I first met DeFeKT at Dave Clarke’s White Noise 400 show in RTE studios. I caught up with him to see how things have been going since.

You’ve had a pretty busy year, what have been the highlights for you?
A nice highlight this year was being asked to do a remix for Hardfloor, getting to work with Komisch and playing back to back live with Blawan and Untold for London Modular.

What projects are you working on at the moment?
I just did my first release in a few years under my ‘ESS’ alias with a track called ‘Orbit’ which was released on Signal Code Records. I have been working on the Tinfoil project with Sunil Sharpe and that has been going amazingly well. We have just finished Tinfoil 2. On the DeFeKT front I have just finished some Remix’s and my new ‘below Ground Ep” was just released on Komisch. There will also be a DeFeKT track featured on a compilation coming on Boys Noize records soon enough too.

How did you first get into production?
I was djing all the way through school i got my first pair of turntables when i was 13. I ended up going to college to study sound engineering so basically it started there.

Can you explain your current studio set up?
I work completely from analog gear and record into a computer. I do not use samples of any sort. I use The Acidlab Miami for all my drums, a modular synth for my basslines, normally Studio electronics Se1 for my lead lines and JX-3p for all my pads or soft lead sounds.

How do you approach and prepare your live sets?
My live set-up at the moment is a modular synth, Acidlab miami, small controller, sound-card and computer. All the outs of the drum machine and the modular synth go into separate channels in Ableton. I basically treat Ableton as a mixer for the gear. I like my live sets to be 100% improvised.

First Published in Hot Press Magazine, July 2014