Last month, legendary DJ and tastemaker Gilles Peterson headed to Sydney for a special listening room event, where he hosted three sessions and played some classic tracks and even one from a famous Australian percussionist.
The event went down at Ivy Penthouse, and the French producer mixed it up with the crowd and shared some special insights.
Check out some highlights below.
Peterson on collecting vinyl
“As I get older, I become more mad with my records. It’s an illness, and luckily for me, because I’m a DJ and I’ve got the radio shows, I’ve got a good excuse to spend money on records. On one hand, I’m into new stuff. But I’ve just got this crazy obsession as I get older, with records I’ve never heard on private press, on private labels, and that becomes a very expensive habit. But it’s fun, and I enjoy it a lot. And it’s tax deductible, so it’s okay.”
Peterson on the sound system at the Listening Room
“The sound system, by the way, is by Atlas Harmonics. I do a lot of these things. I go to, like, bars, and there are quite a few really nice rooms around the place, but this is amazing. What you’ve done here is incredible. He’s hand-built the speakers, and you’ve got a Macintosh, a beautiful amp, a valve Macintosh, which is just amazing. I looked it up, and it’s about eight thousand pounds. So yeah, it’s a really beautiful thing.”
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TRACKS
“I still discover. Like today. I woke up this morning, I’m only here for one day, but I went to Egg Records. I bought this record, ‘Australian Percussion performed by Michael Askill’. Very, very interesting album. That was a good start.”
“So this is Gary Wilson, a kind of multidisciplinary artist from the ’70s and ’80s, very DIY. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Shuggie Otis or even like Prince. He’s like an early Prince who basically made DIY drum machine music. Fucking great stuff. Anyway, before he started doing the DIY stuff, he was doing jazz. And as you know, jazz is my number one love. I always go back to jazz in the end. And I didn’t realise he’d done a jazz seven-inch on his own label. Only 100 pressed, the record dealer told me. And I paid five hundred pounds for it. Must be something special in there. This is Gary Wilson’s first single and it’s called “Dreams””.
Peterson on buying the Gary Wilson record from his vinyl dealer in Tokyo
“So basically, I couldn’t go to his house, so he came over to my place in Tokyo. We were outside in a coffee shop. The sun was coming in. It was quite cold, but the sun was coming in, and he had his little turntable thing and the records. And I’m just watching the people walking around. What’s going on here with these people? And then he played me this at the end of the session, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is like a jazz fan free jazz’. Fun but lo-fi as well. Wow, I didn’t realise Gary Wilson made this music. My dealer says, “Press only made one hundred”. So I put it on the wrist. Put it on. Don’t ask any more questions.”
“Now I’m going to play you a classic. This is the record that when I heard it at the age of nine, fourteen or fifteen, it was a game changer, and it continues to be a game changer record because it’s where jazz and funk and disco and soul meet in a cosmic future world. And, you know, this is 1975, and this is ‘Expansions’.
Peterson on hearing “Expansions” for the first time
“I first heard ‘Expansions’ at a Soul Weekender. Britain had these holiday camps that were built in the sixties that had these horrible, kind of, bungalows, but they also had venues. So these were sort of empty ghost resorts all around the country, in horrible winter weather. And so twice a year, there would be this event called Caister Soul Weekender, and we would all come from all over the country. There’d be about five thousand kids who’d come for the weekend. And it was just the most amazing three days. DJ’s playing the best music. And there was one DJ who sadly passed away last year called Chris Hill. He’d play jazz records in the middle of the night. So you can imagine, like a fifteen-year-old boy who’s searching for his identity, to hear a record like that in the club on a Saturday night. That was my mission in life. So here we are, fifty years later.
