Exclusive Interview with Eric Downer

Exclusive Interview with Eric Downer

21 September, 2009 | 2.49PM

• Written by: thoughtless
• Filed under: Music News : eric downer, thoughtless music

Eric Downer is kind of a big deal in Toronto.  DJing at legendary warehouse parties and seminal clubs such as Industry and System Soundbar, his distinctive presentation of techno and house has earned him a reputation as one of the city’s most unique selectors.  With a spate of remixes and releases under his belt for Thoughtless Music, Revolver and others, he’s now getting attention from a global audience for his fresh take on minimalist techno.  Having just provided an exclusive DJ mix of our latest Thoughtless Times v.4 compilation – and with his remix of Jamie Kidd just around the corner – we took some time to sit down with Mr. Downer to discuss his history as an ambient DJ, his future as a producer, and a thoughtless constellation of points between…

TLM: Over the years, you’ve become recognized as one of Toronto’s most passionate DJs.  Can you tell us got you started on your musical path?  What are your deepest musical influences or roots?

ED: I’d have to place it squarely with my uncle Glenn playing me stuff by Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno when I was about four years old - you drop that on a four-year old kid, then what? I had no choice but to to dig for those types of sounds as I got older. It was clear to me, even then, that mainstream radio wasn’t playing this stuff too often. Because of that initial bug, I went on to crave electronic and underground music any way I could get it. By my teens, I was a burgeoning DJ playing only the best strangest stuff I could dig up for my high school cafeteria out of the facetious thrill in pissing off the other students with Throbbing Gristle and a joy in introducing people to it as well. Then, as now, I would say Mute Records, Factory, Depeche Mode, Cabaret Voltaire and New Order have definitely left their mark! Then, in ‘88/89 everything got all crazy.

TLM: Initially, you became known as an ambient DJ over a decade ago.  Can you discuss what led you to spin techno and house?

ED: I was always into techno & house but was definitely more into a mood you could create with an ambient set when I first started out. There were no generic restrictions and you can do anything you feel like, really. The more channel faders I had open to me at any given time during a set, the better. By the time I was getting into this phase of music, I suppose I was lucky. 1990/91/92 saw a huge explosion in electronic music sub-genres like a big bang. All these sounds were coming from Chicago, Detroit, New York, London, not to mention my own back yard, like Windsor, Hamilton and Toronto (I lived in London, Ont)…

At the time that I made my switch from being a straight-up ambient DJ to more rhythmically structured spinning, I was being hammered by Basic Channel and Robert Hood’s Minimal Nation and UR, while simultaneously getting into Cajual, Relief and all that Chicago stuff while playing gigs alongside Vapourspace, Richie Hawtin, Jeremy Caulfield and Fred Gianelli. I just felt a pull and I was up for a change. London, Kitchener and Hamilton were full of parties and people doing crazy, amazing things. The record store I worked at was supplied by Mike Huckaby, largely, and John Acquaviva who lived in town would drop promo stuff from the distribution company he ran at the time, Intellinet, for us. We were being buried by great music week in and week out, and I was being paid in vinyl! It was a sweet time.

TLM: What was your most memorable DJ experience?  What was your best set?  What was your strangest?

ED: The most memorable DJ experience (there are many), I’d say, was opening for Kenny Dixon Jr. at Industry in Toronto years back. I finished up my set, turned around and he shook my hand and handed me a one-sided white label of ‘Long Hot Sexy Nights’ with Norma Jean Bell. I still value the moment and the record - thanks, Kenny!

Looking back on the years - almost two decades now - I would have to say that my ‘best’ set was playing right after Psychik Warriors Ov Gaia. It was a packed house at a party called Black Lodge and it was my first time playing for that many people in a techno context. As I was starting up my set, PWOG shut their power bars off and half my DJ set-up with them! Silence - and I was nervous. All these people are there in the dark, screaming, waiting. I didn’t have the best start. At one point Jeremy Caulfield asked if I was OK to finish, and right there was a huge moment. I said no, I’d be fine, I took a deep breath, shook off the frustration and fear and went on to play a set I’ll always remember, if not for the lesson in patience, the crowd and how they responded to my set! So much fun back in those days.

The strangest would most definitely be the Halloween I played for some friends in an abandoned 19th century industrial slaughterhouse in Toronto. You walked in through the furnace rooms, where they stoked the coal burners and rendered down any unused parts, and you went up a rickety set of stairs to the main chamber. It was this massive room whose ceiling went up at least sixty feet and had these thick chains dangling down with big, rusty hooks terminating the ends. Torches were placed around the dance floor leaving very minimal light to see. I did an ambient set and worked in other music as well. In front of the DJ booth, someone had drawn a giant pentagram in chalk on the floor. It was the perfect setting to play my darkest music. During the middle to end of my set, there seemed to be a bit of chaos erupting from the dance floor, and I looked up to see someone sacrificing a chicken! Within about twenty minutes the police showed up (because of the noise, not the chicken) to bust the event, which had untold numbers of people you couldn’t see in the blackness. As I took my vinyl away and stopped playing, the promoter ran up and insisted I keep playing, but I didn’t want my vinyl confiscated by Toronto’s finest, so I bailed. Just twenty minutes earlier and that chicken might still be alive today! Crazy space, though, and now it’s all boarded up, you can’t even get close, but it’s still there.

TLM: Recently you’ve begun releasing your own productions and remixes.  What set that in motion?

ED: I’ve been dabbling in production since about ‘97 but never felt compelled fully to release my compositions. I can’t explain it, really, as most of my peers at the time were just taking things to the next level at that time, and moving to Montréal. I was a little behind in my confidence and skills so I waited and got into my film career a bit more. Fast forward to 2007 and a good friend of mine, Noah Pred is starting a label called Thoughtless Music. By now, it was almost a joke, Milligan and Shannon were red in the face asking me why I was waiting for so long and Jeff was pushing me for a contribution to his Collabs series on Revolver. He was really patient and helped me with so much to get that fire burning, as well as Noah. At the same time I was visiting Berlin for my first time and getting that feeling I had when I was partying in Detroit back in the nineties and it all coalesced. How could I not get my shit together and put out some stuff with these guys? The time had come to get some music out. So my first release was a remix for Thoughtless Music 001.

TLM: Can you tell us about your studio set-up and your process working on tunes?

ED: I use a mix of in-the-box and outboard equipment. My sequencer and the center of my studio is Ableton Live. It suits me well, you can do almost anything you could possibly conceive with it. I’ve never felt more creative with anything else. I also run NI’s Reaktor, which only adds to the possibilities with it’s scope, and a host of other plug-ins. As far as Hardware goes, I have a TR-909, my trusty Waldorf Microwave XT, an Ensoniq DP/4 and a Focusrite Compunder running through my Allen & Heath Xone:464. My controller is a Novation ReMOTE 25 SL. I also have an Emulator E5000 Ultra rack-mount sampler that should really get more love. My process is different every time I start a track; I haven’t been constrained by habit too much yet, so I tend to experiment quite a bit, but I’ll generally start with my rhythm tracks and build from there.

TLM: You’ve just completed a masterful mix of the latest Thoughtless Times compilation.  Can you explain that process?

ED: Heh, thanks!  I got my hands on the release and listened to the whole thing over and over for about a week to get familiar with the tracks and to decide how I wanted to arrange them in the mix. Some of it was flying by the seat of my pants, but I had most of the arrangement before I sat down to glue it together. It was done in my studio digitally, and was designed to highlight the music rather than my skills as a DJ, being a compilation showcase and all. It’s fun to layer and blend in a studio/digital context, but it’s a waaaaay different vibe that laying down beats with a set of 1200s!

TLM: What do you look for in a track nowadays?  What makes a piece of music stand out to you?

ED: Nowadays, I guess what I’m looking for isn’t that different from back in the day. A track has to chug, has to go somewhere, needs depth and syncopation and has to make you move. It doesn’t necessarily need the big, overt blow up break-down, I like subtle tracks as well as bangers. There should always be a hint of subversion and a little carrot dangled in front of the dance floor’s nose. Lately I’ve been going back and digging out my old Chicago house vinyl, stuff by Mike Dunn and Paris Mitchell. I’ve been feeling the mix between techno and house a lot more lately and want to fuse those influences with what modern stuff is happening along those lines. For me, that’s always been the territory that’s most exciting, that fine line that can exist between house and techno.

TLM: You used to spin vinyl only, but have been integrating digital technologies more and more over the past few years.  How has this impacted your approach to performance and music collection?

ED: I wouldn’t say it’s impacted either too much, but there are subtleties you notice. In terms of my collection, it’s always been a mish-mash of all formats, never really exclusive to any. It’s still dominated by vinyl first, CDs next, then files. The only different thing is my DJ library, which is virtually exclusively .wav files. It’s no longer 12” singles, but just tracks I want to play, whether they’re a or b sides, whatever. I still shop for CDs and vinyl in the same ways I always have, just not as much. New Record Thursdays are extinct for me, and I miss going to the shop and experiencing a hive of other DJs looking for their music. Now I buy maybe one or two records every couple weeks, depending on what’s in. It’s very laissez-faire.

Performance-wise, I never play mp3’s, but I do play .wav’s I burn to CD, and there’s always vinyl. I never incorporate a laptop, although that will change over the next while as I look towards new means of performance and change-up my old habits. I haven’t been playing out much at all, which suits me for the time being, as I can re-calibrate and re-tool my system.

TLM: You have a vast collection of music, and a deeply informed knowledge of electronic music history.  Where do you see the future of underground dance music heading?

ED: Technology will definitely continue to factor in. People will always party, so really the technology used to express music will leave a mark as well as well as the environments that it’s performed in. I’ve heard interesting things in the form of kinetic dance floors for energy generation, things like that. Politics and the shifting mood of the population will affect things as much as the new youth will. We like to say it’s all different now, but it’s still kind of the same. Whatever trends are grafted on to the surface of it, the core will always be moving people and making them dance or react. I’m always really curious to see what new genres will arise and change everything the way things were flipped around with the advent of hip hop, house and techno.

I also venture to speculate that there are, by far, more people making music now than in the past, and that’s one thing that’s happening now, that will continue to spread outwards. It’s crazy. Again, looking back, most of us knew all or most of the labels or contenders in a broad swath of sub-genres, but now? We see what we’re exposed to and little else. I know there are loads of releases I would love but will never get to hear or play. How will all this be catalogued in the future? How will it be looked at and studied? Will future generations look at underground techno the way we look at underground, rare funk 45s? Will the diggers return, or will they disappear as hard drives fail and music libraries succumb to the weight of time? What gets lost, and what will matter then versus now? What moments are preserved and passed on?

TLM: Indeed, the future is vast, and the landscape of music sure is changing fast.  In closing, any upcoming projects you’d like to share?

The season of remixes - I had a lot this summer – is finally over, and I’m excited about a couple of collaboration proposals which have come my way that I’m keeping close to my chest until they get a little further developed. My other focus is to begin a new crop of tracks that focus on a sound I want to develop for myself. I really want to push my skills further and delve into what I see as a style of my own.

• (0) Comments
• (485) Views