“My name is Daniel Wang. I’m known for making leftfield disco.”
Daniel Wang is one of the most influential dance music producers of the past 20 years, his retro-ahead-of-their-time 90s productions inspiring the likes of Morgan Geist, Lindstrom and DFA to pursue their own eccentric visions of “nu-disco”.
Born in California, Wang spent a sizeable portion of his childhood in Taiwan, before returning to finish high school. His university years were spent in New York and Chicago, during which time he immersed himself in nightlife and night music, hanging with old-school voguers and DJs alike. The seeds were sown.
While based in NYC in 1993 Wang set up his own label, Balihu Records, on which he released his debut 12″, The Look Ma No Drum Machine EP. It contained the groundbreakng acid-fried italo jam ‘Warped’ and ‘Like Some Dream I Can’t Stop Dreaming’, a song which took the relationship between repetition and rapture to new heights. ‘Like Some Dream’ sent shockwaves through the dance underground and these days is regularly covered live by Hercules & Love Affair; you can hear it’s legacy in the tweaked disco-house of Soundstream and even Thomas Bangalter.
Balihu grew to accommodate not just Wang’s productions but those of his friends Brennan Green, Ilya Santana and Massimiliano Pagliara; over the years Wang concentrated less on loop-based productions and began to concern himself more with original arrangements and instrumental textures. He once described Balihu as “a fanzine on vinyl”, and certainly this was a label that existed explicitly in relation to the past; but this only served to accentuate Wang’s originality as a producer, and his best work displays an admiration for, but not a subjugation to, disco’s glittering past.
Following a series of four highly acclaimed 12″s for Morgan Geist’s Environ Records, Wang relocated to Berlin, where he’s been based ever since, releasing sporadically on labels like Ghostly International and Playhouse and building a reputation as one of the finest DJs in the world. This month Amsterdam’s Rush Hour Records release The Best of Balihu: 1993-2008, a CD and limited vinyl set which really underlines the importance and the charm of the label’s material. For a taste of what to expect, download Tim Sweeney’s megamix of Balihu classics here [tracklist is here]. Daniel is on hand to tell us more about Balihu, and explain how Tim Burton’s Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is an apt metaphor for the decline of quality in electronic music…
Hello. Please introduce yourself for the benefit of the uninitiated.
“My name is Daniel Wang, I‘m known for making “leftfield disco music” from the mid-90s til recently, and now I earn my living mostly from DJing at parties big and small around the world. I was born near San Francisco, grew up there and in Taipei, lived in New York for ten years and moved to Berlin in 2003.”
What are your current obsessions?
“The truth is, since I moved to Berlin, the open space and lower cost of living have changed my view of life quite a bit. New York was so crowded, dirty, expensive for the average citizen. Thats a result of massive inequalities there in general – anyone who still thinks that USA is the best country in the world needs a reality check! I bought my own little flat a few months in Berlin for not much money and keep a pile of Architectural Digest magazines next to my bed. So I’ve been obsessed with what colours to paint my walls!
“I got into houseplants too, and have amassed a small collection of Aloes, blue succulents, palms and gorgeous Aglaonemas. My German boyfriend bought a canoe and we go paddling on immaculate lakes in the summer. I still love music of course, but find myself moving away from beats and getting into Debussy, Ravel.. trying to learn the finer differences in classical music, find out what tends toward dogma (cult of Wagner for example) and what really moves me, elegant poetic pieces, like Maiden with the Flaxen Hair, and Chopin of course…”
What prompted you to compile a Balihu retrospective, and why now?
“To be honest, i had wanted to do it for a while, but didn’t have the time or means to do so. The material was all there, but I don’t have an office or a team of employees, nor huge cash reserves in my bank account! Rush Hour always supported my releases in Europe, and they also have a much better idea of what DJs really want – I’m kind of lost in my own little dream-world sometimes. So when Christiaan showed up at Alexanderplatz with his graphic designer and this proposal, I said yes right away.”
How did Balihu come into being? What made you want to start the label, and to release the kind of music on it that you did? Was it a product of environment?
“It’s very simple. Around 1992-93, I was going out in Chicago and New York, and the music I heard in the clubs seemed increasingly rigid, humourless, and unmusical to me. I mean all those assembly-line Masters At Work remixes, the screaming-diva tribal house music from Junior Vasquez and the like…I heard Danny Krivit playing gorgeous old disco and soul records, i knew there had to be something better. So I strung together 17 obscure disco samples, without 909 kick drums or cheesy filters, and made a kind of joke out of the first release – but of course it had to be groovy too. This was exactly the opposite of what every label in New York was doing, so i had no choice but to take a loan from my Visa card and press it by myself. You could say it was a reaction against the environment I was in – but then, isn’t everything a reaction to or against the times?”
I love your description of the label as “a fanzine on vinyl”…can you elaborate on this?
“It means just that, I think! A fanzine is a publication which points you toward the perceived Holy Grail – maybe it’s krautrock, maybe it’s Japanese cult films…Balihu was often kind of an ‘in-joke’ for people who already thought like i did, who would rather hear a nice Fender Rhodes piano loop or synth arpeggio than yet-another „bitch track“ complaining about boyfriends and welfare checks. Seriously, in retrospect, maybe I unconsciously used the vinyl medium as a kind of message network to like-minded DJs who build their view of the music world through the vinyl which they buy (this happened long before Myspace, after-all). Also, I’m not sure any single Balihu track is as perfectly produced as some of the Giorgio Moroder or “Loft” classics which it referenced. Hence, label as fanzine.”
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Rawdon