“I make music that I enjoy the most. It’s really all about me; I basically just make music for myself. Call me selfish… but if people dig it, that’s cool. I don’t try to fucking cater to anybody.”
So I’m hanging out at the Rivoli over a few pints of Amsterdam Blond with Toronto’s DJ Hemingway and filmmaker Marshall Lau, when the eccentric electro-house wiz with an unapologetic shrug unloads this nugget of brute honesty upon me. I love it. Sometimes I find that a lot of musicians are not unlike hockey players when it comes to interviews – no one wants to offend anyone or sound like a prick so I’m stuck trying to figure something interesting to make of the usual “We just want to go out there and give it 110%, everyone’s working really hard and the other team’s putting up a good fight. We’re just going hard, trying to get some pucks at the net and see what happens you know?”. When someone is ballsy enough to just say “Whatever!” it is always both baffling and refreshing.
Hemingway, (real name James Harris) the freakishly tall, freakishly gifted electronic producer is hardly a household name, but he is however at the forefront of a musical movement that is taking place all over the world on the internet: his music is distributed and shared through the wide influence of the Blogosphere. This is very interesting as it gives him a unique take on the independent music world’s dependence on local scenes because he is extremely detached from these spheres of influence; although Hemingway calls Toronto home, he does not especially consider himself to be a part of the Toronto music scene.
“Yeah, I'm more a part of what I guess you’d call the ‘Blog Scene’, or the ‘Myspace Scene’” he says aloofly, airily, downing his pint, “Myspace I just really got hooked on, because there’s all these underground artists who are all trying to become the next Daft Punk. And a lot of it is shit, I’m not going to lie, there’s a lot of shit music out there; but there’s some really interesting people there too… I’ve recently just become obsessed with music blogs.”
He elaborates, “Basically labels will ask a bunch of producers - a lot of them bedroom producers like myself who’ve kind of worked their way up –they’ll ask them to remix singles for indie-rock bands, or even really obscure stuff like old covers of fucking Roxy Music. These remixes end up getting all of this hype from blogs and there’s this thing called The Hype Machine which basically takes all of the music blogs and plays all of their hits; they even have a chart system in place. So you can see what people are listening to, what’s getting played in the underground and it’s really just a different scene than the whole mainstream radio thing. I think it’s starting to take over radio, in a way. You post something and if it gets picked up by a blog, a lot of other blogs will basically try to get themselves out there by picking up on that and it just spreads like a viral video. It’s a different way for underground, unsigned artists to get their shit out there to the masses.”
The Blogosphere and its digital snowball effect is clearly becoming a greater force in the music industry as this is where the sheepish, mild-mannered Hemingway is unbeknownst to most, gaining a fairly substantial following with both his remixes and his own electro-house originals. The unassuming twenty-one year old was recently contacted himself by Atlantic records to produce a remix of the song “Rich Girls” by New York indie-rockers, The Virgins and though his French-House inspired reworking of that song has only hit the blogs barely a week ago, it has already garnered him a lot of praise. I was invited to check out The Virgins’ show at The El Mocambo with Hemingway, but after we were rebuffed for not having tickets to the sold out event, we were obliged to grab a couple of pints at the Rivoli where I was given greater enlightenment into the scope and power of the Blogosphere and of remixes, a world that I found myself to be surprisingly in the dark about.
“There’s a lot of remixers that I’m really, really obsessed with: this guy, Breakbot, who’s this dude that looks like a homeless person, pretty much. But this guy makes the most danceable, catchiest songs and every remix that he’s done has been a million times better than the original, which I completely respect… Also this kid Shazam from Australia. He’s two years younger than I am (21) and he’s making a shitload of money doing remixes and his production is insane; I’m obsessed with this kid… I’m just obsessed with remixes and the whole concept of remixes. You have this source material, and it could be complete shit and it’s basically up to these musicians to turn it into gold and I’ve heard a lot of remixes where I just hate the original. It’s like this new kind of art form where you listen to the original and you listen to the remix and you compare; the really good remixers just create entirely new songs out of the bits and pieces, some of them just work the vocals, others will work with the main hook, but it’s the ones that can actually put it in an entirely different context that I really respect.”
I personally hadn’t especially thought of remixing as being such a sophisticated art-form and hardly considered the remixing culture as a whole. Really, I suppose it runs along the same lines as other electronic media such as digital poetics with its found sound aesthetic; it is a fascinating medium and one that few seem to know much about. As for Hemingway, his recent projects include an upcoming remix of a song by German producer Justin Faust, as well as self-releasing and EP of his own excessively-danceable original tunes. You can catch Hemingway (who also records under the moniker Kid Terrace) on his myspace, or visit a blog near you.
