Me, Myself and My

It wasn’t the biggest release of 2006, or the brashest, or the most hyped (‘Fizheuer Zieheuer’ wins that one comfortably), but MyMy’s Songs For The Gentle cropped up in more of the year’s ‘Best Of…’ lists that one might have expected after its quiet release at the end of October.

The 12-tracker left little immediate impression, but – like a good album should – began to seep into the system after repeated investigations. It’s a record that’s definitely of its time – Berlin, 2006 – but not too much of its time. If you know what we mean.
When hotpress catches up with Lee Jones, the ex-pat Brit who forms one-third of MyMy, he’s groggy after a late/early Friday night/Saturday morning in the city that rarely sleeps.
“I was at a party in my friend’s café below my flat and I ended up staying up a bit late,” he tells us, rather sheepishly. It takes him a while to get going, but once he does, he’s got an interesting tale to tell.
Although he didn’t know it at the time, MyMy was conceived as a result of a split-second decision Lee made in 2002. He’d been making accessible leftfield music under the name Hefner for a number of years, and things had been going quite well.
The remixes were stacking up, the interest was there and the pressure to deliver a Zero 7-esque crossover hit was getting to him.
So he did the exact opposite of what he was expected to do: he turned tail and got the hell out of London.
“I did a runner over here completely,” he giggles. “A couple of things happened, and I just decided in a few minutes to go. And two weeks later I was gone. It was such a liberating feeling, escaping and coming to the frontier.”
Berlin in 2002 was a different place to Berlin today. The Richie Hawtin-sanctioned invasion had yet to take place, and Lee quickly found what he needed – space, music and friends.
“It was different then – there weren’t so many English voices around. I wasn’t really into this scene when I moved here, it was just a fluke that I got into it,” he says. “Then it got really trendy and everyone started coming over. So it was good that I established myself and met the locals and learnt the language… then everyone else started turning up…”
He soon hooked up with Carsten Klemann and Nick Hoppner and MyMy was more or less born.
“I’d known Carsten from years before from DJing as Hefner, and when I got over here, it was only a matter of months before I met Nick DJing at the old Panoramabar.”
Quickly, they got to be friends through partying: “It’s such a small community here – a big city, but the actual scene that we occupy is tiny, a handful of clubs all quite close to each other.”
They posted out a demo of their first studio efforts, and were offered a single release by Playhouse.
One more single followed, the more refined but equally effective ‘Serpentine’, before work on Songs For The Gentle began. As you may have guessed from the title, the two singles ended up the most aggressive tracks on the album.
“It was just about getting the vibe right. The other working title we had for it was The Right Side Of Happy, that was the original title – we liked it, but thought it was too contrived. But we gave it to the designer and he came back with an image that is now the cover, and we were like, ‘Yep, that’s it, that’s the vibe of the album’. And then we changed the title.
“Gentle people – we like gentle people,” he says, of the album title. “We don’t like crazy aggressive clubbers. It matched our personalities in a way.”
Collaboration does not yet come naturally to him.
“Working with other people I still find difficult. I do my best work when I’ve got 10 hours to myself to sculpt away at a piece of music. I don’t know how to do that with someone else.”
Still, he’s happy as part of the MyMy fold: "It’s like a mini-collective – and it works well.”

Songs For The Gentle gets a live airing at Pogo @ The Pod, Dublin on February 3. Also on the bill is Ivan Smagghe (Blackstrobe)