Filed under: Interview
Exactly two years after talking to Luciano HigherFrequency puts the Chilean DJ back in the hot seat. This time round his fame has grown out of control but he is still finding time to make sandwiches…
Interview by Ryo Tsutsui (HigherFrequency)
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HigherFrequency (HRFQ) : You are quite well known that you have been influenced by latin music but could you tell us the story how you got in to electronic music?
Luciano : I was born in Switzerland and I moved to Chile when I was like 9 or 10 years old with my mother. I started with guitar and played in a band and the first encounter with electronic music was when I was playing funk music, there was a French band I was fascinated with because they replaced the drummer with a drum machine. This was the first step into machines and things like this. Also I was always visiting my father that was living in Switzerland, and I had a friend who came back from Italy and brought a tape from a House party, and at the beginning I was not really attracted by that but after it somehow got more into it, and brought vinyl back to Chile and this is when I started to make parties and meet people, we were like 4 people making electronic music in the beginning. I got more into it through Martin Dandy Jack, also Ricardo who was coming from Germany to visit and he was always bring records.
HRFQ : Your DJ play is very emotional in parts, but your releases shows much more of your minimalistic side, do you intend to do that?
Luciano : What I intend to do with my music is to always try and do something that pleases me, and that I feel something for. I will never make a track completely mentally with a formula or something like that, it always has to produce a feeling or something inside of me. And for what I produce I wouldn’t say its minimal music because I have a lot of detail in the music that I do, it’s more like timeless music beacuse normally I do very long tracks like between 10 to 16 minutes so what is minimal in my music I think is the development, how an element comes and goes. I think this is what takes more time than for example pop music, which is like 3 or 4 minutes and you have everything in a short time, I try and put a lot of elements in between lets say 15 minutes.
HRFQ : Last year we experienced your great popularity in ibiza. Has ibiza become very special place for you?
Luciano : Well I think since the 60’s or 70’s Ibiza has been a very special place because of the geographical location, people from Europe and all over the world come to this island to party. Its always had the spirit and it still exists today and I think that’s the most special thing, also it’s a beautiful place, you have sun and beaches. And the music scene is really good because people go there without time, when they go out they don’t think “I have to go back because I have to work” they really go there to party and have a holiday and all these elements together make a big boom.
HRFQ : Could you tell us about your live unit Narod Niki ?
Luciano : The Narod Niki is a project that Ricardo started and its like a band jam session. The idea is to put like 8 people together and to make a jam session. One of the more important things about Narod Niki is that we always try to hide the names behind the project, we always try to move and integrate new people, and to really keep a secret identity somehow. Its very complicated, because when you are on stage and everyone is together its about really trying to reduce yourself to one element, don’t start to compose because normally everyone there is used to composing one track with all the elements but you are a part of Narod Niki you have to think as an instrument, so you have to make one part of the track, the others will make the other parts and its about the feeling and communication that we have between all of us to create one song. You have to be very discreet and at the same time you have to really feel what goes on at the moment and always think what you can import to the track and what you can take out. For me the best one we had was the live we did at the Montreal Jazz festival, with Carl Craig, two guys from Basic Channel, Ritchie, me, Ricardo, Zip and Dandy jack and it was really good, we played for 4 hours, its always long sets, its not something you can do in one hour.
HRFQ : We read that you are one of the owner of the cafe post26 in berlin. Could you tell us how it started?
Luciano : Actually it started on a really bad story, I had a studio in Berlin, just under the café. And before that was a Turkish guy running the café. One day I was making music and the guy was going crazy because the room was going “Boom, Boom, Boom” and then he came down with a piece of mental and I opened the door and he wanted to hit me and suddenly the police and the owner arrive and it was big trouble.Normally when you do music, you’re always the first guy to be throw out of a place, and this was the first time that the owner of the building was fighting for us! Basically she was like “No, they are super creative people, you Turkish guy can’t hit people like this, I throw you out!” then the owner offered us to do something with the café, and we’ve never been into things like this and we decided lets try and do it. So in one week we built an internet café. Suddenly we were all making coffee and sandwiches, and the studio was down and that’s not what we wanted to do, we want to make music not coffee! So we decided to open only for special occasions like record release, Birthday parties and pre parties, this was really nice. There was a sandwich called Big Luciano!!
HRFQ : You play a lot in Berlin too, could you tell us what you think about the scene in berlin?
Luciano : Berlin is like the emerging scene of electronic music, you have a lot of people from all over the world moving to Berlin. And Berlin is really special on the party scene. This is related to of course all the artistic activity in Berlin, but it’s also related to when it was divided (into East and West) and when the wall fell down Berlin had no details about closing times, and you could party whenever until whenever you want, in any places because there were so many empty buildings, it was super chaotic at the beginning, this chaos created a lot of art and creative people. This was the principal motor of Berlin, you had complete freedom and people were coming from all over because it was so cheap. At the moment it has around 2.5 million people but can have 5 million people so you have a lot of spaces, rent is cheap and you have everything you need. I think this will change soon because so many people are moving there. Its good because you have a lot of creativity but many people are doing the same thing in the same city. And some people who move to Berlin forget where they are from. But it’s a great city, there is an amazing musical culture, in design, photography, architecture in everything.
HRFQ : Whats your next plan?
Luciano : I’m going to be working in the studio in January and February, and I’m going to be working on my album. So I took off two months, and this hasn’t happened for like 8 years where I’ve taken off 2 months just to be in the studio. So that’s my next plan that I’m really looking forward to. I’m going to make music with reason, just because I love music. So I’m going to make like 30 tracks and then compile downtempo maybe dance music, I don’t know. But for sure in the album I want to integrate instruments and vocals and I really want to push it further.
HRFQ : Could you give your message to fans here in japan?
Luciano : I’m super thankful to be here!! I’m always excited about coming to Japan. I’m super attracted to Japanese culture, and when I leave I feel an empty space, and I really want to stay here, there’s something magical about here.
Listen to Luciano on hrfq.com
Luciano Interview (Nov 2005)
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