Interview with Hakan Lidbo - 11th Hour Technology

Hailing from Stockholm, Sweden, Håkan Lidbo is without doubt one of the more prolific and diverse producers the electronic music scene has ever witnessed, having released more than 100 records in a career spanning just under fifteen years.

From early experiments in the studio and original homemade releases through to becoming one of the most creative and sought after producers the worlds of Techno, Electro and House have ever seen, he has notched up varied releases across a wide spectrum of the globes labels, including the likes of Feis, Chalant, Force Tracks, Frogman, Pokerflat, Plastic City, Lasergun and countless more.

One explanation for this spread is the sheer breadth of music his range encompasses, -composing everything from Latin Techno through Electro, Synth-pop, Soul, Disco, Click-House and Minimal Dub, imbibing everything with a unique quirkiness and twisted production style.

He is also renowned for his live sets, and has spent a great deal of the last year touring the worlds clubs showcasing his eclectic sound.

We are very proud to present – Håkan Lidbo

Be sure to check out Håkan Lidbo's set.

11th-hour What is your musical background, and what first interested you in electronic music?

Håkan I’ve never really been a DJ (I do try to spin occasionally, but I’m still crap at it) but I’m more from some sort of musician background. I played the piano as a kid but I was more interested in taking mine and my brother’s tape recorders apart and experimenting with different methods of Ping-Pong recordings.

One single moment that meant a lot to me when I was allowed to borrow a recording studio for one evening – that was when I told myself that I wanted to make music for a living. This was about 18 years ago. I bought my first synth in 1984 and I started to build my own studio a few years after. I have always been more interested in specific sounds and production tricks more than actual melodies and lyrics.

I love pop music but the songs that I still keep as my very favourites always have a very significant production.

Håkan Well, I simply had to pay for it myself. It was a 7" single called ‘1-3-7 Disco Heaven’ and that was 1988, a track very influenced by the UK acid movement and the sounds that came after. Still a pretty funky track with a quite nice baseline. I made 300 copies and sold about 70.

11th-hour How would you describe your style to someone unfamiliar with your work?

Håkan That’s a tricky question as I have a few different styles; I make minimal, click-techno, electronica, funky disco, Latin house, garage, techno, lounge/easy listening and much more. But you might say that the groove and odd percussive sounds are my trademark.

I’m very picky about the single sounds and I want every little sound in a production to work with the atmosphere of the track. Very often I process different instruments, like bass synth, hihat and snaredrum, through the same filters or effects. Then I get a solid sound all through the track.

I don’t like productions where you can hear that ‘this is preset sound no #1 on that synth, this is the new plug-in for that software…’. So I try to focus on a unique production for every single track and I like to think that I can make pretty funky rhythm patterns. I’m very influenced by Latin music and even when I make minimal tech house or techno, it’s very often Brazilian or Cuban rhythms but performed with abstract electronic sounds.

11th-hour Why do you think you have been so prolific in releasing music – what drives you to keep producing tracks consistently?

Håkan I have so much music inside that needs to come out. And I find after so many years that good ideas never run out. And I’m still very excited every morning when I get to the studio and very eager to get started. And I also hate when I make a good track and it’s not released, I hate going through my DAT’s and finding a really good song that is still just on the DAT. Good music needs to get released and I keep sending my demo CDs until someone releases that good track.

11th-hour Can you tell us a bit about Container Music – why did you choose to set it up, and what is the direction of the project?

Håkan Container is most of all a publishing company, and I created the company together with my business partner Anders Moren who has 25 years experience in the music business and started to work at Abba’s publishing company in the 1970s. So we started mainly because I wanted to keep the publishing rights for my own music, but now we have other artists coming to us asking about publishing.

There is no other publishing company in Scandinavia that totally focuses on electronic music and that refuses to deal with mainstream music, even if we would make much more money doing so. And I think that’s what’s attractive to many producers of electronic music who maybe asked and got ridiculed by some of the major publishing companies. Container is pretty good at placing music on film, computer games and commercials (but only if it’s an OK product).

Container is also the name of our studio and a production company that licenses the music to different labels around the world. We are working with more than 50 labels all in all.

11th-hour Have you been directly involved with any other record labels in your career?

Håkan I used to work on one of the biggest independent labels in Scandinavia called MNW records. I worked there for about two & a half years but finally when I found myself stuck in a massive workload and not always very understanding colleagues, when I found that no one was talking about the quality and the emotional quality of the music, but only marketing and sales figures, I felt that I had to quit.

I also found that I didn’t have much time left for the studio and that was the saddest thing. I need to make music like I need oxygen so I immediate noticed that I felt much better, slept better and was a much happier person, right after I quit working at that label.

As I explained earlier, Container isn’t a record label, we don’t make records but license the rights to make records to other labels, which we believe in and respect. But we did try to start a label once; Action Music, distributed by Prime in UK. The idea was to give an impression that the label was Chinese, the label text was on Chinese, the artist had a Chinese name (even though the first release was me) and the biography told about the unknown Chinese p-funk movement including some obscure pictures of space-dressed musicians with star shaped electric bass in the middle of a rice field. I realise that the idea was much too obscure but the first and only EP was one of the best I’ve ever made. It sold like 500 copies.

11th-hour Do you produce music purely alone, or are you involved in collaborations with other artists?

Håkan I have a couple of projects where I work with other artists; the electro-punk girl duo 2KHz, the New York jungle rapper Z-MC, the amazing Swedish soul diva Iris and the sweet r’n’b vocalist Paula Lobos. And sometimes I work with other musicians, either where we met in my studio and made a track together (for example the Czech DJ Tvyks on Paper or the New York electro DJ Ulysses on Moon Harbour) or sometimes I make remix duels (Seafoam on Straylight recordings and Tony Senghore on Honduras recordings).

I sometimes use session musicians, but as I can play a little bit on different instruments like bass, guitar, flute etc, I sometimes play the stuff I need – but very, very slow. Then I time stretch and cut up the recordings in small pieces to make it tight. And very often the result is maybe even funkier than if I would have work with a professional musician, but it takes me a few hours to cut everything up the way I want it. The important thing is the result, not the method.

Håkan As I wrote earlier, I’m making quite a few different styles at the same time. I have a few directions that I try to take as far as I can. I’m into a lot of Electroclash at the moment, Lasergun is one off my favourite labels; also the minimal clicks and cuts from labels like Mille plateaux and Force Inc, and the new interesting directions of techno on labels like Feis and Sativae. I love everything Paper Recordings releases.

Some of my favourite artists right now are Si Begg, Tube Jerk, Martin Venetjoki, Len Faki, Sven Andersson, Andreas Tilliander, YMC, Laid, Jori Hulkonen, Oliver Kapp, and Akufen. So again; I’m into a wide range of different musical styles.

11th-hour How do you perceive the music scene in your home, compared with other parts of the world you visit?

Håkan The Stockholm clubscene is not very good at all. Partly because of strict laws that forbid clubs to serve alcohol after a certain time, and most places have to close at 1 o’clock in the morning - some at 3 and some at 5, but most places close early. But an even bigger problem is a department within the police force called ‘The rave commission’ that is trying to kill the club scene in general as they have an idea that the techno and house clubs are the place where young people take drugs.

The rave commission started in 1994 or 1995 where there still were raves going on in the woods, at that time they might have been right, but today you can find just as much drugs in any club playing any kind of music, and in the school yards. Compared with most big cities in Europe, Stockholm doesn’t have a big drug problem, but the authorities’ policy is to try to make it disappear by closing all the good clubs and busting people for having 1 mg of pot in their pocket. When the rest of Europe is going towards a more open drug policy, Sweden is going in the opposite direction. So… you can find some good music and clubs but you have to know where to go and the good ones are normally very small and not always even big enough for dancing.

11th-hour How, in any way does the city of Stockholm influence you personally, and thus the music you make?

Håkan I’m not at all influenced by the music played at the clubs in Stockholm. As I have the fortune to travel to different places to play my live set, I get to hear music played at really nice clubs in Europe, USA and elsewhere. But the creative energy in Stockholm in general is good.

Here’s a lot of people doing contemporary art, film, dance, experimental electronic music, software development etc. And it’s a beautiful city, easy to grasp, very clean and pretty safe, so the place in itself is inspiring, but the clubscene is very, very poor.

11th-hour Why do you think Sweden has developed into such a productive nation in the electronic scene, particularly in comparison with its immediate neighbours?

Håkan First of all I think that our immediate neighbours are getting pretty good at it. The city of Bergen in Norway has excellent producers like Bjorn Torske and Royksopp (and the late Erot), Finland has very good producers of minimal techno and ambient; Pan-sonic, Vadislav Delay / Luomo... and Jori Hulkonen on Fcomm!!! Denmark seem to be a bit after except maybe Thomas Knak (who produced a couple of tracks on the latest Bjork album) and Bjorn Svin.

Swedes have always been good at copying musical styles from UK and USA and then develop them into something new. And we have a history of very good producers of mainstream music. I think that Sweden still is the third biggest music exporting country in the world after USA and UK. To understand why Swedes are so soon to pick up new trends from overseas you must know the people of Stockholm; we all have a New York and London complex; we wish that Stockholm was like these cities and try to copy everything that is going on over there to make Stockholm even more like New York and London. And musically I think we succeed, but when it comes to clubs we fail completely.

11th-hour You have many different and extremely diverse production styles that get vented on different labels at different times. How do you decide what you want to produce, and does this great spectrum of musical tastes reflect your personality in any way?

Håkan Sometimes when I come to the studio in the morning, I have a very clear idea what I want to, sometimes there’s a deadline for a remix or something and then I know what I have to do, but very often I might start with a track, having a certain idea in mind, maybe a funky disco track, but then when I’m in the middle of the production there might be a little insignificant sound that attracts my attention, then I just leave whatever I was doing and focus on that very sound – and the track might turn out like something completely different from what I intended.

I always try to be true to my intuition and I try to disconnect my right half of the brain when I work. You might say that my music very often is improvised, a jam session with me and my software ad my synths. I always try to make the time and distance between my idea and the output as short as possible.

11th-hour Do you compose with a mind to a specific release, or do you select EPs from tracks you have already completed?

Håkan I always select EPs from tracks already created. Sometimes I make an alternative mix of one track that is chosen as the main track. When I make albums I often select maybe 5-6 existing tracks, make a preliminary track order, and then I make new tracks to ‘fill the gaps’.

11th-hour Judging by your prolific discography, would it be fair to say that when you have an idea you can easily go into the studio and get what's inside your head recorded as you please with no real trouble? How long has it taken you to learn the art of the studio?

Håkan I’ve had my own studio for 15 years so I know it like my own pocket (do you say that in English too?!). This and the fact that I’m extremely open minded in my musical taste, I listen to literally everything, makes it possible for me to say that I can make almost any musical genre there is. My studio setup is also a mix of new sound processing software and old synths and effects. And also the fact that I’m making music in so many different styles gives me a wide knowledge of musical tricks. And hopefully it will help me crossing the borders between genres, my goal is to one day invent a new musical style. Pretty ambitious, right?

11th-hour Despite the style of any one of your records, there always seems to be something that sets it aside from all other records of a similar genre. How would you describe this element of uniqueness, and what are its origins?

Håkan Again; the fact that I’m working with different styles makes it possible for me to borrow elements from one style and to put it into another. For example, if you make progressive house you have to learn how to do really long, uplifting break, then if you take that knowledge and use it in a techno song or a disco song, you might come up with something new.

Håkan I didn’t know that I had an image. Most of the photos of me that are published are from the same photo session. Then I happened to wear a nice 60s suit. To be honest I don’t wear suit that often except maybe on weddings and the Swedish Grammy award. But I try to dress somewhat smart. I like the idea that if you look like you have some sort of control over your own look, people might think that you are in control over your professional life. And when it comes to clubbing I must admit that I like the mod idea to dress up when you go dancing. Club wear today is very much about dressing down but in the 60’s working class kids in UK saved all their money to get an Italian suit with a nice cut so they would look really smart at the club.

11th-hour How important is your sense of humour when approaching the production of a new track or remix?

Håkan I’m very glad that you asked this. Humour is very important and I hope that that element will be possible to spot in my music, even if it’s a minimal techno song. I try to make all my songs somehow uplifting and bright. I don’t like depressive and aggressive music because I’m not that kind of person. A friend of mine who is very much into Indian religion and philosophy told me that he stopped making hard techno as he didn’t want to be reincarnated as one of his dark tracks. Music is always about communication and entertainment and to me humour is the most important element of entertainment.

11th-hour What plans do you have for the future of your label and your music?

Håkan I will keep on what I’m doing right now. I release pretty much two records a month and as far as I can see, I will continue to do so in the future. As I wrote earlier; good ideas never run out so I will keep on doing this, hopefully even better, funkier and weirder.

Håkan The fact that electronic music is the art form that is the first to pick up any new idea that is floating around in society and make it into a recording. electronic music does very rarely have anything specific to say, no political message, no moral wisdoms, but the fact that it’s always changing, always looking for new directions, always re-inventing itself, makes it one of the most important forces in a changing society.

Every democracy needs to constantly question itself and its ideology. And then the avant-garde, the free thinkers, even the slightly insane, are the forces that make everything move forward. A new sound of techno isn’t really important except for a limited number of DJs around the world, but it might inspire fashion designers, journalists will write about it, people will listen to it and think "this sounds like something I’ve never heard before - if music can sound this different from everything you know, I can be different as well, I can think different, I can change my life…. Music changed my life - so you never know….

Many thanks to Håkan Lidbo for taking the time out to speak with us….