I


t’s fitting that when we meet Wolfgang Gartner, the LA-based producer whose Kevlar-coated productions have taken electro house to stadium-sized levels and given the US dance scene a hypodermic shot of adrenaline straight to the heart, it’s in Miami. America is, after all, home of XXL, the land where everything is pumped up


and built for widescreen, from vast dramatic sky over rolling prairie land to the proliferation of neck- achingly tall skyscrapers. But in Miami, even the shop dummies have cosmetically enhanced busts, while a meal out guarantees your doggy bag home contains just as much as you’ve eaten. Constraint isn’t in the vocabulary. Yet you still won’t find anyone bigger than Wolfgang Gartner. Alongside multiple Grammy winner Skrillex and serial Twitterer Deadmau5 (both of whom he’s collaborated withon ‘The Devil’s Den’ and ‘Animal Rights’ respectively), he’s chiefly responsible for reawakening the nation’s kids to the possibility of repetitive beats via his releases and label Kindergarten — the top YouTube comment from one of his videos capturing this succinctly with the much thumbs-upped phrase ‘Skrillgang Gartmau5’.


Launching into the public consciousness in 2007 with the debut ‘Shapes’ EP for San Francisco’s OM Records, Wolfgang’s larger-than-life reinvention of the sound of European origin has helped define a new generation of party goes who’ve grown exponentially, now turning up in their thousands to hear him play sets of mostly self-composed beats. Rough and raw enough to reassign dyed-in-the-wool (and hair) rock kids, tracks such as ‘Push & Rise’, ‘Fire Power’ or the inescapable Beethoven-sampling ‘Wolfgang’s 5th Symphony’ are a primary coloured mix of Ed Banger extremism and hyperactive fidget bass, sugar-coated with the retro sheen of ‘Discovery’-era Daft Punk to be joyfully devoured by kids for whom A.D.D. is as readily diagnosed as the common cold and for whom Adderall is just another key to unlock the party padlock. Snapped up by Ultra Records, the publishing arm of Miami’s gigantic catch-all dance festival whose reach is continually extending around the globe as it adds international events, last September heralded his debut album, the aptly-titled ‘Weekend In America’, a collection of swaggering crunked club tracks with guest turns from the likes of Eve and Dipset, aka Cam’ron and Jim James.


Joey Youngman Brought up as plain Joey Youngman, though, the inception of Wolfgang Gartner goes back much further than his release history implies, dating to a similarly engaged period of US dance music in the ’90s when dummy-sucking candy ravers also gathered in their thousands to hit parties up and down the West Coast. “I grew up in California on the Central Coast in this town called San Luis Obispo, which is halfway between LA and San Francisco,” says Wolfgang in the basement of his hotel on Ocean Drive, an unassuming attire of jeans and t-shirt giving no outward sign of his megastar status. “It was about three-and-a-half hours from each of them… when I started going to warehouse parties and raves, it was like 1994 and it was crazy. They were all over the place, even in this little town. I was 14 or 15 and I couldn’t drive, so my mom had to drive me there and would come pick me up. I’d stand at the back and I didn’t know what everyone was doing, all the drugs and everything, I had no clue. Then during the day I would take the bus into town to the record store and listen to music on the headsets. I couldn’t afford to buy CDs or records or anything.”


Soon joining the ecstatic masses in every way and dancing until dawn on mountain tops, it was the sound of funk, disco and hip-hop-sampling house that led him into production, with a prolific output that saw him using his own name and a number of monikers to release on labels such as Nightshift and Tango Recordings, which held sway before European electro and minimal superseded the then-dominant bump of the West Coast. As one comment on Discogs notes, “He must write a house track for every minute of his waking life, and he has 3642.5 aliases… I’m beginning to suspect this fella produced all the house tracks ever made.” “I wasn’t even chipping away,” he says, however, when we ask about his time making house that sounded so Chicago-like, people often thought that this was where he lived. “I didn’t even have any long- term plan. I didn’t have any goals. I loved Chicago house, I loved disco house, I was having fun making music and basically churning out the same thing that everyone had been doing for 15 years. I was still being inspired by Derrick Carter records from 1997 and still trying to get that sound, and it was 2007... I loved the music, but it was time to do something, advance the


art-form, advance my career and move forward. It was a hard decision, it was a personal decision, it was a life decision, but it literally was a one-day thing where I needed to change everything about my life.”


It’s easy to criticise those who are perceived to have abandoned their roots, to accuse them of being turncoats and wax lyrical about those who stick to the same sound through thick and thin. But dance music thrives on innovation, and the cutting-edge has always reacted against the established, subverting genre boundaries almost as soon as there’s a common understanding of what they are. In this light, these motivations provide a strong argument for his switch, both in terms of creative satisfaction and financial security, while making staying in the same place conservative and reactionary. “The US dance scene had been declining for a while and I was running three of my own record labels, as well as distributing two others on vinyl, and all these distributors started shutting down and going bankrupt,” he continues. “They owed me tens of thousands of dollars for records I had sold them and I started getting screwed over. That was my main business, distributing my own records and other people’s on vinyl, and everyone closed down, the pressing plants closed down… “In a six-month period everyone went out of business and stole all my money. I was like, ‘this isn’t working anymore, I need to get out of this’.”


Taking the name of his town’s German college soccer coach (“when I played Pee Wee Soccer he taught us how to juggle soccer balls, he was famous in our town”) and inspired by tracks such as Fedde Le Grand’s ‘Put Your Hands Up For Detroit’ and Justice’s ‘D.A.N.C.E.’, his first new tracks were actually another forward-thinking experiment, pre-dating the synching craze and recording ‘Square’ and ‘Circles’ for Rock Star games, the company responsible for Grand Theft Auto. “I thought, ‘I really dig this stuff and the production quality is on this whole other level from the Chicago ghetto stuff I’ve been doing for 10 years’,” he says on rooting through the proliferation of tracks that appeared on Beatport prior, many of which he discarded as too cheesy. “The mastering and the mixing, and the sounds were so much thicker. They were better at it than me and I hadn’t heard this stuff, so it inspired me from that technical perspective too.”


Turned onto house music during the ‘90s US dance explosion, Wolfgang Gartner was once the prolific everyman producer. But with an insatiable appetite to push both himself and the American scene forward, he’s now the leading figure in a movement transforming the world... Words: JOE ROBERTS Pics: BETH CROCKATT


www.djmag.com 029


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