Welcome to Guest Dose. Every month, NPR Music's Recommended Dose crew invites a knowledgeable and experienced DJ/selector to share personal perspectives on electronic and beat-driven music, and to make a mix from some new tracks they're digging.
Even by the London dance-music scene's exalted standards, Steven Julien is on a hell of a creative run. Since first coming to prominence under the name FunkinEven in 2009-10 as a distinct nonconformist trying to make it in the post-dubstep world, the West London producer has followed the muse down the alleys of his mind. What he's found is an analog-heavy style that mixes an unquenchable love for the diversity of rhythmic music, with the immediacy and urgency that have been his hometown's aesthetic hallmarks ever since pirate radio stations (once Kiss.FM, now Rinse.FM) started serving as its nighttime guide.
Steven Julien's first solo album, Fallen, is out July 5 on his own Apron Records.
"Honest electronic music," Julien says by Skype when I ask him to describe his approach to sound, as well as to the tracks he releases on Apron Records. Founded in 2011, the label has not only been home to his own music, but to a growing list of collaborations with young producers, American and British, who are also blurring genre-lines —artists such as Delroy Edwards, Seven Davis Jr., Shanti Celeste and Jay Daniel.
Apron is also now home to Fallen, Julien's album debut, a singular piece of work that stands at the intersection of analog techno and electric fusion — and, to hear Julien tell it, in a narrative space between darkness and light. "I'm not religious or anything, but I believe everybody has two sides," he says, opening up about Fallen. From its album title on down, the album returns time again to contemplating different types of duality, whether "the love of night versus day, the transition between heaven and hell, the good and bad." Yet the two sides of Fallen are also strangely cohesive, built with big synth sounds played on lower octaves, as well as a lack of sonic polish that's another of Julien's trademark strategies. The result is a wonderfully unique listening experience that's not designed for the club, even if it bears all the trappings.
Julien says that prior to Apron — and, especially, to Fallen — the music he released was too preoccupied with the dance floor. "I won't say it was a mistake, but I will say it was a time when my head was somewhere else." Fallen, on the other hand, "crams in all of my musical knowledge and experiences and love of music, showing that side of me, and what my true passion is."
The artwork to Steven Julien's new album, Fallen.
That passion is interwoven with London's musical history. Julien grew up in the '90s under the spell of such experimental electronic radio shows as Kiss.FM's "R-solution," but also of going to classic drum-and-bass club nights like Metalheadz, or house and garage nights at The End. Before he made music, he was a dancer ("hype dancing, like what Kid 'n Play do in House Party"), and then in a rap group that wanted to emulate Native Tongues crews like A Tribe Called Quest and Leaders Of The New School; but after admitting to being "kind of s*** as a rapper, I decided to do the production. And my very first tracks were one hip-hop song and one house song." (Julien seems to have been a natural, as he told me that Yasiin Bey, a.k.a. Mos Def, is using one of his earliest beats on an album the MC is currently recording in London.) The love of hip-hop samples led him to collect and admire jazz fusion, old soul and disco records, and when FunkinEven first became a name (on Eglo Records, operated by Sam Shepherd, a.k.a. Floating Points), it was as a so-called "future boogie" producer. What followed was an alliance with new-generation Detroit producer Kyle Hall, a "natural bond" that he says led directly to Apron — and now to Fallen.
"Everything you hear on the album is a natural thing, whether it's jazz fusion or techno," he says of the debut. "I kind of never expressed that in my releases before, though I always thought I had it in me." And now, it's out.
The tracks Steven Julien chose for his Guest Dose mix showcase the same type of musical diversity, as well as a sense of history.
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