DEMAC TO THE FUTURE

Tom Demac might've bedded in with Hypercolour in recent times, but he started out raving at free parties in North Wales in the early noughties. He tells DJ Mag that what made him want to start DJing and producing himself was “seeing old hardcore DJ Mark EG smashing records over his head and cutting his record box open with an angle-grinder at Helter Skelter, Bowlers [in Manchester]. I even MC’d at that event in a full tracksuit, going michael kors bags uk under the name of ‘Tom the Don’. Cool.”

He started making music at every opportunity, moving to Manchester from Wales and releasing techno on his now-defunct Electronique Audio label.

Unlike most, he developed a penchant for playing live, carting all his analogue equipment around from gig to gig.

“I remember turning up to my first live gig in London with the boot of my Peugeot 306GTi — in Moonstone Blue with Kenwood 6x9s — I wasn’t a chav, honest! — full of equipment boxes. I had no flight cases at the time, so I was playing live next to a pile of cardboard boxes. Also very cool.”

He had to tailor his sometimes marauding sound for the clubs at first. “Yes, some DJs are very unimaginative when it comes to buying music, and won’t play it unless there’s a solid two minutes of basic groove at the beginning for mixing.

Odd really, considering everything you can now do with CDJs,” he says.

Tom first released on Hypercolour in 2008, one of the acclaimed label's earliest releases, michael kors outlet uk after being introduced to Alex Jones (Pika) via Glimpse (Dense), and he's maintained the affiliation ever since while also showing out for imprints such as Four:Twenty, Murmur, My Favorite Robot, Drumcode and Aus.

“I think I met Will Saul in a club green room a few years back,” he recalls of the association with the latter label.

“I can be in a bit of a state in those situations, so it’s a miracle I now release music with him.”

The bad weather and moaning in Manchester made for perfect creative conditions while he lived in the city, he says. Now located in London, he accepts that his preference for making diverse shades of techno makes him difficult to pigeonhole.

“I suppose I do jump around a bit with my sound, and with dance music’s obsession with placing music and artists in a certain box, it can be a little hindering if you do write different styles,” he says.

“But creativity needs to be harnessed as and when the idea comes about. For me, some days I get an overwhelming urge to write a nosebleed banger, or other days more of an emotive album piece. My last EP on Aus, for example, included a couple of tracks made in my album sessions, along with a couple more dancefloor-based cuts.”

Tom's writing his album at the moment, has some remixes and original tracks dropping over the summer months, and plenty of gigs and festivals coming up too. He's particularly made his name through his free-ranging live shows in the past, taking with him a raft of equipment — pedals, drum machines, synths, acid boxes and so on running alongside Ableton and a Push controller — but he's been trying to focus more on DJ shows in the past few years.

“Playing live has its benefits, but it can be very insular when you’re paying less attention to buying records and always playing your own music in clubs,” he believes. “Everything revolves around you, and in turn you can lose touch and feel less inspired by the music going on around you.

I’ve found when DJing more on the weekends, I’m more inspired in the studio during the week whilst writing album tracks. So I’ve been enjoying programming long DJ sets and regularly buying and searching for records again.”

* Tom Demac plays DJ Mag's BMC party at Patterns, Brighton on Friday 5th June.