The Subs
October 22, 2009 by Aidan Hanratty
Filed under Interviews
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.
Birdy Nam Nam
December 17, 2008 by Brendan McGuirk
Filed under Featured, Interviews
Brendan McGuirk chats to DJ Need from the French turntable crew about their beginnings, working with Yuksek & Justice on the new album and why they “want to create a riot in the crowd”.
How did the four of you come together to form Birdy Nam Nam?
Before, we were all competing in a DJ competition (DMC), so we were doing the world championships as individuals and a team as well. We formed a team in France and won the French title and in 2002 we won the DMC world title. That’s about it. We were competing before and after winning this championship in 2002, we stopped doing battles and did the album. That was released late 2005.
Did you find it hard for the four of you to come together and find a middle ground between each of your styles and influences to enter the competition and work together?
The first thing that Birdy Nam Nam is about is that we have a lot of different influences but the point where all our influences are linked together is Birdy Nam Nam. We know that we can’t use all of our ideas in Birdy Nam Nam, but like any other band, some ideas can’t be used. So they can be used in a solo project or on another side project. It’s mainly kind of a democracy, everybody has to be ok and sometimes three of us are ok and the one who is not sure at the time is ok.
Do you find sometimes you’re fighting your corner for a little more jazz or hip hop in the mix or are you all pretty much on the same wavelength?
No, no… at the moment we are pretty much all on the same wavelength. After doing the first album, which was mainly downtempo music, we toured a lot. So we only played the tracks that had some kind of energy. After that we also did new music for the live versions and played that because we wanted people to enjoy it; we weren’t on stage just to play jazz music. We wanted that kind of energy. Now with the experience of doing a lot of concerts, we did a new album that is more electronic in its sound and there are also a couple of dancefloor songs on the album.
With your new album, Manual for Successful Rioting, are you still working from the traditional point of view with turntable as before? Nowdays a lot of people are using Ableton. One thing that is very distinct about Birdy Nam Nam is that you haven’t done that before.
On the first album, we did it with only turntables and a multi track recorder, recording on pro tools. The moment the first album was finished we already knew that the next album would not only be turntables, we knew we wanted to use synthesizers and program the beats and that’s what we’ve done on the new album. I guess most of the songs begin from samples manipulated or played on the turntables, but most of the beats are programmed on a computer. Some are played live, some hit hats, some effects are played live to keep that human groove, but there is a lot more programmation [sic] and we also created our own sounds, recording synthesizer.
So the album definitely has a lot more composition to it and is a little less sample based than your debut album…
Yeah we tried to make our own sounds with the drum machine and stuff like that.
Earlier you mentioned that you couldn’t play a lot of songs off your first album when you were playing live because they were too downbeat. Is the new album taking a more electro approach? Is there a slightly more upbeat electro feel to it?
Yes but the goal was not to do electro music - it’s to do modern music. Music that adapts to this time, we did the first album in Crazy B’s place and we were using only records, most of his records and we also brought our own too. He has a record collection of 10,000 - mainly jazz, soul, disco…mainly black music. That’s why the first album has a lot of sax, contra bass and flute samples. After that, we realized playing live that we wanted the kind of energy that’s in rock n’ roll music and electro music. We used vintage synthesizers and drum machines [on the new album], so now the sound is more electronic. We didn’t want to do electro music, we just wanted to have a modern sound and powerful sound and a lot of energy in the music.
Yuksek has been producing the album. Is that right?
Yeah.
Has that helped to bring things forward a little more and make the sound more modern like you spoke about?
Yeah, we tried to mix it on an analogue mixer in the studio with only analogue things and the sound was not what we were looking for. Because we’re on the same label and Yuksek did a remix of “Trans Boulogne Express”, we asked him - because we weren’t happy with the first mixes of the album - if he would be down for trying to mix some of the tracks. And after he had done a mix, we gave him the right to touch things. When you are always working on the same songs, you don’t really know what is good and what is wrong. That’s what Yuksek brought, a fresh point of view. Sometimes he changed an intro or an outro, or structures. He also mixed the thing and sometimes he added one or two melodies or arrangements. So we can say he produced it but most of the songs were already done when he arrived, but he changed enough things to be considered a producer.
After working on the album for however many months, are you content with it?
Yeah definitely, before we weren’t feeling that we had an album but now for us it seems like being an album from beginning to end and it’s telling something [sic].
Just to go back to the title of the album, Manual For Successful Rioting. Could you explain what the concept behind the album is and where you got the title from?
We liked that word, “riots”. We have this energy when we are doing the music and playing the music live. I guess we act like a rock band, jumping on stage and giving it a lot of energy. That’s how we see ourselves playing on stage, we want to create a riot in the crowd. That’s also how we want people to hear the music so it’s logical to have this word [in the album title] because it’s the kind of energy we want to give on stage. At the time of the first album, a lot of people were telling us that they weren’t finding the same energy on the album compared to the live version. We hope for new album that people find that energy on the disc itself.
You also worked with Justice on a song for the album. How did that come about?
The last song of the album is produced by Justice. At the time of our first album, they weren’t as known as they are now and we were talking about doing a remix already and we didn’t, unfortunately. This year we played on the same stage a couple of times and the first time they saw us, they told us they liked the live thing. And at that moment we were thinking about finishing the album with Yuksek. They told us one or two songs that they liked and they were two songs that we didn’t plan to add to the album. We gave them the separated tracks, mainly the live version where a lot of elements were played live and they produced it their own way and added a melody, an electric piano melody. We were really happy, it’s the last song of the album and it’s a great outro for the album. A great ending.