Walk this way
Jochem Paap, the Dutch underground techno titan forever known as Speedy J, is perched in front of a laptop inside the bunker that has been his creative hub for the last decade. This is the now legendary STOOR studio in Rotterdam, a space for collaboration, live hardware jams and – more infrequently – the long-serving producer’s own solo music-making activities. Bathed in purple and white lighting and flanked with racks of synthesisers, drum machines and effects unit, it’s like a 1970s sci-fi afficionado’s vision of a futuristic music studio.
“I’m really, really happy with the space,” Paap smiles. “It was originally built as a fallout shelter, so it’s naturally very isolated from the outside world, which is great in terms of sound. It has proven very valuable for starting projects and collaborations, because there’s always space to try things. There’s no fixed way of working – there’s a table behind me, and before each session, whether that’s me alone or there’s a group of us, I’ll select the equipment I think we need and set it up. Afterwards, it all gets unplugged – so every time something is started, the set-up is a bit different.”
Naturally, Paap, who first rose to prominence in the early 90s thanks to a string of inspired, Detroit-meets-Rotterdam techno workouts on Plus 8, Music Man, Harthouse and, most famously, Warp, has an incredible collection of hardware to choose from.
“I’m not the kind of person who can decide about a system which then should last for the next ten years,” he muses. “I mean, I have done that before, giving everything a fixed location or a spot in a rack or something, but the moment it was all connected I already wanted to change my mind. So, I thought, I’m just going to sit in the middle of a room with all the stuff available. Whenever I need something, I’ll just build something. That’s the way my mind works.”
This fluidity in terms of set-ups and creative process lies at the heart of Paap’s STOOR project, which has long been more than a mere studio and rehearsal space. While the studio that bears the name was initially created with collaboration and improvised performance in mind, STOOR is also an event brand (where Paap and hand-picked collaborators deliver improved and semi-improvised performances), record label (dedicated primarily to releasing collaborative material made on-the-fly in the studio) and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of live streams. In those, the famed ‘central table’, flanked by electronic musicians focused on one or two specific pieces of kit, played a starring role.
By his own admission, STOOR and its many interconnected elements has provided fresh impetus over the last decade, allowing Paap and like-minded music friends (Mumdance, Rodhad, Phil Kieran, Function, Steve Rachmad, AnD, KiNK and his old pal Luke Slater included) to express themselves privately and publicly on their own terms.
“What’s the right way to explain this?” Paap asks, mulling over the right words to describe the impact STOOR has had on his artistic life over the last decade. “I get enthusiastic about things that I haven’t done before and I don’t like to repeat myself. I don’t get excited if it is something I have done before. If it’s new to me, or a challenge, then I get excited. That’s the situation I have tried to create by setting up the environment [the STOOR studio] like this.”
He pauses, before going into more detail about how his creative process works. “It always starts with an idea or with something that first exists in my head,” Paap explains. “So, I try that idea and if it is a dead end, I change to a different approach. That has never changed – it was like that from the start. As soon as something becomes like an office job, or something I have to do, then I cannot put myself into it. There’s probably a diagnosis for that, but it’s just the way I work.”
Constantly changing approach would panic some artists, while others work best within familiar set-ups and frameworks. Paap, though, clearly needs the stimulation provided by new ideas and collaborators – hence the emphasis, within the wider STOOR project, on joint improvisation and production. It has reinvigorated one of European techno’s most storied and celebrated artists, but also meant that fresh solo material has become increasingly rare.
“An artist can have a lot of different outputs creatively,” he asserts. “I do collaborations, I do live performances, I do all kinds of things. While I was doing those, I thought that they felt more relevant to me than recording solo albums. The album format was probably less relevant from the moment CDs started disappearing and things went online. It changed the way people listen to music and the whole ritual of putting a record on the turntable, or sticking a CD into a player, kind of disappeared.”
Officially, the last Speedy J solo album – straight-to-tape, extended hardware jams not included – was 2002’s Loudboxer, a typically fuzzy and forthright collection of techno club cuts shaped by the Brutalist psychogeography of his home city. For an artist of his stature and experience, that’s a long time between drinks.
“The last few years, I’ve been feeling like a change,” Paap muses. “Kind of a long to have uninterrupted ritual stuff in people’s lives, for example watching a movie from start to finish, or listening to an album free of the bombardment of shit that is fired at you all the time, everywhere.”
After decades, Paap found himself drawn back to a format that dance music culture has always struggled with, at least in comparison with more traditional forms of popular music: the humble long-player.
“I thought that in this time, with such a fragmented media landscape and such one-dimensional media consumption, having the option to make the choice and listen to an uninterrupted body of work from start to finish is welcome. So, I decided to gather together all the ideas I’ve had along the way in the last few years, finish them, and make some new ones.”
Thus, Paap began to record a new album, one that given his status as one of underground techno’s more celebrated elder statesmen will no doubt be keenly anticipated. Entitled Walkman – a title we’ll return to shortly – it’s an album laden with surprises. While rooted in his love of metallic sonics, brutalist murk, mind-mangling effects and the pull of the dancefloor, it’s stylistically diverse, with Paap variously recalling his 1990s dalliances with IDM, madcap drill & bass (look it up, kids) and intergalactic ambience as well as more traditional techno, mutant electro and experimental electronica.
“It was mostly made last year, but there are some ideas in there that have been in my head longer,” Paap enthuses. “I thought, ‘let’s collect all that stuff again, in the album format, and see what it does. I noticed that to make it work as a sequence of stuff and as like one uninterrupted listen, I felt that some of the stuff needed to be very short. I don’t exactly know why, but I felt that in some cases I could tell the story in three minutes rather than six.”
Walkman is, by album standards, still something of an epic at 20 tracks deep and around 90 minutes long, but its constant ebbing and flowing and blink-and-you-miss-it workouts means that genuinely takes listeners on a journey – one into the heart of Paap’s signature sound and the Cold War aesthetics of his celebrated bunker-turned studio. It’s a kind of pick-and-mix selection dipped in the producer’s own special seasoning, with different moods, tempos and rhythms providing a constant feeling of propulsion.
Juno Daily opines that it is the kind of album that can be listened to in different contexts without losing any of its power or allure. Paap looks a little puzzled. “I stay away from giving people any kind of instructions on how to listen to my stuff – this is just the way I wanted to present what I had made,” he says matter-or-factly. “I kind of completed the puzzle in a way that works for me. And, well, it’s called Walkman because I’ve made a lot of the decisions about sequencing on listening to the material during walks.”
Enthused by this part of the album’s gestation, Paap gets increasingly animated as he speaks. “I would just get away from the studio, go for a walk and listen interrupted – it was important to just consume, listen and make decisions without distractions,” he says. “I would then return to the studio and tweak things. This kind of transit, walking from A to B just listening, was basically part of the album writing process. That’s why the title is as it is, but it is not an instruction – if people listen on Spotify, or at home, or just pick a track and listen to that, it is fine by me. But it was important to me that it worked as an album from start to finish.”
In some ways, for an artist now so used to creating on the fly with others, where one afternoon or evening of improvised performance can result in an album, making Walkman something of a novelty – a process that he’d almost forgotten given the long gap between solo full-length excursions.
“I did notice, during the production process, that creating an album, whether on your own or with others, in one session gets the point across more than a collection of different ideas from different times and places,” Paap muses. “With this, there’s a coherence in the sound palette, the intention behind it, the studio and the time-period in which it was recorded. I think that by doing it that way – one studio, one period of time – automatically connects everything together.”
Those connections are solid, of course, but what makes Walkman special is its winding, slowly evolving fluidity – it’s probably closer, in some ways, to a mixtape (albeit one that inhabits a very specific and distinctive sound world, as you’d expect from Paap) than the carefully constructed solo albums he delivered in the 1900s. You can tell that Paap put a lot of thought into the sequencing and how long each track would linger.
‘It’s like exploring a city – you turn a corner and everything looks different,” he explains. “You walk there for a while, then you decide to go left and everything looks different again. Then you come to a quiet place, then a loud place… It’s all these different dynamics of different environments. You can draw parallels with how the album is structured. It’s like going from scene to scene, into another while quickly, but it makes sense as a whole journey.”
The idea of Walkman being an album inspired by, and made for, journeys is one that has merits. It’s arguably best listened to on headphones, where all of Paap’s sonic details unveil themselves, and will no doubt soundtrack plenty of real-world journeys by foot, bus, rail and air in the months and years ahead.
“Yes, people can use it to accompany their own journey,” Paap says excitedly. “It’s your choice of environment and that environment can become part of the experience. But you could also just have the music play out as something in your headphones and the environment is separated from it, that’s also possible. Again, no instructions.”
Matt Anniss
Buy Walkman on gatefold double vinyl here
