You may recognise the club styled music of Danny Berman's Red Rack 'em alias, lacing together the best from bass music and genral club culture via hip hop house and techno. But Danny's also receiving some huge props for his latest concept and moniker Hot Coins. Billed as an "estranged homage to late '70s NYC anti-culture", his album "The Damage Is Done" - some four years in the making - is defined by its focus on the Big Apple's fruitful 78-82 period, where possibilities seemed endless as punk and disco combined. Hot Coins relives the highs, joys and inevitable comedown of the period on his detailed new album for Sonar Kollektiv. Danny talks to pulse further about his own fascination with this musical period and mixes this week's exclusive Pulse Loves set... over to you sir.
Pulse loves... Red Rack 'em. Tell us about your full time alias... Red Rack’em has been my day job since 2004 when I started making hip hop bootlegs inspired by Yam Who, Blackbeard and Red Astaire. I had to think of a piratey name and as a longtime fan of Tintin, Red Rack’em seemed like the perfect name. I pretty much stopped making hip hop in 2006 and since then Red Rack’em has evolved through deep house, beatdown, techno and garagey flavours. I have released and remixed for quite a few nice labels including Innervisions/Philomena, Sonar Kollektiv, Third Ear, Ramp Recordings and Rebirth.
Hot Coins has always been my disco alias and I began releasing under that name in 2008 with an EP on Society and then on Tirk. My remix of ‘Stand On The Word’ by the Joubert Singers was hammered on Radio 1 by Gilles Peterson and he invited me to perform at the Worldwide Awards in 2009 pretty much on the basis of that one track which was an amazing experience. My DJ set was recorded and played on Radio 1 a few weeks later which was even more mindblowing. Red Rack’em kind of took over from 2009 but I was writing the Hot Coins album in the background all the time.
I run 2 record labels, Bergerac and Smugglers Inn. I started Bergerac in 2010 so I could release the more raw stuff I was making which I didn’t think any other labels would release. The first record was called ‘How I Program’ and it did really well with DJ support from people like MCDE, Move D, Mike Huckaby and Four Tet who put it on his Fabric mix. Since then Bergerac has released one Red Rack’em album called ‘The Early Years’, 2 more Red Rack’em singles and the latest release is a techno monster from Seetheroad called ‘Starpatch’. I did a world tour in 2010/11 to promote the Early Years album which was an amazing experience as I played in places like Russia, Australia and Japan and got to sample so many different cultures and meet some great people along the way.
I have produced and presented my own radio show and podcast called the ‘Smugglers Inn’ for over 5 years now with the focus on cutting edge music from new artists regardless of genre. The show is broadcasted live every second Wednesday 7-9pm UK time @ http://myhouseyourhouse.net and the podcast is available from http://www.redrackem.com and my soundcloud. The Smugglers Inn label is a platform for artists who I regularly play on my show. The first release was really well received and the second one is out in March with tracks from Roman Rauch, Ajukaja, Dragon and Bartellow.
Pulse loves... the album format. Did you approach the making of the hot coins album as a solid body of work? I wrote all the tracks separately but I guess from about 2009 I had the idea of making them all into one album. I didn’t really feel part of the disco scene from 2009 onwards as I was more excited by dark house, garage techno and edgier stuff like new wave and punk funk. So I didn’t want to release any more Hot Coins singles. I did a Hot Coins remix for Ron Basejams track ‘Voices’ and also one for The Wave Machines but apart from that I was totally focused on writing the album and only releasing music as Red Rack’em. I wanted the style of each track to be a different facet of what I love in the various types of music that have influenced the album. Most of the tracks were started around 2008/09 I think. I can barely remember anything from that time as I had a very chaotic lifestyle juggling part time teaching at 2 colleges in Nottingham with being a DJ and all the stuff that comes with that. So I don’t really know when the tracks appeared – they generally were written on Monday nights when I was falling asleep on the keyboard and dreading my early start at college the next day.
I wrote all of the music in my attic studio in my friend Harry Rackhams house in Sneinton in Nottingham. Recorded most of the vocals alone with an sm58 and I played pretty much everything on the album apart from guitars which were by Chris Todd and Paul Johnston and saxophone which was by Pippa Marland. I mixed it on the original SSL 4000 B Series desk that was in the Townhouse studios in London during the eighties. This was the desk that PiL used to record their Metal Box Album, which is credited as the start of punk disco so it’s amazing that my album was mixed on the same desk. Phil Collins recorded ‘In The Air Tonight’ on it and Peter Gabriel discovered gated reverb on it when he heard Phil playing drums loud through the talkback mic and the desk massively compressed the sound. My friend Werner Freistaetter found the desk years later in a cupboard and bought it to strip down and sell spares for other SSL desks. Thankfully he ended up fully restoring it as it’s a totally priceless piece of musical history. I wouldn’t have finished the album had it not been for that desk.
I met Werner by chance when I was playing at the Garden Festival in Croatia in 2010 and then visited him in 2011 and saw the desk in action. He said ‘if there’s anything you want to work on with the desk please let me know’. On the plane back to Berlin I had the brainwave ‘oh yeah… there’s that live music based album which I can’t finish. Maybe I should mix it with Werner….’ The rest as they say is history.
Pulse loves ... Sonar Kollektiv. Tell us about your affiliation with them... I have been a massive fan of Sonar Kollektiv for years and I was highly influenced by the diversity of their output at a very formative stage of my DJing and producing. They have released so many dope records. Detriot by Moonstarr – I saw Gilles Peterson destroy the Electric Souls party at Frodsham in 2004 with that record. Dixons Off Limits series. The Forss stuff. The Umod album. The Broadcasting series. The Trickski stuff was totally ahead of it’s time in my book. Don’t forget Innervisions began life as a series on Sonar Kollektiv and look where they are now. Jazzanova were another really early influence on my production in the early noughties so it’s been great to work closely with them on releasing the Hot Coins album. Of course it all happened kind of accidentally as these things do. Daniel Best invited me to a Sonar Kollektiv party at Gretchen during Berlin Music week in 2011 and I spoke to Oli Glage from the label about doing a remix for Micatone. I ended up doing one for Jazzanova instead for their I Human single and during the meeting about that I mentioned the Hot Coins album but I didn’t think it would be the sort of thing they would want to release. I thought it would be too dark and emo for them. Alex Barck got in touch saying he loved the album towards the end of 2011 and we had the album signing meeting on the 3rd of January 2012 which seemed like a good idea when I made the arrangement but I underestimated my own stamina on my first ever Berlin new years eve so it was an ‘interesting’ meeting put it that way. The best bit was when Claas was smoking out of the window because I told him I had lost my voice because of all the smoking in the Berlin clubs. In the end I admitted there were ‘other factors’.
I am really glad with the way the album has come out. I had full input on the artwork, mastering, remixers and tracklisting. Sonar Kollektiv trusted me to know what I was doing and it all turned out really well. I wanted the artwork to present the rock n roll cliché in a different light and I think we succeeded. It’s not meant to say ‘hey look at me with all these girls’. It’s meant to say ‘hey look how I am STILL miserable with all these girls’. It’s definitely representative of my glass half empty mentality, which I am working on. The album is called ‘The Damage Is Done’ because in certain situations I have found myself in, there really is no going back. You have to run with things and trust they will work themselves out in the end. There’s been many times when I thought I wasn’t going to make it back but I am still here. 2012 was a very full on year for me. Good training for the rock n roll ahead but also a warning of what lies ahead if I don’t make the right choices.
Pulse loves... multiple monikers. What does producing under different names enable you to do? It means I can make diverse music which appeals to different people. I have tried to be diverse as Red Rack’em as well with the different types of club music I have produced and I am pretty sure that ‘Chirpsin’ on Ramp doesn’t appeal to the same type of people that ‘Kalimba’ (on Dixons Philomena label) appeals to. I don’t think it makes sense for me to release the dark garage techno Red Rack’em stuff under the same name as the Goth electro stuff that Hot Coins is making. I would love to get to the stage where I can make what I like under one name but I think sadly to get anywhere these days you have to streamline your creativity and I don’t want to do that so that’s why I have multiple artist names. If I was smart I would just do one style of music as Red Rack’em and forget all the other stuff but then my discography would be an increasingly mediocre repetition of itself. How boring that would be.
Pulse loves... NYC's musical golden age. What is it about this period that inspired your hot coins album? Where to start. It’s the unique melting pot that appeals to me most. The fact that there was hot music being produced by people from totally different backgrounds, in different areas of the city and presenting it to totally different audiences. I love the idea of punks dancing to hip hop, futurists dancing to Kraftwerk and MCs freestyling over 2 copies of ‘Was Dog A Doughnut’ by Cat Stevens. Chris Stein from Blondie wrote and produced the Wildstyle Soundtrack. How did that happen? A Certain Ratio were living in New York in the early 80s because they were so inspired by the musical scene there. This is totally reflected in their output. I have so many musical heroes who created their best works in New York. Francois Kevorkian became the hottest remixer there after he emigrated from Paris. All the no wave post punk people like Lydia Lunch, James White, Suicide etc were only able to develop their music through the lack of pressure to earn money due to the junkie squalor of Lower East Side in the late 70s.
I love the idea that you could move to New York in 1979, start wearing a lampshade as a dress and form a band with zero musical talent and end up written into musical history by approaching it from an artistic aesthetic rather than your musical prowess. ESG will always be hotter than Steve Vai, which says it all really. It’s all about attitude.
My early musical background was pretty much exclusively New York hip hop, so my later discovery and love of no wave, disco and house music which mainly derived from New York makes total sense to me. Black Moon are far more authentic to me than Dre. I love the authenticity of NYC stuff. I grew up obsessed with hip hop culture and I have a romanticized halcyon view of the ghetto lifestyle that sewed those creative seeds. I loved films like Desperately Seeking Susan when I was a kid as it presented this romanticized view of NYC nightlife in the early 80s. I love the tawdry backdrop of the Coney Island boardwalk, The Warriors is one of my all time favourite films. I love the tacky sleaze of Taxi Driver. The ferocity of Goodfellas. It all adds to my voyeuristic love of cultures that I have never experienced first hand. It’s the same with disco, post punk, goth electro, boogie, house etc. I have created my own imaginary mental film about all the scenes referenced in the mix and album solely from the music, voices, lyrics, photos and peoples anecdotes. Sadly I have never even been to America yet but it’s going to happen soon I hope.
Pulse loves... live shows. Can you tell us what to expect from your live shows? Whats the set up? Hot Coins live is quite a traditional set up. Vocals, guitar, bass, drums and synths. But we’re using quite a lot of technology to recreate the clubby feel of the album live. A lot of the drums are electronic and the heavy synth basses on the album are pushed loud in the mix. We’re a 4 piece and have been rehearsing for the last 3 months at the historic Funkhaus Studios in East Berlin to perform the album live. The rest of the band are all German and we’re rehearsing in the former GDR national radio centre so it’s been incredibly atmospheric for me. I feel like Bowie doing ‘Low’ with slightly less decadence. It’s been a real learning curve for me as I have had to recruit musicians, start working with them, learn the material myself and become a rock front man. I don’t write my music in the studio with any aim of performing it live and seldom listen to my own stuff once it’s been released but with the live style of the Hot Coins album it makes total sense to perform it in a band situation. I am incredibly lucky to be working with really high quality musicians and it’s sounding amazing.
We took the basic template of the album tracks, learned them and now we’re tweaking them for live performance. We’re improvising more with them now and getting more confident in how we deliver them. The band set up is Daniel Berman (yes me) on vocals and keyboards – I just got a Kaoss pad which is dope for live delay and reverb so expect some disco claps. David Benjamin on guitar, keyboards and percussion – David has been crucial in the whole thing coming together as he helped recruit the other musicians and his dance music background really helped in picking the right people to play in the band. Jens Dohle on drums is a total legend. He’s a highly skilled jazz player who ran a great label called Vinyl Vibes a few years ago releasing early works by Inverse Cinematics (Motor City Drum Ensemble) so his dance music pedigree without question. I bought several Vinyl Vibes records when I lived in Nottingham so to be in a band with Jens feels quite apt. Steffen Illner is ridiculously talented on the bass. He plays with Jens in Ye:Solar which is their live jazz/house project so to have a rhythm section who are already familiar with each other is really good. My remit was quality musicians who understand club culture and I certainly got what I asked for. Our debut live performance is at the Berlin album launch party which is at Wilde Renate on 16/02/13. We’re taking festival bookings now so really looking forward to the summer already!
Pulse loves.... your mix. How have you approached it? I didn’t want to do a mix of contemporary disco influenced music as I am much more inspired by the musicianship and production value of the early 80s stuff. So I tried to cover all the bases of the music that influenced the Hot Coins album. I tried to tell the story of the Hot Coins album through this mix. You might look at the artists and be shocked at some of the names but all of the music in the mix was either at the cutting edge at that time or they were at least taking regular exploratory trips to the cutting edge during their downtime. Pop music in the early 80s was built for clubs. It didn’t have to be only available on 300 records bought by men with beards to rock a club and I think that’s an aesthetic sadly missing from todays charts. Even in the 90s we had ‘King Of My Castle’ by Wamdue Project but where are tracks like that now? I guess the marginalization of ‘quality’ dance music is part of how it’s sold these days. It’s got to be ‘cool’ s that people aspire to be a part of it. I love the fact that Warm Leatherette by The Normal was a pop hit. Imagine something like that being big now. Less than zero chance. I recorded the mix live in my apartment using vinyl only and it’s the original versions of all of the tracks. No edits. With the Hot Coins album being fairly sample free I wanted to reference that within the mix and use music which was made by real musicians in it’s original form. God I sound really purist now eh..
Pulse loves... underground music. What's been a career highlight for you so far? That’s a tough question. I would say the DJ performances mainly. It’s nice to actually witness a reaction to your music in real life and I find the buzz I get from DJing is pretty similar to good sex where you just disappear and become a conduit for the music. I am not praying to the god of house music or anything like that but I definitely get a couple of days of increased energy and a much sunnier outlook from a good 4 hour DJ set with a decent crowd. Particular highlights so far have been DJing on top of a mountain in Austria for Snowbombing while people were skiing – that was unreal. Both my gigs at Mad Racket in Sydney have been career highlights – to go somewhere so far away and find such a cool bunch of people and get to play for 4 hours on a great system is heaven for me. Djing on the Basement Boogaloo boat party at the Garden Festival in 2010 while the sun was setting over the Adriatic sea was pretty special. Playing at the Worldwide Awards for Gilles Peterson in 2009 was like a dream come true when I had hardly released any records. Closing the Big Chill Festival with a set at the radio station in 2010 was another amazing highlight. After a long hard weekend of playing and partying I was rewarded with a huge crowd outside the radio caravan on a Monday morning and thank god the set was recorded as it was one of the best I ever played. You can hear it here.
Tracklisting
1 - Eurythmics - Regrets (RCA)
2 - Yello - You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess (Vertigo)
3 - Zinno - Zinnos March (Magic)
4 - Nitzer Ebb - Control I'm Here (Mute)
5 - DAF - Verlier Nicht Den Kopf (Virgin)
6 - Cabaret Voltaire - Seconds Too Late (Mute)
7 - Futura 2000 + The Clash - The Escapades Of Futura 2000 (Celluloid)
8 - GeeGee & Gym Band - Majik-Kaboola (Jumbo)
9 - Change - The Glow Of Love (Warners)
10 - Heaven 17 - Play (Virgin)
11 - Robert Goerl - I Love Me (Mute)
12 - Jackie Genova - Arms (Island)
13 - Holger Czukay - Cool In The Pool (EMI)
14 - Fats Comet + Bim Sherman - Rockchester (World)
15 - Methusalem - Robotism (Ariola)
16 - The Assembly - Never Never (Mute)
17 - A Certain Ratio - Shack Up (Factory)
18 - ESG - Party Music (Popular)
19 - New Musik - 24 Hour From Culture (GTO)
20 - Duran Duran - Girls On Film (Night Version) (EMI)
The Damage Is Done is out on 28th January 2013 through Sonar Kollektiv"
Listen to Red Rack 'Em / Hot Coins on Pulse Radio.