15 years, not for him to go to college but instead to set him up with electronic equipment. “I told them I didn't want to go to university and that the best thing for me would be if they bought me a computer with Sound Forge and Cubase on it. And they said 'yes',” he laughs, still a bit incredulous even so many years later at having pulled it off. “That's love,” he adds. No shit.
He was working as a lifeguard by day and DJing in and around Victoria by night, with a techno residency at one club and a drum & bass residency at another. When an accident at the pool resulted in a fatality, he was taken off work and given workman's compensation for a year. It was during this period that he began writing in earnest, and would produce his first singles for local label Itiswhatitis Recordings. It would be the launchpad for both his own productions, and those of his brother Nathan, who records under the name Hrdvsion. In fact, the label was created by DJ and producer Spencer Drennan as something of a showcase for his Cobblestone Jazz project, the improvisational collective featuring producers Danuel Tate and Tyger Dhula, and The Modern Deep Left Quartet, which features the same members plus Colin de la Plante, better known as The Mole.
It still wasn't easy, however. “Trying to be a musician is actually really, really hard. It slaps you in the face, it's just so unpredictable. You think you've got it, then all of a sudden you don't get a gig for a month and you can't pay your rent and you're scraping pennies out of your change drawer.”
Bizarrely, however, his first release was on DreamWorks Records, the now-defunct music arm of David Geffen and Steven Spielberg's sprawling media business, and thanks to his junior high school pal, Nelly Furtado. They'd cover Mariah Carey at school assemblies with Jonson on drums. When she got signed, she came through for him, and he turned out two drum and bass remixes from her first album.
WAGON REPAIR Things solidified, and the releases on Itiswhatitis followed, gaining fans in Europe, leading to projects on labels he revered like Perlon, and with early contemporaries like Cadenza don Luciano. Releases on Richie Hawtin's M_Nus followed too, after which he founded his now benchmark imprint Wagon Repair, a collaboration with producer Konrad Black, Loose Change, Graham and Adam Boothby and Frank Meyerhofer.
Wagon Repair established itself as the underground sound of Vancouver, where he moved in the early 2000s, with its prolific output from Jonson, Black, Jonson's brother (as Hrdvsion), The Mole, Mike Shannon, Deadbeat, Adam Beyer and Jonson's Cobblestone Jazz and MDLQ projects. Later it would boast selections from Dinky, Exercise One, Seth Troxler and Luca Bacchetti.
His first album 'Agents of Time' arrived on Wagon Repair to fanfare in 2010, and then 'Dayz', a singular track for Damian Lazarus's Crosstown Rebels, a part of whose close knit family he now finds himself with his second long player, 'Her Blurry Pictures'. It's as warm and encompassing as you'd hope it would be, laden with voluminous arpeggios and, of course, sumptuously produced. It's something of a testament to - or perhaps exorcism of - a blurry decade in clubs and on the road.
“It's only been in last two years, perhaps out of necessity, that I've had to make a choice and say 'hey, I can't live a lifestyle where I'm partying every weekend super hard',” he says.
“You have to balance it out. It's difficult. The path I was 032
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on was a total warpath, not good for myself or anyone around me. Now I'm a lot more balanced. The title of the album is a play on the idea of being out of focus and then bringing yourself back into focus, and being a bit more present rather than drinking and doing whatever to escape from life.”
He lives in Berlin now, and thanks to having moved back in with his old friend from Canada Colin de la Plante, the work as the Modern Deep Left Quartet is to make a resurgence. He's also making friskier, harder fare as Midnight Operator with his brother. Meanwhile, he bought up the catalogue of Itiswhatitis last year after it ceased to trade some years back. “I wanted to keep Itiswhatitis going and the music close to where my career began,” he says. He's planning a new vinyl release on the reinvigorated imprint, called Typerope, in the next few months.
So things have now come full circle, only to spin-off in another direction, one that's perhaps a little bit more straight-headed than he's been in the past. “I'm a much happier person,” he says. “I still get super spacey with the music, but at the same time, I guess my intentions are a bit different.”
'Her Blurry Pictures' is out now on Crosstown Rebels.
Jonson on analogue
Jonson is now known for his use of analog gear, having decided to 're-learn' his craft pretty early on, in around 1997, before any of those big releases emerged. Here he explains why:
“When you touch a piece of analogue equipment, if you don't know how to use it, it sounds like shit. It took me about five years before I felt like I'd just got the hang of it. When you get pigeon-holed as being 'the analogue guy' people tend to think you hate digital. I've never hated digital. All the effects I'm using are digital. It's just when it comes to the sound source, I found that I had so much more control over what those sounds were. You have to make every sound yourself. It just felt so much more personal. When you write music with presets, it doesn't really sound like your own. It just sounds like everything else. It can sound pretty good, but it doesn't sound like you. I wanted me to sound like me.”
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