Recognise 116: Moopie

O trabalho de Moopie desafia narrativas fáceis. Em qualquer dia, você pode encontrá-lo batendo em todos os tipos de faixas de dança em clubes e festivais ao redor do mundo, ou gerenciando A&R para sua gravadora independente de alcance amplo, A Colourful Storm.

Aqui, junto com uma mistura de techno sombrio, breaks tortuosos e electro sonhador para a série de mixes Recognise, o DJ de Melbourne conta a Michael McKinney sobre o caminho que ele percorreu para chegar onde está hoje e a profundidade de sentimento que o guiou ao longo do caminho.

O DJ e chefe de gravadora, mais conhecido como Moopie, está sentado em seu apartamento em Melbourne, o sol da manhã entrando por cima dele enquanto ele descreve seu princípio orientador com um sorriso no rosto.

É um ethos que ele tem colocado em prática em clubes, blogs e lojas de discos nos últimos 15 anos, perseguindo essa profundidade de sentimento por todos os tipos de buracos de coelho ao longo do caminho.

Um dia, você pode vê‑lo se apresentando em um festival com capacidade para 10. 000 pessoas, lançando house, breaks e techno para uma pista de dança ansiosa. No próximo, ele pode estar sentado em casa, gerenciando A&R para A Colourful Storm, o selo que dirige desde 2016, cujo material é decisivamente mais delicado, variando de spoken word silencioso a clássico com olhos turvos, IDM de arquivo e além.

Tire um dardo no calendário e você pode descobrir que ele está trabalhando em uma reedição de remixes de Enya, lançando novos slammers de free-jazz ou mergulhando na música folk de todo o mundo.

Não importa os detalhes, porém, tudo volta àquele interesse pelas emoções desenfreadas que se encontram na arte e na música – nos corações expostos nas mangas.

Ao conversar com Xue, que já estudou arquitetura e agora trabalha em busca de discos em tempo integral, é difícil não pensar nas promessas intermináveis da música de dança de construir mundos, nas utopias encontradas entre as camadas de vinil.

Em seu trabalho, as possibilidades contidas nessa ideia – vergalhão e metal de um lado, sonhos e histórias do outro – parecem incrivelmente reais. Um mundo diferente é sempre possível, parece argumentar seu trabalho, mas apenas se você o construir.

When we catch up with Xue over a video call in April, he’s in the midst of a typically busy period in Melbourne. The weeks leading up to our chat have seen him play b2b sets with DJ Plead, OK Williams and XDB, not to mention slots at club nights and festivals like Pitch Music & Arts, Miscellania, and un:send.

No dia seguinte à nossa conversa, ele voará para Taipei para tocar no Organik Festival, antes de se preparar para algumas viagens futuras pela Europa que o levarão a Else e Berghain em Berlim, Lux Fragil em Lisboa, The Love Inn em Bristol, Bassiani em Tbilisi, Dimensions Festival na Croácia e em outros lugares.

Mesmo assim, segundo os próprios padrões de Xue, ele está se sentindo bem descansado. O show da noite passada – lançamento de álbum da indie‑pop dreamweaver Carla dal Forno, organizado pela A Colourful Storm – foi certamente mais descontraído do que os mencionados acima, e terminou cedo o suficiente para que ele ainda chegasse em casa a tempo de ter uma noite inteira de sono.

In conversation, he is thoughtful, quick to laugh, and a touch self-deprecating, as happy discussing head-in-the-clouds psych-folk as he is no-bullshit club tracks.

Para Xue, fazer espaço para os inúmeros estilos nos quais trabalha – música de dança de grande escala de um lado, reedições e experimentos DIY de todas as nuances do outro – faz parte do trabalho.

It might be tempting to suggest that he’s caught between two worlds, but the truth is he wouldn’t have it any other way. “As time goes on, I want to be more and more open-minded,” he says, before stating his current stance clearly.

In a brief sidebar about the joys of thumping four-to-the-floor club tools, Xue hammers this point home, making no bones about his love for straight-forward, no-nonsense dance music.

Moopie’s contribution to DJ Mag’s Recognise mix series is a case in point. Leaning into heads-down techno, twisty breaks and daydreamy electro, it’s tailor-made for dancing, but with more than enough rug pulls to keep things interesting.

Em determinado momento, cerca de 20 minutos, Xue se afasta de um trecho de IDM em estado de êxtase para uma rajada refrescante de calor Drexciyan. É arrebatador, sem dúvida, mas esses momentos raramente parecem ser o ponto principal.

Instead, this is a mix about the ways percussion tracks can collapse into each other with an uncanny geometry, and how decades of drum science can still lead to its own kind of alchemy.

Xue has plenty of experience in executing this sort of club-tuned trickery. Once, around 2015, inspired by a classic Optimo mix, he played The Knife’s leftfield synth-pop track ‘Silent Shout’ as one of his final tracks at a festival much more in tune with en vogue club stuff.

Another time, not long after the passing of the late, great Mark E. Smith, he played a legendary clip of The Fall frontman reciting football scores over a hammering techno track.

Throughout our conversation, Xue embraces this sense of unpredictability over any easy narrativization, shrugging at obvious dance music mythologies and repeatedly shouting out other traditions.

He enthusiastically points towards DJs he admires and curatorial attitudes he finds resonant, and goes on sidebars about old-school mix CDs and the importance of spending hours on the dancefloor.

It’s a singular palette that’s been years in the making. Xue’s earliest musical memories are of listening to Western pop records in Melbourne, where his family relocated to from Beijing when he was four years old – a move made, in part, to better his odds of an exceptional education.

Growing up, Xue played piano and violin – “a classic Chinese family means of discipline,” he calls it. Even then though, the rebellious streak that came with his alt-rock phase was starting to take shape.

A friend invited him along, and a teenaged Xue was amazed, above all, by this maximal music’s economy. “I realised that all of these sounds were synthesised,” he recalls.

That interest eventually caught light. Xue found Erol Alkan’s ‘A Bugged Out Mix/ A Bugged In Selection’, a double-disc mix that “showed me the possibilities of a mixtape”.

He’d already been getting to grips with the form and function of dance music, but here, he found tracks like M83’s ‘Birds’ spliced with Nirvana and DJ Koze – a skeleton key of sorts that showed him just how many things were possible with the format.

From there, he nabbed a fake ID, dived into minimal techno and electroclash, and started playing on a friend’s set of CDJs. After learning the basics, he went deep fast, going from bedroom practice sessions to small clubs to playing opening sets for the late Silent Servant.

Naquela época, DJing e música eram tudo sobre “exploração e curiosidade” para Xue, uma sensibilidade que até mesmo se liga ao seu alias. Antes de aparecer em flyers de rave em todo o mundo, “Moopie” era um apelido; antes disso, era a palavra usada para filmes em um programa de computador infantil.

Xue thought the term was cute and adopted it, much to his mother’s surprise. (Even today, only his mother and partner call him anything else.).

That inquisitive throughline carries through in his current work. "I want to rewind the clock, in a sense," he says. "Maybe we want to be children again – to be naive, and to experience things on that level, rather than overthinking them.

Em 2011, A Colourful Storm foi fundada sobre esse mesmo princípio de intuição. Xue estava estudando arquitetura na época, mas passava a maior parte das horas extracurriculares mergulhado em blogs de música eletrônica.

Eventually, he decided to contribute to his own, helping two other friends curate a mix series that would showcase their ever-widening tastes. “It was very much in line with a lot of blogs around that time,” he recalls.

Even then, the not-yet-label was demonstrating its fondness for left turns, inviting the likes of noise musician William Bennett to record a session one week and getting tape-music mind-bender Frank Bretschneider on board the next.

Com o tempo, Xue foi atraído pela ideia de criar algo mais tangível com A Colourful Storm, mas não tinha certeza de como. Foi só alguns anos depois que uma resposta apareceu em sua caixa de entrada na forma de 'California Dreaming', uma versão lo‑fi coldwave do clássico dos Mamas and Papas’ originalmente lançada em 1982 pelo grupo australiano Denial, que já havia saído de circulação há muito tempo.

Another friend of Xue's – the electronic music producer Nerve – happened to have a gig with one of Denial's original label owners. Would Xue want to meet up? “If it wasn’t for that, I don’t think this would have materialised,” he says.

The dream would finally come to fruition in 2016 with the first releases on A Colourful Storm, two very different projects that would prove indicative of where the platform would go over the next 10 years.

The first was a re-press of that Denial record, though Xue is quick to make it clear that he never had any intention of becoming just another reissues and rarities imprint.

Ten years and 50-odd releases later, the label has continued to defy categorisation at every turn. Recent releases include DIY folk and dream-pop compilations, vintage Japanese psychedelia and trance-inflected house.

É difícil resumir, mas esse é o ponto. Sua linha mestra é mais sensível do que sonora. “Sempre houve esse aspecto emocional sobre isso,” reflete Xue.

As a model, Xue points towards Les Disques du Crépuscule, a storied Brussels label he’s long looked up to. “They started putting out interviews with artists and philosophers,” he says.

Objetos e ideias como esses são incríveis para mim. Eles não são possíveis sem uma etiqueta, pois tudo gira em torno da curadoria. Tudo se resume ao que vem antes e ao que vem depois.

If it was a standalone piece, or an object, or a release, it wouldn’t make much sense.” A label, in Xue’s mind, can help connect seemingly disparate ideas. “It really opens up new worlds and imaginations,” he says.

Nowadays, when Xue is working behind the decks, he pulls off similar moves, peering between tracks and looking for trapdoors. “I’ll be DJing at festivals playing homogenous dance music,” he says, again without a trace of dismissal.

Other times, he’s able to go wider still, bridging the spaces between his professional lives in the process. He recalls a morning slot from January of this year, where he leaned into trip-hop melodrama and layered “ambient stuff from the label” on top.

Tarde na nossa conversa, enquanto discutíamos a individualidade obstinada e as técnicas singularmente ousadas de Vladimir Ivkovic, um DJ que ele admira particularmente, Xue se coloca em uma posição de desvantagem, sugerindo que seus sets soam “românticos” antes de voltar atrás.

Then, we start talking about what happens when sets go wrong – when a DJ clears the floor, or when the lights come on early. To Xue, these incidents double as opportunities.

So why not take advantage of that? Suddenly, it all clicks into focus: his interest in carefully calibrated shocks is anything but a party trick – it's the whole game, and it's one of umpteen ways he demonstrates his yes-and attitude to his craft.

Lucinda 'Strobe' Tevatron 'Nu-tronik' E. R. P. 'Perfume Persuasion' Claro Intelecto 'Resonation' Morphology 'Information Paradox' A Guy Called Gerald 'Dirty Trix' Dark Matrix 'Wave Particle Theory One' Terrence Dixon 'Beat' Casino Classix 'Ringer' Aubrey 'Inner Passions Out' Planetary Assault Systems 'Function 4' Dulha 'Lotus (Pluralist Remix)' Noyeahno 'Pushing Percussion' Mono Junk 'Mainio' Seimei 'Metropolitan Drums' Bandulu 'Blank Tape.