Eine weitere Reihe, die wir hier starten: Angesichts der Anzahl an (mehr oder weniger interessanten) Interviews mit Bands, Musikern und DJs die jede Woche im Web auftauchen, fassen wir die Links hier kurz zusammen, es sei denn natürlich das Interview hätte einen eigenen Eintrag verdient. Und weil linken alleine doof ist, auch gleich jeweils ein Auszug – soll ja keiner sagen wir lesen nicht was wir posten.
Den Anfang macht Damian Lazarus, Chef des exzellenten Crosstown Rebels Label, der kurz davor war mit DJ Tiesto den Namen zu tauschen, aber nur unter einer Bedingung….
Tiesto told me he’d been wanting to meet me and told me that he wanted my name. „What do you mean?“ I asked him, and he went on to tell me that they use the word Lazarus in Holland when they’re really fucked up, like „I got really Lazarus last night“. I never knew this, I obviously told him I’d happily swap my name with his for the weekend providing it’s cool to take his dj fees.
Test Industries interviewt Jay Haze, was eigentlich immer ein ziemlicher Spaß ist. Hier spricht er darüber, dass Beatport nicht die Erlösung ist, von der alle sprechen, vor allem nicht für kleinere Label:
I feel that digital sales aren’t territorial enough: most people in Europe can afford to pay 3 euro for a track on Beatport, but for someone in Thailand, that’s still a load of money and they need to be aware of that. There is also not enough of a trickle down effect: if a DJ like Villalobos or one of the other big DJs, is earning say seven thousand euro for a gig, it doesn’t make much sense for whoever it is who makes the records he plays not to get paid.
[…]
A very commercial label like Get Physical has amazing sales with Beatport, but as soon as the term underground gets attached to what you do, which is what happened to me, even if what I do isn’t that underground, you automatically sell far less.
An gleicher Stelle, wenn auch schon einige Wochen alt, äußert sich Peter Grummich nicht nur über seinen Namen und Zukunftspläne, sondern auch über das böse Wort Minimal, und dass in Berlin inzwischen sowieso ein ganz neuer Sound Einzug erhalten hat:
I believe that people understand more and more that technology is not all-important to make music and what they want to do…But there is a lot of crap mini trash on the market and the problem is not whether the sound is dry, clean or fat, it’s more a problem about creating a copy from a copy and more copies from other copies. You know, maybe there is just a drug horizon left from the weekend before or whatever, and that’s in all kind of things what people do!
[…]
There are many new clubs like the Office or Oktagon and their sound is direct and physical rave and jackin house. It’s the new sound of Berlin; Nothing against minimal but minimal is dead in Berlin! You can go to any mainstream club and they will play minimal and Tiefschwarz, but that’s not important.
Pitchfork im Gespräch mit Matthew Dear über seinen Spagat zwischen Minimal Techno und Indie:
The strangest thing is that there is a lot more crossover between the two genres than I would have expected. Some people who are really into rock and indie music actually prefer the Audion stuff. But I’ve been making music my whole life and writing pop songs my whole life. The techno came afterwards. I’m not trying to switch my music up. It’s a natural progression for me. Somebody recently told me that „DJs shouldn’t start bands.“ But for me, I’ve been doing this stuff forever.
Resident Advisor mit Upcomer Will Saul im Gespräch zum Thema Techno in England, seinen Weg vom Sony Mitarbeiter zum Indielabelbetreiber (Simple Records), und die Wichtigkeit von Livegigs für den Cashflow:
I earn part of my living from DJing/remixing, but I also produce music for TV/adverts. If Simple is doing well and the music is getting good press then I get more gigs, so in a way it does keep me afloat. I think DJing or live performances are crucial for the majority of producers to earn a living. If people keep downloading music for free from blogs or dodgy Russian music sites, live performance/DJing will be the only way of earning a living for producers/musicians.
The Wire spricht mit Underground Resistance Betreiber Mike Banks über die Entstehung des Labels, Zukunft, Fiktion und Leichenhausbesichtigungen in Detroit.
We got a wall in the basement, in our basement, in our building in the store, sometimes you know, life would be kicking your ass, you can’t pay the bills, you don’t know where you’re gonna go, because this music shit… I made more money racing cars by far. Illegal money was way better than this music business, it just didn’t have the travel. The only travel you got was going to jail. But sometimes it gets so bad, you can’t do for the people you love, for my sister and my daughters, you want to do shit, and you don’t have nothing.
And sometimes I go down to the wall, and I look at all names from different parts of the world where people have signed it, and that keeps me going. I might come from the basement, and they’ve got this big smile and this CD of their new shit, just like Drexciya did, just like Rob Hood did, just like Rolando, and I think I get energy from it. That’s kind of how we make records.