Brightest Young Things

All words by William Bert

Future Times is DC's best (only?) cosmic boogie nu-disco/house label. Label co-owners Andrew Field-Pickering and Mike Petillo sat down with me on a recent humid Monday night to talk about what they've done, what they're doing, what they will do, and all sorts of dance music-related shit. The cosmic sounds of their new release, Vibe 1, featuring tracks by Beautiful Swimmers, Maxmillion Dunbar, Protect-U, and Sensual Beings, are available now at futuretimes.org. On August 15, catch label artists Steve Summers and Beautiful Swimmers with Chicago house legend Hieroglyphic Being at Comet.

BYT: You've got new record out: Vibe 1. The name to me suggests it's an introduction: this is our vibe, our sound. Do you think there is or will be a a Future Times sound? How would you describe it?

Mike: The record came about from all of us talking to each other and recording at the same time. We had a lot of ideas floating around. Vibe is a tongue and cheek inside joke. We have our internal lingo. We say vibe a lot.

Andrew: We knew we wanted vibe as the title somewhere. Vibe 1—fuck it, sure. But yes, the comp is our vibe. I think that Vibe 1 is a little maybe different from the first 7", the Maxmillion Dunbar. This new one is housey as a whole comp, but all the songs are a bit of other genres too.  If there's a label sound, it's—well, we wouldn't hesitate to release a really good ambient record, or all sorts of funky electronic side of anything. Any sort of aspect of electronic music culture, dance culture, anything could sort of be in there.

What is the Future Times story?

Andrew: I do Maxmillion Dunbar as a side project, and I wanted to put out a 7", so I thought I might as well make a little label name and a logo so I could put out a couple things if this one worked out. Mike wasn't even involved at that point, but then we started hanging out more often, and he was looking to do something sweet and fun like this, so we put out the second one. When I originally started I was just thinking it would be me occasionally putting out records, but now it's other people putting out records.

Mike: I've just always been a music fanatic. It dawned on me the same time Andrew put out that record, I just wanted to have an outlet. We've all done bands and music. Andrew and I have always been like, have you heard this record, have you heard that record? Our friend Jason had been making music as Rhythm Based Lovers, and I was like, this stuff's great. I was really into funk boogie disco stuff and he made awesome modern versions of that sound. Andrew was like, yeah, it'd be cool to put out another record. Let's keep this going.

How'd you guys come into dance music?

Andrew: We're coming at it from punk background. A lot of people into dance music now came from that background.

Mike: I imagine there's a multitude of reasons people come to dance music. There are tons of little bands that act as natural filters. The people who love music can't stop buying records. Eventually you start seeing these records, you're like, where did this come from? You branch out.

Andrew: One big thing for me when I was stretching out from rap and punk stuff was Soul Jazz comps, or Warp records. You might see ads for them in magazines you might be reading about something else. You're like, well, what is that? The first time you listen to a dancehall comp you're like, snap, there's 6,000 records I need to find. You chip away until you hit those genres that interest you, then it becomes like a field day. I also think there's a lot more music, mp3 everything, blogs. And the sheer amount of records that came from DC, from the '80s—when it was new to me it was the craziest thing ever. It's still crazy. You perceive music as one thing, usually within one social circle or cultural circle too, and then [exploding sound].

Mike: David Mancuso [who hosted the influential Loft parties in New York] had a philosophical approach—he was a hippie who had gone into the '70s wanting to bring people together. And punk is portrayed as anybody can do it, but it doesn't work in the same way to bring people together like a disco and dance party can. Punk has violent dark stuff, and not everyone can get behind it. Seeing a band, you're supposed to focus on the band, it's not really about you per se. I think good dance and club music was made as a straight up social thing, the music was made to sound fucking great. The bassline, at a primeval level it's almost scientifically proven—they're working on the funk quotient! Latin percussion, African percussion, this is the oldest shit you can imagine, polyrhythms, that's basic human shit. That's what the music is based off of.

Andrew: There is a definite factor with the Internet, a lot of people being able to quickly find out whether or not they care. There was an underground factor back in the day with tape trading. But in the last 10 years—Ebay plus blogs plus mp3s. Some dude comes out of the woodwork who has setlists from London raves.

Mike: And the best is people from 20, 25 years ago posting on Youtube, saying I used to do this, I made this song—that must be so crazy, such a trip for those people.

Andrew: Daft Punk helped. Everyone loves Daft Punk. In the early 2000's everybody had Discovery. There's that "Teachers" song on the older album where they mention every awesome person who made dance music. I was like, who is each one of these people? Joey Beltram. Frankie Knuckles. Who is Frankie Knuckles? I need to find out now. And there's notes of dance culture in a lot of stuff, there's R&B songs that sample it, trance stabs, weird Detroit techno tones in all sorts of R&B shit. Dance music production is heavy on the effects that are specifically trying to make you go AH! Dance music is meant to be on big crafted sound systems, and it's supposed to boggle your mind.  The bass drum is supposed to kick your chest off.

Mike: For us, it's a social thing. Though our idea of a good time is not everyone's idea of a good time. We can be introspective and nerdy about the collecting aspect of it. It's the modern day quilting circle.

Andrew: When you DJ you want to be like, You know what you ain't got: this crazy record! There's a competitive aspect to it.

Beautiful Swimmers (Andrew and Ari Goldman) went to Europe to DJ. Common wisdom is that electronic dance music is bigger in Europe. What'd you find?

Andrew: Food For Animals [another of Andrew's musical projects] has been to Europe a bunch of times. I say it to these guys so much it's kind of cliche—there was Nirvana here, but there were raves there. I never went to a rave in high school. You'd hear about Buzz nightclub getting shut down, but rave culture in America was small. In the UK, rave culture was huge. A song that lasts 12 minutes with no vocals is not weird to anybody in Europe. In DC people are like do you have R&B, hip-hop, do you have Michael Jackson? In Europe the people are like, play techno, where the fuck is the techno, I want hard techno. When I was 12, 13, it was the year the Prodigy was supposed to hit real big in America. I remember there was a thing on MTV. The year in rock. It said this was the year electronica was supposed to break through. Then they cut to a shot of Reel Big Fish and Mighty Mighty Bosstones. The Prodigy did not make it.

Did you play bigger clubs, see bigger crowds there?

Andrew: Each night was like a really good version of a potential night here. It's not like we played 10,000 person raves. We did weekly DJ nights with people we met through online communities. People do go late, though. In Berlin, cops don't care if you're partying at 7 a.m. For whatever cultural reason, you can't get shut down for things like that. We went to Panorama Bar. People show up at 9 in the morning Saturday preparing to stay till Monday. That club has 50 people working there for the weekend.

[At this point, Ari Goldman, the other half of Beautiful Swimmers, and Jason Letkiewicz, aka Steve Summers, also of Rhythm Based Lovers, dropped in.]

What did people think when you said you're from DC?

Ari: Some people know individual states, but most people just want to know how close it is to New York. In Dusseldorf we were billed as being from New York. Our first Berlin show, we were booked as being from Baltimore.

Andrew: There's a fascination. We play house, we mix in boogie, and I think more than anything people were interested in that. Dance music is heavy on the black music thing, which is inevitably foreign to people from Germany. There is a vast fascination in Europe with black music.

Ari: I think people are interested in what's happening with this group, people on this label, and also the association with other DC labels, like Peoples Potential Unlimited. I don't know if the people over there pay any attention to the fact that there hasn't been any music like this coming out in DC.

Andrew: It would be lying if we said people particularly cared about what's coming out of DC.

Ari: Go-go songs went over well.

Andrew: When Bush was president and I was there with Food For Animals, there was a lot to talk about. People would be like, you like this guy? And I'd be like, oh, of course, I love him—no one in America likes him, motherfucker!

I'm curious about what, if any, limits you impose on yourselves when making your music. Like some dance artists insist on recording drums live, never use samples, others restrict themselves other ways. Do any of you guys do anything like that?

Andrew: Beautiful Swimmers has no hardware. We use a computer and try to sample stuff. We have little rules for ourselves: we don't sample good songs. Like if a song works all the way there's no reason for us to take a sample from it. Beautiful Swimmers started because we both had piles of records that had one cool part. "Swimmer's Groove" is from a track that had a sax solo over most of the whole song. We just looped the part where it was like, how did they put a sax solo over this?

Mike: It's fun and challenging! Like, we have to attempt to fix this.

Andrew: Now we have a joke. We listen to a song, and we're like, I hope it goes bad! And if it does, cool. Or, if it's great, we just DJ it.

Mike: Protect-U songs are are crafted from drum machines from scratch. You have to come up with a setup and say, this is our configuration, let's max it out, see what we can make with this configuration, then we'll switch it up. It's hard. You give yourself parameters to work with. What dance music can't you make with some rudimentary things? You could spend a million years. You have to switch it up when it gets boring.

Is there cross collaboration among the labelmates?

Andrew: There's a bit of family aspect to it. Like, do you know how to edit this thing? Can you mix this for me? Should I pan this rimshot?

Mike: Always pan the rimshot.

Andrew: No one hesitates to have someone else listen to their song in progress.

I want to ask about your take on the DC dance scene, such as it is—the way there are wildly different scenes and dance musics being produced in this city and area.

Andrew: DC is relatively small. DC is very open for shit. People don't give a fuck in DC, as opposed to some places you try to play, you get the stink face for something. DC is pretty ready to go.

Mike: Most of us have been in bands, done projects before. Put them all together, it's grown by word of mouth. Plus new people come to town, college students or whatever.

Andrew: We're in our mid-20s, we're not 16 or 17. There's a lot of people that you've met over the years.  It's easy to get the word out, easy to know a lot of people that way. I could probably high-five many of the people who come to Future Times parties. And we have enough Future Times parties so people know to come to us to hear the crazy songs.

Do you feel a responsibility or guilt that impels you to want to reach out to people from different backgrounds or areas?

Andrew: I will inevitably be from the Maryland suburbs, will inevitably like music from way harder conditions. What are you going to do about it besides reaching out to people to come to parties? It's real awkward to force culture, race, or class interactions. You don't want to festishize people. If we found some record from some dude who came out in the '80s who was from a community that was not the same as where I came up, we would not hesitate to try to find the dude, try to put out the record. In dance music, there's less of a race divide for sure than punk rock. It's not intentional but there is a distinct lack of black people at punk shows. And dance music has less of that.

Mike: It was engineered to be inclusive, it was minority-based in many aspects.

Andrew: You want to throw a party and whoever's going to come to this party will come to this party. You advertise the hell out of it the way you know how. Andrew Morgan who runs [DC-based label] Peoples Potential Unlimited reissues records properly by finding the people made them. A few of them are people around here. He branched out in that aspect.

Do you see Future Times staying local?

Andrew: We have no intention of keeping it local to DC. If someone random sent something and it was awesome there'd be no hesitation. We'd put it out. The reason we started the label is because people had tracks to put out.

What this show on August 15th going to be like? Hieroglyphic Being is playing—tell me about him.

Andrew: Hieroglyphic Being is one of the aliases of Jamal Moss. He lives in Chicago, does Mathematics Recordings and various other labels. He makes great crazy records. He's playing live. Jason's going to play live as Steve Summers as well.

Jason: I'll be bringing my keyboards and drum machines.

Mike: Live dance music is a whole other animal.

Ari: It's a pretty rare opportunity for DC. Jamal's one of the few remaining people in Chicago who has strong ties to old-school Chicago house. He threw the Liquid Sex parties in the early '90s. There aren't too many people who can play a real deal Chicago house set live, not on their laptop.

Andrew: He believes in Chicago house as the temple on the mountain.

Ari: He's going to read that and get annoyed.

What's coming up after next?

Andrew: The next 12" is going to be by Protect-U, probably in the fall. Or by 2010. After that it's not clear enough to mention yet. It's getting easier to do the records because there are more people interested in getting the records we put out.

Mike: There's not really a shortage of material. If it wasn't Protect-U, it'd be Beautiful Swimmers, it'd be a Jason thing. There's a lot of stuff.

Andrew: Too much music. Or rather, so much music.

Ready for more?
Visit the label at : http://www.futuretimes.org/

And this Saturday
Future Times Presents:
Hieroglyphic Being (Mathematics Recordings)
Steve Summers (Clone)
Beautiful Swimmers (Future Times)
Saturday August 15th
Comet
5037 Connecticut Ave NW
10 PM - 3AM