Session Transcript:
Lars Vegas
Red Bull Music Academy, Sao Paulo 2002

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Lars Vegas's year zero was at the Beat Box club in Wuppertal, Germany. The club, which gave British rare groove kings like Norman Jay and Gilles Peterson their first German gigs, soon turned into a record store - and now encompasses epic distribution company Groove Attack and the GAP and Superrappin labels, as well as his own Spectrum Works imprint. Lars - whose debut recording was the influential Loft classic Karma - Highpriestess - explains how a love of breaks and digging informs everything he does. Amen!

Lars Vegas: »In the little town called Wuppertal in Germany, there was a club called the Beat Box, which was run by the guys who run Groove Attack now. The Beat Box was known for booking DJs from America and England, people like Norman Jay and Gilles Peterson - often their first time playing in Germany. The owners, Mue Meuser and Jojo Altevogt, were big music fans and decided to open a record store called Groove Attack. They sold the kind of music these DJs were playing, since you couldn't get those records in Germany.

After two years, the store moved to Cologne to get a bigger customer base. A third partner, Frank Stratmann, joined the team, flying over from San Francisco where he worked at Groove Merchant, a famous used record store over there. Groove Merchant sold the same kind of music: jazz, soul, funk and fusion- old records that everyone nowadays calls breaks.

So Frank joined the team, bringing records in his hand luggage from the States and boom! Groove Attack distribution and wholesale was born. That was in the late '80s, early '90s. From that point on we just grew on an uncontrollable basis, buying from the US and selling to record shops all over Europe. Nowadays we sell to every territory there is.

I started out at Groove Attack doing odd jobs because I wanted cheap records and I ended up running the store. I've been running it for about ten years now.«

RBMA: »So before you started the record store you were already collecting vinyl?«

Lars Vegas: »Yes. I have two older brothers who got me hooked from an early age. They were into independent soul and funk records from the States, what they called club music. Back then, it was a more open-minded thing, before all the subcategories like house, techno and so on happened.

My brothers would make mix tapes typical of the music played in the clubs at the time. They would consist of European stuff like Kraftwerk as well as black music like the Isley Brothers, plus some electro and hip hop.

I was making mix tapes myself when I was about 12 or 13. I never really mixed the music - more like blended them with a tape recorder - pause tape mixes. I always made sure that I was taking care of the music at every party outside school. I didn't really trust anyone else's taste in music because I felt that most people weren't into it as much as I was.

So from that point on I basically went on my own path and tried to find stuff like the kind of records from American police shows, soundtracks and the funk with the heavier beats that went on to become the foundations for hip hop.«

RBMA: »What were your favourites back then?«

Lars Vegas: »I was into James Brown. Not the stuff like Sex Machine that everyone is sick of hearing, I mean the older and rarer ones. There are still some really tough records by James Brown. I also visited America for the first time when I was 16, in 1984. You could get like crazy rare records back then like Tony Avalon & The Belairs for $2. Nobody cared about those tunes back then.

Around this time, rare groove got really big through the London club scene, like Dingwalls. To explain rare groove - it's like a really deep lake and James Brown would be the surface of that lake. It's mostly these small independent records, usually only on 7" vinyl.

These records can be really rare. You really have to investigative to find out about them. When I first started listening to James Brown, I hadn't heard of Mickey & the Soul Generation or African Music Machine or those kind of bands. You build up this kind of knowledge through compilations and association. If you like this record, you would check other records by that guy or that producer.

Now when I was buying these rare groove, jazz and soundtrack records, I was always looking for breakdowns and clean breaks - parts of a track that had just a vocal or solo instrument, nothing else. I was just looking for records that had clean breaks.

David Axelrod is a good example of the kind of artist I would be looking for. He's been sampled by all the hip hop artists. I call it rare groove because it's almost impossible to get the originals of these kind of records. Nowadays though, a lot of this stuff is reissued.

David Axelrod produced lots of Cannonball Adderley records. In the late '60s, Axelrod's productions had a certain drum sound that you rarely found in other records at that time. He had a very distinctive soundtrack vibe that really caught me. A David Axelrod track favoured by hip hop producers is Holy Thursday, which gets sampled all the time. Holy Thursday has a polyrythmic groove with a very rough bass. David Axelrod's music is always very dark with lots of breakdowns, things you can sample. He didn't have lots of percussion, just heavy, heavy drums basically. Nowadays you just sample a David Axelrod snare and just re-arrange it. You need those clean parts to do that well.«

RBMA: »Where was your first gig DJing?«

Lars: »I started off playing in bars because I wasn't confident that the music I had would fit in a club. It was always like a confrontation with people in clubs because they are expecting to hear something else. Then I met the guys at the Club Separee. They asked me to book the DJs because I knew all the people in town. So I was booking for that club and made sure there was a diverse range of music, but at the same time, trying to reroute it and get everyone to check out the old funk and jazz.

A little later on, I started to hear the sound of drum 'n' bass coming out of London. Since I was already looking for old breaks and stuff, I quickly understood the essence of drum 'n' bass. That's what came up next for me.«

RBMA: »What year was this?«

Lars: »We're talking about the early '90s. Back then drum 'n' bass was still called hardcore, basically consisting of old James Brown beats cut up and sped up to 150-160 bpm. Drum 'n' bass nowadays is more like 170-175bpm. A good example of the breaks used in drum 'n' bass would be the Amen Brother break by the Winstons,, which has been used by every drum 'n' bass producer, then and now.

The funny thing about Amen Brother is that it's on the very first record from the Ultimate Breaks & Beats series. They are these compilations from New York that are still the foundation for todays club or club-derived music. On each record you had six or eight tracks, which all contain a hard drum break. These were the tunes that Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash were DJing and scratching with back in the day. And now people are using the same music sources for drum 'n' bass today. The music just got quicker.

So if you take Amen Brother played on 33rpm and want to use the break, you'd put it onto 45rpm. Now you have the Amen break, which is very famous within drum 'n' bass. [Note: Louis Flores pitched down the opening break of Amen Brother on UBB#01, then pitched back up to the original 45rpm speed]. So now I was buying drum 'n' bass. I was looking for modern polyrythmic music. I was trying to find music that wasn't just the four-to-the-floor type of stuff and it was pretty obvious that hardcore wasn't that. I found out that even some techno, like Carl Craig's Innerzone Orchestra, was working for me.

Carl Craig was one of the first techno artists that drum 'n' bass people played within a hardcore context - speeding it up so it works with hardcore. Polyrhythmic music is harder to mix than breaks, but if you've got real experience with mixing you can get lots out of it. If you can't mix well, then don't do it. Never try to mix in a club if you're not really confident about it. I'd rather blend a track instead of messing up the mix. Once you've screwed up a mix of polyrhythmic music, everybody knows and everybody feels it at the same time. Most people will just stand still and go like: "What are you doing?"

So around this time, hardcore became really musical. There were certain tracks that used a very smooth piano loop with drum programming. That's the kind of music I like - hard drums with smooth music. So from that point on I was deeply into drum 'n' bass for around four years.

So the energy of drum 'n' bass allowed me to play in raves and clubs and around the same time, Robert Nacken, a friend of mine wrote this tune. He played all the instruments himself and programmed the beat. It was given to me as a demo and I knew a studio guy who said to come up whenever I had a good demo to work with. So we took up his offer and the result was a track called Highpriestess, made in '93. Basically, the first thing I ever did in a studio as a producer.«

RBMA: »That was a lucky start.«

Lars Vegas: »We put it out on the Groove Attack label, which had just started up. The first pressing sold out straight away, around 3.000 units, which is pretty good if you compare it to sales nowadays. Today, a good track might only sell up to a 1.000. So 3.000 is a really good effort, you know? With re-presses we sold about 7.000 copies of that tune. It ended up on various compilations and through that we were asked by United Future Organization to contribute to one of their compilations. After that we were asked to do remix work and did two other 12"s. We quickly found out that we weren't that good at repeating the Highpriestess concept. So we got more chilled out, doing things on an album format.

We made our first album, Pad Sounds, which got licensed to Japan and since then we've released two other CDs. At the time of our first album, I was getting a little too confident. I'd walk into the studio, expecting quick results and losing a little bit of respect for the whole process of creating music. Before, the studio was like a church to me, like a shrine or something. I was losing that attitude.

I was getting more into drum 'n' bass production and there was a guy from London called Nico Sykes who was making drum 'n' bass at the height of its dark period. Groove Attack was distributing his stuff on No U-Turn, so we became fast friends. I visited Nico in London, worked through the night and came out the next morning with a drum 'n' bass track. Later he came over to Germany and with my friend Tom we made Doppelgänger and boom - suddenly I was making drum 'n' bass records.«