Celebrating His Cin Cin Label, Fort Romeau Reflects on a Year of Change

One year ago, Fort Romeau launched his Cin Cin label, focusing on a split EP format that pushed both established and new artists, and demonstrating a diversity of tastes and ideas from the British producer and DJ. Since then, Fort Romeau has moved from London to Berlin and Cin Cin has been nominated in the Best Breakthrough Label category in the Best of British 2016 DJ Mag Awards. As the label goes from strength to strength, Shawn Reynaldo speaks to Fort Romeau for RBMA Radio’s First Floor about the birth of the label and its ethos.

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Cin Cin has been around for a year now, but I feel like most people aren’t really aware that it’s your label. Did you purposely... not keep it a secret, but not make a big deal out of it?

No, but we’ve been somewhat low-key in terms of how we’ve gone about releasing [records]: they just turn up online and in the store. People don’t necessarily think about whose label is whose or whatever. If it’s an artist that they know, or if it’s been recommended to them by somebody or by a store, they might pick it up without realizing. It’s happened to me as well. Lots of times, I’ve been buying records and then been, “Oh, right. This person runs that label,” so it’s not a deliberate thing. I think we said in the press releases that Ali [Tillett] and I run it, but who reads a press release?

You’ve worked with labels like Ghostly International and put out stuff with Running Back, Live at Robert Johnson and 100% Silk. Given those connections, what prompted you to start your own label?

I like the idea of being able to work with other people. Doing this solo electronic music thing, it’s a quite isolating way to work. You’re working in the studio on your own, for the most part, and then you go away DJing, traveling by yourself. You make friends through other DJs and other producers as times go by, but it’s nice to work more directly with other people and I thought it was an interesting way to work with people and get music out there.

It can be quite an ordeal getting a record out, especially physically, because there are so few plants pressing records and so many labels trying to get them printed, that it can take six months or more for some of these bigger labels to release a 12-inch. Smaller labels like ours are able to operate in a faster time frame – maybe more like three months – and we can work with people who are (almost) completely unknown. With the split EP idea, I like the idea that you can have a well-known artist on one side and a newcomer on the other side (although it’s not necessarily strictly that format). It might be another tool for discovery for people.

You alluded to this, but you don’t run the label by yourself, you do it with a partner. Can you tell us a bit about the other half of Cin Cin?

Yeah, Ali Tillett. He originally ran a club night and booking agency called Warm. They did a lot of parties at Plastic People in London when that was still going – they had a residency there. We were talking in the pub one day about the idea of starting a label. We both wanted to do it, and I figured that if we combined our small amounts of free time, it would be possible – and because we’d already been working together, it was quite a natural thing.

Looking over the Cin Cin catalog, there’s an interesting group of artists. There are newcomers like Bwana, but then there are also established names like Todd Osborn and Nick Hoppner. Is there a methodology to how you curate the label?

Not so much. The label doesn’t have a specific sound. Obviously it’s always going to be, roughly speaking, electronic music, and sort of dancefloor music, but I’m not interested in only putting stuff out that sounds like one subgenre. It’s a case of working with other people who I’m already friends with, or know from either DJing or working with other labels: like Todd Osborn, with Ghostly, and Nick, who I’ve known for a while. There’s no concrete methodology to doing it. It comes down to music that Ali and I both agree on and like – that’s enough of a limitation as far as how to curate the label.

You contributed two of your own songs to the first Cin Cin release, and again to the new record that’s out this week. Is it hard for you to not put some of your own music on all of the releases?

One thing I definitely didn’t want to do, and don’t want to do, is to have a label that it is essentially an extension of my own output. Ali and I want to build something that exists outside of our individual projects – something that has an identity and life of its own. The only consistent idea is to have it as a split EP format, which I have always really liked. I don’t feel that there are many labels that do it as a consistent thing and I think it’s a really good format, especially coming from a record buyer and DJ perspective. If you can get four quite different tracks on one piece of wax, it can be a good proposition in terms of buying records in that you get more bang for your buck.

You’re originally from the UK, but you moved to Berlin last year. What prompted the move?

I think a lot of people have felt the same way over the past few years – London is becoming an increasingly difficult place to live. It’s expensive, it’s so large and it’s such a pain to navigate. I needed a change of pace and I already had a lot of friends living here, so it seemed like a good choice. I don’t know how long I’ll stay here for, but for now it’s a nice change from London.

Berlin has a lot of history and hype when it comes to clubbing. How have you found the experience of living there?

Living here day-to-day, you could quite easily not be aware of that side of Berlin. The thing that strikes me the most is that there are so few people here in comparison to somewhere like London or New York. It feels very quiet, and that’s nice and different. Because I’m playing most weekends, I’m almost never going out in Berlin. It’s not been one of those things where I’ve moved here and said, “Right, let’s go partying five nights a week!” I don’t have the time or the energy to do that at this point.

You started DJing before you had put out any music, but it seems like you didn’t start DJing all the time until you had released a few records. Did you ever feel like you had to learn to DJ on the job, and was that difficult?

There’s a world of difference between DJing every now and again at your friends’ parties to doing it every week. I think that you do learn a lot very, very quickly. There are DJs who will come from having long-held residencies, where they’ll be playing every weekend at the same club, and I’m coming from a different place [than that]. DJing is easy to do but extremely difficult to master, and I don’t think I will ever stop learning.

Has DJing all the time affected your production?

Yes, definitely. I think it has in the sense that I’ve allowed it to, to some degree. It’s the small, technical things, like allowing more intro and outro stuff, but I also consciously try to push back from that natural tendency to make things easy because if you were to follow the thread of logic that suggests that things should exist only to be powerful on big sound systems, then you’d end up making one big kick drum and some white noise. That’s not what makes music interesting, exciting or mean something to somebody. The club music that I enjoy the most finds some way to be kind of happy medium between being physically effective on a sound system and having enough interesting musicality to transcend being functional.