Cid Rim and Jameszoo: A Conversation

Vienna’s Clemens Bacher, AKA Cid Rim, has been a drummer since his youth, but never shied away from making beats on computers. His feet firmly placed in two different musical eras, he takes a dual approach to live shows: when solo he rolls with a computer and controller, drumming with his fingers. When in a group setting, he sits at the drums and blends his jazz training with modern inclinations. Most recently he’s joined two childhood friends with similar backgrounds, Dorian Concept and The Clonious, as part of the Dorian Concept trio.

RBMA alum Mitchel van Dinther, AKA Jameszoo, hails from Den Bosch, in southern Holland. With a psychedelic take on the loose rhythms and sampledelia that informs the beat scene, van Dinther has been one of the most refreshing voices to emerge in the past five years. Most recently he has begun to experiment with live formations ahead of his debut album.

On the eve of Bacher’s latest release for Affine Records (which includes a remix from Van Dinther), I caught up with the pair for an informal chat about live music in the age of the bedroom producer.

Have you two done shows together before?

Cid Rim

We did an amazing one off thing at North Sea Jazz festival, last year. Mitchel on computer and electronics, Oliver [Johnson, AKA Dorian Concept] on keys, myself on drums and Raphael Vanoli, the amazing bass player from Knalpot.

Jameszoo

Oh yeah!

Cid Rim

I loved it. I can’t remember if it was you, Mitchel, or Oliver who came up with the simple idea of everyone taking three tracks of their own, putting them in the pot, so we’ve got 12 songs and an hour [of music].

Jameszoo

I think it was Oliver, it was a great idea.

Cid Rim

We played on each other’s tracks, trying to make it work like a band set up. We played bits of the original tracks and then everyone just added on top, best as we could.

Jameszoo

It was really good. These one-off things don’t always work, but we made it happen. The festival is a great place for this. It was fun. They ended up contacting me and I mentioned I liked Oliver a lot so we decided to get our friends involved. I knew Clemens before, I seen you in a couple places. In Graz…

Cid Rim

That was probably the first time we met up in real life. It was for another festival, one of my favourite in Austria called Elevate. Oliver, Paul and myself have been going there since our teens. They asked Oliver to curate a stage and that’s when he put on Mitchel, James Pants, Bibio and myself and Paul as DJs.

Clemens, how do you try and balance your own solo work and what you do as a drummer for other people, like your recent work with Oliver as part of his trio?

Cid Rim

I’ve always done those two things simultaneously, so it’s not too hard. When we had our teenage band, everyone already had Reason or a computer program at home and we were making our own beats and trying stuff out. At the same time being in a band and playing an instrument was a regular thing, rehearsing every week. It came naturally for me to always be a drummer and a producer. In my own live shows I try and combine the two.

In the very beginning I would play live drums over my own work, but after a few shows I felt it was too weird sitting behind a drum set in front of an audience. Shigeto does it really well, but then he alternates between standing up behind the laptop and sitting at the drums. For me it never worked, and I found the best way to combine it was just playing drums with my fingers using a controller. It’s more natural, like percussion, and a good way to use my drumming skills. That’s how I make it work.

And for you, Mitchel, how is your live show evolving?

Jameszoo

The laptop sets I’ve been doing are more of a travelling, DJ type set up. I do a trio show now with Gideon Van Gelder, the keys player for Jose James, and then Raphael, the guy we mentioned from Knalpot, on guitar and bass. I handle synths and electronics. It’s really an in-between formation until the album is finished. The plan after that is to put together a quartet.

Is the idea to translate the music from the album into a stage show?

Jameszoo

Well, the album is already pretty much acoustic. It’s still my own style of music but with instruments, in a way. The sound designing is blended into it. It’s been challenging. I’ve almost lost my sanity a few times. It’s quite a horrible process honestly! [laughs] I’m here in NYC this week to meet someone for a recording session. It keeps going on, my ideas keep getting blurrier and more over the top.

How do you try and rein it in?

Jameszoo

I’m not sure… I didn’t have a clue when I started the process. I looked at my record collection and thought about what I liked most and what I would want my record to be like and made an honest decision to work more in that area. I’m still not sure if it was the best idea, but it’s almost finished so…

You’ve managed to draw a line then?

Jameszoo

Yeah, it was a horrible process though. I got everything done in a chunk of about three weeks. I rented out a studio, which is quite long but then again not if you’re actually not sure what you’re doing. [laughs] We recorded drums, a lot of keys, violin, contrabass, percussions, and all sorts of stuff. So I’ve got that to work from on my own. I wrote a lot of the compositions before. We worked on that and there were some magic moments that happened, and I’ve used some of those. It’s a mixture of studio improvisation and stuff I wrote beforehand.

How does that compare to your work with Oliver’s trio, Clemens?

Cid Rim

There was some boundary with the trio because we worked from Oliver’s album. Set-up wise I do the drums and some occasional percussion, but everything else runs through a set up between Oliver and Paul. Oliver uses a loop pedal, records himself on the Wurlitzer and SH 101 and then that goes into Paul’s computer where he adds the bass and effects. It’s quite a complicated set-up actually.

For the translation process, from album to the stage, I’ve done similar things before with Spoek Mathambo, so that helped a bit to know how to approach it. Like, what’s the minimum we need as a backing track to make it still sound full and like the album? And where’s the thin line where we can improvise? How much room do we leave ourselves to go away from the album yet still sound like it’s an album track? That’s how we approached it and I think it works quite well.

Jameszoo

With the trio I found out that the most fun is to leave room for improvising and building on a basic structure. With recorded music you have a set length, and it’s always the same. But it doesn’t have to be like that on stage. I think that’s the real advancement of having a band or a live set-up today.

You can do whatever you want and I really love that. That’s what I want to recreate with the quartet. I want it to be a lot of improvising. Picking a small amount of tracks that can be turned into an hour-long show. There are going to be parts that won’t necessarily sound good, but then you’ll have stuff that is really interesting too.

Cid Rim

Oliver’s album is very much based on loops in a way. He worked a lot on getting an ideal, overall sound and then focused on getting loops that can evolve slowly, in a minimalistic yet organic way. That’s been a difficult thing for us, because if we were to play it live as it is on the record it would have been more boring than the album can be. You’re just waiting for something to happen in a way. We’re more energetic.

Some tracks are pretty much the same arrangement-wise but we’ve got room to improvise. So it’s a mixture really, maybe halfway between what Mitchel just described and the actual album. It’s how we’ve always done it, even when we were together in JSBL back in the days. We had these fixed arrangements. Everyone knows what might happen in the next eight bars or so and then we just go over it, you know?

The beauty for me, and it’s the same in my solo shows, is that the more you play it, the tighter you become and so you get to a point where it’s a little boring once you really have it tight and that’s where you can start improvising again. It’s a process that leads you to get something different with every show, little by little.

Do you find it’s important to have something people can recognise, from a release for example, and using that to hook them in before taking it away on a more improvised tip?

Cid Rim

For sure. The most well known tracks on Oliver’s album are the ones that we play most similarly at every show. With the rest we take more room for improvisation. It’s not necessarily a tactical idea to lure the audience, it’s more how the music is. The well-known tracks are pretty club-friendly, so we stick pretty close to them and the other tracks tend to be more open and have more room to play on top.

Jameszoo

In the shows I’ve done there are points where I use familiar tracks that people might recognise. The new shows are going to be based on the album tracks, so it should hopefully become more familiar to people pretty quickly. The trio is mainly all my work, some old, some new, but it’s mainly about doing something crazy. The guitar player blows his strings. He amps the guitar and blows on the strings, so you get these really crazy melodies.

The last show we did, the keys player treated the Wurlitzer pretty nasty. It’s more like a ram jam type situation. It’s really fun to do. I’ve kept the trio shows in mainly off-kilter spots, no festivals or things like that. The kind of places you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see us in. Obviously that’s going to have to change once the quartet comes in. The trio has been a fun formation for experimenting, everyone has their own projects so we just get together and do it up.

What kind of spaces do you prefer for live shows?

Jameszoo

I don’t do the laptop show anymore. I’ve put it on hold for now. It needs to be bigger, I have ideas for animation and stuff like that. Ideally after the album if I have to do solo shows I’d want to be able to recreate the acoustic feel of it electronically on my own, using MIDI triggers, synths and things like that. For the trio I just prefer these weird, one-off spots mostly. For the quartet I can’t pinpoint it yet obviously… what about the trio shows, Clemens? I heard the Japan show was really good.

Cid Rim

The Japan show was amazing. As was the one we did ourselves in Vienna. People at these shows really came to see us. If you have a room full of people that have been waiting to see this project, it’s always going to be great, regardless. What’s been interesting is how the show adapts to spaces. We played this tiny club in Bratislava after Thundercat at 2 AM. People were quite drunk and the album is kind of a quiet one, but it was still a wild party.

And the same in France, in Roubaix, we were in a small club, super packed and the vibe was really good. Then we played a jazz festival at 8 PM with people sat, and that also worked. It depends on how we feel ultimately. If people are sitting, watching, we might put on more of a jazz band face. If people are throwing their t-shirts around, we’ll do the same! For my solo shows I still prefer more of a club context, because it’s mainly straight electronic music.

I was looking at videos people have recorded of our show on Instagram the other day and it’s funny. On one of them I look like this really adult drummer, almost as if I was wearing a suit, and the other I had this total rock and roll vibe. But it was the exact same track. It reminded me of how different it can be, which you don’t always realise in the moment.

What kind of reactions have you had with the shows and do you think the audience understands the subtleties between the different types of live formats today?

Jameszoo

It depends… the Ableton set up works better in a club for sure. It’s not really a party set but you can dance, so I see that in the crowd’s reaction. With the trio we just want to do weird stuff with it so the reaction is in line, I really want people to be like, “What the fuck just happened?!” and that’s normally what we get. There have been a few shows where people came wanting to see a Jameszoo set, and like Clemens said if people are there to see you on purpose the vibe changes. There’s energy you can feel, and it can be fun. I haven’t done enough to really tell, the trio hasn’t toured outside of Holland so… Overall the audience is pretty understanding, I think. I don’t know how much of an indication it is, but the reviews have been positive too. The main thing is that it’s not there yet, it’s still a work in progress. I’m hoping the quartet will take me there.

Cid Rim

There are similarities with us. There are always people who won’t really get what Oliver is doing, because he loops so much. He’s so tight, there’s rarely any fuck ups, so it sounds like it could just be from a computer. A lot of people do get it I think. It’s important to show people what you’re doing early on in the performance I think. In my solo shows, the second or third track I’ll play drums over a long intro and outro where I can go at it with the finger drums. And I think that makes it very clear what’s happening.

Jameszoo

Yup!

Cid Rim

It’s also more fun, you can see it’s live. If you’re too tight it can lose people. From the movement of my arms it’s quite clear and obvious what’s going on, it works. But there’s always going to be the one guy who runs into you at the bar afterwards and says, “That was a pretty cool DJ set man.”

Jameszoo

I love those guys!

Cid Rim

It’s funny. I think the evolution of how people play live in the past ten years, especially the new generation of bedroom producers, has also affected the audience’s understanding and education. Maybe it’s also because you become more known and so the audience knows what you do. Ten, fifteen years ago a MIDI controller was a weird thing to see on stage for most people.