Metro Area: Direct from Brooklyn to Parklife

You’ll know Brooklyn local Morgan Geist for his superb work with Metro Area, his critically acclaimed project with Darshan Jeshrani that’ll be hitting Australia for the commencement of the Parklife tour this weekend. However, the time has come for the spotlight to shine equally as bright on his solo work, as this month he’ll be dropping his first solo album in nearly a decade. Double Night Time will be released on his Environ label, also featuring the distinctive vocals of Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys fame, and it’s a tour de force of esoteric techno and house.

The album is sure to propel Morgan Geist even further into the musical zeitgeist, but he’s already a fixture in the international scene due to his superb work with Metro Area, or course. Here he catches up with ITM from the streets of Brooklyn, talking wholeheartedly about his reservations about the current state of dance music, his hopes for his new album as well as Metro Area’s upcoming tour with Parklife.

First things first: will Metro Area be playing live at Parklife?

No we are DJing at Parklife, we haven’t performed live in a while. We have mainly been DJing until we reformulate the live show.

I was a little surprised when I saw your group on the Parklife line up just because I didn’t really picture you guys playing big open air festivals. Have you frequently played that sort of situation?

We have played open air festivals before; it’s always a bit weird to DJ at something like that. I think your perception of the DJ’s native habitat as a night club is spot on. Obviously, it’s a little weird to play some open air thing. [If you are] Tiesto or something playing some huge trance event then its doable. But yeah, it’s kinda weird. We have done it before. I don’t know the scale of Parklife, but we have played some pretty big places. Probably the biggest one we did was at night, it was open air but it was still night time so even that helps a bit. We have played some daytime stuff and it is still a little strange.

The other thing about Parklife, the line up is so extensive that we aren’t playing a long set. I mean it’s sort of, I don’t want to sound thankless, but it’s sort of absurd considering how far we are going and how short we are playing at each festival. But we will try and pack whatever good records we can into an hour or however long they give us. It’s short, not really an intimate set and it’s during the day, obviously those are sort of challenging factors but it will be fun!

Are there plans for a second Metro Area album in the near future?

Yeah, there have been plans forever; it’s just really slow going for a number of reasons. Primarily we have different schedules and different responsibilities. I mean I run the label; I have been working on my own album Double Night Time which is coming out very soon. It has just delayed a lot of things. Secondarily we have different working styles. Neither of us really have studios. Darshan has been building his for quite a while and he is just wrapping it up now… As soon as we get everything in order we have the intention of doing it. Every time people ask when I kinda groan inwardly whenever I hear myself saying “next year”, I have been saying “next year” for about 4 years. So whenever it gets done we will put it out.

You have done a lot of work of the last 15 years, how does your latest album fall into the whole Morgan Geist continuum of music?

You make it sound pretty grand; I think it’s more just what I want to do at the time. That’s usually what the case is. There are my influences, what I’m excited about at any given point in time (that) usually influences what I’m going to make. And sometimes it’s the inverse of that where I’m really fed up with something. Metro Area, I started that because I was incredible sick of what was happening with dance music at the time. I wanted make records that I was into, everyone was sort of sampling disco or taking disco loops. I wanted to make a record that wasn’t sampling other people’s music. It’s not that we never sampled a drum hit but it was a reaction against that. So it sort of goes both ways, either what I am being influenced by at the time or what i am reacting against. I think with this album it’s a little bit of both.

The biggest departure is vocals. You know writing kinda pop songs, using pop in the broadest sense not Britney Spears or whatever. Just my ideal version of pop, that’s something I have wanted to do more often. So it was sort of fun to do. Obviously the vocals and writing lyrics that was the first sort of completely new thing I was doing. The Album was a bit of a challenge I was feeling my way back into doing solo work which I haven’t really done. Working on other peoples stuff for a long time: metro area, helping with the Kelley Polar album, doing remixes. So it’s like I kinda have to relearn working on my own, defining what I want to do. So it’s weird the album is kind of an experiment in that sense.

I’ve read that you didn’t want Environ to be just a dance label, you wanted it to be a pop label as well. Does Double Night Time fall into that niche?

Yeah, I hope it does. It’s not so much that I want it to be a pop label it’s just that I find dance music extremely boring sometimes. For all the talk of it being super open minded, hedonistic and experimental or forward thinking; I think that absolutely true sometimes other times its really conservative and boring. That’s why I never like getting pinned completely as a dance label… ... I think of my own favourite labels in the past like West End or Prelude, New York labels that anyone would call classic club or dance labels. The way music was made back then and also the way it was consumed there was a lot of cross over. It’s not like today where you have a deep house label, a hip hop label or a minimal techno or whatever the fuck. Back then, West End would have songs that were being played in really underground gay discos but were simultaneously crawling up the RnB charts or even the pop charts for bigger songs. I think that’s what I want to do with Environ.

I just want to make music that doesn’t appeal to this narrow slice of people, that’s what I like about pop music. I don’t like it when music is made to be pop but I like it when good music gets popular. When you are making music to sell records that’s when you are compromising. But if you just make a great record when people from all different genres, all different walks of life, ages or demographics get into it then I think you have made a pop record in the best sense. You didn’t comprise yourself but it appealed to a lot of people. That’s my goal. I mean artistically not commercially. The commercial aspect would be nice but I don’t think anyone even buys music anymore…

How did you end up collaborating with Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys? He does most of the vocals for songs on the new album?

We met ‘cause his label wanted me to do a remix of Birthday off his first album Last Exit. That didn’t work out; I ended up doing a remix off his second album. When they sent me the Last Exit album, I will be honest a lot of remixes I do I only think about the track I’m remixing. I’m kinda picky and I don’t like a lot of stuff, this was different. I didn’t end up doing the mix, but I found myself listening to the album over and over again. So I just became a Junior Boys fan and obviously he was into my stuff, he asked about getting a remix from me. That was it, I think I DJed in Toronto that’s quite close to where he lives in Canada and we became friendly . I asked him if he would sing and he said yes. We have a nice working relationship and we are friends, I’m a big Junior Boys fan still.

Were the lyrics collaboration between the two you or did you write them?

Jeremy wrote the lyrics for one track City Of Smoke and Flame, I wrote the lyrics and music for the rest of it. I wish it were more collaborative but unfortunately I wrote all the stuff and he came in and sang it. But City Of Smoke and Flame he wrote the lyrics, I wrote the music. I like doing collaboration like that I think those are usually the best. Obviously he has his own career with Junior Boys and is pretty busy, I’m happy that he was even down for singing.

I read that James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy of the DFA were going to produce a Britney Spears track a few years ago, it never happened. I was wondering what’s the craziest offer of collaboration or remix you have received?

I don’t know I haven’t had anything that crazy. There have been some ridiculous commercial stuff that were just bad ideas, that I didn’t end up doing. I think Warner Brothers was remixing their catalogue and wanted like a Rod Stewart remix, or something like that. There are always things that come about like that. Usually they are coupled with, “well, we’re having you do it because you’re the cool underground side so, we have no money for you…. We are having this super trance DJ remix this other thing, and that’s where the whole budget is going.”

I also have a bad habit of remixing bands that get really big like on their way up. I remixed The Rapture right before they exploded, I remixed Franz Ferdinand right before they exploded. So I have had some bigger remixes but it’s always when they are on the ascent… [Other than that] there’s nothing too crazy just the usual stuff. You get major labels offers and indie label remix offers and they kinda just balance out. The weirdest thing is just sort of novelty stuff like the major remix of Rod Stewart or Blondie or whatever it were. They are just reworking someone’s catalogue, it’s not really like you are interacting with the band or something like that.

Morgan Geist’s Album Double Night Time is out now through Inertia, and you can catch him touring as part of Metro Area with Parklife. For all the latest on this year’s tour head to inthemix.com.au/parklife:

Sat Sep 27th – Adelaide, Parklife
Sun Sep 28th – Melbourne, Parklife
Mon Sep 29th – Perth, Parklife
Sat Oct 4th – Brisbane, Parklife
Sun Oct 5th – Sydney, Parklife