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Not A Diving Podcast with Scuba
#129 Mike Parker: Art and techno, "If it's about money or fame then maybe you've lost the original motivation"
Mike Parker is one of the most singular practitioners of the discipline of Techno as is possible to identify. His biography describes his approach to music as 'experimental and ritualistic' and on detailed listening you'd have to agree.
He's also a professor of fine art at Daemen College in Buffalo, and a graduate of the art school at Carnegie Mellon University.
So this is an episode about Techno, but not typical of nominally similar episodes of recent weeks.
We discuss recording, work in the studio without a computer, his early experiences in bands, the influence (or not) of EDM, and the mid 90s east coast warehouse scene.
And we also get a definition of 'art' from someone who actually knows what they're talking about!
If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.
You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.
Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.
Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlist
Follow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport
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133. #133 Robert Henke: Co-founding Ableton and the new Monolake album, "We are the children of counterculture"
02:09:41||Season 1, Ep. 133If the medium is the message then surely anyone closely involved with Ableton over the past couple of decades can justifiably claim to have changed the world of music in that time.Since our guest this week is a co-founder of the company, then his contribution should probably be described as world-changing. And not just electronic music, since all music today is to some extent running on tech. Ableton has done more than any other emergent piece of technology to enable vast, previously unprecedented numbers of people to make records.But is that a good thing? We find out in this conversation.Of course we also discuss Robert's contributions as an artist, in particular his new album as Monolake, entitled 'Studio'. We get into the process of making it, and the differences from his previous album projects. And we talk about the challenges and pressures of making music over time.We also get deep into his story, moving from Munich to Berlin in 1990 and gradually developing the projects which would... well, change the world.This is as good as I'm making it out to be, so make sure you get all the way through it!If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlistFollow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport132. #132 Agoria: Digital art and music, "classic records have no functionality - they came from the heart)
01:15:34||Season 1, Ep. 132The potential of NFTs to save musicians was always pretty tenuous, and the more excitable proponents of the whole thing always sounded a bit too much like they were either trying to convince themselves about it. Or maybe that they were just scamming.Our guest this week is deep in the world of digital art, but doesn't make any bold claims to be even linking it in much of a way to his first area of creative interest which was, of course, music.Agoria is an important name in the history of the French scene, with a long career releasing records on the full spectrum of labels, throwing parties (including the key festival Nuits Sonores), and DJing all over the world. He's also a thoroughly nice chap who I've had the pleasuring of hanging out with a playing a good few b2b sets with over the years.We discuss the whole web3 thing, his involvement in the digital art scene more generally, the Paris olympics, meeting President Macron, the Presidential art collection, the future of dance music, and a lot more besides.I loved this conversation and you're going to too!If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlistFollow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport131. #131 Daedelus: Aliens and albums, "there's something else potentially at play here..."
01:42:10||Season 1, Ep. 131In 2020, our guest this week was named an Artist in Residence at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Thus we are finally able to continue the theme established on episode 84 with Matthew Dear, a line of enquiry which I know many of you were keen to see more fully interrogated on the podcast.Daedelus has been making music since the 90s, releasing albums (on labels including Brainfeeder and Ninja Tune) almost every year this century, and performing with such virtuosity that they are now a professor of electronic music performance at Berklee's Electronic Production and Design Department.So we had much to discuss during this conversation, including the nature of extra terrestrial communication, government efforts to support the creativity, intellectual property and sampling, the making of albums, and the views and expectations of the new generation of musicians.This is a good one...If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlistFollow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport130. #130 Gregor Tresher + Juliet Fox: a midsummer double bill!
01:39:23||Season 1, Ep. 130I'm on holiday currently but since we never actually take days off here's an unprecedented episode of the show with two guests and two separate interviews!Gregor Tresher is DJ and producer from Frankfurt, Germany who's been releasing music since the 90s under his own name and under the Sniper Mode alias. We focus on production in this conversation, and specifically collaboration since much of his output in recent years as been working with other people, perhaps most notably in co-writing and producing Sven Väth's 2022 album Catharsis.Juliet Fox is a breakthrough DJ from Australia who has been riding the wave of the current techno boom since the pandemic. We chart her journey from Adelaide, to Melbourne and on to Europe where she now lives in London, having enjoyed the customary spell in Berlin too.Both of these conversations include discussion on the challenges facing the current dance scene, and the reasons to be optimistic. We get some interesting divergences AND convergences of opinion of the various issues, making this a pretty effective double header.Stick it on by the pool!If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlistFollow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatportStudio Stories: Braille on Triple Transit
48:56|Stream the video version of this episode: https://youtu.be/WoQuHAjWYMsAnd listen to Triple Transit: https://push.fm/fl/tripletransitThis is the first in a new series entitled Studio Stories, in which I'll be sitting down with a producer and discussing a release in detail. Today I'm talking to Praveen Sharma, aka Braille, about his awesome new LP Triple Transit which was released today. We get into the technical challenges of making the record, incorporating modular synths and designing an efficient workflow, as well as the emotional journey Praveen embarked upon in the period that he was making the tracks. This is a great insight into an excellent piece of work and you're gonna enjoy the conversation! If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlistFollow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport128. #128 Simon Reynolds: The future of future music, "it's the shiver, the rush, the weird joy and serenity"
01:30:06||Season 1, Ep. 128What is future music anyway? And is it any different from the future OF music?Simon Reynolds is one of the most influential music writers of the last two decades, authoring such seminal works as 'Energy Flash' (on acid house and rave, 'Rip It Up And Start Again' (on the post-punk era), and 'Retromania' (on the obsession of popular culture with the past). His latest book, the recently published 'Futuromania', is a discussion of future music, past and present. And over the course of this conversation we dig deep into its contents, written at various points since the early 2000s. Also covered in the discussion are the current landscape of musical influence in culture, the changing nature of the global dance scene, the rise and fall of Autotune, Lady Gaga and Charli XCX, Burial and Omni Trio, and the influence of Skrillex. I was looking forward to this one and it didn't disappoint! If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlistFollow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport127. #127 Mr. Scruff: Tape edits and the scene with no name, "We just never toed the line"
02:04:08||Season 1, Ep. 127What do you call a music scene with no name?The lack of a commonly-accepted moniker for the mid-to-late 90s movement centred around Ninja Tune and Gilles Peterson amongst others is a real anomaly in contemporary music. One of the most interesting insights from our guest this week, Mr Scruff, is the revelation not even the DJs themselves referred to it as anything in particular. That's pretty crazy!This is a great conversation, a classic episode even. We discuss Manchester, sampling, tape editing, record collecting, as well as the AI stuff and the general making of ones way in the music scene.You're gonna love this one...!If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlistFollow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport126. #126 Regal: Pressure and success, "It's a matter of how you manage it"
01:16:28||Season 1, Ep. 126The pandemic is a topic of conversation we studiously avoided for the first year or so of the podcast, it just seemed a bit boring and predictable. It was shit, basically, and there's only so much you can say about being locked inside for 18 months.But what if you suddenly became a successful DJ in 2019? That was some of the worst timing possible, and must've posed a series of challenges to keep it going, both professional and psychological.This week's guest had to deal with exactly that scenario, and he just about managed to come out of the other side. The pressures of success aren't intuitively easy to imagine from the outside but this particular case probably isn't that hard to empathise with. Work for years to achieve your dreams, manage to do it, and then face the prospect of it all going up in smoke through the most bizarre social circumstances in living memory.Don't worry though, it's not all Covid chat this week, we also get into the music, some technical stuff, more discussion of the state of Techno today (the main theme of the show in recent weeks), and some much-needed detail on the scene in Spain.Regal is a great guy and you're gonna enjoy this one!If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! There are two tiers - "Solidarity" for $4 a month, which features the show without ads, regular bonus podcasts, and extra content. And "Musicality" which for a mere $10 a month gets you all the music we release on Hotflush and affiliate labels AND other music too, some of which never comes out anywhere else.You can also make a one-off donation to the podcast using a card, with Paypal, or your Ethereum wallet! Head over to scubaofficial.io/support.Plus there's also a private area for Patreon supporters in the Hotflush Discord Server... but anyone can join the conversation in the public channels.Listen to the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlistFollow Scuba: twitter instagram bandcamp spotify apple music beatport