#alan oldham

DJ T-1000 kicks off the summer with The Spectral Fusion EP. More than a year ago, he released Don't Complain, Don't Explain EP, which moved bodies with its bottomless drums and savage synths. The current EP intensifies the dance mania with frenetic energy and subterranean swagger. The four-track flood of rhythm has an inspirational debut to T-1000's early love of Lenny White and John Scofield's jazz fusion classics Streamline and Blue Matter. The former is reconsidered as a techno-funk trek replete with racing cymbals, handclaps and resounding drums. The latter's harmony is a starting point in the tribute which rattles and hums along before rising into a mini cyclone of pummeling beats. Finally, T-1000 takes  the World Economic Forum's once-a-year meeting in Switzerland with the electro jam "The Luciferians." The Spectral Fusion EP is available via Bandcamp and all streaming platforms. The DJ/producer/visual artist is making his global rounds taking techno on the road as usual and the dates are below. 

LBA K7 [050-A] feat. Alan Oldham, Ludovic Navarre, Stephen Brown...

In France, each town has got its theatre. Each french theatre has got its Café. Warm up recorded @ Le Café du Théâtre in Belfort, Fr / winter of 1996, snowing a lot !

Alan Oldham is what society now calls a multi-hyphenate, but in times past, the term was Renaissance man.

For the past three decades plus, he has been an innovative purveyor of electronic music and a comic book writer and artist extraordinaire. Oldham started his trek as an eclectic art fan during the ‘80s in his Detroit hometown. He combined his love of the German Expressionist movement in film, the clean lines of Art Deco-inspired objects and more to start writing the narrative and visuals for his characters. The first major result was his trench coat-laden hero JOHNNY GAMBIT. Oldham hit paydirt and was signed to Hot Comics out of Chicago in 1986. The company folded soon after and the character would have two more issues published in 1987-88 by Detroit’s Eclectic Press.

Oldham did not have any time to think about the next move for JOHNNY GAMBIT because he was busy creating the cover art for the first Detroit Techno releases from childhood friends like Derrick May and Juan Atkins. These same friends also supplied him with music for his influential Fast Forward radio show being broadcast on WDET. This writer remembers listening to Oldham play Detroit Techno, house music and industrial in the early morning hours as listeners would call in and get an education on the new sounds that have laid the foundation for today’s myriad of electronic artists. He also worked as a DJ for Mike Banks’ sci-fi and funk-dipped techno crew Underground Resistance. As the ‘90s moved on Oldham started making his own music and founded the Generator and Pure Sonik labels.

Today, Oldham is just as excited about creating as he was years ago. A current resident of Berlin, he still travels the world as a DJ and has had art exhibitions in several countries. He is having a rebirth of sorts with JOHNNY GAMBIT and a Kickstarter relaunch. The new graphic novel is bringing GAMBIT back with a remastered 2 CD set. I spoke with Oldham last month shortly after his set at the Charivari Music Festival in Detroit. We talked about GAMBIT, the early days of Detroit Techno, and what it is about the city that drove him to greatness among his many other career-defining moments.

“It just motivates you to push further so that’s one thing about Detroit. It’s not an easy place. No one’s going to pat you on the back and tell you good job. If anything, they will shit on you. So, it motivates you to push forward, to push internationally and outside of the city.“

How did you decide to bring Johnny Gambit back now?

I’d been working on the book for almost 15 years now. I started it in 2007 and it’s been kind of in the back of my mind to bring back JOHNNY. We did a run in the ‘80s and I didn’t get a chance to finish the original story because my publisher(s) went out of business and then time went by so I thought I’d just reboot it completely.

What was your original inspiration for the character?

Well, that’s a really good question. JOHNNY GAMBIT is basically the kitchen sink character for everything I liked at the time; Japanese animation, Japanese Manga, “Miami Vice,” “Love & Rockets,” the movie “Metropolis” by Fritz Lang, Art Deco design, prototype cars that were never made, and there was a comic back in the ‘80s called “Mister X” that was a huge influence.

I saw where Marvel later came out with the character in “Uncanny X-Men” #266.

There was a girl, well, woman now, that I met at the old Chicago Con back in ’86, and we became friends. Turns out she worked for Marvel so we stayed in touch. It turned out I was going to New York for my first visit back in ’87 and she invited me up to visit Marvel. That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me ‘cause you got to see the real Mighty Marvel bullpen with your own two eyes. So I got to NYC, went up there and I had a bunch of my old JOHNNY GAMBIT number ones with me and she introduced me to a few of the editors like Archie Goodwin and Carl Potts, and I was just leaving my comic as a calling card.

Fast forward to 1990, I’m at Todd Johnson’s old comic shop in Ferndale, and I notice a character named Gambit with the hair to one side and a trench coat. But they gave him powers and they changed it enough so where you can’t sue them. You know how it is, they take the idea and add just enough to it so they can say hey, we came up with this on our own. But the resemblance was uncanny, no pun intended. So yeah, there’s nothing you can really do about it. At this point, it’s just an interesting story. Read more.

Alan Oldham's Return Of JOHNNY GAMBIT graphic novel is launching with a Kickstarter campaign in September. The Detroit native who currently calls Berlin home is bringing back the character with a double album. JOHNNY GAMBIT debuted in 1986 as a black and white comic published by Hot Comics in Chicago. Two more issues were completed in 1987 by Detroit's Eclectic Press. The character was cited in the first article about Detroit Techno written in The Face magazine in 1987. Oldham took a trip to New York that year and gave promotional copies of JOHNNY GAMBIT #1 to Marvel's editors and three years later a familiar visage with pink hair and a trench coat named Gambit appeared in Uncanny X-Men #266. 

Oldham started making techno music and DJing for Underground Resistance in the early '90s and took on his DJ T-1000 moniker to differentiate between his graphic art and music personas. He also founded the Generator and Pure Sonik labels. He returned to visual art in the mid-2000s and had exhibitions in Detroit, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna and his latest private showing in Kobe,Japan, beginning August 12th. 

The JOHNNY GAMBIT reboot is something Oldham has been working on part-time for the last decade. The sci-fi hero comes to life in 124 B&W pages on high gloss paper and a smooth matte cover. The music to accompany the comic is Oldham's 2009 album and a 2012 compilation of music inspired by the character from Blaktony (Aux 88), FBK, Nino Sebelic and more. 

The pre-launch page is live now and there will be more bonuses added to the various tiers. Sign-up for more updates and the full campaign that officially starts on September 5th below. Oldham will also play a live DJ set at his hometown's 9th annual Charivari Detroit Music Festival on August 12th. 

Kickstarter Page 

Techno veteran DJ T-1000's Prisma EP is brief dancefloor sustenance. The two-song EP's lasting grooves and unapologetic hardness boasts his pedigree as one of Detroit's early champions of the genre. The title track sets the heart of beat above 140 BPMs which is then flanked by murky synths, feathery cymbals and pierced with a digital woodblock. "Glitch Behavior" rattles speakers with its volcanic beats before the entrance of serene intermittent keys incites a tinderbox of moving bodies. T-1000's techno lesson proves that after 3 decades he still has something to say in 2021.

The Prisma EP is available via the Sound Of Berlin which is named after the city T-1000 aka Alan Oldham relocated to in 2005. When the DJ and producer isn't making music and DJing around the world he continues to work as a graphic designer. He recently had a sold-out show of his drawings and paintings in Amsterdam. The journey that started with him self-publishing his Johnny Gambit comic book in the '80s, creating artwork for the city's techno luminaries, hosting an influential public radio show and then recording his own music is still in effect. Listen to the Prisma EP and let it crunch your stress limb by limb.

Alan Oldham is just that – a forward thinking futurist and former radio jockey whose work has long fused the not-so-distant worlds of art and music. Creating illustrations under his own name and spinning under the moniker DJ T-1000, Oldham’s status as a sci-fi visionary has made him one of the most unique and important figures to come out of the Detroit techno movement. “Detroit techno, in my view, was originally about futurism,” he says. “Futuristic black music. Look no further than Juan Atkins for that. A lot of old sci-fi movies and TV shows portrayed a future that had no blacks in it. Detroit techno was a statement that black people would be around in the far future. You can also connect Sun Ra and Mothership Connection-era Parliament/Funkadelic to that aesthetic.”

In the tradition of Sun Ra’s Arkestral manuevers and P-Funk’s explorations of funk’s outer limits, Oldham brings forth elements of science fiction, cultural awareness, higher levels of consciousness and even mythology to forge a sensibility from a future state of existence – with nods to realism interwoven. He believes those talents are innate. “I'm a natural,” says Oldham. “I had an art class in high school, but that's about it. I've been drawing since I was born.” His style – sharp, angular, forward and revolutionary – reflects both the evolution of his craft and his consistency. “My style has matured a bit, especially with my move to paintings,” he says. “But essentially, it's the same as it's always been.”