Rob Chadwick gets the lowdown at the Extrema Fesival with the Blueprint techno legend
Interview : Rob Chadwick
Rob: So what do you think to today? How was it?
James: “Yeah really cool, I mean I think the weather could have been a bit better but I just love playing these festivals in Holland especially with this daytime thing, it’s really strange – it doesn’t work in very many places but here it just seems to work, and I kind of enjoy taking something out of its context so yeah it’s good.”
Rob: I was going to ask you, because techno has a darker ethos do you prefer playing in the day time or night time?
James: “I like a small dark club, but you adjust what you are playing to the situations so you know I enjoy playing a broad spectrum of music so it’s nice to come here and people are still interested regardless of the time of day so I don’t know if it works everywhere else because it’s kind of crazy here. The festival season in Holland is amazing!”
Rob: What do you think to Holland and the situation right now? There’s a lot of festivals out here at the moment and so a lot of competition. What do you think to it?
James: “This is the sort of thing, between DJs we talk about a lot. How they can sustain these weekly festivals, which I’m sure you being from the UK, know that it would never happen there, but here they do. I mean this is going on year after year, week after week, they seem to have this attitude where they want to go out and enjoy themselves and it works here so I don’t have any problem with it, I love playing here!”
Rob: And right now, where do you see techno, it had a bit of a dip and then it’s come back, what do you think?
James: “Yeah I suppose as in being in fashion it had a dip, but I mean for me techno has always existed and it is what we do. It’s having a resurgence but I mean there is some fantastic music being played and that’s what is important, whether it’s techno, house or whatever. People come up with all these sub-genres and I don’t think that that is necessarily healthy because good music is good music regardless of whatever it is so we are going through a period where there is some really interesting music being played and this cross-pollination between scenes so techno isn’t so straight at the moment as well. So the people from the bass scene are embracing it and that’s what is interesting. When you start mixing up all these different ideas, that is when really interesting music starts being created, and we are 30 years down the line and we are sat here still talking about it so what does that tell you?”
Rob: And what do you think of UK techno right now, because obviously when you came around on the scene in 1994, 1995 it was huge and then like I say it kind of had a dip but now its got a huge fan base in London, and places like Leeds and Glasgow it’s going strong, its really amazing.
James: “Well I mean places like Leeds have always been really important with the scene and places like Glasgow and it’s because we have a passion in the UK for this type of music. Regardless of roots or anything, the UK has been very intrinsic in what has happened musically in all of this for a long, long time so it doesn’t surprise me. I like the fact that the people are embracing the music still after all this time. You think how many scenes have come and gone and we are still here. We’re in our forties and we still love it, absolutely love it!”
Rob: You originally came from a hip-hop background, is that right?
James: “Musically, yes, but I mean I never DJ’d has a hip-hop DJ. I left school at 1988 which was when the whole acid house explosion kicked off but prior to that, hip-hop was what got me interested in electronic music, so I was very lucky to be at this age where there was this massive cultural and musical change that to be honest with you I don’t think we are likely to ever see again. The age that we were, it was just incredible! When the whole acid house thing happened in 1988, that was when we started going to clubs every week and so yeah before that I did rely on hip-hop and really anything that was made electronically because it just took me somewhere else so it just astounds me that we are still talking about this now after all these years and the reason we are still talking about it now was because it really was that big a cultural change for everyone involved, it won’t happen again! People were hearing these sounds that were being made and people were asking “whats going on, how are they doing this?” It’s amazing what it has created and if you think of any other scene, be it in music or fashion, none has ever stood the test of time like this has.”
Rob: And with the label right now, what’s happening?
James: “I’m recording a lot more and I’ve just had a release out. The next release is by Samuel Kerridge who recorded for Down Woods. The label has become more and more of my focus. I went through a stage with computers when making music and all that kind of thing and now I’ve gone back to how I used to make music and now the enjoyment has come back. It has been a really interesting transition and you realise you have been kind of going down this path and you don’t realise you have been doing it so you look around this studio at all this kit and I wasn’t using it and I was thinking, why is this happening? You get drawn into a certain thing as technology involves, this tactile approach to making music, it blows everything else out of the water. I’m so happy to take a step back but still make music that to me is relevant.”
Rob: How would you say you have developed over the years? What are the changes from when you first starting producing to now?
James: “I think knowledge would be the easiest way to describe it, you have things in your head and whether you can realise them is a whole different thing. You can think, I want to do this and I have x amount of machines, how do I do it? Over time you become more converse with the piece of equipment that you have got. When I started out with Richard Poulson who I started the label with, we had 3 pieces of kit. We had an s950 sampler which was mono, and an effects unit and a drum machine and that was it, but you learn to manipulate equipment to create what you want and that’s what makes it interesting. If you have got no option and are saying it’s not doing what I want, then I’m going to jump to this one, then it becomes much more important to get what you want out of a single piece. So this whole thing now with plug-ins and computer technology you can have absolutely everything for nothing essentially but I don’t think that’s productive. I think you need to give up a lot for art, for it to make sense to you, buying a laptop isn’t like selling your soul to get any piece of equipment just to do something and that’s the whole problem I find with this digital technology thing. It has created a situation where you can have an entire studio in your laptop, which don’t get me wrong that’s great for anybody that wants to just sit and make music, but there always has to be a filter.”
Rob: Also, you being from back in the day, vinyls are now a massive thing again, are you happy with that?
James: “I couldn’t be any happier! This goes back to the equipment thing again, there is a tactile thing with vinyl and there is a tactile thing with equipment. If you’ve got something in your hand, you know you own it whereas if you are buying mp3’s, essentially you are buying thin air. There’s no ownership involved. My record collection is so dear to me, you can’t even explain. If I were to lose it, it would be the worse thing in the world. It’s about you knowing the day you went into that shop and bought it. You know an old record has this kind of certain spell. You can’t replicate that with mp3’s and saying your record collection is on that hardware over there! That’s the problem now. The kids now see cds as something your dad used to listen to, so now vinyl has become cool again, but that’s fantastic and it is about owning something again!”
Rob: And am I right in thinking you are coming up to your 20th anniversary with the label?
James: “Well we will be 20 years next year, yeah.”
Rob: So do you have anything planned right now, anything in the pipeline?
James: “I’ve started to think about it but it’s also quite difficult because the person that I set the label up with is no longer with us and I would much rather be celebrating the 20 years with him, but he’s not but I feel like I’ve got to do it because it is his legacy, but what we are going to do, I don’t know. It’s very difficult because trying to do a tour is tricky but we will do something and there will definitely be a party in London where I will get the people that were intrinsic for it happening for us all together and that’s going to be more important but whether we do it elsewhere I really don’t know.”
Rob: Ralph Lawson and his label 2020 Vision recently celebrated their 20th birthday, just a quick mention on him and his label?
James: “We were actually distributed by the same people many years ago. I don’t know a massive deal about it but the fact that you can keep a record label going for that amount of time is testament to your love of what you are doing. When somebody says I’ve got a digital record label, that doesn’t exist to me, I find that really weird. If Blueprint didn’t press vinyl we would no longer be a record label. So 2020 press vinyl still and they hold their values true and that’s what is important, regardless of anything. A digital label it just doesn’t mean anything, but then again I’m old skool!”
Rob: So just finally to wrap up, where else can we see you coming up? Where else in the UK and have you got any European gigs coming up?
James: “Well we’ve got a really big blueprint party coming up August Bank Holiday in Wapping. We’ve got Robert Hood doing the M-Plant twentieth anniversary, obviously myself, DVS1, Blowan, Tessela, Luke Slater, it’s a huge party and in a really nice space!”
Rob: Is the location a secret right now or are you allowed to let us know?
James: “Yeah sure, it’s in a place called Studio Space. It’s a photographic studio. If you go on Resident Advisor you can check it out on there. We were doing 5 or 6 parties a year at Cable, then Cable shut down, so now we do 3 key events a year. Easter, August Bank Holiday and New Years Day. That kind of works for us. So yeah August Bank Holiday is a big one!”
