By: Tony Price
Ron Morelli is the founder of L.I.E.S. Records, a label that has arguably done more than any other in the last decade to shift underground dance and electronic music back towards their crude, elemental sonic and aesthetic foundations. Ron is also an accomplished DJ and producer in his own right, having released records under various pseudonyms on labels like Hospital Productions, Draconian Steps, and Collapsing Market while playing all over the world. After releasing my own album, IBM CONTRA on L.I.E.S. Records this summer, I caught up with him for this long, in-depth interview where we talk about the label’s New York roots, the death of subculture, contemporary listening habits and music consumerism, cameras facing the DJ booth, his creative habits, the stone cold reality of art’s place and function within modern life and much more.
TP: You’ve lived in Paris for a while now – how important do you think location is to someone who is an artist or a DJ at this point?
RM: As an artist I think you can live wherever the fuck you want to live. It doesn’t matter where you live. As a DJ, from the touring aspect of it, you want to be in it, you want to have it be where, in my opinion, things are happening and it’s convenient. If you’re in North America, you don’t want to be doing these long tours, long international flights every two weeks, that would just break you apart. But I’ll say all this: with regards to the label, the label would be nothing if it wasn’t for my location, where I came from, which is New York City. The label would not exist if I wasn’t at that place at that time. This label came together in an organic fashion, simply, and I’ve said this a gazillion times, with a group of friends that were around. I ended up putting a label together and putting out these individuals’ music, and inadvertently a crew was formed, for lack of better words. It was unintentional. In the end, it ended up being a document of that time period, which is very important because at that time, there wasn’t so much happening in New York, as far as things that I was interested in, and that’s the real important part of why the label came together, because I didn’t like what was around. Nothing really spoke to me. There wasn’t anything I was interested in at the time. Of course there were things happening, but to me it didn’t completely represent what I was interested in. Again, right place right time – we had this crew of people that were all really into music for a really, really long time, and then at the time the stars aligned and I wanted to do a label again, boom, that happened, got the momentum, kept it going, kept it going, the crew gets bigger, time goes by, one club opens, something else happens, warehouses open, and then next thing you know, you have this scene happening. Again, no plans, no agents, no lofty ideas of touring the world or anything – the only goal was to put out some records and see what happens with that, and DJ around the city, and if some other gigs come up you get to go down to Philly or to Detroit or wherever, but it was just very grassroots if you will. As far as location, for me, yeah, that’s really important, but I think for people, at this point, the world doesn’t need another record label. Shit’s useless. Right?
TP: How so?
RM: It doesn’t need a record label. Just, why? Why. No one needs that. But if you live in like Indiana, middle America, and you’ve got some crew there that’s doing some wild stuff, then by all means make a document of that, because that is important. For me, these big city record labels that are just putting out stuff to gain clout and to do things for the sake of doing it, that’s just a waste of space. If you actually have a goal and you’re documenting the local scene, that’s what record labels are for. Record labels are for documenting local scenes, that’s what they serve to do. Whether you look at Factory Records, you look at Dischord Records, you look at Vermiform Records, you look at Touch And Go Records…
TP: Trax!
RM: Trax Records, those are documenting local music at the time.
TP: You said you started the label because there was nothing around you in New York at that time that resonated with you musically. Did you find that once you started the label you may have created a scene out of or around L.I.E.S.? Did you start to feel better about the music around you once you started the label in New York?
RM: Definitely. People came out of the woodwork. I wouldn’t say after that the music got better, but I think other people were like, oh, I could do that. And then they did whatever their version would have been of that afterwards. “This guy got his crew together and put out all this stuff? Ok, well now I’m going to do it.” You could see people doing their little things and what have you. That’s just natural progression. It did motivate some people that were close to us to get some shit done. And they know that if they finished something then I’d probably be willing to work with them.
TP: Do you still see L.I.E.S. as being a New York label?
RM: The attitude is. Obviously the artist roster isn’t, even though I always try to work with some New York artists. The long and the short of it is, I’m not super interested in a lot of the music coming out of New York right now. There IS some cool stuff happening, it’s just not completely what I’m motivated to put out. It was a strong statement, what we did earlier. Now my interests are a bit different. The attitude is very New York. I’m a New Yorker. It doesn’t matter where I live, I’m still always gonna be a New Yorker. My attitude is that, my mind state is that, the hustle is that. Living there is a dead end.
TP: The first release was like 2010, am I right?
RM: 2010, yeah.
TP: Since then, we’ve experienced a decade of crazy change. I think that the 2010s are gonna do down in history as one of the most insane decades in terms of how day to day living changed. and especially for music. Since then, social media obviously, specifically Instagram, continues to recalibrate every facet of our lives. Within music specifically, streaming became the focal point of the recorded music industry, changing how people interact with music. We saw vinyl production being kicked into overdrive for various reasons. Since 2010, have your intentions for the label changed as a result of these things? Do you feel like maybe there’s a new sense of purpose behind what you are doing? Have things become harder or easier having Instagram to promote an independent label, for instance?
RM: There’s a lot more clutter and noise to go through.
TP: Interesting.
RM: People’s attention spans are shorter than ever. They’re focused on and living in their phones. Everything is a 30 second to one minute clip. It’s absolute ADD stuff. It’s just doomscrolling through life. I don’t think a lot of people are in touch with the physical world so much anymore. Maybe that sounds odd, kind of insane, but they live vicariously through these fuckin’ telephones. It’s voyeuristic.
TP: You can’t really argue that.
RM: Music right now – could it be more unimportant and disposable? It pains me to say that because I’ve been immersed in it since I was a kid, literally. It’s the outlet for me that matters the most. I treat it differently, I think, than your normal consumer, I’m not saying I’m better or worse, I just have a different use and need and viewpoint on it. Music is done, it’s over. There’s a million artists out there, there’s tons of creativity happening. That’s never in question, that’s not the problem. But it’s completely, absolutely disposable entertainment, it really is. It’s kind of like running an ad on daytime tv. Who the fuck watches daytime tv? Nobody. It’s something that just passes by. When you’ve got someone running for senate, they’re running ads on daytime tv. Someone’s grandmother is probably not even watching daytime tv anymore. This stuff, it’s going by the wayside. I mean, A.I. is knocking on your door, on everyone’s door. There’s A.I. programs that can produce a better song than you’ll ever make and that’s gonna sound exactly like you want it to sound, you’ll be like, why did I spend a week working on this track when this fuckin’ robot just made something that’s just like it. People are gonna say that “people are always going to want the human element, the blood, sweat and tears and the story.” The stories aren’t fuckin’ interesting anymore, let’s be honest.
TP: (Laughing) No, they’re not.
RM: Everyone can do it, it’s not 1980, you’re not hearing about the struggle to learn something and make something and being rejected a million different times and living on the street, and this and that and everything else. All that magic, and you know, this is extremely negative, and I hate to say it but it’s the cold truth: all that magic’s gone. It’s not the dawn of disco, it’s not the discovery of Chicago house music and Detroit techno. You’re not walking into Paradise Garage for the first time. You’re not going to see Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. Sure, Justin Bieber might be someone’s Black Sabbath in some demented form. Everything means something different to someone else – it’s not going to mean the same thing to me as someone else. But it’s really just over. The creativity is over. Again, people are making things, but there’s no value anymore. There’s no value in them. If I drop off the face of this earth tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. What I do is insignificant. There’s someone that’s going to take my place that’s equally unimportant that wants to take the place that I’m in. And then they’ll go away. And so on, and so forth. But these aren’t important figures. None of these people are important figures. There are very few. Very, very few. Music is just the most beautiful thing, and it’s a very bastardized thing, like every other type of art where the industries have all eaten themselves. The politics – don’t even get me started – the politics have destroyed all art, whether it’s fuckin’ painting, movies, going to the opera, it’s all destroyed. It’s a painful, slow death, and we’re all kind of living in ignorance, in this fantasy world. That’s not to say we shouldn’t always make our own world, and fuck everyone else, because that’s what I’ve been doing, what I think you’ve been doing, since the beginning. No matter what, it’s always gonna happen like that, but it's not really important.
TP: To all of the points you make, I just read this book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor”. It focuses on everything that was happening in music in New York in the early 80s, and the author makes a good point, something that people just don’t think about – that around that time, when Paradise Garage was just THE place to be for certain people, for instance – this was a time when a lot of people didn’t even have answering machines, so to the social element of lives collectively depended on physically exiting your house and finding something, finding out what’s happening. People were coming together around things like music, coming together on a dancefloor, coming together at movie theatres, and you made that point about doomscrolling through life – I think that one of the big things at the core of this “death of culture” that we’re talking about is that we don’t congregate physically around things, places or events. Music, art and ideas only exist to exist as “Content”. I can’t even count The amount of people I work with in music that have said something along the lines of “I don’t know what the point of this is, all of this work so that someone can hear a fifteen second clip while scrolling Instagram?”. As a music fan yourself, how have your listening habits changed? Do you find yourself engaging with music way differently than you were in the 2000s or early 2010s?
RM: If anything, I’m consuming more and more music than I was back then, I would think.
TP: Interesting. Do you use streaming services when you’re out walking or taking transit or something like that or if you’re flying?
RM: I very rarely listen to music through my telephone, if ever, so I don’t have any music on there. Occasionally I’ll listen to mixes when I’m at the gym on Soundcloud. Usually on my headphones I’ll listen to talk radio podcasts and shit. I’m buying records all the time still, a lot of old stuff, also new stuff. It’s almost dangerous because there’s even so much more access now than there was in 2010. I can almost get everything I want. I mean, obviously you’re always one click away if you wanna get something from Discogs, that’s been true for quite some time. But I’m always listening to stuff, that’s my job, to be on top of checking out music and listening to music and finding cool stuff and finding stuff that’s impressive to me. That’s the entire thing. I love doing it.
TP: How do you feel about digital-only releases? Do you feel that a physical release truly legitimizes a project, or is that less important than it once was?
RM: For me personally, if I just did an album and I think it’s an amazing album and we’re like “okay, we’re just going to release it digitally”, I’m not gonna be okay with that. I want the product, I want it to be in the stores, I wanna see it on the wall, I wanna open the shrink wrap, I wanna hold it. But that’s me. Also though, it says something because there is a financial commitment to the music by somebody else that’s not you that says “okay, you made this music, we’re gonna take the time and money to promote it and to put our ass on the line to make sure it gets out there to people.” It is what it is, but it is saying something. I’m not dissing digital-only releases, either, but anyone can do it, and the quality control suffers. I see a lot of these artists, they put every track they make out digitally. Okay, just because you made it doesn’t mean it’s good! A lot of these people are up their own ass. They think everything they touch turns to gold. Most of this shit is trash. Like a photographer, how many shots in an entire roll are good? What are there thirty or twenty-four in a roll, and if you’re really good, maybe you’ll get five, six timeless shots. Maybe, if you’re lucky. With tracks, ok, some motherfuckers are REAL good, and they got a good hit rate, but most people, it’s like, you shouldn’t be putting out every track you make, or every other track, or every third track. Maybe every eighth or tenth track you do is gonna be dope. That’s the problem I see with digital, it’s just a lot of people fawning all over themselves. It doesn’t need to all be there. After that, it’s a preference. I don’t expect some kid that’s eighteen years old to want to put out a record. It’s an archaic thing that they’re not even familiar with. Unless they have like weird parents that shoved it down their throats and they’ve become these weird vinyl people. I’ve seen people like that and it’s very disturbing. I once saw a seven- or eight-year-old kid in the record store with his father. It was unhealthy, man, I dunno. He was like pointing out J. Dilla records, talking about vinyl and stuff and like, this kid’s not gonna have a healthy life ahead of him.
TP: (Laughing) So what role do you think that vinyl plays in electronic or dance music culture in general now? Do you find that people buy t-shirts and records for the same reason, just to buy something associated with a label or an artist? Or do you find that people still purchase records for their intended purpose, to be played on dancefloors by DJs, or to listen to them at home?
RM: No, I do think that some people like sitting at home listening to records, and I do believe that people that buy the records are listening to them at their house. I don’t think the working DJs, me as a working DJ, I don’t need to own – occasionally I’m buying a techno LP, I gotta really love it to want to have it around. I don’t need techno LPs. I just don’t, you know? I’ll buy the digital and play it out. There are DJs that are out playing wax and thank god for them. There’s not many, but thank god for them.
TP: Do you do it often or at all these days?
RM: Very, very, very rarely.
TP: You played in bands in the past and you’ve been a DJ for a while. How do you feel that nightlife or dancefloors have changed since smartphones infiltrated people’s lives? Have you noticed a difference in these environments in the past 15 years?
RM: It’s everything, it’s the world of entertainment, it’s life. Everyone wants to say they were there, they had this steak at this restaurant, they got on this plane, they were at that gig. They were at this festival. It’s the culture that has changed. It’s not the dancefloor in particular or dance music in particular, it’s culture. Everything has just gone to total shit. People want to document their fuckin’ lunch, they wanna document their trips. Again, I’m no better or worse than anyone else. I’m guilty of getting caught up in this on occasion. I try not to. Unfortunately, part of my job is promoting the record label, and part of that is being online, which if I had it my way, I’d never do it, ever, but I don’t have it like that so unfortunately, it’s how it is. It’s culture, it’s everything. Sporting events – we’re not ever going to get away from this. Unless, where they have these certain things at comedy shows where you go to see, like, Dave Chapelle, they make you lock up your phone, or you go to see Joe Rogan, you’re not allowed to bring your phones in. I think it’s a good idea. I don’t think you should have the phones. The Misfits did a reunion show – you gotta lock up the phone. I like that, I think there should be more of that.
TP: What do you think of cameras in DJ culture? The sort of “Boiler Room Effect” and how that’s changed this job, or this culture?
RM: I don’t understand why anyone needs to even see the DJ. I don’t give a fuck what the DJ looks like. I don’t care if they’re fat, short, tall, skinny, Black, white, Asian, gay, straight, trans, astronaut, whatever – none of that shit matters to me. I don’t give a fuck about the person playing the music. I care about the music being played, and that’s the issue. The camera puts the focus on the image of the person playing. I don’t care about that. That’s irrelevant to me. The DJ should be heard, not seen. That’s why I like radio. I listen to radio mixes from the 80s. There’s a mystique behind it. There’s the DJ on the radio, the station DJ, the host, saying “This is Tony Humphries, blah, blah, blah”, you know the name, you know Red Alert, whatever, you know the names, but you don’t know what they look like, you don’t know where they come from, you know, whatever it is, there is a mystique behind it, and that mystique is gone. It’s not special. The focus is on what the person looks like, what they’re wearing, all this stuff, it’s irrelevant. It’s absolutely irrelevant. When I was young, I didn’t go to that many clubs, but we’d go to the roller rink – the DJ’s far up high in the sky. You can’t even see him. It’s like the man behind the curtain. You don’t know who it is, or what they’re doing, it's just magic. The only time it’s legitimate to want to see the DJ is if it’s some crazy scratch DJ, if that’s what you’re into. Okay, then you want to see them doing their tricks and it’s a performance. DJing is not a performance. DJing is playing other people’s music in succession, and you’re making those tracks sound good next to each other and playing them at the right time to work the crowd. That’s what DJing is. It should have nothing to do with the DJ’s identity, at all.
TP: Agreed,one hundred percent.
RM: It’s unimportant. But the way the world works now, it’s all about that. They’re jumping around, and they’re wearing this cool thing, and they’re doing this and they’re doing that. I don’t give a fuck about that. Are they beating it? That’s the question. Do they beat the tracks? Are they sick? That’s it.
TP: If you listen to an old WBMX house mix, you’ll hear wild acid tracks and 909 beatdowns next to a song by Teddy Pendergrass or New Order. What do you think about playing “hits” in the middle of a set? Is this something that you feel is important to the lineage of dance music, playing shit that’s just completely crazy, fresh or obscure and then you dropping in crazy popular disco tracks that people know? What do you think about this type of thing at this point in time?
RM: Well, it all depends on the context. A hit is a hit for a reason and it’s dope for a reason. I have nothing against that whatsoever. I wanna hear Robert Owen’s “I’ll Be Your Friend”. I wanna hear that. You’re never gonna be mad if you hear Arnold Jarvis “Take Some Time Out”. You’re never gonna be upset to hear any of that type of stuff. You’re crazy if you are. That shit is dope for a reason. How can you hate on that? You can’t.
TP: You seem to be a big hip-hop fan. Growing up, my parents were huge into freestyle, and it was big in Toronto. My mom had all these tapes of recorded radio shows from Buffalo and Toronto and there was a huge crossover between hip-hop, electro, freestyle, and house. I feel like the connection between hip-hop and house music, for instance, or just dance music in general is something that people tend toneglect. I’ve heard people be like, “Wow, I’ve just heard a Rick Rubin production on a Run-DMC record, I didn’t know that they used drum machines like that!” Do you find that there’s a lack of recognition of how tied together these things are? Do people turn their noses at hip-hop in the house-contemporary-dance-music world or underground electronic music world? Do you find that?
RM: I think at this point there’s no connection between, say, the house music that we’re into and what’s popular in modern hip-hop, even though a bunch of house songs have been sampled in the last ten years by the likes of Kanye West, with him sampling Mr. Fingers and working with Daft Punk and shit like that or that Pitbull song with the Nightcrawlers sample in it, but the connection is weak. Back in the day they were playing hip-hop and dancehall and house all in the same room. It was all dance music, hip-hop was dance music.
TP: One hundred percent.
RM: You look at all those old records, a lot of them had the house mixes on them. If you look at T La Rock records, EPMD the Jungle Brothers. It was one and the same. It was also another way to make money because you could make real money back then with that kind of stuff. It was intertwined. You look at Fresh Records, that’s a perfect example. There is a ton of house music on Fresh Records. It’s all the same. It’s all dance music. It’s New York. These days, I don’t really know. I see a lot of people playing – DJs playing modern hip-hop and reggaeton all together, that’s not my thing. Maybe it’s a new way of connecting things. Maybe that’s the new version of it. I don’t connect with that music personally, it’s not my thing, but I’m not ignorant to what’s going on so I do see it and hear it. It’s just not interesting to me. But that could be like the modern version of it, of people connecting what hip-hop is now and what dance music is now. There is probably a crossover, somewhat. But the sonics are absolutely different.
TP: The next few questions are from a label perspective. There seems to be this heightened obsession with “The Hustle” within music culture. Every single time I go on YouTube or Instagram, there’s all these embedded videos called, like, “How To Get Your Music Heard” or “How To Promote Yourself as a Producer”, blah, blah, blah. And I recall reading an interview with you saying something like, “This label has a closed-door policy, no demos”, that kind of thing. Do you receive a lot of unsolicited demos, and do you listen to them? Do you ever find gems?
RM: I never listen to unsolicited demos, ever.
TP: Interesting.
RM: Through all the years, I’ve probably listened to less than ten. It’s not the way the label works.
TP: It’s usually a recommendation from someone?
RM: Any time, and I’ve said this before, I like to work with people I know. The few times I have worked with people I didn’t really know, it always ended up blowing up in my face.
TP: I’m interested in Tom Carruthers and myself. How did you come across Tom? Also, I handed you that record when I saw you playing across the street from where I was living at the time in New York. I’m curious, why did you listen to that record? Was there something about the gesture? Was it the fact that the vinyl was in your hands? I’m curious about those two things. Both Tom and I weren’t in your social circle or even in your touring circuit type of thing. I’m just curious about those two specific instances.
RM: Right, well, you gave me that record, and I’ve been given many records at gigs, and, you know, put them aside for lack of better words. But the packaging on it was really interesting to me. It looked really cool. I think it was the list of instruments that were used on it. I was like, let me put this on, and I did, and it was an extreme surprise. I couldn’t believe how good it was. And that’s a very, very rare occasion. And this was years ago, at this point, it must have been five years ago, easily. The thing with Tom, I just discovered his music randomly. I was doing my research, clicking around, finding stuff, and I was like, what the fuck is this guy doing. There was just so much music, and I was like, this guy, who the fuck is this kid? What the hell is he doing? And I just had to get in touch with him. And it was a risk, I’ll admit. I rarely do that. It’s a rare, rare occasion where I do that with someone that’s a complete stranger, but it was just so good, and there was so much of it, and there was a part of me that was like, I don’t wanna see this kid make a mistake with this stuff, either. Not to say that putting out a record with me is the best fuckin’ thing in the world you can do, because it’s really not, at all, but I was like, maybe I can help this guy get it to the right audience, that’s all I really wanted to do, and help him not have the music fall into the wrong hands and go by the wayside, which it easily could have. This guy is clearly just a studio-head. He’s just rockin’ in the studio.
TP: All day.
RM: And when you’re a studio-head like that, you’re not focused on the other end, which is great. You’re not thinking about how to get it out there. But it’s also the dangerous part, too.
TP: Do you have a studio-head side of you for your music and your projects? Do you find that you have a lot of gear and you like to hole up in the studio and not be bothered for hours at a time?
RM: It’s the best time for me, ever. It’s the only time I can be at peace. It’s then, and even though I don’t like flying, when I have to take a flight and just cut off from everything, these are the only times I can find peace, ever. It’s like in the studio, working, hours on end, focused, no fuckin’ phone in the room, no emails being checked, just working. And that’s how I clear my head. Even when I’m at the gym, my phone’s going off. Even when I’m out running, the fuckin’ phones goin’ off, I’m listening to a podcast, and the texts are coming in, and it’s a distraction. It takes your mind away from exactly where it needs to be. You don’t need to have the fuckin’ phone next to you. It’s a double-edged sword. My best days in the studio are the days where everything else in my life falls by the wayside.
TP: A lot of your releases have this spontaneous, improvisatory feel. “Betting on Death”, “Man Walks the Earth”, and “Circus of Death” they almost feel jazzy, like music that is unwinding before me, and I’m listening to it as it’s being made. Does that tie into what you’re saying? Is improvisation and spontaneity linked to “being in the zone” in your creative process? Does this question make sense? (Laughing)
RM: Yeah, yeah, man, yeah it makes sense. The process of “Man Walks the Earth” and “Betting on Death” and then, say doing like, house tracks, is totally different, obviously. The “Betting on Death” stuff is like ear candy for me. When I go in, there’s no pressure to do anything. There’s an idea, and then just like, okay I’m gonna use these pieces of gear, I’m gonna do this, what’s gonna happen is gonna happen. Obviously, there is some sort of goal, but for me, working in that format, there’s zero pressure, which is great, it’s what you want. When I’m making a “dance” track, even those are those are really loose.
TP: They’re kind of free-wheeling and spontaneous, definitely.
RM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what those were. But then “Man Walks the Earth”, that was a huge, long process behind that. Those songs were made for a live performance, they were just sitting around. This guy from a label heard the stuff when I performed them live once. He was asking me what I was doing with them. They weren’t really structured – not that they’re structured now – but I did have to go back and do some editing of it, because they were just really long, long things. Something like “Betting on Death” – those things were long-form things, each cassette is one hundred and twenty minutes long, somewhere along those lines. That’s just candy for me, man. Fun and easy and you’re just kind of impressing yourself, like, oh that sounds sick, that sounds sick. If I’m making a dance track, I’m like, okay, boom boom boom, here we go, everything’s sounding good, okay let’s do it. “Betting on Death” is just texture. It doesn’t need to go anywhere. I’m not in that world, I’m not from that world, I’m not proving anything to that world. That shit’s for me. It’s really cool to be able to work with no pressure. At this stage of the game when I’m trying to make dance tracks, I’m trying to make something that’s good, that’s going to work. First and foremost, that I like, that’s number one. But also like, okay, I want this shit to fuckin’ slam, too.
TP: L.I.E.S. has a specific visual aesthetic. Having worked on a couple of things with you now, my new album, Benedek’s album cover and some other graphics stuff, there’s always an insistence on simplicity, Why is that?
RM: It’s all I know, man.
TP: Do you find that it speaks louder?
RM: This is for the people, man. This is something the people can understand, this isn’t high art. If you want high art, you’ve come to the wrong place. This conceptual stuff – it’s not me. Obviously, there’s something behind it, this isn’t some blind thing, but I’m not gonna try to front. We’re working in true and tried form here and I’m continuing the tradition of that. I’m not saying we’re changing the wheel, we’re not changing the face of anything, we do our thing, I always try to do my thing and I want people to be able to feel it and relate to it.
TP: To communicate, yeah.
RM: That’s why the 12” labels have stayed the same – it’s simple and identifiable. It’s pedestrian. It’s like Trax records. You know what it is, you’re gonna be curious by it, you might not like everything, but there’s something there that makes you go, “I’m gonna pop this on.” And that’s just the attitude I have about it. Of the people, that can make it complicated for you. I’m not gonna make it complicated for you.
TP: What do you think of the “retro aesthetics” that seem to permeate through so much of culture? People are really obsessed with doing things that channel or replicate the past. I’m guilty of that, because I love that shit, but I’m sure you empathize with it too. But what do you think of that? Do you find that it stops people from progressing or do you not care?
RM: I don’t care. I don’t think it stops anyone from progressing. You shouldn’t live in the past. Your mind shouldn’t stagnate. You’re never gonna replicate the past. You’re never, ever going to do that. You’re never going to be able to do something as good as that stuff either. Talking about, like, dance music stuff. It’s what you wanna do, and it's what you’re concerned with. There’re tons of 80s sounding house records that come out that just suck that I’ll never listen to because they didn’t do it good. If you did it better than that, then that’s sick. To me it’s sick that someone can rock with that. The bottom line is the scene these days, they forget about the old stuff. They forget this stuff exists. The building blocks. You could go and get the old stuff, but you should also see that there are people still coming out in that spirit, in that tradition, carrying that tradition on. I think that’s somewhat important, not the most important thing. In electronic music, everyone’s always trying to do the future, the future, the future. We have been in the future of electronic music since fuckin’ Cybotron. We were in the future of this shit in ’79, you know what I mean? Kraftwerk was the future, Cybotron was the future, all that stuff was already. It’s there already. It’s what you want to make of it, and how you want to present it, and what your thing is. I don’t see it as dangerous – how many of these rock bands out there, it’s all the same shit forever? They sound like the fuckin’ Kinks or whatever, it's all the same shit. It’s what you take, it’s how you apply it, it’s the people you surround yourself with and how you present it.
TP: I’ve seen the L.I.E.S. logo and aesthetic copied, channeled, or even ripped off many times. How do you feel about that?
RM: I mean, isn’t the saying imitation is the highest form of flattery? I dunno, there’s only one, you know what I’m saying?
TP: It all leads back to it, right?
RM: There’s only one. You can do what you’re gonna do and that’s kind of that. If I get upset about everyone that bit the sound of the label, the style of the label, used the same graphic design style, did this, did that, I’d never sleep at night. It’s fine. That means you’ve actually made a mark.
TP: There seems to be a line or a common thread running all the way from early rock and roll straight through to punk, early industrial music, hardcore, Chicago house, Detroit techno, and the noise scenes that have popped up all over the world since then. There’s a straight line running through a lot of the stuff we both make or are interested in, stuff you’ve released on the label: what would you say it is that unites all of these scenes, sounds and movements? Do you feel that there’s a common thread running through all of this and are we at risk of losing it?
RM: The only thing that’s really uniting all that stuff is the timeframe in which it was made, and the fact that if you wanted to seek it out, you had to really work to seek all that out. There was subculture there. To get to, to discover subculture, pre-internet, was work. You had to discover everything on your own. When you think of music that’s your favourite music, let’s be honest, you’re gonna say 1980 to 1995 or so, whether it’s from industrial music, whether it’s from house, whether it’s from techno, whether it’s punk, whether it’s hardcore, that’s the timeframe that the best of the best was made, hip-hop, you know, all of it. I think it's safe to say that’s a decent, right chunk of time when the pinnacle of all that was: it was subculture. It was underground. It was for freaks. It was not part of mainstream society. Now, everything is therd on your phone. Now everything is there on YouTube. I’m not dissing anyone. The generations now can do whatever they want. They have access to everything. They can choose to use this access that they have to do whatever they want to do. They have access to everything. If you wanted to make music, electronic music, in 1980, you’d have to go and really figure out how to do it. Now, you can download and app and watch a YouTube tutorial and figure shit out. I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s what the youth and the upcoming generations will do with it. It might not be something that you or me is gonna like, or maybe something genius is gonna happen, I don’t really know. I have no faith in anything, so I don’t think anything good is gonna come out of anything, anywhere, at this point. Death is around the corner, definitely. The thing that ties all of that together is the timeframe and that it was true subculture. It’s one and the same, whether it’s punk, house, hip-hop, it’s all subculture. It’s fringe of society music. It is on the outskirts of everything. Now, there’s nothing special about any of this. It’s not magical, it’s not shocking to me. It’s not like seeing a Puerto Rican skinhead stabbing someone at a Sunday matinee in 1992. You’re like, what the fuck is this. It’s all the paradoxes of everything at war. That was magic back then. You were seeing things unfold in front of your eyes and wondering why they were happening, as a youth. The world has changed, the dynamic has changed, luckily enough I caught the tail-end of being able to experience what underground subculture was. The youth is gonna make of it what they will. There’s always going to be something happening somewhere in the world that will be on the fringes that we won’t hear about until years later, anything like that. Now it’s like, all that crazy stuff coming out of Africa and stuff like that, I don’t follow so much of it but some of that stuff is bananas, what’s happened with this crazy African electronic music. I’m not saying African house music, I’m saying this crazy hardcore stuff from the Congo that’s happening. So, yeah, that’s the thing that unites that stuff: it was the evolution and then the de-evolution of the subculture, of the quote unquote underground, whatever that means at this point, which isn’t much. There’s no underground. There IS an underground, but there’s not.
TP: That’s a very interesting answer.
RM: It’s not important. You’re not seeing Swans for the first time. It’s just not important.
TP: It doesn’t have the same meaning to a collective of people.
RM: It’s a given.
TP: I heard someone say once that we now live in a time where acts of terror have replaced art as the thing that unites us. People used to gather around and listen to the new record by the Beatles and talk about it on the streets – art used to unite people in that way. Now we all unite around TVs when we see mass shootings and shit like that. It’s interesting and there’s a bit of truth to that, our collective focus is no longer on art, it’s on other things.
RM: Yeah, I mean, I guess really it is more about human survival in the modern world more than anything, it’s true. Other stuff is meaningless, it’s just gonna phase the fuck out. People are complaining about all this fast, vulgar techno, like, is that what you’re really worried about? This is not what’s keeping me awake at night. What keeps me awake at night is that ANTIFA’s gonna burn down my street or something.
TP: (Laughing) Exactly, yeah.
RM: Or there’s gonna be no clean water left, or where am I gonna go when all hell breaks loose the next time? Y’know, I don’t give a shit. It’s not important. This world of music that we’re in – it’s smalltime shit. That’s one thing I would like to really, really stress: this is smalltime shit. It’s a drop in the pond comparatively to culture in the world and what the fuck is happening every-fucking-were. It’s meaningless. Wow, you made a good house track. Great. Wow, you made a shitty house track. Great. Who does it really matter to except you and a couple hundred other people? You’re not fucking Robert DeNiro, you’re not the leader of ISIS, you have no fame, you’re a nobody, you’re a shitty fucking DJ and a shitty producer who’s just doing shit in your basement. And you know what? It should stay that way. That’s what it should be.
TP: And there’s nothing wrong with that. We just gotta come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to just be that. That’s a very valid and arguably important thing to be. Do you think Larry Heard was thinking about his upcoming cover on some DJ magazine in 1983 when he was in his basement making tracks? No, he was just doing the act in the moment.
RM: Exactly. That’s really what’s missing, doing the act in the moment. And when you do, rarely, see people doing it, and who understand it, and get it, then you have like one percent hope, maybe, for something. But generally speaking, it’s all premeditated shit.
Ron Morelli’s new promo 12” “Ron’s Torture” is out now on L.I.E.S. Records. His new “Heart Stopper” LP is due next spring on L.I.E.S.