Junkie XL
Interviewed for Riffin' by Webjockey Heidi Patalano
Free Track Download: "More"
Check out Junkie XL's Rifflist: Favorites
Ask Junkie XL what he'd do if his career could have nothing to do with music and he'll answer without a second's hesitation. The world-renowned club DJ, remixer, producer and musician otherwise known as Tom Holkenborg, would be in the kitchen serving up fine cuisine as a professional chef. Like his homemade pastas, broths and patès, Junkie's musical output has a dizzying number of ingredients - all of which he says help to keep things fresh.
From writing scores for films and video games, touring, producing bands like Rocket and remixing the likes of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, Junkie XL has a constant rotation of projects that take him all over the world. Riffin' sits down to chat with the DJ about his upcoming fifth studio album, "Booming Back At You" and the art of composing video game scores.
Riffin': Congratulations on the March release of your fifth studio album. You've been quoted as saying that you wanted this album to reflect your upbeat performances, could you tell me more about how you went about writing this album?
Junkie XL: All the previous albums I've released were more conceptual. I picked a theme or an environment that I wanted to do something in. With this record, it's like a no-brainer almost. I've been talking to fans on MySpace and during shows who were just like, "Tom you should make an album that is like what your live show is." I woke up one morning and was like, "ok let's do this." So that's what happened. It was quite a relief and it felt really fresh to do it like that; just make an album which sounds completely club-proof.
Riffin': How did you come to choose covering "Cities in Dust" as part of that theme?
Junkie XL: Every now and then, I take an older track that people might know and give it a spin. I've done it with the Beastie Boys and a couple of other tracks. Me and one of my best friends were having dinner at a place here in Venice, like a really cheesy bar and they had the music on. We heard the "Cities in Dust" track and just looked at each other and went "Damn, that's the next one!" We did some research and miraculously, no one has touched that track before, which is really rare for 80's hits.
Riffin': You're music video for the first single off the album "More" caused some controversy with your label because of some - ahem - explicit sexual content. Did you collaborate on the concept?
Junkie XL: I sent [music video producers Kaap and Joost van Bellen] the track to see what they thought of it and they loved it. Joost said, "Yeah I've got a bunch of crazy ideas." And I said, "Sure, go ahead." I trusted him completely. At least if he does a video, it's going to be fun and people will talk about it. We had to cut out a lot of stuff that was in there. The song is about extremities and that's what we wanted to reflect. The video is very bizarre and extreme. It cuts back and forth between random scenes, it seems, to unscore those extremities that the song is about. Even the original cut was way over the top with everything that was in there. There's no way to get it out, even on the Internet, unless you go to really shady sites.
Riffin': How does your approach to making an album of your own material vary from composing score for video games and film?
Junkie XL: When you work for movies and video games, for starters, you're part of a team. It's not all about you. It's teamwork. There's one big difference between movies and video games. The movie is a linear experience, you sit down and watch the movie from beginning to end and you have to make the music as good as possible and make it fit with the picture as much as you can.
With video games, that's all the same except for the fact that a video game is an interactive experience, where it's never the same twice. It totally depends on how the player is playing, if there are multiple players. It means that the music has to be interactive as well. It needs a stronger technical background, more talks and meetings with the people who are responsible for the audio because it's so much work to turn music into interactive music.
Riffin': What do you mean by interactive music?
Junkie XL: The latest score that I did for a video game was "Need for Speed." I delivered roughly an hour and a half of music. It's a racing game, so if you race one race lap, you sit down with the creative people that develop the game and you come up with 10 or 15 things that can happen during a race lap that would trigger a certain emotion with the player. They call them beat markers or events. When you make music, you try to cover all those events so that when those things happen, the music that's playing gets interrupted and goes somewhere else to underscore that specific moment when you're racing. The trick to doing that is to do it in such a way that you don't feel that the music is going somewhere else intentionally, but that it goes there because it needs to go there.
Riffin': Do you prefer one process of making music to another?
Junkie XL: I'm in the lucky position that I can do all that stuff at the same time. It keeps my artistic life very interesting and fresh. One week I'm doing five shows in Australia and then I come back and work on a Britney Spears song and then I go for two gigs in Phoenix and Kansas and then I come back and work together with Electrocute doing an album and then the week after that I work on a video game and then three months after that I'm working constantly on a movie and then I'm going on tour again. It's so fresh to work with all these different people.
Riffin': And you're also a teacher now for ArtEZ School of Music?
Junkie XL: Yeah that's awesome. Three music universities in Holland joined forces and became one really big one. They wanted to start a very broad course that had everything to do with film composing, game composing, being an electronic musician, sound designer, producer, remixer, with a lot of input from people who have a lot of experience in that field. They asked me if I wanted to set that study up with them. I said yes to it. I spent the last year and a half talking to them, trying to find the right reading material, trying to find the right types of subjects that need to be covered in four years. Technically, when you're done with those four years, on paper, you would be my ideal assistant. That was the goal.
Riffin': Considering that you've remixed songs from popular artists like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Coldplay, whose music is so well-known, how do you deconstruct a song and remix it?
Junkie XL: The trick is to keep the song in tact, keep the vibe of the original song in tact but give an extremely different spin on it. That's something I've gotten very specialized in, in the last few years.
Riffin': If you weren't doing music in any way, what would you be?
Junkie XL: I would be a chef. I am a chef but then I would do it full time. I just got obsessed by cooking since I was 18 or 19. Every now and then I throw out big dinners for 8 or 10 friends. I spend two days in the kitchen. I make my own pastas, my own patès, broths and stocks and the whole thing.
It's the same thing as music. Music can be broken down into 20 or 25 different elements that make up the sound. It's the same way with food. If you throw them together in the wrong order or in the wrong amounts, the food is horrible but if you do it the right way, it's an amazing experience.
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