What role (if any) did partying play in this? Was this a revelation….
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I wanted to learn how to do the music they were doing. Again, I became obsessed and it took over my life. I felt I could understand the music like no one else could have. They could have been rapping about anything though, I was hearing the music. It was the street – minus bitches and guns of today's hip hop. I went to his house with no direction or concept of rebellion and came out an adolescent in a new world where New York had my soul, where rhythms were raw and sparse, where the new sound called scratching was everywhere, and man, man, man, doesn't breakdance, electric boogies, cuts and scratches just sound soooooo good still! So dirty and muffled where the grooves have worn out, but meant like a statement of 'this is how we do it' rather than let's keep it clean. He suggested we go to his house at lunchtime and listen to it. But somehow all this floated by me, it didn't connect until one day at school my mate bought in a copy of Street Sounds Electro Hip Hop Vol 1.
Well, of course, many pop records were being made in the beginning of the 80s with electronic instruments. And I imagined everyone heard the same as me in the music. The production itself – rather than the words – this is what obsessed me, even though I had no idea I was listening to the production. The sound of the drums, the distant echo before the rack starts (where the tapes had been stored the wrong way round leading to imprint on the tape underneath). Then I started to find a secret desire in mistakes: the shout captured by mistake, the fade out where you could hear the band change direction before it was cut, the two second fill which took on a new life for a second, then vanished. It's too short though! Noticing that breakdowns were too short quickly developed into a different obsession when I stopped listening to 'songs' per se. The drum break at the beginning just before the verse starts still gives me a buzz now. I started converting 7" rock and pop records later on in childhood, the first record I bought was 'Alright Alright' by Mungo Jerry, which I got from a second hand store where I lived and played over and over. My Dad was incredibly supportive of my developing obsession. Whenever I went to a friend's house when I was a kid I would look for the record collection to kind of get a foothold on things. To me that was strange and alien but I got the feeling early on that most people around me, friends of sorts, their parents etc were not obsessives like me.
Their 7" records would be cast on top of a pile of toys, cover lost, played once and forgotten – a quick fix. My brother and sister on the other hand, cast records and music aside like a pair of old trainers. I was fascinated by the medium itself, too – the way the music was held in the slate or plastic, the apparatus needed to play it back. I know a lot of those 1920s dance records, they are ingrained in my head. He was a big band/jazz/dance 1920s and 30s fan, and I grew up surrounded by piano solos, drum solos, huge horn sections, lo-fi recordings, ragtime, and upbeat stuff, rather than crooners. I think he would have liked to be a musician, but was 100% happy with listening to it through the best system he could afford. My Dad was a music devotee, he also needed music like water.
Tell me a little bit about your musical development: what did you listen to as a kid? What did your parents, siblings and friends listen to? (How) was this influential? I was acutely aware that I was quite alone in this in terms of obsession, but I couldn't help myself. A hidden world that spoke directly to me, and selfishly to me alone – I was willing to share but takers were few. I think when I was a small kid it was some kind of escapism, to this mystic world where some kind of energy was bottled up in a recording.
What drew you to music? What draws you to music? But what makes Luke wanna make all that heat and noise? And, for that matter, what makes his system hum? Escape, space, mistakes, mess, highs, lows, obsession. But this is also body music, that gives you a deep reaction simultaneously physical and mental: ECT for darktime dancefloors? But enough preambling and description: for God's sake, listen to the album if you haven't already, it's hot. Lucky for techno fans, Slater pours himself into his music: this year's Temporary Suspension takes the Ostgut sound and heats it until it's white hot: like last year's 'Plastic Star' EP by Byetone and tobias.' 'I can't fight the feeling', Slater's new work manages to achieve the auditory sensation of melting transistors and incandescent wires. Luke Slater is a difficult man to pin down, as RA's Lee Smith discovered recently, with this interview.
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