If you don't know the brothers Oral, Cem and Can, you should check them out on Discogs. I've nicely enough linked them for you, to save the trouble, so all you have to do is click on their names and voila! Sometimes I'm nice like that. Sometimes. I often lose my niceness in a metaphysical surrealist martini that I keep conjuring up in the coffers of my imagination, but the niceties are there somewhere.
I first met Cem Oral in 1996 in Sydney, Australia, when he was touring at the same time that we were there to launch the IF? Records compilation, Zeitgeist 2, in that city.
I was already a huge Jammin' Unit and Ultrahigh fan thanks to the Rauschen series of compilations through German label Force Inc.--which our Zeitgeist series was in fact modeled on (shh! Don't tell anyone!)--as well as his yummy album through Rising High, Jammin' Unit Discovers Chemical Dub.
Cem was responsible for terrorizingly funky acid techno and chemical dub (he now calls it "Kraut-teckkno") through Force Inc., Pharma, DJ Ungle Fever, and New York's Sm:)e Communications and Temple Records, under aliases like Jammin' Unit and G104; he also collaborated with Caspar Pound, Ingmar 'Walker' Koch, Roger Kerosene, and brother Can, as Ultrahigh, Electronic Dub, Zulutronic, Free Radicals, Cube 40, Madonna 303--and Air Liquide.
The first night I met Cem, I got quite drunk and stuck an IF? sticker on his shoe; while I wince at that now, quite memorably he laughed out loud, even when he couldn't successfully peel it off. I subsequently interviewed him several times over for the Aussie media, and in '97 he did a remix of Sydney outfit Krang for the third Zeitgeist comp ('Z3') through IF?
More recently, I hacked together a rather dodgy video for him for the update version of his Jammin' Unit track, 'Remote Car Baby' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFKE8vrq4Qk), and he gave us a track for the last IF? compilation, Z-13.1.
Obviously we've stayed in touch since the stickering episode, and I love Cem as much for his sense of humour as his musical talent; he's also one of the best masterers of music I've encountered over the years, up there with François Tétaz, and runs a way cool mastering outfit called Jammin Masters.
"My job is strictly missionary!" he quips.
"As a grandfather of audio engineering in studios, I'm offering my help to make good ideas also sound good. Many artists don't have the knowledge and equipment to make a good recording competitive with expensive, top-ranking productions. Most of the times mastering helps to elevate the quality--sometimes a mix needs a 'remix'. My opinion regarding mastering is that you can use expensive outboard equipment, or plugins (I use both), but it will only sound good if you get the most important ingredient: mojo."
So, curiosity being the thing that may have unleashed the evils of the world (you know, the Pandora riff, and all that), I also quizzed Cem about his current studio set-up for making his own mojo'd tunes.
"My new toy is a Studer C279 mixing console: small, smart, and very good sounding. Besides that, I still work on my MPC and use always my [Rhodes] Chroma Polaris synth. Software-wise, I still always use [Steinberg] Xphraze because--besides it is really cool for surprising sound effects--I've built-in my whole sound library while programming presets for the company that released that thing."
What the man's currently listening to may surprise some people, but perhaps not others. "Whoa. I listen to old country music like Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and such crazy stuff. Eagles of Death Metal is still on my deck. I love to go to concerts in the moment. The last Motörhead show was nice and LOUD. I think because I do electronic music on my own, I need something different when I'm just sitting on the couch. But have a look at this--I love it! But it would be only half of the fun without the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO-YCiGuWX4."
Cem also has a pet theory about a connection between German and Japanese music. "I think the German and the Japanese underground/experimental music scenes have many good things in common. First to say they exist, and also that they have a tradition. An academic one, and one from the street," he espouses.
Talk ensues of Japanese producers like Captain Funk, Toshiyuki Yasuda, Co-Fusion, HIFANA, DJ Warp, Shufflemaster, Merzbow, and Alone Together, and Cem stops me there. "'Bara No Kodoku', by Alone Together, is a burner! I like the experimental and sometimes aggressive attitude in some of the contemporary Japanese music. I raise my hat to the vital, independent music scene in Japan."
Cem also loves robots, one of my enduring fads, and it was this reason--as much as his music--that inspired me to ask the man to remix 'Robota', a Little Nobody track I made last year with Toshiyuki Yasuda (a.k.a. Robo*Brazileira) doing robot-vocoder vocals.
The Jammin' Unit remix of 'Robota' is being carried by the nice people at Hypnotic Room/Elektrax--ironically located in Sydney--and hits Beatport, Juno, and nearly all the other digital download megastores on Feb. 12.
"I like the original version, and have been a fan of robots ever since I saw my first science fiction movie on TV: The Day the Earth Stood Still, in glorious black and white."
Amen to that, and more hogwash religious asides aplenty.
Leave a comment