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ARTIST Q & A By Dave Mac Photo: Ian Engelbrecht
magine being given a demo on a TDK tape. I imagine some of you reading this may not even know what a TDK D90 tape is! The year was somewhere around 2000/2001 I think. The name scrawled across the tape was Damage. Two young lads from Paarl had sent the demo to Alien Safari and whilst the music was a little on the rough side, it was one of the most promising bits of psytrance to emerge from South Africa back then. Not long after that the duo were rocking dancefloors and in less than a year thereafter one half of Damage – James Copeland - gave birth to his solo project; Broken Toy. The rest, as the cliché goes is history. As Broken Toy, James has gone on to release two stellar albums and tons of singles since. Today he is one of the most booked psytrance
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Broken Toy
So, top psytrance producer turns to electro-swing-tech... Now you wouldn’t be the first psy producer to explore new genres but you’re beyond just exploring. You’ve created a whole new persona haven’t you? Yes, although I don’t think it’s something I can rigidly adhere to. These days people’s appetite for music is so insatiable it’s become difficult to stand out even if you are damn good at what you do. You only have to look at the success of Jack Parow or Die Antwoord
acts on SA dancefloors and if he can motivate himself to bang out another Broken Toy album he will no doubt become a regular fixture on the global circuit once again. A gifted producer with a penchant for the less than obvious, our man Jimmy has recently also given birth to a new project simply called James Copeland. Essentially a minimal tech[house] project with a penchant for vintage sounds, swinging horns and even a touch of blues and rockabilly, Jimmy now swings effortlessly between the high-octane futuristic sounds of Broken Toy and his slinky, throbbing minimal tech project. We caught up for a little chat across the interweb (he was on tour in Europe somewhere) and as usual James was honest, forthcoming and quite chatty...
to see that creating a character to express your music through lends a whole new perspective that listeners latch onto. Some might consider it a piss-take, but in essence it’s making your music 3D - adding a new dimension to it that pushes songs into the realm of entertainment rather than just music. I don’t want to put on an act, but I do want to create the headspace in which I want the music experienced.
But with your talents you could have opted for something more mainstream or radio friendly... Well I do enjoy a bit of a challenge - even to the point of self-sabotage but the bottom line is this; when I sit down in the studio and I’m working on something that I’m not into, I start to get nauseous and I have to bail. My stylistic choices are always instinctive and inescapable. The brief on the James Copeland stuff was simply that I’d do something focused on vintage sounds as opposed to the hi tech science fiction noises that dance music is normally associated with, and at the moment that includes everything from Balkan beats, rockabilly, swing and beyond.
“...it's really what I consider earning your right to party, no matter the cost or how wrong it seems.” Surely you’d like to write a hit song or massive club anthem one day? Something that would get extensive radio play. Not all hit songs are bad after all.... Not so concerned with radio, but a club anthem... Wow! Let’s try and quantify the power of that. Small clubs being rocked by a simple melody creating absolute unity and euphoria - that magic moment clubbers yearn for. Now multiply that by the amount of clubs in the world and repeat the formula adding and including bigger clubs and festivals with millions more people etc and etc. Extrapolate the formula over time and it would be mindboggling to be the person who brought that amount of euphoria into the world! It’s a serious achievement and it is something that gives me a bit of a tingle to think about. I`d love to achieve something like that, but I’m not actively striving for it - I don’t think that’s the point anyway. It didn’t take you very long to get the James Copeland music released... I`ve gotten some fairly random connections through Soundcloud with Nesono [another of James’ projects], which people generally thought was curious, but not something they could play. As soon as I made the JC stuff which was more to their tastes, it spread like wildfire and ended up in the right hands within the first month of starting the project. It was a very satisfying experience considering how long I’ve waited on certain projects to bear fruit.