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[ l u k e . s l a t e r : w i r e d . f o r . s o u n d ] [ t e x t . o n l y . v e r s i o n ] [ b y . c y c l o n e . w e h n e r ] Whether DJing in New York's Tunnel nightclub with glam puss RuPaul in attendance, or touring live as a part of Australia's Big Day Out rock fest, the life of British techno luminary Luke Slater is certainly never dull. Now the Sussex lad has unleashed his latest album, "Wireless", an intergalactic collision of techno, electro, rock, sampled percussion, distorted guitar and fierce breaks. Sure, the retro-electro single "All Exhale" may be getting all the attention with its playful vocoder hooks. But just wait until you hear the resounding "Weave Your Web", an epic that builds and builds without ever climaxing, instead seguing into the explosive finale "Out The Pocket". Earlier this year Slater toured his Freek Funk live show under the banner of the Big Day Out. It was an especially memorable experience. Slater's set wasn't necessarily orientated to the many young ravers or curious rock kids in the dance tent. He didn't relentlessly deliver the ubiquitous bangin' minimal techno. By contrast, Slater's music was infinitely more subtle and sophisticated, starting off with several minutes of ambient washes and Kraftwerk-inspired robo vocals. Brave, experimental stuff. 'It was good to be the first electronic act to be doing something at a rock festival like Big Day Out,' he observes in retrospect. Slater will be lending the same kind of support to his new Novamute album, "Wireless", over the coming months with a series of festival appearances. And then on New Year's Eve he will DJ at Melbourne's Halcyon Knights supa party, Y2KO!, alongside the Space DJz, Doc Scott and FSOM. In a sense this album re-views Slater's background in industrial rock and electro through the futuristic lens of techno. He sees the LP as an inevitable departure from "Freek Funk". Whereas "Freek Funk" was broad in scope, "Wireless" focusses on a specific musical theme. 'I've summed the album up as being "electro-rock",' Luke says. 'It's like a convergence of electro and the attitude of rock. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to get the funk of electro, but I also wanted to give it some energy and some aggression from the rock world. So it's kind of a fusion of those two things. I go off on doing that -- that's why I did it. So it's a little bit different but it's still got a lot of energy. Whatever I do, it's got to have energy in it.' No doubt there will be a handful of purists who accuse Slater of selling his soul to the corporate electronica machine by making an album that can be readily marketed to a rock audience. Yet Slater's music is still a far cry from the likes of Leftfield, Underworld and The Chemical Brothers. 'I haven't disregarded what I've done before -- like I said to myself, "Right, I've made a lot of techno, so now I'm gonna do something totally different." I'm not copying another form of music -- I'm trying to fuse the two. It's just a development of what I've been doing. To me, it's quite a natural development... I don't think I'll ever get to a point where I'm thinking, "Well, I won't do something because there's a risk that I may alienate people who are into my stuff," because I think people who are into my stuff anyway are pretty open-minded.' Increasingly Slater is also becoming a hard one to pin down. Talk to him about his remixes of Madonna's "Power Of Good-Bye" and Luke is predictably (though brutally) sardonic. 'I really wanted to rip her voice apart -- which is what I did,' he says with savage mirth. 'I think she needed her voice ripped apart. It's stayed the same for years and years, so hopefully I abused it.' But Slater is also the man behind the romantically entitled "Freek Funk" ambient classic, "Love". And he is the proud daddy who showed off shots of his newborn to anyone within proximity during the BDO tour. Prior to this, sentimentality wasn't the kind of quality you would automatically associate with Luke. But behind all that hard techno masculinity there bleeds a poetic heart and soul. 'It was a very tearful track and I did get very sentimental about it,' he confides. 'And it's one of those tracks that just really touches my heart.' These days Slater maintains the two primary outlets for his work. Under his own name he disseminates material that relates to his live shows. Then the alias Planetary Assault Systems is deployed for Luke's club-oriented ventures (released via Peacefrog). You could say that the former is pitched to the mainstream and the latter to the underground. However, Slater is not among those techno progenitors who are preoccupied with terms like 'sell out', 'overground' or 'underground'. 'I really have no interest in the marketing of techno at all,' he says matter of factly. So, at the end of the day, what exactly is Slater's understanding of 'techno'? Does he consider it in philosophical, cerebral terms? Or is it just mindless dance music to him? 'I think it depends what you call "techno". I mean, "techno" is such a nasty word... I see "techno" as being music that is always pushing forward -- music that is always developing and doesn't ever really settle as being one thing. I really do believe that things like house and all the other forms of electronic music that are around now are offsprings of techno. They all have the elements. So techno is, if you like, the groundwork for everything. And that is what it should be. It shouldn't actually be a form of music. It's like the foundation of electronic music.' Wireless is out through MDS. |