INTERVIEW: Luke Slater (Part 1 of 2)
- Krisjanis Gale
Consumable Online had the opportunity to interview Luke Slater recently while in New York City prior to the release of his latest album, Wireless (Mute). Here's some of the excerpts of that interview:
Consumable Online: How'd your career in music begin? Not the industry-bio, but the real truth.
Luke Slater: I can't even remember what the biography said; I'll be absolutely honest with you. It was just love of music. I know it sounds a bit cliche, but, even when I was just a small kid, I was into music in a strange way. I used to do some weird shit. I wasn't really a "hanging out with people" sort of a kid.
CO: So you were in a basement with an 808 getting freaky with a tape loop, and what not.
LS: What happened was we had this piano in my house and I used to have piano lessons when I was a kid, and I got really bored of those lessons. I don't know what it is, but in England, it's becoming like a ritual for kids to have piano lessons. So it slightly tipped my mind about piano lessons.
When I got to a certain age, I started thinking: "Well, why am I doing this? I don't really want to learn these pieces of music; I don't really like what I'm playing." I started doing this thing, where I'd take the piano apart. And, my dad had this like old reel to reel. It's really old, and, when you recorded on it, it sounded really kind of warbly.
CO: When you played it, it had this kind of cheap flanging in there.
LS: Yeah, exactly. So I used to take the piano apart and sort of detune - there's three strings for each note - some of the strings. So you get a real fat sort of honky tonk sound. I used to like to record that, and overdub it with any old shit. That's how I grew up.
CO: When did you get the first drum machine? The old beat up 808.
LS: The 808, alright. I was in a band when I was 13. I was the drummer. I don't know why I was doing it, actually. But what I do remember was the keyboardist had an 808 - and a Prophet V synth. We were at one of these band practices, and he didn't come. So I had to use 808 for the drums, and I played bits on the synth. He just never turned up to get his gear, and I've still got his 808. That was a change; that was around the same time when electro came to England, and it totally changed my life.
CO: What factors, at that time, shaped your unique style? And what were, and still are, you major influences from the early electro period?
LS: When I first heard electro in England, it was the first type of music, that was dance music that wasn't a song. It had to do with rhythm, and noise. It wasn't pop music. There wasn't anything like it at the time. You had stuff like Northern Soul, but that was still soul; it wasn't electronic
When I heard electronic music, that was it. And I haven't changed, at all, since then. Those factors that I liked about electronic music, is why I'm doing it now.
CO: Which artists did you listen to in the beginning?
LS: If I really had to get it down, it would probably be Captain Rock and Pacman.
Captain Rock was an electro thing. It was two brothers, called the Elene brothers on a label called NIA, from New York. They wrote tons of shit, under different names. And this is where I got into this thing that made people release stuff; the same people, creating different psuedonyms for what they were doing. They were just putting out tracks, but the Elene brothers, did tons of shit. And it's only later on, you realize just how much they'd done. And people like Marly Marl. He's one of the original hip hop dudes, man. His beats were so raw, unproduced, and rough. It's brilliant. It's people like that.
CO: Of all places, living in Horley, how did you hear the sounds of Chicago and Detroit?
LS: It was about 1987 and we were going to go meet this bloke down in a club in London, who was setting up a label. We wanted to put stuff out; it was a club called the Sound Shaft which was mixed with a gay club called Heaven.
We walked in there and there was this DJ in there, whose name was Steve Bell; it wasn't actually a gay night, I think it was a mixed / gay night. He was mixing records; it was cool, man. I thought "That would be me." So I made some [mix tapes], gave it to the blokes around the club, and I ended up playing down there every week for a year.
You see, at that time, there were so many clubs with DJ's, who were talking between the records. There was a lot of kind of Luther Vandross shit going about, and that kind of soul stuff. It was a bit like "Okay, everybody - the next one's coming up here, and I hope you enjoy it." It was all a bit like that, flashy and nice. I just couldn't stand it.
CO: And that was around the time you released Freebase.
LS: Yeah, with Al Sage.
CO: What other aliases have you recorded under?
LS: Planetary Assault Systems, Deputy Dog, Morganistic, 7th Plain and Clementine.
CO: When did you finally decide, and why, to start recording under your own name?
LS: Because it was the right time. All the time I thought "I'll use my name when it feels right..." I didn't really want to start off just doing one thing in the beginning; I was doing so much stuff, for so many labels - DJAX, Peace Frog, and GPR - all at the same time. And the only way to do it was to use different names. Because a label takes the name, and you can't use it, for a certain amount of time. So that was a way around it.
But now it feels right. It's a different ballgame, what we're doing with my name; everything that comes out on Novamute is what we're doing live.
CO: So basically you wanted to have as many names as possible, and experiment the hell out of...what it was you were trying to do. But now you feel like you've arrived at a point where you can safely produce, under your own name.
LS: Yeah. I can do anything I want to. We just wanted to put out a lot of records, because there was nothing out there, especially in Britain. When we started in Britain, getting our records sold and played, was the hardest thing in the world - because (in England) the media used to be so kind of silky and smooth.
We were coming out with all the hard stuff and everything, and it was a bit odd to hear stuff like that, but we didn't care. We were making records to play in clubs, for me to play, and the clubs were happening. That's what it's about. It's just about putting out records and then playing them out.
CO: In your own words, describe your style of music...
LS: Electro-tech; I mean, what we did with Wireless is electro, with bits of rock, and hip-hop - like street beats mixed together with soul. I wanted to take the attitude from some of the early electro, because the early electro was big music. I really wanted to bring back that kind of that large sound and do something different with it. We wanted to do something we could do live, that was powerful.
Part 2 of this interview will appear in the next issue of Consumable.
