Electronic beatS conversations on essential issues N° 41 · SPRING 2015
“Nothing’s hidden”
Jamie XX
IBEYI Pearson Sound MARK LECKEY DJ Spanish Fly
WARSAW 27
FEB
METRONOMY HIGHASAKITE ADI ULMANSKY GILLES PETERSON MOTOR CITY DRUM ENSEMBLE BRATISLAVA 06
MAR
ARCHIVE SON LUX YOUNG FATHERS ADI ULMANSKY PRAGUE 13
MAR
WARPAINT IBEYI VON SPAR ADI ULMANSKY COLOGNE 29
MAY
RÓISÍN MURPHY DJANGO DJANGO HOWLING SPECIAL GUEST FOR TICKETS A N D MO R E D O W N LOA D T H E EB A P PS!
ELECTRONICBEATS.NET
ELECTRONIC BEATS FESTIVALS 2015
EDITORIAL: preview with Sven Von thülen
“The gangsters and robbers came to dance and skate.” A.J. Samuels: Sven, as co-author
of the Berlin techno oral history Klang der Familie, you have a background in piecing together historical narratives from a variety of different first person perspectives. For this issue, we went to Tel Aviv to find out how the city’s cultural protagonists are dealing with the boycott against Israel. There’s a wide array of viewpoints, most of which aren’t commonly reported on outside of the country. Sven von Thülen: Reading the
report on Tel Aviv, I was fascinated. I’ve never been to Israel before and I wasn’t aware that the official boycott, BDS, existed. I know German DJs who don’t go to Israel out of political reasons, but I also know a few who don’t travel to the United States either, like Ricardo Villalobos. Although in his case, as the son of parents who fled the U.S.-backed Pinochet regime, it’s maybe a different story. But within the German electronic music community, most DJs will play Israel as far as I’m concerned.
AS: . . . in contrast to many British musicians and DJs. Something that struck me when talking with the bookers at the Israeli house and techno venue The Breakfast Club was their apocalyptic account of a party that coincided with the begin-
When does limitation breed new inventions? When does it stymie them? Insular cultural environments have given rise to astoundingly unique forms of music, as we see in this issue’s second investigation into African-American roller skating communities. Historically however, dance music is often compared to a virus, with different but related strains infecting populations and mutating in the process. In other contexts, political strategies actively isolate artistic development, such as the boycott against Israel, where— as we learned from our conversations with musicians, curators and bookers in Tel Aviv—all forms of cultural production have become political. In this issue of Electronic Beats, we take a look at how cultural constraints both facilitate and obstruct creative freedom. Here, author and magazine editor Sven von Thülen helps connect the dots. A.J. Samuels
ning of the war in Gaza in 2014. They said it was the “best” party they’d ever had, which sounded crass at first. But it became clear that what they were describing was an attempt to escape from a political reality they feel powerless influencing. SVT: It might be a bit much to draw a parallel to the atmosphere in West-Berlin in the eighties when the possibility of nuclear war seemed very real, but living in a very small and confined space with the threat of annihilation constantly lurking in your every day life obviously affects people. I think that goes for being closed off from outside influences in general, especially dance music subcultures in places like the U.S.—though mass corporate radio like Clear Channel has destroyed elements of that. That’s why I found the Sound in Motion feature in this issue so engaging. It’s not just that so much interesting music was born in roller rinks, but also, as DJ Spanish Fly describes in Memphis, that his crowd, the gangsters and robbers, left their guns in the car and came to dance and skate. Although there was violence. AS: It’s easy to forget about the
conditions from which music subcultures emerge when they become global. In this issue visual artist Mark Leckey, who
has dealt quite a bit with British dance music culture, describes wanting to create art that people can appreciate in an unmediated fashion, more like music. SVT: I’m intrigued by Mark Leckey’s take on animism—that machines can be possessed with spirits or that corporations can possess you with advertising, which might look strange to read in corporate publishing. There’s also an odd connection between Leckey’s work and Jamie xx, who is on the cover of this issue. Last year Jamie sampled Leckey’s art film soundtrack to Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore on the single “All Under One Roof Raving”. For me, the song is a comment on the idea that dance music is a kind of utopia that brings people together, transcending differences of class and race. Still the tone is more wistful than anything else. It fits to Jamie’s quote that the best dance music is somehow sad, even though I don’t necessarily agree. AS: That song’s emphasis on the British roots of hardcore reminded me a bit of Terre Thaemlitz’s Midtown 120 Blues monologue about New York house having ultra-specific geographical and queer roots. When so much music is appropriated and instantly accessible worldwide, it’s good to have a reminder where it comes from. ~
EB 1/2015 3
Weltanschauung
Weather-wise, there are worse places to be than Tel Aviv in December. But in the wake of a growing boycott against Israel, an increasing number of international artists, musicians and academics are refusing to make the trip to the country’s cultural capital. The result? An atmosphere in which every form of cultural production, from techno parties to art exhibits, has become political. Read more about how Tel Avivian artists, bookers, label owners and activists are dealing with the boycott on p. 84. Photo: Yuli Gorodinsky 4 EB 1/2015
EB 1/2015 5
6 EB 1/2015
When it was released in 1970, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point was a commercial and critical failure, though the film’s depictions of radical protest and its bombastic final scene of a house exploding to Pink Floyd have long attained iconic cultural status. This parking lot shot of the actual Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, California looks a bit like a mini NSA data center franchise. In our Recommendations section on p. 16, Max Dax unpacks Antonioni’s era-defining vision of Swinging London from the 1966 film Blow-Up, which is also the subject of a current exhibition at C/O Berlin. Photo: Birgit Richter EB 1/2015 7
Circa ’87 (pictured here) is one of the smaller works amidst the room-filling installations at Mark Leckey’s current retrospective in Munich’s Haus Der Kunst. On p. 58 Leckey explains how his art practice aspires toward the universality of music—interesting, considering his recent collab with Florian Hecker on PAN is rooted in the complex sound world of the art installation. Image: Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Köln 8 EB 1/2015
EB 1/2015 9
Electronic Beats Magazine Conversations on Essential Issues Est. 2005 Issue N° 41 Spring 2015
Publisher: C3 Creative Code and Content GmbH Heiligegeistkirchplatz 1, 10178 Berlin Managing Directors: Rainer Burkhardt, Gregor Vogelsang, Lukas Kircher, Karsten Krämer, Jeno Schadrack, Burkhard Tewinkel, Dr.-Ing. Christian Fill Director Berlin Office: Stefan Fehm Creative Director Editorial: Christine Fehenberger Head of Telco & Commerce: Thomas Walter Conceptual Advisor: Max Dax
Editorial Office: Electronic Beats Magazine, Waldemarstraße 33a, Aufgang D, 10999 Berlin www.electronicbeats.net magazine@electronicbeats.net Editor-in-Chief: A.J. Samuels Editor: Mark Smith Managing Editor: Sven von Thülen Copy Editor: Karen Carolin Intern: Sebastian Tromm Art Director: Johannes Beck Graphic Designer: Inka Gerbert
Cover:
Jamie xx, photographed in Paris by Flavien Prioreau.
Contributing Authors: Leah Abir, Yotam Avni, Zack Bar, Aluf Benn, Lisa Blanning, Luther Campbell, DJ Spanish Fly, Max Dax, Marcel Dettmann, Emika, Daniel Frenkel, Lee Gamble, Chilly Gonzales, KW Griff, Adam Harper, Nick Höppner, Daniel Hugo, Muhammad Jabali, Finn Johannsen, Daniel Jones, Ata Macias, Robin MacKay, Or Magal, Lola Mitchell aka Gangsta Boo, Nicolette, Hili Perlson, Gilles Peterson, Chen Tamir, Adi Ulmansky, Dana Wegman
Contributing Photographers and Illustrators: Frank Bauer, Lena Ditlmann, Terence Donovan, Yuli Gorodinsky, Walter Iooss, So-Min Kang, Frank Loriou, Luci Lux, Sonja Marterner, Don McCullin, minus, Satoki Nagata, Flavien Prioreau, Birgit Richter, Kathrin Schädlich, Hans Martin Sewcz, Robert Simon
Electronic Beats Magazine is a division of Telekom’s international music program “Electronic Beats” International Musicmarketing / Deutsche Telekom AG: Wolfgang Kampbartold, Claudia Jonas, Kathleen Karrer and Ralf Lülsdorf Public Relations: Schröder+Schömbs PR GmbH, Torstraße 107, 10119 Berlin press@electronicbeats.net, +49 30 349964-0 Subscriptions: www.electronicbeats.net/subscriptions Advertising: advertising@electronicbeats.net Printing: Druckhaus Kaufmann, Raiffeisenstraße 29, 77933 Lahr, Germany
Thanks to: Karl Bette, Marta Collica, Chris and Kathryn Garrihy, Martin Hossbach, Tasha Klusmann, Kat Leinhart, Lili Mayani, Ute Noll, Dejan Patic, Moshe and Tikva Perlson, Alona Rodeh, Rotem Ruff, Brad Samuels, Lorraine and Murray Smith, Elissa Stolman, Liliana Velasquez and Walter Wacht © 2015 Electronic Beats Magazine / Reproduction without permission is prohibited
ISSN 2196-0194 “Hop in the Cadillac and roll by the skating rink.”
10 EB 1/2015
After kicking off Part 1 in our Winter 2014/2015 issue, the Sound in Motion series is back on a roll. Featuring the likes of KW Griff, DJ Spanish Fly and Luther Campbell, Part 2 chronicles the musical innovations and regional anomalies found in African-American roller skating communities in Miami, Memphis and Baltimore. Photo: Satoki Nagata EB 1/2015   11
Who’s afraid of EDM? Certainly not Megan James and Corin Roddick of Purity Ring. Their sophomore LP Another Eternity is more futuristic and shamelessly poppier than 2011’s Shrines. But will the colossal synths and HD drops be too gauche for snobs and too abstract for the charts? Read A.J. Samuels interview on EB.net. Photo: Hans Martin Sewcz
12 EB 1/2015
CONTENT MoNologues
Editorial ................................... 3 Weltanschauung ..................... 4 recommendations ..................16 Nicolette, Adam Harper, Marcel Dettmann, Finn Johannsen et al; on Sherwood and Pinch, 18+, Zenker Brothers, Soichi Terada and more. Music Metatalk with Mark Smith; Video Game Soundtracks with Daniel Hugo; Nick Höppner dissects a Berghain DJ set
INTERVIEWS
“Nothing’s hidden” Lisa Blanning meets JAMIE XX .................................... 48
Conversations
“You’re already in the realm of hallucination” LEE GAMBLE talks to ROBIN MACKAY ........................... 70
“Where we find freedom, they find scarcity” Sven von Thülen meets IBEYI ........................................... 54
SOUND IN MOTION, PART 2.......76 The role of the rink in Miami bass, Memphis crunk and Baltimore snap
“There’s wood, there’s clay and there’s Samsung” Max Dax meets MARK LECKEY ............................ 58
72 Hours in TEL AVIV ................. 84 How artists, activists and cultural producers are dealing with the boycott of Israel
BASS KULTUR ............................. 34 Lisa Blanning talks to Ata about Offenbach’s Robert Johnson
NEU: The Future of Bass is in Your Hands.......................... 98
ABC ............................................. 36 The Alphabet According to Gilles Peterson Style Icon ................................ 42 Chilly Gonzales talks to Max Dax about John McEnroe
Three of our featured contributors: Robin MacKay
Gangsta Boo
Marcel Dettmann
(* 1973) is a British philosopher and writer who runs the Urbanomic publishing house. In this issue he goes in depth with electronic musician Lee Gamble on the genesis of musical concepts and their link to philosophy. And he’s a fan of Dr. John.
(* 1979) is an American rapper and was the sole female member of rap group Three 6 Mafia. Her last release was 2014’s Witch, a collaborative effort with rapper La Chat. In this issue she talks about growing up roller skating in her hometown Memphis.
(*1977) is a German DJ and electronic musician. A longtime resident at Berlin’s famed techno institution Berghain, he is one of the genre’s key figures. In this issue he recommends the debut album of Munich’s freshest techno export, the Zenker Brothers.
In this issue: Augmented Reality! Access tons of extras
with your smartphone in
simple steps.
Get the latest version of our EB.TV app for iOS. If you have already installed the app, run the update by scanning the QR code on the left. STEP Start the AR camera from the app’s main menu and watch for this sign: ------> Sweep over the pages indicated STEP with the logo to unlock videos, exclusive mixes, related articles and more. STEP
EB 1/2015 13
MoNologues
recommendations
“A breakbeat-infected testing ground.” Marcel Dettmann recommends the Zenker Brothers’ Immersion
Ilian Tape
Marcel Dettmann is a German DJ, producer and founder of the MDR label. Since 2000, he has played an integral role in the Berghain/Ostgut Ton dance music machine. Recently, MDR released its first full-length compilation. Another first is Dettmann’s contribution to Electronic Beats.
Opposite page: British Butcher, East London, c. 1965 © Don McCullin, courtesy of Hamiltons Gallery, London. The image is also featured in the Blow-Up exhibition at C/O Berlin.
The Zenker Brothers represent a new generation of German producers keen on refreshing techno. Berghain stalwart Marcel Dettmann sees their breakbeats stunning dancefloors. In 2005 or 2006 I was booked at a club in Munich called Harry Klein. That’s where I met Dario Zenker, who was a resident there at the time. He had already started releasing music, but his own label Ilian Tape was still taking shape. A little later I met his brother Marco. Back then I was responsible for stocking records and administering Hard Wax’s database, so I had a front row seat watching the brothers develop their own unique style. Ilian Tape represents the new sound of Munich for me. When I hear a track by the Zenker Brothers I automatically think of Munich, in much the same way that I did back in the nineties when I heard a track by Richard Bartz. To find and mold your own aesthetic is a vital task for a producer; with Immersion the Zenker Brothers complete that mission. One of the things I really like
about the album is how intuitive the arrangements feel. The tracks just roll, even though there’s only one tune with a straight kick drum. The record sounds like a breakbeat-infected testing ground, but it’s not rave pastiche—they’re twisting the breakbeats in their own way. The brothers have a sense for rugged grooves that demand time to breathe and reveal their power. When I play their tracks I notice how some people on the dance floor are confused at first. Then after a few minutes, you can see how they begin to get it. Once they’re locked in, the energy in the room shifts to a new intensity. If I want to change the pace of a set, or interrupt a steady flow of straight, pounding techno without losing the groove, the Zenker Brothers are my weapon of choice. On Immersion the low frequencies sound crunchy, and the drums are coated in a distorted sheen. That’s something that sets them apart from the British breakbeat and dubstep-informed techno coming from producers such as the Hessle Audio camp. Immersion sounds rawer, and less tight. The Zenker Brothers manage to have
the right amount of granular dirt in their music, and that’s something I miss in a lot of the British stuff. The dusty feel is something I can relate to. I have the impression that Dario and Marco really didn’t care about anything but the moment when they were recording Immersion. The album sounds like they felt liberated in the studio. I would love to lock the Zenker Brothers and Patrick Gräser, aka Answer Code Request, in a studio. I’m very curious to see what would come out of that. Aesthetically, Immersion reminds me of Patrick’s work, especially his debut album from last year. It wasn’t really a dancefloor album either. I think they’re investigating parallel sonic avenues, even though Patrick’s stuff is a little bit more musical and delicate. In contrast, Dario and Marco’s music has this rough edge and is more groove-oriented. It’s this wall of sound that piles up in front of you. It feels like rave, and it’s obviously inspired and informed by nineties techno. But it’s neither overtly aggressive, nor too happy. It’s just dark and trippy, and that’s the way I like it. ~
“Is he aiming a gun at someone?” Max Dax recommends the Blow-Up exhibit and catalogue A new Blow-Up exhibit highlights the film’s nexus of fictional narrative, fashion photography and social commentary. Hatje Cantz
16 EB 1/2015
When my father first persuaded me to watch Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up in 1984 at the age of fourteen, I recall first and foremost
being impressed by the metallic green Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud coupé that the main character, star photographer Thomas (played by David Hemmings), drove through an extremely vibrant, Swinging London. Only later, when I saw the movie for a second, a third and a fourth time, did I begin to truly adore Veruschka, the German
supermodel Thomas photographs in a variety of erotic positions. Antonioni’s depiction of the interaction between the artist and his muse was filmed in 1966, but it lost none of its power when I saw it almost twenty years later. And that certainly holds true today, almost fifty years after it was first released. Much of that has to do with
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
EB 4/2014 17
Above: Don’t miss your exit. Terence Donovan, Man about the Black Country, 1961, © Terence Donovan Archive. Featured in the Blow-Up exhibition at C/O Berlin.
18 EB 1/2015
Antonioni’s treatment of photography and visual representation as subject matter—a cinematic counterpart to Marshall McLuhan’s idea of film and photography as forms of both art and communication. In the film, protagonist Thomas is a kind of hip, existential documenter of beautiful women, happening parties and the poor and homeless, all of which are seen in a single day against a backdrop of mid-sixties London. Thomas doesn’t just live for the moment, he simultaneously lives to record it. Central to the story is his obsession with a series of voyeuristic images depicting a pair of lovers he photographs in a
London park. Upon closer inspection, Thomas starts to believe that the objective of his Nikon F has inadvertently captured a murder. Is that a person hiding in the woods behind the fence? Is he aiming a gun at someone? And there, on the other image, isn’t that a dead body lying underneath a tree? Growing increasingly excited by his discovery, Thomas blows the images up to levels of unrecognizability and pure, beautiful abstraction. Watching this as a teenager, abstraction suddenly made sense to me, from one moment to the next. It was like receiving a microscope as a birthday present and subsequently discover-
ing a whole new world under the power of its lens. Blow-Up helped me realize that I could zoom into the microcosms on the surface. I started to make my own photocopies of images that I stumbled across in newspapers. I blew them up and transformed my teenage room into a studio. The naturalism I had previously admired was replaced by a fascination with abstract photography and abstract painting, which at the time appeared to me as extreme forms of artistic expression. The traveling Blow-Up exhibition, now on at C/O Berlin, is also rooted in a fascination for the extreme forms of expression that
Read more recommendations on electronicbeats.net
Punk icon Richard Hell explains how writer, artist and John Waters’ muse Cookie Mueller stood for everything that was right about New York in the seventies and eighties.
photography has to offer, as well as the medium’s limitations. Divided into five sections—Voyeurism, Fashion Photography, Social Documentary, Swinging Sixties and Blow-Up—the show has masterfully mixed black-and-white set shots and behind-the-scenes stills from a number of different films, placing them alongside selected images from game-changing fashion and social documentary photographers such as David Bailey (Blow-Up’s real life inspiration), John Cowan, and Don McCullin. The images are set opposite various screens repeating endless loops of key scenes from the movie. By so effectively arranging the disparate visual material, the curators have succeed in creating a tension within which connections are highlighted—from cubist painting to experimental photography to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The framework becomes a rhizomatic web of reference points. These then serve as triggers for further investigation: to dig deeper into the subject. Or into the photo grain. Or into the moment in history. As a practically unrivaled cinematic documentation of time and place, it makes sense that an entire room is devoted to Blow-Up’s historical context. There, Antonioni’s shots
of London’s then rundown East End and concert footage of The Yardbirds present a realism that thoughtfully reflects on its own materialization through the camera. The subject of the image is the image itself, and this is the tie that binds the narratives of both fiction and documentation. The film’s juxtapositions are why the initially crass seeming contrasts in the exhibition make sense: mixing the decadence of fashion photography with images of London’s downtrodden. This combination also emphasizes the idea that fashion and documentary photography are forms of journalistic photography, the impact of which is maximized in traditional print mediums. The exhibit’s accompanying catalogue underscores that, with the show’s stills and documentary images retaining the nexus of interactive references on the printed page. Perhaps the only thing I was missing was a nod to the scene in Blade Runner where Harrison Ford zooms into the details of a Polaroid. Then again, so many of Michelangelo Antonioni’s ideas have permeated cinematic and popular culture. Hopefully the show will help visitors magnify their own connections. ~
Max Dax is the former editor-in-chief of Electronic Beats and continues to be a regular contributor. This issue also features his interview with artist Mark Leckey (p. 58) and a discussion with Chilly Gonzales about style icon John McEnroe (p. 42).
“They’ve both pushed the dub tradition into surprising new directions.” Nicolette recommends Sherwood and Pinch’s Late Night Endless Adrian Sherwood teams up with dubstep trailblazer Pinch for an LP that has Nicolette pining for sound clashes in London parks. When I first moved to London back in 1990, I had just signed a
contract with Shut Up And Dance Records, and friends of mine were really into the dub and electronic dub scenes. One of them was also friends with Adrian Sherwood, and she took me to a few of his On-U Sound events. Those and other similar events were my first experiences of dub and sound system culture. Working
with Massive Attack later on, my awareness of the different subgenres of dub were expanded even further. But to be honest, dub was never something I focused on. It was one of many musical influences for me. As a musician, you absorb a lot, and you tend to take the English penchant for stylistic innovation for granted
On-U Sound/Tectonic
EB 1/2015 19
Recommendations
Nicolette Suwoton is a singer, songwriter, producer and DJ based in London. In the early nineties she released a string of classic breakbeathouse tracks on Shut Up & Dance and collaborated with the likes of Massive Attack, Alec Empire and Plaid. Her fourth solo album will soon be released on her own label Early Recordings. This is her first contribution to Electronic Beats.
when you live in London. In that sense, the city is a good place to be a musician because you can be as weird and crazy as you want. It’s an environment rife with idiosyncrasies, cross-pollination and expressions of all kinds. Late Night Endless is a case in point. The album reminds me of the energy at the Dome in Tufnell Park, where they used to have dub sound clashes in the early nineties. It was always a heavy vibe. People weren’t necessarily there to dance, and it was completely different to a rave. Nevertheless, it had a certain meditative intensity with everyone focused on his or her own musical headspace. Late Night Endless has that heavy, introverted feel to it, but the production style is a lot brighter than the music that was being played at those events. Also, the album is a grower, partially because the production is super intricate and rewards close listening. I had to hear it with headphones to fully grasp the immersive scope of the mixdown. My first impres-
“My first impressions were being overwhelmed by the sheer density of the mix and the richness of the sounds.” Nicolette
sions were being overwhelmed by the sheer density of the mix and the richness of the sounds. Sherwood and Pinch’s palette reminds me of my own musical journey, so I experience this record on a very visceral level. But there’s a strange paradox running through the LP: On one hand, it’s very musical. On the other, there isn’t a whole lot of melody to be found. There are vocal-led tracks like “Stand Strong”, featuring the voice of Temi “Queen” Odeyale who’s also from my home country Nigeria. But the musicality primarily
comes from the way Pinch and Sherwood treat their sounds, rather than from melody and harmony. If I had to guess who contributed which aesthetics and elements, I would say that the sonic weight is definitely coming from Sherwood’s side. The bass heft is complemented by syncopated textures and shifting timbres; I like to think the latter come from Pinch, but I might be wrong, of course. The point is that their strengths augment each other. This mix between the booming dread of classic dub and the more sprightly aspects of modern dubstep shouldn’t be narrowed down to a fusion of old and new school influences. That would be a reductive simplification that does a disservice to the richness of the Late Night Endless melting pot. Sherwood is a pioneer, and I think it’s a great idea for him to work with a forward-thinking dubstep producer like Pinch. They represent two different generations of the British dub lineage, and they’ve both pushed the tradition into surprising new directions. ~
“Two souls locked in a strange world.” Adam Harper recommends 18+’s debut LP Trust
Houndstooth
Adam Harper is one of the premier writers on emergent electronic music. In the last issue of Electronic Beats, he recommended Arca’s Xen.
20 EB 1/2015
For 18+, love is a psychic battle of wills. Adam Harper dives into their sadomasochistic complexities to wonder at the pearls of music. There are few delusions more powerful than those shared with another person. Such psychological states are frequently referred to as “love,” but peer closer in and this concept so often papers thinly over depen-
dency, obsession, coercion and abuse. Sometimes it’s something imposed, subject to unequal power relations: masters and slaves, games of wits and denials. Other times it’s a stalemate, a feedback loop, two souls locked in a strange world of their own rituals, mythologies, pleasures and plunderings. Occasionally it’s a downward spiral with the tender violence of mutually assured destruction. This has been called folie à deux or “shared psychotic disorder”; a madness arising
from such a fateful affinity. It’s what makes 18+’s debut LP such a compelling and disconcerting performance of the pop double act. Each track could be as much a threat as a love duet, a series of cruelties as a hymn of sweet nothings. With the creeping implication that they’re addressing or describing each other and each other alone, the pair flows freely and ambiguously between sentimental bliss, gleeful fetishism, barbed warnings and plunging the knife in.
Recommendations
Opposite page: Jill Kennington in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic 1966 film Blow-Up. Set in Swinging London in the sixties, the film boasts a wandering existential narrative based on the life of fashion/celebrity photographer David Bailey. It also features a soundtrack by Herbie Hancock, as well as guest appearances by The Yardbirds. © Neue Visionen Filmverleih GmbH/Turner Entertainment Co. A Warner Bros Entertainment Company. All rights reserved.
The listener is a voyeur, witnessing a ghetto-gothic version of Lionel Richie’s “Endless Love” play out in each of its different forms as so many facets of a single menacing reciprocation. What’s more, the inverse symmetries of gender and skin color add uncomfortable socio-political overtones to the power struggles they lay out as violent erotics. For the few years that passed between their first visibility online and Trust, 18+’s Justin and Samia were known only under the monikers “Boy” and “Sis,” and seen only as blurs or silhouettes. Their YouTube account slowly filled up with minimal yet twisted hip-hop tracks made from esoteric samples, juddering synths and weird found sounds. The rap alternated between a lithe, velvety feminine and an expres-
sionistically pinched masculine, yet each felt equally ominous and alluring. A decisive moment came with the track “Jets”, which now appears on Trust. Its subtly electrifying bounce and eerily singsong refrains confirmed 18+ as a name to watch. By the time the third of three free mixtapes was released in 2013, the pair had honed their craft considerably, each track a perfect balance of hook and experimentation. It seemed only a matter of time before a label became interested—in this case the respected electronic imprint Houndstooth, typically known for groovier material. Trust is effectively a greatest hits derived from their existing work. Much of it comes from MIXTAP3: “Club God”, “Crow”, “Iawa” and the psycho celebration “OIXU” appear, as does
“Dry”, whose playful “brr-rrr-rrr” refrain and piercing synth suggests both the cold and electrocution as its text unfolds. “Nectar” and “Jets” come from MIXTA2E, while “Midnight Lucy” already appeared on YouTube. Album opener “All the Time” is new, and its uneven lope and powerful melody could be bolstered by fuller production values. Even for those already familiar with the duo, the assemblage is well-presented—practically a onestop-shop that can now be enjoyed on vinyl, too. But at only one new track it might not offer much more. What counts are the new listeners who will want to explore MIXTAP3 and some its the standout tracks, such as “Horn”, that are missing here. Hopefully Trust represents the beginning of a career in conjuring similarly unique and provocative scenes from a shared darkness. ~
“A wildcard that can freak a dancefloor out of a false sense of security.” Emika recommends Pearson Sound’s self-titled debut LP Hessle Audio
David Kennedy, the man behind the Pearson Sound moniker, has been responsible for some of the most potent and genre-defying electronic music of the past decade. Emika hears gender and drive in his debut longplayer. Pearson Sound’s self-titled debut doesn’t connect to the outside world. It’s a bit like landing on a new planet. It’s certainly a decisive departure from the juke and dubstep inflected productions that he made his name with, especially under the Ramadanman alias. What remains is David
22 EB 1/2015
Kennedy’s penchant for stylistic frankensteins which gesture toward techno, grime and electro without being reducible to any one genre. If there’s a key thread to trace throughout Pearson Sound, it’s the texture of the drums: A humid sound of hi-gain signal chains and overloaded valves, teetering on the edge of feedback. Personally, it strikes me as a kind of cool and slick boy’s record, which is to say that it has a certain attitude—one that reminds me of some friends that I had back in London. They would meet up, jump in a car, go pick up someone else and head for a club. They all exuded this young, over-confident attitude
that comes from being in the UK scene. There’s a lot of playful competition there, whereas somewhere like Berlin is more about fitting in. Now that this album is out, there will definitely be a few guys thinking, “This is whack, I can do better than this.” They then set about doing their thing, competing and developing new forms. What I am trying to say is that I think this kind of rivalry can really add something to music evolving, and I’m happy to hear that vibe on this album. Living in Berlin, it’s an attitude I miss. As an LP, Pearson Sound never loses its sense of purpose, which makes for a demanding but rewarding listen. The groove
Recommendations
Emika is a Berlinbased producer, singer, composer and DJ. After two albums and various singles on Ninja Tune, she left the label in 2014 to concentrate on her own imprint Emika Records, where she just released an album of solo-piano pieces titled Klavírní. This is her first contribution to Electronic Beats.
structure and the sound effects really challenged me, even to the point where I wanted to turn it off several times, but I take that as a positive rather than a negative because I love records that don’t just play to your expectations. On each track Kennedy focuses in on a single potent idea and delivers it with an in-your-face, punk brevity. Within five seconds, you know exactly where the whole thing’s going. You could argue that there are a few places where he could’ve developed his ideas further, but I think that restraint is part of the point. This clearheaded, single-mindedness comes to be the LP’s defining element. It shows how Kennedy has grown as a producer by going back to basics; or rather, by going forward
and backwards at the same time. One highlight is “Glass Eye” which sounds like a hybrid of grime and melodic Drexciyan electro. I think Drexciya was pretty obscure before all the recent reissues, especially for younger music lovers. Now that those classic albums are available again, Drexciya’s sound is influencing a new generation of producers for whom it seems completely new, and now they’re adding their own flavor to it as well. I’m sure that dance music is going to get more electro-oriented. Actually, I’m kind of waiting for it to happen, but at the same time I’m happy that it hasn’t yet. I love electro, but once it blows up in a newer, mutated form, it will surely end up in the hands of Taylor Swift.
That said, Pearson Sound reminds me quite a bit of Marcel Dettmann’s first album. Musically, they’re pretty far apart, but both producers have the same deconstructed approach to sound. Both albums feel like an anomaly in that they don’t follow anything else that’s out there; they build a groove, but then they destroy it and tear it apart. It messes with people’s expectations, but that can be super-effective, especially on an unsuspecting club crowd. “Swill” is a good example: It has a momentum that falls over itself and never really locks into a flow you could snap along to. It’s the sort of wildcard track that can freak a dancefloor out of a false sense of security. ~
“There he was at last, the house music master from Japan.” Finn Johannsen on Soichi Terada Presents Sounds From The Far East As a collector of JapaRush Hour nese synthpop and an admirer of the country’s music technology, Finn Finn Johannsen is a DJ, music journalist Johannsen suspected and vinyl enthusiast the existence of a hidden based in Berlin. He also co-runs the Macro Japanese house master. label with Stefan Gold- Here he describes how he mann and is one of found him in Soichi Terada. the key figures in Berlin’s renowned Hard Wax record store. This is his first contribution to Electronic Beats.
24 EB 1/2015
I’m an avid and longtime collector of Japanese synthpop from the seventies and eighties. Being based in Europe, that pastime has always proved challenging, particularly before the Internet. I had to start from scratch, mostly with Yellow Magic Orchestra and affiliated labels like Yen, Monad or Alfa. I studied the credits of every record and learned about
new artists, crosslinks and local scenes. But finding those records in continental crates was a rare and lucky occasion. When buying online first became an option, it was pricey—particularly because of shipping costs and Japanese sellers who were perfectly aware that their goods were out of reach beyond their own soil. I regularly came across sellers with pages and pages of offers, complete with listening clips, and I had to eventually admit to myself that I hadn’t even scratched the surface. And facts about the records were still scarce. For a nation so obsessed with technological progress and cultural information, there was mysteriously little given away to the outside world. I found that a little strange because Japan
has contributed so much to electronic music from that period of time, particularly in terms of technology. I also thought it strange that once house came along in the mid to late eighties, with techno following shortly thereafter, there were few notable Japanese producers reacting to it. No matter how hard you tried, the Japanese equivalent to the early house music masters was nowhere to be found. Years later, a good friend of mine, a serious deep house completist, pointed out that there were some interesting releases by Japanese artists on Hisa Ishioka’s King Street Sounds, a New York based label established in 1993 and inspired by the Paradise Garage experience. He investigated further and found
Ishioka’s sub-label BPM Records, which since 1991 has showcased a wealth of Japanese producers taking on the trademark mellow yet crisp Big Apple deep house style as established on imprints like Nu Groove, Strictly Rhythm, Nervous and a plethora of others. The producer with the most credits was Soichi Terada, and he also seemed to have the most distinctive signature sound. It’s known that Larry Levan toured Japan at the end of his career, shortly before his death. There must have been some interaction with the local scene, as he remixed Terada’s gorgeous 1989 track “Sunshower” two years later, as did fellow New York DJ legend Mark Kamins. So there he was at last, the house music master from Japan, Soichi Terada. He even had his own label, Far East Recordings. And though it only had a small back catalogue, the few sound bites I could track down had me completely locked in on every single one of them.
“It also had a weirdly bouncing funk and, more importantly, a charming humor to its melody and arrangement.” Finn Johannsen
Terada’s sound, the whole lush smoothness of it, admittedly owed a lot to its US forebearers. But it also had a weirdly bouncing funk and, more importantly, a charming humor to its melody and arrangement. The music was somehow all-embracing: It was respectful towards Western influences but also freeform in interpretation, like the Japanese synthpop tradition I fell in love with the first time I ever
heard Yellow Magic Orchestra. Unfortunately, the other parallel was that Terada’s output was as hard to find as any other record I had on my Nippon house wish-list—at least the prehouse releases were pressed in sufficient runs! Terada’s records were only sold in quantities of a few hundred. Enter this fine compilation from Rush Hour, which despite an increased interest in Nippon house over the past few years, appears a bit out of the blue. It was put together by my friend Hunee, a DJ and music enthusiast with a fine tendency to dig a little deeper. He managed to secure all the essential tracks by Soichi Terada and his frequent collaborator Shinichiro Yokota. And even when reissues of rare records are quite common these days, this is really something special. Now will someone please compile the complete collection of Koizumix Production tracks and make me an even happier man? ~
Read our interview with Adrian Sherwood on EB.net
“It wasn’t that surprising to hear the story about the volcano.” Mark Smith recommmends Senyawa’s Menjadi Using self-built instruments and a broad spectrum of vocal experimentation, Senyawa’s LP Menjadi succeeds in living up to their explosive live performances. Mark Smith was more than pleasantly surprised. When I first saw the Javanese duo Senyawa perform in Berlin last year, vocalist Rully Shabara prefaced one song with an anecdote regarding the time his vil-
lage was destroyed by a volcano. It was a tantalizing bit of context and helped anchor their abstract mix of traditional Javanese music, death metal power and operatic melodrama to reality. I mean, it wasn’t that surprising to hear the story about the volcano, because the music sounds like an alternately shaken and stoic reaction to tectonic shifts and natural disasters. The graceful sonic force they wield is matched by their physical presence—one which left a huge impression after seeing them live. Actually, the impression was so
precious to me for a time that I deliberately avoided listening to recordings of their music. I feared that the disembodied nature of the recorded medium would suck the marrow out of my memories. Their recent LP Menjadi, released on Rabih Beaini’s Morphine Records, proves my fears were unfounded. It might seem like a stretch for a relatively obscure band releasing records on an outpost like Morphine, but I can see Senyawa crossing over in a big way. I picture them blowing up in the States and opening for Sunn O))). It’s
Morphine Records
Mark Smith is one half of improvisational techno duo Gardland, who will soon be releasing their second LP on RVNG Intl. He is also an editor at Electronic Beats.
EB 1/2015 25
Recommendations
hard to put your finger on it, but there’s something strangely accessible about Senyawa. They’re just too good to ignore. And too raw. A lot of that has to do with the singing of vocalist Shabara, who tends to look out from the stage eyes wide and animated by a sense of urgency. His arms twist and twine like searching snakes, while he traverses a broad range of vocal moods. Keiji Haino gets you in the ballpark, but Shabara’s octave-jumping gymnastics aren’t described by influences. His baritone projects the types of harmonics you’d associate with throat singing. Add a dash of reverb and he’s carving out the cavernous spaces you hear on tracks like “Bala”. On “Menjadi Jadi” he sounds like a mud bath bubbling at a hot spring; or later, a schizophrenic chorus of plotting whisperers. Shabara inhabits a cast of characters befitting the scope of an epic poem, but he doesn’t shift shapes to escape himself. It’s
“Shabara inhabits a cast of characters befitting the scope of an epic poem, but he doesn’t shift shapes to escape himself.” Mark Smith
more like he’s possessed. Or perhaps he can simply channel other spirits. And while I’ve understood exactly none of the words being sung, at no point does the narrative feel elusive. What’s being communicated is more elemental. Wukir Suryadi is the other half of Senyawa. He builds his own instruments out of bamboo and plays them with the private
intimacy a craftsman has with his creations. His weapon of choice is based on a Madagascan derivation of a tube zither, called a valiha. It’s a long, cylindrical pipe sheathed in rows of metal and bamboo strings. Christened the bambuwukir, it’s a beast of an instrument, about five feet tall and capable of an extremely wide range of sounds. It’s the perfect foil for Shabara’s versatile vocal chords. On “Hadirlah Suci”, the rhythms clatter like a bag of bones thrown down a spiral staircase, while “Bala” meditates on bowed, microtonal drones. On “Kayu” it sounds like Suryadi is playing right next to your ear. Every creak, rattle and buzz is vividly present in the mix. Actually, Menjadi is defined by this breathing-down-your neck proximity. Where their live show uses physicality to enunciate the subtleties of their music, Menjadi focuses the lens onto the minutiae of their craft. ~
Opposite page: In this still from BlowUp, main character Thomas (David Hemmings) inspects a series of voyeuristic shots he took of two lovers in the park, only to come to the conclusion that he’s inadvertently captured a murder. Photo: Arthur Evans, private collection, Vienna. Courtesy: Neue Visionen Filmverleih GmbH
Check out a conversation between Donato Dozzy and Suzanne Ciani moderated by Mark Smith on EB.net
“An ephemeral scent evoking ancient forests and even more ancient gods.” Daniel Jones recommends the Ephemera music-scent experience Author Daniel Jones likes to believe he has a nose for music and fashion. But what about perfume? Here he takes on Eau de DRONE, BASS and NOISE to discover they smell best all together. The room is almost pitch black as I step inside, and were it not for the frequent nudges from people behind me, it would be peaceful. The wash of electronics fills the silence with a foreboding ambience, and the mutterings
of the crowd beneath it become a pleasant babble. In the corner, glowing so softly that it only becomes visible after I blink a few times, is a spinning sculpture of a molecule. As its light pulses in time to the sounds emitted from the room’s hidden speakers, an ephemeral scent evoking ancient forests and even more ancient gods drifts in—subtle, but with an underlying sense of power. The room, one of three arranged in a corridor and broken by “resting stations” containing abstract projections, is the beginning of Unsound Festivals’
Ephemera, a collaborative installation that utilizes sculpture, visuals and compositions from Kode9, Ben Frost and Tim Hecker. One of the main focuses however are individual scents crafted for the occasion by perfumer Geza Schoen, known for his 2006 pheromone-enhancing fragrance Escentric Molecules, which sought to provoke discussion on the way scents are marketed to the general public. While the installation’s highbrow conception says “art-piece”, it’s certainly the more wearable and easily marketable of the two lines Schoen has produced. But then, I say that as
Unsound
Daniel Jones is a music promoter and creator of the subculture reconceptualization tumblr formerly known as Gucci Goth, now BlackBlackGold. He is a regular contributor to Electronic Beats.
EB 1/2015 27
Kentucky Route Zero is a computer game where nothing happens but you can’t help play a role. Daniel Hugo looks at how its music makes the idea of a mundane existence feel full of abstract potential.
K
entucky Route Zero [= KR0] is an unassumingly mysterious and complex game. The gameplay is inspired by point-and-click adventure games, where the player directs characters around different scenes to find objects or personalities of interest. But don’t be fooled by the surface layer simplicity in script and design: Where classic point-and-click games reward problem-solving or lateral thinking, KR0 emphasizes storytelling and characterization. A player’s agency is not skill-based, but rather related to how he or she responds to and prompts further discussion, and how a character’s history or personality is established. It’s through these choices that you become submerged within a magical-realist plot unravel-
28 EB 1/2015
Waiting for Whatever’s Next:
The Poetry of the Ordinary ing in the sparse Kentucky fields, as well as in its noirish graphic landscape—one which, from the standpoint of contemporary gaming’s hyperreal obsession, has long been left behind. There is none of the slick fidelity of the gamingcum-Hollywood spectacle, nor any grand moral “victories” to gain. Here we are focused on the humilities of life: of enduring, of just being, with all the waiting and beauty this entails. The game’s dramatic qualities come to the fore in a variety of ways but especially in literary references, including characters quoting Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—a play which KR0 both champions and shares a kind of existential ethics with. That’s something the protagonists, as unmistakably ordinary people,
possess for each other: Conway is an antiques deliveryman making his last delivery before his employer shuts up shop; Shannon is a talented mathematician reduced to fixing old computers dumped by the highway; the prodigious Luna is hemmed in by office work, numb to her routine rejection from art prizes. The game is bristling with strange encounters between characters living life the best way they can through inevitable compromise. Here’s where the sound design plays such a vital role, enhancing the spiraling logic of magical-realism which courses through KR0. At first, the largely experimental and ambient soundtrack seems an odd accompaniment to the Kentucky landscape of gas stations, collapsed coal mines and
factories. However, its strength is precisely in this discordance: like in many video games, the music is non-diegetic, meaning it doesn’t emanate from the game’s surroundings. Rather, it externally coats the landscape in a mist of textures and drones to heighten its mystic potential. Composed by Ben Babbitt, the sound structures can best be described as minimalist. They help to usher in warped dynamics of truth, illusion and fiction, which the characters constantly navigate. The immersion of digital textures within classic electronic forms highlights what’s both modern and forgotten about the game’s vision of Kentucky. It also recalls the game’s strange affinity to the American tape underground, in which acts like Emeralds or Radio People circulated during the mid-2000s. What they have in common—in attitude more than style—is that they’re inflected with the psychedelic and mournful desires of escaping corroding landscapes in post-9/11 America. Ultimately, both the music and the gameplay of KR0 remind us that there is a certain beauty in the ethics of humility, too. ~
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
Illustration: Sonja Marterner
Daniel Hugo on Video game Music
recommendations
someone with junk pheromones that nobody really wants to smell. However, thanks to a decade of working in clubs, I’ve developed a nose primarily adapted to the smell of fog machine fluid and dirty concrete. And like other people, I find myself transported to another time or place instantly with the barest hint of certain smells, as they are obviously closely connected to memory and emotion. For that reason, smells are employed to manipulate mood. Tying the idea to music strengthens this connection; how many times has your mood shifted entirely because of a song? Ephemera picks up on the notion, but mutates it with elements of electronic music: BASS, NOISE and DRONE. With this in mind, I decided the best place to experience the scents in question was actually outside of the original installation, in a place where bass, noise and drone fester. In other words, a music venue. Borrowing the empty boiler room basement of Berlin’s Urban Spree along with a few decent speakers, I filled the small space with each scent and its corresponding sound. BASS Composer: Kode9 Music: “Vacuum Burn” Steve Goodman’s piece recalls exactly what the title suggests: a burning vacuum cleaner smell. There’s a lot of base in BASS—it’s heavy, and while not necessarily something you want to dump all over your neck, wrists and junk (if you roll that way), splashed across the walls of a cold basement it had a surprisingly human touch. For me, it conjured up the detritus of an old study, untouched for weeks perhaps. But more than anything it summoned memories of my early teen youth spent in front of a computer. The dusty hum of an old PC, the slight alcoholic tang of keyboard cleaner hanging in the air. The mouse click samples
and crackling dryness of the composition further enhance this. In the acrid mustiness of BASS, the ghost of my adolescent browsing history whispers aphrodisiac. NOISE Composer: Ben Frost Music: “Herein” As dark and harsh as its namesake, NOISE hit my nasal passages like a blast of cold, metallic air. But what followed was closer in tone to warmth and candlelight. Signatures of well-worn dark wood and a heavy helping of frankincense and peppercorn were obvious, as was the sharp tang of ozone. The image that gradually formed in my mind, as I dance in the fragrant space to Frost’s majestic and sinister piece, was of some ancient place of worship—though, perhaps, not to any god of forgiveness and light. Easily my favorite of the trio, it clung to me long after the last notes of the music had faded. DRONE Composer: Tim Hecker Music: Untitled Like NOISE, Hecker’s contribution also conjures a pagan vibe, but the mood here is further from old gods and closer to
“I’ve taken to combining NOISE with WHISKEY and eventually MINOR HEAD TRAUMA. I call it HNW. The accompanying compositions are generally unlistenable.” Daniel Jones
the angelic or cosmic. Immensity is the word DRONE speaks inside the mind and nose, tied to this world by the odor of fir trees and juniper and the subtle earthiness of patchouli and ambergris. The latter is actually a hugely popular element of perfumes and has been for a long time. Strange, because it’s literally whale bile. Anyhow, what DRONE finally leads up to, however, is something akin to antiseptic incense: interesting for the mind, but less so for my nose. At the end of this trial, I burnt a bit of sage to clear the air and disperse whatever nastiness was lurking around, because I had to go home and start writing. You don’t know real horror until you’ve stared at the hungry, expectant and empty face of a new .doc file for two hours on a deadline. After I packed up my gear, left the club and got the train, I noticed how strongly the scents still clung to me, like dying murmurs of attention. Unexpectedly, they combined in a way that made them all compliment each other. While NOISE will surely find the most use in my odor arsenal, the symbiotic bond of the three makes them ideal for combined re-perusal. In fact, I’ve taken to combining NOISE with WHISKEY and AMPHETAMINES, and eventually MINOR HEAD TRAUMA. I call it HNW. The accompanying compositions are generally unlistenable. ~
Above: The perfumes NOISE, BASS and DRONE were inspired by Ben Frost, Kode9 and Tim Hecker (respectively), and co-created by the perfumer provocateur Geza Schoen for last year’s Ephemera installation at the Unsound Festival in Krakow. To fully grok the essence of the essences, author Daniel Jones requested his own samples, which he subsequently took to Berlin’s Urban Spree venue for a fragrance séance.
Read Daniel Jones’ review of Darklands on EB.net
EB 1/2015 29
music metatalk
Battling the Darkside of Taste:
Flip the Dis
“All reggae sounds the same,” “EDM is for basic b r o s ,” “ S t o c k h a u s e n sounds like a baby mashing a piano.” It’s no big deal hating on this or that genre— hell, people do it everyday. But the dark side of your taste can be an evil place. Mark Smith asks the question: What’s at stake when we’re dissing music?
T
aste moves in mysterious ways and your next musical obsession might lurk where you least expect. Not more than six months ago I harbored a deep-seated prejudice against UK bass music. I called it obnoxious and hyper-masculine, a sonic cock measuring contest for hooligans. Astute observers would stop me right there and point out that “UK bass music” stems from an impossibly diverse swathe of commingled cultures and histo-
30 EB 1/2015
ries, something hardly reducible to spitting dismissals and glib generalizations. At the time, this fact was far from my mind. I latched on to a few musical traits—wobbly basslines and broken beats, especially—which allowed me to condemn a piece of music for the crime of being “too UK.” Looking back, I’m not even sure from where my dislike sprung. But that didn’t stop me from belittling those who enjoyed the music and actively pushing my views upon them. The worst part was that I considered myself knowledgeable about UK dance music, having read canonical works by Simon Reynolds and others, and thus spoke about it with an air of authority. Fast forward to the present day and I’m decoding the rhyming slang of East London MCs and spending inordinate sums on early grime and dubstep white labels. And now people are giving me grief for listening to UK dance music. Call it a case of getting what
you deserve, but this role reversal cast my reckless ignorance in a sinister light. The impulse to push narrow-minded beliefs on people who are enjoying the music they choose is a fascist tendency. What’s more, it’s a common tendency. This isn’t to say that negative judgments should be outlawed, but rather that open listening is an important process of aesthetic renewal, of evolving as a listener. Genres hide their cultural complexities like icebergs; there’s a whole lot going on under the surface, and once you’ve seen the mass hulking beneath, the rest won’t look quite the same. Listening is a process of accretion; every new musical experience, when we’re paying attention, builds upon and changes our impression toward all that we’ve heard before. But absentminded hating nips that in the bud and leaves you in the dark. My change of heart occurred only when I happened across a loose milieu of producers who
interacted with UK dance music history in a way I could understand. Bristolians like Hodge and Asusu and Londoners like Beneath threaded elements of dubstep, funky, grime and jungle into dancefloor destroying plates that were just the right side of techno to appeal to my taste. This specific constellation of stylistic gestures aligned the planets: Suddenly, UK dance music became an access point to a fascinating, living culture with all the richness of a complex organism. The twined helixes of migration, urban decay and cultural cross-pollination became more important than the music itself. I began purchasing records not because they fit my taste, but because they fit into my increasingly romantic picture of British dance music. Some of these purchases flabbergasted the continentally minded tastes of my closest friends, and I found myself loudly defending that which I once dismissed. ~
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
Illustration: Sonja Marterner
by Mark Smith
Every hook, loop, and beat. All your electronic favourites, free on Spotify.
played out
Hypnotize, Bludgeon, Repeat PLACE: Berghain, Berlin / TIME: 10:30 P.M. Sunday (peak time) For Nick Höppner, the relentless stream of four-to-the-floor kick drums heard ubiquitously in his native Berlin is a sign of creative opportunity, rather than an exhaustion of ideas. After countless hours behind the decks at Panorama Bar and Berghain, Höppner still feels the magic of the seamless transition. Folk, his new album for Ostgut Ton, is a paean to the enduring vitality of house and techno in the German capital’s clubbing community. Here, he puts a recent Berghain set under the microscope. 1. Gunnar Haslam “Ataxia No Logos” The true peak time at Berghain is when Sunday night moves into Monday morning. I usually play upstairs at Panorama Bar, so playing downstairs can be a little intimidating because the atmosphere is completely different. At this point of the night the crowd is highly energized and expecting hard, relentless techno. I like to challenge myself and the dance floor with more experimental fare, hence the choice of this acidic burner from Gunnar Haslam. “Ataxia No Logos” is one of my favorite techno jams from recent times. It was released last year on the Dutch label Delsin and shows how Haslam has developed a more functional, yet equally intriguing style since his early releases on New York labels like L.I.E.S and Mister Saturday Night.
Left: Nick Höppner, photographed in Berlin by Luci Lux.
These first two tracks have similar melodic moods, so I’ll make a long, smooth transition to highlight their common traits.
2. Surgeon – “Untitled” (from the Backwards Man EP) This is an all-time favorite from one of the dons of Birmingham techno. The Backwards Man EP came out on Downwards in 2006, more than a decade after the Magneze 12-inch established Surgeon as a pioneering voice in nineties techno. “Untitled” is super crunchy and bangs hard, yet Surgeon’s approach feels
totally open-minded. To my ears, it recalls the uninhibited explorations of free jazz. The melody is pretty atonal, but it makes an abstracted sort of sense that perfectly complements the acid line in the Haslam track. It remains a mystery to me how Surgeon comes up with these crazy sequences and patterns. Both tunes have bizarre melodic sequences, so a long blend creates a sense of continuity.
3. Dave Tarrida – “Asinine” This track continues the wild, free jazz theme with its unpredictable modulations. It feels a bit like an update of the Surgeon record. In fact, they both released music on Tresor and hail from the UK, so perhaps there’s something in that connection. Tarrida’s hypermodern sound design has that lazer focus where every element has its own space to move, and that pinpoint accuracy sounds pretty spectacular on the Berghain system. On “Asinine” he’s achieved a dynamic sense of space that feels alternately cavernous and claustro-
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
phobic. It starts out with a choppy, broken beat, which I think might have confused a few people on the dance floor. I like to throw in a few rhythmic curveballs to break up the barrage of kick drums. Change-ups can be the icing on the cake during a pounding techno set. Another screwed-up, atonal melody is up next. So maybe you can take a guess?
4. Alex Under – “-7” Despite having another discordant refrain, “-7” is less jazzy than the preceding tracks thanks to its austere aesthetic. Alex Under became popular during the second wave of minimal techno in the mid-noughties. The Spaniard has released records through some pretty big labels, like Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8 and Riley Reinhold’s Trapez. The highly focused sound is crystal clear and fits the atmosphere of the Dave Tarrida record like a glove. It’s aged quite well for a minimal techno track and really connects the dots in the mix. Boring to read about, but long mixes really make a lot of sense to me . . .
5. Oliver Ho – “The Approach” Oliver Ho, aka Raudive, has a huge talent for sound design. “The Approach” was released in 1998, ten years before “-7”, yet they gel together perfectly. In fact, it’s pretty amazing how well this is holding up to today’s sound standards. As much as being in a club is about community, I also think it’s about the inner journey, and the four-tothe-floor kick is such a perfect and versatile carrier for musical ideas. Sometimes it seems like people just want to be bludgeoned into submission by 100% in-your-face techno, but I’m confident that the genre’s subtleties will prevail in the long run. ~ EB 1/2015 33
34 EB 1/2015
Bass Kultur by lisa blanning
“Robert Johnson bridged US deep house and German house sensibilities.” At the renowned Offenbach venue, minimalism and hedonism run deep. While many associate minimal house with Berlin, its genesis is intimately related to genre incubator Robert Johnson. Here, co-founder and resident DJ Ata Macias outlines the club’s philosophy and the electronic psychedelia it helped spawn. As a DJ, I tour around the world and see a lot of clubs, and there came a point when I wanted to have one of my own. I had my own vision of a space to celebrate music and dancing. A professor from the school of arts in Offenbach [Hochschule für Gestaltung], Heiner Blum, told me that he had this special place for me. It was a little outside of Frankfurt in Offenbach. A little off-grid, I thought at that time. But my partners, Klaus Unkelbach, Sebastian Kahrs and I saw the space with its wonderful terrace and beautiful view of the river Main and thought it was perfect. My vision was to make a club like an artspace: white walls, a black wooden dance floor enabling people to dance longer, fewer lights to keep the focus on the good sound system, and nothing else. From the beginning we wanted to have flexibility and modularity. Robert Johnson is a space where everything is movable, all of the equipment and all of the interior. We can make it feel bigger and we can make it feel a little smaller. For me, it was really important not to present the room like a discotheque or a typical club. It’s like you’re coming into a friend’s living room; you just want
to spend time there. Therefore it was also necessary to not have any advertisements or branding inside the club. For the bar this meant not having bottles of alcohol in sight. In terms of the booth, the DJs are on the same level as the dance floor, so you can reach out and touch them. They’re very closely connected to the dancers. I think this is why a lot of DJs love to play here—the intimate connection to the dance floor and its dancers. Here, the philosophy isn’t just to make money off selling drinks and the entrance fee. Take the bouncers at the door: in the beginning they were all women, to show people a different way of how to think about entering a club. We always wanted to keep staff meetings as democratic as possible, and everyone in the team should have their say. A little bit utopian, but that was always super important to us. This was also the main angle of our exhibition Give Love Back that ran from September 2014 to January 2015 at Frankfurt’s Museum Angewandte Kunst. All contributions to the exhibit came from friends, mostly Frankfurt natives. Some of them are established artists, like Michael Riedel, who managed to show the evolution of Robert Johnson over fifteen years. Also, the photographer Daniel Herrmann came to the club every Friday and Saturday for three years taking pictures. The results were similar to Andy Warhol’s Studio 54 portraits, which is why we took the best of them and made them into wallpaper for the club—so everyone could find themselves on the walls. In the beginning, club nights were
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
not always super-crowded, as word of Robert Johnson didn’t spread immediately. Also, we played deep house and this was not at all common for Frankfurt. You know Snap!’s “Rhythm is a Dancer”? That’s the original Frankfurt sound: Eurodance. Actually, Culture Beat and Snap! are both from Frankfurt. All this big room, handbag-house or hard techno—these were always considered the Frankfurt sound. The harder EBM-inspired sounds of older clubs like Dorian Gray, and then later trance, hard techno and “schranz” at Omen, Sven Väth’s Cocoon, and Monza are obviously associated with Frankfurt as well. That’s why Robert Johnson stuck out and made its reputation for doing something very different. For example, Dixon was one of the first residents, as well as Gerd Janson, Ricardo [Villalobos], Luciano—all of them close friends. Naturally, we’ve done lots of records through Playhouse [Ata’s label with Roman Flügel, Jörg Elling Wuttke and Heiko MSO], Klang Elektronik and Ongaku Musik. The sound we were pushing—deep, minimal and often psychedelic—had its origins in earlier parties we threw. In the mid-nineties Heiko [MSO] and I ran a night called Wild Pitch Club, which was really intense. This eventually led to a strong friendship and putting out Ricardo’s first LP on Playhouse. You could say Robert Johnson bridged US deep house and German house sensibilities, opening the door for minimal house. What many people today may associate with a Berlin sound was an extension of what was pioneered in Frankfurt. Robert Johnson made that happen. ~
Three Robert Johnson classics: Isolée – “Beau Mot Plage”: Psychedelic house played by all kinds of DJs. Ricardo Villalobos – “Easy Lee”: Changed dancefloors. LoSoul – “Open Door”: The door-opener for what we call minimal house today. Opposite page: Ata (right) with Heiner Blum, director of the Robert Johnson Theorie lecture series on electronic music culture held at the venue.
Photo: Lina Ditlmann
EB 1/2015 35
36 EB 1/2015
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
ABC
The Alphabet According to Gilles Peterson What are the characteristics of a DJ loved by heads and the masses alike? Prerequisites might include: an encyclopedic and decadespanning knowledge of music, a commitment to diversity and a perennial dedication to your audience. Gilles Peterson ticks all these boxes. The co-founder of London labels Acid Jazz and Talkin’ Loud is known for schooling generations of listeners in soul, jazz and global dance music. These days, he continues to broadcast his eclectic selections on BBC Radio6 Music, where he’s as likely to play a rare Israeli jazz 7-inch as a dubstep white label. Here, an ABC of Peterson’s musical education and groove-based curatorial practices, from his humble beginnings as a teenage pirate radio selector to assisting DJ Premier in the fine art of choosing jazz samples. Left: Gilles Peterson, photographed at home in London by Robert Simon. Illustrations: Kathrin Schädlich
as in Abarbanel, Tsvia: If you’re talking about sound quality, the best nightclub in the world is probably The Block in Tel Aviv. One of my favorite moments last year happened during a set I played there when I dropped a 7-inch by an artist named Tsvia Abarbanel. The record is an amazing hybrid of traditional Yemenite singing and Western jazz funk. It was recorded in 1970 but never had a proper release until Fortuna put it out in 2012. I like to mix the intro into a track by Acid Arab called “Samira”.
as in Body clock: I’m lucky in the sense that I’m a master of the power nap. I can quite happily do twenty minutes here or there. As my wife tells me, I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, and it’s been a saving grace in my career. It’s an art.
as in Dingwalls: Dingwalls was home to one of my most renowned and enjoyable residencies. I was there at a mad, exciting period before acid house and acid jazz exploded. It was the club that shaped my musical ethos. Putting on live music, mixing genres together—that’s something that came to its climax there. A lot of people think of it as a jazz club, but it wasn’t really.
We’d play hip-hop, house, soul, and disco. It was also a club where a lot of the DJs who’d been playing the night before would come after their sets. It became the after party spot for a lot of people.
and Afro-Cuban music. I’d play upstairs on a Friday. Downstairs there was Paul Anderson’s party holding about a thousand people, but fifty or sixty dancers would end up battling upstairs on my floor. The music I’d have to play in that environment was hardcore, fast, furious, Afro-Cuban fusion. These dancers would battle at high intensity for five hours at a time.
as in Fusion: Fusion music in the purest sense comes from the seventies; it’s those records that are electric but jazzy, and a little bit improvised. “Liberated Fantasies” by George Duke or “Shiftless Shuffle” by Herbie Hancock. That’s jazz fusion. It was such a big part of what made these clubs so intense for dancing. as in Censorship: In 1990 I lost my show on Jazz FM for speaking out against the first Gulf War. I think I learned my lesson at that time, so now I just stick to the music. Funnily enough, I was the first media victim of that war in Britain. There were articles in the paper and everything. It actually helped my career because it added a certain subversive aspect to my character. Now that I’m on the BBC I have to be very careful about what I say.
as in Electric ballroom: The Electric Ballroom was another London club, but it was strictly about heavy jazz
as in Gang starr: May Guru rest in peace. I was so sad when he died. Younger MCs like Joey Bada$$ and Kendrick Lamar are finding the Q-Tips, the Phifes and the Gurus, which is great to hear. Actually, Guru and Premier used to come to Dingwalls. I’ve got a picture of them there. I used to help out Premier, and I still do. One year he was in London and he had to do a remix for the Dream Warriors. He was like, “Oh my god, I haven’t got any samples!” So he came and borrowed records from me. He took Black Byrd by Donald Byrd and made a track out of it. “Jazz Thing” was such an EB 1/2015 37
important tune for Gang Starr. It has that whole Spike Lee New York vibe going on.
as in Hardcore Continuum: For me, English dance music goes back to sound systems. It’s sound systems that made England special in terms of the culture and music it created, and it’s what set us apart from other countries in Europe. The Jamaicans brought that sound system culture, which became a big part of the heritage for people living in London and Birmingham. That’s obviously had a big effect on the evolution of dance music in the UK. It unites everything from happy hardcore, to jungle, to garage, to grime. So I do agree somewhat with the idea of the Hardcore Continuum. This heritage and evolution is one of the reasons I find it hard to leave London, because for me, everything comes through here. If I was living in Berlin, it’s all very techno and very narrow. In England we’ve got hybrids of different aspects. It’s another sort of fusion.
like broken beat with a tropical twist. It’s very big for me, stuff like Buraka Som Sistema. The other thing I enjoy about what I do is that I end up playing on a lot of different circuits and many different scenes. So one day I’m off to Lisbon and suddenly I get a big dose of kuduro. It’s great that it gives producers and DJs something to focus on and a way to create their own history.
as in London club crisis: In a way, London is the best place in the world to go clubbing. Yet it’s the only place in the world that doesn’t have a good club at the moment. London is about pop-ups and one-offs. People who are into music are a bit sick of the commercialism of
as in Kuduro: Kuduro is a genre that’s a lot easier for me to understand because I’ve been quite tuned in to it. My trips to Portugal showed me a lot of that broken sound. It can be a little bit dancehall or 38 EB 1/2015
as in Northern Soul: Northern soul is very much part of my culture. It takes me back to those younger days when I was looking for something secret and special to do with my friends, something that other people didn’t know about. We’d find these little rooms blasting Art Blakey records and full of eccentric people coming up with these bonkers dance moves. There was a lot of range in the music, but sometimes that led to the DJing being more about rarity than quality. On the whole though, I thank god for these odd little scenes because they unearth nuggets of great music.
as in Ocarina: The ocarina is a properly ancient instrument that I haven’t come across so much, but I’ve seen a lot of thumb piano recently, which is of a similar vintage. It’s been in the hands of Stanley Cowell, the pianist and co-founder of the fiercely independent jazz imprint Strata-East Records. I’ve seen him on the thumb piano quite a bit because we’re putting on a night of StrataEast music at the Barbican in London.
as in Ibiza: The depressing thing about Ibiza is that a lot of people see it as nirvana. It’s like Las Vegas: commercial nonsense. Everything I despise about capitalism is there in Ibiza. However, I still feel that it’s important to go if Carl Cox asks me to play at Space Ibiza. I think back to when I was fourteen and one of the few people in the back room of the club where you’d hear the DJ play something freaky, a cool track you wouldn’t have heard if you were in the more mainstream room. So in that sense you can’t close Ibiza down. But if I had the option I’d rather not go.
as in Jersey club: Whether it’s Baltimore club, footwork or any of those types of hybrids, I always get really excited about it. Everyone throws terms at this stuff, but I don’t know the difference between deep house and hard house. I’ve lost it. I just play music now. I probably play Jersey club, it sounds like the kind of thing I’d spin!
It was a great experience to work together with him in Cuba on his album, and now he’s got a new LP of recordings that he’s made in Peru coming out soon.
clubbing. They don’t want to spend thirty pounds to go see a DJ, which, by the way, is also another reason I find Ibiza awful: you spend a hundred quid in five seconds. It’s not fair. A club like Output in New York, or The Block in Tel Aviv, or Air in Tokyo doesn’t exist in London.
as in Mala: I think Mala represents everything that’s great about London. His sound system, his ethos and what he’s given to music as a producer could only have happened in London, though he’s living in Antwerp now.
as in Pirate radio: I got my start and made a name for myself on pirate radio. At the age of seventeen, I had my own little radio station with my neighbor called South London Broadcasting. We’d record it on cassette, and then my dad would drive us to Epsom Downs in South London. We’d connect the cassette player to a transmitter, plug in an aerial and power it all with the car battery. Then we’d go listen to see if anyone phoned us on the local phone box. One day this other station gave me a call. It was Invicta, the first pirate black music station in London. They got busted and had their transmitter confiscated. So when they asked if they could borrow ours, I said yes—on the condition that they give me a radio show!
as in Quo vadis?: Where am I going? I’m continually looking for new
We’re proud to introduce our new color ways for SS/2015. Just like the sun during spring, we’re bringing you more light and color into your life. We took inspiration from everything we love about the season and created three “sweet as ice-cream” colors to cool down with. Out came Jam, Chick and Mint.
COOL DOWN WITH TH E N EW U R BAN EAR S S PR I NG / SU M M E R 2015 COLOR COLLECTION
URBANEARS.COM
Gilles Peterson owns more records than you.
places and going outernational. There’s talk of making a record in Indonesia. I’m going back to Cuba. I’ve been asked to perform my Brazilian record with Sonzeira, Brasil Bam Bam Bam, at Rock in Rio, which is just insane. There’s so many things happening, so many different places to make records.
as in Retirement: I’m enjoying this too much to stop, and I don’t know when a DJ stops DJing. I always thought that I didn’t want to be that old bloke playing records, but here
playing with a drummer and Dorian Concept on keyboards, and it was like going to see an Albert Ayler concert in 1968. Spiritual jazz is very much alive.
as in Talkin’ Loud: Working on that label was a learning experience. I had to get to grips with how the global music industry machine works. We made some records that I’m very proud of with artists like M.J. Cole, Roni Size, Carl Craig and The Roots. We really had an amazing period there. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time because I was zipping through it at such speed that it was hard to take stock. In the end I had to get out because it was too intense.
as in Universal language: I buy into the cliché that music is a universal language. Like Albert Ayler’s album title says, Music is the Healing Force of the Universe. I totally accept and believe that. Music is something that gives us all hope. There aren’t enough people in the world who listen to music. You don’t need therapy when you’ve got a record collection.
I am. There are plenty of older guys who still inspire me. I had François Kevorkian sitting in the booth with me when I last played in New York. He’s like a professor, and he’s still teaching.
Read more ABCs on EB.net
40 EB 1/2015
as in Spiritual jazz: Contrary to popular belief, there’s loads of modern spiritual jazz. There’s an album coming out by an artist called Kamasi Washington who signed to Flying Lotus’ label Brainfeeder. It’s spiritual jazz all the way. I consider Flying Lotus part of the spiritual lineage. I remember going to see him a few years ago when he was
as in Vertical integration (in the music economy): In the old days, each link in the music supply chain was relatively autonomous and separate. Now anyone can be a producer, label and distributor. Once upon a time, the majors and their distribution partners controlled everything, but now it’s wide open. In terms of art and creativity, it’s very exciting. as in Worldwide festival: It’s the best thing I do. Over the years it’s become a meeting point for all my friends and everyone I meet around the world. Plus, we’ve got a gorgeous location in the south of France. I was tired of
going to festivals where there was always something missing. I wanted to create a festival that provides a well-produced, great experience, whether it’s a live band performing or a DJ spinning. You can’t put on a festival like that overnight. It’s the culmination of my thirty years in the music industry.
as in X-Ray Spex and late seventies punk: I liked X-Ray Spex, but in 1977 you were either into jazz funk or punk music. I loved punk and the clothes, but I was a soul boy. I remember one day coming back from an all-dayer on a bank holiday. I walked out of the party with my mate who was wearing a pair of pegged trousers from a shop called Jones on Kings Road. A punk from our school saw him walking out and beat him up. I did a runner. Whatever tribe you were from, it was a passion. You had to be careful. You had to defend yourself. You were part of a gang. I loved that. Whether as a mod, a soul boy, a casual, a ted, or a punk, you had to make that decision. I don’t think there’s enough of that these days in music.
as in Young Fathers: I was quite impressed when they won the Mercury Prize last year. I was there, actually. I didn’t think they were going to win it. My money was on Kate Tempest.
as in Zouk: This is traditional carnival music from Guadeloupe and Martinique that was supplemented with synths and modern technology in the eighties. I have a residency at La Bellevilloise in Paris where I play loads of these sounds from Guadeloupe and Martinique. I’ve been playing a lot of stuff from the Réunion Islands, too. There’s so many great variations in the styles coming out of the Caribbean, and people go mental for them. ~
CHILLY Gonzales talks to Max Dax about John Mcenroe
Mr. Style Icon John McEnroe to me was always more than just a tennis player: he was a transformational figure. I’ve always been interested in these kinds of characters. When I played chess my hero was Bobby Fischer; for the piano it would have to be Glenn Gould; and for rap, it’s Kanye West. These are people who came along and brought such a radically different view to their genres and disciplines that they must be called game changers. Just when the world thinks that they’ve already seen everything, suddenly everybody is forced to recalculate. John McEnroe invented a new way to serve by turning his back toward the net so that he’d be hitting the ball diagonally. I remember that after the first time Ivan Lendl played McEnroe, he famously described the technique as “serving around the wall.” Other tennis players compared McEnroe to a sniper on a roof, because he angled his shots so differently. Put yourself in the position of a successful professional who’s played and studied the game all his life like, say, Björn Borg. For him, confronting McEnroe for the first time must have been intimidating. No, it must have been terrifying. But it also must have been exciting, because he was witnessing a mini revolution. I was eight years old when I watched the famous Wimbledon finals on TV between McEnroe and Borg in 42 EB 1/2015
“The world needed Franz Liszt to understand that just performing great music is never enough,” waxed Chilly Gonzales recently in a posh Berlin hotel room. While Gonzales’ connection to the spectacle-attracting nineteenth century composer is well documented, few people know that the Canadian-born entertainer cites none other than former tennis star John McEnroe as the source of his polarizing stage persona. “Like Liszt, McEnroe belongs to those who don’t believe in eternal rules—and eventually change their respective playing fields.” On his new album Chambers, Gonzales has chosen to dedicate a song to tennis’s iconic former enfant terrible. Max Dax found out why. Opposite page: McEnroe serving to Björn Borg at the finals of the US Open in 1981. Photo by Walter Iooss Jr./ Getty Images.
1980. It blew my mind and made McEnroe my hero. I suddenly understood that tennis could be a transcendental sport. It has a rhythm that can hypnotize. Indeed, I love John McEnroe so much that I even dedicated the song “Advantage Points” to him. The first part contains all the intensity and brutality of the sport, whereas the second part waltzes along in 3/4, reflecting the moment when McEnroe and Borg were floating in their game. That’s when time stops and when tennis becomes art. Good sports are defined by such moments—that is, when the game transcends competition to expose something like a parallel conversation. Which brings me to the aspect of time. Time is special in tennis because it’s one of the only sports in the world where a match ends only when there is a winner and not after a certain timespan has elapsed. Theoretically, a tennis match could go on forever. It’s happened plenty of times that extremely long matches have been stopped due to the onset of nightfall, only to be continued the next day. Imagine Björn Borg waking up in the morning and realizing that he has to go face McEnroe again, to confront the nightmare of a never-ending tiebreak. Of course, I also love John
McEnroe for his aggressive outbursts and penchant for eating at McDonald’s. All game changers seem to have their undeniably neurotic sides. I personally think that the scandals surrounding characters like McEnroe and Bobby Fischer were important to create a perceived depth. John McEnroe without his eruptions would just be another successful player, like Jimmy Connors or Ivan Lendl. It’s not enough to have an impact on the game. You need to cultivate a larger-than-life version of yourself and part of that is certainly an illusion of depth. Naturally, most people remember McEnroe for his fights with referees. But I doubt they know that he invented the serve-andvolley style—serving and then immediately rushing the net. It took the tennis world ten years to realize that a single player had reinvented their game. Ultimately, I would go so far to say that my Chilly Gonzales persona wouldn’t have been possible without John McEnroe as a role model. It’s from him that I learned that reinventing the world of music isn’t enough. I had to wear a bathrobe on stage and yell into every microphone that I am the future of entertainment to make the people understand who I really am. If everybody learned from John McEnroe, we could all become larger than life. ~
EB 1/2015 43
Adi Ulmansky Counting wiTH . . .
Adi Ulmansky’s smorgasbord of hip-hop, electronics and R&B vocal stylings has audiences worldwide jacking to all of her trades. And while the Tel Aviv native’s aqua-colored hair might scream (sea)punk’s not dead, it’s Keith Jarrett that seems to float her boat.
one
memorable line in a song:
“If it brings me to my knees / It’s a bad religion / This unrequited love / To me it’s nothing but a one-man cult / And cyanide in my styrofoam cup / I could never make him love me.” Frank Ocean - “Bad Religion” off channel ORANGE.
happen. When you work hard and see the bigger picture, things start falling into place. --That I can change the world.
six two decisions I regret:
--Part of me regrets the fact that I stopped going to dance classes at the age of fifteen. For better or worse, my moves are self-taught. --Moving away from London. I needed more time to sink my teeth in.
three
hours ago . . .
I was on a plane flying from London to Tel Aviv. I’d just had the most amazing week working on my live show. We built the set from scratch with new songs and different arrangements of older tracks.
seven albums everyone should own:
people that should collaborate: --Frank Ocean and Keith Jarrett --Björk and James Blake --Adi Ulmansky and Chance The Rapper
Keith Jarrett – The Köln Concert Michael Jackson – Bad Tricky – Blowback Earl Sweatshirt – Doris Lauryn Hill – The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill James Blake – James Blake Prince – Purple Rain
four eight After
things I haven’t done yet:
--Traveled to Africa. --Written an optimistic love song. --Played at an Electronic Beats festival (though that’ll be changing soon). --Flown a jet plane—but that’s probably in the best interests of public safety.
five
things I used to believe:
--That the tooth fairy is real. --That I couldn’t make it on my own. --That the world is good at its core. --I used to believe in luck, but I no longer feel the same towards the good stuff that happens to us. It doesn’t just happen—you make it
44 EB 1/2015
p.m.
nine I answer the emails I missed while working in the studio.
My
lives . . .
I’m not a cat but I would love to be a leopard, or perhaps a lioness. For once in my life I would be the strongest one. Also, in another life I would like to be a man. I’d be the perfect gentlemen and compensate for all the shit that girls go through.
ten
I wouldn’t touch it with a -foot pole: Seafood. ~
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
INTERVIEWS
”
Lisa BlAnning meets JAMIE XX
Nothing’s hidden”
As the producer and MPC-drummer behind platinum sellers The xx, Jamie Smith, aka Jamie xx, has been switching between sculpting the band’s stark, indie romanticism and his own club constructions. His reimagining of Gil Scott-Heron’s final studio album I’m New Here—released in 2011 as We’re New Here—hinted at the scope of his vision as an artist. Several singles later, Jamie xx’s debut solo LP In Colour is due out this May via Young Turks and is heavy on UK bass music influences, as well as his trusty steel drum. Lisa Blanning met the modest Brit in Berlin to discuss the rich continuum of British dance music and working with pop stars. Jamie xx, photographed in Berlin by Hans Martin Sewcz.
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
EB 1/2015 49
J Jamie, it’s been interesting hearing your progression as a DJ and listening to your mixes online over the years. As a British producer, how did you feel when you first discovered the impressive lineage of all these different but related kinds of UK dance music, like hardcore rave, jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, garage, dubstep and grime?
It was a long process of learning about it. But when I first went to Plastic People in London, that was quite a moment for me, and I guess the start of discovering a lot of that lineage. It was the first thing that had really grabbed me musically in a long time that was actually new. Because I used to love—and still do, actually—soul and jazz and that sort of thing. I listened to electronic music, but most of it was from the nineties, and it wasn’t really dance music. So, when I was able to go to clubs and hear music like that for the first time, that was the beginning for me. How old were you?
Seventeen. What was it that first grabbed you musically?
Well, Plastic People had the club nights FWD and CDR, so that was mostly dubstep. Mass in Brixton was drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep, and of course DMZ [Digital Mystikz’ club night usually held at Mass]. All that sort of thing. Can you recall any particular epiphanic moments, particularly in regards to DJs?
With DMZ I can’t remember who was playing most of the time, it was just everybody behind the decks. But the atmosphere in there was people in silence listening to the music. Same at Plastic People and at FWD. I went to see Floating Points there early on, and that was very impressive. Did it make you feel connected to something bigger than yourself? Do you see yourself as part of that?
I do now, but I didn’t at the time. These were people that I looked up to. Although I’d been playing records in bars and stuff, I was very removed from that. And I’m very happy to feel like a part of it now. From your mixes over time it sounds to me like something you’ve embraced more. So dubstep was the genre that hooked you, but what about the others?
I think that garage is probably the thing that ties it all together. It’s just fun. And it’s quite a weird era and style, the garage scene. It had this whole culture of going out on the weekends and spending all your money on a night out. It was quite an odd scene and nothing like that had really happened in the UK before. The rest of it—drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, dubstep—was all about dark clubs and head nodding. But garage came out of nowhere and was something 50 EB 1/2015
Jamie xx on the paradox of melancholy vibes: “The best dance music is music that’s sad, but people are dancing to it.”
completely different. I think that’s why it finished so quickly. It never had time to properly grow until recently when it’s been influencing pop music. You also famously sampled Mark Leckey’s art film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which itself is an homage to Britain’s unique club culture. What kind of raver are you when you’re in the club?
[laughs] I guess it’s changed. I feel a bit older now. At the beginning, I just went to listen to music on my own. Because those sorts of clubs like Plastic People are the best places to do that. Then after we got back from the first The xx tour [around 2010], we all started going out and raving. There were a lot of festivals I was DJing at because of the Gil Scott-Heron record. That was a different side of raving, which I find is an interesting thing. All these people are out, trying to have the best time ever. On the surface, it seems like it’s the best time, but really most of the people that are regulars at these sorts of events are going because there’s something missing from their lives. I quite like that idea, and it’s the same with dance music. The best dance music is music that’s sad, but people are dancing to it. It kind of reflects that in the rave scene. And I probably did the same, raved too much in that year that we had off. But it was all a learning experience. That’s an interesting idea—that people are going out regularly because there’s something missing in their lives. What do you think that might be?
I don’t know. But do you think that was one of the reasons that you would go regularly as well?
It did become that for a while, yeah. Because I was playing so much, I was struggling to make music. I just wasn’t in the right mindset. I didn’t have enough time and space on my own to make music. I’d go out instead. It was kind of unstoppable. I wasn’t allowing myself the time or the clear head to be able to make music. But I had a very fun year. I must have been around twenty. I always danced, even when I went on my own. What’s the worst thing about being in a band with your best mates?
They know everything [laughs]. And they can call you out. It’s like nothing’s hidden. But that’s also the best thing. It sounds like you essentially grew up in The xx. Is that accurate?
Definitely. How did that affect your journey into adulthood?
I had the choice between going to university or doing a really crap tour of the UK in the back of a van, and I chose the tour. I’m very happy I did. A lot of people that I know who went to university—
“Garage came out of nowhere and was something completely different. I think that’s why it finished so quickly. It never had time to properly grow until recently when it’s been influencing pop music.” especially to do music—are pretty lost now. And I feel like I’ve learned a lot more than I would have doing that.
What about someone like Gil Scott-Heron? I know you weren’t in the studio together, but surely that experience must have been important.
Do you recall anything specific about growing up while in The xx that made you unusual from the rest of people your age?
Yeah, his music was a part of my life before I got offered to work with him. For some reason, I managed to take the importance out of it, so I could actually make the music. I’m really happy that I could. I don’t think I’d be able to do that now. I’d overthink it. But at the time working with him and getting to meet him and stuff, I was honored. It was incredibly special just being able to sit down with him and chat. We rarely chatted about music. He would just tell stories.
You have to meet so many people and talk and be onstage and develop some sort of persona—that is, if you’re not comfortable on stage, which none of us are. I think that definitely made us become a lot more confident as individuals as well as performers. And I definitely wouldn’t have been like that if I hadn’t had that whole journey. Now at twenty-six, it seems like you’d fall squarely into the “millennial” generational category. The term gets thrown around a lot in the media. There’s a lot of stereotypes, I’m not sure if you’re aware of that or not.
I hadn’t been, really. I don’t know, I’m just as much a part of it as anybody else. The Internet is a big part of what we do, and I feel musically, it was a massive help for us in the beginning. We even got discovered on MySpace. Part of the reason I ask is because you’re now a young adult, and I wanted know what your general feeling is about what’s happening in Britain now. The country about to undergo a general election. You were able to vote at the last election, but maybe you were less aware of stuff then.
Well, I never talk about political stuff in interviews. I don’t think I should be able to influence anybody just because I do music. So I’d rather not talk about it. Fair enough. So it seems like you have a sense of the influence that you might wield.
I don’t know if anybody would care, but when I see people fronting politics via their popularity as a musician, I just don’t really like it. You’ve formed a pretty close working relationship with people like [Spanish house DJ and producer] John Talabot. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned from the older artists that you’ve worked with?
What kind of stories?
Just fun little anecdotes. He talked about his dad. Now I look back on it, and I’m very happy that I was, like, slightly unaware of it all. I’m not sure exactly what I learned—maybe just to try and think less. You mean in the musical process? What’s the alternative? Feeling more?
Yeah. I guess it’s just that whatever comes out is a lot more natural, and less about a concept that you already have in your head. It’s more about enjoying what you’re doing at the time. I can definitely hear that in my music when I’m making something from just the flow of it and the enjoyment, rather than coming into the studio with a specific idea and trying to put it down on paper or the laptop. You’ve met quite a few big pop stars through your work. At this point, you’ve done a track for Alicia Keys, and your track with Gil ScottHeron was used as the basis of the Drake track “Take Care”. I read that you’ve hung out with Drake. Who have you really vibed with?
In that world? I guess with Drake. I would play him lots of UK stuff while he was making the album Take Care, especially. Then he worked with Sampha on Nothing Was the Same, and he loves Jai Paul and all that stuff. But it’s always a weird thing, or it has been so far, working with people like that. There’s just so many people around them, protecting them or protecting their own interests. It’s hard to have a genuine relationship with these people, I’ve found. And that’s why it’s hard to make music with them. So has that put you off working with big pop stars?
I’ve learned a lot about DJing just from watching and listening. I’ve learned so much from John, really, and Kieran [Hebden, aka Four Tet] and Floating Points. Mostly just about records and new tangents of records to go and look for and be excited about. Those are the guys that always get me started on that sort of thing. Even now?
Yeah. I was playing with Kieran on Saturday night, and we took the train together. He was just pulling out all of these records that were amazing. 52 EB 1/2015
Yes. I might do it again, but in a way, doing that made me realize that I really just wanted to do my own record. So I’m happy I did it. But I went from having quite a lot of restraints doing that sort of thing and not even having a say in the final product to just being on my own in the studio, and being able to do whatever I wanted, which is nice. The Gil Scott-Heron album that you refixed, that came out in early 2011. It must have been a huge confidence booster for you.
It was.
How did you know you were ready to make your own solo album?
I didn’t. Up until the end of the summer last year it was still just a collection of music that I’d been making on the road in hotel rooms, or in my little studio whenever I got time to be at home. Some of the music on the record was started three years ago. I was planning to make it into a mixtape, because I wanted to get the music out of my head and out of my laptop, so I could start afresh with the next xx album or whatever the next project was. But then, gradually, the idea formed that it would just be better to put it out as an album. And then I made four or five tracks from scratch when I decided that. One of my favorite tracks on In Colour is “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” with Young Thug and Popcaan. It’s also kind of a stroke of genius to pair them, because their voices sound so good together. But you’re probably the first one to think of that. What’s the sample that you use that provides the track title?
It’s The Persuasions, an a cappella group. That’s a record that I found in Detroit. Thinking back on your previous productions and also your work with The xx, you seem to have an affinity for voices that your productions will complement. What other vocalists are you interested in working with?
At the moment, I’m working on a ballet for the summer. I’ve been collaborating with Okay Kaya, and she’s got a really nice voice. She hasn’t released anything yet, I don’t think. We’ve been doing weird, abstract stuff for this ballet. I’m not, like, a lyrics guy really. It’s much more just about the sound of a voice for me. And maybe that allows me to be a bit freer with the music underneath, because I’m rarely listening to what the song is actually about. It’s been a really diverse group of vocalists you’ve worked with. Is there anything in particular that draws you to these voices? Going from Romy and Oliver in The xx, which was maybe a circumstance thing, to someone like Gil Scott-Heron, whose voice you grew up listening to, and then choosing people like Young Thug and Popcaan, together.
I think that with Gil Scott-Heron and with the “Fiorucci” vocal samples that aren’t sung, I can kind of relate to it a bit more because it’s not sung. There I actually am listening more to the lyrics. The Young Thug/Popcaan thing was more like, I was in New York for a while and we were driving around in cabs listening to [renowned hip-hop radio station] Hot 97. It just inspired me, and I wanted to make a track like that. I’ve been into bashment [Jamaican dancehall] since I did the Adele remix, basically. I got to go to Jamaica with Alicia Keys and went to a sound system, a proper party, and it was amazing. It was very inspiring. So the vocalists I choose don’t really come from one place, one idea or one type of vocalist that I like. It’s more just the things that happen along the journey.
Jamie xx faces the lens of Hans Martin Sewcz. Photo: Johannes Beck.
What about people who maybe are further out of your orbit?
I love Lana Del Rey’s voice. And I worked on some stuff for her last album that never made it. But it’s great to work with her voice. I don’t know what it is about it, but she’s somebody I’d like to keep trying to work with. I can see why it didn’t make the last album. Ultraviolence was so rock. But maybe if she moves away from that, it could work really well.
Yeah, I was really happy with what we did. But she recorded the whole album and then went back and rerecorded it in that rock style. What The xx does tends to be quite moody, which is not the case for your solo work. How do you feel about that contrast between The xx always wearing black all the time and your sound, which is generally sunnier?
I really like that. That’s why my album is called In Colour. It’s like a play on the fact that everybody thinks we’re moody and always dress in black. We do always dress in black, but we’re not moody. We’re quite happy people. That said, I still love sad music. In fact, that’s what I listen to all the time. But I like the contrast between the two in a song. Although a steel pan is quite a tropical, happysounding thing at first, the tone of it can also be quite melancholic at the same time. Gil Scott-Heron passed away pretty soon after you released the collaborative album. I know you weren’t close with him, but you mention growing up listening to his music. What were your thoughts when you heard the news?
It was very strange. I was actually playing at the Primavera festival when he died. I came off stage and everyone told me, which was strange because the last track I’d played was “NY Is Killing Me” from the album we did. It was quite the moment. I guess like everything with that record, it didn’t really sink in until a lot later, the importance of it. And I felt bad that that was the last thing that he’d released, because it wasn’t all him. I just wanted him to have all the respect that he deserved. ~ EB 1/2015 53
Sven von thülen talks to IBEYi
“ Where we
find freedom, they experience scarcity”
The French-Cuban duo Ibeyi, consisting of twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz, are the latest signing to London-based XL Recordings, and, true to the label’s form, are poised to soulfully shake up the pop world. Fusing Latin jazz, traditional Yoruban chants and minimalistic hip-hop production, they follow in the footsteps of their father, the late Buena Vista Social Club percussionist Miguel “Anga” Diaz. Here, Ibeyi explain Yoruban spiritual traditions and optimal forms of sibling communication. Left: Naomi (left) and Lisa-Kaindé of Ibeyi, photographed in Paris by Frank Loriou. Their self-titled debut LP is out now on XL.
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
EB 1/2015 55
C Chanting plays an important role in your music, which hovers somewhere between musical cultures: African, Cuban, American R&B, to name a few. When was the first time you heard chanting? And what does it mean for you? LISA-KAINDÉ: Probably when we were still in our mother’s womb.
She was initiated into the Yoruba religion when she was pregnant with us, and chanting is an important part of that. See, being initiated is a little like getting baptized or like being born a second time. It’s a religious purification process.
NAOMI: It’s a very long ceremony that takes one full week where you
have to take part in different rituals. There are a lot of things you have to do in that week to align and connect yourself—with the gods, for instance. It’s a religion that was brought over to Cuba by slaves from West Africa.
LISA-KAINDÉ: We are initiated in Yoruba, too, as was our father. I am
the daughter of the sea, and Naomi is the daughter of the jungle. But we are not practicing it every day. We are not worshiping or praying a lot. It’s more a way of thinking and seeing life as something mystical and living with the awareness of being connected to something bigger, a bigger force. Like nature, mother earth or the universe at large. Honestly, I don’t believe in gods though. As a religion, Yoruba has also been politicized in Cuba to some extent. Just like other religions in other countries. I don’t like that very much.
NAOMI: Sometimes we write the lyrics with our mother, who is also our manager. Or with our uncle. Well, he’s not actually our uncle, we’re not related by blood, but we still call him that. LISA-KAINDÉ: Sometimes I have a song and lyrics, but I have the
feeling that I haven’t expressed what I wanted to say properly. Then I will play the song to my mother and tell her what I want to say, so she can help me with it. Sometimes she comes up with her own lyrics and I start to make music for them. The same goes for our uncle.
You were born in Cuba but you grew up in Paris . . . LISA-KAINDÉ: Yes, our parents separated when we were very young.
We moved with our mother from Cuba to Paris when we were two years old.
NAOMI: But even in Paris we were surrounded by chants and Yoruba culture . . . LISA-KAINDÉ: . . . because we were attending a lot of ceremonies
and were in choirs.
How often do you go back to Cuba? NAOMI: Once a year. Our family has a house there, and we have a lot of friends in Havana.
NAOMI: Me neither. For me it’s more about knowing that all of nature is alive and that you can communicate with it.
Do you prefer one place over the other? Cuba and France are two very different countries.
So how does a traditional chant end up in one of your songs?
LISA-KAINDÉ: I think we need both to be happy. We’re very differ-
LISA-KAINDÉ: It just happens. It’s usually a very natural process.
“Ghosts” is the only exception: I had this image of an erupting volcano and flowing lava in my head, and then I thought of this Yoruba chant which deals with lava. [starts singing]. But with “River (Oshun Dub)” for instance, I already had the line “Come to your river,” and then I started chanting. Oshun is the goddess of the river, you know. But I never look at Yoruba books for inspiration . . .
NAOMI: [pretends to go through a book] . . . Hmmm, maybe this
one. No, this one?
LISA-KAINDÉ: We know them by heart anyway. That’s why they
come so naturally. I start with some chords, a melody and the rest just comes . . . or not. If it doesn’t come to me, then that’s fine, too. There is no unwritten law that we have to include Yoruba chants in every song. It has to come naturally to me, otherwise it’s not right.
56 EB 1/2015
ent when we’re in Cuba. Naomi always says that she feels more free over there. For me it’s more about my body—it changes. The way I walk for instance. But also my thinking is different.
NAOMI: In Cuba I can live with nothing. We don’t have hot water or electricity in my grandparent’s house, for instance. I like that. But I couldn’t live like that in Paris. LISA-KAINDÉ: Your inner dialogue quiets down in Cuba. You live
more in the moment and you’re not as distracted by things, like the urge to buy clothes. And even if you were, you can’t really go out shopping. We don’t miss the things we cherish about Paris when we’re back in Cuba. Your mind can wander freely there. I guess that’s what you call the “simple life.”
NAOMI: That’s a privilege obviously. For people who live there the situation is very different. We’re lucky enough to have both worlds.
“We are initiated in Yoruba, too, as was our father. I am the daughter of the sea, and Naomi is the daughter of the jungle. But we are not practicing it every day. It’s more a way of thinking and seeing life as something mystical and living with the awareness of being connected to something bigger, a bigger force. Like nature, mother earth or the universe.” Lisa-Kaindé
I imagine you could say that where we find freedom, they experience scarcity.
What happened to the original EP? Was it ever released?
LISA-KAINDÉ: It’s all about being more closely connected to nature.
got in contact with XL Recordings and decided not to put it on the Internet.
If I eat fresh fruit in Cuba, they actually have taste. You can feel the energy. It’s a special place with such a rich culture. At the same time, I love that you can have access to everything within seconds in Paris. You have museums, theatres, music conservatories. It’s easier here to bloom and become successful. You can do everything in Cuba too, but you have to really want it. It forces you to be extra passionate and persistent. You know, our father came from nothing and he became one of the most revered musicians in the world.
Now that the US embargo has partially ended, a lot might change. NAOMI: Well, the majority in Cuba wants change, but at the same
time, a lot of people are scared, too. Let’s see what the future brings. But I think it’s a good thing that the US stopped the embargo after fifty-six years. My friends don’t know what they’re in for, though. They don’t know what capitalism is. They just want to be able to use iPhones, buy clothes, wear gold jewelery and pose like hip-hop stars. LISA-KAINDÉ: No, that’s not what they want. They want the original
American Dream: To be able to build yourself up from nothing and make a lot of money doing it. In Cuba you can be the best doctor in the world, but you’re still going to be poor. Young people in Cuba want something else.
That’s understandable. But do Cubans also see the American Dream as a kind of scam?
LISA-KAINDÉ: No. Just before it was scheduled to be released we
How did you meet Richard Russell from XL? LISA-KAINDÉ: We did a video of us playing “Mama Says” live opening
for Alice Russell, and you can see that the bass drum says “Russell”. When Richard saw it on YouTube, he said: “Let’s sign them.” At least that’s what he told us. We got a call, and he asked if we wanted to meet him. We freaked out. Of course we wanted that. And then we knew . . .
NAOMI: . . . he was the one. LISA-KAINDÉ: Within a month we started recording. It all went very
fast. We were only eighteen years old. I was at university, but I had to quit and then my music school kicked me out, because we were playing too many shows. From then on it was music only. It was really frightening. I cried for two weeks. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a musician. But when I came to the XL studio, I realized, yeah, this is what I’m going to do. Life chose for me. Music was always there, and my father was this amazing musician who toured the world, but I like it calm. I’m a quiet person. I always thought that I would be a music teacher, teach my classes everyday and then just go back home to my family and live a quiet life. That’s something I love. But life chose a different path for me, which isn’t calm at all. I realized the opportunity was like a train that wasn’t going to pass twice.
Did your sound evolve while working with Richard Russell? NAOMI: It’s all very contradictory. I don’t think people are prepared
for capitalism and how it will affect them. Take bus drivers in Havana for instance: If they want to drink a coffee, they stop the bus and go drink a coffee, even if the bus is full with passengers. If you do that in Paris you would get fired immediately. When did you start making music together?
NAOMI: Not so long ago, to be honest. Three years, maybe? Lisa started to write music and one day she told me that she got an offer to release an EP, and I was like: “You’re not going to make an EP without me!” And Lisa said: “No, I won’t.” So we started to work together. It didn’t go so well, at first. We are very, very different in everything we do. So we were fighting the whole time. We still do. LISA-KAINDÉ: But we realized when we went on stage together for the
first time that music is the ideal way for us to communicate.
NAOMI: Yes, a lot. He was a great guide, helping us to explore so many possibilities without telling us what to do and what not do. LISA-KAINDÉ: He definitely changed the way we listen to our
songs and perceive sound in general. We didn’t have a clue about sound. He opened our ears to every little detail. We tend to listen to music like producers now. We didn’t know what an MPC was or any other machine. We just knew that we wanted to produce the music on our own without other musicians and to use electronic elements to combine all the things we love musically: Latin jazz, hip-hop, African music. But we also wanted something organic. Silence is really important to me. I’ve always said that silence is music. I really believe in that. It creates intensity, and music is about balance. It’s all about dynamics. Dynamics in volume is one reason you get goose bumps from music. You want to feel that your spirit is leaving your body through the music. ~ EB 1/2015 57
MAx Dax talks to MARK LECKEY
There’s wood, there’s clay and there’s Samsung” With his 1999 video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a hazy, slow-mo investigation of working-class British dance music history, Mark Leckey went from being an artist’s artist to being a musician’s artist as well. Since then, the 2008 Turner Prize winner has continued to champion the visceral power of music within the arcane discourses of visual art. It’s a position reinforced in his current German retrospective at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, where the lines between parody and pastiche blur together. As Max Dax found out, some sculpture just needs bass. Left: Mark Leckey, the man with a pearl earring. His collab with Florian Hecker, Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera, is out now on PAN. All photos by Frank Bauer.
EB 1/2015 59
M
r. Leckey, you grew up in Liverpool where you started listening to music at a young age. For many, Liverpool is Beatles territory. What’s your first real music memory?
I listened to The Beatles when I was young, but Joy Division really left an impression on me when I was fifteen. There was this kids club at Eric’s Music Hall where groups like Joy Division would play an early show at 5 p.m. for us. I don’t think that there are still bands that would do that nowadays. I doubt it. And besides, the way that music is being produced has changed. Today’s music is being made on touch screens. Even the Roland TB-303 has become a plug-in, amongst others. I think music making has become much more playful than it used to be. And much more accessible. I tried to be in a band after I had seen Joy Division. I had to buy a bass guitar, I had to learn how to play and I had to practice. Nowadays you just buy a Native Instruments Maschine and you kick it off. If I had had a Maschine when I was fifteen I’d have started making music and probably never have become an artist. I was just a lazy kid. Being lazy as a kid is not a sin.
No, it isn’t. It isn’t a sin for an adult either. Making music just felt out of reach for me back then. It felt too complicated. I have a two-year-old daughter. Since she was one and a half she’s been allowed to play with an iPad app where you can create sounds, and she uses it intuitively. I like to believe that these machines—and it sort of started with Roland’s 303—are like cybernetic man-machines that are enchanted somehow. If machines are enchanted, does that mean that the 303 has a soul?
really were the bridge. But as far as I’m concerned the music that is far more present in my work than Kraftwerk is “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder. That’s kind of the beginning for me. Kraftwerk were laying the alchemistic groundwork, and Moroder kicked everything into a whole new dimension. The reason I ask about musical influences is that you recently stated in an interview that music is like a universal language that can be understood by everybody—whereas art seems to have an invisible barrier that keeps a lot of people away from being involved.
That’s still so true. Your art shows a strong affinity towards music, as if you want to build a bigger bridge.
The Victorian literary critic Walter Pater famously said: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” That’s a lovely quote and I use it a lot because it encapsulates it really. There’s something about music that’s ubiquitous. Actually you could say the same about the Internet. It has that same ubiquity and pervasiveness. It basically just goes everywhere. And like you say, art seems much more restricted in that sense. It seems much more institutionalized, and there’s always a lot of context that surrounds it. It’s like you have to enter the ivory tower and to learn the language of art. But I personally think that this is changing. The distribution of images via the Internet has increased so much in the past few years. I hope I’m right when I’m saying that the barriers are breaking down a bit.
I don’t know if it has a “soul.” But I believe in animism. I’d probably say that it has a djinni or a pixie in it. The 303 is enchanted in the sense that it takes control of you. It’s not necessarily an entirely positive relationship between man and machine. It has all these connotations to ideas like letting the music take control or your body being moved by the machine. It’s like the machine found a way to take over your physical body. At least that’s the way I feel about it. Yeah, it’s not a ghost but a djinni.
It seems art is becoming more fashionable than ever before. It’s as if artists have become the new pop stars.
What’s the difference between a ghost and a djinni?
Let’s talk about your video work Pearl Vision from 2012. You once described it as a self-portrait. The video not only shows you playing a shiny, polished Pearl snare drum, but also, in a way, fetishizing it.
A djinni isn’t necessarily dead. You can summon it, like with a machine. A djinni is more magical than it is deathly. A djinni is not from the other side, but it is otherworldly. There are people who say that Kraftwerk are magicians because they work with enchanted machines. Kraftwerk’s music prominently features in your video piece Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.
When I was making Fiorucci, I remember that I was looking for music that was contemporary with whatever image that I was showing. I was a “casual” in the early eighties. And even though casuals were not associated with music since they were not affiliated to a specific music group, I still remember that a lot of casuals were listening to either early Bruce Springsteen or Kraftwerk. Only a bit later everybody was into soul music, innit. Soul as in Northern soul?
No, more like soul as in disco. But I remember when I first heard Kraftwerk I thought they were a novelty robot band. You know, like the band Space who had a huge electro-pop hit with their track “Magic Fly”. They wore astronaut’s suits in their videos. I thought Kraftwerk were of the same kind. Of course, I found out later that Kraftwerk 60 EB 1/2015
Art language kind of reaffirms the boundaries of what is art and what’s not. But if images—or in my case, videos—are being distributed online, then they enter the same field as images produced by people on YouTube and anywhere else. They become kind of flattened out as they all materialize on the same screen. Everything starts to commingle.
That’s obvious. The camera zooms in on the shiny surface of the snare drum and you start to think that the image has been rendered because it’s just so perfect. It’s reminiscent of TV advertising—another universal language.
In fact, a part of the video is indeed rendered. This way, the object becomes more enchanted. It becomes more erotic, too. And let me tell you something: I am playing paradiddles on the snare, but the rhythm is eventually taking me. It is as if the snare is playing me. I’m possessed by the drum—it’s not me possessing it. In that sense, the paradiddle is like a spell or a chant to get this thing to come to life. It’s as if the drum hears you play the paradiddles and it kind of wakes up. And then the drum takes over. Neil Tennant and the German painter Albert Oehlen both say that surface is the essence of pop.
Well, inch by inch I film or render the metal of the silver Pearl drum. Its surface reminded me of Jeff Koons’ silver bunny.
You seem to like Jeff Koons’ work a lot.
Absolutely. One of the reasons why I made Pearl Vision goes back to when I made my film Made in ’Eaven as an homage to Koons. I rendered his bunny and implanted it in a rendering of my then London flat. I then would “film” the bunny in my flat by getting closer and closer with the camera, catching the reflections of the flat. Koons works with a scale that goes beyond human measures. His work reminds me of my first visit to the Sistine Chapel. It’s a scale that’s beyond human comprehension. And that’s what Jeff Koons is doing. This kind of art seems like it appeared rather than it was made. That’s why its perfection mirrors capitalism. Suddenly, there is this perfectly made silver bunny. How the fuck did that thing get made? Of course you know it. But still, if you’re standing in front of the bunny, you remain speechless. You cannot compute what you just saw. The computer can.
And that’s one of the reasons why I use the computer. I can render the bunny and suddenly it’s there. I have it. I own it. I could even print it out. At a certain point the observer realizes that there’s no reflection of the camera in the bunny.
And that’s the connection to Pearl Vision: I made the bunny film so that I could look at it. But even more than that, I made it to have it. I could never afford to buy a real silver bunny from Jeff Koons. In that sense, both films are private. They’re fetish films. And with rendering, you can come even closer to the drum than in reality. The objects on screen seem to be more tangible than real objects. It’s a kind of exaggeration. And that’s exactly what I do—I amplify that confusion. Because I find it confusing to see something on a screen that I want to touch, feel the surface of and reach into. Like in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome?
Exactly like Videodrome. Which relates back to animistic objects: That’s one of the great iconic modern animistic objects, that scene with the TV. And at the same time you purposefully show logos of various brands in you videos. Your Pearl Vision video is obviously named after a brand and prominently features Sony headphones as well. In another video you have a Samsung refrigerator on display. Are you embracing these brands?
It’s less about embracing them. I don’t really have a choice. They’ve already taken my soul. I’m polluted by them. They are like material. There’s wood, there’s clay and there’s Samsung. Sony headphones have become a substance that an artist is allowed to use. Don’t forget that all the stuff I do is in response to the world. It’s not a critique; I just try to find out why things and substances fascinate me. Do you identify with the brands you use in your imagery?
No. Samsung is a multi-national South Korean company that is mysterious and ominous and terrifies me. I mean, they also build military hi-tech stuff like aircrafts and bombs. When I use a stunning looking Samsung refrigerator in my video GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction I’m not celebrating the brand. All I’m doing is an amplification of the way I feel. I am just amplifying my feelings in a cybernetic way rather than in any expressionistic way. Do you think that GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction might have
made a great TV ad? I imagine that’s what Samsung would have thought.
Actually, there was this rumor that the Samsung piece was a kind of guerrilla TV spot. I first showed it at my show in the Serpentine Gallery in London. And apparently at the end of the show Samsung came in and did some kind of a photo call or whatever. They seemed like they wanted to use it somehow for an internal promo, as if their product had been blessed by my art. Obviously that’s very seductive for them. Someone told me when I was drunk, so I can’t really remember the details. But if you look at it in a satirical way, satire eventually becomes reality. You never talked to Samsung?
No, never. I just bought that particular refrigerator, which at that time was the bachelor machine. And by that I mean it in the Duchamp way that it is a machine that doesn’t need any other input from the artist. But, I actually didn’t want to mention Duchamp. Why? Your work to me seems to clearly follow his footsteps. He probably would have used video to film objects. Or bachelor machines.
I could clearly imagine him doing so, although I’d say that Duchamp was always very distant from what he was doing, like it was an intellectual game of art. But I find that really boring. I want art to do the same thing to me that music does to me. There’s a piece in my exhibition that’s called Big Box Statue. It’s a big, functioning sound system and it stands opposite to a big object—originally it was a big statue. When I go to a gallery and am confronted by any big object that I wish to have a response from, I find it very confusing. There’s a lot of noise of what I’m meant to think and the history of the object. Also, I want a genuine response to this thing. But I can’t get it. There’s too much noise in the way. So, instead of me just standing in front of this object, I treat the sculpture with sound. If you want to reduce the noise-to-signal ratio then you have to go sideways. You can’t go directly towards it. So, in order to get a response from Duchamp’s urinal, you’d build up the sound system opposite to it and treat it with extremely low bass frequencies?
Exactly. The geological layers of “what it means” are sometimes just too heavy. You need subsonic bass and ultrasound to get through the core. I got interested in the idea of animism because of my experience with technology and how responsive it was to me. Technology almost seemed to predict my thoughts, to be telepathic. Is that scary or fascinating?
It’s both. It’s that moment of cybernetic feedback where your input into the machine leads to an output from the machine. It’s what I wanted, but still it seems magical. It’s you and it. It’s kind of symbiotic. You can both be terrified by that and fascinated. The bachelor machine is a machine that makes you productive. And my productivity is all I care about. Nothing else matters for me. ~ P. 62 - 63: Leckey taking notes amidst his soundsystem sculptures before the opening of his retrospective Mark Leckey: As If in Munich’s Haus der Kunst. On until May 31, the show spans Leckey’s relatively short but influential fifteen year oeuvre. P. 64 - 65: Leckey lurking amongst his creations. P. 66 - 67: Fashion designer-cum-philosopher Bill Blass famously said red is the ultimate cure for sadness. Maybe only as the color of men’s pleated pants?
EB 1/2015 61
Conversations
Lee Gamble’s breakthrough LP for PAN, Diversions 19941996, famously used the detritus of forgotten jungle tracks to construct a personalized rave history. Seen as a standout moment in a tradition of thoughtful deconstructions of club sounds, the Birmingham native has long been keen on exploring philosophical and scientific concepts as musical organizing principles, from binary code to social engineering. And while on paper, that might sound stuffy and academic, it’s his music’s hallucinatory quality that has people paying attention the world over. The same can be said of English publishing house Urbanomic. Founded by Robin Mackay in 2006, Urbanomic places leading philosophers into freewheeling dialogues with musicians, chefs, mathematicians and artists. Equal parts esoteric and seductive, the publishing house’s Collapse journal has struck chords particularly in the worlds of music and visual art. So it makes sense that in conversation, Gamble and Mackay don’t come across as ivory-tower types; from Britney Spears to the ghosts of dead stars, it’s all subject to synthesis.
Right: Lee Gamble in London. All photos by Robert Simon.
70 EB 1/2015
Lee Gamble talks to Robin MacKay
“You’re already in the realm of hallucination.” Moderated by Mark Smith Robin Mackay: Lee, I’m not sure if
you agree, but I think there’s a lot of great pop music that’s sophisticated and complex. Pop has to continually innovate and open up new kinds of sensation. For a while I was absolutely obsessed with Dr. Luke’s work with Britney Spears, and the early Ke$ha songs; he’s really creating some extraordinary abstractions. We instinctively recognize these songs as “Oh, that’s a girl singing with some guitars and drums,” but the internal mechanics of it are crazily complex. There’s this sealed, polished, artificial skin that makes it seem like a simple pop package, but on the micro scale, its construction is incredibly dense and tweaked in every possible way. I’m sure that takes a lot of thought.
Robin: Producers have concepts,
this oddball aesthetic. It was an expression of horror in something. These distinct sub-genres and concepts bubble up in the social broth like byproducts. I think pop music’s subversive qualities are sometimes underrated and overlooked exactly because of that polished skin you mentioned. Robin: One of my all-time favorite
core, why did that happen in America at that moment?
albums is GZA’s Liquid Swords, which has an atmosphere that’s utterly compelling and coherent. It doesn’t have a “setting”, in the sense of referring to one time or place. It’s an entirely abstract space that involves sound, language, references and sensorimotor qualities. At their height, Wu-Tang had built their own mythology that superposed their lives, the banter of their crew and the microculture they developed just hanging out, onto this sound that RZA developed. Plus, there were the comic books, the gangster and kung-fu movies, and so on that were intertwined with that. From one point of view, those elements are just contingent; it’s the stuff they happened to be into, stuck together with beats. But they made it gel, and it created a whole new reality. Is that a “concept”? I think when things gel like that there’s a consistent concept at work, even if it’s not articulated as such. The points at which those superpositions lock in, the point where it all hangs together—that’s a concept. Liquid Swords is a concept album in the best sense.
Lee: Who knows, but they nailed
Lee: There’s never been a point
Lee Gamble: I’m with you on these
hidden innovations in popular music. What you said got me thinking about that nineties Memphis rap sound. A lot of it is underpinned by a phantasmagorical, horrorfairytale, tales-from-the-crypt type lyricism—these fables of creeping around in the bushes, stalking the streets dressed in rags, whispered vocals, the graveyard imagery; perhaps it’s indicative of America’s fascination with the hyperreal and an imaginary sense of place. Or the presence of a hidden devil?
Robin: Gravediggaz, horror-
where I wanted to literally transcribe something I have read, be it philosophical or otherwise, into a piece of sound design or music. Having said that, I’m constantly motivated by things outside of music. I don’t have any kind of formal musical training, so I look for other ways of organizing sound. For example, I was reading Philip Ball’s Critical Mass while working on the releases I made for Entr’acte, and that book became very important to my mindset. It helped shape how I approached the overall structures of the pieces and the sound design of the individual sounds. even if they aren’t ideas that you can write down as verbal propositions. To create a concept is to carve a new slice through reality. Your record Diversions 1994-1996 is a really startling example. You have these expansive sonic landscapes that introduce drum ‘n’ bass tracks, which you usually wouldn’t hear when a DJ’s playing; because at a rave, you’d rarely hear a track played from the very beginning. On the other hand, for the DJ these intros are kind of an intimate space where you cue up, where you do your work. You’ve taken these in-between spaces and brought them into the foreground, and the tracks are arranged so as to isolate and examine them in a very concentrated way. It’s almost as if you can hear reflective thinking at work in the music itself. It’s quite an achievement arranging sound in such a way that it starts thinking about itself, a fragment of a track reflecting on the history of its genre.
Lee: I’m aware that my music can sometimes seem overly lofty. Sometimes I’m interested in using theory and concept as practical tools to trigger me into making something. I use concepts as guides for myself, but they also provide a framework that can lead people to alter their mode of listening and approach the record in a different way. Robin: I think that artists often have
a vague perception of what they’re interested in. It’s only afterwards that they can extract the concept,
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
give it a name and see how it fits with other ideas that are floating around. Sometimes you experience something new, and it affects the way you organize reality. It takes some work for your brain to adjust. I remember how amazing it was to hear footwork for the first time. It was the first thing I’d heard since jungle where, on the first listen, it just didn’t make sense at all. It actually hurt my brain. And then within a couple of days it’s totally reprogrammed you, and you’re totally into it. Lee: I can vividly remember having an epiphany as a kid when I realized that an atom has a nucleus with electrons orbiting it. My teacher told me that this is pretty much the smallest thing we know. The the solar system sort of works and looks the same, with planets orbiting the Sun. I remember that totally fucking with my head and sitting there thinking “So, are atoms tiny little solar systems, or is the solar system an atom in another physical space?” I don’t think moments of utter bewilderment like that ever leave you. Robin: Listening to some of your
music, especially your record Dutch Tvashar Plumes, is like seeing the light from a dead star.
Lee: I think the analogy to light is spot on, considering the fact that the majority of starlight we see in the night sky isn’t actually there any longer. We look at stars as a type of ghost. They appear as a hallucination, and our ability to understand them as actual things is a mental projection. It’s only due to the vastness of space and the speed of light that we can see them. We’re witnessing time that’s obscured, processed and re-projected to another point and place. It’s exactly that blurring of the moment that’s interesting. Robin: Do you think this reflec-
tive distance in your work is a sign of the times, where what had seemed like the unstoppable force of dance music has reached the end of a cycle? Do you see a sort of hiatus where no one’s really sure what’s next, apart from reprocessing what’s come before?
Lee: I agree with that in a sense, but I also think it’s a tricky argument. We see historical scenes in hindsight, and that helps us to frame them favorably. That said, it’s obvious that there have been surges of great ideas at specific points in the history of electronic music. I think these accelerations can’t be sustained, and more often than not, they’re aligned with the emerging technologies of the time; it’d be wrong to say that people themselves are inherently more or less creative at certain points. There may be peaks and troughs, but I don’t align these to a lack of ideas. Robin: But it seems to me that
there’s no collective project right now in electronic music. Everything appears so fragmented.
“I had the cheapest Mac I could get at the time and worked out ways of crashing the sound engine . . . Now I can’t get the newer and better machines to do it. A raucous digital racket spurting out of your Mac isn’t the image Apple wants, regardless of their slogan ‘Think different.’” Lee Gamble
Lee: There have been points in
puter and no external interfaces, no internal sequencer, no soft synths and no samples. I was playing around with code a bit and exploring what the computer sounded like “in itself”. Rather than using the computer as a vehicle for software that emulates hardware, I was interested in the ones and zeroes, the binary code beneath it all. I had the cheapest Mac I could get at the time and worked out ways of crashing the sound engine. I’d record the sound of the crash and then re-work it. Now I can’t get the newer and better machines to do it. I imagine that any form of crash is seen as a problem by Apple engineers. A raucous digital racket spurting out of your Mac isn’t the image Apple wants, regardless of their slogan “Think different.”
electronic music history where the future seemed welcoming and hopeful. There was trust and curiosity in the future or at least an ability to reconfigure its negative aspects. You can see it in the dystopian techstep of the late nineties or in Afrofuturism’s use of science fiction to explore the possibilities of a black future. A more pragmatic question I’d ask is: If we were to map out these points where we’ve seen particularly fertile periods of creation, are they aligned with similar socio-economic factors and pressures? Are people more likely to create when they have some reason to escape current times, or when they’re more settled? Robin: I would say that a very par-
ticular dynamic characterizes the history of electronic dance music: Engineers have conceptualized music or sound in a certain technical way; because in order to build a machine, you have to structure things, and you have to decide how to organize the materials for processing. But then you’ll have an experimental stage where people are using the tools, exploring the space they open up, testing the boundaries of what can be done and “misusing” the technology.
Lee: This makes me think of the early two thousands when I was making music solely with a com-
Robin: I find these moments some
Top to bottom: Gilles Châtelet’s To Live and Think Like Pigs is essential reading for raging against the neoliberal machine; #ACCELERATE explores the promotion of capitalism’s self-destructive tendencies. Left: Robin Mackay in Truro, UK.
of the most thrilling revelations in respect to how human creativity works, when technical systems and experimentation feed off each other. Look at the way jungle producers abused time-stretching: Instead of using it for subtly correcting errors, they went totally overboard and created an impossible sense of attenuated time. Those early Rufige Kru tracks really felt like time travel. Electronic music has continually drawn out the “surplus value” latent in these machines. Not as a dispassionate exercise, but in order to provoke new sensations. I think at EB 1/2015 73
pose this argument on to many dimensions of society right now. Robin: I was studying at Warwick University during the mid-nineties when jungle and drum and bass were getting very abstract. We had this unofficial renegade group, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which included Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, who was probably one of the last really original philosophers to survive inside a British university. We’d do conferences, and instead of reading an academic paper, we’d read out these blunted, cut-up texts over some dark drum and bass mix. We’d talk about cyberpunk fiction, sci-fi movies and the early days of the Internet; all of that was precisely what we called “abstract culture.” I had a whole philosophical deduction about the transcendental significance of time-stretching! Lee: You can certainly see that lineage passing through the material from your publishing house, Urbanomic.
Above: In Fanged Noumena, philosopher Nick Land gives his obsession with cyber-capitalism and the collapse of Western civilization free reign. What starts as a thrilling reassessment of continental philosophy ends in a sinister storm of cryptic drawings. 74 EB 1/2015
their best, those sensations are something like signposts for those who are inclined to follow them; vectors that point toward future concepts. Lee: Will we continue pushing forward if we’re rehashing famous old tools? Is their surplus value spent? “New” Roland 808s, 303s and ARP Odysseys are being made. How will these remakes be used? For pure replication and repetition? Or will we unearth something fresh? There’s this expectation for
electronic music to be futuristic in its essence, whereas other styles are static by nature. I think futurism in music is at a really intriguing point. Perhaps modern music is sick from the horrors of the real future and is more comfortable re-cranking the wheels of history? Maybe there’s history in the new futurism? What does futuristic music sound like anyhow? I’m confused. Anyhow, I don’t think this is an ailment confined to music. I’m guessing it’d be possible to trans-
Robin: I’ve come into contact with lots of electronic music producers who have an affinity with what Urbanomic is doing, and appreciate how the Collapse series presents the bleeding edge of philosophy. I started the Collapse journal in 2006 out of frustration at the shortcomings of academic philosophy. I still believed that philosophy was important, but in its professional form it’s highly constrained by its institutional setting, and by the battle of egos and marking out of territories that goes with that. The idea was to try and bring together people from different disciplines and practices to create a dialogue on philosophical questions that isn’t limited by those constraints. There was also this vague idea to create an overlapping structure in which people are talking about the same subject but from very different perspectives. Among others, we’ve done volumes of Collapse on horror, geophilosophy, cookery, and most recently, gambling and risk. Each volume produces this structure by connecting up thinkers and practitioners who otherwise would never have encountered one another. On one
side you’ve got a mathematician, on the other side a chef, and they’ve got nothing in common except that they’re connected through this series of other, overlapping pieces by other artists, theorists, and practitioners. It’s a montage. I feel my role is like a film or audio editor, basically. Although Collapse can be a bit dense and forbidding, that’s probably something that’s appealing. A certain audience is excited, rather than scared off by the overwhelming density and complexity. Lee: Sometimes I’m not sure
whether the content in Collapse is pure fabrication. I like the way the publication links things together and forces you to think about them from under a single banner. Things are not quite as they seem, or feel a little uncanny. Whether that’s the intention or whether I’m misunderstanding, I don’t know. It’s not important. Collapse fires my brain in certain directions. I don’t expect to completely understand everything, but that doesn’t stop it from potentially infecting me as an artist. Robin: It’s interesting and really encouraging to hear how the books become part of the creative process; how they “infect” it, as you say. Most of the time, I think philosophers are trying to ignore the signals that you’re talking about because they’re trying to reduce the experience of reading down to a series of propositions, so as to evaluate and judge it. That’s quite right if you’re trying to make some progress in philosophy; but there’s definitely another way of reading on the part of people who don’t have that kind of investment in the material. They pick up these signals that are both conceptual and affective. There are very weird short-circuits that happen sometimes, when words and ideas can become linked with a particular set of sensations, without it being explicable. I think the confusion is absolutely a positive thing. A lot of my own pleasure in putting Collapse together comes from being on the edge of bafflement and everything almost falling apart. Lee: I remember reading Nick Land’s collected essays Fanged Noumena every day for about
ten days when I was on holiday. I would wake up really early, make coffee and read; it became intriguing to frame my day this way. I became a little lost in it, certainly. But in part, the confusion led me to writing a lot during those ten days. Some of this research became very important for me in sculpting and formulating the ideas behind Dutch Tvashar Plumes. There was this out-of-body-like aspect to reading it so intensively. Robin: When you’re working with synthesized sound, you’re already in the realm of hallucination, where you have sounds without sources. Or rather, you have to hypothetically deduce what the sources might be. What’s really exciting for me is when you can’t listen to something without other thought processes locking in, even if they’re only subliminal: What exactly is it that I’m hearing? Why am I choosing to listen to this? What relation does this have to other musical and nonmusical sounds? Is this music, and if not, what is it? Triggering those thought processes isn’t about relaxing the sensory experience; on the contrary, it’s about intensifying it. I only really like music that makes me ask “Why am I listening to this, and what is it?”
“We’d do conferences, and instead of reading an academic paper, we’d read out these blunted, cut-up texts over some dark drum and bass mix. We’d talk about cyberpunk fiction, sci-fi movies, the early days of the Internet; all of that was precisely what we called ‘abstract culture.’ I had a whole philosophical deduction about the transcendental significance of timestretching!” Robin Mackay Lee: It seems to me that we’re in such an intriguing time for philosophy and thought. New political structures, new technological advancements, landing on comets, exploring Mars, developments in robotics; it’s all happening.
Lee: I was intrigued to hear that you’re interested in seeing philosophy escape from it’s professional, academic setting. Robin: I’m for the idea that anyone can engage with philosophy, and that people from different backgrounds and practices can contribute. Yet there has to be an acknowledgement that a lot of pretty smart people have already thought about this stuff before you. There has to be something to test concepts against. No doubt there is a parallel with music: There’s that mad scientist stage of brewing shit up, but there’s also got to be some kind of reckoning as to whether you’ve just ended up making something that sounds like bad ambient techno from 1990. Ultimately the question “Does this add anything new?” is also the question, “Does this open up any kind of interesting conversation with what went before?”
Robin: Yeah, and most of that
Top to bottom: Gamble’s 80mm O!I!O for Entr’acte from 2006 was inspired by social engineering—the influencing of social behaviors and attitudes; 2014’s LP for PAN, Koch, earned gushing praise from none other than Rolling Stone. Go figure.
isn’t being explored in university philosophy departments, that’s for sure! The interesting thing is, who or what is thinking today? Most of these endeavors—robotics, artificial intelligence, space travel, distributed software, telecommunications—are achievements of humans enhanced by technology. Now the human part is increasingly little more than a facilitator for machines working on other machines. On the one hand, the horizons of our knowledge extend beyond anything we could have dreamt of. But on the other, it’s certainly not “knowledge” in the sense in which it would have been understood before the Industrial Revolution. What we know today isn’t contained mostly in the head and certainly not in one person’s head. ~ EB 1/2015 75
Nightfall at a parking lot pimpin’ session in Virgina, as featured in Tina Brown and Dyana Winkler’s upcoming documentary United Skates.
SOUND IN MOTION, Part 2
In our four part series Sound in Motion, we take a look at wheel-based subcultures that have had an especially important relationship to the development of musical subgenres. It goes without saying that ideas surrounding the rolling and cruising experience—from roller skating grooves and the importance of punk, hardcore and hip-hop for skateboarding, to productions tailored specifically to car audio bass—have long permeated pop cultural consciousness. Wheels matter for music, and we’d like to find out how much. Here’s another look at how sound and motion have fed back into each other in the past and continue to do so today.
Essay and Interviews: A.J. Samuels
art 1 of our roller skating special mapped out the historical conditions that led to African-American roller skating communities developing into petri dishes for some of the most important strains of American dance music. Using the role rinks played in some of America’s earliest civil rights battles as a point of departure, I analyzed how the simultaneous replacement of organs with record players in roller rinks became the revolutionary musical motor behind a new African-American skate experience. With the more “sexualized” genres of jazz and blues now defining how revelers rolled, white fear of interracial mingling increased. Hard won access to rinks by African-American protesters would ultimately give way to the unofficial separation of “black” and “white” nights, which still exists to this day. Fatefully however, this also led to rinks becoming central stages for music and entertainment in black communities across America, with regional and cultural insularity leading to the pioneering of unique dance music cultures, from early hip-hop in New York City to Chicago footwork,
Miami bass and crunk in Memphis—all born in and around skate grooves. But what about the most obvious form of roller skating music— songs about skating itself? During the height of the roller disco craze in the late seventies and early eighties, the “thematic” roller skate song underwent a curious evolution, essentially mimicking the disco and boogie tracks already popular in rinks but changing the lyrics so that people really got the skate-themed message and bought the record. Often, however, that tended to miss the point, because while style skaters rely on vocal cues (as both National African American Roller Skate Archives historian Tasha Klusmann explained to me recently and the Bmore club legend DJ KW Griff analyzes in the coming pages), it’s essentially the rhythm section that defines the essence of skate music, with vocals functioning predominantly as punctuation. But nobody told that to Hollywood and major labels. Indeed, from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Rink to Gene Kelly in It’s Only Fair Weather, Hollywood has a long and interesting history of featuring roller skating as a kind of vaudevillian dance
P
The Role of the Rink in Miami Bass, Memphis Crunk and Baltimore Snap
Discover More on this page with the eb.tv App
element (which it once was.) But the film industry’s first serious attempts to cash in on the disco skate fad were with the ultra tacky rom-drams Roller Boogie and Skatetown USA (1979), both of which included similar soundtracks of up-tempo discopop, rock and whitewashed skate-themed songs, e.g. Dave Mason’s “Skatetown U.S.A.”, Cher’s “Hell on Wheels”, Bob Esty’s “The Roller Boogie”, etc. Unsurprisingly, neither
“The music that we brought to the rink wasn’t yet Miami bass. Rather, I created Miami bass in the skating rink.” Luther Campbell
the films nor the music caught on in African-American skate communities, though you could argue that they weren’t the target audience considering their West Coast, partially outdoor
skate scene focus. Either way, both were undeniably rife with cultural appropriation. And yet, Hollywood’s and major labels’ failures had little to do with a lack of authenticity in their product, per se, as the handful of thematic skate jams successful in African-American communities were created by opportunistic musicians attempting to cash in on a fad. It’s just that their results ended up funky. As Vaughan Mason recently told me in a lively phone interview from his home in Baltimore, his greatest roller skating hits emerged from pure capitalistic moxy: “So, I’m working at a stereo store on Trinity Place, about four or five blocks down from the World Trade Center. This is the summer of 1979. I was living on my friend’s couch, and I was making about 125 dollars a week. A friend of mine from Yonkers had just graduated from the Wharton school of business in Pennsylvania, and was telling me about stocks and explaining how money works and all that. He said, ‘Why don’t you just get a Wall Street Journal and watch some penny stocks?’ So here I am riding the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. On the front of the Journal there was an article that said the industry is selling 300,000 pairs of roller skates a month. I said, ‘There’s no way I can go wrong writing a song about roller skating!’” The result was ‘Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll.” Indeed, the lure of scoring a skate hit caught on amongst a variety of artists: The late seventies incarnation of classic doo-wop combo Little Anthony and The Imperials had some success with their skate anthem “Fast Freddie the Roller Disco King”, which featured none other than a young Prince (a known roller skating obsessive) on electric guitar—not that they followed up on it. Other more dubious figures also tried their hand at the rink burner, including the jailed former cult leader and controversial Afrocentric author, Dr. York. His funky, slightly EB 1/2015 77
Left to right: Mark Cooper, original rink owner Glenn “Shake & Bake” Doughty, staff member Ms. Hattie and Norbert Klusmann at Shake & Bake’s opening, 1982.
upbeat Afro-disco skate gem “Shake ‘n’ Skate” from 1981 found a place in sets of AfricanAmerican style skate DJs in the north eastern United States— that is, long before his writings expounding on the evils of the Illuminati were popularized by early nineties rap luminaries like Mobb Deep. Regional hits like Michigan Avenue’s “Roller Skate Cowboy” or Times Square’s “You’re Hot” were groovy outliers for skating communities that made smalltime artists and managers a quick buck, and there were countless others. What many have in common—in contrast to the faster disco-oriented major label fodder—is that they are more like skate “dubs”, groove copies in a sense, with “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” being the best example. Think Chic’s “Good Times” and multiply that by X, with the minor exception being a handful of electro-inspired skate tracks in the early-mid eighties. Inevitably, Hollywood would eventually revisit roller skating, this time in an attempt to appeal to today’s sizeable African-American skate scene amidst a spate of appearances in the mid-2000s by jam skaters in music videos for the likes of Ciara and Missy Elliot, amongst others. However, some style skaters had mixed 78 EB 1/2015
feelings about films such as 2005’s retro skate flick Roll Bounce starring Bow Wow or 2006’s rink drama ATL, starring Atlanta rapper T.I. and Outkast’s Big Boi, and coproduced by TLC’s T-Boz. The latter is based on the significant hip-hop scene surrounding the historical Jellybeans roller rink in Atlanta, where groups such as Outkast, Goodie Mob, TLC, hitmakers Dallas Austin and Jermaine Dupri all hung out and skated in the eighties. For historian Tasha Klusmann, both films come across as somewhat inauthentic representations of the style skate scene, despite the attention paid to detail in the skate choreography. In contrast, national skate party promoters like Donte Doyle see the increased coverage of African-American style skate scenes as a positive development, regardless of the accuracy of Hollywood’s dramatizations. A style skate entrepreneur of sorts, Doyle has invited stars like Bow Wow to make appearances as guest MCs at his skate parties, such as the recent Skate Warz held in Orlando this past November. Musically however, Doyle seemed adamant when I spoke to him about sticking to rink specialists as DJs. And for good reason, as skaters from all
over the U.S. travel to national parties expecting skate DJs to know the rink diaspora’s musical common denominators, as well as understand the different kinds of music played in regional African-American style skate communities: JBs in Chicago; slower R&B grooves for Baltimore style “snap” skaters; Bmore and Philly club for “fast backwards” skaters from New Jersey; house, boogie and disco classics for the New York heads. In that sense, Moodymann’s Detroit-based Soul Skate—often the lone style skate party discussed in dance music circles—is actually something of an anomaly within the national style skate scene, it being pretty much the only time of year when
skaters also roll to big name acts like “Little” Louie Vega or DJ Quik, as opposed to national party DJ regulars like Brooklyn’s beloved DJ Arson or Chicago’s DJ Joe Bowen. That said, Part 2 of Sound in Motion will continue to focus on important American DJs and producers who not only started out in rinks, but made some of their most significant musical contributions in them—both in terms of sound and accompanying dance styles. Read on about how these artist’s genre defining contributions to music were influenced by the groove and smooth, circular roll of one of America’s most underappreciated wheel-based subcultures.
Roll the Bass:
Luther Campbell
on the Importance of Miami’s
T
mo say that Luther Campbell holds a special place in the history of rap music is an understatement, particularly in regards to the larger role he has played in American popular culture. As the musical mastermind behind legendary rap group 2 Live Crew, the South Florida native helped establish the legal precedence of not one but two separate cases of free speech (obscenity and copyright, respectively) that went to the United States Supreme Court. Which is to say the fifty-four-year-old former candidate for mayor of Miami has done more to defend artists’ rights than all the music power lawyers and petabytes of online petitions combined. But before that, Campbell was known as one of the founding fathers of Miami bass, the southern electro-funk subgenre pioneered in the early eighties and devoted to the idollike worship of low frequencies. With his Ghetto Style DJs crew, he made a name for himself battling other Miami sound systems in rented out roller
Roller Rinks
rinks, holding some of the city’s first ever bass parties. It was in the rink that Campbell would first tailor his booming, freshly pressed, 808-driven productions to the moves of skaters and dancers alike. Campbell’s time spent in roller rinks was not uncommon for Miami bass producers. Fellow innovators and rink DJs Maggotron and Magic Mike both emphasized in separate interviews the importance of the rink as a starting point in their respective DJ careers, although neither seemed especially inspired by the skating experience. Campbell, however, spoke passionately about how the rink fed back into the music, sensing the power of controlling both the dances and the skate speeds during his legendary Pac Jam parties at Sunshine Skateway and, later, Superstar Rollertech, together with freestyle music legend Pretty Tony and his Party Style DJs crew. Here, he describes how many of Miami bass’s dances were created in the rink and how skaters responded to the low end.
Skating was a big part of our childhood growing up. When I was about eight years old, I can remember my parents bought me these Union 5 skates, which we strapped on to our shoes. This is some deep down south history, right here. At Hadley Park, on Christmas day, we put on a pair of Levis and a pair of skates and would actually skate around the outside of the local rink. Then we would move on to my elementary school, which we used as an obstacle course: You’d hop over the fence, go down a big hill, climb up some more stairs, hit the corner and crash hard because you played hard. And that is what prepared us to go into the white neighborhoods with our sound systems on Sundays. The first time I ever played inside for skaters was at the Sunshine Skateway in Homestead, which is out in the suburbs. This was in the early eighties and back then, like today, Miami was a very diverse place. I’m from Liberty City, which is about as far as you can get from the suburbs. At the time, not very many rinks let real DJs into the premises, especially African-American DJs, because the rinks around here
“When I discovered 2 Live Crew, it was when I brought them down to perform in a skating rink.” Luther Campbell
were predominantly white. But on Sundays, when the rink was supposedly closed and the white kids were off doing their thing somewhere else, that’s when they let us in to do our thing. This is when we started putting on our first real bass parties for skaters at 199th St. and Rt. 441 in Ft. Lauderdale, which was Gold Coast skating rink. We dubbed
the party Pac Jam, which was named after the teen disco that I had. The title was essentially our slogan: our jams were always packed. The rink owners would be making tons of money when the places were filled with black kids. And for a lot of the people at the party who were from black neighborhoods like Liberty City and Overtown, it was like going out of town for us. But eventually white residents started complaining about all the black people coming to their neighborhoods. It was all kinds of political bullshit. One of the unique things about my party and my crew was that we would create dances. In fact, a lot of the party was about that in particular. The very first dance was the ‘Ghetto Jump’, which we invented, though we never received credit for the track that came later. But that’s another story. See, the parties were so full that we organized it so that people would dance in the middle of the rink, while others skated all along the outside. And along the sides of the rink before you actually got onto the floor, people were dancing as well. ‘Ghetto Jump’ had the whole rink jumping in the air and doing crazy things with their legs. Then we had the ‘Throw the D’ and ‘Throw the P’, which was named after the song that we had at the time with 2 Live Crew and my Ghetto Style DJs crew. At the time, all the dances were done both on skates, in skating groups and with the skates off, as well. What we brought to the rink was a total change of music. This also included the concerts we had there. And the music that we brought to the rink wasn’t yet Miami bass. Rather, I created Miami bass in the skating rink. But there was a lot of electro, hip-hop, Herbie Hancock, Egyptian Lover, Mantronix, sometimes slowed-down, dragging, bass-heavy Kraftwerk and Original Concept. Then there were the real slow jams for couples skating. And there were so many creative skate crews.
The ever-smiling Luther Campbell, photographed in Miami by So-Min Kang.
But in the last hour we always had people take off the skates and turn it into a big ass dance party. Importantly, you always had to tailor the music to people with skates on and skates off. With ‘Throw the P’, ‘Throw the D’ and ‘Ghetto Jump’ you could do all that, and they were all created in rinks for that very reason. What many people don’t understand is that we wanted everyone to be able to skate to the music because skating’s a large part of our history. And the rinks were where our clientele was. This was always taken into serious consideration when DJing and making music. When I discovered 2 Live Crew, it was when I brought them down to perform in a skating rink. The music was fast and electronic. ‘Beatbox’, for example, was perfect to speed skaters up. They would hit the corners hard as hell, with fast tricks. To the slow tracks people were doing real nasty dances along the walls of the rink. The last rink where Ghetto Style DJs played was Superstar Rollertech on 79th Street, which is where I actually first
saw New Edition. They built a stage in there from the beginning, which made it an important part of young, black music culture in Miami. Pretty Tony Butler used to DJ there, and it was owned by football players Nat Moore and Larry Little. It was the first African-American skating rink in South Florida, and Pretty Tony did a great job with the parties at first. In the beginning lines were around the corner. But the violence destroyed everything. When they started losing money, we were called in to help. Not long after, gangs started taking over with shootouts and fights. Of course, Pretty Tony is a great producer and the music he put out on his label Music Specialists is fantastic. He’s the first person I brought 2 Live Crew to to see if he wanted to put out our record, but he turned it down. We used to have legendary battles with his crew Party Down DJs and Disco Rick, who now runs the famous King of Diamonds strip club. In Miami, all this stuff is connected. EB 1/2015 79
KW Griff is both a Baltimore club producer and avid skate DJ/remixer.
From Bmore Club to Snap Style Skating:
KW Griff
Alive
on How Rinks Keep
W
hile in cities like Miami and Memphis many skate moves were emulated on the dance floor after the skates came off, in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, “snap” skating to quiet storm and rare R&B B-sides is pretty much impossible to simulate without wheels. The fast, smooth, inside-outside leg movements have long been the region’s signature style—one which only increases in speed as the music gets slower. Recently, rare groove skate classics have gotten a production update from an unlikely direction, namely Baltimore club legend KW Griff. Baltimore club DJs are, however, no strangers to skating, as fellow club icon Scottie B famously got his start in the city’s now closed Rhythm Skate rink. Not long ago, Griff’s club classic “Bring in The Katz” was rereleased by Night Slugs, though Baltimore’s mid-tempo breakbeat sound has taken a back seat to much of the music it’s helped spawn, namely younger (and currently hipper) siblings Jersey and Philly club. 80 EB 1/2015
the Groove
Meanwhile, Griff has become increasingly interested in skate music production, following an epiphany of sorts in connecting the rare groove records played in rinks and the many obscure R&B cuts in his own massive collection as a radio DJ. Here, he explains his fascination with the Baltimore skate groove, what his production tweaks have done to renew Baltimore’s rink soundtracks and how he came to DJ at the renowned Shake and Bake and Hot Skates roller rinks: My skating experience growing up was occasional. As a teenager I was mainly going to Rosedale, Columbia and Rhythm Skate, and in those rinks, for the sessions I was attending, they were playing more up-tempo dance and electro—Afrika Bambaataa & Soul Sonic Force’s ‘Planet Rock’, Newcleus’s ‘Jam On It’, etc. So that’s what I actually thought skating was all about musically until in later years when I started venturing out and experiencing what was
going on in other rinks. Even back then in Baltimore and some of the surrounding areas, it was clear that different rinks played different types of music during different sessions. Around 2001 is when I started paying attention to music more in the 80, 90 BPM range, which is what skaters in the DMV—District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia—consider their speed for ‘snap’ skating. It’s a smooth but fast type of roll around the rink. It’s not a dance style of skating; there’s no stopping in the middle of a stride and spinning around and all that fancy stuff. DMV snap skaters may do a few little tricks in the middle of the floor but usually it’s a continuous motion around the rink because more than anything it’s about flow. So, around the early 2000s, a friend of mine asked me to stop down at Shake and Bake with him. When I went inside, it was an ‘adult’ evening session and they were playing music I was very surprised to hear: rare George Duke and Barry White B-sides that are obscure to most but classic in certain circles. I had no idea that people skated to this. You see, when some people think of Barry White they think of ‘It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me’ or other hits. But what I heard at the rink wasn’t familiar to the average radio listener, and I had some of these albums. Eventually that led me to become more involved with skating again and, over time, to make roller skating tracks of my own. In making roller skating tracks I take a similar approach to my Baltimore club adaption of ‘Foot Stompin’’: I use these B-side classics, but I don’t really change the essence of the songs. All I want to do is give it a little more bump, adding a few bells and whistles to make it a bit stronger with more hard-edged type beats so it would appeal to younger skaters without taking away what the seasoned skaters enjoy. It’s somewhat similar to, for example, what producer
ShaProStyle from Chicago does with James Brown-inspired tracks, although I didn’t know of ShaPro at the time. It’s actually at some of the national parties during ‘roll call’, when every state has a certain period of time to just go out on the floor and represent their hometown style of skating, that I got to learn about the other types of music that other regions like to skate to. There I discovered the bridge between Baltimore club and skating—that is, other than my skate dub edit of I-Roc-T’s ‘Work Your Body’. For example, North Jersey and Philadelphia ‘fast backwards’ skaters roll to some of the Baltimore club tracks. They basically do it in trio ‘trains’ in reverse along the wall. A lot of the trio music is more up beat, in the 100 BPM range and higher. It’s interesting to me that the DMV skaters you may have seen at the national party last week rolling to house and showing all their different styles and dances and spins, only want to snap to smooth R&B like Barry White and Johnny Gill at home. Which brings me to DMV crowds. Since I started DJing at Shake and Bake and Hot Skates in Baltimore I’ve noticed how the snap skaters appreciate it
“A lot of fascinating remixes you really wouldn’t hear anywhere else but the rink.” KW Griff
when you pay attention to their body language. That’s also what gives you an idea of whether a song works or not, because skaters won’t even have to say anything to you. The body language and vibe of the crowd will tell you. Which is why when I’m listening to different types of
music, I’m thinking, ‘This could be skate-able but it doesn’t have the snares in the right places so it’ll throw them off, but maybe if I redo it I can make it work.’ Actually, as a producer, that’s how I listen to a lot of music. Take for instance, Diana Ross’s ‘Love Hangover’, the remix of which for the rink I call ‘Skate Hangover’. If you listen to the original it would be awkward to skate to because it starts off with a down-tempo interlude in the beginning and then eventually speeds up to a disco pace. I knew it had skate potential, it just needed a bit of tweaking to give it more of a skate appeal. And that’s a good example of how a lot of fascinating remixes you really wouldn’t hear anywhere else but the rink. Back in the day, the classic B-side cuts could only be heard at the rink because at that time only the DJs had them. You would go to the rink because you’d be excited to hear these songs specifically. They weren’t on the radio and they weren’t blasting at parties because it’s not really party-type music like, say, Stephanie Mills’ ‘Starlight’. And that’s what’s special about the vibe in the skate context: It doesn’t matter how many times skaters hear it, they will skate to it. And when they skate, they’re often focused on the song specifically, so they don’t want you as a DJ to mess with it as it’s playing. And I’ve learned that the hard way. Many skaters don’t mind the DJ showing some creativity, but don’t go overboard with excessive scratching, over blending, or cutting songs short, because skating to music is like an art. Take George Duke’s ‘Starting Again’: That’s a prime example where it starts off smooth and gradually builds to a peak almost near the end of the record. If you cut the song too short or don’t let it play out, there’s going to be some upset skaters on the floor. All they want you to do is play the song, plain and simple. Skaters know what part they’re going to skate hardest to, what part they’ll cool down to, and
what part they’ll do a specific move to. Also, skaters love to see the DJ involved and enjoying what they’re doing. You have to imagine yourself out there on that floor and ask yourself, ‘What would I want to hear?’ Baltimore is known for the skaters to roll at a hundred miles an hour, as people say. They’ll be in stride going around really fast, but totally
smooth. Snap skaters even roll at high speeds to slow jams when they’re skating in pairs during ‘couples’, and it amazes a lot of skaters from elsewhere because when you think of slow jams, you think of skating with somebody low speed, doing a little Fred Astaire step or just a slow dance where people happen to have skates on. Not in Baltimore. Here,
when you put on slow jams around 60 to 75 BPM like Chanté Moore’s ‘Listen To My Song’, all you see are people whizzing by you. It just reinforces that if you’re not really in the skate world, you don’t know what’s going on. But as a producer and skater, to me it has a true uniqueness, and being a part of it is a wonderful thing.
Gangsta Boo and DJ Spanish Fly
on Memphis’sCrystal Palace Roller Rink and Early Crunk Sounds and Dances
W
hile producers in New York City in the early eighties often sought out roller rinks to find funky, slower-paced grooves to rap on and b-boys looked to roller skating for smoothness and flow in developing early breakdance moves, further south in Memphis, Tennessee a similar alliance between rap and roller skating was being forged in the city’s famous Crystal Palace roller rink. It was there in the late eighties and early nineties that skate styles were gradually adapted to early manifestations of slower, booming breaks created by rink DJ Spanish Fly and legendary Memphis groups like Three 6 Mafia. As rap historian Mickey Hess describes Crystal
Palace in his fascinating book Hip Hop in America: A Regional Guide, “Sunday nights at the rink were spectacle enough, with pimps, gangstas, pretty women and bad women on wheels. After the skates came off, the dances that had only begun to take shape on the skates came into full fruition on the dance floor.” For rapper Gangsta Boo, aka Lola Mitchell, formerly the only female and youngest member of Three 6 Mafia, much of the music played in Crystal Palace defined the Memphis sound—that is, in between classic boogie and electrofunk skate jams. Here, she is joined by proto-crunk originator Spanish Fly to describe the way Crystal Palace rink
Left to right: DJ Zirk, Gangsta Boo and DJ Spanish Fly on Beale Street.
culture—driven late nights by stoned, ultra-gangsta Memphis rap—spawned the crunk sound and a few of its dances: Gangsta Boo: Me and my best friend and cousin would get dropped off literally every weekend at Crystal Palace growing up. The thing is, I could never really skate, but Crystal Palace was a real combination between skating and a straight up dance party. A lot of the jookin and gangsta walking took place at the rink—mostly with the skates off, but also with the skates on, because the slide and groove fit both, especially when Spanish Fly was playing classics like ‘Trigga Man’. That was a huge skate song in Memphis. The connection between the skating and the dancing was the music, which was made for both. Dance-wise, it was always a question of, ‘What can you do with your skates on? Or what can you do with your skates off?’ It went both ways. Good skaters did it all with both. Spanish Fly ran the rink musically, lots of Zapp and Roger Troutman style bounce stuff, with his own slow, booming rap in between, like ‘Smoking Onion’. That’s really when skaters, and later people there just to dance, would go crazy. And he played his own shit especially to shout out the different hoods
EB 1/2015 81
in Memphis, because especially a country city wants to have their areas shouted out. And he did that with each track: White Haven, North Memphis, South Memphis, everybody. Each song called out a hood. The rink really brought different parts of Memphis together. It was a whole scene of people who met there, which formed the crunk sound. See, Spanish Fly’s sound was slow and gangsta. OG style. With Three 6 Mafia we got into it at Crystal Palace, especially Crunchy [Black] and DJ Paul. Crunchy was always in there dancing. But sometimes the goons would come out there. There was definitely a few shootings. It fit into another song by a Memphis rapper who was there at the time: Scarface Al Kapone. His track ‘Lyrical Drive-By’ was no joke. Memphis isn’t a flashy city, but you gotta show out, which means you had to skate to the music in a cool way. A lot of backwards skating and crisscrossing. There was a lot of coordination between skating and music at Crystal palace. DJ Spanish Fly: I’ve been DJing
DJ Spanish Fly and a few of his heavyweight hip-hop associates, top to bottom: Fly (left) with members of 2 Live Crew at Memphis’s Club No Name; contorting himself into a position of maximum b-boy credibility on a Memphis street corner; arm in arm with MC Serch (left) and Pete Nice of 3rd Bass; in between DJ Paul (left) and Juicy J of newly reunited crunk trailblazers Three 6 Mafia; joining hands with Club No Name DJ Disco Hound and N.W.A.’s own DJ Yella.
82 EB 1/2015
for a long time, starting out when I was a kid in Clementine, which was my neighborhood in South Memphis. Crystal Palace had a very close connection to Memphis schools and my school had a special deal with the rink where every week they would take the kids to skate. Since that time I had a dream to become a DJ at Crystal Palace, so I got to know the manager really good and I ended up getting the job spinning 12-inches. A lot of this stuff was off play lists, like Egyptian Lover’s ‘I Need a Freak’, Vaughan Mason’s ‘Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll’, and some tracks that were a bit more up-tempo, say 120 to 125 BPM. That is, unless you wanted to slow it up. See, different people and groups had different needs. There were tracks for faster skaters, tracks for men, tracks for women. Then, in the end, tracks for everybody. It was often split up. But as a
general matter, Memphis was always about disco and then early hip-hop and electro, and the Crystal Palace owners knew I was a hot jock. So I could tell when skaters would need, say, ‘Set It Off’ by Strafe or ‘Looking for the Perfect Beat’ by Afrika Bambaataa. Not to brag, but I could figure out the pace of the
“My productions really changed the music that people wanted to hear in Crystal Palace.” DJ Spanish Fly
skaters from one or two songs. When I was going to school though, there wasn’t too much electronic stuff or gangsta stuff at the rink. It was a crowd raised on disco. In the very beginning the managers would tell us to cut more gangsta stuff off. But as a teenager I snuck into a bunch of different clubs around Memphis and that’s what really made me into who I am today, and how I became DJ Spanish Fly. At a certain point I left the rink just to DJ illegally in places like Club No Name, where I was actually too young to get in. Then, as I made a name for myself, I would get invited back into the rink for parties and special events, and that’s when they let me play my own tracks which before were way too gangsta. This is also where my peers and then a younger crowd heard my big, slow gangsta stuff. Because they were too young to get into the clubs! My productions, the gangsta walk style music, really changed the music that people wanted to hear in Crystal Palace and how they danced. This is when a lot of people eventually started to take their skates off and dance in the middle of the floor, which is kind of a complicated thing. Let me explain: You have to keep
in mind that the skate referees were the best skaters and they didn’t allow you on the floor in sneakers. That was the number one rule. But when I started playing ‘Trigga Man’, ‘Smoking Onion’, ‘Get Buck’ and songs of that nature, they started to let people into the very inside of the rink, which was a donut hole in the middle with chairs and stuff. But to get inside, you had to go on this ramp and avoid running into people who were cruising by fast. The rink held around five hundred people, and the middle could hold around two hundred people. And the middle was where you could take your skates off and get buck. That’s the real relationship to me between skating and how people danced to my gangsta stuff: gangsta walking looks like people rolling with their skates off. But back then, they didn’t call it gangsta walking. And crunk of course all came from getting buck. Skaters loved my DJ Spanish Fly productions because they were slow and grooved. Crystal Palace was the only real place to get to hear them for younger people, and so that’s why everybody, and I mean everybody, wanted to be there. And there was a lot of parking lot pimpin’ going on, where I would sell my cassettes out of the back of my trunk, where music exchanged hands, where we’d have a little drink, where the dope boys were—all that. It was like a car show. And a lot of cats were gangsta but you didn’t know it. They were just skating, buck jumping, all that. My crowd was the robbers, the killers, the unaccepted. A lot of people buy hip-hop today, but back in the day, the gangstas were the people who bought rap. And rap tapes were hard to find. It was like dope. When people thought roller skate music in Memphis, they thought Spanish Fly. To me, music changes everything. Music is the key. And the rink is a part of my music, like with ‘Trigga Man’ and ‘Trigga Man’s Revenge’. I still think about it, ‘Hop in the Cadillac and roll by the skating rink.’ ~
n° 41 · spring 2015
ONE YEAR FOUR EDITIONS SIX Euros ElEctronic bEatS
ibEYi PEarSon Sound MarK lEcKEY dJ SPaniSh FlY
is for
electronic beats · GONZALES · LEE GAmbLE · SOuNd iN mOtiON ii · GANGStA bOO · tEL-Aviv
convErSationS on ESSEntial iSSuES N° 41 · SPRiNG 2015
Or sen d electr an email t onicb eats@ o or call burda direct (14 ct/ +49 (0)1 .de 8 min fr 0 5-035 om Ge 3 rman 5 4 92 landlin es
“Nothing’s hidden”
; mob ile rate s may
vary
www.electronicbeats.net Jamie XX
WANDERLUST
72 Hours in Tel How artists, activists and cultural producers are dealing with the boycott against Israel. Interviews: HilI Perlson AND A.J. Samuels photos: YULI GORODInSKy
Artificial paradise: A group of recently transplanted palm trees.
Aviv
Often viewed as the uninhibited, secular bubble within a divided Israeli society, Tel Aviv has long been a creative haven for those seeking an escape from the country’s increasing cultural conservatism. These days however, that bubble appears to be running the risk of hardening into a shell of insularity, as an international boycott movement which targets Israeli cultural, academic and governmental institutions gains in popularity. More and more artists are refusing to come, and Tel Aviv’s musicians, bookers and curators are all feeling it. Indeed, some are supporting it. Justly or not, cultural production in Israel, regardless of form or content, has become politicized. Thursday, 12:15 p.m. Editor-in-chief of Haaretz Aluf Benn explains changing demographics. When I was a kid, Tel Aviv was a city of elderly people, many Holocaust survivors, living in old, run-down buildings. Since the early eighties it has become a cultural hub and a magnet for young people from all over the country—that is, as the standard of living improved and people learned how to party and how to drink. There’s this cliché about the Tel Aviv bubble, that Tel Aviv is not like the rest of Israel. But I reject the idea not only because I’m a proud local, but also because it assumes that there is
some other place that is the “real” Israel. Here, there are two extremes: One of which is Jerusalem, where it’s all religion, history, security problems, terrorist attacks, and tension between Israelis and Palestinians and various religions. The other is Tel Aviv, which is supposed to stand for escapism, liberalism, walking around half-naked and partying all the time. But the real Israel is somewhere in between. Shai Agnon, Israel’s only Nobel laureate in literature, and the guy on the old purple fifty-shekel note— his magnum opus was called Only Yesterday. Published in the forties before the establishment of the state of Israel, it’s based on Agnon’s own experience as a young pioneer from Galicia, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire
Right: Female soldiers on a midday stroll through the Neve Tzedek neighborhood in South Tel Aviv, the first Jewish enclave outside of the ancient port of Jaffa.
86 EB 1/2015
EB 1/2015 87
Above: For Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of Haaretz, the international boycott against Israel has not had a significant effect on the country’s economy or cultural landscape—in part because many Israelis view criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism or appeasement.
Above: For freelance curator Leah Abir (left) and the Center for Contemporary Art’s Chen Tamir, navigating the discusssion of the boycott is an extremely complex undertaking. Despite being the first to devote an entire conference to the boycott’s effects on the Israeli art world, they see their personal opinions on the boycott as irrelevant. Right: Tsvia Abarbanel is one of the first Israeli musicians to popularize Yemenite Jewish songs with Arabic lyrics and chanting. Her jazz and psychedelic inspired take on classic Yemenite tunes has recently been rediscovered thanks to the release of her Soul of the East EP on Tel Aviv’s Fortuna Records. 88 EB 1/2015
and of Poland today. He came to Palestine in 1906. At that time there was a small Jewish community here of about 50,000 people. Back then, most inhabitants were Arabs, the rulers were Ottomans and there was a lot of foreign influence—German colonists, American pilgrims, people from all over the place. Agnon recalls the earliest days during the founding of Tel Aviv, more than a hundred years ago. He depicts the city as a center of free love, going to the beach, waking up late, making art, having endless debates about literature, about society. In sharp contrast, Agnon’s Jerusalem was ruled by ultra-orthodox Rabbis who tried to control everyone’s lives. To me, the character of Tel Aviv is deeply rooted in its founding, when there were only a few people on sandy hills along the coast. Now imagine that today there are many more Jews in Israel. It is a Jewish state. The Ottomans are long gone. We went through British rule; we went through different kinds of Israeli governments. And still the basic issue, which Agnon described, remains: How do we reconcile a secular nationalist movement with religion? What should be the role of religion in Zionism? In my opinion, the rise of minorities is the most important variable explaining Israeli society and politics in recent years. There are two strong minorities that are growing demographically, politically and financially. These are ultra-orthodox Jews and Arabic speakers. And what’s common to both minorities is they are not Zionists and for very different reasons. The ultra-orthodox Jews, who are underemployed because they devote their lives to studying Torah, aren’t Zionists for historical reasons. They struggle to preserve their peculiar lifestyle in a closed society and they paradoxically see the army as dangerous because it’s predominantly secular and co-ed. The Arab community is similarly underemployed, but because they’re discriminated against. And most of the Arab community in Israel is exempt from military service because they’re seen as facing the dilemma of fighting against their brothers, sisters and cousins across
our borders. What’s most important to many Arabs in Israel is justice; to be able to put forward their narrative as a counter-narrative to the Israeli mainstream. That narrative is the Nakba, the term describing the forced dislocation of Palestinians in 1948. When I was growing up, it was not a part of the Hebrew dictionary. And now everybody knows what is was. This is a key aspect of a changing Israeli society. See, when I was a kid, nobody actually talked about Zionism explicitly. You got it from your mother’s milk. The fact that the government is trying to draft more ultra-orthodox Jews on the one hand and to put a cap on the political expression of Arab society in Israel on the other means that these two minority groups have more and more power. It’s a fact: Among all first grade students in Israel, half of the kids belong to these groups. Secularism in Israel is shrinking, and a very different society is emerging. I’d like to think Haaretz reflects this change. For example, there is an old expression in Israel, “shooting and crying,” which means that criticizing the military is legitimate only when the war is already over. We don’t believe in that. We think that wartime is the crucial time to publish criticism because that’s when it may have an effect on decision makers. Gideon Levy’s articles criticizing the Israeli Air Force during the war in Gaza in 2014 for killing whole families in their hunt for individual targets was the most discussed piece of journalism published during the war. Levy argued that these pilots are the crème de la crème of Israeli society and were doing the most horrible things. As a result, a couple thousand people canceled their Haaretz subscriptions in protest because they saw themselves, their neighbors or their family members in the pilots. Raising a critical voice at the time was not so simple. At the height of the war, there were right-wingers trying to physically harm left-wing protesters at demonstrations. This group was actually led by a rapper, Yoav Eliasi, known as The Shadow. Of course, outside Israel, people don’t see Israel’s critical view from within. They debate the boycott.
And whether or not you agree with the cultural, academic or financial boycott of Israel, one thing is for sure: People in Israel don’t feel the boycott at all. Especially not in Tel Aviv, where there are already so many things to experience culturally. Most people don’t know what they’re missing. And I think the mainstream in Israel more or less agrees with the government, who portray any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism or as a form of appeasement to the Arabs or the Iranians or Islamists.
Thursday, 5:30 p.m. At the Center for Contemporary Art, Chen Tamir and Leah Abir explain the complexities of the boycott in the Israeli art world. Chen: About a year ago, a few curators organized an informal meeting of art world people to talk about the political situation and the boycott. From that, seven continued working at it. For almost a year, we tried to figure out how to express our thoughts about the boycott against Israel and how it affects our work. Finally, in January, we organized a public conference and published a report. The BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanction] movement’s guidelines for the cultural boycott are quite complicated, so we mostly wanted to shed light on how it worked and its effects on contemporary Israeli art. Leah: The BDS movement was founded in 2005 as a response to a massive marketing campaign by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to brand Israel in a positive light internationally, using culture and academia and other avenues. So essentially it’s a boycott against anything that projects Israel in a positive light or that presents projects that normalize the occupation—say, through exhibitions or events that show Israelis and Palestinians together as if they were equals. BDS is essentially about creating international awareness of the occupation to pressure Israel to end it. The boycott is generally not against individual Israelis. There have been exceptions both in the art world as
EB 1/2015 89
90 EB 1/2015
well as in various academic settings. Chen: The boycott goes beyond official guidelines, though. Lots of artists choose not to come to Israel without explicitly stating why. So the conference opened with a lecture I gave about different kinds of boycotts in the art world. The second part focused on both academic and art projects that were affected by the boycott, like the three-year Liminal Spaces collaboration between the Israeli Center for Digital Art and the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art, which changed as the boycott took form. The third part consisted of lectures and discussions, including speakers like Kobi Snitz, who is from the Israeli pro-BDS organization Boycott From Within, as well as other organizers of the conference. A particularly interesting lecture was given by curator Hila Cohen-Schneiderman titled, “An International Boycott but Not an Arab Boycott”, which put forward the utopian idea of advocating for an international boycott, but not a boycott of Arab work shown inside Israel because our Arab neighbors are exactly the people we need an exchange with. Inevitably, most of the conversation ended up being centered on questions of “What do I think? Am I pro or against the boycott?” But actually, it doesn’t matter at all what we think. The boycott is part of the situation that we have to negotiate. To say “boycott me,” or “don’t boycott me” is almost a way of turning this into a personal situation when, in fact, there’s no room for Israelis to have much say in this. Forming an opinion about the boycott is not something I have the privilege of doing because I’m the one being boycotted. Leah: I think these days there’s definitely more acknowledgement of the boycott within the Israeli art world, too. It wasn’t part of the conversation before, but suddenly it is, especially amongst Israeli cultural producers. Chen: In terms of speaking about the boycott and “taking sides,” it’s a really tricky thing. For me, I had the freedom to organize this conference, write a text, and
have this conversation with my colleagues. But it’s walking a tightrope because I work for two institutions and many of the other speakers work for institutions or will one day. And it’s often unclear as a curator when you’re speaking for yourself and when you’re speaking on behalf of an institution. At the conference, all of us stated that we were speaking for ourselves, which brings me to an important point: There is a kind of atmosphere of McCarthyism happening in Israel at the moment. It’s been getting worse and worse since the last war in Gaza this summer, particularly with artists and cultural producers who’ve had their lives and jobs threatened because of even a trivial expression of sympathy with Gazans or a mild critique of the war. And of course there’s the boycott law that passed in 2011, which says that anyone advocating for a boycott— cultural, academic, financial—can be penalized. I am not sure people have been punished directly, but the threat of having funding pulled for the Nakba film festival held at the Cinematheque here in Tel Aviv or defunding academic projects or films due to the position on the boycott is a definite reality. Leah: After Gaza, everything here became more violent. You were suddenly threatened by people with different opinions. Inside of Israel, the question of funding inevitably leads to questions like: Where do you work? What do you do? With whom do you work? How do you fund your work? Of course, we choose to work here, and we choose to work with institutions, but it’s not about our stance. Chen: That we do address it and actively want to raise awareness says something, too. Not whether we’re pro or against, but that we do want to acknowledge its existence. According to BDS guidelines, in order to not be boycotted you have to formally make a statement against the occupation. This is something that I’m not sure you could do in Israel, being funded by the Ministry of Culture. Just in terms of how the art world is built, it’s very hard to work here without
governmental funding. This is a very small, almost esoteric position, but for our generation in our line of work, this is one of the major questions we’re dealing with.
Friday, 1:20 p.m. Or Magal, Yotam Avni and Daniel Frenkel— bookers of Breakfast Club, Bootleg and Tel Aviv’s premier dark techno party, Avadon. Yotam: For our generation, the Barzilay Club was the first real environment for techno music in Tel Aviv. It was created after a long era of mega clubs that ruled the city, which came to an abrupt end in 2001, when a suicide bombing killed clubbers outside of Dolphinarium, located directly on the beach. The building still hasn’t been restored and there is a large memorial to those who were killed—mostly Russian Israelis. After that, pretty much all the mega clubs in the city shut down. I don’t think you can claim that the bombings alone did the mega clubs in because these kinds of places also shut down all over Europe. That said, the bombing and the second intifada were the main reasons people stopped wanting to congregate in large groups. And the bombing gave my generation a reason to rebel and go underground. The bombing also gave the mayor of Tel Aviv at the time a reason to remove the clubs from the center of the city. Daniel: And that’s why the only big club you have in Tel Aviv, The Block, is not in the city center but rather near the central bus station. As bookers, the boycott against Israel is a very big deal. You know, every DJ we bring over has a different opinion. But mostly it has affected bigger artists who were supposed to come to Tel Aviv. They have to take tons of shit from people who know they’re coming here. Yotam: Which is why we don’t try to do a lot of convincing. Coming from the second generation of bookers, there are plenty of names we wouldn’t even try to
Left: Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market is a whirlwind of sites and smells, mostly mouthwatering, some stomach churning. Everything from fishmongers and kosher butchers to hawkers of homemade dim sum can be found in its maze of stalls.
EB 1/2015 91
book, because we know they have political problems with us. Also because of all the shit they get from BDS supporters. Which is why we tell some of the guys: Don’t post shows on your artist page. Or: Exactly. Come quietly, don’t post—just do it. The important thing is that they are coming even though they take tons of shit for it and have their own dilemma. An amazing example of that happened last summer when the war in Gaza just started. DJs Shifted and Sigha were here . . . Daniel: It was two weeks after the bombing started, on the night when Israeli ground forces went into Gaza. We had a party here in Breakfast Club, and it was the best party we’ve ever had. I remember there were two bomb alarms that went off that day, both before dinnertime. The club was packed and absolutely insane. Yotam: That might seem like escapism, but what was even more escapist for many Israelis was the psychedelic trance scene, which got big partially because of all the soldiers going to Goa after doing 92 EB 1/2015
military service. That was huge here, especially in the nineties. There were massive demonstrations under the motto “Give Trance a Chance” in front of the city hall. Thousands of people came to protest against police brutality at raves. Actually, psychedelic trance was essentially the reason why electronic music had become a commercial thing in Israel, something that people don’t look at, strangely. The protests started right around when Yitzhak Rabin was murdered in 1995. I don’t get it. Psytrance still dominates Israel. It’s huge. Next to military and high-tech start ups, it’s our biggest export. Or: Sigha told me that if he were to boycott Israel, he would be blaming the people living in the country, not the ones who are responsible. It wouldn’t change anything. Essentially the boycott doesn’t seem fair. That said, visiting Tel Aviv is not like coming to Israel. You don’t often feel the full weight of the conflict. Sometimes I have the impression people just want to punish the society in Israel collectively because they don’t believe that there are
Above: A group of Israeli boy and girl scouts congregate in front of Kingdom of Pork, next to Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station. While most Israelis don’t keep kosher, pork is not a common site on menus.
Above: Solomon Mesghenna is the director of the African Refugee Development Center, which provides assistance to Israel’s African refugee population. For some, their plight is related to Israel’s historical policies towards Palestinian refugees.
political views other than that of the government. But I can understand it if somebody refuses to come. Yotam: Well, I think that being born in Israel and living in Tel Aviv from a very early age you have to have a political opinion. People expect us to say things and to have ideas about conflicts. But some of us are not into it. When people ask me about that, I always say: Listen, I was born here and I love music. I didn’t go to the army, and I don’t want to kill anybody. I’m stuck here. The situation is in my backyard. What do you want from me? But sometimes not having a political statement when you’re being asked to have one is a political statement. Everything I do here is a political statement. I also think doing a party during wartime is a political statement. You could also say we do our posters for the Avadon parties in a political way. See, Avadon, our party, means “damnation” in Hebrew, and it’s about darker techno. For example, we just did a party with Ø [Phase] from Token Records where we used an image from the Black September
Organization’s killings of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. For the first party we also used a huge ink stamp for the entrance that has the name of the night and a series of numbers. Abdullah Rashim was the first DJ to play. For me, the black and white stamp with numbers on someone’s arm in Israel is an obvious reference to the Holocaust. I was hoping people would complain and yell, “How can you abuse the Holocaust like that?” And I would say: I can do whatever I want to do with it. Every now and then when people see the graphics for the parties, we get angry messages. And we like it.
Friday, 7:45 p.m. Zack Bar of Fortuna Records talks psychedelia at café Port Said. The Fortuna label was established three years ago as a kind of collective epiphany. Having collected vinyl for a very long time, we realized there was a special thing happening in Israel that dates back to the fifties, sixties and seventies
Above: Journalists at Haaretz headquarters in south Tel Aviv putting together the center-left daily. During the war in Gaza this past summer, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy strongly criticized the actions of the Israeli Air Force, whose “targeted” bombing of Hamas militants also included entire families as collateral damage. As a result, the newspaper experienced a wave of subscription cancellations, and Likud party member Yariv Levin called for the journalist to be put on trial for treason. Levy is also an outspoken supporter of an economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel.
when Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Arab countries immigrated here. These immigrants came to an already Westernized place, which was dominated by American culture. The result of this influx of Iraqi, Moroccan, Yemenite, Turkish, Tunisian, Libyan and Egyptian Jews was definitively an East meets West moment—one that was reflected in the music being recorded at the time. Almost immediately, Sephardic culture fused with Western aesthetics of recording and of musical influence: Arabic folk music met Western jazz, rock, blues and disco. This is what I see as the most essential psychedelic aspect of what we release, because psychedelic music, when it was born in the sixties, conceptually always had a lot to do with Western musicians exploring Eastern culture, instrumentation and sensibilities. What we do is, in many ways, the exact other way around. A great example is our first release by Tsvia Abarbanel, who brilliantly combines Yemenite chants with jazz in strange time signatures. That record was huge
for us and came to be central to our identity. And then we came out with Grazia, who as a sixteen-yearold kid in the seventies made the grooviest Turkish-language funk with seriously pounding drums and lots of far-out Moog sounds. Importantly, we re-release artists like these on vinyl because we reckon they never got the exposure they deserved. But make no mistake: it takes a lot of time, a lot of digging, a lot of buying bad records based merely on interesting album covers to unearth these gems. Also, most of the record labels we contact don’t have the original masters anymore, so finding the artists or the owner of the rights and then clearing those can sometimes seem like a Sisyphean task. And still the actual story behind the music we release is very important to us; we don’t want to just put stuff out, but rather we actually go into detail explaining who the artist is, how the album was recorded and what the circumstances were. So far we’ve only re-released music by Israeli artists, but this is about to change as we have a very special record EB 1/2015 93
Above (left to right): Over drinks at the beloved underground house/techno spot Breakfast Club, bookers Yotam Avni, Or Magal and Daniel Frenkel discuss how they deal with producers and DJs who refuse to come to Israel because of the boycott. While they accept the reasoning behind the decision, they also feel that as Israelis they don’t have a choice. Whatever they do is automatically political.
Above: Fortuna label owner Zack Bar is glad that his psychedelic re-releases, many of which are in Arabic or Turkish language, place Israeli musical culture within the context of the surrounding region of the Levant. The label is named after his grandmother, who is originally from Turkey. Right: At the Anna LouLou bar in Jaffa, Palestinian activist and poet Muhammad Jabali explained the dangers of “normalizing” the Israeli occupation through the promotion of Israel’s more democratic aspects, such as its multi-cultural identity or queer rights. 94 EB 1/2015
coming out by a Lebanese musician named Ihsan Al-Munzer who does psyched-out, upbeat seventies belly-dance music. It’s two tracks only, but it’s a meaty 12-inch. And this is why for me, what we do is about the music. Maybe we’re naive or escapists, but we just don’t tend to think about politics. We’re clearly huge fans of Arabic music, but people perhaps don’t understand that we grew up on this music. Fortuna is the name of my grandmother, who’s from Turkey. It’s not like we release Thai surf music—which, by the way, I love, but it isn’t a part of me or this culture. We’re in the Levant. Beirut is closer to us than Berlin. The music we release is true to this region. For me, it makes perfect sense. As a promoter and DJ I spend a lot of time booking acts from all over the world, so the boycott is something I’m personally confronted with all the time. But I refuse to get into the politics of it. This is a very complex place. I understand artists who prefer to play in Amsterdam or Berlin where it’s just less intense. But Tel Aviv is an amazing city. It’s on 24/7, it’s happening and it’s generally pretty liberal. I feel privileged. And with all the strife and insanity that’s going on around us, we’re still creating. People get along with people, you see. Governments don’t. Artists should come here and find out for themselves. I remember when we booked Gil Scott-Heron a few years ago, he first said yes, but then he had a show in the UK and was confronted by protestors demanding he not come to Israel. Taking into consideration his historical position against Apartheid, he decided it just wasn’t a good idea to play. Unfortunately, now he’s passed away, and we’ll never have the opportunity again. The fact is that people are suffering. But this is where I live. And I deal with people and music. Not politics.
Friday, 11:45 p.m. Activist Muhammad Jabali on the politics of normalization. No matter if you’re a DJ, arrange poetry sessions or just go and vote in Israel, everything here is a
political act. Cultural production in Israel and especially in Tel Aviv is political activism. I grew up in Taybeh, a Palestinian town inside Israeli borders on the Green Line. I went to high school in Nazareth and did my university studies in Jerusalem before becoming a community organizer and political activist in Jaffa-Tel Aviv. As a Palestinian activist vocal on queer issues, I represent something “sexy” to outsiders, signifying “liberal” Palestinian culture in historical Palestine. But queerness for Palestinians is more normal than the sexy topic it’s painted to be. That said, living on the margins of Israeli society and Palestinian society and being exposed to global trends is a powerful point of view— it’s that of a double minority with a wide international network. And queer culture’s infinite interest in liberty makes it a major influence on any society, but especially in Israel, where queer politics are often a form of projecting democratic normality. It’s called pinkwashing. If you look at south Tel Aviv nowadays, you’re looking at New Jaffa, an occupied New Jaffa. Nothing was “invented” in Tel Aviv. If you think about where the nightlife happens in this city, it’s not in Tel Aviv but in historical Jaffa, which is extremely important to emphasize. Take the club The Block: It’s in Levinsky, which was a mixed Jewish and Palestinian neighborhood in historical Jaffa before 1948. The same goes for the nightlife in the Florentine neighborhood, the main Jewish neighborhood in Jaffa before Israel was founded. Until Allenby St. and the Carmel Market you’re talking about historical Jaffa, and this is where people consume culture. If you know history, you know that this is where nightlife existed before 1948. No aliens came from the sky with a space ship and invented “modern” culture. See, culture is a continuous thing. There was “culture” here for centuries, which included global trends. In contrast to the Israeli narrative, this was not all desert until they introduced Western culture. Look, I am not your regular Tel Avivian cultural producer, and including me in this article is a minefield. Actually, I am not a Tel
Avivian cultural producer at all. Because what I see as art is so fucking different than what this city produces. Ninety percent of what I do as an artist and activist is trying to change what Tel Avivian cultural production is. I am trying to reclaim a lost space. I see Tel Aviv as a very complex city. I see it as a colony. Tel Aviv is the major, white embodiment of losing my space. This interview is taking place in historical Palestine. It’s very tricky how to illustrate that I think it’s fucked up that I am the only Palestinian in this piece. Because that ups the risk of portraying the situation here as “normal” just because you talked to a Palestinian, so people in Berlin and anywhere else think the minorities are represented. But portraying Israel as being truly open and multicultural is misleading. This is not a multicultural existence. Israel has had refugees—300,000 of them— for more than seventy years, and yet now the African refugees who came in the past ten years get lots of attention. Don’t get me wrong, I support their plight, but part of why the situation for African immigrants in Israel is so bad is that today, if they were to get asylum, then Palestinian refugees would have to be granted their rights too. These two things are intimately related. This is not Berlin. And this is why the institutional image of Israel as a normal place similar to Europe should be boycotted. I am not talking about individual Israelis, but rather organizations and institutions. A country that puts so much effort into reducing the amount of Palestinians and does its best to study demographics for how to do so should be boycotted. If you look at Israeli society, twenty percent are Palestinians. And forty percent of Israeli society have oriental backgrounds or grew up in Jewish communities within Muslim majorities— Morocco, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, etc. That means sixty percent of Israeli society has very little to do with Europe. But Israel is celebrated as a special place for electronic music or gays and lesbians or whatever appeals to a white Western image. But this is not a Western society. It’s not just made up of European immigrants.
EB 1/2015 95
96 EB 1/2015
The boycott matters. It matters to have a progressive agenda. And people who work in Israeli cultural institutions should see that, even if it means the government then boycotts them. This is all we ask.
Saturday, 11:20 a.m. Artist, teacher and peace activist Dana Wegman on the importance of dialogue. I grew up in Haifa, born to Argentinian parents who immigrated to Israel in the early seventies. After high school I moved to Tel Aviv to study photography, and in 2002, after graduation, I had my first larger solo exhibition in the Haifa Museum. This was during the second intifada, and there were terror attacks and suicide bombings almost every day in Israel. One of the works in my show was about a terrorist who bombs a café, based on a poem by Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. Two weeks after the opening, there was an attack in Haifa at the Matza restaurant. Sixteen people were killed. Among them were two old friends, both Argentinians named Carlos. One of them was my father. Several months after my father’s death, my mother and her husband—my parents were divorced—left for Paris, and my sister and I joined them. I stayed in Europe for three years, mostly in Barcelona. But at some point I realized I had to be in Israel; I became acutely aware of the importance of social activism, and I understood that I can only effect real change if I’m in Israel. Shortly after I returned, I received a scholarship from Musrara, an institute committed to socially engaged, community-based art in Jerusalem, and joined a program called Artists for Social Change. That was the first time everything became connected for me: art, activism, education and initiating projects. Since I returned to Israel alone, I had to find my own identity and reshape my own sense of belonging. That’s how I joined the The Parents Circle-Families Forum, a grassroots organization of Palestinians and Israelis who have lost immediate family
members due to the conflict. If we, the ones who’ve paid the highest price possible, can meet and talk, then anyone can. I first encountered the Forum at what’s called the Alternative Commemoration Ceremony: Once a year, for the past eight years, the Forum and activist group Combatants for Peace have been holding a joint memorial event to commemorate the Israeli and Palestinian victims of the conflict. This memorial service is attended by bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families and accompanied by artists. The people I met there inspired me to take my personal story of bereavement and turn it from a narrative of victimhood to a place where my father’s memory can be part of something heroic. I wanted to work with teenagers, and one year after becoming a member, I became the Youth Manager together with Osama Abu Ayash on the Palestinian side. See, everything in the forum is co-managed by Israelis and Palestinians. One of the organization’s most important activities are the Dialogue Meetings in which an Israeli and a Palestinian, who’ve lost their loved ones, visit schools and tell their stories, and the kids can ask questions. You can see the difference between before and after these meetings: Beforehand, kids commonly say things like, “Kill Arabs!” But after the face-toface meeting, the fears melt away. The kids understand the pain and identify with the person in front of them. Some members on the Palestinian side speak Hebrew and can speak to the kids in their own language. This, importantly, can allow for empathy. Every year, I bring speakers from the Forum to a school where I founded a photography department some six years ago. Importantly, the school is for high-risk youths in the south of Tel Aviv. These kids mostly pose a risk to themselves, but also to others. They need much more attention; they have problems at home and they’re often from working-class Sephardic Jewish families—North African or Middle Eastern—or they are Russian. These are the disenfranchised within Jewish Israeli society. Sadly,
this class divide still exists. But many of the Sephardic kids feel culturally closer to Arabs than to Ashkenazi Jews in terms of culture, food, music and mentality. Of course, their politics are a different story: It’s a deep-seated tradition that the Sephardi will always vote for the Right. If there were no war, the connection to Arab culture for these kids would be easy, especially when you’re Jewish Arab. It’s the politics that puts fear into people. Separately, Osama and I also organize the Forum’s youth summer camp. This year we had to postpone it because of the war in Gaza. But when the camp opened in the fall, one of the most important guidelines was not to compare and compete on the level of fear, pain, difficulty or terror. There have been fewer terrorist attacks in Israel in recent years, so we have decided to open up the camp for Israeli kids who haven’t lost family members. In contrast, many of the Palestinian kids have lost more than one. Still, the camp is a safe place where everyone can express his or her fears; we do not compare. It was important to tell the children to speak and ask questions in a personal manner and not to approach things as “representatives” or speak in general terms. Because our objective is getting to know the other side. We’re not trying to convince one another but to learn. I use art as a tool of connection and creative expression can be an empowering experience for the kids. Non-verbal communication is key because there is no common spoken language here. At the height of the war, for seventy nights, we set up in front of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, where Forum members told their personal stories, and peace lecturers spoke. As a result, we received the prestigious Dror Prize for NGOs promoting peace in Israel. Of course, there were people who came to scream “Traitors!” at us every night. Sometimes we succeeded in getting these people to talk with us. Often we didn’t. But when everything around us is on fire with violence and hate, we continue our path of tolerance and reconciliation, of dialogue in times of war or peace. ~
Above: At club Kuli Alma (Aramaic for “the whole world”), Dana Wegman told us about The Parents CircleFamilies Forum, which brings together Israelis and Palestinians who’ve lost immediate family members to violence.
Above (left to right): Itai Biri and Yaron Amor record under the moniker Deep’a & Biri and are widely considered one of Tel Aviv’s premier techno production teams, having released tracks on International Deejay Gigolo Records and Transmat (amongst others). When Itai was doing his military service typing up work permits near Ramallah, he would sometimes secretly leave the base to DJ with Yaron at the Barzilay parties, which Yaron co-organizes. Itai served a month in military jail for his transgressions. Opposite page (top to bottom): Eritrean immigrants in south Tel Aviv celebrating a baptism; Revelers dancing the night away to Kenny Larkin at Barzilay’s recent ten year anniversary, held at Duplex. EB 1/2015 97
The Future of Bass is in Your Hands Mark Smith: Why are hands the
gateway for feeling sound?
Daniel Büttner: Our hands and
wrists are especially sensitive to touch sensation. It’s not only the number of nerves but how closely the brain “listens” to those nerves. A blind person can read braille through their fingertips and a cellist can feel the subtle vibration of a bowed string. Actually, MIT researchers have recently developed a wristband that lets your entire body feel cold or warm— like an air-conditioner wristwatch. The wrist, as the extension of the hand, exposes vitals, like our pulse, which makes it really quite a unique part of our body. The Basslet works by using a perceptual trick. The brain doesn’t localize the music we hear to any single part of the body. So the Basslet is designed as an extension of
Compressed audio and MP3 players have made music increasingly mobile, but where does that leave the physical sensation of low end? It’s a question that’s guided audio engineers towards the uncharted waters of tactile audio technology. One of the latest developments is the Basslet, a wearable device that sends vibrations into your wrist, inducing bodily hallucinations of bass and musical depth—even with tiny headphones. We asked Daniel Büttner, head of Basslet’s Berlin development team, to fill in the gaps. Interview: Mark Smith Illustration: minus design
what we hear, and the brain happily fills in the perceptual gaps. On the flip side, musicians often aren’t aware of their tactile listening skills when playing an instrument. Laptops and digital instruments don’t have any vibrotactile feedback; they feel completely numb. I discovered that you can’t build an intimate relationship with a laptop as an instrument. Only then did I realize how valuable tactile listening is to music. MS: These days the majority of
musical experiences occur on laptop speakers or budget headphones, especially for younger listeners. Was part of the motivation in developing Basslet related to the disappearance of the physical music experience?
DB: It’s undeniable that the
Walkman, iPod and now smartphones and music streaming enable
us to listen to any track, anywhere at any time. The impact of this technology is more than just convenience; we don’t have to gather in groups at a certain time and place to enjoy music. Suddenly, we have the freedom to enjoy a personal, inner sanctuary experience. We use music to “aestheticize urban space” as renowned sound studies expert Michael Bull describes it. So, yes, the Basslet includes our body in that music experience. It intensifies the music, like a drug minus the side effects. Actually, users have commented that there is a kind of side effect: A feeling of withdrawal after you stop using the Basslet. But there is another cultural analogy to indicate why the physical presence of music is more important to us than ever: In Berlin we go to clubs like Berghain where we get immersed in an ocean of sound. Producers specifically mix their music to work on modern sound systems, with special attention paid to how their music “feels” in a club. That intent is completely lost with normal headphones. The Basslet doesn’t aim to be a Pocket-iBerghain. We are merely after the same overarching goal: To provide a music experience that connects body and mind. MS: How accurate are the sensa-
tions Basslet creates? Can it be used as a production tool? Is this more for consumers or for prosumers?
DB: The Basslet is like a small,
high-precision speaker facing your body, and body perception will quickly tell us if a track has punch or “transients” as we call it in music production—even better than the ears do. Tracks with clarity and space in the bass feel great on the Basslet. Tracks that smush the low frequencies don’t feel as good. Music can lose its punch when stretching a song or adding certain effects. Although losing transients is sometimes hard to hear even for professionals, it’s instantly felt on the skin. ~
ELECTRONIC BEATS #42 out June 19, 2015!
Âť R is for Roland ÂŤ An illustrated book by Tabita Hub Featuring 23 selected Roland machines from 1973 until 1987 that revolutionized the world of electronic music Offering over 300 pages filled with fine art portraits of the machines, detailed insight into the history and scores of artist interviews AvAil Able from April 2 015 in limited edition Presented by Telekom Electronic Beats For further information please visit www.electronicbeats.net www.theanalogrolandorchestra.de
is for