Slam: Going Back to Go Forward

If you’re listing key figures in Scotland’s electronic music scene, and those who have played a pivotal role in making Glasgow the hotbed of talent it is today, then Slam’s name is likely to crop up almost immediately. The duo of Stuart McMillan and Orde Meikle has long been at the heart of the techno community in this country and they were one of the earliest Scottish DJ and production outfits to make an impact worldwide – both through their own releases and those of their legendary label, Soma.

Given their instrumental involvement with various events throughout the year – the likes of T in the Park and their regular club nights Pressure and Return to Mono, to mention a few – it’s no surprise that studio time these days is hard to find. Yet seven years on from their last full length offering, and off the back of a string of dancefloor singles, Slam return this month with a new album, Reverse Proceed. It’s a carefully sculpted voyage from ambient and delicate beginnings through to the kind of scintillating, heads down techno the duo frequently belt out to big rooms across the globe.

Ahead of the record’s release, Stuart takes time out of a visit to India to give us the lowdown on what it’s all about.

First up, what takes you to India?

We are here for the Go Madras festival which is an electronic music festival on the beach at the Radisson Hotel just outside Chennai. The festival has beautiful scenery and cool people. The main focus is techno, something that's kind of new for India, and it's exciting to come here and play the music to a new crowd. It's also been one of our lifelong ambitions to come to India. We feel privileged to be here!

Reverse Proceed will be your first album for 7 years! How did the record come about and why the delay?

We had decided that we didn't want to release an album for a while after the last one, Human Response – partly because it's such a daunting process making one in the first place and also because we wanted to concentrate on more dancefloor-orientated stuff. We’ve been on a roll making club tracks and remixes for a while. We had releases on many great labels; obviously for Soma and for Paragraph, the newer label we set up, and also for Drumcode and Figure amongst a couple of others. Eventually it was less tangible. We've had a strong history in making albums over the years and I guess that's ingrained in our DNA now. Albums are places you can show more creativity.

Did you set out to have such a gradual progression on the album or did it develop naturally?

We set out to make the album in this way, and inspirationally it's loosely based around the long DJ sets you might hear us play, when we get to do five hours at Fabric for instance, or the warm-up at Pressure or Return To Mono at the Sub Club. In those cases, as DJs we always start with ambient soundscapes then build it slowly into techno. This was the intention and inspiration for the album. Each track was written with each slot in mind based around a sequence from a Cirklon Sequencer, kind of like jigsaw pieces slotted together making a continuous mix with no breaks.

There’s quite a difference stylistically between this and Human Response – perhaps no surprise given the seven year gap. How have your tastes and creative tendencies developed over time and do you both share the same influences?

Yeah, there is a difference but, as you say, I would hope after seven years things were going to change and we would try and push new boundaries for ourselves. I think our musical tastes have inherently changed naturally over time. For the inspiration for this album we actually went way back. We were listening to a lot of krautrock – YMO and stuff like that. We also found inspiration from early electronic stuff from the E.M.S. which was created by British electronic pioneers Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary and David Cockerell in the late 1960s. This is stuff that might have influenced the music that influenced us in the first place, which was Detroit techno. We wanted to try and take something coming from the spirit of that early experimentation in electronic music, but make our own interpretation.

Though clearly exploring different territory at times, there are also some brilliant archetypal Slam moments like when those synths emerge to take us out of the ambient section of the record. Do you find that kind of signature sound is hardwired to an extent?

It's something we don't really think about, but I'm glad that our signature sound still remains even though we have taken lots of new influences and used new recording procedures to make the record. 

How do you work in the studio? Is there a clear division of labour or more of a sporadic approach?

Each track had its own different story to tell about how it came about. The most exciting thing about this project was trying to take things away from staring at a computer or a laptop screen and to make music more organically. The process was roughly based around me playing with the Cirklon sequencer and the modular synth and Orde would maybe be knocking out patterns on the 909. The beauty of working this way meant that we could somehow inject a more human element into making electronic music, playing the modular almost like an instrument. We would take maybe ten minutes of a live pass of each track and then we would use the computer to edit and tweak the final mix. It was important for us to take this album outside of a normal working environment as well, so we recorded this album with Simon Stokes at his Shoogle studios, which is in Royston where he does the Soma Skool tutorials.

You’ve been very busy over the years, with lots of different projects going on. How have you found balancing DJing and running so many high profile events with allowing yourselves time to get into the studio?

It’s hard sometimes. When we are locked down doing an album we have to allow ourselves a short time-frame to do it. Also for Soma and Slam events we have a good team – if it wasn't for Dave Clarke, the third member of Slam, it would be almost impossible to run those other ventures. Also, at Soma we have a great team in the office. It’s all about good teamwork with like-minded people. It would be completely impossible to do it all with just the two of us.

Finally, where did the album’s title come from?

The title Reverse Proceed comes from the process with which we made the album. Conceptually it's about stepping back and using older methods along with modern technology to try and create something new. We made an album in 1999 called Twisted Funk under the moniker Pressure Funk and we decided we wanted to try and get that energy back into the recording process. For the Pressure Funk album we were using the Roland TR-909 with its external instrument feature, effectively using it as a step sequencer. We then discovered the Sequential Circuits Cirklon sequencer, which coincidentally was made in Paisley by a guy called Colin Fraser. So it's not only Scottish techno, it's been made using (partly) Scottish technology as well!

Essentially the title came about from acknowledging the inspirational and tactile way electronic music was made in the past, yet also using modern technology to move things forward... hence Reverse Proceed.