it’ll compress the wave so it sounds more pumpy. So if you go back to someone’s back catalogue — and Classic is a great example — it’s all done for vinyl, so it sounds really quiet, but when you play it on vinyl, it sounds much louder. I just left the old ones as they are, and they sound good, but they’re definitely quieter than the new ones. It’s up to them if they want to remaster it — I like it as it is, but remastering the whole thing would make it sound more ‘now’.”
DISCO FLAVOUR Kicking off with some serious boompty disco jams, all bass splurge and cocktails, the vibe on Self’s Classic mix is a fair distance from the tropical bass he made his name with — this he puts down to natural progression, although he acknowledges the wider move towards disco and house flooding dance genres. “Really my tastes have changed and I’ve got better at production,” he shrugs. “When I started I was pretty shit, so I was trying to make traditional stuff, but didn’t really know what I was up to. And I’m feeling more straight-up house and techno at the moment. I think a lot of the stuff I was doing that was more leftfield, that scene got really popular and a bit shit. It’s what happens with most scenes, they start off and they’re super cool, then people start copying the copies of the copies. I mean, what I was doing eventually came to be called Tropical — which I wasn’t really comfortable with — it was basically just good house music. “A lot of the DJs who’ve moved more onto the 4/4 side are just people who’ve moved to what they find interesting, which is how I think you should be as a DJ, you should move to where you think the music’s best, you should be like, ‘I like disco I’m gonna make some, rather than ‘everyone’s making disco so I’m gonna make disco’. I mean, some stuff
is getting over played 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, and there’s been a bunch of great records in a kinda similar vein after that, then you get the weaker copies, which is kinda where we are now. But really, every tune should be judged on its own merits — is it good or not?”
Discussing his own productions, the workaholic claim stands up to scrutiny. There’s a whole lot of Zombie Disco Squad product getting ready to bowl out of the studio and onto the dancefloor, and potentially a whole new direction entirely. “I just had a techy EP out on Suara, then I’ve got a remix of ‘Booty Clap’ coming out, which Claude VonStroke described as a combination of Mr V and DJ Funk, which made me happy. Then the Classic comp, then a Kevin Saunderson remix, I think E-Dancer — ‘Banjo’, then a mix of Cry Wolf. I’ve been busy! I’m also sort of talking about starting a band with the geezers from Mixhell, which is the drummer from Sepultura and his wife. We’ve got quite a big singer and quite a big bassist potentially involved, but I can’t say who they are… I want to make organic tech house, somewhere between traditional disco and techno. I’ll just be producing it — I can’t play anything, I’m a moron basically, so I’ll just press keys and see what happens.” And what about live shows? Can we expect to see Self taking a rock star persona to the stage anytime soon? He sniffs and thinks, then laughs. “If we were playing live I’d have to learn an instrument. Maybe the tambourine? I could be the tech house Bez selling ecstasy to everyone…”
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