Hi folks,

just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone for their support and kind words over 2011, especially to all those who came to a gig or bought music along the way. Your direct help makes it possible for me to do the job I love and I don’t take it for granted for one minute.

Wishing everyone a happy and peaceful 2012.

Ewan
xx

Here.

A girlfriend of mine once half-joked that I was more intimate with my computer than with her. I don’t think she was suggesting David Cronenberg make a film about me, but the relationship I have with this ready-to-hand-24-7 aluminium work-and-play-pal is undeniably a close one. When I sleep alone it’s usually on the adjacent pillow. Many of us began our computing lives hands firmly around a joystick and now in this haptic age we are encouraged to caress our trackpads and iDevices like proxy lovers.

I am happy to admit that I’ve developed warm feelings towards lots of the tools I use on a daily basis, the ones which look nice and work well. But it’s what they do that matters. I love my coffee machine partly for its cheery curves but mostly because it makes my flesh and blood beloved a little less homicidal in the morning. I love my Dyson not just because even after sixteen years it looks like something from ‘the future’ but because it ruthlessly disappears the crumbs she leaves in her wake.

Similarly when I flip the power in my studio and a hundred lights blink back at me I glow in turn, excited by all this potential to make stuff. I haven’t ever gone as far as to give any of my machines names, but you can see why people are prone to anthropomorphise. Certainly my analogue synths have personalities, seem even to have moods, good days and bad days like the best of us. The fact that some people insist that their iPods are choosing the music rather than randomly shuffling it, says a lot more about us as social and emotional creatures than the fact that we mostly don’t understand probability.

And so it doesn’t seem to me odd two weeks ago to have written a short thank you letter to the man who helped shape so many of the machines I use on his retirement from Apple. For making a computer for people like me with no training in science or the dark arts of the command line, and for insisting that it wasn’t wrong to experience delight or wonder in its use. Our affection for the objects we use to make things ought sometimes to be directed at the people who in turn made them; the likes of Bob Moog, Leo Fender, Dave Smith and Steve Jobs. Blessed are the tool-makers, the dreamers of our dreams.

I write my Groove columns some six weeks or something ahead of publication date. The one that’s due to be printed in three weeks or so pretended to be about our emotional relationships with the machines that some of us spend far too much time stuck to, but really it was a round-about way of saying thanks to Steve Jobs, whose retirement as CEO Apple had just announced. I guess we all knew then in our heart of hearts what was coming, but expecting something doesn’t make it any less sad when it finally happens.

Anyway, here’s the final paragraph of that forthcoming column:

“it doesn’t seem to me in any way odd two weeks ago to have written a short thank you letter to the man who helped shape so many of the machines I use on his retirement from Apple. For making a computer for people like me with no training in science or the dark arts of the command line, and for insisting that it wasn’t wrong to experience delight or wonder in its use. Our affection for the objects we use to make things ought sometimes to be directed at the people who in turn made them; the likes of Bob Moog, Leo Fender, Dave Smith and Steve Jobs. Blessed are the tool-makers, the dreamers of our dreams.”

Thank you, Steve.

Nik Cohn, one of pop writing’s greats, wrote the article which became the movie ‘Saturday Night Fever’. Published in New York magazine in June 1976 ‘The Tribal Rites of Saturday Night’ profiled a dancer named Vincent (immortalised by John Travolta as Tony Manero), a ‘face’ at the 2001 Odyssey discotheque in Bay Ridge. Cohn hung out with him for days and wrote it up in the tough New Journalism style popular at the time. Except Vincent didn’t exist. Twenty years later Cohn admitted that he was a ‘complete fabrication’. What had been presented as reportage from the youth-cultural front-line – right down to the pseudo-academic title and the bald introductory statement that ‘everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved’ – was fiction. ‘Not having been to a place never stopped me from describing it… Any more than not meeting someone stopped me talking about my interview with them.’

In the UK last month* it was discovered that award-winning journalist Johann Hari – who had met his very real interviewees – had been passing off words they uttered in other interviews and books as having been said directly to him. Hari’s borrowings caused a furore and a Twitter meme where the public imagined him interviewing historical figures and scooping all their most famous lines.

Context is the contract between writer and reader; we judge what is presented to us by where it’s located, how it’s categorized. But for both our campaigning journalist and subcultural correspondent a higher authenticity was paramount. Hari claimed what he was writing was more than mere interview, that he was doing a service to the figures he profiled by using their most well-turned phrases no matter where they came from (and implied that his readers were somewhat pedestrian for not getting that). Cohn – already a published novelist – chose rather to present his work not as fiction but fact – using journalism as a cover for his belief in the greater resonance of myth.

Hari – pushing the logic of our internet-assisted age to breaking point yet busted by a quick Google search – is currently suspended.** Cohn the trickster, the myth-maker, got away with it but eventually decided to confess anyhow (albeit when it was too late to matter). Great writers may believe that to lead us to higher truth they need to pull the wool over our eyes, but somehow they still want to be caught in the act of doing it.

*NB this article was written for Germany’s Groove magazine in July of this year. Since then Hari has also admitted that he had been editing his and others’ Wikipedia entries under the alias ‘David Rose’.

** After an internal enquiry Hari is currently on unpaid leave from the Independent but will be returning to work there in 2012.

1. Inxec vs. Droog – Westbound EP [Crosstown Rebels]

Party mavens, DJs, label owners (Culprit) and convivial West-coast hosts the Droog crew have been doing everything right the last couple of years. Now we have their first release for Crosstown Rebels and it’s an absolute belter. Made in collaboration with the needle-sharp production chops of Chris ‘Inxec’ Sylvester it’s slightly darker and more electronic than you might have expected with a feel of early Border Community. I’ve played ‘Unhinged’ at nearly every gig I’ve done in the past four months and I can’t tire of it. Crosstown have been on a breathtaking run of form the last year and half and this steps things up another notch.

2. Virgo Four – It’s A Crime (Caribou remix) [Rush Hour]

Yes, you all know this by now and lots of us have been praising it to the high heavens.

But it’s been interesting to note that quite a few folks have been reluctant to play it, some DJ pals referring to it on Twitter as sounding ‘unfinished’ and being ‘over-hyped’. Yes of course tastes vary, and there’s a whole thing to be written about on the nature of excitement and advanced notice on something – how we can still get annoyed by the (these days increasingly rare) occasions when people get positive en masse, but I want rather to deal with the first point. It seems to me that some people are freaked out by how much it refuses to fit into the pristine but uniform digital aesthetic of so much contemporary dance music. Instead it’s determinedly diverse and dynamic – going from clanking ware-housiness, to muffled vocals to jazzy keys to abrasive electronics within 8 thrilling minutes. There are cross-rhythms and clanging spring reverbs. It is no throwback – it sounds utterly contemporary – but it re-instates some of the things that we have lost in our looped-out, limited to buggery, have lap-top will travel modern age. It sounds like embodied people interacting in real-time with machines and it gives me goosebumps every time I play it – and each of those times someone comes up and asks what the bloody hell it is. Without fail. We need more records like this. I need more records like this. Soon, please.

3. Intruder – Amame [Nervous]

I missed this somewhere along the line – why isn’t it a massive great across-the-board hit? It’s Murk delivering a superbly-produced, catchy-like-lice-in-an-infant-school-playground vocal acid house record and I love it to bits.

4. Death In Vegas – Your Loft [Drone]
First new stuff from them in a very long time and nicely difficult to place; italo-inflected slow house with dreamy but anxious looped female vocals – Austra’s Katie Stelmanis channeling Donna Summer trapped in a neurotic fever-dream. Atmosphere to burn but enough warehousey bump to sound great in the club. Excellent.

5. Hackman – Your Face Pulling My Hair [Greco-Roman]

Not sure how much of the light of day this will see owing to the cheeky-as-anything sample it’s conjured from but it thumps wistfully and mightily at the same time. Worth tracking down if you can.

6. Flowers and Sea Creatures – ‘Flowers and Sea Creatures’ (LP) [Buzzin’ Fly]

There’s something instantly arresting about the combination of Graham Baxter’s voice and Kosta Megalos’ music. Call it emotional heft or something; they have sounded like themselves from their very first release when others spend albums wandering from influence to influence without discovering anything original. I got so excited when Ben Watt played me A.M. that I asked if I could do a re-edit and similarly was very happy to lend a hand with a bit of additional production tinsel and some mixing to the album, alongside Fred Everything, The Revenge and the band themselves. There’s some fine pop songwriting (Kingdom of Los Angeles, Passengers), cool electronics (Electronique, Division) and oodles of atmosphere (Sonic, Pale Complexion, Secrets We Stole From The Dancefloor) in a proper, superb album. I hope it’s the first of many.

7. Mike Simonetti – The Third of the Storms [Italians Do It Better]

Lovely emo-italo chugger with a Sam Sparro vocal, and several superb versions which lend themselves to full construct-a-megamix-as-you-go DJ action. The sort of thing Michael Mayer would play on a Kompakt beach party and you’d have a little hug and an existential blub with whoever was standing nearby at the simultaneous beauty / inevitable transience of it all.

8. Diynamic

Hitting their 50th release Hamburg’s Diynamic are getting stronger and stronger – pretty much everyone’s doing superb work at the moment, both the mainstays and new signings. The collaborative 50th EP is summery and uniformly great, pretty much everything Solomun even wanders past is gold (I can’t stop playing his remixes of Edu Imbernon’s Punset and Noir and Haze). Then there’s the DJ Phono debut album which is really brilliant – Pampa-ish but with a style that’s all his own. And David August looking very promising indeed as well.

9. Walls – Coracle LP [Kompakt]

Walls sophomore album is a good chunk more insistently electronic than their eponymous debut but no less engaging; although there’s still plenty of atmosphere and loveliness there’s a decided M83-anthemic euphoria about it. And as we know, dear reader, there’s nothing wrong with that.

10. Erol Alkan ft. Boyz Noise and Jarvis Cocker ‘Avalanche (Terminal Velocity)’ [Phantasy] / Robin Hannibal ‘I Need Your Love’ [Marketing] / Simone Fedi ‘Bitter Devotion’ [Eskimo]

I’ve been back on the remix trail once again this summer. Erol’s comes in the Classic Records go nu-beat ‘Hall of the Mountain King’ version or wonky ‘Deeper Underground’ house dub as Mr Cocker chants a Leonard Cohen poem over the top. The Robin Hannibal is tweakily acidic vocal house which explodes into cascades of bells and percussion at the close and last but not least Simone Fedi on Eskimo is a balearo-pop vocal hit to which I’ve added tougher drums and a cluster of Jaguar-esque riffs. Phew.

11. The Rapture – How Deep Is Your Love? [dfa]

Yes we’ve got previous. I turned down remixing ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ in 2003 (I figured trying to improve that was a hiding to nothing) and then after a gig together in Manumission ended with me, Matty and Gabe atop an Ibizan sand-dune looking at both ends of the week I landed the job of mixing ‘I Need Your Love’ instead. In 2006 I spent a very intense but enjoyable three months in New York and London helping to produce ‘Pieces of the People We Love’. During the many consecutively sleep-deprived but inspiring days holed-up in mid-town New York with Paul Epworth, I never felt more sure that we were making a stonking great hit and I’ll be honest that my heart broke a little when the album came out and everyone who was praising us to the heavens pre-release seemed to step back a bit and go quiet just when we needed them most. No matter – I’m as proud of it as anything I’ve worked on and I was delighted – as a friend and a fan – to hear just how good the barn-storming first single from their forthcoming third album, ‘By The Grace of Your Love’ is. It’s ended many of my sets this summer and sounded never sounded less than brilliant and exciting. Welcome back gents.

12. Assorted other belters.

Levon Vincent ‘Man or Mistress’ [Novel], Terranova ‘I Wanna Go Out’ [Kompakt], Four Tet ’Pyramid [Text], T.E.E. ‘Connaissance’ (Naum Gabo remix) [Record Makers], Joe Goddard ‘All I Know’ [Greco-Roman], pretty much every single new Axel Boman track released in the last three months, Ali Borem ‘Scotch Your Mind’ [Desolat], Richard Davis ‘The Blue’ [240Volts], Ada ‘Faith’ [Pampa], Naum Gabo ‘Whop!’ [World Unkown], Ron Basejam ‘Looter’ [2020 Vision], Haules Baules ‘Hit Me Slowly’ [Haules Baules]. That should do for now, eh?

It was a journey I shouldn’t have taken; my passport was at the US consulate awaiting a visa so the original flights were no good. To make matters worse I had a kidney infection. Woozy with antibiotics, toilet trips every hour. Sane persons suggested I cancel. But the gig was back-to-back all-night with Andrew Weatherall my first ever DJ and producer hero, the stuff of youthful dreams. Stubbornly, I bought a return train ticket out of my own pocket and set off for Italy armed with little more than a vague sense that everything would be OK.

Some twelve years ago when I was just starting I bumped into a DJ colleague in Stanstead airport. I asked him how he was and he let out an Eeyore-ish sigh. ‘Oh, just tired, so tired. I think I’m going to cancel Brazil.’ In today’s era of recession and tightening budgets I can’t imagine being able to be so blasé. As Spencer Parker wrote recently the vast majority of DJs aren’t lounging in business class, waking up our agents to complain about being put in the wrong five-star boutique. We’re sitting cheek-by-several-jowls with middle-aged tourists on Easyjet, prepping for gigs in anonymous beige-veneer hotels in our underpants.

When you’re self-employed a missed gig is a set-back. My friends have ridden taxis across hundreds of miles to make shows after flights have been cancelled. When the Icelandic volcano struck I travelled in a sardine-tin train for 25 hours to get to my gig. Yes, we do it because we love it, but also because we have to make rent. Thankfully, you’re sometimes rewarded for caring. The border police let me through (it was 9pm and arresting me would have been too much work). And the gig with Andrew was one of the best of my life. Sometimes winging it is worth it.

just wanted to plug a few upcoming gigs and releases – although I’ve been a bit quiet on here lately, I’ve been busy promise!

The last few weeks I’ve spent locked in my studio doing additional production and mix on a large chunk of the new Flowers and Sea Creatures album for Buzzin’ Fly and finishing a forthcoming single for Oxford’s Trophy Wife which we recorded in Berlin earlier in the spring. Flowers and Sea Creatures’ record will be out in the autumn and Trophy Wife in the summer at some point. There are also remixes coming of Erol Alkan and Boyz Noize (the re-issue of ‘Avalanche’ with Jarvis Cocker on vocals for Erol’s Phantasy), Robin Hannibal on Tim Paris’ Marketing label and Simon Baker on 2020Vision.

Some gig highlights in the next month include the Moodmusic party at Panoramabar on 29th May, a 2020Vision party in London on the evening of that Sunday with stellar line-up which includes Simon Baker, Maya Jane Coles, Mark E and Ralph Lawson, Rockness Festival in Scotland on June 10th and I’m playing for the third-year running at How The Light Gets In, a music and philosophy festival in Hay-on-Wye on June 3rd.

I’ve just completed a non-dancefloor podcast for ace London-Japan clothes emporium Oki Ni.  Full of drone, electronic, ambient, world pop gorgeousness and I’ll have a link to that here as soon as it’s online. And in case you’ve missed them both parts of my mammoth 5-hour back to back set in Milan with Mr Andrew Weatherall are available for download on Soundcloud here and here.

More soon.

love,

Ewan

A funny old day on Twitter. A quick message applauding Beatport’s donation of a day’s profits towards Japan’s relief effort is re-tweeted a hundred times. Simultaneously, I am arguing with friends about the ethics of DJing in Israel. When the earth buckles and the seas surge victims quickly have our sympathy. But with political disasters it’s much trickier to find a consensus. Some kinds of solidarity are easier than others.

I have always quietly turned gigs in Israel down, appalled by the accounts I’ve read of the Occupation, the mistreatment of its Palestinian population and recently the blockade on Gaza. The systematic manner in which one set of citizens is being de-humanised parallels the South African Apartheid era when I first heard music and political protest linked and became aware of musicians refusing to travel in order to draw attention to a political situation.

But music transcends politics doesn’t it? Not at all. If music is of and about the world it has to engage it. Musicians are not ambassadors with carte blanche to go where we like as we’re spreading an implicit  message of love. Too damn easy. Sometimes we have to say tougher and less palatable stuff, in this case that the actions of a purportedly democratic government in the name of a decent people are doing them massive harm, and the rest of us too as we sit idly by.

Art and politics at their best are about imagining yourself in someone else’s place, trying to feel what someone in quite different circumstances is experiencing. This is where solidarity comes from. I have more in common with a left-leaning cosmopolitan raver in Tel Aviv than a Palestinian in the occupied territories, but to go there and DJ is to say the status quo is fine, that it’s OK to forget about what’s happening for a moment. To paraphrase Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, it’s buying an alcoholic friend a bottle of scotch when you should be phoning AA.

House music’s most famous political message – that one day the oppressed will be emancipated and find the Promised Land – is derived from the Torah, from the laments of Jews exiled in Egypt and Babylon. Today it seems more appropriate to the plight of their Palestinian brothers and sisters. Until that’s no longer the case, I have to write stuff like this over playing records, smiling and telling everyone “It’s Alright”.

A note:

Above is the original text that was published in Groove magazine this month. I avoided referring to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement;  the campaign since 2005 to boycott cultural and academic exchange with Israel while the occupation and discrimination against Palestinians continues. This was a mistake. By doing so I suggested that the decision to go to Israel or not should be a matter of individual conscience, made on a personal basis in isolation. It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. The fact is that over 170 Palestinian civil organisations have joined together to call for this boycott as one of a number of non-violent methods of putting pressure on the the Israeli government and they have been joined in the campaign by many individuals, groups, unions, churches and peace advocates around the world. It is not about me deciding whether I should go to Israel or not, but rather whether I am going to listen to the wishes of the Palestinian people at a time when not nearly enough others are doing so. I hope it goes without saying that I long dearly for a time when this is no longer the case.

If you would like to read more about the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign then you can do so here:

http://www.bdsmovement.net/call