Meet Techno's Own Kosmic Messenger - Stacey Pullen
What did you get up to last New Years Eve?
I DJed in Montreal in front of 10,000 people at one of the best produced gigs I saw all year. It was very cold but I had a good time.
How much has techno changed since the days over a decade ago when you'd travel eight hours from your college in Tennessee just to watch Derrick May spin at the Music Institute in Detroit?
Not that much here because there still isn't the local support we'd hope for. Only one or two clubs focus on our scene - I'm monthly resident at the Motor Lounge - although some of the music is known all over the world. There aren't even any programmes on the radio anymore, the stations all play whatever's on TV, and we don't even have any magazines!
What about abroad?
The whole global dance thing's getting really well known. For a DJ it's like going at it blind, you don't know how people will respond...but it's a challenge.
You moved to Amsterdam for a year in the early '90s and things really started to take off for you. Which European artists appreciated what you were doing?
Guys like Laurent Garnier - the first time I played in Paris was at his Rex Club gigs in '93. Dave Angel was really accepting of what I was doing, and in Holland they had their own little scene, guys like Dimitri and Marcello.
Your first single, 'Soundscape', for Kevin Saunderson's KMS label, was a remix of The Prodigy, which the band turned down. Did that come about as a result of your European connections?
No, that was before I even left the States, just one of those things that happened by mistake in 1992
Of all your previous pseudonyms and incarnations - Black Odyssey, Bango, Silent Phase, Kosmic Messenger, to name but a few - which was your favourite musically? The most important for me was the Silent Phase album on Transmat/ R&S because it was my first long-player and my first time in a studio outside Detroit.
Do you have any heroes?
Not so much heroes as inspirations like Modell 500, labels like Transmat, and before that guys like Parliament and Kraftwerk. But on a more political and social edge, my parents, who basically instilled in me that I could do anything I wanted to.
Your father was in a Motown group, The Capitols, wasn't he? Does he enjoy your stuff?
When I first got into it he was more interested in why it was so repetitive because he comes from the old school - doo-wop, chord-changes - but on the Silent Phase album there was one song called 'Love Comes And Goes', more of a ballad with jazz influences. He said he could feel the deep oceans of love I put into it.
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About Petrol Records
About Petrol Records
