TRAP_Hi Maya, lovely to meet you. We guess the best place for us to start is with your album... “Everything’s finished now for the album, but I still don’t have the title; I’m quite last minute with things and the worst thing is always naming tracks! But it’s done, and should be out end of March, so not long now. It’s all full-vocal, song-based, electronic stuff – quite different to the club-based tracks people will have heard from me in the past. I’ve got five or six different featured vocalists on there, but the rest of it is all my own vocals.”
TRAP_So when was your house music epiphany? “When I was younger, I was lucky enough to meet people that took me to the right nights; parties like Mulletover and Secretsundaze that were happening in London and very fresh at the time. I remember going and thinking ‘This isn’t what I thought house music was.’ Because what I’d heard until then was very commercial stuff on the radio. From there I just got deeper into it, going to more nights, seeking out what I really liked.”
“It’s been an on-going project for a long time; a couple of the tracks on there are actually around four years old! I’m just really excited though, because, like I said, it’s more than what people might expect of me; I didn’t get into music through club music, I made so many different types of music before I got into house and techno, so it’s all my influences and inspirations translated into sound, I guess.”
TRAP_You were ahead of the curve, treading a path from more bass-driven UK sounds to house and techno that many didn’t come to until years later... “House is very fashionable now. The change I’ve seen is that house has become a lot more accepted with a wider audience. When I was in Sixth Form, I was listening to house, but most of my friends my age weren’t listening to house music or going to house nights. That’s really evolved now, because if you speak to people that are 16 or 17 in London, a lot of young people are listening to that music. And the genre has expanded; it’s such a broad term, anyway.”
TRAP_So, it’s an artist album, a Maya Jane Coles album; not just a collection of house club bangers? “Yes. This is just what I’ve always done, and I feel like I’m at a stage now where I’m happy to let the rest of the world hear it.”
TRAP_Can you tell us more about the features on there? Any production collaborations, or is it all just you? “I’ve done all the production; I don’t tend to collaborate with many producers because I usually have quite a clear vision of what I want a track to sound like. But I love working with guest vocalists, so there’s a few on there. There’s Kim Ann Foxman from Hercules and Love Affair, Miss Kittin, Karin Park – who has done the vocals for the lead single from the album ‘Everything’ - and Tricky, which I’m particularly excited about. People who I was inspired by growing up and looked up to, or people that are new on the scene but have excited me; it’s nice to have a mixture.” TRAP_You just mentioned Tricky – we couldn’t help but notice a real Mezzanine-era Massive Attack sound to the track ‘Back To Square One’ on the recent taster EP for the album... “Oh definitely, that whole Bristol sound, trip-hop - it was a big part of how I got into production. That was one of my first music passions. I guess when I started making music, that sound was my biggest inspiration. I did a remix a while back for Tricky and it was his favourite remix of the package, so I asked him to guest and he was totally up for it.” TRAP_You’re obviously keen to stress that the album is much more than just house music, and is the sum of your many influences... Other than dub and trip-hop, what other inspirations lie behind the project? “When I got into production, I pretty much dabbled in everything and anything. If I discovered a new genre or tune I liked, I’d have a go at my own take on it. It helped growing up in London, because there are so many parties and different things going on. You’re spoilt for choice and exposed to everything from such a young age. From garage and drum & bass, to dubstep, house and techno...
“The whole dubstep sound when it first started, when it was very different to now, that led me on to different sounds. I discovered house music not long after, and it was the first thing I really started going out to. But hip-hop, that was the music that first really got me, when I was 14 or 15, Missy Elliot, Timberland, Pharcyde, Digable Planets, Tribe Called Quest – 1990s hip-hop is a massive passion for me.”
TRAP_Would you agree that it’s not just the audience for house that’s changed, but the music too? The music you and many others are making has a real focus on the bass... “There’s definitely an influence from what’s been before; you can hear the garage, bass-driven roots coming back into the currency. And when dubstep went crazy and mainstream; the producers that were producing the more leftfield stuff, a lot of them floated over to house and crossed over, so that was sort of a stepping stone. “On my album, you’ll definitely hear the club influences; it’s very bassy, so I guess there’s a lot of dub influence in there. My tracks generally revolve around the bassline - I play bass as well -but still, I wouldn’t say it was any one genre. It’s just electronic. I don’t like talking about genres too much. Ultimately, you make music. I don’t like labelling and creating sub genres on top of sub genres; good music is good music.” TRAP_And that attitude applies to your album too? “Yeah exactly; I wouldn’t be able to specify what genre the album is. I’m influenced by so many different things and this final record is a collage of all of that. I want it to be universal music; hopefully the dance music world will embrace it, but I want it to be accepted in the more poppy market too. I like writing catchy hooks; no one ever said pop music needs to be shit, pop is just popular music, if it’s good and catchy, it can be pop – it doesn’t need to be in your face typical radio chart stuff.” TRAP_You previously released dubstep under the Nocturnal Sunshine name, while the Maya Jane Coles moniker has been very much all about house. But this album seems to combine the two... “Nocturnal Sunshine was a name created for a specific sound – that deeper dubstep sound. Maya Jane Coles was and is everything I do, I don’t want boundaries for that name; whatever I produce comes out under that name.” TRAP_So it’s just you. As the name of your record label, I Am Me, through which this LP is being released, suggests. “I never thought, ‘I want to start record label.’ I purely set it up as a platform to release my own stuff, because I didn’t want to sign it to anyone else and be part of someone else’s brand. I just thought, ‘I’ve built something for myself and I’ve got here myself, so I want to keep it that way and not give up my rights.’ It’s a hell of a lot more work, but it’s totally worth it.”
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