Finn Johannsen – Live At Macro Lab, Berlin, August 12 2016

Rewind: Oliver Ho on “Psychick Rhythms Vol. 1″

In discussion with Oliver Ho on “Psychick Rhythms Vol. 1” (1993).

Were you already familiar with the Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia, or was “Psychick Rhythms Vol. 1″ your first encounter with their music?

I was already familiar with their music, I think the first thing I had heard was the album, “Ov Biospheres and Sacred Grooves”. The thing on that album that really struck me was “Linkage”. The way they sampled Egyptian rhythms, and the fact that the track was purely made up of rhythms in a very stripped back way, that were also at a slow bpm. It had a purity and a different edge, very tribal, not techno or house in style at all.

Why did you choose this particular release out of their back catalogue? What made, or still makes, it so special for you? Is it a blueprint for aspects that interest you in electronic music?

The thing about this release that struck me at the time and what continues to be relevant to me is the is the purity of intention. It was an attitude towards music as ‘magick’ that was inspirational. The idea that a particular rhythm is like a spell, something that isn’t just about entertainment, but is operating on a more powerful level. There is a message on the record sleeve artwork that reads: “Warning! This object has nothing to do with art or artificial intelligence. This double package (12″ version) was designed for mixing, for breaks, for possession, for collectors.” This seemed to articulate that there were was something inside the music, that was waiting to released, some kind of energy, that had been placed there by the makers… Read the rest of this entry »

@ Panorama Bar

Macro @ Panorama Bar

• 23:59 h – 03:00 h Finn Johannsen
• 03:00 h – 06:00 h Raudive LIVE/DJ
• 06:00 h – 09:00 h Kruder
• 09:00 h – 11:30 h Stefan Goldmann

Playing Favourites: Adam X

> Strafe – Set It Off

Ok, let’s start it off with “Set It Off”.

Right, we’re going to set it off with “Set It Off”. Basically with “Set It Off”, growing up in New York in the 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with my parents and my brother – my brother being a DJ since 1980, and there were a lot of musical roots in my household. I was always around music. Mostly disco and electro, stuff like that. Growing up with my parents in the 70’s, they were really big on disco and I was hearing everything from “Ten Percent” by Double Exposure to so many underground disco records, like from 76, Jimmy and the Vagabonds, or Crown Heights Affair. Old school disco. I always had roots in the family. My father also had a pretty big rock collection from the late 60’s – Sabbath, Zeppelin, psychedelic rock. That was played probably when I was really younger, but 74/75 my parents were already getting into disco at that time. The roots of the music were always there with me and I would buy records on the occasion. I remember buying Fatback Band’s “King Tim III” which was pretty much the first rap record, Michael Jackson – “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”, “Let’s All Chant”, stuff like that. I was like 7 or 8 years old buying this stuff but I was never really into DJing at this time. My brother was the DJ. He was the one buying the records and DJing. He knew what was going on musically. I would say when I really first started to pay attention to music a lot, but I still was not a DJing, was around 83/84, and I was around 12 years old at the time and I was getting into graffiti which I was actually documenting on subway trains by photographs. I was travelling from Brooklyn to the Bronx. I was going everywhere with a camera – all four boroughs that had a subway system. The records at that time were a lot of electro stuff that was being played. A lot of freestyle like C-Bank’s “One More Shot” or “Al-Naafiysh” by Hashim. I still didn’t really know who the artists were and stuff like that, but I knew the records and heard them all the time on the radio. Around 84 I went to a break dancing club at a roller skating rink to watch a bunch of people battling, and I heard “Set It Off” for the first time. I don’t know what it was with that record but it fit all the movies I liked at that time: New York movies like The Warriors, Death Wish. It was just this dark record that was kind of like the soundtrack of New York City at the time, when New York City was just like in urban decay. On my way somewhere with my parents you would see all these abandoned building like in Berlin in 1945 in certain areas. Then taking the train to the South Bronx and seeing that…I have such a vivid memory of being on the Pelham subway line going to see one of the most famous Graffiti writers in New York called Seen, who was in the documentary Style Wars, and I befriended him when I was probably like 13. He used to airbrush t-shirts in a flea market. I don’t know why music always has a place in a moment that you can remember a certain situation. I can remember being in that flea market and then playing that track. It was just like the track of tracks. It was the soundtrack of graffiti, of New York, the rawness. When I got into techno in about 1990 and I went to trace back all the records that I’d been collecting and I would go back and listen to that record it just sounded so current. Not current to what techno was, but on the production level. When you listen to other electro records or freestyle records from that time, nothing has that 808 feel like “Set It Off” does. That production is just sick. The bassline. There’s really no other record from that time period, apart from maybe “Hip Hop Be Bop” or “Boogie Down Bronx”, that should have been the soundtrack to The Warriors. It’s just an amazing track. The irony of whole record being my favourite record is that it was produced on a label located in Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, so that record was made probably two miles from where I lived. I guess Walter Gibbons produced Strafe, but it was made in Brooklyn. It’s a 100% Brooklyn. That record… the build up, the vocals, just everything about it…I could listen to it over and over again on repeat mode.

Would you say they produced a prototype with this? It’s a lot darker than most of the electro productions around that time.

I think it’s definitely the prototype for a lot of the future electro stuff that was coming out through the techno scene in the 90’s. Anybody making electro music at that time had to know that record. You have “Planet Rock” and you have “Clear” by Cybotron but that record just stands out for me. It’s such a better record. I love the other records but when I hear “Set It Off” the goose bumps come up. It sounds like something from a John Carpenter movie. It could be from “Assault On Precinct 13”, even if you can’t mess with that soundtrack. It is in the same mode as that. It gives the same feeling, and the same vibe and mood. Those eerie chord strings in the back and the bassline. You can’t mess with it.

> Ryuichi Sakamoto – Riot In Lagos

The next one is “Riot in Lagos” by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

This is an interesting track that Bones had turned me onto in probably sometime in the early to mid 90’s. He was refreshing my memory on records that were on when we used to go to roller skating rinks, and one of the other records was Kasso’s “Key West”. I remember he was playing all these records and I was like flabbergasted by the sounds and the music and how futuristic it was for 80’/81′. The thing was when I got into techno and I realised what electronic music was, and I’m hearing Bones and Lenny Dee – this is the 808, this is the 909 – trying to get my head around all these machines, and Bones was playing me records later on saying “these are the first 808 records, or 909 drum rhythm records”, and I never looked at the music I was listening to in the early 80’s, like Kraftwerk, as electronic music or acoustic music – I never made that difference in my head. I never sat there and thought “Oh, I like music with synthesisers”. When I heard this Sakamoto record, I kind of recalled hearing it but it didn’t really ring a bell in a big way for me. But it did ring my bell. [laughs] I was like “Whoa! What the fuck is this?” because I guess it’s got that Eastern, Asian kind of melody sound to it. That is a one of a kind record. There is nothing that sounds like that. I have never, ever heard another record ever sound like that. It cannot be copied.

It even sounded different to the sound Sakamoto was doing with Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Yeah. There is another Sakamoto record that I got a little later on, once I realised who he was, that is quite rare. Not many people know it, it’s called “Lexington Queen”. It’s amazing. It was released as a 12” and also a 45 as well. I probably should have been digging a little deeper on Sakamoto stuff, when I was doing my East kind of record shopping ten years ago, when I was looking for all this 80’s stuff. But I heard a few things by him that didn’t hit me the way those two records hit me. But “Riot In Lagos” is just a special record, what a special piece of electronic music. It’s up there with Kraftwerk.

It is pioneering electronic music, but from a very different angle.

Again, it’s got that Japanese sound to it. Whatever Japanese electronic music was in the 80’s, I don’t really know much about it, but this is a brilliant track. Read the rest of this entry »

Finn Johannsen – Sweatlodge Show April 2009

Peter Kruder – The Law Of Return (Macro)
Red Sparrow – That’s The Way Of The World (United States Of Mars)
Santiago Salazar – Arcade (Stefan Goldmann Mix) (Macro)
Technose Distrikt – Untitled (Rush Hour)
Katelectro – Plug (Ultradyne Remix) (Mighty Robot Recordings)
DJ Sneak – Fear The World (Defiant)
Reggie Hall – I’ll Keep On Workin’ You (Urgent Music Works)
The Pig – Are You…? (Rush Hour)
Aaron Carl & Benjamin Hayes – The Struggle (Remix By The Plan) (Wallshaker)
DJ Sprinkles – Sloppy 42nds (Glorimar’s Deeperama) (Mule Electronic)
Raudive – Tul (Macro)
Pépé Bradock – 100% Coton (Kif Recordings)

As a respected journalist, in many ways you educate your readers. Would you say that this comes across in your DJ sets as well?

To a certain extent. In the days before the internet made all sorts of musical knowledge easily accessible it was more important, because apart from what you could gather in the print media and some specialist TV and radio programs, the DJ at the club was the one to offer the glimpse of what was going on. I have benefited a lot from the skills and taste of DJs like Klaus Stockhausen and others back then, who knew what music really mattered and who also knew how to best spread their knowledge as an intense party experience. If that works, it is the perfect way of learning about music. I was always interested in the historical context of culture and I like to connect the dots between prototypes and later developments and so in the past I felt the need to adopt that, playing a lot of records I felt missed out on the deserved recognition along better known stuff, in order to make people wonder and dance at the same time. I still do that, but now a lot of the rare records I would say are worth discovering are very likely to be discussed on specialist boards anyway, and you can easily gather the information with a few clicks that once took quite a while of digging and research. But this inevitably led to DJing with a mere collector’s approach, which often results in a showcase of rare items and not in a good party. I also don’t like when such sets are presented like the real deal and authentic, as I have been around clubs for a long time now and DJs playing whole nights of just obscure music were the absolute exception. I am very aware of the privilege of having been there when some the music people still dance to today was in early progress, and so I like to play older records like I remember them being played at the time they were introduced. And of course I use the web myself to learn how pioneering DJs played certain records in certain clubs. That is not obliging for how I choose the records for the night, but it satisfies my curiosity. I always make a few steps forward and a few steps back with what I play, and I reserve the specialist program for radio shows and mixes I make or get asked for. For gigs, the way I put my record box together has always been the same, I just pack the tracks that I would like to dance to if I was attending the club the same night, and that’s it.

Tell us a bit about Macro and the label’s plans for the future.

Macro was conceived by Stefan and me to be both a platform for his productions and other music we like, with no artistic and stylistic restrictions apart from a high quality standard. We just wanted our label releases and identity to stand out via artwork and concept from other output we deemed interchangeable and risk-free. Thankfully our ideas caught on so quickly that we got approached by other artists and producers we admire who like the idea of releasing on a label that is laying emphasis on individuality and some lasting impressions instead of just exploiting the trends of the season. You can hear some of the results in this mix. There is a track from our first release this year by Oliver Ho as Raudive, Stefan’s stunning remix of Santiago Salazar’s “Arcade”, which is about to hit the shops, and a track from the forthcoming 12″ Peter Kruder produced for us. Furthermore Stefan’s edit experiment with Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” is going to be released in early June and later this year we will unleash a very special album project with an accompanying series of 12″s, the preparations of which have kept us well busy and buzzing with anticipation since last year. We think it is quite a sensation.

You are known for fusing Disco and Classics in your DJ sets. What changed in your approach for the Sweatlodge set?

I still play a lot of sets where I combine Disco and other related older genres with modern electronic music, but I don’t want to do so per se. I like to treat every set as a new position, be it topical, stylistically or based on a certain purpose. This is basically an excerpt of some favourite sounds I play at the moment as a DJ representing Macro. A hopefully coherent mix of old and new. On another day it could have turned out to sound completely different, but this is how I felt it should be at the time I dropped the needle on the first record. Generally, I have a lot of records to choose from and I try to make good use of that.

Where have you played in the past that you would really want to re-visit again?

We just had our first label night at Panoramabar, and that was predictably an experience I very much look forward to repeat. I also did a nine hour plus back-to-back Disco set with Hunee last Summer at Picknick’s yard which was quite immense and shall happen again. Berlin is buzzing with great clubs, partys, DJs and devoted dancers at the moment, but I have no preferences but a good night out, and I have no doubts I will have some of that for the rest of the year. I’m also looking forward to some gigs lined up beyond Berlin, because I like to travel around and witness some other cities and the according scenes. We’re also working on taking the label out for some dates, and I happily await some fine experiences lying ahead of me with that.

Your message to the world?

Love is the message, of course!

@ Panorama Bar

Macro @ Panoramabar

Santiago Salazar
Oliver Ho
Stefan Goldmann
Finn Johannsen