The Anderson tapes

Like most of dance music’s greatest talents, Jamie Anderson comes from inconspicuous, atypical beginnings; unlike his cosmopolitan techno contemporaries, Anderson hails from Bristol, more famously the home of Massive Attack and Roni Size. Indeed it was the city’s booming beats and breaks cultures that first fired Anderson’s musical ambitions; raised on hip-hop and jazz funk – he was a drummer in a freeform band from the age of seventeen – this background still helped when he started making dance floor music.

In 1997 Anderson set up his own label, Artform, and started to release the Abstract Latinism EPs. Conceived during a period when club techno was typified by its adherence to minimalist tendencies, Jamie’s assimilation of Latino, and in particular Brazilian percussive elements into a deeper, more musical framework made for a refreshing alternative to the mono groove mentality.

“When I started out with Latinism I hired a music teacher who showed me how to play along to old Brazilian records, what order the notes had to be played in,” Jamie explains.

Unsurprisingly, Jamie’s fresh production approach has been aped by many house and techno producers, but rarely if ever equalled. In fact, Anderson seems pleased that his trademark style has been copied, re-interpreted and even sampled by some of his peers.

“I like a lot of what I hear and it’s good that the Latino style has been it has been recognised as a legitimate style of music,” Jamie observes.” It’s also great to hear musical elements coming back to techno after so long. In a way it was necessary to have a period when all you heard was locked grooves because it meant the music could be built from scratch again.”

So what about the producers who blatantly sample Anderson’s work?

“I think it’s great, it makes me feel like James Brown,” he jokes. “I don’t mind at all, in fact I’m more than likely to ask then whether I can stick it out on Artform!”

While his peers play catch up, Jamie has moved on to explore new sounds, evident on his debut album, Blue Music. Released on Bristol house label NRK, it ranges in styles from deep, vocal house to intense, hard techno, sewn together by Anderson’s innate sense of rhythm and reluctance to stand still.

Jamie admits: “It would have been too easy to release an album’s worth of Latin techno, so I tried to include all aspects of the music I’ve been making in the last three years. Now that I’ve put the album together, I can concentrate on new projects and hopefully Blue Music also shows where I’m progressing to as an artist” he adds, already looking to the future. “Blue Music is my finished document, my calling card for the time being. It’s a good start and a solid stepping stone for the future.”

While Jamie’s desire to explore the deep and musical house sound typigfied on albums tracks like ‘They See Nothing’ and ‘Puesta Del Sol’ may infuriate the purists, the producer is quick to counter any allegations that he has ‘sold out’.

“Let’s face it, techno is just an attitude, it’s how you go about it that counts; I went about it as a musician as well as coming from the DJ perspective,” he reasons “and now I want to look at different styles, but to be honest, the music I make has a lot to do with the type of mood I’m in when I go into the studio. I’d rather not be packaged as an artist doing solely one style, something which is probably bad for my sales!”

All this talk of money brings us neatly onto the possibility of Anderson’s work reaching a wider audience; having remixed everyone from LSG to Nick Holder, Jamie says he has no problem taking on major label remix work because: “It would give me the money to buy more equipment, put out better music and allow me the time and opportunity to work with more underground people”, and he has also devised a plan for his own work to become popular. “I’ve planned to set up a project as part of a team,” he says, “but I don’t want to say who I plan to do this with; myself and another producer will put our heads together and stay the shadows until it gets really big! You never know what type of music people are going to get into in the next few years.” If you’re looking for pointers for dance music’s future, then have a listen to Blue Music.

Blue Music is out now on NRK