Martin Rev – Sparks Surgeon – Floorshow Part I A Ghetto Trax – Back 2 Da Beat DB-X – Electric Shock Blake Baxter – IR 020 B2 Random Noise Generation – Hysteria T++ – Space Break Midnight Caller – Callers’ Theme Futurhythm – Want Your Body Millsart – Inner Life (5 To 9) Millsart – Inner-Self Jeff Mills – Zenith Rebel Alliance – A1 LFO – Tied Up Container – Acclimator Ancient Methods – Kings & Pawns DJ Stingray 313 – Remote Viewing Cybersonik – Technarchy Mental Mayhem – Joey’s Riot Norman – Greenroom Robert Hood – A.M. Track Robert Hood – Alpha Suburban Knight – The Art Of Stalking Medusa Edits 1 – The Walk Nitzer Ebb – Join In The Chant Skatebård – Metal Chix Brian Harden – Play Time L’estasi Dell’oro – It Is Nothing What Nothing Is Marchant Etrian – Crystal Cars Suburban Knight – The Warning Philus -Kuvio 3 Aleksi Perälä – UK74R1405036 Sleeparchive – Null Sekunden Heatsick – Time Smudge Omar-S – Blade Runner Surgeon – Floorshow Part II B2 Surgeon – Atol H&M – Sleepchamber Missing Channel – Deadly Spell Octave One – Eniac DJ Bone – Struggle 2 Nina Anderson – Everyday Is Like Sunday Dark Comedy – Without A Sound Aaron-Carl – Tears Maurizio – Eleye
Do you remember the scene in “The Terminator” where the dogs in the dark tunnel go mad, indicating that something is not quite right among the rebels hiding out there? Just a few moments later shots are illuminating the room like deadly strobes. And the shooter has no mercy, killing everything that moves. And soon enough not much is left moving. And then one of the few survivors is staring into the dark, watching the machine in the shape of a human that is causing all the mayhem. And then the machine turns around, and in the dark chaos its lifeless eyes glow, flashing melting metal like beams like a lethal laser pointer towards more potential victims, as the smoke of its heavy gun barrel mingles with the smoke of the slain bodies on the floor.
Sometime in 1990, I was among the crowd in a dark basement club at peak time, and the DJ dropped this track.
It felt exactly like the film scene above. But it was real.
DJ Duke – Escape From N.Y. Sensorama – Quarzzeit Circulation – Memory Schatrax – First Heartbeat Kevin Yost – Natural High DJ Sneak – Latin Seoul GU – I Need GU 3-Play – Summer Breezz The Ghetto Kids – Summer In The City Sensory Productions – Houseluck Gene Farris Presents The DEB Project – Visions Of The Future Dave Angel – Fever Suburban Knight – Echo Location Trackman – Don’t Stop Pete Conman – The Range Count LoSoul – Open Door Product Of Da Neighbourhood – Living In Brooklyn Global Communication – The Way Wamdue Kids – Memory And Forgetting Moodymann – I Can’t Kick This Feelin When It Hits René et Gaston – Merluche Ideale Mood II Swing – All Night Long Boo Williams – Home Town Chicago Model 500 – I Wanna Be There Jonny L – This Time DJ Linus – Pleasure Netto – Like Ghosts Projekt: PM – When The Voices Come Faze Action – In The Trees Motorbass – Les Ondes
Doctor Mix And The Remix – Out of the Question (1979)
A lot of the music we’ve picked out to discuss comes from a similar background in terms of time period, style and sound, but I think this one is pretty obscure. How did you find it?
Through a friend of mine. There’s a label in New York called Acute Records maybe eight years ago or so. A few of my friends in California are really obsessed with The Jesus and Mary Chain, and one of the members of the band mentioned once that this was one of their favourite records of all time. The thing I like about it is the extremity of the music. It’s super high-pitched, with distortion and tinny drum machines but then it’s covers of, like, Stooges songs.
This track in particular has this really insane, rhythmic track that’s super metronomic but super heavy at the same time. It’s very aggressive, but not because of the levels of distortion. The first time I heard it I thought I was listening to [The Jesus and Mary Chain’s] Psycho Candy. The more I looked into it, the more I realized how much of an influence it had on them.
It’s funny. The Jesus and Mary Chain were always compared to The Velvet Underground, but apparently there’s much more to it than that.
Sure. There’s not a lot of stuff like this. The guy was in one of the first French punk bands. And, with this, they kind of combined the attitude of the Velvets with these misinterpretations from a different country. I love that because, for me, techno in California was always a misinterpretation of what was happening in Berlin and Detroit and Chicago just because we didn’t really have a big scene. We had a club scene, but not a techno scene. I just really love the weird interpretations of The Stooges and stuff like that.
Are you interested in bands that deconstruct rock tradition in some way?
At the end of the day it’s all about attitude. Willing to push things a lot and not really care. It was the same when I first heard Cabaret Voltaire’s “Messages Received.” I just didn’t know what to say, I was blown away. I thought, “It doesn’t get any more honest than that.” I think that’s the whole thing. There’s an honesty in the music that you can’t remove. There’s a visceral element to it. That’s how myself, Karl [O’Connor], Dave [Sumner] and even Pete [Sutton] interpret music in some way I think.
Cabaret Voltaire – Messages Received (1980)
There was a very heavy art slant on what Cabaret Voltaire did. I think it’s very, very art driven. They’d also have the influence of The Velvet Underground and all that ’60s psych rock, but they’d do all these awesome records and what came through the most was the attitude. “This is what I wanna do, this is how I’m gonna do it.” And they just went for it.
Is that a quality you try to pursue? Not thinking about what you can or can’t do?
Yeah, I talk to Karl every other day on the telephone, we’re in very heavy contact on a weekly basis, same thing with Dave. But it’s funny because when I make music it’s purely to see what he thinks, just for us to discuss… “Oh, I really like this. What do you think?” It’s more a conversation from an art base. I try to work in a very automatic response way. I work in art direction, so I work quite a bit on TV commercials and magazines and stuff like that. So when I work on music it’s usually very late at night and I have to work in headphones, so it’s usually like a weird mantra type state, kinda conscious and unconscious, while I’m working.
It’s nice because there’s a sense that I’m not really thinking about anything particularly. I’m able to work on music in that mindframe where I’m doing it purely just because I want to see what I can come up with. In a more artistic sense, sometimes I will make a visual and we will work to the visual. Like with the artwork for the album. That was made first. Then we made a record that matched that.
For labels like Factory, design labels were incredibly important. They were, in many cases, as important as the music.
When you get that double impact of visual and audio, you’re like, “Wow, this is really intense.” Cabaret Voltaire for me has always done that. All the artwork on their covers. The early ones especially had that handmade element, which I’m sure was some of the guys in the band literally cutting things out by hand and assembling collages. Read the rest of this entry »
You once told me that you were raised on jazz fusion.
I was. That was the kind of music of my early and mid-teenage years. In those days that was grown people’s music, it was very sophisticated. If you wanted to feel cool and grown up and everything, you were into Weather Report and Chick Corea. Lenny White, who drummed for Chick Corea’s band Return to Forever, was one of my all-time favorites. This song, “River People,” was from Mr. Gone and Mojo used to play it every night. He really made a hit out of a track.
Would you say that Mojo kind of planted a seed in some techno heads with this music?
I would say so. Mojo, for the black community, was it. And this was in the pre hip-hop days where black people listened to everything in Detroit when I was growing up. It was that open atmosphere that allowed Detroit techno to form I think. And Mojo was definitely ground zero for the black community. I mean this guy would play The Isley Brothers, Prince, Alice Cooper, Weather Report. He was the first DJ to play B-52s in Detroit. He broke a lot of music to the black community that we would have never heard.
What was the main inspiration of the things that Mojo played for the first wave of techno producers in Detroit?
I would say the real ground zero for this music was Kraftwerk. Which Mojo also used to play. I was in high school—I’m really dating myself [laughs]—and they released “Man Machine” and “Numbers” back-to-back in America. In Europe, there was a gap, but in America they released those two records almost at the same time. That made a really big impact.
I played this because I wondered if there is some kind of connection between a lot of Detroit techno records and jazz. Juan, of course, said “Jazz is the teacher” at one point, and there are a lot of harmonies in Detroit techno that are pretty jazzy, really complex. I was wondering if Weather Report was the source for this connection.
I think it’s a source, but not the source. I think that Detroit techno came from a lot of different influences. You have to remember that, at the same time, Parliament/Funkadelic were big. So you had a lot of futuristic connections with those guys; Mothership Connection was a big thing. Detroit was a huge melting pot. If you look back, it’s pretty incredible. Everything now is just so market-tested.
Nitzer Ebb – Join In The Chant (Mute, 1987)
That was a classic. There used to be a club named Todd’s in Detroit. It was the big new wave punk rock bar in the ’80s. The main DJ was Charles English, and he had the new stuff all the time. When I was in college we used to go every Thursday. He broke that out, and that was it. I was like, “Wow, who are these cats?”
Later, I was hanging out with Derrick May over at his place. Derrick had just gotten back from London, and he was a pop star. I was doing a radio show at the time and he gave me the double pack, saying “Hey man, take this and play it tonight.” He was in with Mute, and they were giving him everything. I still play it out today, the original version.
I don’t know how much influence it had on Detroit techno, but back in those days we were listening to everything. So when Nitzer Ebb came down the pike, it was like, “Oh, that’s really good.” There was a radio show called Brave New Waves out of Canada on the CBC and we used to hear them play Nitzer Ebb.
This track is from 1987, when you began your own radio show, Fast Forward on WDET. That was a really important year for you.
Yes. I had done the artwork for Derrick [May]’s “Nude Photo,” got my radio show. The night of my first broadcast, I went over to Derrick’s place, and he gave me all these records. He said, “Play these.” All of these records are what turned out to be the first techno records, a bunch of white labels. I was playing Detroit techno, what was then industrial and EBM, jazz fusion, a little hip-hop. WBLS, Brave New Waves, Mojo; those guys were my influences. I would go to see Charles play on a Thursday night at Todd’s and buy those records and play them on Friday night on my show.
How did you get the show?
Well, I was an intern at the station the summer before. I was putting the records in order. I started talking to the program director, and told her how much I was into Lenny White. She was like, “You know who Lenny White is?” I was super young compared to her at the time. So I said, “Yeah, one of the greatest fusion drummers to walk the Earth. Lenny White, Tony Williams.” She was impressed, and she asked if I had a demo tape. Fusion jazz got me the job, so that’s why I kept playing it. It was a whole mish-mash of genres, though.
Were the listeners appreciating that, or did you get criticism for being so eclectic?
I was on super late. It was from 3 AM to 6 AM. The graveyard shift. People dug it, they dug it right away. I’ll never forget playing “Acid Tracks” from Phuture, and some guy called me on the phone and was going insane. “What is this called? What kind of music is this?” It was the early days of electronic music, so nobody knew anything.
In those pre-internet days, doing research wasn’t easy.
Luckily, I worked at radio stations. So they had all of these libraries where you could go in and listen to whatever you wanted. Read the rest of this entry »
Schon viel wurde über die bittersüße Emotionalität schwadroniert, die viele Technotracks aus Detroit verströmen. Jede versonnen stimmende Fläche im Verbund mit komplexen Rhythmen wurde dem fortschreitenden Verfall der Stadt angelastet, jeder Augenzeugenbericht von heimkehrenden Besuchern schien die Fernspekulation zu bestätigen. Eine ganze Produzentengeneration wurde so zum Synonym für den Degenerationsprozess ihrer urbanen Umwelt, und ihre Fähigkeiten diesen in Musik auszudrücken. Voll heftig da in Detroit, Downtown-Wüste, Komplettinsolvenz, Mad Max 4: Inner City Blues, wurde geschaudert, nur dort kann so eine Musik entstehen. James Pennington alias Suburban Night veröffentlichte allerdings schon mit seinen ersten Platten auf Transmat Töne die vermuten ließen, es sei alles noch viel schlimmer. Seine Welt ist zappenduster. Wenn die verzerrten Stimmen über den meilentief rumorenden Bass von „The Groove“ ihre Einwürfe machen, hat man das Gefühl man würde zwei Psychopathen belauschen, die mit einem Teleskop auf der Party im Hochhaus gegenüber Opfer ausspähen. „The Worlds“ handelte offenkundig von Welten, gegen die H.R. Gigers Visionen wie Urlaubspostkarten anmuten. „The Art Of Stalking“ klang wie ein Speer aus chromatischer Materie, der einem von unsichtbaren Gegnern so hart durch den Körper gejagt wird, dass es eine glatte Ein- und Austrittwunde gibt. Die Fantasie von James Pennington schien deutlich gestörter als die seiner Weggefährten, und er schien fest entschlossen, sie musikalisch direkt umzusetzen. Kaum nachvollziehbar, dass er einst Detroits Pop-Durchbruch „Big Fun“ mitzuverantworten hatte. Seine Eigenproduktionen waren weit von jeglichem Eskapismus entfernt, hier ging es mehr um unmittelbare Bedrohung, nächtlichen Einzelkampf und Hinterhalt. So erschien es nur konsequent, dass sich Pennington in der zweiten Welle von Detroit Techno der von industrieller Düsternis geschulten klanglichen Kriegsführung rund um Underground Resistance anschloss, und nicht den hoffnungschimmrigen Introspektiven der Belleville 3 plus Carl. Dort erschien seine Musik nicht mehr wie ein düsterer Querschläger, sondern vielmehr wie die Perfektion eines unheilvollen Aggregatzustandes, und die Einstands-EP „By Night“ wirkte fast wie ein erleichterter Befreiungsschlag, wenn es in dieser Musik so etwas wie Erleichterung geben würde. Gibt es aber nicht. „Echo Location“ klingt wirklich exakt wie Bruce Wayne Junior, der nach dem tiefen Sturz in die Höhle in ein Meer von Fledermausaugen starrt. „The Warning“ und „Nightvision“ bieten auch keinen Ausweg, eher tappt man noch tiefer in den lichtlosen Schlund. Der einzige Orientierungspunkt sind die strengen Rhythmen, die pure Funktion, der Rest sind nur noch flirrende, verwischte Klangwischer, die den Empfänger mit voller Absicht streifen, und man weiß schon, dass der finale Stoß demnächst kommen muss. Aber wann? WANN?
Suburban Knight – By Night EP (Underground Resistance, 1996)
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 »
The Druffalo rave saga continues. This time round the Druffalo Hit Squad travels back to the classic sound of Motor City. No, we didn’t ask for permission.
Never On Sunday – The Journey (Retroactive) Constant Ritual – Hard Way To Come (Network) Psyche – Elements (Planet E) R Tyme – R Theme (Transmat) Mia Hesterley – Spark (Ten) Intercity – Out Of Control (KMS) Neal Howard – Perpetual Motion (Future Sound) Vice – Mindmelt (430 West) Suburban Knight – The Worlds (Transmat) Reese – Bassline (Fragile) H&M – Sleepchamber (Axis) M5003MB – The Cosmic Courier (Metroplex) Open House Feat. Placid Angles – Aquatic (Retroactive) Octave One – Octivate (430 West) Mayday – Nude Photo 88 (Kool Kat) Model 500 – Electronic (Metroplex) Blake Baxter – Forever And A Day (Ten) Esser – Forces (KMS) 69 – My Machines (Planet E) E Dancer – Feel The Mood (Incognito) Octave One – I Believe (Transmat) Underground Resistance – Hi Tech Jazz (Underground Resistance) Pod – Vanguard (Buzz) Inner City – Praise (Ten) Alien FM – Art Of Illusion (430 West) Psyche – Crackdown (Buzz) Paris Grey – Don’t Lead Me (Network) Never On Sunday – Urban Rains (430 West) New Birth – Don’t Blame The Young Folks (For The Drug Society)
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