Danny Wang, outspoken champion of all quality things in life, from melodies to Tannoy speakers and bonzai trees, jumps on board to tell us what he is up to in Berlin. Danny raise to fame with his Balihu record label in the mid-nineties, home to most of his own exquisite productions and other leftfield underground game changers like Brennan Green. Always learning and keeping things real, here’s Danny Wang …
INTERVIEW
Hey Danny!! What’s up and where are you living these days – still in Berlin?
Yes, still in Berlin, and grateful every day that I somehow escaped from media-blitzkrieged and consumerism-obsessed NYC to the Germanic capital. The rents have gone up for sure but they are still affordable, the gays here don’t care if you wear Calvin Klein underwear but they do support our openly homo mayor, I can take a bus to the airport within 40 minutes from the street where I live for 2 Euros, organic food is in every supermarket…There is so much here which makes daily life a bit more pleasant.
Do you think you have completely settled down there and what is the scene like now?
I can’t imagine finding a more pleasant apartment for the same price, and it seems that my german boyfriend and I will probably stay together until we’re both wrinkly, grey, and hard of hearing! So I’m resigned to my fate for the next 20 years: a chinese guy from the states who ended up happily in Germany!
There are enough Americans here, but surprisingly, I’ve found quite a network of “oriental” friends too, Japanese and Koreans mostly, so it feels like home in that sense too. The gay scene is still lively – and although some clubs have been closing due to changes in real estate (Bar25 and ChezJacki are two recent victims), I feel that the music scene shows no signs of fatigue. It’s kind of amazing taking the U-Bahn on weekends here, because the trains are full of young people at 3 or 4am, everyone is going out to clubs+ concerts. The train ride itself is part of the fun. If anything, clubs like SojuBar and About Blank and Flamingo show a trend toward intimate clubs where the sound is better, unlike the raw warehouses 10 years ago, so I think that’s a positive development.
I heard you are redoing your apartment with color therapy – would love to know more about what that means and what colors you are you going for!
Well, I moved into this old 60s flat some time ago, and there was so much ugly old wallpaper, I decided to strip it all off and redo all the walls. As of December 2011, I finally scraped off every last inch. In the meantime I’d been amassing a small pile of Architectural Digest and World of Interiors.. I’m an artsy gay male afterall. Most people in Berlin like minimal white. And then there are the ugly plum purple/ lime green/ sunset orange palettes for the trendy set. I wanted to avoid just white but I still wanted simplicity and clarity, but also fantasy. So the living room will be a very pale shade of blue – imitating the morning sky – but with my green plants and dark wood speaker cabinets, it should kind of evoke Brazil… Or a bit of Scandinavia. Bedroom is dove grey, and I bought pale grey floor boards for the entire flat, with lots of natural wood tones for furniture.
Grey is a magical background colour, it makes the foreground light up. The killer touch for the walls is various fluorescent tubes with interchangeable colour filters which I found on ebay. They’re no longer manufactured since LEDs came along. These colours are not hazy like LED tubes, but strong+vivid. Intense red or violet lights in small amounts against a pale blue or grey wall, I cant wait to install these in the next few weeks!
You are also into bonsai trees. That’s a pretty cool hobby, how many trees have you got and how did you get into it?
Well, I really cant claim to be an expert! I killed a small maple, but have otherwise kept alive a cute “Citrus mitis”, and have half-sculpted a good-looking asymmetrical Juniper which sits on my balcony. Plus I keep a dozen Aglaonemas, Aloes and palms alive in my living room. It would be more fair to say that I really got into studying the principles. To be a real bonsai artist, you need an outdoor garden, patience to water them 2 or 3 times a day, and 15-20 years to get a shape right. Real bonsais should sit in elegant, shallow pots, so sometimes they have such reduced roots, they’re like crippled invalids needing life support, which is the task of the bonsai master.
I’m into a more natural approach, my Juniper sits in a big round pot with plenty of soil, and I did not wire it to death. It’s like not every one who enjoys classical music has to play the piano or compose symphonies.. For me it is about understanding the aesthetic, the categories, the principles of proportion and balance, and understanding techniques which help to keep any plant alive in a pot. I also traveled to Omiya in Japan, which is half an hour from Tokyo, and saw hundreds of real bonsais. Some were mindblowing, but others were simple and feasible, like Jade Plants (Crassulae) which are easy to find anywhere. So it’s not all about 800 year old masterpieces of pine or cypress, it’s more about bringing nature into daily life. For me the biggest lesson of bonsai is Empathy. Because a juniper, a maple, a succulent plant (like Aloe) or a tropical plant (like Dieffenbachia) all come from different places and have different needs for light, water, etc. How to make them feel at home? You do have to understand their natural environment and put yourself in their place, in order to help them thrive. And if you have to use very expensive soil or massive artificial lighting, then maybe the plant doesnt belong here. There are probably lessons in it for all human endeavours too, without trying to sound too serious…!
It’s inspiring to hear about all these things you take on and learn about, what else are you into? I seem to remember you were also collecting vintage synths for while …
I certainly would not be alone in my synthesizer fascination, I know many people collect them… but I just have enough to make music with = two ARPs, a Roland SH101, some rack mounts and theremins. Truly nothing special! If anything, it seems to me that thinking too much about acquiring gear contradicts the creative impulse to use these things to make new music. I like the weird ones, like Yamaha FS1R, an FM digital formant filter module. People who buy so many analog monosynths (MiniMoog, Sequential ProOne etc) are basically buying the same machine over+over again.
Besides plants and interior decor, I am kind of crazy about cooking lately and collected a small supply of japanese ceramics to serve food on. Again, there is a Japanese science to contrasting colors+ textures: coarse pottery for smooth tofu, wooden bowls for comfort while holding hot soup, dark glazes to highlight the pure white color of rice, for example. It sounds crazy but i realized that there are principles for all these things, just like for music+ acoustics in club spaces, which intensify and distill the aesthetic experience. Oh all the things i’ve learned in Japan! LOL.
Many folks describe the golden age of Tannoy speakers as before 1974. Do you have any ones that old and would you describe yourself as an audiophile?
This is another mania which grabbed me in the past few months, but only because I started hunting for new monitor speakers with a bigger woofer than what I had before. I saw+heard some huge wooden-cabinet Tannoys at a friend’s house in London about 12 years ago… I never forgot this feeling of warmth they had, a lot of power+clarity without having to turn them up too loud, and above all the concentric tweeter-woofer design, which means that you don’t have to bob your head up+down because the highs+ lows have a single central focus. This is a uniquely British invention with a good dose of eccentric genius. I never thought I’d be able to afford real Tannoys. But a friend of mine in Berlin was selling his 15-inchers, which were too big, and apparently the 12-inchers have a more neutral EQ response. I googled and found a german engineer audiophile guy who was selling his. This isnt even Ebay, this is a random local advert in Cologne! We talked and he was super honest and down-to-earth. I sent the money without hesitation. When the speakers arrived, perfectly packaged and all, it was a dream come true.
I feel obligated to clarify that I do NOT own pre-1974 Tannoys like the Gold Monitors or Red Monitors series! I bought the DMTs, which have a synthetic cabinet and were manufactured in the mid 90s. But again, i’m after good sound here, not the glamour of vintage gear. The old Tannoys are a mixed bag when it comes to accuracy, and it’s hard to find them in good condition. From reading online, it seems JBLs played a big role in studios in the 70s and 80s too, and nowadays Abbey Road Studios uses Dynaudio monitors from Denmark. So go for the sound, not the name!
Please tell us a bit about your history, where did you grow up, what influenced you and did you always have such an inquisitive mind … I mean digging really deep into things like?
I think everybody has their strengths and their quirks. I was always chosen last for sports in school, I couldnt skateboard or ride a surfboard to save my life, and my handwriting is very poor, so my motor coordination is way below average. But I always had good ears.. Culture is expressed through language and music, and I learned a lot of languages early on, so traveling through Europe or Japan and talking to strangers has been easy for me. I’ definitely C3PO from StarTrek: gay multilingual disco robot!
And I thinking “being oriental” is actually a big part of it. In Chinese you grow up with all these proverbs like “An education is incomplete without reading ten thousand books and traveling ten thousand miles” or “Behind every master is another master, beyond every sky is another sky.” These are like mantras. You know Paul Tee of Sarcastic Disco from LA, DJ Harvey, and Eric Duncan from RubNTug are always joking about being “study masters”. The Japanese simply say “Jinsei wa Benkyo” : Life is Studying. So it sounds really corny, but this “inquisitive minds” thing is part of our upbringing probably.
That said, isnt “digging deeply” a key aspect of DJ culture as a whole? it’s an international super-nerd hobby now, the prices on Discogs are proof of this fact. But I think there are many ways to approach being a DJ, part of it is having obscure knowledge and physical technique, another part is being an entertainer and having an empathic connection with the audience. You can study any topic to death, I suppose, but finding joy and personal meaning in it is something else.
What kind of music education did you have?
Not enough, I’m afraid! This sounds strange but I was sort of denied one. We moved a lot and didnt have money for lessons. My mom is a sort of devoted but liberal Catholic, a bit California free-thinker, who felt that forcing children to practice violin or piano as a “bourgeois aspiration” is a bad idea. I still respect that for her. But she also saw no value in music itself… She used to say “black people go to church and all they do is dance and sing, what does that have to do with spirituality?” She only kept books around the house, no records at all. My dad loved opera and symphonies but passed away after a long depression. So I’ve had to slowly figure it out on my own without properly reading music, unfortunately. I did harmony courses at university, but i wish i had started formally much much earlier. Discovering the theremin was what actually opened up the world of classical music for me.
Do you still get time to make much music between all your other interests and will we be blessed with some new on releases on Balihu in the future?
I feel really ashamed in fact that i havent produced one song in the past 6 or 7 years now. The reason is practical: DJing became my full time job. Even if you only work on weekends, we all know that you need time to recover from all those flights and irregular sleep. And you always have to find new music to play and new ways to approach your DJ set. I discovered lots of euro+ italodisco, as well as soul music, since moving to Berlin which i never heard in the USA. I’ve just been saving every penny for a more stable future here – I know other DJs prefer taxis, but as i mentioned, i take the bus. My home studio needs some more work, but the hibernation is almost over. I think i’ll be releasing vocal tracks with more universal appeal in 2012. Like Change “Glow Of Love” or Madonna “Holiday”, I’d like to make something as happy and crystal-clear as those songs, not just strange obscure instrumental tracks any more.
What 5 songs or records did you listen to today?
Hmmmm! I just listened to.. A compilation by Alexis LeTan from Paris, “Space Oddities”. Nothing but obscure instrumental tracks! I sorted out a playlist for myself: “Favourite Carpenters Tunes”, a lot of Karen Carpenter soul-jazz orchestral stuff recorded in the two years before her death, more mature, breezy, unlike the innocent songs which made her famous circa 1972. Todd Terje “It’s the ARPs” EP by our fave Norwegian nu-disco genius. “Victor/Victoria” film soundtrack composed by Henry Mancini, sung in part by Julie Andrews. One of the best soundtracks of all time! and “Best of S.O.S. Band”, just bought it. Lots of 808 synth drums with funky basslines and pleading female vocals.
What’s your favorite club to play at?
In Berlin, it’s a three-way between SojuBar for its intimate space and crystal clear sound; TAPE Club for its loud but still great sound system, its generous dancefloor especially at the monthly Horse Meat Disco; and AboutBlank, which has a lovely summer garden and always a cheerful, pleasant crowd. But there are a few clubs i really dread too. The biggest best-known club in Berlin actually sounds awful. Same with a massive popular club in east end of London even though they were always really nice to me. If a space sounds good, you can have 10 people on the dancefloor and i’d be happy anyway.
Seen any good movies lately or read any good books?
I saw “Jane Eyre” while flying from London to SanFrancisco to visit my grandmother. Sort of beautiful and uplifting in a proper cinematic sort of way, although I prefer the madness and irony of Bruce LaBruce or Luis Bunuel. Michael Fassbender is total eye candy for a gay man and thoroughly unconvincing when his character says to Jane, “you and are I nothing worth looking at…” Only a few hours later did i realize that he also plays Magneto in “X-Men”. Hollywoo
Would you like to give a shout out to anyone?
For NYC: I’d like to say hi to Brennan Green of Chinatown, to the Environ crew of course, to Carlos Hernandez, to Dei Lewison, the lovely voice of Miura, to DJ Spun, to Alex Lispen at Headgear Studios Brooklyn and to Nicky Siano, to Liv Spencer, to Dr. Dunks… oh gees there are too many good people in New York.
In London, the Voices Crew- Alex Win, Joel Martin, Gerry Rooney and Cedric Lassonde with his Klipsch speakers, and Ade of Plastic People, for upholding the ideals of really good sound and soulful eclectic music. And Dave Redmond, Conor Lynch, and his friends in Dublin for keeping the same spirit alive there!
Thanks!!!
