DjOriented

Drunk on lemonade, high on life, Stefano Miele aka Riva Starr is the kind of person you want at a party. His energy is infectious, uplifting, and a wee bit cheeky.

From last year’s droll Balkan anthem ‘I Was Drunk’, to the reefa-tribute ‘Dance Me’, silly samples, and entertaining viral videos, this Naples-born DJ and producer is a positively charming buffoon.

Small wonder then, that the name of his debut artist longplayer (our Album of the Week) comes straight out of the book of American optimism. ‘If Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade’ he jests, presumably before necking another shot of limoncello.

“In Naples we also have this saying, and it basically means, if life gives you scares you have to develop on them,” says Miele, from his flat in Shoreditch, East London. His English isn’t perfect, but his thick Italian accent charms away the flaws.

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If you met him in 1977 aged 15, in his red gym shorts and blue basketball shirt, if you saw him carrying a box full of records with his headphones around his neck, if you heard him talk about DJing, disco, and some strange music called house, you’d never have believed that he would help change the world.

And yet that teenager created the first ever house music record in 1984, set up the first house record label, was the first house artist signed to a major label, and was the first house DJ to enter the Billboard music charts.

He became known as the very “originator of house music” and in 1997, he was honoured by Chicago’s Mayor Daley with an annual celebration on July 17th in his and the Pioneers of House Music’s name.

Throughout February we’re celebrating Black History Month by interviewing some of the most important black electronic music pioneers and contributors, and we’re proud to have him as our first interviewee.

Ladies and gentleman, please stand for Jesse Saunders.

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It is 1984. In a quiet street in the small German town of Bad Nauheim a 16-year-old kid frantically destroys an encroaching line of pixelated alien spacecraft on a Space Invaders machine in a noisy video arcade.

“Hey Pascal, wanna make some money?” says a voice behind him. It’s the Italian man who runs a small club opposite. “I asked your dad and he said you can come work for me if you want.”

“Sure, what will I be doing?” the kid asked. “Oh, just playing some music for my customers. Come, I’ll show you how.”

The boy went with the man, who showed him his record collection and DJ equipment, and soon he was playing records for people on a dancefloor.

“It was at that small club that I discovered what it truly means to be a junkie,” jokes Pascal Dardoufas, now 42.

A quarter of a century later, Pascal is still a DJ, and as Pascal FEOS, he’s considered one of the original fathers of German techno.

His fourth solo album ‘Terra Bong’ has just been released, and it is our Album of the Week.

We spoke to Pascal FEOS in Frankfurt about his new record, his earliest club memories, and techno history.

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It’s a Saturday night in Berlin and a sweet smiling Finnish DJ named Joakim Ijäs steps up to the sweaty decks at the Watergate club that overlooks the River Spree.

Before he drops one beat, the heaving dancefloor knows what to expect. His rich and gratifying sophomore album ‘Kaiku’ released last year, cemented everything that he had done before.

Darkly optimistic techno and sweetly evil melodies on Berlin’s Mood Music and Bpitch Control have won Kiki many fans, not least because he’s as consistent as they come.

You can always rely on Kiki to get the dancefloor to move and think, so we asked Finland’s most loved techno export to share eight of his current favourite Weekend Weapons.

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In many ways, Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet has spent his life trying to be different. He strives day after day to create something that has never been done before.

Is it human nature, to always want more? Or do only true artists leave their mark on this earth before they inevitably turn into dust?

“The computer is a chance to do something completely new,” says Hebden, from his home in London. He speaks effortlessly, with the kind of quiet confidence a well-read classicist might describe the past. Except, Kieran Hebden always looks towards the future.

“When I pick up a guitar, it feels like the most explored instrument of all time,” he says. “Everything that can be done with a guitar, has been done, but the computer knows no boundaries. The possibilities are near infinite, and that is what excites me.”

Four Tet’s new album ‘There Is Love In You’ comes mightily close to achieving its maker’s goals. From the gentle choral waves of the album’s opener ‘Angel Echoes’, to the surreptitiously danceable ‘Love Cry’, the magical ‘Circling’, the loopy house of ‘Sing’, and the hypnotically intricate ‘Plastic People’, there’s a profound sense of stepping into the unknown.

Yet for all its wires, complicated electronic circuitry, and lonely computer beginnings, its foundation – its woods – feel so very old. With this album, Four Tet has constructed a fantasy world that few will not find mesmerising. It is our Album of the Week.

We met Four Tet for an in-depth chat about his fifth album, studio, and sometimes hectic life.

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In the beginning there was Jack. And Jack had a groove, and from this groove came the groove of all grooves. And then Jack forgot about the first groove, because the new one was better.

This is how dance music developed, for much of its 20 plus years. DJs only looked forwards – they were obsessed with the future. For proof, we need only look at the vernacular of the scene that has permeated every level, from club flyers, to music reviews, blogs, and DJ speak.

Forward thinking. Future-leaning. Revolutionary. Progressive. A multitude of phrases to describe basically the same thing: the new.

That last one of course, became a whole sub genre that seeked to distance itself from that which came before. It wasn’t house, it was progressive house, and it was a state of mind.

Then one day, Jack, while viciously throwing down on his box, looked towards the past.

The return of classic dance music is a conundrum indeed, yet for the past few years, more and more DJs have been playing more and more classics.

Yesterday’s beat preoccupies us now, not tomorrow’s. What caused the paradigm to shift?

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You’re never more than a beat or two away from a warbled roulette of bass on Limaçon’s darkly radiant debut album ‘Tarry Not’, our first ever Album Of The Week on Beatport.

It is aptly titled, for it doesn’t beat around the bush, or bookend its intention with a half-cooked intro and an anti-climatic pad rendition, as so often dance producers do when faced with the daunted longplayer.

From the first kick on the album’s opener ‘Shaken’, you’re thrown straight into the deep end. And how deep it is.

Christopher T. Lee’s complex techno excursions evolve at a brisk, unforgiving pace. Layered constricting circles of bass and bleeps coil around the feet, and curl their way into your brain, feeding it with images of forgotten cities, and the blurry lights of the future.

Like a rush of blood, it pulses, heats, and urges you to the floor with the promise of adrenaline.

So often it delivers. From the beautiful Trentemøller-styled melodic moments on ‘Labels’, to the pitched-down minimal waves of sound on ‘Limantour South’, it fuses dancefloor-friendly rhythms with complex funk at every head-spinning turn.

We caught up with Limaçon as he jumped off a plane in Washington D.C. during his East Coast tour, for an in-depth chat about production, music, and his album.

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I’ve avoided directly reviewing music releases on Beatport since the early days of Beatportal, as our attachment to the mothership meant independence was near-on impossible to guarantee to readers, and more importantly, to writers.

Even though we’ve always enjoyed relatively free comment on Beatportal, much more so than you’d expect from an editorial blog owned by a commercial entity, convincing our readers such freedom exists hasn’t been easy.

And who can blame you, for not trusting the recommendations of a store that sells the product it writes about?

Well in 2010, I’ve decided to jump into the world of recommendations with a new Editor’s Club blog series, that is 100% wholly personal. The blog will highlight my favourite cuts on Beatport, with in-depth personal notes on each record.

These are not official Beatport recommendations, but rather personal picks that I’m playing and listening to. The aim is to highlight good club music, regardless of the label, artist, genre, or hype, because in the world of near-infinite music databases and perpetual marketing, the wood has become exceptionally hard to see from the trees.

I would love for these posts to become a discussion point for electronic music fans and DJs worldwide, so please get involved in the comments section below and let me know your own music highlights, DJ thoughts, and personal feelings.

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It was on December 26th 2009, off a wet and unusually quiet Manhattan street, that I witnessed the true power of dance music. It was not a club or a party, but a DJ did spin, to a group of people that could be found in most living rooms that night after Christmas.

A dozy grandfather, a moody-faced teenager, a mother, with her arms folded, frowning at her two squabbling kids and husband who dragged her away from the sofa to participate in the “fun”. The whole family was there.

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Like Johnny D, the driver of the Mannheim house movement, Ray Okpara too attributes his hypnotic house drums and bongo dexterity to his old African roots.

It’s the Nigerian in me man, or something like that. Anyway, his grooves certainly help the Mannheim-Amsterdam percussive house train to roll-on merrily through Europe, as the clubland equivalent of the Orient Express continues to pick up DJs and clubbers at every city.

Okpara sits mainly in the Oslo carriage, but from time to time, he wonders into the Remote Area/Area Remote and Cecille cars.

His ‘Brothers’ EP in March 2009 was particularly well received by DJs, unlike his ‘Swimming To The Moon’ release, which gained about as warm a welcome as a ticket inspector amongst a group of formerly loquacious teenage fare dodgers (read RA’s 1.5/5 review here).

That said, all in all, Ray Okpara’s doubled up basslines and jungle-friendly house rhythms are all above board, and continue to gain fans as the steam roller threatens to turn into a monstrous runaway.

With a few uninspiring copy-cat passengers threatening to cause delays, as is always the case with trends in club music, we asked Ray Okpara to connect us straight to eight of the best bumpty-bumps on the line for this special whistle-stop Weekend Weapons.

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