“Over five years we opened and looked inside every Moog, every vocoder, every obscure machine ever built. Then there were the clients who passed through our doors – Bob Moog, Brian Eno, Granmaster Flash, Florian Schneider…”
How has your attitude to re-edits and recycling old disco loops changed over the years? What do you think of the current “booming” re-edit culture that’semerged in the wake of Balihu, Black Cock, etc…
“I think each case is individual – although mostly I think that re-edits now are riding on a trend to promote would-be DJs who otherwise can’t create anything original themselves. Many are not necessary, even an insult to the original. I won’t mention names – some are my friends and DJs whom I enjoy listening to! – but when you add these cheesy effects, and ESPECIALLY when you change the song structure, you also destroy the magic of tension and anticipation. I prefer to hear music as a stream of chords and motifs, but many of these people don’t understand this, they only hear the beat. They make a great song into a mechanical DJ tool, which is just like what people did in the early 90s, minus the overbearing 909 kick drum. Even the Balihu re-edits dont sound so great to me, but they were done with naivete, and also in a time when the machines didn’t allow for much more. Again, that’s why i feel that those Balihu releases were a ‘fanzine’. I always preferred playing the originals anyway…”
The Balihu retrospective includes productions from Brennan Green, Ilya Santana and Massimiliano Pagliara alongside yourself. How did you first hook up with these guys and decided to release their music?
“Separate questions and circumstances: I met Brennan through DJ circles in New York, and we just became friends…He was young and cute, very funny and energetic and a bit cheeky. Incredibly funky on any instrument. Carlos was my co-worker at Dr Sound whom I’d just stare at in awe when he started playing bass or live drums. We would argue if The Beatles could even compare to Cole Porter; now he works in an architect’s office but he really should be on tour with some band. Ilya sent me an e-mail around 2004 asking me about music production techniques, and when he invited me to the Canary Islands to DJ, I brought my synths and effects and it became ‘classroom’. But clearly he had all those musical ideas in him already. Massi and I are best of friends in Berlin – he is the only other gay person of all these four very handsome boys, which has nothing to do with me releasing their music, but maybe they’re only handsome to me because I feel their talent and honesty, and Balihu was a way to push them to go further, like I pushed myself.”
How has your attitude to disco changed between 1993 and 2009? Are you still discovering new and exciting things?
“Wow. Thats a heavy question! I think I still enjoy it just as much, but from pure physical instinctual enjoyment, I’ve developed a more formal understanding of how all this music functions. I remember i used to enjoy just beats and breaks more (for example ‘Sweet Summer Suite’ by Barry White), whereas gradually, I developed the love for anticipation and dramatic textures, for example ‘Sumeria’ by Alec Constandinos, which goes on some mystical journey from 1978 to 2000BC at the end of the song…And I’m more into tight pop-groove composing now, especially Rod Temperton, for example ‘Razzle Dazzle’, which he wrote for Heatwave. I discover MUCH less which excites me now, but I dream more about what is possible, and I hear those new possibities in my theremin and other instruments too.
What have been the profoundly important clubbing experiences in your life?
“I think it never ends! Honestly! I thought that those years at voguing balls in Harlem, house clubs in New York would be the end…but here in Berlin, I know lots of gay boys involved in modern dance, we have artist friends who create bizarre, amazing installations in clubs, sometimes the dance floor is full of gorgeous guys coming from Bulgaria, Argentina, Japan, every corner of Germany and Europe, and everybody is moving, kissing, dancing. And the music is some perfect CHIC song, which ironically I never heard in New York! I miss the black people I knew in America who lived for their bodies and for dancing…but I’m getting a different view in Europe, something less competitive and neurotic, something more profound, more connected to beauty and the passing of time.”
You’ve been in Berlin for several years now, right? What are your feelings towards the place? Has it directly impacted on your music?
“Obviously I LOVE it. Surely there are those who don’t love Germany or Berlin too much and who move back to the UK, USA, wherever. It is different for each person. But knowing the language helps, and my German improved a lot after my handsome boyfriend bought a digital-TV Antenna box for me…Just the fact of this sweet, quite innocent blue-eyed man who grew up playing in forests in East Germany seems to me kind of a miracle – you dont meet people like that who grew up drinking CocaCola and watching MTV. I don’t know how long Berlin can keep being an affordable hippie-hipster paradise, things are getting pricier already… but whatever changes your soul and your perspective on life has to change what you produce. That said, maybe aggression and crassness in music is more marketable (just witness hip-hop and Lady Gaga), but gentler, more harmonic music makes you happier. Ha ha.”
Another big question, I know, but what are your thoughts on the current electronic music, disco and pop culture?
“I think that is maybe one of the only questions to which I can offer an honest and correct reply. In the big picture, and summarized in one phrase, I feel people are getting lost in surface texture over substance. This is obviously true for electronic music but even more so for movies, not to mention video games or other genres. And digitally retouched fashion magazines, oh dear! The anorexia pandemic can only get worse. Around the early 90s i started noticing a stream of movies which young people now seem to adore, whose scripts seriously lack internal tension or logic. By these I mean specifically Dancer in the Dark, Amelie, and endless sci-fi and special-effect films like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (with Johnny Depp). It’s all about the image, but the characters on the screen dont have motivation or reason. The Bjork character annoyed me to no end. OK, fabulous cinematography, we all feel sad. But if this mother loves her child so much, why is she behaving in such a ridiculous way so as to lose the child? Just awful films. And awful electronic music.
“The better music from earlier eras, like film scripts, had internal logic – i.e. composition. Parts fit together, chords lead somewhere, each character had specific motivations and faults and virtues… So if we keep this up, we will truly have a generation of digital zombies. Every surface is slick and pretty, and the content is a big zero, without nuance, human effort or ingenuity. I hope this is not the face of the future – I’m seeing some signs that the pendulum is swinging back again.”
You’ve said before that you get sent a lot of slick demos from young producers that just don’t impress you. What are you looking for in new music? Are there any contemporary artists with who excite you?
“Yes, and I dont mean that we all shouldn’t keep trying, but the ‘slick demos’ really weren’t doing it for me – as I said before about slick productions with no human nuance. I’m not sure I can reply correctly to ‘who excites me’ because I’m not in a position to see all that is new and exciting. I dont work at BBC Radio, I don’t even have internet at home! Like, when all the tabloids were reporting on Amy Winehouse, I thought ‘Oh what a mess’. But then I saw a video of her live concert and I just loved her. She is just so real. Her whole body and every phrase just say SOUL.
Then again, as much as I love Mel Torme, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald…I saw videos of ‘new jazz singer’ Michel Buble and thought, ‘He can definitely sing, but this feels like some kitsch parody of Frank Sinatra, there is so little here which is original or coming from within his soul’. As for nu-disco…I like some of the earlier tracks by Norwegian Lindstrom of course, and i admire Maurice Fulton’s bass and percussion on all his tracks, but the most intense pleasure still comes from older music. You just cant compare our little year 2007 synth productions to those jazz-funk session players from 1980 who had already mastered all their chops 10 years BEFORE that.”
What do you feel the legacy of Balihu is? What did you learn from it?
Again in one simple phrase: it is easy to criticize others or dream of making great things, but only when you’ve tried it yourself over and over from beginning to end (a song, a building, a meal, a garden), you learn wha’ts involved, and you learn how hard and rare it is to make something that lasts for more than a fleeting moment. I’m not sure if I’ve gotten there yet – I’ve gotten close two or three times so far.”
The Best of Balihu: 1993-2008 is out now on Rush Hour Records on double-CD and two limited 2×12″s, available from all good record stores. Click here for more information.
Kiran Sande
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Rawdon