Session Transcript:
Mixmaster Morris
Red Bull Music Academy, London 2002

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Mixmaster Morris is a trenchant individualist. Ask him about the pre-acid clubs of London he'll tell you lurid tales from Taboo: "There were orgies in the toilet and somebody died outside in the queue." Ask him about independent dance shops and he'll explain how politics have closed 97% of London's indie emporiums. Ask him about Ibiza and he'll comment that he doesn't like "the ethnic cleansing of house music". The ambient DJ, producer and writer started recording as The Irresistible Force, Rising High Records in 1987, and accompanied The Shamen on their 24-month Synergy club tour. He's now thinking about DJing in hotels.
»It's all about finding a new context to play in«, he explains.

Mixmaster Morris: »In the mid-'80s I was obsessed with sampling and I was doing a one-man show with synthesizing drummachines. Samplers weren't something you'd go and buy in a shop. The only samplers on the market were the Fairlight and they cost $133.000. The first affordable samplers to come on the market were little plug-in's that fitted in the back of Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum. They were incredibly crap computers with about the power of a broken calculator, you could do like one second of sampling. But as soon as I started to cut up other people's music I thought, 'Well, this is the end of all previous music and the beginning of something new.' Because it allows access to all the sounds of recorded music and you can do what you want with them. So I was very excited about that and around '85 I bought an AKAI S-612 that was like the first commercial sampler that was under £1.000 and after that an EMAX and I never looked back. And I remember in '86 I famously said that stage one is completed: "We've had a hundred years of managing records now we sample them." The first time I heard house music was in the gay clubs in London around '85. And at the end of '87 there was acid house parties springing up right across London. Ecstasy arrived in London through the gay clubs and through a club called Taboo, which genuinely was the first ecstasy-based club in London. It became notorious because there were mass orgies going on in the toilets and somebody died outside in the queue. Taboo was a very strange club run by Michael Clark, who's a famous ballet dancer, and Leigh Bowery, who was a crazy designer of extremely weird clothes. You had to dress extremely weird even to get into the club and people like Jeremy Healey played there. He used to play commercial music like ABBA but with lots of effects, so it was music you recognised but it was completely fucked up in a way you didn't recognise. There was a lot of clubs in the early '80s before Shoom, Danny Rampling's club, that will be kind of eradicated in the history books. There was a club called the Hug Club, which was kind of like group therapy on MDMA and everybody hugging each other and playing chill out music. And you have to remember that in the days of legal ecstasy people used it therapeutically, for marriage guidance and stuff like that. And don't think no one actually associated dancing with MDMA in the early days.«

RBMA: »When did you start playing?«

Mixmaster Morris: »I started DJing in 1980/'81 when I was at college, putting on bands there, and playing in between their sets. I wasn't really a disco bunny. I was much more into Indie and experimental music and so I'd put on bands, and then we'd play different types of music in between. Like at English punk gigs they didn't have rock music between the bands they'd have a reggae soundsystem. It didn't occur to me in '87, '88 that we needed a second room because there wasn't a problem with the music in the main room. The music wasn't very hard or fast when it started. Then everyone wanted to go one bpm faster and a little bit harder, so by 1990 there was lots of pretty horrible techno music coming out that absolutely appalled me; that seemed to miss the point of what the Detroit and Chicago guys had got going. So around '89, I started to do chill out rooms. I'd do an 8-hour set every night, 4 hours live and 4 hours recorded because there just weren't enough records to fill the night. I'd use the intros of house records a lot, take the 16 bars before the drums and loop it up, play that and then mix something else on top of it. I developed key mixing and in the early '90s. I started to put keys on the records so everything said D-minor or F-major and had a little chart of which keys would work with which keys. I like to cover a lot of different tempos and the great thing about a record with no tempo is it allows you a transition between different speeds. The whole point was to create some kind of tension and release so we would use records that were rhythmic without necessarily having drums.«

RBMA: »There are a lot of records that you won't play and there are reasons behind that.«

Mixmaster Morris: »This could get a bit political, folks. The majors are trying everything to wipe out the independent label scene. Five years ago we had 100 independent dance shops in London now we have about three because the majors have pushed them out of business with tricks to do with distribution. You go into a shop now it will be 500 Ibiza compilations, 50 Cream compilations, everything is 100% foolproof. And there is no American music, nothing but Ibiza. Ibiza is all white DJs and they all play corporate music and for me that's a pretty reactionary kind of statement. I don't really approve of the ethnic cleansing of house music. If you make it mono-cultural, then you destroy the whole purpose of it, plus for me the exciting thing about house music was that it transcended race, colour, creed and continents. Ibiza clubs on the whole are really shocking. They are the most expensive in the world and I don't think I can agree that it's the best music in the world because you get the Venga Boys, 2 Unlimited and lots of hideous chart commercial music. People say Ibiza is good because rich people or film stars go there, they're not talking about the music anymore. Unfortunately, you cannot experiment in any way; if you play a record and the guy in charge of the room doesn't know it you get ejected from the club. I played at Pacha two years ago, and after two records I got thrown out the club. He threw out Laurent Garnier the week after, François Kevorkian two weeks later and he threw out Gilles Peterson as well. This is a club that has six rooms and all of them are playing banging commercial house. To be honest, I think drug dealers got too much say in the music and it's like: "If you don't play hard music we won't sell hard drugs." I'm not particularly interested in whether drug dealers are making a profit, I'm interested in the music, so I find it all too criminal. There are thousands of people who live there [Ibiza] all year 'round who are pretty damn cool, the people who have permanent residence there and in the winter when all the tourists have all gone, they have their own clubs that you don't read about in Mixmag. Clubs like Camaros, Las Dalias, Namasta: these are an entirely different thing. You won't see the Spice Girls down there, but you'll hear much better music. When you land in Ibiza first thing you see is huge billboards for Ministry Of Sound and Cream all the way down the runway before the plane has even stopped and then when you get off the plane they desperately want to get your mobile phone number. So that every five minutes you get a text message saying: "You've got to go to..." The hype and competition is so overwhelming over there. But it's like over here or in the UK, sooner or later there will be more and more backrooms because there are thousands of DJs who want to play so you find every pub, every bar, every restaurant with decks; turning into a new kind of venue. Hotels, I think, have got a lot of potential because that is one place where you are authorised to go to sleep. I'm working with some hotels trying to develop an in-room ambient music service. Festivals I particularly like because you can play in the campsite. Everyone is asleep, you can't even see them because they are all in their tents but they're all sleeping with a big smile on their faces. It is all about finding a new context to play new music.«