or the first time Classixx seem lost for words. During the last half hour of their conversation with DJ Mag USA, the duo of Michael David and Tyler Blake have been shooting the breeze as comfortably
and naturally as you’d expect from two people who’ve known each other since childhood. Both exude the same easygoing charm as their records; with their original tunes like last single ‘Holding On’ and their remixes for The Gossip and Phoenix all being house and disco of a particularly laid-back disposition. Indeed, as Michael — the marginally less excitable although equally effusive of the two — points out, “even when we try to go for what we think is big and aggressive people will always say it sounds really chilled — which is fine”. But it does lead DJ Mag to wonder what does actually make Classixx angry, a question which — to judge by the sudden silence on the other end of the line — the pair have never actually pondered before themselves. “I don’t like it when people are nasty to each other,” Tyler eventually offers, sounding as bemused as a toddler being picked on in the playground. “Whenever I see people doing that it always blows my mind, because it’s like ‘What’s the point?’ It’s confusing to me because I don’t see why you’d want to hurt people.”
Classixx, then, are not exactly punk rock insurrectionaries spitting in the face of the system. Nor is their debut album ‘Hanging Gardens’ the sound of two men laying their inner turmoil to bear in the style of Ian Curtis or Kurt Cobain. “We’ve both got great relationships with our mothers!” laughs Michael in response to another one of DJ Mag’s attempts to unearth any semblance of a dark side to them at all. But what the soft, supple and sunny ‘Hanging Gardens’ definitely is is a product of not just two happy upbringings, but also the environment in which it was recorded — half in a studio near Classixx’s childhood home in the San Fernando valley, half in a studio overlooking the Pacific in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach. “The thing about Los Angeles is that it’s just not a very depressing place,” Tyler claims. “It’s beautiful and the weather’s great, and that comes through in a lot of West Coast music. Even something like N.W.A — that’s really tough music in some ways, but Dre was
sampling old boogie records, so it sounds warm rather than cold.” “Just driving down the Westside and listening to early R&B on the 92.4 FM radio station or going to the nights that Dam-Funk puts on — all that culture has an effect on you,” says Michael. “In places like this it seems that the music ends up being just more fun and upbeat,” Tyler continues. “There’s not a lot of room for making dark brooding music here!”
PERFECT SURFACES If you’ve somehow still got it in you to be
cynical after bathing in ‘Hanging Gardens’ joyous rays of aural Vitamin D, you could say that Classixx’s music sums up their hometown in a manner other than just feeling like the soundtrack to a surf movie full of bronzed bodies and glistening waves. For whilst tracks like ‘Stranger Love’ or ‘Supernature’ glitter with glamour like the L.A skyline seen from the Hollywood Hills, they can also seem as superficial and obsessed with perfect surfaces as the city itself, with nothing more substantial going on for anyone who wants something other than good time grooves to shake their cocktails to as they shimmy around at a pool party. “You can definitely find people who are weird and surface and obsessed with themselves, but I think you’ll find that those people are mainly transients,” Michael says. “I don’t know anyone who hangs out in Hollywood, for example — it’s a strange place and the concept of going to a nightclub there is just completely foreign to me. It’s too complex to make a blanket statement about L.A in general.” “Plenty of people come here and are like, ‘Los Angeles is so fake’,” Tyler agrees. “But then they’ve only stayed at some pretentious hotel in Hollywood and gone to some bottle service club — those places are very superficial, but that’s only a very small part of L.A and the lifestyles here. There are something like 16 million people in the greater Los Angeles area, so anyone who says they can’t fit in anywhere is probably talking shit.”
Indeed, although there’s no seedy underbelly to ‘Hanging Gardens’, it is much more diverse than it first seems when you explore it further. The opening title track eases you into some deep house bubbles before taking flight into a nu-disco anthem reminiscent of Aeroplane, ‘Dominoes’ takes a handful of old house music chestnuts — filters, piano and breathy female vocal — and roasts them into something
absolutely mouthwatering, whilst ‘Holding On’ ascends to exactly the sort of disco nirvana Daft Punk were aiming for on ‘Random Access Memories’, and the jacking soulful groove of ‘Jozi’s Fire’ seems to have sprung straight from the roots of Chicago house. Meanwhile, amidst the vocal numbers, ‘Borderline’ is a synth-pop ballad sung by Jesse Kivell with the pensive air of a man realizing that the lights really are going up at the end of the night, DFA Records’ Nancy Whang stretches her vocal cords over the taut disco beats of ‘All You’re Waiting For’, and Active Child’s falsetto on ‘Long Lost’ is more than a bit Fleetwood Mac. OK, ‘I’ll Get You’ might sound like it’s accidentally wandered in from some wet T-shirt contest in a Benidorm bar, but overall Classixx still manage to make pop songs that seem effortlessly cool rather than utterly corny. “We have a lot of respect for pop music and certainly don’t think it’s trite to make a good pop song,” Michael states. “If you listen to the record, there are moments where it’s more interesting than just a good club groove with shiny synthesizers. But we just like making fun music because that’s mainly what we listen to. We didn’t make an album that you have to wrestle with or put a lot of thought into. We just set out to make a record that you could enjoy either in your car or in a club — or even with your mother.” “It’s been hard for us to win dance music elitists — those people who stand around nodding their head in smoky warehouses — over in the past,” Tyler admits. “But I think we are starting to and that’s kind of gratifying.” “Most people respond to authenticity, and if we were trying to make 10-minute techno records it would sound like bullshit,” Michael believes. “It would smell funny. What we’re doing is what comes naturally to us and if that doesn’t come across then I think that’s the only way that we’ve failed — making this music is basically who we are.”
FRENCH TOUCH That’s who Michael and Tyler have been
ever since they began bonding over Michael Jackson records at junior high school in a suburb in the Valley. And much as their hometown is on the peripheries of the metropolis, so their musical tastes at school lay on the outskirts of what their classmates were listening to at the same time, with Michael recalling that he and Tyler “were into Britpop when everyone else was listening to rave”, leading them to form their own bands “influenced by stuff like New Order and The
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