In esclusiva per Electronews una delle poche interviste rilasciate da Giorgos Gatzigristos , pupillo di jhon digweed e produttore davvero fuori dagli schemi della scena minimal attuale. Leggete con attenzione e ascoltate
Hello Giorgos , thank you for your availability, we are very excited to interview you.
Tell us a little about you, where you born , how old are you and when you started to realize that music was your way?
I was born in Nijmegen in 1979. I lived there all my life and got my masters degree in business administration there. From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to be involved in music production; it was a natural thing to do and felt good. Albeit it being a very difficult business, there really is nothing else like it and the love for music has pulled me into it.
Every time I hear one of your production i remain literally spellbound, there’s something terribly sweet and progressive in your music, masked by the pure and raw electronic music. very innovative sounds , are you planning to found a new genre?
I never looked at it, that way for I’m not really into any particular genre. The most I can say is I just like electronic dance music that is focused on (the shifting of) technological boundaries. I’m not the kind of guy who would work under pseudonyms: I do what I think is good and there is nothing more I can do. So I’m not really into charting my own work and benchmarking it against other artists / genres. If others would want to classify it as genre X, who am I to call it genre Y instead?
Binary Star System, is a track that I can not hear at least once a day. and it seems Jhon Digweed love it very much . how ‘was born?
It’s very difficult to explain this, since most of the time I work in different ways. I always try to experiment but I don’t like to reinvent everything. So, my process is more iterative and interactive. Sometimes I work for weeks on the atmosphere of something that could end up becoming a piece of music. At the same time, I’m not really busy with creating anything at all since that would only imply that I am limiting myself already. Whenever I have the feeling that something could become a full piece of music I start arranging what I have on the plate in try to turn it into something that’s worth listening to. That final part is the easiest, as it comes to me in realtime.
Talking about serious things, what is the relationship between you and the bedrock?
All my business is handled by my manager, Paul Hazendonk. Having said that, the relationship between us and Bedrock is very good and with that I mean that it’s very professional..
In Italy is returning with force the minimal music, and hard and cruel techno , depriving the ordinary fashion of “nu rave”. What do you think of this musical genre that has now taken root among the most ‘young people?
I think minimal is a ‘garbage can’ term: it doesn’t really holds it’s true value anymore and is used for anything that is simple sounding techno music. I think in every genre there is good music (even in trance music: another garbage can termed genre). You have the top layer which is full of hits and smashers and then you have the soup of good music (the stuff that is interesting and doesn’t get charted by every pop star DJ). Underneath that middle layer is the crap. The genre with the most crap is the least interesting for me.
You ever been to Italy for business or pleasure?
For pleasure.
Please tell us a funny story about you!
I recently turned down a position in a (department of a) company that was best described like a ‘sinking ship’. My job would have been to point it into the right direction…
You play only in digital mode or you still like the feel of vinyl?
Digital & without any decks but I don’t think it’s really important what you choose, as long as you make the choice based on your own believes. I never really romanticized vinyl for more than it is: a archaic sound carrier. It felt good to use only because the alternatives sucked. The only use it had was to beatmatch our music when portable computers couldn’t beatmatch full length tracks (and do so without much preparation) and the interesting music wasn’t offered in a digital format. Some people might say: you could use a CD-player now. Problem is, it’s still an old fashioned way of mixing music and you only do it because you hold value to the craft (and performance values) of beatmatching. Beatmatching -for me at least- is the least interesting part in DJ’ing: you could learn a monkey that, but not how to pick good tunes and arrange those (overtime) in a nice blend. Coupling with the archaic character of sound quality- I don’t see any use for vinyl these days, other than a environmentally unfriendly means of distributing your business cart. Having said that, it will remain a discussion fueled by opinions and omissive of hard facts.
Giorgos thank you, hope to see you soon in Italy, we love you!
I guess I can only respond to that with that it has taken me way too long to get a gig in Italy…
