In WMF’s blacked-out stage block filled foyer just off Berlin’s Klosterstrasse, Sam Spiegel slumps a sit by an empty dim-lit bar, his cohorts beered and planning the later festivities. With it being hours before the Hilfiger Denim Live club set, there is a distinct lack of staff, just Press Officers from the Berlin peg of the Tommy office, as well as a spattering of interviewers, all scarved and jacketed, a result of Germany’s cold. They book interviews and a replacement for Flying Lotus, who couldn’t make tonight because his missed his transatlantic flight, clomping up and down the lengthy halls. With the debris of both previous club nights and the props for tonight – rooms will be decorated with Hilfiger jeans stapled to the walls in words of one syllable – it is almost like an Anne Hardy photograph. An eerie derelict scene in which someone has transported all the props of their day-to-day life and exited, leaving simply a pile of, well, stuff. Disposed racks, clothes, bags, shoes, jeans, slumped floor cushions and tangled coat hangers. It will later be transposed into a teeming DJ room, with hoards of twenty-something internationals looking suitably cool in mandatory checker pattern and skinny jeans. The front entrance has been transformed into a catwalk-type red carpet. This is where the German TV stars will stand, preen and faux-laugh for the press and event photographers. But now this room too is empty but for a velvet rope and obligatory backdrop of Hilfiger Denim Live! Posters, naming the mainstage acts of which N.A.S.A. is headlining.
After a lithe German stylist in buttoned-to-the-throat white cotton talks to N.A.S.A.’s Spiegel about the pros of her upcoming yoga appointment, decks him in a more purple than purple puffer jacket, he sits, falls into place on a cushioned footstall, and details to Ponystep his entire day of sleep the day before, him not leaving the hotel room despite it being his first ever day of his first ever trip to Berlin, and he yawns an appropriately friendly greeting as if to prove his jetlag. This is a different entity to the Sam Spiegel that will later bombard the stage in a space suit to a background of video screens with pre pubescent boys and girls musing about life. He’ll rally the troops by cheering and taunting loudly into the microphone, switching and scratching the records by hand. Dancers will join him a few songs in, and he’ll have more energy than you could imagine for a 2am set. Though Spiegel is renowned for his NASA parties, in which it isn’t uncommon for dancing space aliens to accompany screamathon versions of NASA hits like Wachadoin, the song in which M.I.A. belts out “you lie you lie you lie” ad infinitum. N.A.S.A.’s gig is undoubtedly the highlight of the Hilfiger party, a night that had already seen The Films – a Brooklyn-based indie-rock band, who feature in the Fall/Winter ‘09 Hilfiger Denim advertising campaign – receive rapturous applause, most notably for their constant “I love Berlin” interludes, bookended by continuous Thank You For Having Us’s. N.A.S.A. needs no such pleasantries to win over the crowd. He simply bounds onto the stage and does what he was paid to do: play music and enrapture the audience.
Hynam Kendall: Was this always going to be a project based on collaborations? I’ve lost track of just how many guests there are on the record…
Sam Spiegel: The record just started with me and Zegon [Ze “DJ Zegon” Gonzales, with whom Spiegel works on N.A.S.A.] just fucking around with music for fun, and then we wanted to start collaborating with a couple of friends
HK: People you were working with through your side project Squeek E Clean productions, like Karen O whose album you were producing?
SS: Yeah, once we did the song with Karen O, ODB and Fat Lip, then we really realised maybe this is what the record is about. So we started approaching our favourite artists from all different worlds and put them together into the most unexpected pairings, and we decided to make it about people coming together.
HK: Were you ever worried about the collaborations overshadowing the work you’re doing?
SS: Not really.
HK: I mean the majority of coverage you’re getting for N.A.S.A. is for the collaborations.
SS: Yeah that’s definitely a legitimate concern for us to have now, but then we really didn’t care, we were just in the spirit of making a record with the people we loved.
HK: Did you have any ulterior motives when planning the collaborations? I mean with people like Kanye West lending his vocals, of course it would generate a lot of publicity.
SS: We only worked with who we wanted to. Not one single person was for the radio play. Of course we knew that having Kanye on the song was gonna help, but Kanye is one of my favourite artists, and he’s a friend too. I actually just Music Directed his Glow in The Dark tour, and did the music for that, so I had spent the past few months working with him and he was just really into the N.A.S.A. project, and was like, “Woah, I really wanna be a part of that”, so I was like, “Of course!”
HK: I know you said you wanted to mix these people from different worlds, but how did you pair up the collaborators? How do you know who’ll sound good together? Was it trial and error? I mean, how do you know that The Cardigans’ Nina Persson will sound good with Wu Tang Clan’s RZA?
SS: Sometimes it was just about intuition and feeling – who would feel good on this song? I mean Tom Waits and Kool Keith are both like the most unique motherfuckers in their genre of music, they live in their own worlds, let’s pair them up. A lot of times we didn’t even have the original artists on the record, they couldn’t do it for whatever reason, and it was the second round of people we were configuring that always ended up surprising us and doing amazing things
HK: I know you’ve got excess tracks that you haven’t finished, and bits and pieces of songs, is that because the pairings didn’t work out?
SS: There was one song we did with De La Soul, and it’s a really great song, but we never found the right person to be on it. We reached out for a lot of people to do it, for that song we reached out to David Bowie, who said, “Thanks very much, but this isn’t my cup of tea”, and Lou Reed who wanted, like, so much money we couldn’t do it, and also Win [Butler] from Arcade Fire, who we never connected with because he was always touring… I mean it did happen where we put people together but it wasn’t working. But we were like, “Well how can we fix this? Do we wanna change the track, shall we pull one of these people off of it?” It was kind of like a chemistry experiment. We were always taking people out and putting things back in, that song Wachadoin with M.I.A., when we recorded the vocals we pretty much had to redo the music entirely to feel better with the vocals
HK: How involved were the artists? Were they writing their own lyrics?
SS: None of them were involved in the music, but a good deal of them wrote their lyrics, the verses. We wrote choruses most of the time, sometimes we’d come with a chorus and be like, “now write a verse for this” maybe tell them what we want the song to be about
HK: Was there anything that wasn’t suitable? Or…um, shit?
SS: Yeah of course, we had a really strong vision for the record and it had to be good enough and keep with the concept. If we’d have gone, “Hey, here’s a track, do what you want” it would have been a piece of half-assed music that sounded like the pieces had nothing to do with each other. We wanted one album, one piece of art. We pre-empted with a letter explaining what the project and the song were about, we spoon-fed them a lot of information so they really got the concept. We really did monitor the lyrics, I mean, for example, David Byrne wrote about current events, he mentioned Cheney and Bush and what was going on in Iraq. I’m not opposed to politics in music at all, but we needed it to be timeless
HK: I guess you had to keep the lyrics timeless because the record took you 5-and-a-half years to complete. Pop references from 5 years ago would be pretty redundant now
SS: And personally I prefer music that isn’t too referential, like you listen to the Beatles now and it’s not outdated, having pop references, which is a really popular thing to do right now, just dates the music
HK: It’s funny because lots of critics have noted that your song Money is a kind of zeitgeist song, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the current economic downturn, which I guess is nothing more than funny coincidence
SS: That song was started 6 years ago!
HK: And took two-and-a-half years to complete.
SS: Exactly, it couldn’t be a timely commentary, you know, it was the longest record to create, it spanned years
HK: And then on the other hand Gifted took a week
SS: Yeah, we got that song done because when the record was completed, it had taken so long to do, that we needed a song that represented what we sounded like NOW. What we’re doing NOW. And it ended up probably being my favourite song on the record
HK: Obviously this record was a labour of love, and you were funding it through your other projects, so were the artists singing for free?
SS: We paid a handful of people, but some people did it just for the love
HK: Who was free?
SS: Tom Waits. We were supposed to pay Tom Waits, then afterwards he was like, “You know what, I don’t want your money, I love this project so much I just want to donate my services”
HK: Do you think your follow up record will similarly be a lot of collaborations? Will it be your “thing”?
SS: Not very many. After the remix record of this album comes out, the next one will be done very quickly with few collaborations
HK: But this album will be around for a while, especially if you’re doing a video for every song
SS: Yeah, it’s very much a collaborative process again, we’re pairing off artists with animators and directors, again using friends and people whose work we like, and again, like the music, just going with what feels right
HK: You’re going down a really arty route with the videos, like The Date Farmers and Alexei Tylevich’s hyper violent gangland film for A Volta. Spike Jonze is obviously your brother; will he do any of the videos?
SS: Spike and I wrote a couple of the videos, but he was doing his film the whole time we were making this
HK: Music video-wise, he’s getting a bit of a bashing for his Kanye West’s We Were Once A Fairytale, in which Kanye lampoons his arrogance by drunkenly dancing to his own music, being sleazy with girls, and then, oddly, cutting himself open to reveal a furry critter which he then instructs to kill itself with a seppuku
SS: I love it! I did the music for it, the remixing and sound. I think Spike did a great job on that, and Kanye is great, man. You can’t criticise it, it’s great. A great collaboration. [laughing] Oh man – collaboration, that words going to haunt me now!
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