By definition, and harking back to it’s original origins, it means a musical style that means anything goes. To some it means a specific period in Ibizan clubbing history, as Terry Farley, DJ and producer, says when questioned. “Its all about Alfredo – pure and simple. A South American kid in exile looking at the rich and fabulous slumming it at an after hours club off their rockers and thinking ‘I can play anything and they will dance’. The UK take on Balearic is totally shaped by what he played in those two summer seasons before 1988. By ’88 by and large he was playing HOUSE – using that logic Balearic lived for two beautiful years then died a death in ’88.”
So what does Alfredo, one of the Godfathers of the whole scene, think? “Originally, it was as simple as me trying to make a party with a very cosmopolitan and different crowd very late at night, or very early in the morning!!! A crowd that came from another places and was open to a special experience. This fact gave me the opportunity to play all kinds of styles and tempos of music, and not only English, also Italian, French, Spanish, Brasilian, African, South American… That was the beginning. In actual terms – a mixture of chill out, lounge and dance music. At that time in Ibiza I could play soul, reggae, rock, pop, Latin, and if I like it, the crowd would like it. They where kind of ready for that. And I think they where looking for that `cos I was one of them!”
It’s certainly true that Alfredo was the original DJ and there are those like Farley who believe his playlist in those two years is where it began and ended, but there are thousands more around the world that picked the baton up and ran with it, loving the anything goes spirit of the genre that allowed DJs and producers to take in folk, ambient, house, R&B and whatever suits the mood.
Manchester duo Moonboots and Jason Boardman of the Aficionado club probably have a better take than most on the overall sound of the modern balearic beat. “Its all about playing anything good outside of the four-four mainstream for minds and feet with a balearic edge. Referencing the multi-tempo playlist of Ku (above in 1985), Shoom and the Cafe Del Mar, disco has been added to the mix alongside electronic and folky oddities.” Bill Brewster, author and DJ, shows the extremities of the genre, “Balearic Beat in 2012 is the same as it was in 2011, 1999 and 1984. It’s shit pop records and brilliant EBM records. It’s everything and nothing.” We disagree on the shit pop records but then we like The Blow Monkeys. Mark from International Feel, the label behind DJ Harvey’s recent releases amongst many others, also goes for the anything goes angle. “Balearic Beat is anything I want it to be… Anything you want it to be. In a world of digital noise, black sausage waveforms and ringtone pop music, its pure atmosphere and melody, the last bastion of real emotion in music. Or it maybe just Terje’s moustache!”
The Terje he mentions is Todd Terje. Norwegian Terje, a DJ, producer and maker of edits (we haven’t got space to go into those now), has recently show his ‘man most likely to’ colours and has been getting a big worldwide response to his recent ‘Inspector Norse’ release – a record that takes in disco, electronic sounds and his love for an analogue synthesizer, its the perfect track to show the dancefloor side of our sound. With the Pitchfork website taking notice of Terje’s release it seems the time for the balearic scene to step up is soon coming. Mudd, owner and producer of the uber-balearic label Claremont 56 agrees, “Modern balearic music seems to have upped it’s game. Last year saw some wonderful new music made with a few more band albums coming to the shores. This year will hopefully see some more of it being vocal led and with a fresher look on the style.”
The DJs find it hard to pin down. When asked for his thoughts, Swiss DJ Lexx, one of the scenes finest mix-tape meisters and respected DJ, says “I have no idea how to describe balearic beat in 2012. Is it really up to me to say/define what it is? Is there such a thing as balearic beat in 2012? I’m struggling with this one…” Its the undefinable that makes it almost like a secret society. You either get it or you don’t. In or out. Stuart Leath, long-time clubber and owner of soon-come record label Emotional Response thinks the DJing style of Lexx sums its up. “Just listen to how he puts it all together in his mixes and that for me pretty much captures it… No-one else is really close in my mind.”
So, what does it all mean to us at Test Pressing. It means the beautiful sounds of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra with their fusion of world and classical music in the 80s. It means finding strange records no-one has ever heard or hoping to find a B side on an Italian pop record with ‘that’ sound. It could be any of the host of new producers and DJs bringing the sound full circle to the current day and starting to bend its edges into new shapes. It’s getting a new mix for our website and marvelling at the amount of music that fits our world. It’s not just music. Anything can be balearic. The art-house film ‘Bagdad Cafe’ is very balearic for example, and on the subject of video, if you want to watch the most balearic thing ever then check the Ku Tourist clip ‘Look De Ibiza’ linked to below from the mid-80s with its amazing soundtrack. To summarise, to us its an attitude.
We’ll give the final word to Alfredo. A don and Ibizan legend. “My definition of Balearic; its a music mostly, eclectic, happy , sexy, not cheesy, that gets its roots in the origins of dance music and flourishes on the dancefloor, as a sound that makes you forget genres, or categories and you just enjoy it, listen to it, dancing and sharing it. Beat poetic, but real!“
Spanning many scenes and sounds, Harvey Bassett has been unconsciously carving his global cult notoriety for almost 25 years. As a DJ, Harvey is like no other. His infectiously positive personality seeps into his eclectic sets that aren’t limited to meaningless genrefication and often journey for six hours. Harvey will play whatever he feels, how he feels, and will never spin a lyric out of context. Inspired by his encounters with Larry Levan, he started the lewd label Black Cock with fellow Englishman Gerry Rooney and released legendary reel-to-reel edits which became heavily sought after and widely bootlegged. With a long list of credits as remixer, producer and session player, he has been involved in recording outfits Map Of Africa and Food of the Gods, as well as his recent solo project Locussolus. After overstaying his Visa, Harvey has spent the last 10 years bouncing between Honolulu, Los Angeles and New York. A newly acquired green card finally allows him to visit Australia for the first time.
Michael Kucyk: Are you enjoying the freedom of having a green card?
Harvey Bassett: Yes I am, this year I took a tour of Japan and Europe, which was fun. It was nice to get out and about. I don’t want to spend the next 20 years on the road. It’s nice to be in one place for a couple of months so I’ve been enjoying Venice since I got back.
MK: With such a large gap between visits to Europe, the UK and Japan, have you noticed a dramatic change in any club cultures?
HB: Not dramatically, no. I mean there might be a whole new generation of kids that have come through in that ten years but there was definitely a percentage of the old school represented too. It was good.
MK: Are there any new countries that you’ve toured recently with scenes that have excited you?
HB: Nothing so far. It seems like the scene is small. The venues are maybe only up to 1000 people but globally it seems to be pretty healthy with all the digi-communication and all the rest. People tend to know what’s happening.
MK: You’re involved in thirtyninehotel, a club in Honolulu. How’s that going? Does it have a community following?
HB: Pretty good, chugging along out there. I actually haven’t been out there for ages because I’ve been touring. There are definitely people there but I don’t know if they’re thirtyninehotel people. We’re open five nights a week and stuff goes on there. It could be anything from a seminar of lawyers or earth mothers to a wedding or a jazz band, reggae band, rave party. On the weekend it tends to be R’n’B based music on Fridays and dance music on Saturdays. There are regulars that come out for those nights.
MK: Has this international travel encouraged you to start digging again?
HB: When I was away in Europe I got into it but I think that was more to do with the guys I was hanging with. They’d be like “Harvey there’s a warehouse two miles from here with five million records,” and I’d be like “Let’s go then!”. I don’t purposely go out searching for them anymore but if stuff comes by way or if someone has a bright idea then I’ll go off and dig for some tunes.
MK: Did you have much luck at the warehouse?
HB: That particular spot was in Switzerland. Usually at a place with that many records it takes a whole day just to understand what’s going on in the room. It’s like “OK I’m getting a vibration from this area.” I found one or two records but I actually gave them to the guys I was digging with. Knowledge swapping.
MK: Can you recall your strangest digging experience?
HB: I remember once being in a warehouse somewhere in New York and we had a packed lunch and got locked in for a couple days with mountains high. We uncovered a full working record player so we got to listen to the tracks right there. I’ve had various rooms ankle deep in water with rats and the records are covered in dog shit from the guard dogs at the storage units. Some awful, stinking, brutal stuff. There’s also AIDS hospices where you get gay guys who have been disinherited by their families and all their loved ones have died so all their possessions end up in a warehouse. You go down there and pick up some disco records. That’s maybe morbid instead of strange but at least they go to a good home.
MK: Have there been opportunities for you to tour Australia in the past?
HB: Loads of people have said it but nobody ever made the call or took the kangaroo by the horns. I’ve always been down. I’ve even got some distant relatives and a few good old buddies out there. But this is the first time it’s actually come together and its perfect timing in many ways. It’s a good time of year and it seems like the scene is healthy.
MK: I hear that you’re an avid surfer. Are you looking forward to hitting some waves out here?
HB: Yeah man! As long as it’s not too strenuous! I might drag out a long board. I just bought a new wetsuit and I’m considering bringing it along so I don’t have to borrow someone else’s stinky beaten up wetsuit.
MK: You should watch some cult Australian surf movies like Crystal Voyager or Morning of the Earth. Both have classic psychedelic soundtracks.
HB: I’ve seen both of those. I’m big up on the surf movies.
MK: Earlier in the year I saw you play at Cielo in New York’s Meatpacking District and you opened with a medley of Justin Vandervolgen’s edits. Is he one of a few producer-DJ-edit makers that inspire you?
HB: Yeah I think he’s really good, he’s a friend. Actually I think that was the first three songs off his Golf Channel mix. I was like “that’s fucking great, I’m going to play it!”. So that fantastic mixing wasn’t me. It was Justin making it super smooth although I was adjusting it as it was playing. There’s a thing called Hot Q on the CD player which you can edit on the fly so that’s handy.
Loads of people inspire me. So many European cats making new records and edits and obviously Rub N Tug with Eric Duncan and his C.O.M.B.i stuff. On my European tour I played alongside 20 of the most happening DJs on my scene and everyone gave me a CD with 30 edits on it. And I was like “Whoa!”. Just mind-boggling amounts of rare cosmology. There’s some sublime and some ridiculous, you just have to check them all out.
MK: You’re bringing DJ Garth with you on this forthcoming Australian tour. Do the two of you share a similar spiritual vision?
HB: Spiritual vision (laughs)! There’s not a spiritual bone in my body mate. Me and Garth go back a long way. We’ve been friends for 20 years. He’s a gentleman and a scholar and a real good time DJ. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather be on the road with for a few weeks. He’s definitely part of and a purveyor of the style of DJing, if there is one, that came out of our scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He’s a great DJ and has a great bedside manner as I would say.
MK: How did you two meet?
HB: I don’t really remember. Probably at the Zap club or a TONKA party in Brighton many years ago.
MK: What about Gerry Rooney? How was Black Cock a collaborative effort?
HB: He would often come up with the tracks that we would edit. He’s been a collector, dealer and DJ for many years and has access to unbelievably incredibly great music. We would have some fun cutting up and editing those tracks and putting them out. Although we haven’t done anything together; although we did do a remix kinda but even that wasn’t really together. It was sort of a Black Cock record but he remixed; it was kinda official but he was in London and I was in LA and we basically did a mix each. Gerry was definitely instrumental in the Black Cock thing, for sure.
MK: He seems pretty illusive. What does he do now?
HB: He’s still DJing and dealing records. I’m not sure if he has a website that you can buy records from him or if it’s by secret phone appointment only. I know he DJs out on the scene in London and gets around the world.
MK: The names Black Cock and Map of Africa are pretty potent with a sense of perverse attraction. Were you channeling some raw sexual energy when creating the music?
HB: To a certain extent. Obviously it’s all about sex – the potency of the Black Cock, the double entendre and the tongue in cheek font. And the same with Map of Africa. Just to have fun with word play, and also secret meanings that aren’t that secret. It’s a joke but it’s kinda cool at the same time. To me so much of music is sort of a version of fourplay, especially on the dancefloor. You’re sizing each other up and it’s a version of sexual play in many ways – the way you move and express yourself, shake out or dance with someone. I like names. I often like inventing names and concepts. Obviously Black Cock and Map of Africa are prime examples of the sort of fun we like to have.
MK: Food of the Gods doesn’t feel as erotic.
HB: That’s because I didn’t make it up (laughs)!
MK: Are these just recording projects?
HB: We’ve never performed live as such. It would be nice to be able to put a live unit together and play out but me and Thomas [Bullock] basically never have the time. He’s in New York and I’m in LA, and when I’m in New York, he’s in Europe. To get a tight act together it really takes a couple of months of living together and working together every day for a few months. A couple of years later we’re deep into other projects and our solo projects so I don’t know if Map of Africa will ever play live.
MK: What can you tell me about the Rwandan Ice Cream Project?
HB: Basically these drummer girls came over to New York from Rwanda. They were holocaust survivors and had come over to learn to make ice cream so that they could take the knowledge back to Rwanda and get some parlors going to make a living. It turned out that they were members of this all woman drumming ensemble so we put them in the studio and recorded a couple of hours of songs and chants. It will be released and all the profits will go towards a Rwandan good cause.
MK: Have these girls since returned home?
HB: Yes. Hopefully they’re ice cream millionaires by now.
MK: What does a regular day for Harvey consist of?
HB: Wake up, have a cup of tea, let the fog of the night before clear, decide if I have anything to do, go to the studio, jump in the ocean. You could say I’m awfully romantic and that I get on my motorcycle, drive up to the surf and have a macrobiotic sandwich on the way. It swings between that and peeling the kebab that I slept on the night before off the side of my face. Finishing off the can of hot special brew that I left on the windowsill. Straggling down a very oily 50/50 spliff before staggering out into blinding daylight. In the last couple of months I’ve been pretty healthy and productive. I’m all about good food. A friend of mine catches a lot of fish in the ocean right in front of the house and brings back lobsters and flounders. I would imagine Australian’s are quite used to that behaviour but it’s pretty exotic for an Englishman to actually be able to cook local fish caught a hundred yards away.
MK: Are you eating some quality tacos?
HB: Yes. Without question, the best Mexican food in the world outside of Mexico is in Los Angeles. There are some phenomenal tacos of every variety. I like to eat the ones from the traditional Hispanic taco trucks that feed the workers. You can get three carnitas tacos, a seafood tostada and a Mexican coco cola for five bucks and you’re stuffed and ready to go back to cleaning toilets. Happy and full.
MK: What do you think you’d be doing if you didn’t get into DJing and producing?
HB: Absolutely any kind of mundane brainless job like greeting people at the supermarket. A job that wouldn’t take up any of my brain so that my brain could be left to meditate. I once worked in a factory where the speed of the machines was such that you couldn’t day dream, or you’d loose a finger or two in the blades. I actually learnt to slow the entire productivity of the factory down by turning a particular knob. It was just slow enough so that everybody in the factory could daydream and everyone was happy and could get the job done. But this is where the party’s at and I don’t want other people spoiling party time.
Are there rules when it comes to edits? Should there be? RA’s Will Lynch explores all sides of a thorny issue that shows no sign of going away.
A few months ago I had lunch with the guys from Soul Clap, Eli Goldstein and Charlie Levine. We met up at their usual Berlin haunt, The Michelberger Hotel, and ate schnitzels and maultaschen while we talked about something central to their craft: edits, and more specifically, unauthorized edits. In terms of producing as well as DJing, edits are a big part of Soul Clap’s sound, and their rerubs of other artists’ songs have earned them both admiration and criticism. For some, tracks like 2010′s “Extravaganza” are a clever reuse of pop culture that make for great moments on the dance floor. For others, they’re unoriginal at best and examples of plagiarism at worst. In one of RA’s more controversial reviews, Jack Haighton gave voice to the second opinion by saying of “Extravaganza,” “Yes, it’s catchy enough. (It should be. It’s taken from a platinum-selling album only five years old.)”
Like many successful DJs, Goldstein and Levine have an interesting way of being both very serious and very laid back. Talking about edits brings out both sides: they take the subject very seriously, though their stance on it could hardly be more laissez-faire. “Where do people get these rules?” says Goldstein. “Part of what makes this music so amazing is that you really can do whatever you want. It doesn’t make sense when someone comes along and says ‘oh, that’s not allowed.’” As they see it, edits have been around since the days of disco, and what they’re doing isn’t anything new––in fact, it’s one of the most essential building blocks of production. “Think of Ice Cube, ‘Jackin for Beats.’ Or Moby, ‘Go,’ one of the biggest rave anthems ever. You know what that samples? The Twin Peaks theme.”
As for the ethical side of things—the problem of benefiting from someone else’s art—they’re not convinced they’re causing any harm. “For me, when you’re doing vinyl-only, it’s a pass,” says Goldstein. “You press 500 copies, you’re going to lose money. The whole reason you do it is because there’s a demand, you want to give people something they want. You don’t do it to help yourself.”
Levine thinks about this one for a minute. “Well, you could definitely say edits helped our success.”
“Yeah, that’s true, but the edits aren’t so different from the rest of what we do––our DJ sets, our original tracks, our mixes, it’s all the same thing.” They also maintain that they would never make a fuss about someone else sampling their work, as long as it sounded good (though they were a little irritated by Joel Alter naming a recent track “Soul Clap”—”Maybe we’ll make a track called ‘Joel Alter.’”).
Soul Clap’s line of thinking is common, and not just within their immediate scene: the free-for-all mentality is shared by countless techno, hip-hop and even pop artists. But that doesn’t mean it’s agreed upon—far from it. Though they’ve been around for nearly 40 years, edits remain one of the slipperiest aspects of electronic music culture. For some artists, they’re a lark, something done just for fun to pass around among friends. For others, they’re a serious form of artistic expression, in the same league as original productions. And for some they’re lazy, not something you should take credit for and possible grounds for a serious lawsuit. One label manager who falls somewhere in the middle put it this way: “I guess it’s kind of like drug dealing. We all know it is a big part of our scene, but only the really stupid drug dealers are going to talk about how they do it publicly, which in effect shows they have nothing else going on for them or nothing else to lose.”
The basic meaning of “edit” is itself a source of disagreement. Originally, the term referred to a song that’s been lightly modified for club use. This is what Tom Moulton had in mind when he cooked up the first dance edits back in the mid-’70s. “I worked at a bar on Fire Island, and I watched people on the dance floor,” he said. “Back then everything was edited for radio play, so the songs would end after three or four minutes and you could see this confusion—people didn’t want to stop dancing to the old song yet.” Moulton became famous for what were known as Tom Moulton Mixes: new versions of pop songs that extended rhythm sections, repeated hooks and tweaked the levels here and there to better suit a big sound system. These relatively minor adjustments made the track infinitely better for clubs, and the words “Tom Moulton Mix” became something DJs looked for in the bins at record stores.
Back then the only way to make an edit was with scissors and reel-to-reel tape, but even in the age of Ableton, many edits follow Tom Moulton’s blueprint. “Sometimes when I hear a track, right away I start thinking about what I’d change,” says Ryan Elliott, the Panorama Bar resident and head of A&R at Spectral. He makes edits all the time, but instead of putting his name on them and selling them, he keeps them for himself and his friends. “[Ryan] or Shaun Reeves will send us these zip files full of edits, everyone loves them,” says Berlin-based DJ Bill Patrick. “Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make the track way better. Mathew Jonson has this track, ‘Cold Blooded,’ it has this amazing bassline that leaves and then doesn’t come back in. I wrote [Matt] and was like ‘I love that track but I want to fucking kill you for not bringing that bassline back in.’” Rather than playing the original and working around this detail, a producer like Elliott or Reeves might fix the bassline and play out their own version instead.
That’s what you could call the classic model of an edit, but these days edits often involve a much greater level of artistic input. The easiest examples of this can be found on W+L Black, Wolf + Lamb’s vinyl-only edits imprint. This is the label that gave us most of Soul Clap’s edits (the ones that have been released, anyway) and a couple dozen more by artists like Hot Natured (Lee Foss and Jamie Jones) and Nicolas Jaar. Though they’re stamped as edits, these tracks usually act more like remixes, albeit ones made without the stems (or separate parts) of the original track. Take the label’s latest release, Jaar’s remix of “Work It” by Missy Elliott. Everything aside from the a cappella is completely different from the original, especially the overall mood, which is eerie and subdued instead of crass like the original. In other words, the way it’s reinterpreted is more artistic than it is utilitarian.
“For me, making an edit is like going on vacation,” says Jaar. “It’s a way of getting out of your head, your usual creative process, and just doing something totally different.”
For other artists, the edit is much closer to the core of their creativity. Eduardo de la Calle is the DJ and producer behind Analog Solutions, a low-profile, vinyl-only techno label that sold nearly 8,000 records in 2011, its first year of operation. His productions are highly original pieces of work—modern, imaginative, stylistically fresh—but also heavily indebted to the past. “The idea was to develop a label to pay tribute to the art of sampling,” he says. “Creatively remodel old gems maybe unknown to the younger generations.” Most or all of Analog Solutions’ records sample classic house or techno artists: Carl Craig, Aaron Carl, Basic Channel. At times the samples are indiscernible, but sometimes they make clear references to older songs—for instance, one uses the inspirational speech from “Transitions” by Underground Resistance. De la Calle goes to pains to make clear his respect for the original artists: in the second pressing of the label’s catalog (the first sold out), there is a large sticker on each sleeve itemizing what’s been sampled, sometimes over an image of de la Calle wearing a Metroplex sweater and a ski mask.
“The idea to put the stickers on the covers is one way to say thanks to the people who really influenced me to do the music that I am doing today,” he says. “But some people get confused and think it’s some strategy to get famous or something.”
De la Calle’s tracks are often confused for edits—Berlin record store Space Hall calls him “Mr Edit”—but that’s not how he sees them: in his mind, all but a few are original productions. His opinions on sampling etiquette are in many ways identical to Soul Clap’s: as far as he’s concerned, sampling is one of the essential building blocks of electronic production, everything is fair game and there’s no hard distinction between original productions, remixes and edits—these are just three different points along the same continuum.
This kind of sampling has earned de la Calle a few detractors—one Berlin record shop stopped stocking Analog Solutions because of it—but he is by no means alone in this approach. Greg Wilson, the English DJ and master of the reel-to-reel edit, says this kind of thing reflects a musical tradition that predates even disco. “It’s the same as it’s always been with music,” he says. “Music of the ’60s was drawing from rhythm & blues and the blues itself, taking guitar licks from old tracks. There’s nothing new in that—it’s something that’s always happened and always will happen.” Colin de la Plante, better known as The Mole, takes this line of thinking beyond music altogether: “Even Nabokov ripped off Lolita,” he says. “There was another book, also about a guy who’s obsessed with this girl name Lolita, same name and everything. Nabokov’s book is way better, but he got all of the basic ideas from someone else.”
Some artists feel that, more than being just permissible, edits do a valuable service to the original. De la Calle says that he “rescues” classics from Chicago and Detroit by making them sound cutting edge again. Soul Clap half-jokingly compare themselves to history teachers, chronicling dance music for a younger generation. “The music ceases to be old,” as Wilson puts it. There’s evidence that many original artists feel this way as well. In 2006, the French DJ Pilooski released an unauthorized edit of Frankie Valli’s ’60s tune “Beggin.” Valli heard the track and liked it. Instead of suing Pilooski, he and his label worked with him to release it officially. The original track had been largely forgotten, but the edit brought it back to life: Pilooski’s version made it into an Adidas commercial, and even spawned a cover version by a Norwegian band called Madcon. Soul Clap went through something similar with their edit of “Bakerman” by Laid Back. After their edit had been out for a while on W+L Black, Laid Back’s management got in touch with them with an offer to clear the samples and release it on their own label, credited as Laid Back vs. Soul Clap.
So what’s wrong with edits then? It depends on who you talk to. Maybe the simplest objection is a legal one: unauthorized edits violate copyrights, and copyrights exist for a reason, namely to make sure artists get the money they deserve. Plenty of artists go through the trouble and expense of clearing their samples, and those who don’t are only making the market more dysfunctional.
“I don’t think it is constructive to do things that are basically illegal,” says the aforementioned label manager, who asked to remain anonymous. “Let’s not beat around the bush—it is effectively stealing. I know people dress it up in polite terms, that it is reinvigorating old music or it is this and that and the other, but the bottom line is that anyone who makes edits and do not pay mechanical property rights to ASCAP or GEMA, and are probably not paying anything to the original artists, are effectively trading off other peoples’ work.”
Another prevalent argument has more to do with artistic merit. When Tom Moulton and his peers made the first edits on reel-to-reel tape, they were, intentionally or not, designing a musical experience that had never existed before. The same could hardly be said for many of today’s edits. “You have this glut of edits which are no longer interested in diving deeper and deeper,” says Finn Johannsen, the DJ, music critic and Hard Wax employee. “Back then, there were no computers, so beatmatching and the convenience aspect was not the point of it. Today, there are a lot of edits floating around where the only purpose is to make DJing easier.” He finds many of the arguments in favor of edits “valid but lazy. You can always say ‘It’s always been this way,’ and of course it was, but to make that your main mission… it’s just a question of what you’re aiming for as an artist.”
There is of course the ethical angle as well. Some would say that an artist who makes an edit takes credit for something that is largely not his or her own. This opinion was at the root of Haighton’s review of Soul Clap’s R&B Edits: is it really enough to tweak a platinum-selling record and put your name on it? It doesn’t help that many edits, not least those in the Wolf + Lamb camp, replace the original artist’s name with that of the editing artist (“Soul Clap – Extravaganza” instead of “Jamie Foxx – Extravaganza (Soul Clap Edit)”). Granted, this is only meant to keep snooping lawyers from stumbling upon an illegal edit through Google, and when the edit is of a widely known pop song, the assumption is that listeners will recognize the original. But is that valid?
“I think it’s just the opposite to be honest,” says our anonymous label manager. “I think that a lot of kids out there don’t have the musical knowledge or depth and background to understand the historical references being made. I know people that have used a Todd Terry drum loop and have gone, “oh no no, that came out of my sampler,” because they don’t know any better. I think ten years ago, if there was a big sample people would know the sample and maybe be more respectful about it. Now I think everything is up for grabs, it’s a free-for-all and nothing is sacred anymore.”
It’s worth noting that a number of artists either didn’t want to be interviewed for this article or agreed to do so only if they could remain anonymous, mostly because they’ve done their share of unauthorized edits and don’t want their name linked to something that is, after all, illegal. Contrary to what many producers think, however slim the chance of repercussion may be, there is reason to be concerned. “I know of people in this business that have used illegal samples and have been sued in the past, and they have lost more than 100% of the record sales…,” says the anonymous label manager. “So look, if you have some young kids and they are telling you some stuff about edits, please just remind them what they are doing might be illegal and they may not know exactly what they are doing, because once it is on the internet that is it, it is published.”
Even if you’re not convinced by the legal risks, some argue that since listeners will associate an edit with the original artist (and perhaps assume it’s their work), that artist should have the opportunity to sign off on it. “People are going to hear your edit, and they’ll hear the original artist, but maybe he or she never would have done it that way,” says Ryan Elliott. “To release your edit of somebody’s track without even showing it to them, I don’t think that’s right. You at least owe them the courtesy of getting to say ‘yea’ or ‘nay.’”
Meanwhile, there’s a much broader opinion that sweeps all of these discussions aside: in a place as chaotic as today’s music industry, why bother doing things by the books? Most artists have stopped expecting to make money from their records, copyright laws are ill-fitted to the culture and erratically enforced, and nearly everything is on YouTube or illegal download sites anyway. None of this looks set to change anytime soon. In this lawless environment, it can feel a bit quixotic to play by the rules, especially when no one can agree on them.
Greg Wilson describes the same situation in rosier terms. For him, it’s “open season” or “the wild west,” a place that can be very exciting to those who accept it. “We’re in an unprecedented moment,” he says. “Recorded music has been around for about a century, so we have this incredible amount of material to draw from. And then we have this situation where hip-hop, the most successful music form of the late 20th century, is basically about taking two records, extending those records and putting a rap over the top of what was in reality someone else’s music but making a new thing. So for a lot of artists, especially younger people, that’s what they’ve grown up with, that’s all they’ve ever known, so they look at things in those ways. That’s their way of expressing themselves, and it’s the language they use.
“Old fashioned people might find it a bit out of control,” he adds, “but this is where we are. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
In “Everything Popular Is Wrong,” Stefan Goldmann claimed that the more artists deviate from the known and established, the better their chances are for success. But why should this be so? Now he offers a detailed examination of the psychosocial framework that underlies what we listen to, looking into the factors that decide what is culturally relevant and what is not — with surprising results: exploring the unknown is not only more fun, but also more rewarding.
The amplified champions
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard, its protagonist Rabo Karabekian muses on the origin of special talents and the diminished opportunities in modern societies: “I think that could go back in time when people had to live in small groups of relatives – maybe fifty or hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. […] of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communication has put him or her in daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness.”[1]
Science has had a thought on this subject, too. This development has been named the Superstar Effect[2], in which presumably only minuscule differences in talent or slight advantages in competitive situations snowball into the domination of a whole market by one or a few performers. If you want to buy a recording by a soprano opera singer, you’ll most likely want to buy one by the best — the number two soprano will have a hard time moving any CDs, since the presumably slightly better number one will have preempted the market. The CDs cost about the same, so why spend any second thought on lesser talent?
The superstars obtain what I’d like to call a “first call” position: it is not just about income, but mainly about opportunities. That’s where things strike culturally. Everybody prefers the top performers. A festival wants to present and a label wants to sign the best artists, a movie producer wants to hire the best actors and playwrights, someone who goes to court wants the best lawyer, and so forth. Only affordability and availability seem to give the rest of the list any chance. That’s why the superstar gets the greatest choice to pick from the best opportunities, earning disproportionately more rewards and spreading out to even wider recognition, while the other contestants service whatever is left over.
This cumulative aspect of superstardom has been described by sociologist Robert K. Merton as the Matthew Effect, named after the verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” In other words, the rich get richer, the poorer get poorer and success breeds success.
What are rewards?
An artist feels rewarded when she receives the attention of the audience and of those mediating between artist and audience. Rewards are people coming to hear a performance, spending time listening to recordings, learning the specific style, recommending the music to others and following the further offerings of the artist. Rewards are receiving critical acclaim by experts and peers, finding followers who copy the style, getting the aesthetic message distributed with the help of those who service the media or manage the venues where artists meet the audience. In short, the more social interactions the artist’s efforts produce, the more those efforts have been rewarded. That’s the way society views an artist to be “excelling.”
On the economic side, all these interactions produce fees, royalties and other sorts of material exchanges. People pay to attend concerts, to listen to recordings or to consume media coverage. In varying shares, these payments eventually reach the artist. Usually income will develop in parallel with these social interactions. Respectively some economists have argued that social relevance and monetary rewards match, i.e. whoever ends up earning more is also the better artist, offering the higher quality works of art. Such reasoning makes most of us cringe simply because we don’t trust the market to be a good judge on matters of quality and relevance. Investigating this assumption, in what follows I’ll discuss some theories that separate quality, relevance and the rewards system and examine how they interact.
Birth of the star
But how do we decide who is “best”? Even experts often disagree on the qualities and talents of top performers. And we all have encountered the notorious prevalence of some cultural product that no one we know in person seems to consider even “good,” yet it is inescapably all over the place. It’s not as if we’re all listening to the Rolling Stones or whoever dominates the stadium act category in music. There are many artists who comfortably occupy a place of their own without having the reach of a stadium act. So there must be something else going on as well.
Reasons given for the emergence of superstars range from differences in talent, amplified by mass media[5], to the need to communicate about the same topics when socializing with others[6]. I don’t think these models match what we experience in reality. I’d like to offer a different explanation based on the effects of mental shelf space limitation and social proof. The concept of mental shelf space is analogous to the shelf space limitations in retail: a shop can store only so many CDs, books or brands of cereal. In any given category our minds only comfortably deal with between three and seven items and zone out on the Long Tail, limiting the number of names we can memorize[7].
Most people will not bother to regularly follow more than a few novelists, musicians or movie actors. There are simply not the psychological capacity, enough time and funds to compare thousands of contestants in order to figure out who should receive our limited attention. The search costs would be too high. Therefore we try to minimize them by employing shortcuts. Sticking with the best is one of those shortcuts. And in order to quickly identify the best we look out for social proof. Social proof is a psychological principle that states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct[8]. We assume that enough of the others have gone through the search process and have identified the best when choosing one over the others. Whenever we are uncertain of what to look for, we’ll try to figure it out by looking at the choices of others.
This can go to bizarre lengths: Participants in an experiment were told that two shown, obviously different geometrical objects were the same. Astonishingly, when social proof is overwhelming (actors pretending to be other participants identified the objects as being identical), an MR imaging of the brain indicated that the objects were actually seen as being identical[9]. In other words: In the right social context, we override our own judgments and rewire our brains to see, feel or hear what’s actually not there[10].
Music is a means of social distinction, too. We actually do want to associate with certain groups of people and disassociate with others. With social proof we can figure out what others do and match our behavior accordingly. Social proof is so attractive because it helps us socialize, identify our group and save a whole lot of time, too. We might end up watching a mediocre movie, but we’ll enjoy the company of like-minded friends. In cultural contexts we rarely ever experience severe pain from following that strategy. Well, unless the movie was “Cowboys & Aliens” of course. In the bigger picture, social proof and limited mental shelf space promote diversity of categories and monoculture within categories at the same time.
These psychosocial factors are the reasons why the Long Tail doesn’t work (within one category) and people flock to the upper end of the scale. Against what a lot of propaganda claims, no distribution model or technological measure has ever changed this. Only a few geeks and professionals will ever bother to check out more than a few alternatives, and we all end up with the superstars. In a self-fulfilling prophecy these eventually do get better than the rest since they are exposed to better opportunities, get more funds to reinvest in their work and education, as well as better access to and allocation of other supportive means.
Quality is overrated
A nineteenth-century French novelist named Arsène Houssaye coined the phrase “the 41st chair” to describe the plight of talented individuals, deserving of rewards or recognition, who are nevertheless bypassed as these rewards are garnered by a select few. Houssaye’s phrase was inspired by the Académie Francaise. This elite institution, founded in 1635 during the rule of Louis XIII, was designed to identify and reward the nation’s greatest talents. If you are elected to one of the 40 seats you retain your position for life.
These positions are so important to French society that the members of the Académie are called the “immortals.” The immortals that have held seats include some of France’s most famous citizens, from Dumas to Poincairé to Voltaire. It is intriguing though that the likes of Descartes, Molière, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Diderot, Stendahl, Flaubert, Zola and Proust never got in. It was not that they lacked the ability. It was just that the limitation in numbers made them inhabitants of the “forty-first chair.”[11]
Houssaye’s phrase is a good analogy to what happens to the other contestants within one category. Once the shelf is full, they are relegated to the forty-first chair no matter how great or valuable their actual contributions are. Mental shelf space has two varieties though, a vertical and a horizontal one. Vertically, within one category there are a few superstars and many inhabitants of the 41st chair. Horizontally though there are many more individual categories, each with its own superstar structure. That’s why we don’t all listen to the Rolling Stones exclusive, but also Theo Parrish, Carsten Nikolai, Pierre Boulez, Meshuggah or Fred Frith.
This is intriguing, since horizontal mental shelf space for anything seems to allow for the coexistence of much more items than vertical: we know more separate supermarket product categories than brands of ketchup for instance. In marketing theory the according strategy is known as category positioning: if you can’t be number one in an existing category, create a new category. That might be a good explanation why culture is always changing. The contestants’ determination to reach “first call” status (and the impossibility to get ahead on crowded paths) makes them invent categories. Whoever creates a new category into people’s minds is likely to be associated with it due to social proof snowballing effects.
The horizontal dimension is a social one in the first place. Individuals don’t follow all categories available, but have preferences of a few, becoming “fans” of a style and its representatives respectively. Still, whenever we decide to engage with something less familiar (“let’s go to the opera tonight”), we consult social proof again. Then we join the already existing fans and skyrocket the chosen superstars’ social exposure. That is why the artist who is considered best by the public is not defined by talent or social chatter, but by category leadership, which is usually obtained when the category receives its initial public recognition (“Oh, that’s interesting — who does this?”).
That’s why the actual quality, say of works in a new style of music, doesn’t matter much for success. This explains why often artists creating great works later on receive seemingly unjustly little recognition, while others reap the rewards. Some had their names identified with the category earlier on. Deepening a category is an activity that leverages those already on top. It is a paradoxical situation in which increased competition actually helps the predetermined winners by inflating the category’s rewards (more attention and funds flowing in).
This failure of readjusting the “class” structure within a category once the positions have been distributed is also named the Ratchet Effect[12]: those on top do not fall much behind. It would cost the audience too much brainpower to readjust regularly. If you wonder why someone is still around artistically despite failing to keep up the quality that’s the reason. “Once a Nobel laureate, always a Nobel laureate” as Merton put it.
That effect is not always obvious. For instance, I recognize that virtually all techno superstars of the last decade now seem to lose their grip on dominating the distribution of recorded music. Their singles and albums don’t move that much anymore and their labels are shrinking to levels where they have to be cross-subsidized (even if that’s through the cheap labor of and endless supply of new interns). Still, their touring schedules are packed to the max. They do lose some ground, but no one replaces them. The Ratchet Effect applies to the internal hierarchy, not to the category itself. Categories often decline or get repositioned by other (sub-) categories, but even the captain of a sinking ship is still its captain.
Categorical morphology
In music, categories are often defined by but not limited to styles. One might be the leader of post-minimal technocumbia, but acting in a movie or wearing a mouse mask might do the job, too. “Gimmick categories” like these are usually exactly one artist deep, but at the same time they are subcategories of wider styles of music, too.
Things often get mixed up and attributes from outside music often define what artists stand for. A lot of pop has been highly influential with unimpressive musical foundations and inflated political, social or other agendas. Eventually such agendas help to break new aesthetics, too. Punk’s social and political relevance was probably earlier understood than its groundbreaking musical implications.
An initially small stylistic category might grow big and then split up into subcategories. Think of rock, having branched out in tree-like fashion with countless levels of subcategorization. It is sometimes hard to draw the line whether contestants happen to be in the same or in separate categories. Each of the 40 members of the Académie has his own story, and so have the artists on top in a bigger category. They share an audience, but develop individual profile in order to make it worthwhile for the audience to engage with more than one artist (even if that means putting on the mouse mask). The clearer the differences are the more likely we look at separate categories.
At a higher level, a subcategory might grow to become so enormous that entire other subcategories get repositioned. Once minimal outgrew loop techno (you know, the stuff Adam Beyer used to do), the leaders of minimal automatically became “bigger” than those of loop techno. The personnel’s structure within the subcategories didn’t change, but the metacategory (“techno”) found itself being transformed.
[2] Rosen, Sherwin: The Economics of Superstars, in: American Economic Review 71 (1981): pp.845-858.
[3] Merton, Robert K.: The Matthew Effect in Science, in: Science 159 (1968):pp.56-63.
[4] Grampp, William: Pricing the Priceless. Art, Artists and Economics (1989): p.37.
[5] Rosen (1981).
[6] Adler, Moshe: Stardom and Talent, in: American Economic Review 75 (1985): pp.208-212.
[7] Miller, G.A.: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, in: Psychological Review 63 (1956): pp.39-50.
[8] Cialdini, Robert B.: Influence (1984 / rev. 2007): pp.114-166.
[9] Berns, G.S.; Chappelow, J.; Zink, C.F.; Pagnoni, G.; Martin-Skurski, M.E.; Richards, J. : Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation, in: Biological Psychiatry 58 (2005): pp.245-253. For the pioneering study on conformity see Asch, Solomon: Studies of Independence and Conformity, in: Psychological Monographs 70 (1956).
[10] Now that’s just what Adornians have been waiting for. Before you get too excited having found the proof that we are all brainwashed, don’t forget that conformity phenomenons occur in any social group, including any gathering of non-conformists.
[11] I owe this to Cal Newport, who uncovered Houssaye as the author of the 41st chair equation in: How to be a college superstar (2010): pp.132-133.
[12] Duesenberry, James S.: Income, Savings and the Theory of Consumer Behaviour (1949): pp. 114-16. Also see Merton (1968) p.57.
This month BTP is co-presented by the very talented Emily Law(Warehouse Jacks, DiscoLoveChild) and she’s bringing along some of her friends for Torontos first all Waacking battle with special guest judge Jojo Dancer(Waacouture, House of La Douche, OTI, DLC)
Here’s a little primer..
Interview with Waacking Legend Tyrone Proctor
Willi Ninja clip from Paris is Burning. *required viewing*
Stefan Goldmann on why Web 2.0 can work for you but won’t for most, where all the money went and how working against the market consensus can be a winning strategy.
Electronic music. What we believed for a long time was that anyone with a bit of talent had a chance at a career of about ten years before eventually retiring from the circuit. Of course there are exceptions for whom this does not seem to apply. Francois Kevorkian has probably had the longest career here (unless we count Kraftwerk as part of our little world); and it’s hard to imagine techno or house without Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills or Laurent Garnier.
That’s the good news: it does not necessarily have to meet a predetermined end. On the other hand, artists emerging now face the hardest times ever to establish themselves. The lifespan between breaking through and being laid off seems to have reached a historic low point of half a year. The reasons behind this “haircut” to artistic longevity are the radically lowered barriers to participation, as well as the hectic marketplace discovering today’s new talent and abandoning yesterday’s new talent.
Let’s clarify “barriers”: in the old days of the music business, which was basically before the end of the 1970s, the main barriers to “making it in music” were studio time and access to distribution. Whoever wanted to be heard adequately needed well distributed releases. That is, having recorded material in the first place. The means for producing such recordings were so expensive that at some point only big corporations could spare the funds to pay for the required studio time and personnel.
The effect of this economic barrier to resources was that a couple of hundred artists and bands gained access to an audience of millions. Once a recording was produced it enjoyed a long life in the market due to the lack of competition that otherwise would have pushed it off the store shelves. Only under these conditions did the huge, continuous investments in promotion and distribution actually make economic sense in those times and circumstances.
This model experienced a serious challenge with the advent of the affordable 4-track recorder, which enabled home recording that could deliver marketable results for the first time ever. For instance, the whole late ’70s/early ’80s New York downtown scene can be pretty much explained by this piece of technology. Progress in affordable music equipment in the form of synthesizers, drum machines and samplers gave birth to a plethora of innovative styles in music, including hip hop, house, techno and drum ‘n’ bass.
At the same time independent distribution was born, conquering channels previously serviced exclusively by major corporations. The new distributors were capable of connecting with ever smaller target groups. Fueled by enthusiasm, small businesses could survive on small quantities of product previously considered not to be worth the effort. Tango from Finland and death metal from anywhere found comfortable niches with worldwide followings.
These enabled artists and the people around them to become professionals, i.e. to make a living on the music instead of funding a hobby through an undesirable day job. That was the core economic feature of the independent music culture: no riches, but still sufficient funds to avoid wasting time on activities not related to music. Anyone busy generating income from 9 to 5 wouldn’t be able to gain the deep skills necessary to sustain a career in music and hold an audience for long.
By the way, this comfortable indie-constellation was never really threatened by the majors, who only occasionally dropped by to sign away the most successful artists of any niche. Working within your own artistic preferences became a pretty comfortable thing to do back in the ’80s.
The next level was reached when it took nothing but a standard PC and a microphone (if required) to render an entire production. The software that emulated the previously needed pieces of gear came mostly for free thanks to piracy. Therefore, production costs practically hit zero and the record sales you needed in order to sustain a release fell almost to the cost of the manufacturing of the records themselves (with a few bucks for promotion).
At that point, at least in dance music, sales figures of just around 5,000 physical units were considered a “hit,” whereas a bit earlier it would’ve required a few hundred thousand units. Many soon realized that even the expense of pressing up records or CDs was not really necessary. A digital download has no costs at all. The logical outcome was distribution that granted any piece of music total availability, with the downside of being the most inefficient way of distribution ever: what should I download when there are five billion files to choose from? Whom should I bless with my attention? Do I have any attention to spare?
Contrary to public perception, this didn’t affect the majors all that much. Their problems were mostly in their inability to maximize the advantages they already had instead of wasting resources on trying to revive an overthrown order. Soon enough it dawned on them that big artists (i.e. those with the biggest turnover) can generate reasonable income through so called 360-degree-deals, covering live gigs, publishing rights, merchandise, etc. all under the control of one company.
Even the smallest labels engage in a similar policy nowadays. But the required resources to participate in the game of filling stadiums, really cashing in on movie and advertising deals today are almost exclusively in the hands of majors. Interestingly, the so called “democratization” of music production and distribution didn’t change this allocation of relevant income to the majors’ detriment at all.
Others fell victim to it. Absurdly, the complete disappearance of economic barriers to distribution (offering a free download doesn’t cost more than the time to upload the file) hit the wallets of the “indies” first, stripping a substantial part of their income. This mostly affected the artists and the personnel around them: designers, engineers, studio musicians, promotion and label professionals, music journalists, et al. The mass of competition they encountered meant anyone with a limited marketing budget had a difficult time surviving in the market.
With the same promotional tools available to almost anyone, they lost their efficiency. The professionals listed above basically lost their income. In 2000, an average vinyl single generated a return of a couple of thousand Euros, while in 2011 the same single generates a loss of a couple of hundred Euros, even without what were formerly known as “production costs.” Anything on top, like a bigger production, a decent mastering, or proper sleeve design became factors of deepening material loss. That area of the craft gets subsequently cut off and replaced by an undiscriminating routine of two-step-distribution: “save as” and “upload to.”
Fleeing to a purely digital distribution doesn’t look that much better in general: only an established artist backed by a strong physical release experiences significant digital sales. The overwhelming majority goes by unnoticed. The average “digital only” dance single generates around 100 Euros of profit, for both artist and label, now most often being the same person. And these figures go down, too. Today a couple millions artists try to reach a few hundred people. Or like the contemporary pun puts it, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 people.”
The result is a wide spread de-professionalization. If an artist regularly loses money on her efforts, she faces an economic end to her endeavors sooner or later. Being a “musician” is increasingly becoming a profession for those coming from inherited wealth or being mercantily exceptionally clever. It’s less then ever a question of the intrinsic quality of the music. What used to be done by professional enthusiasts now becomes the domain of the artists — turning them into designer, PR dude and distributor.
It all subtracts from the time spent actually creating music. This puts additional pressure on the remaining professional environment. Nowadays it is increasingly harder to get hold of well executed services. Mastering, manufacturing vinyl, music PR — no one qualified enough is willing to tolerate the miserable working conditions and hilarious paychecks of these jobs for an extended time. Whoever has the chance seems to flee the music industry for something more prosperous. The error rate in manufacturing and distribution grows exponentially and actually feeds the market with ever shabbier products in content and execution.
There’s this die-hard belief that income, at least for the musicians (but not for the professional environment), will come from the fees for live performances instead. But how do you get live performances in the first place? Well, press helps. The problem encountered there is that the media has adapted to the state of the music industry. In electronic music that means whoever succeeds in producing two singles may find himself covered by all relevant press and booked throughout the club circuit, just to be replaced by the next “lucky fool” (a term from stock speculation) about three months later.
New artists get “pumped and dumped.” What about a year old break, a production that takes longer, or time for having a baby? Two weeks without a release are perceived as a career flaw for those who had their breakthrough in the last three years. A longer shelf life in the media and on the circuit seems to be granted only to artists who started before the big flood came, which is pre-2005 approximately (if I were to spend a year on the beach, most likely I’ll be able to continue exactly where I had stopped). Or to those who buy their coverage — although that only works over a longer period of time on a five-figure budget. Most others face the high probability of approaching music as something you do between college and some dull job.
The artists’ disillusionment leads to ever lamer results in music — why bother? A single produced hastily in two hours work sells 500 units, while a delicate masterwork moves 800 (plus a bit of beer money from Beatport). These figures are in constant decline, too. The market average first pressing of a vinyl 12″ is 300 units now, which regularly indicated sales below this figure (deduct records given away as “promotion” and to friends).
What have we learned here? The so called “democratization” didn’t work. Everyone did believe they gained access. This access by itself is stripped of value, though, because no one cares that DJ XY from Z has that new record out. Through any available channel I get dozens of requests per day to listen to somebody’s track. That’s after a spam filter and a disclaimer that I don’t want to receive files. The result is that I don’t listen to files at all — I do buy vinyl regularly. DJ XY doesn’t get the gig.
If he does by accident, that’s for the cab fare. In Berlin, with its conspicuous population of 50,000 DJs, promoters and club owners don’t have to try hard. There’s always someone who will play for free if asked. Hey, that’s free promotion for the new DJ XY record. Meanwhile in the provincial town of Z, the locals “practice” for free, so they develop the skills they’ll need to “make it” in Berlin one day. That’s where things come full circle. No proper gigs, no record sales, no income. Anyone who is not already “there” doesn’t seem to arrive anymore.
The propaganda that the future will have us all giving away music for free in order to make a living on gigs has been proven wrong by reality. Because basically everybody does exactly this and still doesn’t get booked all over (or not often enough, as with most “mid career” artists). The exception being Radiohead, of course, but only after a decade on the million-dollar budget of a major. The only profiteers here (and biggest fans of piracy and Creative Commons) are the stock holders of the Nasdaq 100. If you want to make a living on music, buy the relevant stock and live off the dividends.
That’s where all the money goes that used to pay musicians and music professionals some time ago. It says a lot about the other side of “democratization,” too: the individual in search for music experiences no upside. He pays for the returns of Apple, Google, Beatport and the speaker fees of Larry Lessig and Chris Anderson by being lost in a flood of irrelevant, crappy music and the feeling that others had more fun before (hence the retro obsession in today’s music). The total de-motivation doesn’t manifest itself only in the musicians’ under achievements, but also in the annoyance of everybody else.
A frustrated DJ plays lame tunes in front of people bored to tears. That’s the average event out there. Alternatively, a collective nostalgia for some era of “old days” prevails. Everyone keeps doing the same thing out of the fear that the slightest deviation from the norm will scare away the small remaining, yet patient audience who goes along because of a lack of alternatives (we dance either because we paid or because the drugs kicked in).
Did that depress you? Now, here comes the good news: exactly because everyone seemingly performs to the lowest still acceptable standards, all you have to do as an artist is to unleash disproportional waves of creativity. Since nothing promises secure success anymore, all considerations to what “works in the marketplace” can be freely dumped and forgotten. The more out there you get, the better. It’s the only way to stand out in a totally dull environment.
The advantage is, put cynically, that the old channels are jammed. Whoever tries to break through them following “proven” old ways (which usually means emulating other people’s career paths) is wasting time and energy. We can’t learn much from studying the careers of Carl Craig or Ricardo Villalobos anymore because the conditions that enabled them don’t exist any more. The channels that do work are found elsewhere and are open to those who possess endurance, individuality and substance — the values that are disappearing most rapidly now.
To an extreme extent, success in the arts is subject to random factors (we see many successful people who have no clue how they got there, how to stay there or how to repeat it). The more radically and frequently you stand out, the more often you get exposure to those factors, thus increasing the probability of channels opening up for you. That is not spamming the Internet but creating radically individual great music in the first place. Once you enter the channel, you allow more factors to work for you, since these tend to add up (path dependency).
Art always had to be great (whatever that is) and move people in order to succeed, too. But now there’s that third dimension of having to create a wide gap between you and the competition, even if that’s just within one genre. If you can implement this idea in your work, the flood is not threatening at all anymore since it works against itself. “Unique” is the most valuable word in a crowded environment of generic ideas and overwhelming redundancy. Striving for this quality is also exactly what is most rewarding artistically. Besides screaming fans and free drinks, that is.
A very odd example for creating stand out events: I had that funny experience when I recorded an album for cassette last year. No one involved expected anything more than to have some fun with it. Still, I spent a lot of effort on this one, specifically on getting my head around the question why to use a cassette at all. No one else would have put more work than necessary into such an obsolete format. And just that brought in a lot of attention, which any file on Beatport, regardless how good it is, wouldn’t have done at all. And there was no free lunch involved.
On the contrary, distribution was severely cut down to a very few sources. Today it’s actually so much easier again as long as you can get your head around the notion that “anything popular is wrong.” Especially in mainstream media like Germany’s Der Spiegel or UK’s BBC (in features, not the usual playlists), I’ve only been covered because of totally odd projects. For the same reason new opportunities follow, which artists who cling to functionality and marketplace consensus never encounter.
I don’t play techno clubs exclusively now, but also find myself scoring a ballet, performing in museums or getting calls from classical performers for collaboration — my techno background makes me stand out in these settings as well. In return, crossover encounters of this kind add that edge to the artist’s profile which feeds back into the club scene. It’s definitely more rewarding than spamming the internet with “listen to this track” emails.
Highly individualized, lightly advertised work is way more attractive nowadays than consensus-style work, advertised to death (short, unsustainable hype is the most one can hope for there). People are starting to realize this. Many top labels stopped promoting their new singles for instance. It just appears in the shops and that’s it. It’s not unlikely that artists will increasingly lose their interest in having their output available all over and seek for a more intimate exchange with the audience.
Why plaster the Internet with files? Who finds that valuable anymore? Imagine an incredible piece of music available only once — on dubplate. Or let’s consider falling back in history — music only in the presence of its creator. No release. Come to the concert. Enthusiasm will be back when you get this feeling of attending something really special. How to create this feeling for the audience is the core task of the creatives, if they deserve that name.
That said, it still takes a huge amount of time and dedication for an artist to develop a standout profile. This raises the issue of financing a career in music. Since the indies mostly lost their capacity to fund musicians, the artist’s required initial investment has become higher again. Usually people argue there will have to be some sort of day job then.
As aforementioned, that would be perfectly fine if being occupied all day with something not relevant to music didn’t actively hinder you from devoting yourself to developing your artistic edge. Your mind will be occupied with other stuff instead of exploring the areas of sound where it gets deep. To be able to create stuff that outlasts two weeks, you’ll need to go full time at some point.
Even after tolerable initial periods of day job-cross-finance, those who succeed are never safe. Since the available funds (those remaining after the Nasdaqs sucked out what they could) get distributed to more and more people, even electronic music’s top and near-top level artists’ income drops rapidly. Periods of sufficient remuneration are followed by periods of economic frustration.
Therefore there is a need to have sources of income that are independent from your own music’s direct returns. That is, any income that can be obtained with spending very little time on it — no day jobs allowed unless you are a grossly overpaid consultant for a few hours a month, like I am occasionally. One may consider the pros and cons (there are such) of grants and fellowships, commissions from the industry or institutions, as well as sources of passive income.
The latter means that once set up, a scheme generates income without investing further time — interest, the concepts of arbitrage and leverage, or exploiting details of copyright law may serve as rather abstract examples here. How to make them work for you would be a topic of it’s own. Separating income and music in your head can be deeply rewarding. The freedom experienced in creating music to your own criteria first and even “against the market” if necessary is way more elegant than trying to squeeze as much as possible out of music that has to produce your paycheck. That is another factor contributing to an artist’s longevity in the market — having guts and principles. Get your head around it, do your homework and you’ll quickly see solutions that work for you.
Todd Terje has started a blog in which he “Asks smart people stupid questions.” This is an excellent site for gearheads and producers especially….We’ve posted the first interview with James Murphy but go check out the other interviews with Morgan Geist (Metro Area, Storm Queen) and Andy Meecham (Chicken Lips, Emperor Machine).
http://letsnerd.com/
TERJE
First question is, how do you record your drums? Can you teach me? I wanna set up a kick/snare/hihat/2tom set in a small room, it´s got wooden floor and no damping on the walls. How do I get this to sound ok? I´ve read somewhere that you have a quite basic approach to this. Please do tell, o oracle of nice sounding drums. Preamps?
JAMES
For some DFA drums:
It’s simple, but not so simple. Firstly, I like to “deaden” the room quite a bit. I put blankets up on the walls and stuff. And maybe something blocking the drums from the rest of the room with a big duvet on it, to make the reflections less. Then, listen standing in front of the drums when someone plays… Is there a lot of “low mid range”? If so, put something like a plush chair near the kit. Then, I like to make a “kick drum hut”. My favorite thing is to put a piano bench right in front of the kick. That way i can keep the mic on the kick outside the drum while still getting less bleed. Then, take the bottom heads off the toms and deaden them with some fabric gaffer’s tape and small squares of neoprene mouse pad. So they go “thud” instead of “booooongggg”.
For mics, I like to use nice nice nice mics. Me? Kick and snare are Neuman TLM 193s. Medium sized condensors. You can get away with an Equitek e100 for a cheap alternative. Snare top and bottom (with the bottom out of phase). Toms, I use very fast medium diaphragm mics – -EV RE2000s. With a slow pre-amp, like the built in pres on my Otari MX5050Bll 2-track. Overheads, I like something nice, like some Schoepps, or AKG 451s, more over the snare than the cymbals. Then, I make a “beatle sound” as well… which is a pair of old ribbon mics… RCA bk5s or Coles 4038s… One, mono, just over the kit — between the overheads. The other in front of the kick. I get a tape measure and make them both the same distance from where the beater hits the kick drum head. Those 2 mics I mix together as an “image” of the kit. The other mics are like the “disco” sound — tight and dead — and the ribbons are like the “soul” sound. And you can mix them together.
Setting the mic pres…. I run drum pres VERY VERY cold… Low input. As low as possible. So that there’s tons of un-distorted headroom. That way the ring and room and cymbal noise isn’t too loud. People tend to record drums “hot”, which is why they suck. If you record drums “hot”, they should be one or 2 mics at most. You can cook the ribbons, for example, but nothing else. I like UA 610s with the eq on them, no compression. I tend to lift the highs a bit when I print so that they have a nice disco snap. The ribbons I run thru an old Altec tube mixer.
That’s the drums, I guess…
TERJE
Can you please explain to me what a “word clock” is? You showed me at least 3 boxes of word clocks in your word clock closet the last time. Is this something I need to worry about, or can I be happy without knowing?
JAMES
Oh… Right… It’s the thing that makes sure the digital info all lines up. Each bit of sound info is like a picture. If you think of an image as
pixels, and the image you look at has 300 pixels, and so does the screen you’re using, it’s very critical that the pixels line up… otherwise, each screen pixel will be an averaging of 4 other pixels, making the resolution much shittier. That’s what happens on cheap digital audio. There’s a noticeable “flatness” that you don’t get with analog. No “depth”. That’s from the digital info being translated sloppily. The word clock is the thing that, 48,000 times a second, in 24 places, lines up all those little samples. Not a sexy job, but a critical and difficult one. So WCs tend to be both expensive and ignored. But that’s why so many tracks you get sent in MP3 form as promo sound “good” on your laptop, but then you get the vinyl, and they basically sound the same. Not very deep or interesting. They just sit there, like MP3s, Even though it’s vinyl. And so you say to yourself “well, why bother playing the vinyl”. It’s the in-the-computer-mix disease.
TERJE
What´s the best compression setting EVAR? Would life be easier if I studied lots of compression theory?
JAMES
Shit — that depends. I like playing with stuff that sounds awesome. I have some invisible compressors that are amazing, but not exciting, and I have ones with real “sound”. I use a DBX 165 VU (old, black faced VCA
compressor) and an original Teletronix LA2A for vocals. Also Purple Audio copy of an 1176 on tons of other shit. Fuck around.
TERJE
I hear you´re no enemy of VSTs, anything recommendable?
JAMES
Not a single thing. Though that shitty “mic modeller” thing was good. Not for “modelling mics”, but it had a “proximity” setting that I thought was great for bass guitar. There’s a logarithm for the curve and shape of low frequencies based on proximity that you can’t replicate with a typical eq (and it’s often the thing that “fixes” low end) that this plug in did quite well. Otherwise I use the gates on the computer (because they can look ahead) and that’s about it.
TERJE
Have you thought of constructing your own gear? If so, what?
JAMES
Yes! We make monitors now, which I use in the studio. We’re working on a pre-amp and a DJ mixer (that’s almost done… totally amazing sounding… really).
TERJE
What are your 5 most favorite synths?
JAMES
Shit.
EMS synthi A or VCS3
Yamaha CS60 (or 50, or 80)
Moog Taurus ll
Korg Poly Ensemble
TERJE
Synth/effects/thing that´s highest on your wantlist?
In the bookending chapters of Retromania (Simon Reynolds’ 450-page exploration into the culture of retro, released earlier this year), concerns are raised over the current musical landscape and its fixation on the past. Reynolds opines that pop has become inspirationally bankrupt in this last decade, turning out an endless procession of revivals and rehashes instead of surging forth into the future. He compares the big stylistic revolutions of sixties psychedelia, seventies punk, eighties hip-hop and nineties rave with today’s smaller incremental shifts, and wonders when (if ever) we might get to see such grand evolutionary steps taking place again.
Cynicism, realism or just plain codgery – where you stand on the retromania debate boils down to your own experiences and tastes, of course. All the same, Reynolds’ rhetoric has drawn as much controversy as it has praise. The aim of this Wreath Lecture isn’t to add fuel to the ongoing dissection of Retromania’s argument. My own feeling is that Reynolds puts paid to his critics’ misgivings within the book itself, if not in further interviews. As a history of pop it’s a fascinating read whichever side of the fence you sit and sceptics are more than encouraged to give it a try. The book does make one unassailable point, however: the first decade of the 21st century was largely characterised by revivalist scenes based on the repackaging of old ideas. But more recent developments this year suggest that Retromania could well represent a closing chapter in pop’s history. I’m of the opinion that 2011 will be remembered as a pivotal year in which our love affair with retro began to fade and a resurging interest in the new and now was rekindled.
Taking a look through the 2011 end of year lists, there’s an overall sense of purging, of rejuvenation and indeed progress that hasn’t been present for quite some time. And while we’re not quite speeding away from it just yet, the decade that brought us electroclash, nu-rave, emo, freak-folk and the ‘New Rock Revolution’ (certainly the biggest music journo oxymoron in history) doesn’t feel so recent anymore. Nobody asked for a nineties guitar-pop revival this year, but the call was answered all the same and met with all-round indifference. Oh hey, Viva Brother – how’s conquering the world going for you?
With a whole generation of young musicians now having been raised around club and dance music, electronica is no longer seen as a futuristic frontier. Today’s listeners are as familiar with synthesisers and beats as they are guitars, and blending these is now fairly standard practice rather than a novelty. The rock acts thriving best today are comfortable with this fact, harnessing electronic sounds and ideas when it suits them rather than trying to force a loveless marriage. This means that artists like St. Vincent or Battles can hone their unique styles through mixed media, incorporating drums that sound like samples and guitars that sound like synths (and vice versa, of course). Rock isn’t dead at all – it’s simply adapting to new ears.
The retro-fetishism of ‘80s synth pop and electro-house in the 2000s helped in some way to make electronic sounds more saleable to distrusting rock audiences. We’re past that point now. Rockism is an old man’s sport, the internet age having pretty much dissolved the tribal boundaries that once existed between rock, pop, dance, hip-hop, commercial and underground music. With access to an iPod and an internet connection, there’s no reason you can’t listen to any style of music. We’ve never felt more at ease with eclecticism. It was with open-arms that Glastonbury welcomed Beyoncé on opening her headline set, not with the question ‘Are you ready to rock?’, but rather ‘Are you ready to be entertained?’ Skrillex’s brand of buzzsaw mosh-dance has seen US hardcore and metal fans donning day-glo for the first time and raving it up to purely synthetic music in packed-out stadiums. The UK has always boasted a much longer-standing history of rock-friendly electronic bands, like the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers. But in 2011 it’s no longer necessary for DJs and dance acts to meet such prescribed criteria in order to make that crossover. Today’s audiences are no longer defined by their allegiance to the gig or the club venue – one typically leading to the other on a night out.
Today’s young vanguard are equally at ease with the internet as a musical tool and medium. The playlist at house parties can now be dictated by live streams beamed directly from multiple guests’ smartphones, spelling an end to stereo-squabbles and increased exposure to others’ tastes and influences. The multi-disciplined teen-hydra Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All transcend mere rap collectivism with their internet-savvy and idiosyncratic approach to music and media. A case in point would be the video for Tyler’s ‘Yonkers’, which managed to do in three minutes what the whole of his album tried to in 74, and whose viral distribution via internet channels was largely responsible for the masses of hype surrounding Odd Future at the start of this year. The likes of Skrillex or even Odd Future may not be to everyone’s tastes, but at least their detractors can’t complain about them being derivative. This new eclecticism isn’t the same bland melting pot of past influences, plucked, stewed and regurgitated as per Retromania. It’s a vivid technicolour tapestry of ideas. You can’t even call it genre-hopping any more, it just is. And so long as it keeps moving in the right direction, this will continue to be a positive force for future music.
The extant UK dance scene has been central to spurring on new music. It’s been fascinating to watch the exponential rise and mutation of dubstep over the last decade. From its beginnings as a humble offshoot of 2-step and grime, dubstep evolved into the huge, ubiquitous force we know today. Who would have thought that the dark, ebbing frequencies first heard at specialist nights like FWD>> would eventually have found their place at the top of the charts? Reynolds upholds dubstep as an exception to the rule in Retromania, but dismisses efforts from Magnetic Man and Tinchy Stryder as “watered-down crossovers into chart-pop terrain”. In the short time since this passage was written however, we’ve witnessed the emergence of dubstep across the pop board. The best example of this can be found on Katy B’s On A Mission – the definition of a UK bass-pop gem and one of the first successful crossover records of its kind. She is at once well respected by the underground and adored by pop’s mainstream. And although elements of trance, rave and breakbeat feature prominently, Katy’s mission in question is clearly to accelerate away from the past – influences absorbed, but never flouted. Unlike the preceding Magnetic Man album on which she featured, it doesn’t feel like a token attempt to cut & shut dubstep with pop music. It’s a celebration of UK bass from the bottom-up, harnessing that heavy modern sound to fit her own unique songwriting talents.
Far from slowing down, dubstep and its bass music offshoots are still evolving and reinventing themselves at an alarming rate. Labels like Night Slugs and Hessle Audio are continuing to release records that defy categorisation, the loose, sub-bass heavy template a seemingly bottomless well of inspiration. Bass music now incorporates a spectrum ranging from Shackleton’s atmospheric sound-sculptures to the punchy, synth-laden maximalism of Rustie and Damu.
But those looking to explore even wilder frontiers need only look to the US, and the rise of footwork – a great-grandchild of the original Chicago house scene which, like dubstep, started life as a subterranean version of a more popular style. It may have been in incubation since at least the late nineties, but to most ears the genre’s herky-jerk rhythms, lo-tech production and competitive dancing culture are at odds with pretty much anything we’ve come to see in dance music so far. The recent attention brought on by a series of albums and the influential Bangs & Works compilations on the British Planet Mu label (as well as by dubstep-footwork hybrid man Addison Groove) has seen high praise from commentators such as Reynolds, who speaks in interviews about its “jaw-drop” effect.
Listening – and dancing – to footwork feels like discovering a remote Galápagoan species that has evolved in a vacuum since the early days of house and techno, away from the influence of other dance trends. Named after the freestyle breaky-legged dance performed in Chicago basements and gym-spaces, footwork eschews kickdrums (one of the key percussive elements in house/techno derived dance music), opting for a flurry of erratic snares, toms and rapidfire samples, underpinned by booming sub-bass. Scene stalwarts including DJs Spinn and Rashad are now making waves in Europe – at high volume, away from its comparative strangeness on headphones, footwork has been delighting rather than baffling clubbers. Relative newcomers such as Young Smoke, T-Why and Jlin are pushing the style into even stranger territories. Footwork has proven to be unlike anything we’ve really seen in dance music before. The fact that this once very isolated scene is now infecting outwards bodes well for the future. With a number of albums this year influenced by the genre, by global adopters including Machinedrum, Sully and Africa Hitech, it’s only a matter of time until footwork gains much wider currency.
The world has seen an immeasurable amount of change in only the last twelve months – from the rise of the Tory-led government, the Arab spring, student protests, the Fukushima disaster, the killing of Bin-Laden and Gadaffi, the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent collapse of the News of the World, the England riots, the Occupy movement, not to mention the growing concerns over global economic collapse – there’s no denying we’re far from the pre-credit crunch era of housing booms and relative social stability. Art, music and youth culture are directly affected. There is no longer the same space for the privileged, vintage-toting, apolitical, hipster figure that came to define youth culture in the last decade. Music, as a reflection of public mood, has to galvanise itself in order to fit the changing perspectives of its audience. This doesn’t necessarily mean a return to protest music in the sixties sense of the word (God knows we don’t need any more Frank Turners), but maybe a sense of progress, of movement and action is required in these new, visceral times. Sassy post-modernism comes off as a rather shallow aesthetic when the rent’s overdue and all the shops down the road have had their windows smashed in. No wonder it was PJ Harvey’s topical Let England Shake that made the most impact on critical lists this year.
As long as there’s comfort to be gained and money to be made from nostalgia, retro will always exist. It would be dangerous to abandon the past altogether – pop history is far too rich and plentiful to be ignored outright. But pop is far from eating itself. It would be impossible to cover all the ways in which new music is thriving in 2011. I haven’t even had the chance to touch on the innovations in hip-hop and R&B this year, with Death Grips and Shabazz Palaces representing only a pinch of what’s new and exciting in this arena. It may be some time before we see the kind of seismic movement yearned for by Simon Reynolds in Retromania – but if there is one, it may already be here: we just haven’t realised yet. Rave music wasn’t the product of someone taking a pill and inventing the TB303 one night while everyone else sat about listening to The Smiths. Similarly, post-punk came from a large number of permutations and external influences over a very disparate range of scenes and subcultures, with kids reworking disco and funk licks to suit their own art-school tendencies.
The fact that there are now so many avenues to explore, (or as The Quietus’s Luke Turner puts it in his Wreath Lecture: “the continued shattering of our culture”), means a unified paradigm shift is even less likely to happen in 2011. But with the kind of impact that can come out of the slow development and subsequent explosion of original styles like dubstep and footwork, it’s clear we can still achieve enough momentum to push through those retromanic tendencies and use these new ideas to fuel and define the future.
There was a time when being able to flawlessly match beats and select killer tracks that flowed like butter wasn’t only difficult, but rare and special. Putting that on a mixtape and getting it into the right hands secured you a gig, which could lead to great things.
However, the digital revolution in DJing has changed the game in many ways – some great, some not. Perhaps the largest change, however, is how to go about making a name for yourself in an extremely competitive and highly international market.
This site has gone into great detail on how to market yourself, secure your first gig, and be a better DJ all-round. But this still mostly deals with things on a local scale. And if you are looking to take your talents to an international market, the best way to do that is by making your own music. Here’s why:
1. You can achieve instant global recognition
Online mix hosting services have helped the “mixtape” trend continue into the digital age, and some DJs have even mixed their way to thousands of fans through brilliant social networking.
But what is the most surefire way to get noticed by the biggest jocks in the industry, and of course, by their fans? Make a hit record. If your new hit winds up on Radio 1, you can be sure people from around the globe will know your name very quickly.
A fairly famous DJ once told me: “OK man, I’ll be straight up. You won’t make it through DJing. You will make it through productions. That’s the only way people around the world will recognise your name; otherwise why would someone in Romania know about you? No matter how good a DJ you are in your home town, unless you’re part of a residency to one seriously world-famous night, like Panorama bar or Fabric, it won’t happen through DJing.
“So get in there and get producing, then go to gigs and put the CDs of your tracks in the hands of the guest DJs who would play your sound, and then when you get signed to big labels people will take notice. Get what I’m saying mate?”
2. You’ll get respect
If it’s been said once, it’s been said a thousand times: it’s easier than ever to be a DJ today. I won’t beat a dead horse, but it just isn’t enough any more.
So when you’ve spent years of your life (not to mention several grand) holed up in your apartment learning to make high quality dance music that one day gets released on Beatport, people respect that.
It shows you are truly serious about the music and about your craft. It shows you understand music on a fundamental level, which of course translates into “he’s probably a pretty good DJ, too”. It shows you have dedication, and are serious about being a part of the music scene on a deeper level.
The big jocks know this; they’ve been there too. And many of them love seeing new dedicated and talented young producers work their way up, and are willing to support them.
3. It’s more about raw talent
You have to analyse your strengths and weaknesses. I’m not brilliant at networking, and the only way to get gigs where I live is to spend countless hours out at the clubs making nice with the right people, then countless more trying to get people come to your show. You’re a promoter, DJ and PR agent rolled into one.
I realised this a few years ago and knew this wasn’t for me. I figured I could get much further by sitting at home in front of my computer and learning a craft. Networking is a craft to be sure, but for someone like me, reading books and blogs on things like sound engineering and being able to set my own hours and work from home is how I can best spend my time achieving the results I desire, and it’s starting to pay off.
I know a vast amount more about making music than I did two years ago, and I’m learning more every day. And hopefully with enough work, one day I’ll have tracks big enough to make real waves. Then the sky is the limit.
4. You gain musical understanding
Putting in countless hours learning what instruments, percussion and synthesisers are used to create a desired musical effect has given me a much deeper understanding of the music than I had when I was only a DJ. And if you are a serious DJ, you know how much time you spend analysing tracks to begin with.
As a result, my DJ sets have gotten tighter and cleaner over time, with much less effort spent combing though Beatport. I recognise keys, rhythms, instruments, and basslines that will work together much easier than I used to.
This of course comes to anyone who spends enough time around music, be it through DJing all the time, or just constantly having Pandora going in the background – but producing amplifies it.
5. It gets you gigs
What’s the easiest way to start touring the globe as a DJ? Do what they used to do in the rock’n’roll days: Write a huge single that sells like crazy. Promoters see a rabid fan base and know you will pack a show.
The evidence is currently clearest with some of the overnight sensation dubstep acts. Instead of slowly working their way up gig after gig, they spent a few years in the studio, and by 19 or 20 had a hit record on their hands.
Now of course there is a bit more to it than that. Getting your hit track into the right hands can be tricky, for instance. But if you do happen to write the next mega-hit, you can guarantee that with proper marketing and exposure, eventually that right person will hear it.
Easier said than done….
I do understand that when you are just starting out DJing, music production can seem to big a task to tackle. Learning an in-depth, high-end workstation like Ableton Live or Logic is difficult, and can take years to start getting good at.
But just as you worked hard, learned your DJ software inside and out, and eventually learned to mix and maybe even got some gigs, with dedication and hard work you can learn to make your own music too.
From the perspective of neuroscience, listening to music is one of the most complex things you can do. Many parts of your brain have to work together to comprehend even the simplest tune. So what is music really doing to our minds?
The Mechanics of Music
There isn’t a single music center of the brain, in large part because listening to even very simple music combines a bunch of distinct neurological processes. Let’s first look at the more strictly mechanical aspects of listening to music. As you might be able to guess from its name, the auditory cortex is an important part of processing the sound of music. Part of the temporal lobe, the auditory cortex takes in information from the ear and assesses the pitch and volume of the sound.
Other parts of the brain deal with different aspects of music. Rhythm, for instance, is only connected in a relatively minor way to the auditory cortex. A lot goes into keeping even relatively simple, regular beats – tapping along to something as basic as a 1:2 rhythm brings in the left frontal cortex, left parietal cortex, and right cerebellum, and more unusual rhythms bring in still more areas of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum.
Tonality – the building of musical structure around a central chord – is another crucial part of musical understanding, and it reels in still more parts of the brain. The prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, and many parts of the temporal lobe all go into our ability to recognize the tone of a given piece of music. Taken all together, this means that music already brings in three out of four of the lobes of the human brain – frontal, parietal, and temporal, with only the visual processing occipital lobe unaffected…and there might be a bit more to say about that in a moment.
Music is sometimes given a quick and dirty classification as a “right-brained” activity, meaning that the act of processing music is centered on the right hemisphere of the brain. While this fits nicely with the general dichotomy that the left side of the brain is more engaged in logic and the right in creativity, these are all pretty big oversimplifications. While it is broadly true that music involves more of the right hemisphere than the left, the fact is that the processing of music is so diffuse and decentralized throughout the brain that it’s hard to come up with any single category for all the different areas involved.
The Deeper Impact
Those, however, are just the basic mechanical aspects of listening to music. A good song can trigger a cascade of secondary responses, often involuntarily. An obvious example of this is the propensity to move in time with music – not so much dancing, which is an active, independent process, but simple motions like tapping one’s toe along with the song. This is caused by stimulation of neurons in the motor cortex.
Another intriguing side-effect of listening to music is the activation of the visual cortex, found in the back of the brain in the occipital lobe. Research indicates that some music can provoke a response in this part of the brain, as the engaged listener tries to conjure up appropriate imagery to match the changes and progression in the music.
Part of the reason that music tends to be so meaningful to us is that it’s deeply intertwined with memory. Because the brain is so completely engaged in listening to music, it’s one of the parts of a situation that is remembered most clearly later on. Songs and pieces of music can serve as powerful triggers for memories – hence the cliche about couples and “their song.”
And let’s not forget the language aspect of music. Obviously, not all songs have lyrics, but those that do draw upon the language centers of the brain. The two main parts of the brain associated with language are Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area, the former of which is found in the temporal lobe while the latter is in the frontal lobe. Previous research has tended to indicate that Wernicke’s area is more crucial to language comprehension, while Broca’s area is more tied up in language production, though it now appears that there’s significant overlap. In any event, we can add them to the list of brain regions tied up in music comprehension.
The Subjective Sounds
So just why does music carry so much meaning for us? Because music draws on so many different parts of the brain, it’s hard to say with certainty, but that might actually help give us an answer. Music is extraordinarily complex even before it enters the brain – the pitch of music, for instance, has to be much more stable than frequencies we normally sound, or else it would just devolve into chaotic noise. The same is true of rhythm, tone, and other musical properties – these have to be highly complex to cohere into anything even vaguely musical in the first place.
And it’s not as though there’s any real objective measure of what counts as “musical” and what doesn’t. That shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone who’s ever read a music review, but it’s crucial to remember just how much the brain is involved as an active participant in shaping our interaction with music. Memory is one of the most obvious influences here – you’re more inclined to like a particular piece of music if it carries positive associations, for instance.
It’s also possible that a person’s particular brain chemistry can affect his or her appreciation of music. Considering how many different parts of the brain are activated by listening to music, even one unusual link in that chain can drastically alter the person’s response. There’s also plenty of more everyday factors to consider – how much a person knows about music, whether they themselves play an instrument, whether the music has lyrics, and even whether it’s a recording or a live performance can all dramatically change the particular neural response to the same basic piece of music.
The Hardwired Responses
If there’s one constant in all this, it’s that songs carry a tremendous ability to provoke emotional responses – indeed, it can even seem that that’s our brain’s primary concern when it comes to music. Brain imaging studies have shown that “happy” music stimulates the reward centers of the brain, causing the production of the chemical dopamine. That’s the same chemical produced from eating great food, having sex, and taking drugs.
Even better, the brain hangs onto the ability to understand the emotional impact of music, even if the finer points of comprehension are lost. One study, for instance, focused on a woman with damage to her temporal lobe – and, by extension, her auditory cortex – that made it impossible for her to comprehend different melodies and other basic parts of musical structure. Even so, she was still able to read the basic emotional content of the music, respond appropriately to “happy” and “sad” music in turn.
This process seems to start early, too. Researchers at Brigham Young University found evidence that infants as young as five months are able to discern when a happy song is playing, and by nine months they’ve added comprehension of sad music to their repertoire. Interviewed in 2008, BYU music professor Susan Kenney explained what the babies were responding to:
“The happy songs were all in major keys with fairly short phrases or motives that repeated. The tempo and melodic rhythms were faster than any of the sad selections, and the melodies had a general upward direction. Four of the sad songs were in minor keys and all had a slower beat and long melodic rhythms. For an infant to notice those differences is fascinating.”
And the effects of such music only increases as we get older. (Considering the babies’ responses to the music involved turning their heads slightly, you’d sort of hope it would.) We actually can have physiological reactions to music – happy music with a fast tempo and major key can make us breathe faster, while sad music in a slow tempo and minor key can slow down our pulse and cause blood pressure to rise.
Of course, the roots of those reactions are found back in the brain. It’s just another indication of how powerful and multi-faceted our relationship with music really is, and how it’s able to change our brains in ways both obvious and so subtle that we can barely comprehend what’s happening.
The Norwegian artist gets serious with RA’s Mattis With.
Todd Terje has kept a high profile in electronic music scene for the last half decade through his extensive touring, edits and constant remix assignments. Original productions, however, have been few and far between. This is about to change. His acclaimed Ragysh EP is the start of a slew of releases from Terje, which will begin in earnest with the first release on his new imprint, Olsen, in October. RA’s Mattis With recently stopped by Terje’s studio to talk about the label, the Norwegian style of DJing and the difficult task of balancing a tight touring schedule with fully indulging in artistic experimentation.
I wanted to start by having you explain the Norwegian style of DJing, and the sort of restless way of playing records.
Yeah, that’s right. In Norway you have to play with the dynamics to keep the crowd interested and dancing. What would happen over the course of five hours in Berlin gets compressed into two, because of the strict alcohol restrictions. So that makes the dynamic of a club night just crazy, but it also makes for more playful sets.
So does this apply to you when you play abroad as well?
I definitely have to adapt when playing abroad. My first booking outside of Norway was in Birmingham about six years ago. I was going to bring the Norwegian eclectic way of DJing to the world, so I packed every record I considered fun regardless if it was mixable or not; samba, punk tracks, old disco. I was really keen on bringing the vibe you’ll have at clubs like Nomaden and Dattera where you’ll drop-mix tune after tune. It went terribly. The crowd couldn’t relate at all. That’s when I learned you have to warm-up the crowd with more streamlined tracks in the beginning to prove to them that you’re able to mix properly. After that fact is established, you can take them on a ride. I had to learn the hard way.
How do you adapt to the different cities you’re playing in?
These days I’ll pack a more diverse selection that can cover any crowd or situation. So what I’ll do is test the crowd with a few more standard house cuts, maybe that is the boring 30 minutes of my sets, but when I do I get a feel for what the crowd is reacting to; the beat, the percussion, the disco breaks or melody. I don’t mean to sell out or anything, but you got to know what you’re working with.
The purists may not like this, but a DJ’s job is also to entertain, right?
Yes, exactly! I remember Pål (DJ Strangefruit of Mungolian Jetset) once stated on his radio show that he was perfectly fine with playing Madonna in his sets. “Cause Madonna is cool and DJs are, after all, entertainers.” This was a real eye-opener for me; especially that it came from Strangefruit, one of my heroes, and a DJ that I feel always plays quite artistically. This attitude also helped me adapt to the reality of playing in Norway. When you have an empty floor and 18 girls in the corner thinking what you’re playing sounds shit, why not get them on the floor with a Madonna tune and then play your shit afterwards?
So just be an entertainer then?
Not just. He probably didn’t mean it that literally either. I look at a DJ’s role as somewhat in between an entertainer and an artist. If you are the entertainer for two tracks it will give you so much space to take your set wherever you want. Rather than just playing the most introverted, weird stuff from the get-go.
Let’s talk about the producer side of Todd Terje. How did you get into making music?
I guess it started with a computer. A friend of mine showed me the music-making software called Modtracker. It had four channels and was on a PC 386 that had about a megabyte of RAM. At the time I was listening to Dutch dance music like 2 Unlimited and Scooter. So when I saw this program my first idea was to make something similar. I copied the program went straight home and made my first tune called “Mastermind.”
Haha!
It was really bad. The software had only four channels. So I started with the kick, but because of the lack of channels I had to place the hi-hat on the same channel, hitting in between kick. The next channel had a pad—a sample pad—cause if I played it, it would use up all the processing power. The main element was a one note bassline which I changed the offset on, so it would hit at different times as the beat got moving. Looking back at it was incredibly primitive, but this period also helped me understand sequencing on a basic level. So now when I’m programming I know exactly where to place that rimshot, simply because I’ve been doing it since I was 13.
Some of this experience is definitely proving useful now, as my next tracks will be quite percussive. I want to play more with rhythm structures because that’s what got me into this music. Things like Prodigy. I had no idea their beats were old funk samples. I thought it was programmed, and was amazed at how they managed to pull off such complex beats. So I was sitting at home trying to do the same with my Modtracker program.
Can we expect a breakbeat Prodigy throwback coming up then?
No, not exactly Prodigy. But more rhythms that are not just straight 4/4. There are other exciting things you can do with a kick drum.
I heard there were some interesting circumstances concerning your track “Ragysh.” Could you tell me how the track got started, and how its release came together?
Yes. I started it about two years ago. Around that time I was listening a lot to Luciano’s remix of Argy’s “Love Dose.” The thing I loved about that track was the main element, the groove pattern that runs throughout the song. This was also about the same time as the Fedde Le Grand track “Put Your Hands Up for Detroit” came out, that also had the same type of groove going for it. So I was interested in these simple tracks all about one rhythm. I played the Luciano mix a lot actually. One time in Tokyo I played it in 105bpm and that is when the party started. The track really sounds good in -20%.
But anyway, the idea was to make a track all about one riff. It was really simple to make. If you have a cool beat going, the riff will almost come by itself. So it was just eight bars with groove and the beat—sampled from Tom Tom Club and Salsoul Orchestra—to begin with. It lay around for about two years until I looked at it again. So I just added the trance-y chords without much intent one rainy night when I probably should have been working on something else.
I don’t really get a feel when I make tracks like that. They’re fun, but it’s not the most intricate thing to make, you know. But I finished it regardless and tried it out. It worked really well. Gerd (Janson, owner of Running Back Records) had heard it in a DJ set and asked me for it. Gerd always asks if I have material lying around, even if it’s not finished. So he got his hands on “Ragysh” and showed great interest in releasing it. I wasn’t planning on releasing it at all, but he was so persuasive that I just had to put it out. So without Gerd, the track might not have been out there at all.
Sometimes I get the sense that there are two Terjes fighting for your attention, there is your DJ persona and then a more artistic side of you that is the producer Terje. How do you balance the two?
You’re right. There is definitely a battle going on. I would really like to spend more time further developing Producer Terje. I feel there is so much I’d like to do that I haven’t had the time to do yet. Especially ideas with rhythm that haven’t been fully explored. Of course you have broken beat and dubstep playing with rhythms, but I’m not interested in them. That’s what I want to do next.
It’s a bit difficult, though. I’ll be in the studio making some inspired tracks that are weird and interesting, but back on tour I always have to let my shoulders down and play for the lowest common denominator to get the floor working. So when I make tracks that are weird and fun, and that I have a real good feeling for from an artistic point of view, they might not know what works on a dance floor. Sometimes I wish I had a dream disco somewhere where I could play all of this stuff, but I know when I get on the road it’s always the more smacking disco stuff that has the biggest impact.
Do you think one sometimes stands in the way of the other?
It might sound like it, but on the other hand DJ Terje also really helps the producer with the final stages of a track. The simpler the track, the better it works. Right now I’m working on a very detailed track, working on it on a micro level. If I would allow more of DJ Terje in the process I would get it done really fast. There are infinite ways you can go with arrangements, but it helps to think in the context of the dance floor. For now, though, I’m consciously trying to give the musician and producer space to experiment.
Do ever think about separating the two?
Maybe, but for my album I want to do a mix of both. I would like to show there’s more to Todd Terje than just beat-mixing and making the break come in and the beat drop where it should. It’s not rocket science. For now, I feel it’s important to produce under one name because people might listen to the music open-mindedly. I might be able to open doors to new sounds for people that never have listened to, say, Weather Report. Not that I make fusion jazz. But if there are Weather Report or weird Norwegian jazz influences in my music and the people that loved “Eurodans” like it, they might go and check out those records. If that is the result, I feel I’ve accomplished quite a lot.
Then you go into another of the DJ roles, the educator.
Definitely. I’m always trying to showcase the music that excites me—and my influences—without wearing them on my sleeve. I’ve been inspired by Wally Badarou and his magical sound for many years. His sound is something that really would work on a dance floor. So every once in a while I try to steal a little bit of his feel and sneak it into my tracks. Another example is Jam & Spoon’s “Stella,” from which I used some of the chords in my own music. What I’m doing is nodding my head in different directions to see if the listener picks up. I guess you can call that a sort of education, even though “Stella” was a big hit record. It is just my way of saying it’s time to bring back those records, or maybe even listen to them for the first time.
While we’re on the subject of jazz, you’ve told me that of all your tracks, you’ve taken a particular fancy to the remix of Bjørn Torske.
Yeah, that track shows the direction I’d like to take my sound in the future.
What is it about that that you would like to show us of your own sound?
Well it’s the leftfield drums, the feel that is sort of jazzy and spacy at the same time. Kind of like Jon Eberson’s first record with Moose Loose, without it being too jazz-funk sounding.
Is important to you that there is an element of humour in your music?
It’s important to have some sounds and grooves that crave your attention, pull you out and wake you up a little. I’m not sure if it works that way on a dance floor but it does in my head. Sometimes that is not the same thing. Again, I think you could be so much more experimental with rhythms in dance music without it killing the vibe or continuity. Every time I play the Bjørn Torske remix it stands out, but it still fits between big minimal hits.
What’s coming up for you?
I’m starting a record label with Joakim Haugland and Smalltown Supersound called Olsen. It will be my record label (music, artwork and pressing), but powered by Smalltown Supersound. The first release will be my next EP called It’s The Arps. The name of the EP comes from one of my favourite Monty Python sketches, but no one seems to get the reference! Not even the Brits. Every sound on the EP comes from the ARP 2600 synth.
I have plans to do this with other instruments too. I’ve been buying so much equipment lately that I feel each instrument deserves its own release. You can make almost whatever sound you feel like on the ARP, but even this has its limitations, especially when it comes to fast high-pitched sounds. So if I plan to do it with my other synths, it might not sound as good. Maybe it will just be limitations when it comes to the instrumentation, like just a drum set and a 303.
Do these limitations help you to be creative?
Yeah, because you have your starting point just by figuring out how to create the kick. There are so many sample packs and sounds these days; most people are carrying around a memory pen with 300 kick drums. So that makes it hard to figure out where to even begin. With this EP it was all about working around the limitations of the ARP. In the process, I came across some truly unique sounds within the synth that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Words / Mattis With Published / Monday, 26 September 2011
Todd and Andy would like to start by thanking you all for supporting BANG THE PARTY! You always have been, and remain the most important part of what has been a very successful 5 years.
With that in mind, as many of you have expressed to us that Crawford is an unsuitable location we have made the decision to once again move BANG THE PARTY! We hold no ill will towards the managers and owners of The Crawford but continued issues have forced us to make the decision. Beginning October 22nd. BANG THE PARTY! will be continuing at The Drake Underground.
For this new and exiting venture ANDYCAPP will be manning the decks while THE MAKEOVER will be performing a live set in between.
THE MAKEOVER is made up of two DJ/Musicians, Todd-Rod Skimmins (Bang the Party) and Jeremy Glenn (Instinct, Makeshift) revitalize the everyday way of DJing. The Makeover combine self-produced and existing instrumental tracks in a live performance/DJ set. Makingover artists like Janelle Monae, Gino Vannelli, Arcade Fire, Jimmy Edgar, Young Empires, Aly-Us, Washed Out, Toots and the Maytals and Siriusmo with their patented brand of rapturous grooves and soul penetrating rhythms.
Watching them play is at once mesmerizing and fun -not too hard, not too soft. These buddies know how to get the balance right. Also, Todd plays steel drums and Jeremy’s voice is like an angel. Say no more, right?
We hope you can join us at the Drake October 22nd for the continuation of BANG THE PARTY!
DFA Records seemed like a skyrocket at first, but it’s proven itself to be one of the most durable labels around—dance or otherwise. Founded by the original DFA production team of James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy and Jonathan Galkin, who runs the label’s day-to-day operations, DFA Records went into business ten years ago, releasing its first 12-inches, The Rapture’s House of Jealous Lovers and LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge / Beat Connection, in early 2002, and has been shifting shape, cannily and smartly, ever since.
The label has been leaving deep imprints all over the place ever since—what serious dance-music lover can imagine the last half-decade without the Carl Craig remix of Delia Gonzales & Gavin Russom’s “Relevee,” or Still Going’s “Still Going Theme” and “Spaghetti Circus,” or The Juan MacLean’s “Happy House,” or Hercules and Love Affair’s “Blind” (original or Frankie Knuckles remix) or Walter Jones’ “Living without Your Love,” or Benoit & Sergio’s “Principles / Everybody”? That’s just the icing, and it leaves LCD Soundsystem out of the picture entirely, not to mention divots into indie rock (Yacht) and noise (Black Dice). There’s a lot going on at DFA; it slides in easily next to Warp and Kompakt as a visionary label that has abundant room in its vision.
DFA’s vision (not to mention its ears) belongs largely to Galkin, who befriended Murphy in 2001, when the latter had a DJ residency at the East Village’s cozy Plant Bar, owned by Marcus Lambkin (AKA future DFA signee Shit Robot), where Luke Jenner of the Rapture sometimes tended bar. The deal was sealed when he heard an early version of “House of Jealous Lovers.” “A lot of the music the Rapture came out of, to be totally honest, I wasn’t that familiar with from my old job,” Galkin says. “I’m a quick learner. I got it; I understood where everything was laid out on the North American map, what was happening where. I realized a lot of the sounds, going back and buying stuff, Six Finger Satellite—it started to make sense, the lines drawn.”
Galkin’s background is a part of the interview below, which took place at DFA Records’ West Village offices—a small apartment with kitchen and shower that once served as Murphy’s residence—in July. But we mostly focused on the inner workings of DFA, its history and its tea-cosy-friendly future.
Right now, what is DFA?
Still more of a traditional record label than maybe it would appear. But I think that’s in some ways where we’re stuck in looking to reinvent ourselves. A lot of what we do is still very much part of being a traditional record label: single releases, full album releases, music videos, following a lot of the traditional routes.
What do you think that first appearance is?
Like it’s some very organized subcultural movement, like in the way we A&R and release dance 12-inches. I think people have a hard time exactly understanding what it is. People maybe are overthinking.
Do you mean, people think it’s a dance label and other people think it’s not a dance label, and it’s kind of both?
Yes. And also the amount of mystery, which I’m fine with, but it’s so much less mystery than people would expect. It’s like when people walk in the office—they’re like “This?” They think it might be located inside this cavernous nightclub.
Clearly it’s not: this is a cozy office. You said, “Stuck trying to reinvent yourselves”?
In some ways. There have been a lot of conversations between myself and James [Murphy] about what’s next. The success we’ve had throwing events and parties—partnering with maybe certain corporate brands gives us access to cash. That’s something we would want to focus more on.
Throwing parties?
Yeah, on a worldwide level. We’ve kept it special, in a way, by doing it sparingly. We haven’t gone the route of some of our peers that did it in a way more uniform fashion, probably to our detriment ultimately. But Kitusné and Ed Banger are—almost more so—event, nightlife, club-night focused. When we do parties it feels more like a one-off.
Do you feel you can do that more now that LCD Soundsystem is out of the picture?
Yeah. James’s availability makes a huge difference. For six years I heard “I don’t have time” from him. Now he’s saying, “Help me fill my time.” Not that he really needs help. It’s nice to have him available. He likes to throw parties. I’m not going to get a tremendous amount of help when it comes down to rolling up sleeves and figuring out a radio plot for specialty [radio] for the Rapture, and how to make it work at such-and-such station. It’s not really what he wants to do. If it’s simple as “I want to throw parties,” I’ll kind of take everything we’ve done.
It’s you, Justin Miller, and an intern and then James pokes his head in, right?
When it comes to the record label, yes.
When James comes in with a barrel full of ideas he’s come up with on tour and hasn’t had a chance to give you, is it a barrage?
It is.
Is it everything from high to low? Overarching ideas? “Tweak this”?
Jokingly, there [are] certain things that get his attention way quicker. If it’s really dry business stuff, he’s not even into [it]. More traditional press and radio and marketing, stuff like that, he doesn’t get too involved band-by-band. The overarching sort of events, parties, he’s very into merchandise—we talk about coffee cups or t-shirt sizes or he’ll want to do tea towels or something, he’ll jump in.
It’s always a funny test to see if he’s paying attention: you send him an email and he’ll send no [response] for days, and then you send him an email like, “What about a peach-colored espresso cup?” Twenty minutes later: “Great idea. What about this?” and it’ll be three links to different styles of espresso cups, a four-ounce and a six-ounce. “What about saucers, is that a good idea? Can we make sure the packaging is nice? Should we get stickers for the box we put the cup in?” It gets really detailed, but nothing about the actual music, really. It’s more about ancillary objects. He gets really excited. Justin Miller told me that he designed two different DFA tote bags and that James nixed both—he’s a perfectionist. Does all this merch talk dovetail with the kind of talks you have about how the music business is going to work from now on?
Yes. He does, he gets very excited about those things. Some of them are based on his ability to use his current position to bring people together, to get the attention of certain corporations, the funding, the partners that we didn’t consider before. Now it’s kind of like the sky’s the limit; we can have access to anyone if we want to.
Your office doesn’t say “DFA” on the door. How important is it that you remain anonymous in the neighborhood?
It is important to us, actually. We have enough weirdoes sneaking into the building without any signage on the door. The studio we like to be mysterious. James took some stuff down [from the website] because he wants it to be quiet. We used to get a lot of tourists, Europeans who’d want to drop off their demo, and they’d want to talk. It gets very awkward. You say thank you and move on.
It probably makes it worse in some sense that you’re perceived as a hip label, because people take the rejection even more personally, in a way they wouldn’t otherwise.
This is true. It breaks my heart, because people do take it personally. People who are quite well known take it very personally. I don’t want to name any names. In the dance world, there are people who’ve been trying to get a record on DFA for a decade now. I’ve listened to everything and said, “This isn’t right for us.” There have been some incidents that have ended in that way. I said, “I’m a huge fan. But sometimes I have to stay a fan.” That’s OK. I’m a fan of so much music.
Did knowing the difference take you a long time to learn?
Yeah. But there’s always a certain incident, or case, where no matter what I say it’s going to go the wrong way—that person is so wound up about it.
You’re not talking about the well-publicized time when James and Tim didn’t call Janet Jackson back?
No—way more underground than that. A lot of times when you show initial enthusiasm—”Oh, this is fantastic”—or you hire them to do a remix, they send every single thing. It’s hard enough doing what I do on a daily basis with the bands we have. That’s why our 12-inch singles—there is rhyme and reason once you line it all up, but what we end up putting out is very strange. There is a kind of pinhole, and if it makes it through that process—I couldn’t explain the process, really.
One thing DFA has done well for especially the last five years is slip the dance-rock tag.
Yeah. Which is funny, because it took us that long to lose it. We were running from it in some way. We’d embrace it with certain gestures, but then I’d be like, “Don’t forget, the first album we ever released was [Black Dice's] Beaches & Canyons.” I thought that made everything pretty clear upfront [laughs], but apparently it didn’t.
Let’s go back. What are you doing in New York in 2000?
I am working for a company called Empire Entertainment, a special events production company, putting on high-end corporate events. I’m a talent buyer. For chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies; it’s post-tech-boom. I’d been there for eight years. It was the only job I’d ever had since I’d graduated from NYU in 1994. I met James through a mutual friend at NYU.
We met at Passerby Bar. He said, “I’ve got to go pick up my records. Come with me. I’ll play you some of the stuff we’ve been working on. Come with me to Plant Bar and check out my DJ set.” This is probably in spring of ’01. We come here [and] he plays me “House of Jealous Lovers,” he plays me “By the Time I Get to Venus” by the Juan MacLean, and that’s it. But “House of Jealous Lovers”—it’s pretty much finished. There’s maybe one more mix, but it’s pretty much the done version, the DFA 12-inch version.
I can’t shake it. I just know in that moment—it sounds so corny, but I know this is one of those moments that could change everything. I was just a music fan at that point doing this job, and the more I thought about it in the following weeks, I got back in touch with James and went to see him DJ at Plant Bar, which sort of sealed the deal in my head. I saw what was going on—this sort of nonprofessional DJ scene. It was everything I knew, but it was put together, contextualized in such a way that I hadn’t heard myself before, but it was something missing. As someone who didn’t enjoy going to what were at the time the main-room clubs.
Centro-Fly was almost the left-field version of the Sound Factory. Obviously, that world didn’t appeal to me. The Limelight didn’t appeal to me. I’m not saying this stuff didn’t exist more than I knew, but this was a door opening and me saying, “Oh, this is where the party is that I’ve been looking for.”
Right around that time, in the back of, I think, Arlene’s Grocery, somebody had left [a] copy of Vice magazine. Then [Vice] opened a store on Lafayette St. in 2001 right near my old office. I used to go and wait for the new issue. I’d never read anything like this magazine before. It was irreverent and touched on all these subcultures that I loved and mainstream cultures that I loved. It had really good journalism. It was funny. I was passing my issue to other people to read, and they were reading it cover-to-cover. From the minute I opened that magazine, I was like, “Holy shit, this wraps up a lot of stuff that’s been floating around.” When I went to Plant Bar, I remember seeing Suroosh [Alvi, one of the co-founders of Vice] there and knowing it all tied together. People introduced me. It just kind of clicked. By July or August 2001 I’d quit my job. September 1 we started DFA. [This has] always been the office. Before I got involved James was kind of living here.
DFA Compilation #2 is where you guys really stepped out and became more than just a some big-thing-for-a-minute. Did you feel like that comp bought you some freedom?
It seemed to. In a way, that compilation seemed to wrap everything up in a way that people got it in one. It contextualized everything: you could finally sit down with a body of work that had amassed over the past three years and hear it all lined up. You could hear how a Delia & Gavin track sat next to a Pixeltan track. It was a pretty slim number of artists in total on that compilation, compared to this daunting task looming over us right now, trying to gather the long-overdue Compilation #3, which is probably going to be two compilations, because we have a ridiculous amount of material to choose from right now. But it’ll be great when it happens. It’s kind of haunting my dreams right now.
Compilation #2 was easier because we had [a smaller] repertoire to cherry-pick from. I feel like Comp #1 got rushed out in such a way that there’s definitely some mistakes on that one, though Comp #1 was [for] getting “House of Jealous Lovers” and “Losing My Edge” out to a more mass public, and on that it succeeded.
There wasn’t a lot of “This’ll show ‘em,” answering people’s skepticism, [about Compilation #2]. But it ended up being that way in hindsight. It wasn’t until I went back and re-read some of the reviews that I went, “Oh, people really took it as this sort of moment where we managed to very succinctly summarize [the label's aesthetic].” The idea of putting out a compilation is fairly mundane. So something about that we really got right. It’s good that it’ll be a time-piece, a go-to of that era.
That comp starts with Black Leotard Front’s “Casual Friday”—one of my favorite DFA records. How did that come in?
Through Delia and Gavin. Tim [Goldsworthy] worked on that. I feel like James tried some stuff on that track and it just didn’t work. Tim did a lot of the drum programming. James definitely did some stuff on there, but Tim was in for more of the day-to-day. Tim had a good relationship with Gavin. And then Gavin brought in a few people from the art world that they were involved with. Christian Holstadt is somebody who’s on that record—he should be in the credits, and this guy Daniel Schmidt, who has a gallery in Berlin.
It’s definitely one of those 12-inches where it took over a month or maybe more to make. But nobody was charging them for downstairs; it’s our studio. It was just this one perfect track that came out of there. It wasn’t like, “We’ve done it!” It was just, “Hey, there’s this new thing we’re working on. Gavin’s doing one with a disco drum.” “OK, that’s cool. Just use your time wisely.”
At the time, Delia and Gavin’s career as recording artists was secondary to being fine artists. They were represented by the Daniel Reich Gallery on Third St., which Bjorn from Black Dice is part of, and Christian Holstadt—just this whole sort of Brooklyn [art scene]. Delia and Gavin were a couple at that time. They did art together. They also did a lot of dance performances. “Casual Friday” was basically them making a song for them to dance to. Black Leotard Front—they wore leotards. Delia and Gavin did one ballet on an actual car, parked on [a] lawn. They built this plush-toy limousine made out of white spandex, but stitched, with doors and everything. It was 12 feet long. They did this song. It was part of their art. It wasn’t meant to be…
Hearing about all the people involved, you can’t help but think about early ’80s New York, where so much of the post-punk and no wave was being made by fine artists. Is that a coincidence?
No, not at all. My obsessions, besides music, are fine art and film. I went to NYU film school. At the same time, where my first job was, I was a massive fan of all this music, and a massive fan of even indie and dance and I had older brothers—he’s six years older than I am. I’m 39, so I had this older brother who was, maybe after I was 12, handing me acid house 12-inches even in ’88. We were in Cleveland, and then we moved to Chicago in ’86, so we had Wax Trax! Records. It was a very good time—you had Marshall Jefferson.
We were talking before [the interview] about the major label dance boom. I literally have a stack at home of 40 CDs I picked out that’s, like, ’88 to ’92. I got them out for Gavin. He’s working on a Crystal Ark album. We had this whole discussion of that whole era of major labels putting out dance albums. I did a similar thing with Hercules [and Love Affair]. I almost get into character, A&R’ing this record, I have a very good dialogue with a lot of the artists. Like Andy Butler or with Gavin, we’ll start talking about, “Have you ever listened to To the Batmobile, Let’s Go, the Todd Terry album? Or Masters at Work: The Album?” Both of which came out in ’91.
I get into similar dialogues with singles. But with an album it’s like, “If we’re going to go down this road . . .” There are certain artists that turn in records pretty much done, and then there’s the dialogue. Even Hercules—a lot of the songs he started recording, for me it was fine-tuning stuff. Sometimes artists record a slow song and are embarrassed by it, and it’s like, “I’m gonna tell you right now, that’s a great song.” They need someone else to tell them that. They just want to know someone else is paying attention. There’s nothing an artist wants more than to talk. They’re all hyper-narcissistic. So if you can engage them in that narcissism, and also rolling out, finding those touchstones, those references, historically.
[Gavin] said, “I think the Crystal Ark could be a combination of,” and he named all these different types of things. I said, “Have you heard Duck Rock? It’s very much Malcolm McLaren being a tourist in New York and taking all these neighborhoods and smashing them together. It’s a bit crass, but you have these moments, like ‘Buffalo Gals,’ that [are] just a perfect object. How do we get to something like that without being too self-conscious about it?” Because it’s a trick: you can hear a band record a song and it maybe makes you cringe. How do you think about that but make your record?
How do you apply that to remixes you commission?
The creative process of getting remixes done—to be totally honest, right now there’s probably nothing I enjoy less. The cause-and-effect of getting remixes done has just been bled dry from ten years of looking for them, and also over-remixing and being aware of, once the floodgates opened [with] digital. We’re just as guilty of it: you go to iTunes and there’s nine remixes.
A lot of kids now are ultra-purist on it: if there’s more than one remix, it’s bullshit.
I like that too. Everyone’s a remixer. Because there’s so much content needed—oh, we need the free remix for this website, and this magazine wants to do a cover-mount CD and wants some exclusive content, and we need a dubstep remix, and then they need a… it’s just too much. Why are we trying to please all these [people]?
Still, remixes have helped define the label. One big transitional DFA record was Carl Craig’s remix of Delia and Gavin’s “Relevee,” from 2006.
It’s funny: at the time, we met with some skepticism by some people. But it was a lot of money for us at the time, and we weren’t sure what the results would be. It was a huge risk. I remember getting the first draft of it from him and just being stunned. He asked for notes. So I’m giving Carl Craig notes—so weird. He sent me two different versions. He had a live piano player on it.
With Carl Craig, I knew that he was into Chris & Cosey. I could explain a few things about Delia & Gavin. As soon as he heard the record he was like, “This is my shit.” He was making some not-dissimilar music on his own full-length records. Frankie Knuckles [who remixed Hercules and Love Affair's "Blind"] was also considered a huge risk. Not because he does shit work, but is he gonna get it? He’s a main room remixer a lot of times. Chances are I’m not going to totally relate to his major label remix of Janet Jackson, even though I love Janet Jackson and I love Frankie Knuckles. So going to that guy for our indie leftfield disco record? He knocked it out of the park.
Where did the terms retro-nuevo and skronk originate? Or hip-hop? Michaelangelo Matos runs through an exhaustive catalogue of music’s phrasemakers and trendsetters
Music comes from everywhere, and so do the names we call it by. There’s a longstanding cliche that only the music business needs genre names – everyone else either likes it or they don’t. That is, of course, bunk, as anyone who’s heard enough people trot out lines such as “I like all music except for rap and country” is aware. Not least because quite a lot of those genre names come from the artists themselves.
Gospel, for example, was more or less invented by Rev Thomas A Dorsey. As Georgia Tom, Dorsey played jazz and blues piano before turning to the Bible for inspiration in 1932 and selling songs such as Precious Lord, Take My Hand to churches in Chicago, then across America. His group’s name was the University Gospel Singers. Similarly, bluegrass originates from the name of the country singer-mandolinist Bill Monroe‘s backing band from 1938 to his 1996 death: the Blue Grass Boys. They were named after Monroe’s native Kentucky, “the Blue Grass State”. Glitter rock – a synonym for glam – comes from Gary Glitter, about which the less said, the better.
More often, a genre name will come from a musician’s works. Free jazz comes from Ornette Coleman‘s 1960 album of the same name; ditto blue-eyed soul, from the Righteous Brothers’ 1963 LP. The mid-60s Jamaican boogie dubbed rocksteady is named for an 1966 Alton Ellis single, while reggae followed it into Jamaican dancehalls on the heels of the Maytals’ Do the Reggay in 1968. Soca is a condensation of Trinidadian artist Lord Shorty‘s Soul of Calypso, from 1974, while acid house, originally from Phuture’s 1987 single Acid Tracks, has come to mean anything with a yammering, squealing TB-303 on it.
Ambient, of course, comes from Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978). Eno says in his famous liner notes from 1975′s Discreet Music that the idea had come to him while recuperating in hospital after getting hit by a car in January 1975; a guest put 18th-century harp music on at low volume, then left the immobile Eno to ponder its placement. The guest remembers it differently: in Geeta Dayal’s Another Green World, Eno’s then-girlfriend Judy Nylon says she put the harp music on intending to balance it with the pouring rain outside, and that Eno caught on immediately.
Sometimes lyrics become genres. Doo-wop comes from any number of primordial R&B harmony vocal-group records – the two most obvious are the Turbans’ 1955 When You Dance (“Doo-wop, de-doo-doo,” runs the end of the refrain) and the Five Satins’ In the Still of the Nite a year later (under the sax solo, the chant “Doo-bop, doo-bah!”). In the late ’60s, New York oldies radio DJ Gus Gossert put it into wide use, though he claimed he got it from California aficionados.
Old-school Bronx DJ Lovebug Starski claims to have coined the term hip-hop by rhyming “hip-hop, hippy to the hippy hop-bop” at early parties, telling Peter S Scholtes in 2006: “Me and Kid Cowboy from [Grandmaster Flash's] the Furious Five used to say it together. I’d say the ‘hip’, he’d say the ‘hop’.”
The term jungle came from a soundsystem yard tape from Jamaica that featured the chant “Alla the junglists”. MC Navigator of pirate station Kool FM told critic Simon Reynolds in his book Energy Flash: “There’s a place in Kingston called Tivoli Gardens, and the people call it the Jungle.” When Rebel MC sampled it, breakbeat-led house had a new name. Reynolds points out that the British rave label Ibiza had “the first use of the word ‘jungle’ on their [12-inch] sleeves”, including 1991′s Noise Factory single, Jungle Techno.
Sometimes record labels become genre names, as with industrial, named after Throbbing Gristle’s imprint, established in 1976, and lovers rock, industrial’s polar opposite: sentimental, romantic reggae named for the London label of Dennis and Eve Harris from around the same time. And sometimes record labels just mandate new terms. Outlaw country, no wave and techno all came into use via compilation albums: respectively, 1976′s Wanted! The Outlaws (featuring Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser); 1978′s No New York (Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Contortions, Mars and DNA); 1988′s Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit (Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson).
There are occasions, too, when an artist just says something is something, and that is that. Think of Afrobeat – not be confused with Afropop, an old catch-all to describe, well, all pop from Africa. Afrobeat was the name coined in 1968 by Fela Kuti to describe the music he was inventing around that time, made up of funk, jazz, Nigerian highlife, anti-authoritarian lyrics and high-grade weed.
The 90s were rife with musician-coined genres. Riot grrrl was the name of a 1991 fanzine put together by four of that music’s key players: Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman of Bratmobile; Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill. Illbient was coined in 1994 by DJ Olive, of the trio We, to describe a multimedia presentation to a journalist in Brooklyn. “Some older man who said he was a journalist asked me if this was ambient music,” Olive says, “and I blurted out as a joke, ‘Nope, this is illbient.’ We all had a laugh about it.” And in 1996, producers Ed Rush and Trace of the No U Turn label minted the phrase techstep to describe their blaring, dense, hard-as-hell style of drum and bass.
But sometimes an artist assigns a title that becomes something else. Power-pop was coined by Pete Townshend in 1967 to define the Who, but wound up being what Eric Carmen of prime power-pop practitioners the Raspberries described as “groups that came out in the 70s that played kind of melodic songs with crunchy guitars and some wild drumming”. Not to mention the endless acolytes who mimicked them.
Often, technology drives musical changes, so equipment plays its role, too. Acid, noted above, is one example. So is dub, short for the “dubplate” (duplicate platter) Jamaican sound system operator Ruddy Redwood ordered in late 1967 from Duke Reid’s pressing plant. The recording was On the Beach by the Paragons, and the engineer, Byron Smith, accidentally wiped the vocal. Reid played it alongside the vocal version; the response was so strong he began putting instrumentals on the B-sides. Eventually, creative engineers such as King Tubby and Lee Perry would take the dub side into whole new areas of bass-heavy abstraction.
Of course, journalists need these terms more than anyone, in a sense – a recognisable genre name is powerful shorthand. As the longtime bible of the American music industry, thanks to its trendsetting album and single charts, Billboard has played a significant role in disseminating musical titles. Easy listening, for instance, was coined in the 17 July 1961 edition (not, sadly, included on the magazine’s Google Books archive, though every other 1961 issue is). Rhythm & blues came to be in 1947, when Jerry Wexler, then a Billboard editor, began using it to denote the kind of postwar black pop that he went on to pioneer with Atlantic Records. Rhythm & blues became a chart name in the 25 June 1949 issue, replacing the previous issue’s “Race Records”.
Long before producing The Chris Rock Show and Good Hair, Nelson George was himself a Billboard reporter (he was behind the magazine’s use of the term “black music”). But it was in the Village Voice that George came up with retro-nuevo, while reviewing Anita Baker in 1986. The term meant 80s black pop with roots in pre-disco R&B. “Black pop music had always felt grounded in a very adult perspective on life and love,” George says. “The music became a lot more juvenile in the 80s. To me, ‘retro-nuevo’ was a way to highlight singers who were very contemporary but hadn’t totally abandoned tradition.”
George’s longtime Voice editor was Robert Christgau, who made his own coinage with skronk, a phrase synonymous with no wave that Christgau first used in 1978. “It was a complete piece of onomatopoeia,” Christgau says. “It just popped into my head. I was looking for a way to describe DNA and Mars. That’s what the guitars sounded like to me.”
Heavy metal was also first used to describe ugly guitars. The phrase, of course, originated with William S Burroughs in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine, featuring Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid. Then John Kay of Steppenwolf sang the phrase “heavy metal thunder” in 1968′s Born to Be Wild. But it first reached print as a synonym for hard rock via Mike Saunders (later Metal Mike Saunders, singer for early-80s punks the Angry Samoans), in a review of Humble Pie’s As Safe As Yesterday in Rolling Stone from 1970, describing the album as “more of the same 27th-rate heavy metal crap”.
The same year, punk rock was coined Stone’s Detroit rival, Creem, via Dave Marsh, who used it in a ? & the Mysterians live review (“Needless to say, it was impossible to pass up such a landmark explosion of punk rock, even after two nights running of Tina Turner”). Punk magazine came along a few years later.
Britain does nomenclature like no one else. Krautrock came from NME’s Ian MacDonald in 1972, to describe Neu! and Can and the like; a year later, Faust led their album IV with the 12-minute epic Krautrock. Similarly, Simon Reynolds began using post-rock in early 1994 (he says he used it in Melody Maker, and the May 1994 issue of The Wire has his essay on it) to denote bands using rock instruments to non-rock ends. “I didn’t actually coin it,” says Reynolds, citing Richard Meltzer and Paul Morley’s use of it before him as “an avant-rock synonym”. He explains: “I made it into a concept.”
Also in 1994, Andy Pemberton coined trip-hop in the June 1994 edition of Mixmag to describe the head-nodding instrumentals of DJ Shadow and the early Chemical Brothers. Similarly, dubstep first entered print in 2002, in sometime Guardian writer Dave Stelfox‘s XLR8R magazine feature on UK garage producers Horsepower Productions. According to the journalist Martin Clark, the term originally stems from a “tight circle” and originates either with UK promoter Ammunition or DJ Hatcha, whose Dubstep Allstars Vol 1 came out in June 2003.
As that indicates, the music business needs to know what it’s selling and who it’s selling to. Hillbilly music, a term that predates country music, was the coinage of Ralph Peer, who in 1925 recorded a North Carolina group he named the Hillbillies. When Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family two years later, the name stuck to the sound. Sire label boss Seymour Stein famously came up with new wave to sell punk to US audiences who were afraid of punk’s violent connotations. In 1995, Motown executive Kedar Massenburg, who signed D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, came up with neo-soul as a way to sell them. (It definitively supplanted Nelson George’s retro-nuevo.)
Then there is advertising. Bossa nova – Portuguese for “new wave” – gained currency, according to Brazilian music historian Ruy Castro, when it appeared in an advert for a 1958 multi-artist concert put on by Grupo Universitário Hebraico do Brasil. World music was hashed out in 1987 at an industry meeting. It was intended only for a brief marketing campaign to pump non-Anglophone musicians in retail spaces they might not otherwise fit into, only to remain an acknowledged, if unwieldy, category. Radio formats sometimes impose themselves on the music. AOR is a US abbreviation for “album-oriented radio” (later “rock”) coined in 1972 by Lee Abrams and Kent Burkhart’s consultancy firm for the FM rock radio stations that would define ultra-slick middle-American rock: Styx, Boston, Aerosmith. In practise, it usually translates to “definitively pre-punk”.
And of course, radio plays a big role in the history of the term rock’n'roll itself – though it had been used in blues records dating back to 1922 (Trixie Smith’s My Man Rocks Me with a Steady Roll, for example) and, as Preston Lauterbach’s superb new book The Chitlin’ Circuit makes clear, was basically everyday talk in postwar R&B: Roy Brown’s 1947 Good Rockin’ Tonight (later cut by Wynonie Harris and, on his second single, Elvis Presley); Wild Bill Moore’s We’re Gonna Rock, We’re Gonna Roll (1947); the Dominoes’ Sixty Minute Man (1950) (“I’ll rock ‘em, roll ‘em all night long”). Then in 1952, Cleveland DJ Alan Freed switched his radio show’s name from Record Rendezvous to The Moondog Rock’n'Roll House Party. We’ll leave it there.
Glasgow’s Ross Birchard, AKA Hudson Mohawke, is influencing everything from clubs to Chris Brown with his vivid, psychedelic music, and feels he’s ready for a big, weird pop collaboration.
As you enter the Warp Records office, the left-hand wall is adorned with framed press shots of all the key artists to record for the venerable electronic music institution over the years. It’s meant to be a celebratory display, but there is also something a little unsettling about it. Glance at the portraits of Boards Of Canada, Autechre or Squarepusher, for example, and they all refuse to meet your gaze, appearing deeply uncomfortable about the idea of being photographed. It’s a reminder that Warp artists tend to prefer to let their music do their talking.
The same is certainly true of the label’s latest electro whiz kid. Despite calling himself Hudson Mohawke (the moniker comes from an engraving on a statue in his old Glasgow digs, although he later discovered that it’s also the name of a river confluence in New York State – “So it’s quite cool, it means there’s a Hudson Mohawk Kayaking Club,” he reveals, proudly), Ross Birchard is the last person you can imagine sporting a look-at-me haircut. He has recently moved to London’s trendy Dalston but retains a typically Glaswegian suspicion of anyone trying too hard to be part of the cool crowd. “I don’t like to be too caught up in things,” he reasons. “It’s important to maintain an identity rather than being absorbed into this massive ball of London-ness.” At 25 there is still something of the gawky teenager about him, and he is a hesitant interviewee, if unfailingly polite.
Luckily, Ross’s music is more like his pseudonym: exuberant, colourful and irreverent. He is not interested making anything “deep” or “menacing” – “I spent a long time listening to dark drum’n'bass, where every track would have a vocal sample from Aliens or one of those films, so it got that phase out of the way for me” – and he’s well positioned at the vanguard of young pluralist British beatmakers who are unafraid to flaunt their myriad influences simultaneously.
His musical education began at a young age thanks to his American-born dad, who was a funk and soul DJ on Radio Clyde in the 80s. By the end of primary school, Ross had discovered hardcore and jungle, and was making mixtapes for his friends. At 15, he became the youngest ever UK DMC Mixing Championships finalist, before realising that the world of competitive turntablism was stifling his creative urges. “The only thing I was likely to get out of it was winning a pair of golden turntables. That was the pinnacle of it, really.”
His admits that his first attempts at production, either solo or with the friends who would go on to form the LuckyMe collective, were merely attempts to replicate the moves of his hip-hop heroes DJ Premier or Pete Rock. But he couldn’t prevent his other influences from seeping through: some euphoric happy hardcore chords here, an 80s electro-funk bassline there, or a choppy rhythm that sounded as if it had been scratched by a DJ. These little mutations all contributed to the evolution of Hudson Mohawke’s trademark sound: a vivid, psychedelic melange of J Dilla-esque instrumental hip-hop, space-age R&B, bass boom and old-school rave euphoria, garnished with effervescent FX from unexpected sources (“I used my iPhone to record the Australian traffic-light noise because it sounds like lasers,” he grins).
His productions have proved so infectious that currently Ross finds himself feted by some of the very people he started out imitating. The most effusive response to his sumptuous new Satin Panthers EP came from one of his all-time heroes, hip-hop producer Just Blaze. “Almost got moved to tears,” tweeted the man behind most of the best Jay-Z tracks of the last 12 years. “These are the chords I hear in my dreams.”
“It’s amazing for me because, even though he’s not a household name, he’s definitely a big hero, someone I’ve been looking up to for years,” says Ross, thoroughly chuffed. “It’s a dream come true for me to get gushing praise from him, especially because in the past I’ve completely ripped him off!” Despite this admission, the pair hope to work together soon.
Also tuning in to radio Mohawke has been resurgent R&B superstar Chris Brown, who created a mash-up called Real Hip-Hop Shit #2 based on Rising 5 from Ross’s 2009 debut album Butter (ironically, Rihanna was also sniffing around Fuse from the same album, until Ross resolved to keep it for himself). As a result of this interest, he’s recently been paired up with Kane Beatz, producer of Nicki Minaj’s Super Bass, and tasked to conjure up some magic for Atlantic’s roster of urban stars, which includes TI, Trey Songz and Flo Rida.
“It’s very worthwhile for me to be a part of that world, I feel like I’m gradually stepping on the ladder,” says Ross. Is he interested in the idea of trying to craft an out-and-out hit? “I wouldn’t do it on a Hudson Mohawke album, but I’d be up for working with a major label pop artist. I like the idea of juxtaposing semi-weird production with big pop vocals. If you heard the instrumental to Justin Timberlake’s My Love on its own, you’d be like, ‘What the hell is this?’ But combined with a really well-written, well-delivered vocal, it becomes something else again.”
This doesn’t mean to say that Ross would be content to churn out beats for whoever stumped up the dollars. “I’ve been asked to do a lot of bad UK girl groups, and I don’t particularly want to go down that route.”
In any case, his priority is to finish off the highly-anticipated new Hudson Mohawke album, due for release early next year. Despite his newfound industry contacts, he’s not planning to pull in a plethora of name vocalists, simply because he says the music is deeply personal to him.
Meeting this quiet, unassuming Scotsman in his odd wax jacket and shorts combo, it’s hard not to think of Hudson Mohawke as his madcap, extroverted alter ego who takes over the moment he fires up his computer. But no. “Hudson is Ross and Ross is Hudson,” he insists. “It would be funny for me to think of Hudson Mohawke as a separate character and to produce completely in that mindset. It’s important for me to be myself and keep the music grounded and personal.”
As for whether someone who prefers to keep himself to himself, as he emphasises several times, can produce the kind of euphoric music usually associated with collective experience, well, the answer is on the records. “All I’m ever trying to do is arouse some sort of emotion in myself,” he shrugs. “And while it might be corny to say that you make euphoric or uplifting music, it’s generally happy emotions that I’m interested in. When a particular sequence of chords or a particular sound gives me goosebumps or a little shiver down my back, that’s when I know I’ve found what I’m looking for.”
“He makes incredibly evocative music, all accompanied by his own talkbox-based vocals. Normally you’d associate the talkbox with Parliament or American west coast funk music but he’s used it in a more interesting, modern, electronic sense. There are lots of elements of modern hip-hop and bounce music but with a classic electro twist. I can’t praise him enough. He’s gonna be playing alongside me at my next London show at XOYO [on 19 October].”
“He’s a young guy, I think only 18 or 19, but he’s already done some really amazing stuff. He’s traditionally a grime producer but he’s now branching into doing some American major label stuff as well. He released the infamous earworm track Woo Riddim in 2010, which spawned a whole mixtape of about 50 different MCs all rapping over the top of that one track on repeat. I would not be surprised at all to hear him on a major rap song soon.”
“He’s an Irish guy but he lives in Manchester. He makes sort of modern 80s music, if that makes sense, building from the basis of everything from boogie to new jack swing. He almost has an early Daft Punk feel to some of his newer tracks. One of my recent favourite producers for sure.”
“He’s one of the original LuckyMe clan, now based in New York. He’s doing some really interesting experiments in acoustic and vocal layering, based on almost folk-like tracks. I think he’s massively underrated. He also has an album due in the not too distant.”
“He’s another exponent of the so-called ‘Glasgow sound’. He’s just submitted his first album in fact [out 10 October]. I think his record will be a game changer, it’s really danceable club music but without ever becoming boring or cliched in the way that I find so much current dance music to be. He’s continuously evolving.”
Finding yourself at the forefront of the British dance music scene can prove rather daunting, especially if you’re as shy as Jamie xx. It seems like just about everyone wants a piece of the 23-year-old producer and remix artist. “I’ve just got a message from Thom Yorke,” whimpers a third of last year’s Mercury Music prize-winning outfit The xx, as he bashfully glances down at his phone. As it transpires, Jamie xx’s (or Jamie Smith’s) remix of Radiohead’s “Bloom” has just been mastered, and it’s a remix which is due to appear on the internationally renowned band’s next album.
And Radiohead haven’t been the only musical heavyweights desperate to get their hands on his distinctive post-dubstep treatment; since going solo less than a year ago he has worked on tracks for the likes of Adele, Jack Peñate, Florence and The Machine, and Canadian rap giant Drake. If all this wasn’t enough for the nervous young man responsible for The xx’s beats and production, his ever-burgeoning solo efforts reached a peak with a reprise of the Gil Scott-Heron album I’m New Here; a stunning venture which earned him a joint album credit with the American godfather of hip-hop, just months before he died earlier this year.
In the past two weeks the South-west Londoner has travelled extensively, playing his trademark broken dubstep beats, funky rhythms and spaced out melodies in DJ sets from Singapore and Tokyo, to Montreal and New York, but it’s in East London’s humble Hackney Wick we meet today.
We’re in the studio of the visual artist Davide Quayola where the pair are working on their upcoming collaborative performance Structures. It’s the debut joint project from RizLab, an organisation which aims to bring together the most innovative artists to create new and ground-breaking material.
In a one-off live experience at The Classic Car Club in London’s Old Street, the producer and DJ will debut tracks from his forthcoming solo EP while digital artist Quayola works alongside him, interpreting the music visually and screening it in real time onto three giant HD screens. Guests will be treated to a four-hour DJ set amid an all-encompassing cinematic show of flowing computer-generated artwork.
Smith first became interested in Quayola, a London-based artist whose work encompasses photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations, when he saw one of his projects earlier this year in Paris. Since then, together with artists Abstract Birds, Quayola has finished creating Partitura, software which can both interpret sounds and transform them into visuals inspired by the geographic artwork of Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oscar Fischinger.
The digital artist talks freely about the inaugural RizLab project which aims to create the ultimate in music experiences by bringing togethre progressive artists and pushing creative boundaries. “I’m really looking forward to finally seeing it, to seeing your music,” he chirps gesturing towards his awkward musical collaborator, who nods sheepishly.
It seems that the only non-singing third of the indie buzz band The xx doubles up as the only non-talking half of this RizLab project, but the producer eventually opens up on the subject. “At four hours, it will be the longest DJ set I’ve ever done”, he says.
The xx producer also describes the awe of discovering Quayola’s work in Paris. “I could really see how this could be a totally immersive experience,” he murmurs with discreet enthusiasm.
Likewise, Quayola is a fan of Jamie xx’s. He confesses that it was his girlfriend who first got him into The xx, but adds, “It would have been difficult not to have discovered Jamie’s music over the past couple of years.”
He’s right. As well as his and The xx’s records receiving airplay all over the radio, there’s hardly a BBC montage on television that hasn’t featured The xx’s “Intro”. But as the biggest artists in the industry clamour for his personal hallmark the reputation of this producer-of-the-moment is quickly exceeding the fame of his band. After walking off with the Mercury Music Prize for The xx’s self-titled debut, Jamie got to work on Scott-Heron’s album of remixes. And as the buzz surrounding the award-winning indie band died down, the Jamie xx hype began to reverberate.
Yet the man himself hardly exudes the confidence instilled by a string of critically acclaimed records. “Every time you do a release it sort of stamps you with this thing, you feel like the next thing you do might just be worthless.”
It seems that the huge amount of pressure that accrues when everything you touch turns to gold is taking its toll on the hottest DJ in town. How does an artist maintain creative momentum in the wake of a success that has come relatively quickly? “Making music that you love takes longer and longer in-between every release because each time you’re trying to progress,” he admits.
Though he “tries not to think about it”, he shares the mounting burden of anticipation surrounding the sophomore album from The xx with his fellow band members, Rommy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. “We are all very similar people,” he explains. Familiarity is important to the band. The sole barrier preventing the recording of their follow-up album (already written) is the sourcing of a studio in which they’ll all feel at home. They used to record in Jamie’s bedroom.
Still, success has, to an extent, brought Jamie out of his shell. “It’s definitely changed me. I’ve gained more confidence, I’ve had to,” confesses the introverted DJ. Yet, his social profile remains in stark contrast to the buzz he’s generating. “I’ve been forced to meet a lot more people than I ever would have liked to meet,” he declares, with startling sincerity.
Garnering a reputation as the producer-of-the-moment has lured many others out from the shadows and into a spotlight that they’ve gone on to embrace. The likes of Mark Ronson, Pharrell Williams, Timbaland and Calvin Harris, have all gone on to become more famous than the artists they produced. But finding himself the UK’s hottest commodity seems to have caught Jamie xx like a rabbit in the headlights.
Perhaps the decision to swap Smith for xx when marketing his solo work was intended to manufacture a ferocious persona more capable of thriving in the spotlight. If this was the case, it hasn’t really worked. His refreshing lack of ego and insistence on sticking to what he’s good at, though, points to a character that is unlikely to fall prey to unashamed over-exposure. And crucially, this might ensure him a degree of longevity in the ever fickle industry of music production.
Perhaps the fact that the only one not buying into the Jamie xx hype is Jamie Smith himself will be what keeps the producer’s head above water and ultimately save the man-of-the-moment from disappearing in the waves of his own success.
In music, and especially in underground music, the word “legend” is thrown around to the point where it loses all meaning.What is a legend? It’s someone who broke the mold – someone whose sounds, techniques – even his style – changed things forever. It’s a pioneer that everyone who followed after emulated, whether consciously or not.
In dance music, the person you’re talking about is John Morales.As half of the famed M+M remix team, John Morales has taken the helm on over 450 remix and production projects (the exact number is unknown). Among his remix hits are Disco anthems such as “Young Hearts Run Free” by Candi Staton, “Dreamin” by Loleatta Holloway, “The Player” by First Choice and “Make It Last Forever” by Inner Life.
These and other selections from the M+M archives are contained on the second volume of John Morales: The M+M Mixes out now on BBE Records on CD and vinyl.As he’s back on the scene as a DJ and mixer, rather than talk to John strictly about the good ole’ days (about which he’s been interviewed for countless documentaries, books and magazines), we had a very long conversation about other matters close to his heart: playing Southport Weekender (the seventh time he had DJ’d in the last thirty years), the state of the music industry and, where my interview began, with his ten year hiatus from the studio...
I was re-reading the liner notes for the 1st volume of the M+M Mixes, and it mentioned that you went 10 years between releases. Someone might read that and wonder about the “dark years”. What were you doing during that time?
Well, back in 1993, I got a dose of reality when I got into a health kick. I had stopped smoking cigarettes and started going to the gym and all of that supposedly good, healthy stuff. I was working out of a studio in Lower Manhattan and I’d go to the gym everyday and get on the bike and do some weights.
One day I was on the bike and my heart felt like it was trying to beat out of my chest. I figured maybe I was overdoing it so I took a couple of days off. I got back on it and my heart started racing again. At this point I got scared and figured I better go to the hospital and get this checked out.
Well, I’m in the emergency room and they have to shock my heart back into a normal rhythm and I’m realizing that this isn’t just overdoing it; this is a whole ‘nother animal. I was in the hospital for about 6 or 7 months with an arrhythmia – tests, tests and more tests.
It really broke that groove that I was in. I realized that I really needed to chill out and relax and reassess, considering that things in the music landscape were changing…
And around that same time, I was just starting to feel really burned out and worn down from all the years of 24/7. I’d been working for 15 years straight, staying up for two or three days at a time. So, basically, I stopped mixing and producing altogether, and took a step back. I got into working in the emerging software side of music for a company called Steinberg for a few years. I’m not sure how far you go back but if you remember the Atari computer, I worked for them at the same time, as they went hand-in-hand. Those were the only computers with a built-in MIDI and were really musician-friendly.
How did you get back into the groove?
I had the itch for awhile, but didn’t really feel the inspiration to do anything, plus there were other things going on in my life. I moved to Philly for a couple of years. Then slowly I started to get inspired so I pulled all of my old gear out of storage and started setting it all up again.
It was around that time that my dear friend Paul Simpson called and asked me if I still had my gear. I said yeah, why? He had a mix to do but didn’t have anywhere to work on it. That was Marvin Gaye’s “Funky Space Reincarnation”. We were working on it when his parents became ill, and he had to go away, so I took over. The A&R guy at Universal was happy with how it turned out. Coincidentally, he didn’t live that far from me so I invited him over for dinner one night, and after talking for a while he told me they were in the process of doing a expanded version of Marvin’s “In Our Lifetime” and asked me if I’d like to mix it. Thanks to Paul and Harry, I was reborn.
I love what I do. One day I work on Marvin Gaye, the next day I do some House track. I’m always feeling challenged and motivated. I think it’d be hard if I just worked on the same stuff like some of the House guys do – on just one style all the time. Today I could roll out of bed, go down to the studio and work on an acoustic ballad; tomorrow I could work on a big dance record. I love what I do and it’s a different challenge every day.
You played Southport Weekender for the first time last year. I knew about your residency at the Stardust Ballroom in the ’70s but I didn’t know you were still DJiing.
I played at Southport in front of I guess about 5,000 people – and that was actually the 7th time I DJ’d in the last 30 years. I’d done a couple of guest spots, at Club 1018 and the Limelight once or twice in the mid-’80s.
Credit here goes to Dimitri from Paris who brought me back to it, when Dimitri did his compilation Nightdubbin’. He had a launch party at a place here in New York called SubMercer and since I had material on the CD, he asked me if I wanted to come play there. I told him, “Man, I haven’t DJ’d since I don’t even know when.” He was like, “Nah, just come down and play a little music…” So I did and later he told me, “You don’t sound that bad for a guy that hasn’t played for 30 years.” So I started to explore that again.
Southport has been one of my greatest experiences as a DJ. There are about 5,000 people there and honestly I felt a little overwhelmed. My musical selection was good but my technical skills were lacking. Louie Vega’s there and Kerri Chandler and one of my favorites, DJ Spen. It was just amazing to share the same stage with them and to be promoted as one of the “big figures” of the event. Talk about pressure!
I really don’t see myself as a “legend” and when people ask for a photo or an autograph I feel kind of weird. In the ’70s and ’80s, I was doing what these guys are doing now, and a lot of times people remind me of that and the Sunshine Plates. They’ll say, “Hey, Bro, you started all of this. You’re an OG!” And I was thinking, “Hmm. Maybe I did!” At the time I didn’t think about it because I was doing what I loved, making music. It was weird to Google myself one day and find all of these articles and see myself on Wikipedia and everything.
Sergio, my partner, was one of the nicest people you could meet. He was doing all of the socializing back in the day (not that I couldn’t). But I was a studio rat and would handle all the technical stuff and stay there. It’s like a marriage where you’re both bringing something different to the table. I’d go into the studio and he’d come around at 10 or 11, he would help with the creative process and then take a copy of the mix we were working on to one of the local clubs like the Paradise Garage. I mean, I didn’t really want to do that part of it at all, so that worked out fine.
In the early days I was working with my all-time favorite Jocelyn Brown and I’d go with her to all of the different clubs with the tapes for her to sing with. Sometimes we’d do two or three clubs in a night. I remember saying, “I’m looking forward to the day we won’t have to do this shit anymore.”
But it’s like many of my friends say to me, “You have to look at it this way: you’re a brand, just like Coke or Pepsi. You have to get out there and put yourself and the M+M brand out there.”
Disco edits have become almost trendy in Europe lately. Why do you think that is?
I think the trend toward Disco edits is born from a few things. For many, it’s an inability to get original tapes and wanting to make longer versions or re-arrange certain songs so they can be played in the clubs. There are a bunch of guys who have done edits of my mixes. One guy sent me a re-edit of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and I just said, “Look, the digital download of that is 17 minutes long!” Even when I play it, I only do so for maybe 8 minutes. But you never find yourself glancing at your watch during that time and that’s what you’re looking for. When time is not an issue, you know you’ve got a good mix. If someone is feeling bored about 3 minutes in, that’s when you know that something is missing.
Having been away and then back in it at a top level, what do you think about where House Music is at right now?
I was recently talking to my friend Kenny Bobien, one of the great voices and writers, in Miami. It was about the House scene, a very somber and serious discussion. I said that we just had to face some facts. I feel that in today’s musical scene there is no money or respect for House Music. Realistically, it’s a small community. Selling tracks at $0.99 each on Traxsource – how much do you think you can make doing that? How many producers or people on this side of the industry have regular day jobs because they can’t survive on what they’re making from their music? There’s a very, very small portion that work full-time at this.
I mean, I hear from some guys who make and produce House Music. “I put this track together and I’m offered no more than two or three hundred dollars for it. I paid my keyboardist three hundred!”
But the radio support isn’t there – Louie Vega and Kevin [Hedge] do their show on WBLS here in NY, which is great, but their playlist to me is a little more mixed – certainly different from what you’d hear when they play at Cielo. It’s geared to a larger, more diverse audience.
House Music is not going to the masses. There are a select few who make a living off it, and a vast majority that don’t. And the biggest problem is file sharing which I think affects the House scene immensely – no one wants to pay for music.
And lot of the recording industry now is being dominated by trades.
Yeah, I’ve seen that too. You mix a track for me, I’ll mix one for you. Or someone wants to release a track and will give you a few hundred dollars and wants half the publishing for it. That’s why so many guys are doing it themselves now. It’s sad to me to see good and talented people unable to do what they love because of the economics of it.
There are also the folks who put on the airs of being some kind of House version of Miles Davis, but don’t actually play a single instrument.
But there’s a talent to that too. I was transferring some master tapes for Nervous Records recently, and came across some of the Hip-Hop stuff from the ’90s. The way they’re constructed, some of these tracks, where they take the smallest sample of this and that and patch it together with all these other things…
At first I thought it was crap and not creative, but stepping back and actually listening to it with that kind of concentration, I said, “This is really ingenious.”
How does that compare to the experience back when the tunes on the M+M Mixes were made?
I wrote in the liner notes for the M+M Mixes Volume II CD that the producers of today unfortunately have a limited experience. They rarely if ever get to see shit come together – the experience of the different nuances added by all the different great musicians working together. You might get it on the first take or the 11th take. I wrote, “Nowadays the great halls that once housed studios are vacant, hollow rooms that echo with the sounds and memories of the great music they once created…”
I mean, until you have the experience firsthand of hearing rhythm sections like Baker, Harris, Young, MFSB and on the other artists like Brass Construction putting the Funk down, you haven’t experienced what music is about.
For me, I’m so grateful I’ve been in those rooms when the electricity was just incredible – people just jumping and hollering in the studio when you hear the real shit. Thank God I was there.
There’s definitely something lost when making a record on your laptop. People come to my house and are just blown away by all of the equipment and stuff. I can’t say for sure if it’s better or worse – this is just how I make my records. But deep in my gut I feel like what’s being made today is a shell of what it could be, if some of these guys had a real band and people making their ideas come alive.
I remember hearing someone walking out of a club, saying, “I’ve gotta go, I can’t take these bongos for another two hours…” And I agree. You can go two hours in a club without hearing a single vocal. You can go hours without hearing any song saying anything to you. I mean, tell me to leave, tell me to stay, tell me to take a shit in the middle of the club – tell me anything! But let there be a voice! This is why I love Soulful House – usually there is a song and a story to go along with the great tracks.
I don’t want to belittle anyone. Any craft, whether you repair cars or air conditioners – it’s something you have to learn. When I mix, it’s in three dimensions: it’s front to back and it’s left to right. If you like or don’t like a mix or how I’ve executed my ideas or breakdowns I’ve made, that’s one thing, but I don’t think you can say that my mixes don’t sound incredible.
I’ve been working on the Teena Marie project and had the pleasure of remixing “Behind the Groove”. I took it to a club I was playing at in Miami and walked out into the middle of the floor and said to myself, “This sounds fucking amazing!” Some guys walked up to me and said, like, “Man, this is fucking crazy!”
How many of the tracks on the CD have been heard before?
There are 18 tracks total on the CD but I’ve done about 34 different mixes. Eleven of the tracks are new mixes. The other seven are from back in the day, and it was something like I couldn’t get the tapes or didn’t have access to them.
Everything on the CD is a mix or new version people haven’t heard before – not in this format. The whole concept was to keep true to the original. I didn’t timestretch them, didn’t fix time – I did them the way they were. I was talking to Kenny Dope and he was saying he had to timestretch a track before mixing it. I asked why and he said “Because a lot of today’s DJs can’t mix. If I don’t keep it in perfect time, they might not be able to play it.”
These tracks go from 118 bpms to 123 to 115 all within the same song, because these cats were really playing. They moved with the vibe and weren’t worried about trying to keep perfect time. Some of the songs wouldn’t work and wouldn’t be what they are if they worried about keeping perfect time.
I spent nine months putting this together. I really hope the second CD does well. It’s really sort of a “best of”. It starts with the first mix I ever did – Inner Life’s “Caught Up” – and ends with Jocelyn Brown’s “Make It Last Forever”, which was the last one that I did. I wanted to put out the kind of CD that nobody would listen to and skip around on. I didn’t want them to skip over anything.
You worked on so many tracks, I’m curious about something. There’s a famous story in which Aphex Twin forgot about doing a remix for some major label rock act, gave them something completely unrelated to what he was supposed to be mixing, and they released it. Have you ever done that?
It was a completely different track? No, I couldn’t do that. There were times when I rushed something out. One time I remember rushing something out because I was sick and it became a Top 10 track in the UK. I had a stomach virus, came into the studio and told Joe, my engineer, “Just turn the lights down and let’s just bang this out.” We did the mix in like five hours. A month later it was in the Top 10 on Top of the Pops in the UK. I couldn’t believe it. I went to the UK and worked there for quite awhile after that. I’ve spent 60 hours trying to finish a mix before, and this one… Maybe I should get sick more often.
With the release of Volume II, are you going to be touring at all, and what can the people who come to hear you play expect?
After the first compilation was released, I did some DJing mostly in Europe. With this one, starting April 4th I’ll be playing throughout Europe for the next six weeks.
As far as my DJ sets, I really love Soulful House, and to me it’s the closest thing to good ole’ Dance and R&B. I’ll mix some in, which I think sometimes throws people off. I told Louie Vega and a few of my DJ friends, “I don’t want to be thought of as that guy that just did stuff back in the day, with a disco ball spinning and John Travolta standing in the middle of the floor.” I mix in stuff that I appreciate and love, and hopefully show that sometimes this old dog still can hunt.
Terry, thank you so much for the opportunity to share some of my thoughts with your readers. House Music is very important to me.
The Body and Soul man talks ego, art and collaboration.
There was a brief moment—blink and you might have missed it—when Joe Claussell and his Spiritual Life Music was the flavor of the month in the UK. Slam, Terry Farley and DJ Food all repped for the man in a 1999 Jockey Slut. Orde Meikle’s quote, though, is almost all you need to know about the man who goes by the name Joaquin in his daily life: “A man who ploughs his own furrow.”
Men who do so rarely get caught up in the hype game. That goes doubly for Claussell, who never fails to remind interviewers that he never even wanted to be a DJ or producer. Encouraged by Francois K to do the former and Jerome Sydenham the latter, Claussell has excelled at both through the years, offering an idiosyncratic brand of electronic music that focuses on both body and soul.
Most recently, he’s remixed back catalogue classics from the esteemed Fania imprint, which served up some of the most indelible salsa albums of the ’60s and ’70s. RA’s Todd L. Burns caught up with the Body and Soul member in advance of his appearance at this year’s Stop Making Sense festival to chat about the literal and metaphorical costs involved with remaining true to a vision.
I’m fascinated by your recent project with Fania, because it seems like for you that it might be coming around full circle. Obviously your family was hugely into Fania when you were growing up.
Fania. Salsa. African music. They were all a huge part of my upbringing, amongst other things.
You’ve said, though, that rock music might be the biggest.
Yes. My one of my elder brothers Larry was a Latin rock drummer. He got me into the likes of Zeppelin, Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix. You name it. There was also folk music and pop music that I liked. I have to say, though, that Larry was the biggest influence. His band used to rehears in the basement of our home, and because he had a full Ludwig drum set at home, 24/7, it was very exciting to be around that. He also had the loudest stereo.
Tell me about growing up Puerto Rican at that time in New York City.
The interesting thing is that I didn’t grow up Puerto Rican in that sense. I grew up as an individual part of a whole in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which was a very mixed neighborhood. We had all ethnicities there. I always credit growing up there as being the best thing that ever happened to me. It helped me to see and understand at a very early age different cultures, as well as taught me to appreciate everyone for who they are. So I was in that more as a person, and not as someone with a certain ethnic background. I was just me amongst other cultures, you know? I knew who I was, where I came from, but it wasn’t the mindset that I was brought up with. I was one with everybody. We were all the same.
I guess that also extended to when you first started going to electronic music or dance parties, right? You’ve talk about David Mancuso and Larry Levan being influences. I imagine the crowds were really mixed as well.
They were, but I want to set the record straight. I like a lot of DJs, but they were not my huge influences. My influences, my DJs that introduced me to music were my older brothers at home. Larry Levan was an influence in the DJ sense, but I wasn’t a regular at the Paradise Garage. Then and to this day, I need an influx of all different kind of music. I never gravitated to one genre of music or to one club. For example, one Saturday I would go to the Paradise Garage, and maybe the next I would go to The Mudd Club. I just need to feed my palette of music. I was not a devotee of anything really, except for the music.
I do think, though, that one of the things that you share in common with Larry is that you both bring in a lot of things that people might not expect. You both have open ears.
That was the case for Larry, for sure. And I have never heard anything like that before or after. For me Larry was unique because he was truly expressing himself, and playing what he wanted to play. He was obviously a well-rounded individual when it came to music. I think the difference between Larry playing all kinds of music at that time and what we have today is that DJs today inject a certain song or genre of music as more as shock factor as opposed to just playing it because they really feel it. Or they want to be credited for it in some way for taking the chance. In my opinion, these sorts of things are not to be talked about in the way of patting oneself on the back. You just express yourself because you’re in the moment. I think that Larry Levan did it more honestly than we tend to do today.
Do you think that it is harder to do these sorts of things honestly these days?
I really don’t think so. I put music in the category of being an artform. Unfortunately, even when it comes to the art world—in terms of visual artists or whatever—when we look for acceptance, we lose that sense of being a true artist. We create to please. It is difficult to maintain honesty if you feel like you have to perform. If you are performing because you want to be celebrated or complimented, then I think you’re more of an entertainer. When you’re a crowd pleaser, you tend to stick to a format made to please. When you are an artist expressing from within then you’re just being honest with yourself. That said, at the same time you do have to be mindful of the dance floor and those who come to release regardless. However whenever I can get away with it, I try to do what I want to do.
It’s an interesting concept. You talk about being as ego-less as possible. Yet you have to strike this careful balance, because there is this ego up there that thinks—on some level—that it knows better. That they have the experience to do this, and also to please the audience as well. In a lot of cases, it seems to me like you’ve stepped back from things when you thought that your ego was starting to get involved.
I’m glad you picked up on that. But it wasn’t really about my ego. I stepped back because the whole purpose of what I do is not to being in the limelight. I never compared myself to anyone, and I don’t think of myself as being great. I just want the space to create when and how I want. When some tried to prop me up on pedestal I resisted. I was seeing what happened to others, especially when it comes to the press. One day you are in, and the next day you’re out. Fortunately I am mostly aware of who I am and why I’m here. I don’t consider myself to be someone’s flavor of the moment, I am just too hardcore like that. I’m not trying to be in, and I always want to have this space—the canvas—to do what I want to do. Stepping back to me was the best way of obtaining that.
When I was talking to Jerome Sydenham last year he said that you would always play at Dance Tracks after work on Friday, DJing at your store for all the DJs who knew you. Just for fun. It took Francois K to convince you to play at this Larry Levan tribute for you to finally play in public, right?
That’s exactly right. As far as remixers, Francois Kervorkian was definitely one of my favorites. I loved his work of the ’70s and ’80s and so I was honored that he became a regular customer at my store. About a year or so after he asked me to be a part of a party that he was planning on being a part of, however it was still only in its conceptual stages. (It was later called Body and Soul.)
Because of his earlier influence on me, one would have thought that I would immediately accept, but I turned down his invitation. Having a record store afforded me the opportunity to see the DJ world for what it really was. You’d see some DJs coming in with their egos, bragging and—most disturbing—dissing one another. I had a front row seat for all this, and I always thought to myself, “Do I really want to be a part of that?” I was incredibly content with just playing music in the store and serving my customers. I refused for at least three months, but Francois was very persistent.
I saw that one of the first projects you were involved in, Instant House, was just reissued. Why was the timing right for that do you think?
A lot of that sound is making its way. A lot of producers today are doing minimal stuff derived from house music, using just the drum machines, the keyboard, some samples—as opposed to the full production that until this day I am wired to perform. However, Instant House is more computer-based production. Nowadays, house music is going back to rawness, and that’s where Instant House comes from, but I think that by default it has to do with the tools such as computers and plug-ins that are more easily accessible.
With the Fania release you spent a lot of time with live musicians. Can you tell me a little bit about that process?
The Africa Caribe project was two years in making. We were incredibly lucky to find that some multi-tracks still existed of these songs. However, back in the day, things weren’t computerized or properly documented, so a lot of the work I initially did was simply with researching and cataloguing. As you can imagine there were a lot of mislabeled multi-track tapes, as well as parts missing from the compositions.
Were there any happy accidents?
Absolutely. The great thing about the recording process as well as the musicianship back in those days was that there were usually three individual songs on one reel of tape So, for example, if I received the multi-track to something I wanted, there were two other songs that I probably didn’t know about or—at the very least—alternate takes of what I originally requested. This presented a gift of another opportunity to work with those songs if I chose to. That became the case in many instances. I remember receiving something that was mislabeled on a few occasions, but being blown away by what I heard anyway.
How did you go about constructing the mix?
My approach to this project was first and foremost to respect the masters who produced them, and to keep the original soul of the music intact while enhancing them with some of now. My approach to remixing has mostly been about keeping the message that the artist/producer intended to communicate. Because I believe that’s the whole point.
So instead of getting all self-masturbative about it, and just completely restructure—which by the way turns it into a production—I want to stay true to the original concept. Otherwise it doesn’t serve any real purpose. I must communicate, though, that there are a lot of my ideas implemented into the project, but again all for—and in—respect to the original. My whole thing is to just enhance what’s needed. That is what I did pretty much with this project. I created a more dynamic mix of the past that was not present in the original master. A lot of time was put into the mix, then I added music where I thought was necessary.
You mentioned to me that you were releasing a book in the fall.
Yes. It’s a project I did with Lidy Six, a theater director, where we went into a huge tunnel under Amsterdam central train station that isn’t open yet. It’s called TREMBLING: Sensing Space. I do other things than DJing. I’m very into the art world. I love the creative process. I can put everything that I do under the banner of creativity. I love art, I love visuals, I love music. Fortunately, the music that I’ve done over the years has afforded me the opportunity to meet these people. I’m very grateful for that.
You’re very interested in collaboration.
Of course. Bringing together different ideas and energies is very important. Especially if you completely respect one another’s vision, and are willing to be open enough to understand and implement things equally. Well, not even equally. I’m a firm believer that the best idea should be the one that moves forward. If I’m collaborating with someone and they have a better idea, I’m all for it. At the end of the day, the outcome is the most important thing.
That seems to go back to the idea of being ego-less that we talked about earlier.
Let’s be real. We all have egos. But, at the end of the day, I want to learn. How do we learn if we don’t open up to other people’s ideas and try to hear what they’re saying? This is how I learn. If one claims they have created entirely what they have produced, I think that comes from ignorance. I can completely and honestly say that—subconsciously—what I do comes from a huge well of people and ideas. It’s the way the world works. We absorb information, and then we translate that information using our personalities and then bring it back out to the world.
What’s particularly exciting you in dance music these days?
That’s a tough question. I can’t answer that question without bringing forth the problems that I see. If you want my honest opinion, a lot of what is happening now is re-generated music that doesn’t come with individual personality. A lot of people are doing the same old thing or copying someone else’s work. A lot of that has to do with the fact that producers—and this not just in dance music, it’s anything in the world—are taking and not giving. Maybe they’re just not artists. Maybe there is something much more important to them than searching within, coming up with something creative and bringing it forth to the world. Maybe it’s easier to copy something and get written about than it is to create something original—whether it’s bad or good.
Did it take you a while as an artist to not copy others, though? I’m thinking of artists that are just beginning, trying things out. Perhaps it takes a while to find your own voice.
Well, I didn’t get into the music scene because it fascinated me. I just naturally got involved. I didn’t want to be a DJ or a producer. It was my friends that came to me and said, “hey, you should do this.” I think that’s the reason I never wanted to copy anything. To me, it had to come as natural as possible. Having said that, one of the first productions—again, one I was invited to be on as part of Instant House—was all about sampling records. I did that out of fun with my friends, Stan and Tony. It was all about sampling. I don’t know if I would consider that to be copying…but the first production I ever did had a lot to do with taking directly from someone else’s music. You have to understand, though, that that was all about fun. We weren’t thinking about being famous or whatever.
Do you sample much these days?
I do a lot of sampling…but I sample my own stuff. I don’t really take other people’s music.
Is that a conscious decision?
It’s not a conscious decision. It’s a natural one. If I can do it myself, why take someone else’s music? Part of the attraction for this for me is the challenge to come up with something. Fortunately I come from a home where live musicianship was important. Yes, it’s a lot of money to do this stuff. But that’s what drives me. I’m not a computer-based producer. I can do that. But I’m more drawn to working with people, no matter what it costs. That’s probably why I’m not a millionaire today.
You mention cost. It seems to me that with the rise of software that this type of live recording is more expensive than ever. Studio time was more of a given back then. Or am I off in that assessment?
No, I think you’re right in many aspects. There are two different ways of going about making music these days. A lot of it is computer-based. I think that’s why a lot of music is sounding stale. There are a lot of producers that I admire, but there are a lot more producers out there in general now. You can also go the route that I stick with, which is going into the studio. And, yes, it’s crazy expensive. No one can afford to pay you to do that these days. But I would say that if you want timeless art, I think you should invest in it. I know I have the choice. I prefer to spend most of the money, if not all, to go into production. That’s why I’m in it. It’s a drug. It’s the same as going and buying a bunch of drugs. Getting in the studio and paying for the time, the musicians, for the process and the outcome. I get high from that. Is it smart economically? No. But I’m addicted.
One of the most respected music critics working today, Simon Reynolds has been an expert chronicler of trends and movements in post-punk and electronic music since the ’80s, writing definitive historical overviews like 1998’s Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music And Dance Culture and 2005’s Rip It Up And Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984. For his latest book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past, Reynolds goes searching for the future, and wonders why there don’t seem to be any traces of it in a contemporary landscape choked with remnants of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
Reynolds makes an obvious though still startling conclusion: In an era when aging bands endlessly reissue old albums and younger artists regurgitate their parents’ record collections, nobody seems to be coming up with anything new. While artists kept making great music in the ’00s, the sort of game-changing movements associated with past decades—like punk, hip-hop, or rave—never appeared. One of the central questions of Retromania is whether we’ve simply given up on the “new” in favor of exploring the past, over and over again, via a series of never-ending revivals.
Though mainly concerned with music, Retromania looks at culture on the whole, finding a similarly backward-looking sensibility inherent in fashion, film, TV, and everywhere else in pop culture. The A.V. Club spoke with Reynolds about the book, his definition of “originality,” the irrelevance of time to younger music fans, and whether unplugging from the Internet is the best way to uncover the future.
The A.V. Club: How are people reacting to the book? Are they skeptical, or have you articulated something that they were already feeling?
Simon Reynolds: There’s a whole range of reactions. People I speak to in interviews tend to be more or less on the same page. In some ways, it’s interesting just to put this idea out and see how people react, because some people have got this idea, which I think is actually symptomatic of the very thing I’m talking about, that recycling has always been a part of music. My favorite thing that people bring up is, “The Beatles were influenced by music hall.” They’re talking about a handful of songs, really. That doesn’t quite cancel out “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Rain,” “A Day In The Life”—I could go on and on listing songs the likes of which had really never had been heard in popular music before. People have convinced themselves it’s always been like this, and it hasn’t. The point of the book is to de-familiarize “retro,” and actually remind people that there have been times when music has pretty much come out of the blue. As I say at the end of the book, something new under the sun has happened.
I think it’s amazing that people have convinced themselves that derivativeness and leaning on influences in a really obvious and simple way has always been the norm. It just hasn’t. I actually made a list the other day, decade by decade, listing innovators. And it’s abundantly provable. Some people seem really affronted that I would dare to suggest that the ’60s was maybe a bit more fast-moving and forward-looking and innovative than the last decade has been. They just find it really offensive. Some people deny the evidence. Then there are other people who say, “Well, it’s true, but why does it upset you? Why are you bothered by it?” There’s a bit of blaming the messenger going on, which I find kind of funny. But quite a lot of people are like, “You’ve articulated what I was thinking,” so it varies.
AVC: When people say that music has always been recycled, do they really mean that new music has always had influences?
SR: I think so. I think they’re quite rightly pointing out that music usually comes from somewhere. I mean, there are examples of music that literally came out of nowhere. If you want to, look up musique concrète, the electronic music of post-war vanguard, and some things in techno and acid house and various other points where music literally comes almost without any precedent whatsoever. But usually music has some kind of pre-existing tradition that it’s either developing or reacting against. We all agree on the fact that The Stones listened to Robert Johnson. But to me, what the Stones did to blues is completely different from what The White Stripes did, which was folding back on rock’s own tradition and largely photocopying it. Which is not to say they aren’t a talented group, but it’s different, isn’t it? It’s completely different, what the Stones did with the blues, and the trajectory that lead them to “Sympathy For The Devil” and “Moonlight Mile” and various other pieces of music that are really valuable developments of blues music. That’s quite different from what Interpol does, in their relationship to Joy Division. It’s a whole different order of influence and derivativeness, I think.
AVC: But did The White Stripes really “photocopy” blues greats? I think you can make the case that artists like Sharon Jones and Raphael Saadiq are deliberately trying to make “classic”-sounding records that duplicate a ’60s soul template. With the White Stripes, you can hear the influence of Son House and Led Zeppelin, but I don’t think Jack White was trying to make his records sound like their records.
SR: I quite like The White Stripes, I don’t hate them at all. But I think The White Stripes, their whole shtick is, “We are going back to when music was good and proper.” They are like The Black Crowes in that respect. I don’t think the Stones were ever like, “We are going back to Robert Johnson.” It was more like, “We’re excited by these records,” but they were totally enmeshed in the ’60s. I don’t think that nostalgia and harkening back to rock’s glory days was a part of it, because rock didn’t have any glory days. They were right at the start of it. Groups like The White Stripes or The Black Keys are partly a function of rock having reached a certain age, where it does have glory days. And it’s partly a function of the fact that, like that Springsteen song, magazines are full of boring stories of glory days. Mojo magazine, if you’ve ever looked at it, or Uncut, those two magazines in Britain, it’s almost like Dylan, the Stones, and the Beatles are on this rotation. They have to have four Beatles covers every year, and three Dylan—endless retellings of the same stories. Every year there’s half a dozen Dylan books. When younger groups are exposed to all this stuff, and it’s still on the radio, I think it’s probably inevitable that they’re doing this wistful harkening back.
AVC: Jack White would probably argue that he’s continuing a tradition that he respects, whether it’s a blues tradition or a rock tradition, and that carrying on tradition is a big part of blues and certainly folk music. Do you see any credibility in that?
SR: I think so. I think there’s a defensibility there. But then, if you define yourself as doing that, you’re more or less arguing that rock music is a finished form, and that it arrived at itself at some sort of state of perfection and that there’s nowhere left for it to go. You’re just a custodian. It’s kind of a depressing way to view it. In the book I interview people who have these kinds of opinions. I have an extremely interesting conversation with Billy Childish. I knew I had to speak with him because he’s one of the most articulate thinkers on this whole idea. He has this whole thing where he says, “Originality is overrated.” He defines originality as “closeness to the origin”; primality is what he believes in. Some kind of raw, as unselfconscious as possible, expression. But at the same time, the very idea of unselfconscious expression is actually a consciously thought-out ideology that he has. He has these manifestos that are very funny and articulate, decrying conceptualism in art, and the Marcel Duchamp legacy. Playing the same kind of music for 30 years, honing it and improving it in incremental ways, that seems fairly valorous. It’s more the very empty pastiches of the past that I find troubling.
AVC: You talk a lot about derivative culture in Retromania, but you never define what “originality” is. What makes something original?
SR: It’s difficult. In the book, I don’t actually ever define originality and innovation because it’s such a tangled, endlessly complex area. There are gradations of innovation and gradations of originality. It’s probably easier just to define non-originality and non-innovation. You can sort of just tell it. For instance, one nuance that I don’t address in the book, one of those things that only occurred to me later, is that there are quite a lot of performers in the history of music who aren’t innovative musically. I don’t particularly think P.J. Harvey is an innovator musically, but where she’s an innovator is lyrics, persona, the games she plays with identity. And someone like Elvis Costello is kind of a composite of all these things that existed before—there’s Dylan in there, there’s Lennon, there’s that album that was in the style of Motown and Stax, Get Happy!, he did a country covers album. But what make Costello quite original are his lyrics and his persona.
That’s just one of the roots of troubles with originality and innovation—there’s no definitive formula that you can come up with. A lot of good innovation in pop music is context. If you were to juxtapose the innovations of pop music with avant-garde music, they’re either lagging behind them, or they’re not as extreme. But they’re still, within the context of popular, commercial music, they’re really imaginative. Like Giorgio Moroder’s sound on “I Feel Love” was really imaginative. People in the ’60s avant-garde were doing electronic pulses before him, but he took that idea and made it into something that people could dance to. It was like Morton Subotnick with a disco beat.
AVC: How much of this is a rhetorical issue? Does it bother you that artists are no longer explicitly saying, “We reject the past,” like they’ve often done in classic rock, punk, hip-hop, or rave music?
SR: I don’t think it’s a problem; it’s more a symptom of what they’re doing. It’s more like, the way people represent what they’re doing is usually related to what their practice is, and if their practice is much more archaeological or archivist. I think for a lot of musicians now, the past has almost literally displaced the future in their imagination. The idea that there are genres of music that have been unexplored or maligned, that there are good things in them, that seems to be what gets people going. There’s a whole array of things across the culture that relate to being an adventurer exploring the past, and the past being sort of like a gigantic flea market you sift through. It’s fascinating. I’m totally in love with it. I spend a lot of time sifting through old stuff myself—it’s a big pleasure activity of mine, so I totally understand this. You find these strange things, old pamphlets and books with weird graphics and stuff. I totally dig all that, but it is a significant cultural shift, I think. If you think about it in a really crass way, in the ’60s, people might have had a lava lamp in their living room. Now the exact same group of people is likely to have a vintage manual typewriter. Maybe in 30 years, the vintage manual typewriter will seem as much a cliché of this time as the lava lamp seems like an absurd cliché of whenever it was.
Part of it is that so much happened in the 20th century and things moved so fast, and you had this enormous capitalist engine generating all these toys and gadgets and things that became rapidly obsolescent. It’s all piled up, hasn’t it? And you think of the sheer amount of recording that went on. It always blows my mind whenever I go record shopping how many records I’ve never seen before. I’ve been in record stores forever, decades I’ve been looking through them, and I still see things I’ve never seen, artists I’ve never heard of. The sheer amount of recording that was done, it is almost like this universe of music. Daniel Lopatin in the book actually says it’s a period of digestion, we’re digesting and processing all this stuff that happened musically and in other senses in this really runaway, fast period of time of production. And perhaps that’s fine. Perhaps that’s what we need.
AVC: As you’ve said, music from all eras is equally accessible now. Have we reached the point in music where there is no such thing as a past, a present, or a future, that it’s more about genres now than eras?
SR: It’s hard for me to say, because obviously I still have quite a strong sense of history, having lived through all of it, then researched it, and read it. How old are you?
AVC: I’m 33.
SR: Then you probably do, too, because a lot of your formative experience of music would have been the ’90s, maybe the late ’80s. So you’ve lived in history, when there wasn’t constant news coverage—not about music anyway—and there wasn’t this massive, super-available archive. You probably remember how hard it was to find out about stuff, and how you’d have to look in rock books and encyclopedias. But I think people who only know these conditions of being able to access everything, regardless of when it came out, almost instantly, they’re bound of have a completely different sense of time. Even someone like me, who grew up with a very strong historical sense from my own life and also from my job, I can feel it weakening. I can feel a sense of it weakening a bit, just through the lived, everyday experience of using the Internet. It does have that weird effect where the sequence of things gets jumbled. I can remember periods of time when there was a very strong sense of each year being different from the next year. But I don’t have that sense with the last decade. I’m sure if somebody played me a record, I wouldn’t be able to assign it to 2008 or 2002. It would be quite hard to do.
There’s a piece I came across on the Internet. I can’t remember where it was, but it was done by a sociologist, but in an informal way. She was looking at the music habits of young people, college students and high-school students as well. It seems like they listened to a lot of old music. They didn’t have any sense of not wanting to listen to their parents’ music at all. They were quite happy to be into it. A really large chunk of their listening was The Beatles and ’60s and ’70s music. It probably does feel contemporary to them, in a way.
AVC: How much does this have to do with the declining cultural supremacy of music? Do you think music has become more backward-looking as it’s become less central in culture? Or is it the other way around?
SR: It’s odd, because music seems to be much more omnipresent in lots of ways than ever, really. Because it’s in everything. It’s in movies, it’s in games, there are things like Glee and American Idol and Pop Idol, people carrying music around with them much more. They’ve got more choice. It’s staggering the amount of music you can access, different kinds of music. And I think there’s also more coverage of music. The coverage of music is enormously detailed and instant in a way that it really wasn’t when I was growing up. There were a few music papers and every newspaper would have one person writing about pop, but it wouldn’t get much space. TV was always very sporadic in covering it. There wasn’t that much radio. In the U.S. there was, I guess, but in Britain only one or two stations would cover it. You almost had to sort of seek it out more when I was growing up. Now it seems to be omnipresent, but it seems also to have declined a bit. It seems like people use it more to fill up space in their lives, backdrops to other activities a lot of times.
AVC: You write in the book about how there wasn’t a new music movement on par with punk or hip-hop in the ’00s. Does that reflect a lack of inspiration, or are we just so spread out attention-wise as listeners that it’s hard to band behind one thing?
SR: You can date the beginning of the non-appearance of those movements almost precisely to when the Internet becomes a major force in music culture. As soon as that really starts to take hold as being the major means through which fans talk to each other and everything else that came with the Internet, it’s almost from that point onwards that there’ve been no movements on the scale of hip-hop and rave. And perhaps part of that is because coverage is so instant, there’s no lag for something to grow and develop into a movement. There was a period with rave, before the very early days of acid house in Britain, when it was not really being covered or heard about. It was a good eight, nine months when it was happening in darkness and forming into something. Then it was discovered. And same thing with hip-hop. Hip-hop had several years when it was just this thing going on in the Bronx where it developed. That sort of hatching time doesn’t seem to exist any more.
So there’s that. And I think you’re right, part of the thing about the Internet is that it caters to niche-ification and subdivision, narrowing of focus. Those things were already happening in music. You were already getting a fragmentation of dance music, a fragmentation of metal—I’m always staggered by how many flavors and sub-subgenres of metal there are. And that seems to be an across-the-board thing with most music culture, and that was already happening before the Internet. I think the Internet was the fruition of tendencies of something, it was almost like the things people wanted to do anyway, and they affected them, and enabled them to take them too far, and then they realized that that’s the downside, which is becoming more clear now. With file-sharing: You’re growing up in a scarcity economy of music and then suddenly it’s like they’ve just given you a key to a candy shop. Because you’re still thinking in the scarcity mindset, you start hoarding.
AVC: We’ve talked about how access to this massive archive of music has affected artists, but what’s the impact on listeners? Has it made us more jaded?
SR: I have to be wary about using the word “we.” Some people have called me out on that. I have to take care to not be too presumptuous and conflating my own experience with everybody else. But I do think that this is basic common sense in life, that when you get too much of something for no cost and minimal effort, it’s bound to have less value. I’m basically left-wing, and vaguely anti-capitalist, and it’s strange to realize that the decommodification of music has been a bit of a disaster, and that actually paying for stuff has weirdly added emotional value to it. For most people, money is something that they work hard for in exploitative conditions, and if you pay for something, it’s bound to make you give more of an effort to get out and listen to it. If you’ve got something for nothing, it’s basic common sense that you’re more inclined to not listen to it all the way through, listen to it distractedly, download it but then forget you download it.
And I was just observing my own habits, and I think broadly critics are already on that list, but now everyone is on the freebie list. I wrote a piece a long time ago talking about music-overload, and this is long before the Internet, talking about how having too much music essentially made it hard to feel it, or experience it properly, and how a way of getting that was to be a fanatic. And that’s what I was, a fanatic for jungle music. I think that everyone has that vision of radio DJs and journalists, which is that they can get all this music for nothing, and I think there are very, very few people who can really maintain their enthusiasm for music when they’re that bombarded by it. One of those people was the DJ John Peel. He never lost his enthusiasm. He was always excited to open a new package every morning.
AVC: If the “retromania” problem is rooted in having access to this bottomless online archive, is the solution to simply unplug?
SR: The idea of something existing offline seems inconceivable. It would be like existing without electricity. But those kinds of things are perhaps already happening, perhaps that’s where the hemorrhaging of energy is going. There seems to be some murmurings and grumbling and discontent with the Internet on a whole lot of levels. One of the supreme cultural values is the idea of convenience being a supreme idea or goal. So deliberately embracing the most inconvenient formats that have some sort of delay to them, that seems to have some—I dare not call it a resistance—but some element of recalcitrance in the face of digital culture. Digital culture is about sensations, and making everything easy and frictionless and instant. Perhaps there’s some inherent feeling about getting things exactly how you want it and when you want that isn’t actually that satisfying.
AVC: Maybe that’s the only way to escape the past, to get off the Internet and not have access to it. If you look at the big movements like hip-hop or rave culture, as you said, they existed outside the mainstream media for a long time.
SR: Yeah, I think so. Whether you can really brave those conditions now is a moot point, but those things took a while to hatch and come together. They weren’t based around the latest technology. A lot of what rave is based around is power radio, which is a really old-fashioned technology. A friend of mine just wrote a piece about how important the Internet was in the early phase of American rave culture, but it wasn’t in Britain. It was done very much with fliers in record stores. It wasn’t a really high-tech operation, strangely, because it was all about the future.
I’m pretty interested to see what’s going to happen next. I just wonder what is going to happen next in music. Something has to break in this pattern, I think.
UK-based electro artist Mutsumi Kanamori (a.k.a. Mutsumi Fulton) & husband/producer Maurice Fulton released her first album, AFRO FINGER AND GEL under the moniker MU on the label Tigersushi in 2003. Mutsumi shocked the electronic world with her spastic freak-out dance tracks laden with pop culture references, inside jokes and experiences, incoherent squawks and sounds, and an unabashed confrontational attitude calling out all who have wronged her.
She delivers her form of abrasive disco with a disjointedness that is as frighteningly ferocious as it is hilarious. Her lyrics come often as a visceral stream-of-consciousness; perverse and obscene, commenting on sexual politics and a hyper-aggressive passion for tabloid news coverage. She attacks and celebrates famous figures who pass through pop-culture obsession as quickly and intensely as her music, such as Paris Hilton.
Unfortunately, due to mistreatment, Mutsumi and Maurice left the label. Claiming that Tigersushi had rude comments against the people of Manchester, they released their second album OUT OF BREACH: MANCHESTER’S REVENGE under Trevor Jackson’s label Output Recordings. Tracks like “Tigerbastard” showcased their disagreements with the previous label. However, once again, Mutsumi and Maurice were left without a label when Output ceased production in 2006.
Around this time, a new MU track would leak on her MySpace profile every now and then, but soon we would be left with silence. The tracks were removed, and Mutsumi disappeared from the internet for years. Many, including myself, figured she was done with music after 5 years of silence. This was unfortunate, as she was gaining recognition from figures like Björk.
Recently however, she has returned under the name Mutsumi instead of MU with a new album, released digitally on October 31, 2010–a fitting date. Mutsumi and Maurice are still working together, “I write, we record, he process & mixes,” she clarifies. They are now releasing under BubbleTease Communications. The new album, self-titled MUTSUMI, brings her aggression to a higher level. Her humor is still pervasive, but with a cynical edge that grants her a queen-like status, much like female rap stars.
This is fitting, the new album seems to be much more hip-hop/electro driven, whereas her previous efforts were more tribal. Sexuality comes to the forefront, with a song on prostitution titled “Pimp Slap,” female-on-female sexual harassment in “Did You Just Grab My Butt?” and not to mention “College Panty Smelling.” Fake breasts, sexual abuse, milk secretion and infidelity are also on the list.
These themes have been explored by Mutsumi before, but not in such quantity. On the new record, references to stars and scandals like Tiger Woods and Nikki Grahame of UK’s Big Brother occur without context, as do health care dilemmas and various political injustice.
We are once again graced with the wonderful world of Mutsumi, un-contained, unfiltered. I sent her a few questions online:
It’s been 5 years, why the long wait?
Because with my 2nd LP Trever Jackson burnt me so bad that I didn’t want to make music any more. I thought what’s the point? If people you trust is going to steal from you is not worth doing.
The album is being released under Mutsumi rather than simply “Mu,” why the recent change?
I use to go by the name Mu but too many people started to use that name , plus people were thinking that I was in a group, I’m not having any of that.
Is MUTSUMI going to be download-only? We’ll miss your album art…
CD next year on BubbleTease Communications.
What did you do before music, before MU?
I used to work at Freshmints clothing store in Sheffield, but that was over 10 years ago.
Who are your victims this time around?
Child molesters!
Your new track “I’m Really Pissed” is a list of what really pisses you off… who is this Takeshi wannabe filmmaker?
Those conscious who try to do film any try to be Kitano Takeshi to make film. I hate copy cat.
