Music : Jackin House, Electro House, Dirty House, Deep House, US House, Progressive House, Tech House, Tribal House, Old Skool House, Acid House, Electro, Big Beat, Breaks, Minimal Techno, Detroit Techno, Funky Techno, Acid Techno, Electro Techno, Electronic Body Music and Futurepop
Empathy 6th Birthday
Thursday 5th April
(Bank Holiday Weekend)
10- 6am
Room1
James Holden 3hrs (Cocoon/Border Communiy)
Hybrid 3hrs (Distinctive Breaks)
Jim Rivers
Room2
Kriece
Stuart Wilkinson
Jay Russell
Sam Richardson
Empathy celebrates its 6th Birthday with another Birthday party to savour, this year we welcome 2 of the biggest producers/djs ever produced, both have graced the Empathy turntables a few times already so they know exactly what to expect a huge party!! James Holden first appeared in 2003 and we hear he’s very pleased to be back, he has recently signed to Sven Vath’s Coccon agency and after working with Sasha on his Airdrawndagger album he’s been busy pushing his Border Community label and producing his recent “At The Controls” artist album all this whilst at the same time touring the Globe playing at all the big clubs and festivals such as Sonar, Womb, Amnesia, Fabric and many more.
Hybrid are currently touring to promote their “I Like Noise” artist album which has been their best work to date, playing their live set alongside various dj dates. From what we saw of them at Timbuk2 in March last year we are going to be blessed with their unique blend of progressive breaks.
In room 2 welcome a newcomer to Empathy and the UK scene in general, Kriece makes his debut on English soil with a tour with Ministry Of Sound being a highlight warming up for James Zabiela and Nic Fanciulli at Club Class. He has produced some awesome tracks to date and remixed the likes of Zabiela,
James Holden - Biography
James Holden is far from your average DJ-producer. With his cant-be-arsed-to-make-an-appointment-with-my-hairdresser shaggy hair and vintage Judas Priest t-shirts (with authentic holes) he sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the clean-cut short-haired bloke DJs whose unremarkable faces adorn the pages of the dance music press. ("I dont trust anyone who is cleaner than myself!" jokes James).
Musically he is also a million miles from the faceless repetitive beats mentality of so many of his peers, much more likely to be listening to leftfield albums from the likes of Mogwai, Four Tet or Boards of Canada than the latest essential mix CD. James Holden is a young man plotting a course through the music world all of his very own, putting some personality back into dance music and refusing to stay in the pigeonholes where other people seem so keen to shove him.
If an artist like James hadnt been into music from an early age youd be seriously worried, so we shant bore you with the details, suffice to say it involved his dad teaching him piano, a man called Mr Draycott teaching him violin, an (un)healthy appetite for the music of Queen, early dabblings on his first proto-computer and the unlikely musical guidance of his A-level physics teacher towards all things electronic.
The stuff everyone is really interested in begins aged 19, with a track called "Horizons". Written during his summer holidays from his maths degree at Oxford University on a £500 PC and a piece of revolutionary music software called Buzz (a freeware internet download), this crossover anthem of the summer of 1999 propelled young James and his bedroom set-up into the top flight of dance music production. The rest, as they say, is history.
To this day, James' DIY studio set-up remains largely unchanged since those early efforts, bar a few computer upgrades here and there. Despite initial whispers throughout the establishment about analogue warmth, the days of the twenty grand studio entry level into the world of production were numbered. James had already opened the door for a new generation of talented young bedroom producer-punks who bolted after him, whilst those very same doubters are left scrambling to catch up to the digital revolution which threatened to pass them by. Meanwhile, James has taken his computer production to a whole other level, exploiting the full potential which the new software opens up and unleashing a life of its own where others merely try to recreate what you could do on conventional studio equipment.
"There’s always going to be these people who are going to say, 'You just don’t get that sound unless its analogue',"explains James. "And it’s just complete rubbish. You just get a different sound. And I personally prefer the sound out of a computer to the sound out of a load of rotting analogue equipment. You just need to know where to inject the life into it, and how to, and then the computer can become an instrument just like any other. Where I’m at now is trying to make my music feel less like a cheesy sequencer Lego building and more like I’m playing the computer like it is a guitar or something & more human and raw."
What James has created with this trusty PC is an edit-heavy hybrid sound all of his own, which crosses traditional genre boundaries and has found him fans in almost every scene. Holden tracks slot seamlessly into the sets of techno, trance, progressive and electro DJs alike. From pixie-trance to leftfield dance music, new wave house to melodic techno, the genre-classifiers have yet to find a label which accurately captures the unique yet universally appealing nature of Holden’s music. And although he has spawned many an imitator, Holden’s constantly evolving sound and rigorous attention to detail has been equalled by none.
To a music world overly obsessed by scenes, the James Holden success story reads like a catalogue of contradictions. 2003’s collaboration with vocalist Julie Thompson, "Nothing", was picked up by legendary UK house label Loaded, yet proclaimed by trance legend Tiesto to be his tune of the year. James has remixed everything from Crosstown Rebels electro-house to Positiva dance-pop
More recent developments on the studio front include new Holden & Thompson track "Come To Me", scheduled for release next year, and, after a couple of years respite from remixing, a fistful of new Holden remixes: the nintendo acid and tripped out vocal mixes of Britney Spears' "Breathe on Me"
James' own DJ sets embrace the same spirit of eclecticism as his productions, uniting his own tracks and remixes with acid house, techno, electro and down tempo melodies, as demonstrated on last year's groundbreaking Balance 005 mix CD. "Aphex Twin doing Ferry Corsten up the bum" is James' current (rather unsavoury) description of choice. On the borders of everything yet at the same time accessible enough to be slap bang in the middle of it all, Holden's own steadfast musical vision and his often unorthodox fusion of tracks which the purists have traditionally grouped into distinct genres have won him dedicated followiers the world over. One of a handful of young DJs who have been allowed to rise up the ranks in recent years whose age bears more relation to that of the majority of club punters, the coming year promises business as usual, taking in every corner of Europe, a tour of Australia and Asia and regular trips to the USA.
James' sets are always topped off with a huge helping of previously unheard fresh young production talent, many of whom have found a home on his Border Community label. In just one year the label has gained a reputation as a breeding ground for similarly free-spirited genre-benders, with every release fusing solid dance floor rockers with leftfield ambient interpretations and handy dj tools. "Border Community is my favourite thing that I do at the moment", says James. "It is really rewarding seeing the young artists we release go on to do great things." Names like Nathan Fake, Petter and The MFA are now following James lead and already beginning to leave their own unique indelible imprints on the production world. James is also keen to take his troop of multi-talented live acts and DJs on the road with him, bringing the Border Community road show to a town near you.
Still only 25 years old, James Holden now finds himself exactly where he wants to be. As the digital producer par excellence he is blazing a trail through as yet un chartered territory, showing those who follow in his wake how it can, and should, be done. As a DJ he gets to travel the world, surprising and delighting in equal measures, and enlarging his band of followers at every port of call. And at the helm of his own buzz label Border Community he is proving himself to be quite the A&R man, discovering like-minded souls to help turn his musical vision into reality and peddling something a little different to the record-buying public. Underlying the three components of the James Holden recipe for success is an unerring belief in his own vision and a refusal to do things the way others tell him they always have been done. He is well into the process of carving out a niche all of his very own, and is not about to let anyone stop him now.
Hybrid – Biography
Mike Truman, Chris Healings and Lee Mullins are Hybrid, a Swansea-based collective with designs on the future of music. Their debut album, "Wide Angle", will surprise anyone who thinks that dance music can't be clever, challenging and musically astute. Here's the shocking news: You might want to listen to it for longer than a few weeks. You don't have to be standing up to listen to it.
Truman, Healings and Mullins met while clubbing in Swansea seven years ago. They bonded over Truman's house remix of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall", and they've been doing DJ sets and mixing their own music ever since. They have become sought-after remixers, putting their production skills to use on tracks for artists as varied as Jazzy Jeff, Carl Cox and Alanis Morissette. Now they are ready to make their album debut.
Wide Angle - which has been over a year in the making - was born of Hybrid's frustration with the narrow horizons of British dance music; its structural predicability; its slavish concentration upon beat to the exclusion of everything else; its disinclination to seek inspiration from the broader musical corpus. They wanted to make the dance form more melodic, more imaginative, bigger and deeper than it had ever been before. So they went from Swansea to London, Moscow and New York, gathering material for a set of startlingly innovative tracks.
"We want to make music that will last," says Mullins. "Something that isn't disposable, something that people will want to listen to over and over again." Something, perhaps, that dance music's natural constituency might get more out of than a rushing sensation in the skull and a spontaneous nosebleed and that those beyond that natural constituency might also find inspirational. "We just push the music to see how far it will go," says
Healings.
Too much club music, Truman argues, is wholly predicable: "You know where the samples have come from, you know where the beats have come from, you've heard all these riffs over and over again. What's the point in listening tot? You might as well turn it off. We want to make music that will be surprising, something that will spark the imagination and that is enriching
to listen to, rather than just supplying the same old product." Dance music whose movements are less predictable than the usual breakbeat repertoire.
To this end, they recruited singer-songwriter Julee Cruise, best known for her work with cult film-maker David Lynch. It was her fragile, Naiad voice that gave Twin Peaks its otherworldly quality, and more recently, she has been performing with the B52s, Moby and on the soundtrack of Kevin Williamson's hit horror movie, Scream. "Most techno and dance is so cold and boring," asserts Cruise. "Try and hum it. You can't. Hybrid have melody. They have intelligent, ironic lyrics. They have a nice, neat, clean, tasteful voice. It's a sophisticated sound."
They also recruited Sacha Puttnam, a composer and musicologist who trained at the Moscow Conservatory - where
he rented a tiny flat from a fellow academic that contained just a
bed and a grand piano. Since graduating, he's moved back to his native London and into film and TV work.
He scored The Confessional for Canadian theatrical genius Robert LePage, and recently composed the music for a BBC adaptation of Bleak House.
Puttnam brought a strong element of orchestral discipline to Hybrid's electronic experimentalism. He found the experience educative. "When I'm composing, there's always this little academic on my shoulder, telling me to keep things changing constantly, and to keep within certain strictures. But Mike's taught me to forget all that." Bringing slamming dance rhythms into contact with classical orchestration forced Puttnam to discard the rule book. But he also found precedent for this kind of experimentation:
"It's exactly what Debussy did," he contends. "In his day you weren't allowed parallel fifths. So he comes along, starts using parallel fifths and suddenly that's his own sound. So when Mike's not worrying about academic restrictions, suddenly you get these wonderful harmonies that you're not supposed to have. And they work." Last August, they went to Moscow to prove the point. In the bowels of Mosfilm, the old Soviet film
complex where Eisenstein and Tarkovsky once clocked on for work, they recorded the tracks for "Wide Angle" with the 90-piece Russian Federal Orchestra.
Working the DJ circuit has allowed the Hybrid boys to immerse themselves in a broad range of musical styles. "You draw all these influences in, and use them to create new sounds," explains Truman. Wide Angle betrays the influences of John Barry, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, Berlin techno, Peter
Gabriel and Claude Debussy. "Everything that we've listened to over the years has been absorbed and used in some way," he reflects.
"A lot of people just concentrate on the engine of the music, and forget about melody, and the other bits that make it interesting," argues Mullins. Wide Angle offers brassy, grandiose soundscapes which summon up images of Sean Connery parachuting from an exploding helicopter; dark, hypnotic swathes of sci-fi noise; lush string arrangements supplied by 90 classically-trained Russians; belting club beats tempered with sly, sophisticated touches; sweet, sassy crooning and Marilyn Monroe vibrato from Julee Cruise; ball-breaking rap from SoonE MC. It's music for grown-ups. But it doesn't, thankfully, have that highfalutin pomposity that
has felled past attempts to expand pop's musical horizons. Jeff Wayne it ain't.
"I played it to my family in Iowa," says Cruise. "My brother's into jazz, my mother's in a nursing home, my sister's a regular housewife and my other brother is a hippy from Berkeley. And they all sat there in the living room and they really liked it. They all got it, in their own way. This music doesn't exclude anybody. It doesn't tell you that you don't belong. You don't have to be as bland as Celine Dion to have appeal as wide as that."
Maybe she's getting a little carried away here, but Julee sees Hybrid fitting snugly into a tradition that includes Gershwin and Copland. "It's proper music," she enthuses.
Hybrid's multi-album deal with Distinct'ive Records has allowed them the security to formulate long-term plans. They are developing their live act, and have already gone down a storm in venues as far apart as Miami and Liverpool. They've just be signed for a gig on top of Mount Fuji. With Wide Angle laid down, the band are now doing the groundwork for their next
album. And with tastes and skills as eclectic as Hybrid's, there's plenty of scope for the wildest kind of experimentation. They're making noises about an unplugged breakbeat album, and suite of music in which the melodic instruments play the beat, and the percussion instruments play the melody. Whatever their next move, expect to be surprised.
Kriece - Biography
Over the last 10 years the name “Kriece” has become synonymous with dance music in Australia. Kriece initially made his name as a dj, supporting names such as Sasha, Digweed, Cattaneo & Zabiela on Australian tours such as Ministry of Sound, Renaissance & Cream.
It has only been in the last 5 years that Kriece has gained worldwide recognition for his production work. After a solid debut on EQ Grey Records, Kriece came to the attention of many with his remix of Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker” which was licensed to Renaissance for James Zabiela’s “Utilities” Mix CD.
In 2005, he teamed up with James Zabiela & Jeff Bennett to record “We Make Contact” as The Flying Doctors. This track was given an Oliver Lieb Remix & became the debut release on Kriece’s label “Kindred Sounds” – becoming a fixture in sets of djs such as Sasha.
After spending the early part of 2006 touring South America, USA & UK, Kriece has been locked away in Australia working in the studio & playing at his monthly residency “Robot”, in Perth. The fruits of this work will see the light of day soon including - a massive remix of James Zabiela’s “Weird Science” on Renaissance, remixes on Infusion’s “Music for Vinyl” label & Nic Fanciulli’s “Saved Records” and a new collaboration with Jeff Bennett and new EP’s on labels such as EQ Grey. Also for 2007 expect Kriece’s debut artist album on the legendary 20:20 Vision label
In October & November 2006, Kriece again hit the road with an extensive tour of South America, including a massive gig at the legendary “Creamfields” festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina, alongside acts such as Underworld & Sasha.
Blue Mountain, Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1
£10 before Midnight
£12 after (For guaranteed entry before midnight email empathy_bristol@msn.com)
Tickets £10 + £1 Booking fee available from
Bristol Ticket Shop, The Arcade, Broadmead, Bristol www.bristolticketshop.co.uk 0870 444400
Rooted Records, Gloucester Road, Bristol
www.empathyclub.co.uk
Event info – 07799745870
empathy_bristol@msn.com
Links
www.jamesholden.org
www.myspace.com/iamtherealjamesholden
www.cocoon.net
www.hybridsoundsystem.com
www.myspace.com/hybridsoundsystem
www.excession.co.uk
www.kriece.com
www.myspace.com/Kriece