Cid Rim Talks: Somewhere Between Jazz Fusion And Edm

Music

Clemens 'Cid Rim' Bacher may sound familiar- as a producer the Viennese based musician has recorded a couple of well received 12"s of sky-high intergalactic jazz for the Lucky Me label. He's also been known to moonlight as a drummer, touring with both Dorian Concept and South African rap maverick Spoek Mathembo. Now the Bacher has returned to his producers chair, turning in a new 12" for local label Affine Records that pushes his musical, complex electronica into gleaming fresh territory. Enchanted with the weird, complex music on the new EP, we gave Clemens a ring to find out what we were meant to file it under…

The EP is very musical, is it safe to assume you're classically trained?

I was part of the Vienna Jazz Conservatoire, where I studied drums for 5 years. Within that there’s a lot of theory and stuff about harmony theory, jazz theory, that helped a bit. But most of things I use in my music are self taught, using the little bit of piano I know, or learning from sampling jazz records and working out what the chords are.

Would you consider what you do to be very jazz influenced?

Yes, especially with this record now, the big broad choric main part of it when it drops in- I’ve been a fan of big band music for a long time, I started learning drums watching Buddy Rich videos, and this is the idea of translating old big band sounds into synthesiser sounds. Does that make sense?

I probably wouldn’t have thought of it as a big band record…

Yeah of course! Because it sounds totally different, but lets put it another way, in the past I did these radio sessions where I played my music with a seven piece band, and if I did that again it’d be easy for me to get a horn section to play one part of this record, it’d sound right as an acoustic piece. There’s a strong jazz influence in my music.

And it’s a very optimistic sounding record-

I always end up having this major, optimistic feel to my music. I dunno, if I try to make something sad it never really works, and even if I try to make music out of some sad life experience it always comes out really positive and euphoric. Its probably a personal stamp I can’t get rid of- which isn’t the worst thing I guess.

Yeah, it could easily be the reverse… it’s quite hard to pin down where your music belongs

I’ve been listening to quite a wide range of influences. When I was a teenager I was listening to these old 60s jazz records, and then 70s rock and funk and at the same time the things Warp was bringing out, especially Squarepusher and Boards of Canada records, all the core of the 90s IDM thing. Also a lot of sample based hip hop, classic East Coast sounds like DJ Premier – its always a mixture of loads of different influences, which is maybe why its hard to pin it down. I get the feeling that I want to put all of those influences into every track at the same time – there’s why my arrangements are probably more complicated than they need to be to work in the club, but I get this urge to always put everything in one track

And it times it almost comes close to the big expansive sound of EDM, even if it does twist and turn more than your typical build/ drop track

I want to make music I want to listen to myself. If I'm in a club I could rave away to college boy EDM music every once in a while, but I’d enjoy it more if it had a bit more of a sophisticated touch. And, again some of the 70s fusion records I listen to, I thought, OK there’s a lot of good stuff in those records but it’s just too deliberately complicated, so there’s somewhere in the middle I’m trying to get to

OK, so shall we say your making EDM 70s Fusion?

Hahaha yeah that could actually be a way to describe the genre…

I was interested in your work with the rapper Okmalumkoolkat – how did that come about?

I had a friend who went down to South Africa to write a story for an Austrian magazine, and whilst he was doing this he was lucky enough to run into the right people, interviewing everyone who was hot at that time, allt he artists, musicians and bloggers. He took my friend Dorian Concept for a couple of shows in 200, and then me and my friend The Clonious in 2009, and then we just went to Cape Town and Johannesberg almost every year in a mix of leisure and playing gigs, financing the trips by the gigs. So I started playing drums for Spoek Mathembo. Then my friend heard about the Okmalumkoolkat stuff over the net, and phoned him up to say, 'OK, I know everyone from your crew but I don’t know you, how come we never met?' And he played him some of my stuff, and the next time we were in Johannesburg it was almost already decided we were going to make music togther. From then on he’s become a really close friend, and someone who I regulalarly meet either out in South African or in Vienna.

So can we expect more music from the two of you?

We’re just finishing a remix package of the first EP, that’s gonna come out in a month or something, and we’re already working on Holy Oxygen 2, we’re already mixing that so it’ll be out in a few months, we’ve been constantly working.

With the current vogue for big name American rappers to jump on more twisted European beats, I can easily see your stuff being checked out by some of the US majors

I did do a couple of tracks on the Theophilus London LP, which finally came out last year. The US, or pop in general is highly influenced by sub culture and underground producers, which then really fast get into being well known producers, The whole pop production game has changed, something goes from being hip in January to being mainstream in June, whoever is the first rapper who jumps on the sound wins..! Which is cool, in a way, pop music has become far deeper and more musical in the last couple of years.

And what’s the scene like in Vienna right now?

It developed in a very, very good way in the last 5 to 10 years. There’s people coming out of the city in the same niche I'm in, making the step out and being recognised internationally. The jazz scene in Vienna developed in an incredible way in the last 10 years – me and my friends are involved in a Jazz collective, Jazz Factory Vienna, and that’s just a melting pot of all the people who are making brave, sophisticated, new stuff. It’s been very exciting hanging out with those people, getting some interaction between electronic music and the jazz scene, it’s been very good!