8.

Janet Jackson – Rhythm Nation 1814

I’ve been listening to this a lot while making ‘Melba’s Call’ and the new record. It doesn’t really sound like the stuff I’ve been referencing, ’cause what I’ve been doing a lot is actually using the same gear that would have been used for the tracks that have inspired me. Which I think is important, because where everyone’s going wrong with this new house sound is that they’re trying to recreate something but with new tools, and I think they’re losing a lot of the essence of it though that. I’m really process driven, I think process is important, so I ended up using and sampling a lot of stuff that was actually mid-to-late 80s into early 90s.

It turns out the Janet album is mostly LinnDrum and a bit of [E-mu] SP-1200, which is similar tools to what I’ve been using. But it just sounds so fresh the way they did it – it must have been so crazy at the time. I remember reading that it wasn’t one of her more commercially successful ones. That could have just been slander, I don’t know, but I can believe it, because it’s pretty out there in some cases. You know there’s that genre new jack swing, that came after the Janet album I think, but the way Jam and Lewis produced it, they were doing proto new jack swing kind of stuff. You have all of these off-key stabs, it’s so wrong, it’s almost like fusion jazz in the way that it’s wrong, but it’s still totally pop music.