Tipper: Ready for the nutters

Having kicked off the year at Rainbow Serpent Festival, this November sees Dave Tipper return to our dancefloors. On the producer’s itinerary is the Eclipse festival in Far North Queensland, which promises a marathon seven days of partying and, yes, a Total Eclipse of the Sun right in the middle of it. It’s the kind of environment that Tipper excels in. Ahead of his visit (which includes other dates around the country as well), the bass innovator shared some wise words with inthemix.

In January 2012, you told inthemix: “I’m just trying to focus on the actual enjoyment of making music and not get too caught up in the peripheral nonsense.” How successful do you feel you’ve been with that mission?
Peripheral nonsense has a tenuous grip, apparently, so that mission has only been successful to a point. Although the majority of my time has indeed been spent enjoying the act of making music. There is still the seemingly difficult part of making a living off of that creative indulgence and that’s where the gigs become a necessity. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy playing gigs; I’d just rather keep them to a minimum and spend the main chunk of my time in the studio, which I prefer.

This month you released the Shatter Box EP on Tippermusic. Was there an over-arching theme or ‘vibe’ you had in mind for that release?
It was the last in a series of dancefloor EPs (the preceding two being Bubble Control and Puzzle Dust ) that I chose to release over the course of the last year. It seemed a more engaging way of releasing an album’s worth of what is essentially formulaic material. I personally am not so interested in listening to an entire album of dancefloor tracks and would rather ingest stuff like that in bite-sized chunks, rather than one big chunk, which can be overwhelming and potentially boring.

The only over-arching theme was to have fun attempting to inject novelty into a formulaic process, which is unavoidable when it comes to making dancefloor material. I’ll likely be taking a hiatus from dancefloor releases for a while (although I’ll still be writing plenty for my live sets) and will be focusing instead on more experimental down-tempo material for my next full length album. It will likely be an experimental down-tempo concoction. I’m also toying with the idea of making it an ambient release or potentially a return to a more ‘IDM’ based project, which is a genre I love deeply and always thought was overlooked in favour of less engaging music.

Shatter Box EP teaser

You’ve done plenty of shows this year – do any of those experiences stand out as highlights?
A few, namely Symbiosis and Beloved festival. What made Beloved special for me was not only the size (just a few hundred people) and the location (a very private property deep in beautiful old growth forest on the Oregon coast), but the fact that it only had one sound stage, which is a great way to contain the energy at a party, as opposed to a lot of the bigger festivals which have so many stages and artists performing that it can be conducive to a frustrating experience and will generally create a somewhat scattered energy.