Crosstown Rebels is a family, a vibe, a state of mind. Responsible for some of the freshest house and techno records on the planet right now, we present to you, the current movers and shakers of the Rebel alliance…
“I
love it,” says Francesca Lombardo on her absorption into the Crosstown Rebels family. “I feel really comfortable and really welcome.” It was by chance that Lombardo met Damian Lazarus at the Miami
Winter Music Conference, notoriously where considerably more partying goes on than business. It was clearly meant to be. At the time she was running her own label Echolette Records, where she had been recording under the name Jackie Misfit. He was, she says, impressed by her passion for what she was doing. Though she had amassed a stack of material, she didn’t think he would like it. But she sent it anyway. Luckily, he did like it. Her first EP, ‘Changes’, soon followed. Originally from Lake Garda in northern Italy, Lombardo studied five years of a 10-year course at the Conservatorio di Musica in nearby Mantova, specializing in piano and singing opera. The draw of house music and techno, however, proved irresistible. She had discovered Kraftwerk and Mike Oldfield at a young age, and then at 15, she was already going to clubs in Brescia and Verona. She left for London in 1999. “I knew from the age of six that I wanted to live in London,” she says. “It is the music city.” She joined bands and started raving, hitting the illegal techno parties like Underground Sound, a considerably harder sound than she’s now known for. “I’d be DJing at 140bpm, but I couldn’t write techno. It just wasn’t my thing,” she says. “So I thought, I should be playing what I can write.” She started Echolette in 2010 in the mould of Luciano’s Cadenza.
Now Lombardo is the latest to join a phalanx of female talent on Crosstown, aligning herself with the likes of Jennifer Cardini, Laura Jones and Deniz Kurtel. “I’ve been playing for so long now, and I’ve always worked with male DJs, male engineers, but I’m really straightforward. If I think something, I’ll say it, and I learned a lot from that. I have a kind of male knowledge! It makes me happy to see more and more girls in dance music, running labels. Girls seem to be more perfectionists. A little bit more finesse. You can tell if it’s a girl playing even if you can’t see them.” She’s also among the Crosstown crew with an album in the offing. “Everything I do has to have a strong concept,” she says. “I’m following my heart. It’s better to write music following what’s inside you. It has to be real.” Though she regrets ending her studies early, she says she would not be here now had she continued, and they now inform the way she writes. “I write songs, and people who seem to like what I do like that my music builds like a song, but in an electronic way. Sometimes I wish I could just write grooves! I’m emotional and spontaneous, but some people are more mathematical. Whenever I try to do something that’s me, it works. Whenever I try to do something that’s not me, it doesn’t. You should do what comes naturally.”
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