Zach Steinman and Sam Haar make up the New York-based duo Blondes, who for the last few years have traded in lush, live takes on dance music motifs. Certainly “live” is thrown around a lot as an adjective for any music that’s even remotely unpolished, but for Blondes it’s actually a central aspect. Their tracks are honed from a constant flow of jam-outs and live performances, and the results typically feel intuitive and open, full of a kind of elongated euphoria. Over the last year, they’ve worked with the RVNG Intl. label for a series of 12″s that show them moving closer to the dance floor than ever before; and their new self-titled LP combines these sides with new tracks and remix turns from the likes of Andy Stott, Laurel Halo, and John Roberts. We called them to ask about the series, their sonic evolution, and their weirdly perfect stint playing live in Ibiza.

I think your back story is pretty well documented so I don’t have any Oberlin questions or anything like that–

Zach Steinman: Any what? Berlin questions?

Yeah, Berlin or Oberlin.

ZS: Oberlin. Yeah, good. [laughs] That’s good.

Your first 12″ on Rvng, Lover/Hater, those were staples in your live set, correct?

ZS: Yeah.

Sam Haar: Yeah, we were playing them for basically six months before we recorded them, so they were…

ZS: That was a different approach to making those tracks because we already sort of fleshed them out a lot. It’s different than some of the other 12″s because we made those 12″s at a time when we were knowing we were going to release them and hadn’t played them out very much.

Right, that’s what I was wondering about, if those were taken from your sets as well, or were they completely new compositions?

SH: They were mostly pretty new compositions, yeah.

ZS: Yeah, they were — we’re still trying — you know, I mean we play Business / Pleasure pretty thoroughly out now, but we’re still trying to figure out “Water.”

You’re trying to incorporate them.

ZS: We’re trying to incorporate “Water” and “Wine,” too. But we already started playing “Wine” a lot.

SH: We also actually — well, those we were playing out a lot before, but then they took a totally different shape once we recorded them, actually.

ZS: Right. That’s true. And now with “Lover,” especially, we also do things in our live show, that we — it’s pretty different now than it is recorded on the 12″.

SH: Yeah, I’d say just from playing a lot it’s definitely evolved.

ZS: The repetition of playing these tracks over and over again has sort of made us find new ways, and it’s given — [the tracks have] taken new lives themselves.

Constantly changing?

ZS: Yeah.

OK. So when you decided to compose the series of 12″s, how much were you considering the dualistic titles? Because they seem like…almost dictatorial, like, very clear opposites, but the sides only seem pretty subtly different from each other. Were you really considering, “This is going to be the ‘Wine’ side; this is going to be the ‘Water’ side,” or [was it more arbitrary]?

SH: It was much more like, “We’re going to make two tracks at the same time.” So each 12″ was made at the same time, like, concurrently, basically going back and forth a lot. And so that’s why they sound very similar because they each have their own sort of… process and vibe that they’re working on.

ZS: But yeah, we weren’t like, you know, “‘Business’ is going to feel like… corporate, and then pleasure is going to be like, ‘ah!’” Like, you know, “pleasure.” It was more of a fun naming system.

Right. I don’t get that impression from the music.

ZS: Yeah. I think if anything, “Gold” and “Amber” are the ones that are probably the most true to their names.

Did you decide to collect them all on an album from the beginning, or did that develop just from — was that [Rvng Intl. owner] Matt [Werth]‘s idea?

SH: I think the project took form as we embarked on it. We decided we were just going to do one 12″ at first with Lover/Hater and, you know, we and Rvng wanted to do more. And as we were doing it, we were like, “Oh, we should probably — at some point it would be sweet to release this, like, digitally and put it all together.” So it kind of took shape as we were working on it.

I know you talk a lot about how your tracks are very live things, and they really take shape in the live setting. I was wondering if you had any plans to release a live album ever. I know mixes aren’t really — people don’t really buy mixes anymore, but as far as a live performance album, would you jam out for an hour or something and release that?

SH: We’ve definitely considered it.

ZS: We’ve been asked to release live sets. There’ve been a few people who have asked us for that. We’re probably going to release something like that where it’s like in the form of a mix, or I don’t know. But yeah, I think it would make a lot of sense for us to do a live album.

SH: It’s definitely something in the cards, I’m sure, in the future.

ZS: Merok was trying to get us at one point, when we released Touched, to do alternate versions. Alternate, live versions, but we never ended up doing that. Which is another cool idea. Our tracks are taking new shapes and could be different things.

Yeah, I know you’re kind of known for doing very few takes of your tracks. Do you have alternate versions of your tracks, or do you just go with the first one always? Or…

ZS: We usually have four different versions, I’d say. Generally speaking, we choose the best of four versions. And — minor editing is what we strive for. Even though sometimes we do real editing, but –

SH: Yeah. Sometimes, while we’re composing the track — I don’t — I think we rarely go with the first kind of compositional run.

ZS: It’s very similar to a pancake, you know? You never take that first — that first pancake’s always kind of like a dud when you’re making pancakes. You’ve got to wait for the grill to heat up. [laughs]

The perfectly formed pancakes.

SH: Yeah, I mean the thing is we have to play — we have to play each track a bunch in many ways before we really kind of understand what it’s doing, like, what it is, you know? I feel like sometimes we’ll be playing it and it won’t click for a week or two or who knows, and then it clicks and you know where you want to take it, what you want to do with it, and then you start recording. So it’s definitely not, like — the elements are not improvised in that way, you know? And then on the other hand, sometimes you do a take and you’re, like, “Man, how the hell did we get there?” And it ends up being the best one.

ZS: Right.

So regarding the [Blondes] remix album, I was curious what remix captured your style the best, or what’s your favorite of them?

SH: I feel like they were all such good — they were such good interpretations –

ZS: Of our style, I would say.

SH: I also really like that everybody made it their own in many ways. But I thought — it’s kind of funny, the one that sounds to me like it was made in the same way that we make music was the Traxx one, which is a pretty weird one, you know? But to me, it sounds like he’s just sitting there and playing it in the same way I feel we do. So actually, stylistically, I don’t necessarily feel that much of a connection with it, and he totally made it his own, but, just in terms of process…

I get that same kind of vibe from Traxx, yeah.

SH: Yeah, but everyone took it and made it their own thing, and I really have been happy with that.

ZS: Yeah, I think the remix album turned out really well.

So Matt told me you’re preparing for an installation at MoMA? Is that going to entail anything, special or different from your ordinary live set?

SH: Yeah, well, we’re doing a live set — that’s sort of the main performance — but before that set, as an opening, is going to be — we’re doing an eight-channel site-specific sound installation there. Or semi-site-specific. We’re going to have eight speakers all around the space playing some piece that we’re going to make. And there’s going to be some video installation up too, on the screens there.

ZS: Yeah, we’re going to make a video that’s basically in conjunction with a video we’re making for “Amber,” that will be incorporated into the video. And yeah, it’ll be at MoMA. And then Juan Maclean is doing this deep techno set that we — that he did when we were on tour with him in Toronto that was, like, really amazing. We asked him if he could do a set like that again. So we’re psyched on that.

So yours is a completely new composition?

SH: The installation, yeah. The performance is going to be one of our normal live shows, basically. But the installation is going to be all new composed work. Specialized around the space.

I was wondering if you had any intention to add new gear to your setup. Because I know live and studio are exactly the same, but yeah — or have you added much new equipment since you started playing?

SH: No, we’re trying. I think it’s a process; we already have been slowly adding pieces in since we started. And it’s going to continue to evolve. I think we’re going to get some money [laughs] and sort of feel like wanting to push it in certain ways.

ZS: I think our next album is going to be sort of — we’re going to get some new gear, which will kind of form how we play on that album. So I think we are going to evolve our gear setup.

SH: Yeah, so much of how we play and compose is sort of limited and — on purpose, you know, by the gear or sort of instrument. And so we work with those limitations, and as we alter that, you can sort of help to change your process.

So you’re working on an album right now?

ZS: Not yet. We’re really just working on the MoMA show right now, and –

SH: Then working a lot on promoting this album too. [laughs]

ZS: Right, yeah. And we’re about to go on tour in February to Europe, which we’re –

SH: Prepping for that. When we get back in March, we’re probably going to start diving into some new stuff.

Speaking of Europe, I wanted to ask you about playing Ibiza in the summertime. I remember when we did that email interview a while ago you talked about people, sometimes lying down at your shows. I mean, you make spacey music. I was wondering if you had to change or if you played differently for that kind of scene. I haven’t been there, but I can imagine — I know it’s like super-clubs.

SH: Yeah. No, definitely that’s a good question. We’ve been playing more — I mean even since that initial email interview we had too — we’ve been playing more and more clubs and less sort of, you know, rock venues and more dance-oriented spaces. So we’ve definitely gotten a little more “clubby.” A little more dance-y and dance floor friendly, and I think that’s reflected in the stuff that’s on this record. You play places like that, and you just — it’s a lot more fun to do that than just working more on the builds and getting people going. But on the flipside of that too, when we do play a show that’s much more chill, it’s fun to not try to do that and to get really spacey and let people sort of drift with it, you know?

ZS: Yeah. But in Ibiza, people were there to party, you know? They were all lubricated. I don’t know, it was –

SH: And our job was much more functional, in a way. A lot of people were like, “Who are these guys?” “I don’t know. We’re in Ibiza; we’re going to go clubbing. We don’t know who’s playing.” [laughs] It’s much more functional, and it’s also — it’s fun. I like those kind of parties, too.

ZS: They had the best lasers in the club we played. I just remember looking up and just being like, “Whoa, Jesus.” They had to be, like, $100,000. It was amazing.

I imagine they have a pretty high budget for lasers.

ZS: I’m sure. They had to.

SH: We talked to some people who tried to get a laser that good to go on tour and stuff, and it’s like, you can’t. [laughs] Unless you’re U2, you know? If you’re U2, maybe. What’s also fun about playing those environments is that people, they want to dance, you know? You don’t have to convince them; you just have to give them something that they can dance do and that they enjoy dancing to, you know?

Do you find that’s a thing? Like people have to be convinced to dance?

ZS: I mean, at more rock-oriented venues.

SH: They’re there to see you, and they might dance, but it takes a little more coaxing, sure.

ZS: Yeah, it does take a little more coaxing. Dancing isn’t exactly all our agenda either. It’s kind of –

SH: True.

ZS: We react to the crowd a lot. And I think that if it’s not that vibe, then we play in a different, more — you know, go spacier, usually.

SH: It’s not like we’re up there with a mic being like, “Come on, motherfuckers, y’all gotta dance!” [laughs]

ZS: Yeah, we kind of just –

Adapt.

ZS: Adapt. Adapting, yeah.

SH: It makes it more fun for everyone involved, I think.

Peter Kersten first tried his hand at producing in 2000, releasing his first ever effort on Dial, the label he had just set up with friends Carsten Jost and Paul Kominek (Turner). His melancholic, measured brand of house and techno has been consistent in its quality for more than ten years, thirty singles, five full length albums and around fifty remixes. In the realm of electronic music, maintaining such a consistency of quality is rare; having your first releases sound remarkably undated over this length of time is almost unheard of, yet this rings true for Kersten’s music. With Lawrence as his most well-known moniker — dedicated to his deeper musical expressions — he uses the handle Sten for his dance floor oriented material. Over the years, Dial has seen a remarkable run of releases from kindred artists like Efdemin, John Roberts, Pigon, Pantha Du Prince, Roman Flügel and many more. Its off-shoot label, Laid, has since 2009 done similarly well on a deep house tip, with memorable releases by Rick Wade, Kassem Mosse, Smallpeople and RNDM. In 2006, Kersten, along with a few close friends set up the record store and physical label Smallville Records. The friendly vibes and family feel of the store also extends to the regular parties they throw and of course the music that the label releases. Little White Earbuds got in touch with Kersten to talk about the longevity of Dial, which producers are exciting him right now and the forthcoming projects for his various enterprises.

You’ve been releasing music for over 10 years now. One thing that has always struck me about your productions is that right from the start you’ve had a very polished sound. How do you feel your own productions have changed or evolved over the years?

Writing music for me is a very spontaneous issue. For over a decade I have been digging a lot of styles — house music, techno, ambient, hip-hop — from my very first album to my latest CD, Until Then, Goodbye on Mule Electronic. I don’t see any straight line of changes, but I am still hungry for trying out any sound that fits. The new release on Koze’s Pampa imprint was quite an adventure, as well as my latest project, an experimental jazz band with Christian Naujoks and Richard von der Schulenburg.

Likewise there is a strong aesthetic running through the artwork that accompanies your albums and single releases, which has remained consistent in theme and style. Do you work closely with the people who are responsible for the artwork?

Yes, there is a close relationship to almost all artists who are responsible for the artworks of our labels. One of my very best friends, Stefan Marx, has done all the covers for Smallville and Mule Electronic. He even released his own “record,” a gatefold cover including three gorgeous posters. Our graphic designers Christian Doering for Laid and mainly Till Sperrle for Dial Records are doing an extraordinary, wonderful job, as well as all the artists contributing their amazing pieces. After running Dial Records for more than 10 years, we just started running an art gallery in Berlin called Mathew.

Dial has also remained a by-word for quality in the world of deep techno. What has been your approach to the running of the label in terms of keeping it moving forward yet retaining its consistent high quality?

What holds the Dial family together is the never-ending openness and curiosity for any kind of music. The musicians appearing on our little eccentric label are into so many music styles, whether it is contemporary classic, Norwegian black metal, or sine wave drones. Listening to African mbira music or some old Folkways records at Phillip Sollmann’s place, for example, is part of our influences for making dance music too.

With vinyl becoming more and more rare and less of a tradable commodity, can you tell us the reasons behind setting up the Smallville store?

Exactly when selling vinyl turned out being only a business struggle, including dumping prices on the Internet and discussions about downloads, Julius Steinhoff, Stella Plazonja, Just von Ahlefeld, and myself hardly missed the main points of running a record store: having nice selected music, a great interior setup, lovely people meeting in a cozy atmosphere. Finances are not our thing, but still its working quite well with doing the Smallville parties and printing Stefan Marx t-shirts, et cetera.

And how about the label? What is the mission of the label and how does it differ from Dial and Laid?

Smallville is a straight, deep, club label with focus on friends being part of it. Laid is a house music label too, including contributions by some heroes we love.

Have you had any formal musical training or are you self taught?

I am 98% self taught, I would say. Or let’s say I don’t know much theoretically about production — it still is a very intuitive process.

How long were you experimenting with production before you started making things you were happy enough with to release?

My first try ever was also my first released track, “Shoes,” appearing on Dial-00.

Since you started releasing have there been any major changes to your studio setup that have changed the way you make music?

Oh yes, I started only playing some samples on an E-mu E64 and Kurzweil [K]2000 using Cubase. For quite a while I am using mostly Logic Audio but the really important part of my studio is some selection of vintage acoustic instruments, including a steel drum and an old Deagan vibraphone.

In terms of your album releases, how much planning goes into your albums? Are they thought out with material written around certain themes or ideas, or are they more just a collection of tracks?

There is never any kind of master plan. When I finish a single track or an album I never see an approach regarding the beginning or a straight process. But surely the feeling behind it creates a whole piece of art, not just a collection of tracks. The same goes with my first mix CD, Timeless, on Cocoon — it was quite a long process to collect the tracks and to let them grow together.

Is there non-electronic or non-dance related music that you listen to that influences your own productions?

All the time I am listening to non-electronic or non-dance related music all the time. Schubert, Scelsi, Linda Perhacs, Jeremy Jay, Ariel Pink, Robert Wyatt — a never-ending list of music — that’s my life!

Apart from the remix of the Lawrence track “Never As Always,” it’s been a few years since we’ve heard anything from your Sten alias. Do you have any Sten material you’re working on at the moment, or is your focus on Lawrence?

The focus is on Lawrence at the moment — quite influenced by Sten though.

Your latest release has come out on Pampa. Did you make the tracks specifically for the label, or did you already have them completed? Are you interested in working with the label again in the future?

“Kurama” was intended to be the very first track of my next album. But then at one of the very sweetest festivals ever — the Smallville Open Air in August 2011 — I played back to back with DJ Koze, and he fell in love with that number. He constantly tried to convince me to have it as a Pampa single. If there isn’t any new album by Lawrence this year, it’s because of Koze. But I love him; I would even give him my last pants.

Speaking of labels, what have been some of your favorite labels in the past while apart from your own ones?

Workshop has been a top label for between-the-chairs dance music, I love all the releases here. The Kann guys from Leipzig are my favorites when it comes to cozy house music. Live At Robert Johnson, Underground Quality, Pampa, Aesthetic Audio, It’s, Sistrum — a lot of great stuff is recently coming out. I cannot believe that I am digging electronic dance music for over 20 years now and it never gets boring.

And are there any newer artists you’ve discovered lately who you’re really enjoying?

Richard von der Schulenburg, aka RVDS, is not just my favorite DJ ever — he is an excellent producer playing the keys of deepness all night and day. The Juniper boys from Manchester are the shooting stars of today. Kyle Hall is one of the most exciting newsters — wicked stuff. And Smallpeople, Moomin, Christopher Rau — the Smallville’s magic releases are getting me all the time. And watch out Kassian Troyer!

What can we expect from you over the next year across the board, from Lawrence to Sten and with Dial, Laid, and Smallville?

A Lawrence remix for my friend Superpitcher should be coming out soon. As I am still not deep enough into production for my next album, I’ll be finishing a new Dial 12″ soon. The Smallpeople will be releasing their first vinyl album this year, and I just can’t wait for it — it’s gonna be wonderful! On Dial we will leave the dance floor for some new albums by Christian Naujoks, Phantom Ghost, and a new project by Stephan Abry and Pantha Du Prince called Ursprung. The year will be started by 12″s from Kassian Troyer on Dial and a various artists single on Laid featuring Palisade (aka Redshape), Moomin, and RNDM. What a happy new year!

This year saw the collaboration of two luminaries in the electronic and dance music world. Mark Pritchard has a long history in a wealth of projects, from Global Communication and Troubleman to his recent Harmonic 313 guise for Warp Records. Steve Spacek formed the trio Spacek with Ed Spacek and Morgan Spacek (now Morgan Zarate on Hyperdub) before moving on to solo releases under his own name such as Spaceshift, which featured J Dilla on one song. After both relocated to Australia and found themselves living near each other, they embarked on an exploration of shared themes and beats. The result was Africa Hitech and 2011′s 93 Million Miles, featuring the breakout “Out In The Streets” single. While touring the U.S. they found time to chat with LWE about their history, influences, working together, and what the future holds.

When was the first time that you guys met each other?

Mark Pritchard: I think the first time we met we were both working for a label called Island Blue, which was a subsidiary of Island Records. A mutual friend called Ross Allen was running that label, and I met another band called Custom Blue, who was a friend of Steve [Spacek] and Morgan [Spacek]. So I think there was some kind of Island Records night, or somebody was doing a launch from that kind of crew, and then we all went to it and met them. And then I think I’d heard Eve off of Ross way before it came out, and I was really blown away by that. Then I think just really coming closer to Alex Pilkington (from Custom Blue), there was this point where when I started doing Troubleman projects I was thinking about getting vocalists to feature, and then I was thinking, “Oh, I really like Steve’s voice; I’d like to do something with him.” And I think then maybe by right about 2002-3ish, Steve came down to the studio and hung out for a week, and we started to cut the tracks then, and then one of those made the Troubleman album, and one later got released on Sonar Kollektiv, which is that “Turn It On” track. So that was kind of the first — yeah, we kind of met in early 2000s, I suppose.

With such long histories in dance music of kind all types, what keeps you guys evolving, do you think?

Steve Spacek: Man, just the excitement of it all, really. It’s just, because I always thought, no matter how much stuff you do and how much stuff you touch on, it’s not even the tip of the iceberg, you know what I mean? Sometimes I hear people talk about music and they say things like, “Man, everything that’s been done has been done already,” and I’m like, “Really?” I mean if you thought like that, then you might as well give up already, you know what I mean? I thought, with all the music that has ever gone before, it’s not even — we’re not even anywhere near completing anything. There’s just so many places to go with music. Within those twelve notes, there’s just infinite possibilities.

Yeah.

SS: And so it’s just the whole excitement of that. Because, you know, there’s this feeling that you get sometimes when you do a really great track, when you’re really satisfied with a track, and I love that feeling. And I always look forward to that feeling again, do you know what I mean? Like, where I’ve done something I’m just really buzzing off of and I know that I’m capable of doing that. I know that when I’m working with some people like Mark or whatever, I know that as a collective we’re capable of doing that. And it’s that feeling, that really good — that high, you know, within yourself, when you put something together and it’s sweet and right, and it’s nice and resolved, and the bass line and all the frequencies are hitting you in the right space, it’s just a right emotion being created. That feeling is almost second to none, you know what I mean? And so I know that infinitely that feeling is out there all the time. And then hopefully, you can encapsulate that within a track so when other people listen to it, they get the same vibe too. Or the essence of it, anyway, you know?

Does the history of all of that you’ve done before influence what you’re working on currently? Do you think about that, or are you always trying to move on?

SS: Well, I mean we’re always trying to move on only because we know that naturally, all the things that are meant to be in something, they will just fall in there anyway. When you’re doing stuff you try and cover all bases, but you can’t cover everything, you know what I mean? But if you’re true to yourself and you let it flow out, then when you look back on it, or when you listen to it or whatever, everything that needs to be in there will be in there. And sometimes it’s not and if that’s the case, then that’s fair enough. You kind of win some and lose some, but ideally, you look forward. You always look forward because some of the greatest music from the past… for instance, in the 60s and the 70s, you get so many people so hung up on that stuff. I meet people that are kind of into old music or whatever and they’re not interested in anything that’s new, and I think that’s really sad because what they felt back in the day, in the 70s and the 60s, whenever guys were making that music, one of the big reasons that it sounds the way it does and it’s so compelling is because they were doing, like, essentially what I’m doing now, you know, just without iOS. Man, they were messing with two-inch tape and those old disks, that stuff was state of the art; it was the latest technology.

But these guys had whatever they had within — inside them. And then they were interacting with these pieces of the latest equipment, latest gear, and a lot of it was kind of military gear that had been moved over to kind of the creative and the music side, you know, for film and whatever, do you know what I mean? But they were getting off on it. It’s like, “Wow,” you know, “This mad reel-to-reel machine,” you know, “I can put these two kind of spools up on this machine, and all of a sudden I can sing something into a mic, and when it comes out on this machine it sounds so beautiful. This is fantastic; did it just fall out of space?” Those guys would be flipping out on the latest technology, and a lot of the people that are kind of so hung up on the retro kind of thing, and nothing else, they kind of fail to miss that. So, for us, we’re kind of — we’re sort of championing that — we’re like, this is us now, here, right now in two-thousand and whatever, and we’ve got all these silly devices, I’ve got my phone, I’ve got, like — what do you call it? — I’ve got a Minimoog keyboard from nineteen sixty-whatever, I’ve got the MPC from maybe 10, 15 years ago, I’ve got this iOS app that hasn’t even come out yet — whatever. I’ve got all these bits of equipment, and I’m flipping out on the fact that this is what’s available to me right now, at this point, and I can make this music, do you know what I mean? I can convey this emotion. And so that’s where we’re at. It’s always about looking forward, but with what we’ve got around us.

When did you start talking about working together on Africa Hitech?

MP: Well, we coincidentally moved — we both ended up in Sydney, Australia, and I basically spoke to Alex, because I hadn’t seen Steve for a little while; I think he was in L.A. And then I just told Alex, you know, “I’m moving to Australia,” and then I was over there, and then he just said, “I think Steve might be coming to Australia.” And then when I moved, I went back home to pack up my life to ship to Australia, and I think Steve landed — you know, he’d been there a few times already, but then he actually landed there just as I left to go back and get my stuff to come back. So yeah, we both ended up, like, 10 minutes from each other on the other side of the world. Which is awfully nice because it’s a big move for both of us, and going to a place, a new place, with at least somebody you’ve worked with before, and also you have a lot in common with musically, which was great; and as soon as we got there we were just kind of hanging out, and we started music straight away. So seven years ago we started making music, and then I supposed the more we were doing it, the more we started — the album just developed from there. At the Toronto Red Bull Music Academy we did the track called “Blen.” And we did a track called “Too Late,” and we’d been working on stuff before that. And then it got to the point where we were like, “OK, we’ve got this kind of thing that’s happening, and some different vibes of tracks are kind of happening,” and then over the next few years after that we just kept working on stuff.

I played “Blen” to Steve Beckett, who runs Warp, when I was finishing the Harmonic 313 album, and he was just like, “What’s this? You’ve got to put that on the album.” And I was just like, “No, this is just another thing — another project I’m doing with Steve. You know, we’ve been working on music for a while.” And he thought, “Well, if you’ve got more music like this, then I want to do it,” straight away. After the the Harmonic 313 album we just kept on working on stuff, basically, and then it got to the point where we were like, “OK, we need to kind of lock in and get this album, you know, work on this album and finish it.” So a lot of the stuff is quite old. I mean tracks like “Glangslap” were probably three years old, and “Our Luv” is at least two or three years old.

This is stuff we’d been working on, which is quite good because when we actually went to lock into finishing the album we probably had four or five tracks pretty much done. And then we had a hundred plus tracks that we’d started through that period, and we just went through choosing which ones — we’re both constantly writing all the time so that was the hardest part, really — working out what was going to go on it. I mean it wasn’t really hard because luckily there was a lot of stuff that we were into, but it was just like, “Which ones shall we finish?” It’s in some ways a gamble. Sometimes you pick ones you think are going to be good, and you work on it for a couple of weeks, and it kind of turns out OK. And then sometimes other ones that you think are kind of not a quite nice idea, you work on them, develop them, and all of a sudden you realize, you know, it’s much stronger than what you ever thought. An average track would take a couple weeks, I’d say. And that would happen over maybe three years. You know, so I might spend a day on it, and six months later a might do a couple of days. You know, and then other tracks like “Out In The Streets” were done in pretty much one night. And then I think a week later, I spent another day on it, and that was it.

Did you always know that you wanted to explore dance music through a shared history of African rhythms on the album? Or did that come about organically through working on the album?

MP: Yeah, it just came about organically because I think it’s something that we both look for in music and it naturally kind of goes that way. But the more we started talking about, really, then the name Africa Hitech came up, and then the more we thought about it and talked about it, we both realized that we thought the same thing: it’s like the music we like has that kind of connection to African music. And growing up in the UK has a similar kind of connection, but at the same time you have far different aspects like Jamaican music coming in and Jamaican people coming to the UK. You start just thinking about these things, the reasons why — because a lot of people look at the UK, and they split things up in genres — “Now dubstep’s happening out of England” — but really, when you look back and kind of think about why this has happened, and we always felt that it was the same thing, anyway. It was drum and bass and when dubstep, especially the second time around, right about 2004 when it kind of had that second resurgence with Skream, Benga, Digital Mystikz coming through. it was exciting because it had the same possibility and excitement of what drum and bass did. And all these things have these kind of feelings; it’s just — it’s a tempo, it’s an idea, and you can go — you’ve got a bass sensibility and a drum sensibility, and then you can just go anywhere with it. I mean broken beat’s the same, jungle is the same, garage, grime, up to UK funky, and then going even to footwork from America. It’s just another idea. It’s a rhythm, it’s a tempo, and then it’s open to anything, which is what makes it really exciting.

When I reviewed the album for Little White Earbuds, I made a note that it almost seemed like you were traveling backwards in time over the course of the album, that it was very current in the beginning, and then as it went on you started to hear kind of older song structures. Was that a plan, or did that kind of just come about when you started sequencing all the songs?

MP: Yeah, I think it came about when we were sequencing. We basically kind of wanted to have an album that had some more aggressive club kind of tracks, but also some musical things because obviously an album — you kind of hope that it will be something that people could listen to, and it has different ups and downs and different vibes. Because if you just have loads of 140 [BPM] grime hard techno kind of sounding tunes and some footwork, it’s like you need to give the listener some kind of different vibes to go into. So then otherwise if you have five hard grime tunes in a row, they can really kind of lose their impact. And we didn’t want it to be the kind of album that — we worked really hard trying to find a way of making it so it wasn’t starting off mellow and then going really hype and then ending, or starting off really hype and then just going to all the mellow tunes at the end. But at the same time, it’s kind of like, it’s quite nice to lead people on some more musical kind of, more emotional kind of sounding tracks. So it just felt natural to kind of go that way, but we really tried to kind of get some in early — have a few kind of clubbier ones and then have a few deeper ones and more musical ones and try to switch it up. But instantly there were tracks like “Cyclic Sun” that just felt like a nice ending track. But we had a few tracks that we felt were quite — would be nice, and it was sometimes quite difficult, at that point, to try and find a way. But we always try and get help, when I’m sequencing albums, from other people who I kind of trust their opinions because you get so close to the music and sometimes you would never think about putting one track after another. You’d be like, “Oh, that won’t work.”

One of my favorite tracks is “Cyclic Sun,” and I think it’s because it has a very Mulatu Astatke kind of vibe. Were you looking to evoke African luminaries like him through it?

MP: Yeah, I mean I’m a big fan of his stuff, but I think that one, for me, is kind of like — was definitely — I’m a big fan of Moondog. It has that kind of cyclic sound like a lot of Moondog’s music has, those kind of sounds, and I was really into that kind of vibe and trying to work on that. But also, yeah, it has some — I think you can hear a definite influence from other African kind of music. I think that one, for me, was just kind of trying to work on having those kind of like — using the flutes and having those cyclic sounds happen to fall over each other, and you can have different chords kind of coming down and falling, creating different harmonies — trying to do something like that, but with an African kind of rhythm to it.

It was interesting that it comes towards the end of the album, after you’ve gone through all of these very kind of modern footwork and high tech, so to speak, tracks.

SS: I mean, that’s just the way the album was sequenced. When you’re so close to the music and you’re recording it, you know, when you get to putting it — sequencing it together, sometimes that can be quite hard. As you’re putting the album together, if kind of all makes sense, it just falls into place, and by the end you’re like, “Yeah, I know that’s going to go there.” But you know, we were so close to the music it was quite hard so we sort of gave out a few set lists to friends, you know, like Mark’s girlfriend Lorna [Clarkson], she DJs quite a lot, you know? Just the people who we know around us that we respect in music. And they did they’re little iPod or iTunes sequences, you know? That’s sometimes what I do: I just do an iTunes shuffle, and I find sometimes the shuffle just comes with some wicked kind of arrangements. Some tracks finish, and the other track kind of blends in — I don’t know how it sort of works out — but you can come up with some really nice arrangements there.

Another thing I realize is, you’re really close to the tracks sometimes, and if you can just get them and just throw them up in the air and just let them land, in that sequence there it might be like, “OK, that’s the way they landed; I’ll listen to that. Alright, sounds a bit alien.” But as time goes by, it just makes complete and utter sense. It’s just a funny thing with the brain. The brain kind of just makes sense of everything after a while. You look at something, and it just looks a bit kind of random, and then all of a sudden you start to see patterns. And you can’t imagine it any other way. It’s like, “Uh oh, even though I kind of put this together randomly, now that it exists, it makes complete and utter sense, and I can’t imagine how it would’ve been any other way.” The brain’s got a funny way of kind of doing that to you. So once you’ve got the music you can’t even be too precious about it, do you know what I mean? There’s sort of a kind of element of randomness in the sequencing of the album and a little bit of the, “OK well, maybe that should go after that track’s a definite.” But yeah, that’s just the way it ended up, essentially.

And then, by contrast, tracks like the title one seem very far away from what a student of African music would recognize. How did you translate that central idea into more modern ideas like the more footwork-influenced stuff?

MP: Yeah, I mean that track still, I suppose, it’s African definitely in the rhythm and the bass. It’s still there, just the palette of sounds is different. That track, to me, just sounds kind of like Detroit techno, in a way. But it’s not, you know, the pattern is more an African kind of rhythm or something more like a grime person would do, in a way — it’s that kind of syncopated kind of rhythm. But at the same time the palette is kind of — it reminds me of Detroit and Chicago house in the early 90s, in a way. It’s got that kind of vibe to it, but with a different kind of rhythm. That’s really one of my favorite ones on there.

What was the process for working together? Were you passing files back and forth, or did you spend a lot of time in the studio together?

SS: Aw man, we were in the studio a lot of the times because Mark’s studio is just down the road from both of us. We both live in Baradine in Australia, and his studio is based in an area called Surrey Hills, which is literally, five, 10 minutes tops in a car. Down the road. And it’s quite a nice little area, so we spent time in there, essentially. We’d sort of just be in there, and I’d have an idea or Mark would have an idea, and we’d put it out there, we’d be playing each other’s stuff, because we were always on the same page, and just be flipping out on each other’s beats or whatever. And maybe Mark would have a groove or whatever, and I’d hear a bass line, and I’d be like, “Yeah, I can hear a bass line.” I would jump up and stick the bass line down on it, and then Mark would get back on it again or vice-versa, you know? I would have a groove and Mark would hear a synth line or a bass line or whatever. It’s kind of quite easy, really. And the times when we were apart, then we were exchanging files, but that was rare, really. Because essentially in the last sort of few years, the projects that we’ve been working on have been mainly together, so we’re kind of always sort of around. But yeah, we’d essentially just be in the studio sort of trying things out and just messing around with stuff. We’ll go home and we’ll have our laptops or MPCs or whatever and just have grooves, and then come back and meet up. Or sometimes we’d go into the studio and just be like, “You know what? Let’s just start something fresh,” just sort of like wiping the slate clean and just come into something fresh. It’s fun. It’s the way it should be, really? Just enjoying it. Doing it because we can and it’s there, and then trying to just create something that’s amazing.

I found it real interesting that for the singles from the album you’ve chosen to rework songs and do versions, almost like a sound system way of working. Is the idea of sound systems and versions really important to what Africa Hitech is about?

SS: That’s part of what we do because part of what we champion is that whole sound system thing, anyway, because we grew up in that — more so myself, just being in London and being in Jamaican UK and being in that environment. But it’s just naturally a part of what we do, the whole version thing, and the whole dub plate thing. And you know even with doing stuff on the iPhone, I’ve been — I mean I haven’t really come with it yet so I’ve kind of got to hold it down, but I’m coming with a whole iPlate thing, do you know what I mean? Instead of dubplates. We like that feeling of back in the day when the guys that were in the sound systems were making tracks. Like they would make a track on a Friday afternoon, and by the night that track was being played in the club. It’s fresh and hot off the press. That’s quite a nice feeling, that sort of thing. Maybe it’s not as immediate as it used to be back then, but in a lot of respects we do champion that as well because sometimes in a set we’ll play some grooves that I might have literally just laid down on the iPhone whilst I was on the plane before a gig. And if the vibe is wicked enough, we’ll literally stick it in Logic, you can just maybe boost it up a bit, and play it that night. But yeah, it’s just one aspect of what we’re about. And it’s definitely part of it. It kind of fits into what we do, but in the context of now.

Steve, since you mentioned the iPhone a couple times, where do you see this kind of new instrument fitting in to the workflow of kind of music making these days?

SS: I think the main thing in that is that you’re talking about economics and stuff like that now. Because not everybody can afford to have a studio space, but also as well more people are traveling. More people are moving around so it’s really nomadic at the moment as well. I live on the completely other side of the world to where I was before. So for me it’s like that — that just makes it — it just means I’m on the road, but I’ve got all the tools I need to put together this idea that’s floating around in my head. So I’ve got this groove that’s just bugging me. It’s like, “I’ve got to lay this down,” I just pull my phone out, and it’s a done deal. In some cases, if I’m lucky, I can kind of translate that groove from my head totally the way I hear it down onto this piece of equipment. And then it might just be a simple case of going into the studio and just boosting it or mastering it or whatever. Giving it an overall mix, or whatever. Or, in some cases, then it’s a case of where I’ve got the basic kind of structure or the skeleton, then I just go in and elaborate. But yeah, the possibilities are endless. It’s one of those things that literally maybe tomorrow or in a month’s time, some other kind of angle that we don’t even know about’s just going to pop out of it. And all of sudden people could be using it in a way that we never imagined.

I don’t know whether people were thinking, “We’re going to make these apps so that people can make professional music,” Or whether it’s like people can just play around with sounds and have a little kind of like mess around whilst they’re out and about or whatever. When we first started making music on the phone, for instance, loads of people were saying, “Oh, really? Wow, you know, I’ve kind of heard about that stuff, but can you really get anything decent out of it?” And I’m like, “Are you for real?” If you make music, you can get anything decent out of just banging on the wall. So if you’ve got a piece of equipment that’s got tones in it and drums in it, if you can’t make a complete track from that. I mean, sometimes people kind of miss the whole point. At the end of it there’s instruments around us right down to your voice or, you know, just tapping on something — so if you’ve got something like that that can emulate a Moog or a 808 drum machine or you can put samples in it, then it doesn’t matter how small it is or gimmicky, it might come across. It’s like a valid instrument within itself, do you know what I mean? Because if you click your fingers, that’s a valid instrument. No one can take that away from you. It’s all context, and it’s all the way you see it. [If] it makes sense to you, then hopefully it makes sense to everybody else. And that’s all that matters. But yeah, in that whole iOS thing, man, that’s just like some whole untapped, infinite universe. And it’s just starting. It’s just crazy. Because some of that stuff is even more powerful. I mean, for instance, the Fairlight thing. You know, they’re saying that that little app in the phone is way more powerful than the other one that cost, like, a quarter million two decades ago, do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Certainly the processing power is a lot different.

SS: Exactly, you know? It’s just kind of way more up on it. So go figure. You can kind of go wherever you want to with it. It’s all about what’s inside your mind. And where you want to take it, what you want to do with it.

Once you guys start moving on to making more music, do you think you’re going to be exploring the same concepts of looking back at African rhythms, but in different ways?

SS: Yeah, I mean always. I mean it’s exciting becausewe don’t even know where we’re going to end up with it. The album, the way we presented it is — when people hear it as far as they’re concerned, that’s a snapshot of us at this particular time. But when we were actually sequencing the album together we had this selection of over a hundred tracks. That’s just ones that we’ve recorded down. There’s bits still lying around in laptops, in Logic sequencers. I’ve got a ton of stuff. There’s just loads to play. It’s just really exciting right now, man, because even when we put the album together, there were all these tracks we had to choose from, but then there’s a load of stuff that people ain’t going to believe when they hear it because it’s really quite African sounding as well. They’re quite raw, the drums and stuff like that. But maybe still slightly tech-y, just maybe not as tech-y as the stuff that people have heard, maybe a lot more traditional. But not trying to be traditional; it’s just that’s the way it came out. We were feeling these certain sounds, we put them together, and somehow it sounds a lot more organic and a lot more kind of old school. But then with that stuff we kind of lace it slightly with some of the modern stuff. Not too much, just so there’s a little kind of edgy kind of juxtaposition. It’s nice to have that push and pull of, “Right, it’s kind of over there, but then it’s kind of over here, but then it’s kind of in the middle.” It’s kind of like I’m not too sure if it is or isn’t. Other people hear it, it’s distinctly right over there, do you know what I mean? And it’s just like — kind of when people listen to it, they can kind of get their own vibe from it. Do you know what I mean?

A few weeks ago I was watching a Boiler Room episode and one of the DJs dropped a Skudge track. As usual, someone in the chat was immediately asking “I.D.?” Typically the response is a little slow as people rack their brains, but in this case several answers appeared straight away, mostly to the tune of, “I don’t know the track, but it’s definitely Skudge.” I couldn’t pinpoint the track either, but it was pretty clearly Skudge — looping synth interplay, dynamic percussion just the tiniest bit off-kilter, everything sleek and dynamic. The Stockholm duo are revered by a range of producers and fans for this kind of reliability, a type of heads-down focus that recalls two of their clear influences, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, and ensures most everything they release is worth hearing. Earlier this year, they marked the release of their first LP Phantom, and have since followed it up with two EPs: one of remixes, the other of original material. The other thing about Skudge is they can be pretty tight-lipped, but it seems less about reticent hiding than a desire to simply let the music speak for itself. In advance of their live performance at Blkmarket Membership on October 14th in New York City, LWE contacted them about life post-Phantom, and it appears their day-to-day is business as usual.

One thing I noticed about Phantom was — and I don’t mean this negatively — apart from the intro, outro, and interludes, it sort of feels more like a compilation than a fully-flowing “concept” album. Was Phantom composed in the same way as your EPs? Were you setting them aside/consciously producing them as LP tracks? What were the differences between compiling tracks for the album and compiling them for the EPs?

Skudge: We stated that we didn’t have any concept [for] the album, but most of the tracks were made in the same period and we were thinking LP instead of EP while making them.

With your first LP out of the way, do you have plans for another?

No, we don’t have that at this moment. We’re focusing on the EPs right now.

Your remix packages tend to be very well-curated. How do you go about choosing who remixes your material?

We ask people that we like and if two remixes fit well together, we have a finished release.

What’s your work rate like? You’ve consistently put out records every few months; do you record a lot of tracks in say, one session? Or are you actively working on tracks day-to-day?

We work on tracks and remixes every week, mostly we work on one track one day and listen to it the next day with fresh ears, and then we try to finish what we started. There is an archive of unreleased Skudge material.

You have a really well-defined, recognizable sound. Do you have any plans to add new gear, try a new recording process, etc.? Or are you satisfied with your setup? Do you feel any pressure to stay true to what you’ve recorded already? If you decided to make something radically different, would you use a new moniker/new label or anything like that?

Yes, we are satisfied with the setup. We have some sort of idea we are working with, but it’s important for us to always go further and try new things. We haven’t thought of making a new moniker, but why not!

How do you approach remixing other producers’ work compared to producing your own original material?

We extract the sounds of the original that we like and make it skudgey.

How does the studio setup translate to your live set? Do you do anything differently? Are your sets planned out or are they more like jam sessions?

It is a jam session with a tracklist.

Do you feel involved in any kind of scene in Stockholm? How do you feel about the current state of dance music there?

We don’t feel that we came from a certain Stockholm scene. Skudge was created in a basement in the north west of Stockholm, while other people were sleeping. The interest of dance music is growing, that’s exciting.

As much as I’d generally classify you as “techno,” you’ve been remixed by Appleblim and remixed Instra:mental, who both lean more toward that UK bass/electro hybrid sound. Are you inspired by/do you feel close to that group of producers at all?

We are like all kinds of music and it inspires us. Variation is necessary for us.

What’s coming up for you: new releases, touring, etc.?

We plan to release other artists as well as our own stuff and remixes. Stephen Brown is next up, and more to follow. It will be a nice surprise.

Kassem Mosse has always been a bit of an enigma. There are pictures of him around (though not many), and he’s got a strong internet presence, partly due to his “critics’ darling” status. He even has a Facebook page. Yet the mystery of Kassem Mosse endures, largely due to his music. Surely any producer whose tracks seem to be evenly distributed in a tempo range covering about 50 beats per minute is operating on a different tip from most. His sound appears to be wildly diverse as well, from slow-mo, bleary-eyed tunes to wiry, jacked-up workouts and back again, often on the same slab of wax. It’s this ingenuity and unflinching output that has earned the man born Gunnar Wendel acolytes from across the dance music spectrum, from UK scene-makers like Instra:mental and Joy Orbison to Omar-S and the Laid crew. But it’s his work for Workshop and Leipzig-based Mikrodisko where Wendel has let his freak flag truly fly, where his sound becomes as swampy and amorphous as it can be. We caught up with Wendel in July after his set at The Bunker to chat about context, his newest projects, and to solve the mystery of the facial-haired stamps.

How did you think your set at The Bunker went?

Gunnar Wendel: I think it went quite well. I can’t really judge from a spectator point of view, but I’m very self-critical and there’s always something that I don’t like or I would like to do better. There’s always something you can improve, because there are always changes in the set up. Al these changes keep it interesting for me, but I also have to be able to adjust to the situation. So it’s always different.

I saw you had a lot of gear up there. Had you planned on using those things?

Yeah. I contacted the promoters ahead asking if they could secure some stuff I could use. I wanted some things I know, things I know how to work and I can use, because it’s difficult, obviously, to bring so much over from Europe. If I’m in Germany it’s easy, I can take my own gear with me. But traveling to the U.S. is difficult when you have lots of gear, especially because of these power and voltage issues. It’s much easier if you have something on location. My experience has been that sometimes promoters are confused with those requests and they don’t know what I mean and they cannot get you anything. But I’ve gone to some places where you could get the most amazing gear and we didn’t know beforehand. We did it on the night. And it always works well.

I like it that way. It’s all so different, you know? If you get different types of gear, it will set a different flavor. It’s like an additional flavor. The ingredients are similar, but if you get a 909, you will have a more harsh, banging sound, as opposed to if you get an 808. It gives you a different experience.

So do you allow for a lot of improvisation in your live sets then?

Yeah, definitely. I like to keep it as open as possible, because otherwise it would be really boring to me. Obviously I don’t want to bore myself, so I try to structure my live set in such a way that I can respond to what is happening and to each situation, because you never know what crowd you will get and what the space will be like. Sometimes it is a bit more crass, sometimes it is a bit more house-y, or a bit more laid back. I can adapt to the situation. I like to be able to change the tracks in a way that they suit the situation as it is.

I also just use tracks that I’m working on, unreleased material. I rarely play stuff I have released. I played some in New York, but that was like an encore, so [laughs] it’s OK to do it, I guess. But usually I’m not fond of doing that because I don’t like this rock attitude where you have these songs and people want to hear those songs and you have to play all of those songs all the time. That’s not something that interests me. I’m more about improvisation and trying things out on the spot.

Do you think that you’ll keep honing some of the tracks from this live set and that they’ll see eventual release? Or do you like to keep stuff back for just live performances only?

I do keep stuff just for live performances. Some of the stuff I eventually wind up releasing, but often I prepare that material and I take it to a live set. I just have so many other ideas to work on back home that I don’t go back to actually finish it, and I end up just keeping it for a live set. There are certain things that work in a live set but that don’t work when you make them into a track. That’s the reason why I don’t like people recording live sets. I personally don’t like to listen to them that much because I hear all the mistakes and I think it doesn’t really translate. If you listen to these recordings then you don’t know the audience, and you don’t know the context. You don’t know the situation, so you cannot properly evaluate why somebody is doing what they’re doing. Like, “Why is this part going on for so long?” If you have a particular groove and you’re riding on that groove, it might be cool, and it might work on that specific night, but it might not be something that you want to listen to at home, right? Because it’s something that happens right there on that spot. It’s a reaction to what’s going on. It’s not something that you are producing for listening. I think that’s something is hard to get across and it probably doesn’t translate so well.

I agreed to do the Trilogy Tapes release because I like the work of Will Bankhead, and because they said it would just be a limited cassette. I’m usually not much into the idea of limited editions, but in this case it worked for me because I don’t really want to have that many live recordings out there. I wouldn’t have agreed to put this up as a download somewhere. I have some other recordings of live sets that people want to put up and I shy away from that. I mean, you can see the reason, the promotion, stuff like that, but I’m just not… it’s a different thing. You know what I mean?

Right.

It’s not a finished recording. It’s not something where you can say, “Yeah, I worked on this. I added these details. It has a certain meaning; I put a lot of work into this.” It’s a recording of something that happened that night, and I think it’s better if it stays like that. If you were there and you don’t have a recording of it, then what you have is a vague memory, and that is really all you need. I think there is a certain beauty in vague memories. You don’t need all those recordings that we have of everything nowadays. I mean, who listens to all those recordings anyway? I wouldn’t. I have some recordings of my sets, but I never listen to them, just as I never really listen to my music once it is released, honestly. Do you know the live recording from Tokyo?

Yeah.

That’s one thing I agreed to do, but only under the condition that I could edit it together with the live recording that I did from the space. We recorded the floor sound at Module so you can hear the audience and you can hear the sound from the mixer. It’s mixed together, so it’s not just a recording from the floor. That wouldn’t sound so great, so the recording of the audience is mixed with the output from the mixer. This way you relate more to what is going on. You can understand certain situations.

So when you are in your studio producing tracks that will be put out, do you try to account for the different contexts in which people will listen to your records?

No, because I can’t. I have no control. I cannot control the context in which people will listen to them. Sometimes I might think about adding things that you wouldn’t necessarily hear depending on the situation. You might not hear some things on headphones that you would in the club. Background bits, like [makes rustling sound]. Maybe some silent voices somewhere that you wouldn’t hear unless you are listening to the track very loud. I remember I did this with one track where there was some muted spoken word parts in the background. It’s pretty much silent, just one or two parts, and then it gets a little louder. I like the idea of being in a club where a track like this is being played, and then suddenly you hear a soft voice coming from somewhere, but you’re not sure if it’s coming from the recording or if it’s somebody just talking behind you.

I have some recording devices that allow me to record different places. I also like the idea of putting recordings of a space into a track, but one that isn’t necessarily the type of space where you would listen to it, so you have sort of a clash. But I cannot control context. It’s not like I sit down and think, “OK, this is going to be something for home listening.” I don’t really do that. That’s not something I care much about, actually. I’m happy that people listen, but I don’t sit down and think, “I’m gonna make a real banging club track.” I have certain sounds and ideas and I want to see what I can do with them. Whatever I make should work as a track in itself. These sound recordings I was talking about have to tie in. It has to match somehow. It has to have a certain aesthetic that fits that track, even if it’s not necessarily focussed on a particular situation. The record that I did for Laid has this bit on it that’s taken from a live recording. That’s from a live set I was playing. You probably know it: there is this one loop at the beginning and at the end which is the sound of the audience taken from a live recording. Dor from Laid approached me during a live set in Berlin and asked me to release this track. It was one of the parts of my live set and the guys at Laid were like, “Can we have it?’” and so yeah, well why not? When I finished the track I wanted to keep the idea of the live set, so you still have this relationship of how it actually came about, you know?

That was a track that played with classic house tropes in a way that you never had before, and you haven’t since. Was that planned out?

I’m happy people see it that way, but I don’t think that it is like that. For me it’s not something that tries to be a big house track. But yes, it uses some classic sounds. It’s an interesting question. I wasn’t planning on making a proper house record, but I had the basics of the track in my live set and maybe I was thinking that it would fit well with the label and that gave me an idea. I knew where it was going to come out, so I wasn’t finishing it just because I wanted to finish it. It was based on the fact that they asked me to do it, and I think in that sense there was an influence of going in that direction, because I could have taken it in other ways as well. This was just one of the possibilities. I tried to integrate some details that are based on me playing live. Like, it’s not done on a computer, it’s not automated. I like to have these kinds of human elements in it where you can… well, you probably can’t hear it, but I know it’s there. [laughs]

And then I can say to myself, “This is something I did myself. I’ve been working on it and I made it sound like this, and not some plugin.” It’s not one of those randomizer plugins that does it either. No, I do it. There is some kind of… I don’t know, human agency or something. It’s handmade, or something. I like to have an element of that in what I do. A personal element. Maybe that’s a better way of putting it.

How did you get into electronic music in general, and house and techno specifically? Was there like some sort of big moment that made you think, “I want to make house records now,” or were there some records that you heard when you were younger that really inspired you?

Yeah, there were probably some records that inspired me. It definitely was working more through records, which is at a time when it wasn’t as easy to access music as it is now. I’m from a rural area, so there were some things happening around, but if you didn’t have access to go to those places or an incentive to go there, you wouldn’t go there, so I didn’t have any teenage club experience until I moved to a bigger city. In the beginning I had no relationship to house music, but I always had a soft spot for synthetic sounds. It’s something I realize more in retrospect. When I go back and look at music I used to like when I was younger, I notice that they all have these elements in them that I still like, or they have particular drum sounds, or synthesizers and stuff. You know, stuff that I didn’t consciously realize at the time because I didn’t know how they were made, but it’s something that you subconsciously soak up in a way, and then… I started to dig deeper into electronic music.

It was a very long learning process. I’ve been recording things for a long time. I started out doing field recordings, and I have some field recordings I did with a tape recorder when I was a kid, and when I was a teenager I experimented with recording all kinds of stuff in really primitive ways. Overdubs with cassettes and stuff like that. Then I started to collect all sorts of electronic devices for cheap or from yard sales. I didn’t know how to use them, or what their purpose was even or if they were any good. But I learned along the way by acquiring new technologies and sometimes making the wrong choices. It was a very physical thing, maybe because it was such a long time ago. There was, of course, software around at that time as well, and I tried to fiddle around with that as well, but I don’t know. It didn’t catch on to me. I was more of a hands-on person.

Anyway, there wasn’t one particular moment. There wasn’t one particular record where I listened to it and it changed my life. No, I just grew into it. I was more interested in leftfield stuff anyway — anything that had an experimental edge. Then I went back to listen to where that music came from. I just connected the dots from that to all the stuff I used to like from before. Somehow it all made sense in the end.

How did you first hook up with Mikrodisko and Workshop?

Well, Mikrodisko evolved from a crew. We did parties together in Leipzig, and we started to do underground techno parties. It was a collective called Homoelektrik. There was no money involved, we just covered the overhead for the soundsystem, or it would be a free event. No one ever got paid. It was very idealistic. If we had money left we would spend it on a big dinner for all the people who had helped set things up or who had played music. It was mainly locals and everybody did everything, if you played you would also help cleaning up. Sometimes we had guests from other cities, even people that were quite known, but they too would play for the transport money, without fees. It was a really cool time. And then some of us started doing the label.

For Workshop, I knew Lowtec because he had played at one of our parties. He had a partner, Even Tuell, who had another label that was connected to Airbag Craftworks. A friend of mine, Nadine, she knew him as well and played him some of my tracks and then he asked me to do a record for them. One of the tracks on the first record was supposed to come out on a compilation, but that never happened and then they started Workshop and I just happened to be there at the right time. That’s how it came together, it was all through knowing people. I didn’t send out demos or stuff like that, it was just connecting with friends.

Workshop 03 was pretty notable at the time for the fact that two tracks on the B-side were slow, and that’s become like a much bigger thing recently. What attracts you to those slower tempos?

It’s not something that I consciously do. I don’t have a slow agenda. A lot of the electronic stuff I first got into had hip-hop roots. I’ve always been into hip-hop, and if you look at the early Warp stuff, they also had downbeat type tracks that were slow but electronic, and that’s maybe the connection. I didn’t care if these tracks were supposed to work on the floor. I never had this intention of producing DJ tools, so I didn’t bother to produce at a DJ-friendly tempo because it wasn’t something that occurred to me. It doesn’t matter. I just wanted make music and not necessarily as something that would run a party.

Sometimes I just think there are a lot of tracks that sound much better when you play them slower. Some things are really funky when you play them really fast, but then there are some house and techno tracks that, if you play them slower, have more of a groove. I like slower tempos where you can still get the impression that it is fast. You know, all these people that run around and say, “Play it faster, play it louder, play it harder!” Why? The way it feels depends on how you do it. The live set I’m doing now is at 115 BPM. I never had people complain about that and I can still do stuff that is pretty… well, I wouldn’t say aggressive, but driving. It can be slow, but it can still be driving.

I made these tracks slow because I didn’t care so much about whether they would fit in a DJ set. But then again I’m also doing tracks where I don’t know how they’re supposed to be played. That’s one of the ideas of the last single I did for Mikrodisko. It has two different tracks and it’s anyone’s guess how fast they’re supposed to be played. One is really fast and one is really slow.. or maybe they’re both really slow, or I don’t know. You can decide for yourself. I know lots of records where people just wouldn’t know what tempo to play something at. Maybe people are losing this idea, or the notion that this is actually possible. It used to be that you can play a record at 33 or 45 and it could work both ways, and now you have digital files that are just one tempo. You can pitch shift it seamlessly with modern software, but you know, it’s not the same thing. I have friends who would play records that I liked to play at 45 at 33, and you would only know that it’s not the intended tempo if you had a CD to use as a reference. But it was OK. It’s good if you have a choice how to approach, experience and enjoy a piece of music, even if it’s a silly choice like how fast you play a record.

Well this happened to yourself. When Workshop 08 came out there were some pretty heated discussions about which speed to play the B1 at, and I heard it played out numerous times at both 33 and 45.

The original recording was slow. At the time when it came out, it didn’t occur to me that people would play it fast when it was pressed onto vinyl, and to be honest, I believe it’s only because of the sample I used that they do it. Now I’m more aware of these things and keep them in mind, but at the time I didn’t think about it, and then I stopped caring. Whatever people like, play it fast, play it slow, as long as you play it it’s OK. [laughs] Personally, I don’t like it so fast. I like it played slow. I think also it’s obvious because the last track is ridiculous when you play it at 45. Whatever. It’s good if people have a choice and it’s good if they make these choices, so I’m fine with that.

Why is there always a bearded or mustachioed man on your Workshop records?

They just started with the beards and then it became this running gag. There’s not really a concept behind it. I think we have to stop now, though. It would be silly to have somebody else with a beard after this. It’s three records with beards, sort of a trilogy I guess, but time to look for something else. It’s weird because sometimes people assume I have a beard. I’ve had this recently again, which is funny because it tells you a lot about the assumptions people have just based on some stamp on a record. It’s not a picture of me. The one on the eighth record is a British cricket player from the 19th century. We picked it up when we were in Manchester, so it’s a bit based on coincidence, and again, friendly ties to the meandyou crew from Manchester.

You’ve said that the name Kassem Mosse sort of affords you a bit of anonymity due to mispronunciations and misspellings.

Well it might, in theory. Obviously it doesn’t anymore, so that’s a bit of an issue. It’s interesting because you can still find people who misspell it, so it’s still working to a degree, but in a way you are fixed with that role and that specific spelling now that evolved out of different names and misspellings. Now I’m stuck with it.

The idea of monikers and misspellings of artist names has always been a thing in techno, but now it’s all conveniently located on Discogs. Do you think that takes away some important aspect of house and techno, or is it not really a big deal?

Well, to a certain degree. I mean, there are good reasons for obscuring your identity. The point with techno used to be that it doesn’t matter who did this because you’re trying to just let the music speak for itself, and so the name isn’t really important, or how you write it is not really important. You find it also in the idea of the collective: people involved in the scene should treat each other as equals, it’s not about treating someone as “the star” but rather as someone who happens to be also part of this. If you have different monikers, it gave you an opportunity to hide behind those names, to not be a big name, to remove those preconceptions and judgements. The mutation of the name had a lot to do with doing parties as I mentioned earlier: sometimes we would just make up new names for the next event, or not have any names on the flyer at all.

Coming back to Discogs, you now easily find those lists of all the different types of spellings of a name, which is a bit silly. I mean, who really cares? But in the end it’s something you cannot work against these days anymore. The Internet requires you to have one fixed and stable version of your name. You have to make a brand out of a name. I would prefer if it we could get back to the flexibility. How a name is written or how a name is pronounced is an example of how you typecast things. I mean, in the Internet it’s all written down, but you still you have a level of flexibility in how you pronounce the name because that’s something that people don’t really know when they see it. People interpret it in different ways. I don’t want to have some music nerd who says, “This is the right way to do it. This is the right spelling. This is the correct pronunciation. This is how it’s supposed to be done.” No, it doesn’t matter. As long as you like that music and you know who we’re talking about, it doesn’t matter at all. And the same is true for music: there is no right way, there is no “real” way of doing it.

Take languages. When you Latin-ize a name from other languages, you have all kinds of different spellings, in different languages, and there’s not a problem there. You still know what you are talking about, no matter how you write it. It’s difficult because obviously as a promoter you want to do everything right. Recognizability is also a market interest. If there’s a misspelling, well, I might appreciate it, but from a promoter’s point of view it would be an issue because people wouldn’t find it in their search engines and they couldn’t Google it if it’s misspelled, so you really take care to write it the right way. I think you can clearly see the effects of the Internet at play here. But electronic music it’s not all about the Internet. It’s about going to a party, about what you see, what you experience or what kind of experience you have when you listen to the music, what you feel, what it makes you feel like. That’s more important than just how something is written or how something is supposed to be. It’s a bit boring if everything is set in stone.

You did a podcast for LWE a couple of years ago with Mix Mup as Chilling the Do, and that was an ode to the basically now-extinct chill room. You haven’t really released much of that stuff on record; any reason?

The reason is more that we are still working on putting out a record, to be honest. [laughs] We are working together on another project now that is somewhere in the middle ground between both of us making dance oriented stuff, but not necessarily just for dancing. It will surface soon on Will Bankhead’s label. We’ve also been working on material to release that is more chill stuff, but we simply haven’t finished it. We’ve been doing some remixes together recently and we’ve got some more coming up, so you know, it’s evolving in different ways. We are not really in a hurry because these chill rooms are gone. [laughs] We put it out and it doesn’t make a difference.

The chill room is, to a certain degree, extinct. This also means that there is not a big demand for that type of music. While you have lots of music that is mainly for listening now, with all the retro 80′s synth stuff out there, you are still limited in terms of where to perform it and what type of scene tends to get into it. I mean, techno and house labels are not exactly pushing you to press music on vinyl without a beat in it. A lot of this is happening in an art/experimental context, but that is not necessarily the context we want. Maybe I don’t really want to release this material at all, because I just like to keep these tracks to myself or use them for something else. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I don’t know if it connects to the fact that these spaces don’t exist. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. It’s a difficult genre.

Have you guys been able to do the Chilling the Do stuff live at all? Despite the chill room’s extinction.

We have certain situations where we can do it, and we do it once in a while, but it’s obviously difficult because the demand in a club is for stuff that makes you move. In Berlin, even in the afternoon people aren’t open to listen to stuff that doesn’t have a beat in it, so it’s a difficult situation. You can do it in an art setting, you can do it in a bar, but we want to do this in in clubs. Not on the main floor, maybe. But on the second. At the opening of a party it might work. We do it sometimes for friends who are into it, but it’s not something that bookers are after. It’s such a strange format. It’s difficult because somehow people have to be able to actually listen. They have to sit back and tune into what we are doing, even if they don’t do it consciously. You really need the right situation and the right space to make it work.

How do you decide what tracks go on what label? Do you just send off a couple of tracks and let label heads choose what they want? Or do you plan releases for labels in advance?

Sometimes I have a particular idea for a single release and do certain tracks for certain labels. Sometimes it’s a selection of different tracks that are lying around; I’ll listen to stuff with label heads and they’ll tell me what they like. My problem is that there are a lot of tracks that I like, but I’m not the best judge; sometimes it’s better if someone from the outside helps you evaluate. It can be weird because sometimes you’ll end up with tracks from different periods on the same release. The material for Nonplus I did exclusively for them, intentionally. These are not tracks I would send to anybody else. It’s different from other stuff I release, obviously. Like I said before, with Laid they wanted that one track from the live set, so it was a very particular thing. I don’t want to branch out that far, so I limit myself and I’ve learned to say no to offers because I don’t want be on too many labels, especially not too many similar labels. Still, if I get an offer that is interesting, or gives me an opportunity to move in a new direction, I might do it. For now I’m sticking with Mikrodisko and Workshop. I like to have some focus. I just sent some more stuff to Nonplus, so there’s another EP coming out there as well. Some people who appreciate one type of record I did don’t necessarily appreciate others, but that’s just what I do. I don’t just want to stick to one genre; I don’t think I fit in just one box, to be honest.

You’ve recently stepped up your remix output, having done none before 2010. How do you approach the remixing process?

Well, it depends. It’s different. Usually, it depends on the freedom people give you to work with the material. Actually, I want to cut back on it a little bit. I still have some coming out, but I’m going to take a step away from remixing a bit because… I started doing it because I’ve never done it before, and I wanted to try it out. I was wondering what it would be like to work with material somebody else sends you. What can you do with it? It seemed like an interesting idea, trying to make something out of someone else’s material. I did some completely blindfolded, and that didn’t really work. I did one where I didn’t listen to the original at all and just took the parts and focused on the sounds. Sometimes you get stem files and sometimes you get just sounds. In the end It was so far from the original I could understand why they weren’t so happy about it, so I did another version, but in general I realized I don’t like this process that much.

Basically, if I can have more or less free reign, then that’s good for me. I don’t like when it gets to the point where people are arguing with you. It’s like you are a contract laborer or something. You are supposed to deliver something, and they have a particular idea of what it should be and you are supposed to do it that way. I understand that point, but I don’t really want to do that, so now if people are not really open to just let me do what I want to do, then I’m not going to do it. After doing a bunch of remixes I’ve come to realize that it’s not something that I want to do that much anymore. But I’m OK with the ones I’ve done. This experience is one of the reasons why I started to work with Mix Mup on remixes recently, because I thought it help to have some other input. Like, now there are three people working on it. You have the original producer, and you have us guys, and it makes it even more interesting.

You’ve started a label called Ominira. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Why cassettes?

Why cassettes? The simple reason is that a friend of mine manufactures them, so it’s easy to do. Also, I like that cassettes are so redundant and useless to the techno and house scene. We used to have them as mixtapes for the car, but now that’s rare. Other than that, it’s an odd format, but at least it’s a format, not even an uncommon one in other parts of the world: cassettes are a nice anachronism. And they are not easily accessible. I like that. If you want to listen to it you have to make an effort, you need to have a cassette deck, you can’t just download them and forget about them. I don’t mind if only a few people are making that effort and listen to that music. I want to have liberty to just put out whatever I please, whatever I think is good. You can put out anything on cassette; it doesn’t have to conform to anything. It won’t be all cassettes, though. We have some CD-Rs and vinyl planned as well. There is one 12″ coming out that will be a bit more dancefloor oriented. It will have a track from me on it, one from Kowton and one from Juniper.

It’s an open process. It’s about trying out different things and having a bit more control. If you work with other labels then you always give up control, and that’s cool because somebody else takes the risk. Somebody else has to care about all of the annoying business, but you also give away a certain amount of control. Ominira allows me to do whatever I want. There is no concept other than that the label is not about authenticity, not about realness. Because personally I’m so bored with the notion of authenticity and realness in electronic music. Please, leave that to rock. As far as Ominira is concerned, we just make it up as we go along.

You live in Leipzig, which is close enough to Berlin to go in an out as you please, but still removed. Would you ever move to Berlin, or do you like being outside of the scene for the most part?

Obviously I could move there if I wanted to, but I don’t have any incentive to do so. I like to do my own thing. If you are in Berlin you constantly run into so many people, you meet so many people, which is great but not what I want. I don’t want to be too accessible or work with too many people and take too much influence from a scene. I try to stay away from scenes. I mean, I’ve been involved obviously in this party crew and everything, but even then that crew was quite different from what was going on around town. I like to take a step back and just do what I think is good, not necessarily wind up in a scene and then work on a certain sound or certain aesthetic. I want it to be my aesthetic, not the aesthetic of a particular group or club, so I consciously stay away from it. At this point, it might not even make a difference, because with this attitude I could probably go to Berlin and still not be influenced by it. But I have a good life in Leipzig. It’s easy. It’s chill, so I just kick back. I really don’t have any reason to go there. I’m not really an open person. I don’t approach people to become involved in projects. I don’t pursue people. Just like I didn’t send out demos, or didn’t run after guys like, “Hey, listen to this stuff;” I just don’t do that. So if there is anything going on in Berlin I can go there, but usually if I go to Berlin I will stick with people I know.

Every place has its vanguard, its revolutionaries, its pack of punks. Detroit certainly does. Detroit’s musical vanguard consists of a racially and ethnically diverse collection of women and men. They are largely disjointed, spread out across the entire region of southeast Michigan. Independence truly means autonomy and self-reliance in Detroit’s local music culture; aside from a handful of collectives and temporary partnerships, most in Detroit’s electronic music scene operate alone. Sometimes it works for them, sometimes it simply leads to increased isolation and silence. Aaron Siegel presents one remedy for some of this disjuncture. In 2008 he founded FIT Distribution out of the basement of Peoples Records and in 2010 started the FIT Sound label. These ventures quickly earned Siegel a reputation in Detroit and beyond as a trustworthy figure who showed respect and businesslike compassion.

According to producer Todd Osborn, “Aaron is unique in that he had the initiative to set up his distribution. Especially so since he did it at a time when nearly all were failing and going out of business. I may be biased since he’s been my friend for quite some time, but I think he’s the most honest and fair distributor I’ve ever known.” Siegel recognized Detroit as a hub of extremely skilled musicians who could benefit from a locally based aggregate network of creativity and industry. One of his goals was to bring more unity to Detroit’s scene in order to bring more success and visibility to its artists. That philosophy is immediately identifiable in FIT Sound’s releases, which have included Erase the Pain by Marcellus Pittman, Anthony “Shake” Shakir’s Trackin’ and The Invisible Children by Jamal Moss as IAMTHATIAM. FIT Sound also reissued Walt J’s Divinity single originally released in 1997 on Dow Records.

Siegel took inspiration from outside of Detroit as well. A few years back, he booked Serge, founder and owner of Clone Records, to play a party in Detroit. Serge shared his distribution knowledge and experience with Aaron. “I stayed some days in Detroit and we spoke about a lot of things… and we got along pretty well.” While essentially distinct, FIT and Clone share similarities in their approaches to distribution and their dealings with artists and labels. Serge states of Clone, “It’s really simple, we wanted to sell our own labels… and labels from friends and like-minded people. Besides that, we try to do things [ethically]… no dodgy tricks, big money projects… trying to stay real and always remember why we are doing what we are doing! Most important is that we like the music. But over the years music taste [has changed], labels and artists are developing, so nowadays it is also important that we believe people are doing this for the same reasons we are.” Siegel and I sat down recently and talked about his philosophies about hearing and sharing music; art, sound, and business; and Detroit’s insulated and protective musical culture. This conversation is primarily from that interview. He also added a few updates while on tour in southeast Asia.

Are you from Detroit?

Yes, well the area. Michigan.

How did you get started with electronic music?

When I was in high school, I went to a friend’s party, and a guy I knew, that I wasn’t good friends with, but I’d seen him around school. He was in the basement with a sampler. And so I played with the sampler with him that night and he let me borrow it a few weeks later. He had a lot of music that he gave to me. That kind of started it. I was 16 or something. Then I left Detroit and went to school for film for two years, and I was making music there. I had a radio show in Boston. I played everything. I played ambient, dance music, whatever. I would have the show from 2 ‘til 6 AM. Usually, I’d play more up tempo stuff until 4 or 5, and then I’d take all these ambient and noise records and overlap them. After two years of school, I moved back to Detroit and started organizing parties at Oslo. I did some construction at Oslo. I ended up working there as a bar back in the club. I started doing parties and did parties there. And then I would do them at other venues, like afterhours things.

So when is this now?

This was when I was 20, 21. I was gone from maybe 18 to 20, and I was back here when I was 20. I left high school early and moved to Australia. I went to a lot of events there. That was right when I turned 18. I was involved with music stuff over there, but I wasn’t DJing then. So then I came back and got more involved in the Detroit scene, as far as parties go. I had a party with Egyptian Lover. That was his first time in Detroit since 1983. I would DJ at the party as well. I would play first because I didn’t want to pay anyone to do it. I was funding the parties with the money I made as a bike messenger, paying the artists. I booked a few tours to make it viable to fly them over here. I would design the flyer, hire the door guy, everything.

So it was just you organizing everything?

Right. I did everything. So those were the worst DJ sets ever. I’d be trying to play and thinking how much money the guy at the door had, if he needed change. I could never concentrate. But that was the only way I could learn how to play, to know what it was like to play in front of people.

When did you start DJing, was that with your radio show first in Boston?

Yeah, maybe when I was eighteen, but that wasn’t all vinyl. I had some records, CDs, burned CDs. I didn’t really beat match. I had CD players, so I could kind of do it with the pitch on those. I could do it a little bit with a CD and a record. But real DJing I didn’t really learn until maybe a few years later, when I was twenty. So eight years ago. In the scheme of things, it’s relatively recent. And that led to the next thing. I wanted to stop bike messenger-ing. I wanted a change. I saw a need for another company that could help with distribution of a lot of the independent labels that were popping up that I thought were making stuff that was really interesting. Omar-S has kind of a different sound. I would buy those records at Rick Wilhite’s store [Vibes New and Rare Music] because I didn’t know where else to get them.

I also met Serge from Clone Records. That was kind of an outlet for the beginning of European sales. If I had to go to Chicago or New York, I would bring a couple boxes of records over there and just go door to door, store to store. Introduce myself. See if they wanted to buy records. I’d get their email and they’d become customers. I made the website. Places in the UK or Japan started hitting me up and then other stores. It was sort of a snowball effect with that. I wanted to become more involved with the manufacturing, and with new music. I love old records and finding old records, but to me, it’s more exciting when a new record that’s really sweet comes out. There was Submerge, but they started to focus on their house labels and the back catalogues of Transmat, and KMS, and Metroplex, and then the Underground Resistance stuff. So then there were all these other labels around town, like Omar-S, Kenny Dixon, you know, there’s a million of them. I started contacting them, and other people found out. So that grew.

Well, let’s talk more about distribution. So you started off wanting to distribute music that wasn’t being distributed widely from the city, right?

I also saw it as a business opportunity. I need to make money. I enjoyed riding my bike, but I just needed a change. First off, I liked the music. It seemed like a good job, better job than the one I had, because there was a need for it. And the other function of it was, I wanted the company to fund special limited edition projects or reissue records. Reissue records that are rare, or came out and were missed the first time around. Maybe there was a lack of promotion, or bad artwork when it came out. Or to even try to fund or facilitate labels that have the music ready, but they don’t have the funds to get it off the ground. So if I can fund some good labels or projects, it helps me because it gets more products I can move and then it helps the artist, because they don’t have the money. Then they can move on and work on their next record. That’s special; I can’t just press everyone’s records.

Flier for Siegel’s Thailand gig

So what year did you start distributing?

I’d say officially 2008. Then last year, in 2010, I started the label.

Where do you distribute to, mainly?

I would say U.S. stores are a small fraction, but not as small as people think. It’s picking up. The other chunks are to Europe and Japan. U.S., if it’s a good record, people buy it. Hopefully they buy it. The stores buy it. I don’t know how long it stays there! But people express interest in it. There’s not only three copies of something sold in the U.S. If it’s something that’s really exciting and original, people here want it too.

Do you ever think about selling directly, not doing wholesale, but selling online?

No, it’s too much. I’m involved in other things. My advantage of being in Detroit is that I have cheap rent, I have cheap space, I don’t have much overhead. Every other distributor, most likely everyone except me, has an online store because they have to. If they’re in New York, they have to pay huge amounts of rent and they have employees, and they’re just not selling wholesale as much as they used to, so they had to [go online]. But that’s also direct competition with the customers that they sell to. It’s a total conflict of interest, but they don’t really have a choice. Their only other choice would be to go out of business. Because they’re always going to sell it at a better price than the store they sell it to because they’re buying it for a wholesale price. I just don’t need to do that. If I needed to make more money, I’d rather find some other thing to get into as well. Something different. Otherwise that’s too much music sales. Too much going to the post office and everything.

In 2010, I started the label FIT Sound, which is something I needed to do because I wanted to have total creative control over the music and the artwork and the whole package, you know. I work really closely with the artist on how the mix is going to sound, the edits, and the order of the tracks. I do the art. I pay attention to all these elements, they are all very important. It’s also the music that I want to play, as a DJ, and I think other people will like. I call it a mutated form of the classic sounds of techno and house, stuff that’s not really any genre. It can mix with house or techno, but it’s not anything. That’s kind of what I look for. It’s really fun to find new artists and listen to what they are making. It’s kind of like a hunt. It’s kind of like being a curator of a gallery. You want the best shit. A gallery represents the artists that they’re into, that they go after to represent them.

Your first release was with Marcellus Pittman.

Yeah, the first release was with Marcellus Pittman and it had a really good response. It totally exceeded what I thought. It was the new label and no one really knew. I don’t think people were that hip to him, they know more Theo Parrish and stuff like that. I think it really sold based on the strength of the music rather than the name. And the second one was by Jamal Moss from Chicago. It was these three crazy tracks. It’s like almost industrial and house; I don’t even know what it is. And then the third one is by Anthony “Shake” Shakir. Shake’s always been one of my favorite producers, so I was really happy to put this together with him. He’s a great guy.

I’m working on upcoming releases for the FIT Sound label. One of the functions of the distribution was to do special projects of records I think that were kind of missed when they came out. One of these projects was with a producer named Walt J who released a handful of records in the late 90′s. It was really good music with terrible artwork. So I’m working with him on this sub-label is called Walt J, it’s a reissue series. That’s coming soon. I’m also doing a label called 1983, and that’s more like crazy bands that kind of have elements of electronic music, and that are punk, and weird, and crazy. That’s more 7″ type of stuff. It’s more non-dance, non-straightforward dance music. FIT Sound is 12 inches for DJs, for the stranger DJ, but it’s for the dance floor. And 1983 is the, it’s non-dance floor stuff. I guess a DJ could play it, but that’s for the really weird DJ, you know.

Are those local bands that you’re working with?

Yeah, the first one is called Especially Good.

Oh great! Yeah, they’re awesome.

They’re the first 7″; I’ve got to do the artwork for it, but it’s ready to go. I just say that’s kind of like Joy Division meets Throbbing Gristle. I saw their first show and I wanted to release their music. We recorded enough for three records just in the studio. So they’ll just come out over time. I just like to find crazy, weird, interesting music. I want to put that out and put my money behind it. Invest my time in cultivating that. Also, DJing this kind of music, playing it out. Representing it. That’s what I try to do when I DJ, represent this kind of stuff. I guess that’s my function when I try to DJ, the newest, weirdest, funky stuff.

Do you DJ regularly now?

At the moment I am in Cambodia, just did a gig in Penom Penh and it was incredible. Also played in China last month and in Thailand next week, and also Austalia in August. Playing in Asia has been incredible. They have a real hunger for this music because not many people reach out to these countries. Also, it’s crazy here in Cambodia because there told me there are only about five sets of Technics turntables in the country so the promoter had to go on a mission to find a set. Also it was a big deal because I brought vinyl, they told me they have never seen anyone play vinyl in Cambodia and I also think I was the first guy from Detroit to play there as well. But as far as Detroit goes, I don’t play regularly there. I do a radio show for Viva Radio. The radio show is my regular thing. That gives me more drive to work on these kind of sets I want to achieve in a club environment. The radio show is good practice. But in Detroit… I don’t know anyone who DJs regularly in Detroit.

Siegel in Cambodia with his friend Marady

How did you get connected with Marcellus Pittman? Did you know him already?

I think I just got his phone number from someone, maybe an email. Or maybe I just looked on one of his records. I met up with him and told him what I was trying to do. Then he played me a CD of stuff, but it wasn’t totally done. It was just sketches. He recorded a CD for me and had his turntable plugged in, too, and had his finger over the needle. You know, it’s kind of like copyright protection. He would be recording me this CD, and then every few seconds, put his finger on it, touch it on the needle, or make some noise, so I couldn’t just bootleg it or something. Because he didn’t know me that well. So I listened to the CD and there was a lot of stuff I liked, but there were three in particular that really worked as a package. We went back and got those tracks. On the original demo, certain things weren’t loud enough, or things were too loud. We spent a few months going back and forth and then I did some editing of them. I’m not in a rush to put music out. I’ll spend a lot of time trying to get it as good as possible before I’m totally sick of it. But it’s really important to spend time on each record.

And then the others, like Shake, I had been talking to him about distributing, when I first started, his back catalog. So we were always in contact and I would talk to him on the phone a couple of times maybe when I was doing parties. I’d see him around. The first time I met him I contacted him to play a party with Legowelt and some Dutch guys. That was a few years before I started the label. It eventually came together. I don’t think it’s hard to get in contact with people here. It’s like a small town. I think that if people sense that you have good intentions, and they see your track record, then things happened more naturally.

And who do you do your mastering through?

I do mastering through a few places in the U.S. Actually, I’ve only used one in Nashville. It’s fine. There’s nowhere that’s amazing. Everywhere is hit or miss. They’ve done good work, so I keep going back. But from what I hear from everyone else is that they’re using different ones for different projects. Unless you want to send it somewhere that’s really expensive. But most places in the U.S. are around the same cost, and sometimes they do a great job, sometimes they do a good job, and then sometimes you’ve got to get it re-cut, either by them or by someone else. It just varies. The equipment’s old, they have a good day or a bad day. It happens to everyone I guess.

You mentioned an interview you did where they asked you about Detroit and being secretive and everything. Can we talk about that now?

Yeah. My take on it is that I think that being secretive is like a defense mechanism. People hold on to the things that they want to keep close, the things that are important to them. I use the analogy, it’s like a country protects and cultivates their natural resources. If another country takes them, then they’re fucked, they’re broke. So it’s kind of the same thing, you know? I just relate that to the music here. I don’t think it’s only a Detroit thing. Another thing, is that I think people, in the Midwest in general, are just kind of modest, you know?

Oh, yeah.

They just naturally aren’t like, look at me! So I think that’s one element, it’s just normal people, so they’re not supermodels. They don’t have that mentality. I think there’s more longevity in keeping something underground. And it’s cooler.

I think it’s interesting how over the years it gets interpreted as this aggressive, militant, racist against white people kind of thing. But it’s totally not.

Yeah, you could say the same thing. You could relate it to racial things, but in the end, it’s the same thing. It’s their thing, they protect it. People who make music here, if you approach them and you seem like you have good intentions or you are serious and you have a track record, then I don’t think the race thing matters. But if you come with an arrogant mentality and think you can use money, then you’re going to get that. People won’t want to deal with you. You’ll think they’re militant, or something, but you’re coming at them totally wrong. Like a conquistador or something! But if someone can tell your heart’s in it, then they’ll let you in a little bit. Form a relationship.

Do you produce at all; do you plan to do that?

Yeah, I work on music. When I get home after doing music business stuff all day, if I feel like making music. I have a studio, but I usually only go in there when I’m feeling creative. I kind of have to relax a few hours after dealing with music stuff, turn off the computer, not look at any emails. I do make music, but it’s more of a creative outlet, I guess, for me. When there’s stuff that I like that I want people to hear, I’ll release it, or someone else will release it. I’ll try to have it out somehow when it’s there. But I think I’m still experimenting. Even though it’s been years, it’s not there yet. I’m taking it more seriously, I guess now. But I don’t depend on it. I do it when I want to do it. I don’t want to have to make music to pay the bills or something.

Oliver $’s “Doin’ Ya Thang,” with its generous samples of Moodymann’s signature patter, has caused quite a stir since being released in April on Play It Down. While club audiences, Beatport shoppers and RA charters ate it up, many (including our own reviewer) felt the track exploited Kenny Dixon Jr.’s bountiful personality without giving him any credit. So when LWE was offered the opportunity to interview Oliver “$” Siebert by his management, we knew it was important to ask the man responsible about the arrangements, motivations, and ethical quandaries behind one of 2011′s most notorious records.

I only have a few questions, and I actually primarily wanted to focus on your track “Doin’ Ya Thang.” Because I know that’s been a really big track for you, and it’s the one that’s of the most interest to us. I wanted to start by asking you what your thinking was behind the track when you were making it?

Oliver Siebert: To be honest with you, it was that kind of, like, quick ones. I mean, I basically heard that vocal and I thought, “Well, I have to use that.” I tried to produce a really nice DJ tool. It was not really, like, where I thought, “It’s my next single,” or something really big. I just made it like my other records.

So you would say it was pretty similar in the way that you made it to your other tracks, then?

Yeah, most of my stuff are DJ tools, and this one is a tool as well so.

Were you intending to release it, or was it originally something you were just going to originally save for your own sets?

First I just had it in my own sets, and then I showed it to Jesse [Rose, of Play It Down] because I just thought maybe it’s a nice bootleg idea or something. But that was like the very first version, and there was a lot of more talking in there. So I basically cut it down to the max. [laughs]

I see. So I was curious, did you ask Kenny Dixon Jr. or the promoters that the vocal was sampled from to use the — did you ask their permission to use the recording?

Not really. [laughs] To be honest, they’re clearing it right now — and the thing is in the beginning we thought, “OK, that’s a little thing for us to play out,” but nobody thought [about] it getting that intense, you know?

Yes, I understand. That being said, the track has caused a little bit of an uproar, especially among our readers, mostly because of the extensive use of Kenny Dixon Jr.’s vocals. And some people thought — and I know you weren’t thinking, necessarily, that it was going to be a track you were planning on releasing — but you took advantage of his live performance for your own benefit. And I was curious what you thought about that sort of reaction to your track.

Um, yeah, to be honest, man — I don’t know why it blew that crazy up, but in the end of the day it was just a quick idea, and Jesse liked it very much, and, yeah, that’s basically it.

I can understand that. Even still, though, after you and Jesse talked about it, obviously it became commercially available, and it did quite well on Beatport. And I think maybe the reason why some people have been maybe a little upset by it is because it’s mostly his vocals — with your beat — but it’s mostly his vocals that sell the track. When you were working on it and when you were deciding on whether or not to release it, did you feel any ethical concerns about whether or not to put out a track that was based mostly on Moodymann’s vocals?

Yeah, I mean you’re right — it’s definitely living out of the vocal, that’s for sure. But I never thought it’d go that big, and I thought, like, “Well, maybe we sell our 200 vinyl copies, and then maybe just a few digital things. [laughs] It’s quite crazy how that track blew up, I know exactly what you mean. That track is living out of the vocal and it’s basically my beat, and yeah, it’s really hard to say like– I mean, the vocal is definitely 60 percent, I would say, of the whole production. Yeah.

Would you say that when you’re producing, or when anyone’s producing, do you believe that anything is fair game for sampling, whether it’s someone else’s performance or someone else’s beat or –

To be honest, look at Kenny Dixon Jr.’s productions, you know what I mean. So he’s basically living that what I’m doing, you know.

Yeah, that’s true.

He sampled Chic, he sampled basically everything; and I guess that’s kind of an art, to grab samples from everywhere and just create something new out of it. That was basically my style back in the days when we started with that fidget house thing, and basically we grabbed samples from everywhere, and tried to make them a bit fresher, cut them up just a bit, and twist them, and — yeah.

That’s understandable. I guess the distinction some people would draw between some of Moodymann’s productions is that although a lot of them had identifiable samples — especially his Chic samples and stuff like that — a lot of them weren’t played out, you know? It wasn’t like a long sample that just played out; it tended to be something he’d cut up real fine and then added his own things to it. So that’s sort of the distinction I think some people would see. I wondered how would you react if someone were to have a big sample of one of your tracks for their own record and then became successful?

To be honest, I would be honored, man.

Yeah?

I mean, so many people took my bass drums, my hi-hats, you know. On the other side it’s like when they’d be creative and do something out of it then it makes totally sense, but when they’re doing like a complete four-bar loop, then it’s maybe a bit boring. And I also cut a lot of his vocals together from different sessions, and I don’t know if you heard the DJ set of him.

I can’t say I’ve heard the whole thing, no, actually. So was it a pretty long set?

OK, so it’s basically like cut together here just a bit out of it, and yeah, I had to take out some other crazy words he said in the set. It’s not really like I took, like, a five-minute sample of him and — you know what I mean?

Yeah. I guess it’s sort of hard for listeners to tell, I guess. For people to think, you know, ‘Is this all one long thing or is this — ‘

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I guess that’s a credit to the way that you arranged it because it sounds like it’s, like, one long piece of a set, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally understand what you mean. The people on YouTube, they are also commenting, “Wow, he put some crowd noise in the back, and –” you know what I mean? It’s like they’re talking all good. [laughs]

Yeah, I understand.

So it basically wasn’t one sample like the crowd in the back. I mean, it’s basically like a live DJ thing.

One of the reasons why that song caught my attention is because it sort of takes the DJ set out of the DJ’s hands and gives it over to Kenny Dixon Jr. and lets him sort of play for the period of time. I wonder what that says about modern DJing and about the tools that we make for DJs to play when we’re sort of saying, “I’m going to use a track that sounds like someone else’s DJ set.” I wonder what you think about the idea of literally using someone else’s DJ set for your own DJ set, basically. ‘Cause that’s kind of sort of what this track is. And obviously it’s been arranged, it’s been changed, and I won’t say it’s the same thing. But it does have that sort of vibe, and I was curious of your thoughts about that.

Yeah, you’re right. It’s a bit of the DJ set, right? Like, that kind of live thing, and there were so many people [with], like, crazy reactions when I played it out, and people thought, like, ‘Wow, shit, put the microphone down,’ but it was basically in the track. And I think that makes it so real, you know? So it’s not really like [I] cut out some bad parts or something so it’s like, I think, raw shit.

Were you actually at the set that that was recorded at?

No. No. No, no, no.

So someone gave you the recording, and you were just really enamored with it.

Yeah, basically everybody in the world had the chance to do that.

Oh, OK. I saw someone on Twitter, one of the promoters who was put on that Moodymann night, and he said that no one had asked to record that, and it was sort of like a bootleg recording. And so he was almost a little surprised that it was available for people to, you know go ahead and make into other tracks.

Basically I’m never sampling out something out of DJ sets, but I thought that was too perfect, you know? I mean just check the DJ set out. Listen to it, and then you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Laurie Osborne doesn’t really need much of an introduction, but we’ll give him one anyway. As Appleblim, he and Sam Shackleton ran one of the past decade’s most influential and loved labels, Skull Disco, which defined its own strain of bass music too incongruous to be repeated and too exceptional to be equaled. He went on to start Apple Pips, a label which continually captures the zeitgeist of the bass music world while it swings wildly through genres and styles. As a producer he’s collaborated with some of the best in the business, and as a DJ he stands head and shoulders above the rest (delivering two of our favorite sets of the year. LWE caught up with Osborne recently to chat about the continued influence of DMZ and FWD>>, UK dubplate culture, and more in advance of his appearance this Saturday in New York for the Sub:stance New York residency launch.

Instead of asking you first about how you got into dance music — I feel like it’s pretty well documented — I wanted to ask about the influence of nights like DMZ and FWD>>. These parties were incredibly influential to you and Shackleton at the time, and also most of your peers who were around. So I wanted to know, I guess, what the continued influence of these nights is, now that the music you guys are making is quite different from what was pioneered at those nights.

Laurie Osborne: Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of — it’s hard to say really — as a sort of “jobbing” DJ for want of a better word, I don’t actually get to kind of go to and check out all the other nights now unless I’m kind of playing at them. Because I’m sort of busy most weekends and stuff like that. And something FWD>> I’ve actually not been to in a very long time, you know? So I really — I’m not in touch, and even the London club scene, in general. I’m sort of not even in touch with the Bristol club scene, really, because you’re away a lot. So it’s only when you kind of get a chance to play at things at home that you get to see them. So in terms of, like, DMZ, I haven’t played there for a long time.

So it’s more the influences of probably the people who play at them and stuff like that, rather than the nights themselves because I haven’t actually had a chance to go to those for a long time. I think the last time I went to a DMZ was last time I played at one, which was years ago now — at least a couple of years. And probably the same with FWD>>. I’m influenced by the people they book. Being down in Bristol, it’s kind of like I’m doing more bass there. I feel less of a need to be in touch with the kind of London music. It’s always been a sort of influence. But as I’ve got more and more involved in things down here, you just get more and more sort of taken up in your own thing, really. Just in terms of the people you make music with or promote in the clubs down here. I think that influence lives on in terms of, I still love the music a lot of those people make, but the actual opportunity to go and see them play sort of doesn’t come up as often, unfortunately, anymore. It’s kind of a different dynamic, really, from when you’re a punter, you know? It’s a different role in the music. I was an enthusiast and then someone who kind of started helping to spread it, and then I’ve ended up being involved in more of the music-making and the A&R end. It’s a strange journey. It’s definitely changed quite a lot.

Do you think you guys sort of still look to capture the vibes or the environment that was around back in that period?

Yeah, yeah. I’d like to. In terms of, like, my own experience in sort of clubs, it’s like they were amongst the most kind of intense that I’ve had. And I still have the old night where I’ll go and it will come together in that way. That happened quite a lot back then, where you’re of regularly going to certain clubs. Not every night would be an absolutely electric night, but a lot of them were. It just comes from all over the place now — that particular sound. I think that the refraction of the music, there’s much more of a wide range of stuff getting played. I still love to see someone like Pinch, or Distance, or someone, you know? And it’s still got a vibe — a dope vibe as those days, where it’s like, 140 [BPMs], it’s dubby. There’s so much that’s different now in terms of where everyone’s gone. If you look at someone like Loefah you know, what he was doing then blew my mind, and so I can do something completely different now. Because, in a way, you shouldn’t try to do that stuff. I mean it’s cool that people make music in whatever style, but I sort of massively respect someone like Loefah who sort of do their thing, and then kind of stop it and wait and think, ‘Well, what do I want to do?’ You know? He’s obviously sort of found inspiration in different areas, and helped burst this kind of new scene again. That’s the legacy of it. If people didn’t really care about fashion or trends — just did their own thing then — and can continue to do their own thing. Mala’s still making stuff he could have played that definitely he could’ve played back then, in terms of it fits a certain vibe that as still getting moved on. Do you know what I mean?

Right, right. I guess from my perspective, Sub:stance seems like it’s on track to be maybe almost as influential as a party as those nights were.

That’s interesting.

You’ve played there a bunch, so what does Sub:stance mean to you?

Wow, I mean, it’s a whole bunch of experiences at mashed together for me. It’s Berlin in itself. I’ve not been there for a while and I’ve not played at Sub:stance for a while, but I was lucky enough to come and play the first probably four or five parties. Those were really interesting because I’m watching it go from a little kind of experiment that could have gone either way. It’s obviously good mates of mine and my agent. I’m really lucky to have been involved from the start. Just in terms of someone who turned up and played, you know? So really it’s just a testament to Scuba and Paul Fowler. Just in terms of programming and promotion and having the kind of balls to do it, really. The experience of going to Berlin and having the opportunity to play a really amazing club. It blew me away when I first went there. I’ve always seen it from the perspective of someone who’s playing there, so I’ve never had the kind of, “you might get turned away at the door” kind of vibe, which is a bit of a shame. But I really do respect the kind of — as much as it can seem arbitrary, I do respect the fact that it’s a gay club. It’s gay, but it’s straight-friendly. It’s not the other way around. For me, that’s what gives it its unique vibe.

We’re doing this interview in advance of the Sub:stance launch in New York. What are you looking forward to about that?

I’ve heard really good things about them and just got on with them really well. You can just tell when it’s nice people putting on a nice party and they care about the music actually. So like I’ve got a feeling that it’s gonna be the same in terms of the sort of like program. The people hopefully will sort of be something a bit different. I’m excited to sort of be involved. It’s always interesting meeting different crowds and different places.

When I saw you at Unsound in April, I noticed that — I guess the tempos have been coming down a little bit, more of a 4-4 vibe — but your set, to me at least, was very house. I think if anyone came in, didn’t know you, didn’t know your background, no one would have really known that…

No one would necessarily associate that with dubstep, you know, but you could say that about a lot of things.

Right.

Something like Badawi I think was probably the closest to kind of like something that was “dubstep” influence. But in terms of what Kode9 is playing, it basically is sort of like upfront music. There is obviously more of a kind of a London based thing because he still lives there and he still works with those people and is finding new stuff. So if you know what’s exciting, it’s gonna be stuff that is funky. It’s not dubstep, you know? Funky things from different places. But it’s not necessarily a dubstep thing. Hopefully it’s a meeting ground between those things. But it’s like sometimes I could play a set where it’s mainly stuff people think of as either spacey house or swung techno. But I like to try and mix it up, normally towards the end, and put in stuff that is either what I think of as dubstep or stuff that’s kind of slowed down a bit to mix in. But yeah, I’m definitely not someone who– I’m not tired of that sound, but you got something interesting to yourself. I’ll still be releasing things which people would definitely call dubstep. But yea, I’m always trying to do something a little bit different, just for the heck of it, really. To just keep things interesting.

Have you always been like a bit of a house and techno head or is that more of like a recent development?

Yeah massively. That’s amongst many other things, that’s kind of like the roots of what got me into dance music. I think as with a lot of people, in England or whatever, you’ve got the whole rave thing which sort of like came out of house and warehouse parties and that music was even in the charts. Like when you’re 12, 13-years-old you know you’re hearing this weird music which, it’s just so alien sounding but kind of so familiar. I love it. There’s definitely a period where I think people used to come out and expect a certain thing and get something else and you don’t want to kind of upset people. But at the same time I’m not gonna kind of just play things because I think that’s what people want to hear. You’ve got to be confident in your own tunes, otherwise I think no one’s really gonna get into it. You just stick to you guns and hopefully people come listen to you.

I wanted to ask next about Apple Pips. I don’t think there’s never been a repeat artist on Apple Pips.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that a conscious decision?

Not really; but when looking at it, I think it’s just wanting to sort of like keep things moving on and also give people little opportunities of a release. I quite like the idea of just being like all this different random stuff — which is all stuff that I love, but it’s all quite different. I definitely wouldn’t rule out putting stuff out by the same one again, but I’m not the kind of person who’s entering into long term business deals with people. It’s more just like that’s a tune, I like it, let’s get it out kind of thing. And like in terms of artist development and stuff, that’s not really where I’m at at the moment. There’s other labels that can do that. But it’s been a lot of stuff from people that around me in Bristol. There’s all these people who are influencing me and I want to give them a platform to add onto in a sort of — not condescending, but you know, a helping hand. I love their music, I play it and I want to give them an opportunity to be heard more. Hopefully people will go out and buy something again and they buy it ’cause it’s Apple Pips, rather than a certain person, but just like, ‘Let’s check this out.’ Maybe it’s deep house or maybe it’s some other techno or it’s garage or something.

It seems like you’re always on the lookout for new talent. What makes something stand out to you lately?

It’s just a vibe. It’s a vibe and then it’s kind of a certain kind of hook and if it works. Someone played it and I’ve seen people react to it, with certain tunes it’s just like that’s got to come out because it’s one of those ones that every time you play it people are jumping up and down and shouting and come asking what it is. That’s just the proof of a good tune. You can still like good tunes and still release things without that reaction, but that’s often been the deciding factor. Other times I enjoy either hearing this type of music or working with them or being involved. I get to hear these things as they get made, which and sometimes it’s sort of like, ‘Let’s do something.’ So yeah, it’s generally a reaction of people, or maybe it’s a little personal thing.

Bristol seems to have like a very storied scene. At the same time it seems like the Internet has tempered the influence of really localized scenes. But Bristol seems to still have a very strong local scene. What do you think makes Bristol so special?

I think a combination of place, size, and people. It’s always hard to tell. People used to kind of like ask me in interviews about why,I thought dubstep comes from the UK and I remember thinking, I haven’t got a clue. I’ve asked other people and they’re like, ‘Well, it’s not so much the place. It’s more the people that were there at any one time,’ you know? Bristol sort of feels like it’s got quite a unique feel as a city anyway. Just kind of the natural shape of it and the kind of like the ups and the downs. I’ve never experienced that anywhere else. It’s got very unique topography and layout. And even just where it is in England has an influence because it’s not too far from London but it’s far enough to be completely separate. It’s kind of in the country, but it’s kind of not. You’re not far from the country. I think has an influence on the people there and it’s the people that have sort of been there for X time. So it’s kind of like a melting pot of variously different cultures, which obviously resulted in some really nice kind of like collaborations and friendships, over the years from punk up till now.

I think there’s a certain vibe to the local people here that is sort of quite — I just found it really friendly and especially the music scene. People were never like, ‘Who are you guys?’ You know, ‘You’re from out of town. What are you doing in the city?’ They were very like, ‘Yea, wicked. Get involved. Let’s make tunes and come and play on the radio,’ and from then on it was just friendship. Like no hostility ever. Get involved and have fun and you find that nice. I’m sure you get it obviously in other cities, but there’s a certain thing about Bristol where you go out and have a dance and it’s like no one’s sort of like looking at what you’re wearing or hanging around to be cool. Everyone’s just getting down. People would come and play there often say that. They’re like, ‘Wow!’ The crowds down here are just always very sort of open and friendly and honest. They’re not so trend oriented. It’s just like, ‘Let’s have a party,’ kind of thing. I think that has an influence as well.

Do you think there’s some element of people in Bristol being able to sort of remove themselves a bit from what’s going on in London?

Yeah. In London you’re sort of constantly like checking yourself and sort of like, ‘Wow. Is this the cutting edge?’ or like, ‘Is this cool?’ Maybe that was just me, but that’s definitely what I felt even though I loved it. People in Bristol are less bothered about that kind of thing and actually end up getting on and doing quite a lot more. It’s just a combination for me when, since I’ve lived there. Lots of people from Bristol and lots of people from out of town are just getting together and getting on some really good stuff. There’s some really good magazines, there’s some really good promoters, there are some really good clothes people.

I wanted to next ask about your productions since I think they’ve all been collaborations for the past couple of years. Why is that?

Well, I kind of lost my mojo for quite a while. I was still making music, but I sort of lost the ability to finish things. I was only very good at things when I had a deadline anyway. I mean I’m not really a finisher. I’m more of a tinkerer, you know? So I find that I’ve always made music as a kind of collective with a band. I missed that. After I was asked to do a remix, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t think I’m actually sort of capable of doing this on my own. I don’t think I’ll even enjoy it.’ So I just asked a mate, ‘Would you fancy doing it together?’ and that’s so much fun. It was so much of a buzz. It was like, wow! This is what’s been missing from my music life. Having someone else to kind of buzz off of. I found I’ve just kind of tried out various people and always have really good results. It’s a social experience making music, you know? That’s how I first started playing music was sitting around and jamming with friends, and that for me is where the fun is. The bouncing ideas and random things happening. I totally respect people who can sit on their own and are perfectionists, and a lot of people I know are like that. I do sit on my own and make music; but for me, the buzz is when you get someone else in and play it for them and go, ‘Wow! Maybe you should try this.’ I’ve just found I’ve been lucky to meet nice people and given it a try and it’s always turned out I think pretty well.

Do you approach each collaboration with sort of a specific sound or vibe in mind?

Maybe it will just be like, right, let’s take a bunch of stuff to sample, or just mess around on this synth, you know? Or really not much more than that. Maybe just as you’re starting it’s like, well what kind of mood are you in? Are you in a sort of like housey mood or this mood or that mood? Not really too many preconceived plans. I recently did a thing with Komonazmuk which is yet to come out, but it’s a slow, weird, sort of cosmic sort of house thing. That started just based around some vocal samples that we were working with, basically messing them up and trying to make something different and weird and it just sort of grew out of that. That’s what I love about it. You can’t control it. It just kind of goes where it wants to go. That’s the joy of making music. You get taken in a direction that you never could have predicted

What is your personal relationship with vinyl, both as a DJ and as a label head these days

Well, unfortunately, these days I actually don’t play regular vinyl because a lot of the music I play is unreleased. I play a lot of CDs and I’m not a fan of CDs. I’m always a little bit behind the times. I’m like, maybe I should think about just taking a USB pad and put things into Serato, but in terms of what I find myself musically is just going out and record shopping. I’ll go out and see people DJ, vinyl only DJs and they play amazing sets and it makes you think like, wow. I could do things very differently. But I happen to feel that my role in the moment is to push kind of new music. There’s plenty of people that can play old stuff out there. At the moment I’m buzzing off these particular tunes and these particular tunes are either tunes that my friends have made that aren’t out or they’re from people that send me things that aren’t out. I guess it comes from the old dubstep kind of exclusivity days. Your tunes were your ammo, basically. If you had a tune no one else had, that’s how you got bookings and that’s how you got people listening to you. It’s like you’ve got things that are special.

I’m not taking away from anyone that plays old music or anything like that. That’s the kind of mentality I grew up into DJing with, in terms of jungle. It’s all about exclusive and it was all about the newest, freshest sounds from people who have just made it, and I still sort of feel that. In terms of vinyl, I’ll always still make it and I’ll always still buy it, but a lot of stuff I buy these days I just dig in old shops. That’s a lot of my music collecting experience. I don’t download music and I’ve only very rarely bought stuff digitally as well because I bought all that stuff and then I never feel like I can find it again on my computer, you know? It’s not how I listen to music or look at music. I’m not against it in any way. I’m all for music getting spread in whatever way and, but equally I love records.

You were talking about the sort of exclusivity of some of the tunes you have. Dubplate culture seems like it’s a very crucial part of the UK scene, at least to an American like myself. What about that kind of culture is important?

It goes in different ways. It’s road testing tunes from either yourself or people that you work with or people that you know. There’s that aspect of it in terms of demoing and testing and seeing what it’s like and seeing what the reaction is. There’s also providing a kind of unique experience for people. A lot of people can turn around and say a DJ is there to entertain, but if people didn’t take risks and play fresh stuff then nothing would ever move on and people would just be playing classics. You don’t ever make new classics doing that, do you?I think there’s a happy line between where it’s someone like Jackmaster or someone like that can play some underground electro and can also just drop some big anthem next and it’s like, there you go. It’s providing both. I might not play the big anthems, but hopefully the creative things that maybe one of those tunes will become a big anthem because people like that. They exist, you know? I’ve definitely seen things I’ve played that got a reaction and people have been coming up and asking for them at the next gig. There’s nothing taken away from people that can recontextualize old stuff as well. I mean, I’d definitely like to do that more I think. DJs that can do that are really quite amazing. If you can blend the now into the past… You’ve got to put a lot more thought and time into everything. If I thought I could do that well then I’d definitely start doing it, but at the moment I just feel like there’s so much music that could be played. Otherwise people just wouldn’t hear it and I think that it’s my job to do that.

Do you think a tune like “Sicko Cell,” do you think the popularity of a track like that is at least in some part based around the fact that it was sort of exclusive?

Yeah. Especially these days, you can go onto Discogs and find any record in the world and download a mix by someone and have the tracklist and the tunes on your computer within half an hour. There’s no mystery of the old days. I’m not saying they were any better. I have some mixtapes where I still don’t know what the tunes are. That’s what I loved. It used to frustrate you, but going out and seeing stuff and people would be like, ‘What the hell was that?’ And it might take you three more times of seeing that DJ to hear it again, you know, and you still don’t know what it is. Maybe six months later you finally find out or then maybe it comes out or maybe it never does and you just don’t know. People can come out and listen to me and hear this music. I don’t really want them to go home listening to it on their laptop. I want them to come out and see me play the music the way that it’s meant to be heard.

What’s up next for you and Apple Pips?

Next on the label is two tunes by October and a chap called Borai, and they are two Bristol producers who are just making tons of really nice stuff. I go down to their studio a lot and I got hooked up with October through a little label called Smorgasbord, which is a new Bristol label run by a really nice chap. People were like, ‘Oh, you guys would really get on,’ couldn’t believe that we hadn’t met before. I went round there and it’s just a really interesting studio and it’s a couple of people who just can’t stop making music. They’re deeply into their kind of house music. Current house music in terms of like Chicago stuff and you know, for me it’s just like been a real eye opener. There is some really interesting stuff going in house music. It’s just house music, but to me it just sounder fresher than anything ever has done. Really weird, just deep, trippy, strange music. October and I have just been making a lot of stuff that’s influenced by that, but it’s also doing something a little different and you know, there’s some subs in there. They’re basically just churning out tons of really good stuff and I’d like everyone to hear all of that. It’s inspiring me just to sit there and say, I’d like to push it out there as well. So, hopefully over the next six months, or year or more people will have heard it.

That’s the next thing, and then after that something by Gatekeeper, who again, hasn’t really had anything out for a while and, um, he’s still making really brilliant, interesting music, and these are all people that I’ve known and lived with and stuff for years. So it’s kind of like they’re doing stuff, there’s all kinds of different projects going on, kind of vocalists and grime projects and hip-hop projects and female vocal things. It’s all sort of just experimenting and playing. You know, in my own slow way I’ll hopefully get some of it out there so that other people can hear it.

And then what about you yourself? I know you mentioned earlier you had something in the works with Komonazmuk.

There’s been a lot of remixes just about to happen. There’s a thing by Axel Boman which we’ve done which is for a label called Glass Table, which is again another nice person I’ve met around and about who is doing interesting stuff. They’re from a house background, but they’re kind of like spreading out from their label called Hypercolour, and they do all these different labels now, which is kind of anything goes. From electro to weird bands and stuff. That Axel Bomen EP is pretty much ready to go, which now me and Al Tourettes have done a remix of, and we’re working on a remix for Raudive (Oliver Ho), which is gonna come on a label called Halo Cyan, which is from over your way, actually. There’s works in progress from quite a few different collaborations, which I kind of like, almost want to sort of just let them kind of come out in their own way and not give them too much fanfare. Just sort of just slip them out there and see what happens. There’s all different stuff getting made, you know?

Listening to Room(s), Machinedrum’s absolutely mind-bending new album forthcoming on Planet Mu, one might think that the man born Travis Stewart is some fresh-faced space traveler repping the hot dance sound of a galaxy far, far away. The latter doesn’t seem so far off — there may not be a single producer on this planet who sounds quite like Machinedrum circa 2011 — but Stewart has in fact been on this planet for quite some time, amassing a genre-defying discography and honing his razor-sharp studio chops over the course of the last decade and change. His latest crop of productions are so hot, we reckon the dance music world will be spending much of the second half of this year sweating them out. Thus, we caught up with Machinedrum in Brooklyn a few weeks before he decamped to Berlin for the summer to better know a veteran we expect is about to get his due in a very big way.

Releasing music on Planet Mu is bound to bring you quite a few new fans, many of whom may think the label just plucked some newcomer. As this is certainly not the case, let’s talk about how you got here. Can you take me back to the beginning of your production career?

Travis Stewart: Well, when I first, I guess, started dabbling in production — before I even really knew what it was — it was probably when I was 12 or 13, and I was messing around with programs like Rebirth, which was a software 303 clone. It had, like, two 303s, a 909, and an 808, and so I was just basically making acid tracks, starting off. And I was using Cakewalk and some other programs like that. But then I really started to dive into electronic music when I discovered Impulse Tracker. It was probably like mid-90s, early-90s, something like that. And the thing that interested me about it was a community that was based around it; there was a whole online tracking community where people would upload their files, which were generally really small because at the time, you know, with dial-up and everything, in order to have a music-based community you had to kind of keep things small. So that actually became kind of a challenge for a lot of people — to see who could make the smallest file size, but best-sounding song.

Smallest file size… like actual audio, or some kind of MIDI-style file?

The actual file size, yeah. Not exactly, like, the length of anything because with the whole tracking scene — or trackers in general — you would save the file, and then it would contain all the samples in it and the sequence. So you could just easily pass it around to other people and then you could see what they did to make the track. So I learned a lot from that. But I guess when my career officially got started, though, was probably around, like, ’98, ’99, when I started sending out demos of my material. I’d send it to Schematic Records out of Miami, and I’d send it to a couple of other labels that don’t really exist right now. And I was sort of doing that and at the same time talking with my friend Gabe Koch from Miami, who eventually started Merck Records. He was telling me, you know, “If nobody really gets back to you on these demos, definitely talk to me. I’m thinking about starting a label with all these people that we know.” He was one of my Internet buddies that I had been talking to when I was living in North Carolina. Because I didn’t really relate to many people growing up, locally, that were into the same kind of music. So I ended up meeting lots of friends on the Internet that were sort of into the same kind of music.

Eventually Gabe decided to release my Syndrone album, Triskaideka, which was, I guess, technically my first electronic project. It’s more, like, IDM Autechre-sounding influenced stuff. So that was my first official release and Merck’s first official release. Then at the same time I was doing the Machinedrum project, which at that time [had a] more drum and bass, jungle influence, or maybe even more of the intelligent drum and bass or, like, I think people were calling it “drill and bass” at the time — like a lot of Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, stuff like that. But I was really interested in the sort of flux between hip-hop tempos and jungle tempos, and how they shared the same tempo, but one was double-time, one was half-time. So a lot of my songs were — the earlier Machinedrum stuff was — more focused on that kind of thing at the start.

So if you were on a very different musical tip from your peers at this point, what were they into, and what were you into?

For the most part, my friends were into rock stuff, and the closest they came to liking electronic music was maybe Daft Punk and Aphex Twin. That was even rare. Or Air, something like that. But most of my friends were into alternative stuff, metal. Maybe a few friends were into industrial, like Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly, which I definitely was into at the time. So I definitely found more people who were into the darker kind of stuff, but as far as Warp Records or Skam or any of that underground European electronic label stuff that was coming out in the late-90s, early-2000s — I didn’t really know that many people who were into the stuff.

Maybe it’s a stereotype, but it seems like most teens go through these distinct musical phases, like a classic rock phase or a hip-hop phase. Was electronic music pretty much it for you, though?

Not really. I was into everything, just as I am now. Maybe as I started getting later and later into my high school years I was getting less interested in anything that had vocals. I was mainly into instrumental electronic at that time, but before then I was really into a lot of alternative rock, like Smashing Pumpkins and Hum, and a lot of grunge and stuff like that. But at the same time [I was] listening to, like I said, industrial music and some metal, kind of all over the place.

Eventually you made it down to Florida. Was that the next stop after North Carolina?

Yeah.

And had you released an album at that point?

Yeah, I released my first record [in] the second half of my senior year in high school, in 2000. And then the first Machinedrum release came out in 2001.

You went down to Florida to attend Full Sail, right?

Yeah, exactly, I went for school.

I remember you telling me about a year ago that a big part of why you went there was because you knew that Pharrell [Williams] went there, and that was sort of all you needed to know.

That was part of it, definitely. I was sold on all the good reviews I’d heard — like, people talking about job placement. Just generally the fact that you could have an Associates of Science degree in one year was really interesting to me. I’d tried doing the four-year college thing as a music major for one semester, and after one semester, and just meeting people who were graduating and stuff, I wasn’t really interested in spending four years of my life doing that if I could just have this instant access to a job and a career field that I wanted to do.

Did that experience really broaden your horizons in terms of being a producer? Like, has a lot of what you picked up at Full Sail carried over into what you’re doing now?

I think so, now. At the time I was going to school, I probably would’ve said the complete opposite. [Laughs] Of course, that’s kind of how school goes. But yeah, I think it definitely kind of brought me out of this sort of more — I had a very punk, I-don’t-give-a-fuck kind of mentality before going to school, where all my recordings were blasted out. I didn’t really care about any sort of dynamic mixing or anything like that; [these are the sorts of] tools I kind of picked up in school. So it kind of balanced me out.

It’s interesting what you say about balancing out your production style, because for me, your early Machinedrum albums are all about stylistic navigation. For example, the second album opens up with an ambient tune, and then it sort of transitions into something that feels totally hip-hop.

Are you talking about Urban Biology?

Yeah. At this early point in your career, I sense this tension between this kind of high, electronic feeling and more of a pop feeling. Was there ever a point when you were torn between those two directions, or do you feel like they’re just two sides of your production identity?

Yeah, I guess it’s ever-changing. There’s definitely always been interest in that contrast between both worlds, and [on] some records I focus on it more than others, but it’s sort of just a natural thing that comes out. Because sometimes I’ll be really in the mood to experiment with synths and sound design and stuff like that, and then the next moment I just want to feel a deep groove or something that is really catchy, essentially, you know? And then sometimes both of those worlds come together.

In the last decade or so, you’ve released some singles, some EPs, but it feels like you’ve released at least as many albums, or maybe more. Is there a difference in how you approach putting a single or EP together and how you approach an album, and do you see yourself gravitating more towards the latter process?

Well, I think when I originally started releasing records, it was during this time where I was moreso feeling like I wanted to put as many tracks on a release as possible because that’s kind of what I wanted. Any time an artist would put out an EP or something, I would always want more, and I was like, “I don’t want to do that to my fans.” I would want to give them as much as possible. But I think that’s kind of changed for everybody now. I think EPs seem to be more successful as far as gaining hype and whatnot, and I think it does have to do with the fact that it leaves people wanting more. So you give them another EP, and then that’s more, and you just keep that whole cycle going. So I don’t know if it has to do with people being more ADD than in the past, but — yeah.

My understanding, too, is that you’re able to produce a lot of material pretty quickly.

Well, it’s changed over the years because my first few albums — and even Want to 1 2? — I spent anywhere from three months to two, three years on a track, you know? And after just doing that over and over — I don’t know, I kind of got inspired by this one talk I saw. I can’t remember the name of the lady, but it was on TED Talks, and she’s talking about influence and the idea of “genius inspiration,” like, [genius] coming to people in a moment, rather than it being a spread-out thing. It’s like something that you have to grab as quickly as you can, and get down the sketch of it as clearly as you can during that moment of inspiration. Otherwise it gets lost over time. And I think a lot of my older tracks suffer from never wanting to give up on the track, like, never wanting to release it into the world. Like, it’s this precious thing that I could never give up, and now I’ve just — especially in the past year or two — become less attached to the songs, and I try to wrap up as close to the initial conception point as possible, because I feel like the more days and weeks that separate that original inspiration, the more the idea gets lost.

How fully formed is the idea when it sort of first comes to you? Do you hear the whole track in your head, or do you just hear a little clip?

No, not really. I mean, yeah, I’ll hear an idea. Sometimes I don’t even hear anything. I basically just sit down in front of all my stuff and start vibing. Like, I might just start playing keys or go through my sample libraries and find something that’s interesting. And then even that will just kick-start the song, but I might not necessarily use any of those elements later on. But generally during that first session I try to build out what will be the biggest moment in the song. So it’s, like, the most stacked, the most layered part of the song. And once I have that and I can’t really add any other elements, I’m like, “OK, this is ready. I can start arranging this now.” Whereas in the past I would probably start arranging at the same time I was trying to conceive of what the song was going to be. And so over time I would figure out what that biggest moment in the song would be. And now I just try to get that done as soon as possible because otherwise the song’s going to sound, like, too all over the place, you know?

So it’s a matter of crafting the pinnacle moment of the track, and then figuring out how to get to it and how to move past it?

Yeah.

Does that feel like a kind of songwriting? Like, do you think of how you put a track together as songwriting?

Yeah, I mean, everybody has a different definition of songwriting. I mean, some people will technically consider a song, like, verse-chorus-verse, like it has all these rules that [it adheres to], but yeah, I mean, it’s definitely — what I consider my definition of songwriting is the initial conception of a song, whether it’s a beat or even a lyric or even getting down a rough idea of what vocals would sound like over something. Because I still do that — I’ll sing. If I have a vocal idea in my head and I can’t really do anything by chopping up vocals, I’ll just sing it straight into my computer and, like — even if I’m singing gibberish, I try to get out the idea.

It seems like over the course of maybe the last year or year and a half, you’ve started to zero in on bass music. How did you get there?

Well, I mean, the whole concept of bass music has always been funny to me because I think it’s just — it’s an element of a song. I mean, I understand that it is a genre and what kind of subgenres are made out of that. At the same time I just think of it as an evolution in electronic music. Basically what happened, like, IDM — and I hate saying that term — experimental electronica came out of that period in the 90′s where there was a lot of dance music, but people wanted to make it more interesting, basically, and then as it became more and more and more interesting, it essentially became more wanky, and people were just trying to see who could do the most tricks in the least amount of time. And it just became annoying and really unlistenable after a while, especially with a lot of breakcore stuff that was coming out. And I feel like this whole [contemporary] bass music scene is essentially IDM resurfacing in a more dance club context. Like, you have a lot of interesting sounds going on, interesting drum programming, stuff that is kind of off-kilter, but at the same time you have this underlying theme of bass that kind of carries you and just makes you feel good in the club. Because what’s club music without bass, you know what I mean?

I remember reading an interview you did in September of last year, and the interviewer asked you what you’d been listening to recently, and you said you’d been listening to juke and 16th century choral music–

[Laughs]

— and now that I’ve heard your new Planet Mu stuff, which I’m guessing you were working on at the time, these influences totally make sense. Let’s talk about how this Planet Mu material came together. When did it start bubbling up?

I initially started working on all of the material last summer, and probably wrote one of the first tracks while I was on tour in Europe. I was in Berlin, I had a week off, and I started the track “Now U Know Tha Deal 4 Real,” just on headphones. And then I was really happy with the fact that I could come up with a song like that in one session. And I was listening to it over and over, and I was like, “There’s really nothing I want to change with this. This is really just how it should be. I should just strive –” I mean, it sounds ambitious, but it really isn’t. I feel like it’s more ambitious to spend tons and tons of time on a track and try to be super intricate about little details. Whereas this experience and, like, writing that one song in such a quick time, and just being kind of happy with how simple it was, sort of inspired me to continue along that path. So I started writing more and more tracks around that time last summer when I got back to New York. And it would literally be these weekend sessions or just random times where I’d write two or three songs day after day. So I think the proximity effect definitely came into play there: it gave it connectivity, sonically, to all the tracks because there wasn’t as much time separating all of them.

The tracks are fast — we’re talking BPMs from the upper 140s to 160s — and usually fast music can be a bit stressful. But it’s almost like you break the fever in the music, and it just becomes really chill again. I remember you saying earlier that you were into jungle because the tempo could be felt as fast or slow. Did you discover this tempo range at some point during this process of writing these songs and decide that you wanted to focus in on it and exploit its dual nature?

I think, you know, after experimenting with higher, 130-to-140 tempos with the Sepalcure material, it interested me in sort of doing more of that on my own and seeing where that would take me. And where it eventually took me was, I started recognizing this sort of full circle sort of thing that was happening with my music, going back to where I was talking about the hybrid of jungle and hip-hop within the same song. By upping the tempos more and more, I was essentially going back to what I was originally trying to do back in the day when I was starting tracks at 80 to 90 BPM, but, like, going double-time halfway into the song. And so essentially I’m doing that again, but this time with higher tempos, trying to make it feel like a half-tempo. So if it’s 160, there are elements of it that have an 80 feel. And then 150, 75, et cetera.

Photo by Noor One

Hmm… maybe I’m wording this lamely, like I’m asking it on “60 Minutes” or something–

I like the “60 Minutes” comparison.

[Laughs] Yeah. But… speaking to what you said just before about how you’d start tracks “back in the day,” does it feel like with Sacred Frequency and Room(s) that you’re making the music you’ve been heading towards your whole career? Like, has your career to some extent been preparing you to be able to focused on such a specific sound and to be able to produce in the way that you’re now producing this stuff?

I would agree with that, in a way. Definitely. When I moved to New York I was really focused on working with pop artists and trying to bridge everything I’d learned up to that point with a lot of the interests that I had with pop music. And after doing that trial and error, trial and error, after a while I just kind of got tired of really trying to — it’s one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever had. And not that I’ve given up on it, but I kind of had to take a break from trying to bring those worlds together, so I decided to kind of go back to my roots, in a way. That whole time I was learning how to write pop music led into the way that I approach writing experimental electronic. So this [new material] is probably more or less a culmination of everything that I’ve learned.

This is interesting, because so much of the bass music that’s popular in the U.S. right now — the stuff that would be considered “pop dubstep,” perhaps — is really aggressive, really tough. The Planet Mu stuff definitely has a pop element to it, but instead of taking the “brostep” route, you’ve kind of advanced the melodic side of this music. Has the bass music that’s blowing up here in the States now emphasized entirely the wrong side of this music?

I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s any right or wrong approach, it’s just a different kind [of music]. Like, for all the bro-steppers out there, it’s kind of just — it’s a niche that needed to be filled; it’s people that want to go and just scream at shows, and I definitely appreciate that element. For me, when I’m writing songs, I definitely like the element of aggressiveness, because like I said, I come from a background of listening to a lot of industrial music and noise, and I like everything from, like, Wolf Eyes to Merzbow and the Skinny Puppy stuff that I was mentioning earlier. So I definitely enjoy aggression. But I think it’s just natural for me when I’m writing a song to kind of balance it out, because even during the songwriting process I’ll kind of get burnt out on [the aggression], and I don’t want that. I’ll just naturally not want that to happen, you know?

Let’s talk a little about New York. You’ve been here now for –

Five years, as of a few days ago, actually.

Congratulations! So yeah, I actually talked with FaltyDL about this a little bit when I interviewed him recently. New York is this big city, but this little corner of the dance music scene is really, really tight-knit. And there just seems to be kind of a lot of communal energy there. How do you think you’ve been influenced by this place and by this scene?

I’m definitely happy with what’s been going on recently, as far as, you know, the Percussion Lab nights and this feeling of community. Because one problem with New York [and artistic communities here] seems to be there’s a lot of people not necessarily competing, but [the communities are] very insular, and they’re kind of in their own worlds. They’ll acknowledge other people in the scene, but it’s more about them succeeding at what they do. Because this is a very aggressive city; it’s a very high-paced, and it’s expensive. So if you’re a musician full-time, you’ve got to meet that momentum with being very career-focused. So essentially it leads to people not really connecting with others as much as they should and forming communities here. So I’m really happy about the fact that that’s been happening a bit more with the people that are living here.

You’re taking a break from all that this summer to spend time in Europe. Will you be doing a lot of touring there in advance of the album?

Well, at the moment I have a few dates lined up in Europe, got them all on machinedrum.net. But yeah, I’m going to be located in Berlin starting in June until early September. That’s mainly just a way for me to kind of escape the scene that’s sort of young in America [for one that] has already been bubbling for a while in Europe, and a lot of the influences for my newest record are coming from European labels and European artists. So I feel like I need to be over there when the scene’s really going and then come back here when it’s finally starting to get going here.

What are you working on music-wise right now? I’ve heard that that you and Praveen are working on a Sepalcure album right now, yeah?

Yeah, we’re working on an album. We have really been grinding on the album since I’m going to be [away]. So yeah, we’re really excited about that. I’m also trying to tie up loose ends with some different artists I’ve been working with in New York, like Azealia Banks, trying to finish up her EP for XL. And Jesse Boykins III, we’ve had an album that we’ve been working on for a couple of years now that we’re trying to put the final touches on this month. Other than that, I’m still kind of vibing on the similar style to Room(s) . I haven’t necessarily decided to stop making those kind of tracks. I feel like I’m sort of on a momentum right now. Even though the record’s getting put out, I still feel like continuing that same path because it’s really exciting for me.

What artists have you been listening to recently? New stuff, old stuff?

I could break out my iPod right now… I’ve been listening to a lot of old school rave and jungle. I’ve been listening to — what have I been listening to? It’s always a tough question for me. My mind starts racing. I guess a lot of the new Hotflush stuff. This new Back and 4th compilation has a lot of really good stuff on it. The new Lando Kal on Hotflush is really amazing. Really feeling Jacques Greene. Koreless is definitely one to watch. Distal from Atlanta is really, really good. Om Unit, I’m really digging the Phillip D Kick stuff that he’s been doing. It’s really funny, actually, because I made an announcement on Twitter once that was like, “Hey, I’m going to be at this random bar DJing some of these new footwork jungle edits that I’ve made,” and he direct-messaged me a link to a zip of all these new footwork jungle edits that he had just made. So it was really cool to hear that somebody else was on that tip. So definitely check those out.

What else? There’s so much good music, and I feel like we’re really going through a period right now in the past couple of years where there’s just more and more stuff that impresses me, whereas I feel like there was this lull for a while with a lot of electronic music, especially whenever the whole Ed Banger scene was getting super huge. And I didn’t really — not to say that I wasn’t into any of that; I just feel like a lot of the music that came out of that was very shitty, honestly, and kind of boring. And a lot of people were trying too hard to make this, like, aggressive house electro kind of music and just trying to bite Justice and the whole Ed Banger sound too hard. So for awhile there was that, but now I feel like there’s a lot of interesting music that is becoming just really hard to categorize. And that’s really kind of always been a dream of mine — for people to stop labeling music and just start listening and just kind of get into whatever it is without that sort of pigeonholing going on, you know what I mean?

The strange world of Bernard Fevre, aka Black Devil, finished terraforming in 1978 when Disco Club quietly appeared on the Italian label OUT. At the time, however, no one was willing to make the trip. Following decades of indifference and the subsequently massive critical reappraisal in the wake of the 2004 Rephlex reissue, Fevre has spent the last five years releasing new takes on the BDDC sound for Lo Recordings. With Circus, his latest full length, he lets fly the claustro-dystopian vocal sound of BDDC in an array of new directions by way of a bewildering assortment of vocal collaborations (including Nancy Sinatra, Faris Badwan of the Horrors, YACHT, Nicolas Ker of Poni Hoax, and Afrika Bambaataa), all the while maintaining the recognizably dark contours of the Black Devil sound. In this translated email interview with LWE, the Frenchman reflects restlessly on his laurels, shedding a hint of light on his untimely vision, while devilishly leading us further astray.

You’ve described the early 70s in Paris as “revolutionary times.” In terms of musical upheaval, could you say something about your adventures in Parisian nightlife and what left an impression on you during that time?

Bernard Fevre: I wouldn’t say it was really “revolutionary,” but there was some electricity in the air. You felt alive. I really listened to a lot of music back then, and I was going out a lot and had the chance to meet a lot of interesting people. It was surely a good time for music and experimentation. I’m really part of this mood: playing music as a game and try some new things. That’s where Black Devil comes from.

On the original Black Devil release, it certainly sounds like you’d been listening to “I Feel Love,” but from a different perspective–through the walls of the more obscure club next door, perhaps. Regarding your tastes at the time, what role did more popular club music play?

Sure, I knew that track, but to me it wasn’t that new. I mean it sounded fresh, but it was just a very good product from Moroder: a bit like good marketing to sell you a new car. I’m not denying the fact that it was big and cool at the time, but it wasn’t that crazy. It wouldn’t have been a hit otherwise, I believe. Just a bit ahead of its time in terms of production, which is great. My dark side maybe comes from the fact that I’ve always been producing music without paying attention to fashion or marketing. Maybe I should have

By 1978, you’d been producing library music and had released several solo LPs: Suspense and Cosmos 2043 on Musax, and The Strange World of Bernard Fevre on L’Illustration Musicale. In songs like “Cosmic Rays” and “Dali,” you seem just a disco beat away from that distinctly Black Devil sound. What was the transition from your earlier albums to Disco Club like?

My early music was like a baby, then it became a teenager: drinking, smoking, going out, trying sex. Then it went out of control and became a monster, which is part of me. That’s what the last song of Circus says: the devil is magnetic. I can’t get away from him.

Would you consider BDDC an extension of your commercial work? Or did you consciously approach it from a different angle? The BDDC sound is so recognizable that I wonder if you intentionally (or subconsciously) made use of commercial techniques like “branding,” to some extent, while arriving at that particular sonic combination.

There’s some confusion actually in my resume. I did produce music for commercials, but only after BDDC tanked in 1978. Before I was working for a music-hall, playing keyboards in several bands, and traveling around the world, touring and trying new things with my machines. When it became boring, I started working solo. That’s how it happened. When I started BDDC, I wanted to shock people. I wanted people to say, “What’s this? I hate it. I love it. Turn the stereo down! Turn it up!” But nothing happened, and no one cared. I was a bit like a child playing Cowboys and Indians in his head with nobody paying attention. Then, I learned to be calm and quiet. It’s not that easy to be a punk.

What reception did Disco Club receive in 1978? And in what direction did you move afterwards?

BDDC didn’t exist in 1978. I was the only one that cared about it. So, I said to myself, I’m over as a “pop” artist, let’s make some music for a living, producing jingles and such.

Putting aside your Milpatte releases, is there a reason most of your post-Disco Club productions were never released? And are there any future plans for a retrospective of that period?

I don’t really care. Actually, I don’t remember anything. My brain is more focused on BDDC now. There might be a reason why it’s never been released, and maybe it’s better like that.

After the Rephlex reissue, what was the process for reclaiming the BDDC sound? Was it strictly a musical reappraisal? Or a technical one as well?

I took me two years to get the groove back. 1978 was so far away, it was like doing archeology for me. I really worked hard with my brain and with my machines. And then one day, the sound was there: I heard some parts which sounded both new and familiar at the same time. That’s how BDDC was born again.

How quickly were you able to take things in new directions? Would you say there was a point at which you consciously moved from past to present?

That’s a real criterion for me. My ears are now used to this special sound, which I prefer to most other sounds at this point. It’s not that I’m self-focused or pretentious, but I want to strengthen it and make it evolve towards the future.

As your work has been appreciated by a new generation of listeners, and its influence better understood, do you feel the connections you’ve made (via remixes, touring, labels, etc.) within the contemporary club music scene have affected or changed your creative process?

Not really. I’ve been here for a long time, and I believe my music is still a bit ahead of its time–maybe less so than in 1978–but I can feel it since younger audiences are really into it, and girls too. Not only geeks or record collectors. But I still work a lot to keep my music alive. I don’t care about the past, I live now, and I want my music to be played for a long time. But it feels good to know that people love your music, you feel better.

With Eight Oh Eight, you completed the “BDDC trilogy.” Does Circus, therefore, represent a new phase for BDDC? And is this perhaps what’s motivating the collaborative aspects of this release?

If I had considered Circus a step backward I wouldn’t have released it. A lot of people now tend to expect BDDC 1978 redux. Why would I do this? It’s easy and not exciting. I’ve always tried to explore new soundscapes, and I’m now old enough to pay no attention to what people or fashion is expecting from me. I’ve always loved The Beatles, and I think they were good at being pop and experimental at the same time. I don’t want to be the old-school, legendary guy who does the same tricks over and over again. It might be funny for people, but that’ll drive me crazier.

As you work with a wide variety of vocal talents on this release (Jon Spencer, Claire Evans, Nancy Sinatra, Afrika Bambaataa, etc.), do you consider it to be an experiment with the vocal aspects of the BDDC sound? If so, what were you looking for originally? How did you decide who to collaborate with? And were there any surprises along the way?

I would hear all the time “BDDC is ahead or out of his time,” so I started wondering if it was really true. The strongest idea to challenge my music was to open the Club to different kinds of artists: let’s see if they can entertain me and the audience, while keeping the spirit of my music. I’m proud of the results, and I believe it’s a great combination of magic and electricity. They’ve all been great and professional. Of course it was impressive, for example, to have Bambaataa at my place in Paris while he was touring at La Machine du Moulin Rouge. He came with his entourage, and it was something great and unique. I don’t really know people in hip-hop (or dressed like that) but everything went perfectly, as he’s a real artist and gentleman. Nancy Sinatra didn’t come to Paris but recorded in her own studio in Beverly Hills. It was a bit supernatural, first that she was accepting, then that her vocals were in my mail box! Franky’s daughter, she’s one of my heroes!

I’ve been to London to meet Faris Badwan from the Horrors. No one spoke French, and my English is pretty bad, so I was a bit scared. But Faris actually knew a few words–he’s not that shy, really–and we felt good, so communication was easy. I’d also met YACHT in NYC last summer, playing at the Southstreet Seaport festival. She’s half French, so it was easy to arrange some studio recording sessions abroad. I kind of like working on voices that I didn’t record myself at home. It’s both scary and exciting. It’s a lot of work, since you need it to fit exactly what you had in mind. Sometimes, it’s not that easy in the studio. It can be funky, like with Nicolas Ker from Poni Hoax. He’s a bit like an extraterrestrial, a freak. I was a bit worried about the results. How would it end? But after some time, we discovered we weren’t that different, we were both freaks to each other. We became friends, and the recording was really easy. He’s a real performer, a character. You just need to hear his voice to feel like he’s near you. He’s one of the best French singers ever.

How did you manage collaborations with so many different vocalists? Was your approach generally the same or different in each case?

Of course you can’t work the same way with each artist, but as I said they are professionals, so they played the game. And I was lucky enough to have them sing my English lyrics, which might not have always made sense to them. When I hear Jon Spencer singing “Fuzzy Dream,” I’m still amazed. He’s a real werewolf, like onstage.

As we move closer to 2043, where is the Black Devil sound headed?

I can’t tell. As I said, it’s a bit like a monster I can’t control now. It might eat me alive…