Interview with Tomas Andersson By Paul Bergenh., 23 November 2005

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What kind of music do u produce?
I'm not much of a fan for labelling music. I try to make passive aggressive, repressed anger music. Unintelligent music for very intelligent people, haha! I hate lame music. It has to have an edge and it's allowed to hurt you sometimes. Perfect sound is so over-rated. That's why I can't stand much of the prog-house, cause it's too busy trying to sound polished. I guess you could call my music techno, but not the traditional swedish knuckle-hard tribal stuff. I try not to play too fast, cause then you loose much of the funk i think.

It seems you have found your home at Bpitchcontrol for your releases, how would you describe Bpitchcontrol as a label?
I'm really happy to be associated with them. They have helped me very much and they have a real hectic and quite diverse release schedule, and they answer the phone when I call them, which is not all too common I'm afraid.
They have some kind of little "family" there in Berlin, cause most of their artists and DJs live there and know each other from way back. In that sense I'm a bit of an outsider living in Stockholm 2000 km from the HQ, but really I don't mind. Stockholm is a rather slow city with not much going on but that leaves some room and time for producing music instead.
I like the fact you always have to listen to each new release on BPC cause you just never know what they come up with next. It's not like with some labels that push just one sound and you know pretty much exactly what a new release will sound like before you even put the record on. Isn't that boring?

Your liveset has changed since I heared it first, beginning of 2005, and now a days. What's the biggest difference?
New gear. Some of the sounds are the same but I just recently switched to Ableton Live and I have to say it's a super program. It really give you room to improvise and the on-board effects fit my needs perfectly. I also got a new MIDI-controller with loads of faders and knobs and buttons, which mean I can control most of the action in Ableton without using the mouse.

Is there a message you like to extend with your music?
Well, I don't have any political agenda if that's what you mean. I just want people to forget their pathethic shitty lives, if only for five minutes. It's consumption music and mostly with a pretty short date, but that's ok. I don't set out to make timeless classics. That would be really pretentious of me.

The "Washing Up" EP, and especially the Tiga RMX, is played over and over again. You called it the "hardest" track you've ever produced. What do you mean by that?
It's not hard in the obvious sense, with extreme kickdrums and stuff, and it's not very fast either. It's really all about the
bassline, and some driving hihatloops. I think I got them to push the track forward in a nice way. The kickdrum is virtually non-existent in my original version.

Why is the original better then the Tiga remix?
Hehe, well since I made it I have to say my version is better, don't I? I really like the remix, it's a super-effective piece of stupid party music, it's bassy and rough and the added vox/shouts are over the top in the best sense, and I like the fact the bassline is used in it's original form. But… my hihats are still harder. In a passive-aggressive way.


What is the best club you've ever been to? (i know the story already, please share it with the rest of the world!!)
A few years ago I was sitting at home in a friends apartment. This guy is a bit of a bohemian and he doesn't have any chairs, so everyone just sits on the floor. So there I was, sitting on his floor, making simple loops in a tracker-program on his Amiga (he still uses it…) and suddenly everyone decided to go out to some party, but I was so into the music I was making so I decided to stay there. I sat there for a few hours making music non-stop, listening in headphones really
loud, and I suddenly realized this was like the best party I've ever been to! So you don't have to go out, the party is in your head anyway I guess. It can be really rewarding going to a club and having that mass-psychosis experience when the room is full of people who go for the same goal, but actually for me it's a pretty individual trip.

What is "relive.se" all about?
Re:Live is a streaming audio company I work for. We stream electronic music over mobile phone networks, specializing in live-sets. The idea is that when you're on the subway or out on the town and need to hear some good music, you log on to our server via your phone and listen to top-quality live electronics. At the moment we run in Sweden and Denmark, but we're starting in Austria now, and in Italy and the UK early next year. As we're based in Sweden, most of our artists so far is from here, but we're very busy commissioning live-sets and label-dj-sets from some very good guys out there.

You were born in Sweden, does Sweden still offer you everything you seek for a place to life?
I could do with a little more sun I guess, but it's ok. My brain doesn't work properly in a hot climate. I have my family and my friends here and we still have ok social security in this country.

Thanks Tomas, for taking the time to answer our questions