I had planned to create a Downbeat mix for a while. However, this mix is not your typical chill out-style mix, but something that sounds down-to-earth and alien at the same time. Based on straight HipHop grooves, it’s probably a good soundtrack to dust off your favorite smoking tool…

Nerditional information: Dadamnphreaknoizphunk used to be just a collection of Downbeat tracks by the Acid-Techno veterans Hardfloor. After two EPs that were so different from what they normally produce, they decided to separate their musical activities into these two projects. I have been a big fan of their Downbeat tracks for quite a while, and it is great to see how their original Acid-TripHop evolved over time. It started with just some TripHop beats and effected 303 sounds, but their latest album even has vocals. Love it!

Talking about TripHop, you can’t get around mentioning Massive Attack. Being (more or less) the inventors of that sound, it’s great to see that they’re still active and produce great material. However, their older releases (like the beautiful Teardrop) still sound fresh.

I got to know Dynamo Productions through their releases on Unique Records which was one of my favorite labels for quite a while. I have to admit that I lost track of their releases a while ago, but their Funky-HipHop-Breakbeat style still resonates with me.

Tracklist:

1. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist
2. Dynamo Productions – Back To Basics (Jimi Entley Sound Remix)
3. Dadamnphreaknoizphunk – Orange Crush
4. Spatnej Wliw – Den 9 (RMX Instrumental)
5. Erwin Lehn Orchestra and Stereo MCs – Color
6. Hardfloor – Dubdope
7. Röyksopp – Eple
8. Fever Ray – When I Grow Up (Version by Lissvik)
9. Massive Attack – Pray For Rain (Tim Goldsworthy Remix)
10. Dynamo Productions – Hey Yeah!
11. Kinobe – Summer In The Studio

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rizzato/2435080104/ // CC-by-nc

With 20 years of turntable experience and about 2.500 live gigs, Mike S.Kreama certainly has a story or two to tell. When I prepared for the interview with him, it wasn’t easy for me to make sense out of the long list of things he has done already.

Good thing that Mike is an open and friendly guy and helped me understand his history and his idea on good music. Let’s start with an exclusive mix from him:

“I used to play in various Funk, Ska and Reggae bands, and that still influences me as a DJ. I played drums, guitar and bass guitar, and I still like electronic music with some organic elements in it. I also have tons of oldschool HipHop and Electro vinyl at home. These are my roots.”

With these roots, it’s no wonder that DJ S.Kreama has developed a preference for Breakbeats and other funky electronic sounds. Techno has remained somewhat alien to him.

“I was interested in Techno and Goa sounds for a short time years ago, but I quickly sold all the records that I had bought from those genres. Techno is too similar to military march music to me, and my music is a kind of protest against this. Straight beats are ok sometimes, but it mustn’t be too dull and simple. I like rhythms with a little bit of shuffle in them.”

If I wanted to explain to someone how to promote yourself via social media, I would probably use DJ S.Kreama as a positive example. He does a great job of promoting himself and his buddies through various platforms such as Blip.fm, Twitter or SoundCloud.

“I wasn’t really aware of the power of social media until about a year ago. I have a friend who organizes underground parties in Miami, and he is promoting his parties mostly through social media. He explained this to me and since then, I really got the hang of it and use it a lot to promote myself and my friends or get in touch with other DJs from around the world. I get really good feedback, too. You just have to give people something that they value, that’s how you can be successful in the networks.”

Being a sound designer by education, Mike has been lucky to work on several music-related film productions. He is particularly proud of Sonic Mirror, a film about Billy Cobham.

“Billy Cobham is an awesome Jazz drummer, and it was a great pleasure to work on this movie. We really travelled around the world and traced his roots with him. He was also sampled by Massive Attack for their song “Safe From Harm“. I can’t say that I was this lucky all the time, but having had the opportunity to work with music I love means a lot to me.”

I am always looking for good music, so what could be better than good music coming to me?

Ellie from Kentucky-based Indietronic band Fair Heron sent me some of their songs to share with you, and since their stuff is cool I am happy to feature them here.

Their sound is both melodic and progressive and reminds me a bit of Fever Ray or Ninca Leece. While I would normally say that this is more for listening than for dancing, Ellie told me that their live shows are “generally pretty dancey”. So I guess that’s one more reason for promoting them: To get them to tour internationally so that I can see them live.

Here are some songs from their “Now Carla EP” for download:

Fair Heron – Digi Quilt

Fair Heron – This Is My Mogley

Fair Heron – Empathetic As A Ghost

And by the way, if you play in a band, produce electronic music are if you are a DJ and you think your style fits to what I usually feature here, just drop me a line through the contact page.

When I found out that there was a newly-founded school for electronic music in Cologne, I just had to register for their very first electronic music producer course. I am now among the first alumni of the Electronic Music School and looking forward to my first releases now.

After my last lesson, I sat down with the two founders Björn Torwellen (B-T / Decksharks / Datany)  and Jeyênne (XPQ-21 / Jeyênne) and talked about how the Electronic Music School came to life.

Björn Torwellen

“The idea came to me one night when I couldn’t sleep. I had been teaching courses on Ableton Live before, but I just had this idea of a room full of audio equipment and students learning to work with that, like in a normal music school.” (Björn Torwellen)

While there is certainly no shortage of electronic music producers, one can notice a lack of quality in many productions. This is one of the reasons why the school was founded.

“Producing music has become dramatically easier and cheaper than it used to be. However, a lot of music isn’t well-produced, either on the technical or on the creative side. Apart from that, there are so many creative tools and techniques to choose from that a lot of people simply end up being confused. We want to serve as a guide in this confusion and show people what they really need and give them a good foundation for their creativity. For example, at the beginning of the first producer course, one student asked me what equipment or software he had to buy to become a good producer. When he told me what equipment he had at home, I just told him that he already had everything he needed.” (Björn Torwellen)

While the school has been getting very positive feedback so far, there are also a lot of challenges involved in running it. One of them is a lack of examples to learn from. With its aim to combine elements from music theory, audio engineering and electronic music culture, it’s hard to find something that is similar to this approach.

Jeyênne (XPQ-21)

“There are classical music schools out there, and there are courses for people who want to be professional audio engineers. Both is interesting, but that’s not what we want. When Björn called me and told me about what he wanted to, I immediately agreed to join because I felt that this was exactly the kind of combination that wasn’t there already.” (Jeyênne)

“We had to make assumptions on how to teach this, and we are changing things all the time when we feel something can be improved. For example, we learned that plain software courses for Cubase or Ableton Live are not enough. It’s not enough to just teach people how to use a certain software and there are already courses where you can learn that. We are aiming for a more holistic approach and try to teach things that you really need to produce good music. I also assumed that people would want to work with our equipment (synthesizers, mixers, MIDI controllers, …), but most people are happy to bring their laptop along and work on that.” (Björn Torwellen)

The school has just been around for a couple of months now, but it’s already growing. Apart from courses and workshops on various topics (producing, mastering, marketing, circuit bending, sound synthesis, …), Björn and Jeyênne are preparing to teach in other cities as well. Vianna, Munich, Linz and Dortmund are just some of the cities they will visit in the near future.

“We are also working on a book and several DVDs right now. We first thought that this would hurt our business, but now we actually think that this will strengthen us. Everything we teach can already be learned through books or the internet, but it’s just different to learn from a person than from a book or a computer. I think the book and the DVDs will help us to reach even more people and make our name well-known. I also hope that we will be able to build a community around the school. I hope we can stay in touch with our alumni and I’d be happy to see some activity coming from the people that we taught.” (Björn Torwellen)

“We are also preparing courses for kids and we hope to be able to reach out to other music communities. When you think of electronic music, you often only think about House and Techno, and that’s what most of current students are actually interested in. To me, it doesn’t stop here. A lot of HipHop, Pop or even Gothic/Industrial music is mostly electronic music and we would love to teach people how to do that, too.” (Jeyênne)

Here’s some music so you can see that those two guys actually know what they are talking about:

Björn Torwellen – Dekadent Disco

“We Shit Bits” , a DJ Set by Björn Torwellen

XPQ 21 – Rockin’ Silver Knight

XPQ 21 – Hey You

When I do an interview with an artist / DJ, I don’t do it like a neutral journalist. I am a music nerd, and I do care about the music and the people that I write about.

However, doing a good interview is not easy. I tried various approaches and formats over the years, and my current approach reflects what I have learned. I’ll start with explaining how interviews are typically done to contrast that with my approach.

Record & cut: Lots of work for a little bit of content

I started doing interviews at the local student radio station when I was a student myself. When we started the initiative to create our own radio station, we turned to experienced radio journalists and learned from them. The first approach that we used a lot was to take a mobile audio recorder, go to the person we wanted to interview, ask our questions and then cut out the best parts. A radio-friendly interview was not supposed to take longer than 3 minutes.

This approach works, but recording and cutting the material is very time-consuming. You often ended up working an hour or more for one minute of interview.There is also one strange effect that I noticed a lot: People often said the most interesting things when the microphone was off before and after the interview. During the interview, a lot of people just talked very unnaturally, probably because they were afraid to say something wrong.

Live-interviews: Bad for shy artists

Live interviews combined with DJ sets seemed to be a great idea to me at first. You just invited an interesting DJ / producer to your studio, let him play his music and interview him in between. This approach is a lot better as you have more time and you can easily combine a good impression of the artist’s sound and the person behind it. I used that approach for quite a while, both at the student radio station as well as in the shows that I played at various web radio stations.

For me, this works quite well if I have an artist in front of me who is comfortable with speaking into a microphone and can talk straight to the point. However, not everyone is like that. Many times, I had guest DJs that played great sets, but were just too shy to present themselves well when being interviewed. I also got the impression that some people don’t like to listen to people talking in the middle of a DJ set. Even if the talk is interesting, it still interrupts the music.

What I do today: Talk & summarize

So this is what I do to today: I meet with the DJ / artist that I want to interview. We sit down, have a few beers, talk and simply have a good time. I take notes on the side that I use later to write the article. I do ask questions, but I don’t do a formal interview, and I am definitely not neutral in the interview since I like to comment, challenge or support the words of my interview partner. I also do interviews via phone sometimes, but that just means you have to leave out the beer.

After that, I take my notes and try to identify the topics that we talked about. There are often one or two topics that I find especially interesting in retrospective, and I try to choose those topics that my interview partner either has a distinct view on or a good story to tell about. For example, Elodie & Thompson talked a lot about their experiences in Ibiza, and CJ Masou’s topic was the combination of electronic music and Jazz.

I then condense these topics into a few paragraphs and add a few quotes from the artist. These quotes are often not something that my interview partner said word by word, but mostly a condensed version of what he said. A “real” journalist would probably scoff on that, but this approach helps me to show my perspective of the person behind the music a lot better than the other approaches. I also think that I am doing the artists a favor if I don’t give them the pressure of having to speak in a radio-friendly way. So far, the feedback was very positive.

I also ask my interview partners for a photo that they are comfortable with and a DJ set or other examples of their music. I think it’s important to have the interview, the music and some pictures together since that gives you a much better impression than just a magazine article or a radio interview. However, I believe that it’s better to separate the music from the words so that they don’t interfere with each other.

To conclude this, I would like to say that doing interviews and getting to know interesting people in the process is what I enjoy most about running this website – and that’s why I keep doing it.