Soul Stirrer

We may not know much, but hotpress is sure of one thing: mainstream dance music today is pretty fucking boring. The same group of DJs playing the same pool of records in the same clubs run by the same promoters. To paraphrase BRMC (badly): whatever happened to my rave-up? Why are so few using this most accessible of genres to say something even remotely interesting?

Ten years ago, dance music was a reaction against the hegemony of the charts, pop music and shoe gazing indie dullness. OK, everybody was off their gourd, but making music for a couple of hundred quid on clapped-out computers and watching it chart seemed like something from another dimension.
Whilst there are few artists within the mainstream today generating anywhere near the same level of excitement, there nonetheless remain a select band of rogue operators at least attempting to do something relevant. Step forward Adam Freeland - breaks pioneer, laidback stoner and now, it seems, anti-establishment commentator extraordinaire.
You might have come across Adam’s new single, ‘We Want Your Soul’, on some of the more clued-in radio and TV stations. It’s a future breakbeat stomp, with a clever vocodered anti-corporate vocal rant embellished with choice Bill Hicks samples. It’s both pop and underground, stupid and clever and quite unforgettable. How the hell did this happen?
“I think I just started asking questions about what was happening around me,” offers Adam. “I travel quite a bit, so it was quite interesting to be in the US and see a story reported one way, and then arrive back to England and see a completely different slant on it. It’s incredible to see the spin that is put on things. I suppose getting into Bill Hicks as a stoner teenager, and now reading the likes of Noam Chomsky today all contributed to it too. I think I became more aware of what’s going on around me.”
Spin? Chomsky? News? ‘Avin it with Peasy and Blocko this isn’t. (And thank fuck for that). Adam’s new LP, Now And Them (recorded under his band moniker, Freeland) ploughs a similarly worthy furrow.
“I didn’t want it to be just three singles and the rest fillers,” he offers. “A lot of my favourite albums were made in the 1960s and ’70s, when an album was something that was meant to be listened to, to be enjoyed. And my favourite dance albums, Massive Attack and Leftfield, are all complete albums. So there was an effort to make something more than just a collection of club tracks.”
The good news is that it works. Now And Them has its ‘serious’ moments – ‘We Want…’, ‘Mind Killer’, ‘L.I.F.E.’ – but it marries these with intelligent breakbeat and downtempo, dubby numbers, ending up with an enjoyably complete package.
“I think there had to be a balance,” reckons Adam. “There had to be a bit of both – 10 rants would have been quite dull really. It’s like yin and yang. Obviously, the serious stuff isn’t in the only thing in my life, so I had to reflect that. I think the common thread that runs through it all is the production, it holds it all together quite well.”
Just to prove he ain’t Guardian-esque all of the time, he also found time to whack out two cracking bootlegs of the lead single, one mixed with The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’, the other with Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. “The Nirvana one came together after I was playing a festival in Denver, and I got snowed in in a shitty motel in one of the worst snowfalls in decades. Just me, my laptop and a phone line. I had an idea of putting Nirvana and Fischerspooner’s ‘Emerge’ together, but it didn’t work, so I tried these two. I finished it, played it at our Marine Parade (Adam’s label) party in Miami, and it took off from there. Next thing, a friend in Australia calls me to tell me it’s being played on one of the biggest stations, in between Christina Aguilera and Danni Minogue!”
So can we expect a slew of increasingly militant LPs over the next few months? Is Adam Freeland the Gil Scott Heron for the monged-out generation? “Fuck, I don’t know what I’ll do next. I’ve only just finished this fucker, so I’ll have to see what happens…”

The single, ‘We Want Your Soul’, is out on Marine Parade now. The album, Now And Them, follows in October