{"id":20000,"date":"2015-06-18T00:20:23","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T22:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/?p=20000"},"modified":"2015-06-18T00:33:32","modified_gmt":"2015-06-17T22:33:32","slug":"interview-ashley-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deephouseamsterdam.com\/london\/interview-ashley-wild\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Ashley Wild"},"content":{"rendered":"

You Are We is one of London\u2019s original Sunday night shindigs, before Sundays became trendy, You Are We were bringing the vibes to east London and built up a solid following thanks to their hedonistic soirees. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Ashley Wild<\/strong> is a core member of the You Are We family and he\u2019s not half bad at DJing and producing, too. One of the nicest chaps in the business, we sat down for a chat with Ashley recently and he told us all about You Are We\u2019s recent label launch and much more\u2026<\/p>\n

“We never really made any money, but it wasn\u2019t really about that. It was the chance to start building something really interesting…”<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n

Let\u2019s start with a bit of info about You Are We\u2026 tell us about the brand and the label\u2026
\n<\/strong>We\u2019re in our sixth year of You Are We now, we started in 2009. It first started out in London in the east side, there were three of us behind the party initially; myself, Ali Watson and Tom Roberts. It was an offshoot of some parties we ran at The Cross for a number of years, run by a team of guys called Halo. I was invited down to play with them after an after party at The Key, and it was a time when I was bringing more of an underground sound and I think they quite liked that freshness. Eventually from that larger party \u2013 myself, Tom and Ali wanted to take the underground sound away for a new party which became You Are We. The name comes form a Crazy P song, it kind of encompassed what we\u2019re all about. It was less about promotion and more word of mouth, with a team of friends behind us. At that time myself and Tom were playing out a lot in east London and a lot of the crowd we had emerged from playing after party after after party.<\/p>\n

Our parties were located at Corbett place, we wanted to go back there, it used to be Retox on Sundays. We convinced them to let us in, there were some issues with sound restrictions but it was the right location. The music focus was very much on house, and techno depending on the artists we brought in. We just wanted to offer a bit of a fresh party on a Sunday, there wasn\u2019t a great deal going on. It was pretty much just us and the Fuse guys, who we know really well and have a lot of admiration and respect for. It was a chance for us to play out ourselves, and i think people really appreciated the fact we were considerate in taking care of the crowd that was coming in, rather than, \u2018Hey, this is a party, we don\u2019t really care about your experience of the whole thing\u2019. We never really made any money, but it wasn\u2019t really about that. It was the chance to start building something really interesting, and we took it from there to a slightly larger venue.<\/p>\n

Tell me a little bit about the first party you put on.
\n<\/strong>So the very first party will have been the start of summer 2009 with David Keno, and about 400 people turned up. I think we had Tim Green and Ekkohaus for the subsequent parties if I remember rightly. These were people that really interested us from a musical standpoint. We weren\u2019t about huge expensive acts. I think we caught a lot of acts just as they were bubbling up at the time. We\u2019d usually have one, possibly two headliners depending on the length of the party and it meant we all got a good two to three hour set each, and we could really control the vibe and the tempo, which was important as we were building something really important to us. There was a nice vibe to it, a lot of people and DJs and promoters we\u2019d met from round London at various parties came to support us, a lot of friends of friends. It became a chance for people to come along and catch up with each other, see familiar faces, DJs would come after their gigs in London, we\u2019d sneak them through when the security closed the doors.<\/p>\n

How long would you say it was before it broke out of that inner circle of friends and attracted a wider audience?
\n<\/strong>Probably towards the end of the following summer. We didn\u2019t really sell tickets online or promote it, we wanted to control the look and feel of the party. I remember getting out of a taxi around Old Street just before one of the events and there were three girls asking how to get to the party, they\u2019d come down from Liverpool. And I was like, \u2018Cool jump in the cab with me!\u2019, and that was the first time I\u2019d really come across people that had heard of it outside London. From there we started getting offers from other spaces, artists wanting to play.<\/p>\n

I remember being out and about summer 2011 and having who\u2019d be like, \u2018Yeah we gotta go to You Are We, that\u2019s the place to go, hope we\u2019re gonna get in etc\u2026\u2019 But not really in the way they spoke about other parties, it really had a kind of niche appeal, a rarity value.
\n<\/strong>That\u2019s great to hear, that\u2019s exactly what we were looking for. Other nights we aspired to were great but even as punters we were looking for something a bit different. I think we got there in the end. We always struggled with licensing in London as lot people do, but we had a good run with Corbett Place. I think it got to the third year when we realised we had to look for a different space. We had some great sound engineers, we could almost have gone so much further with the sound but there was only so much we could do with that space.<\/p>\n

At what stage did you guys decide that a label was the next step?
\n<\/strong>To be honest it was probably two years ago we started talking about a label. We wanted to do it as a collective from the party. It was myself and Scott and Stu that wanted to be a part of that, to push our own music first and foremost, to control how and when it was released. To collaborate with people who we\u2019ve played alongside with or those who have inspired us over the years. It took longer than we thought, there were certain areas we lacked a bit of direction and understanding what goes into the mechanics of running a label – outside of pure A&R and getting your brand out there. But yeah we\u2019re up and running, into our second release now. It\u2019s been great, we decided to link it to the party as there\u2019s such a good story behind it and we wanted to drive it further. A label and showcases gives us more options to take this abroad. It\u2019s often difficult to pitch a party to a foreign promoter, whereas a having a label behind it helps to do that.<\/p>\n

How\u2019s it going so far
\n<\/strong>As I said we\u2019re on our second release, which is an EP by myself and Antonio. Tboy collaborated with us, he helped with the latter end engineering on some of our tracks. Myself and Antonio came together for a very deep house, techno track \u2018Tripwired\u2019. We had a reasonably fair amount of interest when we finished it, so we used it as the second release for You Are We. The first release was the VA; six tracks, I think it was good way to start the label with a VA from artists and friends. It was a bit of a statement, a mix of sounds. I don\u2019t think you\u2019ll ever hear one fixed sound from us. We\u2019re pretty lucky to have a got this far, to have the ability to put out music, to potentially affect people\u2019s lives in some shape or form, it\u2019s pretty special. We struggled a bit with the business side but we\u2019ve got our good friend Bibi on board now to manage the label. We work with Word And Sound who have been fantastic. We\u2019re starting off purely digital, which is mainly a financial decision. We\u2019ll do vinyl for particular releases and we\u2019re looking forward to that, but at the moment it\u2019s battling the minefield of digital music.<\/p>\n

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What\u2019s going on in terms of future plans?
\n<\/strong>We did our first collaboration last summer with Kaluki on the terrace at Space. It was great to be asked and to get involved, I know those guys really well. We went up to Edinburgh at the end of last year, and we\u2019ve had our first label showcase at Cuckoo Club in the West End, we thought we\u2019d take it away from where we usually are – in east London, which is all warehouses and basements. We wanted something intimate.<\/p>\n

The next release is Kreature, a really good friend of ours with a remix from Animal Trainer. It\u2019s a different vibe again from the first two EPs. A full EP from myself and Wildkats, and Borrowed Time are all in the works. We\u2019re still trying to get our head around the marketing side of it, using social media etc\u2026 to approach the right people. It\u2019s easy to be cynical. I myself work in marketing three days a week so I\u2019ve got my head around some of it. I\u2019m quite a private man so I\u2019m still sort of coming to terms with the openness of it all. We\u2019re up to about 4,000 followers which is great for us.<\/p>\n

What would you say so far is the most important lesson you\u2019ve learned so far through all of this?
\n<\/strong>I think one of the hardest things is getting all four of us together. Stu was in Barcelona, Scott was in Scotland, I\u2019ve been in London. We\u2019ve learned to deal with the logisictis. The main thing is taking control of our own destiny, we spent a lot of time waiting for people to get back to us. It slowed us down. We decided to be a bit more militant with people and certain areas and it\u2019s amazing how quickly everything became after that. We\u2019ve learned to work with people who are hungry to work with us.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a funny industry, an industry full of broken promises. But it works both ways and we\u2019ve tried to be honest with other people. The idea of starting your own label is popular now, it\u2019s a lot more accessible, you can manage a lot of the media channels yourself but I think that, when considering what you should put into a label in terms of your heart and soul, them music has to come before everything else.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s going on with you solo-wise?
\n<\/strong>I had a slow end of 2014 in terms of output, but I\u2019ve got two releases out at the moment – one is on Dial Tone, a Mexican label which is a remix for a house act called Clouded Judgement. I\u2019ve got the You Are We EP of course. I\u2019ve also got an Ep coming up on a new house label called Clouds Above, which is a remix for our Californian friends Low Tide. I\u2019ve got a load of stuff wrapped up, including another collaboration with Antonio and another collaboration with Adam Curtin who\u2019s a friend form Nottingham, on more of a house vibe. I\u2019m also in the process of learning Ableton Live now.<\/p>\n

A lot of my stuff up til now has been quite key driven, quite a lot of minor chords quite a lot of emotion. I\u2019ve certainly been inspired by a lot of Detroit music. I\u2019m thinking about making new music in a different way now, \u201cHow can I play that live?\u201d. I\u2019ve got a couple of goals I\u2019ve set myself. I\u2019ve been using a lot more hardware, invested in a Moog Voyager last year. It\u2019s really opened my eyes and ears to new areas I can work in. I now work three days a week, so I can balance that with music.<\/p>\n

What about Burning Man, I know you\u2019re a regular there\u2026?
\n<\/strong>Every experience for me is deeply personal. I went for four years on the trot. There\u2019s been years when it\u2019s been a really crazy chaotic hedonistic party and years when it\u2019s been a balance between that and finding a bit more about myself and bonding with friends from around the world. I\u2019ve got a wedding in Ibiza this year, so logistically I\u2019ve got to take a year out! I\u2019m going to go to Dimensions this year though, which I\u2019m really looking forward to. I want to be educated a bit more. Also, dare I say it, I\u2019m approaching my 40th birthday.<\/p>\n

Just to finish up – without house music I would\u2026
\n<\/strong>To paraphrase Charlie Chaplin’s quote about laughing each day I will say that ‘ A day without music is a day wasted…’<\/p>\n

Ashley Wild\u2019s next release, \u20180.15\u2019 is out this month on Dilate Records with Kiki and Geddes remixes.<\/p>\n