Seeing as there has been quite a lot of controversy about some of Jay Haze's recent remarks, I decided to dig up this interview I did with him and Samim in DJ Mag around the time of the Fuckpony album release. My favourite part is Haze getting arrested for making bomb threats against his school...
If you had said to me at the start of the year that a former member of the Grateful Dead’s touring entourage and a bankrupt Swiss internet entrepreneur would be responsible for one of 2006’s best house albums, I would have offered you a nice warm strait jacket.
But in this instance truth is stranger than fiction, and the fusion of evocative, old school house and techno and modern minimal precision that constitutes ‘Children Of Love’ by Fuckpony, an alter ego for Berlin-based producers Jay Haze and Samim, is a product of the authors’ unconventional lives.
Enduring serious illness, homelessness and time in jail rather than the usual E-fuelled clubbing experience that puts most producers on the road to techno nirvana, Haze and Samim emerged from these life-changing events, phoenix-like, to release an album teeming with infectious tunes like ‘Ride The Pony’ and ‘Cellphone Hit’, a place where Chicago drums and raw acid lines underpin Detroit musicality and deep house chords.
“It’s been a long, strange trip and we feel like between us, we have climbed Mount Everest. We have spent long periods of time in jail, in deserts and in hospitals. It makes us different to most producers and gives us a greater motivation to survive,” Jay says matter of factly.
Samim, of Iranian descent, grew up amid the banking wealth and eerie orderliness of Switzerland, one of the world’s richest countries, while Haze, an Irish-American, comes from a small town in the foothills of the Pennsylvanian Appalachians, one of America’s most impoverished regions. In his teens, and, bear in mind that this is in pre-al Qaeda times, Jay spent time in jail on terror-related offences.
“I wish I could kid about this, but it’s true: we had a science test at school and we didn’t want to do it, so myself and my friends called in a bomb threat to the school,” he recalls. “We got caught and my friends sold me out, so I did time for it.”
Haze spent 16 months in jail, with the first two months spent in solitary confinement.
“In the last two weeks of solitary, they took away all of our privileges, including our books and cards, but I survived by taking apart my blanket, thread by thread,” Jay recalls.
After his release, he toured with arch-hippies the Grateful Dead, selling LSD, and ended up living on the streets of San Francisco. “Actually, it wasn’t that bad. The weather was good and I knew a lot of people there from the Grateful Dead days,” he explains, playing down experiences that would have crushed the will of your average laptop tehcno geek.
Getting his act together and leaving the States, Haze bumped into Samim in Zurich as he hitchhiked across Europe.
“He tried to buy grass from me, but we ended up going for a beer together,” Samim laughs.
A few years later, Jay moved to Berlin and set up the Contexterrior and Tuning Spork labels as outlets to release stripped back house and techno. Samim, who had worked as a dotcom entrepreneur in Switzerland – unsurprisingly, he lost all his money when the bubble burst in 2002 - and later as a club promoter, joined him. They started to gain a reputation as producers of minimal club music, but then disaster struck when Samim was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
“I only found out by accident, so I was lucky,” he explains. “The healing process was the worst part - pain is 90% fear, and when you’re not scared, it’s not so bad. I learnt a lot of important life lessons– when I was a promoter, I was surrounded by party people, and falling ill made me decide who my real friends were.”
Samim still has an “acid house scar” across his face from the operation, a reminder of how cruel life can be. Having put up with so much bad luck, you’d expect that such suvivors to churn out nosebleed gabba as they give two angry fingers to the world, but Haze and Samim reacted differently.
Instead, ‘Children Of Love’, with its kooky artwork, hippie dippy title and nods to a less cynical time in dance music seems too happy, an unlikely product of two people who seem cursed by fate.
“We’re on a path and we believe that the best part of it is in front of us, so we look forward to that,” Samim says of the album’s inherent optimism. On another level and without being too sanctimonious or evangelical, Fuckpony also see ‘Children of Love’ as an attempt to give the minimal generation a taste of dance music’s glorious past.
“This is not extremely new or original music, but it’s new for us as producers and because the young kids into minimal don’t know about this music, it’s fresh for the current climate,” Jay says.
There’s always a danger that assuming the role of musical educator brings with it a po-faced seriousness, but thankfully, ‘Children of Love’ avoids this potential pitfall, and vocal contributions from Big Bully, Shaniqua and Lil Dirrty Ghetto Bastard poke fun at life on ‘It’s Only Music’ and ‘Make Money, Hoe’.
“If you don’t laugh, you have to cry and I love a good laugh,” Samim says. “Humour is a powerful force, even if you have to force it on the Germans!”
“Our experiences taught us how to deal with tough situations: when you don’t have your freedom, all other problems seem small.” Jay concludes. “We are not doing this for the fame and fortune – we feel lucky to be alive and have this special gift of music, so we remain hard-working optimists and always make music with a smile.”
Finally, here’s some single reviews…
