Alex Smoke: A walking contradiction
His music might be moody, but the Scottish technoist is anything but. RA checks in with a cheerful Alex Smoke.
Like Disneyland, sometimes the darkest places on earth are the ones where there’s never anything but smiles – or so says Alex Smoke. “If you meet people who listen to incessantly happy music, you’ll find that they’re usually pretty sad people,” he says. If he’s on the money, then shrinks’ waiting rooms should be swollen with J-pop starlets, ‘uplifting house’ vocalists and happy hardcore DJs. Now there’s an idea for a reality TV show.
Given the gloom that Smoke’s work repeatedly conjures, you’d imagine the music would be reflected in the man making it, but as a matter of fact, Alex Smoke is a frank burst of sunshine. “People who haven’t met me who’ve just listened to my music probably think I’m a miserable bastard,” he confesses. “But I’m alright really. I’m not as miserable as people think I am.”
Yet Alex Smoke’s music is a moody beast, full of brittle drums, cold pads and upbuilding arpeggios that drive at your ears like sudden storms. His 2006 album ‘Paradolia’ was a seventy-four minute exploration of the darker side of deep – an incredibly accomplished piece of work, but one that seemed to prove that techno is a lonely hunter indeed. It’s something that draws me both to Smoke and the deeper end of techno – the way the music explores the darker recesses of the human psyche armed with nothing more than kicks, claps, pads and stabs. With the best works in the genre, we’ve discovered a way of synthesising these feelings in sound, and it’s a sadscape that Smoke has no difficulty drawing out of his machines. If ‘Paradolia’ is the human skill for perceiving patterns in the apparently random, then Alex’s particular imagination is about drawing the darker parts around us into a convincingly menacing whole.
“People who haven’t met me who’ve just listened to my music probably think I’m a miserable bastard. But I’m alright really.”
But the reality of Alex Smoke, aka Alex Menzies (the man behind the persona behind the music), seems extremely balanced – someone who gets it all off their chest and into their laptop. Growing up under bleak Scottish skies would be enough to depress anybody, but Alex’s supportive upbringing and musical background gave him the balance he needed, as well as providing a decisive influence on his sound signature. “I've been brought up on a lot of music that builds to a climax and has a feeling of structure, so I naturally tend to replicate that. And also the fact that I'm creating layers of parts, one after the other and when they’re put together over the course of a track they naturally create a sense of direction.”
Both Alex’s parents are heavily involved in classical music, and the man himself also had lessons when he was a wee lad. You’d have to wonder whether mum and dad approve of all this messing about with beats and bleeps, but Smoke has no such problems with parental approval – he’s even managed to make his dad jiggle. “My parents understand the production side more, because that makes more sense to them. The DJing, they’re just not that bothered. To them, playing other people’s records, it’s just not that big a deal. But, you know, they kind of understand. If their friends ask them what I do, they wouldn’t really know what to say, they’d probably just say ‘music’. But yeah, they’re cool, they understand… There’s been times that my mother’s told me about where she’d come home and dad was playing some of my music really loudly on the hi-fi. I thought that was good, you know? They probably didn’t like most of it, but you know, I’m glad they’re trying.”
If it was the recent ‘Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi’ mix getting a rinse at Mum and Dad’s, the particular kinds of Smoke emitted would be thick, dark, and dense. It was a compilation that favoured precious deep techno cuts like classics from Radiance, Model 500 and Aril Brikha, a few new favourites like Gaiser’s remix of ‘25 Bitches’ and the Ghost Dog sampling dubstep of Burial’s ‘Gutted’. The overall effect was either enervating or cathartic, depending on your point of view, and played much more like a collection of favourites strung together for a friend than a calling card for a DJ in search of peaktime slots. In another recent interview, Smoke conceded he thought he’d get a lot of stick from the press over the mix. When I pushed him on it, he told me, with typical candour, “It's not a club mix and I wasn't entirely happy with the flow of it... it's simply the kind of things I'd like to listen to.”
This philosophical approach is also manifest in Smoke’s ambitions and accomplishments as a DJ. “I’m a producer and I like to DJ, but I’m happier producing. I don’t think of DJing as my primary thing. I wouldn’t try and push my DJing beyond a certain point.” Even Smoke’s sometimes sizzling live performances are still far from where he’d ideally like to take them. “I literally just use Live. I've got an X-Session controller with lots of knobs, and that's it. The drums are all samples from track sessions, with the various parts bounced down separately for maximum flexibility… To be honest I feel a bit guilty doing that, because I’d like to actually do a bit more, so I’m looking into making it more involving.”
"My parents understand the production side more, because that makes more sense to them. The DJing, they’re just not that bothered."
But when it comes to composing, it’s an entirely different matter. “I take my music quite seriously and I want to represent myself as well as possible,” he emphasises. A little intense perhaps? But Smoke keeps his beast locked in the studio. “I'm really only a control freak in the work sense, in that I prefer to work alone and do all my own stuff.” And what goes on behind these closed doors is between him and his beast. “If I’ve got a particular melodic idea then sometimes I’ll start off with that, but otherwise I’ll just start off by trying to make the most crazy noise I can and really fuck around with things until I find something interesting, and let one thing suggest itself after another,” he explains. “I love the blank canvas, when every option is open to you and you can start with an idea as abstract as you like. Slowly but surely you rein it in and the idea becomes more concrete, until you reach completion. In general, each new part added suggests the next part. I can normally hear in my head what I want to happen next.... the kind of timbre, the duration of the notes, the complexity of the pattern and so forth...”
Back in the ‘real world’, Smoke has also been working on two other, quite different, projects – a hip-hop album, which is in search of a publisher, and a classical piece, commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council to celebrate the mapping of the human genome, of all things. The genome piece is an undertaking he’s excited, if daunted by: “There are twelve scientists and an artist who are also involved in presenting the various aspects of the work and research to the public, and I'm doing a piece to be played at a concert the same day.” In a change of pace, the piece is a straight classical composition for twelve instruments, and is a totally new challenge for Smoke. “It’s certainly harder to do than computer music because it involves working to the strengths of the various instruments, and really thinking about the concept you’re trying to convey.” It seems oddly fitting that a man who makes such desperately dark techno is composing a celebratory classical piece. Maybe Smoke’s happiness is in the genes.
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