7/27/2023 0 Comments Pop nsync drum coverSome of the mixes merely extended songs for dancers by adding instrumental sections and long drum breaks, like Tom Moulton’s pioneering disco remixes at the Sandpiper Club on Fire Island a decade earlier. hits for European audiences, working largely by hand. He also adored Def Leppard, especially the production work by super producer Mutt Lange. That was the thing that drew him to pop-the simplicity of it.” Denniz much preferred the synth-pop bands coming out of London in the early ’80s-Depeche Mode, Human League, OMD. Whenever I would play my complicated jazzy chords, Denniz would make a face. He liked chords you could play with three fingers. “Denniz hated jazz,” the former SweMix DJ StoneBridge says, “It wasn’t simple enough. Parliament-Funkadelic, Cameo “anything with a funky bass line Denniz loved,” says Lundin. Unlike his SweMix colleagues, who spun house and acid house at the Bat Club-as Thursday nights at Ritz were called-Denniz loved funk and soul. A bit like High Fidelity but with dance music.”Īt Ritz, Stockholm’s premier dance club, Denniz was much in demand as a DJ. “I was always a little nervous when shopping there. “They were all a bit cocky,” Jan Gradvall, a prominent Swedish music journalist, remembers. When they weren’t in the studio or working a club, most of them clerked at the Vinyl Mania record store in Vasagatan, close to the Stockholm train station. It was a collective of 10 Swedish DJs led by René Hedemyr, who as JackMaster Fax spun records at Tramps, one of the city’s biggest discos. SweMix was located in the soundproofed basement of a building on Kocksgatan Street, in Sodermalm. Seated in front of his Apple computer-he always had the latest Macs-his cigarette would stick straight up between the fingers of his right hand as he moved the mouse. He had a licentious-looking gap between his two front teeth that showed when he smiled. Denniz dressed like a teenager, in T-shirts and jeans, or in large green military-style trousers, and hoodies, everything worn loose. “Maybe 250 times a day he’d do that,” says Kristian Lundin, one of his later protégés, who Denniz called “Krille” (Dagge was big on nicknames). When it hung down in his eyes, as it usually did, Denniz would blow upward, puffing aside hair strands with wheezy gouts of smoky breath he always had a Marlboro Menthol going. So Californian-looking he could only be Swedish, Dag Krister Volle-Denniz PoP’s given name, though friends called him Dagge-wore his long blond hair with plenty of volumizer, loosely parted in the middle, Jon Bon Jovi–style, a reminder that the New Jersey rocker had started his career as a hair dresser. One day in 1992, a demo tape addressed to Denniz Pop, a 28-year-old DJ, arrived at a Stockholm-based music company called SweMix. Excerpted from The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |