Goreteks: aligned with the magical Free Love Digi imprint – more later – and part of that increasingly-burgeoning Denver scene. Their special take and longstanding love of D&B is woven through the Secrets ep. So we gave them a nudge and went in on all fronts. Even about South Park.
Goreteks hello!
Strode from Goreteks here!
How’s life?
Doing well, currently visiting New York City for a week, and Baloo is back in Denver working on a few tunes.
I wanted to talk about ‘Louder’ from the ep, can’t get enough of this…
Glad you asked about ‘Louder’.
Baloo started the tune while he was still living in North Carolina last year, and sent me the initial sounds, and said he was stoked about getting that low bassline nailed down solid. I had just grabbed some samples from one of my favourite shows, ‘True Detective’, and the one that made it into the tune wasn’t at all the one I was aiming for when sampling the show, it just ended up sounding like it was in the right place.
It’s an overzealous preacher giving a sermon and the people in the crowd saying ‘Louder, louder’, really seemed to pop out of the audio, so that’s what we named it.
A few days before I started working on it, I had played a show in Denver on the same ticket as Floating Oasis, another Denver local who does a live PA that includes a djembe and guitar. He happened to message me right while I was in the middle of a my second session on the tune, and hooked me up with some djembe samples he had recorded, which I chopped up right then and threw into the tune and pretty much got it to completion.
Speaking of the affiliation, what sort of affiliations/activities are you involved in?
We are part of Recon DNB here in Denver, a local crew that has been putting on shows since 2003.
Shouts out to Maggie Despise for putting literally everything she has into bringing only the best jungle/D&B acts to Denver and letting us be a part of it! Also we do a two hour show every Tuesday – 5pm PST, 8pm EST – on jungletrain alongside our friend Darkstar.
Jungletrain has many shows all week long with a bunch of our favorite artists from all over the world.
What’s the sort of D&B over time/now that really inspires you, what artists? There’s so much eccentric and on fire D&B about!
We’ve been playing since the mid to late 90s, and have always been fans of heavy stuff: Dom & Roland, Ed Rush & Optical, and Tech Itch have always had the largest presence in our record collections, which we combined last year.
Also played a lot of Moving Shadow and Renegade Hardware back then.
These days we’re huge fans of labels like Rupture, 117, Scientific Wax, Paradox, Subtle Audio, and others that still put out the classic sounds.
Also there are a lot of US producers like Greenleaf, MartianMan, and Indidjinous, who we really look up to and are constantly progressing their sound. Every time we hear new tunes from those guys it makes us want to work harder.
Can you tell us how the linkup with the excellent Free Love Digi happened?
We’ve known of the label for a while since another Recon member, ATIC released tunes on it a few years ago, and is now the person mastering all of the label’s tunes.
I then met Quentin Hiatus last year when he played at a Recon show for the first time and we linked up again online a few months afterwards and got this EP rolling.
What’s a part of your studio that you couldn’t live without? That you wonder how you ever lived without?
We use DMG Equilibrium as our EQ, and it’s helped us a lot since we started using it; we still have a ways to go in perfecting our sound engineering but having that plugin has made a world of difference in the last few years.
Recently I got a Moog SubPhatty and nearly every tune we’ve started since getting it has had bass from that synth on it. ‘No Mercy’ on our EP for Free Love Digi was the first tune we used it in that’s been released.
Oh and Dropbox: we share Logic 9 projects back and forth rather than deal with audio stems and it’s made our productivity more consistent since we started doing it that way.
What’s a tune in your head right now, any genre.
The South Park parody of the Game Of Thrones theme song unfortunately!
What’s forthcoming, what’s next from you, Goreteks?
We have an EP on the mighty Architecture Records coming very soon that we’re very excited about!
Also two tunes coming out sometime in 2015 on Eastern Promise Audio, a few more on Omni Music, and an EP with Mutants that’s still in the works.
We’re also both hoping to make a big trip to London later this year for a Rupture show, and also spend some time around England, and Ireland and Scotland too!