DJ Legend François K Does The Digital Dance Like No Other & Takes Another Musical Aboutface.

Published in the March 2007 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 20 - Number 3
By Jim Tremayne

     New York City—It’s November 6, the Monday night before Tuesday’s mid-term elections, and from the Cielo DJ booth François Kevorkian surveys his audience. There’s a buzz in the air tonight and it seems to have seeped in freely from the outside world, the place clubbers are usually all too happy to escape. But this Deep Space party is different, and François can sense it.

So, after playing a delicious mixture of techno, dub, jazz, rock and R&B tunes (Justin Timberlake!), François offers a simple gesture. He plays Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and cuts out the words “war is not the answer,” allowing the audience to sing them, and they do with gusto. It’s a very powerful, very communal moment. Mission accomplished, he smiles and gets back to his very serious work.

For François, 53, that work now has expanded past 30 years. Famous in pop-music circles for his studio efforts with Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode, François is perhaps best known in the underground for his Wave Music imprint and for Body & Soul, the long-running New York City party he co-founded with Danny Krivit and Joe Claussell. Although its patrons would hear more of a mix of sounds than advertised, Body & Soul became a celebration of deep house, an iconic touchstone for the genre.

But for François, the five-plus years since Body & Soul’s 2001 closing have taken him in a different musical direction. In addition to embracing the freeing artistic aesthetic of Jamaican dub—which is reflected in the Deep Space event—he’s taken a bit of a techno turn. Inspired by the current crop of sonic architects—EDM producers like Trentemøller, Joris Voorn, Gabriel Ananda and others— François has become a major purveyor of minimal, electro and techno flavors. (For proof, check out Frequencies, his excellent double-disc mix comp.) But a bandwagon jumper, he’s not. Like anything he’s ever done in the DJ booth, he offers his unique stamp.

This is now done via Native Instruments Traktor DJ studio. When he’s played out with Derrick May (as the Cosmic Twins), it been a mixture of solutions—Traktor, Ableton Live, CDs with the Pioneer CDJ-1000. But, aside from his use of Yamaha SPX-990, TC Electronics Fireworks and Pioneer EFX-1000 effects boxes, his Deep Space party is all about computer DJing. Because of the room’s sharp Funktion-One sound system, its amazing acoustics and, most crucially, the prodigious sample rates at which the audio files are saved, François gets a sound that he himself describes as “pretty glorious.” He’s right—and because of that sound, because of the venue, because of his fearless approach to DJing, Deep Space remains the best party in town.

We caught up with DJ François K in his Wave Music offices over the holidays and talked tech, music and artistic philosophies.

DJ Times: The last time we spoke, you had just played a 9/11 benefit and the New York run of your Body & Soul party had just ended. We talked about music mostly and how it could heal. What has changed in your life since then?
François K: A great deal, I guess. The main thing that really happened is that my overall musical direction took focus. I sort of grew up.

DJ Times: In what respect?
François K: Some people are very lucky and they discover early on what their identity is. I guess, in some other cases, it takes awhile to really figure out where their head is really at. Maybe in my case, it took me longer to know what I was truly missing musically.

DJ Times: And what did you find?
François K: I was mad and crazy about dub on one end—dub was a really important part of my life in the studio and as a DJ, but I was in a state of denial about it. I didn’t really see how important dub was to what I was doing. The other part was that I really have a natural affinity to electronic music. Although that was perhaps a little more in focus in the ’80s when I was working with a lot of early electronic music bands like Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode, it took a back seat in the ’90s. Maybe in the five years since we did the interview, it really came back into focus. That was something that I was actually pretty much in love with and the main difference from five years ago is that I started doing that, especially when I was playing overseas. It has lead me to a much greater level of success than I ever thought possible.

DJ Times: In the Frequencies CD liner notes, you discuss “an incredible surge of creativity” in the techno world. You mention Mathew Jonson, Trentemøller, Jeff Mills.
François K: I just think it’s a natural progression from the days of when techno started in Detroit. It got so big in Europe in the ’90s with the raves. Not only did it get big, but it got pretty boring and pretty brutal. What some people call techno in Europe is obviously a way to get rid of aggression, but it doesn’t have much to do with what it was originally.

DJ Times: You mean the more soulful elements?
François K: Yeah. And then I think that in 2000 or so, there came a reaction to some things—whether you want to call it trance or gabber or the other, more extreme forms of techno, the kind completely devoid of any soul. The reaction came and people who were playing that previously were dropping the tempos. There became more of a sense of melody and the rise of aesthetics when it came to sound design, which I think was absent in the earlier in-between days [of techno]. I’m talking about when it got really commercial, with Love Parade and a million people. There was a tendency there for things to get king-sized, but there was a certain subtlety that was getting lost. But I think recently with the whole new crop of people you can see a whole new emphasis on sonic elements, compositional evolution and what people call minimal.

DJ Times: Doesn’t the minimal sound run the same risk? It seems to be pretty big—everywhere but the U.S., of course.
François K: It’s a big buzzword right now, of course, and as such it’s going to be abused by people jumping on a bandwagon. But there’s a whole class of people who have introduced a certain aesthetic, which is important because it harkens back to the very early days of really cool electronic music. Those exciting days are here because we’re seeing these undercurrents surface and become accepted.

DJ Times: So what are you hearing when you travel?
François K: In Europe, people were either into progressive house or the real banging kind of techno, but suddenly you now see a whole shifting away from that into a more sophisticated sound, what people now call minimal. Or a certain form of electro that is very sophisticated—it has a lot of class to it. It’s almost like electronic disco. I quite like that.

DJ Times: On your mission statement on your Deep Space website, you compare dub to jazz and the cubism movement. How do you make those connections?
François K: Because it’s a form of abstraction. Although jazz might’ve had its roots from a very populist kind of musical movement with Dixieland and everything else, it became quite sophisticated over time. When you trace its evolution first from Dixieland, then Stride, then the big bands, then Bebop and Cool and all that, it’s kind of incredible.

DJ Times: It certainly quit being popular music after awhile.
François K: Exactly. In a sense, dub is something that has always been an undercurrent. For example, you might not notice it at first, but if you take a lot of the seminal, early ’80s—the New Wave/punk kind of records—you’ll notice there were a lot of dub production values that simmered, including even The Clash.

DJ Times: Especially on Sandinista!
François K: And a lot of the output from Island Records—these Grace Jones records—was heavily influenced by dub, but nobody connected the dots. Ironically, I had to look back at my own productions and mixes from the time to realize the impact of these early dub records. It was so phenomenal that I remember that I almost overnight changed my sound where, instead of just turning out pretty nice and polite extended versions of songs, I suddenly started introducing all these crazy elements in the mix and these dramatic dropouts and echo effects and wild processing. This allows the person at the mixing board to really re-conceptualize how it’s made, break it down to its simplest elements, but yet treat it in such a way that it’s an abstract creation, where it’s not necessarily dependent on the song form and the constraints of the normal aesthetic of songwriting. The person at the controls is free.

DJ Times: You have room to move.
François K: Yes, it took me going back to my early mixes from those days—like “Go Bang” [by Dinosaur L, 1982, on Sleeping Bag Records] or some dub mixes I did of D-Train records—to see how much I felt this was a part of what I was doing. Because I got quite successful early on in the studio, I got sucked into this whole vortex with all these major pop acts because most of the emphasis at the time was on the vocals. I got involved in doing the album versions—the real versions, not the DJ-oriented ones—it took a back seat. Even through the ’90s, I was consciously doing this in the studio, but dub was sort of the stepchild. And I think that since we last spoke, I spent some time thinking about what I really liked from all that.

DJ Times: So dub never left you.
François K: I remember in 1980 and 1981, just DJing and using crazy tape delays and sound effect overlays on top of records. I made entire reel-to-reels of crazy sound effects that I would maybe give to maybe one or two people, like Larry Levan. They became so legendary. Those were François’ sound effects and everybody wanted them because they added extra spice. Take any track, put that stuff on top and you could work with it. I felt that maybe it was something that I was good at.

DJ Times: How did you further incorporate it into your DJ nights?
François K: I’d get offers to play several nights in a row, so I wanted to give a different emphasis for each night, so I came up with this idea of Dub & Beyond in 1995 or so in Precious Hall in Japan. It wasn’t that successful, but I found it satisfying to play whatever I wanted. I also took it a little further and did a party like that in London at Plastic People. I didn’t call it anything special, but I just went wild. I saw how people reacted.

DJ Times: How did Deep Space happen?
François K: I was offered a chance to do a house-music night in 2002 and 2003—I was not really into the idea of yet another house-music night. I thought it would be better to start something completely different, and on a Monday night. You could say the rest is history.

DJ Times: It kind of worked out. What’s the greatest joy you take from it?
François K: Like last night, I put on a bit of Thelonious Monk, just out of the blue. Whatever the hell I feel like playing, I just play it. I think, as a DJ, a lot of us have very specific constraints on what style we’re expected to play, especially when we get paid a lot of money. We’re expected to perform to a standard that the crowd and promoter paid for. And sometimes we’re really put into a pretty narrow framework. When you get 5,000 people ready to party, they just want to get it on. The different thing about Deep Space is that it’s not necessarily about any kind of format.

DJ Times: What is it about, then?
François K: It’s about taking the plunge, letting yourself go into this mode where you see what comes next and feel it a little bit. It’s very organic. You can stop dancing—nobody said it’s wrong to stop dancing. But in this day and age, it’s a pretty radical, rebel kind of statement. In the mid-‘70s, it was anything-goes because there were no rules. Unfortunately, we developed standards that people started conforming to. It’s like the hunter gets captured by the game.

DJ Times: How do you mean?
François K: I remember going to Europe before there was beatmixing everywhere and they were amazed that people could beatmix—they thought I was doing some kind of magic show. Then I went back to Europe and was being cursed at because I didn’t beatmix sometimes. They got so conditioned that they didn’t imagine that anyone else would do anything else—they didn’t think you were a DJ if you didn’t beatmix. It’s like Pavlov’s Dog—you condition people to certain things and they respond to the conditioning. People are conditioned now. Deep Space is about deprogramming people.

Deep Space: François K's digital playground.