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Interview with Above & Beyond and preview to the Anjunabeats Volume 3 launch party Reported by josie / Submitted 20-06-05 12:37 London-based Anjunabeats is the UK’s fastest growing dance label. Founded in 2000, and already giving Vandit and A State Of Trance a run for their money, Anjunabeats is home to such beloved artists and alter egos as Above & Beyond, Oceanlab, Tranquility Base, Smith & Pledger, Aalto, Alt+F4, Endre, Menno De Jong, and Super8. Whether you’re a fan of euphoric trance or not, everybody… and that’s no exaggeration, adores at least one Anjunabeats record. Anjunabeats Volume I, their first compilation album, was released in 2003. Volume II was released in 2004, and was reviewed on these very pages, as was the launch party at London’s Turnmills (with these reviews you’re really spoiling us). Volume III hit the shelves on 13th June of this year, and the launch party is on July 2nd at a spiritual home of trance — Passion at Coalville’s The Emporium, from which wild horses, a battalion of infantry, or indeed a full time job and roughly one hundred miles could not keep me. Above & Beyond member Tony McGuinness drew the short straw and gave me his considered opinion on Anjunabeats, Above & Beyond, Aussie TV, Kylie and Paul Oakenfold. Above & Beyond Tony, it’s 8pm on a Friday, and alcohol has been consumed. Let’s try hard to avoid such ‘preview interview’ questions as ‘tell me why Above & Beyond are just so great’. Actually, part of the reason we’re so great is because we all landed from another planet and so we’ve got superior skills in production, song writing and A&R than normal human beings… so that puts us ahead. Obviously I wouldn’t really want that coming out though. I quite understand. The line-up for the launch party is pretty flipping stellar (Above & Beyond, Matt Hardwick, Smith & Pledger, Aalto, Super8, Andy Bagguley). I’m glad you think so. One of the things we haven't done that much is club nights. We’ve had a couple of nights in London, but this is the first big Saturday night we’ve done. We’ve tried to get a mix across the board of Anjunabeats artists that are going to give people a good night out, and we’ve got some Super8 coming in from Finland. He played one of the best trance sets I heard last year at the Volume 2 launch party. That’s really nice of you to say! I unfortunately couldn’t be there because our old agent double-booked us with a date in China. I’ve only heard him play in Finland — he was at Paavo’s wedding a few weeks ago and we all span a few tunes in this little bar in Helsinki. There is an awful lot of instrumental electronic trance around that’s really quite cack, and Elo (Miika Eloranta — Super8) is like one of the real great rock and roll artists who’s got the same guitar that everybody else is using, but just cracks out things that are just so much better. Why have you chosen Passion? They sort of chose us to be honest — we’re guns for hire. We've done stuff at The Gallery because we’re quite good friends with the people there, and we’re also really good mates with the people at Passion — it's probably the club that we've played at the most in the UK. The two new promoters, Andy Bagguley and Marc West, they’re real old chums of ours so it was just a meeting of like minds. It’s the first time we’ve put an Anjunabeats event on — they were the first people to ask — so we said yes. Have you had a different theme or idea for each album? I’ve always believed when you’ve got a label like we've got, that has got a fairly dedicated following, then some kind of record of what we've been doing is important. With Anjunabeats Volume 1 we’d had quite a lot of records out on vinyl so we had a year and half or two years worth of stuff to choose from and it was quite a retrospective thing. We managed to include the Madonna remix (‘What it Feels Like For a Girl’), the Ayumi Hamasaki remix (‘M’), and there’s a lot of Above & Beyond stuff on there. Then as the label has grown and got more successful, we’re moving towards compilations that have more upfront stuff on, so it’s a ‘must-buy’ for the people who know the label… not just because they want everything we put out, but also because they’re keen to see where we’re going. I think the important thing is to put on the very best that you can at the time that you’re compiling it. What’s come out recently that you really like? God now you’re asking! Thing is we get so many… one of the reasons we put every single Anjunabeats release in a different colour sleeve is because it's quite hard to remember the names of instrumental records. It’s not like if you’ve got someone shouting ‘lager lager lager’. One of the things that we do with Anjunabeats is to think about what colour the music seems to suggest. Sometimes it's quite obvious, for example Eighties we did a day-glo colour which we'd never done before. If you think of Yilmaz Altanhan — ‘Eighties’, it’s got to be that bright Day-Glo orange. ‘Sky Falls Down’ has got to be light blue, and ‘Surrender’s’ got that calm blue, summer’s sky vibe to it. Otherwise sometimes I’m thinking… “it’s that one that’s half way through my wallet, and it’s got big black writing, oh what’s it called!” Tunes Tony? Right. One of the records that I’ve really loved for the last 3 months was Mike Foyle vs Signalrunners — ‘Love Theme Dusk’, it's beautiful… absolutely beautiful. We managed to get that before everybody else and we’ve been absolutely caning that. There’s a new DJ Tab-Super8 thing called ‘Ghetto’ which we’ve been playing. There’s a really lovely dub that Matt Darey did of ‘Liberation’ with no vocal... I think he’s going to make it into a new tune, and that’s really really good. What else… there’s a bootleg of Petter — ‘These Days’ from the Sasha album ‘Involver' which I’ve been playing out, and that’s great. Are you all equally good at mixing or is there one of you that’s a bit rubbish and gets sent for beers? I’d say at this point in time we’re all pretty good. It's one of those things, after a few drinks if you gave us a box of somebody else’s records… there would always be a certain amount of trepidation, but I think we’re all pretty good. I enjoy doing it when I’m doing it, but I hardly ever practise because it bores me to tears. How do you know what will mix into what in a set? I have a sheet of A4 with all the records in key… there’s about 80 records on it. How do you tell what key a record is in? You put it on and you play the piano until you’re hitting the same notes as them! So you guys are pretty musical? Yeah, Jono and Paavo are both classically trained, and I used to be a guitarist and I’ve had piano lessons, so I’ve got a musical ear. It works for me. It’s what you do unless you want to sound like Paul Oakenfold — the world’s best key-clash mixer. One of the lovely things about Paul is he doesn’t really care about anything except whether a record’s good or not. We do try and mix either in the same key or a fifth above. The thing you’re trying to avoid at all costs is a semi tone out — really hideous key clashes. Then there’s the bit that sometimes doesn’t work… sets have their own life, specially when you’re playing back to back. If I play the new Matt Darey dub which is quite chilled, and then Jono or Paavo suddenly picks it up and sticks on something quite banging, then the set moves in it's own way. Do you ever look out across the dance floor and think “I’m going to risk it”, and go for something a little bit different? There's a risk involved in every record that you play… except the end of the set when you’ve had 37 people holding their phone up saying “please play Delirium — ‘Silence”’. You think “oh f*cking hell I'll have to play it” and it absolutely goes off. There’s a few records that always do that. We do sometimes take a track and stick the vocals from another one on top of it to give people something unique. What we’ve started doing in the last few months is tracks that are not necessarily going to be for release, but we make something that fits a hole in our box. Smith & Pledger What's the track that you’ve made that you love the most? If you asked us all, we’d all say Razorfish by Tranquility Base, because of the spirit in which we made it. Actually it was a remix of Three Drives — ‘Sunset In Ibiza’. When we heard the original we thought this is nowhere near as good as ‘Greece 2000’. There's a way that the riff works — an off beat arpeggio thing — that’s got real funk to it, whereas we thought the riff to ‘Sunset In Ibiza’ was really crap. So we did that tune but with the rhythm of ‘Greece 2000’. For fun we decided while we were doing it to put a little snippet of ‘Greece 2000’ in there, and then we thought ‘f*ck it, while we’re at why don’t we put in this other bit from Energy 52‘... and then we put the stab in from BBE… and we made this record like one of these old Jive Bunny things. We sent it off and the A&R man rejected it! What he wanted was a record that sounded like ‘Sunset In Ibiza’, so we changed the riff, kept the rhythm of ‘Greece 2000’ but changed the notes, and it became this free record. I’m surprised you don’t say ‘Surrender', or even ‘Getting Away'… how has that not been bigger? I think ‘Getting Away’ suffered a little bit from how big ‘Surrender’ was, which is just one of those beautiful, simple songs. It's just got something really elegant about it. We’d done those two tracks roughly at the same time, and we thought we'd have a quick follow up with ‘Getting Away’, and the world wasn’t quite ready. What do think about artists like Darren Tate and tracks like ‘Winter’? Darren is actually a really good friend of ours and he’s an incredibly talented man. In some respects he suffers image-wise from his success. He’s done tunes that have become bigger than most people in our genre over the last few years, and once things become pop tunes then generally not a lot of love is given to them any more. If you could go out on the p*ss with anyone in the world who would it be? Kylie for me. She’s absolutely gorgeous. Any intellectual reason? None whatsoever! If you want an intellectual let me think… hmm, actually she’s the only person that comes to mind. I would like to go out on the p*ss with Kylie… that would be really nice. Matt Hardwick What would someone have to say about you in print in order to get sued? I don’t know to be honest. I don’t think there's anything that anyone could say in the press that would make me want to sue, because I don’t think I’d get satisfaction from suing people unless it was mortally untrue and implied that I’d done something illegal… and I hadn’t actually done it! I’m firmly of the opinion that people are entitled to their own view, it's one of the reasons why we never interfere in our forum if someone goes on there and slags us off. What's your favourite TV programme? Ok this is easy. I didn’t know it was on and I just caught ten minutes when I got back from the studio last night. There’s an Australian comedy show — Kath & Kim — it’s f*cking brilliant. It's genius… genius, I love it. Plug time… Get yourself to our website Anjunabeats, it’s fantastic! And come to the Anjunabeats Volume 3 launch party at Passion! It’s going to be great fun, I’m looking forward to seeing you there! How nice will you be to single girl fans? I'll go as far as is needed! We need more girls in trance! Photos courtesy of Anjunabeats. Share this :: : : : Follow HarderFaster :: Other Features By josie: It's the Generation game featuring Agnelli & Nelson, The Thrillseekers and Lange Peach at Heaven: Reviewed The Gallery at Turnmills: Reviewed The International Indoor Festival at SeOne: reviewed The double ender: interview with trance legends Darren Tate and Mike Koglin The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly those of the author only for which HarderFaster will not be held responsible or liable. Comments: From: danj on 21st Jun 2005 08:47.22 Good review, loved the last few questions From: Savoy on 21st Jun 2005 15:33.28 Congrats, cracking interview. From: LegendaryOne on 22nd Jun 2005 12:26.17 good interview, why can't all previews be like this?

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