INTERIOR DESIGNS
Dec 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Christine Hsieh
The walls in Dan Ormondroyd's London home are shaking, and Ormondroyd, one half of the big-beat-turned-retro-futuristic dance duo FC Kahuna (with Jon Nowell), is trying his hardest to talk over the din of builders tromping their way through the house. “They're basically gutting the entire place,” he shouts. “And I'm trying to shift thousands and thousands of records from one room to another.”
Quite a fitting metaphor this is for FC Kahuna's development. The pair made a name for themselves as rising stars of the big-beat sound championed by, and eventually played to death by, the likes of Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers and scores of imitators. Their Big Kahuna Burger club in London was successful to a sloppy, lager-fueled degree but quickly wore thin — especially given that the Kahunas were keen to start producing more cutting-edge tracks rather than tossing out the same tired tunes week in and week out. A new spot at the highly regarded Headstart club at London's Turnmills tuned their ears to bigger and better things, so they headed into the studio with a fresh approach and emerged with a finely tuned, solid floor-stomper of a debut full-length, Machine Says Yes (Nettwerk, 2002).
They have certainly come a long way since their first ham-fisted attempts to make music. Before they were even 10 years old, Ormondroyd and Nowell teamed up (they lived just down the street from each other in Leeds, England) and began recording songs into a tape machine while talking over the mess. Fancy equipment still does not figure heavily into their musical plan. “The first port of call is always the decks,” Ormondroyd notes. “We'll fish for little sounds and drum loops and then just rip stuff off of records and put it into a computer. I just think that there are more surprises in samples.”
Painstakingly constructing tracks from the ground up using hordes of samples may seem like more trouble than it's worth, but the Kahunas have a fairly efficient game plan. Well, sort of. “I'm hopelessly slow, but I do have a standard way of rooting for samples,” Ormondroyd says. “There are three key criteria: First, if the original artist is dead, there's not much chance they're going to be on the phone to you saying, ‘You've stolen a bit of my record.’ Second, if you're stealing something from someone and you can't disguise it, it's a bit better if no one's ever heard of them before. Third, you can really tell if something's going to be good by looking at the cover. If it's ridiculous, then those people must have been on some weird, mind-bending chemicals. And, therefore, they must have some really silly drawn-out passages with all these instruments going daft.”
FC Kahuna have a different sound, but they're the same lovable pair of longtime clubbers who've cleaned house a bit and remodeled as necessary. “Electronic music can still be exciting,” Ormondroyd insists. “We're still trying to push the whole idea of it forward.” Indeed, they've reshaped their sound into something less haphazard, more modern and much edgier, but underneath it all, the Kahunas are still doing what they do best — hunting down interesting sounds, isolating unique samples and rebuilding those sonic snippets into their own contemporary vision of electronic dance music.
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