“I remember when I was 14, in the car with my father who is a musician. I was singing along to something on the radio, and he said, “You’re singing is really good…but you’re a bit flat.” I was like, “Flat? What does that mean?” Even since then, I’ve known that I’m not a profound vocalist. But I make music where it’s more about me just fitting within the soundscape of the whole song rather than trying to stand apart from it.” [link]

by Matthew Styles, celebrating Zanzibar, 1993.

memorials

“I felt the label was really big—even though we never really got as huge a hype as other labels in the press. I always thought we were…not underrated… but maybe for what we’d been doing—and for how long we’d been doing it… Maybe it’s our personality. Because we weren’t outgoing. But sometimes you think it’s a bit funny why some labels after two years become a cover story and be like “The Label” or whatever. In a way I think it’s good not to be this kind of label. Like, it’s another way of saying it’s over for a lot of people. I’ve always wanted to be, not different, but I also don’t want to be part of big movement. When I see there is something coming up like the minimal hype or something like this, even though I pick up some of the records, I never understood why people only focus on this one new thing. I always try to go around it, and do something different.” [link]

“When I got to play [in Japan] first, in 1996, I was so blown away. I had not done that many gigs outside of England. And the Japan trip was really due to Jeff Mills using two tracks on his Liquid Room mix, which was obviously massive over there. It really blew my mind, in terms of things like food. Before that, I had this really English idea that “food is something that keeps you alive.” Over there, I discovered the sensuality of food and so many other things.” [link]

In July 2010, I interviewed Plastikman for Groove Magazine. They published a German version of the chat in their September / October issue. Here’s the unedited transcript in English of our exchange.

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“At that point, there wasn’t a lot of good music coming out in my opinion. And we were always thinking that maybe we should do a more US house-inspired sound and bring it down here [to Frankfurt]. Playhouse, at that time, was going in a different way. They didn’t have so much contact with the US anymore. There were a few labels doing this, but not so many. Philpot, Mujaba. So I was thinking I’ll do my own stuff, I have some friends doing music and I want to bring this US house sound. Many German labels have their own artists. They have their friends, but nothing else—’nobody else can release on my label.’ That’s it! They have like this, like, cocoon. [laughs] ” [link]

slack

“A lot of the time when I was buying stuff, I found maybe one track on a record with four tracks that I liked and the other ones were like, ‘Hmm, OK. But…’ Sometimes I bought a record for the single, but I wanted to make a label with four good playable tracks. That was the whole idea. I wanted to be able to play every single track on every single release that I put out. I thought, ‘This is going to be a label purely for DJs, I’m not going to be too pretentious about it, I’m not going to write “save the world” slogans on it, it’s just going to be what it is—well-crafted DJ tools.’” [link]