Tuesday, May 10, 2005

JUNE 2007/INTERVIEW/DANIEL WANG


You played a gig here in Athens a few weeks ago, what was your impression of the Athenian crowd?

I had a wonderful time; it was quite obvious I guess! I wasn’t too surprised as I’d been to Athens before so I knew Dimitri who does Synch and I know there are some people who are into some really diverse music there. It was really nice to have a real crowd in the city that likes dancing in a venue where it’s nice to DJ rather than at a music festival some place outside of Athens. I also had the chance to go record shopping with Paul (Moxie) and so I found a few good records which was nice. I was quite surprised as in one store the guy seemed to be a real soul/disco specialist; he told me he’d just been to New York and bought a load of records so he had lots of records that you usually only see in New York, sometimes in Paris maybe but not often in other cities. I definitely don’t find a lot of those records in Berlin, so I guess there are a couple of people there who know what they are doing!


What inspired you to set up Balihu records and how did you meet with your remix partner Brennan Green?

There are 2 or 3 different phases to Balihu. I did the first release in 1993, but the inspiration first came to me in 1991 or 1992, from some bootleg re-edits of MFSB "Love is the Message", Don Ray "Standing in the rain" and Patti Jo’s "Make Me Believe in You" by Phil Asher from London. This was 16 years ago, no one was really paying attention to these obscure New York disco classics at the time - no one played this sound in clubs. I wanted to do something similar, but with even more obscure samples and references. Even the word BALIHU is just a nonsense word -- because everyone else was calling their label "deep spiritual groove" and such and I just thought, how stereotypical! I wanted to do something different.

In 1996 or so, I started working at a vintage synth shop in downtown New York, and so discovered moog filters and analog synths, and a more "Italo" sound - that was a new phase, from maybe Balihu 007 and onwards. In 1998 or 99 I met Brennan Green through another DJ friend, and we just became close right away. He is just a very smart, warm, funny person, and his fingers can really play keyboard and guitar licks "right in the pocket" (= on the beat). Plus, he is very cute - even though he is hetero, he was emotionally almost like a gay boyfriend to me. We are still in touch constantly.

In an Interview you did back in 2004 you suggested that you weren't a fan of hip-hop or techno because they were not very musical. Do you still stand by that statement?

I’m not into any of the so-called pure "techno" or "hip-hop" nowadays, I still stand by that, of course, but in the exact same way, I'm not just into "nu disco" either. I don’t want to sound snobbish about it, it’s just the truth, really. Techno now is a genre which is obsessed with 5 Roland synths and drum machines (TB303, TR909, SH101), and with a tempo of 127 bpm. "Hip-hop" is supposed to represent black music - based almost all on sampling other people’s music from the past, and almost NEVER creating something original, and the tempo is also always about the same -100 bpm or so. This hyper-limited view of musical possibilities is stupid, tragic even. It is based on race and class perceptions too - black, white, African or European. When I say disco, it just includes all tempos, all eras, and all colours (and nice key changes!). I enjoy some techno and some hip-hop too, but I don’t at all like the limited mentality. If someone plays only kitschy 70s Eurodisco, it can be ALMOST just as boring.

You founded Balihu all those years back and in a way you’re the innovator of what they call nu-disco now, What do you think of the new wave of so-called nu-disco producers and the current trend for referring to things as ‘cosmic’?

I guess I should say I’m one of the people who started the scene as I was releasing back in ’93, but even from about ‘89 – ‘92 I’d been hearing people do things within house music and plenty of interesting things coming out on Nu-Groove, so I wouldn’t say I was really the first and in fact the two people who probably influenced me the most were Phil Asher (who now does mostly broken beat unfortunately!) and DJ Harvey of course who did all those Black Cock records based round various obscure soul bits. So for me it’s never just been about disco music, just any good music, and music that’s made over a dancefloor 4/4 rhythm is going to end up sounding like what disco sounded like, after all disco was just an incredibly diverse list of music all made for dancing.
As for the new generation there are a few I really like, for example Lindstrom has done a couple of pieces that I play and that actually sound good – they measure up I think to the old pieces because they’ve got musicality, they include some nice chord changes and they use different instruments, but I do have mixed feelings about a lot of the re-edits that people make, the Moxie ones are nice, but there are others where you get the impression that the DJs don’t have any musical ideas, so they take a piece of music that’s already quite good, that doesn’t need an edit and they take out all the good parts and the interesting parts and then when you bootleg it of course you lose some sound quality too so you get something inferior to the original and then they put it out under their own name, as if they really had anything to do with its creation! So this phenomenon bothers me a little bit, but the people that are trying to do more creative things I think are great.

When you first moved to New York which clubs were you frequenting?

In the late 80s and early 90s I was first going to the big gay clubs like Mars and Roxy, and then at some point I really discovered soul music and house music clubs where all the really hardcore African American and Puerto Rican dancers would go and those were House Nation, which was at Bleeker Street and Broadway and was actually an African dance studio and I met Francois Kevorkian there, then we started going to the Sound Factory Bar on 21st Street and Danny Krivit would play there regularly.

So you just mentioned Francois Kevorkian and you’ve mentioned him in the past as an inspiration to you – what do you think of his Deep Space nights?

Actually I wouldn’t say Francois was a big inspiration, he was just someone who started me off, because I only heard him play about 3 or 4 times and when he was playing classics he was great but his new material and the stuff on Wave doesn’t really excite me - it’s well engineered but there’s very little musicianship in it. He was doing Body & Soul for a long time and again that was fun in the beginning when he and Danny Krivit played but then later Joe Clausell would play all this Afro-Brazilian stuff which never sounded very musical to me, it all sounded the same and so me and my friends just stopped going after a while. As for Deep space, the sound is not bad but it’s kind of degenerated a lot just because New York doesn’t have a really dirty, underground atmosphere, I mean you can’t really have a great dance party in a posh little lounge when people really need six times the space to really move and get down. It’s almost made for tourists – lots of Japanese tourists and lots of white kids from the suburbs, whereas the original New York mix of people, the blacks, the Puerto Ricans, was always what made the scene alive and that’s totally gone from Manhattan now as far as I can see. By contrast in Europe in places like Berlin you still have a really crazy working class who go out and maybe they just want to hear hard techno or whatever, but there’s a raw sexual and physical energy in the clubs that you just don’t find in New York, it’s just become too posh.

Which one of the clubs/discos would you have frequented if you’d been living in New York back in the day?

From the 70s most people think of the Paradise Garage which was mostly black, but I’ve got a great book called Night Dancin’ and it’s actually a 1980 published catalogue of the all the clubs in New York and you realize that besides Paradise Garage and Studio 54 there were loads of clubs like 12West, Barefoot Boy, Ice Palace out on Fire Island and I get the impression that these were the clubs that played the really hardcore, interesting, European orchestral disco music which is more interesting to me now, so I think I would have gone to those places. Those were also the hardcore gay clubs where everybody just took off their clothes, took drugs and danced until the morning! Those places were probably more adventurous but no one is telling the story of those places now because they probably all died from AIDS which is the sad reality of it. The people who survived to tell the story of dance music, people like Francois Kevorkian and Danny Krivit are generally heterosexual, (and there’s nothing wrong with that!) but they have a different view of the scene and also of dance music from what the white gay men or the black gay men of the time had and the story’s not complete without those people’s perspectives, so yeah, I think I’d have been going to the harder gay clubs instead!

You interviewed the legendary Tee Scott before he sadly died a few years back, how did that interview come about?

That’s a funny story actually, I started going to these Vogueing balls like the ones you see in the movie Paris is Burning, and of course they totally fascinated me. There were only 2 or 3 other Chinese or Korean kids and then everyone else was black or Puerto Rican, but it seemed like since I wasn’t white either they let me join in and would let me go to their balls and parties, so the House of Ultra-Omni decided to take me in for a couple of years and Tee Scott was actually their house DJ because he was good friends with the mother Kevin Omni. So we were at this Vogueing ball where all these drag queens were dropping to the floor and dancing in these competitions and the DJ was playing stuff like Harmonica Track by Danny Tenaglia and Evolution by Georgio Moroder and he was amazing so I went and asked him who he was and he said “I’m Tee Scott’! The incredible thing was he never really had a regular DJ job though, he always had to have a day job to make a living, he was working as a clerk at the county courts back then.

As well as Tee Scott you've also interviewed DJ Danielle Baldelli; any inside stories about that experience?

This sounds funny, but I can’t really say I "interviewed" him first. I mean, he is an extremely intelligent man, very aware of his place in the canon of dance music - only he didn’t get so much exposure in the English-speaking world before he met me. But many people in Italy recognized that he played a big role, and unlike Larry Levan or Tee Scott in America, he didn’t die before he got wider recognition. My friend Luca Benin from SlamJam sportswear was a Cosmic Club fan in his youth and he introduced me to Baldelli, but Baldelli's replies to my questions were the same things he has been saying for 20 years. He made sure he documented himself very well from the beginning!

You've cheekily remarked on a couple of your peers being ‘tone deaf’ in the past, do you think this is a general problem in contemporary music production and if so why?

Yes, I definitely stand by my statement there, you can quote me - a huge segment of dance music producers in the 90s were tone deaf. Number One - Louie Vega of Masters at Work. I would listen to his keyboards and bass lines and think, my god, they’re not in tune, they’re just wrong. No one else hears this? And he is the biggest star on the scene? So I had to start my own thing and eventually leave New York, where hype and racial correctness are more important than musical substance now.

That said, I don’t think there are SO MANY tone deaf records now. But they mostly suffer from very impoverished musicality -- you can’t convince people, because if they don’t hear it, they don’t know the difference. All the classic 70s records had marvelous simple key changes, minor to major, obbligato, touches which show musicianship and inspiration. Almost everything today sounds looped, quantized, and is totally shocking - an idiot like Alicia Keys could win Grammy Awards for a song with no intro or ending, no decent key changes ("Falling"). Amazing, isn’t it? Not all of my own records have the best chord changes, but at least my DJ sets are based around these principles. You can’t change the fact that all these TONE DEAF people are involved in music though - it’s a democratic society we live in. Anyone who can buy a computer or a turntable gets to call himself a musician now.

You often mention "Love Is The Message", why is this track so special to you?

Honestly, I almost never play the track these days. For anyone who knows classic disco, this is like playing ABBA’s "Dancing Queen" at a wedding party!! But still - it was the first great disco record, from 1973 - and it has a strange mathematical perfection in the break. The balance of sounds: organs, violins, and saxophone - it is unique. I just mention it for the people who don’t know how important it was. But really, now when I hear it, I feel more nostalgia than excitement. Like someone telling you that Physics greatest equation is E=mc2. We all know THAT!

On the cd you gave us you’ve included Jimmy Briscoe and the Beavers ‘Into The Milky Way’ and Leon Ware ‘Got To Be Loved’ – can you tell us a little bit more about these tracks?

Well they are both so good! To be honest there’s no special story about either of them, I just really like both of them and they’re both about 112 bpm! Into The Milky Way I got from Eric Duncan from Rub’n’Tug and I think he heard it from Harvey, it’s just one of those rare Salsoul tracks, which I think I bought on eBay in fact; the Leon Ware is from a super soul collector who’s also based in Berlin and whose eBay name is actually Tee Scott - he sells a lot of expensive soul records under that name by coincidence.

So what future plans are in the pipeline?

Well my German husband and I (his name is Boris, Boris from Berlin) are doing a track for his label Careless Records and that will be out soon and then otherwise there’s a Danny Wang album scheduled for later this year hopefully, if I get my homework done!