Electracoustic: Jazz Funk Jamming Remixed for Clubs

London based Canadian Greg Mihalcheon, is the brains behind Electracoustic, a project which combines live musicians improvising at free-for-all jams sessions over prerecorded club friendly dance floor beats. Mihalcheon, who came to London to study his first occupation architecture, started his musical project in 1999 and now three years on is preparing to release an album of remixed jam sessions in the New Year. Producers already involved include Kerri Chandler, Blaze and Meat Katie for a project that's both imaginative if a little complicated. As Skrufff's Jonty Adderley found out when he met Greg in a Fitzrovia pub recently on a chilly London afternoon,


Skrufff (Jonty Adderley): Your press release starts by describing your 'label agenda'…


Electracoustic: "And didn't the press pack explain the word agenda- (sighing). The agenda is to try to take good quality live music and put it into a format that's accessible to the club mentality. We're looking for good riffs, and talented musicians who can play this music live, which shouldn't come as a shock to music lovers, but I think there's a large group of people that don't even know the difference between a bass guitar and a sax line. They just think that all music comes from samplers or synthesizers played by some producer working in his bedroom and that's not what it's all about or has to be about. What Electracoustic aims to do is to combine the club friendly dance music DJ vibe of music, with a live element that changes and leaves half of the production up to chance.

But getting back to the agenda, it's to continue to incorporate different beats vibes into live musicians performing, whether that has a jazz focus or whether you start to pepper it with a punk guitarist here or a country banjo there. The founding idea is to combine the beat-friendly production values of studio work with something which is a live spectacle, and always changing, then to bring together as many different types of beats producers as possible and to introduce them to audiences who otherwise wouldn't be friendly to their kind of sounds. It's about the soundclash, ie a combination that people wouldn't expect, whether that's a banjo with a double bass or something else."

Skrufff: So you're producing the beats initially, then introducing the musicians-

Electracoustic: "We're producing the beats beforehand, then either we let the musicians hear them before or sometimes not- it may be a completely live jam. The beats provide a certain bpm (tempo) and a tinge which will determine whether it's a harder edged track or a happier edged one. The beats initially are no more important than the click of a metronome. They just mean we can synch whatever music comes out to a regular beat. We also have live drummers and percussionists on top of the beat track."

Skrufff: So you're role is in deciding which musicians you use and what the beat is-

Electracoustic: "Exactly, like a beats curator. I've got to preselect certain elements to make sure everybody can gel together and are also prepared enough to know what they're doing."

Skrufff: How long have you been working on this idea-

Electracoustic: "We've been refining the science for the past two years to see what works best. Doing something live means there's always a certain amount of spill so you need certain fallback scenarios in place if things don't work out."

Skrufff: What brought you to London initially-

Electracoustic: "I initially trained as an architect, here in London. I was trained to think about buildings in a macrocosmic and microcosmic way, the macrocosm being the actual structure of the building and the microcosm being how each individual room would function. So when I got into music production really by chance, I realised that you could view an album in the same way, the album being the building and the tracks the rooms. I was also familiar with computers from having used them extensively in architecture. So when it c Tags

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