Recloose

Toby Laing

We are lucky enough to have with us for the next 12 hours [laughter] this young man here, Matt Chicoine. Also known as Recloose. A big round of applause, please.

Recloose

Hello. Hello Red Bull Music Academy, hello.

Toby Laing

You may know Recloose from his work as a DJ touring various parts of the globe. You may also know him from his production work, producing remixes, albums, from way back, releases with Planet E, and currently his album on Peacefrog, Hiatus on the Horizon. He’s a musician, DJ, producer, et cetera, et cetera, band leader...

Recloose

Dickhead.

Toby Laing

Indeed.

Recloose

Father.

Toby Laing

Father.

Recloose

Sandwich artist.

Toby Laing

It all started with sandwiches in one way, didn’t it, mate, perhaps. There was a very special sandwich that you prepared some time ago.

Recloose

It all started with two pieces of bread and a tape.

Toby Laing

This was some time in the ‘90s, working your day job, making sandwiches. But at the same time, obviously, producing music in your home studio.

Recloose

Yeah, in my home dining room, with, what did I have... an S-900 and a crappy Roland keyboard and Cubase. I was making sandwiches in the day, just honest day job out of university. And it was, luckily enough, a deli where a lot of the techno godfathers used to come eat, and others as well, artists and musicians and whatnot. Anyway, I had a demo one day. Carl Craig came in. I was actually a bit chicken to give it to him in person, so I served it up on some bread with a pickle. Demo on rye. Put it in his bag. Thought I was going to get in trouble, get fired, but I got a record deal. It’s good to be chicken sometimes.

Toby Laing

Let’s go back a bit. You’re working with your Cubase at home in your dining room, but before that, you’d studied music. You’d been into music for a long time prior to your first forays into electronic music.

Recloose

I came up playing the piano and saxophone. I paid my dues in the high school marching band. Now I’m enjoying music, but back then it was just pain, having to walk around in sub-thermal, sub-Arctic weather playing wack shit. Yeah, so I paid my dues. Came up playing the saxophone, learned a bit. Not extensive training, but had a background in it. Got to university, started doing radio DJing. That was a really good way just to get up on records. They had a really nice library down there in Ann Arbor, WCBN. Then just started DJing and producing and playing the saxophone again, so, full circle.

Toby Laing

I don’t know what kind of perspective you have on this, but, for those of us outside of Michigan, there seems to be something about Detroit and the area around there that promotes music. I mean, there’s something in the water, or the air, or in the snow.

Recloose

I know this is probably one of the most commonly asked questions to people from Detroit. My theory, and I think I’ve heard other people say similar things, is that it’s one of these sort of magical places in the sense that it’s blessed and cursed all at the same time. In some ways, it’s such a poor city and there’s a lot of despair there, but there’s a lot of beauty that comes out of that as well. It’s a city where it just starts to get a leg up, and then something happens and it’s on the back foot again. There’s always something quite intriguing going on with people’s yearnings. I think a lot of that comes out in art and music, especially, for years and years.

Toby Laing

Was there a point you can remember where something clicked, or something changed, in your consciousness of music? Or was it a gradual process that was always in the background?

Recloose

I’ll be totally honest. I did not grow up in Detroit, I grew up in the suburbs. The difference between the suburbs and the city is immense. Totally different. You grow up in the suburbs, you have very little knowledge of what’s going on in the city. It’s almost like not spoken of unless it’s on the six o’clock news in some sort of negative light. So it was very eye-opening, being at an age where I could go and explore the city for myself and see what it was all about, and then get to the point where I actually moved there. The feeling that I got from the suburbs didn’t inspire me to make music.

When I came to Detroit, I was immediately inspired to make music. It was that feeling again, it’s this historical place. It’s blessed and it’s cursed. There’s ghosts. There’s stories everywhere, there’s history. I can see why a lot of times with journalists and fans of Detroit music, they get this very romantic notion of it because of this reason. You go there, it’s one of the most striking places you’ll ever visit, because there’s people living there, but it’s a ghost town at the same time. You come to certain neighborhoods, and you see billboards from the ‘60s, untouched. Literally, a friend eating dinner on Woodward, the main street, running north-south into Detroit, saw a tumbleweed rolling down the street. This is the major city in Michigan. It’s this very bizarre thing. It’s a city, but it’s almost becoming rural again, you know what I mean?

That said, it’s easy to be romantic about it if you see it through magazines or movies or visit it on occasion. I think living there can be a bit hard sometimes, because it can be a tough place to live. And there’s not all of the same conveniences that you have in a city like New York or Chicago or whatnot, but it’s a kick in the ass and it’s a great place to come up. You meet like minded-people, they all seem to find each other and make music and be artistic.

Toby Laing

That’s what happened to you. You did find some like-minded people when you went to university and started producing music. You got this demo out to Carl Craig, and he, what, responded immediately or sometime later?

Recloose

Yeah, I forgot about it, and I got a call a couple days ago. I was just doing my thing. I was actually making music. I was like, “Hello?” “Hello, this is Carl Craig.” I was like, “Who?” “This is Carl Craig.” Holy shit. Gulp. All that kind of shit. I was a bit starstruck at first, but he’s a real down-to-earth cat and it just went from there. He was very helpful in the process of developing a sound and learning the most basic shit about music, like panning. I had everything right at 12 o’clock. “Dude, maybe you want to put some of this over here, and this.” I was like, “What’s that do?” There’s very basic things that if you haven’t studied music, you don’t have someone to show you, you don’t really have any notion. I was definitely a novice, so he showed me some very useful stuff. As well as just business savvy. “Be up on your shit, be ready to be screwed, because this is the music industry.” Some of us may know, or you will know soon. Watch your backs. [laughs]

Toby Laing

You actually joined the Innerzone Orchestra as a turntablist, or... I don’t know if this is true, man. I’ve read it but I’ve never heard it from your own mouth. Is that for real?

Recloose

Yeah, yeah.

Toby Laing

What was the touring, and the gigs, and whatnot?

Recloose

We did a handful of gigs, so Carl had this crew, the Innerzone Orchestra, and it was a small kind of improv jazz group, where he was running stuff off the MPC, and then we had Francisco Mora on the drums, who’s this out jazz drummer, played with Sun Ra and whatnot, and then Craig Taborn, he’s a Brooklynite, but he came up in Michigan as well. And myself, and then we had also had Paul Randolph, and Lacksidaisycal on some of those gigs, AKA Ta’raach, some people might know him. We did some gigs around the States, like Coachella Festival, and things like that, and did the Montreal Jazz Festival, went to Europe, did some festivals in Europe.

Lot of fun, and a very good experience just for me to be in a professional band environment, outside of my marching band experience, or my high school jazz band to see what actual, proper musicians do onstage, and the exercise of listening to one another, finding that space. When it’s appropriate to do something, when it’s not, how to build tension and release, and things like that. It’s a very good experience for what I’m doing now.

Toby Laing

That lead to that kind of period of your work. Would you say that that was feeding into your first release, the first LP you put out or the early remixes and onto the LP, the first 12"s that you did?

Recloose

Yeah, it tied in a bit. At that point I still saw them as two different things, doing stage and then being in a studio. And I think they are essentially two different things. In the studio, you’re capturing performance, but with an audience, it’s kind of a different dynamic, but there were definitely lessons I learned from doing those Innerzone gigs that I brought back to the studio. Just to be experimental, you know. I think I always wanted to take a relatively experimental approach to what I was doing and trying different things, but playing with cats like that encouraged that even more. I mean, Carl, at that point in time was very into that, and Francisco was just mad, and we used do to these... We used to call them space chords and we’d just make noise, free jazz for ten minutes and piss everybody off. We’d be loving it and they’d be hating it, but fuck it.

Toby Laing

It still seems to be the order of the day for Carl Craig at the moment when he plays live, takes his orchestra around. I remember the North Sea Jazz Festival, you were playing over there a while ago.

Recloose

Yeah, well he did a thing with Francisco there as well, and that was even on a bigger scale, and it was a Sun Ra tribute thing. This was back in 2003, so in its nature, it was going to be pretty out there and pretty experimental. But, I mean, the last few times I’ve seen Carl, he’s been DJing, I think with Serato, or Final Scratch, or one of those newfangled things, whatever they are.

[talks into mic] Everyone okay, is everyone there, hello? Is everyone good? Hey, how you all doing, hey. So quiet.

Toby Laing

It is quiet in here. Maybe we should play a song. Play a tune maybe.

Recloose

Turn on the background music. Just roll this old stuff.

(music: Recloose — unknown)

Toby Laing

You’ve got to have someone in the project who’s not just letting whatever happens, happens. You got to hold on to some kind of vision.

Recloose

No, there needs to be somebody controlling, not controlling, but directing it. Letting people exhibit their artistry and feel like they’re creating, but at the same time steering them in a certain direction. Saying, “That’s cool. Maybe we can work on that a bit better. Let’s try this a different way.” I didn’t have the background to do that at first, because records, they don’t give you shit. Samplers, they don’t give you shit. They don’t talk back. They just do what you tell them to do. Whereas musicians, they’re living, breathing things. So it was a whole different thing. But enough hard lessons learned, I think I’ve come out better for it. Takes a while, definitely. It’s a whole different realm, doing a band. A lot of work, but a lot of fun as well.

Toby Laing

Maybe we should play something to show the kind of music that you were translating into a live sound.

Recloose

[flips through CD case] OK. I think I’ve got rough recordings of some of the gigs, just to give you an idea of what we’re doing. Or should we have a before and after?

Toby Laing

Yeah, let’s do that.

Recloose

Everyone still there? Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? So here’s this like this kind of clubby thing called “Turkish Delight.”

(music: Recloose – “Turkish Delight” / applause)

Toby Laing

Then you put it in a small van and drove it around Europe for a couple of months?

Recloose

It was quite tricky. Because again, with samplers, it’s so easy to create a lot of parts. But when you have a band. You wouldn’t know about this, but sometimes you can only make a band so big. Granted, Fat Freddy’s Drop is, what, 38 deep. But you can’t have all the instruments all of the time, so we had to sort of prioritize and pick what worked.

(music: The Recloose Live Band — “Turkish Delight (Live)” / applause)

That’s the idea. Nasty, live in Sweden. Basically what we ended up doing was everyone played all the parts and then everything else ended up on MPC and just triggering live. What I do is I switch from saxophone, trigger up samples, go back to saxophone, play percussion and that’s a really great thing about this band, because everyone’s quite multi-faceted. So if you’re going to have people in your band, it’s really good to have people that can play three instruments, and can sing and dance. And then you have a really good show.

Toby Laing

After that experience of putting this band together and managing people, I suppose you could be forgiven for firing them all and just going back into the studio just by yourself.

Recloose

Yeah, man.

Toby Laing

Going back to the original scheme.

Recloose

Who needs people?

Toby Laing

Is that the case or are you going to persist with this approach, or...

Recloose

Yeah, we’re still doing the band. I think it was quite time-consuming, recording lots of takes, and lots of people, and different situations, and going back through and editing them. And that was the thing in the recording process that I realized, “I don’t necessarily have to do this.” There’s times when you have an idea, and if you don’t have the musician you’re forced to either play it on a synth or something, or go look through all your records and find something that’s going to approximate that idea. Sometimes it’s great to have a musician and just say, “Play this, just like this.” You know? On the flip, it’s sometimes good just to have your records to go through. It can be time-consuming but oftentimes when you look for samples you’ll come up with things that you didn’t expect to find, and it can often make your music take a turn for the better. Again, I guess it’s just a balance. Just finding what works best for you. But I recommend if you’re gonna record people, get them to do only as many takes as it takes, and don’t edit it unless it really needs it, because you’ll waste all day, and weeks and weeks and weeks going through.

Toby Laing

That goes back to what you were saying about there having to be someone who’s directing the project, saying what they like, what they don’t like. You’re going to end up with less of your hard-drive space full of whatnot. I seem to remember you working the horn section really hard on a couple of those tunes on your album.

Recloose

Yeah, and you were there. It was... It’s funny what you end up with. It can be quite difficult. You have to think about the whole picture, like setting up the right environment, the mic is set up, make sure it’s the right room. Do you want to do multiple takes? Do you want to record them as an ensemble? Is there lunch there? Do they need a massage? All these things you need to take into consideration, because thay all contribute to the performance. Yeah, oftentimes you have a very specific idea in your head and you can’t really expect people to come in and nail it first take, you know. It’s like, they’re going to do what they do. I suppose preparation is the key there, and not doing two million takes.

Toby Laing

I don’t know if you’ve got anything that you could play us that maybe a... an example of what we might be able to expect in the future.

Recloose

Yeah, so I’m just working on my next album. I just hope I haven’t bored people to tears because it’s so quiet in here, man. Is everyone bored or what, what’s going on? Is everyone okay? All right? OK, cool. Anyway. Yeah, I’m working on my next album and I’m having fun. I think that’s the most important thing if you’re having fun. I think the last album was a bit of a stress because it had been so long since I put an album out and it was quite a time-consuming process, finding the right label, getting the right deal. This time around, it’s been a lot more fun.

Toby Laing

Maybe you’ve just got some words of advice after going around meeting with different labels, changing labels. Maybe you’ve got a couple of things you might want to say.

Recloose

I think when it comes to labels, I mean, don’t ever assume anything. Make sure that the contract is tight. If you don’t know what the contract says, make sure someone knows what it says. You do need a manager to oversee that kind of stuff. If you don’t have the business savvy and know what a contract says, you need to get someone to do that. In addition to which, what I learned on the last album, every label’s different, but I don’t want to feel like I’m shit talking about Peacefrog, but some labels need people to stay on their ass and see the project through. Some labels take the initiative. They have the creative vision, they say, “OK, here’s the music. We have an idea of how we want to market it. We want to portray you in this way. We have this whole design going on. We got a logo. This is what your look’s going to be. We’ve got the photography all hooked up. This is your tour dates ...” blah blah blah. Peacefrog is not this kind of label. They’re the kind of label that you need to come with the grand master plan. You need to tell them this is what’s going on. Unfortunately, I had a manager who didn’t follow through on that stuff. As a result, we had a song that got a bit of attention through Dust here in Dallas and whatnot, and then the album did alright, but because there was not someone riding their ass and saying, “Here’s the 10-step plan to marketing this record. We’re going to do these songs as singles, these are the remixers, here’s the video, here’s the second video, here’s the tour dates, this is what you need to provide, this is what we’re providing, here’s the timeline.” All this stuff. We didn’t have any of that. And I sat back thinking, “Well, they’re the record label. That’s their job.” But some record labels don’t see it like that.

The best advice I can give is to say, make sure you know what’s going on with your music, how it’s being handled, and ultimately you need to be in control of that stuff. Because if you’re not, it’s your career. If it falls to the wayside and people start dropping the ball, at the end you’re going to be the one that suffers, so make sure you’re on top of it at all times, you know. I think it’s another great lesson... Every release I’ve put out, every musical experience I’ve had has been a lesson. There’s always been a lot of mistakes made, but that’s just how you learn. You develop. Musically you develop, as a business person, as a manager, everything. I’m still kind of half-ass about shit, but a lot less half-ass than I was so.

Toby Laing

You go into a relationship with a label and it’s quite alright to have a lot of expectations and to make it clear what those expectations are, so that everyone knows. Maybe some of them will be met.

Recloose

That’s what you’d expect, but you can’t, again, you can’t always assume. You don’t want to drive people crazy. You just have to figure out, “What do I need to do in order to get them to do what I want them to do?” You don’t want to ride them every day on the phone because it’s just going to piss them off and they’re going to go, “Forget this guy, he’s a pain in the ass, I don’t want to do anything for this guy.” But you can’t wait three months to hear, like, “When are they going to call, when are they going to email me, when are they going to tell me what’s going on?” You kind of have to be proactive in order to make sure that your music, your identity, your career is being managed in the right way. It’s so great just to bury your head in the sand and just make music. That’s what I would love to do. I’ve been doing that since I started basically. It’s only the last year or two, I’ve said, “OK, all right. I need to come back to reality and stay on top of this stuff.” You know?

In an ideal world, we’d all just be flaky musos and just sit in the studio all the time and, “Contract? I don’t want to see that. Just bring records. Bring instruments. But don’t talk about business points, cuts, publishing. I won’t have anything to do with that, that’s not inspiring to me. I just want to make music.” But if you want to keep making music, you do have to know about these things. And I’m definitely not the person to ask. Don’t waste your time.

Toby Laing

What is this little tune that you have there?

Recloose

I got... I don’t know. I just... You know. Oh, here’s another thing I’ve been doing. Getting a new album together, which I’ve found is quite a good process. As I make these tunes, at the end of the day, I like to do a bounce down. I don’t know if... I’m sure other people do this, but it’s good to keep a running catalog of what you’re doing, especially on an album, and just update your progress every time. Basically I’ve got like eight tunes. Rough. They sound like crap. A lot of the performances are just reference, but these are just ideas so I can just play little snippets. If you don’t like it then it’s just because they’re rough and I’m not done with them yet.

(music: Recloose – untitled instrumental)

Audience Member

Hi. Have you got any tips on dealing with flaky musicians?

Recloose

What’s that?

Audience Member

Have you got any tips on dealing with flaky musicians that you were on about earlier?

Recloose

Try to keep them happy, within reason. But know who’s boss. If you’re paying them, they have to answer to you at the end of the day. That doesn’t mean you have to be a hard-ass about it, but you do have some say. If they’re not on time, you need to tell them. If that’s what you expect of them, you need to tell them that. And if they’re habitually not on time and it’s disrupting your work flow, then maybe you should find somebody else. It’s really hard when they’re your friends, especially. It’s difficult, because it enters this whole other realm. Business, friendship, we all know these things don’t always mix. But you can’t be afraid to be straight-up with people if they’re not meeting your expectations. It’s just a matter of developing the language of getting these ideas across to someone without alienating them, pissing them off straightaway.

It’s something I’m definitely still learning. When you’re in a studio with someone and you’ve given them this beat, but they start singing a melody, and you’re really not feeling it, how do you approach it? What do you say to them? Do you say, “That shit is wack. Try something else, now, because I’m going to get sick”? Do you not say anything and just have a very uncomfortable look on your face and hope they understand what you’re conveying, what you’re feeling? Or do you say, “Yeah, that’s cool, man, but why don’t we try it a little bit differently?” These are the three different ways you can get these things across, and I’m sure there’s other ways, too. Tact is always good, but being straight-up works. If you’re boss, you have to remember that you’re boss. You can’t be wishy-washy, or else you’re not going to get anywhere with it.

Toby Laing

Do we have any more questions at the moment? Yes?

Audience Member

I was just wondering, most of your releases that you’ve done, have you released simultaneously in all the territories where you were looking to release? Like whether it’s been through the States, or through Europe or Japan, if they all happened at the same time, or if they’ve been stayed?

Recloose

It’s a very good idea to release simultaneously, because then you get into problems of people selling imports and pissing off the local label, distributor, whatever the case is. It’s usually a very good idea to do it, coordinate it, so it all comes out at the same time, unless you’ve explicitly said to all the parties involved, “Look, this is the only territory you sell to. You cannot export this product,” because then you get into some really tricky business. It’s good to keep it tight and keep it released at the same time.

Audience Member

You’ve generally got to work it that way?

Recloose

I’m not the most hands-on guy, but I’ve been pretty sure that that’s how it’s worked. I remember with the last album, we only sub-licensed it to Loop in New Zealand, so Peacefrog handled everything. It wasn’t much chance of a conflict there.

Audience Member

How structured are you with your music-making? For example, if you come to the studio, are you available? Can you be reached on the cell phone the whole time? Do you go through all your emails in a day? What does a day look like?

Recloose

In the studio? Yeah, I usually do my business stuff in the morning, take phone calls and do e-mails until about, however long it takes, ten o’clock, and then make music from ten ’til lunch time, and then make some more music, and then hang out with my kid. I try to keep it pretty regimented. But music is one of those things where you can’t always box it in. Sometimes you’ll have an idea at two in the morning, and you just have to get up and get it out. Music, family, it’s this tight-rope walk, but you try to keep it pretty regimented if possible.

Audience Member

Have you always been so structured?

Recloose

No, I’m a new father. My son’s three years old. I was a pretty much a bachelor for the first four years of making music, so I could come and go as I pleased, and I could stay up ’til all hours out of the morning, and work for fourteen hours straight, and not bathe for a week. It was all good. I was a bachelor, I didn’t have to do my laundry, whatever. Sweet. Now it’s not the case. I’m living in a box. The box is somewhat malleable, but it’s still there.

Audience Member

Has that affected your creativity?

Recloose

Yeah, actually, at times it has. It’s been a challenge at times, but I think I’ve adapted. I’ve learned how to work in that way. I think that it’s good to have structure sometimes. Chaos is chaos, and working within confines can be good for your creativity sometimes. It’s good to put a limit on it, just in the same sense that some people have very basic studios and make brilliant music with it, like antique samplers from 1987 or whatever, and they have ten seconds of sampling time, yet they can make these masterpieces out of it. That’s dated technology. Why don’t they want a software sampler that has infinite amount of sampling time? Well, because they don’t have those same confines anymore, and I think it forces you to be creative sometimes. And having a kid forces you to be creative, definitely. And patient.

Audience Member

I wanted to ask you about how you got into arranging and more elaborate production, like studio production? I guess you started off with quite simple equipment as well, or basic equipment, right? How did you go from that to arranging all these horns and the different things that you do?

Recloose

My musical background is pretty rudimentary, so I don’t have a lot of training. When it comes to doing things like arranging and composing, I’m a novice. It’s one of these situations where you experiment, trial and error, and it can take you forever to arrive at your final result, because you don’t have those tools. You don’t know the shortcuts. It could be good, but it can be a pain in the ass, too. It can be good in the sense that you’ll do something totally different than someone that has been trained, but it can be very tedious as well.

I don’t really see a big difference between arranging samples and arranging horn lines. I mean, it’s the same premise. It’s sound. Doing horns is just the idea of harmony and what you want to do. Do you want to keep all your harmonies parallel? Do you want some to have little tangents in... Here’s the main line in this. There’s all different ways you can do it, cascade the stuff. Have your main stuff over here, and then call-and-response. All different ways you can do it. Same with vocals. All just different techniques, but they’re all pretty much tied in together. You don’t have to use your sampling. It’s all just elements of production and arranging and composition.

Toby Laing

Well, OK. I’m going to go super deep on you now, bro. I want to know, what is it? Obviously, your reasons for making music maybe have changed over the years, from when you were younger to now. But I mean, when you go, when you finish doing your phone calls in the morning and it’s time to make some music, what’s some inspiration that you draw on? Does that change? I don’t know, there’s a lot in your music. On that last album, there was a reggae track on there. There’s all kinds of stuff coming out in your music. I just want to know if you even can describe what the source of it is.

Recloose

It’s funny where you find inspiration. I think if you want to remain creative and passionate about what you do, that’s the most important thing, is making sure you have access to inspiration. You can find that in a lot of different places. You can find it through just being happy in your own personal life, or spending time with your kid or your partner, or gong to the beach, whatever. That in itself is inspiring to me. Reading is inspiring to me. Especially reading biographies, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Thelonious Monk. Biographies are quite interesting, and it’s good to see what other people have gone through. I find Wax Poetics, it’s obviously, I think most of us are familiar with that magazine, very inspiring read. Well-written, well-researched magazine, if you want to learn about a plethora of crazy musicians.

Then, obviously, just hunting out music and always challenging yourself with different types of music. I get quite bored listening to the same thing for too long. I go into these different phases, and that tends to be what influences me when I produce. At the moment, we’re getting a little bit older, and I’m finding myself being more and more nostalgic and looking back to my childhood years. Good old days of Fruit Loops and Saturday morning cartoons and Prince.

So that’s a good segue into this little rough track I’m working on here. It’s real corny, it’s rough, but hopefully it’s funky. This’ll be the last thing, I don’t wanna drag it on too long.

(music: Recloose – unknown / applause)

Cheers, thanks guys.