Fatty Fatty Phonographics has just reissued Daniel Wang and Brennan Green’s jaw dropping remix of Block 16’s ‘Electrokution’, which after a messy gestation via London’s Nuphonic Records, blew our tiny little minds apart when it came out on his Balihu imprint in 2003. It’s also been a favourite of DJ Harvey, I-F and The Unabombers, not to mention nu-school whippersnappers Bicep and Leftside Wobble. We caught up with the man himself to talk about how the record came about,how learning the theremin changed how he thought about music,and lots of other stuff in his past, present and future.

According to the sleeve notes of his suggestively titled EP ‘The Probe, The Strobe’, Daniel Wang began making music ‘out of frustration and love’. The love came from hearing the amazing disco, electro and house classics that fired underground Chicago and New York dancefloors. The frustration came from hearing too many identikit house records that lazily sampled these classics without bringing enough of the love along with them.

Wang set about righting these wrongs 12 inches of loud cut black vinyl at a time, crafting a deeply disco infused left of centre house sound with hypnotic layers of  loops and lifts from those self same classics he had fallen in love with while living in Chicago. In a world of anonymous bedroom producers the text heavy and oh so opinionated record sleeves on his self run Balihu imprint were a cheekily refreshing break from the norm.

 

Wang soon moved to New York  to continue his musical education, holding down a day job at the musical instrument shop Dr.Sound while getting to hear the likes of Tony Humphries, Tee Scott, Francois K and Masters At Work by night.

These New York legends had all picked up on his unique sound, as had up and comers Darshan Jesrani and Morgan Geist of Metro Area.Those two were busy constructing their own unique melting pot of sound, sharing a love of Garage/Loft classics, deep boogie and the raw sounds of early Detroit techno and  Chicago and New Jersey house. Wang shared notes with them and ended up releasing a full LP named ‘Idealism’ on their Environ label in 2001, as well as a smattering of 12 inches.

At the time, few of the prominent house DJ’s in New York picked up on Metro Area, and Wang was disgusted by what he increasingly felt was a closed minded, closed shop. Their records were a cult success in Europe however, and when collected together on their self titled debut album, ‘Atmospherique’ and in particular ‘Miura’ broke through on European dancefloors in a way Wang never had. Suddenly a lot more people were listening in to see what was coming next from these disco dazed New York based producers.

 

By this stage, Wang had been moving away from the sample orgies of his early records and was attempting to use as much of his own musical improvisation as possible. He had been overdubbing self played keyboard parts onto his records since the ‘AfroAsiaTechnubian’ EP in 1995, and now he wanted to step things to the next level by composing his own material from scratch. He had become enamoured with the strange sounds of the theremin while working at Dr. Sound, playing it during DJ sets and liberally spraying it all over on his 2001 Environ EP ‘Nocturnes’.

For those who don’t know, the theremin is “an electronic musical instrument which allows the musician to control two properties of sound: volume (loop antenna) and pitch (rod antenna) and is played without being touched by the musician. It senses the electrical capacitance of the human body in mid air”. Thanks, guy on YouTube. And yes, you read that right – you play it by not touching it! Have a look at the original theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore here to get an idea of this fantastical instrument from outer space -  just watch the intense physical and mental concentration as expressed through her undulating eyebrows…

 “The background to this is that I never had the chance to learn to read and play music in the traditional sense” says Wang. “My mom was a bit hippie liberal but also ignorant; she saw no value in learning music in its own right. As a child I often heard her say (with no irony at all) ‘Black people go to church just to sing and dance, what has that got to do with Christ or spirituality?!

My father loved opera and played trumpet, but he suppressed these hobbies to have a stable job as an engineer. Plus, we moved around a lot and didn’t have much money, so I never got any lessons. When I discovered the theremin in 1998 or so, it was like a late chance in adulthood to recover something. Our sales rep told us that I had probably sold more theremins than any other store salesperson in the USA, and thus, in the world. I was such a nut that I’d explain the physics, and then give our customers a personal lesson, asking them to move their hands and match the notes to a piano tone, and when people realised that it was not this nonsensical unapproachable thing they had imagined, they would shell out the 300 or 400 dollars to buy one…

It sort of became my ‘gimmick’, you could say, but I really did take an intense interest in it and could play it reasonably well sometimes, and I realised that playing this rare instrument live in public would put me one little notch above DJ’s who only played records, and that it would emphasize the emotional and melodic aspect of what I do, compared to most DJ’s who seem to only care about keeping a steady beat”

A colleague at Dr. Sound named Pamelia Kurstin helped to develop this nascent interest in the theremin. According to Wang, she is now ‘generally accepted as the greatest theremin player there has been, so far’ and you can see why during a Ted Talk as she expands on the theme of the concentration involved in playing the theremin….. Wait till you see what she starts doing around 2.45…. But do not attempt to listen on shitty Steve Jobs sponsored computer speakers. You won’t be able to hear it as the frequencies are too low. And while we’re on the subject here, try not to listen to any music on shitty Steve Jobs sponsored computer speakers. You’re taking so many of the frequencies out of it you might as well not be listening at all. Plug it in, plug it in!!

Pamelia was already proficient on about twenty instruments before taking on the theremin, and was able to bring a musician insight to Wang’s attempts to pull himself out of his sample based mode of creation.

“I was always concerned with the specific contours of basslines and melodies, but watching Pam play, I started really having revelations about what ties all music together. Pam taught me to think purely in numbers, which is how any good composer or jazz musician must approach all harmonies and counterpoints: basic 4th and 5ths, using 3rd, 6th, 7th, or 9th tones, for her this was instinctive but for me, it helped me break out of a lot of restrictions I had. I mean, the essence of European music is modulation and counterpoint.

If you consider ALL traditional musics, whether Indian, Chinese, African, Arabic, they’re all stuck in one monotone, until Bach came along and created cyclical modulations away from the root note (roughly speaking). If you think of a DJ set this way as opposed to just keeping the beat, then the whole DJ set becomes like one big continuous symphonic movement, which dovetails with the way some people discussed disco music during the era of “The Saint”…

DISCO NOTE:  ‘The Saint’ was a New York nightspot where the residents were famed for their ‘sleaze’ spots –  in the early morning they would gently ease the madouva dancers down from the frenzy of the peak-time 125 bpm disco by playing slower, prettier, funkier and more melodious music, spliced with unexpected blasts of classical and big-band jazz, not to mention other musical curve-balls such as playing familiar records at drastically different speeds.

The term ‘sleaze’ refers more to the fact that it was a time when people looked to pick up a partner rather than being an essential character of the music itself. When taken as a whole, the sets do indeed take on a quasi-symphonic character, such as this wonderful set from Jim Burgess at the club’s closing party in 1988.

Around the turn of the century Wang had found himself spending more and more time in Europe, forging strong associations with, amongst many others, London’s Nuphonic label. Nuphonic was home to the likes of Idjut Boys, DJ Harvey, Ashley Beedle and Faze Action, and had recently released ‘Electrokution’ by Block 16, a collaborative effort between Raj Gupta (aka Ray Mang) Idjuts/Harvey collaborator Pete Z and Glen Gunner.

Their 2001 ‘Morning Sun’ LP was on the cusp of release, ready to be declared ‘Album Of The Year’ by The Unabombers, and the lead single lived up to it’s name, a jittering, skittery modern electro track with heavy disco drums and shape-shifting string arrangements. Unfortunately, all was not well on the Nuphonic horizon, with major financial problems leaving the label on the brink. Danny takes up the tale…

“I truly can’t remember exactly who approached me first about the remix, but I had become good friends with Raj Gupta and Pete Z after spending time in London. I played a quite terrible theremin live set with Pete saving my ass by providing backup on piano, and Raj’s wife also happened to be close friends with other DJ friends in NYC as well. I also met James Hillard in the Nuphonic office, he was still a skinny little boy, not yet the gay bear icon of Horse Meat Disco which he has become. They had released maybe 50 white label promo copies of our remix just before it was announced they’d gone broke, so the joke is that we bankrupted them (laughs)”.

Having been delivered all the individual tracks by the band, Wang “recorded it all on my tiny Korg D16 workstation, I mean this little blue box with a 4-inch wide LCD screen and 12 faders” and set to work with Brennan Green on an audacious, outlandish 13 and a half minute remix that doubled the original’s length. The duo added all sorts to it, including a bouncy drum machine breakdown, the unique, yearning sounds of the theremin, some squalling 70’s disco-rock guitar, an utterly ludicrous 21^st Century jackin’ disco section, and topped the whole thing off with a dub reggae coda where the eerily beautiful sounds of the melodica take centre stage.

Let’s start at the end, with that very unexpected 3 minutes of trippy dub. It’s hard not to think of Augustus Pablo, dub reggae’s king of the melodica, during this bit…

“We are referencing Augustus Pablo explicitly and with great admiration because I was enamoured with one particular track of his at the time, maybe it was ‘The River Niger’…… I had the whole album, most of it sounded uninspired and sort of sunny-lazy to me, but this one track had a spark of inspiration in it”

Danny’s in China so he can’t open the links we are sending him (fascists hate dub music don’tcha know) but it appears he is talking about ‘East Of The River Nile’, or as he calls it: ‘This one… with three distinct notes on melodica which anchor it, going middle (long noooote), up then down. Then the bass grooves subtly underneath it’

“The gag is that we repeated bits of the solo from a big “Garage Classic” called “Double Journey” by Powerline on Prelude Records.  And we removed the kick drums on every other beat to get that “dub reggae” rhythm sound. I really do love the sounds we used in this part, very melancholic and unearthly at the same time”

You manage to pull all these different musical sections on the records together with the help of spacey dub like effects – echoes, reverb, drastic eq-ing etc – is there a direct influence there too, or does this come more from the use of such effects on old disco remixes?

 “Dub reggae. To be honest, the influence is very indirect, coming from the use of delay and reverb I heard on Prelude and West End records, whose engineers like Francois Kevorkian were obviously influenced by King Tubby, Studio One, etc.

“So it’s a particular technique and feeling, but dub music on the whole, that interests me very little, because it’s often a muffled rhythm over an indistinct and forgettable harmonic development, perfect for people under a hot sun lost in a cloud of ganja, it’s kind of numb and passive really, but it’s beauty is not in harmony, but rather in its distortion of time and space.I own a few compilations of classic dub, and I rarely have the urge to listen to them again and again.

At the same time I recognize that on the opposite end, you have Europop (or worse, Jap or Korean pop) which is too regular, too bright and cheerful and over-composed, lacking bass power, lacking randomness, spontaneity.  So ideally between these two extremes you have disco music which exploits the best of these African sub-genres and of European chordal sophistication”

(The solo they grabbed sections of occurs between about 1.10 and 1.40)

“The truth is, Brennan told me recently that he always kind of loved AND hated this remix” he continues “In a way, the whole thing was a very vain and self-conscious way to show people what we could do with modest instruments, 12 tracks and a bit of cleverness. I’m still always amazed at these minimal-techno or IDM-electronic-whatever producers who own all this cool vintage gear, they have 128+ tracks on Protools or Ableton, all they can make are stupid loops removing a kick drum now and then and they actually take themselves seriously!

By this point I already felt very strongly that it’s better to approach any remix or original production as a chance to be creative rather than to borrow or steal… For me the remix only really takes off in the second half with the ‘cosmic disco’ section as you call it. The first half, which references the original and then goes “Symphonic” (with the theremin) and “Electro” (with the drum machine breakdown)  always felt like it’s going through the motions a bit. Luckily the strings serve as a kind of introduction, leading to the more percussive and funky parts in the latter half of the remix. But the “rock” and “dub” sections in the second half have much sharper and more expressive sounds and solos from both Brennan and myself”

Mr Green turned down a chance to talk to us about the record, saying that you could do enough talking for both of you. He wasn’t wrong! Tell me a little bit about what he brought to the table for this remix.

“Percussion and bass are really among Brennan’s strong points.I remember clearly that I just couldn’t get the keyboard bassline on the “rock” section correct, it has a sort of portamento note which makes it “roll” at the end of every 2 bars or so, Brennan got on the keyboard and got it within 3 or 4 takes. A lot of the percussion was from him too, in fact Brennan just went to Brazil last month and spent a small fortune on hand percussion instruments, he has been playing pandeiro (a slithery sounding Brazilian version of the tambourine) masterfully for a few years now.

On the other hand, I think the “distorted rock guitar solo” was mostly me, or half Brennan half myself maybe.  I was always into that sound, whether from rock bands like Journey or disco-rock productions like those of Moroder. We didn’t use a real guitar though, it was faked, using synths through an analog distortion pedal.The 808 was also a Korg digital beat box, not a real 808. I still hear the difference, but our variation was acceptable for me, after all the remix was about this funny concept of clashing and blending styles and not about showing off what we owned in the studio”

From a DJ’s perspective, it’s always been the first half of the record that works better on the dancefloor, with the hypnotic strings and theremin sounds and the sharp, staccato riff holding the dancer’s interest before the big ‘cosmic disco’ surprise. It is only the braver DJ who doesn’t mix out once the ‘rock’ and ‘dub’ sections start sinking their sonic teeth in about 8 minutes into it… But even then people will go with it because in all likelihood it’s something they haven’t heard before, and it’s certainly not a straight down the line dancefloor record from that point… People like to be surprised sometimes!

“I know that it sounds awesome on the dance floor because I heard several DJ’s in New York play it at the time, and people really went crazy for it without knowing what it was – that’s always the biggest encouragement for any DJ, isn’t it?”

That’s what makes us so surprised to hear that you have a love/hate relationship with the record – it always works for the dancers and you always get people leaning over the decks and asking ‘What the hell is that?!’

“With Brennan it’s maybe 40% Love 60% Hate I would say, but with me it’s 85% Love 15% Hate because actually I AM proud of it, but the hesitation is more and more from realizing what we could have done better – like put in a real chorus or bridge with chord changes… Brennan and I were more rebellious back then too. I suppose I wouldn’t do a remix like this again in 2013, I’d try to be more subtle nowadays (laughs).

All of this sounds like musicianly navel gazing to us, especially when you consider that two of underground dance music’s ‘crazy cults’ ( Wang’s words)  in the form of disco king Harvey and Dutch Italo-disco/electro don I-F were caning the record at the time. In fact, both get a shout on the original Balihu 12 inch for ‘hearing it’. There are few better arbiters of taste around…

“They played and promoted this remix of ours right away, and I think both even sent me emails encouraging us and telling us how much they liked it.  Although there are some crazy cults round these two guys in particular, I also feel that there is justice in the DJ world after all, that these really funky, lovable, amazing characters have lasted for these past 15 or 20 years…… and it’s because they keep their ears open and have never succumbed to the boredom and pressures of commercialism”.

The wider world might not have been able to open their ears to Danny and Brennan’s take on ‘Electrokution’ at all if it hadn’t been for some stubborn persistence on Wang’s part. He tells us that it was simply ‘My pride which wanted this thing released on vinyl, that’s all. The three members of Block 16 merely had to approve the vinyl release, so there was no legal problem at all…’

And thank fuck for that persistence because a true 21^st Century masterpiece might have been lost altogether! In it’s cheeky boldness it was possible for us to hear a braver new future for dance music, one not so constrained by the oh so straight 4/4 beat that still dominates most dancefloors overground and underground. It sat as well with modern house records as it did with classic leftfield disco nuggets like Loose Joints’ ‘Tell You Today’ or Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Evolution’.

 

Nowadays Danny himself is less likely to throw out hyperbolic opinions on the dance music scene  than he was at the height of the minimal techno madness, when he famously used the word ‘fascism’ when describing a night at some German tech-hole or other, chatting instead about the simple science in the fact that people want a good, solid beat underpinning the music they hear on a dancefloor. He’s keener to talk of the little niche he has carved for himself in a world with a much greater appreciation for the influence of disco on the dance music scene we know and love today, even if it is a ‘monster with 40 heads…dominated by ‘Dull loop-based techno without melody or harmony’. Oops, there he goes again!

“At the end of the day I’m simply grateful for the fact that our little brand of eclectic, odd, queer disco music has secured a little corner of the world. Not just myself, I mean Horse Meat Disco, Harvey, I-F, Todd Terje (I love “Inspector Norse” and I admire his person and his natural musicality so much), Rub N Tug, Brennan Green, all the usual suspects. Also, after travelling the world a lot, I became much more realistic. I’ve met people who can still hardly carry a tune after years of musical training, I’ve met girls and boys in remote places (Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, Middle East) who never went to Paradise Garage but who can sing and dance as if they were born there.

You can’t ask people to appreciate more music than their ears, minds, and feet are actually capable of perceiving. Why some people hear things and some people don’t is one of those accidents of nature which I’ve learned not to pass judgment on. Like me, I have good ears, but I could never ride a skateboard for 10 feet even if my life depended on it!!”

A year or so after the record came out, Danny made his Dublin debut for Downtownsounds, and it really did appear the man was on a roll. In the run up to the night we were positively salivating over a biog on the Environ site that promised ‘With the spirit of Karen Carpenter and Clara Rockmore guiding me, here come classical-reggae and nu acid-disco for 2004!’

Environ Records/Daniel Wang

The ‘nu-acid disco’ part was already being fulfilled by the likes of the wondrous, arpeggio-drenched ‘Echo By Midnight’

But unfortunately the avalanche of deep disco joy we were expecting turned into a trickle, with the amount of releases from him since covering the fingers on one hand. What happened Danny, what happened?!

“It’s really simple, for the past 9 years or so I have setting up an entirely new life for myself! I didn’t really plan it this way, when I moved to Berlin in 2003 it was just an instinctive reaction to the conditions in the USA: restrictive and commercialised nightlife,George Bush as president, cost of living, and I never really liked most of the gay people I met in New York.  Berlin of course offered a new start for me and tens of thousands of émigrés in the past decade.  But when I arrived, I still had financial debts and my legal status was uncertain.  So I just took any DJ jobs I could get, which left little time for producing.

Also, about 4 years ago, I was able to move into a very cheap 1960s communist-style Plattenbau (flat-apartment), but I’ve had to renovate the whole place by hand, which has been totally fun, but my studio equipment has been sitting in cardboard boxes.So that’s why I’ve been silent, but it’s a good thing, because I’ve really had time to listen to lots of classical, jazz and pop and think about how I could reach up to a level better than what I had done before”

Danny’s DJ sets have always been a riot of musical colour and fun fun fun – at that first DTS gig he stood beside the support DJ banging a cowbell and smiling and waving to the crowd, that old Mancuso maxim about the DJ having one foot in the booth and one in the crowd writ large. And our old friend Mr. Theremin made an appearance too as well, leading to smiles and many quizzical looks on the floor.

Add all that to the fact that he can talk the hind legs off a donkey and it’s unsurprising he got lots of repeat bookings all over the world.This has helped his old productions reach more and more ears, culminating in a mammoth retrospective on Rush Hour at the tail end of 2009. He is taking his time about the next musical steps, because a big big leap is required first -

“The transition (from sample based music) was pretty much complete in 2001, on the two Environ releases “Silver Trophies” and “Nocturnes”. “Berlin Sunrise” only contains a rhythm sample on the B-side dub mix, “Echo By Midnight” has no samples at all.It just took some practice to realise that recording your own handclaps or congas is just as easy as sampling them, even easier maybe. And I always played all the strings and horns on the keyboard by myself anyhow.

With all the “nu-disco” bands like Crystal Ark or Escort now recording everything live, part of it is just that the technology became affordable for everyone.  When I started Balihu in 1993, there were no digital multitracks below 20,000 dollars or so.  So all I could use was a 2MB Akai sampler”

When we get to talking about  ‘Tell You Today’ and ‘Evolution’, Wang ends things on a hugely hopeful note –

“Those are the great exemplars of disco fantasy for all of us. When I get a few more things right in terms of cyclical chordal progressions and production values, then I can really release a few things on that level, which will happen in the next few years…..I am very optimistic”.

‘Downtownsounds Classics Vol 1’ is in all good disco loving record shops right now, flipped with a Pablo and Shoey Rejig of Sweet Cream’s disco screamer ‘I Don’t know What I’d Do If You Ever Left Me’. Grab yourself a copy here

Have a look at it’s lovely full colour sleeve, front and back:

Postscript:

Note from Fatty Fatty/DTS Towers – Danny is dead wrong about ‘King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown’ by Augustus Pablo, a classic LP which introduced us to the power of dub way way back. It’s got plenty of beautiful chord changes and gloriously wistful melodies as well as those unexpected dub-wise twists and turns, and sounds far from numb and passive to us. But then again we do love our reggae and dub, so much so that we took our name after this classic reggae ode to the more rotund woman…

 

Here somebody smart has put together Jacob Miller’s original with the one that Pablo ‘dubbed’ for the title track of this LP – you’ll struggle to get a better demonstration  of what it is that dub is attempting to do…

 

In fact, you can decide for yourself on the LP, ‘cos here it is on YouTube…

While working at Dr.Sound, Wang was lucky enough to meet a legend from another time in the form of Dr Robert Moog, inventor of the synthesised keyboard that bore his name, as well as a variation of the theremin which he sold so successfully at Dr. Sound. The Moog is perhaps most famous for providing the instrumentation for Walter Carlos’ soundtrack to Stankey Kubrick’s ultra violent classic ‘A Clockwork Orange’

“Of course, spending several days intensely with Dr.Moog at the trade fairs seems like a fantastic myth now.  But he was extremely approachable, friendly and practical, like the cool grandfather we all wish we had.  He even personally sent me emails inviting me down to the Moog offices in Ashville to visit.  He was full of modesty and good cheer every time he visited our store in New York, always thanking us for our efforts to sell his products, although I can say that I did my part too!”

Danny gets Zen on the theremin…

“Another thing with the theremin is you cant cheat because you can only play what you hear in your head. It is very unlike a piano, which can mechanically reproduce correct or accidental tones from touching any key. With a theremin, 99% of what you play is false unless you clearly know in your head the notes which you intend. But if you use this approach on guitar or violin, it makes music much more instinctive, because it’s not mechanical finger movement, it’s the mind itself which directs you to find the tones.

This also resembles what Zen Buddhists preach: that the mind shapes the vision of one’s world. It must be said that Pamelia is half-Oriental, and that we found a sort of family-like sympathy as friends, especially now that she lives in Vienna and I in Berlin. That’s the whole story. And I’m still playing theremin, I just haven’t had much chance to release any new music,but the theremin will surely appear again soon on my records”

DISCO NOTE 2: Though the sleeve proudly announces ‘No samples’ were used in the making of ‘Nocturnes’,we’re sure Mr. Wang won’t be too put out if we mention that he half inched the bassline for ‘Black Boots and Sine Waves’ from this mid 80’s dancefloor wrecker, even thanking Eric Duncan from Rub’N’Tug ‘for the bass’ on the sleevenotes. And what a bassline it is! It was on a brilliant BBE compilation called ‘NightDubbin’ a few years back, compiled by Dimitri from Paris and mixed by dem Idjut Boys…