“US HEADLINING ‘I LOVE TECHNO’ WAS SEEN AS BLASPHEMOUS”

I Love Techno

Dave: “This was one of the few ones made for Any Minute Now, but it never made it onto the album. We just couldn’t fit it on, but it fit on Nite Versions. It’s not actually a remix, but actually a track that worked.

“We were playing out at festivals a lot, and it was made for the festival called I Love Techno, which was in our home town of Ghent. While we were working with Flood he suggested making a track that we could play there. 30,000 techno fans from all over Europe would come. It was seen as quite blasphemous that they asked Steph and me to headline as 2Many, because this was a place that people like Kenny Larkin would play.”

Steph: “At that moment, in techno, that world was super closed off to a lot of other things that were happening. Even if it was say, Aphex Twin, or anything else that was a little bit more left field in electronic music.

“Then, especially when we started coming up, it was like, ‘Oh. There’s this other thing that’s happening in dance music’.”

Dave: “Afterwards we ended up headlining the festival as Soulwax a few years after. We ended up curating one of the stages as well. Then the ship was complete.

“It showed they had the balls to change it around. But, at that point it was seen as very controversial, which is why we made this particular track.”

KracK

Dave: “This is our favourite version. It’s a story similar to many others. The original, the Any Minute Now version, was... a song. And it contained many elements. It’s also double tempo. We made this one half tempo.

“It was, and is to this day, super satisfying to see the reaction of people to this. Especially at that point, when we were DJing. A lot of it was 125-130bpm. High energy stuff. And to see this, where the track is like 110 or 112bpm. To get that massive reaction to a downtempo track was hugely rewarding. Still, to this day.”

Steph: “Also, we should say, that the original on Any Minute Now, was based around this riff [hums it]. It’s a guitar, and we kinda bent it. It was super satisfying to see that, when we did the Nite Versions, to see the impact of that riff. It kinda made the transition from indie/rock to dance music complete.”

NY Lipps

Dave: “Again, this wasn’t particularly made for the Nite Versions album. It was something that we had made, in that period, for ourselves. And since it was already a remix of a Soulwax single off the previous album it felt like it would fit perfectly. And it was something that people were playing out, so it was quite successful, but it wasn’t specifically made for the album.”

Steph: “Even though it wasn’t made specifically for the Nite Versions album, it made complete sense. It was just a tune we made, and a remix of a Soulwax song.”

Dave: “We cleared the sample, too [Funky Town as performed by Lipps, Inc.]. And it was easier than we thought. Sometimes it can take ages, but this one was fine. Easy.”

Another Excuse

Dave: “With this we just really wanted to work together with [LCD Soundsystem’s] James Murphy. He was still working with Tim [Goldsworthy] back then, too.

“They asked us if we could just make a load of stuff for them, on synths – just a bunch of stuff, not an actual track. We sent them a load of bits. Like, say, the main groove of the song. And they turned it into something completely different, which was great.

“Then they sent it all back to us and we got Nancy [Whang] to do vocals on it.

“It’s not actually a remix. But, it made complete sense in our heads to include this on the album – because it was a remix of a song that didn’t actually exist.”