Interview with ADJ - 11th Hour Technology

London based DJ and producer ADJ is probably best know to the general public as one of the operatives of the infamous Soho based record store, IQ (Instant Quality). The long running manager of this sadly defunct vinyl emporium, Andy is also responsible for the labels Pyramid Transmissions and the newly formed Wandering Soul imprint, as well as being heavily involved in the US label, Outside Recordings.

He is also an outstanding Electro DJ, and his deep, dark and dubby sets of twisted electronics have made him highly in demand across the globe.

We are proud to present - ADJ

ADJ Well, I’ve been into it for years – since early Eighties basically. I grew up listening to Funk and Reggae, with all the electronic effects. When I was about 12 (about 1978), I was listening to Mad Professor, King Tubby – they were using loads of mad electronic effects on top of Dub music. After that it was things like Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaata and Cybotron in the early Eighties, and it started a natural progression – I moved into Hip-Hop, then House and Techno. I’ve always been into the Electro beat really – I think during the Eighties I didn’t really know why I was into it – I just loved it, it was just something that made your body move! It’s only now that I realise it was avant-garde, forward looking music – you listen back to some of it, it still stands up today. You listen to Cybotron and it’s still like it was done in 20 years time, it never sounds dated. So I guess that’s how it got into really, just a natural progression, moving through the genres of music that I liked. I was always into frequencies, mad effects etc…

ADJ Never! Never into pop music… My dad used to have a go at me when I was 12 years old for playing booming Reggae! I was the only kid in my school that was into pumped up music. I just loved it – I got to hear it and that was it… When I was young I had a lot of black mates who lived near where I was, so I was lucky to have access to that kind of music - and I just got straight into it, into all the B-lines and grooves and weird noises…

ADJ Mixing? I don’t know, probably about mid-eighties, just when I left school. Not really mixing, just sort of chucking records together, quite badly! Me and my mates did a few discos when we were 17, 18… Well, not discos, but a pub where we had two decks plugged straight into the PA, and we’d just fade Electro, Reggae, Funk, anything – just chuck it all together! Serious mixing, I guess around 1987. My friend Insync, he had some decks, and he was better at actually mixing records before I was – I had a better collection, but he was good at mixing and scratching, so I learned a lot of my technique from him.

ADJ Yeah, we had a club down near Crawley, where I used to live – in this little outside town called Horsham, middle of nowhere! We used to do that every Friday night, and one friend from there worked for Turbosound, so back in 1987 before anyone had even knew of it, we had a 5K Turbo rig in a club for 150 people (!!), with me and Insync just playing fat hip-hop, early house, acid, everything! It was having it, properly! It even got into on of the music magazines, as one of the best up and coming electronic music clubs in Britain…

ADJ Producing? I first wrote something about 1992, with Insync – just hardware sequenced, no computers – just a 909, 101, 808 and a Juno. For it’s time it was probably alright, though we never released it. That was the first time I tried writing anything, but the first release I had was in ’95, on my first label, Analogique. Very deep electro and underground B-12 / Stasis-y sounding techno stuff.

ADJ I was just into that music, it was a natural progression again. I was DJing it, and I loved it, so I thought I’d like to have a go at writing it - and I did!

ADJ Well, I used to run IQ [Instant Quality], the record shop in Soho, and when that shut down I opened up a small shop inside Vinyl Junkies – I had my own counter in there, and it was called Pyramid. I had that open for a year, but I was only allowed to sell electro and electronica, and there’s not enough of that to pay £500 a month rent, so I basically worked for nothing for a year – which I didn’t really mind, but at the end of it I was two grand in debt, and decided I couldn’t really carry on losing money. So the shop shut, and I moved on and restarted a label. Analogique had stopped – I was doing it with a partner and he basically decided he didn’t want to do it anymore, so I decided to finish with that and start Pyramid.

11th-hour How had you been involved with IQ – did you start the store yourself?

ADJ No, I didn’t start it myself, but I used to manage it. Basically the people I knew who ran the shop knew me as a DJ, knew my taste in music, which was very diverse at that point, and asked me to come in and do a lot of the buying…

ADJ We wouldn’t sell crap music, it was as simple as that. We would not sell crap music, and that was our downfall! There was no real competition, not for what we were doing – IQ was known as a very special shop because we wouldn’t sell shit. The people who owned it were kind of rich, one of their parents ran a bank, and I think they went into it thinking that they were just going to make loads of money. But one thing I will say for them, even though they finished up just shutting down, and probably lost a couple of grand between them - they never told me to change the music policy, because they all understood what we were doing was right, and we had a lot of people actually coming in and buying the music. It went down because basically we got our rent doubled, from £300 to £600 per week, plus another £600 per month business rates – they couldn’t find anywhere else to run it, and I don’t think they were making enough money to worry about finding somewhere else, so they decided to close it down. Which was quite sad, because the week we shut down we got someone ringing us from Australia saying we’ve just been voted the third ‘Most Essential Music Shop’ in the world, in an Australian magazine! That was the week we shut – bit sad wasn’t it…

ADJ Well, I’m doing a lot of free parties myself; I’m involved with Outside Recordings from the US – I’ve been doing lots of tours with them, I’ve been doing distribution for them in this country, and I’ve been getting them artists for their label. I’ve also been looking for our own label, getting up and coming artists who’ve never been heard – that’s what our entire label is about. Everyone else puts out people who've been heard – they get their look in, but there’s a lot of people with amazing music who haven’t been heard of – so that’s what we are really about, getting those artists noticed and getting good music out to people. Opening peoples minds – if you play people deep music they’ll get into it. Everyone’s playing the same old shit, just trugging along and the people aren’t even enjoying it – they’re just nodding up and down, just going out for the fact of going out. You play them deep music, they suddenly go ‘Wow! What’s that?!’

11th-hour Do you always work alone, or do you collaborate with other artists?

ADJ No, no, I collaborate all the time… I work on my own, I work with other people, whatever. I find that working on my own is great because I’ve got my own way I like doing things, and I like to write some bad music sometimes and have got my way of doing it! But I like working with other people because you always end up doing something you wouldn’t have done yourself. I always feel like ‘neither of us would have done that on our own, but we’ve come out with that together’. I love collaborating, it’s just different ideas and different ways of doing things. None of us know everything, and if we think that, then we’re full of shit!

ADJ Music that influences me… Well, best artist – Bola on Skam. Deep, deep, twisted, warped wicked music man! I’m also really into [Carl] Finlow. Although some of his stuff can be a little bit light, he does write some bad music! I mean, when he writes good stuff, he writes fucking good stuff – layers upon layers upon layers of music. There’s loads of good artists really – lots of good electronica coming out. Though there’s not that much good electro around to be honest with you. I don’t get many influences from that now – I write electro in my own way…

11th-hour Do you find people are releasing a lot more electro at the moment?

ADJ Well, there’s lot’s of crap stuff coming out! And, though this is only my opinion, I know lots of people are into it, I think there’s a lot of synth pop coming out. My idea is to go forwards not backwards. Always remember your past, and use influences from it, but don’t try and do something that’s twenty years old. Synth pop is for the eighties, not now.

11th-hour Do you think that’s just down to the same old fashion trends – Seventies music last year, Eighties this year etc?

ADJ Yeah, definitely – I mean, it’s just two sounds arpeggiated with a voice over the top! Be honest – it’s crap! People can do a lot better than that now – be inventive, move forward, not backward.

11th-hour A lot of people seem to think that Electro is all retro – not realising it’s been developing all this time…

ADJ I know, a lot of people do think that, but it’s forward looking music, always has been. It’s always been there, and always been underground. People should notice that when everything else has gone overground and commercial, Electro’s always been there, and it’s always been twisted. But now, as it’s getting a little bit of a name for itself, you’re getting all kinds of people jumping on the bandwagon… Like Dave Clarke – ‘I am the Electro King!’ You’ve been playing banging techno for the last fifteen years, what are you talking about!

11th-hour So do you think there’s any good reason why it’s suddenly becoming popular?

ADJ Because people are getting fed up with the same old crap – and they’re suddenly getting little glimpses of deep music, and they’re going ‘…that’s wicked!!’ It’s the original electronic body music man, it makes you dance – you can’t help but dance to Electro! It makes you move, it makes you pop… It does weird things to you! And people are slowly getting to hear it. ‘Electrocuted’ went on at 333 for a couple of years, we had ‘Perverted Science’ for three years, though that just shut – people have had a chance, even if just little glimpses, of hearing this music… And of course it’s not just us, there’s lots of other people doing it as well. All over the world it’s the same thing – in Germany, in the States – it’s starting to creep through. You can’t deny it – it’s got funk! And what does funk do – it makes you dance. If people hear music that makes them dance, and makes them smile, then they can’t help it – they’re gonna get into it!

11th-hour What do you think of the scene in England then, compared to the rest of the world?

ADJ Up its own arse. In one sentence. Up its own fucking arse – it thinks it knows everything, but it doesn’t know jack shit. People all want to stand at the side, stroking their chins going ‘oh, I wouldn’t have done it like that, ooh I wouldn’t play that, ooh, ooh look what he’s wearing!’ Basically, that’s the way I look at it, because I go to the States, to Europe, and they’ve got energy for it. They enjoy something they like, and they’re up for something new. They’ve actually got energy – they dance, they smile, they all get into it and are actually excited about it. Whereas here everyone just seems to be nodding their head all day and not actually getting into it.

ADJ Just the attitude basically – they think they know it all. Whereas they don’t know fuck. None of us do, we’re all learning, every day. We’re all finding something new every day of our lives; none of us know shit really, in the big scheme of things. People are scared to express their feelings here – they’re scared to dance, they’re scared to sweat – to upset their perfect image. We all used to come back in the morning covered in mud from head to foot, looking like we’d just been dug up! It was brilliant, we all had a great time, we were all smiling. All week we’d be talking about it, and couldn’t wait till the next one. Now everyone goes home like ‘oh god, I’m tired’, etc – it’s like going to the pub now. They’ve forgotten the whole point of why they’re doing it in the first place…

ADJ Well, not too much in London! We’re starting up a regular fortnightly thing ourselves in Old Street, starting at the end of June. Only small, about 120, 130 people, and we’re just going to get up and coming DJs to come along and play good electronic music – not one thing or another. Just good electronic music – you come along and play what you want, we’re not going to tell you what to do. If we book you as an artist or a DJ, then you come and do what you do as an artist or DJ.

Other than that, I’ve just got residencies down in Plymouth, I do Wang every two or three months, and I do Groovetech every month. It’s quite sad really, I play everywhere else in the world, but don’t seem to play much in London.

I do at least two or three month long tours in the States every year… I’m doing Croatia in July, then a three day festival in Switzerland. I’m also going to do a small electronic system at the Burning Man festival in Nevada – that’ll be an experience of a lifetime – forty thousand lunatics in the desert – can’t wait!

I’ll also be getting lots of my friends over from the States to do one off parties here around the country, though not to much in London. It’s really sad, cause this is where we are know for promoting our music – we used to run IQ, everyone knows who we are, but they’re just scared to have people play something different.

11th-hour So what plans do you have – for the future of the label, for mixing etc..?

ADJ Hopefully we’ve got a new worldwide distribution deal for our labels – for Wandering Soul, and for Pyramid. I’m hoping that will sort it out, because to be honest with you I think British distributors have got their heads up their arses as well. It’s like ‘Oh, we know it, so it obviously can’t be that good!’ If I sent a record that was totally anonymous to them, they’d be all over it. For instance, this Outside release we’ve just done, with the Carl Finlow remix, and our remix [Spy-Tek – Transmission Unknown Remixes] sold out in the States and Germany, everyone’s been talking about it, it’s had write ups all over the world, charted and reviewed everywhere. You tell this to distributors in this country, give them copies, and then they don’t even bother to give you a phone-call back! They don’t even bother, they’re just ignorant bull-shitters. Unless it’s cheesy House or banging Techno they don’t want to know. They don’t realise that that shit’s had its day, this music’s the future, always has been! It’s just kept its head low until now! The German, and the American distributors – they’ve actually got the balls to do it. And it’s huge – for them, electronic music is their first.

11th-hour Why do you think the electronic music scene (i.e. going out and listening, dancing etc to music) has kicked off so much in Europe compared to the States, even while the States releases so much quality music?

ADJ Well, it is in the States, it’s starting to really kick off, it’s really getting big…

ADJ Oh yeah, it has been a long time coming. I’ve been going to Miami for a few years – I hate the music conference, we always do the Infiltrate, which is the anti-conference. And this year, when we were doing our night, there were like four parties going on within a quarter of a mile – that’s never happened before. It’s brilliant – it’s infiltrating all the cheesy House clubs! And that’s happening all over…

What other plans – just to get unknown artists out there and heard, and to open peoples minds basically. To get back to the whole thing of just going out, and listening to some good music by DJs who are enjoying giving the people a good time – not just standing there saying ‘Right, I’m playing this, fuck all you lot.’ People who are out there trying to open peoples minds, give them a good time, and try to get crowds back – so there’s a complete interaction between DJ’s and crowds. No-one makes a party – the DJ doesn’t make a party, the promoter doesn’t, no individual makes a party – it’s about everyone in that place getting down as a collective, and enjoying themselves. That’s what I want to get back to.

ADJ I just love it! It’s me, it’s who I am – I was born A.D.J. – that’s my initials! I just love to play music, music makes me feel absolutely amazing, and I like to make other people feel like that. That’s it basically – that’s the only reason I do it…

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