The Mix 112: Jump Source

“Learning stuff is always the number one thing. I don't really want to do the same thing over again,” says Patrick Holland over Zoom. He’s calling from his studio in Montreal which he shares with friend and long-term collaborator Francis Latreille, also known as the DJ and producer Priori and one half of Naff Recordings, among other projects. Patrick has spent the morning skateboarding before heading to the studio to build out a new modular setup for an upcoming corporate gig. It’s behind closed doors, he explains, but the promoter will provide a Fender Rhodes piano, which he will use as a synth alongside his modular setup. “Woah” says Francis, calling in from Amsterdam, where he played the previous weekend, “You’re getting ambitious with it!” nodding in respect. “Might as well do some educational building on my own while getting paid,” Patrick retorts. 

Both Patrick and Francis share some 15 years of making music between them, in which each have steadily become prolific in making quality dancefloor tunes. Together they make music as Jump Source. Their first EP came out back in 2016 via Patrick's now-dormant label, ASL Singles Club, before they started self-releasing music via Bandcamp; a catalogue that focuses on club music, first and foremost, in the 12-inch single format. Outside of their own production work, the pair are also prolific collaborators. In the last year they’ve worked with friends like james K, Physical Therapy and Maara on their album projects, helping with production and mix engineering. They’ve also worked with electro-clash titan, Tiga, on his recent album ‘HOTLIFE’.  

We found ourselves on Zoom one Tuesday evening in late May to discuss their debut album, ‘Fold’, which recently landed via NAFF Recordings. It’s an album that echoes “the electronic LP boom of the early 2000s, while balancing peak-hour club anthems with an everything-goes pop ethos” according to the accompanying text. In other words, it sees them veer slightly left of regular dance music structures to take a more intentional approach and focus on songwriting, including collaborations with Harmony Index, CFCF, billy woods, Loukeman, BEA1991, and more. We talk about that process, why collaboration is almost always a good idea and what makes a good pop song in our conversation below. Their accompanying mix is a three-hour section from a recent set at LA’s Wellness Check party, where they went one-for-one on records all-night-long.

You guys just put out your first album together, ‘Fold’. Throughout making the album, you’ve been touring as solo artists. You’ve also been preparing your live show and collaborating with other artists to produce and engineer their records. That’s a lot of work. How does everything balance? 

Priori: You start setting deadlines for yourself or they come from someone else's timeline. Most days, we go into the studio with something specific to do. When we’re home, that's our time to work on this next project before going back on tour. It is more regimented, by nature.

Patrick Holland: For me, I've also put my solo artist project on the back burner these last four or five years to almost entirely focus on either Jump Source or writing, production and mixing for other folks. I realised I enjoy doing that more than working on my own stuff. 

What is it about working with other people that you prefer?

Patrick Holland: The variety is a big one. Working alone can be great sometimes, but I did it for a really long time, so I was ready to open that up. It's fun to work on so many different records, even in one week. 

I guess you can learn a lot when you’re working in a variety of genres? 

Priori: You get put out of your comfort zone a little bit, which forces you to get better at things. 

What makes a good dynamic for collaborating? 

Patrick Holland: I think openness. Always having another idea and never just shutting things down and being stagnant on it. Being able to keep things rolling. Not getting hung up on finer details. 

Priori: If someone believes in an idea, we should try it. I think a lot of things are worth trying. Staying open is important. If you work with people who you admire for a reason or you enjoy their music, you should definitely be open to trying things they want to try.

One of your most recent collaborations involved working with Tiga on his album. How did that come about? Did this project take you out of your comfort zone? 

Priori: I did a remix for Tiga. He liked what I did and suggested we get coffee. He had been working with so many different producers over the years, but most of those people are in Europe. We did a couple of sessions making a lot of club tunes and he was pulling out a lot of references that were ambitious in the sense of harmonies and songwriting, a lot of stuff from the '80s. I know it’s one of Pat’s strengths, songwriting and writing stuff for guitar, so I asked if he wanted to join a couple sessions. From there all three of us started working together. 

It’s been a nice dynamic. Everyone has different strengths and brings something else to the table. Sometimes you lose perspective on the song and it’s nice when there's someone else who can come in and be like “Maybe this section is too long?” or “Maybe this is too quiet? If you bring this element up, it makes the whole track more exciting.” Bringing in more people is almost always a good idea, in that sense, as long as you trust everyone's taste. 

You said some of the references Tiga was pulling out in the studio were ambitious. Music from the '80s. What were some of those references? And why did you consider them ambitious? 

Priori: He was showing me a lot of stuff from Echo & The Bunnymen and Depeche Mode. Things that were made in big studios, where people play instruments really well and have probably two or three extra engineers in the room. That's what I mean by ambitious. These are records that have been perfected and they’ve been played and captured live. 

Writing purely club music can be done entirely in Ableton these days and it can be quite effective on a dancefloor. But once you're trying to capture the humanness of a recording with live instruments and you're trying to write songs with different sections, it’s definitely easier with a few heads in the room. 

What goes into good songwriting? 

Priori: I think it’s about doing things intentionally. When I started writing dance music, I had no theoretical skills in writing music at all, I would just do things until they sounded good. 

Patrick Holland: I find a lot of dance music is more jam-based. You jam around on different elements until things glue and that's sort of it. And we still do that. 

Priori: It’s not a bad thing.

Patrick Holland: It’s not a bad thing at all. It's the most gratifying thing ever. But then it’s about saying “Alright, that's a great jam, but why does this chord sound good with this? Let’s open that up and investigate.” You try to create a bit more narrative, so that it's not super repetitive and you play around more with the different elements you have. On this album, I would say the songs are song-like, but not many of them necessarily run in a classic structure. It's pop-esque, but not full blown pop. 

Priori: It's a very vague definition of pop. A lot of pop music these days would start with the chorus, or if you don't have a vocal in the first 20 seconds, you're kind of screwed when you’re making music for radio or streaming. We're not doing these things to make it work in the pop world. We like a lot of songs outside of dance music and we're trying to bridge the gap. Most of the songs on this record still have the bones of club music. We just tried to go the extra mile in terms of being thoughtful about arrangement, chord progressions or how we could get more out of the sounds we made.

Patrick Holland: A good example of a group that we both admire, big time, that does this thing in-between dance music and song-like structures is Everything But The Girl.

Priori: 100%. Or that Dntel album, ‘Life Is Full of Possibilities’. He's written a lot of music with pop bands and rock bands and that album has the aesthetics and ideas borrowed from pop, but with a huge IDM influence. Those intersections are very interesting. When you hear things that would be in a pop song, but it's been arranged and processed completely differently. Lali Puna ‘I Thought I Was Over That’ is an album we listened to a lot. It was an inspiration for this album, in some ways.

Patrick Holland: It’s not so much pop music, it's just straight up songwriting. Rather than it being a three chord part looped, with a melody and bassline underneath. But a song can also be just those elements. It just depends on how it's presented. 

I love the track ‘Shattered’ ft. Helena Deland & Ross Meen from your album. The combo of the ear wormy vocal hook and the bassline. And the whispery vocal also reminds me of Opus III.

Patrick Holland: Actually, that whispery vocal was done by our friend who's in a hardcore band. It’s a hardcore vocal but it fits in a really cool way.

Priori: Then the instrumentation we did on top and Helena's vocal really brought it into this catchy zone.

Patrick Holland: Writing that one as a mega challenge. The amount of melodies and lyrical ideas I wrote. It took me almost a month of working on it every day with it on loop to find a good idea. 

Were you on the verge of it driving you nuts?

Patrick Holland: Of course. But once we got the Helena vocal it made sense and we knew what to do with it. 

Priori: It's the one song I wasn't involved in making as much. But when I came in, it just felt right to me, which was probably a relief for Pat. It's a lot of experimentation, as much as we talk about being intentional. There’s a lot of thought that goes into it but, ultimately, we're still trying to pair a hardcore vocal with a garage beat. It’s about trying to make those elements fit together in a compelling way.

You mentioned pop songs for the radio need to provide some sort of instant gratification. But there are pop songs which don’t do that. What makes a good pop song?

Patrick Holland: The best pop songs are the ones that are still challenging. They subvert the norm or the formula in a really sneaky way that most people don't even pick up on, yet it works with people's brains immediately; which is a very hard thing to achieve. A band like Talk Talk, for instance, was nuts at that. 

Priori: With pop, a lot of people think about this radio friendly sound but, to me, Deftones is pop. Of course, the aesthetic and the instrumentation is maybe not what people would describe as pop immediately, but they wrote songs where, when you reach the end of the song, you just want to play it again. 

Grouper is pop in certain ways. If you listen to certain songs, you want to read the lyrics and figure out what it's about. It creates these layers of things to discover. It’s a very loose definition of pop, but in regards to this album we were just like ‘let's try to write songs’. 

Patrick Holland: Yeah, songs that are narrative-based and have sections. I guess ‘pop’ is almost more of an adjective here. 

With reference to the club music parts of the album, there's a lot of crunchy, minimal moments. I know Ricardo Villalobos was one of the musical inspirations behind the album. What do you love about him?

Priori: There's a long list of things we like about the way that he does things. There's a Villalobos remix of Beck that came out in the 2000s, when a lot of bands were getting remixes done for their records. There was an emphasis on electronica, which was electronic music that wasn't necessarily meant for the dancefloor. People were really experimenting with acoustic instruments as well as tons of electronic stuff on their records and we really like that dynamic. 

So many influential and timeless records came out around that time and Villalobos did an insane amount of remixes. He's famous now for playing minimal, but he has an insane range and appetite for music of any kind. Whenever I've seen him DJ, he played something I completely didn't expect. He just seems like someone who really loves music and he’ll play whatever he's excited about in that moment.

Patrick Holland: He's a songwriter. Big time. Tracks like ‘Dexter’ are so melodically rich and emotional. He’s someone who plays whatever he wants, for better or for worse. Whether the crowd likes it or not, he's testing those waters constantly, which maybe isn't even fully intentional on his part, but it's interesting. 

Priori: His productions are incredibly rich in general. The drum sounds on songs like ‘Affect’ on our album have this crisp minimalism and very clicky sounds. Tons of people do that now, but I think him and a few others were definitely pioneering that and making it sound really exciting.

Yeah. They have elements that scratch your ears and jump out at you. Listening back through your stuff, I noticed a shift in your output after the pandemic, where things start to feel more textured and have these elements that audibly jump out at you from ‘JS03’ onwards. What happened there on a technical level? 

Patrick Holland: We both did our own thing. I was more in a band world and Francis was diving deeper into his solo stuff, doing more album focused work and the NAFF label stuff. When we finally decided to make another record, we were using chains of different effects and doing things that we hadn't done before, like using amps and reamping stuff through guitar amps. 

Priori: We were going a little further in terms of sound design and experimentation with gear. I think the thread that continued is dub. We've always loved dub music and dub techno. It’s something that is still present on the album and in our liveset. We got into distortion a bit more, which means some of those records jump out of the speakers a little bit more than the stuff we did before. 

Patrick Holland: Before, we would track stuff from outside the box into the box, as clean as possible. In the newer records, we started tracking into various different types of preamps that all distort and saturate things differently. When we track each element through different preamp chains, it fills up the sonic space in a different way and with a lot more depth. Simply speaking. 

Priori: Distortion adds harmonics. It's just giving character to different sounds, intentionally.  When you start playing with distortion, you open up a whole other palette. It's an area of music that is worth exploring and we learned a lot from doing those earlier records. Now we pick and choose one sound that is extremely rich and will jump out of the speakers. That creates depth in the song if other elements are softer, for example. We’re just intentionally playing with the texture of things in that way.

In recent years you’ve been involved in the making of lots of records other than your own. On those records, I noticed that you reference ‘Jump Source Studios’ as the credit for your work. This reminds me of someone like Porky, this prolific mastering engineer from the UK…

Priori: Legend!

Do you guys wish to build your studio into something of similar stature? 

Priori: It's just a way of documenting where things were made. We never advertised or rented our studio to people we don't know. We use it pretty much every day. It’s just cool to remember where records were made. It's not the goal to build into something of scale. We used to do it with NAFF as well. We had a name for the old studio, Casa Di Ruffino. It's the name of a really cheap wine we used to drink. It documents where the music was made, but it's a complete joke. That studio was just in the kitchen, on the table, with some speakers. It's not about the status of a certain studio, it's almost mocking that a little bit. Documenting with a little bit of cheekiness. 

Patrick Holland: Like that Factory Records studio Mark Reeder would work out of. It wasn't a studio like Abbey Road or something, but it was a room that existed with interesting gear in it, where good music got made.

You’ve just completed some live dates as Jump Source, off the back of the new album. How did that go?

Priori: It's been really rewarding to play together. Out of the live sets I’ve done, it has the most improv and looseness to it. There is a structure, but it really feels like we're playing off each other. Every time has sounded quite different. Obviously, the songs are the same, but the way we perform them and transition between them has been quite different. We've sort of manipulated them in some ways, to make them work on a dancefloor. It keeps it exciting for us and I feel that translates to the people as well. It's been really fun. We also play a lot of the older stuff as well. It was fun to update that older stuff and make it fit sonically in the world of this album; adjusting the drums or moving things around. There's a bit of everything in there.

Patrick Holland: It's a nice thing to do after making an album. Instead of it just coming out, you’re following it up with being able to celebrate those tracks and reinvent them.

This live show sounds like yet another big undertaking from you guys…

Patrick Holland: Yeah, it is. There's more variables at play too. Francis's bag got stuck in Brussels when he went to Serbia and the bag was just floating around the world for the last couple weeks.

Priori: It showed up at my house in Montreal yesterday at 11:PM. But we had to make do without my gear for Panorama Bar and improvise a little bit. It was a slightly stressful moment, but it's a part of the process for sure. People are really understanding, more and more. Maybe because the world we live in is getting more and more artificial, people tend to really enjoy the moments that feel a little unruly in a set, when things aren't perfect. People know you're working to make things sound a certain way live. I think that feels exciting in a club where people are used to hearing meticulously produced and mastered songs, then you show up and make music on the fly. The imperfections make it exciting and human.

Can you tell us about your mix?

Jump Source: This mix is a three-hour chunk of a recording from LA’s Wellness Check party at Canary Test on April 3. We went one-for-one all-night-long. Shout out to the organisers and dancers.

'Fold' is out now via NAFF, check it here

Tracklist:
1 Malin Genie & Frits Wentink - Tongue Kiss
2 Laid - Punch Up
3 Claude VonStroke - Who’s Afraid of Detroit?
4 The Martin Brothers - Stoopit 
5 Olga Korol & Per Hammar - Darth Vader
6 Tiga - ???
7 Vic 20 & Sinclair - Nikita
8 Amber - Sexual (Li Da Di) (Deep Dish Cheez, Whiz Remix)
9 Ricardo Villalobos - Easy Lee
10 John Spring - Strange
11 Jump Source - Scrap
12 Paul Cut - Memorize Your Face
13 Derrick Carter - Where U At? (The First Mix)
14 Rydeen - Mwvave Koncxi
15 Tom Pooks & Joy Kitikonti - Mono Electricien
16 Kotelett & Zadak - Ultramarin
17 Physical Therapy & DJ Python - Strong Boy
18 The Micronauts - Get Funky Get Down
19 Basement Jaxx - Get Down Get Horny
20 Burnski - Circuits
21 Unknown Artist - Urges 3 (Dub)
22 Dude Energy - Renee Running
23 DJ Richard - Leech2
24 Break 3000 - Plastique People ft. Zusi
25 DJ Fitness - Chinese Dog
26 Robag Wruhme - Dopamin
27 Erik Travis - Tek Dance Music
28 DJ Godfather ft. Dj Deeon - Hold Up
29 Serge & Tyrell - Pump-O-Matic
30 DJ Suzy - Digital Girl (Funk Remix)
31 Maetrik - Ceredrum
32 Steve Angello & Laidback Luke - Be
33 Jump Source - Bleach
34 DJ Slugo - Freaky Ride
35 MANT - What You Think
36 High Lonesome Sound System - Waiting For The Lights (Thai Mix) 
37 Panash - Jack 2 Jack (Jesper Dahlbäck Remix)
38 Robag Wruhme - Jause
39 Underworld - Dark & Long
40 Björk - Alarm Call (Alan Braxe & Ben Diamond Edit)
41 lazy deejay - w coast blvd
42 Jump Source - Endlessly ft. BEA1991
43 John Tejada - Vereor
44 Circulation - Turquoise (differentGear Remix)
45 Baraso - Space Mob
46 JB Rose - Wake Up (King Britt Underwater Scuba Mix)
47 Satoshi Tomiie - Proody-106
48 Al Wootton - Body Healthy
49 Oldboy - Extender
50 MMM - Dex
51 Crustation - Flame (Mood II Swing Vocal Mix)
52 The Coastal Commission - Rhodes Through Space