Fine margins of genius: a Photek interview - part two
This is part two of my interview with Photek (aka Rupert Parkes), from 2019. You can read part one here.
The interview first went out in October 2019, around the release of Parkes’ Original Soundtrack for Mosul, a documentary about the battle to reclaim the Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State.
BC: It’s interesting what you say about the source material, because you've remixed people like Bob Marley and David Bowie. How do you do that? Obviously no one is going to ask me to do it. But if they did, I would be so intimidated by this David Bowie song or this Bob Marley song, that I wouldn't touch it. How do you go about it? Do you have to go: no, I'm just going to change it, that’s what I'm here to do?
RP: You know, I had to struggle with that and particularly more recently with the Bob Marley remix - One Love / People Get Ready, you know…
BC: Yeah, just go for something obscure!
RP: There are a few things that go through my mind. The first one, which I overcame a while back in my career, was if you don't do it, someone else will do this. This project's moving ahead. They're asking people to do it and it's either going to be you or - who knows? - DJ Clown Boy, whatever guy's going to make an absolute mess of of this remix. So you may as well, someone's gonna step up.
Now, I think the only time that I declined on the basis of I just don't want to touch it, was Bug in the Bass Bin by Carl Craig. I don't know what to do and I just want to leave it the way it is. I can't touch that, I have no idea. So back to the Bob Marley remix: I listened to the acapella, I listened to the multitrack and there's little outtakes in there that weren't in the finished version that we all know. And I just had to take a pause for a minute and be like, Wow, don't rush into this. This is a real privilege. Don't mess it up.
And my mission is going to be to make something that can stand the test of time. So don't use sounds that are this year only, or next year only; try to make something that will be classic because you're going to regret this forever, it's going to go out with the artwork looking like Legend [Photek’s remix was released as part of a reissue of the classic Bob Marley compilation Legend]. And if you're not careful, there'll be this ridiculous remix, circa 2017, that's just going to sound cheesy in retrospect. So I think I succeeded in making something that didn't fit any particular decade or whatever.
BC: Your Bob Marley remix is really dark, as well.
RP: I listened to the lyrics a lot. As I was listening I was trying to get some meaning out of it. And I thought, OK, what can I add? And what you could add is to make it a different mood. Like, ‘Hear the children crying. Let's get together and feel all right.’ That's coming from a place of maybe things are not all right. The children crying… There would be no need for a song like that if there was one love already. So, OK, there's room for some other expression in here.
BC: What can you tell us about Demons of War [from the Mosul soundtrack]?
RP: Demons of War, that is, I believe, the cue where this Iraqi team of soldiers are sitting around a campfire at the end of the day; they're telling stories around a campfire and it's one of the most tragic, heartbreaking stories that I've ever heard.
A family is pinned down by ISIS in their home and they try to escape. The mother has been killed by an ISIS sniper and there are two children and a father, and they decide they're going to try and escape that village or that little neighbourhood and they're going to try to get to safety. They run across the street and one of the children is shot by the sniper in the father's arms and he turns back to the house again with one child alive, one child dead. It's so traumatic. He gives the other child, the surviving child, a sleeping pill to try and calm them down and tries to decide what he's going to do next. He decides that, after a while, he's going to bury one child and then try again with the surviving child. This time he makes it, he escapes, but when he reaches the security forces, he realised that he buried the wrong child.
Now I want to cry just telling that story. I get goosebumps. I get a surge of adrenaline when I tell that story, because it's so profoundly tragic. And these are real experiences of people in the modern age going through this, under the conditions that they're in. I think that I supported that story, with the music that I put in that scene. How do you make music to support such terrible tragedy? And by the way, not actors. This is a documentary.
BC: How does the film world compare to the music world? Are they very different?
RP: I think they couldn't be any more different. It's pretty remarkable, now that I've made that transition, I can see it must have been funny for film and TV people to hear me talking about what I would like to do with film and TV before I ever tried - and it would have been hilarious. It’s such a different world as an artist. It's ready when it's ready. It might take 18 months to write an album, there's all kinds of pondering and re-listening and playing the music to people and getting feedback and then sitting on it for a while.
As soon as you hit film and television, you're a small team player in a big machine and you're just serving the bigger picture. Literally, you're serving the picture and your music is simply a supporting role. A crucial role but you're not leading the charge by any means. So you go from being someone flapping in the wind, day to day, to being absolutely regimented, extremely efficient, and you're writing three albums of material a week. And it's all good and you're writing it to somebody else's specification. It couldn't be more different.
BC: Do any of them [people in TV and film] know about the music that you did in the 90s? Are any of them fans? Have you encountered that?
RP: Yeah, they're occasionally - I'd say maybe one or two in 10 occasions - they're like, ‘Oh, yeah, I bought your album back in the day,’ or whatever. But that doesn't relate to the project necessarily. They might just say, ‘Oh well, he's competent at making music but I don't want that sound in my production. But clearly he can make music and having met him, he can communicate and we can get this done.’ But it's not necessarily that people are out there looking for drum & bass.
BC: What do you think of the state of drum & bass today? Do you think it achieved its potential?
RP: I think so. I mean, honestly, I get so little time to listen to any music other than what I'm working on now. I'm definitely out of touch with all music, including drum & bass. I get to dip in and out again, hear things and I think, wow, the production has come so far. It's incredible. It's so advanced and so smart and well executed and in that way, yeah, it fulfilled its potential.
BC: Have you been to a drum & bass club or seen a massive drum & bass arena go off recently?
RP: No, it's been a while. It's funny, I'm so absorbed in this world now that I'm barely making it to a show, it just doesn't happen. I’m in the studio by 6am most days.
BC: But do you feel proud with what you've achieved? I mean, you obviously, you yourself, but also the other people who were pioneering this music in the 90s?
RP: Yeah, I'm very proud to have been part of that. I do appreciate what that was. You know, it's funny, I have this conversation occasionally and people say, ‘Hey, are you proud of what you achieved?’ And I think, well, I don't think that I really achieved anything but I did contribute at a very particular moment in time. So in that way, right place, right time, happened to be in the right frame of mind to be part of that. But I don't feel like I achieved anything with that. I think I was privileged enough to contribute to something that was important at the time. And I think it changed music significantly and I think it was one of the first new music genres since rock and roll, almost truly new.
BC: You had a reputation at the time for being very cerebral. Was that fair? Obviously you could dance to your music as well but it had that cerebral image - for me anyway.
RP: Yeah, I think that that's reflective of me. I try to think on different levels and on different planes at all times. And I try to live my life that way too. So I try to maintain a balance. Hopefully it wasn't seen as being cerebral, a detriment to being good music for the club. Hopefully one didn't overshadow the other. I'm sure it did for some people.
When the term ‘intelligent drum & bass’ came out, that was a bit awkward, because did that mean that other drum & bass was stupid? No, it didn't, it was just layered differently. And also a lot of the hardcore rave music that had come before, you would never call it intelligent music. But it was complex and it was sophisticated, even though it was a bit rough around the edges. So that whole intelligent drum & bass thing, it didn't sit very well with me.
BC: I think it was John Peel that used to say, ‘Well, if that's intelligent drum & bass, I'd like to hear stupid drum & bass.’
RP: I think maybe that's where I got it from. John Peel was one of the first people to jump on my music and one of my early supporters.
BC: Back in 2000 you released Solaris, which had a lot of house influences, a brilliant album. How was the reaction of the drum & bass scene to that?
RP: I think almost all the producers who I knew and respected, they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we get it. Chicago house thing, yeah, wicked.’ And they all love that music too. So it was very, very normal. And they're probably, ‘Oh, not much drum & bass on this. OK, next question: what you got for me on DAT? What can I play?’ Here you go. It's the next thing.
So I think it was more people who make music got that very easily, whereas maybe music buyers would find that frustrating. I think I understood that more later because I have no doubt there were people who were frustrated that there wasn't much drum & bass on that album. And if I went to buy a Herbie Hancock album, he released a new album and it was, I don't know, country, I'd probably be pissed, because I've been waiting a long time. Maybe that's not a good analogy but you know what I mean.
BC: No, I think that works. Getting back to the soundtrack work, when you see your music, combined with images, can you sit back and enjoy it? Or do you sit there thinking, that synth could have been louder. Or something like that?
RP: If there's a mix issue, mainly it would be the music needs to be louder relative to the dialogue and everything, that's usually the experience for most composers. The music would have added so much more to the picture had it been three or six DB louder, it wouldn't have got in the way of the dialogue.
So if you get a bad mix or a super quiet mix, that can take you out of the experience. But as you're working on the music, you get to do what you want. You can mute the dialogue. You can turn the dialogue down. And that's the best feeling ever. It's actually one of my favourite experiences, if you score a scene and you really love what you've done, you get to turn it up and really listen to how it works with the picture and watch that on a good system in the studio. It's fantastic. I love it. It's a good feeling.
BC: You say that a lot of composers, musicians, they say that, ‘If only was a little bit louder…’ You might say, well, they would say that because they want the music louder. It's like every DJ turning themselves up. Do you think there isn't an element of that - or do you genuinely think, no, actually, really they should turn turn that up?
RP: I've tried to play devil's advocate and quite often I think, well, I know how powerful the scene was. I think I'm not completely biased where I could say, Yeah, well, if you can't hear what that guy's saying, you've lost an element of the story, which is clearly more important.
But if it's not compromising dialogue and that music is intensifying your experience of the picture and of the story, then, yeah, bring it up. And I always wondered why, in those circumstances, people don't see that as being obvious. And I guess there are two reasons. One is that some people are simply more visual. Some are kinaesthetic, some are visual and some are audio. Undoubtedly you're going to get a lot of visual people in film and television. So they're getting enough of an experience anyway, just that there is some music there; they're seeing the picture and they're following the performances, so visually, they're satisfied with the drama. Whereas an audio person needs a little more audio information to complete that picture.
That's one reason and I think the other reason is that generally movie creators are partly writers. If not, they are the writer. And for them, the story is already there in words. So they also don't need the intensity of the music. They don't need the intensity to come from the music as much as an audio person. It’s like two ways of looking at the same thing.
Some listening
The combination of Afro-Portuguese beat-maker Nídia and drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist Valentina Magaletti was always going to be a potent one, two beat scientists and rhymical experts coming together on one glorious record. Mata, the first fruits of this collab, has a brilliantly rolling beat, half way between Kuduro and jazz funk, a nagging vocal hook and just enough moody melody to keep the drums at bay.
This new version of Panda Bear & Sonic Boom’s Livin’ in the After by Mexico City mariachis Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez is probably the ultimate version of a song that I enjoyed very much in original and dub versions but I am now unable to rip from my (virtual) turntable. So much drama! So much emotion! So smooth! So simultaneously weird and not at all weird. God I love it.
Lisa - New Woman (featuring Rosalía)
Rosalía is basically royalty in our house, the artist of the decade, and even this pretty minor number with Lisa of Blackpink (another band that gets a lot of play chez nous) is well worth it, with the Catalan singer giving emotional depth and Barcelona passion to the song, which in itself is a decent electropop number. It is catchy as hell too.
The playlists
If music has the charms to sooth a savage beast, the consider my two playlists as a kind of beast-friendly ketamine dart. There are two: The newest and the bestest, with all the best new music of the last three years; and the Newest and the Bestest 2024, which is a variation on the above that you can probably work out.