Having made a name for their signature ‘dirty house’ sound it may surprise some to find that UK duo King Unique is now a leaner (perhaps?), meaner (maybe?) solo outfit. Having remixed more artists than you’ve had hot dinners, King Unique have been playlisted by artists as diverse as Sasha, Soulwax, Danny Howells and even Tiesto. Touring Australia this month, inthemix tracked down the remaining Matt – there used to be two of them – to find out what’s been keeping him busy of late.

To kick us off, you have a reputation for being a pretty eclectic act and have thrown everything from Norwegian pop to balls out techno into your sets – what can we expect from you when you hit Australia?

Weddell Seals (Underwater) is my absolute favourite track right now. I’m currently indulging my geeky side and someone posted this on a synth-blog that I normally frequent to get my jollies by staring at old synthesizers. The track is exactly what the name says – a recording of seals, but these have to be the trippiest electronic-sounding seals on the planet. It’s a great way to start a set. So anyway, yes, seals and a shed load of really great techno and house. That’s the new King Unique motto by the way.

You have toured extensively, how does clubbing in Australia compares to other places around the world?

More hats. Definitely a lot more hat action here than you find elsewhere on the planet. I noticed quite a few cheeky fedoras twinned with silky shirts on my last visit – how’s that look doing now? Serious answer, though, I based myself out here for four months in 2006 and my impression was that Australia’s scene is mainstream in a way that’s unusual in the world today; reminded me of the vibe in the UK in the 90s. In lots of countries – unless people see themselves as being a clubber, raver, whatever term you fancy- they’re not going to wander into a house club of an evening. It’s not like that here; the whole electro house sound was something that anyone might go out for of an evening.

Obviously I’m talking about the mainstream chart-oriented stuff, but it has a ripple down effect through the whole scene. It’s not cool to say so – cos we’re all meant to be such underground heroes now – but the UK’s scene is a lot poorer for the loss of the big mainstream clubs. Mass popularity creates a buzz in the mainstream media about the whole scene, not just the cheesy hits. It makes the music cross into films, TV, adverts, computer games, and it gives sponsors something to spend their budget on, which in turn makes huge dance festivals with cool line-ups possible.

When all that stuff goes, lots of the great underground stuff goes with it, and that’s when you realise how good you had it. Actually that was a really fucking boring answer. Hats. Let’s just say ‘more hats’.

Where has been your favourite place to tour, and why?

I’ve been saying Tokyo for years, and it still is in my top two or three places, but I’ve got to be honest Lithuania is a fantastic clubbing country right now. I play there every 3 or 4 months, mainly at Exit in Kaunas, and it’s just a perfect fit for King Unique. The people are pretty much universally cool and good looking, they’ve got an almost Aussie-like dry sense of humour, and also names with loads of really enjoyable consonants in them like Vanagas, and Errrrrrrrrika… it’s not spelt that way, but you’ve really got to roll your Rs. They’re sort of ‘buttoned-down’ in everyday life like the English, so it’s a real shock the first time you see them all rushing the DJ booth and screaming their tits off… for three solid hours. Plus they don’t fuck about when it comes to smoke machines. Look on YouTube, you’ll see what I mean.

Your blog mentions Lamingtons, but what else do you enjoy in Australia?

Other than food? Cos I’d like to chuck in pide bread, blue-eye, really fresh salt & pepper squid and Weet-Bix before we move on. We have some soggy little sacks of shit called Weetabix back home, one drop of milk and they dissolve into a porridge of bland sludge. Weet-Bix fucking rock.

So groovy Aussie stuff – last night a kangaroo punched my one year old son and a possum nicked half my wine; exactly the sort of thing we went to Kangaroo Island for, so nice work from the marsupials there. On the 2006 tour me and my eldest son – who was two at the time – got stranded on the beach at midnight in Bicheno [Tasmania] ‘cos we were too scared to take the only path off the beach through all the screaming Tasmanian Devil burrows. It’s good to keep the tradition of exposing my kids to savage beatings at the hands of your wildlife.

I’m doing lots of dad stuff, though, like taking them to the Star Wars exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum [Sydney], dangling toes in the fountains at Darling Harbour, that sort of thing. Also at the Powerhouse, I took 5 minutes to prostrate myself on the floor in front of the VCS1 synthesizer in the musical instrument section. The very first synthesizer from the UK’s greatest makers – there should be a queue to it like Lenin’s tomb.

For the nerds out there, what does your current DJ setup comprise?

Matt, Mac and Monome is my 2009 setup. The Monome is a wooden box with 256 buttons that’s been described as able “to do anything and nothing”. They’re hand built by techno-hippies in the Catskill Mountains, and the software that makes them do anything rather than nothing is made by users and shared for free with other users. It’s all very open source and utopian, and thank fuck as my coding skills extend to two lines of BASIC from my school days – ‘10 PRINT “Matt”’ and ‘20 GOTO 10’. Not exactly The Matrix.

I’m using a few of the bits of software to control Ableton and I’m still defining what I want to do, what I can do and most importantly practicing like a madman. If it all works as I hope I’ll be able to completely chop up the tracks on the fly, grab drum sounds and play or sequence them over the top of the tune they’ve come from, add effects to just individual beats – all kinds of studio tricks in a live show. Plus I can fuck up spectacularly so please feel free to cheer, boo or rush the stage when that happens.

You have, to put it mildly, completed a shit load of remixes. Which have been your favourites, in terms of how much fun they were or how pleased you were with the end result?

I honestly like most of them, but to pick a few – Baz ‘Believers’ I still love it when I hear it. It came together in no time at all and it has quite a light touch because of it. Tracey Thorn’s ‘Grand Canyon’ took three weeks, during which it was mainly a confused mess with nearly a hundred tracks of heavily automated parts. The process made me fairly mental but the end result is exactly the balance of tech-house meets torch-song that I’d hoped for. Tracey blogged a while later that despite hating dancing to her own music she’d had ‘a dancefloor moment’ when Ben dropped it to close a Buzzin’ Fly set in New York. When I read that I thought about listening to ‘Missing’ over and over when it came out, thinking it was such a great record. If I’d known then – flat broke, working lots of hours for free in Liverpool studios and getting nowhere with music – that all these chances and experiences were coming I’d have been staggered. So I like that remix quite a lot. Of the recent crop ‘Anon’ for Fergie and ‘Heaven’ for UNKLE are probably two of the best things I’ve ever done, honestly. Trippy, spacey and covered in VCS3 noises, which is exactly where I’m at now musically.

Your website previously featured the line “King Unique = Dirty House” – do you feel that tying yourself so closely with a particular genre has been a dangerous thing to do in the notoriously fickle world of dance music?

Well, it was more that the genre tied itself to our ‘line’. Dirty house came about because when we used to be asked ‘what style do you make/play?’ in interviews we’d find ourselves giving these long rambling answers, like ‘sort of housey techy rough grungey dark tracky trippy electronic stuff’. So we came up with the catch all title ‘dirty house’, which – for us – meant nothing like what it came to mean a couple of years later. So yes, hands up, we coined the term but not the genre that sprang up around it. A lot of that sound, with all due respect, sucks.

A lot of clubs in the UK have closed in recent times, including Turnmills which hosted your night, and also The Cross where you were a regular guest for Renaissance. Do you feel that the age of large clubs is over?

It’s a cliché that rock stars of the 60s and 70s will add, “long since closed, sadly” when mentioning old venues they played – this is no different to my mind. It didn’t matter when The Cavern in Liverpool closed, rock’n’roll had already conquered the world. Of course it was a bit of a kick in the balls if you lived in Liverpool… The same thing’s happened with house and techno. Some of these places closing in London saw the late 80s acid-house explosion – that’s 22, 23 years ago now. It is kind of sad and plenty of UK clubbers are getting misty eyed about it, but the truth is individual clubs don’t last and maybe it’s better that they don’t. Shut the doors and build the legend.

Fresh from rocking Playground Weekender, the newly single King Unique continues on his journey around Australia this month:

Feb 13 – Limelite, Perth
Feb 14 – Roxanne Parlour, Melbourne
Feb 19 – Transit Bar, Canberra
Feb 28 – Chinese Laundry, Sydney