Most know Zombie Disco Squad for his upfront, punchy productions for Dirtybird and Made To Play, but his new mix for Classic, ‘Through the Eyes Of...’ shows a more loose-limbed, funkier side. Nat Turner talks mixing up the Classic catalogue, getting bored of deep house, and getting punched in the nuts by Eats Everything... Words: IAN MCQUAID
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at Self — the one man jack machine of Zombie Disco Squad — has just delivered one of the best mixes we’ve heard this year: ‘Classic Through the Eyes Of... Zombie Disco Squad’. Let loose on the hit-stuffed Classic back catalogue, he’s knocked together a journey through much-loved bangers and lesser-known
gems, effortlessly shuffling from twilight disco sleaze courtesy of The Hue and Prztz, to late night moody house bombs from the likes of Claude VonStroke and Style of Eye. Along the way, he throws in his own edits, taking his Classic retrospective beyond a standard mix into something far more personal. However, when we meet to discuss the comp and his forthcoming releases, Self’s mind is initially on other things. “I’m just fucked basically,” he sniffs apologetically over a coffee, round the corner from his Brick Lane studio. “I’ve had flu for ages, I’m in the wars... I broke my elbow last weekend at the Dirtybird party. I’ve got this friend called Big Ted — who is big, he’s like seven foot. And it all started when Eats Everything punched me in the nuts as a jest, so then I turned round and punched Big Ted in the nuts, naturally, like a chain of nut punch. Then Ted closed a door in my face, so I tried to kick him up the bum, which is where it all went wrong, cos his bums about four feet off the ground. It was a slippery concrete floor, so I went leg over tit. No one saw luckily, I was super pissed and didn’t really notice, was just like — ‘urrrrhh it hurts’. I went home and then I was like, ‘Shit that really hurts’, so then took some codeine and went to the doctors, and they were like, ‘You’ve broken a bit inside your elbow and there’s nothing you can do for it’. It’s all good though. I’ve got broken bones and the flu, but fuck it, just persevere.”
And persevere he will — he’s got gigs to get through yet. “I’m out to Hamburg to DJ, I’ve no idea what the night is, though, because I’m in Germany quite a lot. It doesn’t matter, though — it’s great having switched to playing off USB sticks, cos I can turn up to any club and play whatever. There’s so much music with me, that if it’s a deep night I’ve got the deep shit there, if it’s banging, I’ve got the techno — and I’ve been playing long enough now that I sort of know what I’m doing. Just about. I’ve got two 32GB SD cards, and that’s basically my whole music collection with me, just plug it in and you’re there. I switched when it became club standard about six months, a year ago — and I’ve stopped carrying CDs, which has nearly tripped me up a couple of times when they’ve only had Pioneer 1000s in the club. “I’m actually about to swap to Traktor, because you can do so much more,” Nat continues. “You can go into the back of the Pioneer 2000s with a USB cable, so you play like normal, but you can have an extra thing which they call a — and I hate the name — remix deck. It’s like this pad that controls a little Ableton-style thing that can fire off loops. I’ve never played with laptops before, this is gonna be the first time. I’ve bought one ‘specially for it — I got a PC one, I was like ‘Fuck it, if I play one show that’s the laptop paid off’.”
WORKAHOLIC When DJ Mag’s surprised to find that he plays off a PC rather than a Mac, Self tells me something that is tantamount to treason to a large
“Some stuff is getting overplayed already — a lot of the bootleg deep house stuff I’m really not feeling. The copies of the copies of the copies. If you think the first record that kicked that off was ‘Extravaganza’ by Soul Clap, an amazing tune... then you get the weaker copies, which is kinda where we are now.”
body of the dance community. Brace yourselves Mac lovers. “Macs are a bit shit these days,” Nat reckons. “I’ve always used a PC for producing, cos I use Cubase, and it’s native to PCs so it runs a bit shit on a Mac. People try and get me to switch, but I tell them to hop it. I used to think Macs were a great product when Steve Jobs was alive, but they’ve lost that edge. The new iPhone’s alright, but the old one was groundbreaking.” Talk of shit, over-hyped technology leads us to talk of shit, over-hyped dance stars, and Self makes an entirely unprintable, and (probably/ maybe/ definitely) true claim about a famous DJ who had their debut album ghost-written, relying on a hefty amount of ‘help’ from the ‘engineer’. It’s a vague bone of contention for Self, who taught himself production skills from scratch, and to this day still takes the majority of his work from the first kick right through to the last master. “Yeah, normally I do it all myself. It depends how long I’ve spent on a track, if I’ve spent ages on it I might need a fresh pair of ears, but nine times out of 10 I do everything. To be honest if I was starting again, I’d probably be a bit lazy about it, and get someone else to engineer, but I’ve learnt all the skills now. Truthfully, there are people who really enjoy the engineering side of things, but I don’t. It’s a necessary evil.”
DJ Mag’s not entirely convinced Nat would “get someone else to engineer”. He’s a self-confessed workaholic, who reveals “I normally get into the studio for 10 in the morning and leave at about 10 in the evening, four or five days a week. I really go for it. It’s in the Truman Brewery, so there’s people knocking about to have a coffee with or whatever, but I work pretty continuously.” There would have been no real shame in his taking the Classic catalogue and mixing it straight, and that’s what a bunch of other DJs would have done. But that isn’t how Self works — the whole compilation came about in the first place because he wanted to remix their
tracks for his own use. “I’ve always been a big fanboy of Classic — it’s what got me into house music in the first place,” he admits. “Luke heard my album, and was really sweet and gave me really good feedback, and we were just chatting about doing stuff. I did a remix for them, so I actually just asked for the back catalogue to edit for myself, just to play and update a bit, and they were like, ‘Why don’t you do one of these mixes?’ “It was a bit overwhelming because there’s so much on there, there really is every style of house music in their back catalogue and they’re all such classic tunes — well, hence the name — so I just went through and picked out the ones that hadn’t been played out too much, that weren’t such big classics, that I really liked. Then I got some mates involved; there’s an edit from Jesse Rose on there, and something from Claude VonStroke.”
We wonder how the old stuff has fitted with the new — the label has transitioned from vinyl releases to digital, and this would surely throw up a couple of discrepancies? “When you cut a vinyl you don’t make it as loud because the grooves can’t handle it, like when you actually cut the lacquer it can’t be super compressed, but on an mp3, you can push it. A vinyl will limit itself,
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