Florian Meindl returns to his imprint FLASH Recordings in LP format once again with ‘Collide’. A collision of analog sounds and styles, Collide takes the listener on a dark techno journey including collaboration with studio wizard Jamie Anderson from the UK.
Hi Florian, hope you are enjoying this autumn.
Thank you! Yes I do, in general I like to have tides in Germany, each section of the year has it’s own character – the winter could be shorter though.
How do you feel about autumn and winter? Some musicians say they are more creative in summer, others are different, what about you?
Autumn and winter is clearly a better dark Techno mood but I had to learn to unchain my creativity from too many outside factors like tides – it’s maybe a bit similar to a comedian who’s friend died but he has to play the happy guy in the show – and at the end it was good to play the happy guy because he distracted himself from had happened and people enjoyed it too.
My creativity depends mainly on a certain theme I want to put into the language of music and also about if I’m in a certain flow – and this flow must be free of too many technical studio problems and it should be a couple of sessions after each other so I can dive deep into my music-world.
Florian Meindl: Where The Music Comes From
You are one of the artists who view techno music as a “futurist statement”, as Jeff Mills said. It’s not just dance music for you, is it?
Yes I like this statement, but my music is more like an outcome of themes, skills, gear and sometimes an answer to things that happened. There are so many things in nature and in the universe and in mathematics which are themes to my musical activities – and also many parallels in all sorts of things – certain ratios are the same. What is the smallest fraction of time? But we don’t even know what time is – there is always one more question you can ask and then the same problem exists in mathematics, which seems to be a description of nature. That’s where my music comes from. And the fact that I try to make most musical pieces danceable lifts those themes into a higher level because the body gets involved, a mathematicial would maybe also have more pleasure if he would have to climb up a mountain to unveil the secret of a theorem.
Well, mostly when I do something I do it to an extreme – I spent almost all my earnings to get the studio I have now and I’m satisfied with! The transition to the analogue gear is a bit like from going from a square to a cube, not only in the sense of room and the movements I have to do to make music but also in the sense of the audio and depth of the music.
Florian Meindl Video Premiere:
How do you see yourself in the modern scene? Techno is becoming popular and there are more and more money there, where is it all going from your point of view and where are you?
Yes Techno is on the rise again and I figured out a series of events which always tend to happen when things get more popular – it will saturate at some point and protagonists with boring music taste and a tendency to just copy things that work will poison the genre Techno but here it comes, what is Techno? Almost everybody has a different understanding of it – I think it’s more about a mindset – it’s difficult to explain but for me Miles Davis, Jeff Mills, Sun Ra or Chic Corea have more in common for me than than some Techno tracks to my understanding of Techno. It’s always a bit
hard to see yourself how other people see you – I actually try to not care too much about it – but all I can say is that I follow my visions, respect the history and my own experience, develop myself continually and bring everything down to musical recordings through my technical setup and skills – then I try to support the meaning of it by giving it an interesting name and artwork or concept.
Florian Meindl on Analog Devices:
You are famous for your love to analogue devices, you still use them a lot when producing?
Yes, I also like computers a lot and I started to make music with them but after many years I didn’t like to just sit there with the mouse so I decided to explore the analog world. What you have to consider is, that almost all analogue gear has got mini computers built in and many things are digital anyways so it’s not about being an analog purist here.
Well, mostly when I do something I do it to an extreme – I spent almost all my earnings to get the studio I have now and I’m satisfied with! The transition to the analogue gear is a bit like from going from a square to a cube, not only in the sense of room and the movements I have to do to make music but also in the sense of the audio and depth of the music. Another, hidden dimension is the magic inside music which cannot be described but only felt, and everybody feels it completely different – it makes no sense to discuss about it.
Do you think it is still crucial for the contemporary producers to know the gear?
No, nothing is crucial here, really – there are always lucky moments where you don’t know anything about it and the outcome is better than everything else – but you might have much more success long term if you know everything very well but be able to forget certain rules in certain moments – that’s musicians who excite me!
Florian Meindl: Watch Out!
Any productions we should anticipate?
I’m working on my third artist album which will be released at the beginning of February 2017 and a full analog live act tour! I will post some studio videos preparing my live act and performing it a little bit so watch out!
