Soulwax

“We don't think of music in terms of genres, it's all music.”

Soulwax

Ahead of their huge Dublin show at the weekend with Kraftwerk and Boxcutter, we present an interview from last year with Soulwax’s Steve Slingeneyer. The band are famed as remix experts, top DJs and as a plain ol’ rock band. Steve explains how they manage to keep all the balls in the air.

Words by Chris Jones

What has Belgium ever done for us, huh? OK, we’ll give them one stone-cold new wave classic in Plastic Bertrand’s jabbering ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’ and the career of leftfield indie stalwarts dEUS, but aside from those honourable exceptions, they really are struggling. Then there’s the fact that the country is commonly considered the most boring in the western world (name five famous Belgians? Go on). Tin Tin is a cultural icon there, for Genk’s sake. Just as well the balance has been redressed somewhat in the last seven years by a pair of unassuming, geeky brothers who are as comfortable with sequencers in their hands as guitars.

Not content with bothering the singles charts in 2000 with songs from their second album Much Against Everyone’s Advice, Soulwax’s Stephen and David Dewaele got busy with vinyl, samplers, an open mind and a whole heap of ingenuity and realised they were really rather marvellous (frequently better, actually) at playing other people’s records. Initially, 2ManyDJs - as they first dubbed themselves after one of their best songs - bubbled under. Their As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt.1 mix is still commercially unavailable but then Pt.2 arrived at the same time as some kind of ‘moment’. Call them mash-ups, bootlegs, or even ‘bastard pop’, but they were everywhere. The Freelance Hellraiser’s inspired coupling of Christina Aguilera’s ‘Genie In A Bottle’ and The Strokes’ ‘Hard To Explain’ (entitled ‘A Stroke Of Genius’) and the Sugababes’ ‘Freak Like Me’ (a cover of a mash-up) were inescapable. Concurrently, Erol Alkan and Rory Phillips were packing London’s students and scenesters into Trash by reminding skinny kids in skinnier jeans that it’s fun to dance. Call it providence, call it being in the right place at the right time, but the Flying Dewaele Brothers (another nom de deck) were onto something.

Now Soulwax are up there with LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk in the pantheon of gentlemen who get parties started, whether Stephen and David are digging the crates, or all four members (adding Steve Slingeneyer and Dave Martijn) are playing live or remixing someone else. Now [November 2007] Soulwax have decided the time is right to collect their highlights thus far. But why a compilation and why now?

“We just wanted to bring it all together,” says Steve. “Some of them are really old, like the Kylie one [‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, a secret track on the Radio Soulwax Pt.2 mix], and there’s also a few new ones. It’s a document of what we’ve done so far, but it’s not an end.”

Just as well, as you will no doubt agree as you watch flailing limbs in the living room of your next house party. The compilation is entitled, with admirable bloody-mindedness and disregard for concision: Most of the remixes we’ve made over the years except for the one for Einsturzende Neubauten because we lost it and a few we didn’t think sounded good enough or just didn’t fit in length-wise. But including some that are hard to find because either people forgot about them or just simply because they haven’t been released yet. A few we really love. One we think is just OK. Some we did for free. Some we did for money. Some just for ourselves without permission and some for friends as swaps but never on time and always at our studio in Ghent.

Or just plain old Most Of The Remixes, if you’re into the whole brevity thing. The two discs, one mixed in a 2ManyDJs fashion, bring together 14 tracks featuring everyone from Robbie Williams and Sugababes to The Gossip and LCD Soundsystem. Never ones to limit themselves to one style, Steve claims the band’s formative years are the cause; that a magpie attitude to music is in their blood.

“There was this great club in Ghent called Boccacio we used to go to in the late Eighties that played a whole mix of stuff - rock, electronic, hip-hop - so we were always surrounded by that and thought it was normal to listen to all kinds of music. It was a great scene at the time.”

It’s a shame this image of cool Belgium never made it over here, but it goes some way to explaining how the Dewaeles and friends became the dons of so-called bastard pop. The band’s first two albums were pretty straightforward indie-rock, but following the emergence of 2ManyDJs it was 2004 before they got round to releasing a third album as Soulwax. Any Minute Now captured the spirit of the time again, as dance-punk had joined the bootleggers in the clubs, and The Rapture, LCD, !!! and the rest were mining the rich seams of post-punk and new wave. Their next release was then inspired by Duran Duran. During their early Eighties heyday, bands would release 12” versions of their tracks to be played in clubs, but these were usually rudimentary mixes. Duran Duran went one further, totally re-recording the tracks and calling them ‘Night Versions’. Soulwax did the same, releasing a seamless, re-recorded club version of Any Minute Now in 2005 called Nite Versions, and then toured it with French electro producer Vitalic in support and 2ManyDJs closing the night. When the tour arrived at the Mandela Hall in Belfast in October that year, it got messy. According to Steve, Nite Versions and the next album point the way forward – the Soulwax dichotomy is well and truly over.

Continued on page 2

Issue #51 - I Told You This Would Be A Good Issue

Featuring Biffy Clyro, Of Montreal, Duke Special, Frightened Rabbit, Cold War Kids, Jay Reatard, Pat Mills, and more.