Prototypes _ Interview With Roebin de Freitas

Around the time of the ‘Nobody..’ album.. you said that you were tired of shit artwork and some of the baggage that comes with being involved with a label. You hadn’t been making music for a while before that.. so was that whole process good preparation for a bigger project?

That’s maybe the reason why my relationship with Rednox came at precisely the right time. I had finished the double CD and still had lots of tracks ready to go. That and the fact that I didn’t really want to contact loads of labels and play the waiting game made me push forward.

It took us just over a year from deciding to work together and having the first record in our hands. As I said, we push artists and that’s exactly what we did with Stanislav Tolkachev. And to be frank, that’s what he did with us as well. But it was worth it and we’ll never doubt for a second to postpone a release until we get things exactly right.

We had a mix from Derrick / Derlich the other week. He was telling us about Unit 81. You guys did a remix for your own EP on Singularity. How self-indulgent is that on a scale of 1 to 10? Haha

Voidloss asked me if there was an artist from the Singularity family I wanted to remix one of my tracks on the release. There were a few. That’s why I wanted to be on the label in the first place. The kind of artists, the way it’s presented, it all fits nicely together (or should I say dauntingly). Singularity certainly was on my short list of labels I wanted to release on.

Derlich was one of them and sent me a rough and basic remix of one of the tracks in his typical style. It really made me want to start working with him more and more. I put some acidic lines on top of his structure and put in a breakdown. Some editing later we were both really pleased with the result.

We don’t care if it’s viewed as self-indulgent.

It’s fine. Just would hate Wunderground to investigate you, thats all 😀

Have you known Derrick long? How do you find working with him?

I got to know Derrick through his music. Here was this guy making this signature industrial techno and turned out to be Belgian. This is a small country, especially when you think this country has two lingual communities so the Dutch speaking techno community in itself is really small. I thought I knew most of the people involved from going out or talking to online at least at one point in time. So I really felt the need to connect with him and we started talking about all sorts of stuff. After a while we felt ready to start making music together. It all seemed as a natural progression.

We’ve had a couple of jam sessions where we actually sit together and those are very hypnotic affairs. Last jam was about 4,5hrs of Derlich’s industrial rawness and me tagging along with my Sherman filterbank in a nice chain of effects. There’s the feeling we can get a full EP out of every session so in that sense it’s a fast method.

But then comes the tedious task of editing. It’s also the time where I start interfering more than during the jam sessions which are more about creating a vibe and setting the big plan. Also we don’t use the same version of Ableton at the moment so we can’t just exchange projects and files the way we need to. That part takes up a lot of time. So in that sense we’re really slow.

Derrick is all about Ableton. He swears by it. I don’t see him using anything else anytime soon and when I hear his music and how it has a unique character I wouldn’t dare trying to persuade him of the opposite. Although I would bet a fair amount of money he’ll be buying a Sherman soon. That machine has Derlich written all over it

Anyway it’s a good idea to let the initial adrenaline pump of the jam session rest for a while so the sounds can mature.