The Red Bull Music Academy continues to be far more than just a quickie marketing tool for the beverage manufacturer. Up recently on its website is a series of interviews recorded this year in Barcelona. Among them is one with ambient figure Fennesz, whose first release was back in the pre-laptop days of 1995, and he talks to the RBMA audience about making the transition to digital production from analog, the importance of guitars in his work, his collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, how David Toop trainspotted his rare effort in proper sampling, and much more.
Many people around me, many colleagues around me, were doing really abstract electronic stuff at that time, and melody was kind of forbidden [laughs] — and I didn’t agree with that at all.The podcast edition (MP3) puts the Fennesz interview alongside entries with great backpacker hip-hop act James Pants and industrial-pop mainstays Front 242. The video versions of the Fennesz, pictured below, is longer than the MP3 excerpt, and include musical interludes (redbullmusicacademy.com).
