A quick chat with the dynamic dutchman who’s been quite busy over the past few months. Enjoy.

Brabe – Inner City

Brabe – Inner Time

Flying Lotus – Breathe (Brabe Bootleg)

Brabe – June 09 Mix (Mediafire)

S: Hey Brabe! Welcome to the Squeegie fam. From where are you based?

B: Hey! I’m currently living in Amstelveen, a small and shitty suburb on the southside of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

s: What’s in store for Brabe in the coming months? EPs? Remixes? Tour?

B: I’ve been making quite alot of new stuff the past few months! I’ve made several remixes to appear on Prompt Digital and Electric Sushi, and I did a Crookers remix, which will be released on Man Recordings. I’ve also got some EP’s in various flavours coming up; some weird, typical “Brabey” tracks on ESP, and some more deep house-ish tracks, appearing on Electric Sushi and Urban Torque. I also recently finished a couple of breakcore/minimal tracks that are probably just too weird and fucked up to find a label for, and I’ll be making some co-op stuff together with Robert Boogert soon. After the holidays I’ll be trying to get some more gigs, next year will be a lot less strenuous than the past year has been for me, so I’ll finally be able to focus more on DJ’ing.

S: From your productions, we can easily tell a certain level of finish and quality both technically and musically. What is your musical background and how did it bring you to electronic music?

B: I come from a musical family, with both my parents being classically trained musicians and three older brothers playing a musical instrument as well. I started off playing the violin aged 5, later I switched to viola, and as a teenager I started getting lessons in trumpet and piano as well. I got more and more interested in all kinds of other musical genres in my teen years. Aged 17 I got in touch with the sounds of Dave Taylor & Co. through a Gilles Peterson radio show; up to that point I couldn’t care less about house music, but this was love at first sight. Together with good friend René van Munster, whom I played in a classical orchestra, we started checking out the entire scene around Switch, finally ending up making “fidget house” ourselves.

S: Who/what are your biggest influences?

B: Switch & friends used to be the only reference point I had in house music, so you can still quite clearly hear their stamp in the music I make, I think. The way Akufen incorporated “micro-sampling” in his tracks, cutting up samples that seem completely unrelated to tiny pieces and blending them together into something absolutely beautiful, also has been a great eye-opener for me, as well as how Matthew Herbert ingeniously integrates samples in his music.

S: If you could talk to one person, living or dead, about music, who would it be?

B: Hmm, that’s a though one…first person that comes to mind now is Max Tundra. Guy makes amazing music in a completely unique idiom, and he ventures his opinion on music in a really fresh and direct way, not afraid at all to legitimately bash all kinds of shitty music.

S: Taking from your new EP on Jack Union, I’ve seen your style progress into a more ambient, enveloping style than your earlier “fidget” work. Was it just the overdose of wonky wonk wonk wobwob (a la “Is this Fidget?”) that made the change for you? The Flying Lotus bootleg had me thinking where you were headed musically, is he a big inspiration?

B: Yeah, I have the idea that with a large part of the tracks I’ve made recently, I sort of alienated myself from the ‘fidget’ scene I’m commonly associated with. I noticed the sudden tremendous ammount of ‘fidgety’ tracks clogging up the internets (and the musical poverty that comes with it in many cases) – but I’ve had my share of cliché cut-up vocals, batfuck-insane breakdowns with bombastic rising synths, followed by speaker-ravaging wobbly basslines, so I didn’t really feel I had anything more to add to that particular genre (besides the “Is This Fidget” track). That’s why I wanted to take my music into another direction.
I have great admiration for the music of Flying Lotus, not only does he produce mind-blowing music, but he also manages to keep innovating in every new track he makes, not leaning on some kind of instant-success formula. That’s perhaps one of the most difficult things to succeed in in music, if not in all arts, ’staying fresh’, not just constantly repeating yourself.
I tried sticking as close as possible to the original “Breathe” track on the bootleg I did, but of course it’s miles away from the tremendous quality producing he does – he’s indeed a true inspirator for me.

S: What producers are doing it for you? What are your top five dance tracks right now?

B: My five house-tracks-rocking-my-world now would be:
1. Global Communication – The Way (Secret Ingredients Mix) – timeless classic, if you manage to make a 1-second hook sound awesome for 10 minutes straight, you must be doing something right.
2. Pezzner – Shasta (Master King Reprise Mix) — weird, but funky as hell.
3. Humate – Love Stimulation (Radio Slave’s Panorama Garage Remix) — basically anything Radio Slave, goes without saying.
4. Marc Houle – Investments — currently having a Marc Houle-period, absolutely marvelous producer.
5. Maetrik – Sweet Lovin — at first you go “what the shit?”, but when the bass comes in…wow.

S: As producers ourselves at Squeegie, is there a tip you can give us to help us out in the future for making clean sounding music as you do?

B: Well, what I think of now, I used to put extreme distortion elements over the bassdrum in every track, basically just so it would automatically blow away all other sounds on the four beats in the measure, so that it would give a recognisable 4/4th rhythm (before that my bassdrums used to be either way too soft or overlapping with basslines, so I unintentionally gave people on the dancefloor a hard time actually finding the beat). But recently I stopped doing that and simply oppressed all the other sounds manually, and that really helps sustaining a decent sound quality! Unless you really want that ‘heavy’-ish (but pretty shitty) sound, of course.

Thanks for interviewing me!

Cheers Brabe, hope to have you back up here soon.

posted » July 4th, 2009 by MacGregor
tagged » brabe . crookers . flyinglotus . matthewherbert . maxtundra . renevanmunster . robertboogert . switch