Enemy Records
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Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Enemy Records Re-Launches this month What up, Tricks?
Dustin Zahn here, breaking in the new Enemy Records log with a little more information about the relaunch of the label. First off, let me explain the whole blog ordeal here on the Enemy website.
The blog basically serves as a really easy way for Enemy artists to give people a quick update about things going on with them and their music. You can expect to find news you wouldn't normally find on the regular news page, and you can even comment on it. The news here pertains more to personal matters rather than the actual label news. You'll find updates about what is going on in the artist's studio, their touring schedule and much more. At times people will even be lucky enough to download sneak peaks of upcoming tracks or tracks that are work-in-progress. Sometimes you'll find tracks that aren't techno-related at all, or just really bizzare dumb shit that we've come up with in the studio.
And now for those who are interested in learning why Enemy shut down...
Originally I had an EP lined up with tracks from me, Ian Lehman, and Silent Paul. It was going to be late night Kanzleramt-type groovin' tracks that I was really feeling at the time. Still for some reason I felt like it just wasn't right. I put it on the backburner for a minute and completely forgot about it. Times changed, labels and distributors disappeared into the great unknown and I had no clue what my next move was going to be. In the fall of 2005 I decided I needed to get back on top of things with Enemy but the hardest part was figuring out where I wanted to take the label, while staying true to its original theme as well as my artistic intentions.
Deciding the new format
The original idea for Enemy: late-night club tracks with contrasting elements. Hard metallic drums and lush organic synths...a throwback to the influential techno I grew up on from the swedish boys such as Adam Beyer and Joel Mull, as well as the really influential Kanzleramt label started by Heiko Laux. Ian and I decided early on that Abiotic would be mostly a family affair and that our friends were pretty much, well...shit out of luck. Still, we had mutual friends making some great music and I thought they deserved a chance. Not only would this label focus on the sometimes softer side of Abiotic Recordings, but also give focus to our friends and local inspirations as well.
The new idea: At first I thought, maybe I should just put out hard stuff on Enemy as well since I was getting so many great hard techno demos. The second thought was, all my friends have been making minimal lately and its pretty good...maybe they deserve a chance. Both of those were personally out of the question. I felt that sticking to my guns and releasing more hard techno wouldn't do justice to music fans. I'd be sort of a one-trick pony. On top of that, I had plenty of offers for other harder labels and already started Abiotic for that reason.
So next I thought, what about going minimal? Too predictable. So many fuckers have been bandwagoning minimal that I didn't want to be associated with that lot. That's fine if they actually dig all the new stuff coming out, but many of them explain to me how this had this huge "epiphany" that is minimal techno. Apparently it was so huge that they seem to give up everything they worked for in the past. Their past works were now "garbage and should never have come out." Producers they jocked for years were now no longer important in their lives. The first couple cases you hear of this is shocking, but even more shocking is that this happened to almost every techno producer in Europe within a couple months time. Some might say it's a coincidence, but in Wisconsin we called it "bullshit."
It was clear that going either of those routes was a bad idea for me as an artist. I walk the line between many genres, picking things I enjoy from each and leaving the rest. Some people are able to pick this out in my releases and DJ sets. DJs (myself included) began having trouble finding effective records to cross over from genre to genre, and that struck a bell. I finally found the true calling for Enemy. So many producers pigeonholed themselves that it's time to bridge these various forms of music together.
In the end, Enemy will release club tracks focusing on bringing something different (i.e. not always new) to the table. Silentpaul, a good friend and talented producer had the perfect tracks to break the idea for the first release. His A side focuses on quirky experimental elements with a house music backbone. The B1 cut hints at the trendy new minimal sound, but blends it up with chuggin' percussion from the good ol' days as well as moody overtones from other forms of music. The B2 track takes that idea a step further. What happens when you take the clicky, poppy shit from trendy minimal and sequence it like its a hard techno track? You get a frantic, fast paced techno stormer that may not be an anthem but will definitely help people party through the night. You see, we're not here to change techno or follow the rest of the herd. We're just here to offer futuristic sounding tracks for musical ideas of the future, something I think has been missing from techno in recent years.
If you actually read through this whole rant, I applaud you! Future posts will never be this long. Thanks for tuning in and thanks for your support.
-Dustin Zahn
P.S. RIP Kirby Puckett...he would be the original Minneapolis-groping bad ass, but Prince already claimed the title.
¶ Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Dustin Zahn here, breaking in the new Enemy Records log with a little more information about the relaunch of the label. First off, let me explain the whole blog ordeal here on the Enemy website.
The blog basically serves as a really easy way for Enemy artists to give people a quick update about things going on with them and their music. You can expect to find news you wouldn't normally find on the regular news page, and you can even comment on it. The news here pertains more to personal matters rather than the actual label news. You'll find updates about what is going on in the artist's studio, their touring schedule and much more. At times people will even be lucky enough to download sneak peaks of upcoming tracks or tracks that are work-in-progress. Sometimes you'll find tracks that aren't techno-related at all, or just really bizzare dumb shit that we've come up with in the studio.
And now for those who are interested in learning why Enemy shut down...
Originally I had an EP lined up with tracks from me, Ian Lehman, and Silent Paul. It was going to be late night Kanzleramt-type groovin' tracks that I was really feeling at the time. Still for some reason I felt like it just wasn't right. I put it on the backburner for a minute and completely forgot about it. Times changed, labels and distributors disappeared into the great unknown and I had no clue what my next move was going to be. In the fall of 2005 I decided I needed to get back on top of things with Enemy but the hardest part was figuring out where I wanted to take the label, while staying true to its original theme as well as my artistic intentions.
Deciding the new format
The original idea for Enemy: late-night club tracks with contrasting elements. Hard metallic drums and lush organic synths...a throwback to the influential techno I grew up on from the swedish boys such as Adam Beyer and Joel Mull, as well as the really influential Kanzleramt label started by Heiko Laux. Ian and I decided early on that Abiotic would be mostly a family affair and that our friends were pretty much, well...shit out of luck. Still, we had mutual friends making some great music and I thought they deserved a chance. Not only would this label focus on the sometimes softer side of Abiotic Recordings, but also give focus to our friends and local inspirations as well.
The new idea: At first I thought, maybe I should just put out hard stuff on Enemy as well since I was getting so many great hard techno demos. The second thought was, all my friends have been making minimal lately and its pretty good...maybe they deserve a chance. Both of those were personally out of the question. I felt that sticking to my guns and releasing more hard techno wouldn't do justice to music fans. I'd be sort of a one-trick pony. On top of that, I had plenty of offers for other harder labels and already started Abiotic for that reason.
So next I thought, what about going minimal? Too predictable. So many fuckers have been bandwagoning minimal that I didn't want to be associated with that lot. That's fine if they actually dig all the new stuff coming out, but many of them explain to me how this had this huge "epiphany" that is minimal techno. Apparently it was so huge that they seem to give up everything they worked for in the past. Their past works were now "garbage and should never have come out." Producers they jocked for years were now no longer important in their lives. The first couple cases you hear of this is shocking, but even more shocking is that this happened to almost every techno producer in Europe within a couple months time. Some might say it's a coincidence, but in Wisconsin we called it "bullshit."
It was clear that going either of those routes was a bad idea for me as an artist. I walk the line between many genres, picking things I enjoy from each and leaving the rest. Some people are able to pick this out in my releases and DJ sets. DJs (myself included) began having trouble finding effective records to cross over from genre to genre, and that struck a bell. I finally found the true calling for Enemy. So many producers pigeonholed themselves that it's time to bridge these various forms of music together.
In the end, Enemy will release club tracks focusing on bringing something different (i.e. not always new) to the table. Silentpaul, a good friend and talented producer had the perfect tracks to break the idea for the first release. His A side focuses on quirky experimental elements with a house music backbone. The B1 cut hints at the trendy new minimal sound, but blends it up with chuggin' percussion from the good ol' days as well as moody overtones from other forms of music. The B2 track takes that idea a step further. What happens when you take the clicky, poppy shit from trendy minimal and sequence it like its a hard techno track? You get a frantic, fast paced techno stormer that may not be an anthem but will definitely help people party through the night. You see, we're not here to change techno or follow the rest of the herd. We're just here to offer futuristic sounding tracks for musical ideas of the future, something I think has been missing from techno in recent years.
If you actually read through this whole rant, I applaud you! Future posts will never be this long. Thanks for tuning in and thanks for your support.
-Dustin Zahn
P.S. RIP Kirby Puckett...he would be the original Minneapolis-groping bad ass, but Prince already claimed the title.
¶ Tuesday, March 07, 2006
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