Jana Rush on DJ Deeon, Boombass on Philippe Zdar, C Tangana on football

... because some weeks you get a lot of interviews done

(Picture by Cecilia Díaz Betz)

Jana Rush on DJ Deeon

At Primavera Sound 2023, I interviewed the brilliant Chicago producer Jana Rush. She was a fascinating interviewee and I decided to ask her for her thoughts on DJ Deeon, who sadly died last week. Below is what she sent. 

“Around 1989 to 1991 hip house was been blended and played with the sound of house music. The likes of Fast Eddie, Tyree Cooper, Kool Rock Steady, and a number of others were dominating the underground scene and radio stations. The first time I heard a Dj Deeon tape was in 1992; this was the beginning of Ghetto House music. Between 1993 and 2000 was the reign of Ghetto house/Ghetto Tech music, coming from the likes of Paul Johnson, Dj Deeon, Dj Milton, Dj Chip, Cajmere, Eric Martin and Dj Funk. 

“The biggest difference between ghetto house and regular house music was the amount of sampling going on in the music at this time. Samplers had just began to hit the ‘consumer’ level of pricing, which brought with it a rash of sample-based tracks; however, there were just as many ‘original’ beat and acid tracks coming out of the studio sessions as sampled tracks. 

“Deeon had a reputation of making hard hitting, booty shaking, ghetto house music! From day one, he was an STAR in Chicago. Deeon was the originator of ghetto house, which is the parent of Juke and grandparent of footwork. House music is the great grandparent of footwork. For me, Deeon always had the best bass lines and with each project/EP his sound improved/evolved. Ghetto style toms, snares, and 808 rimshots are a constant reminder of the rugged ghetto house sound in Chicago. 

“The biggest difference ghetto house brought to the table was it had a booty shaking, Miami Bass influence going for it. Ghetto was being played worldwide even though a lot of the innovative producers at that time were not getting the attention producers receive now. I mean, their music was being played out but there were not too many magazine covers, worldwide interviews, or tours being handed out like today.

“Some of the biggest influences coming from that time were Deeon, Cajmere, Eric Martin and Dj Funk. U can still hear evidence in footwork today. Sometimes producers nowadays revisit previous samples used in the 90s. Many of these samples come from the likes of Lil Louis, Marshall Jefferson, Phuture, Deeon, and Paul Johnson to name a few. Fight it as you might, IT’s ALL CONNECTED!”

Boombass on Philippe Zdar

For the latest Line Noise I interviewed French Touch hero Hubert Blanc-Francard, better known as Boombass, and one half of La Funk Mob and Cassius with the late Philippe Zdar, who died in 2019. He was a very thoughtful, open interviewee and there’s lots of great stuff in there about the French Touch, hip hop, working with MC Solaar and more. But I thought I would give you this lovely quote about Zdar, his best friend for two decades. 

“He was first my friend, you know? As me, for him. We had this very special relationship as two best friends can have. But we had the chance to share the music and everything, too. So it was very strong. My memory now is a bit… I don't know. He was my best friend. It's the only thing I could say now and I could speak about it for hours. But musically he had a craziness. I’ve discovered it now. I knew it but - I don't know how to explain - when you're in it, you don't see things. 

“It's like in a couple, you know, it's when you go away from her that you realise some things about your wife, for example. And when he [Zdar] was mixing and using all the gear of the studio, he had a special, magical way of using it, like a musician, you know? And I’ve discovered now on old tapes - we have our old tapes - and it's really…. It's funny to discover, to realise things about a friend later that you saw but you didn't really realise because you were inside the machine. 

“And now I say, ‘Wow, we were two crazy guys.’ And I know I'm gonna miss this, too, for a very long time. I’m gonna miss him all my life - but this craziness on the music and sound too. I'm gonna miss it always because it was really our way of doing things. And now I have to find a new way of having fun in the music. But I'm gonna miss that because it was really incredible.”

Listen to the interview here.

Incidentally, Boombass’ new WWWIPEOUT EP is great - reggae and rave influenced house that is VERY classic Cassius. Give it a listen.

C Tangana’s favourite football anthem

As you might know, the crossover between modern and traditional Spanish music is a big thing for me (lots of love to Tarta Relena, Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés, Rosalía and Júlia Colom, among others.) So it was a pleasure to write about C Tangana (who is A BIG DEAL in Spain) and his new anthem for Celta de Vigo in The Guardian. He is also the only person I have ever interviewed who my son has had any interest in, which was nice. You can read it here. 

And if you want a little bonus: I asked C Tangana what football anthems he liked and he mentioned this - the Himno de Sevilla by Andalusian singer El Arrebato - which he composed the club’s centennial. “Basically, what he creates is an aesthetic that doesn’t have a lot to do with your typical anthem but has more to do with the collective of Sevilla. And people really took to it and they sing it in the stadium. He succeeded, in that they fell in love with the song and feel represented by it.”

Disclosure, Slowdive and the art of instant career development

“If I was the manager of an electronic music group”, I recently argued to a friend, “I would tell them to alternate albums: one packed with guests; the next guest free; the following one packed with guests, and so on. Voilà: instant career development, no two albums the same.”

The catalyst for this was the new Disclosure album, which features no guests and no samples, after three albums full of invitees. But this is actually something I have been thinking about for a while: how on earth, as a musician, do you make demonstrable progress between albums? And how do you spin each album as something new, when it is often the same people using the same instruments as they did last time out?

You could say it doesn’t really matter, that the strength of the music will out and so on. And in some cases this is true. But, on the whole, it seems important for musicians to avoid the idea that they are simply releasing the same old album, time and again. The Strokes’ second album, Room On Fire, got a critical pasting when it was released in 2003 for sounding too much like their debut.

I am sure we all have our favourite artists, whose sound we adore, who could, for our tastes, quite happily continue cranking out the same sound year after year and we’d still be happy. Todd Edwards is one of these for me. I adore his intricate sampling style and would be happy for him to continue with this until the sun finally pegs it, two billions years hence. In fact - and I feel slightly ashamed for saying it - when Edwards has diverted from this style, moving into his modern disco-ish productions, I have vaguely resented him for it, enjoying this music less than his microsample spectaculars. Sorry Todd.

On the other hand, we all have artists who we enjoy in limited doses - one album, maybe, or a couple of tracks - where the temptation is to look at their new release, conclude it probably isn’t that different to their previous work and give it a berth. (Disclosure, actually, are close to this for me.) Harsh? Yes, utterly. Fair? Not a bit of it. But true? For me, certainly. And this is why artist PR and marketing teams work so hard to establish some kind of narrative around their new work: the comeback; the radical change; the back to basics; the creative rebirth etc and so on.

Of course, some artists do change their sound in between albums, sometimes radically, Aphex Twin in the 90s being a great example of this. For most, though, the difference between one album and the next is of slight changes and sonic polishes. And that’s fine. Others - like Todd Edwards - make a massive leap forward at the start of their career, then essentially produce variations on a theme, their innovation already established.  (Although, now I think of it, Edwards’ 2006 album Odyssey is a brilliant evolution of his classic sound. Go and listen to it now.)

I was pondering this when the latest Slowdive single, Skin in the Game, hit. When I interviewed Slowdive’s Neil Halstead at the 2022 Primavera Weekender I asked him how the new album was coming along. For context, when the band had returned with their eponymous, fourth studio album in 2017, they had called it “a stepping stone record for us in terms of getting back into doing Slowdive - a familiar record for anyone who's heard us.” I asked Neil if the new record the band were working on was going to be something more experimental. 

He seemed amused: “Not really, actually. I thought that would be the way that we would be going but actually this record, it’s had an awful lot of… there’s been a lot of swings and roundabouts. I’ve submitted a lot of different stuff, some of it is very experimental, some of it isn’t and I think the way we’re going with this record, it’s probably more, I don’t know if ‘pop’ is the right word. But it is definitely that end of the solo spectrum. Which is a surprise to me.”

Sure enough, Skin in the Game is a gorgeous pop song, as was its predecessor, Kisses, which was released a few weeks before. There’s nothing radical about them, no big changes and everyone seems to love the two songs. Do people not care if Slowdive - a band who received a critical apocalypse when they released a very experimental record in Souvlaki - just make the same record again, so long as it sounds like Slowdive? Were music fans waiting for Disclosure to make a change in their sound? Or is it all about the individual quality of the record, in the end, and career development very much of secondary importance? Most importantly, was I born to be a music svengali? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. 

New Music

p-rallel - I Know

It is, very definitely, another summer of UK Garage bangers (some 22 years on from the last one), with garage influenced tunes from the pop star likes of Newjeans, Jung Kook and Priya Ragu joining summer anthem bangers such as Hudson Mohawke & Nikki Nair's Set The Roof (ft. Tayla Parx) on the airwaves. This week we saw Sega Bodega remix Caroline Polachek’s Bunny Is A Rider in a suitably summer 2001 garage bump; but best of all is I Know from West London producer and DJ p-rallel, which has the slight melancholy sweetness of the best UKG vocal anthems. “This tune is me tipping my hat to some of my favourite garage tunes that still go off but they're sweet and smooth, the girls always hit the floor for those ones and sing their hearts so the mandem follow, perfect for warming up the party or a vibe switch,” he explained.

Kraftwerk - Numbers (Todd Edwards remix)

…. and talking of garage and summer plans, I am going to see Kraftwerk this Saturday and am very excited about it. So here’s Todd Edwards’ remix of Numbers to get us all in the mood. 

Sofia Kourtesis - Si Te Portas Bonito

How does Sofia Kourtesis make it all sound do effortless? Much as on her breakthrough hit La Perla, Si Te Portas Bonito sounds like it floated down, fully formed, to Sofia one afternoon when she was waking up from her nap, which is to say, the melody is brilliantly inevitable and the production nebulous and sublime. I can’t wait for her debut album. And you can hear my 2022 interview with her - in which she revealed she was working on an album - here. 

Big Thief - Vampire Empire

You probably already know this Big Thief song, which fans have long been clamouring for. But did you know it was recorded in Guissona, Catalonia, at the Teatre de cal Eril Studio, with “additional engineering” by the very Catalan Joan Pons Villaró and Jordi Matas Domènech (as well as the rather less Catalan sounding but hey who knows? Phil Hartunian)? That makes it a Big Thief triumph made in Lleida.

Creation Rebel - Swiftly (The Right One) / Panda Bear and Sonic Boom - Whirlpool Dub (Adrian Sherwood 'Reset in Dub' Version)

An Adrian Sherwood double? Hell yes. The legendary - a word resolutely merited in this case - British reggae producer and On-U Sound founder has been on a spicy streak of late, producing records from the likes of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Horace Andy. And he turns up on two fantastic records this week: Sherwood produced Swiftly (The Right One), a mournful, lightly dubbed out roots number from from On-U Sound house Creation Rebel and Prince Far I; and has remixed Whirlpool from Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s brilliant 2022 album Reset, adding what sounds like a gorgeous touch of cello. BTW I interviewed Panda Bear and Sonic Boom when they played Barcelona earlier this year.

Burial - Unknown Summer

I'm a big fan of most types of Burial. But summer vibes, reggae house Burial is definitely one of my favourite types of Burial. Also, the last 10 seconds of this song have a distinct DJ Sneak You Can't Hide from Your Bud sound to them.

The playlist

You can hear all of there and more on my playlist, the terribly named but actually quite fun The newest and the bestest.