Lucy - Stroboscopic Artefacts

In a scene awash with diluted, watered down music it's refreshing to find labels and artists sticking to their guns and making music for the heads without drifting into elitest, chin-stroke territories. One key example is Stroboscopic Artefacts. Ali Macdonald ventures into the underground to talk techno politics and compressed dub with label head Lucy.

Pulse: When, where, how and why was SA started? Lucy: We started the label for lots of reasons, but one reason has to do with how I make music. As a producer, I don't feel constricted by notions of genre. When I sit down in my studio I feel totally free to make music dictated only by my mood whether that means IDM, techno, house, dub or ambient. But, this feeling of creating without borders is also something that I really needed to challenge; otherwise it becomes just another form of superficial routine. For me it’s far more challenging to produce music within a defined identity. That’s why I wanted to create a label with a distinct focus and so Stroboscopic Artefacts was born in Berlin in September 2009.

By focused, I don't mean trying to be mono-directional. What I mean is that I’m interested in the idea of "discipline" (to borrow the words of Silent Servant) within the process of artistic creation. It's actually funny that this personal goal has resulted in a platform that is full of different artists. SA is clearly not a Lucy solo label. The releases of the other artists like Xhin, Frank Martiniq, Luke Slater, Ercolino, Dadub, Perc, Chevel and so on, deeply influence me and impacts on the "educational process" I'm going through. It's really a double sided coin.

This atmosphere makes it possible to have a defined sound identity under my Lucy moniker, whether releasing on Stroboscopic Artefacts or for other inspirational label like Mote Evolver, Prologue or Meerestief. And because of this, I feel even more at ease to work on other projects in other ways, under different names.

"Every repetitive movement or sound always seems to be the same, but really it never is because our perception changes all the time."

When starting the label I was initially on my own, with only the guidance of Walter Ercolino who really taught me the A to Z of how to manage a label in an elegant way. But I was really conscious of the fact that as someone who is not just a label owner, but also a producer, it can sometimes be really delicate to promote yourself without having the sensation of spamming people. I wanted to create an underground label, not an advertising agency. I wanted to run the project with a partner, but instead of looking for someone with a music industry background, I wanted to do things differently. I actually had my epiphany in the studio while I was working on my full length IDM project (still a work in progress). I was recording vocals with Clare Molloy and I thought, she's great, sincere and as, they say in German, really fucking clever! I asked her "Are you up for it?" and the answer was a big and smiley "Yeah". For me this has more value than a hundred years of industry experience. Clare suddenly took an important role in the label. But she’s a friend first of all and this is the most important thing. After all we're speaking about underground culture here.

What is behind the name Stroboscopic Artefacts? "Any of various instruments used to observe moving objects by making them appear stationary, especially with pulsed illumination or mechanical devices that intermittently interrupt observation." That is the scientific definition of what stroboscopic artefacts are and we use that as our label concept. First of all, it conjures the image of a club, of a dark place, just lit with flickering strobe lights. We are releasing techno music and naturally the name needed to capture that atmosphere of the club, our favourite context for experiencing techno.

As a producer, the name has another layer of meaning for me. It's the perfect way to express the common roots of the rhythmic structures that most tracks released on SA have. Let's make an example, pick someone who isn't used to listening to techno, or who isn't used to club culture and they will often say that "It all sounds the same to me". The first response to this is the teenage one, to take it as a massive insult! But going deeper with this outsider perspective helped me to discover another aspect of producing obsessive, circular, repetitive sounds. Every repetitive movement or sound always seems to be the same, but really it never is because our perception changes all the time.

In reality you always experience things in flux, in a sort of liquid reality, that’s why it is really difficult to absorb individual details of experiences. Let's say, it is really difficult to observe the individual pieces of the puzzle, it's easier to contemplate the whole. And when you listen to a record over and over, there will always be slight differences in how your brain perceives what it’s listening to. It's the same, on a smaller scale, with how a drum machine loop or a synthesiser loop operates within a track. So the label is interested in the way that perspectives shift and of course, this awareness plays an important role for when I select the SA releases.

There is a clear direction in the SA output – tell us what influences the sound. Our main influence at the moment comes from dub music, and results in what I call "compressed dub". Dub music uses similar processes to the ones that techno uses and we are just compressing the typical mechanisms of the original Jamaican dub music into a range of 126- 130 BPM. Compressing for example by looping sounds again and again, doubling effects using delays and reverbs, letting the analogue resonances and imperfections run or by using reel-to-reel tape recorders. All these techniques are filled with subtle variations and imperfections that give a unique richness to the sound. And when you have a structure that is seemingly "always the same" suddenly you are given the chance to concentrate on the details, to actually hear or see or feel analogue imperfections, or spontaneous variations.

Is it important to you that listeners understand this? It's important that they instinctively feel this concept, but there's no need that they understand it in a philosophical way. It's always about the old Romantic conflict between ideals and how these ideals relate with the infinite possibilities of reality. But this friction between ideals and reality is the most fertile state in which to exist. I mean, at SA we're not a political party and this is not a manifesto that we are talking about. We are just interested in a process of creating perspectives and posing questions.

Do you want to keep SA records for the dance floor, or will you be exploring different areas? SA’s releases are certainly club music. But I have to specify that what we're doing on Stroboscopic Artefacts is really my utopian club soundtrack, not what you usually expect to hear to in an average club. This utopian soundtrack should be able to deeply question our dystopian world. I really believe that a club can be a medium with the capability to express ideas about how we think about society. It's for me a place of freedom, a place where the DJs can express their moods and ideas coded in rhythm and frequencies to an open minded audience. If these ideas were communicated using verbal language people probably wouldn’t listen to what you had to say. Music is another language, but it is a language. And let's not forget that language is culture, and culture is power.

Most of the SA output is pressed to vinyl. Do you secretly despise those digital DJ’s who download their music? Digital is not the problem for me. The problem is when digital is handled in the wrong way. Digital of course costs a label a lot less to produce, but this shouldn’t mean that less attention is given to mastering, to promotion and to the quality of the releases. For us, we are really trying to keep exactly the same benchmark for vinyl and digital releases. Our Samplers, which are digital, are of just the same quality as the releases we choose for the vinyl series, but digital gives us the freedom to be more experimental and wide ranging.

I recently received the new SA remix by Luke Slater, it’s killer! How did you hook up with Luke? From the beginning of SA I wanted to keep the remix thing as a real exception. I'm tired of the remix policy of many labels, which is like one remix per release. It often sounds to me like, “Ok we are releasing these original tracks, but we know that they aren’t strong enough, so we just call in a big name, we pay the remixer (who is often not very interested in the track or label’s vision) tons of money and maybe we can have some hype for our release.” For SA it's really not like this. That's why this remix comes in a special limited "remixes" edition two months after the release of the original with Luke Slater on one side and Dadub on the other.

From the beginning of SA Luke started to give really heartfelt support, letting us know he liked the label’s direction. In November, when Ercolino and me had just finished "Gmork", I sent the track to Luke saying that this was going to be the next SA release and was totally honoured when he decided to remix it. It's not so common that a techno legend like Luke decides to do a remix, especially for such a young label. He has done just a handful of remixes in the last few years, and knowing this I deeply appreciated his "yes" for the remix.

Can you tell us about any other artists you have been working with recently? Or any that you would like to work with? A really satisfying collaboration is the Oblivious project, a collective of mainly visual artist who we're working with more and more in really “out of the club” direction. I take care of all the sound designing part under my real name and at the moment we're working for some really interesting contemporary art festival, galleries and exhibitions. Our AV performances have been gathering a lot of interest and I feel really good potential in this project.

"Music is another language, but it is a language. And let's not forget that language is culture, and culture is power."

In terms of my club-targeted productions, artists I have been working with include Prologue’s Dino Sabatini (from Modern Heads). We’re producing a track that will be released in a compilation mixed by Jonas Kopp who I'm also making some tunes with. I am also really excited about the fact that this spring Xhin came to Europe to play at our label party at Suicide Circus in Berlin and we decided to seize this opportunity to start working on a Lucy & Xhin EP.

As collaboration in more ongoing sense, I'm working closely with Dadub, because they just opened a mastering studio, Artefacts Mastering, in a sort of twin-ship with Stroboscopic Artefacts because we wanted to give the releases our own sound from start to finish. Mastering is totally essential for this and the Dadub duo, Daniele Antezza and Giovanni Conti, are taking care of the whole mastering process and are sometimes even mixing the tracks. Their mastering is not a cold technical approach; they are able to make utterly creative mastering. They never use preset mastering chains, they start afresh for every track which gives the tracks a unique timbre.

Now, people I would like to work with... I think Peter Van Hoesen is one of my main sources of inspiration, and of course artists like Moritz Von Oswald, T++, Martyn, Dettmann or René Pawlowitz. They are able to keep a strong identity without repetition, the quality of their production is just unbelievable and they never seem to tire of their muse. Yes, it would be very interesting to exchange some production methods and secrets with them in the studio.

What happens on a typical day in the life at SA headquarters? I wake up at 5:30. Clare arrives at 5:32. We have just enough time for a coffee before we run through our labyrinth-like HQ. When finally we find our way to the room at the centre of the maze we start to listen to the SA soundtrack, mainly Britney Spears and Sean Paul. The most important thing for us is to be serious at all times. There's no place for humour in a Techno label.

Is Berlin an important place for SA? Being based in Berlin is really important for SA. There are so few cities where what I call the “colourful layer” of society is so prevalent. By this I mean that here there is not such a stark dichotomy in professional situations, like bourgeois on one side and working class on the other. But there’s this wonderful undefined layer of people who are creating their own visions of the future every day. The artistic community here is just as strong as it was, in say New York in the 80s or London in the 90s. From the artist’s point of view it means that they are living in a situation that automatically creates an audience interested in new things, ideas and stimuli.

This is more than true for the techno scene here and Germany has a rich legacy of techno and electronic music culture. It’s like a creative playground where you can really build up a family. For SA the label is not just a self contained bubble filled just with the artists and our HQ, it’s also about the people who come to our parties, those who buy our records, the DJs who play our tracks and continuously give us support, and also those certain people who really get what SA is doing and believe in the vision we are developing.

Ali Macdonald