and for his next act...
If Nobody Slams Dance-Music Culture More Than Armand Van Helden.
Yet, the Iconoclastic DJ/Producer Remains One of the Genre’s Best Talents. What Gives?


Published in the December 2005 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 18 - Number 12
By Kerri Mason

New York City—There’s a map on the back wall in Armand Van Helden’s home studio, a 9- by-13-foot laminated monster that looks like it came straight out of a classroom.

“I was on a flight coming from somewhere, and that was in Sky Mall,” he says, referring to the catalog tucked into the seat pocket of any airplane with domestic origin, a secret addiction of many world-traveling DJs. “You’re supposed to shellac it up or something, but I just stapled it.”

The map’s eternally undergoing acupuncture, with pushpins jutting from almost every landmass: From New York, Van Helden’s home city, to Syria, where he spent two years of his childhood, to standard DJ outposts like Ibiza and Las Vegas. “Those pins are for all the places I’ve been,” he says, his eyes splitting time between the Snoop Dogg video on his 50-inch TV and the buildings of 21st Street, just outside his loft’s industrial windows. “The whole conquer-the-world thing.”

If Van Helden’s out for world domination, he’s sure picked an odd way to go about it. In dance music, mere mortals can become gods—and CEOs—with the flick of a crossfader. But he’s disinterested in the life of a touring DJ, even though offers pour in from exotic potential pushpins, like Dubai, Morocco and India. Nympho, released this past September, is his first full-length since 2001’s Ghandi Khan, and stubbornly straddles the dance-rock border, alienating purists on both sides. And while he cuts an imposing figure in dance music—the darkly handsome, hip-hop-styled, uncensored creator of stylistically diverse classics like “Witch Doktor,” “You Don’t Know Me,” and his groundbreaking remix of Tori Amos’ “Professional Widow”—Van Helden would rather not be front and center. “I’m a producer looked at as an artist, which is the weirdest thing to this day for me,” he says. “I never considered myself an artist.”

Pop stardom, with its schedules and pressures and restrictions, is completely polar to what Van Helden values most in his life: “I don’t have to answer to no one.” Never mind the fact that his music would have to fit neatly into a single genre, too. And he’d be forced to corrupt the “pure, simple fun” of recording with commercial considerations. “I feel that being an artist period is being a clown,” he says. “It’s like a role you have to play. You put this little red clown nose on. ‘Where do I have to stand? Where do I have to go? Buy my record!’”

So three years ago, when major label Interscope expressed interest in blowing him up as a mainstream artist—”to the TRL level,” he says—Van Helden didn’t hesitate: “I just thought, ‘This is going to be living hell. It’s going to be a nightmare.’ So I turned it down.”

Armand Van Helden looked world domination square in the face, and told it to fuck off. But what he got in return was something that, to him, is even sweeter: Blessed autonomy.

Usually, when you talk to an artist on the eve of an album release—especially his first in four years—there’s a sense of urgency, perhaps even some franticness. Managers and press agents might be flitting about; photographers might be snapping away. Your subject could excitedly relate the motivation behind his new collection: an inspirational sabbatical, breaking months of tortuous writer’s block; or the work of some obscure artist. Then, when you read the eventual press release, the same story, in the same language, will be right there on the page.

That’s not how Van Helden does it. Sitting on a black leather couch in his sparsely decorated, live/work loft—around the corner from Gypsy Tea, the lounge where in a few hours he’ll entertain invited guests of his new domestic label, Ultra Records, and Caroline Distribution—he’s a man at ease. There’s no script to stick to. There’s no campaign to amp up. Things are, for the most part, exactly as they’ve always been.

“My life is so consistently balanced,” he says. “I did the same thing I did the day I made ‘You Don’t Know Me’ that I’m doing today. I’m the same person, really, I just get older and little wiser. I’m less abrasive these days. I take things with a little more Gandhi approach, a little more like, losing isn’t actually losing.”

And the potential for loss is real. Nympho, like most of Van Helden’s work at the time of its release, is risky, a collision of his disparate influences—most of them from hip-hop and rock—that ends up sounding unlike anything preexisting. Van Helden likes to call it “crunk rock,” or “cool cheese.” Ghandi Khan and 2000’s Killing Puritans attempted the rock-dance cocktail, but the mix was rough, raw, and unpalatable to most listeners, who at the time were riding the progressive house wave straight into the arms of Sasha and Paul Oakenfold.

But this time, Van Helden’s timing might be perfect. DJs are increasingly using rock-pop mash-ups to move beat-weary clubbers. Indie kings, like DFA’s James Murphy—who Van Helden thinks is genius—are landing on the covers of dance magazines. And Nympho is more polished than its predecessors, without losing the grit for which Van Helden is known. Think of it as a collection of original mash-ups, with songs that are just as catchy as the ’80s pop classic some bedroom producer could dump over a Nirvana riff. Grimy rhythm sections underpin loops of fuzzed-out guitar, while nasty girls tell tales of downtown lust in that atonal ’80s style, and punk boys go ballistic over just how hot the girls are. “When The Lights Go Down” might as well be a Go-Go’s record—only better—and “Sugar” is a new anthem for any good girl resigned to sweating total losers. Previously released singles “My My My” (an impassioned old vocal, looped and repeated for emphasis) and “Hear My Name” (sex-kitten pop featuring Spalding Rockwell) are already hits.

Observers, therefore, might say that Nympho is Van Helden’s most trend-conscious work of the last five years, a return to dancefloor relevance after years of pushing the envelope clear out of the mailbox. But he’ll tell you the opposite: It’s one of the first times he’s truly let go. “You can’t please everybody, of course. I still try to,” he says without a hint of irony. “But honestly, all of that is off when I’m recording. When I record it’s about that vibe and the feeling and the funk, and it’s all kind of instinctual. After the fact, I listen back and I’m like, ‘OK, where does this go?’ My little strategist mind comes into play. It’s really like the art of war: “Well, if I do that, then I’ll do this, and this will balance this, and if I attack here…” It’s just a whole fucking process. And because of being in the music industry for a pretty lengthy time at this point, I do understand the right sound at the right time.

“But with Nympho I was just like, I don’t really care. I’m watching the indie-rock bands and that’s what I was focusing on. I wasn’t really looking at anybody in dance.”

Van Helden cites LCD Soundsystem, Interpol and Bloc Party as some of the album’s primary influences, not to mention n.e.r.d. leader/pop producer Pharrell Williams, who he calls “a modern-day Quincy Jones.”

Says Van Helden: “My ultimate goal as a producer is Pharrell. He’s like a figurehead bust, and there’s like a row of them that’s declining, and I’m way down in the one-footers and he’s over there with like the Washington Monument.”

Nympho is Van Helden’s attempt at growing a few feet toward the heights of pop producing…on his own terms, of course. In his perfect world, the album would be released under the name of its guest performers—Electroclash girl duo Spalding Rockwell (his Britneys), or rabid vocalist Virgin Killer (his Justin)—with a big “Produced By” credit for him on the back cover.

“I’m not an artist; I’m just some dude in a studio making music,” he says. “I just want to make the music and then go away. So that makes me a producer.”

If Nympho is successful, Van Helden thinks he’ll get the leverage and notoriety to do just that: Develop other artists’ projects as a marquis knob-twiddler, and leave what he considers the dirty work to them. “You’re only worth your sales, so hopefully if [Nympho] does OK, an album produced by me will be a sellable thing, which is where it will totally make sense to me. You’re the artist, you’re going to go all over the place and tell everyone to buy this record; I’m gonna sit home and watch TV. That’s totally where I belong.”

Sure, his close friends call him “a lazy fuck,” and industry skeptics admonish him from not touring when he so obviously could. Interscope is probably still scratching his head over how someone could pass up international stardom for a couch and an Xbox. But Van Helden doesn’t care, or have any guilt about it. “I’ve worked pretty hard in my life already,” he says. “I know where I came from. I come from nothing. So to be in this position is blessed and privileged. Believe me, I know that. But you know what? I have a choice: Work or not work. People don’t understand that because they’re stuck in structured lives, so they have to do certain things. And I’m like, ‘Look, if you put yourselves in my shoes what would you do?’ And most of the time they’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, if I didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t work.’ And that’s exactly the answer.

“I’ve very, very anal about picking projects. I don’t want to waste my time. I’d like to live it while I’m young here. I’m not waiting ’til 60 to stop working, to go out and figure what the Caribbean’s about when I’m 60. I’m doing the Caribbean right now. I’m not waiting.”

Where Pharrell’s dirty pop’s got bounce to it, Van Helden’s has crunch, which he attributes to two factors: A new electric guitar and bass, which he had never incorporated live into recording before; and AmpliTube, a guitar plug-in for Pro Tools by Italy-based IK Multimedia.

“AmpliTube is fun because you’ve got a bunch of delays,” Van Helden enthuses. “It’s got three things [an amp module, stomp-boxes module, and post FX module], and you can just turn them all on at once, so you can get some really fucked-up shit. It has a big reverb. And it’s really dirty. It’s nothing like those clean Superchumbo mixes—pristine, crystal clear. This is just dirty. It gives you dirt without even having to look for it. A lot of people ask me, ‘How do you dirty up your sound?’ And I’m actually trying to make it cleaner.”

Van Helden’s guitar and bass cost him $100 each. “They’re straight-up pieces of shit,” he says. “I don’t really know how to play, but I know what I’m looking for—I don’t practice.”

For Nympho, he just plugged the instruments into his Mackie Onyx board and let loose. “Any time I pick them up, Pro Tools is on record, and I record myself for about three minutes acting like a fool. And then I find something in there that’s good and I loop it.” The Spalding Rockwell girls tuned the guitar to a chord, so all Van Helden has to do is strum. And he plays only one string on the bass. “It works fine. I wanted to take the other off just because they were getting in the way.”

Van Helden uses the Onyx to record only, not mix; he does that in Pro Tools. “I don’t even know why I have the board, because I have like four faders up. I love it, but I don’t really use it to what it should be used for, because it has an awesome British EQ and you should mix on it.” He says that he uses one edit window in Pro Tools, with all his recent songs taking up “eight to 10 tracks. Ten would be a lot. And that’s a whole song—vocals, everything. It makes it easier for me to mix that way, because you’re balancing eight elements instead of 80.”

Van Helden samples most of his drums from vinyl. “I kinda take a snare from here, a kick from there,” he says. “I just add the Roland V-Drums module—the $800 one, not the three-grand [unit]—to crisp it up a little bit more.”

The rest of his studio rig is equally sparse—all that’s left is a Korg synth, and an SSL stereo compressor—and that’s exactly the way he likes it. “I pride myself in it,” he says, his eyes getting brighter. “I do all my stuff right out of my house. I never went to a big room. I am the first and last with my music. Nobody touches it, but me. Nobody.” He uses a Neumann U87 to record vocals (yes, all in the room with the map), sometimes with a Vocoder.

“I have the least amount of equipment I know of out of any producer anywhere and I love it. I love when people go, ‘How are you doing this all by yourself?’ because nobody does that. A lot of people think I have a whole staff of people, but DJ Times is the perfect magazine to explain to them that I’m the last of my species from what I know.”

Van Helden and dance music have always been strange bedfellows: He’s none too fond of what he sees as the close-minded nature of the scene, and the scene just does not know what to make of him—an icon who nonetheless chooses to live outside of the structure that made him one. “Dance music people in general, at least in America, because they’re kind of like a sect, they end up being more miserable than the rest of the crew,” he says matter-of-factly. “The hip-hop and rock people are not that miserable.

“[Dance people] won’t accept a record from their community blowing up. It’s unheard of. They don’t like it. It automatically means that it must be bad. It makes no sense. Every other type of music embraces it. The more people the better. Like when a Snoop Dogg song comes out, the whole fucking planet is on the record. Everybody is listening to the new Snoop Dogg, it’s not like you have to, like, figure anything out. You’re gonna go out to a club, you’re gonna hear the new Snoop Dogg. It’s just gonna happen, and everybody’s going to be enjoying it with you. It’s that easy.”

But if he could have his way, Van Helden would execute his ultimate plan: a scheme that could finally jolt dance—a genre that, no matter what he says, he truly loves—to the mainstream success it has up to now only skirted. “All dance music needs is one hero, like an Eminem of dance. Let’s say, like, Dirty Vegas, but that’s you actually singing, and you’re doing it in the video, and it’s understandable to the 16-, 18-year-old kids. And you’re on TRL; you might get BET crossover. It could happen. If I was an A&R at a label, or if I had the power, I would find that newjack kid and do it—because that’s the only thing that will take it to the next level. I know the underground would hate me for it, but you know, fuck ‘em. Because who else is going to take it to the next level? Who else is going to make a record that people remember 20 years from now?”

But what would this dance Messiah be like, exactly? Van Helden spews out a laundry list without even thinking. “An American-based kid, doesn’t really matter where he’s from. He’d need to have the hot sound of that particular moment, and be able to be diverse as well. And you know, good-looking, quite a character, a strong personality, very street, not nerdy, but everyone’s nerdy in dance music. I’m nerdy. But you know, street. Goes to hip-hop clubs, drinks champagne just like anybody else, might bling a little. Might have a little Southern twist; goes to Atlanta to strip clubs. A little bit of this, little bit of that. Has to be very, very spicy.”

Van Helden looks up, perhaps realizing what the person sitting across from him is thinking. And without a hint of sarcasm, he makes his last bid for world domination.
“It should be like a younger version of me.”