33/45

Born in Iran, raised in Rotterdam, Moody Mehran is a one of a kind deejay and a wonderful personality. Being a part of the Triphouse Rotterdam collective has been a great influence on both his musical taste and his record collection. Nowadays he resides in Amsterdam, where plays most of his house-heavy dj-sets. We’re happy to have him mix the seventh podcast in our series. He delivers a lovely mix filled with house bangers and Chicago inspired moods.

Mehran grew up in Rotterdam and by the time he was sixteen, he was spending most of his time in its underground party scene. Mehran: “Almost all my friends were deejays and they were playing around town a lot. I was actually the only one of my friends who didn’t play records. I think that was because I wasn’t really fond of the predominant genres that were being played. It was mostly tech-house and minimal. I was more into old school house, vocals and banging drum patterns.” It was an older boy next door who introduced Mehran to house music when he was young. “He used to go to Parkzicht a lot, which was the place were Rotterdam got to know about house and early hardcore stuff. He had al these tapes from back in those days and we would listen to them. After a while he gave it all to me”, Mehran continues. “But there wasn’t really a big scene for that kind of music in Rotterdam anymore, so I would go to a lot of hardcore parties, like Decibel, where they had the ‘1192is4you’ stage. There they would play Detroit, Chicago and early house stuff. Old-school bangers.”

What do you do when there isn’t any night where you can dance to you’re favourite music? Well, you host one yourself, which is exactly what Mehran did: “I started doing parties in Rotterdam where I could invite deejays that would play more of the music I liked. Not long after, I started doing the events for Triphouse Rotterdam as well.” After working at Triphouse for a while and already buying a few records there, Mehran decided to start deejaying as well. “I noticed that Amsterdam there were a lot more parties where they would play my music and I always had a passion for digging records. I started mixing vinyl at Khalil’s (one of the owners of Triphouse, red.) house, because he had turntables. He had to listen all of my train wrecks though, day after day, haha!”

Music is an important part of the Iranian culture and the love Mehran has for it definitely comes from growing up with it. “My father listens to Iranian music all the time. It’s because it’s part of the culture. When you have family or friends over for a visit, it’s not uncommon to put on music and have a dance in the living room”, says Mehran. “I really try to get to know everything about the Iranian culture, find out about my roots and the music that belongs to it. I’ve been digging for Iranian and (Middle-)Eastern music a lot lately” If possible, Mehran wants to make a trip to Iran every year, also the check out the local scene. There aren’t any clubs to go to though, because they’re currently illegal. Mehran: “The scene in general is very undeveloped. Every now and then there is a small, secret party hosted by locals, but the government doesn’t know about those. Clubs are virtually non-existent and if you want to buy records, there’s sometimes a box of 7-inches lying in a shop that sells remote controls and satellite-dishes. It is getting better and better though, so I’m really curious to see where it’s going the next few years.”

Philou Louzolo has been making a lot of waves lately with extraordinary out-of-the-box dj sets, filled with African beats, funky disco, old school house and freaky grooves. He has released music on TINK! Music, Bons Records and Lazare Hoche and is part of a collective of African creatives called The Alkebulan.
 For our 33/45 podcast series he delivers a mix packed with house gems from all over the place. It contains soulful vocals, grimy acid and playful as well as deeper tracks.

An interview with Philou needed to be done over Skype, as he’s staying in Zeeland during the summer, near his hometown of Burgh-Haamstede. “I live in Rotterdam nowadays, but I grew up here in Zeeland. In the summer I come back here and stay for a few weeks to relax and make music. I can do a lot of the creative process here and then mix it all together in a studio in Rotterdam.” Philou says. 
Being raised here by his Dutch grandmother, while his African family is still living in Congo, his love for soul, disco and African music comes totally from his own discovery. Philou: “My grandmother listens a lot to Bach and Mozart, which I can also very much appreciate. But when you start growing older, you really want to try to figure out your own identity, you know? I wanted to get to know my roots and with that came the music that belonged to it as well. For instance, I got to know Fela Kuti through his ideas and revolutionary way of thinking. It was only later that I learned he also made great music.”

The good thing about living in Burgh-Haamstede though, is that it’s close to Renesse, a place that turns in to one big party during summer. Philou: “I started working at a bar in Renesse when I was a teenager. The resident that was always playing there made me want to deejay as well. So with his help, I went from runner to bartender to a resident deejay. He taught me almost everything there was to know about it, also music wise. While we we’re playing cheesy pop hits at the bar, he got me into house music as well.” By that time, going out in Amsterdam or Rotterdam in the weekends got Philou more and more in to house music, starting out with latin and dirty house parties. “Nope is Dope, Sneakerz, these kind of nights. It kind of took its course from there on out. I was discovering Kerri Chandler stuff, visiting the Catwalk in Rotterdam, started listening to more deep house, you go from one thing to the other pretty fast.”

The bigger part of Philou’s record collection consists of disco, afro and soul. For a reason though: “I started buying vinyl because I discovered tracks that just weren’t available in digital format. Most of the house records I could just buy online, but that’s not the case for the African records. My first record was in fact a compilation of African music that contained one track in particular that I had to have, but couldn’t find digitally. That’s actually the main reason I buy vinyl, out of a necessity, tracks that I can’t get a hold of in any other way.”

In the sets you hear from him nowadays, Philou combines the house he discovered through the bar and by going to clubs, with the African, disco and soul he learned about all by himself. Philou: “I always try to combine the two in my sets, it’s part of my personality. Sometimes it’s more housey, sometimes more afro and disco. But with this podcast I definitely wanted to show my love for house.”

Boye is a type of deejay that’s not easy to find anymore these days. Being a true collector, he plays his music to let other people listen to what he has discovered. It’s a genuine way of expressing himself. And having worked at Kindred Spirits and Rush Hour for more than eight years, his knowledge of music from all genres and corners of the world is quite extensive. Nowadays, Boye is one of the programmers at Paradiso, but he also has a steady flow of very nice gigs in Amsterdam, as well as in other parts of The Netherlands. His podcast contains all sorts of tracks, ranging from wave to funk to boogie and from disco to house. It’s a great addition to our podcast series.

Boye bought his first records when he was 13 years old, at his local record shop in Zoetermeer. Boye: “The place was called BPM Dance, I bought my first house records there. Internet was still somewhat absent, I was too young to attend proper parties and there was no real music scene in a place like Zoetermeer, so the main and only sources of music were the radio and TMF / MTV. At the record store I could find stuff that was more appealing to me, something different to listen to. After a while I had about a crate full of records, which was already worth quite a lot for a kid of my age.” But it didn’t really take long for Boye to dig a little deeper and find out about other genres, shops and places. “A couple of years later my love for hip-hop kind of grew simultaneously with the love for house. I already bought quite a few hip-hop records online, through this German website. But then a friend of mine introduced me to Fat Beats, a former Hip Hop based record store in Amsterdam, and later on also Rush Hour. So every now and then I would travel to Amsterdam to buy more records.”

Boye discovered all his genres, artists and records in a very organic way. It really went from one genre or artist to the other. Boye: “Getting into hiphop also made me check out the samples, which allowed me to get an overview of the standard rare grooves. Those rare grooves got me checking out more jazz and disco, which eventually brought me back to house from Detroit and Chicago. When I heard Theo Parrish play about 10 years ago, all of a sudden all those worlds came together. Going from the standard rare grooves, looking up the producers and finding other records, to rare stuff also gives you another way of approaching your dj-set I guess.  Nowadays guys who play disco for 2 years already drop various rare tunes, but somehow they don’t know a lot of the classics. That’s the main influence of internet, it allows you to accumulate a lot of rare tracks in a short period, but the road to those rare tracks is very different from the way how I was always used of doing it. I started out with listening to all the widely available Prelude, West End and TK Disco records for instance. After which you dig deeper and deeper and end up with rare records. Currently a lot of the younger dj’s don’t even know all those standard tunes, which is not bad in a sense, but it leaves out a lot of the context I think. Some house tracks are by many considered ‘not done’ because they are overplayed, somehow this doesn’t apply to disco, simply because a lot of the younger DJ’s don’t know the context of a track in terms of availability or rotation. For instance Midas Touch by Midnight Star is almost as ‘credible’ as a weird lo-fi PPU tune.”

By the time Boye was introduced to the Rush Hour family and started working together with the likes of Antal and KC The Funkaholic, things really took off. Boye: “I needed to do a internship for the education that I was doing, so I got one at Kindred Spirits. It was in the same office as Rush Hour. In the end I stayed in that office for more than eight years, working for both companies. With all these people around me, I really learned a lot about all kinds of music. I would go record digging in Paris with them for a day and Antal or KC would hand me all these records to check out. That really sped up the learning process, haha!”

You might know Juri Miralles as one half of KERK!, as programmer of the wonderful Disco Dolly or maybe even as the label manager at Tom Trago's Voyage Direct. So handing over the decks to him for our fourth podcast was easy, as we know he always delivers. A very funky podcast that contains some great boogie and disco tracks as well as a lovely selection of house records. And of course, Juri blends them together perfectly in an hour of bliss!

If we would sum up all the music-orientated projects Juri is involved in, you would wonder where he finds the time to do it all. Next to his jobs at Disco Dolly and Voyage Direct, Juri has also been playing records with Robert Mulder as the deejay duo KERK! for over seven years. And then there is also the occasional set he plays with one of his other friends. “Or, as I like to call them, my DJ bromances, haha!” Juri says.

Through all the tracks Juri used in the podcast, you can hear a lot of these different ideas and projects. Juri: “I think that a podcast should be something you listen to at home and that it doesn’t need to be filled with club bangers. I always try to come up with a theme and with this one I wanted to create something warm and summery. I used a lot of new music that I recently discovered through Disco Dolly and Voyage Direct.”

“I try to always look for records that are a bit freaky and weird, you might be able to hear it in the mix.” Juri continues. He always had this admiration for that kind of music, starting at the first records he bought, which was mostly dubstep. Juri: “Back in 2006, I was listening a lot of dubstep, mostly at Sonic Warfare parties. I kind of got there through hip-hop. But almost none of the music they played was available to download online, so I started buying all these dubstep records. Not for deejaying, but just to listen to”, Juri says. “I listened to them at work. I worked for a photographer who used to be a deejay, so he had two turntables and a mixer at the studio. But after a while, I also tried to mix a few of my records together. It didn’t really go that well, but with the help of a few YouTube tutorials and a lot of practice, I got there eventually.”

After meeting Robert a few years later, around 2008, they decided to start deejaying together. Starting out with minimal and tech-house, they both got in to other genres along the way, like house, disco and funk. “I always buy records that have a feel to it that I can relate to. I then know I can definitely play it somewhere. Most of it I buy online, through decks.de. They have a lot of freaky and less-known stuff, interesting little white labels and such. For disco and funk I really like the selection Rush Hour has. There I often end up buying disco from the 80’s. They tend to be a bit more synth heavy and italo like.”

For the next instalment in our podcast series, we hand over the decks to Maxi Mill. You might know him for his excellent releases on Voyage Direct or Rush Hour, but Maxim is also a very talented dj. Just like his productions, his sets are filled with futuristic house and techno beats that have a very spacious, warm and analogue sound. But this podcast shows Maxim’s love for the music he grew up with and has been collecting ever since. A great selection of disco, funk and boogie that’s a joy to listen to.

In his early days as a deejay, Maxim was mostly playing hip-hop: “I used to come to Fat Beats, Amsterdam’s best record shop for hip-hop and sorts. I was only 13 when I listened to my first records there.” Being around so much music at such a young age, Maxim slowly built himself a nice collection of records of all kinds of genres.

The name David Cornelissen definitely might ring a bell for you. David has been playing a lot of dj sets in Amsterdam in the last year, including a very nice one in Trouw’s de Natte Cel, and he has also been part of Nuno dos Santos’ Something Happening Somewhere (SoHaSo) label. Nowadays he’s working for another great Dutch platform, named Dekmantel. So for our second podcast we invited this great guy and he delivered a bit over eighty minutes of forward thinking, synth heavy house with italo and disco influences.

David had only really started dj’ing about three years ago. David: “Up until then I was definitely interested in it, but let’s not count those years. When Nuno dos Santos, who is a good friend, asked me to help him out with his SoHaSo label I started doing a few warmups at label nights. That’s when it started out for me as a dj.” Through SoHaSo, David slowly started to find out what he wanted to play and what kind of music he liked: “I would discover a lot of music through the label, but I found out along the way that I was interested in stuff that was a little bit more raw and edgy then the music we were releasing. When I left SoHaSo a while later, leaving Nuno to really do his own thing, I was able to let go of the music from the label and find a nice middle ground in what I wanted to play.”

Through is current job at Dekmantel, David gets in touch with even more music. “It makes my dj sets quite diverse and definitely a lot more grown up”, he says. “And now that my position at Dekmantel is steady enough, I can focus more on dj’ing than before. I try to stay on top of the music that I like, so that I know what’s coming out every week. And when I know what I want to have, I go get it at one of the different stores, like Rush Hour or Clone, or buy it online at Phonica for example.” 
David doesn’t really have a very big physical record collection yet, but in this way, it’s growing very steady every month. “I’m just very much in to new music”, David says. “I want to be able to play a record that I like about three or four times. After that, I almost always want to move on to newer interesting music. That’s actually quite a challenge, because it forces me to add new music to my set very often, haha!”

For the start of our podcast series, we were keen to find an artist that would perfectlymatch our thoughts about music and our vision on what we want 33/45 to be. Ever since moving from sunny Sydney, Australia to Amsterdam (about five years ago), Max Aybsmal experienced a musical journey like no other. Inspired by all the different sounds the Amsterdam nightlife holds, Max has been making waves as a dj that can amaze you with very versatile sets and weird, exciting records. As such, we’re happy to have him do our debut podcast, which contains house, acid, African beats, disco and more. It’s deep and trippy and it will catch you by surprise.

Max has always been a big music lover, but back home in Sydney there wasn’t really that much choice. “Ever since I was very young, like six years old, I knew my life would be about music and art”, Max tells us. “But in Sydney my friends and I mostly listened to pop, rock and some hip-hop. And if we would hear electronic music, it was always dubstep. The dubstep scene in Sydney was huge, you’d hear it in every club.” His first introduction to house music was through his father. Max: “I think my father was the only guy in Australia who liked house music. I used to ride my motorcycle and took his iPod with me. There were all these weird African house grooves on it. I didn’t actually know what it was, but I enjoyed it very much. My friends didn’t understand me though. They weren’t in to it at all.”

After moving to Amsterdam, it didn’t really take long for Max to completely fall in love with house. Max: “The Amsterdam nightlife had a very different vibe. People were enjoying themselves a lot more, compared to Australian night life. House music was, and still is, everywhere. I really felt it. It made me emotional listening to it.” A period of heavy house record collecting followed. Max sometimes even skipped dinner just to buy new records. “I went to Rush Hour almost non-stop. And at Clone I bought everything online, because shipping costs were cheaper than a train ticket to Rotterdam.”