From boot camp to house champ: Abe Duque

From boot camp to house champ: Abe Duque

12 August, 2009 | 6.29AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: abe duque, abe duque records, process recordings

When Carlos Abraham Duque Alcivar joined the United States Marine Corps, he spent four months in boot camp at Parris Island, in South Carolina - the facility made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s movie Full Metal Jacket.

“My Marine days really shaped my character, it made me a tougher dude and more resilient to failure,” says Alcivar otherwise known as the American DJ and producer Abe Duque.

“Boot camp was hellish. I was a bit chunky back then, so they put me in this platoon with all the fat guys. It was a special platoon called PCP, or Pork Chop Platoon. We trained all day, every day. Other platoons, they did other stuff like shoot guns, but we just woke up at 4am and worked out all day.

“It was miserable. I never thought I’d get out of there. It was hell on Earth,” he says, laughing. From the photos and background, you’d expect Alcivar to be a hard nut to crack, but he’s chatty and full of chuckles.

Alcivar eventually left the Marines after four years and became a music producer. He went from shooting M16s to putting out house records. His drill instructor must be pissed, but he took a few things with him from his Marine days.

“My first release was in 1989,” he says. “But it was only after 15 years of trying that I saw real success. I guess I kept coming back for more pain, that was something I might have learnt in the Marines.”

Some would call it insanity - to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, but Abe Duque, he would call it discipline, resilience, and self-belief. Once a Marine, always a Marine.

With his third studio album ‘Don’t Be So Mean’ having dropped recently, and its darker dancefloor moments filtering their way across clubland’s underbelly we felt it was time to salute Abe Duque.

You’re a big name in Germany, why do you think that is?

Germany is my most popular country, or shall we say, it’s the country that has supported my music the most.

I guess it’s because I originally hooked up with these Austrian guys like Patrick Pulsinger, and started putting out music with them in the early 1990s, and that built me a fanbase in Germany.

Wasn’t that under a different name?

Yeah, in the mid 90s I went under the name Kirlian and I did three albums on the Disko B label from Munich.

What happened to Kirlian?

I quit that alias because I wanted to start fresh again. The Kirlian stuff was really diverse, and I did all styles from ambient and deeper stuff, all the way to dancefloor cuts, so I thought it was time to do things under my own name.

Plus people need you to keep things as simple as possible for them. I’m sort of this new guy again now. Or at least, I’m the oldest new guy on the block.

At first, you released under Abe Duque without any promotion whatsoever. Why is that?

Yeah it was a strange time in my life. I just wanted to do music for myself. So I put out records with no hype sheet, no promos. I hoped that the records would get discovered by themselves.

By release No.7 we had sold 25,000 copies on vinyl without any promo. It just blew up.

You quit the music scene for a while, didn’t you?

Around 1999 and 2000, things were not going great for me. All my gigs went down and it seemed really hard to persuade European promoters to fly out a guy from New York. So I sold my studio equipment and my brother got me a job working at the investment bank JP Morgan doing service work, fixing desks and that sort of thing.

Then one day I remember standing in an elevator thinking how bored I was. So I went to my wife and begged her to let me try and make music for just one more year. Just give me one year, and if it doesn’t work out, I won’t ever do music again, I told her.

So I dropped the carpenter job and started putting out pure dancefloor records, with no hype. I wasn’t desperate, I just wanted to put out my music, and if it got picked up, then great. If not, then I was out.

It’s totally ironic, as soon as I stopped pushing, it blew up. It was like God playing a sick trick on me. But I think there’s a lesson there for most people - if you truly believe in yourself and keep pushing, eventually you can make it.

But it worked?

Yeah, it worked, but I never thought that it would frickin’ work! By release No.5 the label started to get picked up. Sven Vath charted one of my tracks and that brought me loads of attention. Then DJ Hell asked me to produce his album. And then the Pet Shop Boys asked me to produce their new record, but even though that never came through in the end, it showed that I was on the right path.

Do you think your years as a Marine trained you to never accept failure? Not many producers would give up, sell their equipment, and then come back and try again, only to finally succeed.

It’s totally ironic, as soon as I stopped pushing, it blew up. It was like God playing a sick trick on me. But I think there’s a lesson there for most people - if you truly believe in yourself and keep pushing, eventually you can make it.

Since you broke through, you’ve maintained a healthy following.

Things have been at a certain level since then, but every time I do an album things get a little hotter. I’m doing so many interviews at the moment which is new for me.

How come you haven’t done that many interviews over the years?

I’m not sure, I just never really felt like it. I tried my best to avoid press. Believe it or not, I think that’s one of the reasons for my longevity. I haven’t been overexposed and that can work in your favour.

Did you have to buy a lot of your old equipment back, or did you just not bother replacing the stuff you sold when you quit music?

I bought a lot of it back, yeah. I had a massive amount of equipment from back in day, but I kept some of it, like my Rolands. I couldn’t bear to part from some of it. I bought back my Juno Alpha and Super Jupiter. I’ve bought a lot of controllers recently. But I’m not one of those guys who’s only about analogue.

How so?

Well some guys are hardcore analogue, and say ‘I only use analogue, grrrrr, and they look down at the software guys’, but it doesn’t make much difference to me. Software and new equipment is part of evolution, and we should embrace change, as DJs.

It’s like this debate now about digital DJing versus vinyl. I was talking to Joey Beltram the other day and he made this great point - do you think if you went back to the 70s and said to the disco guys like Larry Levan, ‘You can either have all of these heavy and scratched plastic discs to spin your music from, or this shiny pretty laptop that stores thousands of records and you can carry it around with you everywhere’, they would have chosen the vinyl? Err...no.

Let’s talk about your new album ‘Don’t Be So Mean’. Is there a concept behind it?

Nah, the album doesn’t have any concept. The title is just because you need to call it something. The record is just a collection of dancefloor tracks really, made without any compromise.

But tracks like ‘Following My Heart’, with the vocals of Virginia, is quite a different song for you. It’s more like a techno love ballad.

Virginia is a girl from Munich, who my manager introduced me too. She has her hands in a few different pies, and she’s a great vocalist. But there’s no hanky panky going on, if you say it’s a love ballad!

Ok. But the album does have slightly sinister thread running through it. It’s dark and haunting anyway.

When something haunts you, it keeps coming back, and keeps entering your brain. So in that sense, I find haunting melodies great as they stick inside you and you keep thinking about them.

Blake Baxter, as always, appears on a few of the record’s tracks. What’s your relationship like with him?

I’ve known Blake since 1992. We were friends who were both making music, but we never actually got together in the studio until 2005. It was like one of those weird friend situations, where you shouldn’t have sex because it might ruin a good friendship - we weren’t sure we should get in the studio together in case it ruined our friendship.

But it worked out. For this album, he came out to New York for a few weeks and stayed with me. When we weren’t in the studio we went on bike rides together and just chilled Working with him is so easy, I wish every vocalist was as good as him. Just hand him a microphone and he’ll nail it straight away. Everything that comes out of his mouth is sexy, or at least, that’s what the girls tell me [laughs].

Your track ‘What Happened?’ with Blake in 2004 was huge.

Yeah, I’m still making money off that record, can you believe it? Because of that record, DJ Hell persuaded me to do my first LP, it really took my career to the next level.

And now you’re riding the wave?

I’ve always shied away from hype because I wanted my music to speak for itself. I’m gonna die one day and I don’t have any kids. I need to leave something behind, and my music is all I’ve got.

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