Tim Fielding @ The Underground - Paddies Night!

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House Junkies present “The Journeyman” Tim Fielding @ The Underground in Kennedy’s on March 17th from 10pm. The man responsible for the first ever DJ mixed compilation CD series “Journeys by DJ” and the man who’s club The Brain played host to the seminal talents that were Billy Nasty, Leftfield, Orbital, Moby, Andy Weatherall and more back in the day when MP3 was an extra in Star Wars. Don’t miss this opportunity to check out one of the true pioneers of electronic music with what promises to be a quality set bringing you the A-Z of dance music. Support on the night will come from Anthony O’Brien (House Junkies resident) and Nick Corrigan (Switch, Pod). Check out [url]Http://www.connected.ie[/url] for an exclusive interview with the Journeyman himself.




Tim_Fielding_Bio

Thanks to Jude Schwepp from Connected Magazine for the following Interview with Tim....

Can you tell us a bit about what you’re up to at the moment? Lots of ocean hopping or are you staying put in NY for most of the time?!



I’m building a site for MTV in New York to do cool stuff on mobile phones. It’s called www.flux.com and along with my baby son, Leo, it’s taking up a lot of my time. Not nearly enough jet-setting and ocean hopping, I’m afraid, though I will be down at the WMC in Miami this year.



What kind of vibe did you want to create on your new album “Loft Party” and what do you think is the secret to a good mix cd?



The vibe with Loft Party is in keeping with the JDJ After Hours CDs – kind of a party album that you can kick back and zone out to. Loft Party is a double pack – the first mix is more jazzy and funky, the second is a drawn-out hammock house affair with mixes that drop right down to the intros. It builds back up to a party vibe so you can put the first one back on again and keep going round in circles.

There’s an awful lot that goes into a good mix CD. The programmer treads a fine line between maintaining a particular vibe and being as eclectic as possible. Few mixes sustain interest after 40 minutes or so. The ones that do usually tell a kind of story. What was nice about Loft Party was that I cast the net wide to include some distinctive vocals and exotic sounds and by a complete fluke they sort of gelled thematically, which is what you can really lock your head into once you get past the groove.



With regard to the JDJ series it was a simple yet hugely successful idea that spawned many copycat series. Why do you think a compilation mix hadn’t been commercially available up until then?



Strictly speaking, you mean ‘legally commercially available’, because bootleg mix tapes were around long before. To anyone who was on the club scene then, DJs had started becoming heroes and it was clear that they were playing a creative role beyond most people’s perception of them, which was typically of some goofy bloke telling bad jokes on the radio. It was an idea whose time had come, and I just happened to be someone that appreciated that and at the same time knew how to license tracks and get a CD into distribution.



Back to the early days for a quick question!! When you had so many future super stars gracing the decks in The Brain were you aware at the time of how influential these guys were going to become?



Not at all. We had a lot of guys that were really great but just faded away. And then there were guys like Moby who went from strength to strength. The early 90s were terrifically experimental – a special time. Techno wasn’t taken very seriously, I think partly because the artists were just learning to perform it live. The rock press dissed us as ‘faceless techno bollocks’, which we thought was hilarious, like being told off by your parents. Casper Pound had it printed onto a t-shirt. One thing I could see from my vantage point down the Brain was that Techno was just like any other kind of music, and that as a genre it was going to be massive.



Why do you think The End has remained one of the most successful clubs in London where other clubs that kicked off around the same time seem to have had their day ?



Two things: the hard work that the MD, Zoe Paskin, and a seriously loyal team have put into it, and the fact that the two guys that conceived the End, Layo and Mr C, have always had complete freedom to do what they want to do. These are two of the most cutting-edge DJs in the world, they’ve got clubland in their blood and what makes them tick is getting other brilliant artists down there to blow people away. A lot of people that run clubs have a kind of marketing mindset – they appeal to the fashionable crowd who spend a lot of money on booze but who ultimately move on to the next hot spot. The End has always been about the music and the vibe, we couldn’t give a monkey’s which celebrity might be down there or not, and the competition we’ve had to cope with has forced us to develop to a point where the formula is almost self-generating. After 10 years you can still go down there most nights of the week and it feels like a wicked underground warehouse party that you’ve just stumbled into. When I visit from New York these days, I’m amazed how much better it is than the clubs in the USA.



You must have seen a lot of changes in the dance music/ club scene in the last twenty odd years have the changes been mainly positive or negative?



After 20 odd years you stop thinking in terms of positive and negative. Things are what they are. When the lunatics take over the asylum, they stop looking like lunatics anymore.



Do you think music is losing its soul to technology, is the art of DJing going to suffer because of advances in software or do you see this as a good thing?



Absolutely not. DJing and technology are intertwined. I’m a believer in the idea that we unlock the soul that is in music, and that technology helps us do that. Beyond that, it is somewhat out of our hands. I remember being at a music conference in 1991 when some Luddite from Manchester was complaining that CDJ machines would put DJs out of work. Wrong!



Where do you think dance music is heading now what is the sound of tomorrow?



Dance music always reinvents itself by going back into its roots. I think the funky broken electro sound is very cool and the lyrical stuff coming out of the South London grime scene could be huge. I’m still waiting for a really good blend of rock and breaks that isn’t the Prodigy – maybe it will happen this year?

Another thing I like the look of is Defected’s Most Rated series, where the clubbers get to vote on the tracks on the comp, which was one of the best mixes I’ve heard in a while. Mobile is making everything more interactive, and that’s a good thing!



What producers are working their magic for you at the moment?



Francois K, always. Timo Maas’ last album sounded pretty hot. I’ve been exposed to a lot of Hip Hop and R’n’B in New York and producers like Dre and Vidal are masters at those phat lowdown funky productions. And Coldcut of course never fail to be interesting. Looking forward to their new album.



DJing/Producing is a tricky career path to follow any tips for anyone who might like to head down this road?

Do something different that you can make your own and leverage, like run a special night at a club or focus on a certain sound. And then build it from there. And sleep around a lot.



Highlight of your career to date if you can pick just one??!!



Producing JDJ ‘After Hours’ and seeing it sell as well as all the others. And there have been a few cracking nights along the way, of course. Hopefully this one for House Junkies on St Patrick’s will be another!