodies” he told EBTV, and in a Ransom Note interview he divulged that he thinks this  “works to my advantage, because whereas some people are always looking for the hook that fits a track I can just experiment with different samples and ideas until something clicks.”

In 2013 this all found its rightful place on the album format as he released his debut and only LP under his given name. “Family Vacation” was constructed around an abstract idea, taken from a fictional story written by a friend. “It’s a murder mystery, in a way,” Boman explained in RBMA with a fictional tome written around the infamous, real-life murder of the soul singer, Sam Cooke.

Family Vacation proved an artist that can go beyond floor and the perfunctory beat. “Not a lot of tracks for me have to start with a kick” he explained in RA about the making of the album. “Did you care about the dance floor when you were writing the album?” asked RA’s Kristan Caryl. “I tried to, always, but I’m bad at it and if I do it I get a wave of self-hate. I can set my mind on doing some techno, pumping 4/4, but I always end up somewhere completely different.” Axel Boman’s extensive musical palette has always played a role in his music, and he’s always displayed an innate ability to feed some accessible pop element into his very serious dance floor music.

It’s something that other Swedish artists like Varg also emulate, but whether that’s a Swedish thing or just the open-ended listening habits in the era of the internet is something up for debate, but it’s clear that Boman has never been one to confine his music to one small area in the vast expanse of modern music history. At the end of Family Vacation, Boman came to the conclusion in a DJ Mag Interview that; “I needed to have some closure with this computer and this hard drive and all these gadgets that I’ve been working on so long, so they kind of helped me to reach that point. Now I’m ready to throw that out the window and start all over with the guitar.”


Since then he’s split his efforts between many side projects like the John Talabot collaboration, Talaboman and Man Tear, a post-pop project he does with label mate Petter Nordkvist. Man Tear is Boman and Nordkvist indulging their pop sensibilities with the sonic template of House music. Boman’s desire to work outside if the club music cannon and flex “different muscles in the brain” sees him constantly experimenting with different elements in music and according to his EBTV interview that activity is only set to increase in the future.   

“I listen to lots of music so get lots of inspiration,” he told RBMA, and in the very same breath he also explained that all his music is “always” focussed on the club floor. The trajectory might not always correspond to the initial idea but the purpose of his music is always to get people dancing and from his various musical projects, his LP to his EPs and singles, it’s that unflinching consistency that makes Axel Boman’s work such a favourite on various dance floors, even if the results are often quite random

*Axel Boman plays Frædag this week with Strangefruit, g-HA & Olasnkii and Olefonken.

Album of the Week: Fabric presents Bonobo DJ mix

The grooves on our Bonobo records have been worn smooth by our bar staff over the last two years. Bonobo is an in-house favourite and “The NorthBorders” and “Migration” are records that you’ll continually hear, oozing out of our Cafe’s front door in the middle of the day and spilling into the early evening. I’ve personally heard “Bambro Koyo Ganda” from his second LP “Migration” so many times that I can sing it from memory, which is impressive since I’ve never even been to Morocco, and can’t understand a word Innov Gnawa is signing on the track. But that is the charm of Bonobo’s music.

It can extend over both physical and musical borders, with an elusive charm that feigns categorisation. Elements of Downbeat, House, Electronica and Indie Pop, form the extensive bedrock from which Bonobo creates enticing musical landscapes with attainable access points from various musical perspectives. The English artist makes the kind of records that are perfectly suited for those uncertain moments, when you need to bridge a gap in a crowd through music. Through immersive melodies and dense atmospheres he crafts singular pieces that can be enjoyed at a superficial level, but also leaves something to be explored if you want to experience something a little deeper.

This is consistent of his latest release too, which is not an LP of new original material, but rather a mix. Fabric lured the producer over to the DJ booth, for the first mix in their new  format after closing out the Fabric live chapter. It’s the first recorded mix from the artost since 2013’s late night tales. Bonobo strings together a selection of tracks from the likes of DJ Seinfeld, Throwing Snow, Âme, and Dark Sky, with audible whispers of his artistic voice coming to the fore within the grand narrative of the mix. Whereas his own music has mere fleeting encounters with the dance floor, this Fabric mix, is committed to the dance floor, especially during peak time.

Bonobo’s penchant for melodies add his personal artistic touch, elevating the music beyond the rudiments of DJ tools and drawing comparisons with Trance. There’s an uplifting element to the mix  where it can move beyond the doors of Fabric and into any context like… oh I don’t know… a bar in Oslo? Theres’s an inextricable bond between this mix and Bonobo’s original work where it can occupy the same space on the shelf, even if its not an LP, giving “The North Borders” and “Migrate” a much needed break for a while while we wear this new record down to a smooth finish.

The cut with Filter Musikk

Sometimes at Filter Musikk a porthole to real world appears, opening directly into Skippergata and through what we thought was an impenetrable glass door. Often a person will slip through that doorway, clutching a cable or some idealistic dream of becoming a troubadour/ podcaster / producer with a kind of rabbit in the headlights stare, searching Roland Lifjell’s face for answers to questions that a psychoanalysts and a team of medical professionals couldn’t solve.

Roland suffers these fools gladly and he’s always quick with a cable (it’s almost always a cable) to break down the barrier (notice singular) standing between them and their unattainable creative industry, before they disappear back into obscurity, and out through that in-door. I’ve witnessed this exchange on fair few occasions and I tend to drop what I’m doing every time, internalising the voice of David Attenborough as I watch the scene unfold, and try to decipher what in the actual fuck just happened.

I mean, did they not see the records! Or is this some platform 9 ¾ situation. It’s like when people say they don’t like music, or listen to Ed Sheeran; I understand why you might not like something but why do you hate yourself so much. Are you not in the least bit curious about what undiscovered musical gems lie in wait in those dusty shelves; are you not aware that you are on hallowed ground? That’s when I realise that this might not be for everybody. And that’s ok too, because that just leaves more for the rest of us.

But we only have a finite time on this planet and the musical  treasures that wait to be uncovered at Filter Musikk are too many for a mere ten fingers to sift through in a day so with that: it’s time or another cut with Filter Musikk, where we and Roland Lifjell select our personal favourites from the latest new arrivals on wax.

 

Longhair – Longhair (Bordello A Parigi) – 12″

Is everybody taking their cues from Luca Lozano’s design studio? I don’t know what it is about this distorted nineties visual aesthetic, but it just lures you in, and while it might not suit records from many labels, it does communicate something of the music through a record like this latest one from the Dutch label Bordello A Parigi.

Marko Pelaic and Benedikt Bogenberger, collectively known as Longhair, deliver three proto-house, balearic cuts that make the first sonic impressions of a looming spring-summer season. Taught 808 kicks with an accent on the one and three, set a tempered mood, with hand percussion and synthetic bass-lines weaving their way through progresisve forms across the release.

Beatific melodic excursions eddy and swirl around misty atmospheres trapped in some reverie of a beach holiday. From “Squirt” to “As we travel” Longhair doesn’t veer from a sound they’ve clearly perfected and each one is able to carry a dance floor no matter what the context.

 

Infiniti, Reel By Real – Techno Por Favor / Sundog (Preservation Sound) 12

Marcel Dettmann recently highlighted this release in his new BBC radio residency. It’s one from the archives recently remastered, but sitting alongside the contemporary playlist of Dettmann’s first show, it still holds its own as an ultimate classic. Infinity and Reel by Real are in fact one in the same as Juan Atkins and “Techno Por Favor” and “Sundog” are timeless classics that Preservation Sound has brought to the fore again with a remastered edition.

While these original records are certainly coveted by devoted collectors, sonically they don’t really hold their own alongside contemporary records in the context of a DJ set, and that’s why we love these remastered editions. “Techno por Favor” and “Sundog” originally appeared on a couple of compilations right at the start of Techno’s history, when they had just started naming the genre, and even at that time Juan Atkins’ productions were a cut above the rest. He’d already started staking his claim as a formidable producer through the Model 500 project during the eighties, but when he started drifting into Techno he staked a claim as a super producer.

“Techno Por Favor” and “Sundog” have held their own and it’s great to see a new label like Preservation sound updating these hidden gems for a new audience, and bringing them together for the first time on one record.

 

New Frames – RNF1 (R – Label Group) 12″

It’s all about the B2 on this one, or as the label calls it 0.2… They’ve also called the A-side AB, and although we’re not sure what any of this means, it doesn’t really matter because by the time you get to “In the night,” it’s all irrelevant, because you’ll have emerged in the upside-down, transported on the metallurgical sonic constructions of New Frames.

Kobosil’s R label hosts the relatively new production duo who tap into a little something of that EBM trend currently dominating Berlin’s subterranean movements in the dark. David Frisch and Mathis Mootz however don’t piledrive their sound into a pail of distortion and 8 step sequences, but rather align their efforts towards the unyielding thrust of modern Techno.

Tracks like “Reese Defence” and “Totes Neon” feature vocals delivered like political slogans in much the same way groups like Front 242 or Nitzer Ebb did back in the eighties, but in the case of New Frames, these vocals feed a unrelenting machine music restrained in a minimalists straight-jacket progression.

It all comes to its glorious apogee by “In the night” with its hammering beat and a synth skewering every 8th note. A distorted vocal barking out from some abstract netherworld at a regular interval, anthropomorphizes the metallic, robot music feeding the aggression of the music.

 

Deep Dimension – Rave Channel (Gen X) 12″

Despite what their name might suggest, Deep Dimension are hardly exploiting the depths of their soul in their artistic pursuits. The relatively new Dutch duo comprised of Jeffrey Hek and Jimmy van de Geijn make bold, effectual statements on the dance floor with their latest record.

Considering their nationality, it’s not exactly gabber however – which lets face it is a relief – but strains of that relentless Dutch electronic music is certainly there; what did you expect from a record called Rave Channel. They restrain their ancestral impulses as they approach elements of hardcore, breakbeat, jungle and all those harder factions of electronic dance music.

Over six tracks, Deep Dimension hardly let you come up for air as they coerce a dance floor to their will through pounding kicks, broken beats and samples that sampled other samples, eroded through years of bit-crushing, screami9ng at you through the polyrhythmic malaise.   

 

Choc Stars, Teknokrat’s – Nakombe Nga / What Did She Say (Rush Hour) 12″

No, but seriously is Luca Lozano designing everybody’s record sleeves at this point? This record is a far cry from Longhair however, as Rush Hour continue to make some rarified finds available to new audiences. On this release they’ve offered us two sides of the same coin, with an original piece from Congo band Choc Stars and a 1989 track by Belgium producers Teknokrat’s  which samples “Nakombe Nga”.

It seems that the Choc Stars was a popular record in Belgium, because as one astute discogs user points out, the same sample is also present in Virginity’s “The Key”. So it seems that afro bubblegum played a vital role in Belgium new beat, but it doesn’t seem that a band like Choc Stars were officially credited on these tracks.Thanks to Rush Hour that record has been set straight, but I sincerely doubt if the original artists will ever be compensated.

This release certainly fuels that bubblegum frenzy, which Rush Hour has played a serious hand in bringing to the fore, and doesn’t look set to disappear anytime soon. Antal had a fair few of these kinds of records floating in his bag when he played Jaeger last year, and there’s probably some more in the back room at Rush Hour that are waiting to be unearthed. While this record brings nothing really new to the bubblegum sound, it does highlight how influential this music was and gives a band like Choc Stars their rightful place in music history. Perhaps this is the first of what could eventually be a series.

Emerge with Espen T. Hangård

* All Photos by Carsten Aniksdal

Espen T. Hangård’s greying beard; the indented lines that cross his forehead; and his voice, spoken with the measured gravitas that only life-experience can bring, suggests he might be a veteran of his craft, but he’s not. Even though he’s been working in music for the best part of his life, he only made his debut  as an electronic music artist in 2018. Releasing two LP’s in quick succession in Primær and Elementær, accompanied by a string of live performances around Norway, Espen went from relative obscurity to the darling of the DIY electronic music scene over the course of the last year. His, razor-sharp productions, which lie somewhere between the electronic pop formations of Kraftwerk and the Braindance excursions of Aphex Twin, was an instant hit across the Electro community. Espen’s distinctive approach, which offered a perspective on Electro in contrast to the ubiquitous DJ’s point of view, relayed an innocent charm that counterpointed the perfunctory elements which have been dominating electronic club music since Drexciya.

“When I started I wasn’t trying to release anything,” explains Espen when get the chance to sit down for an Interview, “I just wanted to make the stuff I wanted to make.” I had heard and wrote about both Primær and Elementær when they were released and something about Espen’s sound had immediately intrigued me. There was no pre-emptive focus on the dance floor and the song structures followed very similar to structures usually found in pop/rock music. When I heard him play live for the first time, I had found an electronic music artist bucking the DJ-cum-producer trend with a sincere nod to the past, and something completely unique to what anybody else is doing at the moment in Electro. Espen immediately stood out amongst the crowd, as he completely avoided those entrenched tropes, in some part emboldened by his unique musical history.  

Espen was “born in the seventies and grew up in the eighties” in Tonsberg and his first contact with music was through Heavy Metal and bands like Kiss and Iron Maiden and not Hip Hop as the usual DJ rhetoric would predict. At the same time however, he was also “exposed to the electronic pop music” of the nineteen eighties with chart topping singles by Madonna, New order and Depeche Mode, informing his early musical tastes. While most teenagers of the eighties were engaged with some peer pursuit and music was segregated either as the “dirty, unkempt” crowd of a Heavy Metal inclination or the “feminine” synth pop of the new romantics, Espen chose a very different route and absorbed everything he could when it comes to music. “I never thought that I had to distance myself from anything I liked before,” explains Espen, “I was always just listening to anything.”

By the age of 14 he had picked up the guitar and enamoured by the “new and exciting” sound of Thrash- and Death Metal he started his first band, Noplacetohide, followed by side projects like Altaar and KILLL. Noplacetohide had an impressive sixteen year run as a prominent fixture in the Norwegian Rock- and Metal scene, and they released two albums during the height of popularity for Norwegian metal. Throughout it all however Espen never lost touch with those early electronic influences .

Groups like Nitzer Ebb and Depeche Mode marked that crossover point between Espen’s Metal- and electronic indulgences. Espen attests; “the aggression of Nitzer Ebb probably has more of an appeal for people who are into rock music.” It was bands like Nitzer Ebb, Depeche mode “and the “Mute kind of stuff” that first drew Espen to the possibilities of drum machines and synthesisers. “The first big show I saw was Depeche Mode and Nitzer ebb in 1988,” recalls Espen. “Nitzer Ebb was a radical thing and they were just playing a backing track and a metal percussion thing, it was very stripped down and minimalist.” By the mid nineties, Espen’s musical interests had extended to the Warp family, with “Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and Autechre” piqueing his interests, “but it took many many years after that before I started making my own electronic music,” he admits.

By the late nineties, however he had bought a soundcard and managed to get his hands on cracked copy of Cubase, merely as a “sketching tool for writing music” for his many bands. “I didn’t really get into it that much,” recounts Espen and it took another ten years after that before the “ball started rolling with making electronic music at home.” Outboard synthesizers and drum machines followed and it all culminated in an intense recording period between 2009 and 2012.

“I was not thinking this was going to be released initially,” says Espen. “I was just trying to emulate the music that I thought was cool, and learning the craft.” He quickly found he had an affinity for the machines and “after a few years” Espen had amassed a “pile of tracks” that he thought “were good enough to release.” It conspired around a dialogue with the label Galleberg Forelag and by 2018 the first batch of tracks came out as Primær, which was almost immediately succeeded by Elementær.

“The first tracks on these albums were from 2009,” says Espen, “three months from when I started making this kind of music.” After recording those first pieces in that three year period, Espen “made the decision to finish all the tracks no matter how hopeless they were” to the point that if he “were to play them to a friend,” he could play it “without any hesitation”. Working quickly through all the tracks he eventually had enough for two LPs and decided to split the tracks up into two distinctive records. “I could have arranged the tracks so that the two albums would have sounded very similar,” explains Espen, “but I chose to put the slightly more linear tracks on the first one, and the more elaborate, melodic tracks on the second one.” Espen believes it gave each record a “different temper” from the other, but close enough to relay a very unique sound across the two records that sets Espen’s music apart from the contemporary electronic music landscape.

How did he have to change his approach in music going from guitars and vocals to synthesisers and drum machines? “You have to think completely differently about music and how you produce it,” he explains. At the time, Espen had felt that his guitar playing had “hit a dead end” and turning to synthesisers, drum machines and grooveboxes felt “very liberating.” Espen had found new inspiration in old machines and their “old backwards interfaces.” He utilises these machines and archaic interfaces in a way that harks back to the likes of groups like Nitzer Ebb and Depeche Mode, where song structure and melodic themes impart a more accessible listening experience in his music, something which becomes apparent when you experience Espen T. Hangård in the live setting. At a recent show at Kafé Hærverk I was taken aback by Espen’s live set. In a scene dominated by the DJ-producer characters, where live sets often feature the same sinuous thread that spans a DJ set, Espen’s performance stood out. Built around the very same song structures on the records, he would play each piece as its own song, often stopping the drum machine, loading up a new project and setting forth from there like a band would through their setlist.

“I’m used to performing in bands so I’m used to music being live,” says Espen. “Also from the audience’s perspective doing a laptop set is perfectly cool, and playing records is perfectly cool, but to me I get something more out of it if the music is to a certain degree created in the moment.” The way he plays live is a “nerdy thing” for Espen and it’s probably something that has migrated to electronic music from his “rock orientation.” He’s not very “good with repetition” and is constantly in need of ”something to happen, to have a break and have something else come in.” This is what sets Espen’s live performance, and by association his music, apart from the rest of the artists working in his field. It is something that also carries through on his artwork for his first two LP’s where the usual retro computer graphics and robot themes, are supplanted for something that flows more organically across the collages made by Canadian artist Tag Andersson. It’s “very abstract,” feels Espen, “but they have a very clear feeling to them” and he still feels that eighties reference resonates through Andersson’s post-modernist design elements underpinning the work.

It’s unclear whether the aesthetic will follow through in Espen’s future works, and in musical terms he feels that he is “done with that period now.” He’s moved on to recording sessions from 2016, and while he hints that his vocal might be making more of a contribution, there is “nothing concrete” that has formulated yet from these recording sessions. There are also pieces dating back to 2013 as well as “one or two metal projects that I want to realise.” He’s main group Altaar are still  together even through they’ve been on hiatus for a while and whenever he can, Espen will be trying to work on music in one form or other. He’s recently contributed a “shouty” remix of a new Blitzkrieg Baby release destined for Aufnahme + Wiedergabe, but beyond that there is nothing primed for release.

He has however just released two full LP’s in very close succession and if that’s an indication of the kind of creative enterprise of the artist there is surely going to be more from him, very soon. As an electronic music artist he might be what the press would call an emerging artist, which is funny considering he’s already had a full career as a musician and artist, but in electronic music he’s certainly found a new voice, one that looks set to emerge, as a singular contribution to a choir of voices in this field.

 

* Follow Espen T. Hangård on Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud.

Album of the week: Various artists – TK Disco Re-edited Vol 1

During the height of Disco in the late seventies T.K. Disco has been the first and only word in Disco. Their iconic tiki-themed covers  have long been synonymous with the sounds of Disco, with the Miami-based label staking their own remarkable claim in the genre, most impressively as an independent label in the 1970’s. Throughout that decade T.K. Disco supplied DJs with energetic Disco cuts from a stable of talented artists, and even making their mark in the charts with the likes of KC and the Sunshine band. Unfortunately the label  didn’t survive much longer after the “Disco Sucks” event and movement and filed for bankruptcy in 1981, but the music lived on with tracks like Ralph McDonald’s “Jam on it”, being sampled by Hip Hop’s upper echelon, from the Roots to Q-Tip over the years. In Oslo, and with the city’s unique relationship with Disco, T.K. Disco records has always enjoyed a special kind of reverence in the DJ community.

In 2015, label owner Henry Stone resurrected T.K.Disco, re-issuing some old favourites from its back-catalogue and updating a few seminal pieces through edits from the likes of Danny Krivit, records that have always enjoyed an audience at places like Filter Musikk. In the latest addition to the label’s extensive catalogue comes a whole series of these edits in a double LP. Re-edited Vol. 1 is a selection of some of the label’s most iconic pieces re-edited by some of the DJ world’s most renowned figures working in the field today. Dimitri from Paris, Norman Jay, Late night tuff Guy, Kon, Todd Terje and Danny Krivit, take on tracks like Ralph MacDonald’s “Jam on the Groove” and KC and the Sunshine band’s “I’m your boogie man” for this star-studded release.

Their contemporary counterparts handle the fragile originals with the care of a museum curator, preserving as much of the original, but leaving their own faint mark in the process. Importantly these are edits and not remixes, so the original sonic  charm of these classics remain in place while some structure and perhaps, modern mixing effects are applied to make these records work on a modern dance floor for today’s audiences. Todd Terje delivers two KC and the Sunshine Band edits, most notably their seminal 1976 classic, “I’m your Boogie man.” He strips the original from its vocals, and with a minimal approach, he turns the Disco original into a future boogie classic, which will surely be making the rounds this summer on the DJ circuit.

And while Danny Krivit turns Ralph MacGonald’s “Jam on it” into a DJ tool in one of the most extreme edits in this compilation, most of the producers have favoured a more reserved approach to handling these classic disco tracks. Each producer their unique perspective from the modern DJ booth through these old tracks, not in a way of modernising them, but rather like hearing them with a fresh set of ears. T.K. Disco have certainly caught everybody’s attention with this star-studded- cast and tracks on the first of what we hope to be a series, so it would be interesting to see where they take it next, and if they can maintain the standard they’ve set on volume 1.

The cut with Filter Musikk

Think about the DJ, and the first image that comes to mind is somebody hunched over a pair of turntables. Even today, in light of CDJs and DJ software, when television or films need to portray the DJ in the correct context, a pair of Technics 1200s will almost always be in the foreground of the shot. The turntable and the record is an iconic image today, one that carries so many subjective associations with the DJ that record culture and DJ culture are completely interchangeable today. But they’re not.  What people have experienced in recent years as an increased interest in the vinyl format and thus record culture through physical sales, is actually the rise in sales of classic LPs, re-issued by big labels. New pressings of classic albums by the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin don’t subsume record culture nor does it have any relationship to DJ culture who’s calling card has always been the 12” single.

On the other end of the scale DJ culture is also necessarily record culture either. As Øyvind Morken so eloquently put in a recent piece he contributed to this blog: “There are loads of people who are into music, but they are not into record culture. Producers still release music on vinyl rather than digitally, even though they don’t buy records themself. They are not contributing to record culture, they are merely taking advantage of it for their own personal gain.” Emerging labels and up and coming producer-DJs are relying on that very same iconic image of the DJ with his/her two turntables when few of them even play records or in some extreme cases even own a record. They saturate record culture with the kind of music that should be reserved for the consumerist DJ culture online, releases that leave little to be desired beyond the trend-informed obvious.

There are those places however where DJ culture and record culture converge. These places are becoming rare, but they’ve wavered little from their origins. There are those DJs and institutions that have always perpetuated the 12” single vinyl format, even during a period where it went through a great slump. Even though DJ culture would emerge as a popular culture during this period, record culture would suffer at the hand of digital music technologies, but there were always a dedicated few perpetuating the 12” format and record culture as DJs; places like Hardwax in Berlin, Rush Hour in Amsterdam and Filter Musikk here in Oslo.

People like Roland Lifjell at Filter Musikk have dedicate their entire lives to the format and today, as record culture is being infiltrated by a new kind of insincere capitalist, they remain the bastion and the sanctuary for the ardent records, DJs and listeners that bridge that narrow gap between record culture and DJ culture. It’s people like Roland Lijell and his shop Filter Musikk that continues to pursue the same ideologies that turned the DJ behind a set of decks into an icon by distributing those records, labels and artists that still uphold that legacy. Here are some of the latest arrivals that perpetuate the sentiment. This is the Cut with Filter Musikk.

 

Luigi Tozzi – Tender Is The Night (Non Series) 12″

A great deal of noise has infiltrated Techno over the last 5 years. Crunching, distorted kick drums pounding their way into oblivion through a bedrock of white noise are currently soundtracking early mornings in vacuous warehouse spaces across the globe. While that kind of thing certainly has its appeal, at times you just need to take a step back and breathe for a second. You need the counterpoint, a deeper, minimal, progressive sound and nobody does that sound better than the Italians. The likes of Dozzy Donato, Lucy, and Luigi Tozzi have excavated a deep, spatial vacuum in Techno for many years, offering an interpretation of the genre that relies on something a little more cognitive than the immediate threat.   

After perpetuating this sound over a fair few records, mostly for Hypnus Records, Luigi Tozzi brings his music to Manuel Anõs’ (Psyk) Non-Series. Luigi Tozzi’s spatial awareness in his productions prevails with four cuts that lie on the border between ambient and Techno. Microtonal, synthetic droplets bounce between delays and reverberations as they float on breezy pads, rolling over the cascading percussive rhythms. There’s a very progressive nature to his music, especially on a track like “Black Market” where the rhythm section is unwavering in the languid atmospheres floating in the hemisphere above it. Luigi Tozzi has perfected his sound by now, so he’s breaking very little new ground on “Tender is the night,” but as it migrates onto Non-Series, it’s spreading the gospel of that Deep Tech Italian sound further into the world.

 

Tarjei Nygård – Lost In Lindos (ESP Institute) 12″

Bergen producer, Tarjei Nygård returns to the Californian imprint, ESP institute for “Lost in Lindos”. The four-track EP finds itself somewhere between Deep House and the Balearic isle as samples and synthesisers conspire on the fringes of the dance floor for this release.

There’s an expressive charm to Nygård’s records where you can discern that all-encompassing nature of Norwegian DJ/producer culture, but it’s never defined by it. For the majority of the EP, Nygård creates a path towards the dance floor with three cuts erring on the side of caution at downtempo rhythms and deep, progressive melodic phrases.

From the Trance synth work on “Forus Echo” to the bubbling synth and talking drum of the title track to the jangly melody and deep bass of “Bleusa”, Nygård merges a wide spectrum of musical references at some subconscious level in unique musical pieces, but that’s not where this record is at its best, believe it or not.

It’s the ambient beauty of “Øllie” that really steals the show on ”Lost in Lidos.” Ten minutes of  tranquil strumming guitars and processed field recordings swirling around the stereo field envelopes the listener in a warm, sonic embrace. Seemingly going nowhere, elements converge and float apart, making brief contact through the track that moves through it temporal line like a living organism.

 

Frak – Berga Magic EP (Hypercolour) 12″

Björft’s Jan Svensson and his group Frak have been doing this kind of music since the 1980’s and yet somehow they still manage to bring something unique to the landscape with every record they bring out. Although most of the group’s output is reserved for Björft records, they often moonlight on similar labels, and this, latest release finds them on Hypercolour.

Frak’s DIY Punk, Techno aesthetic has wavered little from those first tapes, but they’ll often modulate between different aspects of this sound, between Electro, synthwave, EBM and Techno as they coax abstract noise from determined machines.

On “Berga Magic” they veer very little from the consistency of Techno’s four-four insistence, but bring a little of that eighties black magic along with them as gated snares, bouncing-ball toms, and fuzzy bass lines converge across these four tracks.They bide their time, settling into each loop and letting it linger with little to no development around the very strict rudimentary foundation that makes up each track.

Frak rely on a mere few bold elements that make their mark immediately and veer little from those crucial elements, only adding noise or the much needed break to colour the stoic progression, leaving enough blank canvas for the DJ who needs to manipulate it in- and out of the next track.

 

DJ Di’jital – Electrohop1 (TRUST) 12″

TRUST records seem to come with their own money-back guarantee. We have yet to find a TRUST record we haven’t liked and now with the addition of Detroit legend DJ Di’jital contributing to the discography, this record is a no-brainer.

In America, the associations between Electro and Hip Hop have always been more fluid than in Europe, where although its ancestors are the very same that inspired artists like Afrika Bambaataa and Egyptian Lover, the contemporary results are always more likely to align themselves with Techno rather than Hip Hop.

DJ Di’jital crosses the boundary  for TRUST on “Electrohop1” playing between samples and synthesis and switching quickly between phrases in his tracks, like a scratch DJ would. Tracks, barely breaking the four-minute mark, make succinct, immediate impressions with DJ Di’jital training all his focus on the beat. Pieces like “808 Kits” and “Jlt to this” are DJ tools in many respects, almost like the producer was purposely making a record to be sampled by emerging Hip Hop producers.

“Input Main”, “Gamma Radiation,”  and “Entity (The Getdown)” make the biggest impression with vocoders, sawtooth waves, swinging beats and song structures leaving a tantalising thread to the origins of Electro.

 

Inigo Kennedy – Trajectory (Token) 12″

Inigo Kennedy’s music indulges much the same sonic identity as his DJ sets, where more is indeed more. Plying layer upon layer in his sets, he’s one of the few DJs we’ve witnessed actually using four decks simultaneously and the music he constructs, mostly for Token follows the same premise.

Extensive layers on “Trajectory” bathes the record in a kind of murky hue punctuated by explosive kick drums and chattering hi-hats through the opening title track towards “Turmoil” on the B2 cut. The aggressive onslaught of the percussion section is subdued by languid pads that cast a visceral light on the individual tracks as the concurrent theme of this release.

Kennedy’s melodic phrasing lays a path of crumbs towards something slightly more emotive beyond the immediacy of the thunderous pounding of kick drums. It’s refreshing to hear a Techno producer of Kennedy’s calibre adding more depth, and a melodic component to the genre, contrasting the stark, barren treatment of Techno that has prevailed for the longest time.

 

Front left speaker – Flint

Front left speaker is a new series of stories told from the front left speaker of a memorable night out. To kick off the series I (Mischa Mathys) remember the legacy of Keith Flint in an unlikely context . It’s 2003 at a rock festival…

In a muddy field somewhere in the east midlands UK, I’m standing up to my ankle in a brown sludge I hope is composed of only mud. In front of me, a hundred odd people have somehow managed to pull the tarp they were standing over their head, repurposing the floor as a makeshift uber-umbrella against the incessant UK summer downpour. Ah summer in England… This isn’t a rave, nor is it even an electronic music festival. This is the Download festival, 2003, the inauguration of the Download festival in fact and no, it is not some music sharing nerd-a-thon… this is a no thrills, no fuss rock festival when guitar music was still dominating the charts and popular.

The moshing hordes pushing against the fence are currently shoving their way through some millennial, nu-metal band’s greatest-, and only hit, before the band retreats from the stage and into permanent obscurity. The crowd subsides into a faint din below the drip-drip-drip of the water hitting the tarp, as a wave of bodies, dressed in black scurry across the stage making room for the next act. Two drum kits are rolled on the stage and then suddenly, without much warning Keith Flint emerges, prowling the stage from one end to the other with a joker’s snarl smeared across his inanimate face. There’s an intensity in the silence as the rest of the band take their position behind Keith before they break into a thunderous clattering of guitars and percussion.

The short, stocky Englishman has aged little from the arsonist that invaded our television screens in the mid-nineties as the Firestarter, and his presence is as formidable as ever, especially in this context. The iconic inverted mohawk might have grown out into a Rotten-like razor trim, but dressed in a leather kilt and a pristine white vest, strutting across the stage like a caged badger that don’t give a fuck, he exudes every inch of the rebel that ignited that fire all those years ago. But this isn’t Prodigy, hell there isn’t even a synthesiser on stage. This is Keith Flint fronting his brief but explosive foray into a fully fledged punk frontman as Flint during a brief hiatus from Prodigy.

Everybody of my generation, the jilted generation if you will, has a Keith Flint and Prodigy story, and most of them go something a little more like this: ”they introduced me to electronic music”; “they were the first electronic band I saw live”; “Keith Flint and Prodigy changed my life”. This rhetoric runs perpendicular to my own biography too, but seeing Keith Flint fronting his own band, really puts into perspective the awe-inspiring presence of the artist and the man that would expose rave music and culture to whole generation of impressionable youths and bring it to the forefront of popular culture. It was Keith Flint’s eccentricities that finally gave dance music the one thing it had always lacked in the sea of introverts… a rock star… a personality for young malleable minds to idolise and imitate, although few of us were ever brave enough to shave a 10cm parting over our skull.

Electronic music’s popularity to-day is in large part due to Keith Flint and Prodigy’s impact. Their borderline blasphemous treatments of House, Techno, and Acid replete with

wailing guitars and screeching vocals, took electronic music out of the hands of humdrum DJ culture and the subterranean liars of club culture and put it front and centre… stage to be exact. Acts like Orbital, The Chemical Brothers and Aphex Twin had already come into their own as live acts, but Liam Howlett’s dancers-turned-frontmen in the form of Maxim and Keith Flint had suddenly presented the world with a fully fledged rave group, a group that had something visual and tactile to offer machine made music, a group that could jump around on stage and incite a passive crowd, and in Keith Flint a poster-image of a group that could addorn a pubescent fan’s wall.

In South Africa we didn’t get Prodigy on the airwaves until the Fat of the Land (and radio was pretty much the only source of new music for us at that time), but I’d already been an obsessive fan since “Music for the Jilted Generation, when my UK cousins had procured a copy and brought it back to South Africa. By the time Fat of the Land came out I had already worn out the tape my cousins had graciously copied for me; familiarised myself with their entire back-catalogue through tapes borrowed from friends and a copy of the Prodigy experience; and had manhandled the breathe cd single so much the cardboard sleeve had completely disintegrated.

Fat of the Land though turned a mere fanboy into an obsessive. We had just gotten MTV (well, my grandmother got MTV) and any opportunity I would get I would spend late nights waiting for the Firestarter video to air after the watershed. I had drawn the cartoon image of Keith Flint (that one from the fat of the land innersleeve) on my school bookcase, impregnating the image of Flint on there forever, his ghostly figure haunting my high school career, much to the dismay of my teachers, who had wasted no time in giving me detention for soiling my bookcase, but deterred me little from my eternal musical pursuits.

And here Keith Flint is in the flesh, on a demure stage in the middle of the day shouting into a microphone like his confronting his nemesis. The music doesn’t break any molds and it is very much of its time and place, but Keith’s presence is magnetic. The tonal vitriol spewing forth in staccato angry bursts from Keith’s lips is emboldened by raucous guitars and two drummers beating their kits into glorious drum n bass compliance. Strands of Prodigy are in there somewhere, but Keith commands every part of this solo project. Prodigy collaborators Jim Davies and drummer Kieron Pepper flank Keith on guitars and drums, strengthening that connection to Flint’s claim to fame, but putting Keith Flint in his rightful place as the dominating frontman he imbues.

Much like Keith Flint, I had taken a hiatus from electronic club music, and my listening habits is had been consumed by guitar wielding bands like Queens of the Stone age and the Mars Volta for the years leading up to this concert. It would not be the first or the last time that I would switch sides like this, but if there was ever one group that would ultimately bridge the gap between guitar music and electronic music and continue to win over fans from either side, it was the Prodigy. At 15 when I had delusional dreams of becoming a musician and forming a band with a school friend, Prodigy’s Breathe would play in the practise sessions as some source of inspiration; Davies razor-like guitar work on that track to this day stirring something corrupt in me alongside that metallic percussive sample.

And even though like most people of my generation I would outgrow my immature adolescent musical tastes, whenever a new Prodigy record would come out I would at least give it a listen and at times, with tracks like “Girls” and “Take me to the hospital” a glimmer of that teenage rebellion would shine through and re-ignite that fire that started my appreciation for electronic music.

Flint’s show is explosive and brief, and Keith barely gets a sweat going before they evacuate the stage as suddenly as they pounced on it. I’ve never seen Prodigy live; by the time I eventually could, I didn’t want to taint the impression they left by seeing some over-blown stage production. But seeing Flint at Download in 2003 had forever burned an impression of Keith Flint into mind, a musical persona and a presence that was born to be a frontman. Keith Flint was an icon and possibly the last of his kind. “We’ve basically lost another amazing frontman,” Download creator Andy Copping told Kerrang after Keith Flint’s untimely passing in 2019 . “I mean, you almost forget that with The Prodigy it has always been about their sound, but Keith orchestrated everything, and he was the focal point of the band. When most people think of The Prodigy they think of Keith.”

 

* If you have your own story from the front left speaker, we’d like to hear and share it. Please send us an e-mail editor@jaegeroslo.no.  

Album of the week: Sleaford Mods – Eton Alive

Sleaford Mods music sounds like it was recorded in the basement of a pub, with Andrew Fearn balancing his laptop on a beer barrel while Jason Williamson shouts over the din from the punters above between buying rounds in the pub. Fearn’s raw, inimitable approach to production is only matched by Williamson’s scathing indictment of the world, but on their latest LP, “Eton Alive” you’d be surprised to find that their commentary is not entirely directed at the British upper-class as the title suggests.

Sleaford Mods’ electronic Punk sound has been cemented over four preceding records, rooted in the same three chord philosophy of their Punk Rock forbearers, but wielding laptops instead of guitars and whittling the political ideologies of the seventies down to the everyday woes of the working class British citizen. “I’ve got two brown bins, but should I have one, what the council don’t know won’t hurt them.”

Fronted by Williamson’s gruff vocal, which offers a sort of antithesis to the puerile charms of the likes of Mike Skinner and Johnny Rotten, Sleaford Mods’ music aligns itself more with the tone of the chatter at the local pub, trying to find the brief necessary escape from the realities outside.

Williamson’s matter-of-fact tone in rattling off through some abstract narrative is as approachable as ever on “Eton Alive”. He paints a lurid picture of things like social media culture, celebrity, the establishment in the record industry, and consumerism with Fearn (wearing his “I still hate Thatcher” t-shirt) leaving enough room for the vocalist’s commentary in his bare-knuckled production. Bass guitars and live kick drums bring a new dimension to Sleaford Mod’s sound on this record from the tin-can electro-pop of their previous albums.

There was some mention of some soul influences petering through this latest record, but besides for the organic tones of the production this record is still more of a full-frontal assault at superficial level than any deep, soul searching realisation. Sleaford Mods’ lyrics wrap it all up in some abstract twisted metaphor, open for interpretation at times, but always making sure it gets it point across. There’s that usual nihilistic “everything is shit at the moment” strain underpinning everything, which in the shadow of Brexit and right-wing conservatism feeds a larger meta-narrative, depending on the listener’s perspective. The abrasive word-salad Williamson tosses over to his audience in a kind of a tabloid word jumble, is easy enough to decipher if you’re looking for more out of the music than its musical immediacy, but it is up to the listener’s perspective.

Sleaford Mods are the Bob Dylans and Kris Kristoffersons for the pre-millennial unidentified generation; the generation born between generation x and -z; wondering around in the purgatory wasteland that can be found between their credit-consuming generation mother and fathers and the optimistic ideologies of the next generation. Themes in Sleaford Mods music are nihilistic to the point of utter conviction on “Eton Alive”, giving a voice to the everyday man in search of something tangible and accomplishable in a world with too many impossible parameters. “

The wrong record at the right time by Øyvind Morken

Untzdag resident Øyvind Morken discusses the allure of certain unusual records, that when played at the right time can have very significant effects on the dance floor.

I’ve been a resident at Jæger for the past seven years. Coming in every week I have to keep it interesting for myself and I’m pretty sure that if you’ve been recording me since the beginning, you wouldn’t hear me playing the same kind of set twice. I’m always bringing new music and the best parties I’ve had at Jaeger are the ones I’ve played all night and could dictate the evening through several tempos and moods; that’s the nice thing about playing a residency, you can develop it in a way that’s personal to you. I didn’t force this in any way, it’s the way I am, and the way I am is the way we all are, eclectic. My record bag reflects this too, and although I always have to carry those records that if I know I’m struggling I can play those records, and I’ll be fine, I’ve never been interested in those. I’m more interested in the records that you have to fit a whole set around. These are the records that might not naturally work at any point during the course of a night, or you really have to tailor them to make them fit. These are the wrong records at the right time.

The wrong speed

It’s something that has interested me since I started playing records at the wrong speed. At the flick of a switch on your record player, you can drop a record down an octave or two in pitch and play it at about three quarters of its original speed. I remember starting to do this in the early 2000’s and I thought I was a genius, because I thought nobody had done this before. But then I read about Fat Ronny, Beppe Loda, Baldelli and Mozart – All these guys were doing this since the late seventies and early eighties, and it was nothing new. DJs have been doing this since the invention of the variable pitch record player, but it’s still something of a lost art in the era of CD players. By virtue of the modern DJ CD Player, DJing now is very tempo-based, with the beats per minute constantly displayed on the bright luminous LCD screen. It’s incredibly hard to ignore. The way I grew up Djing, it was based on the inherent musical quality of the record rather than tempo so I have to think; How can I find a way to bring all this music into a set.

Take André Bratten’s Un Pax / Americana for instance, which plays at 140BPM. I play that it at the wrong tempo around 105 -110BPM and the record suits me better at the wrong speed. It’s a full-on Techno record usually, but at the wrong speed its a chugging, pumping record. It’s what the wrong record at the right time is all about. It’s about playing a record that fits a mood and it’s about establishing the sound of a night. Sometimes I can even play under 100 BPM the whole night; creating a vibe with slow music and that’s why I play the wrong record or the right record at the wrong speed, for the vibe. An artist like André Bratten would probably hate it, but when you release a record it’s not yours anymore; It’s mine and the dance floor’s.

Weathermen – Deep Down South

Not every record sounds good at the wrong speed, and it’s never about just hearing something familiar at a slower tempo. It’s about a record that turns into something completely different from the original, like this Weathermen record. There are two versions, but I usually play the one with the vocal because it’s heavier. In this case I accidentally stumbled on the effects of playing it slower, but often I will actively look for a record to play at the wrong speed, because I love playing in a very psychedelic way. When you get the dance floor in on the slow music, it’s completely different night out. You don’t get tired and it gives the dancer more room to get into the rhythm of the night.

Now, this might be a bold statement, but I think most DJs that play in Oslo are at times cowards. That is not to suggest that they aren’t good DJs, merely that they let the dance floor dictate the music; The crowd controls the music. If you don’t experiment, and you might fail, you’ll never know the limits to where you could push yourself and the crowd. As an individual who’s been on both sides of the booth since a teenager, it’s better to have 15 people in a club having a great time, rather than 150 who aren’t really interested. The common denominator goes down as you bring in more people and there’s going to be more people who aren’t there for the right reasons. If there are too many people that are only half into it, it ruins the vibe.

I am stubborn about music and the mood it sets, and I’ll play a record like this, this way which will give the dancer a more substantial reward at the end of the day; If they don’t leave they’ll get into it. It might take longer, but at the end of the night they might be in for a better night because they’ll let themselves experience something that they haven’t heard before, even if it is something that they have heard before.

Hysteric – Temple

If you play a record at the wrong speed, it’s curious how when listening to it at the right speed, something doesn’t quite sound right afterwards. This Hysteric record can be played fine at both speeds, it sounds like a space-aged Electro record under normal circumstances, but slowing it down, gives it a whole new character, eccentric bordering on malicious. Hysteric is known for his disco edits, and I’m not sure if this is an edit or an original, but in the way it sounds at this slower speed, there’s something unusual about it.   

Everybody has a finite capacity for new things, and I think to be open to new ideas and new music, takes constant work. I look for stuff everywhere. Even so, I don’t think I’ve played a record that I don’t personally like. Playing music should be something special and I don’t want to end up hating it. I buy music (both physically and digitally) every week and I continue to find stuff all the time; it never ends, and that’s a good thing.

It is getting harder though as the market becomes absolutely flooded with people that don’t get record culture. There are loads of people who are into music, but they are not into record culture. Producers still release music on vinyl rather than digitally, even though they don’t buy records themself. They are not contributing to record culture, they are merely taking advantage of it for their own personal gain. I prefer records and artists who in the spirit of DIY culture make personal and substantial contributions to this record culture with records like these. I like the do-it-yourself stuff. I like the whole process of making a record; from designing the centre label to getting it pressed and out there. You can’t think of it as something to make money from; It’s like the guy with the motorcycle, it’s a hobby, it’s costing him money.

Unconformist at the right moment

Tik & Tok – Cool Running

There’s a seven inch version of this track somewhere in Oslo for the more curious amongst you. This is a track I like to play at peak time even though it might not be suited for that. It’s funny with Electro records; While they might work in the rest of the world right now, they are hard to play in Norway and I’ve lost a few dance floors around Electro records across the 18 years I’ve been active. It’s quite a contrast from the rest of the world where I’ve experienced people are more open to it. It has something to do with the early closing times in Norway in my opinion. When I play clubs in other countries where they are open till 8/10 in the morning, people are more open to different stuff early in the morning. When I play a club that runs deep into morning, I can play a crazy krautrock record at 7am in the morning and people could be totally in to it.

You can’t do that in Oslo or Norway because everything closes early, and this has huge cultural implications for our nightlife. Not just because of the problem of having everybody in the street at the same time, but the whole thing about the way people consume alcohol or drugs, it’s so intense in a very short time; It’s not good for the body or the mind. It’s part of the reason I will play a record like this at peak time, because it just counteracts that excessively intense mood. When people have space, it’s a different way of going out. We used to have later nights in Norway, where even though the bar will close at 3am, the club will stay open till 5 or 6 am and that’s one of the things I miss of going out in Oslo today.

There was this club called Potta and they used to play House music when the bar closed after 3am. It was a lesbian club and one of the few places that played dance music, after 3am. I used to go there by myself. None of my friends would go there because it was a lesbian bar. But I didn’t give a shit, because I just wanted to listen to the music.

Concept Neuf – The Path

This is a record that if you play it at the right time, it’s super funny. It’s very dramatic and it’s very picturesque like a movie. It’s library music from a French (or at least French speaking) percussion group, and I love records like this. I found it in a shop in Oslo and the cover immediately resonated with me as that snaking xylophone stretched out into the distance. I’ve always been into percussion music and percussive sounds.  

I’ve played it and emptied the dance floor, and I’ve played it where its exploded into a funny party scene and it usually happens after the extended introduction, where a calypso, party vibe ensues and the dance floor turns into this imaginary scene from a movie of an hotel bar in Acapulco. It’s music that doesn’t take itself too seriously and that’s very refreshing in the current era of club culture and music. House and Techno music, especially Techno music, takes itself too seriously.

You have to remember that the whole dance floor is a performance and everybody is contributing to something. I just saw Mission Impossible the fallout and DJ Harvey is in it, and they just nailed what club culture is about today; 1000’s of people, standing stock-still with their camera phones trained on the DJ. I think with a record like this it would be pointless facing the DJ, because it would be boring if you don’t lose yourself in it. Something that’s gone wrong in club culture today is the glorification of the DJ. Today people are a name on a poster before they are actually DJs, without the necessary experience or musical knowledge to cater to an audience.  

The unexpected surprises

Francois De Roubaix & Bernard Maitre – Les Onix

I always see people coming in, warm-up DJs playing house records from the first track out, like they are already embodying that name on the poster. I like to bide my time and settle into a night. This is one of those records I like to play when people start coming in. I always start without a beat, usually ambient or library music, because I play to the room, and it is usually empty at the beginning. This is another piece of library music, this time from a French kids tv show recorded between 1972 and 1976 and it’s so different. I would love to have an opportunity to make music for kids television and I know Bjørn Torske has made music for kids tv in the past. I’ve asked him to send it to me, but he’s misplaced the original recordings. I can imagine he would be quite good at it, and I was curious to hear it.

These are just skits, composed of the kind of strange sounds that kids usually love. I have a newborn son and he’s always curious when I’m playing music and the audible effects of a physical action, like placing his hand on the record, or the result of his own yelps in a reverberating room. I didn’t get this record for my son, but like the previous record, I found it a looking through stuff, and thought; ‘this looks interesting.’

Paul B.Davis – Deep Wine

In a similar way I found this record, which is not a record, but actually a CD. It’s not listed on discogs, and much like every other record I’ve mentioned it has that DIY feel to it. It was released by a label called jolly music and the kid responsible for the music is only like twenty years old. It’s a grime track with this dance hall rhythm, and there’s even a bit of Rhythm Is Rhythm in there. I don’t know anything about grime and I wouldn’t necessarily look for music under that genre, but this record shows that if you look in unexpected places you might find some pearls. People look for music in these narrow confines dictated by genre, and they won’t usually find music like this if you look for music in that way. You have to broaden your horizons even if it goes against your personal tastes.

Some of the other tracks are super cheesy and yet it would probably appeal to a few people during this current revival of Trance in Europe, but Deep Wine is the one I always play and definitely needs to be played at the right time. Because of those dance hall elements, if you play it for a bunch of House- or Techno heads, they would just leave. You need to work it for the right moment, and sometimes you might win over one or two of the more uncompromising heads in the room.

Insanlar – Kime Ne

Then there are records too that completely defy categorisation. This is one those records and one that never leaves my side. It was released by Insanlar, which is Baris K’s band, and today it’s a pretty known record, but it was given to me by Baris before it was released, when he played Untzdag years back. There aren’t that many 24 minute records that you could play the full 24 minutes of on a dance floor like this one. The first time I played this one, I had completely lost the vibe on the dance floor, and I was like ‘fuck it’, and dropped this in. Its effects were immediate, it completely reset the vibe and brought everybody back to the dance floor.

I think this is a live recording, from a club Baris runs in Turkey with a couple of friends, called MINIMUZIKHOL. There’s something incredibly musical about it with real musicians playing instruments over sequenced drum machines and synthesisers. 15 minutes in and somebody starts scatting and it just explodes with energy. It ended up being like a riot on the dance floor, even though it’s a slow tempo record.

It’s an amazing piece of music and there are not that many tracks that are this long that you can play through its entirety. This has something extraordinary about it and it’s something I’ll keep coming back to. For some people changing the tempo in the middle of the night would be something totally wrong, but for me it’s exactly what I mean by  the wrong record at the right time.

 

The cut with Filter Musikk

A wave of gentrification is sweeping across the global village and everything from politics to culture is being swept up into mediocrity and conformity. In music, the result is an introspective re-appropriation of musical genres at some rudimentary level. A formula of formula of an idea of how music should sound, has very little value beyond the immediate and has lead to a major stagnation in music. At every level it seems that artists and musicians tend to conform around a populace idea of what Hip Hop, Techno, Electro, Techno et al is and it has taken all the idiosyncrasies out of the music, where most of it blends into the same monotonous drone.

Throughout music history and into its present there are those characters and musical institutions that have opposed this conformity in powerful and intense terms. They ardently and at times vehemently opposed societal norms in pursuit of something unique, sticking their tongue out to the world and its conservative musical trends. Powers that be find them dangerous because they don’t understand them or their piercing rebel yell, and would rather suppress them than listen to them. These characters will eventually almost always prevail and sometimes even mobilise a culture behind them. Keith Flint was such a character… and he might have been the last of these characters.

His untimely passing comes in age where we desperately need more people like him to oppose the mediocrity seeping in as counter culture becomes mainstream culture and Techno bros and weekend pleasure seekers saturate every aspect of this culture and its music. It’s time to take up that rebel call again and if we’re going to find the power in our lungs to summon its piercing strength, we’re going to have to retreat into the margins again, back to the point of gestation from which this culture’s roots emerge and that means going back to the record store.

In Oslo Filter Musikk is the first and only word on the matter, the last vestige for the undesirables and the freaks like Keith Flint who pursue a onerous path against the tide of conformity, and the only place we can go to keep the spirit of somebody like Keith Flint alive. During a time when vinyl was in a sales slump, Filter Musikk persevered with Roland Lifjell at the helm, and as one of the few artists still releasing new vinyl at that time, Prodigy made up a fair share of Roland’s stock. “Felt I was the Prodigy store for a while there,” muses Roland, and even managed to win a fair few DJs over to the raucous sound of the UK ravers at that time.

For the generation in their mid thirties  everybody has a Prodigy or Keith Flint story that they can tell, and for the generation that came before and after it, their’s and Flint’s impact on electronic music and rave culture has been a formidable and lasting one. It’s with great sorrow that we dedicate this edition of Filter Musikk to Keith Flint, and hope that his iconic legacy could inspire a new age of musical rebellion, soundtracked by music that retains that spirit, hopefully music like this like this…

 

Mas569 – Vamos A Entrar Desde Afuera (Forbidden Planet) 12″

There’s something to Jurg Haller’s Forbidden Planet label that simply shouts out at you from its austere packaging. The pencil sketches that adorn the cover of Forbidden Planet records are quite insidious as they draw you into their dower aesthetic, only to reveal something viceral, often grotesque or even ghastly in their abstract form. There are many other labels that have a similar visual profile, but what sets Forbidden Planet apart from the rest, is that the visual aesthetic carries through to the music, through past releases from Mono Junk, Cadency (Hector Oakes) and the Mover and now with this latest release from Chilean producer Mas569.

Electro is FB’s calling card and Mas569 upholds the sonic aesthetic that the label has perpetuated since day one. Skipping Electro rhythms and synth-heavy melodic phrases remain the order of the day as the new artist finds his voice in the Electro genre. “Vamos A Entrar Desde Afuera” is quite a leap from the artist’s previous and first EP, which favoured the kind of tougher House sound associated with early L.I.E.S records, but the way he weaves the melodic phrases through the heavy percussion bares some similarities with this latest EP. There’s a little more on the bone on “Vamos A Entrar Desde Afuera” as “Raza”, “STGO” and “Martillo” cater for something a little beyond the dance floor as the artist finds his place in the Forbidden Planet catalogue.

 

LNS, E-GZR – Crypto Stock / Beatdown (Wania) 12″ 

LNS and E-GZR are back on the Sex Tags Wania imprint, appearing together for the first time as a collaborative duo for the A-Side, “Crypto Stock”. A bold stomping Electro cut that moves  between writhing acid bass lines and wispy atmospheres, the track unfolds much like those early Aphex Twin pieces on Warp as it continually evolves and modulates between phrases.

Appearing like the random thoughts of an android on the cusp of an existential crises, the form avoids consistency and normality for the abstract. It’s a pattern that the elusive E-GZR perpetuates on the B-side on his/her own, focussing more on the percussive elements than the previous track. That Wania / Sex Tags DIY immediacy is consistent and the music retains that kind of immediate allure, like the artists are recording the music straight onto the acetate and moving onto the next thing almost instantly.

 

Girls Of The Internet – Fondness Makes The Heart Grow Absent (Drab Queen) 12″ 

Girls of the internet are neither girls, they are not even a plurality, nor are they adept at Internet it seems with a small social media following. Girls of the Internet is Tom Kerridge, a side-project of the Ramp Records founder that has brought a little something of House music back its origins on this latest release for Drab Queen. The AA-side features soulful vocals, funky bass-lines and Tom Kerridge’s unique electronic adventures that flutter through the track like dazzling animatronic fireflies.

Terrence Parker takes the theme of the track and dials back the clock to 1989 for an energetic piano version of the original. Underpinning the essence of the track with that soulful vocal and the grooving bass, very little else remain of the original, as Terrence swaps out Kerridge’s guitars and electronic frivalities for a stark dance floor construction with meatier kicks and a perfunctory minimalism instead. While the original might indulge more of an effort on the listener’s behalf, Terrence Parker just gets straight to the point on the remix for a peak time vibe.

 

Roza Terenzi, D. Tiffany, Jayda G – Oscillate Tracks 001 (Oscillate Tracks) 12″ – link

Oscillate is a Berlin club night turned label. Coming to the fore out of the heady musical vaults at ://about blank, Oscillate is renowned for its forward-thinking music policy and its progressive club ideology which this first record attempts to capture this in the abstract language of electronic music. Oscillate “alumni” Roza Terenzi and D. Tiffany lead the way for the label with two Electro-breaks cuts that take their cues from various aspects of club music in a kind of assemblage of what the club night represents.

From D.Tiffany’s hoover synth echoing in the distance on “Spirit Alien” to Roza Terenzi’s lysergic 303 bass movements on “Electronique”, there’s a nod to the common threads of the  past with a view to the future as they pull various influences into the space of each trac,. The two seasoned producers have a distinct handle of their individual craft, but where they crossover in the realm of a more open musical palette, is where the sound of Oscillate thrives.

 

Adlas – Arrival By Air (Answer Code Request) 12″ restock – link

It seems that we’re pretty much sticking to Electro and breakbeats on this edition, but from one end of the spectrum to the other with this new artist arriving out of nowhere on Answer Code Request’s label. There was some speculation that Adlas was a new Answer Code Request alias, but a picture of a boyish visage bathed in a hue of blue on discogs put that  rumour to bed… thanks to Roland.

Four, stark bass-heavy tracks ensue with Adlas using syncopated kicks and broken snares to cut through wispy veils of electronic mist. “Search Signal” is the closest the producer comes to a four-four Techno sound, while retaining the sonic nature of the rest of the EP. The producer makes his debut with all the experience of veteran so it’s clear why people might mistake this for ACR, but this EP stands on its own, and although there are some similarities to UK Bass artists like Manni Dee, Adlas music shies away from common tropes in search of something unique in the club music realm.

Ending on the heady force of “Tidal Lock”, Adlas leaves a severe impression on his debut release. The artist doesn’t quite imbibe the affronting spirit of Flint, but the music, like all the other pieces represent the audacious spirit that Keith Flint’s character left on the scene. The bulk at the status quo and sneer at musical conformity as bold, individual pieces.

 

Kala announces international parties series

Kala festival will be back in their little corner of paradise in Albania in the summer of 2019, but before they do, Aka Juan and Ollie Shapiro will be taking the show on the road with an International party series. A little amuse-bouche ahead of the main even, Juan and Ollie will bring a little bit of Kala to Jaeger too for this series. They’re trip is a double threat as they pile Øyvind Morken, Olanskii and Prins Thomas into the back of their van, making a b-line for the albanaian coast, where our residents will play along other musical heavyweights like Theo Parrish, Honey Dijon, François K, Jayda G and Midland.

“We are joining forces with some of our favourite clubs and promoters across Europe to get us ready for the summer,” announced Kala today. “The Kala tour bus will be visiting three beautiful cities before heading to Dhërmi in June. Some of the acts on the Kala line-up will be joining our residents at three top parties for a taster of what’s to come this summer in the Riviera.” You can find out more from Kala’s Facebook page.

Tickets for Marcel Dettmann are now available

We’ve released a limited amount of pre-sale tickets for Retro pres. Marcel Dettmann with Daniel Gude. There will still be tickets available on the door on the night for this event, but now you can secure you’re place for the 4hr Marcel Dettmann set in our basement on the night. The tickets are available here and you can find out more about the event here.

Marcel Dettmann makes his annual return to Jaeger for Retro and like before we’ve just given him the keys to the basement. For the last few years he’s returned to the EBM, synthwave and early German Techno musical flavours of his youth playing to more intimate crowds like our basement and the Dekmantel Selectors stage.

He’s been recently anointed a BBC radio resident too, where he’s brought his unique musical palette to the radio for the first time. You can listen to the first show below and read an interview with the artist from our archives here.

Funk with a sinister edge with Melkeveien

It’s been about a year since Kristian Møller Johansen released his last track as Melkeveien. “Homecoming” came out in the summer of  2018, about a year on from the single before that “Sove På Det”. So it only makes sense that his next release, “Hockey Pizza” should come out a year on from the last to perpetuate the sequence.

Kristian breaks in to a hearty chuckle over the phone as I ask him about his annual release schedule; as if it’s not the first time the annual onsistency has occurred to him.“Hockey Pizza” is still at the mastering studio when I call him up for this interview, and Kristian won’t let me hear a single note until these final touches are applied to the record and it is finished to the degree he expects.

* Cover art by Kåre Magnus Bergh Design by Jette Graaner

The focus for “Hockey Pizza” was on a more “organic, live sound”  than the previous records like “Homecoming,” which was composed from “more programmed and sample based stuff” according to Kristian. “Homecoming” took strains of Disco and Acid and brought them together in the realm of DIY electronica. Rumbling bass lines, syncopated beats and swathes of synthetic textures streaking across the popular song structure, established the sound Melkeveien had been cultivating since “Sove på Det.”

Kristian tells me this is due to evolve on “Hockey Pizza” with a “drummer playing drums rather than a drum machine” lending a different “energy” to these new songs. Guitarist Fredrik Ryberg and keyboard virtuoso Ole Anders Røberg also feature heavily on the forthcoming “mini-EP”, which with Knut Sævik (Mungolian Jet Set) at the mixing controls, gives it more of a live band sound than the solo pursuits of Kristian in the Melkeveien records before it.

It’s a structure that’s more suited for the live show that accompanies this release and will be making its way to Jaeger for the official Oslo release of the new record. “We’re focussing on the band stuff” Kristian tells me in light of the forthcoming release party. The band consisting of Kristian and Embert Johnsen on samplers/keys and John Birkeland Hansen on drums is a fusion of “live and sequenced” material that can easily mutate from a concert venue to a club.

Together they’ve come in to their own as a band, which will result in more recorded material says Kristian, but will also ultimately return to the “more club focussed” sound of “Peter Pan Death Wish” in future releases.

It was “Peter Pan Death Wish”, released in 2014 that first brought the Melkeveien project to the fore. The track found its way on the trailer for the Lynne Ramsay film “You were never really here” starring Joaquin Phoenix and gained a lot of exposure for Melkeveien abroad with  the London Times calling it “essential listening” at the time. That would ultimately reverberate back home too, giving some favourable reception to the single and the EPs that followed.

“People seemed to like that record” says Kristian in a very self-effacing way as “Peter Pan Death Wish” continues to rack up streams over half a million on Spotify. With its plucking sequenced synth and its elastic rhythm and bass, the single would live on beyond the trailer soundtrack to the club floor and bring the label Dødpop to the fore.

Dødpop is a label Kristian runs with Bård Farbu and Robert Jomisko, born out of the brief but significant Skweee wave at the turn of the decade. A “pan-Scandinavian” musical phenomenon out of the era of Myspace, Skweee was a kind of DIY, cut-n-paste Electro that shares a very similar ideology to what lo-fi House does today.

“I don’t consider myself making Skweee anymore,” says Kristian. “The Melkeveien thing is a free thing”, avoiding strict formats for something that can flow effortlessly between his musical influences. If urged to describe his music, he calls it “funk with a sinister edge” and the results find themselves somewhere between Ratatat and Lindstrøm, but really defies categorisation beyond the electronica reference.

Growing up in Hamar, Kristian had a varied musical upbringing. His first foray into music was in a Hip Hop group in the late nineties, although he never considered the group a success, at least not outside the Hamar area.

“That didn’t evolve into anything,” but it did lay a foundation into production, bolstered by an early interest in computer music. “’I’ve been into producing music on computers since 1998, starting with FastTracker and music floppy discs,” says Kristian. He started making music with Niels Thiessen (Mandagsklubben & Brokesteady) in Hamar and released his first record as Mr. Nguyen in 2004, a track called “Hiroshima Hookers” on Sekur Beats. He describes it as a “dancy and quirky” record with references to Warp records and today you can still hear the grassroots of what would become Melkeveien in that record.  

Kristian, Bård and Robert then eventually established Dødpop after trading some tracks online, and noticing some very sonic similarities, similarities that were contemporary with the musical epoch and would eventually lead to the creation of the Skweee genre.

Kristian adopted the name Melkeveien from his street in Hamar which went beyond Skweee to an all-encompassing electronic sound with elements of Disco, Electro and Synthwave coursing through its foundations.

Today Melkeveien switches between being a solo project and a fully fledged band and Kristian reiterates that it brings “a different energy” to the project  “when the band plays together.” With John Birkeland Hansen in situ there’s that tactile and visual interpretation of the rhythm, which when experienced in the live context, is a very vivifying expression of the beat.

Beyond this live show, there will be a tour in Norway promoting “Hockey Pizza”, and a new track will be released on Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp label evry soon. Kristian is certain there will “absolutely be an ep and album” in the future and if there’s any merit in the consistency of releases thus far, then 2020 looks like an exciting year for Melkeveien.

Album of the week: Sound Stream – Love Remedy

German producer and DJ, Frank Timm has been resolute in the singular pursuit in his music. Since the late 90’s he’s been releasing records as Sound Stream, Soundhack and SSOL on labels created solely for each musical endeavour. The only time he’s ever veered from this undeviating path was a couple of exclusive pieces for the Ostgut Ton label as Soundstore, but they undulated little from the sound he’s cultivated across his releases. Tracks like “‘Live’ goes on” and “All Night” are dance floor classics today with a relationship between Hardwax and Timms facilitating the eccentric vision of the isolated producer and the exclusive labels that bare his craft.

Timm’s music across his monikers is an assemblage of deconstructed samples, expertly re-arranged and constructed for modern dance floors. Always avoiding obvious over-sampled references, Sound Stream et al is informed by Black, American music, repurposed for the hedonistic, nocturnal pursuits of today. His work is best suited for darkened German, musical bunkers where a high energy prevails and a tougher percussive arrangement is expected. Now, for the first time his channeled these efforts into an LP.

Love Remedy is a collection old, unreleased tracks and some new material with the same kind of resolute attitude that courses through all his EP’s and 12″. You’ll find no album-filler track or the mood stifling, experimental ambient inclusion on Love Remedy but rather ten tracks of unadulterated fun for the dance floor.  Sweeping Disco strings and bouncing Funk bass-lines remain the order of the day in Timm’s work, but tracks like “Get Down” and “Right Back” offer more than just the functional and develop a little further from their central themes.

The context for Love Remedy however remains strictly on the dance floor and all its efforts is still directed at the body. Timm’s skills at manipulating only the bare essentials of a sample to his devices so that the effects of that all-mighty rhythm section are never subdued is a masterclass in modern sampling techniques. Where edits like these will often get muddied up by the original sample, Timms has a way of giving it enough room to make its impression without overpowering the thunderous drums rolling in behind it.

Love Remedy is yet another solid piece of work from the Sound Stream name and while it will hold no surprises for those familiar with the sound Timms maintains as an artist, Love Remedy is also an effectual doorway into this music for the uninitiated, looking for something more than just a DJ tool.

 

Life after Mo Wax with James Lavelle

Do you think you’d ever want to start another label like Mo Wax again? “Sometimes I do” says James Lavelle, and then there’s a moment – a very brief moment–  as he considers the question … “in a nostalgic way, but in a sense of where we are right now, I don’t think so. I don’t really want to do that right now.”

In 1992 at a mere 18 years of age a precocious James Lavelle, alongside Tim Goldsworthy started what would become one of the most successful independent record labels of all time in the form of Mo Wax. With James as the driving force behind a group of kindred spirits and proficient artists, the label essentially invented Trip-Hop (although James never liked the term himself); launched the careers of a new generation of producers like DJ Shadow, Kool Keith and DJ Krush; and released seminal albums like Endtroducing (DJ Shadow), Psyence Fiction (UNKLE) and Meiso (DJ Krush) through their formidable and explosive tenure. “Mo Wax felt like a band in which I was the lead singer,” James told the independent back in 2014 “But there’s a point where you have to go ‘OK, we’re done’. The whole thing had lost its momentum and I was pretty burnt out.”

By 2002 Mo Wax was defunct and most of its catalogue was sold to Universal music while working relationships at Mo Wax strained as rifts deepened between some of the core group of artists. A new documentary, The man from Mo Wax puts this all into perspective with the director Matthew Jones cut and pasting found and recorded footage together – like his subjects would pieces of records. Framing those tumultuous years in the context of an ailing record industry and the fracturing community towards the end of Mo Wax’s lifetime, the documentary looks to offer a personal perspective on the life and times of James Lavelle during his time at Mo Wax.

“It is what it is” James told Clash Magazine about the film, “and I think what it’s done is it’s allowed something to have that feel and that honesty and that truth, even though it’s not my film and they do have their agenda.”  That agenda is an intense roller coaster ride through the biography of Mo Wax “which at some points maybe focus more on the lows” than James would care for. He reiterated this sentiment in a recent Resident Advisor Exchange, but today he’s “glad it is out” because it’s been “ten years of a strange journey.”

The period directly after Mo’Wax “was all about rebuilding” for James he tells me over a call to his home in the UK. He poured himself completely into his work and his main musical focus, UNKLE.  He started DJing a lot more too and then work on Never Never Land began, the anticipated follow-up to UNKLE’s debut LP, Psyence Fiction. In 1998 Psyence Fiction was one of the highest grossing releases of the decade and one of the last of its kind as the record industry faced the unprecedented challenges of selling records in the digital age and the Internet.

Never Never Land, and any record after,  would never again reach physical numbers like Psyence Fiction, but the sophomore record still reached number 24 on the UK album charts and number 6 in Billboard US Dance Charts when it was released. Never Never Land also begat a relationship with Island Records which lead to Surrender all, the label that became James’ exclusive platform for UNKLE for over ten years where records like War Stories came to life.

While the documentary paints a vivid picture of a fractured community at the end of Mo Wax James insists that “Surrender all was still based around the community at Mo Wax.” UNKLE too still had “a lot of people still involved from Mo Wax” and a lot of the people James worked with “for years continue to be involved” today in the musical project and the latest record label that facilitates all the UNKLE material, Songs for the Def. A hybrid title with references to the classic Hip Hop label Def Jam and the prominent Queens of the Stone age album Songs for the Deaf, it collates the diverse range of influences UNKLE continues to appropriate in its all-encompassing sound.

James made his debut on Songs for the Def with The Road Part I in 2017, with its successor primed for release in March 2019. The records are orchestrated from the very same collaborative principles that established UNKLE with Psyence Fiction as broken beats and cinematic textures converge in radio friendly song formats, produced and recorded at the highest level with a host of talented musicians and artists.

*James Lavelle plays a Mo Wax set at Jaeger this Friday. 

Relationships with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age continue to make impressions on his and their material (James co-wrote “Like Clockwork” from Queens of the Stone Age’s LP of the same name), while UNKLE also continues to assimilate new artists like Miink in its work too.

“Luckily, I was young when Mo Wax started and pretty young when it finished so I was able to start a whole other chapter,” James told the Independent. Life after Mo Wax was a period of intense creativity for James Lavelle that at an artistic level overshadows his time at Mo Wax. He curated Meltdown festival; released the majority of UNKLE records; made music for films; toured UNKLE live; made music for other artists; and also staked his claim as world renowned DJ during this time – the latter somewhat aided, but not completely dependent on four contributions to the Global Underground series.

The relationship with Global Underground happened much in the same way as all the other musical relationships happen in James’ life it seems; the result of coincidence and the circles he moved in. He was a resident at Fabric and very prominent on the “big international DJ circuit” at the time GU approached him.

“At the time it was a very bold thing to do,” he remembers “because the divides in electronic music were very large.” He jumped at the chance however and took it as a “great opportunity” to present “what the perception of a DJ mix within the context of the style of music, in the context of Global underground” could be. The last mix he did for the label was a mix of pure UNKLE material and while he doesn’t “DJ as much anymore“ he still demands a great level of respect from the DJ community for his work at the decks.

James started DJing at the prodigious age of 17, playing places like the legendary Fridge in Brixton. “I grew up on people like DJ Harvey and Giles Peterson as well as Hip Hop DJs” he says when I ask him about his early DJ influences. He’s always favoured UK DJs because they were always more dexterous in the booth compared to their American counterparts. UK DJs were always “more eclectic and much less divided” according to James. James’ own introduction to Djing would come from the traditional  record store roots, and today his skills are the cumulative result of his extensive music career and his early appreciation for record culture.

Growing up in Oxford, he made regular jaunts to London where he began to “discover records in a different way,” he explains in a loving vinyl interview. “I was going to London to do kung fu when I was 13 or 14. It was in Chinatown and I realised that area, around Soho, is where all the good record shops are.” He soon found a job at the legendary Honest Jon’s in Portobello Road, where he could nurture his latent skills as the musical curator that would underpin his work at Mo Wax.

These skills have hardly left him today as he still curates groups of artists around the UNKLE project and his record bag as a DJ. “I’m interested in music in all areas and I’m interested in discovering old records and contemporary records,” he says when I ask him about his buying habits today. In the age of the Internet he finds a never-ending source of new and old music. “As the world opens up more people discover these records that they haven’t discovered before,” and James counts himself as one of these people. From “African funk to turkish psychedelia all these things happen as the world becomes more accessible.”

Although James is less likely to find new things from the nineties, the period where he was most active as a DJ, producer and label owner, “there is so many things constantly” coming into his purview, from those ethnocentric records from the past to new Hip Hop from the likes of Marlowe.

How has his experience of DJing and record culture changed from the time he had been at the height of Mo Wax? “It depends on the context,” he says. It’s a very “commercialised and Americanised” arena today with a lot of the dynamic shifting from the actual DJ to the “success of the songs” a DJ releases as a producer, but in many other ways it remains unchanged for James. The disparity between various sects of club culture between the margins and the more popularised forms of the same culture “have always existed” according to James. In the “nineties you had Cream and Robert Miles” and today “it’s just amplified.” James puts it down to the “much bigger scene of club culture” that exists today, but he is optimistic that this “is a positive thing”.

Even so, he doesn’t see himself ever trying to establish something at the level of Mo Wax today. “It takes a lot of time and investment in other people’s lives to make a record,” he explains and he doesn’t think his head is in the right place to try it again. “I don’t want to be responsible for the careers of of other artist,” he explains and so he’s much happier focussing purely on his own creative endeavours at UNKLE. ”I did Mo Wax and I had that experience and the way things are now is that I have a similar experience with what I do with UNKLE because it’s collaborative in many different ways.”

There’s never a hint of any regret or resentment for Mo Wax and on occasion he’ll even put together a full set of Mo Wax material. “I’m proud of the records I released at the time,” he explains but it’s clear that that era of his life is not what defines him as an artist today. He’s gone on to pursue his creative endeavour as UNKLE; established a couple of labels; and while working at XL even hired the person that would go on to sign Adelle to that label. And according to an interview in Clash Magazine “there are many more” things that were left unsaid, especially in the documentary. James Lavelle is a multi-faceted artist and DJ, one whose career and life after Mo Wax is enough material for whole other documentary series.

The cut with Filter Musikk – Klasse Wrecks special

A distinct aesthetic theme emerged as Roland Lifjell unpacked the new batch of records over the weekend. Noisy monotone greyscale sleeves, repurposing some ninety-nineties fanzine visual aesthetic made up the bulk of the latest arrivals. Artists from the leftfield corroborated the theme and it was immedeately clear this wasn’t some trend-informed visual anomaly seeping through the vinyl market, but rather the visual identity of one, unique label. That label is Klasse Wrecks. With a fair share of records coming in via the label and its subsidiaries we thought we’d take a different approach to the cut with Filter Musikk this week with a special edition dedicated to latest arrivals from the label.

Klasse Wrecks is the combined effort of Lucas Hunter (aka Luca Lozano) and Michael Ho (aka Mr. Ho), a label that has emerged out of a very close-knit community of artists. “Klasse, Zodiac and Grafiti Tapes are basically labels enabling the interaction of my friends, it’s a small family,” Hunter told Inverted Audio in an interview from 2016. The family includes artists like Fett Burger, Johanna Knutsson and Phran with Hunter and Ho contributing their fair share to the discography and Hunter’s enigmatic artwork presenting the music in visual terms through his very distinct aesthetic.

“There are a few words that spring to mind when thinking about my work;” Hunter told Stamp the Wax, “DIY, outsider, rough, raw, bold…” and that’s a fair indication of the type of music that dots the Klasse Wrecks back-catalogue. Very rarely confined to the strict parameters of a genre or style, the artists and records that feature on Klasse Wrecks, including all its subsidiaries, move between elements of House, Electro, Techno, break-beats and even Trance. It’s not in any particular sonic identity, but rather in the very same attitude that signifies Hunter’s visual aesthetic; “DIY, outsider, rough, raw, bold.”

“I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything,” Hunter told Stamp the Wax, “people are free to be their own masters. I approach work with the intent to make a striking, simple, effective and sometimes humorous piece of work, if I’ve done those things then I feel I have done my job.” For the record enthusiast and collector this particular approach strikes a very harmonious chord, and making it impossible not to pick up a Klasse Wrecks record, whenever you’re in the presence of one.

Releasing music since 2014 with a consistent release schedule, Klasse Wrecks has garnered a very sincere and dedicated following, which in the last year has become a major source of inspiration for other labels too. If that Cardopusher LP on Boys Noize Records looks familiar it is because it was made by Hunter and if there is a sound that is currently dominating the leftfield DJ circuit it is very likely to contain a few Klasse Wrecks records. We’ll try and unravel just exactly what the appeal is to the label in this week’s edition of the Cut with Filter Musikk, a Klasse Wrecks special.

 

Memphis – Around The World / Lost Lands (Klasse Wrecks) 12″

Who would’ve thought progressive House would be a thing in 2019?  But in the spirit of Klasse Wrecks’ self-effacing manner, Memphis (Paul Williams) puts a contemporary spin on the genre for the label. Upholding that rough, bold and DIY ethos, Memphis gets dirty with a lurid bass movement tarnishing the lower frequencies while pitched percussive sounds bounce between the bars.

“Around the world” and “Lost Lands” are essentially two interpretations of the same track with that chunky bass underpinning both tracks. While the AA side “Lost Lands” favours a more minimalist approach “Around the world“ looks to a more bolder formation. Incorporating some exotic world influences and with EBM-style yelps dotting the extensive sojourn around the globe, “Around the World” offers something immediate over “Lost Lands” and its more transient, progressive sounds.

 

Dos Ritmos – Antropophony (Klasse Wrecks) 12″

Luca Lozano and Phran are Dos Ritmos. Klasse Wrecks are as much a collaborative community as it is a vehicle for these separate artists and Dos Ritmos is hardly the only project to be born out of the community behind the label. A down-tempo percussive project “Antropophony” is their first outing together with a kind of tongue-in-cheek approach to tribal and ethnic subsects of the House genre.

Five tracks favour a tougher approach to music that samples ritualistic percussive library pieces. Dos Ritmos, combine these polyrhythmic devices with synthesizers and sonic atmospheres that re-contextualises them as something more ominous and enigmatic, sucking any spiritual or trancedal association out of these sampled pieces. These aren’t mere House tracks built around a piece of distant library music, but rather a post-modern assemblage of primordial ritual music and the contemporary interpretation of such musical rituals as they happen in clubs all around the world today.

The mysterious and sinister “Cuero” and the dub-heavy “Repeater” are some of the more interesting examples of this dichotomy at play, but all five tracks have something to offer in that regard. From the expressive vocal arrangement of “Masque” and “Yanomani” or the polyrhythmic design of “High Volta” there’s something incredibly alluring to these tracks, even for somebody that has never really enjoyed the tribal connotations in electronic music. It’s the first time something really new has been achieved with that kind of music for a long time.

 

The Horn – The Counter Counter Offer EP (Klasse Wrecks) 12″

Last year Luca Lozano dug through the archives with a remix of The Horn’s “The Villager” from 1996. Steve Horne was only active for a brief moment in the mid nineties, making Balearic-inspired electronica through the Evolution imprint. And although his actual output might be quite reserved, he was nothing short of a prolific producer and apparently has recorded a fair amount of unsigned demos since. Klasse Wrecks unearthed some of these for a new EP of original material from the veteran producer.

“‘The Counter Counter Offer’ EP collates music produced between 1994 and 2018 and offers them up as an introduction into the world of the The Horn and his music making process,” says the blurb from the label.

The EP harks back to a more adventurous time in electronic music, where it was expected to push the boundaries of music to the outermost limits of human understanding. Digital synthesisers and computer music technology coming into its own during this period, saw people like Horne sculpting intoxicating, alien landscapes never heard before in a musical context. “Schmaltz” and “M1LF” are prime examples of this at work as off-kilter sonic anomalies counteract the beatific melodic arrangements.  

It’s on the more “traditional” tracks like “Hermit House” and “Trinity” where Horne’s music is at its most captivating as it indeed makes its counter counter offer to the barren, lifeless sound that dominates contemporary club floors. Innocent melodic exchanges in an opaque harmonic atmosphere leave a little more on the bone around the House-informed rhythm sections.

 

Karlos Moran – Mmg003 (Moran Music Group) 12″

Moran Music Group is the newest subsidiary of the Klasse Wrecks family and the exclusive vehicle for Karlos Moran, who adds the third installment in the Moran Music Group discography. We don’t know who Karlos Moran is, but it’s quite likely that it is somebody from the Klasse Wrecks family operating under a pseudonym.

Mmg003 is a very balearic record, with luscious keys and synthesised pipes floating on a liquid bed of House beats. Interlacing rhythms from an percussive orchestra coaxed from drum machines offer staccato counterpoint to the languid melodic arrangements, where the tracks appear both punchy and delicate at the same time.  

It’s music that’s evocative of an Iberian beach scene in the late eighties, including cabana shirts, cocktails in coconuts, and sun-drenched mustachioed men. You can almost smell the Coppertone tanning lotion on a track like “Kosmos”.

 

Luca Lozano, DJ Fett Burger – Hands Of Doom 2 (Klasse Wrecks) 12″

“REPRESS PLEASE REPRESS PLEASE REPRESS REPRESS PLEASE REPRESS PLEASE REPRESS !!!!!!!!!!;”  the people shouted on discogs and Klasse Wrecks accommodated. Fett Burger and Luca Lozano’s collaborative EP “Hands of Doom 2” is back on the shelves. The nineties-leaning, slowed down rave record was one of the best received records ever to make it out of Klasse Wrecks stable. It combined the playful Norwegian flair of Fett Burger with the UK roots of Luca Lozano in one of the most successful collaborations featuring either of these artists. The breakbeat arrangements, and the sidelong swipes at cues from early rave music – like that pitched hoover on “Signalrød” – makes for intriguing and captivating listening, especially in the context of a dance floor.

That sort of idiosyncratic cut-n-paste approach, where artists lend from familiar tropes, but make it their own with wholly individual take on these clichés are everything that Klasse Wrecks is about for this listener. Taking something familiar, fucking it up beyond all recognition, and then presenting it to its audience as something completely new, runs through every release on the Klasse Wrecks discography from the music to the artwork. The sights and sounds of Klasse Wrecks might be in vogue at the moments as trends conspired around it, but the label is certainly in a class of its own. For the last four years and beyond, they’ve quietly carved out a very niche sound and aesthetic that many are trying to copy or even appropriate as their own today, but there will always be only one original.

 

Album of the week: 7th Plain – Chronicles III

Luke Slater returns with his ambient-leaning Techno alias, 7th Plain for the third part in a compilation series from the Ostgut Ton family’s A-TON imprint. The label, whose first release was Chronicles I back in 2016, continues in its efforts to archive and document Slater’s extensive back-catalogue with the third instalment in the series. Recorded throughout the nineties, and collated on a hand-full of LPs and EPs, Chronicles is a hermitically-sealed, musical time capsule that has preserved some of the finest ambient Techno ever recorded for the next generation.

It’s music that has aged gracefully over the last twenty years, and it still stands up today in the current musical landscape. Back in the nineties when this was originally made, music like this sounded like it came from the future and today it feels like time has finally caught up with the music. With some modern mastering touches applied, it sounds the best it has ever been as Luke Slater’s expert hands at crafting expressive layers from synthesisers clearly comes to the fore now after some digital tweaks.

It sounds like the artist and producer has filled all the available space with sound. Densely orchestrated pieces made from an arsenal of synthesisers and drum machines fill every moment of every track, but somehow it still manages to retain an airy presence on the record.

Familiar titles like “Reality of Space” and “Excalibur’s Radar” are there, taken from the two landmark albums, “The 4 Cornered Room” and “My yellow Wise Rug” and sit side by side each other, putting into perspective the incredibly fertile creativity of the artist as 7th Plain during this period. The series seems to conclude with this third instalment, with tracks taken solely from the aforementioned two LPs and many people online suggesting that it is the finest of the triptych.

While Luke Slater has continued to make music under various guises like Planetary Assault Systems and L.B Dub Corp, he had never again really resurrected the 7th Plain until the Chronicles series, by which time it had been steeped in its own mythic lore. It’s curious why Luke Slater never again made music as the 7th Plain and why even today with so much interest in that music, he’s not made any new music under that moniker.

The renewed interest in this music and A-TON’s work in cataloguing the music and framing it in the Chronicles context has installed this music today as a bonafide classic series of works from one of the finest Techno projects that ever existed.

Jayda G on the Essential Mix

Last night Jayda G stepped up to the essential mix for two hours of Disco, House, Gospel and R&B which is available to stream via BBC and a few Mixcloud stations like the one below.  The mix comes a month before the much anticipated debut LP, “Significant Changes” coming out via Ninja Tune and it’s a week before the Canadian DJ and producer joins g-HA & Olanskii in the booth for Frædag.

Classic Disco, House and Gospel from the likes of Gladys Knight, Mr. G and Ron Trent course through the set, setting a pre-party Friday mood for this mix that could carry on into the early hours of the morning to any musical dimension.  The mix includes “Significant Changes and Beyond” taken from her upcoming LP at the heart of this mix and a couple surprises from Faith Evans Seu Jorge at the very end for a very comprehensive mix.

Premiere: Center of the Universe – Flash Forward (Endless Winther Flutemix)

At the center of the universe is a musician, surrounded by his instruments, collected from around the world. Center if the Universe is Jørgen Sissyfus, the unconventional artist and DJ at the heart of an expansive musical universe that covers the entire musical globe.  Channeling elements from traditional folk music from various regions through a modern electronic music palette Center of the Universe makes beatific albums with purposeful themes in the style of DIY left-field pop music.

Since the turn of the century Jørgen has been releasing LPs and EPs under the Metronomicon Audio imprint out of Oslo, following a very DIY approach. Underpinning his music, there’s a pseudo mysticism that flows forth from his music, which when combined by the striking themes of records like “Taking a nap with the Center of the Universe” and “Selected Modulations”, brings something exotic to the fore.

From the abstract, where Center of the Universe’s music is informed by ideas like space and time to the very literal form his lyrics can sometimes take, Center of the Universe skirts a line between something severely cognitive and very innocent. Although he’ll often collaborate with other artist (most notably on signing with the Center of the Universe) Center of the Universe is very much a one man show, but on his most recent record, he’s opted for a very different approach, putting his very idiosyncratic sounds in the hands of other producers for a change.

Expansion Pack, which will be officially released tomorrow, is a collection of remixes from Center of the Universe’s back-catalogue from remix artists across the globe. Original pieces have been re-interpreted by the likes of Magnus International, Boblebad and Sloth UK through 10 tracks and today we have the privilege of premiering the opening track, “Flash Forward (Endless Winther Flutemix)” on the blog while we chat to Jørgen Sissyfus about the new record and his upcoming gig at Jaeger for Vinny Villbass and Daniel Vaz’ Badabing.

Tell me about the origins of the EP and some of the ideas that informed it?

(It’s not an EP it’s a full length of mixes!)
The last years I have been releasing some EP’s and albums, most of them with names commenting the format, like Extended Play and Maxi Single Last year we did Singing with the Center of the Universe where 8 singers made songs to my beats. This is not really commenting the format, but now we’re back to that with Expansion Pack, which is the name of this collection of mixes.

Why these particular remix artists?

This release started with producers asking me to do mixes of some of my songs, the results were great in my ears, and I asked some of my favourites like Mesak and Magnus International to do mixes so it would add up to an album. It’s wonderful having people like Sloth UK and Endless Winther to voluntarily do mixes, I am very happy that they have faith in my music! All of the mixes are quite different from the originals, and Toshybot even made a love song from one of my instrumentals.

I don’t assume you have any favourites, but which remix took you most by surprise?

I got the remix from Guvi straight after I played in Germany and he heard my track. He was so quick and I was super happy about the sound of it. Now that’s a year ago, so I am very glad we’ll get this out. I hope some Norwegians will check out his music now.

There’s always a kind of mysticism to the atmosphere to your records. What outside of music inspires you?

I would say I am very inspired by the endless topic of curiosa in all its myriad forms. I am also thinking a lot about time, space and both the very small and enormous things in the universe. The physics and science of sound is also an inspiration, even if it’s both outside and containing music.

Your music seems to channel melodic and harmonic structures taken from folksy traditions, channeled through a modern electronic palette. Where and how do these elements converge for you as an artist? How does it reflect your own musical upbringing?

As a DJ I used to play a lot of folk music and music from around the globe, both original and hybrids/edits. I also used to play bass in a band that played arabic music, kurdish music and music from balkan and greece when I was young. I grew up with that (and electronic music) even if it was and very far from the norm where I grew up. It’s quite natural for me to add some elements from this music, but I don’t want it to be a pastiche. It’s not supposed to be bread with some spice on top, but a well baked børek. Off course it would be easy to attack this as cultural appropriation, but DJ’s from the areas I “borrow” from are among the people that play my tracks the most.

This record is all remixes; “Selected Modulations” was like a homage to synthesisers; and “Singing with center of the universe” was all about the vocalists. What is your working process for these albums and their very distinct themes? Do you find the theme solidify around the album or do you have an idea laid out before you even record a single note?

I really used to start with an idea of something cool to do or make, and after that it’s the same process again but for every track. Most of my recent tracks starts with a “what if”. A very concrete example is a track from Extended Play called Acid Rembetiko which is “about” what would happen if you fuse greek traditional music in 9/4 with Acid house. I have a lot of stupid experiments, but I have to be happy with the actual musical output to use them.

 *Expansion Pack is out tomorrow via bandcamp

 

What will be the source of inspiration for your next work?

Good question, I have already started making what will be the Unknown album. It will be one for the dancefloor, and obviously it will be packed with riddles and mysteries!

You collaborate a lot with other artists. Why is it so conducive for you?

Since I do everything (also mixing and mastering) for C.O.U. it is even more important to have input from others. Actually it’s bordering on a paradox, I’m the Center of the Universe, but the project is very much about relating to, and collaborating with other people, also the people listening to the music.

You’re performing live at Jæger this Saturday, and it won’t just be you on your own. You’ve you assembled for the live band and what will it sound like?

There will be Singing with the Center of the Universe this saturday, so four singers are coming along to sing their songs. Apart from them it’s me playing different instruments. We are really looking forward to playing at Jaeger, it’s a great place for electronic music!

Album of the week: Espen T. Hangård – Elementær

After making his debut in the world of Electro last year with the stunning  Primær, Espen T. Hangård is back with another LP, Elementær. The sophomore LP, released less than three months on from his first, suggests Hangård’s furore into electronic music is more than a fleeting fancy as he marks his intentions with another eight cuts of bristling energy. Elementær was captured during the same recording sessions as Primær between 2009 and 2012, and features Hangård in the a creative frenzy, coaxing beatific arrangements from lifeless machines.

Skipping Electro beats and lysergic bass movements, bounce through phrases in the spirit of Kraftwerk with a hint of Aphex Twin through expansive textured layers. Like Primær, Elementær harks back to the origins of the genre, where innocent melodies and song structures lifted from popular forms of music coalesce in that creative cauldron that not only birthed the earliest Electro and therefore Techno, but also Hip Hop. Short, effective pieces with a stocky determinism, make punchy entries, before moving on to the next track.

Simplicity is at the core of Hangård’s work with a no-frills approach to Electro and breakbeats. Building the foundation of his music on the rudimentary constructs of Electro where Roland X0X machines engage in a musical dialogue with each other, Espen T. Hangård is not breaking any new ground for the genre, but in his fundamental approach, he manages to capture something perfect and pure. Hangård’s expressive melodic nature, negates any designs on the dance floor for music where function will yet again follow form to engage with its listeners at a instinctive level.

Shimmering pads and multi-layered textures, temper the fast-paced rhythm sections of tracks like “Atlas Reconfiguration” and “Trampoline” with a kind of wistful serenity clouding the productions. Alongside Primær, Elementær establishes Espen T Hangård’s sonic signature as an electronic music artist, offering a view from the side with regards to Electro and broken beat music as he proffers his interpretation of the origins of this music.

Greetings from Jaeger – The New Website

Back in 2016, we took a step back from the ongoing manual labour, dusted off our overalls, and saw that it was good. A month of renovation, remodelling our bar upstairs, building new restrooms and gutting the staircase made a significant impact. We were still polishing glasses while pumping those first beers from the new bar, and even Ola (he, who is always tinkering) took a moment to admire the handy work.

Only a moment though, because there’s always something to be done. In reality, those renovations never really ended. Work has steadily commenced with a splash of paint, a light fixture and even a wall appearing dotting the timeline since 2016. It’s an ever on-going process as Jaeger continues to evolve and grow, one that will most likely never see an end, but that’s just the nature of the thing.

There was one thing however that we’ve always been meaning to get to throughout it all, but had to neglect for more essential upgrades and changes. As the interior, the soundsystem and the DJs kept changing with the times our virtual presence receded further and further back into the past. Finally it got to  a point where it no longer represented what Jaeger had become so it was time to update our website. With the help of the very patient team at Baggy, we’re proud to present jaegeroslo.no 2.0. We’ve been working on it for two years and with some delays, some false starts and some new beginnings, baggy finally put it together in two months.

It’s a virtual presence that now matches, or even rivals our physical attributes, and frames all that content we’ve been working on over these past years in its rightful idiom. It’s not merely a facelift, but comes with a few new additions that will put our residents, our events, the mixes, the pictures and our blog directly at your fingertips.

As in every aspect of of Jaeger our residents always comes first, and it’s always been our intention to have a dedicated home for our residents both in the physical realm and now in the digital realm too.You’ll find all of them on the resident page at jaegeroslo.no, with their biographies, latest mixes and releases, and some very important links available. All 18 of them are on there like a trumps card pack, with links to each individual artist from there events.

Our events should also be more accessible than ever, with an option to add to your google calendar. (Updates with ical to follow eventually). For the longest time we’ve been fed-up with social media (especially facebook’s event feature) and the way it’s taken ownership over the internet. We spend a lot of time and effort on bookings, logistics and sound,and artwork for all our events to be formatted in some slow, basic html framework that looks as shit at it works. You’ll still find our events on facebook, but our website be catalogued further in to the future for the more musical curious amongst you.

Our blog will remain a focal point in this new addition of jaegeroslo.no with the same kind of content, and more, gracing its pages, which will also including a dedicated page for the Jæger mix series. At the moment it’s still very much a one-man operation, but it has always been my intention in making the blog a dedicated music blog with features, interviews, reviews and op-ed pieces, not just for our residents and visiting guests, but for the entire oslo clubbing community and its music. A one-man operation won’t sustain this lofty ambition so we’ll be looking for contributors in this next instalment of jaegeroslo.no.

If you want to write for our blog email me at editor@jaegeroslo.no. Whether you want to ask your favourite DJ some questions; talk about an artist or record you admire; share a story of a night out; or getting something about music off your chest; we’ve always wanted the blog to reflect the community. If words aren’t your thing however, and you’re more of a visual person, we’ve also got you covered, and our new gallery page is there for your pictures.

This is yet another new phase in this ever-evolving organism that is Jaeger, but like everything else it is and will always be a work-in-progress and together with the people at Baggy we’ll be developing the site more in the future. But now, it’s time to dust off the old overalls again, kick back with Daniel Gude and enjoy our handy work for a moment. Just a moment though.

Album of the week: Harbour Boat Trips Vol. 2 by Trentmøller

There’s a palpable coldness to Trentmøller’s latest musical creation. An icy sting clings to the atmosphere of the tracks, like a cold mist clinging to the surface of the ocean. It seems to waft off the glassy exterior and into your ears where its cold touch lingers for its duration. It arrives as the literally titled, Harbour Boat Trips, and it is the long-awaited second instalment of a mixed compilation by the Trentmøller. The first Harbour Boat Trips was released back in 2009, and it was always expected that Trentmøller would follow it up, but none expected to wait nearly a decade. With the help of HFN music, it’s finally here.

Like its predecessor, the theme remains Copenhagen. “Loosely inspired by the motion and movement of Copenhagen’s busy harbour,” Harbour Boat Trips captures the evocative mood of the Danish capital’s shore through a collection of wispy electronica, shoe-gazing tempos, seductive vocals and piercingly cold atmospheres.

Trentmøller might be best known for his cinematic electronic albums like “Last Resort” and “Fixion”, or his entrancing live performances with a full band, but he has also been known to dabble in the booth, and has compiled on rare occasion, stunning mixed pieces for the likes of Late night Tales and Audiomatique Recordings. “Sometimes it’s nice to take a break from my own stuff and present some of the music I like and music that inspires me,” he says in the liner notes of the compilation. Combining pieces from artists like Tropic of Cancer, Pyrit, The Raveonettes, Slowdive and of course his own catalogue, the connection between the diverse roster of artists is tenuous, but the results are consistent and captivating.

There’s a sonic identity to the compilation and mix with a sinuous link to the DJ-artist behind the mix. Trentmøller’s natural penchant for leading female vocals and electronic musical pieces that move like sentient organisms is also accounted for on this mix, with the DJ stringing these various pieces together in the same way an album would unfold. “I like it when a mix tells a story,” he says in the press release for the record. “If the tracks together takes you on some kind of journey, then it’s interesting to me.”

Harbour Boat Trips vol.2 is not so much about the journey, but rather it’s destination. The listener is instantly transported to Trentmøller’s musical idea of Copenhagen and if you’ve ever been to Copenhagen, walking along the harbour boardwalk, it doesn’t take much to cajole the listener back to that place. There’s always been a very definitive mood that has accompanied Trentmøller’s music, and it wasn’t something that could easily be relayed that effectively through a mix of music, but somehow he’s managed to capture that mood in this mix too. Trentmøller makes absolutely no concessions to the underlying sonic theme of the mix, encouraging the listeners to completely immerse themselves in the music as they are whisked away to that elusive destination.

Jacuzzi Boyz with Jawn Rice & Fredfades

It’s jacuzzi weather in Oslo. Relatively mild winter temperatures and uniform snowfall have draped the city in a white blanket that crunch under my feet as I make my way to Tøyen. There’s no actual jacuzzi waiting for me on the other side of this trip, but more like the abstract comfort of jets of warm water rushing up my spine. On my earbuds is Jawn Rice and Fredfades’ Jacuzzi Boyz, an album that hints at the lure of summer in the depths of winter. The funky bass of “Mutual Love” comes on and I hasten my step towards Fredfades’ Tøyen apartment to sit down for an interview with he and Jawn about this latest Mutual Intentions creation.

Fred’s apartment looks familiar. I recognize certain angles from album covers and press shots. It’s crealy a producer-DJ’s hovel with a few walls dedicated to synthesisers, turntables and a fair amount of records. On the record shelf which contains an eclectic array of records, the luminous green backs of Jacuzzi Boys is immediately visible. There’s about twenty of them sitting side by side on the shelf, the last of the first pressing of this record. “500 was definitely not enough records,” says Fred in a matter-of-factly tone. “We sold out before it was released in the first five days.“

On Spotify the single, “Show me how” has already raked up an impressive 164 000 listeners which Fred says is “really good” for Mutual Intentions. Although the Mutual intentions name has been around for a long time in Oslo and Norway, the label is fairly new and Jacuzzi Boyz in many ways marks a new era for the MI label. After featuring on labels like King Underground and Jakarta, Fred and co, are bringing the music back to the collective with a whole load of records primed for release in the near future, including more music from FredFades, Ivan Ave, Jawn Rice and Byron the Aquarius.

Fred plays me some clips from this last record; Byron’s vocals improvising their way through warm Rhodes keys and synthesised strings, while Fred continues to talk about the mutual intentions label: “I used to think we couldn’t do that stuff ourselves, but I’d rather earn less as long as I know that the 50%goes to mutual so we could use on something rather than it going to some dude paying his rent in another country.” A message chimes on Fred’s phone. It’s Jawn, he’s at Tøyen station, and should be with us in 20 minutes. I admire Fred’s synth collection as Jawn enters in from the cold, to join us.

Jawn Rice & Fredfades play Nightflight with Fatima this weekend.

Tell me a bit about the origins of the LP, what made you want to start working together?

Jawn: We’ve always kind of worked together, since I moved to Oslo.

Did you know each other as kids?

Fred: No, I was in Seattle and I got an email from him after he bought the SP1200 (Drum Machine). We decided we should meet up when I get back to Oslo, and we met up at my father’s place and just made some beats. We made some Hip Hop together for nearly six years, and Jawn started doing more electronic stuff and moved out of the city centre. Eventually he taught me Ableton. I decided to share some sketches with Jawn, and he opened the ones he liked and worked on them.

So that was the origins of the album too?

Fred: Yes, kind of.

Jawn: We’ve always been sharing sketches. I’ve been making sketches every day, for years, but I feel that these past years have been more productive in getting some of these sketches out as songs with Fredrik. It’s just a continuation of our friendship.

You guys have been friends longer than you’ve been working together?

Jawn: We’ve always been friends with a hobby.

Fredrik: Jawn is a super talented musician, but I don’t think he has the same need as other people. If we didn’t put out his stuff, nobody would probably hear it, but it’s really good, so we have to take care of it and get it out.

Jawn: The album was mostly Fred’s ideas and I tried to contribute with sounds.

Jawn, why did you stop making Hip Hop and turn to these electronic sounds?

Jawn: I’m still making Hip Hop. I think it changes every now and then. I can like Hip Hop for a year, and then spend two years listening to something else. Sometimes you just get tired of listening to that one style.

Judging from the output at Mutual Intentions and your record collection Fred, you are eclectic people.

Fred: Yeah, I get tired pretty fast, and usually I get tired of contemporary music a lot faster than stuff that’s aged a bit.

Fredrik, I know you’ve collaborated a lot in the past with other artists, especially through the MI network, but Jawn do you often collaborate with other artists?

Jawn: Not so much. I usually just work on my own. I try to make beats with other rappers, but I haven’t really finished anything.

Fred: It can be frustrating working with other vocalists.

So what made this relationship work so well?

Fred: I think it’s because we’ve known each other for a long time; we share a lot of favourite artists and inspirations, and we have a similar approach to music.

Jawn: I knew exactly what kind of music he was into when I first met him.

Fred: What’s funny now is that we don’t listen to the same artists and styles, but we still work well together.

Was there any seminal influence you were considering when you started working on Jacuzzi Boyz?

Jawn: Not really.

Fred: I would send Jawn some references, but there was never anything that we were aiming to sound like. It was all technical stuff. He is really good in the mixing process and he can recreate anything you show him.

 

I thought I could hear a lot of your individual character in the records, like I could hear a bit of Warmth and a bit of Highlights in there, and of course a bit of that Hip Hop too.

Jawn: I think there is a lot of Hip Hop in that record, and some House and a lot of fusion.

Yes, and you can put on in a club situation and people will go off, especially the single.

Fred: Yes, people are playing it. I used to play the single, but now I play the instrumentals more and it’s always weird playing your own music.

Jawn: Yeah I’m totally finished for the album.

I imagine that since you’ve been working on it so long, that it will get a bit tiresome listening to it after well.

Jawn: Yes, I always know the record is ready when I’m just tired of it.

Jawn,  you strike me as the type of person that’s a perfectionist, and will brood over some minute detail.

Jawn: Yes, I tend to do that every day, but only if I’m entertained by the sounds. That’s usually what I’m thinking about before I go to sleep; I’m opening up projects in my head, while lying in bed and editing it in my head.

Fred: I have a very different approach. I make loads of sketches, save stuff and then bounce the first versions. I’ll keep it in iTunes and after a while, I’ll make a playlist that will tie different tracks together in a red-line. And we did the same with our record.

You worked with some collaborators on this LP  like Tom Noble and Lucid Paradise. These are people outside of the Mutual Intentions family. How did you hook up with these people and what were your thoughts on these collaborations?

Fred: I’m not afraid to reach out to people, I do it all the time. Usually I do it, because they have a song that I really like at that point where I’m finishing up a record, and I think it could work well with a song I’m working on.

Lucid Paradise happened because my friend put out a modern soul record from the artist, which is also called “tonight”, actually. We just wanted some really good vocals so it made sense to contact those guys.

Did you find that working together, brought something else to the surface that you won’t necessarily find in your solo work?

Fred: Yes, I don’t think I would have made a record that sounds exactly like that on my own.

Jawn: I’m not sure I would have put any records out at all if it wasn’t for the collaboration with Fred. (laughs)

Fred: I made a lot of sketches which were probably more fusion Disco, than your electronic demos.

Jawn: I’m getting more and more inspired by other people’s original music lately. If Fred tells me about a good song, I will listen to the song and think, we can make this song. I also liked the rare stuff he was playing and I didn’t hear anybody else playing those tunes.

Fred: I have friends that are good musicians, but don’t have that many references, so they will always make stuff that sounds like you would expect it to sound like, but I think if you’re constantly searching for music all the time, you get tired, and you start looking for small things, small mistakes, stuff that hit a nerve. There’s no point in making the perfect song, it already exists and there’s no reason to duplicate it.

Those mistakes or “quirks” are often the thing that gives a record that sense of identity.

Fred: That’s something I learnt when Jawn taught me how to use Ableton. I’m kind of inspired by all the possibilities and all the limitations I had. I really liked all the crazy stuff you could do in Ableton, but after a long time working in the software, I figured out there was something I was missing. I spoke to a friend about it and he said it was those coincidences in that primitive gear, those small glitches that would make unintended art.

Where did the name Jacuzzi Boyz come from?

Fred: Jawn invited me to Lillehammer, where he’s from and we hijacked these snowboarders’ jacuzzi, and the name got stuck. It was a really stupid name, and we just wanted something that really popped, and luckily it worked.

And it relays the feeling of summer perfectly that you capture in the sound.

Jawn: I also think it sounds like summer record somehow, even though it was made in winter.

Fred: I played it to my friend, Hugo (LX) and he was like: “you need to put this out before the beginning of summer!”

Jawn: And we are working on an EP with some remixes from this record that should come out in March.

Will you continue to work together after this?

Jawn: Yes

Are there already thoughts about the next album perhaps?

Fred: Right now, I think we’ll be releasing another record from Jawn, because he has so many unreleased demos.

Jawn: I really want to make something else.

Fred: It’s really different from the other stuff, even more electronic.

Jawn: After every three or four months, I’m usually done with what I’m digging and moving on to the next thing. Like now, I really enjoy mixing aggressive rap music with House music and dance music and I think that’s something I haven’t heard that much, so it’s fresh to me.

Humbled: Shadow Child in Profile

Few recording artists are able to claim success in the way Simon Neale has encountered it. While most artists are content in toiling away in one pre-designated corner of music, Neale has managed to conquer two opposing factions of electronic music, the underground and the mainstream.

As Dave Spoon he has had phenomenal success as a DJ, producer and remixer with a couple of Top 40 UK hits under his belt, remixes for global pop sensations like Madonna and sets at some of the world’s most prestigious booths during the height of the the superstar DJ era. With a distinctive big-room Electro-House sound, based on bold sawtooth bass-lines and groovy step-sequences he was a cut above the rest with tracks like “At Night” becoming crossover sensations, overnight.

Acts like David Guetta, Calvin Harris and Steve Aoki would arrive into popular culture much through the same channels, but Dave Spoon would always hold a little in reserve to appease an underground faction of his fans.

In 2012 he did the unthinkable and retired the Spoon moniker indefinitely and re-incarnated his musical output as Shadow Child, where we would trade in the commercially accessible sound that had brought him success for something closer to the beating heart of House music, buried far beneath the surface at the roots of the music, but updated for contemporary audiences. As Shadow Child he signed to Dirty Bird records, established the label Food Music with Kry Wolf’s Lewis Darvill, and became a weekly host on Rinse FM.

Trading in the big-room Electro-House sound of Spoon for “skippy garage tendencies and brooding, macho basslines” (as Noisey called it at the time), Shadow Child made an immediate impression on dance floors with his track “String Thing.” From there he quickly established the new moniker at the opposite end of House music’s spectrum from Dave Spoon and in the succession of a few years he came to dominate this spectrum of House music too.

“It was never a plan to shout about it being me, I simply wanted people to discover the music first,” explains Neale in an interview with Deep House Amsterdam. Even though these two distinct projects come from the same individual there’s never been a confluence and each has been allowed to live in their own corner on their own terms, completely independently of one another.

After an LP and several EP’s on Labels like Ovum Records, Super Tracks,Unknown to the Unknown and Food Music of course, Shadow Child has done for the second room, what Dave Spoon did for the main room in House music.

Simon Neale’s entry into music, production and DJing is the result of an early interest, education and some fortuitous conditions. He had been picking through his dad’s extensive record collection from a young age, making mixtapes from a dusty collection of Police and Rolling Stones favourites. When his secondary school was given a hefty increase in their state-allocated budget and decided to invest in the arts and a music studio in particular, Neale directed his inquisitive musical nature from listening to creating.

He was “fortunate to be around that type of kit at that age” he reminisces in a Rinse FM interviewand armed with a coveted arsenal of synthesisers and drum machines, he took his first baby steps towards a career in electronic music. He was “really taken with House music” at the time, but that would not be encouraged by production as much as it was by DJing.

He became “obsessed” with DJing at the same time, especially overcome with the sounds of early Rave and Hardcore. A friendly DJ neighbour would let Neale cultivate this obsession into a skill, leaving the latent young DJ to his own devices on a pair of borrowed decks. Production and music would be briefly sidelined for DJing after Neale left school. With no access to the studio at the end of his school career he honed his skills as a DJ instead, while computer technology developed to a point where he wouldn’t need a studio. By the time the virtual studio software Reason hit the shelves in its first incarnation, he had borrowed a computer from a friend and started making music again.

Being “a bit of a nerd,” he found an immediate affinity for music’s computer age, and in a mere few years went from bedroom producer to Dave Spoon, acclaimed producer and DJ. Even as Spoon it was always a UK “vibe” that would inform his music, as he channeled those early sounds into a contemporary voice. “I don’t really hold back my love for Jungle & DnB” he told Deep House Amsterdam, and though it might be quite imperceptible, it has always been there in his music. As he moved from Dave Spoon to Shadow Child, he accentuated that UK sound in his music, where he would join the likes of Julio Bashmore and Eats Everything on the Dirty Bird roster, bringing a distinctly UK vibe to the label out of San Francisco.

The decision to retire Dave Spoon and become Shadow Child was immediate and a definitive. There are “no plans to use him again,” he told Noiseyin 2013. “I had to break down the boundaries from what I was doing before.” As Shadow Child, Neale essentially embarked on a new musical career from scratch.”To be honest, I wasn’t into what happened to Electro House,” he explained about his decision to move on from Spoon. ”Where it’s gone is to America, becoming the EDM thing. Fantastic and very lucrative if you’re into it as a producer and DJ, but I just couldn’t get into it and didn’t want to play that music, so I had to change it up and here we are!”

It was Eats Everything that paved the way in bringing Shadow Child to the world through the former’s connection with Dirty Bird. Neale already had the seminal track “String Thing” done at that time, “but with no home, or name for it,” he reached out to Eats Everything to facilitate the introduction to Claude Von Stroke’s label. “It’s thanks to (Eats Everything) that the link came with Dirty Bird and now the rest is all history, as they say,” he muses in Deep House Amsterdam.

“String Thing” laid the foundation for Shadow Child to start a new label to frame this new sound, and when he heard Lewis Darvill (Kry Wolf) had similar ideas, he approached his friend with; “why don’t we do something together?”. He told Rinse FM that; ”It took us six months to come up with such a simple name, but a lot of thought and pride’s gone into it.“

That UK vibe that he has been cultivating ever since Dave Spoon was there more than ever in Food Music too. There’s a “distinct UK sound from the midlands” Neale mentioned in several interviews and it can be heard in the prominent bass figures and stoic 4-4 kicks that lay much of the foundation for the label. The label features an extensive discography, with artists like Junior Sanchez, A1 Bassline, Danny Howard and of course Kry Wolf and Shadow Child dotting releases.

Shadow Child’s own “Ooh Tune” and his debut, and only LP, a collaborative effort called “Connected”, have made their own impressions on Food Music, but he’s also made significant contributions on other familiar labels – three releases on Unknown to the Unknown, Ovum Recordings and Super Rhythm Trax came out in 2018 alone.

As a DJ he continues to proliferate the scene, playing paces like London’s Printworks and his Rinse FM show every wednesday between 9-11Pm. “I buy vinyl every couple of weeks,” he explains in Electronic Groove about the show.“ It’s essential for me to keep it all moving and not rely on all the music everyone gets sent by the promo companies every day… I have to keep separate from everything else or it’s always going to be the same.” He’s featured guests like “MK, Detlef and Eats Everything, right through to slightly more alternative artists like Lone, Coco Bryce and Super Flu.” He continues to maintain that balance between the obscure and the familiar as Shadow Child, and with his extensive experience in both fields he is able to move freely between these worlds, without upsetting one over the other.

From Dave Spoon to Shadow Child there’s something abstract that pulses through Simon Neale’s music with an innate ability to attract large audiences. It’s in the simplicity of it, but it’s also in the humbling nature of the man behind the music.  “What I do seems to be striking a nerve at the moment,” he told Deep House Amsterdam in 2017. “So I take all of those positive feelings and comments and pump that back into my creations. Some aren’t musically genius, but they’re effective for sure and that’s what it’s about for me. Humbled to be doing what I do.”

Shadow Child joins G-Ha & Olanskii, Olefonken, Helene Richardt and Broder Ibrahim for Frædag this week.

Album of the Week: B12 – Time Tourist

Mike Golding and Steven Rutter didn’t release many albums as B12 during the height of their career in nineties, but the ones they did had cultivated a certain allure and mystique. They counted the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre as their peers at their label Warp, but some bad business decisions on their part, only amounted to two albums, even though their recorded catalogue at the time would number in the hundreds of unreleased tracks.

Their significantly shy media presence and their reserved output had never seen them rise to the same level of success than their counterparts, but their music lived on, enshrined forever in surreptitious underground lore. Dedicated fans and obscure collectors coveted their minimal output as their music laid dormant, but as that all changed in the last decade, B12 stepped out of obscurity again and embarked on a new phase of their career.

This next phase was spearheaded in most part by the re-issue of their seminal debut, “Electro-Soma” and it’s previously unreleased successor, “Electro-Soma II” on Warp records. While they had released their third LP and their entire anthology o their own B12 records back in 2008, the re-issue had catapulted them into the public conscious again and brought new, much-warranted attention to B12 and their music. For the fans it had validated their obsession, while introducing the group to newer audiences.

While Steven Rutter has steadily been recording music as a solo artist, mostly for his Firecracker recordings imprint, these re-issues have had the rumour mill spinning a yarn that the two are back in the studio together, working on some new, original material together – rumours nobody has been able to validate yet. For the moment, we’ll have to be content with the re-issues.

Around the time of “Electro-Soma”, Warp had offered B12 a record deal with a substantial advance for three records. They didn’t take it, because of some unsubstantiated concerns of a financial burden, and Warp all but cut ties with them. In 1995 however they’re name come up again at the label office and Warp approached them for a sophomore LP, and B12 wouldn’t make the same mistake again and simply jumped at the chance – “Time Tourist” was the result.

Today “Time Tourist” reaches us from some distant past, where it appears to be very much of its time, but not necessarily out of place in our contemporary age. Charming melodic phrases play amongst incandescent harmonic movements coaxed from the familiar sounds of vintage synthesisers and grooveboxes. Even in the 1990’s B12 weren’t necessarily braking any moulds, but they had firmly embraced that second wave of Detroit, and put their distinctive spin on it.

While “Electro Soma” was compiled from B12’s back-catalogue prior to their record deal, “Time Tourist” was an album that was created start-to-finish with the idea of becoming an LP. Science fiction concepts fly untethered to any single thread while the symbiosis between man, machine and music lays the fundamental ground for B12’s sound.

From “Void/Comm” to “Radiophonic Workshop” B12 trace a singular mood through the individual pieces that make up the LP, travelling over crests and through crevices as tension mounts and dissipates over their tracks. Pieces like “Scriptures” and “Gimp” are constructed like songs rather than tracks, with extensive introductions and complex harmonic- and melodic resolutions, and even though they are grounded in that same DIY aesthetic and sonic simplicity of their Detroit counterparts, B12 have always favoured a slightly more evolved and considered musical approach to their arrangements.

“Time Tourist” might be enshrined in its own time capsule, but there’s no reason why this record shouldn’t enjoy the same level of admiration as Kenny Larkin’s “Azimuth” or Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works”. B12 deserve their rightful place amongst these artists, and thanks to the re-issue of “Time Tourist” and “Electro-Soma” they can finally take their place.

In the Moment with DetErGrovt

ngrid K and Daniel Wien are DetErGrovt, an electronic impro music duo created for the stage. Daniel and Ingrid met each other at an impromptu jam session at one of Robin Crafoord’s SYNC sessions and found an innate bond with each other through a shared appreciation of improvised music. Daniel, an electronic music artist and producer, and Ingrid a vocalists with roots in contemporary Jazz in Oslo were thrown together for one event and built DetErGrovt out of the premise of the event’s extemporised nature.

Each DetErGrovt appearance is unique, an improvised performance built from nothing where Daniel Wien coaxes electronic soundscapes from an array of synthesisers, which Ingrid embellishes on with her instrument, her voice. Living between club concept and jazz concept and completely versatile, both on the dance floor and the stage, DetErGrovt have already made a fundamental mark on the Oslo scene while the project is still really in its infancy.

They come to Jæger this weekend for Olle Abstract’s LYD, which gives us an opportunity to find out more about their origins, their creative relationship and the future of DetErGrovt.

Hello Daniel and Ingrid. I’ve read your bio where it says that you came together at Robin Crafoord’s sync and just clicked after that. What was it that encouraged you to start working together after that session?

We met for the first time at the sound check at Sync, grabbed a burger and had a nice chat about life and music. After playing for a few minutes, we both realised we were on to something special, and after the gig we quickly decided to do it again.

Was there a specific moment for either of you where it just all fell into place during that session?

The whole thing, really. Have you ever experienced meeting a new person and thinking “Yes. That’s my friend”? This was one of those times, and it has resulted in a really cool partnership and friendship that we both value.

How does the name DetErGrovt (It’s rough) allude to your working process and sound?

Actually, it was Ingrids instagram name for a long time until Julie and Maja from Girls Club suggested that we’d use it as the name of the project when they came to see us perform. It’s a cool phrase you can hear people use about things that are really good, bad, surprising etc. It’s rough is a nice translation, but “damn dude that’s siiiiiiiick” is a better one hehe.

For people that might not have heard you before how would you describe your sound what you sound like?

It’s definitely in the techy area. The use of live improvised vocals and effects also pushes it in the trippy direction. Our energy and the energy of the dance floor gives each performance an unique flavor, we never know exactly how it’s gonna be until we’re standing there playing, and that gives the music a nerve that you might not usually find at night clubs.

From what I’ve heard and understand is that it’s all based on improvisation, but then you also just told me you are about to have a rehearsal. Is it about improvising around set pieces,or starting every set out from scratch?

We don’t rehearse, but sometimes we meet up and have a jam session. Daniel often builds a set that he can use freely and Ingrid improvises over that. We often finds bits and pieces we like when we listen to our own recordings and if it’s possible we might try to recreate them the next time we play.

How do you affect each other, creatively?

Its an organic process, but sometimes Daniel make a cool baseline or a groove, and Ingrid gets all creative on that. And sometimes we have philosophical discussions that pushes us both in the creative mood. It’s no recipe really, we just go with the flow.

Is it an immediate working relationship that happens in the moment, on stage or do you cultivate it through discussion and playing together?

The stage is where the magic happens!

How would you define your individual roles in the group beyond musical terms?

Daniel makes most of the foundation with beats and grooves, and Ingrid sparkle her fairy dust on it to make it alive. The energy on stage makes it a complete story.

Some of your performances have made it out onto soundcloud, but not as individual tracks.You guys clearly record a lot, so is there any plan to eventually release the material as an EP or a LP?

Yeah, we have some plans ;-)

I saw you play at Sommerøya last year and it was a very tempered, deep set – suitable for the time of day you performed – but how do you see your set going at Jæger?

Well, since it’s all in the moment it depends on the warmup and how much energy it is on the dancefloor, but tribal-techy-flow-electro is what we have as an intention.

Besides this gig at Jæger, what lies beyond the horizon for DetErGrovt?

We both have individual projects besides this, but we really want to get DetErGrovt out on the road in Europe!

It’s Called Friendship with Catz n Dogz

All Photos by: Yonathan Baraki

“It‘s called friendship,” says Grzegorz (Greg) Demiañczuk about Catz ‘n Dogz’ next LP, “because we are really good friends and we trust each other.” He and Wojciech (Voitek) Tarañczuk have an extensive history of working on music together as Catz ‘n Dogz with three albums and several EPs marking their tenure together, but on their next LP, Greg and Voitek believe they’ve hit a new stride in their music.

The first single from the new album, New Love is “one of the best tracks” they’ve ever made according Greg, and the rest of the world concurs. New Love has received a favourable reception already in its first week out, getting playtime on BBC radio, Hype Machine and some deserving love from the music media.

Raspy strings and a stabbing synth imbibe a premature feeling of summer on “New Love,” with Catz ‘n Dogz’ distinctive upbeat melodic nature underpinning the track. It’s a sound that’s evolved considerably from the deep Tech of their first EP  “Armadillo” but still retains that accessible and engaging nature that Greg and Voitek have always maintained across their records. Even in light of their last EP, “The Feelings Factory“ (Dirtybird) Catz ‘n Dogz make a bold leap in the evolution of their music, one that has paid off considerably and has all the markings of a crossover success for the Polish duo.

Greg and Voitek started DJing and making music together back in the nineties in the city of Szczecin, where their relative access to Berlin paved a way to a career in electronic music, that would lead to more than just the music. Today they count a label (Pets Recordings), a talent agency (Feast Artists) and a festival (Wooded) as some of their accomplishments, with their work as producers and DJs the central focus of their creative endeavours.

Today they travel the world as DJs between recording LPs and EPs, and split their time between their hometown, Madrid and Berlin when they are not on the road. They are still putting the finishing touches on their LP and the next single, when I call up Greg at home in Szczecin. We were supposed to talk the previous day, when he and Voitek would be in the studio together, but Voitek is at home with a sinus infection.

…it’s one of the best tracks we’ve ever did. It really shows our inspiration from the time we were growing up and it’s got a lot of positive energy in it.

“You know, the typical DJ illness,” says Greg through what I imagine is a smile on the other end of the telephone line. They are currently working on a track with a “really famous Polish rapper,” his first foray into English. He has just delivered the vocals, but Voitek’s condition has delayed the process a little. “It was a lot of fun doing this track,” says Greg and the rapper whose identity he conceals likes it too. “It’s almost done, we just need work on the arrangement and the quality.”

But New Love is out, the first single from the LP, and there’s been a bit of hype around this already. There was a social media post about this track somewhere, saying that you felt it was the best track you’ve ever done.  Why do you think so?

Actually it is, it’s one of the best tracks we’ve ever did. It’s got this feeling that (we were always trying to put into our music). It really shows our inspiration from the time we were growing up and it’s got a lot of positive energy in it. We are really happy about the track and also the remixes. It looks like everybody likes it too and we didn’t expect it to be such a big hit. It’s one of the last tracks from the album that we did, and I think it contains all the inspirations we were getting when we were working on the album in Spain.

Can you tell me a bit more about the album?

The last time we made an album, we were still working out of our studio in Berlin and the project took us one and a half years, because it was so big. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves and the album came out great, but it was a lot of stress. That’s why we decided to do this album in a shorter period of time.

Voitek moved to Spain almost three years ago and he discovered an amazing place in the mountains. We rented a wooden house and found the acoustics were great.The view from the window, 1300m up in the mountains was amazing. It was perfect. We were surrounded by nature and we didn’t put any pressure on ourselves and that worked out really well.

The album is called friendship, and you and Voitek share long history together in that regard. How did you two meet and what compelled you to work together originally?

We are both from Szczecin, which has a population of about half a million people. It’s very close to the Baltic sea, but also very close to Berlin. That’s why the access to music for us was pretty easy compared to other parts of Poland. It was hard to get the music we liked in the 1980’s when we were young, but we were able to listen to the radio from Berlin and Germany.

Because we were so close to Berlin a lot of DJs would come here for the odd gig so the scene was really good and the clubs were really good and that’s how we met; because the scene wasn’t very big. I saw that Voitek was doing some music and I started doing some music, so we exchanged music. And then a new club opened and we were the residents, and started doing the radio show at the same time.

What was the club called?

Mezzoforte. It was actually pizza place with a basement where we were inviting people like John Tejada, High Fish and some other DJs to come play.

What  sort of music were you being exposed to at that time, the stuff from West Berlin?

Actually, we had a friend who had all the limited editions and unreleased records from the US, because he was exchanging some emails and letters with the shops from Detroit and Chicago.

You know how it is, you get pretty creative when there is not so much stuff around. Now you have to spend a lot of time looking through a lot of records, but at that time you really had to make an effort.

Yes, but the main inspiration came from Berlin, because we were going there once a month with a huge list of records, fighting in the shop, trying to decide who would get the best records.

I remember when we started to play together at the residency, we were flipping a coin to see who would play a record, because sometimes we would only have one copy, because we could only afford one copy.

Do you think that effortless connection from playing back to back made it quite easy to start making music together?

No it was not. We were playing back to back, but also Voitek was playing harder and I was playing deeper. Through the years from playing back to back we started mixing our styles. Our heroes were DJs like Laurent Garnier, who was also collecting different styles of music. When we played longer, we were able to connect our styles.

We always wanted to do some music, because I was always into the hardware and software and discovering new sounds, and Voitek was always very manual.

Somehow our connection was really good. Through the years we discovered how to work together and right now it’s amazing.

Even when we buy records, we don’t buy the same records; a similar style but a little different. When we meet in the club we’ll play some stuff the other one doesn’t know.

Each of you brings a little of your own individuality to Catz ‘n Dogz to make it what it is.

Yes, I think that’s the best, because it’s like a challenge. It’s a bit like competition and we need the energy. To be honest, right now, it’s even more inspiring and more fun. As I said earlier we don’t put any pressure on ourselves today and we can just focus on self development and the music.

I am shocked with the quality of the records we are getting. It’s really hard to say no to some stuff…

That brings me back to the album and what you said earlier about how this album came together. Did you find there was a development or evolution from the last record Basic Colour Theory?

Yes. Basically as an artist you always want to do something new. Before we were doing music with a basic idea without thinking about the sound or the arrangement, but right now when we work together it feels like we have more experience through all the years of working together.

I also want to ask you about the larger Catz ‘n Dogz empire, which includes Pets Recordings (the label), Feast Artists (the agency) and the Wooded festival. Why have so many fingers in all these pies at the same time?

Because we don’t like to have any free time. (Laughs) Sometimes it’s too much though. For example this year we’ve decided not to do the Wooded festival because we have the album tour.

It was always our dream to do the label. That was always a lot of fun for us; discovering new people, because we still like to dig. The label is doing really well and we have a lot of new releases for this year.

Marysia is our manager and she also runs Feast artists with Marta who’s also helping us with the label. We’ve known them a long time, and they are good friends and we have a really good vibe working together. It’s all about friendship.

The label is quite versatile with people like Richie Hawtin, Ejeca and Matthew Jonson all on that one label. What do you look for in artists you want to sign for Pets recordings.

Right now we are quite full. To be honest I am shocked with the quality of the records we are getting. It’s really hard to say no to some stuff, but we have to because we don’t want to release that much.

When is the Catz ‘n Dogz album coming out?

It’s actually coming out on the Brexit date. (Laughs) We only discovered it yesterday.

You’ve played at Jæger a lot –  I think you’ve played every year for the last three years.

Yes, it’s so much fun. It’s a really great club with a great sound system, and we love to come to places like Jæger and play once a year because then we go and we really know what to expect and you can really focus on the music. When you go to a new club you never know what the people are going to be like and how the sound is going to be, so the first hour is a test.

And what are your expectations at Jæger?

We can experiment more and we can play more underground, because the sound is really good. We can play some stuff with bass and test our own new productions because of the sound. We’ll play some edits and some unreleased stuff.

So we might get a sneak peak at some of the upcoming album?

Definitely and some singles.

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.

Album of the week: Prins Thomas – The movement of the free spirit

In 1993 Joakim Haugland established a label with a very specific DIY philosophy based on a  very specific community of Norwegian artists in his hometown, Flekkfjørd. The name Smalltown Supersound, had little bearing on the actual premise of the records and tapes coming out of the small collective – “There was obviously no supersound in our small town” – but some 25 years into the future, Smalltown Supersound has certainly cultivated a Supersound out of its ranks; a sound that has gone on to define Norwegian music beyond its borders.

With an intimate, but expanding artist roster, which today still counts no more than 15 artists, Smalltown Supersound lives by its eponymous ethos. It’s all about a supersound out of small town. That small town was eventually engorged by Oslo and the artists like Kelly Lee Owens and Neneh Cherry have given the label a multinational presence, but the approach has changed little.

Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, Bjørn Torske, Jaga Jazzist, Mongolian Jetset; Biosphere and Mental Overdrive have made IMPRESSIVE contributions to the label in its 25 years. Consider Lindstrøm where I go you go too; Bjørn Torske’s Trøbbel, Todd Terje’s The Arps or Annie’s Don’t Stop and it frames a label that has not only perpetuated the “Norwegian Sound” but has placed it on the forefront of popular music in many respects.

Dotting the discography throughout the label’s extensive existence, the mix CD and compilation have played an integral role in compartmentalising this sound, through the vast cosmic reach of the label’s “sound.” From Noise, Jazz, Electronica or Pop, Smalltown Supersound has very few defining characteristics to the music that makes it out on the label, but somehow there’s that red thread coursing through it all, which the mix CDs and compilations always framed in the context of each other in many of those “ahhhh’ moments on the label.

The trippy dub eccentricities of Mungolian Jet Set; the brooding electronica of André Bratten; the noisy exhortations of Deathprod; and more recently the sweet tranquility of Neneh Cherry, all live side by side and together across the Smalltown Supersound. So what better way to celebrate twenty five years of the label with just such a compilation, an all-encompassing document of the last twenty five years as exemplification of that red thread.

There is only one DJ on the roster that could ever frame this correctly, and label head Joakim Haugland knew it. “For me it was obvious that (Prins) Thomas should make the Smalltown Supersound mix” says Hauguland in the liner notes for the record. Prins Thomas in return provided a super mix that in no uncertain terms simply captures “The movement of the free spirit” and in it, that elusive red thread of Smalltown Supersound. “Most of the time I am probably the only one that sees it,” ponders Haugland, but “now Thomas has found the spiritual unity.”

Thomas captured that spiritual unity across an incredible 80 tracks that goes from the extemporised noise of the label’s furthest leftfield reaches to those familiar favourites – although those are often featured in some or other remix form of the original. Needless to say there are a few exclusive remixes too, but the individual tracks pale in comparison in the grander context of the mix as they come together through the expert hands of Prins Thomas.

This vast and expansive mix sums up the dexterity of the label in quantity, but it’s Prins Thomas that brings the mood and that spirit across through his selection and his assemblage of that selection. There are no obvious highlights and to review the individual tracks will be a futile endeavour, because the execution of the mix brings them together as one singular artistic statement.

If ever there was a case for DJing as an artistic expression this would be it and the only regret is that we picked up the vinyl version, which only has the first part of this mix available through a clumsy double LP format, which interrupts the flow of the mix – A few exclusives on a double LP with the mix in is entirety as download, would have been a much more rewarding format for the listener.

The movement of the free spirit is a great testament to the ethos of Smalltown Supersound and Prins Thomas’ interpretation of that spirit and sound will undoubtedly make its own incredible impression on the discography. “The Movement of the free sprit” will undoubtedly make its own impression on the Smalltown Supersound catalogue, a classic in its own right.

A moment with Black Motion

Thabo Mabogwane & Bongani Mohosana have been making music together as Black Motion for the best part of the last decade. Coming through the ranks of South Africa’s vibrant House music scene, the pair count Culoe de Song and Black Coffee as their counterparts, but together they’ve established a sound in the South African House dialect all their own.

Black Motion’s sound is built on the foundations of the drum, with rhythms structured around native musical languages informed by rich cultural heritage of South Africa, but executed in the familiar style of House music. “We’ve never wanted to make house music,” they told Billboard magazine in a 2017 interview, “we’ve only ever wanted to make South African house music.” With rhythmical arrangements closer to Kwaito than House music, and diasporic influences from the wider canon of contemporary music informing their work, they’ve made a severe mark in South Africa’s music scene, signing as a joint venture artist to Sony and playing to stadium audiences back home.

Black Motion are a prolific musical duo, making their debut with the LP, “Talking to the Drums” and releasing an album every three years up until the present to their latest LP, “Moya Wa Taolo”. Lacing an intricate and deep narrative through their work, each album progresses from the last, both conceptually and musically and they trace a fluid line through South Africa’s cultural diversity. They’ve kept South African audiences entertained with their LPs and hybrid live shows for the best part of decade, and now that they’ve “hit” what they considered “the roof” of popularity at home, the next phase of their career is to export it to the wider world.

After establishing Black Motion as one of the highlights of the South African House scene, they’ve striked out on the international scene in recent years and again all on their own terms through their unique take on the live-DJ experience, perpetuating the Black Motion sound and energy.. We bared witness to their awe-inspiring craft on stage during their recent foray into the northern hemisphere, which found them playing at Jæger and in a brief moment we also found an opportunity to sequester Thabo and Bongani backstage between soundcheck and their show for a Q&A session.

“You are born into House music. There’s nobody that comes from the hood that doesn’t understand House music. Your daily life is House music and that’s why we incorporated it into our lives. “

How did you guys meet?

Thabo Mabogwane: We met in Soshanguve, in the hood where we are both from, through a guy called Moses. We were producing individually, and through Moses we linked up and formed Black Motion. This was 2010.

Moses, was he also involved in the House scene at the time?

Bongani Mohosana: No he’s just a guy who likes music and collecting music. He had some of my stuff and some of Thabo’s stuff and he decided he had to put us together. And I’ll say he’s the founder of Black Motion, because he invested in a lot of up and coming artists. He bought us our first equipment.

Soshanguve was there at the centre of the House explosion in South Africa in the nineties reaching up all the way to Polokwane. 

Thabo: O yeah, proper.

Were you aware of what was happening around you at the time in terms of House music?

Thabo: Yes, as soon as you are born into Soshanguve, it became culture, House music became tradition. You are born into House music. There’s nobody that comes from the hood that doesn’t understand House music. Your daily life is House music and that’s why we incorporated it into our lives.

Bongani: House music is also a little bit of our clan. We’re from the same clan, even though we might have different surnames. It’s a part of our roots, because we would play drums when we wanted to celebrate something.

Thabo: Or call the rain and when we want to heal somebody traditionally, we always want to communicate it with the drums. So, what better way than taking our culture and fusing it into House music. We started out with drumming and producing our own tracks and doing what we do in the studio on the stage. That’s the whole movement, that’s how it started.

I’ve read in past interviews that the drum is an important element to your music. So it is something that has been informed by the traditions of your clan?

Thabo: Yes, it’s always tradition, especially in our clan. We are descended from the clan of the rain queen, Queen Modjadji. The source of all communication, the most important part of our culture are the drums. Everything we do, we do with drums. Whether it’s the healing or an initiation… anything that’s cause for celebration. The drums are the key to everything and that’s why we incorporated it in our music. When we’re on stage and we’re playing the drums we think it touches people…

Bongani: Spiritually.

When you were listening to House music growing up, how much of it was from the States and Europe and how much was homegrown?

Bongani:  We were listening to everything. Music is music. When you check our phones today, it goes deep. Deep African music but also European music. We play those traditional sounds from other countries so we can learn where the music comes from.

Thabo: In the nineties we had a lot of music that taught us a lot about House music. I think it was around the eighties when vinyl started coming in from people like Frankie Knuckles and  a whole lot of artists from the US, especially Chicago – they opened up the scene in South Africa. Every day there were a whole lot of tracks that we would hear from vinyl. So I would say Chicago House influenced House in South Africa. Because we were not that privileged back in the day of owning a computer, we just relied on the music from overseas.

Bongani: And compilations.

Thabo: That’s how it circulated.

I’ve read that your philosophy is about exporting the Black Motion, and in extension the South African sound to the wider world.

Thabo: Yes, accommodate everyone.

How does the reception compare when you play in Europe and the States to back home in South Africa?

Bongani: It’s different, but for us it’s a fresh start to get to see people who connect through us through music even though they might not know us. They give you that 100% attention and for us it’s overwhelming. We feel that in South Africa we’ve hit the roof, so for us being here and travelling all over the world, we’re learning.

What is your connection with other House artists in the region like Black Coffee and Culoe de Song, do you feel you are part of a bigger scene there today?

Thabo: Yes, there’s always an involvement with whatever we try and do, especially with Afro House, the kind of House that we do and push. There are always a whole lot of collaborations with other artists and we have done a few tracks with Black Coffee in the past too. In December we did a surprise concert with him. So that’s where the link comes in.

Bongani: There’s usually a three year gap between our releases, because we dedicate a full year to other musicians. We collaborate with other artists and perhaps work on other projects with them and after that we’ll focus on our own album.

“We have to sit down first and tell each other stories and that’s where the song will come about, it’s a spiritual connection.”

Have you seen House music in South Africa evolve a lot with so much focus from the outside world looking in today through social media and the internet?

Thabo: Yes, it’s grown a lot, but in different genres too, I think. Sometimes the popping of the Internet can lead to a whole lot of pressures too. The internet is a buzz, it’s a moment, so there’s a whole lot of artists in South Africa that are only Internet based.

Bongani: They appear to be proper…

But then it’s just hype.

Thabo: Yes, but there are some real artists that are really making it big without the Internet

I believe there is some narrative that follows your music across albums (at least through Talking to the Drums to Ya Badimo) and that the “musical journey also mirrored that progress.” Can you tell us a little more about these themes?

Thabo: With the first album, “Talking to the Drums” it’s the first initiation of becoming a traditional healer. The first step is communicating through the drums which is opening the channel. The second album was entitled “Aquarian Drums”. This is the second step of becoming a traditional healer. You go underwater for six months, hence the title. The third one was “Fortune Teller”. This is where you are able to tell others what you’ve heard under the water. “Ya Badimo” was the step where we give thanks, like a thanksgiving ritual. “Ya Badimo” is the ancestors and we gather round to say thank you and give thanks to the journey. And now we’re at Moya Ya Taola, which is the spirit of the bones.

Yes, I was going to ask you where Moya Ya Taola fit into this narrative, because I’ve only heard the story up until Ya Badimo.

Thabo: That’s imbedi. This is the point where we’re going to tell you about the music. It’s a reference (to traditional healers) as they would throw the bones and tell you where to go. So, our bones is our music and we just throw it on the floor.

Bongani: It’s like we are giving the people what we learnt.

Is that why that album features the most collaborations, because you’re giving something back?

Thabo: Yes exactly, and if you check you see it is made up of people that are not popular in South Africa or that well known. We want to give people a chance. We only want to take people that don’t know the industry and give them a platform.

Bongani: And some of the (collaborations) are people that we were in the studio with three years ago. We take our time, we don’t just jump in and record. With our collaborations we don’t believe in image. We have to sit down first and tell each other stories and that’s where the song will come about, it’s a spiritual connection.

How do you come across these artists?

Thabo: In most cases they are people that approach us, and we can usually sense if they are serious. Other times it’s people that come via recommendations from people we know.

What do you look for in an artist for these collaborations?

Together: Originality.

Bongani: The artist needs to be themselves.

Thabo: And not try and impress.

Bongani: We’re not VIP guys, we’re very accessible. We like to be around people. We learned to listen to other people’s stories and that’s where we get our answers.

*Frædag returns this week with B.Traits

Album of the Week: Fredfades & Jawn Rice – Jacuzzi Boyz

The Mutual Intentions crew are back, and they’ve brought a little summer to Oslo this winter. Whether they are evoking the sounds of golden era Hip Hop; making Deep House for dusty fingers; or simply playing rare disco and boogie 7 inches from the booth, it’s hard to pin down the Mutual Intentions sound to anything other than a feeling or a mood. On the latest offering, Frefades and Jawn Rice have conjured a specific feeling again, and it hits you like a cooling “summer breeze” on a muggy July evening.

Fredfades and Jawn Rice have combined forces on Jacuzzi Boyz, the latest record from the Mutual Intentions camp and released via their own label. After the lush humidity of Fredfades’ “Warmth” and Jawn Rice’s tempered House on “Highlights”, the pair find a captivating middle ground on Jacuzzi Boyz. Combining Fredfades’ 90’s era sampling techniques with Jawn Rice’s rich House arrangements, Jacuzzi Boyz is a record that emphasises each producer’s strengths in a mutualistic symbioses.

“It isn’t Easy” hit the ground running for the latent LP, as one of the most exciting tracks to come out of Norway last year. Combining deep sonorous chords with funk-induced bass lines and jacking beats, Fred and Jawn have cultivated a sound that speaks to a more versatile era of House music. When they especially turn up the funk on tracks like “Bright Tomorrow” and “Mutual Love” through snappy synthesisers the entire record starts to burble with energy as it makes a beeline for the dance floor.

As ever, and something that’s very persistent in all Mutual Intentions endeavours, is that sense of nostalgia where you’re lost in some intangible memory that floats between surreal reverie and reality. Fredfades and Jawn Rice transport you to an exotic world on the fringes of the familiar where Rhodes keys eddy between languid progressions across nine tracks. Guest appearances from established artists like Tom Noble and Lucid Paradise offer some dynamic variation across the record, while maintaining that signature sound, the duo has cultivated on this record.

It might be the first time Jawn Rice and Fredfades have worked together on a record this closely, but the collaboration shows an instinctive creative partnership that is more than just the sum of their individual parts. They’ve clearly been simmering in this sound together for some time, refining their strengths together on a record that will live beyond its own declinations and certainly win over a few more fans to the Mutual Intention scamp. Jacuzzi Boyz strikes a particular chord with the listener, one that lingers on a mood long after the record runs itself out.

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

The cut with Filter Musikk

The collective post-new-year hangover stings just a little bit harder and longer in Scandinavia. Short days and bitter temperatures plummet the soul to the depths of despair where pessimism and melancholy create miasmic web of hopelessness entanglement. Abandoned on the gloomy moors of resigned wretchedness, our only companion is the empty wail of silence that gapes in ugly contorted disconnected shapes from the fog, but hardly makes a sound, gnawing at our eternal discomfort. Serenity now! Our only salvation is music and in Oslo there is only one man and place that can save us from this desolate wall of silence. Roland Lifjell and Filter Musikk is to the rescue with a new year and a new box of records.

While the entire industry is still incapacitated from the festivities, writhing on the floor, looking to reassemble any semblance of a record, Filter Musikk has already unpacked the first batch nothingness, but Roland Lifjell has got just what we need to get through this trying annual period. Records with no “official” release date or in some cases no official release title, live beyond such trivialities whenever the arrive at Filter Musikk. They take on a timeless quality maturing with age as they continue the lineage of electronic music through the format that started it all… vinyl. A record encased in the physical format at these prices are not things that encourage the throw-away culture of digital consumerism.

“Vinyl import continues at a steady pace” this year says Roland Lifjell and he guarantees that 2019 will also “be a fine musical year.” That remains to be seen Roland, but in the first shipment of the year he sets yet another uncompromising tone and it’s hard to argue with the music. With Roland’s expert help, we sift through these records in an effort to find just what kind of music will take us forward through this year. Broken Beats and a tougher sound all round looks set to continue to dominate the releases, but it will undoubtedly be an eclectic musical year ahead judging from these releases.

Aleksi Perälä – Sunshine EP (Djak-Up-Bitch (DUB)) 12”  

Finish producer Aleksi Perälä first caught the attention of the world through a couple of releases on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex imprint, a suitable home for his expressive electronic sound that loiters in the melodic depths of genres like IDM and Electro. Bold percussive arrangements and visceral arrangements have marked his fooray in electronic music with prolific effort. His releases (not counting EPs or singles) count into the twenties since 2007 mostly on his eponymous AP label.  

The Sunshine EP, which is more like a mini-album, is the most recent, coming off the back of several releases in 2018, including the 2018 LP of the same name. The tracks on the EP are a mastercraft in sound design and production, and even though somehow everything is louder than everything else, there is a natural balance between the parts. Perälä’s percussive treatment dominates tracks with kick drums, irrelevantly pile driving their way through the centre of vast electronic textures, disturbing the surface of the tracks only for a moment, before they resume their natural state, like a footprint in wet sand.

It’s in Perälä’s playful dichotomy between the severe beat arrangements and beatific melodic parts where the music thrives and engages with the listener. The dark timbral quality of those kicks is counterpointed by melodic textures like fairy dust, neutralizing the functionality for something cognitive.

Unknown Artist – Unknown (EEE 004) 12″

You’ve got to love a whitelabel. A simple pencil etching on the inner disc is the only clue to what lies concealed on the grooves of this record. A vocal sample from Madonna’s back catalogue is prominently featured, and naturally for fear of litigation the artist has very wisely chosen to conceal his or her identity.

The curious choice of this particular vocal sample suggest a younger artist though, but the vocal sample apart, it’s actually what lies behind it that made our ears prick up. A deep, rolling bassline modulates like a tsunami through the vacuous space with a sparse percussive ensemble tweaking around the edges. Once you’ve heard the first sixteen bars of this record there’s very little left to be discovered, but it will make a great DJ tool for anybody with a penchant for turn-of the-millenium-madonna. (not sure how it’s still on youtube)

Various – Panorama Bar 07 Part I (Ostgut Ton) 12″

Taken from the latest Panorama Bar mix with nd_baumecker at the helm, this is the first of two EPs with exclusive tracks for the mix. While the second is surely going to be the favourite amongst fans, featuring House darling Ross from Friends, Dave Aju and Duplex, with three deep, expressive House tracks, it’s first EP that caught our attention… uhm well, first.

Specifically, it was Falty DL’s broken beat House contribution that first catches the ear. The airy familiar vocal sample used across nineties rave tracks and the horn synth repeating that familiar yet distant memory of a melody stored way back in the banks of the mind, sets an evocative mood of the past. Accentuated with the pads that weave their way through the arrangement and in the end, there’s a dream-like quality to the track that carries on through the rest of the EP.

Nd_baumecker is known for sets that  proffer a little more than the functional. Never one to shy away from a pop reference or an uplifting melody, the music he selects wanders far across the musical spectrum and on this particular collection of tracks he selects three tracks that set a very salacious tone. Jinjé and Glenn Ludd expound on the Falty DL track with elements of House, Techno, Trance and Disco coming together in very much the same way Baumecker’s sets come together. The three tracks are taken from different points on the recorded mix, but hey work well together on this EP.

Various – Eel Behaviour: Moray (Earwiggle) – 12″

It’s only the second in a series of compilations from Earwiggle, but truth be told we’re a little bit late on this one, because since this came out at the end of November, the label has already released three more editions! While the “Eel Behavior” series is already on “Onejaw” we’ve had to remain content with “Mooray” – better late than never.

This uncompromising electro compilation bears a sharp-toothed grin like the aquatic serpent from the title. Umwelt, The Advent & Zein, Replicants and Galaxian all contribute to the compilation with demanding uptempo Electro cuts. Umwelt and The Advent & Zein set a dystopian tone with darker, lysergic movements around skipping Electro beats, while Galaxian and the Replicants offer a more retro approach to the Electro genre with beat arrangements closer to the Hip-Hop origins of the genre and melodic expressions lifted from eight-bit video games, played through eighties synthesisers.

999999999 – Rave Reworks (NineTimesNine) 12

This is a repress, in fact the entire record is something of a repress. Hoovers and glassy staccato synth stabs take us back to the ninety nineties rave culture through this release.

The Italian duo 999999999 update the antiquated sound with a focus on atmosphere and the tonal percussion in true Techno fashion in its earliest traditions. It is a kind of Techno that started seeping into dance floors in 2018 and looks set to dominate Techno dance floors for the year ahead. Happy new year from the Cut with Filter Musikk!

The lost art of the warm-up DJ with Davidow

It’s an early Monday evening in the lounge upstairs in Jæger and Davidow (Brokesteady and Mandagsklubben) has already had his first request. One of a trio of girls from the suburbs, on their way to a Shania Twain concert, has asked for a prelude from the country songstress, but her slurring appeal goes unanswered. She eyeballs the DJ from under a furrowed brow, but the seasoned DJ merely smiles back, in response to her icy scowl. “She annoys me a little bit” he says through a smile, his words barely piercing the frequencies from the DJ booth speakers. It leaves little impression on him as he carries on serving up a selection of funky house-edits that billow around the edges of the rhythm section.

The tables are dotted sporadically with people and beer glasses, but the dance floor is still empty as patrons settle into the evening ahead. Cerron’s disco classic “Supernature” comes on and feet start to twitch under tables as Chi-Chi Favelas’ voice shrieks about an ominous chemical future. Dystopian lyrical themes contradict an upbeat Disco progression, bridging a gap between the mind and body that will take Davidow into the next phase of his set. The eccentricities start to fall away to make room for the stripped back pulse of an incipient dance floor.

The practise of an opening DJ is becoming something of a lost art in the world today. The subtleties of that first musical contact with an audience and establishing the mood of the night ahead eludes us in an age where immediacy and the idea of a DJ as an artist has dominated the booth. For most DJs coming through the ranks today and for the next generation making their mark, concepts like Boiler Room and Soundcloud have set an unusual standard. With little to no introduction and the DJ-producer honorary in full effect, the DJ is no longer a facilitator, but rather more like an artist. There needs to be some rather inconsequential cohesiveness to the DJ’s set, establishing a sonic identity that has some fundamental relationship to said artist’s recorded works and its effects need to be immediate.

Completely disconnected from the reality of the dance floor (even during the Boiler Room sets you are usually facing a camera and not the audience), the DJ’s role no longer accommodates the club environment, and the set becomes an extension of the DJ’s artistic expression rather than facilitating what’s happening on the dance floor. For a DJ like Davidow, this style of Djing is doing little more than indulging an ego, and when he steps in the booth on a Monday night at 11:00 pm there is no room for an ego without a dance floor.

“It’s important to make people dance,” he says extending his voice over a downtempo Tech-House track, “more important than playing my own selection.” He digs for a longer track through his USB stick, with playlists and track listings extending into the infinite space of his thumb drive. A primal rhythmic track starts snaking its way through the preceding outro with a melody floating through the spaces between the beats coaxed from a quirky panpipe. He selects the extensive track to accommodate room for a conversation rather than the short bursts of questions and answers we’ve been throwing back and forth between the mixes.

“It’s all about positive energies,” he says. “It sends out a good vibe when you step into a place and see two people dancing” and that is what he tries to recreate every Monday through his sets. Contextually that can change with the seasons, making each Mandagsklubben very different from the last.  Whenever Davidow takes to the booth for Mandagsklubben, he will always “check for moods.” For example: “There was a time when there were a lot of people dating on Mondays,” and Davidow soon realised that certain style of “Techno and dating can make a vibe.” He would play “Techno with a little touch of darkness” during that time and it always seemed to work in coaxing budding young lovers onto the dance floor.

But it’s not just about a genre or sound, and Davidow has to juggle many external factors in accommodating the early hours of Mandagsklubben, but two things that remain consistent through his sets are that “it usually starts very slow” and there’s an underlying rhythm that connects all the tracks. In the early sets I like to mix different genres and moods, but I try to let the rhythm be the guideline,” he explains. Rhythm “is the key” to his sets and even when he floats between genres and styles there is a very tangible link through the rhythms of his set.

The panpipe tracks stops abruptly while we talk, ten minutes passing by in the space of a few, belying the languid progression of the song, but Davidow is quick with the next track, picking up the pace of the set as a steady 4-4 beat comes into focus. He says he’s “stopped preparing” for Monday nights at Jæger and just brings everything he has on USB sticks. How does he know which way the night might go musically? “It’s hard to say how, or what I take into consideration,” he replies. “It’s usually what I find the day before I play. He’s “still learning every night” he explains and can never predict which way a night might go. The “positive thing about having your music digitally” for Davidow is that he can often go back ”through playlist seven or eight years back to see what I played on a Monday in November.” He finds it “interesting to find gold now what you thought was shit back then.”

DJing is in a constant state of flux and evolution for Davidow. “Because people change and DJs change, especially myself going through so many different steps in my life,” Davidow perhaps finds himself more adept in the context of the warm up set today more than ever before. Is it experience that makes for a better warm-up DJ?

Back in the beginning when Mandagsklubben was “very much a party concept,” it was “very hard in the beginning and all of us were partying very hard,” says Davidow. Since then they’ve moved the concept from Visk & Vilt to Jæger, and Davidow has become a family man with two kids and a career towards law. Naturally his priorities changed and they “don’t have an after-party every Monday anymore,“ he says with a laugh. “It’s been a long journey” he says, and although he does “miss playing the late hours, there’s no room for that anymore in this period of me life,” he insists. He seems very content in playing the opening hours and setting the stage for his Mandagsklubben compatriots, Jeff Niels and André Bravo.

On this particular night Niels’ absence means he has to pitch it up for André Bravo, who is ready to take the night into the next phase in true uncompromising Bravo- bravado. André pulls down the volume faders and pitches up the tempo and Mandagsklubben sets into overdrive as more dancers join the splattering of bodies on the tight dance floor upstairs congressing under the swirl of light from the mirrorball up above.  A few people still linger around tables in a state of flux, between dancing and standing but Davidow’s work here is done… at least for tonight.

 

*Davidow plays every Monday at Mandagsklubben with Andre Bravo and Jeff Niels as Brokesteady.

 

Album of the Week: Studio Barnhus Volym 1

Since 2010 the Stockholm-based label Studio Barnhus has pursued a very indefinable and eccentric approach to music. Off-kilter House and weirdo pop electronica unites the releases across their discography with label heads, Kornél Kovács, Petter Nordkvist and Axel Boman contributing regularly to the label. Releases from the likes of Baba Stiltz, Matt Karmil and Art Alfie have redefined the Swedish dance floor and beyond, bridging that extensive gap between serious club music and unequivocal guilty pleasures.

Unifying electronic beats with popular musical forms, the artists and label are an unconventional anomaly; non-conformists as a result of conforming to all the norms. There are no musical taboos in Studio Barnhus’ lexicon and the music the label proliferates avoids the pretentious and embraces instant gratification in the context of club music. This first compilation puts this into perspective with a selection of music across the label catalogue that frames these ideas in the broad scope that defines the label.

Label heads Axel Boman and Petter Nordkvist set a serene mood on the opening track as Man Tear, which floats somewhere between the composed vocal serenading of Portable wrapped in the icy sonorities of the Scandinavian electronic dialect. The track sets a tone for the rest of the compilation where a vocal phrase is never to far away and electronic textures are stretched across vast empty spaces. There’s a diverse palette to this record that really showcases the breadth of the Studio Barnhus roster.

From the haunting shoegaze House of Off the Meds to the Kornél Kovács dance floor romper “On Roofs”. Familiar names like DJ Koze, Baba Stiltz, and John Talabot naturally leave their mark on this record, but it’s the newcomers like Bella Boo and the aforementioned Off the Meds that provide a welcomed counterpoint to the dance floor. There’s something odd and eccentric about the record, but it doesn’t alienate or provoke, but rather entices.

Skewed pop references combined with mystical electronics, provide a very interesting listening experience through the course of the record and not only does it contextualise the Studio Barnhus sound, it also hints at where the label will be heading to next.

 

Season’s Greetings

The winter solstice is upon us. Outside my window I spot a glimpse of Jæger’s backyard (Bakgård). A thin film of pure white snow coats the brown terracotta tiles, burying invisible footprints beneath the cold. It was only a few months ago that we were still scurrying about outside with reckless abandon to the sounds of DJs and artists from all across the world. Those incorrigible among us still brave the weather every Saturday to the tune of guilty pleasures selected by MC Kaman, but for the most of us, we’ve staked our claim down in the cozy enclave of the basement. The year is not over; a christmas, a festival and a new year’s party, still awaits, and for a fair few of us, the year never really ends. It’s an immutable loop with no end, no beginning, just the same procedure as every year… James.

In a couple of weeks Jæger hosts the first event of the next year with the same kind of fervour that follows us through each and every week, but should auld acquaintances be forgot, for the sake of a new year, the next month or simply a new day. Can we just take moment to reflect on the year it’s been for Jæger, Oslo’s DJ community, the music and the culture.

Has it been almost year again since Moritz von Oswald and Tony Humphries graced us with their presence? Two legendary figures from the opposite ends of the world, from different musical origins in the same booth in the space of a month. The Disco and House goliath, Tony Humphries represents the legacy of those genres, which Nicky Siano would put into perspective later in the year with Hallelujah Disco; a narrative through the history of Disco and House music from another monolith of the scene. 2018 however, would prove to be Techno’s year, with Moritz von Oswald setting the tone for the year ahead dotted with acts like Octave One, Carl Craig, Dr. Rubinstein, Shed and Ben Sims. Roland Lifjell and Filter Musikk facilitated a few of these Techno-centric events and in some of the truly special occasions the man behind the counter and the records, Roland Lifjell would grace us with a set.

Techno was harder, faster and more tenacious than it’s ever been in 2018. Bold, intrepid beat arrangements and aggressive, DIY textures conjured from despotic machines streamed out of Berlin and into every club around the world, and even we had to submit to its power. Silent Servant, Regis, Reeko and Tommy Four Seven were the DJ ambassadors of this sound, while Aurora Halal, Octave One and Bjarki left their artistic impressions on us in the form of their live sets, but none rattled the cage and ruffled the feathers quite like The Mover, when he stopped by for the newly launched Gatavisa showcase back in September. It was a sound that captured the dissent and the anger in a world dominated by populist politics.

Yes we had our fair share of trying times in 2018 as policy makers spread their cancerous rhetoric through much of Europe and the rest of the world. It was the year of Trump and Brexit and even club culture fell victim to the populist nationalism that informed these news fixtures in 2018. Our neighbours, Blå were the victim of a terrorist attack executed by an individual under the influence of a populist ideology, while our friends in Georgia, Bassiani faced a government crackdown, the likes of which they haven’t seen since the soviet era. The latter however lead to one of the most inspiring scenes of solidarity through music that we’ve experienced since the UK passed the criminal Justice act. The “We dance together, we fight together” campaign has seen Bassiani resume operations in 2018 and as similar protests pop up around Europe in France and Hungary, the hope is alive that we can stem the tide of nationalist populism sweeping over Europe.

It’s a shame politics has infiltrated club culture like it has in 2018, because in the end it is about the music and leaving these issues at the door, the indulgent escapism of a moment and a music shared amongst a group of strangers. While guests have frequented us, it’s the residencies that have remained the constant bridge between music and community. They are the glue that holds us together. The theatrics of Den Gyldne Sprekk and DJ Lekkerman; the deep musical obsession of Øyvind Morken for Untzdag, the community of Det Gode Selskab; the guilty pleasures of Nightflight; the determinism of Brokesteady and Mandagsklubben; the legacy of Daniel Gude and RETRO; the continual motivation of a scene at Ivaylo’s Jæger Mix, and G-Ha & Olanskii’s window to the world in Frædag have remained steadfast in their onerous pursuits week in and week out without fail.

We’ve experienced the entire spectrum of music this year at Jæger from the burgeoning trendsetters like DJ Seinfeld and Ross from friends, to the established veterans like Marco Passarani, Nick Höppner, Mr. Scruff, Francis Harris, Craig Richards and too many more to mention. Finnebassen and Leon Vynehall, honorary Jæger residents have made return visits in 2018 while DELLAs Drivhus, Karima F’s Affirmative Action, Charlotte Bendiks’ IRONI, Vinny Villbass’ Badabing and Prins Thomas have all set up shop across our two floors to offer some needed contrast over a Saturday night.

Our record shelf is almost full with records acquired from Filter Musikk, and music from Hubbabubbaklubb, Sex Judas, and Kuuk have made severe impressions on our playlist. 2018 is also the year we’ve established The Cut with Filter Musikk, our very own singles club, with the records that have been making the rounds on the Oslo circuit. A record from DJ Hell got us into trouble with those authoritarian sensors at facebook, while we’ve discovered a host of new artists like the Burrell Connection, Giant Swan and O/H as well as some classic reissues and new music from the likes of André Bratten, Rulefinn, Fett Burger and Telephones.

The music, both off and on the dance floor had been so diverse this year, and the DJs had been serving up a smorgasbord of music from the three corners of electronic music all year long. The closest we’ve come to a scene had been the dying embers of Lo-Fi, which turned out to just be House music with DJ Seinfeld and Ross from Friends rising to popular heights this year with DJ sets from the former and an album and live show from latter making a formidable impact on the global scene. And yes, we had them were here too.

Thanks to G-Ha & Olanskii’s Frædag we’ve had the world on our doorstep and we’ve been spoiled in Oslo this year as internationally acclaimed DJs became more and more accessible and our little venue, offering the contrast from the large vacuous spaces from the rest of Europe that bring these larger than life DJs and artists back to the roots of it all. An intimate cabin space nestled in the subterranean depths of the city in the bosom of a 10 000 watt Funktion One system can never really compete with the 1 000+ arena venues that are dominating the scene but we’ve happily held our own, and we’ll continue to hold our own through to the end of this winter solstice and beyond…

 

Download nd_baumecker Panorama Bar 7

nd_baumecker releases the much anticipated 7th edition of club’s mix series

Christmas has come early in our office with the release of nd_baumecker’s Panorama Bar mix, on the very same day he’s playing in our basement. After some delay with the release of this mix, it is finally out today.

It’s been four years since the last Panorama bar mix and the Panorama Bar resident since 20014 takes the honours for this edition.  “This composite identity as a selector, collector, club curator and musician feeds heavily into the diversity of Baumecker’s 120-minute vinyl-only mix,” says Ostgut Ton.

Exclusive tracks from Falty DL, Ross from Friends, Jinjé, Gen Ludd, Dave Aju and Duplex joins an eclectic playlist with Mr. Baumecker’s distinctive sound underpinning the selections. It’s “deep, unpredictable, funky, bassline-heavy, melodic, and seamless flowing between different rhythms and key-changes” according to Ostgut Ton, who’ve made the mix available for free download today via their site.

You can download the mix here and catch nd_baumecker in our booth tonight.

Jamie 3:26 postponed

Pål Strangefruit fills in for Jamie 3:26 tonight at Daniel Gude’s RETRO.

As a result of the drone incident in Gatwick, we regret to announce that Jamie3:26 is unable to join us tonight for RETRO. After his flight was cancelled, we scrambled to get the Chicago artist over on a later flight, but were unable to secure a seat for any time today.

We have postponed the booking till next year, where we’ll find a new suitable date for Jamie 3:26, but RETRO will RETRO commences with resident Daniel Gude and special guest, Pål Strangefruit filling in for Jamie 3:26.

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. “

 

The craft of Suzanne Kraft

Diego Herrera is a prodigious musical talent. In the eight years he’s been active as a producer, he’s made seven LP’s as Suzanne Kraft; released an underground dance floor monster EP in 2015 as Dude Energy; has collaborated with the likes of P. Relief and Jonny Nash on various Eps and LPs; and most recently he’s released an LP under the new alias SK U Kno. Did we miss anything? Possibly, Herrera is a very productive artist and his musical reach spreads far and wide, and there is sure to be some projects under pseudonyms or collaborations that have eluded us.

 

 

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Herrera’s name first cropped up on the LA online radio channel, Dublab. He rose through their ranks from intern to programmer and host, while concurrently refining his musical voice as a producer and artist. He got his first real break in the latter after releasing the sleek deep Disco/House “Green Flash” on Running Back. With elements of House, Dub, Disco and Funk coursing through the release, Herrera’s eclectic musical influences made for a unique sonic signature in his work.

He followed it up with EPs on Young Adults, Noise in my Head and Kitjen, expounding on the diversity in his sound with a series of bold dance floor cuts that made severe impressions in record bags. He eventually moved to Europe, Amsterdam to be exact, and took his career into overdrive, where he went from a EP/single artist to an album artist for Jonny Nash’s Melody as Truth label.

The albums, like his EPs favoured a diverse approach, with the serene ambience of a record like “What you get for being young” counterpointing the pop-centric constructions of his debut LP, “Talk from home” in an exquisite balance that showed his variation as an artist, but also defined an attitude in sound. Built around the polarity of vintage synthesizers and organic samples with intuitive rhythms that break with common tropes, Suzanne Kraft is unlike anything you are likely to have heard before.

He transports this to the booth with a digger’s fascination for music that finds him in good company in Amsterdam where people like Antal and Young Marco occupy a very a special place on the DJ circuit. Naturally he’s found a kindred spirit in Øyvind Morken too and as the pair get ready to go back to back this Wednesday in our booth, we took the opportunity to ask the visiting DJ and producer some burning questions.

Untzdag with Suzanne Kraft and Øyvind Morken

Hello Diego. Where are you originally from and how did you get your start in this kind of music?

I was born – and raised in – Los Angeles to a mother and father who have always been supportive and encouraging of any creative endeavour since day 1.

Which came first; DJing or making music?

Making music.

You had your start at dublab in LA. How did you end up there and how do you think it aided your career?

I started at dublab as an intern when I was still in high school, about 16 years old. I was a fan of the station and just wanted to be involved in any way, so I wrote them an email and got a response from Ale (the now station director.) Both frosty (station director since 1999) and Ale were hugely influential on my musical worldview by constantly showing me all sorts of music across all genres. I eventually became a staff member and hosted a weekly radio show for about 4 years – first with SFV Acid and then with Daddy Differently. dublab sort of became both my playground and classroom over the course of roughly 6 years.

I noticed there is a lot of that Berlin Techno sound currently happening in LA. Are there places, parties, or record stores that accommodated the more eclectic approach that you favour in your music and DJ sets?

As far as record stores go Amoeba will always be at the top of my list. The shear size and turnover there has always lead to me finding countless good ones.

Places – nothing compares to driving through and around the city listening to music.

Parties – I’d always prefer a bar or a friend’s house.

You’re obviously not there anymore since you moved to Amsterdam. What encouraged you to move this side of the Atlantic and why exactly the Dutch capital?

Over the course of a few years doing European tours I saw the potential to perhaps make a living off playing shows and DJing if I lived in Europe. I took a gamble and, so far, it’s paid off. I picked Amsterdam because of the concentration of friends who live here.

What are some of the differences between playing for a European audience compared to a US audience?

My experiences playing in Europe greatly outnumber those in the US so I can’t really comment.

There are some obvious differences to your Dude Energy alias and your works as Suzanne Kraft. How do you approach all your musical projects differently?

I don’t have any conscious approach towards working on music. I tend to work on many, disparate sounding things simultaneously and just slap a different name on it when it’s done.

Am I right in thinking that Suzanne Kraft is more focussed on the album format?

You could say that.

Each LP is very different. Do you usually have a thematic framework or concept informing the albums as Suzanne Kraft?

Each record has usually been the result of finding a sound palette or workflow I like. Every record I’ve done on Melody As Truth has been recorded very quickly because of this – usually within a week.

When you talk about a sound palette and workflow, it sounds like each album is usually built up from something like a single synthesiser that informs the other sounds too. Is that the case?

In essence, that’s correct. Although historically it’s been more of a constellation of equipment or a new/different studio to work in. I tend to work on music most days, playing and recording aimlessly until one day I strike upon a string of cohesive ideas that, quickly, start forming something you could call a record.

Your records as Kraft are quite diverse in terms of sound. I imagine like your DJ sets, you’re attracted to diversity in music, but what’s the single thread that ties it altogether for you as an artist?

Probably some kind of internalized emotional narrative. I’ve learned I’m not a very expressive person but – and I do recognize how saccharine and cliché this can read – music does serve as my best outlet of expression.

Do you feel there needs to be a relationship between the music you make and the music you play out?

I think there is certainly an element that is inextricable between the two – an exchange of influence from one to the other in either direction.

You’re last LP was actually a collaboration with Jonny Nash. How do these collaborations filter into your own music?

With Jonny they’ve become inescapable… We’ve been sharing a studio for two years now. But in general I find a good collaboration with anybody to be freeing, insightful and, most importantly, effortless. That record, ‘Passive Aggressive’, is a perfect example – we recorded and mixed it in 4 days.

That was the last LP in 2017 that had your name on it. What will your next recorded project be and sound like?

I’ve got a handful of projects in the oven at the moment some of which might be more experimental things, a 5 year old pop EP and some more straightforward club stuff. Some of it might sound like this:

 

The new stuff LP as SK U sounds amazing. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

The ‘U Kno’ record was a result of working on a bunch of sketches for a couple of live shows I did at the end of last year. I exported all these fragments and track elements to present this sort of mixed collage. No ‘Label’ expressed interest in releasing what they heard at one of the shows and so I re-created the arrangement with some amendments

Why did you create yet another a new alias in this case?

Oh who knows… :) Putting it together felt like a “new chapter,” so I decided to title the chapter.

What music from other artists are currently always with you, and how do you see your night going when you’re with us?

Bruce, Wah Wah Wino, C.A.R., P Relief, SFV Acid, Niagara, General Ludd to name a few.

I’m quite looking forward to the night at Jæger. Øyvind’s a good laugh so I hope to share some good laughs.

 

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!

 

The Cut with Filter Musikk

It is the season to be rated and ranked. Seriously, I thought we were done with this? Ever since Resident Advisor penned that very “sincere” open-letter about stopping their yearly ranking of DJs – right after they had just released a best-of list I might add – I was under the impression that the general consensus had shifted from blatant objective favouritism, to everybody just making up their own mind about what they’ve enjoyed listening to this year. Apparently that’s not the case as Mixmag, DJ Mag and host of others start rolling out their best-of lists for 2018 – from best of DJs to best EPs and mixes. Even those sanctimonious harbingers of cool at the gate of electronic music, Resident Advisor couldn’t help themselves and have already compiled a best-of-albums and a best-of-tracks selected by a group of very eager-to-please elves waiting in their ranks.

But what of all the artists that are still releasing records in 2018; what of the limited pressings of records, baring little more than whitelabel; what of the ones that don’t have a mailing list bombarding the media types with familiar names, labels and tags? How can one piece of music be better than the next anyway when there is no absolute objectivity behind one person’s choice over another? If a DJ was the best DJ in 2018, was s/he a worse DJ in 2017? What about the albums you didn’t hear or the music, that like most music, simply exists without the eternal hype machine plugging it to the media?

Records like those do exist; The whitelabels, the artists and the labels that refuse to pander to the music media and the capitalist systems that tip “objective” favourable scales with a wad of cash. That’s why we and Filter Musikk, started The Cut, to put a spotlight on all this “other” music; the not-good-enough (or more likely not popular-enough) to make it on to the best-of, better-than-the-rest of lists. These are not the best records out of the new releases (sometimes they aren’t even new), but rather the releases where Filter Musikk and Jæger’s tastes converge for that brief moment in a fortnight.

Don’t, for a single moment however think that his is going to be something like the best of the cut of 2018. No, Roland Lifjell is still taking deliveries of new records, the latest in the cutting edge world of electronic club music. In fact, he has just unpacked a fresh batch recently. It’s the last batch of records for the year, but then there’s still tomorrow, because like P.Diddy on a sugar cookie, music “can’t stop won’t stop uh-uh-uhh.” This crimbo edition of the cut with Filter Musikk we’re saving you from the ranked and the rated, the popular and obnoxious to get back to the thing that matters above all else… the music.  

 

Ajukaja – Untitled (Bergerac) 12″

From the vaults of Red Rack’em’s Bergerac label, comes four Deep House cuts from Estonian producer, Ajukaja. There’s always something a off-kilter about Ajukaja’s music and this record doesn’t fail to produce its own quirky, eccentric results. Combining synthesisers, samplers and vocals, Ajukaja doesn’t exceed the parameters of House music persay, but he does offer a view from the side through a pair Bootsy Collins’ formal glasses.

From the treatment of vocals, often pitched down to foreign abstract elements bouncing off the surface of grooving beat concoctions, this record gives us a fresh new alternative take on a genre that has become too comfortable in its own shoes. Testing the boundaries of House music, his approach is unique and foregoes formulaic function for an eerie expressionism.

The sluggish basslines and sedate vocal of the opening track “Mhmhmh” drags its feet through an oozing mire of synthesizers and found sounds. The deep, grumbling vocal crawls out from the depths of a sunken hole, urging you close to the speaker. A reserved down-tempo rhythm indulges the body in subliminal rhythms that groove with a gangster lean. From that opening track to the inventive use of vocoder on “Walk”, and the haunted disco of “Ekleeer”,  Ajukaja’s music hardly confirms to any kind of template.

Dopplereffekt – Athanatos (Leisure System) 12″

There are so many imperceptible layers to Dopplereffekt’s music. From the influence of Kraftwerk on the group, to the scientific themes that course through their work, and all the other mysterious abstract concepts that influence each record, decoding a new Dopplereffekt record is like trying to piece together a 4-D puzzle in minecraft. There’s never a guide, a clue or some red thread to follow, but as you contemplate these themes and more, you’re allowing yourself to be swallowed way down in the rabbit hole of Dopplereffekt to a point where you are completely immersed in their music.

While Gesamtkunstwerk-era Dopplereffekt is still the best example of the group’s work, they’ve hit something of new stride in their relationship with Leisure System since 2013’s “Tetrahymena.” They’ve followed it up with a split release with Objekt and an Ambient electro LP called “Cellular Automata” and now their back with the genetically-themed “Athanatos” for the label.  

Dopplereffekt are at their best in this realm with swinging electronic beats and punchy bass-line workouts like the second, half of this EP. When they move too far too left, with electronic experiments overwhelming the track and not rewarding  the body the results can often fall flat, but luckily they’ve contained that aspect of their DNA to the title track only. “Hayflick Limit” especially harks back to that golden era Dopplereffekt with vocals, bouncing beats and textures evocative of Drexciya’s underwater escapades finding a common ground in their production.

They’ve saved for last though with “Mitosis” which is just classic Dopplereffekt, and “Athanatos” is definitely worth it for that alone.

 

Psyk – Voiceprint Remixes (Non Series) 12″

Manuel Anós’s Psyk gets the remix treatment over on his own label, Non Series with three blistering takes on his “Voiceprint” EP from earlier this year. Tangible functionality is the key to these remixes, as the three remix artists do away with any idiosyncrasies for the sake of the dance floor. Even Peter Van Hoesen, who in his own music usually offers some kind of dynamic partnership between the beats and melodies, foregoes anything that doesn’t work on an immediate level on his interpretation of “Falling”. Neel and Shifted toe the same line with “Night Current” and “Voiceprint” respectively, re-interpreting the originals as autonomous and brazen DJ tools.

 

 

Code 6 – Untitled (Midnight Drive) 12″ reissue

Yet another blast from the past, finally getting a re-issue. When people are all out of new ideas, digging through the archives is sometimes the best solution. It’s that shot in the arm we need to reset, rewind and get back to the original ideas. Code 6 is one of the many Joey Beltram aliases forgotten in time, appearing on three or four releases before completely dissolving by the mid-nineties.

Code 6 was his escape from the hard-edged “hoover sound” of European Techno he helped pioneer in the early nineties where the records shared more in common with the emerging break-beat Detroit sound from artists like Carl Craig. This re-issue of the last of the Code 6 releases captures the current zeitgeist in the UK for the return of the break-beat and a more a melodic approach to the dance floor.

Synth movements hover (not hoover) above the shards of splintered beats, softening the harsh exterior of determined drum machines, with layers of evocative charge. Everything Beltram touches as Code 6 is simply drenched in brilliant layers of harmony and melody that languish in their own reverie as they fill the spaces between the beats. You gotta love a re-issue.

 

 

Laksa – Delicates (Ilian Tape) 12″

Ilian tape are an uncompromising label. They are not a label that indulges a sound as much as an attitude. If you’re looking for something familiar, cosy and easy to play amongst the rest of the conformists, Ilian Tape is not your label; here, there be monsters. Rhythm structures that defy not only convention but physics, brooding electronics and body punching percussion are the order of the day at Ilian tapes and on the particularly trying days, even we have to pass up an Ilian Tapes release, but not this day.

UK artist Laksa makes his second appearance on the label in as many years following up “Camo” with the ironically titled “Delicates”. The title track lures you into a very false sense of security under the misnomer, utilising some breathy synths and sequences, before the second track on the EP, “Madu’s Break” has the record tumbling down a flight of stairs in an ingracious onslaught of broken beats and glitching musical interfaces. It’s a ferocious 6-minute percussive track that moves like an improvised diatribe through a musical vitriol, exploding in a release of tension that has been building up through the preceding track.

There’s a general continuity that flows between the tracks, where one takes up from where the other left off, and after the all-mighty energy of “Madu’s Break”, Laksa tempers his sound for “Dust” before it subsides in “Yogi’s Choice”. It’s rare to find a narrative like this through an EP. Delicates is an intense, deft-defying experience through four tracks that uphold that uncompromising Ilian Tape ethos, but Laksa puts his own stamp on the ideology through gnashing fractured beats, crunchy synthesisers and the omnipotent bass billowing through the production.

 

The Gospel of House Music

Will Bankhead, the unflinching gauge of cool in electronic music and head of Trilogy Tapes recently dispelled some sage advice via his twitter account: “A lot of you experimental music dudes need some gospel house shoved up your arse”. In an age of heads dropped low as deep, indistinguishable Tech-House beats eddie around uniform dance floors – only to stroke the ego of an over zealous coke-head in the booth – Bankhead’s comment hits a salient nerve. Heavy-handed, disenfranchised DJs playing 125 BPM 4-4 kicks at 11:00 at night to an empty dance floor need to re-evaluate their sets and perhaps the best place to start is to return the roots of House music. Gospel choruses and throaty vocal performances exalting syncopated beats from their hallowed vaults contained on wax, is the only appropriate way to communicate the reverend nature of this culture we call House music.

 

 

Think about it… An early morning in the company of your peers, singing and dancing along to music as commanded from a raised pulpit… “It’s like church,” Tony Humphries once famously said“ you know what I mean? Especially on Sunday mornings.” The club is our church, the DJ is our reverend and the music is made to raise the spirits. We’ve subjugated the omnipotent deity and our only absolution is the momentary escape from the realities waiting outside, but the similarities to a place of worship is eerily consistent; but in modern times there has been something important lacking. It’s the music and when music supplants all religion it’s the crucial piece if the puzzle for the club and this has sadly been missing of late. Functional, droning electronic beats marching with drastic precision lack the soul of House music’s origins and it’s time to rewind, turn back the clock and once again make the dance floor our church.

Let’s take it back to its origins and one of the pre-eminent Disco tracks, that even preceded  proto-House to become one of the most legendary dance floor tracks of all time, “stand on the word.” Now that we know the track has absolutely no connection to Larry Levan, other than he might have played it at some point, this track was the precursor to all the vocal House music that came after it. Originally penned by Phyliss McKoy Joubert, a minister out of Crown Heights, New York the song was originally recorded for a compilation LP of Gospel music. It found its way onto the dance floor when Tony Humphries spread the word through his residency at the legendary New Jersey club Zanzibar. After getting his hands on a couple of copies of the record he would extend the breaks and the the tracks eventually became a Zanzibar anthem. “7:30, 8:00 in the morning, you would have an encore or closing song,” Humphries told RBMA. It was so popular that Humphries would eventually remix the track under the new title the Joubert singers where it is still enshrined today and lives on in infamy as the track started it all.

 

 

As Disco morphed into House these origins would play a fundamental role in the emerging new sound of the 1980’s, coming out of New York and Chicago through selectors like Frankie Knuckles – appropriately referred to today as the godfather of House. Unsurprisingly Knuckles had a similar vision of the club as Humphries in that he believed it was “like church… by the time the preacher gets going, the whole room becomes one”. This analogy to the Sunday reverence might in fact be something embedded in the cultural roots of the early facilitators of this music. People like Knuckles and Larry Levan, predominantly black inner city kids, would have undoubtedly been going to church with their parents from an early age and bare witness to the awesome, spirit-elevating might of a choir or an angelic soulstress, as they were wont to do in the US.

It seems unlikely that these, usually gay black or latino kids would find solace in church music, but that connection is confirmed today through countless books and think pieces about this music. Today it’s something that echoes through the whole legacy of House leading up to the present. Go to Horse meat Disco or the NYC Downlow and House music is still perpetuates this balance between thumping 808 beats, mind-bending 303 surges and a vocals belting out soulful exaltations from up high. Whether it is acting on the fringes at club-concepts or at the height of its popularity, Gospel infused House has remains resolute and it offers a human dimension and an inseparable link to the origins of this music. House music and the clubs from which it sprang was the last sanctuary for the persecuted black and gay young men and women, a place where they could be themselves, completely liberated from the conservative views. The music facilitated this feeling through the sounds of Gospel, not as a church-going music but something that offered an escape from the trials and tribulations of growing up gay in the late seventies, early eighties and even nineties in every-day America.

It’s no surprise that the music reflected a proud and determined optimism of Gospel music rather than a sombre dissatisfaction in sound. Uplifting melodies high-energy tempos and spirit-raising lyrics all coalesced in music with a positive message for the oppressed at its core. “Brother and Sisters one day we will be free” sings Joe Smooth in 1989 on “Promised Land” and that message has echoed through House music ever since. Robin S asking in no uncertain terms  “you gotta show me love” from deep beyond her lungs or Ru Paul inviting you into her “House of Love” conveyed a positive message of hope and perseverance for a disenfranchised youth in the familiar Gospel motifs.

 

 

In his book Trance Formation, the academic Robin Sylvan even suggests that the Rave Culture that followed was not merely a counter-cultural revolution, but rather a “significant religious phenomenon”. And this makes absolute sense… doesn’t it? Music, for as long as it’s existed has had a significant part to play in religion and vice versa. Consider the English Reformation: The music, which had previously been the reserve of a church elite, sung in Latin, started being transcribed to English to put the word of the God into the mouth of every common English- man and woman. Then consider the music of Bach – exclusively written for God, but today lives on in the classical cannon beyond religion.

Music has always had a spiritual dimension, and as we’ve progressed as a society and started doing away with ancient folklore about pre-eminent spirits watching over us like big brother, the spirituality continues to live on in the music… but only if the music reflects that.

As people turn away this “spirituality” in House music they also unwittingly, or in some cases purposefully, dishonour the legacy established by the young gay, black and latino men and women who created this music. The idea of the club as a church, can’t be sustained if the music doesn’t offer that spiritual dimension. At some point during the end of the nineties the vocal became some kind of tawdry production cliche and as artists and DJs abandoned it, a little of the soul of House music left along with it. The dance floor became an isolated experience, unless you went to specific club nights that honoured these roots, usually gay underground club nights like Honey Soundsystem or the aforementioned Horse Meat Disco. Trance-inducing synth-melodies work on occasion, but when all you need is a song to sing along to, something to move the spirit and bond with a stranger, nothing beats a powerful vocal expelling messages of love, unity and spirituality deep from within a soul. House music isn’t just something for your body, but rather something for your mind, body and soul.  

 

*Hear the full gospel at Jæger from the lips of an originator.

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.”

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.

 

Album of the week: Susumu Yokota – Acid Mt. Fuji

At the beginning of the year, Fact Magazine ran an article about the resurgence of Japanese Ambient music. Albums that had been pressed in limited copies for the Japanese market only  found minimal success outside of their own country, and had largely disappeared into obscurity, was being excavated by a new audience over the internet. While some of these artists followed their work into the mystical vaults of music history, others prevailed and found success in electronic music.

Susumu Yokota was one of the fortunate ones. Touring Europe throughout the ninety nineties while releasing music for prominent dance music labels, he established a productive Tokyo – Frankfurt connection, but while some of his work were readily available, some had found a fate much the same as counterparts like Hiroshi Yoshimura. His second album, Acid Mt. Fuji on Sublime records would follow records like Yoshimura’s “Green,” disappearing almost into obscurity. A CD-re-issue in 2016 came at the perfect time on the crest of a wave of the resurgence of Japanese Ambient music, leading to a newfound interest in music like this.

The Internet and especially Youtube had suddenly brought these mythical sonic documents to a new audience scouring the known digital hemisphere in search of something they hadn’t heard before. A few of these exotic pieces concurrently caught the ear of a few influential people on various labels and as a result some 14 years on we now have the first re-press of “Acid Mt. Fuji”.

Mr. Yokoto sadly passed away in 2015 after a long period of illness, but his music lives on forever incased in that reverential time for electronic music, the ninety nineties. The record returns to the world during a time of Bandcamp and the style of Ambient/New Age music that is currently being proliferated through the website. “Acid Mt. Fuji” slots in there somewhere with a DIY approach to groove boxes and digital synthesisers, but at the same time negates the trend as something that lives outside its own time, both as something from the past, and something that couldn’t be encapsulated in that time either.

Susumu Yokota paints a surreal, abstract landscape in psychedelic hues with Mt. Fuji looming in the distance of the frame. Beads of wafer-thin electronic droplets cling to bio-organic rhythmic structures like a mist hanging over a rainy forest. Pulling back the shroud, simple repetitive structures form the basis of Yokota’s work, which can go from lush, padded ambience to churning percussive movements. Music, like “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” is conjured from some fantastical world where the biodiversity of nature finds some synergy with hyper-modern language of machines.

Echoes of unlikely animal kingdoms, where African elephants and Capuchin monkeys occupy the same ecosphere, pierce the thin exterior of the album’s electronic stratosphere and organic sounds forms some unlikely relationship with stark electronic noise. Melodies offer only wistful encounters with the listener, like they exist without the purpose of being heard, answering that old adage about the tree falling in the woods. While  Moments like “Alphaville” and “Saboten” do offer jolts to the system in jack-hammering four to the floor beats, they only disrupt the languishing atmospheres for a moment before disappearing back into the serene, opaque mist of songs like “Oh my god” and “Tanuki.” This new re-issue enshrines the sounds Susumu Yokota and “Acid Mt. Fuji” for yet another generation and the future, where it will hopefully live on in infamy for centuries to come.

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.

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:

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

 

Album of the week: Sun RA – Disco 3000

“We might have a gig on Mars one day,” Sun Ra told Michael Ray, “so you got to be swinging on your horn, because they don’t party like earthlings.” It was during the recording session for “Disco 3000” in Rome in 1978 that would completely change the way Ray approached his instrument, like someone had “erased your main frame and reboot your drive” according to the trumpet player and vocalist on the LP that was re-issued this year via Art Yard records recently.

That’s how you should approach Sun Ra’s music and this album, like it’s from Mars.  There’s no linear entry into “Disco 3000,” a jam session turned album and right from the opening you’re dropped into the centre of a musical tornado with portholes to multiple dimensions… folks, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Musical expressions like thought bubbles crop up and then dissipate in a miasma of sounds that push and pull the listener into every which direction.

A drum kit tumbling down the stair case; organ and keys quivering under the pressure of Sun Ra’s experienced fingers; and horns and vocals cropping up like interrupted communiqué from distant planets ebb and flow through recorded Jam session. It’s hardly easy-listening, as atonal musical vignettes gather and disperse around incalculable time signatures and transient rhythms.

Without the famous Arkestra,  John Gilmore, Lauqman Ali, and the aforementioned Michael Ray, join Sun Ra on his inter-dimensional musical journey; an impromptu jam session living beyond its time and place forever sealed in wax. There’s a primal urgency that surges through the record that still echoes through the speakers some forty years on. It’s music that was made way ahead of its time and even in ’78 already Sun Ra was coaxing otherworldly sounds from synthesisers, and sequencers that at times like “Dance of the Cosmo-Aliens” seem more appropriate for Drexciya era Techno than 70’s fusion Jazz.

There are elements of Sun Ra’s other works too, most notably his film “Space is the place”, which according to the liner notes served as some inspiration for the musicians involved and ends in an interesting story with Sun Ra in a US customs office with a bundle of pornographic material under his arm.

Everything about Sun Ra is steeped in mystery and myth and this record just adds to the allure. Mere mortals like us are not really equipped to make much sense of Sun Ra’s music and ideologies, but there’s an undeniable magnetism  that even after the man has gone still lives on in his music. All you have to do is sit back and listen, and if you listen carefully, you might just pick up whatever the Jazz icon is transmitting from whichever dimension he occupies today.

Philipp Boss delivers a DJ profile mix for DGS

Before heading out to Oslo to play Det Gode Selskab next Sunday,Philipp Boss created a mix for the collective’s DJ profile mix series.

Philipp Boss is a 24 years old DJ, music producer, sound artist and founder of the label Einfach Hören [ˈaɪ̯nfax ˈhøːrən] (german for “just listen”). He is part of a new generation of Frankfurt/Offenbach Producers and DJs centered around the newly established GOSU record store. Growing up in a suburb of Frankfurt am Main during the late 90ies, Boss and his friends founded a band, spending a lot of time together everyday jamming blues, funk, soul, reggae and rocknroll music in their small rehearsal room.

In the late 00s Boss started digging vinyl and diving more into electronic music. With the age of majority, Frankfurt’s nightlife and its clubs became accessible. The infamous Robert Johnson Club as a constant source of inspiration in mind, Boss started producing electronic music and soon developed his own remarkable style by blending various genres. The greatest motif in his productions is always groove and rhythm, rather than big build-ups and massive drops.

With 12” releases on Pager Records, Rawax Motorcity, a double-album on La Peña Records and appearances on his own Label Einfach Hören, Boss constantly shapes his interpretation

*You can find out more about the event here.

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.

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.

 

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.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

Just outside of Filter Musikk lies a barren end of Skippergata currently under construction. Turning a corner at Jernbanetorget, rubble and noise greet the pedestrian as if s/he has just passed through the gates of Mordor and stared directly into the eye of Sauron. A treacherous path lies ahead, and we have to navigate debree, machinery and a mote (over a temporary plywood drawbridge) to get to our desired destination. We persevere because on the other end of this journey lies a ring of resin that the DJ still covets more than anything else in the world.

Passing through the glass doors of Roland Lifjell’s sanctuary the vacuous noise of the outside world falls away into an euphonic berceuse, cloaking the vinyl enthusiast from the harsh realities of the human world as we slip into a warm subconscious slumber. Some have had similar experiences at the brink of any icy death, but for the music enthusiast it’s a tangible escapism.

A familiar mixture of electronic sounds and the stale aroma of cardboard boxes greets you as step across the threshold as Roland welcomes you in with a cup of instant coffee and a grin like cheshire cat from his pulpit of synthesisers and records.

Roland Lifjell and Filter Musikk is an institution in Oslo and Norway and one of the few remaining places in the world that specifically facilitates the DJ and his/her needs. Yes, there are other record stores and other DJ equipment stores, but few are so passionate about the craft than Roland Lifjell and Filter Musikk and at the heart of its passion lies the deep oily veneer of freshly pressed vinyl, a kind of black that sucks you in and spits you out on the other side… naked.

Every week (or when the mood strikes Roland) he unpacks a new shipment of records to feed into the ever-expanding collection and gives us a first glimpse over his shoulder, from which we compile a list of favourites we call the Cut with Filter Musikk.

 

Hell – I Want U (Remixes #2) (International Deejay Gigolo) 12″ Limited Edition

It’s the track that keeps on giving. I want U was released two years ago now and this marks the second set of remixes of the track, which also includes a second Hacker remix of the original. This is a limited edition however with versions in pink and black vinyl and finds DJ Hell in a provocative mood – Just look at that cover.

Darren Emerson provides a sultry, oozing version of the original with a low slung kick-bass arrangement that glares at you from the darkest caverns of a dark room like a mysterious  lothario waiting to pounce on the next conquest. It stays fairly true to the original, but somehow Emerson has managed to sexualise it even more. Taking the mustachioed original, and stripping it bare to nothing but a harness and jockstrap.

The Hacker has some weird obsession with this track, and jumps on the remix for a second time in as many years. A tougher body workout ensues with a monstrous kick looming in the foreground with the Hacker stripping back even more of the original to find that functional, primal crux of the track. Along with the Darren Emerson remix this release simply oozes sex.

 

Yuri Urano – Autline (Central Processing Unit) 12″

The central processing label is to this decade what Warp was to the nineties. Chris Smith and the CPU crew have an instinctive feel for the avant garde in electronic music with a considered aesthetic and theme running through their releases. Always introducing new artists through the label, while upholding the futurist principles of electronic music, a CPU record is always a highlight amongst new releases.

This latest release features Japanese newcomer, Yuri Urano. Hailing from Osaka, she’s made a formidable impression on the Japanese Techno scene in a very short time, performing with Ryoji Ikeda, starting her own label, and releasing a fair few records as Yullippe. On this release she favours her new eponymous alias for music that finds an empathetic bond with the CPU sonic aesthetic.

A more progressive dance floor sound than her Yullippe alias, Autline is a tough, beat-driven record, through which enigmatic sound design and functional rhythm structures create intense sweeping technoid dioramas in sound. There’s an unstereotypical industrial aspect to tracks like “Pec” and “Massio” that sounds like turmoil and disillusionment, but is in a controlled extended outburst in sound.

The dub-infused “Knock” and orally-enhanced “Autline” bridge the gap between this and Urano’s Yuliipe alias, but the EP gnarls in a demonic sneer at you from the darker corners of the contemporary dance floor.

 

The Secret Seapony – Secret Seapony EP (Ullis Tapes) 12″  

The mysterious Norwegian record label, Ullis Tapes has long been a presence in the shelves of Filter Musikk. Dotting the House section from time to time, it’s a fleeting presence that always seems to disappear before it gets truly settled. A DIY project from the music to the website – just marvel at that basic HTML simplicity – Ullis Tapes follows in the footsteps of the those that have come before them, the likes of Sex Tags Mania and Full Pupp, with a breathy take on the electronic sounds of the dance floor from House to Dub.

The Secret Seapony EP offers a deep House take on this model with synthesisers and keys landing on galloping 808 kicks like echoes from space. Uptempo House rhythms are veiled under feathery layers of pads that only separate for moment to let rumbling bass movements out from under the light fog. The title track sets a tone that modulates through the release in a similar mood.

 

Lone – Ambivert Tools Volume Four (R&S) 12″

After being in the news recently for being blatantly ripped off by the Black Eyed Peas, Lone is back on R&S with the follow up to his Ambivert series. The UK producer gives us a little bit of everything on Ambivert Tools Volume Four moving from the luxurious break-beats of “Pulsar,” to the bouncing electro of “Odeo 808” and the exotic House of “Blue Moon Tree”.

Lone’s luscious key and synth arrangements, the very same Will I Am found to good to resist, form the basis of this incredible artist’s work. Lone is able to add an accessibility through melody and harmony in the dance music genres that allude most producer-DJ artists. Charming melodic pieces trail along stuttering beats, as Lone pieces together fully formed compositions from elements of UK bass genres and House music to create his signature sound.

The tracks all go through various phases and everybody will have their own personal favourite as discogs reveals, but the artistic charisma that ebbs through the entire record has a magnetic inescapable allure regardless of musical taste. Will I Am would be so lucky to even get close to the artistic talent behind Lone and Ambivert Tools Volume Four.

 

Ascion – Your Finest Nightmare (OAKS) 12″

Drama, it’s something that often alludes Techno-genre today, but it’s possibly the most vital ingredient. Artists will favour immediacy over drama, and the results are static pieces that border on the banal. A big kick thundering along at 130-plus BPM is little more than the anodyne drone for the insipid march through the doldrums of life. It needs variation colour and a sense of progression to encourage a dance floor; it needs drama. 

Ascion’s latest EP on OAKS, “Your finest nightmare” delivers this in droves, and it’s not just about the titles. “Vicious as Acid” doesn’t introduce the lysergic buzz of a 303 seizure until half way through and even at the steady pace of the determined 4/4 kick, there’s a distinct flow of progression precisely orchestrated through the defiant stomp of Techno foundation.

There’s a sense of intrigue through the melodic progression tethered to the rhythm section, hanging on by a mere thread as tracks pulse along and unimaginable speeds. The stoic synthesised loops remain fairly consistent, but they seem to float like a question mark hanging in the air, imbibing the record with a sense of mystery. It slightly subdues the toughness of the underlying foundation of each track and “Your Finest Nightmare”

Ni kjappe med Alwanzatar

Alwanzatar er et enmanns party-orkester for utenomjordiske kulturkvelder, huleraves og innvielser av romskip. Musikken lages i hjemmestudioet Holy Space! på Lindeberg i Oslo, på gamle båndopptagere og et stort antall analoge og digitale synther. På konsert spiller eneste medlem Krizla fløyte, synthesizere, sequencere, trommemaskiner og loopere, mikset på stedet gjennom tung båndekko og effekter. Musikken er inspirert av magick, meditasjon, acid house, dub og krautrock. Siden starten i 2012, har Alwanzatar gitt ut en håndfull kassetter og spilt konserter over hele Norge. Debutalbumet “Heliotropiske Reiser” ble gitt ut i 2017 på Apollon Records, til undring og begeistring fra mange kritikere. Det ble fulgt opp i oktober 2018 med albumet “Fangarmer Gjennom Tid og Rom”.

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

Tredje gangen på Sprekken og Jaeger det må feires! Hva skal du gjøre denne gangen?

Nå tar jeg space-elementet fra Spectral Haze og okkultismen fra Tusmørke så langt ut jeg kan! Det blir en sinnsyk rigg av synther og trommemaskiner, kabler overalt og blinkende lys. Livesettet mitt er som å se under panseret på et dårlig vedlikeholdt romskip, sammen med en ritualmagiker/psykedelisk mekaniker som prøver å fikse det ved hjelp av fløytespill.

Du er kjent som ene i Momrakatakk. Hvor lenge har du hatt dette prosjektet?

Alwanzatar har holdt på seriøst siden 2012, med å spille inn tapes og legge ut låter på Soundcloud. Før det var det litt i det små med elektroniske eksperimenter og påkallelser. Første album på ordentlig plate kom i fjor. Jeg har eid theremin og båndekko siden 90-tallet og brukt elektroniske ting i prog og psykedelia lenge, men ikke som noe eget prosjekt før de siste seks-sju årene.

Du har mange spennede titler på dine sanger?

Fordelen med å jobbe hovedsakelig instrumentalt, er at du kan gi låtene skikkelig fete titler uten å måtte følge opp med en skikkelig fet tekst. Jeg beskriver med titlene hva sangene ser ut som for meg når jeg prøver å forestille meg noe visuelt til lyden.

Vi føler at mange av sangerne kunne vart musikk inspirert av Theodor Severin Kittelsen  og svenske John Bauer som Juan Atkins eller Ravemusikk ifra 90 talet. Er det noe andre kunstnærer som inspirerar?

Jeg er veldig inspirert av skogen der jeg bor, på Lindeberg, som møter blinkingen fra flyene, helikoptrene og lysene fra industri og blokker i Groruddalen, så både Bauer og Kittelsen passer, men også H.R. Giger og Pushwagner er inspirasjonskilder. Musikalsk er jeg inspirert av Bo Hansson, Phuture, the Orb, Cluster, Harmonia, Tangerine Dream og Lee Perry. Ravemusikk fra nittitallet er klart en inspirasjon, ting jeg har hørt på fest opp gjennom, på DJ-sett rundt forbi, masse greier jeg ikke vet hva heter. Jeg har alltid likt jungle og drum n’bass og fikk en ny interesse for å dra ut og danse da dubstep kom til Bergen rundt 2006, med Benga og Skream og sånt, og fester i bunkeren på Nordnes/Teknikkerkroen. Dubstep fikk meg til å teste ut theremin med ringmodulator for ordentlig dyp bass. Da sprengte jeg PA-anlegget i øvingslokalet.

Hva kan du fortelle meg om instrumentene dine på “Fangarmer Gjennom Tid og Rom” albumet?

Det er en haug med synther og trommemaskiner jeg har samla opp de siste årene, alt er koblet sammen og synkronisert, stort sett ferdig programmert, men med mye variasjon av filtere, ADSR og transponeringer underveis. Det er mye jobb med å mikse ting ut og inn, det spilles inn på bånd hele greia på en gang, så det er fort at ting må gjøres om igjen. Så er det pålegg med fløyte, theremin, mellotron og diverse synther etterpå, siden jeg ikke fikser å spille alt samtidig. Det som går inn i mikseren og videre til bånd er Korg MS-20, Arp Odyssey og/eller Behringer D styrt av en Arturia Beatstep Pro, som igjen er styrt av en Boss RC-300 looper der jeg har en haug med nye og gamle loops av alt mulig rart, gjerne kule patcher eller melodilinjer fra mellotron eller fløyte. Dette er synkronisert med Korg EMX-1, Volca Beats og Arturia Drumbrute, så er det Cyclone TT-303 for acid og gjerne en Boss Syb-5 på Volca Beats for enda mer acid. Jeg liker å legge et par pedaler inn med ulike filtere for å holde ting møkkete og stereopanorert litt hulter til bulter. Selve mikseren har RE-201 space echo og Mooger Fooger Cluster Flux koblet til, for dyp ekko og flanger/phaser effekter. Det er veldig mye kobling og knotting, jeg legger mye vekt på å lete etter oppsett som får mest mulig til å jobbe sammen på en gang, og finne ut hvor jeg kan få en ledig hånd til å vri på enda en knott mens alt det andre går.

Er bergstroll fredlige?

Bergtroll er ikke fredelige, de er alltid ute etter å snike seg innpå noen for å ta dem. Men de er så store og tunge at det ikke fungerer særlig bra. Du hører dem lenge før de kommer, som en illevarslende trasking nede i fjellet

Er det noe forskjell på Bergstroll og internett troll? Hvordan skal man forsvare seg mot de?

Eneste måten å forsvare seg mot bergtroll er å snu og løpe. Hvis ikke blir du spist eller pult og tvunget til å bli boende med dem inne i fjellet. Eller pult, tvunget til å bo med dem inne i fjellet, og så spist. Troll på internett er litt det samme, hvis ikke du holder deg unna, tar de deg til fange og tar mange år av livet ditt og spiser deg opp eller puler deg, men i en mer overført betydning.

Hvordan finner du på så kule titler? Vi gleder oss til denne giggen!!!

Takk for det! Jeg finner på titler ved å tenke på sangen og gå for det første jeg kommer på.

Hvor får jeg kjøpt den nye musikken?  

Musikken er tilgjengelig fra bandcamp, https://alwanzatar.bandcamp.com/ eller i platesjapper, f.eks. Big Dipper eller Tiger. Jeg tar også med meg noen skiver og kassetter til Jaeger!

Olanskii, Øyvind Morken, and Prins Thomas head to Kala 2019

Kala festival in Albania adds Jæger residents Olanskii and Øyvind Morken to the line-up with Prins Thomas.

In its second year running, Kala Festival returns to their picture paradise location with a summer line-up for the ages. Featuring the likes of Josey Rebelle, Honey Dijon, Secret Sundaze and CC: Disco against the backdrop of the Albania rivera replete with white sandy beaches, azure waters and intimate musical stages, Kala festival tick all the right boxes for a musical summer break. Just look at these pictures from last year.

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Jæger will be there too with Olanskii and Øyvind Morken and honorary Jæger resident Prins Thomas over the course of the weeklong program. Expect some House, Disco and Balearic sounds echoing down a sun-streaked beach beyond a green gully with some of the worlds best selectors. Tickets are on sale now and you can get them here.

Album of the Week: N’Draman Blintch – Cosmic Sounds

The Nigerian artist N’Draman Blintch and the album Cosmic Sounds is one of those records that’s been steeped in mystery and folklore in the record community for some time. It has all the markings of a cult classic: an artist that disappeared into obscurity, affiliations with an infamous record producer and a host of musicians that went on to great careers in music after it was released.

Very little is known about N’Draman Blintch, and after releasing three records within a year of each other in 1980, his name never comes up again in music history. The record sleeve and various online references only refer to his academic career and that his favourite hobby is “sleeping and dreaming,” possibly in an effort from the label to create an aura of myth around him.

One of the myths they’ve chosen to dispel around the release however is its tenuous connection to William Onyeabar. While Blintch might have recorded parts of his previous album, “Cikamele” in Onyeabor’s Nigerian studio, there is irrefutable evidence he was no in deed the producer of this record that everybody assumed he was.

Cosmic sounds boasts some incredible musicians too like Lemmy Jackson and Gasper Lawal, but on of the most surprising collaborators is Carol Kenyon, who later went on to be the voice of Heaven 17’s “Temptation” as well as doing lead- and backing vocals on a host of iconic eighties pop albums, just check her wiki page. It’s no surprise that the only original copy available for sale at the moment is coming in at an eye watering €1200, but on a recent trip to our local record store we were able to secure a copy for a mere €22.00. We love re-issues. Cosmic Sounds is too good to keep vaulted in some glass house where it can’t be pawed at, and played until the grooves are worn out.

Opening track “Self Destruction”  leaps over the grooves as it bounces in a funky Disco staccato over the grooves of the record. There’s a fusion element to the track which expands over the next few tracks, but “Self Destruction” is sultry Disco stepper with keys melting in the heat of that funky bass. Percussion weaves in lattice pattern around a space-aged progressive arrangement, pulsing with a primal energy.

Syncopated rhythms, Funky bass-lines and staccato keys might have been common place by the 1980’s but N’Draman Blinth and his band touch the borders of space with this record as synthesisers dart across speakers like Todd Terje’s Inspector Norse, threading their way through the tightly organised organic elements from the musicians.

From “Self Destruction” through to “Cosmic Sounds”  the band maintain some inhuman intensity in upbeat arrangements that even through their extensive journey of the extended tracks on the record that never seem to get tedious. Transporting you form one end of a track to the last through a inter-dimensional beam, “Cosmic Sounds” touch on a variety of elements and styles and phases, before it dissipates completely into the soulful lament of the closing track, “She Africa.”

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. 

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.

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.

 

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.

The Truth behind MANOID

An intricate sadness overwhelms the listener on MANOID’s debut LP, “Truth” as droplets of electronic melodies pour down from some desolate post-utopian wasteland. Elements like broken neon lights flicker for a moment in the foreground, before disappearing into the miasmic orchestration between man and machine. For a moment, a semblance of life appears as a lone string quivers on the fringes of the music in a legato dirge before the opening track, “No Time”  disappears back into the nothing from which it arrived.

There’s a humility captured on “Truth” that borders on despair which MANOID (Karol Murawski)  tells me is “really a truth from heart” that he’s trying to convey through music in his debut album. He’s in Warsaw, Poland where he lives when I phone him up to talk about his latest album and more and in a pronounced Polish accent, he elucidates; “I created this album at a really important moment in life.”

The sadness I perceive at first is in fact a serene gravitas at the core of the album, an artist projecting some inner truth through the musical form. “Truth” coincided with the birth of his son and the album was about really trying to “catch the moment” which he does in music that combines effervescent synthesis with blistering rhythms, interjected with stark melancholic movements.

“To Grieve” enshrined the artist’s music in the recorded format for the first time. Released via hafendisko (a HFN sublabel), bulging percussive arrangements thread through a dynamic electronic topography. Raspy synths protruding out of the rolling landscape interject waves of texture that envelope the audio spectrum. A stark arid cloud hangs overhead with elements of white noise and static controting through the track that established MANOID as a recording artist. It was the first track he sent to the Hamburg based label label, while the sound of the budding LP was still finding its voice.

How did the Polish artist end up on a Hamburg label?

“It’s really simple,” he explains. Some of his “family lives in Hamburg” and he would often visit them there. He became familiar with the label through the music of Kasper Bjørke and sent them the demo for “To Grieve”. Two weeks later HFN  answered “yes, it’s cool, we want to release it,” but y then the idea of an album had started to take shape, and Karol would only give them the single if they released the album. The acquiesced and “Truth” was born.

MANOID draws comparisons and inspiration from the likes of Kasper Bjørke, Trentmøller and Andy Stott, Karol tells me. “Andy Stott is much darker than me,” he suggests. Where Stott’s music prefers a fractured kind of dissonance created by raw materials, MANOID favours “clarity” above all else. There’s a glossy kind of sheen to the music that barely ripples as beats skip through the arrangements. Although inspired by an artist like Stott, for Manoid it was never about emulating their sound, but rather the philosophy that informs an artist like that or Max Cooper’s work.

“For me it’s always curious to hear an artist whose made a really interesting palette of sound,” he says. As MANOID it was about “looking for something new” and that couldn’t be about co-opting someone else’s sounds. “It’s easy to recreate someone else’s sounds,” he suggest, but that’s not what he’s striving for in music. “I want to create my own style,” and for that he relies on “field recordings and whole palette of effects” to achieve the desired results. He combines those elements into a lonesome soliloquy from machines tethered to the depths of the artist’s own experiences and feelings.

Before MANOID, Karol Murawski was an unknown, trying to find his voice as an artist and producer. Born and raised in “a small village on the east of the country,” Karol grew up on the edge of a forest, a “really small village surrounded by trees and maybe fifty people, mostly old people”

What sort of music would he have been exposed to?

“I had the internet, and my friends were listening to Hip-Hop.” Besides skating and listening to Hip Hop there wasn’t much else to do but make music. At first he “tried to make some hip hop beats,” but it wouldn’t be long before the allure of electronic was too good to resist. Through electronic music he first found those “endless possibilities to make new sounds” that would eventually inform MANOID. He bought his first synthesiser, the small but powerful Waldorf Blofeld, and “from that moment it was easy to learn how to create these new sounds.”

When it came time to go to university, he moved to the bigger city of Lublin to pursue his studies, all the while nurturing his own artistic endeavours. In Poland where there are “maybe two or three” dedicated electronic music labels and “straight proper Techno” is dominating the clubs and festivals at the moment, the Polish scene is only now “starting to grow up” according to MANOID. Festivals like UNSOUND in Krakow and big city “clubs where you can go and see underground music” are also nurturing more of an experimental electronic scene in the country.

It’s from this spectrum of electronic music that MANOID too would emerge as an artist, but he shares no personal connection to any particular scene at home. He’s a singular figure that occupies a corner of electronic music where heady electronic textures eddie and swirl around stoic dance floor constructions like Techno, without succumbing to the hardened sounds of the dance floor genre.

His latest single, “Take Me” is the only song from the album that features vocals and has all the markings of a crossover success, similar to something like Trentmøller’s “Moan” or Andy Stott’s “Faith in Strangers.” Although MANOID’s purpose was to create an “instrumental album” by the time he “finished the draft of ‘Take Me’” he felt that he “missed something.” He approached HFN label affiliate and Darkness Falls vocalist Josephine Philip to collaborate on  the penitent slow-churning charmer “Take Me.”

Philip’s vocal adds that essential element of human warmth to the album in a plaintive lament that emphasises the stark electronic atmosphere of the entire album. “Truth” plays on the same kind of evocative mood that from its influences, but as MANOID, Karol avoids any perceptible relationship to any other artist, and rather tethers his sound to something personal, that lives beyond the sound.

The album lives on today in a live show, which MANOID uses as a platform to “recreate and expand the songs.”  Including new and unreleased material, he says “the live show is always something different” and in the MANOID ethos he continues to strive for “something new.”

It’s unclear where this will take him next, but you get the sense that it will surely not be fleeting or immediate. There’s a gravitas on his debut album that sits with the listener as it fades out through “letting freedom grow.” MANOID leaves the album something of a cliff hanger with probably the most beat-driven track on the entire album, with a fluffy 4-4 kick and those brooding electronics pulsing to the beat of a dormant dance floor. As 16 bars count out the end, there’s a sense that “Truth” might be unfinished, but MANOID has indeed said all he has to say, for now.

 

*MANOID plays live this weekend for Frædag x Filter Musikk

 

Album of the week: Matthew Dear – Bunny

Matthew Dear has come a long way from the staccato, bric-a-brac House of 1999’s “Put your hands up for Detroit.” He has become a transient figure in the margins of indie-pop music, genre-hopping through the years under various aliases and habituated to change. From the woozy neo-Disco of his early releases like “Backstroke” to the post-pop-punk of his critically acclaimed 2012 LP “Beams,” Matthew Dear darts between styles and sounds like a hummingbird, feeding off elements of Detroit Techno, eighties synth-Pop and the pseudo-pop a la Talking Heads and David Bowie.

His Technoid aliases, Audion, Jabberjaw and False veer the furthest off the grid and onto the dance floor, with purposeful electronica made for the likes of Spectral Sound and M_nus, which leaves his eponymous work free from these temporary indulgences and focussed on crafting an individual sound as an artist, which in recent years has seen Matthew Dear find his voice; both figuratively and literally.

Since “Beams” his voice has moved into the foreground taking a more of a central role in his work where it sounds today like the music comes together around his vocal part rather than the other way around.

It is the most prominent it’s ever been on his latest album, “Bunny.” Matthew Dear’s sixth studio album favours a more organic approach, constructed from  soothing melodies coerced into popular forms with Matthew Dear’s gravelling baritone touching on familiar themes of love and life written from the sober perspective of an older, wiser man. Tracks like “Echo” talks of the frivolities of carefree youth with a nostalgic sentiment, but there is also a palpable sadness that traces through the entire album, hovering above the upbeat arrangements like a restless spirit looking for some form absolution in the happiness of others.

Jangly guitars find a unique synchronicity with drum machines and synthesisers on “Bunny,” something that might have carried over from Dear’s work on the MGMT remix album. Matthew Dear has never conformed to a contemporary pop sensibility before like he has on “Bunny.” His albums in the past would usually arrive at pop, through a kind of skewed vision of popular culture through the fringes of  music, but on “Bunny” there seems to be an intent to create contemporary pop album from Dear. There’s an immediacy to the album, an accessibility, but there’s also a sincerity to it, that doesn’t appear forced or disingenuous. Matthew Dear might have made a contemporary pop album on “Bunny”, but he did so on his own terms, not bucking to trends, but manipulating it to his vision.

Matthew Dear’s work has always been for the committed fan, but on “Bunny” there’ the potential for individual tracks to live beyond the album, and reach a new, younger audience. He never really veers off the path of the sound of the album, and there’s a very intimate connection between all the tracks, but tracks like “Bad Ones” and “Heroes” have all the markings of chart success.

In the booth with Ivaylo

Beyond the glistening electronic particles colliding in the audible frequency spectrum, a burbling creek of rhythms tumble over each other in slow motion, refracting the dusty reflections of a synthesised organism into the atmosphere. A languid, pulsing humidity clouds a dense forest of sounds, with irregular peaks jutting out into the upper edge of the unattainable heights of the clouds, for fleeting glimpses of melodic arrangements. Digital noise like micro-organisms gather around any semblance of life as they form a subtle quilt of sound.

In the absence of the Jæger mix this week, due to some unforeseen circumstances, Jæger mix resident Ivaylo steps up to the challenge to soundtrack our weekend ahead. Pacing gently through the abstract landscape of ambient music and broken beat, he sets a somber tone through the hour long mix recorded in our basement last Sunday.

 

People still call me Roxy with rRoxymore

There is an innate contrast to the music Hermione Frank makes as rRoxymore. Pensive rhythms are rendered in the rapier stabs at synthesisers and drum machines forming pristine, silky arrangements that glide over the surface of bouncing tracks. Her music seems to be made from fleeting encounters between the conscious and the subconscious that at times feel very raw and organic even though the machine aesthetic naturally belies those connotations.  

Her artistic moniker is an anagram of “oxymoron” in French  – “I just added another ‘r’ because people kept calling my roxy, but it hasn’t changed, but people still call me Roxy” – and her music like her chosen alias is a contradiction in terms that has left an unique impression both as a recording artist and a live performer.

Refining her craft as a DJ through her teens in Montpellier France and then Paris, hers was always a very inclusive approach, fusing disparate elements it seems she’s “always wanted to melt things like this,” according to a Factmag interview. “I wanted to mix organic stuff and electronic, so I would start with disco or a jazzy thing, then funky, playing trip-hop maybe and finishing on house.”

From DJing her route into music would follow a less orthodox route by today’s standards where she made her first impressions on the dance floor as a live performer, performing both as a solo artists and with other musicians. It was after moving to Berlin where she would make the  biggest stride of her career when she befriended rising DFA star Planningtorock, to become part of the touring live band and subsequently release records on the the artist’s Human Level label.

Since making her debut as a recording artist with 2012’s “Precarious/ Precious Ep”, she’s gone on to release records for Paula Temple’s Noise Manifesto, Don’t be Afraid and most recently Ostgut Ton.

2017’s “Thoughts of an Introvert” and its follow up, “Thoughts of an introvert part 2” became something of a breakout hit for the artist with various antennae vibrating at the frequencies rRoxymore was transmitting. Those tracks were born out of a time and place where Frank “wasn’t feeling Techno” anymore, but those records weren’t as a much an evolution of her work as it was establishing the music of rRoxymore outside an epoch.

While these records and the inclusion of “Tropicalcore” in Fiedel’s recent Berghain mix and compilation has certainly introduced rRoxymore to a larger audience, she’s always been steadfast in her approach to music, combining philosophies to informing a kind of lucid abstract music that is very unique to her as an artist.

We wanted to know more about these ideas ,the influences that inform her work and her live show, and before her arrival at Charlotte Bendiks’ IRONI, we called her up and found a very amiable personality, friendly yet succinct in her answers with hearty titter often punctuating the end of her sentences.

I’ve been listening to thoughts of an introvert part 1 and 2 while preparing for this interview and I’ve read somewhere that at time of writing those pieces, you weren’t feeling Techno anymore. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

There are two sides to the coin: One is more like a dark account while the other one was more of a positive way of dealing with the world to sum up the state of mind I was in when I wrote it.

It’s got a very organic feel to those records, almost in an improvised Jazz style. Was there anything about those records that changed the way you made records previously?

The modus operandi behind this was always the same, but yes maybe it has more of that improvised feel, that has always been a part of my work. Maybe you feel it more here in these tracks than the previous releases. If you hear some Jazz influences I’m really happy about that because it was a big influence.

While we’re on the subject of influences, tell me a bit more about your earliest musical influences and how much did Jazz play a role?

I’ve been listening to electronic music for a long time, but I grew up in a Jazz home – in fact my dad is very much a Jazz head. So Jazz was very much an influence, I won’t deny that.

When did you start picking up electronic music and DJing?

When I was a teenager I already started DJing and I was really into this kind of music. It’s always been there, and there was a phase I was not so interested, but then it came back to me. It was a passion for while.

I’ve read somewhere that when you started DJing, it was about mixing organic sounds with the more abstract electronic sounds.

Yes.

Did that inform a large part of what you took into making music too?

Yes, totally. I’ve always had this idea (now it might not sound so new) to have this organic sound mixed with a very rigid structure that comes from a computer. I’ve always wanted to have these two types of philosophies working together. You can hear it in my tastes and also in my production.

You said computer there, but the few times I’ve seen you live, it’s always looked to be a machine-based thing. Are you using the computer more than the analogue machines?

When I say computer, I mean both the computer and the machines. Analogue for you might be a synth, but analogue for me has other connotations.

Your first record  came out in 2012 but I believe you had been performing live for some time before then.

Yes totally.

So do you approach the aspects of production in the same way as you do a live set?

No I think the two are very different. Even though I keep in mind that I have to re-transcribe my music for the live setting, but they are two different things. In the studio I like to spend time on sound design and stuff like this, but when I approach the live part I have to consider other things to make it work. I don’t work in the same way, no.

So when you are re-transcribing the things for a live show, is it about recreating those tracks in a  recorded sense?

Yes and no. It is a part of it, but there’s a lot of improvisation in a way too.

 

I became familiar with your work through Planningtorock, when you were part of her live act and after you released your first EP on her label Human Level. How did you meet and start working together?

We met through MySpace when I was living in Paris and when I moved to Berlin, she was one of the first people I got in touch with. At that time she was about to release her second album on DFA and she was looking for someone to tour with and I had that experience already and it came very easily. We became very good friends, and we toured together for many years. She’s been a big support.

You’re other affiliation is with the label don’t be afraid, and you’ve worked extensively with them. What do you enjoy about working with them?

It’s really easy. Andy is a true passionate guy about music and the music scene. He’s very low key and super generous and he really understands me and gives me all the freedom I want… I don’t need more. (laughs)

I’ve a lot struggles with other labels. People often approach me and ask me to send them music, but they want me to tailor something for what they have in mind, which is very difficult. You should always trust your artist and follow what they are offering.

The other release that has a special place in my personal record collection, is the Decon/Recon #1 on Paula Temple’s Noise Manifesto. It’s such an interesting concept. What was that experience like and how did the idea come around?

It was great, especially at that time. It made sense because we all shared the same studio. It was Paula’s idea to bring us all together so it came together really easily. It was really nice. We had a few gigs together as well and it was really good.

I’m interested in your upcoming live set, and I’m curious what it will sound like.

It will be very dancy and more playful for a club night. A lot of drum machines and bass drums.

Is it easy to relay those sort of organic sounds and rhythms in your production for some of the tracks on “thoughts of an introvert “in the live show?

I don’t play that one so much. I keep the more straightforward ones for the club environment. It will still be very organic, but I might only play one of the tracks from that EP. We’ll see… now that you mention it I might.

So you adapt your set accordingly.

Yes, of course. I can’t play the same if I play at three- or four am than if, for instance tomorrow I play at nine whee the vibe will be more artsy, so yes I’ll adapt accordingly.

Do you think that your set at Jæger will be more in line with track you released on the recent Berghain compilation?

Yes.

 

Profile on Midland

In a scene for the Resident Advisor video documentary Between the Beats an audience member entreats Midland (Harry Agius); ”please save ‘Final Credits’ for the end of the set”. “I don’t think it’s going to be there tonight”, says Agius, smiling through the words to let the fan down gently into “I’m phasing it out.” In 2016 “Final Credits” propelled Agius’ career to new “uncomfortable” heights on a trajectory that put Midland on the lips of every discerning music enthusiast but the time of the video documentary in 2018.

The invigorating burbling of a bass and drum kit exchanging familirities through a Disco dialect sets an amicable tone that’s accentuated by the raspy reed, synthesised in the melodic region. It touches on some deep personal level when an expressive vocal joins the cavalcade, transporting the listener back through time to the future as predicted in the 1970’s. “I just wanted to write some music for the essential mix” he told Between the Beats. After making it and listening to it “fifty times in the studio,” he sent it to Jackmaster who said “yeah we listened to it like a hundred times at an after party.” Agius realised that “this record has some legs.”

Already an established and respected DJ and producer at the time “Final Credits” came out, it was in no-way a launchpad for Midland’s career, but rather something of a crossover success for the artist.

Harry Agius doesn’t think he’s “innately talented” according to a XLR8R interview from 2018, but he’d always been a fan of music to an obsessive extent. Growing up in East Africa, his earliest musical experiences were handed down to him from his parents, “stuff with a strong emotional tie, with structure” like Abba and the Beach Boys. It set on him on path of discovery that would have him hopping over genres and decades with zeal, encouraged too by his older siblings (5 of them to be exact). Everything from Led Zeppelin to Prodigy informed the young Agius’ musical tastes which only expounded by the time he moved back to the UK at the age of 13.

It was while at school that the DJ bug first bit when Agius was handed a copy of an Andy C set. “It was on the way to a rugby game on a school bus,” Midland remembers in an interview with Billboard Magazine. “The moment I got back I took out the CD decks and was like, right: how do I make things play at the same speed?” He became “obsessed with drum and bass”, while mastering the intricacies of becoming a DJ as a teen. “I was super young, super keen, went to every party, met everyone, chatted to everyone,” he explains. “The guy who ran the radio station, they used to host a room at one of the biggest rave nights in the city. I was watching the DJs with him; every song I would just tell him the name and chat about it. He was like, ‘Just shut up — you can have a set!'”

It wouldn’t be long before drum n bass became too restrictive however and Agius realised, “because of the tempo, there wasn’t a huge amount of area to maneuver.” He set out on a trip through Spain for a month and purposely left his ipod at home in an effort to step away from drum n bass. When he returned to the UK, he would find a renewed appreciation for the more lethargic tempos of Aphex Twin and Moderat and made his first tentative steps into the world of production. “I think that’s what lost quite a few people in the early days, that my music was very unplayable,” remarks Agius in Billboard.

Between all of this Midland found himself at university in Leeds, where he befriended future Hessle Audio member, David Kennedy, aka Ramadanman / Pearson Sound. Kennedy had seen Agius DJing through the window in his dorm room and the pair struck up a relationship that endures to this day. They were housemates for 6 years, living in Leeds and then London and would eventually start working together as producers, but not till much later. ”Initially we were on slightly different vibes musically, when they were starting the label I was deep in to drum and bass but as things have progressed our styles have began to cross over in places.”

Agius watched the the Hessle Audio collective go from hosting an online radio station, using his decks, to “one of the most inspiring collective of DJ’s/label guys and producers around” according to an interview with Wired. “Moments like seeing David play his first FWD at plastic people, getting their residency at Fabric, Ricardo playing David’s tunes, their respective Fabric/essential mixes were all such important moments to witness.”

Midland’s own career would follow a slightly different but parallel route to similar greatness. In Leeds he started working for the internationally acclaimed Wire club while making music and trying to get gigs on the side. “At times I found it really hard”, he told his old club, “mainly due to the nocturnal hours we kept and the fact that I was in quite a tough stage in my life personally as well as being really unsure about what it was I was trying to achieve in music.”

An openly gay man working in a very straight industry and especially with the chauvinistic connotations that harder genres like drum n bass often bring could not have been easy for Agius, but he found inspiration and support through the community at Wire through the likes of club nights and institutions like Metropolis/Dirty Disco, Subdub/Exodus, Back 2 Basics, and Mono_Cult as he moved from Drum n Bass into 4/4 House music.

“Mono_Cult have a real special place in my heart, they took a complete chance on me way back at the start and have really supported me all this time,” says Agius in Wired. “I still remember Paul Woolford messaging me on twitter all those years ago seeing if I wanted to go for a coffee. We ended up back at his studio chatting for hours, he even gave me a midi keyboard as I was too poor to buy one, we’ve been friends ever since.”

The most significant shift in Agius career would happen in 2010 however when he and Kennedy released “Your Words Matter / More Than You Know” as Ramadanman & Midland. “I was just listening to 4/4, anything sub 140”, he told Resident Advisor in an interview from 2011. “Moderat’s album was pretty instrumental in my shift, then I went to stay with Ramadanman [at his folks’ house in late summer 2009] and we made ‘Your Words Matter.’ I’d always liked that speed and…it just felt right.”

Released on will Saul’s AUS music, “Your Words Matter” and “More Than You Know” were two pristine Tech-House arrangements that offered something more in the lower end of the spectrum, borrowed from the likes of dubstep and drum n bass. It set a tone for Midland’s productions to come with more releases on AUS garnering the attention of a new burgeoning UK scene sobering up from the heady era of dubstep, that had lost its way somewhere over the atlantic.  

Midland tracks like “Trace” became dance floor anthems in the UK and very soon beyond with Agius’ music finding a unique sonic identity in the larger canon of House music. Sweltering bass-lines and razor sharp productions made lasting impressions on the dance floor. “For me, when you’re making music, you get to a stage in the song where it’s cool; it’s working, but unless I really get that feeling in my chest, that hairs-standing-on-end feeling, then I’m not really achieving my goal,” Agius told Resident Advisor about his musical process.

It’s that philosophy that would eventually also inform “Final Credits”, a track that Agius would go back to time and time again in the studio before releasing it on his regraded sub-label, cementing his legacy as a producer indefinitely.

But for many it’s a DJ that Midland would ultimately make his mark. An avid music enthusiast, whose selections span the globe and and history of music, Agius as Midland has some innate sympathy with his audience when it comes to DJing. Painstakingly arranging sets around the environment and context he is always striving for a set where you “feel that you’re part of the crowd” according to the between the beats documentary. When it feels like “the music is picking you and it’s a collaborative process between you and the crowd,” that’s the moments he’s after as a DJ.

In 2018, he’s stopped incorporating “Final Credits” in to his sets, and although he is “very happy” with the success of that record he doesn’t believe it should define him. Records like “Trace” and “Blush pain”t a very different picture to “Final Credits” and although there is veritable sound at the core of all his releases, they are composed of fleeting references and influences that span an extensive musical identity. From House to Disco and even his early afro influences, Midland is a distinct musical entity in electronic music today.

*Midland plays Frædag invites Midland this Friday. 

The Cut with Filter Musikk

“A mind-bending animated video”…. “After grinding his teeth with a solid 20-ish EPs” …. “a series of minatres that harness the many shadows this legendary act”… “Oozing style.”

Nobody should be oozing anything really and that guy should ease up on the drugs if he’s grinding his teeth through 20 EPs. We don’t need an email to tell us what music to listen to, we’ve got a guy for that.  

Roland Lifjell spends six days a week at Filter Musikk, his office is literally built from walls of records, which on occasion, if he’s feeling particularly good -spirited, spill out onto the shop floor at Filter Musikk. Boxes upon boxes stack up like a paper mache fortress of solitude. We don’t know where he sleeps, but rumour has it that his bedroom is a music studio, his bed lamp is a vu meter, his sheets are made from old speaker cables, his pillow is a subwoofer  and he survives on a combination of instant coffee and sub audio frequencies transmitted from the afterlife by Sun Ra’s ghost.

On special occasion he parlays these frequencies into a DJ set, but his prime conduit remains the immense record collection that constitutes Filter Musikk. Every week he annexes a corner of his record hovel bat cave for new arrivals from the labels and producers that do a little more making music and a little less sending emails. These records are the last fragments of the true underground.

Some say Filter Musikk incites riots, while others proclaim Roland Lifjell is musical necromancer that will insnair a listener in a dangerous capitalist routine, buying music in a outdated format every week to no-end at all except self-indulgence. There are those that call him an immortal, the result of a chemical spill at a record plant.  All we know is he’s called the…

No… no… we’re not doing that.

Welcome to the cut with Filter Musikk where we’re always grinding our teeth on the latest mind bending series of minatres oozing into Filter Musikk, whatever that means.

Linkwood – Fresh Gildans (Firecracker) 12″ Limited Edition

One of our favourite House acts on one of our favourite labels. Nick Moore’s Linkwood alias and side project, Linkwood family has been a tour de force on Lindsay Todd’s Firecracker since EP1. As Linkwood, Moore pieces together obscure samples with homemade beats in music that steps.

On “Fresh Gildans” he does more of the same with three exquisite House tracks, housed in some exquisite packaging, hand-crafted by Lindsay Todd. The extensive opener hits you right in the gut with a meaty electro kick, before a breezy west coast synth steps into focus. Ghostly voices project from the ether while an erratic bubbling synth tries to compose itself between the rhythms only to break down and fall apart at each turn of phrase.

It’s a hi-fi quencher, and it is carried over on “Another late Night”, while the ambient sparkling of  Solar Panel, rightly takes its position on the hallowed B2 spot. It’s a tough House release from one of the best labels out there today, both sonically and visually.

 

The Burrell Connection – Hyper/Orbit (Craigie Knowes) 12″

What is the burrell connection? Is it somehow related to House legends, Rheji and Ronaldo Burrell? Is this the Burrell brother from another mother?  There’s a very prominent UK sound to the Burrell Connection that belies any… uhm Burrell connection.

The House maverick, who we believe hails from Scotland, has got a certain rough-and-ready approach and broodiness to his sound that combines just the amount of fear and body for a House track to survive on some of the more alternative dance floors.

Violently swinging elbows through on “Hyper/Orbit” through breakbeat arrangements dripping with the sweltering psychedelica of acid loops and sub-bass encounters of a dub kind, The Burrell Connection delivers four tracks that show absolutely no exercise in restraint.

“Hyper/Orbit” has got that indefinable UK house thing, that looks right past you into the depths of hell, like it’s seen some shit that you couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Channeling something of that UK bass culture into House, the Burrell Connection is a potent weapon, one that needs to be played on that Funktion One system downstairs.

 

Kasper Marott – Keflavik EP (Seilscheibenpfeiler) 12″

After the intensity of the Burrell Connection, we need a moment and this release from Danish producer Kasper Marott has all the right ingredients. The A-side and the title track of this release has a very charming melodic synth that borders on the fringes of trance, without getting too cheesy. At rack that doesn’t take itself too seriously it puts a smile on your face and a bounce in your step.

There’s a Lo-Fi electro vibe to the entire record and in the more solemn moments of “Microworld” and “Megatu” it’s more refined in our opinion. While Keflavik entices you to lean  into the record, the B-side is the real allure of Keflavik. Synth lines sparkle at the very top end like a xylophone made from glass, with a very amiable disposition playing through the entire record. It’s impossible to not like this record.

 

André Bratten – Lim / Recreation 26B (Smalltown Supersound) 12″

What was supposed to be a record a month through 2017, is now a trilogy in its second episode and a third slated for when Smalltown Supersound and André feel like it – apparently November 30th. Like “Un / Pax Americana” this one is a limited release with no re-issues planned. Although if you missed out on the last one, we believe Roland might have a copy or two still floating about.

“The downbeat, left-field offering demonstrates a continuation of the Norwegian producer’s brilliance, which seems to recognise the importance of his skraggle-house predecessors whilst simultaneously taking on new territory in terms of his own production and sound.” Whatever Bleep, this is just André Bratten living out his deepest Aphex Twin,fantasies, and that’s a good thing; We don’t want him wallowing in the mundane.

We’ll steer clear of the usual clichés that usually accompany this style of club music, terms like mind-bending. From the electro-acid of “Lim” to the fast-paced ghoulish synth work of “Recreation 26B”, Bratten actually maneuvers this release towards the centre from left-field, in a spot where it’s not completely impossible to fit it into a DJ set. The bold raucous Techno “Math ilium Ion” are but a distant memory, and there are absolutely no traces left of the Disco Tech of “Be a man You ant”, and through these last two releases, it’s the most consistent we’ve found André Bratten to ever be. That’s until the next album, at least.

We’re big fans of Mr. Bratten so we’ll jump on any release, but these last two 12 inches from Smalltown Supersound does seem to have softened the producers sound a little, not quite to the more misty-eyed extent of his albums, but certainly to a point where it’s more approachable for the uninitiated listener. Something just seems to have cliqued for us across these two releases and we look forward to last of the trilogy later this month.

 

L.B. Dub Corp – Roar (Stroboscopic Artefacts) 10″

It doesn’t quite “roar” as much as it growls, but then again, Luke Slater’s releases as LB Dub Corp has always kind of snarled at you. Whereas his other aliases like Luke Slater and Planetary Assault systems are generally traditional Detroit takes on Techno, L.B Dub Corp is a little more unusual and it’s no surprise that it finds itself on Stroboscopic Artefacts today, a label known for its more opaque future vision of Techno.


Repetitive loops that stubbornly meander without much evolution don’t often make for wholly interesting music, but Mr. Slater finds some innovative ways to make it still sound progressive. Kick drums distorting and contorting under their own weight and organic rhythms born from some cyborg tribe, strike a transcending ritual mood on this record that pulls the fabric of time out from underneath you.

Even as you try to analyse the very static loops contained on a track like “Hard Wax”, it comes to an abrupt end in which you’ve lost seven minutes of your life without realising it. The repetitive nature of the music, immerses you completely, repeating like a mantra that coaxes the listener over to a higher plane.

 

*Filter Musikk is back at Jæger on the 23rd of November with MANOID and Ben Sims and Frædag. 

Album of the week: Marquis Hawkes – The Marquis of Hawkes

Marquis Hawkes is a beguiling figure in contemporary House and Techno. Earnestly dedicated to his craft as a DJ and producer, his music is a testament to the legacy of House and Techno established in the spirit of Chicago and Detroit all those years ago. There’s an organic evolution to the music he makes as Marquis Hawkes specifically from those first seeds planted through the likes of Frankie Knuckles.

He approaches House music like an artisan, using the raw materials to craft something simple and ornate from a mere few essential parts, and it never comes as anything pretentious or overly indulgent – it’s House music as it’s always intended to be, but for a contemporary ear, syphoning everything from Garage to Electro through the artist.

On his second LP, The Marquis of Hawkes he doesn’t mess with perfection and like his debut, “Social Housing”, merely adapts his sound to the LP format with more vocals, strings and pads softening the tracks for their extended play purposes. It’s an album you can listen to from start to finish and not merely a collection of dance floor cuts.

There’s a toughness to Marquis Hawkes’ music that he projects through bold kicks and fuzzy Juno bass lines, laying there on the surface like the calloused skin of a metal worker’s hands. His music is made up of very little more than these elements on this LP, and the odd pad, or synthesised string never stays for too long before it returns to these core parts.

Marquis Hawkes’ ability to channel a vocal into this formula is unmatched in House music today, and whether he’s using an obscure sample or parlaying the services of Jamie Lidell and Ursula Rocker on the mic on the LP, he adds a dimension to his music that is perfectly suited for this listening experience.

From the high-energy disco-stomper of “We should be free”, featuring the vocals of the aforementioned Lidell to the bicep bulging acid beat of “Tough Love”, Marquis Hawkes covers all corners of the dance floor on this one.

There’s a stifling energy that pulses through the entire album, transporting you to dark a smoke-filled hovel strewn with all the colours of a modern-day club room. There’s a little something here for everybody, from Garage to Disco and of course House, with the artist doing away with any eccentricities that might cloud the purpose of the record. It’s an album of Marquis Hawkes doing what he does best… making bold, potent House music.

 

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.  

Espen T. Hangård – Primær

In the aptly titled “Primær” Espen Hangårdmakes his debut in electronic music, turning his resources from the world of Metal to the alien distant planet of electronica for a punchy and slinky Electro album. Trading in his guitar and microphone for synthesisers and drum machines, after a lifetime of colluding with the dark forces in doom and trash metal bands of nefarious sorts, he makes his debut as a producer with a brooding and mesmerising take on the DIY electronic music genres.

Although Espen T. Hangård is possibly best known for his work as the lead singer and vocalist for NoPlaceToHide, he has been known to dable with the dark arts of electronic music, like that of  his atmospheric doom metal side- project like Altaar.

“Primær” is an entire world away from any of Hangård’s previous musical works however, as a beat-orientated Electro LP,that yields some interesting curiosities, undoubtedly informed by his own musical history and experiences. The extended repetitive loop of “Es ist” takes the listener on an evocative journey through a  breakfast  TV aerobics workout after the short opener “16” Jupiter” to stake its claim in a late eighties musical palette.

Incisive percussive rhythms deliver bruising body blows as they pummel their way through the centre of track with a 303 bass line warbling away in the foreground with dynamic flair. This opening track deceives however, because beyond “Es Ist” we find  more fuller arrangements than the stark opener.

Brooding synthesisers romanticising about melodic synth wave hooks, prance above ferocious gnarling bass-lines and skipping break-beats. Somewhere between DMX Krew and Depeche Mode,  Espen T Hangård’s music lives. Each track makes its own particular statement and besides “Es Ist” they only stay long enough to make their mark and then hand it over to the next. The soundscapes are lifted straight off the eighties program patch these synthesisers arrived with, while the beats run through systematic patterns like an old binary computer. It’s in the way Hangård combines them in which they find that ineffable charm.

“Turbo” and “Left Hand Pad” are some of the more memorable moments on the record and are very much composed like songs with melodies that require something a little more than one note. Arranged through distinct phases, Hangård applies some craft to the electronic domain on “Primær” and the result is an album that lasts beyond a functional design or the instant moment. These and the small imperfections Hangård allows to linger on from the recording process, gives “Primær” a particular hand-crafted sound that does away with any posturing. It’s laid bare for the listener to take from it what s/he will.

Primær doesn’t break any new ground nor does it try to assimilate genres in tactless promiscuous ways in order to consolidate the artists other musical projects. It’s just a good solid electro album from somebody that has been a long time fan of electronic music.

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.

Photo by Mats Gangvik

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.

Charlotte Bendiks delivers Phantasymix

Erol Alkan lures Charlotte Bendiks over to Phantasy for the label and blog’s mix series.

Our IRONI resident, Charlotte Bendiks headed over to Phantasy for their fairly young mix series and delivered an exhilarating hour of intense beats and vivid sounds for the 16th edition. “Charlotte Bendiks has become one of dance music’s most exciting and offbeat new figures” says Phantasy’s John Thorp and she showcases this in the mix with sounds that entice the listener over to the dark side. Muddy synths and off-kilter melodic arrangements show Charlotte’s moodier side in a mix that tempts the body.

Accompanying the mix is a Q&A with Charlotte  where she talks about “depressing secrets of Norwegian drinking culture, the pressure of curating the music for her Aunt’s wedding and exclusively reveals that she has been living as a ghost.” You can read that interview in full here and catch Charlotte Bendiks in our booth again in two weeks for IRONI.

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.

 

The cut with Filter Musikk

Let’s take you on a skewed trip down memory lane, from a time when the record store towered above the skyline like a grail-shaped beacon of light for the nerdy music enthusiast. A time when anonymous DJs played cumbersome plastic discs to an army of youths dancing in a parking lot. We’re assimilating a hazy past lived through youtube channels and bargain-bin finds in thrift stores through contemporary music; piecing together an abstract narrative like a Terry Gilliam film.

This week on the cut with Filter Musikk we’re romanticising the good ole days through a pair of Bootsy Collins’ rose tinted glass, cursed with a dangerous cocktail of the the Jedi mind-trick and Ron L Hubbard’s Dianetics. Picking through the latest arrivals at Filter Musikk this week, we’ve found a handful of records that conjure a very tangible past for us, memories that we’ve adopted as our own from some distant collective memory that we’ve completely misremembered.

On this wistful Wednesday we’ve got some selective nostalgia with Roland Lifjell as we look for some intangible connection to the past through new music. We’ll make unsubstantiated claims about refutable links to electronic music’s time immemorial, and look to the recent records offering some wispy connection to the past. 

 

Marius Circus – I Feel Space (In The Garden) 12″

From viral youtube video to one of the best selling records of the season. Unless you’ve been avoiding social media for fear of being coerced into reading some “fake” news, you would have seen Marius Circus’ live interpretation of the Lindstrøm classic and unofficial ode to Giorgio Moroder, “I feel space”.

It’s ok, Lindstrøm is cool with it and gave Marius Circus permission to post the video, who somehow also then got the rights to publish the version via his Secret Garden imprint.  And if that wasn’t enough, he then roped in Andrew Weatherall into the equation with a remix of the new version and we’re left typing out emojis where words have failed us.

Marius Circus has pulled a rabbit from a hat with this 12”, framing the Lindstrøm classic in a new light for a new generation. In his homage of an homage, Marius Circus delivers a punchy, bright version of “I feel Space” that pays some due respect to the original and with a reverend touch, moving it from one pedestal to the next. His delicate work with the track, laminates the melodic reverie of the original in a glossy finish.

Andrew Weatherall releases it again from its plastic sheath and scuffs it up with a size ten doc martin pounding on a breathy kick. Taking Circus’ pristine work and clumsily handling it with a child’s impatience, Weatherall’s muggy interpretation would be more fitting under the title “I feel trapped” , giving us a record with two very distinct tracks on it.  

 

Bell-Towers – My Body Is A Temple (Unknown To The Unknown) 12″

Like that video of the early raver kids dancing to some inaudible sounds projected from some ephemeral fane long after the party is over, Bell Towers channel some obscure sounds from disparate corners in their 12” for Unknown to the Unknown, ”My Body is a Temple”. There’s a hint of the macarena in that synthesised latin percussion that introduces the track, which falls to the background as various retro synths course their way through the arrangement.

It’s a downtempo synth-House track with all the playfulness and irony that we’ve come to expect from the UTTU  label. Remixes from Bell Towers and Andras give us a couple of stripped down, sleek remixes of the original, but it’s the original that maintains the allure, with just the right amount of selective nostalgia to lure the stalwarts, while giving the progeny something to insta-snap about on their handy.  

 

Krikor – Pacific Alley In Dub (L.I.E.S. (Long Island Electrical Systems)) 12″

Krikor Kouchian’s 2017 album Pacific Alley was one of the most memorable albums of that year. Wielding an army of vintage synthesizers like Zelda’s sword, the French producer carved out 11 tracks of wistful sonic adventures that put you in the 8-bit drivers seat of Out Run, cruising PH1  with “the Dude” as your driving companion.

The album was perfect, it wanted for nothing, but if you were going to do a remix version of it, hell why not do a dub version. It’s like “the Dude” stepped in through the John Malkovich wormhole. If you’re going to mess with perfection you might as well go abstract with it. We’re glad Kouchian left Niños Matadores perfectly untouched, but tracks like “White Snow”, “Onda Vaselina” and  “Hermanos Cerdo” do well in dub. Accentuating the heady, unhurried style of Kouchian’s music the dub treatment adds a new more dance floor orientated dimension to the tracks, without losing the eccentric vibe he cultivates on the originals.

 

Volruptus – Alien Agenda (bbbbbb) 12″

The Icelandic rave alien makes returns to his home planet on Bjarki’s bbbbbbb after a sojourn on Nina Kraviz’s Trip. Lysergic bass-lines drip from intemperate beat arrangements in a sound that Volruptus has claimed ownership over on three releases to date. Using the TB-303 like a talkbox to make contact with other planets, Volruptus sends them afloat on a steady beam of raunchy electro beats at death defying speeds through the galaxy, and on this release he’s held nothing back.

Nothing on this release gets quite as close to the appeal of alien transmission on the first release, but the Icelandic artist is nothing if not determined, and you better strap in for “Misanthropy (Dark Stöff) V1 M1”, that one will eat you alive.

Putting up a slender grey finger to the musical establishment and common decency, “Misanthropy (Dark Stöff) V1 M1” takes off at 180 BPM and propels you into the next dimension, to the absolute limits of where a kick drum and an acid bass-line can take music, as it starts coming apart at the seems.

 

Giant Swan – Whities 016 (Whities) 12″

I, for one am happy that Techno is going into this direction again. Acts like Giant Swan and O/H from last week have taken up the call from the likes of Broken English Club, Silent Servant and Regis as they return to the raunchy sounds of early European traditions from the eighties and nineties.

Distorting synthesised communique with hell take great big chunks out of the atmosphere, while mammoth kick drums and percussion punch large holes through body music arrangements. Channeling that sound and punk attitude from the likes of Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb into a contemporary dialect, Giant Swans are one the most exciting groups currently active in Techno.

We find the UK artist (Robin Stewart) on Nic Tasker’s Whities with three tracks that take no prisoners and gives no quarter, bricking up walls of sound, only to break it all down again with juggernaut beats. It’s a malicious, bear-knuckled sound,t tamed in the halftime rhythms they favour over the relentless pummeling of a four-four distorted kick.

Giant Swan takes some of the best elements of past versions of Techno and assemble tracks by throwing everything against a wall to see what sticks, and the result is a crunchy DIY music that’s instantly gratifying and never retreats into obvious a morphisms.

 

Album of the week: Neneh Cherry – Broken Politics

In a world increasingly dominated by politics, Neneh Cherry has decided to negate the current angry rhetoric, retreating from the choir of the  disenfranchised, the forgotten and the partisan, in an introspective album that approaches the eternal “broken politics” of our society in a poetic way. As Joe Muggs explained in his review of the album for Bandcamp, “Neneh Cherry’s very presence is a political act” and since 1989’s debut album “Raw Like Sushi” she’s been making formidable political statements through her music.

Falling in with a punk crowd when she first moved to the UK from Sweden, Cherry found inspiration form the likes of Viv Albertine and Ari Up (she would later perform with the slits too) and channeled the raw energy of punk into a popular format assisted by the future trip-hop beats of Cameron McVey, who would later go on to create Massive Attack and take Cherry’s hand in marriage.

Ever since Raw Sushi, Neneh Cherry’s dusty beats and singular voice has left reserved, but dominant imprints on the musical landscape. “Homebrew” and “Man” followed in the wake of “Raw like Sushi” before a long hiatus after  the critical success of Man. The opening track “Woman” was her answer to James Brown’s  “A Man’s World” and set a striking tone in 1996 in the era of UK Girl Power groups like the Spice Girls. (Incidentally “Woman” was released the very same month as Wannabe.) Alongside the pensive “7 seconds” with Youssou n Dour released, it made the name Neneh Cherry a household name in the late nineties.

After” Man”, Cherry receded from the limelight, working as a broadcaster and occasionally as a DJ, and performing and recording  with other musical projects throughout the years. In 2014 she returned in her eponymous role with “Blank Project”, an album she wrote with McVey and which was produced by McvVey’s 21st century counterpart Kieren Hebden, aka Four Tet.

When it was time to follow it up, Cherry turned again to Four Tet in the producer’s chair and “Broken Politics” cements a new era in  Cherry’s enigmatic recording career. It seems that their relationship in the studio matured with the nimblest touches from keys and strings padding out Cherry’s word association lyrics. Like piecing together extracts from her personal diary, Cherry  compounds all the world’s problems in a mournful soliloquy.

“Broken Politics'” lyrics touches on some very contemporary political issues from African migrants drowning at sea, to the US gun laws and feminism, pieced together like a collage from disparate outtakes in a way that echoes these prevalent issues.  It’s nothing new to a musical activist like Cherry, who has been confronting some of the very same issues in her music since the 1980’s, but on this album she gets more intimate and personal than ever. The solemn minimalist arrangements compared to “Blank Project”, gives Cherry’s vocals the space to breathe and linger with the listener.

The way Cherry’s voice and the lyrics form an intricate symbiotic relationship with the music that contrasts and emphasises with the content, is the best it’s ever been. Although her songwriting style might not be as literal as it was on “Buffalo Stance” or “Woman”, the contemplative way she strings her thoughts together as lyrics on “Broken Politics” strikes a very particular nerve that feels like the artist is bearing her most personal thoughts on these matters.

Ross From Friends – On the Web

Googling Ross from Friends…

friends.wikia.com says:

Ross Eustace Geller, Ph.D. is a fictional character from the NBC sitcom Friends, portrayed by David Schwimmer. Ross is considered by many to be the most intelligent member of the group and is noted for his goofy but lovable demeanor His relationship with Rachel Green was included in TV Guide‘s list of the best TV couples of all time, as well as Entertainment Weekly’s “30 Best ‘Will They/Won’t They?’ TV Couples”.

Ross Geller’s middle name was supposed to be Eustace? I never saw “the one with Ross’ middle name”. Here he is playing a keyboard like an ass:

Anyway this is not the Ross from friends we are we are looking for. We’re looking for Mr Felix Clary Weatherall, the UK House DJ better known by his moniker Ross From Friends. Although he shares his real name with UK electronic music royalty Andrew Weatherall, there’s no relation apparently, just like there is absolutely none with David Schwimmer’s character  rom friends.

Besides what you heard, David Schwimmer is not actually suing Weatherall for the name, but the source of his chosen DJ moniker is dubious nonetheless, and it seems Weatherall’s intent on misleading the music media.

In an Interview in XLR8R he claims:

“The reason I chose the name was because there was this TV in the studio where I was making music that had a DVD of Friends jammed in it and it was stuck on. So every time I made music, the TV show Friends was constantly playing while I was recording. If you listen carefully you can hear some of Chandler’s sarcastic quips in the background of my tracks where the mic picked it up.”

But in a clash interview he says:

“Well, funnily enough really, Ross From Friends was… We used to have these top Trump Trumps cards when I was a kid and, basically, I had all the characters from Friends on there. And it was like, you know, Rachel, Joey, Gunther etc. Stuff like that. And then, for some reason, Ross’s card said ‘Ross From Friends’ on it, rather than just ‘Ross’. And so, you know, yeah it came entirely from Top Trumps.”

And in a Ransom Note article it gets completely weird:

“My Uncle, when we were living in Dubai, began a company that acted as a middleman distribution unit for furniture from the manufacturers to the stores. In this industry, because of packing, glass objects like windows and mirrors we’re specifically difficult to ship. So each distributor had a sign that would indicate whether they sent mirrors or not. My Uncle had a sign that said ‘Sends Off Mirrors’ to indicate that his distribution plant would, in fact, send mirrors. After staring at this sign over long summers of working at the plant, I discovered that ‘Sends Off Mirrors’ is an anagram of ‘Ross From Friends’ and so it kinda stuck!

Yeah it did kinda stick, and like DJ Boring, DJ Seinfeld and DJ Windows XP, a quirky name was part and parcel of a new trend that emerged in the early part of this decade that became the phenomenon referred to as LoFi House. Here’s DJ Seinfeld explaining it what it constitutes on this very blog:

 “Lo-fi has become a catch-all term for a silly DJ name and a disco edit with some distorted hi hats.” Weatherall’s explanation of the sound is a little more wistful, focusing on dance music’s evocative past. “I do it because I’ve gained a real love for the old-school sound, where it really just sounds worn-out and knackered, and it’s got a lot of character. Everything’s very crushed and compressed.”

In addition to the sound of LoFi that it was also about the meme-like you tube videos created by random fans, videos like this one:

LoFi house was a self-perpetuating hype machine that with no real influence from the artist it dominated search engines and youtube playlists like a Skynet super-bot. Today Spotify has a LoFi playlist of their own (featuring a smiling Ross from Friends on the cover image no less) while music media outlets like Thump are left scratching their heads about the algorithm proliferating the music through the internet.

As much as LoFi House was a trend-based thing for the Internet, and a new genre for the music media to latch on to, it wasn’t and it isn’t. It’s a just a modern interpretation of an old school DIY House music which had gone by Nu Groove in the past, and is adopted today in the larger canon of House.

Ross from Friends in some ways ratified it as House this with his debut album Family Portrait. NME said “Family Portraits’ paints a vibrant and touching picture of what dance music can mean to people” in their review of the album while Pitchfork chose to interpret that in a different way with “the UK producer attempts to shake the shackles of ‘lo-fi house’ in search of a more nuanced understanding of dance-music nostalgia, but he can’t quite escape the shadow of his influences.” Whatever your opinion of the album, its impact is undeniable as one of the biggest House albums of 2018.

Even Rolling Stone magazine jumping on the bandwagon with their more-than-generous 3 and a half star review, whatever that means.

According to RA, the album “which took over two years to make, was inspired by a trip Weatherall’s parents took in 1990, before he was born, throwing soundsystem parties across Europe, and also by the dance music they played in the house as he grew up. “ Although judging by Weatherall’s track record with the media I would question the validity of this, but there’s a video to prove it and there’s definitely a family resemblance there, unless it’s just Ross from friends dressed up like Jerry Seinfeld.

Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder is the label behind the release and Ross From friends contributed a new track to their upcoming compilation too.

Touring the release of his album, Weatherall has opted for a live show, featuring guitar and saxophone. Although an accomplished DJ in every respect according to his peer DJ Seinfeld, the live show certainly has an undeniable energy to it as seen from this Boiler Room TV. At some point the guitarist is playing on the shoulders of some guy. We do not condone this behavior however.

Ross from friends is bringing this to Jæger this weekend as part of the Family Portrait tour with the Hubbabubbklubb DJs presiding and in a message on the Ransom Note about this tour he said:  “Make sure to catch us, Ross From Friends, at various bars and clubs up and down Europe—and remember—the first 30 people through the door get a free Topman iPod touch case!” We can’t confirm this will actually happen, but we did have to get some towels from Ikea for the event, so make of that what you will.

Googling Ross from Friends October 25th 2018…

Oh, one last thing, if you do see a Ross From Friends that bears striking resemblance to the real David Schwimmer you’re in the wrong place and should probably check your pockets and contact the police.

The cut with Filter Musikk

Video killed the radio star when Sting told to the Dire Straits I want my MTV, but as music television turned scripted reality and the radio fled to the internet, there was a singular constant that remained steadfast in its resolution… the record store.

It survives the hype and the format and even when it might not be at its most popular it quietly waits, biding its name for the next revolution. The record store, is a relic from the past, but also the last remaining outpost for discernible musical tastes. It’s the only stop for DJs and enthusiasts alike, and whether you buy your records online or at some physical address, it’s the closest you get to the music through the recorded format.

In Oslo, Filter Musikk ticks those boxes. In our small town with big city aspirations we value and embrace that human connection that Filter Musikk offers. It makes music the tangible artistic expression, our last remaining link to the artists and their music in a digital world occupied by holograms and insta celebrities; where alien signals from exotic locations sell consumables to an unconscious audience.

Filter Musikk is a retreat and an escape from the brutal noise of this digital signal, and our last and only port of call to the music that matters. Here a record exists for the sake of the record, because the artist and the record company thought it was good enough to cement it in time in the physical format, for generations to come.

It’s the music that exists long after you’re hard drive is full and the cloud has evaporated. It’s the music that will outlast us all. These are the last physical records of human ingenuity and artistry and in this feature with Filter Musikk we celebrate the latest editions to this ever growing library.

This is the cut with Filter Musikk.

 

Various – Börft Dance Classics Vol. 2 (Börft) 12″

Börft records are constantly jumping the border with Sweden with an armload of records for Roland and Filter Musikk. Earlier this year they delivered a few boxes from their back catalogue and now their back with a few compilations from their classics archive and a bunch of a stickers.

Börft dance classic Vol 1 and 2 arrived in the same box and this second one particularly caught our attention, because it features FRAK, the artist that started it all for Börft over thirty years ago with the label’s first cassette, “Raggarslakt”. None of those tracks are on this compilation however which comes from a more mature era in the label’s lifetime.

Tracks recorded for the label between 1997-1999 constitutes this release with a particular focus on the dance floor behind the selection. Tracks from the aforementioned Frak, Crinan, Kord and Pean Romel appear together and have aged gracefully from a time when House music was still very DIY, but had started figuring out what this button does in the studio.

There’s a fervent and impatient energy to the tracks that at the point it reaches Crinan’s Jeti sounds like Tom Cruise after he got into Xenu’s cookie jar. Simple, repetitive refrains stay the course through extensive dance floor workouts that make absolutely no concessions for anything outside of a DJ set or club.  

House music has hardly strayed far from these ideals documented on this compilation today, but over the years it might have lost a little of this urgency and reflecting on this day is both nostalgic and inspiring.  

 

RXmode – Degraded (The Transhumanism Remixes) (Bass Agenda) 12″

A boy’s sullen visage greets us on the cover of this record in a mood that pulses through the entire record. RXMode returns to the UK label Bass Agenda for a malicious Electro romp on Degraded and ropes in TFHats, w1b0 and Slaves of Sinus for a bunch of transhuman remixes.

The original offers a bouncing beat with a snare whipping at the surface texture of the track. A 303 bass-line burbling up somewhere from hell itself, sticks to the subterranean frequencies with a sense of malign intent mirrored in the atmospheric soundscape of the rest of the track.

TFHats or Tin Foil Hats, offer the most interesting rendition of Degraded wadding a vocal lead line in the mix and completely making it their own. It harks back to a time of Nitzer Ebb and Front 242 and we approve this message.

 

Luke Eargoggle – Computer Nights (Börft) 12″

In amongst the re-issues and greatest hits records in the Börft box also came a few new records, maintaining the label’s relevancy on the electronic music landscape. It’s odd that Luke Eargoggle has only been on Björft once before – on the 2015 train to illusion record which has been repressed recently – seeing as the two musical entities are practically from the same region and that they both dwell in the obscure corners of electronic music. Or maybe he has?   

For those of you who don’t know, Luke Eargoggle is to Electro what Kurt Loder was to MTV. (Yes, there’s a theme emerging here just bare with me.) Luke Eargoggle has been making funky Techno and Electro for the best part of a lifetime, and he’s been proliferating it for just as long through his label Stilleben records. Computer Nights is the recent, or quite recent, addition to an immense discography that has seen him waver little from the original sound of Detroit and Chicago.

Computer nights could easily have been sleepless nights as Mr. Eargoggle appears restless and solemn, piecing together effervescent textures with jack hammer beats. The title track contains some curiosities as it jumps through some slight tempo changes, something that gets incredibly accentuated when you drop the speed to 33 too. We should have more electro at 90 BPM in my opinion.

The whole EP is a fast-paced pursuit to arrive at Grava 4 in a spaceship guided by a broken computer. Melodic lines like the de-tuning synth on “I heart you” and the discontented synthesised choir from “Vampire Kollaps” give Computer Nights a very peculiar edge. There’s some disturbing nightmare laying beyond the funky rhythms and the major key melodies, but it’s all going to be ok, we’ll get there soon.

 

O/H – Market Values (L.I.E.S. (Long Island Electrical Systems)) 12″

Rhythmic noise is used to describe this latest offering from Ron Morelli’s label L.I.E.S on Discogs. Isn’t all music just rhythmic noise? O/H or Ontario Hospital follow up 2015’s Future Ready on Opal Tapes with Market Values… and just in time for Halloween.

Fragments of distortion and the disenfranchised samples of some audio scion, scratch like nine inch nails on a chalkboard under the draconian control of Techno formations. Four-four kicks and sequenced bass-lines are unable to contour under the pressure of Techno’s strict parameters as pieces splinter off into the ether in a magnificent spray of noise.

A disgruntled vocal at the centre of all the tracks spewing angry phrases on the record, bemoaning the age of hyper capitalism. O/H actually have something to say here and they’ve found the prefect sonic expression on Market Values for their anti-capitalist vitriol. It’s still a Techno record, a Techno record with a functional design, but it’s also a record that’s angry and tries at least to make an impression beyond its initial purpose.

 

A Homeboy, A Hippie & A Funki Dredd – Total Confusion 2018 Remixes (Rising High) 12

“From when MTV played good stuff” says Roland Lifjell and sends me this video. We didn’t get MTV in South Africa until 1997 and before then we were still listening to the radio and looking up at the moon, but the hyper-colourful video does well to emphasise the sound of this record. It’s an early 90’s rave classic, music from when MTV was still young and idealistic.

And that’s it, we got back to MTV! Woo Hoo! It’s been one hell of journey, but we made it. It’s the end of the article and we accomplished a narrative arc… I’d like thank you all for sticking with us and see you all next week.

A brief exchange with Ejeca

In 2012 AUS records paired the emerging House duo, Bicep with Ejeca and propelled two careers from a single track, “You”. Although the former had already released EPs previously, the record established Garry McCartney’s career as Ejeca who released a string of EPs that very same year and hasn’t stopped since. “You” is a slow moving track with euphoric peaks as it paces through a half time break beat. A ghostly vocal sample rides a tide of synths like a lonesome echo in the fog.

Ejeca, the Belfast artist and DJ had been making music since his teens and started DJing shortly after, playing Techno for the discerning tastes of close family according to a sixatthegarage interview. From his first solo release, Krunk he went on to release 12 inches and EPs for the likes of Waze & Odyssey’s W&O street tracks, 20:20 Vision and Unknown to the Unknown.

Ejeca’s music is built on the foundations of House with elements of trance, breakbeat and acid, pulsing through punchy dance floor arrangements on his releases. There’s always a melodic line or harmonic synth ascending to ephemeral heights in his works while sub-bass lines rumble at the depths below ground.

McCartney has established the label Exploris in this singular pursuit with releases from the artist and others like Dema and Chris Hanna filling out the catalogue. In recent years he’s split his musical narrative in two with his trance edit project Trance Wax, lieteraly taking its cues from the likes of Sasha and Moby’s music and pitching it down to the more palatable House tempo where McCartney’s music lives and breathes.

As Ejeca he’s hung up the headphones for a moment and taken to the stage in a new live show that has been taking him all over the world. After a recent sojourn to Australia and New Zealand, he’s back in the studio. We caught up with McCartney and Ejeca for a quick exchange to ask about his musical origins, his workflow and the Belfast scene before he jets off again to Oslo and Jæger.

*Ejeca plays live this Friday at Frædag.

Hello Garry and thanks for taking the time to talk to us. I believe you’re in the studio right now. What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve just got back from an Australia and New Zealand tour which was great. Production wise I’ve finished of Trance Wax 5 and two Ejeca EPs have also just been sent off for cutting, all three will be out in the first half of next year.

 

Do you usually have an idea for a record framed in your head before you even start recording or composing something?

I try and mix it up during the wake and make a different ‘genre’ each day. For instance I’ve been making a lot of jungle and drum and bass lately, it’s good but not good enough to get released yet. I find varying what you make really helps your sound gain originality.

What are the key ingredients to a piece of music that makes a record an Ejeca record for you?

It’s hard to answer but I think I keep things simple. There is always a nod to the 90s in my tracks, whether it be house techno or trance. I think nostalgia is a key thing to me.

I believe when you started DJing you started with Techno. What drew you to House and how did your surroundings and Belfast play a role in your development as an artist?

I used to buy and mix a lot of hard techno. Old Liebing and Beyer stuff, as well as DJ Rush, Viper XXL etc. I just liked the groove and tempo. At the same time I was in to French house, Crydamoure and Roule were great labels. All of this stuff was played in different rooms in Shine in Belfast 15 years ago. Sadly Shine has recently closed, and end of a 23 year era.

How did you go from being Djing to producing, and what effect has producing had on the way you DJ?

At first I produced, I would have been about 12 using the early version of FL Studio (Fruity Loops). I can remember making techno tracks with samples of Cartman from South Park :-/

I would always see myself as a producer first, I like djing but I feel most at home in the studio.

 

In an interview with you there’s a reference to an Irish scene. Is there a scene in Belfast and who and what are the key players there?

We have people like Calibre, Boxcutter, Phil Kieran, who have defined genres in the past. I know now for a small city there’s a huge amount of underrated producers who are making great stuff so the underground production scene is very vibrant.

I’ll let you get back to your work then, Garry. Is there anything you’d like to add before we see you next week?

I’m really looking to visiting Norway for the first time, I’ve heard great things about Jaeger! See you on the dance floor.

Album of the Week: Ross From Friends – Family Portrait

Ross from Friends (Felix Weatherall) might have his tongue firmly in his cheek when he’s being interviewed, especially when talking about the origins of his chosen artistic alias, but when it comes to music, he’s nothing if not serious. In one of the most anticipated albums of the year, Ross From Friends went from a DJ and producer of niche form of House music to an international musical sensation.

Since “Talk to me, You’ll understand” his second release, he’s been on an upward directory, facilitated by the Internet and Lo-Fi, the musical label that derfines his music as a funny DJ name, distorted hats and meme culture. Wether it’s David Cameron humming his breakout hit through his resignation speech or the video of the precocious youngster for “Gettin it Done”, the Internet has played a major role in bringing Ross From Friends to the wider world, but it’s always been more than just a meme, a funny DJ name or a tag and from behind all the layers of irony and jokes a very sincere debut album emerges called Family Portrait.

Family Portrait finds Weatherall perpetuating the strain of House music he’s developed on EPs for Lobster Theremin and Magicwire for a more involved listening experience. Off kilter samples, mutating into alien atmospheres, play provocatively against the backdrop of sinewy digital percussion punching holes through cloaks of synthesised pads.

Weatherall’s musical palette reaches further than it’s ever done before, incorporating elements of breakbeat, garage and R&B in its DNA, while moulding it perfectly for the album of format. It’s a Ross From Friends work made for introspective listening moments on a set of headphones on an old iPod, and while it remains as playful and energising like his dance floor workouts, there’s also an invisible calm to the album.

Filler tracks like “Back into Space” and the more reserved pieces like “The Knife” set a melancholic mood, while “Thank God I’m a Lizard” and “the beginning” – which obviously comes at the end – maintains the Ross from Friends connection. Weatherall is not exactly charting new ground for his sound on Family Portrait, but merely contextualising it in the same way he’s done with the live show in the traditional club format or the guitar and saxophone framed within electronic music dialect.

Family Portrait has subverted the natural shelf-life of similar Internet sensations and established Ross from Friends as more than the sum of its parts.

Prins Thomas compiles 4-hour mix for Smalltown Supersound

Smalltown Supersound celebrate their 25th anniversary with a mix by Prins Thomas.

The Oslo-based label Smalltown Supersound called on longtime affiliate, Prins Thomas to compile a mix celebrating their quarter century and the Prins obliged with a 4-hour mix featuring everybody from Sonic Youth to Ricardo Villalobos. It’s called the The Movement Of The Free Spirit and will be released late November as a cd Box Set with the first disc available  as LP too.

It’s a monster mix with an extensive tracklist covering three CDs with 10-15 tracks on each. Joakim Haugland of Smalltowen Supersound told RA that “Thomas has followed the label since the early beginnings. Back in the days I was always thinking: ‘He’s a house/disco DJ—why does he want my noise records?’ I realize now I wasn’t smart enough to understand his scope… While I have always struggled to describe what the label is, only now—with this mix—I can finally say: This is what it is.”

There’s an unreleased Bjørn Torske & Prins Thomas track in the mix and it includes music from the label and beyond. There’s a heavy Norwegian presence with Biosphere, Jaga Jazzist, Lindstrøm, Diskjokke et al on board as Prins Thomas perfectly presenting the sound and concept of Smalltown Supersound on this mix. We might have to install a CD player in the café for this one.

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 DellaFirst 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!

 

Homero Espinosa

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

 

Da Capo stands in for Black Motion during Oslo World

Black Coffee protege Da Capo joins the Oslo World line-up and Black Motion reschedules for early 2019.

Due to some unforeseen circumstances Black Motion are unable to fulfil their commitment during the Oslo World festival and we have to wait just a tad longer to get the South African DJs at Jæger, but it’s a two for one as we get Da Capo to stand in for the duo. While we’ve rescheduled Black Mortion’s appearance at Jæger for the 18th of January 2019, South African House artist Da Capo will take their place for the Oslo World festival.

A burgeoning talent on South Africa’s enduring House scene, Da Capo has been nurtured under the wing of South African House music monolith, Black Coffee, and like his peers Black Motion, he makes esoteric House music, bringing together influences from home and further abroad.

Da Capo is Nicodimas Sekheta Mogashoa is a self-taught producer & DJ who first fell in love with house music at an early age enabling him to have a good ear for music and the unmistakable ability to create blazing sounds to keep masses salivating for more.  It earned him his spot amongst South Africa and the world over as a highly regarded producer at the tender age of 21.

Inspired by the biggest names in the house music industry such as Nick Holder, Zepherin Saint and Andy Compton, to name a few, Da Capo has set forth on a journey to create his mark on the House Music scene with the release of his Solo EPs released under DNH Records  elevating him to the status of a household name in countries far afield and clubs around the world. Recently he’s signed a deal with Toronto based Music Label DNH Records owned by well-known DJ/Producer Nick Holder. 

You can find out more about the event here and here.

Drexciya Submerged

Watch a short documentary on how Drexciya went underwater and then to space through their music.

Cropping up today via Resident Advisor comes this short documentary on James Stinson and Gerald Donald’s Drexciya and the underwater concept at the centre of their work. With some audio commentary from the Stinson, Donald and Techno luminaries  Jeff Mills and Stingray, RA delves briefly deep into the sci-fi, water-world of Drexciya in this documentary. There’s some interesting factoids on the origins of these concepts in black American music history – it stretches back further than you think – and the reason why Grava 4 is named Grava 4.

 

 

 

Tickets for Hubbas Klubb with Ross From Friends is available now

Limited tickets are available now for Hubbas Klubb with Ross from Friends through Ticketmaster.

Avoid the MC Kaman guestlistpqueue mayhem and secure your ticket for Hubba’s Klubb on the 27th of October, when Ross From Friends joins the Norwegian troubadours in our basement for a live set. You can read more about the event here, and get your tickets here.

We have only released a limited amount of tickets for pre-sale, and there will still be some tickets available on the night at the door.

Ross From Friends has just released his debut LP, Family Portrait and his accompanying live show has been getting some incredible reviews already. Here he  is doing his thing for Boiler Room:

Hubbabubbaklubb also just released their critically acclaimed debut LP, Drømmen, Drømmerne, Drømmer this week, and the band will be playing a DJ set in the company of Ross.

Album of the Week: Hubbabubbaklubb – Drømmen drømmerne drømmer

For as longs as I’ve been in Oslo there has been talk of an album. It was an album, that was a mere abstract thought, talked about in hushed tones and reverend whispers in clandestine locations. It always left a tense air of expectation wherever it went and it hadn’t even had a name yet. Today it has a name. Hubbabubbaklubb’ debut LP is finally here and it’s called; Drømmen drømmerne drømmer. What had been a metaphysical concept since the Oslo group released their first single has found its way into physical form and it’s occupying a very special place in our record collection. The album was released over the weekend with great fanfare and spectacular sold-out live show dubbed the flying circus in Youngstorget, but beyond the hype a truly remarkable musical document exists. Its up there amongst Todd Terje’s “It’s Album Time” and “Prins Thomas & Lindstrøm” as one of the best Norwegian LPs of our time.

Hubbabubbaklubb is something of an Oslo supergroup with people like Joystick Jay, Olefonken and André Bratten making their own significant contributions on Oslo’s musical soundscape as solo artists. Lead singer Morten Skjæveland is the force behind events like Skranglejazz and Hubba’s Klubb and a DJ, while brothers Pål Ulvik Rokseth and Ole Ulvik Rokesth influences can be felt in various other musical projects from the city, like Gundelach. Together, although sans André Bratten lately, they’ve been releasing music as Hubbabubbaklubb since 2013, absorbing various other musical characters in a mercurial band of troubadours whose sound moves through the great expanse of the known musical universe like a solemn glacier, consuming all and everything in their wake.

In many ways Drømmen drømmerne drømmer is a Hubbabubbaklubb greatest hits album, containing the singles “Mopedbart”, “Tomme Lommer” and “Eddie & Suzanne”. In the context of the album however there’s a sinuous bond that exists between these tracks and the rest of the album, that suggests they were always intended for an album, together. It seems like this LP was five years in the making with songs like “Mopedbart” – and I’m sure there are a few previously unheard pieces that are just as old if not older – only maturing with age.  The album is not  framed within a single contemporary period because these older pieces, which much like the fotos and the lyrics pasted on the impressive gatefold sleeve, exists beyond time, it’s a truly timeless record.

Drømmen drømmerne drømmer is made up of partisan songs, each with its own subtle differences, coming together in a truly distinct Hubbabubbaklubb sound. Lead vocalist Morten Skjæveland’s shy melodic reveries expressing lyrics with a nostalgic tongue in cheek  glare is in the foreground of the Hubbabubbaklubb sound with slow modulating textures moving through the gaps between beats and bass lines. There’s a delicateness to their music that is accomplished in the studio, where they distribute parts evenly across the musical spectrum like a band of musical Bolsheviks in a Monty Python sketch. Through a few key elements, they lay down serene textures that envelope extensive sonic pastures like an impressionist painting, with far reaching musical influences informing their work.

Whether they are getting folksy on “Fjellet” or tapping into soul and funk with “Den Hvite By”, the parameters of their sound are not exactly concrete, reaching far into a eclectic spectrum of music, but it’s always delivered in a way only the Hubbabbubbaklubb could. Remarkably they manage to channel this into one distinct voice every time throughout the record.

Each song is its own all-encompassing universe, and its hard to remember an album with so many radio friendly singles contained on one record, but there’s also a fluid exchange between the tracks where in the context of the other they only work in the album format. Like a William Burroughs narrative or a Quentin Tarantino plot-line, Hubbabubbuklubb create a fully-formed picture out of musical vignettes that come together under auspices of the LP. There isn’t a insignificant moment on Drømmen drømmerne drømmer and everybody will have their own highlight on the record. Much like those record mentioned earlier, Hubbabubbaklub’s debut LP has all the markings of a modern day classic and a truly timeless record.

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. 

The Cut with Filter Musikk – The nearly Norwegian Halloween special

Frozen pizzas, Waffles, French bistros, Friday Tacos, Latin dance halls and Hamburger joints; you don’t get much more Norwegian than that. This week on the cut, it’s a Norwegian invasion… well nearly. Coming in fresh off the press to Filter Musikk this week were a lot of represses and dominating the new releases was a very Norwegian contingent. “Why don’t we only pick out the Norwegian records this week,” said Roland and who are we to argue with the proprietor of Filter Musikk.

Roland Lifjell is an ardent supporter of the local scene. In amongst the records that make it onto shelves in his store and into record collections of local DJs, is a substantial Norwegian selection. Records from the local labels and artists make exclusive premieres at Filter Musikk on a weekly basis, often getting a headstart on the big distributors and stores further afield in Europe.

We’re not nationalists, but Norwegian music and DJ culture is some of the highest standard you’ll get in the world. People covet the vinyl format here, only perhaps equal to the way they do in Japan, and nowhere else in the world are you able to find so many good DJs per capita with a serious investment in music. Yes, even Berlin pales in comparison. In Norway, music, digging and DJing is very much a way of life thanks to high salaries and a lot of free-time (fr everybody except Roland though) and it’s made a fundamental imprint on the musical landscape through the artists and records they’ve released. Todd Terje, Full Pupp, Sex Tags, Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas are just a few of the exports, but there is so much more to be discovered, if you dig just a little deeper.  

That’s where Roland Lifjell comes in. He prioritises these records, placing them up on the display rack, and always holding one or two back for some of the dedicated followers and, of course his own record bag. At Filter Musikk it passes directly from the label owner (and often the artist) to record store and eventually to consumer. It’s a very personal exchange that Filter Musikk facilitates in Oslo and that’s why it stands as bastion of music and Dk culture in the city today.

So let’s get into it, the Cut with Filter musikk, a nearly Norwegian special.

 

Kahuun, DJ Fett Burger, DJ Grillo Wiener – Batteri – Strøm (Sex Tags UFO) 12″ repress

“Last time i heard this was 2000 omg .classic dd”, says one discogs user. Sometimes the classics never die and that’s why the repress exists. Fett Burger and Sex Tags is not the type of label to just do a simple repress anr this repress of “Batteri” is not just another copy of the original UFO03. To change things up, Fett Burger delivers the new original track “Strøm”, featuring DJ Grillo Wiener on the b-side of “Batteri.  

It’s a Norwegian invasion on this release, as Telephones join Fett Burger and Grillo Wiener for a feisty House workout on Strøm. Raucous percussion, played by Telephones apparently, and gnawing bass-lines counterpoint the energy of Kahuun’s track on the A-side. It’s bit more DIY and less polished than the A-side, but it definitely worth it if you don’t have a copy of the original pressing.

“Batteri “still steals the show. It’s lasted the test of time and some 18 years on from when it was originally made it still sounds great. Shakers and hand percussion interject with rapturous delight as warm rhodes chords form a languid bed of harmony for a very dense arrangement.

 

Velferd – Visions Of The Unknown (Maksimal) LP

Bergen calling… Velferd ponders the universe, space and the unknown in this six track LP for Maksimal. “Visions of the Unknown“exists somewhere between the Blade Runner soundtrack and the restless sequential melodies of Giorgio Moroder. A retro Sci Fi theme pulses through the record with both visual and sonic cues from a simpler time when spacemen wore fish bowls on their heads and robots were the evil spawn of mad scientists.

An arsenal of eighties synths, exchange beatific melodic lines between unwavering drum computers pounding out rhythms like an unionised android. Although only six tracks long and  could as well be an extended EP or a mini album, there’s a theme running through the tracks that tie the dots in an album-like narrative.

It’s a archetypal Norwegian sounding record with upbeat melodies, airy textures and crisp hi-hats transposed from Disco into the modern, digital age. “Visions of the Unknown” is Velferd’s third only release and it was released with an assemblage of quirky sci-fi-themed videos for each track. “Ventures” is the pièce de résistance on this release, but it’s worth the wait as you play through to rest of the record.

 

Luca Lozano, Telephones – Double Vision EP (Klasse Wrecks) 12″

Luca Lozano’s Klasse Wrecks has spawned a new concept: Pairing two producers on the same release with an original track and a remix from the counterpart. The first in the series features Lozano himself and Norwegian producer DJ Telephones.

Lozano does a trancy break-beat rendition of the Balearic sound on “Ibiza Bullshit Necklace”. A jittery harmonic refrain follows the apprehensive break-beat as stabs of synthesised horns interject the progression. Like a view of the beach from Café Del Mar through a glitching television screen, Lozano plays on the quitessential “Ibiza” sound here focussing on the artificial in a distinctly Luca Lozano way.

Telephones forces Lozano’s efforts into a more restrictive mould with a 4/4 House beat and the Norwegian softens the edges of Lozano’s original through some temperate pads, in a more rose tinted interpretation of the “Ibiza Bullshit Necklace”. He maintains that mood on his original, “Tonya vs. Nancy” with that unique DJ Telephones penchant for atmosphere very much at the heart of this release. It does however get a little repetitive, and Luca Lozano corrects that on the remix with what has become his trademark break-beat arrangements.

“Funnily the remixes on each side are the best tracks imo” says Tim Reade of Discogs, “Particular mention has to go to B2, Luca Lozano’s remix of Tonya vs Nancy. Total killer!” We agree with Mr. Reade here, although that’s not saying the originals are anything but good either.

 

DJ Fett Burger, Dj Candle In The Wind, Macho Macho Burito Band – “Feed Me” Take Out Vol.1 (B.L.A.D.) 12″

We’ve talked at length about this release a couple of weeks back, but now it’s available in the more affordable 12” format too. If you couldn’t see yourself forking out the whopping 400kr for the special limited edition of this Pizza Box record, you can now own it in a very demure and modest simple white cardboard sleeve.

 

Restive Plaggona – Unready To Exist (Sacred Court)12″

Well, we did say nearly Norwegian. Roland Lifjell sneaked this into the pile when we weren’t looking. Restive Plaggona is Dimitris Doukas, a producer most likely residing in Berlin, who has been making cinematic electronic music for imagined horror movie soundtracks over the last two years.

“Unready to Exist” is his first 12” after an incredible (almost impossible) run of tapes and LPs over the last two years as Restive Plaggona. The music draws some correlation to acts like Lumisokea, FIS and Vatican Shadow with a severe focus on sound design and approach music with the ear of an auteur. The introduction, ironically called “Bad Endings” makes a very potent, unsettling introduction that immediately establishes an air of tension that sticks to this record like a symbiotic host to its parasite.

It’s a record that comes just in time for Halloween, a record that will haunt your dreams with malevolent arpeggios and terrifying percussive motifs that strike at some primal fear in us all. Blood curdling tones cloud the record like a ghostly miasma, invoking the spirit of John Carpenter and Stephen King with a very 1980’s kind of sonic template suspended over a modern industrial foundation. It’s a record for dark nights and ominous moods.

 

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.

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!

 

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.

 

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!)

Album of the week: Death Grips – Year of the Snitch

Death Grips are to the music industry what Banksy is to the art world. They have undermined their label Epic, releasing music for free over the web before the official release, provoking the industry at every turn possible from the artwork to their performances. They cancel shows and tours at a whim and when they do perform it’s usually with deprecating air of contempt on their faces. They’re constantly teetering on the edge of destruction, like when they dismantled the project while riding the immense wave of success that came after their third studio album “No Love Deep Web” only to reform again a few months later.

The California duo made up of vocalists MC Ride and drummer / producer Zach Hill are a volatile force that aggressively subvert expectations with an anachronistic attitude supplanted directly from Punk. Their recorded works  channel this into furious diatribes, a carousing cocktail of industrial, punk and electronic noise with dissident disdain while animalistic, primal performances deliver a glaring view from the side of their world through brutal noise, drenched in tension.

They’ve been actively recording and performing since 2010 with records like “Money Store” and “No Love Deep Web” receiving great critical acclaim and tracks like “I’ve seen footage” and “Guillotine”” taking some of the top honours in various best of lists through the years, only probably fuelling the group’s intense aversion for these institutions. After some much debated will-they-won’t-they through 2017, they’re back in 2018 with “Year of the Snitch”, their first record in two years, dispelling rumours that they’ve broken up again.

It’s officially their 6th studio album, but Death Grips have lost none of their edge, and have only grown more incensed it seems. Violent staccato guitars and jittering electronics fuel Zach Hill’s furious percussive onslaught while MC Ride delivers obtuse outbursts from his microphone like a young activist with nothing left to loose trying to incite a riot. There’s no peace to be found on “Year of the Snitch”, as the LP powers through 13 short, electronic Punk tracks, cutting through the quiet like a sharpened incisor violent tearing at the flesh. “Year of the Snitch” is Death Grips baring their teeth like never before.

There’s no knowing what inspired this album or fuelled their rage, the notoriously media shy band still refraining from fielding any nosy questions from reporters, but even if it’s just subconsciously, something gnaws at the current atmosphere of discontent spreading through the world. Everything Death Grips does, there’s always been some abhorrent socio-political undercurrent goading their fervour. Everybody said Punk would be the music that will soundtrack this new era of discontent, but few knew that it was already here and it was called Death Grips.

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.

The cut with Filter Musikk

Freddy K once famously told us: “If you have a club with good resident DJ, that is culture.”  He went on to explain that this culture is also about the radio station that proliferates the music, the clothes you wear to identify and most importantly the place where you go to buy the music. Well, he didn’t say “most importantly”, but he might as well have. The record store is still the bastion of any good DJ culture today. Some of them might have moved online, but most still peddle their wares out of a physical store. In Oslo there is only one place that fits that profile and that is Filter Musikk

It’s Oslo worst kept secret and also somehow the city’s richest trove of hidden musical treasures. It lives beyond the media hype of the moment with records carefully selected by proprietor and DJ, Roland Lifjell. Years of hands-on experience and the wisdom only age can bring, supplies Oslo on a near-weekly basis with some of the best, new music around.

A stalwart in the Oslo DJ community, Roland doesn’t merely play us the records we want to hear, he is the invisible force behind the soundtrack of the weekend in the city. That barely audible din that you hear sweeping across the city every Friday and Saturday night, that’s Roland Lifjell; the record you hear only once, but you can’t shazam or find on the internet the next day, that’s most likely hidden on a shelf in Filter Musikk; and that sound of the future or the familiar melody of a distant past, they all converge on a premises in Skippergata.

That is culture, or at least a vital part of this culture. The club would be nothing without a place to buy the records and the records would have nowhere to go without the discerning tastes of the record store owner. The record store, for many is still a place for new musical discoveries and re-acquaintances with old favourites.

Some of these you’ll find on-line, but most of them are often saturated by the excessive releases that dominate the release cycles and the only place you can siv through the muck to get to the gold, is still a record store like Filter Musikk. Here’s Filter Musikk’s cut of some of the best releases that arrived during this week.

 

Mr. G – That Cold Sweat EP (Phoenix G.) 12″

We just can’t get too much of a good thing, and while many of us are still reeling from Mr. G performance in Jæger’s basement from last Friday, Filter Musikk sneaked in a copy of That Cold Sweat EP to keep the momentum going. It’s a limited release produced specifically for record store day and if you were in our basement, you might remember one or two tracks from his set.

Mr. G has his thing down pat. There’s nobody in House music that can touch Mr. G’s sound. It’s a mixture of his experience as a sound-man a DJ and a digger that converge on his MPC. Jacking beats and well-directed samples make up the crux of this EP again with music made for DJs. Having said that, “Flex” throws up a bit of a surprise with that downtempo beat and filter bass. It’s just more of G-thang, a good thing.

 

Thomas P. Heckmann – Body Music Remixes (Monnom Black) 12″

Thomas P Heckmann released one of the most pithy records of 2018 and yet very few people picked up on it. It was a powerful display of Techno, Electro and EBM and while everybody was trying themselves in the popularity of Industrial, No-Wave, EBM, Heckmann released an album that put them all to shame.

Body Music was a master class in the fundamental ideology of Techno from the German producer and while it should have dominated the genre this year, it was largely ignored by the “savvy” world music media. Possibly it was just too good, and anything else released this year as a Techno, EBM, Electro album  just pales in comparison.

Coming via his Monnom Black label in a shade of red that would make Brett Kavanaugh blush, it’s a release that should come with a health warning, because if you are in any way predispositioned to vascular illnesses, DAX J’s opener will certainly not bode well for you. There’s no mild-mannered kick-snare introduction here. It’s Rob Zombie getting his hands on a 303, a rollercoaster that starts at the peak… It’s what Techno should sound like.

Heckman brings Karl O’Connor (Regis) and Simon Shreeve (Mønic) back together as Cub for a remix of “Acid Head” and gets CJ Bolland to put his spin on that track too. It’s good to hear the Horrorist on there too, one of Techno’s most sincerely underappreciated artists. He’d been away for some time, but since 2016 has been very active again, staking his rightful claim as one of the the genre’s most unique artists alongside Heckmann. He’s clearly still got it on the remix of “Departure”. Thomas P. Heckmann’s Body Music is the album that just keeps on giving.

 

Mesak – Kisko Kisko EP (Roots United) 12″

Yet another Finnish Electro export. Mesak(also known by Velcro Fastener) is one of the more fluid Electro artists out there today. Incorporating elements of abstract electronica in his works, his EP’s can go from IDM to ambient, but on “Kisko Kisko”, he’s electro close to the Electro denomination.

There’s DJ Overdose and Mono Junk on here too just to bolster the association in case there was any doubt. Mono Junk appears as a vocalist on “EBT”, and that’s a curiosity in itself. There’s a weird glitchy nature to Mesak’s music which takes some time to warm to, but once you get around the jagged edges of the tracks, his music intrigues and he puts a very unique stamp on his interpretation of this style of music.

The DJ Overdose remix of “Kisko” is more traditional in comparison if you’re looking for that kind of thing, by why settle for the obvious?

 

Joan Bibiloni Band – The Boogie (Sotofett remix) (Saft) 12″

It’s a reissue of the obscure Disco classic by the Joan Bibiloni Band. We love reissues, it really sticks it to those Discogs speculators, hoarding rare records and not even listening to them. They’re like hedge fund managers of the music industry who in turn are like the black eyed peas of the finance industry… just really the worst people.

This reissue comes with a really abstract interpretation of the original from Sex Tags man, Sotofett. The Norwegian producer tears the original arrangement apart and rips open a hole to some alternative dimension. Warping delays and scattered fragments of vocal snippets ebb and flow between the bass guitar line and the only semblance of some sanity throughout the track.

It’s a remix for the adventurous DJ and an audience with an open mind, but if there’s always the a-side for the more conservative Disco fan.

 

Timothy J. Fairplay – DX Marks The Spot EP (Body Works) 12″

Timothy J Fairplay is the eponymous moniker of Junior Fairplay, who we mentioned right here on this feature some weeks ago. Here he straps on a keytar with one hand while manipulating a bulky drum machine with another for a synth wave release on Body Works.

“DX Marks the spot” might be some reference to the Oberheim DX drum machine, and it certainly like sounds like that on the title track with a kick that is screaming to break out from the speaker. Sequence synths running parallel with percussion while melodies and pads pile on in extreme eighties subtlety, infuses retro sound design with a modern minimalism throughout this release.

The EP conforms to this formula, but each track makes its own impression with unique melodies coaxed from some ghostly miasma lingering your conscious some time after. It’s a full-bodied release and “PHANTOM GUARD DOGS OF CHOMOLUNGMA” particularly resonates for its ghoulish charm. What’s your favourite?

 

Olefonken does the Alumni Mix

The Frædag and Jæger resident heads over to Red Bull Music Radio to do the alumni mix.

Leisure Suit Larry goes on Hurtigruten in Olefonken’s mix for the energy drink’s online radio channel. A quirky mix from the mind of an eccentric artist, the Hubbabubbaklubb musician combines outlier pieces with a particular melodic and ambient disposition.

A soothing collection of tracks spanning the 1980’s to the present, Olefonken’s music taps into that original Balearic spirit. Polyrhythmic melodic phrases exhale into the atmosphere through luxurious synthetic voices pulsing at a reserved rate. The mix ends on a track taken from the debut Hubbabubbklubb album, a record we’ve been anticipating for some time and is finally due to arrive with us sometime in October.

Olefonken is back in the booth at Jæger this Friday for our bi-annual DJ Maraton.

Øyvind Morken appears on Vodkast

Øyvind Morken recorded a mix for the Vodkast crew out of Tbilisi.

A while back Øyvind Morken played Horoom in Tbilisi for the Vodkast record label night. Horoom / Bassiani have been in the news a lot of late and it seems on all accounts that they are turning the tables on their battle against the conservative authoritarian forces  at work in Georgia trying to do away with places like Bassiani. Vodkast is one of the institutions in Georgia currently leading the charge, as one of the only labels and record shops distributing the sounds of electronic music in the region.

Øyvind Morken clearly made an impression and the label, record shop and club night asked him back to record a mix for their podcast series. Øyvind Morken is “strictly on a weirdo-wave-vibe with this one” with a mix that sounds much like the opening hours of his Untzdag residency. Down-beat with a psychedelic fusion of obscurities this mix was recorded to “get deeper acquainted with that monday blues” according to the DJ and a “dining room music mix” according to Vodkast.

Album of the week: DjRUM – Portrait with Firewood

DjRUM (Felix Manuel) makes music assembled like a collage from the disparate sounds of London’s various musical sub-cultures. He is c a product of his surroundings with elements of Dubstep, Garage, Grime and even Jazz pulsing through every release. Polyrhythmic percussion is at the nucleus of DjRUM’s sound, moving through tracks like stop-motion cinema, laying the foundation for expressive minuets of melodic flourishes. No two consecutive phrases are ever the same with a very organic musical approach to melody and harmony through his EPs and LPs.

2013’s “Seven Lies” stands as a particular testament to a symbiosis between the machine and the human in electronic music during a time when conservative robotic rhythms and mechanical melodic refrains started becoming more commonplace. Manuel had found a home at 2nd Drop Records, a label that seemed to exist solely for his music, but also a home that could nurture his music without forcing its own influences on the precocious talent.

After a string of EPs and an album for the London-based label, Manuel found a new home on R&S in 2017 and a year after making his debut on the label with “Broken Glass Arch”, he returns to the LP format with “Portrait with Firewood”. It’s the format best suited to Manuel’s work and it delivers no unusual surprises as a DjRUM album, with the producer still channelling all those eclectic influences through his very idiosyncratic metaphorical amplifier. There’s the polyrhythmic foundation yet again wit  expressive melodic excursions suspended between phrases into fully-fledged composed songs, but on this occasion there’s also a new element that has found it’s way into DjRUM’s music.

There’s a new animated quality to his music that hasn’t really been there with live strings and piano coursing their way through the LP. While Manuel has always composed from the piano, it’s never been so prominent on his music before and a track like “Creature Pt.1” is not something that would really have made an appearance on “Seven Lies”. Manuel’s music, although luscious and visceral had always remained quite boxy, a mere result of the digital age, he was born into, but on “Portrait with Firewood” this has notably changed.

This new sound quality really highlights the depth from which Manuel’s music gestates. Even a track like “Showreel pt.3” with its erratic drum n bass excursions and unforgiving chattering of filter resonance, bows to the piano punctuating phrases as they trail off from the last note in to the next. It’s a marvel of visceral quality that has been there in Manuel’s work before, but never quite touched so intimately on the artist working methods.

What had been composed on the piano was refined through the electronic realm, but on “Portraits of Firewood” that is not the case. Piano motifs are lifted straight from the instrument and accompany the live strings perfectly. It’s a feat of production  in the way Manuel combines these with electronic elements, each complimenting the other as if their created from the same source.

Whether it was accommodated through the R&S budget or simply the next natural evolution in DjRUM’s music is unclear, but “Portrait with Firewood” is the greatest expression of Manuel’s work up to this point. It shouldn’t deflect from the inherent beauty of all his work, but it is the music DjRUM was always meant to make.

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

Ivaylo lands on Cassy’s Kwench

Ivaylo joins Jay Tripwire and more on the Fusion compilation for Cassy’s Kwench label.

Ivaylo has been busy. After releasing some new music with Slammer for Cymawax and while he’s prepping a bunch of releases for a myriad of labels, he’s headed over to Cassy’s Kwench records for the label’s new compilation series, Fusion. He is in good company amongst the likes of Avision, Jay Tripwire, Hector Moralez, Paco Wegmann, Pete Moss, Onur Özman, Sisto & Jack District.

Ivaylo adds the deepness with “Marcel’s Vista” on this House compilation, with some female vocals and elongated pads filling out the looping, bass and kick theme. Hats and shakers sparkle over the top amongst the wispy textures as Ivaylo gives us a space to breathe in amongst the more energetic tracks  from his peers.

It’s available today via Beatport.

Album of the Week: Martyn – Voids

Martyn (Deijkers) launched his electronic music career back in 1996, playing Drum n Bass in his hometown Eindhoven after hearing an Ed Rush set. He released his first record as a DnB artist in 2005 but by 2007 he fell in with a new crowd as Dubstep would make its mark on the world. He released his first album, “Great Lengths” during that time, which in many ways became an epithet for the genre at the arc of its narrative. His second LP “Ghost People” was an instant critical success and where Great lengths introduced Martyn to the world, the sohpomore established him as one of the greatest producers of his generation.

As the walls around Dubstep started to crumble, letting in a new flood of influences and its major players moved on to other aspects of music, it would also be a catalyst for Martyn’s next phase as a producer. Leaning on influences of early House and Techno with the studio prowess of Drum n Bass, with significant hints of Garage and Dubstep, Martyn’s music became an amalgam of his all things past, present and future. By his third album, “The Air Between Words”, he’d beyond what had been dubbed Bass music by the pundits, with that effects can be discerned through the larger narrative of electronic music, inspiring a whole new generation of artists and musician.

Martyn’s innovative ear as a producer and his transient influences as a DJ and music enthusiast is constantly in some flux, especially on his albums and it makes for intriguing listening experiences with no two albums from his catalogue ever alike. On his fourth studio album and the first for his newly adopted home Ostgut Ton he re-affirms this position with “Voids”.

Born out of the idea of “space” that Martyn encountered on M’Boom (a seventies percussive Jazz record) while recuperating from “near-death experience”,  “Voids” is still unmistakably a Martyn record with interlacing  percussion rolling out from under the waves of sub-bass drawls while familiar keys and synths pad out the exterior of his productions. There’s a definitive connection between Martyn’s previous album, taking the sound and stripping it back further, while expanding on the polyrhythmic nature of his music.

While you can really M’Boom’s influence on tracks like “Mind Rain” and “Nya” with their effervescent clattering of rhythms, there’s something else we discern on the record that subverts everything else on the record as the dominant character of the record. A coldness prevails throughout “Voids” that lends a darker tone to Martyn’s music on this LP. There’s a boldness to Martyn’s music we haven’t really heard on previous albums as the producer expounds on his minimalist creations with a soupy humidity. Although there are fewer elements on “Voids” than have been on Martyn’s music in the past, the music sounds much bigger, and there’s much more taking place in the spaces between the lattice like textures.

Kicks swelter in the muggy air of the swampy bass synths while busy percussive parts puncture the higher frequencies of the tracks. Martyn’s eclectic nature still prevails and elements of Garage and Drum n Bass find some bridge to Techno and House with Martyn’s unique focus on rhythms at the fore of the whole album. There’s no universal narrative to discern from the album, but there’s a comprehensiveness to the album, which like Martyn’s previous albums set a unique tone separating it from previous LPs.

Martyn doesn’t really evolve through his albums, but each one makes its own indubitable mark on his discography, often falling into a larger narrative of musical trend that can be inferred on his music. “Voids” yet again makes a mark, but on this occasion there’s no particular zeitgeist or scene that is currently tracing an arc through music, and as such this LP stands very much on its own.

 

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 Cut with Filter Musikk

We need a keeper at the gate of good taste. House and Techno’s popularity has reached the high water mark and inevitably a tide of shit has spilled onto the shore with it. With more music, comes more bad music, somebody once told me and we are in desperate need of a filter, a steadfast patron to wade through the muck to get to the gold.

Roland Lifjell has taken up the inglorious task of providing this service for Oslo and Norway and through his shop Filter Musikk he’s been the purveyor of good taste for over two decades. The shepherd to our herd, he’s saved a few of us from the innocuous drone of the boring by only presenting us with the records worth listening to and saving us from the rest.

Amongst the chaos of empty boxes, synthesisers and records at the Skippergata boutique store a calm order prevails. There’s some primordial instinctiveness that guides us through the shelves cataloguing the entire history of electronic music from House to Techno, and no end of hidden treasures waiting to be plucked.

Walk over to Roland’s “office” – it’s the cluttered section behind a pillar – and tucked out of sight, down on the floor, close to his feet a pile of records wait, still sealed in their plastic sheaths waiting to be encountered for the first time. These are the new arrivals. No, not the new releases. They are yesterday’s news and tomorrow’s classics and the records that are waiting for a place on the shelf. The records we’re interested in are the new news.  

In what is becoming a weekly, although erratic tradition Roland gives us first dibs on these freshly acquired pieces and with the help of the veteran music head, we pick out a few of our favourites.

 

DJ Fett Burger, Dj Candle In The Wind, Macho Macho Burito Band – “Feed Me” Pizza Burger (B.L.A.D.) 12″  Limited Edition pizza box with magazine

It’s a record in pizza delivery box! The crew behind the illustrated zine, B.L.A.D have put together a compilation of music with a fast food theme, burned it onto a record, and slapped in a pizza box with the latest edition of zine. It’s one of those records where the presentation alone is enough reason to just get it, and throw in some music from DJ Fett Burger, Vilunki 3000 and Macho Macho Burrito, and there’s no reason not to get it.

Ok, that’ll be 450kr! If you’re not willing to part with that kind of money for a 12”, “don’t worry says”, Roland Lifjell, there’s going to be an unlimited 12” version of this record in the near future.

Although DJ Fett Burger’s artery clogging alter ego Pizza Burger is on the lid, it’s Vilunki 3000’s appearance on this record as DJ Candle in the Wind, Earth and Fire (what a great name) that steals most of the show. The Finnish DJ and graffiti artist’s flair for the eccentric, delivers two funky, esoteric horror-sci-fi-fast-food mashups for this release. “Pizzeria Zombie Miserable-Theme” and “Pizzaria Robot Woman Theme” are two cyborg-balearic cuts, pieced together like an institutional collage with guitars, eighties synthesisers, vocoders and drum machines colluding on the fringes of sanity.

Macho Macho Burrito slings a slinky bass hook over a new-age Disco arrangement in a very DJ friendly cut for a monosyllabic rhythm nation, while Pizza Burger orders last call at the counter. The squealing high energy House of Pizza Quattro Formaggi Senza Formaggio is instantly subdued by the rattling digestif of Pizza Hawaii Con Salsiccia E Vino, marking the compilation’s outro in a record that just shouting to get played.

 

Paranoid London, Bubbles Bubblesynski – The Boombox Affair (Paranoid London) 12″

Paranoid London pay tribute to LGBTQ activist and DJ, Bubbles Bubblesynski (Anthony Torres), who was shot and killed last year in San Francisco in what many are still claiming was a hate crime.

Paranoid London described the enigmatic DJ as the “exact kind of lunatic” they like to work with and although a collaboration had been on the cards between these two monoliths of electronic beat music, it never came to fruition due to Torres’ untimely passing. Instead Paranoid London ripped the vocal from the late DJ’s facebook page and strapped it to a slamming lysergic dancefloor workout as a fitting homage to Bubbles Bubblesynski.

Two versions, stripping the original down to functional DJ tools complete the release, but it’s all about the a-side on this one and the memory of Bubbles Bubblesynski. 

 

Dominik Eulberg – Abendpfauenauge & Oleanderschwärmer (Apus Apus) 12″

Two pensive Tech-House tracks with a Lepidopterist theme mark the latest release by German producer Dominik Eulberg. Like Darwin on the beagle, Eulberg explores the natural world on “Abendpfauenauge”  and “Oleanderschwärmer”, invoking the moth like he did the fauna and flora of the two previous releases of his Apus Apus label.

“Abendpfauenauge” and “Oleanderschwärmer” are long-form odes to the winged insect, biding their time through progressive arrangements and downtempo beats. A subtle beauty envelopes the the tracks as entrancing melodies flutter in random patterns through evolving themes. Swarming around the incandescent glow of the dance floor, 4-4 beats and a repetitive rhythm section keep the tracks from spiraling off into obscurity, with genial themes never wandering too far from their origins.

“Abendpfauenauge & Oleanderschwärmer” is a masterclass in composition for the electronic format from a sincere musical perspective and even if you’re not necessarily a fan of the artist or this style of music, you have to admire it for its technical perfection and melodic beauty.

 

Legowelt – Omnibus Babylon EP (Clone West Coast Series) 12″

Legowelt continues to make incredible music by that old Bunker adage: That the music they’ve pedaling is still the ultimate sound of the future. It’s the sound of the future as it was some thirty years ago but for people like Helena Hauff it “still sounds more futuristic than anything else”.

Legowelt has been making this style of music for as long if not longer, and although his creative pursuit changes, the music he makes still lives by this unwavering code. Ominous Babylon might be a Clone record, but there’s an unbreakable line connecting this record with his first record for Bunker, “Pimpshifter”.

Clattering atmospheres on beds of mossy synthesisers and rubbery bass-lines bounce and retreat through syncopated beats over four tracks that are unmistakable Legowelt creations. There’s always a cavernous depth to Legowelt’s music which he achieves through the wispy tails of his arsenal of classic synths, enveloping the listener in a mantle of sound. While the title track is Legowelt as minimalist as he can get, the outro “Golem Memory Bank” tips the other end of the scale, bordering on the ambient realm.

There’s no real urgency to add this to a Legowelt collection, but the ardent fan will have to have it, and if you ever needed to get into Legowelt, why not start here. It’s as good a place as any.

 

Steven Rutter & John Shima – Step Into The Light (FireScope) 12″

FireScope is the brainchild of B12’s Steven Rutter after making a triumphant return to music a few years back, bringing the B12 name back into everyday circulation and stepping into a career as a solo artist while establishing FireScope records at the same time.

It’s a busy label with an unusually large catalogue (considering its years) and a striking visual aesthetic. It’s an extension of the artistic persona behind the label and in many ways it’s the continuation of the B12 sonic identity. Steven Rutter as the main aesthete, has assembled a group of artist around the label in pursuit of his artistic ideology, including John Shima.

Rutter joins Shima on “Step Into The Light” with an EP of DIY electro cuts, soundtracking the future of a parallel timeline, broken from the present back in the nineteen-nineties. Rutter’s always providing some musical narrative to a science fiction novel playing out in his imagination and on “Step Into The Light” the addition of Shima only bolsters this affect.

Percussive parts are pushed way back into the distance, where they form part of a complex entangled aerie of sound. The presence of legato synths mobs every track with lethargic melodic layers intersecting each other in a measured progression that extends a  single moment of time infinitely.

“Disjointed Route” with its detuned, bouncing melody is the most curious of tracks on “Step Into The Light” and for those that require a bit more urgency in their music, “A New Day” provides a more immediate pulse.

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”.

 

“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.”

 

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.

 

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.

Album of the week: Various artists – We out here

Something is rumbling in the subterranean depths of London, and it’s not the underground. Ambling out from the sunken basement venues located deep within the city’s bedrock, a harmonious racket has returned to the streets of the capital city, reverberating with the echoes of a distant past and modulating with the present in a newfound fervour.

It’s the sounds of Jazz and it has been a while since London has experienced this style of music quite so intensely. All around the city a new generation of musician and artist has breathed new life into the genre appropriating it for their own unique devices through a modern, ephemeral perspective.

Just a few weeks back we featured the latest Kamaal Williams LP as a sliver of this new scene and you can definitely hear traces of it correlating on Leon Vynehall’s last album. Together with the likes of the Ezra Collective, Moses Boyd and Shabaka Hutchings, these young musicians and artists are currently re-writing the soundtrack to London’s nightlife and it was only a matter of time till somebody was going to compile and catalogue it.

“We out here”, a project that sprang into existence out of Brownswood Recordings  brings these artists working largely independently of each other together for the first time to document the origins of this new movement and spread the sound beyond London. Recorded over three days in a London studio, it captures a zeitgeist in a capsule of frozen sonic time, invoking the spirit of Jazz for a new younger audience.

Dusting off the stale connotations it has garnered through a couple of decades of self-indulgent technical prowess,  “we out here” and this new generation of Jazz performer is re-contextualising the genre within the effervescent melting pot that is London. Through the dialogue of a group dynamic and in the spur of the extemporised moment these artists and musicians gathered to re-create some of their live material for the recording.

The compilation is based on a fusion, freeform tradition of Jazz, but as much as it reflects the various diaspora musical traditions from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia through its unique compositions, it also reflects the contemporary musical landscape of London.

Theon Cross’ “Brockley” and its melismatic semaphore brass stabs lends as much from urban musical forms like Grime as it does from the shattered polyrhythmic foundations of Jazz. On Shabaka Hutchings’ “Black Skin, Black Masks” elements of Ethiopia pulse through the cornucopia of clarinets at the centre of a maelstrom trying to re-assemble broken percussive arrangements and swirling piano incantations. Kokroko create an assemblage of southern African tropes in their contribution, “Abusey Junction” but repurpose it in a distinctly Caribbean and Latin flavour, a feedback loop that bounces between origins in the way on London could inspire.

Tracks like “Black Skin, Black Masks” and the Ezra Collective’s “Pure Shade” feed off an intensity boiling over just beneath the surface that ebbs through the entire compilation. It burbles, often literally with the social tensions of the city, but at the same time it can be heard as a celebration of the unique diversity that London boasts. It’s in this fusion of diverse musical languages that “We out here” appeals and this is also the decisive point of unification between all these artists and their music.

It’s a diverse collection of music forged within the cauldron of a city with a complex social identity that can only ever really be communicated through the abstract language of art and music.

Ivaylo & Slammer team up for Hidden Origins

Ivaylo and Slammer release Hidden Origins via Cymawax today.

Arildo’s Cymawax gets longtime collaborators  Ivaylo and Slammer back together in this 12″, available today. Featuring two deep, melodic cuts from the production duo, “Hidden” and “Origin” doesn’t stray far from the sound of previous releases like “Breathe Easy” or “Guide Line”, but hardens the exterior of their sound for the purpose of the dance floor.

Jack-booted beats and tenebrous bass-lines contrast the brightwork offered by the melodies and harmonies for a more salacious outing for the duo. Trulz & Robin pounce on these aspects of the title track in their Tape remix, darkening the hue further in their interpretation of the original.

It’s the first of a series of releases from Ivaylo, the Jæger resident that sees him moonlighting on Cymawax and Cassy’s Kwench label before making a return to his own label, Bogota this autumn.

Hidden is available at Phonica today.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

In the heart of Oslo a place exists that’s a store, but also a refuge, a social hub, a job for some and a way of life for a dedicated few. It’s one of the last remaining record stores in the world that is still built around a sense of community, where regular customers come in not only to buy the latest records, but also just to hang-out, have a chat and listen to music.

The store, well it’s Filter Musikk and at the heart of the store is Roland Lifjell – proprietor, DJ, producer and facilitator. Always at hand with a new arrival or an old favourite, he’s eager to distill some of his experience and advice down to the next generation. He spends six days a week at the counter, personally serving every customer that steps through the door, and when he’s not there he’s either DJing, sorting his personal collection or working on his own music.

With a meticulous knack for picking new releases, Filter Musikk’s selection is eclectic yet esoteric. Walk amongst the shelves and it’s as if it exists purely for you, and regardless of taste or interests, there’s always something to be found. From the used, bargain bin selection to the sections for every Techno or House label in existence, you are always spoilt for choice at Filter Musikk.

At times it might be somewhat daunting, perusing the shelves, and especially the days when a new box of fresh releases arrive, so with the help of Roland and a whole lot of time on our hands, we present the cut with Filter Musikk. This week we start our journey at home, with a new batch of records from a local stalwart…

 

Rulefinn – Finnitus Edits #3 (Finnitus) 7″

We were in the store when (rule)Finn hand delivered his latest batch of edits to Roland and Filter Musikk. Roland could barely hold ‘em with his bare hands, that’s how hot they were. This is the third in a series of Disco edits (no duhh) Rulenfinn puts out via his own Finnitus label on the 7” format.

It’s Disco for a working man’s club, stripping down the sequence to reveal a fat man in a skin suit. A jiggling beer belly, a moist moustache and a pint glass in hand, two-stepping to an infectious beat, Rulefinn’s Disco edits cut back on the flair and glint of the originals for the barebones of it all; the beat, the bass and only a simple hook.

On this latest edition, Rulefinn provides two tracks, “Klabb & Babb” and “Eroding in Africa” anchored in the percussion and bass repetition. On “Klabb & Babb”, he adds a spacey dimension with strings and synths streaking their way through the composition, while on “Eroding in Africa” he turns his sights back to the motherland with Marimba and male vocal choir. It’s a disco edit… what more do you want?

 

Mbulelo Mehlomakhulu – Robotic People EP (Transmat) 12″

Some thirty years on and Derrick May’s Transmat records is still going strong with music that upholds that original ethos of the label from 1986. You can draw a definitive, unbreakable line between MS001 to MS089, with that essential futurist proclivity ebbing through the entire catalogue.

Mbulelo Mehlomakhulu is unknown, but his name suggest he might be South African. On the release he combines the explorative sounds of electronic music with the elusive timing of  percussive rhythms from genres like UK Funky, Kwaito and Gqom. The rhythms of “Robotic People” and “Orchestration” and the synthetic marima on “Panacea” adds a very African flavour to this record, while it remains firmly grounded in its electronic palette.

Like Ursula K Le Guin’s tribal-ésque vision of distant planets, this records sounds like an alternate universe where Techno was developed on the continent of Africa instead of Detroit.

 

K-X-P – 18 Hours (Of Love) / Tears (Optimo / Mika Vainio remixes) (Svart/Öm) 12

It’s a House remix of a rock band! That takes us back a bit, back to the glory days of labels like DFA and bands like Hot Chip, to a time where Morgan Geist is remixing the the Raptures; The thin White Duke is editing the White Stripes and Chicks on Speed are proclaiming with intense fervour “we don’t play guitars!”

The Scottish bad boys of House, Optimo remix Finnish prog-psych group K-X-P’s 18 Hours (Of Love) in this vein. They barely hang on to the vocal of the original, offering a pumping nu Disco version instead of the dubby progression of K-X-P. You don’t necessarily need to be a fan of the original or even the band to appreciate this mix, as Optimo expounds on the energy of the original for a proper club workout.

And now a moment of quiet to remember Mika Vainio… What must be on of the legendary Finnish composer’s last recordings, K-X-P offer a moment of pause on the flip of this release with a very solemn remix of their 2012 track “Tears”. R.I.P Mika Vainio.

 

Bjarki – Oli Gumm (трип) 12″

Bjarki is a prolific producer. In 2016 we saw the extent of his talents when he released three albums in one year on Nina Kravitz’ Trip records, and after a short sojourn on his own label bbbbbb, he’s back on Trip with Oli Gumm, and yet it’s only been less than a year since he’s last release on the label.

For Oli Gumm he gets back to that big room Techno sound that launched his career with “I wanna go bang”. With the weight of the world coming down on that kick drum and exploding into the atmosphere around it, there is no mystery as to Bjarki’s intentions. It harkens back to his live show he played at Jæger a few months back, where everything from the music to the way he arranged the lighting is completely fixed on the dance floor.

There’s the odd curiosity, an atonal melody or mechanical sample that puts Bjarki’s mark on these tracks as the producer contrasts the heady nature of the music with some moments of weirdness. Alone these elements would not appear to work together, but through Bjarki they simply meld together, that all-consuming kick’s gravitational pull creating a black hole into the strange and mysterious world of Bjarki and musical mind.

 

Zarate_Fix, DJ Sotofett – Arjun / Afroz (Sex Tags Mania) 12″

Sotofett teams up with Zarate_Fix on this two tracker for Sex Tags. It’s Electro with a deep low end, swathed in the ghostly reverberations of synthesisers. Melodic treatments erring on the side of psychedelic and rhythmic patterns based on the UK sounds of labels like Swamp 81 bring a warped edge to this release.

Zarate_Fix is the producer behind the Sex Tags Australian counterpart, Thug Records. The pair teamed up for the first time in 2016 on Planetary involvement for ZF’s label and where they were still feeling the other out on that record, here they’ve managed to find a unique groove together.

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!

 

Album of the week: Helena Hauff – Qualm

Helena Hauff’ relays a distinct energy through her music. From the moment you put a needle on a Helene Hauff record you are the presence of it, and whether it’s running along at 140 BPM or simply idling at an ambient pace it never dissipates.

The Hamburg DJ and producer has garnered a reputation for her enigmatic and uncompromising DJ sets that have in recent years set the tone for a new trend in Techno that looks to the more industrial sounds of electronic music. In demand and always in a booth, Helena Hauff’s output as a recording artist remains quite reserved, but when she does indeed set her sights on the recorded format, it’s as if she channels all that energy of her DJ sets through the studio.

Using analogue- drum machines and synthesisers in the same way they would have been used some thirty years ago, Helena Hauff’s recorded works hardly pander to the DJ’s needs, and in the LP format it truly thrives. Her 2015 album, “Discreet Desires” still stands as a masterclass in post-industrial electronica, humanising the harsh electronic exterior of inflexible machines.

If you hadn’t heard the name Helena Hauff before, by 2015 she was the darling of the Techno community and what listeners  found in her music was only the tip of the iceberg of what lay beyond in her DJ sets. Between then and now she’s re-issued “A Tape” (which is exactly what it claims to be) via Dark Entries, but besides an EP on Ninja Tune, her recording career has mostly reverted to the shadows of her thunderous DJ career. But in 2018 with much anticipation came her follow up to Discreet Desires, “Qualms”, with the physical copy finally reaching Norwegian shores.

“Qualms” hardens the exterior of Hauff’s music again, closer to what it sounded like on A Tape, with ferocious acid lines and jack-booted beats crunching and distorting under the weight of their mass. In “the Smell of suds and Steel” we might hear echoes of tracks like “Piece of Pleasure” from “Discreet Desires” as viscous pads coalesce around an unwavering rhythm section, featuring little more than an 808 and a 303.

“Qualms” gives some of the machines more freedom as Helene Hauff favours a sound that’s far less polished than its predecessor. Everything’s on the verge of cracking under the immense pressure of the kick drum like on the title track, where distant melodic phrases strain against the volume of the thunderous electro beat. It’s an album that feels very much spurred on by a singular moment with Helena Hauff making absolutely no concessions for the final execution, the artist completely exposed as she is.

Elements of Acid, Techno and Electro all gather in the confluence of Helena Hauff’s musical personality, but the way they are directed through her previous records and now “Qualm” can only exists as they do here through her distinct artistic voice. It simply adds to the allure of Helena Hauff and yet again establishes the artist as a unique entity in the electronic music landscape.

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.

Album of the Week: Broken English Club

For the past five years,  Techno veteran, Oliver Ho has been sculpting brutalist musical expressions as Broken English Club. The side project, which has featured on Jealous God, Citittrax and L.I.E.S has dominated Ho’s output in recent years, with the producer feigning the functional stomp of Techno for a music that lies somewhere between Swans, James Ruskin and a dystopian science fiction novel. Inspired by the works of JG Ballard, Broken English club combines elements of EBM, Acid, Techno and Electro with music that floats effortlessly between the dance floor and the album format.

On his most recent record for L.I.E.S, “White Rats” he leans towards the latter with an abstract narrative stalking the stark electronic ensembles. It strikes a general disillusioned tone through the soliloquies that accompany tracks like “Animal Town” and “Anonymous Death Tapes”as Ho creates a sonic backdrop as two dimensional as a slab of concrete and paints it with a rubber-like lacker. There’s a harshness to the music as synthetic stabs and hollow percussion jut out from the cold, brash backgrounds he creates.

For the most part “White Rats” plays on a monotonous, repetitive drone that lingers just a little to close for comfort with numbing effect. As Broken English Club, Ho has come a long way from his first album “Suburban Hunting” with the dance floor premise of his debut all but completely avoided on “White Rats”. “Funny Games”, “Let’s Play” and “God Man Dog” to offer some glimpses of the past with a regular percussive component to tap your feet to, but their repetitive nature and form inspire closer associations with a kind of ambient or drone style of music, than Techno.

I didn’t realise Broken English Club could strip its sound back even further, but on “White Rats” it’s succeeded. there’s never more than three or four parts playing at one time, but there’s a sense of space that overwhelms and almost suffocates the listener. Like Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori channeled through a set of headphones, Broken English CLub’s sound on “White Rats” confront the listener like and impenetrable wall. There’s this sense that you’re standing a big empty warehouse, but you’ve been made to face a cold wall, a wall of sound. It’s perhaps not the best album to get into Broken English Club for the first time,  but “White Rats” is certainly a powerful tour de force, and through every new album, Ho keeps nudging that envelop a little further away from his Techno roots and to further abstract corners.

 

In the booth with JT Donaldson and Ivaylo

Listen back to Jt Donaldson and Ivaylo’s back to back  for the Bogota showcase.

JT Donaldson joined friend and long-time DJ collaborator Ivaylo in the booth for Ivaylo’s Bogota records showcase a couple of weeks back.

JT Donaldson makes regular contributions to the Bogota records label both as a remixer and an artist and the showcase precedes their next jaunt together for the Ivaylo’s America, out on the 5th of October with JT Donaldson on remix duties.

The two DJs find a sinuous flow in this mix, recorded in our backyard. Years of experience working within the House music echelon, on occasion together, show its strength here, offering a peak time vibe that works on a set of headphones too.

You can read a full interview with JT Donaldson here and follow Ivaylo on social media, who’s got some exciting releases in the pipeline in the immediate future.

The Cut with Filter Musikk

Walk straight ahead of Oslo central station. Turn left onto the temporary cul de sac marking the end of Skippergata. On your right, a construction site where a big yellow crane looms menacingly over a building project reaching towards an unattainable stratosphere. On your left; a shop trapped in time. Walk to the glass plane door, past the the empty boxes in a display window, antiqued by sun and time. Open the door to the chime of an analogue bell and step through the portal. You have now entered the Filter Musikk zone.

An alternate dimension, independent of time and trend, free from the contemporary strains of autocratic forces, where good music is simply…Good Music. Roland Lifjell, proprietor, DJ and one of the original vanguard is the keeper of the gate, providing Oslo with the records we didn’t know we had  to have. The only record store in Oslo that specialises in electronic music, Filter Musikk is an isolated anomaly, a world that operates on its own accord.

It provides sanctuary and safe passage to the lost souls of Oslo’s DJ community who roam aimlessly upon the world. Watch as a newfound vigour and focus consumes them, as they scratch at dusty sleeves. Pass through the maze of boxes containing new- and used records and get lost in the musical labyrinth of Roland Lifjell’s mind. You won’t dare? Well, then we’ll just have to do it for you.

 

Privacy – New Product EP (Klasse Wrecks) 

Luca Lozano’s Klasse Wrecks label is one of the few places you can hear good breaks today. Besides making his own contributions to the label, he uses it as a platform for the unsung heroes from House to Electro.

Here he presents an Electro record from Privacy. This unknown artist is all about privacy and although we know nothing of the artist behind the records there have been records on Lobster Theremin and and Cultivated Electronics in the past. Here Privacy provides four classic Electro cuts on New Product.

As a DJ you need not listen further than  “Make yr transmission”, but each track makes its own mark. From the slow thuggish nature of “Whole Car” to the body slamming beat of “Manchmal” Privacy provides a few different points of view on Electro and breakbeat from this record.

 

Baba Stiltz – Can’t Help It (Studio Barnhus) 12″link

We still can’t figure out the appeal of Baba Stiltz. Is he just another one of these hip-to-be-square DJs re-contextualising the trite in the context of House music or is there more to the enigmatic Swede. Whether his misdirecting his audience with some eccentric cue from dubious sources or throwing in the oddball track in a House mix, there’s definitely something that draws you to the music. A bit egocentric and sometimes ephemeral we find ourselves constantly being drawn to his work.

This latest release finds the producer back on home turf with a 12” for Studio Barnhus. A long-time affiliate of the label, he reigns in the madness a little across two tracks, “Can’t Help it” and “This is it (Body Mix)”. Vocals add a mournful depth across the melodically rich productions that sit somewhere between Hot Chip and Stephan Bodzin. Designed purposefully and tastefully as dance floor cuts, Baba Stiltz puts his usual spin on these records, throwing eccentric curveballs, disemboweling the vocals on “This is it” and stuttering through the main melodic theme on the opener.

If you’re not singing along to “Can’t Help It” on the second listen, there’s obviously something wrong with you. We really like it, but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe that’s the appeal of Baba Stiltz?

 

Benedikt Frey – New Now (Live At Robert Johnson)

Benedikt Frey is Live at Robert Johnson’s cultist figure. Conjuring records that err on the side of witchcraft, he provides the darker hues to the Frankfurt’s flagship record label. Live at Robert Johnson operated out of Robert Johnson seems to let the artist pursue his/her own distinct sound and like previous records for the label l;ike “Reframe” and “Running in Circles”, “New Now” is Benedikt Frey just doing his thing.

Sluggish progressions through nebulous, hazy synthesis swathe break-beat percussive arrangements through the A side, much like “The Lobbyist” did in 2016. There’s always this element of psychedelia to Frey’s music which completely tips the scales on the “Clown Time” with fragments of incoherent noise rupturing the simple acid-bass-line and beat combination.

The title tracks sits on B2, where there’s always a surprise lurking, and here Benedikt Frey slows everything down to a near halt with a wavy Electro track.

 

Secret Squirrel – Secret Squirrels #18 (Secret Squirrel) 

You would have seen releases from this label like the shelves regularly at Filter Musikk. Secret Squirrel is a Disco and House edit label out of the UK that have cottoned on to formula and they’re sticking to it. From the artwork to the records and even the packaging, Secret Squirrel stick to a theme like a squirrel to his nuts, with the only difference between releases being the colour of the inlay. They are consistent, and consistently good.

This records delivers a punchy funk across two House edits which according to one astute Discogs user are edits of Panache, “Get Down To The Sweet Jazz Music” and Kellee Patterson, Turn on the lights” respectively. If you are looking for a couple of Disco tracks that will work in the context of a modern House set, look no further.  

 

Mr. Velcro Fastener – Ignorance EP (Electrix)

Is Finland the capital of Electro? Mr. Velcro Fastener have been around since 1997, making Electro body music, and some of it for Electrix. Here they are again slamming through the dance floor through 808 kicks and punchy metallic synths. A swooshing pad passes through the centre of the mix on the opener a “Monster in two worlds” while Nitzer Ebb style vocals takes a dystopian view on human nature. “That’s ignorant!” (in a mock Michael Jackson voice)

“Bakteriofag” (which we hope is not a slur) is a deeper take on the Electro genre with elegiac textures reaching towards the heavens over the pounding kick-snare combination. Interesting story, Mr. Velcro Fastener got their name from a friend who misunderstood the term Velcro Fastener as an English name. Two remixes of the opener follow with Silicon Scally giving us little variation on the original and M-Twelve barely hanging on to the original pad on an entirely new song. Interesting choice.

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.

 

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.

 

Album of the week: Detroit Swindle – High Life

There’s an unmistakeable bounce in Detroit Swindle’s step as they return to the album format for “High Life”. The Dutch, House duo made up of Lars Dales and Maarten Smeets have occupied a special place in House music since 2012, with  their debut “Guess What” lionising their music for a future generation of House music enthusiast.

Alongside the likes of Motor City Drum ensemble, they unfurled House music’s DNA into distinct strands that went from R&B, Jazz and Gospel, and retooled it for the modern dance floor. Intrepid four to floor kick patterns, warm chords and bass-lines that bounce across syncopated rhythms are Detroit Swindle’s purview and they very rarely wander from the formula.

On “High Life” they hardly mess with perfection, but like 2014’s “Boxed Out” they coerce it into the album format. Looking towards more popular forms in song structure rather than dance floor progressions, Songs like “Yes, No, Maybe” featuring Tom Misch and “Flavourism” featuring Seven Davis Jnr. bridge that impervious gap between the dance floor and the radio.

Detroit Swindle spread their wings on this album however, more so than we’ve ever experienced in the past as they draw on a wide arching sonic palette to arrive at the sound of the album. It’s still a Detroit Swindle House album, but there’s a new kind of eclecticism that explored the borders way beyond the boundaries of House music’s DNA. From the funk driven bass-lines of “Freeqy polly” to the improvised progression of the Jungle by Night collaboration, “Call of the Wild”, Detroit Swindle offer a view from the side on “High Life”.

A trumpet solo, a singular electric piano extemporising on a melodic love song and vocals make for a texturally rich album with Detroit Swindle’s signature sound still providing the rock on which the house was built. The warm electric piano chords, those staccato synthetic bass-lines and persistent percussive patterns are still order of the day, and still dominate of tracks like “Ex machina” and “Cut u loose”, but like the cover art of “High Life” there’s a imperceptible depth that offers something a little more rewarding than the sum of their parts.

Whether its a balearic strain creeping into their music or just the album format exposing a new side to the Dutch duo, Detroit Swindle offer us a slightly new take on their interpretation of House. It’s a still very much a Detroit Swindle record and call it an evolution or just a slight detour, “High Life” is unmistakably theirs, but delves a little deeper and stays there a little longer.

Presenting Sex Judas featuring Ricky and the Moist

So Sex Judas finally gets the band together.

Tore Gjedrem: “It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time; have a multi-ethnic group.

Tore and I are talking under the cover of an opaque shade cast out in the alley in front of Bare Jazz. It’s been four years since I last interviewed Tore as Sex Judas, when the cartoon character was still in its infancy and Tore still lurked anonymously behind the big, burly figure of his own invention. Four years later and Tore has finally realised the band that he had intended for the project all along



Made up of a an eclectic and formidable group of musicians, the band consists of Ivar Winther on keys, guitar and flute; Kristian Edvardsen on bass; Sidiki Camara on percussion and a string instrument called a ngoni; and of course Tore on vocals and everything else. Each member brings his own unique character to the project, which they solidified on the debut album, released earlier this year via Optimo music.

“Go Down Judas” was a charismatic work that embodied the spirit of its protagonist in an LP that looked to further stretch the known boundaries of the Sex Judas sound. “The idea of the album was to be an enriching musical experience for me” explains Tore about the primary concept behind “Go Down Judas”. Uninterested in the way the outside world might perceive the LP, Tore wanted to approach “different styles and experiment with music” as Sex Judas. “I equally love as much folk music as I do House etc; that’s why there are so many styles, it’s a playground.”

Tore Gjedrem is possibly best known for his work with Petter Haavik as the electronic music duo Ost & Kjex. Together they’ve released three studio albums, several EPs and cemented a legacy as a studio- and live act through labels like Crosstown Rebels and Diynamic.

Is Sex Judas more or less restricted than Ost & Kjex?

Tore: “It’s not that Ost & Kjex is locked in, but after many years of doing it, it forms a style and behavior in the studio and (there are) certain expectations from the audience. You also have some obligations to the people that know your band. You don’t necessarily put out a noise album as Ost & Kjex.”  

In the case of Sex Judas it’s about being “as open as possible” and allowing the project to move between different factions of musical tastes, which can go anywhere from Funk to Disco to Afro, to House, Ambient, as far as the imagination can stretch. Lacking the personal skill perhaps to achieve this on his own, Tore has tied in his ragtag band of musicians and through the album and the live show he is able to actualise his vision for the project with each musician bringing some key element to the group:

Sidiki, a Malinese professional musician provides that essential African rhythmic device. “He is not on the ones and fours, he operates on a different time“;  Ivar Winther is a “good friend” and “a soul mate when it comes music” who has worked with Tore before as Snuten; and Kristian Edvardsen is “the best bass player ever” who is “very central to sound”, providing that unmistakable funky groove to the whole project.



It is Edvardsen’s bass on “Det Syke Vesen Som Kjeder Seg I Bunnen Av Mennesket” that brought an entirely new dimension to the Sex Juda’ sound from the first two EPs, “My Girls” and “Big Sex Thing” and became fundamental to project, heading into the debut LP. Alongside Camara’s evasive rhythms it established the distinct sound of “Go Down Judas” that lended a human touch to the LP. From “Sidiki’s Jam” with its progressive nature and African themes to the funky groove of “All good Junkies” the music takes on a very organic nature in its execution all under the pretense of a cartoon character, bridging that gap between fiction and reality.

What exactly was the intention with the album?

Tore: To create a small universe with the characters that portrays life in all its glory. There’s a lot of personal things in there. I also love the connection between sexuality and music; it’s just such a great, positive thing to have a horny vibe in a club. This is also why I flirt with sexuality in the context of a character, so people don’t see me as a fucking freak.” (Laughs)

On the LP, Sex Judas breaks the fourth wall. Increasingly disillusioned with the conservatism of the real world, “Go Down Sex Judas” finds the character in sombre mood. There’s a sense of lament and sorrow on songs like “The Hedonist Disappeared into Normality” but it is also constantly contrasted with this sense of upbeat enthusiasm in the music made for the dance floor. Sex Judas is a complex character and Tore plays on certain “duality” between conflicting notions in an effort to “confuse” his audience.  

Sex Judas sometimes becomes the mouthpiece to Tore’s political views, tongue firmly in cheek but coming from a sincere desire to respond, reflect and criticise current political dogmas in society. Sex Judas questions things like “the abhorrent direction politics is taking today with the far right” through the music, the lyrics and even the cover LP has its own significance.

Sex Judas and Ricky sitting outside the infamous SEX shop – Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s clothing store that became the symbol of the disenfranchised Punk youth – is no mere coincidence. It’s a small “call to arms, to have this connection with the punk era.”

Today he sees the club and club music as the equivalent of Punk and Disco in the seventies; “a place for the left-outs and the liberals.” But as club culture has become popular culture it feels like there’s little room for the left-outs and liberals as superstar DJs wearing sunglasses at night, play to completely disconnected audiences preoccupied with their phone. Tore believes club culture doesn’t take to much notice of the world outside a quite isolated space”, but at the same time he believes there’s room for change.

What needs to happen for it to change?

Tore: There is room for people to speak their own mind also in electronic music. Even a song title can convey a lot of meaning. In the simple lyrical meaning in the Disco era, there’s a lot of black- and sexual liberation in these short choruses, that can be about being happy, but can also be about liberation.” I don’t want to be to preachy though, music is also supposed to be fun, but It can be about a lot of things in the same time.

It’s this duality, and there’s that word again, “duality” that Tore tries to instil and bring across in his work as Sex Judas. “I love the contradiction in the character” reiterates Tore, and that in itself breathes life into the project, where Sex Judas lives beyond the two dimensional world from which he is born.

Within that fourth dimension Sex Judas is constantly evolving too and some of that evolution in is sure to  be influenced by Ricky and the Moist. “The more you work with people, the more they grow into the concept”, says Tore. He believes Edvardsen, Camara and Winther “will definitely put their mark on it” and “already have” in some respects with another album already in the works and Tore currently putting the final touches on an EP earmarked for the end of the year.

What’s the EP like?

Tore: “It’s quite similar to some of the album tunes with an organic sound. One song is with Sidiki playing the ingoni recorded in the same session as the track on the LP. But it takes the whole thing into a long song structure, with singing and choirs.

The other song is a love song for my girlfriend that started five years ago as a House track, but I’ve been re-doing it because I want this one to be perfect. That will be the title track and then the other tracks will be a slacker Disco track.”

 

The following album will be subtle, “something you can listen to going to bed” adding yet another layer to the complexity of the Sex Judas sound which shows no signs of ever settling on anything concrete. Sex Judas has taken on a life of his own and as he modulates freely between various aspects of music it’s Tore’s vision that keeps the character grounded.

From the politics to the humour, from the music to the musicians, Sex Judas is a very intriguing and multifaceted character. It’s easy just to get lost in the entertainment value of the music Tore creates through the cartoon, but equally and concurrently it’s so much more rewarding to dig a little deeper and delve into the immense world, and reality of Sex Judas.

 

*Sex Judas featuring Ricky and the Moist play Jæger tomorrow  for Frædag.

Album of the Week: Kamaal Williams – The Return

Jazz hasn’t been this cool since the time of Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. The musical movement that started as a neo-classical interpretation of the blues and rag time has matured with its audience and performers to become associated with a certain type of refined grey-haired musical audience, and not necessarily the streets of London.

But as younger musicians find new forms of expression through the sound of Jazz with albums like Leon Vynehall’s “Nothing is Still”, Floating Points’ “Elaenia” and Thundercat’s “Drunk” coming to the fore it’s breathing new life into the genre.

Jazz is the ultimate fusion genre, and electronic music genres, from Hip-Hop to House and Techno have often incorporated elements of Jazz, sampling its wares both literally and in more abstract terms like technique. In a new wave of artists pursuing the sound and the attitude of Jazz, comes the House producer and keyboardist formerly known as Henry Wu and one half of Yussef Kamaal, performing under his eponymous artistic moniker, Kamaal Williams.

Like Floating Points and Leon Vynehall who arrived through the mediums of House through the underground scene in London, Henry Wu first rose to prominence through House-driven beat-records for Rhythm Section International, Eglo and MCDE, featuring his enchanting work on keys and ephemeral bass movements that create lattice-like textures weaving in and out of dance floor percussive movements.

As Kamaal Williams he drops any inclusion of regular drum patterns in favour of wholly futuristic fusion between Jazz, Funk and Soul for his debut album, “The Return”. It’s a return to the music he was making as Yussef Kamaal with Yussef Dayes rather than anything you would’ve heard as Henry Wu.

Funky keys, stepping in unmeasured rhythms between effervescent percussion and burbling bass lines, flow like a river through this album. Joshua Mckenzie on drums and Pete Martin on bass assist Williams in achieving something effortless on “The Return”.

Everything feels of and in the moment, with nothing forced or predefined. It simply oozes cool, elegant and unperturbed, but in deep, soulful, introspective kind of way. There’s a substantial mood to the album that’s solidified in the warm keys of the Rhodes electric piano and the reticent bass movements biding their time and minding their space in the orchestration of the album.

Although there’s no lack of skill coming from the three corners of the album in terms of percussion, bass and keys, it swaggers rather than brags, like some naturally tapped bountiful resource that spurts from some immense crevasse lying between these musicians. “The Return” might have some significant personal meaning to the artist, but for this writer it only signifies one thing, the return of cool.

Mix of the Week: Tommy Four Seven

Setting the tone for his RA podcast, Tommy Four Seven kicks off his set with a Broken English Club track, plunging into the moribund depths of the Techno genre. The stalwart DJ and producer favours a singular pursuit with huge industrial rhythms contrasting salacious atmospheres in one of the hardest hitting mixes we’ve heard since Kobosil played our basement last week.

Tommy Four Seven has been an immoveable fixture in the world of Techno since the early 2000’s, indulging the heavier, macabre corners of the genre with music that propitiate accessibility. As Techno’s popularity waned and gained through his generation, Tommy Four Seven has remained steadfast in his industrialised vision of the genre, and through labels like CLR and his event 47, he’s the original ambassador for the genre, keeping his finger on the pulse without conforming to public opinion.

In his edition to the RA podcast he distills this perfectly down through the mix. It comes a month before he makes his way to Oslo and Jæger for the second edition of the Triangle Showcase, hosted by Frædag on the 14th of September.

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!

 

The cut with Filter Musikk

There’s a finite amount of music you can listen to in a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. Thus we compartmentalise; we arrange music according to genre, artist, label and if you’re Spotify, moods, making our daily musical input more digestible, palatable.

But if you’re anything like us, your appetite becomes insatiable, the desire for new music leading you each day through an inescapable and unfathomable network of immersive rabbit holes. Very soon you’re in too deep, up to your neck in new releases, retro finds, old favourites and random peculiarities that don’t just stop with one release. Your head is spinning in a vacuous black void of the record and an insipid drone ensues.

DON’T PANIC!

Roland Lifjell is here to help. The proprietor of Filter Musikk and DJ stalwart has got your back. He’ll negotiate the mountain of shit, expediting the good stuff, the records worth your while, regardless of genre or style. There will be the familiar and the new, the rediscovered and the unlikely, but it will always seem specifically curated to your individual tastes. Isn’t that what a record store is supposed to be?

Few record stores today have the singular identity of Filter Musikk, providing Oslo with a regular influx of new records to discover and paw over with a specific focus on the DJ and enthusiast. As usual Roland Lifjell selects the best of these 12” and EPs for Jæger’s audience. These are the records where Jæger and Filter’s tastes converge and some, if not all of these will most certainly be making the rounds through our booth.

 

Jiska Huizing, Rudi Andre Valdersnes, Bjørn Torske – Drum & Trails (Ideophone)

A new Norwegian record label, Ideophone is the creation of Julie Silseth, Rudi Valdersnes & Jiska Huizing, with the latter two contributing to the first release from the label. Moving between the dance floor and the experimental realm, Ideophone set forth with a two track single with one extensive cut from the label co-founders and a remix by veteran producer and DJ, Bjørn Torske.

Jiska Huizing & Rudi Andre Valdersnes intrigues with “Drums & Tails”. While the bass and kick rhythms stay quite true to the purpose of the dance floor (albeit in quite an abstract way), the various additions give the track a very organic feel as it progresses through its extensive 18 minutes. What could have been quite exasperating is modulating all the time as elements of electro-acoustics and club music find an unusal common ground. There’s a certain humidity, like an Indonesian forest to the music that definitely cultivates a mood on Ideophone’s first release.

Torske completely avoids that mood, heads straight into a remix of the A side with Costa Del Torske. It’s classic Tørske with a percussive laden track urging the steppers on the floor with a repetitive shuffle and a 303 bass-line, flipping the script on the original. The swooping synth and pad that introduces the original is played in reverse at the end of the remix, as Torske interprets the title in very literal terms.

 

DJ Oblong – Speed Your Rage To Me (Rage Australia)

This one tracker evokes early Acid House, letting it congeal in a modern electronic music palette for a newer, younger audience. Lo-Fi meets its forefathers in this platypus pf a track. Yes, like the platypus this is a track made up of some very disparate and confusing pieces. An immense gated-reverb follows the kick, but instead of turning the clock even further back to the eighties, DJ Oblong stays put with a ratcheting breakbeat and liquid, acid bass-line. And from there it gets really crazy as layer upon layer is added like a collage coming together in a padded cell.  “Qui est DJ Oblong???” asks one soundcloud user, but what he should be asking is more like “WTF DJ Oblong?”

 

808 T-shirt

Now you can also pretend to own one too! It seems Roland (the company not the man) have gone into the retail clothing industry. Instead of making T-Shirts and trainers, venerating past accomplishments why don’t they just get back to making 808 drum machines. And I’m not talking about that VST in a box; not that there’s anything wrong with a VST emulation either, but putting it in a physical box, kinda defeats the point. I’m talking analogue circuit 808. If acidlab can make a pretty decent, relatively affordable (relatively I said) clone of the original, why aren’t Roland. I’d rather have an original 808 than a T-Shirt, but yeah at least it’s not an H&M Metallica T-Shirt.  

Andre Bratten – Un / Pax Americana (Smalltown Supersound)

André Bratten is a musical chameleon, and an aloof one at that. From his first album, “Be a man you ant” to his second “Gode” only a faint line distinction exists between the Nu-Disco sounds of his debut and the Avant-Pop electronica of the follow up. Actually not faint; oblique to the point of invisible. Throw in the brief encounter with the brutalist Techno of “Math Lium Ion” in the mix and you’ve got a separation of several degrees between consecutive works in his discography that almost feels like André Bratten is purposely  messing with us. We would be upset if he wasn’t so damned good at it all.

“Un” and “Pax Americana” follow this trend but for first time ever we see Mr. Bratten offering a more resolute  direction in his music. We’re sure it’s just mere coincidence but this latest release on Smalltown Supersound, bares at least some resemblance to his previous release, “Valve”, which forms part of larger series of releases we hope to see later in this year, but don’t hold your breath.

The mechanical consistency of “UN” is contrasted by the melodic serenity of “Pax Americana”, but together they have a similar nod to the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre, looking back at an early nineties experimentalism mutating from within the larger body of Techno. There’s always a wispy thread through the Norwegian producer’s works and where André Bratten will end up after “Un / Pax Americana” is anyone’s guess.

 

Tessela, Lanark Artefax – Blue 01 (Whities)

Tessela’s “Glisten” immediately takes me back to the “Hackney Parrot” era. It’s the tension he so adeptly creates with the vocal sample and the stop-start nature of his rhythm section. Tessela keeps you on tenterhooks the whole way through and on “Glisten” he keeps that suspense consistent, with no release in sigh, which perhaps the subsequent track will provide. I’m afraid not. 

Coming via Lanark Artefax,  “Touch Absence”  is even more obtuse in that regard. The young UK producer gives us more of the same with stuttering percussion and glitch melodic phrases that only resolve right at the end when they disappear into expansive ambient pads. “Blue 01” will be a perfect interjection in a set to that next phase, or just to mess with those people that are always waiting for “da drop”.

 

Juxta Position – Elixir (Figure)

Juxta Position is the alias of Mark Hawkins. O yes,  you might know him better as Marquis Hawkes. He debuted his Techno-driven Juxta Position alias a few years back on DVS1’s Mistress recordings, and we’ve always kept an ear out for these releases. Erring on the darker spectrum of Tech-House and Acid, Juxta Position cultivates that mysterious quality that lies in the empty space between drum machine and mono synth.

On Len Faki’s Figure imprint he finds that atmosphere in droves between a 909 drum machine and the familiar squawks of a 303 bass synth. While his Mistress releases often added an alluring vocal to the mix, he favours a more functional purpose on this 12”. “Figure doesn’t often release very interesting music,” says Roland Lifjell about this release, “so it’s good to see that they’ve released something that’s ok”.

Album of the week: Bugge Wesseltoft and Prins Thomas

Like two celestial bodies under the auspices of Newton’s law, Bugge Wesseltoft and Prins Thomas find each other in this new collaborative LP. Neither artist is a stranger to traversing the borders between music and both have found new audiences roaming through unlikely corners of the musical cosmos.

Bugge Wesseltoft, a denizen of the Norwegian Jazz world is no stranger to Prins Thomas’ DJ and electronic musical universe. He’s collaborated with Laurent Garnier and Henrik Schwarz in the past, and during the days of Skansen he would often play live amongst DJ sets. Prins Thomas’ knowledge of music is a lexicon in itself; the DJ and producer boasts a record collection that could be contained in a small library and in his productions he channels it all through that idiosyncratic sound he has cultivated across five LPs, his collaborations with Lindstrøm and his most recent krautrock-adjacent album with Bjørn Torske.

It is strange that Bugge and Thomas have never collaborated before, as both artists are quite significant figures in the Oslo world of music and their paths have most certainly crossed in past. So this is a most welcome collusion between two bastions of the Norwegian musical milieu and the results don’t disappoint.

Evanescent sonic extemporisations gyrate into the firmament in something like an extraterrestrial event through “Furuberget”, the opening track of their LP. In a tentative and gentle display, fleeting musical  improvised moments swirl around an empty space for the first 6 minutes before a regular rhythmic phrase provides the anchor they needed to develop alongside each other, creating an extensive thematic arc that negotiates the length of the track and establishes the entire feel of the album.

Recorded at Rainbow studios in Oslo, where the a bulk of the ECM catalogue was recorded, Bugge and Thomas funnel the traditions of sets improvised there through this LP. Incorporating the help of the legendary Jon Christensen on the drums, they nod to history of ECM, but in a new kind of fusion they keep their eye on the future. Dub style mixing techniques, weave looping electronic figures through cascading piano and percussive ad-libs that underpin the bulk of “Bar Asfalt” “Furuberget” and “Epilog”.

On “Sin Tempo” the sonorities of Wesseltoft’s piano prevail in a eloquent piano concerto while “Norte do Brasil” sees the majestic Moog synth and lo-fi electro-samba rhythms conspire in a playful musical interlude on the album.

It is however on the three longer pieces mentioned before, where the sense of a collaboration is strongest, and especially on “Bar Asfalt” where it conspires in something completely unique. It tantalises with its melding of afro rhythms, off-kilter drum kit, Wesseltoft’s piano and a immoveable bass-line provided by Prins Thomas, I presume. Here Prins Thomas and Bugge Wesseltoft particularly invoke that spirit of innovation and experimentation of Jazz musicians in the 70’s. Between the regular pulse of the rhythm and the melodic eccentricities there’s something I’ve certainly never heard before.

It’s merely the centrepiece however, and it shouldn’t distract from how good the rest of the album is. Between the extensive layers of context, concept and execution, this album makes a significant contribution that will certainly mark a point of reference in contemporary music going forward.

In Pictures: Øya Natt 2018 – Frædag x Filter Musikk with Etapp Kyle and Kobosil

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* Photos by Sara Ramsøe

Mix of the Week – Tod Louie

Recorded live at a recent Club Der Visionaere outing, is this recorded mix from Det Gode Selskab’s Tod Louie. From the outdoor Berlin club, Tod Louie summons the sounds of summer through a selection of House and Tech-House records that bounce through an upbeat House grooves and lean melodic indulgences. The energy is thick and lingers on the mix even out of the original context, as Tod Louie plays through two hours. His efforts corral a busy dance floor with a sensory focus on the corporeal as he delivers an unpretentious body mix to his audience. Live and unfettered, this mix from Tod Louie will leave you with a  bounce in your step.

 

In Pictures: Øya Natt 2018 – Retro pres.: Bjarki, Sassy J and Charlotte Bendiks

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Photos by Sara Ramsøe

Karima F selects Avalon Emerson

Avalon Emerson is a DJ, producer, artist and musical innovator. Hailing from Arizona, Avalon Emerson’s latent talents were first encountered on the west coast of the USA when she signed to the XLR8R associated label Icee Hot, while emerging through the ranks of LA’s underground rave scene as a DJ. From Los Angeles a move to Berlin beckoned and her recording career flourished with releases on Spring Theory, Shtum, Whities and Ghostly International, while her prowess in the booth left European audiences awestruck.
Avalon Emerson was a triple threat; a producer a DJ and an artist. She’s not a producer who can DJ, nor a DJ with a studio, but rather an artist, that applies her artistry across disciplines. Her talents also extend to making her own instruments and DJ equipment and to visuals, like her video for emoji-vision video “Natural Impulses“. Her dexterity for her artistry is boundless and everything she approaches leaves a distinct mark on the landscape.
Affirmative Action resident, Karima F know this all too well. A return Jæger guest, Avalon Emerson and Karima F have shared the booth on more than one occasion both here in Oslo and in Berlin, and as Avalon Emerson prepares to come back to Jæger for the upcoming Øya Natt special of AA, we asked Karima to pick some of her highlights from Avalon Emerson’s catalogue.
Avalon Emerson – Quoi! 

She started off strong and took it up from there! Her debut from 2014, released on San Francisco label Icee Hot, gained her worldwide attention. Stylistically she’s confident, allowing her compositional skills to shine through. This hasn’t left her productions.
 
Octo Octa – Adrift (Avalon Furiously Awake Version) 

If slow build-up and the pay off that follows a drop was a person.
Bwana – Three Way is the Hard Way (Avalon Emerson Remix)

The Canadian producer Bwanas music is excellent in its own right (just check out his latest release under his real name Nathan Micay on Whities – a staple in Emerson’s sets for the last year), but Emerson’s remix from last year is remarkably tight. Classic B-side material!
 
Avalon Emerson – Hurdy Gurdy DJ Tool

There’s a shortage of good DJ-tools with kooky names. Released on the wonderful Dresden-label Shtum, a sub-label of Uncanny Valley, Emerson has not only made her mark on Berlin by playing a number of jaw-dropping sets for Berghain / Panorama Bar, but also in the old East German suburbs.
Slowdive – Sugar for the Pill (Avalon Emerson’s Gilded Escalation)

Slowdive and Avalon Emerson might be an unlikely pairing at first sight, but the desert rat from Arizona effortlessly sculpts the english shoegazers to something completely of her own.
 
Avalon Emerson – One More Fluorescent Rush 

I’ll let this track speak for itself.

Øyvind Morken and Kaman Leung gets Tunnel Vision in new collaboration

Øyvind Morken brings Kaman Leung out of retirement with a track for a new Gravity Graffiti compilation.

Appearing alongside Telephones, DB Source and Acidboychair, Øyvind Morken and Kaman Leung team up for a trippy, early evening dance floor workout on Tunnel Visjon. It’s the first time since 2007’s “Lacrimal” to feature Kaman Leung’s credentials and apparently the first in a line of releases coming from the new duo.

You might have heard this one doing the rounds at Øyvind Morken’s Untzdag event already, drudging through the lower mids with a sticky sequential synth dotting the outer edges of the off-kilter percussion. Eighties  movie soundtrack synths coat the rest of the track, streaking through the atmosphere as melodic phrases weave their way around the percussion.

A clip of the track is streaming with others over on Gravity Graffiti’s soundcloud and you can pre-order the release via Juno.

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.

 

The Cut with Filter Musikk

Another week, another batch of new arrivals for us to paw over at Filter Musikk. Our little corner of paradise in the heart of Oslo’s city centre, Filter Musikk is the refuge from the innocuous and incessant drone of mediocrity pummelling our ears from every which way today.

It’s our fortress of solitude, no more like our Hall of Justice where we, the kindred spirits of music convene to find new music  curated, personally it appears by Roland Lifjell. We don’t even need to get our fingers dusty for this one, everything still pristinely wrapped in its cellophane packaging with new, unknown- and familiar titles, artists and record labels to discover.

Yes we can find all these records online and on streaming applications, but the chances are we would hardly come across them if left to our own devices, and where else could we find the latest releases so wonderfully presented, usually on the floor somewhere behind a load of boxes.

This week, it looks like Roland has made the industrial section a permanent section at Filter Musikk with more releases from aufnahme + wiedergabe and two droning cuts from Roots in Heaven extending beyond ten minutes petrifying at the bottom end of the new arrivals list. But since it’s still summer, we’ll leave these for the winter doldrums and head straight to the House section.

 

DJ Senior Vasquez – No More Drama (Paraiso, 4)

No more drama indeed. A top-to-bottom House record form the Portuguese artist previously known as Photonz, rolling House music out of the deep and back onto the dance floor. As a nod to the early sounds of New York House (uhm Junior Vaquez, anybody) this record doesn’t disappoint. It provides a modern, and darker (I might add) twist to that classic New York sound with deep 808 kicks pounding a steady, quite demanding kick out at 4/4 with an overtone of mystery provided by keys and synths.

It comes via the new Portuguese label Paraiso, another nod to that era in New York House music – Paraiso is Portuguese for paradise wikipedia tells me. This record from the Senior Vasquez fits perfectly within the other three EP compilations released by the label, but it also solidifies the sound of the label. I’m gonna take a wild guess here and suggest DJ Senior Vasquez is also it’s proprietor of the label.

“No More Drama” and “Herbalife” are the guts of this record, with the latter specifically noteworthy for its invigorating percussion, and it’s sense of drama, ironically.

 

Omar-S – That’s Me (FXHE)

I mean, it is Omar S. Most will know his sound instinctively by now as that Detroit House sound, replete with dusty samples, invoking the entire history of House music through his records. This is only one track, and although we usually would pass over this, because let’s face it when you’ve heard one FXHE track, you pretty much heard them all, there’s a sense of celebration to this cut that is weirdly alluring.

That annoying vocal sample and what is that… a saxophone!… is usually the kind of stuff that we tend to avoid, but like a bout of syphilis, once it’s in there it’s annoyingly in there and the temptation of contracting it is just to great an indulgence. Once you’ve heard “That’s me” there’s no forgetting it, annoyingly.

 

96 Back – Provisional Electronics (Central Processing Unit)

Central Processing unit was one of Resident Advisor’s label’s to watch last year. Although we’d been keeping an eye on them for some time (thanks to Filter Musikk) before the feature, with tracks from Nadia Struiwigh, Annie Hall, Morphology and DMX Krew had been catching our ear consistently through the label’s releases.

96 Back makes his debut through the label and it’s as you’d expect from CPU; demure bleeping Electro with designs on the dance floor. Like every release before it, a simple binary number which is the real number of the release in actual fact, marks the cover immediately drawing the eye and with it the ear to what’s contained within. Track titles echo the numeral theme of the cover on this occasion… intriguing.

Spacy Electro, rather than the more schizophrenic IDM we’ve heard from other releases on the label, groups these 4 tracks under a defining model. It’s achieved through oblique machine maneuvers; bubbling sequences and wafer thin drum programming. Stark, but ingratiating there’s more than just what’s on the surfaces of these tracks, with each listen revealing a new layer. “000” and “100” are particularly captivating, and offer two very unique sides to the same coin. It’s just another reason to keep listening to CPU and keep an eye 96 Back, and not because RA told you to.

 

Phase Fatale – Reverse Fall (Ostgut Ton)

The title track, “Reverse Fall” and “Blackbox” are the tracks you want to focus on, on this release. Although Phase Fatale has a penchant for the darker side of electronic music genres, it can often lose sight of the focus target of this kind of music, the dance floor. The brutalist nature of his sound has never quite cottoned on to the functionality of the dance floor, and while previous EP’s like “Anubis” and the album “Redeemer” were pronounced examples of his No-Wave/EBM sounds, they were often erratic or short-lived, with little in the way of seducing a dance floor.

“Reverse Fall” and “Blackbox” rectify this and wow! This takes Phase Fatale’s sound out of the second room of some DIY squat joint and places it peak time in Berghain’s main room. Ignore the two filler tracks, unless you’re a fanboy/girl, and just get stuck into these two meaty Techno tracks. Don’t let “Reverse Fall“ fool you with its subdued intro, the sequential synth running through various melodic patterns, while different elements move in and out of the arrangement, won’t leave you bored or disconnected. It seems that something might have been leftover from the young artists previous collaboration with Silent Servant, or there’s been a guiding hand from the Ostgut Ton talent pool. Whatever it is, He seems to have arrived at the sound he’s been trying to cultivate.

 

Will Saul – Bugs (Aus Music)

Will Saul’s latest for his AUS label is a mesmerising percussive workout, featuring acoustic drums and off-beat rhythms, or at least for the first minute of the opener and title track, “Bugs”. After that it’s business as usual for the label honcho and DJ with a stomping kick drum and staccato stabs that aren’t in the habit of mincing words.

Jumping between acoustic percussion and 4/4 kicks through some of the slightest sonic arrangements, this two tracker is Will Saul doing what he does best; providing the pulse of the dance floor with the odd curveball thrown in for effect.”Map Room” features a little less of the latter, with the austere atmosphere’s only tempting with those thin swathes of metallic synths streaked through the auditory landscape.

Matt Karmil, who’s remixing docket seems to be getting stamped every which way of late, is on the “Bugs” remix, toning the excessive urgenicies of the original down to a more palatable level. Between the remix and “Map Room” there’s seems more of a consistency to the sound of this 12”, and it’s more in line with AUS a few years back, during the Bicep era, than anything coming over the last two years.

 

Morphology – Mind Stealers EP (Cultivated Electronics)

More Electro? Yes please! It should be no surprise that Morphology should be on the cut this week. We really like Electro, but too few DJs play it out. Perhaps this will change their mind, probably not, but it’s worth a try,  so if subliminal messages are indeed a thing… PLAY ELECTRO…

If you happened to see Morphology at Kafé Hærverk a few months back, it would no doubt have stuck with you, and their releases are no different. Besides featuring on CPU, mentioned earlier (PLAY ELECTRO) they’ve had releases on DMX Krew’s Abstract Forms, Semantica (even), Solar One music and now again on Cultivated electronics. The Finish Duo are an absolute must see in the flesh, but their recorded music does well to relay that energy they bring through their shows.

They have a very distinct sound; like the claustrophobic feeling of a JG Ballard novel brought to Drexciya’s vocoder. There’s a sense of gothic drama to their music, with densely orchestrated layers of machines rupturing under the weight of salacious 4/4 kicks. You only need to hear the opening track “Mind Stealers” to get into the sound of Morphology, which even SYNC 24 manages to uphold with his remix of the title track.

It’s a sound that grabs you by the gut and immerses you completely in the moment before spitting you out on the other end of “Wages of Sin”. There’s no moment for repose and you simply have to acquiesce to its urges. Just remember to… PLAY ELECTRO.

 

*Filter Musikk present Etapp Kyle and Kobosil this Friday in our basement for an Øya Natt special.

Album of the Week: EOD – Named

We’ve had EOD on this feature in the past, with the self-titled debut for WeMe records, and although we tend to refrain from getting two consecutive albums from a single artist on our shelf – just because surely there’s more music out there to discover every day – having EOD’s second album join the first amongst our records just made sense. The artist, from Trondheim, is a unique entity on the Norwegian scene and beyond, with music that bulks at the conformities of borders between electronic music genres, incorporating elements of breakbeats, electro and IDM in an unidentifiable sound that has become the eccentric sounds to EOD.

Listening to “Wilbur” from his sophomore album “Named” I challenge you to compare it to anything else out there. Something akin to Leisure Suit Larry stuttering on the green and black screen of a DOS system is the closest I can get to describing the sound of that track. Fortuitously it and the rest of the album, which runs the gauntlet of this sonic spectrum, has found its way on Bjarki’s bbbbbb label – the only record label that could ever be a suitable vehicle for EOD’s music today. Although EOD has featured on the label before with the “Swurlk” EP, the honour of debut LP from the label ultimately goes to the Norwegian artist and with good reason.

“Named” is very much like the second half of EOD’s last album, which makes it more of a consistent album. It seems like this is the point the Norwegian artist was always intended to arrive, after EP’s on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex and his own EOD imprint skated around a less defined sound for the artist. There’s a sense of calamity and urgency through the record, but it’s grounded in pleasure rather than disruptiveness. From the cover art to the label and the  closing track, “Whippoorwills” everything relays this theme.

Glitch Bass or Bleep Beat would be adequate nomenclature to describe EOD’s music on “Named”, but even then it falls short of putting into words what this album represents. Liquid Drum N Bass through a food processor, is another way of describing the album with tracks like ‘sblood Thou Stinkard” and “Y’ha-nhtlei” specifically urging this kind of simile, but try as you may, there is no consistent designation that ever seems appropriate for this album. Even EOD, it seems tried and failed, settling merely on the title “Named” on the occasion.

There’s a melodic serenity that pulses throughout the entire album, yes even “Wilbur”, but it’s completely wrapped up in a kind of impartial non-music, with random, and it seems very organic glitches spiralling out of control, and distracting from the inherent beauty of the melodic phrasing of the tracks. “Named” is unlike anything you would have heard before, although it might be on the spectrum of IDM, but it’s more like UIDM – unintelligible dance music. Unintelligible, yet completely mesmerising.

Mix of the Week – Lucy

Dip into this deep, Techno mix from Lucy for the Truancy mix series. For the best part of his career, Luca Mortellaro and his label, Stroboscopic Artefacts  at the forefront of Techno’s constant evolution, and in this mix and through his new “Totem” series for Stroboscopic Artefacts, it seems he is favouring a more “organic sound” in his works and the label’s output.

Like his last LP, Self Mythology, an exotic sound palette is at work here as he takes the disjointed sounds of copious library records and seduces them over to the dark side of Techno. They saunter rather than pummel through the repertoire, with resolute repetitive loops underpinning the tapestry of sounds unraveling in the atmosphere. A very indulgent journey ensues leading us into the weekend and the heavyweight Techno of Regis and Downwards.

 

MC Kaman picks his odd Metalheadz favourites

MC Kaman takes us through the subdued landscape of Metalheadz at halfspeed.

Drum and Bass producers make great music, no doubt. DnB might the genre they are known for, but loads of the artists also make supercharged beats that carry on that vibe of the genre, but at a more reserved pace. Drum and Bass is a genre that co-opted the technology back in the 90s in the UK and the result was a whole new style of music that paved the way for much of today’s electronic music, beyond that singular genre. Think IDM, hardcore, dubstep, Techno… no…Yes. Drum and Bass is everywhere, you here an amen break or a saw tooth wave bass, and one label in partcular has played a significant part in spreading that gospel, Metalheadz.

Nightflight resident and office funny man, MC Kaman shares a few nuggets mainly from that holy grail boxset from Metalheads. The Tin Box!

Starting with the Big Lamp track from this Box. I had to buy the whole metal boxset to get that one tune. It was actually this track that made the day and still stands the test of time. It’s something that could easily have come from one of the Norwegian Disco boys. Sadly Mark Gooding passed away and we salute you for the music!

In a perfect world Hidden Agenda would sell millions of records and be on everyone’s playlists. In reality it is just for those who love this music. Hidden Agenda is my favourite duo on Metalheads. Mark and Jason Goodings made some eclectic DnB, with a unique sound when they came together. This track is something else. The title could be taken from “Get Carter” a British cult film” with Swedish Pinup girl Britt Ekland.( Not the one with Sly Stallone.) I somehow picture her when I hear this song. It is sensual, tough, and soulful. Just Like Britt, This song stays an evergreen. “Pressin On” is on the otherside of that fine piece of wax with a D-Train sample!

Oopsie… here is the song BTW..

Bonus Scene:

Ed Rush is one of my favourite DnB artists. He is like Karl Malone the Mailman. He always delivers! Ed Rush’s Westway is one of the coolest tracks ever put out by Metalheadz. Ed Rush does jazzy hiphop with boomin jeep beats. Damn its fresh! I mean, it could actually have been a big influence on me back in the day. Somehow Ed Rush didnt release more of these beats that I know of.

Photek was untouchable in the 90s. The Michael Jordan of Drum & Bass. Then something happend. He moved to LA. Like LeBron, LA changes people. He is now part of Hollywood. Some purist would say for the worse… I say it was for the better. Rainy Ipswich or sunny Tinseltown…I go Tinseltown. He did what he wanted. He wanted to score films. He made some new music. He found love! Had kids. Did some new albums. My drum and bass friends didn´t like the music. I didn´t hate all of it. He got beaten by Sonny .. I mean Skrillex at least twice in the Grammys. Despite all of this, he did a mixtape on K7 which is different. Despite all of this, Photek is still the best! He did the soundtrack for Tron 2. Here is a steamy scene from Tron 1 (parental guidance is advised) …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzHd1GI6wbI

Here he is in the 90’s.

Bonus Tracks of DnB Producers making dope beats.

J Majik: Mermaids:

Adam F: Colours

Danny Breaks: Dislocated Sounds from Beyond Infinity

4hero feat Shawn J Period

*Metalheadz play Øya Natt pres. Metalheadz with Ed Rush, Lenzman and DJ Subway

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. 

The cut with Filter Musikk

Spilling out from Filter Musikk, the cut is the latest singles and EPs currently infiltrating the Oslo DJ scene in real time. Every Friday at Filter Musikk we get first dibs on the freshly pressed records, the smell of new vinyl and the indescribable satisfaction of ripping through the thin plastic sleeve as we explore the latest electronic music pieces reserved for the vinyl format.

These are the tangible truths, the physical format that keeps the real record industry chugging along, and live beyond the expectations of the hype machine. These are the records that will live on in record collections and record bags all over the city, long after they and their artists popularity wains, a salient investment in the fundamentals of club- and music culture.

Junior Fairplay – Faxes From The Future ([Emotional] Especial) 

Acid, Breakbeat, House, Techno reads the blurb on Discogs, but they left out trance. Yes, there’s an unmistakeable synth motif on opener “end of love” that smells of coconut oil and Red Bull; an Ibiza beach party in full swing or the tropical sounds of 1999. Call it Trance, balearic or lo-fi, it’s that melodic refrain that is the lure to the hook. It’s something familiar, yet not, like Vanilla Ice under pressure, but endures exactly for that reason.
Roy of the Ravers, purposefully avoids it for his acid freakout interpretation of the original, making a completely new track in the process, merely adding to the already kaleidoscopic colour palette of this release. The remaining tracks “The Shazsquatch Goes Back Into The Woods” and “Faxes from the Future” take care of the breakbeat section, with the latter also venturing into the spacey sounds of electro for the occasion. A truly diverse release from Junior Fairplay, a fairly new alias for Tim Fairplay doesn’t disappoint on any of the fronts it proclaims. 
Svreca, Retina.it – A/A Revisited (Semantica) 

Originally on the “Nuel – Konstrukt 005” release from 2017, “Avenza” and “Aquatermae” get the remix treatment on this release from Semantica. Wata Igarashi and Max Durante were put to work on the originals with the singular objective; take the tracks and make them more. They expound on the atmospheres of the Svreca and Retina.it tracks, by retaining the trio’s minimalist arrangements, but adding a miasmic cloud of noise and disruptive layers through which determined 4/4 kicks punch a hole.

Although the two remix artists put their own stamp on their interpretations, it wavers little from that potent Semantica sound. As one of the few labels still holding true to the original ethos of Techno, proclaiming  the sounds of the future, Semantica and artists like Wata Igarashi, Max Durante, Svreca and Retina.it continue to explore the endless possibilities of an electronic music sound palette. Hyper minimalist and intended for the dance floor, without ever becoming too functional, Semantica’s pursuit is onerous in the modern history of the genre.

 

Dina Gad – Crack The Whip (Thank You) 

Originally released in 1989, this Dina Gad track gets the re-issue treatment via Thank You and Sound Metaphors (distribution). An Italo Disco track with a darker edge, alluring vocals and a reserved pulse seduces the listener into the track, with a simple tantalising drum beating the dance floor into submission, and that’s only the second version. Simply titillating, this is Disco, the seductive temptress of the dance floor, bringing sexy back in 1989.

Schwefelgelb – Aus Den Falten (aufnahme + wiedergabe)

In at Filter Musikk this week is a box of aufnahme + wiedergabe records, a label out of Berlin that’s been bringing the punk edge back to the electronic music for a while. Snarling at the conformists and glaring, vehemently at the kowtowers, aufnahme + wiedergabe have sequestered themselves in a niche corner of electronic music, between the margins of EBM, Techno and Industrial genres to make one of the most formidable statements on electronic, club music.

Among the Konkurs, Terence Fixmer and S S S S records Filter Musikk received this week from the label Schwefelgelb stand out as one of the most inhibited artists currently producing this style of music. It’s the sound of Berlin as you imagine it to be, raw and not in the way of some inflated Techno press release. It’s machine music through and through that speaks to something corporeal and primal on the dance floor.

 

Afriqua – Vice/Principle EP (R&S)

Afriqua (Adam Longman Parker) is the embodiment of twentieth century composition. Channeling electronic music intended for dance floors into the cerebral, he creates expansive enlightened musical universes. On his latest EP, “Vice/Principle” for R&S contrapuntal, minimalists textures make up the arrangements, with interconnecting passages creating a sparse sonic atmosphere that envelopes the listener.

For this release on R&S in order to dance comes to mind, as Parker weaves beguiling electronic experiments between kick drums, 303 bass excursions and feathery pads. like droplets of water falling on the dance floor, each sound and its ultimate design, is executed in harmony with some greater narrative of the track. There’s something introspective about the progression of tracks like “Cerch” that conspire with tendencies in Jazz, but it remains open and inclusive.

There’s very little repetitiveness in the music itself, with form playing an important part in the songs, and even though there’s always a beat to latch onto the journey happens on the outer edges on the music, where it is a very organic experience for the listener.

Album of the week: Flammer Dance Band – Flammer

Coming out of the community at Hausmania and featuring Don Papa on percussion is Flammer Dance Band. The five piece bursts forth with this debut record on the new lyskestrekk records label with a limited press of 500 copies and we’ve managed to get our hands on a copy of one of the last ones. Most certainly a future discogs legend this record is something that will speak to the diggers and the selectors for its quirky and enigmatic nature.

The spiralling rhythms and sonic melee that ensues when the needle touches the record, takes the audience on a cosmic journey, but as their name suggests, this isn’t some introspective jam session, but rather something more inclusive, a dance record. The repetitive nature of tracks like “Din Ting”, even with its off-kilter contrapuntal rhythm section, distills elements of arfo, psych, funk and disco to a modern dance floor.

They strip the arrangements right back to where the percussive elements often just appear alone in the mix with only the slightest interjections interrupt the incessant beat. Taking their cues from a seventies musical palette, but re-contextualising it in the era of DJs, Flammer Dance Band have created a new kind of fusion, indicative of the kaleidoscopic musical environment in Oslo.

There’s a playfulness to the record, from the lyrics for “Lunsj på Grønland” to the video for “Liverer litt sjel”, that comes across in volumes through the music. These might be very serious musicians, but it sounds like they are having a lot of fun with it. Simple, repetitive riffs with little in the way of lead solos, besides the odd saxophone incursion (which has sounded this good on a record since careless whisper), keep the whole thing grounded and immediate.

Landing the space discoship back on earth in the context of a traditional band format, “Flammer” pulses with an organic sound, like a band on stage. The background yelps and Torb Roach’s processed vocal add to the character of the sound, creating an aura of an event to the album. It’s easy to transport yourself to Hausmania’s basement through this record as the primal urge kicks in to dance the night away, with the only criticism being that the experience is too short.

 

Mix of the Week – Roland Lifjell

Published two years ago by the people at Trushmix, and recorded 15 years before that, this mix from Roland Lifjell just won’t quit. Coming across this mix on social media recently, twe’re once again reminded how timeless this mix is. And more than anything sit showcases Mr. Lifjell’s diverse musical ability; providing something a little different from those deep, introspective Techno journeys he usually takes us on.

Roland Lifjell’s Filter Musikk night returns on the 10th of August with an Øya Natt special featuring Etapp Kyle and Kobosil, and he’ll be back in our booth on the 21st of September for another Filter Musikk night featuring Reeko. Until then, we have this mix, which keeps living on in infamy.

Fredfades and Jawn Rice join forces on new LP

The Mutual Intentions boys combine their talents which you can hear on the first single from their new LP .

“It isn’t easy” premiered on Spotify today, appearing on the album “Jacuzzi Boys”, coming out later this year. Freadfades and Jawn Rice deliver a straight-up House track with designs clearly on the dance floor. Following Jawn Rice’s Highlights on the Mutual Intentions label and Fredfades Warmth from last year, this track falls somewhere beyond those two LPs, succumbing to the functional demands of a dance floor on this occasion.

Between Jawn Rice’s synth work and Fredfades samples it harks back to a simpler time in House music, stripping the genre down to its essential parts without going lo-fi. They showcase their combined experience as producers and “It isn’t easy” certainly has all the right ingredients to become an instant House classic.

From the warm chords opening up the track to those carefully selected vocal samples, the different elements fit together like a perfectly orchestrated puzzle. The vocal sample is an instant earworm and the progression of the track gives it the room to get familiar with listener without ever getting overtly repetitive and stale.

Fredfades and Jawn Rice have certainly caught everybody’s attention with this single and we look forward to hear what “Jacuzzi Boys” has in store.

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 Cut with Filter Musikk

Navigating the maze in Filter Musikk every week we head straight to a special pile next to Roland Lifjell’s desk every Friday. These are the freshest records to arrive in Oslo. Not to be mistaken for the new arrivals, these are the new-new arrivals, the records that haven’t yet been sorted into their dedicated sections.

In a new segment for the Jæger blog, Roland Lifjell gives us priority and lets us pick our favourite releases of the week in the Cut with Filter Musikk. These are the 12 inches and EPs that will undoubtedly be making an impression in DJ sets in the near near future and the records you didn’t know you wanted to hear.  

Marius Circus – Had No Clue (In The Garden)

Marius Circus has been consistently carving out a distinctive sound on his records over the past few years. The Oslo native has been going it all alone, releasing music exclusively on his own imprint, In The Garden. That level of artistic freedom has delivered some of the most endearing cosmic synth works for the dance floor, which he’s brought to life on the stage recently with a live show.

“Had no Clue” doesn’t mess with the tried and tested formula he has established in the studio through the label. The title track adds layer upon layer without getting bogged down, with the rhythm section adding a functionality to the submersive sonic layers he synthesises. The B-side, “Tyst” expounds on the very same principles, but slows the tempo down to lethargic 112BPM. Mr. Circus’ production adds a depth and space to club music that sucks the listener into some ethereal dreamscape on this release.

Bjørn Torske – Kickrock / Blue Call (Smalltown Supersound)

Accompanying the release of the album, Byen this week is this 12” from Bjørn Torske via Smalltown Supersound. “Kickrock” and “Blue Call” follow the sound of the album, but steps up the pace to peak time on the dance floor.

Looping themes imbed themselves like an earworm, while Torske’s vivacious percussion keeps the adrenaline high. From the sonic collapse of “Kickrock” to the jazzy improvisation of “Blue Call”, there’s something that completely lives in the moment in this new music from Torske.

DJ Overdose – Wires Smoking (L.I.E.S. (Long Island Electrical Systems))

DJ Overdose is back on L.I.E.S after a sojourn on Unknown to the Unknown. His releases offer a darker edge to Electro, and completely feels at home here on Ron Morelli’s label. In “Wires Smoking” he provides four DJ tracks that combine contrapuntal percussive arrangements with menacing layers of synthesisers. Textures ooze provocatively over the industrial pounding of drum machines that aggressively confronts the listener. There’s a physicalness that even now, listening to it at home, pulls and pushes at your instinctive primal tendencies. We challenge you to remain stationary while listening to the provocative electro beat of “Dark Spectre Echo”.

Various – Studio 89 Records 002 (Studio 89 Records / S89002)

The second release from this burgeoning UK label has established something unique through the distant and faint sound of an eighties, New Beat palette. Following on from Disco tendencies of the first release, Studio 89 turn to a more synthetic sound on this second compilation.

Untitled tracks featuring unknown artists are compiled in a sympathetic relationship to each other. Big beat percussive arrangements make this the most DJ friendly release and combine them with elements of EBM and synthwave. The A-side samples D.A.F as an honorary ode to the German band, that surely influenced and inspired the artist.

Everything about Studio 89 is so well executed, from the music to the cover art and this liner note: “Hotline number: +44 776593 8693 We are back, we are licentious, we are rough and ready with Studio 89’s second release… ready to spread into a clubhouse near you. A sizzling charge of hot and heady lust. Sexy beats for you fancy freaks. We are your ship master, cruise with us into the depths of your dreams.”

This is definitely a label to watch out for in the future.

Artefakt – Falling Into The Light (Delsin)

Delsin, the Amsterdam label, is nothing but consistent, and have carved out a niche sound over the years through Techno. Breathy pads and four-to-the-floor productions have provided a fair share of memorable moments in DJ sets, and here Artefakt doesn’t mess with that perfection.

The Dutch electronic music duo keep it functional on “Falling into the Light” with tight percussion arrangements anchoring swirling textures. Lucious pads fill the arrangements with punchy kicks and snappy snares cutting through the mix over the three three tracks with the obvious highlight coming in on the B-Side with the ten-minute long title track.

Album of the week: Bjørn Torske – Byen

There’s a moment in “clear air” where you thought you heard enough, but in true Bjørn Torske style he whists you off to some weird Jazz infusion whirlpool that made you forget why you came here in the first place. That’s the majesty of Bjørn Torske; he’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time. An enigmatic figure in the world of electronic music in Norway, Bjørn Torske’s albums like Nedi Myra and Trøbbel have made a significant impact on music history. His musical legacy played no small part in bringing the Norwegian space Disco sound to world-wide attention, but it’s all based on a sincere musical understanding that can go from upbeat Disco to the obscure margins of Rock n Roll.

Byen is the Disco provocateur doing what he does best. The album plays like a Bjorn Torske DJ set, with elements of hand percussion and cosmic synths tracing a journey through some of the most diverse corners of music. A progressive take on electronic music, Byen bides its time through the seven extensive tracks that make up the album. Building on repetitive loops that Torske manipulates to his whim, Byen looks forward as much as it looks back. There’s that familiar Disco aesthetic, but rather than arranging it around familiar song formats, Torske’s sights are firmly set on the dance floor with tracks aimed specifically for the DJ.

Tracks like “Night Call” are exquisite exercises in control, plodding along through a single repetition that keeps throwing something new at you just before it gets too mundane. It’s simplistic and eloquent, instantly recognisable, but fleeting and imbedded in the moment. Only Bjørn Torske could essentially play a loop for 11 minutes without it getting boring. The narration of the album is transplanted from something like a seventies concept record for the modern dance floor. There are traces of what Torske and Prins Thomas were doing on Square One together, but as far as comparing it to earlier records like Trøbbel this record stands alone in the Bjørn Torske discography.

Perhaps it’s the distance it occupies from his last record, but Byen shows a new side to Bjørn Torske that also earmarks the future of the Norwegian sound, if such a thing exists. Like the new Prins Thomas and Bugge Wesseltoft record, the music stalwart is taking the cosmic sounds of Space Disco to the very outer edges of electronic music, where it errs on the side of a psychedelica, krautrock and prog.

Mix of the Week – Textasy

A break-neck electro and breakbeat mix from the people behind F.T.P soundtracks the start of our weekend this week. Bouncing along at 140BPM, this mix features unreleased tracks from an upcoming compilation by the label. A little bit Ghetto and a whole lot of  attitude, Textasy runs the gamut of the label he calls home and the result is captivating.

A fairly new label, F.T.P have made a severe impression only fiver releases in with the kind of uncompromising sonic aesthetic you hear on this mix. Broken beats and hazy references to music from popular culture (the Black Eyed Peas?) there’s a confluence of styles and genres that leaves a singular mark in the context of a mix like this.

Album of the Week: DJ Fett Burger & Stiletti Ana presents 358 Men

The first, and rumoured to be the last, LP to come out of Freakout Cult sees Fett Burger team up Stiletti Ana for a punchy, psychadelic House workout. Freakout Cult, the lovechild of Fett Burger and Jayda G, runs to its conclusion (apparently) with releases from the likes of LNS, Rudow and of course Fett Burger and Jayda G making a formidable impression on contemporary House music through a reserved but consistent catalogue.

358  Men doesn’t tread very far from the path they’ve carved out as a label with an album of solid functional House tracks with a clear purview on the dance floor, but it also hides something special. Fusing elements of House with a Balearic charm, Fett Burger and Stiletti Ana blend functionalism with progression over the course of six tracks and three fillers.

Various hand percussive instruments leave their mark as Fett Burger’s distinguishable trait in his music, while a plethora of adventurous electronic sounds coalesce around unwavering rhythmic motifs. Laying a staunch  foundation through the looping rhythm sections that progress very little through the course of a track, Fett Burger and Stiletti Ana pile on synthetic textures in a progressive House style that borders on psychedelic.

“Smell of Gasoline” with its catchy lo-fi, bubblegum melodies and strict 4-4 rhythms is the clear crowd pleaser standing on its own on the B-side at 45 rpm, while tracks like “Brain Dead” with its lethargic pace and kaleidoscopic textures travel the furthest outside dance floor parameters to make a very dynamic experience across the length of the LP.

If rumours are true and this is indeed the end of Freakout Cult this LP ends it on a high note, putting the rest of catalogue into perspective and on occasion showcasing the utter extremities of the label’s sound and ideology. DJ Fett Burger and Stiletti Ana find a musical language all their own on this LP, a space between Lo-Fi psychedelic and progressive House music that works on the dance floor and the context of an album, a rare combination.

Mix of the Week – Kelly Lee Owens

Last year, an effort to bring Kelly Lee Owens over to Jæger had to be re-scheduled to a later date due to unforeseen circumstances. We’re patient however and while we wait for a date to be confirmed, we found some constellation the DJ’s latest contribution to the Fact Mag Mix series.

Kelly Lee Owens offers a dynamic twist on the bubbling synthetic sound that underpins her own sound, with beat-less tracks from Helena Hauff and Floating points intersecting 909 and 303 stripped-back rhythm tools from the likes of New York Transit Authority.

She segues between tracks like the course of a night compressed into a mere 40 minutes, truncating every high-energy moment with a more reserved, somber contrast. It has satiated our previously unquenched hankering for the artist and DJ and will have to see us over till we finally get to hear Kelly Lee Owens in our booth.

Album of the week: Ntombi Ndaba – Tomorrow

Afro Synth is a DJ, blog, record store and now a label out of Johannesburg, South Africa that has brought the musical genre known as bubblegum to the world stage. A labour of love for Dave Durbach, DJ Okapi who has been collecting and playing these records and other obscurities from the African continent and especially South Africa for the better part of 10 years. After a couple of 12″ re-issues of Kwaito and Disco, comes the label’s first LP, a compilation of music from South Africa’s long-lost treasures, Ntombi Ndaba.

“Tomorrow” is a carefully selected body of Ndaba’s work throughout her short but virile career recorded as Ntombi Ndaba & the Survival. Ndaba quickly found a voice in the era of South African pop music, later known as Bubblegum joining a choir that included included artists like Brenda Fassie and Cheek to Cheek. (Coincidentally Ndaba performed with both Fassie and Fumi Maduna of Cheek to  Cheek in a theatre production called The Hungry Spoon.)

Although her music found its way onto the labels like EMI, Ndaba’s brief recording career came to an abrupt halt in the early nineties, and where artists like Fassie became internationally renowned, Ndaba retired and almost disappeared into obscurity. That was until Okapi and Afro Synth brought the artist to the world’s attention again with this compilation, coming at a time when there’s a renewed buzz around the bubblegum sound.

The sound of the record will appeal to anybody who is familiar with the genre, but it’s Ndaba’s deep, passionate vocal at the fore that also sets it apart from other artists of that time. The quirky lo-fi electronic sound of  the time provides a striking contrast to her soulful voice, which adds a fervent, dramatic touch to the music. Tracks taken across her short discography from 1988 to 1991 show  a more mature side to the infectious pop arrangements.

There’s been some criticism that much of that bubblegum sound is very interchangeable, but there were a few people that set the bar just a little higher and Ntombi Ndaba was one of them. Ndaba’s career might pale in comparison to somebody like Brenda Fassie with only four albums to her name, but they made indelible mark on the music of that era which Afro Synth immortalises for the next generation in this compilation.

You can read more about Ntombi Ndaba and this compilation over on the Afro Synth blog.

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.

Hear Prins Thomas and Bugge Wesseltoft’s Furuberget

Stream a track from Prins Thomas and Bugge Wesseltoft’s forthcoming album on Smalltown Supersound.

The self-titled album due out on the 20th July is the first time these two Norwegian musical icons come together.

Although they might represent two different sides of the contemporary musical landscape in Norway, both Wesseltoft and Thomas are no stranger to experimenting in new musical idioms, and as you expect “Furuberget” is a combination of improvised piano interludes and funky bass manoeuvres.

A dreamy, elusive arrangement featuring jittery percussive moments and explorative electronic textures, moves from one phase into the next, slipping further and further into a improvised rabbit hole.

Prins Thomas is back at Jæger this Saturday, playing back to back with Øyvind Morken.

Album of the Week: The Orb – No Sounds are out of Bounds

There’s something comforting in the fact that the Orb is still releasing music. The Alex Paterson endeavour has always represented something unencumbered, music that never gets weighed down in time, trend or style. Although the Orb was tagged early on as an Ambient project through classic tracks like Little Fluffy Clouds and Blue Room, their music incorporated elements of dub and world influences, underpinned by themes taken from science fiction.

The allure of the Orb was always about complete escapism, and their music offered a journey through music, moving parallel with the rave culture of the nineties, but at the same time living beyond the constraints of the dance floor too. Records like “The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld ” and “U.F.Orb” were albums that you could put on at home at the end of a night out and today they life on as electronic music classics, right alongside the artists that inspired them like Kraftwerk and Brian Eno.

Paterson has always toed a unique line in the margins of electronic music and working with the likes of leftfield characters from Jimmy Cauty (The KLF) and Lee Scratch Perry to Thomas Fehlmann, the Orb has hardly conformed to any singular stylistic traits in electronic music through the years and it continues to do so today with the latest album,  “No Sounds are out of Bounds.”

Combining elements of dub, ambient music and electronica, the Orb’s latest album lives up to its name. Artists from diverse corners of music namely Jah Wobble, Roger Eno (Brian’s little brother) and Hollie Cook make guest appearances on the album as if to drive this point home. Pieces like “Pillow fight @ shag mountain” come together like an abstract collage, refusing to lay down roots in anything concrete that could define the sound of the album.

There’s a happy, melodic temperament to the record however, something that has always manifested itself in the Orb’s music. Any conceptual science fiction themes eludes us on listening to the album, but that sense of a journey is still very palpable on “No Sounds are out of Bounds” and it feels that Paterson and co. has travelled to the furthest recesses to find these sounds and bing them together for this album. They’ve not covered any new ground as the Orb, but have found yet another new point of convergence for the disparate sounds that inform the project.

 

Mix of the week – FredFades

Recorded during Motor City Drum Ensemble’s Worldwide FM show this week, comes a recent mix from FredFades. Accompanying the Danilo Plessow on his State of the Rhythm show earlier this week, the Mutual Intentions affiliate laid down a rare selection of records for the hour. FredFades picks through some obscure corners of music where genres fuse and disparaged records from onetime artists are newly appreciated. Deep, funky bass lines lay the foundation the mix, where all manner of elements extend out to the musical cosmos, from Jazz to Synth pop. FredFades’ mix starts 54:45.

*FredFades plays our backyard tomorrow night with Dirty Hans where they’ll bookend  a live show with Lucid Paradise and The Pendletons.  

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 6th 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.

 

Album of the Week: Leon Vynehall – Nothing is Still

Leon Vynehall doesn’t do anything in half measures. He’s avoided the long player format for some time, even though his previous two double EPs, “Rojus” and “Music for the Uninvited” were considered by many to have the consistency and considered effort of an album. The weight behind those records were immense both in concept and the execution. They were built on an electronic framework lifted from club music, but incorporating various elements from diverse musical corners they were hardly functional or banal.

Concepts of gay club history and his mother’s mixtapes as well as the journey of a night out on the dance floor underpinned the records, without sacrificing the end result. The concepts might have influenced the direction of these acclaimed releases, but Leon Vynehall’s musical voice was always the attraction. There’s a thought-provoking artistry to his music, and even his 12″ releases with their clearly defined function, has always brought a cerebral dimension to House music.

On his debut album, “Nothing is Still” it should come as no surprise then that this is all in effect, and that it comes in as one of the most considered bodies of work from an artist working within the electronic club music realm. On this occasion, Leon Vynehall almost completely veers from the club music themes that underpinned previous releases for a piece that echoes the cognitive pursuits of genres like Jazz, Ambient music and even some Classical sub genres.

Ironically there is a stillness to this album, in which textures, that incorporate, samples, found sounds, and synthesisers, subside into a dream-like ether. Built on the conceptual framework of migrating people, using the story of his grandparents and their relocation to New York, we hear a narrative that flows through to the course of the  album, the theme bolstered by the track titles.  There are cues from Vynehall’s beat-driven music, like that brief interlude on “English Oak”, but these moments are fleeting, like the artist is deconstructing them into the album, where they take on the form of pure melody and texture.

Acoustic instruments thrive in Vynehall’s electronic landscape, transporting you to 1950’s New York where the sound of Jazz spill out of sultry basements into the soup of a foggy night. Our purview is fractured through jarring electronic sounds, that creek and fracture around  saxophones and pianos. The album moves at a reserved pace, but easily incorporates new themes into single compositions taking up a new thought at a whim and a will.

“Nothing is Still” falls somewhere between Floating Point’s “Elaenia” and  Nicholas Jaar’s “Space is only noise” to stake his rightful claim amongst that artistic paradigm. A subtle album execution with lofty ideals, this album is not like any other of Leon Vynehall’s records as the artist’s commitment to album format bringing a whole new dimension to Leon Vynehall’s music.

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. 

Equal rights for Kenya – A Q&A with FRI and the Gay and Lesbian coalition of Kenya

In the week leading up to Gay Pride in Norway, it’s often easy to forget the significance of the pride movement. In a country where same sex marriages are legal today and discrimination between same-sex relationships is illegal, the importance of pride is often taken for granted. In the context of a party in a city where homosexuality is in the open and (for the most part) accepted, some of the values it was built upon might seem irrelevant today.

But the reality is that pride is the basis of an ongoing struggle and although a country like Norway has won its battle, the war still rages on in other regions.

In Kenya at this very moment the LGBTQ community is facing an unprecedented battle ahead. The Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK) are currently working towards decriminalising a law, that remains from colonial rule and still prohibits any consensual relationship between persons of the same sex. It’s the first case of its kind in Kenya, but it could also have some significant repercussions in the region where countries like Uganda and Nigeria are facing similar battles.  

Kenya is one of 34 countries on the African continent in which homosexuality is still outlawed today and one of even fewer where a possibility exists to eradicate this archaic law. GALCK have taken the case to the courts and with some help from FRI, the association of gender and sexual diversity in Norway, they aim to make this law a thing of the past and finally bring some justice for the LGBTQ community in Kenya.

As Lina Tordsson of FRI explains via an email, “you can’t sue the state without resources” and the organisation has taken up GALCK’s cause, raising funds to help with the legal costs. Two weeks ago twenty percent from the door at the Gay Guerilla event at Jæger went to this cause and with NORAD (The Norwegian agency of Development and cooperation) pledging 9kr for every 1kr, FRI have raised 161 100 kr for GALCK’s cause from that event.  

We at Jæger wanted to know more about the cause, how the money will be used, the legal battle ahead and how this will help the LGBTQ community in Kenya so we sent some questions to Lina from FRI and Yvonne Odour from GALCK to shed some light on the current situation in the country.

*You can find out more about FRI here and GALCK here and if you would like to contribute you can vipps a donation to FRI at 12011.  

Hello Lina and Yvonne can we start with FRI: Can you tell me about the FRI and what your role within the organisation is?

Lina Tordsson: FRI is part of a global movement for justice and equality, and we have been collaborating with sister organisations in Asia and Africa since 2008, with support from Norad and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. I am part of the international team!

How did FRI get involved with GALCK, and why did you want to particularly take up their cause here in Norway?

L: We have collaborated with GALCK since its inception. Before GALCK, the LGBT community in Kenya was organised into smaller organisations and groups, and they came together to form a national umbrella organisation that could speak for the whole movement with a unified voice.

FRI has seen how important this has been for the movement in other countries, including our own, and therefore we wanted to support their efforts.

Yvonne, tell us a bit about the reality of the situation there in Kenya for LGBTQ people.

Yvonne Odour: LGBTQ rights in Kenya are limited compared to other jurisdictions in the world. Any sexual practices between males termed “gross indecency” are a felony under section 165 of the Kenyan penal code, punishable by  up to 14 years imprisonment.

The state does not recognize any relationships between persons of the same sex; same-sex marriage is banned under the Kenyan Constitution and there are no explicit protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Sections 162 a and c and 165 of  the Penal Code continue to validate stigma, discrimination and violence towards individuals who do not conform to society’s expectations on gender identity, gender expression or sexual orientation. Over 1,000 incidents of violations against LGBTQ people since 2014 have been documented — ranging from murder to mob violence, verbal assault, rape, blackmail and extortion.

How is the Gay and Lesbian coalition of Kenya able to operate in this environment?

Y: Working in a rights constrained context like Kenya can be very challenging. Some of the ways in which we manage to navigate these spaces is forming strong relationships with our partners and allies, there is strength in numbers and our mainstream allies help us get into spaces we normally could not.

At GALCK we also work to show the public that our issues are intersectional, that our struggles as Kenyans intersect and that means joining in other causes like anti-corruption, women’s march and doctor’s strikes so when the time comes, they stand with us. We also work with and for a very resilient community and this gives us strength and courage to exist and work here.

Lina, I know you’re raising funds for the legal battle ahead, but is there any other ways in which FRI is getting involved with this case?

L: FRI believes that the fight for equal rights in a country must be done by the people in that country. GALCK understands the legal structure, the needs of the community, the politics and sensibilities involved – and they are running the show in Kenya. Here in Norway, FRI is working to harness support from the LGBT community here, and work with our embassy and policy makers to ensure they are at hand if the community needs them.

Y: At GALCK, we are cognizant of the fact that there is the court of public opinion outside of the high court, we therefore also ensure that arguments out of court are being had and we engage the Kenyan public in dialogue that is much needed. FRI has continued to support us to ensure that this happens through ; Op-ed pieces, Community dialogue – civic education, Security training for LGBQ folk, Media training for journalist and community members.

How much money will it take to get this law revoked?

L:  I would guess that the answer would be something like this: We do not really know. This has not been tried before in Kenya, and GALCK is paving new ground as we speak. We know that the Kenyan state, some religious entities and individuals will put up a fight, and it will not be an easy victory. But more than the court case itself, it is important that LGBT people all over the country are safe from the harassment and violence that typically follows increased visibility. So GALCK has been working with all its member organisations to train them on safety and security, ensure they are on board with what is happening, and support them in working with their local policy makers to harness support for the cause. The fight will not be won in the courts alone, but among the people of Kenya.

Corruption is a reality in many African countries unfortunately. How do work within these systems to make sure that the funds are directed appropriately?

L: FRI supports GALCK directly. GALCK has a rigid system in place to ensure that the funds are spent appropriately, and they are training their member organisations to do the same thing.

What are some of the most difficult hurdles facing GALCK in this legal process?

Y: Some  of the challenges faces have been, Antigay lobby actively organizing a push back, they are funded and organised and this poses an actual threat to activists and to the cause.

  • They do this trough; sensational opinion pieces in leading Newspapers, Radios station and TV , Sheiks and pastors strongly pushing religious/culture narrative.
  • Banning of RAFIKI (a film about lesbian love that was nominated for the Cannes award),censorship & moral policing by the KFCB Kenya Film Classification Board.
  • President Uhuru Kenyatta’s remarks about gay rights not being an issue in Kenya during his interview on CNN just a day before our mention. He further said that this is not his personal opinion alludes to the possibility of other forces pushing the anti-gay agenda through powerful people.

Nigeria and Uganda have similar laws in place. How could a win in Kenya affect the rest of Africa in that regard?

L: A lot of the countries that have been British colonies in the past have similar laws in place. The law was actually written by the colonial administration in India, and almost copy-pasted to the other colonies. It is part of the colonial legacy that the people of the now independent countries still have to grapple with. FRI thinks Kenya is important because it’s among the largest African economies and a power hub in the East African region. We also think the Kenyan activists can offer other African countries a blueprint for how to run such a process – and show them that it is possible.

Is there anything else beyond the situation there at the moment (something I would ask Yvonne) that I should know about the cause?

L: I think you could ask Yvonne what will happen if/when the law is removed. How will you celebrate, what will it mean for the community, and what will the next steps be to ensure equal rights for all?

Y: If same sex acts are decriminalized in Kenya, we anticipate the psychological adjustment (mental well-being) of most LGBT+ persons will increase, it is important to feel like you belong in your own country.

There will be improved access to health care, this is backed by research. Hopefully a wave of subdued and non-discriminatory legislation will prevail in the region, we are happy to set blueprints and we can now focus more in building cohesion within our communities.

Though decriminalisation might not end prejudice and discrimination against LGBTQ people, at least we will be protected by the law and this is a significant shift from how things are currently.

 

Album of the Week: Mr. Fingers – Cerebral Hemispheres

Larry Heard is House music. He was there at the event horizon of the genre as a DJ, producer and record label. His seminal track “Can you Feel it?” as Mr. Fingers, sampling the Martin Luther’s “I have a dream” speech remains a bastion for House music, some thirty years on from its release. Washing Machine, Closer and Amnesia all contributed to cementing his legacy early  and he’s never stopped recording, performing and DJing since.

Gerd Janson once said of Heard that he “put the soul back into the machines” and many prominent critics and figures on the scene have attributed the origins of the Deep House genre to Heard.

Born in Chicago, raised on a healthy mixture of Soul, Jazz and Motown, Larry Heard’s musical career began behind a drum kit, before embarking on a solo career in 1983. He had found an affinity with the machines at the cusp of a new age in music and he formed an integral part of the foundation of House as Mr. Fingers through releases on Trax, Jack Trax and his own Alleviated records. He’s been an unwavering presence in music ever since and as Mr. Fingers he’s recently made his long-awaited return to the album format some twenty-odd years on from “Back to Love” with “Cerebral Hemispheres”.

“Cerebral Hemispheres” comes at a time when House music albums are little more than a selection of tracks recorded on the same equipment at the same period time, with 18 songs that move through the evolution of a night on the dance floor. From the luscious, soulful treatment of opener “Full Moon” to the transcendent synth work of the beat-track “Electron”, the LP moves through very many moods throughout its existence.

At the fore is Heard’s treatment of melody and harmony that touches on that deepness he is known for. On “Cerebral Hemispheres” expressive acoustic instruments, mostly played by Heard himself, find a unique sympathy with the programmed percussion and arrangement to form densely textured compositions that very rarely outstay their welcome. More than just a loop, each track grows and evolves channeling the improvisational methods of Jazz through the melodic-and harmonic parts while the rhythm section and percussion remain steadfast in their resolve.

The title of the album makes some allusion to the opposing characteristics of Larry Heard’s musical upbringing as his dance floor leanings coalesce with his Jazz, Soul and Motown influences. Where they sometimes form two distinctly divergent paths on the album like between “Urbane Sunset” and  “Sao Paulo”, they are at their best when they crossover at a moment like “Sand of Aruba”.

Cerebral Hemispheres is a very colourful and textured encounter with Heard’s immense musical background, from his early musical education to the origins of House music and beyond. The album follows a couple of EPs from Heard as Mr. Fingers after a ten year hiatus and suggest a new era of creativity for the producer, at least if not the DJ and label boss; staking his claim yet again as one of the most important figures in House music.

Mix of the week – Kompressorkanonen

Kompressorkanonen (Orjan Sletner) has forgotten more about music than we could ever fit onto a record shelf. A true underground hero in the Oslo underground scene and a Discogs personality (yes they exist), Kompressorkanonen has been inspiring DJs and promoting electronic music in the city since Goa Trance. His record selection spans the known electronic music universe with a special tribute to one of the most exciting eras of electronic music, the nineties.

“My memory starts getting hazy beyond 2000” he once told me and he’d rather sacrifice any memory beyond, than lose what he has on the ninetiess and the music from that era. Here he delivers a Trushmix to that effect. “Chopped up rave techno, breaks beats, glitchy sounds, fast cuts and those samples cut in a way we don’t hear much in these days dance music” is how the guys at Trushmix describe it. The energy in this mix is infectious and resolute and we can’t stop listening to it.

Kompressorkanonen doesn’t pander and digs deep through that immense library of nineties music to deliver a setlist of forgotten and unknown gems for this mix.

Profile – Cin Cin

It might not come as a surprise to you that the record label Cin Cin was concocted over a drink in a pub – it’s in the name after all. Ali Tillett, the promoter and booking agent working with Warm in London had met friend and peer Michael Greene, better known by his DJ/producer alias Fort Romeau, for an innocent pint at the local, but what started out as a “tipple”, would be much more significant  as the pair laid down the basis of a record label.

“We both wanted to do it”, Greene told Red Bull music academy back in 2016 “and I figured that if we combined our small amounts of free time, it would be possible – and because we’d already been working together, it was quite a natural thing.” Cin Cin sprang up during a phase of immense popularity for Greene’s Fort Romeau project. “The motivation was that I didn’t have enough stress and hassle in my life already” he would joke in Groove magazine, but in all seriousness the label had a very humble and simple premise to it.

“Doing this solo electronic music thing, it’s a quite isolating way to work. You’re working in the studio on your own, for the most part, and then you go away DJing, traveling by yourself. You make friends through other DJs and other producers as times go by, but it’s nice to work more directly with other people.”

And the other aspect that would inform the label was the idea of the split EP format. Greene had “always really liked” the idea of the split release, “especially coming from a record buyer and DJ perspective”, he told RBMA. “If you can get four quite different tracks on one piece of wax, it can be a good proposition in terms of buying records in that you get more bang for your buck.”

Cin Cin’s first release saw label head Fort Romeau (who else) accompany Panorama Bar/Berghain resident Nick Höppner on the inauguration of the label for Cin Cin 001. It had always been Greene and Tilett’s vision to create a label where they “can have a well-known artist on one side and a newcomer on the other side” and through Cin Cin 001 they achieved… wait hang on.

Both Fort Romeau and Nick Höppner weren’t exactly newcomers at that time, with Fort Romeau’s albums Kingdoms and Insides already bringing the artist to the world stage and Nick Höppner releasing extensively on Ostgut Ton before that time.

“(I)t’s not necessarily strictly that format” Greene clarified for RBMA. The distinguishing characteristic to the split release however was the idea that you could discover an artist that you were perhaps unfamiliar within the context of a release from an artist you have come to know and adore.

For the split releases the “first port of call is always to ask friends and producers who we admire and have some affinity with. We don’t want to pair each side of the record too closely, there just has to be some sense of synergy between the artists. But as it’s largely dictated by our tastes there’s is always some strand that connects everything, even tenuously.”

That thread errs on the side of tenuous with Cin Cin 001, with Nick Höppner turning the tables on FR’s melodic Detroit House with two glitchy Garage cuts. The thread remains there however with both artists offering padded luxurious atmospheres that sink to unattainable depths on the record.

Even though Greene and Tillett’s intentions were  to keep Cin Cin “somewhat low-key” releasing records that merely “just turn up online and in the store” Cin Cin 001 propelled the label into the music public consciousness almost instantly.  

Perpetuating that ideology, releases from Todd Osborn, Laurence Gay, Ripperton, V, Bwana, Lor and Bezier followed, coming full circle back to Fort Romeau within the first year of the label’s existence. There was little fanfare around these releases, simply appearing in record stores. Inconspicuous amongst other records, they only really stood out once you put the needle on the record. From V and Bezier’s eighties inspired synth House to Lor’s cosmic dance floor workouts and Fort Romeau’s Detroit House, there wasn’t a distinct sonic signature to the label, but there is certainly a mood that ebbed through the whole thing.

“There’s no concrete methodology to doing it”, Greene told Shawn Reynaldo in RBMA. “It comes down to music that Ali and I both agree on and like – that’s enough of a limitation as far as how to curate the label.”

Although a conduit for their shared musical tastes, Cin Cin hadn’t really solidified a visual identity through those first releases in the first year. While all the digital releases featured the same pencil drawing of two disembodied hands setting a wine glass into vibration, the physical releases were little more than centre disc picture in a plain black sleeve.  

That all changed with the New Jackson / Elliot Lion split, Cin Cin 006. The label achieved a visual identity with that release that extends up to the most recent release, Cin Cin 010.  Featuring artwork from Arnau Bi Ponany, the look of the label was largely influenced by Greene’s tastes and his admiration for the aesthetic of labels like Whities and Live at Robert Johnson according to an exchange between Tillett and Greene on Thump.

The swirling monochrome imagery that adorns the front of each Cin Cin record since garners hypnotic associations as it flows around the centre disc of each record. On the rear, the Cin logo – two disembodied heads connected at the temporal lobe – communicates something of the ideology of the label;  Ali Tillett and Michael Greene’s shared musical knowledge and taste influencing the collection of artists and music appearing at the centre where the two heads are joined.

The new artwork brought with it a new phase for the music on the label too. New, relatively unheard of artists like Statue, Gacha Bakradze and Ara Koufax, still appeared alongside established artists like Marco Passarani, Lauer and Knightlife, but from Cin Cin 008 the music would take on a more corporeal form.

From Bwana’s Annex to Statue’s Base, there’s an elemental shift from the keys to the sequencer in the music. Where before synthesisers would create immersive textures for the dance floor, they were now stripped back to the their most basic function with an energetic take on House music.

Built on the foundation of the mechanic rhythms of machines, rather than the expressive human movements through keys, Cin Cin’s focus seemed to shift dramatically to the centre of the dance floor. By the time you get to Marco Passarani’s ICU Cin Cin is almost unrecogniseable against the backdrop of the first four releases, but that’s the nature of the beast.

What did you expect? The musical landscape is an evolutionary landscape and peoples’ tastes, perceptions and style changes with its movement, so a label built upon personal tastes is sure to evolve with time and Greene and Tillett make no excuses for it either. In his 2016 interview with RBMA Greene made it clear that “the only consistent idea is to have it as a split EP format”.

Ironic that the only consistent idea is based on a format that doesn’t really encourage consistency, but that’s exactly what keeps Cin Cin interesting and unique.

Since the music on the label will always be an organic extension of Tillett and Greene’s personal tastes, it will undeniably modulate, and today it’s taken on a life of its own. It lives beyond the Fort Romeau sound (he hasn’t contributed to the label since Cin Cin 005), or any of Tillett’s musical projects and for the last two-and-a-half years, it’s remained consistent, and probably more appropriately, consistently good.

Lauer and The Golden Filter share Cin Cin 10, the most recent release from the label with The Golden Filter approaching the label from a completely different world than the previous artists on the label. An electronic live duo, The Golden Filter were a surprise addition to the label, but their inclusion perpetuates Greene and Tillett’s unwavering philosophy for the label; that is no philosophy other than the split release format.

It might have started out as a drink in the pub, but like every drink in the pub, it’s gotten out of hand and today Cin Cin is the incorrigible eccentric at the bar with no particular purpose other than the whim of his will.

Hear a new track from DJ Seinfeld for his upcoming DJ Kicks

DJ Seinfeld streams a new track from the compilation and announces a tour which stops off at Jæger this summer.

Preceding the release of  DJ Seinfeld’s DJ kicks compilation the UK producer and DJ has shared an original DJ Seinfeld cut from the upcoming release. “Typeless” is out today via all major streaming services and it will appear alongside mostly exclusive tracks from the likes of FaltyDL, Andras and Project Pablo.

The Swedish producer and DJ took the iconic !K7 mix series back to the club, recording it at Inkonst in his hometown Mälmo. Expect “a steady dance floor pulse” with “slippery electro grooves, more cosmic synth work and dusty broken beats” according to the label.

The track comes with the announcement of a DJ kicks tour planned this summer with a stop at Jæger scheduled on the 31st of August.

Olanskii features on Wooded Podcast

 Frædag, Sunkissed and Jæger resident delivers a mix to the Polish festival’s podcast series.

Wooded is a city festival and events series co-ordinated by producer and DJ duo Catz n Dogz, C&C Bookings and Feast Artist management. Olanskii joins esteemed guests like Margaret Dygas, Answer Code Request and Ryan Elliot for this year’s edition on 23rd of June, in Łasztownia, Poland.

“Wooded is the result of an exceptional collaboration of key players within the Polish club and electronic music scene”. Established since 2013, they have two festivals under their belt and a host of events that handpick artists and DJs from the local Polish scene and abroad.

Today, they’re streaming a mix from Olanskii leading up to the event and his set there.  You can find out more about the event from the Wooded website and follow them via Facebook. Tickets are available at Resident Advisor.

 

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.

Album of the week: Luca Lozano – Boss Moves

Luca Lozano (Lukas Hunter) is one of the more exciting producers currently working in electronic music. Releases on Super Rhythm Trax, Hypercolour, Sex Tags and his own Klasse Wrecks label has seen the UK producer and DJ carve out a unique sound on the dance floor. Embodying the spirit of UK dance music history today, Luca Lozano has been working within the realm of break-beats, acid and rave, combining these elements in a modern aesthetic with powerful effects.

From the electro-tinged explorations of “Outer Space” to a recent bootleg release that wasn’t officially named his, but carries his signature all over the release, a Luca Lozano track or EP carries certain hallmarks that sets it apart in the contemporary landscape and makes it instantly recognisable and appealing.

He finds a unique sympathy with the musical world around him, while mutating it through the UK provenance from which the producer arrived into music. Elements of Hardcore and Rave find a symbiotic relationship with today’s sonic palettes, taming those mythic beasts for modern audiences. The singles and EPs he has released up to this point indulged the DJ’s perspective, but now comes an album on Running Back that extends beyond the DJ booth and takes Lozano’s sound to a whole new audience, “Boss Moves”.

Like KiNK’s last album on the label, “Boss Moves” is Luca Lozano distilling the sound he’s cultivated over his EP’s and singles into the album format, incorporating more layers into the music that softens the functional aspects of dance music without losing sight of the inherent, infectious appeal of his artistry.

“Boss Moves” calls to mind the furtive 90’s without any sense of nostalgia. Acid riffs and deep, dub bass figures ebb in the subterranean depth of breakbeat percussion arrangements. Legato synths pad out the spaces between the rhythm section without subverting the functional demand of Lozano’s music.

For the most part, the producer tempers the blow of the sound we’ve come to know from him, but every track carries the signature of his work and in its entirety. “Boss Moves” concentrates Lozano’s efforts on the essential elements in his work and exploits them for something more accessible. He takes those core 90’s UK dance music elements lost to time, dusts them off and puts them in a modern context where everything from the Balearic Isles to Ambient music finds a place in his rich sonic tapestry.

It’s Lozano’s melodic treatment of the album that sets it apart from previous EPs. With specific designs on the album format, tracks like “Essential Elements” are swathed in expressive synths and atmospheric padding that add a visceral dimension to the rhythmic arrangements. Although this is not Luca Lozano’s first foray into the LP format, it centres the varied sound his been proliferating through his EPs over the last few years, highlighting the core appeal that they all share, and taking them beyond the dance floor.

“Boss Moves” is a record that fits in various sections of our record shelf with a very unique artistic voice behind it and it will be in the spotlight this week as our album of the week.

Ivaylo’s Houstin Sally is up on Traxsource

Ivaylo’s next release, out on Music Department is available to pre-order and stream via Traxsource today.

You’ve heard a cut from the release on Ole Abstract’s LYD this month, and now you can pick up the release ahead of it’s official release date, next Friday.

Released via Russian label Music Department, the release is the first in a line of releases prepped for 2018 that sees Ivaylo return to studio after something of a hiatus. “Houstin Sally” and “Drippin Kitty” are deep adventures in House with lively percussive arrangements that make its mark on the dance floor.

“Drippin Kitty” has already started making the rounds in DJ sets around Oslo and it precedes a release on Bogota Records , which sees the boss return to his label as well as a host of new releases from the Jæger resident primed for the near future.

You can pre-order “Houstin Sally” here and catch Ivaylo this Sunday for his weekly residency at the Jæger mix. 

Mix of the Week – Unscented DJ

Acid lines ripping wormholes through the fabric of reality cascade against swirling atmospheres like Dali’s melting sub-realities. A psychedelic House mix from Unscented DJ, “a DJing person from NY”, has caught our attention for its freakish nature as our mix of the week.

Moving through uncanny interpretations of House music, the mix plays on tracks with a peculiar disposition. Chirping electronics and obscure noises appearing from far flung dimensions, ebb in and out of view from the syncopated beats and House-informed rhythm sections.

The mix recorded for cminus is soundtracking our weekend ahead.

Gay Guerilla and Jæger raises over 150 000kr for the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya

Takings from the door at last week’s Gay Guerilla’s takeover at Jæger has been donated to FRI in association with the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya.

A large group of people from Oslo’s LGBT community descended on Jæger last week, as this month’s choice for the “gay takeover” event, Gay Guerllia. Every first Friday of the month, a group of Lesbian, Gay, Transexual and Bisexual people create a pop-up gay bar in a venue with a largely heterosexual profile with the purpose to break stigmatised pre-conceptions of gay nightlife in the city.

Jan-Mikael Modig, Luke Schtele and Ole-Marius Walbækken lead a group of 3000-strong which can see up to 300 people join a single event. This is the second occasion they’ve chosen Jæger as their target and, like last time,  Jæger has pledged 20% of its takings on the door  to a worthy LGBT cause.

Gay Guerilla and Jæger raised 16 100kr fro FRI to be directed to the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya for the purpose of eradicating a law from colonial rule that still makes it illegal for two people of the same gender to engage in consensual sex. The Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya’s first priority is to bring the case before the court,”and you can’t sue the state without resources” says Lina Tordsson, the international advisor for FRI.

FRI, the association of gender and sexual diversity in Norway have long been fighting causes like this on a global scale, without taking a cent in administration costs from donors. For the past two years NORAD have pledged 9kr for every 1kr donated to the organisation, and our 16 100kr will see 161 000kr go to the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya for the fight towards the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

You can read more about Gay Guerilla here and the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya and their cause on FRI’s website.

Jealous God – A legacy, hermetically sealed in electronic music

“I don’t want to start another label” Juan Mendez told Maria Perevedentseva in a Quietus article from 2016. The producer, DJ and label owner, known also by his artistic name Silent Servant had just called it a day on Jealous God records, the label he established in 2013 alongside co-conspirators James Ruskin and Karl O’Connor (British Murder Boys). Naturally at the time, he  was pensive about embarking on the next phase as a record label boss.

He, Ruskin and O’Connnor had just announced ten more releases from the label, scheduled throughout the succeeding year, calling an end to a 15-odd year collaboration for the trio which started in the Sandwell District collective.

After a successful five-year run Jealous God’s legacy has been enshrined in electronic music history, leaving some giant shoes to fill in its wake. Today, after twenty two releases, Jealous God has taken on mythic proportions as one of the most unique record labels ever to come out of the Techno genre.

The label sprang into existence with releases from Ruskin and Silent Servant in 2013, but it wasn’t really until the third release, another Silent Servant 12”, that Mendez “felt that it was the start” of Jealous God. “Visually, it was what I wanted it to look like”, he told the Quietus “and from an audio standpoint it’s what I wanted it to sound like.”

Going from Silent Servant’s “Siglo 2” on the first release to “Lust Abandon” on JEL03 there’s definite shift, where a kind of minimalist functionalism disappears into something closer to the EBM, and minimal wave genres. The droning atmospheres clouding stoic beat arrangements of Siglo 2 are pushed to the background to make room for percussive staccato synths and legato pads haunting the exterior fringes of “Lust Abandon”.

Jealous God had found its sound, and it was solidified in the look of the product. For a large part Jealous God was Mendez’ label, and it wasn’t about his sound as an artist, it was all down to the aesthetic of the label, a look he curated throughout its twenty two releases, starting with the cover for “Lust Abandon”.

JEL03’s cover is adorned with label’s bold graphic logo, etched in gold on black, something that would remain a constant presence through Jealous God’s catalogue. It was presented alongside a pastel photograph of a readymade figurine arrangement including the virgin Mary, Jesus on the Cross and the Grim reaper, all hermetically sealed in its plastic wrapping. There’s a dichotomy at play there from the imagery to the packaging and the music, and it was Mendez aesthetic vision that defined the label as much as the sound it proliferated.  

Mendez, a visual artist and graphic designer, had been working as art-director at an advertising agency since the mid 2000’s. He moved into designing record sleeves after joining the Sandwell District Techno collective with his first musical release as Silent Servant on their label in 2006. Using his free time to design covers for Sandwell District, he crafted a visual identity for Sandwell District that had a kind of monochrome appearance with a stylised collage approach to artists like Tom of Finland. But what inspired it? “Karl [O’Connor, Regis] was always sending me books on Teddy Boys, old UK youth culture, cafe racer, leather culture stuff,” Mendez told Resident Advisor’s Matt McDermott in 2017. “And then I got this idea to mix all that up with horror movies.”

Sandwell District had too many cooks in the kitchen however and it made for a volatile environment, one that would eventually implode as n it came to a dramatic and pointed conclusion with Rrose’s Artificial light (1969-1909) in 2012.

Out of the ashes of Sandwell District, Jealous God was born in close succession with Ruskin, O’Connor, and Mendez at the helm. Jealous God became a platform for those artists and their musical tastes with Mendez taking on a pivotal role at the label, managing art director Corinne Schiavone, photographer Rita Minissi and Los Angeles experimental filmmaker Jenny Nono towards his vision for the label. “I do like that curatorial aspect (of the label)” he told Mcdermott and from the artwork to the packaging and back to the music, there was a consistency to Jealous God that few labels have been able to achieve to that degree.

A reserved, yet poignant output followed JEL03 and the label took its ultimate shape through releases from the likes of Broken English Club, Phase Fatale, Fixmer, In Aeternam Vale, Alexey Volkov and the artists at the head of the label; established and new artists that would mould a distinct, yet varied sound for the label. It was the sound of Techno, operating in the margins of the genre. EBM and minimal wave played an integral role in the sonic disposition of the label, incorporating the punkish quality of those genres without sacrificing the technical refinement Techno had achieved up until this point. It certainly wasn’t DIY, but it was bold and immoveable like Punk.

There was a fluid dialogue between the sound and the artwork and the packaging, which took on more of a “real-world presence” according to Mcdermott when comparing them to the Sandwell District concepts. Including tangible objects in the artwork, arranged in contrast and sympathy with each other, there was a Duchampian quality to the cover-art that communicated something of the music with a flourish of Mendez’ latin-american dry and direct humour in the subtext.

Mendez was heavily influenced by the Toilet Paper Magazine and “without ripping them off” he played on that style of 60’s photography and the “pop-ness of things” in their work. “Also having the two distinct concepts of ‘Jealous’ and ‘God’ allows for a really interesting and creatively productive mix of ideas,” he explained in the Quietus.” This dichotomy becomes a sort of mould, a limitation that creates a means of no limitation.” Between the artwork and the music, Mendez and Jealous God relied on a certain directness, where the artwork was easy to read, and conveyed its themes and ideas “quickly and effectively”.

Issue no. sixteen with Broken English Club (Oliver Ho) comes to mind. Ho’s known obsession with JG Ballard and especially the novel Crash is brought to real life through the photograph on the cover. A human torso at the wheel of a car takes on the form of a mannequin (perhaps a reference to Mannequin records)  in a flesh-body suit that compliments to blue hue of the automobile interior perfectly. “I wanted to embody that, mix it up a bit,” he explained in Resident Advisor. “Something like Eyes Without Face meets Crash.” He continues: “I wanted it to have this androgynous, non-sexual feeling. That’s why I used the tin body suit with medical braces. I wanted to push my design off the table top.”

 

From the music to the artwork, there was a considered effort running through the Jealous God label and its releases that had a striking effect on both the listener and the viewer. You’re immediately drawn to their records regardless of your musical proclivity, and for the musical enthusiast, a Jealous God record always reserves a special place in your collection.

From the sleeves to the little trinkets they included in some of the releases, Jealous God records are pieces of objet d’art that have made a significant impact through the short tenure. Calling an end to the label Mendez, Ruskin and O’Connor have made a unique impact in the annals of electronic music across their biography and discography.

Bringing it to its conclusion seemed inevitable too, because if it had become a ubiquitous feature in record stores it would have certainly lost some of that mythic appeal it had garnered.

But Jealous God couldn’t just merely end either and there always had to be something deeper to it. Going from Ruskin’s JEL02 to JG022 the label had to complete a circle for Mendez. Like a DJ set it would need to reach its apex at Domenico Crisci JG12, and dissolve again in JEL022. ”I  needed time to arch the label’s sonic direction, so that I could come back to that sound (JEL02)”, he explained in the Quietus. Using the analogy of a DJ set at Berghain he says, “I can start off with Pye Corner Audio or Broken English Club and by the end I will get to Oscar Mulero, I will get to the fucking Waveform Transmissions or Sleeparchive records. That arch is crucial, and now the label embodies that.”

It was an appropriate and pivotal point to bring that label to its conclusion, and as such it left indelible mark on the musical landscape, one that has hermetically sealed its legacy in electronic music much like the records it sold. Few labels have been able to achieve this in electronic music history, and if the feat ever was to be repeated Mendez is one of the only people that could. Although he is not completely opposed to the idea of starting a new label, and suggests in the Quietus interview that he “probably will”, Jealous God set the bar pretty high.

“The next step is to have a new, clear, distilled idea” says Mendez about life after Jealous God and we’ll wait with bated breath for that moment to arrive.

*Silent Servant plays our basement this Friday for the Triangle Showcase.

Album of the week: Actress x LCO – Lageos

In 2016 Darren Cunningham as Actress and the London Contemporary Orchestra collaborated for the first time in a live performance at London’s Barbican centre. Playing a selection of  previously recorded material from Actress’ back catalogue and some new original pieces, they distorted the fringes between the electronic – and acoustic realm with a performance that had some lingering effects. Recorded through Boiler Room at the Barbican, the show eventually moved on to the Tate Tanks and the Strelka Institute in Moscow, where it’s garnered some critical acclaim, before being realised in the recorded format as an EP and now, an album, “Lageos”.

Rather more than just a recording of these live shows, the album was  reverse engineered (in a sense) from those initial sketches. LCO recorded new material based on these performances as stems, which Cunningham then manoeuvred through the narrative of an album.

“For much of the set we look to realise as close as possible the timbres and colours of Actress’ electronics through acoustic means (which he in turn responds to); something of a physicalisation of those synthesised or sampled sounds”, explains LCO’s Hugh Brunt about what they were trying to achieve through their acoustic instruments and various bric-a-brac re-imagined as instruments, like plastic shopping bags to make hi-hat sounds.

Cunningham reimagines these as the facade of buildings or physical spaces in the way of Iannis Xenakis. Particularly inspired by the impressive brutalist architecture of the Barbican centre, Cunningham tried to “integrate the shapes into the arrangement and then take that apart”, in the arrangement of “Lageos”.

The result is an album with jagged rhythmical edges softened in abstract melodic interludes, that deconstruct its own themes. With the same experimental foresight of Arnold Schoenberg or Karl Stockhausen, but purposely expressed in the language of popular electronic music rather than anything from a classical dialect, Actress and the LCO bring that gap between the classical and the contemporary ever closer through this work. Factor in Boiler Room and the Barbican and worlds do collide.

It’s not the first time a project like this has been realised in the electronic music’s hierarchy and since Techno’s adolescence, artists like Carl Craig and Henrik Schwartz have collaborated with orchestras. LCO are often a part of these style of collaborations and have even worked with artists like Matmos in much a similar way, but those have always been a classical accompaniment or interpretation of an electronic artist’s music and never before have they collaborated in recording wholly new material.  “Audio Track 5” is such a piece, a song Resident advisor said “isn’t easy listening, and it’s certainly not his best work”. But I’d have to strongly disagree.

As one of the more palatable songs on the album featuring the rarefied 4/4 beat and happy melodic refrain plodding around those wailing strings and muted piano, there’s a certain amiable quality to the track that definitely makes it one of the more accessible tracks on the album, especially compared to the high frequency drones and chirps of  “Momentum”.

There’s two sides to this album, and the patient listener will be rewarded. Listen past the obvious noise, or the stuttering rhythms and there’s a solemn serenity to “Lageos” that only reveals itself as you listen to it more, and as the album progresses through its individual pieces. Even a song like “Galya Beat” with its obstinate, at times overwhelming, serial arrangement, dissolve into the upbeat percussive melodies of “Chasing Numbers” on the other end.

They form a very immersive experience, that plays most effectively on space, the acoustic instruments offering a brand new dimension in the Actress sound. Where previous albums like “R.I.P” and “Ghettoville” often had a kind of claustrophobic and anxious feeling underpinning their tracks, “Lageos” has a far greater endearing quality to it, with LCO really opening up the sound of the artist through their collaboration.

It can’t really be defined in the Actress discography so comparing it to previous albums like “R.I.P” would be unnecessary, but in the contemporary music landscape it makes for a breath of fresh air as something that doesn’t merely pander to any pre-disposed form or style, and taking it from the stage to the recorded format, perhaps sets a new precedent for these types of collaborations in the future.

Musikkfest Playlist

A beautiful noise descends upon the city of Oslo this Saturday as Musikkfest 2018 commences. Countless stages and thousands of bands, DJs and artists represent the future sounds of the Norwegian capital. Everything from House to Metal acquires a stage at the various music venues and open public spaces that make up the city festival and every year were torn between acts, stages and venues to sustain our musical appetite.

As we trawl the endless stages with a plastic bag of warm beer, trying to navigate the incomprehensible Musikkfest guide we’re often left scratching our heads, resigning ourselves to a curb somewhere off Musikkfest watching some guy play an accordion.

Naturally, Jæger offers a stage too on this day, in fact we offer two stages with live music and DJ sets from some of the artists closest to us, which can in itself be a daunting prospect. This year we’ve got live sets from Finnebassen, Ost &Kjex, Mutual Intentions, Ja Azz, Marius Circus, and WHALESHARKATTCKS and DJ sets from G-Ha & Olanskii, Nils Noa, Helena Rickhard, Stine Amundsen, MC KAMAN, Spilt Melk and DJ Cesi across our two floors.

Luckily for us many of these artists and DJs have profiles on youtube, so we gathered all that we could find, and one MC Kaman easter egg in one handy playlist to peruse. DJ sets, recorded music and even live performances make up this Musikkfest 2018 playlist, which should make it somewhat easier to navigate Jæger’s program this year.

Stream Olle Abstract’s LYD for June 2018

Olle Abstract showcases June’s new Norwegian sounds in another LYD showcase.

Featuring Ost & Kjex, Whalesharkattacks, and De Fantastiske To, and Ivaylo here comes the sound of your Norwegian summer. Olle Abstract gets in ahead of the curve yet again, with some new Norwegian sounds coming out this summer.

Jæger resident Ivaylo’s next release via Music Department, Dripping Kitty gets a play as well as Ost & Kjexx and Whalesharkattacks’ Private Dancer, just in time for their Musikkfest performance this Saturday.

You can find the full playlist here, which also features new music from Boblebad, who played in our basement last month for LYD as well as Full Pupp’s Sprutbass, Prins Thomas and Of Norway.

Olle Abstract will be back at Jæger  in September for another LYD showcase.

 

Stream a Samo DJ remix from the first Schloss release

Inverted Audio premiere a track from the newly founded Oslo label with a remix of Max Fowler’s In an Asset.

“An imprint you should definitely keep your eye on” according to Inverted Audio, the label run by Karima F and Ida Ekblak out of the Oslo artist space, Schloss premiered this month with a 12″ from Max Fowler. Two original tracks from the UK artist feature a melodic and deep approach to House with a remix from Swedish powerhouse producer Samo DJ on the flip.

Samo DJ strips back the arrangement of the original, offering a club interpretation of the soulful track from Fowler. Skipping along at an accelerated pace the track retains only the bare essential melodic appeal of the original as Samo DJ’s  focus turns on the percussive rhythmic section. Adding a hollow kick with a fair bit of click to it, Samo DJ plays on his strengths for this remix.

The record is available at Phonica Records and you can read Inverted Audio’s feature on the track here.

Profile: Charlotte de Witte

Over the last two years Charlotte De Witte has exploded on the scene, leaving audiences winded with her aggressive take on the darker aspects of the Techno genre. Blowing through the clubbing landscape, going from a relatively unknown DJ to playing festivals like Awakenings, Pukkelpop and Dour, with thousands in attendance and signing tracks to the likes of Saura, Novamute and Turbo, in a matter of a year, you’d be forgiven for thinking hers is a sudden and immediate rise from relative obscurity to popularity, but you’d be mistaken.

Charlotte De Witte started DJing in 2010 and immediately waves at home in Belgium and then abroad as her alter-ego Raving George, a moniker she created to “avoid the stereotypes of being a female DJ and producer” according to an XLR8R interview. Launching a DJ career at a time when inequality between the genders had still been rife, De Witte opted to use a male alter ego, and chose George because “George is a pretty reliable name”, according to her old discogs page. ”I want a ‘George’ to come fit my bathroom, to fix my car, to command my battlefleet. You can always rely on a George. A George founded the US of A, created Star Wars, sang Karma Chameleon and invented the Lean, Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. Ryan Gosling’s dog is even called George FFS. George gets shit done.”

Raving George came into the world during a time of Gesaffelstein, Boys Noize Records and Brodinski, and as that alias, De Witte perpetuated the distorted interpretation of electro made popular by those artists and labels. A recording career naturally beckoned after making her  phenomenal entrance as a DJ, and after a tentative start in the studio, she released her first music as Raving George in 2013 with the “Obverse EP” on Crux records.

Producing had not come “naturally” to De Witte, but with a little help from some producer friends she landed upon a sound that perpetuated the zeitgeist of the time, but maintaining a DJs approach to the production suite. “The first steps of producing were very hard” she told XLR8R , but she “always kind of knew how I wanted my music to be like”. With a little assistance in “making something actually sound good and club proof “, her first releases unified her vision and resulted in three more EPs as Raving George. But just as that alias started solidifying a sound, George would be put to rest, as Charlotte de Witte returned to her given name with a significantly more personal and candid take on music and DJing.

“After DJing for six years, it became pretty obvious to most people that I actually was a woman, not a man”, she told XLR8R. Raving George started to “lose its purpose” and she “didn’t feel the need to hide behind a male alter ego anymore.” A changing landscape in the electronic music world and Raving George’s services were no longer required, with Charlotte de Witte free to make this an eponymous career free of prejudices. “This is who I am; I am a woman, playing and producing music, and I’m bloody well proud of it too.

Today Charlotte de Witte is associated with a kind of big room Techno sound that bares comparison to the likes of Ben Klock or Len Faki, but it took De Witte’s some time to get to that point after Raving George. “Growing up and digging into more electronic music” De Witte eventually found her place in the world of Techno, a genre she told Awakenings festival during an interview session; “suits me much better than electro”. Where those first Raving George releases perhaps hinted at these early electro influences when she adopted her eponymous alias they all but disappeared as De Witte grew into the sound she has dominated since 2015’s Weltschmerz on Turbo recordings. Impressive kick drums punch a hole through dark atmospheres, relaying De Witte’s love of melancholy through noisy textures. ”I love music that  digs a bit deeper and touches your emotion” she told Awakenings. She likes the “stripped-back” nature of Techno and thrives in music with a “less is more” disposition.

The shift from Raving George’s last single “You’re Mine” featuring the vocals of Oscar and The Wolf to “Weltschmerz” is a significant one. She took Raving George to the boundaries of contemporary electronic music with vocal Tech-House track that was more pop music than dance music, and in something of a contrast in the very same year she introduced herself as Charlotte De Witte with a functional Techno release indulging a merely corporeal appeal.

The change from Raving George to Charlotte de Witte was a huge move “mentally” for the artist but also reflected the change of attitude in the music industry where De Witte felt that promoters were starting take her more “seriously” when it came to her music and her sets. Her sets are an extension of her work in the studio, with a raw, minimalist approach to Techno and videos from her performances at Awakenings and Dour as well as recorded mixes from Mixmag to RA have propelled her career in an astonishingly short time. Alongside releases on Novamute, Mary Go Wild and Sleaze records, Charlotte de Witte has made a considerable mark on the landscape in a very short time, putting her name on the tip of the club community’s tongue today.

 

* Charlotte de Witte plays Frædag this week.

Album of the Week: Sex Judas – Go Down Judas

Tore Gjedrem (aka Ost from Ost & Kjex) conjures the golden tenor of Sex Judas for the character’s debut LP, Go Down Judas. After a couple of breakthrough EPs on Tim Paris’ Marketing music, Sex Judas found his way onto Optimo Music, where he’s resided since 2015 with Det Syke Vesen Som Kjeder Seg I Bunnen Av Mennesket.

Go down Judas is an album of sorrow and lament re-imagined through the sound of Disco, Funk and House, with the soulful R&B vocal of the main character breaking the fourth wall between this reality and his fictional world. “Let the power go” and “Navigating the sea of shit” deals with the greed, sexual inequality and “the destruction of truth” in a world of Putin and Trump, while “All good Junkies” and “Snake Song” elaborate on the Sex Judas story, from his birth in the original sin to his doomed future.

From Sex Judas’ birth at the beginning of time to the present, and his own dissolution with his imagined/real world through the opener “The Hedonist disappeared into Normality” Go Down Judas is the story of the character’s demise in a contemporary world, as he makes an unlikely protagonist against the backdrop of our current reality. A symbol of provocation in a sterile, conservative world, Sex Judas might just be the one that will pull us out of the writhing sea of snakes.

Gjedrem finally gets the band together on the album. Although it is a solo project, it has always been the intention of Sex Judas and Ricky’s creator to turn the project into a band, and on the album he’s succeeded with a stellar cast of musicians joining the producer in the studio. Ole Henrik Moe, Pål Strangefruit, Bugge Wesseltoft, and Sidiki Camara lend their distinguished, individual touches to the record, embodying the sound of a live band in a club setting.

Go Down Judas jumps from a proto-club sound of tracks like “Sidiki’s Jam” and “Candy Darling” to album songs like the album’s opener, “Snake Song” and the funky Disco of “The Sorrows of Young Walter”. Gjedrem’s eclectic tastes really come to the fore through this album with each track making a significant unique mark on the record. Even the more club-inspired tracks that bare some resemblance to Ost & Kjex’s approach the dance floor, travel from distant corners of that musical universe – Disco, House, Acid and Boogie all making a contribution to the style of the record, much like DJ Ost set.

Where previous EPs “My Girls” and “Big Sex Thing” were still really exploring the Sex Judas sound, and Det Syke Vesen Som Kjeder Seg I Bunnen Av Mennesket threw a bit of curveball,  “Go Down Judas” is the most concrete version of the Sex Judas sound we’ve heard to date; a sound perfectly suited for the album format.

Mix of the Week – Finn Johannsen

It’s 6 hours of dub music from one of the most practised heads in the German scene. Finn Johannsen, best known for his affiliation with Macro and Hardwax, is an avid music enthusiast, which clearly comes to the fore here as strings together 6 hours of “top notch reggae, dub, and other bass heavy Jamaican sound system vibes” for this Trushmix.

A radio host, music journalist and selector Finn’s dedication to music spreads across an impressive career and a vast chasm of musical interests. Finn’s selections can drift from the sounds of the Macro label, we heard last year when he played alongside Stefan Goldmann to the soulful house of this radio mix and then jump across to the Caribbean isles in this latest Trsuhmix.

Each mix is a considered digger’s approach to a chosen genre in which seems to catalogue the style through his distinctive tastes, and this Trushmix takes this to the extreme, soundtracking the start of an early summer.

Hear a new track from Ost & Kjex featuring Whalesharkattacks

Ost & Kjex cover the Tina Turner classic “private dancer” with vocals from Whalesharkattacks.

The track is streaming over on Dancing Astronaut today and takes the original into the present with a bouncy club interpretation with Whalesharkattacks embodying Turner through a pitched vocal.

Paying homage to the eighties classic, Ost & Kjex strip it back to it’s bare essentials with  barely a chord progression discernible as they turn it into a nascent club burner. Whalesharkattacks makes the song her own and it all pays dividends at the extended break as she croons “I want to be your private dancer”, before Ost & Kjex falls back into the kick-bass pattern.

“We had a fascination with Tina’s Private Dancer since first being exposed to it by Pat Sharp on Sky Trax in the 80’s”, says Ost & Kjex over at Dancing Astronaut. “Whalesharkattacks personifies everything that’s cool about the 80’s, so when we met her we knew we had to cut a version.”

The track which comes via Crosstown Rebels today is the first release from the duo since Freedom Wig, and comes a week before they and whalesharkattacks perform live in Jæger’s backyard for Musikkfest 2018.

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.

Album of the Week: Jon Hopkins – Singularity

There’s an alluring kind of perfection to the music of Jon Hopkins. There’s a painstaking degree of precision to the composer’s work. Hopkins’ sounds are designed to a cinematic extent, in perfect relation to each other through compositional forms that speak of some evocative fiction. Across his various solo works, and collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno and King Creosote, as well as his award-winning score for Monsters, there’s something unassailable in his music that has leaped across musical markers.

In 2008 he was cordially accepted into the electronic dance music circles with “Insides”, his third studio album which saw the producer, composer and performer inducted into the club music sphere, by combining elements of dubstep with visceral piano works that saw Hopkins travel from the stage to the club through his music.

A pianist/keyboardist by trade with a progressive attitude to synthesis and sound design, Jon Hopkins garners the admiration from peers and music enthusiasts alike and alongside the likes of Nils Frahm and Max Richter, he has brought the gap between the worlds of Vivaldi and Väth closer together. Over the last decade, he has made music that channels a classical music education through a contemporary electronic realm. He is able to modulate with the contemporary landscape as it evolves, but with music built from a textural, melodic purview, it steps out of time with the that time and place as a distinctive musical voice.

“Singularity” thus, could not be more suited as the title that marks Jon Hopkins’ return to the album format after five years. “Singularity” follows on from “Immunity” in one smooth movement with much of the same sonic designs at its core, sounds Hopkins has continually developed through the years in his work. There’s a dance music, percussive quality to his work again, that evokes rhythms from Dubstep’s era, but in “Singularity” there’s a distinctive narrative quality to the album, that we’ve not experiences in quite such a focussed way before. While “Insides” and  “Immunity” featured a similar cinematic flair across individual tracks, that’s exactly what they felt like, individual tracks.

On “Singularity” we find a distant connection between the individual songs, that tends to build tension through the first three songs, move up to transcendent heights through “Everything Connected”, before finding a resolution in “Feel First Life” and “C O S M”. The album languishes through those two tracks, “C O S M” teasing with kick at times but never over-exerting the listener , before it lands on “Echo Dissolve”; a piece of solitary piano music and atmospheric accompaniment that sounds what imagine the feeling  of contentment sounds like.

It’s a marvel listening to the way tracks like these and “Luminous Beings” unfold, progress and resolve in their entirety, and while Hopkins had already established something of this ability in “Immunity”, through “Singularity” I believe he’s achieved perfection. It’s almost too perfect.

Bassiani set up Donation Fund for legal battle

Tbilisi club Bassiani /Horroom has set up a donation page to help with their legal costs in the fight to remain open.

The fate of Bassiani’s future in the Georgian capital still hangs in the balance after a police raid on the club two weeks ago in response to alleged drug deaths at the venue and night club. The raid, in which eight drug dealers were arrested, resulted in a protest outside of the Georgian parliament in which thousands gathered for an impromptu street rave organised by the White Noise movement, a movement dedicated to relaxing the country’s strict drug laws.

After surmounting pressure from the public, the interior affairs minister was forced to apologise and the protest dispersed peacefully, with promises of investigating the incident at Bassiani and a renewed process of “working on liberalization of strict drug policies and the return of the club”, according to Bassiani’s Facebook page.

“Despite the negotiations, none of the agreed conditions have been fulfilled” says Bassiani and the club remains closed. Over the weekend they’ve set up a donation page “to help retain BASSIANI / HOROOM & HOROOM NIGHTS team and venue, to prepare a legal battle and stop the state oppression.”

You can donate here, and Jæger will also be making its own contribution with more details to follow shortly.

Getting to know DJ Hamburger

When I first met DJ Hamburger he was eating a slice pizza.

A regular at Jæger, Olav Friisberg is a sound engineer a documentary filmmaker, a DJ and an essential part of the Mutual Intentions crew, where he’s been documenting the rise of the DJ collective and label from behind the camera and performing as a DJ since 2013.

The second time I met DJ Hamburger he was behind the mixing console, working as a sound engineer.

In recent months, Olav has become an integral thread in the fabric of Jæger from the mixing console to the DJ booth. His Jæger mix brought a funky quality to the Nu-Disco genre, while stepping at a reserved pace. As a DJ  he is able to toe a very distinct line between digging for unlikely music without sacrificing the atmosphere of the party.

A reserved and jovial character, with a sincere musical appreciation that can go from John Petrucci to Breakbot, I’ve come to find a kindred spirit in Olav, and when I found out that he and I will share the booth this upcoming Wednesday for Untzdag, I wanted to get to know Olav and DJ Hamburger a little better.

I meet him on one of the first sunny days in Oslo this year. He has his computer with him and is trying to sort out a “messy” hard drive ahead of a gig at Kulturhuset but thinks better of it.

What are you playing tonight?

I’m gonna play like French House, Disco mix.

Similar to the stuff you played for your Jæger mix?

More poppy though. With a lot of vocals, cheerful and happy House stuff.

Like the Kitsune type of thing?

Yes exactly, like the Ed Banger kind of stuff.

Is that kind of stuff that got you into DJing?

I think so. I remember buying everything from Ed banger records. That was maybe the start for me and DJing – that and playing in the camp at Roskilde festival, where we built this stereo on wheels that we could travel between the camps with. I made these mixes for it that played a minute of each song, like a power hour.

That’s very much an ed Banger type of thing, playing one minute of each track. I remember hearing Mr. Ozio doing that at Melt in 2008. He would play a snippet of each track in a very Hip Hop kind of way, flicking the crossfader from end to the next. Going from White Tripes to Flat Beat.

Yes that was that time they mixed things like master of puppets into a kind of stadium electronic track.

Yeah the summer of Nu Rave. I remember a lot of people wearing colourful, fluorescent clothes and going to festivals. What happened to all those acts after that summer, acts like digitalism?

Yeah, it lasted for a few years. I remember expecting breakbot to play that style of music in his set and being disappointed when I saw him in Madrid and he was playing harder Tech House. I mean, where was the funky thing he was known for?

For me one of the DJs out of that era that stayed the test of time, is Joakim. I remember seeing him a couple of times after that whole scene moved on, and his sets incorporated elements of Disco and House in that funky way, without sounding stilted or out of touch with the contemporary landscape. It was a time of Tech-House and that minimal thing and his sets were just refreshing.

How have your tastes evolved since; what are you listening today?

I’m not into labels that much, I don’t remember the names. I have a very messy approach to sorting music, because I’m always preparing for a new gig. I don’t go back to my playlists from my other gigs so it becomes a messy archive.

But, I’m buying a lot from Lobster Theremin and Rhythm Section and I think I’m definitely going to get the next Jex Opolis when it comes out on Monday. He has a label called Good Timing.

Olav packs his computer away. The pristine cover is a mesh of colourful stickers, hinting in no subtle way to his affiliation with the Mutual Intentions crew.

Mutual Intentions have been a singular and determined presence in Oslo since 2013 and from their releases and parties they’ve breathed new life into everything from Hip Hop and Soul to Deep House in the city.

Olav’s induction into the crew came via John (Jawn) Rice who had worked with Olav as a graphic designer on a couple of film festivals when he had been at university in Lillehammer. It had cemented a friendship that led to an introduction to Fredfades and laid the foundations for the start of Mutual Intentions.

 

Were you all friends before you started playing music together?

Everybody was friends before Mutual Intentions. I started documenting and filming stuff. In the beginning if you want to get more involved, you can get more involved with it, and do more stuff. To release music there is a plan.

Are you working on music at the moment?

Yes.

What does it sound like?

Disco, House, bass. I like to play bass and I play guitars and I have a synth that I bought from John to pay his rent.

I do other stuff, so I focus more on DJing. When I make music one song can take a month.

Does it start with bass?

Yes and drums.

I never get finished with anything, so I don’t care about it and I just put it out there and give to friends. Because I don’t like to sit there and tweak and produce.

But you always have Fred and John at your disposal for that type of thing I imagine?

They are on a whole different level I think.


Olav is no musical novice. He had a focussed musical education at college. Although his main instrument was the electric guitar, he eventually moved over to bass in a class that had ten electric guitarist for every bassist. Playing guitar and bass for bands going from teenager to adolescent, he eventually gave up on the band dynamic to avoid the “hassle”.

“I think that’s hard within any group” he suggests “everybody has their own view of how it’s going to be.”

So when did clubbing and club music happen for you?

Clubbing started a bit late for me. I never started with going out that much. I started playing in a café in Lillehammer, while studying documentary film there. I was quite late checking into the club scene in Oslo. The first time I went to Jæger was like 2012 and I went to Villa once or twice before then.

I was more of a concert or festival person. I started working as a volunteer at festivals when I was 16. I was going from festival to festival doing different kinds of jobs. Slottsfjell was a cool clubbing experience when Slagsmalsklubben played.

They were a chiptune group?

Yes, 16 bit kind of sound.

I remember I had this kind of idea that I would go around in slippers everywhere that year for the festivals. Of course I lost a few slippers. At Roskilde it was like the worst rainstorm ever and I put a plastic bag around my slippers, that was my solution. (laughs)

It was the stupidest thing to do, walking around with crushed glass everywhere, but still festivals were a good way to experience new music.

Yes and it recontextualizes music styles too. When I was younger I would go to a lot of festivals to listen rock bands essentially, but then also encounter a lot of electronic music which then would lead down a path to the club tent and eventually the club.

Yes, from rock to rave.

What sort of music were you listening to as a youngster growing up.

When I was ten years old there was a trance period. When you’re a kid you don’t care so much, it’s just about; ‘this is on the radio so I’m going to listen to it.’

My dad was a fan of Marcus Miller and he loved Frank Zappa, he kind of looked like Frank Zappa too. I liked the music, the humour, and the attitude he had. There’s this experimental thing. I haven’t listened that much to him, but I remember we had this school project where we had to listen to Peaches and Regalia, where the rhythm isn’t 4/4 but 7/4 or something. It’s fun to listen to and interesting play.

It’s odd that people aren’t that experimental with music today and so open to different elements. It feels that everybody is trying to fit into a particular slot.

Yes, you occupy a certain position. I think people like to put people more into categories.

You think that would have changed more in the other direction today with things like the internet making all this music available, but it hasn’t at all. Maybe it was better when everything as Rock or Techno.

For me it depends on the day. Like Saturday I’m going to play R&B hits at Oslo Velo, that’s something I’ve always wanted to do and I’ve been watching (MC) Kaman playing on Saturdays at Jæger. That vibe is such a nostalgic trip and it’s just as fascinating as playing Techno or something else. I really respect that, but then again I would also be bored after two or three gigs.

I really like when people put different stuff together, like ND Baumecker playing Missy Elliot, my party people before a really heavy Berlin Techno track. It can work.

You get surprised in a way. In the end you’re there for the party. It’s about; they’re going out, they want to have fun and they want to listen to the songs they know.

Olav does play a lot for someone engaged in a career like his and he’s gigs are quite diverse, often odd. One of his most recent experiences was playing Techno and House for an arts seminar just outside of Lillehammer. “I DJ’d during the meeting”, says Olav with a guffaw. It was one of “weirder” experiences for him as a DJ, but he adapted regardless.

His sets can go from this gig at Kulturhuset to playing Jæger in the courtyard where he will play House and Disco as the counterpoint to Hunee downstairs. As a DJ he likes to keep it open and “surprising”, adapting to his audience even if it leads to a DJ feau pax. “I don’t feel like mixing two songs in a different key into each other would destroy the mix”.

There’s a sense of lightheartedness that ties his music together and is very much in line with the personality behind the music. From his chosen DJ moniker to his sets, there’s a sense that Olav never takes himself to seriously and it comes through in conversation and his selections.

Lets wrap this up because we’ve talked a lot. Tell me something no-one else would know about you.

(Laughs). Is that your standard question… Nobody knows that I like pizza that much. I was actually going to ask you if you wanted to get pizza instead of a coffee. Yeah nobody knows why I’m called DJ Hamburger: I was meeting up with a friend and I called them up to order a burger for me, and then she and her friend started calling me Olav Hamburger, and it just stuck.  

Hunee pulls out of Untzdag tonight

Hunee is unable to attend tonight’s untzdag event but the party will go on regardless.

We regret to announce that HUNEE will not be able to join us tonight for Natt til 17 mai // Untzdag med HUNEE (Rush Hour) due to extenuating personal circumstances. The rest of Untzdag will still go on as planned and we’ve reduced the entry fee on the door in light of this unforeseen event. Hunee has been rescheduled for the 31st of October instead and you can read his statement below.

“Hello Oslo! Dear Dancer,
I won’t be able to make it to the party at Jaeger tonight due to unforseen personal circumstances – i am very sorry about this!

Luckily, we already found a replacement date: October 31st – so see you soon! ?

About tonight: Øyvind will play an extended set – and surely, he knows how to do the jaeger thing.”

Clubland in Tbilisi comes under threat and it’s about more than your right to party

Club culture in Europe has been severely rocked by yet another incident in which a government has exacted its force on the electronic music- and club community.

This weekend in Georgia, Tbilisi Bassiani / Horoom and Café Gallery, two prominent institutions in the club community in Georgia were raided by armed police as a response to an alleged five drug deaths occurring at those venues in the last two weeks; claims Bassiani have openly denied.

60 people were reportedly arrested in connection with these raids including club co-founders Tato Getia and Zviad Gelbakhiani. It came at a time when Georgia’s controversial zero-tolerance drug policies were coming under review, and which the recent drug deaths had postponed till the next year. In response to the raid, the activist group White Noise, which shares a close relationship with Bassiani, held a peaceful protest with DJs and a soundsystem in front of the Georgian parliament with “thousands” of protesters in attendance dancing to Techno and House music supplied by local DJs, Ateq, Sa Pa and DJ Dustin.

The protest went on for two days, with several counter-demonstrations by nationalists and  social conservatives, including the neo-Nazi youth group Georgian Unity, springing up in opposition, forcing the police to impose a barricade between the two factions. The protest carried on with only isolated incidents (70 demonstrators were detained) and eventually dispersed when the minister of internal affairs addressed the crowd in a statement, apologising for “endangering the security” of the clubgoers through these police raids, and pledging a full investigation into the incident.

“Altogether eight persons, seven men and one woman, were arrested in police raids Friday night for ‘dealing narcotics’“ reports Democracy & Freedom watch on Monday the 15th, but its reported that the club-founders were not amongst these and its still unclear what this means for the future of Bassiani, Cafe Gallery and Tbilisi’s club community.

This latest Georgian incident is indicative of a trend in which conservative governments all over Europe are currently focussing their attention on club culture as a consequence of various different policies; chief amongst them their ongoing war on drugs. In one of the most publicised cases, Fabric lost their license in 2016, before having to compromise with the authorities, who reluctantly let the club stay open under some very strict conditions.

Here in Oslo, we’ve seen Blå suffer a similar fate, and in the more severe cases we saw Naboens Techno Kjelleren and Redrum completely disappear from the scene, with authorities revoking Techno Kjelleren’s license and not allowing Redrum to go ahead through mounting pressure on the host venue. Even Berghain has come under threat from a rogue far-right proposition to curtail the club’s opening hours. That proposition came from the right-wing nationalist German party AfP and as the third largest political party in Germany, it’s no mere empty threat.

Although in that case the proposal was quickly withdrawn – even the nationalist know where their bread is buttered in Berlin –  it is part of a growing trend of conservative views in Europe currently swayed by a populist right-wing factions in governments and it’s creeping in all over Europe. 

In 2017 Bloomberg reported that “support for populist radical-right parties is higher than it’s been at any time over the past 30 years”, and that support for these parties are growing rapidly across the map. With prominent seats in governments all across the continent, they are able to affect change at a political level that keeps enforcing archaic policies and as a consequence club culture is under threat as the unsubstantiated harbinger of drug dealers and illicit nocturnal activities officially, but unofficially, as a safe space for people that don’t confirm to their traditional views.

Bassiani and Café Gallery have openly supported the LGBTQ community and in a country where “homosexuality is still considered a major deviation from highly traditional Orthodox Christian”, it is almost certainly a contributing factor to what happened in Tbilisi this weekend. In our article last year with some of the DJs at Bassiani Tornike Kvanchiani (Kvanchi) claimed that homophobia is still common amongst “80% of the people” in Georgia, and since Bassiani’s second room Horoom was specifically established in response to the homophobic threat in the city, you can’t just simple ignore that this might have been a factor to that raid.

On the face of it this might look like the unbridled actions of a drug policy, but lurking in the shadows and in the subtext is an attack on a way of life; a way of life that doesn’t conform to a populist right wing’s traditions and the conservative, antiquated views of policy makers.

If indeed it was all about drug policy, arresting 8 low-level drug dealers (if they were even that) at a club is not really getting the message across. You want to fight drugs, do it with knowledge. Drug testing has proven to work in Amsterdam and it might have saved the lives of those in Georgia who were poisoned through an unknown substance, possibly contained within narcotics they ingested. If it was about drugs, why arrest both club founders in full view of the media, just to release them a few hours later? To me it seems they were trying to make a point, as if to say “your lifestyle will not be tolerated”.

Tbilisi and White Noise’s response to the incident was sheer brilliance. A peaceful rally through music and dancing is always going to be hard to vilify. And even when a few far-right factions showed up, threatening violence and disorder, White Noise and Tbilisi hardly flinched and carried on to prove that the community poses absolutely no threat in open view of the world’s media and Europe’s clubbing community gathered in support behind them on social media.

In Norway the social media channels were saturated with support, but in that I couldn’t help but feel a slight air of hypocrisy. When Redrum were shut down before it even happened there was little support in the same way and as Naboens Techno Kjelleren were forced to close recently, an isolated blog post marks the grave where it died a senseless death. When Blå was threatened, yes we all stood behind it and public opinion swayed policy, but it’s not just about an isolated incident and where we kept Blå, we’re still struggling with an unwarranted police presence at events and unnecessary checkups from the authorities, checkups bordering on harassment.  

But when I asked a prominent Norwegian Techno DJ, why it seems that the authorities are currently persecuting Techno music, that question remained unanswered. Whether it’s fear of personal oppression or just a disinterest in that topic, it shows conformity to the status quo, like some some warm, comfortable numbness that comes just before you freeze to death. 

In the Bloomberg article about the populist right’s momentum in 2017 one of the regions that are doing well in that regard was reported to be Eastern Europe. No surprise there, I hear you say and with good reason, but what if I told you that the region leading from Eastern Europe is none other than Scandinavia. Have we become so placid in a region of fiscal prosperity and the lap of luxury that we are willing to completely ignore the conservatism affecting our very way of life. 

Yes we’ve had early closing times for a while now, and the state has always imposed a kind of will on its people when it comes to alcohol consumption, which indirectly affects the community, but when you are living in a city where it’s nigh impossible to book a hip hop artist or host a techno event, and the third most popular party is the right wing party FrP shouldn’t that be cause for concern? Who is the state to decide what music you should listen to and how should spend your free time?

While we all like to think that we’re living in the cozy lap of liberalism in Scandinavia, we’re clearly not and you just need to observe the trend in which venues and club events with certain music policies have been persecuted in very recent memory.

Th trend extends to Sweden where Into the Valley was shut down last year by the police; it jets off to the UK where Fabric came under pressure and places like Dance Tunnel were forced close. It even stretches to Ibiza, that mecca of clubbing where police have raided Amnesia, Pacha and Privilege as part of a tax fraud investigation that very possibly conceals other motives too.

What happened in Tbilisi is just another event in a long line of incidents that suggest club culture is under a very real threat from influential right-wing policies in Europe. Yes, all these incidents have different reasons. Some are the result of drug policies, some are safety concerns and some are under the pretence of tax fraud, but they’re all very specific in their target, clubs and the club community.

If paying your taxes were such a real concern, why not challenge tax haven policies that deprive nations of taxes in the billions, rather than look for a couple hundred thousand stashed away in a wall. If safety and human life was such a concern, why are we letting people perish at sea for the sake of retaining some foolish idea of a national identity. If drugs are such a concern, why go after eight dealers rather than their suppliers.

These apparent reasons to their actions hide something more sinister and dangerous behind it. For me it seems to be an attack on the free and liberal ideologies that club culture promotes. The club space is the last vestige of a truly free and safe space, for people that don’t conform to the “idealised norms” of a conservative society. Even the internet can’t claim to be the liberal space it once intended to be  as everything we do is monitored and, it turns out, exploited. The club might be the last bastion free from conservative views and this is coming under threat under what is almost a populist right-wing status quo in Europe, if the statistics are correct.

What happened in Bassiani and Cafe Galleri and Tbilisi is part of a larger trend of traditionalist and conservatives currently imposing their ideology on European governments. In the age of Brexit and president Trump this threat can no longer be ignored and perhaps for our generation the only way we can affect a change is to keep club culture alive and kicking.

Dancing to music in a club is so much more than your right to party, it’s a political statement, and we will dance with Tbilisi, not just in their fight, but in a show of solidarity to any opposition that wants to suppress anybody;’s inalienable right to dance, whatever their reasons. 

 

Album of the week: Galcher Lustwerk – Dark Bliss

Galcher Lustwerk makes House music with a very distinctive twist. Residing in the deep recesses of House music, much of Galcher Lustwerk’s music would be indistinguishable from the rest of the genre if it wasn’t for the addition of his voice. Galcher Lustwerk’s nonchalant, stony vocal is the personal artistic stamp that sets his records apart from his peers.

Releasing music since 2014 via Tsuba and his own imprint, Lustwerk Music, EPs like  “I Neva Seen” and “Nu Day” have established the artist’s unique sound through stripped-back House arrangements that finds itself on an album for the first time with Dark Bliss.

Out via White Material, where Galcher Lustwerk released “Tape 22” in the past, Dark Bliss finds its way onto the vinyl LP format in 2018. With tracks rarely breaking the four-minute mark, but built on the foundation of the repetitive nature of House music, Galcher Lustwerk’s music  accommodates a variety of listening experience and can easily flit between the DJ record bag and your headphones.

Progressive loops saunter with little progression while wistful keys float across the expanse of the tracks and Galcher Lustwerk’s voice underpins each track with a daydream-like quality. Although he broods over familiar themes in Hip Hop like on a track like “What U want me to do”, others, like “Red Rose” are more congruous with House music’s one-line samples, but the lyrics all maintain a tentative distance from any real concrete meaning inferred on them.

Short, reduced pieces make up Dark Bliss, through musical vignettes that distil Galcher Lustwerk’s sound down to individual tracks and tie the album together as a whole. With no elongated dub versions like those on his EPs, Galcher Lustwerk’s debut album is the most fully realised execution of the sound he’s steadily cultivated as an artist. It’s a record whose variety of production work is something we can appreciate with a view from the booth, while his vocal communicates something more visceral and approachable.

Listen to Charlotte De Witte’s Resident Advisor mix

Charlotte De Witte delivers a club mix to the resident advisor podcast series.

The Belgium artist and DJ whose success has propelled her onto every major booth and stage this past season, has managed to find a gap in her extensive touring schedule to put a mix together for the people at Resident Advisor as part of their popular podcast series.

De Witte doesn’t temper her sound for the occasion, putting together a selection of music that plays in the peak-time hours and the kind of DJ slot she’ll accommodate today. Acid basslines and 4/4 kicks stab menacing atmospheres through tracks that pursue a singular committed path through the mix.

It’s an uncompromising Techno mix from the artist and sets the tone for her upcoming appearance at Jæger in a few weeks. Charlotte De Witte plays Frædag on the 1st of June.

Tune in to Ivaylo on P3 tonight

Ivaylo, resident Jæger Mix DJ and Bogota records boss will be on Ruben’s P3 show tonight.

Recording a guest mix for the popular P3 radio show, Ivaylo turns in a mini mix for Ruben, going live at 20:15 tonight.

“It is 30 min mix with all my own productions”, says Ivaylo “where only the first track on the mix was released last year on Bogota, the rest is only unreleased music (which comes out on different labels threw the year).”

Ivaylo is currently in the studio prepping some tracks for various releases this year, some of which are heading towards a new direction for the Bogota records boss, producer and DJ.

Ivaylo is back this Sunday with the Jæger Mix and you can tune into the show here.

Mix of the Week: Perel

A varied, energetic body music mix from Perel finds its way to us today via Deep House Amsterdam. Incorporating elements of synthy nu disco, EBM and house in this mix, Perel offers a captivating mix for the Dutch blog. 2/4 kick-snare arrangements underpin the mix with tracks that offer arrangements rather than functional loops, which Perel strings along in a very comprehensive mix. From Âme to Schwefelgelb and then to Butch le Butch le Strange’s remix of Fade to Grey,  Perel finds unlikely connections between disparate corners of the musical universe, with a specific energy tying the tracks together.

Following the release of her debut album “Hermetica” on DFA this year, this mix suggests that Perel’s change in direction in the studio is accompanied by a change of direction in the booth too. A regular visitor to Jæger as part of Vinny Vilbass’ Badabing residency, the last time we saw Perel it was in the context of a live set and we look forward to a return visit from the artist, perhaps in the context of a DJ set.

Find the full track-list here and you can read more about Perel in our last interview with the artist here.

Profile: Anja Schneider

In 2017 Anja Schneider made the bold decision to part ways with her label, Mobilee. Citing differences in the vision for the label, between her and the label manager Ralf Kollmann, Anja Schneider separated from the label of her creation as if compelled by a mere natural impulse.

“It’s a bit like a marriage or a long-term relationship”, she said in XLR8R’s real talk last year . “You go in different directions and this happened with Ralf Kollmann, … and I. We just wanted different things.”

Emboldened by her belief that “techno (was) becoming more and more business-oriented” and that Mobilee was unable to hold on to the original ideals that started the label, Anja Schneider’s remarkable moved showed an incredible resolve. Putting her “passion” for the music above a material wealth or success of her label, Anja Schneider did what few would do her in her position today.

Apart from being born in Bergisch Gladbach, very little is known about Anja Schneider’s early life. She divulges little from her personal past and present to nosy interviewers and proffers only professional achievements in her biography.

We know however that her musical career begins in 1994 and culminates to a move to Berlin where she immediately found a job at a little known radio station called Kiss FM. Working with the likes if Ellen Allien, Schneider went from producer, to radio host, to club DJ in a way that “was all quite natural and organic” she told Skiddle magazine in 2015. She came into Djing from an “old school thing”, playing the length of a track and then telling the people about it over the course of a radio show that would be programmed “to have half an hour hip hop, half an hour indie, rock (and) techno.”

Her first experiences at mixing came from DJing at radio parties, a trial by fire education where she “played in some of the worst discotheques you can ever imagine, with lazer lights and so on.” Going from those radio parties to the techno club was another smooth transition for Schneider and after a short course in beat matching from a friend it was: “hey, you’ve got a club gig”. She learnt her trade through the job to a point today where she feels “more confident with a night and how I build up” because of those early experiences.

Anja Schneider went from Kiss FM to the newly established Fritz FM in 2000 where she established the “Dance Under The Blue Moon“ that ran for an incredible 17 years, with a substantial and considered electronic music profile. And although radio will always be her “first love” , it was however as a club DJ that the name Anja Schneider would be etched into modern electronic music history.

It started with Mobillee in 2005 first as a label and then as a DJ agency. “When we started the label we had no idea of what it was going to be like”, she told Skiddle.

“(W)e didn’t know we were going to be here in 10 years, we just wanted to release music, use my name and help other people and build a collective. Of course then everything changed. Vinyl sales were going down, so we had to move on and build up our own booking agency to survive and create something new.”

Did she at any point realise then that she might be parting ways with the Mobilee in the future? “It is something you don’t expect” she told Deep House Amsterdam. Where everything just happened ”organically” around the label and they had all been friends first, they eventually “lost this original relationship somehow” to a point where Schneider “was not feeling it anymore.”

While at Mobilee Anja Schneider had gone from facilitator to artist. Collaborating through most of those initial releases, by the time her debut album,Beyond the Valley came out in 2008 she had cemented a career as a bonafide solo artist. Her sound slipped effortlessly into the Mobilee catalogue with a the purview from the DJ booth. Minimalist textures tied into progressive, repetitive structures, often featured subtle, delicate touches; a melody or a percussive sample. In 2011 Schneider felt the best example of her work up to that point came in the form of Hello Boy when she told The Ransom Note, “I had the biggest release in my life, which has changed it completely and launched it into a new dimension.”

Anja Schneider had cultivated a distinct sound as an artist, that was very congruous to her sound in the booth. She became a noted presence on the DJ circuit with this individual sound as that career kept going from strength to strength merely on her prowess in the booth. At Mobilee she continued to release music that best fitted the 12” format and her musical pursuits both as a DJ and a producer, but as she started work on her sophomore album, she “didn’t want all the pressures associated with the release as I just wanted to do everything the way I wanted’, she told Deep House Amsterdam.  

“Another major motivating factor behind my decision to leave Mobilee was the desire to make my own decisions, rather than always thinking of the collective and teamwork” Schneider said in her Real Talk piece for XLR8R as to drive that point home.

This culminated in Sous music, a new imprint, that was “very personal” to her. The label takes its name from her mother’s maiden name, with the album simply titled SoMe, cementing the individualist artistic pursuit behind the  new label. It’s Schneider doing what she’s best at and like her debut album, SoMe is an album of dance floor singles with a concise theme running through it, made specifically for the album format. Combining vocals, polyrhythmic percussion with an unwavering 4/4 beat, Anja Schneider’s presence is all over this record.

Unlike other artists that embark on the next phase of their careers, Anja Schneider never lost touch with her own creative identity, and in fact in her next phase she’s only reaffirmed what she had been doing all along. Starting a new label with Mobilee’s success still very much apparent Anja Schneider has only gone on to reinforce her musical approach both in the studio and subsequently in the booth in this next chapter of her already successful musical career.

 

*Anja Schneider plays Frædag tonight. 

Filter Musikk residency at Jæger

Oslo electronic music specialist, Filter Musikk takeover Jæger’s basement this summer with an electronic music DJ line-up.

DJ and proprietor of Filter Musikk, Roland Lifjell is collaborating with Jæger and Frædag between June and September with four confirmed events in our basement, featuring guest appearances from Boris, Etapp Kyle, Kobosil, Jokke and Reeko, appearing alongside Roland Lfijell.

Filter Musikk has long been the bastion for DJs and producers in Oslo, with Roland Lifjell at the helm. Nestled in the heart of Oslo, the shop is where DJs go to buy records, and producers go for the latest in electronic music equipment and experienced advice.

Roland Lifjell is a veteran of the Norwegian clubbing scene who stepped into the environment as a DJ and went on to establish the Filter Musikk store, which has turned into a community of vinyl- and electronic music enthusiast today.

“This is their night” says Roland Lifjell of this community. “Making a connection between the record store and the music” the intention of these nights is to give “the whole thing a wrapping” with Filter Musikk’s profile transposed to the club.

Maintaining “a focus on what’s (happening) at an international level” through electronic music and vinyl culture, Lifjell and Jæger have booked some renowned artists and DJs that embody this philosophy to our intimate basement space. Presenting “electronic music on a smaller scale” Jæger “feels like home” to Roland Lifjell and was the “most natural” choice for presenting the Filter Musikk ideology,

More information will follow shortly, but  you can read more on Filter and Roland Lifjell in this 2017 article over on Monument.

In the booth with Andrew Weatherall

Listen back to a live mix from Andrew Weatherall recorded in Jæger’s basement.

Andrew Weatherall fans are loyal to the point of obsession. Right now on Facebook there is a page dedicated to inducting Weatherall into the hallowed spot of John Peel’s original Radio 1 slot, suggesting, in no subtle way that Weatherall is the reverent spirit of Peel incarnate today… and they’re possibly right.

In Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s glossary, The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries, Weatherall stakes his rightful claim as the “electronic punk” only a few pages away from the revered Peel, aptly bridging a gap between the likes of Francis De Grasso and Sasha, a position that at the age of 55 continues to make him an enduring presence that pursues a singular path in music.

In the early nineties after Acid House was firmly instated as part of popular culture and shortly after his success with Primal Scream on the 1991 record Screamadelica, Andrew Weatherall could have easily taken a position amongst the Oakenfolds and Sashas of the world as a superstar DJ, but feigned the spotlight in favour of something more substantial.

“It’s a lot of work, once you go up that slippery showbiz pole”, he told The Independent in a 2016 interview with Fiona Sturges. “(I)t would keep me away from what I like which is making things. I mean, I had a little look in the early Nineties. I stood at the bottom of that pole and looked up and thought to myself ‘The view’s pretty good. But it’s very greasy and there are a lot of bottoms up there that I might have to brush my lips against. So, maybe I’ll give it a miss’.”

It was from this position where Weatherall had an epiphany that would set him on the trajectory that lands him here today in is spot as a bonafide DJ Revolutionary.

“I was kind of in on the bottom rung playing Cream and all those clubs and I nearly went with it” he tells The Ransom Note. “But I was in these clubs thinking I should be playing better music than I’m playing. I was thinking ‘I shouldn’t really be playing this music, there are far better records in my bag’.”

Even when Andrew Weatherall was playing to audiences always in anticipation of a hands in the air moment his record bag remained consistently eclectic and weird.

Weatherall grew up in the suburbs on the outer fringes of London, and he would spend his weekends going on “raiding parties” in the city. Trips like these would usually involve some “skirmishes” he told Bill Brewster in The Record Players, but ultimately they would involve buying records. In Beaufort Market in the Kings Road, the same road which Sex Pistols came to the fore and Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren owned and ran the Sex Shop, Weatherall bought post punk records from a place called the Cage. In the week Weatherall would be engaged in all manner of jobs just to make enough money for a weekend jaunt into the city. By the age of 13 he had become known as the “bloke with the weird records” and as he came of age he would start being asked to “come play some music”, stepping into the role of DJ as that role became more defined through the 1980’s.

And then Acid House happened, and it was like: “call that bloke with weird records to come and play in six in the morning!” Andrew Weatherall stepped into that role at Shoom; “the place that kicked off rave culture” according to Rolling Stone Magazine. “I wasn’t skilled” admits Weatherall to Brewster, “I was playing such varied music, you couldn’t mix it”. Even so, Shoom was the launch pad that put Weatherall’s career on a trajectory to DJing, and bookings followed where he crafted his skill in a trial by fire, going from the weird records he would play at six in the morning at Shoom to mixing House and Disco. By 1990 his presence had been established in the echelons of Acid House, where his legacy as a DJ and producer would eventually be cemented with Screamadelica and all the records and remixes that followed from there.

Today Andrew Weatherall continues to enjoy a legacy as the “bolshie bastard” he cultivated during those early years; the perpetual outsider that has elevated him to become the rightful heir to John Peel, but also perhaps not. Although his sets on the radio and the music he makes across various projects certainly entertain this comparison, he’s very much a DJ born into the world of Rave and Acid House and as a DJ few compare to Andrew Weatherall as you can hear in this mix we’re streaming exclusively on our website today.

His set eschews the formulaic functionalism of modern House and Techno for those “weird” records in his bag, but today they’re not weird in the sense of The Woodleigh Research Facility, one of the more leftfield project he is currently engaged in, but rather weird in the sense of that “bolshie bastard” attitude, with designs on the booth.

He knows his audience, and at Jæger his set favoured a 4/4 proclivity, but it combined guitars, synthesis and melodic vocal hooks in ways that you don’t often hear on the dance floor. His tracks come from vastly different sonic spheres but in the context of the mix they all find a disjointed relationship with each other bolstered by the unique artistic identity behind it.   “Even if you’re playing wildly different music, I try to make some sort of connection or some sort of flow”, Weatherall told Brewster when the latter asked what makes a good DJ.

“I want to listen to something in slightly open-mouthed wonder, doesn’t matter whether it’s a rockabilly track or techno. I got hooked in the idea that everything has to be new and original for a while. Originality is not what’s important, it’s authenticity.

 

*Frædag is back this week with Anja Schneider

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

 

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

 

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’sliked 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

 

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

 

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

 

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.

Album of the Week: Moby – Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt

Moby has engaged in a flurry of creative pursuits over the last few years. While some of his classic records like Go and Porcelain have received the remix treatment from artists like Rex the Dog and Timo Maas, he’s finally put his life into words with the very funny and poignant Porcelain memoirs, showcasing a proficiency for word craft we’ve only sampled through the lyrics on his albums. Last year, he released two guitar-driven albums, “These systems are failing” and “More songs about the Apocalypse”, which in the age of president Trump, saw Moby return to the sectarian sound of Punk that he has on occasion entertained to air his political frustrations.

He released two ambient albums over  2015 and 2016, all the while keeping his audience guessing as to which direction he will favour for his next musical, or artistic pursuit. Now, with much anticipation comes “Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt”; an album that comes the closest to the sound of Moby on “Play”, the most successful album ever to be release by the artist.

The charm of the album lies in the artist’s ability to channel an electronic, dance music palette into the popular form. This hints at something of “Play” throughout the album, but where that 1999 album stayed close to Moby’s rave roots with tracks like “Bodyrock” and “Machete”,”Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt” feigns any indulgent diversions as if “Play” was an album only consisting of only “Natural Blues” variations.

A sweet melancholy drifts through the entire record as elongated pads and synths ebb across jagged electronic beats and Moby’s wistful vocal utterances, often counterpointing a soulful female vocal. Themes of nostalgia and longing pace through the premise of the album, executed as something upbeat in reserved tempos. There’s a solemn gospel quality to the entire record from the voices to the exalting phases of the production and Moby’s blues inclinations.

The album harks back to an era of electronic music composition in the late nineties when people like Moby and Massive Attack were propelled into the popular consciousness as a new pop-sensibility started to infiltrate  variations of trance, house and trip-hop. It’s an unapologetic introspective album from the artist, and although the titles might hint at an abominable sadness, beyond the lyrics there is hidden happiness in the music that’s pensive and richly rewarding if you give it the time.

In a Guardian interview last year Moby said of the album, “I find it almost emancipating that there’s almost no commercial potential for it” and on “Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt” that really comes to the fore. There are no musical distractions in the form of an unwanted single, and from start to finish there’s a very prominent mood and sound that paces consistently through the record, in a sonic moment which sees Moby at his best, yet again.

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.”

Hear a new track from Frantzvaag

Frantzvaag is back with a new release on the Smallville imprint Fuck Reality with a premiere of  the leading track “I Skyene”.

Taken from the much anticipated Fuck Reality 05, “I skyene” is the first original track from the Oslo artist since his acclaimed 2016 release on the same label and it’s premiering today on Canadian site Bolting Bits.

Frantzvaag’s signature Deep House sound, tapering from the fringes of House music’s origins into a modern dialect are given a boost of adrenalin on “I Skyene”. Rhodes chords swell around an effervescent percussive arrangement that hint at Frantzvaag’s extensive experience in the booth.

Frantzvaag has made an impressive impression on Oslo’s electronic music scene since returning to the city and can be found regularly playing in Jæger, Villa, Ingensteds et al. An integral part if this current generation of House producer in Oslo, he’s slowly carving out a distinctive sound to the world through the Fuck Reality label which is sure to play a significant role in the future of the genre.

Fuck Reality 05 will be released on the 9th of May with a special launch event in Fredensborgveien. You can read more about Frantzvaag here.

Jokke’s Shed Essentials

Few names resonate with electronic music quite like that of René Pawlowitz. The name doesn’t ring a bell? How about EQD, WK7, Head High, Evil Fred, Wax, Craft, or Zigg Gonzales? Still nothing; how about Shed? That’s gotten your attention. Germany’s renaissance man of modern Techno has ticked all the boxes across various of club music genres to arrive at a version of each stripped to its bare mechanics. Where the cardinal and the tenacious dwell, that’s where Pawlowitz’ music resides.

He’s an obstinate producer and DJ, playing on the fringes of club music with an idiosyncratic voice and although many have tried to replicate that voice, none have succeeded. His music is minimalists in the way of a concrete tower; bold, steadfast and brutal in an unassuming way. A Hardwax affiliate, he epitomises the sound of modern Techno and plays no small part in its extensive popularity today through releases on Ostgut Ton, Monkeytown and his own aptly named Soloaction records amongst various others in a list too long to mention here.

Pawlowitz’ artistic identity is so wrapped in the Techno genre that when Resident Advisor interviewed him in 2017 the only title for that article would only ever be “Definitely Techno”. He transposes his idiosyncratic sound to the live stage and his DJ sets, across his aliases with a view of Techno in its broadest possible sense yet as Resident Advisor so aptly put it, “definitely Techno.”

“His output as Shed marries the lush textures of Detroit techno to an immediacy and bass-weight borrowed from rave and hardcore.” established Crack Magazine in an interview with the artist. For enthusiasts and DJs alike, Pawlowitz and he’s many aliases are synonymous with the Techno genre in almost every perceptible way, to the point where the two are hardly distinguishable. “The reason his name is linked to Techno (has) gotta be because of Hardwax, Ostgut, Berlin and so on”, says Void- and Jæger resident and Oslo’s go-to Techno DJ, Jokke.

As one of Oslo’s most prominent Techno figures, Jokke too is not spared the universal appeal of the German producer’s music, and Shed and his various aliases make significant contributions to the DJ’s own collection.”I like his sound. It stands out, like a bass/techno fusion that actually works. As a DJ, you will always hear old rave gems you’ve never heard before.” Opening up for Shed in our basement this week, we asked Joke to put this in to perspective for us with a few seminal records from the René Pawlowitz discography.

Picking through his own record collection, Jokke sent us a handwritten note with some of his essential Shed picks. 

Shed – 7m (Red Planet Express)  

 

Released in 2004, this is one of several releases produced that year from the artist, a year that saw the artist, DJ and producer Shed become a household name among DJs and fans alike. A big room kick drum is swathed in abundant layers of atmosphere, echoing the concrete facade of an industrial building co-opted as a modern Techno club in what quickly became Shed’s signature sound.

 

Shed – Another wedged Chicken (Shedding the past)

 

Taken from Shed’s debut album, “Shedding the past”, “Another Wedged Chicken”, showcases Shed’s innate ability for the album format. With hardly a kick drum in hearing distance, it’s definitely an album track, but drop this in the middle of a Techno set and it will certainly grab the entire dance floor’s attention.

Much of Shed’s universally acknowledged relationship with the Techno genre is tied with his affiliation with Berlin Techno institutions Hardwax and Ostgut Ton, who are also of course Berghain. Berghain’s own reputation as the bastion of uncompromising Techno is in parts even down to Shed bringing a maximalists quality to the genre in what was then quite a minimalist age.

 

Head High – It’s a love thing (Sigg Gonzales island mix)

 

Just when you thought Pawlowitz was an immoveable Techno artist, he makes a House track. Head High is the producer’s House alias, but as if to completely dispense with any myths and common tropes in House music, his Head High alias is in many ways much harder than the stuff he produces as his various Techno aliases. Head High strips back House music to its raw mechanics which he takes to the extreme here on “It’s a Love thing” as his Sigg Gonzales alias in this mix. That familiar atmospheric kick is everywhere in this track too, but with syncopated hats and a R&B vocal sample, it clearly has designs on House music.

 

Evil Fred – Get On

 

A rarified record from Pawlowitz, this alias only made one record on H2 back in 2013 before being resigned to the Shed annals. This is Pawlowitz on a Tech House tip with two-step garage influences echoing in the distance. It’s one of Pawlowitz more curious releases, but yet you can still hear that acute mastery of atmosphere on this record. Although a very minimalist record with merely a percussive arrangement, the elements combine to give it a larger than life character.

 

Craft – Time will tell

 

Pawlowitz ‘s fleeting nature with electronic music can’t merely contained as Shed, and he’ll often create new monikers for a single release like the aforementioned Evil Fred record. Craft is a most recent creation, and through it he made this ambient masterpiece for the Ascetic Limited label in 2017. There’s a cinematic charm to this record that brings us back to that defining character in Pawlowitz’ music, atmosphere. The synthetic layers are quite reserved, with only a few parts, playing counterpoint with each other, but like every Shed release, he seems to be able to get the most out of very little.

 

WK7 -Rhythm 1

 

In the same year he released that Craft record, Rhythm 1 came out via the Power House label, showing yet another, different side to the Pawlowitz palette of  sound. A House track with big trancy synths in situ, Rhythm 1 touches on the hedonistic heights early UK rave with a modern twist. There’s a deep dub-infused bass rolling in deep waves below the track, and as ever he manages to find an allotted space for diverse, often contrasting parts in his productions. It’s his skill as a producer, that has made Pawlowitz such an appealing figure over records; DJ’s snapping up his records eagerly because of the knowledge that they will sound immense over a large Funktion one system.

 

Wax – 50005 a1


And now for something completely different… here’s Pawlowitz’s Wax alias with some Dub Techno. Offering a repose from the formidable percussive workouts of his other aliases, this is probably the furthest away from Pawlowitz signature sound as Shed with 808 kicks and lethargic pads looping to affinity in a very controlled and introspective manner.

 

Shed – Taken Effect (Final Experiments)

 

Taken from Shed’s last album on Monkeytown records, it’s a record that apparently makes a nod to the nineties, “when it blurred into rave, ambient, home-listening electronica” according to Joe Muggs in RA. It’s a far more reserved interpretation of Techno with luscious pads and sidewinding acid leads, creating a whirlpool of atmosphere that sucks you through the track and the album. It’s not some nostalgic re-hashing of Techno’s past, but rather a modern interpretation again, with  Shed’s presence firmly embedded in that familiar atmosphere where large percussive arrangements echo in the foreground of a very minimalist arrangement.

 

*Jokke and Frederik Bekkåsen open up for Shed this Friday

Album of the Week: LNS – LNS-1

The Vancouver DJ and artist LNS (Laura Sparrow) inaugurated her eponymous label LNS-1 recently after a string of releases over 2017 through the Sex Tags Mania conglomerate. Since 2016’s “Heliacal Rising” on Fett Burger’s Freakout Cult, the producer has constantly caught our attention with her unique and melodious take on dance floor genres.

Wether she’s working on her own or collaborating with Sotofett on their various Wania releases from last year, her sound is a retro-fitted Electro- and Ambient creation, born from machines, while retaining an indefinable human charm. Her music proffers a modern, melodic interpretation of Electro and Ambient music, without desecrating the hallowed grounds of its origins. LNS makes textured song-arrangements and effervescent melodic hooks like ear-worms that are able function on the dance floor while holding the listener’s attention.

This approach solidifies her sound on LNS-1 and although only six tracks long it has all the markings of an album. There’s a consistency through the tracks and if you ignore the E-GZR remix, there’s a fractured narrative going from the A-side to the B-side of the record.

“Recons One” and “Wasp” are lively Electro constructions with a certain degree of function in their rhythmical approach, but whose sensuous, layered textures drip with sweet melodic- and harmonic appeal. They arrive and depart in a very purposeful way around the beat in an effort not to overstay their welcome. The results are two Electro tracks that move, modulate, grow and resolve in a very accessible and interesting manner that doesn’t exasperate or bore the listener in the dance floor’s repetitious way.

On the B-side as if the flip of a coin, LNS gives us three ambient tracks, as counterpoint to the A-side with the “July Rain” sitting in the middle as the crux to that side of the record. With a similar pace to the the A-side of the record, but foregoing a regular percussive rhythm section in favour of a quivering Juno bass-line, “July Rain” is that moment of catching your breath during a particularly energetic Electro and Techno set, while at the same time building up the tension for the next phase of a set.

Between the majestic “Filed of View” and the sinuous “Eons”, “July Rain” is the connection between the sides, that “Eons” brings to its natural conclusion with a very lush and heavy cinematic arrangement. Another excellent example of LNS’ textured Electro-ambient sound, LNS-1 is a also great example of the song-writing prowess of the Canadian producer and DJ that has all the markings of moving over to the album format in the very near future.

Øyvind Morken releases My Computer is acting Strange

Released today via UK label Mysticisms comes a 5 track EP from Untzdag resident and Moonlighting boss Øyvind Morken.

Two years on since Øyvind Morken’s last release Distinct Dialect, comes a new 12″ from Øyvind Morken. “My Computer is Acting Strange” sees the title track embark on a very splintered melodic refrain with elements of Electro and proto-House all joining the very disjointed song arrangement.

Øyvind Morken’s distinct sound pulses through the entire record, and goes from the dance floor with “Multiple Sarcasms” to the leftfield afro-infused “Life in Graffiti”; a track that only Øyvind Morken could pull off in a DJ set.

The record is available now via Phonica records and you’ll be able to find Øyvind Morken every Wednesday at Jæger for his weekly Untzdag residency. This May sees Hunee and Ruf Dug join the DJ for his residency.

Ivaylo airs mix on Sleepless

Jæger mix resident and Bogota records boss, Ivaylo steps in to the Sleepless studio for a mix.

Between prepping some exciting new releases for various labels including his own, Bogota records, Ivaylo headed over to the Sleepless studios for a mix of nocturnal pleasures. Keeping it deep, but effervescent, Ivaylo laid down a set with a signature Ivaylo touch.

Ivaylo delivers an upbeat mix even incorporating flavours of Disco, offering very little release for insomniacs, with the DJ also having one foot out the door to the club.

Ivaylo is back at Jæger tomorrow for his weekly Jæger Mix residency with Det Gode Selskab‘s Phillip Hinz as his special guest this week .

Mix of the Week – Traxx

Legendary Chicago/Detroit producer and DJ, Traxx ushered in black history month at Smartbar, Chicago in February and this is the result. A diverse set recorded live during the QUEEN event, played from every which corner of electronic music and beyond. From the leftfield proto-House, to synth-wave and even incorporating INXS’ suicide blonde, this mix spans the absolute breadth of club music, with special focus on its roots.

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.

A:G The Nose (DGS001) is out now

A:G’s The Nose and the debut release from the newly established Det Gode Selskab label hits record shelves this week.

Pressed on 18og vinyl,  the release marks a new and exciting chapter for Det Gode Selskab crew. Jæger’s Sunday residents have long been the purveyors of a good time in the city, and they’ve taken it to its natural conclusion this week with DGS001, their first release as a label, featuring A:G.

The Sunkissed and Villa resident delivers a soulful tech track, with a vague rhodes piano, musing vacantly through a planted four on the floor rhythm section. Karl Fraunhofer, Tod Louie and Solaris take the track further to the centre of the dance floor, stripping it back to a functional monster that runs away at a more excessive pace. DGS also call on German producer and DJ Dandy Jack for his interpretation, who like the DGS boys, opts for a view from the booth.

The Nose is the first in a series of records from DGS that will look to “tickle the senses” as they go from a DJ collective, promotors and Jæger residents to record label. You can pick up a copy of The Nose from Juno now.

* Det Gode Selskab play every Sunday at Jæger. 

 

Album of the week: Soft as Snow – Deep Wave

There’s a raw urgency to Soft as Snow’s debut album, which when you hear in the context of their previous two EPs, might sound like an evolution in their work. It’s only when you hear Oda Egjar Starheim and Øystein Monsen perform these songs in a live setting that you realise that urgency has been there all along and it’s only now fully realised in the recorded format for the first time.

“I think we got closer to keeping the music how it was conceived” Oda told me in an interview last week on this blog, and it was during their live performance in Jæger’s basement, during the performance of  “Tropical Speed” that the connection between the intensity of the record and its origins were obvious.

Monsen’s broken-beat rhythmical pattern on that track is all down to an potent physical exertion that is relayed exactly like that on the record too. On the record, “Tropical Speed” communicates this perfectly and it has the unnerving effect to manifest itself in the listener too. It’s very much the climax of an album that builds to that incredibly intense point, a contrast from the start of the album, where a simple beat ushers in the album, somewhat inconspicuously.

Starheim’s background as a performance artist, and Monsen’s ascent through the Oslo noise/rock scene is more distinct than its ever been on the previous albums. Layers of jagged distortion jut out from the surface of tracks, while Starheim’s voice splutters and croons in a very cognitive way. There’s a fluidity between her voice and the various synthesised textures, that embeds her vocals in the fabric of the music, rather than offering traditional accompaniment-vocal arrangement.

As a debut album it consolidates the nature of their live act in the presentation of the recorded format, and where their previous EPs Glass Body and Chrysalis were tentative steps towards finding their feet in the studio, “Deep Wave” is them planting their feet firmly in that context. It’s a bold,unforgiving album, that demands the listener’s attention, and like their live show is completely alluring and incredibly potent.

DELLA and Homero Espinosa release Burning Hot

Coming out via Traxsource this weekend is a new collaboration with DELLA and Homero Espinosa on Moulton Music called Burning Hot.

The Jæger resident (real name Kristina Dunn)  teamed up with the Bay area producer/DJ previously known as DJ Huey for a single released through the San Francisco studio facility and label Moulton music on Friday.

DELLA and Espinosa deliver a scorcher for the dance floor, with deep chords and upbeat synths stabbing at a jacking House beat. DELLA’s voice offers a human dimension to the stark electronic patterns with a cadenced vocal delivery of a rhetoric turn of phrase around the title.

The single comes a week on from the last DELLA’s DRIVHUS, an evening with DELLA and Honey Dijon, which saw a room full of bodies in constant motion in the basement. DELLA’s DRIVHUS will be back in October with Homero Espinosa and you can hear/buy the single now over on Traxsource.

Mix of the Week: Adam Marshall

Adam Marshall delivered a dynamic, effervescent set for the Ransom Note mix series over the weekend. One part of the Canadian, progressive Techno group, Graze and the head at New Kanada records, Adam Marshall has been making music since the late 90’s, and from his more minimal solo releases to his work as Graze, there’s been a distinctive mood that followed him through his work. This mix sums it all up through tracks that err on the side of some nebulous temperament. Marshall piles layer upon layer, leaving ghostly trails of pieces of familiar tracks from Disco to House over pulsing Techno tracks. The whole mix floats in and out of focus like a sound being blown in the wind, and makes for one of the more interesting Techno mixes we’ve heard for a long time.

Karima F launches Schloss records

Affirmative Action resident Karima F and Oslo visual artist Ida Ekblad has launched a new label with a 12″ from UK producer Max Fowler.

Coming out of the Oslo artist space of the same name, Schloss looks to combine the visual aesthetic of Ida Ekblad with the musical ear of Karima. Fowler delivers two deep soulful House tunes with Swedish super-producer Samo DJ interpreting the latter of the two in a remix.

Matt Karmil is on mixing and mastering duties on this one, providing those essential fine touches that we’ve heard from records on Studio Barnhus, PNN and Smalltown Supersound in the past. You can pre-order and listen to the record over at Phonica Records.

Karima is back for some Affirmative Action this Saturday, playing all night long in our basement.

A guide to post-Trance

What is post-Trance?

Literally meaning “after trance” and not in the spiritual enlightenment kind of way, but rather referring to the style of music called Trance. It was a phrase coined by Techno artist Voiski back in January 2017 when The French artist used it to describe a Resident Advisor live set he’d recorded. The blog described it as “bright, unfurling synth arpeggios and a complete absence of drums” and “(e)qual parts Berlin School synth exploration and endless techno breakdown”. Voiski’s sound had been moving around those elements through releases on Dekmantel and Demented at that time, with a more determined rhythmic focus.

So it has nothing to do with Paul Van Dyk?

No, post-Trance is in fact a misnomer. Trance the genre popularised by the likes of Van Dyk in the nineties is the direct descendent of the balearic sound, transposed to machines. Post-Trance is no way directly tied to this genre or scene in any way. With about twenty years between them and with no musical correlation other than a melodic approach post-Trance is in fact a direct descendant of Techno more than anything else. It’s European Techno sound that expounded on the possibilities of early Detroit and evolved with the genre’s minimal phase in this century. It’s closer to the music made by artists like Extrawelt and Stephan Bodzin than Paul Van Dyk or Sasha, but there are obvious, albeit tenuous threads tying them together, like anything through the history of dance music.

What does it sound like?

It’s a melodically rich adaptation of Techno, in which the genre remains trapped in a purgatory of incessant build-ups. It’s like somebody pressed the loop button on a particularly high-point during a nineties rave and asked Shed to add a 4/4 beat. Pacing at very high speeds through 909 kicks, bright arpeggios cascade down from piercingly sharp synthesisers. It’s a unique interpretation of Techno, stripped back and constantly building to some hedonistic uncertainty, and borders quite close to cheesy at times (see that Joey Beltram remix of Breaking Bricks). There’s no rigid formula to the tracks other than it appears in forms similar to House and Techno, but it’s set apart from the modern constructs of those genres as something far more upbeat and engaging than the somber, industrial interpretation of Techno and the functionalism of modern House and Deep House genres.

Is there a post-trance scene?

No and the internet has taken care of that just like it’s done with anything else vying for some sub-cultural status. It’s certainly produced by artists with a penchant for a tune, but these are isolated instances and in many cases it might make up merely one track of a paint-by-numbers Techno release like Echoplex’s “This is My Techno Melody” on 2017’s ARTS release of the same name. Consisting of artists that continue to associate with Techno in its broadest sense, these are independent and isolated pieces of music coming largely out of Europe, through artists that are not really connected to each other. It seems that it’s more of a revolt against the stoic, very minimal, atmospheric interpretation of Techno that is so popular at the moment in places like Berlin and cellars all over Europe.

Who are the artists and labels working within it?

Besides those artists already mentioned, and it seems that Voiski is the only one that really did over more than one release, Konstantin Sibold and Peter Van Hoesen should also be added and  have all had releases out in this style of Techno. Konstantin Sibold’s Mutter is probably the best example of it. The 2016 release was way ahead of the pack, and established the genre before Voiski coined the name and assumed ownership. It’s rumoured that Sibold might have been somewhat tentative about releasing the music, but I’m sure he is assuaged in its incredible reception.

Although Sibold, Voiski and Echoplex have all dabbled in this style of music we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the artists that have always favoured the melodic interpretation of Techno through the thick and thin of the genre. Artists like Mono-Junk, Extrawelt and, through his darker days, Legowelt.

Is there a future for post-Trance?

While Voiski is definitely bearing the torch for the genre of his own invention, it seems that other producers and artists  have only had fleeting encounters with it. There will no-doubt always be some upbeat melodic interpretation to Techno and whether it’s called post-Trance or not, it will remain a major part of the genre for generations to come and will almost certainly go in and out of vogue as the Techno and House music continually evolve.

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.

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.

 

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.

 

Album of the week: Extrawelt – Fear of an Extra Planet

In a musical world where it seems sounds and artists have to constantly adapt and evolve to stay relevant, we take some comfort that a group like Extrawelt exists. With their latest album “Fear of an Extra Planet” they close out a trilogy of albums for Cocoon Recordings that started back in 2008 and through which Extrawelt’s sound has remained an unmovable presence.

Steadfast in their resolve, Arne Schaffhausen and Wayan Raabe have been creating unprescribed melodic Techno in an idiosyncratic artistic voice for the better part of a decade. Undulating synthetic layers play through expressive melodic ridges in an effort climb some hedonistic heights while drum machines and minimalists percussive elements clatter along at galvanising speeds. Although six years might have passed between “Fear of an Extra Planet” and their previous album “Aufruhr”, they’ve simply picked up where they left off.

Their sound remains anchored in the brooding melodic realm of German Techno where they dwell amongst acts like Dominik Eulberg, Stephan Bodzin and Konstantin Sibold. They execute tremendous control in the studio as layers pile on progressive arrangements that never get bogged down under their own weight. New elements  join existing pieces like they’ve been there all the time and disappear into the next, creating a constant development through each track. There’s a sonic thread between the songs, but each title appears to be composed with its own unique narrative, independent from the album, but contained within the same world.

From the 3LP format of the album to the constant percussive insistence, Extrawelt remain close to the dance floor on the album, with slight references to disparate aspects of its history including elements of  Electro, EBM, and Breakbeat in the tracks. There’s a cinematic indulgence and spectacle to the tracks that definitely install them in the context of an album rather than a single , which by “2084” reaches grandiose, space-opera proportions.

the titles and the manner in which the songs are arranged suggests there might be some contextual prose informing “Fear of an Extra Planet”, but what remains the core appeal of the record is the fact that it sounds like Extrawelt, and between Schöne Neue Extrawelt and Fear of an Extra Planet it’s the consistency that makes this a timeless record.

Hear a new track from Melkeveien

Released over the weekend, “Homecoming” is Melkeveien’s first original release in 2018. After an hiatus from 2014’s Peter Pan Death Wish, it seems the Norwegian electronic indie act are back in the studio, with “Homecoming” following closely on from 2017’s “Søve På Det”. This latest single is airy and light with a ghostly charm locked away under those layers of synths.

Released on their own Melkeveien Music imprint, it seems the group might be going it alone into the future, without dødpøp, who has been releasing the group’s music since their first single. Artwork from Audun Røberg jr ties the Melkeveien theme together.

*Melkeveien play Olle Abtsract’s LYD showcase on April 28th.

Mix of the Week: Honey Dijon

By special request from our resident DELLA, Honey Dijon plays us into the weekend. This mix, recorded at Boiler Room in October last year, is a peak time set that caters to an unbridled energy. Honey Dijon doesn’t placate her crowd with unnecessary fillers and from beginning to end this mix simply bounces along. Latin-infused House beats combined with familiar vocal a cappellas deliver infectious results. Definitely a mix to dance to it’s a delectable amuse bouche for DELLA’s DRIVHUS this Saturday who welcomes the DJ to our basement for the evening.

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 

Courtesy of Studio Prokopiou

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!”

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.

Listen back to DELLA’s Sleepless mix

DELLA plays House music for insomniacs in this recent mix for the Sleepless series. Foreshadowing the weekend ahead with DELLA and Honey Dijon under the same roof, this mix provides the sonic backdrop to our week ahead. A soulful House mix from the DRIVHUS resident sets the tone for what might occur on Saturday where she’ll open the floor in our basement for the Chicago/New York House DJ, Honey Dijon.

Blikk.no feature Honey Dijon

Featured today on Blikk.no is an article about Honey Dijon. Reidar Engesbak delves into the career and biography of the DJ covering her start in Chicago’s underground, her move to New York, meeting Danny Tenaglia, and becoming a trans-icon and activist for queer culture and music. You can read the whole piece (in Norwegian) here.

Album of the Week: Nils Frahm – All Melody

There’s always been a kind of fluidity between classical- and electronic music since the dawn of the transistor, and the gap between these musics has since only narrowed as composers like Delia Derbyshire, John Cage, Glen Gould and Terry Riley adopted the studio as an instrument. Artists like Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson continued this tradition up to the present, and as electronic music evolved, so did the musical palette these artists borrowed from. Electronic percussive music and the rhythm experiments of Terry Riley would inform their musical textures with the same minimalist resolve as club music and created an unlikely thread between these two worlds.

Amongst them the German composer Nils Frahm too would emerge, and took it one step further, incorporating drum machines and synthesisers in his solo piano works that had a foot in both sides of this musical spectrum. A live performer, whose performances are able to switch between the club setting and the concert hall, Frahm’s music has enjoyed an ambiguity that has been adopted by both factions. Often making appearances in DJ sets as well as crafting a few himself, he enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the dance floor and its musical traditions. The composer’s music is instantly recognisable for its minimalist, melodic charm and celestial textures that  lend from to the heady nature of dance music. Albums like “Screws” and “Solo” have made severe impressions in the past and on his latest work, “All Melody” he might have created his greatest work yet.

This isn’t mere exaggeration and one important aspect of this latest album has set it apart from all his previous works; the studio. All Melody is the first work to be released, that was entirely recorded in Frahm’s dream studio, Saal 3 at the former East German broadcast centre Funkhaus in Berlin. With “every acoustic environment” at his disposal, Nils Frahm was able to create those magnificent and enchanting textures that drift through the album like a soft bilious cloud. Essentially an acoustic album, save the Roland Juno synthesiser  at the heart of his setup, Frahm relied totally on the studio as an instrument from which he coaxed out some of the most endearing sounds and arrangements.

“All Melody” is an incredibly beautiful album with a serene solemnity running through its every moment. There’s a narrative that runs from one end of the album to the end as if it was recorded in one continuous sitting. Familiar themes develop throughout  the album and some old themes from Frahm’s previous albums like” Screws” find new life on tracks like “Forever Changeless”. “Sunson” with its aloof kick clearly makes its mark as the single from the album, but sandwiched between the introduction and “A Place” with their haunting vocal lines, it feels more like a stepping stone, perhaps even a necessity that Frahm feels he should get out of the way quickly, before he embarks on the rest of the album and its mostly beat-less form.

“All Melody” evokes feelings of sadness, loneliness and contentment and as the title suggests its main intrigue is its melodies, often quite simple, innocent melodies which Frahm manipulates to great affect through the studio. The organic essence of the record and its instruments makes for a warm album, something not easily accomplished in the realm of cold stark electronic instruments. It’s hard to imagine an album more perfect than this coming from the German composer, and it will surely stand as a modern day classic in the years to come.

Hear a new track from Sex Judas

Tore “Jazztobakk” Gjedrem is back as Sex Judas on a new album currently primed for Optimo music. The Ost and Kjex producer and vocalist adopts his cartoon alter ego for the character’s debut LP. With this trusty sidekick Ricky, embodied by a host of collaborators including Bugge Wesseltoft and Strangefruit, Sex Judas finally arrives at the format he was made for after a few prominent releases on Marketing music, Cymawax and Optimo Music. “All good Junkies” is the first single from the album, and a direct descendent of Sex Judas’ “Det Syke Vesen Som Kjeder Seg” from 2015 on Optimo Music. A funky bassline and a clattering of vigorous percussive parts dance against the surface of the tracks as Sex Judas’ silky vocal lays temptation at your feet. All good Junkies is now available stream and the album, Go Down Judas is primed for release on the 18th of May.

Mix of the Week – Nabihah Iqbal

Introducing Nabihah Iqbal’s mix for Groove magazine is the Cure? A club edit of Lullaby from loops for two minutes, before handing over the rest of the mix to Disco and early House. A dynamic mix with heady peaks and emotive troughs comes together from eclectic corners of dance music with a nostalgic charm underpinning the entire mix, even through newer tracks like those from Other People’s A.L.L. The NTS Radio DJ’s steps out of the control room and into the DJ booth for this with its designs on the dance floor. The mix follows Iqbal’s debut album,Weighing of the Heart released last year through Ninja Tune, but favours a more organic palette from that record. An ethnomusicologist by day, radio DJ by night and producer and DJ everywhere in between, Iqbal’s talents know few bounds, a young star certainly on the rise.

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.

 

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.“

Album of the Week: Ekman – Primus Motor

Ekman (Roel Dijcks) is a curious anomaly in the modern era of Electro. He’s been prodigiously releasing records on some of the most progressive records of the genre and Techno since 2012, featuring two distinctly different characteristics to his music. With a foot on either side of the North sea his records on labels like Shipwrec and Créme Orginization clearly favour a West Coast Dutch interpretation of a traditional Electro/Techno sound, while his music for labels like Trilogy Tapes or Berceuse Heroique feels more contemporary to the heavy-handed, snarling Electro and Techno currently making a lot of noise in the underground scenes of the UK and New York.

In 2017 he released several 12 inches on several labels, but “Onomatomania” on Trilogy Tapes is an entirely different animal to “Doomsday Argument” on Créme Organisation. Both are deeply rooted in the traditions of Electro, but where “Onomatomania” strips it all down to a heavily distorting kick-bass arrangement made to intimidate the body, “Doomsday Argument” transports the earlier sounds of the Hague into the contemporary, with melodic synths and pads floating through clean drum machines with more accessible results.

“Primus Motor”, his second LP,  is a continuation of the latter as he comes back to Shipwrec for the first release of 2018. Drum machines and synthesisers remain in character with a minimalist approach to the record. Grounded in the familiarity of Electro rhythmical arrangements with a retro space-aged take on synthesisers, “Primus Motors” is reserved and fairly innocuous in the context of Ekman’s extended discography. There are moments like “Goldbach’s number” with its distorted kick that hint at something closer to Ekman’s first Trilogy Tapes release, but it remains contained amongst beatific melodies and sustained strings.

There’s much more of an anthemic quality to the tracks  that is more suited for the album format of a dance record. The repetitive nature of the tracks are perfectly suited for the dance floor while the conservative melodic-harmonic phrasing offer something more visceral than the functional dance-floor track. There’s something of Robert Hood’s “Minimal Nation” on the record, and not just in the way the tracks have been stripped back to definitive parts. There’s a bare functionality to them where they avoid the usual album format of tracks made up of various unrelating tracks, with the ubiquitous ambient or filler track intersecting big room moments. The percussive drive is at the heart of it all, and there are no filler tracks. It’s an album that bares a comparison to classic Drexciya albums like Grava and Transllussion, but from the purview of the dance floor rather than the studio.

 

 

Mix of the week – Rude Lead

We’re still coasting on that Boogienetter vibe from last night with this mix from Rude Lead soundtracking a very good Friday indeed. Rude Lead digs deep past the obvious in this modern soul mix featuring a host of rare and obscure records from the soul genre. One-off original pressings segue effortlessly from one to the other, with funky rhythms and visceral Motown vocals relaying something of the workingman/woman’s woes, and perpendicularly, loves.  An infectious groove underpins the mix which Rude Lead tracks through its entirety without even a moment of concession given. You can read more about Rude Lead in our interview from yesterday.

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”.

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.

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

 

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.

Album of the Week: Frankie Knuckles – Ultimate Production

Frankie Knuckles is House music. He and friends like Larry Levan, came up through Disco as DJs, playing soul, R&B, Disco, and European synth records in New York. Using drum machines and edits to extend breaks on tracks, while digging further than the tawdry Disco tracks of popular culture in the late seventies, DJs like Levan, Ron Hardy, Tony Humphries and Knuckles ushered in a new era for dance music through what would eventually be known as House music. In New York it was called Garage, named after Paradise Garage the famous club where Levan held a residency, and in New Jersey it was called the Jersey sound, but it would be in Chicago that House would get its name and its all because of Frankie Knuckles.

Knuckles moved to Chicago in 1977 and took up a residency at Warehouse where he continued to play his blend of R&B Soul, Euro-Synth and Disco, which the locals started calling House after the club that spawned it. House was an attitude, a style and even a fashion before it was a music genre, with Frankie Knuckles at the epicentre of its soundtrack. Before it became 4-4 kicks and syncopated hats, it was broad swathe of contemporary music played by one of DJ history’s most legendary selectors. By the early eighties  Knuckles had honed the sound of House when he distilled essence of what he was playing in a set into production through synthesisers and drum machines to establish House as its own musical genre.

Tracks like Your Love, The Whistle Song and Move your Body were the result and today they remain venerable classic House tracks with Knuckles’ melodic disposition and funky rhythm and bass underpinning his works. Although Knuckles found his way on Virgin in the early 1990’s, it would be the Chicago labels DJ International and Trax, that would bring this sound to the wider world at first, with Frankie Knuckles at the head of the light brigade of House music. EPs like “Ultimate Production” and “Your Love” established Knuckles as a producer early on and although these EPs have been repressed countless times as new, younger audiences continue to be charmed by the Frankie Knuckles legacy, never before have they appeared on an album together, until now.

Trax Records have combined those early singles on a single record for the first time in “Frankie Knuckles presents Ultimate Production”, taking its name for the original DJ International record from which the double 12″ takes its name. Adding “Your Love” to the mix and including a Kevin Irving and Dancer track, both mixed by Knuckles, this is a comprehensive early Knuckles compilation. The early DJ influences are predominant on this compilation with Jamie Principle’s soulful voice moving over of progressive, looping House arrangements and Knuckles acute melodic sensibilities at the foreground. Dancer’s “Boom Boom” reflects the early days of Acid House amongst tracks that feel more analogous with an European synth sound from the 80’s than later House records.

Trax obviously haven’t broken any new ground on this record nor have they uncovered any rarities, but putting all these tracks on one record for the first time, puts into perspective the early sound of House and the legacy of Frankie Knuckles that continues to be House music today.

Mix of the Week – Ivaylo

And for something completely different from resident Ivaylo. Our Jæger Mix resident and Bogota label boss moves away from the signature Deep House sound we’ve come to know from the producer and DJ for this latest edition to the  Skranglejazz mix series. Tracks with a view from the bottom, roll big heavy bass lines past a clattering of sonic elements twisting and grinding up against a melee of percussive parts and stabbing chords. It’s an off-beat mix for the Bulgarian-cum-Norwegian DJ, who seems to be entering a new phase of his career with some new music rumoured to be abandoning his signature Deep House sound for labels other than his own Bogota records.

Global Underground 1996 -1999: The DJ mixes that defined the DJ as an artist

At the rate that DJ mixes are appearing online today, there’s enough music on Internet to play through a dozen life-times it seems. If a site like Resident Advisor can feature a mix a day, and radio stations like NTS have enough DJs on there to play two shows at any given time, that’s a daily number of mixes my addled brain is just not able to compute. It’s enough to match…  no, actually surpass the amount of music that’s out there already. Everybody is a DJ and every DJ needs a new mix a month to get heard above the noise, so the DJ mix is has become as trite as the op-ed piece on a music blog today. With so many noteworthy DJs amongst these and mix series like RA, Dekmantel and XLR8R all contributing to the melee on a daily basis, the DJ mix is a ubiquitous daily feature in our lives and it’s difficult sometimes to remember where it all started… until one day you start rifling through your wife’s old cd collection.

Yes I know, recorded DJ mixes have been around as long as the DJ, and mixtapes haven’t merely been the proclivity of DJ’s either, but before the 1990’s mixes recorded on the likes of camcorder, dictaphones and cassette bared little resemblance to the significance they have on popular culture today. Back then they were the propensity of the obsessive fan or the prospectus of an aspiring DJ. They were never really intended for public consumption and indulged absolutely no consideration for a consumer. The mixtape before the 1990’s was an insignificant, functional object… but that all changed when the DJ became a cultural phenomenon and a little-known concept called boxed re-defined the mixtape (or rather mix CD) for generations to come through a series called Global Underground.

The Mix CD

By the mid nineties clubs like Ministry of Sound, Mixmag and Renaissance had already been putting out mix CDs and tapes for audiences to listen to, but it had been little more than a pure promotional tactic for the club, party or publication it was promoting. “There was a huge Ministry of Sound logo on it with ‘Mixed By’, say, Pete Tong or whoever it was in tiny letters,” remembers co-founder of Boxed and Global Underground, Andy Horsfield in a Pulse Radio interview. By that time he and his business partner James Todd had been spending a lot of time in clubs already and had started sharing these experiences with new audiences, selling bootlegged tapes of mixes from their hometown of Newcastle Upon Tyne.

It was a time before DJs like Sasha and Paul Oakenfold were the name-brands that adorn the advertising billboards posing as festivals today, and a time when the DJ was still an approachable facilitator. Friendships were established early on in the firmament of the club between DJ and punter and Todd and Horsfield would make lasting bonds with the likes of the DJs that appear as enigma’s in DJ history today. Encouraged in a way by the likes of those Ministry of Sound mixtapes, Todd and Horsfield would establish the Global Underground and turned all the focus on their friends, the DJs. They opted to put the DJ front and centre rather than the club and consequently they helped establish the era of the superstar DJ in the wake of the series.

Although there were already mixes like Sasha and Digweed’s classic Renaissance mix that would establish their prowess early on, three things immediately set Global Underground apart from anything else out there at that time: The emphasis on the DJ, recording the mixes live, and the nomadic nature of each mix. Andy Horsfield again in Pulse Radio: “We thought it would be good to base an album series on flying to an international city with a DJ, throwing a party, bringing a photographer and a journalist along and capturing the whole thing in an album.” In that way they reflected the rise of electronic music on a global scale and instead of just releasing a mixed compilation where the tracks contained within were the focus of the album, the DJ, the set the venue and the people all played a role in establishing the first occurence of the DJ as a bonafide artist.

Kicking down the door

“Tony de Vit live in Tel Aviv” was the first Global Underground release and it made a formidable statement. The creator of the Hard House and Hard NRG genres who held residencies at the infamous Trade and Heaven (at a time when it still made a significant contribution to club music), wasn’t exactly known for making concessions in music and the first Global Underground still lives on as a testament to this attitude. It’s an uncompromising Hard-House mix coming in at a nosebleed 140 beats per minute. It encapsulates that era in club culture perfectly with a style of music that took House to its functional extreme and an energy that remains unmatched except maybe in the Hardcore genre. It also came at a time when genres started splitting into sub-genres and mixes became genre-specific, but most importantly it put the DJ in the spotlight, recording Tony de Vit’s legacy for generations to come even after his untimely passing. Unlike a series like Late night Tales or the Dekmantel Selector today, in which tracks appear individually like a compilation and the DJ mix is added at the end, the individual tracks on the GU series were only heard in the context of the DJ mix with the DJ stringing them together as a personal artistic statement.

What makes it even more impressive is that GU is recorded live and during this period it was all on vinyl too! The point perfect manner of the way De Vit segues one track into the next without losing a beat, at that pace, whilst retaining that energy is still a wonder to behold. Beatmatching is clearly second nature, leaving the DJ to focus purely on the selection and pulling a narrative together from one end to the next. It seems that the limitations of just using a finite amount of records, encouraged more consideration for the tracks you played. Perfectly programmed and to a degree flawless, you’d be hard-pressed, even today to find a DJ that can hold a candle to De Vit’s mixing talent across any genre, in any format. There’s a reason these DJ’s were exalted to superstar status and Global Underground played their fair share in bringing a DJ like De Vit to the rest of the world through a very accessible format, including wish-you-were-here images from the events for the consumption of adolescent minds who would later mark the next generation of party goers.

Global Underground didn’t merely enter the room with GU001, it kicked down the door and brought the House down with it, establishing it as a dominant force not to be taken likely. Hard House was definitely on an upswing during that period and Tony de Vit, being the precursor to acts like Lisa Lashes and Anne Savage, helped establish it as genre. Although De Vit followed the induction of Global Underground with with GU005 in 1997 with more of the same, Global Underground were not be pigeon holed either. “(O)riginally I wanted GU to be the best DJ’s in their field be it hard house, trance, progressive, house, techno etc.”, says Horsfield in an Interview with Decoded Magazine “something I think we achieved with Tony De Vit, Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, Danny Tenaglia and Darren Emerson.”  

Global expansion

Following Tony De Vit, came Paul Oakenfold; first with his New York session and then, a few releases later, with the live in Oslo release. Although Paul Oakenfold moved from the balearic isles of Ibiza to establish the early sound of Trance in the UK in the 80’s, the GU mixes, especially the Oslo edition, shows an eclectic selector able to go from liquid Drum n Bass to the heady atmospheres of 90’s Trance in the same night. Where De Vit captured the energy of a room, Oakenfold captured the mood, moving through the opening phases of his set to peak time with invariable ease, and although later mixes on the GU series would feature some computer editing sorcery, these early mixes were exactly what they said on the box – live.

Where big cities like London and New York were already the favoured destinations of big room DJs and audiences by the mid 90’s, Global Underground’s decision to use exotic locations like Tel Aviv and Hong Kong became a trademark of the series. It allowed the listener to travel all over the world with their favourite DJ and it seems that model was always in affect and often dictated by the DJ. “More often than not the DJ concerned picks somewhere that’s very special to them”, says Horsfield in his interview with Decoded Magazine. Today, we’re left wondering what drew Oakenfold to the small Oslo club Cosmopolite in April 1997, but it left a definite mark in the Global Underground discography and DJ history.

Oakenfold was a regular contributor to the Global Underground series and like De Vit, Sasha, Tenaglia and Emerson, he helped usher in the era of the superstar DJ in the late 90’s. The DJ would eventually become the de-facto artist and while GU were mirroring the global effect of electronic music, it’s also true that what they were witnessing and encouraging was the eventual rise of the star DJ that continues today with the likes of Peggy Gou and Ben UFO. Highly sought-after and fetching considerable fees, DJs like Sasha and John Digweed started touring like the bands and pop-stars before them and Global Underground were on hand to capture it all on compact disc.

GU’s most featured artist Nick Warren, stopped off at Prague, Brazil, Budapest and Amsterdam through the first four years of the series, and if we consider each GU release took six months to create, from logistical planning to release, that should be some indication of just how much travelling a DJ like Warren would’ve done between the Global Underground releases. The Global Underground series had a pendulum effect: They would follow their DJs around the world, recording mixes for the consumption of an international audience, who would hear these mixes and then create the demand for the DJ to come their, new location, starting the whole process over again and keeping a momentum going through the series.

By the time we get to Tony De Vit in Tokyo, Global Underground had brought this western notion of the superstar DJ to the furthest reaches of the world, all at a time before the global expansion on the Internet. Even though dance music had already been huge by the time Tony De Vit landed there, Japan had its own DJs and there were “just no western influences at all” according to Horsfield on Pulse Radio. “Back then nobody spoke English” remembers Horsfield, “there were no signs in English and you were very very much aware you were somewhere completely alien.” It’s unsure whether Tony De Vit came to Tokyo via Global Underground or via some other route, but the chances are good that a Japanese audience might have been turned on to De Vit through the GU001 initially.

John Digweed in Hong Kong; Darren Emerson in Uruguay; Paul Oakenfold in New York and Digweed in Sydney, literally covered the four corners of the globe with a DJ roll call that still earmarks festival line-ups all over the world, and amongst them one DJ would lead them all as the penultimate superstar DJ of the late 90’s, and yes he too would feature on the Global Underground series.

Sasha in Ibiza

Sasha in Ibiza, GU013 wasn’t just a mere entry, but stood on its own in the Global Underground catalogue and the history of DJing today as one of those timeless DJ mixes, and Andy Horsfield is in agreement. “We did the Sasha record back in 1999 and it still stands up and sounds amazing, it really does.” Although Horsfield didn’t originally want to do Ibiza because he thought it too “cheesy” according to a Red Bull Australia interview, he was persuaded by Sasha and has absolutely no regrets today. “We did the opening and closing of Space that year [1999] and the parties were just fucking phenomenal.”

A progressive House/Trance mix by the iconic DJ, there’s a particular visceral dimension to the British DJ’s mix that places you in the middle of a dance floor when everything – the music, the lights, the people and the venue – finds some perfect harmony with the other. And listening to it today, almost twenty years on from when it was recorded, you’d have to agree with Horsfield when he says it still stands up. Yet another flawless mix in the series, and although probably edited on this occasion it would have still been a vinyl mix and almost surely recorded from one end to there other with only the slightest post-production editing to complete it.

Sasha in Ibiza it seems is just the perfect combination of DJ, sound, and venue. Something just clicks on this mix that makes it one of those universal mixes, holding its own amongst anything that came after it too. Like Sasha and Digweed’s Renaissance mix that came a few years before it, it really defines the recorded mix and the DJ as an artist during this period. There’s a thread that ties the entire mix together from one end to the other, and even though the individual tracks might have aged somewhat, the way Sasha pulls them together for the mix puts them in a space beyond their time.

The Global Underground series only gathered momentum from there, with highlights like Deep Dish in Moscow and Felix Da Housecat in Milan continuing the series up until the present day where artists like Solomun and James Lavelle continue to bear the torch, but as electronic music, club culture and DJ’s expounded, Global Underground’s presence would become less so too. As the Internet established a new era of the social-media-lite DJ, where Soundcloud and Mixcloud are absolutely saturated with hour-long sporadic expositions at the decks, the Global Underground series would have to fight for its position. Today GU is something tawdry and cheesy and for younger audiences who today hold DJs like Ben UFO, Marcel Dettmann and Peggy Gou in the same esteem as the previous generation venerated the likes of Sasha, it has become an irrelevant dinosaur unfortunately.

There’s no space for a Global Underground in today’s market share, but everything the DJ is today and the DJ mix has become, is all down to those first four years of the Global Underground series.

 

JM086 – Jeff Niels

Mandagsklubben’s crusader Jeff Niels (Niels Theissen) takes his turn at the Jæger mix. The Brokesteady DJ is part of the foundation at Jæger as one of its longest serving residents, and a DJ with an ever-progressive view of the dancefloor while able to submit to its impulses. He’s able go from an early evening Deep-House set to a bass-heavy Chicago set without much persuasion and there’s always a smile waiting for you on the other side of the booth. A knowledgeable selector with a cool disposition Jeff Niels is the antithesis to the notion of the DJ as the centrepiece. Coming from the unassuming atmospheres of Fisk & Vilt to the heady environment of Jæger, Jeff Niels is able to find that fleeting balance between entertainment, function and appreciation in his sets that usually mark the early part of a Monday evening.

In his Jæger mix opts for mood, with heady pads and an omni-present cloud of texture gathering around low-lying 4-4 kicks, 303 bass-lines and syncopated hi-hats. With tracks by Hodge, Tornado Wallace and Daphni all making an appearance the track listing lends from various different genres and styles, which Jeff Niels manages to tie together through a shared atmosphere. Rather than progressing from one point to the next, this edition of the Jæger mix wallows, appears static in nature even though the club arrangements of the tracks might suggest otherwise. Ending his mix on the  Soulphiction’s funky “b3b4urd1”, Jeff Niels leaves us on a toe-tapping high-note (pun intended) on this week’s edition of the Æmix.

 

Give us an introduction
Hello, my name is Niels. I play music at Mandagsklubben with my dearest friends Andrè and David. I like it a lot.
What is your earliest memory of a piece of music?
 I have a vivid memory me playing “air drums” to the epic intro on dire straits money for nothing (the 8 min album version). Seeing the Pink Floyd Ummagumma album art in my childhood friend’s parent’s house, also made a lasting impression on me. I must have been 8-9?
What sound or genre do you feel represents what you try to do through your selections?
 I have a pretty set routine selecting and buying music. Every Monday I look through what has been released that day and buy the tracks that in some way or another resonate with my mood or state of mind thats specific day. I usually end up with 6-8 new new new tracks and they will basically dictate what other music I will play as well. Genre? Anything with drum machine.
What do you consider your role as DJ should be?
I D K ! Moving from Hamar to Oslo eventually led me to the great discovery: a dj is actually a thing that can inhabit different personalities. Going to different clubs, being able to be fed a mix of new weird, exiting, sad, terrible, happy or difficult music was fantastic. I would just like to contribute to facilitate that experience for others.
What was the theme of your mix?
How To Mix Like Jeff Niels.
Which track in your Æmix best represents the theme of your mix and why?
Which track in my Æmix, do YOU think best represents the theme?
That new Hodge track on “Don’t hold breath” because it captures the mood that stays consistent throughout your mix…
What do you hope your Æmix relays to the listener?
Shazam!
What’s next for you after this mix?
Mandagsklubben!

A Q&A with Terre Thaemlitz (DJ Sprinkles) – Part 2

*All photos courtesy of Comatonse Recordings.

Terre Thaemlitz is an intriguing enigma in art and music as a multi-disciplinary artist, musician, critic, DJ and academic with extensive work in all those fields coming together under one vision: “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.” As a DJ and producer, the Fagjazz sound she established through her Comatonse label in the nineties, has cemented a legacy in electronic music with close associations to the Deep House and Ambient genres. As a multimedia artist she creates provocative audio/visual works to the critical acclaim of audiences and peers alike with a strong conceptual framework bolstering her execution.

Last week Terre Thaemlitz spoke to gallerist and writer Ruby Paloma about the concept informing her latest work “Deproduction” and the relationship her works share with each other. Thaemlitz also shared her views on some of the problems precipitating from artistic institutions and her “extreme issues with Pride[TM]”. In her answers she also sheds a brief light on her musical upbringing and how she might approach music and her multimedia works like “Deproduction”. We take up the conversation after Thaemlitz makes clear her views on the artistic and cultural hierarchy and Ruby posing more universal questions about the artist’s work and career. Again we get some unexpected insights into Thaemlitz’ musical upbringing and her nihilistic approach to art and music.

Terre Thaemlitz presents Deproduction at Kunstnernes Hus this Friday before assuming her DJ moniker for Frædag invites DJ Sprinkles.

Could you talk about what the main problem/ concern is in your practice? This could be related to form, theme or philosophy. Is this constant or has it changed over time?

Although I would not want people to presume there is a teleological course to my projects, I guess a common thread would be the anti-essentialist and anti-spiritual deconstruction of issues of authenticity and originality in any form or aspect of life.

You consider yourself a nihilist. Does this affect your ‘sound’ as much as it affects the conceptual framework of your projects?

Certainly not in the cliche sense that something “nihilistic” must sound “dark.” For me, a queer relationship to sound has more to do with cultural limitations than possibilities. For example, 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. It wasn’t about an “authentically queer sound,” but rather a “queered relationship to mainstream sound.” I think this is also a huge part of the MTF transgendered stage – drag shows – and our fascination for performing or lipsyncing to pop songs that are more related to the experiences from which we have been historically excluded, and less related to the experiences we live. This tension is also where I think a lot of trans sarcasm, snarkyness and shade come from. So for me, this is the nihilistic subtext to many queered and trans applications of sound. It is not a “sound” in itself, but a broken relationship to a sound’s dominant and intended purposes.

In Deproduction, you discuss how much current LGBTQ politics is centred on same-sex marriage and the institution of the family in general. Your two premises: That having children is unethical, and That families make democracy impossible, resonates with the work of anti-natalist philosophers such as David Benatar, Sarah Perry or Thomas Ligotti. David Benatar believes that life is not good, and that people only imagine it to be, and that there is little purpose in rearing children in such a climate. In the Republic, Plato suggested that parents should be prohibited from raising their own children and even residing in the same vicinity as their children in order to preserve equality and avoid personal possession. Could you discuss Deproduction in relation to these or similar philosophical arguments? And what does Deproduction contribute to this line of philosophy?

Yes, this is all obvious stuff to many people, including many who have children. I mean, when working on “Deproduction” I had a lot of input from friends with children who were capable of the honestly required to speak about these things, so it is a common mistake for people to presume the only people thinking about these things are easily dismissible “childless freaks” who “don’t get it” because we don’t have kids. My project has been dismissed in the press many times as a didactic rant against having children, when in fact it is about investigating what it culturally means to breed. I see breeding as an inevitability of animal life, so the question of how something is “ethical” or “unethical” is a cultural issue through which we attempt to make sense of that inevitability. The ability to choose not to have children is not as easy as people think, and in many cultures is still an impossibility. Most women have no choice. Most men have no choice. It is the only way to be recognized as adult women and men. Even in the US, access to abortion is continually limited by the Rightists. And this lack of access greatly informs the general population’s sense of ethics around child bearing. In contexts where women wishing to terminate pregnancies have no options but to disobey very “morally motivated” laws and place their bodies at undue risk, of course it culturally aligns birth control and abortion with “immorality.” That violence against women is a large part of what I consider the “unethical” circumstances that most children are born into. More broadly, I think this world is incredibly violent and miserable in so many ways, and the more compassionate thing is to avoid imposing it onto another human being without their having any say in the matter. I don’t think I contribute anything new or special to the arguments of others, but maybe the format of my project as an audio album brings a certain language and outlook on this topic to a different audience than the audiences of the people you mention. Although I guess I do continually relate these issues to the cultivation of queer and trans experiences – and what our experiences mean in relation to dominant cultural ethics – which is not something discussed by all of those others. As with most of my projects, I try to speak through a voice centered in queer and trans experiences – even if some people feel a topic like having children initially appears more “relevant” to straight culture. Like, I’ve had some people tell me I should have left out the bits on queer and trans experience – even some queers told me that. For me, that presumption of the discussion being better served by targeting straights is an erasure of our very experiences which testify to the non-universality and violence of dominant heteronormativity – queer and trans experiences.

You discredit positivity and argue that negativity is ‘an indispensable act of any cultural endeavour that frames itself as critical’. Do you have any philosophical, artistic or musical influences that have lead you to take this position? And when did negativity become important in your work?

o    The Italian Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci had the motto: Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will. “Pessimism of the intellect” means to see the world as it is, rather than as what we would like it to be or as we fantasise. To accept nothing at face value, to doubt all that we are told, and to question everything. “Optimism of the Will” is not meant as religious faith but is based on historical realities and the fact that the application of human ingenuity, if you want, and struggle, is what brought us from pre-civilisation to civilisation. Do you believe in the Optimism of the Will, Terre?

No, I do not believe in teleology or humanity being on a path of progress, etc. I think there is a very insect-like dynamic to social change. In a way, it spreads like a hornet’s nest. Have you ever seen a nest that fills an entire old barn or shed? There is a point where the nest’s growth takes on a complexity and momentum that seems unstoppable. I imagine from the perspective of larvae hatched and nursed at the deepest, hottest core of that nest it appears inevitable. The nest becomes the known world. For me, Optimism of the Will is simply an ideological byproduct of that kind of complexity and momentum. It’s ideological function is to conceal our ongoing relationships to slavery. For example, today it is the slavery of exported and underpaid or unpaid labor required to facilitate First World lifestyles of excess. Under globalization, the majority of slavery is displaced to the edge of the nest, and therefore appears nonexistent to those at the core.

Meanwhile, even at the core, we in the First World internalize a slave ethic of mandatory participation in labor until old age. There is an insistence that we all “socially contribute” (in terms that dominant culture recognizes as contribution), and an incredible pressure not to “exploit” or rely upon the few social services that are available to us. Those who cannot earn enough to afford living in a First World culture are socially punished, sued, evicted, deported or incarcerated. Those who refuse to work are the most dreaded of all. Non-participation is such a taboo that the majority of us immediately rule it out as a possibility – yet who among us ever asked to be born into this shit world? Again, the sophistication and complexity of this hornet’s nest makes our own slavery appear to be something else. Something distant in time or location, or perhaps even something that has been overcome. This is delusion. And even if one refuses to identify one’s own working ethic as rooted in a model of slavery, any realist should easily be able to list off at least two or three types of unquestionable slavery within their own local economy. Just start by identifying the types of labor available to people without proper legal status or protections. Sex work is an easy one to get the list going… Meanwhile, how many “democracies” continue to have royal families? I believe that is also part of the Nordic Model.

One could argue that there is a strong sense of antipathy in your video work, in some of your Terre Thaemlitz electro-acoustic projects and in your performances (I am not thinking of your DJ sets as DJ Sprinkles here). At times, this antipathy is experienced as non-violent aggression and as an attack on your audience. Could you talk a little bit about this?

I suppose the “attacks” you are referring to are simply the affect and discomfort associated with having one’s principles challenged? I think this is an unavoidable aspect of criticisms of homogenization, essentialism and heteronormativity.

Is your artistic and moral awareness, and to some extent asceticism, not only a means to overcome a frustration-filled and painful human condition, but also a means to reflect on the meaning of life?

 Oh, come on, life is meaningless. Who wants to devote energy to such an obviously misdirected topic, when there are so many real things to reflect upon? [Laughs.] I take issue with this term “overcome” as well. I recognize change, but do not think we – as a quite shitty animal – have a capacity to overcome or transcend violence. Recognizing that inability is a starting point for other, non-teleological analyses related to how to cope with or organize through unending struggle and resistance.

What you do as Terre Thaemlitz is intrinsically linked to you as a person, which will undoubtedly follow you when you assume the role of DJ Sprinkles. Do you feel that these two aspects of your artistic personality are indeed linked? And if so, how do you distance yourself or draw yourself closer to your work as Terre Thaemlitz in your releases and work as DJ Sprinkles?

I guess what you are identifying as “intrinsically linked to me as a person” is about my insistence upon inserting the subjective within cultural analyses? This is a way of stopping oneself from falling into the classically “neutral” or “objective” voice of high Modernity and classic analytical methods. It is also about oral traditions, storytelling, and other non-traditional ways of speaking analyses.

My producing under various aliases, and in multiple genres, is similarly a rejection of the Modernist model of an “artist” or “musician” speaking from a singular voice, with their work manifesting a linear path of development over time. You know, like mapping Picasso or Bob Dylan’s evolution over time. Again, that is a high Modernist, teleological means of approaching “creativity” in the patriarchal public sphere. Metaphorically, my schizophrenia of personas and productions parallels the schizophrenia of my experiences with gender and sexuality. The decentralization of a singular voice is meant to mirror the decentralization of those and other social dynamics, as I perceive and experience them being culturally imposed from different vectors, in ways that are simultaneous and contradictory.

And finally, which of your works (including your writing) do you find has had the greatest impact? And which has had the greatest impact on you?

That first question is way too lofty for me. I’d have to say, “none.” As for the latter, “Soulnessless” was definitely the most complex and difficult project to realize, both in terms of personally thinking through the themes as well as the social interactions involved.

Album of the Week: Gundelach – Baltus

Gundelach’s debut album has landed and it’s everything you thought it would be. Jangly guitars, emotive synths and toe -tapping beats pour forth from the artist’s deepest depths, underscored by that haunting falsetto at the foreground of the Gundelach sound. After releasing the self-titled EP two years back to a great reception, Gundelach has been constantly on tour, all the while –unbeknownst to us – putting the finishing touches on his debut LP. As an LP, “Baltus” consolidates the sound that Gundelach first introduced to the world with “Spiders” in 2015 with one of the most distinct voices in pop music today.

Baltus combines elements of modern R&B and eighties synth-pop in wispy arrangements that touch on something soulful. Gundelach’s lyrics explore familiar themes in love-songs, but in an abstract way that could be referencing a jilted lover or performance anxiety; the true meaning of the words hidden amongst stereo-types and clichés. The lyrics however appear superfluous to the melodic reverie in Gundelach’s voice which communicates something visceral and urgent in its delivery.

The familiar falsetto draws the listener close through cloudy reverbs and delays expounding on minimalist arrangements with the music relaying the emotional depth rather than the lyrical content. An extended vowel or a rhythmical consonant galloping in time with the percussion expresses something universal in the abstract that speaks to every individual in a unique way while textures with their origins in guitars, synthesisers and drum machines – all performed by the artist – create a soft harmonic bed for the singer’s unique voice.

Gundelach plays on various moods through “Baltus” . In “Hurt” and “Iron” there’s a Stranger-Things-like melancholy evoked, which completely disappears when Ary joins the artist for the  dance-floor friendly “Games” on the first track on the B-side. Even in that very upbeat moment, there’s an entrenched sadness there that’s possibly best reflected through the other Ary collaboration on the album and the lead single “Past the Building”.

There’s no discernible evolution from the first Gundelach release, nor are there any surprises. There might be a confidence lingering in the background that first EP helped cement, but that strand is tenuous and insubstantial. “Baltus” breaks no new ground in the Gundelach sound, but rather fortifies what was already there, cementing the career of a pop artist on the rise.

Mix of the Week – Tod Louie

Tod Louie surprises with this new profile mix for Det Gode Selskab. An exotic mix with traces of organic instruments tracing a line through familiar club arrangements, this mix finds Tod Louie in a reflective, meditative disposition. Counterpointing percussive rhythms weave through seductive melodies and haunting backdrops with a lethargic, often invisible 4/4 counting out the mix in the background. “It’s a listening mix, you can have in the background,” he says in the accompanying Q&A  …”But it will also make you dance.”

Tod Louie is a central figure in Det Gode Selskab collective, a clubbing institution and a label that moves between their weekly Sunday night residency in our subterranean dance floor at Jæger to the various open-air club concepts in they operate all over the city. In the first DGS release Tod Louie joins Karl Fraunhofer and Solaris for an interpretation of A:G’s The Nose in his first attempt at  production, and embarks on the next phase of his career, that begins and ends with his admiration and curiosities in the booth.

You can read the full Q&A with Tod Louie over on the soundcloud page and catch him every Sunday at Jæger for Det Gode Selskab.

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…

 

Album of the Week: Anthony Linell – A sense of Order

At a time when ambient music has taken on new-age connotations through endless Bandcamp pages that peddle handmade cassettes from the obscure hippies, ambient records rarely make their presence felt in the way of Brian Eno’s mediative, unhurried synthesiser music of the eighties and seventies. Ambient music today draws closer connotations to spa retreats than airports and very rarely do we find a record that carries on a tradition of this genre as an continuation of the Eno philosophy.

The last record to do that was Dominick Fernow’s Ambient black magic project, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement from last year, which felt the closest we’ve come to a progression of Eno’s Music for Airports in quite some time, even from Eno himself. It seems however that more artists have taken note of this vacuum in music, and Anthony Linell is the latest to find solace in the calm reflective pool of the ambient genre for his latest album on the Northern Electronic label.

Linell, who has always hopped between the experimental realm of electronic music and Techno is probably best known for his energised club constructs as Abdulla Rashim, mostly found on his Northern Electronics imprint. A formidable presence in the world of Techno, Linell across his various aliases, has garnered the respect of the scene, as one of its more progressive minds, extending the sound of labels like Studio Barnhus and Semantica into the furthest realms of possibility for electronic music.

A Sense of Order finds Linell in more contemplative mood however, where legato melodic lines linger amongst a hazy drone and the electronic chirps of a simulated environment. There’s no new-age mysticism or spiritual plateau in Linell’s work on the album, but rather a just whisper of tones slipping in and out of the background. Tensions build through the modulating swell of sustained chords, never breaking beyond the surface before they resolve through repetitive passages that feature no discernible beginning nor end. There’s an unease to the music, a distinctive aspect in Linell’s music, but it’s never as upfront or confrontational as it is on his Techno jaunts. He exercises some noticeable constraint on A Sense of Order that at times like “Leaves of Glass” is almost completely serene.

Individually the tracks make no permanent statement, as they should with fleeting melodic lines leaving no superlative mark beyond that moment of time and the sonic texture never indulging more than a peaceful swell. The sonic atmosphere is constant and even when the title track carries connotation to Vangelis’ excursions on the Blade Runner soundtrack, it never amounts to anything more than a fleeting throughout in the immoveable presence of the album.

Mix of the week – Leif

Leif, the Freerotation resident DJ and producer, pulled an inescapable mix together for Blowing up the Workshop last week. From RA to FactMag, this mix has received a tremendous reception and with good cause.  Amongst all the beat-driven, fast-paced House and Techno mixes that continually pass through our playlists, Leif ambient approach gives us cause for pause and offers repose in a ceaseless winter season.

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.

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.

Album of the Week: Nightmares on Wax – Shape the Future

Warp’s artist in residence since 1989. Nightmares on Wax is back on the label he calls home with his first LP in five years, proffering a vision on the shape of things to come in “Shape the Future”. Nightmares on Wax have seen electronic music gestate as an underground movement, develop throughout the nineties and refined with technology to this point today, where it is firmly ingrained in the popular psyche. Breaking out in the UK rave scene in the late eighties, Nightmares on Wax have moved in unison with the development of that music, moving from the breakneck breaks of early rave and hardcore records, to the more idle dub sound George Evelyn has cultivated since Smokers Delight in 1995. A solo project today and with large group of collaborators on call, Nightmares on Wax have slipped into a unwavering groove that has seen the music develop little, but remain consistently good, and in “Shape the Future” it’s hit on something contemporaneously perfect with the current landscape of electronic music.

In the foreground, Nightmares on Wax’s low-slung dub rhythms, long legato pads, and warm keys swirl around the album in its usual impassive mode, but underpinning the album is the slickest production and song-writing we’ve heard on an electronic music album for some time. “On it Maestro” sounds closer to something recorded during Abbey Road’s heyday rather than the ubiquitous bedroom-studio and with a severe focus in combining various elements into fully-formed songs, rather than extended loops, “Shape the Future” is Moby’s “Play” from a roots-dub purview. From the bluesy sway of “Typical” to the Gospel break-beat exhalation of  “Citizen Kane”, there’s an ineffable appeal to the music that lingers with the listener and expounds on the Nightmares on Wax sound with a more accessible approach.

The deep swelling bass-lines and Hip-Hop sampling techniques remain consistent with what we’ve come to know from Nightmares on Wax since “Smokers Delight”, but vocals from the likes of Sadie Walker, Jordan Rakei and Mozez re-contextualises it in popular music’s more palpeable idiom. We’ve seen many electronic music artists trying to find that intangible cross-over between the dance floor and the pop album of the late, but where few were able to achieve that by merely adding a vocal line to a House track, Nightmares in Wax succeeds. Shape the Future is an album with remarkable cross-over appeal without bastardising or fetishising the roots-sound of Nightmares on Wax.

Mix of the Week – KSMISK

Recorded in Jæger’s basement during the first LYD showcase, is a live performance from Oslo’s latest intergalactic Techno voyeurs, KSMISK. KSMISK is the Techno alias of a prominent Oslo electronic music act, who have for the last few years have making uncompromising Techno for Thomas URV’s PLOINK label.

A combination of thunderous percussion and salacious atmospheres transported from a time of uncompromising Techno and electronic exploration finds its form in a modern dialect of synthesisers and digital production. After a couple of EPs on PLOINK and one on Arild Lopez’ Cymawax label, their debut LP, Mikrometeorittene was released last week with great anticipation. The geologically referencing album is constructed in some sludgy primordial soup where atmosphere and rhythm play off the other as a descendent of early Biosphere and Mental Overdrive.

They presented this new music for the first time at Olle Abstract’s LYD showcase in January, harnessing that uncompromising energy from their recorded works in the club context with vivacious and determined results as a live show. The spacious minimalists arrangements from the albums an EPs take on a more gruelling personality as unprocessed synthesisers and gnarling drum machines play off the energy of the dance floor and cascade off the other, trudging through hazy frequencies.

We recorded the set and yes, this live show, is our mix of the week.

*You can pick up a copy of Mikrometeorittene online at the PLOINK shop or in person at Filter.

 

Do it Yourself: A guide to Brooklyn’s New Wave

Nik Dawson is tearing chunks off some unidentifiable street food under the vamperish red hue of the lighting at OHM in Berlin. Cowering in the DJ booth, hunkered over, hood up, his lip curls around his dinner with a snarl in guarded frosty reception to any would-be stranger. Sybyl Jason is currently deep into a set, standing in front of Dawson peppering the dance floor with an ambiguous selection, spanning the early sounds of House to the more aggressive Techno and Electro from a more contemporary set of producers. Jason’s set skips through genres, zig-zagging between styles and sounds like hummingbird in search of some indefinable sweet release. The defining character of her mix is that there is no defining character, a deconstructed DJ set where everything goes and no boundaries exist. The mix is only to get from one point to the next avoiding the acute poignancy of the perfect segue from one song into the next in favour of the unbridled energy of each track.

Nik Dawson seems nonplussed as he takes over from Jason, assuming his artistic alter-ego Bookworms and taking position behind a set of jagged cables an knobs that mark his musical workstation. Commencing through a set of inarticulate noise and aggressive rhythms, Dawson’s barrage of distortion and incongruous percussive rhythms bare no resemblance to slick production work he showcased on records from L.I.E.S and Anómia. The music is as aloof as his demeanour, hood still up and completely focussed on the torturous sounds emanating from non compliant machines. Scant bodies keep their distance, casting long shadows on OHM’s floor, attempting to find some symbiotic harmony with Bookworms. Harmony eludes most of us and it’s only until Via-App takes her cue from a pause in Bookworms performance, that a synchronicity starts to appear.

The Brooklyn native distills the truculent energy from Bookworms into something more palatable for the dance floor, while retaining that biting power that’s been the foundation of the night at OHM. Via-App’s live set is a blend of incandescent machines and choleric rhythms, with rather more engaging results than her predecessor. It’s music that has been defined as punk-DIY Techno on the flyer, which is a kind of Techno spewed forth from unprocessed, noisy machines. It’s Techno in its most exposed form bearing more relation to genres like EBM and Electro than contemporary Techno, and for this event at OHM its crowding under the No-Tech banner.

“No-Tech was formerly a monthly event for DJs and live performers focusing on experimental approaches to dance music” reads their bio. Between 2013 and 2015 in Brooklyn, resident DJs Ciarra Black & JR Nelson, sought to redefine electronic dance music, combining live performances with DJ sets, and blending outlier styles and genres like Noise and Industrial with Techno and Acid through a very do-it-yourself approach. In a 2015 interview with RA Via App (Dylan Scheer) said No-Tech is a place “where you can play whatever you want and it’ll start conversations”. A bar in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood set the scene for the now defunct No-Tech event, which has since started a cassette/digital label cementing the ethos of No-Tech through release from heretofore unknown acts like Speaking Parts  and exporting that sound elsewhere to places like OHM.

No-Tech and Scheer are part of a wave of electronic music producer, events organiser and performer that have centred around the New York burrough, Brooklyn for the last five years. Born out of the noise and DIY scene in Brooklyn, its relationship to Techno in Berlin is tenuous and its intentions lie in decimating preconceptions around dance music with a noisy, gritty, almost destructive approach to dance floor genres. “Noise and Techno have been tied aesthetically for a long time”, explains Scheer of her approach. Her music can be heard as an continuation of a long-standing tradition of Techno in New York from musicians and record labels like Cititrax, Silent Servant, Bunker New York, 100% Silk, L.I.E.S and Ron Morelli, but with a flippant slant to the traditions of the dance music culture we have come accustomed to in Europe.

In the US where dance music has never quite enjoyed the levels of success or acceptance as it has here, it’s always seemed to have to fight to stake its claim. With few purposely built venues for this music compared to cities like Berlin or Amsterdam, but with the same level of interest, the music, promoters, DJs and artists in New York have always had to adopt a kind of a a do-it-yourself attitude and in this latest iteration its been taken to the extreme. Quasi-legal venues as show-spaces and events that combine DJs with live performances and visuals have come to define this musical development in Brooklyn and New York over the last 5 years. There’s nothing as succinct as a sound or a look to it, but rather just a feeling, a feeling of non-compliance with the status quo and a complete disregard for institutionalised musical traditions.

One of the most significant figures to come out of this scene, and bring this music and this attitude to the wider world is Aurora Halal. Aurora Halal is a producer, visual artist and the creator of the Mutual Dreaming party series & the Sustain-Release festival, both of which have been important platforms for the kind of music coming via Brooklyn. Mutual Intentions is a party described by RA’s Jordan Rothlein as “DIY, but ruffled to perfection” and it like No-Tech it combines all the essential ingredients: a makeshift venue; a do-it-yourself approach; and an artist/dj roster made up of local and international kindred spirits like Xosar, Lena Willikens, Relaxer, DJ Sotofett and Helena Hauff. Now in its seventh year Mutual Dreaming is at the crest of a wave that will inevitably move out of sight, back underground, but shows no signs of slowing or stopping. It’s elevated the name Aurora Halal into public consciousness through the label that’s followed it and through her lauded A/V performances at festivals like Dekmantel and clubs like Berghain.

Originally from DC, Aurora Halal started making her mark in Brooklyn as a video artist making music videos for artists like Max D and providing visuals for shows like Ital’s “Dream On” tour. She had been congruously working on music since 2010 with Jason Letkiewicz (aka Steve Summer, Malvoeaux) as Innergaze, who together had released two albums of jacking Tech via Cititrax and 100% Silk. Going out on her own eventually with the same 808 samples loaded on her MPC and with the purpose of creating a live show in mind, Aurora Halal has burst forth as a solo artist, distilling the ethos of Mutual Dreaming into music; “DIY, but ruffled to perfection”. Not as disruptive as Via-App or Bookworms, but harnessing that same sonic aesthetic made from animated machines, Aurora Halal’s music is two records deep today via her Mutual Dreaming label.

Synthesisers blister as analogue circuits crack under their own weight while drum machines attack and suppress the fabric of time through Passageway and Shapeshifter in her discography. Born from the point of view of a live performance for a club context, but functional on any recorded format, it’s music that continues on a tradition of Techno provocateurs from New York that defied preconceptions in favour of something primal immediate, but coming from a different point of view. It’s an ideology that weaves itself through the fabric of New York and Brooklyn’s next generation of musicians, who came into this music via a DIY approach rather than a scene or a genre. With no definitive stylistic trait in the music other than the evasive Techno declination and with no real singular event, club or group of people at the centre of this music, it’s nothing you coul pin down as a counter-cultural scene.

Individuals like Aurora Halal, Via-app, Bookworms and Ciarra Black and events like Mutual Dreaming and No-Tech all seem to operate independently of the other in true do-it-yourself fashion, but it’s exactly that DIY attitude that underpins all these various entities and brought them to the attention of the wider world. That however doesn’t seem to be the intention of acts like Aurora Halal, who although had found some interest and praise in what she’s doing, remains an artist, producer and promoter very thriving in the margins and feigning any kind of media attention or notoriety. There’s no perceptible agenda and although she and other artists like Via-App are certainly enjoying a moment in the sun, everything about their work and what they do vehemently opposes pandering to anything, and as Halal so eloquently put it to Dummy Mag: “Who knows when it will go out of fashion again, leaving it back as it was… in secret”

Back at OHM it’s still seems like its very much a secret thing while Ciarra Black channels Via-App’s rapturous sounds into a DJ set for the small but dedicated audience. There’s something of an undercurrent between all the acts, even though their music can occupy vastly different spheres. It’s an attitude, an attitude that gives the institution the finger with an individualist design on music. At OHM and in Europe where there is no need for a DIY scene, as club culture is a popular culture rather than a counter culture, some of what events like No-Tech and Mutual dreaming are trying to communicate gets lost in translation. But that energy is still there, that provocative energy of something moving against the tide and that, that is something that goes beyond music and harks back to the origins of the counterculture that started it all.

 

*Aurora Halal performs live at Jæger this Friday for Frædag invites Aurora Halal and Dr. Rubinstein

Introducing Remii

Remii’s remix of El Hermano by Carloscres on Bogota records wraps itself around the bottom end of the original. Slowing it down, the producer beefs up the sub-bass whoomph of the track, with a bouncing Electro-House take on the original. The mix lives alongside mixes by Jay Tripwire and Bogota boss Ivaylo and stands apart from them as the furthest outlier from the original. Incorporating a fraction of a vocal from some obscure gospel source and intermittent waves of legato synths that sink the track at opportune moments to the deep, Remii’s remix drips with the sultry heat of summer.

Remii (Emini) is a producer and a DJ with a readymade touch. His remix of Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy’s mine” has gotten 146k listens on Soundcloud to date and showcase an innate ability to repurpose the familiar in a completely different context.  His original tracks with a proclivity for the funky side of synth music, are alluring pieces that combine various musical tropes in unique musical assemblages. A soundcloud anomaly, Remii is reserved in his approach, but is a veteran of the Oslo DJ and music scene, where he often plays between the dichotomy of pop music and club music on the weekends.

With a sincere respect for a guilty pleasure and refined touch in the studio, Remii Emini is a conundrum, that we’ve not been able to solve through his music and DJ sets alone so with his remix of El Hermano playing in the background we sent him some questions to find out more.

*El Hermano by Carloscres is out on Bogota Records now and available via Traxsource.

Hey Remii. Where are you at the moment and what are you listening to?

I’m home on my computer. It’s Monday and -12 outside. I’m listening to some Sango a tune called Middle Of Things, daydreaming of palm trees and umbrella drinks.

What’s earliest memory of a piece of music and thinking “I want to do this”?

Fa Monteco-To The Rhythm, kickass house tune!

What sort of influence did your family have on your musical tastes and creativity?

My family aren’t really into music. Both of my parents are from Albania, and they mostly listen to albanian music. I’m not really into it, except some very old folkish, jazz sounding stuff.

What did your first attempts at making music sound like?

I remember I sampled some vocals from N.W.A and the beat had that funky french house thing going on. I sampled Ice Cube’s part on F tha police, when he says; coming straight from the underground.

What was the turning point when you started to feel comfortable and pleased with the stuff you were making?

Hmm, I felt pretty comfortable with a track I did called 1983. It had that retro sounding italo flavour. This was in 2004 I guess.


What musical instrument is essential to your work?

Synths! Chords, sequencers, funky basslines. Mostly software in Reason and some few hardware, (love the Micro Korg, especially the vocoder). I’m also thinking about buying a talkbox!

What’s always inspired you musically?

The music I grew up with! Good old hip hop, r&b, new jack swing, disco, italo, boogie, funk, house, juke, jersey-club, nola boune and the list goes on. But I also listen to modern Pop music, anything from Dua Lipa to Travis Scott inspires me. Bruno Mars’ new album is lit, btw!

What desert island disc would be essential for you?

Warren G Regulate…G Funk Era! No, wait! Michael Jackson’s Thriller! Wow. They’re both masterpieces!

 

Some of the first things I heard from you were your remixes of pop songs. What inspired you to remix songs by the likes of Christina Aguilera and Monica?

Well, Genie in a bottle is my nr. 1 guilty pleasure. The boy is mine was a big hit when I was in high school, and it brings back a lot of good memories.

What were your intentions with those kinds of remixes?

I guess I wanted to recreate them! I often play the Brandy & Monica remix at the club, and people dance to it. The Aguilera remix is more of a “just for fun” thing.  

You’ve recently remixed El Hermano by Carloscres. What drew you to original track initially?

Ivaylo played me the original, and I liked it. A juicy tech house track! It’s got some nice pads, a groovy arpeggiator and a filthy bassline!

You slowed it down, allowing the bass to swell more in what I considered an electro House interpretation. What did you hope to bring out in your version?

I like that slow, down tempo type 110-115 (or slower) bpm house. Yeah, I feel it has more of that straight forward bouncy electro vibe going on.

The release came out Friday, what do you hope the listener’s get from your remix?

I hope the listeners dance to it!

What’s inspiring you outside of music at the moment?

My son, my wife, and everyday life!

What’s in the pipeline for Remii after this release?

Keep making music! You’ve probably understood that i’m quite a skitzo when it comes to genres. I started producing some moody trap beats last week! Maybe I’ll add some vocals… maybe not.

Lastly, can you play us out of a song?

“Shooby-doo-bop, shoo-doo-bop I, wanna love you, Shooby-doo-bop, my computer love!”

 

 

Album of the Week: KiNK – Playground

KiNK is one of the most prolific record producers of our time. With little more than a Fender Rhodes piano, and a bit of a loop he’s able to conjure alluring House arrangements from what appears to be a bottomless pit of creative inspiration. His discography is a vast, expansive collection of music that is only defined by KiNK’s hands-on artistic process and the rudimentary designation, House music. Form follows function in KiNK’s work with a minimalists persuasion and a repetitive disposition with designs marked solely on the dance floor. He’s achieved success on almost every noteworthy House label around and has contributed his fair share of classic titles to dance music’s ever-expanding glossary.

His live shows and records move congruously with each other with the producer the central figure around which his machines orbit into life. Only one LP on Macro has managed to capture his idiosyncratic style in the album format, until Running Back invited the producer back for the ultimate succession, Playground which lines our shelf today.

There’s no pretentiousness about Playground, which like the EPs and singles before it, states its claim in the club context. An energetic pulse clamours up the walls and through your body as Playground unfolds through 3 records. Tracks like Samodiva and Peter Plete Plete might by noteworthy album fillers but for the rest of Playground there’s a toe-tapping inclination that weaves itself through the fabric of the album. Over the past 12 years KiNK has been perfecting an immediacy in his sound and the House genre with effective results that on Playground seems like the culmination of a career’s work. There’s no particular sonic personality to the album that you would not recognise as KiNK’s, and the songs stand on their own as much as they go from one into the next, like a deconstructed DJ set.

A taste of Metal and Yom Thorke stay with you long after the album is complete and although KiNK might not be breaking any new ground, there is very rarely a dull moment and the album lives up to its name. There’s a sense of fun communicated through every beat and melodic expression and its particularly contagious.

Mix of the week – Hunee

Brilliant Corners in all its audiophile persuasion, replete with Klipschorn speakers and high-end rotary mixer, inspires a kind of refined listening experience away from gnarling, aggressive club format that suits a DJ with an eclectic approach well. It inspires a certain DJ to flourish, a DJ with a kaleidoscopic vision of music, who is able to channel the energy of the place and the people in a selection that will entertain as much as it informs. Few DJs exist that can toe that imperceptible line quite like Hunee, and this mix recorded during a Resident Advisor event at the London venue is a magnificent show of his selection prowess.

Hunee is a DJ with an acute sense of music, one that has risen to the cream of the crop on the talent of a DJ alone, a unique feature in today’s producer/DJ landscape. A profound digger, whose musical selections spread the breadth and width of the musical lexicon, this mix sees the DJ move through more organic styles of music, away from the functional dance music we might encounter at peak time on a packed dance floor. The selection travels from progressive seventies western rock to South African bubblegum, with a focus on the fringes of the contemporary and the familiar.

*Hunee joins Øyvind Morken in May at Jæger. Watch this space for more details. 

It just makes sense with Perel

“I never dared to become an artist” says Annegret Fiedler over a phone call with the release of her debut album looming closer.  “It was always kind of there, but I never really thought about it”, she explains – “I never thought I was good enough”. Annegret’s voice struggles a little under the consternation of a cold, but she is in good spirits; she always seems to be. Never taking herself too seriously, Annegret is always quick with the self-effacing jibe or joke; a humble, down-to-earth character at the heart of a very serious musical talent. Better known by her artistic moniker Perel, a Afrikaans/Greek transliteration of Pearl and her given name, she has become known for sets that plot a cosmic journey through House and Techno and productions with minimalists and micro- functional approach to those genres. Her proximity to Norwegian producer and DJ Vinny Villbass has seen her play Oslo a fair few times for his Badabing event series, but on the eve of her next appearance at Jæger  and Badabing quite a lot has come to pass for Perel since we last spoke. Besides releasing Opal on About://Blank, a host of new remixes on the cards, the biggest news is that she’s also signed a three album deal with James Murphy’s DFA label. Die Dimension is the lead single of her debut album, Hermetica and was released late in 2017 to great critical reception, but it also hides a significant change in direction for Perel’s music.

“I returned to my roots”, explains Annegret by way of an answer when I question the differences I hear to her earlier productions. For the better part of four years, Perel’s musical designs have been focussed on the dance floor with stripped back House cuts and Tech-House arrangements dominating a reserved discography. It was a knee-jerk reaction to earlier projects; indie-pop-electro acts, with Annegret’s vocals in the foreground, projects where she always felt she was under-appreciated. “If there was a male on stage they (the audience) would just go straight to him and thank him for the music. I was just disgusted, so I thought I needed to do some rough House music with no vocals.” Chauvinism might have been the catalyst for Perel, but Annegret’s adept musical ability had always been there, and yet there was something about the “rougher, minimalist House”  she was making at that time that nagged at her even from the beginning. “I didn’t like it and I didn’t play my own music”, she says about her relationship with her earlier releases. “It didn’t come out naturally” and after only a short while Annegret “needed to get some distance” from that sound. About two years ago, she returned to the music from before, forged in the reductive-pop ideology of electroclash, but with the slick production approach of modern the House music she had been making. “The stuff I’m doing now is indie, but still made for the dance floor”, she explains and although the electronic drums and synth sequences “keep it a bit trade” in Annegret’s opinion, she feels that the music she’s been making recently  is more honest. “I did it just for myself” she says and the results show for themselves.

She took some of these tracks to a love radio show in New York in 2016, playing with Justin Strauss and when Juan Maclean happened to come by and hear some of this unreleased music  he said: “that is some really cool stuff let me forward that to DFA.” Annegret sent those and a bundle of new tracks, “even the hidden tracks” to DFA and to her surprise DFA wanted all of them. Annegret came back with “yeah sure you can have them even though I think they’re crap.” They are not! Annegret’s humility and humour hangs on the end of that remark as she laughs through the statement and listening to the preview of the album a few days later after our conversation, I can confirm there’s no truth to any of it. Hermetica is a considered, acute body of work where Giorgio Moroder meets DAF meets New York. Bubbling staccato synth sequencers live audaciously alongside live percussion, guitars and of course the defining character of Perel’s new music, her voice.

Singing in German across songs like Alles, Perel’s voice charms in its alto whisper, as it progresses through the song in its distinctive synth-pop arrangement. There’s a seductive hue to the album with harmonic progressions and melodic expressions bouncing around the arrangements in good spirits with only two tracks, PMS and the ensuing Signum Verdi, favouring a more sombre disposition, and tying the whole album together. The allegorical PMS with its harsh, stoic metallic percussive march and saturate atmospheres, grinds the album almost to a halt in its bellicose mood, but only ever goes to enhance the narrative of the album as it springs back to form through Myalgia and ends up on its high note Die Dimension. It’s there where DFA leaves it’s largest impression on the record. Initially a track featuring very little of Annegret’s voice, it was under the direction of the label that Annegret added that idiosyncratic vocal in German that flips the entire song on its head and ends up defining the album.

“I didn’t even know I was working on an LP” muses Annegret, and yet she can see a congruity through the tracks. The album came together during a “certain time” and Annegret is sure the LP “reflects” that. “Inner fears, a relationship, doubts and struggles” all played a role in shaping the album with a fair of mount of insecurities put to rest through the work. Annegret’s fleeting encounter with Turbonegro-esque rock group during university, synth-pop projects and rough House seems to found a unique and personal voice in this latest phase of her career, quelling any inhibitions that have been ingrained in her as a kid.

Growing up in working-class east Germany it was a situation imbued by the surroundings that made a career in the arts the stuff of fantasy initially for Annegret. Even though Annegret grew up singing in the church choir and playing the piano, often writing little vignettes from her instruments, a career as a musician never dawned on her before she went off on her studies, joined her first band and eventually started DJing. She soon realised a career in sociology and communications was not for her. “I already felt like there’s something wrong, I can’t have a job working in an office. I needed to change my life. I went to a psychiatrist and I realised I should just follow my heart and give it a chance – that’s really me.” A move to Berlin followed where she really “got into this club thing” and her career as a DJ and producer started to pull into focus, leading up to this point today  and her nascent debut album prepping for release. “I didn’t think the album would happen now”, she says, “I thought that would be much later in my career.”

Hermetica arrives soon and accompanying the album, Annegret is currently touring with a live show with designs on club audiences. An adept performer from her years playing in bands, the departure from a DJ set allows Annegret to bring “a lot more personality” to a Perel performance. There’s “something special with a live performance” for Annegret, which just “makes sense” in the context of the album and delivers “something personal” to the audience that a DJ set just can’t always relay. Something personal is indeed the only way to express what Annegret Fiedel has achieved through Hermetica and her most recent musical works. There’s something defining about her debut album, a sound that seems to have always been there in Perel’s music, but has only now found its most comfortable form. It’s something in Annegret’s voice that pulls it all together and it’s in the song structures that shy away from the traditional House and Techno forms for something more concrete rather than progressive, making a provocative statement rather than filling idle holes in DJ sets. It is indeed something personal and thus too, it engages at a personal level with the listener and as Annegret says, “it just makes sense”.

 

*Perel play Badabing this Saturday with Vinny Villbass and Daniel Vaz. 

 

Beyond a culturally determined reality with Burnt Friedman

There’s something about Burnt Friedman’s music that’s impossible to pin down between  genres, styles or cultural cues. The German artist’s music exists beyond any zeitgeist or totemic musical pole in an unifying artistic language all onto its own. With an acute focus on rhythmical structures to an almost obsessive degree, Friedman’s work operates on the fringes of electronic, experimental music, reinforcing a pervasive, primordial musical form that exists through and inspite-of every and any musical tradition and stylistic trope. If Friedman’s music conforms, it’s a fundamental conformity, a precursor to all music and something he consolidated recently with an Anthology that contextualises a career spanning the better part of four decades.

Friedman engaged in the experimental aspects of music from an early age, using toys and household items in a “primitive” pursuit to create music. A drummer in various projects throughout the nineteen eighties, his focus, like so many of his peers, shifted towards electronic processes during a time  when musical machines were commonplace and allowed musicians to start exploring music outside of the limits of natural and institutional human impulses. Through several solo projects and collaborations, Burnt Friedman created music throughout the nineteen nineties, with his largest contribution coming via his Nonplace Urban Field project in which he first established the idea of music with origins from- and designs on a non-place. Nonplace is music that lives outside culture, identity and music politics as a form of artistic expression that moves “beyond a culturally determined reality”.

In the early 2000’s Friedman established this idea as a concept for his new label, Nonplace and embarked on the defining solo project of his career as Burnt Friedman. It’s as Burnt Friedman he joined forces with Jaki Liebezeit, the legendary drummer for the penultimate avant garde rock group Can for five albums as the Secret Rhythms series before Liebezeit’s untimely passing in 2017. The exploration of rhythm through the series  engaged with music on a primary level with poignant effects without alienating the listening experience. Using a universal numbering system rather than track titles, the music was laid bare with little by the way  of subjective influence from the artist informing the listening experience. The music is free thus to exist in its nonplace, not even bound by the identity of the artists involved.

Burnt Friedman has explained this at great length through countless interviews in the past and more recently in an XLR8R interview and Resident Advisor exchange, leaving very little left to be said in fact, but when an opportunity arises to ask an artist like Friedman some questions, there is only ever one option…

Hello Mr. Friedman, and thank you for taking the time to answer some questions for us. I’d like to start with the recent Anthology. What inspired you to revisit this material?

A few years ago I received offers from various labels to conduct a release. Since I had amassed a vast archive of recorded pieces dating from 1980 on all sorts of audio formats of which only a tiny proportion were ever released, I felt the temptation not only to finally digitize everything for reasons of secure storage, but also to scan through it. I did not manage it completely at all. There was a beacon of hope that I could find something worthwhile which I had forgotten about or would hear with a fresh mind, so as interest rose, this was when I decided to do something about my productions of the past decades. I edited and retrieved the audio from tapes, DAT tapes and hard drives. The idea not to release any of the current productions for the Nonplace label determined my selection. The anthology compilation should also reflect my current view of music so that many of the materials would make apparent the continuation into my actual repertoire in that the concept of Non-places and Non-times are brought to light.

I read in a recent interview that your first experiences with making music used a shoebox, some rubber bands, a microphone and toy instruments. How has this type experimental (for lack of a better word) approach informed your music throughout your career?

There are 2 things. It informed my music clearly insofar as playing on an instrument is primary. After my first reclusive discoveries with primitive toy-like instruments I’ve joined or founded many groups, several engaged at once, often trios or spontaneously many more members, in which I would be drumming – for a period of 8 years I think – while my point of focus shifted more to  the production process as much as  investigating sequencers and automata. Going into the rehearsal room always meant to record something new.

Around that time during the early 80s machines and electronics became a natural component amongst the group process, this is part of the reason why one can still hear such components, the Ms20 synthesizer foremost, for instance. By the end of the 80s the Atari computer became the household tool and changed the environment quite drastically in that the rehearsal rooms which I occupied from 80s to 90s were given up. A second thing that informed my music and I think it is more important is having limitations back then. In a weird way only by limitations forced on one, a state of freedom can be experienced. When you know what you want to do you can handle today’s privileges, the vast technical applications, the choice of styles, etc. by which I mean, now it is necessary to know what to ignore. That is something Jaki Liebezeit would have confirmed also, whose influence is a major one to me. His findings in rhythm practice and theory (https://unbound.com/books/jaki-liebezeit/) inform my music thoroughly since the 2000s.

I know you started out as a visual artist. What and who were your influences in music and beyond that set you on the path to sound?

Firstly, I do not believe that one starts out as someone. A deliberate move into an art academy doesn’t require to be someone either, and the fact that the resulting diploma, approving the existence of such artist, doesn’t help to confirm that deep down in the soul. Rather upon increasing reception and acknowledgement in public appearance it is that such a persona becomes negotiable. Now, early on, it was Tubeway Army´s “Are Friends Electric” that hit me really strongly in 1978 and inspired to a fairly loop driven, repetitive music. I remember I played drums backed by Jean Michel Jarre´s first 2 albums a few times and noticed how to keep up with the machine. I liked Robert Görl´s drumming as DAF as much as ritual traditional music that I eventually came across. Sakamoto´s Riot In Lagos is a monster.

The music across your projects defy classification, and I’ve read about your own misgivings on class distinctions in music too. What adverse effect do you think it has had on music?

The future decides as to whether my projects defy classification. You see, I am amazed how current identity and gender politics in prospect for equity, inclusion and diversity is reflected in the pop history of increasing inter-sectionality of music when individual freedom broke loose in the 60s. Imagine also that on the other hand, people were talking of “african music”, etc. as if it was a category. The only way I found to oppose the struggle with natural diversity by releasing more and more subjective categories, I finally learned to address the matter on the level of the individual. Music does come from small groups or individuals and they might claim it came to them from the gods. In the standpoint of an artist as well as in the position of a scientist, their utterances have no obligation to culture, by which I don’t claim they do not have any cultural imprints at all, we are naturally born cultural beings. Yet, music and science (maths) appear beyond a culturally determined reality, hence, those disciplines are negotiated with on a universal or at least transcultural scale and not with notions of territory, biography, bloodline, skin color and traditions even.

How do you see it playing out in the future?

Tomorrow’s music will be tomorrow’s past and so on. The future of the music lies in the past forever and the acknowledgement and continuation of its core principles can be interpreted with ears of today.

There’s been a constant development in your music throughout your career. Do you feel it moves contemporaneously to musical developments around you, and what usually influences a change of direction or a new area of focus?

Generally speaking, in the beginning one tends to imitate, but the way of an artist is then to see whether you can contribute something of relevance which obviously requires an interesting proposition, a statement if you will. As for me, now, I have found a direction and as I said before, in other words, a freedom to swim in many directions has became a freedom to follow the essential in my perception of music.

There’s an inquisitiveness to your music, like you’re constantly searching for something unattainable in the structure of your songs. What part of your creative process would likely be accountable for this feeling of discovery?

Hell of a question. But yes, I prefer music to remain unattainable, but at the end of a day it is a subjective observation and each one of us will have a deviant idea of this. The rhythms for example are of such a nature that they are easily executed and moved naturally by using minimal force, so that´s really attainable, at least when you got used to it. Feeling of discovery ?, pretty much one’s point of view. You could put it into different  terms maybe. I noticed that in most previous productions I tend to arrange instrument tracks and overdubs in such a manner that a group process can be imagined, a process in which the music was not precomposed, jammed rather, ordained by the mandatory structure of the rhythm.

To what degree do rhythms usually inform and dictate a musical work?

To inform is easy to answer. Rhythm and melody belong inseparably together, generally speaking, music that is periodical does have rhythm but not all music is periodical, think of ambient, drones, free jazz, etc. To dictate is more delicate to answer. In my own music it is obligatory almost, and welcomed to execute the rhythm rules on the smallest elementary level, whereas I do not see any particular dictates in rhythm ruling in many other musical fields, in sheet music for instance and rock music, too. I am now contributing a thesis to a book project about Jaki Liebezeit and my main argument is, that no practically coherent concepts of rhythm rules can be found in the western popular music.

I look forward to reading that.  What do you feel is left to be discovered in this area of music?

If I knew, what would be left to discover ? Avant-garde is a backwards method. As stated before, in other words, let’s acknowledge that a drum can not be improved. It would be naive to think, that the playing got any better over thousands of years. To keep up with the training is not easily maintained, especially in the format of groups and a cultural shift towards a DJ as a liberating force behind the music.

An anthology in the past usually suggests one phase leading into the next for an artist. Where do you see the Burnt Friedman going after the anthology and what are some of the concepts and influences that will inform the next phase of your career?

I’m not launching a next phase as I am merely phasing in, learning how to develop the right grooves outside the even spectrum. It’s not possible for me to say I convey this and such emotions, although I am aware that many listeners relate to music strongly on this level only. If this was not the case, the music would be design rather, or staged, not a living being. I get goosebumps when the music has me.

 

Listen to a mix by Øyvind Morken for Dimensions

Taken from a recent set at Villa, where Øyvind Morken warmed up for Ron Morelli, this mix made it on to the Dimensions podcast series, where Morken is due to make a return appearance this year. An opener set playing in lower BPMs and picking at fringes of electronic music through ambient, synth wave, and dub before moving into a familiar House beat right at the end when he hands things over to Ron Morelli. “Øyvind Morken’s unique style is obvious… moving with ease between genres and tempos without losing contact with the dance floor”, says Dimensions of this mix. Polyphonic rhythms roll over each other in Øyvind Morken’s scattered assemblage, with the DJ moving effortlessly between styles and genres, continually building the tension as he prepares the floor for the ensuing night.

*Øyvind Morken plays our lounge every Wednesday for Untzdag and is in our basement, all night long tonight.

Mix of the Week: Huxley Anne

Exploring the tenuous exchange between LA’s beat scene and the UK bass scene, comes this lush mix from LA beatmaker from Huxley Anne. Digging deep between Hip Hop and Dubstep and experimental breakbeat from the likes of Noisia and Untold, Huxley Anne creates a sauntering mood that floats effortlessly between those worlds. Even Thundercat puts in an appearance in this rhythmically dynamic mix, adding a touch of soul between electronic beats. Applying a fair bit of ingenuity between the tracks as she segues between them, Huxley Anne finds obscure connections between distant, often dissonant styles.

Listen to an RA exchange with Burnt Friedman

Burnt Friedman talked to Angus Finlayson over on Resident Advisor about his extensive career for an Exchange session yesterday. Starting with the Secret Rhythms concept, the pragmatic German talks about labelling tracks, natural rhythm, working with Jaki Liebezeit, individualism, cultural imprints and Nonplace. Rhythm is recurring theme throughout the interview, and Burnt Friedman shares some incredible insights about cultural appropriation and music’s universal nature from the perspective of his own experience. Friedman and Finlayson discuss universal themes in music and art, rather than the minutiae of the artist’s biography, exposing Friedman’s mind rather than his career to the world throughout this hour-long interview in what is one of the most incisive RA exchanges in this series. – “There’s a promise in electronic music.”

 

* Burnt Friedman plays live in our basement next week wit Call Super and G-Ha & Olanskii fir Freadag

 

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.

Album of the Week: Action Bronson – Blue Chips 7000

When it comes to Action Bronson there’s very little that’s subtle or inconspicuous about the New York rapper. His style lands stinging blows across stuttering musical assemblages that steal from a vast palette of influences, while self-deprecating lyrics about food, the opposite sex, and smoking illicit substances bring Action Bronson’s wry and crass sense of  humour to the fore. His onstage antics, whether he’s handing out free steak dinners or fighting with security guards, are about as delicate as the monster truck he rides in his new video for Let me Breathe and have lived on in infamy, compounding on the caricature of the artist and the music.

But as the first stabs of Augusto Martelli’s piano leads the post-introduction to “Wolfpack” from Blue Chips 7000 it indicates a change of speed for Action Bronson’s music. Not so much in the character and the ego of the artist, but rather in the context it finds itself. The production duo Party Supplies, sets the tone for an album that lends more from Jazz than the Funk that Action Bronson’s previous records were known for. Long-term collaborators Alchemist, Knxwledge and Harry Fraud expound on this sound, softening the edges of Action Bronson’s sound on the third instalment of his  Blue Chip mixtape series.

Action Bronson, an American-Albanian born Ariyan Arslani, launched his career at the height of the online mixtape hype, heralded by the likes of Pitchfork and Fact Mag for his distinctly New York Boom-Bap style in the studio. A lauded New York chef, he took to music after breaking his leg, but can still be found in the kitchen for his Viceland show, “Fuck, That’s Delicious”. After a succession of mixtapes his Dr Lecter debut album caught the attention of the wider world in 2011, riding a tide of Hip Hop, that included the likes of  Chance the Rapper and Odd Future and their various solo projects. Two more albums followed including 2015’s Mr. Wonderful, by which time Action Bronson would start the first of the Blue Chip mixtape series with Party Supplies. Blue Chip 7000 is the last of these mixtapes and the only one to receive a physical release.

Blue Chip 7000 dials down the bright staccato stabs of earlier Action Bronson releases in favour of something a little more refined, coming together around unlikely samples from Erykah Badu, Akula Owu Onyeara, and Leo’s Sunshipp. Rhodes electric pianos playing around syncopated rhythms and elastic bass lines conjuring expressive melodies combine in cohesive tracks, that saunter around the lower tempos. Arslani’s lyrics are as coarse as ever, bringing the elevated samples  back down to earth as he ponders familiar themes with his usual hubris and mordacity.

Action Bronson is still the larger than life presence that ties the record together, but the contrast between his rugged lyrical delivery and the production on Blue Chips 7000 make this record a very unique Hip Hop experience for 2018. He  had certainly taken the funk sound of Action Bronson’s earlier records to their conclusion on Mr. Wonderful and Blue Chips 7000, makes a refreshing change of pace for New York rapper.

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

Maximillion Dunbar – Cassette Arabic

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.

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.

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.

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”

Album of the Week: Legowelt – Legendary Freaks in the Trash of Time

The eccentric Dutch producer, Legowelt and his menagerie of classic synths have created yet another timeless album, adding to an extensive discography of a truly ingenious creative figure. Legowelt’s signature sound, which uses an arsenal of coveted vintage synthesisers, is all over this record and the producer has taken extensive care to create an album rather than a collection of singles. Everything is densely layered with a focus on harmony and counterpointing melodic phrases surrounding lively percussive rhythms on this record.

 

Legendary Freaks in the Trash of Time is Legowelt veering very little from the sound of his early career in the the late nineties and early 2000’s where his music found the ear of Bunker records boss Unit Moebius and launched a career as one of the most idiosyncratic producers of our era. From Bunker to Clone to L.I.E.S to Creme Organisation and Unknown to the Unknown, Legowelt’s records have made severe impressions in the world of Techno and House and where other’s have wavered and adapted to accommodate trends and scenes, Legowelt has remained a constant and in many ways he is his own trend.

“Legendary Freaks in the Trash of Time” is very much a record for the heads, but also a record for those seeking something outside modern House and Techno tropes. There’s something a little more refined and distinguished on this latest album, taking that raw energy and brutalist sound of earlier records like Dark Days and tempering the edges off the sound. Tracks like “Trips in Polarius” and “New Stories” could have been much more aggressive than their final take where we hear a softer side to Legowelt’s earlier works, as the percussive elements are pushed a little further back into mix and melodic phrases drip down sweetly from their harmonic genitors.

There’s a euphoric disposition underpinning each track, lifting hands in the air towards that intangible height where lasers cut through the miasmic air. It can be quite nostalgic, but with a modern production touch there’s little trace of a retrospective take from Legowelt. Where albums before this like “Crystal Cult 2080” and “The Paranormal Soul: are products of their time, albeit with a undeniable Legowelt approach  “Legendary Freaks in the Trash of Time” steps completely out of time and stands on its own, as a modern classic.

New music from Radio Slave and Rekids

Coming via Rekids over the weekend are two remixes of Radio Slave’s “Grindhouse”. Two cuts of uninhibited Techno come via Slam and Obscure Shape & SHDW, transporting the original DJ tool from Radio Slave’s  2008 “No Sleep” series to the present. It’s  the second in a series that saw Len Faki approach the Radio Slave classic first, and is set to feature Vatican Shadow in the future. The original, leaves the remixes wide open for interpretation, with little constituting the track, and each remixer is able to put his/her own stamp on the record.

Slam takes the original to a dark place, leaving it dripping in the humidity of its own atmosphere as dense layers of noise and pads cling to the unwavering 4/4 kick pattern. Obscure Shape & SHDW, keep it minimal with the beat in the foreground and scattered objects finding a syncopated harmony with the driving force of their kick. Each artist leaves a distinct mark on the track and there’s very little tying them together to the same source, the vague original leaving a mere whisper of itself on the remixes as Slam and Obscure Shape & SHDW make their own.

*Radio Slave plays Frædag with G-Ha & Olanskii this week. 

Mix of the Week: Errorsmith

Pronking African rhythms and  alien electronic textures come together in this Errorsmith mix for Factmag. A variable jumble of references and sounds make it into the mix, with a distinctly UK take informing the German DJ and producer’s mix. The mix follows his first album in 13 years, “Superlative Fatigue” which saw the producer continue his exploration of the  Razor synthesiser he helped design and build. The PAN album with its impatient rhythms and icy textures balancing on a knifes edge was unanimously hailed by critics and marked the long-overdue return to the recorded format for Errorsmith. It adds to a discography that includes his work with Fiedel as MMM, his collaborative project with Soundhack as Smith and Hack, and his lauded “Protogravity” EP he accomplished with Mark Fell.

Errorsmith and the various projects have never rested on musical laurels nor indulged common tropes in electronic music, as they travelled to the furthest reaches of electronic music in all shapes and forms and this mix puts much of that in perspective, which accomplishes the very same ideals through the music of others. It’s genre bending mix as Errorsmith combines clashing rhythms, jarring structures and the occasional vocal in a very precisely executed mix. Abruptly segueing one track into the next, Errorsmith crams an extensive tracklist into his hour-long set featuring the likes of Peder Mannerfelt, DJ Rashad and of course Errorsmith in the brief medley that transpires.

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. 

 

New Norwegian sounds on LYD February

Olle Abstract plays a selection of new Norwegian sounds for February in his latest edition of LYD. Featuring Vibeke Bruff Kim Dürbeck and KSMISK amongst others it’s the first real taste of what’s to come in 2018 as Olle Abstract hand-picks some of his favourite future releases in this edition. Everything from sweet indie pop to brooding Techno gets a spin this month, with Olle leaving us on a high note and the immoveable sound of KSMISK’s “Silicate”.

*Olle Abstract is back with a new LYD showcase at Jæger on the 28th of April. 

Album of the Week: Taxgorkhan – Leaves in a Stream & Plateau

Exploring the infinite realm of possibilities, between ambient, krautrock and “world” music, comes two albums from J.Hannevold as Taxgorkhan. “Leaves in the Stream” & “Plateau”, released late last year, consolidate the artist’s sound as an esoteric journey through the furthest reaches of any and all known musical dimensions. Arriving to the recorded format through the “O. Gudmundsen Minde” label created by Noise pioneer Lasse Marhaug and radio host and Hip Hop experimentalist Lars Mørch Finborud, the two records offer a very unique listening experience.

Hannevold’s moniker undoubtedly takes its name from the transliteration of the Chinese city Taxkorgan, a major stop along the original silk road  with an oriental flavour informing the signature sound of this project. Bamboo flutes, oriental scales and plucked strings echo the lost sounds of an age-old culture, transposing them into a modern dialect through electronic means and re-establishing them in an avant-pop context. Merging these oriental flavours with elements of fringe-rock, Taxgorkhan creates a kind of pseudo new-age music without the pretence or irony that’s usually associated with that music.

Leaves in a Stream & Plateau are defined by their exotic melodic arrangements, evoking the shamanic mysticism of drum circles and meditation sweat lodges, if they were located at the edge of the universe. Synthesisers and drum machines, transport the music from a spiritual levity to cosmic one. Like Sun Ra travelling to the intergalactic nether-regions on the sonic tides of Jazz, Taxgorkhan navigates new worlds through an old, world music. Taxgorkhan plots a wholly unique journey through various musical forms to arrive at its esoteric sound with an indefinable charm that makes for captivating and entertaining listening.

Listen to a new track from Peggy Gou’s upcoming EP on Ninja Tune

Peggy Gou has returned to Ninja Tune for “Once” and has shared the first cut from that record last night via Ninja Tune’s soundcloud page. Gou, who enchanted Oslo last year when she visited Sunkissed, says the EP draws from “all (her) influences of the last few years” and mentions “Maurice Fulton and DMX Krew” as specific influences. “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)” contains elements African rhythms, early House and Acid coming together in an infectious whirlpool of sound with a cloying voice jumping over the bars. The EP is out the 2nd of March the week before she plays Frædag alongside G-Ha & Olanskii and live guest Laurel Halo.

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. 

Listen: Radio Slave live at Shelter in Amsterdam

Coming through our inbox this morning via Shelter in Amsterdam is this 4-Hour long intense Techno mix from Rekids boss Radio Slave. It’s a late night scorcher of a mix from Radio Slave, an intense four hours in one of Amsterdam’s most exciting new clubs which simply oozes energy through the speakers. There are a lot of hidden gems and unreleased stuff coming via the Rekids label contained in this mix, and a perhaps a little taste of things to come to Jæger in the near future too… Amsterdam is was a recent stop on the UK DJ’s 2018 touring schedule which sees him land at Jæger on the 9th of February for G-Ha & Olasnkii’s Frædag residency. More details on that event to follow soon.

Album of the Week: Marcel Dettmann presents RAUCH

Billowing out from under the concrete fortress that is home to Ostgut Ton’s ambient / leftfield subsidiary A-TON is RAUCH – a new collaborative work between Felix K, Marcel Dettmann, Sa Pa and Simon Hoffmann. Originally recorded to accompany the images of post world-war 2 monasteries by photographer Friederike von Rauch in an exhibition called insgeheim (“in secret”), the music appears on an album for the first time, mixed and arranged by  Berghain’s favourite son Marcel Dettmann. A Tourette by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis near Lyon; Roosenberg Abbey near Ghent; and Maria Regina Martyrum in Berlin appear in Rauch’s pictures as seductive aesthetic details, which the production collective presented by Dettmann breathe into life as a post-modern ambient composition.

Created in dialogue with Rauch’s images, the music gesticulates in the industrial drones and cavernous atmospheres of the 21st century sound art music. A heavy, grovelling murmur that never quite materialises into a pulse underscores the arrangements, while metallic percussive parts and extensive legato phrases swarm around the higher frequencies. Removed from the context of the installation and Rauch’s pictures, the music evokes images of pious solemnity from the perspective of an eerie, abstract presence. There’s something sinister at work in the incandescent white noise and the breathy emptiness that surrounds the arrangements that are more than just the listener’s own projections.

Synthetic melodic phrases that seem to fall down from ecclastical heights creates an accessibility that is often missing on works like these. Appropriating the reverential qualities of  synthetic strings and positioning them in the abstract world of music concrete, the 2-sided LP is approachable even in its atypical nature, much like the impressive sound installations created by Susan Phillipsz. Like Rauch’s visual work they intended to audibly document, the production collective ties a thread between the abstract and the conventional; contrasting the aesthetic beauty of the execution of the romantic period with a kind of raw realism found in modern artistic practises.

As an album it’s a presence all onto itself, never quite disappearing into the background, as it shifts from the crunching drones that introduce the album to the hypnotic allure of the sinewy strings that float in and out of Dettmann’s final arrangement. RAUCH skates the marginal border between sound-art and ambient Techno and through A-TON, it offers an introduction to both sides from the other end of the spectrum, calling in perhaps a new phase in their continued merging practises to-day.

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.”

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. 

Album of the Week: Terekke – Plant Age

Terekke is one of a core group of artists that helped establish the L.I.E.S label in its formative years. When Ron Morelli launched the Long Island Electrical Systems label back in 2017, it was his intention to create a conduit for the “great” unreleased material his friends were producing. Chief amongst these friends was an obscure figure called Matt Gardner that was making music as Terekke.

Terekke’s deep, but buoyant House productions bottled the zeitgeist of its time and pushed it out to sea where it could float across the entire expanse of the electronic music ocean. His debut EP, “Damn” engendered a reserved and determined output, which by his second release, “YYYYYYYYYY” had become a firm favourite amongst critics and heads alike.  Three EPs in on L.I.E.S and a self released digital EP with a caricature for a title and Terekke it seemed was finally ready to embark on a debut album and “Plant Age” thus came by way of none-other than L.I.E.S.

“Plant Age” is an ambient album that breaks the pattern of Terekke’s past productions and transposes the atmospheres that used to cloud around percussive tracks to the foreground. Wispy electronic textures, perpetually on the verge of deconstruction, perform fleeting dub manoeuvres across eight short tracks. Each note or sonic anomaly seems to hold on for eternity, before moving on to the next, wholly unique phase. There’s no sense of repetition on “Plant Age” and the album takes on an eerie organic quality through machines that appear to operate on a conscious level. “Mix 91” and “JQM” are particular highlights, with dub arrangements and jazz ad-libs transporting the listener through some fantastical cloud; Terekke’s lo-fi sonic signature elevating the listener above and beyond the music.

You simply float through the album’s eight tracks and when it does begin to bob to and fro between tracks, the movements are subtle and spontaneous, only breaking the serenity of the moment, before returning to the perpetual state of stillness that bookmarks the album.

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.

 

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?

 

The live performance in the age of the club

There’s something Stefan Goldmann said in our recent interview  that lingers with me. “Now we’re kind of back in 1840”, he remarked about a trend consuming electronic music, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1990’s, and never to this degree as electronic music is more embedded in the popular zeitgeist than ever before. It’s like an 1840 from the steampunks perspective. In an era where the recorded format holds absolutely no monetary value for the artist, we have returned to an age before the shellac disc and gramophone, a time when a live performance was the only way you could experience music. It correlates to the current trend of favouring an “insta-value” over a material worth; where the picture of an experience (a holiday or concert) becomes the commodity over the obvious curio. We display holiday snaps and snippets of live performances on social media like we would’ve done records or books in our homes in the past, placing value on the experience rather than something physical. Venue, social context and style can often sway the experience of the concert, making it unique to the person experiencing it, and the fleeting nature of it all is something we can appreciate in a world where everything is available at the stroke of a keyboard or the swipe of a screen. We are human and still covet that feeling of identity and discovery that set us apart from our peers and in 2017 going into 2018, the idea of the live performance plays right into this part of our psyche as egotistical individuals.

But what constitutes a live show today? For bands like Rolling Stones or the Foo Fighters it’s still very much still about the musicians playing their instruments to packed arenas or music venues, but for a generation raised on electronic music there’s some contention there. And conflate that with the nature of the live performance relying on machines at a constant predetermined tempo and composition and opinions divide even further. Can we suggest a control with the DJ set at one end of the spectrum and the singer-songwriter at the other end? Well… no actually. In many ways the singer-songwriter playing rehearsed composed arrangements relies on very little by way of improvisation, which begs the question again, if you’re just mimicking previously recorded material are you indeed providing a unique experience… but that’s a questions for a whole other article. Let’s stick with electronic music for the moment and ask if a DJ set is indeed live. For argument’s sake let’s consider the DJ in the traditional sense with a bag of records. S/He might be playing pre-corded material, but I’d suggest that the way s/he puts them together, matching tempos and finding that common thread between musical pieces, is quite analogous to a Jazz/Blues band in the context of a jam session, each musician accommodating and/or contributing to the music that’s currently transpiring.

If a DJ is indeed playing live then what is a live electronic performance if it’s not a DJ set? When Vril played Jæger’s basement ion 2017, his live set constituted something of a DJ set in many ways. He used the software Ableton to launch “clips” (samples) of pre-recorded material (mostly from his own discography) and rearrange (compose) them in an extemporised way. The Giegling artist is in fact DJing, but on a macro level. Instead of segueing entire songs, he’s segueing parts of songs in something akin to a remix or an edit. Ableton like most compositional machines run on an internal clock that syncs everything in time, so in Vril’s case and similar cases, the performer is compelled by predetermined aspects like tempo and arrangement, more so than I would suggest a DJ with a 100-odd records spanning genres and tempos.

Where the distinction lies between the DJ and the live electronic music performer is that sense of identity, the very same that compels our desire for a unique experience, albeit from an artistic perspective. We define the live experience as a sound or even style unique to an artist, and although a DJ might be able to adopt some of that identity it’s strongest still in the presence of the artist in the act of composing. Yes s/he is in the act of composing even if it might be re-arranging recorded samples or merely attenuating timbres and textures in the context of a performance. In the case of B12 ( Steven Rutter) for instance he utilises both methods, playing previously composed melodic sequences over synthesisers and pre-recorded samples of entire melodic/harmonic passages. Through this method he is able to change the sonic structure of his works, although he is not able to change the compositional framework by much. In his practice the purpose of his music is to merely recreate the recorded song, much like Foo Fighters or the Rolling Stones might. One could argue for the sake of mere recreation, live is more like a copy of that perfect moment in the studio, only now its subject to the influence of direct human interference and all the random- and imperfect moments that come with it.

Imperfect is the optimal word here, because it’s exactly that aspect of human nature that makes each live performance unique to that moment in time. James Holden’s new live show for the album The Animal Spirits plays on the dichotomy between pre-programmed electronic music performance and live instrumentation, with a live drummer, percussionist and horn section providing that visual, tactile idea of “playing” an instrument, while James Holden himself manipulates an array of electronic instruments from a small podium. He utilises the best of both worlds and can easily adopt methods from both the traditional sense and the electronic music sense, but it was from a single uncanny moment at a recent performance at Gretchen that the show truly sprang to life. During one electronic introduction to a song the performance stopped abruptly as if man and machine stopped communicating, with Holden apologising before starting the song up again. A fairly insignificant moment in an otherwise flawless performance, and yet it had such a conspicuous effect. The usually shy and quiet Holden was forced to address the audience directly which consequently disarmed the band and audience alike and lent that flawed charm of a live performance to the show. As with the presence of the live musicians its effects were that of humanising Holden’s machine music, and all because of an innocent mistake on the part of the performer, the moment offered a unique and direct experience to the patrons. Whether it be a conscious impromptu indulgence of the performer or a happy accident, even the slightest of deviation of the original recorded material can offer that human dimension we long for in music; that artistic identity of the artist, communicated to his/her listener in a unique exchange between two individuals.

Whether it’s a vocal-guitar performance or somebody like James Holden probing the modulating possibilities of a synthesiser, what sets the live performance apart from the recorded performance (which is almost always has its origins as a live performance) is that sense of a dialogue you get between the performer and the audience. Even the introvert behind the laptop, creating music from some unintelligible process is still present in that moment, and although s/he might not be communicating through any concrete language we are able to understand, the music that results has some metaphysical relationship to the here and now. The performer and the music is thus affected consciously or subconsciously to the context in which they appear. In electronic music’s natural habitat that context that is the club, or dance floor and thus live performances by electronic musicians, operate on a similar design to the DJ set. In the context of the club, the DJ set or the live performance becomes more than a performance of a previously recorded composition and elements like the audience, the dance floor and the soundsystem are all factored in to the music. Whether the artist is improvising  on a composed piece of music or completely inventing a new composition within this context, elements like how many people are on the dance floor, the body language and even their own sonic signature are all processed through the performer and whether unconsciously or consciously, it will have an effect on the resulting music.

What does this have to do with 1840? Well, besides the fact that musicians and artists are “playing” their instruments in the presence of an audience, nothing really. We could argue that perhaps an orchestra performing in 1840 might even be more constricted by the composed piece than the freer electronic musician. A musician from 1840 is not only able to change the progression and the arrangement of the music anything quite like the modern electronic music artist, who is able change the sound of his instrument to a degree that would warrant a whole different instrument in the traditional sense. Even modern guitar bands, other than in the more experimental Jazz genres, aren’t much able to affect their instruments or their songs in quite the way an electronic music performer could reacting to the circumstances of the moment. Stefan Goldmann’s comment lingers either way and in 2018 where Jæger will be bringing a live act to accompany a DJ almost every weekend it might feel like 1840 again, albeit a revised, updated modern version of it everything from social media to the soundsystem playing their roles in the experience . Yes, live performances are definitely embedded in the modern zeitgeist as it was in the past, but in the age of the club and the DJ, they share an intricate relationship with the artist, the audience and the context, a relationship that’s never existed quite like this since man first pulled an animal skin over a hollowed tree trunk for the sake of entertaining the community.

Album of the week: Claro Intelecto – Exhilarator

Claro Intelecto’s music swells and breathes with a dense t ecclesiastic choir of synthesisers and drum machines, pulsing at various speeds through the history of electronic music. A moonlighting project for Manchester’s Techno veteran Mark Stewart, Claro Intelecto skirts around the genre’s more marginal exploits, combining elements of dub, electro and IDM into mesmerising creations of a subtle type of beauty. Tracks like “Peace of Mind” with its deep, soulful interpretation of the Electro genre and albums like “Metanarrative” in which dub bass lines lament amongst long legato pads,  provide a kaleidoscopic Bifröst between dance music genres and more introspective listening experiences. It’s been five years since Stewart channeled this into the album format with “Reform Club”, but at the end of 2017 he’s returned to the Delsin label with the highly anticipated “Exhilarator”.

“Exhilarator” shows yet another dimension to Claro Intelecto, engendered as IDM by critics and bots alike, for lack of its more eclectic origins. Definitely more sporadic, and less humane than its forbearers, the album’s unique and alien sonic signature is interspersed with fragmented break-beat rhythms playing against each other in the language of intelligent machines. Claro Intelecto’s softer side is still present in the harmonious tracks like “Pantomime” or “Through the Cosmos”, with melodic synth lines bouncing off lethargic pads,  but hiding behind every part is always something quite disconcerting or strange.

Stewart’s sonic palette strives for undiscovered territories on “Exhilarator” and although deep Rhodes chords and 90’s-era pads are still prevalent, odd electronic curiosities weave their way in and out of arrangements like mischievous digital ear-worms looking to disrupt the peace, or piece. At times they subtly arrange themselves towards the rear of the tracks, adding some malevolent small element of intrigue to the atmosphere, while at other times they’ll distort and even disrupt the pulse of a track, like on the 7-minute long masterpiece “Kozyrev’s Mirror”. It’s the futuristic sonic disposition of Techno brought to live around familiar tropes that forego the adverse isolation of pure experimentalism.

Claro Intelecto’s “Exhilarator” offers us a way into fringe of electronic music through the familiar and deposits the listener into a multi-disciplinary world of music beyond the obvious or the conventional.

Album of the Week: Patrick Cowley – Afternooners

Patrick Cowley is probably best known as the magician behind the synthesisers on timeless classics like “You Make me Feel” (Sylvester) and “Right on Target” (Paul Parker) and the man that took Giorgio Moroder’s Hi-NRG and shaped it to the designs of the queer dance floors in San Francisco in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. His eighteen minute remix of Donna Sumer’s “I feel love” is one of those rare cases where the remix is actually better than the original and his two solo albums “Menergy” and “Mind Warp” are archetypically Hi -NRG, taking the sound of Disco from the stage to the studio and becoming the first true electronic dance music. Sadly, Cowley also became one of the first victims of AIDS in 1982, before doctors even realised what they were dealing with, and his star was a fleeting presence in the musical firmament, only to die to early, but one who’s incandescent glow can still be seen reflected in the music we listen to today.

Patrick Cowley was a genius, without adding any hyperbolic effect and although we know him for the music that infiltrated popular music culture, he was an avant experimentalist. He founded the Electronic Music Lab at the City College of San Francisco and away from the dance floor he could be found indulging any and all creative whims that took his fancy and notorious amongst these creative indulgences was his famed music on John Coletti’s gay porn movies for Fox studios.

Taken from the archives of Cowley’s time at college, Coletti would speed and pitch these pieces to match his films and the result was the soundtrack albums School Daze and Muscle Up, which later on became fully-fledged albums in their own right. Succeeding School Daze and Muscle Up in 2017, is Afternooners the third in the series that came about after Honey Soundsystem label, Dark Entries unearthed more archival material recorded between 1979 and 1982. Like School Daze and Muscle Up, the compilation is made up of previously unreleased material, mostly recorded around the same time as Cowley’s Mind Warp  LP, but it also includes three bonus tracks found in the archives of fellow Megatone Records recording artist Paul Parker and the attic of teenage friend Lily Bartels.

Taking some of the body out of the music, Afternooners reflects a side to Cowley he never had a chance to truly explore beyond the cutting room floor, and perhaps even hints at which direction the music might have gone in the future. We have to imagine it’s Cowley purely in the process of a creative flurry, composing for the mere sake of composing, and it lends a raw quality to the music contained within that you might not get on the purposely produced School Daze and Muscle Up, records that were released in Cowley’s lifetime.

I imagine on tracks like the “The Runner” and “Jungle Orchid” I can hear Cowley experimenting with the machines, but the music is still very much epochal with the electronic sounds definitely incased within their time. It shows the advancement of affordable synthesisers like the Roland’s SH09 and Juno series, machines whose rubbery lead lines would go on to define House music and showcases Cowley’s talents as a true innovator on the back of history. Probably never intended for anything specific, Dark Entries used the porn compilation series to catalogue these previously unreleased pieces, using the titles from fox Studios’ 8mm film loops to some provocative effect. “Afternooners” draws a line in the sand between Cowley’s somewhat experimental output and his more functional works intended for the dance floor as well revealing further dimensions to this extensive musical talent.

Who is to know what Cowley’s ambitions was for this music, but in the context of this compilation they stand to show the musician and composer as one of the all-time greats of music and some 35 years after his death, Cowley continues to intrigue with Afternooners.

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.

Album of the Week: Skatebård – Skateboarding was a crime: In 1989

Skatebård’s debut album Skateboarding was a crime: In 1989 has become a coveted gem for the Discogs community in recent years. Fetching anywhere between €50 to €200 its collector’s appeal has installed the fairly inconspicuous album into the realm of left-field treasure, and with good reason. Originally a limited release on the small Tellé records sub-label Tellektro, the mini album is a modern classic today, but until now, you’ve only been able to find the record floating around on Discogs at eye-watering prices, traded like a commodity rather than the endearing electronic dance record it is.

Fortunately today we can finally get our hands on a relatively inexpensive copy of Skatebård’s debut with the first re-issue of Skateboarding was a crime: In 1989 in 2017 making its way onto record shelves everywhere.

The mini LP has stood the test of time and Skatebård’s analogue sequenced sound has only aged like a fine wine. The comparative energetic tempos to today’s standards are the only thing that eludes to its age, and densely textural compositions still stand-out amongst modern day contemporaries; utilising the same sonic palette that’s been informing electronic music since the eighties, but combining them in a way where they truly come alive off the temporal recorded format.

Skateboarding might have been a crime in 1989, but in 2002 in Norway’s electronic music scene, everything went anywhere and this album went some way in establishing a new Norwegian sound alongside records from Bjørn Torske and Prins Thomas & Lindstrøm, a sound that the media coined Space Disco, but travelled much further into unknown dimensions. Incorporating everything from Trance to Disco and House, records like Skateboarding was a crime: In 1989, laid the foundation for a whole new generation of music producer in Norway that would take the entire globe by storm throughout the first decade of this century.

Records like Trøbbel,  Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas and Skateboarding was a Crime: in 1989 installed Norwegian electronica into the alternative popular consciousness at an international level, but unlike the aforementioned records it might have been somewhat overlooked in the past, appearing on a sub label in a limited pressing. The collector community never doubted its importance however and it’s due to those passionate heads that the album stayed relevant and probably in some part due to the excessive prices they were asking for their rare copies that the reissue eventually saw the light of day.

Today’s Skateboarding was a crime: In 1989 is ready for a whole new generation of music enthusiast to enjoy, while some of us to become reacquainted with an old friend.

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.  

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.

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?

Øyvind Morken delivers two mixes for L.I.E.S Tapes

Untzdag resident has delivered two mixes to Ron Morelli’s Mixtape series on L.I.E.S. “Two 30 minute sides of impeccably mixed road trippin music” is what L.I.E.S calls it, and what might that mean? “Think Baldelli, think the Italian countryside think of a ton of tracks you don’t know and you have your starting point.” Ron Morelli’s tastes are not to be taken likely and although we haven’t yet heard the mixtape yet, it’s sure to be yet another Øyvind Morken eclectic adventure through the schizophrenic DJ’s kaleidoscopic mind. Pick up a copy over on L.I.E.S.

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.

Album of the Week: Prins Thomas – V

It’s been a chameleonic year for Prins Thomas. 2017 saw the DJ/producer spend most of his time over at Smalltown Supersound, kicking off the year in sober ambience with “Principe Del Norte” and its remixes; traversing rocky shores with  Bjørn Torske on “Square One”; and heading into the future with the white label release of Blade Runner’s end titles. It only seems apt then that he signs off the year on his own eponymous label, Prins Thomas, picking up the numerically labelled  releases up again from III with V, with “Principe del Norte” unofficially claiming the title IV.

Recorded in 2016, V is Prins Thomas on familiar ground, combining elements of Disco, House, Nu-Groove and synth wave in what has commonly been refereed to as Space Disco, but is the undeniable sound of Prins Thomas at play. In the album format, he feigns from the perfunctory, and instead indulges a more melodic disposition where synthesisers croon and percussive elements bounce along at a reserved pace.

There’s a familiar sonic nostalgic palette informing V, which combine a diverse range of influences and references, and coalesces not in a specific era or style, but rather the artistic personality of Prins Thomas. From the formulaic acid lines of “Æ” to the  gated toms and icy guitar riffs of “Venter På Torske” or even the Kwaito (UK Funky) vibe of “Ø”, the individual parts might be a bevy of clichés, but combined they forego the obvious. Throughout V there is this intangible familiarity because of this and it creates a listening experience that is like discovering that obscure b-side from a favourite band.

Prins Thomas does move slightly away from the lo-fi Full Pupp sound on this record, and it makes sense appearing on his own label. V closes off yet another monumental year for the Norwegian producer and it deserves its spot on our shelf as the album of the week.

Jæger Residents’ 303 picks

Roland’s TB-303 is inextricably entangled in the history of electronic music today. Not since the Mini Moog has an electronic instrument played such a fundamental role in the discourse of music. Alongside the rest of Roland’s x0x series the TB-303 took music to the man on the street like never before in a flurry of creativity that lead to Acid House with the TB-303’s sound becoming the common denominator in the Acid House genre.

Since its creation it has moved into other genres and has become so ubiquitous in the makeup of modern electronic music that there are fewer new releases today that don’t feature the machine than those that do. It continues to inspire a new generation of musical novice through the many hardware- and software clones that came in its wake, while the original purpose of the machine is continually re-imagined by musical pioneers across genres.

None know the legacy of the TB-303 better than our residents and at any given time, we are certain that there is at least one track featuring the machine in their record bag and in their sets. We asked some of our residents if we could take a peek into their record bag through a few of their latest 303 obsessions to prepare for the pioneers of Acid House, Phuture before they land tomorrow. So in no particular order…

 

Øyvind Morken: Roman IV – Altes Testement

 

Øyvind digs up this deep and sensual example from the 90’s. The 303 has been softened somewhat in this exquisitely subtle release from yet another one of Roman Flügel’s aliases. Øyvind sends it our way under the pretence of a context: “I kind of don`t have any kind of favourite music. I  would have a new favourite every day if I thought about music in that way. But, since I am going through some old cd folders I used while djing in the early and mid naughties, I found this and some good memories came back.”

 

DELLA: Bobby Konders – Nervous Acid

 

DELLA is no stranger to the lure of the 303, both in her sets and in the studio. This track by Bobby Konders for the Nu Groove label from 1990 is a perfect example of how quickly Acid ingrained itself in the musical lexicon. The “Acid” in titles like Nervous Acid, much like Acid Tracks, almost immediately relayed the sound of a record before you even picked it up, and there had always been only one machine behind that sound, the TB-303, and over the course of thirty years that’s still the case.

 

Jokke: Helena Hauff – Rupture 

 

When asking VOID resident and our resident Techno DJJokke, we were given more than a few choices; the 303 always a prominent feature in his selections. This track by Helena Hauff caught our attention immediately however as an example of the grittier side of the 303’s personality. Here the machine truly bears its teeth as it gnaws through the resonance of the filter, aligning itself closer to Techno than House in Ms. Hauff’s signature “punk” aesthetic. Special mention needs to go to Andreas Gehm on the flipside here, because although Phuture might have created Acid, Andreas Gehm was responcible for keeping it alive as a steadfast facilitator and promotor of the genre and his untimely passing last year certainly was a blow to the genre.

 

Oskar Pask: Dream 2 science – Breathe Deep

 

Our Frædag resident plays something from the front of his record bag. A low-slung 303 lays the foundation for an exotic House track swathed in layers of feathery pads and contrapuntal electronic rhythms puncturing the atmosphere. At the centre of it that unmistakeable 303 bass-line galumphs along the beat of the track, often splitting in two, as a more resonant sound moves into the lead line intermittently, without ever dominating the character of the track. Dream 2 Science take the 303 in more subtle regions with this melodic, slow-burning House track.

Celius:  Shinra – Endgame

 

Oskar Pask’s partner in crime and fellow R.L.O.C resident also had more than one track to choose from, but this Electro cut from Shinra showcases the versatility of the TB-303 and the Acid genre. What might have started in the genealogy of House, had no intention of being exclusive to its ancestry and Electro, with its unyielding futuristic design welcomed the machine into its arsenal where it soon became a common trope. Endgame, which features on a compilation solely dedicated to the 303 (only 303 copies were ever sold) is a more recent example of the 303 being used in an Electro form, as the perfect component to the omnipresent 808 in the genre.

 

Ivaylo:  DJ Adnan – Stop War (Jay Tripwire Remix)

Jæger Mix resident Ivaylo naturally turns to the deeper spectrum of club music with this remix by Jay Tripware. The remix is a world apart from the DJ Adnan original, with the 303 being the major difference between them. It’s unique sonic identity adds a whole new dimension to the Tech-House track, giving it an edge it lacked before. The off-beat accents (designed into the machine)  also give the track a funkier groove in Jay Tripwire’s hands who certainly displays an adept, intricate knowledge of the machine on this remix.

 

Karima F: Tin Man – Tip the Acid

 

It seems apt to sign-off with this pick from Karima F, who chose the more unlikely track from Tin Man’s Keys of Life Acid as her 303 track du jour. Tin Man refrains from the usual bold sonic framework in which the 303 usually appears in and strips it down to bare essentials, where the machine steps into the role of lead melodic part, with little more than an hi-hat and an attenuated mono synth padding out the space behind it.

Update: Kate Miller takes over from Kelly Lee Owens for upcoming Affirmative Action

For personal reasons Kelly Lee Owens will have to postpone her appearance at Jæger to a later date and in her stead we’ve lined up Oscillate’s Kate Miller to join resident Karima F for this next edition of Affirmative Action. Kate Miller spends her time between Melbourne and Berlin, with each city exacting its  influence on the artist identity in different ways in her sets. Her sets are varied and ever evolving, going from the most recent releases to classic old school gems, merging the funky and the dreamy, the uplifting and the dark. An Oscillate resident, she’s just helped ushered in three years of the prominent event’s series at ://about blank in Berlin in a year that’s seen her play everywhere from Panorama bar to Kaiku in Finland.

 

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’”.

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.

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.

Album of the Week: Jawn Rice – Highlights

Jawn Rice’s debut studio album, Highlights takes the Mutual Intentions crew on a slight detour at the end of a year that has seen their catalogue expand exponentially with a host of memorable releases. Released on the Mutual Intentions label, Jawn Rice traverses the depths of House for his latest release Highlights. Combining elements of R&B, Soul and Funk in the collage-like MI tradition, Jawn Rice’s energies focus closer to the contemporary dance floor with 4/4 kicks and syncopated hats dictating a groove for minimalist House textures.

Slinky bass-lines glisten up and down between the percussive beats pulsing at an effervescent tempo. Jawn Rice keeps things tame with full, warm chords inspiring a fireside mood throughout the 9 tracks. Going from the eighties synthesised Funk of “Lovin U” featuring K-Maxx’s soulful vocal to the more thread-bare House of “Beats & Vibrations”, Highlights’ range is quite wide, even though  Jawn Rice keeps his sonic palette pretty focussed on the machines. Drum machines and synthesisers make a detour from the mutual Intentions crew’s more sample-based production in the way of Fredfades or Ol Burger beats.

2017 has certainly been Mutual Intentions’ year in Norway, delivering time and time again, and in this release from Jawn Rice they end of the year on a cliff hanger, showcasing yet another side to their endearing kaleidoscopic musical universe.

Album of the Week: Funkadelic reworked by Detroiters

Journeying from some distant cosmic slop on the other side of our known universe, Funkadelic’s influence on earth has had rippled through the edges of space and time since their arrival. Between them and associated sister act Parliament, they’ve invented Funk, which became the precursor Disco, leading to House and the group have had left their extraterrestrial touch on everything from R&B, Hip Hop, to rock and even Jazz. An all-black band from Detroit, Funkadelic arrived at their sound through Blues/Jazz, Motown and Rock, and in the convergence of these various styles, Funkadelic arrived at sound that channelled Humour, Sci-Fi and Psychedelia from the outer most realms of known musical traditions and left an enduring heritage.

Their legacy has exceeded the limits of their genre and their sound, and nowhere else has it left its mark more permanently than in their hometown Detroit. Having a direct influence on acts like Amp Fiddler, Dirtbombs and Underground Resistance, artists that have worked with Parliament or Funkadelic (P-Funk) in the past, and their music constantly cropping up in DJ sets from the likes of Moodymann and Marcellus Pittmann, Funkadelic it seems is a constant source of inspiration for the next generation of artist in their hometown, and in this compilation, it’s exactly these artists that pay tribute to this legacy.

The remixers handle the original material to great reverential degree, leaving their mark only subtly with a respectful nod to the eccentricities and charm of the original works. Very rarely remixing the tracks to the degree of the modern Techno producer, where little more than a loop, remains, artists like Moodymann and Claude Young Jr, put their own musical identity aside and let Funkadelic take centre stage throughout this compilation.

Funkadelic’s gritty bass lines still manage to anchor psychedelic blues arrangements, that the various remixers extend and bolster with new powerful percussive arrangements intended for modern dance floors. That intrinsic humour and otherworldliness remains the allure of their music even fifty years on in timeless classics like “Cosmic Slop” and “Get your ass off and Jam”, and the remixers  do well to keep that all in tact for this next generation of listeners. The original tracks are hardly left unrecognisable and this compilation will do well to introduce and entirely new generation to the music of Funkadelic, keeping that perpetual influence of one music history’s most unlikely stars exactly where it should be, at the centre of the known universe.

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 “InfinityInês 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 and​hardcore​ ​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.

 

Album of the Week: Ivan Ave – Every Eye

Over the course of the last year and a half, the Mutual Intentions crew have staked their claim in recorded music, releasing some of the most forward-thinking Hip Hop albums of recent years from the likes Ol Burger Beats and Fredfades for a host of labels working at an international level. They’ve cultivated a sound that merges the sonic palette from rarefied Jazz and Soul records with the production techniques taken from early Hip Hop. Their arrangements float like silk across the records as lyrics unpack the layers of arbitrary everyday life, discovering new depths to everything from songwriting to the joy of the first hot day of summer.

One of the most frequent voices in the Mutual Intentions diatribe is Ivan Ave, who’s graced almost every record in the crew’s discography on top of the 4 LPs he’s released as a solo artist. An intuitive lyricist with a rhythm completely unique to his artistic voice, Ivan Ave always manages to compliment the production style of his cohorts in his soulful countertenor and see-sawing metre. Featuring on records from Yogisoul, Fredfades and Ol Burger Beats over the course of this year, we’ve been patiently anticipating the follow up to 2016’s Helping Hands, Ivan Ave’s last solo album. He’s teased the release with the single “Also” and  a video for “Young Eye”, tracks that take up the baton where Helping hands left off, as elements of Jazz , Soul, Hip Hop and  Funk combine in one colourful diorama, with Ivan Ave’s enlightened vocal in the foreground.

Although earlier records, Breathe and Fruitful solely relied on the production magic of Frefades, Every Eye, like Helping Hands expands the pool of musical talent to include producers MNDSGN, DJ Harrison, Kiefer, Kaytranada and Dâm Funk on the line-up. This star-studded guestlist, which include the formidable Frefades too amongst them, lay down an effervescent foundation from which Ivan Ave’s words lift into the ether. There’s low grunt to the music on Every Eye that’s new to the Mutual Intentions  sound, and probably the American producers like MNDSGN and DJ Harrison applying their touch to the record, which lends this record a Thundercat quality. Those fleeting jazzy moments and fully fledged arrangements, give Ivan Ave more than just a loop, and the rapper pounces on the opportunity to extend his range of rhythmical phrasing that leaves the record reading like continuous narrative rather than singular poetic lines.

Ivan Ave’s lyrics on Every Eye, in-keeping with his style, look for big-picture metaphors in the mundane, where something like locking a bike together with another can signify the beginning of a relationship. Lines like “coming through like knees in the summer” are unique, quirky and playful, but with serious intent as they carry hefty swathes of metaphorical weight behind them, for everything from his own musical career to a the current political landscape. Combine these little eccentricities with Ivan Ave’s transient rhythmical phrasing and the evanescent production quality, the songs are sporadic and it’s often difficult to determine where one song ends and another begins. As a result the albums flows from one end to the other, rather than stuttering through singles and tracks. It’s an album that needs to be experienced in its entirety from start to finish and all the small curiosities that mark the appeal of the record are, just like Ivan Ave’s lyrics, only a small part of the bigger picture that is Every Eye.

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.

 

DJ Mag goes to Sommerøya

DJ Mag stopped by at Sommerøya for a feature on the festival and Norwegian club music. Finnebassen, Of Norway and DELLA offer some insights into the scene and the music with Sommerøya as the backdrop. Sommerøya is the star of the article, and for good reason, but Jæger too gets and honourable mention with Anja Schneider saying Jæger is “one of the best clubs she’s ever played in her life”. Read the full article here.

Album of the Week: Marcel Dettmann – Selectors003

Marcel Dettmann is a DJ that sets trends rather than panders to them and recently he’s returned to his roots, the eighties era of synth wave and EBM where it all started for a young Marcel Dettmann. The German’s DJ career began buying and selling records in his hometown the former GDR, where record stores had been thin on the ground and lacked that critical edge that the bigger cities like Berlin had. Dettmann catered to a post punk industrial kind of electronic sound with the likes of Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb and sold these records to other music obsessives in his hometown. It wouldn’t take long before word got out about his exceptional ear for music and would eventually set him off on a career in DJing.

A move to Berlin followed with a job at Ostgut (Berghain’s predecessor) waiting in the wings and established a career that would go from strength to strength. A resident DJ in Europe’s very first clubbing institution, a critically acclaimed producer and a world class DJ, Marcel Dettmann is a household name today, and his most commonly known for a sound of Techno, that combines the finesse of the studio with a primal urgency on the dance floor.

The EBM from his youth would refrain from making a significant appearance in his sets again, with just the odd tip of the hat to  the genre where it all started for him, until most recently. In recent sets, including his appearance at Jæger, Dettmann could be found scouring the back end of his record collection, for edits of some of those very rare cuts that inspired him as a teen. His sets today are dominated by synth wave, EBM and industrial post-punk gems from a time before mega stardom, and in latest edition of Dekmantel’s Selectors series, he puts it on the record for the first time.

Featuring Front 242, Cabaret Voltaire and the Force Dimension, Selectors 003 is a Techno DJ digging like Disco DJ towards the back of a collection where those archetypal pieces that document the early life of the genre preside. Dettmann picks from the more obscure corners of the genre and although he might include some known names, he doesn’t pick obvious hits or common denominators. A bevy of stabbing guitars, industrial percussion and synth sequences falling off a cliff traces through these collection of songs in a long thin red line that stretches back to 1980’s.

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.

 

 

  • 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.

Album of the Week: Wu Tang – The Saga Continues

In a recent review of Wu tang’s “The Saga Continues” factmag’s Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy’s grievance with the album is that it”grips on the past”, and if the biggest complaint with the Saga Continues is that it sounds like old Wu Tang, we were sold before we even heard a bar. After the top-down debacle of “Once Upon A Time In Shaolin”, which saw the unprecedented sale of a one off album to pharma-douche Martin Shrkeli it sounded like Wu Tang had completely lost touch with reality and jumped off the deep end of their own heightened egos. Even if in the context of an “art” project “Once upon a Time…” was poorly conceptualised and badly executed and that’s before we even get into the person behind the purchase.

If “The Saga Continues” is Wu Tang in a repenting mood it, it is unequivocally a Wu Tang album, featuring a collage-like sampled palette and clever lyrical deliveries like Inspectah’s Deck “my price hiking like the pills Martin Shkreli sell”. Producers RZA and Mathematics is said to have referenced Dre’s 2001 and Enter the Wu for inspiration, and it shows, but what’s more significant is that this re-upholstered version of an old sound sounds, is far more interesting and engaging than any of the tropicalHouse, trap beat lethargic narcissism currently infecting Hip Hop. Going to back to a sound from earlier in their career Wu Tang and Mathematics are not merely acknowledging the past and their legacy, but also musing on how little has changed.

In the intro RZA even asks “is this 21st century and we still gotta ducking the  fucking coppers“; a scathing comment on just how every little has changed through the course of Wu Tang’s existence and Mathematics and RZA’s cut-and-paste sampling collages do well to drive that point home. Accompanying the dusty arrangements are lyrics that show a maturity from the core Wu Tang affiliates and oft collaborators like Redman. Pushing well pass there forties now, these lyrics appear arrive from something more honest as the various artists try to make sense of the modern world. When Redman says the line “fuck rap, I divorced her, the bitch bore me” on Lesson Learnt it sounds like it comes from a real frustration of the current musical landscape. That aggression of youth has definitely been tamed and refined on the Saga Continues, but   Wu-Tang’s sound and delivery still drives it forward with the clan’s unmistakeable social commitment in their lyrics and musical references at the fore of this album too.

Putting the Wu Tang sound through a contemporary viewfinder, Mathematics put them squarely in the contemporary and  where Rap’s gotten incredibly lazy  Where some might have seen the albums as dismantling the Wu Tang legacy, we see a Wu Tang album that makes up for the past Shaolin indiscretion, and in fact restores a little of that legacy they might have lost through that album. The saga does indeed continue.

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

Album of the Week: Kölsch – 1989

Danish producer Rune Reilly Kölsch has been on a singular onerous mission through his albums; “the narration of his life through sonic soundscapes”. His previous two albums 1977 and 1983 documented two distinct periods in his life namely, early adolescence in Copenhagen’s Christiania and the first European trip travelling over the border to Germany aged six. 1989 marks the next in this series and also the completion of this extensive trilogy of records, which have marked a big portion of Kölsch’s working life.

The album references Kölsch’s teenage years through the divorce of his parents, a period he remembers as “a difficult time in my life, where I mostly just remember the greyness of it all… I would escape that grey world on my skateboard, listen to my Walkman as I explored the city around me. Music became my saviour—the only way to overcome my family’s hard times. I found a soundtrack to my grey life, and suddenly there was colour.”

That colour has always been tantamount to Kölsch’ sonic signature. Beguiling melodic and harmonic passages cascade off the energy of stoic rhythm sections destined for the dance floor, but not always quite arriving there. Songs like “grey” are misleading in their title as magnificent kaleidoscopic sonic adventures to some superterrestrial body. Throughout 1989 Kölsch attempts to relay that feeling of a new heightened sense of awareness through great big swathes of uplifting crescendoes and airy harmonic accompaniment and although at first appearance it might sound somewhat clichéd, their’s an unmistakeable honesty there, like the producer laying his emotions out bear in the open.

Some might liken 1989 to late nineties Trance, and certainly you would be forgiven for thinking that, but the album plays in rather more reserved tempos and the melodic phrasing is far more complex than what might evoke a late nineties Trance track. They remain beatific melodic expressions, articulated simply but also effectively. A little tawdry at times but never dull, 1989 is unashamedly happy and does well to express that feeling you get when you first experience a new sound for the first time. It puts an exclamation point rather than a full stop to this trilogy of records from Kölsch and Kompakt, and hopefully brings some contentment to the artist behind these works.

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.

 

Norwegian artists remix Sex Judas

Dropping via Arildo Cymawax imprint today is a hefty onslaught of  Norwegian supreme producers remixing a bevy of Sex Judas’ finest works. Featuring Blackbealt Andersen, Magnus International, Charlotte Bendiks, Melkeveien, Human Inferno,  Arildo and Trulz & Robin, the remix package is a star-studded affair, with every artist leaving his/her own quirky imprint on the idiosyncratic music of Tore Gjedrem’s (Ost & Kjex) Sex Judas invention. “Monter Sur Le Cochon Norvégien N’est Pas Facile” (or getting on the Norwegian pig is not easy) is made up of new interpretations of previously released Sex Judas works like “My Girls” and “Big sex Thing” with Sex Judas riding shotgun as he hands the wheel over to some of Norway’s most enigmatic producers.

Memories of Magnus International’s extroverted SEXJUDASFUCKOFMIX playing in our backyard two years ago for Oslo Musikkfest are still fresh and hearing it on record for the first time, hasn’t softened any of its punch, while Blackbelt Andersen’s mix of “Salvador” suggests more is in fact more and adds to the dynamism of the original.  Trulz & Robin and Charlotte Bendiks in contrast, strip everything back to the bass lines and beat of “Everything Changes” and “Salvador” respectively, while Arildo and Human Inferno step completely off script with their psychedelic takes on “My Girls” and “Salvador”. There’s a little bit of everything here for anybody on this remix EP, and whole heap of pleasure to be gained from listening, especially  on the dance floor.

DELLA heads over to Chicago’s 5mag for a mix

Jæger resident DELLA is currently on tour in the states and has graced the pages of Chicago’s 5 Magazine with a mix and an extensive feature interview. She talks up Jæger and offers some insights on being a vocalist, producer and DJ playing at an international level. You can read the full interview here and we’re streaming above, which also features some new music from the artist and DJ.

* DELLA is back in Oslo this week with Tommy Bones for DELLA’s Drivhus.

Album of the Week Bugge Wesseltoft – Everybody loves Angels

We’ve been dogged by by noise since as early as the 16th century when one citizen complained about the noise coming from his next-door neighbour’s gunpowder factory. Yes gunpowder factory, and ever since that first official noise complaint, we’ve been bombarded with sound. In our present digital age, noise has taken a metaphysical manifestation and now more than ever we can’t seem to escape it. Adding to the constant hum of our fridges and our televisions, is the aggressive barrage of tweets, posts, instas, snaps, ims, pms, updates and feeds imposing itself on your life through this little 17″ conduit in your pocket. A time for repose is needed now more than ever and with music contributing its fair share to the “noise”, we are happy to find that some of it still offers an escape from the “loudness” of everyday.

Through his latest work, Bugge Wesseltoft offers us a tranquil moment from said noise with an album of works crafted from the subtle voice of the piano. Our introduction to Bugge Wesseltoft might have come from the world of experimental electronic music through albums like “Trio”, but in “Everybody Loves Angels” he returns to the acoustic realm with a combination of original pieces and Jazz variations of popular music from various genres and eras. Recorded at LofotKatedralen, the largest wooden church in Norway, there’s something of a pious theme running through the music, but not in the way of some dogmatic religious reverence. Wesseltoft calls it “the feeling of being part of something bigger” in the liner notes with the natural surroundings of Lofoten playing an influential role on the album.

The sense of space is palpable through Wesseltof’s piano works on  this album, and his mastery of the space in between the notes  plays a significant role. In his variations of songs from Simon & Garfunkel, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens, the Beatles and Bruno Mars, the original melodies merely haunt Wesseltoft’s piano passages as if the nostalgic charm of those pieces leads the artist off to some higher celestial plain. It’s there in the heavens, amongst the angels where Wesseltoft offers us quietude and peace, an escape from the noise.

 

Ivaylo’s Bogota records goes Colombian

For the first time since establishing Bogota, Ivaylo has enlisted a Colombian artist to the roster. Atlántico House Caribe is a new artist  from the Colombian capital making his debut EP on the label that takes its name from the city. As serendipity would have it, Atlántico House Caribe’s sound is one that is perfectly suited for our Jæger Mix resident’s colourful perception of the musical world. Over the course of the two tracks, we find the producer in the grips of a Latin flair evoking the spirit of a beach party.

Giorgio by Carbone finds the producer in ecstatic rapture as a lead synth line reaches celestial heights through the steady percussive foundation that informs this House track. Beaming with colour and rich in contrapuntal rhythms Giorgio by Carbone is fervent with a Latin swing embracing the mood and the feel of the Colombian capital as an introduction. Tellstroem smoothes out the dynamic flair, taking the track deeper into the realms of the beat, exorcising those Latin percussive parts to take centre stage, and reducing the synth line to a single repetitive bar.

On the flip, Atlántico House Caribe keeps it funky with Oyelo Mango and its bouncy bassline that evokes the early days of Daft Punk and Filter House. Samples work alongside synthesisers in an incandescent collage of colour and sound. The Colombian producer remains upbeat with that Latin flair firmly ingraining itself on the record, before Demarkus Lewis turns it down a notch in deeper that deep PM mix. Over the two tracks and its remixes it introduces the young producer as a latent talent, with Bogota records calling in a new generation of House music.

* Ivaylo plays every Sunday with a guest to record our weekly Jæger mix residency

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.

Øyvind Morken’s Jungelerotikk / External Processing now available on Bandcamp

Øyvind Morken’s 2015 primal voyeuristic adventure, Jungelerotikk / External Processing is no longer the prized exclusivity of the international DJ community. Released on limited edition 7″ on Morken’s Moonlighting imprint, Jungelerotikk / External Processing was the privy of DJs and collectors alike, a shinning gem of a needle in a haystack that was just a little too good to keep to themselves. As rumour spread about Morken’s jungle adventurous so did the demand and a repress was certainly on the cards. After a lengthy to and fro with the pressing plant it was determined, for whatever reason (but most likely the dubplate was lost), that Øyvind Morken’s debut on Moonlighting would be resigned to the eternal Balearic and House archives and possibly lost forever. But alas, it is a digital world we live in and Øyvind Morken, as label head has made the decision to release Jungelerotikk / External Processing digitally for the first time. Both tracks are available on Øyvind Morken’s Bandcamp page and now you too can enjoy the resplendent sound of monkeys mating in the wild to a downtempo percussive groove.

Dortmund – Det Gode Selskab DJ Profile mix

Det Gode Selskab are back with their acclaimed mix series and Dortmund have the honour of bringing the series out of hiatus, with  Karl Fraunhofer and Florian Grisard reviving their Techno-leaning project for the occasion. After the nostalgic charm of the Out-Run-inspired Santa Cruz, Fraunhofer returns to Dortmund, to pick up where he and Grisard left off with last year’s HELLE FARBEN, released as part of Ploink’s 96-16 #3 compilation. Featuring little in the way of pandering, Dortmund go from the melodic simplicity of Tech House to the gregarious Techno that dwells down in concrete basements. A couple of the best moments are Iron’s acid workout A.C.D and Head High’s heavy House hitter, “It’s a Love thing”, two peaks in a mix that goes through the entire spectrum of dynamic ranges and moods of the more uncompromising corners of the Techno and House genres.

* Det Gode Selskab are back this Sunday for their weekly 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.

Album of the week: Bicep – Bicep

Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar have nurtured something completely distinct in House as Bicep. They deal in a raw, unadulterated sound of House, feigning dogmatic approaches and forging ahead of trends. Theirs is an instantly recognisable sound as big, jacking beats take centre stage in minimalist machine productions expertly crafted for the purpose of physical movement. Their percussive-focussed productions squash everything in its wake and stand on their own in any DJ mix. In the 7 years they’ve been around, they’ve released music on labels like AUS, KMS and of course their own Feel my Bicep imprint, with many dance floor killers attributed to them over the course of their career. Their music is perfectly suited for the 12″ format – utilitarian with just a hint of idiosyncrasy – and its definitely not difficult to see why they’ve feigned from the album format until now.

Curiosity draws you to Bicep’s self-titled debut album. As an act that’s made no bones about the corporeal intentions in their music, you wonder how they might approach something outside of the nightclub and away from the floor. On their “Just” EP we might have gotten little hint of what Bicep would sound like if not all their efforts were focussed on the floor, but with that EP we also lost something of the Bicep charm as they experimented in a different realm. For Bicep to work in the album format they would need to retain that crucial identity in their music, but at the same time channel it into something that could be accessed in a less than purposed setting. It would be an incredible feat, but on their debut they’ve certainly achieved that.

Bicep’s sound still takes centre stage, but their arrangements forego their usual DJ-purposed forms, for fully realised songs, utilising bridges rather than build-ups and applying more melodic- and harmonic weight to their threadbare productions. Bicep is still fairly stripped back, but there’s a lot more focus on melodic engagement and they’ve subverted ubiquitous four on the floor arrangement for rhythms that swing from break-beat to two step and back to 4/4 at a much more reserved pace than their previous EPs. This album is like Martyn’s The Air Between two worlds or Four Tet’s Pink, re-contextualising the dance floor a something more abstract,  something that could extend a night out to before and after the event, where you can either carry on the momentum with a track like “kites”, or slip into something more tranquil like “drift”.

Album of the Week: B12 – Electro Soma

A glimmer of a future-past reaches us this week through the music of B12, as the classic 1993 album “Electro Soma” is re-issued for the first time via Warp Records. Obscure characters in the first UK wave of Techno, B12 like LFO and Aphex Twin sought to uphold the legacy of Detroit’s futurist music, although from distinctly UK point of view. Break-beats replaced naive marching machines while dense arrangements stripped early Techno of its raw minimalist primacy for a more calculated, musical execution. B12 and their peers moved Techno out of the bedroom and into the studio and Electro Soma stands as an epitaph today for the electronic dance music producer.

With re-issues like these a common occurrence today; instrument makers like Roland re-hashing the past; and much of the newer generation of DJ digging further through the archives of Discogs, it’s easy today to get caught up in that in the “things were so much better back when…” kind of mentality. But that’s not why we admire Electro Soma today. We like Electro Soma because it upholds that core essence of Techno’s appeal as a future music. It’s music made for expeditions to Mars; music for an age of voice commands, self driving cars and autonomous robots; and music for a post-television, global village. Chirping electronics and complex rhythm structures slide off synthesised strings and organs in voluptuous melodic passages that defy the functional aspects that Techno has so stubbornly been following over the course of the last decade.

In the present Electro Soma’s sonic palettes might seem somewhat stilted, simple off the shelf patches on digital synthesisers, and in no way represents our future today, but that crucial prescience that defined Techno early on is still there. It still attempts to convey the music of the future, a future in the context of its own time, but a future nonetheless. Like “I care because you do” and “Microgravity” its a timeless classic, but unlike those works it got lost in the media hype where shy introverts like B12 are often looked over for their more popular peers. On our record shelf, alongside albums from Transllusion and Biosphere, Electro Soma stands as a beacon of the spirit of Techno, which artists like Convextion and EOD (also pieces on our shelf) honour in their pursuits to soundtrack a new future.

Download Mr. Scruff live at Jæger

Mr Scruff ‘s show in our basement lives on… The UK DJ/producer graced us with his presence and felt particularly magnanimous after  he show, releasing the recorded mix via his facebook page. All four hours of the mix from Frædag are available as a download here (password jaeger).  You can read an interview with Mr. Scruff here and Frædag is back again this week with G-HA & Olanskii leading our annual autumn DJ Marathon.

A Magnificent Seven from 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 influenced him at the time. 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 move to Berlin and 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 Marcel Dettman and Berghain.

Following releases on Berghain’s Ostgut Ton label, Dettmann 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 his post punk industrial influences from his youth. His highlights have been many through the course of a career which stretches back to the late nineties, but though seven defined moments we can unpack the legacy of his career in the booth and in the studio.

Berghain 02

When Nick Höppner established the Ostgut Ton label back in 2005, Marcel Dettmann wasn’t the first artist to grace a cover. No, that honour went to André Galluzzi who mixed the first comp for the label. When Marcel Dettmann mixed the second official Berghain compilation however it brought the attitude, style and energy of Berghain to life on a record for the first time. It firmly placed the club in the popular consciousness for good, and that queue snaking its way outside of Berghain is in part due to Dettmann’s rise in popularity during that time. Planetary Assault Systems, Redshape, Norman Nodge and Shed all contribute to timeless Techno document that even today outlives its time and its place. It’s Dettmann’s purist pursuit of the genre that has made him the unprecedented selector he is today.

Dawning / Dead Man Watches The Clock

He might not have the honour of the official first Ostgut Ton release, but together with Ben Klock he does claim the o-ton01 catalogue number. “Dawning / Dead Man Watches The Clock” was the first EP of original material to hit the shelves under the Ostgut Ton label. At a time where minimal Techno was sweeping across the dance floor, Klock and Dettman moved Techno out of its temporal comfort zone. Still incorporating the less-is-more approach, but forgoing the placid trancedal qualities of their time, Dettmann and Klock took from their impressive knowledge of dance music’s history with elements of Acid, EBM and Techno in its purest form all informing this two track release. “Dead Man watches the Clock” and “Dawning” are two sides of the same coin, one offering a contrast to the next, where acid bass lines are smoothed over by celestial melodic lead lines on the other side.

Vril V3

Vril is enjoying a kind of popularity today that puts the German producer in the same echelon with Marcel Dettmann, and a big part of his appeal was due to the success of this track which Dettmann played a hand in bringing it to the masses through his conducted mix and compilation. Released through Music Man records in 2011 it’s Marcel Dettmann at his usual best, mixing the old with the new, and putting the obscure in the context with the familiar in a way only he can. Dettman’s keen ear for new music caught this track way before anyone else did, and building on his reputation as a selector and a tastemaker, V3 was just one of many modern Techno classics first heard in the context of a Marcel Dettmann mix.

Dettmann

The debut album from the German producer would cement his reputation in the studio after establishing a his provenance in the booth. Where he was no slouch in the EP and 12” format, he proved on “Dettmann” that he could master the album narrative in Techno too, a feat very rarely conquered in the Techno lexicon. Minimal and atmospheric Dettmann remained close to the dance floor, the German producer opting for tracky arrangements, but away from the functional beat, it oozed melodic delight. The design sounds stark and barren, but manages to outlive the zeitgeist of its era. Tracks like “Viscous” live on today as timeless individual pieces that can accommodate more than just bland functionalism.

MDR

Marcel Dettmann’s eponymous label, Marcel Dettmann Records has long been a beacon for uncompromising Techno, with Dettmann’s intuitive ear behind every release. Playing host to the likes of Norman Nodge, Answer Code Request and Kobosil, MDR is a proving ground for new talent as well as a refuge for established Techno stalwarts and friends of Dettmann, artists and DJ’s he’s gathered around Berlin and Berghain.

Kobosil

One of the more recent additions to the MDR catalogue, Kobosil is Dettmann’s ear to the ground again. His star quickly rose after MDR 10 where acid tinged body music cemented Kobosil’s talent on record. From there Kobosil found his way onto Ostgut Ton and the album format with the brilliant “You Grow, We Decline” bringing the Berlin talent to a wider audience. “Oath” and “V762 Cas” from MDR 10 are modern classics today and owe their existence as much to Marcel Dettmann as they do their creator.

Selectors

At the height of popularity, when he could do little wrong, Marcel Dettmann has completely turned the tables on everyone and veered off into uncharted territory. Returning to the music of his roots, his sets have moved into the EBM and synth wave genres where dark sonic palettes echo against marching percussive rhythms of military precision. His Selectors compilation for Dekmantel documents his latest adventures honouring those early influences, while at the same time offering something unique in Techno  for new, younger audiences. Cabaret Voltaire, The Force Dimension and A thunder Orchestra dot this release and we have it on good authority these and other like them are mostly informing the DJ’s sets these days. All that’s left is to hear for ourselves when Dettmann lands in our basement tonight…

 

* Marcel Dettmann joins DJ Nuhhh and Krüger for RETRO tonight.

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.

Album of the week: Maceo Plex – Solar

In Maceo Plex, Eric Estornel has been moving  something of his headier Techno alias Maetrik into a more accessible realm. Born on the dance floor but not entirely dependent on it, Maceo Plex is project that can go from introspective sorrowful electronica to big-room pleasures, while retaining some of that depth that he requires to remain an underground artist. It features Estornel’s acute and technically magnificent production techniques that cemented his career through Techno’s minimal phase some ten-odd years back, but foregoes the latter’s functionalism in favour of something more cerebral.

On Solar, the sophomore LP as  Maceo Plex, Estornal probably travels the furthest to bring these two worlds together, refraining almost completely from the dance floor’s pulse and incorporating more vocals than he’s ever attempted in the past. Solar, named after his first born, is an album of great introspective warmth, and although the lyrics are somewhat flat, shallow and clichéd the subtle role the voice plays within the arrangements, adds a deeper dimension to the electronic landscape they accommodate.

Besides “Lucid Dreamer” and “Tesseract” which call on familiar Maetrik tropes, Solar is the closest Estornel has come to consolidating in Maceo Plex those ideas he set out to achieve in his debut album, Life Index. Unlike that Crosstown Rebels album, which was kind of “made to order” according to Estornel, Solar is the artist’s vision for Maceo Plex finally achieved. Like the Trentmøller’s Last Resort or James Holden’s “The idiots are Winning”, Solar is an album with more to offer than just a loop.

Solar is very much a listening record, something we can put on in the background and engage with necessary and on our terms, in more than one context. Although not quite a pop album, it gets fairly close to being that crossover album that could take Maceo Plex and his music into more mainstream territory.

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

What’s in a name – A Q&A with Central

A distant memory circles back now. It’s a whisper from the not-so-distant past rather than a memory; a break-beat arrangement with imposing sub-bass swells surging through Jæger’s basement and three young individuals that through the course of a day and night have left an impressionable mark on Oslo. The boys from Regelbau, No Hands and Help Recordings are winding down their set in Jæger’s basement at the end of a visit that saw them close out the Skranglejazz summer and as the last resonants of a new unreleased track from DJ Sports fades out they cement a vision of the future; a future that operates outside of predetermined, where everything is possible and the results are exciting.

Manmade Deejay, DJ Sports and Central are this vision incarnate, a group of individuals that graced our booth for one evening in September and inspired as the incipient generation of electronic music. They are also Mathias Okholm, Milán – and Natal Zaks respectively, members of the defunkt Regelbau collective and the people behind the Regalbau, No Hands and Help Recording imprints from Denmark.

At the centre these labels and the community that sprung out of the unlikely city of Århus are brothers Milán- and Natal Zaks, who as DJ Sports and Central have started to leave notable impressions on labels like Dekmantel, Firecracker and Gravity Graffiti. Ranging from a Balearic kind of House to a more alternative electronica through their Palta (Natal) & Ti (Milán) aliases, they’ve set a tone for a new generation of producers and DJs and have created the closest we’ve come the see in a scene for a long time.

Theirs is not a stylistic scene, but rather something in direct conflict with categorically defined music varietals. They urge for a more open reception of their music and where everything might go, they certainly do not go everywhere. Central, Manmade Deejay and DJ Sports’s set was diverse, dynamic and incredibly eclectic, incorporating House, Dub, Breakbeats and even Techno at various times from an informed approach. Going back to back through the night, each DJ instinctively knew where to go from the next, calling on the innate musical relationship they created through the Regelbau collective.

It puts into perspective a lot of what I and Natal Zaks talked about in a Q&A session earlier that day, before they closed out Skranglejazz for the season…

Tell me about Århus, the town in Denmark that you’re from. How would you describe it?

It’s a quiet city, living at a slow pace. It’s not that big with the ocean, the forest and the city all quite close together. One thing that really sums it up for me is that it is a very friendly city, and not only because a lot of my friends are there. There are a lot of people around that I know that make music and the environment is very relaxed.

What’s so conducive of the environment to spawn so much musical talent in recent years?

It’s just our home and that’s where we make music. Our scene is very small and it’s basically just made up of our friends. I don’t think the city plays a particular role, but rather just the friendly environment we’ve all created around the music.

There’s a lot of support between styles. One of the best-known places for hosting concerts and shows is called TAPE. That venue specifically circulates around live music, and although they mainly focus on live music, they are friends of ours and they welcome our music too.

There’s also this Golem initiative that focuses on creating some communication between the labels in the city. It is sleeping now, but we used to meet up intermittently to discuss different projects we were involved in and then we split the costs of a tape publication machine. It increased the contact between different styles. We also have a Golem store that archives and collects most releases from the scenes.

How many labels are involved there?

Regelbau, Help Recordings and No Hands are the labels I run with my friends and apart from that there’s Partners that’s run by Matias Gulvad and he does these collab releases. I had one collab with Soft Armour and Milán (DJ Sports) had a split with C.K, and the idea is that people just make music together or remix each other. We also have Brystet who has released everything from black metal to pop-rock and some of my stuff as Palta and Central. There are many small tape labels, but very few of them release on records.

 

These are all mainly cassette labels?

Yes, and I don’t really know of any labels that focus on club music, besides Regelbau, Help and No Hands.

And with so many labels collaborating, I suspect there’s a lot of cross pollination going between genres and styles.

Yes, we’ve just released a free jazz record for example on a new label we started called Saino. It’s something that I started because I wanted to focus on acoustic music, and do the distribution through Safe; so exploiting the same machinery, but for different kinds of music. Daniel Summer is the artist behind the first release, and he did this duet record where he just travelled the around and improvised with other musicians.

That’s quite a departure from the other three labels you do. Regelbau, No Hands and Help seem a little more consolidated, but what are the main differences between these three labels?

The essential difference between No Hands, Regelbau and Help is that Help is run by my me and my brother. So we decide everything that comes out there. We don’t really think of it as a style difference, but it is different and time will also show it is different. It’s not a conceptual difference but a difference in the music that is released on the label.

And am I right in saying that No Hands is a bit more of an experimental outlet for the dance floor?

Yes, it’s a label where everything is welcome. For me No Hands is quite defined, Help is quite defined, and Regelbau is everything that doesn’t quite fit in either of those.

Tell me more about Regelbau.

My brother and I, Mathias (Manmade Deejay) and CK were part of a collective as Regelbau, but the collective doesn’t exist anymore.

Why did you disband?

Because we were eleven guys and that was just too many. Some of us were very interested in running the labels, while others were more interested in doing events. Eventually we decided to focus on the label.

It’s interesting how many collectives have similarly disbanded in recent years into different factions and/or individuals, and while a label might remain the collective pursuit is portioned off.

It’s sort of a supporting structure that you create with a collective, where you influence each other a lot and figure out how you work together. You spread out the work through a bunch of people and then you find out what you are most interested in. And I can only speak for myself, but I’m definitely more interested in making music and releasing it.  

Than DJing too?

Yes, and putting parties together and being in a collective.

You have all these different projects, from DJ Central to Palta and all the other collaborations. Where does the bridge lie between all these different projects?

Well, the bridge is me. Essentially everything I make will be connected to me in some sense. I find the difficult part is not the labelling part, but when the label influences what you do. I don’t find that a very attractive position to be in as a producer and a musician. Limiting oneself at the beginning will have you thinking in a certain confined direction and bring up a lot of uncertainties. I start working by eliminating any concepts or ideas, and just focus on what comes out. Everything I make doesn’t have a name until I release it. If I end up doing new wave music for example it’s not unuseable, I just need to find another way to make it into a record.

 

What eventually separates a Central record from a Palta one?

Central is obviously more dance floor orientated than the others. I just completed my electronic composition studies after six years and a lot of my academic work was non-club music and it really opened my eyes to music outside of the club. So one leg has always been in club music and one in experimental music. Palta therefore was an outlet for the stuff that I find more interesting. It wasn’t that I didn’t find Central to be any less interesting, but it is more entertaining.

It serves a function as well.

It serves a function and it is also often a good way for me to start working by eliminating any concepts or ideas, and just focus on what comes out. Is it the work with the drum machine or is it a work without grid.

Is that how you define the origins of each project, in- and outside of the grid?

No because there is Palta stuff start that starts with a drum machine. It’s not the role of the music to fit the name, it’s the name that must accommodate the music. The first record I did as Central was a Techno record. It was very dark and acid. It was on Nord records, and that doesn’t make Central a Techno project.

You mentioned earlier that you don’t make music specifically for labels and yet those releases on Dekmantel really sound like they belong on that label. How did that come about?

It was just them that picked up on it. I had a lot of unfinished stuff lying around as Central, so I sent them many tracks. They decided what they liked and then we ended up with something that I had thought of as an album, but we split it into two EPs.

I was actually going to ask you about that too, since it sounded like the second EP was maybe a result of the success of the first one.

For me those kind of thoughts are a little bit dangerous, because when you start planning too much on what the music is going to be like before you’ve made it, that’s where I feel you begin to fail. I think it’s good to have this sense of freedom. For some it might be nice to think of songs as the numbered tracks on a record, but that doesn’t necessarily work for me.

Since those Dekmantel releases it seems that you’ve focussed most of your energy on releasing on your own labels. Will there be future releases on other labels again?

My brother and I will be releasing an EP on a newer Glasgow label soon. We started expanding to other labels together. Milán did his solo album on Firecracker, then we did this Palta & Ti release and we have a record coming out on Gravity Graffiti right now too. So I am releasing on other labels, but I want to focus more on our own labels.

 

Do you ever feel any pressure to when working with other labels, that stilt that freedom you were talking about earlier?

Not really. Both Gravity Graffiti and the glasgow guys were very open minded. I actually find myself to be less worried because it’s a new chapter and I can more or less do what I want. And the records that Milán and I did for these labels are very much a step in a new direction. They are showcasing what we are interested in but couldn’t really find a home for on our own labels.

Can you tell us a little more about this new direction?

The releases are very different and I’d say very un-preoccupied music. A lot of it is based on improvisation.

Will these be released under new pseudonyms?

It’s under under the Palta & Ti moniker. Ti is Milán’s more experimental side, the counterpart to my Palta alias.

So your experimental side is coming to the fore more. Do you see yourself completely leaving the dance floor at some point?

No. Also I think the process of making dance music is such a happy, carefree state of mind. It feels really good, so I wouldn’t stop because of some pre-occupation with it being cool.

You mention that the dance floor is a really feel-good kind of environment, so would you say the Palta project is more of a conscious musical effort?

Actually I’d say it’s exactly the opposite. It started for me, when I was studying, that I wanted to make music that I couldn’t remember doing. It was my third year, and I was making music when I was extremely tired or trying to do music extremely fast. I was working with the sketches in a way that there’s no time to regret anything and you just keep pushing forward. All and all I can some it up as a project that wants to be first-thought-best-thought.

Do you usually know when you are working on a Palta track compared to a central track.

Yes, It’s not like I’m going to deny that when I’m working on it, it can’t have a name. There also other projects that haven’t been released yet, and will be out soon too.

More music under new aliases… Where do you find the time for all of this?

I don’t do much else. I don’t work on stuff for a long time.  When it becomes heavy on me, then it’s not worth it. Often I just let go of stuff when it’s a hassle. I wouldn’t release anything I wasn’t happy with in the end.

 

Album of the Week: Red Axes – The Beach Goths

Like tumultuous waves pounding an invisible shore obscured by the dead of night, Red Axes come crashing in on “The Beach Goths” with great temerity as keys crunch under foot and irreverent percussive parts clash in harmonious counterpoint. Jangly rhythms and dissonant atmospheres set the tone for this sophomore LP from this idiosyncratic two-piece band. Channeling something from the Velvet Underground into the contemporary, the Red Axes have always been a kind of Ramones for the post-punk, pre-tropical era and on their latest record they consolidate what they’ve first established on the album format on Ballad of the Ice.

The album format is where  Red Axes truly shine and while their EPs and 12 inches might be focussed towards the more accessible and often the dance floor, the albums tend to showcase more of an eclectic, versatile and often more adventurous sound palette. “The Beach Goths” is a ratty blend of music from an electronic and acoustic realm, bridging musical dialects with the progressive charm of Frank Zappa. Although drum machines and the grid inform a large portion of their arrangements, Red Axes put keys, guitars and voices in the foreground of their latest album, opting for a band-like arrangement for the most part “The Beach Goths”.

Songs are preferred over tracks, with chord arrangements following accessible formulas and arrangements opting for popular verse-bridge-chorus forms. When Red Axes do get tracky, like on the opening two tracks, they prefer a kind of transcendent improvised structure where dub rhythms and receptive loops create the point from which they astral project over the entire landscape of the musical lexicon, past and present. Through “The Beach Goths” Red Axes visit elements of punk in Relaxation (for your mind and body); traverse the landscape of  jazz/exotica in “Cooked Banana”; and even dabble in an improvised interpretation of  Hi-NRG for “Shir1”.

Red Axes are nothing if not eclectic, and although the tracks might all emanate from contrasting corners of the Red Axes musical hemisphere, they all converge into a singular stream that flow’s uninterruptedly through “The Beach Goths”.

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.

Karl Fraunhofer on Outrun to Santa Cruz

Coming via Sprechen records soon, “Synth Wizard” and Gode Selskab affiliate, Karl Fraunhofer  presents “Santa Cruz”. Channeling an eighties sound palette through his immense collection of drool-worthy synths the Dortmund man goes solo on this two EP outing, noodling his way through cocktail-hour synth lines and broad-shouldered pads. “Santa Cruz” precedes “Tone” which will both be available via Sprechen on Traxsource, two tracks that call to mind Todd Terje in more introspective mood or Kevin Bacon in angry dance posture. Check out the video above and both tracks below, or listen back to Fraunhofer on the Æmix.

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.

LCD Soundsystem – american dream

There was no doubt that when LCD Soundssystem said “this is happening” in 2010 and  James Murphy called the whole project quits, it wouldn’t be the last we would hear from him and the post-wave-electro-punk band of his creation. Even as the “long goodbye” tour drew to its conclusion, and the supposed final recordings came in the form of a live album, there was this continued nudging sense that LCD Soundsystem had more to give to the world.

As James Murphy worked on other projects like Arcade Fire and the Despacio Soundsystem it was clear his creative genius was far from exhausted and that LCD Soundsystem, one of the most unique electronic music projects to come out of the early 2000’s, would grace our Hi-Fi’s soon again. LCD Soundsystem were born out of the electroclash era, where punk, New-Wave, Electro, House, Disco and Techno all merged in a fantastic crescendo, laying the foundation for bands like LCD, the Knife and Black Strobe in one of the more exciting periods in electronic music’s recent history.

It was exactly like James Murphy said in “Losing my Edge”, the single that would propel LCD into mass-consciousness: “I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought electric guitars.” In that period it opened up a whole new world to the electronic music fan and introduced a few rock fans to a new music played on what resembled kitchen appliances and 12 years on from releasing their self-titled debut it’s no coincidence that we find that same spark on their monumental come-back album, american dream.

James Murphy’s voice strains to juxtapose the upbeat synthesiser arrangements with his usual frank and jocular cynicism, but as in american dream there’s an underlying despair in his vocal and his lyrics that we had not heard before. Track titles like “North American Scum” and “New York I Love you, but your bringing me down” had always eloquently played on that love-hate relationship Murphy has with his surroundings like a Seinfeld routine, but on “american dream” it feels more concerted than ever as a piece of commentary on the current political landscape of the American super-power.

Lyrics like “I have a penny for your thoughts if you could keep them to yourself” and “the revolution was here that would set you free from the bourgeoisie”are not only expertly crafted one-liners, but they’re also a lot more somber than Murphy’s usual tongue-and-cheek charm. There’s a sincerity to the album and the subject matter that pays homage to artists like David Bowie and Lou Reed and the end of that ineffable idea of an American dream, and if ever there was a tone of an impending end to LCD Soundsystem’s music, “american dream” certainly captures it. The ephemeral buoyancy of previous albums is weighed down by large arrangements with wall-of-sound-like guitars and chunky synthesisers that feel more composed than the DIY roots of the one-man band.

James Murphy caters to a more epic sonic arrangement on “american dream” and “This is happening” wasn’t quite it, this might just be it. James Murphy has said he will never make another big deal about the end of this project, and on the surface it does seem “american dream” might just conclude LCD Soundsystem as Murphy gets the last of what he has to say off his chest.

A mysterious e-mail appeared in my inbox. “Sassy 009 -pretty baby” in the subjectline.

[Poem]
A mysterious e-mail appeared in my inbox.
“Sassy 009 -pretty baby” in the subjectline.
“Oh this looks interesting”
Hopefully it’s an e-mail from a secret agent,
a femme fetale in Ukraine.
Not a stupid bookingagent.
Maybe from someone close by.
Aw shieeeeeeeeeet………
Just another mail from Mischa.
Mischa the bearded bard.

Oh it’s the new project from Andrew Murray.
Mr. Baya.
There is a picture here. But not nsfw.

Sunniva Johanna Teodora
They are pretty. They got cigarettes!
A hyperlink…
Hope its not a virus.

Whoa the sound is infectious.
No presskit. No pressrelease.
Guess i can write anthing i want.
You wanna hear?
At your own risk.
Don’t playit on a ducktaped laptop.
put you headphones on…. enjoy…

It’s Official
I mean we have Official Releaseparty at Jaeger soon.
Pretty Babes out now on Luft recordings and out on your local stream.

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.

Album of the Week: DJ Hell – Zukunftmusik

Seeing DJ Hell play at Sommerøya a couple of weekends ago plagued by a botched rider; technical issues; and a premature closing time, only to overcome the obstacles and still entertain a loyal legion of fans, was a thing to behold and reminds me yet again of the DJs alluring appeal in the booth… and it’s not just the incredible physical presence. It brought back memories of a set circa 2009 in Fabric where he opened with Iggy Pop’s “I wanna be your dog” and then forced his way through a wormhole that extended to the dark vortex of Techno, EBM and House.

Yes before anyone coined the term Punk Techno, DJ Hell was the original Punk that played Techno, both in the booth and in the studio. His albums went from the iconoclast House of “Munich Machine”, to the single-chord aggressive purge of “NY Muscle”, and eventually the minimalist Tech-chíc of “Teufelswerk”. Behind each album there was a central aesthetic that could be a defining concept or just a musical mood that DJ Hell always brought together over the narrative of an album. Album cuts working side by side with singular dance floor excursions, DJ Hell always managed to slightly blur the lines between the two aspects of electronic music. On his latest excursion in the album format, “Zukunftmusik” DJ Hell yet again adopts this approach erring on the side of the song rather than the track on this occasion.

Through the 17 tracks that make up “Zukunftmusik” DJ Hell and collaborators Peter Kruder and Roberto Di Gioia favour a kind of electronic pop album for a four-four generation, acknowledging the electro-pop sounds of Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Depeche Mode. Yes, there’s some irony at play here in the title of the album, which translates to “future music” as the musicians and producers largely call on a retro-future sound of electronic music in the seventies, most noticeable on the second single of the album “car, car, car”.  That track like “Warm Leatherette” and “Cars” makes obvious references to the dystopian Ballard novel Crash that inspired so much music of that period from The Human League to The Normal, and in his very unique way Hell pays tribute of that music of that era through this and the other tracks of the album.

For the most part Hell negates the dance floor, and when he does get his feet tapping in the first single form the album, “I Want You”, it feels forced and out of place, that track being much more suited for the 12″ format which was released earlier this year. “I Want You” doesn’t quite co-operate with the rest of the album, and you need to look no further that “I want my future back” or “K-House” to find where the essence of “Zukunftmusk” lies. These are epic sonic arrangements that call into mind Vangelis or Jean Michel Jarre and make the crux of the appeal of the album, and even when they favour a four on the floor form like “Guede” or “Wild at Art”  they still stunt the functionalism with their arrangements.

“Zukunftmusik” is yet another chapter in the DJ Hell legacy that just seems to spawn new life around each turn, feigning the obvious or the ubiquitous and you are able to feel the DJ’s strong personality pulsing through every groove and hook on this album.

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.

Album of the week: Les Amazones d’ Afrique – République Amazone

Can a piece of music actually bring about social change? Can the ephemeral placement of a group musical notes with relation to a set of abstract lyrics illicit a public response to dogmatic social practises that would effect change? For a group of west African musicians the answer is emphatically, yes. “Les Amazones d’ Afrique are an all-female collective of west African musicians campaigning for gender equality, strong in the belief that music can support social progress.” Kandia Kouyaté, Angélique Kidjo, Mamani Keita, Rokia Koné, Mariam Doumbia (of Amadou & Mariam), Nneka, Mariam Koné, Massan Coulibaly, Madina N’Diaye, Madiaré Dramé, Mouneissa Tandina and Pamela Badjogo make up the group, coming together in Mali in 2015 to approach issues of gender inequality in a west African dialect that extends from Mali, to Benin, Nigeria and Gabon and eventually the rest of the world. All accomplished musicians in their own right with Grammy awards amongst the accolades between them, Les Amazones d’ Afrique take up a rousing battle cry on their debut album with vocals that haunt blues dub and funk arrangements on the record.

A distorted Mbira (thumb piano) calls in the album, counterpointing a rhythm section playing in a blues dialect, and when Angélique Kidjo’s  join’s the minimalist pop arrangement, several musical histories collide as an incredible diorama of disparate musical cultures coming together as a single voice. From there to the end of the A-side, Les Amazones d’ Afrique’s 2016 hit “I Play the Kora”, the producer Liam Farrell (Doctor L) references a thick lexicon of musical traditions, straining under the effect of distortion as they eddy around his larger than life bass-patterns. Film composer and producer, Farrell takes care of most of the instrumentation on the record, calling in favours from drummer Mouneissa Tandina, ngoni player Harouna Samaké and guitarist Mamadou Diakité at times, as functional accompaniment to the vocals that take centre stage throughout. Avoiding obvious musical curios and reductive recording practises Les Amazones d’ Afrique transcend the term World Music and any of its kitsch associations, and even on a song like B-side opener”Anisokoma” with its strong traditional African provenance, nothing can undermine the prowess of these incredible singers.

Even though the literal message to their music might get lost in languages like Fon and Bambara on the record, the visceral encounter with these voices provoke as they rage and grieve against the musical backdrop anchored by Liam Farrell’s lurching bass lines. In the context of the record, which is made abundantly clear through the powerful image of the artwork; the text on the back of the record (the second thing you read); and the liner notes, it is impossible to miss the intention behind these voices on the record, and even though we might not understand some of the lyrics, an internal dialogue exists between us and the music. It’s hard not to think about issues like sexual abuse, FGM and gender inequality while listening to the record without taking anything away from the allure of the music. But it’s not just in the message that Amazones d’Afrique are able to effect social change, and apart from starting a crowd funding campaign, they’ve also donated all the profits from “I Play the Kora” to “The Panzi Foundation”, a support agency for survivors of sexual violence in DRC.

It seems indeed that music can support social progress, from planting a seed for thought to providing financial support for social causes. Les Amazones d’ Afrique are justified in their belief and have done so in the best record we’ve come across this week.

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

 

Album of the Week: Various Artists – Kern Vol.4 (compiled by DJ Stingray)

A few months ago Armin van Buuren announced a new residency in Ibiza with some artwork emboldened with the letters “UR”, but something didn’t quite sit right the online music community when they got wind of it. It was a replica (right down to the font) of the Detroit collective and label’s logo, Underground Resistance. Armin Van Buuren had very publicly slighted one of the most influential and important groups in electronic music, showing either a lack of respect or just plain ignorance of the musical origins that he owes so much of his career to. It was a very poor choice for a marketing campaign and the internet was duly riled up including the people behind Underground Resistance, who rightly pointed out that Van Buuren and the marketing team are essentially “exploit(ing) the years of work that another artist has put in for (their) own benefit”.

Underground Resistance has played one of the most significant roles in Detroit as the second wave of artist to emerge of the newly established Techno genre in the late eighties. Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Galaxy 2 Galaxy, Drexciya (James Stinson & Gerald Donald) and of course the founder Mike Banks, are just a few of the names to emerge of the collective, but probably one of its most lauded offspring today, comes in the form of DJ Stingray.

A UR affiliate – although such claims can’t be substantiated, considering the nature of the collective – DJ Stingray’s career starts as the second generation of Techno artists started to come to prominence in Detroit. Starting out as one third of the highly acclaimed Urban Tribe alongside Carl Craig and Kenny Dixon, before landing a job as Drexciya’s touring DJ under the alias, Drexciyan DJ Stingray, Ingram couldn’t ask for a better foundation to his career. Under the direction of Drexciya, Ingram would wear a balaclava while working, a direct result of UR’s influence and their political motives. With the untimely passing of James Stinson and the end of Drexciya, DJ Stingray and the ski-masked prevailed, and through the first decade of the new millennium he established one of the enigmatic DJ careers. So it seems incredibly fitting that Berlin club and label, Tresor would honour the DJ with handing the “Kern” series over to him for its fourth edition.

DJ Stingray doesn’t disappoint, and through the eight tracks he’s chosen for the double LP release he’s compiled a selection of tracks that have been determined in their resolve to uphold the origins of Techno. From Aphex Twin to Gesloten Cirkel, these artists and the songs that Ingram chose, harness the full potential of Techno, not as some functional, formulaic version of the genre, but as the forward-thinking musical ideology it is. Feigning strict 4/4 rhythm patterns and incorporating break/electro beats, DJ Stingray showcases Techno on “Kern vol. 4” as a modulating music, one that develops with its environment, but always as some futuristic outlook from the present landscape. It’s Techno as an underground revolutionary music and one that should engage consciously as much as it functions practically. Ingram’s history, starting out playing the biker bars of Detroit is evident here as he plays between sounds and genres liberally to inform his mix and this compilation. From Professor X’s Hip Hop referencing self-titled track to Aphex Twin’s leftfield adventures in Acid, anything goes for DJ Stingray and he keeps the energy high throughout.

DJ Stingray’s statement in this mix is bold and highlights a world of music Armin van Buuren clearly has forgotten, or more likely never known, and “Kern Vol.4 we believe couldn’t come at a better time. This compilation is welcomed reminder of the origins of a roots music we must never forget or ignore, and even today, in its true form, it’s still the most exciting form of musical expression for the dance floor there is.

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

 

Album of the Week: Arthur Russell – Instrumentals

The iconoclastic genius, Arthur Russell adorns our shelf this week through “Instrumentals”. It’s a work that finds Russell in sweet repose, and is yet again resolute in its pursuit in finding that fulcrum point between a populists appeal and an avant garde musical philosophy. Recorded in New York between 1975 -78, Instrumentals feature a collection of  suites created from 73 modular thematic sketches, that like in similar fashion to Terry Riley’s “in C”, could be played in any order in an improving ensemble.

A performance piece initially intended for a photograph series by Russell’s Buddhist’s teacher, these pieces stand on their own today as an example of Russell’s compositional craft entombed in a series of unique recordings. Originally released as “First Thought Best Thought” the tracks receive a little digital sprucing in the mastering studio, with many critics believing it’s enhanced the audio quality tenfold. Without getting bogged down in Sterophillia, there is something crisp in these editions that allow the individual instruments more prominence and space, with the muddling of frequencies and that 70’s tape hiss erased.

It lends more of that haunting quality to the music, as the individual instruments are given the breadth to enunciate more accurately in the minimalist landscapes of the compositions. Delicate and nuanced and arranged with some reticence, it’s hard to believe these were recorded from live performances. They were recorded at a time that coincides with a spiritual awakening for Arthur Russell and through the slow movement of each melodic line there’s a serenity you could almost touch through the speaker as these melodic lines entangle themselves around each other. It’s remarkable what the small chamber ensemble manage to lay down in texture from these sparse melodic lines, often disappearing into a dense tone cloud, where there’s little to no distinction between them.

Arthur Russell’s eccentric flair for traversing the popular and the serious give these pieces their appeal, and even in “Reach One” one of the later recordings with its jaunty serial rhythms, there’s something soothing an calming for the uninformed listener. These recordings are from a time before Russell moved into the world of Disco, but they harness that very same uncompromising and idiosyncratic conviction that we later hear on World of Echo, showcasing yet another side to Russll’s extensive talent, as a musician, an artists and a composer.

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?

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!

 

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.

A Deep and Dark Slavic twist – An Interview with Tijana T

In the late nineties when NATO was bombing the Serbian capital, Belgrade for reasons that hard to remember today,  the innocent people caught in the crossfire could but look on as the harsh realities of a war they didn’t cause nor welcomed, was fought right at the doorstep. As is always the case with these types of international squabbles where two political elites determine what’s wrong or what’s right for a nation, the innocent civilians on the ground with no political motive of their own are always the most effected by the circumstances that evolve around these situations. During times like these it’s often useful to evoke that old English trope of ”keep calm and carry on”, but often that’s not nearly enough and what you need is more than just an escape, and that’s exactly what a whole generation of adolescent youths in 1999 in Belgrade. They took to the warehouses with Techno as their soundtrack and tracks like Richie Hawtin’s Minus Orange became anthems for the disenfranchised youths of the Serbian capital.  

One such youth was Tijana T(odorovic), and as she explains in Resident advisor: ”Being a DJ at that time was the highest form of rebellion—in a country under sanctions, with no music distribution, where no one is allowed to travel abroad and the inflation rate leads to an average salary of €3 per month, to find records, throw a party and have thousands of people raving to it — that was fucking magic!” She went from the dance floor to a career in music journalism, interviewing various electronic music producers and DJs as a TV presenter in Serbia.

Playing obscure electronic classics on national TV in Serbia, she would inform open-minded audiences throughout the country while bolstering her reputation as a knowledgeable and sincere selector. Eventually leaving her TV day job she poured herself completely into your new calling as a DJ. It coincided with an appearance at Exit festival where she would croon the audience over Abe Duque’s live show to an ecstatic response, cementing in her the desire to become a performer, and DJing became her calling.

Tijana T would follow Abe Duque to Germany, and garnered the respect of a whole new audience, cementing her reputation as an internationally recognised DJ. Last year marked 15 years from interviewing guest at EXIT festival to playing the main stage, and Tijana T’s journey has only but begun. She’ll be playing alongside VRIL and G-Ha & Olanskii this Frædag for their Øya Natt special, so we thought it pertinent to shoot over some questions.

Hi Tijana thank you for talking to us. You are the first DJ from Serbia to ever play at Jæger so paint us a scene if you please. You’re a teenager in Serbia, NATO is currently bombing your city and the schools are closed, but you’re listening to Richie Hawtin in a warehouse club. How were you introduced to this music and what was it about it that spoke to you?

I was quite familiar with electronic music of all sorts as a kid, as my uncle was a passionate music lover and record collector. So already at age 3 or 4 I was listening to Kraftwerk and even much crazier stuff like Einsturzende Neubauten. Lots of industrial and synth records were around the house at the time. My uncle also took me to the first house party when I was 14 in a club called Soul Food in Belgrade. I still remember people covered in glitter with wigs, drag queens dancing on the speakers. The track playing was The Bucketheads “These Sounds Fall Into My Mind”. At the time parties and raves were just starting in Belgrade and it was the thing to do, a place to be! It was new, exciting and spectacular. The country was in a total disaster, falling apart, poverty, hunger, war imagery everywhere, young men being taken to the war involuntarily,  hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding in…. and in the night everyone lived as if we’re in New York. Due to this crazy situation, the media was quite open and there were not so many commercial demands so we could actually get educated on the most sophisticated music of all genres just listening to the radio or watching TV.  I religiously tuned in to some radio shows on radio B92 and wrote down all the song titles and if I didn’t hear it,l I would call the radio station to ask for an ID. I was quite a nerd at school and had a lot of extra activities after school, language classes, choir rehearsals, music classes and I approached going to parties equally diligently. I would go there all on my own, somehow find a way to get in as I couldn’t afford the ticket, then stand in front of the speaker, dance for hours and then either go home get my stuff and go to school or just go to school directly. At the time I had no idea or wish to become a DJ, I was studying languages and literature and philosophy, convinced to become professor later in life.  

You went from a student, to a music television host and selector (with the type of programming that would make Larry Flynt blush). What do you look for in tracks as a DJ today and how has it developed through your career?

My music taste is really wide and even if I did music journalism for such a long time, I still don’t find it easy to verbalise my feelings about music. It’s such an intimate, physical thing and so personal. I find it hard to discuss music with other people as it depends so much on each one’s personal frequencies and emotional perception. In music (as in life) I like to feel intensely. So it can be ecstatic feeling, it can be melancholic feeling, it can be noise that disturbs me, it can be an infectious groove. Also, since I have the experience as a radio and TV selector, I have a bit of a pop perception, always looking for “songs” even in loopy techno tracks.

Speaking of pop music, your first stage appearance was actually as a vocalists for Abe Duque. How did you go from there to the decks and how did the scene in Belgrade play a role in your development?

At the same time I started working with Abe I started a Monday night residency in Belgrade with my best friend. We were both girls doing music TV shows and interviewing musicians and DJs and we always thought there’s so much music we could also share and play. So what started as a fun thing on a Monday night, became a successful club event and as I was travelling with Abe I could buy records and get more serious. We don’t have record shops in Belgrade really. Abe was also my mentor in teaching me how to perform live and use machines as well as where to get my records. So for years I was practising my mixing skills at full parties, crowded places. I’m very lucky people in Belgrade were coming for my selection and not for the mixing, it was really embarrassing for a long time :) And I am very happy that many club owners and promoters were persistently booking me at that time. They had more belief in me than myself. I would never be who I am if I wasn’t doing so many various gigs around Belgrade, from little bars in front of 2 people to all-nighters, and huge raves. Belgrade has a tough crowd, people are selective when it comes to music and they want to be entertained at the same time. Belgrade completely defined me as a DJ.

 

Besides that vocal appearance, you’ve feigned the ubiquitous DJ/producer role. Why have you steered clear from the studio?

Actually I spend time in the studio and I work on music, but I’m so self-critical it’s hard to select something I would like to have released and share with the world. I think there’s so much mediocre and bad music out there, I don’t want to be the one contributing to white noise. Also, I wanted to see how far I could go with DJ-ing only. Imperative of having releases in the DJ world is something don’t agree with.

We talk a lot about the escapism that a club environment offers, because at the end of the day everybody needs an escape from the harsh realities outside time to time and just be allowed to enjoy themselves, right. But how fundamental was, and is, the clubbing scene in Belgrade to underlying social structure in the city for everyday people like you?

Going out in Belgrade is still a must. It’s not only about social or economic circumstances, it’s also in our mentality. Serbians are like Mediterraneans in that sense. Eating, drinking, having long coffees, partying… but all that with a deep and dark Slavic twist. In a way people in Belgrade go out so much cause there’s nothing else or nothing better to do. It’s not escapism, it’s reality. And it’s good cause the mainstream culture almost doesn’t exist due to really gloomy political situation in the country. So we built our own culture. I said it already before, but right now the world is in a really weird historical moment. Maybe it’s time to wake up and understand what’s going on around us. My feeling is that parties, clubs and festivals in the Western world also make youngsters a bit numb. It’s so easy to live in that bubble where everything is nice, all the people are familiar and you just travel, dance and get lost. Some seriously wrong things are happening outside this bubble.

Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton said in their book “last night a DJ saved my life”: “Dancing is political, stupid!” What are your thoughts on that sentiment?

It is, or it could be or more precise – it was political. I danced in a political sense very much, I can feel this statement. But in 2017 we can’t dance things off. I mean, yes of course, if dancing becomes a part of some sort of extreme worldwide revolution :) Better don’t get me started on politics, my views are not easily digestible for everyone.

Today you find yourself in Berlin. How has the scene there continued to shape or even evolve your selections?

Actually I’m still only a regular guest in Berlin. I live in Belgrade. I started coming  to Berlin very often when I started working with Abe back in 2005. It was really inspiring and that’s the place where I bought my first records. Berlin is for me was extended education and it still is. I go there to learn and evolve.

You started out as journalist 16 years ago interviewing people at EXIT festival and last year you made it back full circle back to EXIT, but playing a headliner slot. What was the significance of that for you and would you say that it coincided with cementing a Tijana T sound in the booth?

Last year was beautiful at Exit and this year I played a super headliner slot at Dance Arena. It was a really touching moment. My heart almost exploded and I got all my friends and ex-colleagues on stage. It was such a celebratory moment. The very special touch was Roisin Murphy’s band members with Eddie as the master of ceremonies also there with me. This guy created some of my most loved pieces of pop music and he was there for support. His reaction to my set was worth a million. I’m not going to share it with the public though :) I think with Exit things just came together somehow finally. They recognised I am ready and it happened.  

How do you see your set at Jæger unfolding next weekend?

It will be serious and humorous as always. Happy to play with Vril, he’s also funny. Surprisingly.

Can you play us out with a song.

It’s not going to be club music. Here’s a super emotional song by PJ Harvey.

 

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.

Album of the Week: Porn Sword Tobacco – 2017

We opt for a kind of quiet before the storm hits this week as Øya rolls into town and look towards an ambient work for our album of the week. Leftfield Swedish electronic producer Porn Sword Tobacco, headed over to Acido records to put together “2017”, a lush wavy ambient LP that soothes something primitive in the listener. Untitled tracks, field recordings and synthesisers that loop into infinity, repeating a mantric hymn cascade over each other to create a blanket of sound that covers the record. The sound palette is subtle and allows the listener to drift in and out of the embrace of its pliable textures.

Waves of water lapping up on some distant shore and the constant chirping of indistinguishable lifeforms pad each extensive track like some reminder of the origins of ambient music, but they feel synthetic in their design as if walking through some virtual reality dream. The percussive elements that crop up randomly, evoke associations with their west-african ancestry, but as they modulate in pitch and in timbre, PST keeps us from falling too deep into rabbit hole, keeping the listener engaged, rather than apathetically present.

As an ambient record it has a lot of character, and maintains that old Brian Eno trope of ambient music as being both ignorable and interesting. PST manipulates our natural sonic world into something curious without ever being obnoxious about it. It’s especially interesting when he seems to mimic the world around him through synthesised sounds, making for a very unique ambient record.

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. 

Album of the week: Bjørn Torske & Prins Thomas – Square One

Bjørn Torske and Prins Thomas go back to basics on Square One with live drums and liquid bass-lines setting the tone for lethargic slow pulses and warm lush keys languishing in their own warmth. Based on the title, the two Norwegian electronic music pioneers, used this project to tap into something primal in themselves and music. The live drums and the played bass guitar are repetitive and mantric and combined with the psychedelic miasma of electronic noises gathering wistfully around the arrangement and untangled from any proposed form, Square One calls to mind Tangerine Dream, NEU!, and even a little of Kraftwerk, circa Autobahn, where the cataclysm for experimental electronic music took root.

Neither Bjørn Torske or Prins Thomas are strangers to this field and in Square One they take us to a journey to the big bang of this music. The closest we ever get to a four on the floor is the lonesome thump of a Djembe drum on “k19 del 1” or the boxy kick of “Kappe Tre”, and in this collaboration Bjørn and Thomas shrug all responsibilities to the dance floor in favour of a head-bobbing catharsis. The mood goes from relaxed and pensive to quirky and playful through the course of the album, and although they’re effectively paying homage to the roots of experimental electronic music, they hardly disappear into mindless self-indulgence. There’s an expert balance between the accessible and the a deeper listening experience on Square One and an album you’d constantly want playing in the background.

It’s passive where it needs to be, but if you allow it an expansive world awaits beyond the repetitive drones and the meandering percussion. Square One isn’t a mere jaunt into revisionist nostalgia, but rather a severe and considered interpretation of a past music for a new audience and as it arrives through two of the world’s most exciting dance floor manipulators, it makes quite a statement on the current state of electronic music.

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:

  1. OEIL CUBE- versatile records
  2. OYE – Edits 003 uffe
  3. 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.

Catching up with Charlotte Bendiks

A lot has happened since we last spoke to Charlotte Bendiks. While she continues to play all over the world, she’s also brought a new live show to the stage, released her brilliant debut for Cómeme, “Hidden Tracks”, and will be inducted as a Jæger resident this week when she kicks off her new IRONI residency this Saturday.

Her EP made a definitive impression on the Cómeme roster and Bendiks’ own discography, showcasing her penchant for body music and her intense relationship with the place of her origins, beyond the arctic circle. Following her Aurora EP on Love OD from two years ago it establishes a distinctive sound that follows the Norwegian producer from the studio to the booth.

She joins us in the booth as our new resident with her new residency IRONI. Her first guest is label mate Ana Helder, and curiosity got the better of us, so we sent some questions over to Charlotte to ask her more about her EP, the residency and playing alongside Ana Helder.

Let’s get stuck in Charlotte, and probably the biggest thing that happened since I last interviewed you is the EP for Cómeme. Tell me a bit how that came together?

It started with Studio Barnhus asking me for demos and I sent them some tracks. After a year of sending tracks back and forth, they decided not to release a record with my music after all. So suddenly, I had all these tracks and I didn’t quite know what to do with them. Avril Ceballos, who runs Comeme together with Matias Aguayo, asked me to send the tracks to her so that she could help me find a label for them.  However, after listening to them together with Matias, they decided that they wanted to release my music.  And so we went to work, selecting tracks for the EP. And during that process, we ended up working with some old and unfinished Hidden Tracks that in the end became the EP.

I read the PR and there’s talk of mysticism, ghosts, ghouls and aurora borealis. What were the conceptual themes behind the tracks and was there anything of particular influence for the EP as a whole?

There are many stories behind the Hidden Tracks… Stories that cannot be shared with just anyone, because you have to be able to handle them. The stories can be quite intense,  and that is also why the press sheet for the EP is very mystical and abstract.

Tromsø,or more accurately the north, makes quite a prominent feature on the EP in terms of the themes you. Why do you have such an intense creative relationship with your origins?

Growing up in such a remote and isolated place, I felt disconnected with the rest of the world – almost like a geographical outsider. In general, I think a lot of art and music derives from artists who identify themselves as outsiders.

I know you’ve been splitting your time between Berlin and Norway more lately. Do you think it’s going to have an effect on the direction your music will take later?

Everywhere I go, everyone I meet and everything I listen to will inspire me. I always look for new sounds or vibes, and the more I get around the more I will discover.

It’s a great EP and I really love the complex percussive arrangements that really gives the record a great energy. What will you be taking with you going into your next project and how do you feel you’ll be developing your sound in the future?

I think maybe the next step for me will be to form a band. Maybe explore my Norwegian roots and the black metal scene…

But let’s get onto the crux of the interview IRONI. You told me a little about it in an email the other day, but maybe you can tell Jæger’s audience all about it in first person?

Ironically, I don’t want to answer this question.

You first guest is Ana Helder. She’s also part of the Cómeme and a friend I imagine. How do you know each other and why is she your first guest?

I met Ana many years ago. The first time we met I think I was living in Cologne. We have played together many times since then, in Germany, Norway and Argentina. She is one of my favorite DJs, and a dear friend. Since she is on a European tour at the same time as I start my IRONI nights, it fits perfectly to have her as the first guest. Also, it is kind of sweet, because I was the first guest of a party she started in Rosario Argentina, called Sub Culto…

How do you imagine the night might sound and what do you think Ana will bring out in Charlotte Bendiks

Ana plays both funky and trippy at the same time. We have a very similar taste in dance music, so I guess we will have a lot of fun trying to surprise each other with hidden treasures. However, I guess we won’t know what it will sound like until we start playing together. Also our set will depend a lot on the crowd and how they respond to it.

And lastly, can you play us out with a song?

Of course, I have to choose one of my favourite Ana Helder tracks.

Album of the week: Charlotte Bendiks – Hidden Tracks

Primal, dreamy and abounding with atmosphere, Charlotte Bendiks’ debut on Cómeme establishes the northern DJ and producer as the new definitive voice above the arctic circle, upholding a legacy established by Biosphere and Bjorn Torske singlehandedly today. “Hidden Tracks” is a six track EP that joins a dotted line between the rhythms of a warmer clime with a Norwegian aptitude for wispy atmospheres that glint in the stardust of functional dance floor creations. Charlotte confines her efforts to evasive percussive arrangements, that loosely cling to a floor on the floor pattern, as contrapuntal rhythms collide, reflect and multiply  in the disappearing void of cold, yet dense sonic backdrops.

“Kaia” sets the tone for much of the EP, and Charlotte expounds on a very intense creative relationship with her home, but where Biosphere and Mental Overdrive found wide open spaces in their music, Charlotte finds more of a dialogue between a dance floor and it’s very many different dialects. From the jacking House arrangements of “Mopped Jacks” and “Tellstainnj”to the Ghetto effervescent “Noir” and back to the tribal overload of “Kaia”, Charlotte’s feet stay firmly planted on the dance floor, but they gravitate towards the outer fringes of four-four club music.

Working closely with the people at Cómeme on this release, the label’s spirit is definitively present on this release, emphasising the carefree nature of a party as scattered diatribe. Hidden Tracks is Charlotte Bendiks’ most consolidated effort to date and as she bounces out of the extended EP with the vivacious “Noir”, Charlotte Bendiks leaves us asking for more.

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.”

Album of the Week: Welcome to Paradise II

Young Marco’s idea of paradise is not some image of a beach, palm trees or an exotic location, but rather a sound. It’s the sound of what he calls Italian Dream House between 89-93 and in his second instalment of “Welcome to Paradise”, he compiles some of the best examples of this style of music yet again for our listening pleasure. Tropical sonic landscapes, featuring percussive melodies interlaced with House beat arrangements and sinewy synths that disappear in the ether as soon as they touch your ear, cultivate a mood across the double LP compilation that speaks to something close to our hearts at Jæger. With an emphasis on melody and harmony and a beat that evokes the origins of House music, “Welcome to Paradise” is playful yet majestic, and never pretentious about its origins. Some might draw parallels to Balearic Beat, but this is close as we’ll get to the origins of House music from the European continent.

Showcasing familiar standards in the genre from the likes of 707 Boys and Sasha, the compilation brings back fond memories of old favourites while opening up a new generation to these significant wonders from the past. There is an air of joy in every cut Young Marco selects and holds onto a feeling of pure contentment through the compilation that finds its way to us via his Safe Trip label. If there ever was a DJ that would be in the knowledgeable position to catalogue this style of music, it would be Young Marco and he does it with the experience of a selector that stands in then upper echelons of House music.

Deep, luxurious and soothing, Welcome to Paradise takes us a mile away from the pressures of a weekday, in the rapturous calm engulfing waves of some the best music from a lost era through one of the greatest collectors of music of our time, Young Marco.

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.  

A new world awaits us under ground

In the cold, sobering light of day on a Sunday morning our thoughts yet again drift to Blå and its uncertain future. Today Brenneriveien is abustle with wares and folks as the weekly market goes about its business and it’s hard to believe that a mere few hours earlier a violent incident wrestled the fate of the Oslo clubbing institution into uncertain water again. At 2:30AM that very same morning an armed assailant had shot four people; two doormen, a Blå employee and a guest in an incident outside the club that could possibly sever the wispy thread Blå had been hanging from since the authorities had tried to revoke its license last year. First and foremost our thoughts go out to the brave folks on the door and the Blå that literally took a bullet for us, the guest that got caught in the crossfire, and the entire team at Blå that had been working so tirelessly this past year to make Blå incident free and safe for the music enthusiasts that patronise it.

After last year’s turmoil that saw Blå’s license being revoked by the licensing authorities on the request of the Police, but eventually renewed for a probationary period, this incident certainly doesn’t bode well for the fate of the cultural hub of Oslo. But I’d like to suggest this isolated incident is cause for greater alarm as the very sanctity of club culture is under threat from a new kind of patronage. The authorities and moralists will no-doubt be firmly saddled on their high-horses today, eager to point a finger at someone, and it will be Blå and Hip Hop that will almost definitely bare the brunt of their accusations, but for me this incident is just another indicator in a long line of experiences that suggest the very essence of club culture is being infiltrated by people that have no business there and it’s killing the experience for the rest of us, the people that love the music, the artists, the DJs and most importantly the dance floor that has essentially shaped the very thing of what we are today.

Whether it be Hip Hop, House, Techno or even Punk, the very constitution of clubbing, is ingrained in the music, and the people that band together around said music. Everyone is welcome, but this might not be for everyone, and if you’re bringing a gun to a party you’re there for the wrong reasons. Concealing a weapon, the assailant had certainly come there with a premeditated violent encounter in mind and that person should in no way should represent the people that had come out to see Kool G perform on the night. People Like Jan Steigen and Jorgen “Joddski” Nordeng (Raggabalder Riddim Rebels) who I’d bumped into earlier that evening on their way to the concert. They and the extensive crew around them, the tireless supporters and purveyors of Hip Hop music in Oslo are the true faces of this subculture in Oslo, but when an incident like that happens, the narrow and ignorant minds turn to the face value, and people like this young, irrational assailant becomes the common denominator for it all. Immediately associations with violence, gun culture and criminal activity crops up in light of the genre and the sub culture and they forget all about the majority that and focus on a minority at the forefront of an isolated incident.

Many will no doubt turn to Hip Hop’s lyrics and their associations with gang culture, holding it up as validation of this type of behaviour, but to this is like saying all horror films inspire serial killers. For a music born and bred in the impoverished suburbs of America, where gang culture and criminal behaviour was an everyday reality, it’s only natural that the music references it. You are a product of your environment and anybody engaged in a creative pursuit will always be influenced about what’s around you. So to blame Hip Hop for inciting and encouraging the kind of behaviour we witnessed at Blå is incredibly vague, and just plain obtuse.

This incident should be considered for what it was, the irrational behaviour of a very confused young mind. Who brings a gun to a party and shoots four people for not being granted entry into a club? What are your cognitive processes that would lead to you harming another individual with the intent of fatally injuring them, all for the sake of the last 30 minutes of opening time? It’s clear that even if he was some kind of gangster, this was not a gang related incident. He wasn’t shooting at other gangsters but at innocent employees just doing their job and keeping a bunch of music enthusiasts safe from harm. It’s rumoured that he was known by the police as previous offender and possibly even as a right wing sympathiser. If that is the case is this not a terror attack?

Because, today that event and that single individual threatens one of Oslo’s finest cultural institutions;  a livelihood for everybody from the staff to the DJs that work out of the venue; and a way of life for the rest of us that just want to indulge simple pleasures, forget about the mundane and dance the night away listening to our favourite music and socialising with other people in the context of the music. The actions of individuals like the gunmen at Blå threaten to destroy this very existence, and for me it extends from this extreme, to the guy that thinks it’s ok to grope girls on the dance floor; the people that verbally abuse a DJ when they’re not playing their song; and those folks that generally just ooze disrespect the nature of club culture. It’s from them that I urge we take back the night and return clubbing to it’s rightful subterranean hollow as a subculture. To those that are new to this, but respect what it’s all about, you may join us, but for those that believe they can impose their narrow minded, ignorant and obtuse views and actions on us, this is not for you, so we urge you to stay away as we take our counterculture back. A new world awaits us under ground.

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

Album of the Week: Goldie – The Journey Man

Almost twenty years on from his last solo outing Goldie returns to the album format to put any doubts of his proficiency in the studio to rest. The Journey Man suggest Drum n Bass is far from resigned to the echelons of history and it took one of its founding fathers to establish it in a modern context for the rest of us. Where the genre has certainly fallen into a kitsch stylised version of itself, Goldie has breathed new life into the genre with his latest creation, and in some very fine ways returned it into the loving care of its urban roots. If ever there was anybody to represent these roots it would be Goldie.

The statesman for Drum n Bass, Goldie is the enigmatic figurehead of Metalheadz, an institution of the genre and beyond, who have inspired countless artists across the broad spectrum of electronic music. A natural showman, DJ and who would have thought it, actor, Goldie is a poseur with the talent to back it up and as social commentator and music expert his criticisms always tend to hit the nail on the head. As an artist thus, he can’t quite just release a piece of music, he has to make a statement and for The Journey Man that statement is bold, unique, cutting a discerning path through the stale repetitive traditions of music.

Based on the typical foundation of drum n bass, The Journey man is atypical of the banal functionalism and paint-by-numbers nature established genres tend to go in. Slowing down the excessive tempos of the past and finding some human dimension through vocals and sweet plaintive melodic- and harmonic phrasing, Goldie has managed to open up an entirely new dimension in the Drum n Bass genre. The grit from his earlier work remains however and although Goldie as a person has probably fallen for the trappings of luxury, as is his right, the music retains the sound of an urban sprawl. Hi-hats dusted with distortion, indignant kicks breaking out of the confines of their frequency range and deep growling bass-lines sneering with the full effect of Goldie’s midas beam, coalesce in fervent visceral arrangements.

At the same time The Journey Man shows a softer side to the hard man from Walsall, as songs like “Mountains” and “This is not a love song” relay a gentler Goldie, the sweet innocent person behind the braggadocio of a tv personality. These songs also showcase Goldie’s vast musical range as he touches on elements of R&B and Jazz and combine them with his rich, albeit familiar electronic palette. Goldie proves Drum n Bass is certainly alive and well, but has shown that it can do with breaking out of it’s strict confines on The Journey Man, and its something we definitely is worth listening to.

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?

Album of the week: Various – Lifesaver 3

Live at Robert Johnson are back in the recorded- and physical format with Lifesaver 3. Always a reliable instrument by which to gauge the way which the tide of club music is turning, the lifesaver compilations mark their third installment with familiar names like Lauer, Roman Flügel, Massimiliano Pagliara and Fort Romeau – Artists and DJs with close ties to the Frankfurt institution. Individually they cover the broad scope of electronic club music, but for Lifesaver 3 their was clearly a collective intent behind their work. With the majority of the artists favouring a DIY electronic sound with direct link to Detroit the pulse of Electro runs through the heart of Lifesaver 3.

Each putting their own spin on the genre, from Lauer’s upbeat delights from an eighties synth palette to TCB’s stripped back ghetto variation on Electro, artists walked outside the confines of House and Techno’s rigid formulas for Lifesvaer 3. It’s only Roman Flügel, Fort Romeau and Felix Strahd that stick to a four on the floor arrangement, and in the context of the compilation it does come across as a little stilted and stale, but not without their own individual beauty as prime examples from these artists.

It’s Benedikt Frey that makes the most significant mark on the compilation, delving in dark and morose soundscapes, delivering one of the most unique tracks on the compilation and a great example of his artistic voice. Benedikt Frey is certainly one of the most exciting artists around today and with a few releases on LARJ already, he represents the label and the club’s innate ability in finding those rarefied gems in electronic music. Theirs is a unique ability to keep pushing at the boundaries of club music, both in the recorded format and through the experience, and Lifesaver 3 establishes this yet again.

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.

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.

Album of the week: Chmmr – Auto

We’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for Chmmr’s debut album, Auto to make it our way, and it’s with great pleasure that we can finally add it to our record collection as our album of the week. Lauded by peers like Øyvind Morken and Magnus International, way before we even heard a single note from it, Auto is Even Brenden crystallising his Chmmr alias in the album format, after a few spontaneous EPs on the Full Pupp label, the foster home for the quirky and unusual sounds of Norwegian electronic music.

Chmmr’s music bounds with charm and grace on Auto. Playing in an eighties electronic palette of machines, where percussive arrangements are thin on the ground and synths evoke winsome dreamscapes, Brenden creates a very colourful diorama of visceral melodic encounters. He infects his productions with a tangible humanity, leaving his personable touch hovering over the keys long after they’ve been recorded. Leaving the parts quite dry and not overtly processed there’s rawness to Auto, and you almost get the sense that Brenden is in the room with you, playing his instruments just for you.

Combining syncopated Disco rhythms with melodies and harmonies that travel the world over, Auto defies tags like nu-disco and Balearic and adheres to an enduring quality. Alongside this Brenden displays a unique music ability, using complicated harmonic arrangements, inverting chords and using unusual dissonant moments to resolve his phrases, without ever losing sight of the beauty in the simplicity he manages to capture. Melodies remain quite focussed and obstinate in their repetition, offering balustrade for the complicated harmonic movements entangling itself around the polyrhythms of the percussion.

The album reaching our shelves has been worth the wait, and we are in firm agreement with the common consensus that this is one of the best albums to be released so far this year. We only needed a moment to realise it and it took very little discussion to make this our album of the week.

Captain Credible and his sentient music

In the days following a Captain Credible appearance in Jæger’s basement for Notam, a little piece of the Norwegian producer’s next EP remained behind. Fantasy Mansion is part EP, part sound installation, part instrument, part sentient being, and for the last week it’s been living on the landing of our staircase, quietly lying dormant until you plug your headphones and it springs to life with series of random beeps and noise.

It’s a simple exposed chip, featuring a little more than a blinking red LED, a headphone jack, a light sensor  and a couple of small buttons and is an extension of the EP rather than a preview. Containing none of the original material from the EP, it’s an instrument producing random sounds with a the kind of liberty only an artificial intelligence could. I recognise some of the sounds and patterns it generates as random realisations of what follows on the composed version Fantasy Mansion.

Fantasy Mansion is Captain Credible’s second release in a chip form, and follows on from Dead Cats in 2015. Part chiptune, part IDM and part concept, these two releases follow a specific conceptual strain from the artist Daniel Lacey-McDermott in which a complex array of concepts inform his methods that result in these uniquely packaged EPs. He solders every chip by hand in limited number as the physical embodiment of his releases, and even though they make pretty, functional objet d’art there’s much more to this music than meets the eye.

In the days following my first encounter with Fantasy Mansion I arrange to meet Daniel in a sunny spot to talk about his latest EP, the methods behind creating them and how a PCB constitutes an EP.

I’ve been playing around on your “EP” at Jæger.

Did you come up with anything good?

No, but I did have a lot of fun. I’m curious did you use it to create the album?

I used it a little bit, for some sounds, but the music is so convoluted, programmed and processed that it is hard to recognise. I do however build all my instruments, it’s part of my ethos. By building the instruments I play at a concert or to compose music, I try to move the abstraction layer one step down, so that I’m not guided as much by other people’s choices in instrument design.

Is it completely analogue?

No, some of them will be analogue, and some of them will just be controllers. The most important aspect is how you use it and how it invites you to use it. For many years I’ve been building instruments out of found objects. I’ve been very focussed on the functionality of the instrument, conscious of how I’m shaping the creativity by controlling the parameters of the instruments.

Is it about a tactile thing thing for you?

Yes, I also have this weird duality where I’m making instruments and then using them. When I’m building instruments, I’m building instruments for somebody that’s going to make music with them, and I tend to think how can I build these instruments to influence the way the music is composed.

Recently it’s also been very much tied up to the aesthetic of the instruments. I’ve become more aware of how the appearance of an instrument influences how you use it. Before It’s been more about a practical observation like how many strings a guitar has limits you to how many notes you could play simultaneously.

Is this something that started for you through an education?

No I studied phonetics and linguistics in Trondheim and recently I did a bachelor’s degree at the arts academy in Oslo, but I wasn’t there much… I was on tour.

I had a very utopian idea about the field of modern arts was going, but it wasn’t anything like that. I should’ve expected, it’s all  about networking, following the current paradigm, and being relevant, and not so much about free expression, which is what I would like it to be.

Do you feel that you were very constricted by the institution of art?

No, it was  more that you were expected to deliver something within a paradigm with its own innate values and focus on areas that I wasn’t that interested in. Like stacking pieces of wood in a corner of a room is interesting art, but when that’s the only accepted form of expression, then it becomes forced and uninteresting. My utopian idea of what the field of arts should be like is obviously ridiculously naive and impossible to implement in real life.

Was your sole focus on the sound and sound art?

Yes I had done a bunch of installations, and my live performance was my main focus. During my first two years, there was a professor that was very interested in what I was doing, art as algorithms, which went completely over the heads of the others and he had to leave.

At what point did you start making the instruments and how did you get into it?

In around 2007. What happened was that I had made a bunch of music and was asked to play a concert. I looked into what the norm was for playing electronic concerts during this time, and it looked like you were supposed to stand behind a laptop with a trackpad and check your emails while your music was being played in winamp. (laughs) I didn’t want to do it so I decided to build a set of instruments that would be intuitive to use and improvise on, but that would also be explanatory to the audience.

In the way you can see a bass guitarists play a note or a drummer hit a beat, I built my instruments in modules so I had a specific module that does a specific thing that is very audible in the soundscapes.

So there’s a visceral association for the audience between the instrument and the sound?

That’s the idea, but I realise that it gets a bit hectic and confusing.

It would at least make it very entertaining to watch though.

Yes, and for me it wouldn’t be fun to just sit behind the laptop and press play,  

To what end do you make these instruments for recording, since this a completely different context where there’s no audience on the physical plain?

In recording their purpose is to force me to work in specific ways, through limitations and the possibilities of the hardware. I also build software instruments and effects that I use in the production process.

For Fantasy Mansion, did you make any of the instruments with an underlying concept in mind, even if it’s only in the subtext?

There definitely is a lot in the subtext that I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to get. This album has a lot to do with my fascination with quantum mechanics and parallel universes and the work of Max Planck. When it comes to the instruments, inadvertently yes I specifically made instruments for this release, although that wasn’t the intention at the time, it just happens.

And the PCB  that’s now hanging at Jæger was one of those instruments?

Yes, I used an early prototype of it for inspiration and for sounds. For example: That circuit board is very simple so most of the work is in the code. While I was programming it, I recorded all the noises it made. Often I’ll  go back to a recording I made weeks ago and find that it made something really interesting and I have no idea how I came to make it do that, but then at least I have the recordings.

That’s an incredibly organic process from designing the instruments to the end result. Was there anything you were specifically trying to achieve with this album in terms of sound?

I was actually going for a cleaner, simpler sound than I’ve made before. I’ve released a similar circuit board EP about two years ago, which was also a step into a cleaner soundscape from the stuff I released before that again. (Laughs) I suppose in ten years it would be House.

Why a PCB?

I’m very fascinated with the concept of sentience, intelligence and artificial intelligence. And the fact that there is no real way to define sentience or the sense of self in an objective way. I’ve always been interested in making things that seem to live, and things that are unpredictable, to the extent that you have no idea why it’s doing what it’s doing, but at the same time coherent, so it seems like it’s taking conscious choices.

I wanted to compose music that would convey this as strongly as possible, and the most obvious way to do that in a sensible way is to build a platform that is able to make music that is randomly generated in a set of rules that is fake sentience. Which is why I have the tagline sentient instrument on the circuit board.

So the circuit board is in fact not the album, but rather an extension of the album, taking on a life of its own after the fact?

Yes.

It’s also really redefining ideas of composition, performance and reception that have been incredibly ingrained in our modern listening experience.

Yeah, exactly, but that’s a very post-modernist way of viewing music really, as a fixed recording, that’s defined by a start and an end. The content is crystallised, but the content is not always going to be interesting.

Do you think there will come a time when perhaps there is no content to your music?

Where everything is generative? I am sure there will and I hope it’s before I start making House, because generative House might be entirely indistinguishable from ordinary House. (Laughs)

The idea is to release three EPs and this is the second. The first one was 100 copies and when you plugged your headphones in it started playing an infinitely long song, but it would always play the same infinitely long song. And the second one takes it more into the realm of interaction but at the same time, it gives the circuit board a bit more control than if you were to perhaps use it as an instrument. It occasionally moves notes, deletes beats, transposes your music or just deletes everything and starts again.

It’s completely algorithmic of course and pre-defined to an extent. When you turn it on it samples the electromagnetic radiation there and then and it samples the level of light twice (with a small break in between) and then adds those numbers together to get it’s random seed. That number is going to be different every time you turn it on. And interestingly enough one percent of background radiation is from the big bang, so one percent of the composition is the end of the universe.

And the third release?

I haven’t made it yet obviously, but I have a few prototypes that might come to fruition. I want to base it on the same tiny chip. I like to use something underpowered to do something more complicated than what it’s supposed to. Most of the work of this last EP is about cramming enough code onto the chip. It’s completely full, you couldn’t fit another byte of code on there. But the third one might become an audio processing device which will pitch incoming audio up and down and modulate it in some other ways and the idea is that it will be a sentient universal remixing device.

It seems that you have a very clear purpose in taking away the human control in your music.

Yes, that it’s a running theme in these. The sentience of the device requires that you take away some control from the person operating it.

Which is completely the opposite of your live show, which all about introducing your human impulses to the music.

You’d think, but then you are assuming you know what I’m doing. (Laughs) It’s set up in a pretty complicated manner, so there’s a lot that can go wrong, and I’d like to keep it like that because when things go wrong and I don’t understand what’s happening interesting shit happens that I definitely would not be able create if I knew what I was doing.

 

*Fantasy Mansion is out 23rd of June.
*Catch Captain Credible on stage live at Hærverk on the 23rd of June.
*The next Notam night at Jæger is on the 17th of October.

A Deep Soul – Kerri Chandler

The legend of Kerri Chandler’s immense appreciation for music, sound and the dance floor is one that has been well documented in the past. Tales of the New Jersey DJ standing on the dance floor, mid-set tweaking levels remotely; tuning systems before a gig; and remixing tracks on the fly, have rippled through clubland since the eighties. It paints a picture of an artist completely invested in the musical experience that goes way beyond the perfunctory role of a DJ, and assumes a position somewhere between technician, DJ and artist whenever he gets behind a pair of decks. In a XLR8R interview he talks at length about his processes: “I’ll go through each speaker in the room and I’ll listen. I’ll listen to all the crossover points. I’ll listen to the range of the room. I’ll listen to noise of the ceiling vibrating. I like to know the room very intimately — and then I try to get the best sound I can out of that place.” It’s this meticulous approach that sees Chandler feature in as many tech magazines as music publications , with interviewers getting caught up in the nerd culture surrounding Djing and music, but as Chandler says in that very same interview: “It’s not just for me…I might be one of the DJs there, but I want to see everyone do well. I don’t want people to just say ‘Kerri was great,’ I want everyone to say ‘That night was wonderful.’”

It’s a desire to cultivate the perfect atmosphere for a good night that stems from Chandler’s roots as an integral part of the New Jersey scene where places like Zanzibar and people like Tony Humphries created their own community away from the limelight of New York. That was the springboard” explains Chandler in an interview with Attack Magazine, and “Tony was the voice” . In a region and time where delinquency had a fast grip on society, Chandler and friends opted for a more positive perspective. “Our attitude was, rather than going out and shooting someone or robbing someone, let’s make some music and have some parties.”

Chandler grew up in East Orange in New Jersey, a neighbourhood that rapper Treach made famous by saying: “If you make it out of East Orange without getting shot or stabbed, you’ll be alright.” In an area where a life in crime was an accepted way of life, there wasn’t much in the way of leisure time other than going to church and making music for a young Chandler. “All we had was hope, gospel and some kind of raw talent” explains Chandler to Attack ieditor Greg Scarth and while many escaped their situation through drugs and music, Chandler turned exclusively to the latter for his escape from this harsh reality — a gruesome reality where Chandler often lost friends and loved ones to violent crimes.

Kerri Chandler was a precocious talent that had started out working as an studio intern at a mere 14 years of age, went on to become a production manager at a film studio at the age of 15 and ended up back in music as a head engineer at a studio at the tender age of 16. From engineering he went into production, making tracks for the R&B singers and rappers that would pass through the studio. He instantly realised he had an innate ability for this and started making music and edits for himself, mostly to play at Club America, a local club New Jersey club that became famous exactly because a young Kerri Chandler had come into prominence there. Those edits and original pieces had found the ear of the local DJ community through Tony Humphries no less, who had started playing Chandler’s creations on the radio early on. Chandler was instantly welcomed by his elders, as a much younger statesman of the sound of House sweeping across from Chicago to Detroit to New York and New Jersey, an infectious wind blowing across the east coast, with each city putting it’s own spin it. In New Jersey’s purported Latin influence helped shaped this sound, but Chandler certainly added a new idiosyncratic touch to his interpretation. He might have been the new kid in the block, but he always had the staying power that in many ways outlived the people he looked up to.

Channeling those gospel roots into House’s more soulful dimensions, his creations brought a new emotional depth to House music that got stamped with the term Deep House, almost instinctively.  “Every song I’ve ever done I actually have a meaning behind it”, explains Chandler to XLR8R’s Reisa Shanaman back in January 2016. “There is a real reason I wrote this song, and it’s usually something to get off my mind or something I was going through and I wanted to write about it so I could kind of release [it] out of my inner being.” Merging gospel with Latin influences and the sound of House from Chicago, Chandler fell into a sound all his own through externalising this spiritual depth with deep chords; improvised keys with a progressive touch; soulful vocals; and a lively percussion arrangement lifted straight from Disco. Although New York had access to the high-end studios, the sounds of Garage and Nu-Groove had nothing on Chandler’s prodigious production talents and his early works like Atmosphere and Raw Grooves still hold their own a couple of decades on in the contemporary House scene. While Deep House has gone through its own development in Europe, currently occupying a corner in House music where minimalist electronic arrangements and a lo-fi sound aesthetic dominates, Chandler’s music, mostly found on his Kaoz Theory label, is always a welcomed distraction from the epochal trends. His signature kick always bouncing out in the front of a track like a prancing horse, never dominates the elements that infect his productions with melody and atmosphere; the things that relay that eternal depth to Kerri Chandler’s music.

He easily extends this to the booth in sets that fuse DJing with the studio. He was one of the first DJs to bring a sequencer to the booth, and has always embraced new technologies. When Midi was introduced he upgraded his Roland drum machines to incorporate this new incredible feature and enhance his music through technology. He was one of the first to use timecode DJ systems and a laptop, enjoying the freedom of bringing your entire record collection on the road with you.

With all the advancements in technology, Chandler today enjoys bringing his entire studio with him, remixing tracks on the fly, and even creating new pieces spontaneously. He is always one step beyond in technology and interpreting the role of the DJ, making each Kerri Chandler DJ set a unique experience. Throughout all of this Kerri Chandler has remained that humble character as the kid on the block making tracks. Even though it was initially thought he’d be a little more than a flash in a pan, he’s outshone most of the very people that came to this conclusion. Today he firmly occupies that place on the steps of House music’s legacy, not only as the original institution of the genre, but also as an active purveyor for the future of the genre.

Album of the Week: Svømmebasseng – Broder

We wade up to the shallow end, into the cooler waters of the indie synth pop/disco sound of Svømmesbasseng for this week’s album of the week. Always a welcomed sound at Jæger, Svømmebasseng bring an infectious blend of icy electronics, warms bass and attainable melodies through sweet vocals that always manage to capture a sense of a feeling through their music. Broder follows on from their 2014 album Fløte, with the band sticking to the sound we’ve come to know from them as one of the most enigmatic bands in Norway. They channel a fierce musical ability into music with a pop-sensibility without succumbing to commodity. In a tradition that extends back to Röyksopp and The Kings of Convenience, their productions are gentle arrangements, easy on the ear and bright on atmospheres.

Broder uphold the tradition, with thin guitars playing simple arpeggio’s while keys and synths pad out the room for vocals float softly above the fray. With syncopated hats and a formidable kick, the drums bring a unique dimension to the tracks, always on the cusp of breaking away, keeping the energy at a level, that takes the melodic and harmonic parts from the cognitive to the corporeal. Where Svømmebasseng are set apart from their contemporaries, is that they make music specifically for the dance floor, keeping a tradition of Disco alive in their distinctive Scandic accent. the manage to channel that energy we’ve come to hear from them on our stage to recorded format, exceptionally well on Broder, which will keep us dancing throughout this week and beyond.

* Look back an interview with band here as they went back to back with Laurence Guy.

Affirmative: An Interview with Karima F

“I understand the mechanism of DJing is to create a good vibe, but at one point you have to say if you don’t like it go home.” And there it is, right at the end of our conversation; that firebrand determination that cuts right to the core of it all, feigning the calculated rhetoric some DJs play up to for an unbridled honesty that’s rare in the interview situation. “Let’s just have a conversation”, I urged Karima Andrea Furuseth (Karima F) at the beginning of our interview, indeed hoping for exactly these moments. As an active journalist working for various music and news publications in Norway and beyond, Karima has been in this situation enough times, albeit at the other end of the table, to understand the subtext of promo and enterprise that are embedded in the interview context to forego them, and we’re able to sit down in the spirit of a simple honest exchange.

It was through RETRO – a past residency she held at Jæger alongside Daniel Gude (DJ Nuhhh) –  that I would be introduced to Karima, and our acquaintance would not by way of any literal language, but by way of a DJ set. I remember it clearly, the first bars of a Theo Parrish track bursting at the seams with a formative kick snare arrangement, opening an early set by the Norwegian DJ during, pummeling a nascent dance floor into submission, with no quarter given. At RETRO she might have “felt a necessity to catering to an audience”  as a “warm-up DJ”, but at no point did she ever concede to public opinion or institutionalised dogmas, in any noticeable way at least. Even before I’d spoken a single word to Karima, I realised there was something curious, defiant and bold behind the character at the decks. “I want to get people on the floor with no time to spare” she muses about her sets. An unrelenting figure in the booth, a Karima F set is poignant, direct and affirmative, establishing the dance floor instead of pandering to it, “a constant battle” to avoid the obvious and to cultivate a temperament uniquely hers at the helm.

It’s always unclear where a DJ’s musical awareness comes to the fore, but Karima can pinpoint it exactly. It all derives from her formative years where she had “made a very conscious decision to be culturally involved at an early age”. Born into a very “protective environment” in the suburbs of Oslo to a Norwegian mother and an Algerian father , Karima’s youth was “not exactly conservative, but not necessarily culturally aware either”. She had picked up the violin in an early effort to “fit in with the cool girls” in Tåsen where her only exposure to music had been through the ubiquitous sounds of Celine Dion, but those were mere tentative steps towards her chosen profession, and she basis no relevance on them today. In a house where there was little in the way of creativity, except folk music and the odd Raï composition, Karima had found a very early interest in music, but nothing quite solidified in her reserve to pursue it at any significant level until the age of 19. It would only be only then that DJing first arrived as a creative outlet for Karima. Although already culturally conscious having picked up the pen as a burgeoning journalist writing for the Øya-published fanzine “Fan”, Karima “wasn’t really aware of what a DJ entailed”. After being asked by the fanzine to play some records for a festival opening party, she thought “sure, I can press play.”  

Today Karima F has pressed play from Panorama bar to Øya Festival, and spends her time between Berlin and Oslo, as a full time DJ and a part time writer. As a DJ her ”selections have become more streamlined” today. Taking her time to cultivate something more prolific, she feels she has a “better Idea of how (she) wants the set to go”, which during RETRO was more about “acting on impulses.” Karima’s approach had always been a calculated one. “When I got my decks I spent an hour each morning before going into the office”, she reminisces “practising for a year, just to master beat-matching and then spending another year just getting comfortable enough to actually play in a club.”

Feeling like she was “tricked into it at 19”, Karima knew the booth was for her when during that first event, a receptive audience started “throwing their hands in the air and stage diving” to The Communards. “Wow if every night is like this…”  she thought at the time, before adding with some satire, “I’ve never had a night like that again”. It didn’t go unnoticed and shortly after Karima would be approached by Jeff Niels (Mandagsklubben) to establish a new night at Fisk & Vilt, one that saw Karima pushing against the grain with the encouragement of Niels. “He said to me ‘there are too many good DJ’s in Oslo’” so “on the merit of being really bad I was given the job” she says with a simper. Karima has always been very coquettish, never taking herself too seriously, infecting enough humour into a storyline, without making slight of the facts underlying the matter.

It’s exactly in that spirit in fact that she’s established “Affirmative Action” today, a new residency at Jæger that “seeks to give the unrepresented white male DJs their contested place in the European electronic music scene.” With her tongue provocatively in cheek Karima approaches issues of gender inequality in the booth, an issue she’s been publicly vocal about in the past, with this new night only in subtext. A subversive DJ and social commentator, Karima is intent on changing the patriarchal hierarchy from within, but not by way of “using (female djs) as a quota in the booking program”. It’s about establishing female DJs as an equal to their male counterparts, and not using gender as some kitsch marketing strategy, and that’s why Karima will be booking men as well with her first guest the “singular” Kosmische producer and DJ, Barnt.

As if cued by kismet, Bob Dylan’s “The times they are a changin’” starts playing over the café stereo, and I sense a congenial air leave us as we approach a more serious waters, and I have to ask Karima; do you think the times are indeed changing? “ It has changed” marks Karima, but she still feels it has a long way to go. “I was looking through my record collection”, she says by way of elaborating, “and I was disappointed that I don’t have more women in my selection. Men are overrepresented in the genre I’m interested in.” She mentions Avalon Emerson, Shanti Celeste, Kelly Lee Owens, Aurora Halal, Steffi, Karen Gwyer, Jayda G, Inga Mauer, Powder, Willow, Lena WIlikens and Charlotte Bendiks as current role models, but still thinks “it’s weird that women are noticeably absent” at the same extent men are present. “My theory is, because it is so accessible, there’s some sort of protectionism going on”, she continues. “Using language to turn it into a cult to exclude people because there’s some sort of ritual that you need to know, and by intellectualising it makes it seem more unattainable than it really is.” But it’s really “easy being a DJ” according to Karima and it seems that “with everything there seems to be some institution that defines what’s right and what is wrong” and that extends to the world of DJs and electronic music producers. “If so many men make it, it must be easy”, says Karima with a tight-mouthed smirk and we’re back in the friendly grip of humour.   

It’s unsure how Karima is able to expresses this in the abstract void of electronic club music, and especially with fewer female producers falling it into her category, but what is certain is that music has always worked within a socio-political landscape for Karima. When she made her “conscious decision to be culturally involved” at a young age it was in the backdrop of living in Hoybråten, “a really horrible place” where Karima was constantly teased for her Muslim heritage. She had however found a resilience in the “white male music” from bands like Jokke & Valentinerne and gravitated towards the community around Blitz, a local haunt for the politically aware that embraced the sound of Punk at that time.

At the same time, Karima’s musical identity would start to take shape, aided by some fundamental figures around her. “A boyfriend at the time” would introduce her to Tom Waits’ “Rain Dogs” and The Streets’ “A grand don’t come for free”, opening up a world of new musical discovery away from the pop standards of her youth. Coinciding with a job at Platekomapniet it would lead to a serious investment in music taking shape. “As a result of the job, I listened to everything” explains Karima, who started indexing music with a digger’s approach, even before she knew the term existed. I ask her what she’s digging today. “I’m trying to catalogue the history of jungle and hardcore”,  she says.  It’s all part of Karima’s desire to “map out everything” and with so many DJs and producers “referencing Jungle and Hardcore in music” today, albeit at more conservative tempos, Karima’s curiosity has been piqued.

During our conversation she cites a short list of musical influences that have “opened a door” to a new style or genre, including her latest Jungle/Hardcore infatuation, but at the top of that list is  “Brigitte Mandlied” , a “musical mentor” of sorts according to Karima. It was Birgitte that took Karima from the “white male” music of her rebellious teenage years and into “disco and eighties groove” from where she developed as a DJ, going through new rave and eventually landing in the dance floor fundamentals of House and Techno that she is known for today. She’s favoured an eclectic approach I’ve found through my experience of her sets, but there’s always a palpable energy underlying everything she touches from Disco to Techno, which brings it all together quite comprehensively as a set.

It was in Mälmo, embarking on a fine-art degree in her early twenties, that Karima really started to envision being able to DJ exclusively and the Karima F sound or temperament we know today started to solidify through Disco. It was there she had found a DJ community that was “incredibly welcoming” and an environment in which it was “easier to do things”, nurturing a latent talent further in her through the experience of others. “All my friends were older men collecting records”, she remembers and she would often follow one them on flea market jaunts in search of rare Disco records, picking up the kind of knowledge only experience can bring with an open-minded resolve. Although Karima still doesn’t consider herself a collector, it could be here where her archival tendencies took a definite shape. She quickly found a residency of sorts, playing at a local cocktail bar through those very same friends that took her under her wing, and it wasn’t long after she was hosting bigger gatherings in the area too with the likes of (Henning) Telephones.

Her time in Mälmo was also significant for two other reasons; it’s where she first “got ruined by the idea of institution” through university, and it’s also where she would come to “love writing”. Never quite a creative outlet for Karima, writing certainly propelled her into the public eye, and magazines like NATT&DAG would give her a platform from which she could express that musical curiosity that has followed her throughout the different aspects of her working life.

Today writing however has become institutionalised again for Karima as it’s “caught up in the framework of something dull like a job”. While she’s aware of her “privileged” position as a writer/DJ, she imagines a day where she “would stop writing and just DJ”. She’s currently so enthralled with music that when she’s writing writing she can’t help but think: “why don’t I have the same feelings about it as I do with music”.

It’s clear that there is an inherent passion to Karima’s work in the booth, whether it’s culturally invested origins in music; her socio-political activism outlook from the perspective of music; or her simple curiosity in mapping out the entire history of music. Our conversation winds down as we talk about life in Berlin, and how she most enjoys “going out to listen to her friends play” in the German capital. In the simple honesty of a conversation over the course of an hour, we’ve exhausted Karima’s story leading up to this point. Even in this mere fragment of time, Karima has confirmed, in words what she’s established for me in that first set those two years earlier. It’s more apparent than ever that Karima F’s motivation is firmly ingrained in the music with no hint of compromise allowed. Hers is a singular path… and if you don’t like it you can go home.

Experience Captain Credible’s Fantasy Mansion

Possibly the first EP to ever be released on PCB, Fantasy Mansion by Captain Credible has been installed Jæger this week for a preview. Part album preview, part art installation, part musical instrument, the album is now up at Jæger for your listening pleasure. Channeling elements of Aphex Twin and Otto Von Schirach, Captain Credible describes his music as “punk-electronica”. At times intense cacophony at other’s serene innocence, Fantasy Mansion is an EP that lives in its own dimension. “The physical manifestation of this EP is a circuit board with buttons, a light sensor and a headphone jack. This circuit board can be played as a musical instrument, and the user can easily compose his or her own melodies. It will also generate its own beats and melodies and even occasionally modify those made by the user. It will also synchronize to external hardware like drum machines or sequencers. This EP is therefore not a finished work, but instead a starting point for further experimentation and expression by the user.” The PCB will be up in our landing leading down to our basement, so bring a set of headphones and experience it for yourself, before it’s official release date on the 16th of June.

Album of the Week: Nathan Fake – Providence

Noisy yet subtle, Nathan Fake’s return to the LP format is immediate and poignant. After an extensive  hiatus that saw the artist’s last album, Stream Days released five years ago, Providence marks a significant point in the artist’s career. It comes via Ninja Tune no less, a label that has brought made quite a significant footprint in our record collection at Jæger, and carries on in that label’s tradition of bringing different perspectives to the dance floor.

Swirling synthetics and dramatic arrangements make bold statements on Fake’s fourth studio album. Stepping completely back from any purposeful functionality and embracing an eccentric electronic palette that breaks from any traditional means. Fake focusses on a textural arrangement, layering parts upon parts to create  intense claustrophobic pieces of uncanny beauty. Fully composed, Providence sounds like a lifetime’s worth of work channeled into a mere instant of time.

Unnerving at times, but often sweet the album features a very distinct electronic palette of detuned synths and odd harmonic tones that avoid instant obvious melodic arrangements for a more oppressive and direct sound. Fake doesn’t placate his listeners and indulges in a catastrophic maelstrom of noise, organised into definitive compositions. An electronic baroque album of sorts, Providence only bears rewards for the patient listener, and when Fake indulges a single-like arrangement, like on the RVK everything falls into its right place.

Listen back to Vinny Villbass (live)

It’s not often we get to put out a live session on the blog, so this is a rare treat: Vinny Villbass recorded live in our courtyard two weeks ago. In the spirit of a bootleg, we hit record to capture the live set. Completely live and unedited, this live set features some new and old material from the Sunkissed /Jæger resident, showcasing Vinny’s adept musical hand that stretches from the studio to the booth, and to the live stage. From dub rhythms to organic House, Vinny’s music bounds with joyous occasion and a happy disposition as he cultivates a very distinct mood.

It’s very Vinny Villbass mood, and the producer/musician/dj’s sound is completely discernible here. Melodies play in synthetic textures while polyrhythms are exercised through reserved percussive parts, infecting enough colour to the arrangements through piano stabs and improvised moments. Vinny brings a humanity to this machine music and sabotaging the strict electronic measures through vocals and human imperfectness. Check out his latest EP “Skauern” on Paperecordings featured in this set.

In the Booth with Karina

With a bag full of records and a  badabing in her step Karina joined Vinny Villbass in the booth one Saturday night in May. Bringing some soul to the cold electronic palette of  House and Disco, she laid down some melodic bass-lines and old-school beats to a receptive audience on a packed dance floor in our courtyard. Karina brought an infectious physicality to her music, playing through the broad history of the dance floor from Marshall Jefferson to Boo Williams. Like a librarian, she catalogued everything from Hi-NRG to Electro House, the familiar crack of a needle on vinyl pulling the dust off old favourites and bringing them to a new audience, and putting us  in the right mood for the weekend ahead.

A guide to Jæger’s live stage for Musikkfest 2017

Musikkfest Oslo is certainly one of the most unique musical experiences out there. Featuring a host of Norwegian artists, musicians and DJs, many of which have found an audience on the world stage, it’s an enriching experience and almost seems crazy that it doesn’t cost a cent. Jæger ritually plays its part each year, bringing an electronic, and club dimension to the festival and this year the booking department has turned much of its focus on the stage with a host of live acts dominating our schedule. We took it upon ourselves to unpack them for you here, and introduce a fair few rising and established talents here…

Finnebassen

Finnebassen swaps the DJ booth for the stage in an exclusive live show for Musikkfest. Not quite unfamiliar territory for the Norwegian producer/DJ, it is a fairly new way to experience a Finnebassen performance. We’ve know his idiosyncratic productions and his incredibly enigmatic sets, but the stage show is one only reserved for unique occasions, a most recent set during the launch of our new pizza concept in April, where Finnebassen was joined by Kai Gundelach on stage. We’re told he’ll be bringing Martin Heff on this occasion, a musician that has worked closely with Finnebassen in the past, and who joined Finnebassen last year for a special Sunkissed: Live performance. Finnebassen’s DJ sets usually bring large crowds to our basement, and his live show is sure to be no different as we get a glimpse at a more intimate side to his work. Where melodic refrains exist amongst driving percussive patterns, who’ll find Finnebassen’s music, but in the context of a live show, we’ve seen it practised at more reserved tempos, bounding with a tactile emotion, but with a later timeslot the platform is wide open to take it very close to boundaries of a Finnebassen DJ set. Read an interview with Finn here and give his latest track, Soul a listen as an apt thermometer.

Charlotte Bendiks

Charlotte Bendiks is no stranger to Jæger’s stage and has opened up for Anna Schneider most recently in our basement with her live show. With releases on Mental Overdrive’s Love OD label and Cómeme she’s received international recognition for her percussive productions that tap into something primal in the dancer. In an interview with this blog from last year, she unpacks the ideas behind her music and her sets through the term body music, as “playing with sensual physicality”. Charlotte: ”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.” Music that bounds in texture through contrapuntal rhythms playing off and against each other creates a very energetic pretense while languid melodies and a palpable sensuality to her sound.

Pieces of Juno

Pieces of Juno makes her debut at Jæger for Musikkfest, rounding out a very pop-centric stage this year. Her music has beguiled and entranced audiences since 2015 with a few select EPs and singles that have found their way out into the world, most notably through the popular tv series Skam. With cinematic flair, Pieces of Juno creates provocative pop songs from electronically orchestrated sorrows and burlesque narratives that is most accurately captured through the title of her latest EP Kalopsia. Behind her expressive and delicate voice, Pieces of Juno comforts something sinister in her music that only breaks to the surface in the airy, droning dissonances that swim in and out of an ambient fog.

WNDR

A familiar face at Jæger, who can most often be spotted amongst the Mandagsklubben crew,  WNDR’s star has been on the rise for some time, and his efforts have not gone unnoticed. Freshly signed to Sony music, his latest single “Human” has seen those streaming play counts tick over like a clock on Doc Brown’s Delorean. His music incorporates elements of House, Pop & R&B, exploring trends from the most obscure corners of the musical globe and channeling them into effervescent dance floor and radio creations for a varied audience. The futuristic artist brings his newly inaugurated live show to Musikkfest this year and we’re sure “Human” will make an appearance during his set.

Baya

Baya is currently immersed in a tour for  his double EP, Oslo-Harlem, a release that dealt with concepts of masks and his relationship with his father’s visual art work. An enigmatic pop star from stage to record, Baya’s music is a fluid dialogue between accessible melodies and pop arrangements and music for the dance floor. There’s a conscious engagement with the music through subliminal concepts that we’ve unravelled before in an interview with the artist, while at the same time finding a way to engage at an attainable level with an audience. He’s developed Oslo – Harlem into an incredible live show, travelling with an impressive stage installation, where his father’s artworks combine with pop art to create a spectacular visual experience adding yet more dimensions to the extensive ideas behind the striking image of the mask.

Sex Judas

The larger than life Sex Judas is a character that germinated in the fantastical world that is Tore “OST” Jazztobakk’s mind. Tore lets his imagination run free with Sex Judas whose tawdry sexual urges and fantasies are brought to song through elements of House and Disco. With releases on Marketing-  and Optimo Music, Sex Judas has found a large audience, to whom he likes to indulge in his most debauched fantasies on the dance floor. With a release slated on Optimo later this year, including a remix from Øyvind Morken and still enjoying a small discography, the stage is Sex Judas’ and his live shows are as entertaining as they are invigorating and lustful. Never before has a fat black man from the south been so convincingly channeled by a skinny white guy from Norway.

Mutual Intentions

Mutual Intentions are back again this year to do their hybrid live, beats and DJ set, taking up the largest chunk of our early programming, with their extended artist/DJ/producer collective. Last year they came off the back of a Jazz cats album and invited Eikrem along for a show that lit up your courtyard in the late afternoon. Featuring Ivan Ave, Fredfades, Yogisoul, Ol’ Burger Beats, Mest Seff, Jawn Rice and SRAW on the roster, with a newly released album from Fredfades and an upcoming release by Ivan Ave, the Mutual Intentions crew have some new material to get out there. It’s been a busy year for them with releases by Yogisoul, Fredfades and Ol Burger beats;  a Boiler Room episode; and some really memorable visual moments like that stricking Ivan Ave video for “Every I” courtesy of Hans Jørgen Wærner, Moe Chakiri and Erik Treimann. The scene that Mutual Intentions have built up around themselves certainly feels at its most liveliest yet, and we certainly can’t get enough of it here at the blog and have really enjoyed interviews with Fredafades and Ivan Ave as well as releases from the Fredfades and Yogisoul. We’ll let Fred play us out…

Album of the week: Fredfades – Warmth

Fredfades and his ability to capture a tangible mood through his productions has touched a fair few of our favourite records over the past two years. Wether he’s working with Kristoffer Eikrem as part of the Jazz Cats project or assisting on production duties for a member of the Mutual Intentions crew, Fredfades’ productions are immediately recognisable for their dusty charm and soulful inclinations. Music with the personality of a rare 7″ found amongst cobwebs in old second hand stores are brought into the present through the contemporary voices of peers like Ivan Avenue and Yogisoul where Fred’s music flits between grey areas amongst Jazz, Hip Hop and Nuo-Soul.

Warmth, his first fully realised solo work perpetuates the Fredfades sonic aesthetic, calling on an infallible list of voices to bring that human dimension to staccato arrangements where Fender Rhodes chords and synth melodies bounce off lethargic break-beat rhythms. A healthy dose of surface noise and needles clipping against tiny scratches on vinyl bring a healthy dose of colour and personality to the record, where they bound with life. Was it John Peel that said: “Life has surface noise”? Well Warmth certainly has that idea of living life engraved in its grooves.

With bars from guests rappers like MoRuf, MoShadee, Chester Watson and of course Ivan Ave encouching on everyday living  and the soft dream-like vocal hooks from voices like Nanna B, Fredfades captures a feeling somewhere between sorrow and the changing of the seasons. There’s a sense of sweet reverie to the pieces, like being pushed slowly on a hammock by indifferent sound waves, trying to make sense of this improbable life. It’s going to be a welcomed companion on our record shelf this summer, with Fredfades  yet again setting the tone for new underground beat music in Norway and beyond.

* Pick up your copy at King Underground or at the upcoming Mutual Intentions showcase for Musikkfest Oslo. 

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’.

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.

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.

Album of the week: Talaboman – The Night Land

Axel Boman and John Talabot combine efforts as Talaboman for The Night Land, an album that brings a new dimension to House as the effervescent rhythms of Barcelona meets Nordic soundscapes. At times Balearic, at times atmospheric, always House and often unconventional, The Night Land is an eccentric album designed for the obscure corners of the dance floor. Bold, big-bodied synthesisers, hover over root pitches with indeterminable curiosity, coming to rest at their side as they crystallise in the sparse atmospheres created by synthetic reverbs and delay.

Combining Boman’s pragmatic functionality and Talabot’s latin flair for colour, the pair create a House album like a storyboard, traversing through the spheres of House music to arrive at the fringes of the familiar. There’s no singular sound around which the album is orchestrated, and it can go from the progressive lethargic thump of locked grooves like “Six Million Ways” to the serene ambient electronica of “Brutal Chugga-Chugga”. Elements of field recordings, contrapuntal percussion and unconventional  textures, make this album a lot more Balearic than either producer has attempted on his own, and inadvertently perhaps latching on to some contemporary trends.

In amongst records from the likes of Chmmr, Telephones and Tornado Wallace, The Night Land perpetuates a certain stylised inkling for a new Balearic sound in House, featuring reserved tempos and lo-fi melodic hooks. Talaboman makes it their own, doing away with some eccentricities for a more functional album, with both producers leaving their individual mark across the album, with a professionalism that eludes their lo-fi peers.

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.

 

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.

Vinny Villbass – Skauern

There’s a natural charm that comes with any Vinny Villbass track, an indefinable affinity to capture a mood and an atmosphere with a mere few strokes at the keys or a percussive loop. There’s a sense of shamanic ritual to the Norwegian producer and DJ’s approach, a dancing ritual between body and mind, man and machine that instills a sense of joy and wonder at every bar, every phrase of a new track. A clear image comes to mind when you hear it, that of Villbass in his studio, dancing between synths and drum machines as he exerts an emotional pressure on his instruments to express a most visceral language in dance music.

Skauern, Vinny Villbass’ latest edition to the Paper Recordings catalogue, does exactly that and more as it relays a sense of an emerging summer, dealing in everything from lethargic dub rhythms and quirky melodic synths, playing in some stratospheric dimension lying just beyond our reach. There’s a sense of something off-beat, possibly zany just beneath the surface and on Skauern it comes in the form of detuned synths on “En Liten Pose Selvtillit”; the tribal percussion on “Kahytten (Full Fest Versjon)” and those dub rhythms of the closing version of “Kahytten”, and that’s without going into those titles and their literal meaning.

A little bag of self doubt, it might be called, but there certainly is no sense of any of that in that or any of the other tracks on the three-track effort. Villbass’ extensive studio experience captivates and entertains with engaging melodic phrases, contrapuntal beats and a host of clever re-directions, avoiding obvious drops or white noise build-ups. On “En Liten Pose Selvtillit” we detect a sound of what could be confused as something from Pantha Du Prince, Villbass, possibly relaying a hint to his work with that producer, but most striking on that track is the key change during the bridge, which acts as a dynamic twist in the track, instilling a little serenity before embarking on its next phase.

Surprises like these set Skauern and Vinny Villbass records apart from his peers, and add that indefinable Villbass touch to House music. Skauern is charismatic and engaging for these reasons, upholding that natural charm that comes with any Villbass record.

*Vinny Villbass is back at Jæger for Badabing with Karina

Vinny Vilbass asks Karina one question

Karina, best known for her credentials as on of Ibiza’s Zoo project residents is an intriguing figure on the House and Techno underground scene. With roots in Poland, Norway, Berlin, Ibiza and Egypt, she’s a polyglot whose skills behind the decks have traversed many languages bringing nomadic gaps between cultures and music as a travelling DJ. She’s a big fan of the physical format, a staunch supporter of vinyl since becoming a DJ, and has even stamped a few of those herself with releases on God Particle and Cymawax. Preferring the versatility of the booth, it’s as a DJ where she has made her most significant mark on House and Techno with a penchant for the versatile, digging deeper and longer through the echelons of electronic music, to find a style uniquely her own.

 

Vinny Villbass you know, the Jæger, Sunkissed and Footfood resident of irrefutable charm and ability, that has been lighting up dance floors and record shelves for as long as we can remember. His burgeoning Badabing nights at Jæger has seen him invite some stellar friends to our courtyard and basement over the last few months, and as Karina joins him in this next episode, we’ve asked him to shoot her a question. There was only one question, on his mind, a question of such philosophical prowess that Karina didn’t hesitate to answer in some extensive detail.

Vinny Villbass: Your Norwegian dialect is interesting. Where are you actually from and where are you going…

Karina: Hi Vinny, well now you must know you’re delving into some deep philosophical questions there:) My dialect depends on where I am and who I’m talking to. I call it a dialecto flexible. I was born in Poland; grew up in Cairo; went to school in Norway; went back to Poland to study political science; learnt German in Berlin and spent many summers in Ibiza. My full name

is Karina Chaczbabian, and my surname is from Armenian origin, but written in Polish. It’s been misunderstood and misspelled regardless of where I find myself, and I’ve heard so many versions of it, that when I hear a new one, I just crack up laughing. I’ve even heard it pronounced “Matsjbabi”! For the most part however I’m Karina. I’ve learnt six languages and as such I feel at home in many different places, something I regard as a positive thing. But I always feel most at home on the south coast of Norway, because that’s the place I’ll always return to find a perfect balance.

Quo vadis you ask? I find it paramount to live in the present and that my thoughts never stray too far from that path, terrorising me with visions of the future and possible future scenarios. There’s nothing wrong with planning ahead, but realising that you are living in the here and now is essential to a good life. House and Techno help me focus, and when I’m mixing I’m thinking of nothing else than the music I’m hearing right there and then. It’s a form of meditation for me.

But since you asked where I’m going… Status Quo: On my way from Berlin, through Poznan (for some studio time) to Warszawa (for a special Disco set) and then on a 6AM flight to Oslo. I’m really looking forward to seeing friends and playing with you on the 20th of May! It’s been awhile since I’ve been back in Oslo and this will be my debut at Jæger. I always play vinyl and I haven’t played a rotary mixer since my gig at the Panther Room in New York, a while back so it should be good. After Oslo I’m in Kristiansand for ten days and I can’t wait to go to the forest. Then I fly to LA, it will be my first time in the City of Angels, which should be cool. After that I’m playing the vinyl only stage at the Who’s Who festival in Ensenada, Mexico. I stay a week in California between San Diego and San Francisco, before moving on to Texas, where Houston awaits, after which I celebrate my birthday in Dallas on the 23rd of June with the Creme de la Creme folks.

Following that still unsure, I’m waiting on my agent to finalise a trip to the east coast. Either way, I’m back in Europe at the end of June, got Barcelona TBC, and four gigs at the Zoo Project in Ibiza, where I’m a resident. After that you’ll find me back in Kristiansand eating shrimps and catching up on some sleep. ;)

Album of the week: Forest Swords – Compassion

As Forest Swords, UK producer, Matthew Barnes creates vast synthetic dystopian landscapes, carrying the weight of the world in slow sinuous movements trudging through the world with a lethargic determination and a flair for Gothic drama. “Compassion” is the artist’s third studio album, with the critically acclaimed “Dagger Paths” and “Engravings” marking a solitary career on the fringes of a music that has moved well into its witching hour. Breaking through during a time where artists like “The Haxan Cloak”, “Holy Other” and “Trust” were embracing a melancholic retro-active sound that got tagged with everything from “Shoe-Gaze” to “Haunted House”, Forest Swords outlived many of these contemporaries, perpetuating a sound that traversed ephemeral categorisation, withstanding the fleeting hype of an internet craze. Forest Swords has established something substantial, away from a trend-informed language of his peers, and in Compassion it has brought about his finest musical testament to date.

An album of bold, orchestral textures broods with life, relieving some of that oppressive weight from previous albums, with heavy layers stretching over a new infinite space to find a delicacy on this album I’d not witnessed before. It’s unmistakably a Forest Swords album, with attractive melodic phrases peering through the vaporous drone of synthesisers and obscure processed vocal samples, that will have you singing along to gibberish or a foreign language. New to this album, is the use of orchestral instruments/samples for Forest Sword, which emboldens the sound with large brooding legato brass lines and staccato strings that bring a dynamic turn to tracks like “Arms Out” and “Raw Language” that’s never quite existed  like this in the music of Forest Swords before. These are remarkable pieces that could appeal to diverse audiences, and in the context of the album have made a significant contribution to music in 2017.

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

Album of the week: Of Norway – The Loneliest Man in Space

Hiding in plain sight amongst the piles of records littered over the shelves of Roland’s Filter records, a stack of the same record makes a prominent pillar against one wall. Roland hands me a copy, “for Jæger”, he says, its glossy plastic sleeve demurely proclaiming its title as “The Loneliest Man in Space” by the Norwegian production duo Of Norway. “There are hints of Todd Terje there” says Roland who declares the album contains some of the best music the duo has produced to date.

Of Norway have been a significant feature on the Oslo musical landscape, both on record and in the booth, including their electric live sets. Regular features at Blå, Villa and Jæger, with releases on Bogota, Darkroom Dubs and now Connaiseur records they are not exactly newcomers and have cemented themselves in Oslo’s vast music scene distinguishing themselves amongst the purveyors of Deep House. Their name identifies their sound as that informed by the region where space and atmosphere are vital ingredients in the make-up of their music, and while their work certainly warrants some comparison to Todd Terje’s earlier work, “The Loneliest Man in Space” has definitely travelled a long distance from anything like Space Disco.

Synths emulating the void of space with percussive elements hollowing out a deep trough, Of Norway sculpts a very particular sound for the album, existing somewhere between Jean Michel Jarre’s earlier work, Trentmøller and Lauer. It’s completely captivating as a sound, and by the time Linnea Dale’s vocals kick in on “Favourite Mistake”, you really feel yourself sequestered from the daily impulses around you, quite like the loneliest man in space. Deep, intoxicating and atmospheric, these are very much album tracks, and although there are hints to Of Norway’s more dance floor compulsions from early 12″ and EPs, The Loneliest Man in Space stands alone in their young discography as a very concise work.

Album of the week: Benjamin Finger’s Ghost Figures

Benjamin Finger is nothing short of a musical polymath and his eleventh studio album, Ghost Figures show’s he’s just as adept in an acoustic language as he’s proven himself to be in an electronic one. Ghost Figures sees the producer and multi-instrumentalist turn almost exclusively to the piano and its melancholic resonances for a minimalist album evocative of the Erik Satie, transposed to a digital world. As the title implies the work lives very much in an ethereal dimension, with slow wistful piano motives lethargically pulling at simple beatific melodies.

As with everything Benjamin Finger there’s an electronic component, but with the absence of anything concrete like a synthesiser, and this being very much in the vain of a piano concerto, the electronic elements are resigned to the background. Processes either extend notes, or fill in the gaps between fingers that move across the ivories at a snail’s pace. A reverb feeding back on it self eternally or some obscure field recording of a chanting crowd, pad out the silences and add to the atmosphere of the record, where they co-exist in the echoes of the piano.

There’s nothing  forced here and everything appears to exist without any real purpose. It’s a work redolent of Benjamin Finger’s more reflective moods like on “Listen to my Nerves Hum” and yet again shows us another side of this extensive artistic personality in which where everything is allowed.

You can read an extensive review of the album here.

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.

Album of the week: Joe Goddard – Electric Lines

Joe Goddard returns to long player for the first time in eight years as his eponymous artistic alias. The DJ, producer and label boss, who might be best known for his work as a member of Hot Chip, has a restless approach to music. DJing as Greco Roman; releasing the music of others on the label of the same name; producing music between everything from Disco to Synth Pop, all informs the same person in Joe Goddard, and when Hot Chip enjoys some downtime, Joe Goddard can be found assuming any and all of these positions. Whether making uplifting House as Two bears, DJing for Greco Roman Soundsystem, or experimenting with electronica as his new project “A Pulse Train” with Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points), creating is certainly at the centre of Goddard’s everyday life with no preconceived notions of where it will land in his vast kaleidoscopic vision of music.

A Spotify playlist about the influences behind electric lines:

For this latest Joe Goddard album, he has assumed the Pop aesthetic infused with UK urban genres that have been concurrent in his work since Gabriel. Going from R&B to Disco in the first three tracks, Goddard leaves the start of the album open and accessible, with no desire to test more obscure waters until “Lasers” takes us into a wall of synthesised sound and a House beat. It’s a momentary diversion however and Goddard quickly moves back into melodic vocals and densely synthesised textures that sit somewhere between Solange and Kraftwerk as bold, yet simple electronic orchestrations and sweet vocal hooks. There’s certainly a pop inclination here to Goddard’s work, but it’s like no pop album you’ve ever heard.

Although Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor makes a cameo, there’s little to no relationship to Goddard’s band other than his choice instruments, and it appears that for this album Joe Goddard was very much aware of the contemporary musical landscape. There’s an emphasis on introspective melodic lines carved out of melancholic synthesisers, adding a severe depth to tracks that function at a perfunctory level.

Job Jobse: A legacy of Trouw incarnate

My last memory of Job Jobse is from Trouw, at the end of a night in the summer of 2014. A bright light shining in through a sliver of an opening in a window infusing favourably with the playful neon lights in situ on the main floor. I remember it as a particularly saturating summer, with nights as warm as days, and that night Job Jobse’s colorful, optimistic set, had found its perfect temperature. Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence was shaking through the sound system as the last song of the night/morning and I barely see the DJ in his booth through the sea of hands pointing to the sky ahead of me. It’s an image that has been irrevocably burned into my memory, representing so many similar nights at Trouw during its last year. It’s the only image that comes to mind when I think of that time and place today, Job Jobse playing the main room of a disused printing press, turned super club. Possibly even something close the the Mandela effect, the image puts into perspective the great impression the club left on Amsterdam with Trouw incarnate as Job Jobse. Job, still just a kid really at the age of 24, closing a night at one of the most respected clubs in the world, not only says a lot of Job Jobse’s skill but also reflects how congruous his career is with that of Trouw. “That place taught me everything I know”, exclaims Job in a recent interview with XLR8R. It’s there he cut his teeth as a DJ and a club-promoter, booking the inaugural night for Trouw, called Drukpers alongside Olaf Boswijk, while honing his DJ skills at home in the bedroom – the skills that would eventually lead to this moment four-odd years on, playing room one to a packed crowd exclusively there for the DJ’s set.

Job Jobse’s relationship with Trouw actually goes back even further than that club itself and has its roots in what was the predecessor called 11. When most seventeen year old kids were still trying to figure out a life beyond the social boundaries of a school and how to interact with the rest of the world, Job Jobse was already on the path to his nascent career. Finding a job distributing flyers for various nights at the club, Job’s mind was always on a singular path. Doing the legwork was only ever for the purpose of the guest list, “which was good because at seventeen I was not allowed in officialy”, said Job Jobse to me when I interviewed for Trouw’s blog in 2014. “Of course I was only doing this to go out to the nights. I hated the job (and) I wasn’t good at it either. I started going there in the last year it was open and because it was so special I wanted to go there as often as possible.” Job would go there alone after a night out distributing flyers, listening to the artists and DJs like James Holden, stuff on the “cheesier” side of House music that would go on to inform his musical tastes as an adolescent. It wouldn’t take long for Olaf Boswijk to notice this kid standing all by himself at the front of the club and after an introduction the co-owner of 11 and founder of Trouw, would strike up a friendship with Job over mutual respect and musical tastes. “We had a clique, right from the start, even though I was ten years younger than him”, explains Job in an interview for Deep House Amsterdam. It was a clique that made Job Jobse and integral part of Trouw’s inception, helping Olaf as an assistant booker, who had come to trust Job’s musical tastes and instincts. The inaugural night and Job’s first booking assignment would become known as Drukpers, a reference to the venue’s previous life as a printing press, and while Olaf assumed the position as resident DJ, Job brought some of the newest breed of House DJ’s to Amsterdam, laying the foundation for what would become the most sought after venues to play for any DJ. At the same time Job would be honing his DJ skills while amassing a record collection in his bedroom and when his skills behind the decks eventually found some form, he travelled down the industrial staircase of Trouw from the office to the toilets, where he would play his first sets as a DJ,

No, that’s not a typo, his first events as a DJ really were hosted in Trouw’s toilets. You have to start somewhere, and it always struck me that Job particularly loved this aspect of the origins of his career in music, and relays some of that uncanny sense of humour often extending into his work as a DJ. It wasn’t just about programming the muzaik for people to urinate to as a joke, but rather quite a serious extension of gay night at Trouw and a night that would be known as Plei-rave (a Dutch play on the word  for toilet). By the time I had come to Amsterdam, it would be gone, but remnants of it still existed as toilet attendants at the venue continued to blast the latest Rihanna tunes through a set of crappy laptop speakers. Job Jobse’s Plei-Rave however had more of a professional intent, with a proper sound system in the toilets (just let that sink in there for a bit) and Job looking for a contrast to the Electro and Techno on the main floor, with a more anthemic Disco and House sound. “I just played my Disco and Italo and synth pop records there and of course the older gay people really loved it.” It was a tentative start as a DJ with little in the way of beat-matching and mixing, before his confidence, bolstered by an admiring audience, produced a latent talent starting to flower. It was something Olaf had recognised instantly in Job, even before this moment and “in a really short time”, Job had found himself in the booth on the main floor of Trouw.

Job Jobse selections were expressive and accessible tracks crafted with a certain high-energy, a youthful exuberance brought to life through a mix that could ignite an entire dance floor almost instantaneously. There were no taboos with Job it seemed and with an entertainer’s approach to a DJ set, Job Jobse’s mixes often spoke to a large cross-section of Trouw’s diverse audiences. In a city where electronic music had been the populace norm since the late eighties, you could expect anybody from Speedy J’s legion of older fans to the trend-informed hipsters, dressed in layers of black, and Job Jobse, coming into his own in that environment, had an encompassing ability to reach the largest portion of those varying audiences on the dance floor. I’m glad to hear not much has changed in that regard, except the DJ perhaps digging more into shadowy corners of the dance floor, but the essence of Job Jobse set has remained unchanged. It was always something that managed to speak to you, regardless of your own musical tastes and there was a social aspect to it all too.

At the front of the dance floor whenever Job played at Trouw there were always a few familiar faces, a group of dedicated friends, which was a key component in Job Jobse’s appeal, I realise now. Known collectively in the as Malawi, they were people like Arif Müller and Luc Mastenbroek, people who would listen to the same music, share musical experiences and largely inform Job Jobse tastes to the point they were all “kind of the same person” for Job. He might have been the DJ “playing the music out on a Friday and Saturday night”, but they would always be there dancing, goading him on, informing his track selections with their weekly listening session, and largely responsible for creating that social air around Job. A social air which extended to Trouw, and whenever he played there, it felt like you were at a guest at a house party, and not a mere audience member at yet another super-club. Like so many of the people involved with Trouw, the Malawi boys and Job Jobse would go on to define an individual path in the wake of the club’s very short but electric existence. “Together with crews like Dekmantel and Rush Hour it brought up an entire generation of ravers, DJs and promoters”, elucidates Jobse in XLR8R of Trouw’s influence. “I strongly believe that is the reason why Amsterdam has one of the strongest scenes in the world right now.”

With his own history so entwined through Trouw, and even the pre-origins of Trouw in club 11 Job Jobse is one of these reasons too and probably the most significant figure in Amsterdam to come to prominence through a single club, and as his career keeps going from strength to strength he epitomises what the club set out to achieve for that brief moment in time, carrying on its legacy, while at the same time carving out his own career from its fertile remains.

 

Album of the Week: Varg – Nordic Flora series Pt.3 – Gore Tex City

Brooding, ghostly atmospheres, born from the darkest corners of artistic mind, and extending into corporeal constitutes Varg’s latest LP on Northern Electronics, and the third in a series of Ambient-Techno works under the Nordic Flora title. An enigmatic series of works that plays on the ambiguity of the artist behind it, it’s also the most “honest work” to date according to the artist, if you were to believe the statement as part of the eccentric social media presence that surrounds the artist and distracts the media. Behind all the posturing and diversions of instagram however is a serious artistic intent and an extensive discography, that has established a very unlikely artist in the extended Techno gene-pool.

At its core Nordic Flora series Pt.2 – Gore Tex City is an ambient album, but hiding between the opaque layers of that genre is something far less restraining and certainly more pronounced than what the genre tends to represent. There’s that initial draw of slow moving, repetitive parts creating a sense of security for the listener, a safe space which is then abandoned immediately as you enter the world beyond it. There’s an impatience that lurks everywhere in Varg’s music. He appears hardly content with anything as he flits from one moment to the next, either through percussion, vocals, noise or just a feeling he communicates through his sound design. The album itself comes across as restless too with tracks like “I hope you are still there” moving closer to the fringes of Techno, than pure ambient pieces like the title track. Varg’s mastery of creating a sonic space draws on a dichotomy of elements that give the LP its unique presence, never resting on one specific voice, but a chorus of voices that informs everything that is the LP.

Even the kitsch or the obvious deserves and warrants a space in his music, with those vocoder R&B peppered tracks like “Red Line” and “Blue Line”making the case for a pop sensibility from the artist. Even the title of the album Gore-tex, alludes to something less than trendy, a whimsical but not mindless addition, and you do get the sense that Varg has spent a lot of effort in bringing all these elements on the album together. It makes this a most varied work of a mosaic artist, and what could have easily been a high-brow ambient- or intimidating Techno work is one of the most extroverted and wholly accessible electronic music works out there, and one of the highlights of this year so far.

On the history of the selector – abridged

Since the creation of the “DJ”as we know it today, which we can accurately-ish place at the start of seventies, two ideas of a DJ emerged personified by two key figures; Frank Degrasso and David Mancuso. While Degrasso is largely considered the the founder of the mix, the first person to beat match and segue one track over to the next, Mancuso approached DJing in a very different way. Mancuso took to the music itself to narrate an evening’s progression with the “DJ” taking a more passive role than the fulcrum around which it all depended. In a Loft apartment in the artistically affluent New York of the seventies, Mancuso’s philosophy to DJing was more like that of a late night, mute radio jock, allowing the music to stand on its own and perhaps even establishing the purest form of what we understand as clubbing today, but that’s for a different article. Mancuso, a hi-fidelity sound obsessive, avoided mixing and anything that might obscure the sound of the original recording, to play each record as the artist intended most regularly at his infamous Loft parties. He never used a DJ mixer, and with very little between stylus and speaker, Mancuso’s ideology was that of pure sound, unmarred by device and person alike in pure appreciation of the music where the audience always took centre stage and the records would form the sinewy bond between the people and the night.

From that point on two ideas of the DJ would be constructed: the DJ as performer as embodied by Degrasso, and later by the likes of Sasha and Klock; and the DJ as selector in the form of David Mancuso, which has evolved through DJs like Young Marco, Lena Willikens and Motor City Drum Ensemble. Where DJ’s like Degrasso and his lineage centered around the performance aspects of the DJ, often in favour of the more functional dance tracks, Mancuso’s more introverted and socialist clubbing ideology informed an approach to DJing that pivoted around the music, and function invariably was in the end result and not in the execution. Whereas the the DJ as individual would go on to covet the spotlight, the DJ’s that opted for the selector’s approach achieved notoriety only through back channels, whispers from the underground of remarkable records being spun in the shadows by serious music heads away from the glare of the big-room dance track. The selectors were always on the lookout for those rare finds that took a lot of effort and knowledge to come by, and although for a DJ like Mancuso it meant not mixing in the contemporary DJ sense, it was more about a musical dedication that went far beyond than just stringing a few sure-thing-tracks together and looking for that alternative hit, the B-side or the unknown artist or label, that made the dance floor a more esoteric thing than the DJs that went for the obvious hit. It obviously happened around the seventies in a landscape where DJs were known by the tracks they played, regardless of which inclination they followed in their style of mixing. So intrinsic was a record to a DJ that audiences would “know who had broken a record” even two decades on as Bill Brewster explains in an RA exchange. It was clear from the origins of the DJ, whether selector or otherwise, that there was a serious connection between singular pieces of music and the DJ’s that played them and where they took it to the extreme, a selector existed.

The selectors broke records not for their contemporary appeal, but for their rarity, their obscurity. When and if a selector broke a record, there would be little to no chance that it could exist in another record bag. They broke the records that were limited releases, short run presses of some obscure group that might have only released one DIY record, but that record was a miracle unto itself. It might not have had the commercial appeal of a pop song, but it would light up the dance floor and more often than not outlive their contemporaries to become legends in their own rights with all credit going to the selector who took the time and patience to find said record and play it to a receptive audience. Yes, the selector existed because of digging, and although this is common practise today, in the seventies and the eighties it wasn’t nearly as popular amongst DJs always on the lookout for that new record they could breakout on the dance floor. Levan, for instance used to play a new record consistently through the night until that record became ingrained in the collective consciousness on the dance floor, drummed into people like an incessant playlist of a radio channel. Audiences that might not have warmed to the record at first would dance to it by the end of the night. On the other end of the scale the selector would have to go deeper, dig further back into the archives to find that track that would work on the same level but immediately and without the aid of contemporary appeal. That takes a truly special record and the more unknown, unfamiliar and anomalous it was it was, the more it came as an instantaneous surprise to drive the dance floor into a new direction. “When we started digging it wasn’t a popular thing to do”, remembers Sadar Bahar in an old interview, a selector that cut his teeth at Chicago’s other Warehouse. He was explaining it in reference to digging Soul music, which for a DJ that came to prominence during an age of Disco moving over to House was a very unlikely direction, considering the absolutely massive beat-orientated sets from the likes of Levan at around the same time. During a period of edits, remixes and the first emergence of the DJ-producer, the music was in the here and now, and looking back into the annals was not the most popular thing to do. Sadar Bahar preferred the road less ventured however, and won the respect of audiences and peers alike for his concerted efforts in finding that less obvious records when everybody else was jumping on the next thing, to great effect. Although he came from Chicago, and was an integral part of the House scene before it was even called House, Sadar Bahar is one of those oblique figures in dance music, but an important one and because he approaches music like a selector, still perusing boxes of used records today in search of that sparkle in the rough, he is also a timeless figure that continuously warrants the attention of heads everywhere.

It wasn’t however in the US, where the idea of selector would truly become defined, but from the most unlikely of places, the English north and home of the Northern Soul movement. In a place and an era that saw a predominantly working class society exist, entertainment was a rarefied, conservative affair taking place in ballrooms with barely more than comedians and waltz standards as entertainment. Those black and white films you see of the English north from that era were not indicative of the technology available, but rather just what the region inspired in film makers, a dull lifeless aesthetic with little to no escape for the hardworking folks that existed there; that was until Northern Soul came along. At a time when black American music was only the purview of private radio stations and a few unique record stores in London, Northern Soul brought it to dancefloors where high kicks and baggy corduroy trousers offered a vastly different approach to the sequence and opulence that Disco would eventually become. When the DJ’s in New York started moving into the sounds of a commercialised consumerist Disco, the Northern Soul movement looked to the out-dated R&B and motown records of the sixties for their soundtrack, but it was never about the obvious record that everybody could sing along to. “We found our own records in defiance of (BBC) Radio 1, in defiance of the news media, and in great defiance to Top of the Pops”, explains Northern Soul DJ and legendary figure, “Ian Levine” in the BBC documentary: Northern Soul Living for the Weekend. “Northern Soul started out as us looking for records with the Motown Sound that weren’t on Motown, and the more they had flopped, the more they were a B-side that no one had ever heard before, the more desireable they became”, continues Levine. In that single sentence, Ian Levine defines the idea selector – a DJ that digs for obscurities and rarities, the tracks that could have easily been as popular as their contemporary counterparts, but which for some  reason (label, promotion, and unfortunately looks) never attained the same stature as their counterparts. Tracks like The Tams’, “hey girl don’t bother me” and Duke Brown’s “Crying over you” were admired for the honesty and epitomised by their lo-fi sound and rawness, which spoke to a working class and its pragmatism. It was and has always been the selector’s role to draw attention to these records and while peers were playing the latest, and popular records to catch more ears on the dance floor, Northern Soul reversed the roles and pounced on an audience’s desire to go out dancing to uptempo music to introduce the masses to these rare and often exclusive gems.  

In the wake of Northern Soul and Disco’s patriots like Mancuso, the rise of the  DJ as performer, and an extension of Degrasso, Siano and Levan, came with household names like Frankie Knuckles (who had already started making waves in Disco as a Levan apprentice), Larry Heard and Todd Terry taking to the sound of House music through the eighties, sounds that favoured the locked groove of a drum machine and the synthesised landscape of a post-modernist eighties society in search of the modernity of an insatiable capitalist future. By the time Sadar Bahar came onto the scene properly, It seemed for the most part that the selector had had its day and that those looking to find that rare late groove were left behind in the forward mobility of an idealised, but unsustainable progression. In machine-driven music where the DJ turned producer and were now setting pop music trends there was no room for the music of the past or the obscure, only the relevant future. But there was always going to be a problem. The average DJ was still a facilitator and there wasn’t nearly enough of this new music to facilitate an evening, and above that it lacked the the dynamism of a night. Cue Bill Brewster on his first experiences on House: “I remember it was September 1987 and Mark Moore 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 was clear House would be a great new thing, but it wouldn’t be enough for a night and certainly not enough for Ibiza, where night turned into day and day turned into night and DJs like José Padilla and Alfredo had to modulate an evening/morning’s through an extensive set. Combine this with the fact that these DJs had limited resources for records on an isolated island sans Ryanair, and what you got was DJs turning to the obscure b-sides of an eclectic record collection. “Ibizan disc jockeys had to squeeze out every playable track from their collections” writes Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton in a DJ saved my life. “This meant finding rare gems on mainstream albums, scouring unthinkable artists for anomalous masterpieces and repurposing tracks never intended for the dance floor.” It wasn’t just about playing Phuture’s “Acid Trax” which now could also fit into a selectors set, but also playing Cure’s “The Blood”. It was those vague unintentional dance records from an encyclopedic musical mind that on first glance should never accommodate the dance floor, but found a fluidity between contrasting musical moments, that informed and pleased the nonpartisan; marginalised music fan. And with that the Balearic sound was born.

That Balearic sound was eventually interpreted by the likes of Paul Oakenfold and Pete Tong, who brought it back to the UK and the north as Acid House, and the sound of the Factory in Manchester amongst other things. In fact Acid House would be a misnomer and in the second summer of love, when this music started making its way to the UK, it was nothing like the 303 sharp jackin beats we had heard from Chicago in the late eighties, but rather an electronic House sound that took the eccentricities of the melodic Balearic sound applied to the consistencies of a locked groove, with a kaleidoscopic vision of what dance music constitutes. Amongst other things, it gave us our first glimpse of the superstar DJ, an anomaly which came to prominence significantly throughout the nineties and was at its peak when Trance, a direct descendant of that Balearic sound of Ibiza, brought it to the world stage through household names like Sasha and John Digweed. With more new music like this gentrifying sound of Balearic there was enough of it to fill a DJ set now, and digging towards the back of a crate wasn’t even necessary let alone playing that obscure rarity. Collecting dust somewhere in the back of a record shop.

It seemed that the days of the selector were numbered throughout the nineties where those big garish DJ sets and stages from Tiesto and like took a serious foothold, but there would eventually be a saving grace, the Internet. Shortly after the world wide web happened forums like DJhistory.com and the Dubstep forum started cropping up and gave rise to a new selector, one with uncapped data and the wealth of knowledge from an extensive online community at his/her disposal. In the early 2000’s DJ’s like Prins Thomas and Todd terje would haunt DJhistory.com for those rarefied moments, like cliff Richard’s funky B-sides or the 45’s to play at 33. While later, over across the channel Dubstep forum would create a new youthful community exchanging and sharing ideas on black English dance music and beyond. Characters like Ben UFO and Addison Groove would engross themselves in the esoteric music from unlikely sources through clandestine meetings on forum threads that would lead everywhere from Dubstep, to Acid and obscure House samples. Considering that, it might be obvious why dubstep itself was such a short-lived phenomenon, as DJs and artist quickly ventured into new directions after its initial existence. Dubstep turned to House, Techno and even Disco, and a DJ like Ben UFO took on a new versatility that directly opposed genre-specific mixes, the selector for a post-Internet world. Today Ben UFO’s sets can go through the Hessle Audio catalogue, stomp off into the world of classic Chicago House, abruptly change direction into Detroit and then come back to the UK through Garage. Where electronic music for the dance floor has existed for well over a lifetime, those rare B-sides aren’t coming from The Cure or Motown  look-a-likes anymore, but rather from a vast catalogue of everything from Ambient to Vaporwave, where new presses today are even smaller in number, and finding that weird flip on a little unknown House label is more envogue than ever thanks to internet’s deep net musical anomalies like Lo-Fi House.

In Norway even, what was first established by the likes of Prins Thomas and Pål Strangefruit is embodied today in DJs like DJ Nuhhh, Øyvind Morken and Olefonken, DJs that not only trawl the history of music, for that less obscure unknown gems, but also find that modern equivalent that will set their dance floor apart from the ubiquitous deep/tech House set. Speak to a selector like Øyvind Morken and topics can range from proto-House records from level 42’s keyboardist Wally Badarou to Shackleton’s recent very unusual releases on Honest Jons. Øyvind forms a select group of DJs like Ben UFO, Young Marco, prins Thomas and Sadar Bahar with a lineage to the roots of the selector. They are uncompromising DJs with an extensive knowledge, consummate consumers of music whose finger is not only the pulse of new music, but constantly finding new old music to present in the context of a contemporary mix. “It’s better to buy (records) all the time than to miss stuff”, said Prins Thomas in an interview with this blog earlier this year. The selector is also a perpetually unfulfilled collector. There’s an insistent and voracious drive for consistent discovery, not only to bolster personal collections, but to present tracks not as functional DJ tools, but rather as the oddity finding a context much more significant than latest Beatport highlight.

From Mancuso to Marco there is a thread underpinning them that sets them apart from their contemporaries. They are the selectors, the DJs that stretch just that little bit further in their pursuit for the obscure and the idiosyncratic. They number amongst some of the best DJs today and even at a time when everything is available to everybody they still manage to find their niche. Although labels like Dekmantel have started putting more emphasis on their role on the dance floor’s musical development, the selector is hardly a contemporary construct, it’s congruous with its time, but not dependent on it. This defines the selector today in the landscape where the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips, but they still tend to stray towards the same viral magnetism that informs the populace. While we still barely brush the upper layers of music and its culture, the selectors are somewhere at the back digging deeper and longer, in search of that one record… which constantly alludes their record bag.

Album of the week: Thudercat – Drunk

Laying somewhere between the eccentricities of  Frank Zappa and the Hip-Hop sensibilities of Flying Lotus, comes the fast-paced, doggedly tenacious third album from Thundercat, the alias of Stephen Bruner. Sweet melodic refrains, dusty beats, incredible Jazz bass movements and a palpable disdain for anything safe or consistent, Drunk is a rich kaleidoscopic musical expression from a very neurotic mind. Short successive tracks are neither cathartic, nor do they wallow, and within them they move and modulate to the next phrase like they have ADHD, songs jumping on the next moment before it had even completed the last. Tracks skip through the album, like snippets of an inconsistent face-paced modernity offering little glimpses of just living a life through lyrics that wallow and flourishes in the mundane.

Even guest appearances by Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, Wiz Khalifa, Kendrick Lamar and Pharrell Williams are fleeting moments that feel like their merely stopping by for a brief interlude, from their own mundanity. In many ways the album title expresses perfectly the music within as the incoherent and inconsistent ramblings of an intoxicated mind at the cusp of a new phase. Bruner’s musicianship really comes to the fore; bass figures swaying while walking through Jazz and Funk, a harmonising falsetto vocal smoothing over sporadic rhythms, and contrapuntal elements meshing over each other like a splatter painting finding form only when you stare at it long enough. Pop-cultural references juxtaposing serious socio-political commentary, Thundercat’s lyrical fixations contrast the glimmer and glitz of the music for moments of personal reflection in a diorama of a modern life.

It makes for a fun combination, one which is engaging on many different levels as if Prince collaborated with Sun Ra, Miles Davis and Tyler the Creator. It all informs Thundercat, but nothing quiet comes close to a simile when tryting to put this latest album into one sentence and all that’s left is just to listen to it.

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.”  

Album of the week: Sigha – Metabolism

Sigha’s second album continues to explore that indefinable boundary between the dance floor and the artistic motive. Emerging out of the versatile club scene in the UK in 2009, Sigha, like so many of his contemporaries, took to a divergent path in a world dictated by dubstep and found the allure of Techno to good to resist. Music that broods in the melancholic atmosphere where deep bass figures loiters; minimalist synthesised landscapes thrive; and rhythms chug, is where Sigha’s sound lives. Through the 12 tracks on Metabolism he expands on a musical ideology that looks toward an “arcane spirituality”, where places of worship are re-contextualised in the cavernous, brutalist architecture of European club spaces.

Sigha’s music on Metabolism is built on repetition as mantra and melody and harmony as space. Deep reverbs extend like sinuous glands from the unwavering foundation of 4/4 percussive rhythms that seem absolutely content in song structures that refrain from progression in search of something transcendent in the extended moment. There’s a severe focus on sound design, where the artist creates sonic environments rather than songs or tracks. In the album context they draw on a singular thread that ties them altogether in an LP that liberates itself from the strict confines of the dance floor for something more abstract, yet still functional.

There’s no clear division between the tracks, and when your left with only the memories of the album what gets reconstructed in your minds eye is a picture of a completed whole. Metabolism is the artist second album and in a world

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.

Album of the Week: Various Artists – I Wanna See All My Friends At Once Vol 2

NYC Loft records came to the world a bit auspiciously last year. Claiming to release unreleased material from a prominent New York production crew, the validity of which has yet to be checked, the rate at which they’ve released tracks and the quality of the music that they’ve produced suggests NYC Loft Trax has its roots in a prominent fixture in New York nonetheless. NYC Loft in name bears some association with David Mancuso and his loft, an audacious move and although we sincerely doubt that there’s any relevance there (Mancuso doesn’t strike us as a locked groove kinda guy), there’s certainly an age appropriateness that doesn’t completely rule out the possibility. Their releases thus far have focussed on lo-fi House cuts that err on the side of Nu-Groove, music that speak of more than just a dance floor functionalism, but can light up a House set in an instant. “I Wanna See All My Friends At Once Vol 2” is the latest document in this series and our album of the week, and as much as we like this release for its own qualities, it gives us an opportunity to bring this remarkable young label to the worlds attention.

It’s the first release that actually features artist names in the titles, but with no connection to other tracks, except DJ freestyle who remixes Pascal Cordoba on the final cut, these names might be little more than a tantalising ruse. Like previous releases, “I Wanna See All My Friends At Once Vol 2” is grounded in an early nineties House aesthetic, replete with R&B vocal samples and bright Piano chords that cut through any mix. Melodies and harmonies overwhelm dusty staccato rhythms that sparkle with the time of prominent hi-hats. There’s a remarkable energy to the music that undermines its Deep House tag with a melodic and rhythmic insistence with none of the features of an introverted creativity at play. The music is direct and to the point, without being boring and formulaic, and has given Nu-groove a new face, which is nothing if not kaleidoscopic. From the subtle Rhodes chords of  “Holding you Close” to the acid tinged “Comblnaca” that rounds off the compilation, this record is made up of many flavours, while remaining grounded in the NYC Loft Trax sound.

Most importantly it gets the Olanskii seal of approval, by whose insistence we’ve made this our album of the week. “Get two copies” he said so we’ll try not to where out the grooves too much before Frædag rolls along, where we’re sure this record will be a prominent feature.

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!

Jæger goes into the Maze

“In a forest glade, a little bit north of the festival area at Into the Factory, our club concept The Maze will take place. We’ve invited some of the foremost clubs of the Scandinavian music scene to curate this area. And just as the name reveals, this area will be formed as a maze with different spaces for each club.

The clubs and promoters hosting the Maze are: Fomo (Stockholm), 1991 (Stockholm), Jaeger (Oslo), Jolene (Copenhagen), Love Potion (Stockholm), Kiloton (Malmö), Seaweed (Stockholm) and Tzar (Gothenburg). Welcome to enter The Maze.”

As part of a collaborative project with Into the Valley, Jæger will join the Swedish festival for a club concept as an extension of the main festival line-up. More information to follow soon.

Album of the week: Adept & Rude Lead – The EP

Dusty beats, melodically inclined samples, dub rhythms and engaging vocals take centre stage for Adept and Rude Lead’s next release and our album of the week. Simply entitled “The EP”, it suggests something inevitable and concrete has finally come to fruition for the Norwegian MC Adept and DJ/producer Rude Lead. The duo’s second only release to a mixtape from 2012, “The EP” affirms a sound for the two artists and it’s something that is uniquely theirs that qualifies for no comparison. Rude Lead’s subtle production touch alongside Adept’s characteristic vocal, in which you can hear various aspects of MC culture combining, makes a formidable pairing that has a very distinctive an unusual sound on record.

“The EP” has no relevance to any zeitgeist with Rude Lead’s choppy samples lifted straight from the fundamental building blocks of Hip-Hop in a way that is contemporary and relevant regardless from which perspective you approach it. It’s a blank canvas, but not an empty one and allows Adepts husky tenor an evocative space to expound on his tongue and cheek social commentary. There’s a sense of humour to his lyrics and their abstract, allegorical form offer no contemporary ideas, but rather engages through metaphors and similes that leave it all up to the listener to decode, often with his/her own subjective ideas filtering through. “Take a Fresh look” could be about finding a new perspective in Hip-Hop or it could be about perhaps opening your eyes to a new dangerous political rhetoric. Combine that with the melodic rather than functional use of samples from Rude Lead, a symmetry exists between the beats and the vocals that modern hip-hop often looses in the beats-for-hire approach. There’s something of Snoop Dog’s melodic touch to Hip-Hop in Adept’s voice, without baring any comparison either, that makes for more engaging listening than rapping over beats.

It’s just more of a feeling than anything, and that’s what you get throughout the five tracks here, a feeling. “The EP” is a Hip-Hop record that very much stands on its own, and like nothing you would’ve heard before. It’s our album of the week, and yes, we do realise it’s not actually an album, but there is something succinct to it that we believe might even be called a mini-LP and makes this quite a brilliant release. How could we not make it our album of the week.

A Motor City Soul with Amp Fiddler

Joseph Anthony “Amp” Fiddler’s musical legacy is the thing of legends. A keyboardist, producer and artist, his sounds have graced records from Prince to Moodymann with his touch on the keys a fundamental part of P-Funk since the 1970’s. As a Detroitian, he stays close to his roots and besides working with artists from the city like Carl Craig, he has also established a few careers, most notably that of J.Dilla when he introduced the teenager to the MPC.

Amp’s is a DIY ideology, from which he crafts durable expressive moments as a solo artist, collaborator and session musician. His solo works are soulful, congenial pieces that speak of the traditions of Detroit that started in Motown and moved beyond House and Techno. Five albums and countless EP’s to his name with distinguished titles like Afro Strut and Ghetto Waltz amongst them, Amp Fiddler’s mark on music has been a significant one.

Born from the stage, Amp Fiddler is a performer who takes his cues from people like George Clinton and hones them in his own modest way, far removed from the braggadocio of the big stage, and remaining true to the DIY nature of his work. For this next tour he’s even opted the route of going it alone, leaving the backing band back in Detroit for a series of solo live performances with Jæger his next stop. It’s given us context to shoot some questions over to him about playing with other musicians; solo live; the legacy of Detroit; and his last album Motor City Booty.

From past interviews we’ve surmised a cool, calm character who’s very visage embodies soul and when we get our answers via email a few days later, his disembodied words still reflects this…

We’re very excited to hear your live show, which has been billed and emphasised as a solo live show. Can you tell us what are some of the ideas behind the show?

Thank you for having me in Oslo this week. I feel the need to try something different as I always do. Being a lover of technology I decided to explore performing solo, which I know and feel is making me grow in different ways than the norm. My first idea was to explore my Roland connection with DJ Recloose and using the Roland DJ-808 along with Roland System-8 and their RC-202 loop pedal along with a microphone.

You’ve played with some amazing people in the past (and we’ll get back to that in a bit) so why a solo show and what dimension do you hope it brings out in your music that a full band couldn’t reach in the past?

Being solo has allowed me to make any and every decision I choose when I choose without limitations to what’s mandatory with other musicians. It’s different, It’s liberating, and it’s the freedom to be at will to make choices.

Jæger is quite an intimate venue and we hope it will be the perfect environment for your show. Is there a specific feeling or mood you particularly want to capture during this tour?

My mood seems to change at will but for the most part it’s a funky party.

The tour comes shortly after “Motor City Booty”. What particular element of that album are you bringing out on tour with you, and can we expect some tracks from Ghetto Fly and Afro Strut too?

There will be a mixture of the past and the present, which is my philosophy about most things. Fashion, Music, automobiles etc…

When you’re playing album tracks live, is it about replicating the sound of the album or merely using it as a jump-off point to take it to new territories?

It’s a combination of  playing backing tracks as well as creating on the fly and hopefully reaching new territories which is the real fun.

I’ve heard from more than one reliable source that your live shows are absolutely captivating. What is it about the live context for you that particularly works well in your music?

The mic, the freedom to be and create on the fly and the sound when it’s good, Which has to do with the sound person the equipment available and the venue.

I want to rewind for a bit and talk about Detroit. From Motown to Techno and House from the likes of May and Moodymann (something we obviously feel very close to at Jæger) to people like Dilla, and even the White Stripes. What in your opinion and from your experience makes the city such a great creative hub?

Well for one…..Snow! For two…..minus one temperatures and our passion is music. We love and eat music all day. Knowing our city was a hub for creative energy from Motown on we tend to also have a passion to carry the torch

Is there something of a community that exists there, where you all feed off each other, or is it all coincidental?

I don’t believe in coincidence so for me it’s all love and community growth sharing the vibes and frequency of each other to help grow and cultivate in whatever kind of music.  We all seem to have a need to collaborate and jam together for the good of it all

Time and again Detroit has faced socio-political problems and adversity to remain the cultural icon it is, especially since artists like yourself, Moodymann and Danny Brown continue to call it home. What keeps you there and accounts for the city’s staying power?

  Shit! …….Somebody’s gotta do it and show that we can become a centre for music again in the US. Show that we are fighters and win in the midst of loss of business and commonwealth. Were coming back and we are sticking and staying. Standing for the city and falling for nothing!

Motor City Booty seems to be particular homage to the city and it’s music, and not just in its title. From the Motown-like “Soul Fly Pt.”1 to tracks like “I got it” with it’s Funk and House references, was there a conscious effort to highlight various eras of music that the city produced?

Not really, It was Yam Who who came up with the idea for the title. I think the lyrics and titles are just where our heads were at the time reflecting the music being so funky.

You have quite a versatile and varied musical voice, which is always open to new musical styles too I believe. What musical features and styles particularly draws and holds your attention?

Thank You. I would say that soul and jazz are the first two but I love so much music that I find it challenging to sing over music of many styles. I am normally eager to try anything different, If I’m singing from my soul than it can normally fit over anything depending on the melody

Are you constantly adapting to the musical world around you, and how do you approach new influences in your own music?

I am always adapting to the future. Electronic music is flying while waiting for no one so I’m always listening. Sometimes we’re so busy we don’t have a chance. I also have to be conscious of my demographic and lane that fits me best. If I do something its because I love the music and not that it’s the next thang everybody is buying. My influences are based sometimes on new gear i acquire and mix with old gear. I love technology so that effect how I approach new ideas.

Getting back to the people you’ve played with in the past and continue to play with today. I know from a previous interview, that what you took away from the Enchantments, was that you learnt to play a song from start to finish perfectly, before taking it to the stage. Do things like this still happen and how have various eras affected how you sound today most significantly?

Yes indeed…Performing songs means knowing it top to bottom unless it’s just a groove. Now with performing some electronic music I have not had to focus so much on song or composition but there are many exceptions and I still have to learn songs.

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.

Album of the week: Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm force – Yermande

Mark Ernestus, the man behind Hard Wax, Basic Channel and a prominent fixture on Berlin’s Techno scene, is not anything but diverse. From Basic Channel’s incredible reign, both as artistic voice and propagandist to Hard Wax’ unremitting pursuit of the harder, more rigid examples of Techno, Ernestus is a figure of great significance in electronic music both on and off the dance floor. Recently – although it’s something we might deduce from the dubby flavours of Basic Channel on occasion – Ernestus has ventured closer to the roots of this music through the music and rhythms of Africa. After a few releases on Honest Jon’s in the context of remixing artists like Nigerian brass band, Obadikah and the South African Shangaan electro artists BBC, Ernestus  approaches the album context with a group of assembled Senegalese musicians under the pretence of “Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force” and a LP called “Yermande”.

Ernestus deconstructs music, taking it back to its roots, music before a time memorial, an animal skin spread over a hollow shell pounding out a contrapuntal rhythm, but displaced into the present with modern instruments and electronic processes. Percussion, Bass and Guitar is the bastion from which the “Ndagga Rhythm Force” embark on repetitive rhythmical devices, which Ernestus then expounds on in providing a significant empty space in which vocalist, Mbene Diatta Seck can move freely, through evocative melodic lines. There’s a connection between Ernestus’ Dance floor history and a history that extends to something intuitive through the Sengalese musicians, and in this debut they set a tone for a collaborative work with incredible depth beyond the minimalist atmospheres that occupy the foreground.

In the moment with Dandy Digital

Anders Åkergren appears in silhouette within the frame of large window letting in a blinding array of light from the outside world. Anders’ features are indefinable, a visual metaphor for what I know of the prominent Swedish DJ that goes by Dandy Digital. Anders’ history and his DJ career is an opaque collection of small facts: A DJ that’s been very active on the Stockholm circuit, an association with Axel Boman; and an upcoming appearance at Jæger. But there’s a very tangible sense that a lot more awaits to be uncovered just beneath the surface of a 20-odd year career as a DJ, so with that I call up Anders Åkergren and find a personality that’s eager to share more, and a voice with a lot more to say than the stereotypically obvious.

Anders has been ”very active in the electronic music scene” in Stockholm “since the late nineties” when he started collection records and playing to a variety of crowds all over the city. An affection for electronic music since the tender age of nine when he first experienced Kraftwerk, Anders had the adventurous/curious personality of a DJ ingrained in him from the very beginning and “knew from that moment on that there is so much out there to find”. And was it always electronic music that intrigued him? “Yes, it’s always been electronic music, but I love everything really.” Although his tastes had always been far-reaching it was the music from a measured 4/4 beat that would lead him on a path to a DJ career and the beginnings of a record collection he could play to other people. “It was ‘97 and at that time I was really into House and Techno”, remembers Anders. Although Dub and Disco was also making an impact on his musical personality, it was House and Techno that would lead to beat-matching and particularly “Jeff Mills and Detroit Techno” that cemented what would become a career as a DJ.

At 20, Anders found himself moving in the same DJ circles, playing the same places and events as Axel Boman with a noteable friendship and even creative collaboration blossoming from there. They were “DJ partners before he (Axel) got very successful with his productions” and on a harddrive somewhere there’s even a track they produced together for Adam Beyer’s Drumcode label. “Adam Beyer liked it but didn’t consider it an A-side“ and wanted them to make “a Techno Banger” for this purpose, something both Anders and Axel didn’t feel too comfortable doing. “We were like are we going to make music for Adam Beyer or are we gonna make music because it’s fun, so we declined.” While it could’ve have certainly propelled Anders’ career along, he has no regrets. “I want to feel really secure about what I’m releasing” he explains and has always considered himself a DJ first.

It’s in the role of selector which Anders has carved out a career as Dandy Digital, a career which has taken him from Stockholm to Berlin and Amsterdam, where today he features on the Studio Soulrock roster – an organisation and label headed by “Is Burning’s” Carlos Valdes. Although quite successful in DJ terms today, Anders has always maintained an underground approach to music and DJing, which has its roots in his origins, becoming a DJ and hosting events.

It was in a fertile landscape after the infamous “Rave Commission” in the nineties, when Swedish authorities were intent to “destroy the old Techno scene, because they thought it was all about drugs” that Dandy Digital would first emerge. Finding success as a DJ we would also turn his attention to hosting events in Stockholm, something “that got a bit easier in the Techno scene when the Rave Commision turned into the bar commision”. Hosting parties and Djing e lead to a residency at Regnbågsrummet  from 2000-2003, an experience that Anders says taught him “the most about taking a session/night from A to B”. That residency lead to a residency at Grodan Cocktail club, playing an audience of 250 every week, before he and his former partner brought ESQUE into the world in 2007. A 400 capacity club in Stockholm it featured the first Funktion One system in Sweden with Anders playing an integral part in its music policy. It was an experience that Anders “learn a lot” from, but unfortunately what could’ve been “a beautiful thing” with excellent international bookings like Len Faki and DJ Koze soon turned sour when certain “factors came into play. It ended up that even my best friends didn’t want to come because they had been humiliated by the bouncers.”

A sad situation like that and Stockholm’s “really trend sensitive” society means that Anders “feel(s) more at home in Berlin and Amsterdam” where there’s more of a liberal attitude and organised community around clubs and club music. At the time of writing, Anders is back in Stockholm and has been for the past six months, where he’s been quite optimistic in terms of what’s happening in the city’s party scene. It seems that the air is turning towards a more liberal approach, with a younger generation throwing parties and ”the older generation being allowed to go about their business more and more”. There’s still “a kind of cocky vibe going on” according to Anders where “ people are more comfortable wearing expensive clothes than going out and meeting new people”, but on the whole Anders is very hopeful about what’s going on. “Lately, one of the best venues I’ve seen in Stockholm is Texas Sauna”, says Anders ”a fetish Sauna club run by Mickel Eklöf, who threw the first raves in Sweden.” Anders is also inspired by the persistence of Damien Eie, a stalwart on the scene who is still “throwing underground parties for different people at different locations” even after years of harassment by the authorities. “They are letting him go about his business, even though he’s taken a lot of punches over the years.”

In all appearances, Anders seems to be a very positive character, finding a silver lining on even the gloomiest of clouds. As we start to delve further into more conversation territory away from the usual Q&A topics, we talk about Amsterdam and all the “beautiful” things and people he enjoys while being DJ. And the thing he enjoys the most? Connecting with other people through a DJ set and in explanation Anders shares a story of a recent experience.

“I had a really beautiful moment when I played in Berlin recently. About an hour after my set a girl came up to me and she had heard my whole set and she described and what she experienced and it was like hearing myself talk. I felt like she knew what I was doing even though we’d never met before. That’s really the meaning of Djing to me.“

Today Anders’ selections are more eclectic than his earlier career, more in-line with his musical tastes. He’s still a student of the Jeff Mills’ school of mixing and its “skillful beast-matching” approach, but today he gets “more pleasure mixing more genres and eras together”. He always brings a “lot of music” and lets the night take him where it may. “I don’t plan my sets, I take it as it comes and I do what is suitable in the moment.” Anders adds that he is very “stoked to be coming to Jæger” and that he has never been to Oslo before. so we are very curious to see where the night might take us when Dandy Digital drops by in our basement.

No Fillers, only Killers with Delfonic

Markus Lindner, better known behind a pair of decks as Delfonic is a fundamental figure on the  Berlin scene. Part-owner of OYE records, an institution in Berlin and a prominent DJ himself with a residencies at Gretchen and  Farbfernseher, Lindner has the type of career that any self-proclaimed music nerd swoons over.

A DJ and collector first and foremost, Lindner was a dedicated customer of OYE records, before moving behind the counter and eventually becoming part-owner. His primary objective has always been the music, and whether playing it or pedaling it, there’s a passion there that has persisted even when vinyl was going through the worst of times. His dogged approach to music, whether it’s finding the latest new record; the popular track, customers will buy; or just feeding his own curiosities, informs an eclectic personality whose musical recommendations are always a sure thing.

In that spirit he’s also established a distribution outlet around OYE with 25 labels on the roster today, including Money $ex Records, Tartelet and Box aus Holz. It’s created a focussed yet, eccentric community around the shop with the sound and the spirit of OYE represented through artists like IMYRMIND and Glenn Astro.

With his extensive experience between DJing, the shop and now the distribution outlet, he makes the perfect subject for a Q&A. We sent him some questions via email and he obliged, taking time out of his incredibly busy schedule to field these with some very honest answers.

You’ve came up through the ranks at OYE, from a customer to being a part-owner. How has that evolution affected your own musical development?

That’s a really good question! I guess a lot, but I always have to remember my role at OYE. Sometimes when I order records for the store, I have to imagine which customers could like the record even if I don’t really like it. And after years of making orders you become harder in your decisions about the music. Otherwise it’s great, because you can learn so much about Music or Music history from your customers or colleagues, that you’ve never expected. And more often I would love to buy more records for myself through all the genres, but sadly it’s not possible. But in the end I would say it definitely affected my musical development and taste.

I assume you are also still a customer. Do you ever feel like you have to apply strict measures on yourself when considering your own buying habits?

When I started to work at OYE, I bought way more records, but now I have a family and money goes other ways ;-) But when you’re at the source and you pay less for records, it’s really easy to get addicted. But we always have the business politics, that customers come first, so when we have a rare record, I prefer to sell it than to keep it.

With so much at your disposal, what do you look for in a record in the context of a set?

First if it fits in my sets or my music taste. Second if the genre fits as well. Third I would say, that I should play it out more than once. It should be a future classic – no fillers, only killers.

But genre-wise I have no boundaries. I always try to play between styles with different energies.

You’ve been a longstanding resident at Icon, which became Gretchen. Can you give us a glimpse of how a regular night will play out there, through your selections?

Normally I only do warm ups there, because I love to do that. First hour is just for myself to check out new music or music from our labels. But it always depends on the night or with whom I play. I wanna build a mood, which gives the headliner the opportunity to be the main act. So I start really deep and keep it deep as long as possible. First I check the main act and what they / he / she plays and then I select my music, but I never play music I don’t like even if I know it would work out. You can always hear my taste in the warm up sets. At the end of every set I go down with the energy to give the next act the opportunity to have a good platform from which to start.

How do your guests sets differ from a residency set and what can we expect from your upcoming gig at Jæger?

When I play prime time, then I play prime time, but I always try to tell a story or play through different kind of music styles. Also I like to mix old and new music or bring some breaks. I wanna have the attention on the music I play, because the selection is now more important than ever. There is so much good music out there, that you should be careful what you play and don’t waste the short time we have with shitty music. I really love to play from Disco to House to Afro and Jazz. But nothing has to happen, everything goes…

What has been the fundamental role of the record store in DJ culture for you?

For me the record store was always at the centre of the DJ culture I grew up with, but nowadays there are so many ways to get in touch with great music. But you shouldn’t forget, that a face-to-face culture at the record store is priceless for your taste and for discovering cool music. Music is a social thing and to meet people like you do in a club is always better than just downloading music. I’m not saying it’s bad, but we should try to get the best periphery.

At the end, all the internet platforms and streaming / download services helped us and also brought the people back to the stores!

Even at a time when vinyl  sales were very poor, the record store and OYE specifically remained. What in your opinion attributed to its staying power through these years?

We worked for free ;-) spent all the money on records and never gave up. Here we are still and it’s going quite well now. I think it was really important to be keen, disciplined and to be critical with yourself.

What is it about vinyl that just won’t quit for you as a DJ and a record collector?

I still prefer this format as a DJ, because it’s more fun to play and you “work“ with the medium. As a collector I prefer vinyl, because of the sound quality and it lasts forever. And emotional wise you are more connected with a piece of vinyl then a digital file. At the end vinyl is the king of all music formats.

Tell us a bit about the OYE distribution. What are some of the ideologies behind your picks of labels you work with?

It started 3 years ago only with one label, Box aus Holz. And after a while there was more demand and we befriended more labels. It was a step by step business with no master plan. Now we have around 25 labels on the roster and distribute exclusively in Germany and the rest of the world All Ears in the UK takes care of.

For me it’s really important to work with people and labels I really like and I have a good personal relationship with. It makes everything easier. Music-wise it’s like OYE: totally diverse. We have some House, Techno, Beats, Jazz or Edits in the program. Sometimes I start projects with friends when they have some good music we think we should release. F.e. with Hauke Freer from Session Victim  and I run “XK Records“. We’ve just released the 2nd issue, but there is no pressure at all. When something is ready we release it. With Money $ex Records, which I run with Max Graef & Glenn Astro we released 3 Albums in 4 months. This is really hard to realize, but I think it’s the best way to do it –  when you feel it.

But you can check all our releases on our soundcloud page.

With so many labels flooding the limited pressing facilities around the world, what are some of the difficulties you’re experiencing today as a distributor and how do you see it playing it out in the future?

I have built up a really good connection to our mastering studio “Schnittstelle“ and our pressing plant Rand Muzik, so we don’t really have the problem with postponed releases. We can make a record in about 2 months. They are doing a great job and it’s easy to work with such professional people.

But I definitely see a problem in the mass of releases right now, or since 2016. Too many labels, too many releases and sometimes everybody should think twice, if this music should be released on vinyl. I’m not talking about taste, but sometimes it feels, that a lot of people are using the vinyl hype / ultra limited pressing as a marketing tool to promote the labels or producers to get better gigs. But the music is just a tool. It doesn’t help the business and record stores at the end, because the customer is not an idiot. They can feel it immediately and they are willing to spent a lot of money on records, but not for cheap tools.

With all these labels that you’re involved including Hotflush, who I’m told have a desk in one of the rooms in the back of the store, is there something of a label community forming around the store and how do you all influence each other through OYE?

To make it clear. I was never involved in Hotflush. We subleased a room at OYE Kreuzkoelln to them and we were running the Hotflush vs OYE parties together at OHM for a while. We still have a great connection and these guys know how to run a label and make it big! But now we’ve moved on and we have our distribution office in this room, because we needed more space for the backstock and upcoming releases.

As I said before. I prefer to work with people who know OYE and most of the time they are customers. So we already have a connection and we influence each other. Sometimes they work at OYE like Alex Seidel. After his releases on Tartelet, Money $ex and OYE Black Label we found a new label for him: “Schwarz 12“. He had some absolutely crazy tracks ready between Techno & Electro, but no label wanted to release them and I’m ready when something like this happens. I know Alex now for years and he is such a great guy and his taste of music is insane. I’m really impressed with him, so we’ll be releasing this new stuff soon.

With Berlin being such a great city for this music, does it ever feel saturated, and how do you feel OYE and the labels you’re involved with stand out from the crowd?

That’s true, we are always complaining here in Berlin about everything, but the tourists know what’s going on and it’s cool so to see how excited they are about our scene. When you travel a little bit and you come back to Berlin, it’s still a great city for music culture and clubs.  But I have to say, that I don’t go out that much anymore, something I did for years almost every night. After years it feels like the same thing.

There are always a few prominent artists circling around OYE too. One of them is IMYRMIND, who’ll be playing at Jæger with Amp Fiddler the following week. What can we expect from his set?

This boy is crazy. His album “Uniwerum Luxury“ is such an outstanding record, because I bet, that not everyone is gets the idea behind it. And I always enjoy his DJ sets a lot, as he spins records from Jazz to Funk to Disco to House or Techno. I’m not impressed by a lot of DJs nowadays, but you should check this guy!

The day after your set, you’re doing a pop-up shop at Baklengs. What do you hope to bring to Oslo that we might look forward to?

That’s a good question as I have to pack the records really soon ;-) I try to dig records, which represents the OYE sound. Quite organic music from Disco, Afro, Funk, Jazz to House, NeoDisco, Broken Beats and HipHop.

We will bring around 600 records and a lot of the OYE family stuff! Also I will bring some exclusive promo copies for the pop up!

You’re playing at Jæger under the RETRO banner, which is a night dedicated to those unsung heroes of electronic music’s past, present and future. Which artist or record best personifies this for you?

Detroit Experiment is one of my all time favourites of the past. Present I would say Soulphiction and Alex Seidel at the moment. What the future brings I can’t really tell you, but there will be some dope stuff ….

 

*Catch Delfonic at Baklengs the day after for the pop-up shop.

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.

Album of the Week: Baya – Oslo – Harlem

Oslo – Harlem is a very personal body of work from Oslo artist Baya, who upon a trip to Harlem to meet his estranged father, he found a common link between two disparate artistic voices and the consequence, a double EP. Although not quite a concept album, the ideas that arose through interviewing his father, Professor Sompohi Baya, were channeled into music across two records with his father’s strong visual work based on the African mask, finding a perpendicular narrative to the album as visual accompaniment.

Falling somewhere between artists like Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaur and MIA, Baya’s music pulls at very distant threads, merging elements of synthesisers, guitars and the artist’s chameleon-like vocal to produce melodically-rich music that engages at an accessible level, with layers that can be peeled back further to reveal more through each listening experience. There is a narrative to be explored connecting the tracks, that often gets pieced together through the interview-interludes throughout, but songs like “Movin Up” and “I called to say Hello” stand all on their own, and showcases a song-writing ability that calls to mind experts like Steely Dan or Prince.

Very much a contemporary album however Oslo-Harlem bounds with colour and juxtaposition as various elements of the songwriter’s influences merge into a unique voice, one that rejuvenates the stale formulaic approach to pop music that exists today. We look forward to experiencing the album in the live context too when Baya comes to Jæger’s basement on Friday to debut his live show, until then we’ll be playing this album on repeat in our cafe.

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.

In the Booth with Olle Abstract

Olle Abstract, the don of Oslo’s House music scene and the man behind the New Norwegian Sounds podcast series has been the thermostat by which we often gauge the temperature of House music in the Norwegian capital. A larger than life presence, he can be found everywhere from Filter Musikk, sampling the latest releases from House music’s extended echelon, to the audience at Jæger listening to the newest talent in electronic music coming to the fore. He is also no stranger to our booth, and during a recent Nightflight we found cause to hit record, and today we have an enigmatic set that will be the soundtrack to our week ahead.

A four-hour set, that starts in the lower tempos and loiters around the visceral aspects of House music, where evocative melodies and vocals are a common thread, sampling a diverse selection of House music from the past to the future. There’s a palpable energy throughout the extended set that continually builds from one moment to the next, through jacking-beats, acid loops and hi-NRG synth sequences that will leave your spirits quite lifted as we stare the week ahead in the face.

Album of the Week: Tornado Wallace – Lonely Planet

Travelling through the disparate corners of various musical dimensions comes Tornado Wallace’s debut LP, “Lonely Planet”. Flying under the Balearic banner, Australian producer and DJ, Tornado Wallace is the latest edition to Running Back catalogue, that sees the label swimming in colour and evocative soundscapes yet again. Tornado Wallace combines textures redolent of 50’s sci-fi films with those atmospheres reminiscent of world music to create remarkable harmonic- and melodic contrapuntal movements of great intrigue and suspense throughout the 40 minutes of the album. Nothing is taboo, and native American flutes and wiry guitars also have a place amongst the electronic textures that make up most of the album.

Sincere panpipes, synthesised from some machine in the eighties, abound with chorus, delay and reverb, finds itself amongst calls of wild birds and polyrhythmic percussion with the odd modern keyboard voice, bringing the whole ensemble into the present. Laid back tempos and easily digestible sonic palettes indulges pure escapism and respite from any corporeal engagement. There is no lofty purpose to this music, other than to enjoy, and your enjoyment can flit between nostalgia and relaxation, as you travel through the kaleidoscopic vision of Tornado Wallace on his debut album.

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.

Amp Fiddler comes to Jæger in March

Amp Fiddler goes on tour this year with a special solo live performance and is set to stop off at Jæger on the 17th of March. The multi-instrumentalist whose worked with everybody from Funkadelic to Prince and Moodymann, will make his first appearance in Oslo on March the 17th and has chosen Jæger’s basement for the occasion. Frædag in association with Oye Records and Baklengs bring Amp Fiddler to Oslo with DJ support from INYRMND. Save … the … date.

Album of the Week: EOD – EODS

The promise of 2017 being Electro’s year is one that we get incredibly excited about as releases by the likes of DMX Krew, DJ Stingray, and Plant 43 have given us a fair few reasons to get our hopes up. Perpetuated in the margins however, Electro has always been a constant, going through phases, where it might grab the attention of a fair few tastemakers, but feigns the popularity altogether to remain the shadowy weird figure it’s always been in club music’s social circles. It’s DIY ideology and machine aesthetic makes it a firm favourite for music nerds, and has given us a fair few labels and producers, operating under the surface of it all, happy to catch the ear of some like-minded folks without actively seeking appraisal.

EOD is such an artist. The artistic pseudonym of Kristiansand producer Stian Kjevik, has seen given the world a substantial taste of his music via labels like Rephlex and CPU, upholding that nebulous disposition of this music and its practitioners. He arrives in 2017 with and album via WeMe records, a 3LP affair which explores the boundaries of Electro, but which easily move into areas of Techno and Acid without hesitation.

For the most part EODS is crafted from a melodically informed musical disposition that swathes striped-back machine percussion with layers of  foggy harmonics and spatial melodic motifs. The DIY ideology is accounted for, offering whispers of tape hiss and live improvised electronics as obvious hints to the artist’s working methods. Energetic tempos are impeded from being boisterous with tranquil sonic atmospheres juxtaposing the gait of rhythmic sections. At times, in the more obscure tracks, we get hints of Aphex Twin, and to EODS and electro album would be wrong, even if it makes up a large part of the album. It adopt much of Electro’s template, but unlike previous EP’s from the artist it is much more flexible.

Boiler Room Oslo: Jæger

Takk for sist Oslo. Boiler Room at Jæger has been one the most memorable experiences we’ve had in Oslo and one that will make a formidable highlight in our club’s biography. From Øyvind Morken’s opening set, which saw you all erupt in applause to Prins Thomas’ birthday set at the end, you were there through it all and put up one of the most charming faces of a community ever to grace the screens at Boiler Room, and for that we thank you Oslo.

But it would be remiss of us not to thank our DJs on the night, who absolutely stole the show, bringing their A-game for the event. Øyvind Morken, Finnebassen, G-Ha & Olanskii and Prins Thomas, you are absolute legends and today you have been immortalised in five stunning sets we can all play back at our convenience. A special shout-out needs to go to G-Ha & Olanskii who made all this happen, once again turning the world’s attention on Oslo as they’ve done countless times with Sunkissed, and showing everybody just exactly how intense a night out could be in Oslo. Thank you.

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.“

Omnipresent: The music of Tokyo

The moment your feet touch solid ground at Narita Airport in Tokyo Japan, a wave of calm and serenity envelopes you on the sonic plain. There’s a quiet, light hum from people scurrying to their final- or next destination, but filling the noticeable void where noise usually resides in western transport hubs, a synthetic glass harmonium plays a forlorn melody over some small speakers in the distance. Legato notes sustained to forget any purpose or objective, and bounce off the vacuous entrance hall to the airport, the odd short burst from a human voice interjecting the quietude that ensues throughout.

Before my first visit to Japan, I had been made aware of Japanese music culture from various sources: Haruaki Murukami’s novels which often talk of the country’s Jazz traditions; music and mixes from the electronic sphere with special reference to the likes of Ena, Soichi Terada, Dommune and DJ Nobu, and countless articles and essays on the audiophile culture in the country, most significantly a recent RA article. But nothing could ever quite prepare me for the extent which music infiltrates the everyday in Tokyo and what was just a short trip on the airport travelator would set the tone for an experience that still only scratched the surface of music in Tokyo.

My first evening in the city, a hazy jet-lagged affair spent sampling a variety of meats on a stick and my first taste of Shōchū & Hoppy, bares associations with the boisterous sound of the many arcades in Shimokitazawa. A cacophony of 16-bit noise operating at the most superficial of listening levels, completely assault the ear while a blinding array of visual messages expound on the discorded noise, relaying no singular objective other to engage with the inanimate object. Some people approach the activity-based consoles with the same vigorous energy of an exercise session, and if you remove yourself just momentarily from a singular focus, all the sounds conspire into a densely orchestrated “noise” that brings with it its own unique peace. From this distance there’s an objective ambience, nothing more than inoffensive childish innocence that can be ignored instantly in the spiraling density of sounds that play out in this Tokyo precinct daily.

Night and day play out in complete contrasts, and the next morning proves to be an antithesis to the preceding night. Where chaos and cacophony raged the night before a calm reigns through a piano concerto strained through a thin tannoy system. The slow moving classical piece, a recording of a simply orchestrated arrangement, reflects the order and the cleanliness of the street below. Inoffensive it creates yet a new acoustic backdrop to the very same street from the night before as the bohemian little district wakes up and goes about its business.

It doesn’t take long to realise there’s hardly ever a moment of complete silence in Tokyo. Walking through Shibuya in the early evening its presence can be felt more than ever. The continuous drone of a people living in a big city in constant harmonic counterpoint to the sharp incandescent lure of pachinko machines; the intermittent shriek from a music video; the loud visuals from a collage of advertising boards floating above a mass of human heads; and even the synthetic bird-song being broadcasted through the metro system. They all conspire in a general sonic atmosphere that bombasts the individual, and although they all hide their own peculiarities, I can’t help but wonder; what of the more concentrated and purposeful efforts? What of the actualised music?

This is why I’m in Shibuya. Away from the metropole where sushi bars and Izakayas lure the hungry and thirsty off the streets, past the giant intersections where crowds crawl their way across, selfie sticks raising a flag where tourists take ubiquitous holiday snap, there lies a bar/club, called Oath. I make Oath my first port of call in the first club-music experience that would eventually lead me to UNIT and DJ Nobu later that evening.

Oath is a very inconspicuous hole in the wall for the business district just shy of the centre of Shibuya. Inconspicuous in aesthetic, its entrance lies in a back street, but where traffic noise and very little else persist, Oath can be heard, long before it can be seen. It dominates (both physically and sonically) Tunnel, the more commercially aligned, Disco-orientated sister club in the basement. Walking through the plastic curtain over its threshold, Oath perpetuates the idiom “big things come in small packages”. A clunky iron-red look commands the interior, conservatively perpetuating the intimacy of its physical dimensions, trying very hard to contain the larger than life sound radiating through the walls, while mirrors play visual tricks to enlarge the actual size of the space. It’s barely gone ten in the evening and already a small dance floor has formed, DJ U-T representing Seltica is presiding over a small audience made up of a mixture of expats and locals. The swell from the single Tannoy® sub at my feet is loud but warm, never consuming nor overwhelming and although it’s a PA system rather than a hi-fi system, the sound in the small venue is incredibly controlled. DJ U-T plays a selection of Deep cuts that border on the malignant and darker sound of Techno eluding to more than what House percussive arrangement might suggest. The DJ stands behind the bar, where the relationship between the DJ and his/her audience is very much one of facilitator and not their nucleus of focus. Assuming the same position as that of a barman, any notion of performance is acutely missing, a universal reality I have found throughout Tokyo.

Oath and the venues that make up the bulk of that RA audiophile article, only scratch the surface of Izakayas and bars where two decks, a mixer, a wall of records and barman assuming the role of DJ prevails. In the smaller and more musically varied venues barmen and -women mix records while mixing drinks without any real notion of something like a trend or curiosity. This is just the reality for your average watering hole in the city. These can go from a more commercially-focussed venue, catering to executives with carafes of expensive French wine and familiar eighties pop standards to a smokey third-story apartment, playing esoteric Japanese folk music from the sixties while you sample the array of Japanese whiskies on the shelf behind. Izakayas like these are too many to mention and are incredibly varied and more often than not I found myself looking for specific venues only to be sidetracked by the allure of the sound of a record spilling out from some open hatchway leading to a bar that could accommodate a mere handful of people.

Oath is one of the more established venues in this regard, regularly featuring Tokyo’s most esteemed DJ’s and a host of international contemporaries in a venue the size of a living room. Not quite featuring the high fidelity focus of some of their contemporaries, Oath is definitely more club music oriented, but a finely-tuned system, padded ceiling and thick walls suggest that audiophile focus is definitely present and accounted for. Jun Kitamura (the head of Capricious records) takes over from U-T continuing to move in deep territories, but delving further into the eclectic, touching on elements of Techno and Acid as the ”dance floor” expands. With 20-odd people in the venue, Oath is nearing capacity and everybody is in some state of conversation, while the DJ tucked away next to the bar, works through his bag of records. I find myself looking out the window, admiring the skull and bones insignia on the bricks and taking in the general atmosphere with the DJ’s role certainly more retracted, even absent when compared to most European clubs.

It’s quite the contrast from what I experience later that evening when I find myself at UNIT for a Kontra Musik and Nuance night which sees DJ Nobu on the bill – in fact it’s almost the complete opposite of what Oath is. It’s something more familiar as a “club”. Buried about three floors beneath the surface, at some distance away from any other nightlife establishments, UNIT’s impartial cavernous space is dotted with small pockets of people, dancing to a live show of TM404. A good expat contingency is accounted for, many of which make up the Nuance crew currently playing some ambient tracks from the likes of the 7th plain in second room to a reticent audience, slinking back in their chairs, catching a breath before returning to the main floor where Ulf Eriksson has just launched into his set.

It’s a year on since Japan has scrapped the dancing ban, which required venues to have a specific license to allow people to dance. UNIT is full, but hardly capacity, and I assume it’s because people are still adjusting to the lifting of this ban, only to find its relevance to dance music and culture was probably not as significant as I thought it to be. I ask one the expats about the turnout, a Canadian who works for Yamaha music and keen supporter of DJ Nobu. “No, this is a good crowd”, he replies “Techno is not very popular” he suggests and even though a place like Tunnel might be packed with people dancing to Disco, a genre like Techno still mainly operates in the shadows. He can’t give any input  as to the dancing ban’s influence at all, and poses the same question to his companion, SAYA, who by some coincidence is a Techno DJ with a residency at Oath. She reiterates the justification for the small turnout, but neglects the question on the effects of dancing ban. “It’s only recently that people are getting into Techno” she says in perfect English, the dancing ban, it seems by her disregard of the question, playing less of a role in the recent evolution of electronic music in Japan than what I perceived through many articles I had read on the matter. I ask more of the locals at UNIT about the subject, and where some try to offer a picture most don’t understand the question. I had hoped to write something along the lines of “electronic music in Tokyo after the dancing ban” but what I found was a electronic music culture still very much in the embrace of the underground, where mainstream statutes still hardly have a stake.

Abandoning my line of questioning in light of these aspects, I’m now more curious as  to which DJs and producers are currently setting the tone for electronic music in Japan and Tokyo. SAYA mentions DJ Yazi as an example of her most immediate influences, but insists most of her record collection is of European descent with the record store, Technique a favourite hub for DJs like her to find those records. I make a mental note to visit the store when I’m back in Shibuya, just before DJ Nobu takes to the decks. After Kontra Musik’s Ulf Eriksson’s somewhat lacklustre, but technically adept performance, Nobu’s style hits you like a freight train. The elder statesman of Techno in Japan is dynamic, raw and forceful. His mixing proficiency is a stark contrast to Eriksson’s smooth, calculated manner and Nobu’s mixes go from peak to peak creating these brilliant walls of sound that swell and crash over pieces selected from both the past and present. In the black, featureless hollowed out space of UNIT, Nobu fills a void with music that inserts colour, movement and texture from Techno’s more obscure and uncompromising corners.

Inspired by Nobu’s set and recent releases by a latent Japanese Techno talent ENA, I make my way to Technique a few days later looking for some new music records. Unlike SAYA and her peers, I am here solely for new Japanese artists, but a hearty  Detroit section leaves me inclined to paw around in the compact space of the record store and stick a Rhythim is Rhythim release in my bag. Back on track however and with some help from the clerk, who hands me a formidable bundle of personal picks, I make my way to a listening station looking for something that jumps out at me and my personal tastes. The man next to me is bobbing his head to Robin C and Omar V’s Full Pupp split, but my bundle is solely made up of Japanese artists and labels. Immediately, titles from Britta, Gonno and Iori jump out at me, and I can’t help but fall for the latter’s second cut, “Ripple” on Less is Techno’s ( a new French label) second only release. I flip past some other familiar titles and what I come across for the most part is a sound that is reminiscent of U-T’s set from OATH. It’s a Deep House sound for the most part, extorted to its bare essentials, loitering in the melancholy fringes of Techno. A peculiar antithesis to the more upbeat, cut & paste sound of Deep House in Europe at the moment, the Japanese interpretation, seems more inclined to follow the production aesthetics of Techno, devoid of the sample-based formula distilled from producers coming from a Hip-Hop background, with machines creating new luscious landscapes from unidentified sources. I grab a melodious deep two-tracker from EFDRSD, an outlier example of this sound, featuring an Inner Science track on the B-side that entwines you in its sweet melodic prose like an artificial intelligence learning to communicate for the first time.

The few hours I passed at Technique was a definite highlight, but the “digging” experiences to be had in Tokyo are plentiful and can go from finding new Japanese music to finding rare copies of European and American music under thin layers of dust, tucked away in stores like Flash Ranch in Shimokitazawa. It was indeed in this little bohemian neighbourhood made up of used clothing stores and eateries that I found the more intriguing record stores. One such place lead me back to Mr Murakami’s novels and Japan’s own traditions with Jazz. In one of the border streets to Shimokitazawa lies a record store whose Japanese title still eludes me. A lone clerk, I assume to be the owner, handles the records with white gloves as he transfers them from player to sleeve in the way a museum archivist might handle an antique vase. It’s with some trepidation that I embolden myself even to ask to listen to a few pieces from the Japanese fusion section, my clumsy hands pawing at the immaculately preserved sleeve with the grace of a ten-ton truck compared to this man. Nonetheless, he allows me and I imagine I steal a glance of a smile when I leave with a couple of records from Stomu Yamashta and Sadao Watanabe under my arm.

Later that evening in Shimokitazawa and the scent of Korean style BBQ has my hunger piqued, but yet again it is a sound that overwhelms my other senses. The sound of a wayward percussive rhythm stumbling up some stairs in reverse, drawing me to its source where a mælstrøm of sound drags me down to the subterranean levels of the city. A staircase leads to a small room where a Jazz trio is performing a piece of fierce intensity. The drums are locked in some perpetual dual, rhythmical in counterpoint to a double bass which purposefully slingshots between melodic phrases and percussive stabs. Each player in this scene has left the humble single sheet score in front of them far behind in search of some new conscious plane. Their virtuosity is immediately obvious, the technical ability of the pianist so controlled and effective as fingers glide effortlessly over the old upright in the corner. They and their audience are completely engaged on every level through the performance, the hour-long musical session unravelling across set pieces of improvisation where the trio finds some unconscious synergy, even if each player is wholly travelling individual paths. The intimate space is almost at maximum capacity with a mere handful of people and when the session ends I grab a chance word with one of the patrons, a classical pianist who admires the performers and their dexterity in negating the scores direction. “I need the score to play”, she says as we discuss music from Norway’s own Jazz traditions to Noise. “Yes, there was some guy here last week making some sounds with all these different boxes”, she says about that particular subject with no noticeable indication of some musical edification impeding her opinion. I try to stay for the second session, but hunger has inhibited me and I find myself floating back up to street level where a Korean style BBQ feast awaits.

Listening to the improvised conjecture from Jazz musicians and their instruments would prove to be the last orchestrated musical experience for me in Tokyo, rounding off a diverse musical collage of the city, that includes everything from the strained, dissonant sounds of Gagaku (traditional court music) at Meiji Shrine

to bubblegum pop playing through the narrow alleyways in Harajuku – mere footnotes to this piece that could easily make up yet another article. There’s no singular musical identity that defines Tokyo, but whatever they do, even when it’s playing the music from further abroad it is uniquely theirs. A broad musical dialect that ranges from contemporary Jazz to dystopian Techno, music it seems, consumes the quotidian life of Tokyo. I wasn’t quite prepared just how omnipresent music is in Tokyo, and how even the most banal of activities has a musical component to it. I leave Tokyo in the same way I arrived, with a new version of that synthesised harmonia playing me out, but more inquisitive than ever, already planning my next visit to the city and digging much further beneath the surface of this wonderful musical culture.

Album of the Week: BCUC – Our Truth

The sounds of Johannesburg, are rich with the vibrance of a city largely made up of a heterogeneous diaspora. The music of the city can go from the lonesome rhythm of a djembe drum to the familiar contrapuntal melodies of South African House, and then as you cross a street, the expressive yelps of ululating joyously screaming at you from a passing car making its way to a wedding. Amidst these sounds there’s a new fusion sound that’s emerged in recent years, a fusion of  music from the traditions of Jazz, Kwaito, Rock and Funk vying for a communal space and perpetuated by groups like BLK JKS, Makoomba and The Brother Moves On. These groups are all very different in styles and sounds but all find a unique voice where contrasting genres and traditions find a mutual spirit, and can go from the more pop-focussed sound of Makoomba to the more progressive rock and communist concepts of The Brother Moves on.

Amongst these groups a new group has emerged from Soweto, a collection of comic-book-like characters that prompts associations with the afro-fusion sounds of west Africa in the seventies, but informed by an unmistakeable South African aesthetic. They are Called BCUC or Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness and although they have been around since 2008, in 2016 they put this sound on an LP for the first time. Dotted with Psychedelic flavours, BCUC’s debut album Our Truth is a progressive fusion record that is in itself a living entity. From “Yinde” 20-minute musical exploration of a collective consciousness to the more composed form of  “In my Blues” what you get throughout the entire album is a live feel, a completely natural sounding album with the pretence on showcasing a group of extremely skilful musicians coming together as one entity.

Much like the city that bore them, there’s no distinct style they conform to and in the resulting music you find a collage of diversity and bright, blinding colour. There’s no defining BCUC, and even when they try to put it in words on a section of “Yinde”, they ramble through abstract languages that never really gets close to the larger-than-life music that they perpetuate. Asazani recently made it into a mix by Rush Hour’s Antal, a mix that highlighted some of the best music ever to come out of South Africa, and BCUC’s induction into this echelon is no mere accident and Our Truth deserves  a place alongside the Fela Kuti’s and Hailu Mergia‘s of our time.

In the Booth with Olanskii

Ola “Olanskii” Smith-Simonsen is Jæger’s robust rudder, unwavering in his pursuit of new music born from the traditions of black American electronic music, rooted in the traditions of Chicago, Detroit and New York. Loyal to the residents, Olanskii preserves Jæger’s position as a hub for electronic music in Oslo, first and foremost providing a platform for Jæger and  Norway’s incredible talent pool, to which he himself makes an incredible contribution. Alongside G-Ha he’s established two of the most significant benefactions to electronic music in Norway through Sunkissed and Frædag, which offers Jæger and it’s audiences a window to the world.

More than that however, Olanskii is a tireless purveyor of electronic music, with an ever-expanding record collection that samples everything from Disco to avant garde Techno, a record collection that sits just two floors above Jæger’s cabin basement, almost consuming the very office from where Jæger’s daily operation is commences each day. Week in and week out, records arrive at Olanskii’s desk featuring some of the newest and most engaging pieces out there, pieces that eventually make it onto our turntables and through our Funktion One systems every Frædag.

It’s not often that these selections ever make it much further than our booth, but a recent Frædag session was just too good to keep to ourselves, so with Olanskii’s blessing we now have the opportunity to listen back to his set from a few weeks back. It’s Olanskii at his idiosyncratic best, finding a singular mood through a diverse musical collection that spans the entire electronic music spectrum. From afrobeat rhythms to sultry vocals, Olanskii’s set is made up of elements of Disco, Techno and House that conspire in a minimalist, sparse landscape that bounds with life, engaging with the listener on an objective level.

Come and hear more of it tonight when he and G-Ha again assume their residency for Frædag with Helena Hauff and N.M.O.

Album of the Week: Masselys – High Fantasy Low Fantasy

Masselys “High Fantasy Low Fantasy” is the album of the week.
After a superb show in our basement, this is one of the most exciting bands from Oslo. This band consists of Kjell Olav Jørgensen (drums), Bjarne Larsen (bass, guitar), Jomba (synth, gitar, fx), Jonas H. Dahl (guitar, bass, synth), Viviana Vega (vocals, guitar)

Masselys rose from the ashes of Oslo band Salvatore, thanks to key members Bjarne Larsen, Jon Birger ”Jomba” Wormdahl and Kjell Olav Jørgensen. And if you miss Salvatore’s electronic rock, Masselys is quite similar, just more danceable and catchy.

Even though Masselys started as a trio, they have incorporated the bass player from the uncrowned kings of Norwegian rock in 2006, 120 Days, now on guitar. In 2011 they were joined by multi-instrumentalist and poly-lingual vocalist Viviana Vega (Metronomicon Audio, WHALESHARKATTACKS).

High Fantasy Low Fantasy album is produced by Boris Willsdorf from Einstürzende Neubauten. This album has taken 8 years to finish up. Let the music talk for itself.

This can also be downloaded at Bandcamp:
https://mottomotto.bandcamp.com/album/high-fantasy-low-fantasy

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.

Avalon Emerson: A year on

Avalon Emerson is a creative polymath whose music and sets have become a prominent feature on the electronic music landscape, a rare entity that combines new technology with old to create within the broad spectrum of multimedia talent. A software programmer, a DJ, a producer, a video artist and a DIY enthusiast who customises everything from her headphones to her filters. Avalon Emerson is the complete musical package, and yet her music is approachable, slightly innocent, but serious without being intimidating or menacing. We spoke to Avalon before about her origins on the west coast of the states and how her formative years might have shaped her musically to-day, but a year on, and watching the artist and DJ going from strength to strength, justifiably garnering the attention of a wider audience as she goes, there is so much more to the story of Avalon Emerson, than a Q&A session could ever yield.

We talked to Avalon mere weeks before the release of her “The Frontier” 12” on Whities, a release that propelled her further into the populace club music conscious and would eventually lead to her being recognised as one of the most exciting rising talents of 2016 by none other than Resident Advisor. Tracks like “the Frontier” and “Church of Soma” on Spring Theory talk of Emerson’s rich musical education from Arizona to her residency at Soma in San Francisco and acknowledge the artist’s past a she propelled her music into the future. Her early days were marked by Djing, making music, and sending hundreds of self-effacing personalised emails to the blogosphere, which spread her music to larger audience outside of her immediate west-coast residency. Today she’s an internationally acclaimed DJ and producer living out of Berlin and her last release, “Narcissus in Retrograde” through Spectral Sound has sealed what has fast become an oeuvre par excellence in an electronic music language, the male dominated culture of this music was unable to ignore any longer.

“Narcissus in Retrograde” cemented something in Avalon Emerson’s sound that started coming together for the producer on the Frontier.  “I think they are more tonal follow-ups to it (the Frontier)”; says Emerson in an interview with the Quietus, “they neatly follow where I’m going with my music from ‘The Frontier’ – particularly into ‘Natural Impasse’.” The Frontier’s driving personality, its refined production touches where everything fits neatly into its place and Kraftwerk-referencing melody chimes lazily, and evocatively against the purposeful rhythms section sets the tone for something that explores the more expressive corners of of the dance floor, which she then carries into “Natural Impasse”. Like the former, “Natural Impasse” plays in solid, often provocative drum/bass arrangements that dominate the sound system while hollow melodic tones (this time from a marimba) cascade down the surface of the track. There’s something captivating in that playfully juxtaposition that expounds on itself when Emerson takes these elements and applies touches of glitching digital curiosities, that sets her aside from her more purist peers. Much of Emerson appeals lies in this unconventional manner the execution is achieved, even though it’s crafted from a Techno formula. Like her roots, she gives nods in the direction of House and Techno’s ancestry with 303 lines and sonic palettes lifted straight from the dance music’s oldest rulebook, but she manipulates them in the digital realm like it were a time-travelling Doc Brown peeling off his future mask to reveal a rejuvenated younger version of itself to the world.

A Technotronic vision of the past enraptures Emerson’s music, which can go from the more reserved aspects of Tech-House like “Church of Soma” to the more auspicious and grandiose Techno gestures like “Groundwater”.These subtle differences in her tracks  also reflect how Emerson is constantly in flux with her environment. “Church of Soma”, with its melancholic melodic vocals might suggest something of the reverence she has for the place she could call home as a DJ during a time she was perhaps feeling some conflict with San Francisco’s “monoculture of moneymaking” (as she calls it in RA), which provoked her move to Berlin. Similarly “Groundwater” with it’s large-than-life beats and raspy didgeridoo bass-line that form an aggressive Techno amalgamation, might have something to do with 2016 being a tumultuous year for Emerson with old relationships straining; new relations blossoming; and the political catastrophe back home according to her recent interview in RA. “Try as we might we can’t escape where we came from”, she recently told CRACK in reference to “The Frontier”, and I believe that extends to the present and Emerson’s socio-political environment too. Tracks like Church of Soma and Groundwater are little extracts we get to the artist’s current frame of mind expressed through her unique musical voice.

That musical voice often stretches itself into the more literal realm with tracks like “Why does it Hurt” and “Constantly my cure” allowing the artist to lend her vocals to the tracks, entrenching the abstract musical form with something more personal and literal. “I’ve been doing… more lyrics-driven stuff not really made for the club”, she says in that extensive RA piece and looks like she is prepared to take it all the way into an album in the future. There’s a Miss Kitten-like shiftlessness and a Knife-like androgyny in her voice that make these tracks particularly engaging for this listener and in the more subtle aspects of these tracks there’s something there that definitely speaks to a much wider audience – something she could definitely exploit through an album. It will certainly centre an artistic voice, without pinning it down to anything outside of the album context, something we know she does all too well through her DJ sets too. 

And between the DJing and the music she still finds time for other creative outlets, which lately has taken the form of video artist too. For “Narcissus in Retrograde” she created a collage video, which she then turned into a playful emoji mosaic experience. “I trimmed each video, turned them into gifs, and processed them into various emojisaic gifs using a ruby script created by my friend Lucas Mathis (github: @lilkraftwerk)”, she says in that in that interview with RA, “ then edited them all together using Adobe Premiere, a process that took me about two months.”

There was clearly no way of  stemming her artistic ability in 2016, which just appears to be going from strength to strength leaving us very much on the edge of our seats for 2017 when it comes to Avalon Emerson, and her upcoming set at Jæger this week. 

Album of the Week: The XX – I See You

The XX are back with an album that see them moving closer to the egde of the dance floor – undoubtedly informed by Jamie XX’s recent experiences behind the decks – but still very much comfortable in their corner. It’s about the furthest the XX could get ever get from their debut album with Romi and Oliver’s melancholia lyricism and vocal enchantments pulling the Jamie’s productions back into familiar territory for the band.

Tracks like “Say Something Loving” and “Dangerous” bring a new high-definition of colour to The XX that we’ve never encountered before. Garage beats and arrangements that refrain from the stark minimalists landscapes the band are known for previously, set a new tone for the band, but retain that unequivocal XX thing. Tracks like “Performance” and “A Violent Noise” is the closest we ever get to a pure XX moment, like the two preceding albums, but even on those songs there’s a new quality to the music, opting for something a bit more inspiring and uplifting in the melodies and arrangements that offer stark contrasts to the two familiar voices, which continue to loiter in sadness and reverence.

“I see you” is still undeniably the XX but where co-exist might have seen the band getting too complacent, this latest album certainly has none of those qualms and see the XX covering new ground, and the group’s sonic aesthetic evolving.

 

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

 

Album of the Week: Bonobo – Migration

Bonobo makes incredibly stunning albums. He orchestrates synthetic textures around UK-influenced percussive arrangements and vocals that create a visceral dialogue between the artist and his audience. Occupying that undefinable space somewhere between the dance floor and your headphones, Bonobo uses vocals, pop-indulgences and toe-tapping rhythms to create something unique and thorough, every time he approaches the album format. Some of the more astute of you might have heard “The North Borders” consistently playing in our café, and when we saw his new album, “Migration” on the shelf in “Big Dipper” we picked it up without hesitation and before even hearing a a single song. We knew it was going to be good, but only after listening to it, did we realise it was one of the best albums we had ever listened to.

An album from concept to execution, through and through, “Migration” expounds on that signature Bonobo sound with subtle R&B touches floating around Garage beats and evocative textures, which on this latest album often feature chamber orchestras. The album and the the accompanying booklet talk of movement and humanity’s constant flux within the space it occupies. In the abstract, Bonobo relays this as sweeping legato melodic- and harmonic movements that touch on something quiet and supple in the human spirit, where empathy reigns.

Bonobo’s production touches are masterful and his music has an indiscernible quality to it where it’s not one thing that catches your attention, but the complete picture of a song, where you can’t observe one element ending and another beginning. Harps, acoustic strings and a Moroccan drumming troupe flit between the spaces amongst the beats as human footprints in the dust of electronic expressions from cold synthesisers and drum machines. When vocals appear, Bonobo’s music is at it’s most serene, but on this album the artist has found that human voice in the abstract form too, and “Migration” stands as some of the best work the artist has delivered up to this point.

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.

Album of the week: A Tribe Called Quest – We’ve got it from Here… Thank you 4 your service

“Back in the day when I was a teenager, before I status, before I had a pager”, a group existed that tamed the raw assault of  gangster rap; acknowledged the history of black music and culture through conscientious lyrics and beats that delved way beyond the superficial; and took Hip-Hop into its golden age. That group was “A Tribe Called Quest” and collectively Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg changed the face of Hip-Hop through iconic albums like “Low end Theory” and “Beats Rhymes and Life” throughout the nineties, and when they disbanded at the end of that decade, they left a gaping hole in the world of Hip-Hop.

After a formidable hiatus, sighting a riff between Phife and Q,  they returned to the stage in 2004 and after a tentative period of would they, won’t they the Tribe came back with the critically acclaimed record “We’ve got it from Here… Thank you 4 your service” towards the end of last year. The record stands as the legacy of Phife Dawg, you passed away during the making of the album, and a better legacy he could not have left.

It’s the Tribe doing what they do best, with a roll call that includes some of the biggest names in the Hip-Hop world and beyond including Busta Rhymes, André 3000, Kanye West and Consequence. Q-Tip dusts of his samplers, channeling beats through the mountain of his experience, from which they flow unperturbed amongst expressive samples and grooving bass lines, in that style A Tribe called Quest have been cultivating since 1989. Simple melodic refrains and staccato beats that reference the origins of hip-hop counterpoint remarkable vocal expressions that acutely analyses the thin reality of our social fabric. Without diverting from a recipe they’ve mastered since their humble beginnings “We’ve got it from Here… Thank you 4 your service” stands as a prime example in a genre that today has largely disappeared up its own ass today.

It’s the sound of Hip-Hop’s before it fell for the trappings of fame, hype, trend or narcissism and stands as a testament to “A Tribe Called Quest’s” enduring appeal, that have made them legends in their field, and like the albums that came before it  “We’ve got it from Here… Thank you 4 your service” and its timeless aesthetic will stand as yet another testament to their legacy.

Album Of The Week: Legowelt / SFV Acid / Haron – Plafond 1

We establish 2017’s album of the week at a leisurely pace, dipping our toes into the cool waters of ambient music with Den Hague label, BAKK. Featuring a trio of artists that occupy the the more obscure corners of electronic music, Plafond 1 is made up of a protracted track from each artist, where they journey through some remarkable spaces between the music. Where tonality is in the abstract and a sonic environment is synthetic, Legowelt, SFV Acid and Haron create a record that re-contextualises the transcendental for the ascetic, a real-world ambience that engulfs rather than suspends.

There might be some elusion to the ambience of a previous generation in the kitsch artwork, but as Legowelt journeys through the notes of a detuned broken chord, there’s something present there that can’t be ignored in the way of Brian Eno’s ambient philosophy. Through Legowelt’s “Wild at Heart” and Haron’s “Marimbaman” Plafond 1 applies structure, while on SFV Acid’s “Offline Wave” it introduces tension through dissonant sonic indulgences that counter point each other. There’s an uncomfortable charm to Plafond 1, where a pseudo landscape exists, a virtual spirituality grounded in the cerebral where repetition is always on the cusp of evolution and the sonic signatures alien to anything we’ve come to know as natural or instinctive.

Clubbing in a Police State in 2016

January 2016, and the promise of a new year filled with endless possibilities it represents, is palpable even through Oslo’s frosty -18 degree celsius winds blowing through the heart of the Norwegian city. The prospect of a president-elect-Trump is still the worry of some far-fetched radical distant future; Brexit is  the totalitarian proclivity of only a few radicalised men and women, ignorant of any tangible evidence for their conclusions; Andreas Gehm, Phife Dawg, Prince, George Michael and David Mancuso are still with us; and in general, world opinion is less divided than it has yet to become – even though an ambivalent, apathetic sentiment has already begun to ferment in the bowels of a political elite and their obstinate and obtuse followers, who had completely lost touch with any sense of the real world. No, January 16th 2016 still held the promise of a new year, and those other things were still the worries of a not-so-distant dystopian future, especially in Oslo, where I felt a presence, I had not felt since…

Redrum : Murdering the dance floor.

Passing a corner in Grensen a queue of people greeted me, directing me towards the new Oslo Theatre’s basement entrance as they snaked their way over the pavement. There was a optimism there amongst them that reflected my own at the prospect of the opening of Redrum, a new clubbing event that was being talked about in revered tones, even before it made its debut that night. It was an unusual sight in Oslo to see so many people out the pre 1 AM mark, many young and eager faces among them. I had a tinge of that excitement I had first felt back, o so many years ago, when clubbing was still very new to me and still retained much of the subcultural status it had garnered since the eighties, as a social space for groups of people that didn’t acquiesce to the status quo or pander to the popular. Redrum particularly imbued this feeling. Coming together through an unlikely group of Oslo’s most motivated and sincere electronic music fans, Redrum captured something unique in the current clubbing landscape. An antithesis to clubbing since the dawn of the super-club, the super DJ and the producer-DJ ubiquity, Redrum didn’t conform to the ideas of electronic music that had cemented its popularity in recent times, and an audience from Oslo’s most unlikely, reciprocated and gathered en masse to take part in this event, and like me, they were completely oblivious to its ultimate demise.

By the time DJ Sannergata had gotten to the decks, pushing the limits of refinement through tempos that brushed passed the 140BPM mark and nullifying physics as the vibrating speakers took on a rigid form. Protruding from their timber coffin at a 90 degree angle they were strained, and audibly so, but the dance floor of the basement venue was packed and every body was moving. When the house lights went on around 00:30 a loud cheer erupted around me. A few minutes passed and they stayed on, awkwardly flooding the dark basement with artificial light, but the music was still playing and there still wasn’t a stationary body in the house. When a surly looking man, looking very much out of place in his plaid shirt, chinos, sensible coat and messenger bag stepped up to the booth, we finally sensed something was wrong and when he killed sound system, pulling a cord out of socket, the shock and confusion that fell on Sannergata’s face did well to capture the dismay of everyone around me. The police had literally just pulled the plug on this party and without much warning, they sent a bunch of bemused people out onto the streets immediately souring the spirit. With chants of “we want our money back” the crowd flooded out of  the venue while a small group of policemen and -women looked on from the opposite side of the street. I catch a glimpse of the man that pulled the plug and I believe that I discern a grin etching its way across his face.

The legal president for closing the event? It’s not, as you might have immediately thought narcotics (although it seemed there might have been grounds for that judging from a few gurning faces) or even a noise complaint, but rather something incredibly trivial. It seems the police found grounds for illegal activity at the sight of an administrative omission from the organisers, who had not used a regulation electronic payment system. Not registering your takings electronic apparently calls for immediate and punitive action from a small police force in civilian clothing. Redrum and her organisers were, in the following weeks, escorted into interrogation rooms to be questioned by police like an organised crime syndicate, facing quite serious charges. These are people I’ve known on a personal level as a group of unassuming electronic music fans, a reserved group of people that spend most Saturdays with family engagements, holed up in studios, or in bedrooms playing records and vintage synthesisers. The police however had grounds for suspicion and Redrum were “fortunate” enough to walk away with a hefty fine, but what this ultimately came to was the demise of Redrum after a single uncompleted event.

You see, how I mean to live is underground.

Redrum was unfortunately a victim of her own success and a social media reach that extended far beyond their immediate social circle, meant you had to be living under a rock in Oslo, in a lead dome to have missed any news of the event. That also implies the police naturally got wind of it too, and what was initially meant to be a small gathering of music heads was suddenly a high-profile “rave” smack bang in the centre in the city. (Curiously, the more low-key venue Redrum first booked, opted out at the last minute without much of an explanation, and there is some suspicion that the police might have paid the owner a visit.) If Redrum might have stayed off social media and remained at their initial low-key venue, would the police have still shut it down?

Fast forward a few months and a television news article catches my attention. I judge from the interviewee, we are still in Norway – Oslo says the scrolling text below a very grave looking fireman. Dressed in his firefighting fatigues, he swings a wide fire escape door shut and then open, pointing to various fire hazards as he descends into a basement, the remnants of which looks like an abandoned squat, except for the professional, high end sound equipment. It was the venue of an illegal rave in the city that the police had shut down, and the camera does its best to sensationalise the scene, zooming in on empty plastic wrappers scattered across the floor; cigarette burns on an old couch; electric outlets feeding an aggregation of appliances; and that huge heavy fire door swinging shut, barricading an exit and robbing a group of hypothetical teens from a hypothetical future and in a few purposeful camera angles putting a question to its audience: what if, but what if could swing the other way too. 

What if the current political rhetoric towards club music and culture continues on its moralist right-wing path and remains unchanged? What if the politicians and the law makers keep looking on this movement with the same disdain they’ve immortalised in things like the Criminal Justice act in the UK and The Rave act in the USA? These are the very same moralistic views imbedded in a traditionalist right-wing theme that have put a stranglehold on London’s clubbing scene; installed the dancing ban in Japan; judges event organisers in the US under laws intended for crack houses; and has resulted in the strict big-brother, nanny-state controls in Oslo that have restricted the potential for a thriving club scene since the nineties. What if there’s nowhere else to go but under ground to escape the purview of these cultural bigots and their staunch, most often religiously motivated, traditions?

Thirty-six unfortunate souls got to answer that question when the Ghost Ship went up in flames in Oakland in the US this December. With no support or infrastructure for club music and club culture to survive at a sub-cultural level (the big edm raves and super clubs of Ibiza are a popular culture today and fall outside this category) venues like Ghost Ship and that basement in Oslo fill a demand. Unfortunately this demand is pounced upon by individuals with very little or often no experience and the DIY nature in which the approach it can often have dire consequences. Where there’s no support from the state for this class of cultural institution and no midsize venues to cater to smaller audiences because they’ll just get shut down, somebody’s informal living arrangement would have to be a venue and wood crates would have to suffice as a staircase, wood cases that trapped those innocent lives on the ghost ship – innocent lives whose only objective was to experience something unique in a world that has become more gentrified than ever in 2016.

Months before this tragic event, I was speaking to Jack France, a counter cultural figure in London who alongside Sebastian Bartz puts together the INFERNO events in London. INFERNO is an event series that sought out the unusual and the non-conformist, extending from music to the arts. What started out in the established mid-level club Dalston Superstore, had to move to squats when they started drawing “too much attention” from local authorities, something Dalston Superstore couldn’t afford in an contemporary environment where Dance Tunnel just came to an end and Fabric’s license was barely hanging on a thin thread. I listened to Jack muse about their last event where they had to pump out a flooded basement and fight off local gangster types looking to extort money from the event’s organisers with a lone security guard the only deterrent to a volatile situation. “The security guy was brilliant”, said Jack at the time, but it’s something else he said that hit nerve: “at least we were open while Fabric was closed….” They were indeed open, possibly putting punters in danger of local gangsters in a venue that was not quite up to code, while Fabric, “a beacon of good practises” was about to get shut down. But without places like Fabric and Dunce Tunnel, those mid-level venues that cater specifically to a counter culture, where else can we get to experience a counter cultural activity?

The agenda

At the time of speaking to Jack, Fabric was temporarily closed until they awaited the fate of the council hearing, a hearing that revoked their license, but ultimately lead to them striking a deal with the council and police that will see their doors swing open again in the new year. The events surrounding this result has been thoroughly publicised and there’s no need reiterating them here, but while writing a piece about Fabric and their situation (an interview that we will probably never get to publish), and listening/reading some of the opinions expressed by the Fabric team, something became abundantly clear. Although much of it was vitriol and criticisms, it did the appear they were being specifically targeted and suggests there was an agenda from the authorities. It’s all conjecture of course and we have no evidence other than hearsay and public opinion to back this up, but there was the undeniable feeling that club music was being persecuted, for reasons we’ve not been able to fathom. Prohibiting the sale of illegal substances might be the cause for this “agenda”, but it seems incredibly futile to cut the supply off at the last point and not the source. So if there is indeed an agenda the reason behind it seems to be something quite sinister and this has led to a general feeling of discontent, between the authorities and the clubbing community, splitting a rift between “us” and “them” wider than ever in 2016.

In Oslo in July this contempt was more tangible than ever as a clubbing institution in the city was facing the same fate as Fabric. Blå which has been a significant cultural phenomena and hub in the city for twenty years and more, catering to all kinds of marginalised musical declinations, from the Hip-Hop and Reggae of the Raggabalder crew; and the Techno, House and Disco from Prins Thomas’ Full Pupp nights; to the weekly oddball Jazz from the Frank Snort orchestra, all in one of Oslo’s most bohemian settings. There was public outrage at the authorities, which included the police and næringstetaten (the official licensing authority) for revoking Blå’s license, and much like in Fabric’s case, the decision seemed to be overturned by public opinion. As the rumour mill started to churn, insinuating police were deliberately targeting Blå and arresting known offenders in or outside the venue to force closure, overwhelming public pressure mounted and following a brief trial licensing period, Blå did get its license back. It’s almost as if the public outcry at the prospects of losing Blå and Fabric took these authorities completely by surprise as is evidence in the very unorthodox and unprecedented ways they turned their decisions in both cases. It also suggests that they are perhaps not as restricted by the confines of the law as they make out to be and can in deed make compromises and even exceptions.

Why and if an agenda then exists is unclear. The gentrification of the inner city all around major European cities may go to explain some of the situations, but not all. In Oslo public opinion also lays blame on a police force that is unwilling to co-operate with venue owners and the stringent laws governing nightlife which sees the city’s population arriving and leaving in scheduled droves each weekend, resulting in altercations with each other as they try to occupy the same space for a short period of time through a drunken haze and perhaps stretching the police’s resources. I’m of the opinion too that the nanny state which Oslo and Norway has so effectively pushed onto their citizens has lead to a lack of self-control, self-reliance and personal responsibility. The strict alcohol laws that govern are not intended for the drunk that binge drinks and starts a fight but rather the person serving him or her. Where all responsibility lies on the venue to control their punters, the population has been raised on the expectations that leave them largely unaccountable for how much they consume. (Licenses can be revoked and staff can be fined for serving an outwardly drunk individual.) With that kind of hand-holding going on, self-control doesn’t need to exist and many punters tend to then drink until they are given orders to stop.

Extend this practise to narcotics, where venues are often helpless, because if there is a will there is always a way,  and you’ve got a serious problem, a problem the authorities have placed once again laid all the responsibility on the shoulders of the venues in Norway. My own experiences of speaking- and listening to authority figures from næringstetaten and the police is one of complete disengagement with the reality of club culture, to the point where they can’t even begin to offer any solution to the very things they will hold the venue operator responsible for. I’ve sat through a nærinstetaten community program with the police and when the question was raised of how to discourage drug use in an establishment a mere shrug of the shoulders is all they could offer, telling us that subject would be approached during a future version of this program. But your license could still be revoked if drugs are found in your venue. The general feeling amongst venue owners is that they are happy to operate in the confines of the law, “but if they can’t even tell us how to deal with it, how do they expect us to deal with it”. That suggests to me that the authorities hardly know what to do about the situation themselves and leaves me to agree with Pål Strangefruit’s summary of the situation, who during an interview one rainy afternoon in July said: “I think it’s very clear that the politicians and the police are a very long away from where we are.“

A new hope

Looking back on that interview with Pål and those dark clouds hovering over us – Oslo in the summertime – could easily today be interpreted as some sort of ominous prediction of dark times ahead, an end to a 2016 that saw a predominantly right-wing, moralist ideology grab the imaginations of the populace. Albeit marginally, it seems to be winning everywhere at the end of 2016, and its views seem to to be seeping into every aspect of our lives and it was particularly felt in the realms of club music and its culture. But then again the authorities and their willingness to compromise like in the case of Fabric and Blå are indicative of not being able to point a finger of blame at one institution. Things are far from black and white and the police also have to work within the confines of laws, more so than any other institution. It’s still however up to the authorities to take the greatest step forward to-day I believe, and for that they’d do well to take a page from Amsterdam’s book.

A night zsar, harm reduction strategies and more flexible licensing laws that allow some clubs to stay open longer than others, have made nightlife in 2016 a wonderfully lively and safe experience in Amsterdam. Three new exciting venues, a clubbing tourism that probably surpasses even Berlin now and an infrastructure that allows the scene to thrive is what clubbing in Amsterdam predominantly represented this year. Berlin might have made Berghain a cultural institution and Tokyo might have become a new highlight in electronic music following the end of the dancing ban in 2015, but Amsterdam really proved to be the most progressive city in terms of their attitude towards nightlife and the culture that’s spawned around the electronic music. And while London might be taking a step in that direction with Sadiq Kahn installing a night zsar, Oslo and Norway probably has the longest road to travel to get to that point.

Where Redrum’s immediate demise might not bode well for the future of clubbing in Oslo, Blå being able to remain open is a glimmer of hope that attitudes might sway towards a more liberal view of club music and its culture in the future, but everybody is very much on tenterhooks. What I did take from this year and especially Redrum however is that there is a severe hunger for a more alternative club culture there, one away from the established, a subculture which is not restricted by trivial laws made twenty years ago and free to thrive through individuals that inspire and motivate outside of the confines of the popular and give music, art and culture a forward momentum.

What I learnt through clubbing in a police state in 2016 is that thirst is still there, driving it all along as it has done since David Mancuso. Where barriers are presented, those folks who are keen to preserve the ethos of clubbing will find a way around it and as we learnt from the Ghost Ship, it can have very dire and tragic consequences if an infrastructure isn’t already present. Clubbing in a police state is not conducive to the nature of this music and the fundamental nature of this culture and the more we fight it it seems the more the authorities are willing to compensate. It’s still way too far away to establish a dialogue as we saw with some of those conditions of Fabric’s re-opening, with this side of the fence doing most of the bending as the authorities apply their will on us, quite unfairly. But it seems we’d rather still be doing it, and have to endure being watched over by big brother, than lose it all together.  2016 might then stand testament to changing attitudes to club culture for the future. If we were indeed clubbing in a police state, it looks like it would take a whole lot to be able to oppress it and there’s always the promise of a new year just waiting over the horizon. 

Back 2 Back with Laurence Guy & Svømmebasseng

Somewhere between the stage and the dance floor a musical entity exists that is constantly striving to narrow that divide where the inconsistencies of these worlds cease to exist. That musical entity is Svømmebasseng; a band whose disco-infused synth music is made from the same stuff that pulses through any club floor, channeled through a group of dedicated musicians to form a congruous relationship between the entertaining, the functional and the visceral. When they are not on the stage they are at the decks for their club-informed Svømmebasseng events, introducing their audiences to the music, and the artists that have caught their collective ears.

Laurence Guy is such an artist; a House producer born and bred in the cauldron of one of the world’s foremost clubbing scenes, London. Guy’s music favours a melodic charm built around the purpose of the dance floor, and something that speaks to Svømmebasseng’s personal musical tastes. Through the Church label – whose residencies at Corsica studios is a modern bastion for London’s clubbing scene – Laurence has cultivated a sound all onto his own. Finding a foundation in the deeper waters of House music and manipulating a sense feeling around a beat that very much has it’s roots in the UK, he has established himself as a rising musical talent over the last few years, finding the ear of people like Fort Romeau in the process, whose Cin Cin label released “Ubik” and “One for you, Lou” earlier this year.

It was an exceptional year too for Svømmebasseng, who also released their acclaimed ”Bli med” EP as an appetizer before their sophomore album hits the shelves next year. They’ll be wrapping up the year with Laurence in our basement for the “Svømmebasseng presenterer” event during Romjulsfestivalen, which gave us cause for a chat. We dialed up Laurence in the UK and Philip Lindberg from Svømmebasseng in Bergen to find out a little more where these two musical entities find a common ground.

Hi Philip. What was it about Laurence and his music that you wanted to bring to- and share with Oslo.

Philip: I discovered Laurence about a year ago on a collaboration with Harry Wolfman called “the schrew”. From that point on I started following his released and I think he is one of these artists you can just play the whole catalogue from without getting bored. Svømmebasseng also does a bit of Djing and I must admit that songs like “Thinking Of You” and “Ubik” are often included in our sets. So based on this the whole band really wanted to experience him in the flesh as well as maybe introducing our audience to a new, solid artist.

And Laurence, you are off course involved with the Church folks. What was the story behind your meeting and releases there?

Laurence: I basically made some tunes and I was trying to think who to give them to, and Church has just released the FYI chris one. It was maybe the first or second Church release on the label and it was similar to what I wanted to do. I have a friend called Ben Pearce, who’s also friends with James from Church and I just got him to introduce us… that was it.

Did you go to their parties often, the Sunday night events at Corsica?

L: No I had never been to one before. I started going after I got involved with them. The only thing I heard from the label was the FYI Chris release.

Since then you also had a few releases on there and also on Cin Cin, Fort Romeau’s label.

L: I had never met Fort Romeau, but he runs the label with a guy called Ali Tillett, who’s my agent. I sent him some music to see if he could pass it on to some people, and he said “ I just started the label and do you want to release it on there?” So we did that instead. I was quite happy to share it with Fort Romeau, because I have been a fan of his for while.

It sounds like personal relationships are important for spreading your music to others?

L: Yes, spreading music through personal connections is very important to me. It’s nice to build up a relationship with a label, so that you can work together to ultimately push everyone involved as far as possible. It leads to more interesting music, as you feel more comfortable sending all kinds of ideas.

Philip, getting back to you. You’ve obviously gotten Laurence to DJ after your live set. Where do you find a continuity between his sets and Svømmebassengs music?

P: We think that it creates a good continuation. During the last years we’ve been working more on songs the audience can dance to, by introducing elements and rhythms which can be found in more club oriented music. In addition, Laurence has a lot of melodic stuff in his music, as we do, so it should be a great transition. Also, we like his music so we wanted him to come over to play.

L: It’s up to me that the music I play first is a continuation of what you’ve played. So it will be fun. I’ll just bring a lot of different stuff.

Have you heard some of Svømmebasseng Laurence?

L: No, to be honest, I didn’t really know much of what was happening that night, other than that I was going to Oslo. I’m pretty excited. The club looks amazing.

P: I would actually have been amazed if you had heard about us. (Laughs)

Yeah, because you guys sing in Norwegian, so I think it’s very rare for the music to travel far from Norwegian shores. But with the melodies and the Disco feel to Svømmebasseng it’s perfect for the club environment and a DJ set.

P: Yes, Normally when we have a night, and afterwards we’ll have a DJ or we DJ ourselves. Basically we like club music, but it’s not always that easy to make club-music as a six piece band, so we get some clubbing vibes from DJs like Laurence

Can you tell us a little bit more about the origins of Svømmebasseng?

P: During our studies in Bergen we got together a couple of friends and started jamming. The jams turned into songs and we decided to try to present our music to the public. We needed some vocals and we got our friend Lars (Sandbakken) and the next door neighbour of the two brothers in the band, Hans and Jens (Heli) , to join, that’s where Ine (Johnsen) comes in. After playing in different gardens during the summer of 2013, we got a record deal and have since then, slowly put together new songs. During the spring of 2017 we will release our second studio album, Broder.

And Laurence tell me a bit about your origins in music.

L: It started ages ago, when I was 14/15 with Hip-Hop Dj, basic program where you put loops together…

P: O yeah, I had that one.

L: There was sequencer in there and I got really excited about that and moved on to Fruity Loops and just carried on from there. Originally I was making Drum and Bass.

How did you make the move into House from there?

L: As I got older, the tempo slowed down. When I was 15/17 Drum and Bass was really exciting ‘because it was all kind of fast. When you go to parties it was quite intense, and it was all really fun when you’re young. But the crowd isn’t very open and the music is very one dimensional.

With a lot of the Drum n Bass out there, in interviews they’d always talk about how they were influenced by Detroit House, so I started looking a bit further. I realised that if you go to a House music party you could get a lot more different music in one night.

Growing up in London, must have been quite exciting, since it’s always been such a hub for electronic music?

L: I lived about 45 minutes away from London. We’d be in London every weekend from the age of 16/17, going out all the time. I never had much need to go anywhere else, since you can pick four amazing line-ups in a week and go to any one of them.

Do you find this whole thing with police cracking down on clubs in the city has affected the music scene there?

L: Yeah, there’s quite a few venues closing so you notice that any medium sized event is really struggling trying to find places to do it, so if it continues like that you’re just gonna have this huge gap. So you have Ministry of Sound or Fabric and then tiny basements that are not really that well equipped to put on decent parties.

Philip, with your experience of club music in Oslo and Norway and the stringent laws that dictate it, what are your thoughts on the scene as a whole?

P: Well, you can’t experience the biggest DJ names every weekend here in Norway, but I still believe that especially in Oslo, the music scene is really good. I however still live in Bergen due to studies (laughs). In Oslo, my experience is that the music that is played on a night out can be as good as anywhere else. But, there may be an aspect of musical nationalism involved here, I don’t know…

You don’t sound to keen on Bergen, but isn’t most of the electronic music scene of Norway pretty much there, with people like Bjorn Torske, Annie, Mental Overdrive and Röyksopp all living there?

P: Off course you have some names, but in recent years it seems like the club awareness there has basically gone a bit down. Or, there is the possibility of me becoming too old to understand what is cool these days. But as an example, there was a DJ coming over from Berlin a month ago and I heard the club was basically empty. .

Laurence, do you have any association with Norwegian club music at all, before this event?

L: Uhmmmm. I hope I’m right when saying that the Full Pupp label is Norwegian. In that sense I’ve always been into that Cosmic Disco thing.

P: I think It’s called Oslo Space Disco.

L: Yeah that sort of thing, but I’ve never been to oslo or Norway so I’m pretty excited to get out there. I’m looking forward to it, and eating some pickled fish.

Maybe we’ll try and dig up some Lutefisk for you… it’s a bit of an acquired taste though.

 

Album of the Week: Various Artists – Dekmantel Selectors mixed by Motor City Drum Ensemble

Technically our album of the week for some time in May, we haven’t been able to get our hands on a copy due its popularity. Every time we’d get to Roland at Filter, the few copies he got in wouldn’t even make it to the shelf before it would snatched up by zealous music connoisseurs. But fortune favours the determined and when Øyvind Morken insists that you to get a copy,  you don’t question why and just make sure you get one.

It’s also a perfect way to round up our album of the week feature for 2016, as this record holds a light up to exactly those origins of Dance music we hold up in the most regard at Jæger. The Dekmantel Selectors series of events is about highlighting those DJs “who can present an interesting selection of music and play that music in a way that really communicates with the audience on the dancefloor”. These are DJs whose veins pulse with the legacy of Ron Hardy, Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan and continue to pursue the marginal music for the sake of DJing. Needless to say, Motor City Drum Ensemble represents exactly such a DJ today and quite apt for the position of inaugurating the Selectors series, which was immortalised for the first time on disk this year.

Where House is about the marginalised origins of the genre which extend back into Disco and Deep is about how far you’re willing to dig, MCDE resides. His knowledge behind the decks is revered by all with even the slightest inkling of musical taste and he’s able to tie a red thread through the entire history of dance music through a single set. Where Larry Levan planted the flag, MCDE waves it. For his Selectors edition he does this again going from the early nineties House of Risque III to the instrumental Disco of Bill Deal and the Rhondels, while tapping into rhythms of  Africa with Licky. Hearing these pieces as individual tracks on the compilation, allows them the ability to truly shine and MCDE takes a step back from the turntables in the way of a true selector, who wants to share these rare gems he’s acquired with a larger audience.

These aren’t obvious selections and MCDE gives us a peak into the esoteric record bag he is known to carry around, placing those unsung heroes of Dance music on the pedestal they deserve through this Selectors series and setting a fairly high standard for the future of this Dekmantel series.

Subjective Machine Music – In Praise of Barker & Baumecker

Within the diverse and esoteric worlds of Sam Barker and Andreas Baumecker, music can exist anywhere and nowhere at the same time. From the apocalyptic dimensions of German Techno to the innovative rhythms of a UK dance trends, Barker & Baumecker eschew the generic in favour of a complex musical language in which they question preconceived notions from within the system. They exist as a single entity all unto their own, an abstract singularity of a multiplex framework, constructed from diverse musical incongruities and honed into an idiosyncratic sound, that is uniquely theirs. It’s in the complex fabrication of a diverse range of influences and vision that they work and which has cemented their appeal on and off the dance floor.

As individuals their musical identities extend beyond their combined artistic pursuits, with Sam Barker’s origins taking shape around an experimental electronic scene in Brighton, while Andreas Baumecker was already an integral part of the Berghain / Ostgut / Panorama Bar musical family. Barker, a polymathic musician, favoured the more experimental side of electronic music, occupying the leftist boundaries as Voltek and providing a platform for similar artists/DJs through his weekly Brighton event, “Instrumentality” in the early 2000’s. Baumecker’s first adventures into the artistic waters of music, away from the decks, would have far more fragmented origins back in the early nineties, which resulted in him giving most of his equipment away and coincidently starting the career of another musician, Isoleé. “But that’s another story…” muses Baumecker in an interview for Track it Down back in 2011.

Their musical paths would first cross in 2008, and not as musicians or DJs but rather as booker and agent. With Barker following his day job for the Little Big agency to Berlin and Baumecker looking to book a more diverse program for Berghain, the start of a very significant partnership would gestate behind the curtains and what started out as an Autchre event at Berghain would eventually lead to regular events under the guise as Leisure System. With nd_Baucker and Barker as residents and bookers, Leisure System would bring some of the most innovative acts to Berlin, and eventually to the wider world through the Leisure System label. Names like Joe Farr, Rob Clouth and Dopplereffekt, names that personify the most forward thinking aspects of dance music have been regular features on the label, while people like Blawan, JETS, Joy O and Marcel Dettmann constituted the progressive event’s line-up.

With a roster like that, it’s no wonder Barker & Baumecker don’t occupy generic corners of dance music and instead fill the many empty spaces between the margins of electronic music. What started out as a vehicle for the non-conformist attitudes in dance music would naturally lead to an creative outlet too as such a working relationship between two creative individuals could never be contained behind a curtain. Their first adventures as a production duo would only come in 2011 when Baumecker was asked to remix  Sleepy Eyes Of Death “Final Hearts Beat Black” and called on Sam Barker to help him, which came out as a Voltek & nd_Baumecker remix.

A 130 BPM body music take on the indie synth original, is the first taste we get of Barker & Baummecker’s very eclectic yet singular musical personality where energetic staccato synth sequences can disappear into a miasma of legato textures before coming back to the dance floor, as if by its own volition. It cemented in Barker & Baumecker a hardware focussed sound where the driving force behind the music is the space where the two musical personalities overlap and create something unique as an amalgamation of their efforts. “I’m most satisfied when there are parts from both of us that are kind of working together and supporting each other” justifies Sam Barker in an interview with RBMA and this particularly comes through their music as pieces that can drift into surprisingly unique directions to obscure corners of electronic music’s most diverse landscapes.

Sam Barker refers to it as a “diorama” in an interview with RA and since their debut original single “Candyflip” that idea of the diorama is exactly what is communicated through their music. “Canyflip’s” breakbeat origins will fall into 4/4 Techno and even electro with a sparkling piano, and trancy synth movements, communicating something far more visceral than the functional beat could ever express. There’s something of a push-pull relationship between these elements that shouldn’t theoretically work, but find a common ground through the personalities behind the music. Much like a nd_Baumecker set, which can draft maximal Techno into the same sphere of eighties pop music, there’s a red thread that drifts through it all, these contrasting musical anomalies finding a connection through the creative relationship of artists behind the work. It’s cemented in the way one artist will channel something of their own experience and skills to the other.  Where Baumecker has learnt “how to use a synthesiser “ through his accomplice and Barker has come to grips with “the structure, dynamics and tension of dance music” through the dance floor statesman (according to that RA article), a surprising cohesion has formed, where their work is only informed by the way they work together.

It’s been it’s most impressive in the album format, where the extended player allows them to work even further outside the usual constraints of genre or immediacy and their bold experimentalist tendencies shine through, most incandescently lighting the way to an equality between all these dance floor derivatives. What’s more is that it’s very much a concerted effort by the duo, one that Sam Barker explains as such in his interview with Track it Down:

There’s a lot of generic music around, and always was. As soon as a formula for a particular genre arises, it can be repeated almost mechanically, and so quality and ingenuity can quickly disappear, (and) the genre along with it.”

He goes further in that interview to suggest that “some formulas like House and Techno become a common language” that some “(p)eople can use it to say unique and powerful things, and communicate interesting ideas” and here is where we get to crux of the Barker & Baumecker appeal. It’s exactly through these common languages that the group managed to say something unique so what were essentially records made up from the generic elements that constitute House and Techno and their various sub genres, form a symbiotic relationship with their origins while pushing at the borders of electronic music as a whole. Whether it’s the glitch-informed peculiarities of “Transsektoral” conspiring with dub’s sonic palettes or the cinematic nature of “Turns” juxtaposing dance floor beats, the progressive natures of Barker & Baumecker are very much informed through the simple music languages we know, without resting on their formulaic laurels. It makes for an accessibility to their music where words like experimental and innovative are just the signifiers of their methods and very rarely inhibit the execution of the work.

Barker & Baumecker redefine the dance floor at every turn and the pun is indeed intended here. “Turns” breaks down the stoic barrier of Techno’s more functional insistence of the age and infects it with a visceral component, that might question its club-ability, but transcends the very notion of club music for something far more human – a subjective machine music. It might have something to do with the album’s origins as an ambient work, which “then, in the end, we decided to put beats on” according to Baumecker in that interview for RBMA. There’s a life that exists through the beats that certainly hint at that very notion, and communicates something raw and visceral, something club music in its purest form hardly brings across. Barker says in that interview that there might still be an ambient record, and it would be very interesting indeed to hear the results of such a work.

Perhaps we’ll get a little foreshadowing of that proposed work in their hybrid live/dj show at Jæger, performance being yet another dimension in which they challenge preconceived notions. Barker & Baumecker are unique and deserve their space in club music’s canon alongside the Klocks and Dettmanns of the world for their ingenuity and the persistence in challenging the musical zeitgeists of the age. Their broad takes on the House, Techno and Bass genres, allow them to move the whole nature of club music forward while breaking down the barriers that exist between them, and finding a sound and personality that extends beyond the dance floor.

Lauer on the Web

Phillip Lauer is a musician, DJ and label owner, particularly known for his work as the eponymous moniker, Lauer and as one half of the DJ duo Tuff City Kids with Gerd Janson, but more on that later. Here is a picture of Lauer:

 

 

 

 

 

Here is another one:

He likes talking on his phone when he’s being photographed. Google Lauer… “Lauer confronts Trump about Tweeting”? No, that can’t be right. Lauer’s last album on Permanent Vacation was called “Borndom” for its homophonic relationship to boredom, which is indicative of the lack of concept behind the album according to an interview in XLR8R. That hardly suggests he’d engage in a war of words with the president elect of the USA. “Siri, look up Phillip Lauer instead”. Resident Advisor says “Phillip Lauer is a long time DJ and music producer based in a small town near Frankfurt, Germany.“ Frankfurt Germany is an alpha city according to Wikipedia with one of the biggest airports in the world. Here’s a picture of the airport.

Funny story: I once stayed at that Hilton when I missed a connecting flight, and with 5 hours to spare I thought it pertinent to go clubbing. With live at Robert Johnson still fairly unknown back then and cocoon on the other side of the country, I thought I’d ask the concierge for advice, which naturally led me to a vacuous Hard House club in the city centre, spitting me back into 1997. The lesson there is, never ask a concierge for clubbing tips. But I digress, back to Phillip Lauer and Frankfurt. Yes, Frankfurt is home to the Sven Väth-designed Coccon, and ATA’s Robert Johnson, two very significant players in club music today, albeit from very different perspectives.

It’s through Robert Johnson where Phillip Lauer got his first break as a skateboarding, punk/hip-hop enthusiast looking for some time at decks. After spending “small fortune about the size of a small family car at the bar” according a Fabric interview, ATA, the founder of Robert Johnson eventually caved and let Phillip Lauer play. Lauer had been was making electronic music since the nineties at that point and it was as Plenty Ammo that would make his recording debut with a track called Kiss my Phillipino Azz according to Discogs. O, I get it – Phillip–ino. Look up Kiss my Filipino a… no, forget that. “The tracks on there were basically the first tracks I made – recorded onto a cassette tape,” says Phillip in that Fabric piece. Kiss my Phillipino Ass was released on Inbetween Records, a label run by a friend. “My first release was the label’s last one”, jokes Phillip in the interview with XLR8R. This is what it sounds like.

 

Deep House grooves dominate the beatific melodies, Rhodes chords and expressive percussive elements from Latin dissent, but it’s no paint by numbers release. There’s a quality there that extends much further than a debut and if this is some of the first music a young Lauer created, I wonder what lies beyond it. Journeying through Lauer’s discography, we find the same insistence on the groove and it’s obvious that is the fundamental basis of his work – something that might allude to his origins as a drummer and bassist in punk bands – but at the same time as the years progress, the tracks become more honed, expounding on harmonic/melodic structures through charming synth works. What were minimalist functional dance tools like “Kiss My Phillipino Ass” and “Dance your ass off” extends beyond the dance floor and into pop-informed waters through the numbered EPs on his Brontosaurus label and his ventures on Permanent Vacation and Live at Robert Johnson which also put out his latest release, “Tearsh”.

There’s very clearly defined progression in Lauer’s discography where he goes from that earlier functional tracks to the sound we know now as Lauer, the synth, proto deep House work that two albums in he has defined as uniquely his. Every discography is not without its peculiarities however and Lauer’s is no different, with a release on Punkt Music as P.Lauer being particularly suspect. Discogs calls it Glitch / Electro. Remember Glitch? Not so unusual for its designation, what’s peculiar is that there is hardly any trace of this release on the world wide web, and googling Free Entry for Girls did return some results of very ill-repute in deed. But persevered, I did and eventually I found the “Robag Wruhme’s Drikki Bass Rixmi Im Partyhuhn Rework” of the track, which asks more questions than it answers…


It was an interesting diversion, but getting back on track, what possibly cemented a Lauer sound, if such a thing even exists between the eclectic elements that make up the sound, was captured on his debut album. Called simply “Phillips” it couldn’t be called anything else, the producer’s signature is all over that release, replete with its melodic charm and dance floor tracks that don’t need the club environment to exist. RA called it “Yacht Rock House” in their review of the album and thank god we were spared that genre name getting a foothold. It was released on Gerd Janson’s Running back label and came out shortly after the two German friends started DJing and producing together as Tuff City Kids. (I did tell you we’d be getting back to this.) Tuff City Kids are primarily something of a musical readymade with a Duchampian perspective that repurposes the music of others as a new creative device. Here they are remixing Hotel Lauer – another Lauer project, this time featu

Whether in the form of a DJ sets or their production, where even original tracks start off as remixes, Tuff City Kids are continuously recycling the music of others with the purpose of creating something new. And the driving force behind the production side of this… Lauer. Well at least according to Gerd Janson who “often likes to joke that his role in the arrangement is limited to making coffee and looking at his cell phone” according to Magnet Musik. Unlikely as this might be, it does appear that Lauer is a serious head in the studio, something that comes across when he took RA on a tour of his studio. Ok, for those that have absolutely no interest in the technical aspects of music, look away now, shit’s about to get nerdy…

Lauer is a self-proclaimed “preset man” and loves nothing more than dialling in one of his favourite sounds from his Ensoniq mirage as he does here.

In the article, he goes into some depth in his working processes and hints at the influence of his punk roots, whereby his time is mostly spent on finding the right sound and avoiding fastidious technique in favour of getting something out urgently and raw instead. He tinkers around while being interviewed and RA were kind enough to film some of them, which give us rare insight into his creative processes. Here he is playing on a syncussion machine from Pearl, a very unique percussion synth that I know Robin Crafoord from Trulz and Robin-fame likes to indulge in from time to time.

Could that even be a track on the next Lauer album? In all likelihood yes … ok you can look back again, the nerd moment is over… His sophomore album “Borndom” is after all a collection of songs that were all collected from the cutting room floor and reassembled for the album context according to that RA article and the XlR8R interview. This album came via Permanent Vacation rather than Running Back, yet another prolific label, Lauer calls home. It’s the first recorded work that features vocals too with “Telefon” and “ESC” featuring Ela and Jasnau respectively on the mic. And yet there’s something inherently Lauer about it all. Just have a listen.

Is it something we’ll be able to pick up in his mix too? We’ll have to be patient until he pays us a visit in our booth. Until then here’s a mix he did for mixmag who say “If you’ve ever left a club night with an unshakeable grin at the absolute abundance of vibes…” No, I can’t even finish that quote – Music journalism has really taken a turn for the worst.

Album of the Week: Barker & Baumecker – Turns

The opening track of Barker & Baumecker’s second album, churns through a dense fog of electronic components, slithering its way to the listener through a melee of abstraction in order to communicate something visceral. From there on in it ventures into the farthest reaches of electronic music, from Kraftwerk to post-dub, dragging the listener along for the journey as it twist and turns its way through the 12-minute opus that constitutes the opening track “senden”. There’s no evident formula that the Ostgut/Leisure system affiliate pair ascribe to other than their own idiosyncrasies, which on “Turns” creates a rich collage, where musical spheres flow indifferently over, above and through each other. The two eclectic musical personalities behind Barker & Baumecker seem to goad one another, pushing and pulling each other through the album, into spaces where you’d never expect the songs to go. What could have easily been two to three different songs are compressed into pieces of cinematic proportions, carving out a narrative through the context of a dance floor, at least for the most part.

Unlike their 12″ releases, where an obscured view of the dance floor can be discerned, for the album format they opt for something more tentative and experimental, where the functional is only ever met by chance occurrence within the framework of something bigger than what a club could offer. Even tracks like “Turnhalle” and “Noctural”, where a percussive workout might be more dominant are spared the insistence of the ubiquitous beat. Rather, elements like the percussion and the pads feel more congruous with some greater theme and what were initially pieces associated with dub, techno, ambience, and IDM loose all connotation with their origins as they get lost in the larger picture of each track, much like the two individuals behind the music would do in their DJ sets.

It’s no coincidence that “Turns” should be our album of the week on the eve of Barker & Baumecker’s visit to our basement this week with a hybrid live/dj show, but that should not deflect from the general magnificence on this album. Where electronic music and dance floor borders have been drawn, Barker & Baumecker continue to carve out a niche sound and prospect for the future of this music and this latest album stands testament to exactly that as it did with Transsektoral. What’s more it’s not without being accessible, and they manage –particularly on this album – to find that perfect balance between creating something that can find the ear of the music obsessive without losing touch with those things we find appealing in musical traditions as evocative melodies, intriguing sonic palettes, and addictive rhythms all conspire to continually draw us to the music. That, more than anything, is why it’s our album of the week.

Nine of Nine with Waze and Odyssey

In a mere five years Waze & Odyssey have accomplished the kind of notoriety it takes many DJs and producers a lifetime to achieve. Chart-topping dance singles that manage to reach an audience outside the genre; remixes that receive more air time than the originals; and bookings that have seen them adorn some of the most prestigious listing boards in clubland, including Panorama Bar, The Warehouse Project and Fabric.

Although their rise came rather quickly and suddenly, it is not without its merit, and behind Waze & Odyssey we find two accomplished DJ/Producers in their own right who set out to create something unique as a duo that would negate their individual pasts for a new combined future. What was Serge Santiago and Firas Waez would become Waze and Odyssey and in the same way they would contemporise their own careers, they would contemporise music.

Taking sound from the past and merging them with the current trends both their sets and their productions play on the dichotomy of yesterday and today to find something truly unique in the current landscape of electronic music. Their sets are invigorating, high energy affairs that honour the traditions of Chicago and can go from the pedestal of a festival stage to the intimate space of a 200 capacity club.

They’ll be bringing this to Jæger for Frædag and before they land, we caught up with them via email  for a Q&A session to find out what makes them tick.

You were both accomplished producers and DJs before Waze and Odyssey. What drew you to each other creatively and how do you think you compliment each other in the booth and in the studio?

2 is always better than 1; we meet in the middle with relatively similar tastes but the fringe tastes that we both bring make for an interesting take.

In the mere five years you’ve been together you’ve been an unstoppable success. How has it shaped Waze & Odyssey if at all?

It’s been great; we were very fortunate to hit the ground running slightly; we have learnt a lot along the way but arguably have a better handle on how we balance touring, writing & life.

What do you think are the key ingredients of any Waze & Odyssey track that makes it so appealing to the rest of the world?

The kick and the groove, gonna punch in the club!

There’s a sense, in your music and the way bring it to the larger world, that you like to uphold the underground roots of the music. Is there some specific era or idea of club music has always been your intent uphold as Waze & Odyssey?

In lots that we do, we like to blend the old and new, outboard vintage synths with WAVES plugins; usbs and vinyl; we are massively influenced by loads of those amazing old records so we like to try and update them a little in our way.

For me your music can be summed up as a high-energy nod to the origins of Chicago House with elements of R&B and Soul interjecting a modern sound palette. How would you describe your sound other than that?

It’s just good dance music.

And how does that inform your DJ sets?

It varies on set, each slot is different and we work to that. Whether it’s big club, small club, festival stage; you’ve gotta play for the moment.

You’ve played so many notable clubbing institutions around the world today, from Panorama bar to Fabric to Warehouse project, to name but a few. How does a venue inform your work in the booth?

We’ll have a knowledge of the club already and have an idea of where we can go within our sphere. Each of those clubs can all differ also depending on time, so that has a lot to do with it. We’re soundtracking people’s free time, it’s what mood we feel and want to try and achieve.

Your productions I imagine is quite effective on the bigger floors like WHP, so how do you adapt your sound or sets to accommodate smaller, intimate venues?

Actually playing to the bigger venues has been what we have had to adapt more to; when we started it was all about small clubs across Europe where you can play things a little differently / undoubtedly the bigger shoes like WHP you have to connect a bigger audience together so it’s a different style. We love playing both, but the smaller shows can sometimes feel like a lot more intimate.

We’ll be streaming your tour mix from WHP along with this Q&A. What do you hope the mix will bring across that will be brought to life during your tour?

Our variety, we like to mix it up across our sets within the realms of house & techno. It will make you wanna move.

Album of the week: Makam – Than Sadet

Dutch producer and DJ, Makam (Guy Blanken) has been a regular feature on the Dekmantel imprint since its inception, something that implies his tenure of the Amsterdam scene as much as it does his talent. He returns to the label with “Than Sadet”, his second album, showcasing “a new sound” for the Dutch stalwart according to the label and what’s immediately evident is that something has certainly shifted within the producer’s work. Makam’s Deep-House Techno-informed inclinations have made way for a balearic kind of sound with plucked strings hollow percussion, communicating something far more exotic than he’s ever ventured towards before these 11 tracks.

Makam transmogrifies electronic sounds into picturesque landscapes of distant scenes, converging around stark minimalist percussive sections that can go from the break-beat rhythms of the UK to the measured beats of traditional House and Techno. Makam certainly stirs the pot on “Than Sadet”, as tracks like “Buddha’s Bridge” and “Stray Dog” take vastly different cues from the DJ’s own eclectic record bag, going from dance floor tools to something more reflective. The tracks, however  different, are congruous with each other in the way their sound palettes are informed by the exploratory nature of Makam’s new approach, where samples and field recordings have a more prominent standing. There’s the Thai-theme that’s obvious in the album title and track titles too, but more than that there’s this inquisitive aspect to the entire album.

Even a track like “Resort Abandoned” which establishes itself in the acid-fuelled dimensions of House soon disappears into the murky world of field recordings and elongated pads that smooths out the energetic rhythms of the 303 and percussive section to the point where a touch of ambience can be felt. Tracks like that one and “Buddha’s Bridge” do bite on the dance floor, but the general beauty of the album lies in something of Balearic nature Makam has adopted on this release, which can be summed up by the title track. The kick that intermittently goes off-beat; the pads that seem to eternally swell around one loop; and whispers of improvised keys, all congregate under the shimmer of a repetitive loop with it’s transcendent traditional qualities.

If Lucy were to have made a House album after Self Mythology “Than Sadet” would’ve certainly been it. It has something of that exotic, field-recorded flavour, but without venturing too far into the mystic, grounding everything in the contemporary rather than going into pure library music. It’s still cut from House music’s cloth, but for those that need more than just a 4/4 beat there’s more waiting for you beyond the dance floor on this release.

Music to Dance to with Nelly’s Crush

Nelly’s Crush are a group that occupy that indefinitely modulating dimension between the stage and the dance floor. A collective, of sorts, they’ve only existed for a short period of time, but in that time they’ve managed to establish something unique and captivating as a live band and as a recording act. They’ve received a lot of attention from here and abroad for their beguiling sound that combines dance-informed beats, spacey synths and sensual vocal hooks. When asked about their popularity, Sven Waagan from the group hopes it’s because “we play live electronic music in a live context” while Nelly Hansen, one of the other founding members believes it’s because the “melodies are catchy.”

Thus far their single “Get Off” is the only piece of music that has made it into the public’s consciousness, introducing us to the electro-pop-modern-soul sound of a group that very much consider themselves a live act. That single, which featured on P3s’ Urørt, got a lot of praise from American blogs too, while at home their shows were met with a great reception each and every time. “All our shows have exceeded expectations”; says Sven with many people in the audiences singing along to songs they haven’t even released yet.

Their concert at Jæger will also be something of a make-up show for those that weren’t able to get into their gig at Klubbøya a few months back, and while we now know what their name is about – “she’s Nelly and we’re the Crush”; says Karoline Garfjell (and not the Google result involving the rapper Nelly and Beyoncé) – most of who this new band are, is still something of a mystery.

So on a frost-bitten evening in Jæger’s offices, over a cup of Kaman’s reduced-price, watered-down coffee, we sit down with Nelly, Karoline and Sven to talk about their upcoming debut LP, their visual showcase and why Tor’s Crush would not have been as an intriguing prospect…

Are you the core members then?

Sven: We are 6 core members. Tor, Are and Simen as well.

But you label yourselves as a collective. So I imagine you have some floating members?

S: Yes. We don’t have a regular drummer. We bring in other musicians and that can vary from show to show. We also have a sax player, who will be here on this upcoming show. We have to fly him in from Trondheim.

Is that where you are all originally from?

All: No
Karoline: None of us.
S: We’re spread all over the country. It came together in Oslo though.

What are the origins of the group?

S: We had a band before this called Thor.
Nelly: And then we changed some members and changed the name.
S: … and changed direction.
N: … and became Nelly’s Crush.

Not Thor’s crush

S: Thor’s Crush (laughs). Sounds like a goth, new romantics type of music.
K: Nelly’s Crush is more catchy.

So it started with Nelly (Hansen)?

S: It started when we met her and found out we all had a passion for soul and disco.

So, would you describe yourselves as a soul disco funk group?

S: There’s a lot of variety in our songs, but most people haven’t heard our songs yet. It’s somewhere between disco soul funk and pop. The main part is that we want to make music that you can dance to.

But I imagine that it has quite a live feel to it where even the electronic elements are played in and not sequenced?

S: Sure
K: It’s synth based. We are inspired by the disco of the seventies, and synth pop in the eighties.
S: We have elements from disco-soul, like the guitar, but then there are also melodies from the popish nineties which we love as well.
K: We take in everything we like.

What sort of influences are you talking about here.

K:  Prince
S: And early Madonna stuff. We have some songs that might remind people of her that have yet to come out.
K: There is also one other influence, Whitney Houston.

Whitney Houston, Madonna and Prince.

S: The classics.

I heard you guys talking about layers while I was making coffee.

K: We’re inspired by ABBA, so every song has layers and layers of vocals.

And who does vocals.

K: Me and Tor.
N: (pointing to Sven) And you.

Can you tell us a little bit about your new single Undertow, which is set for release this week?

S: It’s like a mixture of Portishead and Röyksopp and it’s our only ballad. The verse is a bit claustrophobic and unnerving, but then the chorus opens up into this big, dreamy thing. It’s really slow, but in the show we’re going to have a bass-line to make it more dancy.

Ok, so the live show is often different from the recorded format?

All: Yes.
S: It’s less polished, more raw. We can vary it from concert to concert.

Do you have fixed roles on stage or does that also move around like on the record?

S: We have the four fronting members, but we’ll be eight people on stage for this show. It’s me, the girls and Tor at the front, because we sing it’s kind of natural.

Let’s get to the debut album. Do you have a name for it yet?

S: There’s a song on the record called Sellout Youth, which we thought would be cool as the name for the album, although we haven’t settled for it yet! It’s a sort of ironic catchphrase as the lyrics are about how some kids always seem to ride the right waves and gain popularity, and so on can seem like they’re selling out, but then again they’re not trying to, are they? But we are always pretty shameless about making sure music is properly pop so we’re probably the ones selling out. We’re the sellout youth.

There’s an obvious visual component to your work too, and it’s going to be part of your live show here.

S: We’ve never played with proper lights before. We’re a new band as Nelly’s Crush.
N: We want to be a visual band.
K: We want people to have fun when they’re looking at us too.
N: And not to just stand there and watch us but to get in that dancing mood.
S: We play dancing music and you need lights for that.

There are also some images, I believe?

S: Yes and they are cued to the music.

What inspires you visually?

S: Those old pre-VHS videos of old disco and funk bands always gets us. You’d be hard pressed to find that kind of energy even after postproduction in modern flicks. Just straight-from-the-heart dancing pleasure. Incredible.

And the clothing and visual design in the movie “Hackers” also deserves a mention. It’s so totally off-beat and far from reality, yet I love it. It’s bad taste gone great.

So what instruments will be on stage on the night?

S: We have guitar, bass, drums, three synths, a trombone and sax.
N: And I play the flute.

The flute is an interesting addition. It’s not something that’s too common in a band today.

N: Yeah. Everybody’s always like: ‘is that like Jethro Tull?’ No it’s not at all like that. (laughs)
S: We use the flute on all of the songs.

What sort of role does it play?

N: It depends. There are some harmonies, some leads and some melodies.
S: We have a lot of melodies in our songs.
N: It’s a new combination, and something you don’t get to see that often in a pop band.

It’s very unique indeed.

N: And with the combination of synths, sax and and trombone, we’re something of a pop-orchestra.

A pop orchestra I think is a perfect description of Nelly’s Crush and a great place to end our conversation. Anything that you want to add?

N: Just that we’re looking forward to the show.
K: Hit us up on Instagram and Spotify!

Listen back to Mutual Intentions

This Saturday gone saw the mighty force of the Mutual Intentions crew descend down onto our basement in full force, with their eclectic penchant for the obscure corners of dance music providing the pivoting point to the trend-informed Nightflight in our courtyard. Fredfades, Ivan Ave, Moe Chakiri, Yogisoul, Stian Stu and Erik Treimann programmed a night of music with its sights only set on the dance floor, bridging the  gap between the old and the new as they went through phases of House, synth pop, Soul and even Disco. As ever the crew pulled out some obscurities from the expansive vaults of their broad combined musical club desires.

It’s a mix that we can share with you today, and provides the soundtrack for the weekend ahead and another Nightflight on Saturday.

Listen back to Olav Brekke Mathisen & Sideshow Jøgge (Live)

Echoes from the past are brought to life again as Olav Brekke Mathisen and Sideshow Jøgge call on “hits and sketches” from 1999 to the present in this live recorded mix from March at Hubba Bubba Klubb. The mix, recorded back when the year was still merely in bloom, comes from a much simpler time –  at the cusp of a new summer full of optimism; the idea of a president Trump as ridiculous at still sounds; and so many more talented musicians than we are left with at the end of 2016.

Olav and Sideshow take us even further back as they skate through their musical biography from the days of “Vi Drar!” and “Elektromotor” up to the present, touching on elements of Disco, Boogie and House in one large smelting pot of dance music.

Back 2 Back with Vinny Villbass and Justin Strauss

Vinny Villbass and his frequent jaunts to New York has cemented a lot of friendship, none so more apposite than the city’s Justin Strauss. By all accounts Justin Strauss is New York, a musician and producer whose career is perfectly ingrained in the city that raised him. Justin’s career extends back to the seventies, where he as a fresh-faced seventeen-year old started playing in the power-pop group Milk n Cookies, before moving into New Wave in the eighties and riding that wave all the way into club music today as Justin Strauss and one half of A/Jus/Ted and Whatever/ Whatever.

With at extends back three decades through some of the most significant moments in dance music in one of the most significant environments for this music, Justin Strauss’ resume reads like a who’s who of dance music. Mudd Club, The Ritz, Limelight, Area, Tunnel, M.K., Life, and Centro Fly are just some of the institutions he’s added his name to, while Culture box, WetYourSelf, Horse Meat Disco and Panorama Bar are new additions to his ever-expanding resume.

As a producer Justin’s experience and longevity is the type of thing that might encourage the adjective, veteran, but whereas those connotations might often be misinterpreted as something stale and inflexible, Justin’s efforts continue to provide a fresh take on club music, with original releases and remixes alike.

His take (as one half of Whatever/Whatever) of Vinny Villbass’ “The Itch”, expounded on the melodic charm of the original, setting the percussion back a little and allowing more of that melody to come to the fore while bulking it up with a formidable atmospheric presence. It might have been the first time the Vinny and Justin appeared side by side on a record together, but like their time in the booth together before it shows a mutual musical spirit exists between them that might just extend beyond the booth too…

Vinny Villbass:

Good morning America!

What is your Manhattan morning routine sir?

Justin Strauss:

It’s getting colder here, so my routine consists of orange juice, oatmeal with bananas and maple syrup and lots of coffee, which I’m looking forward to having more of in Oslo. So good. Then I’m off to the studio to work on some music, with my Whatever/Whatever production partner Bryan Mette.

VV:

No way… I’m having oatmeal as well in the morning. What are the odds ;) Not very hedonistic, but amazing what artistic abnormalities a good solid foundation can spark. Speaking of which, thanks to you and Bryan for a very very fine fine w/w remix of my track “The Itch”.

It’s not your first remix, I say with severe underemphasis. You must have one of the most extensive lists of remixes on your CV.  If you go back in time, what remix was the most fun/interesting/clever etc?

justin-studio-1JS:

Vinny that is a tough one. I’ve been fortunate to have worked on and still working on so many great records by amazing artists.

But one memory that will always stick out would be when I was remixing Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much” in 1989, Luther happened to be working in another room in the same studio. He popped in to hear what we were up to with the remix and loved it so much he asked me if he can sing on and add some new vocals. He did, and I will always treasure the experience to have had that moment with him.

 

VV:


villbass-kidAmazing! I can picture just the two of you doing the vocalist headset nod producer thumbs up music video thing that I reckon everyone was doing back then. hehe.. Wish i was there!! And to be honest my biggest dream has always been to roll down the streets of Manhattan in 1981, wearing nothing but rollerskates and a ghettoblaster…. well well, i had my own style in Oslo back then.

And so did A-Ha! You actually did a remix of them too, in 1988. The late 80s influences were quite present in that remix, and A-Ha was a BIG act also in the states at the time right? Or is that just the Norwegian version of the story?

 

JS:

A-Ha with their video for “Take On Me” became one of the biggest MTV bands. I was djing at the Ritz in New York City at the time, where they had a huge scene where they showed videos. That song was massive. I remixed the follow up single “You Are The One”. I also did a really nice dub version that was only available at the time and for many years on the promo only vinyl. I think it’s be issued now on a recent A Ha – compilation.

 

ahaVV:

Nice! So whats your view on the current scene? I guess disco will always be the guideline of electronic music in NYC? As it is in Norway as well, funny enough…

JS: The scene is New York is very good right now. The best it’s been in years. Lots of great clubs, bigger and smaller. More attention to the sound. For me the best djs and clubs will always be a mix of great music. Disco, house, techno, balearic and cosmic, whatever. There is so much amazing music, new and old and I like to connect the dots between them so to speak.

VV:

Good thing! Oslo is also having a big club badaboum at the moment. Or should we say Badabing? ;) Looking forward to hearing your set at Jaeger, Justin. Could you please bring me a pastrami sandwich? I really really miss those…

JS : I don’t think they travel very well, but let’s grab one in Berlin. I had a nice one last time I visited. And really looking forward to playing at Jaeger with you on December 3rd!

VV:

Yeah, Ill catch your set at Panorama bar the week after. That will most definitely beat the sandwich. But first: BADABING !!!

Album of the Week: Nosizwe – In Fragments

This week’s album of the week comes at the behest of MC Kaman, who applauded Nosizwe’s debut album for its Jazz-touches and it’s approachable sonic nature. “In Fragments” sees the Norwegian/South-African songstress cement something definitive in the long player format, with her voice the guiding light for a musical accompaniment that saunters around elements of Hip Hop, Jazz and R&B. What she first established on “Do You” in the recorded format, sounds more moulded than ever around Nosizwe’s voice, emphasising the unique character of her vocal and proving new ground for pop music in the way of someone like Solange Knowles, the Weekend or Blood Orange.

The South African connection also feels stronger than ever with Nosizwe channeling everything from Miriam Makemba to Ma’Sibongile  Khumalo and especially Brenda Fassie through her music, putting her own twist on this heritage through processed beats and harmonic-and melodic movements that step much further outside of any common musical language. From the walking double bass jazz lines of “Lesson” to the dusty sampled drums and horns of “Breathe”, Nosizwe paints broad strokes through her music and somehow they all conspire around her singular voice. Nosizwe’s vocals, whose dynamic range can go from sweet subtle serenade to a determined soulful eruption, are the bedrock from which all these elements are built and shape the album. And even with these diverse aspects informing the music there’s something complete and resolute about the album and Nosizwe.

Her musical identity is as complex as her own, and her lyrics offering some social commentary talks of  subjects like the recent social unrest around South Africa’s universities through “Lesson”; #blacklivesmatter  through”Breathe”, and touches on feminist themes in “Keep a good Woman down”. She weaves these politically motivations through her musical narrative like Erika Badu, not as a protest album, but rather an observational commentary on the current situation. It’s the amendable nature of the music that keeps you tuned into these themes with Nosizwe’s voice offering that human, visceral connection for the entirety of “In Fragments”.

In the Booth with Sunara

The Oslo World Music festival at Jæger was diverse colourful diorama of music and characters dancing in and out of our basement and lounge, an obscure din that struggles to pull into a focus a few weeks on, except for a singular focal point at its core. It’s an image of the Sri Lankan DJ Sunara, sand it’s not as you expect. It’s not her behind the booth or being whisked in and out of the venue, but rather one of her standing next to the booth, moving on the dance floor or sitting at the bar. Oslo World music festival saw a fair few artists, DJs and heads coming through Jæger’s doors, but Sunara was the only one that we saw each and every night during the course of the event.  

When she wasn’t dancing, or in the booth, she was wandering around the room experiencing the sound of the room and the Funktion one system from various vantage points. “I went from place to place listening for rattles” explains Sunara over a grainy Skype connection from Sri Lanka a few weeks after. Venturing to spots on the dance floor where probably only Ola’s (Smith-Simonsen) ears have wandered, Sunara’s musical interests lies far beyond just the music  – “what impressed me was in that smaller space those speakers working so well”, she says with a wide smile, beaming from the screen. She takes a keen interest in the whole experience, immersing herself in every tiny aspect, from the music to the sound system to the people, everything informing her time in the booth. It’s an “energy based thing” for Sunara and “the crowd and the sound effects the way you play”, shaping her whole approach to the music as she delivers it to her audiences.

Her time in Oslo, was not the first time outside of her native Sri Lanka in the role of a DJ. It comes as no surprise considering the inherent talent of her skill, but it’s still a far-cry from her humble, almost accidental beginnings as a DJ. Growing up with parents that “listened to cheesy music” from the likes of Tom Jones, Sunara knew from an early age she would not form a relationship with that kind of music mat all. “My dad was a singer and that was his love”, she emphasises with a smile that says she took absolutely no interest in the musical delights of the previous generation. She was however “fortunate enough to grow up with a bunch of friends that had good taste in music” and what started as an interest in metal and rock soon also came to find an interest in electronic music, when those same friends started throwing parties with an emphasis on electronic music. “Through partying I was introduced to electronic dance music. Once I got into it, I understood the purpose of it.” Sunara’s assimilation of this music and the culture soon blossomed into an interest, when one of the friends hosting the parties turned her onto a new style of music called glitch-hop. Enthralled by this new music, but unable to hear it in the club-context, Sunara would exhaust her friend’s music library and when it became clear that her newfound passion had evolved into a skill that same friend would eventually ask: “ do you want to play at one of the parties.”

I learn from Sunara that there isn’t a scene that allows for much more than House and progressive House, tech house  in Sri Lanka, with beach parties being the norm and clubs very much catering to a commercial music. Techno in any shape or form is the purview of but a few and although the beach parties do play “Techno to some extent”, Sunara and her peers are very much a small and select few. They utilize organisations like the Goethe institute and the Border Movement, with some focus on promoing ”growth and awareness in south east Asia with regard to electronic dance music”. Through Goethe and The Border Movement Sunara and her peers are able to take part in events, attend residencies- and play in foreign countries. “ This has definitely helped a lot of the young producers as they are able to meet others in the same industry and also see how different countries work, differently.” For a young scene like Sri Lanka’s, which Sunara claims is about 13/14 years young, this seems to be paramount to the development of the music and the artistry and through events like Pettah Interchange it has allowed the likes of Sunara and her musical peers to “play the music we love to play and not conform in being commercial artists.”

The music they play and propagate is very informed by a European and North-American underground standard, a minimalists Techno aesthetic. Sunara sites Canadian producer Alicia Hush as a particular favourite while one of her preferred sets from the Oslo World Music Festival, was the hard-hitting German-informed Techno set from Nastia. “I liked her music and her vibe, that pumping kind of music” says Sunara whose own set streaming here today, bears some similarities to the Ukrainian DJ in its stark minimalist approach. Although where Nastia pumps, Sunara Saunters, making use of melodically-inclined sonic palette that adds some warmth to the cold minimalist aesthetic of Micro House and Minimal Techno. There’s nothing really to imply a Sri Lankan tradition in her sets and when I ask if there are any traditional influences cropping amongst her and her peers in the booth or beyond, she believes not. Although the electronic music came to Sri Lanka through the DJ, it was very much a European sound that has informed it from the start. Even today as some of the DJ’s make the move into production there’s very little of a Sri Lankan tradition, informing the music in Sunara’s opinion. She sites artists Geve, Curio, Asvajit and Nigel as personal favourites with only one record label, Jambutek currently releasing this kind of music at home. “The guys there are really interesting because kids that are making this music; to see them from the starting point progressing into producers is a pretty cool thing.“

It all makes for a very unique situation, the birth of a musical identity for the region right at the chrysalis stage with Sunara and her friends at the epicentre of it all. She too will eventually look to make the leap into production, but like that investigative way she stalked around our basement, absorbing the character of the soundsystem, her venture into production realm will be for research purposes more than anything. “I’m interested in taking it a step further” she says “to understand how it’s done, which would definitely help me to deliver it when I play it.“ For the moment however Sunara is still just at the crux of this next phase of her musical development, but like her work in the booth, which extends way beyond mixing two tracks together, this will surely also see Sunara pouring all of herself into this next endeavour.

We leave Sunara and Sri Lanka at this point, on the cusp of a new musical era, one that we got a small taste of during the Oslo world music festival, and one we look forward to following closely as it develops further.

Album of the Week: Íxtahuele – Call of the Islands

Íxtahuele are a Swedish “exotica” group that call on 1950’s jazz-library sound palette of the likes of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, transporting listeners to exotic locations from some forgotten past, through a very detailed research approach to this music. Their sophomore album, “Call of the Islands” builds on the tiki motif the group have established from their most unlikely of origins, Gothenburg, since their debut “Pagan Rites” . Sparkling marimba strokes and keys occupying the more lounge-informed tempos, ebb and flow like the waves crashing on a Polynesian shore, while hand percussion and bass-lines talk of the curious tribal rituals buried somewhere deep in the jungle.

Simple, seductive melodies laze around a in a hammock, swaying amongst the bird calls and animal chatter of some retro island scene. There’s a relaxed, comforting feel to the music, a breezy island soundtrack, where you can just lend yourself over to the music. If you let it, Call of the Island will transport you wherever you’d like to go and as the darkness of winter sets in, it brings a notable warmth to our daytime playlist as the album of the week.

Listen Back to William Djoko

William Djoko’s enigmatic and esoteric personality lives on through this mix recorded in our basement for the Oslo World Music Festival. Occupying all those grey areas on the dance floor between House and Techno, Djoko’s set is broad and extensive moving through hollow tribal percussion, UK bass rhythms and esoteric vocals throughout the hour-long musical adventure. The Dutch producer’s African heritage – inherited from his father – can be felt too, most notably with Anbuley’s vocals at the beginning of the mix and the focus on contrapuntal percussive rhythms cropping up through out with an expressive vocal expulsion often offering an accent to the beat, from the likes of Fela Kuti amongst others.

Today it brings back memories of the tall, animated figure in our booth, constantly moving to the pulse of the music with the audience, a beaming smile never leaving his face. You can read more about William’s roots, dancing and his new single “Dirty Talk” in our feature “A William Djoko Groove” while you listen back to this mix.

Fierce for the Night with Virginia

When Virginia released her debut album earlier this year via Ostgut Ton, the world got its first taste of what an Ostgut Ton Supergroup would sound like. Featuring Steffi, Martyn, and Dexter on production credits and Virginia’s vocals the glue holding it all together, “Fierce for the Night” marked a seminal work within the Ostgut Ton catalogue – one which blurred the boundaries between the dance floor and the popular song format, and took the entire clubbing community completely by surprise.

“Fierce for the Night” brought a soulful dimension to cold measure electronic landscape where the vacuous vaulted ceiling spaces of a Berlin club found a more homely existence. The  club-tracks and their repetitive progressions billow around the German/Brazilian songstress voice, modulating between verse-chorus-bridge forms, as lyrics talk of love and loved loss through dancing metaphors. Eighties percussion and synthesisers bounce between elements of Garage, House and Acid, transposing the pop-song permanently to the modern-day dance floor.   

Virginia, formerly Virginia Nascimento might only have only released her debut this year as Virginia, but her extensive career extends much farther back, back to the nineties, to her teens, from where she recorded several EP’s and even an album as Nascimento. A career as a DJ would run perpendicular to her career as a vocalist, which would see her lend her vocals to to minimalist dance music from the likes of Abe Duque and Butch, while learning to to beat-match records through the tutelage of Disco B, DJ Hell and Posse in Munich. When she made the move from Munich to Berlin her voice found the ear of Steffi, and after featuring on Steffi’s “Yours”, Virginia would be inducted into the Ostgut Ton family with a few more EP’s alongside Steffi and Dexter, before “Fierce for the Night” would lead us up to this point and Virginia’s imminent arrival in Jæger’s cabin booth.

Naturally, we wanted to ask a her a few questions, but Virginia’s extensive touring schedule means it would be difficult, but thanks to the incredible people behind Ostgut Ton, Virginia made some time for us and allowed us to drop her line.

What’s the life been like since the release of your LP and have you enjoyed the reception?

After the release in May, Steffi, Dexter and I concentrated on the live show. It was nice to see and feel how the songs of the album came alive and how great it was after the writing phase to get direct feedback from the audience. We got very great response for the album. I am really happy with how good it was received.

It’s a remarkable album and odd to think it’s your debut (at least as Virginia). What does the album format cement for you as an artist?

Thank you. I am happy you like it. As you already mentioned it is my first “Virginia“ album. I released an album before in 2008 under my mother’s maiden name Nascimento. I think the format of a long player is very special and gives you the chance to really tell a story. To show a wider pallet. There is space for all kind of tempi – slower songs, faster songs, mid tempo. There is space for lyrics and through those it might even show a more personal insight of the artist.

You’ve had a string of EPs and collaborations leading up to this point. What exactly did you take from those into the album and how do you hope it communicates a Virginia sound to your audience?

I guess everything I’ve learned over the last years flowed into the writing process. My experience as singer, songwriter and producer. but I also had great help from my co- production team Steffi, Dexter and Martyn.

Vocals have always been central to your music, I assume. Are they the first creative step in your work and how did they affect the entire creative process of laying down the album?

Most of the time I start with a beat and a melody. Then I record first phonetic vocal ideas. I play around with them, sort out the catchy ones and arrange them to a structure of verse- chorus and sometimes a bridge. For some tunes this pop song structure is too much as it is meant more for the dance floor. So I reduce the vocal parts and add another instrument for the melody. For “Fierce for the Night“ we worked with my vocal ideas almost until all the instrumentals were completely finished. Through the guide vocals we knew more or less how the instrumental should be laid down. After that I wrote the final lyrics and had a couple of vocal recording sessions alone and with Steffi, and we switched the old vocals with the final ones.

So it didn’t start and end with you?

The process started and ended with all four of us. Everyone was working on every song at different stages. It was really important for us to have an homogenic album and not a patchwork of songs like a collaborations with Steffi and another one with Dexter etc.

Will you all be working together more in the future?

Yessssssss!!! At some point for sure. All three of my partners are working on their own projects at the moment, which they postponed for this collaboration.

What’s quite magnificent is the structure of the songs, where they are informed by club music, but can easily extend beyond the dance floor to a hi-fi system. It’s reminiscent of Roisin Murphy to me, but is there any particular piece of music or album you were referencing during the making of the album?

That was also my aim for this album, to write pop songs rather than club tracks, but building a bridge between the two genres. Writing songs that work on the dance floor played by a dj as much as on a stage played live with a band. It is hard to tell if there were some particular songs that influenced my during the production. I guess that all the music that ever listened to influenced me somehow.

Is there a particular track/edit/remix from the album that you currently enjoy dropping in your own sets?

Somehow, I often forget about playing my own music. I did play ”funkert“ a lot, especially the edits that Steffi made for the 12“.

I read in a recent XLR8R interview that you were very disenfranchised with the state of some of the Techno around, and wanted to bring a bit of Soul back into the music. What’s your point of reference (artists or tracks) that come to mind when you think of soul in Techno?

Just to name a few that pop up in this moment: RAC, the Austrian label Central, DJ Bone, the label Djax Up, etc.

In my opinion this is also a reason why labels like Clone Classic Cuts or Chiwax Ltd. are so successful. They re-release so much stuff from the early years of house and techno because this music has such a big recognition value. All this old dj Skull´s and Gemini productions. Obviously there is a high demand for music with a lot of musicality … or the complete catalog of Drexiya that was released again. This is great electronic music with soul. Music that people want to listen to even after 20 years. Not only some beats and a couple of noises no one will remember…

Is this something that you like to reflect in your sets too?

I do as much as I can; Not to be extra “old school“, but because it is really good music. I play probably 50% old and 50% new music.

For those folks that are  only familiar with the album today, what can they expect from your set at Jæger?

A lot of fun is what I am hoping for!

We look forward to seeing you on Friday Virginia. Can you sign us off with a song?

I am very much looking forward to playing for you guys for the first time. My song of today is: Big Strick – “Twisted Faith“ (7 Days Ent).

Prins Thomas picks: Jamal Moss / Hieroglyphic Being

The Hieroglyphic Being spaceship, piloted by Jamal Moss will soon descend onto Oslo and Jæger for a live show in our basement alongside Øyvind Morken and Prins Thomas as representatives for Rett i Fletta. Jamal Moss’ career is the thing of urban legends. Literally raised on the streets of Chicago, where he would spend the nights in the embrace of various clubbing institutions, all for the sake of a bit of warmth, Chicago’s roots unquestionably, pulse through his veins. His determined musical outlook, started with little more than a drum machine, a rhythmical understanding and a dancers frame of mind, which through the tutelage of local heroes like Adonis and Ron Hardy, both directly and indirectly, he has carved out an unparalleled career. He’s appropriated many different faces, from Africans with Mainframes to Interplanetary Prophets and of course Hieroglyphic Being in his pursuit of engaging with club music at every level from DJ to label-head.

As an artist and DJ he embodies the heritage of this music, always looking to remind the revisionists of the history and origins of this black dance music. As Hieroglyphic being he keeps alive the most exploratory version of Techno’s vision, while his label Mathematics embodies all these elements and more, a definitive voice in electronic music’s echelon for uncompromising, forward-thinking club music.

His discography as an artist is broad and reads like Haruaki Murakami novel, always intriguing, constantly pulling at the thin fibres of club music’s origins awhile taking them unwittingly into new directions, weaving new narratives, that constantly ask, how did we get here. From Africans with Mainframes’ stomping contrapuntal workouts to the mutated Chicago House melodic expressions from his work under his eponymous moniker, there’s a lot to encounter when come across the name Jamal Moss. Thus, it can be a daunting task to approach Moss’ extended discography, but luckily we knew of a man with a record collection that could help us in our endeavour… Enter Prins Thomas. “First of all, I find it really hard to pick favourites out of Jamal’s catalogue. I think a lot of his tracks shines best when in the mix and not played as separate standalone pieces. Describing them is the same, our vocabulary does not have the words needed to describe the sounds contained. So, second best after recording a mix and let the music speak for itself… here’s my random selection, 8 records, I managed to dig out from my very unorganised vinyl walls…”

Interplanetary Prophets – Zero Hour (planet mu 12″)

“As far as I know, the only music to come out of this project, done together with the producer Ital.”

 

I.B.M. – A music box reflection (creme jak 12″)

“Funky fresh filth that is both impossible to dance to, AND impossible to sit still to.”

 

The sun god and the myth lives on trio – Cosmic chords one (cejero 12″)

“Downtempo drama that grows from quiet peace… to full on nuclear war over the course of a 12″ side.”

 

Africans with mainframes – rb-3 from “Comission number 3″(biorhythm 12”)

“Jamal together with occasional sidekick Noleian Reusse. This could almost pass as normal Techno.”

 

Hieroglyphic Being – “imaginary soundscapes” ALL TRACKS (mathplus 2xlp)

“Jamal showing us there’s yet more sides to him than we know. Quite a few drone pieces and experimental stuff alongside that machine bump and grind that we know him for. Still very grateful he gave me permission to remix one of these tracks for my ‘paradise goulash’ project.”

 

Mark Forshaw – The fuck (jamal loves his i.b.m. remix)(berceuse heroique 12″)

“For once the it’s actually the original that sounds the most distorted and fucked up thing on this record. Jamal’s remix is like a quite breeze in comparison. Still tough as nails and the one I prefer.”

 

Modus – Voice of vatikan (the hieroglyphic being experience 14)(marmo music 12″)

“Just realised I’ve been playing this track at the wrong speed. So what I would have described as the sound of angry elephants running across the dance floor now sounds a lot more like snails either fighting or fucking, slowly… still prefer it at 45 though.”

Øyvind Morken picks: Mathematics

The Hieroglyphic Being spaceship, piloted by Jamal Moss will soon descend onto Oslo and Jæger for a live show in our basement alongside Øyvind Morken and Prins Thomas as representatives for Rett i Fletta. Jamal Moss’ career is the thing of urban legends. Literally raised on the streets of Chicago, where he would spend the nights in the embrace of various clubbing institutions, all for the sake of a bit of warmth, Chicago’s roots unquestionably, pulse through his veins. His determined musical outlook, started with little more than a drum machine, a rhythmical understanding and a dancers frame of mind, which through the tutelage of local heroes like Adonis and Ron Hardy, both directly and indirectly, he has carved out an unparalleled career. He’s appropriated many different faces, from Africans with Mainframes to Chicago Bad Boys and of course Hieroglyphic Being in his pursuit of engaging with club music at every level from Dj to label-head.

As an artist and DJ he embodies the heritage of this music, always looking to remind the revisionists of the history and origins of this black dance music. As Hieroglyphic being he keeps alive the most exploratory version of Techno’s vision, while his label Mathematics embodies all these elements and more, a definitive voice in electronic music’s echelon for uncompromising, forward-thinking club music. From the artwork to the artists represented, there’s a future aesthetic throughout the label, that’s firmly rooted in the ideological traditions of this thing we’ve come to understand us club music.

None understand this vision more than Øyvind Morken, who week in and out dig through club music’s past, present and future, all in the hope of communicating a bit of this music’s ideology to his audience. His sets can go from afrobeat o Techno in the space of a bar and in between contrasting, schizophrenic segue-ways he finds the primordial root of the music that ties it all together. Who best then to ask about Hieroglyphic Being and, what better example of the musical ideology of the artist is there other than the label than presents Moss’ whole musical universe. With that in mind we asked Øyvind to pick his favourite Mathematics moments, for us to dig a little deeper through the Jamal Moss’/Hieroglyphic Being psyche.

 

Mark Forshaw – Neptanus

Øyvind Morken: “Techno the way i like it, the old school way. Heavy, but still has a good portion of “music” in it. The whole EP is great.”

 

Faces Of Drums – The Lost Tracks 1

“Steve Poindexter and Jamal Moss beating out some industrial jack. Quite funny to see the look on some faces when this gets dropped.”

 

John Heckle – Life On Titan

“Hard to chose from Heckle’s stuff, since so much of it is so good, but I think this is the track that has had the most spins from me.”

 

Le Matin – Mange De La Marde

“Synth-poppy electro-deephouse. I guess the more industrial stuff and synth stuff appeal’s to Jamal as he was a regular at Chicago’s Medusa’s club, a teen club for weirdos, where leather-clad synthers met up with house music jackers on the dance floor.”

In the Booth with Ison

Anastasios Diolatzis is one of the heads behind Greece’s longest running electronic music festival, Reworks.,a formidable selector and a producer you might have heard of before as Ison or one half of Actor One. As a producer Diolatzis has enjoyed marginal success on labels like Gigolo and Noir while his skill as a DJ is beyond compare in Greece and reaching audiences all across Europe, including the Sunday crowd a few weeks ago at Det Gode Selskab. Diolatzis adopted his Ison alias for the event that saw him travel through the microcosms of Techno and House, instilling a definite mood with a set that never drifted from a very defined course. With our recorder still running from the Jæger mix, we managed to capture this idiosyncratic figure in our booth and present that here to you today alongside a Q&A with the artist, DJ and festival organiser.

So Reworks. Tell us a little more about it and how it sprang into existence?

Well, it started out of a necessity really…  we had already been throwing parties for quite some time but we identified a major lack of risk taking by the existing clubs back then. Everybody wanted to hear the same djs circulating again and again and we wanted to break this rule. Plus there was no other festival for contemporary/electronic music existing back then in Greece. We wanted to change that, Reworks was born and is been running for 12 years now. It is today the longest living electronic music festival in Greece presenting more than 1000 artists so far their majority for the first time in the country. We try to present the wide spectrum of electronic music from Modern Classical, downtempo, jazz, disco & funk to abstract or experimental to house & Techno.

G-Ha played at Reworks this year and here you are alongside DGS. What’s the Norway-Greek connection?

It just started I suppose, but I was always keen to the nordic sound since the early days. I believe it is an amazing scene, it has so much talent and a wonderful sound aesthetic. I believe it is a bit underrated too as it is in the far north, maybe coz the country is a small number  in terms of population so the scene is therefore small too. Greece is on the other side of Europe to the far south, but still we have similarities with  each other believe it or not as we got common attributes. So I wanted very much to bring closer our scenes and to develop a connection between Norway and Greece. 2 years ago we started, slowly through the support of the Norwegian Embassy in Greece and began inviting artists from Norway to Reworks. This year we had G-Ha and he was personally a highlight musically. So much so that he also played as a secret guest on Sunday, during our closing event. I certainly hope that this connection will get more established and wonderful projects and collaborations will follow.

What’s the current creative environment like in Greece and Thessaloniki?

Greece has a major difference comparing to Norway. Its creative industry lacks financial support from the state. There are no cultural institutions or organisations where the young creative community can turn to and get a push for its first steps. In Thessaloniki especially there is almost nothing so the resources are strictly limited. And with the crisis things became even more difficult. So all communities or individual projects simply rely mostly on their own resources. This is both a blessing but also a curse. Blessing in a way that you simply start your project out of enthusiasm, ignoring any kind of compromising, but a curse also as at some point additional support is necessary to bring the project to the next level. At the moment there are different projects out there some of them are very promising and interesting. Wonderful artists, creative teams that have beautiful projects under their belt. But there is a lingering question whether they will be developed through time or not. This remains to be seen and the next generation will have a nice case study, I suppose.

Which artists should we look out for?

There are quite a few actually.. Larry Gus ,Nikola Gala, Fantastikoi Hxoi / Dream Weapons, Tendts, The Rattler Proxy, Monika, Gioumourtzina, Eddoh, Lumiere, Esoteric Sob,  Manos Mylonakis. There are also two  promising artists George Adi and Senka whom I believe in deeply.

How have you seen the scene develop there since the early days of Actor One?

It has developed quite a lot I must say. We got more people trying to make music nowadays as well as bands emerging. It is a productive period and also more event collectives also emerged and the NON events and Reworks have both contributed to that, in setting up an example. At the moment there is a booming of events, especially in Thessaloniki it feels like there is no crisis at all. It is kinda artificial though as it also includes people that are not in it for the real scene, but as in most of the cases this won’t last long. Things will return to normality and it will be productive in a healthy way again.

It was 2009 when I first came across you on that Gigolo compilation as Actor One. You’ve had a few releases out, including one with Solar as Ison, but these are very rare occurrences. What’s been taking up most of your time musically over the course of these seven years?

Actor One has gone through different phases, but it is rather laid back, relaxing project. The reason is that first and foremost I consider myself as DJ and then a producer. Add to that the fact that lots of work needs to be done for Reworks as well as the other events we do. So Actor One is active whenever both myself or Chris my partner in the project feel like it. It gives me much more freedom to make music this way. But we have been fortunate as almost every track we have made it actually went on being released, even our first amateur efforts. So we’re pretty lucky.

You started out in radio and considering Reworks, would it be fair to assume you prefer the role of selector/programmer?

You can say that. In Greece in order to support your music you have no way than throwing your own parties. It seemed that it was not enough, so we had to create also a festival, and a radio show which is aired constantly since 2005. So for the past 12 years I am lucky and happy as radio is a passion for me,  having the chance to present the newest forms of music on the FM is a blessing.

What do you hope your time at decks communicates about your to your audience?

I always want to tell a story so I like long sets. Actually the longer the better. I have a residency in Thessaloniki which is called crossover and there the sets can go up to 10hrs. This is actually my favourite way, as the night starts with ambient/downtempo/experimental or even jazz sometimes. Progressing via different house and chicago stuff to techno in the morning hours. As I collect music of different music genres this is absolutely perfect in order to avoid any kind of “dogma” in my music. Don’t get me wrong, I fully respect the people that support a certain style with passion. But I love many different styles so I try to blend as much as I can. Unless it is a 2hr set where things there become more simple.

Is there musical ideology that you like to convey through your mixes?

No rules

When you came to play for DGS, what frame of find were you in and was there any particular mood you wanted to set on the night?

Well it was a Sunday night so watching the room I had more of a micro house feeling. Something to enjoy a drink, and dance with your partner to.

There’s a great flow to this mix, where we can trace a theme through the tracks. What ties all these tracks together for you?

Thank you. No particular theme as i don’t like to prepare my set. Mood was nice, everybody was friendly and with a smile so the mix simply came out :)

Was there any personal highlight  in this mix?

Hmm i would say Kalk – Akasha is always an all time fave :)

Thank you Ison. we look forward to your next visit and until then we’ll be enjoying this mix.

Thank you !

Mutual Intentions playlist

The Mutual Intentions crew have compiled a Spotify playlist to get us all in the mood for their basement takeover next week. They’ll be going head to head with MC Kaman and Nightflight, offering adding a soulful dimension to Nightflight’s repertoire. They’ve given us a little taste of what we can expect from Fredfades, Dirty Hans, Moe Chakiri, Ivan Ave, Yogisoul and Stian Stu on the night with this playlist hinting at elements of Hip Hop, R&B and Soul.

Album of the Week: Roman Flügel – All the Right Noises

Roman Flügel does make all the right noises here on his latest album for the Lawrence & co, Dial imprint. His third studio album for the German  label, Roman Flügel has definitely found a rhythm at Dial that allows the freedom to develop and and experiment in his sonic aesthetic. Flügel’s percussive-based minimalist textures, featuring soft warm, timbres around the lower ends are clad in thin veils of icy electronics that create a sympathetic ambience throughout the whole album.

The track title “Warm and Dewy” is a great way to describe the entire album, and Flügel accomplishes that through a kind of sticky percussive and bass combination dragging its feet through the rhythm while ethereal, soft melodies bounce off their exterior into a sonic vacuum where they just tend to linger endlessly. There’s an obvious proximity to the dance floor with the steady pulse of kicks throughout the album, and the title track or “Dead Idols”  are ripe for club picks of the month, but the album’s true majesty lies in the penmanship of the tracks and how they come together in the meta narrative of the album. The effervescent bubbling electronics of “Planet Zorg” and the longing melodic charm of “Life Tends To Come And Go” instil a sense of completion to the work, creating a flow from the first subtle chords of “Fantasy” to the last strokes of the keys on the final track.

Unequivocally Pearson Sound

Back in 2006/7, or perhaps even earlier, there was a low rumble bubbling up from London’s its subterranean levels. Nights like FWD>> at Plastic People were popular haunts for a new clubbing social circle, one that would congregate around dubstep and bass music, but would disregard most denominators for something more fluid, streaking towards a new dimension in club music – one more perceptible to an growing international internet audience where everything is allowed and expected. Tags like future bass, future garage and just plain old future tried to pin it down, but the fleeting nature of the artists and the music they made and played cast its net far and wide encountering elements of Techno, House and even Hardcore. In the end only one label would stick, post-dubstep and even then only as a vague catch-all explanation of the myriad of new, experimental, and forward thinking dance music coming out of the scene. Like any scene, it would breathe new life onto the dance floor and become a stepping stone to the next generation’s artistic voice. Characters like L-Vis 1990, Bok Bok, Blawan, Joy O, Ben UFO, Pangea and Pearson Sound would be exposed onto this platform,from which they would propel their own careers and individually make this music their own.  

Of course back then, Pearson Sound would be known as David Kennedy, but it would plant the seed for Hessle Audio, and kickstart a production/DJ career where Kennedy would first be introduced to the world as Ramadanman. As Ramadanman, he found love on labels like 2nd Drop, Soul Jazz and Apple Pips while establishing Acetate in Leeds – a vinyl only night as a base from which his skills as a selector would first be noted and establish the DJ super-power we’ve come to know today. Back then he favoured a Garage focused sound, that took the frequency spectrum of dubstep to a two-step beat and R&B melodies. It’s a sound that would eventually modulate however and as it went into a rachet minimalists percussive workouts like Blimey and Revenue, it started to take on a life its own, and eventually moved over to its own sonic palette as Pearson Sound. Kennedy would eventually resign the very successful Ramadanman alias with the Missy-Elliot-sampling white label, Grab Somebody, showcasing the kind of uncompromising challenging personality behind the music who prefers not to rest on his laurels.

As Pearson Sound, he would adopt some of the zeitgeist around 2010/11 venturing further into those dark, vast minimalists tools that contemporaries like Blawan and Randomer were doing at the same time, while effectively drawing a line of separation between him and everybody else. Where his peers were effectively embarking further and arbitrarily into other territories, Kennedy as Pearson Sound was honing and refining a sound that would become intrinsically his while reserving his more varied works for new monikers like Maurice Donovan and DJ Harlow, the latter’s brand of high energy Techno the producer’s latest departure from what has become an obvious Pearson Sound sonic aesthetic.  

Through it all, there’s always been a versatility to David Kennedy, especially alongside his Hessle Audio compatriots. One that evolves along the lines of some invisible path where they find new unique voices, existing between genres and styles. With three different personalities informing everything on the label, the output has always favoured a reserved approach, placing a lot of significance on each release, especially true when it features one of the two producers at the head of the label, Pangaea or Pearson Sound. Kennedy and his reserved output on his own label, even as Ramadanman suggests a severe personal investment exists where the forward momentum of the label is always the prime objective. From the Grime-focussed drum workouts of Starburst to functional tools of Clutch and last year’s extended mixes from his album, there’s a definitive drive to constantly be pushing the boundaries of dance floor conventions through his unique artistic voice, but even more so when it dons the Hessle Audio tag.

He cemented this with his acclaimed self-titled debut from last year. Pearson Sound saw the artist bring yet another dimension to his work, for the first time appropriating the album format. He showed a new depth to his work, where he took the icy electronics and functional minimalists beats of his earlier work and channelled it into something closer to a portrait of conspiring elements, eschewing individual tracks for the sake of the greater whole. Pearson Sound would swell with the accents of deep low rumbling kicks; creep around melodies and atmospheres with sinister motives; and break club music down to fundamental parts before building up again into songs. Where there were only a dance-floor designs before, Kennedy created immersive listening experiences that showed there was a lot more depth that waited past their functionality. It showed that Pearson Sound can be simple and effective through many layers of complexities even when the dance floor isn’t able to accommodate him, and in the context of his earlier works it showed an artist with much more to offer than just the functional DJ tool.

It was that “forward-thinking” ideology seeping through his work on that album, much like it has done since Ramadanman, and it’s the same thing that keeps Pearson Sound interesting as he continues to modulate within the spectrum of the Pearson sound. Where XLB brings us today with it’s energetic percussive workout and frozen electronics, is not that far removed from PLSN, and at the other end of the spectrum a more unconventional or unusual approach like REM or Raindrops exists too, but like PLSN and XLB they are all very much cut from the same cloth without falling victim to bare repetition. There’s a host of possibility within the  Pearson Sound convention and effortlessly floats from the studio to the booth, where his sets are a little more flexible. In the booth you can hear a more varied sound, informed as much by Ramadanman and DJ Harlow than by that stark minimalist bass sound he owns as Pearson Sound, all infected with the palpable energy of those FWD>> nights at Plastic People with an eye firmly on the next phase of club music.

Pearson Sound has been a cornerstone to that next phase as an artist, a DJ and a label head. He continues to challenge the status quo from the booth to the studio and through Hessle Audio, frequently modulating between futuristic trends while establishing something unique within them, an idiosyncrasy that defies any simple label except one, Pearson Sound.

Album of the Week: Nicolas Jaar – Sirens

That sound of breaking glass you hear at the start of Nicolas Jaar’s Sirens is the Chilean / American producer breaking conventions yet again. Following his dance-floor appropriate Nymphs series of releases, Sirens sees the producer, DJ and artist contextualising his music for the album format for the second-only time. Not including Pomegranates, a re-scoring of the Soviet film The Color Of Pomegranates, Sirens is the long-awaited follow up to the Space is Only noise and like that album, Jaar’s eclectic artistic personality informs everything about this album.

Like his DJ sets that can channel everything from Soul to Jazz and beyond through a club floor, this album ties together a cornucopia of outlier elements to string together songs as a musical diorama. Jaar’s inquisitive and exploratory style informs the direction of the music throughout the tracks, which can go from the improvised electronics of “Leaves” to the stomping garage rock beats of “Three Sides of Nazareth”, and leave you guessing around every phrase as to where the producer will go next. Everything from rockabilly to Jazz creeps its way into the music and pulls at the very thin roots of the tracks, allowing something like “The Governor” to go from down-beat rock bass hook and vocal to a great dissonant honking sax and beguiling piano refrain, disappearing into the white noise of the next song.

Nicolas Jaar’s music on Sirens like his debut album, are thick with layers and take the listener to very unsuspecting places at times, and it’s up to the listener to choose the level of their encounter with the album, but Sirens allows for many possibilities of involvement, making it quite an accessible work at many levels.

A William Djoko Groove

William Djoko is a very complex artistic entity. Raised by a Cameroonian father and an Ukrainian mother his musical identity spreads far and wide. Growing up he could be exposed to anything from “Bob Marley & the Wailers to Paul Simon, from America (horse with no name) to disco…. and of course MJ”,  and it’s this versatility that hones into his music and his sets within the margins of club music. I call him up a week before he arrives at Jæger for the Oslo World Music Festival and find a well-rested Djoko after ADE, readily available with a question as much as I am and  eager to find out more about his upcoming gig. “I’m very curious myself”, he says with a chuckle asked about his thoughts on the upcoming event. “I would love to see what it does and what it embodies in Oslo.”

That inquisitive nature informs everything about the artist and DJ whose music and sets are diverse and span the dimensions of the Techno and House canon, which can incorporate everything from percussive African polyrhythms to bass-lines lifted straight from the streets of Chicago. “Someone will go ‘ah, he’s playing bass now’ and I’ll say ‘really, I thought I was playing House and Techno.’”  

William’s career, which has its roots in this diverse musical ideology,  begins with Jason and the Argonauts, a band where he assumed the role of frontman. An electronic group based around the sounds of the computer, William brought an energetic showman quality to this machine music, one that some critics believe informed his skills as a DJ. It’s at the booth where he would make his mark at Trouw, the Amsterdam club whose legend is firmly entombed in clubbing history today, and whose existence would spawn and bolster so many careers, William’s included.

It was at Trouw that I would be introduced to a “William Djoko groove” during his Late Night Society events alongside Borris Werner. It would also begin to inform me of Djoko’s work in the studio, an extension of a House / Techno aesthetic interlaced with the contrapuntal rhythms of African traditions,most notably on his 2014 EP, “Satisfied”. Since then William Djoko has remained somewhat inconspicuous on the release front, while his star as a DJ has continued to rise since Trouw. It’s exactly there where we pick up the story.

So what’s Life after Trouw been like for you?

Life after Trouw… Is that a question then? (Laughs) It’s been amazing. When you say goodbye to something you have this mourning period, off course. The last month of Trouw, I was at there every single day, maybe even twice a day. I spent a ridiculous amount of time saying goodbye to the club because it was so amazing. The day after it closed I just laid in bed watching a series to make me laugh, and as soon as an episode stopped or I had to go to the bathroom, I was like (mock crying voice) O my god, I can’t believe Trouw is gone. It was very emotional. After that it’s been amazing, man, we’ve received so much love here in Amsterdam. It’s brought me to such cool places as the former resident of one of the coolest clubs…in the world.

It’s not completely gone though and De School rose like a phoenix out of the ashes from Trouw. I haven’t been there yet, but I believe it’s completely the opposite of Trouw.

Yes it’s like the verdieping, the second floor of Trouw, a little bit more compact with a low ceiling and the whole sound system of Trouw is now in that room. It’s dark, there’s maybe like two lights, one of which is an emergency exit light. They have to have it in there otherwise it would be pitch black. Once you’re on the dance floor its hedonistic, your bodies are rubbing up against each other and you’re sweating and your fucking anonymous in there.It’s great for flirting. Djing there is a whole different experience, because you only see the first row of heads and the second row are just shades and after that you are not able to see anything. It could be ten, it could be five hundred people in there at a time.

So you’ve played there a few times by now?

Only once. I played back to back with Seth Troxler. It was a really last minute thing on a Sunday. I opened the night and Seth came around two. Seth and I have known each other for years now.

Yes, he was quite close to the Trouw family.

He is a resident at De School now too. It was an amazing night. It went on till Monday morning 7 o’clock, because it was so good.

I suppose it’s the type of place that would encourage late nights since you can’t see the people, you’re completely immersed in the music?

Yes, it’s really different, but maybe the thing that made it so amazing was that we went back to back from one. We just locked and we just went everywhere and everyone was screaming, but you just hear the screams and you don’t see the faces. (laughs)

What sort of things were you playing together?

Dark trippy and banging. It’s a safari man.

Has your style changed much since Trouw, that eclectic “African” House sound I remember you playing around 2014?

I think in 2011/12 I started developing a more eclectic kind of vibe, but I’ve also always been kind of eclectic in that sense.I like a different styles of music within House and Techno. To me it’s one thing, it’s a Djoko groove. (laughs) There is an African vibe in there obviously, but I like mixing it up, feeling the energy of the crowd and just playing with that. It’s all about interaction, I can give a lot, but the more I get back obviously there would be more of a synergy and we could rise together. I don’t have a “style”;  I just play records that I find I like.

I Imagine that eclecticism has quite a lot to do with your formative years growing up with a Cameroonian father and a Ukrainian mother?

That definitely left an imprint because you hear different styles of music as you grow up, but…

I had this talk last week in Amsterdam for ADE about diversity in club life with me as a mixed-race DJ. And we talked about growing up black in a white community. You are always on the outskirts, you’re being approached- and you approach things differently. Not mainly for that reason, but it has to have something to do with it, but then again, I’m not a psychiatrist. (laughs)

You can certainly hear that in your productions at least with those African influences making counterpoint percussive rhythms alongside a House music’s sound palette.

Polyrhythmic music is my favourite, I love it.

How does that work into your sets. Is it from playing House music with those characteristics, or going back to the roots of it?

It kind of comes instinctively and I don’t really try to think of it too much. I like making weird rhythms and sounds, and I’m a very vocal person, so I’ll just (expels a squeaking sound) when I‘m alone at home. And I have a dance background, from Ballet to Modern to Salsa, so I move a lot. Everything has to do with rhythm so maybe my music is a translation of how I see things or bodies moving. I can’t stand still when I DJ, or when I’m in the studio. When I’m really feeling it, I’m like a tornado.

It sounds like music is quite a visceral or concrete thing for you?

You can put it as a visceral reaction, but it’s something that I’m making which has me reacting immediately. I don’t know how that works, I’m still trying to find out myself.

If you’re dancing in the studio while making it then obviously people will be dancing on the dance floor when you’re playing it?

That’s part of the philosophy. (laughs)

Before you started your solo career, you were in Jason and the Argonauts and one interviewer wrote that the frontman part of being in a band might have some effect today on your work as a DJ. Do you find any truth to that?

I don’t see a link in that directly. Being a frontman was never my choice. It kind of just evolved. I came in to the group the last one in, and I happened to have a mic. I never went into it being a frontman, but having a mic obviously gives you some privileges on stage. I don’t know how that would translate into my djing.

I thought it was an odd correlation, since Djing feels more like an introspective endeavour.

It’s introspective, but… I have this memory DJing in my friend’s bedroom – where all DJ’s start – and his mom came in later during the day asking what the fuck is going in the House. Not because we were djing, but because I was moving so much while standing still she thought the House was coming down around her. So even when I’m standing still in a bedroom, all this energy has to be set free. So when I’m on stage it’s all about the show. And I like the show thing about DJing – you can actually watch people playing. You can wink at me, I can wave to you, I can talk to the light guy up front, and we can all interact while listening to the music. It’s like ‘let’s make a show together’, and that to me isn’t very introspective. If I can, and most the time I can, I will always try to make it into a show.

That’s probably where that writer got that from, the showmanship aspect of your DJing.

Right

You mentioned ADE earlier. Besides your panel discussion, what else were involved with and  how was event in general this year?

Nothing short of amazing as always. It’s Thursday now and the last party ended on Monday morning, and you see people trying to reconnect with one another only now. It’s just so full on!

This year there was also three new club locations so you want to go on a small tour and check everything out. Everywhere you go you meet so many people on the street, it’s like the streets are made of syrup. For me it’s the centre of the universe for that week.

Yeah, this year must have been quite a unique experience, since as you mentioned, there were three new additions to the club scene in Amsterdam.

Exactly. I played the Thursday night at Shelter with Jackmaster, Tom Trago and Moodymann and I played back to back with Jasper Jones. It was just ridiculous, I love that club so much and I’m gonna do my own night there too next month. It’s amazing what’s going on here in Amsterdam. Everyone is doing a great job and everyone is rooting for one another.       

Is your night at Shelter gonna be a continuation of Late night Society?

That one was me and Borris and we also decided in the last year of Trouw, not to continue with that one.

As a hommage to Trouw?

Yes, I think it’s better left there as something we thought of in 2010. That was an idea that was then and there and I think it’s always good to move on.

Will there a particular concept for this new night?

For the first night I have Craig Richards and Kornél Kovács. I have a very good understanding  with Kolja (Verhage) and in the talks we had, he could offer me a lot of freedom in who I wanted to book and how I wanted to book. Of course over the years my network is huge and I have so many friends who are talented that I could offer a stage to. It’s all fresh and all new and it will be interesting to see how it all goes.

It seems that Amsterdam as a whole is so fresh and so new, with all these new places opening.

We mentioned your productions earlier and I want to get back to that. You had a bit of a hiatus from recording.

Yes, I had some VA’s and some single tracks on compilations and I had a couple of remixes, but yeah it’s a been a bit quiet release-wise. Literally this week though “Dirty Talk” is coming out on Voyage Direct. It’s my new EP with an original track and a club-dub version. It’s been a giant year-long project and it’s had a good reception already.

And that will be your first original release since Satisfied?

Yes, since Satisfied and Sacred Secrets , which came out at the same time. Due to poor planning and timing from both sides, both releases came out in the same week, So people either know Satisfied or Sacred Secrets. I put out two releases in one week which was the worst timing ever.

And then there was nothing for two years.

No EP’s for two years, but I just framed the new one and it looks amazing so I really feel confident  and I’ve got a shit load of new music ready.

I can’t wait to hear it in your set!

In the Booth with Soul Clap

Earlier this month Elyte and Cnyce’s interstellar Soul Clap ship descended on Jæger with the full force of Sun Ra’s most cosmic determination. Holled up in our basement the entire night, they brought the might of a Bootsy Collins platform down on Oslo, with their Funk-determined vision of an electronic future narrated by Mad Max.

Captivating and energetic, their set skated through dance music from the 70’s to the present on a celestial trajectory where no man has ventured before, their destination set to mark the release of their latest- and second album, “Soul Clap”. Like “EFUNK” before it this latest album is a highly intoxicating punchbowl of musical influences concocted from the group’s most primal experiences on the dance floor, distilled for your most hedonistic listening pleasures.

Tracing a line from their Funk roots, with syncopated, bouncing live drums, oozing cool bass-lines, and vocals that call out at you from some foggy hazy corned of a dance floor like a siren song, Soul Clap is undeniably a soul Clap album from cover to cover, while at the same time plotting perhaps a new orbit for the Soul Clap ship.

To find out where exactly the are headed with this new album, we shot over some questions to Elyte and Cnyce, which they answer here while you listen back to their time in our booth.


We’re gonna keep it focussed on the new album, but I just have one unrelated question: Did you enjoy your time at Jæger, and if there were any highlights you could recall?

The show at Jaeger was so dope!  What a great club, sound system, vibe, DJ booth, crowd, energy… it’s a winning combination over there!

Ok so onto the album, Soul Clap….

It’s self-titled. Is there any particular reason behind that?

We decided to self-title this album because musically we feel it really represents us at our core. This is the album we’ve always wanted to make and we want the world to hear it and understand that it defines us, where we’re at and where we’ve come from.

It’s your second only album in your extensive career. Why is the album such a rare format in your discography and what particularly inspired you to approach it again on this occasion?

You know, it takes a lot to create an “album”. There’s so much more thought and philosophy that goes into it. EPs, remixes, edits, they are the fruit of lesser work. Not that they’re any less special musically, just less of an overall musical effort. But albums are the most important form of statement for a musician. Albums also seem to be benchmarks in a musician’s career and therefore totally necessary for real growth.

As with EFUNK and many of your ep’s/12”, there’s a lot of collaboration on Soul Clap. What do you find other artists universally bring out in your music?

We really wanted to tap into the traditional style of making an album on “Soul Clap”.  And by traditional, we mean recording many session musicians. If we represent the canvas and the album represents the black and white lines, it’s the session musicians that are all of the wonderful colors that make this album dazzle. These are the players with the chops and while we’re not entirely all thumbs here, there are some ideas that require a greater skill level to come together and that’s what these artists really bring out in our music.

Wolf & Lamb make an appearance again too and you have a close relationship with that group. What do you like about working with them and what do they particularly bring out in your music?

W+L are our brothers, the four of us make up an incredible team. Together we’ve brought life to Crew Love, so much music and so many unforgettable parties. We love their art first over money approach. We love their classy taste that they applied to the Marcy Hotel which they then applied to their overall aesthetic. Musically Gadi specifically has always been an incredible A&R and helped develop our sound into what you hear today. We’ve always been on our own path, but it’s safe to say we owe a lot to Wolf + Lamb.

What did you take from the  EFUNK experience that you developed further on this sophomore work?

EFUNK was a tribute to our roots in house, r&b and most importantly FUNK. Especially Parliament-Funkadelic, and that love and sound is very much alive on this new album.  This new album also tells our story after we went down to Tallahassee, Florida where we met George Clinton and got to jam with him and the many other musicians who spend their time at the studio there. Tallahassee is also where the core of this new album was created. Songs like “Numb” and “Elevation” were written down there and hold that energy.

It’s undeniably a Soul Clap record with elements of Funk and House conspiring, very often in the form of a pop song, but was there an evolution to your overall creative process for this album?

For this album most of the ideas began as sketches, loops and jams. From there, as the arrangements came together the demo’s were born. Then these demos were taken into larger studios, like Redbull Studios in Manhattan, Midnight Magic’s studio in Brooklyn and finally Martin Buttrich’s studio in Barcelona, where the demos were fleshed out, studio musicians were recorded, feature vocals were recorded and these entities became album songs!

You favour the progression of a “song” over the repetitiveness of a “track” throughout most of your work and again on this album. Is this grounded in something unique within your musical upbringing?

The music we grew up with, the music we love, the music we want to write, they’re songs! It’s not that we don’t appreciate tracks and the power that tracks have, it’s just this is where our hearts are.

Your live mix that we’re presenting today on Jæger features a similar focus on the traditional song, especially on the beginning of the mix. How do you achieve this fluidity between the dance floor and the recorded format, that seems to exist both ways for you?

We’ve each been DJs for 20 years now, that’s 40 years of combined experience.  Fluidity in mixing and programming is achieved thru repetition. Just like working a muscle, these are exercises we’ve done countless times.

There’s this tangible party atmosphere to your music, and this album especially. I feel that if I put it on at a house party it would be like you’re in the room there with us. Is this something you set out to achieve and if so how did you get in that frame of mind before you went into the studio?

Thank you very much! Maybe we are in the room with you, watching thru a web cam… ever consider that?  We didn’t set out to achieve this goal, but it is certainly a compliment.

One final question. I mentioned that I really feel that party atmosphere on the record, but what do you hope the listener will get out of it?

We want our listeners to feel as funky, freaky and free as they wanna be!  

Album of the Week: Telephones – Vibe Telemetry

Telephones infects a palpable sense of fun in the music through a Disco aesthetic he masterfully manipulates like a comic strip narrative for the purpose of pleasure. There’s the obvious dance floor perspective in his music, but it’s something the music arrives at without a clear agenda, a mere by-product of its approachable nature. His music is something that can pass from a set to your headphones and after a few EP’s on Full Pupp, Sex Tags, Love on the Rocks and Running Back, it can finally be heard on the album format with “Vibe Telemetry”.

“Vibe Telemetry” continues where “The Ocean Called” EP left off calling on elements of Disco, House, Synth and Afrobeat focussed on a very distinct album narrative. There’s a uniformity that exists between the songs where at times it might be hard to believe there existed any at all. From “Sierra’s” punchy four on the floor introduction, to “Data Jungle’s” textured field recordings and “Mezcal Eclipse’s” House-piano refrain, everything finds a place and in the melee the results are evocative and memorable.

There’s a reckless abandon that’s imparted on to the listener and in the presence of “Vibe Telemetry” Telephones certainly relays a tone and a mood, that has some correlation to his work in the booth, where hedonistic pleasures are translated into intuitive melodic pieces and polyrhythmic suites. It is like he is telepathically transmitting a “vibe” through the speakers, a vibe that has been grafted from the party to the album format, and by pure coincidence also brings across in today’s contribution for the RA mix.

Oslo or Bust with Gerd Janson

The short transfer from Oslo Lufthavn to the city is the closest we ever get to the DJs and artists that pass through Jæeger’s booth every weekend. It’s the most time we ever get to spend with the artist, where they are no occupied at the job at hand and we’re not shouting over the enormous presence of a Funktion One system at each other. We get to kick back, as they normalise to a ground-level air pressure, while the Tesla almost drives itself. The scenery, with its splashes of fleeting green intersecting the ubiquitous grey of the multi-lane road ahead, hardly inspires, while the quiet hum of the electric motors underneath us add to the perfect conditions for a conversation. With our guests at ease and our questions at hand, it’s Oslo or bust and this week’s guest is Gerd Janson.

Gerd Janson boasts the type of credentials that even RA’s top 100 DJ can’t compete with. Residencies at Robert Johnson, Panorama Bar and Trouw; a Fabric mix on its way; and a successful label like Running Back are just some of the highlights on his impressive resume. Admired by fans and peers alike for both his solo appearances and as one half of Tuff City Kids alongside Lauer, Gerd Janson is one of the most sought after DJ’s for any club with a forward-thinking music policy. His sets can go from the club-charts to the more obscure corners of House and Techno, maintaining that balance between entertainment and enlightenment as the present, past and future collide through his sets.

We pick up Gerd at Oslo Lufthavn and we find a witty and amiable personality in a fine mood. His German accent is quite shallow and his answers to our questions show an adept hand as an interviewee. There’s never even the slightest hint of an ego, and you forget that your talking to the same man that sports that impressive resume as he’s as eager to talk about music and clubbing as we are about asking him. So while were in the car, let’s start there…

I heard a rumour that you would drive from your residency at Robert Johnson to Panorama Bar.

No never! That’s too crazy. (laughs) I like driving, but that is too much. It would take 5 hours. If I would finish at Robert Johnson at 10 and played at Panorama bar in the evening at eight it would be too crazy. Who started that rumour?

I’m not sure, but it might have something to do with the fact that you weren’t drinking at the time and you can imagine how stories get exaggerated from there. I do believe you partake in a drink or two now, though. I know Prins Thomas enjoys his Belgium beers and single malts. Did he have something to do with your decision to start drinking? 

I still don’t drink beer. Prins Thomas sparked my interest in single malt whiskeys, I have to give him that, but when I actually DJ or party I still don’t drink. I’m a private drinker. I still consider myself a non-drinker in that respect.

Good to know for later… While we are on Prins Thomas, you often share the booth with him. What is it that draws you to his artistic personality? 

I just shared a flight with him from Amsterdam to Oslo, coming from ADE. He’s approach is even broader than mine when it comes to dance music. We’re friends outside of music, and we don’t always have to talk about music. He has a larger than life persona. He is almost like a Norwegian magnet so if he decides he likes you or takes you in, then it’s hard to get away from him. I very much enjoy his company in the DJ booths. He is one of the greatest living DJ’s on the planet.

Much like you… especially considering your associations with Panorama bar, Robert Johnson, Trouw and Fabric. What makes places like those so special in your experience?

When it comes to clubs and I think that holds true for Jæger as well, there are some things that you can’t always put your finger on. There are ingredients that bring it closer, ingredients like the sound; considering things like the shape of the room; the people; how the people are treated in the club; music policy, all these little things, bring the molecules together. Having said that, all those places do it very well in different ways, but I still wouldn’t take up the responsibility if someone approached me to build a club. I think the bottom line though is the people.

People’s musical tastes can be quite different depending on where you go to, and your quite broad, so do you ever plan your sets ahead?

No. I have a routine for certain pockets of the party, but it’s never planned?

Getting back to venues… I can imagine you can be quite selective of the places you play at. Do you have any specific criteria for a venue?

I’m not picky. If the money’s right my mix is tight. (Laughs)

Are there any new venues that have gotten you excited?

Yes, I played De School in Amsterdam two weeks ago, which is kind of the follow-up to Trouw. I liked it a lot. It’s totally different to Trouw. It’s dark it’s a basement, it has a low ceiling. The vibe there is great. I also played Breakfast club in Tel Aviv for the first time recently, which I really liked that. I’m pretty open.

If the opportunity is there…

I’m curious.

Let’s talk about the Fabric mix, which will be out soon. You obviously couldn’t have known that they would have lost their license at the time, but how much significance do you place on it now?

I hope that my mix isn’t gonna be the nail in the coffin. They’re closed for now, but as far as I understand, the label will go on anyway. The mix after mine is by Scuba, and I’m sure they have a few lined up after that one. Of course it’s a bit of bummer for them that it’s not intertwined with the dialogue of the club. I’m not a big fan of laws behind nightclubs. I know the whole story, but they tried everything in their power to guarantee a safe clubbing experience. I read one comment that said, “if prisons can’t keep drugs out, how should nightclubs be able to.”

Considering those ingredients you mentioned earlier, what do you think will be lost for good, if Fabric goes?

I think Fabric is one of the places that is kind of the playground and the godfather of what came after in London. They had a music policy and a party policy that sparked the fire for all the other parties that are happening in London, so they are, in some ways, victims of their own success. I believe that a city like London also needs Fabric as an anchor, where you know this is a “super club”, but they place emphasis week in and week out on UK-specific music on their Friday. I think it’s important to have a steady rhythm, and not only have one-off parties here and there. They changed the way clubbing worked in London a lot.

Many people we talked to suggest that nothing would change and the scene would just move on. On the back of your experience, what would your opinion be on that sentiment? 

I’m not clairvoyant, so we will have to wait to see how it goes. It goes two ways: If this is just a sign of the times, it will become harder and harder for clubs and parties to work. If this is just an isolated incident to Fabric because of where it is and what happened there, then the scene would just move on. But I don’t think the scene would just move on.

Jæger has rallied behind Fabric in some part because of the universal repercussions that this will have on electronic music and the scene. Have you been able to discern any affects of Fabric being closed at any of the other places you’ve played?

No, I couldn’t say I have. I think what’s nice is that there is a big level of solidarity in London. People are trying to do something about it. It has a unifying quality in a very competitive landscape. People do care if an institution like Fabric runs into trouble and they stand united.

On to Running Back. Many label owners turn DJ to spread the sound of the label, and mainly stick to the label’s catalogue, while in your case it’s the other way around and the label comes after the DJ. How do you represent the sound of the label through your sets?

 Any criterion for a release I put out is firstly, ‘do I like it’ and secondly, ‘would I play this’. Then there’s of course music for different occasions, certainly. For example, there is a Tornado Wallace album lined up, and I would say most people would argue there is not a single dance track on there. To me there are at least two or three tracks I would play at Robert Johnson when I start the night there. And then there’s stuff like KiNK, peak time music, and the more you get busier as a DJ, the more you find yourself in the peak time slot, and that also informs the way you pick and play music. If there’s a common denominator, I try to place it for every phase of the night. It also comes from my DJ approach to be more open minded, which can include stupid records as well as intelligent ones, and that’s how I also try to steer the label. You are also dependent of what people send you.

How would you describe the sound of Running Back from there, colourful? 

Yes, that’s good or rainbow music? (indistinguishable)

Rambo music?  

Yes that too, Rainbow and Rambo music. (Laughs)

So, if some comes across the label with no knowledge of you, would you hope that it reflects of you?

I think that some of those records are very different I would just expect people to take it for what it is, to look towards the artist more than the label, that’s why my name is never on a record even as an executive producer. It’s not a Gerd Janson type of label, so I would expect people to listen to the music.

 

*Special shout-out goes to our host Ivaylo Kolev for putting the questions to the man and taking care of our guests week in and week out!

Album of the Week: Leon Vynehall – Rojus (Designed to Dance)

Leon Vynehall’s  larger-than life House music makes a return to the longer player format in “Rojus (Designed to Dance)”. Like Music for the Uninvited, this latest record avoid’s aligning itself with the album format completely for the less-indulgent planes of the mini-album, but like MFTU there’s a connection between the tracks that are cut from the same cloth in the way of an album. There’s a consistency that ties all the tracks on Rojus together, and like its predecessor, it’s created from a concept. For Rojus, Leon Vynehall turned to the famed birds of paradise and found some similarities between the way they lure a mate and the social interactions on the club dance floor. Leon Vynehall adopts a David Attenborough role from his vantage point in the booth, and strings the experiences together as 8 tracks designed for dancing.

Rojus features a strong percussive section throughout, with elements of samples, and field recordings conspiring to create towering musical landscapes. Some criticisms have surfaced that this mini-album is nothing like its predecessor and when we asked Vynehall  about the reception the last time he played at Jæger, the UK producer/DJ shrugged and said “it’s not supposed to.” Vynehall stares closer than ever into House music’s looking glass, peering through elements of Disco and Funk to arrive at Rojus with the producer’s trademark sound filled-in noticeably more on this latest record. The stripped back sound of MFTU is enhanced quite significantly as Vynehall masterfully adds to the overall atmosphere of his music and creates music that swells with dynamics and life as they travel along their timeline, all the while retaining the core-appeal of the artist’s sound. Leon Vynehall’s tracks are forged in the beat and it’s at the drums where they often take shape, the producer’s chosen instrument at the core of all of his music. It infects the music with a unique groove where he then piles on layer after layer, before moving on to harmony and melody.

It suits the Running Back catalogue in which it finds itself and in the week that saw Gerd Janson in our booth, this album makes for good company as we try to normalise again.

#savefabric weekender raises £9600

Thank you to all those people that came out two weeks ago for the #savefabric weekender. With your support we raised £9600 for Fabric as they take on one of the biggest legal challenges they’ve ever faced. With an appeal date set for the 28th of November and an ensuing a legal battle that will see them take on the UK’s licensing laws, the Fabric team face an arduous and thankless road ahead of them. Ola and the Jæger team immediately realised the universal consequences of closing Fabric and repurposed the autumn DJ marathon for a #savefabric weekender , where 75% of the door went to #savefabric. Oslo reciprocated by showing up on mass, raising that formidable amount that Ola has now put in an envelope and shipped to Fabric Life ltd. It should help ensure the daily operations of the company could go on too, while the #saveourculture campaign ensues in the UK. We’d like to thank all those dancers that came out for the cause and made this happen, it was an inspiring scene and one that will hopefully take back that which is ours, Fabric.

Back 2 Back – Vinny Villbass & Perel

Vinny Villbass and Perel have an instinctive musical bond whenever they step into the booth together. Whether they’re playing Farbfernseher in Berlin or Jæger in Oslo, there’s a complimentary connection that runs through their selections and can go from House and Disco… to Metallica? Yes, Metallica. The quirky DJ pair are devoid of any pretence and the music, whether rock or disco always remains at the centre of their focus. Vinny from Oslo and Perel in Berlin, have created yet another connection between these two cities and one can often be heard in the other’s neighbourhood. Perel recently joined Vinny in Jæger’s Sauna booth, for the last outing in our courtyard before we moved in for winter, going back 2 back for a dual birthday bash the entire night. It’s a session that we didn’t want to have come to such an immediate conclusion, so with the aftermath of their double-birthday wearing off we got the two DJs to ask each other some questions, while you listen back to the mix. 

Vinny Villbass: That was one hell of a double b-day party last saturday. Have you recovered?

Perel: No! I’m sick, haha. Always a good sign. Anyway, we found out that we have a lot of mutual favourite tracks on saturday! I don’t mean „hits“ –  i mean like real pearls! Could you pick one of these out of our recording and explain why this is a „pearl“?

VV: Good sign indeed, been struggling to reach for my coffee mug as well this week. Well, I guess the jingly circus percussion and happy major melodies of “Sun My Sweet Sun” by Red Axes is one of those recent pearls at least. You can only have so much of escapism, sometimes you just need a straight up party track that shakes your belly. Lots of dancing in the booth on saturday btw. Why do you think some djs don’t dance?

P:That’s a really good question indeed! Sometimes it’s difficult when you play vinyls and the booth is small. But for the rest it might be simply a matter of personality…

My feet automatically start to move when I dj. 

So VinnyVinnyVinny, what makes a good dj to you?

VV: I guess someone who dares to take risks. Honestly, most dj´s really bore me. After the usb-revolution, everyone seem to call themselves djs, and very few knows anything about dynamics. So i prefer going to LIVE-shows …or a bloody good warehouse-rave or an intimate basement house party. Am i getting old?? Let’s not have any more birthdays…  

Did you hear any crazy good dj sets lately? Somebody i should check out maybe?

P: Check yourself Vinny! No honestly, your vinyl-only set at Farbfernseher (Berlin) in August was one of the best I’ve ever heard! The whole package – your music selection and your technique you play with vinyls was just amazing! Besides that I see a lot of really good female djs coming up currently! Check the roster of “MInt Berlin“! What’s on your schedule next? Any new releases or big things in the making?

VV: Hehe. I take politeness to honesty any day, so thanks. I’m still remembering your amazing energetic set at the Bossanova in NYC last year, so right back at yaa!!!

Just in the studio finishing some tracks for Paper Recordings. Bought my first paper vinyl back in 1999, so really happy to be releasing on the label. Hey, congrats with your new record “Amin” with Moscoman! Nice stuff!! But one last thing, when are we gonna do a Metallica remix split? We do have ze punk faktor! JAA?

P: All the time Vinny! I think this is THE perfect Xmas present for our audience. So stay tuned – Something big is coming up in December!

VV: moahahahaa… Winter is coming!

Listen to Floating 2 by Tellstroem

Tellstroem will be substituting Øyvind Morken tonight for the weekly Untzdag residency and has sent us this mix as a little foreshadow of what we can expect later tonight. Afro-beats, exotic sounds from the east and synthetic sci-fi textures come together in true Untzdag style and has set the mood in our office the pretense for the evening ahead…

Album of the week: Various Artists – My Love is Underground 16

What is it: A selection deep-house dance floor cuts from Jeremy Underground’s label.
Where have I heard it: Rumbling out of the bottom end of our Funktion system.

For this album of the week we travel to deepest subterranean depths of our basement floor where the lowest rumbles of those new 21″ subs are at their most profound. My Love is Underground 16 features a host of established and new House artists that personify Jeremy Underground’s values for this music and his label. Featuring soulful chord progressions, abstract vocal samples and nods to the roots of this music – most notably on Ebony Cuts’ “Disco Credit” – the tracks just scream out to the dance floor, but feel right at home pitched down through a low-slung stereo system.

Like all the other MLIU cuts, there’s a rawness to the tracks featured on this compilation, a sort of naked candidness that doesn’t hide behind any flashy tricks, and just cuts to the bone of this music. From Hugo LX’s eloquent Rhodes-chord House progressions to Telefon Dons’ stripped-back percussion, there’s an unembellished honest quality that ties all the music together. They cut through all the unnecessary egotistical appendages that took this music to the larger stage, and take House music back to its roots, travelling to the deepest core of House music through 808’s, Juno Basslines and the staccato el. piano stabs.

To go where no man has gone before with Dekmantel Soundsystem

If Dekmantel were a universe the Dekmantel Soundsystem would be the vessel that transported us through it all. It’s a DJ-collective that brings the Dekmantel sound to the wider known world, a sound that breaches genres and styles with the sole focus of bringing people together through adventurous electronic music. As Dekmantel Soundsystem the music has always taken centre stage, and like the annual festival of the same name, it celebrates the underground heroes at the forefront of the electronic music scene, pushing it to the farthest reaches of this galaxy.

At the centre of the Dekmantel universe is Casper Tieltooij and Thomas Martojo, a pair of Dutch DJs who created Dekmantel as a way to bring a new dimension to electronic music in Amsterdam, predicated by their own tastes. What started with a focus on Detroit House soon incorporated more styles and genres as their universe expanded around the festival of the same name, a festival that has become a serious highlight on the international electronic music calendar today. A label would eventually follow suite with names like Juju & Jordash and Joey Anderson propagating the House sound that would spawn the Dekmantel universe, but like the festival, would eventually incorporate other styles and genres, going from the Electro of Entro Senestre to the Techno of Robert Hood.

Dekmantel is a living entity today and even in the short time it’s been around, it has set the benchmark for what many labels, festivals and electronic music organisations want to- and should be. They’ve continued to laud the unsung luminaries of electronic music, while pushing known conventions further and further into unmarked territory. Their UFO imprint stands as a landmark of their explorative perspective, a label that took shape around their UFO stage and features to this date three unique releases by Randomer, Peter Van Hoesen and Voiski, all bringing something unique, probing and fresh to this music. They’ve also established a new “Selectors” series, a DJ compilation series that was inaugurated by none other than Motor City Drum Ensemble.

Yes, the Dekmantel universe is quite vast, always growing bigger, and navigating through it is nigh impossible, so we’ve enlisted the help of Dekmantel Soundsystem to steer us through its expansive interior this Saturday, and before they land in Oslo, we thought we’d get a quick peak behind the curtain with a Q&A. 

Can you explain what exactly a Dekmantel Soundsystem is and who constitutes its parts today?

Dekmantel Soundsytem is made up of the two original founders Casper Tielrooij and Thomas Martojo. They have DJ’ed together for almost ten years.

What’s the role of Dekmantel Soundsystem in the Dekmantel universe and why does it need to exist?

As very young music fanatics, we started throwing parties because we wanted to invite great artists, but also wanted to DJ ourselves. The broad spectrum of music we play reflects the line-ups that you see at our events and the records that we release on our label.

It’s not like you can realistically roll around the globe with a custom sound system, so how do you interpret the Soundsystem element in your name?

Of course, the tradition of adding soundsytem to your name should mean that we bring a sick physical sound system anywhere we go. That’s not the case, it’s more a name that reflects the touring aspect of the original soundsystems. We will bring a lot of music though ;)

The name Dekmantel can mean various things: a festival, a DJ collective and two labels. How does the Dekmantel name modulate between all those various factions?

Dekmantel really comes down to the fact that we organize and do things in a way we would love them to be ourselves. Festivals we would like to visit ourselves, records that we would want to buy ourselves, and DJs we’d like to hear ourselves.

I remember when you started out Dekmantel was mostly focused on a Detroit House sound with Thomas Martojo and Casper Tielrooij at the centre of it. What’s been the driving force behind the evolution of the Dekmantel name and what’s been the common denominator throughout it all?

It’s correct that in the beginning we were known for a focus on American house and techno, but also a lot of disco. However, at that time we already had a broad taste in music, from WARP to Fela Kuti and from Dilla to European house and techno. The common denominator in working out all these interests is really, again, our own taste which like that from everyone evolves and changes.

The latest edition to the Dekmantel is the UFO sublabel, which takes its name from the UFO stage at the Dekmantel festival. Is everything Dekmantel informed by the festival and how does the festival operate as the nucleus to it all?

The Festival is of course our key moment in the year and with the stages we could create some kind of order in the broad spectrum of music we would like to broadcast. We noticed that this festival order was also a really great way in organizing the label as we are expanding our activities on that terrain very much in the last year.

While we’re on the label, the UFO label has three releases out to date, and focuses on experimental/futuristic techno, electro and electronica. How would explain the sound of the label?

The UFO stage at Dekmantel Festival is the place to be when it comes to aphotic, experimental and futuristic techno, electro and electronica indeed. You can find Blawan there, but also Holly Herndon. With the launch of  UFO on the label we beam these aesthetics into physical audio realms that tip to the dark side of our musical tastes.

The flagship label continues to deliver a mix of House cuts and has shifted over to Techno quite a bit more in recent memory. What has been the focus of the label so far and where do you see it heading to in the future?

I don’t think it shifted to Techno to be honest. The main label displays a wide range of electronic music. From Legowelt ambient to the techno from Robert Hood and the blissful house by Palms Trax. It’s also the home to dear label artist in which we really believe: think of Juju & Jordash, Vakula, and Joey Anderson amongst others.

There’s also the new selectors series. Can you tell us a little more about that, and what would influence your picks for those releases?

Admittedly, drawing a line between “selectors” and mere DJs is an all-but-impossible task—it’s essentially a “you know it when you see it” proposition. Every Selectors compilation will include a collection of hand-picked, unmixed tracks personally curated by the artist.

I’ve heard that you had one of the most impressive sound systems for a festival this year from various sources. The importance of the sound system is one we know all too well at Jæger, but how do you maintain a level of control when Dekmantel goes on tour?

It’s a crucial point in deciding which venues to visit. We indeed heard that sound in Jæger is valued very high and for us it’s the most important thing. It doesn’t make sense to play all these beautiful music if the sound system is not top notch.

Were there any musical highlights from this past festival that you’re looking forward to bringing on tour with you?

We will surely bring some new heat from Fatima Yahama. Next to that we are still playing a lot of ESG and Azymuth tracks, both bands doing incredible shows at the festival this summer. Central, your Danish neighbour, did send us a killer track just before the festival which is going to be a very cool release in the nearby future.

Dekmantel always seems to have its finger of the pulse of this music, so can we have a look into your crystal ball and get a little glimpse of what will be lighting up the Dekmantel universe in the near future?

Kind words, thanks Just like with the label, all events and tours we did this year were remarkable. Dekmantel Festival again met our own standards of running a festival and Dekmantel Selectors was a very intimate, magical experience. And all the time we were working on a new chapter in our history: Dekmantel Festival São Paulo. On our tour, we just fell completely in love with the city and the local crew and scene. It feels like the perfect place to start a new adventure.

Getting Honest with Moomin

In a world where function often dominates form, Moomin finds an expressive language that creates a new poignant dimension to this music without losing sight of its inherent purpose. It’s not predisposed to any particular dance floor decorum and yet it applies itself to that context effortlessly. The function that exists around the music is often merely coincidence, which only seems to further emphasise the emotion already there in the music; a positive visceral experience that more than often borders on happiness and contentment. Much like the cartoon characters Moomin references in his artistic moniker, there is a sense of universal joy Sebastian Genz brings to his House alias over his countless EP’s and more markedly over the two albums that came via Smallville. “You need to feel something”, says Sebastian by way of email correspondence about the process behind his creative efforts to arrive at these results. The German producer and DJ foregoes in his productions the introverted music obsessive in favour of adding the emotional depth that this music quite often lacks in it’s more concrete terms. It’s grounded in the origins of the producer’s work as Moomin, where the music came from a necessity to be “honest with yourself and make the music you feel”; music that was not proposed to align itself with the hype of the moment and only intended for the shared experience.

Moomin arrived for the Kiel native after an era spent in the German Hip Hop game. “I guess when I started with German Hip Hop in 1992, everything was more or less just beginning”, remembers Sebastian. It wasn’t common practice to “rap in German Hip Hop” and Sebastian found an affinity with the scene, not so much as a fan, but more an admirer of its raw underground appeal. Everything was unique and exciting, but when it went from “something that was ‘underground’ to something super commercial” Sebastian became very disenfranchised with the overall scene. “I couldn’t associate myself with that anymore” and instead he turned to electronic music for inspiration. “I went from Hip Hop to stuff like Aphex Twin, Authecre and Boards of Canada”. Everything was new and exciting again and “discovering all things electronic was like reading a new book” for Sebastian. He would consume it all for the purpose of stripping it back to its origins, going from the likes of Aphex Twin to “Techno and from Techno to House” where he came to the primordial ooze of it all, the origins of this electronic music, from which Moomin would gestate. From Hip Hop there would no-doubt be some similarities to House music’s sampled nature and it’s quite obvious that as Moomin, Sebastian created something very unique within the House paradigm, perhaps from these roots, but also in the fact that he never wavered from his ideology to remain true to himself.

What was meant as just a personal endeavour, some fun to be shared with friends, could never quite be contained as such and Moomin’s music eventually found a much larger audience. Amongst others Moomin found the ears of Julius Steinhoff and Just von Ahlefeld from Smallville and after a couple of EP’s on White and AIM, the artist was inducted into the Smallville family with “The story about you”… and what was quite remarkable about that album, was that it featured some of Sebastian’s first musical attempts as his House alias. It was an album “that was never planned” and came together organically from tracks made during the initial stages of Moomin’s development, presenting an artist that projects a confidence in his sound, one that’s devoid of any artistic insecurities, and puts everything out there on the surface for the world to take from it what it may. More significantly however is that this debut also featured the first track Sebastian made as Moomin, “Watermelon” – a track that is the blueprint from which Moomin’s sound can be distilled into its fundamental parts. Sebastian seems to graft House music’s roots onto an attainable humanity where restrained percussive elements play amongst pervasive textures, with results creating amiable atmospheres that are unavoidably pleasant and engaging. “The biggest challenge is not to get bored while making music”, explains Sebastian about his own engagement with the music, something that he’s continued to carry through to this day with his latest LP, “A minor thought”.

It’s also an album that, more than anything emphasises the special relationship Moomin has with Smallville. Unlike “The story about you” Sebastian, on this occasion knew that he would be making an album, and although “creatively there was no difference” for the artist, the decision of which tracks would be included in the final product fell not only onto the artist, but also to the label. Still, “there was no pressure, so I just made some music and when I thought it was the right time I passed a collection of tracks on to Julius and Just.” Sebastian left it then to Smallville to pick the tracks that would eventually make it on to the album, showing a level of trust and dedication to the label that recording artists very rarely do today. “Smallville is more than a label for me it’s a family, a friendship and trust. I am very thankful to be part of it, because they’ve put me on the map.” It’s a very deep-seated trust, one that would even see Sebastian go against his own decision not to include ”woman to woman” in his final selection for the album. He was never quite “happy with that one” and “found it kinda boring”, but respected Smallville’s decisions to include it and since, it has been “one of the most loved tracks on the album”.

That song, like much of this latest the album, appears on the surface to put more focus on the sample, with Sebastian’s Hip Hop roots more prominent than ever on this record. It only goes to aid in his efforts to relay that sense of feeling he maintains at the centre of his work, something that seeps through to the listener, and at the very least sets an emotive scene, from which we can presume our own feelings. It’s unsure how Sebastian instils the same sense of feeling through his DJ sets and when I ask him about it, he is unable to give me an answer. But like his music there’s an unpretentious ability behind it all that Sebastian explained earlier is about being honest with your self. It’s that sense of honesty, and communicating something personal like a feeling, where Moomin indeed finds its charm and like the cartoon characters of the same name, it’s completely irresistible, at any level. It’s a charm that stems from the man behind the artistic moniker and something I even discern through our very brief email exchange. More than anything it seems to be grounded in a genuine excitement in the music and playing it for other people, something that hits home, when at the end of exchange he signs off with: “I am really looking forward to playing at Jaeger, and to be honest it is one of places I’ve always wanted play.”

Album of the Week: Portable – Alan Abrahams

What does it sound like: Alien electronics interjecting soulful vocals.
Why is it our album of the week: Its inescapable charm.
Dance floor or Sofa: Although suitable in both contexts, Alan Abrahams is definitely a more personal experience.

The designation, Alan Abrahams suggests this latest album is a very personal effort for the man behind the Portable moniker. Using his own name as the album title adds to the sense of charm and humility that we encounter here on Abraham’s 7th album, and something that has always weaved it’s way through the South African artist’s music. Being a regular feature on labels like Perlon and Live at Robert Johnson, he now adds the luminary, !K7 to that list with an album that takes a slight diversion from the dance floor, although not totally losing touch with it. Although  “More Than” would be more than happy in that context, it is the closest the album ever gets to the measured beat and repetition of a dance track, with Alan Abrahams adopting the role of songwriter for the most part.

Abrahams said that the album was partly inspired by his decision to give up drinking and taking drugs, and in the lyricism we find themes of love-loss and loneliness, expressed through resolving chord progressions that meander in reserved tempos and billowing textures that include acoustic pianos, strings and guitars. “Your Warrior”, “Say it’s going to change” and “Closer” are all cut from this cloth and instil this feeling of departed love and separation immediately through the opening three tracks, but digging only a little deeper you’ll also find Abrahams’ continued resolution in pushing at the edges of electronic music, and truly expressing its exploratory nature. It’s probably its most notable on “Séraphin” but it’s most effective when Abrahams finds a perfectly orchestrated balance between these exploratory moments and the universally personable nature of a vocal song, with “Say it’s gonna change soon” probably the most perfect example in the regard. Alan Abrahams a fully rounded listening experience, and instantly recognisable as a Portable album, for his distinctive 80’s-synth-pop vocals and those alien sonic palettes he works in. It’s something we can put on at any time of the day, and works best as the sinuous bridge between the sofa and the dance floor.

#Savefabric – The DJ’s Perspective

Fabric has been an institutional light at the end of a tunnel for a generation of revellers that have always looked for the unparalleled experience of electronic music and the culture that has grown up around it. It’s given a platform to any experimental, innovative faction of electronic music where nothing is taboo and everything from Drum & Bass to Techno to House warrants an audience. They are facing one of the most difficult periods in their existence after the revocation of their license where they were being held accountable for actions outside of their control. They’re doors remain shut today as a result while they await they’re appeal hearing on the 28th of November, an appeal they hope to use to highlight some fundamental flaws in the UK licensing act, which they’ve taken upon themselves to fight at the highest possible level with the #saveourculture campaign. It’s a cause that’s rallied everyone from Four Tet to Richie Hawtin, and even here at Jæger we’ve given our annual autumn DJ marathon over to the cause. Because everyone that’s danced to a four/four beat in the context of club with your friends will most certainly know the universal effect this will have on clubbing and this culture. No-one knows this better than the DJs, the people that have turned this cultural phenomenon into a profession, so we roped a few of them in on our crusade to find out just exactly what effect Fabric has had on them, and what sort of future we’re facing if the cultural institution were to indeed go.

vinnypoppopp Vinny Villbass (Producer, DJ, promoter – Sunkissed)

What does fabric mean to you?

I’ve been subscribing to the fabric CD series since 2002, so I’ve always been following the musical development of the club. The Swayzak mix is still one of my favourites. Or the Halo & Hipp-e one that me and diskjokke was listening to again and again while driving trondheim-oslo-trondheim… or actually the very first with Terry Francis..or.. shit, there have been many.. Fabric has definitely had a big influence on my djing, even from across the pond.

What was your most memorable personal experience there?

When we organised the 100 years of Norwegian independence at Fabric in 2005. Olanskii was living in London at the time and booked pretty much all the relevant Norwegian acts to play. There was a club floor in room 3; jazz/electronic-floor in room 2; and metal/rock/pop in room 1. Definitely my longest day ever in London (if you subtract one particular corona-marathon-madness including mariachi-band and robeparty) Most of us were up, working for 28 hours straight to make it happen. Amazing experience!

How have you interpreted its role in club culture?

To put it in street lingo: “they’ve always had their shit together”. There are so many clubs around Europe that are unprofessional, messy and just completely mafia-driven, so a club like Fabric should really be a blueprint of how to run a club the right way.

What do you think its impact will be on this culture universally if it goes?  

Unlike most others, I’m not afraid of losing Fabric as such. They have had some great years, and clubs come and go. Looking on the bright side, all the good people at Fabric will be spread around in other positions and the London scene will evolve. Politically, I’m obviously against the closure. Accidents do happen from time to time, especially when you gather such a big amount of people on a regular basis. Fabric should not be blamed, the illegal drug industry should!

 

finnebassenphotoFinnebassen (Producer & DJ – Noir Music) 

What does fabric mean to you?

Fabric was the first club I heard of outside of Norway. I heard stories that the actual floor had subwoofers in it, and that the bass would resonate through your body. Then I went there for the first time in 2010. I had already been at Fused at 93 ft east for a solid 8 hours, before we went to Wetyourself at Fabric and I saw what clubbing could be. Even though I had already been partying for a while, I just couldn’t leave. It was shock and awe. I had never seen a space like Fabric. It was jaw dropping. Keep in mind that I had never been to a proper club outside of Norway, so imagine the impact that impression had on me. We ended up staying until we couldn’t stand up right anymore. For me Fabric was a definitive catalyst in my choice to pursue music as a profession. For me it’s also one of those clubs that keep you hungry and makes you keep going. Playing at Fabric I think is a validation of your efforts in this business. It’s a place that demands that you try your best. They wont except anything else. I think Jaeger and Villa, or Sunkissed for that matter, exemplifies the same mentality to the Oslo scene. Fabric is also a huge contributor to the cultural value of London’s nightlife. They offer world class acts every weekend and cater to a very varied audience that like a lot of different kinds of music.

What was your most memorable personal experience there?

I have a couple. Playing room 3 with the You Are We crew was amazing! And playing with T-Williams in Room 2 was probably the best one! The people who work there are also extremely professional. Apart from that, it has to be Craig Richards 5 hours in Room 1. Holy Mother. That was a master class.

How have you interpreted its role been in club culture?

Well from what I’ve experienced first hand, is that they always have been on the forefront when it comes to security measures and that they take the running of the club extremely seriously. I was there once when there was a suspected rape in the club, and they contacted the police and did exactly what the police told them to do. They are eager to cooperate with law enforcement and they want matters that occur within club premises to be handled in the correct way. That is admirable and they should be applauded for it. I think most people will hold Fabric as a standard that they use to compare other clubs.

What do you think its impact will be on this culture if it goes?

I’m no fortuneteller, but I think the culture will continue to grow, like it always has. This industry is about innovation and progress, but there will be a huge gap to fill. If it’s even possible to fill the void that Fabric potentially will leave behind. If they decide to close, that is. I think the people that want to close Fabric will learn that closing a club will not solve the problems they are trying solve. If anything, it might make them worse. Fabric is a rock in this industry and the world of clubbing. People from all over the world will rally behind this cause. I sincerely hope that there are people with common sense in this world and that Fabric will stay open, and continue to offer the world clubbing at the highest level.

 

 le-loupLe Loup (DJ & Producer – Half Baked / Concrete) 

What does Fabric mean to you?

Fabric is like Rex Club in Paris. It’s an institution in the UK. They bring a certain way of thinking about the industry and this music. It was interesting, because it is a huge club, but they also introduce new talents to the crowd. They were always pushing the limits of the music. They were visionaries. They brought a lot of unknown DJs to the community, and they trusted small DJs, because they have a reputation. It’s really important for the scene, because when you are not known, to play in a club with a serious reputation is really important.

What was your most memorable experience there?

The first tim e– It was room 1, the first time; I was really excited and impressed. It was an achievement for me; it was a good feeling. Because it was a known club, and you know when you play this club you’ll be recognised in the scene. It’s a really important point your career to play there, so when I had the opportunity to play there it was really special.

What do you think will happen when it’s gone?

I don’t know. It’s a bit sad but it’s not the first time a huge club has closed. For this community and this scene it will be hard. I heard it’s going to be harder for the people there. I’m sure there is someone who will open a new club, and the cycle will continue, but it’s a sad period.

Will it have a global affect on club culture, do you think?

Maybe a bit for a time, but I’m sure it it’ll continue. For example 5/10 years ago Paris was dead and now it’s back and evolving. London is a bit complicated but things will change. It’s about politics and law, but that can change you know.

 

14068573_10154039349907917_5197567697897456761_oOlanskii (DJ, Promotor, Venue Operator – Sunkissed / Jæger)

What does fabric mean to you?

As a Londoner, it was my second home for many years. It has played a pivotal role in shaping my own sound, but also my approach to running a club. Certainly with Sunkissed, back in the early days, I really wanted to build a club-night where you could start somewhere innocuous, reclusive, or deep if you like, and build it slowly on a trajectory as the night progressed. This has in many ways become the norm here too now. But back then, starting out mellow or with minimal oomph was somehow risky or not common practise. And in a sense it wasn’t about the beginning, but where this approach could lead to in the end. Perhaps even recreating a faint sense of that magical 7am movement that Fabric has always done so well.

But also many other aspects of Fabric have been instrumental in the way I work and set up the club (Jæger). Things you might not think of if you’re not actually running a club, like how the door flows (again Sunkissed took a few pages from this one), or using the stage as a dance-floor. And of course, the emphasis on a great soundsystem. I compare everything to Fabric’s main room. That’s not to say I want to copy that particular sound, but rather that feeling; sound that envelopes you, that moves you physically, and allows you to immerse yourself in the music, all without being painfully loud.

And then there are the people behind the club. Words will not do them justice, the reverence I have for Judy, Craig, Shaun, Keith, Terry and the rest of the team. Judy Griffith, booking the Saturday nights, has a workload that make my own seem like a teacher’s holiday, yet she will always find the time to come to check new people out. The number of times she came to the Nottinghillartsclub, and it would be me or g-Ha on a tumbleweed Thursday or something… She would still take the time, as she did with so many others. Everybody we’ve flown over, anybody who’s anybody who’s lived in London or played at Fabric, Judy knows them all. If I can ever raise my bar to a fraction of hers, I’ll be proud. And Speaking of Saturdays, there’s no way around the residents. I’ll say this again. Every club I’ve ever looked up to and loved, always put their residents first. And for me, Craig Richards is still one of the greatest, ever. Few can match his determined and singular focus. In the way he contributes to the direction of the club, but also as someone who has always kept it underground; never bought into loveharts, instasnapping, or vacant stadium size festival touring. Which gets me onto Keith Reilly. I think the last time we met, I took him and Craig to a triple bill with Susanna & The Magical Orchestra, Into the Country and Supersilent. At the end of the rather mental Supersilent gig, I found Craig at the back of the room, slightly discombobulated, and Keith at the front of the stage beaming. And this is Keith to me, every time I’ve meet him, its always been about music, rarely about House and Techno – his club has always spoken volumes about both – but something new, something fresh, something out there. Shaun Roberts heads up the most important Friday nights anywhere for Bass music and Drum & Bass. So much will be lost with it. So much music will lose its centre stage. To me he’s first of all a great friend, and someone who with aplomb manages to be both the centre of the party, and that guy who is making that Friday tick every week.

What was your most memorable personal experience there?
Easily Ricardo Villalobos vs Richie Hawtin. 2003 I think, but certainly 2004 and 2005. They all blend somewhat into each other as a mass of pure bliss. But there was this particular moment. I guess it was Ricardo getting into it, as for what seemed like half an hour, there was birdsong, low noises, creaking. And only that. With the whole room hanging on through the whole space out. Until a low rumble of bass – and my guess this coming from Richie – crept in until they finally let the whole thing rip with a massive kick. Well you can work out the rest.

O, and getting to warm up that main room twice. Few things will ever get close.

How have you interpreted its role in club culture? 

Fabric is one of the greats. It stands tall among its contemporaries, be they in London, Ibiza, Berlin, Tokyo or New York. I’ll be telling my kids about Fabric, when they are old enough, as if it was my Paradise Garage. What set Fabric apart when it opened, was how it went against the super-club ethos of its time. Fabric was real, it was personal, and even if it was a big club, it was underground. It still is all of those things. It just needs its licence back like London needs Fabric back.

What do you think its impact will be on this culture universally if it goes?

The two issues that reverberate around the Fabric closure are about responsibility and security under the law. There is no denying the clubs bear a particular responsibility as licensed premises. And although clubs do not sell drugs, clubs do have a responsibility in averting their sale and use on their own premises. However, there are different kinds of responsibility. There is no argument around the need for effective measures to combat the use and sale of drugs. But should the club be held accountable when patrons manage to circumvent those measures, and cause themselves harm (in this case death)? Drugs get through airports, into prisons, and into parliament toilets. Stopping them entirely is not possible. And you need to balance measures with outcome. Clubs must be safe, but also places for joy and freedom. How do you balance these things?

And then there is security under the law. The report from The Metropolitan Police was long on hearsay and short on fact. Most of it related to one single night. Bar the two tragic incidents that happened this summer, there was little to back it up. But it wasn’t really necessary as the verdict was delivered by a handful of Islington Council civil servants, not a court of law. And this is typical of the disdain that licensing bodies in many parts of the world heap on the financial and personal investment made in clubs and venues. In no other business could a licence be revoked so fast, and with so little real due process. Your life’s work, your job, your favourite venue. It doesn’t take a butterfly.

This needs to change. In place must be an objective responsibly, measured on what is actually done. Not just the outcome, which could be chance or bad luck. And due process is needed. I for one, feel that Fabric is fighting a much bigger fight and what happens will reverberate elsewhere. That is why it is so paramount that we stand by them.

Album of the Week: Eli Escobar – Happiness

Why is it our album of the week: It comes on the recommendation of Olanskii.
What does it sound like it: Quite literally, Happiness.
What’s that supposed to mean: House with tinges of Gospel, Soul and packed with melodies.

Off the back of some album’s that erred on the darker side of dance music Ola “Olanskii” Smith Simonsen aka “The Boss” threw his name into the hat with a submission for the record of the week. He opted to bring a little light to our record collection with this record by Eli Escobar, a record he’d been carrying around in his bag for weeks and sneaking it into his sets whenever he can.

Happiness encapsulates it’s sound in its title, with the New York producer Eli Escobar presenting little slices of musical joy over 12 captivating tracks. The sound of the album is ingrained in the history of House music, with Rhodes piano chords and effervescent rhythms juxtaposing soulful melodies and reverential vocals, often supplied Nomi Ruiz, repeating simple little lines of vocal encouragement. There are strains of Disco, Gospel, R&B and Soul that can be felt throughout and Eli’s music, which bounds with a rich tapestry of parts that come together in constructions that can move from the dance floor to your headphones with ease. There’s an amiability to the music throughout that puts a smile on your face regardless of the context and highlights a New York sound that we don’t often encounter these days. What’s more; it comes with the Olanskii seal of approval, and that’s all the reason we need to make this our album of the week.

Puss & Kram takeover Jæger’s Instagram

Leading up to our #savefabric weekender, we’ve relinquished control of our Instagram account to Puss & Kram for this week only. The pop DJ-duo of Emma Louise Stridh and Julie Aida Graf breaks down borders with their sets that can go from Rihanna to Green Velvet, bending the “rules” of the dance floor to their every whim all for the sake of the party. They are both multi-talented creative individuals, with Emma’s background in professional ballet and Julie’s career in the visual arts, and everyday life for these two indiscriminate music fans is a rich tapestry of colour, amusement and intrigue. They’ll be giving us a sneak peak into this fabulousness for the week leading up to their set at Jæger for the #savefabric weekender.

Listen back to Greg Brockmann for Half Baked

It’s a Half-Baked takeover today on our site, and the gifts, they just don’t stop coming. Earlier we spoke to Le Loup, and now we’ve been given the green light to share the first half of Greg Brockmann’s set with you. It departs a little of that Saturday night magic we witnessed over the weekend, replete with a stripped back House sound, where rathchety beats and low-lying bass-lines conspire in a sound that is quite new to us. Brockmann brought the infallible colour of Half-baked to his set, the label and events series’ personal touch seeping through every aspect of the night, through their French resident. It’s the first hour and a half of the night that saw Le Loup and Brockmann go back to back and Brockmann, the Koncept music boss and skilled selector, showcasing some of that deep-digging personality behind the music, and introducing us at Jæger to some exciting new cuts along the way.

Oslo or Bust with Le Loup

Le Loup (Léonard Perret) represents a generation of artists that today make up a wave of House producers who are re-defining the genre for the next. It’s House music, influenced by the soul and grooves of Hip-Hop through sampling; channelled through the multicultural scope of clubbing since electroclash; and distilled into House music’s deeper hemisphere, where melodies and harmony bring a new depth to this functional music. The Parisian producer and DJ shares these traits with peers like Moomin, Seuil and Genius of Time, while bringing his own unique dimension to the music through melodic and harmonic elements that favour an upbeat temperament and lightness to the music. He’s released music on labels that operate on similar designs, labels like Eklo, Concrete and Half Baked – the event series and label that, like Le Loup’s music, infuse the music with colour and atmosphere, most perfectly summed up in his “Manimal” EP of last year.

It was on the Half Baked ticket that Le Loup would come to Jæger last week and when our artist host, Ivaylo mentioned there was a empty a seat in the car, I decided to tag along to ask the French DJ and producer some questions. The ride from the airport to the city centre can be quite uneventful, but with Le Loup’s close relationship with Half Baked and Concrete and the flourishing Paris scene on my mind, there was enough to talk about to make the journey a short one and get us in the mood for the Saturday night ahead.

What’s Paris like in terms of clubbing at the moment?

I think we are in a good period. In the last four or five years it’s changed a lot and now we have a lot of parties and a lot of demand. People are going out a lot more. Maybe there’s too much sometimes, and you don’t know where to go. When you make music of this kind, more underground music, you often get 2 or 3 promoters working in the same style going to war, because you have a little community and it gets more complicated to bring people to your party with so many other parties.

So there are a lot of venues catering to events like these?

Yes, there are a lot of venues, and there are a lot of parties also outside of clubs. You really need to bring someone to bring the people. It’s really more complicated to reach your community or your crowd without big names today. It’s getting better and better but it’s really complicated.

When you were just starting out, what was clubbing like and what sort of music or scene was influencing you at that time?

I was really young when I started going to clubs, like 14. I started going to posh clubs. I was playing at the time, but I wasn’t really going for the music because I was going for my friends and my friends were not into House music, they were into Hip-Hop and commercial music. Around 15 I started going to Pulp – That was a really special club. There were DJs like Andrew Weatherhall, Ivan Smagghe and Chloé, you know the Kill the DJ crew. It was really special to me, because there was this melting pot of people. It was a gay club, but you had people from the hood, people from more affluent neighbourhoods, everything was mixed for the music.

Was there a lot of Hip Hop influencing you at this time too because I can hear strains of it in your work? 

I was really into Hip-Hop, I still am. I listened to a lot of French Hip-Hop, but also like J-Dilla, Dr Dré, Nas and Tupac, the west coast stuff. When I started going to high school, I started listening to more House music. Bob Sinclar, around Africanism, was some of the first House music I heard. It was really House music with Hip-Hop roots.

Did you start DJing around that time too?

Yes, around 16.

And it was mainly Hip-Hop?

I never really played Hip-Hop. My uncle bought me some turntables, and then I started buying records. My first records were House records like Abé Duque “What Happened” and John Tejada “Sweat (on the Walls)”. It was during the electro-house period and it was not a prolific period of music to me now, but I started with this type of music.

Do the Hip-Hop influences seep into your production today?

Yes, because I’m really influenced by old school hip-hop. I’m a really big fan of J Dilla. The way he sampled the tracks, it was all about the groove and it was hypnotic. It was really interesting to me, because although I wasn’t producing Hip Hop, the approach was the same.

It gives the music a very human element.

Exactly, there’s that human feeling to the music because it’s not that straight.

Q-tip once said the reason he liked Dilla so much was because each element had it’s a place within the production. 

That’s the thing to me now when I produce I want every element to have its own place. You don’t want to have too many elements, because sometimes you can have too much and there is no use for some elements. When you don’t need something you remove it, and you only keep what is really essential to the track.

There are a lot of melodic elements to your music. Does that come from a musical background?           

My family listened to a lot of music, like Jazz and Classical music and my uncle who bought me the turntables, was a big fan of Jazz. This is really my style of music – fusion Jazz. Its very melodic, but the groove is important too. I try to maintain a balance between melody and grooves.

You mentioned Concrete earlier when we were walking to the car, and you’ve had an EP out on their label recently. How fundamental is Concrete to an artist like you and do you see a scene evolving around it?

To me everything started around 2009/10. At this time Paris was a bit dead. A friend of mine started a party on the river called Le Sundae. It was a new beginning, when we started to play there. It was really fresh. Before Concrete, there was twisted with a new venue for each event. They eventually found a boat, and started putting parties together there. At that this time everything started to change because people were enthusiastic and excited to go to parties because it was something new. Concrete brought a new dynamic to the club scene there.

You are very close to the people there? 

Yes.

It’s quite all encompassing, but what brings it all together?

Brice (Coudert), the artistic director and he really likes music and he likes a lot of different things, like me. He wants to bring different styles of music to the Parisian crowd with a focus on quality. It’s complicated to do only one thing, you can get lost.

Do you think it has shares some similar ideas with “Kill the DJ” where there was a focus on a broader range of styles and audiences?

Yeah, but it’s also about trend. Music is always evolving and those guys were really big when Electroclash was big, and dark music prevailed. It was a mix of everything with this dark feeling. I think it simply changed with the evolution and fashion of music. Those guys were into a type of music and it changed, and people moved on.

And concrete is a bit more open. 

They are more open and they can switch the music, and they can bring different kinds of people, because it’s also a business, you know. So when you want to bring people to the club all the time, you need to bring different people because the same people can’t come every week.

We should also talk about Half Baked, because that’s why you are here. How did you get involved with them?

It was 2009/10 when they contacted me to play. I had a connection with those guys early on, through the French connection and our similar age. We started doing more things together and became like a little family.

There seems to be personal touch to everything they do.

Yes, to me the spirit of Half Baked is Bruno (Ciaramicoli). Bruno really is the soul of Half Baked. He’s always after a good spirit to the party. He’s not all about the fame, he’s also about the vibe and the energy of the people.

I find that you translated that exact idea very well in your Manimal EP you did for them.

Yes exactly.

What went into the creation of that EP?

I came to London with Seuil and we went to Robin’s (Ordell) place and decided to make a track. The first one was released on Eklo. I was producing a lot with Alexi (Seuil) as Hold Youth and when Robin came to Paris afterwards we decided to go to the studio and just see what happens. Bruno had also been asking us to make a track, so we tried to make something together and made these five tracks over two days.

It sounds like it was a very inclusive affair with Half Baked perhaps also influencing the outcome. When you play a set at a Half Baked event does it put you in a certain frame of mind?

I always try to bring my sound, and in general I always think about the party. I want to play the music I like but I also want to entertain the people. I want them to have fun. I don’t just want to play music for myself, I want to create a party.

I think you couldn’t have chosen a better day for it then…

Album of the Week: Convextion – 2845

What drew us to it: The album artwork.
What does it sound like: Like that advanced civilisation in H.G Wells’ Time Machine.
Where will it fit in: Amongst the more restrained Ambient and Techno moments like Truss Me and 7th Plain.

Convextion’s 2845 is an album that completely sucks you into its alien, space-exploratory world. The artwork’s initial engagement with its audience and the 16-minute opening track, New Horizon steadily draws you into textures laden with engaging melodies and buoyant harmonic expressions and before long you find yourself completely immersed in Convextion’s music. There’s a Sci–Fi / space-aged theme to the music that gets communicated through dreamy synthetic atmospheres, playing perhaps on Gerd Hanson’s personal fascination with those themes that ‘s cropped in his music before, most recently the Hubble Telescope-referencing Ancient Light under his ERP moniker.

Like that ERP release from this year what Hanson does impeccably well as Convextion is the way he composes rather than designs. His focus is in creating the appealing textures on 2845 are not through creating a sonic palette from which a song will gestate, but rather bringing different melodic elements together, whether the splash of a high-hat or the legato pulse of a string, to create a new sonic world. The result is a very futuristic space with a very organic feel.  Like some utopian future civilisation that survives at one with nature at a very technologically advanced age, Convextion finds a serene balance between the synthetic layers and the natural way they unfold. 2845 isn’t shy of a beat either, but doesn’t insist you get up for the occasion either, making it the perfect introduction to the start of your night, whichever musical galaxy you might find yourself travelling to.

Eloquent Music – In Praise of Leon Vynehall

Leon Vynehall is one of the few artists who can justify the media-shy persona he has established. The clichéd image of the artist who only speaks through his/her music is one that often gets exploited by individuals that like to cultivate a darker, mysterious artistic image, but whose music very rarely expounds the idea of a communicative music or even accommodates it. Leon Vynehall is cut from a different cloth however. A reserved poignant output and music that often gestates from personal experiences coincide with music that seems to communicate with its listeners on the dance floor in a very direct way, without imposing a will on its subject. ”I hope that listeners can incorporate their own stories into it”; he says in a rare interview with Mixmag from this year about his latest album Rojus and it’s something I feel we can apply to all of Leon Vynehall’s work. Active in this musical field since 2012, Leon Vynehall’s unique take on House, which rarely relies on the genre’s stylistic traits, never adopts the status quo, and resolutely stays true to the artist’s voice, still makes him an inimitable force on the dance floor even 4 years on in a genre that can so quickly modulate to the next big hype.

From this vantage point it’s hard to imagine that Vynehall’s background lies in the world of “crunchy post-hardcore” as the Red Bull Music Academy puts it, other than perhaps in his deft production touches, where acoustic, played instruments slide along effortlessly amongst synthesisers and sampled drums. A place for everything and everything in its place is a mantra that seems to permeate throughout Vynehall’s catalogue, but at the same time everything about the UK producer’s music always goes much deeper than that. His breakout album (or mini-album as the artist prefers to call it), Music for the Uninvited dug deep into the artist’s subconscious from the most unexpected source and thus inherently affects the music from a very personal place. “What I wanted to do with this was look back on what moulded the way I write music – the melodies and application of samples – as well as how I listen to it, and the sonic palettes I use. The first music I listened to subconsciously was on the way to school in my mum’s car.” It’s easy to deduce from this that Vynehall’s own tastes were informed by his mother’s during his formative years with “lots of old funk, early dance, plus some hip-hop” influences seeping into his own music and snaking their way right through to the present, where Vynehall’s music and even his record collection reflects that, as he reveals in an interview with Boiler Room in 2012.

Mr Scruff also makes an early appearance in those subconscious listening experiences , and might allude to his own techniques in the studio where sampling plays a fundamental role, and from which he pieces his music together as a kind of a collage, often constructed around a theme or a concept. His second album, or mini-album as Vynehall still insists on calling these extended musical collections, like MFTU came together through a concept. For Rojus, Vynehall considered the “similarities between birds’ attempts to captivate and impress the opposite sex with dance, and the way strangers try to attract one another in clubs”. The Rojus title features the by-line “designed to dance”, which puts this idea forward as a kind of a “musical accompaniment to the narrative” with “a certain degree of storytelling done inherently via the music’s dynamics, textures and temperament”; explains Vynehall in that interview with Mixmag. That album takes its name and track titles from birds or birds of paradise and juxtaposes these natural elements with a club scene the artist knows intrinsically well by now. These different elements display in Vynehall a kind of complete immersion in his music where club culture is intertwined in something else, suggesting a very thoughtful and personally influenced process in his creativity. Throughout the two mini albums and the few EPs that have found their way on labels like AUS, Rush Hour and 3024, Vynehall shows a severe personal dedication to the music, one that the reserved release schedule and his reluctant biographical nature tends to bolster. You really get the sense that Vynehall doesn’t just release music for the sake of releasing it and when he does there’s no need to force it on anybody, since those that are interested and find similarities to Vynehall’s own tastes, will invariably find their way to it.

The artist’s dedication to the music is broad, and applauds the narrative of the history of the music that calls on elements of Funk, Disco and House. He does it quite literally in a track like “It’s Just” through the opening sample taken from Paris is Burning, a documentary about a gay cultural dance movement – one of the earliest developments through House music. It’s also in the abstract of that song, with the artist featuring a sample from the Isley Brothers’ “Don’t say Goodnight” (or the Dilla sample of that track), something the listener senses he treats with respect, but also adds to the density of the song. Vynehall’s music is never quite as simple as an 808 kick and a bass line, and an acoustic kick drum can often be found amongst arpeggio synths, juno bass-lines, and sampled strings. Listening to a track like “Brother” or “Beau Sovereign” you hear all these elements conspire into these fully rounded listening experiences that are more than just functional dance tracks but have no issue in finding their way onto the dance floor, often sounding like miniature compressed versions of Vynehall’s DJ mixes. Like the music, his DJ mixes are pleasant little slices of music’s history, and can go from acoustic elements to functional House effortlessly, while retaining something unequivocally Vynehall about them. There’s a groove to the DJ’s mixes that go right from Funk to Garage, an uncanny ability to tie tracks together from sporadic corners of dance music with Vynehall’s distinct voice at the centre of it all.

Leon Vynehall’s musical voice is indeed the common denominator through his music and his DJ mixes and on the rare occasion he does agree to an interview, one can clearly sense the musician’s personality affecting his art. There’s a sincere personal investment in his music and his selections and it’s one that is quite visceral and tangible from the listening perspective. It very rarely feels calculated or forced and Leon Vynehall’s deft hand at the production chair or in the booth is always a marvel to encounter. It imparts a certain timelessness to his music one where you find a strong artistic personality that won’t indulge ideas of whimsy or buck to trend as he does what he does best… being Leon Vynehall.

Listen back to Ivaylo on WAWH music

With two weeks off from our Jæger Mix series due to invited guests succumbing to flu season, our website has been far too quiet on the music front for our liking. But as if serendipity came and landed directly in our fortunes a mix passed our desk featuring Jæger Mix architect Ivaylo. It’s about time we had the Jæger resident take front and centre for this series, and although this mix is not quite that, we won’t look a gift horse in the mouth and his sojourn over at Why Are We Here will do just nicely, thank you. Ivaylo ventures into an icy metallic palette for this mix with his love for the deep coming through in airy synthetic chords and elastic bass-lines that snap around 808 kicks and crisp dewy textures, soothing the atmosphere all around it. It looks like the next Jæger mix has been pushed back yet another week, but at least we’ve got something to keep us company in the meanwhile.

Album of the Week: Various Artists – Space Echo The Cosmic sound of Cape Verde 1977 -1985

What is it: More that just synthesiser music from Cape Verde.
What does it sound like: A variable cornucopia of styles coming together in the wake of oceanic mystery.
Why is it our album of the week: You’ll have to read further to find out…

Ok, it’s technically not an album, but Space Echo’s narrative reads like an album, especially when you familiarise yourself with the story of this music, conveniently written up in the booklet that comes with the gatefold LP. The story begins with a shipment of synthesisers heading to an expo in Rio, which disappeares at sea. It turns up a few months later 8km inland on the Sao Nicolau Island of Cape Verde, to the surprise of the locals and the Portuguese scientist, who declared it must of fell from the sky. The bow of the ship had traces of extreme heat, similar to traces found on meteors and one conclusion was that it fell from space, so it was only natural that the music which would eventually arise from this cosmic incident would be classed as such.

After distributing the instruments amongst the locals and with electricity finally coming to the island, a third generation of musician would emerge calling on a host of influences, sounds, genres and styles that only an island colonised by the Portuguese off the coast of West Africa as a slave port could produce. Not exactly pure synthesiser music, Space Echo features a kind of West African big band at the centre of it with a “formidable rhythm section” and of course a synth wizard named Toy Viera noodling away at some of those synths distributed by the village elders. The band was called “Voz de Cabo Verde” (the voice of Cape Verde if it wasn’t obvious) and feature as backing band on eight of the tracks on this compilation. The tracks contain elements cosmic collage of some of the funkiest and spaciest music we’ve ever encountered from the region.

Thanks to the recent efforts of labels like Analog Africa, who uncovered this almost forgotten music of Cape Verde in some Lisbon studio, we are finally being exposed to this music that would’ve been very nearly lost as little more than colonialist trinkets. Not for curiosity value, but for the intrinsic value of the music itself.

Red Axes on the Web

Typing Red Axes into my search browser took me to a wiki page called, runescape, an odd encyclopaedia page listing various entries from the World of Warcraft, and not what you expect – a bunch of red axes, the kind wielded by firemen. The Internet is a strange place. Apparently The Red Axe is “a Dwarven mining company, and a member of the Consortium of eight mining companies which rules Keldagrim.” Although quite peculiar and definitely a subject for further investigation, these are not the droids I’m looking for, but I bookmark the tab anyway, research for another day. Let’s try this again: “R..e….d…A…xes”. Select RA… check tour dates. “Nightflight x Hubbas Klubb with Red Axes the 17th of September.” Their RA biography reads: “Red Axes is a project created by Tel-Aviv Based producers & DJs Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi.” Tel Aviv is a major city in Israel and pictures of the city all over the web reveal crystal clear Mediterranean ocean waters crashing on to white sandy beaches on a coastline “marked by stark 1930’s Bauhaus buildings” according to Wikipedia. Uhmmm Bauhaus? Where exactly? These look like modern skyscrapers to me.

Views of the waterfront and beaches of Tel Aviv

There are also images listed under a dedicated nightlife category, depicting scenes of street parties, beach gatherings and host of packed super-club like venues on several pages. “There has always been a strong club scene in Tel Aviv since the 80s, people like to party hard” says one Red Axe in an Interview with Anthem before continuing, “… but as teenagers we were more interested in live shows and rock n roll, than parties.” It turns out before Red Axes its members Dori and Niv were in a post-punk band called Red Cotton. “Dysdercus cingulatus is a species of true bug in the family Pyrrhocoridae, commonly known as the red cotton stainer.” Red Cotton is also a denim company and features in a poem by Robert Browning, one that apparently “has never been one of Browning’s more popular poems, originally because of the perceived sordidness of the story.” Definitely worth a read then, but nothing about Red Cotton the band, or at least not the version we’re looking for. We’ll have to take Red Axes on their word of its existence, but how does a post-punk band go from the stage to the dance floor with appearances at ADE and Boiler Room. An extended stay in Amsterdam apparently. Dori Sadovnik and Niv Arzi got into the “whole club music thing by going to parties” in the Dutch capital while the band lived there. Club 11, the predecessor to Trouw and De School was a favourite hangout apparently. “When we started producing electronic music we searched for a way that will allow us to keep the style we came from”, they said in an interview with Yet Another Music Blog and explains some of their guitar driven sound. In that same interview they say they met each other as children at the various table tennis tournaments Niv used to put together at his house. Niv incidentally was also a professional player in his teens with his career highlight at the age of 14 when he helped Israel secure victory against Germany in a European tournament. Search table tennis…

This man, who has no arms, has just competed in the Paralympics, but back to music… The first track Red Axes officially released was called “Bela” according to Discogs, a track that warrants the tags House and Tech House on the catalogue site. It was released on Klasse Recordings in 2011 and features an energetic percussive arrangement, colourful piano stabs and a ghostly synth riff, which if we put them all together sound like this:

Red Axes also have also covered Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, another nod to their post-punk roots, but which was a little confusing when searching for an example of Bela. Do we also detect a re-occurring theme here? Bela Lugosi was a Hungarian actor best known for his roles in horror films like Dracula, probably the first ever actor to commit to the Horror genre for the silver screen. I didn’t have to Google that, but IMBD does mention that the actor was apparently buried with the cape from his 1931 appearance in Dracula. The Red Axes version of that song is featured on their debut album “Ballad of the Ice”, which was brought to us by I’m a Cliché, a label the duo have called home quite regularly throughout their recorded career. They’ve also released tracks and EPs on Hivern Discs, Crosstown Rebels, Permanent Vacation and Multi Culti. Their most recent release at the time of writing is “Dikembe Manutu/Rage In The Cage” according to discogs, a collaborative single with fellow Tel Aviv native Moscoman. It’s an “absolute belter of a record – really great percussion, odd but wonderful” according to one discogs user. I wonder what s/he finds odd about it? Moscoman and Red Axes are thick as thieves. Here they are going back to back showcasing some of that effortless prowess they manage in the booth.

Moscoman is also from Tel Aviv and his proximity to Red Axes amongst other releases from the group apparently “suggests a wider scene whose instincts mirror Sadovnik and Arzi’s”, according to an extensive interview in RA. The same interview also mentions singer Abrão in this “pool of talent”, a voice that has graced at least two Red Axes tracks, including “Sabor” a track we first encountered when we heard Daniel Gude’s Skrangleteip Mix from earlier this year.

Sabor means taste or flavour in Spanish and if there’s one conclusion that can be drawn from Red Axes on the web it’s that their music doesn’t conform to any one particular flavour. From Post – Punk to what Discogs describes as House, Tech-House with music that RA so accurately describes as a combination of guitars and synths, Red Axes are something of an enigma, but with the help of the world-wide-web we’ve been able to lift some of the opaque shroud around the band. What our Internet search has failed to reveal however is the existence of any actual red axes… So where do firemen buy the tools of their trade? The Internet is a strange place.

An Everyman’s Music with Finnebassen

“Doesn’t Finn look a lot like Prins Thomas”, utters the voice of Petter Celius just below the din of the music next to me. I nod a smile in agreement. The resemblance is quite uncanny, especially since Finn has grown his hair out and his beard has filled out his rounder facial features. Bar the notable age difference, they do indeed look quite similar. Is this a new Oslo DJ trend I have not yet latched onto or is it because the tall, athletic, hairless frame of Øyvind Morken stands between them, a yardstick by which any shorter hairy figure would look quite similar. It’s quite a little setting we have here. Some of the world’s biggest DJs and electronic music stars are all here, all at arms length. Finnebassen, Prins Thomas, Øyvind Morken, Magnus International… is that the square handle bar moustache of Blackbelt Andersen I see there too? They are all here, looking on while Prins Thomas violently thrashes kick after kick through the forgiving rotary mixer, and I notice Finn with a severe focus drawn all over his face. Like an attentive pupil, he seems completely immersed in the action from the booth, absorbing every little nuance from Prins Thomas. There’s a humble humility to the DJ, one that doesn’t quite transpose all that noticeably when he’s playing to a packed house in Villa or Jæger, or playing to audiences measuring in their ten’s of thousands on the international festival circuit and the biggest European clubs. It’s quite often difficult to remember that he has an essential mix; various releases on labels like Get Physical and Noir; and tours that extend to South America under his belt when you meet him in this context, and that’s exactly how it is too when we sit down for a chat and a beer at Hell’s Kitchen earlier that week.

After a few weeks of to and fro emails with Finn, I get one that says: “I’m in town for two weeks now! If you still wanna sit down one day for a chat, now would be the perfect time!” It’s the window we’ve been waiting for. The jet-setting DJ has been hard to pin down for an interview, and I‘ve been trying since the start of the year, so I don’t balk at the opportunity and get straight on it, leaving a dusty trail behind me as I exit Jæger in a rush. When I get there, the Viking-like shadow of Gustav Viken is looming over Finn, no-doubt tempting his friend to join them for a sunny midday sojourn somewhere, but Finn, professional as ever, postpones the invitation till later that evening, appeasing Gustav with a knowing grin. This is just a little slice of Finn’s exotic and often weird lifestyle, which can go from a South American tour to a “birthday party in Ålesund” in the space of two weeks and I get the sense he would have it no other way.

He’s enjoying something of a holiday at the time of the interview, if you can really call it that with a fully booked DJ schedule for the two weeks he is in town. “If I have weekend off that’s my holiday.” Nonetheless when he’s back in the city that raised him, there’s a strong sense of being home and a comfortable calm prevails in Finn. “I get to say hi to Ola (Olanskii) and see Geir (G-Ha) play and it’s an important part for me, to see what’s going on in Oslo and for me to be part of it.” As a DJ that’s in demand the world over and could have made the more industry-convenient Berlin or London his home by now, Finn is cut from quite a different cloth and prefers to be grounded In Oslo and it’s very unique clubbing scene. “The term clubbing is defined differently wherever you go and Oslo has a very laid back attitude towards clubbing. How often do you see resident DJs dancing and actually taking in what’s going on in the city around them.” It’s clear that there is at least a deep-seated appreciation for the city’s intimate clubbing experiences. He not only speaks openly of his admiration for the Oslo clubbing scene, but also purveys it quite literally in his music with tracks called Blå, Villa and even Jæger. “The whole scene in Oslo is a big contributor to who I am as a DJ and as an artist and the DJs who most inspire me are from the city.”

But how does a kid raised by a rock and roll father who’s “always been playing in a band” (a band called Empty Souls who knock out Everly Brothers hits all dressed in black) and who learnt the guitar at the age of fourteen, end up being one of the biggest House DJs in the world? Quite simply: Sunkissed. “I went to Sunkissed for the first time when I was twenty.” Coming from the west side of Oslo, and with Solli plass the peer-favourite hangout, Finn eventually had it up to his “ears with blazers and everyone looking the same. There had to be more to this horrible culture” and that came to him when he first set foot in Sunkissed. “I came in and saw this one guy in a wife beater and one guy in basically the same thing I was wearing – nice shirt and a blazer – but they were all having their own fun. It was such an individual, yet collective experience.” Before then Finn had already dabbled at the decks, mostly at the back of the russebuss, but it was the Sunkissed experience and a fortunate meeting with Petter Celius, Frædag’s resident opening DJ and Finn’s long-time friend, that the DJ bug officially bit. A residency at Skaugum, playing soul and R&B for an older generation became the crucial starting point for both DJs. “It was a really good start for me, because I was playing to people like my father and I knew what kind of music he liked. It’s an important step as a DJ to learn that you there to play to other people.” Countless hours were spent on a bedroom floor consuming records and beers with Petter for their various residencies around town while on a poor student budget, all in the hope of sharing a little slice of this feeling with the people on the dance floor.

Playing for an audience has always been the decisive element to Finn’s musical personality and seeps in through every aspect of Finn’s creativity, including his productions. Finn’s ability to “play to other people” is something that you’ll invariably pick up in his music too and first came to everybody’s attention when he released “If you only knew” through Electronique Digital. It was an instant success for its accessible R&B vocal hook and slinky rubber bass lines running counterpoint to an infectious House percussion section. It bounds with melody and harmony, featuring a development in song structure not that dissimilar to chart music, while it’s form is clearly taken from the dance floor. It’s these fundamental elements that you still hear today in his latest offering, the Jarre-like synth- focussed “Rotundo”. That is a track replete with highly dramatised compositional traits similar to that of the French synth wizard, and although there’s very little of a stylistically to tie this to earlier tacks like “Touching Me” these Finnebassen tracks are an everyman’s music. For the dance music fan there’s the dance progression, complete with endless shifts in emotive dynamics, while for the trend-focussed pop fan, tracks like these feature the simplistic harmonic and melodic ingredients that are immediately tangible for the nonplussed music fan. There’s a little bit of everything for everybody, and even the most hardened underground music nerd would be hard-pressed in suggesting that this music is in anyway flawed.

I’m curious how Finn manages to find this balance in his music and when I approach this question during the interview he says with a wry laugh: “I have no idea how to answer this question and maybe that’s why I’m so successful. My first couple of tracks – I didn’t really think it would have any commercial appeal when I made these tracks. More often than not if it sounds good to my ears it sounds good to others.” In the past he has been driven by trends and preferred “not thinking about how this is going to be perceived in ten years” so that something like a trip to London can take his music from a 2011/12 “deep house thing” to a “Tech-house driven sound” ala Jamie Jones, all the while retaining Finn’s appreciation for the fundamental musical constituents. “The harmonies and melodies appealed to the person in me who liked older music.” R&B and vocals and bass-lines with more than just one note are fundamental to Finn’s tastes and his music. But, although trend-aware, Finn is definitely not trend-focussed. “You can like one trend but don’t let it define you. Trends, they come and go and you might like some of them. I won’t ever commit to any one trend and produce a track.” It’s something that just naturally occurs in Finn’s music and even DJ sets, where there never appears to be some agenda from the artist to ride a specific populist wave. ”It’s wrong to not play a track that you like based on the notion that it is part of a trend”, he cautions. “Stop over thinking it as a cred thing; it’s simple – pick out the records you like and play them.”

At the same time there’s also subconscious need in the artist to continuously be riding that wave of success it appears. “Suddenly you’re playing clubs and festivals all over the world, and you’re scared of losing it. In a genre that is evolving all the time I started thinking I have to come up with a new fresh thing.” Talking to Finn about his music is riddled with juxtaposition like this. There might be contradiction there but it’s wholly an honest contradiction highlighting the complexities of being a successful artist in this contemporary environment where electronic music, a style of music that is not only dictated by tastes but also technological advancements, or even regressions. You always have to stay on top of the new thing, while trying to stay to your own musical personality.

You can easily see it would open up a whirlpool of confusion and compromise in an artist and Finn is no different. It will however always come to a head and as an artist gets older when the true personality prevails and Finn, I believe has reached that stage today. He has grown incredibly tired of this trend-informed hype to maintain that level of success, and has recently adopted a more simplistic mantra; “fuck it, just do your own thing.” There’s ”more of an ambition to do timeless music” for Finnebassen today and you can year that sentiment creeping in on tracks like “Rotundo” and his recent remix for Gundelach’s “Spiders”. “Initially Kai wanted something clubby and I delivered a 95 BPM remix instead.” The reception of that remix was still phenomenal, premiering on ID magazine to hundred’s of thousands of listeners and yet Finn can in no way be compared to somebody like Kygo when it comes to home grown success. Finn still toes that invincible line between being essentially an underground artist with phenomenal commercial success, and Oslo, it seems has always been a bit slow to catch on, with many listeners not often seeing the bridge between all these artists as singular.

“It’s pretty intense sometimes because we don’t know what to do”, says Finn. “We have a very dedicated crowd to some extent, but this is not London or Berlin, and we can’t have all the chin-strokers show up all the time.” A place like Jæger that’s open 7 days a week, needs to be the “social democratic answer to the clubbing scene in Oslo” that it is and that often means the music and some of the people behind the music go unnoticed. Finn can go from playing Skaugum to an audience to a dedicated few to playing Villa – on the very same night sometimes – with a queue stretching the entire block. It’s incredibly erratic and there appears to be very little sense to it, but I feel that Finn prefers it this way. “For me coming to Jæger is not really like going clubbing; it’s more of a safe haven of sorts.” It all adds to the complexities of this artist, which are incredibly difficult to decipher and the most trying time I’ve ever had to put it into words. Interviewing an underground artist is simple: they have a very strong ideology that they strictly uphold to. The same goes for a pop star: They have an agenda to sell as many records as possible and conform to trends endlessly to achieve that. Finnebassen is in that no-mans land between those two worlds and it thrives on contradiction, contrasts and fluidity, making it incredibly difficult to summarise and categorise as a distinct anomaly. But then again you get to meet Finn and throws up a whole other stack of issues, where you find a pragmatic individual that just happens to make music.

A few days after the interview I see Finn at the bar in Jæger with no immediate people around him. He tells me he just had a disastrous situation with a laptop that killed a live set he had been preparing, and was consoling himself with a beer and some music, which at that time was selected by Noir – the man behind the label that has given him the platform to create endlessly. After something of a hiatus last year, which saw Finn taking some personal time, Finn is affirmatively back in that creative flow and “Rotundo” might be the first release since 2014’s Milestone EP, but it suggests more things are to come soon and it imparts a little of that timelessness Finn talked about earlier. I try to ask Finn about it, since the NM2 track was released in between conducting the interview and writing it. I learn from Petter that Finn is in town but he’s lying low at home, after a particularly heavy night at Skaugum – implied in Petter’s tone. I file the question to the back of my mind, until next time…

Listen back to Øyvind Morken on NTS

Untzdag resident Øyvind Morken took a little trip to London this weekend to play Brilliant Corners alongside Piers Harrison and Chuggy. London however was not quite ready to let him go with just one appearance and an invitation to NTS radio via Nic Tusker found Øyvind Morken joining the Young Turks imprint Whities’ boss for his 88 Transitions show. The show is now available to stream with Øyvind on duties for the second half of the show.

Jæger in collaboration with Monsters of Reality – The Mimesis Machine presents THE RITUAL

Is clubbing holy? Is God holy? Is love holy? Is trance holy? Inside a club, wrapped in the holy beat, one can act instinctively, reaching back to basic human desires.

During the Ibsen festival Monsters of Reality – The Mimesis Machine will bring Rafika Chawishe’s The Ritual to Oslo and to Jæger’s stage for a special exclusive performance on the 26th of September 2016 only.

“And in all these lands I have shown my mysteries, taught my dances and established myself as a God” (Bacchae, Euripides, 410BC)

The Ritual will be brought to you by Jæger in collaboration with the Monsters of  Reality who are:
Artistic leader and producer: Siri ForbergProducer and dramaturg: Marit G. Eggen
Production manager: Hans Voigt
Production assistant: Frances Gerono

Album of the Week: The 7th Plain – Chronicles I

Who is The 7th Plain: Luke Slater’s Ambient moniker.
What is Chronicles I: A collection of collected material The 7th Plain’s archives.
What does it sound like: Sweet melodic and cinematic tracks that could easily have scored the next Blade Runner film.

Luke Slater’s discography is a vast cornucopia of Techno’s most extensive possibilities extending from his honorific moniker to the better known Detroit-focussed excursions of his Planetary Assault Systems alias on labels like Peacefrog and his own Mote-Evolver. Laying dormant however throughout the extended discography was The 7th Plain, that was until Ostgut Ton’s newly established sub-label A-TON got into Mr Slater’s archive and found what might be more than an album’s worth of material, if Chronicles I is indeed the first in a series as the title suggests.

Unlike the industrial, sound-designed focus ambiences we’ve come to expect from artists like Kobosil on Ostgut Ton, The 7th Plain favours more resolving melodic excursions, leaving all the tension behind as synthesisers create willowy padded textures. Slater creates lush dreamscapes that drift off into some unknown dimension, never quite disappearing into the background as the sweet melodic textures give the passive listener something to continually hold on to. There’s something of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works to the album and perhaps even hints at the age of some of this music, but like that classic Twin album, Chronicles I has a timeless quality to it. There are percussive moments throughout the album, but it relies more on an emotive component than a functional one, and works as well on a home stereo as a full-blown Funktion One system. It’s a remarkable work from Slater, one that will surely be an instant classic, and you only have to listen to it once  to understand why.

Introducing Frantzvaag

Considering the average age of this newest generation of producer/DJ, it’s very likely that any newcomer to this music would most likely have been raised by the generation that were there at the gestation of the House and Techno music; around the same age their offspring are now. Any 19 – 25 year old would most likely have parents that were around that age when what we have come to understand as electronic dance music (not as a genre, but what it literally stands for) was in its most exciting infancy. It’s a sobering thought; one that especially hits home when I sit down with 22-year-old Mats Ottem Frantzvaag who says his appreciation for House was handed down to him by his dad. “He had all these compilation CD’s” Mats tells me, and although his father, who has always been “pretty interested in music” generally might not have been at the very forefront of the House movement, he most certainly was of a generation that were some of the first people that would have come across this style of music. Although an interesting point, and one that will surely keep a few music’s most free-thinkers occupied in the years to come, it probably speaks more of Mats’ universally open perspective of music than it does of socio-cultural anthropology. Mats is a producer and DJ about to release his debut EP as Frantzvaag for Fuck Reality, a Smallville sub-label, and when we heard that he’d be having the release party at Jæger we dropped by to be formally introduced to this new talent.

Growing up in Sandvika, the Oslo-born Mats “spent way too much time searching through music blogs” as a youth while partaking in “everything from French House to Lounge music” through his father’s music collection. But like many of the generation that grew up with the internet Mats wouldn’t be content with merely one genre of music and would also savour ”early New York nineties Hip Hop, like Pete Rock and Large professor”, from which an interest in sampled music blossomed too. When he got his first sampler for a birthday at the age of fourteen/fifteen, a seed was planted. “Back then I only made Hip Hop beats and this bad kind of electro stuff.” It was from Hip Hop however that Mats started digging deeper into the music, and through the work of the likes of Pete Rock, he “got more interested in the samples” behind the music, and soon started venturing further into Jazz and Soul from this Hip Hop catalyst. Picking through samples and getting to grips with sampling techniques established in Mats a desire to delve deeper into the music, its techniques and its history during his adolescent years. At the same time an aspiration of just “getting away and experiencing something else” encouraged a change of scenery and pace and Mats made the move to London to enrol at the Point Blank music school. “It’s what I always wanted to do”, says Mats about his decisions to study production and it was during this time in the company of kindred spirits that he really got a chance to develop his kills as a producer and DJ. “All these guys I went to school with had this big collective and also had a studio and DJ setup and we all used to hang out there before going out.“ These experiences and the education applied Mats with the skills that his latent talent required to develop his sound and when London’s expenses became unjustifiable, he made the move back to Oslo with experience, more influences, and hefty collection of demos. One such demo found its way to Julius Steinhoff and when the Smallville boss heard it, Mats soon got a reply asking for more. That track was Knitring and today it introduces Frantzvaag’s debut EP on Smallville’s Fuck Reality imprint. “I was not like: ‘I’m gonna make an EP’, it’s more like tracks I made over the past year. I made two of them when I still lived in London and the other two when I came back home.” For Frantzvaag’s debut Mats picked the tracks that were “pretty similar” emphasising a “New York Deep House” sound that he’d been cultivating in his productions for the last year. The EP plays in the humid textures of New York’s more organic musical aesthetic as the percussive elements of the music combine with sauntering chords being pushed forward at a reserved pace. For a moment you can hear Mats’ Hip-Hop roots and sampling inclinations come to the fore, but its never obvious and the samples combine in a very natural way, making it often hard to determine their existence. There’s a Dilla-like perfection in the way Frantzvaag’s various elements all manage to find their position in the space they are allocated and as a result the music breathes but without the assertiveness of a hip-hop beat, and so it imparts mood rather than function.

Influences from New York, experiences from London, and a youth spent consuming various movements in House through his father conspires in Mats’ music as something worldly, a universal quality that undoubtedly caught the ear of Julius Steinhoff too. He is however very “excited” to be back in Oslo and to be part of the effervescent scene we’re experiencing here despite all odds. Even though he might ”find lots of the new stuff happening in London very exciting – especially things popping of around the Peckham area, like rhythm section, rye wax etc and the artists affiliated with this” – he still feels it might be heading towards a “kind of a downward spiral” (especially in lieu of Fabric’s almost immanent demise) and prefers being back home where he finds the scene “really inspiring”.

Mats enjoys being in Oslo with the young DJ getting opportunities for “playing a bit more” and when he is not studying “innovation, and creative business development at Oslo school of management” (a degree he hopes will also further his musical career) he is immersed in all aspects of music. You will often find him digging for new records to sample at Baklengs, where he occasionally assists proprietor Hacir, if he’s not working at his part time job at Hi-Fi klubben. He says he has “found a lot to sample, just sitting around listening to records” with Hacir and after we’re done with our interview he intends to go straight there to help Hacir unpack some new arrivals. Some of these records he might even take with him when he plays out at places like Skaugum with sets that can go from “Techno that’s not just Techno” to Funk to House. “I don‘t really have a big plan when I’m playing” says Mats, preferring to stay in the moment with the music and the people on the floor. The next time I will most likely see Mats will be in the booth at Jæger for the release of his EP and I sense a definite hint of excitement in his voice about the upcoming gig. “It’s going to be super fun and a big dream come true.”

Mats is only Twenty two and we laugh at the fact that he would be technically under the age limit for a Friday night. Our conversation is brief as it is with any artist at the forefront of his career, but its given us the introduction to the artist we’ve needed. Now, all that’s left to do is sit back and watch this new career unfold and the complexities of the artistic personality behind those influences, experiences and education develop further along his career.

Listen back to the Bogota Showcase

Almost a week after the Bogota Showcase rolled into town, we are still getting little tidbits from Ivaylo and the crew as little mementos of one memorable Saturday night at Jæger. This latest souvenir Ivaylo has arranged for us is the recording of the entire night… well almost. Some technical issues (uhhmm “redlining” the mixer) did prevent Slammer, Arildo and Ivaylo’s own set from making the cut, but at least we have the majority of the night on record. It features the cream of the crop of new Norwegian talent with mixes from Of Norway, André Brave, De Fantastiske To, Omar V and Terje Saether. The separate mixes encapsulate the sound of Bogota concessively and gives us yet another reason to relive the weekend.

Album of the week: The Dave Harrington Group – Become Alive

Who is Dave Harrington: A session musician and producer that is best known for his work as one half of Darkside.
Who is the Group: A bunch of musician-pals assembled for a three-day recording foray.
Why is it our album of the week: It fuses free-improv jazz with free-thinking electronics.

Become Alive is the result of a three day recording session orchestrated by Dave Harrington. He called on some of his favourite musician pals, “unpacking his musical training” through these individuals, who all accentuated different parts of Dave Harrington’s own musical development. The three-day free-improved recording sessions, were then re-visited and alongside co-producer Samer Ghadry, Harrington set out to create fully formed compositions from these rough musical sketches.

The result is music that is incandescent, unpredictable and bounding with life. Through re-approaching the recordings from a production perspective, Harrington manages to find concise forms where wayward and free-extemporisation lived before. He applies some of that free-thinking Darkside approach to these recordings and finds new textures for acoustic instruments through electronic processes, that swathes everything in a kind of hazy atmosphere, pulling these various elements together in a singular voice that’s an immersive listening experience. Not much of the free-improv remains on the surface of the tracks, making the music far more accessible and approachable for an immersive listening experience. We make Become Alive our album of the week, since we’ve admired it since its release and on the week of The Dave Harrington group coming to our basement, we intend to listen to it quite a bit.

Listen back to Bernard Horn & Nadja Chatti for Esperanto

Esperanto, the Stockholm based artist agency, came to Jæger last Saturday with Nadja Chatti and Bernard Horn taking their position in our sauna for the event. The two Esperanto artists went back 2 back showcasing something of the unique talent the name Esperanto has been cultivating in their midst in Stockholm. We were on hand to capture the entire evening’s set as the DJs went from the organic sound of Disco, easing into the early evening through Deep House and ending up in the more energetic tempos of House and now it’s available to stream for those who want to relive last Saturday night or for those that want to get a taste of what Esperanto is cooking up.

Catching up with Ivaylo

It’s been an exciting year for Ivaylo and Bogota records. The label adopted the vinyl format for the first time, releasing Bulgarian artists Sound Solutions’ “It’s All About” which featured some great remixes from Norwegian talents De Fantastiske To and Of Norway. As well as a steady stream of releases, which will see Terje Sæther inducted into the Bogota family shortly, Ivaylo has also taken his show on the road, bringing the Bogota showcase to clubs like Renate in Berlin and Nitsa in Barcelona, playing for audiences into their thousands. As a DJ he’s also made a few trips back home to Varna, and it seems from Ivaylo’s perspective that there might be something interesting brewing in the Balkans. But it’s been a year since we last spoke to our resident for the blog, and with all these new developments we thought it’s time to catch up with Ivaylo ahead of the Bogota showcase at Jæger this weekend.

It’s kind of weird doing this Q&A with you because we see each other almost every day. But a load of stuff has been happening with you and Bogota records since our last interview, almost year ago. Can you fill the good people in on what’s been happening?

We switched to the vinyl format; established great bases for showcases in both Berlin and Barcelona, which was the main goal for 2016!

Lets talk about the vinyl release. Why did Bogota decide to make the move to the physical format?

We have actually always had the vinyl format in mind as the way we want to release music. As the digital/streaming format has taken priority on the music market and those formats are essential for establishing platforms for promoting and sales, I simply wanted to make Bogota accessible to all in the digital domain. We’re going to keep both formats in the future as I don’t really see the big difference between them, but people are different and have different needs.

What spoke to you particularly about this release that you wanted to invest in the physical format? 

It’s a funny story. I heard the original 7 years ago in a skate shop where Ogi from Sound Solutions worked. We were hanging out there and I remember both Strahil (Kink) and I liked the bass line of the track. Last year I just came accross the track on my hard drive and it took me a couple of minutes to call the guys and ask them if they still have all the parts and if it was possible to do a re-work. We got the track month later and here it is.

There’s a host of Norwegian talent remixing a Sound Solutions, a Bulgarian act. Is this something you always intended for the label – bridging the gap between the country of your origin and the place you call home today?

Well, that’s the main thing with Bogota. We are always trying to build bridges with our releases and as a Norwegian label and me from Bulgaria the answer was simple: “It´s All About”.

While we are on the subject of Bulgaria… You played there recently. There are a few eastern European countries that have made quite huge impressions in electronic music recently – countries like Romania, Croatia and Hungary. Is there anything, artist, club or style, that you encountered on your recent visit that could include Bulgaria amongst those countries soon?

I played couple of gigs in both Sofia and Varna this summer. There is guy from Sofia called Ivo Graves, who I know from before. He is a great DJ, selector and the best thing is that he has started producing music as well, which for me is the one to look out for!

In Varna I played and put together on an outdoor party with my friends. The party happened in a parking lot under the longest bridge in Varna. There is this guy called Borg, that I’ve been following for a few years now and this time I was really impressed with his skills behind the decks. He is maybe the only one from Bulgaria at the moment who really gets me into what we used to call the “Bulgarian underground flow”

Your hometown, Varna has all the ingredients to become quite a clubbing destination. A nice little beach town with enough gritty warehouse-like locations to make Berghain look like a five-star hotel, but the last time I was there they seemed to mainly focus on beach-bar Ibiza style places, without a real focus on music. What’s it like there now?

I wouldn’t call it little beach town, as there are 1 million people in the summer and over half a million the whole year round. We started a music platform called “Collective Varna” last year and the goal is exactly as you mention in the question, to find abandoned buildings in the city still there from the communist era. There are plenty of locations and it seems like even the Varna multiplicity is willing to help us of organize different music events at those locations. As for the Ibiza style beach bars and clubs – yes they are there – we just don’t see them.

What is the next release scheduled for Bogota?

We are coming out with BOG009 on September 27th. It is a 3 track-EP from Terje Saether with 2 more remixes from Alex Jangle & Matztam and Rave-enka. All the guys on the release are from Oslo.

You’ve got all the guys, bar Sound Solutions from the last release coming to the showcase. They’re quite a varied bunch. Where do you find a connection between these artists and how do you think they represent Bogota individually?

“Its All About” the sound. No hahaha… the thing with Bogota is, that I personally know most of the signed artist, particularly the line up for this showcase. They all know my ideology within the label and the sound we represent. Also except for Slammer and I, they are all from Oslo (although Arildo is half Spanish grew up in Oslo ). I’m personally very exited about the night, as the line up is set up in particular order (time wise) taking care of each individual artist and their way of playing.

Slammer is putting together a live show for the event. What do you think we could expect from that?

Slamming deepness.

And you’ll be closing the night off with a DJ set obviously. You mentioned to me the other day that you as a DJ will be going back to DJing with vinyl more. What encouraged you to make the move back to that format?

I simply find better music released on vinyl nowadays. But as you know I love to edit tracks and use my own sounds in a DJ set, so I´m going to go on 50/50 with the formats.

And what tracks are you looking forward to bringing here with you?

The new release from Bogota, a couple of tracks from me, and lots of edits.

Last year’s event was quite a success and you’ve been playing to crowds in the 1000’s at clubs like Renate and Nitsa. What do expect from this next showcase and what will you and the guys be taking with you from previous showcases?

Honestly, my only expectation, as always, is that the musical journey will be kind and strong enough to keep everybody in the flow of the moment.

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?

 

Album of the Week: Biosphere – Departed Glories

Where is it from: Norway’s desolate North
What does it sound like: Norway’s desolate North.
Where’s the best place to listen to it: Norway’s desolate North.

Biosphere’s (Geir Jenssen) legacy has firmly been etched in electronic music’s archives since the 1990’s. Known for his immersive ambient textures; mediative Techno workouts; and innovational sonic palettes Biosphere is an unconventional pioneer in the field of electronic music, both in its most accessible form and its more experimental corners. The producer’s environment, the arctic North (Tromsø), often draws parallels to the icy sonic aesthetic he calls on  and swathes in frozen atmospheric delays and reverbs as the immersive textures he conjures in his music. In the nineties his music flourished in the “chill-out” rooms of place like Heaven in London and offered a subtle counterpoint to the Aphex Twins and Authecres of the world while retaining a position amongst these artists as a true innovator.

His latest album, Departed Glories might not garner the same enthusiasm as past works like Substrata or Microgravity, but it’s most certainly a Biosphere album and for that you have to commend it. Jenssen deals with rather more minimal, reserved textures on this outing than in the past, and favours a warmer organic sonic palette where vocal choirs and plucked strings are not alienated amongst the exclusively electronic elements. It’s hard to say how Jenssen evolves the Biosphere sound through his records or what intrinsically makes it so unique but Departed Glories definitely proliferates the Biosphere touch without succumbing to any cliché other than being an ambient record. The reserved appearance of the record is Biosphere at his most solitary and listening to it alone while nursing a drink is a most rewarding listening experience.

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.

Album of the Week: Dopplereffekt – Gesamtkunstwerk

What is it: Electro/ Detroit
What does it sound like it: Detroit Electro for the Pop indulgence. Possibly the best album ever made.
Where is it most at home: Anywhere On the dance floor or in the car, in the bedroom, out in the woods. on the moon.

Another act that came out of the ashes of Drexiya, Dopplereffekt was the brainchild of Gerald Donald and became an instant cult classic amongst discerning music fans. It put a new, much needed spin on the classic Detroit sound, taking it out of the the abandoned warehouses of the city’s dilapidating motor industry and into the glitzy showrooms of LA’s most narcissistic and plastic pop culture reality. With tongue and cheek female vocals hooks about being a pornographic artist and modern culture’s love of plastic surgery, accompanied by energetic electro synth riffs that hardly exceed the three-minute pop-song standard, Dopplereffekt’s Gesamtkunstwerk manages to breach that indefinable border between the underground dance floor and the more accessible realms of the superficial world. Released on DJ Hell’s German label, International Deejay Gigolo Records it also appeared to narrow the distance between the US and Europe’s dance floors and at the same time became the catalyst for a new dance-music trend the world over.

Real Electro got rebranded as “Electroclash”, which seemed to come into its own almost immediately after this record was released, laying the foundation for acts like Black Strobe, Miss Kitten, The Hacker and Vitalic to toe a similar line in contemporary music conjecture in Europe. At the same time, Dopplereffekt was an unique entity with Gerald Donald’s historical significance in the story of dance music tied up within the group. As much as it might have spearheaded a movement it certainly existed on its own terms and that’s part of the reason its gone down as classic album. Today it gets re-issued periodically through Clone, who now exclusively publish the record and its as in-demand and as significant today as its ever been. Dopplereffekt however is a group in constant flux, and shortly after this record they ventured into a drone ambient aesthetic for their follow-up records on International Deejay Gigolo before coming back to a Drexicya kind of sound for Leisure System in the last few years. Although great works all in their own rights, Dopplereffekt never managed to get that same crossover formula quite as right as they did with Gesamtkunstwerk, and that;s why it stands out in their own discography and electronic music’s discourse.

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”.

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.

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.

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?

Album of the Week: Floating Points – Elaenia

What is it:  Avant Garde electronica
What does it sound like: House through the perspective of a neuroscientist
Why is it so good: It redifienes the boundaries of electronic music

By the time we started the album of the week feature, this album had already made a considerable impression in our collection and had to put to one side for fear of wearing out the grooves from over playing. But with Floating Points visiting us this week, it gave us a chance to pull it out again and marvel at its rare beauty once more. Floating Points’ Elaenia is one of the all time greats of electronic music for the forward momentum it applies to this form of creative expression and its ingenuity. It occupies that rare space between genres and styles that in the past would have warranted a completely new genre, but today makes it stand out amongst its peers. Laying a foundation on Floating Point’s expressive House aesthetic, Elaenia mixes elements of Jazz and House in the same pot in which Bitches Brew was stewed to arrive at something unique and inventive for the 21st century.

The album is forged in the expressive flurries of a genius mind and it is presented as something that combines a inquisitive personality with elements grounded in dance music. At the centre of the album’s charm is the Rhodes piano which acts as like a pencil drawing for all the other elements to take shape around and come together as something cohesive. It’s improvised, yet there are clear structures to the music that go through phrases on the wave of a feeling. It’s something that we’ve still not been able to categorise amongst the other albums on our shelf and as such it stands alone as a 21st century masterpiece.

Album of the week: Moby – Play

What is it: Lush, bluesy electronica
Why was it so significant: It set a new standard for electronica and pop music alike.
Where does it work best: Anywhere at any time.

Re-issued on vinyl for the first time, Moby’s Play is our album of the week. The fifth studio  album of the New York producer is significant watermark for electronica and pop music as a critical success in both fields, and for good reason. Play was an instant commercial triumph for its ability to fuse elements from the distant corners of electronic dance music with R&B and Blues, reconstructing them into popular forms that were more accessible to the average man while remaining true to the producer’s underground dance music roots. Moby’s clever combination of samples your able to sing a long too and big dance beats within the electronic tradition heralded a new era for this music in which it could be both a cult hit and reach a populist mainstream.

Tracks like Honey, Natural Blues and Find my Baby were instant commercial successes as singles and Play is one of these rare albums where there’s never a boring moment. What’s more it’s stood the test of time and listening to it today, the characteristics that made it so endearing are still there. Whether it’s sweet melodic phrases or Moby’s innoccently composed moments at the microphone, it’s hardly an album that can be ignored and it’s no surprise Rolling Stone magazine considered it one of their 500 greatest albums of all time. Almost every person old enough will have a favourite moment from this record, and even amongst some of the other new records out this week, and stands as a giant moment in recording history and it should find a welcome home in our collection, sure to get a lot of love from the folks behind the bar.

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 LeungMoodymann “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 .

Album of the Week: Various Artists – Sherwood at the Controls Volume 2 1985-1990

What is it: A collection of Adrian Sherwood’s greatest production credits between 1985 – 1990
What does it sound like: Adrian Sherwood being consumed by his machines.
When and where does it sound best: In a comfy chair through a immense sound system.

This collection of tracks from Adrian Sherwood, comes from a time when the famed producer took a little departure from the world of dub-reggae, applying the techniques he’d mastered from that genre to Electro, Hip-Hop and IDM for his On-U label. The compilation features tracks from the likes of Ministry, Lee Scratch Perry and his own Tackhead project, bubbling with the ferocity of the eighties, driven along by the raw machine aesthetic of that era. For those familiar with Sherwood’s work it offers a new perspective on the artist and producer, and for those who are new to Sherwood’s work this compilation offers a very comprehensive view of the man at work and his focus on the noise within the music. It showcases the multi-faceted ability of this self-proclaimed “tone-deaf” producer and the distinct sound he cultivated as Adrian Sherwood. The compilation is segmented in four distinct sections that include Hip-Hop, Outernational Beats, IDM, and of course Dub. Although this latter genre is where Sherwood made the most significant contribution to music, what this compilation puts forth is that there is clearly no end or limit to his talent.

Sherwood at the controls is a melting pot of influences and a rich tapestry of music that will keep you thoroughly entertained as you take a musical journey through the producer’s history. There’s a little something for everybody in there, and will undoubtedly open up new conspiring worlds to the listener too. It’s all held together with Adrian Sherwood’s distinct machine-focussed assault and their larger than life personalities. Whereas Volume 1 of the series introduced us to the idea of the legitimacy of Sherwood’s status as a musical legend, this volume solidifies it.

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.

Album of the Week: Yogisoul – By Nights

What is it: Jazzy Hip Hop for summer’s evening.
Who will play it: Fredfades | MC Kaman
When are you most likely to hear it: On a dusky Friday afternoon.

Peaking through hazy broken Rhodes chords and dusty hip-hop beats is Yogisoul’s debut making an appearance in our record collection as our album of the week. The Mutual Intentions affiliate roped in a few friends for this album with Ivan Ave,  Awon, and Kristoffer Eikrem making an appearance amongst tracks that combine jazzy samples alongside viscerally moving instrumentals that seep with the humidity of a city in the heat of summer’s evening. It’s an album that loiters more than it progresses, and what Yogisoul and his various production partners achieve on this album is a mood. Lyrics  often fall tease at some nostalgic reverie, talk of summer loves and future conquests with the reserve optimism of an adolescent with his entire ahead in front of him to strengthen the theme of the record. There’s no narcissistic spew about personal wealth or talent, but rather just a confidence in the lyrics that highlight a maturity in Yogisoul’s creative expression, while often alluding to a hidden playfulness. By Nights offer’s the ray of sunshine in our week and here’s hoping that if we play it enough times, the weather will follow.

Album of the Week: Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures

What is it: New Wave 
Who will play it: Herr R | Tellstroem
When are you most likely to hear it: At the end of the night.

Our record of the week comes courtesy of Tellstroem this week. The Swedish DJ, producer and label owner joined us on our hunt for this week’s edition, and when he stumbled upon a sale at Garden.no, he couldn’t resist the temptation of an offer nor an album that’s made one of the most severe impacts on recorded music ever, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Tellstroem brands a tattoo in his fore-arm that reads “Love will tear us apart again” and although that single is not on this album, there’s a clear admiration for the band from the tattooed DJ when he says “it’s the only band-tattoo I have”. The band’s influence however isn’t the reserve of one individual, but can be felt coursing through the veins of music history, and transcends their original rock roots today.

The DIY sound of the album, which gestates from guitarist and synth-enthusiast, Bernard Sumner’s love for Russian kit synths and simplistic, thin-as-air guitar hooks laid the foundation for bands like Depeche Mode and Human league, while Peter Hook’s rapid-fire, loopy bass lines can be felt through EBM and Techno the world over. Although the band’s career was tragically cut short by the suicide of their singer Ian Curtis after releasing their second only album, Closer, what was left behind in those two albums, especially Unknown Pleasures would never go quietly into that gentle night, including the band that remained after the death of their singer. Joy Division, became New Order, which then became an essential catalyst for the sound of Acid and House in the UK centred around Tony Wilson’s Hacienda, but that’s a story for another time. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasure is an essential edition to any record collection, and thanks to affordable re-issues we can now call on it whenever we feel the need to reference the genesis of the music we consume today. There’s never a weak moment on the album and whether you like the unbridled punk of a track like “Disorder”, or something a little more upbeat featuring more electronics like “She’s Lost Control”, there’s something in there for the more complete music fan. It’s just an iconic album, and that cover art, reminds us why the LP is still more effective in drawing your attention to the music than any other format.

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″

Album of the Week: Trus’me – Planet 4

What is it: Analogue electronica from outer space.
Who will play it: Dj Nuhhh | Oskar Pask | Willie Burns
When are you most likely to hear it: Deep into the darkness of the set.

Trus’me’s newest album, Planet 4 hints at a simpler time, when man first encountered machine and opened up to a harmonious world that led to the Rubiks cube and Lycra. The album plays on retro futuristic themes of our closest celestial body Mars, spinning around subjects like conspiracy theories and water on a lifeless planet expressed through a minimalists machine aesthetic. There’s some reference here to the early Electro and Techno pioneers like Jeff Mills and Model 500, but never extends to anything more than a respectful nod. Planet 4 is firmly installed in the present with tracks like “Dark Flow” and “Here and Now” featuring the kind of deep, House-leaning sound we’ve come to know from the Prime Number’s boss.

But on the whole it’s tracks like “The Unexplained” and “Our Future” that propel Trus’me into new uncharted territory, if not a completely new direction. It has perhaps something to do with where the album was recorded, the Analogue Cabin – a studio Jæger could find some affinity with, we’re sure – that made the British talent pursue that particular sonic aesthetic on the album, the machines appearing like they steer the course of the album as much as the artist behind the work. It’s something quite unique from this artist none the less and that’s why we’ve chosen it as our album of the week.

Listen back to Noir on Pils & Plater

Noir stepped into the mix for Pils & Plater over the weekend to foreshadow the upcoming event celebrating two years of the radio show. Noir put together a selection of tracks that showcased the ability that’s made him the international super power he is today. He’ll be bringing this to Jæger this Saturday for Nightflight vs. Pils & Plater.

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.”

Album of the Week: Hailu Mergia & the Walias Band – Tche Belew

What is it: Fushion Jazz from the East of Africa
Who would play it: Øyvind Morken | Herr R | Olefonken
When are you most likely to hear it: As dusk settles in and the DJ booth creaks open for the first time.

Our very own Yonatan Mulatu and Mnyichil Tekola Manaye share a national heritage with the artist behind our next album of the week, Hailu Mergia. The obscure Ethopian artist would’ve remained as such had it not been for the New-York based label, Awesome Tapes from Africa and their persistent pursuit of introducing new audiences to this esoteric style of music. Emerging from the same generation that gave us Fella Kuti and Francis Bebey, Hailu Mergia too fused elements of Jazz, funk and rock with his own traditions to create music that was as intriguing as it was entertaining. Like those artists from western Africa, who fuzed their music with elements from their own traditions, Hailu Mergia and others like him including Malatu Astatke, took the sounds of their region and transposed it to a modern popular format, for consumption in the western world. Ethiopia’s traditions being somewhat intertwined with Arabic traditions make this a unique style of music in itself with Hailu Mergia and the Walias often relying on archetypal Arabic melodic movements, the minor-second ascension or minor-seventh descend relaying some of the exoticism of the from those origins. 

The recording might show some of its age, with the over-saturated sound of the tape subverting some of the more expressive moments of the record,  but even with that Tche Belew is a timeless record, one that deserves to occupy the same echelon as Kuti, Bebey and Astatke. There are many other records in this artist’s discography, but Tche Belew is definitely the highlight, and a very good start from which to delve further into the music of Ethiopia.

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.

Listen to Josh Wink’s profound sounds

Shortly before announcing our Burn Residency featuring the legendary Josh Wink in the line-up, the DJ and producer broadcasted his latest edition of his recorded mix series, profound sounds. This second edition of profound sounds comes via a live set at Industria in Porto, Portugal, one of Mr. Wink’s “favourite countries to play and visit in the world.” Josh Wink ventures through various perspectives of House and Techno coming together under Josh Wink’s extensive experience and the palpable feel of the event. yYu can listen back to this set now.

Album of the week: Magnus International – Echo to Echo

What is it: Nu disco travelling back through time to nineties rave .
Who would play it: Øyvind Morken | Karima | Magnus International
When are you most likely to hear it: Anytime of the day.

Finding inspiration in the early nineties Techno of Aphex Twin and Claude Young, Magnus Interntaional’s debut LP features the kind of densely orchestrated synthetic textures of an early Carl Cox set, transported to the present through the effervescent Disco sound of Oslo and Full Pupp. Never a dull moment on the 11-track effort Echo to Echo brings together spacey synths, ratchety beats and popular forms in an album that can go from listening music to dance floor jams in the skip of a beat.

The gentle viking giant Magnus International is no stranger to the world of Disco where all these elements converge, and on this album, which was two years in the making, he shows the adept hand in the studio, that previously brought us tracks like “Das Magnus” and “Undulat”. He’s been touring the album vigorously of late with a special live performance and he is most certainly going to return to Jæger with Echo to Echo some time soon, while new music and remixes also can also be expected from the artist any time soon. You can read more about the album and Magnus’ influences, including wrestling and Arthur Russell in our interview with the artist earlier this year here.

Hestival – A day at the races comes to Jæger

Hestival 2016  combines horse racing and electronic music, to bring you one of the most unique experiences in your festival calendar this year. The brainchild of Christian Blomberg, Hestival launches in 2016 as something of a childhood passion for the Norwegian equine- and music enthusiast. “When I was younger, my father took me to the horse races in Oslo”, he tells me in an email about what started it all. “I was fascinated by the speed of these massive animals, but nothing about the rest of the setting appealed to me. It felt pretty posh and I wasn’t old enough to gamble nor drink. I forgot about horse racing for a while until I re-discovered it when I moved to Melbourne, Australia in 2009. The Melbourne Cup is the ‘race that stops a nation’: also called spring carnival; it brings together people of all ages for a month of celebrations, horse races and day partying. My friends and I sought out those events and it was a blast. A day long party, filled with gambling, booze and – of course – horses. I remember thinking that it was strange that we didn’t have anything like this in Scandinavia. While there are party days at the race tracks in Oslo, only families and old people would go to those. Going to the races’ feels like something distant and posh (think about Ascott in the UK) and people in their 20s and 30s would not attend.”

Enter Blomberg, with his experience of Melbourne and his youth at the races. “Thinking back to those awesome days at the Melbourne Cup, I remembered two things that I did not like: the food was awful and there was no music. Fixing those two things would make it the perfect day.” And today we have Hestival as a result, featuring an event featuring gambling, racing, booze, and for the first time ever music. Blomberg didn’t cut any corners on either front, and has drafted some of Oslo’s most revered musical talents for the event including Olefunken and local legend Lindstrøm. Jæger will be hosting the official after party  on Saturday, the 18th to conclude the event with Det Gode Selskab’s Solaris and Tod Louie taking care of our musical programming for the event. This one is not to be missed.

*  Go to www.hestival.com for more details and to get your tickets. Tickets are selling out fast. 

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.

Album of the week: Kobosil – We Grow, You Decline

What is it: Droning Techno echoing through the cavernous halls of Berghain.
Who would play it: O/E | Jokke
When are you most likely to hear it: Opening up the night or marking a shift towards calmer  waters.

Ostgut Ton’s favourite son, Kobosil made a fundamental statement on the label and the world of Techno with his debut LP last year, and it is very peculiar that it hadn’t found its way into our collection yet. We Grow You Decline, takes the  industrial sonorities of Techno, and displaces them to the darker corners of ambience and the early hours of a club night. The liquid sound-design Kobosil employs here is nothing new to the artist’s palette and although we’ve heard it on the b-side of a EP’s like RK1 it comes together quite concisely for the first time in this album format.

There are moments like “The Living Ritual” that allow for a more energetic interpretation of a German dance floor, but for the most part Kobosil’s debut is far more open for an introspective listening experience. He allows for more atmosphere in his tracks than ever before and the odd functional beat rarely makes an appearance, Kobosil preferring a sinister thin droning aesthetic over everything else for the most part. The atmosphere is hardly ever thick and distant reverbs and sparkling synth modulations keep the whole album grounded in something far more subtle than the industralised Techno of his peers, showing a kind of maturity in his music that far exceeds the young Kobosil’s years. This slots quite nicely next to Juan Atkins, Moritz von Oswald and Transllusion.

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 6th 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

Listen to the Prima Norsk 4 sampler

It’s highly unlikely you haven’t heard about Prima Norsk 4 by now. The mix series, which is back after a long hiatus, returns with a new format, a new ideology and an exciting new list of artists joining the impressive discography. After a very successful crowd funding campaign, the next edition in this fundamental Norwegian tradition finally sees the light of day this week, with the official Oslo launch of the compilation taking place at Jæger this Saturday during Nightflight. With that, the guys behind the release, i.e Beatservice, have given us the rare treat of sharing some of the music on this next edition of Prima Norsk in this sampler, available to stream right here. You can read more about Prima Norsk and some of the new ideas behind the new edition in an article at Jæger.

*It’s also been announced today that Syntax Erik will replace B.G Barregaard who is unable to attend the event.  

Listen back to Olanskii on Pils & Plater

Visions of our illustrious leader are fleeting, rare occasions. He’s either shrouded in a pink/blue haze in our basement or taking on the form of a blurry apparition in between two states of being as he darts form one meeting to the next in search of that next booking. Some have seen him haunt the booth at Panorama bar recently, while others swear on spotting him alongside Tony Humpries at the decks over the weekend. We can neither confirm nor deny those allegations, but we’ve been given proof of his very existence today when his guest appearance on Pils & Plater arrived in our inbox today. Olanskii stretches his DJ muscle in this rare recorded mix for the Oslo radio station and proves yet again what 20 years of experience in the booth amounts to as he searches for a more soulful encounter with House music. Evocative melodies, contrapuntal rhythms and ethereal sound palette’s are drenched in the warmer tones of s as Olanskii quashes musical taboos going from House to Disco, breaking the line of separation completely between these two genres. The mix is now available to stream and you can download it here.

Tilted – A Christian Tilt Q&A

Christian Tilt numbers as a part of something akin to a community in Norway that is spear-heading the new charge in Techno, one that’s been paved by Thomas Urv’s Ploink label and event series. Something of a trend running concurrently with a renewed interest in Techno internationally, Ploink has been forging a path towards the future of this music in the region with a community born out of isolation but coming together through equal spirits like Thomas Urv and Chritian Tilt. As much as they make up a new wave of Techno artists in the region, they are also its originators, with Ploink and Tilt established back in the late nineties, and conspiring over the course of sixteen years to become a formidable artistic force in the region, one that has paved the way for artists like +plattform and Nordentstam.

The creative output of Christian Tilt’s has worn many faces, from Nu-Disco provocateur to remixer, but it’s under his eponymous alias, Christian Tilt that the artist has made a most formidable mark to date. After two EPs and an appearance on Ploink’s recent 96-16 series of releases celebrating the 16th anniversary of the label, Tilt has managed to install his music within the scene as something that likes to live in the darker margins of the genre, where malicious sound-design, an energetic tempo, and sinister melodies converge on the dance floor. Like his peers, Tilt’s music is a foggy beat-orientated version of Techno, coming to life in the vast industrious space of a Berlin club, before moving onto Norway where icy synths and atmospheres swathe the functional sound in impressive brick wall sonic atmospheres that are unexplainably evocative and visceral at the same time.

It’s this sound that will be coming to Jæger on Friday with Ploink, and before Tilt takes the stage in our basement, we decided to call him up to talk about Ploink, his music, and the live show he’ll be bringing to Jæger.

How did you and Ploink cross paths initially? 

It is a long story, but the short version of it is: I’ve been friends with Thomas since the late nineties, doing parties and playing together. I’m struggling to remember, but I think it was 95, when Thomas and I started playing records together.

And your career started as a DJ?

I started playing Heavy Metal in a rock band.

And how did you get into electronic music?

My friend Mico introduced me to electronic music. The first time I went to a Techno party was before Ploink at the Huset in Bergen. I was out drinking, or something (laughs) and ended up at a party and got intrigued.

What was it about that that intrigued you? 

It was something totally different than what I was used to. I found it much more interesting than playing in a band. I started off with a couple of record players and collecting records.

When did you make the leap into production?

I started at the end of ’98. I moved to Denmark at the end of ’99 for a year and I bought my first synths and drum machines there.

What were those first tracks like that you made?

Some of them are very similar to what I’m making today. I listened to one I had made early on and it’s very similar to one I just made. (Laughs)

So you’ve had a very consistent creative output.

Yeah, that surprised me a little. Maybe I was trying to make that track again, you know.

I noticed that your music has a darker edge to it. 

I like to be landscape where things are a little confused and dark, but I’m also very fond of melodies. To put harmonics into a noisy landscape is quite satisfying.

Do you ever approach a Ploink release differently than anything else?

When I do stuff for Ploink it’s more on the darker side, than Techno. Usually when I play live, I play with a lot of melody. Lately I’ve actually been harder and darker than previously. But I do everything, you know. I make some nu-disco too.

Do you have any anecdotes that you care to remember from your previous experiences at Ploink?

There are so many… I’ve been blessed with doing a lot of interesting warm-up gigs for artists that have been headlining. That’s always fun to do.

And to round things off, what can we expect from your show on Friday?

 You can expect a very energetic and dark Techno set.

Album of the week: Gundelach – Gundelach

What is it: Sweet falsetto vocals over lush electronics
Who would play it: Olefunken | Herr R
When are you most likely to hear it: At the start of the evening, at the first touch of the light dimmer.

From the moment of inception “Spiders” sets the tone for an album with music that speaks to a visceral core within the listener. Gundelach’s self-tilted debut favours a sweet blend of sonorities where his falsetto vocal is given the space to gestate amongst icy electronics and the slow pulsing rhythm of a sweltering day. He finds a pop-informed sound in the more adventurous corners of electronic music and with Joel Ford’s (Ford and Lopatin) experienced hand at the production controls, Kai Gundelach finds a place where they can co-exist like they did for Autre Ne Vuet.

This music, which we know from past interviews exist out of impromptu jam sessions, carry the initial emotive extemporisations all the way through the studio where they are allowed to grow and refine to impart some of that feeling to the listener on the other end in a grandiose gesture. The music plays in a sombre aesthetic, but in Kai’s voice and the upbeat chord progressions of tracks like “Space Echo” we find a glimmer of light, like those first rays warming up the earth on a spring morning. It’s a short LP, but something stays with you long after the dry echoes and delay depart from the Gundelach’s sonic world.

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.”

Album Of the Week: Transllusion – The opening of the Cerebral gate

What is it: Techno from an originator.
Who would play it: Dj Nuhhh | Øyvind Morken
When are you most likely to hear it: When peak time is just around the corner.

When picking through James Stinson’s back catalogue, the most obvious choice for an album of the week would certainly be Drexiya, the project he and Gerlad Donald established way back in the 90’s as the uncomplicated, forward thinking sound of Techno of the era and a generation of inventive creative individuals. A fervent facilitator for the future of Techno, Stinson embodied completely what it was to be Techno through various aliases, which included some seminal moments in the genre like Abstract Thought, Shifted Phases and Underground Resistance. Always dedicated to the futuristic aesthetic of the genre, he never rested on his laurels and continuously pushed the boundaries of electronic music right up to his death in 2002. It was just before his untimely passing that he seemed to have hit an incredible stride in his artistry and in a very creatively fertile year, he set about producing seven albums, under various aliases for various labels, including Rephlex, Tresor and Kombination

Transllusion’s “The opening of the cerebral gate” was one these albums, which were all collectively known as the “seven storms”, and one of the first of the series to make it out into the world. “Transmission of the Life“ opens the LP and as we listen to it, the beeping synthesiser blends effortlessly into our modern world, with our social-media enabled telephone conversations and our talking fridges. Stinson had some eerie gift for predicting the future of music, and Transllusion is particularly evocative of present-day Techno, being partial to heavy atmospheres and dominating kicks, without losing touch of the esoteric melodic appeal of Stinson’s brand of Techno. The music on the LP bounds with melody, counterpointing the functionality of the rhythm sections with Stinson’s dark hew enveloping all as it’s always done. It is an album nonetheless and the tempo paces itself; the harmonies sections loiter; and the atmosphere is dense with melancholy.

This was not the high-octane disenfranchised youthful version of Stinson we got to know through Drexiya, but rather a more contemplative, reserved elder, and while, yes there might be a track like “Negative Flash” to get the pulse racing, a track like “Dimensional Glide” exists in the same universe, and hints at a calmer, restrained personality with legato keys and the slow meandering pulse of a House track. It would have been been interesting to see this personality unfold later through his career, but alas it was not to be. We will never know which direction Stinson would eventually be heading towards, but at least we still have the Seven Storms thundering away through recorded history, and thanks to Tresor reissuing Transllusion’s “The opening of the cerebral gate” we have our album of the week.

Karima – Skranglejazz mix

Karima gave those rascals at Skranglejazz a taste of Retro in a mix that harnesses the raw energy of uncompromising House. The “99% vinyl mix” is Karima at her finest, doing what she does best with a couple of decks, an incomparable musical knowledge and a bag full of attitude.

Album of the Week: André Bratten – Gode

What is it: Avant garde electronica from Norway.
Who would play it: Celius | Oskar Pask | Herr R
When are you most likely to hear it: To ease you into the start of an evening.

As part of our refurbishments, we’ve done away with the impersonal iPod going through generic playlists, and made more than enough room for a record player. We’re getting back to the intimacy of listening to music, through the very personal act of putting a needle on the record. But we’re not merely content with the records we have and want our record collection to evolve and grow with us and the music, and to do that we’ll be introducing an album of the week to add to our collection.  

To inaugurate the series we have André Bratten with his seminal sophomore LP, Gode. If Aphex Twin were to find himself in the tundra Gode is the record that would rock him into that blissful eternal sleep. Hiding behind the innocent title is an album of formidable force that can go from the beatific siren song of “Cascade of Events” to the ferocious determination of “Math Ilium ion” all finding their place in the meta narrative of the album and marking André Bratten’s next development as an artist.

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.

Listen to Øyvind Morken’s recorded set for Skranglejazz

One Thursday morning, when we were all very much still in la la land, dreaming about subduing the Untzdag hangover we most certainly asked for, Øyvind Morken was still awake. Harnessing the effects  of his weekly Wednesday residency at Jæger, he decided to stay at the decks, and record a set for the guys at Skranglejazz. Øyvind Morken flows tirelessly through the set, feeding off  syncopated rhythms, eighties drum machines, rubbery basslines and quirky synthesisers, touching on everything from Afro-Beat to Disco and Electro. Morken’s Strokes are always broad, incorporating everything from the artist’s immense tasteful palette. We don’t always get the opportunity to hear an Øyvind Morken set outside of the context of a dance floor, but on the rare occasion we do, like this one, it’s an extra special treat.

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..”

 

Olefonken debuts new video

Olefonkens new video is out and it looks amazing. It was produced by Andrea Ottmar and directed by Thea Hvidstendahl. The track Quaaludes is produced and Recorded by Olefonken and the vocals by ARY and can be pre-ordered here: http://snorkelrecords.com

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.”

Steve Bug

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 Chris

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 200th 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!

Bjørn Torske on getting Feil Knapp on Smalltown Supersound

Bjørn Torske has always been something of an otherworldly figure on the Norwegian dance scene. He thrives in the unorthodox, even when it comes to getting his music signed it seems. In this  video for the upcoming documentary on paperecordings’ Northern Disco Lights, Torske and Per Martinsen (Mental Overdrive) explain how they got the album, Feil Knapp signed to Smalltown Supersound. It’s an amusing anecdote from the rich history of Norway’s electronic dance music scene, one we’ll certainly be considering when Bjørn Torske headlines Bypåske med Skranglejazz this weekend.

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.

Hear Ivaylo’s March Lab Cleaning Jam

Bogota Records boss and Té Dans resident Ivaylo has hit the lab again for his monthly LCJ and has given us a peak at the mix for the blog. There’s an optimistic hint of spring in the air, with buoyant percussion and upbeat bass-lines the order of the day for this March edition of Ivaylo’s mix series, which never fails in lightening the mood. The mix looks forward with Ivaylo’s signature take on the deeper end of dance music and there is a palpable optimism in the mix, one that could even signal some of the great stuff to come from Ivaylo and Bogota records in the very near future. Watch this space is all we can say…

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.

Hear Vinny Villbass’ newest track

Following on the success of last year’s Zip Zap, Vinny Vilbass joins us in 2016 with a new single on Eskimo. The Itch is one of many new releases the Norwegian producer and DJ has lined-up for this year, and features Vinny Villbass doing what he does best. Animated melodies and an infectious pulse come to the fore, with Villbass’ slick production hand baring his signature like a rubber stamp. There’s a hint of the origins of Techno in the Itch through that lead hook, while a House beat and a syncopated bass-line give the track that unmistakeable Norwegian feel. Two remixes, from Whatever/Whatever and Alejandro Mosso, tie up the release only emphasising the appeal of the original. The entire release is streaming today via Soundcloud and you can get your copy here today.

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 RadioShe’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:

Hear Ivaylo’s latest Lab Cleaning Jam

Having barely arrived back from touring his native land,  Ivaylo went straight to his lab to cook a little something up for the weekend. This edition of lab cleaning Jams finds the DJ favouring the darker corners of Techno with Ivaylo’s signature search for the deepness tying the mix together. Not one to be pinned down in the darker side however, Ivaylo also finds more of an uplifting mood in some Disco and House that takes us through to the end of the mix. Look out for some of these tracks cropping up in his Té Dans set today.

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 25th 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 a mix by Karima

Retro resident Karima visited the folks over at Recens Paper to lay down a mix for the magazine, and she goes in with all the ferocity we’ve come to expect from her on any given Thursday night. She doesn’t hold back, stepping into the mix with a heavy House beat from Mr. G and keeping the energy of the mix high for the next 30 minutes. Karima loves the rawer edge of House and it really shines through in this mix through the track that closes out the short, but purposeful  mix.

 

Hear Luca Lozano and Telephones go back to back on Four the Freqs

This mix with Luca Lozano and Telephones brings the past and the future together into the present for Jæger. With Luca Lozano’s set from Christmas still fresh in our memory and Telephones joining Øyvind Morken for his first Untzdag back this week, it’s like the two timelines have crossed each other’s path to bring us this very special mix. Telephones joins Luca Lozano from his Berlin Community Radio slot, For the Freq’s with the two personalities egging the other on, digging deeper and deeper through the underworld of dance music. They laid down a set that goes from soulful Jazz to quirky Greek synth-pop, in the space of 30 minutes, before moving on through the annals of disco, house and acid, each DJ laying emphasis on the eclectic and the rare throughout their set. If ever there was a set that could explain what a Wednesday sounds like at Jæger, this one comes pretty close to setting the mood for the early part of the evening.

Hear Prins Thomas’ Principe Del Norte

Billed as on ode to late-90’s ambient music, Prins Thomas’ fourth album, Principe Del Norte sees the Norwegian producer avoiding the percussive beat in favour of creating cosmically cinematic environments. Streaming now via NPR the album is built around swirling textures through synthesised counterpoint, forged in the icy layers of synthesisers and spacey reverbs of distant delays that chime in the the repetitive nature of minimalism. It’s Prins Thomas like you’ve never heard him before, but yet there’s something intrinsically familiar to the music, that draws a direct correlation to his first releases alongside Lindstrøm. It’s quite an album on first listen and Thomas and Smalltown Supersound, have been kind enough to give us a sneak peak at it before it hits the shelves on the 19th of February. Look out for a future feature with the artist here… that is if we get our way.

Stream Rave-Enka’s Rett i Kroppen (Track by Track)

rett-i-kroppeRave-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.

Listen back to Rolando on Tweak FM

Retro’s first booking of the year is the mighty Dave Clark, and it arrives with the memory of their last monumental booking still ringing in our ears. It wasn’t that long ago when Rolando paid us a visit us in our basement to bring a little of Detroit to Oslo through his uncompromising Techno set. In this latest podcast for Tweak FM, he captures a little something of that magic he left behind in Oslo, and for those that feel his set at Jæger is now a distant memory, this podcast should bring back some fond memories. There is talk of the Detroit legend returning to Jæger in the future, but until then we’ve got this podcast, and another Techno stalwart in the way of Dave Clarke coming our way very soon.

Stream a set from Norwegian Girls

Karima (Retro) and Tobias Sørensen teamed up as Norwegian Girls for a recent set at Bergen’s Landmark and they’ve been so kind to record the results. The House-focussed set features some acid, break beats and can often be found loitering around the deeper end of the genre.  This mix does o well to get us through the middle of the week and all that bit closer to the weekend. Karima will be back at Jæger for our DJ Marathon and the official reopening of our newly refurbished venue.

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.

Stream a Pils & Plater compilation of mixes

Pils & Plater, broadcast from Radio Nova every Saturday has been kind enough to put together a playlist of their recent shows ahead of this weekend. The weekly radio show, which is compiled by Tina Marie Borgholt and mixed by Jose Espeland, curates the very best in electronic dance music each week for their hourly broadcast out of Oslo. Often featuring guests like Nils Noa, Daniel Vaz and Olle Abstract, the show also highlights the best in local DJs with a focus on the hedonism of club music and the feel of a night through a broadcast radio show. They will be bringing that show to Jæger in the spring to celebrate their 2nd anniversary and while we look forward to that event we have this compilation of mixes to carry us into the weekend. You can also stream some of the past guest mixes on Pils & Plater’s soundcloud page and find some of the tracks from these mixes on this handy Spotify Playlist. Pils & Plater runs every Saturday at 20:00 on Radio Nova dab or spiller.radionova.no, with weekly guest mixes from 21:00.

 

Magnus International previews new album Echo to Echo

We’ve been very excited about Magnus International’s debut LP for quite some time now, and although we’ve been given a sneak peak of the album, it’s still a very rare treat to hear news breaking around the release. Echo to Echo is set for release on the 12th of February and Full Pupp and Magnus International have given us another sneak peak at the album in the form of this album teaser. We wait on tentative hooks for it’s eventual release date…

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.

Hear Kobosil’s debut LP via Ostgut Ton

Although Kobosil at Jæger is but a distant memory form 2015, we are still enamoured by young producer’s work, especially since the release of his EP 91, the first release for Berghain’s Ostgut Ton. It seems that he’s succeeded that release with his debut LP for the very same label and Ostgut Ton are streaming it two days before it’s release… and the physical copies have just sold out. It must be good.

February / March line-up

samleplakat_feb-mars_3

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.

Stream Etapp Kyle’s Boiler Room set

Ahh, it’s like being transported back to December in our basement, where Etapp Kyle opened up the Ostgut Ton’s Zehn. Boiler room have made Etapp Kyle’s set from November available for streaming today, and for those that were there in December, we’re sure you’ll recognise one or two tracks from his set at Jæger. Etapp Kyle is a little less hesitant in this Boiler Room appearance, introducing a defined beat a lot earlier in this shorter Boiler Room set, but it carries much of the same feeling from his set at Jæger. The young Ukrainian DJ also sneaks in a track from his amazing Klockworks release from last year. It’s worth a listen so sit back, turn it up and relive the experience with us.

Bjørn Torske live on a mountain

As part of a documentary on the rise of Norwegian dance music called Northern Disco Lights, Bjørn Torske is deposited on top of Tromsø’s Storsteinen to play an impromptu live set. We are only really offered a glimpse of the live gig, but they couldn’t have chosen a more scenic venue for a live gig. “Northern Disco Lights – The Rise and Rise of Norwegian Dance Music” is set for release at the end of the year, and is the work of the guys behind Paper Recordings, whose had a long standing relationship with Norwegian Dance music since the nineties, and are probably in the best position to tell the story to the outside world.

Last year they interviewed Tom Trago at Jæger for this very same documentary and you can still watch that clip over on Vimeo. You can find out more about the documentary here

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.

It’s time we talk about drugs – A summary of Resident Advisor’s “Drug Policies and Electronic music culture”

While our construction / bar crew are hard at work gutting the inside of Jæger as part of our renovations, those of us less adept at manual labour – exclusively me (It took me an hour to remove one hand dryer attached to a wall with two screws) – have taken the time to catch up on some reading. Resident Advisor’s longer reads in particular and while they’re not always convenient to read they are almost always insightful, but something about they’re latest article needs to be heard by as many people involved or participating in clubbing culture as possible. So I’ve taken to summarising the piece for those of you who don’t have the time to indulge in the extended piece, because it’s time we really start talking about drugs and it’s role in clubbing culture like adults.

Drugs have been synonymous with clubbing culture since time immemorial. Whether it was psych rock and LSD in the 1960’s; speed and the punk scene, Heroin and Jazz in the 1950’s; Ecstasy and Rave culture; or even the rise of cocaine in Oslo’s clubbing landscape recently, drugs have always been a part of clubbing culture and it would be incredibly obtuse to ignore that fact. And with club culture completely entangled in electronic music today the two are almost one in the same. This is not to suggest that Jæger condones the use of drugs (hell, we don’t even allow energy drinks), but like Sacha Lord-Marchionne from The Warehouse Project says in the article; “We would be morons to think that, no matter what measures we put in place, people aren’t going to get drugs into the venue.” Luis-Manuel Garcia approaches the issue of Drug Policies and Electronic music culture in this article by looking at what is the most effective policy on drugs in the UK at this moment, which is WHP and the way they operate within the law to give the punters that might indulge in drugs the safest way to do that, distributing information about harmful substances they might come in contact with by allowing experts to test any confiscated drugs. This is called a “harm reduction” strategy in the article and it seems that the most effective way of combating drug abuse is still that model of a weary hippy standing on rickety stage, telling the audience at the first Woodstock that the brown acid is a bad trip. Because drug policies are still too constricting to let researchers and scientists do their job and find affective measures to have some sort of quality control over the drugs we injest. Drug policies it appears occupy a scale from eradication-focussed zero tolerance policies to Harm Reduction. “Harm-reduction policies tend to be less pathologising, seeing drug users as normal, everyday people, most of whom partake in drugs in culturally-specific settings that only rarely lead to harm.” Think of the “needle rooms” in Norway in the context of a recreational drug like MDMA or Ketamin. This article focuses mostly on the USA and it’s draconian war on drugs, which resulted in the Rave Act of 2003, “which extended laws intended for ‘crack houses’ to make the organisers of raves and other dance music events legally responsible for drug use on their premises.” And it Garcia poses the question “are you willing to increase the risk to drug users in order to drive drugs underground?”

In the article Garcia speaks to people like Stephanie Jones and organisations like Dance Safe to make a case for reforming drug policies and especially introducing harm reductions policies in venues, organisations and festivals. It seems that the current drug policies not only stop organisers, venues and festivals from implementing measures to educate their audiences about drugs, but also encumber researchers like Dr. Doris Payer from studying the effects of recreational drugs and how to prevent harm to users. Because with all that we know today, there is reason to suggest that drugs can be safe in a controlled environments with small quantaties and no more harmful than alcohol or cigarettes. Garcia suggests there is a cultural stigma around drugs as dictated by these current policies and that “(t)here may have been times when we have failed to look after ourselves and each other because of deep-seated, culturally-ingrained morals about pleasure and propriety.” It’s in essence a kind of hypocrisy where even those who indulge in drugs, safely and without real harm, tend to associate the activity as akin to the gangsters shooting each other over the right of a distribution area. It encouraged me to believe once again to fight drugs on a universal level rather than a national level and the article makes several references to the Netherlands and Portugal’s stance, where it’s still illegal, but the police’s resources are focussed more on preventing the organised crime that naturally evolves around supplying something illegal – like bootlegging during prohibition.

Garcia doesn’t broaden his approach on a universal scope like this, but rather focuses his attention on something that’s far more realistic for this time and place, and returns to harm reduction policies and the best solution for making sure those that do take drugs don’t come to harm, because of unknown and harmful contaminate substances. It appears that it’s something we’ve been doing for as long as we’ve been taking drugs at clubs, developing something of buddy system when we do indulge. “Ravers are remarkably resourceful when it comes to managing drug safety under clandestine conditions,” says the article. It appears with prohibitive drug policies enforced by heavy handed security with adverse affects to the drug user, we form a tight knit community, where we look out for one another through a network system, a sort of ground roots Harm Reduction strategy if you will. The article goes on to say this can have disastrous consequences, but fails to mention how, and suggests that it’s only through tightly managed systems like on-sight testing that these systems have a controlled effect. For the moment places like WHP can only really test the drugs that are confiscated, and post a notice to warm of any harmful effects. But the most effective harm reduction strategy would actually be onsite testing for potential drug users and for the most part this is still illegal, since anybody handling the substances could be prosecuted for possession, and that’s the case for Norway too – even though punishment for possession is fairly light with 6 months the longest jail sentence for small quantities.

This is why Garcia says it’s important to educate and familiarise ourselves with drug policies, because they in turn have a fundamental affect on clubbing culture and the dance floor. It can save a person from intoxication and death if reformed and even if you don’t use drugs, it can still impact those around you if you are a part of club culture. You can read the full article here if you feel compelled to dig deeper and would urge you to do just that.

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.

New Norwegian Sounds by Olle Abstract

While most of us are still sleeping off our hangovers – this writer included – Olle Abstract has picked through new Norwegian music, and assembled some of the hottest new tunes coming your way in the very near future. It features a track from Øyvind Morken’s next release on Full Pupp, as well as Magnus International’s debut album on the same label. Both releases will make a big impression on the year, with Magnus’ debut album already turning a few heads way before it’s February release date. André Bratten’s hauntingly magnificent Cascade also makes and appearance here, and it comes a few weeks after his spectacular sophomore release ‘Gode’. There’s also a cut from the first Full Pupp split from Blackbelt Andersen and we definitely get the sense that there’s a theme to this selection, but new excellent tracks from Finnebassen and Niilas suggest this is not the Full Pupp special we think it is.

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 21st 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 theres 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.

 

Amateur Nerds: Talking to Thomas URV about Ploink

Thomas Paulsen, better known by his URV patronymic, is making his way down a mountain somewhere in Volda when I call him up. “You’d laugh if you’d see how steep it is”, he says. I offer to call him back, the fear of a horrific fall looming as he pants down the receiver, but Thomas insists we continue while he climbs down a rope. A short while after our conversation, a photograph of Thomas pops up on my phone with the mountainside in the background. The Norwegian DJ and label owner is sporting an outlandish grin in a T-shirt with the name of his label Ploink emblazoned on the front.

Before Ploink, Thomas’ early career as a promoter has its roots in rave events “around the mountainside of Bergen and Voss.” Thomas remembers, “carrying speakers one by one up a mountain or into the woods”, the challenge of the terrain the least of their concern as a non-existent budget and the fear of their equipment being confiscated by the police were always looming in the background. “We were only seventeen years old so we weren’t allowed to do anything in clubs with a license.” They took the mountains, halls, warehouses, woods and some of the islands around Bergen like the “hippies and punks” that established Techno in the region before them. Those first events were promoted under the name VTOL towards the end on 1993, inspired by the likes of Uforia and Zone in Oslo and Logic in Bergen, Thomas and his partner Jørn brought Techno to a new Norwegian audience, often through illegal parties, where the chance of “losing money or equipment” was all too realistic.

ploink

As the pair grew old enough to take their music to the licensed venues, Thomas and Jørn descended down the mountain with all their gear and would go on to establish what would eventually be known as Ploink around 1996. “We went through a few names before we settled on Ploink, and we trace the history of the club back to 1996, if for nothing else, than to be able to celebrate 20 years next year. ” It was during that phase that they started looking abroad, bringing artists like James Ruskin, Richie Hawtin and Surgeon to Norway – calling in the new millennium with the aggressive sound of Techno ringing through the peaceful mountain landscape. It’s quite an impressive list of artists, but Thomas is quick to dismiss the importance of the headliner suggesting, “anybody can book artists” if faced with the same situation. “In the beginning I did it just to get some playtime for myself.” It was a natural and typical progression of events for Thomas, one that’s old as time itself: “A DJ that can’t get any gigs starts promoting his own events.“

One of the first acts Ploink would bring to Norway would be DJ Hell, and while Thomas might be somewhat dismissive of the importance of the bookings for the events, bringing a DJ like Hell – a relatively underground personality – to your debut takes a lot of nerve and a lot of faith in what you are doing. The risks paid off and Ploink soon grew to unimaginable magnitudes, perhaps a little too fast for its young impresario, Thomas. “It grew way too quickly and I messed up with my economy.” As a result Thomas has some ambivalent feelings about those early events. “There’s a lot I would’ve done differently.”

The events went on regardless, and the impressive lists of artists visiting Ploink grew to feature the legends like Jeff Mills, Derrick May and Mathew Jonson, to name but a few. “For a long time it was just about getting people over and setting up the parties.” It came during a time that would see Bergen become the epicentre of much of electronic music in Norway, with the likes Bjørn Torske moving to the city, creating a close-knit scene of electronic musicians and aficionados. “It’s very easy to bump into people here that are into music.” It was an innocent time where email and the Internet meant the personal connection was essential in getting Norwegian Techno abroad. Similar to the metal or punk scene – who managed to reach out to an international audiences and labels through distributing demo tapes directly between fans and artists around the same time – the Norwegian Techno scene would find a way out through mixtapes “creating a strong foundation for the underground scene” and spreading their sound further. It’s in this landscape that Ploink came into prominence, and when Thomas reminisces on those early days there’s something irrevocably different from the scene today. He misses some of the personal touch of direct contact and looks back fondly on moments like booking DJ hell and Acid Scout via fax. ”I typed out the offers on the PC at the Bergen library and ran back to our office at record store, Primitive Records to send the fax to Disko B in Germany. I had to run back and forth like this to write replies and send them before the library would close.”

This experience comes from within a healthy era for Norwegian Techno, one in which the “arctic label” it received from over-zealous journalists did well in promoting the sound of artists like Biosphere and Mental Overdrive abroad and establishing a distinctly Norwegian sound for the genre, one that would often prompt adjectives like glacial and icy when describing the atmospheric and densely layered music. “Small shops like music Maestro in Oslo, Primitive records in Bergen or Geir Jensens Biophon from Tromsø was also integral in setting up the foundation of the Norwegian scene.“ With these various influences conspiring, Norwegian Techno had always had a unique standing in the world of electronic music and in Bergen especially, where a lot of these artists were based, it took on cultish admiration from the locals with Ploink taking on hallowed proportions for many music fans. “In Bergen, there are a lot of people that even feel that Ploink belongs to them.” Successful as it might have been however it took a toll on expenses and the excessive costs of the event series eventually ran the company into the ground, taking Thomas’ personal economy along with it. I get the sense that Thomas is reluctant to talk about this stage of Ploink and I veer from the topic to arrive at Ploink today, in which the name has taken on the connotations of a record label, a label that operates with the same incentive of those original innovators from Norway.

“Our main objective is to get Norwegian Techno out of the country.” Vakum’s Knot EP is the eighth release form the burgeoning label, and came out a few days before Thomas made the ascent up the mountain, marking just over a year of the label. The label’s history stretches much further back than a year though, and it starts with two friends, two friends that bonded over a love for music on top of a mountain, where else? “The whole school was on a mountain trip. I could hear this girl from another class talk about The Prodigy and I ran up to her saying – did you say, Techno?” Thomas laughs as he shares this anecdote of the significant meeting between him and Elisabeth Nesheim (Miss Mostly). They’ve “been like siblings” ever since, that epochal moment they bonded over music on top of mountain, both carving out impressive career as DJs from there. “She’s an amazing DJ. She’s quite fierce, quite hard.” Their shared vision of a label had been years in the making, and in the spring of 2014 everything conspired and the time was right to launch Ploink, the label, with an EP dedicated to the very town that they owe their whole existence to, Bergen. The Bergen EP, which featured Vakum, Nordenstam, Christian tilt and Thomas on production duties was an ode to their hometown and its mountains, with the inaugural EP’s cover adorned with “a picture of the town from one of the mountains”. It sold 150 copies in Bergen alone, with the same fans that coveted the events, now laying claim to their label.

But it’s never really been about the sales for Thomas or Elisabeth, who both have independent professional lives, but rather more about the passion for the music and the people that make it. “The whole project is doing what we want to do, releasing the music that we want to release, and stay 100% independent.” They’ve reached nearly 40 producers already in their search for music to release, “forty producers from Norway that make the kind of Techno we want to release!” Thomas sounds incredibly excited when he relays this fact to me, and his boyish enthusiasm is infectious. “There’s so many good producers stuck in their bedroom making track after track. There’s just so much music out there.” So far there’s been eight releases with the label giving out six a year, but each one has been Techno of the highest standard, bringing that Norwegian tradition to a new generation of music fans. Thomas paints a fairly broad brush when he talks about Techno, but through every release of the label you’ll find something that is unique to the genre, something I can’t quite put my finger on, but its there and it probably has much to do with the fact that Thomas and Elisabeth are “musically set” in what they want to achieve with the label, even if they are self-proclaimed “amateur nerds”. “We’ve only been doing this for one year and we are learning as we go.“

Much of the distinction lies with their artwork, which is striking and immediately pops out at you from a record box. It has been heavily influenced by Thomas’ early teens, when as an aspiring DJ, Thomas found the most impact from KLF’s imagery with their hidden codes and mythology. “It’s been a huge influence on how Elisabeth and I work today. We put in a lot of nerdy codes that only we know how to solve and if you look closer, you’ll find at least one KLF reference on each release.” More than anything the visual element of the label is also “playtime” for Thomas and Elisabeth, and they take pride in the way they represent their artists for a bigger audience abroad. “It needs to be something that we think is beautiful in its own way and try and surprise people. Elisabeth and I call it art, but it’s also about packaging a product we want to sell and that can help to advance the artists’ careers.” There seems to be a selfless ideology behind Ploink, an ideology that gives each and every artist complete freedom in expression.

A couple of days after my telephone call with Thomas, I meet up with Robin Crafoord, one half of Trulz and Robin, whose KSMISK alias will adorn the next Ploink release. He plays me the two Techno tracks that make up the two sides of the release, two meditative Techno tracks that take on epic proportions through their excessive proportions. It left Thomas literally speechless when he tried to describe it to me over the phone and in their presence its obvious why. Once again there is something instinctively Norwegian about them in the way they open up through the immersive layers instead of taking the oppressive dimensions of their European counterparts, while maintaining some of that sinister appeal that should be inherent in Techno. It’s something that you find across all the releases from Kahuun to Vakum and it’s something they try and bring across with each showcase that follows a release. It’s the only time Ploink assumes its role as a promoter today, and the emphasis has turned to focussing solely on Norwegian artists in this regard. “What we do now is we do the releases and we do the release parties for the releases.”

Thomas has to ask a man for directions as we reach the end of our time together. I ask if he’s still going the right way. “I’m going the right way and as he put it, I can go anywhere from here. All roads lead to Volda apparently.” Thomas carries on, telling me more about the future releases, including three releases with 12 artists during the beginning of 2016 to celebrate twenty years of Ploink. They’ve had some luck with their vinyl pressing plant and being with them before the vinyl hype, means they are not as frequently affected by incredible delays, like much of the rest of the industry. Thomas is also not discounting a future international act signing to the label. “I’m sure we will at some point” but for him the focus will always be on getting “Norwegian Techno out of the country.” Ploink might have come along way from their origins hosting illegal parties on top of a mountain, but in some ways that element is something they’ve continually carried through with them all a long. Thomas might finally be down the mountain, but Ploink has only reached its crest and who knows where the label will take them next.

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…

Music is my life – Live with Nils Noa

Nils Noa always has a smile on his face. It’s a smile I hear reflected in his bouncy club constructions, a smile that hides a set of fervent teeth, ready to cut into the dance floor at a moments notice. There’s very little that can be said about Nils Noa’s talent as a producer or DJ that hasn’t been observed before. He’s a musical chameleon in the way he can adapt to sounds, genres and trends as a musician and as a selector. He’s featured on some of the hottest tickets in Oslo, and further abroad, and still holds the accolade of the youngest DJ ever to feature on Pete Tong’s essential mix for the BBC. With credentials like that, Noa has achieved in music what most artists only achieve in a lifetime, leaving very little left for the artist to explore in the world of music, but this is Nils Noa we are talking about. Behind the glossy veneer of that smile hides a prolific talent, a talent that can’t be subdued into submission, a talent that needs to be set free to venture into new territories all the time. This continued commitment to the music has brought Nils Noa to the stage in the role of the performer as he develops a live show around his original music. He’s bringing the show to Jæger this weekend in the hope of warming up our new basement sound system in preparation for the winter cold. We’re naturally intrigued and popped a few questions over to Nils via email in the hope that he could give us an insight into this new direction.

Hey Nils. I see from your email you work for Sony Music. What do you do there?

I have worked here as a product manager since January, with the focus on electronic music. But now I am going over to A&R. I’m really looking forward to it.

How do you separate the job from your music?

Well the music I play as a DJ, and most of what I make is more niche, but I do sometimes make some more poppy stuff. So its not that different after all, I guess. Music is my life and they’re just different settings.

We don’t often get to see you play live. What should we expect?

On Friday I will play some upcoming stuff plus my latest tracks and remixes. It will be very inspired by the way I DJ, but with a few synths and a drum machine. I will try to make the best out of what I have.

Why have you adopted the live format for this particular show?

I want to focus more on my own music now, and try to play more of it out. This format is more fun in that regard, even if I don’t have the best of skills yet, but you need to start somewhere, right?

Right. How would it compare to your DJ sets for the audience?

Its quite the same I guess but I am able to do more stuff on the fly, add more sounds, tweaking them more than in a DJ-set, and I’ll try to play some keys. On the other hand there is a lot that is pre-programmed and arranged, so it’s hard to change things like in a Dj-set if things aren’t working. So fingers crossed…

Is there any particular song you are looking forward to playing out through Jæger’s new system?

Yes. A new song I’ve never played out before, and it doesn’t even have a name yet. Looks like it will be the last song in the set list. It’s a bit different from what I have released in the last year. Not so tracky and loopy, but more things going on. Not sure of it will work in a club setting, but I have a good feeling about this one.

While we are on the subject of new music, we’ve heard Less is More from Olle Abstract’s last Lyd session. Can you tell us a little more about the release?

It’s a straight up club release, made to work in my DJ-sets. The release also includes the track Sometimes Slow Is Good. Both tracks are based mostly on the Moog Minitaur and the Roland 909. I’m just trying to make the best out of both, and not fuck around with too many other synths.

While we are on the subject of synths, that hollow bass on Less is More sounds incredible. Was there any particular thing that inspired it?

Not really, but I wanted to make a club track that sounded (ph)at on a big sound system. Its 3 different basses and deep organ sounds playing together. I actually muted more channels than I intended. I was afraid to would sound to stripped, but it kind of worked like that.

What’s responsible for making that sound and will it be coming with you to Jæger on tonight?

It’s the amazing Minitaur from Moog, a small, but powerful synth I’m really into these days, and yes, it will be there tonight for sure.

I have one last question. If you could cover any other artists song in your live set what would that song be?

Good question.  Let me think…
Anything depeche mode.

 

“Isn’t all music equal” – Interview with Rave-Enka

In August Ravi Brunsvik (De Fantastiske To) debuted his live show as Rave Enka for The Formant’s 55. The event showcased Ravi’s unmatched talent for music in the language of machines. Rave-Enka manipulates the dark trinity into infectious dance constructions with a foundation in his prominent musical education. He’ll be bringing this ability to Jæger’s stage this weekend, but before that happens, let’s have a look what’s behind this intriguing enigma of an artist.  This interview was first posted on the 12th of August and re-blogged from The Formant.

The first time I met Ravi Brunsvik  he laid down a challenge: “Can you write a review without using the letter ‘e’.” Quite an impossible task considering that in just two sentences I’ve used the letter eighteen times, but I keep it in the back of my mind when I sit down with the artist for a chat, hoping for some of that light-hearted banter to make it’s way into the interview. I find my wish comes true when Ravi opts for a liquid lunch and two beers are dispatched as we start talking about Rave-Enka, his new solo project.

There’s an innocent sense of humour behind everything Ravi approaches. His open personality and perpetual grin suggests there’s a joke or a pun always just around the corner, and it’s only natural that it should find its way into the moniker he picks for himself. “It’s a really stupid pun on an old folktale, the fox’s widow.” Brought to life during a ‘vorspiel’ (Norwegian for pre-party), Rave-Enka has obvious connotations with the artist’s given name, but more than that, it relays the inherent playful intent behind the artist and his new solo project. “I stuck with the name, because it doesn’t take itself too seriously and that’s kind of the foundation of the project – having fun with dance music.” Having fun with dance music is not an alien concept to Ravi and he’s had the most success from this point of view with the duo, De Fantastiske To.” We have a lot of fun too.” Ravi‘s creative outlet doesn’t feature an off switch however and when Marius Sommerfeldt is not available, the Oslo native makes busy work from idle hands, turning to his solo projects, the latest of which has taken the form of Rave-Enka precisely. “Most of the Rave-Enka stuff started with Marius being occupied with work and me not having to do anything during the day, except make music.”The hardware focussed project sees the producer have an opportunity to indulge a more of the experimental side of his personality, making music while getting to know some new pieces of equipment in his home studio.“I’m trying to figure out how to manipulate them and use it to make new sounds and soundscapes.

Two sides of his musical personality suddenly reveal itself, as a serious intent lurks behind the entertaining cloak, a wizard of Oz of sorts manipulating the jokes and the puns from his impressively industrial console. These two elements first came together on Rave-Enka’s debut EP Påfulgen, with a sound that drew on diverse influences through a personal concept, executed for the dance floor. “The concept was to make tracks that represented really great experiences I’ve had, playing in clubs. There was one that for me represents the eighties electro movement and there’s one that’s more geared towards acid house, while another is disco not taking itself too seriously.“ Hiding behind the humour again we find a serious intent behind the title track, drawing on Ravi’s adventurous aptitude as he forced a drum machine through a vocoder, an idea initially inspired by Herbie Hancock’s Rockit. “The vocoder can only play monophonic playback so it glitches out. I had a really fun time with that one.“ Fun derived from a serious experimental investment, which doesn’t necessarily come across in the catchy executions that they deliver. He’s turned all his focus away from the computer screen for this particular project and moved towards a series of machines, referred to as the dark trinity. Ravi carries the manuals with him on his phone at all times, immersed in the technology as he explores the boundaries of the machine and man in the context of electronic music. “Hopefully I’m using them in my own way but they also have their limitations and that’s influencing me too. It’s probably a give and take.”

Whether it’s as Rave-Enka or with De Fantastiske To, Ravi manages to infect the machine music with a distinct human personality and it’s something that stems from Ravi’s early musical development behind the piano. “It’s a great compositional tool. That’s where all my musical ideas come from and develop.” Playing the piano from a young age has certainly made a big impression on Ravi and I can hear his skill come through on a song like Folk og Ferie, the latest track to billow it’s way into the charts from De Fantastiske To. His skill has its roots in early Jazz influences handed down to him by his father and informed by an artist like Horris Silver. “He grooves, that’s what I like.” Influences like those are transported through to the machine age where Ravi launches into a groove from different starting points, through a drum machine, synthesiser and sampler, where his work as Rave-Enka has manifested its roots. “It’s more about the boxes these days.” He finds that he has to strip things down as Ravi the musician goes off on a tangent, but all of it comes down to energy, the energy that naturally occurs in club music and that’s the crux of what Rave-Enka is trying to be: “Something that gets me riled up in what I’m doing. It’s more of an emotional thing than the conceptual thing.“ In between discovering new technology and indulging his instincts as a musician, Ravi manages to find a balance that’s efficiently creative, and incredible accessible, all thanks to the cheery disposition he has at the heart of everything he approaches.

Two more beers come our way and after we both indulge our inner geek with the intricate features of his machines, I find Ravi the DJ is just as much a part of his personality as the artist. At fourteen he played his first gig for a soda and it’s something that has been a constant in his life ever since, as he often accommodates the DJ side of his personality when creative inspiration is distant. “For me they uphold the balance that makes me enjoy music.” The two even found a mutual outlet in the form of Armand Fra Halden, a dormant edit project. Ravi is an exceptionally efficient artist if anything and often mentions a new project during our talk. “I once had an idea where all the tracks would represent different illnesses. The whole idea was that I would have that particular illness while I was making the track.” That particular idea never left the conceptual realm, with the type investment required from the artist having some striking similarities to an idea like writing a review without the letter “e”.

It’s all in the spirit of fun for Ravi and it’s something he brought across in his debut live show not too long ago, and hopes to re-create here for Jæger. There’s also a new EP that’s waiting for a record label to expose it to the world. “Most of it comes from acid house. I draw a lot of inspiration from what I perceive as the movement from that time.” Rave-Enka is not by any means a project that should deflect Ravi’s attention away from the success that is De Fantastiske To and “as long as there’s a home for it to exist in the world” he’ll pursue it. It’s just another outlet for Ravi to express himself, and he hopes that it keeps the element of fun at its core as he delves deeper into his machines. ”It’s pretty open-ended. Isn’t all music equal or something?”

*Rave-Enka will be one of the acts driving Jæger’s new sound system in as we move in for the winter.

 

“Don’t call it electroclash : Q&A with Ivan Smagghe”.

It’s an onerous task, summing up Ivan Smagghe’s career in the space of an introduction. The DJ/producer’s career spans the breadth of electronic music history over three decades and it’s not by sheer luck he’s in that position. He’s amassed a cult following in all his musical endeavours. From Black Strobe and Kill the DJ to his infamously evocative DJ sets, Ivan Smagghe has something of a Midas touch when it comes to music. His ear for music is astounding and he completely embodies the idea of the eclectic DJ, while his penchant for esoteric digging always ensures a surprise is never too far off in his sets.

With all that in mind, where does a biographer even begin to tell the story? Smagghe today is just as relevant as Smagghe in Black Strobe, but neither could exist if it wasn’t for Smagghe in Paris, slaving away at Rough Trade to pay off his growing debt to the record store. Actually that’s a good place to start, not Rough Trade, but the records. Ivan once lost 25 000 odd records when his storage unit went up in flames in 1999. The Parisian had been a music collector long before he’d been a DJ, an aspect of his musical personality that was handed down to him by his parents. You can still catch him playing Jaenette’s Porqué te Vas, a favourite from his youth, passed on to him by his mother. It was as a result of his collection that he started DJing when friends persuaded the latent DJ to share some of his music and something seemed to click with Ivan as his eclectic musical tastes fused disparate musical styles into singular musical narratives, all tied together with Ivan’s unique ear for music. A set could go from anything 80’s synth pop to acid house at his regular Kill the DJ events. It’s a style of mixing records that would soon become known as electroclash, a style of mixing most DJs base their sets on today, even though many of them don’t know it.

It was within this scene, Smagghe first rose to prominence as a DJ, but it was also that temperament, which would lay the foundation for Black Strobe. Alongside Arnaud Rebotin, Ivan captured the sprit of electroclash in the recorded format with tracks like Me and Madonna. The tracks were raw and punkish, but with a serious investment in catchy melodies and entrancing vocals that have stood the test of time, even outside the electroclash movement. All the while Smagghe continued to cultivate his DJ personality, perhaps not as the ardent collector he was before the infamous fire, but rather more like a connoisseur of good music he’d like to share for the purpose of a good time. He would go on to leave Black Strobe, but continue his production pursuits in various other projects including It’s a fine line, a group he shares with Marketing Music boss, Tim Paris. This group is still active today, but if there’s any one thing that Iavn Smagghe is best known for, it’s being a DJ and his sets for the likes of Bugged Out’s Suck my Deck series has garnered a legendary status amongst punters and DJs alike. And, we suppose the rest is history? Well far from it, we’ve only really picked at the thin layer of the thin veneer of the surface of what is Ivan Smagghe. There’s still so much left to uncover, and the only way we’ll be able to dig a little deeper is through some questions. Where do we start? Why not Oslo…

Ivan, I’ve seen your name on a few bills in Oslo in the past. Is there any special connection to the city that keeps bringing you back?

Not more than a few friends really: Oyvind, Thomas etc… I suppose I was into the “Bergen” sound in the very early days where I met Pal Strangefruit, Erot, Bjorn and all of them when I used to radio (in the 90’s). That spaced-out disco wavething (and it’s many off-shoots) is my kind of thing though I am not a purist. Good record, bad record is all that matter.

You must know Oslo well enough now, to know that it’s not still all about disco here, but what always goes down well here from your perspective in the DJ booth?

I am not sure I know Oslo very well. Anyway, I play what I play. I am not gonna change my style. I could not even if I wanted to. Last time I was there in the summer was during that festival, there was a lot of people, may be not people who would be my core audience, all went fine.

You’ve mentioned a few times that your musical education started with collecting records. Do you still remember the first record and what exactly drew you to it?

The first I bought myself was probably Soft Cell’s Tainted Love. But my dad was a record collector too. Tangerine Dream and The Velvet Underground were on constant rotation at home.

How did you go from collecting records to realising you want to mix them into each other?

Someone just asked me to play at a party. I had nver wanted to consciously be a DJ. I was working in a record shop to pay off all the records I wanted.

You started working for Rough Trade because you owed them Money, I believe. Did working in the store provide any particular inspiration or was it just about paying your debt to them?

If you collect records, or are into music, working in a shop is great. At least the day when you open the boxes of new stuff. Rough Trade was cool because it was two shops in one, a dance one (where I mainly work) and a rock-indie one (where I come from musically). And of course, you meet people.

You also worked for Rough Trade’s Radio station Nova at the time too. Paris must have been a very interesting place for music around that time with the likes of Daft Punk and that French house sound cropping up.

It was more on a personal level (meeting a lot of people am still friends with) than on a musical level for me. I was not really into the French disco sound.

From playing records you eventually started making them. How did you make that transition?

I started making music with some friends. Then Blackstrobe because Arnaud and myself came from the same musical background.

You never had a formal music education and you still don’t play any instruments (I think), but you clearly have a musical ear. How these elements come together when you’re in the creation process?

I don’t feel the need to play any instruments. I mean it would be great if I could but making the type of music I like is so much more than that. And I can work with people, I like it. Programming a beat or a sequence is not that hard, and I’ve got enough references in my head to try and be inspired.

Electroclash was an obvious big part of your career back in the early 2000’s. Did you ever envision a whole genre springing up around the style of music you were making at the time and how did it affect you?

“Electroclash” as I don’t like to call it was just the idea that there was other types of music than house that you could play in a club. Obviously, coming from a cold-wave, rock, punk background, I ended up right in the midle of it. That idea (that “no house music all night long”, putting punk bands in clubs) was the whole thing behind Kill The Dj. Then, as all good things, it became diluted…

The production side of your career has always been something I imagine was a day job for you, and you’d consider yourself a DJ first and foremost. Would this be an accurate assumption?

I don’t know. Do I need to be “something first”? I am back to writing a bit, I am working on some TV/film projects… Djing is my job more than production, that’s for sure.

One last question. You are playing for the opening of the Munch/Vigeland exhibition. I’m not sure how much you know about the event, but I’ve heard you’ve got an art school background. Do you ever find the visual arts stimulate your musical pursuits and what do you think it will bring to your DJ set this Friday, (if anything)?

ahahaha. I haven’t got an art school background. I studied Politcal philosophy and litterature. But I more and more think that visual excitation in a club can make it happen as much as the music. I am gonna have to dig deep into 19th century screaming disco for tonight.;)

Do you believe in ghosts – Hubba interviews Prins Emanuel.

Do you believe in ghosts – Hubba interviews Prins Emanuel.

This Saturday sees those rascals from Hubbas klub return to Jæger with a string of friends in tow for what promises to be pure unadulterated fun, if their previous exploits are anything to go by. They’ve called on a few of their favourite artists for the event, which launches new clothing label, Duo of Duck, and we sent Hubba’s main instigator, Morten Skæveland to interview Prins Emanuel ahead of the event. The conversation starts with breakfast, what else…

We start with the most important meal of the day. What is your favorite thing for breakfast?

Eggs florentine, omelets, shakshouka – all together. Not kidding. And bloody marys.

Tell us about the Malmö scene.

There isn’t really a Malmö scene, or, you could say it’s very very small.
Unfortunately, there’s not really any functioning meeting place for like-minded people. However, there is some great talent in Malmö, both with DJs, artists and producers (you know who you are!).

There is a lot of sounds from nature in your songs Why? Are you fond of nature?

Yes, of course. Especially Ivar. He looks like what we in Sweden call a Skogsmulle. The sounds from nature are also very atmospheric.

We’ve heard rumors about Malmö’s Sergio Rizzolo booking Andras Fox to play in his living room a couple of years back. Are the rumors true? Were you there?

Yes, it was a really nice smoky bed room gig. Maybe 30 people in his apartment, some snacks, beers and a casual hangout. Nothing fancy. Andy visiting us in fall almost seems to be a tradition now, he’s here at the moment. We’re going for a sauna soon.

You played at the Apple Flower festival, a festival hubba has also known to frequent. What was your experience of the festival?

It was amazing. We had a super drunk Moonboots constantly doing shananegans around us. Beautiful! And scary!

There’s a Golden Prinz record! Please tell.

Well. It’s been in the “idea phase” for quite some time now. But it is slowly coming together. It will be 100% party trax, boozy and hazy.

What can we expect from your set on Saturday?

We’re bringing a drum machine, an MPC, a synthesizer and a delay pedal and we will try to make it as exciting and stupid as possible. In the record bag is, as usual equal parts soca bangers, South African and West African stuff, leftfield disco and boogie.

And most importantly: Do you believe in ghosts?

Yes!

Six of the best from O/E

*Photo by Danby Choi

Following a brief stint in Berlin, where he played for the likes of Tresor, we find O/E back on home turf, alongside DJ Nuhhh for this week’s instalment of Retro. Jaeger’s own shadowy Techno figure, who you’ll often find lording over the mixing desk downstairs, takes a step into the limelight on this occasion and adopts his natural position, in front of the crowd, behind a set of turntables. O/E’s career as a producer and DJ has found some affinity with the darker side of electronica through synth wave and EBM and it’s something that comes across in his regular darkroom residencies at The Villa, where you’ll regularly find some of Berlin’s best put it in appearance. And while these influences, and those recently acquired from the German metropolis, will most likely be infiltrating his Retro set, there’s a remarkable history that also needs to be accounted for. With that in mind we asked the DJ and producer to take a step,  rewind, and give us taste of the past and pick some of his favourite dance floor classics…

The Flirts – Passion

O/E Says:
“This is a classic Bobby Orlando-produced Hi-NRG/Disco track. I could listen to the main hook lead for hours! The synth-riffs and the typical 80s walking-bass makes this track perfect.”

 

Sandra Plays Electronics – Her Needs 

O/E says:
“Also known as Regis, this is a beautiful, post-punk influenced, minimal wave piece.”

 

Brand Image – Are you Loving

O/E says:
“Italo disco at its best! The magic with this track is its bass line, which is so out of sync its just amazing. The song has a really nice chorus and a hi-hatless killer 80s beat. Also notice the out of tune synth lead.”

 

Front 242 – Masterhit

O/E Says:
“Front 242 is one of my all time favourite acts. I tend to change which is my favourite track of theirs all the time, since they have really different sounding era´s – Early 80s, late 80s/early 90s and the newer stuff. Right now this is my absolute favorite. The classic EBM bass line, the typical f242 perc, sampling and of course, those amazing vocals. ”

 

Blue Mathue – Perfect Pictures

O/E says”
“Norwegian synthpop from 1983, released on Uniton Records. Classic track featuring members of Clockwork Orange.”

 

Roladex – Cathode Rays

O/E says:
“Great track from the 2014 release ‘Roladex – Anthems for the Microage’. A moremelodic part of the growing new wave of minimal wave. Good to hear a ‘correct’ way of using classic analog synthesisers in a modern release. Check out the label Medical Records (funfact: which is run by a actual doctor),based in Seattle.”

Straight outta Bergen: Talking to Kahuun

Kahuun’s Superduplex has been playing on repeat as I prepare some questions for the man behind the moniker, Kai Stoltz. The Beatservice release, with its euphorically sober intro, is an uncompromising Techno track with an aggressive sound palette, transported to the immediate future with a non-conformist attitude towards trend. There’s an element of fun to the record, and it naturally infects the questions I send him via email to his home in Bergen. Superduplex merely marks the tip of a remarkable iceberg of a career, and in some ways one that has completed a circle. It’s the latest chapter in a career that spans 20 years, but it also sees the producer making a return to his roots as a Techno DJ, a role Kahuun quite comfortably assumed in the early nineties. A DJ first and foremost, Kahuun found his musical voice through hip-hop and the DJ mixtape, when he connected a couple of tape players up with a din cable in his bedroom. It was through this primitive sampling and recording technique that he found an affinity with the mixtape and it pushed him into the world of the DJ, a world that eventually consumed all of him. Those early methods of recording eventually made their way into his first releases with edit-heavy house focused material finding a home on Paper Recordings in 1998 with “Long time no see.” Between then and 2005, Kahuun had steadily been releasing material, infusing his music with everything from break beats to jazz. Following something of a hiatus Kahuun returned to production in 2011 after a re-issue of 2001’s “Batteri”, but in 2015 it also marked a distinct move into Techno again from the DJ and producer. Fellow Bergen tech-heads, Ploink gave us our first taste with “ “Plenty of Headroom”, a mighty Techno track that once again hints at the Kahuun’s love of the break-beat, appropriated for the world of minimalists beat onslaughts. And it was soon accompanied by the beat service release that’s been steadily winding up through that magnificent intro again. So, with Kahuun providing soundtrack, we head off into our first question ahead of his appearance at Jæger tonight alongside Karima and DJ Nuhhh.

 

I read somewhere that your first adventures into multi-track recording was through two tape players and a din cable. What can you remember of those early experiments?

When I was around 13 years old, my younger brother and I got a cassette deck each for Christmas. This was a small deck with only one speaker, but it had a DIN connection to record audio. I experimented with making loops and stutters with the use of the pause button on the recording deck. It was also a good pitch effect holding the pause button half way in. I guess all of this was inspired by the Max Mix records, especially Max Mix 2, which also gave a glance into the world of Italo Disco.

So, it wasn’t multi track recording, only single track.

What was some of the music that prompted you to start creating your own music and why?

I wasn’t so much driven to create music at that time. It was the DJ thing that looked most exiting. When I watched the Beat Street movie at the cinema, in 1985 I think, it gave a glance of a culture that was so new and fresh. I guess I was hooked from that moment on.

What were your first DJ sets like?

I started DJ’ing at the local youth club in 1987 when I was 15, but didn’t play in a proper nightclub until I was 18. This was at a venue in Bergen called Choice where we played everything from disco, rock, dance and techno. Sometimes after closing hours we continued with the techno long into the late morning. This was exiting times for a young nerd like me.

What was Norway like as a creative environment during that period?

When I started Dj’ing at a techno venue in Bergen called Club Phoenix in 1993, I realized there was a lot of great electronic music being created in my own town. I had a Saturday residency at Club Phoenix with Bjørn Torske, who had just moved to Bergen from Tromsø, and it was quite inspiring playing with him and other good friends, like Erot, Balthazar, Gymbag etc.

Your first official 12” came out on paper recordings in 1998. How did it come to fruition and how did the connection between a label from Manchester and an artist from Norway evolve before the days of the Internet?

Some friends of mine (Those Norwegians) were signed to Paper Recordings and released their, still fantastic, album Kaminzky Park in 1997. I took the opportunity to use this connection and sent a demo tape to Manchester. Yes, it was a proper DAT tape sent by proper mail. They liked what they heard and communication was through phone and fax.

Long time no see, takes its melody from the Stones’ Paint it black. How did it find its way into the track?

I have actually never mentioned this to anyone, but ahem…, this sample was never cleared, so I hope I am not going to jail…

The sample is taken from Eric Burdon & War’s medley version of Paint It Black from 1970. A fantastic version with massive percussions, flutes and hypnotic spoken words.

You’ve hovered around house with some very eclectic influences, like the previous one you mentioned, making their way into your music. What has been your approach to music and genres since the start of your career and has it changed much over the years?

I found great inspiration in the 80’s and 90’s hip hop and electronica, such as The KLF, The Shamen, Prodigy, The Orb, Eric B & Rakim, De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, A Tribe called Quest and Digable Planets. There was a national radio show every Friday called Bomlagadafshipoing which was very inspirational. I think I have most of their shows on tape. Later I found rhythmical inspiration from weird Funk, Soul, Latin and Afro-beat records.

A break-beat can often be found in your music and along with things like that paint it black melody, it creates an element of fun on your records. Is that an essential part of creating music for you?

I have so much fun creating music I guess it is hard for me to avoid adding fun elements. It is just part of the experimenting and creative process. In most of my tracks I experiment with loads of elements just for the fun, and sometimes it just fits and I keep it. 90% of those elements are deleted.

It’s something of a Norwegian disposition I find: music that takes itself lightly without losing the professional touch. Do you agree?

I think it is a positive and uplifting vibe in the Norwegian way of thinking and creating music that you can probably hear around. This again will infect the listener and crowd at the club. You know, laughter is very infectious.

There was a bit of a hiatus in the mid 2000’s, at least on the production side of things. Is there a reason your career was put on hold temporarily?

For me it has been healthy having a “serious” daytime job to get the contrasts in my life between the office and the studio. At some point this job stole a lot of my time and focus. I didn’t stop producing music, but focused a bit more on the day-job, bought a house, got married and got two amazing inspiring kids.

And one of the things that happened upon your return was that Batteri was re-issued on Sex Tags. How did that happen?

Batteri was first released on 12” in 2001 on the HiFi Terapi label by my friend Eivind Olsvik. Sex Tags asked me if I wanted to re-release the track as a 10 year anniversary, and that is how it got re-released. Sex Tags had a smashing release party at Landmark in Bergen where myself and my mate Leca played live, post too many bottles of cava…

The music certainly stood the test of time, but how do you feel about music you’ve made in the past finding a new audience in the present and how does it influence your future work?

Production wise it has been very inspiring listening to what the young producers do today. They have such good control in the low frequency areas. My early work was produced using a Fast Tracker as my tool, and there was no chance to control the eq on the channels. No fancy plugins with sidechain control or filters. Everything on the Paper 12” was programmed on 6 channels in Fast Tracker.

I hope that my diversity in music influence after 30 years of music input adds some elements to my production that can again inspire others and also trigger the dance foot if you are on a dancefloor, or on the street, or wherever you like to dance. I still learn something new every day in the studio, and there are so much exiting and inspiring things going on at the gear side today, that I really feel I am still at the starting line and so motivated to continue creating music for decades.

In 2015 you’ve made the move into Techno essentially. What inspired you to move into the genre that started it all for you and how did you intend on making it your own?

I feel that Techno has always been a part of me since the early days. When I was 16 I could easily lie on the floor and listen to Sleezy D’s “I’ve lost control” over and over again. My production has maybe been a bit softer than what I am working on at the moment. My friend Thomas Paulsen, who runs the techno label Ploink, asked me if I would like to do a few techno tracks, and that pushed me into new and exciting waters.

That eclecticism is still very much the essence of what you do, I find. From Plenty of Headroom’s break beat and Superduplex’s moroder-like extended intro. What bits of music have been influencing you recently?

As a DJ I of course need to keep an open ear to all the new stuff, but when it comes to inspiration for my own production I tend to listen to timeless electronic classics as much as young heroes such as Todd Terje and Andre Bratten. It has also been very inspiring working together with my mates Kohib and Leca.

Is this style of production something you’ll be developing further in the future do you think?

As I see it now, I will probably be heading more into deep, dark and fun electronica, but it is the inspiration at the creative point that decides. A morning production can be very different than an after midnight production. I guess the inspirational mood follows the sun.

And after all these years of making music and basically moving into a new chapter for 2015, what is the underlining essence of the sound that embodies Kahuun across all the years, platforms and influences?

I find it hard to create music without a twist on the beats and a groovy bassline. Even if I plan to create techno.

What is the pipeline for Kahuun?

Right now I am working on some tracks for the Kohib & Kahuun EP2. I also work on some stuff to be out on Paper Recordings.

On the live side I am preparing a live set for Den Elleville Festen in Bergen September 19th and also a live set together with Kohib for the Ekko festival in Bergen October 31st. Exciting times!

What has been playing in the background while you’ve answered these questions?

Max Mix 2 from 1985, straight outta Youtube.

Waking up with András Fox

András Fox’s music brims with the promise of a new day. Melodic hooks flutter in through open windows between the stochastic rhythm sections, breathing air into the productions through synthesised woodwinds, while rubbery juno bass lines lazily loiter around your feet. The Australian producer’s beats journey from Disco to House taking a detour through eighties synth pop, arriving at your ears inconspicuously, but with intent. In some ways the dance constructions have some affinity with Brian Eno’s idea of music being both there and not at, but with András Fox there is a serious emphasis on fun in his music, made up of nineties synthesisers and jangling drum machines. His sound is one that first found its form with 2013’s critically acclaimed Erskine Falls EP, when András moved from sample based House edits of Daydreaming (his first mini album) into pure original synth territory in the spirit of the private-press artists of the eighties and the nineties.

The release arrived around the same time as Embassy Café, where he joined forces with Oscar Key Sung for some soulful electronica, with Oscar’s unique R&B vocal fitting Fox’s productions like a glove. It’s in that work where András first emerged as a producer with an immeasurable talent for crafting songs, hooking his audience on sweet melodies and infectious beats that mark a retro sensitivity without indulging nostalgic sentimentalities. It’s the only time he and Oscar have donned the producer cap together, but the mix of their combined creative output, is something that just clicks with Fox’s own artistic inclinations, making Embassy Café a clear stop on the path to Fox establishing a unique artistic voice.

In those two early releases Fox cemented his career and his sound, opting for the DIY aesthetic inspired by the musical garagistas of previous decades, with the advantage of internet distribution and Bandcamp helping him along the way. The voice of those early self-styled home-producers come through in spindly synthesisers and indolent drum machines, with András Fox transposing it for a contemporary audience, opting for a catchy hook or memorable bass line rather than the functional dance aspect. It’s music that’s unassuming, offering a backdrop to any situation rather than encouraging a particular one. His discography concludes today with Vibrate on Silent forging ahead in a sound that is exclusively András Fox. This latest EP spills over like a informercial on holistic healing, with organically crafted melodies cropping up through the synthesised pan flutes. There’s evidently also more of a focus on a continuous beat, but it’s charm lies specifically in its beatific sound palette, rooted in a very innocent sense of humour that comes across in his live shows.

András has played in Europe on several occasions in the past, but always in the role of a DJ, and it is only on his latest tour, that he’s left his DJ bag at home, to make room for a few synthesisers and a  drum machine. He follows Harvey Sutherland as the second Australian discoteer to join Jaeger in as many months and even though Ocar Key Sung will not be putting in an appearance alongside the artist on this occasion, we can expect a live set filled with the charm of retro synthesisers and inconspicuous beats.

The Deep Soldier: Ivaylo talks Bogota Records

“How would you describe the music on the label?” “House”. Ivaylo Kolev likes to leave his responses open like that, avoiding anything that might define Bogota Records within the strict parameters of a subjective opinion. I’ve spent many Saturday afternoons, listening to the veteran Bulgarian-cum-Oslo dj wax lyrical on all aspects of music in a similar way; his earnest grin forgiving his immediate critical impulses. “I’m just trying not to get so lost in the things behind the music.“ It’s the reason he won’t define the sound of the label as anything other than House, especially when sub-genres become so conflated that they completely erase the lines between each other. Ivaylo is only ever able to offer the word ‘deep’ when I ask what particular focus there is behind the sound of the label. “The word deep has been misused often. They use it too easily. For me it’s about a deeper understanding. It’s all about the love, when we talk about deepness. I’m the real deep soldier, because we start talking about a state of mind.”

Since Bogota Records’ inception last year, the label has developed that deep understanding around a core group of artists who Ivaylo affectionately refers to as “brothers & sisters” when we sit down for a chat and a coffee at Bare Jazz. During the course of our Interview, Ivalyo will often use the pronoun ‘we’, when talking about the label even though the label very much centres on one individual, Ivaylo. “We build the picture together,” he insists when I pick up on the habit. “It’s always been about the community. This is the biggest love. This is what keeps me going.” People like Tom Gilleron, Renate, Slammer, Jay Tripwire and Johnny Fiasco make up the community of artists that Ivaylo has collected as friends over the last twenty years of his career, sharing the label boss’ vision of music that digs deep without going dark. Although he loves nothing more than “a spoon of darkness to see the light”, Ivaylo very rarely associates deep with the sombre disposition of the artistic mind it is often associated. “If you look at the last ten years, the producers became so sad, they became so serious. These days you rarely see a producer or DJ smiling.” It’s this particular nature in deep music that Ivaylo looks to change with Bogota Records, a label that forges ahead in the deep end without falling into the darkness. For Ivaylo, Bogota Records will always be about the party and there is no place on the dance floor for melancholia. “You are going to a party, not going to explore some guy’s depression. I wouldn’t love it if I went to a club, stayed there for five hours, and got really angry when I got home.” That type of artists is not “ready for the love” that Ivaylo and Bogota Records want to give to the world through their music. “70% of other people that go to the club, don’t really know music, they feel it. When you play music out it’s a super big responsibility. That’s why I’m very concerned as an owner of a label about what tools we are giving these people. How they touch the soul of the person on the dance floor.”

It’s Ivaylo’s 20 odd years of experience in music as a dj and producer that has applied him with this unique perspective of club land and what he expects from the music. 17 of those years were spent in Oslo promoting the sound of Deep House, a sound Ivaylo traces back close to the origins of House, when “something happened to the machines” and the sounds became very “organic” with chords and synths going into deeper territory on both the physical – and metaphysical plane of the keyboard. “The reason it became different is because new sounds came around.” In those sounds Ivaylo found an affinity with the music and brought it to Oslo with somewhat mixed results. ”I remember growing up with deep house, and we were only like a thousand people. We kept meeting in places like Miami, at the music conference. Everybody was into hard house during those days. Everybody thought deep house was boring, and that was the general consensus only ten years ago. I was running around Oslo trying to promote deep house and everybody thought it was too loungy.” In only a decade, the picture is a drastically different one, with the sub-genre finding international acclaim in every situation, but Ivaylo hesitates to affiliate himself with the success of the sound, preferring still his own interpretation of the word deep, in favour of the popular connotations that the word might hold in the context of music today.

For Ivaylo and Bogota Records the sound is all about colour, vibrancy and the party, an idea that is expressed in the label’s name, but rooted in the dj’s perspective from the booth. “What happens with music is that we find sounds and combine them in a bigger way. I would love to hear the world like Nicholas Tesla saw it. He saw colours in the sky and light everywhere. Everything is music. When I play a set, I see the music. It’s a picture. If I go deeper than that, I see colours.” Colour is something that one can certainly discern from his dj sets on Saturday afternoons when the DJ dons his recognisable fedora, puts on his sunglasses and goes deep into the music through very progressive sets as part of the weekly Te Dans event. The tracks, often Ivaylo’s own edits, form an organic single entity as he ties ‘sounds’ together to form an amiable atmosphere for passive listeners. “As a producer or DJ I try to accommodate the audience with regards to sound, but my main goal is the message. Which explains my understanding of deep house or deep music.” This understanding filters through to the many artists involved in the label and is not always confined to the DJs perspective. “Tom Gilleron’s never considered himself a DJ. It’s all about ‘sounds’” and combining them for Tom through a live set. DJs. “Tom runs one of the biggest studios in Brixton, London. He masters many big names. So we are super pleased and happy to get him out of the studio for a very rare live set during the label showcase.”

Combining sounds in a bigger picture takes on a different meaning in the sprit of collaboration that often happens on Bogota Records, and which can take on many different forms; from straight forward remixes to Ivaylo’s long-time professional relationship with his engineer, Slammer. One of the more successful collaborations on Bogota has been between Ivaylo and Renate with their track Guide Line. ”I met her when she was recording an album at the age of seventeen. Her voice was amazing, and I asked her if she wanted to try House music. I had to sneak her into the club, because she was under age. She didn’t really understand the reaction of the people, but she loved the flow.“ The track features a extended introduction, before the beat kicks in, an oddity not often witnessed from the dance floor, but works incredibly well with Renate’s voice serenading the listener before the functional dance element of the track kicks in. It creates a very distinct mood, with Ivaylo’s focus on the deep end of emotive expression coming through in evocative chords and the subtle production.

He hopes to bring some of this feeling to his first label showcase this Saturday, but at the same time he intends to “open the door to more than just releases. “When you play you are really showing your personality, your feeling. When you produce something, you only give a piece of what you are.” The showcase promises to bring this intension with a mix of moods that go from the afternoon to the evening, bringing old and new artists from London and Barcelona to Jæger’s bakgården. “Usmev (Xavi Altés) is a new breed of artist out of Barcelona. Xavi studied at the conservatory in Barcelona.” As one of the newer artists on the label, Usmev also marks the organic progression Ivalyo imagines for Bogota records in the future. “The family will grow. I’m super excited. There are people out there who don’t even know I’m watching them.” More than that Ivalyo looks for a sound in the label that will adapt over time and embody his personality, doing away with the strict confines of a genre or sub genre. “For me its very simple. Music will grow up in five years time, people will not go for labels they will be going for a sound. “That sound for Bogota is House rooted deep in the visceral experience of music with the intent of bringing light and colour to the dance floor, wherever it might be.

* Bogota Records’ label showcase will take place in Jaeger’s Bakgården on the 22nd of August.

Text: Mischa Mathys

Alienating Music – Interviewing Roland Lifjell

“I feel like what’s happening in the Techno scene is opening up for what I want to do. What I hear in Techno is that there is some purpose in the music again.” Roland Lifjell is in a good place right now, and there is a confident intent from the artist to make a serious return to music in all its forms. Like most of you, I got to know Roland through his shop, Filter Musikk. I look forward to his weekly emails of new records arriving in the store, and even more so when I don’t recognise any titles. It gives an incentive to get my ass down there and find something new and exciting, or dig through the shop’s diverse back-catalogue to find an old favourite I’d forgotten about. I take the opportunity before our interview to do exactly that while Roland shares an anecdote or two with the last of the customers for the day.

I find a These Hidden Hands Remix by Atom TM too good to resist, and Mount Sims’ Hate Fuck, brings back fond memories of my first adventures in club land. As I pay for my purchases, Roland and I fall into a familiar form, sharing our critical points of view on music today, and yet again I find Roland’s invaluable knowledge giving me a new perspective I can’t even begin to comprehend as his years of experience as a DJ, producer and record store proprietor reconcile. We dive into the subject of edits. “If you look at House music, they steal stuff all the time and they don’t even care, that’s the regular thing.”

Roland needs the artistic intent in the music to make it work for him, and even though we focus on House and Disco for a moment we are quickly drawn to the genre that’s closest to Roland’s heart, Techno. “Good Techno… you can’t fake it.” His words are inspired by a recent Tresor release that was pulled for plagiarism. Cofucio’s Golden Rule was removed from shelves by the label a few months ago since it was noted that, for the most part of the release, the producer merely added elements over two obscure Techno records, and this particularly strikes a nerve with Roland. “The worst is that the stuff over the top wasn’t even that bad. So, he could have just removed the original stuff and said he was merely inspired by those tracks. He didn’t bother going that far. It’s then that I sense that he wants to be on a cool label; he wants the fame without earning it. I think the reaction that he got ­– pulling the record and people condemning it – was right. You have to come with something to the table.”

Originality is important to Roland, and at the height of his career in the latter part of the nineties this was one element that was notably absent in Techno. “I felt for many years there was a dead end. I didn’t like where the music was going.“ Roland became disenfranchised by an oversaturated market and “inflation of a lot music styles”, conspiring to take the novelty out of the genre. It came during a time when he was still releasing music while playing for audiences that would number in the thousands. “I was lucky enough to be part of that big wave of Techno, where you could play as a relatively unknown artist for 1000 people or more. That was pretty unique.”

It wasn’t to last however, like every big wave, it crashed into the shore in an incredible white wash during a banking crisis and a new nail in the coffin for vinyl. “A lot of the labels I had contact with went bankrupt and I had a lot of deals that didn’t go through. There was a lot of disappointment, a lot of work for nothing.” It came around the same time Roland invested all his time into the shop, which absconded with the freedom to express himself as an artist and forged a solitary path ahead for the person behind the music. “I was overworked for some years. I probably wouldn’t do it again.” It’s only now, when the market is at a new peak and Roland is finding new inspiration in the Techno being released, that he has discovered renewed appreciation for the music that’s closest to his heart. “It seems like people acknowledge what’s coming out now and they pay more attention to artists.”

It’s in light of these circumstances that Roland has found “some purpose in the music again.” In labels like Stroboscopic Artefacts, Prologue, Ostgut Ton, and artists like Luke Slater, Reeko, Donato Dozzy, Roland is finding inspiration again as a DJ, and it’s coming through in immersive sets that can span 4 hours. “What I like the best is when I can surprise myself. I don’t plan anything. I just do mixes that fit and are kind of interesting. What I like about DJing, is when it goes to that next level I didn’t plan.“ He packs his record bags at the last minute with the intent to discover new unfamiliar material for the first time, trying to get back some of that feeling when a new genre or artistic sound exploded onto the scene. “I miss that first experience, that thing it felt like when electronic music was completely new.”

That experience came in the eighties for Roland with artists like Ultravox, making  lonely synthesiser music that Roland found easy to relate to. The influence of his uncle and his dad – who ran a local radio station in Oslo – affected Roland from a young age and he found an affinity with what he calls alienating music. “I liked that lonely feel in the music, especially the instrumental stuff. It’s rock and synthesisers, but they sing a lot of stuff where you don’t get the lyrics. You don’t really understand what they are singing about when they do, so you get alienated in the lyrics.” Though albums like David Bowie’s Low, Roland made his way into music through a set of decks at a young age, his youth club in Nesodden giving the adolescent Roland his first experience as a performer. But like everything Roland takes on it wasn’t the perfect situation he’d imagined for himself, just yet. “I did some private party stuff. I was playing like hip-hop and rave and all that stuff, but at some private party I saw some guys who could mix. I got angry with myself that I couldn’t mix, so I just had to practise more to learn.”

Today his sets transcend technique and the focus has turned very much into taking the listener on a journey, even if it exist for selfish reasons. “In the Techno I like I look for some meaning in the song through the instrumentals. They need to tell something unique with that alienating effect.” Roland’s intention is to deliver this narrative through his sets to the younger audiences who share his tastes, in the hope of recreating something of his first experience for them. I suggest it sounds like he might be trying to live vicariously through the younger generation and he breaks out in the coy, introverted smile I’ve seen before and says: “Sounds pretty sad.” But that’s the best Roland can hope for in what he perceives is a “leftover culture.” He has certainly found inspiration in Techno again through the new music making an appearance, but at times it can feel quite frustrating for Roland to play for a small audience on the back of his experience and knowledge from the early part of his career. “I was part of something that felt much bigger and felt more important.”

Roland will often venture into this hyper-critical personality during previous conversations I’ve had with him, but its not in the sense of some nostalgic cretin trying to relive his past, it comes from a sincere experience of two different eras in electronic music. Yes, everybody is effectively listening to electronic music, but for the most part it’s all been done before, a cyclical culture that, thanks to the Internet and accessibility, makes the new discovery all that much harder to exist, and that initial wave of Techno where thousands of people will fill a hanger just for the music is a very distant memory. For Roland this means that he often finds it hard to see the significance in what he does today. “I have to be careful, because sometimes I can just be bored of everything. It just feels meaningless. ‘O, another record by that guy I love, but he’s doing the exact same thing, o no… O no!’ (Laughs) I realise I can’t be too strict and judge everything too much. When you get too professional about things it’s  just not new and fresh anymore. Just like people that do a lot of drugs over and over again, I want that first experience. I want that back but I realise I can’t have it. Now it’s so defined and categorised.“

There is a duality to everything that is Roland Lifjell and the more I speak to the man, the more complex the identity reveals itself to be. The shop might have strained his patience for some part of his life, but at the same time it suited the lone wolf part of his personality, the man who finds solace in the comforts of working alone and the music it inspires. He might be have been brought up on the lonely synthesiser music of the eighties, but can find a personable pleasure in many other genres, even if they are considered somewhat easy by Roland himself. “I can even listen to some of that Dutch Trance stuff. I think even Eric Prydz can be interesting.”

Roland is a multifaceted character and through every critical notion he might share about the current musical landscape, he always finds an element that suits his personal tastes. He might miss some of that initial experience with electronic music he finds the current landscape most fertile for exploring his own artistic voice further. “There’s no compromise again.” Inspired by his formative years, he is making music today that broods on the darker side with that alienating intention at the heart of it. “I have also found new energy in working on a techno project with an old friend Kristian Sinkerud that we are fine tuning these days.” It features a unique signature that Roland says wasn’t there during the early part of his career. Today he feels his music can be completely inflexible, and it’s an attitude that comes through his DJ sets, where he is once again inspired by the newfound purpose in Techno. “I have a view of what I want to do, but it has to be refreshing.”

I don’t quite ever get to the bottom of what this view might be during this interview, or as I piece together past conversations with the artist, but I sense that I’m closer at an answer than I’ve ever been before, and although this interview might now be over, much more was left unsaid. “Is that it, you don’t want anymore”; Roland says as I switch off the tape recorder. I have enough for this chapter, but it’s left us very much on the edge of a cliff, keeping us on tenterhooks while we venture into the next instalment of Roland Lifjell’s career.

Words: Mischa Mathys

 

In the moment with Cassy

Cassy is the quintessence of a modern day nomad. Her globetrotting career as a headlining DJ has made the world her office and residencies at places like DC-10, Ibiza has meant that home is always a temporary construct in the literal sense. When we dial her up she is back in Vienna. “We’re just here for the summer now, we don’t live anywhere really.” Her accent’s natural inflection towards the habits of the region hints at Cassy’s formative years in the city where she was raised by her Caribbean father and Austrian mother. She refrains from ever referring to the city as home during our conversation, only ever alluding to Vienna as a mere convenience. It was during her time in the city where she first invested in a career towards the arts, both through acting and music, and it was as a singer that she took her first steps into the world of electronic music, adding her vocal to the likes of Zombie Nation’s Unload. Her biography has been well documented throughout her remarkable career thus far, and while much focus has been spent on her production efforts, it is as a DJ that she’s truly engraved her name in the electronic music history books. “I’m not a professional singer. I see myself way more as a DJ than a singer.”

Everything Cassy, or Catherine Britton, seems to approach is never in half measures, and that includes her remarkable beginnings as a DJ. “I was hanging out with Miss Kittin, Electric Indigo and Acid Maria. I was impressed with what they were doing, but I didn’t really see myself doing it too. Electric Indigo convinced me to start DJing myself. I just tried it and I guess I just got addicted somehow.” There’s an obvious natural ability in Cassy as a selector, when you see her perform or hear a recorded mix. It’s something that might have flourished with her formal arts education, but more than anything Cassy suggests her success boils down to experience. “Experience is the type of thing that will always make you the better DJ. In the end there is no formula, or at least for me, there is no formula.” The tools she took from that impressive list of early tutors laid the foundation for Britton to make a sizeable mark in the DJ world with a sound that she finds best to describe as “warm and groovy; whatever that means.” It’s not something she can put in words exactly, but there’s something definitively Cassy in the music she selects and it proves itself time and again when she is in front of a crowd.

Much of her skill as a DJ stems form her ability to read a crowd and Cassy forms a symbiotic relationship with her audience, feeding off their energy as much as they feed off the music. “That’s my job. For me it’s a given, if people pay me to play in the club, and I should pay attention to the crowd. “ And her crowd can swell from the 250 strong she’s played for at Jæger, to the thousands she’s stood before on grand festival stages. “I don’t think the size of the crowd is what makes the difference. It’s the energy or your own state of mind. You can have a great time in front of five thousand people or five people.”

Yet, there’s no pre-determined mood or feel that Cassy strives for as a DJ. “You can’t really go for anything, the energy is something that really only happens in that moment in the room and that is something you have to play with or have to be able to deal with.” She accredits her refined selection skills to knowledge more than anything. “I am relaxed enough to know what music fits where. I love so much music that I don’t have to show something with the music I know. The more you know the more freedom it brings.” This freedom affords her the special convenience of playing new music from friends and trend is very rarely something that she placates too. She is constantly expanding her knowledge of music, emphasising the importance of new music, “but that could be anything” for Cassy. “I could be listening to something that was a trend three years ago, and I actually quite like now.”

The music makes its way in and out through Cassy’s record bag, with glances thrown at the labels, but when I ask the DJ for anything in particular that’s been lighting up her sets, a single title or artist escapes her. “I wouldn’t say one artist in particular; it’s a broad spectrum.“ This eclectic taste, her ability to read the crowd and cultivating a particular energy for specific dance floors are the key ingredients behind Cassy’s success as a DJ for this writer. Above all however, the root of all this success lies with the DJ’s emphasis “to connect with people” through music that “makes people get together.”

Cassy has to stop midway in her sentence, to tend to her son. He is part of the reason she is Vienna for the summer. With her family around the corner, it’s easier for Cassy to be called out to a new booking, making the city’s centrality a suitable port from which to depart. “Now, when I go to Ibiza for a night, I go in and out.” She mentions its always difficult leaving her son for work, especially during the week, but like any true professional in any industry, she is as pragmatic as ever when it comes to hers. “You work so hard to build up a career, and this is how you set up your life and structure. This is how I earn my money; this is my job, so obviously I also want to treat it with respect and love so I don’t get sick and tired of it. It’s about finding a balance. Loving what you are doing is also sometimes hard work.”

Through out all this; travelling, raising a child and playing for various crowds across this globe, Cassy has also managed to find some time to make music. She is currently prepping her debut LP, with a release date yet to be confirmed. Her vocals form the central part of the record, but she wont go as far as calling it anything quite as subjective as a Techno or House album. “It’s definitely an electronic album” but like the music she plays it’s diverse. She ventures for an obscure, “very organic” when asked to describe the process of making the album, but like everything throughout our conversation Cassy avoids venturing into any specific subjective explanations of her music. She leaves everything open for interpretation and there’s a universal approach to everything that is Catherine Britton. From her work as a DJ to her interpretation of what a home could be, Britton is unique in every sense, without ever being esoteric. I leave her about here to get back to her son. I can hear the youngster’s sobs in the background, and I feel like quite the ass having deprived him of his mom during the little time he gets with her.

*Cassy will be headlining NATT&DAG og JAEGER presenterer Frædag med Cassy (UK), g-Ha & Olanskii, Roland Lifjell, Ricky Late & Ollis, Celius. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook

Words: Mischa Mathys

Willie Burns – On the crest of a wave

Willie Burns has finally quit his much despised day job as a swimming instructor. It means he can devote his life to “just doing music stuff and the thing.” Not to be confused with some obscure code word for a secretive indulgence of the American DJ, the Thing is actually a very prominent record store in the heart of Brooklyn. It’s where Willie Burns’ alter ego William Burnett spends most of his time, digging through endless stacks of records, categorising them and cleaning up the mess other record enthusiast make. Once referred to as the biggest influence in his life, the Thing is William Burnett’s personal cave of esoteric indulgences and the source of many odd gems in his record collection. “I don’t know if I would call them gems in the money sense, but they are definitely good music and not overplayed.” One such record that has made its way into Burnett’s record bag recently, and will no doubt find its way onto Jæger’s turntables, is “Never too late” by Robert Owens. “It has the bassline from Sylvester’s ‘I need somebody to love tonight’ looped over and over with a 909 and Robert Owens singing on it. It’s pretty great, and its one of those records that everyone thought about doing but never did – Sample that Sylvester track and put a beat on it.”

“Never too late” is a dance record from the furthest reaches of Chicago’s House history, but if anything Burnett’s digging is eclectic. “Good music is good music. It could be to enjoyed at home or in a DJ set, or a sample, or even a sound.” From his work as Black Deer, and its Moroder-esque synthetic space adventures, to his first explorations in disco as Grackle, this eclecticism shines through the many aliases he entertains in his productions. As Willie Burns though, he stays close to the dance floor appeal of Robert Owens, only striving to “make a dj or dancefloor record”, using his much-loved SP 12 sampler to make and shape the characteristic sound of Willie. It’s in that machine where a particular familiarity can be heard in his music, a familiarity that stretches back to the early days of House with a sound that is quite evidently New York. “I think I use the same machines they did and sample the same records”, explains Will when I ask him about the secret ingredient to Willie Burns’ New York inflection, “or maybe it’s the pace of life or the water.” Whatever it might be, it comes across in Burn’s productions as gritty House tracks that float as much as they stomp. Punchy 808s and rubbery basslines are drenched in luscious pads, while a crafty hook is always around the corner. It’s a sound that has found a home on labels like The Trilogy Tapes and Hot Haus, but often ventures outside the strict parameters of House. Last year’s EP “I wanna love you” goes from uplifting trance loops to low-slung funk bass grooves that bears some similarity to Moodyman at times. On the other hand 2013’s self-titled EP, released on L.I.E.S, ventures into even grittier territory with tracks “Dr. Monkey” and “Rewind” tearing up the groove like a dot-matrix printer and an irresolute tape machine respectively. It hints at the eclectic musical taste of Burnett’s, but when I ask the producer and DJ, whether this is something that he’s picked up through digging for records at the Thing, he only manages “hmm… I don’t know” as a response.

William Burnett is in San Antonio Texas when we catch up via email. “I came to visit my family. I haven’t been back in 2 years. Gonna swim and eat bar b que and Mexican food; and maybe check out the thrift shops.” Although originally from Texas, William has been calling Brooklyn home since 1999, after an extended detour through San Francisco. Collecting records, skating and refining his skills on guitar – an instrument WB still refers to as: “the only one I feel like I can play” – Burnett eventually got bored with the West Coast lifestyle and moved to New York, where his first adventures into production and DJing flourished. He adopted the DJ persona Speculator – a name that reflects the speculative way Burnett approaches music through a mix – and found a natural affinity with the decks by presenting his idea of “good music” to an audience. His disco alias Grackle matured during this time too, but it was eventually kicked to the curve when Willie Burns was born. “I think the biggest thing that ‘started it all’ was getting a studio outside of the house. That was when I really started taking it seriously.” Armed with little more than that SP-12 sampler, the producer cut his first record as Burns, the aptly titled ‘House’, in 2011. A string of releases naturally followed, and using the network of contacts he made through the Thing, William soon established WT records, a label that that reflects the owner’s eclectic personality through releases by artists like Hunee. It’s on the strength of the label and his musical career that William has been able to finally quit his other day job. Well that… and cutting down on some other expenses. “I still get records, but it’s not the way it used to be with me spending all my money on it.” That is not to suggest that Burnett is not feeding his musical impulses through other peoples music however. “I think it’s more about music in general. I’m listening to more music than ever, it’s more in the digital world, even if it’s a taboo.”

William is quite content on the listening end from the comfort of his apartment in Brooklyn, the life of a touring DJ never really holding much appeal for the artist. “I like Brooklyn. I have a good apartment, nice studio, and I like my job at the thing. It’s never boring. Good restaurants, records and people are always coming through.” He does make the odd exception and one particular person keeps calling him back to Jæger. “I come back for (MC) Kaman. I met him when he came to New York about 10 years ago through friends of friends and we hung out a lot. We stayed friends. Jaeger is a great place.” The last two times he was here he was able to swim in the fjord during a heat wave. “Swimming in the fjords isn’t exactly what you think about when you think of Oslo.” It looks like he might be able to do so again if the weather holds out, and at least the thought of an undesirable job will be the last thing on his mind as he dips into the tepid waters of the Oslo fjord.

*Catch Willie Burns on Wednesday, the 22nd of July alongside Øyvind Morken for Untzdag.

Words: Mischa Mathys

 

Yours sincerely, Andre Bratten

1am, Sunday morning and I’ve never heard Jæger’s Bakgården system sound so… tender. Mark Broom and James Ruskin’s Hostage is oozing out of the mighty subs, the heavy bottom end of the Techno thriller pulsing through the packed dance floor, embracing each body on its way to the rear and through to the bar. I look around me and every person has his or her hands in the air, touching some invisible beam projecting out from the DJ booth where Andre Bratten’s smile peers over the decks. All the other DJs are on their feet too, punching holes in the air to the time of the beat. “I was going to play Quoth from Polygone Window (Aphex Twin) after that. It’s 142BPM with only distortion.” Instead he drops Blawan’s ‘Why do they hide bodies under their Garage’. Hardly a subtle track in comparison to Quoth; I see some of the bodies evacuate the dance floor, looking somewhat overtaxed and exhausted. “I am not like Prins Thomas mixing six tracks into each other – he’s the best DJ ever. I’m more of I don’t give a fuck kind of guy. I don’t care, I just want to have fun, without being to pretentious about it.” The next day I meet Andre at a quiet little café in Oslo. He’s looking fresh considering the late night, speaking in concise sentences, placing the words in pragmatic sequences like his thoughts mature long before they actually reach his lips. I get a sense that Andre is forming an opinion of me, our roles feel reversed, awkward and I get the impression he is interviewing me in a very calculating manner with some banal questions on everyday life. But this interview isn’t about me…

Last night’s show was a practise run for the Norwegian producer. Having not DJ’d for two years, Bratten has returned to the decks after being exhausted with the travelling hassle of playing live. The set goes through everything from hard Techno to Trance, as he keeps the energy on the dance floor at its peak consistently. “I think Techno DJs also play too much Techno. My DJ style is not about having a DJ style. When I DJ, I do it with the idea that I’m not a DJ.”  It’s only in the wake of the release MATH ILIUM ION that Bratten has once again donned the DJ smock and is foraging in the archives of dance music. It’s an EP that is fundamentally a transitional record for his audience, an audience that might have been familiarised with Bratten’s music through ‘Be a Man you Ant’, but grown to adore him through Trommer og Bass. “It’s not the artist EP with hits. You buy the record, and it’s a story between the first record and the next record.” Trommer og Bass is the beginning of that story, a track that has been receiving much love from the DJ community for over a year now. “It was a dance floor DJ hit, but the rest of the EP is way better musically.” The bulk of the EP is the continuation of the story with the crux, of what is essentially a mini album, taking on the form of Minor- and Common- Misconception – two dark Techno monsters that lie in the shadow of the leading track’s mass appeal, bringing an intriguing and alluring dimension to MATH ILIUM ION. “It’s quite dark, darker than anything else in the Oslo scene. I get angry when I hear music that’s too much of a major vibe. It pisses me off when they go into pop territory with a pleasing hook, so I have to do the opposite. It is more fun to make something with more layers. Trommer og Bass is just there to give people the opportunity to buy that track on vinyl, and the other five tracks were the main EP, but I included ToB because I found it interesting and smart to do so.“  The lead track certainly bears similarities to a track like Aegis, but there’s also a clear move from the artist to explore new territory on this EP. “I think I’m very conceptual. I make what I want to make at that time and as a musician your evolving all the time. I feel this record sounds like me but it’s different from the first record. It’s all me!“

‘Be a man you ant’, was released on Full Pupp, the label where most Norwegian electronic artists debut, but very rarely with a LP. “The first record was trying to do Norwegian space disco with a twist of Techno. Aegis was a more Techno-ish, more British more border community kind of vibe.” With some of the tracks from MATH ILIUM ION made before the debut, it shows a producer not evolving as much as being in a constant state of flux, but more significantly, it shows a very cerebral personality behind everything he approaches. “I had to think a little about politics, I couldn’t do a super weird Techno record first.”

Techno, it seems, is the lifeblood of this artist. It was through Warp artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, where Andre was introduced to the world of electronic music and found inspiration as a musician. “I am an Autechre fan, always have been. Autechre is kind of like the father of industrial weirdo IDM Techno. I like Aphex Twin, but Aphex Twin has too much pop in it sometimes. I really like Autechre’s Amber record because it’s a little bit Autechre, a little bit Boards of Canada and a little bit Aphex Twin, and I can see Aphex Twin is really inspired by Autechre. If you listen to the first record Aphex released and then you listen to him after Warp it really goes into the Autechre territory.” Inspired by the likes of these artists it is unsurprising that Bratten likes to fuck with his audience during his DJ sets. At the height of the evening, a familiar bass-line from my youth stops me dead in my tracks. Faithless’ Insomnia starts drowning out the previous Techno track as Maxi Jazz’ legendary poem speaks to us from the past through a set of Funktion One speakers. “That’s the best track ever made you know, and the CD single, with the long track, is the coolest version. The funny thing about that track is, it starts really Housy and then it goes into Trance suddenly.” Andre emulates the sound of the opening bars of the bass line before adding; “I found it funny to play Faithless and everything I had in my folder called bangers.”  It kept the audience on their toes throughout the night as the dance floor started to emulate the waves of sound passing through it, people leaving for a quiet moment only to return for the next ‘banger.’ It was a performance at peak time, but peak time was almost four hours long. “I think its good to push the limits and see how long you can stay on a knife’s edge, and if you drop it you will probably fuck the whole thing up.“

This uncompromising attitude it seems is at the heart of everything Andre approaches, and while we focus extensively on his career as a DJ, Andre never appropriates the honorific when he refers to himself. He opts rather for the title of musician, and the divide between the two is too big for Bratten ever to consider bridging. “I get frustrated and irritated by the social stuff around the DJ world. It’s depressing and sad. A bunch of forty-five year olds snorting coke, playing other people’s music, getting laid and drinking, that’s no life.” Andre is quite stern on the matter without resorting to a pure rant, and what particularly comes across while we discuss this, is that he has no time for over-inflated egos, especially in the role of music selector. “If we stigmatise it, the DJs’ thing is that they find tracks and talks about tracks, and they have this weird thing with ownership of music. I really don’t understand it.“ Andre can concede some arrogance on his part too when it comes to his music, but for him the egos behind the decks are not warranted at all. He refrains from social media as a result of this aversion, with his Facebook page holding a mere two posts in its three-year existence, both from his label, and both within the last four months. “I don’t really care about social media, which is a bad thing because I should be better at it, to reach out more. I can see the benefit of being more personal. At the same time I think you should just be yourself and give the finger to what you should do. Likes is not a real thing compared to popularity.“ Andre is not a friend of the crass promotional tricks to sell records that usually accompanies the personalities. His EP was barely announced before it was released two weeks on and although Trommer og Bass had been around for a while, the track remains little more than a precursor to the rest of the EP. Andre even avoids gig announcements these days, preferring a low-key event with nothing but a name in an effort to avoid the trap of the ostentatious musical personality. “Where there’s too much of a mythical thing around artist I loose interest. I think it’s pretentious. I think Aphex Twin is probably the smartest marketing guy in the world, but I find some of it quite pretentious.” My mind drifts and I’m reminded of a brief telephone conversation to plan the interview:

Me: “Is there anything you want to particular discuss during the interview.”

Andre: “No, but I don’t want to make it personal.”

During the interview I recall a quote from Oscar Wilde that said: “Music is the art, which is most nigh to tears and memories.” Surely Andre must infect his music with some of his very unique personality? “You can’t make music that is not personal, sure, but that’s my arena, and its’ not for anyone else. I don’t want to be dictator of what people feel. I find people that need to talk about the personal input in their music need to see a shrink. They use the personal tag to sell it more than anything.” His dislike for the personal tag includes getting an insight into his working methods. He is often labelled as an analogue producer by the media and will go to great limits to avoid the tag if he can. “People asking if its analogue, do you really care? Does it sound good? There you go have fun with it. I’m just an artist making music and I have a modular synth, that’s fucking it.”

Synonymous with this is the Disco tag that often over-excessively is applied to anybody making music in Oslo. A recent review of MATH ILIUM ION on a very popular blog reads like the who’s who of the Oslo space disco scene lumping Bratten together with everybody from Todd Terje to Lindstrøm and although, like Aegis, Trommer og Bass might have a loose connection with Disco, in so much as it features some syncopated hats, the EP is quite clearly a Techno EP, one that specifically ventures into the darker side of the genre. It’s a sound that is quite different to anything else that’s coming out of Oslo at the moment. “I think the Norwegian scene is missing a proper Techno guy, so I’m trying to be that guy.“ I have no doubt that he will be that guy in the light of the previous night’s DJ set, especially with the help of a label like Smalltown Supersound, the next step for any Norwegian artist after Full Pupp. Andre sees the label as being one of the best in the world, perhaps only second to Warp, giving him the opportunity to truly realise the scope of his sound and the layers he likes to work in.

I could speak to Andre all day about music and his acute criticism of many of the unspeakably bad practises that follow the industry around like an awful tattoo, but it’s a rare sunny afternoon in Oslo and the beach beckons. I feel I’ve merely scrapped the surface of Andre Bratten’s career and musical identity, but I don’t believe I’ve seen the last of him either. Our conversation has covered much and I feel, even though not a single personal anecdote was mentioned throughout our conversation, that I could say I already have some familiarity with the person – particularly through his views, but more importantly through his music. He’s unpretentious as a person, and uncompromising as DJ and musician, but above all, his character is down to earth and approachable – a rare amiable character in electronic music. With much of his memorable set still ringing in my ears from the previous night and hard disc full of unforgettable quotes in my recorder, I leave André Bratten to get back to André Bratten.

 

“We’re going disco” – Q&A with Harvey Sutherland

Harvey Sutherland has already carved out a distinct career for himself only a few releases in, but you might not know of him yet. Hailing form Melbourne, the talented musician has made his way in to some very influential DJ bags, DJ’s who hoard his music like a secret weapon. They use tracks like Bermuda to make a lasting impression on the dance floor without letting up their coveted piece of information. You would’ve no doubt heard Sutherland’s sound bouncing out through Jæger’s system by now, without you even knowing it. Harvey’s adventures in disco is a uniquely modernised version of the genre where syncopated 808’s and improvised synthesiser loops break the monotony of the house beat and brings an intuitive dimension back in to the world of electronic dance music. Having featured on the likes of labels like Voyage and MCDE, five releases already behind him, and a European tour in full swing, the name Harvey Sutherland is sure to be on everybody’s lips soon. Last year’s Oscillate defined his career for many in sultry tones and sparkling claps as it made its way into many DJ sets. His improvised style is as engaging as it is entertaining and he prefers to showcase it in the live context through a few bits of analogue gear with the Roland Juno at the heart of the rig. That rig will be making its way to Jæger’s bakgården on Wednesday (22/05) as part of Øyvind Morken and Gaute Haaversen’s weekly Untzdag event. Harvey took some time out of his busy touring schedule to answer some questions via email for us ahead of his appearance for Jæger and we get some exclusive insight into artist’s music and influences, including a little preview perhaps of a possible DJ set…

 

 

Do you still live in Melbourne?
Yes, there’s a bit more space to move around now that everyone’s gone to Berlin.

Is Berlin something that might appeal to you in the future especially since you are touring Europe at the moment?
Not really. It’s a beautiful city, but it seems very easy to fall into a trap of not being very productive or creative. I like having a sense of normalcy and a day job too – music is just an outlet for me.  

Your music has some similarities to the space disco sound that Oslo has been known to delve in. How did you fall into disco and how did you come across it in Australia?
It was a combination of seeing great DJs playing at home (andee frost, andras, two bright lakes) and the Internet (beat electric, soulsides, PPU). It was a lot more “edit-ey” a couple of years ago, so its good its come back around to good songs and arrangements. I’m also just really into handclaps. 

How was the alias Harvey Sutherland born amongst all that?
You’ll have to ask me in person.

Ok I’ll hang on to that one, but can you tell us a bit more about the early part of your music career and how it morphed into the sound we have come to know as Harvey Sutherland?
I was playing keyboards in a few bands at home, before tinkering with my own production. I made lots of different stuff, instrumental hip-hop, sample-based ideas. Got a bit tired of that, and started playing live improvised dance music with a good friend as part of a music collective and label in Melbourne called ‘This Thing’. We threw some great parties and put out records, including my own ‘Low Altitude’ 7” and the first Harvey release on cassette. Some good friends in Melbourne supported both of those releases, and it eventually made it to the right ears. Now I’m here, I have no idea what I’m doing really.

Other people seem to think you do though. Someone described that sound as “Arthur Russell wearing John Oates’s moustache while making love to Cat Stevens circa Izitso”. How would you put it into words?
Nowhere near as amazing as any of those people.

You are five releases in now in a mere two year recording career and it looks to be constantly gathering momentum. How have working with the various labels like Voyage and MCDE affected you work?
I try not to make stuff with a specific label in mind; otherwise you end up falling into formulas and expectations. MCDE was a bit like that – I initially tried to make very club-oriented music because of the history of those Raw Cuts releases but then watched Danilo’s Dekmantel set from last year and thought “fuck it we’re going disco”.

Is it easier for you to fall in to disco than, say house for instance? 
I want to make records that sound and feel like my favourite records. Those records happen to be disco most of the time, so yes it’s quite natural to move in that direction.

You rely on a lot of analogue equipment in your setup. What are your favourite bits of kit at the moment and can you tell us how it influences your music?
Couldn’t live without the Rhodes. Most of my tunes start there, and you can get away with not being a very good piano player on it. It’s very forgiving; all the notes get all smudged together in a really nice way.

Are there any bits of kit that you’d like to use in the future that you’ve heard in another artist’s music recently?
Live drums, dry room, ribbon mics, space echo saturation. Jack J style. That guy is seriously inspirational. 

What bits of kit will be making their way over with you and what can our audience expect?
I’m borrowing various Junos on my travels, so I generally just choose a bunch of interesting patches and go from there. It’s quite improvised in the sense that I don’t really have set tracks, it just kinda flows in and out of different rhythms and melodies. Lots of live looping and probably a bit too much funky noodling.

Yes, I believe you do like to improvise in the live situation. I’ve seen a video of you performing and it adds a very human dimension to the electronic means you use. Is this idea behind preferring a live show rather than a DJ set?
I like making things really difficult for myself, so the live show is perfect for that. It’s more fun than DJing, because something could go catastrophically wrong at any moment and that’s a lot more interesting to watch as an audience member. If I’m lucky, there’ll be some happy accident and the set will take a different turn. It works better in intimate spaces, like “we’re all in this together”, and I think people really respond to that.

If you were to DJ however, what live recordings would be some personal picks for you?
I was hoping to DJ a little bit at Jaeger! I’ve heard its an amazing system and rotary, and I’ve been buying a few records on my travels. Maybe these ones: