Alex Ridha is a busy man. He is taking a well deserved break and enjoying a stroll around a particularly blustery Berlin, as Totally Dublin catches up with him for a chat on the cusp of the launch of his new, highly-anticipated album Power, to talk inspirations, light shows and minimal techno.
So your official album launch is also the beginning of your tour.
Yes, it starts in London. I mean, the album comes out on October 5th I think, but the launch party in London is with my friends Smith n’ Hack and Housemeister.
You were saying that the new album picks up where ‘Oi Oi Oi’ left off?
The only thing for me that was clear was that I just do what I like to do in the studio and that I didn’t want to have the ‘pop’ approach now with the second album, which is the usual way for a lot of artists when they have a successful first album. I wanted to make myself free from any pressure, and anything that people want to hear or think about my stuff, so I just did what I felt like doing, and these were the tracks on the album. No – I mean normally I really don’t care what people think about my music. It’s very important that artists also do the music for themselves and not really think about “how will people like it?”. I mean, obviously my music is linked to my DJ sets and my live shows, so of course they should work in my DJ sets, but that’s the only thing.
You been diversifying somewhat working with Gonzalez and others now.
Yeah, that’s the most beautiful thing happening right now. I’ve had some requests to produce bands or whoever, and I mainly said no to most of those requests because I didn’t feel that I get inspired by the other party. A lot of people approach me because they think I’m their inspiration and I should make their music and stuff. When I work with people it should go hand in hand, you know, like I get inspired by working with Erol Alkan and Gonzales.
I saw Erol Alkan play recently, and he played both of your collaborations, Waves and Death Suite. The response to them from the crowd was unbelievable. Are you planning to do more work with him in the future?
For sure; we’re already working on some new ideas and we’re already playing some ideas out and testing them. For us it’s very important to get together in one room, because that’s where the magic happens. Just to get the main ideas and to be creative together is really important.
Rather than trying to e-mail ideas over and back?
We did both for our EP, but the main magic was happening when we went together in one room, and we’ve already done some new stuff.
When do you reckon it will be coming out?
Maybe spring next year.
You’re going on a very extensive tour to promote the new album. Would you consider employing a band and doing a live show? With visuals like perhaps what Luciano is doing with his Aether show for example?
No. I think its cool for a lot of artists, but on the one hand it depends where I play; in clubs I’m really the DJ who plays a lot of my own stuff, but I’m always doing live edits, remixes and mashing up things while I’m playing and I do it very much on the spur of the moment and I enjoy this so much. I think that when people can see a person who they’re watching is enjoying what he’s doing they have fun as well.
A lot of DJ’s go crazy now for the special light shows, and I think it gets a bit ridiculous; it should still be focussed on the person who is playing the music, you know? It’s different when you play live for example; I think when you play live it’s more important to have visuals and to have a live concept, but for me this wouldn’t really work out because I’m not a fan of being on stage with my laptop. And the other option would be for me to take all my drum machines with me but I couldn’t control them on my own on the stage, I’d need someone with me.
You’ve mentioned before you feel that the Berlin music scene is stagnating somewhat, that its not evolving as fast as it was 4 or 5 years ago. Do you think that minimal techno has taken hold and it’s stuck in one place now?
Yeah, totally. It occurs not necessarily because of minimal music, but generally when too many people jump on the same train it gets difficult, because that’s when the inspiration is overused and it just gets boring and stuck. It was really strange for me to see this happening in Berlin because Berlin used to be so outside of the box, and suddenly everyone was jumping on the minimal train. Berlin used to be very radical in music styles, and now they’re all like “oh, fuck!” So now they all pretend that they were never minimal; they’re now all deep house and say that they were always house.
But it’s cool, you know, because it’s nothing new. It’s always like this with a lot of styles that come out. Like when punk music came out in the 70s: two years later everybody was a punk. There is always motivation from this as well, and the most important thing is that there are certain people that will do something fresh in that particular time.
And are these the kind of attributes that you would look for in artists for your record label?
Totally, that’s exactly what I’m looking for, and I think I’ve found some really talented young guys. They all have their own sound as well and that’s so important nowadays, because a lot of producers take a record that they’ve just bought in the record shop and they think “let’s do a record like this!”, and that’s where it’s already failed for me. It’s more important to do your own thing, and of course being inspired by other peoples stuff is cool, but its value depends on how seriously similar you want to do something like someone else. With the artists on my label I really think they have their own sound even though the style is different for all of them. Like Housemeister has his own sound, and then there’s Strip Steve and Djedjotronic, or Shadow Dancer. I don’t think they ever really do something bad because they’re talented, and they have good taste.
Boys Noize new album ‘Power’ is on the streets now.
