“I make music with my computer and other electronic devices. Sometimes it sounds nice, sometimes it is unpleasant and mildly grating.”
So declares a simple two-line sentence on Si Begg’s MySpace site – and that’s it. Nothing more.
He’s apparently content to let the music on the site speak for itself, which it does. It speaks volumes, as does the back catalogue of one of electronic music’s most creative, innovative, truly consistent, and genre-twisting boffins, over a career spanning 20 years.
Before I coerced him into an up-to-date interview last week, the last time I interrogated the Brit was three years ago, and maybe he remembered how I then tried to pin him down on the issue of what exactly is ‘Si Begg’ music.
His answer?
“Ouch! I dunno. Electronic, futuristic, fresh? I try to be true to myself, and make personal electronic funky shit.”.
Just a month ago, after I played him Si’s brand new remix of my track ‘We Call It Crack House’, Shin Nishimura – one of Japan’s top new tech DJs – called it “F***ing crazy, and very much the avant garde sounds of future minimalism.”
Si Begg is the guy, Ken Ishii once told me, that was up there with the best producers on the planet, the man who has released mesmerizing records under multiple other aliases like S.I. Futures, Buckfunk 3000, Lenny Logan, Cabbage Boy, and Dr. Nowhere versus The Maverick DJ, for labels such as NovaMute, Tresor, Ninja Tune, Scandinavia, Language, Trope, and his own Mosquito and Noodles imprints.
Back in 2001, he released ‘The Complete Death of Cool’. In my book, it was the album of the year as much for its hilariously eclectic, musically brilliant content, as for the sardonic title. It came as no surprise then that when I interviewed him straight after the record came out, he told me a lot of producers took themselves way too seriously.
“I think people confuse seriousness with integrity or meaningfulness,” he muttered at the time. “Just because you take yourself really seriously doesn’t mean what you’re doing is valid – and vice versa.”
Earlier this year, we finally decided to take my label, IF?, into the digital realm, a move that made much of the deleted back catalogue, dating back to 1995, available again as digital downloads.
I got an anonymous e-mail straight after the announcement that we were going digital, and it ranted that “You’ve sold you’re [sic] soul to the devil!” Hilarity aside, it does beg the question – have we?
“Easy one, this,” Si told me last week. “Don’t talk such shite – is it about the music, or the product? For me, it’s about the music first… I don’t care if it’s on wax cylinder, taped off the radio, a gatefold-vinyl, or flac download. A tune is a tune, is a tune. Of course, packaging and design do have a role to play, but it’s about the music first.”
Si had, at last count, has at least 50 available digital download releases on Beatport alone. Given his extensive experience with vinyl and CD releases of his own music (check out his entry on Discogs, and you’ll likely be bamboozled), plus his work with his labels, it’s downright essential to get his take on the digital download phenomenon.
“Downsides first,” he suggested. “There are now so many releases to wade through, it can be hard work. 12-inches were a nice design ‘object’, and I still believe vinyl played on a decent system sounds better.”
The upsides?
“It has massively democratized parts of the music business, especially in the dance and electronica fields,” he assessed. “We’re getting closer to a more level playing field, where major labels don’t call the shots so much – in theory, a small label on Beatport has just as much chance as a major to get noticed and shift units.”
He was on a roll with this theme. “You can release multiple versions of the same track for barely any extra cost, which leaves far more room for experimentation – why not stick up that weird track you thought was too ‘out there’ for the vinyl release?
Even if it only sells 10 copies, it doesn’t matter. It’s easier to get stuff worldwide, with no high costs for the punters buying imports, and also far easier to get hold of the releases you want, rather than having to deal with anal or elitist record shops, and so on.”
On a final note, he echoed the sentiments a lot of like-minded peers are floating right now.
“I find that most people who are anti-download fall into two camps: Greedy people who think it makes the music easier to share, therefore will cut back on their profits – do you want people to hear your music? Or make money? – and the elitist types who liked the fact that they were one of only 800 people who had that rare Juan Atkins release on Metroplex, and enjoyed being part of a select ‘club’ of other anal types, and hate the idea that now just about anyone can download those rare tracks for a quid or so.”
A decade ago this month, at a tiny record shop in Barcelona, I stumbled across an anal-collector’s item classic: My first Buckfunk 3000 record. It was the 12-inch version of the Stir Fry Mix of ‘Fried Funk & Microchips’, with pictures of the Cybermen from Doctor Who plastered on the label.
It’s never left my record box since. And while I may have to ‘fess up here to an anally retentive feeling or two about a million other people possessing the same tune, I’d be thoroughly chuffed to see it available as a digital download. After 10 years of hack DJing, my vinyl version is a mess.
And if we’re perking up here about 10 years ago, the very first time I interviewed Si (for the Melbourne media) was close to that, in 1999. At the time he’d completed a remix for Japanese outfit, Co-Fusion, that kind of blew my susceptible brain out.
When I asked him about the remixing process, he was as gloriously frank as ever. “I enjoy remixing; I like the concept of working with these parts that you didn’t choose yourself, and trying to make the best of them. I try to keep enough of the original so that you’d recognise it; I don’t see the point in doing a whole new track.”
Si has since gone on to remix Tipper, Ken Ishii, Sven Väth, Cristian Vogel, Lamb, Subhead, Susumu Yokota, and two of my own tracks – the first one for the ‘Noodles Discotheque Vol. 2’ compilation on vinyl back in 2001, and now the remix of ‘We Call It Crack House’, an offering from Sydney’s Hypnotic Room [l] imprint, the very first in their new Special Editions releases.
When he finished the recent mix, Si had only one, characteristically Beggian thing to add to the accompanying e-mail message: “Let the machines do the work, that’s what I say.”
Amen to that. The residents of Earth’s twin planet, Mondos, would be proud.
© Andrez Bergen, Tokyo 2008
