In The Studio: Luke Slater

Through his army of aliases, Luke Slater has spent 30 years imbuing techno with visceral intensity. Danny Turner catches up with one of the genre’s most iconic alchemists, to discuss his latest L.B. Dub Corp release

Techno legend Luke Slater became fascinated with sound from a very early age, spending hours toying with his father’s armoury of dictaphones and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, before later becoming immersed in the nascent acid house scene and creating the Jelly Jam label for his own releases in the late ’80s.

A restless innovator, known for his uncompromising tendency to meld styles and influences, Slater has released a prolific body of work over the past three decades. Whether skirting the mainstream under his own name, producing primitive techno with Planetary Assault Systems or prescient Chicago-house as L.B. Dub Corp, his output remains as vital as ever.

Tell us about your early experiments…

“Even as a small kid, I was naturally drawn to anything that made sounds. My dad had all these weird old microphones, reel-to-reel tape recorders and ancient dictaphones, which were about the size of a record player. I’ll never know why he had that stuff, but I used to mess about with it. The reel-to-reel got to be quite a fascination. I also had a lot of piano lessons and used to take the boards off the piano and mess about with the strings underneath to create these really long reverb tails.”

What did these inquisitive experiments lead to?

“Drums became my thing and I was in a band when I was 11 or 12 in the early ’80s. My drum set had a clip-on thing called a Syndrum, which had frequency, resonance and pitch controls. If you hit the drum, you got a synth note and you could make all these disco sounds. The keyboardist had a Prophet-5 and left a Roland TR-808 at the rehearsal, which I thought was amazing. The whole hip-hop and electro thing was at its beginnings, and I was hearing the Roland 808 on these records without knowing what they were. When the band thing finished, I got into mixing records.”

Mixing as in playing decks, not production?

“Yes and that movement became a complete obsession for me. The sounds from these records were so fresh – not ‘fresh’ as in hip-hop/electro slang, but a totally new sound. I didn’t have any decks, but the concept of mixing records together was intriguing. I came across people who were putting things together using a pause button on a tape machine to cut records together, got fascinated by that and started making megamixes until I managed to get hold of a couple of really cheap turntables that didn’t have any pitch on them so you had to speed them up and slow them down with your fingers. I used to go to Covent Garden with two mates from Balham and play my mixes while they breakdanced in the square [laughs].”

You mentioned electro, which spawned from new wave and electronic pop. Were you inspired by those movements at all?

“Yes, people like Can and DAF and some of the German stuff, although Kraftwerk only came onto my radar when TheModel was a hit. I was a massive Gary Numan fan – I remember when Are‘Friends’

Electric? came out, it was one of the most mindblowing records I’d ever heard. So I was into electronic pop, until it went a bit cheesy.”

You also worked in a record shop and released your debut single Momentary Vision on their label. Can you tell us a bit about that?

“Around 1987, I worked in an import record shop for dance music called Mi Price Records in West Croydon. I worked there with a guy called Colin Dale, who put on the original techno and house shows on Kiss FM when it was illegal, and a guy called Alan Sage who I hooked up with musically. He ran a label linked to Greyhound Distribution in Battersea and we’d end up going to a studio in Hammersmith to record stuff, although I didn’t really feel I could be free and wanted to make music myself. Out of that, I started a label called Jelly Jam and opened a record shop in Brighton.”

You had some mainstream success in the singles chart in the early 2000s. Were you not tempted to see how far you could push that?

“A lot of people bring up my AlrightonTop album because it’s really different to a lot of the stuff I’ve done. I did two albums, FreekFunk and Wireless, on NovaMute, then Mute wanted to do an album and I thought it would be a really good opportunity to try and orientate songs into electronic music in a way that I liked. I felt I’d come to an end with my releases as Planetary Assault Systems, this time the whole approach would be totally different. Writing and dealing with vocalists was a very band-like process. It was a rebellion against rules and the reaction was really mixed. A lot of my original techno fans were totally disgusted, but I’m really pleased that I made that album.”

Have your pseudonyms been a marketing tactic or just your way of demarcating your music?

“It’s not a marketing tactic. The way I get through life is by writing music, and when I’m writing I don’t always come up with what I expect. The tracks always seem to accumulate into something else, which I think is where these pseudonyms get built. It can be a blessing and a curse, because although it’s bloody annoying that I can’t settle on anything, I have a sense of freedom. I do try to give a nod to the people who buy the music and love it. If I’m working on a Planetary Assault Systems project, I’m aware that it needs to be of the same mindset that I originally created. I wouldn’t want to sell that out; that would be really offensive.”

One of those projects is L.B. Dub Corp and you’re about to release your second album under that name, Side Effects. Was this album written on the road?

“We were on the road with Planetary and in-between I was coming home and working on bits and bobs, but I actually find it impossible to write anything using a laptop in a hotel or with headphones. I definitely need a decent set of speakers in a room – give me that and I’m happy to make anything. I suppose it’s similar to how young guys are listening to records on mobile phones and it sounds shit, whereas back in our day we had boogie boxes on our shoulders.”

Are you disappointed at the technologies people use to consume music these days, considering hi-fi used to be the standard?

“It’s getting better, but it’s been through a real trough. I’ve noticed that even when I write a track, I’ll take it indoors and play it on the laptop to see what it sounds like because I know that a lot of people check stuff out on these very narrow-range speakers. It kind of works because, forget about the bass, I can still check whether I can hear certain frequencies. I don’t think I’d ever like to master a record specifically for a laptop, but laptops are part of the world we live in and I want people to hear what I’m doing. It’s very lonely otherwise.”

So it’s just for research. You wouldn’t dream of mixing an album on laptop speakers?

“For the majority of the ’90s, everything I did was made using a pair of Yamaha NS-10s and when I listen to those speakers now they sound impossible to work on – there was no sub bass. So I’m sure psychology plays a part in all this, because all that crap technology didn’t stop good music being made. It’s definitely about what you’re used to. When you really know something, you can make decisions about whether the sound is real or not. I don’t think people listen to production that much, there’s something else in music that’s more important: the carrot on the stick.”

Would you agree that for instrumental music, the focus has to be more on the production, whereas a great song can stand on its own two feet despite poor production?

“I guess that’s right, because with instrumental music you’re relying more on the sound to make the mark. The production behind a song is reasonably rigid and can’t wander too far, there’s a certain standard to it – maybe there’s a bit more compression or distortion on a snare, but you can’t go too way out before the song becomes abstract. The mindset’s totally different and there are always exceptions to the rule. Young Fathers is a band that battles with things not being in tune and I’m a big fan of that, but there’s definitely an art to making dance music; a different set of rules.”

Side Effects seems to have a very classic and authentic techno sound. Was that intentional, to bring things back to source?

“That’s a good observation actually. It’s influenced by really early and obscure house records made by Foremost Poets or darker underground stuff like Ego Trip. Being around so long, a lot of those really early records are important to me; maybe there’s some kind of dark spiritualism that I want to try and get back to in there.”

At this point, is the challenge to perfect your sound or technique, constantly trying to better what you’ve done before?

“I don’t think I’m trying to perfect things, I’m just seeing whether I can write stuff that makes me feel good that sounds new and interesting. I’ve learnt that your legacy can hang heavy. The history of what I’ve done is there and people want you to keep doing that – but that just can’t happen. I always want to be going forwards rather than trading on the past, even if that will play a part by default.”

For you, is technology’s main function to reinterpret the techno ethos or push it forward?

“I think it’s to do with ideas rather than technology. Technology brings a revolution of possibilities, but doesn’t necessarily seed ideas. The golden egg is the idea; then you can do something with it using the technology. With all the possibilities technology offers now, maybe the challenge lies in how to limit yourself. I’ve always liked that idea. Choice can be the killer, and these days it’s like Santa’s grotto. The last Planetary album, Arc Angel, was predominantly written in Ableton Live, except for a few outboard

“Psychology plays a part in all this… crap tech didn’t stop good music being made”

bits. I just wanted to prove to myself that it was possible to do that.”

You come across as very assured and confident, but does that belie the hard work and self-doubt that goes into the music-making process?

“For me, making music is a constant psychological battle and I’m never able to say that what I make is good. It’s like a musical religious suffering – there’s not as much joy as there should be and when an album’s coming out I generally head into a bout of depression. But I also think it’s good to suffer for your art. Doing gigs and releasing music brings so much of a high that I think you have to come down at some point. It’s a continuous rollercoaster. I’m more grounded in that these days, but I guess I live for the buzz you get from those extremes somehow. The lows can be quite inspiring as well, the feelings that go with them can create a lot of ideas that you can use later on – I try to embrace wherever I’m at.”

Is the heart of your studio the mixing desk?

“I have two rooms. One of them is used for experimenting with ideas where I can hook up a laptop and fiddle around with it, but don’t feel like I’m actually in a studio. The other area is a professional, kitted-out studio based around an Audient ASP8024 mixing desk. I’ve never been into hooking external stuff up to the computer directly – the idea of using a desk has always been around me. I bought the original 8024 in the ’90s and have just updated it, although it doesn’t get used in the same way it used to, where every channel had to be up on the desk to get anything going. These days, I use it many different ways. Because there’s a lot of outboard in here, I can access it all really easily through the patch bay, which is the traditional side of things, but I will also use it for quite a lot of post-production.”

So it’s really just a bridge between the outboard gear and the DAW?

“It’s the central station for hooking stuff up in any way I want, although I still do a lot of stuff on computers. In fact, most of my outboard now is more used for processing. I’ve still got my Akai S950 sampler, but I’ll use that for processing more than actually running it live – and having the desk and patchbay frees me up to patch a load of hardware and make different noises.”

Do you still tend to use hardware synths for sound generation?

“Yes, sometimes I’ll just plug in a synth. There’s a lot here including a really old ’70s Moog and the Korg Mono/Poly. Also the Roland Jupiter-6, the JD-800, which is looking a bit knackered now, an Oberheim OB-8, Alesis Andromeda A6, and new stuff like the Arturia MatrixBrute. I’ve still got all the old Roland machines from the 303 up to the 909. The studio’s been built up out of stuff I originally had but never sold. I’ve never been a collector as such, and I’ve sold quite a bit over the years, but things like the 909 are still very much in use.”