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In The Studio With... Matthew Styles

Since moving to Berlin six years ago, Matthew Styles has deeply ingratiated himself within the city's infamous and respected house music community. The fact that he shares his studio locale with Steffi and Matthew Jonson (amongst others), only bolsters the fact that he's serious about his studio emissions and over the last few years he’s seen releases on his wife Dinky's Horizontal imprint, B Pitch Control and, most recently, for Derrick Carter and Luke Solomon's Classic imprint. This coming Saturday he's coming to share his live wares here on our own Martin Audio rig under Craig Richard's The Nothing Special banner so we thought it a good opportunity to speak to Matthew with production gear very much in mind, to get to know more about his creative working process and how he's going to bring his electronic music style to Room One this weekend. So where is your studio? The studio is in the famous Templehof Airport in Berlin that was built in the 1920's. It was taken over by the US after the war and used for the Berlin Airlift at the start of the cold war. Our rooms were used by the CIA up until the Americans left the city after the fall of the wall. We share a small section of the giant building with a few other studios from NSI (Tobias. & Max Lorderbauer), Mathew Jonson, Steffi and Candybomber Studios. What would you say is your central point, I noticed there's a full size keyboard there - do you spend a lot of time working the tracks off this for ideas? Do you have a set working process for putting together a tune? The ideas start in different places, it could be a sample I found, or maybe some experimentation with some chords or a sequencer and synthesiser. Sometimes I might have a certain idea of what I want to do so it’s just a case of working that out. What's in those racks? In the rolling racks there are the rack-mount synths from Studio Electronics, Waldorf & Roland and two hardware sequencers from SND and Sequentix. In the other rack is outboard processing stuff, compressors from Tubetech, Manley, Neve, Effects from Eventide, Bricasti, Ensoniq. Then the wooden rack is digital stuff, AD/DA converters, Midi and such. In the keyboard rack, with Sequential Circuits & DSI units, a Yamaha DX7, Roland TR-808, MPC and assorted bits. What would you say is your most essential piece of gear that you work with? Well maybe it’s not the hippest thing to say, but the computer is the master. You can do everything you need with the computer. Out of this what do you take out to perform with? How do you go about putting together your live set? For my live show, I use the MPC1000, Computer and some effects pedals, and this is spread out of 16 channels on a mixer and then performed in a "dub" style with the effects. The main thing actually is to keep it compact and flexible as possible. In some cases I might be DJing one night and playing live the next. So to carry around keyboards and too much other stuff isn't feasible really. I work with the drums from the MPC and then melodic stuff from the computer running live. How the stuff runs together is improvised on the night. I'm still developing it from each experience, fabric will be my 5th show, the others I have done was twice at the Panorama Bar, once at Robert Johnson and another at a small club call About:Blank in Berlin. I learn a lot from each experience and try to use that. Vocals are something that reappear throughout the live sets I've heard you play, are they recorded with the help of your wife Dinky? Yes there are some vocals from Dinky in my music, normally I just trawl through some of the old recordings she might have made as she works out improvisations for her own things, and use outtakes from those. There might be a word or phrase here and there that works for something else that didn't make it onto her own songs. Actually we never did something where I said "hey, can you do this" and recorded her with a specific idea. Unless of course it was for her own songs. I prefer to use the outtakes of her experiments for my own projects. And finally if money were no object what would be your dream studio related purchase? Money no object, hmmm maybe some crazy ATC monitoring set up of maybe a Fairman EQ or something like that.
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