Noir Interview 2014

Noir is back with his second collaboration with singer-songwriter, Hayze, on the outstandingly mesmerizing ‘Angel’, so we thought it would be a good time to catch up with our favourite Danish DJ and find out all about the single and what’s to follow in the coming year.

Hi Rene, how have you been?
I’ve been really good. I’ve been touring and always busy with the label – it’s not easy to run a label on the sideline of being a producer and a DJ… This year I’ve taken some time out to finish my upcoming album.

And you’ve just released your collaborative single ‘Angel’ alongside Hayze…
Yes… It took me a long time to finish. I released ‘Around’ in 2011 with Hayze and we had a few opportunities to do a follow-up back then, but it didn’t feel right between us. He’s a singer-songwriter and he lives in Malaysia and I live in Denmark so we do everything over the Internet, so two years after ‘Around’ we found each other again and connected. With ‘Around’ it was me who sent Hayze an instrumental which he started writing lyrics to, but with ‘Angel’ he sent me an idea with the vocals and I absolutely loved them and said to him “this has to be the follow-up to ‘Around’. So I started producing the music six months ago and it literally took me six months to be happy. I tried a lot of things like making it very organic, very Deep House, and I ended up with this mix of arpeggio Giorgio Moroder synth and some Techno vibes, but I’m finally happy with it because I didn’t want it to sound like everything else out there; I didn’t want it to sound like ‘Around’ – I wanted it to be an evolvement from ‘Around’.

Were you concerned that people would compare it to ‘Around’?
Yeah, of course people will compare it to ‘Around’ because it was such a big hit, but I already distanced myself from ‘Around’. Six months after ‘Around’ I released a single called ‘Found Out’ with Richard Davis on vocals and everybody expected me to do the ‘Around’ follow-up and do something like ‘Around’, but it was winter and I wanted to go deeper and be different, show people that I’m not gonna copy myself. I’m gonna try something different for every production. A lot of producers have a template and a specific sound, and I like to start from scratch.

Would you define yourself as Electronica?
When you hear my album which is coming, you will definitely define me as an Electronic artist.

When can we expect it?
We’ve got plans for it for the beginning of 2015, but things are going so well that I think it might be released this year, October/November – that’s what I hope! It actually all depends on the singer-songwriters that I’m working with because that part takes a long time. It’s like Ping-Pong: “can you please re-sing that part or sing this break down or key change”, it sometimes takes a lot of time.

What other singers have caught your ear for the album?
I can’t reveal too much because a lot of the demos have been sent to the singer-songwriters out there. As long as I haven’t approved or confirmed anything yet, it would be really stupid for me to name names and then they don’t end up on the album! You never know which songs – I might demo 20 and use 12.

So what do you look for in a vocal artist?
Heart… Soul… Emotion… I really like vocals that are quite fragile, where you can hear the person is singing from the heart. It’s one of the reasons why I picked Hayze for ‘Around’, because I knew him from previous tracks, especially with Sandy Rivera. I loved his honesty and his singing from the heart. You could hear it on ‘Around’ and you can most definitely hear it on ‘Angel’.

What do you think it is about the two of you that results in such compelling and exhilarating music?
I think we connect over the emotion of the music. What turns us on is if I make music that speaks to his heart or he writes vocals that speak to me – that’s where we connect. We don’t sit in a studio doing the music or the vocals together – he does the vocals and I do the music. I guess there’s just a connection there. We’ve talked about it a couple of times and there’s something spiritual between us. We can feel it; it was there on ‘Around’, the few attempts we had after ‘Around’ we didn’t feel it, so we left it and waited until the right time and the right track. Seven months ago he sent me some sketches for ‘Angel’ and I fell in love and said, “this is the one.”

Well we love it at BBM!
Thank you! I’m glad when people like it because it was such a long period of time; I changed it so many times. You won’t believe what it sounded like in the beginning. It wasn’t shit, but it wasn’t as good as it is now! [Laughs]

It’s going to feature on your next album; what direction are you going with the record?
From the demos that I’ve put down, so far it’s very split between Electronica, House and Techno. There’s some classic Deep House from 10-15 years ago; there’s some really dramatic Techno tracks for summer and festivals; and the Electronica tracks are a mix between Hip-Hop influences and very old school Kraftwerk.

Speaking of Kraftwerk, you were influenced heavily by it as a young child and then the Acid House movement in the UK and US; what would you say influences you now?
I listen to a lot of music because of my teenage fascination with Depeche Mode, The Cure and Portishead; that still sits in me and that won’t go away. There’s some melancholic influences and it’s still the melancholic music that really turns me on. Today I would be inspired by Jamie Woon; Adele for Pop music… But I try not to get too influenced by other artists. When I sit down and make music I lock everything away and let things flow from the heart and I’m not one of those producers who sits down and listens to some music and says, “I will make something like this.” I just try to invent something new every time.

Well it seems to work!
[Laughs] Thanks!

We have to ask you about Noir Music; who should we be checking out at the moment?
We’ve got a lot of stuff coming. I had a little meeting with myself and my A&R and I brainstormed Noir Music last year because I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong, but I felt like I could do more right. I felt that I needed to put the focus back on Noir Music a lot more than I did in 2013, so I made some changes. In 2014 we will only be releasing songs as singles, and then obviously we have some good remixes of those songs, and then I made two EP lines – one is called TRX, short for ‘Tracks’ and the other is RMX, short for ‘Remixes’ – and the TRX line is going to be songs that I love and have to release on Noir Music, and RMX is for back catalogue tracks, where we find our favourite producers and we make them do new versions of these classic tracks. Yesterday, we released the first remix EP and the big hit from Larse is on there called ‘So Long’ and it’s now being remixed by NiCe7 and it looks to be doing pretty well. So that’s what I’ve been doing for Noir Music. There’s a lot of cool artists coming up like Kevin Saunderson and a new single from Larse – his first full-vocal single. There will be new stuff from Hot Since 82 and Kashmir is on the label. A lot of good stuff.

So is it like a rebranding?
It’s not that I did something wrong in 2013 or regret any of the releases, but sometimes you have to stop and rethink stuff, so that’s what I did and I felt like I wanted to simplify things. That’s why Noir Music is only singles now, the RMX EPs and the TRX EPs. I felt it was a little bit too confusing with the releases last year. I don’t know if that’s rebranding or just evolving and making things better.

Almost like what you have to do with your own music?
Yeah, of course!

Thanks for talking to us, Rene!

By Charlotte Mellor