GAULS GONE WILD
The DMC-Winning Birdy Nam Nam Think Turntablist Competitions Are for “Nerds.” Can a French Turntablist Quartet Find The Funk & Steady Employment in a Fractured, Deconstructed World?

Published in the June 2006 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 19 - Number 6
By Brian O’Connor
Photos By Rahav Segev


New York City—We’re in downtown Manhattan, inside an East Village photo studio, and DJ Times’ photographer, Rahav, has spent the better part of the day contorting the four members of Birdy Nam Nam into a conga-line pretzel. Now he’s on his back, cajoling the Nam Nams to form a circle around him, hover above him, look down at him as if they were in a rugby scrum. The Nam Nams comply, and it is easily the scruffiest rugby scrum I have ever seen, and quite possibly the funkiest.

It’s a sunny day in early spring, and there’s unrest in Paris. Students and young adults are protesting a new French labor law that makes it easier for employers to fire young workers. It’s the day’s headline, but the Nam Nams can’t relate. They’re working, but they’re artists, and their rewards are of the less tangible sort (and as most DJ crews know, there’s little scratch in the game of scratch). One Nam Nam is even homeless, skipping among different friends’ houses night after night, more in the fashion of a member of the French Resistance than the studio-head in a DJ crew that’s pushing turntablism to artistic extremes. For today, at least, Birdy Nam Nam remains politically unburdened and artistically undeterred—or just naïve, the crucial quality that pushes art.

They respond to Rahav’s direction like abiding Francs, and Rahav reciprocates by speaking French, because the French love it when speaking French is attempted, by anyone, anywhere. I realize this, too, and on my way out the door to a deli for provisions, I request if anyone wants anything to eat by announcing, “Croissant?” The Nam Nams lift their heads from the rugby scrum. “No, no…thank you,” they reply. With this interaction, we’ve joined hands, in a sense, across the language barrier. But in the language of beats, basslines and rhythms, in the culture of crossfaders and pitch manipulation, Crazy B, Pone, Need and Little Mike need no interpreters.

Later that night, The Kitting Factory is stuffed with a legion of young, expatriated French. Four turntables are set up in one corner of the Tap Room, and Pone, 22-years-old, lean and tall, sticks his head out from behind the curtain, amazed to see so many supporters in the space, realizing for the first time that no matter where you’re from, to be in New York is to never be alone. The group is emboldened and they take to their turntable stations with enthusiasm, and for the next hour they drop huge, clopping beats, fractured d-n-b basslines, stuttering vocal snippets, and whomping build-ups that coagulate the crowd into a few mobile, sweaty, fist-pumping, drunken clusters. Birdy Nam Nam plays its self-titled debut album, multi-cultural deconstructed musique that requires a passport, and the crowd responds for the duration like flowers in the desert catching rain. The Nam Nam are bopping up and down, too, at different times, reinforcing the notion that each member does his own thing, but only in the interest of a greater whole.

Yes, these Gauls have gone wild, and DJ Times chatted with DJ Need and Little Mike of the former DMC World Team Champions—Crazy B and Pone don’t speak English—to find out how they do it.



DJ Times: What music have you guys been working on recently?
Need: At the moment, we are out on tour so we don’t have much time to work on music. The last stuff we did we composed the music for a piece of theater that was played twice in Paris, at the beginning of March.

DJ Times: Music for a play?
Need: A play, contemporary theater. We did the soundtrack, kind of a score.

DJ Times: Did you work with the playwright?
Need: No, we did the music first with the director, we composed the music with him. It was ambient stuff, with most of the time actors playing over the music, and then someone wrote an arrangement for that, over a 20-person orchestra, and we played our music live with the orchestra, and the actors were playing in the middle of it. It was our fist experience meeting classical musicians. And it was in the theater, so we also played in front of a different audience. We’ve done it twice and we’re going to play again in Europe in September. The play is called “The Comeback of Jean Baptiste,” and it’s talking about an imaginary singer. It talks about music and the history of that singer, from his birth onward.

DJ Times: When you’re scoring that, are you producing it differently than you would your own music?
Need: Not really. We mostly used turntables and records. The main idea for the first album was that everything was done with turntables. We wanted to discover what we could do only using them; we also did music for a movie called Transporter II, which was out in the U.S. We scored seven minutes in the movie and we used samplers. Crazy B is used to using samplers, but on the first album we wanted to concentrate on what we could do using turntables. Now, for the future, we’ll be using musicians and every aspect of production available to us.

DJ Times: So in the studio you’ll write for the musicians?
Need: Yeah, we don’t write, or read music, or play an instrument, but we already recorded songs with musicians and we tried to direct them.

DJ Times: No one in the crew plays drums?
Need: Mike plays drums a little bit, but we want to learn to play instruments, but it’ll take time.

DJ Times: Why do you want to learn to play instruments?
Little Mike: We love music, and we want to use instruments. I want to learn guitar, keyboards, drums, learn to make basslines, just music to play.

DJ Times: Are you limited musically by being DJs?
Need: No, I think bands using traditional instruments are limited. We can play any kind of instrument with the turntables—that’s the cool point of it. But when soloing, we don’t have that range of notes that an instrument has. We are limited by the range of the sounds on the records.

DJ Times: Eventually, you want to play your own parts and then record them, and then spin those in the studio?
Need: At the moment, it’s not the point. We just want to learn how to play, just to play them.

DJ Times: You guys consider yourselves a band, not a turntable crew? What’s the difference?
Need: We spend most of our time together. We see each other almost every day. We are not just working together; we spend most of our time together—so we are really close. We compose music in the studio and we play live, and we aren’t playing anybody else’s music. We are playing our music live, we are speaking with microphones…like a band.

DJ Times: Maybe one of you will be a singer one day.
Need: Maybe, maybe in 10 years all of us will be able to play different instruments and we’ll record an album using real instruments.

DJ Times: At your gigs and in the studio, who’s doing what?
Need: There not really roles. Everybody plays the parts that he played during the recording of the album sessions. So Mike is mostly taking the drums live, but in the studio there are no rules—if you come up with that sound and you can do something with it, and it sounds good to everyone…like, if I found a sound, and maybe I’m not able to use it, or someone will see something different and will try to use it his way and if it sounds better, we always talk a lot when we’re recording and everybody is OK with the result.

DJ Times: You each bring different musical passions to the group.
Little Mike: We are all eclectic. I can listen to some jazz, some punk, same with DJ Need and Crazy B and Pone. I think it’s all about energy. I like stuff to be direct.
Need: All of us can listen to a wide range of music. I prefer maybe jazzy things, Mike likes electronic, but we’re all open to everything.

DJ Times: You’re listening to records for ideas, right?
Need: That’s a big part of what we do—we record shop all the time. We are touring all the time, so that’s good, because we can find something new, in new stores, new places.

DJ Times: How has touring changed what you do?
Need: It hasn’t changed what we are doing. At the moment we have a pre-set routine, a set that is an hour and 15 minutes, and we do that set and if the crowd is excited we can do more freestyle stuff at the end. It’s getting bigger and bigger in France, and when we come to the U.S. we begin again. It’s a challenge. America is a huge country.

DJ Times: Is America intimidating?
Need: Not really, but it works differently. In the venues in France, there’s a lot of people working in venues, because the country helps a lot, in the cultural aspects—when there’s two or three people working in a venue in America, there are 10 in France. So in France you are really welcome, there is someone who is cooking, there is someone who is taking care of you, bringing you food, and drinks and stuff like that. So we are used to being really welcome. That’s different in the U.S. That’s true for sound quality, too. We always play in France in concert venues, never in clubs, so there is a sound for the crowd, and a monitor for us, even in small venues, with 300 people. It’s a lot more organized. Here in America, we’ll play in a lounge bar, even a restaurant, so we aren’t used to that.
Little Mike: The big difference is that in the U.S. everybody has big sounds in their car, but in the clubs, you know…it’s crazy…
Need: In England, too, there is that culture of the sound quality, when you go in a club the sound is a club. In that club Fabric, all the basses are beneath the floor, so the bass comes from under the floor and it’s crazy. It’s more of a pleasure to play when there is good sound quality. That’s why we came on tour with our sound engineer, because when we came last year we realized that if a sound guy doesn’t care about us we’re going to get sloppy sound. We are trying to do something cool and our engineer is a big help. At least if we don’t have the same quality that we have in France, he can still have it sound pretty good.

DJ Times: In France, what kind of crowds are you pulling in?
Need: Our crowd is a lot of girls and a lot of 30-year-old people, rather than teenagers and people in their 20s. Mike’s 22, Nick is 38, so we have different ages in the group, and that’s cool because we feel lucky about having the crowd’s ages into their 40s.

DJ Times: You guys have won the DMC World Team Championship, but now you say the DMCs are for nerds. Why?
Little Mike: That is my opinion. It’s about technical things and stuff like that…and some guys playing in a room, and standing there watching the Internet, and everyone’s like “Wow, wow, you scratch, wow.” I don’t care about it—we just want to do music. We take our inspiration from other bands. We go to concerts, we listen to all types of bands…

DJ Times: Coldplay?
Little Mike: I like Coldplay…
Need: Not Coldplay.
Little Mike: We listen to African music, hip-hop bands, electro bands, punk, reggae…
Need: That’s another reason we consider ourselves a band, and not a DJ crew. We just want to do music, and our inspiration comes from bands.

DJ Times: Is Birdy Nam Nam a full-time pursuit? Is this how you make a living?
Need: It is full-time, but we’re not really making a living at it. I’m homeless the last two years. I can’t pay my rent, so I live in friend’s places, every night I move to different places. We all live in Paris—I’m not from Paris, I’m from a city away from Paris—but I have to be in Paris every day. We have things to do every day, so I have to be there. I have a lot of friends living in Paris, so that’s OK for now.

DJ Times: Are you all homeless?
Little Mike: Crazy B has his own place. He has four children, so he has to take care of them.

DJ Times: How big are the crowds at your shows in Europe?
Need: Currently, we are doing two or three concerts a week, in different cities in Europe, 500 people a night, but it’s getting bigger and bigger. Even when there are not so many people, the vibe is cool. We can have a good concert in front of 40 people.
Little Mike: In L.A., we played in front of seven people, and that was cool.

DJ Times: For the next album, will you be sticking to the same process, just four turntables and the truth?
Need: We’ll be using samplers, and live musicians. Already, at some of the concerts in Paris, at bigger venues, we have a friend who plays keys who plays with us, and another friend who’s a percussionist. So when we can pay them, we’ll take them with us. We rehearse together and while we’re finding our places, musically, he’s finding his, like he’s another turntablist. We pressed two records for recording the next album, and he played some parts for it, and we re-edited his parts and pressed it on vinyl so we can use them on our record. We wanted certain sounds that we weren’t finding on records. He gives us the chance to manipulate it.

DJ Times: You’re recording with what software?
Need: Recording in Pro Tools…I’m the studio guy. I just learned while recording the first album. It takes time to learn all the effects and plug-ins. I knew how to track the records, and we just do mixdowns without effects. It was four turntables—everyone was looking for their sounds. When we had the bassline, Mike was playing four or 16 bars of the bassline, we recorded it, looped it, then after looking for the next sound, each sound came like that…

DJ Times: Sounds like a laborious recording process.
Need: At the beginning, it took quite a long time. Now it’s faster, some of the album was recorded in one day or two afternoons, some of the tracks were recorded a month after we first started it, after we left it alone and came back to it. But at the moment the process is getting faster and faster.