The Subs

Analogue spoke to The Subs ahead of their Halloween performance at Transmission in Dublin next week.

Your sound has been described as “Boys Noize brutality and Wagnerian rave drama” - how appropriate do you think that description is?

Well, we can live with that. I guess the brutality and rave because we simply cannot leave a sound sweet and cosy, but it’s the contrast of emo-kitch with beats that are pounding like a motherfucker that does the trick for us. But we’ll take any influence and rape it. In fact, our sound is called Belga Trance.

Ghent is home to yourselves, Soulwax, The Glimmers, I Love Techno…. What is it in the water there that such a seemingly quiet place is home to such crazy parties and DJs?

Belgium has always been good at beats. Remember Telex, Front 242, Technotronic, the whole new beat period, cult labels like R&S… Why? Because we’re not the best songwriters, English not being a native language? Because we are good at stealing? Belgium, geographically at the heart, played an important role in bringing dance to Europe. And in Ghent The Glimmers started this eclectic way of DJing, followed by 2 many DJ’s…

The video of Fuck that Shit from Pukkelpop is pretty insane - how did you go about getting all the footage together?

On national radio we asked the audience to film us during the show with whatever cam they had, including cellulars, iphones etc… Then they sent the footage to us. It was a very bumpy road, getting all that different footage into one format. And also, I had a camera glued to my microphone, but during the show I got carried away (as usual) and I constantly blocked the view of the cam with my hand. You can catch a few shots of my mouth delivering the screams though…

Since Pukkelpop takes place so close to your home town, is that a special show to play?

It’s one of the best festivals in Belgium, so it’s special. Great line-up cause it’s a good balance between established and upcoming talent. We always try to come up with something special.

What’s been the craziest thing to happen at one of your shows? Apart from getting a few thousand people to scream “Fuck that shit!” of course…

Life is wonderful and magical, but at the same time it’s so dreadfully banal and full of boring patterns. Live we try to break the rules. This gives you momentarily the feeling of breaking free, which is delightful, but it is only a temporary illusion of course. But it can linger on for a while though… The craziest thing is when you realize thousands of people are feeling the same thing at the same time. A collective musical orgasm so to speak. But having literally more then 200 people from the audience on stage is quite crazy as well, with us in de middle of that turbulent frenzy trying to carry on playing…

I noticed some similarities between From Dusk Till Dawn and the music of Joe and Will Ask? - so it’s funny that they remixed the track. Apart from these guys, who do you see as your musical peers, on the same wavelength as yourselves?

That’s difficult to say, because everyone has his own sound. But Fake Blood, Simian Mobile Disco, Yuksek, Justice, Boy 8-Bit, Crookers… Too many to mention… They all have a few tracks we wouldn’t mind if they were made by us, hahaha!

Trance is a dirty word nowadays, yet you made a hit called Kiss My Trance - which found favour with Tiesto of all people. Do you think, with the right people, that style could be given any respectability? Surely it’s no more cheesy than the disco sound that’s rife at the moment…

Oh man, that whole thing about what’s hot and what’s not, I won’t say I couldn’t be bothered, but it’s a bit tiring if it’s about chewing on styles that have been. You know what I mean? The whole fidget thing was in a way interesting because there was something fresh about it, Africa trying to make club music, and at the same time artists like Santigold, MIA, Buraka Som Sistema in the picture. It was/is something that transcended the pure clubbing genre… So we liked what was happening but didn’t participated because it is simply not our thing. Disco on the other hand is the root of dance music, so for me, everything is disco… I mean, we absolutely adore the old Italo Disco, and Disco will always remain an influence, but we’re not intending to make some really disco sounding thing, unless we, there we are again, find a way to rape it with love.

The video for that track was pretty interesting - for example juxtaposing cooking and DJing was a nice touch. How involved are you guys in the videos for your songs?

We always work closely together with the guys from The MKR, who are really good friends (they also made some videos for Das Pop). But all of a sudden the Kiss My Trance video was just lying in our mailbox so to speak. Some young talent from the southern part of Belgium simply gave it to us. This was particularly pleasing since there’s a lot of political nonsense between the north and the south.

But our video for My Punk we practically made ourselves. We drove on three mopeds from Ghent to Paris with three cameras on our head. After like 10 hours or something, we got so bored we started to drive into shopping malls and stuff and eventually got busted… Well, it’s a long story to tell everything, but if you check out the video, you gotta know everything is 100% real. We even still got a lawsuit pending…

You’ve had a lot of releases on Lektroluv’s label - what’s it like working with such an elusive character?

He eats a lot of spinach.

What are you working on right now? Are you concentrating on shows, or is there new material in the background?

Doing a lot of shows (10 years of Fabric, I Love Techno) but spending a lot of time in the studio as well. We’re releasing a new clubber called Mitsubitchi, which will be available first on Fabric’s label.

The Subs play the Transmission Halloween Party at The Button Factory in Dublin on October 31. See here for tickets.

Fake Blood at the Twisted Pepper live review

Photo by Matthew Johnson

Bodytonic kicked off the grand opening weekend of their much-discussed new venue The Twisted Pepper in fabulous style by playing host to one of the most elusive producers and DJs around at the moment, Fake Blood. Attempts by yours truly to secure a tête-à-tête with this most mysterious of figures were fruitless; the man quite simply “doesn’t do interviews”.

This didn’t come as a surprise. Over the last eighteen months, Fake Blood has risen from obscurity to become one of the most talked-about remixers and producers on the electro scene without doing a single interview. The internet, and particularly the blogosphere, has worked itself into a flurry with theories abound as to who exactly the man behind the moniker is.

Why his face or identity matters so much is beyond anyone’s guess, though the more Fake Blood attempts to conceal his real persona the more the guessing intensifies. A simple browse across various blogs and forums reveals myriad of guesses: Diplo, Switch, Hervé, Sinden, Boy 8-Bit, Norman Cook and, bizarrely, Tiësto are among some of the speculations put forward by bloggers and dead-serious electro aficionados. A tongue-in-cheek blog even ran for a while.

Such rampant hype might lead to easy conclusions that Fake Blood is more style than substance, but his remixes have proven him to be an extremely adept and intelligent producer (perhaps the strongest argument that this is not a man who came out of nowhere and just started twiddling knobs and pressing buttons). His rhythmic preferences would definitely suggest a history somewhere in big beats; the drum loop in The Wiseguys’ 1998 hit Ooh La La is suspiciously similar to Fake Blood’s style. In fact, the theory that Fake Blood is, in fact, a DJ called Theo Keating, formerly of The Wiseguys and now of The Black Ghosts, is the strongest of the lot.

In each of Fake Blood’s remixes his name is uttered by the original artist, giving his works a tag or audio stamp; amazingly, this is done by cutting the original vocal part into tiny phonetic fragments (phragments?) and reslicing them to construct the words “fake blood”. This is careful, deliberate time in the studio; clearly he is spending a lot of time poring over his production, something backed up by the fact that his remix total from the last year-and-a-half has yet to hit the double digits. Yet even with this low output, he has successfully spread his gospel of “grindcore” far and wide.

With this kind of hype and anticipation, the atmosphere in The Twisted Pepper’s main room was already electric before Fake Blood had even stepped on stage. Dresses from an earlier NCAD exhibition were suspended from the ceiling at various positions, yet these additions could not distract the crowd as the man himself emerged and began dropping incredible bone-rattling tracks like pebbles in an extremely responsive pond.

This bone-rattling sensation wasn’t just thanks to the DJ. The Bodytonic guys are renowned for an incredible attention to detail, and doubtless they have spared no expense giving their newly-renovated jewel in the crown the most tinnitus-inducing audio configuration possible. Wobbly basslines pulsated and throbbed through the room, while Fake Blood’s extremely distinctive punchy bass drum, used in most of his remixes and definitely in his solo work, snapped through the room like a low-frequency whip.

Spoken/sung “fake blood”s were heard at least every thirty minutes; he incorporated most of his remixes into his two-and-a-half hour set, including the reworkings of Cheap and Cheerful by The Kills and Stuck on Repeat by Little Boots. There were also some remixes and re-edits that won’t be found on any blog or internet resource, including a version of Soulwax’s Teachers re-cut to say (surprise surprise) “Fake Blood is in the house” - unfortunately this results in the drums being sliced up as well, resulting in some messy rhythms and confused (but still extremely enthusiastic) dancing.

The last half-hour of his set saw the kind of incredible, potent, kinetically-charged atmosphere of mutual amazement and appreciation which is witnessed on the Dublin club scene once in a blue moon. Before you ask, there were very definitely no illegal substances flowing through my veins, nor was I under any significant alcohol-based influence. The tunes were simply that good. The robotic vocal lines from LFO’s Freak were combined with the manic snare attacks of Vitalic’s Valletta Fanfares, and thrown into a genre hot-pot that even saw Dr Dre make an appearance.

At 2.30 a.m. he finally played the track that many had been waiting for: his first solo effort, Mars, with its heavy, punchy drums and crunking bassline, though that organ sound definitely seems to be nicked from somewhere… *cough* 2 Unlimited’s Get Ready for This *cough*. This was followed by a track that’s still burning substantial holes in dancefloors everywhere - Soulwax’s remix of MGMT’s Kids. Suffice to say everyone present went completely insane, all the way till the song’s close. As the lights rose he dutifully played Blood Splashing (Fake Blood Theme), the B-side of his solo EP. Once again the room went nuts.

Upon retiring outside, a large majority of attendants found themselves covered in sweat, clothes firmly glued to selves, the product of a hectic set that had everyone dancing with little pause for over two hours. Crowds lingered, puffing on cigarettes and still beaming from ear to ear, knees still wobbling from the effect of being hit with so many crunchy basses and thumping drums. The verdict was unanimous. Who is Fake Blood? An incredible, incredible DJ, that’s who.