2009’s ‘it boy’ for electro has been called the next Deadmau5 with tracks consistently dominating charts and dancefloors and yet, for the first year of his existence, no one knew who he was. When Wolfgang Gartner finally unmasked himself as prolific deep house producer and Fetish Recordings honcho Joey Youngman the entire dance community was understandably surprised. What has come as an even bigger surprise is that as the Wolfgang alter-ego has gotten infinitely more attention, Joey has decided to retire the Youngman sound and name once and for all. His Myspace reads ‘Joey has left the building,’ fan sites for Youngman redirect to Wolfgang’s Myspace page, and thousands who followed his sound for years were suddenly left without an explanation as to why he had suddenly disappeared from the house community. Wolfgang sat down with URB for his first magazine interview about the electro doppelganger and why he decided for such a drastic musical shift while at the top of his game.
What do you attribute to your buzz and notoriety?
It’s all about the music. One thing I’ve realized is that if your music is good enough, you will be rewarded for it even if you don’t have the best promotional and marketing team behind you. There are artists who make good music, but to be honest with you, all of the ones who are unbelievably talented will always blow up at one point or another. I have gotten so many demos in my lifetime and probably less than one percent of those really blew me away. Those artists went on to blow up and have music careers. It always works out. If you’ve got the skills, it will happen. That’s just what my personal observation has been over the years.
And now that the Wolfgang persona has blown up, do you ever envision returning to Joey Youngman?
No. To be honest I’d like to use my real name again at some point, but if I ever go back to using it I will have to be doing that sort of style again to correlate with what I was doing before, and I’m not going back to that style any time soon.
You obviously love the style associated with Joey Youngman – it’s what you started out doing. Don’t you feel any sense of abandon now that you’re doing something completely different?
Actually, very little…not as much as I expected I would. I think the reason is that the more I’ve gotten into this new sound, the more I’ve realized that it’s not really that different to what I was doing before. It’s 128bpm, there’s a kick on every quarter note, a clap on every other quarter note, a bassline, whooshy effects at every 16 bars, it’s about 8 minutes long…ya know? It’s all house music. I just think the stuff I’m doing now is a new incarnation of the type of house I grew up on. It’s the future of it.
You’ re actually quite vehement about discarding the Joey Youngman persona once and for all. Why?
I don’t know. I don’t think it necessarily helps my career that I was doing this for a long time on the underground in a different style. It makes it less exciting – people get excited about a new guy who just burst onto the scene, but I think when they find out I’ve been doing this for a few years and just changed my name they are less fanatic about me. Not sure if that’s exactly the case but it’s just the picture I get. I also just want it to be perfectly clear that I’m not doing that style anymore, I don’t want people to mix up that stuff with this stuff. To me, personally, I like it all. I like what I did before and I like what I’m doing now, but most DJs and clubbers tend to have a specific niche they are into.
So how did your musical transition happen? Was it a conscious choice to change direction?
Kind of. Previous to about 2004 I was very open-minded musically and into everything. House, deep house and disco house was always my love and what I played as a DJ, but a lot of my friends played trance or progressive and I was able to get into it and listen to it in my spare time and enjoy it.
Then around 2004 for some reason I just closed myself off to everything except for deep and jackin’ house which is what I was making. This is about the time electro was starting to come up, and I absolutely hated it. I mean, I really talked a lot of shit on electro house.
That went on until about 2007, and a few things happened in 2007. First off, everybody was talking about this track called ‘Put Your Hands Up For Detroit,’ which I had never heard of but everybody on the deep house forums was saying it was the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with house music, that it’s totally mainstream, blah blah. So I went and checked it out, and was like, ‘this is electro??’ I really dug it. I know that’s like the most well-known, mainstream track ever in electro house, but I honestly loved it.
Then around the same time in early 2007, I played a couple of gigs with guys who were playing electro. I played one with Tim Deluxe who was a huge hero of mine growing up in the 90’s, and another with Pete Heller and they were both playing what I’d consider to be electro. It was stuff I’d never heard before and I really, really liked it. I remember getting home from the Brazil gig where Pete Heller had played and going onto Beatport and doing a bit of digging in the electro house section. As is the case now, 98% of everything I heard was utter garbage, but that 2% that I liked was really cool. So I started buying some of this stuff just to listen to it and analyze it from a production standpoint. This was around the time Deadmau5 was starting to have top 10s on Beatport along with Nu Funk and Community Funk and it was really the first time in almost a decade I can remember being literally ‘blown away’ by a piece of music. It was refreshing to be humbled like that, because I hadn’t been in so long.
Around this same time I got an email from the main music director at Rockstar Games. They were looking for music for a new racing game and were fans of Joey Youngman. But all the stuff I was doing wasn’t completely in line with the game – it was too deep or chilled out or just not the right attitude. They were picking up mostly electro type stuff so I decided to try and make an electro track for the game. That track was ‘Squares’ which came out on Om and it was the first electro house track I ever made. They licensed it (along with another track of mine) to the game, and that’s how it all started. After that happened and I actually had fun and learned a bunch of new shit by making that track I started making a few more, and a few more. It wasn’t until I had a #1 on Beatport that I decided to completely abandon the deep house stuff.
What is it about the sound of Wolfgang Gartner that people love so much? What is the signature sound?
In a nutshell: beats and basslines. At least, I think that’s what people are digging. That’s always been my thing. I mean, it really is the foundation of dance music anyway. A lot of the biggest tracks in dance music have just been an amazing drum and bassline groove.
And how did you come up with the name Wolfgang Gartner?
Well I’ ve always used a lot of aliases. I had an Italian alias, Mario Fabriani, and a Greek one, and a Spanish one, so I just went over to a country that I hadn’t used as an alias yet. I guess electro was big in Germany, or at least I associated it with Germany, so, Wolfgang it was!
You’re taking a break now from doing remix work to really focus on Wolfgang material…can we expect an album in the future?
I honestly don’t know the answer to that one. There have been some talks of an album, and there are certain decisions that I have to make over the next month or so which I can’t talk about that will dictate whether or not I produce an album. Basically it will go one of two ways: I will either continue to put out singles on Kindergarten and do things the way I’ve been doing them, or sign exclusive with a label and write an album. It’s a big decision that I have to make.
Do you feel pulled to do one over another?
Right now I’m totally on the fence, that’s why this has been such a hard decision. I think writing an album would push me to be a bit more versatile – Maybe explore some new territory with vocalists and new instruments, but the way I’ve been doing things is so fun. I mean, I literally write a track, master it, and upload it to Beatport, and they put it up a week later, and it sells. Straight from the studio to the world. And nobody is telling me what direction to go in, I just make what I want to make and put it out. On the other hand, I am ‘running’ my label, so I do have to monitor my sales and do a bit of promotion, which I suck at, and deal with licensing, territory deals, and all that other stuff. So I sit here in my office usually about 3 hours a day just working on everything. It’s not as bad as before when I was distributing vinyl, but it’s still busy-work. So it would be nice to be on a label and not have to do any of that. Just focus 100% of my energy on the music, which is what I was supposed to be doing in the first place anyway. Each direction has benefits and drawbacks. It’s a hard one.
So what plans are coming next besides the potential album deal? Do you see your sound evolving at all…any major remix projects or tours?
There’s definitely going to be some sort of ‘evolution’ in my sound. I’m still not completely sure what it is yet. I’m almost positive it will still fall into the genre category of electro house but I am trying to come up with something new right now. If you heard my newest track, ‘Flashback,’ that was me starting to poke in a new direction, but I’m not sure if that’s where I’m going to go. I used a few disco samples in it combined with nasty electro bassline stuff. Sort of like old meets new…it came out a bit Joey Youngman vs. Olav Basoski vs. Wolfgang vs. Justice. It was a load of fun to make but I don’t know how much more of it I will do. I am definitely trying to do something new though. I think dance music needs it. There are a lot of cool little pockets of styles going on right now but none of them are really ‘it’ in my opinion. I want to be the one to start a new trend but it’s so hard to do that. It’s risky too. I’m trying though so we’ll see. Maybe I will fail miserably…it’ s not completely unlikely. As for touring, there is lots of stuff coming up. Some of it is on my official tour schedule on Myspace and some of it isn’t, but I will definitely be out there a lot in 2009 assuming the economy doesn’t take a complete nosedive and put the entire dance music industry under!
Speaking of instant gratification, the blog community has really embraced your tracks – what are your thoughts on that?
Honestly, I’m not happy about it. The way I see it they are taking money straight out of my pocket. Bloggers will try and tell you they are helping you in some way, like they are promoting you to some new fanbase you didn’t already have, and Maybe they are…but they’re still giving away my music for free. They’re still stealing from me. Right now I’m estimating that the ratio is about 15:1 for my music – that is, for every one legitimate download people buy of my tracks, fifteen steal it for free from blogs or Soulseek. I’ve tried to send notices to blogs to take my music down but it’s almost impossible to fight. You get one taken down and another one pops back up. And all people need is one. I just did a Google search on my new track and literally the entire first page of results were all people giving away my music for free. In all honesty it pisses me off…a lot. But I don’t know what I can do.
I send samples to the blogs but that’s not what they want. A few of them are cool and will post up your clips and just promo your stuff but most of them just buy it off Beatport and then make that file available for free. I mean literally, you go to a blog to download a track, and it’s the exact file off Beatport with the track ID number still in the file name and everything. I spent last Friday sending ‘unauthorized file’ emails to the file hosting sites and most of those files are still there today. Even these so-called legitimate file hosting services don’t remove your stuff and a lot of them are in other countries. It makes it virtually impossible for a little guy like me to make any progress.
Do you have any formal music training in your background?
Oh yeah, lots of formal training. I played classical and jazz piano for almost ten years, was pretty damn good at it too if I do say so myself. I’ m very rusty now though – I don’t think I can even read music anymore! The one thing that stuck with me was fingering, so I can still solo pretty decent and play anything that comes into my head. I just couldn’t write it or read it.
Do you record any instrumentation live for your tracks or think about doing it for future projects?
I record all of my keyboard parts live, if that counts. So all my basslines, melodies, etc., I play on a keyboard. But I think that’s pretty common. I can only play keys though. I’ve thought about trying to do a keyboard solo but I don’t know if it meshes with the Wolfgang sound. I used them on just about every record I made as Joey Youngman and got a bit carried away. Sometimes I just sit in the studio and solo over my electro shit, just for fun, but I don’t think it would be too well received if I actually recorded it.
Did you grow up in a musical household? Always have an inkling that you wanted to be involved in music?
Yes, actually earlier than I actually have memories of. I only know what my parents tell me about the early years because I was too young to remember it. But apparently when I was a toddler they used to take me along to concerts with them and I would come home and play the melodies that I heard at the concert on my little toy piano. My dad was big into music – he played bass in a funk band called The Youngman Brothers. They were actually really good! He made a living playing gigs for a few years too but never made it major. I’ ve thought about trying to sample some of their old demos actually.
Where do you look for inspiration?
My biggest and best source of inspiration is other music, other music within the genre that I am trying to make. I know this can be risky business because the end product can come out sounding too much like what you were being inspired by, and I’ve certainly fallen into this trap multiple times as Wolfgang. But it really is what gets my creative juices flowing most effectively. I love listening to other music, especially disco. I have a huge disco record collection and still listen to it a lot in my car, but that’s mainly because it puts me in a good mood. It doesn’t really help me make better music.
Honestly though, everything in life is inspiration. Whether you realize it or not, everything you see, everything you do, every person you meet seeps into your brain and influences what you do. That’s why it hurts me to be such a hermit. The more I get out of the house and have experiences, whatever those experiences are, the better my music is. Especially gigs. And it’s not just the playing and the clubs that helps my inspiration. I think it’s just as much the airplanes, airports, customs, lack of sleep, and general mental stimulation that I get from traveling. Generally I tend to make my best music when I come home from a very long, very rough gig. And it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a good gig as long as it was somewhere far, far away, and I am relatively jetlagged. That seems to do the trick. I think that’s sort of my drug Maybe since I don’t drink and I don’t do drugs I need something to take the edge off and the fatigue I get from traveling does that for me. Hmmm. I think I just learned something new about myself!
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