Interview — RatCat: the scene, the studio and what a DJ is for

01In the ten or so years that I’ve been interested in the Croatian electronic scene, you, Jan, have always been there. Do you consider yourself a constant of Croatian electronic music?

Yes. I played my first DJ gig in the summer of 2000, at Crossroad on Krk – which means I’m coming up on 25 years behind the decks. I’ve been through various phases of the Croatian electronic scene, watched musical and DJ trends come and go, clubs open and close, and got to know the various ways audiences take part in all of it. If nothing else, I can’t think of a period when Croatian electronic music wasn’t a constant in my life.

02My interest in that scene began in my old age – when did you get hooked on electronic music? And how?

Very early. I grew up with a mother who was, and still is, completely obsessed with music, so the nurture side certainly had some influence. But for as long as I can remember I was drawn to music with electronic sounds. It started with mix tapes of the dance music that was popular at the time, at the beginning of primary school, then The Prodigy, and gradually everything else that was available. At 12 or 13 I started going to the legendary music shop on Ilica, Planet Music, where I spent hours listening to records and talking to the DJs who would come in, or to Juraj Štumberger, who worked in the shop. At 15 or 16 I started becoming aware of Detroit and the specific relationship between that city and electronic music. The fascination with that city has never stopped; in fact, it only grows with the years. Detroit is still a leading creative centre from which an incredible number of progressive ideas come.

03Music, together with all the other positive values established after the Second World War, was the foundation for the formation of a pop culture that strongly influenced our generation and the ones before it. What will become of it now, when values that were untouchable until yesterday are visibly collapsing and civilisation seems to be entering a very dark period?

Yes, music is still the foundation of culture. Admittedly pop culture and music aren’t synonyms, although they’re strongly connected. Music is one of the ways contemporary pop culture communicates its values. That hasn’t changed, and I actually think we’re living in interesting times in that respect. Kendrick’s Super Bowl performance is an interesting cultural, or rather countercultural, moment. Or the fact that Beyoncé won a Grammy for a country performance. These are proof that contemporary pop can still be a driving force for change. It’s interesting that at the start of the Super Bowl performance Kendrick referenced Gil Scott-Heron with: “The revolution’s about to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy.”

Music has survived worse periods than the one we’re in and I think it will survive this one. There will always be music that carries human stories with a certain depth, and there will always be people for whom that kind of music is an important factor in life.

04Croatian electronic music seems to me, at this moment, stable, substantial, diverse and decent. As someone with years on the scene you’re more than qualified to judge, so tell me, analyse the scene – what’s it like, what was it like, where’s it going?

You’re right when you say it seems stable, and we definitely have a solid amount of musical output from local producers. However, my feeling is that we’re going through a period of contraction compared with the period between 2000 and 2010. Every scene is a living organism that expands and contracts, but my impression is that over the last twenty or so years there has been a disproportionate decline in underground dance music culture here. What I see is a rise in festivals, and they’re necessary for many reasons, but the bloodline of a healthy scene is small clubs and events that happen every weekend – not just on the coast and not just in the capital.

There are fewer clubs – which, unfortunately, follows global trends after the pandemic – there is a smaller audience and less of the diversity that was very present in earlier periods. Apart from most of it being centralised in a few cities location-wise, in terms of genre everything is increasingly reduced to a few big clusters, which I find very unexciting. Electronic music is a genre with infinite potential and infinitely many colours and sounds in which everyone can find their identity. But what I hear out there today is mostly very similar and generic, as if individuality had stopped being a currency.

05OK, let’s say we have a scene now, but what about the audience? For the generations shaped by the baby boom, the activism of the 60s, the layering of electronics onto rock from the 80s onwards, all the way to artificial intelligence, music was hugely important, it identified them in a much broader sense. And today?

Part of this question can refer back to one of the previous answers. From the appearance of MySpace onwards, we have been witnessing a shift in people’s behaviour, in communication and in the way individuals communicate with their own community and the global one. Now we can see how big a shift that actually was, because it has crept into every segment of everyday life. However, technological innovations like that enter society without a manual, and it takes time before the positive and negative consequences become visible and before some ethics of use are established. I think we’re somewhere in the middle of that process, because we’re starting to see the negative effects of the latest mass-technology novelties.

But people still listen to music and identify strongly with it. Just because they no longer sit on the sofa romantically reading the lyrics off a record sleeve, but have Bluetooth headphones instead, doesn’t mean they don’t experience music just as emotionally and identify with it. Every era brings its own circumstances.

The problem I see, not strictly related to AI but more to social media, is the fact that there are fewer and fewer dark corners where new ideas can mature a little before being exposed to a global audience. London’s grime genre is a great example of music that was developed at a micro level for several years before it stepped onto the world stage and infected the world. It seems to me that today ideas get exposed while they’re still in embryo, which makes the initial experimental period harder, because “the world is watching”.

06I hope you survived the introductory sociology and philosophy, let’s turn to the musical you. What have you been doing in the studio lately?

Who doesn’t love a bit of philosophy as a warm-up? The studio is busy because Cycle Studio operates in several capacities – my own work and the label, projects for musicians we help with recording, production or mixing, and jobs for clients from the advertising industry. There are always several parallel projects in rotation.

At the moment we’re working on the album of the fantastic soul/r’n’b/hip-hop artist Melanie Malike – a natural multi-talent whose voice doesn’t know what a bad take is. The music is easiest to describe through influences – 90s soul, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, The Roots... We recently recorded keyboard and bass parts with Nikola Šantek and Viktor Slamnig. The album is coming along nicely.

On Cycle Records we have several interesting releases.

CYCLE-02 is out – it’s the track “Rising Soul” by Pula producer Andrej Lasić, with my remix and a remix by the Japanese producer Kes YM. (https://jankincl.bandcamp.com/album/rising-soul-cycle-records-cycle-02).

CYCLE-03 is also out as of recently, it’s called “If You Don’t Get It, It’s Not For You”, and it’s a specific release intended for advanced DJs. (https://jankincl.bandcamp.com/album/if-you-don-t-get-it-it-s-not-for-you-cycle-records-cycle-03).

CYCLE-04 is at mastering, it’s called “Grind Revisited” and it’s out in about ten days. It’s a reissue of the track “Grind” that Borut Cvajner and I made ten years ago and released on Tit Zero, Dejan Milićević’s label.

In parallel, I’m working with Ishfaq on the next Cycle release – our first joint EP, under the name No Mad Rush. Many people know Ishfaq – a musician and producer from Ireland with a Zagreb address. We’ve been working together for years – he plays keyboards on my productions, performs live with me and is my permanent production partner. We have a lot of material, it may all end up as an album.

Of the outside projects, we’re currently deep in production on Sara Renar’s new album. Sara and Dimitrije have brought excellent songs and are open to exploring different ideas, I think it’s going to be an excellent album. The first single “Nježne riječi” is already out, and the rest should follow after the summer. Ish and I also recently finished Melita Lovričević’s song “Sami”, I’m very happy with how it turned out. Two weeks ago Phillie’s “Zagreb Rap Demo (1985 - 1992)” double LP came out too, a compilation of the earliest rap music from Zagreb, on which Igor Fabris and I did the restoration and mastering.

We’re doing mixes for quite a few projects by the American deep house legend Kai Alcé. Remixes of Louie Vega’s track “Seven Mile”, with vocals by Moodymann, were released recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uH-hMIiTH4) – we did the mixdown of Kai’s versions, and the mastering was done by the cult New York engineer Herb Powers. Kai did an excellent job with the remix itself and I’m very happy with how the final version sounds in the club. We did something else for Kai just recently… ah yes, we mixed his remix for the Canadian label Selections. Anyway, Kai is a friend and an excellent producer, we love working on his music.

On top of all that, I work on my own music every day. I’ve just finished two remixes for the South African producer Problem Child from Ten83, and I’m in the final phase of work on the next EP (working title “Silent Steppers”). In recent years I focused more on building the studio and the label, but now that everything is in place – production is going smoothly and I’m happy with the results. A new album is in the plans too – hopefully by the end of the year.

Anyway, we’re always working on a lot of projects in parallel and it can get hairy when deadlines coincide, but that’s part of the job. I have an excellent team of collaborators with whom everything is well run in, so we’re always on time. Lovro Baletić works at the studio and is involved in all the day-to-day business, and then there are Ishfaq, Ivan Komlinović, Igor Fabris, Filip Motovunski, Sven Weisemann… I’ve got a really good team.

07If I had to place you in a drawer on the scene, it would be decorated with baroque carvings. I don’t know whether that image makes sense to you, because it’s just a mischievous projection of my mind, which, like an AI in some free photo generator, assembles an illustration of you going with Vivaldi to the old Kulušić or, better still, Šibenik’s Azimut, to a Vivaldi or Bach concert. If you feel the need, comment….

Haha, thanks for the compliment. What I read in your impression is colourfulness, and I think it describes well how I experience music. I’m still too much in love with music to stick to just one straight line.

08That image is probably the product of the episode when we first worked together, at Andrija Bakula’s Select night at Azimut. The DJ booth you and Regis Kattie were behind was full of instruments, cables and little cables, somehow playful, baroque. If you feel the need, add….

That night has stayed with me as a very good memory. The party was excellent, the chemistry with Regis was on point, the soundsystem and the crowd were fantastic and generally the night was banging. That was the first live show we brought the little Moog Mother synthesizer to, and I remember how much the room shook from the sub when I pushed up the fader.

(Btw, greetings to Andrija and congratulations on the baby! A fantastic DJ with excellent taste.)

09You have the nerves to collaborate – it can’t be simple making music with other people?

I love working with people, that’s how you get the best results. All my regular collaborators are people who live music, understand the traps of the creative process and are good communicators. Of course, I like being alone in the studio too, it’s an opportunity for a different type of work, but those are all different sides of the same coin.

Live shows are the best way to see how good a combination you are with someone. Lately I’ve been playing live a lot with Ishfaq and Melanie Malike, in several different combinations. Ishfaq has been my live partner at shows for several years now, he plays keyboards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq1_XfbGmHY&t=763s

Recently he came up with his own live project called Ishfaq’s Music Room, where he has the main say and I help him on the mixer and drum machine. With Melanie Malike, on the other hand, we perform her music; she sings, Ishfaq plays keyboards, and I’m on the mixer and drum machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkyfdhfu5W0

Last month we had a few shows where we performed with all three live acts in one night, and at some point you reach a place where we might be performing one of my tracks, but Ishfaq goes off script on the keyboards and Melanie joins in on the microphone, and in that moment something comes about that none of us would have made solo.

Yeah, I really love that call-and-response moment with people.

10I know you love women – is it harder to function in a relationship or in a musical collaboration?

A world without women would be an extremely boring place, and in fact neither one is hard for me. Communication and a bit of tolerance matter in both situations, and then everything works.

11Tell me, Jan, do you consider yourself a fulfilled guy – I don’t mean in the sense that you’ve done everything you needed to, because there’s still loads ahead of you, but more for this specific, current moment?

No, but only because I actively avoid that position. When I released the album with Regis I had that feeling of a milestone, after which came a strange feeling of emptiness that lasted a month or two and which I found pointless. I suppose I’m naturally the type who’s always looking ahead, at what’s next and what still needs to be done.

I can’t say I’m not satisfied, sometimes it’s hard to believe the situations I’ve found myself in because of music, but I don’t have any real need to look back and reflect on everything that’s been. I think it’s healthier to have a mind set on what’s next.

12Would you have achieved more if you were in Berlin, Tel Aviv, London or some fourth musical centre?

Possibly, but a lot of things would have been different too. You know that’s a highly speculative question with simply too many parameters. I’m where I need to be and I’m getting the most I can out of that situation. I spent a period in Berlin, there was even an idea that it would be a permanent destination, but I came back to Zagreb, and from where I am now I think I decided well.

13Would you have needed, in terms of character, ego, financially, emotionally, to have achieved more?

Certainly, financially. I can’t complain, but the reality is that making and releasing music costs money, and sometimes I don’t have big enough budgets available to carry out projects as quickly as I’d like. It mostly comes down to that.

14Are you a better DJ or producer?

DJ. I’ve spent a lifetime behind the decks and it comes to me as naturally as breathing. I’d like to have some of that ease in the studio.

15How much of a problem, for a producer DJing, is his own production, in the sense that his own productions complicate his efforts to entertain the crowd on the dance floor?

A knowledge of production will make a DJ better, because he’ll understand the structure of the music he’s playing. He’ll be more precise in recognising the nuances hidden in a track and what effect those nuances can have on a room when they’re amplified through a soundsystem.

The reverse is true too: the chance to play your new track on a big soundsystem, in front of a crowd, and between two tracks made by other people will immediately underline everything that doesn’t work about your track. That’s an extra useful feedback loop which I use at every DJ and live show. You need a sense of proportion though. Clubs aren’t operating theatres, and a certain degree of experimentation and risk is a necessary part of a good DJ set, but you have to keep in mind that people didn’t pay for a ticket to listen to a DJ trying out his new demos.

16Is that even the best description – that a DJ needs to entertain people, get them dancing?

Entertaining and getting people dancing are definitely components of what a DJ needs to do, but above all a DJ needs to create additional emotional value through the selection of tracks and their timing. Every track is a kind of capsule of different emotions, and one night in a club has enough time to take the audience through a whole series of genres, feelings, ideas and intensities. In those situations when you’re really on the top of your game, people leave the club in the morning richer by an experience they won’t soon forget. It doesn’t happen every time, but it’s something to aim for.

I’ve never understood DJ sets or parties where the music doesn’t change, but just becomes linearly more intense and harder. That’s a poor use of the full potential of this music.

17At a time when clubs are closing en masse, globally, and for new generations music is only a peripheral thing, or important in specific cases like the Thompson phenomenon here, is there any need at all to get people dancing?

To paraphrase Theo Parrish from one of his recent interviews – some people like to dance, and some people need to dance. As long as there are those who need to dance, there is a need for good DJs and small clubs where you can experience something real.