In discussion with iamelectron on “Don’t Fight It, Feel It” by Primal Scream (1991).
This single is an outtake of Primal Scream’s seminal “Screamadelica” album. What is so important to you about this track that you chose to discuss it, and not the whole album?
The album as a whole is an amazing creation (excuse the pun) but it’s “Don’t Fight It, Feel It” that means the most to me. Every time I hear it I’m back in 1991 and it still gets the hairs standing up. It’s one of those songs that I’ll never be able to disassociate from the state, time or place I was in when I heard it.
How do you have 1991 in mind, especially compared to the years shortly before and after? What made that year special?
The summer of 1991 was a major point in my life. It was when I decided to pack in Art College and give the DJ game a serious go. I’ve been around electronic dance music in one form or another for quite a while. I was, and still am a huge fan of New Order, and some friends and I started a Joy Division/New Order cover band at school called Funeral in Berlin. I had the bass and the pony tail so I was Hooky, haha! Then I got involved in a Goth Disco band. Don’t laugh! We covered Dead or Alive, Sylvester, The Fine Young Cannibals and our Hi-Nrg version of “Jolene” was legendary (to about five people). So I was really into the sound of drum machines and synths. But it wasn’t until I went to Edinburgh Art College in ’89 that house and techno really hit me. I stayed in halls of residence for my first year. In the room around the corner from me was this guy from Aberdeen and he was always with this girl from college that I had the major hots for but was too shy to approach. So one day I went up and introduced myself to him in the hope that he’d introduce me to said lovely lady. I never got the girl, but I did get introduced to Acid House. My new friend lent me copies of “The House Sound of Chicago” and the first Jackmaster compilation, and I was blown away by the rawness of it. So I started hunting down more records. I’d done a few bits of DJ’ing before, playing at indie disco things with a few electronic tracks thrown in; Factory releases, Tackhead, Nitzer Ebb, early Ministry/Revolting Cocks, The Residents that sort of stuff – and now I was sticking in these new House tracks, completely unmixed I must add because I had no concept of how to put two records together at that point. I started to meet more people at college who were into the House scene and we’d head down to nights like UFO; a short lived weekly party in Edinburgh that Optimo’s JD Twitch ran before he created the infamous PURE night (with his DJ partner Brainstorm).
Then in 1990 Glasgow became the European City of Culture and with that came late licensing laws and Atlantis at the Sub Club (with residents Harri and Slam) so we’d head over there and got to catch the first touring DJ’s like the Boys Own and Flying gangs. Then a friend and I started driving down from Scotland to London to go to clubs there. I was being consumed by House! By now I’d completely lost interest in actually getting a degree and to my parent’s dismay I moved back home (home being St Andrews, a very small, very insular University town on the East Coast of Scotland) to ‘take a year out’. I’d unintentionally timed my move with the opening of a night in the nearby city of Dundee called the Rumba Club, and from the spring of 1991 to Christmas of that year it was absolute chaos! During those eight months Weatherall played three times – and on his second visit he dropped “Don’t Fight It, Feel It” as his very last song. I had never heard a reaction to a record like the one he received that night – and I don’t think I’ve heard a reaction like it since. When the whistle noise, stuttering percussion and that wobbly bass line started the place erupted – it was madness!!! I’d love to hear a recording of his set because I’m sure he was mixing both sides; starting with the A side and then moving onto the “Scat Mix”. When that deep, deep, bass noise he briefly uses in the track came on the place went up another gear. So I’m on a packed dance floor going nuts to “Don’t Fight It Feel It”, surrounded by all my friends who are going nuts and whack – epiphany time! Sod college, sod everything else…I want to do what he (Weatherall) is doing! So I left the club that night…“and he was never the same again”. Yip, 1991 and this track will always be really important to me.
Im Gespräch mit Hendrik Lakeberg über „True Faith“ von New Order (1987).
Wie bist Du auf „True Faith“ gekommen? Was war der erste Zusammenstoß mit dem Stück?
Ich bin ja gerade auf dieses Stück gekommen, weil das Stück mich eben nicht schon seit Jahrzehnten bewegt. Es war eher eine Intuition. Mir ist der Moment eingefallen, als ich das zum ersten Mal gehört habe, und der illustriert ganz gut warum ich es ausgewählt habe. Ich war ungefähr 20 und kannte das Stück nicht von der Zeit als es herausgekommen ist, da war ich 9 Jahre oder so und hatte es zu dem Zeitpunkt also nicht gekauft. Ich habe es im Radio gehört und mochte es, wusste aber nicht, wer das war. Dann war ein Tag, wo ich die Straße lang gelaufen bin, und dieses Stück als Ohrwurm im Kopf hatte, und es kam genau in dem Moment aus irgendeinem Auto, ich glaube es war sogar ein Cabrio, das an der Ampel stand. Das war seltsam, und es war das erste Mal, dass ich es ganz bewusst gehört habe. Und ich habe gedacht, dass ich herausfinden muss, was das für ein Stück ist und habe mich darum gekümmert. Und seitdem ist es immer wieder eins meiner Lieblingslieder gewesen. Es gab es eine Zeit, da habe ich es gar nicht gehört, dann wieder, dann habe ich Platte mal verloren und wieder gekauft. Das Stück hat mich irgendwie begleitet.
Und das immer noch?
Ja, jetzt gerade nämlich wieder. Ich weiß nicht genau warum, aber es hat wieder mit dieser Intuition zu tun. Ich glaube, dass Pop bzw. Musikhören ganz viel damit zu tun hat. Nicht mit einer bewussten Entscheidung, sondern mit dem Empfinden, dass dir irgendetwas an einem Stück gefällt, und du weißt gar nicht warum. Es ist wie etwas Vorbewusstes. Das Stück hat textlich ganz viel damit zu tun, das etwas zu Ende geht und etwas Neues anfängt. Vielleicht liegt es daran, aber ich kann es Dir nicht sagen. Es ist nur so ein Gefühl. Read the rest of this entry »
In discussion with Bill Brewster on “Sextet” by A Certain Ratio (1982).
What is your personal history with this particular album? How and when was your first encounter with it?
I bought it the week it came out. I had just moved back to Grimsby (my hometown) after working in London and Switzerland as a chef for five years. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life but I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of it sweating in a kitchen. I’d met some new people who were trying to do cool stuff with music. We’d all been punks in 1976 and 1977 but got bored of how musically limited it all was. We were searching for something new. We had a musical mentor, a guy who ran a musical instrument shop with a few boxes of records in the back, called Roy Bainton. He was 15 years older than us and knew loads about music, everything from Mike Westbrook and Carla Bley to Graham Central Station and, in particular, the blues. We were listening to all this brilliant old stuff that was new to us and also discovering bands like A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo who, like us, were also groping towards something different. We were in the process of forming a band when this album came out.
What made you decide for „Sextet“ instead of other of their albums?
They toured to promote this album and we went to see them at this bizarre wine bar in Leeds. I went with all the guys who were in my band. The venue was brightly lit, chrome-plated, horrible. And it was nearly empty, but they didn’t give a fuck: they were astonishing, really tight (helped somewhat by Donald Johnson’s prowess behind the traps). I suppose what “„Sextet“” represents to me is a crossroads of where I had arrived and where they were headed; a sort of Robert Johnson involving trams, drizzle and Northern misery. What is interesting about „Sextet“, listening back now, is that they’d reached a certain competence on their instruments but they still had a thirst for wayward and interesting song ideas and arrangements. Later on, when they were recording stuff like “Don’t You Worry Bout A Thing”, they ended up sounding like those pale Britfunk imitations of the real deal, whereas what makes „Sextet“ endearing is that they sound like nothing and no-one else. The world they inhabited then, it seemed to me, was hermetically sealed from outside influences. I imagined them living together in a big house in Whalley Range, a bit like the Monkees, except with acid and analogue instruments. Read the rest of this entry »
I discovered this track in one of your live sets, and I was really surprised by it. How did you get to this?
I actually heard this being played by Ron Hardy at the Music Box.
Ah, so it was Ron Hardy who inspired you then?
The people that have inspired me musically where I am now is Ron Hardy, Larry Levan, Larry Heard and fortunately but unfortunately Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain. Those are pretty much some of my strongest influences. Later on it became people like Farley Jack Master Funk when he was really bringing it to the table musically on the radio, and from that point on it’s like my whole world expanded, it expanded to unparalleled paradox.
In regards of “Diskomo,” though, when I heard Ron Hardy play it, it didn’t make sense to me because I wasn’t on drugs. But a lot of people that were in the party scene at that time were experimenting with drugs. Ron would spin records faster, because he was under the influence. So the thing is I probably heard “Diskomo” at a faster speed. You never knew what Ron was doing at this time, so when you hear “Diskomo” and you hear these sort of patterns and tone pads and kind of modular effects like wind and stuff in this manner, it was hard to tell what was what. If you were in that time period, would you think that was Ron Hardy, or would you think that was a record?
It has a really eerie atmosphere…
It’s the same thing with Ian Curtis, and what Joy Division did. The producer behind them gave that whole thing atmosphere, that sort of specialness. And that’s what “Discomo” did for me when I heard it.
This new wave post punk music is not necessarily something you would associate with early house, which is kind of peculiar, but you seem to be attracted to this kind of music…
This is house music. That’s the thing that nobody—and let’s make this clear, I am nobody to tell you what is and what isn’t the truth—but I can tell you what I know and what I saw. And it was the innovation that Larry and Ron undertook, and it’s the innovation that I have personally taken on myself. I am singlehandedly the ambassador of truth right now. I feel like I have singlehandedly taken on the roles of these artists in the way that they described their music and the way that they played their music, and I feel that I’m someone that can say that this music that has somehow been forgotten has a greater significance than people can imagine.
New Order – Video 5-8-6 (1982)
Let’s talk about New Order. This has a kind of long-jam approach to recording, but it is also kind of a blueprint, not only for later electronic developments, but also for their own developments. There are already shadings of “Blue Monday” in it, but it is much earlier, 1982.
I play “Video 586” in my sessions. I play every type of sound known, and I am probably the world’s biggest risk taker. There are probably three other people that I could say right now that are as risky as I am.
Who are they?
Mick Wills, from Stuttgart, Germany, James T. Cotton and myself. And, actually, someone who is on another level to also give full etiquette and education and experience is Jamal Moss. In my eyes, even though he doesn’t DJ, musically what he does with IBM and these other projects… it’s not the sort of stuff that you would usually hear.
But he does DJ, doesn’t he?
Jamal is one of my guys, and I have never seen him play wax. But what I have of him, the material that I have gotten from him, is still sick. It’s like another level of Ron Hardy through Jamal Moss. Without a doubt.
You seem to be quite like-minded in your approach…
Well, “Video 586” is an idea that I didn’t realize that was important until later, Jamal didn’t realize until later, that JTC didn’t realize was important later. It’s the idea of not following the law of 4/4 music, or the law of what it should be. This is what made music risky, and this is what made New Order risky.
Why do so few DJ’s take risks that way do you think?
Because they are scared. They’re scared to lose the crowd, they are scared to be risky, to do something that they have never done. That’s why you have something called the social chain, and it’s what everybody else follows. I am not on the social chain. Those people that I have mentioned, Mick Wills, James T. Cotton, Jamal are guys that I know do not play by the rules.
So is that your main agenda? To change the set of rules?
My main agenda is to change the rules to the way that they should be. The way that everybody is crying, “Why can’t it be like the days when I was growing up.” Because this is the point, think about it: Why do people play records from the old days? Because they wanna remember. Why do you always have to remember the past? Why can’t you deal with now? Read the rest of this entry »
In discussion with Philip Sherburne about “The Flat Earth” by Thomas Dolby (1984).
Why did you choose this album, and how did you come across Thomas Dolby in the first place?
Until I was 12 or 13, I got most of my pop music from Top 40 radio. There weren’t a lot of other options for kid living in suburban Portland, Oregon in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I loved a lot of things that I’d probably cringe at now, simply because they were all that was available. This is not one of them, though. Thomas Dolby’s “The Flat Earth” has remained a personal favorite for a quarter century now, and within it I can find many of the seeds of my eventual love for electronic music. I don’t remember any first encounter with Thomas Dolby’s 1982 single “She Blinded Me With Science,” which was all over the radio that year. I’m sure it was the synths and samples that grabbed me. I had discovered synthesizers through the music shop where I bought piano sheet music – Bach, Czerny, Phil Collins – and was nuts about anything with synths in it (In 1983, I’d get one of my own, a Korg Poly-800). Curiously, I didn’t dig any further into Dolby’s music at the time, but then, the song was ubiquitous, and in retrospect, it was such an odd single it probably didn’t gesture towards a form bigger than itself, like an album. It was what it was, and that was plenty. In 1984 or 1985, I went through a brief period of checking out LPs from the Multnomah County Library. That’s where I came across „The Flat Earth“. It was the cover that got me. Around that time, I would latch onto anything that had the faintest hint of “new wave” to it, and the cover’s pseudoscientific markings and cryptic photo-montage seemed like the most modern thing I’d ever seen. In retrospect, the sleeve is hardly so dazzling — a slightly watered down version of Peter Saville. (In fact, it looks a little like a cross between the Durutti Column’s “Circuses & Bread” and Section 25’s “From the Hip”, but it lacks the elegance of either.) Still, it was good enough for a 14-year-old jonesing for the New. I remember sitting on the floor of my parents’ living room, hunched over the sleeve, trying to make sense of the whole package. Not to repeat myself, but “cryptic” is the only word that fits. Everything about the music seemed to hint at hidden meanings, from the sleeve to the lyrics: “Keith talked in alphanumerals,” after all. Who the hell was the guy panning for gold on the cover? Who were these mysterious Mulu, people of the rainforest? What was a drug cathedral, and why an octohedron? (I had so much to learn.) Etc., etc. I’ve long since stopped caring much about lyrics, much less concept albums, but I was young and impressionable then, and every flip of the record seemed to offer another clue as to some strange, grownup world I couldn’t begin to decipher. The same went for the music, of course. For starters, there was the stylistic range: “Dissidents” and “White City” were recognizable as pop music, after a fashion, but what was “Screen Kiss”? It presented a kind of liquidity I don’t remember having recognized in music before that – first in the fretless bass, the synthesizers and the stacked harmonies, and even the chord changes, but mainly it was the way it trailed off into the scratchy patter of L.A. traffic reports, multi-tracked and run through delay. I’d never heard the “real world” breaking into pop music before, and certainly not spun into such a purely “ambient” sound. “Mulu the Rain Forest” was another weird one – again, an approximation of ambient, long before I’d discover it. And “I Scare Myself” totally threw me for a loop. What was a Latin lounge jazz song doing here, especially sandwiched between the humid “Mulu” and the jagged, chromed funk of “Hyperactive”? There was no doubting the continuity of the album, but the pieces felt at odds, as fractured as the cut-up sleeve imagery; the sequencing seemed erratic and the two sides of the LP felt out of balance with each other, and yet you couldn’t have put it together any other way. Just like venturing to the edge of the (flat) earth, flipping the record had a weirdly vertiginous quality to it. (I was, you may note, an unusually impressionable adolescent, at least where music was concerned.)
At the time I got this it took some time to grow on me. Was it the same with you or was it love at first sight?
A little of both. There was definitely something off-putting about the record at first, but I devoured it anyway. I’d go so far as to say that the parts that alienated me were precisely what sent me back into it. I wanted to figure it out. All this might sound a little silly now. Today, I can recognize that a lot of it is pretty overblown, beginning with the lyrics: “My writing/ is an iron fist/ in a glove full of Vaseline”? That’s… pretty awful. (Also, it may go some way towards explaining the purplish quality of my own youthful stabs at poesy.) But for all its excesses, it kept drawing me in. I still listen to the fade out from “Dissidents” into “The Flat Earth” and feel a thrill all over again, all those gangly licks and hard-edged FM tones giving way to hushed percussion and a yielding soundfield… It’s funny, too, to listen today to the title track and even hear the tiniest hint of disco and proto-house in the rolling conga rhythms, things I had absolutely no idea about then. Whatever its failures, this was the album that, more than any other up until that time, convinced me that records offered more than just a hook and a chorus, that they deserved to be puzzled through, analyzed, unpacked. That they offered up their own little worlds, worlds I would aspire to inhabit. Read the rest of this entry »
The Druffalo Hit Squad with yet another hurricane session for the party boys (and girls) who only come out at night. We own your lonely hearts, and we show you images of heaven. Yes, it is love, and we don’t move away from it, darlings. We got the gloves on, we dream electric, and we don’t stand back. Reason? No. Boredom? No. Orchestras? Yes. To a Debussy beat, the city waits forever. It shines like destruction, it lives inside us. We can make you see it. And we think hard about the weather, too. We’re pretty sure it must have rained. We dress for action, and howl at many moons. Who do you love? Is it us? Is this a test?
Kim Carnes – Hurricane (EMI America) Foxy – Party Boys (T.K. Records) Peter Brown – They Only Come Out At Night (CBS) Local Boy – Thriller/Owner Of A Lonely Heart (Profile) Peter Godwin – Images Of Heaven (Polydor) Gang Of 4 – Is It Love (Warner Bros. Records Inc.) Culture Club – Move Away (Virgin) Visage – Love Glove (Polydor) Giorgio Moroder With Philip Oakey – Together In Electric Dreams (Virgin) Stevie Nicks – Stand Back (WEA) John Farnham – Age Of Reason (RCA) Leonard Cohen – First We Take Manhattan (CBS) Andrew Poppy – 32 Frames For Orchestra (ZTT) Pet Shop Boys – Left To My Own Devices (Parlophone) Yello – Call It Love (Vertigo) Eurythmics –Love Is A Stranger (RCA) Data – Living Inside Me (Virgin) Cut Glass – Alive With Love (Ear Hole) New Order – The Perfect Kiss (Factory) Blancmange – The Day Before You Came (London) Steely Dan – Glamour Profession (MCA) Chas Jankel – Glad To Know You (A&M) Greg Phillinganes – Behind The Mask (Planet) Elbow Bones & The Racketeers – You Get Me High (EMI America)
There were the two veteran goth girls generously trying to teach goth dance moves to a veteran mod in the backyard of a hater’s party where the wall once stood. One deckchair, a bench, and a table were destroyed in the process. The veteran goth girls were still able to perform the moves most authentically, but the veteran mod failed disastrously due to stubborn groovyness, and not being able to remember that it’s one step forward, two steps back, and not the other way round. He could not produce the claws of desperation and a doomed expression either. This for you, veteran goth girls!
XTC – Dance With Me, Germany (Excerpt) Cocteau Twins – Cherry-Coloured Funk Felt – Primitive Painters Siouxsie & The Banshees – Dear Prudence Echo & The Bunnymen – The Killing Moon Tuxedomoon – Some Girls Japan – Ghosts Wire – Marooned Monochrome Set – Alphaville Gang Of Four – Call Me Up Sad Lovers & Giants – In Flux The Associates – Skipping Clock DVA – Resistance New Order – Sunrise Bauhaus – Bela Lugosi’s Dead Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Mercy Seat Hybrid Kids – D’ya Think I’m Sexy?
Ich langweile mich nie. Ich wechsle die Atmosphäre, spiele unerwartete Melodien und riskiere etwas.
Spielst Du Freestyle? Wie machst Du das?
Ja, ich spiele Freestyle. Nur einen Sound zu spielen ist öde und außerdem mag ich verschiedene Stilarten. Zum größten Teil benutze ich Minimal Techno gemischt mit Electro, House, Breakbeats und Anderem. Freestyle ist aber gefährlich, denn es muß harmonisch sein.
Ist Retro notwendig?
Nein, ist es nicht. Daß ist geschmacksabhängig oder man will sich damit an schöne Momente erinnern. Ich bin retro zum Spaß oder um zu überraschen, aber nicht automatisch. Read the rest of this entry »
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