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Aril Brikha
When Sweden's Aril Brikha decided to shop his demo, there were really only two outside choices for him. "I had submitted my music to 2 or 3 different Swedish labels, but none of them wanted it. When I thought of foreign labels, the first ones that came to my mind were Transmat and 430 West. So I sent the same tape to both labels in Detroit, both of them liked it, and got back to me days after they got my tape." As things worked out, Brikha ended up signing a deal with Transmat, and a friend who had submitted a demo around the same time, Simon Hartley, hooked up with 430 West. Brikha didn't want to go outside his home country, but he felt he had to after finding nothing but frustration. He had had an EP out 2 years back on the local Planktown imprint, plus a track on a compilation, but nothing since. "The labels here said my music was 'too soft'," Brikha explains over a crackling phone connection from Stockholm, "and they wanted harder tracks." Many, including Brikha, worry that the sound of Sweden has turned into one big compressed kick. "I respect the labels here for what they do, but it's harder techno and I'm not into that. I think it's just easier to present harder tracks to people rather than complicated tracksr or softer or deeper material. I guess you could generalize and say that people at clubs find it easier to respond to the energy tracks rather than emotion-filled ones." According to Brikha, things are changing. "The main stars that have been making the harder techno are coming into more deeper stuff, both in techno and in house. Jesper Dahlback, for example, was making the more Chicago-style, rough stuff 3 years ago and he's now doing more deep house. Cari (Lekebusch) is doing a house label now, Adam (Beyer) is doing some more soulful stuff as well, so hopefully as the DJs progress, the audience will too. I hope the focus isn't just on the harder stuff in the future because all of the other styles in dance music have gone deeper--or more soulful, at least." Soul is the key word when speaking of Brikha's sound. When Transmat released his "Art Of Vengeance" EP through their Fragile subsidiary in early 1998, its combination of propulsive rhythms with a warm vibe resonated with both house and techno DJs, and especially tastemakers like New York's Francois K. Brikha admits his influences--ranging from Jean Michel Jarre, Depeche Mode, and Front 242 through to Michael Jackson-don't add up to his output, but it's possible that he was appreciating these sounds differently. "I always find when people listen to electronic stuff they just hear some cold sounds and atmosphere. I just hear this warmth." And the funny thing is, he has made efforts to change. "Sometimes I'll start with something harder but like 99% of the time it ends up with me adding string pads and stuff and eventually I just take away the harder things," Brikha laughs. "One of my favorite hard tracks is 'Black Sea' from Drexciya. It begins as a hard track with distorted analog sounds, and then you have the strings come in and the whole song just changes. That's what I want to have: a beat, a groove with energy, and then I want to have warm sounds flood in. I like to spend my time working with string chords anyway, instead of making hard compressed beats." Aril Brikha's Deeparture In Time is out now on CD via Transmat; it will be released as 3 separate vinyl EPs soon.
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