With a minimum of fanfare, Swayzak released an album of sly, deep techno called Snowboarding In Argentina in 1998. For several years previous James Taylor (not the reformed junkie folk singer) and David “Brun” Brown had been working on their particular brand of late night electronics, releasing a few pieces of vinyl on their own self-titled label, including the now classic “Speedboat/Low Res Skyline.” Since then they’ve released a further four studio albums as well as two highly revered DJ mix comps, all under the banner of a not so subtle bastardization of Patrick Swayze’s name. With the other half of Swayzak now living in France, Little White Earbuds caught up with Brun at his local pub in London to talk about the re-release of Snowboarding In Argentina, Paul McCartney CDs and their new Serieculture DJ night.

How did you and James meet?

David “Brun” Brown: We met in about 1988 in the days of acid house, although we weren’t really in to it. We worked at a record company together. It was the boom Thatcherite years and I came from Glasgow and it wasn’t a boom time there. But one of my best friends got a job working in a record company in London. We had worked together at a record store in Glasgow and he said, ‘Come down to London, you’ll get a job.’ So I did and I got a job the very next day after being unemployed in Glasgow for about a year. And working at a record company was one of my dreams. It was at Island records, so it was doubly fascinating. James was working there in the promotions department alongside my mate, so there was a whole gang of us. One of the guys we worked with back then is now the managing director of Island and he used to be the post boy.

So how long before you started playing around with music?

I’d been doing stuff myself since I was fifteen but all the guys we worked with were guitar-orientated, whereas I had a synthesizer and a drum machine. I was always trying to make it work with these guys but it just didn’t. After a while James and I started going into one of the studios at Island and jamming with the gear. Eventually we got more into the electronic side of things. James was working with other guys who were teaching him a lot about electronic gear, so he went and bought a sampler and about 1992 we started doing more stuff. Then by 1993 we wanted to do it properly and make a go of it. We worked on material for the next four years and we realized we had to start putting it out. We weren’t really sure what it even was because we weren’t in the club scene in any way. A friend of ours offered us the money to press a record, but we decided to do it ourselves and took them to stores around London. We came across two or three that were really in to it and we were really surprised; I wasn’t expecting that response at all. One distributor who was very dismissive of us at first ran after us down the street after we’d left a 10″ for him.

What is the design you use for the Swayzak label, the cat on the girl’s head?

It originates from the Bazooka Joe cartoon from the 50’s. A friend of ours came up with the design. we never took ourselves that seriously, hence our name as well, and it stayed with us ever since.

Tell me about the Dirty Dancing album and how it got lumped in with the electroclash sound.

A lot of people compared it to electroclash but there was only one track on there that was anywhere near that sound. I like proper electro rather than the clash side of it. That album was inspired by our trips into Germany and discovering all this music that wasn’t available in Britain, and playing with people that had never played here. Britain was still in the dark ages in terms of electronic music then. Labels like Playhouse and Kompakt and Perlon — all those labels that are now quite big were nowhere to be seen over here back then.

Was that the first time you’d done a music video? (for “I Dance Alone”)

No the first one was done for “Speedboat” from our first album and it was done for a budget of £12.99. We have a friend who is a really prolific film director now and he chopped up a bunch of different Super 8 clips of us on holiday. We had to pay the editor about $400 though. The last film this guy did was $35,000,000 so we got him for a good price.

You’ve just re-released Snowboarding In Argentina. What have you changed about the album?

Well when it first came out it was originally a series of twelve inches, and we ran into this guy from the New York office of Island Records and he asked us what we’d been up to. We told him and he said we should make an album and he’d help us get it out there. So we released an American version and then we hooked up with Pagan in Britain and did a British version, which was a more perfected version of what we wanted. So when we went back to it we took off the tracks we didn’t really like any more, IE the one particularly crap drum n bass track on it. Apart from that, I just remastered the DAT’s and edited the tracks properly because the first ones were just a fade in and a fade out.

Swayzak love the environment and riding the bus

Tell me about the new Serieculture night.

I’m still a bit undecided about it but it’s going to be at the new T Bar near Liverpool Street. The proposed idea is to start the night with a vinyl auction and I’m going to invite down some well known or infamous DJs who want to sell off some pieces of vinyl. I’m not sure exactly how it’ll work but they’ll perhaps play a record for the last time and then we’ll sell it. Maybe it’ll be single records or maybe a whole lot. I went to a night in Berlin called 1991 and it was a hip-hop night. As they were playing the tracks a guy was writing them out and projecting the names up on the wall. I really like that idea. But it’ll be an all vinyl night, no CDs or digital vinyl. I may have people playing live so they can use their laptops for that.

Having started making and releasing music well before the days of downloading and mp3s, what are your views on the matter?

We wanted to do a vinyl only label for ours and other people’s music, but actually it’s really difficult to do because so many people will only distribute it if they can get the digital rights as well. I’m quite torn by it because I really want to keep things on vinyl but at the same time you’ve got to release the music. Even if we do the vinyl someone will upload it anyway. I was given a nice record the other day and it was quite a rare white label. I checked it out on the Internet to get some more information on it and there was this site where you could download it for nothing. It really takes away from the value of a rare track. We tried out a digital release with “Bunny Girl” and people bought it, but you just don’t get any feedback on it like that, so it feels like you haven’t even put something out. I know some people think the music should all be free, but it shouldn’t. As it is you can only make money from doing gigs now. If it keeps up it may kill the whole scene and then you might as well just go to Starbucks and drink coffee and buy a Paul McCartney CD.

Over the course of your career you’ve focused on albums, much more so than a lot of other acts. Why is that?

Initially around the end of the 90’s it was the thing to do to show that you could do it. The first one was really just a collection of singles, but with the following two we had the budget to make an album so we wanted to do to it. But it’s interesting because now you can just release a couple of tracks and if they’re on the right label and get in to the hands of the right people then you can get a lot of work out of it.

With subsequent albums you’ve used vocalists more and more. Was that something you wanted to do right from the start or did you just happen to evolve into doing them?

That happened more out of frustration with just doing instrumental tracks when we felt we could write things for vocalists. We never push the vocalists in any direction at all, we just give them the music and they sing whatever they like. I think the vocal tracks help us reach a few more people, perhaps take us out of the clubs a bit and into people’s living rooms a bit more. I think it can definitely make a track more memorable.

What can we expect from you in the next year?

Well we may do another album although it’s a pretty weird time to be doing that now. When we first signed with K7! in 2002 we were selling about 25,000 copies of our albums, which we were really happy with but now we’d be lucky to sell 5,000. That’s not just us either, it’s a lot of artists. We’ve been active on the 240 Volts label again so we have some releases coming up on that. The first release has already been lined up. It’s going to be an EP with four different tracks by four different producers so you get some good value for money. They’re all relatively unknown guys for the first release, coming from San Francisco, Paris, Luxembourg and Dover here in England. Every release will be like that. We’re working on doing colored vinyl and hand finished sleeves to make it something a little different, something special that shows the effort put in to it.