On January 12, 2018, we headed to Jenja Club Jakarta to witness Dubfire live behind the decks.
Before the night unfolded, we caught Dubfire for a brief five-minute chat.
The conversation focused on his compilation album, HYBRID: Decade of Dubfire.
The project had arrived the year before and marked an important milestone in his career.
Last year you released album “HYBRID: Decade of Dubfire”. What it means to you?
Basically, put together everything that I’ve done in my first decade as a solo artist.
I thought, there’s a lot of material, especially earlier material or some material that wasn’t released widespread that lot of people maybe missed, I want to compile it altogether.
The HYBRID show that I was doing basically put together in a new way, a lot of the old material from first decade that I worked on.
In many ways, I want to bring it all together, to look back what I achieved sonically as a way to use that to move forward in my next kind evolutionary cycle as electronic music artist.
I’m not a big fan of nostalgia, but it was a good way to look to the past and what I achieved production wise and use that as a catalyst for moving on to new territories of music production.
Read more: Budakid Brings Progressive Energy to Jenja Jakarta
The album consists of 42 tracks. How you curated the tracks?
I just sit in the studio (laughs).
Sometimes the idea just flow and other time takes… (pause).
I mean, every song has its story. Every remix has its story.
With remixes, it’s different than original production.
Original production, you have blank canvas.
With remixes, you sit down and you have the original source material to draw from.
Sometimes you may think that the original material is gonna inspire you in a new way, but the ideas don’t come.
Often times I would do a remix and I hate it by the end.
I would scrap it and start all over again.
The one thing I set out to do as a solo artist, that I didn’t do when I was in Deep Dish, was to have complete creative freedom and complete quality control over everything that I did.
So I really like work on projects that had really important deadlines.
I work on projects that were for friends or songs that I thought I could add something to.
Ultimately, once you put your work out there, it’s gonna be there forever.
So you may do the best job you possibly can.
I only try to do the best.
Some projects took very little time and some projects took great deal of time.
You’ve been visiting Jakarta few times. What can we expect from your set at Jenja?
I’m just gonna play a lot of material I’ve been playing over the last 3-4 months.
Everyday I’m getting new music.
There’s a lot unreleased material that I’ve been working on and I’m gonna test it out tonight.
Ultimately, I have an initial roadmap of where I want to go musically with every gig, but I like to let the crowd kinda dictate which direction to goes on.
While I may have an idea of the musical journey that I want to create, ultimately it has to do with the connection that I have to the crowd.
So the crowd will feeling more energetic and they want something a bit harder and faster, more Techno.
It’s kinda balancing act to the connection to the audience and the audience dictates where I go musically.
That night at Jenja Club, Dubfire proved his point once again.
His performance grew from connection and intuition.
The energy shifted constantly, shaped by his dialogue with the crowd.
