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EVENTS
San Proper Interview
RnB/Hip Hop | Wednesday 23rd January 2013 | plana
Fabric 12.1 w/ San Proper, Portable (Live), Trus’me & Jimpster Delusions of Grandeur
Supported by Ricardo Villalobos, Laurent Garnier, Zip and his label Perlon, San Proper is part of a growing number of Dutch DJs who are moving from a local cult status to become an international cause célèbres. San Proper is the real deal. One could describe his story as one of the struggling artist, but if that is true, he has certainly enjoyed the struggle along the way. In 2011 he released his debut album for Rush Hour and frequently collaborates with Ricardo Villalobos exhibiting some of the same eccentric flair for next level sound. This time, San Proper will be taking a break from his extroverted live show to build an imaginative house DJ set suitable to the surroundings of Room One at Fabric. We know San as an ambassador of theAmsterdam electronic scene and together with London’s finest Craig Richards, accompanied with a live-set by Portable, aka Bodycode, who is accessible and idiosyncratic in his live act, bringing to wide influences (born in Africa, living in London and now Berlin) to bear his deep vocal-led productions on Perlon and Spectral Sound.
The remixes San Proper made last summer for labels like 87 records, Soweso records and artists like Belfie, Adil Hiani and Rick Wade have a strong ressemblance to his own work. His signature is prominent. You’ll hear him use his vocals a lot, his percussive ad-libs, the bass-lines and themes set the tone. In his tracks, like on his debut-album “Animal” which he released on Rush Hour records in June 2012 you’ll notice a lot of his field-recordings and cinematic ambiance sounds which he uses because he claims it adds more story to his tracks. In a bar in Dalston, London, he tells me about the different tales and saga’s behind his music. He explains to me why he occasionally prefers to play eclectic sets and emphasizes his love for Disco with a cheeky statement. “Disco is the ‘mama’ of House-music, and i like to date both mother and daughter…”
I meet San Proper for the first time during Mutek.es 2012 in Barcelona. He was invited to play a live-set at Moog, after the success of his first show for Mutek in Montreal 2010. I remember his present personna during the performance, he has an attractive force, very special, some kind of spark that makes him different from the others. His ‘lives’ are funky, experimental, excessive and dangerous, and i have to admit, one of the best i’ve ever seen.
Fabric is worldly renowned for being the best in technical equipment. The best sound and best lights flood the dance floor giving the audiences to feel part of a world made of Techno and House music, with it’s visions which shape the dance culture. Tonight his happens in Room One for sure, in the same booth where a plate of Scott Patterson, founding father of the club Fabric, says “Fabric Heritage. Hardcore, worker, raver, horse lover Scott Patterson lived here”. San Proper is on the best DJ’s to line-up nowadays. In his repertoire i’m hearing Funk-influences, electronics, Jazz, Samba, Techno which all together sound like a whirlpool of proper tunes. It reminds me of tectonic textures and lava, pure sound and raw material.
San Proper promotes his friends and colleagues from his city who are responsible for the ‘Amsterdam-sound’. He talkes about projects as Shoebox, Alphabet and some more Tom Trago, Awanto 3, Melon, Overlast and O-Boogie and tells me that when first started releasing his ‘Proper’s A’dam Family Series’ he felt an urge to make his debut of 12′-inches a collaboration project with these MPC-heads to represent the sound of Amsterdam and the infuence from abroad. He hints about a new project he’s setting up entitled ‘Stiletto’ and praises Heleen Blanken, a good friend, a new VJ-talent who recently produced the visuals “Alpha Century” with Jeff Mills. Proper is obviously impressed with the visuals and tells me what a massive impact it had when he fell in love with the Axis compilation Mills put out in the nineties. The depth and mystique echoes on.
San Proper released his new album entitled “Animal” in June 2012 with Rush Hour ( www.sanproper.com ), an independent label based in Amsterdam since ’97, which has a renowned status with the tracks and albums they released in the last fifteen years.
In his live-shows, San Proper uses guitar, synths, bass and his vocals. Once he’s recording in his studio, he’ll use lots of live-drums and percussion on top of his electronic productions. He explains to me he prefers the combination of drum-computers with organic sounds and tells me on his album his lyrics are about the topics in his life, like a diary. He gives some examples with tracks like “Brain Soup”, which refers to a hangover which feels like someone’s making brain-soup in your skull. He tells us about the girls running around in the corridors of his mind with “a Choice named Joyce” which like “Another Sign” and “Water castles” have an obvious feminine inspiration, like most of the tracks on the album this last example is about women, their tears which he turns into diamonds to seduce them… He has a soulfully distorted mind which presents Proper’s Dusty House Music…”
Lara Pearl interviewed San Proper in Fabric, London, Saturday 12.01.2013
