-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Sign up today!
It might be coming off laptops, but a lot of new dance music sounds like hard rock or electro-pop. This isn’t the first time the genres have crossed streams, as producer Junkie XL (the Dutch-born Tom Holkenborg) knows well. A vet of industrial bands, the multi-instrumentalist was grouped with the Big Beat DJs in the ’90s—folks like FatBoy Slim who made thumping, sample-laden dance rock. His potent sound got him the go-ahead for the first legit remixes of Elvis. XL might not fit in with the super DJ brethren, but his touch with the rock-dance hybrid has kept him at the top of the remix short list. Knowing Chicago was due for an XL fix on May 3 at Vision, we sat down with him between parties in Miami.
Time Out Chicago: I noticed that you remixed the new Madonna. How did you land that?
Junkie XL: I think I’m a little bit of an outcast in the dance industry. When I was in industrial bands, I combined electronic music with guitars—this was like 1989. People were looking at me like, What are you doing, that’s not working. I kept following a path and experimented. At a certain point I got a lot of recognition not only from deejays but also from a lot of other artists like Gary Numan.
TOC: Do you ever toy with doing the full live-band thing again?
Junkie XL: I don’t think so. I’ve worked with so many people. Who’s going to do the vocals? If I play a Dave Gahan track live, or a Madonna track, or a Robert Smith track, it’s fairly impossible. [With] scratch electronic, I lip-synch most of my songs on stage. And people go, Yeah, it’s all good. But if you bring one person on stage that actually sings live, they start wondering, Where’s all the other stuff?
TOC: You keep intersecting with prevailing trends in dance music.
Junkie XL: Yeah. I admit that that’s what happened over the years. It’s very funny now with that whole electro-punk-clash scene and Justice. They’re brilliant, but it’s that complete mash between alternative music and electronic dance music that happened in the ’90s, but with different influences. It’s more electro-orientated, like certain ’80s bands.
TOC: You just redid “Cities in Dust.” Do you want us to rediscover the ’80s?
Junkie XL: People who are young know the Whitney Houston stuff or the Madonna stuff. What I wanted to do, primarily, was not to redo the original Siouxsie song but to give it something else, that holds up now, for kids who hear it. It’s working out. It’s the most downloaded track on the album.
TOC: Do you tune your live set for a rock crowd or a dance-club audience?
Junkie XL: When I play Ultra Music Fest, it is dance-orientated; when I play Coachella, it is more rock orientated: faster transitions, louder guitars, louder aggressive bass sounds. When I’m playing a dance festival, I have slower transitions so you can pick up on the beats. That’s the beauty of my music.
