It s Oliver Now!

Over the last two years, Ealing-based producer Oliver Ho has steadily risen from obscurity, attaining an international reputation as both a DJ and producer. With an impressive catalogue of singles on his own Meta label, releases for James Ruskin s Blueprint and an album, last year s well received Sentience, Ho had made a name for his hypnotically funky spin on minimal dancefloor techno.

It would have been easy for him to further this sound, Oliver has taken a different direction, evident on his second album, Listening To The Voices Inside. Indeed the follow-up to Sentience is nothing short of a revelation: denser and more percussive, Voices takes live, organic elements, pure jazz sources, tribal African and Brazilian rhythmic influences to shape a new, distinctive spin on techno, a genre often accused of tightly adhering to a limiting template.
Oliver explains that he wanted to move away from hard, fast minimalism: Voices is a way for me to say this is the other side, the way I m going. I think the perception was that I made very hard, dense techno, but that s not just what I m about. Voices indicates where I want to take my sound.
With other UK pioneers like James Ruskin, Steve Bicknell and Surgeon all releasing albums over the coming months it looks like there s a techno resurgence going on in Britain right now, and all these new projects have forsaken high bpm counts for a funkier, less rigid sound. Oliver agrees that a slower tempo gives him more room to work with the sound. 180 bpm gabba doesn t give you much room to experiment!
This phenomenon would also confirm a general shift in dance music productions. Layo & Bushwacka, Mr. C and their many contemporaries have successfully fused house, techno and an occasional smattering of breaks to make tech-house, a style which has earned the former Shamen rapper s label a three album deal in the States. It s also apparent among trance and progressive house DJs, a slowing down of tempos and the re-introduction of funkier grooves.
Subsequently everyone from Mr. C, Sasha and Jeff Mills are charting the same records, a return in many ways to the acid house values of old. Whatever the result, Ho believes that the way forward for techno lies in a less purist attitude.
Techno is getting a lot groovier, it s less about banging music nowadays, he confirms. Dense, fast music can be powerful, but recently, things got to a point where a lot of producers were making furious, fast, hard music. It should always have been a mixture of styles. It s important for us to have links with other music and I like the way techno and house have become closer together.
These developments are taking techno back to what it should be, good music irrespective of what background it s from. It also means techno is pulling on similar influences to house, using tribal, African percussion and Brazilian influences. It means we start touching on Latin and jazz influences as well and start giving techno a new sound. At the end of the day there s only so much you can do with an analogue riff!
Apart from creating a new, funky strain of organic sounding techno, Ho and his peers, producers like Ruskin and Surgeon, of whom Oliver says We re all trying to push it in a similar direction, but with our own styles have finally severed the sometimes asphyxiating umbilical cord with Detroit techno. Strong links to Motor City have often been seen as the main reason for UK techno standing still, but the new wave of producers, which Ho spearheads, has little in common with the legacy and musical heritage of Detroit.
We ve been influenced somewhat by Detroit but we ve also put something into it which is innately British, Ho says adding that most contemporary techno has a background which US producers weren t exposed to, a heritage that takes from the tradition of electronic music in this country Coil, Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle, the punk scene and industrial acts. We re definitely injecting something new into it.
When he s not producing floor slaying techno hybrids, Ho, like so many of his peers indulges his more abstract, experimental side. His second label, Light & Dark, devotes most of its releases to ambient music and Ho is also launching a new stamp, Exit, which will incorporate multimedia projects. With a compilation of experimental work from the likes of Surgeon, Claude Young, James Ruskin, Steve Bicknell and Karl O Connor scheduled for release on Exit, Oliver hopes that the project will showcase the experimental side, which is 50% of what we do.
Despite all this activity, Ho and like minded British producers remain largely unknown quantities in their home country. DJing around Europe every weekend, Oliver experiences the other end of the spectrum, with some European countries integrating underground electronic music into their mainstream. At the same time, Oliver feels dubious about his work achieving mainstream status.
If you go to Germany you can see what it would be like to crossover into the mainstream, he says. Unfortunately, for something to cross over it has to go through a cleaning process, it has to be sterilized and all the undesirable elements taken out. When it finally crosses over it often loses what originally gave it its identity.
Listening To The Voices Inside is out now on Meta.