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Dälek

Inspiration;
Alap: You do whatever it takes to follow music. To find creativity and inspiration. I feel like I’m thirteen all over again. But I’m old enough now to recognize the cycles of creativity we go through. As you get older you just become a stronger and more creative person. I didn’t find my inspiration down the block. I found mine in Berlin, Germany. Who knows, five years from now I might find it in Egypt. In ten years it might be Japan. I don’t know where that inspiration is going to take me. I don’t follow people. I follow music. If you leave yourself open. It will take you somewhere. I think each person has their own muse and their own source of inspiration.
Their own way of expressing themselves and telling their story. Moving to Germany helped me to appreciate New York City so much more. I think people who live here all their lives might take it for granted. I respect New York as if it were a temple. It gave me life. It gave me knowledge and a thirst for more. Growing up in Parsipanny, New Jersey I always had that thirst to live in the city. I got that chance to live in both Manhattan and Brooklyn. Somehow I got into a negative cycle and needed a change. Traveling gave me the opportunity to start a new relationship with the city I loved. Going back to Germany for another year will make that even stronger.
There’s so much I haven’t experienced yet. I feel like a kid again.

Will: That’s one of the most beautiful things about New York. It’s always changing.
People complain that it’s not the same as it was. Why would you want it to be the same.
There’s so many places in the world that never change. Why would anyone want that?
Just like he said. After all those years of touring I was so happy to be home again.
I was so in love with this place. I loved Berlin, the cities and countries we toured.
But this is home. This is my true love. I find that when I’m back there are so many things I want to do and explore. Creativity happens no matter what. It may not be the same crew you grew up with. People get stagnant and fall by the wayside but there’s always a new generation of kids that are doing new things. There’s always a place where creativity is happening.
It’s always been like that.

Alap: When one thing get’s stagnant you find something new. When Punk stopped happening I found Hip Hop. When Hip Hop stopped doing it for me I found Dub. When Dub stopped happening I found Dancehall. I was always positive. I just kept shifting gears. When one thing gets stagnant I find energy in something else.
I don’t know how many people know this but for some time there’s been this Berlin/Detroit connection. Music like Trip Techno. That’s a scene I somewhat slept on. I was never really became a techno kid. But if you look at it Berlin is like New York in a sense.
If you live in New York for any set time you’re bound to get into Hip Hop. Or at least get exposed to it. Berlin is like that when it comes to techno and Club Music. I’m really getting into techno. Now I’m hearing all this Detroit stuff from 1996/1997 that I missed out on. That’s an important time because it’s right there where we started. We slept on J. Dilla which I tragic.
He’s a producer from Detroit who passed away a few years ago. He worked with groups like Pharsyde and Tribe Called Quest before going out on his own. He helped put Detroit on the map. If you look at it Detroit is today what New York City was in the 70’s for Hip Hop.
The Detroit sound is everywhere.
Meeting;
Alap: Brownies was for a lot of us what CBGB’s was to a lot of other people. It’s where I met Ted Leo, The Rye Coalition, The Van Pelt, Gern Blandsten and his crew.
That was like our CBGB’s. I didn’t get it at the time though. I was complaining that it wasn’t CBGB’s. It was great but I was just too blind to see it.

Will: Back in college I had some solo stuff that I had played for him. He had a studio and started coming by and recording stuff. He would have me listen to The Beatles,
to My Bloody Valentine.

Alap: At the time I was recording bands like
the Rye Coalition and The Van Pelt. Bands that were turning me on to a lot of new sounds. I had probably heard
My Bloody Valentine about two weeks before he had.
It was a great time because it was all so fresh to me.
Will was coming from the same place I was but we we were all into these new sounds too. It was exciting because he was responding to it the same way I was. His reactions and responses were totally parallel to what I felt. It took about a year of us listening to all this music together to really develop the sound that would become Dälek.
In a way, we were training our ears. At the time Will was working delivering packages between New Jersey and New York and going to “Other Music” on a regular basis. So when he’d come to each session he’d have at least three new records in tow. He introduced me to bands like Broadcast at a time when I wouldn’t even get to hear them on WFMU. It was reciprocal from the start. I may have lit the fuse but Will had the spark. At the time I was getting into a lot of older stuff like Velvet Underground, Kraüt Rock and other styles. He was responding to it by taking it to the next level. Showing me the new groups that were doing it.

The Sound;
Alap: It comes from Will. If we were a band. Will would be the vocals and the drums.
Will is the whole thing. I’m the production. I bring in the sonics and the atmosphere.
He’s the meat and potatoes. I’m the gravy. A lot of what I do is inspired by his rhythms.
The rhythm is where everything starts. Will starts with the basic drums and bass. He’s like a wizard. Will shits beats. I have more of a production sensibility. Then there’s Josh who is like the third member. He adds the guitar and the keyboards. He’s like our secret weapon.
So you have Will with the rhythms. Josh with the melodies and I’m there with the production.

Will: It wasn’t a set formula for every song. There were songs that Alap started from scratch and ones that I did.

Alap: Spiritual Healing is a song that I didn’t do a thing on. It was perfect.
It didn’t need production or anything. There are songs like that and there are others that
Josh would add something to and I’d tweak a bit.
Direction;
Alap: After touring for so long we needed a break. We’re on a hiatus now. We haven’t made a record in over a year. It’s not as if we’re taking a break musically. We’re just shifting directions. We’ve started working on film scores. We want to see what’s out there and what we can do with this. For the last thirteen years it was tour, tour, tour. That was us in our twenties.
I look at that as our Black Flag years. I’d like our thirties to be something different.
Maybe something in the Tangerine Dream realm. Where we’re scoring just about every film out there. I would love to go into Danny Elfman territory. Like in the 80’s. The band that played at virtually every party in those John Hughes movies

Will: We could be the band that’s playing in the background in every movie.
“Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters.” (That Thing You Do) reference

Alap:. We had enough distance now to really look at the past years. It’s like a war zone when you’re in that constant cycle of touring. We had toured thirteen years straight for nine to ten months a year.
Chris Skelly;
Will: We have to mention Chris Skelly (Dahlia Seed). If it weren’t for him our first record would have never come out.

Alap: Chris is the reason “Negro, Necro, Nekros” ever became a record. We had been recording for over two years. We started writing (Will and Alap) in ’96. We realized we liked the same things and had a common goal. We both loved all these different genres and styles from all over the world. The question was “How do we take all these different sounds and make them gel.” Chris had a label with his roommate Dave Galgano “Rocket Science”. They would come to the studio and hang out. At the time I was just an engineer. I was working with all these punk bands like Dahlia Seed but hadn’t done anything with Dälek. I played him what was to become
“Negro, Necro” and he was floored. It was a really proud moment for me. I really respected his taste in music. Both he Chris and Dave know music and had these insane record collections. Almost immediately Chris was “You HAVE to put this out!!!” Something I really had no intention of doing.
Will and I were just two drunk guys making Hip Hop with a lot of noise on top. It was crazy.
He was persistent. He said he’d personally go out and hand it to labels. This was right around the time of that Electronica movement of ’96 with artists like Tricky, The Chemical Brothers and Massive Attack. We were a lot rougher than those guys though. Maybe a Stooges version of Massive Attack.
Touring/The Band;
Alap: We toured for thirteen years straight. Ten months a year.When we started out it was me, Will and a DJ on the turntables. We drove that vehicle for so long. It got to a point where we wanted to experiment with different lineups. At one period we had two guitarists and a DJ.
We had a keyboard player and a guitarist playing with us. There’s been a lot of different configurations. At times it was just Will and I. Just me and a DJ. We even did an instrumental tour when Will was sick. Looking back it was just a time where we got to experiment.
It was more for us than the crowd. We wanted to stay hear the songs in different ways.
There were places like Paris that we played six times in three months. Each show got bigger and bigger which was a really nice feeling. I was starting to see a lot of the same people in the crowd. “Hey, I know that guy.” We’re more popular in Europe than the United States.
We’re not huge but we can fill a place like Bowery Ball Room. Getting back to Paris.
We were pretty popular there. So there were a few shows where we let the crowd pick the songs. That gave us a chance to do songs we had never performed live. Having different lineups helped us reinterpret the sound and give the fans who had seen us before, something different.

Will: At times we could have sent out a DJ and stayed at home. (laughs)
But I don’t think our live shows ever sounded like our records. It was two separate things.

Alap: The live shows were a lot more physical. We opened around fifty shows for the Melvins around 2002. We were getting write ups that we were actually louder than the Melvins.

Will: Alap recorded a lot of Punk bands. At the time there really was no underground Hip Hop scene. We were playing with these bands out of necessity. We wanted to play shows, period.
If I want to play a show it doesn’t matter if it’s a Black Metal band or a Country band.

Alap: I had a studio going back to 1993. I was recording all these bands. I recorded Rye Coalition in ’94.
The Toll;
Alap: It makes you fucking crazy. There’s no sugar coating it. I went into a serious depression that I was only able to get out of last year. It turns you into a machine, a monster.

Will: Being off the road actually allows you to step back and look at things. Part of me wonders what’s wrong with me. I gave up all those years of a normal life. I missed a lot of birthdays, christmas’. Normal things with my family. I wouldn’t change a thing but it makes you wonder what it is about music that makes it have that power over you. Sleeping on floors is the least of it. But being on that stage for those thirty or forty minutes makes it all worth it.
Even on nights when your exhausted, run down, hung over. Once you hit that stage it’s all forgotten.

Alap: As exhausting as it was. All those shows we did felt real. Even those bad shows where the PA was broken or there was no crowd, we played for real. There was that one night where we were so loud that the monitor blew up. The speaker was actually on fire. There were flames coming off the stage. At times it was just insane.
A banner year;
Will: Knowing who I am as a musician and the incredible crew we put together. All the projects that me and Afro are working on. I’m starting to see the branches of what we started.
Producing artists like Oddateee, Gym Brown, Skalla, Mo Rican, Dev 1, IconAclass, Ma5terBa55. I’m working with singers. I feel stronger and more confident than I ever have in my life.
I feel like I have so much more to do musically. I’ve loved everything that’s happened up to this point but I feel that every year should be a banner year. I look back with fond memories but I don’t rely on those memories to get me through. I need to keep pushing myself because I want to make and create more. I’m thirty five now but I feel as if I’m just getting started.
I’m respectful and I understand how lucky I’ve been to accomplish what we have up until this point.

Success on their own terms;
Alap: Dälek has been a success. I feel as if we won. I don’t feel any sense of failure because we didn’t get to a higher commercial level. I look at it as one hundred percent creative success.
We made seven albums. Collaborated with Faust. Who gets to do that? Living in a tent in Germany and working with the master himself and recording a record with him. It was great.
We got to do a 7 inch with them and followed it up with an album.

Will: I was shaking my head thinking “How did this happen?” But the thing is they contacted us. Faust wanted to work with Dälek.

Alap: We plan on taking that success and make it bigger. We have this foundation and we can help people learn and grow from that. Looking back, we did it our way and we kept it pure.
That’s not an easy thing to do. You won’t see a lot of acts like us. We may not be the biggest but we are unique.

Time to Live;
Will: There came a time when we were on tour where I was tapped out. Physically, lyrically and emotionally. What was there to write about. I wasn’t about to start writing songs about being backstage. I need to be wandering the streets again. I needed to be experiencing what was going on.
Scoring;
Will: Since we’ve been doing Dälek we always thought that our sound could work in movies.
Like most of the things that have happened in our career. If we talk about doing it.
It’s bound to happen. We put some feelers out and did some small Underground films just to get our feet wet. We were contacted by this director who’s a fan of our music. He had the same idea we did. He thought our sound would work well with his movie. He hired us and we’re working with him on it. We’re just looking to get our collective foot in the door. Maybe it will turn into something we can do for the next decade or so.

Alap: We’re scoring three films this year. We’re touring less and creating more.
We’re going to have a higher output of music because we won’t be playing two hundred shows a year. We went through all those years of touring. We felt like we were Black Flag in that regards. It was a great part of the process and helped us to build our foundation. Because of that we could be doing Dälek for the next thirty five years. I was never one of those people that wanted to do the same thing. There are great artists such as AC/DC, Motorhead, The Misfits and
Sick of it All that have that one style they do so well. I love those bands but I always wanted to find different ways to express myself. With the technology and opportunities to do different things.
When I think of artists like Miles Davis and Quincy Jones. It inspires me. They’re music and creativity had so many lives.

Will: Here’s this kid who grew up in Newark. I grew wanting to be a DJ like my cousins.
Here I am scoring films. It’s crazy.
on the DL;
Alap: Downloading, or illegal downloading as they call it is the best thing to ever happen to Dälek. Before downloading we’d have twenty people at our shows. Fifty if we were lucky.
From 1996-2004 we toured non stop to zero to twenty people a night. Or if we opened for someone we’d maybe have a hundred fifty people. Absence came out the year downloading took off. People would come to shows and they had downloaded it three weeks before it’s official release. So these people would come to the shows and even though they had downloaded it...
They wanted to buy the album because they wanted to support us. We got to see this first hand.

Will: I look at it this way. If your album isn’t available for illegal download then you don’t matter.

Alap: Radiohead gets downloaded before their album comes out. When I heard Absence was being downloaded I was so excited. Because no one had been reacting to our first two records. Not only are people talking about our record but they are out there looking for ways to download it. Do you know how much energy that took in 2005? Nowadays you just google it but back then it was a lot harder.

Interview and images: James Damion

Dead Verse

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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

As I enter the smokey room Alap “Oktopus” Momin and Odddateee are engaged in what seems to be an apocalyptic battle between man and machine. The vibe is both atmospheric and surreal. I feel as if I’d entered another dimension. Without saying a word I crouch down to slowly ease my camera out of it’s bag. As I raise it to eye level and begin to focus I stop myself. I feel as if I’ve entered some sacred temple and to take a snapshot would be considered Taboo. As I go to step back and put my camera away the battle ends and Alap looks up from the computer. He smiles and welcomes me with a warm hug. We were already deep in conversation about artists like Black Uhuru and Afrika Bambaata when Will (MC Dälek) walks in the room. The interview that I’ve been wanting to do for almost five years is about to happen. JD

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