Shit Robot, live from a castle

By Will Deitz » The man who built DFA, married a countess, and has some kind words for Giuliani.

Marcus Lambkin built DFA Records – literally. He lives in a castle. He’s married to a German countess. He’s releasing an album that’s taken 20 years to make. And he seems to think “Shit Robot” is a good moniker. With that background, a transatlantic phone call with the Schloss-bound acid house legend had a lot to cover, and though the lack of a crack of thunder and a Dracula-voiced “good evening” upon his answering was a bit of a let down, it’s still a journey talking to Marcus Lambkin.

Marcus came to New York from Ireland in 1992, a 21 year-old kid who had won a green card and wanted to escape Dublin’s fading techno scene. He spent the bulk of the ‘90s in a New York City wholly alien to the one we know now, DJing in the East Village at a time when every bar was a dance party and every street was a new opportunity to see strangers doing smack in public. Introduced to DFA founder and LCD Soundsystem mastermind James Murphy through a mutual friend in 1998, Lambkin helped Murphy install the cabinets in DFA’s recording studios, schooled him in dance music, and likewise introduced him to future DFA co-founder Tim Goldsworthy. Lambkin and fellow Irish ex-pat Dominique Keegan opened Plant Bar, the “unofficial DFA headquarters,” in the heart of Alphabet City in 2000, where the DFA Records sound was forged through dance parties and DJ sets.

However, when it came to putting out a record, Marcus was the slacker in the class. While LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture were blowing up, Marcus was grumbling about the decline of the New York club scene and smoking “far too much pot.” However, those days are apparently gone, and, now living with his wife in a town of 900 in the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany, he’s taken the time to put together his first full-length album, From the Cradle to the Rave. Nine tracks long, Cradle features a host of DFA faces, including Murphy, Juan MacLean, Nancy Whang, and Hot Chip frontman Alexis Taylor, mostly on top of the acid house beats that Marcus has loved since he first laid ears on them. Marcus may be an unabashed nostalgic – Shit Robot gets its name from the DJ nights he and James Murphy hosted almost a decade ago – but he’s not clamoring for a resurgence of ‘90s-era nightlife (everyone dressed like idiots then anyway). We spoke to Marcus about the heady days of the NYC club scene, the DFA family, and the practical reasons to dance less.

So, From the Cradle to the Rave is finally out. How are you feeling about it?

I’m great. I’m really stoked and kind of happy. All the reviews are great so the pressure’s off, so I can just relax a little and enjoy. I’m really kind of blown away by the great response. I of course like the record, and I knew it was good but I’ve also been sitting on for like a year now. It’s getting a much bigger response than I anticipated.

Everyone’s been talking about how the album was “20 years in the making” – but I heard you only started it about four years ago.

Yeah, it was 20 years ago that I first discovered acid house, and this album is kind of an amalgamation of all those influences over the past 20 years. In reality it was more like three or four years. Actually, I was almost finished with it, but I had a baby girl born a few years ago. That kind of put a hold on things for a little while.

So what tracks finished it off?

All the tracks were started a long time ago, except for the Nancy [Whang] track [“Take ‘Em Up”] – that was done after my daughter was born. I had the album pretty much done, and then we were kind of like, “Okay, the whole album is the same dance tempo - let’s put in something a bit slower.” The idea was for it to be like an old Ministry 12 inch from the ‘80s where they have those wicked dub mixes on the B-side. I sent Juan [MacLean] the track, and asked him what he thought, and he said, “You know who loves that stuff? Nancy.” The Ian Svenonius track [“Simple Things”] was one of the later ones too, and all the rest, some of them started out as little noodly jams a long time ago.

A lot of people seem to be describing From the Cradle to the Rave as a “DFA Manifesto”, because you were so crucial in DFA’s history and because it features so many DFA names. Do you think that’s fair, or do you feel it’s more your record, and just happens to have some of your friends singing on it.

I don’t attempt to take all the credit for this record. If it’s good, it’s because of the contributions from a lot of people and the help I had from a lot of great friends. I wrote the songs – I didn’t write the lyrics or anything, but I wrote the music, so I’m confident that it’s definitely Shit Robot style, but then I think people like that it has that DFA sound that people got to love through DFA remixes. All the other bands who’ve come through on DFA don’t really have that DFA sound that you used to get from the remixes, and I think that’s in the album. James [Murphy’s] productions give it that nice DFA sound. Then it just so happens that the people who are singing on it are my friends, and my friends happen to be people in and around DFA. I know it’s a cliché to say it, but DFA is a family, and we are all pretty much good friends.

You’ve spoken before about your friendship with James and his influence on you. What do you feel he brought the most to your sound?

Pretty much everything. He sort of held my hand and guided me from day one. When I met James I was a DJ guy – I’m not a musician at all. I don’t really play an instrument – I can play guitar really badly. So he’s kind of a pretty much taught me everything, and sort of led me through. He gave me a [Roland] 909 and a delay and was like, “Go away and play with that.” Then I started playing around with Reason, and that was how I sort of started learning how to put together a track. James was the one who was like, “Get away from that. Get a real synth, and play with a real synth.” And he also taught me a very important thing – relevance. I’m so attached to that old school acid house sound, that rave sound from when I first started going out to parties, and I’ve always been trying to recreate that. James taught me that it’s great to make that stuff, but it needs to be relevant today, or there’s only gonna be a handful of people who are going to like it.

You’ve also spoken about how you came from Dublin to NY in the early 90s and the club scene was crazy. Did Rudy Giuliani really mess that up?

I wouldn’t say he messed it up. When he came into power, he wanted to improve the standard of living in New York, and basically cleaned up the streets. At the same time that he introduced the cabaret law, which is an old law from the prohibition era that states that you have to have a license to run a dance bar. At the time there were all these bars and clubs in the East Village, and they all had turntables and DJs and there were dance parties going on everywhere., which got a lot of noise complaints. So he basically shut down all these bars for having people dancing, which was a problem we encountered with Plant Bar. [Giuliani] definitely sanitized a lot of New York and the East Village, but at the same time he also made it a lot safer. The 2nd Avenue train station used to be pretty much a homeless shanty town. I remember my first time walking around there I was terrified. There were people shooting up in doorways. So we lost that dance culture, but we gained a safer place to live.

So what do you think of the New York club scene now? Is it pretty much gone as you remember it?

I wouldn’t say it’s gone – it’s just very different than what I remember. Yes it’s entirely different, but it’s think it’s going through a resurgence. For a few years when I was gone, it was really terrible I think – there wasn’t really a lot going on. The big clubs are always the big clubs, and they’re just the bridge and tunnel crowd on Saturday night, and then there are your sort of cool underground clubs and parties. And I think they’re having a great resurgance now. When I go back to New York there are always great parties – and what I love is that there’s a lot of disco, which you don’t really hear everywhere. There are great disco parties in New York. It’s not so much the traditional clubs. The big clubs are all pretty much the bridge and tunnel in a Saturday night. The New Yorkers tend to avoid those things and have their parties on a Thursday or Friday night in a bar. The last time I played in New York I was at Tribeca Grand and I played with Justin Miller and Jacques Renault and it was awesome. It was a load of fun, which you couldn’t always say in New York – it’s not always great fun to play there, but it has been recently.

How did you get hooked up with a castle?

I met a nice German girl when I was living in New York. We fell in love, got married, and it turned out that she’s a countess. At the time we were thinking of leaving New York, and it’s not often you get to go live in a castle. That was four years ago.

So are you kind of like the castle at the center of the town?

Yes – it’s a bit surreal. All my neighbors are farmers. My next-door neighbor is literally the shepherd with a crook. He slaughters his own sheep. We just bought two legs off our next door neighbors.

A phrase I didn’t anticipate hearing today.

Posted on September 29, 2010. More on: shit robot, marcus lambkin, dfa, bothering, james murphy, tim goldsworthy, the juan maclean, hot chip, nancy whang, alexis taylor