Electronic Beats interview
Electronic Beats have just posted an interview conduced with John over the phone some days ago and, while it’s not as in-depth as the one for Groove magazine; it contains many interesting bits of information.
Amongst other things, John shares how he didn’t like rave at first, how he left a rave club because they were making hip-hop and how he eventually had a phase where he made three hip-hop albums. He lists works from Johnny Jungle, Komakino and Pure White/Orca/DJ Crystal as his favourite rave records from the 1990s. He also states that nobody other than him has heard the music he’s been making for the past year and a half, which Alternative Nation, and many others after them, reported in their own piece, calling it “no longer releasing music”. Such a statement does not appear in the actual interview.
Here are some excerpts from the interview.
Maybe we underestimate imagination.
What the imagination gives to the experience of listening is a big thing. Punk and rave and the original pioneers of rock ‘n’ roll: those periods of music are really important because they were pure energy. The atmosphere around the music was apparent. For me, a lot of the electronic music that’s made today doesn’t seem to be made for people’s imaginations. I don’t hear a lot of atmosphere; I hear a lot of compression. It’s an unfortunate direction. I like when music has mystery around it. There are still individuals making music around the world that has atmosphere and imagination, and who are obscure and unknown. I hope that one day our industry figures out a way to promote this kind of thing, instead of music that drills itself into our heads and is promoted to death. It was really nice for me as a kid to listen to punk rock and have very little idea who the singer of Black Flag was, or who the singer of the Germs was. I just knew I lived in the same city as them, and I knew I breathed the same air as them, and that was enough to set my imagination aflame.
Yeah, I was going to ask if you’d ever tried to make jungle.
There are jungle drums on my albums Enclosure and PBX Funicular Intaglio Zone. Both those records have a lot of breakbeats, but there are also guitars and synthesizers. I was trying to do my version of what Black Sabbath or Depeche Mode would sound like with jungle drums. Going faster was a big challenge. Around when I was making acid house stuff, I programmed a jungle-type beat into my Machinedrum that played really nicely at 168 bpm. I was really proud of myself—it didn’t sound tense, the way drum machines have a tendency to sound when you speed them up.
As far as making acid house, I don’t have any desire to. Recently I’ve been making really abstract music out of samples. I don’t have any preconceived idea of what I’m going to do going into it, I just let the samples guide me, and gradually add in synthesizers and drum machines to it to round it out. At this point I have no audience. I make tracks and I don’t finish them or send them to anybody, and consequently I get to live with the music. The music becomes the atmosphere that I’m living in. I either make really beautiful music that comes from classical, or I make music where the tempo is moving the whole time, and there’s no melodic or rhythmic center. It’s just disorienting music that’s falling apart.
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You can read the whole interview here.
