leftdance
Entrevista a Jahcoozi
Leftdance talks with Jahcoozi, a multicultural electronic band.
Members: Sasha, Oren, Robot
I recommend visit :
Here the interview:
1)When and how was Jahcoozi born ?
Robot __ in 2002, robot met sasha thrugh a mutual friend, they started hanging out, making tunes together loosely, then met oren and started forming the band slowly.
Sasha __ if you need the whole story !!
we all moved to Berlin seperately ... robot in 1999, sasha in 2000 and oren in 2001. We didnt know eachother, we met up in Berlin for the first time. After meeting up through friends of friends we started making tunes together..... we didnt have any major expectations of what we were going to make or do with the music.... we were just keen on working together. robots beats and sasha's voice....... there wasnt so much stuff like that coming out of berlin and there still isnt. oren was a perfect match coz he had been collecting studio gear for years and had worked in studios in israel to earn money. It was 2002 in Berlin..... pre-high speed internet and thus pre-myspace and email at home It was actually a more pre-paid mobile phone time for me! Things were slower .... you had to burn CDs not just upload music!
Robert had a little label at the time called Hamton and was making music with different people, but all pretty low key etc. It happened through a chance that we met each other. I met Robert through a common friend. I'd made this stupid, cabaret song as a joke and recorded it on a minidisc mic at my DJ mate's house, the friend played it to Robert, and he thought I have this weird voice We recorded it over some 'illbient' (yup remember that word!!) records mashed together and I sang like some stoned Marlene Dietrich type in a fake French accent ! . He passed me a CD with beats and instrumentals. I'd done some stuff with techno people before, saying a line or whatever, and it was really good to get this whole demo of beats which was so wide-ranging. Not just straight music, very electronic, jazz, drum'n'bass, ragga, dancehall, whatever! And I could see from this 16 beat CD that that was someone I wanted to work with..
Robert and I met up a few weeks later and I asked him to make a dancehall beat for me, which i then went on to record Black Barbie on . The rest is history really..... we slowly started meeting up for often and after 2 or 3 sessions we had the songs Black Barbie and Fish. Both of which were a solid start.... i guess we got lucky.
Oren we also met through a friend of ours..... his former band mate from Israel had met an Italian friend of ours in a dingy squatter house style club. Everybody was pretty open back then and did not have such strong preconceptions about Berlin in the way many people do nowadays....
So after meeting Oren and seeing how much studio equipment he had brought with him Tel Aviv we started going to his place to record with him and make tunes. That is how this 3er combination came to life.....
.I had coal heating, the city was much more understatement than it is now. There were much less tourists... it didnt feel as techno Disneyland as it does now. Everyone was wearing a good old second hand ski jacket and funny cargo pants or even super techno style buffalo boots.... and nobody really gave much of a shit about what was cool or not.
It was much cheaper back then.... we all moved to Berlin during the Deutsch Mark times.... its almost another era now....
There was very little expectation at the beginning..... i mean i was doing it for fun. i had never really thought about labels or releases. Robert was the person who burnt CDs and sent them to labels likeAphex Twin's Rephlex for example.
It was only after Rephlex actually wrote back to us, that i realised that we might even end up taking our music to the point of releasing it!
Like anybody, when you just move to a city, you're open to meet new people to define your life in that city, being music heads at some point our circles crossed at the right time and we all happened to meet each other. As i said .. berlin was a village back then.
2)Which are your main musical influences ?
Robot: everything from jazz to metal
Sasha : pretty wide ranging ... dub, jungle, dancehall, jazz, techno, IDM... even stuff like Leonard Cohen which i guess you'D have to call Folk. i was open to pretty much every thing apart from indie rock....felt alienated by that stuff when i was a teenager... even though i actually bought a ticket to see the Smashing Pumpkins at Brixton academy when i was 12 years old! Black Sabbath, Captain Beefheart and King Crimson are band that i can appreciate now that im grown up..... guess you get cleverer with age.
3)Which art, apart from music, do you really love?
Robot :__i love surrealist painters like leonora carrington, but also stuff like kerry james marshall and basquiat-
Sasha: __
the art world agitators the Guerilla Girls.... anonymous group of crazy feminist activists from New York in the 80s...
contemporary art, graphics, installations... i go to see lots of stuff and tend to forget peoples names a lot (unlike with music). I like Hilary Pecis's pretty psychedelic collages, she is from San Fransisco as far as i know. Wangechi Mutu... also does collages... upcoming Kenyan born artist. Films... Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl... love the weird German and Austrian filmmakers!
BUT who do i really love??!
well my friends... so i gotta big some of them up...coz these people are making it happen in berlin NOW!
3mulgator .... art/fashion run by my next-door neighbour/hairdresser/multi-disciplinary genius a.k.a. Hugo Schneider... he made video of a tune of ours called Namedropper, he is also responsible for the wonderful tantric yoga spider cover of our new album Barefoot Wanderer
C-Neeon ... fashion/graphic designers from Berlin ... amazing graphics and clothing.
Starstyling ....art/fashion label from berlin
4)About the future of musical industry, do you think the compact disc will be extinct?, only digital version will remain?, record labels could redefine their role?
Robot __I think the physical media will vanish and everything will go digital. i think also mp3s will vanish, cuz the quality is not good enough, with computer getting faster and discspace bigger the whole time there is no use not to use quality wave files any more. the music industry will have to learn to adjust to the new tendencies and react with clever ideas instead of trying to preserve an old system.
5)Which was the first record each of you, bought?, which was the last?
Robot: first: faith no more - the real thing. last: a moondog cd as a birthday present for sasha.
Sasha : yeah... wicked birthday present... my next door neighbour had burnt me the CD already.. but having it for real is definitely much more special. Thanks Robot!!
First7" vinyl :: little richard - tutti fruiti ... loved that song when i was a kid!
Last :gonja sufi album as mp3
6)From your point of view, today in electronic music scene, which subculture is more avant-garde: drum and bass, electroclash, minimal, new house, goa, others?
Robot :I thnik the mutation going on in dubstep are very insteresting, dubstep clashing with techno, with hiphop, its kind of a meta genre...but barefoot is the new religion.
Sasha : _ barefoot baby! its all about the ethos!
but its very true that in light of the post-dubstep movement, there has been a clear increase in the willingless of people to listen to the more experimental side of electronic music, and that at 3 am in a club. Acts like Mount Kimbie are appealing to house/dubstep heads which is proven by the fact that its come out on Scuba'S label hotflush, hyperdub has also seen some really dubby electronica with King Midas. thank god all that new rave shit is over and people are getting more into heady stuff than straight up bling.
having said all that.... there is always a nische fan base of people who are listening to avante garde stuff without the press telling them to do so. ... real music fans .. you get me? Moondog for example is as cutting edge today as he was in his lifetime. So keep pushing the barefoot! free of Bpm and genre constraints..... earthy,organic and demanding soundscapes creating dance music for the now and the future....
7) You visited argentina in 2008, is there some chance for your coming back? would like to..
Sasha: we would like to hope so! we had a great time in Buenos Aires.... has a similar feeling to Berlin before Berlin got so hyped. It has a feeling of a forgotten era... like there are ghosts walking around. When everything is renovated, like they are doing in Berlin now, you dont tend to get this romantic, slightly gothic vibe anymore.
We didnt get to go to Patagonia last time.....i would love to go there.
we would come back and play immedietely .... so spread the word!!
8)Tell me about the backstage production of new album called Barefoot Wanderer ?
Barefoot Wanderer feels more abstract than our last album (Blitz n Ass), ...yup it feels deep and syrupy...hypnotic and very listenable!! but we still use Jahcoozi typical poly-rhythms and an array of organic and inorganic sounds.. Space age meets roots....futuristic urban i.e. post-dubstep, 2-step, dub, electronica, future-step / future bass, .... plus maybe a little inkling of hip hop/digi-dancehall/bashment and even soul influences there...... i.e. BAREFOOT! Or at least a good example of Barefoot ...
This album shows us being a bit more melodious than we've been in the past. It also feels like the most consistent , coherent album we have done to date..... just a lot less all over the place than the other two. We wanted it to be something you could listen to at home from beginning to end rather than just a collection of tracks that we made in our usual style of genre-jumping.
I feel like our last album was like brand new pair of sneakers and this one feels like we stripped it down, took our sneakers off, and are doing it Barefoot....
Why 'Wanderer '?
Rather than running through, as on our last album, we' ve wandering through sub-genres rather than jumping from genre to genre.
I think it also reflects the openness in electronic music right now...a post-bling era.
A more artistic time and climate that is not so dependent on hyped up pop.
It seems like an almost cyclic return to some of the deeper sounds and ideas of what used to be called IDM, electronica or even trip hop, but of course with much more up-to-date production, fatter basses and a far more futuristic approach.
stylistically Barefoot Wanderer feels a little more like our first album (Pure Breed Mongrel) than like our second album (Blitz n Ass) ... but reflects all the experience we have gathered and an artistic development since then.As well as the above mentioned wandering in terms of creativity / the exploratory act of wandering, we also physically made some of this album in different parts of Europe.. rented holiday homes in rather desolate places like East Germany or Northern Holland (exotic right?!?) and locked ourselves away and made music (partly coz we wanted to get away and work differently, and partly coz we were touring so much that it made sense to use the time and the place). More than anything having no internet connection and virtually no phone reception definitely allowed us to concentrate more than in Berlin where there are distractions all around.....
why 'Barefoot ' ??
That's what we together with our longterm friends and collaborateurs Stereotyp & Alhaca in Vienna have been calling the sound we've been making in Continental Europe (well us in Berlin and the Crunchtime crew in Vienna). cross-genre, cross-bpm, organic shit!
(eg. Stereotyp rmx of Black Barbie from Pure Breed Mongrel album in 2005)
Stereotyp & Al-haca branded the term a couple of years back.
the beauty of barefoot is that it is a sound that isnt constrained by BPMs or one genre, it is a sound which is united by texture, consistency and choice of sounds... it can in some ways also be seen as lan umbrella organisation for bass music.
I think with our album we are just referring to a growing scene of producers, fans which include some of our friends and long-terms colleagues. Whether we ourselves are pure Barefoot is also arguable.... we seem to be wandering somewhere within this umbrella organisation.There is also a strong link between Barefoot and dance somehow... obviously the foot, the riddims and bass. There is also loads of room for sub-genre references to Barefoot that the bass-loving kids of today should come up for themselves ....e.g. Sparefoot, Threefoot, Spacefoot!! im only joking... but this shit is supposed to leave room for wacky interpretation and crazy rhythms which will encourage us to evolve into a species bearing the next-level of rhythmic feet ... !
Robot : its dark, its deep and its less hysterically clubby.....we were really tired of all this loud and overplayed ed banger-diplo-sinden-whatever hype we wanted to something different, more deep and subtle, less in your face and obviously catchy/clubby...
Entrevista a Jahcoozi
Leftdance talks with Jahcoozi, a multicultural electronic band.
Members: Sasha, Oren, Robot
I recommend visit :
Here the interview:
1)When and how was Jahcoozi born ?
Robot __ in 2002, robot met sasha thrugh a mutual friend, they started hanging out, making tunes together loosely, then met oren and started forming the band slowly.
Sasha __ if you need the whole story !!
we all moved to Berlin seperately ... robot in 1999, sasha in 2000 and oren in 2001. We didnt know eachother, we met up in Berlin for the first time. After meeting up through friends of friends we started making tunes together..... we didnt have any major expectations of what we were going to make or do with the music.... we were just keen on working together. robots beats and sasha's voice....... there wasnt so much stuff like that coming out of berlin and there still isnt. oren was a perfect match coz he had been collecting studio gear for years and had worked in studios in israel to earn money. It was 2002 in Berlin..... pre-high speed internet and thus pre-myspace and email at home It was actually a more pre-paid mobile phone time for me! Things were slower .... you had to burn CDs not just upload music!
Robert had a little label at the time called Hamton and was making music with different people, but all pretty low key etc. It happened through a chance that we met each other. I met Robert through a common friend. I'd made this stupid, cabaret song as a joke and recorded it on a minidisc mic at my DJ mate's house, the friend played it to Robert, and he thought I have this weird voice We recorded it over some 'illbient' (yup remember that word!!) records mashed together and I sang like some stoned Marlene Dietrich type in a fake French accent ! . He passed me a CD with beats and instrumentals. I'd done some stuff with techno people before, saying a line or whatever, and it was really good to get this whole demo of beats which was so wide-ranging. Not just straight music, very electronic, jazz, drum'n'bass, ragga, dancehall, whatever! And I could see from this 16 beat CD that that was someone I wanted to work with..
Robert and I met up a few weeks later and I asked him to make a dancehall beat for me, which i then went on to record Black Barbie on . The rest is history really..... we slowly started meeting up for often and after 2 or 3 sessions we had the songs Black Barbie and Fish. Both of which were a solid start.... i guess we got lucky.
Oren we also met through a friend of ours..... his former band mate from Israel had met an Italian friend of ours in a dingy squatter house style club. Everybody was pretty open back then and did not have such strong preconceptions about Berlin in the way many people do nowadays....
So after meeting Oren and seeing how much studio equipment he had brought with him Tel Aviv we started going to his place to record with him and make tunes. That is how this 3er combination came to life.....
.I had coal heating, the city was much more understatement than it is now. There were much less tourists... it didnt feel as techno Disneyland as it does now. Everyone was wearing a good old second hand ski jacket and funny cargo pants or even super techno style buffalo boots.... and nobody really gave much of a shit about what was cool or not.
It was much cheaper back then.... we all moved to Berlin during the Deutsch Mark times.... its almost another era now....
There was very little expectation at the beginning..... i mean i was doing it for fun. i had never really thought about labels or releases. Robert was the person who burnt CDs and sent them to labels likeAphex Twin's Rephlex for example.
It was only after Rephlex actually wrote back to us, that i realised that we might even end up taking our music to the point of releasing it!
Like anybody, when you just move to a city, you're open to meet new people to define your life in that city, being music heads at some point our circles crossed at the right time and we all happened to meet each other. As i said .. berlin was a village back then.
2)Which are your main musical influences ?
Robot: everything from jazz to metal
Sasha : pretty wide ranging ... dub, jungle, dancehall, jazz, techno, IDM... even stuff like Leonard Cohen which i guess you'D have to call Folk. i was open to pretty much every thing apart from indie rock....felt alienated by that stuff when i was a teenager... even though i actually bought a ticket to see the Smashing Pumpkins at Brixton academy when i was 12 years old! Black Sabbath, Captain Beefheart and King Crimson are band that i can appreciate now that im grown up..... guess you get cleverer with age.
3)Which art, apart from music, do you really love?
Robot :__i love surrealist painters like leonora carrington, but also stuff like kerry james marshall and basquiat-
Sasha: __
the art world agitators the Guerilla Girls.... anonymous group of crazy feminist activists from New York in the 80s...
contemporary art, graphics, installations... i go to see lots of stuff and tend to forget peoples names a lot (unlike with music). I like Hilary Pecis's pretty psychedelic collages, she is from San Fransisco as far as i know. Wangechi Mutu... also does collages... upcoming Kenyan born artist. Films... Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl... love the weird German and Austrian filmmakers!
BUT who do i really love??!
well my friends... so i gotta big some of them up...coz these people are making it happen in berlin NOW!
3mulgator .... art/fashion run by my next-door neighbour/hairdresser/multi-disciplinary genius a.k.a. Hugo Schneider... he made video of a tune of ours called Namedropper, he is also responsible for the wonderful tantric yoga spider cover of our new album Barefoot Wanderer
C-Neeon ... fashion/graphic designers from Berlin ... amazing graphics and clothing.
Starstyling ....art/fashion label from berlin
4)About the future of musical industry, do you think the compact disc will be extinct?, only digital version will remain?, record labels could redefine their role?
Robot __I think the physical media will vanish and everything will go digital. i think also mp3s will vanish, cuz the quality is not good enough, with computer getting faster and discspace bigger the whole time there is no use not to use quality wave files any more. the music industry will have to learn to adjust to the new tendencies and react with clever ideas instead of trying to preserve an old system.
5)Which was the first record each of you, bought?, which was the last?
Robot: first: faith no more - the real thing. last: a moondog cd as a birthday present for sasha.
Sasha : yeah... wicked birthday present... my next door neighbour had burnt me the CD already.. but having it for real is definitely much more special. Thanks Robot!!
First7" vinyl :: little richard - tutti fruiti ... loved that song when i was a kid!
Last :gonja sufi album as mp3
6)From your point of view, today in electronic music scene, which subculture is more avant-garde: drum and bass, electroclash, minimal, new house, goa, others?
Robot :I thnik the mutation going on in dubstep are very insteresting, dubstep clashing with techno, with hiphop, its kind of a meta genre...but barefoot is the new religion.
Sasha : _ barefoot baby! its all about the ethos!
but its very true that in light of the post-dubstep movement, there has been a clear increase in the willingless of people to listen to the more experimental side of electronic music, and that at 3 am in a club. Acts like Mount Kimbie are appealing to house/dubstep heads which is proven by the fact that its come out on Scuba'S label hotflush, hyperdub has also seen some really dubby electronica with King Midas. thank god all that new rave shit is over and people are getting more into heady stuff than straight up bling.
having said all that.... there is always a nische fan base of people who are listening to avante garde stuff without the press telling them to do so. ... real music fans .. you get me? Moondog for example is as cutting edge today as he was in his lifetime. So keep pushing the barefoot! free of Bpm and genre constraints..... earthy,organic and demanding soundscapes creating dance music for the now and the future....
7) You visited argentina in 2008, is there some chance for your coming back? would like to..
Sasha: we would like to hope so! we had a great time in Buenos Aires.... has a similar feeling to Berlin before Berlin got so hyped. It has a feeling of a forgotten era... like there are ghosts walking around. When everything is renovated, like they are doing in Berlin now, you dont tend to get this romantic, slightly gothic vibe anymore.
We didnt get to go to Patagonia last time.....i would love to go there.
we would come back and play immedietely .... so spread the word!!
8)Tell me about the backstage production of new album called Barefoot Wanderer ?
Barefoot Wanderer feels more abstract than our last album (Blitz n Ass), ...yup it feels deep and syrupy...hypnotic and very listenable!! but we still use Jahcoozi typical poly-rhythms and an array of organic and inorganic sounds.. Space age meets roots....futuristic urban i.e. post-dubstep, 2-step, dub, electronica, future-step / future bass, .... plus maybe a little inkling of hip hop/digi-dancehall/bashment and even soul influences there...... i.e. BAREFOOT! Or at least a good example of Barefoot ...
This album shows us being a bit more melodious than we've been in the past. It also feels like the most consistent , coherent album we have done to date..... just a lot less all over the place than the other two. We wanted it to be something you could listen to at home from beginning to end rather than just a collection of tracks that we made in our usual style of genre-jumping.
I feel like our last album was like brand new pair of sneakers and this one feels like we stripped it down, took our sneakers off, and are doing it Barefoot....
Why 'Wanderer '?
Rather than running through, as on our last album, we' ve wandering through sub-genres rather than jumping from genre to genre.
I think it also reflects the openness in electronic music right now...a post-bling era.
A more artistic time and climate that is not so dependent on hyped up pop.
It seems like an almost cyclic return to some of the deeper sounds and ideas of what used to be called IDM, electronica or even trip hop, but of course with much more up-to-date production, fatter basses and a far more futuristic approach.
stylistically Barefoot Wanderer feels a little more like our first album (Pure Breed Mongrel) than like our second album (Blitz n Ass) ... but reflects all the experience we have gathered and an artistic development since then.As well as the above mentioned wandering in terms of creativity / the exploratory act of wandering, we also physically made some of this album in different parts of Europe.. rented holiday homes in rather desolate places like East Germany or Northern Holland (exotic right?!?) and locked ourselves away and made music (partly coz we wanted to get away and work differently, and partly coz we were touring so much that it made sense to use the time and the place). More than anything having no internet connection and virtually no phone reception definitely allowed us to concentrate more than in Berlin where there are distractions all around.....
why 'Barefoot ' ??
That's what we together with our longterm friends and collaborateurs Stereotyp & Alhaca in Vienna have been calling the sound we've been making in Continental Europe (well us in Berlin and the Crunchtime crew in Vienna). cross-genre, cross-bpm, organic shit!
(eg. Stereotyp rmx of Black Barbie from Pure Breed Mongrel album in 2005)
Stereotyp & Al-haca branded the term a couple of years back.
the beauty of barefoot is that it is a sound that isnt constrained by BPMs or one genre, it is a sound which is united by texture, consistency and choice of sounds... it can in some ways also be seen as lan umbrella organisation for bass music.
I think with our album we are just referring to a growing scene of producers, fans which include some of our friends and long-terms colleagues. Whether we ourselves are pure Barefoot is also arguable.... we seem to be wandering somewhere within this umbrella organisation.There is also a strong link between Barefoot and dance somehow... obviously the foot, the riddims and bass. There is also loads of room for sub-genre references to Barefoot that the bass-loving kids of today should come up for themselves ....e.g. Sparefoot, Threefoot, Spacefoot!! im only joking... but this shit is supposed to leave room for wacky interpretation and crazy rhythms which will encourage us to evolve into a species bearing the next-level of rhythmic feet ... !
Robot : its dark, its deep and its less hysterically clubby.....we were really tired of all this loud and overplayed ed banger-diplo-sinden-whatever hype we wanted to something different, more deep and subtle, less in your face and obviously catchy/clubby...