Interview: D25 Part Two: Stacey Pullen

Stacey Pullen is one of those rare artists that manages to remain one step ahead of the curve while maintaining a strong appreciation for what's come before him. Putting his mark on the !K7 'DJ Kicks' mix series in 1996, to this day it's still considered one of the most futuristic mixes in the game (more on that later, with insight from Martyn too). As our leg of the D25 tour lies just around the corner (it's this Sunday y'all), highlighting Detroit's 25 years of innovation and artistry, it seems a fitting time for one of its most seminal players to have a moment of reflection. Read on to discover Stacey's thoughts on the last 25 years, his plans for reviving Black Flag Recordings, the new music he's working on, as well as the best bits of his back catalogue that he’s digitally re-releasing...ride through his wisdom - from past, to present, to future, and back.

What are you up to today?
At this moment now, I’m just getting everything together before I leave on the D25 tour. I’m tidying up everything, listening to music, trying to finish up this mix that I’m doing, trying to make sure everything’s squared away for my new release that I’ve got coming out next week, and making sure all the stores and distributors got the record and all that good stuff.

Speaking of which, we’re really digging your new BFR joint, ‘Get Up,’ in the office.
Yeah, that’s what everybody says. I kinda decided to release it that way because I wanted to build up the anticipation – so come out with the ‘Alive’ track and have ‘Get Up’ be even better than the first.

But I don’t think you can really compare them; ‘Alive’ is such a different vibe.
That’s true. I had the ‘Alive’ track done for a while, and I kinda sat on it for a minute – because music is ever-changing, and I’m always being inspired by things. So I sat on it for a minute, and I gave the original to a couple of friends and they played it out. But when I played it out, I felt like there was something missing. That’s the good thing of doing your own music, being your own boss, is that you get a chance to let the work find itself. So I did that track and I did the Hi Tek Soul mix, which was the perfect compliment because I’ve done the Hi Tek Soul parties with Derrick in the past, and I wanted to put that stamp on it just because I’m kinda affiliated with it.

You just mentioned that music’s ever-changing, and that’s along the lines of something Carl said the other day…if that’s the case, how do you know, or decide, that something’s finished?
You know it when you hear it, but it may take a day – it may take a week. I’ve been in the studio recording, recording, recording…and then I'll get bored of it, and take a break – and I’ll come back to it with a whole different energy. So you really don’t know. At the end of the day, you just gotta stop. (laughs) There is such a thing as overproducing. I remember I was working with Derrick years ago; we did a remix for a track called ‘Wiggin’.’ And he said, ‘You know, I like the track – I like the remix that you did – but you did too much!’ That’s what happens when inspiration’s just flowing like that. So now what I do is – if I go too far, I’ll take a couple of parts out and I’ll set it aside for a totally brand new track. So it’s constantly evolving. It never finishes, because if I doing a track off of a track that I already did, then that’s the continuation of that track. I just have to stop sometimes, but that varies – anywhere from two hours to two days!

Right now, I’m working on a mix for Jamie Anderson and K-Alexi – the track is called ‘Cyclone’ and that’s on a label called Mija Recordings. Actually, how that came about was I charted the track on Beatport, and the owner of the label contacted me about a remix. So I’m finished with production - I had to stop (laughs) - so now I’m just finishing and arranging it, and making it that powerful 7-8 minute DJ track that will definitely keep people on the dancefloor.

After speaking to Carl last week, we’d love to hear your take on D25…
I’m really happy to be involved with the whole 25 years of Detroit techno, because to be honest, when I first started out doing music, I had no idea…well, none of us had any idea that the music was going to take off the way it did. And now it’s 25 years later. I can still remember years ago, when I didn’t even know none of these guys. I was just one of those outside guys trying to get in. So for me now to, be a major player in this - and being personal friends with these guys, most importantly – it’s like more than anything I could’ve imagined. And now it’s all about the history – can’t nobody take that back. No matter how many different genres of music come and go, or how many tracks come out per day, or how many promos I get, you can’t erase that history. And that’s really the most important thing that I’m appreciative about.

Speaking of “how many tracks come out per day” - as someone that’s been involved in the game for so long, do you feel as there’s an overwhelming, almost suffocating, surplus of music these days? Sometimes I find myself wondering how many DJ mixes I can listen to in one lifetime, or how on earth I can manage to file all of the tunes I get sent.
Yeah, I was talking to this guy, and we were talking about the whole music world, and releases, and mixes, and everything. Years ago, there was a point where I had a problem with people recording my DJ sets, because it was a copyright infringement – you know, I didn’t want anyone having a mixtape without paying for it. Now it’s no longer about the track of the month, or the track of the year – now it’s like the track of the hour! So that puts a whole new twist on things. But I think, at the end of the day, what we’ve done with D25 is that we’ve made timeless music, so we can play music from 25 years ago and it still sounds as fresh as it did when it first came out. And it still sounds as innovative as a lot of the music that’s being made today, even though there are so many producers, and endless possibilities with making music and different sounds, and being innovative with technology. We’ve kept it that way, and we have that defined sound, just like that Motown sound of the 60s. That sound has been around since the 50s/60s, and you can still listen to a Motown record and instantly know it’s a Motown record.

There’s a lot of really interesting parallels between the two. Actually, wasn’t your dad a Motown singer?
He was a singer in a band called The Capitols, they had a song called ‘Cool Jerk,’ which was a one hit wonder. He sung around in a lot of other local Motown groups, but with that group in particular, he was touring with them as well. Of course, the different path that people take in different lives led to the demise of the group. Have you ever seen a movie called ‘The Five Heartbeats’? That was pretty much the story of my dad and his career: a lot of different personalities together and then all of a sudden, one guy goes this way and another goes that way, and before you know it the group is disbanded. People had families – my dad had me, and now I’m the continuation of that.

And when did you start to get really into music yourself, particularly techno?
I was a fan from when everything first came out, which was in ’85, obviously (being the 25th anniversary and all). I didn’t get involved until ’91, ’92 – that’s when I met Derrick. Then I met Kevin and all those guys; they were all at that point where things were taking off. I was a student learning up under those guys. My first release was in ’92, and I moved over to Amsterdam in ’93.

How did Amsterdam come into the equation?
I always gotta tell this story, it’s funny - my first financial advance was a little money in my pocket, and a plane ticket to Amsterdam. That was my financial deal with Derrick May and his Transmat stable. As a kid in Detroit, how can you not be excited about that? The plane ticket was supposed to be for a month, but after that month was done I asked myself, ‘Why do I need to go back?’ I wanted to stay there, hang out and see what was going on in Europe. My first underground party was the Lost party with Steve Bicknell and all those guys. So I wound up staying in Europe – one month turned out to be a year and some change. I came home, and started my foundation and brought everything I’d learned in Europe back to Detroit, with a nice creative energy. From that point on, it’s just been nonstop. The most I’ve taken off since that time was actually 2 months; that was at the beginning of this year. After traveling for so many years, not traveling for 2 months was a crazy feeling. It was like a new beginning for me. Plus I needed to take off some time to get back in the studio, and start the label back up again. I needed that time out to just put my passport in the closet.

Let it collect some dust for a little while and kick back.
Yeah, let it collect some dust while I insert new pages – because it’s so full! (laughs)

So what is the plan for Black Flag Recordings – do you plan to expand the label beyond being a platform for your own work, and take on other artists?
It’s always been a platform for my own work, but a while ago I met this guy here in Detroit – he brought some music to me, he works as part of a duo. I heard the potential in this one track; it was more of a housey thing, lots of soulful vocals. Detroit may be the lovers of techno but we’ve made some good vocal tracks that have really made it and been commercially viable; I mean, ‘Big Fun’ and ‘Good Life’ are two of the biggest electronic tracks ever. Even though it wasn’t the intention, they had huge commercial success. Anyway, he brought this track to me and I felt like it was a really good time for me to executive produce it, and put it out on my label. His name is Phil Augusta, and he’ll be coming out on my label with a track called ‘Sound of Music.’ At the end of the day, I don’t really want to be a label boss – I don’t mind helping people, but I kinda just wanna do my music and focus on that. But at the same time, if a track comes across my desk – or I should say my computer now, because we’re in the digital world (laughs) – if a track comes into my inbox and I like it, then I’ll definitely consider it.

So I have those two releases that are about to come out, ‘Get Up and ‘Alive.’ And I’m working on another track right now, I’ll probably be done with it at the end of the summer, considering all of the travelling that I’ve got. Then I’m gonna be re-releasing some of the Black Flag catalogue as well. And I just recently required the rights back to two of my albums that I’ve recorded in the past – I’m going to release those albums, as well as remixing and just continuing on. This year is blowing by really fast, but I’ve got things coming out consistently between now and the end of the year.

When I interviewed Martyn for his fabric biography, he actually quoted you as a big inspiration for the way that he put together his ‘fabric 50’ mix. He said: “Stacey Pullen - one of my favourite DJs - did a mix on the ‘DJ Kicks’ series for !K7. It's four-to-the-floor orientated, and it's got a great pace and momentum. It was also one of the first CDs where I noticed experimentation with effects; of course, nowadays that’s the most usual thing in the world (because of software like Ableton), but back then it was just all straight-up vinyl. You had to rent a studio and an engineer to actually have a couple of extra effects on your mix.”
To this day, I still have people coming up to me and saying like, ‘I was listening to your !K7 mix and it’s awesome – you had some ‘Blade Runner’ pieces in there, and the mixing that you were doing was crazy!” It’s funny, people tell me that the things you can do with technology now enables you to do it much faster, but when I did it then it was 3 decks, along with a reel-to-reel machine with tape and cutting utensils. We were doing some old-school editing. With my effects that I had, and adding some soundtrack info in there, I did the mix and then I dumped it back on to tape, and did a little editing. When Derrick May and all those guys were on the radio here, they were – especially Jeff Mills – all into the editing block: getting the razor blade out and doing it the old-school way, just to see what they could do. It was a project; it wasn’t just doing music or DJing. It was a project back then, and I really had fun doing that.

It’s that conceptual feel that I personally miss - the project, the full package – and it kinda goes back to what I was saying about the surplus of DJ mixes…it feels like there’s not nearly as much thought and love put into mixes these days.
Like I said, the music is so disposable now – I hate to use that word, but it is disposable to the point where you can listen to something and then you can forget about it. And then you come back to it like, ‘Oh wait, I listened to that a month ago!’ But doing a project like the !K7 mix, I really put my heart and soul into it. And then to top it off, !K7 had us do an original track based on the elements used from the mix. So basically, out of the songs that I chose to play on the mix, they asked me to create a song out of those elements. I took snips and pieces and samples out of one of the records that I used, and then I did a track based on that sample. Then I would go back and do, y’know, a kick drum to it, and use another portion of another track and put that into my original production. So all in all, what it came down to finish the project, I had a complete original track based on the elements of that mix, that was the ‘DJ Kicks’ 12” – and then the original ‘DJ Kicks’ mix came on CD. That was a really cool project, and I really take my hat off to the guys at !K7. There were only 4 other DJs that had done a ‘DJ Kicks’ before me (C.J. Bolland, Carl Craig, Claude Young and Kruder and Dorfmeister), I was the fifth.

Lastly, when I came across your fabric biography (from back in 2004!), one line in particular stuck out at me – it was something you said about the future: “The future is one second from now. I just strive for longevity. I look to be one step ahead: living in Detroit and travelling you see both worlds. You have to be mentally prepared to move on.” I got curious to see how you’d feel hearing it back 6 years later, considering we’re in the future now from when you’d said that.
As we touched on earlier with the whole D25 thing, in this electronic music world that we live in, we’re still able to be talked about and we will continue to be talked about in the future. As long as we have that history, we will always be there, in the future, because of our past and present. People in the future will always be able to look back, or reflect, or understand, or appreciate what we did in the past. That’s why I called my album, ‘Today is the Tomorrow You Were Promised Yesterday’: it’s basically the past, the present and the future. Being from Detroit, we’ve always kinda looked ahead ahead of the curb and tried to – or not even tried, it just kinda came about naturally for us to be forward-thinkers. Juan was the main guy who showed us all how to do that – we listened to his music then, and still listen to it in relevance today. It’s up to us to keep that flag burning.