GENTRIFICATION IS A PERSONALITY TRAIT

MARSHALL MCLUHAN 'THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE' MONDAY CONFERENCE ON ABC TV 1977

“I made a strange discovery about the rear-view mirror…I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that you do not see what has gone past, you see what is coming. The rear-view mirror is the foreseeable future, it is not the past at all.”

5 TRACKS: NICK MARTINELLI

By Tony Price

During an interview on the Questlove Supreme Podcast, Jimmy Jam called Nick Martinelli “the biggest biter ever”. While there is no denying the clear influence of Jam and Lewis on Martinelli’s sound in the mid 80’s, his spacious, gleaming production style was groundbreaking, and influential in its own right. His production and remix work between ’84-’88 for groups like Loose Ends, B.B. & Q. Band, 52nd Street, Change, and Five Star can be read as a masterclass in cultivating moodiness and sophistication on the dance floor. This is deeply sensual, pristine music. laser-guided, precise and crystalline, he made judicious use of expensive sounding reverbs to emphasize the empty space that hangs between the ricocheting clatter of 808 hits, glacial pads and sparkling bell tones. 

LOOSE ENDS - “CHOOSE ME (DUB MIX)”

Year: 1984

Label: Virgin Records

Writers: McIntosh, Eugene, Nichol

Producer: Nick Martinelli

52ND STREET - “YOU’RE MY LAST CHANCE (REPRIEVED DUB)”

Year: 1986

Label: Ten Records

Writer: Tony Henry

Producer: Nick Martinelli

Remix: Boyd Jarvis & Timmy Regisford

B.B.& Q. - “GENIE” (12” DANCE MIX)

Year: 1985

Label: Cooltempo Records/Elektra Records

Writer & Producer: Kae Williams Jr.

Remix: Nick Martinelli

Cooltempo Records/Elektra Records, 1985

CHANGE - “MUTUAL ATTRACTION (VOCAL/LONG REMIX VERSION)”

Year: 1985

Label: Cooltempo/Chrysalis

Writer: Timmy Allen

Producer: Jacques Fred Petrus

Remix: Nick Martinelli

P.P. ARNOLD - “A LITTLE PAIN (INSTRUMENTAL)”

Year: 1985

Label: 10 Records

Writer: China Burton

Producer: Dexter Wansel

Remix: Nick Martinelli

5 TRACKS: NYC HOUSE SELECTIONS BY TOM CARRUTHERS

By Tony Price

Tom Carruthers is one of the greatest contemporary producers in dance music. In era of sensorial overload and mindless genre-mashing, his elemental approach to production cuts through the nonsense with maximum impact. Concerned primarily with beat and bassline alchemy, his sound evokes the spirit of a specific period of time in the late 80s-early 90s when little more than speaker-busting basslines and spine-cracking snares were needed to light a dancefloor on fire.

These five selections by Tom largely represent a snapshot of a sound coming out of New York City in the late 1980's that, much like the Bleep sound coming out of the UK in parallel, utilized technological innovations in synthesizer and sampling technology to combine various strands of music from the previous decade into something sparse, bombastic and catalytic. This is music made largely in the wake of Todd Terry’s foundational early house singles under the Royal House, Masters At Work and Todd Terry Project monikers. As with Terry’s productions, the energy, ethos and influence of electro, freestyle and hip hop lingers between the trunk rattling low end, skippy snare drum syncopations and spattering metallic hi-hats.

TRIBAL HOUSE - “DIM DAE”

Year: 1988

Label: Pow Wow Records

Producer: Winston Jones

“This ones a relatively rare one, you’d be hard pushed to hear a DJ spinning this 12”. It’s produced by Winston Jones who did the NYC hit “Cultural Vibe - Ma Foom Bey”. Proper warehouse material!”

THE SOUND VANDALS - “ON YOUR WAY (DEEP MIX)”

Year: 1991

Label: Nu Groove Records

Producer: Howie How & Little Carlos

“A timeless house cut by Brooklyn duo How & Little. Still sounds fresh to this day!”

TECHNICAL ONSLAUGHT - “THE CALLING”

Year: 1990

Label: Allabi Records

Producer: Joey Beltram

“This track is my favourite Beltram cut. Dark and moody, as it should be. Holds it own in any techno/breakbeat set.”

CHANNEL ‘H’ - “FEEL GOOD (CLUB MIX)”

Year: 1991

Label: Astor City Records

Producer: John Spice

“Quite a rare NY house cut. Only those in the know know about this one. Classic NY style joint with complex percussion, a heavy bassline and clever sample use. One of my personal favourite records I own.”

HOUSE WITHOUT A HOME II - “IT’S JUST A !!!”

Year: 1989

Label: Maachan Records

Producer: Nori, P.D. DJ. & R Roc

“This track is quite well known amongst the old skool crowd in the UK. Not much is known about the producers, but nevertheless, it’s a solid cut. ”

—————

Find Tom Carruthers on Instagram
Find Non Stop Rhythm on Bandcamp

INTERVIEW: PHIL DEMETRO

By: Tony Price

After 26 years spent working at Toronto’s legendary Lacquer Channel Mastering, Phil Demetro, one of Canada’s preeminent, in-demand mastering engineers is striking out on his own. Over the course of what has arguably been the music industry’s most mercurial and volatile period, Phil has seen many a trend come and go. Technological developments have transformed the manner in which people produce, distribute and consume music and I was very curious to learn from him the ways in which this may or may not have changed the crucial, yet mysterious, and often misunderstood process of mastering audio. In this interview, Phil and I discuss the fundamentals of audio mastering and contemplate the ways in which contemporary listening habits have changed the process of music making. We debate the differences between lossless and “lossy” audio files and ruminate on what is at stake in an increasingly digital world where the physical and spiritual dimensions once intrinsic to the process of engaging with art have taken a back seat to techniques and practices that favor convenience and speed.

TP: Mastering is a very mysterious process. When did you start and why?

PD: There’s no natural musical ability in my family tree. My dad played a little bit of saxophone, he’s an immigrant from Eastern Europe. That was not the focus of his life. You grow up and you have access to your parent’s record collection. I was born in ’68, I’m turning 55 years old. Everyone had the Beatles and that kind of stuff kickin’ around. So you hear those types of things and end up growing up loving music, but because the family culture was, “when you get older, you gotta go to school, you gotta do well, because you gotta put food on the table, you don’t want to starve, like our family did” and all those kinds of things, there was really more of a practical, utilitarian approach to work. It’s not supposed to be fun or satisfying or anything like that. I went to university and I went to college, I’m interning at Scarborough Grace Hospital in the psych ward, and I’m basically going that direction towards mental health. It was fundamentally clear after year two that this was not for me. You’re with a whole bunch of people that you realize, you know intrinsically, some people, you’re like, this is where you belong, they’d truly found what their “thing” is, and I was like, this is not my thing. I’m not gonna be able to be as effective or as helpful as I could be to people, because I’m not a natural. So I thought, I love music, I love records, let’s go to school for music. I stopped everything, in my late 20s. I was going to go to the Trebas Institute. With a little bit of guidance and a few questions and whatnot, I ended up going to a place called the Harris Institute. I went there and not the other schools because, if you go to the regular institutional route, everything is like, concrete walls and fluorescent lighting and they treat it like, it’s a very cold, harsh environment, which is not comfortable to spend a long time in. So I went to Harris, they had aquariums, and the colour scheme is purple. Halogen lighting, wood floors, I was like, wow. If I can’t get it done here, I can’t get it done anywhere. At that time, the school was looking for internships at the end of the school year. They would set you up and, as it turns out, I didn’t know what mastering was, because by third term, I was asking one of the instructors, “we didn’t do mastering, what’s mastering?” And they were sort of like, “just forget it. You don’t need to know, it’s not important. It’s way at the end, there’s other things for you to do.” So, very strangely, around that time, I get a call from my mother, and she says “the Avon lady in my neighbourhood, her husband owns a mastering studio if you wanna go for a tour.”

TP: Whoa.

PD: I thought, well that’s interesting. I had no concept what it was. So I went, and as it turns out the Avon lady’s husband was a guy named George Graves who co-owned the Lacquer Channel at that time. I went there on a tour, and I walked in and there was all this old stuff, the lathe was there, old tape machines. I expected shiny SSL consoles, I expected a mix environment, but all this stuff kicking around, they looked like gigantic sewing machines. I’m like, oh my god, what a dump, this isn’t very nice. But when I found out what it was, the guy who gave me the tour was a freelancer at the time, a guy named Brad Rogers, he explained what it was, and I thought, wow, my whole life I’ve always been making tapes and recordings and trying to fix and modify things to try and get the best possible capture that I could afford as a kid. That was my thing: how do I make a copy of this? I found that very fascinating. What’s the best possible way I could make this happen? As it turns out, that’s what mastering is. It really ultimately is making a transfer. So, I got in here, I snuclk in very luckily because they’d had bad experiences with interns. Managed to get in and on the first day, Scott Murley, who was co-owner at the time, said you’re welcome to stay as long as you want, but there’s no job for you at the end of this. I just said I’m happy to wash toilets and make coffee, to be honest. And it’s been 25 years. I’ve been in this room for 25 years, it’s like a piece of veal, really, there’s no windows, it’s recycled air, HVAC, no windows. I’m preserved, sort of.

TP: I find it interesting that you asked that question about what mastering is at Harris, and it was kind of like, “don’t worry about it”. That goes back to my point about mastering being a mysterious art form. When someone doesn’t really understand what mastering is, what’s your go-to answer?

PD: I can relate to a degree why people don’t want to tell you. The people that I learned from and grew up with, they’re not social influencers or TV stars or actors, they’re just workers. They’re doing a job. They’re real purpose is not to explain what it is that they do, they’re not fashion models or actors. They do a job and sometimes, you go to a musician and you ask “hey can you show me how to play that?” And they’re like, “I can just play it, but I can’t show you how I play it because I can’t explain it to you.” I understand also from a competitive standpoint, I’ve seen this in person, a lot of people don’t really want to tell you what it is because if I keep the mystery alive, you also maintain that competitive edge. If you run a business and you do a magic trick, or you have something mysteriously secretive or better, if you have a special sauce that the competitor doesn’t have, it ensures your customers keep coming back in droves, right?

TP: Yep.

PD: If I could put caffeine in my masters I’d do it. I’d never have to worry about business again. But the short answer definition for mastering is, basically, the process of making a master. That’s the definition. Mastering is you’re making a master. What is a master? In the music production process, as you know, if you’re a songwriter or performer and you’re looking to go to a studio, you do recordings, you do a mix of those various recordings. If you have a rock band, you’ve got guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals, etc. You make recordings of all those instruments and then they’re balanced via the mixing stage, where they get all their relative levels and perspectives. And then, traditionally, the album has been a very popular format, so you would have an artist that would have five, six, seven, twelve songs on an album and you’d have to take all those different mixes and you’d have to compile them. The process of compiling them – you do the sequence, you do the space in the songs, you would do some correctional adjustments, because basically you want someone to listen to your music and not be distracted by technical difficulties, like, this track is too bright, this track is too bass-y, this track is too quiet. So you really want to bring a level of cohesion and continuity to a full listening experience so you’re not having to get up and make adjustments to your playback system, you’re not distracted by that, you’re just enjoying the music. You’re in the moment. So the mastering ties all those different musical elements together and frames it in such a way that you can add a creative element to it. I think that’s sort of where a lot of boutique mastering and some of the big name mastering studios really develop their reputation over the decades, by bringing a nice proprietary and consistent addition to an already existing mix that sounds fantastic. You’d go to someone on the East Coast or the West Coast or overseas or whatever and have these hallmark sounds. Studios would get to be known by their sonic footprint or their creative stamp on your music, and people would be like, that’s the key to the hit. They would look at credits on a record and go, “oh that record was done there, this is great, I’ve got to work with those people.”

TP: That’s a great answer. In 25 years of mastering, we’ve seen the first “death” of cassette and vinyl, the rise and fall of CDs, and now vinyl and cassettes have come back. We’re now inside of a very digital landscape when it comes to consumer music habits. We’ve had all these different formats in that short span of time. In your opinion, what do you think is the best sounding commercial medium for listening to music? Not so much from a mastering perspective, but as a listener or a music fan, do you have a favourite, or do you think one sounds better than the other? Does convenience help sway that opinion in in one direction or another?

PD: Yeah, I mean, there’s listening experience and then there’s just listening. For me, the ultimate listening experience is not even the format. For me, the ultimate listening experience is one free of distraction. I don’t have the internet going. As a kid I used to sit there for hours on the couch at my parent’s house in front of the stereo playing records, just like everybody did. And that’s a beautiful thing, but you can’t always do that. It’s great when you’re a kid, but when you’re older, life takes over and you can’t really set aside two hours of your day just sitting on the couch staring at a record jacket. You can’t do it. For me today, the ultimate listening is usually on my dog walk every night. I load up .wav files as opposed to MP3s. I load up the high-res tracks and I put in some earbuds and I’m on my walk. I’m not fumbling with cables, there’s no one around, just me and the dog, so my focus is very much – I’m outside of myself, or work, or home, things like that. I’m not distracted with making a left-hand turn or dodging car accidents. So for me, it may not be the best sound, it’s pretty darn good. My own space, outside, walking with my dog with earbuds playing .wav files is the best.

TP: Do you believe that there is a major audible difference between a compressed digital audio file, like an MP3 or a .wav or a .flac file? What would you say that audible difference is? Do you think that the average listener can tell? This is something that always gets debated on the internet, or amongst musicians, whether there is an audible difference.

PD: Yeah, people love to argue. I would say there’s not a big difference, because the MP3 and Apple have really invested considerable resources, time and money, into figuring out how to streamline audio so that you can send it everywhere across the internet or stream it without interruption. If you played a file for me and then told me what it was, if you played me an MP3 file, maybe not like 128 megabit, kilobit per second MP3 but maybe something higher, and you said that was a 96K .wav file, I would have to believe you. Now, if you play them side by side, you could probably hear a difference, and I think anyone could probably hear a difference, whether or not they care, because it sort of becomes a point of diminishing returns, where I think people are like, “just give it to me, I want to hear the song, I’m not here to be a music critic for a magazine.” Some people just want to get the job done and they love the melody or they love the beat or the rhythm, it just makes them feel happy or want to dance, whatever it is, it makes them want to sleep or something. Honestly, man, I don’t like the idea of MP3 and I slightly have my back up against the wall about that whole thing, because it seemed like everything was improving: video was getting better, you’re getting 4K high-definition, BluRay, but for audio people, it seemed like it was going backwards. And I was like, “why are we getting 128kpbs MP3s that sounds like the music’s underwater?” So, the soundtrack is crappy, but the video is sharper than reality.

TP: That’s a very, very good point.

PD: Are we second-class citizens, us audio people? Why can’t we have better? But I think the ultimate experience for a human being, whether it’s convenient or not convenient, is to listen 100% analog. That’s the best way to listen because the minute those sine waves get digitized, down at the sample rates, basically just little photographic snapshots along the line, following the line of a real analog sine wave, is the minute that so much musical information is being tossed away. Even though we know what we’re listening to, we can identify music in any bit reduction, whatever they do, we’re still organic creatures and our ears are not binary, zeroes and ones and pulse-code modulation technology, our ears are true analog, right? That’s where the ultimate experience is, dealing in reality. Probably as you know, we’re getting further and further into virtual reality and being sucked into the machine. It’s more and more not so much about natural experiences anymore but sort of like, we do it because we can.

TP: As a mastering engineer, you are constantly receiving fresh mixes from artists or producers. Do you think that two and a half decades of listening to MP3s through earbuds has changed the way that people make and mix music in any way?

PD: I’m not really sure, I mean, if MP3s came around in the late 90s, when people started getting their iPods, and sharing their music libraries around. I don’t know if it’s the technology so much that’s changed production. I think what’s changed, from my experience, is just moving away from traditional means of musical capture, so a tape machine or cutting a record has moved to a screen, looking at a screen. So instead of having, when you go to those classic studios, there’s no screens anywhere. It’s just a console and the engineers and speakers on the wall, and every decision was being made with your ear. There was no eye. There were no eyes involved in musical decision making. For instance, I always notice if I’m driving in my car and I’m trying to parallel park, I have to turn all the audio off in my car or turn it really, really down, because I don’t feel like my brain has enough DSP to handle parallel parking with my eyes and having music blasting at the same time. I have to give one up. There’s almost kind of like a sharing of the DSP between senses. If you have a workstation like Pro Tools, and you’re looking at music on a grid, you’re not really caring about performance necessarily as much, because you’re like, well now we can put this whole performance on the grid, we can fix that snare, we can move that over there, so really it’s almost like you’re assembling a puzzle, in a sense, but your eyes are now part of the auditory process, because you’re now using your visual to confirm what your ears are hearing. But I always feel the eyes are dominant to the ears.

TP: Wow, I understand exactly what you’re saying. I think my opinion is similar, too, in that it’s not so much that the sound of music has changed the sound or manner in which people make music, it’s the process of making music that has changed the process of making music as a result of all this. Which brings to mind another debate, which is what I wanted to ask you about: the ongoing analog-digital debate. Does analog gear play a large role in your workflow? What do you think of that debate when it comes to production and mastering? Do you think that analog equipment will always play a role in mastering? We have these new - I don’t even know what you want to call them - these new ventures into artificial intelligence mastering, where you can upload a song and it purports to be able to master the song for you, which I want nothing to do with. I’m just curious about what you think when it comes to mastering about that analog-digital debate.

PD: If you do it long enough, if you do something for many decades, your opinion is going to change. Your opinion is going to be reflective of the times, whether you know it or not. Look at the kind of conversations you probably had today, they’re all probably based on current events in the news, and five years ago, your conversations were based on current events on the news. So, any sort of prevailing opinion I might have is based on, say, the last 25 years. And I would say there was a time when I would say the analog gear was how we’d differentiate ourselves a lot of the times, because of what we have: certain gear that other people don’t have, or it was very expensive so a lot of people couldn’t afford to have that equipment. Fast forward through time a little bit, and by the way I do work with analog, I have all the best analog and I work digital, so it’s one or the other, or it’s a hybrid. I have to say that when I see people now entering the field, and they’re posting – I can’t blame them – but their sort of proud picture of their studio outfitted with all the gear, and they’re standing in front of this big stack of equipment, I sort of feel sorry for them in a strange way. I’ll look at them and think they bought into it, you know. And I feel sorry for them because I really feel like now it’s less and less and less a critical factor in getting the job done. Even though I have all the analog gear, and maybe I should be keeping secrets, but the reality is it’s quickly becoming esoteric and outdated. Now, why do I say that? Because if you have an analog performance on an analog tape and you’re going through analog equipment, records that were made a certain way have a certain sound. The current production that I’m really hearing nowadays, I’m hearing less and less analog in it. What I’m trying to say is, and this might take us into your automated processing or artificial intelligence future, is that if you’re a 15-year-old kid and you have Ableton or something, and you’re like, “I’m gonna make a song.” They reach into their sample library and they start dragging stuff into the playlist, into the session, “oh there’s my drum, there’s my snare, I’m gonna bring in a kick, I’m gonna pull in a longer sample,” and they line it all up, right? All those sounds are generated digitally or by computer. It would almost make more sense to treat it with the same tools, because it’s of the same world. I find that by going to analog, the first thing that happens is there’s losses. You can’t go from a digital environment out to analog and have it be a one-to-one process. There is a loss. Now, if you go through a bunch of equipment, you’re gonna get distortions, you’re going to get phase shift, you’re going to get noise, and then you gotta hit another set of converters, and that’s going to change again when it comes back to the computer when you continue processing it. That’s a lot of patch-points and distortion and manipulation. I think sometimes that’s why a lot of those records end up being so smashed and so loud and so crazy there for a while because there had to be so much processing to get a market result from the losses from using off the equipment. It’s like a measure of compensation – you dropped in a bit of a drop there, so I have to do this to compensate. Now what? It was a bunch of successive compensations. You could get amazing results. I’m not slagging it. My feeling is, if you now have an environment that’s on a grid with computer-generated sounds, other than maybe a vocal, the music is now vastly becoming an equation. Where’s your highest amplitude, where’s your lowest amplitude? All these use all frequencies. You can determine compression. All these things, you can calculate. So basically music is quickly becoming an equation. That’s why it’s so easy for these online mastering programs to do what they do, because based upon consumer feedback plus inputting certain things, music feels formulaic. Do you ever listen to music, and you’re like, wow, everything sort of starts to sound the same way. It’s because of natural tendencies for human beings to capture the flame. They wanna put the genie in the bottle, and once you’ve got it, you want to perfect that one thing. That one thing changes, but everyone tries to perfect THAT genie. Intrinsically what happens with human beings is you do have things like mood, and adrenaline rush, so the enthusiasm which you bring to a track, the spirit – music will excite you, you’ll sweat, your whole body’s coursing, and that’s the one thing that we’ll always have over the automated process, at least for the next few years anyway. We can bring a depth or a taste aspect that’s not necessarily just a keyed, formulaic, this is going to work for everything idea. A little bit louder, a little bit brighter, a cut here, a boost here, compress here, limit there. If you have ten different artificial mastering services doing a song, they might come out very close, where if you have ten different human beings mastering it, it’ll be very different.

TP: Yes. Yes.

PD: As long as the human being is an autonomous individual, a real person with a real, true personality and distinctly different from somebody else, then you’ll always have something that’s unique and hard to replace by a computer.

TP: I agree. That was an amazing answer. I’m curious about what you think of the state of physical music media, the place that we’re at with vinyl and cassette existing as this consumer product that everybody in music is infatuated with. A lot of people being very adamant that their music exists still in a physical form, even if people aren’t listening to it, they just want to own it. I’m just curious, what do you think of that?

PD: I think the fact that the cassette comes back or the vinyl comes back to a large degree really reinforces our nature as human beings, that we are really, truly looking for experience. We’re nostalgic, we’re romantic. I have to say, as much as I prefer convenient listening nowadays, nothing really matches the wonderment of being able to create a playback system, getting a great turntable. Saving my money, getting a particular stylus, and getting great speakers and a room. There are so many aspects I can bring to the process. It’s involved and very satisfying to spend some time, devote yourself to something, and have this incredible outcome. I think the vinyl world, with cutting records, is a similar thing that people forget how satisfying it is to put a needle into a groove and just look at it and watch this thing track across this platter, and then music’s coming out, and it’s just like, wow, this is so cool. It’s like watching things being made in a factory as opposed to just getting, like, a cake: there’s a cake, right, but there’s all these things, like how the cake gets baked and decorated. Essentially, I think it’s too sterile, MP3s are too sterile. Put it on a hard drive and you forget you have it. You go to your bookshelf, there’s books, there’s vinyl. Those are old friends. I love that, I wanna go back and check that out. Not that having a big collection of stuff is important. I have a couple records that are my parents that I treasure because there’s memory there. You can have a relationship with vinyl that you can’t have with the MP3 stream. We’re visceral, we’re tactile, we’re human beings. As much as I think the world is going to try to push us into a virtual world, I think the soul is crying out for contact with real things.

Phil can be contacted at phildemetromastering@gmail.com. Check out his website for more information: phildemetromastering.com

INTERVIEW: RON MORELLI

By: Tony Price

Ron Morelli is the founder of L.I.E.S. Records, a label that has arguably done more than any other in the last decade to shift underground dance and electronic music back towards their crude, elemental sonic and aesthetic foundations. Ron is also an accomplished DJ and producer in his own right, having released records under various pseudonyms on labels like Hospital Productions, Draconian Steps, and Collapsing Market while playing all over the world. After releasing my own album, IBM CONTRA on L.I.E.S. Records this summer, I caught up with him for this long, in-depth interview where we talk about the label’s New York roots, the death of subculture, contemporary listening habits and music consumerism, cameras facing the DJ booth, his creative habits, the stone cold reality of art’s place and function within modern life and much more.

TP: You’ve lived in Paris for a while now – how important do you think location is to someone who is an artist or a DJ at this point?

RM: As an artist I think you can live wherever the fuck you want to live. It doesn’t matter where you live. As a DJ, from the touring aspect of it, you want to be in it, you want to have it be where, in my opinion, things are happening and it’s convenient. If you’re in North America, you don’t want to be doing these long tours, long international flights every two weeks, that would just break you apart. But I’ll say all this: with regards to the label, the label would be nothing if it wasn’t for my location, where I came from, which is New York City. The label would not exist if I wasn’t at that place at that time. This label came together in an organic fashion, simply, and I’ve said this a gazillion times, with a group of friends that were around. I ended up putting a label together and putting out these individuals’ music, and inadvertently a crew was formed, for lack of better words. It was unintentional. In the end, it ended up being a document of that time period, which is very important because at that time, there wasn’t so much happening in New York, as far as things that I was interested in, and that’s the real important part of why the label came together, because I didn’t like what was around. Nothing really spoke to me. There wasn’t anything I was interested in at the time. Of course there were things happening, but to me it didn’t completely represent what I was interested in. Again, right place right time – we had this crew of people that were all really into music for a really, really long time, and then at the time the stars aligned and I wanted to do a label again, boom, that happened, got the momentum, kept it going, kept it going, the crew gets bigger, time goes by, one club opens, something else happens, warehouses open, and then next thing you know, you have this scene happening. Again, no plans, no agents, no lofty ideas of touring the world or anything – the only goal was to put out some records and see what happens with that, and DJ around the city, and if some other gigs come up you get to go down to Philly or to Detroit or wherever, but it was just very grassroots if you will. As far as location, for me, yeah, that’s really important, but I think for people, at this point, the world doesn’t need another record label. Shit’s useless. Right?

TP: How so?

RM: It doesn’t need a record label. Just, why? Why. No one needs that. But if you live in like Indiana, middle America, and you’ve got some crew there that’s doing some wild stuff, then by all means make a document of that, because that is important. For me, these big city record labels that are just putting out stuff to gain clout and to do things for the sake of doing it, that’s just a waste of space. If you actually have a goal and you’re documenting the local scene, that’s what record labels are for. Record labels are for documenting local scenes, that’s what they serve to do. Whether you look at Factory Records, you look at Dischord Records, you look at Vermiform Records, you look at Touch And Go Records…

TP: Trax!

RM: Trax Records, those are documenting local music at the time.

TP: You said you started the label because there was nothing around you in New York at that time that resonated with you musically. Did you find that once you started the label you may have created a scene out of or around L.I.E.S.? Did you start to feel better about the music around you once you started the label in New York?

RM: Definitely. People came out of the woodwork. I wouldn’t say after that the music got better, but I think other people were like, oh, I could do that. And then they did whatever their version would have been of that afterwards. “This guy got his crew together and put out all this stuff? Ok, well now I’m going to do it.” You could see people doing their little things and what have you. That’s just natural progression. It did motivate some people that were close to us to get some shit done. And they know that if they finished something then I’d probably be willing to work with them.

TP: Do you still see L.I.E.S. as being a New York label?

RM: The attitude is. Obviously the artist roster isn’t, even though I always try to work with some New York artists. The long and the short of it is, I’m not super interested in a lot of the music coming out of New York right now. There IS some cool stuff happening, it’s just not completely what I’m motivated to put out. It was a strong statement, what we did earlier. Now my interests are a bit different. The attitude is very New York. I’m a New Yorker. It doesn’t matter where I live, I’m still always gonna be a New Yorker. My attitude is that, my mind state is that, the hustle is that. Living there is a dead end.

TP: The first release was like 2010, am I right?

RM: 2010, yeah.

TP: Since then, we’ve experienced a decade of crazy change. I think that the 2010s are gonna do down in history as one of the most insane decades in terms of how day to day living changed. and especially for music. Since then, social media obviously, specifically Instagram, continues to recalibrate every facet of our lives. Within music specifically, streaming became the focal point of the recorded music industry, changing how people interact with music. We saw vinyl production being kicked into overdrive for various reasons. Since 2010, have your intentions for the label changed as a result of these things? Do you feel like maybe there’s a new sense of purpose behind what you are doing? Have things become harder or easier having Instagram to promote an independent label, for instance?

RM: There’s a lot more clutter and noise to go through.

TP: Interesting.

RM: People’s attention spans are shorter than ever. They’re focused on and living in their phones. Everything is a 30 second to one minute clip. It’s absolute ADD stuff. It’s just doomscrolling through life. I don’t think a lot of people are in touch with the physical world so much anymore. Maybe that sounds odd, kind of insane, but they live vicariously through these fuckin’ telephones. It’s voyeuristic.

TP: You can’t really argue that.

RM: Music right now – could it be more unimportant and disposable? It pains me to say that because I’ve been immersed in it since I was a kid, literally. It’s the outlet for me that matters the most. I treat it differently, I think, than your normal consumer, I’m not saying I’m better or worse, I just have a different use and need and viewpoint on it. Music is done, it’s over. There’s a million artists out there, there’s tons of creativity happening. That’s never in question, that’s not the problem. But it’s completely, absolutely disposable entertainment, it really is. It’s kind of like running an ad on daytime tv. Who the fuck watches daytime tv? Nobody. It’s something that just passes by. When you’ve got someone running for senate, they’re running ads on daytime tv. Someone’s grandmother is probably not even watching daytime tv anymore. This stuff, it’s going by the wayside. I mean, A.I. is knocking on your door, on everyone’s door. There’s A.I. programs that can produce a better song than you’ll ever make and that’s gonna sound exactly like you want it to sound, you’ll be like, why did I spend a week working on this track when this fuckin’ robot just made something that’s just like it. People are gonna say that “people are always going to want the human element, the blood, sweat and tears and the story.” The stories aren’t fuckin’ interesting anymore, let’s be honest.

TP: (Laughing) No, they’re not.

RM: Everyone can do it, it’s not 1980, you’re not hearing about the struggle to learn something and make something and being rejected a million different times and living on the street, and this and that and everything else. All that magic, and you know, this is extremely negative, and I hate to say it but it’s the cold truth: all that magic’s gone. It’s not the dawn of disco, it’s not the discovery of Chicago house music and Detroit techno. You’re not walking into Paradise Garage for the first time. You’re not going to see Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. Sure, Justin Bieber might be someone’s Black Sabbath in some demented form. Everything means something different to someone else – it’s not going to mean the same thing to me as someone else. But it’s really just over. The creativity is over. Again, people are making things, but there’s no value anymore. There’s no value in them. If I drop off the face of this earth tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. What I do is insignificant. There’s someone that’s going to take my place that’s equally unimportant that wants to take the place that I’m in. And then they’ll go away. And so on, and so forth. But these aren’t important figures. None of these people are important figures. There are very few. Very, very few. Music is just the most beautiful thing, and it’s a very bastardized thing, like every other type of art where the industries have all eaten themselves. The politics – don’t even get me started – the politics have destroyed all art, whether it’s fuckin’ painting, movies, going to the opera, it’s all destroyed. It’s a painful, slow death, and we’re all kind of living in ignorance, in this fantasy world. That’s not to say we shouldn’t always make our own world, and fuck everyone else, because that’s what I’ve been doing, what I think you’ve been doing, since the beginning. No matter what, it’s always gonna happen like that, but it's not really important.

TP: To all of the points you make, I just read this book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor”. It focuses on everything that was happening in music in New York in the early 80s, and the author makes a good point, something that people just don’t think about – that around that time, when Paradise Garage was just THE place to be for certain people, for instance – this was a time when a lot of people didn’t even have answering machines, so to the social element of lives collectively depended on physically exiting your house and finding something, finding out what’s happening. People were coming together around things like music, coming together on a dancefloor, coming together at movie theatres, and you made that point about doomscrolling through life – I think that one of the big things at the core of this “death of culture” that we’re talking about is that we don’t congregate physically around things, places or events. Music, art and ideas only exist to exist as “Content”. I can’t even count The amount of people I work with in music that have said something along the lines of “I don’t know what the point of this is, all of this work so that someone can hear a fifteen second clip while scrolling Instagram?”. As a music fan yourself, how have your listening habits changed? Do you find yourself engaging with music way differently than you were in the 2000s or early 2010s?

RM: If anything, I’m consuming more and more music than I was back then, I would think.

TP: Interesting. Do you use streaming services when you’re out walking or taking transit or something like that or if you’re flying?

RM: I very rarely listen to music through my telephone, if ever, so I don’t have any music on there. Occasionally I’ll listen to mixes when I’m at the gym on Soundcloud. Usually on my headphones I’ll listen to talk radio podcasts and shit. I’m buying records all the time still, a lot of old stuff, also new stuff. It’s almost dangerous because there’s even so much more access now than there was in 2010. I can almost get everything I want. I mean, obviously you’re always one click away if you wanna get something from Discogs, that’s been true for quite some time. But I’m always listening to stuff, that’s my job, to be on top of checking out music and listening to music and finding cool stuff and finding stuff that’s impressive to me. That’s the entire thing. I love doing it.

TP: How do you feel about digital-only releases? Do you feel that a physical release truly legitimizes a project, or is that less important than it once was?

RM: For me personally, if I just did an album and I think it’s an amazing album and we’re like “okay, we’re just going to release it digitally”, I’m not gonna be okay with that. I want the product, I want it to be in the stores, I wanna see it on the wall, I wanna open the shrink wrap, I wanna hold it. But that’s me. Also though, it says something because there is a financial commitment to the music by somebody else that’s not you that says “okay, you made this music, we’re gonna take the time and money to promote it and to put our ass on the line to make sure it gets out there to people.” It is what it is, but it is saying something. I’m not dissing digital-only releases, either, but anyone can do it, and the quality control suffers. I see a lot of these artists, they put every track they make out digitally. Okay, just because you made it doesn’t mean it’s good! A lot of these people are up their own ass. They think everything they touch turns to gold. Most of this shit is trash. Like a photographer, how many shots in an entire roll are good? What are there thirty or twenty-four in a roll, and if you’re really good, maybe you’ll get five, six timeless shots. Maybe, if you’re lucky. With tracks, ok, some motherfuckers are REAL good, and they got a good hit rate, but most people, it’s like, you shouldn’t be putting out every track you make, or every other track, or every third track. Maybe every eighth or tenth track you do is gonna be dope. That’s the problem I see with digital, it’s just a lot of people fawning all over themselves. It doesn’t need to all be there. After that, it’s a preference. I don’t expect some kid that’s eighteen years old to want to put out a record. It’s an archaic thing that they’re not even familiar with. Unless they have like weird parents that shoved it down their throats and they’ve become these weird vinyl people. I’ve seen people like that and it’s very disturbing. I once saw a seven- or eight-year-old kid in the record store with his father. It was unhealthy, man, I dunno. He was like pointing out J. Dilla records, talking about vinyl and stuff and like, this kid’s not gonna have a healthy life ahead of him.

TP: (Laughing) So what role do you think that vinyl plays in electronic or dance music culture in general now? Do you find that people buy t-shirts and records for the same reason, just to buy something associated with a label or an artist? Or do you find that people still purchase records for their intended purpose, to be played on dancefloors by DJs, or to listen to them at home?

Ron Morelli - “Ron’s Torture (Demo Mix)” (L.I.E.S. Records 2022)

RM: No, I do think that some people like sitting at home listening to records, and I do believe that people that buy the records are listening to them at their house. I don’t think the working DJs, me as a working DJ, I don’t need to own – occasionally I’m buying a techno LP, I gotta really love it to want to have it around. I don’t need techno LPs. I just don’t, you know? I’ll buy the digital and play it out. There are DJs that are out playing wax and thank god for them. There’s not many, but thank god for them.

TP: Do you do it often or at all these days?

RM: Very, very, very rarely.

TP: You played in bands in the past and you’ve been a DJ for a while. How do you feel that nightlife or dancefloors have changed since smartphones infiltrated people’s lives? Have you noticed a difference in these environments in the past 15 years?

RM: It’s everything, it’s the world of entertainment, it’s life. Everyone wants to say they were there, they had this steak at this restaurant, they got on this plane, they were at that gig. They were at this festival. It’s the culture that has changed. It’s not the dancefloor in particular or dance music in particular, it’s culture. Everything has just gone to total shit. People want to document their fuckin’ lunch, they wanna document their trips. Again, I’m no better or worse than anyone else. I’m guilty of getting caught up in this on occasion. I try not to. Unfortunately, part of my job is promoting the record label, and part of that is being online, which if I had it my way, I’d never do it, ever, but I don’t have it like that so unfortunately, it’s how it is. It’s culture, it’s everything. Sporting events – we’re not ever going to get away from this. Unless, where they have these certain things at comedy shows where you go to see, like, Dave Chapelle, they make you lock up your phone, or you go to see Joe Rogan, you’re not allowed to bring your phones in. I think it’s a good idea. I don’t think you should have the phones. The Misfits did a reunion show – you gotta lock up the phone. I like that, I think there should be more of that.

TP: What do you think of cameras in DJ culture? The sort of “Boiler Room Effect” and how that’s changed this job, or this culture?

RM: I don’t understand why anyone needs to even see the DJ. I don’t give a fuck what the DJ looks like. I don’t care if they’re fat, short, tall, skinny, Black, white, Asian, gay, straight, trans, astronaut, whatever – none of that shit matters to me. I don’t give a fuck about the person playing the music. I care about the music being played, and that’s the issue. The camera puts the focus on the image of the person playing. I don’t care about that. That’s irrelevant to me. The DJ should be heard, not seen. That’s why I like radio. I listen to radio mixes from the 80s. There’s a mystique behind it. There’s the DJ on the radio, the station DJ, the host, saying “This is Tony Humphries, blah, blah, blah”, you know the name, you know Red Alert, whatever, you know the names, but you don’t know what they look like, you don’t know where they come from, you know, whatever it is, there is a mystique behind it, and that mystique is gone. It’s not special. The focus is on what the person looks like, what they’re wearing, all this stuff, it’s irrelevant. It’s absolutely irrelevant. When I was young, I didn’t go to that many clubs, but we’d go to the roller rink – the DJ’s far up high in the sky. You can’t even see him. It’s like the man behind the curtain. You don’t know who it is, or what they’re doing, it's just magic. The only time it’s legitimate to want to see the DJ is if it’s some crazy scratch DJ, if that’s what you’re into. Okay, then you want to see them doing their tricks and it’s a performance. DJing is not a performance. DJing is playing other people’s music in succession, and you’re making those tracks sound good next to each other and playing them at the right time to work the crowd. That’s what DJing is. It should have nothing to do with the DJ’s identity, at all.

TP: Agreed,one hundred percent.

RM: It’s unimportant. But the way the world works now, it’s all about that. They’re jumping around, and they’re wearing this cool thing, and they’re doing this and they’re doing that. I don’t give a fuck about that. Are they beating it? That’s the question. Do they beat the tracks? Are they sick? That’s it.

TP: If you listen to an old WBMX house mix, you’ll hear wild acid tracks and 909 beatdowns next to a song by Teddy Pendergrass or New Order. What do you think about playing “hits” in the middle of a set? Is this something that you feel is important to the lineage of dance music, playing shit that’s just completely crazy, fresh or obscure and then you dropping in crazy popular disco tracks that people know? What do you think about this type of thing at this point in time?

RM: Well, it all depends on the context. A hit is a hit for a reason and it’s dope for a reason. I have nothing against that whatsoever. I wanna hear Robert Owen’s “I’ll Be Your Friend”. I wanna hear that. You’re never gonna be mad if you hear Arnold Jarvis “Take Some Time Out”. You’re never gonna be upset to hear any of that type of stuff. You’re crazy if you are. That shit is dope for a reason. How can you hate on that? You can’t.

TP: You seem to be a big hip-hop fan. Growing up, my parents were huge into freestyle, and it was big in Toronto. My mom had all these tapes of recorded radio shows from Buffalo and Toronto and there was a huge crossover between hip-hop, electro, freestyle, and house. I feel like the connection between hip-hop and house music, for instance, or just dance music in general is something that people tend toneglect. I’ve heard people be like, “Wow, I’ve just heard a Rick Rubin production on a Run-DMC record, I didn’t know that they used drum machines like that!” Do you find that there’s a lack of recognition of how tied together these things are? Do people turn their noses at hip-hop in the house-contemporary-dance-music world or underground electronic music world? Do you find that?

Ron Morelli's exclusive mix for Rainbow Disco Club 2022 podcast

RM: I think at this point there’s no connection between, say, the house music that we’re into and what’s popular in modern hip-hop, even though a bunch of house songs have been sampled in the last ten years by the likes of Kanye West, with him sampling Mr. Fingers and working with Daft Punk and shit like that or that Pitbull song with the Nightcrawlers sample in it, but the connection is weak. Back in the day they were playing hip-hop and dancehall and house all in the same room. It was all dance music, hip-hop was dance music.

TP: One hundred percent.

RM: You look at all those old records, a lot of them had the house mixes on them. If you look at T La Rock records, EPMD the Jungle Brothers. It was one and the same. It was also another way to make money because you could make real money back then with that kind of stuff. It was intertwined. You look at Fresh Records, that’s a perfect example. There is a ton of house music on Fresh Records. It’s all the same. It’s all dance music. It’s New York. These days, I don’t really know. I see a lot of people playing – DJs playing modern hip-hop and reggaeton all together, that’s not my thing. Maybe it’s a new way of connecting things. Maybe that’s the new version of it. I don’t connect with that music personally, it’s not my thing, but I’m not ignorant to what’s going on so I do see it and hear it. It’s just not interesting to me. But that could be like the modern version of it, of people connecting what hip-hop is now and what dance music is now. There is probably a crossover, somewhat. But the sonics are absolutely different.

TP: The next few questions are from a label perspective. There seems to be this heightened obsession with “The Hustle” within music culture. Every single time I go on YouTube or Instagram, there’s all these embedded videos called, like, “How To Get Your Music Heard” or “How To Promote Yourself as a Producer”, blah, blah, blah. And I recall reading an interview with you saying something like, “This label has a closed-door policy, no demos”, that kind of thing. Do you receive a lot of unsolicited demos, and do you listen to them? Do you ever find gems?

RM: I never listen to unsolicited demos, ever.

TP: Interesting.

RM: Through all the years, I’ve probably listened to less than ten. It’s not the way the label works.

TP: It’s usually a recommendation from someone?

RM: Any time, and I’ve said this before, I like to work with people I know. The few times I have worked with people I didn’t really know, it always ended up blowing up in my face.

TP: I’m interested in Tom Carruthers and myself. How did you come across Tom? Also, I handed you that record when I saw you playing across the street from where I was living at the time in New York. I’m curious, why did you listen to that record? Was there something about the gesture? Was it the fact that the vinyl was in your hands? I’m curious about those two things. Both Tom and I weren’t in your social circle or even in your touring circuit type of thing. I’m just curious about those two specific instances.

RM: Right, well, you gave me that record, and I’ve been given many records at gigs, and, you know, put them aside for lack of better words. But the packaging on it was really interesting to me. It looked really cool. I think it was the list of instruments that were used on it. I was like, let me put this on, and I did, and it was an extreme surprise. I couldn’t believe how good it was. And that’s a very, very rare occasion. And this was years ago, at this point, it must have been five years ago, easily. The thing with Tom, I just discovered his music randomly. I was doing my research, clicking around, finding stuff, and I was like, what the fuck is this guy doing. There was just so much music, and I was like, this guy, who the fuck is this kid? What the hell is he doing? And I just had to get in touch with him. And it was a risk, I’ll admit. I rarely do that. It’s a rare, rare occasion where I do that with someone that’s a complete stranger, but it was just so good, and there was so much of it, and there was a part of me that was like, I don’t wanna see this kid make a mistake with this stuff, either. Not to say that putting out a record with me is the best fuckin’ thing in the world you can do, because it’s really not, at all, but I was like, maybe I can help this guy get it to the right audience, that’s all I really wanted to do, and help him not have the music fall into the wrong hands and go by the wayside, which it easily could have. This guy is clearly just a studio-head. He’s just rockin’ in the studio.

TP: All day.

RM: And when you’re a studio-head like that, you’re not focused on the other end, which is great. You’re not thinking about how to get it out there. But it’s also the dangerous part, too.

TP: Do you have a studio-head side of you for your music and your projects? Do you find that you have a lot of gear and you like to hole up in the studio and not be bothered for hours at a time?

RM: It’s the best time for me, ever. It’s the only time I can be at peace. It’s then, and even though I don’t like flying, when I have to take a flight and just cut off from everything, these are the only times I can find peace, ever. It’s like in the studio, working, hours on end, focused, no fuckin’ phone in the room, no emails being checked, just working. And that’s how I clear my head. Even when I’m at the gym, my phone’s going off. Even when I’m out running, the fuckin’ phones goin’ off, I’m listening to a podcast, and the texts are coming in, and it’s a distraction. It takes your mind away from exactly where it needs to be. You don’t need to have the fuckin’ phone next to you. It’s a double-edged sword. My best days in the studio are the days where everything else in my life falls by the wayside.

TP: A lot of your releases have this spontaneous, improvisatory feel. “Betting on Death”, “Man Walks the Earth”, and “Circus of Death” they almost feel jazzy, like music that is unwinding before me, and I’m listening to it as it’s being made. Does that tie into what you’re saying? Is improvisation and spontaneity linked to “being in the zone” in your creative process? Does this question make sense? (Laughing)

RM: Yeah, yeah, man, yeah it makes sense. The process of “Man Walks the Earth” and “Betting on Death” and then, say doing like, house tracks, is totally different, obviously. The “Betting on Death” stuff is like ear candy for me. When I go in, there’s no pressure to do anything. There’s an idea, and then just like, okay I’m gonna use these pieces of gear, I’m gonna do this, what’s gonna happen is gonna happen. Obviously, there is some sort of goal, but for me, working in that format, there’s zero pressure, which is great, it’s what you want. When I’m making a “dance” track, even those are those are really loose.

TP: They’re kind of free-wheeling and spontaneous, definitely.

RM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what those were. But then “Man Walks the Earth”, that was a huge, long process behind that. Those songs were made for a live performance, they were just sitting around. This guy from a label heard the stuff when I performed them live once. He was asking me what I was doing with them. They weren’t really structured – not that they’re structured now – but I did have to go back and do some editing of it, because they were just really long, long things. Something like “Betting on Death” – those things were long-form things, each cassette is one hundred and twenty minutes long, somewhere along those lines. That’s just candy for me, man. Fun and easy and you’re just kind of impressing yourself, like, oh that sounds sick, that sounds sick. If I’m making a dance track, I’m like, okay, boom boom boom, here we go, everything’s sounding good, okay let’s do it. “Betting on Death” is just texture. It doesn’t need to go anywhere. I’m not in that world, I’m not from that world, I’m not proving anything to that world. That shit’s for me. It’s really cool to be able to work with no pressure. At this stage of the game when I’m trying to make dance tracks, I’m trying to make something that’s good, that’s going to work. First and foremost, that I like, that’s number one. But also like, okay, I want this shit to fuckin’ slam, too.

Ron Morelli - “Laugh Taker” from the Dissapearer LP (Hospital Productions, 2018)

TP: L.I.E.S. has a specific visual aesthetic. Having worked on a couple of things with you now, my new album, Benedek’s album cover and some other graphics stuff, there’s always an insistence on simplicity, Why is that?

RM: It’s all I know, man.

TP: Do you find that it speaks louder?

RM: This is for the people, man. This is something the people can understand, this isn’t high art. If you want high art, you’ve come to the wrong place. This conceptual stuff – it’s not me. Obviously, there’s something behind it, this isn’t some blind thing, but I’m not gonna try to front. We’re working in true and tried form here and I’m continuing the tradition of that. I’m not saying we’re changing the wheel, we’re not changing the face of anything, we do our thing, I always try to do my thing and I want people to be able to feel it and relate to it.

TP: To communicate, yeah.

RM: That’s why the 12” labels have stayed the same – it’s simple and identifiable. It’s pedestrian. It’s like Trax records. You know what it is, you’re gonna be curious by it, you might not like everything, but there’s something there that makes you go, “I’m gonna pop this on.” And that’s just the attitude I have about it. Of the people, that can make it complicated for you. I’m not gonna make it complicated for you.

TP: What do you think of the “retro aesthetics” that seem to permeate through so much of culture? People are really obsessed with doing things that channel or replicate the past. I’m guilty of that, because I love that shit, but I’m sure you empathize with it too. But what do you think of that? Do you find that it stops people from progressing or do you not care?

RM: I don’t care. I don’t think it stops anyone from progressing. You shouldn’t live in the past. Your mind shouldn’t stagnate. You’re never gonna replicate the past. You’re never, ever going to do that. You’re never going to be able to do something as good as that stuff either. Talking about, like, dance music stuff. It’s what you wanna do, and it's what you’re concerned with. There’re tons of 80s sounding house records that come out that just suck that I’ll never listen to because they didn’t do it good. If you did it better than that, then that’s sick. To me it’s sick that someone can rock with that. The bottom line is the scene these days, they forget about the old stuff. They forget this stuff exists. The building blocks. You could go and get the old stuff, but you should also see that there are people still coming out in that spirit, in that tradition, carrying that tradition on. I think that’s somewhat important, not the most important thing. In electronic music, everyone’s always trying to do the future, the future, the future. We have been in the future of electronic music since fuckin’ Cybotron. We were in the future of this shit in ’79, you know what I mean? Kraftwerk was the future, Cybotron was the future, all that stuff was already. It’s there already. It’s what you want to make of it, and how you want to present it, and what your thing is. I don’t see it as dangerous – how many of these rock bands out there, it’s all the same shit forever? They sound like the fuckin’ Kinks or whatever, it's all the same shit. It’s what you take, it’s how you apply it, it’s the people you surround yourself with and how you present it.

TP: I’ve seen the L.I.E.S. logo and aesthetic copied, channeled, or even ripped off many times. How do you feel about that?

RM: I mean, isn’t the saying imitation is the highest form of flattery? I dunno, there’s only one, you know what I’m saying?

TP: It all leads back to it, right?

RM: There’s only one. You can do what you’re gonna do and that’s kind of that. If I get upset about everyone that bit the sound of the label, the style of the label, used the same graphic design style, did this, did that, I’d never sleep at night. It’s fine. That means you’ve actually made a mark.

TP: There seems to be a line or a common thread running all the way from early rock and roll straight through to punk, early industrial music, hardcore, Chicago house, Detroit techno, and the noise scenes that have popped up all over the world since then. There’s a straight line running through a lot of the stuff we both make or are interested in, stuff you’ve released on the label: what would you say it is that unites all of these scenes, sounds and movements? Do you feel that there’s a common thread running through all of this and are we at risk of losing it?

RM: The only thing that’s really uniting all that stuff is the timeframe in which it was made, and the fact that if you wanted to seek it out, you had to really work to seek all that out. There was subculture there. To get to, to discover subculture, pre-internet, was work. You had to discover everything on your own. When you think of music that’s your favourite music, let’s be honest, you’re gonna say 1980 to 1995 or so, whether it’s from industrial music, whether it’s from house, whether it’s from techno, whether it’s punk, whether it’s hardcore, that’s the timeframe that the best of the best was made, hip-hop, you know, all of it. I think it's safe to say that’s a decent, right chunk of time when the pinnacle of all that was: it was subculture. It was underground. It was for freaks. It was not part of mainstream society. Now, everything is therd on your phone. Now everything is there on YouTube. I’m not dissing anyone. The generations now can do whatever they want. They have access to everything. They can choose to use this access that they have to do whatever they want to do. They have access to everything. If you wanted to make music, electronic music, in 1980, you’d have to go and really figure out how to do it. Now, you can download and app and watch a YouTube tutorial and figure shit out. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s what the youth and the upcoming generations will do with it. It might not be something that you or me is gonna like, or maybe something genius is gonna happen, I don’t really know. I have no faith in anything, so I don’t think anything good is gonna come out of anything, anywhere, at this point. Death is around the corner, definitely. The thing that ties all of that together is the timeframe and that it was true subculture. It’s one and the same, whether it’s punk, house, hip-hop, it’s all subculture. It’s fringe of society music. It is on the outskirts of everything. Now, there’s nothing special about any of this. It’s not magical, it’s not shocking to me. It’s not like seeing a Puerto Rican skinhead stabbing someone at a Sunday matinee in 1992. You’re like, what the fuck is this. It’s all the paradoxes of everything at war. That was magic back then. You were seeing things unfold in front of your eyes and wondering why they were happening, as a youth. The world has changed, the dynamic has changed, luckily enough I caught the tail-end of being able to experience what underground subculture was. The youth is gonna make of it what they will. There’s always going to be something happening somewhere in the world that will be on the fringes that we won’t hear about until years later, anything like that. Now it’s like, all that crazy stuff coming out of Africa and stuff like that, I don’t follow so much of it but some of that stuff is bananas, what’s happened with this crazy African electronic music. I’m not saying African house music, I’m saying this crazy hardcore stuff from the Congo that’s happening. So, yeah, that’s the thing that unites that stuff: it was the evolution and then the de-evolution of the subculture, of the quote unquote underground, whatever that means at this point, which isn’t much. There’s no underground. There IS an underground, but there’s not.

TP: That’s a very interesting answer.

RM: It’s not important. You’re not seeing Swans for the first time. It’s just not important.

TP: It doesn’t have the same meaning to a collective of people.

RM: It’s a given.

TP: I heard someone say once that we now live in a time where acts of terror have replaced art as the thing that unites us. People used to gather around and listen to the new record by the Beatles and talk about it on the streets – art used to unite people in that way. Now we all unite around TVs when we see mass shootings and shit like that. It’s interesting and there’s a bit of truth to that, our collective focus is no longer on art, it’s on other things.

RM: Yeah, I mean, I guess really it is more about human survival in the modern world more than anything, it’s true. Other stuff is meaningless, it’s just gonna phase the fuck out. People are complaining about all this fast, vulgar techno, like, is that what you’re really worried about? This is not what’s keeping me awake at night. What keeps me awake at night is that ANTIFA’s gonna burn down my street or something.

TP: (Laughing) Exactly, yeah.

RM: Or there’s gonna be no clean water left, or where am I gonna go when all hell breaks loose the next time? Y’know, I don’t give a shit. It’s not important. This world of music that we’re in – it’s smalltime shit. That’s one thing I would like to really, really stress: this is smalltime shit. It’s a drop in the pond comparatively to culture in the world and what the fuck is happening every-fucking-were. It’s meaningless. Wow, you made a good house track. Great. Wow, you made a shitty house track. Great. Who does it really matter to except you and a couple hundred other people? You’re not fucking Robert DeNiro, you’re not the leader of ISIS, you have no fame, you’re a nobody, you’re a shitty fucking DJ and a shitty producer who’s just doing shit in your basement. And you know what? It should stay that way. That’s what it should be.

TP: And there’s nothing wrong with that. We just gotta come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to just be that. That’s a very valid and arguably important thing to be. Do you think Larry Heard was thinking about his upcoming cover on some DJ magazine in 1983 when he was in his basement making tracks? No, he was just doing the act in the moment.

RM: Exactly. That’s really what’s missing, doing the act in the moment. And when you do, rarely, see people doing it, and who understand it, and get it, then you have like one percent hope, maybe, for something. But generally speaking, it’s all premeditated shit.

Ron Morelli’s new promo 12” “Ron’s Torture” is out now on L.I.E.S. Records. His new “Heart Stopper” LP is due next spring on L.I.E.S.

INTERVIEW: TELEPHONE EXPLOSION RECORDS

By: Tony Price

Telephone Explosion Records is a record label based in Toronto. Founded in 2007 by Steve Sidoli and Jon Schouten, the label has evolved from it’s humble beginnings documenting the local punk and garage rock oriented sounds coming out of the area into a major force in the Canadian music scene and a crucial nexus point for various currents of underground music from the past, present and future. In this interview we traverse a multitude of topics, from vinyl pricing structures and the Toronto music scene of the 2010s to the gentrification of taste, the possible connections between music piracy and reissue culture and beyond.

TP: My first question is a simple and obvious one: why did you start a label? 

JS: We had no choice. It's just the classic thing of being in a band and being excited when you’re young and it's really hard generally for bands, you know. Wait, when we started the label, did Spotify exist?

TP: What year was this, 2007?

SS: Or maybe 2008.

JS: Give or take. I think we put it on a sticker somewhere. Hold on, let me look at the printed material. Yeah, 2007. That's how so many indie labels had been born over the years. Like Mute Records with Warm Leatherette, you made a piece of music that you were proud of and you wanted to put it out and that was basically the only way to do it.

TP: Your label has always had a focus on physical media. How would you say that music culture's relationship with physical media has changed since you started? Do you think people care more or less about something existing in a physical form? Do they buy these things for the same reason that they may have in 2008?

JS: I mean, definitely not. We were going through a distribution change in the last year, and we were having conversations with a few different larger indie distributors, and one of the conversations that we had when we were talking to them was about the pricing of our records. We want our products to be affordable and approachable for people. We had this whole case of trying to make these physical items accessible, and the person at the distribution company was like, why? It doesn’t matter anymore, because if people want to hear this music, they’ll do it on Spotify. If they’re gonna walk into a record store to buy it, they’re not gonna give a shit if it's $23 or $26. They’re already committed to wanting this thing in physical form, and they don’t need this physical thing anymore to listen to the music. So pricing strategy for vinyl doesn’t matter. If somebody wants it on vinyl they’re probably going to buy it regardless of the cost, is what he said.

TP: That’s very interesting. Do you think when people commit to spending whatever amount of money on vinyl at this point that they’re even buying it to listen to or are they buying it to own it?

JS: Right. It really changed changed a lot in my mind about our pricing structures and how we were thinking of these things and the difference between physical media and the future. Previously, the whole business was based on physical sales, and now as we’re moving forward, that is quickly becoming a much smaller portion of the business. And it is interesting. We were of the type of business, even three years ago, that was kind of proud of that fact that we were a very physical-based label. Now, we’re thinking more about opportunities for the music outside of it being such a limited release in a physical format. The world gets a lot more broad, opens up a lot more for both the label and the artist in terms of promotion and exposure and how people are consuming this media. I think that often, if you’re really stuck in the format and the physical media, it's very limiting in terms of your mindset.

TP: Did you find the transition from being a primarily physical label into more of a streaming-focused world made things confusing? Or did they become easier for you, from a label standpoint?

JS: Well, number one, I don’t think we’ve become more streaming focused. I think we’ve pulled back and have a bird’s eye view of everything that’s going on, to be able to see that it’s more of a balanced picture. It’s all important, but generally speaking, the opportunity for music is not in physical media sales anymore.

TP: From the other side of things, as music fans or consumers, what are your thoughts on streaming in general? Do you predominantly stream music when you hear it for the first time or do you like to buy vinyl? Just curious as to what you think. I personally love streaming music. Politics, and internet bullshit aside, I love it. It’s an extension of growing up in the era of BitTorrent and stuff.

JS: I think we’re both quite different, so I’ll let Steve answer independently.

SS: I’ve traditionally been more of a streamer. You know, I remember being a pretty average CD collector when that was the predominant medium, and as soon as MP3s came around, that kind of tied into the same time that I moved out of my parent’s place and struck out on my own, alone. As soon as money became an issue, MP3s and finding digital music that way took over.

JS: Soulseek, baby!

SS: Yeah, exactly. Soulseek was a classic.

JS: Still rocks, by the way.

SS: But as time evolved, I did get more into streaming. I found that I enjoyed getting MP3 downloads, whether I paid for them or not, to be better, because it still allowed me to have a collection that I curated, and Spotify was almost too much, too soon. I remember when that first came out, I ended up just listening to like, fifteen to twenty hours of nu metal because it was available. And I couldn’t figure out anything else that I wanted to listen to at the moment, it just like shocked my brain into listening to “Bodies Hit The Floor” or something, you know. But recently I’ve actually been buying vinyl again and I find that I’m enjoying it more because, once again, I’m curating a collection, and so my mind isn’t blown away by the possibilities of what I could listen to, so I don’t get frozen by that, and it forces me to listen to music over and over again, more often. That’s when I really start to connect with music. I can like a record, but I don’t love a record until I’ve heard it, like, thirty, forty times.

JS: I think I’ve always had a lot of records since I was a kid. I don’t have like, a lot lot, I’m not a psychopath. And I was super late to Spotify. I think Steve was on Spotify for years before I got onto it. And I was still like a Soulseek downloader, record buyer, I love digging and all of that stuff too. It’s interesting, now Spotify has become way more of my go-to, and also YouTube. Now when I find that when I’m buying records, I’m trying to buy stuff I’ve never heard before. I’ll just go off of the vibe of the cover or the era, the label, the players, the producers. So I’m buying the records that I’ve been lusting over for ten years, I’m buying things that when I put the needle down at home, I’ve never heard any of it. And that to me is a very exciting thing again, because it creates this thing – when I was a kid, when you’re fifteen you do the same shit, you’d go to the record store and buy the latest Lookout Records release and you’d put it on and home and chances are you’d end up liking it because, going to Steve’s point about the economics, you’d spend so much money on it that you’d just have to listen to it thirty times and by listening to anything thirty times, you’re probably going to like it a lot more. That way of listening to music when I was a kid, it forces you to like everything you buy a little bit, Which is really funny.

This YouTube hack, which is apparently the thing to do if you want to stop giving Spotify your money, is you get the YouTube Premium account so you don’t get any ads, and then you can get a player on your phone – it’s the same thing as Spotify, you can go to another window on your phone and it doesn’t turn off, so it’ll play like a player. I don’t know if everyone knows this, but DSP, the people that distribute music digitally to Spotify also deliver it to YouTube music, so you get the entire Spotify/YouTube catalogue, but you also get all the private uploads that all the weird collectors put up without any commercials, and you can save it to your phone.

SS: It’s incredible.

TP: I have that and it’s changed my life. I like to think about the late 2000s that  period I always refer to as ‘the Blogspot era’. You know exactly what I’m talking about, right? Having the ability to go into those people’s YouTube accounts and find this insanely obscure stuff and have it right beside new releases that the digital distributors send out is insane. So that is definitely something that I have come across and love.

You’ve both touched on something, which I also wanted to ask, both from the label side and personal side, but let’s keep it personal for now. Your relationship to collecting physical things. You both buy vinyl, you just said that, but books, magazines, do you still enjoy buying those things and how do you store them? Do you have a system within which you keep these things lined up and organized, or do you like having them around the house, the studio, for inspiration? If not, do you keep that to the computers?

JS: I barely read, straight up. I read like two books last year, and it was strictly because of the pandemic. The books we have around are all like, the book that’s on the coffee table in the studio is that new Don Cherry book, “Organic Music Society” or whatever that’s called. Do you buy any books, Steve?

SS: No, I exclusively listen to audiobooks -

JS: Don’t get him started on this.

SS: - and I only listen to short horror stories.

JS: And they’re horrible. They’re so fuckin’ dumb, it’s like made by some crazy lunatic in his mom’s basement in Delaware.

TP: And when we say short, how short are we talking?

SS: Like, thirty minutes or under.

TP: Okay, that’s a decent bite-sized scare for you.

SS: While I’m going to pick something up in my car, I can get there and back and listen to the whole thing and then come home with goosebumps.

JS: Did you get what you were looking for? Nope, but I came home with goosebumps.

(All laughing.)

JS: Steve plays this shit when we go on tour while I’m driving literally the whole car falls asleep. There is no scare factor. The fear factor is gone. Joe Rogan is not on board for your podcast.

SS: One of the longest running MP3 collections that I have from Soulseek is what’s known as the Mammoth Book of New Horror. And I have Volume 14 or something, and it’s probably like thirty or forty short horror stories, and I have that on my Google Drive and I can share that with you.

JS: Share the link!

SS: Yeah, I’ll send it over. I’ll send it over. But (spooky voice) don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Bruce Haack - “Party Machine” from the Preservation Tapes LP (TER, 2018)

TP: So with all of this being said, and after talking about the conversation you having with distributors, what do you think the future holds for physical music media? Will it serve any purpose in the future?

JS: To be frank, if you’re a business that’s relying on physical media and you want to have longevity, you’re not thinking correctly.

SS: That’s the real horror story (all laughing).

JS: Straight up. Can you envision a world in ten years, all the people that are fuckin’ 23 years old right now, do you see those people as 33-year-old adults that are obsessing over the pressing quality of specific records? I just don’t fucking see it. We’re all dinosaurs, a little bit, that are obsessed with this stuff, and obviously there are new generations that are into it, but I just think that the number of people that are going to be into physical things, very organically, are gonna look at collecting and anything of that nature as pretty weird and obsolete, but again, I think that human nature of collecting is going to move digitally. I think NFTs and that kind of thing are showing us a little glimpse of how that human desire to hoard is going to be manifested in a digital way.

TP: One of the major trends in the past decade has been the increased outsourcing of what were traditionally label or managerial duties onto the artist. More than ever before, artists are expected to play the role of the bank, the producer, the graphic designer, audio engineer, social media manager, model…do you feel that artists that you’ve worked with over the past decade have been able to adapt to these times well or do you think that people still in general have a hard time dealing with these duties?

SS: I think that it’s not always the case. I think that we still do come across artists that are very green in all those aspects, and you’d be surprised that that still exists, that there are people that have no idea of anything outside of just making music, and that’s in a lot of ways, the way it should be. But obviously that might have more to do with the style of music and the artists that we work with, right? If we were a bit more mainstream we’d probably come across people that have their social media situation completely manicured and have everything down and maybe even be acting as their own manager. But I think it’s worse and I think there’s a time that people romanticize, and for good reason, when musicians just had the opportunity to make music without any outside influence.

JS: I mean, what a dream though, holy shit. Who wouldn’t be like, cool, I’m just gonna focus. Honestly, isn’t that still the dream, for people to get to that size where they’re just kind of like offsetting that? I feel like artists have just had to learn how to do this stuff out of necessity and the fact that budgets and sales have determined those resources, the financial resources for those things, has diminished, that’s the result. I think its also so empowering for an artist to be able to fully sculpt their vision and it’s something that people don’t often get to do historically where they’re like, I get to push my brain into thinking about how I want to be represented physically and what this project means. I think it allows people an exercise to have more understanding and depth in their art a little bit too.

SS: That’s the flipside, that’s the good part. You can come up with a concept record and have the concept go beyond the music. It could be everything from the art direction to how the person looks or the people look, to how they want that story to be shown to the world, and that’s a good thing, right? Because you don’t have your board room of usually straight white guys crunching numbers and letting that be the thing that dictates all that other stuff.

TP: I wanna bring it back to something we were talking about before and tie it in to the reissue stuff you guys have done. The Blogspot era, which was around the time that we probably first met, that’s kind of the world that Telephone Explosion came out of, in a way. That was my favourite time for music consumption, that time at the end of the 2000s when there were just thousands of these really highly-curated music blogs appearing with links to MediaFire, RapidShare and Megaupload uploads of these insane records. I was discovering these New Age tapes and Japanese noise and European free jazz and all this crazy dub and shit, it was just mind blowing.

JS: FM Shades.

TP: Do you remember Crystal Vibrations? Did you ever come across that one? That was the big New Age blog, that’s where I first discovered Steve Roach. Some of the stuff you guys have been putting out on TER or Morning Trip seems to be part of this resurgent boom in reissue culture that has emerged in the past decade. It’s almost like you’re filling a void that was left by the disappearance of these blogs. Would you say that part of your intention with rereleasing these lost or forgotten records is sort of a reaction to the gentrification of music curation at the hands of tech companies like Spotify? Filling a void that was left after the last iteration of obscure music sharing systems were around?

Steve Roach - “Structures From Silence” from the Structures From Silence Reissue (TER, 2017)

JS: Yeah. What do you think, Steve?

SS: I think that it’s different, it feels different, anyways. Buying a deluxe LP reissue package with all the liner notes and photos and all the information that you could want, compared to this clandestine, Blogspot download through MediaFire, they’re two separate experiences, you know? I also have memories, share some of the nostalgia for that time, and I did not discover Steve Roach that way but I could imagine listening to that on an MP3 the first time would have been a cool experience. I’m picturing it being 1 a.m. on a pretty big desktop computer or a pretty clunky laptop or something like that, that’s pretty cool.

TP: That’s exactly what it was like for me!

SS: It’s true, I do think that in a lot of ways, the people that buy the reissue records that we put out, and that Morning Trip puts out, probably did have those same experiences and so the landscape changed, and the internet changed, and you couldn’t really have those experiences anymore so we’re providing it in the way that is possible and makes sense now, and it’s not better or worse, but it is different. It’s a different experience.

JS: I think it’s become crazy mainstream. When we started reissuing the Bruce Haack stuff, we thought we were doing something that nobody had fucking done before, which is really stupid of us. People have been doing this shit forever. People were reissuing 70s records on cd in the 90s, it was still very much underground thing in a way for people to access this archival music. We’re probably second wave reissue if you want to get into waving it. And then I think there was a third wave, and I think when that hit, it got to the point where it was really fucking cringe and everything became about the hype sticker and the “lost” classic, and the uniqueness of the story diluted the quality of music. I think that with that came competition, and with competition came more records getting reissued and the quality of that category of music had diminished to the point where it no longer felt special for a while. For me, specifically. It just felt like, oh everyone is doing this and it feels like anything can be reissued. It came very diluted, to the point where culturally, people were more concentrated on the past than the present, and I was guilty of that at point of my life, a hundred percent. And I’ve just had a bit of a shift in my life through the reissue boom where I want to focus more on what’s going on now and cultivating that, because I think that’s more exciting. You’re working with real humans who are still alive and you can help careers and the whole thing is so much more collaborative and feels better, and the future is uncertain so there’s that excitement. It’s an interesting thing where people got so sucked in to living in the past through their music consumption where, regardless of what music you like, whether it was New Age or esoteric jazz or hard rock, there’s always a contemporary band that’s doing that in a new, exciting way that can scratch that itch for you. I feel like if you’re going to put your money and your attention toward something, it should be supporting someone that’s doing it now.

TP: I’m curious, does it seem to you that people are more interested at this point in purchasing physical copies of reissues than they are new music? Are they apprehensive to buy new music in comparison or do you find it’s actually not like that?

SS: I think it’s probably equal. If you’re an artist that is popular and you’re like an “indie” artist or, ‘insert contemporary genre here’, and you’re on a larger label and it’s the type of label that moves vinyl, then I think there’s still a thriving market for that. You go to any record store and you look at the new release section and there will be some reissues there but there’s still plenty of new records, and if you talk to the people behind the cash, they’ll be like yeah, that one moves for sure. I think in a lot of ways, the peak of the reissue scene is over now. I think we’re post-‘that’, where things live a bit more harmoniously and they don’t eat each other’s market share as much.

JS: I actually think that they benefit each other. I think that oftentimes, going back to the physical thing specifically, if you’re getting into physical music, you grew up in the 90s and you’re a backpack hip-hop guy and you go through a resurgence of wanting all your A Tribe Called Quest records again, and you buy the setup and you buy those staple records, then you have the setup, and it becomes a gateway for you to get into buying the contemporary physical products. I think vice versa too, if you already have the setup and you’re into contemporary music, you’re going to buy the old stuff. We used to think that they lived in separate worlds within the consumer, but the more I think about it now, it’s all become the same, a little bit.

TP: What is the process of reissuing a body of work like? Do you hear something that speaks to you followed by this the whole process of tracking it down? If these artists are still alive, how do they usually react to this proposal? Are they excited or surprised? Skeptical?

JS: Each situation is completely different, but the initial spark of a release is always from when you hear something and it literally knocks you over, and you’re just like, I’m gonna investigate this, I’m going to look into this further. The journey becomes very individual at that point. Most of the time I’d say the artists are really excited that somebody’s interested in this music. They’re eager, I would say, is more the response you would get than somebody that’s like “fuck off”. But there are people that have negative attachments to that time in their life. You have to think that, typically speaking, this is a bit of a dark cloud, but typically speaking, the records that we’re reissuing are small, private press records that somebody put their heart and soul into, in the 70s, 80s, 90s where it was hard to do all of that stuff DIY. Going back to your question about the artist in 2022 is the manager, social media person, booking agent et cetera, think about being somebody in 1981 where you’re just like, oh, I have this weird electronic funk music you want to make, you have to go out and buy the TASCAM, learn how to use it, write all the songs yourself, figure out a production plant that’s going to press it for you, you have to make the artwork, you have to distribute the record, you have to create your own record label. Oftentimes these records are coming out on private press record labels that are just the artist putting out their own records, like we started with, which is ironic. And then most of the time, they’re failures. That’s why they didn’t do well, that’s why they only made one round of 500. It was always outsider music and they didn’t know how to distribute it or make it a big thing and from a large industry perspective, they were failures. So that can bring up old, bad feelings for some people. They spend five or ten years of their life and put thousands and thousands of dollars into this record, and now it’s like you’re talking about it again. It’s a bit of an interesting thing. There is no better feeling than getting somebody on the phone for the first time. It’s really exciting and you don’t know what the person’s gonna be like. Most of the time those conversations tend to be an hour too long because it just spirals into the era and what they were doing, what they’re doing now, all that sort of stuff. They’re really wonderful conversations.

Tony Price - “Interview” from the Interview/Discount LP (TER, 2020)

TP: I want to bring it back to the beginning and talk about Toronto now. We first met in Toronto, probably around the time that you started Telephone Explosion. Maybe I was just young, but it seemed to me at the time that there was some kind of a current or a pulse running through the underground music scene in Toronto at that time. There was a healthy blend of DIY venues, independent promotors or curators, and then you had medium-sized venues that were there as a place to play when other bands came through, there was a good selection of record stores, it felt good to be in a band at that time, from my perspective. It seemed like there was always something happening, there were new bands and projects always popping up. There was also this cross-pollination between Toronto and these emergent scenes in Brooklyn or Montreal or even, like, Atlanta or something. This was largely the scene that helped give birth to your label, and to my own career in music. Over the past decade, I’ve lived in and out of Toronto and every time I come back I feel like there’s some drastic change, from all perspectives that I was just talking about. How do you feel that Toronto as a music city has changed and what do you make of the current situation in terms of a Toronto music scene?

SS: Good question. I think there was definitely the prevailing spirit before the pandemic and Covid hit was that gentrification and rising prices combined with streaming and the ability to watch stuff on YouTube instead of live was killing the live music scene and the underground music scene in the city. Then we didn’t do anything for two years, and now that we’re back, we’re in this, it’s not really a boom, but people are so happy to go out and experience musicians playing music live, it’s almost this overjoyed feeling. I don’t know how long that’s gonna last for, but right now it’s once again a really good place to be. But we’ll see what happens in a year or so. It’s an interesting question because I feel like the age you were when a certain thing happened co-relates to your feeling on things. I had just moved to Toronto in 2007, 2008, so it was a brand new city to me. I was in my late 20s and I was meeting all these new people and I still had connections to Ottawa where I was from before, and Montreal, and it was just a time when playing shows meant a different kind of thing, so I wonder if there are people that are 22, 23 in Toronto now that are having that exact same feeling that you and I had in 2007 and we just don’t see it as much because the age difference is a prohibitor from us being involved in that stuff.

JS: Yeah, I think that’s totally it. I think it has a lot to do with youth for sure. The city has changed a lot. Toronto in 2010, to me, was peak fucking amazing city, but that was also because I was like 25 and partying all the time. We would have friends that would come up here for NXNE when that would happen and it became the Northern SXSW, there was house shows and rooftop shows, and it felt like the energy was unstoppable. Obviously Toronto has developed, changed ike the rest. That’s what happens with a city. Pre-pandemic, there was a heavy vibe of all the DIY spots getting shut down, pretty much non-existent as it stands. Obviously Covid had a lot to do with that too, in terms of the new wave of them starting back up. But I do believe there would have been another way. I think that overall, the spirit of Toronto currently is very positive. There was definitely a dark period where people really liked to shit on it, but in terms of the overall community vibe, I think Toronto is actually experiencing something right now that has never happened, and that’s truly breaking down the different scenes and genres within the city. People are way, way, way more open to being in different scenes and seeing different genres of music and having different experiences, where before, if you were a Tranzac person, you were a fuckin’ Tranzac person. You would never go to, like, Coda, or a nightclub, or something. You’d never go to Neutral, the goth bar. You stayed in your lane, and now I feel like Toronto, which is probably representative of the world, is that people are just way more open to going to anything that’s good and interesting. To me, that’s more exciting than where we were at when we met back in 2008 or whatever. I’m just excited.

TP: That’s amazing to hear. Since that time, I have been in Toronto for long stretches of time. I’ve also spent time in these “traditional” music cities, like New York, or London, or L.A., and these places obviously are very storied with their pasts, but speaking right now, being in New York City, the music scene here is, I don’t even know what it is. I do feel that Toronto always has had something special to it. What I think didn’t exist at that time that needed to exist, for a lot of us, was a label like what Telephone Explosion is now. I think you really have filled a void that was very prevalently gaping. I know you guys had your label at that time, but it wasn’t what it is at this point, where it’s this central, powerful hub that could have tied everything all together. I think that’s an important part of a scene. I really understand Toronto’s gentrification has been wild over the past seven years. To watch things change at that rate has been insane. Every time I come back, I’m like, where am I? I think with Telephone Explosion at the point where it’s at now, where it’s internationally recognized as being a force of music, really is and can continue to put Toronto on the map, with everyone making music here. There are so many people crossing boundaries and so many people that are doing amazing things in those spaces between scenes, and I think that you guys have a wonderful knack for recognizing that. I know exploitation is a dirty word, but “exploiting” those interesting links between things. I’m very happy that everything has come as far as it has for you guys and it’s a pleasure working with both of you. It’s such a pleasure to work with people who you don’t have to explain things to. You just get it and you know it, and it’s very amazing that you guys are still Toronto based. I just want to say thank you for always sticking with me and I really appreciate everything you guys have done.

JS: Wow. Thank you, that’s very touching. But isn’t that what it’s all about? Isn’t it all about long relationships? We didn’t set out to be like “we’re Toronto! Check out Toronto!” like billboard people. We did it and it’s just the music that touches us. We truly think it’s extremely special. The way that it's developing – I think in the next couple years you’ll start to see that cross-pollination pushing even further out and I think that’s when you start to break down genre connecting communities, that’s where the real powerful stuff is.

TP: I look forward to what happens with this stuff. You can always draw comparisons to the past. I’ve recently been obsessed with the early 80s in England, again, like I was in 2008. That kind of cross-pollination that was happening in post-punk. The setting and the timing is ripe for something like this to really blossom. That’s basically all I have written down and you guys really answered some cool questions in very compelling ways. I’m excited to type this up.

JS: Well, hopefully should hire someone to do it, because we talk too much. Steve has a theory that we are living in an era, maybe you can describe this better than I can, about the proficiency of being musical, basically.

SS: So going back to that 2007 stuff we were talking about, that was the time when it was not cool to be good at your instrument, or to make records that sounded good (all laughing). If it sounded it was just a microphone going into a soundcard, that’s what everybody wanted. I had people actually come up to me at times saying, “you’re good but I’m not really into drummers that can keep time, I’m more into people that just seem like they’re picking it up and going with it.” Now, it’s become cool to be a muso again.

TP: In the same way that it’s become cool to be rich.

SS: Whoa.

TP: You see what I’m saying?

SS: Now that you’ve said that, it’s going to burrow into my brain and I’m going to start researching it.

JS: Isn’t that what social media promotes? It’s not like, look how shitty I am.

TP: There’s a very interesting correlation between those two things, you know.

JS: Totally. It’s like, look at all the nice shit I bought, look at the nice shit I own, look at the nice shit I’m doing.

TP: That’s interesting. Do you think that there will be a time in 20 years when a new label pops up and they’re like, we’re reissuing these cassette tapes that were made on GarageBand with blown-out microphones from the dollar store? It’s inevitable, really.

JS: Abso-fucking-lutely. People are already reissuing emo stuff that was pretty crappy from Southern Ontario and doing releases that never came out on Bandcamp. The reissue culture has because, again, the 70s, 80s, 90s, whatever has kind of been tapped, it’s all moved up already. You’re starting to see reissues that are like, “originally released only on Bandcamp in 2008” and stuff. It’s moving up. For sure. I think that you’ll see 5th wave garage moment.

SS: Somebody rereleased a Times New Viking cassette or something.

JS: Oh boy.

TP: The Holy Cobras discography, 5 LP box set.

JS: Oh my god, take it. Please. I’m sure they’d be into that. It’s just like, what is time? When you have friends, it’s just a funny thing where your interests kind of grow and stay the same. And it’s wonderful.

INTERVIEW: BENEDEK

By: Tony Price

Benedek is a DJ, producer and recording artist based in Los Angeles. Over the last decade he has released records on labels like L.I.E.S. Records, People’s Potential Unlimited, and Leaving Records, all of which could be classified as modern classics. A skillful producer and programmer possessing a virtuosic sense of musical vision and a keen ear for arrangement, Benedek’s sound masterfully combines the familiar and immediate with the heady and avant-garde. Throughout his discography you can find traces of technological funk, computer-age jazz fusion, the iridescent sheen of early ambient New Age music, and the metropolitan clank of early Chicago house. In this discussion, we talk about the concept of sound presets, the happy accidents built into music-making machines, the notion of “retro” in music and much more.

TP: I’ve seen you play guitar a lot. Is that your main instrument, your primary instrument?

B: Yeah, it is actually. I’ve been playing guitar since I was like 9 years old, and it’s definitely my primary instrument, though it doesn’t always make it onto my tracks, I’m definitely most comfortable on guitar. 

TP: Very interesting, I’m the same. I’ve been playing guitar since I was pretty young, too, so I was just curious about that. A lot of your music is obviously very synth and drum machine focused. When you say it doesn’t show up on the records, does it play a role in writing songs or coming up with songs?

B: It does, depending on the track. I think more recently I’ve been getting into it, back to trying to write by starting out more on guitar and looping things. The tracks that have guitar on them, where it plays a bigger role, I’d say those – I often am coming up with the chord progressions and the riffs on guitar. But I don’t usually write on guitar and then figure it out on keys; usually if it’s gonna be a guitar based track, I figure it out on guitar. If I have something I’m working out on keys, I’ll layer over it with guitar. It depends on the track. I recently got this Midi guitar plug-in that you just play and it turns it right into Midi.

TP: Do you still have that studio space you had a few years ago?

B: Yeah, I’ve had this studio space in Koreatown – it’s been eight years now, I think, since 2014. I’ve had a few people I’ve shared it with over the years; it’s mainly me and my buddy Alex Talan, who helps me make a lot of my stuff. He’s a really sick engineer and producer as well. 

TP: Do you tend to make music more during the day or at night? 

B: I find myself making more dance-y stuff at night, it definitely influences the music. Dependson the time of day, it definitely impacts the vibe. 

TP: I agree, I agree. Are you the type of person that has to adhere to some kind of a schedule? Do you wake up every day and make your way into the studio or do you just kind of see what happens? 

B: I like to have somewhat of a schedule. Usually we split up the time depending on who’s in here. I try to come in every day. I like to work early in the morning but I like to stay up late. I think my inclination to stay up late overpowers that pretty often. I definitely like to keep somewhat of a schedule. If I can get in the studio every day at the same time in a week, I like having that momentum, for sure.

TP: Do you prefer working alone or do you like working – not so much in collaboration, but maybe in the presence of others in the room, having people there? Is that something that you enjoy or do you usually like being completely alone when you’re starting to make a track?

B: You know, I like working with other people around but at certain stages I prefer to be alone.  If I’m already far enough along with something,  I need to be alone to just focus, mixing or fine tuning things or whatever.  But of course, there are definitely different vibes to be caught with different people in the room.  

TP: You like to use a lot of old gear, so I’m just curious about how you navigate between the worlds of digital and analog. Do you find that when you use archaic gear or old synths, drum machines, synthesizers and stuff, that it creates a situation that is conducive to happy accidents? How much of a role does chance or improv play when you’re working with machines like that? 

B: It definitely plays a role. With drum machines, if I’m not sequencing something in Ableton, if I’m using the built-in sequencer in some old drum machine, sometimes I can play random things and see how it gets quantized. I think that’s part of the zeitgeist of electronic and dance music, house, techno etc., the random sequence, say, a drum machine triggering a Pro-One or an SH-101, playing random notes in. That’s a part of the practice of it. Even looping, playing something in, you could do this with a Midi controller into a computer, too, but just playing something random, having that get looped and then quickly layering something over that, you keep layering, that’s definitely, for me, where I find a lot of energy and fun, it’s a fun process. 

Benedek - “Doodat” from the Mr. Goods LP

TP: I agree with you fully. The past decade, you’ve seen the price of gear rise by ten times what it was in 2008. So the entry point for anyone interested in this stuff, you get like one piece at a time. I think that’s something I learned when I started getting into drum machines and synthesizers, just how much of that music that inspires you to buy an SH-101 or 808 or something, is made largely by chance. A lot of acid house is very much a random, spontaneous process where you press play, turn knobs  and see what happens and then all of a sudden, it’s printed out on tape, and it’s done - that’s it. It can change someone’s life, just – that accident, that chance. What about presets? Do you find yourself happy with presets or do you end up tweaking things and dialing in your own sound?

B:  I love certain old presets. There’s just something about them. They sound good, they hit a certain spot. I don’t know if it's nostalgia, some of the sounds that I like, they just sound good and they work in a certain way. The DX7, just the stock sounds that come on a DX7, those sounds are so done to death, but sometimes they work, it’s what you want. I definitely love to program my own sounds as well. Before I could even play keys I was really into sound design. In high school I got a cracked copy of Reason. I started out on that, just messing around with those plugins, trying to make sequences. I didn’t play keys, I was a guitarist, I just loved electronic sounds and production. And then I got a Juno HS60, a Juno 106 with built-in speakers; on that thing I learned synthesis. I think a lot of people started out on the Juno. It’s very barebones, sounds amazing, super friendly to learn. Initially I didn’t want to use presets, I wanted to make my own sounds. Over time, I learned the presets are pretty cool. The music I like, some of it is just all presets. My heroes weren’t always trying to make that DX7 bass sound from scratch every time. 

TP: There’s a clip of Jimmy Jam testing out the Roland Boutique D-50, have you seen that clip? He just says, and I’ve read this in other interviews, too - that he is 100% presets. He hates having to change sounds, he’s like, “I want to plug it in, press a button and have a song basically written from that sound.” It’s interesting how these charges get pressed when it comes to synthesizer-based music. If I plug a Stratocaster into a Twin Reverb, it’s a sound that’s just considered normal, even though it’s very much an “old sound”. One thing that artists who use vintage equipment often get told is that their music “sounds retro”. How do you feel about this kind of thing? Do you feel like you make “retro” sounding music? Is it something you aim for or try to avoid? I mean it’s kind of impossible to not want to sound like Jimmy Jam. 

B: I agree, I think about it in this way: when you see in 2021, a thrash band, like a band of 20-somethings in 2021 who have been listening to classic metal or punk, these genres which keep going – you don’t hear thrash and necessarily think “oh, that’s 80s, or early 90s.” So to me, all this stuff has that connotation because it didn’t just keep going. I guess house and dance music did keep going, and of course there’s different eras, but as far as the funk side of what I love, what we’re into, and the R’n’B, it’s funny, it gets pegged as being of a certain time, but to me it’s just so classic, it’s just as classic as classic rock. Like you’re saying, the DX is just as classic as a Twin Reverb at this point, a Strat and Twin Reverb.

TP: I agree, and that’s a part of what I love about L.I.E.S, there’s nothing “retro” about that label or that world that Ron(Morelli) has cultivated. It’s very much that he and everyone that’s involved with that label understand that the core values and ethos of this type of music existed long before the DX7 was invented and will last long after we are all gone. How did you end up hooking up with Ron to do the Mr. Goods record? 

B: I met Ron in like 2011 or 2012, but we didn’t really know each other. I would just go into A1 when I lived in New York at the same time as Brandon, Delroy Edwards, who is a good friend of mine from L.A., so we all ended up hanging. I would go into A1 and hang with Brandon, and kind of met Ron then in passing. A couple years later I saw Ron a few times; he played in L.A. and I would say what up to him, but we first really got to hang in Europe when I was out there and we started talking.  Ron’s the best.  An absolute legend and a real head who just knows so much shit. 

TP: Do you make an effort to ensure your music is released in some kind of physical format? Or is that by the nature of who you’ve connected with that it has come out that way?

B: I’d say that I do love for it to come out physically, if it’s at all possible.  Most of the labels I’ve worked with do physical releases. It’s all been pretty organic. The releases I’ve put out, the people involved in the labels – we were friends already or we became friends through the process of putting the record out. I definitely prefer it to be that way. There’s a lot of great labels where that’s not the case, but I definitely prefer that, where I feel like we’re working on something together. It’s collaborative. 

TP: What role do you think vinyl plays in either dance or underground music culture at this point? Do you think people are still buying records to listen to or to DJ with, or are they buying them in the same way they buy t-shirts?

B:  I think there’s a lot of people that just love to have the physical, tangible object but don’t necessarily treat it in the same way someone who is digging for this stuff day in day out would.  Playing records is definitely not a must as a DJ in this day and age but depending on the style of music you’re into it can bring a lot of depth to what you’re doing.  Most of the music I play out is older and was never released digitally at all. I like the idea that maybe you’re one of the few hundred people in the world who knows this one track and the other heads listening to it are on the other side of the planet. 

TP: Do you use Spotify, or any music streaming services? Is that something you enjoy using as a music fan?

B: I dunno that I enjoy using it, but I do use it. I think it’s very convenient but I think the playlist aspect/format as a way to push music from a corporate agenda – I think that’s really wack, but for artists or labels to make playlists for people to access, I think that’s cool, to have that be a communal thing, that aspect is cool. I feel like they haven’t worked out how to get people paid properly. I still like having actual files of all my music, I’m weird like that, like I’m stuck in, like ten years ago. 

TP: That’s interesting, because that’s something I’ve been asking everyone. That’s something that I still do too, not even for DJing. There’s so much stuff you can’t find, especially dance music, on Spotify. They’re hiding in the basement channels of the internet!

B: One hundred percent. For me, my favorite platform has been YouTube since it came out, and though it’s gotten worse over the years, to me that’s the best place to dig for music other than going into an actual store. 

TP: I agree, you get the same kind of happy accidents you do with analog gear. Something will show up, you’ll click on a user with 50 subscribers, and then you’ll find some insane track. I think that, speaking as a music fan, Spotify is convenient – I use it a lot when I’m walking around or driving. But like you’re saying, these tech companies have gentrified taste, like they’ve gentrified the act of curating or discovering stuff. The playlists that Spotify and Apple make, they’re fucking horrible. They obviously serve a purpose, a purpose that does little for us. Something that makes me happy is that NTS exists. NTS has changed my life. I used to live right across the street from the booth in London, and that’s how I heard about it. Discovering that, couldn't believe that it existed. The amount of amazing, life-changing music that I’ve been introduced to through NTS is insane. But I’m curious, other than YouTube, how do you usually find new music, music you don’t know about?

B: I love just digging through records and CDs wherever I can, but also through friends. I love just hanging out with like-minded friends that are into similar musical worlds and sharing music. To just hang out with a couple friends, smoke some weed, drink beers and listen to music. It sounds funny, but that’s maybe my favorite. As far as personally, on a digging kind of level, I guess record stores, YouTube.   A couple years ago, I’d say Blogspot was really popping. 

TP: I miss Blogspot. Those were the days.

B: Yeah, like ten years ago to maybe, like 2015 – but there’s still some out there!

TP: That short window of time, until those RapidShare-type sites were all taken down, that was such an insane time to discover stuff. 

B: It was cool. I think that was the Golden Age of something. I was just telling my friend, it’s always the Golden Age of Something. What is this the Golden Age of that we’re in right now? But that time might have been the Golden Age for fuckin’ Blogspot. The RapidShares, ZippyShare - 

TP: MegaUpload, whatever…

B: Yeah (laughs).

TP: How do you find your work as a DJ and your work as a producer are linked, if they are at all?

B: They’re linked for sure, but I also get into a different mindset. As a DJ, I know some producers who when they DJ will mainly play their own tracks, or their own unreleased stuff in a way that’s more integrated. I like playing my own stuff, but I also really like playing things that inspire me and things that I’m excited about that I’ve never heard before. I just love to play something that I just found, something that I’ve never played before. To hear it on a good system is just a good feeling, ya know. And have people interact with it.

TP: Do you see DJing as an extension of your music production, or is it a different thing?

B: I’d say it is related. Of course I play music that informs what I do as a producer. My goal when I’m DJing is to play things that have inspired me, to pay homage to the music that I get inspired by. I would say when I play live, that’s the real live performance extension of my production, and DJing is something slightly separated but it’s all integrated for sure. I’ve definitely done sets where I play live keys over it. I wanna do more of that. It’s kind of a fun way to bring them both together in a way that’s – I heard this Boyd Jarvis and Timmy Regisford radio broadcast, like a WBLS, one of those New York radio stations, and Boyd is like going over the track. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It sounds crazy. I realized he was playing live over it, and I was like, I need to do that more often. A few people do it but it’s kind of rare. I’ve seen Byron the Aquarius do it and he’s sick. 

TP: Yeah, on Instagram, I’ve seen him rip over tracks. 

B: Yeah, he does it a lot. I wanna do that more.

Benedek - “Afterglo” from the Bene’s World LP

TP: How do you feel about the increased efforts that are expected of an artist in promoting their own music on social media? Is it something that you enjoy or dislike? How do you feel about it? 

B: I don’t like it. Straight up, I definitely don’t like it (laughs). We have to do it nowadays in the most tasteful way that we can, but I really don’t like the “talking to the camera” type style, some people can pull it off and that’s their vibe, they own it, but for a guy like me – I don’t have any desire to do that. A lot of the music that I like is almost anonymous, faceless. You don’t see Larry Heard doing that type of thing, or even producers like Jam and Lewis, you didn’t see them doing that either. Back in the day, maybe there would be an interview in like, Keyboard Magazine, but they’re not front and center and I have no desire to – I’m down to have images of me out there or whatever. I don’t even really like doing interviews. I like doing this, with you, because you’re my friend, but some random journalist, I haven’t had the best experiences doing that. So it’s kind of the same thing with the social media shit. People are expected to do so much now. People, like, writing a question, and people are supposed to comment? I guess this is where we’re at now, but there’s gotta be some alternative because it’s not for everyone. 

TP: I’m in the same boat as you. I’d say it’s more than discomfort. I have a crippling fear of putting myself on the internet. That’s why I’ve kind of forced myself to find a way with Maximum Exposure, whatever it may be, to exist on the internet, but in a faceless way, which is largely inspired by the music we’re talking about here. To your point, asking questions, doing that type of stuff, being part of the game or whatever – maybe this is just wishful thinking - but I think being faceless or maintaining some type of mystique, although it doesn’t provide immediate results, I think in the long run does help. I think that’s why we’re still intrigued by Gherkin Records, why we’re still intrigued by Jam and Lewis. So I think there is another way for people like us. I’m hoping at least. And that’s what I’m trying to get at with these interviews, another way to talk about things that isn’t self-promotion.

B: Hundred percent. I love that. I have so much respect for what you do with Maximum Exposure. As soon as I discovered your page I was like, “this guy knows his stuff, this is cool.” Really compiling inspiring really sick and curated vibes, visually and musically. It’s dope. Not many people are doing what you’re doing. 

TP: Thank you, thank you. I’m still trying to figure out what it is and I’m still trying to make it be the best that it can be, but I definitely feel exactly how you feel. It’s awkward to be an artist today, everyone’s expected to act like a celebrity or an influencer.

B: Totally. There’s just this micro-celebrity culture. I blame reality TV. I think reality TV is the catalyst for all this shit. And then you have like a generation, our generation, that grew up watching this shit and whether they liked it or not, people absorbed that and they think that’s just like, how you have to be. Maybe it works for some people, it’s definitely funny, but it’s not inspiring, it’s not artistic, it’s not musical…

TP: It’s not natural!

B: (Laughs) I could go on for hours about this shit.

Trackstars- “Bonanza” from the Trackstars EP

TP: I just wanted to ask one more question, about the Track Stars record. You’ve been friends with Brandon, Delroy, for a long time? 

B: Yeah, for like ten years, I’d say. 

TP: And you guys had done something together for PPU before, right? A seven inch?

B: Yeah, we did an RX 45, it was this really bugged-out, strung out – I think one of them was called “Strung Out”, it was like music for a snuff film or a porn, like really low budget fucked up sounding. 

TP: So what was the deal with Track Stars? Was it tracks that you’d been working on for a while or had sitting around? Did you intentionally come together to do this for L.I.E.S.?

B: It was definitely intentional. We came together and we wanted to make some house tracks and put ‘em out, and we did it. I forget if we were making it for L.I.E.S. from the jump but we started making these tracks, six of them or something and we ended up with those four that we put out. 

TP: Did you write the first record together? 

B: Yeah, we made it in person in his studio. 

TP: Do you have more of that stuff coming out? Did I read that somewhere,that there’s another volume? 

B: Man, we have other stuff that’s unreleased but we are definitely planning to do something. We’re overdue to link up again.

TP: Other than a new Record on Apron records, do you have other stuff due out in the foreseeable future?

B: Yeah, there’s this record with my friend Anthony that I’ve been working on for like two years now, I guess since right before Covid started, and it’s kind of like ambient-fusion-y, some ECM vibes.

TP: Did you do a live set with him recently?

B: Yeah, yeah!

TP: Yeah that was amazing!

B: Thanks man. We did a live show in September. Hopefully once we put the record out I’m sure we’ll do more. It’s been fun to play more guitar and do something different. This is the first fully collaborative album I’ve done with someone, and it is such a different process, especially this type of music, which has made it cool. He comes from more of a jazz background, he’s a trained musician, jazz guy. Plays trumpet and keys, amazing singer. He’s a vocal coach, teaches piano. He’s really much more of a traditional musician than me. He’s played on a few of my records in the past. He’s played in live stuff in L.A. We’ve been doing stuff together for a long time but this is the first thing we’ve actually released. The project doesn’t have a name yet, but I’m working on it. 

INTERVIEW: TONY PRICE VS. JUNO DAILY

I recently did an in-depth interview with Juno Daily as part of the promotional campaign for my new “MARK VI” LP. We talk about my life-long infatuation with car design, the story behind the album title, the influence that 1980’s dance music and glass architecture had over the sounds that make up this album, technology, vaporwave, 80’s revivalism and much more. Check it out here.

LINK SUPPLY VOL. 2

By: Tony Price

An assemblage of miscellaneous links to articles, essays, videos, playlists, records and more.

• Land Of The Rising Sound: A Roland Retrospective

  This 72 minute documentary by YouTube music historian Alex Ball dives deep into the Roland Corporation, covering the history of their output, inventions and innovations from the birth of the company fifty years ago up to the present day. Founded in Osaka, Japan by Ikutaro Kakehashi in 1972, Roland has arguably been responsible for shaping the sound of modern music more than any other entity. Between their innovations in synthesis, MIDI technology and audio effects, the degree to which they have influenced, or even created the sound of modern music is absolutely astounding.

• Is New York City’s Best Sound System In A Bumper Car Arena?

  Yes, it is. Installed in the early 1980’s at the direction of owner and audiophile, Scott Fitlin, the sound system installed in the Eldorado Auto Skooter bumper car arena in Coney Island was the work of famed sound system designer Richard Long, known famously for his systems at Paradise Garage and Studio 54. As this Red Bull article explains, Nicky Siano and Larry Levan would ride around, smashing into each other while listening to “Love Is The Message”. I went to Coney Island recently and took several rides at Eldorado. They were playing “Bodak Yellow” through the system, and the sound was absolutely INSANE. The bass was holographic, 3D. It was the most physical sound system I have ever interacted with. Only in New York does this type of shit happen.

• 150 Session - A Few Chapters From The Mental Machine

  This 1 hour special on NTS Radio by DJ “ML” combines excerpts from the legendary Electrifying Mojo’s audiobook “The Mental Machine” with an assortment of Motor City machine funk classics from the likes fo Omar S., Jeff Mills, Derrick May and co. Mojo’s flanger-laden vocals spitting metallic truths over drum machine calisthenics and midnight synth-scapes…it doesn’t get any realer.

• Art Bell Tape Vault

  Someone has finally compiled and uploaded an archive of full length recordings from Art Bell’s infamous Coast To Coast AM radio show. If you are unfamiliar with the show, read up on it and listen to some of these recordings late at night while driving or sitting in a dark room. Before the recent mainstreaming/weaponization of the “conspiracy theory”, Art Bell’s late night radio show was the place to plug into for all things weird and paranormal. This is a vast reservoir of snapshots from the dark, fractured interiors of the postwar American psyche. There is a lot in here: shows from the day after Windows 95 was released, interviews with scientists who purport to have worked at Area 51, recordings from the days following 9/11 and armchair Y2K theorists making their predictions on the eve of the new century.

INTERVIEW: DAMAR DAVIS

By: Tony Price

Damar Davis is a DJ, producer and recording artist based in Los Angeles. Through his label Salon Recordings, he has cultivated a scene and sound that are filling a void in dance music on America’s west coast. A virtuosic drummer and manipulator of machines, within his productions you can hear the influence of J Dilla’s fractured funk, the cybernetic swing of Theo Parrish and the glossy sheen of prime time G-Funk. The Salon sound is at once corporeal and machine-like, familiar and hyper-futuristic. I spoke to him in December 2021 about the relationship between drumming and programming drum machines, the state of dance music in Los Angeles, his relationship to physical media and much more.

TP: What’s going on? You’ve just released a new EP a few weeks ago.

DD: Yeah, I released “Duende” a couple weeks ago. Before that I was just playing shows like every weekend, I was running the gauntlet. It was kind of intense. So I’m kind of happy things have slowed down. I’m hyped that things are slow now, or slower. 

TP: I don’t think I asked you this when we hung out in L.A., but would you consider your ‘main instrument’ to be drums? I’ve seen you play some nasty drums. 

DD: (Laughs) Yeah, I grew up playing drums in church, you know, typically Gospel chops musician. Not typical, but like, that’s my background. Everyone in my family plays some sort of instrument. 

TP: Do you still play often?

DD: The drums? Nah, man. I wish. I was actually talking to my girl about it the other day and I miss touring, man, I miss being in a band and like, I dunno, putting my energy in and seeing a sea full of people and just playing, you know, going for it. 

TP: A completely different life. 

DD: Yeah, yeah. 

TP: Do you feel the rush you get from playing drums on stage is different from playing a record to a room full of people as a DJ? 

DD: Yeah, especially as a drummer, there’s like this automatic adrenaline that you get, even if you’re playing a slow song, you know. If you watch someone that has a backing track and a guitar singing right after watching a full band, even if the songs they’re playing are super high-energy, it’s just not going to match. 

TP: When you’re making electronic music, do you approach programming drums in the same way, being a drummer, that you play drums with a band or is it more of an experimental approach? On the record you put out earlier this summer, there are some 808 high-hat patterns which are just wild. Listening to it, I was curious as to how you approached that.

DD: I approach it exactly like if I’m playing the drums. I write the part to it, like if it’s a verse or if it’s a chorus, then those are the parts for the song. Most of the time I don’t really click drums in; a lot of people click some drums into their DAW. I normally play all my drums out, either like on some sort of pad or on the keyboard, like I’m playing all those drums. 

TP: Last time I spoke to you, you had  recently moved out of a rehearsal space or studio space and set up at home. Are you still in that mode, where you’re working in your home studio, or have you moved into a different space? 

DD: I’m still at home. I have a studio room, if you want to call it a studio room, where I work out of. But it’s getting to the point where it’s just like, alright, I need to be back in a space where I can track real drums, and have friends come and play on the record. I’m just kind of like, ugh. 

TP: I feel the same way. I went back to Toronto for most of this year, but I came back to New York, a cool spot in Chinatown, but my room is really tiny, and I realize that I really need to get a space that I can work out of, for the same reasons that you’re explaining. Being able to do stuff with other people is important.

DD: 100%.

TP: So what’s your home studio situation like? Are you the kind of guy that sets a schedule for yourself or do you wait for inspiration to hit and then just walk in to the studio and see what happens? 

DD: So, normally I’d say before, in the beginning of the year, I would wake up, work out, take my dog for a run, and then after I take a shower, like, immediately into songwriting. But, now, I feel like, I dunno, I’ve reached this point where everything kind of sounds the same, and everything looks the same, from a consumer standpoint. I pick up my phone and everything on Instagram looks exactly the same. And then I listen to what other DJs are playing and everything kind of sounds the same, too. So as of right now, I don’t have a routine ‘cause everything sounds so shitty to me. Myself included. I’m so tired of hearing the same shit.

TP: I know exactly what you’re saying. It’s hard. I find myself buying synths when I hit that wall, trying to spark some sort of inspiration. But it often doesn’t help, you just end up sitting there trying to figure out how to program the thing, thinking to yourself that this isn’t really helping my problem, is it? (Laughs)

DD: Buying new gear is never the answer.

Damar Davis - “Gym” from the Haus LP

TP: No, it isn’t! It’s always the problem, actually. What’s your relationship like with gear? Do you like using hardware gear or do you find like it kind of gets in the way? 

DD: I mean I feel like with the majority of the hard gear that I do own, I use it and write with all the time, but with everything being accessible on the internet, it’s kind of hard to spend a lot of money on a Juno when you can just buy a plug-in. 

TP: The plug-ins at this point are sounding amazing. 

DD: Right. 

TP: What’s up with Salon? When did you start Salon? 

DD: I started it at the end of 2019, but it started out as just a party, and then it formed its way into a record label, by necessity, because my experience with other record labels. So, the story behind it is pretty much just to put out music that I like from my friends, first and foremost, and then to pretty much – I feel like there was this empty space in L.A., as far as music was concerned, and like the style of music. No disrespect to any of these people, but I feel like a lot of the artists in L.A. that were playing house or electronic music sounded a lot like, Ben U.F.O., or like Shlomo, you know. I kind of was like, there’s no one really representing the stuff that I like. My immediate group of friends, we are all into more soulful, J. Dilla, house-y, Theo Parrish-type stuff. So since no one else was doing it, I was like, well, I might as well start that. 

TP: Do you think that the fact that Salon started off as a party first has helped to cultivate an offline, real-world community in a way that starting a label online wouldn’t be able to? Has a community come together though that? 

DD: For sure. I mean, there’s so many people that just keep coming, there’s no other sound like this in L.A., no one else is doing this, you get that whole gauntlet of emotions. I mean, like I said, I feel like, even with house music in New York, or house music in Oakland or wherever, no one is really doing a West Coast soulful sound of house music, other than us. It’s kind of like what Dre did with the Death Row sound. 

TP: I can definitely see that kind of parallel for sure. 

DD: It’s not like we’re trying to emulate that or wear this hat, it’s kind of what we keep getting as far as a response to what we’re doing. It was kind of like an idea that grew legs and started running on its own. I’ve been trying to grab it by the harness and try to steer it as much as possible, but it’s kind of been running on its own, going crazy.

Damar Davis - “LA” from the Duende EP, out now through Salon Recordings

TP: What would you say is the most frustrating thing about running a record label in 2021? Is it the promotion side that is the most agonizing? What about streaming? Do you like streaming, from a consumer standpoint? What about from an artist and label standpoint?

DD: Alright, so, it’s so crazy because, as you know since you have your own label, there’s so many different hats you have to wear as a label. And then dealing with different graphic designers, and then dealing with the consumer that’s like, I’m only gonna buy records, you’re not a real record label unless you put out records, and then there’s also the basic consumer that will just come to our parties that’s just gonna stream our music on Spotify or on iTunes because it’s easily accessible. So, I don’t knock streaming; I wish we could get more money from the streaming side of things, but at the same time, I feel like it is what it is and music is going its own way as much as possible. In that regard, I just try to push Bandcamp as much as I can. Then on the other side, as a label, even small diners have their own clothing, so you might as well have t-shirts, hoodies, hats, stickers, whatever you can. 

TP: What about from a consumer standpoint, do you like it? 

DD: I do, man. I use Spotify – I don’t wanna sound like a jock, but I use Spotify mainly for when I’m working out. But if I’m looking for music, I’m listening to mixes.

TP: When it comes to music and finding new mixes, for me, personally, NTS has always been the beacon of hope. Do you listen to NTS radio? 

DD: 100%. My first experience with playing on online radio was on NTS. The longer my stint goes, the more I realize there’s so many NTS, they’re just the one that has the crown right now. Everybody has an online radio show on a different platform.

TP: What role do you think vinyl plays in the world of dance music at this time? Is it the same as any other kind of consumer area in music, where people treat vinyl like they treat t-shirts and posters as just something to buy and own rather than something that has a specific use value to it? 

DD: I’m just going to be real, I know people that buy records not to listen to them, they buy them just to have a record collection, and they’re music snobs, you know. But as far as buying records, I don’t feel like a lot of people buy records like they used to. I feel like mainly DJs buy records, but other than that, you’re not getting a bunch of people going crazy over records, unless it’s people who are in the scene, buying that record because they plan on playing that record, or because they’ve been supporting that artist since day one, or if you’re in, like, Europe. That’s really it. And then if you’re a hip-hop beat producer that’s kind of O.G., you’re buying records too, but other than that, they’re not buying records. 

TP: Do you buy records? 

DD: Yeah, for sure. Not all the time, but not as much as I should.

TP: Do you ever DJ with vinyl? 

DD: Every once in a while, on my radio show, but not live. I did that Vinyl Factory thing and that’s the last thing that I did with actual records.

TP: Do you collect any other physical media? Do you collect magazines or books or anything like that? 

DD: No, man, it’s super weird. As a kid, my whole family was kind of athletic, so it was like, “you have to play sports.” That was the thing. Either you play basketball, or you play football. So, I was outside a lot of the time, so I never really got a chance to do collecting, other than shoes. Like, shoes and some types of clothing, I would, but not as much any more. Hardly ever. 

TP: How do you store and maintain your digital files? Do you really make an effort to back up sessions, for instance, when you’re making music? do you use Cloud storage? How do you navigate that? 

DD: Funny that you ask that. So, yesterday, since I told you I haven’t really been making music, I was like, alright, I’m gonna go back to the old way that I used to do things, and I literally go through all my sounds that I have, whether it’s like, loops, chords, basslines, one-shots, and I make folders for everything, and then after I make folders for them, I put them on a hard drive, that way everything is backed up, and then I go from there. I’m kind of a nerd about that.

TP: So when you can’t really find inspiration to create a song, you get down to work and organize things. 

DD: For sure, because you’ll come across a sound, or you’ll come across a vocal loop and you’re like, oh, this is cool, I’m gonna use it. It sparks ideas. It’s just like being clean. If you cleaned your room as a kid, you’d be like, oh, there’s that shirt! Or, there’s that toy!

TP: (Laughs) Yeah, for sure, I’m that way to this day. I can’t even sit down at a computer and do work unless everything is cleaned up and lined up visually, so I definitely know what you mean. Did you work in a studio for one of the records that you put out this year? Do I remember seeing that online? 

DD: Yeah yeah yeah, so Future Sound and Frogtown. 

TP: Nice. Did you produce in there, or just mix? How did you incorporate going into the studio into your work flow? 

DD: It was mainly just mixing. My friend Jon Jon has a studio in Frogtown and I just went over there to mix the record down, and he has really good gear, analog and digital, and I needed to be in a space where it would sound like it was, really in the club. So it was really helpful to just take it there, ‘cause I can’t really like bump bump music like that in my spot.

Damar Davis - “GF” from the Bronze EP, available now through Maximum Exposure Inc.

TP: There is a ‘Salon sound’, I really do think that, in the same way that there is this ‘Apron Records sound’, and it is quite futuristic. Do you have any interest in making things sound old or analog, or is that not something that passes through your mind while mixing? Your stuff doesn’t sound retro or throwback at all. I feel like a lot of people, and I’m guilty of this, really fetishize old sounds. Do you ever do that? 

DD: Nah man, I like things that sound super fresh. I don’t even want to say it’s a competitive thing, but I feel like the number one thing that would make a Salon sound is that I am really aware that our direct competition is, like, mainstream media, so even if we do make dance music, there’s like, a Kaytranada that’s making dance music that’s gonna get played on the radio, and they’re not using older sounding stuff, they’re using brand new gear and all new sounds that makes everything sound super fresh. So as far as a consumer is concerned, they don’t wanna hear older stuff. That’s for people that are buying records. And no disrespect to anybody, that’s just the way my brain thinks. 

TP: For sure, and I think that sometimes it just takes someone with a vision, like you, to create this world that becomes something like Salon. So what do you have going on in the next year? Do you have any specific plans for what you want to do with music in Salon or are you just going to try and go with the flow and see what happens? 

DD: There’s definitely a roadmap. You’re gonna see Salon in other states, We’re gonna do other things in other places, not just L.A. You’re gonna get more merch and stuff like that from us, just because we are super aware of fashion and the times. What else? Obviously, just music, great mixes, equal opportunity for female DJs as well. It’s a big thing that we’re really big on, so all that stuff, man.

TP: Do you run everything with Salon on your own or do you do it with someone else?

DD: It’s really all just me.

”Duende” is out now through Salon Recordings

Follow Damar Davis on Instagram

Follow Salon Recordings on Instagram

INTERVIEW: TOM CARRUTHERS

By: Tony Price

Tom Carruthers is a producer from Cheshire, England. His latest LP on L.I.E.S. Records is an instant classic. Drawing inspiration from the early 90’s bleep techno, the grimiest of NYC house and Motor City machine funk, “Non Stop Rhythms” is an elemental masterpiece that is a masterclass in otherworldly, minimalist production. I recently spoke with him about his new album, his recording process, the birth of his label Non Stop Rhythm, and using social media to promote music.

TP: Congratulations on that L.I.E.S. record. I listened to it at the gym yesterday. It’s incredible. I love it so much. 

TC: Nice one, I appreciate it. Been in the pipeline for a while so I’m glad it’s finally out now. I think my copies arrive tomorrow. 

TP: The artwork looks great, too. 

TC: Yeah, it’s cool, innit. 

TP: So is that a compilation of a bunch of stuff that you had either put out or worked on before?

TC: I think it’s a few tracks I already released on the label, and my label’s quite small so he (Ron Morelli) wasn’t too fussed about it, about the fact that they’re already released, but a lot of it is unreleased material, I’d say half of it is unreleased. 

Tom Carruthers - “Cyclone” from the Non Stop Rhythms LP out now on L.I.E.S. Records

TP: So, you have Non Stop Rhythm, that’s your main label, right? 

TC: Yep. I did have a label in 2018 called L&T Recordings, but that’s pretty much died off now. Non Stop Rhythm is my main focus. House music. 

TP: I feel like I’ve seen you post a bunch of stuff with different graphics, maybe different label names. Did you have another one as well, or was it always just L&T and that turned into Non Stop Rhythm?

TC: I was doing L&T but I was more into European techno, like R&S Records, that was a big inspiration for that label. Over the past couple years, I’ve gotten a lot more into New York house music, Chicago house. I thought I’d start a new label, Non Stop Rhythm, to take you from the more house-y kind of sounds but with tempo stuff.

TP: When did you start that label? 

TC: It was around February 2020, just prior to Covid and all the rubbish. 

TP: You’ve put out a lot of music since then, haven’t you? 

TC: Yeah, super prolific, especially through 2020. I wasn’t really working at the time, I was just focusing on my music and living off the income of my record labels. 

TP: So during the pandemic you’d just be making tracks all day and then just put them out as soon as possible? Was that your goal?

TC: Yeah, just to get them out there. I wanted to be super busy. I think in one year we put out 50 releases, not all my own on the label, but from guys all over Europe, all over the world to be fair, but a pretty prolific 50 in a year. 

TP: That’s wild, very cool. Did you do one 12” as well, physical? Or did you do more than that? 

TC: Trying to think, I did put one out, I made up a little label called Crash Records for it for a massive house single. Pressed up a few of them and then I put out two 12” on Non Stop Rhythm. One was a reissue by Freddy Bastone, not sure if you’ve heard of him, from New York, “Corporation of One”.

TP: Yeah, that track is crazy. I was surprised when I saw that you reissued it. I was just looking at Discogs…how many vinyl records did you press for these two releases? 

TC: Both of them, just 300. Kept it small, just to test the waters.

TP: Do you have vinyl distribution? Do you press them and sell them out of your house? 

TC: What I’ve done is I have a digital distribution contract, with a company called Label Way. I signed that in late 2019 for L&T Recordings, and Non Stop Rhythm falls under that contract as well. I got a physical distribution contract with a company called Above Board Distribution. 

TP: They’re London based, right? I feel like I’ve heard of them before. 

TC: Yeah they’re based down in London. Doing loads of old school stuff so they’re on the same wavelength. 

TP: That’s great. So do they do pressing and distribution? Do you get it pressed on your own and then ship it to them? 

TC: No, just distribution. I’m funding all the records myself. Probably best to do that, though. 

TP: Do you have plans to do more vinyl? 

TC: Yeah, I’ve actually got a reissue coming out. I’ve paid the guy the advance and everything, I just need to put the order in. It’s called Exocet, “Lethal Weapon”. It’s a three-track single from 1989. Bleep techno. 

TP: So it’s a U.K. thing? 

TC: Yeah, it’s off a label called Catt Records, originally based down in London. 

TP: Amazing. When you reach out to these older artists and talk about reissuing their stuff, what’s the response usually like? Do you find that a lot of these producers are still involved in music, or have they moved on from that? Are they happy to hear from you? 

TC: To be fair, I’m into the more obscure stuff, so a lot of the guys are surprised that anyone is still interested in the music, to be honest. A lot of them are surprised and they’re fully on board. I don’t come across like a businessman. I’m just passionate about music so I think it comes off.

TP: How did you end up getting in touch with Ron from L.I.E.S.?

TC: Ron originally reached out to me, saying congrats on the label, and that he likes what I’m doing with Non Stop Rhythm. Eventually we got talking about the music and he said he’d like to put some stuff out. I was a little bit hesitant at first because that’s why I started my own label, I want to own my own stuff, but he seems legit and we got a good deal together, so I thought why not. Seems a cool guy. 

TP: Definitely. I feel that more than pretty much anyone, Ron has been the most important figure in maintaining, preserving and promoting the raw aesthetics and sonic roots of dance music and electronic music in the last decade. Do you ever DJ live or are you a strictly producer and label guy? 

TC: I did one mix for my mate Mario Liberti’s label Deep In Dis, I think it was 2020 I did that. Mostly strictly producing, it’s more my thing. 

TP: So when you’re producing, do you usually think more so about how your music is going to hit on a dance floor or are you more concerned with how it sounds through headphones? Do you put one above the other when you’re producing and mixing? 

TC: To be fair, I just go for what I personally like, and it seems to be catching on now, it’s selling, so people are obviously on the same wavelength as me. I mainly base it towards the dancefloor though. 

Tom Cruv - “Work The Box 21 (Original Mix)” out now on Trax Records

TP: What about listening? I personally like to buy vinyl, I’ve always bought vinyl, but I definitely listen to music mostly on my headphones. I stream a lot of music. It is what it is. When it comes to you as a music fan, not so much as a producer, do you find that you listen to vinyl, or do you prefer the convenience of streaming music? 

TC: Yeah, I listen to a lot of vinyl. I collect a lot of vinyl. Nu Groove Records, I collect them religiously. 

TP: What’s record buying like where you live, and in Liverpool? Are there good record stores? 

TC: There’s a few stores, but mostly I buy off Discogs. I’m not against buying records online. I’ll get what I want. I don’t want to settle for something I’m not really interested in. My collection, I’m 100% interested in. 

TP: What drives your interest in reissuing music? Is it mostly to get it out there, feeling like it needs a second life? What is your thought process like when you find a record that you want to reissue? 

TC: Partially that, partially to give it a new lease on life, but also, to be on my label. It’s cool to say I put out good music. If I reckon it’s good, they’ll wanna put it out. 

TP: Did you do a track with Trax Records?

TC: Yeah, I put out a single on Trax under the name Tom Cruv back in April of this year. 

TP: How did that come about? 

TC: They've got Marcus Mixx, I don’t think he works with them anymore, for A&R, but I just sent him a few demos and he said he reckons they’d fit really well on Trax Records. Not even demos per se, just a couple new tracks that I’d made, check ‘em out, see what you think. He was like yeah, they’re really cool. I made them on one of those old 4 track tape recorders so they’ve got a lot of tape hiss. 

TP: I noticed that, I love that aspect of your music. I wanna ask you some more questions about production stuff. What was your setup like during the pandemic? Obviously, everyone was locked at home. Did you have a bedroom setup? That’s the way I imagine Larry Heard making his early stuff. 

Tom Carruthers - “North West” out now on Non Stop Rhythm

TC: Pretty much set up in my bedroom, yeah. I’ve got an old analog mixing desk, a couple of drum machines, a lot of it’s sample-based, so I’ll just load samples, I’ve got a massive sample library, old school, obscure sounds. I’ll just load them into the keyboard and play my riffs with them like that. I’ll chop a lot of sounds from old records, say there’s a nice bassline, I’ll chop the sound, load it into my keyboard and then play my own riffs with it. 

TP: What kind of keyboard are you talking about when you say sampling keyboard? 

TC: Casio, stuff like that. Nothing major. But they do the job. They’re effective.

TP: Sounds incredible. That’s the thing, these days, people are so obsessed with gear, but if you look at Derrick May, you look at Larry Heard, any of these guys in the early days of house music or techno, they’re just doing what they can with what they have. The sound of tape hiss, when you’re using samplers from the 80s that have a really low bitrate, there’s a real nasty hiss on top. 

TC: Adds character!

TP: It’s amazing, that’s what’s missing. It feels like you are engaging with a living thing when you hear those artifacts. Do you still predominantly work at your home studio or do you have a place that you like to go to do work? 

TC: I’m still running the same setup, stick with what you know.

TP: How many channels is your mixer? 

TC: It’s an old 32 channel. I got it passed down to me off one of my dad’s mates when I was first starting to get into it. I think it’s an old Allen and Heath mixer. 

TP: Did you grow up playing music or did you start making electronic music as your first foray into music? 

TC: I’m not classically trained or anything. What it was, I was probably around 15 when I started getting into house music. It was all over the radio and it kind of blew up over here on the charts. But then I started to veer more into the underground stuff, did a little bit of digging, and that’s where I found the early Chicago stuff, New York stuff, and then I just fell in love with that. 

TP: Do you prefer to make music during the day or at nighttime?

TC: Probably nighttime, early hours in the morning. That’s when a lot of the magic seems to happen. 

TP: When you sit down to make a track, is it different every time? I personally like to start with drum programming, whether it’s Ableton or if it’s with a drum machine. Do you start off with drums or is it different every time for you? 

TC: I’d say the majority of the time, it would just be a bassline and then I’ll go program the drums and then go from there. A lot of my tracks are just a bassline and drum machine, some effects added. That’s what I’m into, the percussion side of things. Drum programming, complex drum programming. Not just one bar looped like a lot of the modern stuff. Snares. 

TP: A lot of your production does remind me of the Mayday stuff. I think Derrick May’s drum programming is very kinetic. His hi-hats are always so alive, they jump around and I can definitely hear that in your music. It sounds like you do have an element of hardware magic in your process, where you like to have a hands-on approach. Would that be true? Do you like to be able to touch knobs while you’re making music, or is it not so important to you? 

TC: It’s more of a hands-on kind of thing, I like to have a hands-on approach to it, yeah. 

TP: What do you think of modern house music? I’m talking more about the contemporary underground scene rather than the stuff that’s huge. 

TC: There is a lot of cool stuff out there. A lot of young people, like myself, I’m only 22. But a lot of people are starting to get into the bleep-y, obscure kind of stuff. I reckon it’s definitely making a resurgence. 

TP: That’s a good thing. What is it about the older stuff on labels like like Transmat or Nu Groove that is still so potent to you? 

TC: I’ve never been able to put my finger on it, and I don’t think many people can, it’s just got the edgy, obscure, proper underground kind of vibe. Just a dark kind of vibe. 

TP: I think it comes down to what you were saying, people making music and releasing it as it comes. They get to the desk, behind the drum machines and then two hours later they have something, they’re editing it down, and then it’s being pressed on vinyl. 

TC: That’s the same with me. I make most of my tracks in one sitting. I don’t like coming back to it a track, because by the time I’ve come back to it I have a completely new idea. So I’m one of them, I’ve got to get it done there and then, so I’ll stay up for hours and just try to do it in one sitting. 

Tom Carruthers - “Technology Grooves (Original Mix)” out now on L&T Recordings

TP: When you have all of your stuff going, do you improvise and then edit at the end to make an arrangement? Or do you go into it with arrangement in your head as you’re making it? 

TC: Mostly I’ve got the layout in my head, how I’d want to map it out. I’d say I spend the majority of the time actually creating the sounds, morphing the sounds. The mix down is like a five-minute process for me. 

TP: Considering how fast you make and release music, do you find yourself ever looking back at your catalogue and thinking, “oh my god, I forgot I made that track!” Does it still feel fresh to you like you’re hearing some of it for the first time?  

TC: Yeah, some tracks, I’ve completely forgotten about. I don’t really enjoy listening to my own music because I know what’s coming.

TP: I feel the same way. Looking to the future, do you have any plans to perform live? If you were to do something live, would it be more of a DJ-based set? 

TC: I’d be more into DJing, because realistically, that’s where the majority of the money is in the dance music industry. So if I ever wanted to make a proper living from it, I would probably veer into DJing at some point. 

TP: So what’s coming up for you? Are you just going to keep releasing tracks as you make them or are you going to do EPs or albums? What’s your plan with the label and with your own music after this L.I.E.S. record? 

TC: The plan is probably going to start working towards albums, say in around a year’s time, maybe a best of. Like, “the best of so far” on Non Stop Rhythm. I’m doing another release more L.I.E.S., more techno-oriented. Got a nice reissue from a guy called Ron Wells under the pseudonym Jack Smooth coming out on Non Stop Rhythm too. 

TP: Did you send that to me? You sent me some reissue you were working on.

TC: I think I might have, yeah, Jack Smooth, “Break The Sound Barrier”, and the track two is “Buzz Off Music”. Really cool stuff from 1991. 

TP: Is that going to be a digital release or is it a 12”?

TC: Just a digital release, because unfortunately, he lost the master tapes a long time ago.

TP: When you’re promoting stuff, your own music and your label, do you focus mainly on Instagram? What are your tactics?

TC: Mostly IG, Instagram, yeah. Send some stuff out emails to friends, I do it organic. I don’t pay for promotion. 

TP: Do you get frustrated with Instagram or do you feel like it does what you need it to do? 

TC: I like the Instagram format, to be honest. I reckon it’s cool, posting snippets. I noticed it’s slowly starting to grow but it’s organic, so it’s not going to be overnight. 

TP: Exactly. I think Instagram’s pretty good for a label like yours. You have a strong, consistent aesthetic. Your 12” artwork is like a classic house label. Every time you see it with a little snippet, you know what to expect. You’re gonna hear a track, it’s gonna be raw, it’s gonna be good, so I think it works. 

Anyway, that’s pretty much it! I just want to say I love everything that I’ve heard from you and it’s very exciting to discover a new artist, especially someone that’s just doing it for the right reasons. So, nice to meet you and thank you for doing this.

TC: Best of luck to you!

”Non Stop Rhythm” 2xLP is out now on L.I.E.S. Records

Follow Tom Carruthers on Instagram

Follow Non Stop Rhythm on Bandcamp

THE DELFONICS - "DIDN'T I BLOW YOUR MIND THIS TIME" LIVE IN 1973

Not sure where (or why) this was recorded, but hearing the Delfonics perform alongside relatively minimal live instrumentation is indeed mind-blowing. Peeling back back the crimson-colored velveteen eroticism of Thom Bell’s stunning arrangement and production, this performance showcases The Delfonics as masterful singers capable of amplifying hushed tenderness to overwhelming levels of feel in a way unmatched by anyone ever.

LINK SUPPLY

By: Tony Price

An assemblage of miscellaneous links to articles, essays, videos, playlists, records and more, cultivated and presented on a semi-regular basis.

• Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? By Thomas Pynchon (1984)

  Pynchon ruminating on our relationship to the technological instruments of our own demise. Rather than being an irrational fear and hatred for science and technology, Pynchon argues that Luddism represents a revolt against the growing obsolescence of the human. Written nearly 40 years ago, this topic is now more pressing than ever. It’s pure Pynchon: dense, prescient and sweeping.

• Gang Stalking: Real Life Harassment or Textbook Paranoia? by Joe Pierre M.D. (2020)

  A decent overview of one of the more interesting cultural manifestations of our contemporary techno-psychosis. Gang Stalking is a phenomeon that has been around for nearly two decades, but has grown in both popularity and significance in recent years. Targeted Individuals live in a state of constant paranoid fear that they are being followed, watched, and harassed by unknown forces that may or may not be facets of the elite ruling class, the government, military-industrial powers or tech corporations. Pierre positions the phenomenon somewhere between a shared delusion and a conspiracy theory.

• Record Labels Cannot Stop Winning In 2021 by David Turner

  If you have an interest in the state of the music industry, or the intersection of art, tech and commerce, you should sign up for David Turner’s “Penny Fractions” newsletter. In this recent letter, Turner references a report commissioned by the Canadian government to look into the economics of music streaming. The report found that in Canada, 70% of streaming revenue went to record labels, 17% to performers, and less than 15% to publishers and songwriters. The report also found that BMG, Sony, Warner and Universal account for 75% of the market in share in Canada. For an industry with a history of extraordinarily exploitative practices, the ongoing consolidation of power and wealth in the music industry is disheartening, but fully expected.

• Westside Gunn - Hitler Wears Hermes 8 (2021)

  Donda and Certified Lover Boy are two of the worst efforts by two of our supposedly leading stars. Both of them are bloated, boring, and bloviating examples of the cultural stalemate that we’ve been shrugging our shoulders at for the last decade. Released just around the same time as both of these atrocities,, Westside Gunn’s (supposedly) final installment in the Hitler Wears Hermes series was also unleashed. As per usual, Gunn delivers the goods. Broken up over two “sides”, the album contains a fleet of guests, both familiar (Benny, Conway, Keisha, Boldy, Mach-Hommy) and big name (Wayne, 2 Chainz, Jay Electronica). Beats and production by Nicholas Craven, Daringer, Madlib, Jay Versace, Camouflage Monk et al. solidify Gunn as a purveyor of the finest moods in contemporary hip hop. Over the last decade we’ve seen the rising influence of the the Neo-New York sound as crafted and refined by the likes of Roc Marciano, KA, and Griselda, to the point where they are being name checked and photographed with the biggest names in music. Contemporaneous with this rise has been the utter decline in ambition, innovation and provocation once expected from the likes of Aubrey and Mr. West. Maybe this is the long-awaited changing of the guard.

TERRY RILEY + DON CHERRY - KÖLN 1975

This set was recorded live on February 23, 1975 in Köln and never officially released, purportedly due to the distortion present on certain sections of the recording. At once microscopic and interstellar, immediate and eternal, static and endlessly unspooling, it is as enthralling and mystifying as you might expect a meeting of the two most fascinating musical figures of the twentieth century to be.

INTERVIEW: CALVIN LECOMPTE

By: Tony Price

I recently spoke with Calvin LeCompte about his new album “Laughed At An Attachment”. We talked about his recording process, the sonic semiotics of tape hiss, the hilarity of psychedelic aesthetics and more.

TP: I really love your show on NTS Radio. I think we share an infatuation with music that feels like it has fallen through the cracks of time, sounding sort of “half produced” or “demo-like”. What is it about that set of sonic qualities that appeals to you?

CL: Absolutely, yeah. I would assume that an entry point to talk about something like this would be intimacy. Perhaps it’s appealing because it feels intimate? I’m not saying that a demo is always better, but it has an energy to it that is often times a little more exciting. Even tape hiss itself adds a level of excitement, It’s more intimate, it’s looser, it feels more exciting. 

TP: That excited energy bleeds through the crackle of your new album Laughed At An Attachment. How did you make this album? Do you have  a home recording setup or do you have a work space that you go to?

CL: Me and my girlfriend live in a two bedroom in Chinatown. One room is a bedroom and the other is a studio. As far as for how it was recorded, I have, for lack of a better way to put it, fetishized that type of tape sound and the home recording tradition, so to speak, and I just gravitate towards it. An artist like Tonetta, although he doesn’t record to tape, has always resonated with me. I started recording into a computer with Garageband, so this has been a sort of backwards learning curve. I think most of the time, or at least with those a generation before me, people start with tape because that’s what’s available. For instance, learning a four track like a Tascam is not entirely intuitive. Figuring out bouncing left and right, activating certain tracks, etc. But I finally found a tape machine that I can comfortably work with. My understanding of it is that it’s the last four track cassette recorder ever put into production, maybe 2006, 2008? It’s called the Korg CR-4. It’s a wonderful machine. The nature of it is that it has built in speakers, which is cool, but it also has built in effects and amp simulators. You have to look into this machine. It’s fun. The inputs are direct, and this sounds trivial, but they are in the back of the machine, so you’re not reaching over the back, blindly hoping you’ll find the right input. Little things like that add up while you’re recording. It’s just a pain in the ass, you know what I mean? You just go in right through the front, you don’t have to pan it to the left or right, it’s just direct. Being a musician you usually end up, on some level, becoming some kind of a gear-head or something, and I don’t have a ton of gear, but you’re always looking for new things to make your process easier. I’ve kind of called it quits and decided that I’m only using this machine, hypothetically, for the rest of my life. I actually have two that I use at the same time. Otherwise, I’m done. I’m done looking for sounds! This machine has been good to me. I like it a lot. That’s how I made the album.

TP: I can imagine that between those two machines, bouncing ideas down, running them back through each other, all of that movement back and forth between two machines adds more life and character…you can almost hear those machines breathing on your record.

CL: Yes! The thing is, with a computer, everything is so intentional. I’m not saying that this is bad, but with my process, the accidents are actually real, and this works better for me on some level. For instance: I write pop songs. I’m not that really that “experimental”. I mean, there are some experimental elements on the record for sure, but typically, I am shooting to write a verse-chorus type of thing, and it can become a bit, I won’t saying “boring”, but predictable, which is fine. I like predictable. But to have real mistakes that I can’t really touch up helps me find the sound that I am looking for in the first place.

TP: With regards to computers, what role, if any, do they play in the music making process for you?

CL: They are exclusively used for the final step. I don’t use them for anything other than to digitize the tracks and share them with people. It just complicates things for me. I try to finish a track in four hours. The point of that is, and I’m sure this happens to everybody, but I can go as far as dedicating three weeks to a month to a song, and it is no better than the a song that took 25 minutes. I try to create something in four hours and the caveat is that it’s allowed to ‘suck’. It might turn out great and it might be something that I never want to hear again, but at least it’s done, you know?

TP: Very interesting. Do you find yourself making music more frequently in the day time or the night time? Does it really matter at all?

CL: I’m usually quite a night owl, although recently I’ve somehow managed to get on more of an early riser type of schedule which is a bit unusual, but yea, when I’m staying up until eight in the morning that usually means things are going pretty good! 

TP: You are located in Chinatown in Manhattan. Space is obviously usually quite limited. What is your relationship to physical media like? Are you a record or book collector?

CL: That’s a good question. Very much not so, actually. I get by with the internet. The things I have, I tend to use. I do read often, and I have what I have, but I’m not, you know, seeking out first editions… I don’t even have a record player. It would be really special to own some of the records I play on the Uline show, but I’m okay not really collecting. 

TP: What about with your digital files? Files and folders that you accumulate for your NTS show, or your own music…do you organize and archive this stuff and save it on harddrives?

CL: Well it’s all archived on my laptop, and I have put it on thumb drives before, but the show is archived on NTS, thank god. When I do the Uline I tend to really make a point of not bleeding the songs together because the songs are possibly so rare that they’ll never show up again, and if anyone needs them again, they won’t have any bleed from previous songs and they can be extracted from those archived shows.

TP: Incredible. When it comes to uncovering this stuff, is it a really time intensive process for you? You are unearthing and presenting music that in many cases is so obscure.

CL: I dedicate the last four to five days before my deadline to be like, “I’m not doing anything else”. I order food and spend 12-13 hours going through all of my bookmarks. I’m not ever familiar with any of the songs before they go up there, so I enjoy the program as a fan of it just like anyone else does, it’s basically all that I listen to (laughs). And knock on wood, I don’t know how the fuck I keep finding stuff!

TP: This reminds me of your album cover, the image that presents you as some sort of doorway. It’s as if these songs that never got their chance the first time around are out there, swimming in the ether towards you specifically, passing through your brain to find their way to us. 

CL: I hear you man! Sometimes if I’m on a psychedelic or something I can get on that wavelength, I know what you mean. 

TP: How would you describe or sum up the Uline catalogue show?

CL: Hmm. Not to be so clinical, but it’s just primarily an expression of my taste in music. What I exclude from the Uline is important. I don’t really fuck with music made beyond 1983, I don’t fuck with proto-punk too much, if that’s even relevant. I just like to stay in my zone, and I definitely don’t mean to sound xenophobic here, but I do tend to stick to English speaking music. For instance, there is a lot of very beautiful Japanese folk out there, extraordinary stuff, but I don’t know Japanese. I don’t know the history of Japanese music. I just feel that I can kind of understand the UK and the USA stuff, so I feel like I know where it sits in relation to everything, but if you are a Japanese artist you might be commenting on another major artist that I am unfamiliar with, so I think that’s a show for someone else.

TP: In both your music and your show I can recognize a particular sense of humor, a ridiculousness and absurdity that bleeds out of the lyrics, music, and aesthetics of 1960’s psychedelia; it’s something that has kept me drawn to and in love with this stuff for decades. Is this something that you also pick up on and intentionally showcase?

CL: Some of that music is certainly funny as hell. But first and foremost it has to resonate.

TP: Of course.

CL: Yeah, funny is good. If I find something funny I’m happy to put it on there.

TP: My last question is about a song you played a few months ago by Linda Finkle, called “Welcome To The Race”, the Hillary Clinton song. (Laughs)

CL: You see, that’s funny. But it’s also important because it’s a moment in time. With all of this stuff, its really a chain of people who bring this stuff to life, uploading, archiving it online. 

TP: I could talk about this stuff for hours, but I’ll let you go. I look forward to putting this record out together.

CL: It’s been great working with you. It’s been a perfect fit and really, really positive!

Laughed At An Attachment is out now on Maximum Exposure, streaming everywhere. Limited edition cassettes are also out now through Adhesive Sounds.

REFLECTIONS OF MATTER: THE GRATEFUL DEAD'S "DARK STAR" AND THE SECRET SIXTIES

By: Tony Price

The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” is not only the definitive musical expression of West Coast psychedelia, but the only artifact from the scene that came close to capturing the vast expanse of the new frontiers of inner space being that were being explored, exploited and experimented with in the 1960’s.

“We live in a very strange time”. A statement pasted against the walls of our United Mind, lining the curvature of our increasingly individuated reality tunnels. If you chase the various currents of our contemporary derangement, you soon find that they lead you westward.  

1960’s California was a sort of nexus point where the burgeoning strands of Cold War imperialism, techno-fetishism, and mass media converged into a new form of power. Somewhere in between the military-funded genesis of what we now call the internet, large scale experimentation with altered states of consciousness and the arch individualism and mass consumerism of the 1960s we find the contours of our current reality beginning to take shape. 

Our collective nostalgia for the Sixties, as anthologized in antiseptic Time Magazine retrospectives and vaseline-lensed music documentaries, presents us with a pastel-hued slideshow, snapshots of a time where “we almost changed things”. Be that as it may, we never truly stood a chance against Them. What the Sixties did offer us was a glance behind the curtain, a peek at the inner machinations of an empire in flux. 

An alternative recollection of the 1960’s recognizes the vast influence of intelligence research and the military-industrial complex undergirding the key political, cultural and economic shifts of the decade and the State’s shift of aim towards a frontier previously unconquered: inner space. 

The Grateful Dead formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. That the house band for the so-called counterculture should be born in one of the principle cities of Silicon Valley comes as no surprise. While popular mythology suggests that there was something Promethean in the air, the existence of programs and projects like MKUltra, CHAOS, COINTELPRO and ARPANET show us in retrospect just how inter-tangled the various facets of early internet research and the nascent counterculture were with military-intelligence interests.

The degree to which the Grateful Dead were an intelligence facet has been analyzed and debated to death in the nether regions of the internet. What cannot be denied, however, is that the early history of The Dead and their milieu is inextricably stitched to MKUltra and government LSD research. Dead lyricist Robert Hunter was an early volunteer test subject for psychedelic chemicals at Stanford University’s covertly CIA funded MKUltra program where he was paid to report back on trips on LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. John Perry Barlow, early cyberlibertarian internet advocate and lyricist for the band, admitted in 2002 that he had spent significant portions of time at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. One of the counterculture’s more interesting characters, Owsley Stanley, the Dead’s early sound engineer and financier, was also a clandestine chemist notorious for being a principal source of LSD in the Haight, producing millions of legendary hits of the most potent ‘cid available. Owsley was the son to a government attorney, the grandson of a US Senator, and worked within the military-industrial complex, doing stints at Rocketdyne, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Edwards Air Force Base. While studying at Stanford, Stanley began producing LSD. By 1965, he was producing hundreds of thousands of tabs of acid, becoming the primary source of LSD in the Bay Area. One must wonder where the means and funding to embark on such an endeavor might have come from, but that might just be a bit of the ol’ paranoia speaking. During his time at Stanford, author and fellow psychonaut Ken Kesey was also paid to serve as a guinea pig for studies in psychotomimetic drugs under MKUltra at the Veteran’s Hospital in Menlo Park. Kesey was the key architect behind the infamous “Acid Tests”, a series of Bay Area parties in the mid 60’s centered around the advocacy of LSD where hundreds of people “turned on” with the help of Owsley acid and wiggled away to the tune of the Dead’s electric excursions. 

Make what you will of this information, but there is no denying that there was an electricity pulsing through California at this time. The side effects of maniacal Cold War electronics research created a booming consumer electronics industry that allowed for advancements in sound recording and amplification technology. Inspired by the boundary pushing sonic developments being conducted by Joe Meek and George Martin + company across the pond, West Coast psychedelia found an entire generation of musicians mutilating speakers with transistor fuzz shrapnel and tape echo derangements in efforts to replicate in sound those technicolor visions swirling around their freshly fried minds. The Dead’s early studio recordings were groundbreaking in this regard, and worthy of investigation in their own right, but “Dark Star” was the only artifact from the scene that ever came close to encapsulating the terrifying vastness being encountered during those early inquisitions into the frontiers of our collective interior.  

The Grateful Dead - Dark Star (Single) (Warner Brothers 7186, 1968)

Released in 1968 on Warner Bros. as a two minute and fifty second single, the song was lyricist Robert Hunter’s first collaboration with the band. The track, noodly, drumless and stoned, features Hunter’s lysergic ruminations sung in harmony overtop a couch-locked arrangement of various guitars, organ and tambura. The track hangs like a sedated cloud, moving slow like ribbons of smoke off incense. It is one of the most understated and underrated singles of the late 1960’s. The band started playing the song live in 1968, and it would eventually become a centerpiece to their live sets up until 1974 when the song disappeared from setlists, save the odd occasion, until the 1990s. Live recordings of “Dark Star” from the late 1960s and early 1970s are unlike anything in the recorded history of rock and roll. 

It has been said of the I Ching and Tarot that within them one can find a model of the entirety of the universe. One is inclined to apply a similar mode of expression when trying to talk about these live recordings of “Dark Star”, for it as if every thread of American music finds itself unspooling simultaneously within them. “Dark Star” is endlessly suggestive; often expanding outward beyond the 20 minute mark, the Dead’s live extrapolations on the tune seem to have no beginning, middle or end. Sprawling, nonlinear and quantum, the band circles, swirling around the peripheries of a theme endlessly. Jerry Garcia’s spidery guitar spills out weblike; Daddy Long Legs like Uncle Sam on stilts; Appalachian triplets clogging through mists of feedback infinitum; silicon chip blues bends weeping in electric indigo; snaking sativa bebop figures in slow motion that tangle like a mess of live wires. It never moves, yet it never sits still, endlessly flowing into itself. 

Whatever it is that actually went on in the 1960’s we may never fully be able to comprehend. All that can be known for sure is that many of the textures that make up our current predicament can be traced back to happenings, developments and clandestine maneuvers of that time and that somewhere inside the meandering pathways and black holes of “Dark Star” lies the secret story of the 1960’s.

The Grateful Dead - Dark Star (Live) - 11/2/69 - The Family Dog at The Great High Way, San Francisco

Check out this mix featuring various versions of “Dark Star” compiled by Noah Kohll from the band Color Green:

For further reading on the the birth of the internet, LSD, MKUltra, and the counterculture check out:

From Counterculture To Cyberculture by Fred Turner

Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine

Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee

CHAOS: Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill