Under the gun: Matt Tolfrey
Source:
http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1137
We catch up with the Leftroom boss to take a look inside his record bag.
"My girlfriend and I went for a walk one day, looking at these warehouse spaces that we're thinking of moving into. And we saw this vinyl stuck to a window. It was a shop called Vinyl Pimp. It was right across the road from our place in London!" I begin to feel sorry for Matt Tolfrey's girlfriend as he tells me a story about time off from DJing. It seems that Tolfrey can't escape music, even when he wants to.
That's been the case for Tolfrey, seemingly, since he burst onto the scene in 2005, showcasing a deeper take on tech house via his Leftroom imprint. Since he began the label, Tolfrey has quickly become an international fixture, establishing himself as part of a new generation of DJs that includes Seth Troxler, Dyed Soundorom and Stuart Geddes. The trio are among Tolfrey's closest musical friends, all pushing similar agendas: Get darker, deeper, weirder. And have a lot of fun while doing it.
Tolfrey is clearly having fun these days, and why shouldn't he? With two new labels on the way—a digital arm to Leftroom, a bootleg label with Soundorom—and a number of productions with frequent collaborator Inxec set to be released, the humble DJ from Nottingham is living the dream. We caught up with him via phone late last week to find out what has been soundtracking that dream lately.
Blondie - Heart of Glass (Djebali Edit) [White]
An absolute mega-bomb. Normally, I wouldn't put an edit like this in my charts, but Djebali deserves the praise here. I was playing with Seth Troxler in Milan, and usually I'm quite calm when it comes to asking DJs what track it is that they're playing, but every so often there's an odd one where I'm like, "What the hell is that?!" That's one of the best things about playing with friends. It's a bit of a game. You drop something and it's like, "I didn't send this one to you, did I?"
Andri - Housers Revenge [Cityfox]
I got this track from Zev at Wolf + Lamb without knowing what label it was, and I started to play it all the time. One day when browsing Beatport, I finally put the artist name in there and figured out what it was. It wobbles really nicely and has a great vocal. It's still so hard to find a nice vocal these days. It was also nice to find that it was out on Cityfox, because I'll be playing there in March. I've heard great things about their club in Zürich—that they have some of the best acoustics in the world. I'm really looking forward to it.
Inxec and Matt Tolfrey – Hollywood [Culprit]
This is the first full release of ours on the Culprit label—the imprint run by the Droog guys from Los Angeles. I remember playing this song for the first time for them. One of the guys ran up to me and was like, "What the hell is this?" And it was nice to be able to say, "This is the one we wrote for you." Inxec Chris and I have been working together for a while now, and it's been an evolving relationship. I've gradually been able to figure out how to do some things production-wise, and now with him moving to London recently, things should hopefully work much faster.
S.A.S. - Straight Off The Bone [Foot and Mouth]
This is one of the first releases in a new label that I'm starting with Dyed Soundorom. It's a bootleg thing called Foot and Mouth. With me being English and him being French, it seemed like an obvious idea for a name. We've basically been sitting on some bootlegs made by friends that we've all been playing, and one night Dyed and I simply decided that it might be fun to put them on vinyl. Since we mentioned that, we've been sent even more, so we've got plenty of tasty bits coming up. There will be a little bit of digital love, but it will mostly be vinyl-only.
Eric Johnston - 500K (Ryan Elliott's Beat Reprise) [Leftroom]
Eric is from the same camp as guys like Seth [Troxler], Lee [Curtiss], etc. but he's the one that hasn't left Detroit yet. I've been playing his music for ages, and he's a new addition to the Leftroom family. Ryan Elliott, meanwhile, is a guy I've been trying to get into the studio for a long time because he's so being lazy about it, so my first port of call was trying to get him to do a remix. Ryan does a lot of edits that a lot of our crew play out, and he's basically just done that here, making it just a little bit darker, a little bit loopier, a little bit weirder.
Rusty James - Everybody's Talking [Left'd]
Left'd is the new digital label that we're starting soon. Rusty lives in Brighton, and has just had a release on Mothership. And this is a great little track with a great vocal. Because the vinyl sales are coming down so hard, I feel that if we're going to introduce artists on the label that it's going to be best to do so digitally. Leftroom now is just going to be a small little family. We're not going to be releasing tracks from strangers. If a digital release does really well, we may end up putting out a limited thing on vinyl, but these will serve as a taster for things to come.
Nicolas Jaar - Time for Us [Wolf and Lamb]
This track was a little bit of a mystery to me for a while. I had heard it a couple of times, and wasn't quite sure if I "got it." But then when I played it myself, it made sense: It's a great end-of-night record. I would love to be able to get the parts and make a remix. You could probably drop it in the middle of a set, but you'd have to be pretty ballsy to do that. It slows down so much in the middle of the track. On a massive rig—when you have bass that low going that slow—it sounds a little bit like a dubstep record.
iO - Little Marvel [Leftroom Limited]
Back in the day, we started Leftroom and it was focused on the family idea. But we ended up getting tons of tracks—big tech house tracks—that we wanted to put out. That's why we started the Limited label. It was an extension of Leftroom for the bigger room jocks. But I actually sought these Ukrainian producers out. I had been playing their track on Diynamic all summer, so I got in contact to see if they had anything. And they put me onto some friends of theirs called Westboy. So we'll be releasing this on an EP called With Love from the Ukraine. There seems to be a little crew of people making great music out there at the moment.
Cajmere feat. Derrick Carter - Dream State [Cajual]
This was passed on to me by Ed Karney of Mixmag. I heard a rumor on the grapevine that Cajual is actually coming back, and that there is going to be a Cajmere album at the end of this year. I'm a massive fan of Green Velvet of course, as well as Derrick Carter, so this is just perfect: Two of my favourite producers—one doing the beat, one on vocals.
Global Communication - The Way [Dedicated]
Stuart Geddes and I share a lot of vinyl. We keep each other excited about music. He put me onto this one, and I later found my own copy. It's obviously a great, great record. What they've done here is such a hard thing to do, to keep back a bassline so late in a track that's going to blow a dance floor to pieces. I don't have enough patience when I make music to do that. But obviously Tom Middleton is pretty good at what he does. [laughs] I'm pretty sure I paid at least 50 pounds for this one.
