Do No Touch This Amp: Who are ya and whaddya do?
    Andrew Duke: My name is Andrew Duke and by day I am program director here at CKDU in Halifax. In my free time, I record and perform and record electronic music.
    DNTTA: When you say electronic music, what do you mean? Your bio describes you as a techno artist, but your work doesn’t sound like traditional techno music.
    AD: I definitely make an effort to not try to sound at all traditional in what I do. If I had to describe it, I’d say I’m two different styles of music. One, I guess, would be techno-ish in that it is rhythmic and you can dance to it, if you are so inclined. The other stuff I do is more listener oriented. It might be rhythm oriented but it’s not beat oriented or dance oriented. Some people might call it dark ambient or experimental listening music, something along those lines. Sometimes I am doing stuff that combines the two and sometimes I am doing one or the other. That’s the biggest distinction.
    DNTTA: How would you describe your music then? Would you go along those same lines, dark ambient?
    AD: I’m not a big fan of labels. I find it most interesting when other people review it and come up with names for what it sounds like. I find something really interesting is when someone says this sounds like something-ish or is influenced by something else. Sometimes they will come up with artists that I may have heard of but not necessarily heard. If I hadn’t heard an artist then I couldn’t be influenced by that artist, but someone will say, you sound like this artist or a variation on this artists work. If it’s an artist I hadn’t heard, I may go out and seek out that artist. There’s a wide range of artists that people had said my stuff sounds similar to. Some of it is familiar artists like Aphex Twin, or labels that people might know, like Mille Plateaux, or there are other labels, for instance, like Mego, or smaller European labels that I may have heard of but not enough to be influenced by. A name that’s come up a number of times is Lustmord, which I may have heard about ten years ago because I had a roommate back then that had a lot of electronic music from that era. I recognize the name but it’s not something that I have had in my collection. Autechre is another name that comes up. I have a couple Autechre records, but I don’t sit around thinking “How did they do that?” and “How am I gonna do that?” If anything, my favourite artists would be artists like Drexciya out of Detroit, which are primarily electro artists and they are very melodic, sometimes dark melodies and sometimes joyful melodies.I am definitely not doing music in their style, but it is an artist that I look up to and admire.
    DNTTA: When I listen to your work, I heard a lot of kraut-rock, especially more experimental bands like Kluster, or modern artists like Pole or Pan sonic. Do you listen to those types of artists at all?
    AD: I am a huge Pole fan. I actually don’t own any of his material, but I preview a lot of it at CKDU. I probably heard some Kluster ten or fifteen years ago, but it’s not something I have in my collection. I used to have a lot of Tangerine Dream records in my collection at one point, maybe ten or so years ago. Pan sonic is another artist is another artist that has come up in reviews, but it’s not an artist that I have in my collection. I have heard stuff from then, I have heard stuff from Mika Vainio and the other gentleman whose name I won’t attempt to pronounce (ed. Note. His name is Ilpo Vaisanen). I find that interesting that when the names get thrown out at me that I’m not like, “Oh no! They found out the secret, that I am just copying them”. Honestly, I’m not doing that. I am just playing with stuff and when I think it sounds good, it’s good. 99% of the time it’s artists that I have heard of, but I don’t have any records by them.
    DNTTA: Let’s talk about your new album. It’s called “Spring Has Sprung”. How did the album come about? Where did the inspiration come from?
    AD: Starting in January or so, I had been recording listening type of music, dark ambient and experimental stuff and that turned into an album called “Physical and Mental Health”, coming out on Folding Cassette Recordings out of California. I wanted to get into doing stuff that was more up-tempo and more beat oriented. I wanted it to have some experimental touch to it, but I also wanted it to be techno-ish. The first song I recorded was “Pharmacoi” then I did “Chromosome 20”, which has dark textures that sort of swirl around. Then I did “Felt NH”. I did “FF” really quickly and listened back to it the next day and said to myself, “What the heck was I thinking?”, so I re-recorded it. That one has turned into one of my favourite songs on the album. It’s very downtempo and has alot of clicky sounds as opposed to textures. The second song that was done was “Crablike”. My goal was to do something that had a funk feel to it, but had an on-beat, off-beat, a disorienting type of feel to it. I send the first five sounds out to some friends who play music and are DJs at campus/community stations and got a good response to those. I thought I would do some more stuff, but I didn’t want to do the same thing again. Then I did the last five songs. “Knot Rocket” was a track that I did quickly and I listened to it again and thought “What the heck was I doing?”, then I redid it, and thought “That really doesn’t do it either”, so I put the two together. The first half of “Knot Rocket” is Day One and the second half is Day Two. I sort of had a love/hate relationship with that because I did it so quickly. One of the reviews, in Ultra Magazine in Belgium, said that was their favourite song on the album. So, at that point I had ten songs, so I sent it out as a sampler to some people. Then I thought I should give it a title instead of just calling it a sampler. So, what should I call this? I recorded these songs in January, February and March so it was pretty much Spring. I thought, I’ll call it “Spring Has Sprung” as a joke. I’m not sure how Spring is in your part of the country, but in Nova Scotia it’s pretty darn crappy, its dark and rainy. I thought it would be ironic, because when you hear the phrase “Spring has sprung”, you think hippies and flowers. Instead of calling it “Ten Dark Songs Recording Just Before the Spring”, I called it “Spring Has Sprung” for a joke. It’s kind of backfired on me in a way, because some of the reviews have said that this was a perfect title, it sounds like creatures blossoming. In !exclaim Magazine, then described one of the songs as amphibians in a pond having a rave! For me, that’s great because you get to read other people’s reactions and 99% of the time, it’s not something that even crossed your mind. 99% of the time, they are telling you things about your work that you never thought about. A good way to put it with the 1% it does work out, I recorded a song for another album called “Andbolts”. I didn’t want to call it “Nuts and Bolts”, I just called it “Andbolts”. A lot of people heard the song and didn’t get it, but one person emailed me and she asked me “So, where’s the nuts?”. Everyone else was going, “Well ‘Andbolts’, what the heck does that mean?”. There are a lot of little in-jokes, like there is one song called “Inbox” and one called “RSVP”. Those are fun to do. I put a lot of thought into the order of how the songs should be done and a lot of people have picked up on that. I’ve got good reviews, if I can’t get a label to put it out, I’ll put it out on Cognition Audioworks. It’s got some attention from labels, but they want me to do other stuff from them. There’s a label in Sweden called Komplott, and one in France called Bip-Hop, one in Finland called pHinnmilk. If I don’t have someone license “Spring Has Sprung” by September or October, I’ll just do up some covers and put it out on Cognition Audioworks.
    DNTTA: Tell me about Cognition Audioworks as a label then. Do you just put out your own stuff or do you work with other artists as well?
    AD: I have worked with other artists in the past. I had two cassette labels in the 80s, one called Digitalis, which was more electronic stuff, much darker and not all techno-ish. The second was called Incognito Musique, which was essentially just some friends and roommates farting around. We did dancy stuff and we called it Incognito Musique because we didn’t put our real names to it. Did you ever see the commercial about 10 years ago with Scott and Joey? There would be a series of cheese commercials with Scott and Joey, they would eat cheese and comment about it?
    DNTTA: Yeah, I remember those.
    AD: We had a band called Scott and Joey, and it was cheesy dance music. That was our little in-joke. We took it to all the clubs in Halifax and they would be playing our little dance song off a cassette. We thought it was really hilarious, because we had no intention other than having some fun with it. I put those things to bed and in 1990, I started up Cognition Audioworks. There were a couple of things released on cassette that were recorded in my studio, Cognition Sound. Those were just limited edition, just sent out to some friends and some radio stations, pretty low key. Then I put out a couple of my earlier releases that are no longer available, “Communion” and “Drowning in Oxygen”, put out on cassette with hand packaging. Then I got into releasing stuff on CD around 95. I didn’t have a lot of contacts, it was for fun. When I started syndicating my show on CKDU, I got a lot more contacts, and people were saying, “I noticed you have a record label, what about sending out some promos?” I hadn’t really bothered to send out that many promos. When I started to send out “Spring Has Sprung”, I thought, “I’m really gonna promote this.” So I sent 35 copies to a lot of campus stations in Canada, some copies to some stations in the States, some copies to RadioSonic and Brave New Waves. I acted like a real record company, but it was really low key. It’s hard when you are recording and acting as a record label to keep track of the business end of it. You can be so busy with recording that you don’t have any time to pay attention to the business end and get the music out there. I’m trying to keep it low key. Maybe in five years or so, I might be releasing all kinds of material, but for now, I’m just doing my own material on Cognition Audioworks in pretty low-key fashion.
    DNTTA: You work for CKDU, the campus station at Dalhousie, and you have a radio show called “In the Mix”.
    AD: Yup, it’s on Thursdays, 2-3:30 Atlantic Standard. About half the time you can hear us on RealAudio at our website.
    DNTTA: What do you play on your radio show?
    AD: I play electronic music, probably 50% experimental listening stuff and 50% upbeat, techno stuff. There have been times where I play mostly vinyl and beatmixed it, and there are other times where I feel like collaging stuff, so I play tapes and CDs at the same time. I try to keep a balance, so if you like the dancy stuff, there is enough of that so that when I get into the experimental stuff, you won’t go “Goodness!”. If you like the experimental stuff, but not into the techno stuff, you can appreciate it as well. I will also play some electro stuff, some old school stuff, like old house music.
    DNTTA: Is that the sort of music you are interested in? Is that the music that influences your music?
    AD: I wouldn’t just say I am interested in that. If I am home, I could be just as easily be listening to some Louis Armstrong or Stevie Wonder. When I am home, a lot of my time is spent, listening to electronic music, so when you are done that, you don’t want to be listening to more electronic music. I do have a lot of  electronic records in my collection, but I probably have twice as many funk records in my collection. I like disco, but not like ABBA and the Bee Gees, I’m not into that pop disco. I like the disco that was like proto-house that grew into the techno and electronic music we have today.
    DNTTA: You have a website. What do you used it for?
    AD: When I was doing a lot of music writing, I would archive the columns on the website. It was also one of the sites that carried the syndicated version of my radio show. At one point, there was about 60 hours of audio archives there, with interviews and live PAs. All the text based stuff is still up. I haven’t done a syndicated show since May 2000, because the server that was serving the show shut down. In the past, you would have been able to go to my site and listen to the show. You can see what’s available but you can’t listen to them. I have all the shows on CD-R, but I haven’t had time to get them into the computer. There is a lot of stuff to read on there, like interviews with Pole and some Micro-Sound artists, some Canadian artist like Daniel Lui out of Toronto.
    DNTTA: What’s the electronic music scene like in Halifax?
    AD: DJ-wise it’s not bad. We have a thriving hip-hop scene. There are a lot of trance and drum and bass DJs. There is a bit of house music, but not many techno DJs. Live DJs are hard to find, mainly because of our population and because our scene has just started growing since 92. For the past five or six years, every October has been the Halifax Experimental Music Festival, which is good. There might be some art exhibits with some electronic music. I think there is a lot of potential at this point, but we still have a ways to go.
    DNTTA: How do you think the Canadian scene is for electronic music?
    AD: In the bigger cities, it’s a lot better. Toronto and Montreal are doing very well. In Montreal, they have the Mutek Festival, that’s one of the best electronic festivals in North America. I have heard good things about Vancouver. I was in Winnipeg for the NCRA Conference this summer and they seem to have a really strong hip-hop scene. There is still lots that can be done, and we need to let people recognize that it’s not DJs who make the music, it’s the artists. It’s like radio. You know that the people who tell you the weather aren’t the people playing the music. Halifax is still working towards that.
    DNTTA: What releases have caught your ear lately?
    AD: I listen to a lot of stuff that isn’t electronic music. I can appreciate sonic elements of Destiny’s Child. You might think that’s strange for an electronic musician to mention, but I can appreciate it. I may not be buying the CD, but there are elements that I can enjoy. As for electronic music, I tend to like stuff off the Mille Plateau label out of Germany, I like some of the stuff on Force Inc. I like a lot of Canadian stuff like Tomas Jirku and Mitchell Akiyama.
    DNTTA: Last question, what’s up next for you?
    AD: I applied yesterday to play at the Halifax Pop Explosion. The few people I have talked to said that it needs some electronic music. I have also applied to be part of the Mutek Festival in Montreal. I definitely want to get into doing some sort of live tour some time later this year or early next year. “Spring Has Sprung” will likely be out on a label, maybe Cognition Audioworks around October. By that time, “Physical and Mental Health” will be out on Folding Cassette Styles. I have recorded a companion album to that called “More Destructive Than Organized”, coming out on a sub-label of Staalplaat called Bake. I am currently working on a full-length for a label for a label out of California for Phthalo, called “Consumer vs. User”. There’s not a lot of texture to that album, it’s more crazy noises. I am on a couple compilations, one called “Integral Components” from the Component label, one on souRce Research out of the UK. Their last compilation had Coil on it. I would say Coil, its not conscious I think about Coil, but if you were to ask me ten years ago who my influences were, I would say Coil.
    DNTTA: Good luck in your future endeavours and thanks for your time!