Conducted in August 2011. Read the full article.
From the piece:
Your last release, Tourist, was based on your time living in Berlin, and heavily featured the sounds of the city; the new single was born because you had to deal with uni assessments. Do you need a hypothesis or a premise like that to work?
Yes. Absolutely. I’m mostly lazy, and there’s too much Internet on the Internet, so I’m not one of those guys with a massive vault of finished tunes. I’ve found that up until this point I can only make stuff that has, if not so much a purpose, then a target or a concept.
Tourist came together very quickly and worked, because I was there and there were all these sounds around me. It was supposed to be a quick throwaway thing that was kind of like a postcard, like a “Here’s some interesting sounds from whilst I was away”, and it ended up being a proper release.
As soon as ‘Focus Energy’ and ‘Motive Order’ started splitting into two and I found the samples, that was the concept: can I make something that’s like a club 12” that will make sense in shows, and be a bit more “pumping” or “driving”. I wanted an exploration of “beats”, rather than it just being eight minutes of street noise.
Once you’re fixed on your concept do you listen to certain things for influence?
I don’t really listen to the kind of music that these new tracks are. I mean, I made this single and thought “I guess this is techno” and then I played it at a show, and some girl who thought I was a DJ came up in the middle of the set and started telling me it was trance.
I didn’t know what Trance was…but apparently it’s this. I’m not a clubber. I listen to left-field dance stuff, which is more headphones music, stuff like Luke Abbott and Actress; which is rooted in dance, but it’s not, you know, club chart “bangers”. I never got the whole minimal techno thing. But as time’s gone on the rhythms of it feel quite natural.
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