Jay Denes

Deepsoul3 were lucky enough to have the chance to chat with Naked music pioneer Jay Denes...     

The interview

DS3:

You created the Naked Music label back in '98 along with Ada Dyer & Catherine Russell, how did it start? Did you ever envisage the success you have received & are you happy with where the label is now?

JAY:

Well I didn't create it with them, Naked music was a production company 1st, that was started by me & Dave Boonshoft the 1st record under the Naked music name was on OM records under the guise of Naked music NYC, they are in San Fran & we are in NY which a lot of people don't know, the impression has become that we are from San Fran & that's because Miguel Migs was there, Lisa Shaw has lived there on & off & Bruno Ybarra who did a lot of A&R for us lives there, so we had an office there, but we've always really been in NYC. And Ada & Catherine sang on the 1st Naked music record, so I guess the label has been running 6years now & how do I feel about it? Um I didn't envisage the success we've received & nor am I sure that the success we've received is what I had in mind when we started! It was more just done out of not wanting to sell records to other people that I have made, it got to a point where I felt I really don't need to sell my records to other independents, when I thought I might as well put them out myself. At that point when we started to do it, it really just took off unexpectedly. Now its just 6 years later & you become identified with certain stuff, some of which I'm happy with & other things immediately put you in a box, which then you're in a position of trying to break out of. That's where we are now, we've always been somewhat broad but you get labelled for doing a particular thing, so now we're trying to encompass more of what our original intentions were, like Aya's new record I think its out in the UK in June 28th.

DS3:

Great, I've been waiting for that, is it going to get a vinyl release or is it just CD?

JAY:

You know, maybe, people have been asking that, at some point, I don't know whether you've heard it?

DS3:

I've only heard the sound bites from the website, it's a lot more down-tempo she has an awesome voice...

JAY:

Yeah, it's not even so much down tempo I suppose it doesn't really have that much to do with Club Music, I wont say its unrelated to it, because I produced it so it's very rhythmic & more vibey, necessarily than something club playable, although DJ's have been bugging me about putting it out on vinyl, because if you play in lounges or smaller places you might want to play it. I'm working on the 12" remix for one of the singles now, so you know that's definitely a step in another direction for the label & then the next full length after that is even further out in terms of what it is & that's Gaelle's & we're working on Lisa Shaws record right now.

DS3:

Very few labels can state to have their own instantly recognisable sound, I believe you can, who have been your major influences & who is currently doing it for you on the current scene?

JAY:

I honestly am kind of out of it when it comes to new shit, I don't listen to that many new records, I really don't & its embarrassing to admit, and its not to say that no-body's doing what I like but I just feel like, most of the stuff that really inspires me or that I feel is done on the level that I really want to learn from, is like 'OK that guy was hitting it', it was all different periods. You know there are new records that come out that I like, just not that many & not necessarily in dance music. I listen to a lot of different music, there are Rock bands out there that are good that are playing. I'm not really into that much dance music.

DS3:

I feel one of the problems is too many people putting out too many mediocre records

JAY:

Yeah that's been a problem for a long time, I have this weird relationship to dance music, I like dance music as much as I like any other kind of music, you know 5% is good and the rest is crap & I think that's pretty much the same across the board in all genres, except that standards are possibly held higher in Classical music, but generally speaking I feel that is true. There have been different ages throughout musical history where one format may have been stronger during a certain period & I view music as that, then I have music I like & listen to & a smaller category that I have music I like & listen to & influences the music I make, and any success I've had doing dance records or a particular style is because it just happened. Like the 1st Blue Six record (Sweeter Love), when it did well, the phone would ring & people are asking if you want to remix something, & its big names, that's what they're asking you for a remix of their record in that style. So then I thought I should make a Blue Six album & that became my definitive statement on a particular Niche of style, which now has evolved into something completely different. I'm dying to do a new Blue Six record, but it takes me a year to make a record like that, that's the other thing about me in dance music is that, a lot of people that work in Dance music professionally work really fast & I'm not one of the them.

DS3:

I think something like that is well worth the wait as it is timeless

JAY:

I'm always shooting for that & that's one of the things that bugs me in the dance music genre, the glut of releases & it really bugs me that people make records with the idea that they'll be out there for 3 months, to me that is so apathetical to what I listen to music for that's just wrong, so I'm always trying to make something myself that has more meaning to me & becomes very difficult as I feel I'm in a constant war to try & do the best work you can & if you're in an Independent you are already working against the idea that you have less resources to do that, Yet I'm trying to do something that's not going to be around 5 minutes, I want to make music that has a higher level of purity & intention to it. I it's a very difficult thing to do in the current record industry, as its really bad right now, almost at a state of collapse & a lot of people are in denial about it & when major labels fail they take independents down with them, cause a lot of people at Inde's are part of majors for example lets say I spent a year working on Aya's record during that year that's for my company, I'm not getting paid for that, so we have to make money from our own record sales or somewhere else, and what was very helpful if you're a producer or writer of music was periodically out of the blue you'd have some major label that paid well would support you & you'd be cool as you could work on that for 3 or 6 months & not have to worry, but those days are gone, it just doesn't happen now, so that combined with the general decrease in the sales of CD's, we're just trying to weather the storm & make it through the dark ages.

DS3:

Hopefully it will pick up soon

JAY:

I think they will, I think its a matter of a few years & things will re-structure themselves & whatever the means of new distribution like I-Tunes has been really helpful & the wave of the future somehow will be that kind of cable based subscription/Internet downloads.

DS3:

I agree I think its good to see more labels like West End, Reconstruction getting involved in that kind of thing as there are lot of websites where you can pretty much download anything & you could have 3,000 tunes & never spent a penny.

JAY:

Exactly & that's a big thing that needs to be addressed, but people point to that as being the decline of the industry & I don't think that's really true, I view that as being a contributing factor but the largest factor in all of this is major labels haven't taken music seriously for 25 years now & they've done no artist development, the Stevie Wonder's & Marvin Gaye's of the World aren't born they are made you sign somebody & you develop them over a period of years & if you look at the majority of really great shit from history on that level, the really amazing records they made tended to be between their 3rd & 8th album, & its been for 20 something years now, if you don't go Gold on your 1st record they drop you, which means no artist development & they'll only sign stuff of the lowest common denominator, so you end up with very disposable hip-hop. Where the corporations are only concerned with making a quick buck & having a good turnover that quarter & that makes everybody else in every other genre follow the same business model, hence you have kiddy groups & short term marketing & very disposable assets, so they have dug there own graves really & a lot of people on the fringes of the industry have a hard time too, us being one of them, I feel that Naked has hung in there & consistently put out high quality records as best we can & stay true to it.

DS3:

The 1st release on the label was Petalpushers - Breaking it down & this instantly set the benchmark for other Naked releases, how did you come about meeting the likes of Miguel Migs, Lisa Shaw & the rest of the Naked family?

JAY:

Right, Bruno lives in San Francisco, & Migs at that point wasn't even Djing very much, he used to play guitar for SKA bands & he started making some records & Bruno was like you have to hear my friend, so he sent me this record & it was really alright man, and that was right when me & Dave talked to Bruno, cause he used to be A&R for OM records, & he had worked the record I made for OM & then when he was leaving there we were like why don't we start a label, & he said that he'd do it but he didn't want to move to NYC, so we said that didn't matter it's the age of the internet, so you can stay there & that became the 1st one, I did a remix of it & we had a couple of other people remix it & Stuart who was our friend did the graphics & it just took off, then the 2nd I think was Blue Six Music & Wine & we were like here's a direction & people want this, we can do this, but I honestly feel that it bothered me to be one dimensionalised like that because even if the 1st Naked music NYC record for Om was sort of a contemporary R&B record, I wont even go as far to say I was identified with that & it was something I was doing and the same with Blue Six. A format is irrelevant to me in whatever I do, I just work to do the best I can, and really now over the last couple of years I'm staring to feel a distinct sense of who I am & what it is I'm trying to do & how that fits into music in general no matter what the format is. So you know it wouldn't matter, if you said to me lets do a club record, or lets do an R&B record, or lets do some spacey thing, I guess I just feel that I have a vibe that's mine & I come from there, it was all pretty organic really, I feel that everybody was heading to one thing at the same time, we all sort of run in all different directions as people, if you talk to Migs about what he's into currently or Bruno you'd get very different responses.

DS3:

That's cool though, cause if you all draw inspiration from different things & then come together you can all bring something different.

JAY:

Yeah, it is what it is & it's certainly created an identity that's larger than one person & I like that the main thing its done for me personally that I'm grateful for, is it lets me sit here & work on records that I like with no-one telling me what to do & knowing they're going to come out, which is the coolest thing, cause if you work for majors there's like a 20% chance it will get to completion & that the artist wont get dropped & any number of things, you really start to value being able to make things & have them exist in the World. It's certainly a blessing!

DS3:

You were the mastermind behind Blue Six & Beautiful tomorrow is without doubt one of the best deep house albums made (a sure fire modern day classic!!!!) What were your goals when you started the project? Can we expect a follow up?

JAY:

Well, I was sick of club music, I didn't feel that I was making anything good at that point, and basically decided that if I was going to do some club stuff it would have to be something I love personally & this is true, I was bitching to Francois Kevorkian one night that I'd had enough of this shit & what's the point of making music if you don't feel it & there's just no reason to do it & he was like why don't you do what the hell you feel like & I'll put it out, so honestly when I made sweeter Love I remember going to him & saying that I love this record, but I don't know if you'll like it or if anyone will like it, its nothing like what's out there at all, & I really didn't think that anyone would care for it & luckily people loved it & it was very popular, so I took that as licence to say fuck it all & I'm just going to do whatever & if I fail at least I would have failed on my own terms, cause there's nothing worse than failing when you're not being true to yourself & that's the worst, this way I could say I fucking took my shot. So that's kind of where I'm at now, we're at a new plateau of that in many ways & if that was one step towards a thing, we're at another one. Dance music is collapsing & comps and all that shit is a saturated thing & you don't want to be just that anyway & Aya's record is a huge 1st step toward that for me & likewise with Lisa Shaw's record.

DS3:

What can we expect from that?

JAY:

We have all had a lot of conversations about what we wanted the record to be & not be & you know one of the things I didn't want was just a record that was another fucking female vocal house record, the World doesn't need that & Lisa doesn't need that, and my heart isn't in that neither is hers, she's like everybody & likes a lot of different stuff, I mean she used to sing in a rock band! I also didn't want it to be me speaking as the record company, Lisa has a huge fan base which is amazing for somebody that doesn't have an album out she has a HUGE fan base & we're trying to make something that is completely funky & dance floor, but not in the conventional way & can be remixed to be anything, its going to be like a modern dance/soul record rather than just some generic R&B or House record, because a lot of people in club music make that mistake & think they'll do an R&B record that's just a copy of something else.

DS3:

That's the worst thing when producers just regurgitate beats from old soul records

JAY:

Yeah, we definitely aint going there its definitely some modern funky shit in a very different & organic way & in the same way I had the same conversation with Aya & I give her major props for that cause when we started working on her record & I was coming up with roughs & stuff & you know, she said here's a whole list of things we're not going to do & that was high on the list 'Don't do anything that anyone else is doing' and that's really why the record is unique to her it does not sound like other peoples records, yet somehow its funky & Cool & familiar yet doesn't sound alien & its not intentionally artful & trying to alienate people. Its all shit we like!

DS3:

I think that's really cool & seems to be the way of the label & you don't conform to trends & fads

JAY:

Yeah the label was club music coming from that attitude, and it's a confluence of different peoples ideas of what's cool & what's not, as there are records that I would never have put together like Lost on Arrival, Bruno did that, and as long as that's cool & an audience that likes that on a certain level, OK this may not be my thing but if its nailed & people like it so be it.

DS3:

I must say the Trentmoller ep was slamming!!

JAY:

That was another Bruno thing, he was really into him, I don't listen to that whole format of that kind of stuff, but when he played it for me I could hear this wasn't my thing but the guy is the shit! So you had to acknowledge it & whether it was my thing was irrelevant, that's why I had him remix things on the Aya - Uptown 12" & he did a really good mix on the Andy Caldwell thing, so that's the sort of the attitude he went with & lets just do shit that's cool being done by people who want to do cool shit & I cant lie as a company I feel that there is definitely some stuff that is more my flavour & some stuff that is more Migs flavour or Bruno's flavour, but it all gets in there & Dave (Boonshoft)who has been with me from day one has been non judgemental about it, and is like alright if this is high quality & you think its dope shit he'll run with it & he's really open minded about it, I've tried to be too, but I think there is definitely a tug of war between content & style, that's what I would say, I guess in certain ways I'm more of an old school guy, I lean towards having content that is meaningful in a way that will not age & am constantly trying to do that, I don't want to hate a record a year from now, and how do you do that? A lot of the time it means staying away from contemporary trends & stripping it of stylistic cues especially if you're in a contemporary genre. Then the flipside of that war is highly stylised music that's done well, but its like OK there is no heavy song there its just groovy shit, we have elements of both of those & the next record after Aya is Gaelle's & that's even further out there its some really over the top beautiful cinematic shit. There are a couple of things on there related to dance floor but nothing obvious & we're working on 12" & stuff for it too, but I look at it as just plain music & yeah there will be 12" of those records & yeah maybe they'll feature on the next Naked music Comp that will have licensed stuff & some of our own shit on there.

DS3:

I'm sure you've been asked this a million times, but when can we expect Lisa Shaw's solo album to be released?

JAY:

It should have been out already, for a million different reasons kept getting pushed back, we weren't getting the right stuff back & it was delayed, so it's ended up with myself & Eric Stameil who did Gaelle's record, which is done & will be out in the fall, probably September at this point & together we're producing the Lisa record now & God willing that will be out late fall or January.

DS3:

I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that it comes out on time

JAY:

Yeah, I'm trying its a lot to do, I think despite peoples impression of us we're a really small company, there's only really 4 of us including our attorney & it's a bit overwhelming!

DS3:

Wow, I'm surprised to hear that!

JAY:

Yeah people certainly have that impression of us & its funny cause people talk to me like that & I'm like 'this is a really small company that's tried to stay a float through various incarnations & trying to do our thing, I guess the difference is underground success & over-ground success, are so vastly different in terms of scale, you know what I mean, it means money too, as we were in a joint venture with EMI, we did it for 2 years & that was really all we could take, we actually managed to get out & we're lucky as we're on good terms with them, but it was not working out. The way those deals are structured with majors, we had a really good relationship with our US partner Astralwerks but interfacing with the larger global company was just proving a disaster for us, so we got out of that & we now have all new deals all over the World, in the UK actually we're going to be distributed by Pinnacle, which we're looking forward to.

DS3:

What was the reasoning behind changing the artwork on the covers from Stuart Patterson's drawings to actual pictures?

JAY:

Well that's just really pragmatic as there are a few of his illustrations coming out on some 12"s it's as simple as this, when you do artist records Aya's being the 1st one its actual pictures as they're actual people & the other artist records that have been put out have been producer driven things like Blue six & Aquanote.

DS3:

Is that actually her on the cover??

JAY:

Oh yeah Aya is stunningly beautiful & she sings really well, you're not the 1st person to ask that a few people have asked who the beautiful girl on the cover is & I'm like that's her! She just looks like a Naked music girl! & Likewise Lisa & Gaelle are going to want photo's cause its there album, which is not to say that if I do a new Blue Six I wont use the illustrative thing again & Also it's a good way to differentiate between producer & artist albums. I think change is good, and the market is so saturated & so many people have copped every aspect of what we were doing. I've always felt what differentiated us from everybody was that we were trying to be a content creating & driven label, 90% of the stuff that comes out on the label is made by people who actually play instruments & write music & we don't really make sample records.

DS3:

Can we expect any of the Naked family anytime soon in the UK?

JAY:

Yeah I'm certain something will be happening but I'm not sure what yet (Aya's promotions) I'm sure Lisa will be over & Migs, but you have to time it in time with the release.

DS3:

Sum up Naked Music in 3 Words?

JAY:

live being honest

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