WetYourSelf!: Catching Up With Alex Under

The WetYourSelf crew speak to CMYK label boss Alex Under, a personal favourite of theirs, ahead of his return to Farringdon this Sunday. Read on to find out more about the evolution of Under’s live set and fresh plans underfoot for his own output as well as the label’s in 2013. Firstly, how was 2012; what were your high points and low points? I would say it was a year of catharsis for me; it brought a lot of big changes in my personal life, all of them for better, but it was still a hard year. Musically and professionally, the high point of the year was the release of my second album and getting my live set together for it working alongside the outstanding visual artist Rod MacLauchlan. I don’t recall any specific low point, at least one that I would make public. We've just arrived in 2013 – Did you make any New Year’s resolutions? points? Just to continue on the hard path of being a better human every day. That and to stop drinking coke... You released an album last year, ’La Máquina De Bolas’. The album is quite different from your last one, what was your motivation behind recording this album and can you tell us something about the processes involved and what you wanted to achieve? I produced La Maquina de Bolas as an exercise of deleting every single prejudice I had in my mind when working in the studio. I felt totally stuck in terms of creativity, I wasn’t enjoying techno music either, suddenly techno music became exactly the opposite of what It used to mean for me. Since I can’t produce music A La Carte I decided to stop making music for a while, and then I started doing some long live recordings, which I then built up in the form of 8 tracks which became a conceptual album that is based in psychoacoustics and biology, based on ideas of how the human brain discards a sound that it has been repeating after some time because is not considered as a menace for survival. Can you give us an insight into what to expect from your live set coming up, especially for those who have not seen you before? My first season of performing live lasted 5 years, it was a very productive stage of my career and that performance almost came to life itself. But, also it was a very long period of time and I stopped because I thought it couldn’t go any further with those initial ideas. After preparing the live set of ‘La Maquina de Bolas’ I was curious to do a similar performance but with dance techno music, so I was testing some setups, well to be honest I’m still testing them.., but I’m very close to what I want it to be. For me, it’s a priority that the live set is different from before and what I do when I DJ, I hope I will know how to do that before Sunday... How is your label going at the moment, have you got any releases planned for next year? Yes there is a good bunch of new releases coming up. I started back again with cmykmusik at the end of last year with my own release ‘Blanco de Mente’ and we have some great Spanish producers coming next who had remixed me on Soma, Fernando Sanz and Cesar Martinez, also with the other label bemysheep, we just released a free download of the first of these remastered tracks , ‘Nobody Lives Forever’ by Dolly la Parton, which is a deep psychedelic masterpiece. And finally, can you tell us who your favourite are artists at the moment? I’m a very loyal man; Thomas Brinkmann is gonna be my favourite artist forever. But if you want some names I discovered more recently, I’d say Madteo and Hakimonu. Alex Under will be joining the WYS! Residents in Room One this Sunday, for more info and tickets go here.