Amidst Gingy & Bordello hiatus, DJ has collaborative work with Nautiluss on horizon
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Gingy says he also has more work in collaboration with members of Azari & III on its way
Although he’s best recognized for his collaborative productions with Anthony “Bordello” Galati in recently paused duo Gingy & Bordello, Toronto-based producer Brian “Gingy” Wong is using the additional free time between helping to make electronic gigs on local dance turf run smoothly to explore his solo career as a producer in a more committed capacity.
The Grid listed Gingy amongst its local artists set to make waves in 2014, and with good reason. Just over a month into the year, he already has studio collaborations with Nautiluss and former members of Azari & III lined up for 2014 (as well as a lengthier list of potential collabs he wasn’t yet willing to divulge to the public).
In anticipation of his late night DJ set at Long Winter tonight, we got together with Gingy at a sandwich shop in Toronto’s West End to chat about what’s in store for the producer now that his main collaborator is working in Montréal. Below are five of the freshest insights that came out of the interview.
1. He’s embracing the Gingy & Bordello hiatus as an opportunity to progress his solo endeavours.
“It’s just a different dynamic. It’s all different projects, right?” Wong reflected. “You pursue different things based on common ground when you’re collaborating with somebody, but when you’re by yourself, you have more free reign to do whatever. So you have to self-filter a bit more so it’s the process of discovering that and then realizing what you like more and what you don’t like choosing direction for yourself.”
2. Aside from “RAPT,” an upcoming single featuring vocals from Starving Yet Full (aka Cédric Gasaida from Azari & III), we can expect Gingy collaborations with Nautiluss in the near (ish) future.
“I share a studio with Nautiluss [aka Graham Douglas Bertie, formerly of Thunderheist] so we’re working on stuff together,” he teased.
3. He says his studio recordings and his DJ sets keep one another fresh.
“[The studio recordings and the DJ sets] kind of feed each other. I find that if I don’t do both, whichever one I’m really focused on just becomes a little bit stale. So I personally really like doing both. Maybe as I get older I’ll hate DJing more. But right now I really like it. On one hand, DJing is social. You get to feed off of other people and there’s energy that you’re trying to get out of other people. In the studio, you can pursue your ideas a lot more, I think. It’s a balance. You go to the studio to develop your ideas and then you bring them out to people.”
4. The collaborative work he’s done with Alphonse Lanza III (aka Alixander III of Azari & III) was created out of fairly little spoken communication.
“With collaborative work it’s more – I don’t want to say compromise, because you’re feeding off of each other, too – you have to find common ground and then build off that. Whereas when it’s solo, you almost have to force yourself to work within a set of parameters, as if there was someone else working with you, and then build off that. It’s more free when you’re solo because you can kind of change those parameters as you go, too, so it’s a similar process, but without the other person. It depends, though. With Alphonse we don’t really talk about it much. There is communication – there is a dialogue – but it’s not necessarily explicit or spoken. When I’m working with Alphonse we just design sounds based on what we hear off each other, kind of intuitively, and that gets easier around time. You write around each other. There are certain affects that we pursue. Like mind spaces we try to occupy.”
5. The music he’s been on top of lately is split between “relentless,” “muscly bodied” industrial techno, and “deeper” atmosphere-based house, but he hates talking about it in terms of categories.
“I have a library of records that I really like. And as you find new music, you add to that and build off that in terms of vibes you like and then it all just comes together. There’s a few different veins. I’m simultaneously really interested in really relentless industrial techno – so that’s just full force, muscly bodied music – and then on the other side kind of deeper house or even trance-y kind of stuff – almost ethereal, transcendental, new, spiritual…atmospheric. I don’t know, I hate using buzzwords to describe it. It pigeonholes it too much. It’s kind of shitty to talk about music with descriptors sometimes. I’d rather just listen to it and decide what it sounds like. It’s kind of better when people decide for themselves.”