Umek

You’re becoming a regular to our ‘Toolroom Knights Mixed’ compilations. What challenges do you face when creating a mix?

This was quite an epic journey. I’ve started working on this compilation in December then it was on hold troughout January when I took my annual month off, after that we’ve had to licence couple of new tracks and then I already embarked on a month long tour trough Americas. I have to thank artist for their tracks and the office for getting quickly trough all paperwork. As on my first instalment in Toolroom Knight series, which was a nice success, I wanted to include as many exclusives as possible and I’m happy that they contribute to one third of the playlist. I’ve got many more but they didn’t qualify or just didn’t fit in this mix. I took the story further by producing two special intros, mixing in some movie speeches and dialogs, and on top of all this I’ve also created 30 beats out of approximately 150 loops especially for this mix. Both mixes are good representation of my club sound with some additional ornaments. One specific problem we had to solve was where to record this compilation as I was on tour. Luckily the owners of Clash club in Sao Paulo offered to use their club for one afternoon and I mixed one of the CDs there and the other one also somewhere in Brazil, though I can’t remember exactly where that was. Initially I planed to create this compilation in the studio but it turned out great anyway and now it also has a nice story attached to it.

What exclusives do you have on the mix?

There are some 14 or 15 tracks included in this two mixes exclusively: Ant Brooks’ "Blasted", Koen Groeneveld’s "Blue Stratos", then Siwell’s amazing track "Tech This Out", Guille Placencia & George Privatti’s "Just Clipper" and other tracks provided by Uto Karem, DJ Anna, Simon Doty, Federico Scavo, DJ Chus and many more. These guys and girls are regulars in my radio and DJ playlists, so I’ve asked them for their new productions and they responded quickly with their exclusives.

You have two brand new tracks on the compilation, ‘Love To Dance’ and ‘Fluid Feel’ with Mike Vale. Can you tell us about them?

It took me unusually long to get this two in the mix. Not that I couldn’t finish them. I’ve had to choose between a dozen of more or les finished tracks and it took some time to decide which ones to future. Probably I wouldn’t though that much about it but I don’t record compilations just every day, so I really wanted to include crème de la crème of my new productions. Hopefully I succeeded and people will like what I created. I’ve played with "Love to Dance" for some time and I did the final mix and mastering between gigs in South America. The other one is my latest collaboration with Mike Vale. I recorded the initial idea, sent it to him to upgrade it, then we met in his studio in January for a session where we threw out everything we didn’t like and after that he finished it.

You have collaborated quite a few times with Mike Vale. What makes this a successful partnership?

We know each other for years. We used to hang out a lot with our friends, I’ve spent holidays at his home couple of times and he crashed my place when he needed a place to sleep as we don’t live in the same city, we did a lot of snowboarding together, he’s a true friend of mine. Couple of years ago, when our music became more compatible, we decided to do something together. As the results were always good tracks we decided to do another one for this compilation. And it’s not our last joint-project as we already scheduled the next studio session.

What have you got coming up on your label, 1605?

The biggest project right now is our 5 Years Anniversary compilation. I have to finish my first collaboration with American DJ Dan – sadly we didn’t manage to meet in person during my recent USA tour. And then we plan to release a new track from … khm … Mike Vale. It seems everything evolves around Mike Vale this days …