That’s rather hard to say; I believe I first heard Funkadelic… early 70’s? Seems as though I remember hearing “Maggot Brain” as my introduction to their music? And it would most probably have been at a party; maybe a cousin’s house or on a military base at a function? Don’t really know. However I seem to remember that piece first: I certainly had no idea what or who it was? At the time I thought the label art was somehow the band’s responsibility, therefore I would buy records according to the artwork; if I was at a friend’s house and they had something I liked I would go to the record store, usually with my father, and look for the same artwork and buy the record (we’re talking 7″ singles here). Needless to say it was often not what I was looking for. However, rarely did I return anything! This is how I ended up finding out about Led Zeppelin at age 5 or 6. I was looking for Rare Earth. When I finally witnessed Funkadelic’s artwork first-hand it cemented my high regard for their overall “thang”!
Was it a part of your childhood and youth in California?
There was a very strong and rich musical culture in our house. Every morning before school we were allowed to listen to music (no TV, only on Saturday mornings) that we selected from an extensive record collection procurred over previous decades and life in Kansas, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Poplar Bluff Missouri, Osaka, and wherever else our parents had been on their journeys with the military. This included 78 rpm shellac discs and 7″ children’s records recorded at 16 rpm. Father always loved Jazz and has an extensive collection of Blue Note recordings from the label’s inception until around 1970 something. Errol Garner was a big favourite, Booker T. & the MG’s. I did not really get into Jazz though until much later, though I liked Errol Garner! The rest was boring to me then. “Shotgun” and “Green Onions” I liked a lot but until this day I can’t stand James Brown for example?! Only one song that I can’t remember the title of, from around 1958. Mother was into Gospel and female vocal performers such as Morgana King, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Dakota Stanton, Aretha of course, also some guys like Major Lance and Joe Simon both of whom I still love today. This collection still exists, excerpts of which you can hear in a set I uploaded to soundcloud.com/eric-d-clark under the moniker “The OZ Effect”. When I’d go looking for what I liked and tried to share it with them it was not met well. They tried to form me with classical which I found to be very little of a challenge, especially as I could trick the teachers by learning pieces twice or even three times as fast by listening to them on vinyl (my component stereo system was right on top of the piano next to my father’s AKAI reel-to-reel, which he bought in Osaka three years before I was born and I adopted; when I am at our house in Sacramento I still use this machine!). Funkadelic were strictly off-limits (very enticing) but I kept the records anyway, even though they were considered to be devil music by Mom and Dad. I was still under ten? Read the rest of this entry »
In discussion with Rusty Egan on “Low” and “Heroes” by David Bowie (1977).
I assume you got into the albums “Low” and “Heroes” at the time they were released, but were you already a fan of his before that?
Yes, since Ziggy Stardust.
David Bowie was always famous for continuously reinventing his career, but did this phase particularly appeal to you?
Bowie’s Berlin Years I believe were the foundation of The Blitz Club playlist. Via Bowie I found Kraftwerk, and that lead to Neu!, Can, Cluster and Krautrock as it was called, Bryan Ferry then led to the work of Brian Eno, and his Ambient series …all this music lead to the basis of my collection. If you join the dots Bowie, Eno, Iggy, Kraftwerk, Mick Ronson, Lou Reed. Read the rest of this entry »
Kannst du Dich noch erinnern, wie und wann Du auf King Crimson gestoßen bist? War es eine nachhaltige Begegnung?
Auf jeden Fall! Die erste Begegnung war auf Radio SWF 3, da machte in den 70ern Frank Laufenberg (!) eine 2-teilige (!!) Sendung über King Crimson, das muss man sich mal vorstellen. Zwar abends, so gegen 22h vermutlich, aber immerhin. Da hab ich dann fleißig mitgeschnitten mit meinem kleinen Poppy Mono-Kassettenrecorder, und die Kassetten wurden dann rauf- und runtergespielt. Da waren praktisch alle “Hits” der Band dabei… und ich war gerade mal so 12 Jahre alt, schätze ich.
Warum hast Du Dir das Album “Red” ausgesucht? Was macht es so wichtig für Dich?
Es war dann das erste Album, das ich mir gekauft habe, zusammen mir dem Live-Album “USA” – beide gab es als Sonderangebot bei Zweitausendundeins, für 7 Mark fuffzich, glaube ich. Ich hab die bestellt, ohne genau zu wissen, was mich erwartet, und es war total der Hammer. Am Anfang hatte ich richtig Ehrfurcht vor dieser Musik, sie war so gewaltig und fremd für mich, dass ich die Alben gar nicht sooo oft hören konnte, aber ich hab sie von Anfang an geliebt. Da war ich ja auch erst 13.
In discussion with Martyn on “Fear Of Music” by The Talking Heads (1979).
What got you into the Talking Heads? Can you remember the time and circumstances you first became aware of the band?
My father was an avid vinyl collector, he was a football player and played in the UEFA cup tournaments at the end of the 70’s and early 80’s. Wherever he played he managed to find a record store and buy new music. I’m not sure where he picked up “Fear Of Music” but I’m quite sure he bought the record when it was released (in 1979). In 1984, when I was 10 years old, my dad bought “Stop Making Sense” and I remember both that album as well as “Fear Of Music” being played at the house many many times. “Stop Making Sense”, a live album, came with a booklet with pictures from the live show, so I browsed through it whenever the album was played. I loved the “Fear of Music” sleeve as well, as it has an embossed pattern, it was the only record I had seen at that time which had that.
Why did you opt for “Fear Of Music” over other of their albums? What makes it so special for you?
Musically, I remember liking “Stop Making Sense” better at that time, it features a lot of the big Talking Heads tracks like “Psycho Killer”, “Burning Down The House” and “Once In A Lifetime”, and although I knew “Fear of Music” practically by head, I revisited it many years later and came to appreciate it more. My dad didn’t own the other Talking Heads albums, but he did have Tom Tom Club’s first album. I started buying vinyl around 1982, with my first allowance money. It started with pop music obviously, and my own collection started to grow and grow. Later, when I got into late 80’s / early 90’s hip hop, I started digging in my dad’s soul and funk records (as hip hop used many of those to sample from). I left all the new wave and 70s/80s pop for what it was at that time, but about 5 years ago I went back in big time, to Roxy Music, David Bowie, ABC, Human League, Ultravox, and some of the New York bands like Talking Heads. I was moving houses a lot and dragged my vinyl collection everywhere, for some reason I felt that some of my dad’s records needed to be in the collection just to carry a part of my “home” with me. Even now that I’ve moved to the US, I had some of my favourite records shipped over and some of those have indeed been “in the family” for 30+ years, including “Fear Of Music”.
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 »
> Backroom Productions – Definition Of A Track ( New York Underground Records) 1988
A rare tune from 1987. Indeed nothing but a track.
I knew this from the vinyl edition of the DJ-Kicks by Terranova. At that time it fit right in with what they were trying to represent with that compilation. I used to play this track regularly back then, it was very good for warming up.
So you actually know this for quite some time then.
Yeah, of course! I was not into Terranova that much, but the compilation had some brilliant tracks on it. East Flatbush Project and such.
This has some kind of Hip Hop vibe to it, too. But it does not exactly sound like 1988.
No, and I didn’t know that (laughs).
Would you still play it?
Definitely. I don’t know when and for what occasion but it is a class track.
It somehow reminds me of the bonus beats they used to have on the flipside of old House records.
Yeah, but bonus beats have gone out of fashion a bit, apart from Hip Hop. Argy had some for that Sydenham track “Ebian” on Ibadan last year. But I think it is not really relevant anymore for the current generation of House producers.
The percussive elements really distinguish the sound of that era from today’s productions. Lots of handclaps, or here it’s rimshots.
My problem is that I don’t really like all these percussion sounds from drum machines. I prefer sampled real instruments. This is probably some classic Roland drum machine, like a 606. I would take the bassdrum and hi-hats from somewhere else. The toms of these old machines are always cool, but the bongo sounds for example are not for me. I wouldn’t use that for my productions. I couldn’t do these 100 % authentic references. I think it’s supercool to listen to in a Prosumer record for example, but I couldn’t do that.
You got qualms about doing something like that?
No (laughs)! I’m just working on a new track for which I sampled an old Amen-break. I don’t care, if I like it I use it. This kind of break is in 90 % of all Drum and Bass tracks and nobody cares, so I don’t care either.
> Phortune – Unity (Jack Trax) 1988
This is an old track by DJ Pierre, from his Acid House days. But it is different to most tracks he produced back then. It is pretty deep.
It’s great. Awesome vibe for 1988, I could listen to this all day. It doesn’t tranquilize my feet, it’s not boring, it’s perfectly right. And I would grin from ear to ear if I would hear this in a club.
Some of its sounds have aged really well.
I really like this. I think it’s a pity that there are not so many tracks with great basslines at the moment. There are a lot of simple, functional basslines without much of a melody. Of course it’s effective and some current tracks need some of these dominating, functional elements, but a track like this for example needs a bit more, and I miss that. It’s also simple, but it has more and different harmonies. I like that, it gets me hooked. I would love to buy this on Beatport (laughs)!
I do not remember too well how this mix came into being. Most probably I needed some relief from playing sets mainly meant for dancing purposes. The vibe is nocturnal, in parts even a bit disturbing. The title of the mix is taken from the monologue of the killer in the movie “Klute”, also used in the Clock DVA track included here. For some reason I am absolutely neither the paranoid type nor do I believe in conspiracies. But I love culture that deals with paranoia and conspiracies.
Howard Shore – Welcome To Videodrome Clock DVA – Sonology Of Sex Ennio Morricone – The Thing: Humanity Part 2 (Excerpt) Talking Heads – Drugs Aphrodite’s Child – The Wakening Beast Clock DVA – The Connection Machine Brian Eno & David Byrne – Mea Culpa (Mr. K Edit) Jerry Goldsmith – The Piper Dreams Lalo Schifrin – Amityville Frenzy Cerrone – Strip-Tease Suzy Q – Makes You Blind Alan Parsons Project – Lucifer Lalo Schifrin – Scorpio’s Theme MC 900 Ft Jesus – Falling Elevators Grace Jones – Walking In The Rain (Remixed Version) Suicide – Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne Associates – Matter Of Gender Yello – The Evening’s Young Buzzcocks – Radio Nine Soft Cell – Kitchen Sink Drama
Second appearance at Betalounge in Hamburg. At that time I was still celebrating by rekindled love for disco, mostly with Hunee, whom I got to know in a record store, of all places. We were some kind of go-to tag team when a floor required some vintage gems and we had tons of fun. Playing a set of that kind in Hamburg was a bit like carrying owls to Athens, though. After all I learnt most of what I knew about disco in that city and its clubs, and there were really many DJs and collectors there who were hard to impress with this playlist. Anyway, I had to try, and paying dues and so on.
Ich gebe zu, Hip House war nicht gerade ein Ausbund an lyrischer Tiefe, doch wenigstens seine Partytauglichkeit ist absolut zu Unrecht in Verleugnung geraten. Bei dieser Platte jedoch passierte eine verblüffende Harmonie von Wumms und Hirn. KC Flightt, der Hip House-New Jersey-Repräsentant, nimmt die Perspektive des Besuchers aus dem Weltraum ein, der seine bissigen Beobachtungen der weißen („Group A“) und schwarzen („Group B“) menschlichen Spezies im urbanen Lebensraum in sein Logbuch notiert. Das erinnert an „Cities“ von den Talking Heads, doch es ist deren „Once In A Lifetime“ das hier als Sample über eine Acidline sinniert, die brummt wie eine Motte im Wandschrank, die über Nacht auf dreißigfache Größe mutiert ist. David Byrne hatte im Videoclip einen Gastauftritt. „And who got the pay? Well, eventually Group A.”
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