Who is Kazell? For one, he is someone who is traveling across North America on a spring tour, appearing at each stop with one of the most simultaneously daunting yet sought-after tasks – opening each night for Sasha and John Digweed. On another count, he is a prolific producer and owner of Influx Audio. Last week I had a chance to ask a few questions of the only person that Sasha and Digweed want opening for them on every stop of the tour..
But before I get to the interview, I have to mention that my new single, Seismic, is now out on Pacific Front Recordings and is for sale on Beatport, and rumor has it, iTunes is soon to follow. I wrote Seismic with Dustin H and remixes come from Stefan Anion, Shiloh, and Powerplant. Have a listen to Seismic. Hopefully I didn’t just break the internets with all these links.
And on to my interview with Kazell:
How long have you been DJing? How long have you been producing?
I’ve been DJing for 17 years and producing for around 5 years.
What brought you to the US from the UK? How would you compare the scenes?
I had wanted to visit the US from a young age and finally made it over in 1992, I came over with a promoter and another DJ from Manchester looking to set up some gigs in Miami. The Southern US was still developing when we arrived which was quite a contrast to what was going on in Manchester at he time. I think I was really attracted to the US scene when I arrived as it had a funkier eclectic edge.
What is your philosophy on DJing? Why do you do it, and what do you hope others will get out of it?
I think any DJ’s aim is to do something unique with their music. Although you’re mainly playing other people’s tracks its really satisfying to put a mix together that has your sound embedded. I hope that the people that come to hear me play leave ready for more!
Between your tracks that you wrote with Mike Hiratzka and your latest collaboration with Habersham, your sound appears to be very diverse. How would you describe your sound as a producer?
I like to mix things up in the studio and spend a lot of time hunting down diverse sounds to draw inspiration from. If I had to describe my sound as a producer I’d say its currently a blend of dub, funk and electronic house music but it changes all the time and I’m fine with that. I personally respect producers that keep evolving and trying out new things.
How would you compare your sound as a producer to your sound as a DJ? Do you find your DJing influences your production, and vice versa?
I think they differ quite a lot as I write lots of tracks that aren’t necessarily aimed for the dancefloor. I do sometimes come home from a good gig and try and capture a certain type of new sound i’ve come across though.
What is the focus of your label, Influx Audio?
Quality forward thinking music
How do you see MP3’s effecting the underground music scene?
I think Mp3’s have undoubtedly changed the face of underground music in a terms of easy accessibilty but illegal downloads are really killing the scene too.
CD’s or Vinyl or Serato?
CD’s and sometimes Traktor Scratch
As a DJ known for warm-up sets, you must have a different set of influences than most DJ’s who are associated with Sasha and John Digweed. Who are your influences as a DJ, and what effect have they had on your sound?
Well the warm up sets are just a part of what I do as often headline too. For the warm up sets I like to play a lot of the deeper, atmospheric music that I collect. I think Terry Francis’s “Architecture CD” was a big influence in terms of a great chilled tech house cd as well as Swayzak’s first album “Snowboarding in Argentina”. The sound has changed quite a bit since then but the mood is still alive.
What future singles do you have in the works? Any plans for an artist album?
Habersham and I are planning a follow up “Paradise Rockers” single later this year and I’m currently working on a new band project which I’m really excited about. I can’t really say much about it yet but watch this space!
Websites you’d like to plug?
Well Kazell.com of course 😉 but I’d also like to give a plug to liquified.com, they throw some amazing parties and I’ve been there resident DJ for years, and mention my PR and marketing company, Volume Communications.
Thanks to Craig and Ali for setting up this interview, and of course to Kazell for sharing his thoughts.
Submitted my remix of John Morgan and Kevin Shiu last night for approval. Waiting to hear back on that. In the mean time I am moving on to the unnamed track that myself, Justin and Dustin are working on. We have a deadline of next Wednesday to be done, so given that we started this track a couple years ago I think that’s fair time to finish it up and send it off to the stores.
Speaking of the stores, Beatport has Seismic listed with the wrong song names and has wrong genre for the Powerplant remix and even has the wrong preview clip for it. That’s pretty disappointing stuff but it isn’t the first time I’ve seen this done. No good. Once the proper release is listed I’ll link to it.
Update: Turns out we messed up the submission. DOH!
In other news, Google launched something rather significant last night – Google App Engine – this is basically an online application development platform. Will be interesting to see what people come up with when they have access to some of the tremendous resources of Google. And of course there are all sorts of implications here, and I think some of the most insightful ones are suggesting that this will (at a very high level) make the acquisition of a company very fluid for Google if the company has developed on Google’s platform already. Clever..
Just ate lunch but feel empty. Perhaps its time to go out for a walk!
The image above has something to do with this post. Give me a moment and I’ll tell you how.
I think a lot about songwriting. The fact is though, that I write very few songs, but many more tracks. What I mean by this is that the music I compose is not songwriting. To me, a songwriter writes something that you can sing. You can’t sing my songs, but I’d like to see you try if you disagree with me.
There are gifted songwriters out there. One of them, in my opinion, is Patty Griffin. Let me preface this by saying that most of those out there who think you know my musical tastes will probably not expect me to like PG or even live in the same universe as her. But I do, and musical influence is a strange animal that knows no boundaries. Not in the same way that tastes impose boundaries.
Artistic influence is about what is on the outside and hasn’t completely made it in yet. That’s the only way it stands a chance to inspire – to be different, to contrast and to show a different way of doing things. In the case of Patty Griffin, there was never much of a chance that we are remotely similar. But there is something in her songwriting that strikes a chord with me, and indeed one of her songs, “Goodbye,” is one of the few songs by anyone to have achieved a 10/10 rating on my Radio Paradise account.
Part of songwriting, to me, is writing good lyrics. This might sound obvious to many of you but I have spoken to a lot of people who do not take lyrics into consideration when they judge whether or not they like a song. If I think I like a song, I immediately look up the lyrics – this is to see if I like the message behind it all. If the lyrics turn out to be garbage, then it sours the song for me. However, in the case where the lyrics are very good, it can turn an already good song into a meaningfully good song. That is another category altogether – this is the kind of music that now has lasting power for me. I’m not going to get into what I consider to be good songwriting itself or what good lyrics are. That is far too subjective – I’d rather just say that you know when something has been written with purpose, and you also know when something was just written. And finally I’d like to give you an example of the good songwriting I am talking about.
The example I’ve chosen is a lo-fi video of a PG doing a performance of the song “Goodbye” with an acoustic guitar. This is pretty raw and in this environment I think this really shows the talent involved. Here it is:
And here are the lyrics. Maybe follow along while watching the video:
Occured to me the other day
You’ve been gone now a couple years
Well, I guess it takes while
For someone to really disappear
And I remember where I was
When the word came about you
It was a day much like today
The sky was bright, and wide, and blue
And I wonder where you are
And if the pain ends when you die
And I wonder if there was
Some better way to say goodbye
Today my heart is big and sore
Its tryin’ to push right through my skin
I wont see you anymore
I guess thats finally sinkin’ in
Cause you cant make somebody see
By the simple words you say
All their beauty from within
Sometimes they just look away
But I wonder where you are
And if the pain ends when you die
And I wonder if there was
Some better way to say goodbye
If you liked that song I’d recommend you find the studio version because it’s simply gutting with full sound – ie: bass and a bit more instrumentation, and of course you get PG’s full vocals. So what does that all have to do with the image above? Well the lyrics remind me of a couple friends I’ve lost over the years and the image above – the weightless woman – reminds me of some dreams I’ve had where I’ve died and started floating over a room. So it’s a pretty loose connection, but from where I stand that is all that’s required.
Somewhat unrelated:
How many of you out there use iTunes? If not, what do you use? Does it have the ability to subscribe to podcasts?
When I was looking through my photos the other day, this one sparked something in me. I had a topic to pontificate about which would have been relevant to boundaries, limitations and things like putting items in their correct place, and consequence.
But all of that escapes me today and all I can think about is how perfect this was to find by accident while walking along Commercial Drive with Anand a couple of weeks ago. I went over to Vancouver to work on music with Anand before he went to WMC in Miami, where he currently is with Krishen. I got a text message last night – it said “At Mansion – Sasha and Digweed are playing some RIDICULOUS percussional tracks with huge chord progressions.” Sounds like something I would enjoy. Of course I am envious that I am not there right now.
It has come to my attention that I need a new computer. Any suggestions on what I should get? Just kidding, seriously – I know what I need in this department, and have been doing the research for years. Every year my current batch of research becomes obsolete, and so I have to upgrade that research. Basically (and I don’t expect this to come across as great information, but more of a recording of an observation) every year that goes by, every new model that comes along and matches the previous price point of the previous top of the line model, you get more out of an upgrade than you did before. As it is with innovation and (relatively) static price points, the consumer wins in this regard.
This is most overtly parallel to the lifecycle of digital camera functionality and, in particular, what is migrating from the feature-rich point-and-shoot consumer model cameras to the pro-sumer digital SLR models. In short, there are a number of features that were pioneered on the R&D-a-plenty point-and-shoots and they’re coming to the more specialized, higher-end cameras. I suppose the most striking point of all of this is that more features does not equate to high end. Anyone that knows anything about cameras knows that the most important points of the camera are not photo filters or face-tracking live view on a flip-out LCD, but rather the glass, the image sensor, and the person holding the camera. Everything else is peripheral.
All that being said, I am still very happy with the Canon 30D and can see myself using it for years to come, and upgrading the body (not the lenses) in about 3-4 years, for a total lifespan of 5-6 years. Some people are splitting hairs about whether they should get the 30D or the 40D, but my advise is that it doesn’t matter which one you get because they are roughly the same compared to what your options will be in 5-6 years when it comes time to replace it. The Live View technology in the 40D is VERY rudimentary and is not fully functional yet in my opinion – it has a long way to go – just look at the difference between what Olympus’ Live View is capable of and what Canon’s is. When Canon fully slams their R&D budget against Live View, expect to see some awesome results. But I anticipate that even if that has already happened, we wont see the results in actual available cameras for a year or two at least. I don’t know if Canon has a slow turn-around between R&D and actual product roll-out into the marketplace, or if they’re just lagging behind on purpose to see how the tech effects Olympus’ sales, or if they’re just behind, period.
Thoughts?
Here you go – something a bit less ranty than my last post and a bit more happy. It was my dad’s 63rd birthday the other day and we had a birthday party last night for him. It was a good time. Here is my mom with my dad. The cake had no nuts so I could eat it. It tasted pretty damn good.
I made a website for my mom – she is an artist. If you are a relative of mine or a friend of my mom, you may have heard that this website was a long time coming. It is true – ever since around 2003 I had been planning it in my head. I was ready to build it at any time, and earlier this year my dad registered the domain. That was it – I had to do it at that point since they were getting serious about it too. I designed the site to showcase her art, awards, and upcoming events as well as show a bit of info about herself and there’s also some room for interactivity in the form of commenting in her gallery. Here’s a screen shot:
I am deeply pleased that I have been able to set it up in a way that allows her to update the site herself with a Content Management System. The handwriting you see on the site is her actual handwriting – I had her scan (at a fairly high resolution) some words that I asked her to write out, and then I turned them into PNG24’s with an alpha layer to achieve a seamless blend with the website background, which I created out of a canvas pattern blended to the colour scheme that I had decided on. I also added some rollover behavior on the handwriting buttons (previous, next, more, back) so that it becomes more prominent when you move the mouse over it. I think it translates really well to what I wanted the user experience to be – professional, sophisticated, but not out of reach. A lot of effort has gone into this website from both myself and Mom and I’m glad to see that it is up and in front of the public now.
Here is the link: Nirmala Greenwell, Artist – www.nirmalagreenwell.com
AFK on Pacific Front Sessions for March 2008. Special guest John Morgan AKA Powerplant. This show will be airing Wednesday, March 19th on Proton Radio at Noon PST.
There’s no quality assurance in P2P. This should strike the idea down on its own. I don’t want someone downloading a glitchy mp3 and then assuming that’s supposed to be a part of my song.
Underground labels will NEVER see a slice of this pie. EVER. And it will destroy their revenue, utterly. Costs will not even be covered.
How do you enforce this? Does everyone pay? How about those who want to support the artists in a more direct way – are they going to be double-charged? Is there going to be someone running around at the ISP level checking to see who is downloading music with P2P software and then checking to see if they are paying the $5 fee for approved P2P music downloads?
This will destroy music stores that have worked hard to get people to pay money for music. A lot of valuable work will be un-done, and we will be teaching bad lessons when it comes to how our society values music and art in general.
What they appear to be arguing about is how to divide up the money. This is because there is no clear way to do this, and the only thing they can possibly come up with to do it will be a scheme that sees the rich getting the biggest slices of the pie, and the rest will be deemed “immaterial” and will receive nothing.
The only possible way they could hope to attempt to divide the money is by comparing relative sales per quarter and then applying that as a percentage determiner in who gets what. However, by approving a plan like this, you are cannibalizing sales, so your sales figures (which you base percentages off of) become instantly useless, because no one is buying music anymore – they’re all just downloading on the $5 plan. The truth is they have no plan on how to divide the money fairly, because there IS no way to divide the money fairly.
Ladies and gentlemen, this proposed plan is the equivalent of throwing a bunch of DVD’s in a ditch at the side of a highway and charging people $5 to dive in and see what they can get that isn’t scratched or messed up. I’m not putting my name behind it. This is a 100% horrible idea, and so was the CD levy, which, for the record, I have seen $0 from. I am a registered member of SOCAN, and I have registered works. The irony here is that I buy CDr’s to give away my own music on as a promo, and I have to pay a levy on THAT, and some of it ends up in Avril Lavigne’s pocket.
How wrong is that?
Just as wrong as this.
Seismic is the third collaboration between myself and Dustin H. When we first sat down to make this track I think we were both intimidated by what we had previously accomplished with The Morning Star and Cascadia, and we didn’t want to mess up what precious studio time we had. At the time, the clipper between Victoria and Seattle was on a wacky schedule so we had even less time than we should have. And Dustin was living with this band at the time and they distracted us a fair bit, but it was cool talking to them about what they were up to, and hearing some of their influences between songwriting sessions. They had come up from California. I am not sure what the impetus was behind coming up to Seattle and it still doesn’t make sense in my head, but there you have it. Anyway we had actually sat down to make something epic and soundtrack-ish. Instead, a magma monster burst out of the ground in front of us and demanded to be turned into a progressive track, or else he was going to destroy the entire Pacific North West with a massive earthquake. What the hell were we supposed to do? We agreed and spent the next 18 hours making Seismic, and in the process, saving the citizens of Seattle, Vancouver and Victoria.
The original mix features a number of twists and turns, ethereal noises and abrasive synthetic ones, percussion that falls from the sky above, and basslines that shake the ground below. You’ve heard of hurricane parties? This is an earthquake party. On remix duties we have been completely spoiled. Shiloh gets in on the fault-line fiasco with some serious progressive-tech business that I am sure will find its way into many peak time sets. Stefan Anion is responsible for the breakbeat remix on this release, and what a fine piece of work he did here. There will be no survivors from this remix – it is devastating. Powerplant, aka John Morgan, provides us with a real nice atmospheric house number that manipulates and molds the original synths into a whole new arrangement. All in all I think the package is very well rounded and I am very proud of this Pacific Front release.
AFK & Dustin H – Seismic (Original mix)
AFK & Dustin H – Seismic (Shiloh remix)
AFK & Dustin H – Seismic (Stefan Anion’s Running For Cover remix)
A few weekends ago, I went over to Saltspring Island. The sculptures you see are by Jay’s very talented mom, Lynn Demers. They’re amazing – you have to see them in person. The faces statues are between 3-4 feet in height!
