WHO Life in Berlin has been good to American DJ Stewart Walker. For the past five years, the vibrant techno capital has helped revive his take on music and injected new life into his label Persona Records. Walker had his share of defining moments in the US with early, harder techno releases from 1997 on Detroit’s Matrix Records and later on m-nus, but after his 2003 album Live Extracts was picked up by definitive German techno label Tresor, moving to Berlin would ultimately take Walker’s decade-long career making melodic, downtempo and breakbeat variations to a new level. Walker first started producing music in 1992, mixing sounds from a drum machine with his guitar amp and sampler. By 1997 he had begun playing his music live for the first time using just a sampler and mixer; it was a hit, which led to him touring around the world. Best known for contributing to the development of minimal techno with his 1999 album Stabiles, Walker created Persona in 2001 to try something different with micro-rhythms and inject a more human touch into his music. A resident at Berlin’s Tresor nightclub, Walker is currently remixing and editing music as well as touring his former home turf with his now-laptop-based live show.

WHAT “Words like house, electro, deep or techno are meaningless [to me] because of wide geographic and historic variations,” says Walker. “So, I’ll say that my music occurs around 128 to 132 bpm, and is pretty dense with many harmonic and percussive layers. Currently, I’m interested in variations between Senegalese, Ethiopian and Nigerian music of the ‘60s and ‘70s and how they interrelate [and] connect with American, and especially Jamaican, music from the same period.”

WHERE Tempo/Breakandenter present A Night of Live Music with [A]pendics.Shuffle, Noah Pred and others. Sat, Apr 26. Cervejaria, 842 College. $17 advance.
 
FAVOURITE RECORD OF ALL TIME Company Flow, Funcrusher Plus or Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill.

FAVOURITE RECORD RIGHT NOW [Persona Records artist] Touane’s unreleased next album.

FAVOURITE WEBSITES RIGHT NOW: www.slate.com, www.prodigy-pro.com/forum and www.gearslutz.com

WHAT IS YOUR MOST SURREAL DJING EXPERIENCE? “[Playing in a] Soviet-era missile base, a Stasi training facility in the former East Germany [and an] underground WWI bunker in Poznan, Poland.”

DIGITAL OR ANALOG? “In terms of sound quality, it’s the same to me. The new [analog to digital converter] Apogee Rosetta D/A sounds better than I could have imagined, and the same is true with my transformer-balanced analog mixer. Sometimes I prefer hardware over software so I can listen with my ears, instead of my eyes.”
 
WHAT IS VITAL TO YOUR DAILY ROUTINE? “Manaresi coffee beans, Drum tobacco, public transportation and Canadian Club whiskey.”

WHAT GLOBAL ISSUE CONCERNS YOU MOST RIGHT NOW? “The US presidential elections, reinterpreting modern capitalism as corporate socialism and figuring how to react accordingly.”

WHAT IS THE LAST GREAT FILM YOU SAW? Stranger Than Fiction.

WHAT ACTOR WOULD PLAY YOU IN A BIOPIC? Marlon Brando in his Last Tango in Paris era.

WHAT ARE YOU READING RIGHT NOW? “Moby Dick. It’s from my growing collection of classics I jokingly refer to as ‘books I’ll never read,’ next to James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path. I’m trying to get through them all, but the internet always steals my concentration.”
 

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