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In the studio with...  Stockholm,
Sweden – What happens when a very large Swedish liquor
manufacturer approaches a devoted Swedish underground producer in
hopes of using his music for commercial or promotional purposes? If
you’re Aril Brikha, you listen, but you’re initially skeptical
of such a scenario. If you’re Absolut Spirits, you understand
those misgivings, and you give him nearly complete free reign on the
project. “At first, I was kind of negative about it because I don’t make the kind of music that I would think might interest Absolut,” says the Stockholm-based techno producer. “Of course, I didn’t know the conditions of this project—I thought it would be a jingle, which would be controlled by Absolut. Then they explained that the conditions included artistic freedom.” For its “Three Tracks” promotion, which also included offerings from English electronic trio Taxi and Swiss DJ/producer Rollercone, Absolut entered the dance music realm with only one proviso to its participants – create a track, no matter how inspired, that somehow reflects your interpretation of the brand. The company will send it out as white labels to various DJs and never sell it commercially. Taxi came up with a gorgeous, loungy vocal number, while Rollercone delivered a cheeky, but suave house cut. Brikha, however, rendered the most obtuse composition—a deep, wafty, quirky track that pushed the brand perhaps more subliminally than people realize. “I just did my interpretation, but it was music that I would normally make,” he says. “I wanted to have a futuristic approach, so I downloaded a picture of the bottle from their website and I put it through some freeware from the Internet that turns images into sounds—pretty much what a fax machine does—and you come up with a sound effect. I wouldn’t call it an instrument. But I used the shape of the bottle and I put that sound in the intro and the outro of the track. If you run the sound of the track through an oscilloscope, you will actually see the shape of the [Absolut] bottle.” Brikha’s own success story has been a result of similar ingenuity and curiosity. A young fan of electronic pop, the Iranian-born producer became interested in music with few reference points outside the radio. When he bought an Ensoniq SQ-80 synth and began to make his own tracks, DJs told him that his output favored the best Detroit techno. Only later did Brikha become interested in the genre, his favorites being Robert Hood, Kenny Larkin and Carl Craig. After three years of trying to make it on the Euro dance scene, he sent demos to Derrick May’s Transmat label in 1998. After three days of waiting for his parcel to arrive, he had a deal with the Motor City label. Since then he’s released an EP (“The Art of Vengeance”) and a full-length (Deeparture in Time) on Transmat—a second album is expected sometime in 2004. His “Groove La Chord” became the outstanding track on several compilations, including 2000’s Body & Soul NYC, Vol. 3. Additionally, as a solo performer he’s entertained the Detroit Electronic Music Festival and top clubs like London’s Fabric. “In the studio, I use all hardware—MPC 2000XL, the Ensoniq, Nord 2 Rack, Korg Rack Synth,” says Brikha. “I program all my songs from scratch—all the strings, all the bass sounds. Even before I knew what a 909 drum machine was, I tried to program kick drums that sounded like that because I didn’t know what to buy. My main synthesizer—the Ensoniq SQ-80—is the same one I’ve had since I was 15. I tried to stay away from the whole laptop thing, but it’s kind of catching up for me now because [if I’m] playing live with all the gear, not only is it heavy to carry around, it breaks down and I can’t find people who can fix this stuff that’s 20-years old. “I’m starting to get into laptops now. I believe that it’s not until recently that laptops and sound cards have developed stability, and that’s what I want. I don’t just want things to be easy for me; I don’t want things to break down while I’m playing. For example, it’s not until recently that you had Firewire Sound Cards with multiple outputs. I want to have all my instruments going into a mixer, so I can play around a bit instead of just sitting.” On the night in Stockholm when Absolut presented the “Three Tracks” artists in an elegant hotel basement-club setting, Brikha warmed the already-vodka-fueled room with his brand of deep, soulful techno. After imbibing a little of his own truth serum, Michael Persson, Absolut Spirits’ Director of Marketing, was asked why his company now asks DJs to promote his brand. “The DJ’s role has changed from the way it was 10 or 15 years ago,” Persson says. “Now they are more like artists composing their own music. We’ve worked with other art modes like fashion design and fine art in the past, so this idea is natural because I think the majority of what you hear out there on the dancefloor is art pieces. We wanted people to listen to the brand, so to us, yes, the DJ is an artist, too.” |