As far as dance music production teams go, Jono Grant, Tony McGuinness and Paavo Sijamäki – collectively known as Above and Beyond – are in no need of an introduction. As producers, their original tracks and remixes have set the standard for melodic dance music. As DJs, they have toured the world, filling some of its finest venues to capacity. As the minds behind the widely respected Anjunabeats label, they have redefined an entire genre with their uplifting, and intelligent-yet-accessible sound. Most importantly – they’re on their way to Australia. ITM recently caught up with Above and Beyond’s Tony McGuinness to find out more.
ITM: Above and Beyond have certainly made an amazing impression on the global dance music scene over the past few years, with the Anjunabeats label having become something of a household name among dance music fans. Your accolades in recent times are too numerous to mention – but surely it hasn’t always been this way. Was there a particularly pivotal moment, an email, telephone call, or event, at which it became clear ‘wow, we’ve really made it’? How has that changed things?
Tony: That’s an interesting question. One of the real truths of the human condition, I think, is that ever-present self-doubt. It can be very difficult to know when that defining moment is when it’s your own success that you’re trying to evaluate, and it’s easy to deny or rationalise to yourself those indicators of success as just luck or coincidence. I suppose that we’ve only really been truly aware of the scale of our success within the past 3 months. One of the big things is that we’ve had lots of people that we’ve never seen before coming to our regular gigs here in the UK. It’s not just the same faces, but lots of people that have never seen us before, coming forward and saying that they’re big fans. Even at the same venues as we’ve been playing at for years such as Turnmills. Our production of “No One on Earth” was very successful, as was the Essential Mix we did for Radio One that ended up winning Essential Mix of the year, and those have both helped a lot. Despite all of this, we do still get taken by surprise with it all sometimes. There’s a funny story from the last time we were in Melbourne, actually, last December, that might provide a bit of illustration. We were sitting at Melbourne airport after the show, sitting with a fair few international DJs that, in a lot of other places, would be pretty widely recognized – big names, you know, and there’s me sitting there. An airport worker walks out from the kitchen, looks over, comes out past all these other DJs and asks me for an autograph. I look around, and ask if he wants any others as well, and he says to me, “no, that’s fine, just yours thanks”. So yeah, it can be a bit of a surprise at times!
ITM: At a time where it seems many in the dance music industry suggest a move away from uplifting and melodic trance, pointing back to the 99-2000 era as the ‘high point’ of the era, Anjunabeats has planted its flag firmly in melodic trance territory, and in so doing has rallied countless DJs and club-goers to their cause. Care to wade into the genre/history debate and share your thoughts on where trance is today, and where its future lies?
Tony: Wow, that’s a fantastically complicated area, really. But here’s something. Trance has really only been around for a little while in terms of its existence as a genre. Compare for example rock and roll. When was its peak, really? 1956? Does that mean that rock and roll is dead and irrelevant now because it has already had its peak? Of course not. As a genre, trance has a number of soft areas that people tend to stick pins in, and sometimes we’re too myopic to realise that it’s not been around that long at all. Personally, I can’t see how there’s anything wrong with using the same sound sets to make the same music. If there were, four piece rock bands would have become obsolete a long time ago. Part of the problem, I think, is that there is so much bad pop ‘trance’ on mainstream radio. R&B has suffered much of the same problem, in that there is a lot of really bad, really commercial R&B, giving the legitimate tracks a bad name. I suppose you could say it’s a bit like having bad Chinese food – if that’s the first time you’ve tasted Chinese, it’s really going to put you off the entire cuisine and discourage you from actually exploring it very much. The trance genre is robust and valid. Electro is a fad that seems to want to be implanted as a genre, and there’s a lot of talk about whether its peaked or not here in the UK, but I can tell you this: whenever you think the peak was in one part of the world, I can tell you that the peak in Brazil, in China, in so many other places, is still very much in the future.
ITM: You’ve just launched a new Anjunabeats sub-label called Anjunadeep. What’s the story on the new label, how is it going, and why did you see the need to move in that direction with a discrete label rather than carrying on under the Anjunabeats banner?
Tony: Initial reactions have been very positive. Already we’re starting to get lots of demos for Anjunadeep, and that’s important for us, because as DJs we play a wide variety of music, from more progressive through to the more banging stuff, and we’re always looking for a wider range for our own sets. By creating the sub-label, we’re sending out a signal saying that a track doesn’t have to be 138BPM for it to be Anjunabeats material. What matters is the quality of the actual tune. For me, progressive three or four years ago equalled boring. I think things got very stale, and as a result the progressive scene largely threw baby out with bathwater. The entire dance music industry did badly, because it seemed people were scared of doing anything melodic. In more recent times, all of this has changed. There’s been a real revitalisation of the progressive sound – the new wave of melodic progressive such as we’re seeing on Perry O’Neil’s label, Electronic Elements, for example, or the stuff that Probspot is doing. For Anjunadeep, if it’s a boring track and you can’t remember it, we won’t put it out. That doesn’t mean it has to be strictly melodic, mind you – Remy and Roland Klinkenberg are two producers who have done some great work that, while not purely melodic, is certainly far from boring. Real ‘club moment’ records, I suppose you could say. So that’s what Anjunadeep is about: beautiful, melodic progressive trance.
ITM: The internet generally, and the peer-to-peer exchange of music files in MP3 format specifically, have radically reshaped the landscape of music distribution. Where do you see the future, both in terms of revenue collection models and in terms of piracy, for genre-specific labels such as Anjunabeats five years from now? Do you see the move from the ‘gotta have it’ aesthetic of vinyl to the easily duplicated hands-off MP3 as representing a concern to the medium-sized record label’s existence?
Tony: It’s a very complicated situation, but realistically from where we stand there is a logical way forward: permit the exchange of MP3 files between end users, but do it with automatic royalty collection. It’s just something that has to be done. Governments can’t really stop peer-to-peer file sharing at the user level, but at the ISP level there is certainly the capacity, in theory at least, to monitor what comes and goes and come up with some kind of payment model for it. This is where further developments need to come. I think in this area, the micro-payments issue becomes very important. The general population needs to understand that as artists and label owners, we make money not out of selling objects but out of selling ideas. This entire concept of paying for ideas will be easier for us to understand, I think, five years from now, when everything is made in China, and all that the rest of us have to offer for sale are our ideas. If you give someone else’s idea to someone, that’s wrong, you have to pay for that. The payment process, mind you, I think it should be made painless and not something that has to be thought about. At Anjunabeats, we’ve recently started doing CD singles, but we’re doing primarily online sales of them because there just aren’t many CD single racks in most of the record stores yet. As more DJs start to use CDs and not just vinyl, a market for a nicer CD-based DJ product will come alongside vinyl. One argument that we hear a lot about vinyl is that it’s a nice thing to spend money on. Colours, sleeves, it looks nice and it’s pretty, there’s a very strong aesthetic component that you just don’t get with a download or a burnt CD. As an industry we’ve overlooked CD singles from this perspective, I think. As far as where we’ll be as an industry and as a label five years from now? The best part is that I have no idea. The future is delightful to me, because its always beautiful.
ITM: It seems a number of DJs are moving away from merely mixing pre-recorded tracks from vinyl and CD, and have moved towards creating entire sets on a laptop via programs such as Ableton Live. To what extent does Above and Beyond incorporate, or plan to incorporate, such technology into live sets, and what are your thoughts on the use of such technology in live sets more generally?
Tony: Well let’s start with CDs versus vinyl. For us, travelling internationally, getting on flights and whatnot, CD is much more practical than vinyl. I do think the sound quality of a CD is slightly worse compared to the lushness and warmth of vinyl, but for international flights vinyl can be a real nightmare. As far as Ableton goes, for me, the experience isn’t quite there yet. I saw Sasha this Saturday night past, and apparently he stopped his set early because people had stopped dancing – but it looks like he’s checking his email up there. You’ve got software that automatically gets your records perfectly in time, so what’s the show? People like to see a little bit of juggling. I’d think CDs are a happy medium between vinyl and a laptop. I love vinyl, I hanker after the different coloured sleeves and labels – as a DJ, it appeals to me in a way that a scribbled-on CDR simply doesn’t. At least when you’re playing a CD, you’re doing something physical live. The concept of focusing on a computer screen is much different from spinning little discs, be they black or silver. With a laptop, you’re looking at the crowd the way you look in an automobile rear-view, it’s not your main point of attention, whereas with CDs and vinyl what you’re seeing is people’s faces. That has got to be your focus as a DJ, you’ve got to be looking at the crowd. If you’re not looking at the crowd how can you possibly play the right record? That keyboard that looked like a guitar back in the 1980s, silly looking thing that it was, the point was to get the keyboard player out from behind the pile of equipment and to interact with the crowd. Ableton is great for radio mixes, but live it’s a big question mark. It’s just boring to watch.
ITM: One element of the Anjunabeats mixed CDs and Above and Beyond livesets that really stands out to the careful listener is your embrace of long, melodic in-key mixes from one song to the next, such as is more traditionally associated with progressive and its related sub-genres. In recent times, we’ve seen Armin Van Buuren, Sasha, Tiesto and other well-known internationals suggest that key-mixing is the way of the future for both live sets and for their released mixes. As a DJ, what’s your take on key-mixing?
Tony: Do we do it? Absolutely, all the time, all our records are keyed. We’re even going to start putting the key on the sleeves of our Anjunabeats releases. It just sounds wicked. Those who don’t think it’s worth the effort, they probably can’t tell the difference between keys anyways – but we’re all musicians, so we do it. Whether every last person on the dance floor notices or not, WE notice. We have all our tracks keyed in a list, and have been doing it like that for some time. It makes so much sense, and it’s really important to us. Especially when we’re doing a lot of travelling in between sets and we don’t always have a lot of time to review every intro and outro of some of the newer tracks we’re going to play ahead of time, key-mixing lets us mix material we don’t know so well without resorting to brute force. If you’ve got a new track that you know the key of, you can always give it a go and you know the mix is not going to be terrible. When you know the key and you know the track, the results are even better. So yes, we’re big believers in key-mixing, you could say!
ITM: Have you found the Australian club scene do be any different from that which you’ve found in Europe and the rest of the world? Is there anything that sets Australian clubgoers apart from their cosmopolitan cousins?
Tony: Well, we’ve certainly always been very well received in Australia. We’ve played to some wonderful crowds, particularly in Brisbane. The local culture of the people in every city is totally different, really – what they drink, what sort of crowd it is, what sort of music they’re used to, who they’ve heard before us, all of that has an effect. Every gig we do is different, can play every city and its different, so I’d have to say that it’s not really a country that we’d say has a specific identity in that regard, but really the whole city. That said, the Aussies definitely know how to have a good time – probably second only to the Irish!
ITM: And so, with just a few weeks left until Above and Beyond roll into Melbourne, anything in particular we should be expecting?
Tony: Well, we have just this past week finished the original mix of the Sirens of the Sea. We started it some time ago, then got distracted, which is why there’s a remix on Anjunabeats already by by Kyau vs. Albert. We’ve just finished it, and its going down really well. We’ll also be playing Alone Tonight, the next Above and Beyond single – it’s very sad story and another wonderfully big sad moment. We’ve also got seven or eight new tracks coming near to completion that we’re hoping to try out, too. It depends on who’s on before us of course, but we’ll definitely have some surprises for our fans.
Above & Beyond tour Australia as part of Godskitchen, don’t miss out!
Sep 30 – Brisbane, Family
Oct 2 – Sydney, Space (BUY TICKETS)
Oct 7 – Perth, Metro City
Oct 8 – Melbourne, Melbourne Park (BUY TICKETS)
