Pako & Fredrick reveal the truth behind 'Magic Shop'
Author: Paul Beynon
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
Recently they released their first 12" single, 'Systematic', and their first artist album, 'Atlantic Icebreakers', on the new GU Music Imprint.
I caught P&F at midday. Fredrick was still waking up, helped along by the sacred first cup of coffee. Pako is more of tea drinker, preferring "plain tea with lots of sugar".
Fredrick got into house music after listening to a 2 hour radio show featuring house and hip hop 12s back in 1986. The first record he bought was Jazzmaster Funk.
He bought a few more records and realised that "This was cool." He kept buying records but being 13 at the time, he was still too young to go out to clubs and hear the music. He was cool with that though because, at the time, he said there wasn't much of a scene anyway.
For Fredrick, the natural step was to buy decks and get into mixing. He finally got out and about at age 16. He checked out some small house parties and the 1 or 2 clubs that were playing house at the time.
At age 14, Pako was listening to the same radio show and was instantly inspired by hip hop music. He later joined the army and music was stripped from his life. When he finally got home from the army in 1992, he was introduced to a new style of music, house.
'92 was the boom year for house in Holland and this was the summer Pako and Fredrick met. On his way home from his first party, Pako was riding home on his bike, he met Fredrick and they've been friends ever since!
"I was walking on the street with a hangover with a mutual friend of ours and somebody came by on a mountain bike. My friend was like 'Hey. Pako!' and we started talking and after that we started going to a lot of the same parties."
The inspiration behind their music is to try to express the individuality of each day. Fredrick described to me a natural process where they write whatever they were in the mood for at the given moment. They wanted to make this individuality more obvious and a long player was the perfect platform.
I have only had a brief listen to Atlantic Icebreakers, but it becomes apparent that a variety of tastes and styles has inspired the music within.
While he agrees that there is too much pigeonholing of music, Fredrick says that it's necessary.
"Without it, things would be chaotic, all over the place."
We talked about this and he agreed that genres are more of a descriptive device than a definition,
"and it makes it much easier when you go shopping for records, it saves you from looking through 500."
In the studio, the boys use Logic audio on an Apple, a B8B Digital 8-Bus and of course, a host of synths and samplers. In their live sets, they remain loyal to one of their favourite Akai MPC Synth series, and they've just scored a new MPC4000.
They don't use laptops when performing live. Fredrick says that he doesn't trust them, for onstage anything can go wrong. Using hardware is a more reliable option, and the hands on aspect of a live show is also more appealing.
The MPC series are a synth/sequencer in one machine which is powerful enough to create a whole tune on - "except that it doesn't sample", says Pako. I asked if they had completed any tunes using only an MPC. They mentioned 3 or 4, but the one that caught my attention was one of my personal favourites, 'Magic Shop'!
The track has a really long intro, and I had to ask why it was so long. Fredrick starts the story.
"At the time we wrote magic shop, we were living in Arnhem. Mushrooms were semi-legal at the time and there used to be this guy that handed out business cards. You could call him and he would bring mushrooms to your house. The night we were writing 'Magic Sho Tags