HIT THE NORTH

It would be impolite of me to reveal the year we first sat down with Phil Kieran and talked about the issue of his debut LP. Here’s a hint though: if you’d mentioned the term ‘Big Brother’ to anyone, they’d have assumed you were speaking about Orwell. If you’d brought up Al Qaeda, chances are they’d have the subject down as an exotic chef. It’s been a frenetic decade for the Belfast DJ and musician. A decade where he made the leap from wunderkind to maestro – releasing close to one hundred tracks; establishing himself as a top draw throughout Ireland, Britain and Europe; co-writing the soundtrack to Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience with David Holmes; and, alongside Martin Corrigan and Danny Todd in Alloy Mental, even managing to enter the realms of indie-dance crossover and emerge with his reputation enhanced.

Kieran’s work schedule goes some way towards explaining why it’s taken so long for him to deliver Shh. However, once he made the decision to start work on an album, the same single-mindedness saw him take some fairly drastic action in preparation.
“I didn’t want to mess around with it,” he says.” I wanted to concentrate all my energies on making a really great record. So for that year, there were no remixes, no singles, less gigs – and it’s mad, you take a step back like that, only for a short time, and you start noticing your bookings drying up. But then you get a bit of a boost – people hear it and like it, you hook up with a brilliant label, get a good booker, start getting involved in the sleeve design, the live shows. So I’m broke, but I’m optimistic too.”
Kieran’s good mood is understandable. Cocoon, Sven Vath’s highly respected label, has picked up Shh for release, and initial reactions suggest it could turn out to be one of the landmark techno albums of the decade. Which will hardly come as a surprise to those who have tracked his progress over the last decade (including the horde of fellow techno artists who got busy exploiting the template he created on 07’s ‘Skyhook’). Or, indeed, anyone aware of the exacting standards he set himself on first entering the studio.
“I always had a very clear picture of what it was going to be like,” he admits. “There was a specific moment when everything crystallised for me. I went to see Kraftwerk in Dublin last year and I actually cried at one point. It was pure electronic music at its best and it made me realise what I had to do. I don’t mean I wanted to go off and make a Kraftwerk record, it just refocused me. I had intended to go off to Berlin for a month and immerse myself in some of the real heavy, underground clubs. Do my homework on the most current music that was being made. But then I just thought: fuck that. Seeing Kraftwerk at their best, you don’t get a better reference point than that.”
Shh is both head-bendingly aggressive and musically multi-coloured. If contemporary techno can sometimes seem an imposing and impenetrable place – Phil’s open-house policy (drafting in Todd and Ros ‘Moon Unit’ Blair on vocals, referencing everything from Boards Of Canada to Joy Division) has created a record capable of making friends outside the cognoscenti.
“Belfast has always been a techno city,” Phil explains. “But it’s also always had a really weird, experimental side too. So I’ve always been drawn towards things that are challenging. And I think I’ve spent the last few years constantly developing. The Alloy Mental record was brilliant in that it meant I haven’t just been making heavy techno albums for a decade. Once that finished, I was ready to make a techno record – but a really strange, twisted, interesting techno record. One of those records that other people start ripping off as soon as it comes out.”
Dance music’s obituary has been written and rewritten countless times of late. Shh, however, is just the kind of daring, challenging and utterly vital record to suggest that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
“There’s a way of making music where you can ham it up too much,” Phil opines. “You can definitely stick the odd swoosh noise on, knowing it’ll make everyone go mad when you’re playing it in a club. I’d prefer not to have to do that. You can make music with artistic merit that’s not up its own arse. It’s hard to find good dance music that’s honest. And I hope this record is honest. You have to work harder to get to that level. I mean ‘Skyhook’, that came about with me messing around with a synth – one wee weird noise. But it went huge in London, and everyone was doing it. I could have carried on down that route, but you can’t keep regurgitating yourself. You have to put the blinkers on. It’s a weird balance, on one hand you want people to like your stuff, but on the other, you want to make them work for it.”