Piemont “Like That” (Kevin McKay Remix)

As we gear up for WMC next week, Toolroom has prepared a compilation of tunes in honor of the Miami Beach affair. While any number of parties will be happening on the sand, oftentimes the best moments occur in a dark room well after midnight.

Glasgow Underground label boss Kevin McKay serves up a handful of edits on the compilation. He also delivers a thumping remix of Piemont’s “Like That” (the label released the original earlier this year) that’ll certainly help usher in those late-night vibes.

Did you discuss or exchange ideas with other producers while creating this track?
Yes, on a couple of levels… I love the original. It’s one of those rare club records that is super musical but also really works on the dancefloor. The more I listened to it, the more I started to think about how some of the elements, on their own, would create another kind of record entirely. I’ve been playing a lot of Metodi Hristov’s records recently, and I love his simple, groove’n’hook approach to house music. His style was definitely on my mind when I was thinking about this track—although hopefully I’m not going to be explaining this to a jury in L.A. anytime.

When Christian from Piemont sent over the parts to the track, he just sent loops of the parts they had used. I went back to him and asked him for the full-length stems of the track, as their arrangement was perfect. While I wanted to change up the vibe of the track, I wanted to keep the core arrangement the same… What I’ve done is very much like how a remix was to be approached back when the concept began in the disco era. All the music you hear is Piemont’s; it’s just arranged and delivered in a way that fits my mixing style.

Once I had finished all the arrangement and production, I handed the session over to my friend Andy MacDougall, who records as Polarised and is currently in the Beatport techno top 20 remixing DJ Tim & DJ Misjah’s classic “Access.” He is such a brilliant mixing engineer, and he got the track to come out sounding very heavy!

Were you impulsive on this track, or did you have a sketch in mind before you started?
I definitely had an idea of what I wanted to do, so the whole thing came together very quickly. I really like it when that happens. With the simpler kind of tunes, it almost needs to happen that way so that you don’t get bored of basic loops. It’s great having someone like Andy to send the session off to for mixing, as before, I’d do everything myself. It’s a tough job remaining convinced of all your decisions when you’re the A&R, producer/remixer, and mix engineer!

Do you think advances in computer technology and gear have affected your creativity?
They have affected my creativity 100 percent… I have so many options when it comes to sound creation. If I want to make a track like I did in the ‘90s, I can still boot up my ASR-10 and load in samples from a record deck, and then output the multi-track to my Mackie mixer and get working my DP-4+ effects rack [here’s an example from 2001]. The way I made records then often meant that the creative process followed a similar pattern each time, building a groove with samples and then playing around with the elements on a mixing desk to work out the arrangement. I definitely felt limited by the equipment. I used to have ideas that I just couldn’t do with the gear I had.

That rarely happens anymore. If I want to create a reverb of a drum hit, and then send that reverb to a delay unit whose delay time gets shorter and shorter, creating this ever-decreasing sucking sound, I can. I can be incredibly creative when it comes to effects, and I can write in all manner of ways—the same way I did in the ‘90s, using Ableton’s scene style arranging, or just plotting a track out over time. I can write with pretty much any producer anywhere in the world, as long as they have the same software and an internet connection. 2015 truly is a happy place for music production.

How does this production reflect your personality/ethos?
I think that my tracks consistently have drama. I love a lot of contrast in my mixes, and this one definitely has that.

How do you measure the success of a track?
There are loads of ways I measure success. A lot of the time, it’s purely down to how people react to it in a club. If it turns the dancefloor into a sea of happy, fist-pumping people that are grinning wildly, then that’s good enough for me. That’s the reason I make most dance music at the end of the day. On top of that, it’s lovely to get respect and nice words from your peers, so seeing your own music in other people’s charts or seeing videos of DJs you like playing your records is wicked, and I always get such gratification from that. Lastly, seeing things do well commercially also makes me happy, but in a different way. As a label owner, it’s important to see your records sell. When those tracks are your own, it makes you feel very proud.

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