Phil K: Techno for girls!?

[obby]

Thought I would share this article with my fellow BreakBeat Heads!

..:: Phil K: Techno for girls!? ::..

: Sunday, 11 September 2005

: Written by Andrew Greenwood

Breaks DJ/Producer Phil K looks a little frustrated. We're sitting backstage behind the East Coast tent at Glastonbury 2005, having just come from the other side of the Dance Zone where he played an hour Breaks set on the Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, outside of the crazy Lost Vagueness zone at the world's greatest music festival, trying something different such as dishing out a history lesson onto an unsuspecting crowd doesn't receive well, as the Australian born DJ found out the hard way.

"Today, I made a goal to play a set from 1984 - I thought it was kind of funny to try to see people breakdancing in the mud, but it didn't happen. I think a lot of people completely missed the point. I was playing on a breaks stage and my whole approach was well this music had to come from somewhere - for me, it came from break dancing music. That's where I know about breakbeat so I just thought well fuck it I want to play the records that made me like breakbeat. I haven't mixed those records for 20 years and it was kinda funny trying to do it all with the new technology."

But it's by being different that Phil K has carved his reputation as one of the most technically skilled DJs in the business. The 36 year old Melbourne native has lived through massive innovations in dance music in terms of technology, and when talking to him it becomes clear very early on that after 2 decades in the business it's that constant technological innovation that drives him after 20 years. Currently he's a global ambassador for Pioneer proDJ, and between the "running around DJing, making records and travelling", also does DVD workshops showcasing the DVDJ X1 DVD turntable, including at the June 2005 instalment of Sonar in Barcelona, Spain.

"Sonar was amazing - there I ran a DVD workshop on the Friday, taking people through the ins and outs of DVD DJing, then Saturday I played. The room was an auditorium and people came and sat down, the whole room to start with - but by the end of the set most people were up and dancing so it really worked and at the end of the day, that's what I do - I make people dance."

The release of the X1 has taken DJing to a new level. Phil uses it by making his own film clips and then editing the visuals, syncing them to particular tracks before burning them to DVD. When the DVD is played on the X1, there's an array of digital effects that can be used to manipulate what's being broadcast in a very similar way to how you'd use a CDJ. "It's still quite limiting in terms of my selection", he says. "At the moment as I've only got 30 or 40 film clips that I can choose from. But it's getting easier and easier to create and it's a project that I want to do once a year, spending maybe 10 months of the year on touring and just visuals for 2 months, and make it a thing in the future."

I asked Phil what kind of sound he's adding to those visuals and his sets in general at the moment. The answer, it would seem, is - no one really knows. "I had one guy who works for a pretty big record company and all he does it trainspot - that's his job - and he came and saw me a few weeks ago and then I bumped into him the following week at Sonar. He's like 'Dude, what the fuck do you call the music you play?' and I'm like 'I dunno what do you call it?' and he's like "I dunno, that's why I'm asking you" ...and I say 'I dunno - maybe techno for girls!' It's breakbeat influence but doesn't necessarily have to be breakbeat. Sorta breaky house music with really dirty digital shit going on -it's whatever I like at a given moment."

Whatever he's playing, after 2 decades of pushing the boundaries, he shows no sign of hanging up the headphones. Ask him to talk a little about technology in dance music, and you might have some difficulty getting him to stop as he can get a little Zen. It's clearly something that keeps him awake at night.

"Last night I was going to bed and thinking crazy stuff about where DJing is going and if I have two FX units plugged in what I can do; Being able to set feedback loops and record into the loops and having a second FX unit to create a resonance for that feedback loop, you know running that feedback loop as a live loop and then having the second FX unit running that loop and seeing whether they would sync."

Yes, I thought. Exactly.

"I don't know whether that should work but that's what drives me. All that kind of stuff, having all of these ideas and going "fuck, can I do that?" and what does that mean? Does that mean I'm DJing? Does that mean I'm… well that's what drives me, That's what keeps it exciting. I think one day we'll get to a point where what we understand as DJing right now won't be that, it will be something like…you'll be playing pieces of records and mixing your own stuff and there will never be one recording coming out. You can already do it with programs like Ableton but I think the art form of DJing and actually grasping the technology and taking it to its fullest - I don't think (right now) many people are taking it to that level, but it will happen and that will be DJing."

It should come as no surprise then, his response when I asked him what we can expect on the forthcoming Global Underground album, a project with Luke Chable under the moniker LoStep, due out later this year. "Loads of weird stuff", he says. "It's different time signatures, ambient stuff, there's no real pattern to it, it's not we're going to make an album of this or that, you just go in and do stupid things and see what happens."

The album has been in the pipeline for some time, with the pair spending many months trying to get it completed while fitting around Phil's hectic tour schedule. I pushed him on when we could expect the final brush strokes to be in place, but despite it being scheduled for release in the second half of 2005, he's a little cagey.

"We've got a bunch of records we've been working on for ages and most of them are one hook away from being done, but it's that final brush stroke that you can never really be happy with. I'll know when it's done, it's just what colour do you put there…and its really difficult when you're looking for a hook and they've all been done and you not only just want to make a new melody, but you want to make it in a different way so the listener says what the fuck is that? And to me that's the hardest thing to do, to find something that's hooky and at the same time fucked up."

Whatever it sounds like, it's a safe bet you'll hear that same ol' Phil K sound on the Album - in other words, expect the unexpected.

Phil K's Global Underground album is due out, we hope, sometime before the end of 2005.

[dpreston]

fuck yeah

[marcodavalos]

Good stuff Obby.

.