De muziek satiricus
FREE TRACKS
ETERNAL SUMMER (DANCE MIX) 40 min.
BIOGRAPHY
Funny, funky and different
In the beautiful summer of 2004 '40 % rabatt' and his girlfriend were walking through downtown Kleve, a German city just accross the Dutch border at Nijmegen. One store advertised with a large print: '40 % rabatt'. 'I stood there for a moment and decided that this would be my name and so this moment was the moment of birth of 40 % rabatt', he says laughing.
It was very hard work, spending many hours on worthless tracks. 'It was very tough having the ideas but not being able to convert them into the sound I wanted. I am a very spontaneous character and I want to act immediately if I have an idea, and not having to wait days and days before I finally know how to do it.'
Finally, after many disappointments, the energy finally started to pay off. First he made some worldbeat-tracks like Taking sides, but he evolved in a more funk-based style, as a result of using many soul and funk-samples. 'When I went to discotheques a lot, I always missed this link between cold techno and warm funk. There is funky hiphop, there's jazzdance, and there's soulfull house. Yet I still missed this style I like to make.'
Very important for 40 % rabatt is to sound 'different'. 'You also should not want to be too sure on what you want to make. Don't try to make some sound. It will not make you happy. Try to discover yourself by trying odd solutions someone else wouldn't dare to make, and not making any compromises. I rather try something foolish that doesn't work than that I imitate others.'
The use of funny movie-dialogues is essential for this style. 'It just finishes my tracks. I watch a lot of classic movies, which always contain a lot of funny dialogues. So I put them in my tracks, and they give the silly vibe I love, like the works of Monty Python, or the comic-writer Gotlib.'
Examples are Sexy, with the usage of a Belmondo-sample, or Buttons, with the funny sample about putting on buttons, which came from My man Godfrey. 'But if I come accross a sample of someone finishing a relationship on a answering machine, or a judo instruction in Japanese, or a guy yelling amidst thousand turkeys, I will use them immediately.'
40 % rabatt finally starts to get some recognition from other producers. 'It's hard to get some credits if your style is not very common. People like the syles they already know from other musicians. But people now start to refer to my music as 'the typical 40 % rabatt-sound', easy to listen to, good for dancing, and sometimes funny. I feel very happy if they say so. It means that my music has character.'
The production rose in 2009, with all kinds of new tracks, which results in the release of a whole album in september 2010, at the Bankrupt recordings netlabel, the label of fine artists as Sagesse and Crookram. This album will be called Heden erwtensoep, and it will contain a fluent dancemix of the best 40 % rabatt-tracks so far.
Is everything sample-based? 'Yes, it is. I make music with someone else's pretty beats. It is somewhat thievery, but agreable thievery, in my eyes, if you make something nice out of it. It's all about the beats. You have to cut them originally and funky and from there on the track will evolve itself.'
De Satiricus