Influences: Werkha

Football like it used to be. Going and watching City scrape a victory against Birmingham in the horizontal sleet, or lose terribly at Maine Road. For some reason those years of football carried far more interest for me. Whether it’s my negative opinions on ownership and oil money in the role of the wider world, or maybe it’s the commercialisation and sheer amounts of money in football.

Either way, wandering across the park to watch Sean Goater, Kinkladze, Ali Benarbia and the rest give their best was a formative experience in the development of my own 5-aside footballing career (or the problem with it – aha!)

Reality, humour and the abstract all intertwined. It’s pretty much everything I love about cinema. Most importantly it exemplifies how art can carry the stories of struggles in an imaginative way. If you’ve not seen it, watch it. If you have seen it, revisit it.

Takes me back this record. It opened up a whole area of music for me when I was younger. At the time it was a type of music I aspired to make. Why couldn’t I learn those instruments? Write those parts? Record and produce like that? I’m still working on it. But this really set me off on the adventure.

When you come into DJing it’s so important to remain open to different approaches. This is ultimately going to influence your approach and style moving forward. I got dropped into DJing through house nights. That predictable, seamless 125bpm mixing craic. I never wanted to sit in that area of DJing personally, and learning from the sets of the likes of Andrew Ashong, MCDE, Floating Points, you grow to learn the importance of selection over the mathematic technicality of matching tempos. I think the other risk with matching beats over selection is that you can completely mess up the energy and direction of a set. Andy Scruff (great selector) once said to me as we watched over a Gilles P set about the importance of ‘going deeper’ with selections on b2b sets, rather than trying to compete or outdo your counterpart. That simply isn’t sustainable for a whole night.
I think a really beautiful recent set that highlights the importance of selections is Donna Leake’s Boiler Room. She’s playing in Glasgow soon and I can’t wait to catch her set.

Listening and learning that cool jazz of Bill Evans bore a big influence on my approach piano, taking me away from my previous classical approach (which admittedly felt a little stale by that point anyway).

I remember sitting down and taking it apart. His music makes piano playing feel like a movement, something that ebbs and flows. The feel is of a pianist who has sat at the piano and let their fingers decide where the chords come from. Beautiful blocks of notes. His movement across the keys is my favourite of any pianist.

This was the first tune I learned for the purposes of gigging with a jazz band I played with when growing up. Every time I hear it I remember trying to keep that rapid f***ing tempo going!

This tune taught me so much about locking in with your kit player, creating the spine of your music through your bass and kit relationship. This was also one of the first times I heard Herbie. Absolutely smashed it out the park with this one.

So Flute has become a home from home really. A solid Manchester night, great support from music lovers throughout the city and beyond. It’s maintained such a solid family feel to it whilst having welcomed some really exciting names to the city. There’s unlikely to be a crowd I’ll enjoy playing for more than a So Flute Manchester crowd and invariably, that’s had an impact on the music I want to make… the audience I envisage making music for. Big up Danuka & all the family.