Daniel Avery: Pure Grooves

So it’s all about finding the right audience?

Yeah. I believe that. Also you will piss off kids. I’ve played gigs before where there have been lads down the front clearly wanting it harder, fist pumping away and shouting  “Play harder!” but I don’t do that so I’m not gonna give it to them. Imagine how boring it would be if every DJ in the world just gave the front row exactly what they wanted? That would be so boring.

 I remember being a Parklife a few years ago and they had James Holden playing in one of the tents and there was a guy at the front shouting “Turn it up!” which is the most banal of requests you can make – public take note –  and just looking at him thinking that there was no chance of him responding to him shouting at him.

[Laughs] That’s actually something I’ve had to remind myself of many time. I’ve had to remind myself that when I was 17-18 and first started going to clubs I was such a quiet, shy teenager. But I was the biggest music fan in there or at least in my head I was, but I wasn’t in the middle of the dancefloor or going up to the DJ making requests but rather at the back or towards a corner taking it all in and letting it affect me. So you have to remember that those people do exist and those people down the front shouting for it to get harder, those are the same people that leave comments on youtube and are the same kids I hated at school because they just shouted out whatever they wanted because they thought their opinion was the most important. These people are the same in their adult life and you’ve got to remember the quiet kids at the back. They are just as important.

I totally agree. As a fairly anorak-ish teenager I’d be probably be spending the first half an hour wandering around the club trying to work out where I could enjoy the best sound quality…

Exactly and that is rarely down the front!

Yep but you have to worry about anyone whose night isn’t complete unless they have high fived the DJ! Now to return to the album it plays very much like a DJ set in regards to the fact it’s very coherent. Was this a conscious decision or did the ideas and tracks just flow together?

It was very conscious.  In retrospect I feel doing the fabric CD the year before was really good training for the album as I knew I wanted it to sound like a DJ set. To have peaks and troughs; light and shade. Thankfully the reviews have been great but I read one from an American website that basically said “It’s good but it sags a little in the middle” and I was like “It’s meant to as that was the idea!”

I don’t know who would want music that is just up, up, up. It’s not how I fell in love with music and so that isn’t how I’m going to make it. I discovered music through albums. First through the radio and then from the artists albums in full as that’s how it is supposed to be. That is another fear I have for in the next 10 years we’ll see the decline of the album. I really hope we don’t but there is a chance of it and we move onto to a culture of you just pick your favorite tracks from an album and that’s all you buy. Well no because this is an album that has been designed as one body of work with hours going in to thinking of how to construct it and won’t make sense as intended if taken out of context.

After the year we’ve had with high quality albums I’m less concerned about the format than I once was but agree that people don’t give them enough consideration and essentially want artists to remake their favourite track repeatedly.

Yeah but these people are the same people who are often down the front! I’ve never left a comment on anything saying “I think you should have done it like that” knowing that the person has probably spent a year making it. I mean like who the fuck are you to tell someone else that they are wrong? If you want to make demands then make them of yourself and do something that you believe in. We shouldn’t worry about those initial people who say “It should be more like this or that…”

Definitely. Can you tell us more about your future plans?

Well I’ve just completed a remix for Factory Floor which has just dropped on DFA and I’m also producing a new band from LA . We’re working on a single and they are a kind of psyche- rock band who I’m really excited about working with although I can’t say who they are just yet.

Cool. We’ll invite readers to guess their identity! We’re loving the Floorplan remix at the minute. I got it wrong when they were first mentioned to me as I confused them with Robert Hood’s Floorplan! Luckily they’re both cool so I didn’t embarrass myself too much in conversation.

I think they come from quite a similar shelf in many ways so that’s probably quite an interesting if accidental observation to make! The are some similarities there. Also despite all my whinging in this interview I’m loving DJing more than ever at the minute as I think this is a really exciting time to be involved in electronic music. I think the crowds are the best they’ve ever been.

I totally agree. I think crowds are more educated now than ever before and that we see more and more crowds who have gone to see artists rather than just attending clubs because that is somewhere to go.

Yeah. I think that the new generation of kids coming to clubs  are very educated and because they have access to everything via soundcloud or boiler room they no longer care what genre things are or even use the word genre. Probably. [Laughs] I’ve noticed that some of the kids who come and watch me DJ will be the same kids who watch Daphni or Seth Troxler and we all do very different things. I’ve also got the monthly show on Rinse FM which I’ve really been enjoying. 

You can catch Daniel Avery at this year’s Bugged Out Weekender running across the 7,8 and 9th of March alongside a host of some of electronic music’s leading names: Tickets are available below:

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