How's Seattle this time of year?
It's quite nice, thanks. Grey, cold, wet...finally! Summer was really getting me down.
Yeah! And it's chicken season! My favorite time of year, really.
What got you both into electronic dance music? Any particular DJ or record that really struck you in particular?
It was a Church of Ecxstasy track..must've been 1993. We heard that and it freaked us both out.
And that's pretty much how it was for us in the early days - huge hoover-filled rave anthems. Not this wet-panty crap that Detroit was doing.
Strictly low-brow. "James Brown is Dead" and all T99 songs were a pretty
major influence for us, if that gives you any idea.
How did you two meet up and begin working together?
That's a good question. We met in high-school, or junior-high, and then
Dave moved to hick-town desert-land in Arizona and got all weird.
Whatever.
Then he came back and we eventually started mucking about with my Roland Juno-1 and his guitar. He brought Skinny Puppy and The Orb back from Arizona with him, which we both ended up really getting into.
Our early stuff was pretty industrial in the pre-rave anthem days.
What sparked you both to get into production?
Yeah, like we said - we just started messing around with shit and kept messing around with it. We eventually added a drum machine, then a turntable, a multi-track, sampler...
...and so on. Before we got the multi-track we used to bounce down from one tape deck to another, recording drums or synth parts or whatever along with it. We'd bounce down maybe 12 levels by the time a song was done.
It sounded GREAT, let me tell you.
Hell yeah it did! Once you get 12 layers of tape hiss it really starts taking you on a magical journey...just the hiss alone!
Where did you come up the name Jacob London? That isn't a reference to Jack London, is it?
Jack who? Which movie was he in again? No, actually Jacob London is a local entertainment lawyer here in Seattle. He used to take out ads in the back of our weekly independant paper...we just thought his name was cool.
We're going to hire him when we need a lawyer. Just for the sheer comedy value.
He could be a totally crap lawyer for all we know! But it's funny, and that's all that matters.
Whatever happened to Vitus Dance, your previous name?
Why do people always ask us about this? Why do they even KNOW about that?
[ Ed. note: Uhhh...because its on your epitonic.com page Dave. ]
There's no reason anybody needs to know about that. Stop asking us this.
What drove you to start up Squid records?
Well, our good friend Jon Lemmon offered to do a P&D style deal with us and give us our own label, which was an off-shoot of his label, Viva Recordings.
Where has Squid been lately?
Well, even if you have Jon Lemmon doing all the hard work for you it's still a lot of work running a label. It's not so important to have our own label anymore at this point.
We'd much rather just make music and have other people put it out for us. Oh, and pay us too. We're just in it for the money after all.
Also, Viva and the sub-labels were taking a breather for a little bit while the economy was busy flushing itself down the toilet. Now that the dust has settled a little Jon is ready to push Viva to the front again, so maybe that will bring a new squid release as well!
Clearly you're fans of sampling, especially on recent releases. How much time do you spend digging for samples? What's your favorite sample digging story?
Oh yes - sampling. Well, this one time...we heard a really cool 80's song on the radio. Then, we went online and searched for a bit of the lyrics I remembered, and once we figured out what the song was we downloaded it from the Internet.
Yeah! Then we sampled it! That was really cool.
I also hear a distinct Akufen and Todd Edwards influence in your work of late, that technique of lots of short, stacatto, detuned samples - was this on purpose or did you just find yourself doing similar things?
It was fairly accidental. We had heard a few of Todd's productions and were
really blown away by them, and we have always really been into Herbert's
stuff, especially the early Wishmountain records. We had always had a pretty cut n
paste sampling ethic, so it was a natural progression.
Funny thing actually - we had never even heard of Akufen until his Perlon
2x12" release. One afternoon I had this great original idea to do a Todd
Edwards style thing, but totally freak it out and just sample as many random
things as possible and throw them all in one track. Then, I went record
shopping that night and heard the Akufen record. I was SO pissed!
Mm-hm. You don't have to lie, man.
Shut up!
What gear and software are you using for production?
We've been using Fruity Loops!
FLStudio dammit!
- oh, right. Sorry. We've been using FLStudio for the past year or two,
of course along with a large array of VST plug-ins. NI Battery is our best friend.
If we ONLY had FL and Battery we'd be just fine. They're that good
together.
How does your creative process work? How do you approach writing a
track?
How much time does it usually take you?
We used to have a great space where our studio was, but since we lost
that
we've been working together separately a lot. We'll work on tracks
idividually
at our respective homes and then when we get stuck we'll swap them over.
That's one great thing about working with software.
We've got a really great system that's come out of the whole situation
now
actually. We can get a lot more done since we're each working on a different
track at the same time.
It normally takes us between 2-4 weeks to finish a track or a remix,
depending on how unruly our trained monkeys are being at the time. They're
learning.
Do you use a musical approach, or is it more textural?
It really depends on the song. Overall I'd have to go with textural, but
it varies.
We've been trying to find a good balance between the two. House music
starts to get pretty wanky when you drift too far to either side, in our
opinion.
If we're going to really push the genre it's going to have to be more
musical, but not in the way most people make house musical. Sax solos and
Rhodes parts have got to go.
Haven't most of our recent records had a lot of Rhodes in them?
Um...uh, hey! Look over there!
How you see your production changing in the future?
Our big long-term goal now is to take house music to a place where we
are
producing albums that people want to actually listen to. Unique, interesting
vocals. Respectable track-lengths. Pop music, basically.
Matmos has come really close, but they're more "out there" than what we
have in mind I think.
Basement Jaxx is doing it.
Yeah...but then they're a little too heavy on the party vibe. It needs
to
be somewhere in the middle.
What roles do each of you play in production? Are they distinct, or do
you
both switch off in the engineering role?
This is that "system" we mentioned earlier. We've found that my
strengths
really are in rocking the 8-bar loop in the beginning and nailing down all
the initial elements. Then I'll pass it off to Dave once I feel everything
is "good enough", and he arranges it out into a track. I'm the "element"
guy and he's the "arrangement" guy.
Of course it's not black and white like that, but that's generally how
it
goes. Each project is different. We can both hold our own across the whole
process just fine, but usually the tracks that we both have equal parts in
turn out to be the best.
And when we find time to actually both work on one song at the same
time,
something special usually happens.
Something special usually happens after I eat Mexican food for lunch
too...but that's different.
I've never seen a Jacob London DJ gig. Have you been playing out a lot
lately?
We've pretty much been Seattle-exclusive until recently. We play out
pretty
regularly here in town, though. We have a monthly residency at Bonzai, a
really nice little Japanese club/bar/restaraunt.
We're playing in Texas this weekend, for Sean Anderson and Merrick
Brown. We're really looking forward to that! Hopefully Texas can handle us.
We might have to hold back a little. For Texas' sake.
Any particular favorite place to play?
Anywhere there's a mostly-packed room of drunk people who just want to
shake their bootys!
Oh, and preferrably where people won't be asking us to play Madonna or
hip-hop.
What releases have you got coming up for late '03 and '04? Anything
that you're particularly excited about? And what about remix work?
Well, let's see...we have a remix of DJ Ali's smash hit 'You Don't Know'
coming out on Classic soon, along with our 2nd EP for them. We did a remix
for Harmonious Dischord, and we're just finishing up a remix of a Rithma
song for Om.
And we can't forget the U-Freqs Halloween special that just came out!
Yeah! Oh, and we also just wrapped up a 12" release for Double Down.
We're
really looking forward to that one. It's probably some of the best work
we've
done in the past year or two. And that one will have a Jason Hodges mix,
which is always a good thing!
There's a big push in electronic dance these days towards hybrid live
performance, something to keep djing fresh and interesting - Final Scratch
is being increasingly adopted by influential people like John Tejada and
David Alvarado. Richie Hawtin is integrating FS and Ableton Live together
with a customized mixer. Any plans in this direction?
Nah, not really. We were talking about working something like that out,
but
we decided that's not really good enough. You're still talking about a guy
turning knobs and checking his e-mail on stage.
People want more out of a performance these days. I'm sure those people
will do some amazing things with those new set-ups, but we have a higher
calling.
Don't wanna go into it TOO much here, but we really want to put together
a band and have everything played 100% live. No sequencers, no DJs, no MP3s.
Until we can go all the way with it, we're fine with just playing records
and
CDs like normal people.
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