Artists
ItaloJohnson: the mystery men
ItaloJohnson don’t want anything getting in the way of what they do best
For international men of mystery, ItaloJohnson are an open, affable bunch. They’ll chat about social lives, family lives, parties, hangovers, their own in-band friendship, recording processes, influences, their musical pasts: they’ll even own up to having made gabba records in past lives. Nothing seems to be off-limits in conversation – except they won’t let their names or identifying details about jobs or other aliases go on record.
Their timelessly poised, bumping and bassy house records come out on vinyl with barely any online presence, next to no information or clues to their makers’ identity, and months between each release. And yet they’ve become some of the most collectible and heavily rinsed tunes in the house underground, and made the trio ever more sought-after as DJs as time goes on.
So what gives? Sitting in a glossy Docklands hotel room with Mixmag, the three 30-something Berliners – who we’ll refer to just as ‘R’, ‘M’ and ‘J’ – make it instantly clear that they’re not publicity-shy sensitive genius types or full of grandiose keep-it-underground theories. Burial or Zomby they most certainly aren’t. The half-Italian R is the most forthcoming of the trio, and seems like a de facto spokesman; it’s him we deal with on email, and he who welcomes us in. J is the quietest, but seems like a ‘doer’ – he’s by no means withdrawn, but it’s noticeable he springs to life when the conversation turns to DJing, dancing or the pressing and packing of their vinyl (which he personally hand-stamps). The pair of them are visibly Berlin club people, with part-shaved techno hair and understated sportswear; in contrast M, the oldest of the three, has the air of a Renaissance aristo. He has a background in classical music and looks the part: tall and slender with a high-necked dark sweater, neat curls and laconic air (exaggerated somewhat by the fact he’s sprawling in his chair due to being laid low with flu).
It’s obvious that these three personalities work well together. Not once in an hour-long conversation do they talk over one another or seem to disagree: typically, their answers are passed around, fleshed out by each of their personal takes as they work their way around the topic. Much like the steady-stepping curves and grooves of their music, which seem to unfold very naturally, this makes it very easy to believe them when they say that everything about ItaloJohnson happened very organically.
“We never planned it [their anonymity and the vinyl-only releases] or even talked about it among the three of us,” says R. “It is just the natural way our ideas are. We each have a different background in how we socialise with music, but there’s a lot of overlap, and that area where we overlap decides what we do. It was what we all liked, so it’s what we all did.”
The birth of that unspoken understanding among the trio is a real 21st century dancefloor fairytale. Ask for their shared reference points and M says, “there’s only one important one, right...?” The others nod and smile. “Panorama Bar,” he continues, “from 2006 to 2008.” “We all met on the dancefloor there in 2006,” explains R, “and it hit us like lightning! We knew each other a bit before then, we all had our own musical stories, but this was the time we became friends, and discovered that we all had the exact same ideas about sound. We were just ready at that moment: minimal and microhouse was dominating everything in Germany but becoming stale, then Panorama Bar came along with residents like Cassy and Prosumer who played straight-ahead house music but with this real sharp style. It was raw beats, stripped down, really groovy, funky, repetitive... we loved it.”
All three were old enough to have been around the block. R and J were hip hop-heads from Hamburg, R later becoming a drum ’n’ bass DJ (“really hard, angry stuff in clubs with no girls!”), while M was obsessed with Underground Resistance and other house and techno from a very young age, but – incongruously, given his dandyish demeanour – started his DJ career as a teenager in the mid 90s playing gabba, even playing at the notorious Dutch Thunderdome festival.
They all followed the techno scene as it got locked into Jeff Mills-style loop/tribal grooves then (“literally overnight in about 2002” says J) flipped to minimal/micro-house. For all that they’d get bored with its ubiquity by 2006, they all loved this scene (J laughs, “I still liked to get sweaty and go wild just as much as with the hard stuff”) and they participated gladly in it – until their lighting bolt moment in Panorama Bar.
It would be another four years before the friendship coalesced into ItaloJohnson, though, during which time Cassy and Prosumer’s influence would ripple out from the heart of Berlin, creating a climate that was ready for the three guys’ “ideas about sound”. Slowly, slowly (can you see a pattern forming?) they fell into producing as a trio, grabbing moments where they could and developing a patient, perfectionist work pattern. All of them have jobs – R and J “in club music”, M just smiles and says “I won’t tell you” – and even though R and J share a flat, between their work and weekends usually spent DJing, they’re lucky to get an evening or two a week to actually get into the studio. When they do, they never give up on a track, honing it until it works – so their tiny released output represents almost the entirety of their productions to date.
Their production process is as pragmatic as everything else they do, which perhaps explains how their tracks manage to sound both retro and futurist, electronic and organic simultaneously, with live percussion playing off muted rave sounds and super-subtle acid licks. “We like synthesisers and hardware,” says J, his hands mapping out the shapes of studio kit, “but there’s no rules about it.” And it’s the same when it comes to their attitude to vinyl. “We’re certainly not vinyl hardliners!” says R; “we play digital music when we DJ.” “I say to anyone,” says M, “‘hey, please play a good set, it really doesn’t matter what tools you’re using, and please produce a good record: if it sounds good, it is good’. Some things are faster to do with analogue gear – if you want a certain sound, you’ll spend endless hours with plug-ins – but if you use just analogue gear, you’re stuck in a certain domain of sounds, you can’t get this precise, super-loud, on-the-point, transient rich kick, for example. So the combination of analogue and digital has power that neither alone does.”
Yes, they release only on vinyl, but that has more to do with the practicalities of their desire to stay away from the pressures of having a big digital presence. “People are concerned about photos and quotes and things that you put on social media all the time, and this is so much what we don’t want to do,” says M.
J picks up the thread: “We realised anyway that we couldn’t even feed social media, with only two releases a year, and two remixes in six years – we’re just working on our third. Most times we don’t have anything to promote. Social media wouldn’t really work for us!” Gently mocking the standard DJ’s Instagram feed, they chime in with the clichés: “travel pictures, pictures of their food...” says R. “Always saying ‘Thanks so much to...’ or ‘Looking forward to...’” continues M; “I mean no criticism, no judgement, no nothing, but for me after five, ten years, I feel it could become boring!”
Their approach might seem to hold them back from success: their records are few and far between and so generate little income, they only ever DJ as a trio, meaning bookings are more expensive and thus offputting for promoters and their avoidance of the social media game means “ItaloJohnson” simply has less selling power as a brand. As R puts it, “we get do good club bookings for places that have a regular crowd, but not so much for festivals, because they rely more on the big names on the posters to sell their tickets.” But if they want it any other way, they don’t show it. None are averse to the idea of giving up the day jobs if demand picks up and DJ fees go sky-high, but they genuinely seem to have a Zen-like contentment about their pace of life. As R says: “It’s about having your own rhythm as you. We put out as we can and when we can. We produce when we can, which is not often, so we just decided to be responsible to ourselves and only be dependent on ourselves.”
Subtle and pragmatic it might be, but there’s a quiet radicalism to their approach. They’re not outsiders by any means: they have their industry jobs, they all still like to party hard and kick back with musical friends like DJ Koze and Jamie Jones when they’re out on the circuit. And, as noted, there’s no harsh manifesto or artistic pretension in their withdrawal from the expected musical treadmill: just a constantly gentle negotiation around what they like and what they want to do, and a silent understanding between three friends about what is best within club culture and what are the unnecessary trappings.
Interview done, Mixmag gets in a cab with J and R to Studio 338 down the road in the light-industrial wasteland around the O2 dome, while M grabs forty winks to try and sleep off his illness. There’s no sense of getting hyped up: they explain that they never prepare sets, knowing that each crowd is different, so every time they play it’s different. M arrives just in time to start at 1am, and they seem to effortlessly slide into their set. There’s no grandstanding start, no drama, no attempt to make a splash: just letting each record breathe as they move around one another sipping beers and unhurriedly selecting from vinyl, CD booklets and USB sticks, before executing another long, elegant blend. Snaking percussion lines, warm US garage chords, hints of acid lines or techno oddness, all orbit the timelessly bumping basslines. Characteristically, there’s no rush to get anywhere, just a revelling in the funky moment, three friends appreciating their shared tastes – and it becomes clearer than ever that their secrecy is no hipster affectation: it’s just a part of a wider stripping-away of anything that’s unnecessary to the enjoyment of the tracks. Without hype and information overload, in their set as in their career, ItaloJohnson are proving themselves, one tune at a time.
ItaloJohnson play at Egg on July 9 and Farr Festival on Friday July 15
Joe Muggs is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to Mixmag, follow him on Twitter
