Thu, 03 Nov 2011  /  Post a comment

Tue, 30 Nov 2010  /  Post a comment
Smallville21 by Smallpeople & Rau "Meadows EP" is a collaboration between Smallpeople aka Julius Steinhoff, founder of the Smallville recordshop/label, his companion Just von Ahlefeld aka Dionne and their new discovered artist/friend Christopher Rau, also known as Hamburgs deephouse wunderkind. Today the guys sit in for another session of "How We Did It" and talk about their latest smash hits:

"Meadows"
Actually there was never a real planned intention to produce a record together until the day we got a call by our alumni Christopher Rau, who asked us to come by at his studio to check out his new synth he found at his grandfathers basement.

This instrument wasn t just a simple product of Japanese craftsmanship, it was more the child of a former Bavarian radar technician who worked for the European space agency in the 70s.
In his freetime he completed this beauty which was forgotten after he lost interest in Stockhausen and other experimental music. Because of the long period of time this thing slept in this dark basement, we gave it a name: we call it "the Mole".

The rainy weather in the beginning of this summer gave us the opportunity to work the hell out of this machine. One day we got a visit by Julius’ mother which didn t only provide us with cookies and tea, but no she surprised us with her skills on the piano when she wanted to check out the synth herself.
Without her knowing, we recorded this incredible jam and tried to bring it to full complexity in one session being high on her cookies and tea.

The good thing was our candid approach to this stuff, without having this or that style in mind. We first got aware of the magic of this song when we played it the first time on several outside gigs over the summer.

"Life Aquatic"
Because of the roughness and the approach to create an atmosphere with a minimal instrumental effort, we decided to do an answer to meadows on the flipside.
We got back to the studio while it was still very hot, with the intention to preserve this summer madness for the coming and feared fall season.
On one of our trips through the countryside we got lost and had the bad luck to sleep in a barn, but took the opportunity to collect various sound samples of animals sleeping besides us and other strange noises that scared us, which later found its place in this track. This time we started only with the beatsection, which came from a borrowed TR-707 that looked like a piece of crap and a kickdrum by a magical Manfred Fricke machine.
Sweating like swiss cheese in the studio we didn t realized how we projected the craving for dipping into a cool ocean on to our music.

In the end the the conclusion of this record is a lot of knowledge of how far you can get without being too focused on classical genres in the beginning of a project and earning the experience of how you get there….