A beautifully ECLECTIC JOURNEY FROM a SCENE STALWART

One of the scene’s most revered house music producers, UK aficionado Shur-i-kan steps up for Lazydaze mix #31 with a stunning mix full of original productions.

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How did you decide to approach your mix? Was there a concept behind it? I rarely do mixes for other channels outside my own, for no special reason other than I don’t have much time. I took this one on though because it was a downbeat channel - which allowed me to go outside the more housey genres that I normally feature on my own show.

My own show has been going for over ten years so it’s fairly easy for me to make now. I just find new deep house tracks released the last month, or pick from the hundreds I get sent via promos and try to blend them together nicely. With this mix I could have taken a similar approach, but it was quite a hard task to know even where to start with such a selection. I listen to a lot of downtempo, but I don’t regularly curate it, so I didn’t have those selection chops ready. So I wondered if I could just create a mix using completely my own tracks. Turns out I’ve been quite a prolific producer over the years so maybe I was showing off a little also! 

Are there any particularly special tracks or moments in there for you? You’re asking me to pick from my babies, that’s not fair! Ok, so ‘Beach Life’ is quite a special track I think - it’s just got that vibe. Hard to pinpoint what it is, but you know it when you hear it. The other interesting one is ‘Improv With Bill’. I’m a piano player by training with a background in jazz. In this track, the background piano is a sample of Bill Evans looped and I just improvised over the top. You could argue it's a bit cheeky to play over a legend like Evans, but I think it works out quite well - it’s a different take of his take of the original recording.  I like the improvised, spontaneous nature of these types of compositions, as it avoids me getting stuck in an endless cycle of revisions.

You released an album this year Points Of Focus which has quite a few non-dance floor moments in it – some ambient and downtempo. What made you decide to take this approach? I’m best known for house music but have produced hip-hop, downtempo and even film music. A lot of these alternative tracks don’t always get released because they don’t fit within the traditional single/EP format. I had a couple of aborted attempts to create an album, but labels just expect everything to be quite one-dimensional in terms of content. I understand why, but it was a little frustrating.

Anyway I got tired of having them gathering dust on my hard drive, so I wondered if I could mix some of them together to make them more than the sum of their parts. I then put it out on my own label. Turns out it worked really well. I really enjoy listening to them and the feedback has been great. Perhaps in these Covid years people are responding more to ‘listening music’.

You’ve seen and experienced the music industry drastically change across your career. What’s it like being a dance music producer in 2021? It’s not changed that much fundamentally - people still write music in their home studios on computers, play it to their mates, bung it out on a label and hopefully do some nice gigs. The main difference is that due to the nature of social media, artists are under a lot of pressure to constantly publish content to satisfy the algorithms. This has suited artists that are photogenic, very chatty or happy to spend a lot of time creating content. I do feel personally that this has distracted somewhat from the core business of making great music and contributed instead to the general noise level of modern society. But I don’t resent it, I’m happy to play the game a little. I'm lucky in that I already built up a reputation over the years that I can leverage and I’m not dependent on the ‘biz’ to make a living, so I can pick and choose a bit more.

Do you still DJ? What other work are you involved in outside of music? Well not in the last year or so for obvious reasons, but I’ve not officially retired from DJing. I still enjoy it. However I made a conscious decision a few years ago to radically reduce my international travel commitments in order to reduce my carbon emissions. So now I consider very carefully before travelling anywhere by air. It’s possibly a bit late considering all the flights I took in previous years, but I’ve got to act where I can. Also I have other responsibilities - I’m a tech company co-founder and at the height of Covid became a Dad, so I’m not short on things to do!

What’s your all time favourite chill out album? The one you always go back to? Hard choice. For deep chill I guess anything by Brian Eno is perfect for ultimate zen. Music For Installations is on my Spotify playlist when I want to concentrate on tasks. Outside of that, probably Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works as the archetypal chill-out album of that generation. Love that cassette sound!

What’s coming up for you in the future? Anything you’d like to share? It’s back to house music for a bit. I have a vinyl EP out on July 23 on Fred Everything’s Lazy Days label entitled Life, Beats and Strings and then I’ve also teamed up with my old friend Milton Jackson for a new EP on Freerange in the summer. They are both strong releases so I’m excited about that and just happy to be back in the saddle!