Straddling House, Disco, Breaks & Prog with a unique twist and an eye for the underground NOLAN is making serious waves right now, with key releases on Mobilee, LNOE, Bedrock, Circus, Kittball, MadTech, Crew Love, Get Physical, OFF, Gruuv & Connaisseur Recordings. Teaming up with Nolan, Italian mainstay Davide Squillace makes his debut on Rebellion with Drive Good, the single featuring French talent Jaw on vocals and US stalwart Rick Wade as remixer. DMCWORLD grabs a world exclusive with Nolan as the world goes crazy for the track…
Hi Tim! Great to have you with us today. How are things with you? Whereabouts are you based right now?
Doing great thanks, enjoying Brighton now the sun’s come back out to play!
We’re pleased to be chatting with you around the release of ‘Drive Good’, your collaboration under your Nolan alias with Italy’s Davide Squillace. This is a really interesting collab! We hear you and Davide haven’t actually met in person yet, what’s the story behind you two deciding to work together?
We got chatting online at the start of the Pandemic having been intro’d by a mutual friend and just hit it off really, similar musical taste and outlook on life. So after sending each other tunes back & forth it wasn’t long before we decided to get on a collaboration together.
What was the process like behind the creation of Drive Good in particular?
Davide sent me a few projects he’d recorded as live jams on all his Modular gear in Barcelona. Some of it was raw AF and I just had to add some extra synth lines, drums and bass and then sent it back his way. He added more modular elements and gave some direction on where we should take the track then back over to me for mixing and mastering. Then I started toying around sampling and layering some vocal samples from an interview I found on YouTube from the 60’s when he suggested to get JAW on vocals instead.
Jaw’s vocals round the track off perfectly. What was it like working with Jaw on this one?
I’ve been a massive fan of dOP & JAW ever since I heard his 2013 collaboration with Claptone and being as he’s a mate of Davide, who having suggested he might work well on it, took a listen to the track and got back to us pretty quickly with a vocal draft saying, “you’re either gonna love this or hate it”…. We both loved it!! So he recorded some more which I also worked it into the track adding effects. Davide & Jaw both then made a few suggestions on the arrangement front to get it to its final version.
Rick Wade nails his remix too! A word on that?
So so good! I love Rick’s vibe on Heist Recordings, that Detroit Swindle classic House sound so I was really happy to hear he’d taken our song in that direction now too. I’m hoping the Traxsource crew will get behind it with this sound.
It has been a very strong year for your Nolan alias with releases on Circus, Mobilee, Solaris and more, as well as Rebellion now too. As an artist of many aliases (Timo Garcia, Cypherpunx and more), Nolan appears to be your primary one right now in terms of the rate of output, it’s exciting to watch it develop. How do you go about deciding on which alias you will focus on and when?
I just love writing music, whatever genre takes my fancy at the time depending what mood I’m in.. It’s only after tracks are finished I have the issue of what name I can sign them under.. I’ve got some D&B tunes I wrote over the last few years I’ve no idea who to sign to or even if I need to create yet another pseudonym to release them under! I already have 8 active monikers! I ditched my long standing Timo Garcia guise as I didn’t like the direction Tech House was going in a few years ago and that was the sound most synonymous with that guise. And being such a fickle industry some labels weren’t interested in signing my new material having seen I’d released on other big Tech House labels. Quite a few years ago I started releasing as NOLAN which is my real middle name for the deeper slower sounds so I’ve just carried on using that one for all things House, Breaks, Melodic Techno or whatever Prog is being branded as these days!
My Cypherpunx guise is a collaborative project I have with a good friend Doug who’s also the other half of Flip Fantazia on more of a Techno tip. Where as we were using the Flip Fantazia name for writing for Sync and TV on more of a downtempo vibe for production companies like Ninja Tune PM, BMG PM, Deep East Music, Cavendish Music etc although we did recently just release an artist album of our favourite tracks we made which we released on vinyl mid pandemic called The Trip.
Can you tell us a bit about your studio setup? Do you use the same gear for each alias or do you find yourself leaning to different bits of kit for each?
I don’t have much outboard gear, just a Moog Sub 37, Model D, an old MC303 and a few other bits but Doug records on guitar, live bass, keys etc for our Cypherpunx and Flip Fantazia material and Davide uses his Modular set up so loads of material to work with as well as all the Arturia and Roland plugins we use which are a staple in my production.
Aside from juggling the many aliases and making great music, you are also a programmer for Brighton Music Conference which held its most recent event in September. What can you say about BMC and what’s it like working with them?
Last week was amazing, everyone is saying it was the best BMC so far. I think the sudden heat wave and beautiful seafront setting definitely helped that and also the fact people hadn’t seen each other for almost 2 years so it was a massive fun networking party spread over a few days with so many fun and insightful panels across 4 theatres too. We had the likes of Carl Cox, Roger Sanchez, Jaguar and Coldcut down to speak and perform this year amongst many many others. Now it’s time to start planning the next one which is only 6 months away at the end of MAY as we move back to our normal Spring time slot.
A pleasure to chat with you today Tim! Congrats on a great year of releases so far and we look forward to hearing what’s next. To round things off, is there anything else upcoming from yourself that you’d like to share with us?
Many thanks.. As it happens I’ve actually got NOLAN releases coming out every few weeks now right into 2022 with new material coming out on Bedrock, Mobilee, LNOE, Still Vor Talent & Renaissance as well as a few remixes one of a huge classic from 1988 which should be out on vinyl soon too.. exciting times!
