Articles - Interviews

Chris McCormack’s “Elevator Music’ Techno (interview)

“Is there any truly pioneering music left in any corner of the world?  Techno is suffering more than most to my ears, but then techno is a cherished possession to me and all I ever really wanted to do when I was thinking about it as a producer was to try and help make a difference, to inspire someone to inspire someone else.”

Renowned and respected British techno producer Chris McCormack cut his musical teeth in the mid 90s, producing massive techno tunes including Erase Techno, his Ground and Gueshky Remixes before delivering his acclaimed ambient techno opus under the name UK Gold. Turning to mastering in 2004, he’s since worked on tracks for the likes of Ulrich Schnauss, Soma, Detroit Grand Pubahs, Gary Numan, Slam and Black Dog, as well as turning down offers from more than a few potential clients.

“I’m sure some producers must just think once they given me this horrible squashed up mess, I can unravel it, turn the volume up even higher and give them back something big, bright and bold which defies the law of physics,” says Chris, “It’s all really quite perplexing and annoying in equal measure.”

The ‘squashed up mess’ he’s referring to are tracks on which producers have applied limiters throughout to try and increase volume, resulting in the waveform- the tracks visual audio display-, looking like a continuous block.

“To be brutal, I can only guess it's the blind leading the blind,” says Chris on why so many dance producers send him their ‘smashed’ techno tracks (he reckons it’s around 70%).

“A lot of people seem to think that limiting is a required part of the mixing process these days, never mind the mastering, and in some cases it can indeed be.  Heavy limiting can be effective on individual sounds within a mix, but across the whole mix, well, it’s always going to end in disaster.”

It’s like it’s become this disease that people can’t seem to get away from. People seem afraid they might get left behind in the big race or that if they limit the tracks before sending them to me, somehow this extra volume will assist me in making a better master. It’s just not true.  The more dynamics I have to play with, the better my Eq’s will respond, the more my compressor has to work with and the more I can find the correct shape and natural balance for the mix.  Education is working, however, I get less smashed tracks than I did a year ago.”

“I don’t know where we can all go from here, but a lot of producers to me just sound like they live inside Ableton,” he continues, “There’s nothing to attract my ears to any sense of place, emotional state or individual expression, just lots of endless flat sounding tracks doing the same thing. Sadly a lot of it is the modern day equivalent of elevator music.”

Mastering business aside, he continues to work on his own music, and has just released a new compilation ‘Chris McCormack presents Exit to Extinction Part 3’ as a completely free download (with parts 1 and 2 available to buy).

Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): What prompted you to set up Blacklisted; what got you so interested in mastering in particular?

Chris McCormack: “I’ve always had a deep fascination with mixes, I mean just listening to mixes, the balance, the blend, making two sounds coexist together to create something more. I like listening to anything with clarity, punch and depth.  Sometimes I’ll hear a sound so perfectly crafted it just sends shivers up my spine.  The mix is such a powerful thing for creating feelings and emotions, in many ways it’s the key to everything in music. I guess mastering is a natural byproduct of this and therefore I have always gravitated toward it.   I get a lot of satisfaction from crafting and shaping mixes.  I love finding the right balance, the right dynamic.  It’s an emotional interaction with the music.”

It all started seriously when I mixed an album last year for a good friend.  On one particular track, he dropped round the completed mix files, along with his bounce of the mix as it stood. It was a slow ballad I suppose you would call it, just piano and female vocal.  I could hear the sentiment in it was emotional, but it wasn’t making me feel emotional listening to it. 

Anyway, I got to work on the mix and a few days later I asked him to come back round to have a listen. I went of to make some tea and when I returned he was crying, momentarily unable to speak. All I did was mix it in a way I felt it needed to be mixed, getting the perfect balance of top, bottom and mids, reverbs, vocal level and compression etc.  Mastering as an extension of this helps redress the missing balance that can make the difference between being emotionally moved and unsatisfied and that for me is the most satisfying part of the whole job.”

Skrufff: What's wrong with the waveform looking like a continuous block: what implications does that have for the final track?

Chris McCormack: “There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with it per se, it just sounds crap.”

Skrufff: You’ve mentioned in previous interviews turning down mastering offers for tracks that are produced this way, are big name dance producers doing it as much as amateurs in your experience?

Chris McCormack: “No, it’s definitely more prevalent with the newer producers.  The truly established names understand how the whole chain works and it’s always a pleasure to master for those guys. Sometimes it feels like people are putting on limiters just to hide the fact that their tracks are not very good, like somehow an L2 (limiter) is going to magically elevate a track into a “commercial” product.

Smashed mixes that come here for mastering bug (irritate) the hell out of me to be honest – I just turn the master gain down in the studio and get on with it if I feel I can still do something useful with it and there are no other mixes available.  I am here to do the best job I can for everyone, I always try to educate if they are willing to listen, but if you want to go ahead and shoot both of us in the foot by smashing your track up before sending it to me, I can only then make a choice to master it or leave it alone.  Either way the result will not be as clean and punchy or musically satisfying as just giving me the right track in the first place.”

Skrufff: Where do you stand on the vinyl versus digital debate?

Chris McCormack: “To be honest, they are just delivery mediums in the end and you work with the limitations of each to deliver the best sounding product.  Each have there own advantages and disadvantages.  For the nerd in me, I prefer full quality digital files as they give a truer representation of the source mix, the studio in fact.  From these files I can quite often tell what kind of set up made the tracks. For the music lover in me, vinyl is more woosey, richer, more alive, more real, more imperfect and somehow becoming more like life itself.  But I don’t prefer it per se.  The mastering engineer in me always loves to hear it as it was made.

As a writer I would often come away annoyed that vinyl had taken a mix I had worked on for a week and messed around with it, softened the transients and adjusted the spectral balance, but other times really chuffed with the end sound. I guess in those situations I was less generally happy with the mixes to start with.”

Skrufff: Technology's been improving all the time: how much is high quality laptop mastering something that will soon be available to all?

Chris McCormack: “High quality laptop mastering is here already.  What’s important is a great set of objective ears, years of experience and a great room with a true sound.  Look at this way:  If the equipment in a studio is a high performance car, and the mastering engineer is the driver, putting the car on ice and trying to achieve a good lap time is like trying to master music in a bad room, all the equipment in the world wont help you connect with the music and let you hear what’s really happening. The room is the environment in which the mix performs to its potential, as the road is to the car. It’s hugely important. 

Just this week I have done consultancy for two established producers, pulling their rooms to pieces, showing them where to make changes, how and why.  For both of them I think it’s going to be a revelation. Both of these cases have been prompted purely by listening to the mixes they sent in for mastering; I could hear the room all over them. I’m not just going to sit here and take people’s money for mastering when I could help show them something better that will stay with them and inject itself into their future mixes forever.”

http://www.blacklistedmastering.co.uk/article04.htm (Download Chris McCormack presents Exit to Extinction Part 3, here)

Article by Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)

Subscribe to Skrufff music newsletter at www.Skrufff.com

Articles - Interviews

“I think some people misunderstand me in Germany right now, they think, sound-wise, that I’m a new Justice adaptation because I’ve played with them a few times. I have 100% respect for them but actually my DJ sets are becoming a little deeper again.

Of course I’m not playing tech-minimal but I am playing music that’s more stripped down. I’m also not playing so many hits any more.”

Articles - Interviews

Gilles Peterson’s Fighting Talk

 “Touch wood, I’ve always been all right, in fact I’ve never even been punched in my life as a DJ. Though I’ve almost punched a couple of people myself, actually I’ve been pretty rude to people on occasion. When people are rude to you when you’re DJing, well, I don’t take it. Anyway, I’ve been beaten up other times, but not as a DJ.”

Though his fellow Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood was once shot, Gilles Peterson’s reputation as one of the friendliest, down-to-earth DJs has long preceded him, and he laughs as he recounts his relatively trivial brushes with danger, behind the decks and elsewhere. Like Westwood he’s long specialised in urban, underground, eclectic styles of music, though steering broadly clear of gangsta rap, has instead ended up something of dance music institution, his self deprecation only partially concealing a razor sharp mind. Respected as much as he’s liked, he’s also long attracted devotion from his army of fans, with one or two crossing lines that even he felt uncomfortable with.

“I’ve had a few stalkers incidents, a couple of crazy women, I’ve had the police on two women,” he admits.

“They wanted everything and they became obsessed,” he explains.

“That’s the radio thing, I guess, and some people who are mentally unbalanced can turn it into this crazy thing. If you acknowledge them, that’s it. You’re saying yes to marriage. It got frightening for me at one point. .  But that was a few years back, I was younger and better looking then,” he laughs.

The ‘radio thing’ he refers to is his phenomenally popular, heavily syndicated weekly show on Britain’s Radio 1, that celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. For Peterson, he admits the landmark is ‘a big deal’.

“Ten years is a big part of my life, I’m very grateful to still be part of what I believe is still the best radio station in the world, that is a pretty big deal. I’m one of their leftfield DJ’s, so I’m hanging on in there,” he enthuses.

Skrufff (Benedetta Ferraro): How difficult is it to maintain your enthusiasm week after week: year after year, how do you avoid falling into a routine?

Gilles Peterson: “Luckily for me, the music that I play is still diverse and therefore exciting. Sometimes I feel a bit sorry, maybe I shouldn’t use that word, what I mean Is, I don’t know if I could be just a drum ‘n’ bass DJ. If all I ever played was drum ‘n’ bass, I don’t know if I could still be here doing what I’m doing. The great thing for me is that by playing such a wide musical range, if I don’t get it from Hip Hop, I’d get it from Electronic or I might be hearing some new bands that are really exciting. Generally for me every week there’s something new to get excited about.”

Skrufff: You must be being sent hundred and hundreds of tracks week after week: how much does the standard vary?

Gilles Peterson: “It varies enormously. I’m not one of these guys who listens to everything and writes notes about everything I listen to, I’m actually an awful communicator. I don’t really have a set way of doing things; there are time when I listen to everything that gets sent to me and other times I don’t. Sometimes I listen to what gets recommended to me, and somehow it all works out. I try not to make it a job. Ever. If I’m not in the mood, I won’t listen, because I don’t want to force myself.”

Skrufff: How much do you believe recession and hard times are good for creativity?

Gilles Peterson: “I think so, musically it’s a good time certainly, though I know I sound like a cliché. The good thing about being in England is that it’s quite a cynical place, it’s a hard place, very competitive, it makes people work really hard. People do work really hard here to make good music so you can’t bluff it as much as anywhere else. And I like that. It’s a hard place, but it’s more real in terms of the development of music.”

Skrufff: What's your take on the digital revolution: are you still carrying vinyl around?

Gilles Peterson: “I play mainly off CDs because I like mixing with the Pioneers (CDJ 1000s), but then again if I play small places, like ‘Plastic People’ I quite like playing vinyl, because these are clubs where they still manage to look after their equipment therefore vinyl sounds really good. Also some people still like watching me playing vinyl and I think they’d be really upset if I’d turn up with a laptop. I use it just occasionally, but I don’t see myself switching to it totally because I think DJs who just use computers end up always playing the same music. One of the good things about bringing your CDs or vinyl is that you only bring a certain type of music, which in a way makes you more creative. If I know that I have the big records in my computer, I know I’d end up playing them; and then you’ll end up playing just the hits. Whereas, if they’re not in my box or in my computer, then I’ll have to break new stuff. That’s exciting.”

Skrufff: your BBC biog says that 'Gilles' show on London's Jazz FM was axed in 1990 after he played 'inappropriate' music and made statements supporting peace during the Gulf War': how hard was it to stay quiet during the 2nd gulf war? how tempted are you to speak out now, about Gaza?

Gilles Peterson: “Once you experience what I’ve experienced, you definitely don’t want to go back there. I’ve made my statements when I was younger, got in trouble for it, and especially with what’s going on these days, with all that Jonathan Ross situation  that just happened and general paranoia, if you have a little bit of experience as I have, you just stick to what you’re good at. You’re not brought in to be a politician. I was young and naïve back in those days. I had a gig in Tel Aviv coming up and obviously I had to cancel it, but it’s not something that I’m going to talk about. Sadly it’s like that. That’s the state of the nation. But you know, you can always be subtle, with the music that you play, for example.”

Skrufff: going into your background: reading your biog on the old trust the dj site, it talked about you getting the residency at the Electric ballroom coz the previous resident thought you'd fuck up: how aware were you of that hostility at the time?

Gilles Peterson: “Again, I was young and naïve so I didn’t really realize at the time. I guess I must have been very annoying because I was very keen at the time.”

Skrufff : How did you handle all the negativity and stop it from crushing you?

 Gilles Peterson: “I think when you’re young and so determined you just go through anything, don’t you? You’re more radical, resilient, when you’re younger, as you get older you become more sensitive. The funny thing with that DJ, Paul Murphy, is that we still DJ together sometimes these days. Every year we do a party together and I do have a bit of admiration towards him; I think in terms of jazz/dance music he was and still is number one.”

Skrufff: Was there any point when the hostility disappeared?

Gilles Peterson: “I think DJing is a bit of a sport, it’s very competitive and boys will be boys. There’s always going to be jealousy and competitiveness in DJing and I think a lot of DJs must have been wondering why have I done so well. I think I was very lucky because I came right at a time when DJing became a career and you could make a living out of it. I got the timing really right; I was the right age at the right time.”

Skrufff: How have things changed?

Gilles Peterson: “Things are a little different now. I think DJ are still worth more than they should be, I also think the ‘super star DJ’ thing of a few years ago was almost ridiculous, and I was quite happy to see the end of the ‘Super Clubs’ because music was not a top priority for them. I think now there’s a better balance; there are some very good DJs out there who deserve what they get, just a bit like footballers. Some may say how could they afford them, but if people pay money to go and see them than they’re worth it.”

“To be honest, from my point of view, I’ve never really thought of it that way. To me it was, has the club got a good sound system? Do people like what I play? These are the important things to me, otherwise I would have dome a lot more worse gigs that I have in the last twenty years.”

Skrufff: Danny Rampling told us a while back that DJs’s fees took off in the house scene, when Club UK got going (leaping to 4 figures): did you go through a similar leap in fees at one point?

Gilles Peterson: “You know what, for me I’ve been pretty steady all my life. I guess that’s why I still get a lot of work, because I was never out of reach. Again I play at a lot of parties for my friends for nothing; if I like the party, I’ll play. Obviously, when the big things come in you’re looked after. It’s just a question of balance. I think the days of the £15,000 a gig are gone, maybe a few people like Mark Ronson are still on those figures, the guys who play big celebrity parties and maybe some of the trance DJs still do too, but most DJs have gone down in price for sure.”

Skrufff: what do you make of the growing gang violence in London: why do you think there are so many shootings- particularly black on black shootings? How do you think it can be addressed?

Gilles Peterson: “Well that’s a sociological question… I don’t know. Violence has always been there, obviously the drug thing cannot be ignored, but I think mainly London is a very tough place to live in especially if you don’t have much money. I often wonder how do some people survive. It’s a dog eat dog place. I live in Hackney and with all the different tribes here I can tell you it’s mental… the thing that always gets me is to see police outside schools. Scary. But I remember being in clubs or pirate radio stations twenty years ago and hearing about the same things going on. I didn’t read about those things, but I knew they were happening. I don’t go to these clubs anymore but, back in the days, I used to play in more urban clubs where things were definitely more intense.”

Skrufff: you were a member of Level 42's fan club…

Gilles Peterson: “Yeah, big time!”

Skrufff: did you ever meet them?

Gilles Peterson: “Er, no.”

Skrufff: Have you ever considered your own fan club?

Gilles Peterson: “I have my Myspace page, and I think I manage that quite well.”

Skrufff: What type of fans do you usually attract?

Gilles Peterson: “I get all kinds, they’re usually quite pretty, but generally I get a good cross section. My fans are brilliant, I’m really proud of them, they’re cool, they’re into good music… I’m saying it half tongue ‘n’ cheek but actually I have an unofficial Peterson’s website with message boards called Brownswood.co.uk and that’s amazing, what they get up to, and the community is incredible. Some of the people on it were on the message board at Radio 1 when I first started, and my message board was so popular, it was by far the most popular, so the BBC decided to change it all by putting all DJs all together. My fans hated that, so they decided to create their own message board. They have grown so much, some of them even promote events, and some of them have even become my friends. They’re supporters, but they also keep me in check. If they don’t like something that I play, they’ll let me know. It can be wonderful, but it can also be painful as nobody likes to read bad things about themselves, but they do keep e in check.”

Skrufff: are you still in touch with the likes of Courtney Pine, Brand New Heavies or Galliano or Jamiroquai: or Colin Favor?

Gilles Peterson: “I do yes. Galliano was MCing with me in Australia just recently, I saw the Brand New Heavies in Serbia and we shared the same mini bus. It’s good. A lot of these people I see here and there still. We still stay in touch and with some of them we’re still friends.”

Skrufff: You seem to have had a seamlessly upwards path in your career: looking back, what have been the biggest mistakes you've made?

Gilles Peterson: “We always wish we could have done certain things in a certain way, but what we talk about the most when I talk to people of the older generation is that it would have been nice to have had more advice when I was setting up Acid Jazz or Talkin’ Loud… it would have been good to have had better management because financially we could have done a lot better. On the other hand, I think the reason why we were so successful is because we didn’t really care about money; the whole thing was about being into what we were really into. Maybe if I had that business side, I would have lost out in creativity. But you can’t really think that way, you just have to be happy and move forward. I’m just happy to be healthy and that my friends and family are healthy and that I still do what I do. I wake up and I’m excited. These are massively big things.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/gillespeterson (listen to Gilles on Radio 1 here)

http://www.myspace.com/gillespe

Article by Benedetta Ferraro (Skrufff.com)

Subscribe to Skrufff music newsletter at www.Skrufff.com

Articles - Interviews

“Berlin has a great reputation amongst young people in Serbia, especially those young people who love art, design and music. So many of them go to Berlin just to see and experience the city. London is also popular, but it's perceived as more of a mainstream destination by most people here.”

As well as being one half of hotly tipped nu rave/ turbo folk mash-up duo the Good Guys, Andrija Kovač, 24 is the creative director behind Exit Festival’s alternative dance arena Happy Novi Sad, and as such, is superbly placed to discuss European, as well as Balkan club culture. And kicking off the year with a live Good Guys performance alongside Hot Chip and Terence Fixmer in Novi Sad, he’s equally well versed on the minutiae of both environments.

Articles - Interviews

London house legends X Press 2 unveiled remixes of their 1993 classic anthem ‘London Express’ this week, including a brilliant remake by upcoming producer Idiotproof.

The new electro-tech version should even find favour with X Press 2’s own Rocky who chatting to Skrufff in 2005 admitted he rarely played his earlier tracks such as the band’s biggest pop hit Lazy.