Talking to: False Witness
Having made their base in Berlin in 2020, via Boston and New York, False Witness is taking the techno world by storm. The quality of their dark and empowering musical output is evident within seconds of hitting play and is backed up by their impressive CV of big-name collaborators and sets at some of the most iconic techno venues out there. But they are not just about techno - as well as being a visual artist, in their own words, they wants to help create a world that is ‘every bigot’s worst nightmare’.
Back in the US False Witness was a founding member of queer artist collective KUNQ, who were calling for a more anarchic, democratic approach to dance music culture before the terms ‘woke’ and ‘cancelled’ were even a thing. False Witness has since led rallying cries against the gatekeeping culture in dance music as well as against audiophilia, wanting us to not only celebrate and raise up the underrepresented in dance music culture, but also the joyful audio imperfection to be found in the darker, danker corners of clubs, warehouses and basements around the world.
We caught up False Witness to talk about their latest release on Lobster Theremin records and delved really deep into music, politics and culture. Read on to hear about why musical escapism will never be their thing, the rebellion of techno, growing up on a diet of reggaeton and The Prodigy, Berlin and New York’s pandemic landscapes, and why music really needs to stay political.
How are you doing? Where are you at the moment?
I’m good - I am in New York right now, I’ve been here for a couple of weeks and I am getting acclimated to the city again. I got all these refunds from 2020 for cancelled flights, summed them all up together to make this trip back to the US just for a little bit, just to get vaccinated and to see my family. I have been based in Berlin since June of last year.
Are you permanently based in Berlin now?
What happened in 2020 was I had just started playing some events in Berlin proper, then I got booked to do a tour in the US, around March, so I went back from Berlin to New York and one by one they all got cancelled because of the coronavirus starting to spread. I was unable to get a flight back to Berlin, so I was stuck in the US with no apartment, no means of support, so I was a little screwed. Luckily I had some friends I could stay with at that time, so as soon as I knew the borders were closing between the US and Germany I found a ticket and made it back to Berlin in June, again, to a totally different scenario. The whole of the US was in a heightened state of fear whilst Berlin was very lively, and everyone just seemed ... it seemed like the virus was under control. But then another wave came and the whole city has been in shutdown for the last six months.
It's just been a very quiet reflective period. I just keep thinking of the insurmountable loss we have gone through in this period, not just nightlife, but in terms of death. There has been so much death, and not many of us are processing it, it's just like this thing I have been carrying in my apartment during lock down, day to day.
How is it in New York at the moment?
Lively, very lively. People have started getting vaccinated, maybe months ahead of everyone else in the world so it’s like parties seem to be back up happening again, so people are really just going with that. It’s very liberating but it also almost feels bad, like am I doing something wrong!
There’s this sense that you are potentially endangering others by doing stuff like hugging, and that was pummelled into us for the last year. Not without reason, but it just was what it was. And now we are emerging out of that, none of us have experienced in our lifetimes a pandemic to this level, so we are just getting adjusted to the aftermath.
Yes, It's a big one to process as well. What do you think the pandemic brought to your music? Has it given you the chance to really create?
I think it gave me time to really experiment. I got given a really good opportunity in Berlin to open my own art studio, so I was working on not just music, but also painting and sculpture. These are mediums I haven’t really explored yet, but they do reference and act as sort of bridges and connectors between the mediums of art and music. One medium isn't tangible, but these are more tangible as objects and how they relate to each other is actually really fascinating.
As a musician I felt like it didn’t really matter what I did as long as I did something. I did struggle a bit in the early days to write music, but I just thought ‘this isn't forever and even if I write an entire album with the total absence of any kick drums, it will be a monument to the times’. But it wouldn’t resonate, it wouldn't be something structurally that I would be wanting to use in the future; mainly because I envision myself as a dance music artist, I enjoy that kind of layering and structure that dance music has. These structures that are in house and techno for me are grounding, and they can provide other references in layers that help me express myself in other ways. So for me I think it was really helpful to kind of solidify that that was really what I wanted to do.
Tell more more in your own words about the music that you are making.
I would say that a lot of it is very anxiety-driven; we live in a very anxious period of just discontent with the way things are. I think techno is a very abstract style of music and I have really grounded myself in that genre, as much as I possibly can, because it is the one genre of music I think I have the most proximity to. It's an American style of music, it is a unique black style of music. I am not black myself but it comes from a black, queer orientated perspective and it is kind of something I resonate with, especially as my politics are very supportive of Black Liberation, so these are things I want to explore in my work.
Techno’s sounds and rhythms encourage people to dance, but the noise, dissonance, the cadence of certain sounds, it tends to bring out elements of agitation and anxiety, which is something I enjoy bringing out of audiences. It is not just one smooth ride, there are a lot of concentric moments and it's not necessarily one 130bpm two hour or eight hour session, a lot of it is changing very dramatically. It can be very euphoric at one point, then very intense at another, almost violent, very hyper-masculine; but for me that is an examination of why we feel those feelings and why we associate those feelings with it.
I have read a couple of your interviews and things you have written and I like what you say about not wanting to make music for escapism.
It should very much reflect what is happening around us. I think a couple of years ago there was this discourse around gunshot sounds in dance music and how that was considered distasteful. I thought, well, it's in infinite styles and kinds of dance music, and to remove it would be kind of anti-Black, like a disingenuous approach to make things too palatable for white audiences. So I found that discourse a little disturbing. Some of my favourite Jersey and Baltimore club tracks have that gun shot sample; my experience of New York City, the sound of a siren or an alarm or explosions, glass shattering, these sound effects or these noises that are so commonplace in urban environments, or places where I have grown up. Them making their way into the music is crucial because those sounds give a cadence, give that effect to the audience. They make those associations in their mind whether they are conscious of it or not.
Techno is supposed to be rebellious, it's supposed to reflect what’s happening. It's made in warehouses, it's made in people's bedrooms with trains passing by, cars zooming past. It reflects the motion of the city it was born in - Detroit. And it’s offshoots in cities like Berlin and New York represent that sound too. My goal is to reflect this internationalist’s view of techno as well.
Tell me a bit about your musical upbringing. Have you always been into music as an art form and to enjoy as well? And who were your influences when you were younger?
I really liked just music as a concept when I was younger but I don't think I had a sense of identity or who I was as a person until I was maybe ten, eleven or twelve. I was listening to records like Daft Punk’s Homework or Prodigy’s Fat of the Land, The Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, these kinds of dance groups and artists. They were my entry point into it; really fun house music and some trance thrown in there as well, but I could tell that there was something in there that was unique.
Where I grew up that wasn't something that was encouraged, most of the dance music in that era was hip hop, r&b, dancehall and reggaeton if you were Dominican or Puerto Rican. Also those sounds are deeply ingrained in who I am as a person, especially in the early 2000s that became really formative. I saw the bridges between them, and I felt like I was the only person in my hometown who did, because everyone thought that dance music was too ‘faggy’; too gay.
There was no space for me in a rap setting, and also I am not a singer so I couldn't really belt any strong vocals out myself, but I understood that there was a connection between the two and I wanted to play around with it. I had one of those big, chunky PC computers of the time and there was a programme called Mixmeister that was readily available at the time. It was me trying to get these reggaeton songs like the DJ Blast Reggaeton compilations and trying to beatmatch that with Felix Da Housecat or something. He had just released Kittenz and Thee Glitz, so it was this really glammy, sensual, electroclash album mixed with reggaeton, so these new prototype mixes were how I started making music. Then eventually when I was in my twenties is when I formally began to call myself a musician.
Going back to that time, tell me more about your involvement with the KUNQ collective, What were its founding pillars and what did it bring to the queer clubbing scene where you were in the Boston area.
So KUNQ was a artist collective of queer individuals who were connected by music. We had various different gender expressions and none of us had a commonality of where we came from; we all came from very different parts of the world and very different parts of the US even, but we bonded over a connection to music and this kind of radical politics that was very pro Black Liberation. It was a beautiful collaboration of artists that bought together sides of Boston that I have yet to see happen ever again. You know, trans guys, drag queens, people from all walks of life, gender non conforming people, people on the margins of Boston, which is an extremely white, extremely academic place to grow up. These people just emerged, It was a really special time.
Most of us had moved to New York by the mid 2010s and we only started promoting ourselves as DJs at parties, we didn’t start calling ourselves a collective. We didn’t want all the trappings of a collective; we didn’t want to start putting out music, have dos, have any sense of ownership, the concept of ownership was anti-anarchistic, so we wanted it to be an absolutely no rules whatsoever kind of thing. Eventually we all disbanded by 2017-2018, because basically we had completed what we had wanted to do. We had provided a platform for ourselves, we had uplifted the people we wanted to uplift, we provided this space, and all of our careers were blossoming and going in the right direction, so the association with the word just wasn’t necessary.
KUNQ was a concept that was based on no genre, but eventually all of us as artists did find our own niche. We still support each other but it wasn't something we needed to perpetuate any further. It was a really interesting learning experience to work out where we came from and how we could singularly come together with this concept of non ownership and power share. Whether someone was a questioning trans woman, black, queer and questioning, or brown, queer and questioning, we had all these different combinations but not placing one above the other. It was a very communistic take on a club collective.
You’ve been really vocal about challenging the zeitgeist in queer and dance music culture, do you think KUNQ did that? Also, is it something that you set out to do as an individual in general or did it just happen?
It's funny because I don’t think at the time KUNQ got very much attention for anything. We put on very few events in New York, the association was mostly known to people on flyers; they would see a DJ name and then KUNQ and people would be, like ‘what is that?’. And then a Resident Advisor article came out [in 2016] about what we were and there was so much backlash, stuff like us being posturing anarchistic assholes. Which is amazing because a lot of people said stuff like ‘they are just these anarchistic cunts who don’t want us to have a good time’, or that we only want to play bad MP3s. We were clearly making some points that were ruffling some feathers, and it became evident that the electronic dance music scene had some deep right wing fascist problems. The people who were consuming dance music were not politically aligned with what we believed in, and that was very revealing.
My opportunities I could get as a cis man were mitigated and changed so I could uplift, like, five women who were on the roster who were not offered that opportunity. It was not so cut and dry, but when situations like that happened it was important for someone to say something and to speak out. We were the first to do it before there were these concepts of cancellation or wokeness.
So it sounds like the democratisation of music is really important to you, would you say?
Sure, I know there is still work to be done. I always think of this quote by my colleague Shyboi - someone wrote in the description of a party in her biography that Shyboi was dismantling white supremacy in the club, and that is blatantly not true, because she made the point in an article that if you could dismantle white supremacy through DJing we would have done it already. Yeah, okay, like it’s done, it's finished, it’s over! Just one DJ set changed the entire paradigm - it’s just gone! We had that kind of press at the time and it was just soundbites for people to think of us as edgy, when we were not being edgy, we just believed that. So when people made these claims we were really frustrated because we were like ‘how is that going to be’?
So its not really about a democratisation of dance music because even now we have diversity lineups where promoters, party organisers or festivals will do these events where there are x amounts of female artists, or x amount of queer artists, to fill up these quotas, much like an affirmative action type thing you see in colleges. But these elements of power are still there; the owners of the festival, or the owners of the capital in a venue, they are all still white and their egos are all still very fragile the moment you say something about them that damages the way they see themselves as a saviour. They should, like, be doing it because they are a good person, not just to lend a hand to the poor browns, blacks and queers, you know? They get hurt and then they rescind those opportunities and then we don’t have an opportunity to fight back.
So they are still exercising control and playing into that whole structure aren't they?
Not related to me, but that was widely happening a couple of years ago when there was the DJs for Palestine movement and the Room 4 Resistance crew was kicked out of About Blank [a club and live music venue in Berlin] because they held Pro Palestinian views. That was frustrating for many of us, because we just wondered how many clubs and events out there are going to cancel us and tell us we can’t play because we are vocal? That is constantly in the back of a lot of artists’ minds, and I think it is what pressures them into saying they are not really political. But dance music is birthed from politics, you cant remove one or the other. To not be vocal and not have these critical ideas and not be constantly learning, is not just detrimental to yourself but also to your fanbase that is looking to your music and feeling that kind of inspiration and then finding out you are just this centrist, apolitical mess who just stands for nothing, you know?
Cynthia Jones by Possibly Seattle Times (archive) - ebay posting, Public Domain.
That is interesting what you say about dance music being rooted in politics, because it's not something you hear said very often. Mostly people are saying it should be fun, it is escapism, so it's actually really great to hear somebody say that.
It's like, in the UK especially, I wrote a song called Claudia Jones. People were asking me who Claudia Jones was and I thought that was great, because the whole reason I called it Claudia Jones was so you could type her name into Google and find out she was one of the founders of Notting Hill Carnival. She was a guaranteed full-on communist and she was a Caribbean woman who had such a hard time throughout her life because of extraditions from so many different countries. These are the types of stories and these are the types of people who should be celebrated, they are the people who founded these institutions that we take for granted now. Notting HIll is a major UK dance event and it’s important that we know where the roots are from and that we pay attention to these monumental figures. Their dues are owed.
Moving on to another thing you've been very vocal about in the past... this whole idea of audiophilia, of going against the grain when it comes to everybody’s love affair with vinyl and excellent, flawless production. I find that really interesting as well, your insistence that you can just play battered old MP3s and stuff pulled off of Youtube and it’s just as valid. Having listened to your stuff you are releasing it does sound really well produced, and I understand it has to be, but is that still something you feel really strongly about, dismantling those ideas?
Yeah, absolutely. I think all music production as an art form is very subjective, as all art forms are. I think the standards of music production exist purely to be played in certain places; space and environment will determine how music is going to be made, A good example of this would be there are so many good quality UK garage or grime records or things that are very low end that sound great in a garage in Dalston, but have absolutely zero impact in a giant air festival, because the frequencies don’t travel very far, so the bassline sounds really weak, so you need an MC to kind of carry that tune. Any low end music just isn't going to sound good when there aren't any walls, there's nothing to keep the sound indoors.
This is one of the lessons I learnt when I DJ’d in Berghain [a club in Berlin called the world capital of techno] for the first time. It is this really cavernous place that is really well sound designed, I can hear every aspect of my music there. So some of the tracks I have mixed and mastered sound flawless, I am just like amazed that I could make something like that, then there was this track I made on my laptop a couple of weeks before and I decided I wanted to play that and it sounded so flat and empty, without the same gravity as the other tracks I was playing. At that point I realised that that is why tracks are built this way.
So this audiophilia that people are so attached to, especially in techno because there is this very regimented way of thinking of how techno should sound, it comes from the fact there are these giant events where music has to be loud, it has to carry across large audiences, it has to be spaced out a certain way - there is no room for muddiness. Also in the 2010s the deconstructed club sound took all of its elements from hip hop and r n b, and how the constriction of those tracks are made, so all the elements like high hats and kick drums, they are all very spaced out and queued very perfectly so you can hear the timbre and quality of every single instrument as if they were played in their own separate rooms and their own separate spaces.
I appreciated that but it was never something I gravitated to, I liked when sounds started to bleed into each other. It was a bit like there was this aggression, there was this noise , it felt a bit like a jungle you were trying to climb your way out of, and that for me was where music had its most power. A lot of people, especially in techno, value this idea that tracks have to be made a certain way so they can be played at places like Berghain and everyone can hear them with perfect clarity and I thought that that takes all the fun out of DJing. I wanted moments of complete dissonance where the math is not always completely perfect. That sense of anxiety is how I make my music. It has a technical, mathematical component to it, but it also has a sense of feeling and emotion to it, you know?
Things that are perfectly mixed and mastered just don't have that same quality of realness and emotion. Some of the best dance tracks that I have ever heard are like 128 mp3s from DJs and producers in New Jersey where the sound is just completely blown out, you know, but the quality and the harmonics of the music still pierce through. Especially if it’s being played on two monitors, and made for a bunch of teenagers and twenty somethings who just want to dance and have a good time. They don’t give a shit what Berghain is, they are just trying to have a good time. These tracks are way more impactful than any whitewashed minimal track that's ever come out of certain labels. That distinction is important because we need to remember who our audiences are, and who we need to reach out to. If my audience was just a bunch of nerdy white men then... ha, well, maybe I wouldn’t have said anything.
Who’s exciting you at the moment on the music scene?
I always support my friends, everyone who is making music now. I know that Shyboi is a partner of mine and we have a project called Falseboi together. I just interviewed LSDXOXO who is a colleague of mine and we used to play together at Ghetto Gothic in New York. His new record on XL is fantastic. There are other artists in Berlin that I am really, really into, like VTSS is an amazing producer. In terms of dance music, techno, there are so many different things happening now, it's hard to pinpoint anything, but I just go through my list of who I’m supporting and who is supporting me, and people will send me cool tracks. And sometimes you will just find a random artist on Bandcamp or Instagram. There’s this really exciting stuff being made in Beijing by Out of Fashion Boys at the moment and there's this South Korean artist artist called Unreal Numbers who is really exciting.
What's coming up next for you?
I’ve just had a new release come out with Lobster Theremin. Jimmy Asquith has been really supportive, the whole label has been very supportive. I have another record with a sub label coming out with them soon as well that's more very aggressive techno driven. I am working on an album, but it's not finished yet. Right now I am collaborating with an artist called Bootee in Los Angeles; I am going to meet her next, she is actually a video artist and vocalist. A lot of my friends are more than just musicians, they are working in other mediums like the visual arts and new media, which I am really excited by. That collaboration is really important, to not just bridge music artists together, but other mediums, and create stuff like installation together and stuff that's a little bit more out of the box.
I will be back in Europe in July. I am scheduled to play some events in the UK in the fall and I am also making some announcements about some new stuff I will be doing as we leave this lock down experience, although I can’t announce anything yet!
You can listen to Life Can Be Cruel on The Everyday’s Earwax playlist.
Fashion
