Fiedel
Fiedel, your recent DJ sets and mixes show you have a real interest in so-called UK funky and post-dubstep rave and garage stuff. What attracts you to these sounds?
Fiedel: “Basically, I just like to play tracks that move me and hope to share this with the audience. Those tracks have that certain force to move me. It’s their special kind of funkiness, restlessness, the unpredictability, the breaks, the basslines, the energy they create. Plus I like the fact that they combine different styles or even stand between the styles, so I can mix it with techno or house. In my DJ sets I really like variations in sounds and styles – depending on the party I play.”
“Our new material points in a similar direction with a fast and funky groove and lot of low-end – as you can hear in track 5 of my FACT Mix. We were asked if this track was UK funky when we played it for the first time last year, but back then we hardly knew that such a style even existed. These beats refer also to dancehall, soca, and kuduro for instance. Its a great time when genre boundaries disintegrate!”
MMM – Touch & Go (from 10th Anniversary EP)
“We were asked if one of our tracks was UK funky when we played it for the first time last year – but back then we hardly knew that such a style even existed.”
‘Donna’ was obviously a massive tune for you guys, and is now a certified classic. Tell me about its origins…
MMM: “This track is inspired by Donna Summer’s ‘Our Love’, a classic Giorgio Moroder production. It has this great acid synth line at the end. We tried to come up with something similar but a with a rougher sound. We used analogue sequencers to get this kind of meandering melody, and jammed this track together. One of us was tweaking this screaming Korg MS 20 filter while the other was muting and unmuting tracks. Then we cut up the audio recording of that jam, slicing the best parts together.”
What about the live incarnation of MMM? How does MMM studio feed into MMM live, and vice versa?
MMM: “Just as we jam in the studio, we jam in our live set. We use the same set-up. Rather than preparing whole audio tracks and just pay those back, we prepare a tool that we can jam. We have some beat and melody variations that we can step through manually, modulate synthesizer and effects, and we can play along with additional sound. If we didn’t do any of this you would only a hear a static loop or beat.
“We are constantly developing our live set. Adding new tracks to it in their earliest stages so that we can try them out. In a live set it is often OK – and sometimes better -Â if the tracks are not so elaborated but still a bit rough.
“We always record our shows. Sometimes for studio versions we take a good live version as orientation and reproduce it in order to preserve this particular moment we had during the live set. This influence of club atmosphere and the reaction of the crowd is missing in a studio situation.”
MMM – Nous Sommes MMM (from MMM 4)
“Just as we jam in the studio, we jam in our live set.”
MMM releases aren’t very frequent – only three 12″s in the last thirteen years! Is this deliberate? Are you sitting on a lot of unreleased material?
MMM: “It’s four releases if you add the Anniversary EP with Soundhack! Agreed, we’re not the fastest but we are working on it! We already have a bunch of new tracks in our live set awaiting release…”
What’s next for MMM?
MMM: “MMM5!”
Kiran Sande
zentrale-mmm.de
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jackmaster