Interview – Elite Force
Eighteen years is a long time in the electronic music world, but for Elite Force, one of the unquestionable kings of the beat, the time has been more than well spent.
Constantly evolving his craft and forever diversifying into different areas of production, Elite Force has over the years managed to stay at the top of his game by constantly exploring the variable patterns of change within electronic music, and his love for the journey works in near symbiosis with his over-arching optimism.
“It’s an exciting field to be in,” he remarks, reminiscing. “Over those eighteen years the evolution has been constant, really, no more so than at the moment with the change in the way that people are buying their music. There’s always something around the corner to keep you on your toes and to keep you interested.”
For Elite Force, however, there has also been a noticeable shift in recent times in the way in which artists project themselves to the world, due to the change in the accessibility of both the music, as well as production tools for artists, and this also has had an effect on why he has pushed himself so hard to stay focused. “In the last few years it’s gone from production almost subsiding your partying and DJing on the weekends to DJing almost subsiding your production,” he explains. “It’s really has almost got to that point where you are working to earn money on the weekends in order to pump money into the labels. From that point of view, structurally, it’s quite a major change really. I think the effect that it has had on a lot of peoples production work is probably quite noticeable.”
This change in approach towards music production, and the dearth of music that has been put forward by sub-par artists over the last few years, has done nothing to help the more established artists, and yet, juxtapositionally, it has also helped them to remain on the bleeding edge. “We live in a real fast food culture with music now,” he laments. “Where people kind of buy that new bit of software and they just want it to work out of the box and want that tune out of the box, they don’t want to spend three or four years honing their craft.”
Yet, it is clear that the fast food music culture has also helped artists like Elite Force sustain an image of vastness in relation to their peers, as their flexibility and wealth of knowledge helps them to continually innovate, and his optimism as to the future of the electronic music is noticeable.
“It’s a really good time for producers,” he enthuses. “People like Oliver Huntsman, Radioslave, Basement Twins for example have some great stuff .. there’s dozens and dozens of them out there, producers just ploughing their own furrow really, and just looking for something different.”
Sitting aside his contemporaries, and furtively ploughing his own fields of creativity to match any of them, Elite Force seems un-beholden to any form pigeonholing.
“I’m quite busy doing stuff under a few different aliases at the moment,” he says. “I’ve just done some more twisted kind of house music as Zodiac Cartel which has been doing really well for me. In the last year I released a few mixes under Double Black, which again I just wanted to separate off a bit form Elite Force -just to put my head into a different creative space for when im sitting down making music .. after a while, people know what you do very, very well and there’s a sort of weight of expectation that comes with it that you sound a certain way.” at that, he stops for a moment, perhaps hitting on the crux of the matter and focusing on the real reason why it is that his endeavours are devoured by music lovers across the world.
“As a bit of a magpie of an artist I don’t really like that,” he laughs sardonically. “I just like to sit down and do what I want to do.”
Tags: basement twins, Breakbeat, double black, elite force, oliver huntsman, radioslave, zodiac cartel
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