One of the biggest names in electronic music and a founding member of the Pretty Lights Label, Michal Menert, is set to release a new studio album entitled “Space Jazz” in early November.
One of the biggest names in electronic music and a founding member of the Pretty Lights Label, Michal Menert, is set to release a new studio album entitled “Space Jazz” in early November. Menert is currently touring behind this planned release on a strenuous three-month tour.
Menert found a few production spots on records early on in his career as a producer, but broke out onto the scene with a solo album in 2010 with Dreaming of a Bigger Life. With his funky sound and vibrant live shows he quickly came up through the ranks of the electronic world. Last year, Menert released his sophomore album Even If it Isn’t Right.
Music has helped Menert find success and it has truly become his life, but he says it started out as something much similar early on when he was a kid. “Music was kind of the one thing that I related to. I didn’t relate to people very well. And [music] created a deep form of conversation between me and the rest of the world,” said Menert. ““Music became a great tool to get my point across when I didn’t feel like I could do it just by talking. There is a whole lot of emotion that can be brought out – especially with instrumental music ”
Now, when Menert is looking for music to draw from he often looks to those same albums he connected with from his childhood. “I still listen to a lot of that stuff. A lot of the polish music my dad played around the house, that’s the same stuff I look for now,” the stuff he looks for to sample in the multilayer and vibrantly textured works that he now produces.
“I actually just got back from a trip to Poland and got about 50 or 60 records of stuff that I’ve been looking for awhile,” Menert said. “I found the digital versions and whatnot, but I just wanted to have that actual physical record. I don’t know I guess it’s kind of a ritualistic thing, finding the record. You go through a quest to find a record and you feel better for sampling it because you’ve been waiting for two years to have it by the time you might find it.”
For Menert collecting vinyl is not simply a hobby, it’s a itch that he has to scratch. He estimates his vinyl collection to be anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 strong.
“There are a lot of records [I] sample because they end up resonating with me for another reason. Songs that hit you and you say ‘ah man this is an amazing song.’ A lot of times what’s cool is you find those little moments like a little interlude or a two-minute instrumental part on an other wise horrible record,” Menert laughed. “It’ll be a record from the late seventies, or early eighties and the rest of it is just reaching and trying to be a record of that time, which it’s clearly not. But there are a few songs or a few moments where you’re just like ‘man the artist is really being themselves and it sounds amazing.’ I guess those records are the ones that I’m most excited about.”
The records that truly shine through when listening to a Michal Menert production are the funk records. There is a futuristic funk aesthetic at play in much of Menert’s music and he says a lot of that comes being drawn in by the groove of funk when he was younger. “Listening to James Brown early… My guitar teacher gave my three James Brown records and was like ‘these will change your world’.”
“I remember learning how to play guitar, I took lessons for a couple of months, and I never really wanted to learn how to solo. It was funny, I was 12 or 13 years old and I just wanted to learn how to play grooves, like what the Red Hot Chili Peppers were doing at the time and like what was in the background of a lot of hip-hop.”
This groove oriented, more subtle side has stayed with Menert, and is likely what helped to separate him in the vast world of what is Electronic Dance Music (EDM), a scene, Menert says, which is still in it’s “formative stages.”
“It’s cool,” Menert said. “Because there’s a solidarity, but at the same time people kind of lumped it all together. It’s cool that there is solidarity, but at the same time there are distinct genres and subgenres in what has been called one genre or one movement. I think more will come to light when people realize ‘oh wait, an EMD show doesn’t always just have to be about bass, and glitter, and glow sticks’.
This is a lesson that might be hard to swallow for much of the cult followers within the EDM scene, take away their candies and hula-hoops and you might just find yourself on a slippery slope towards a bad candy flipping incident. Nonetheless Menert is looking forward to his show in Richmond.
“I like Richmond. I’ve played at the Hat Factory, The National, The Canal Club. It’s a cool town… Virginia is a place that I went early on in my career when I was first getting shows outside of Colorado. It’s a cool spot to be, the kids there get pretty wild, the beers there are cheaper,” Menert said jokingly.
Cheap bear and some funky music, what more could you really ask for out of a night? Menert will be playing the Canal Club on October 10th. For more info visit his website
