Singe when you're winning

Alex Smoke is tired. He's been up all night making music and when he finally tried to get some sleep at 6am, the people in the apartment below cranked up their PA.

“I’m always considerate to my neighbours and use headphones, but the fuckers below me must have a 2K rig in their flat. The worst thing is that they’re playing crap pop music,” he explains as he attempts to resuscitate himself with yet another coffee.
In spite of his neighbour’s habit of playing awful music at anti-social hours, the Glaswegian producer has persevered and recently finished work on his second album, the follow up to last year’s debut, Incommunicado.
Fashioned by the soul of Detroit and the stripped back European techno aesthetic, Paradolia's 12 tracks are delivered with swagger and panache.
There’s also a pop sensibility on the muffled vocals of ‘Never Want To See You Again’, ‘Anima’ and ‘Make My Day’, not to mention references to his childhood as a trained classical pianist and cellist on ‘Prima Materia’.
Although he claims that he came up with the album’s title in a hurry (‘paradolia’ means the ability to perceive coherent images in randomness) it’s a fitting name because the common bond here is Smoke’s ability to craft innovative stuttering funk.
“It’s nice to have things rattling against each other and that’s the appeal for releasing on Vakant, making weird sounds and fitting them in. I like that in other people’s music: when you listen to Aphex and Autechre you hear it. I’m trying to create that sound and rein it into a dancefloor format.
“Minimal is perfect dancefloor music and it’s a meeting point for men and women,” he adds. “It has a sexiness and grooviness that is missing in techno which is too rigid and which alienates women. The point about Villalobos and Luciano’s music is that it’s loose, it’s about getting the sounds to bend in time. Berlin is brilliant, the concentration of talent and passion for music is incredible. But I would never get anything done there. I’d just get swallowed up by it. Anyway, I wouldn’t be interested in the hedonistic lifestyle. People are very self-absorbed there. It’s all about pleasure.”
For the moment, Smoke, whose revulsion for heavy drinking bucks the Scottish stereotype, is happy to contend with noisy neighbours and remain part of Glasgow’s small but healthy scene.
At the same time, he’s not happy for his work to exist in isolation. A self-confessed film obsessive (“I love David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Kowalski, Polanski, French cinema and 70s thrillers”), he hopes to eventually score film soundtracks. He also peppers his work with political messages.
“I love reading, mainly politics and philosophy,” he reflects. “But I’m wary of talking about politics because you can get misunderstood and come across like a preacher.”
‘Don’t See The Point’ (one of his biggest tracks last year) was written at the outbreak of the Iraq war.
“It was all so inevitable, so pre-determined – we are going to war no matter what. There was ridiculous talk from Blair. He was trying to justify it with evidence of WMDs."
Some producers have argued that making and playing dance music is in itself a political statement, an act of disconnecting from conventional society.
“That’s bollocks, the most vacuous thing I’ve ever heard,” Alex replies. “Music has universal appeal. It speaks to people everywhere. Hoping that making music will be sufficient without saying anything is lame. It’s all very well saying that music can bridge gaps. But if people are just going out and getting nutted, you're not achieving much.”
Disillusionment at global consumerism and the inability or unwillingness of politicians to tackle issues like poverty led Alex to include ‘We Like It Insipid’ on his new album and to donate all the profits from Paradolia to Oxfam, Amnesty International and Friends Of The Earth.
“If I was real about it, I would live on the barest minimum and give everything away,” he explains. “People don’t realise that we’re so well off because we’re living off people with nothing. If everyone made a donation to charity, it would make a huge difference.”