DAVID Holmes is suddenly getting famous. Remarkably, this change in his visibility isn't happening following an intensive round of interviews and promotional appearances, or even a huge hit record. Instead, Holmes has created his reputation through a stream of DJ appearances and a series of tunes that have made just about everything else emerging from the dance scene seem not just dull, not just formulaic, but redundant.
From his meticulous reconstruction of Ruby's Hoops, to his electro torch single, Gone, to his string soaked Grumpy Flutter Pt. Z David Holmes is an artist enjoying a period of astounding fruitfulness.
His story is not, however, one of overnight success. The Belfast born DJ and producer first tried to a commercialise his interest in music through hand produced fanzines that he published in his early teenage years. By the time he was 15 he had begun to pick out the British bands that interested him and book them to play Belfast.
"I didn't know what it was called that I was doing. I just rang people up and asked them if they wanted to come and play and pt, them up in my mother's house, says Holmes, rearranging the leather bean bag that serves as a chair, picking pieces of chicken from his sandwich with one hand and gesticulating with the other.
CLEARLY everything is beginning to move too fast for Holmes to do just one thing at a time. The previous night he DJ-ed for 7,000 appreciative dancers at the Point Depot. The night before that he had played to a packed house in London. After spending a couple of hours in Belfast later last Sunday evening, he was due to head to Andy Weatherall Sabresonic studio in London to get to work on another rem ix.
Holmes began DJ-ing in fairly much the same manner as he began promoting concerts, bringing his favourite records to parties and eventually doing the same thing on a professional circuit. He played, he says, everything from soul and blues to Northern Soul, the Jam and the Sex Pistols and pretty much whatever appealed to him.
One day the world changed. Well, bits of it. The first House music to come out of Chicago hit the air waves, cropping up on The Tube and Top of the Pops. Holmes didn't need any explanation of what was happening. Later, somebody would turn up and plot out how Ron Hardy or Frankie Knuckles had invented a sound that took the camp energy of disco and the rock steady beat of progressive German electronic music and blended them into a new musical form called House.
But all that, of course, was much, much later. For the moment, Holmes watched the first wave of Chicago House acts Marshall Jefferson Farley Jackmaster Funk and Steve "Silk Hurley crash onto the shores of Europe. House music had arrived, and the figure of the DJ, sweaty tshirt washing around predominantly his armpits, one hand on the turntable, the other awkwardly pressing some headphones to his ear, became the central figure of popular music.
The electronic dance style split up into a myriad of little camps. The DJ's became more famous than the records they spun. A succession of hybrid electronic styles Acid, Balearic, Belgian or Italian house began to spread through clubs and dance events, and then, suddenly, the whole scene exploded over ground in a mushroom cloud of tabloid horror stories.
All that started nearly 10 years ago. The story of European electronic dance music has been a familiar one, a sound that came across the Atlantic as a throbbing rebel pulse and slowly became a kind of sonic varnish, to be applied over any sound to create instant pop. But if the music has been marked by this sort of water torture commercialisation, it has also been marked by fleet side steps on behalf of DJ's and fans. One such mood swing seems to have just happened and David Holmes is there in the thick of it.
While some DJ's have been resisting, struggling to maintain a sense of balance, a sense of continuity, others have grabbed the new music and set off for the future. Holmes is one of the latter group.
Not that he'll readily admit it. Try to discuss the impetus for a radical musical alteration provided by Jungle, or the reawakening interest in samples of rock drum patterns (one prominent DJ recently listed Ringo's drum solo from Strawberry Fields Forever as one of his top 10 favourite tunes) and Holmes will disingenuously say "you're over analysing it". Nevertheless, he is hard pushed to deny that something is happening.
When he DJ-ed at the first night of Exploding Plastic Inevitable (also the Warholian name of the record label Holmes runs) in Dublin's POD last month, his set was baldly confrontational. The steady bwoumph-bwoumph-bwoumph-bwoumph bwoumph was gone and in its place were jagged acoustic drum patterns. The headlong race of digital fugues had been replaced by something which, while not quite slow, had a pace that was relatively contemplative.
The drum patterns were old, little snaps that clearly had their origins in rock, but were now finding themselves shackled into a new world of slapping, echoing contortion. Suddenly, the grinding certainty of the House and techno beat, the low slung kick drum, the rise and fall of electronic waves, the scatters of bleeps and squirming squeals had disappeared.
STRANGEST and to fans of Holmes's techno style most upsettingly, peppered through the tunes were the sounds of wailing acid guitars. Holmes, who stood, his head dipped over the turntables, almost constantly chose a set of tunes that seemed to say one thing very loudly, very clearly over and over again "techno is dead". When he had finished playing in the early hours of the morning, crowds refused to leave the dance floor, stamping their feet and demanding more.
"Of course techno's not dead," says Holmes, "but I don't think you can even call the music `techno' anymore. I mean, anybody can go into the studio and make a sound like a Detroit techno record. It doesn't mean anything. It's about what's in your heart and soul that puts your individual stamp on it. It's not recreating a sound, it's about your personality and your feelings.
"There's far too many people following a sound and not enough people pushing the boundaries, which is what techno should be all about. There are a million people out there trying to make records like someone else's. That's why I don't consider myself a techno producer. I just try to make David Holmes records."
