The Danny Livewire Interview
Daniel John Gonzalez aka Danny Livewire... read more...
[block]Daniel John Gonzalez aka Danny Livewire started out in Chicago with The Treehouse Collective experiencing the rave scene and it's collapse. Then came an electro tag-team duo with The Nurse called Electro Videostar Killers. From there he worked with Relief Records being mentored by Green Velvet who took him under his wing and helped steer him into the right direction. He is a founding member of Hi-Fi Hearts Label and is currently working with Kompute Musik. He took some time out to chat with us at his loft in Wicker Park about music, travel and working with a record label in the digital age. [/block]
CT: Danny, Livewire, Daze?
Danny Livewire: Daze has been the video namely and then Livewire has been the production, the music production, DJing and as of lately I’ve been going by Danny Livewire as kind of a hybrid between the 2 names.
CT: How long have you been DJing? Did you start with DJing?
DL: No, I didn’t actually. I started with a live PA set. That’s actually how I got the name “The Livewire”. It was strictly live PA with a couple of drum machines, synthesizers, stuff like that. Did it a couple of times during the ‘rave’ era. I started with a crew called The Treehouse Collective here in Chicago throwing rave parties back in ’98 through around 2003. So you can say I started a good 10 years ago.
CT: Wow.
DL: I know, time goes by so fast. I myself don’t even realize it was that long ago. But I made the transfer from live PA to DJing simply because I got lazy. Doing live PA takes a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of creativity and sometimes the product, when you’re performing live, isn’t as well produced as when you DJ tracks. So I ended up just producing my tracks and DJing them out along with tracks from some of my favorite artists.
CT: So how old were you when you started?
DL: I started when I was in high school actually, was possibly 16 or 17 years old. Just hanging out in a friend’s basement learning how to DJ on his turntables and then I got a chance to throw a party in a loft spot, gave a ring to the Treehouse Collective to get some help and one thing lead to another after we threw our first party. It was a great success, we had Hugo Moya on the bill. Kashmere was supposed to be on the bill but he didn’t show up but he ended up showing up to later parties which is cool. He’s always been a big influence on me as far as music styles are concerned.
CT: What would you describe your sound to be?
DL: Well, it’s an evolution between techno and electro and just good ol’ fashioned dance music, dirty disco. I like a lot of the distorted beats these days, distorted bass lines, running synthesizers just blaring in your face and heavy kicks. The evolution started as techno back in the rave era and once the rave scene started to collapse upon itself I switched over to electro to more of an element of glam and pop, making it more appealing, more easily digestable so to speak because a lot of the techno rave stuff was banging, banging, banging! I love the bangs don’t get me wrong but you gotta have it composed into songs for people to enjoy.
CT: Electro is more pop, vocal.
DL: Yeah, its more off of vocals and I also was born in the 80’s so I got a big 80’s influence, with my synthesizers and even my vocals are very much 80’s driven. People say I sound like a mix between Depeche Mode, New Order and Green Velvet.
CT: I noticed that about your music. Do you ever use guest vocalists on your music?
DL: I do actually sometimes, but I do my own vocals majorly at the time. Usually if it’s a guest vocal it’s me remixing somebody else’s song. I just finished a remix for Mount Sims and Alexander Robotnick that's coming out on Kompute Musik, “A Time For Living” it's a great original song so I was really flattered to do the remix of it.
CT: What's the relationship with you and Kompute?
DL: Well technically I'm the Kompute label manager. I was kind of appointed the title by Matt Nee about a year ago, maybe half a year ago, but I help out on the label as much as I can. It's been kinda tough running a label these days with the collapse of the music industry in general but we've been reving up our online presence, digital has been going really good. It's been really hard selling music through the record distribution chains just because of the collapse of industry but Kompute Musik is a great label, some of the people on there are some people I really look up to like Dirty Criminals, Alexander Robotnick, Mount Sims, Matt Nee, Plastique de Reve, Garbo. It's basically a network, it's world headquartered in Chicago but we have people in South America, people in New York, people on the West Coast, people on the East Coast.
CT: Are these people artists or people that work with the label?
DL: Majorly artists, other DJs, other producers. We have a group of graphic people too nowadays that are helping us. It's a fun endeavor, really not too lucrative these days. As I mentioned before the collapse of the music industry kinda happened around 9/11, all the shipments stopped coming and international music just hasn't been going through lately. When I was overseas I spent some time in Europe, a couple months out there last winter and a lot of the comments I got from the record stores, record distributors were like, “What's going on with the States? We don't get anymore Chicago House.” I think the major reason why is because of the choke-hold that's been put on by distribution outlets out here, they don't want to work with local producers and they don't want to support the local guys, they just want the big cuts that are gonna get huge number of sales for them but they don't realize that without small stuff you can't build a scene out of it. It's been kind of a wrestle dealing with them from a label perspective being manager I instituted going straight digital. So all the stuff we've been doing these days has been digital and CD-based.
CT: That has a big impact on DJs and the way they perform.
DL: Well, it's a huge impact because these days a lot of it is all digital. You go to a party these days you rarely see people spinning vinyl anymore.
CT: It went from vinyl to CDs and now you don't even need CDs.
DL: Yeah, it's laptops, and a lot of the times people are downloading the songs straight from the blogs or straight from Limewire. They’re missing out on the experience of hunting for a song, going to a record store, finding a cut that’s just so hot, buying it, actually buying it and spending money on a cut that you love and then going home and mixing it with your favorite cut, favorite tracks. Nowadays you go hit blogs and within an hour you can download all the newest songs and you take them out to a party but you don’t have the experience of actually mixing them together.
CT: There’s no connection.
DL: Yeah, there’s no fluidity, which is what DJing was all about when I first started. DJing was all about taking 2 tracks, mixing them together and creating a unique song out of 2 tracks, even 3 or 4 depending on how good of a DJ you are. I miss seeing people mix on 4 turntables, you know? It doesn’t happen anymore, one laptop. It is a different industry but it’s technologically the way everything has progressed. It’s one of those things that as a label we first tried to fight it a couple of years back and now we’re just trying to work with it. Setting stuff up on Beatport, I-Tunes, all the different outlets that are available to us, there’s so many available these days you kinda have to navigate your way through it and try to be original in how you market it and get it out there.
CT: A lot of times when there’s change there’s always a backfire too, is there any kind of movement going on backfiring a lot of the digital?
DL: Yes and no, people who know, know the difference between playing a song digitally and playing a song off a piece of wax, I mean it just sounds different. But there isn’t really a backlash because your average consumer can’t tell the difference. The only people who can really tell the difference are the people who are in the industry and are already in the know and those people already get everything for free anyway (laughs). So, they are not the consumer, they’re the people who are creating the stuff as well. It’s a mix, as with any industry you have to position yourself for success and these days, especially in the music industry it’s all-digital.
CT: I’ve seen you perform live and you have quite a set up, you have something behind you… mixing your own tracks, that’s kinda your thing?
DL: Yeah, I’ve got a bit of everything, that pretty much is my thing, that’s how it evolved. Doing a live PA and just producing my songs at home. Well produced, mastered correctly and then playing them out sounds ten times better than if I were to do it live on the spot simply because you can’t EQ everything, you can’t process everything, you can’t master everything live. If you record it that way, play it that way it would sound right. That’s really why I made this shift into DJing. As far as doing stuff live is concerned these days, I’ve incorporated a lot of video and DJing has been another step into the whole digital realm of media, and there’s been a lot of convergence between the video jockeys and the DJs, disc jockeys because, just the scene in general, the videos are cool. If you mix the two together and you have the two coincide together it’s even cooler. To a lot of people DJing is really unexplored territory and a lot of clubs don’t understand how to work with DJs so it’s not as wide as being a DJ is. If you go to a club very few still have VJs. I found it difficult in the VJ scene to exist as a DJ because people weren’t familiar with that. I wanted to do a live set with music and video, like DJ/VJ set but the vast majority of promoters are just like, “Oh, you a VJ? I want you to VJ! VJ all night, play all this stuff and I am gonna have my DJs play.” But, you’re DJs suck! I want to play with my own music (laughs). So I stopped VJing for a while simply because I was only getting gigs for VJing and I was sitting there listening to crappy DJs and I wanted to DJ. It was pretty boring.
CT: I bet that didn’t really inspire you to go a good job as a VJ. How does that work out when you do both? It must be intense. DJing alone is intense, I can only imagine doing both.
DL: It’s really intense. It is very, very intense and when I first started doing it I was lucky enough to have some good help. I teamed up with a partner of mine her name was The Nurse and she was an electro DJ as well but she also studied to be a film director, so she had a film background and we produced videos together and we did a tag-team set, so we would take turns on video and then take turns on audio, which was very useful to begin and learn a lot. I learned a lot from her and our experience together was great and we went our separate ways and now I do VJing straight off a laptop and DJing with disc be it vinyl or a CD basically so its just DJing with an added element of being able to control all my videos on my synthesizers and playing them right along with the music.
CT: Cool, so do you compose the visuals yourself?
DL: Yeah, I use a program where I can control different video clips and mix them together just like being a DJ and you can mix the different visual elements on top of each other, in and out of each other stuff like that and I have it hooked up to my synthesizer so that when I’m playing live all I have to do is push a key and it plays that video clip that I want and since it’s also hooked up to a synthesizer it will also play the synth noise and so in and out of songs I’ll play a synth line and trigger them all with the video and the music. It’s really cool, haven’t had a lot of chances to put it out there yet so not a lot of people have seen it but I definitely think that’s where the future is going. You see a lot of new technology out with the DVJs, Pioneer and Newmark making DJ mixers that mix video as well so it’s definitely going that way ‘cause video is just a whole other element to audio and when you’re trying to create an environment or a scene or something it’s good to have both.
CT: Fluxcore is headed that way, having just done C’est Dommage at Victor Hotel we’re teaming up with a bunch of people, DJ’s and visual artists on future projects in the nightlife scene.
DL: It’s all about collaboration too, even as a VJ and as much as I am a DJ I love other people’s stuff. I’ll take videos that other people put together with motion graphics and smash them together just like I would two hot cuts. It’s just another element to add to the mix.
CT: It’s important I think. Especially when you experience it as a club-goer, I’ve been to many places with great screens and shitty visuals.
DL: It’s a lot of work but it’s definitely worth it.
CT: You mentioned being overseas this past winter, what was going on out there?
DL: I was mainly visiting a lot of people. In Ireland, Green Velvet was on tour so I got a chance to meet up with him out there and hang out with all the Irish cats and when I was in London I had a good label meeting with Fabric and they’re on a bunch of things out there.
CT: They have quite a movement going on.
DL: Yeah, they have a great operation going on with the label and the club together. My whole frustration especially here in Chicago dealing with clubs is that a lot of club owners just don’t support the DJs or the artists that they feature at their clubs. It’s a real tragedy because if they were they’d be a hundred times more successful. Fabric is a great example of a working club that is all about that. They have their own label and licensing operation which takes in all the DJs that they get at their club which are the top DJs in the world and they put CDs out with their DJs and podcasts and everything and I was very impressed with their operation.
CT: I was fiddling around Myspace one morning and came across a bulletin you posted while you were in Europe, and I remember it sounded like you were berating people here (laughs) and then I kept reading it and it was actually really inspiring and you were basically about how the scene here is shitty and how back in the day you’d throw parties where thousands of people would show up and now they can hardly bring in 100.
DL: Yeah, when I first started in The Treehouse Collective, we did a lot of underground parties and at our undergrounds you’d have about 400 or 500 hundred people come out and then every weekend or every other weekend we’d participate with about 4 or 5 other crews to do masses and we’d have 4 or 5 thousand heads every weekend! Yeah, that was the rave scene, things are totally different now but I think a lot of it has to do with business in general and how serious to take things. I think sometimes out here people tend to take things maybe a little too serious or not serious enough. You just have to realize what arena you’re playing in. I don’t want to send out any negativity at all, that bulletin I sent out, when I do put things out there to kinda irk people a little bit it's just to push them in the right direction.
CT: What are you working on now?
DL: Right now I’m working on an album of all my produced songs. It’s probably about 75% complete right now so in the next couple of weeks I hope to finish it and have it released on Kompute Music or a sub-label. It’s gonna feature myself doing vocals, my own beats along with a couple remixed tracks, something that’s still a work in progress. I’m still DJing. Also I’ve been spending my time on a community arts space where I live. We have a gigantic, 7000 square foot loft right on the west end of Wicker Park that is been going pretty good. We’ve had a couple of events here, got in trouble with cops (laughs).
CT: It’s ain’t a real event unless you get into trouble with the cops!
DL: We’re gonna start planning a couple more after-parties, a couple of plays will be done here. We do photo shoots here, we do music videos here. We do all sorts of things here.
CT: How does the writing process go for you? Do you start with a beat?
DL: I usually start with a beat then try to gather some inspiration from my life at that point in time to write the song around. It really changes depending on the track. Sometimes inspiration is right there and I can finish the track in a day. Other times I am working on it and I get stuck and I can’t finish it for months.
CT: Are you an instrumentalist?
DL: Yeah, I grew up in violin lessons and I learned the piano, guitar, trumpet and stuff like that. I’m a computer guy so I love working with electronics, machines. A lot of my work is sample-based so I just take a lot of samples out of the real world and then process them and compose them into an electronic song. I just love beats and sound, big bass and exotic vocals.
CT: Any last words?
DL: There’s a question everybody has to ask themselves, how serious am I going to take this? If you really want to become gung-ho about it, really get serious about it then get serious about it. But if you’re just in it for the fun, enjoy yourself! You don’t have to take it too serious because it’s stressful to take it too serious. Just enjoy what you got, appreciate everything that comes your way and you will love every moment of it.
