Murder On The Dancefloor

Musically, not too much happens in December and early January. Too many compilations, too much pressure, far too much crap. Imagine hotpress’ delight when, one cold and wet Tuesday in December, a DJ mix like very little else landed in our postbox. A mix that favoured passion over fashion. Seventy minutes where The Cramps and Ricardo Villalobos rub shoulders, Os Mutantes and CLS get down and Loose Joints and Basic Channel cut a rug. It’s like Radio Soulwax for your cooler older brother.

But first, let’s examine how this mix came into being. It is – curiously enough – the tale of a techno and house pioneer who decided he’d had enough. Enter JD Twitch from Optimo, aka Twitch from Twitch and Brainstorm fame, aka Glaswegian techno refugee Keith McIvor.
“When I first got into techno and house in the late 80s and early 90s, it was exciting, it was underground and it was… sexy,”?McIvor reflects.
T&B started what became a legendary techno club in Scotland, Pure, which ran for a decade and epitomised all that was right about 4/4 music. But as the years passed, all was not right on the good ship Pure.
“By the mid-90s, it all started getting so boring – and I blame Jeff Mills for this.”
Really?
“Well, it’s not just him, but he started off a trend for hard, boring, looped techno and pretty soon, that’s really all there was… just people punching the air all night long – it was so unsexy. And there were no girls!
“Pure ran up to 2000 – and once a year we still get back together to do a night – but I think by 1997 or 1998, it became a drag, we really didn’t know why we were still doing it. So we stopped in 2000 – 10 years after we started.”
But while one way of life was drawing to a close, another was beginning.
“Optimo started as a Sunday night thing in 1997 where we could go to play records that we liked that weren’t techno, stuff that we loved. It wasn’t meant to be a huge success, but it just grew from there.”
Now a weekly, trendy magazine-endorsed club night, the pair have just released their first compilation on hip French label Tigersushi. As outlined above, How To Kill The DJ (Part Two) is a blast, 42 tracks in 74 re-edited future/retro minutes. How long did it take?
“About 18 months – and if we had known it was going to take so long, I think we would just have released a 15-track mix and left it at that. We really had no idea how difficult it was going to be to licence tracks. And then there was the re-editing – I had to put so many tracks on to the computer and chop up beats so they could be mixed in time.”
What does Keith think of what the ‘house’ scene – the sound and lifestyle that inspired so many to look at things differently - has become today?
“It’s so, so different. For me, it’s just not relevant anymore. There’s no mystery to it – it’s on when you walk into a café, a bar, a clothes shop… it’s too fucking easy.”

Optimo’s How To Kill The DJ (Part Two) is out now on Tigersushi. It’s brilliant!