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Martyn Interview

Wednesday 7th December 2011 | Osh

 

“I think major cities have very good club scenes and crowds and stuff, it's when you get to places like I don't know Charlotte, North Carolina that it gets a bit more difficult. It's nice though, it kinda feels like soldiering in a way, spreading the gospel of electronic music...”

We caught up with electronic musician Martyn to talk about his new album ‘Ghost People’, his views on the Dubstep scene and who he would invite to his desert island.

Hi, this is Dan, a soldier for The Guestlist Network, and we are sitting here with Martyn. How have you been?
Pretty busy. Lots of talking and meetings and all that, so that always happens when I get to London. You know I'm just really really busy, running around and seeing everyone and y’know, it’s good.

How’s your Summer been?
Very busy! Yeah I played festivals quite a lot, so its a lot of flying as well because I live in the States, so I do fly back and forth between Europe and the States quite a lot now.

How is your music received in the US?
I guess um, I, it’s quite different you know, the US is a very different place musically, its primarily sort of a rock and hip hop culture I think and it’s less about dance music, so you know it takes quite a lot of time so sort of convince people to listen to electronic music I think, but then again you know the cities are really really big, so even if you were in a city like New York or Chicago or whatever there is always going to be a decent crowd for whatever you do even if it is very niche y'know, so um, so yeah I think major cities have very good club scenes and crowds and stuff, it's when you get to places like I don't know Charlotte, North Carolina that it gets a bit more difficult, y'know. It's nice though, it kinda feels like soldiering in a way, spreading the gospel of electronic music and just going to all these places and sometimes you just have a crowd of 10 and sometimes you have a crowd of 1000 y'know, it's very different.

I imagine sometimes it could feel quite special, you could blow their minds sometimes for people that have never heard this kind of music.
It's fun. I mean it's hard work but the thing also about America is that the crowd is very appreciative for you coming out there and playing for them y'know, it's what you hear about bands all the time as well where they say you have to do at least 2 or 3 tours in America and play all these little cities y'know to become known and I guess people are not really reading music magazines all that much and they just wanna see you play in the flesh and that's when they appreciate it and that's when they become fans, so there are a lot of true heads in the US. It's good.

So, what was your last gig?
Um, the last time I played, Hamburg, Germany. That was last Sunday because I played Ghent on Friday, then Cable here, on Saturday.

And you're playing Boiler Room tonight. Do you know much about The Boiler Room?
Um, I've known one of the guys for quite a while cause he used to work for Gilles Peterson at Worldwide and Brownswood, so yeah we've always been in touch and it's basically between internet and kind of a real gig, y'know like a live thing and a gig and it'll be interesting..

We have quite a good line up, so it's me, Jon Convex-who is also on my label, Dbridge who is an old friend and then Kode 9 who is also a good friend as well, so it's kind of an old man night tonight because they are all a bit older haha, but it'll be good.

I think a lot of our watchers will be watching definitely
Yep yep, it's been doing really really good, they have thousands of people tuning in live and watching the archives and things like that, we've also invited lots and lots of people as well to the club so that we at  least have some sort of club vibe while we are doing our thing so you are not literally playing live for a little camera y'know. It's nice to have a few people at least watching you or listening. It makes it a bit better.  


So, we are going to talk about 'Dubstep'. You are kind of regarded as one of the figures in the Dubstep explosion. What do you think of the scene right now and where are you at?
I'm not in Dubstep! Haha. It's very very weird. Um, obviously, y'know when Dubstep started I thought it was a very inspirational thing. When I first encountered the music which is usually like all the early Burial stuff and Kode 9 and Digital Mystikz and you know South London. For me that was a really sort of inspirational time and I was playing loads of Drum and Bass and some House and some Techno, this is clearly sort of a new thing and I was just inspired by it and I never really considered myself a real Dubstep artist, I just took my influences from all over the place basically and just made my sort of take on it y'know. So I wouldn't necessarily regard me as one of the main founders or anything, there are other people here, especially in London that are much more founding fathers of Dubstep than I am, you know. I'm grateful to them for what they have done. Now Dubstep has blown up and has become a very big genre and it has also changed quite drastically in a musical way, I mean, especially in the States as well, it's so popular, it's like some sort of new rave music y'know. You just see a lot of new people coming in and taking a lot of credit for music they probably didn’t even hear about 2 years ago. So, it's very strange, I just try, I mean, I wouldn't say I would distance myself from it but I think if you listen to the music that I do it just speaks clear enough that it hasen't got that much to do with that sort of popular Dubstep sound, so um, so yeah I just kind of let the music do the talking for me I guess and um I must say that y'know there are a few people like Magnetic Man are sort of truly deserving the hype and the attention I think because they were there in the very very beginning, at least Skream, Benga and Artwork were there back in 2005 when the name 'Dubstep' wasn't even there. So for them it is fully deserved I think.

Where are you at with your music right now. When you are Dj'ing, what are you playing and what are you liking?

Um, well, I kind of grew up on House and Techno and I think all my music, even when people were calling it Dubstep, I still kinda found it sort of Techno, so I think in my DJ sets that’s also where I kind of draw from, sometimes it's older tracks and, yeah, there's a lot of interesting new things going on at the moment you know, there's what they call 'Bass Music' I guess that's the new hip thing.
I do like the fascination with people going back to computers and keeping it stripped down, percussive, you know like UK Funky was another thing, the people left from that group are making some really interesting stuff, so I mean, a lot of it is London based but I also just play a lot of straight up House and Techno and even some sort of Pop-y nu-wave-y stuff, just lots of different things, it becomes more and more interesting for me just because now that the tempo is going down a little bit in UK music, you can actually mix it a lot easier with older House tracks or, so now I can just play anything between 120bpm and 130bpm.

So, a bit more freedom?
You have so much more range now, you have 15 to 20 years of dance music at your disposal now, so um, so it's good to sort of start digging for old records again and then trying to find an odd bit that noone has and, which is kind of what I always liked about DJ'ing anyway!

You have a new single out 'Mask/Viper', is this a taster before your new album?
I think it shows the direction of where I am going. It's sort of fall-to-the-floor-y but it still has my sort of organic sounding, sample-based sound and things like that. I think it's quite a good precursor to the album.

So, your new album, let's talk about it, what's going on?
It's called 'Ghost People', my second album, which was kind of interesting because I remember I had a lot of fun with the first album just because you know the first time you do an album you can kind of put everything on the table that you have got and sort of, you know, show people what you are about. Obviously once you have done that you cant just do that every time so for the second album it took quite a while to find a sort of a direction that I wanted to take, so it was a lot of hard work but um, I'm really quite happy with the result and every time I listen to it now and also hear other people's feedback it seems that people are enjoying it and yeah, so it's good. I wouldn't really know how to describe it all that well I mean, it's obviously sort of from a four-to-the-floor era I guess, but it still sounds like me.

The Martyn sound.
Whatever that is! Ha ha.

You're releasing this one as well as the single on 'Brainfeeder Records'. Brainfeeder was founded by Flying Lotus and has artists such as Teebs, Gaslamp Killer. Why did you choose Brainfeeder?
It wasn't really a choice, but um, I released the first one on my own label and um, we had a lot of fun with that but um, the time I spent making the actual music and the time I spent trying to get it out there and promoting it and you know, being the label manager basically, was about the same, so it was a couple of months for the music and a couple of months promoting. It was a good experience, I may do it again sometime, but for this one I was thinking there are people who better at promoting stuff than I am, better at organising stuff than I am because I'm really not that much of an organiser, so I do like making music, performing and stuff, but label managing is very different job. The thing for the second album was to get some more experienced people in to do it and I was in touch with Flying Lotus for quite a while, we've been friends for quite a while and he was like 'Well, if you do it on your own label that's cool but if you wanna do it on someone else’s label then you should do it on Brainfeeder' and um yeah, I mean I felt comfortable, I still feel comfortable with them and they kind of let me do what I do best and they take care of the rest which is very nice. You get a lot of input and feedback from them so it's a good experience so far.

Alright. So we've talked about Brainfeeder, let's talk about 3024, a record label startedd with you and fellow friend Erosie. How did that come about?
Wow! That goes back a looonng looonng time. Well we are both from Eindhoven, in the south of The Netherlands, I don't know, how did we meet? I don't even remember?! It's been a while but um, we've started working together I think in 2001 where I was promoting nights, Drum and Bass nights and um, we needed someone to design flyers, so I knew Erosie before that though, you know like via-with-via with friends, mutual friends and stuff and we used to hang out at the same sort of spaces, clubs and things, but you know he was a proper sort of graffiti street art guy and I just DJ'ed. I guess that flyer thing was the thing that connected us in a professional way, he has done flyers for me for a long time and then when I started the label we were like 'Well, we are so on sort of the same wavelength in a way; him in a graphic way and me in a musical way. You know when we talked about making your own thing out of all of your , I guess that's exactly the same what he does, you know, just in a visual way. So we were like 'Yeah! We should hook up and do something together', so we started the 3024 label, um, which is 3024 because it is the Zip code in Rotterdam because I was living in Rotterdam and he lived in Rotterdam for a long time too. So it's kind of like parallel lives in a way and we have been doing this since forever.
Erosie: I think the thing about the Rotterdam thing is that that was the time, the period that both of our lives kind of changed. It was kind of like a milestone.
I think from a reversed point of view it becomes more clear to me like the past half year is that it is exactly the fact that you simply don’t want to stick in one thing only, in a way you just say you want to this and this and this. So because of that, you keep a certain freedom of like, a way of working and also freedom of a mindset. I think this something we share although we do completely different things. I'm absolutely not musical.
Martyn: I'm not very graphical! Ha Ha! I've tried sketching, and I scanned the sketchers for the first album and Erosie was laughing so hard!   
Erosie: To me,  I think it's not the most important thing, you don’t need to pin down what you are doing. Everybody feels this need to pin things down immediately. I think it's like an internet thing. It's something like from the past 5 or 10 years. There's this period when something stays fresh because it doesn’t have a name. The problem is once you've named it, it suddenly gets a different crowd, which is good but also bad because it changes what it was. It can remove a certain feeling. I think it is like you were talking about the Dubtep thing, a perfect example you know, because it was really nice before it had a name!
Martyn: Dubstep, it's BPM, the beat should go like, the bassline should go like that, it's supposed to sound like that.   

You only have to look at a YouTube video of one of Martyn's tracks and you see people squabbling.
Yeah yeah, but I enjoy that! I enjoy people discussing or people being puzzled by it, and it is good because it kind of tickles your brain, it's supposed to be music that you like you know or enjoy, but it's also supposed to be music that makes you think a little bit or starts making you look for other stuff. That's also a good thing, if people are inspired by what they hear and makes them wanna know more about techno or all these old guys in Detroit.

Like a reference.
People need to search for music because it's one of the most fun things you can do, when you have no clue where you are going. You just keep discovering new stuff.   
 
So, what's your tour schedule looking like for the rest of the Summer?
Horrific! I just try not to look at it! Ha Ha! It’s actually, it’s not that bad. This Summer I have been doing live shows aswell as DJ’ing, so for a lot of the festivals in the Summer I just play live, so for me that’s kind of new, it’s quite inspiring and it’s also kind of stressful because you know you have all this equipment, and you have to rely on the equipment a lot more I think than regular DJ’ing, so everytime I play I’m like ‘DON’T CRASH!’ and just make sure everything works since I’m not super experienced in it you know a lot of things go wrong still, but um, it’s good you know, it’s sort of like trial and error and musically it’s a lot of fun. I think the first couple of gigs were good but a little bit stiff, you know, but now I’m getting better, I’m flexible with it, I’m more confident with the equipment, obviously I know my own music so I can improvise parts. Before I kind of held on to the structure of the original songs and now I just use loops and sort of re-arrange them on the fly, sometimes I drag it out 10 minutes if I like it and if I don’t see that it’s working I can switch to the next one, or mix stuff up, so now, I don’t know, my live sets are kind of like you hear beats from one song and a melody from another and lots of lazers on the top, Ha Ha, lots of bass and we’ll see where it ends! Yeah, it’s quite freestyle, it’s good.

Here’s a scenario, you’re exiled to a desert island..
I would swim really quick back to home!

There are sharks swimming round the island!
I would beat them!

You’re only allowed to bring 3 people. Who would they be?
3 people? My wife, Miles Davis...

You need to have a bit of balance now, Miles Davis might send you crazy!
That’s not a bad thing! Are there drugs on the island?

There may be Martyn. We don’t know what grows there.
Johan Cruijf I would get him! Yes! Erosie can go on the next island!

Do you know Johan Cruijf? The best Dutch football player ever, like he was big in the 70s and stuff. In Holland he is also a philosopher I would say. He is like a tv pundit. He’s just funny! He has things that he says that are called Cruijf-sms. Funny quotes!

Lastly, if you were invisible for the day, what would you do?
That’s a difficult one. What would I do if I was invisible? I don’t think I would do much else than what I usually do. I like what I do everyday already. I don’t think being invisible would make it all that different. I don’t think I need that superpower!

Martyn’s second album ‘Ghost People’ is out on the 3rd of October on Brainfeeder Records

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