Superchumbo’s Cosmic Throb

By Gloria Free
Published in the August 2005 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 18 - Number 08

Try as he might, Tom Stephan—aka uber-producer/DJ Superchumbo—just cannot get into Chopin.

“A friend of mine did this mix CD, and it goes from chill-out electro music, into classical music, and then back to chill-out,” he says. “I’m with him, until the rhythm stops and it just goes into this minimal piano music. Then I get totally lost. It made me realize, I’m moved by rhythm and that lower end of sound—bass and drums and that kind of stuff—as opposed to melody. I think that’s why trance music just goes right over my head, because it’s kind of like the rhythm, it’s there, but it’s not really very important. It’s all flying above you, and I’m definitely more about being on the ground.”

Stephan’s first artist album, Wowie Zowie (Twisted), is anything but heavenly, alright, a sticky-wet trip through Hades’ own bordello, or maybe a haunted industrial plant during the overnight shift. There are menacing vixens (Samantha Fox on “Sugar”), emotionless MCs (Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant on “Tranquilizer”), hopped-up cheerleaders (Gay Joy and Alan T. on “Bring It”) and scheming stalkers (Sylvia Mason-James on “Some”) populating Wowie-world, all dancing to ’Chumbo’s signature throbbing, reverberant house beats.

“Some people think that the things I do are quite hard, and it just depends where you’re coming from,” says Stephan. “If you’re a big Masters At Work fan or something, maybe something I do sounds hard. But when I think about what I used to listen to when I was a kid, Skinny Puppy and things like that, this is nothing.”

Stephan is an American living in London, a kid from sleepy upstate Olean, N.Y. (population 15,347), who loved Madonna, John Waters and Kiss. (“I hated that they had their best moment when they did the ballad. I was always like, c’mon, get to ‘Detroit Rock City.’”) When school took him to the U.K., he never looked back—except to unwillingly visit New York City’s Sound Factory when DJ Junior Vasquez was at the helm, caning DJ Pierre’s entire Wild Pitch catalogue. Stephan sopped it up, and returned to Europe with a new purpose: to make music just like that.

His affection for industrial bands like Skinny Puppy and Nitzer Ebb couldn’t help but get in the way, though, which led to tracks like 2002 top-charter “Irresistible” (also included on Wowie)—a classic New York vocal chopped up to sound like a CD skipping, over blurs of dangerous synth. Stephan was actually inspired by a café’s malfunctioning CD player on that one, and says that it’s common for him to cull ideas from his surroundings. “It’s usually one thing, usually a vocal thing, or something like with ‘Irresistible.’ Or maybe I have a vocal idea that just popped into my head, and some kind of drum sound or drum track that I like when I’m in a club, and I just put them together. I used to do a lot of singing stuff down my answering machine, but I actually found the things that were really good just stayed in my head anyway.”

Wowie was a long time coming: Danny Tenaglia debuted its thematic single “Dirty Filthy,” a collaboration with vocalist Celeda, at Winter Music Conference 2004. “The biggest lesson I learned with this album was to start the artwork before you start the music,” says Stephan. “We didn’t start thinking about it until all of the music was finished, and that’s really what took us so long. We went through three or four designers, maybe even more. I had an idea of what I wanted, but I’m not great at getting that across, and I’m not that great with Photoshop.”

Stephan says that he’s been “holding back” playing Wowie tracks during his DJ sets, because of the delay in its release. “I want it to be fresh for me when I start playing it too,” he says. “But I’ve been playing ‘Bring It,’ especially when I’m in Miami, because Alan T. [Miami club personality and the one of the track’s vocalists] always suddenly appears from nowhere to perform it.”

While Wowie got the standard CD, 2xLP release, it was made available to the digital community weeks before, via an exclusive deal with Beatport.com. Stephan says that the increasingly popular website—which offers legal downloads for around $1.30 a track—is definitely part of the revolution. “I think it’s great that we’ve finally got a service like that in place, run by people who know what they’re doing and have a great selection of music,” he says. “A couple of years ago everyone was getting their music on the Internet, but they didn’t have a way to do it legally. You can’t really blame people for the business not catching up to their needs.”

Working in a small home studio, Stephan mixes new software (Logic Audio, Ableton Live) with vintage hardware (Roland Juno 106 and SH101 synths) to exact his cosmic, floor-throbbing results. But Stephan insists that he isn’t a one-man gang and mentions that Pete Gleadall, his engineer of nearly 10 years, remains integral to the Superchumbo sound.

“I take care of the writing and programming and then Pete basically cleans up my mess,” he says. “After hearing the songs non-stop for several days in a row, I find it hard to be really picky about the sound of the bass drum—and this is where Pete comes in. He fine-tunes the track. Also, we know each other’s likes and dislikes, so I can bounce ideas off Pete and wait until I get a smile to know I’m on to something.”

“If I’m writing an original song I’ll usually have a pretty good idea of what direction I want the song to go in. The songs that make it to vinyl are the ones that go around in my head for weeks and weeks. If I don’t forget an idea, I figure it’s worth pursuing.

Stephan’s Studiochumbo
Logic Audio on Mac
Ableton Live
Waldorf Q Synth
Clavia Nord Lead
Moog MiniMoog
Roland Juno 106
Roland SH101
Native Instruments Reaktor
Native Instruments Battery
Bitshift Audio pHATmatik
Spectrasonics Stylus RMX