Davide Squillace Person Of Interest By Rick Warner Jeff Mills to Napoli for the first time. But after a sojourn to London as a young man, the confines of the southern Italian city of under a million people just seemed too much. “After London I moved back to Napoli to study sound engineering and I was like, ‘I need to get the fuck out of here!’ It was between Berlin, Amsterdam and Barcelona,” Squillace explains. “Berlin? Everyone’s in Berlin. Why am I going there? Amsterdam, I love the city. It has beautiful architecture and people, but it’s just too cold. So I went to Barcelona and I really loved it. I’m not here that much now but when I come back I’m really happy.” It’s in his Barcelona office that I catch him for this interview. He’s happy, surrounded by props from a recent video shoot. He grabs a cube-shaped art piece and thrusts it into the Skype camera enthusiastically, explaining the stop-go film technique used on the shoot. “It’s very inspiring,” he says of his new label, This And That Lab. “There is a bunch of people at the office and we’re brainstorming every day.” Created to merge his love of music with his passion for art and media exploration, This And That has Squillace thinking big already. “We’ve teamed up with a contemporary art gallery from Napoli and every cover is going to be done by a different artist,” he says proudly.
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All evidence suggests otherwise. Squillace grew up in Naples, coming up in the electronic music scene alongside Marco Carola and Rino Cerrone. “I’ve been really lucky to grow up in Napoli. It’s not too complicated a city and it’s not very cosmopolitan. It’s a tough city,” he explains. At age 15, he and his friends were already putting on parties, bringing heavy hitters like Richie Hawtin and
It’s lucky that he’s playing in the open air of the Greenwood Hotel in Sydney, though, because his music isn’t for the dank, dingy sweatboxes. He wants something much nicer. “When you hear that underground dance music needs to be in a dark place – it’s bullshit. I can’t stand it anymore. I want a fancy nice place. I want to see people. I want a place where I can talk to them.” What: Circoloco Easter Sunday With: Apollonia, Dyed Soundorum, Dan Ghenacia, Shonky When: Sunday March 31, from noon Where: Greenwood Hotel / 36 Blue St, North Sydney
Future Stuff By Lauren Murada
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n a cold night in 2005, Van She played their first gig. It was at Bang Gang, the legendary Sydney party at Club 77 – a night that had a big part in the band’s development, according to lead singer and guitarist Nick Routledge. “That’s actually where we met each other,” he says. “Mikie [Di Francesco, synth] I already knew, but it’s where I met Matt [Van Schie, bass] and Tomic [Archer, drums]. It was a pretty amazing time. Ajax was the first person to really advance our music. He played one of our songs on FBi – that’s how we got our first gig, which led on to Modular signing us.” In the past few weeks, following the death of original Bang Gang member Ajax (born Adrian Thomas), there has been a lot of reminiscing about the party DJ and Sweat It Out label owner. Routledge had spent the past year working with Ajax on a new album. “I have eight tracks sitting on my hard drive that we were going to release, but because he was such a perfectionist, we would finish a track, we were like ‘Oh, it’s great’, be heaps excited about it, but then the next day, he would call and be like ‘I like it but, we have to start again’,’’ he says. “We were talking with Angus and Connie from Sneaky [Sound System], Kim from The Presets and Beni, and hanging out quite a lot and talking about starting a label, future stuff – he was really excited about it,’’ he says. Whether we will have a chance to hear this new music is unknown, but the legacy of Ajax and the impact Bang Gang had on the Sydney dance music community will live on. A perfect example of this is this Sunday’s Harbourfest, where you can see a number of artists who came up through the mid-to-late ’00s electro scene, like Midnight Juggernauts DJs, Yolanda Be Cool and DCUP. The Van She boys will also be DJing – a lot of people don’t realise that a Van She DJ set comprises of mostly of their own music. “A lot of our DJ set is music that we have produced and written that hasn’t come out on anything,’’ Routledge says. “There’s a
new project that’s going to come out in the next couple of months that might get a spin.” Since the Sydney boys started the band eight years ago, they’ve released two albums on Modular, V and Idea of Happiness, and made hundreds of remixes for the likes of The Klaxons, Feist, Groove Armada and Sneaky Sound System. These days they all have side projects, with Di Francesco’s Touch Sensitive and Van Schie doing Du Tonc; Archer rarely drums with the band anymore due to work commitments. Routledge just finished work on his solo project Nicky Night Time, and is currently in talks with record labels about releasing it. This makes live shows in Sydney few and far between, but the boys are finally playing live together this Saturday night at Major Raiser’s Givva Fork Party. The not-for-profit organisation that runs unique, innovative campaigns to fund school feeding programmes in vulnerable areas of the globe. At the time of our interview, though, Routledge is headed for a writing vacation; he and Van Schie are aiming to get into the studio soon. “Well, we’re always in the studio, but I guess later we’ll record it while we’re in there and just get someone to mix it.” He’s tight-lipped on what the new material might sound like, though, saying only that “you can never tell what will happen”. What: Major Raiser’s Givva Fork Party With: Elizabeth Rose, Polographia, Olympic Ayres Where: The Standard When: Saturday March 30 Also: Playing Harbourfest 2013, with The Aston Shuffle, Tonite Only, Midnight Juggernauts DJs and heaps more Where: King St Wharf, Darling Harbour When: Sunday March 31
Ivan Smagghe Done To Death By Alasdair Duncan
If there’s a thread that runs through Smagghe’s musical career, from his legendary Death Disco mix through to the tracks he produced with Black Strobe, it’s a tendency to gravitate towards slightly twisted sounds. ‘Dark’ is the word I use, although Smagghe is not quite sure. “I’ll take anything people say about me, so if that’s what you think, then it’s valid, but I don’t think I’m necessarily drawn to dark things,” he says. “I don’t like dumb, happy-happy music, but I’d say that I’m more attracted to things that are strange. I like the weirder side of dance music. I absolutely don’t mind playing disco music, as long as it has a stranger side to it, but I really don’t like this word ‘dark’.”
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van Smagghe got his start selling records at the legendary Rough Trade store in Paris, but he never considered the fact that he might one day have a flourishing career as a DJ. “I have always been very passionate about buying records, ever since I was a kid,” he says. “When I started DJing, though, it wasn’t because of any
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plan or design, and I never really intended for it to be a way to make money, it just happened by accident.” This was the early ’90s, and at the time, playing records was just for fun. “I loved doing it, but I never thought I wanted to be a DJ,” he says. “I mean, no one really wanted to be a DJ in those days, but it just happened.”
He ponders the question of darkness in his music for a bit longer, and eventually hits on a description that he likes – “I guess maybe the best way to put it is that the music I like isn’t ‘straight’,” he says. The aforementioned Death Disco mix, released in 2004 but still just as essential today, is a good example of this. It’s crammed with weird and wonderful hybrids of disco and house from the likes of Sweet Exorcist and Ralphie Rosario – it’s music that evokes the glamour of the nightlife, but with a decidedly sinister edge. “I love disco and I love pop,” Smagghe says. “My only rule is that I like to do things people don’t expect, things that are a bit strange.”
Smagghe lost a great deal of his vinyl collection in a fire several years ago; many DJs would consider this a calamity, but he took it in stride. “I still have some vinyl, but I’m not a fetishist about it,” he says. “I mean, there are people who fall in love with an artist or label and need to have every one of their releases on vinyl, but I’m not like that.” For him, ultimately, it’s about the quality of the tunes, rather than the format. “There are two types of music,” he says, “good and bad. End of debate. The rest of the things, like the format – that’s all just technicality. I’m not interested in that at all.” As for the music he’s enjoying currently, Smagghe is reluctant to say. “I could name one, but then later, I’ll think, oh shit, there’s also this one and this one,” he laughs. “There’s that, but there’s also the fact that I might really like one particular track by one particular artist, but then the next thing they put out might be something I really dislike. Likewise, I might hear a track I really like by an artist I really don’t like. So I never really like to say what I’m enjoying or what I’m not – I just like to listen to a lot of music.” What: Picnic Touring presents Ivan Smagghe When: Thursday March 28 Where: The Abercrombie Hotel
Van She photo by Ben Sullivan
s resident of Ibiza’s infamously raucous DC-10 party, Italian producer Davide Squillace has got cred. The casual clubber (or festival attendee) who thinks Guetta is a genius probably won’t have heard of this guy, but that seems to be just fine with Davide. He doesn’t think he’s that famous either. “I have three more interviews after you. What is it with you guys?!” he laughs, referring to his morning schedule of interviews from Australia. “I’m not even that interesting.”
Despite the advertising campaigns and art show curation that keeps him busy at the office, it’s still music that takes him across the globe. He’ll soon be in Miami to play a few dates at the big electronic music love-in that is the Winter Music Conference, before bringing his deep, melodic house sounds back to Australia’s shores as part of the Circoloco Easter tour. After a successful 2010 debut tour alongside Jamie Jones, Australia is a destination he is looking forward to revisiting, despite the long haul travel to get here. “First thing is like ‘Wow, you fly all the way to Australia and it’s shit. It’s a long way.’ But trust me, it’s pretty amazing,” he gushes. “It has this kind of California vibe with a more European mentality. I would love to live in Australia if it were an hour away.”
Van She