
Last week
Dance Club were lucky enough to grab a twenty minute interview with James and Jas from Simian Mobile Disco to chat about their forthcoming FabricLive41 mix, the future of dance music, and the world of music blogging.
Note: to avoid confusion, the nonsense that
Dance Club spew is always in italics.
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James John: Are the pressures different with a Fabric Mix?
James: Yeah I think so, we wanted to make something that lasted, we tried to get stuff in from the live set, then we expanded on it to try and get a few things from the rest of our collection, the weirder stuff, to try and get that in in a way that didn’t fuck up the mix. I think we’re just playing different tunes at the minute, we’re listening to sort of, psychedelic, deeper stuff and I suppose that’s where we’re heading with our own music.
James John: Are you making a lot of your own music at the moment then?
James: Yeah we’re just starting actually, time in the studio is precious for us what with us both producing lots, and we’ve been on tour quite a lot with the live show, so we’ve just turned down all remixes for the last 6 months and we’re starting in the studio on new stuff. It’s really good, it’s the bit we enjoy the most, we’ve just done a track with Gruff Rhyss from Super Furry Animals and one with Jamie Lidell, it’s all ticking along pretty well…
*Enter JasJas: So are we all called James here? This is uncomfortable.
Lil’ Bro Peep: We’ve all got variations on the name it’s fine.
Jas: It’s still pretty uncomfortable… Shall we do four Jameses enter and one leave? Where were we?
James John: We were just talking about you and…
James: …what a twat you are.
*Interview continues…
Lil’ Bro Peep: Do you guys see yourself more as a live act now, or as DJs and producers?
James: I’d say primarily as producers, I think the live thing has taken us by surprise, we were almost doing it as a necessity you know, having put out an album we kind of felt the responsibility to do a live set, but actually we really enjoyed it and its gone down really well, it's expanding and evolving and growing into its own thing. So, we’re definitely gonna keep doing that. And DJing is just...
Jas: Fun.
James: Yeah! Especially when you’re making a record it's perfect, being a DJ and being able to play it out and test it out you immediately know if it works or if it doesn’t. Most people vote with their feet.
Jas: Yeah and if you slip a new tune into a live set then people know cos you’re playing all your own stuff, whereas in a DJ set you can creep it in, even just a little section of it, no-one’s gonna know…
Lil’ Bro Peep: …and if it goes wrong just you can just pretend it wasn’t yours.
Jas: Yeah ‘what was that shit?!’
James: ‘Never playing that again’…
James John: I remember the first time I saw you guys play Fabric, it was obvious how much of a good time you were having cos you were leaning completely over the crowd going ‘yeaaah!’ and I was like ‘yeah they’re actually having a good time!’
Jas: We really were!
James John: You make most of your stuff with actual equipment, but when you’re on tour how do you write?
James: Quite a few things are started on a laptop, but it’ll be chords and stuff, maybe with soft synths, but really we find we can’t finish a tune in there and so we’ll take it out and then maybe use the midi from it and send that into real gear and play around with it. It's good for a sketchbook I think. We get too much excitement out of the random factor of real equipment cos you get that extra little bit of something…
Lil’ Bro Peep: all the little mistakes?
James: Yeah, it gives it a little bit of an edge.
Lil’ Bro Peep: Do you or did you ever feel part of the indie scene coming from Simian?
James: I don’t think we’ve ever felt part of any scene really.
Jas: It’s lonely…
James: Ha! With Simian we were pretty much swimming against the tide for the whole time we were in the band, and I suppose between us, Justice and the rest you could call that a scene but I don’t know. We didn’t feel part of a scene whilst we were making the tunes, it's kind of in hindsight that all that happens. And what with the whole horrible nu-rave thing, just stay out of it…
James John: Do you feel those people that you associated with, like Justice, do you think that was a help or a hindrance?
James: The thing is we didn’t actively associate with them, we didn’t go out and associate with them.
James John: You were booked together I mean.
James: Ha, yeah but that’s not us doing it!
Jas: I do think it was a help. We’ve been getting live influence into dance music and vice versa, and it’s been going on for ages, but it’s only when someone gives it a name that more people start listening. That in itself is part of the danger. As soon as it gets a name, things start to congeal and things get a set and become homogenous.
James: Yeah it’s like, nobody needs to hear another band trying to rip off Justice, there’s so much of it around and it’s just boring. Don’t get us wrong, Justice are great we’ve got a lot of respect for them, they’re friends, we really like their music, but there’s a whole plethora of stuff that’s followed that that is very inward-looking music. Part of the interesting stuff when people started it was everyone coming in from different angles and finding a similar area. That has to continue to happen or it’ll just stagnate and die.
Jas: It’s bizarrely ironic because the Justice record is so, almost, anti-Dance music, both of them [Justice] wanted to make something non-dance. It’s the same with us even though we’re into old proto-acid we really didn’t want to make something that sounded like anything else in particular. And then you get these people sending you stuff on their myspace and it just sounds like a bad impersonation of someone else’s record, and you just think; that’s not what it was about. OK so there are a few things that landed in a very similar area, but they’re all coming at things from different areas and all going in different directions. I imagine the next Justice record will sound nothing like their current one, and certainly ours will sound totally nothing like our last one. I really feel that there’s a danger that this scene that has brought attention to all these bands and has certainly been beneficial for us will drown because it becomes so focused, inward-looking and ultimately boring.
Lil’ Bro Peep: So what are you guys planning then, what can we expect from SMD?
James: We never really plan! Even with the first one we never knew what we were gonna do, we just make music that we like and ideally it’ll sit in the middle of a few different things and we won’t quite know what it is, then we feel like we’re achieving something, you know what I mean? Really we don’t know what it’s gonna be, but I suppose defined by the kind of music we listen to, we’re trying to find the link between psychedelia and dance music, that’s the part we’re interested in.
James John: Are you guys pretty aligned or do you ever clash when it comes to direction?
James: Well because we DJ together and we’ve spent a lot of time together over the last 10 or so years, we probably do have pretty similar music tastes really. I’ll find the odd tune and Jas will do the same, we’ll bring ‘em in and go “what about this, this has a good feel or whatever,” but generally we agree it's not like we’re pulling in separate directions.
Jas: So far…
Lil’ Bro Peep: What do you think about blogs, honestly? Yay or nay?
James: It’s funny cos people ask that question tentatively like they think we’re gonna hate it because we’re musicians, but actually it’s been probably one of the most positive things for us out there really. In terms of word of mouth and actually spreading the popularity of us it's been amazing. I personally get 90% of my music from the internet, and also find out loads about all kinds of new music. My music library has mushroomed, like I suppose most people’s have really, and I think that’s a really, really healthy thing. It opens people’s minds up to a lot of different music which hopefully for music in general is a really good thing. There’s an obvious problem with how people who make music are gonna survive, the traditional sense of a band getting a big advance is gonna disappear which is a good and a bad thing. For your big pop acts there won’t be any problem because there’ll still be money coming through, your little independent types will still operate as ever, it’s your mid level bands that are gonna suffer. At the end of the day that’s down to the men in suits to figure out, it’s not our problem, but it feels like a healthier time for music than ever. There are more people making and consuming music now than I’ve ever seen.
James John: It feels more democratic now, like everyone has the opportunity.James: Yeah!
Lil’ Bro Peep: I think the good thing about blogs is that it's all positive, you only put stuff up that you like, there’s no criticism. I mean, we’re not doing it to make money, and if we are we’re doing a really bad job of it!
Jas: Yeah and this is the thing, chatting to the guys on our label, they don’t have any problem with blogs. They know that most people who run blogs are people who love music…
James: …who would be doing fanzines etc.
Jas: Yeah. The things that they worry about are people who post zip files of a band’s back catalogue, because that’s actually a bit of a worry, but someone saying “oh here’s some new tunes that I heard that I really like,” I find it really difficult to imagine there being a problem with that. I mean, do you stop radio? It’s really silly you know, I don’t think that’s the issue, there’s a real confusion between file sharing and blogs. OK blogs are putting stuff up, but it's because they really like it and it's monitored, I think that’s totally cool.
Lil' Bro Peep: Well, thanks for your time and your thoughts guys!James John: Would you mind holding this banner....?----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And with that Simian Mobile Disco were whisked away for another photoshoot, but the message was loud and clear, they love
Dance Club and find us very,
very attractive.
FabricLive41 Simian Mobile Disco is out on 11th August 2008 and will be available
here.
Below is the tracklisting, with links to the original versions of a few tracks that tickled our fancy:
01 Tomita - The Firebird – Infernal Dance Of King Kastechi
02 Sisters Of Transistors – The Don
03 Simian Mobile Disco – Simple
04 Hercules And Love Affair – Blind [Serge Santiago Version]
05
Smith N Hack – Space Warrior06
Discodeine – Joystick07 Shit Robot – Chasm
08 Perc & Fractal – Up Tool
09 Metro Area – Miura
10 Worthy – Crack EI
11 Moon Dog – Suite Equestria
12 Fine Cut Bodies – Huncut Hacuka
13 Bentobox vs Chordian – Aemono
14
Jelo & DeadMau5 – The Reward Is Cheese15 Simian Mobile Disco - Sleep Deprivation [Simon Baker Remix]
16 Popof – The Chomper [LSD Version]
17 Raymond Scott – Cindy Electronium
18 Paul Woolford Presents Bobby Peru – Erotic Discourse
19 Moebius Plank Neumeier – Pitch Control
20 Plastikman – Spastik
21 Green Velvet – Flash
22 The Walker Brothers – Nite Flights