Jocks away

It’s been 11 years since Slam released their debut album, Headstates. In the interim, the Scottish duo have flirted with everything from US vocal house to synth-pop and electro-funk. For proof of this, check out their 2004 album, Year Zero. Now it sounds like they’ve decided to return to their roots. Human Response revisits Slam’s love of Detroit techno, the rich chords and emotional strings flying in the face of the prevailing minimal and electro house consensus.

“In many ways, this album has seen us come full circle,” reflects Stuart McMillan. “But rather than just looking backwards to Headstates, it felt like it was a challenge to use that Detroit blueprint and to take it forward. I wouldn’t be very happy making the same music we were doing 10 years ago. But it’s very easy to lose the emotion in music.”
Tracks like the dreamy ‘No One Left To Follow’ and purringly plaintive ‘Looking North’ sound like Slam have drawn on the most introspective sections of Larkin, Craig and May’s back catalogue.
“For sure, there are some influences from minimal on the album. But a lot of people I know have said that they were sick of the way that techno had been going, down this hard, repetitive loopy route. And so were we. When minimal came along, it was like the polar opposite of what had come before it, it was a deep sonic experience. Now a lot of the minimal records are in danger of sounding the same. But it just means that you have to look a little bit harder for the real gems.”
Conscious of current trends, but still defiantly going their own way, Slam’s approach is the same as their label Soma, which has cultivated Alex Smoke, Octogen and Vector Lovers in recent years. These are artists who combine a deep understanding of the past with a desire to experiment and push things forward.
The label is A&Red by committee, and Stuart is adamant that Soma isn’t a money-making venture. After all, this is the same label that gave away Daft Punk to Virgin just before they released their debut album.
“Deciding what to release on Soma is a collective decision that’s made by about five or six people, and those decisions are made with the heart and not thinking about the purse strings – it's still a labour of love,” he says.
Soma recently put out its first retrospective collection, Virtual, by pioneering UK techno act The Black Dog and also plans to re-release one of that act’s seminal ‘90s albums, Temple Of Transparent Balls sometime this year.
Older and wiser, McMillan is no longer the techno militant he used to be.
“Back then, I was a real purist," he explains."If techno didn’t come from Detroit, then I wasn’t that interested. Let’s face it, the axis has shifted from the US to Germany. There's no question that this is where most great modern electronic music comes from now.”
However, he insists that what constitutes a great techno record hasn’t changed.
‘Listen to Martin Buttrich’s ‘Full Clip’,” he says, giving an example of a new ‘classic’. “The drums and rhythms sound modern, but the strings and the muscial ideas on that track are the same as they were 10 years ago. It’s possible that technology may evolve to a stage where all we have to do is press ‘play’ to make a track, but if that happens, no matter how easy it gets, I’ll be one of those people who’ll want to deconstruct it and work out how to make it not that easy.”
This is exactly the kind of human response I’d hoped for.

Human Response is out now on Soma.