NEW FRONTIERS
dispatches from the outer limits of dance musiC
crossing the line Just how far can you push it? From superclubs in Shanghai, to acid house in India, to making music in Iraq, promoting in Palestine, and risking financial ruin by simply getting a round in; meet the places and the people that are busting the boundaries. Add to that the strange and terrible story of original illustration by andy steward
contents dance music terrorists the KLF, François K’s tour of New York, our selection of the most out-there acts, clubs and artists in dance music, plus the pros and cons of raving in the tenth dimension. And you have the Mixmag New Frontiers issue: pushing dance music forward since 1983.
shanghai klf acid house in india most expensive clubs iraq/palestine/new artists françois K final frontiers of clubbing
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NEW FRONTIERS CHINA
ORIENT EXCESS
The Old Market
Clubbing’s a blast in the space-age city of Shanghai Words Nick Stevenson Photos Davide Bozzetti, Hayden Russell
044 MARCH 2008
Signs o’ the times
CHINA POPULATION 1.3 BILLION
1
1 SHANGHAI: POPULATION 20 MILLION
Flights Return flights to Shanghai start from £436 (www.dialaflight.com). Virgin fly from £454, and Cathay from £520. A direct flight takes around 12 hours. Accomodation If money is no object try The Grand Hyatt, where a grand twin will cost you £155 (www. shanghai.grand.hyatt.com) The new Ucool International hostel costs just £3 a night (www.ucoolchina.com).
Did you spill my Tsingtao?
THE JEWEL IN Shanghai’s clubbing crown is Attica. The 2,500 capacity club is the sister venue to Attica Singapore, and is the first port of call for all of Shanghai’s high-profile visitors. Last week Paris Hilton partied here with MTV; tonight, DJ Aldrin from Singapore’s Zouk is set to play, and tomorrow, ubiquitous housers Hed Kandi are bringing their glitter-sprayed funk to the club. On our tour of the club a couple of things stand out: the lavish restaurant next door; the soundsystem, designed by New York engineer Gary Stuart; the super-slick DJ booth, which has the thickest carpet I’ve ever stood on (I feel guilty for not taking my shoes off); and the dancefloor, with seating and tables spread across it. I’ve often mocked Pacha Ibiza for having more seating than dancing, but here in China the sofas are even invading the dancefloor. It’s midnight, but the clubs here don’t get busy ’til about 1am. Nevertheless, the clubbers who are here are receptive to everything that’s being played, enjoying the tough stuff just as much as the funkier warm-up (although we hear Armin van Buuren cleared the floor here recently – the Chinese aren’t big on breakdowns). We continue our tour, and it’s soon clear that the best has been saved for
Heart to heart at Attica
Teed off
Ministry of Sound comes to Attica
“Yeah, baby!”
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CREDITS
MAYBE I’M DREAMING. I gaze, bleary-eyed, out of the window of the taxi, looking for something – anything – familiar, but I’ve no idea where I am, no sense of what time it is and I can’t understand anything around me. Suddenly I see a face I recognise. It’s the footballer Michael Owen. He’s smiling down at me and showing off his shiny new watch from a huge skyscraper-sized billboard. I wind up the taxi window and rub my eyes. Perhaps I nodded off during the 12hour flight and this is my subconscious playing tricks on me. Why do I keep seeing Sven Väth flashing up on video screens on the back of phone boxes? Why am I in China? This is perhaps the final frontier for adventurous clubbers. Fly a little further, to Australia, and you might as well be clubbing back in London’s Earls Court; drop back a few hours in Thailand and your so called ‘frontier’ is an already well-trodden rave cliché. But the world’s most populous country couldn’t feel further from home. From the moment you arrive your head rolls back to gawp up at the scores of skyscrapers you last saw Tom Cruise jumping from in Mission Impossible 3. What makes Shanghai’s cloud-tickling skyline all the more remarkable is that 20 years ago it didn’t exist. After the communist takeover in
1949, the city was effectively frozen in time. Only in the mid 90s, when communist market policies began to relax, did Shanghai begin to grow again – and at a rate never before seen anywhere on the planet. These days Shanghai has five or six major clubs, many of which take advantage of DJs stopping off here on their way to gigs in Singapore or Sydney. Local clubbers are getting to see just as many headline DJs a week as you would in Leeds or Manchester – hence Sven Väth flashing up on phone boxes and Ferry Corsten, Deep Dish and Carl Cox’s mugs staring back at me as I flick through an indecipherable city-listings magazine.
CREDITS
Shanghai: bright lights, big city
DJ Big One at Attica’s Vanity night WWW.MIXMAG.NET
Having a (glitter) ball MARCH 2008 045
CHINA NEW FRONTIERS
music scenes in China, thanks in part to China’s home-grown hip-hop sound. Like many kids growing up in the shadows of skyscrapers around the world, while few have the money to produce their own dance tracks, many have the ambition and ability to rap. Beyond the nascent hip-hop scene there is no real underground dance movement in Shanghai. There are no dance radio stations; the internet ban on the BBC means they can’t stream Pete Tong on Friday nights, and so unless you catch visiting DJs at the clubs it’s very difficult to hear dance music here There might be 20 million people in Shanghai, but for the few thousand that are into dance music and can afford the lifestyle, it’s high-end clubs like Attica (and a handful of studentoriented nights at Bonbon and Babyface) that make up their underground.
City views at Bar Rouge
The busy Xujiahui district in the French quarter, the best place to buy electronics in Shanghai
“Hello London!” Smoking’s fine in Shanghai; club photography, less welcome...
Gridlock!
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last: the outdoor ‘Playground Terrace’ has the world’s most impressive clubbalcony view (and being a Slinky regular at The Opera House in my early days, I don’t say that lightly). The vast panorama takes in the west and east sides of the Huang Pu river, reflecting the dazzling skyline of the city’s business district; it’s like something straight out of Blade Runner, with its futuristic silhouettes, building-sized TV screens and enough lights and video walls to make Piccadilly Circus look like an energy-saving light bulb. Shanghai, like its proud new skyline, is not a city of moderation but of showing off what you’ve got. As DJ Aldrin bangs out everything from electro to techno, the mix of wealthy locals and ex-pats dance the night away with no care for the money they are spending. They’re dressed in smart club-wear, but trainers and hats are just as popular in the hip-hop room next door. Ex-pats and locals all dance together and at a nearby table I spot a group playing a rather basic-looking drinking game with a dice, some tea and a bottle of whiskey. When clubbers here order Champagne at the bar it’s accompanied by six giant sparklers, just to show everyone else in the club that they’re buying the bubbly. However, I’m under no illusions that this is how most Chinese people spend
“Most of Shanghai’s population can’t afford the hedonistic lifestyle we take for granted” their weekends. Although the door fee a bar staffed with eight people where tonight is a reasonable £8 and, thanks just two would suffice. to heavy sponsorship, the bar is It’s 4am, and an afterparty at a club offering free vodka for the first few called Dragon is suggested. We share hours, the club isn’t packed with locals. a cab with Hui and Zhi who, between That’s because most of Shanghai’s telling us about Ferry Corsten’s set at population can’t afford the hedonistic a club called G Plus last night, fill us in lifestyle we take for granted. “Clubbing on the Shanghai scene. Like most of here is for the wealthy minority; mainly the Chinese we meet on our night out ex-pats, children of the rich and the they are giggly drunk. Shanghai emerging middle class who are clubbers, we’re told, are a fickle employed in white collar jobs, often in bunch and show no particular international companies,” confirms loyalty to any one venue. Since Nick Barham, an ex-pat ad exec taxis are cheap, revellers spend from England. “The average the night darting from venue monthly income is about £150.” to venue. When new nightEven that average is very spots open crowds flock to much skewed by the city’s them, so it takes a lot of burgeoning millionaires. ongoing effort to stop your One reason the wages are so club from emptying out when low is that employment is so the next disco du jour opens. Shanghai’s Cloud Nine high. Everywhere seems One club, called Space, lasted building overstaffed, almost as if jobs for just three weeks before the are invented to keep people city’s attention inevitably busy. It’s not unusual to find shifted elsewhere. WWW.MIXMAG.NET
Attica might be the city’s best, but it’s not the only venue fighting for clubbers. Places like Bonbon, G Plus, Babyface and VIP all hold big nights with big-name guests. We’re tipped off, in hushed tones, that one venue is very antiWesterners. Apparently there is blatant and open drug use, and the owners are worried a Westerner might blow the whistle on the club’s narcotics policy. At £16 a pill or £80 a gram of coke, drugs are expensive, but easy to get hold of. We get asked a few times if we’re ‘OK’ by randoms – none of whom are Chinese. The apparently lax attitude towards drugs is one of the most surprising revelations of this trip. In a communist state you’d expect a totalitarian grip on the city, but when we arrive at Dragon there are no searches, CCTV cameras or even obvious-looking bouncers. Nevertheless, Dragon is no grimy pit of gangsters and buzz-chasers, but a comfy, booming, low-ceilinged basement where the Champagne is still flowing and the crowd are having it full-pelt to electro and house. Wen, a clubber we meet at the bar and whom we spotted earlier dancing alone in the corridor (much to the amusement of a group of girls), tells us about Shanghai’s newest club, an old air-raid shelter named, appropriately enough, Shelter. Shelter’s the place for hip-hop – one of the fastest-growing WWW.MIXMAG.NET
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON I wander around the city’s markets, my hangover not helped by a bombardment of people asking if I want everything from a Gucci watch to a remote-control helicopter. It’s quite daunting, walking around Shanghai on your own. Since the city is so vast and the cabbies don’t speak any English, there’s an overwhelming feeling that if you get lost here, you could be gone forever, lost in the cracks between the monstrous architecture. I take photos of all the major buildings I pass so I can find my way back – like a digital version of Hansel And Gretel. In an internet café I’m happy to discover the rumours concerning the ‘The Great Firewall of China’ are not all true. Although the BBC and YouTube are blocked by government cybercops, MySpace and Facebook are both big. In fact, Attica throws Facebook parties called Face2Face, popular with ex-pats. Shanghai is an incredible city with breathtaking architecture, but as in any foreign country it’s the less obvious things that stand out: people clearing their throats and spitting in the street, dogs nearly always wearing little coats, and more builders running around in hard hats than in the caves of Fraggle Rock. It’s not unusual to get stared at, either; the TV stations here rarely feature non-Asian people, so the only other place locals outside the city centre might see Westerners is on the covers of magazines. Shanghai has always been ahead of its time. It was the first Chinese city to have electric lights, it once had more cars than the rest of China put
Attica’s cosmopolitan crowd
Coal barges on the Huangpu river
Glove story
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NEW FRONTIERS CHINA
Cocktails at Glamour Bar
together and now it has the highest hotel in the world. At the top of the Grand Hyatt is the world’s highest bar, Cloud 9, on the 87th floor. It’s here I bump into Jeremy Healy, who’s playing at Attica in a couple of days’ time. Like us, he’s there to check out the view, but all we can see is cloud (or smog, it’s hard to tell), so we decide to hit some more bars. In the UK, clubs and bars are housed in everything from railway arches to old cinemas, but most of the places we visit in Shanghai start with a lift ride to the top floor of shopping centres or restaurants. Clubs here are status symbols, not organically grown through rave or counter-culture. We leave Glamour Bar for Bar Rouge, a huge, open-plan club, blaring out Samim’s ‘Heater’ to locals and a handful of holidaying South Africans. At the bar, a flyer advertises a CircoLoco night, advising patrons to ‘wear your chicest suit’. Imagine enforcing that dress code at DC10. The next morning I’m on board a cutting-edge Maglev train, propelled by the magnetic track directly to the airport at a friction-free 280mph, high above the seemingly never-ending blur of derelict accommodation and industrial estates. The view makes me realise that while the money invested in Shanghai may mean luxurious clubs and lavish bars the majority of residents will never see them. In the UK, no matter how much money you have or haven’t got, most people can still enjoy clubbing at the weekend. The blaggers, the beer-boys, the liggers, the WAGs and the VIPs all rub shoulders on our dancefloors. Shanghai may be an incredible place to visit for a night out, but sometimes it takes eight time zones to realise just how good you have it back home. For more info: www.attica-shanghai.com
TELL US WHAT YOU THINK AT MIXMAG.NET 048 MARCH 2008
The Old Market – the best place for souvenirs
THE FIRST FRONTIER: SINGAPORE Shanghai’s Attica is the sister club to the original Singapore venue. But just how did that tiny island go from fragile frontier to long-haul destination? ◆ FORGET THE ‘no chewing gum in public’ rule – Singapore is actually no more a strict nanny-state than the UK. “Getting licences for clubs here is easy,” says Attica Singapore’s co-owner Mikey. “There is no red tape like you have in the UK.” Here in Singapore the clubs stay open until the last person leaves, and if you’re not losing yourself in one of its beautiful bars or clubs there’s always the weekly sunset parties which fill the island’s beach bars. Singapore’s nightlife kicked off when superclub Zouk opened back in ’91. Before then, the country’s
four million or so inhabitants just had pop discos and r’n’b bars to go to at weekends. By the time Attica opened in 2004, Singapore had become a global hot-spot for adventurous clubbers looking for winter sun and cheap iPods. Attica is now one of Singapore’s most beautiful nightclubs. Set in the riverside entertainment quarter of Clarke Quay, Attica nestles among other venues including bars from Hed Kandi and Ministry of Sound. Attica’s house soundtrack, elegant setting (courtyard, lounge, outdoor bars and two
floors) and cheap drinks (about £3) make it one of the country’s most sought-after spaces. “We renovate the club every six to eight months, so it always has a new look,” says Mikey. One of the club’s highlights is its pneumatic lighting rig that lowers to near-grabbing distance before opening up like a flower. We’ve heard of booming dancefloors, but blooming...? Despite all this, with a constant flow of international DJs it’s Attica’s music that’s at the forefront. For more information, check out www.attica.com.sg
Singapore’s Attica club is refurbished every six months WWW.MIXMAG.NET
NEW FRONTIERS the klf remembered
burning the house down They were dance music’s most frontier-crashing act, the pop music anarchists who pioneered sampling and ambient
house, spawned The Orb and invented stadium-sized beats. Oh, and they torched a million quid
Words Gavin Herlihy
As the Timelords in 1988
The Orb’s Alex Paterson
Jimmy Cauty in 1992
Tammy Wynette
Dead sheep at the Brit Awards in
Jimmy Cauty (left) and Bill Drummond
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june 1988 time to upgrade As the 1980s pop scene degenerates into a manufactured mess of Kylie and Jason singles, The KLF’s designs for cultural anarchy quicken pace. “We realised the time had come in the history of pop music that anybody could have a number one so we reached out and grabbed it,” Drummond later said. Their ticket is a new alias, The Timelords, and a novelty record that mashes the Doctor Who theme tune with a single from 70s glam rock star Gary Glitter. ‘Doctorin The Tardis’ is so absurdly bad and insanely catchy it naturally goes straight to number one.
1988 house music all night long
1988 always read the manual
With a number one in the bag and an unhealthy amount of criticism for pioneering the then-controversial art of sampling, the pair turn to house music, releasing acid classics like ‘What Time Is Love’ and ‘3am Eternal’ as The KLF (the initials stand for the Kopyright Liberation Front). Jimmy also begins DJing in the second room of Paul Oakenfold’s legendary acid house night Spectrum with friend and former roadie, Alex Paterson. Their sets are all about taking a break from the MDMA adrenalin of the main room, so the pair play music for dancers to chill out to. “Afterwards we’d get told off for driving Jimmy’s police car round Trafalgar Square,” remembers Alex. With its flashing lights and music booming from the stereo the 1968 Ford Gautie film prop was like a “rave on wheels”, prompting clubbers leaving Heaven to dance in streets while passers-by look on bemused.
Insistent on proving the shallowness of the pop industry Drummond and Cauty write The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way) in which they outline a clear path to chart success, foretelling the future of the music business in the process. Nineteen years later the Klaxons claim the book as their inspiration for topping the charts.
roadies thought his Christmas had come early and started picking it all up, we made him throw it all back but he wasn’t happy.”
1990 everybody just chill out
1990 grab the money and run Now established on the rave scene, The KLF are booked to play a Helter Skelter rave in Oxfordshire. Before the gig they painstakingly spend all day writing ‘The KLF Loves you” on 1,000 £1 notes and during their performance throw the notes into the crowd. “I was dancing on the stage watching all this money go down,” says Alex Patterson, “no one had seen it yet and one of the www.mixmag.net
redferns, rex features
Successful record A&R Bill Drummond quits his job to form The KLF with Jimmy Cauty, with the statement: “I will be 33 1/3 years old in September, a time for a revolution in my life.” Cauty was a former illustrator (at 17 he painted the famously trippy Lord of the Rings poster for Athena) and had played bass in pop band Youth. A young NME journo (and future Loaded founder) James Brown makes the JAM’s (the Justified Ancients of MU MU, the name given to the KLF’s first musical alias) debut record ‘All You Need Is Love’ single of the month. ‘The Queen & I’ a single from their debut album 1987 (What the Fuck is Going On) contains uncleared Abba Samples, and is withdrawn after legal threats. Not to be defeated, Drummond and Cauty (or King Boy D and Rockman Rock as they preferred to be known) and Brown take the ferry to Sweden in a US police car full of unsold albums in an attempt to
persuade ABBA otherwise. “It dawned on me we were never going to meet ABBA,” recalls Brown. “They burned some of the albums in a bonfire, gave a gold disc to a prostitute and threw the rest of the albums overboard on the ferry home.”
redferns, rex features
November 1987 Lighting the fire
Cauty and Paterson’s parties give way to The Orb, the partnership that singlehandedly spawns the chill out genre (at the time known as ‘ambient house,’ a term coined by Drummond). “The Orb started as a happy accident,” says Alex. The duo had begun by experimenting with ambient music at Jimmy’s squat in Clapham, Trancentral, but when The Orb are offered an album deal, Alex rejects an offer to absorb the band within the KLF’s label, KLF Communications, and Cauty leaves the band. “The Orb was going to be a backburner for the KLF,” says Alex. “but it was my baby and I wanted to see it grow.” The KLF’s next album ‘Chill Out’, properly kick-starts the genre but doesn’t credit Alex.” www.mixmag.net
october 1990 stadium house As The Orb furrow deep into the ambient scene, the KLF try their hand at producing their own movie ‘The White Room’ which fails to get off the ground. So they invent ‘stadium house’, a genre that combines all the energy of rave with the mass appeal of pop. “What Time Is Love’ goes to number one in the charts, and is an international hit, ‘3am Eternal’ is a UK number one in 1991 and top five in the US. Their coup de grace is ‘Justified And Ancient’ for which the pair travel to Nashville to persuade country diva Tammy Wynnette to sing vocals.
february 1992 ewe what? At the height of their chart fame, the KLF decide enough is enough. Booked to play the Brit Awards, at which they were to be presented the award for Best British Group (later found buried
in a field near Stonehenge), the band decide to exit the music business by performing the most graphically outlandish stunts possible. Extreme Noise Terror, the vegan band who are to share the stage with the KLF, prevent them from executing Bill’s plan to throw buckets of sheep’s blood and dismembered parts over the crowd. At the last minute, Bill opts out of his original plan (to cut his own hand off as a finale) instead firing blank bullets from a live machine gun into the crowd. As they leave the stage, an announcement is made: “the KLF have left the music business” and later that night the KLF dump a dead sheep outside the official Brit awards party (the band’s artwork had exhibited a peculiar obsession with sheep over the years). The next day the papers went ballistic with critics everywhere lambasting them for their “sick performance.” In reality, it’s probably the most punk rock act of rebelliousness by a band who weren’t even punks.
may 1992 press delete The band follow through with their decision to leave the business by deleting their entire back catalogue, an act of career suicide that will deny them millions of pounds of future sales. As usual, Drummond pens the press release: “We have been following a wild and wounded, glum and glorious, shit but shining path these past five years. The last two of which has led us up onto the commercial high ground – we are at a point where the path is about to take a sharp turn from these sunny uplands down into a netherworld of we know not what.” Some claim the act isn’t as reckless as it seems: Bill’s experience in the music business means the band’s record deals are drum tight. Licensees of KLF records in Europe are still able to export records back to England from which the KLF will be awarded royalties, and companies holding stock of KLF records in markets like Japan or MARCH 2008 051
NEW FRONTIERS the klf remembered Burning a million in cash in 1994
Fuelling the financial flames
The KLF’s Last ever performance at the London Barbican in 1997
The last show: 2K are supported by striking Liverpool dockers
january 1993 art attack Bill flees to Mexico before returning with a new concept for cultural rebelliousness. The K Foundation, set up to subvert the art world, ups the ante of the KLF’s pranks. In 1993 controversial artist Rachel Whiteread wins the £20,000 Turner prize. She emerges from the ceremony to find the K Foundation have awarded her “worst artist of the year” and nailed double that amount, £40,000, to a board of skip pine hanging outside the Tate gallery. When the pair threaten to burn the money, she reluctantly accepts it. 052 MARCH 2008
august 1994 million reasons The K Foundation’s next plan, to exhibit a million pounds nailed to a picture frame, is rejected by galleries. Bill and Jimmy decide the ultimate sacrifice to materialism. They board a plane to the Scottish island of Jura and burn one million pounds. “It’s about controlling money because money tends to control you. If you’ve got it, it dictates what you have to do with it. We wanted to be in control,” said a statement. Many question the authenticity of the stunt.
september 1997 the end The KLF’s last performance takes place at the London Barbican, where Cauty and Drummond perform as 2K. The tune is called ‘Fuck The Millennium’. Ahead of their time, as always. All the KLF’s videos are at youtube.com/ user/klfcommunicationsnet
BURNING QUESTIONS Today’s DJs on how the KLF changed everything MYLO “I loved the whole idea of “stadium house” – that instead of just being cool and underground, house music could be something huge, overblown and totally daft. The tunes were great but it was all the self-mythologising that set them apart. And the million quid… did they burn it? Bullshit! Do you really think a Scotsman would burn a million quid?” FREEFORM FIVE’S ANU PILLAI “I admired the way The KLF mixed high art and pranks. Not being afraid to throw different genres together and steal chunks of whatever they wanted was a definite statement back then. I was about 15 and had just bought my first sampler and that kind of attitude was very liberating. But, ambient stuff aside, I didn’t like the music much.”
DANNY HOWELLS “The first time I ever heard the KLF was back in ’87 or ’88 when John Peel played ‘Whitney Joins The JAMs’. I hadn’t quite heard anything like it – quite horrific in a way but absolutely irresistible. My interest dwindled around the time they were appearing on Top Of The Pops. But The ‘Chill Out’ album really drew me back. I’d not experienced a collage of sounds and samples used like that before. From start to finish, it was the ultimate sonic journey. It’s one album that I still listen to on a regular basis and never, ever tire of.” JAMES LAVELLE “The thing I loved about the KLF is that they literally rewrote the book on the record industry.I loved their DIY approach, and the fact they ended it when they did: on a high.”
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redferns, rex features
America are still be able to sell on their stock. Indeed the band are back in the studio two weeks later to record a thrash metal album, ‘The Black Room LP’. It was yet another attempt to piss off their pop fans, but after a week of recording The KLF lose interest and scrap the sessions.
NEW FRONTIERS india
TITLE NEW FRONTIERS
havin’ it raj Most clubs may close at 11.30pm, but acid house has hit India and 1.1 billion people may never be the same again... Words Rahul Verma
054 MARCH 2008
india POPULATION 1.12 billion
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1
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1 mumbai: POPULATION 13 MILlion 2 kolkata: POPULATION 14 MILlion 3 bangalore: POPULATION 5 MILlion
Flights Return flights to Mumbai start at £349 with Air India, £404 with British Airways and £416 with Virgin Atlantic. Flights take around 10 hours direct. Accomodation in Mumbai the Railway Hotel starts from £22 (hotelrailway. com). Alternatively, try the Marriott on Juhu Beach at £178 (marriott.com/bomjw).
A few hundred miles north of Donje in the Gujarat state capital, Baroda, India’s number one DJ, Nasha, is beginning a ceremony of his own. Gradually he’s enticing an all-Indian audience of shy late-teens and early twenty-somethings onto a dancefloor set in the manicured gardens of a smart four-star hotel by incorporating flashes of bhangra and Hindi pop, into a hi-energy, kaleidoscopic mix of trance, house and breaks. A group of fresh-faced guys, in de facto uniforms of tight jeans, bicep-
Clubbers in Hyderabad pop their big fish/little fish cherry
The vocal house fairies dusted her with joy www.mixmag.net
Jalebee Cartel bring the noise www.mixmag.net
Girl talk at Six Month Story in Delhi MARCH 2008 055
camera press, karishma bedi, david mcdonald
DJ Nasha
credits
A raging fire spits and sizzles as a white-robed pundit (a Hindu priest) feeds the dancing flames with clarified butter. Smouldering incense wafts peppery fragrances into the crisp morning air, making the noses of the unusually large congregation twitch. Worried villagers, representatives from cultural organisations and government officials sit on white sheets, heads bowed, repeating the Pundit’s mantras in hushed voices. This is a Havan, a Hindu religious ceremony normally used to bless a new home or the birth of a child. Today, though, the atmosphere is sombre and tense: the purpose is to purify this secluded rural spot, near Donje Village, 30kms from the city of Pune in midWest India, of “evil influences”. A month previously, local police raided a rave on the site. Two hundred and eighty-seven revellers were arrested and their blood tested (the majority later tested positive for cannabis and other drugs). After the ceremony, respected local historian Ninad Bedekar tells the assembled press that the ravers’ actions were “highly objectionable and obscene”. Acid house has arrived in India, and today this mango farm near Donje is the front line in a clash between East and West, tradition and modernity, young and old. Those arrested in Donje, according to the Times Of India, included ‘call
credits
India: home to 1.1 billion
centre and IT firm employees, sons and daughters of affluent businessmen, air hostesses and college students’. In other words, India’s new middle class. The world’s largest democracy (with a population of 1.1 billion – more than one sixth of all the people on the planet) is booming. The country’s expanding middle class is expected to reach 583 million by 2025, and there’s not only a generational but a cultural chasm between these new young Indians and their parents and grandparents. The older generation are generally austere, ascetic (consuming no alcohol or meat), conservative, defer to family and still remember the bloodshed and hunger of the fight for independence from the British Empire. New India, by contrast, has been raised on a diet of Premiership football, Hollywood blockbusters and Friends, earns salaries their parents’ never dreamed of, has an international perspective and often no longer lives at home. The contrast between middle class India (concentrated in the metro cities of Mumbai (Bombay), the capital New Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai (Madras), Kolkata (Calcutta) and Bangalore), with cash to flash on mobile phones, cars, clothes, eating, drinking and dancing, and rural India, where 70 per cent of the country lives without running water, sanitation, electricity and basic healthcare, couldn’t be more stark. Bollywood and cricket are the glue that just about binds the country together.
india NEW FRONTIERS
Her beacon and siren denote a rave emergency
Clubbers at Elevate in New Delhi: not all of India is dry
056 MARCH 2008
“Now India’s going crazy. There’s a new bar or club opening every month” However, when it comes to dance music in India, it’s a case of not running before you can walk – as Ministry Of Sound found when its spectacular Indian franchise opened and shut within six months back in 2007. Smaller venues such as Delhi’s Six Month Story (or Bombay’s recently opened Blue Frog) seem far better placed for success, reflecting the fact that dance music remains a niche hobby, and club culture is in its infancy. After a two-year sojourn in New York, it was Goa, traditionally the centre of dance music in India, that Nasha returned to with his Bass Society night of dubstep and breaks – guests have included New York dubstep MC Juakali, Mary Ann Hobbs and Freq Nasty. It’s Nasha’s second time around: Goa became his sanctuary after becoming frustrated with pushing dance music in Bombay over a decade ago. He quickly became
immersed in the region’s thriving trance scene: “I didn’t come back for four years,” he recalls. “I was clubbing, partying and living trance. I would sell my mixes and party clothes at the flea market in Anjuna – it was a total hippie vibe that was about fun and being on the beach. It was illegal but beautiful: the whole village depended on the full moon parties, and everyone made money – the local organisers, the police being paid off, village ladies selling chai [tea] and villagers selling food, fruit and water as the parties would go on for days.’ Goa is still party central over Christmas and New Year. That’s when half of Bombay descends to live it up, and thousands of tourists, including British-born Asians, Europeans and Antipodeans pile over on budget flights for sun, sea, partying and more. But things have changed. Mindful of gangs attracted by the drug trade and understandably wary of the region www.mixmag.net
karishma bedi
electronic dance music) is alive and kicking in India’s metro cities and in Goa, with venues ranging from superclubs and restaurant-cum-bars to five-star hotels and intimate lounges, all playing anything and everything from minimal to breaks via house and lots of trance. Zenzi, for example, is Mumbai’s focal point for dance music. The club is based in the exclusive suburb of Bandra – home to Bollywood’s A-list – and wouldn’t look out of place in London or New York. Half acts as a pan-Asian restaurant while the other hosts local and international electronica artists and DJs playing house and minimal to a mixture of Bombay scenesters, rich kids who’ve studied abroad, students, models, ex-pats, clued-up tourists and dedicated dance-heads. Deepak Valecha, 24, works for an IT company in Bombay and loves going out alone. “Going to a club isn’t something I do with my friends,” he explains. “They aren’t EDM fans, and if I have converted a few, they still haven’t graduated to clubbing. I prefer going out by myself with no inhibitions, no baggage, just me and the music. I’ve made friends with other EDM clubbers that way, too.” In the capital, New Delhi, superclub Elevate rules the roost, attracting the likes of Sasha and Ferry Corsten.
karishma bedi
accentuating T-shirts and slicked-back hair which mimics their Bollywood heroes, begin dancing. Soon the dancefloor’s heaving: hips thrust, arms pump, legs kick out, brows are beaded with sweat and all you can see are blissful smiles. It’s innocent, fresh and overwhelmingly friendly: I am soon tugged into the middle of a crowd pulsating with the primal urge to dance. This higher state of consciousness evolves naturally, without any ‘assistance’ at all. Gujarat is a dry state meaning alcohol’s prohibited, even for cocky Westerners – something the concierge’s stern shake of the head politely informs us of. It’s a world away from when Nasha began DJing in Bombay 12 years ago. “All we had was 1980s music on vinyl and very few bars and clubs. People weren’t into going out, and partying was only for the very rich,” he recalls, preparing for a gig for Google in Hyderabad. “Now India’s going crazy. There’s a new bar or club opening every month in the metro cities.” Perhaps it’s India’s sheer scale, but sometimes it seems like 20 years’ worth of UK dance music developments are happening all at once at different points across the country. While the countryside clamps down on raves, much like the UK at the dawn of the 90s, dance music (known as ‘EDM’ or
turning into an Indian version of seedy Phuket in Thailand, local authorities have clamped down on illegal parties and introduced zero tolerance for drugs. Big outdoor parties, like the Sunburn festival for 10,000 people and the Anjuna Beats beach party, still go on, but they’re licensed. The rest happens in hotel clubs, in bars, at back-yard parties where you take your own booze. You’d struggle to get away with a full moon party or any kind of unlicensed rave now, not least because the prevalence of mobile phones means the police are never far away. In Goa, acid house has already gone overground. Just like in New York at the turn of the decade, clubs across India are an easy, high-profile target for political point-scoring, whether it’s the state governor, police or government official. Recently, officials in Bangalore introduced a ‘no dance law’ in clubs and bars as part of a clampdown on girly bars, though police have said they will not apply it to proper dance clubs. So in 2008 clubs in Bombay, the home of Bollywood and entertainment capital of India, shut at 1.30am, while in Bangalore the lights go out at 11.30pm. “Ever since club culture has come to the forefront the government has been against it,’ explains Arjun Vagale from Indian electronica band Jalebee Cartel. “India is the birthplace of psychedelic music, and psychedelic music is directly related to drugs, so they feel anything electronic has a drug element. Cops have hit the clubs very hard so the drugs scene has died. Right now Delhi is going through a good phase – the cops check everyone’s IDs so it’s a little rigid, but it works.” The constraints have yet to deter DJs, promoters and, most importantly, ravers. MTV India presenter Nikhil Chinapa’s passion for clubbing and dance music saw him found club night Submerge six years ago. Now he takes Submerge all over India, even to Bangalore. “Sunday clubbing in Bangalore is quite a phenomenon. Our nights start at 7pm; by 9pm the dancefloor is packed and by 11.30pm everyone’s happy to go home. The club makes more money on Sunday than any other night of the week. Now there are at least six venues in Bangalore doing Sunday club nights,” he says. As well as Submerge, the website for which has become a one-stop virtual shop for Indian dance music, Nikhil’s also the main man behind Sunburn, India’s largest dance music festival. www.mixmag.net
The 10,000-capacity, two-day event welcomed familiar names such as Carl Cox, Axwell, Above & Beyond, Pete Gooding and Simon Dunmore, and Indian DJs including Nikhil, Pearl, and Nasha plus electronic acts such as Jalebee Cartel and MIDIval Punditz to a beach in Goa between Christmas and New Year 2007. With Sunburn, Nikhil’s taken Goa’s licensing and time restrictions in his stride: “We did Sunburn with the blessing of Goa’s government. We had to work around a Supreme Court Directive that there would be no loud music after 11.30pm outdoors, even if you’re on a remote hill with no-one around for 100 miles. That’s why Sunburn is a daytime festival.” Twenty-one-year-old Neha, who works for global investment bank Goldman Sachs and lives in Bangalore with her parents, is anything but put off by the city’s 11.30pm curfew. “I go out sometimes twice a week – we’re dancing from 8pm to 11.30pm,” she explains. “Other cities start around 10pm or 11pm and go on until about 3am, so the timeframe works out to be the same, give or take an hour. On any given Sunday there are about four to five hundred people at the club. My parents aren’t anti-dance music – they don’t mind as long as I’m not doing drugs, becoming an alcoholic, or bringing random men home.” Euan Moore, a 21-year-old student from Chennai (or “Chen-high” as he calls it), goes out twice a month and prefers the early closing times: “I’d rather clubs shut early because the night always ends on a high, leaving people screaming for more. That’s what makes people come back.” Perhaps the main reason behind the rise of dance music in India is one that all the Havan ceremonies in the world will struggle to overcome. Cold hard cash, in the form of companies sponsoring events and festivals in the hope of getting their hands on the markets caused by India’s economic growth, will smooth dance music’s transition from underground to mainstream. But there’s something else too, something even more unstoppable. It’s a phrase you’ll hear in the UK and across the world from Baltimore to Berlin: “I love losing myself in the music,” says Neha, “and dancing the night away.” There goes the neighbourhood... tell us what you think at mixmag.net
Jalebee Cartel Six Month Story: more than a flash in the pan
Mass arm elevation at Elevate MARCH 2008 057
NEW FRONTIERS expensive clubs
the financial frontier They say that the most important words to learn in any foreign language are “The gentleman over there will pay.”
Worth breaking out the dictionary if you are visiting any of these, the world’s most expensive clubs
Words Sarah Marshall
billionaire club, sardinia
The Billionaire boys’ club
blush, las vegas, us
When Formula One manager
“Even oligarchs need time to
rest,” says Maria Katko of Russia’s ◆ most notoriously elitist club. After a stressful day bumping off journos and bribing government officials, Moscow’s upper class bathe in buckets of Cristal champagne and dance on £750 a night tables at this disco. In a city famed for its savage face control (if it don’t fit: ‘Niet’), only the rich, beautiful and famous stand a chance of admittance. Head picker Pasha has even had a hit song written about him by a Russion hip hop band – though whether this got them in the next weekend is debatable. Allegedly even a cousin of Prince Charles was once 058 MARCH 2008
turned away. Arrive in a sports car with a string of models in tow and you might stand a chance. Once inside, guests are treated to a catwalk show and elaborate performances involving seven-foot drag queens, trapeze artists, bikini-clad robots and a snowstorm of confetti. Elizabeth Hurley, Shakira and Naomi Campbell have all graced the dancefloor. The super-rich can even reserve a £10,000 VIP box. Bargain. Oddly, the toilets are French-style holes in the ground and cost 30 roubles (60p), proving that even oligarchs don’t dump gold. Entry cost Entry is free, but the door policy is fierce. Reserving a table costs between £750-£7,500 Drinks A gin and tonic is £13 Is it any good? Not really, it’s full of fat Russians
Money flows like tap water in Las Vegas and the strip’s first ◆ “boutique club” attracts most of the
‘Billionaire’, he had exactly one type of clientele in mind. The silver-haired playboy describes his pad as “a place where, even if people aren’t billionaires, they can spend like billionaires”. He isn’t joking: dinner alone will set you back £7,600. To up the ante, Briatore even randomly turns away famous faces: Bruce Willis was kicked out for refusing to pose for a photograph, while a member of the Italian national football team was refused entry for not wearing a proper shirt. But Briatore does have the upper class’s interests at heart. He recently staged a protest against a new yacht tax in his club. And in an act of admirable narcissism the Flav also has movies of himself playing on flat screens around the place. Entry cost £36 – but don’t even bother unless you’re gorgeous and female. “A solo man? Impossible,” says Briatore Drinks It costs £125 just to reserve a table, so don’t expect happy hour Is it any good? With fist fights between models and fashion designers flashing their breasts, it sounds like a party to us
big spenders. Part of the Wynn hotel, Blush is also attached to a casino and restaurant. Guests lounge on plush couches underneath a ceiling decorated with 300 individual colourchanging lanterns, while the more energetic opt to shake their milliondollar bootys on a dancefloor made of lit onyx. Other touches include VIP purse lockers, TVs by the bar and a separate area in the lavs for ladies to powder their nose. Resident DJ Mighty Mi plays a predicatable mix of rock ’n’ roll, hip hop and house, but no-one could really give a diamond studded Rolex what’s blaring from the speakers. “You’re paying for prime real estate, for a desirable spot that everyone else wants,” says manager Sean Christie. Whenever anyone orders an expensive bottle the DJ spins the theme from Rocky or Mission Impossible. Classy. Entry cost £15, although £25 buys you a front-of-line pass Drinks A bottle of vodka costs £240. But if you don’t finish your bottle the club will look after it for a week Is it any good? If Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are in town, the chances of an entertaining night increase
Bob Sinclar: hoping he doesn’t have to pay for his own drinks
jimmy’z monte carlo, monaco You don’t have to be a grand prix rally driver or a supermodel ◆ to get into Monaco’s premier night-spot, but it helps. Nestled between the French and Italian Rivieras, this is where the European jet set spend their summers. A bottle of water is £18 in this place. Entry cost Free – but it’s about the only thing that is Drinks Cocktails cost over £20 each and beers are £16. Is it any good? The eye candy is fantastic, but unless you have a Platinum Amex don’t bother
movida, london, UK
Blush: you will at their prices
les caves du roy, st tropez, france
lotus, sao paulo, brazil
Movida is a playground for ◆ London’s rich, royal and wannabe
A regular in the tabloids,
Everyone from Beyoncé to the Beckhams hits the Cote D’Azur in ◆ July. If they aren’t partying on P Diddy’s
Any club that boasts aeronautical positioning for ◆ guests arriving by helicopter isn’t
famous. This is the club responsible for the world’s most expensive cocktail, which includes cognac, champagne, 24-carat edible gold leaf and an 11carat white diamond ring. The £35,000 drink is accompanied by a floorshow and two security guards. Movida also claims to be the world’s biggest buyer of Dom Perignon. Not the place to buy a round, then. Entry cost Membership is £500 Drinks £24,000 for a bottle of Cristal Is it any good? Just read about it in the papers the next day
yacht you’ll probably find them in St Tropez institution Les Caves du Roy, part of the Byblos hotel. When P Diddy showed up a few years back, the Sultan of Brunei sent five methuselahs (worth £16,500 each) to his table. No wonder Dom Perignon named the world’s most expensive jeraboam of bubbly after this place. A bottle of Byblos costs £9,000. Entry cost Entry is free if you have the right Rolex. Drinks A glass of water costs £16! Is it any good? If ever there was a time for minesweeping, this is it
for the usual hoi polloi. This Asianinspired supper club (an offshoot of the Lotus club in New York) is a honeypot for beautiful Brazilian booty and wealthy tourists left dribbling in their wake. Fortunately for those without a chopper there is entry at street level. Lesser beings arriving by Bentley are divided between various levels of the club. While semi-rich playboys might only make it to the third floor, the likes of Giselle Bundchen and Leonardo Di Caprio are whizzed straight up to the
Movida: bright sparks www.mixmag.net
photo: massimo dallagio
diaghilev project, moscow, russia
and serial modeliser Flavio ◆ Briatore named his Sardinian nightclub
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Lotus: crap tunes
top VIP tier. Everyone else (i.e. the most beautiful people from arguably the best-looking country in the world) is bundled into the working class quarters below. Typically no-one is there for the music. While mere mortal blaggers spend the night trying to weedle their way up top with lame excuses about being Giselle’s shoelace tie-er, celeb deities quaff champagne and discuss their next trip to St Tropez. Entry cost £17 for men and £11 for women. Reasonable in the UK, pretty extortionate for Brazil Drinks Men have to spend a minimum of £34.00. Women get away with spending half Is it any good? While Lotus scores high on beautiful people in lavish surroundings, the music is crap. Take an iPod and you’ll be in heaven MARCH 2008 059
NEW FRONTIERS OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
NEW ARTISTS NEW FRONTIERS
THE FRONTIER WAR
BREAKIN’ THE BOUNDARIES
Iraq and the occupied territories of Palestine are two of the most dangerous places in the world right now. But that doesn’t mean that the music has stopped...
Cannibalism, urban hippies and dolphins: presenting today’s 10 most frontier-busting acts, people and clubs around Words Joe Muggs
Don’t let them catch you on the streets after dark
Mocha
club called Borderline, in the last block of buildings of East Jerusalem, just before the beginning of West Jerusalem. There was a really good vibe at each gig. There was a lot of curiosity in the audience. Some were more sensitive to the message we try to spread, others seemed to be really into the beats and were particularly responsive to the faster tracks we did. In Palestine you need to expect the unexpected. Shortages are common. When we got to one of the venues (which was in a park) to do our sound check, we found out that the stage
PROMOTING IN PALESTINE
DJ Foundation produces dance music on Metal Postcard records “I’VE ALWAYS LIVED in Mosul, in Kurdistan in the north of Iraq. To the north is Turkey and to the west is Syria. The city is very old, with a mix of people, many Kurdish (like me), and Sunnis and Christians. America has big army camps here and there is fighting in the street: American bombs and jihadis. Some of my friend’s relatives have been hurt. And many people have left the city, like my mother who has gone to Syria. My father and uncle work for the University. I first became interested in dance music after hearing house on MTV. My friend and I made our first track in 2002 – we mixed two CDs on tape! Now I use my uncle’s Apple and download samples from the internet. I use samples of people speaking about the war, and a synth and keyboard. My friends all like dance music as well – the last time I DJed was at a party at my uncle’s. I love Daft Punk, Michael 060 MARCH 2008
Jackson and Quincy Jones, Kathem AlSaher, Justice, Armand Van Helden, Chic, Dr Dre, Korn, Bob Marley, Rachid Taha, James Brown and Pendulum. We have music stores, but I have no money and the music they sell is not dance. I get tracks by email from friends in the US and Europe, and sometimes friends come from Syria with new CDs. Some of the hotels have a disco but it’s bad music. You can’t go out in the night because the army will take you. The American army takes people to a house called ‘the disco’ to beat them, that’s what they call the prison here because they blast Western music. It’s dangerous in the streets and you can’t go out at night because the army will take you. AlQaeda are present here, and we think Turkey is coming to fight in northern Iraq. I hope it’s getting better but I don’t know. I make tunes about the war. It’s sad and evil, so I want to say something about it. But I also want to make music for dancing and laughing!” DJ Foundation’s 'GHAD/USA' is out now on Metal Postcard. For more, go to myspace.com/thedjfoundation
Tanks on the streets of Mosul
DJ Foundation’s home studio
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Checkpoint 303: talkin’ loud
For more information on the collective, www.checkpoint303.com
Tetine Perfectly timed to replace the sorely missed Bonde Do Role, the CSSapproved bootydancing Brazilian boy-girl duo Tetine offer “tropical punk, Miami bass, experimental radio, punk funk, hysterical vocals, freestyle, feedback, film-making, performance, love songs, funk carioca, cheap tunes and noise”. And who can argue with that? Chelmsford Crime Club/Chelmsford Film Society DMT-crazed, dolphinand biscuit-obsessed MC Philie-T does Essex hardman ranting over off-beam hip hop beats from Ming, and, as CFS, makes eyeball-burning online movies to fry your friends’ minds with when they’re a bit the worse for wear. Jazzsteppa Berlinbased Jazzsteppa are the first fully live dubstep band – with a brass section, live acid bass and an MC they’re ready to rock festivals in 2008, and to show that there is still massive room for expansion in the genre.
Music with a message
REX FEATURES, JAMES QUINTON, SHAUN BRACKBILL, MONA LISA
MAKING DANCE MUSIC IN IRAQ
Mocha is part of Checkpoint 303, a collective that blends field recordings, electronic music and oriental tunes to spread a message of peace and human rights in Palestine: “THERE AREN’T that many clubs in Palestine. Most of the time people go to restaurants or hotels that put on special events on specific nights, and so temporarily turn into clubs. One of the very few real clubs here is called Cosmos, located at Beit Jala, close to Bethlehem. The most popular type of music on most of the dancefloors in Palestinian clubs is the kind of mainstream Arabic pop music that blasts from most of the Middle-Eastern satellite TV music channels. Very few local DJs mix; most simply spin one track after the other. Aside from the lack of musical diversity, the “you can look but you can’t touch” attitude (also typical of clubbing in many other Arabic countries) might be considered by some clubbers to be particularly frustrating! We put shows on in Palestine in June 2007, in Ramallah, Jerusalem and Jericho. The show in Ramallah was in a café called Café Zan, and had a great crowd of predominantly young people – a mix of Palestinians and foreigners. They were really responsive and some already knew our tracks from our website. The place was trendy, packed and had a real good vibe to it. In Jericho we performed in the open air in the Spanish Garden. The show was free and the audience was a mix of all ages. Some were there specifically to watch the bands perform, and many others came just out of curiosity. We also performed in the courtyard of a high school and in a restaurant/
wasn’t built yet, they had no electricity, and the temperature was over 40°C! A couple of hours later a wooden stage was set up and an electrical power supply was sorted out. The show was great, the people were amazing. It was basic, but all the more worth it! The situation is tense and difficult here, and whether events we put on can go ahead is directly related to the current situation, which can change quickly. Two of our shows had to be cancelled for security reasons.”
Mi Ami, Yeasayer and Spring Tides From San Fransisco, Brooklyn and London respectively, these are just three out of a wave of bizarrely tough ‘urban hippie’ bands weaving African influences into live punk, funk and psychedelia without ever straying into tie-dye World Music worthiness. Mi Ami are noisy, wild and tribal, often performing with fearsome dancing girls; Yeasayer boast huge 80sstyle production, celebratory choruses and irresistible grooves; and Spring Tides combine Ghanaian vocals with folk, dub and, on their debut single, one of Hot Chip’s sweetest remixes to date. My Toys Like Me With quite a reputation on the live circuit already, the woozy, trippy take on electropop of My Toys Like Me is set to win more friends in 2008. The fact that Frances Noon is one of the most striking and idiosyncratic frontwomen to come about in dance music for some while isn’t going to hurt, either.
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Matthew Stone ‘Art shaman’ to some, Nathan Barley to others: 24-year-old Stone is a key artist and DJ allied to the east London day-glo-nu-rave-Boombox gang and the Wowow rock’n’rave warehouse party crew. The epitome of a young, attitude-laden approach to fashion and art with roots sunk deep in clubland hedonism but a clear vision of wider possibilities too. FrYars Like an alternative universe version of the chatty narratives of Kate Nash, 18-year-old Ben ‘FrYars’ Garret is a cracked bedroom poet, producer and entertainer who seems to live in a Victorian world full of incest, duels, cannibalism and ketamine. His cabaretelectronica live shows have proved surprisingly accessible and have fuelled a growing hype around him. NozL/Freecasing Newcastle/ Sunderland Scratch DJ duo energised by their discovery of dubstep and electronica, the fantastically quirky and innovative NozL also have invented the bizarre and hilarious new urban sport of Freecasing (search for it on YouTube). Dstrukt.com and WeWorkForThem. com With design and animation that make the average music visuals look like outmoded video games, these two are taking club-inspired artwork into the galleries and film festivals. WeWorkForThem’s ambient visuals, in particular, are a reminder of how beautiful chillout can be. Bangface Weekender Bangface is now a fixture of clubland with its mixture of art, pranks and true rave debauchery: what else could they do but push everything to the next level with a weekend-long event in late April? With everyone from Modeselektor to Chas ’n’ Dave playing this is going to be straight-up mEnTaL.
MARCH 2008 061
françois K NEW FRONTIERS
new york state of mind Pushing the boundaries of disco, dub and house for over three decades, DJ François Kevorkian calls New York home. On a tour of his favourite spots, he explains to Mixmag why he loves this most pioneering of cities Words Ralph Moore Photos Adam Weiss
It’s past midnight on a bitterly cold Monday when we arrive at Cielo for François K’s unashamedly futuristic Deep Space night. But despite the cold, icy expanse outside the club, we’re not talking Star Trek here. While there might be something of the scientist about François K, he’s no sci-fi geek. He’s far too busy studying music – in every sense of the word – to have time for anything as frivolous as Deep Space Nine. Walking into the club – full of New York hipsters, student soul devotees and young, Armani-clad Wall Street suits – we’re hit by a series of dub-infused records so new that they probably don’t even have song-titles yet. As we hit the dancefloor, we’re greeted with crystalline, liquid drum ’n’ bass. From there we swerve into some moody Tempa dubstep, then he drops some reggae and a little disco before sliding into the superlative soul-charged ‘Raver’, the best cut from the new Burial album. He has everybody in the club by the ear from the minute they arrive. By the time he drops Underground Resistance’s ‘Amazon’ – much to the joy of Swedish producer Rune, half of storming live-techno duo Ink & Needle, who has also come to New York to specifically to hear FK – we can see why this funny-looking bearded Frenchman is greeted with such awe in certain circles. So how did a 50-something ex-jazz drummer come to become one of the most important figures in dance music? And how does a man with a wife, a son and a recording studio to run stay so ahead of the game? To answer these questions we”ll rewind 12 hours. It’s a breezy afternoon in January when the Mixmag team arrive at a typical New York diner to meet François for the first time.
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credits
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“You would hear the bass from the other side of the street and… it got louder and louder” www.mixmag.net
Sporting his trademark salt and pepper beard and pincer-thin reading glasses, FK sups on a soup and mulls over where to take his new English tourist friends. Our first stop is Central Park, where five-and-six-strong families wander leisurely and endless waves of joggers throng the paths. As we walk towards the roller-disco we spot a black guy skating, dressed in matching white cap and trousers. He looks as old as disco itself. “In the mid-80s I was mainly a producer and I stopped DJing from 1983-1990 so I came here a lot. I live right at the edge of the park and my wife and I have a child so when I was here, I came every weekend. We’ve always danced and skated here. Dancing around in the summertime, you’d get 300 people dancing in a huge circle. That guy – the guy with the cap, he’s been there forever. Skating is part of music, but it’s funkier, r’n’b slow-jam music. Danny Krivit played here last year.” After a quick subway ride we are on West Eighth Street, home to Electric Ladyland, the studio of legendary 70s guitarist Jimi Hendrix. If you didn’t know where to look, you’d miss it. “I came to this street the second day I was in New York City in 1975. This is the first place I wanted to come. [As a jazz musician] it was the very reason I wanted to be here. When I first came Hendrix had already been dead for five years but I was seeking out some of the people who had something to do with him. The door was open so I went downstairs without being asked and there was an incredible lobby covered in space ships and galaxies.” Just up from the studio, we say hello to FK’s friend Benji at his Disc-O-Rama
The park…
…the tunes…
…the shop…
…the man. MARCH 2008 063
francoise k NEW FRONTIERS
François K: underground even on the train
record store. Upstairs are CDs while downstairs is the haven of the true vinyl addict – although all is not well in vinyl land... “I met François when he had just come over from France,” says Benji. “This was 1976,” says FK. “We just started talking about music: Walter Gibbons, Yvette Turner.” “There are maybe ten record stores left in New York now, smaller places,” sighs Benji. “No-one can afford the rents anymore, that’s why we had to move to this location.” And does he believe that vinyl sounds better than CD, we wonder? “Of course. You can’t change that. The recording is going to be better, and warmer,” says Benji. “People have moved to CD for convenience only, not for the sound. And when people are going out clubbing they can tell the difference. When CD is loud, it sounds FK’s been waiting 20 years for the doors to reopen at the Paradise Garage
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distorted. I don’t care what anybody says, I know the difference.” We daren’t mention MP3s. Our next port of call is what looks like a garage. It’s actually The Paradise Garage in deep disguise. The disco haven has been closed for 20 years now. And if you didn’t know where to look you’d never find it. Situated on 84 King Street, the club’s name derives from its origins as a parking garage – which, judging by the trucks inside, it has now firmly reverted to. After we’ve taken some shots, a security guard looks on with bemused amusement – he has no idea he’s on such hallowed ground. The building which housed the Paradise Garage is now the home of Verizon Communications. “They used to have a sign. You would hear the bass from the other side of the street and when you got up the ramp it got louder and louder, I’ve never experienced anything like it. For us, there has never been anything close to this. It was a membership only club but it closed 20 years ago so I get used to the fact that it’s not around any more. When it was open, we felt it would last forever. It closed on September 23rd 1987. Why? Because the owner was dying and he didn’t want to renew the lease. The community hasn’t lost touch but a lot
“Madonna did her first live performance here. They messed up the tape!” of those people passed away from AIDS. When they made Ministry Of Sound they copied what was created here: the design of the dancefloor, there were no bars, no drinking on the dancefloor because this place didn’t serve any alcohol. Loleatta Holloway, Ashford & Simpson, whoever was the big singer in house and disco, had to come here, because this is where everything was created. Madonna did her first live performance here. I was there, they messed up the tape!” Born in January 1954 in a little town in the south of France called Rodez, Kevorkian’s early passion for music led to playing jazz drums during his teenager years. Growing up in the suburbs of Eastern Paris, he went to college in Lyon and Strasbourg but it didn’t work out – he didn’t want to be a biochemical engineer, he wanted to make music. “I came from a pretty musical family,” he begins. “My grandmother
was a piano teacher, her sister was a piano teacher and my Mom was a dentist. But she also professionally played the flute in classical orchestras. When she re-married, her husband was a professional guitar player, so I was always around that. But all this classical music was boring me.” If anything the music he was attracted to were seven-inch singles like ‘These Boots…’ by Nancy Sinatra and later The Beatles and James Brown. In retrospect, classical didn’t stand a chance. “I specifically remember listening to ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath and when Led Zepellin came out with ‘Whole Lotta Love’ in vacation camp at Christmas. I also remember clearly checking out ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ by Pink Floyd in 1968. These psychedelic things started attracting me.” A year later, François went to Woodstock and was, by his own admission, completely blown away. It set a template and fervour for music MARCH 2008 065
NEW FRONTIERS françois k
“I stayed at the YMCA. It was the only place I could afford”
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house – took months to perfect. François K is now 54, a number he shares with the club that most epitomises the glitter-ball glamour and cocaine sheen of 70s disco, Studio 54. (Ironically, his Axis Studios are now built on part of the original building.) When he takes us to the former Paradise Garage and we ask if he ever got to play, he shrugs and says “maybe a dozen times” but really it was Larry Levan’s club. Given that most DJs would give their right ear to have been bestowed with such an honour, FK takes it all in his stride. Equal parts music historian, jazz musician, social scientist and looking very much like your favourite globe-trotting geography teacher, FK has been there and bought the vinyl double-pack. He’s also a complete perfectionist and a total stickler for detail: rumour has it that FK will only play 24 bit Wav files now, such is his attention to digital details. When we ask if he has a little machine to turn his old vinyl into CD, he splutters and says, ‘it’s not little!’, insulted that he would entrust such an important task to some tiny gizmo. But he’s not so upset as not to mention, as the interview comes to a close, that he’s writing a book on the history of disco and best of all, he has the pictures. But despite the history behind him, he remains the eternal student and frontier explorer, if not quite the scientist his parents wanted him to be. When Mixmag returns to London, at his request, we speak one more time. François is concerned, saying he still hasn’t quite answered one of our questions: why do so many DJs lose their edge once they hit 40? He ponders the question again, suggesting that more DJs should take on weekly residencies rather than 200plus globe-trotting DJ gigs a year. Despite his enormous success it’s just not in him to play music for financial gain. The kid who wanted to play drums is just as excited by music now as he was when he first came to New York City all those years ago. François K’s ‘Masterpieces’ is out now
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Still searching for the perfect beat
Is he trying to tell us something?
The rollerdisco lives on in Central Park
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that has remained with him ever since. “Woodstock was a revelation,” he whispers, wide-eyed. “It was like: here’s your blueprint. When I saw Santana live on stage – and then Hendrix – it took me into a whole segment of music that I needed to find out more about. And by 1971 I started to become conscious.” François moved to the US in 1975, where he hoped to find more challenging gigs than back home. But he had no plan and nowhere to go. “Where did I stay? Like the Village People say: YMCA, it was the only place I could afford. It was full of Vietnam Veterans. Most of them were inner city kids and mentally shell-shocked”. FK, you may notice, has a very good memory. Having ‘DJed’ before in Strasbourg with one turntable (“I was not allowed to play music that made people dance, the owner thought it stopped people from drinking”), he soon started playing drums along to a DJ at a local club. “But we clashed and he tried to rinse me by playing drum solo records. But those were the ones I knew! So in some way I earned his respect. And he tolerated me. The guy’s name was Walter Gibbons.” Known as ‘The DJ’s DJ’, Gibbons was a hugely important part of the early 1970s New York disco scene. He also did a re-edit of a song called ‘Ten Percent’, essentially the first remix of all time. “He had a sort of aura about him. And I thought – maybe I should try and do what he’s doing.” FK hasn’t looked back since. Since picking up his first “little bag of records” in 1976 to his formative experiences at the Paradise Garage to his genius A&R run at Prelude Records – not to mention his production work with Mick Jagger, U2 and Depeche Mode – François has outlived every scene and fad but consistently made his mark through a series of remixes and residencies in New York City. If you listen to his Essential compilation from 2000, you will discover a man who can join the dots between Carl Craig, classic Chaka Khan soul and vintage De La Soul with the ease most people flick channels on the TV. His latest triple mix CD ‘Masterpieces’ – all cosmic techno and deep spiritual,
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NEW FRONTIERS what’s next?
Clubbing: The final frontier Now that dance music has conquered the world, where do we go from here? Words Thomas H Green Illustrations Graham Samuels
Clubbing In A Parallel Universe Once you understand quantum string theory like we at Mixmag do – anti-quarks, d-branes, fermions, the Calabi-Yau manifold and all that – you’ll be able to travel via wormholes to alternate realities which sit right next to our own. In these universes DJ Scotch Egg might be god-emperor while Simian Mobile Disco attend the loos at Caesar’s Niteclub in Purley. You never know what’s going on until you arrive. It’s a downer when life never began on Earth but, at best, the party never stops, whether at Queen Diana’s dubstep sex-jacuzzi or frugging frantically with a race of Dutch gabba lobsters.
Clubbing under the ocean
Pros
Cons
◆ In some realities you’re a superstar celeb. OK, that’s alternate you, but it’s cheering nonetheless. ◆ No clubs open in the Thousand Year Reich? Never mind, your options are literally infinite. ◆ You can charm bookish losers such as alt-Amy Winehouse and alt-Lily Allen into hitting the town with you.
◆ It could take a lifetime to understand just one per cent of the conceptual physics involved. ◆ In some universes, Luton and Telford are dance music’s dual cultural hubs. ◆ The reality where giant mosquitoes rule clubland and humans are served as drinks is best avoided. ◆ Oakenflowers. ’Nuff said…
Ensure you have a personalised oxygen system or gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld. Due to water’s density sound travels faster and stereo’s irrelevant so just set up one big speaker hanging from a buoy. Dancers enjoy near weightlessness, but are slower paced than a mime artist on valium – so BK is out and trip hop’s suddenly huge again. In the chill-out lounge, live whale song is a must. Don’t surface too quickly or you’ll suffer decompression sickness, aka ‘the bends’: pain, confusion, memory loss and blurred vision. Probably no worse than an average hangover, then...
Clubbing In Space With raves on Future Earth all psytrance, like in Matrix: Reloaded the only destination for discerning clubbers will be outer space. You’ll take the Ryanair shuttle to the Crab Nebula, dock into Fabric’s oxygenated bio-orb and give it some zero-gravity welly. There’s no up or down in space so, as Lionel Ritchie prophesied, you’ll be dancing on the ceiling. The DJ booth will be a caged sphere drifting elegantly about the club, followed by a slo-mo trail of floating wannabes and groupies. Other ways to club in Space include simply flying to Ibiza, heading for Playa d’en Bossa and queueing for an hour.
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◆ Below 30 metres the body inundates the brain with nitrous oxide – so that’s free laughing gas all round. ◆ Approaching 70 metres under, hallucinations kick in, so add that to the fun. ◆ On top of that you’re raving with Nemo. ◆ No-one would ever need to go to the Ladies or Gents.
CONS ◆ Drinking would be very tricky. ◆ Underwater vision makes objects look nearer than they are, so attempts at hugging could prove embarrassing. ◆ A power-surge in water would be problematic, in that it would electrocute everybody. ◆ No-one would go to the Ladies or Gents.
Clubbing Inside Carl Cox’s Small Intestine Pros
Cons
◆ Dancing among the stars! Nowhere is more techno than space. ◆ Lock eyes with someone and one small step/ giant leap will see you at their side. ◆ Every breakdance move in human history will effortlessly be yours… ◆ …and you can literally moonwalk. ◆ And as for zero-grav. sex…!
◆ Your drink hovering out of its glass ◆ ‘Gravitational fluid shift’, as suffered by astronauts, is just as nasty as it sounds. ◆ Jeff Mills, Underground Resistance and other ‘Interstellar Fugitives’ still running around telling everyone they’re aliens. ◆ The post-club taxi 6,300 light years home could leave you a tad skinted.
Traditionally club nights in Coxy’s small intestine are approached via a miniaturised submarine injected into the bloodstream. The three-deck wizard’s recent conversion to a healthier diet, however, means that, once miniaturised with the right protective wear and an oxygen tank, you can simply climb onto a forkful of the techno maestro’s supper and enjoy the ride. You’ll need a crazed professor to shrink you, some friends and a sound system the size of microbes but after that it’s just a question of clearing a space amidst Carl’s digestive goo and getting your funk on.
Clubbing in the Mesozoic era One for the time machine massive. No police or environmental officers to spoil the fun, just dragonflies the size of bicycles and truly enormous lizards. No-one can say for sure what dinosaurs danced to, but experts believe some were at Shoom ‘back in the day’ so try and take Danny Rampling along to keep them on side. Tyrannosaurus Rex can be a bore, always asking for hardcore and eating the DJs; however, employed as security they’re in a class of their own. No electricity so remember to bring your own generator. Whatever you do, don’t let Barney The Dinosaur near the decks.
Pros
Pros
Cons
◆ There’s likely to be a sea of Champagne flushing through on a good night. ◆ Like a proper old warehouse bash, it’s good and dark. ◆ Just give the intestinal wall a good kick when you want to leave. You’ll soon be on the move. ◆ The exit journey is one crazy water-shute party to remember!
◆ White blood cells and, if Coxy’s on the Actimel, ‘good bacteria’ trying to absorb you. ◆ The phrase ‘Everything’s turning to shit’ becoming uncomfortably literal. ◆ Unexpectedly maximising and, Alien-style, exploding the great man. ◆ Leaving may be ‘one crazy water-shute party’ but the destination ‘pool’ leaves a lot to be desired.
Metaphysical Clubbing
Pros
Cons
◆ The climate’s nice and warm. ◆ Most dinosaurs are vegetarians, and some of the more forwardthinking ones even enjoy electro. ◆ No hassles with mammals going on about ‘redblooded rock music’, as most of them are still tiny shrew-like creatures. ◆ Raquel Welch (circa 1966) wandering about in a fur bikini. Possibly.
◆ Older dinosaurs talking endlessly about it being better in the primordial ooze days. ◆ Not much in the way of human company (except for Raquel). ◆ Danny Rampling playing one of his old Millionaire Hippies tunes. ◆ Giant meteor hitting earth, bringing about global darkness and mass extinction. A bit like the end of prog house in 2003.
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Bearing in mind that time is merely the fourth dimension, to call the tenth dimension ‘off the scale’ is an epic understatement. In the tenth dimension everything that has or could ever happen is a single entity. A club in the tenth dimension would simultaneously play all sound ever made from the Big Bang until the end of infinity. You are, in essence, God. Or possibly a single dot in the eternal void. It’s hard to say, as the whole dimension is way beyond human conception (rendering our illustration, left, something of a challenge). The only certainty is that Ricardo Villalobos would go down a treat.
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Pros
Cons
◆ It doesn’t matter what you wear as you’re beyond vision. ◆ It’ll be easy to pull as everyone and everything is you. ◆ You wouldn’t need drugs as you’ve gone far, far beyond the k-hole. ◆ You are, amongst many other things, every DJ who ever lived. Or could live.
◆ It might all get a bit much. ◆ You suddenly understand why people buy DJ Sammy tunes. You even like them. And hate them. In fact, of course, you are every possible DJ Sammy that could exist in every alternate universe. As well as not. ◆ Yes, it definitely could get a bit much.
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