Futureboogie Takeover: Introduction

Futureboogie is the renowned Bristol-based dance label, management and booking agency that was founded ten years ago. To celebrate their anniversary, the people behind the label – Joe90 and El Harvo – are releasing Futureboogie Recordings 10. The compilation album features tracks from the varied acts they’ve worked with over the past decade, including Typesun, Eats Everything and Waifs & Strays; buy it here.

We’re marking Futureboogie’s birthday with a special label takeover week with mixes from various artists whose material they’ve released over the years. To kick off the week we spoke to the Futureboogie founders, and we have a mix from Joe90 for you to listen to at the bottom of the post. Enjoy.

PN: In your opinion what was the defining era for dance music?
FB: In terms of an era we lived through I guess the 90’s, where labels like Ninja Tune, Warp, and Mo Wax were strong, varied and incredibly interesting. I was in my 20s so lots of going out, DJing, and buying records during that time.

PN: What are the best and worst things about running a label?
FB: Best – seeing people dance to tracks you’ve put out, seeing a new artist you’ve put start to get some recognition and gigs, seeing an artist grow and feeling like you may have helped that along the way a little.
Worst – distributor sales spreadsheets.

PN: How have you seen dance music change over the past ten years?
FB: Podcasts. Downloads. Digital DJing!

PN: Where outside the UK is making waves in dance music at the moment?
FB: I guess that is still some of the obvious places – Berlin, Detroit, Leamington Spa.

PN: What is it about Futureboogie that sets it apart from other dance labels?
FB: It’s impossible for me to answer that. We just do what we do and hope enough people like it.

PN: Are purists when it comes to DJing? Is using iPods or CDs cheating?
FB: The format doesn’t really matter when it comes to putting it in front of a crowd. It’s a different thing when it comes to history, digging etc, but for clubs and making people dance, it really doesn’t matter.

PN: Do you solely play the music that you love or do you cater more to the crowd’s tastes depending on which context you’re in?
FB: Any DJ should pay attention to the crowd that’s in front of them. But surely you’d only play music that you liked, wouldn’t you?

PN: What advice would you give to someone who’d want to get into DJing? What’s the first step to take?
FB: Practice, and really listening to your records.

If you were to have free reign to sign any three acts to your label this year who would they be?
Floating Points, Caribou, Henrik Schwarz.

What’s Futureboogie going to be doing in 2012?
Plenty more great music we hope.

Listen to the Futureboogie founders’ mix for Planet Notion on the Soundcloud widget below.