Artist to Artist: Ciel & Mathis Ruffing

As such we felt it was right for them to reflect on why the record makes sense. They do so in an intriguing conversation below:

Ciel: We come from not exactly the same genre / sub-scene of dance music; I’m from more of a techy world and you from more of a footwork / bass background. How important is it to you to collaborate with someone who makes the same style of music as you?

Mathis: Not at all. I never saw myself as fully part of one specific scene. I’ve always operated at intersections of music genres and made it my mission to transfer knowledge, codes, friendships between them.

Ciel: So, if sharing the same genre background isn’t so important to you, what are the most important qualities in a person that you choose to collaborate with then?

Mathis: Good question. I generally just love making music with friends. And if something cool is the result of that, I try to finish that up and release it into the world. I don’t usually select my collaborators in a strategic way. Things just come together organically. There’s so much more stuff in the vault that I need to finish up. (Apologies to everyone waiting on new versions of tracks lol!!)

Ciel: We both have a deep love of hip hop. In what ways can genres outside of dance music inform the way we make dance music?

Mathis: I think it’s cool to sprinkle random musical and cultural references into music the same way a film director weaves in little references to other things outside their movie. You get a glimpse into their thoughts, inspirations and what moves them. That makes it more personal.

Ciel: Sampling is a massive part of both of our musical practices. What are some of the most important “rules” of sampling you set for yourself when it comes to selecting the source material and recording from it?

Mathis: There are basically two main rules: There has to be some kind of recontextualization going on. In the sense that you take something from a completely different stylistic or historical context and place it somewhere else. For example: Sampling Aphex Twin for a Rap Beat is super cool. Sampling the same song to make a new techno track is probably lame.

The other option: You mess up the sample beyond recognition and remove the context entirely.

Ciel: You’ve produced a lot of amazing beats for rappers / MCs over the years, which is such an important but more background anonymous work compared to the limelight nature of DJing. How do you reconcile the two, as a human? Do you prefer one over the other? 

Mathis: I love both, but I’m definitely more confident in the studio than on stage lol. I see them as two phases of the same cycle, though. One couldn’t exist without the other. There would be nothing to play if no one made tracks in the studio. And making tracks would be pointless if no one would play them out. Even though I think about it much less than about producing, I love DJing so much. Playing cool music, vibing and dancing with your friends is kind of the best thing in the world, isn’t it?

Mathis: Cindy, you are based in Toronto. I was fortunate enough to visit there and even play with you at the amazing club Cafeteria. What were your first clubbing experiences like in Toronto?

Ciel: I was a band kid so I didn’t really club when I was younger. I’m a millennial that was in university during the peak of indie rock and the early days of blog house so the earliest shows I remember going to in Toronto were Sonic Youth, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem with M.I.A., Justice & Uffie, etc. My university years were when I first got exposed to dance music though and I was getting into minimal at the time. I saw Ellen Allien, Michael Mayer, and went to my first DEMF (now called Movement) in 2007 when I saw Matthew Dear play B2B with Ryan Elliott for six hours and it truly changed how I heard music forever.

Toronto has always been more of a rock & hip hop city so my musical experiences are shaped by that for sure. Back then going to a punk show would be quite harrowing as a girl (most of my friends from high school were not into the music I was into so I’d often go alone), you’d get roughed up in the pit and sometimes it would be stressful. My friend got lifted out of the front row of Sonic Youth by a security guard because she was about to pass out from being squished. When I started going to more raves and stuff, it was a totally different beast. There’d be party photographers and drugs and the biggest worry I had was getting too sweaty or getting split up from my friend group. I still go to rock shows from time to time but clubs feel more like home now.

Mathis: In an alternate universe, in which you weren’t a producer & DJ for electronic music, what other music scene would you be active in?

Ciel: I’d probably be a bass player in a post punk band, and maybe sing. I love non-dance music and I always will, and writing basslines is one of my favourite things about music production. Plus bass players just look cool as hell, don’t you think?

Mathis: I saw you posting about the beautiful “Oh well” track by L.E. Bass and you mentioned that it’s by one of the few women in tech house during that time. Are there any other important shouts when it comes to non-male dance music producers from the end of the 90s / early 2000s? Which ones are your faves?”

Ciel: To be honest, I shouted it out because it’s such a rare find. I’ve been digging into house, tech house and some tr*bal/prog from this era for ages and it’s always so hard to find women producers in it. Though I wonder now after learning L.E.Bass is a female producer from Silverlinings how many other detail-less Discogs entries of 00s-era producers were actually women. Like, am I just making assumptions based on my own bias that dance music has always been male dominated because the most famous ones have all been guys? Anyways, tracks I’ve recently discovered made by women:

Rachael Starr – Otherwise, What’s the Point?

Lottie – Bushroot (Mr. G’s Gone Deep Dub) – I actually discovered Lottie from her 2001 Snapshots 2xLP compilation I found for $10 at Invisible City that never leaves my record bag now because there’s just so many good tech house bangers on it. Didn’t realize til later she also made music. This one is sick!

Misstress Barbara – 666 FVW – one of the best Primevil releases ever, so deep and driving at the same time, every time I play “My Passion for You” it has a kinetic effect on the dancers that I love to witness. Plus she’s Canadian so gotta shout out the homegrown talent 🙂 

Mathis: We’re both obsessed with the track “Substate” by Blue Noise. It came out on the Belfast based label Slide Recordings, which had a phenomenal run of releases in the beginning of the 2000s in my opinion. Full disclosure: you 100% put me on to that track! Do you have more secret weapons like this that would fit the descriptors: atmospheric, euphoric, deep, airy? The readers (i.e. me) desperately need to know!

Ciel: Ahhh so this was just a roundabout way to get some tracks from me, eh? Hehe

Eastern Strategy – Adventures in Blue  – I tend to say this too often but this is my fav song ever

Jay Tripwire – Deep Rumbler

Dav – 2 Years – I think my fav kinda tune is just driving 4 on the floor kick with a fat bassline with a lot of high energy 16th note hats + perfectly sculpted snares.

Mathis: Since you’re consistently playing so much and sometimes super long sets, I have to ask you some stuff about DJing. When prepping music for your DJ Sets, what sort of things are you looking out for in the tracks that you pick? And is there any specific dramaturgical curve that you’re looking to build in your sets?

Ciel: It’s difficult to answer because I don’t think I ever had to do anything in particular to prepare for longer sets. I’ve just always been more of a selector with a deep arsenal and wider taste rather than a super dialed in, narrow sound palette. I came from radio and some of my earliest DJ heroes were radio DJs like John Peel. In the arts, a lack of specialty can sometimes feel like the kiss of death because the press doesn’t know what box to put you in. But fundamentally I feel it’s a more natural, human way of relating to music, at least for me. Having this range makes playing for a long time very natural and I’ve always had more music than the time I had to play them. Over time I just got more accustomed to thinking about all my DJ sets, not just the extended ones, in terms of what “points” (subgenres) I want to hit and what makes sense in terms of the energy and flow of the story I’m telling, this changes from set to set dependent on who’s playing before and after me and the state of the dancefloor. So, when I played the closing eight hour set at BOOT in 2024, I didn’t really prepare anything other than a playlist I made at the last minute of some chill songs I wanted to close with.

I’m a house DJ first and foremost so there are tons of subgenres of house on my USB at all times – from dubby house, to deep house, from minimal to UK tech house, from ‘90s NY house to jacking Chicago and Detroit techno, plus a little speed garage and proggier stuff. So, I just played from playlists I already knew and was quite familiar with – I generally try to refrain from trying to play a bunch of new stuff for these longer sets because winging such a long set requires a deep familiarity with the music. I also have a playlist called Beat Change Tools of tracks that change BPMs, which is SUPER useful for me because other than house, the style I play the second most is downtempo. Having a track that goes from 130+ BPM to 100 is so key, of course you can easily do it live with the pitch slider but that requires more practice at home, which I can’t do because I don’t own CDJs. And then I just wing it. I don’t play from pre-sequenced sets, it’s always improvised from the feel and energy of the dancefloor, and the only work I do in advance is dig for music and careful tagging & colourcoding in Rekordbox.

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