November 06, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7)
It looks like DJ Download has gone bust, only to be bought up by Juno. Wonder if this will be the start of a trend in the digital distro sector, aping what has happened to many vinyl distros since the start of this decade?
Here's the official statement:
"It is with great regret that we have to inform you that DJdownload Limited has been placed into administration by the Directors of the company effective today.
The Directors have worked extremely hard over the past few months to try and save the company: overheads were reduced and attempts to increase revenues were made but ongoing efforts to raise further finance were unsuccessful. Despite their best efforts the company was not able to continue to trade.
We would like to thank you for your support and business over the years and we wish you all the best in the future."
November 06, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)
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October 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4)
October 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Here's an interview I did with Luke Slater aka Planetary Assault Systems ahead of of this weekend's show in Dublin for Earwiggle together with Ancient Methods - probably the best techno line-up of the year in our fair and rainy little city. The interview appeared in yesterday's Metro freesheet.
Luke Slater is one of the UK’s most talented techno producers, but has dealt with critical failure and personal upheaval to make a spectacular comebacks. Since the early 90s, Slater released inspirational electronic music in many shapes and forms - from abrasive club tracks to gloriously mellow ambience – under the Planetary Assault Systems, X-Tront, Clementine, Morganistic, 7th Plain and Clementine guises and under his own name
But then in 2002, his life changed. Deviating from his underground approach, he hooked up with vocalist Ricky Barrow from The Aloof and released ‘Allright on Top’, an album’s worth of pleasant if forgettable pop songs.
By his own admission, he wasn’t prepared for the reaction it received.
“It was a real experience - I didn’t actually realise how many of my fans I had alienated with the album,” he laughs. “There were so many people who were committed to my techno work. Being part of the pop world was like having a real job and I just couldn’t toe the line,” Luke adds. “One of the things that annoyed me was playing in live venues. I didn’t see the music as pop music, but that’s where it got placed. I have no regrets about doing that album, even though I’ll never do it again. The techno world is a much nicer place.”
Slater didn’t feel the same way about techno at the start of this decade: he had stopped writing electronic music and although he was still gigging regularly, he admits he was doing so to pay the bills.
“By about 2002 I had done so much and I didn’t want to keep repeating myself,” he explains. “I also felt that the scene was turning into something wrong - techno wasn’t meant to carry on like it did in the 90s. It needed a break especially as the whole scene had gone mad for ten years.”
Luke says that he enjoyed the good times as much as everyone else and had “no control over anything, but I was kind of enjoying that”. However one day, he ended up in a doctor’s surgery and was told that he needed treatment.
“I was diagnosed as being bipolar or having manic depression,” he says. “I always had a tendency towards depression and it helped my creativity, but suddenly things were out of control and I needed to get a handle on what was going on.”
While Luke says that he only sporadically suffered episodes, it caused chaos in his private life.
“On occasions I locked myself away, but I was in a relationship and it started to go hideously wrong due to my behaviour,” he recalls. “Rather than being creative, I’d hit the town and even though I’d feel good, it would turn into madness in my head. I would end up doing destructive things like spending money I didn’t have, I just didn’t realise I was doing anything wrong. I didn’t get to the stage where I was running down the road naked, but it was messy.”
Thankfully, Slater overcame these problems and refocused his energy on music production and started releasing as Planetary Assault Systems again, a guise that had yielded classic techno tracks like ‘Booster’, ‘In From The Night’ and ‘Gated’ during the 90s.
Earlier this year, he issued an impressive album and an EP, both called ‘Temporary Suspension’, which lived up to the classic hard-edged, pulse-racing Planetary techno sound.
The fact that the new material was released on Ostgut, the label run by notorious Berlin club Berghain, was no coincidence, as its resident DJs, Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann, cite Slater as a major influence.
“A few years back I made the decision to find one club in Berlin and to stick with it,” he explains. “There are so many clubs in that city, but few of them are the right ones. I was looking for a club with an anything goes policy, so I chose Berghain,” Luke adds. “I feel that there is a lot of good techno music around again - it’s like the newer producers looked to what was really good about the 90s and added to it, but the groove and the feeling behind it is the same,” he says.
With Luke touring the Planetary album heavily across Europe, including his first live show in Dublin this weekend, Slater has also found time to reactivate one of his other projects. In 2007, Luke wrote a piece of music as 7th Plain to accompany a modern dance performance by the Berlin Staatsballet.
“I ended up doing an hour’s worth of music to accompany one of their performances and it may get a commercial release,” he says. “My experiences have taught me that there isn’t one direction in life, there are many aspects - never have any regrets and never say never!”
October 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2)
October 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
The following statement is Alex Cortex's reply to some of the more negative posts made here and elsewhere about his retirement from techno. The reply is unedited (there may be some grammatical / syntax errors, etc), but this is the way he wanted it to be posted. I'd just like to add that these comments were made as part of private conversations we had together. Anyway, this seems to better encapsulate the frustrations and unhappiness he feels about electronic music in 2009:
"Someone forwarded me the Test Industries thread with quotes from my email today. Always nice to get some positive feedback, that's for sure. I usually embrace constructive criticism, too, but some opinions there have been just very negative. That reflects pretty much how I feel about this scene: lots of negativity. At least one comment gets it right - it's just a bit of news. I never pretended to be the best at anything or to have invented anything, never created a buzz around me, just have been doing my thing and that for quite a while now. some opinions clearly show that many people don't have a clue how hard it is to survive in the music business, or they speak from some very comfortable position.
"I couldn't care less for the individuals voicing their opinion there, but as they represent something I met quite often, here's what I think about that: It is hard to survive in this business if you don't live in a techno hotspot but are all on your own; if you don't work at a club, label, distributor, record-store, booking agency, or else affiliated business; if you don't snore coke or share hookers with 'important' people at afterhours; if you don't conform to producing what i call "the sound of the season"; if you don't answer 'yes' to everything; if you don't sell yourself cheaply and in return have to justify yourself for not entering the fee dumping contest so many artists blindly accept; if you don't care more about your haircut or choice of t-shirt than about your music and sound; if you don't get obsessed with squeezing out any penny of this business but rather try to provide other music lovers with a timeless product; if you don't get obsessed with your (imagined) importance, but forget about these vanities and concentrate on the actual work in the studio. artistically (and largely on a personal level too) this scene has been creeping up its own arse.
"What's that about only having one photo of myself, if techno once prospered as a faceless music? What's that about speaking up is nothing but wailing, being lame and desperate? It's rather the other way round, that almost nobody dares to speak up in public out of fear to lose something, whatever that could be, although in fact everybody is complaining in private that everything is stagnating and getting worse by the day. That an artists has to retire from making music because he can't make a living out of it is partly also the consequence of a scene forgetting to respect its artists. Buying their music, booking them for gigs, that's the direct way how to maintain that an artist can keep working in what he's doing best, especially if he does that to have people partake in it in the first place. Maybe my biggest 'fault': I never produced tracks that needed immediate release because otherwise they would sound dated. My stuff usually sits quite a while, any time between one and ten years has been the case so far, until it finds a place somewhere. This way of working means that to buy equipment and to make music is a constant investment of money and time without knowing if you will ever see a cent for what you have been doing. add a string of cancelled gigs and releases and here we are.
"My temporary retirement btw is not something which came up just now. I haven't been producing any new solo tracks for at least half a year, maybe longer. And I still have enough finished material in order to have releases for at least a year, rather longer. If i get gig, remix, or production offers with a fee attached I feel I deserve I will still take that on. but making music just to be in that scene? In THAT scene? If it wasn't suffering from a rocknroll complex and was artistically more challenging - then maybe."
October 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (35)