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BRAD VACHAL INTERVIEW
Thanks again for the mix and congratulations, I just saw that your record with Eric Hedford,
former drummer of the Dandy Warhols, has made Disco Record of the Week at Piccadilly!
When did you start producing music and how did you and Eric connect?
Eric and I met when we were in our late teens. I was working at a little 12" dance shop called
Turntable Mary's and also as a (non-alcoholic) bartender at a club. Eric was working on music
with the guy who owned the club I worked at, he'd also just started to DJ at another club the
same guy owned. So between the club and the record store, we met, and started talking about
music. That was the late 80's - little has changed.
One of the first things I really remember doing together was the first afterhours party here, it
was called Pluto (so recently stripped of dignity of being called a planet - shocking). And it was
real afterhours, it started at two. We used his PA, I DJ'ed a lot of the night, it was in the heat of
summer. It was a really fun time.
Eric had already been making music for several years by the time we met. My wife fir st met
him when she was in the ballet, and he and his musical partner did music for the ballet (and
performed onstage with the ballet - just music though he didn't dance). And then he did the
stuff I just mentioned with the guy who owned the club, that was kind of freestyle hip hop type
stuff (for lack of a better touchstone) and they also did a Primal Scream-ish kind of number.
I first got into making music with him in the mid-90's. He'd already tried his hand solo on
knocking out a few techno/house type tunes. Then he invited me to come over and work on
stuff too. We worked off and on for a couple of years on tracks, before putting out a couple of
records. Trust me when I say they are not worth hunting down. Between then and now, we've
worked off and on, but nothing that came to fruition.
Eric's always kind of kept one foot in the electronic side of things, and one foot in the rock side.
He was one of the original Dandy Warhols, and was with them until the late 80's. The last few
years he sang and played keyboards in a band he put together called Telephone, very new
wave rock n roll. Just recently he's started a new dance rock band, and he's playing drums
again - the guy who played bass on Alan vs Gary is playing guitar with him.
You have released an edit on the Beard Science label, but I believe this one on Tirk is your
first big release. You must be thrilled about hitting it off with such a strong label and the
fantastic Richard Sen remix?
Yes, the internet makes things like this so much easier than they were ten years ago. To be
able to shoot files around the world, letting you send music to people and labels that you
admire and respect. Sav Rezmi at Tirk was interested right off the bat. He wanted to h ear
more, and we really didn't have much more. So after some waiting while we worked on some
other things, he wanted to get i t going with the two tracks on the record. And once that all
came together, it made us start working a bit harder. In that time between his initial interest,
and deciding to do it, we got interest from some other great labels, but it was hard to think
about going anywhere else when Tirk was interested.
When Sav said he wanted to get a remixer in to give the project a boost, since we are new
artists, Richard was at the top of the list for me. And I have to say it was a good pick, that he
really gave us a corker.
Have you got any other releases you are working on?
We work a couple of times a week. We work at what I'm sure many would think of as a pretty
slow rate - just under a song a month. At the moment it's all our own original stuff. Tirk had
hooked us up with a remix for a sister label, but in the end, they thought it better if we kept it as
our own track (it was a total redux, the only element of the original we used was the vocal).
We've got a deal with Tirk, all our stuff is aimed in that direction at this time - a full album worth
of material being the end goal. We've got a couple more tracks near completion, may just need
a bit of spit and polish, or at the very least, our bass player to come in and play.
Do you think Hedford Vachal has a specific sound and how would you describe it?
Nothing too specific, we try not to have one track sound like the last. I guess they all kind of fall
within the disco realm. But we deviate from that too. Keeping things sounding "live" is one
thing we aim for. Trying to make songs that sound like there were instruments plugged in to
make them, rather than the entire thing taking place inside a computer. Recording entire
passes of instruments, rather than looping the most perfect bar of the entire take. Not
quantizing everything. Trying to keep the sampling to a minimum - both Alan vs Gary and Toys
contain no samples. And we definitely have a go-to keyboard too. We take inspiration from
whatever - good and bad. Our studio sessions often start out checking out random music stuff
on youtube or researching the history of some band. Not necessarily heady stuff, last week
was Fleetwood Mac and their offshoots - Bob Welch has some soft rock gold. Bob Seger,
Beach Boys and the Bee Gees have been in the mi x before.
You're from Portland, Oregon right? Did you grow up there and what were your musical
influences growing up?
I grew up across the river in Vancouver, Washington. Pretty rural, but still just the extended
Portland 'burbs. Portland is a very classic rock kind of town. I've realized during those studio
youtube sessions, how influencial my long school bus rides listening to 70's soft pop radio
were. We'll find random old yacht rock hits on youtube, and I always seem to recognize them. I
was always kind of drawn to futuristic sounding stuff, I definitely liked robotic elements. But I
don't mean that I had discerning taste, I liked Styx's "Mr Roboto". When hip hop and electro
came along, I really latched onto that. Seeing stories on TV about breakdancing and
scratching really intrigued me. Then a bit later, and hanging with a different group of kids, led
into the more new wave side of the coin.
How did you get into djing? I read somewhere that you were heavily involved in the
warehouse / rave scene in the nineties …
Well I'd always bought tapes when I was into hip hop, and make pause button tapes off the
local public radio's early hip hop shows. I'd be the kid at school playing the jams for the
breakdancing kids. Probably my first forays into playing music to make people dance. I'd try a
little breakdancing at home, but never went for it in public, I just played the tunes. But then
when I got into the new wave stuff, all my friends were buying records, and that led to me
buying records. This was about the time my friends and I started going to clubs some too. And
that led to us wanting to do mobile discos at our high school. The music was always so bad,
we wanted to try to get decent music at the dances. After I graduated high school, I started
working non DJ jobs in clubs, and filling in here and there for people DJ'ing. And at about that
time, people started coming up here from southern California, and implanting the
rave/warehouse party ideas in our heads. A handful of us started throwing warehouse parties
and "raves". Even then we were leary of the word rave, it's funny how quickly we were soured of
that. It took a year or so to really take off. The early days here were still holding onto a bit of that
Los Angeles illicitness - the first warehouse party for instance was a break-in. My friends and I
had all tired of the rave thing, and had gone back to the clubs by the time the raves caught on
really big in the US in the late 90's.
What’s the most memorable gig that you’ve had?
Probably these outdoor parties we used to do called Indian Summer. We did them over the
course of three summers. They were the first outdoor parties in the northwest. The Wicked
guys in SF were already doing Full Moons there, but there was nothing like that up here. My
friends and I spent a lot of our summers camping, and a lot of the rest of the time throwing
parties, so we figured the best thing would be to combine the two. Being in the beautiful
northwest probably made the whole proposition easier too. We'd drive around looking for the
ideal spot, a big clearing, with plenty of parking, remote enough, but still with good roads and
easy to give directions to. They were always free, we'd always get 400 people or so. The
authorities would always show up, but always at the end, we were pretty blessed in that way.
The best spot was at the end of airstrip in the middle of the woods, sitting on the edge of a cliff.
The first Wicked full moon party outside of the bay area was there. I think they thought we were
crazy guiding them up there at two in the morning. Lots of fond memories from these parties.
Are you throwing any parties or do you have any residencies at the moment?
Eric has been doing a Friday weekly called Soul Stew at a club called the Goodfoot for about
seven years now. Eric plays them all, and for the last few years I've alternated with another guy.
It started off as a funk/soul 45 kind of night, and has always changed and evolved a bit. It's just
more of a party vibe now, funk and disco and rock and whatever else goes - we even take
requests - we'll play it if we have it. It's Eric's night, but Ian and I definitely help make it what it
is. I don't have much of an outlet to play newer stuff right now. The Portland massive mostly go
out to nights with mash-up ADDJ's and the underground crowd is kind of largely stuck in
house music (and nothing but) all night long – but lately there's been a lot of cracks in the dam
of good taste. And I don't mean to bash house music at all, just switch it up some folks - 4 on
the floor at 122-126 bpms all night long is bit stifling.
How long have you been working in record shops and what’s the shop like where you are
at the moment?
I started working at the place I mentioned before, Turntable Mary's, on July 11, 1989. I
remember the date because it was the day after my nineteenth birthday. I worked there for
about four years, before kind of falling out a bit with the owner. Never saw him too much again,
he died of AIDS in 2002. Now I work at Platinum Records, I've been here since the start (1993).
We're a DJ one stop type store. We sell records, turntables, needles, mixers and lights, pretty
much everything DJ/club related, recently more studio gear. I do the buying for most of the
music, aside from the hip hop and the commercial. I try to keep a good cross section of stuff,
from older recurrent type to the newish and most fashion forward stuff, traditionally we've
always had a lot of house music. We have good music, some really horrible music, and a lot
in between, theoretically a bit of most anything that a DJ would play - mostly newer tho ugh, not
a great used section. With so many US shops closing, people from out of town are always
pleasantly surprised to find a shop like us in Portland. And we also sell Serato and it's ilk, so
we're on both sides of the changing face of the dance music. I'm probably done if records go
away though, I'm not interested in being a computer salesman.
What do you think of the present dance scene in the US?
I think it's at more of a valley than a peak. And not that that's an altogether bad thing.
Something not being so trendy can kind of separate the wheat from the chaff - it can move on
some of the dunderheads. It seems that while maybe nationally "the scene" isn't thriving, you
can find good things happening in most of the bigger cities. Things overall in Portland are so-
so, but there are still good nights happening too. I think things are getting a bit more intimate
at the moment. It will be interesting to see if that, along with the rising price of airline travel
might create a trend for less out of town talent, and more reliance on local DJ’s.
What were your top five tunes today?
Love – Alone Again Or
Bill Harlem – Harlem
Diana Ross – I Ain’t Been Licked
Wild Magnolias - Soul, Soul, Soul
and since it was a studio day - Hedford Vachal - Next Day After - I heard that one a lot.
Any shout outs?
Eric, the Beard Science brethren, Bill and all the DJH massive, Sav, JP and all at Tirk, all the
west coasters, and thanks to you for hosting the mix and letting me blather on.
Tracklisting:
1) Was Not Was - Wheel Me Out
2) Dark Side - Gimme the Music
3) Lenny White - My Turn To Love You
4) Altz - Epics and Donuts (MJS mix)
5) Chris Reynolds & Leon Roberts - Check It Out
6) Ray Martinez - Natives are Restless
7) Trybe - Psychedelic Shack
8) Free Blood - Never Hear Surf Music Again (Barfly mix)
9) Hedford Vachal - Toys (Richard Sen mix)
10) Figurines - The Air We Breathe (Prins Thomas Mix)
11) Japanese Synchro System - Check It, Spread It (C2 mix)
12) King Sunny Ade - Synchro System
13) Afrobutt - Farewell
14) Joe Claussel - Animal Forest (Part One)
