Ian Pooley has been at the forefront of all things house for a very long time now. Not content with being one of the most forward thinking producers on the scene he is also right up there in the big league of gentlemen DJs as well as running his own record label Pooled Music. Pooley is playing a series of gigs here in Australia including the Parklife festivals so Ollie Brooke had a chat to him about the inner working of the Pooley machine and what get’s him ticking.

While you are a German producer your style bears a lot more similarities to the US sounds with the disco and techno influences running strongly through most of your tracks, why is it that this sound influenced you so much more than that of the likes of Kraftwerk and the European Acid House movements?

I don’t know really, when I started focussing on the music it was the Chicago and Detroit sounds that caught my attention. The funk and soul aspects of it and the techno influences of the Detroit sound always rang true with me. Derrick may and his sound was something that really appealed to me back then. I never really liked the European music, I found it quite cold and soul-less, it was very straight. From the beginning, being fan of Derrick May, had a huge influence on a lot of my productions and my overall tastes.

You split from V2 records in order to achieve goals that you were unable to achieve with them, what were these goals?

Well I kind of left V2 because a lot of the people changed there, so there were a lot of new staff and it didn’t work as well as it used to with me. I’d built up a relationship with the old staff there and I found it harder to deal with all these new people. I think I wanted to see how it would be to do my own label anyway and so that seemed to be the perfect time to begin that course.

You’ve pumped out some truly great tracks over the years, Quattro, Piha, Samo Iluzjia and many many more, when you complete these tracks have you ever got an inkling as to whether they’re going to be big or not?

No, never, I can’t predict how it will go. I can’t plan to make a hit and when I do I never see it coming. I produce stuff that I like all the time so if other people like it too that’s good but I can’t tell which ones people are going to love or not – they’re all good to me!

So you never have a greater feeling of satisfaction once you’ve completed some tunes more so than other, like with Quattro for example?

No, definitely not. With Quattro I was kind of surprised by the reaction it got. I thought it’d be a good B-side or something like that, it was a bit deeper and more subtle than a lot of my other stuff. When I got the first reactions I was pretty surprised so I can never tell…

With your album, Meridian, you obviously have a lot of house tracks on there but there’s plenty of down tempo numbers too. This obviously indicates you have a wide appreciation for “good music” as opposed to focussing on specific genres/categories. Today however a lot of producers focus on one style of house and have a fairly narrow field production styles. What advantage do you think this gives you?

It’s weird, all the old school DJs and producers from my period, the early 90s and before all produce loads of different sounds, it’s normal to be interested in different sounds really – I used to buy records by everyone, I’d buy a house track in the same purchase as a Public Enemy track etc. I think it’s a bit bad really that producers do focus only on one style, the same for DJs. It’s really only the younger DJs and producers who focus on one style, a lot of the ones that got into the scene in the late nineties. I think it’s quite sad really, for me it’s a lot more fun to be able to chop and change styles and take people places that they don’t expect – same goes for the production side of things too.

One of the movements currently in focus is the electro house sound – a lot of people are producing sub standard music of this ilk and it’s giving the whole sound a bad name, what is it that you still like about it?

To be honest I just like stuff that’s good, I don’t pay attention to what the “sound” is, if it’s got a good groove then I like it. I like the DJ T stuff and most of what Spirit Catcher do, it reminds me of early 90s house and techno. In general a lot of shit music is being made these days but it doesn’t bother me too much, at the end of the day if I don’t like the music I won’t buy or play it. I don’t really pay attention to the style but I know I wouldn’t play one style for the whole night…

You work with NRK and you also run Pooled music, what are the pros and cons between putting out releases on your own label and one that’s already established?

I suppose with Pooled I am having to establish the label and it’s sound and so I have to be aware of what tracks I put out. But with NRK I do a bit more of a club orientated sound, a lot of deeper stuff and it’s focussed in a certain way. With pooled I’d like to keep it open and not limit the sound to any one style – I’m not restricted in what I do but I have to be more aware of what the overall sound is like even though I don’t want it to be known for a certain style.

Your DJ and production careers are both as strong as each other, is there any common ground between the two mentally for you?

I started both really early and simultaneously so for me I can’t really make and comparisons between the two. It’s like I’m a DJ only on the weekend and the producer only comes out when I’m not DJing – sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea and do a track. In the studio I’m like a different person, I get totally into it, I’ll forget about the time and I can sit there the whole day making a track. There’s little the two have in common for me….

Recently you’ve moved to Berlin from your home town, why now?

It’s good cos I wanted to do some stuff during the week, converts, exhibitions, for inspiration – there’s nothing going on in my home town like that and I’m finding I need a bit more inspiration to keep me going. I wanted to be nearer the hub of the culture, so I can go to more house clubs and experience more of the scene. Berlin is known for having something different going on every day of the week and has a big pool of producers – I think it’s pretty cool that I can just meet up with people and we can talk about stuff together – it definitely brings something extra to the whole thing for me.

Playing the international circuit, you’ve obviously had a lot of warm-up DJs play before you, what ones are stand-outs and what are the good and bad things you see/hear them do?

Well my favourite up and comer at the moment is a DJ from Berlin call Dixon (one half of Wahoo). I can tell you the worst thing that warm-ups do and that is when they try to compete with you. They play all the biggest club hits as if to say “look what I can do” blah blah blah. It’s like they’re saying this is my crowd and this is how to rock them but really they’re just screwing up the whole night. The good ones always inform themselves about the main act and change the set to suit the style and don’t push it too hard.

What are your feelings about the amount of new technology available to DJs now?

A lot of DJs say to me why don’t you use Serato or that or this but for me it’s still the most obvious thing to go to a record store and listen to tracks on a good sound system. You get to listen to the whole to the whole track and in good quality. Rather than some shit quality 30 second clip of an MP3, it just doesn’t cut it for me. Plus it definitely brings way too much bull shit into the scene, you see all this shit setup in clubs just to play some music – the more time you spend learning new methods and technologies the less time you can spend on the music and that’s what really counts/. It’s really the most simple thing to buy records and have a bag of them in a club. It’s much better to use this method than to have a list of tracks, you can have a list of favourites and that’s pretty dumb cos you will always just play the favourites.
The action of going to a record box and looking through the records makes it a bit more creative cos every time you see a record it reminds you of the moments you played it, the visual memory triggers a memory of the track, not just the title and when it’s playing on the deck you can see it all the time. It’s just better, it’s a better method of playing. Yes, you’re searching for a specific track but with digital DJing you just type in the name and you get the track. When you search through a record box you see so many other tracks and each of them may be a potential track that you might play, for me that’s a better way of DJing.

With Piha you produced one of the finest moments of house in the last 10 years and you followed it up with Heke – a completely different style of track. What lead to the change in the follow up track?

Well we thought about it carefully as to whether we should do the same. But then we thought it would be too obvious and it would kill Piha, people would think it was the same track and if we did anything after that again then people just wouldn’t be interested. We decided to take it a bit more subtle with Heke, not so in your face. I really like Heke too though.

What are your top tunes at the moment?

I’m really liking Recloose – Dust right now and pretty much everything by Spirit Catcher, there’s a Cass & Mangan remix of a Royksopp tune out now and also some remixes of Kelis’ new stuff

You’re playing here at the Parklife festivals and, alongside quite a few others, are headlining the shows, what can we expect to hear in your sets?

Well lots of stuff really – I always like a good mix of new and old tracks and deep house & disco right up to electro house and tech house – basically a big mix of all things house!