Audio: Voigtmann shares a rare downtempo session

Few artists have mastered warming up Room One better than Voigtmann. The London selector has had his fair share of early shifts in our space over the years, regularly drawing from the beatless end of his collection to guide us into Saturday night’s heady peaks. These sets are the perfect opportunity to show off the sheer power of our beloved Martin Audio rig, giving way for the kind of subtle, spatial cuts that only Room One can bring to life. It’s a path Voigtmann’s taken on his latest mix for us, a rare downtempo session recorded in advance of his opening set for Craig Richards and Ricardo Villalobos next weekend. Check the kind of sedate stuff he’ll likely be drawing for in the opening stages of the night, and find out what he’s been up to recently from our interview below. Download: Voigtmann fabric Promo Mix So what have you been up to recently? I’ve been very busy touring – I just came back from an Australia tour and off to tour Colombia at the end of this month. In between, I try to fit in as much studio time as possible. Also, I am currently building my new home on the London canals, which is a great balance to touring life. What’s the theme of the mix? This mix is a chance to interweave samples, ambient and downtempo tracks in a more copy and paste way rather than a regular mix. The two channels were constantly running in the background, being manipulated in volume and EQ while I overlay tracks and samples on the other two channels. This is a pretty different playing style to what we usually hear from you, is there anything here you’d draw for in a club set? Most tracks on the mix are B2s taken from club records, so it’s definitely in the realm of a warm-up set too. You’ve spoken a lot about how our Room One space and its sound system has influenced you, is this set similar to how you would approach warming up the room? For me, warming up Room One always starts out with ambient tracks, leading to slow downtempo tracks and slowly bringing it up to club music, then raising the intensity of the tracks. These kind of floating tracks always fill up Room One beautifully, and sound amazing in there. How does your process for digging out these records differ – do you spend much time looking in different places to where you normally would go hunting? I have three main categories I constantly look for and take notes on when I hear something or shop somewhere. I mostly collect club tracks, funk music and downtempo beauties like this. It's an ongoing process to pick up new sounds in all these categories. We often hear you playing records that can be difficult to identify, do you think you consciously make an effort to play lesser known records in your sets? Not at all, I am just looking for music that keeps me excited. These lesser known tracks can have some unique flavour and that's what attracts me, I don't care if a record is rare or not. The music is important. How is everything going with Subsequent going recently? I had a huge release with Gene on Earth, and the following represses, then a fantastic record with Robin Ordell. I’ve decided to take a path of less promotion and focus more on the quality of music, rather than all the promotion fuss that most of the time overshadows the quality of music. What else are you up to in the near future? There are a few exciting things coming up. I am expanding my tours to new places this year across South America, Australia and Europe, but also have an interesting development happening here in London. I cannot reveal it just yet, but watch this space…