Fabriclive31 – The Glimmers
Syndicated Interview

The Glimmers are Mo Becha and David Fouquaert, hailing from Ghent, Belgium, they both fell deeply under music's spell at a young age. At 16, old enough to DJ but too young to drink, they found themselves gigs together at a local bar called Mistral. A few years later, their residency at a club called Fifty Five saw them sweating out 11-hour marathon sets every week; workouts that nurtured their flexible attitude and inimitable style.

The Glimmers took their unique genre-blurring style to a factory in Ghent for their next night-time takeover, Pablo Eskimo Bar. Once a factory to produce Eskimo underwear, The Glimmers filled the walls with their revolutionary sound and found it was the perfect ambience to get beats, not panties, in a twist. Mingling disco with post-punk, reggae, hip hop - and everything in-between - to create unimaginable concoctions, the night that began with 300 people soon attracted over 7,000 hedonists flocking from all over the world.

The remarkable success of the club night spawned a compilation series in which the mighty sound of Eskimo was encapsulated on disc. 8 celebrated Eskimo compilations later, with a widely acclaimed DJ Kicks mix and a Blue Note CD released on the side, The Glimmers find themselves continually shuffling between cities with smiles as big as their tour schedules. Most recently, The Glimmers have been pushing remixes and their own productions, not to mention their latest release, FABRICLIVE31 (see sidebar)

For DJ dates visit www.myspace.com/theglimmers

But first... this interview with Mo and David!


How has 2006 been for you?

Mo: 2006 started very hot for us! We were in Australia for two weeks doing a tour and on January 1st it was forty seven degrees; very hot. Since then we've been to Japan, Canada, New York, Miami, Brazil, Argentina – we've been all over basically which was very good!

How would you describe the New Beat or Post-Punk Disco scene these days?

David: There's a lot of different scenes – you have house scenes, funky scenes, hip hop scenes – we don't like the word “scene" as its just a collection of people. Once every one and a half years it changes into different people, different generations going out – then they love one sort of music or another - for us its just on big party and we try to have a good time!

What did you aim to do on your Fabric CD?

Mo: What we tried to do for our fabric mix is just to, well, we've been playing here for the last 3 years every 3 or 4 months so we tried to recreate on the CD what we do here at fabric when we play in the main room; a good mixture but very up-tempo. A lot of the CDs we've done before started slow, building up etc. but for fabric you do the building at home to go straight into it so we've done the same with the CD.

Please explain The Glimmers' approach to DJing with two of you together?

Mo: Usually when we play records together its always one on, one off - David plays one then I do – we ping pong all the time – it makes it nice as I don't know what he's going to play. I just have 2 or 3 minutes to search for the following record and it's the same for him. The good thing now is we play more with CDs; before I could see the sleeve from the record he was playing but now I can only see an empty place in the CD wallet with lots of track names. I don't know in advance. Even for me, it's a surprise what he's going to play next and it's the same for him I suppose. That keeps us going in a lot of different directions in a short time without ever knowing where we are heading!

How much vinyl are you using in sets with other formats readily available now?

David: Well, we don't play that much vinyl any more – recently we did our first set with no vinyl at all. Its nice to see all the different formats coming up but we don't like MP3s because of the sound quality. Its good just to listen to something but to play in big systems in clubs – I think there's something lacking. We love the sound of vinyl so we record our own CDs. We buy all our stuff on vinyl and then record onto CDs just for the luggage thing – to avoid breaking our backs every 3 weeks! That's why we're playing more and more with CDs these days – the machines are nice to use and you can make loops and do a little bit more than with vinyl. We still have the sound of vinyl as we recorded the music from the vinyl and this keeps us more or less satisfied.

How did you approach the challenge of making a remix? Did you have certain goals in mind?

Mo: We love working on remixes because we get a lot of music parts, start taking things out, stripping it down and then adding things we feel are necessary for the groove or the direction that we want to take. Most of the time we have a rough idea we set out with a few weeks before we start the remix. Once we start in the studio though you never know what will happen so the thing you had in mind - it could be the total opposite. You have to leave enough space for mistakes to happen because from mistakes beautiful things can appear! Its something you don't really know in advance, you just have to work on it and then know when to say ok, that's it - the finished version.

David: We get asked to do remixes for different kinds of artists – sometimes very underground electronic stuff. If its already an underground dance music kind of track sometimes we don't see that many possibilities for the remix as its already a dance track. So, for us its nicer to work with pop music or rock bands because they have a lot of real music recorded by real drummers, bass guitarists, vocalists, whatever. New Order was very nice to work on- we had the chance to meet Peter Hook as well – he's a great guy. The Killers was surprisingly a very dance/crossover track already but we stripped it down, really stripped it down, just kept the bass and drums and dubbed out the vocals a bit. We tried to make dance versions like the 80's extended versions - not really remixing but more making extended versions of the tracks if it suits the song of course. That's our approach to making a remix – and the goal we have in mind is that we want to play the mixes in our DJ sets. It's a very difficult goal because we don't always play our own remixes – we're not always 100% satisfied with what we've achieved. So, that's what we set out to do and we're still working on it!

Having played all over the world, what makes Fabric a special venue?

David: What makes Fabric a special venue? Well, first the location – London is a still a great city – musically it has a history and fabric is now part of that (even though its still here of course!). It was a pleasure to be here for the first time – we were very excited to play in the club and we were asked to play again and again – its nice to be part of it. Now we've made the compilation for them its even better. It's a nice venue, has a great sound system and wide musical spectrum – its great to be part of it.

What's going on with the Eskimo label?

Mo: The Eskimo label was born just being purely for compilations but after a few years it started to release 12 inches and now they've just released the first artist album. It's evolving in a nice way to an artist label and having its own artists make albums for the label. Its great because at the beginning it was yeah, ok we'll make a Eskimo club compilation but then it gave us a platform to release our first 12 inches of our own productions as Dirty Minds and know other people are making albums like Lindstrom, Lotterboys are doing one now – so its growing into a real label – more than we ever dreamt it would be.

What's next for The Glimmers?

Mo: So what could happen in 2007? Well, I think touring the world all over again and releasing a lot of our own productions. The past year we've worked a lot with friends, producers and musicians we know from all over and have produced a lot of tracks. Now we're going to release them – every month a 12" on our new label called Diskimo. It's nice because its our own outlet and we can do whatever we want with whoever we want – a great way to get your music out.


Thanks Glimmers!

And thanks to Mori at takeoutMARKETING for hooking us up with this syndicated interview.