Superstar DJs: Lab4
Author: Hugh Mouser
Sunday, March 10, 2002
What have you been up to recently-
We've been doing a lot of work for our new releases, touring, and we're due to make some music for an ad this week.
Do you do a lot of work for advertisements-
We have done in the past, yeah. A couple of years ago we did an ad for Reebok, with the athlete Florence Griffith-Joyner (Flo-Jo) in it. They went to Underworld and Nine Inch Nails first for the music, but they both messed it up. They wanted fluffy trance, but Nine Inch Nails' track just sounded like a pneumatic drill drilling into a fucking wall! Reebok were going to pay the other two £750,000 for it, but because we were less known they'd only give us £50,000, but still, that would buy us like a whole new studio, you know, so it was great.
On the Fragile website your first album, Neurocide, is described as one of the best techno albums ever. There's definitely a hard techno side to your sound still - how do you describe your music-
Lez: Yeah, I mean that term gets a bit bandied around and watered down. It's not traditional techno in the sense of Jeff Mills. There are actually 2 techno tracks we've recently done. One of them is very dark and a little bit like Jeff Mills, and the other one was a dark one that came out on Fragile 7, I think, called Bitch, and that was around 140 bpm. We want to put them both on the next two albums.
You have a new album due out called Virus. How has your sound progressed from the last album, Evilution, and when is the new CD due to be released-
Lez: That's right. We've got shitloads of tracks, but not all of them will fit on one CD. What we're going to do is in 2 months time release Virus 1, then about 3 months after that release Virus 2, and then we're going to release Virus Mutations at the end of the year. Virus Mutations is going to be remixes of our favourite tracks from the two Virus albums, but not done as four-on-the-floor stuff - it's going to be more like Aphex Twin, maybe a bit more experimental. We'd like to make it more electronic than trance or hard house; and maybe add a really big cinematic ambient remix just to see what sort of avenues we end up in. Also we have some long-term plans about releasing Devilution 2, which will be another collection of back catalogue stuff.
How will the albums be packaged-
Lez: Virus 1 will be a double album because we've got a live CD, like on the previous releases, this time at the Liquid Room. Virus 2 will be a single album, but they will probably be about 60 or 70 minutes long. I think we've got about 2 hours of music to pick through but we love every track. We don't want to drop anything so we thought fuck it, we'll just do Virus 1 and Virus 2, or Strain 1 and Strain 2.
What's been the highpoint of your career so far-
Lez: That's a difficult one. Gigwise, I think the most people we played to was at Dance Valley in Holland. It was on the hard house and trance main stage. We played to more than 25,000 in broad daylight, so that was a bit scary. They had about 100,000 people there and the last DJ was Carl Cox, and he played a fucking wicked set, then Orbital finished off and they were so shit, they got booed off because it was so crap. It was really slow and everyone was expecting at least 140bpm stuff, and they come on with spooky "oooo" stuff for ten minutes! We supported them at the Eclipse festival a few years ago down in Cornwall. It was a pretty cool experience; I was chatting to Orbital and they're loaded. They charge 25 grand a gig, but< Tags