Jazzman Records

I've been accidentally buying records from the UK's Jazzman label for a few years now. And thinking about it, I reckon I a decent part of my music education (thanks Mum) contained if not these exact sounds, then sounds closely related to them.

So I received a compilation on BGP Records this afternoon called Superfunk 2. It's old school, down home, FUNK. I wonder if this kind of music will die out as a form of tunes that are created by folks in the 2000s? Of the groups I'm aware of (and I'm no aficionado) there are Quantic, The Bamboos, and Breakestra all doing the business. And there's a certain Alice Russell who kills it on the mic too. She's good. And there was some band from Finland I heard recently too, but their name escapes me right now. Hmmm.

I caught this quote on Jazzman's site tonight, and I thought I should share it with the people who read this page, which to my knowledge is currently nobody:

It’s hard to make good music without drawing upon good influence, and we at Jazzman worry about the rubbish that kids today are listening to - it doesn’t bode well for the future of music in this world.

Amen my brothers and sisters. I worry about the rubbish the kidlets are listening too as well. If you were to ask me what sort of music I like, it'd give you a non-committal answer that goes, "Well, I like a lot of different music". I admire producers like Dan F, Elite Force and Meat Katie who are so incredibly dedicated to their sound. I just don't have that single mindedness.

These days I get booked to pay funk, rare groove, hip hop and assorted mid-tempo funkiness, and this makes me happy. I like collecting vinyl too - I get the majority of these types of tunes on wax you see, it makes the gigging easier. So here I am, writing about Jazzman, and funk music, and recalling the Motown music I heard so much of in my youth, unable to focus on one sound, yet exploring decades of recorded output and being satisfied by that. At least I'm honest.

Dan F - The full bit

I'm reasonably confident that ITM and their readership have moved on from the feature article posted online on 25 July. For a read of that, go here.

For the whole thing, read on:

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Top producers have long since abandoned making music that fits into any one particular style. Classification of music by genre was invented so as to better package music for sale. Sounds good on paper, and it does have a role in this era of quick consumption and digital downloads. For producers of the world’s cutting edge underground electronic music however, the constraint of genre plays no part in the choices made at the mixing desk. To do so would undermine the creative process and the work ethic required to turn thoughts and concepts into living sound.

Dan F is a person who embodies a purist’s outlook on music production. He finds comfort behind his G5, not hyping a Saturday night crowd on tour in a foreign country. He doesn’t care about the constraints required to make music suitable for the breaks genre, the techno scene, the rock circuit, the hip hop crew or anything remotely trendy. He makes music that is drawn from themes and concepts of the world and its issues. His is music that appeals purely on its melodic and rhythmic merits.

Fellow producers and luminaries of the underground electronic music community including Meat Katie, UNKLE, Andy Page and Lee Burridge are all similarly inclined, and Dan F’s latest offering ‘Rendition’ fits firmly and comfortably amongst this group. Rendition sits astride genres, while drawing from, absorbing and ultimately reinventing them.

Past

Dan Findlay hasn’t always made ground breaking electronic albums from his studios high in a Hong Kong apartment block. Originally from Canada via England he first worked as a geologist exploring for gold and oil. With commodities prices being depressed by comparison to today’s prices, Dan found it difficult to stay gainfully employed. Needing a change, and a more stable source of income, Dan took a civil engineering opportunity and moved to Hong Kong. Finding less enjoyment from the civil engineering than he did from exploration and ‘falling asleep at my desk often enough to not get my contract renewed’, Dan decided to try an equally unstable career path. Music.

Like many of his contemporaries, Dan took piano lessons as a youngster and spent a lot of time digging through his Dad’s record collection where the sounds of Count Basie, Robert Johnson, and Creedence Clearwater Revival found a place in his imagination. Later, he picked up Sound On Sound and early copies of Future Music and was fascinated by the products and technology in those pages. Dan bought a series of ‘really cheap and crappy Yamaha keyboards because the sounds and primitive sequencing features were far more interesting’ than the acoustic piano. ‘The first thing I ever owned was something like a PSS-380. It could make white noise and really fucked up digital harmonics if you ramped the pitch up’.

Not long after landing in Hong Kong, Dan saw Roland’s MC-505 and an Akai MPC2000 at a local music store. He bought them both, and ‘pushed those things to point where I started hitting all sorts of limitations. I eventually moved onto an Akai S3000XL with ReCycle and buggy pirate copies of Cakewalk and Cubase and made this latency ridden MIDI driven monster. As soon as I had got my head around MIDI a chance meeting with Andy Page introduced me to Logic 4 and the process of audio sequencing. I never looked back.’

These days Dan works on a G5 Mac with Logic 7 as his main workstation. He categorically states, ‘I will never upgrade my current Logic set-up. Logic 8 is the worst piece of shit ever created so my future upgrade path will involve Intel Macs and switching over to ProTools for mixing and final engineering’.

Dan made his mark on the music world by releasing a string of well-supported 12s and remixes on Global Underground, Distinctive, Lot49, Bedrock and his own label, Disuye. Tracks such as ‘Zhenghe’, ‘Corporation Triptech’ and ‘Do The Decent Thing (Go Fuck Yourself)’ as Dan F, and recently ‘Girls In Front’ and ‘Busy Tone’ under his Whømp moniker have all found their way into the record bags of the best underground deejays. When the calls for remixes and collaborations started in 2003, Dan answered. And they haven’t stopped.

Dan rates his best remix work as the string of reworks he’s completed for UNKLE – ‘I Need Something Stronger’, ‘Inside’ and ‘Burn My Shadow’. Years ahead of their time, and still being played out, up to three years after they were first released. Collaborations with Lee Burridge and Jariten (as Random Source) have all done damage on dancefloors across the world and have made it onto top compilation mixtapes, most recently Ewan Pearson’s Fabric35 mix.

Expect to see more music from Dan F without any collaborators though, ‘Working as a team in the studio does not really work for me and I can't see myself attempting it again. No more sitting down with someone else and a blank canvas. The motivations I have for making music are too overpowering for me to be flexible’.

Disuye

Dan set up Disuye Records initially as a vehicle to release his own club singles and ultimately as a vehicle to release his album projects as they evolved.

‘Disuye comes from the old Chinese slang phrase ‘大少爺’ and is translated roughly into ‘spoilt little brat’ or more accurately ‘big little master’. The word traditionally refers to the eldest son of a rich and powerful family. In Chinese culture, men get all the respect and if you are the father (making all the money) then you rightly deserve that respect. As the eldest son in a rich family – your biggest worry being whores and alcohol – simply being the second eldest male in the household is enough to earn nearly the same level of respect.’

Disuye is a demanding going concern, but is one that allows him the freedom to get his music out to both loyal and new fans all over the world.

Rendition

Finding suitable descriptive terms to describe Dan’s second album ‘Rendition’ is, at best, extremely difficult. It would be easy to resort to a range of clichés, but to do that would undermine the colossal effort and thought that has been poured into this album. Rendition follows themes of political messages and short stories expressed through a convergence of styles covering rock, electronic, hip hop, industrial and chill out. And with its straight rhythmic structures, sub-five minute song lengths and a lack of abstract melodies, it’s an album that is accessible too. Throughout the 15 tracks of this largely instrumental longplayer, heavily altered voices peer through the mix, giving the listener encoded snippets of information that guide you through the stories. Bisc1, rapper and lyricist on two tracks on Rendition, offers some choice words on his website www.bisc1.com:

‘Dan F has pushed limits, changed landscapes and delivered a sound that is new, that is heavy, and that is the future’.

Rendition is riddled with a low pathos akin to Massive Attack’s seminal 1998 release ‘Mezzanine’. It’s bad guys crossing paths in Hong Kong’s alleyways. It’s the frustration of seeking solitude and being unable to find it. It’s stencil graf, bass bins, a perfect sine wave, and the trash of white noise on a broken mono television set. Built with precision and to exacting tolerances, Rendition showcases Dan’s huge depth and breadth of influential listening. And despite being entirely produced by electronic means, it doesn’t sound electronic. It's a record for night time listening. It is a record that will change the way you think about electronic music. It quite literally does not sound like anything else available today.

Two vocalists - New York’s Bisc1 and Brisbane’s Quan Yeomans - lend their skills to Rendition over three tracks. The Regurgitator front man, or Q according to the album credits, provides both the lyrics and vocal performance on ‘Follow the Sines’.

‘He did a brilliant job’, says Dan. ‘I’d done several projects for Quan over the years so I decided to ask him if he’d feature on one of my tracks. He took what I thought was a so-so instrumental track and turned it into what it is now. He spells the meaning of the song out in letters ten feet tall… he’s got more musical talent in his hair-cut than I have in my entire studio.’

New York rapper Bisc1 features on ‘The End Of It’ and ‘White Wall’. While visiting Hong Kong a few years ago, Bisc1 and Dan met through a mutual friend. And as Bisc1 describes that meeting, ‘We made a tune or two, the energy was right, so we made more.’ (Those songs remain in Dan’s back catalogue, and may see a release on Disuye later this year.)

‘N44982’ opens the Rendition journey by introducing you to an industrial, back alley world with snippets of passing sounds over the low hum of a big city. ‘Right On’ is all machine beats injected with sampled, edited cuts of guitar. A two-note bassline holds it all together, murmuring in the background and expanding into melody as the song progresses. White noise is a surprisingly well-used feature throughout the album and is used with particularly judicious effect on ‘Incidental’. This is the closest thing to rock on the album, except for the mechanical typewriter holding down the rhythm in the quieter sections. The whole song is interrupted as if by an ill-tempered neighbour fumbling a jack from an amplifier’s input port. Programmed guitars feature and are augmented by textural back-up including harmonics, string and pick up noise.

Rendition flows as a coherent musical statement, despite the surprise turns in energy levels and intensity: just when you think it’s an electronica-meets-rock album, it morphs through the back-to-back vocal tracks, ‘Follow The Sines’ and ‘The End Of It’ followed by the super dark electronic number ‘Frag’. And from the end of the last of the brilliant lyrics to flow through Bisc1’s mic on ‘White Wall’, ‘Leaves’ enters like a storm building, crescendo-like in its intensity, threatening to break loose, but somehow being held. ‘Anticomm’ marks a step-change from the intensity of the prior tracks. Here the downtempo overdriven bass, topped with a gorgeous melancholic piano and industrial beats is perfectly placed. ‘Sand pit’ starts a slow burn of driving, static filled purpose, backed by a looped guitar sample that is expansive as it is metallic, while ‘Where Are You’ opens with a Chinese violin before clouds of apple-green cover and then briefly open, revealing downtempo perfection rarely seen. The static interjects only occasionally here, and a numbing sensation takes over. ‘Dead Air Space’ takes you back up into a half muted scream and the second to last track entitled ‘____’ is the comma in the sentence, the chance to breathe in, the pause before the ending of ‘Next’.

‘I'm looking outside of what club music offers to find those themes and concepts I need to make music, and I'm not concerned if anyone else gets them but me. Others will I'm sure, 'cause my stuff is not exactly way out there ... but if anyone does follow what I'm doing that is now a bonus, not the goal.’

What does it all mean?

The word ‘rendition’ has several meanings. The particular meaning Dan has chosen to represent his album is one that many people are not familiar with. Reported only sparingly in the mass media, Extraordinary Rendition is a practise undertaken selectively by the Clinton Administration and massively by the Bush Administration in the purported ‘War on Terror’. Extraordinary Rendition involves CIA operatives kidnapping suspected terrorists in foreign countries, usually on loose circumstantial evidence, and transporting them to a third country (such as Egypt, Jordan and Uzbekistan) where the suspect is interrogated without charge, and without any accountability. In the reporting that is available, torture for months on end is frequently cited by those who have been rendered. The Bush Administration alternately denies knowledge of torture, or claims that these third party countries to the Extraordinary Rendition program have provided assurances that suspects will not be tortured. The practise itself is not in question.

‘Rendition is one of the few words that had both a strong political connotation and also some musical meaning. After shortlisting the word I later learned it can also mean 'an explanation of something that is not immediately obvious' ... so on all counts it suited the project perfectly. Most of the songs are based on events or situations I'd read about.’

Despite being completed months ago, Dan had to overcome significant setbacks to achieve a release for Rendition. As Dan explains, ‘the model for small artists and indie distribution has changed significantly over the years and without constant management things slip behind schedule very quickly. The only alternative is to do it yourself. There’s more work involved but at least I have control and to be really honest, I feel much more alive about producing knowing that I control the path between me and the audience.’

My day job

In between making future music, Dan can be found hard at it mixing albums and singles for Chinese pop artists. This, of course, brings karaoke to mind, but with his pedigree Dan doesn’t get the calls to produce those kinds of artists. In a music industry as large as China’s, quality songwriters abound, and it’s these artists which enthuse Dan.

‘My reputation as an underground producer here in SE Asia means that most labels won't even think to hire me for the really bad karaoke destined tracks and instead I am contacted to work on decent quality album projects like Eason Chan, Josie Ho and suchlike, remixes and more esoteric, experimental releases. Some of the noises and studio tricks I've managed to slip into these - still essentially - pop songs make me laugh when I hear 'em again on radio. I’m working on music everyday so it's all good. Actually there are a few Chinese artists I would like to produce for eventually, one of them being Faye Wong.’

Yumla

The other string on Dan’s increasingly long bow is Yumla. Dan set up this bar on the western boundary of Lan Kwai Fong in Hong Kong’s Central district in 2003. With its changing painted façade, refusal to charge an entry fee, and six-nights-a-week music roster covering the entire range of electronic music, Yumla has become the venue of choice for Hong Kong’s underground music community. The motto that greets everyone who walks in the door is beautifully simple: Tunes. Booze. People.

Dan has recently introduced the ‘Yumla knows:’ series of nights, which allows only those producers whose tracks are already being regularly spun by the Yumla resident deejays to headline. To date Yumla knows: has featured Martin Eyrer, Dean Muhsin, Tom Clark, Danton Eeprom and Frank Monoroom.

‘I set that place up to relax,’ Dan says, ‘I book all the DJs, kick-started quite a few careers, and arrange the schedule of events. It's cool having passionate DJs, a proper PA system and decent crowd to test drive new mixes with. In that regard I have my own personal dance-floor bolted onto the studio!’

Future

The futures of Dan F, Disuye Records and Yumla are tightly interwoven. With none of these enterprises being remotely commercial, yet with each holding its own in an increasingly commercial and cluttered world, where does Dan see these ventures heading?

‘I think the future, at least for people at my level, will require a direct connection between communicative artists and a supportive audience. We need our own shop-fronts selling our own music and merchandise, directly to the audience. As for Yumla, we have great management, incredibly talented DJs and a fantastic crowd of supporters, so unless our running costs skyrocket out of control, we will be around for as long as people want us.’

The release of Rendition marks the beginning of a busy back half of 2008 for Dan F and Disuye. Digging through old hard drives recently, Dan has uncovered 10 tracks that didn’t see a release for a range of reasons. There’s a soon-to-be-released remix for AMB on Chi Recordings and several remixes from Rendition.

Dan has already started working on his next full-length album. With Rendition as a guide, the next one should be even more amazing.

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Massive respect to Dan for giving so much of his time to me. After all, I was only some bloke who made contact on myspace to ask about the origins of a slide sample.

The self loathing post

Difficult to put a point on where to from here. I'm nearly 31 an have absolutely no idea what I am doing with my life, nor what I should do to find out. I've done quite a few things, think that I have goals more lofty than most, yet am covered in an apathy that sees me behaving like the suburban masses I think I dislike so much. 'There is nothing more common in this world, than unsuccessful men with talent.' Who was that, Tennyson? I make money, and that's about it. But then, you can be a talentless muppet in 2008 and make money. There's nothing hard about that. Just turn up and punch in. Book hours to overheads and kick back. Log on and read email. Check the sports results on the BBC and wonder about what's happening next weekend. Output? What is output?

Seems like the self loathing comes after weekends spent drinking pish. So why don't I fucking stop it and try to achieve something. Use that apparent store of willpower. Kick a few goals. Get some runs on the board. Stake a claim. Mark out some territory.

Yeah, why not.