philip sherburne

Clap happy

Yeah, that is in fact pretty much what I meant. Drip * Drop * Clap -- sorry, Drap -- nicely expands on the sonics and signification of the techno handclap. Among one of his several cogent observations: "It's also a nod to crowd-music synergy in dance music; the music reacts to the dancefloor, so sounds made on the dancefloor should be used in the music."

That reminds me of something Thomas Brinkmann once told me regarding the shouts in the Soul Center records. "Starting with the scream of J.B. [James Brown] on W.v.B. 2," he wrote, "I realized a reaction on the dancefloor. The people who are usually shouting and screaming got this from the speaker (Uups!). At this point there had been two possibilities : The party came down or the people start to scream as well. Expression or impression..."

Creepshow

New mix alert! This is something of a work-in-progress, so feedback (of the positive, negative, and even noncomittal kinds) is welcome. I don't have a whole hell of a lot to say about it, because when I was practicing this evening, a speaker jumped off the shelf and clocked me in the head in mid-set (note to self: turn bass down), and as a result I'm feeling a little fuzzy. (What is it with me and head injuries while DJing? I think rechristening myself "DJ Klutz" is in the near future.) So I've got a fifty-cent-piece-sized lump on the noggin and I'm afraid to go to sleep, but this mix is loud enough it ought to stave off yawns for its hour duration. Download and enjoy. Note: ain't a damn thing micro about this one.

Creepshow (Short Version)
P. Lauer, "Starkweather Swing" (Punkt)
Caro, "Super Contact Danse" (Orac)
Granny'Ark, "Granny's Square Dance (E.J. Pasadena mix)" (Zora Lanson)
Matsai, "He Boombah (Tiefschwarz remix)" (Missive)
I:Cube, "Vacuum Jackers (Maurice Fulton remix)" (Versatile)
Christian Kreuz, "Wir Sind Bereit (Munk remix)" (Disko B)
Tim Paris feat Mike Ladd, "Architexture" (Virgo)
U&I, "Rockin' Fly Incantation" (Freak n' Chic)
Offset, "Electro-Menager" (Missive)
Misc., "Rocket Kontrol" (Sender)
Misc., "Flow Control (Basteroid rmx)" (Sender)
Black Strobe, "Pins & Needles" (Output/Puma)
Ferenc, "France" (Kompakt)
Mathew Jonson, "Decompression" (Minus)
Thomas Andersson, "Numb" (Bpitch Control)
Le Dust Sucker, "Mean Boy" (Plong!)

On a totally tangential note, I played a 45-minute set of schaffel at Amoeba Records tonight (lump on head throbbing in sync: duh-daduh-daduh-daduh), and at least eight people came up during the set to ask what I was playing and where they could find a record or CD of it. At least - honestly, I lost count. (Sadly, Amoeba doesn't actually stock much of what I was spinning. I sent one woman off to search for the Schaffel Fieber comp and she came back holding a Shamen CD in one hand and some trance comp in the other. "Are either of these it?" Um... no.) Commercial snafus aside, it was wildly refreshing to see such a good response from my captive audience. Techno may be dead, but the schaffel virus seems to spark a minor fieber wherever it travels.

Max Trax

Writing about Trax Records' 20th anniversary, disco for aliens, and the intertwined strands of "track" and "song" in house music's DNA, Tim Finney abounds with hooks and personality.

For L.A. eyes only

To the folks from LA that emailed me about gigs down there - please write back. I can't find your email anywhere, and I've looked high and low.

(And, yeah, I feel stupid posting this.)

Mission Delirious

Mission St, San Francisco - Saturday, August 21, 2004.

Where is

What think you when you think, “Juarez”?

If you are like me, very little – well nigh zip, casi nada. Except, of course, for images of La Migra, rumors of drug cartels, and a vague awareness that many young women – I’m not sure whether they number in the dozens or the hundreds, honestly – have been murdered, occasionally disappeared, over the course of many years by assailants unknown. In short, Juarez is probably not in anyone’s top 10 vacation destinations. But this does not stop me from going there – to DJ, as a matter of fact. It is the first time anyone has ever invited me to another country solely to play records, and that’s reason enough for me. I am, in fact, deeply honored.

My approach is like most approaches these days: shotput via aluminum tube, concoursed along interminable carpeted and peoplemovered passageways. I buy a copy of The Economist in San Franicsco; in Phoenix I scarf down an unappealing burrito which is nevertheless far less unappealing than the other deepfried, steamtabled, cholesterolcentric fare on offer. Like most trips these days, my trip is uneventful. (The discomfort caused by lugging two bags of records as carry-on luggage does not qualify as an “event,” given its seeming interminability.) The scabby desert surrounding El Paso, my point of arrival, is an abstraction.

Until, that is, I emerge through the sliding glass doors into a dry, hot blast of air. El Paso has done its damnedest to eradicate the desert – driving along its freeways, if you ignored the rocky buttes around you, you could be in any suburban sprawl in North America, ruled by asphalt, boxed in by “big box” retailers. But its heat is very real, almost solid. I do not envy the soldiers practicing maneuvers at nearby Fort Bliss. (What a name.)

My hosts pick me up and we drive to a run-down party supply store to purchase wristbands, which the club apparently has run out of. The party supply store is a warehouse filled mostly with dust and empty space, but where there are objects they are piñatas and mylar balloons and streamers and napkins and ribbons, many festooned with American flags. The border is a five-minute drive away, marked by the sluggish Rio Grande, which wends between industrial plants and alongside signs in two languages warning polluteddon’tfishhereoryou’lldie; “Rio Grande” seems a misnomer, the result of an overenthusiastic branding exercise. There are INS agents in SUVs parked behind glass hutches every hundred yards or so; many of the hutches are pocked with bulletholes.

Crossing the toll bridge into Mexico I have my passport in hand; my host waves it away. “You won’t need that.” He’s right; we drive into Mexico without stopping, without so much as a look from the guards. Such lopsided border controls cannot be pleasing to those who endure the grim exercise of going the other way with any regularity.

Juarez is a mall town – more big box retailers, fast food outlets, and smaller, more localized strip malls. We pass a Vegas-style pyramid sporting a sphinx on its roof. Called El Sfinge, it is a nightclub. Not far beyond is what appears to be an entire mall given over to yuppified nightclubs, one garish, bepalmed entrance after another. I will not be playing here.

My hotel is the Hotel Monaco - or perhaps the Monte Carlo, I can't really recall. Three stars, though, or so the wall tells me. And a generous checkout policy, with departure not required until 1pm. (Between 1 and 3pm room rates are 25%, between 3 and 5pm 50% -- though I can’t figure out if this was the surcharge for failing to vacate your room by 1, or the rate available to afternooners looking for lodging of an hourly nature.) There is a strange squeaking coming from the ceiling, which disturbs me, due to the mouse-sized hole right about the location of the squeak, but a simple test of the AC switch eventually reassures me that it was just the finicky complaint of the fan blades. (I know, since when does AC have fan blades? Let’s just not talk about it.) And there is cable TV with MTV Latin America which I watch for about five hours while sucking down Diet Coke, purchased from the lobby vending machine for 5 pesos a pop, and waiting for my ride to the night’s gig.

MTV Latin America does not differ significantly from its North American parent. I did see a handful of Latin American videos in the Top Veinte countdown, but I sadly fail to remember the names of the artists. I believe they were Latin Avril, Latin Britney, and Latin Thursday, but my memory may be clouded by cultural chauvinism. I think those are close, though.

(What's up with all the hit-and-runs in videos these days, anyway? I saw at least three videos prominently featuring people getting sedanned - how long has this been going on? And won't someone please think of the children?)

At 9pm I carry my bags downstairs to the lobby to meet my ride. My ride is nowhere to be found; the desk clerk stops me on my way out the door. “I’m sorry, you can’t leave,” he says in Spanish. “They only paid half the fee for your room, and I can’t let you go until they pay the rest.” I consider forking over the remaining $18 for the privilege of stepping out for a breath of hot fresh air, but content myself with ordering and reordering my records for the next 45 minutes.

My host’s friend arrives with his girlfriend and pays off my keeper. Abel is a stone-faced guy who grills me on headliners I’ve opened for and favors progressive house and psycotrance, as they call it here; his girlfriend is an American catalog model from El Paso who spends much of her time, she says, in Juarez, when she’s not working in New York or Barcelona. She speaks little, if any, Spanish. I don’t ask.

My gig is at a club called the Underground, which lives up to its name – situated in Juarez’s slightly seedy downtown (gangs have been a problem, admits the manager), it’s a boxy basement space with a kick-ass soundsystem, wonderful monitors, and a Red Bull fridge behind the booth stocked full with Sol beer. I couldn’t be happier.

The gig itself is underpopulated; perhaps two dozen people pass through all night. It’s a shame: the DJs before me, one from Juarez and one from Dallas, play storming sets full of Akufen and Robag Wruhme and Dominik Eulberg. The global spread of this marginal music never ceases to amaze me. My own set goes well – I don’t think I’ve ever played better, technically speaking. An hour of minimal, lots of Donnacha Costello carrying us into more acidic territory, then full-on Sender/Black Strobe/Ferenc/Mathew Jonson madness. I barely remember the last hour. The 15 people there crowd the stage and dance, whoop, whistle. Fucking troopers. Who needs a crowd? It’s a house party and everyone knows what to do. I finish with Westbam and Nena’s “Oldschool, Baby” as the lights come up and say a prayer of thanks in Cologne’s direction.

There are afterparties, or there are supposed to be. Something at a ranch somewhere fails to materialize. We wind up, a whole caravan of us, outside a gated home in an upscale neighborhood. My host seems nervous. “Are you sure you want to go? Maybe we should just go back to our house.” Hell yes I want to go! There are men in cowboy hats and kittenish women in heels and bobby socks. Entering the compound, though, the music is not techno – as I’d expected, techno being the universal music of afterparties the world over, no? – but norteño music. “This is a narcotraficante house,” says one of our crew, quietly. “Or at least the children of narcotraficantes.” We do not stay long – in fact, we grab our liter-sized beers and pile back into our Jettas and pickups and beat a hasty retreat, playing hopscotch in the traffic back to someone’s house. Whose house? I’m too tired to ask. Turntables and a mixer appear out of a car trunk; before long someone is playing proggy techno and a joint is being rolled in toilet paper. The toilet paper is scented. I play a few records but the beer and miles exercise a stronger torque than the Technics, and my host graciously returns me to the Monte Monaco, where Latin Avril is still singing on the TV I’d left on, where a now-reassuring squeaking still emits from the ceiling, and where only 5 hours hence my kind and generous host will gather me before swinging through the MacDonald’s drivethru – the hash browns taste exactly the same on the other side of the border – and ferry me back over the bridge, past the stern, Oakleys-wearing customs agent, and on up into the hills for a quick scenic tour of El Paso’s heights (even here, La Migra patrols, climbing deadly hills on mountain bikes) before depositing me in front of the airport’s sliding doors. An embrace, and I am sucked back inside the processed air and peoplemovered home.

Don't look now

'k, I was actually kidding in my hateration in that last post, but here's something I do hate. I've been spending an inordinate amount of time on eBay in the last few weeks, searching for overpriced early '90s titles on R&S/Apollo, Speedy J classics, bleep 'n bass stuff, and, um, that Middleton remix of Kylie's "Chocolate" that I've been going so ga-ga over (warning: after I get done with a "middle school" techno mix [because it's not quite old enough to be old school] I may soon post a bona fide deep house mix on this site, so run far and run fast, lest your presuppositions about yours truly being the Maven of Micro be forever quashed and kiboshed). And I have come to harbor a deep, unreasonable, and almost murderous loathing for the hucksters that end their listing headlines by writing, "L@@K!"

Dude, a simple "look" wouldn't get me to click on your link if I didn't have any interest in what you were pawning. All caps wouldn't help. But the weird, pictographic, "My 'look' has eyeballs for os!" rendering of the world just fills me with creep and bile. It reminds me of grade-school teachers that would turn a "Good!" grade on a paper into a smiley face, with G and D becoming ears, the Os eyes, and a silly little nose and smiley mouth descending from the thing. That was cutesy, ha. But affixing a weird, overemphatic hieroglyph to your auction listing to attempt to attract my attention? That just makes me want to punch you.

(I am so getting my feedback points docked for this entry.)

Doubt not

You know those people who you read, and you're like, "Goddamn it, how does he/she do it, all smart and witty and at ease and able to do things like draw connections between German/Detroit techno and baseball, while I'm sitting here trying not to use the phrase 'lugubrious bassline' for the third time this month?" And you're all, "Fuck that guy!" and then you just go back to reading him/her in a sort of seasick awe.

Yeah, I hate that too.

(But Andy: Don't give up on Italic! The last few singles have been corkers, at least the hella trancy Einmusik track on the Minimal Allstars 12" (ITA 038), and the M.I.A. remix on the new Skua Lovelle (ITA 041).)

Now playing

(No cutesy conceits. No clever constructs. Just records I can’t currently get enough of.)

Vini Reilly, “Contra-Indications (Album Mix),” from Factory 12” Fac284

I’ve owned a few Durutti Column records in my day. I bought The Guitar and Other Machines as a teenager in the ‘80s, and maybe Bread and Circuses as well; a few years back I picked up Another Setting at a garage sale. They failed to make much of an impression, honestly – the guitars seemed too treated, the atmospheres too murky. (And yes, I realize this may be the point.) Why did no one tell me, then, that in 1991 Vini Reilly dabbled in acid house?

The eponymous A-side of “The Together Mix,” sleeved in an appealing lime-and-silver, TDR-designed cover, was apparently co-produced by Together, the duo responsible for the Star Wars-quoting 1990 hit “Hardcore Uproar;” the tune interjects New Orderish, rimshot- and tambourine-heavy drum and bass programming (circa Technique) with occasional flourishes of Reilly’s guitar. Quite lovely, really, and certainly enough to make me wish I could have been there to hear what it sounded like at the time.

It’s the first song on the B-side, though, that shines. (Entitled "Contra-Indications," it apparently comes from Reilly's album Obey the Time.) The production is even better than on "The Together Mix": brittle, electro-inflected drum programming; contrapuntal arpeggios that jump from mode to mode like kids playing hopscotch; a preference for wonderfully dated synthesizer sounds akin to the breathy “vox” patches of Depeche Mode’s Violator. And then Reilly’s guitar crawls out, a green vine from beneath paving stones. It’s almost morning gloryish in its effect, nearly smothering all the carefully pieced and programmed bars of the lattice behind it. In another context, the casual virtuosity of Reilly’s playing – its emphasis on The Riff – might be offputting, but here it locks into the equation and makes the song perfect.

Stop me if you've heard this one

Thomas Bartlett walks into a nominally electronic album and exclaims, "[I]t's a very odd experience to be emotionally overwhelmed by music assembled from sounds with the kind of skin-deep sheen that one normally associates with artifice, heartlessness and techno." There are also two factual errors in the piece: the label should be spelled "Gooom" (three o's), and Run Into Flowers is not the group's debut record. (I know Salon is in financial straits, but did they lay off all the editors over there?) But I'm encouraged, frankly: if Bartlett keeps discovering "electronic" music that confounds his preconceptions at this rate, he might just put the torch to the straw horse somewhere around the time of, say, Kompakt 200's release.

All sets are off: #1

At long last, I've hooked myself up with some server space, so hopefully a minor deluge of mixes is forthcoming.

Here's the schaffel mix that I put together for Sonar a la Carte this summer. Recorded live, no edits. (Eg, go easy on me in the loose spots.) The levels are a little low, so you may need to listen loud. Click here to download the mix (92MB). I've moved the file to a .mac homepage, so you may need to rename the file with a ".mp3" extension in order to save it correctly. Let me know if you encounter problems.

Schaffel Is Stronger than Pride:
T. Rex, Baby Strange (Reprise)
Jürgen Paape, Ballroom Blitz (Speicher/Kompakt)
Electronicat, Amat Salé (Disko B)
T.Raumschmiere, Monstertruckdriver (Novamute/Shitkatapult)
Das Bierbeben, Wir Sind I (Shitkatapult)
Pastamusik, Highway to Brandenburg (Pastamusik)
Robag Wruhme, Wuzzelbud “KK” (Musik Krause)
International Pony, Leaving Home (Playhouse)
Grungerman, Fakeln Im Sturm (Kompakt Extra)
W.B., You Might Say I’m Ruminativen Parfum Rework (W.B.)
M.Mayer, Pride Is Weaker than Love (Speicher/Kompakt)
Konfekt, Fin[Hel] (Areal)
Naum, Ari (Speicher/Kompakt)
W.B., Pusta Reime Im Knubbeltz Verfahren (W.B.)
Konfex, rex[pol] (Areal)
Nost, Is This The End? (Force Tracks)
M Mayer, Speicher 7 (Kompakt)
Superpitcher, To Turn You On, (Kompakt)
SCSI-9, All She Wants Is (Kompakt)
Akufen, My Way (Force Inc)
Goldfrapp, Train (Mute)
Quarks, I Walk – Superpitcher Schaffel Mix (Speicher/Kompakt)
Quarks, I Walk – Moonwalk Mix (Home)
Jonas Bering, Down to Big Sur (Sentrall)

Yet another first reaction

...because it's fun to blog before you've heard fully three minutes of a record.

But who the fuck let George Winston sit in on the new City Centre Offices release from Swod? It sounds like Windham Hill gone all Philip Jeck. (Now, the opposite could I suppose be interesting, if Jeck took some Nightnoise records, carved them into lock grooves, slowed them down to 16 RPM at -8, and FXed the fuck out of them. But treacling the ivories to the accompaniment of needlefluff -- and lemme guess, that's Siamese cat dander collecting on your Stantons, isn't it? -- is not ok.)

Kids: rococo noodling with your foot lashed to the sustain pedal (what is this, a Speed sequel set in a conservatory, with a bomber threatening to explode the piano if the note fades to silence?) is not acceptable unless your dayjob is as a purveyor of crystals and neatly wrapped bundles of sage.

[Full disclosure: I actually once took jazz piano lessons from a woman whose son recorded for some Windham Hillish label, the name of which I no longer remember. He also, however, played keyboards in Missing Persons, so that pretty much redeems him, and therefore myself by association. I certainly thought it was cool at the time. Actually, no; at the time, given that I was 14, I probably thought it rather embarassing. Looking back, however, I see playing keyboards for Missing Persons as immensely cool. (Whatever happened to Dale Bozzio, anyway?) This was, I believe, my first brush with Rock Fame and very likely one of the catalysts that sent me down the path towards becoming a wide-eyed freelance hack. All this has nothing to do with anything, really, but that seems to be the theme of the blog of late, so why fight it?]

Hello... hello... hello...

Holy shit. I don't think my eyes have ever gone so wide for the first bars of a CD as they did when I stuck Dizzee's Showtime in my computer. It locks into this fucked-up, seasick loop that's almost schaffel while Dizzee intones "hello... hello... hello..." over and over and over.

Only after it had gone on for one and a half minutes -- making it the most avant-garde intro to a pop album ever -- and I stopped it and the CD refused to restart did I realize that it was but an inadvertant Ovalism due to anti-pirating encoding, or some such.

For a second, though, I thought he'd gone completely off the deep end.

To be continued, as soon as I round up a proper CD player.

Wing ding ding

Dammit, Simon, would you stop theorizing for a moment and give the rest of us time to come up with something snappy?

But since you've gone and left us all in the dust again, I'll fall in line. Now I just want to know who's kiss-kerning their beats.

Easy one

If I were a grime artist (scroll down for the reference), I'd be Filch.

Apropos of absolutely fucking nothing

One of my favorite songs ever, or recordings, anyway, must be Gray Matter's version of "I've Just Seen a Face," which I think is a Beatles song, but really can't be sure. If I'd bothered to chime in to Jane Dark's listeners' project -- which I started to do, but then held off, because for a frightening moment I couldn't think of a single goddamn song with words that I ever sang to myself, ever, with any kind of regularity -- this would have been the song. Last time it popped into my head, before this moment -- and for perhaps the first time in years -- was sometime in June, walking along Colón in Barcelona, headed towards Barceloneta on an afternoon so sparkling it felt almost delusional. I didn't think about the words then, and don't exactly now, but maybe that's not true either. Such a song of optimism and delirium I'm not sure I've ever heard. I first heard it when I was perhaps 16 and I suppose it's been with me ever since, crawling a smooth and rutted circle somewhere deep in my, um, gray matter. A perfect verse and a perfect chorus do-si-doing endlessly towards infinite bliss, in spite of the inevitable unidirectional arc implicit in the "falling." Enough to make believers out of the most jaded and degraded of us. Enough to make me think, yeah, I can be maudlin -- like I'm being right now -- and fuck it. I've just seen a face...

Bittersweet

I saw the video for Kylie’s “Chocolate” recently and didn’t think I liked it – seemed too much like breathy, stock R&B – but somehow it’s catching. (This is a good thing: my listening tends to be far too prejudicial. I like to be seduced; I like, in fact, to be proven wrong.) I love the way she falls into this toggling between two notes in the bridge, up and down, up and down, up and down, stuck in this interminable little lock groove (right after she’s sung, “I waited so long…”) and then filliping out and into this wonderfully filigreed little trill (“…and then you came…”) that carries a kind of implied acceleration without actually speeding up. Despite the breathiness of the vocals, Kylie’s delivery is in fact incredibly weighted, as though swimming towards the surface with lead strapped to her ankles.

Better still is Tom Middleton’s remix, which effectively translates her two-note toggle into a bassline that just bobs endlessly beneath gorgeous sunrise pads cribbed straight from the Cocteau Twins. The first bits of the vocal that Middleton exploits are precisely this snatch of the bridge, which I think is not coincidental – recognizing its locked-groove quality, he taps into it and finds no reason ever to leave. Completely ignoring the original’s rather D’Angelo-like minimalist drum pattern, Middleton swaps in a deceptively upbeat, open-hi-hat-heavy rhythm to propel the waves of melted taffy. I’m still in the first phase of infatuation, so my appraisal could change, but today I’m willing to class this one of the greatest seven-in-the-morning-on-the-beach tunes ever. It’s seven minutes long, but I wouldn’t complain if it stretched to 70.

Minimal Melchior

Thomas Melchior has to be one of the most under-appreciated talents in the Minimalist Continuum. While his biggest successes were probably in his Vulva project alongside Tim Hutton, which released three albums of acid squiggles, radical tempo variance, and drum machine mayhem (two on Rephlex and one on Source Germany), it was their Yoni project that first alerted me to Melchior, and as I blogged a few months ago, My Little Yoni remains one of my top ten or 20 “electronic” albums of all time.

He dropped off my radar until the past few years when he started releasing under his own name for Playhouse, but in fact throughout the late '90s he was working alongside Baby Ford in at least two duos, Soul Capsule and Sunpeople. Rededicated to the minimalist project, he applies the spirit of microhouse – spaciousness, truncated musical elements, a playground at recess’ worth of swing – to a more traditionalist deep house aesthetic. It’s jacking, melodic, muted without sacrificing punch and glossy without giving up the grit.

Melchior also ran a short-lived label called Aspect; the CD version of his excellent new Playhouse album, The Meaning, contains many of those tracks on a bonus disc, and a remix 12” or two is in the works as well.

I recently spoke to Melchior for The Wire, catching up with him in his Berlin studio – he’s just relocated there from London – shortly after his return from several months in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. That article will be out in September; read on for the full text of the interview – the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series of uncut interviews here on Chez Sherblog.

PS: Now that the new album is out, what are you working on?

TM: I don’t know, really, just some new stuff. I haven’t really kind of done anything for the last few months because as you know I had a baby. That’s why i went to Brazil. My girlfriend lives there, and we had a kid there, a boy. So that’s been taking up my time.

The whole resettling to Berlin the last year, there’s been a lot going on.

You’d been in London before that?

Yeah, and I finally decided that I should go to Berlin. I kind of had a plan for a while, but it’s quite a move after a long time. The older you get, I think, the harder it gets to make a change. So I’m kind of a bit homeless at the moment, I don’t even know where home is anymore.

So what’s your background? I thought you were English, but on the Ongaku site it says you’re German but raised in the US, Spain, and England.

I’ve always been moving around with my family, so I finally ended up living in Washington DC, and I did a few stints in NY as well. I’ve always kind of been moving around, but the last 20 years I’ve been in London. Pretty much became like a London boy, and I finally tore myself away from it. Because there were a lot of changes going on there as well, you know, in the last seven years. England has become a bit, I don’t know – it’s changed the emphasis a bit and the electronic music thing isn’t really, it hasn’t got the same force there as it has in Germany.

Well it seems not to be happening in England at all these days, except for some small sectors.

Yeah, it’s a shame. Obviously there’s a lot of talent there and people doing it, but it’s not really connected together. There you feel quite isolated. In the last few years I’ve been feeling quite isolated there. Me and Peter as well, Peter Ford, we lived in the same neighborhood –

Which one?

In Ladbroke Grove, Portobello, a part of town that’s become really flash now in the past few years. That’s kind of part of the change. It became more and more ritzy. It’s kind of nice, but after a while it becomes too much, and you’re like, Oh my God, I’m starting to participate in this glitzy world. I didn’t want to, you know? I didn’t want to do that. It doesn’t go with the music – there’s something about it, and I’ve seen that in Berlin, it’s a lot less glamorous here and it’s more down to earth. In a way that’s better for the music, there’s less bullshit, you know?

It’s interesting you say that, because a lot of people tend to accuse the microhouse scene of being this glamorous, jetset, globetrotting, flashy music. And you’re saying the opposite, that a glitzy city can’t support that music.

Well, to a certain extent there is the house scene, which is almost always a little bit more glitzy, isn’t it. You know, the sort of Luke Solomon, Derrick Carter – which is really wicked, I think that’s really wicked as well. I love that Derrick Carter kind of stuff. But it is veering towards the more chic end. I don’t know, the parties here in Berlin seem to be a lot rougher. You know the Watergate?

No, I’ve never been to Berlin.

You have to come! Well, for me I’m kind of rediscovering it, in a different way for me. It’s great making a comparison to London. It’s a German kind of thing. Adjusting to the German way of thinking is a bit of a change from the English way of thinking. The English are a lot more relaxed, kind of laissez-faire… They’re more relaxed, aren’t they, kind of more soulful in a way. And that’s maybe reflected in the kind of music they like as well. They don’t like it too intellectual, too intelligent, or too…. I don’t know.

It’s interesting because what I hear coming out of Playhouse or Perlon is incredibly relaxed and sensual and soulful.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. This kind of minimalism, a lot of people have to get it first, don’t they. But in a way you don’t want it too big anyway. The music becomes too big; it’s nice if it’s kind of small, [played in] small clubs, it’s much nicer, isn’t it? I think so. I don’t know, it’s definitely a change in Berlin.

So what drew you there, was it the community?

Yeah, basically. Over the last few years, I got to know Zip more and more, and basically yeah it’s four years now, and he was always quite into the stuff I was doing, and Ricardo as well – they’re kind of like my biggest supporters. After a while I realized that I should give it a go. Try going back, you know, because sometimes it’s nice to touch your roots again.

Where is your family from?

From all over the place, but I spent about 10 years in Freiburg, in the Black Forest. Near Switzerland.

I don’t know Germany at all – I’ve only been to Cologne.

I don’t know Cologne. Sounds quite happening.

A million producers, but not much nightlife, which is perhaps different from Berlin.

Here it just seems to be – I mean, compared to London, people say that’s the trap in Berlin, that you get there, there’s so many things to do, you can always go out. And everyone is here as well, you get like – I mean, it’s great having everyone there. Luciano, Ricardo, Daniel Bell… it’s really nice. It’s basically a meeting point. It’s almost mind-boggling to get all your favorite producers in one place. It’s probably like Detroit or something.

Is Peter Ford there as well?

No. I’m trying to convince him to get over here as well but basically he’s got different circumstances and it’s harder for him to leave. I think he’d really like to, but it’s hard for him to get himself out of there for the time being. You never know. Everyone’s trying to get him. It would be perfect.

So Brazil, you’ve been spending time because of your girlfriend…

I’ve always been into Brazil, so I kind of, yeah, basically via my girlfriend there. But basically I wouldn’t mind kind of living there – obviously it’s everyone’s dream to live on the bay somewhere…

This is in Salvador da Bahia?

Yeah, and it’s a totally different world. I really like it there, I really like the people. I suppose it’s like, you said you’re going to Chile, so you know the difference. You get a different perspective to the world you live in, this high tech, everything modern, big cars, and then you go into this world, and you meet a bit rougher side of life.

It’s interesting because the whole Perlon crew has a strong Latin American connection via Chile. Now you’ve become part of the German/Latin American contingent as well.

It’s odd, there’s some cosmic thing going on.

Is your time in Brazil starting to filter into your music?

Obviously I don’t want to do, like, Brazilian house music. To translate it onto a minimal level is a bit more challenging. But I’m working on it, yeah. I think it’s not quite – there’s so many different styles you get influenced by in Brazil, so many different directions – there’s so many different rhythms. Just so many rhythms you can use there, it’s great. It’s a great country for learning rhythm, understanding it – getting the African mixed with the white, with the Latino, Portuguese… that’s probably the most amazing thing about Brazil anyway, is the mixture of cultures. It’s unbelievable the kind of variety of people you get there. It’s quite mind-boggling.

I was only in São Paulo once, for a week, but it was unlike anywhere else I’d ever been.

São Paulo is obviously a bit more European, it’s like the European Brazil. When you go further up North the African influence becomes stronger, and it becomes poorer and poorer as well. Salvador’s an amazing city. It’s African baroque, basically. Really surreal… it seems odd, you know? Like some weird fantasy. And everyone’s playing drums all the time, it’s unbelievable – at least the Baroque part of the city feels like it’s vibrating. There’s an unbelievable energy.

So in a way it’s not entirely unlike Berlin, where you’ve got parties going on 24/7.

Yeah, though there it’s obviously the more primitive variety. Here it’s more in a controlled environment. The whole atmosphere’s more controlled.

Electronic music isn’t really going on in Salvador. I mean, the whole thing in Brazil, obviously the further south you go you have the more interesting… well, Buenos Aires is a bit of a hotspot, isn’t it. Everyone goes there, basically, and then São Paulo sometimes. They’re more switched on, and they’re really into what’s a bit trendy. The further up north you go, their idea of electronic music, is like the batistaca [ed note: I didn’t catch this word] kind of stuff. Really fast, really hardcore – that’s what they think is techno, you know?

It’s a bit like it used to be here 10 years ago, it’s 10 years behind. On a mass level, you know. All the old rave DJs from the UK, you know – it’s really funny, you meet people you haven’t seen for years. “Oh, what are you doing here?” It’s like, “I’m playing on a rave.” The same stuff [they were playing 10 years ago]!

Tell me about your passage through the rave scene. I think I told you, but Yoni was one of the first 4/4 records that really turned me on. I’d grown up punk rock, and somehow anti-electronic music, and when I heard Yoni it just flipped my head around.

That’s great, I think that’s really great if you can get people into it who normally wouldn’t really like that. Part of my brain has an element that understands a person that doesn’t like techno music. I can understand if a person says he doesn’t like it. I can understand there’s something to it they obviously don’t like.

It’s quite nice if you can do it in such a way that you can get somebody into it that wouldn’t really – I suppose, coming from the same background, you know, being a musician you understand a certain fact, certain things about electronic music – you could do it a bit lighter, or make it really obvious… I think it’s really great you say that, coming from punk rock. I used to like punk rock as well, but obviously I’m a bit older.

How old are you?

39. I wasn’t punk rock, I was more, I guess, new wave. I kind of had a few musical growing-ups, basically, as everyone does. I kind of come from a black music background as well, liking James Brown, Funkadelic… just basically completely funky music. Anything that kind of goes, basically. Punk has that energy as well, doesn’t it. Ch-ch-ch-ch-

Yeah, the forward motion –

Yeah, pushing it.

And at what point did you get into the rave scene?

Well, pretty much from the beginning, really. It was kind of like, doing electronic funky music, when the acid stuff first started, and you could hear it on the radio, you know. ‘86, ‘87, you were always really listening to it, yeah, crazy sounds from America. So obviously that had a big influence, and from then it started growing and I started getting deeper and deeper into the music itself. Kind of started going different directions, and yeah, basically – the progression got more and more dancy, basically, like a path that was opening up.

That’s where I’m at at the moment. There’s a lot of stuff which is more ambient, which I really like – it’s a lot more on the electronic, electronica, I suppose. And now it’s much more, like, well, as you know… minimal.

Kind of, I don’t know, maybe there is a direction, a natural progression in electronic music – especially when you get a couple of decks, and then you go, “Hold on – I want to play this together with another record!”

I was going back through the Vulva records, which I haven’t listened to in a long time, and I was intrigued by the variety of tempos. Nowadays, and frankly I like this, everything’s in the same range. But that Vulva record is really all over the place, from half-speed to double-time…

Obviously, there’s a lot of styles to explore. In the beginning there was kind of a search for a style, like which is the one… because they’re all good, you know? I suppose in that era as well, it was more like the thing if you did an album, it wasn’t just for the club, it was kind of like an album, a band album. It’s nice if you have different tempos, especially if you don’t have vocals, that you can bring variety through the beats and the tempos. It’s not like that any more now! [Laughs]

I like the fact that I can play all my records together and mix them seamlessly – within reason.

I kind of think there is something addictive about it, 125, 128 BPM, jacking. There’s something about it, I’m addicted to it.

Tell me a little about the new record. What you said earlier – you understood people who don’t like certain elements in electronic music, and that might be what appeals to them in your work – the new record in many ways is a traditional deep house record, with a lot of elements that I would otherwise find boring, but there’s a lightness of touch that puts it over the edge.

Yeah, yeah. I suppose that’s the way I like it. When I go out – I’m kind of a house fan, I like sexy house music. I have a weak spot for it. And I kind of like, the more the beat is bumping and grinding, the more I like it. Obviously with the garage stuff, it’s got this two-steppy – sometimes it’s too crass, bang in your face, almost like drum’n’bass. But I try to make it a bit garagey, and the other element, another influence I have, is Chez and Trent productions, like Prescription Records and Balance, this sort of phase of – I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, it’s kind of – in my eyes it’s the best house music that’s been made, some of the best, anyway. Ron Trent and Chez Damier, that’s the golden era, the mid-‘90s, and everyone was in that scene. Derrick Carter when he was beginning, or not the biggest DJ in the world yet. That’s the kind of style. It is quite basic as well, what they’re doing. In a way their productions are a lot bigger, in the more classical kind of Kevin Saunderson studio productions, in a way. But they’ve made it sound very small already – you couldn’t really play it in a big club because it’s too small sounding, in a way, and very muted, and very… unlarge, you know? Almost understated, and in fact immensely beautiful. Obviously that’s the direction I like – taking the sound and making it basic, having the rhythm pumping and using certain elements that in a way are traditional, but they work. They can be minimalized.

It’s a bit like bringing the old, that era, and trying to fuse that.

Your music is very suggestive. You’ll have one little keyboard blip that implies an entire melody you don’t have to say.

That’s right, it’s like hinting at what could be. It’s basically like, obviously the music’s kind of, the whole kind of minimal house stuff is really wicked like that. There’s a lot of, a lot more now, funky minimal… it’s a lot more sexy, the music now. Because a lot of the German stuff was a little more stiff, you know.

Well, it’s going in a couple of different directions, because on the one hand, Kompakt is going in this trancy direction, like the Ferenc stuff, really banging, it would be hard to call it sexy – and then what Ricardo Villalobos is doing is in the opposite direction, that it goes so deep into the groove, it’s weirdly static. It sort of draws out a moment over the space of several hours.

It’s true, you know. Ricardo kind of works that was as well, doesn’t he, using long sections and then editing them, doing it live and then editing them later on. He kind of thinks like a DJ anyway, so obviously – that’s partly why the tracks I do as well are great tools as well for a mixer. You can use them very easily as tools, and Ricardo likes that as well. Obviously you have to make them really long and very repetitive.

It’s a certain element of dance music is made like that, isn’t it. If you think as a DJ already. Because you know that they’ll want to mix it.

So it’s intentionally incomplete.

I suppose, because you complete it on the floor.

And yet your new record is a really lovely listening record, I listen to it around the house all the time.

Did you get the Aspect CD as well? The finished copy has got a bonus CD – it’s a little bit like a hidden gem, the way it’s worked out with Playhouse. You know about my label don’t you?

No!

That’s like my third attempt at running a label. I’d done it in the past, during the ‘90s, I never had the success that I wanted to make it continue. So Aspect, I started that in 2000, and only put three records out, but these three records have become quite sort of sought after. I don’t know, not many were sold, but the ones that people have, they love them. It’s like collaborations with Peter, and another French guy, and a couple of friends, and it’s a lot more varied than the album. There’s a bit of a variation going on, and in a way, that is a real gem.

So if you buy the CD of The Meaning, there’s an extra CD with all the aspect stuff.

Yeah, basically, with all my back catalogue on it.

Wow. Will you be reissuing the vinyl?

Playhouse is taking two tracks out of it, and Ricardo is doing a remix. It’s like four years old now, but it basically slipped under. You can get the vinyl through Hardwax,

That’s really nice on CD. The album itself is more jacking. When I heard them together, I thought, “Oh no! The bonus CD is better than the album!”

I’m interested in your productions because on the one hand there’s a similarity to your colleagues in Berlin, and yet you’re using drum samples instead of clicks and burps and pops. Where are you sourcing this stuff from?

Yeah, it’s basically done the old way, with an Atari and outboard gear. It’s pretty simple, pretty basic. I’ve got a good mixing desk, fairly good. It’s quite simple, but basically – I’m glad I didn’t – there was this time a few years ago when everyone changed around to the Mac, and I suppose it’s just me and Peter, he as well is an Atari man, we just sort of stayed on it because we wanted to continue with the music. I found a lot of people who switched over the to the Mac thing kind of lost it a little bit, for a while. I figure, if it ain’t broke…

So you don’t have plans to go to Mac then.

Well, yeah, I’ve got a Mac already and I’m sort of in the process of switching over. [Laughs.] It is kind of… obviously with time, you realize that it’s a lot easier on a Mac, you know. The control is tighter in a way. But there is something great about the old hardware. The Atari has a tighter groove than a lot of the laptop programs. It’s more primitive, and therefore the groove is more… bang! People can’t really explain why it is, but it’s just got a better groove. There’s another machine, an Akai hardware sequencer, and sometimes these machines have these particular grooves to them, and you can’t really get that on a laptop.

It seems to have improved now though, so that’s why I’m changing. People say it’s MIDI or something, there’s a millisecond delay or something. There’s definitely a difference, almost becomes like a trademark after a while.

I suppose it’s a challenge as well – obviously I’m inspired by the laptop music as well. Not all of it is good, I have to say. Often I find that the sound is a bit – it sounds too hollow. It sounds great and perfectly engineered, and all the gear you’re using is all in one machine, it’s a lot easier to control it, give it a unity. Whereas with analog equipement I find it’s more manual.

Well, I recently saw a laptop producer follow a pair of DJs, and I love his work, and yet there was something missing, following the vinyl, which was pressed so live and hot – it was as though the laptop just couldn’t replicate that intensity of sound.

It’s a different sound, you know. It goes back to the digital thing, and although I can’t claim to know much about the analog to digital converter business, it’s quite hard to get right. People say they can produce the analog sounds in digital programs, but it’s still not quite there. Obviously it’s becoming a lot better. But again, vinyl, a track always sounds much better once it’s on vinyl, definitely. It’s got a warmer sound to it, doesn’t it. Especially with bassy stuff.

Another band, Plaid, I think they’re great as well – they like to use a digital kind of setup, completely digital, and it does sound a little bit tinny at times. It’s hard – at the end of the day, these are like details. You can get used to it. If you listen to all digital stuff, you think this sounds great. But if you put a vinyl on, you go – oh!

Tell me a little about Soul Capsule.

It’s basically this project that’s established itself. We’ve been friends for a really long time, and basically started working together, and we seemed to work quite well.

Before I was with Soul Capsule, I hadn’t really established my profile so much, and when I was working with Peter I realized that it was an important thing, and he guided me along a bit, so I became a little more independent. And by that time this sort of more jacking house direction became the thing I really like to do. So I kind of established myself by working with Peter. It was quite a hard process, because you kind of realize you’re in the shadow of somebody, so it can be frustrating as well. But basically we continued because everyone said it was great. It was a good combination as well because Peter’s really slow, he slows the process down, and you kind of get in deeper.

I think it’s more fun as well with two people. If you’re by yourself it becomes a little – personal life comes up, the lonely hours in the studio. But with a friend it’s really good fun.

With Yoni and Vulva you did a lot of really acidic work. Have you been tempted to go back to that, especially now that acid’s coming back?

Obviously it’s the old Rephlex kind of – well, the acid thing. But then I’d go with the old sort of Rephlex philosophy, which is basically doing acid music but not necessarily using acid sounds. So basically the whole idea is that it’s kind of trippy, isn’t it? That’s what acid is, for me, anyway – you know, get fucked up, trip out with the music. I suppose, yeah, it’s always tempting to do an acid track. But then when you switch that sound on, you go, “Nah,” you can’t do it.

Anyway, I don’t know – I don’t like being part of a trend particularly, you know. I kind of feel like I see myself outside the trend, over the years. If it then slips in together with something, that’s great. Obviously that means you sell more records, doesn’t it, if there’s a trend. But yeah, I mean, no. I kind of think my music is a bit acidy anyway, without using the acid sounds.

But yeah, the old acid stuff is amazing. The acid sound is part of what gets a lot of people into the music as well, this sort of element, that kind of frequency. But the acid thing got a bit ruined with the Goa thing, didn’t it? That took on the kind of, hey, let’s throw some trips, get really fucked up… it really crystallized into that, didn’t it? That kind of psychedelic trance. The excess of acid music.

I know quite a lot of people from the psychedelic trance scene, from London, you get to know them sooner or later – or a lot of people from the old days as well. And they throw good outside parties. Good parties; the music always sucks. Hippie chicks, you know? [Laughs.] But a lot of these people, they’ve kind of progressed as well – they’re really kind of into the minimal stuff now. They’re particularly into Akufen. So you see the continuation of this acid vibe – obviously that’s more the insider Goa people who switch to Akufen and realize that if you can take a trip to Akufen it’s a bit of a step up from psychedelic trance.

Maybe we could talk about minimalism briefly. You’ve always been to a certain extent a minimalist.

Yeah, I suppose, obviously the thing about minimalism is you keep it to the essentials, and you concentrate on the part rather than on the overall effect. You basically build it through all these layers of parts. Obviously you become more and more into the parts, and then you want it to be more and more simple so you can hear the parts quite clearly. I find that it’s kind of complicated, but you can still look through it. And if you blast it up too much and make it too big, it’s too much. I often find if the music’s too – on the whole I’ve always liked the more muted sounds. If it’s too bang, the snares are too loud; I find that with a lot of the Trax stuff, for instance, they’re very clanking, aren’t they. Obviously there’s a minimalism of the sound, and a minimalism of the parts.

There’s a restraint in the sounds you use, and a reduction of the elements.

I like that about, basically the whole of this popping and clicking, I like that about the minimal direction of the past few years. That the sounds have become very chk-chk-chk, clicking.

Well I think Pantytec is the extreme example of that, very clicky and scratchy.

They’re quite small sounds, aren’t they. I like when you listen to someone like Herbie Hancock, you know – he does like, basically, it’s a kind of jazz funk, and it’s electronic but everything using very small parts, and very snappy and yet very flowing.

That’s almost exactly what Jan Jelinek once said about Roy Ayers’ Ramp project.

Obviously it’s come about a bit as well through having a laptop or whatever. When you hear this minimal music on these cheap speakers, like on your laptop, it kind of pops really nicely, doesn’t it? I reckon that’s how it came about. It sounds good on a big system, obviously, but you get a lot of fuller sounding music, and you have it on cheap speakers, and it doesn’t sound as good. So I reckon that’s how the clicking got into it. [Laughs.]

That’s kind of a dream come true, the minimal house thing. You get a lot of it in the hip hop production as well; that’s becoming more minimal as well, isn’t it. Like really stripping it more and more – obviously that’s the future.

Indie rockers say the darnedest things

"'Funky' is... an unusual word to use in describing music made up almost entirely of electronic sounds."

Decisive

Henri Cartier-Bresson has died. I saw an exhibition of his quite by accident when I was around 13 or 14, and there was no looking back.