Guest of Honor: Julien Mier about styles interweaving

Dec 3, 2013 | by Chloë Arkenbout | Music

About the author

Born and raised in Amsterdam, lives to dance and dances to live on electronic music, has a small vinyl addiction, appreciates a little sarcasm now and then, thinks musicals are annoying and loves those moments where you lose track of time completely.

Julien Mier‘s signature is this wide approach of fragmented melodies packed in a palette of sometimes almost waterfall-like textures and dreamy, melancholic stories, and he is influenced by nature and space. Does this sound awesome or what?! Julien is playing at HOAX this weekend and I got a chance to have a little chat with him.

Tell me, what does your perfect crowd look like when you perform?
“Oddly enough, my perfect audience is not Dutch. I performed at a festival in Barcelona last year and the culture there is completely different. People get loose faster on crazier stuff. The further south you go, the more people seem to be open to new contacts and new concepts. That’s why I love it when people are surprised by music they don’t know yet, but do understand and like the idiom. The ideal spot is playing second, when the crowd just got in. Then I can play my semi-calm music but also the freaky stuff in the end. At the end of my sets there’s always one idiot who almost breaks his neck at my hyper rhythms.”

When I go out I often dance with my back to the DJ. I’ve always wondered, what do artists think of that?
“I can imagine that some artists wouldn’t like it when people turn their back on them but I don’t mind. I’m not a DJ and I’m always busy pressing buttons like crazy. A lot of the time I don’t even have time to look at the crowd. Obviously I do sometimes, but not too long because then I will lose track. It also depends on the night though. A concert where people look at you while they listen to you closely is different than a club night where you set the vibe.”

You live at the Veluwe. Isn’t this unpractical?
“It’s only a 15 minutes bike ride to the train station of Apeldoorn, where I used to live. Then it’s only an hour to Amsterdam from the station. Apeldoorn is pretty central in the Netherlands.”

I interviewed DJ+ a few months ago and we talked about how dubstep suddenly became a dirty word; hence the term ‘future bass’. What’s your opinion on this?
“Funny, I know Paulus from way back, from the first dubstep parties in Amsterdam (not Oi, but Radical in OT301). I was a big Kryptic Minds, Rese, Mala and Loefah fan. Dubstep got killed slowly by the big amount of electro influences. It became a different concept and almost a different style compared to the original aesthetics. It became dirty in the same sense that trap is the dirty baby of footwork and juke.”

“Nowadays so many styles interweave (thanks to Hudson Mohawke and Bauer for example) that it’s almost impossible to keep them apart. I’m grateful for this moment because music isn’t black or white but has a lot of different bright colours. People are used to putting labels on everything, which creates funny names such as future bass, zouk bass, moombathon, future blab, wonk and cruckstep… I never focused on making my music a certain style. People always asked me to slow down my hyperactive 160+ BPM music but when juke and footwork from Chicago became bigger, my music got the same stamp. Future bass was also a coincidental reference. I noticed that acts such as James Blake, Mount Kimbie, Bonobo, Dorian Concept came really close to the music I was making. This helped developing my music and also gave people a reference to my music.”

I used to go Radical in the OT301 actually. You play at Hoax this Friday. What can we expect?
“A lot of people think I play pretty calm and soundscapey live but that’s not true. On a stage I like to play freaky stuff, especially in a club. I make a lot of edits of things I find funny or cool. In the past I have used ‘Goede Tijden, Slechten Tijden’ beats and a juke version of DuckTales for example.”